#I’m gonna take at least a day off to watch the show uninterrupted | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

no-droids · 5 years ago

Text

Mercy, Sabotage, and Dead Space

(gif credit to @redwyyne-archive)

Part One of The Bet series

Pairing: Poe Dameron/Reader

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 12.7K

Summary:

1. No sex.

2. No touching yourself.

3. No orgasms.

Warnings/Tags: DUBCON/NONCON elements, fuckboy Poe (OOC), Enemies to Lovers, degradation/humiliation, mentions of oral sex, SMUUUTTTTTTTT also I’m not sorry for what I did but you’re not allowed to read if you’re gonna get mad at me okay byeeee

***

This.

This shit, right here.

If the question was ever, “What’s the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever let Poe Dameron somehow talk you into doing?” then the answer is this stupid shit, right the fuck here. This is like. You remember that one game, Mercy? The one where you’d dig your nails in and twist arms and just needlessly inflict pain on each other as children until one of you cried uncle because someone somewhere once decided to turn torture into a matter of pride?

You always thought those games were fucking ridiculous. Who can hold their breath the longest, who can handle a lit deathstick against their flesh the longest, who can take the hardest punch—who cares? It’s child’s play. It’s self-inflicted agony for the sake of bragging rights and even as a youngling, you refused to fall for it.

But then you met… fucking Dameron.

You know those people that… they don’t just rub you the wrong way, but literally every single aspect about their personality is sandpaper against wet skin and your whole entire being feels chafed raw just by existing in their general vicinity for an extended period of time?

You’re… you’re not usually a competitive—much less aggressive person. You never have been. It’s just not part of your nature. If you ever excel at anything in life, it isn’t because of some secret, deep-seated desire to win or be better than anyone else. You just… do you. You do whatever you do, and if it’s good, it’s good. And if it’s bad, it’s good. Because at the end of the day at least it’s still you, and you’re okay with that.

But this?

This shit? Right here?

“This is fucking dumb,” you say, because you know it’s what you both must be thinking so you may as well just get it out in the open. “This is the dumbest fucking thing, Dameron. What are we doing? Why are we doing this?”

The grumpy, orange-jumpsuited figure sitting behind you just sighs heavily and slumps even further down in his bucket seat, as if it isn’t the first time you’ve tried asking this incredibly valid question (it totally is), bringing a palm down to thunk the top of the guidance controls between his legs in a quiet irritation you’re almost certain has everything to do with the very topic you’re trying to bring up.

“Because,” comes that infuriating drawl. You can only see his face from this angle by looking at his reflection in the transparisteel barrier directly in front of you, but even just imagining the way his mouth moves while he rounds out the words makes your jaw clench. “The coordinates we picked up were scrambled and this rendezvous could be going down at any one of thirty-six locat—?”

“No,” you interrupt him with a scowl, “not why I’ve been floating in dead space in this Maker-forsaken ship with you for eight fucking hours a day since… fuck, what’s today? Thursday? Friday? Nope, can’t be Friday, Friday’s our off-day. Thursday, then. …Thursday?” You shake your head. “Ugh, see? Time doesn’t exist when I’m not allowed to cum, life is like one never-ending nightmare.”

“Oh.” He takes a second to think about it in silence, the calloused tips of his fingers scratching the side of his face while he considers. It wouldn’t usually be as loud as it is right now. Maybe it’s the haunting quiet of space surrounding the ancient powered down hunk of metal you’re both stuck in, inadvertently isolating and amplifying the sound—or maybe it’s because your copilot’s jaw is currently covered in a thick, dark beard that you swear barely took his testosterone-overloaded ass a fucking week or two to grow, if that. Regardless, the dark bristles crunch loudly under his short fingernails and it takes you about a grand total of five whole uninterrupted seconds of the scraping sound to realize you’re grinding your teeth along with it. “Well,” he finally says, “that was your stupid idea.”

“Hmmmmmmmno,” you contest firmly, wiggling your elbow back to poke at his shin with your index finger once, twice, thrice, until he finally slaps your hand away in quiet irritation. To the misfortune of you both—and likely the other hundred or so pilots concurrently taking rotating shifts in these tandem x-wings in a glorified mass stakeout, the cockpit of this ship is just way too fucking small. Your arm is squeezed uncomfortably against machinery and electronics to get to him from this angle and a light slap isn’t going to stop you now that you’re here. “You—” (poke) “—have a superiority complex and decided to turn it into a competition, not—” (poke) “—me.”

“Oh, I have a superiority complex, okay,” he scowls and nods in vehement, fake agreement, finally giving up and letting you poke at will, but the appeal is lost as soon as you realize he’s over it and your arm eases back into your lap. You watch his reflection look out of the viewport and scan the empty void of space for the twentieth time in the past five minutes, clearly just as desperate to get back to base as you are. “So what is it you call saying—wait, no no, not even saying, loudly declaring—‘Of course I can go longer without sex than “wham bam thank you ma’am” Dameron, you brainless fucks, it’s a simple fact!’”

“Alright—I don’t sound like that, fuck you very much,” you return, in reference to his shrieking, high-pitched impression of you surrounded by your fellow pilots in the rec room when you’ve had a bit too much to drink. “Also, you don’t have to finger-quote literally every single syllable of my fucking sentence, Dameron. First and last word, that’s all it takes. And if it’s so superiority complex-ey of me to state simple facts, then what is it you call saying ‘betcha two weeks worth of pay you can’t, pretty baby’?”

“Uh, easy credits?” He immediately asks, side-eyeing your reflection through the transparisteel. “ Easy credits. Just begging for it. Two weeks of your slutty, sexy, easy fucking credits just begging to be taken and used— ”

“You need to get laid,” you cut in to tell him bluntly, scrunching your nose in what you hope looks like disgust. As per protocol, the power to the x-wing was cut at the beginning of your shift—what feels like a fucking eternity ago—as a preventative maneuver in case the target falls out of hyperspace unexpectedly. Avoiding the scanners of a fleet that may never actually show means it’s cold and dimly lit in here—just starlight in front of either you, but you’re hoping he can gauge the severity of your revulsion with your back to him. “You just turned my money into a sex object. It was vile. I feel violated on its behalf.”

“Sounds like you’re the one who needs to get laid,” he tosses carelessly back at you, and you roll your eyes with as much sass as you can physically muster, so tired of all the dodging. You know this hasn’t been easy for him either, he just has too much pride to admit it. “Besides, you’ve gotta be past the withdrawal stage by now. Is it really all that bad?”

“The fuck you mean, ‘Is it really all that bad’?” You snap at him, shuffling around grumpily in your seat, hating the way the bulky weapons controls sit right between your thighs and prevent you from closing them. Withdrawal stage, ha. “Of course it’s all that bad. It’s horrible. It’s the fucking worst. And more importantly, how are you not having any trouble with this? Oh, wait—that’s right,” you answer yourself before he has a chance to. “Because you cheated.”

“I did not cheat,” Dameron’s reflection immediately challenges with an accusatory finger pointed at you. “I did not. When the fuck did I cheat? I swapped housing assignments with your shitty roommate and slept in the bunk below yours for a month and a half—all because you don’t believe in the honor system—just so you could tell me I fucking cheated?”

You scoff, feeling your annoyance spark even more. He’s always been able to get under your skin, but the neglect you’ve been forcing your body to endure is just throwing gasoline on an already roaring fire. “Okay, first of all? Rude. I am a fucking joy to have as a roomie, alright? I put up with your snoring, your 2:00 AM dinners, you blasting your radio while I’m trying to sleep, I barely complain about your body odor—”

“My snoring is adorable, I get snacky at night, only sad people with fucked up lives hate music, I smell amazing,” Dameron casually lists off on his fingers, the self-confidence so easy and unshakeable that you swear he’s almost preening at the compliments he just gave himself by the time he’s finished rebutting everything you can think to throw at him. And, while you’d never admit it, he does smell good. He smells… unbelievably fucking good. Always. Something dark and woodsy, you can never quite put your finger on. It pisses you off, so much that you’ve made a habit of pulling a face of disgust whenever the warm, rich scent noticeably reaches you, hoping it deflates his ego just a little bit. No such luck so far.

“Whatever. The point is I’m a good fucking neighbor, alright, I’m neighborly as fuck,” you grumble, crossing your arms over your chest defensively. “And don’t make it sound like I’m putting a chastity lock on your balls every night, because you can fuck anyone you want. In fact, I strongly fucking encourage it—I just want to know about it when it happens.”

Dameron smirks and you groan, already knowing what’s coming. “You wanna hear it?”

Yep, there it is. “Second of all—”

“Feel the whole bunk rock with it?” He goes on, completely ignoring you. “Use the excuse that you’re trapped up top so you can just stay there the whole time and listen? You know you can do a lot more than just—”

“Second of all,” you project over him, “you’re seriously telling me you haven’t had any wet dreams then, hm? No snorgasms? Hmmm? No happy naps? No captain midnights? No mattress fracking? Hmmmmmm???”

His voice very quickly sounds… shocked. “How many fucking euphemisms—?”

“Wait wait, one more—” you quickly interrupt, too much momentum to stop now, “—sleepskeet.”

You watch in immense satisfaction as his expression seems to progress through all five stages of grief, before he exhales a long, unamused sigh and scratches his beard again. You want to pluck each strand of it out of his face one by one. “Anyways. Wet dreams are totally different and don’t count.”

“It’s not different!” You burst out, unable to help yourself, “it’s an orgasm, and rule number three is no orgas—”

“I know what the rules were, Gold-Ten,” he returns calmly, and it infuriates you, how he’s always able to make it seem like you’re the instigator who’s overreacting. And he knows exactly what he’s doing by calling you by your flight designation, and it pisses you off even more because calling him Black-Leader in any other situation besides active warfare just feels like an unnecessary reminder of his skills. Why he’s currently behind you manning the guidance controls and why you’re currently stuck in the front seat with the bulkier weapons systems. “The question is if you’re seriously that bad enough of a sport to automatically disqualify me because of something that happens to any human with a dick indiscriminately when we blueball ourselves.”

“But that’s the entire fucking point, Dameron!” You shrill, throwing your hands in the air in pure exasperation. “There it is! You need it more than I do, you just said it yourself! Not to mention I said I can go longer without sex than you can— sex , not orgasms, but as it turns out I win at both. Now can we please call this shit off so I can finally cum? This isn’t fun anymore.”

“Nope,” he says immediately, popping the P with a bit too much hard emphasis to be genuinely amused. He’s frustrated, too—his voice is too pleased, too fake to not be masking irritation underneath. “Sorry. But this was also your stupid idea, so.”

“You’re insufferable,” you grumble, anger flaring equal to his, just way more… verbal. And descriptive. “Wet dreams don’t count, fucking right. Tell that to the oceans of Kamino I got going on down there, huh? I move on this seat wrong and I’ll slide off it—”

A loud slam of a palm against the controls suddenly echoes throughout the small cockpit, causing you to jump slightly.

“Don’t,” Dameron snarls, “... say shit like that to me. Not right now. Not right now, fuck .”

You go quiet for a moment, not expecting that much of an outburst at something you considered to be a throwaway remark, but then… oh. Something occurs to you, something… sinister. Oh, well, now there’s an idea.

Everything inside you immediately surges up and burns at the thought—the mere whisper of a way out of all of this, quickly, without giving in and letting him hold your surrender over you for Maker knows how long. It’s so fucking simple, you don’t know why you didn’t think of it before. You don’t have to wait him out at all; instead, you just need to… entice him into giving in first.

Neither of you say anything for a while, and you don’t know what he’s thinking (nothing, probably—a dry tumbleweed bouncing across an empty desert landscape, you imagine) but you take the dip in conversation to consider a plan. You can’t go at it too outright, it’ll be too big of a turnaround and he’ll see it coming lightyears away. A halfhearted joke about your pussy tossed out without thinking is what catalyzed the most substantial reaction from him you’ve seen, so… maybe you can keep steering the conversation towards the idea.

“How many wet dreams have you had?” You suddenly ask, your heart beginning to pick up in your chest as soon as the words are out of your mouth.

“Excuse me?” Dameron grunts from behind you, and you catch his reflection raising a thick eyebrow at you.

You take a deep breath and disguise it by stretching your back out just a little bit, lifting your shoulder blades and arching the sore muscles there, before settling back down in your normal crappy posture once more. “Now many times did you cum in your sleep? Had to at least been once for you to claim they don’t count.”

“Why does it matter?” He asks, completely sidestepping the question for the second time. “It was involuntary.”

You shrug. “Just so I know how many freebies I can get tonight.”

“No,” Dameron instantly counters, his voice dead serious. “Not fucking allowed.”

“Why not?” You ask, and this time, there’s significantly less challenge than you’d typically deliver it with. Instead, your voice is soft, questioning. Not argumentative, but curious, and there’s just enough of your point left unsaid that it’ll seem like he conjured the rest of the image himself.

There’s silence while he considers his response to the perfectly executed bait. You assume you’re both picturing the same thing, because it’s what you’ve pictured almost every single night spent in this celibate hellscape. The cool darkness of your shared quarters, the standard-issue sheets that still feel crispy and rough on your skin no matter how many nights you’ve slept in them, with one of your hands pressed tight over your mouth and two of your fingers circle your clit.

“You only get to do it if I’m in the room,” he poses instead, and you swallow thickly, feeling your body tighten with an unintentional drop of pure heat through your tummy at the thought. Maker, it must be really bad if Poe fucking Dameron is getting to you like this. The bane of your existence shouldn’t make your insides twist in on themselves—at least, not in a good way.

“Not like I’d have much choice,” you eventually respond, keeping it purposefully ambiguous. “It’s your room, too. Unfortunately.”

Stars, it’s been so long since you’ve done this, since you’ve walked the fine line between flirtation and seduction, wanting to turn on the charm slowly—gradually ease it up like a hyperdrive lever under your fingertips so that you’re at maximum by the time he realizes you’re even there. You take a moment to glance at his reflection, watching Dameron look back at you curiously, a flash of interest in his eyes.

“By the way, how does that one girl feel about us doing this?” You ask out of nowhere, suddenly remembering the existence of his pretty little number. You’ve seen her under his arm around base at least a few times, which is more than you can say for the rest of them. “Red-Six. Tall brunette with the tattoos—I don’t bother learning names, they all come and go.”

“Nihla,” Dameron nods with a wistful sigh, tilting his head to rest against his shoulder. “Or, wait… Neah. No—it was… Nalal. Yeah, Nalal, I think that’s right…”

“Unbelievable,” you mutter. “One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is how many people get in line for you, I’ll never fucking understand it.”

“They just want me for my cock,” he tells you without missing a single beat, sounding like he’s not joking in the slightest. “It was starting to get obnoxious. Glad I finally have an excuse to turn them down.”

“Unbelievable,” you repeat, stunned by how truly, mind-blowingly full of himself he is. “You’re… fucking…”

You end up just staring at him and making a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, at a complete loss for words, and Dameron eventually shrugs and continues on after you fail to form a coherent thought in the allotted time frame he provides.

“Now I can just tell them I’m in a long-running bet with Gold-Ten over who can sexually deprive themselves the longest and weirdly enough, they don’t seem all that interested anymore,” he remarks, tilting his chin up and rubbing at his beard again, and for some reason… the sound of it bothers you somewhat less now, the way he phrased that resonating deeper inside you than it should. Lower than it should. You blink a few times, almost shocked by your body’s unprecedented response to his admission—Poe Dameron uses you as an excuse to turn down sex with pretty girls? Happily?—and your mind goes blank for a second while he watches you through the transparisteel. “It’s alright,” he eventually goes on, tilting his head. “Sometimes a sabbatical is good. I do really miss pussy, though.”

“Well,” you finally tell him, oddly not having much else to offer at the moment. “I’m sorry? And… you’re welcome. I guess.”

Dameron shrugs once more and makes an apathetic sound without opening his mouth, and you drop your stare down to the machinery between your spread thighs after feeling like you were looking at each other for too long. The position started uncomfortable and seven hours later, it’s still fucking uncomfortable. At first the discomfort twinged at your hips and lower back, but now the sensation seems to be… centering itself a bit more, finding a spot right between your legs, especially when his words echo through your subconscious and make you naturally want to push your thighs together. I do really miss pussy, though.

You try to snap out of it a bit, try to stop hyperfixating on the way your underwear has felt sticky and wet for fucking hours now, but it’s so fucking difficult to chill yourself out when your body already went into this whole situation with a month and a half long stumbling block. He’s not really doing anything at all—he’s leant back in his chair and staring out the window into the black emptiness of space when you steal a look once more, but something about how his casual responses are affecting you makes it seem like he’s the one currently seducing you.

Maker, you have to focus. You have to control yourself. You’re starting to feel a little warm in your thick jumpsuit—a particular shade of orange that does not compliment your complexion but you normally rejoice in wearing regardless. It’s baggy and uniform and hides most of your curves and most importantly, it keeps you toasty on missions like this. Space is cold —especially this far out in the Cauper Void, and there’s no fucking reason this powered down hunk of floating metal should feel as muggy and stifling as it does in here.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” you suddenly hear yourself say, spontaneously, no thought put into it whatsoever. One last try, one last attempt to avoid it, a last-ditch go at flight before he gives you no choice and you’re left with this one remaining option. “This isn’t a good idea. It’s… not healthy. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

This gets a small chuckle out of him. “I know you don’t, pretty baby.”

“Then let’s just call the whole thing off,” you propose once again, trying to lighten your tone, make it a… a friendly thing. It sounds so fake, even to your own ears—since when would you be desperate enough to let the dreaded petname slide?—but granted, you know what they say about time and measures and all that shit. “We can call it a tie, just go back to the way things were befo—”

He cuts you off and pins you with his gaze through the reflection. “You realize that you begging me to put an end to your suffering is—ridiculously hot, mostly—but also only an incentive to make me keep pushing until you finally give in?”

You groan and comb some of your hair off your forehead, not liking the way it’s getting just the slightest bit damp. “Fine, we won’t call it off, but can we at least just stop—” You immediately catch yourself, not wanting to unintentionally push this too far too quickly, but your hesitation is clear and compelling enough for him to prompt you.

“At least just stop what?” Dameron asks, and though you don’t think it’s intentional or even noticeable from his perspective, something about the way his voice sounds… husky. Low to the ground.

“Stop dragging it out,” you breathe, your heart pounding. Why is your heart pounding so fucking fast? This is a fucking sting op, a facade, so why are you getting so caught up in the lie you’ve spun for yourself? “Finish it. Sooner, rather than later. Quit being masochists about it, just fucking put it to—”

Maker, your eyes instinctively snap to his at your poor choice of wording, having almost said bed on complete accident. Genuinely, you didn’t mean to phrase it that way, but at the same time, the thought of it almost burns you alive. Fuck. Dameron, and you, in bed. It could be mean. It could be rough. A fight for dominance more than anything. He’s bigger than you and he could make it fucking hurt, especially after going without it for as long as you have, but something about how double-edged that type of relief would be isn’t really sinking in for you right now. Like a person slowly dying of thirst that’s fantasizing about drowning. Regardless, the idea of a night with him and the sudden assortment of vivid imagery it provides is enough to get you to shut up and take a deep breath, just wait with your mouth shut for whatever his response is.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to wait long at all.

“This is cute,” he suddenly tells you, and you jerk back and sputter a bunch of consonants stupidly like he smacked you.

“Fuck you?” Are the first recognizable words that can be heard. “I’m not—this isn’t fucking— cute?”

“It’s cute,” Dameron repeats, hiding a soft smile from you with a few of his fingers pressed to his lips. “You,” he says as he points at your reflection, twirling his finger around in circles, “trying to be all sneaky about it, go about your little performance. It’s like… watching a little kid just blatantly fuck up a magic trick but they’re naive enough to think it’s working. Keep going, I’m enthralled.”

You hold still for just a second as ice suddenly sinks through your tummy and clears away any trace of warmth you may have once felt from before. Of course. Stupid. Stupid, you shouldn’t have even tried something like that, you don’t know why you thought…

Horrifyingly, you go dead silent and the lack of an immediate response from you hangs awkwardly in the still air. You’re usually so quick with him, so fiery, letting the things he throws at you just glide right off you, but for some insane reason, you’re actually fucking… embarrassed? A little bit?

You should say something, but your whole body is just frustratingly blank, almost buzzing in mortification, and it gets worse and worse the longer you stay quiet. You don’t usually put yourself in a position to be compromised, and you certainly didn’t think the place he decided to jab this time had particularly thin skin.

You… you’d forgotten what it’s like to have someone laugh at you when you’re genuinely trying your best to flirt.

Well, it’s too late to say anything now, you think. Now it’s just uncomfortable in here—true discomfort, not the typical angry silences. You’re used to that, you’re used to huffing and crossing your arms and ticking your jaw through the breaks in conversation, refusing to say a word because you’re beyond pissed off. This is different. This quiet sits different in the air, this emotion hits different in your chest, somewhere vulnerable. A crack in your armor he found without even necessarily intending to, but at this point, the stupid way you can’t seem to hide the wound from him is just as much to blame.

“So, uh…” Dameron clears his throat as you shut your eyes tight against the awkwardness, but you can still feel a strange little shift in the air from behind you. There’s something about the enclosed space, the quiet darkness surrounding you both, you feel… too close to him. Sharing his air, feeling the energy when it’s cramped and you’re not able to just get up and storm away from him like normal. You don’t like it. You don’t like that you can immediately tell something has changed without being able to see him, that type of intimacy between you is pushing a boundary you can’t quite pinpoint but know exists.

You snap your eyes open and look over at Dameron’s reflection when he’s quiet for too long, and though you try to glare as fiercely as possible at him while you do it, the look on his face almost stops you dead. The pure intensity raging in his expression, the way he’s got his eyes narrowed, flicking back and forth between yours, carefully studying you, wondering if perhaps he may have gotten it all wrong. “I mean, y’know. Theoretically speaking, and all. If I broke, you’d let me fuck you?”

You… aren’t expecting that.

You don’t know why but your heart suddenly starts to race again, but it’s not the same as before. Before it was speeding up and at an angle, like a rocket trying to escape a body’s gravitational pull, to go somewhere, search for something. This time it just feels like it’s ricketing downhill, unsteady and out of control, about to break apart with every single pothole that rattles and slams through you. Shit. You didn’t expect the ultimatum would be presented to you so up front like that—you thought there’d be… some resistance, at least.

Fuck, you take way too fucking long thinking about it, and your face feels warmer and warmer the more you mentally pick apart his specific phrasing, wondering where you should even begin. You still haven’t said anything, but the damage is already done. What should've been a firm, instantaneous go fuck yourself is left suspended, unanswered, open for interpretation. You miss your window of opportunity to shut him down, you overshoot it by a longshot, and then you feel that spark of a what-if flare deep down once more.

No, fucking stop it. Stop it. Maker, your eyes do everything they can to not look at him while you concentrate and work to tap into your anger, stoking the flames of your fire to avoid feeling… temptation. How dare he? How fucking dare he do this to you, especially when there’s no chance to get out of here, to abort mission and cut your losses? You clench your jaw and isolate that fury, magnify it until it’s the only thing you can feel anymore.

“My turn now,” Dameron eventually breaks the silence to clarify, blinking at you, and by this point you’re so fucking pissed off that you don’t recognize that isn’t actually a question.

“No,” you immediately snap, strung far too thin to deal with this new, treacherous territory with him. Defaulting to normal is best, it’s easier. “No, it’s not your turn, and fuck no, you can’t fuck me, not even if it means I win this stupid bet. No to everything that has anything to fucking do with you, alright? Don’t talk to me. You’re lucky if I agree to sleep in the same fucking room as you tonight. And—and?—I think your beard looks dumb.”

Okay, so maybe the last part was just a little bit childish, but you’re in such a bad fucking mood and you want to insult something he’s clearly just trying out for right now, hasn’t yet solidified as part of his usual appearance and unshakeable confidence in it. It’s a downright lie—you think he might look more attractive with it than he ever has. Effortlessly rugged and masculine, framing his face and making his eyes all the more piercing.

You don’t think it works, but regardless, he heeds your sharp words and says nothing for a good few minutes at least. You had hoped the break in interaction would allow you the ability to reset a little bit, give yourself time to work through it, but it’s like the pressure in the air steadily increases regardless of how silent it is in here—or perhaps, because of it.

You can’t help it. You flick your eyes to the transparisteel in front of you once more and catch his reflection staring directly at you, unmoving. It jars you as much as it sparks your anger, and you glare down at your hands and give him a few seconds. A few seconds of grace, of mercy, before you try again.

Sure enough, he’s still got his dark eyes pinned to you when you go to check once more, like he’s actually fucking thinking about something right now, which is just… astounding, for obvious reasons. Mainly, the nerve of him. The fucking nerve of him to be able to look at you like that, like he’s just entitled to study your every feature, searching your eyes for things you’ve never looked deep enough to find within yourself, making incredibly loud assumptions with his mind that he has absolutely no right to be making.

“Shut up,” You snap at him defensively, feeling like you’re sweating buckets even in the freezing emptiness of dead space. You can’t figure out if it’s a cold sweat or if your body is legitimately just malfunctioning under his stare. “Shut up.”

You watch as his reflection suddenly drops his head back against the seat and rolls out the stiffness of his neck, blinking his eyes shut and raising his eyebrows like you’re completely overreacting, like he has absolutely no idea. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re not that dumb,” you challenge. “You’re… plotting. Evil plotting.”

A thick eyebrow drops so that only one is quirked up, and a grin pulls at his lips.

“You’re right,” Dameron admits casually after a moment with his eyes still closed, his voice pitched low in the cramped ship. “I was thinking about what it’s gonna take to get you to lose.”

You swallow against the dryness in your throat, starting to unintentionally bounce one of your legs up and down without even realizing it. Fuck, this ship is small, it’s too fucking small in here—you gaze wistfully out at the vast endlessness of space, wanting to grit your teeth at the irony of being surrounded by the one thing you so desperately wish you had.

“I just have to find a weakness,” he shifts forward in his seat and reveals to you, bewilderingly shameless in his honesty. Like all of a sudden you’re an accomplice to this endeavor instead of its target, as if he isn’t spoiling the secret by letting you in on it. “Something that you like, that gets you going. Something that riles you up, gets you all hot and bothered down there—”

“So you can exploit it,” you huff, slouching over a bit and trying not to sound like you’re pouting.

“—so I can exploit it,” he finishes happily, collapsing back into his seat like he’s glad you caught on so quick and he doesn’t have to explain further. “Now we can do the whole routine—the bickering, the tension, the undeniable sexual chemistry we have—or we can skip all that and you can just tell me flat out what it’s gonna take to rev that pretty little engine up, because I want it purring.”

And, it’s so fucking weird, because the specific verbiage that would normally make you cringe just hearing it spoken aloud doesn’t inspire the typical response, even though it feels like it should. It feels like you should be grossed out, it feels like a moment you should screw up your facial expression and act offended, but you’re… not. This is actually fucking working, it’s unbelievable. The undeniable fact infuriates you just as much as it stumps you.

“You do realize that everything you say is a game that two can play at, right?” You point out, not really sure where you’re going with this but feeling heated about it all the same. “What’s stopping me from exploiting something you like?”

“See now that’s a great idea,” Dameron announces, clapping his hands together happily and sending you jumping a few inches in your seat at the sudden sound, your hand automatically shooting up to rest on your thumping heart. “I can tell you what I like, and you can just listen.”

Alright, no, wait—backtrack—

“How about I tell you what I don’t like,” you snip breathlessly, tucking your hair behind your ear and feeling all the blood rush to your cheeks. Default to normal, default to normal. “Your fucking attitude. Your demeanor. The way you talk down to me. You don’t listen. You walk around like you’re such hot shit just because you’re a good pilot but none of that means anything when you don’t ever fucking listen. You’re terrible at it, doesn’t matter who’s talking—you don’t listen to me, you don’t listen to people who actually like you, you don’t listen to orders, you don’t listen to reason—”

“You think I’m a good pilot?” He suddenly asks, and you have to take a second. This cockpit isn’t designed for anything other than sitting, much less turning all the way around, but you’re sure you can find some way to throttle him from here. He chuckles as you let out the loudest sigh you’ve ever heard yourself make—which, is an incredible feat you think both of you should be congratulated for—before Dameron eventually carries on. “You could tell me that,” he admits with a shrug, a hidden smile on his face that he’s trying to bite back. “Or you could tell me the truth.”

You shouldn’t encourage him, but you just can’t fucking help it. There’s something inside you, something you can only compare to a morbid sort of curiosity. Maybe you’re just a glutton for punishment, even more so than agreeing to this bet has already confirmed. “And that would be—?”

“That you use anger as a defense mechanism because I touch a nerve you didn’t realize you had,” Dameron replies breezily. “Have since the moment we met. And that you maybe want me to touch something else, but you’re too stubborn and proud and committed to hating me to ever admit it. You can admit it, it’s okay, I can touch whatever you need me to tou—”

“How about the emergency eject button?” You hiss, finally feeling your frustration peak. “Pop the top on this bitch. Put me out of my fucking misery, right now. You’ve got such a big head that the blood flow will probably keep your tiny little brain warm enough as long as you strap yourself down beforehand, I’ll wait. And then you can go back to base, alone , and find another poor girl to emotionally torture since you probably don’t get enough of it from the ones you work your way through but can never remember the most basic things about.”

Remarkably, that actually shuts him up. You’re doubtful the jab really hurts him, but you’re not going to feel bad about it either way. He deserved that. You cross your arms over your chest and don’t even bother looking at him, huffing and flushed with the climax of your ferocity, now left feeling strangely exhausted in its wake. Eventually your breathing evens out and disappears into the silence, until nothing at all can be heard.

It’s like that for a moment—only a moment, before the loud tearing of velcro suddenly shreds through the quiet in the cockpit, completely rattling you. Automatically your eyes shoot over to his reflection, watching large hands pull the orange jumpsuit apart at his chest and then shrug it over broad shoulders. It’s not sexual. It can’t be sexual, because there’s just no fucking room to allow it—it takes him forever to pull the long sleeves down his arms, but the way he drags it out somehow just increases your anticipation for an event you should have absolutely no interest in spectating. He’s wearing a white sleeveless undershirt underneath and the jumpsuit bunches at his waist, making him look all the longer and more defined as he finally collapses back into his seat and reclines in it, the distant constellations bathing his lean torso in dim speckles of starlight.

Your gaze catches on every good part of him—it falls down the muscular lines of his neck and follows the thin gold chain wrapped around it, disappearing into the white of his scooping neckline. His toned body finds a place to rest and stretch out without looking awkward or uncomfortable, coarse hair darkening his jaw and dusting the strong lines of his forearms—but it’s his eyes that make your heart stutter. They’re endlessly deep and dark and knowing , and you can’t seem to look away from him, not even when he opens his mouth to address you.

“You’re always so fucking mean to me,” Dameron remarks, and for just a split second—just a split second, you feel a stab of regret. “I should eat you out tonight.”

Fuck, he hits the nail right on the head on his very first try, and just hearing the words come out of his mouth so effortlessly makes your pussy clench in on itself in need. Nothing about his inflection changed from one sentence to the next, nothing in his voice made it seem like he just flipped the fucking galaxy upside down with just a few words. To an onlooker who doesn’t speak Basic, they’d have absolutely no hint as to why your face is suddenly radiating heat at an industrial capacity, blazing hot enough to warm the whole cockpit. You feel like you’re literally burning up with it. You have to put a palm to your cheek to make sure it’s not actually on fucking fire. “What— what did you just say to me?”

“That’s what you need,” he drawls, unbothered by the sharpness of your tone. “What you’ve needed, ever since I can remember. Should’ve done it a long fucking time ago, now that I’m thinking about it. How long’s it been? Tell me the truth, I know it’s been awhile.”

You feel like you’re being roasted alive like one of those hairy little Kowakian monkey-lizards that you’re pretty sure have sentient designation but are the first to be skewered and cooked over the firepit regardless. Your heart is slamming against your sternum and you scramble to come up with an even slightly clever response after such an ambush.

“This is your plan?” You raise an eyebrow at him, feeling a bead of sweat drop down your temple and onto the corner of your lashes. Oh fuck, be cool, be cool. “You think this is gonna work? Ask me if I want a weak orgasm and rugburn on my thighs?”

“I can shave,” Dameron proposes quietly, lifting his chin and gently scrubbing the side of his cheek. The sound of the thick bristles against his fingers makes you swallow thickly and push back very vivid thoughts of how his face would feel between your legs. How soft and wet his mouth would feel at the center of that thick, coarse beard. “Tonight, I’ll shave it off. Make it nice and smooth for you.”

Something inside you surges up to assure him he absolutely should not shave, and you actually have to bite your tongue to keep it buried at the last second. Stars, that was a close one, what the fuck prompted that?

“I don’t give a shit what you do,” you quickly return, resisting the urge to wipe your brow. “Beard or no beard, makes no difference. Foreplay is overrated, I’m not big on wasting time.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” he immediately laments—so quick , and the worst part is that the sympathy in his voice actually sounds sincere. You’re having trouble looking him in the eyes right now, hearing the genuine pity come through in his tone. “Who… who did this to you?”

“You said you want to figure out what I like, what turns me on,” you return, tucking your hair behind your ear once more and trying not to sound self-conscious. Maker, how long until your shift is over? You need to get out of here, this shit is… way out of your league. “I’m not into it, so try again.”

“Really?” Dameron takes a moment to look at you, furrow his thick eyebrows at you in barely concealed curiosity, before his head tilts sideways and drops to his shoulder. “Normally I’d respect that, but I meant it when I said you need it.”

“We fucking hate each other, Dameron,” you hiss, a reminder to him as much as it is to yourself. Fuck, you really don’t like where this is going. “You don’t know anything about me, you don’t know what the I n—”

“I bet you think we’d fuck hard,” he murmurs, low enough that you have to take an unsteady breath and physically brace yourself for whatever is going to come from that dirty mouth next. “You think that maybe I’d throw you around a little, give it to you from behind, teach you a fucking lesson for always talking back to me. But that’s primitive shit, Gold-Ten, that’s not for you.”

Resist. Resist . You’re part of the fucking Resistance, for Maker’s sake, you’re taught to hold out until death in torture scenarios. Since when did this tin can suddenly become a new POW camp simulation you have to train for?

“I want to take you apart so slow that you can’t talk at all,” Dameron continues quietly, and you close your eyes, biting your bottom lip hard enough to sting. “We don’t even have to fuck—I mean, I want to, but mostly I just want to taste you. Go nice and slow. I want you on your back, so I can look in your eyes and see all that anger just… fade away. I want to watch you try to fight how fucking good I’ll make it. How hot it’s gonna be when you can’t glare at me anymore, when your pretty doll eyes go all soft and sweet and you finally realize that I’ve never hated you at all.”

Maker. This is a trick. It’s not a question, it shouldn’t be presented like one—this is a dirty rotten trick , and you’re not gonna fall for it. You can’t fucking fall for it. It’s a low blow, and you refuse to even acknowledge he said anything at all. He’s lying to get your guard down. He laughed at your flirting. He’s a shit person, he’s using you, this isn’t real.

Real or not, you still gulp loud enough for him to hear it.

“We could go back to our room after our shift is over,” he offers out of the blue, and you have no clue why, but when he pauses and lets it hang in the air for a second, you don’t interrupt him. You stay completely silent while he waits for you, waits for your typical snarky comeback. You have it in your head instantly, you know what you’d normally say. Your room. It’s not ‘our’ room, it’s fucking your room that you’re generous enough to let him bunk in, a privilege he’s this fucking close to losing—but you can’t find it in yourself to say it right now. Your anger is gradually losing the war to your arousal and you’re forced to watch every single small defeat inside you happen from the sidelines.

His reflection blinks at you through the transparisteel, his eyebrows raising just slightly at your prolonged silence, before he suddenly sits up a little and leans forward.

“And I could lock the door,” Dameron continues, lowering his voice, both in volume and register. “The lights in there are way too fucking bright but I don’t want to be in complete darkness, so maybe we can turn them off and open the port shade, let just enough light come through to see. I could turn on the radio, find something quiet, easy to listen to. Something you like, I’ll let you pick it out. And then… Wait, hang on, which bed?”

You clench your jaw and purposefully say nothing even as your pussy squeezes, glaring right through his reflection into the black void of space.

“Mmm. Your bed,” he eventually decides. “I want you comfortable. You shower at night. Your hair will be wet and you’ll be in those baggy pajamas that you think I can’t see your nipples through, the ones that I know you take off under your covers and then put on in the morning when you think I’m still asleep. That’s good, I want you relaxed, so that maybe… maybe you’d let me take your panties off at some point. And you could lay back and open your legs, and I could go down on you for a little while. However long you need.”

Fuck.

No, this isn’t fucking happening. Your lower muscles aren’t twisting in so hard that it actually fucking hurts, your pussy isn’t leaking through two layers of fabric under your jumpsuit, your body isn’t outright revolting against the sheer neglect you’ve put it through. Maker, it’s fucking painful. You have to clench your hands into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms before you can open your mouth.

“You want to know what I need?” You nearly wheeze, a drop of sweat sliding down the back of your neck this time. Your body feels like it’s three sizes too big for this cockpit and your skin feels like it’s three sizes too small for your body. “I need you to shut the fuck u—”

“What you need,” Dameron purrs, sliding up closer behind your seat and sighing soft against the worn material of your headrest, “is a warm mouth to cum in. Don’t be shy, pretty baby, you can tell me.”

You growl out his last name as threateningly as you possibly can before he purrs yours right back in your ear, and fuck, you’ve never heard it sound so sexual before. Last names allow pilots to maintain a respectful distance from each other. Flight designations are Resistance-wide, but last names are just… allies. Not friends, not companions, but a vast network of people brought together by a common enemy. It hurts to lose a first name. But the way yours sounds rolling off of Dameron’s tongue is just too sinful, too intimate when calling you that is meant to sever intimacy by design. He says it slow and makes it dirty, muddies it in the back of his throat as he slides up even closer to you, until his face is right next to yours as you stare at each other through the transparisteel.

“I’m really…” he pauses, before exhaling through his nose and swallowing thick enough to make his Adam’s apple drop and bounce up again, his tongue coming out to wet his plush lips as he blinks slowly at you with a heavy gaze, “… really good at it. Call me Poe and I’ll do it for you all night.”

Shit, your pussy is just a fucking mess right now. It feels like it’s melting sweet and syrupy all over your thighs, throbbing and pounding and clamping up and screaming at you to do something, at least press your hand down there to alleviate some of the aching tensi—

No— stars, no touching yourself is rule number two. You drop your hands to your thighs and squeeze them, trying to reign yourself back in.

“I think you’re—just projecting,” you try, but turns out responding in general is just an all-around bad idea. Nothing about it comes out right. The ‘just’ sounds like your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth and your voice cracks on the word ‘projecting,’ but you don’t even have time to be self-conscious or embarrassed at how much you’re giving yourself away—all your energy has to go towards fighting the tightness between your open legs, how you’re so fucking turned on that you’re worried you’ll cum without even touching yourself. Oh Maker, can you imagine? How fucking proud of himself he’d be? You can’t let that happen, but fuck, holding back something so appealing is so much harder than it sounds.

Tap into that anger, tap into that anger—only, you can’t suddenly find it. Where’d it go? Fuck, doesn’t matter, conjure it. Quick, before it’s too late, get mad —don’t let him lure you into a… a false…

Dameron tilts his chin down towards the line of your shoulder and then slowly turns his head towards your neck, breathing you in gently.

A false sense of…

His soft exhale makes goosebumps break out all the way down your arms.

… What?

“Maybe you’re right,” Dameron acknowledges, talking just under your ear. You watch his eyelids dip and the dark beard brushes against your skin and you catch just a hint of that woodsy, spicy scent engulfing you. Like… teakwood, maybe? Stars, you don’t know, you think you’re starting to lose your mind. What the fuck does teakwood even smell like? “Maybe it’s just what I need. You should exploit it, chances are I’ll still cum first.”

That rockets another painful spasm down low. It hurts so fucking bad—fuck, maybe you could… rub yourself up against these weapons controls? Just a little bit? That joystick, right there, just ease yourself up against it just to nurse this wound a little bit…?

No, fucking— bad. That’s bad, you have to stop—

“This isn’t real, this isn’t—y-you just…” You flutter your eyelashes shut, digging your fingernails into your thighs like it’ll help break through the fog of his lulling voice, how fucking amazing he smells right now. “You just want to win th-the b—”

“ Fuck the bet,” he tells you quietly, his head dipped low enough now that his lips brush against your neck, and you shudder so hard at the sensation that your shoulder almost knocks into his chin with it. “You really think I’m doing all this for a fucking bet?”

Don’t trust him, don’t trust him, don’t—

Your deep breath is so stuttery and uneven that it’s technically just a series of shallow inhales all anxiously strung together, too desperate for oxygen to go about it legato. It’s painfully obvious to him by now, it has to be, but you very quickly miss the shaky breathing as soon as he takes away your ability to do it all together.

“Let me taste you,” he whispers, his voice almost breaking with how gentle it is, how it sounds like it flips in and out of his register when he speaks this low. “Right now, let’s make it real, let m—I know you have to be soaking fucking wet, baby, just let me try a little bit of it, please—I’m… holy shit, I’m so hard just thinking about it.”

“You c-can’t,” you stammer, reaching up to pinch the bridge of your nose in frustration. At him, at the situation, at the painful throb of emptiness between your legs. “Fuck, it’s not allowed, it’s against the rules—”

“It won’t be,” he assures you, and you hiccup when you suddenly feel his hand brush against your side, strong fingers branching out to curve against your ribcage. “You don’t have to do anything, you can stay just like this. Just a few seconds and then I’ll stop, I promise.”

Oh, Maker, it’s on the very top of your tongue, so unbelievably close to telling him something—but you don’t know what it should be. You’re right at the tipping point, on a tightrope right between what you want and what you should want. And, knowing you’re this close to giving in, Dameron slowly eases his hand down your side and starts to trail it inwards, and just the lightest brush of his warm tongue against your neck shatters any composure you have left.

You whimper and instinctively try to close your legs, but you fucking can’t— your knees are forced wide apart by controls and your whole body freezes when his hand slides down and folds gently along the curve of your pussy through the thick fabric of your jumpsuit.

The feeling of being held like this by him is just too good , cradled so perfectly in his palm as he opens his mouth and flutters his tongue out to taste your skin again, giving you a little more of it this time and letting you feel the roughness of his beard with the way his lips move. Your breath catches, then he hooks his fingertips up just the slightest bit and pulls back, and you suddenly have to smack your whole hand over your face in a terrible attempt to stifle your loud gasp.

“Oh, Maker, I c-can’t,” you stammer against your fingers, not being able to trust him or your own body. You continue to protest even after he moves back up, resting his palm low on your abdomen, letting the heat bleed through the fabric and transfer directly to your floor muscles as he lifts his head up from your shoulder. “I can’t, we can’t, I…”

You can’t see him, but you know he’s looking at you. He’s staring right at you through the reflection, studying the way you’re hiding your face from him, how you’re still melting, still losing your composure just from the warm palm pressed tight your tummy.

His touch leaves you for a second. But then the deafening sound of velcro ripping at the crotch of your jumpsuit has you dragging your hand down your mouth and your eyelids dipping.

“Dameron,” you breathe into your fingers, just as his carefully slip into the small opening and begin to work at the button to your pants. “Dameron, this isn’t—you don’t want—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I don’t want,” he grunts at you, and you try not to bite yourself at the sound of him unzipping things and yanking fabric to the side. “What I really fucking want is the real thing, but I guess this’ll have to do for now.”

“I—” Your mind whirs desperately, trying to process when his fingers wedge under your panties and down. But he doesn’t give you a single fucking second. As soon as the tip of his middle finger reaches your slit, he’s dropping it and sliding it through your slick, hot, unbearably neglected cunt.

“Fuck,” he spits, and you feel like you might be about to break your own fucking jaw with how hard you’re clutching it, trying so desperately not to make a noise. The pad of his finger is rough and calloused as it drags against your clit in slow, tight circles, and you clamp your eyes shut and try to breathe normally, but it’s no use. Fuck , it’s been so long . You’ve been aching for it for a full fucking month and a half now and you know that even if he couldn’t feel it, he can hear how drenched you are right now. It’s making an obscene sound as he steadily masturbates you with one heavenly finger, giving your body what it’s desperately craved for so many weeks. “Fuck, baby’s pussy got fucking wet hearing me talk about how good I’d lick it, huh?”

That sends a bright flare launching through you and you gasp raggedly, both hands whipping out to snatch at his forearm where it disappears between your legs. “No, shit, wait, stopstopstopstop stop , I—”

His hand slips out immediately and yet you continue to tremble like his finger is still right there, like your clit is just imagining it so vividly that it’s successfully convincing itself of the illusion. The aching bit of flesh is burning, that good burn, the one that’s searing and bright that makes your muscles continue to chase the sensation long after the stimulation is gone. Fuck, he almost made you cum. He barely touched you for a few seconds and yet your fingers have to tighten into claws to slow your body down the fuck down, flexing against your thighs and trying your best to halt the impending climax.

By the time you’re able to wrangle yourself back from the edge and look at his reflection, his middle finger is already in his mouth and he’s blinking slowly at you, his pupils blown wide. You’re breathing hard at him, staring open-mouthed at the way his lips are closed below his second knuckle, how he takes forever dragging it back out again. You have to close your eyes. You have to clamp them shut and keep them that way, knowing you won’t be able to look at him through whatever he’s going to say next.

Except, oddly, he doesn’t say much.

“Shit,” he breathes, dropping his mouth to your neck once more. “Shhhit. I…”

Your eyes snap open in sudden, blind panic when he doesn’t continue, horrified at the possibility that he doesn’t like it. Dameron always has something to say, he doesn’t go speechless. “Oh—Maker, is it not—?”

“Mmmfuck, just—” he grits, panting hot air against your skin, “—fuck. Give me a second.”

You can only see the crown of his head with the way he’s angled, but you can see his shoulders a little further back. They start… moving slightly. Just the littlest bit, a smooth motion, like his whole body is slowly easing back and forth—

The nav controls are between his legs, you immediately realize. He’s grinding up against them with how close he is to you and your seat.

And suddenly, it’s like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A ray of sunshine that breaks through the raging storm. Dameron might cum in his pants like this. Which means you’ll win, and arguably more importantly, you’ll finally be able to cum. You don’t even take a moment to consider the potential consequences—how you’re going to have to withstand the stimulation until he succumbs to it, how you’ll have to outlast—but you’re not thinking straight. You’re not really thinking at all.

“You can…” you suddenly hear yourself whisper, and your heart pounds in your throat when he instantly stops moving. “One… one more. If you want. You can put your finger inside this time, it’s where I’m the… w-wettest.”

“Fuck,” Dameron croaks into the crook of your neck, his voice scraping low and rough and sending a tremor through you. “Fuck, okay, yeah—”

His hand slides across your hip and down, but you catch him just in time.

“But don’t touch my clit.” You try to sound as firm as possible through the breathlessness, still trying to put your foot down even when you’re giving in, and Dameron’s teeth come out as he stifles a soft groan into your neck in response.

“Yes, baby,” he murmurs obediently as his hand sinks down once more, and so diligently, he avoids it altogether. His fingers slide under your panties and fall straight down to your entrance, down to where you know you’re the hottest, where your pussy is flexing and pushing wetness out with a steady, wicked throb. The pad of his middle finger presses gently against the tight muscles there, rubs just the slightest bit to feel that resistance, and then the length of it eases inside you so slowly that your knees rattle against bulky metal.

“Fucking Maker , ” he hisses as he slides it in, his body making a sudden jerk against the controls.

Your eyes roll back at the feeling of something inside you after so long, after such a torturous buildup, and you grasp at his forearm again when it curls naturally up against searing pleasure. Oh, it’s so good, it’s so good, your hands shake while he very carefully moves it in and out, the raw sparks of heat threatening to incinerate you as your muscles cling to every ridge of his finger. He gets it sopping wet, bathes it so completely in your slick that you’re almost certain it’ll come out pruny and drenched.

“Shit, okay,” you pant, squeezing desperately around his finger, “o-okay, fuck, that’s enough.”

His hand pulls out… slower this time. He slips his finger out of you quick enough, but he drags the tip of it through your folds as he retreats, just barely grazing your clit and making you jolt in your seat. Shit, you don’t know if it felt intentional enough to fault him for it—mostly it just excites you, thrills you to have him edge you like this without really needing to put any effort at all into it.

Dameron lifts his head to sink his finger deep into his mouth once more, and you tremble as you watch him enjoy it, staring at the way his shoulders seem to relax as soon as your taste is on his tongue, how his face goes soft with it and he almost slumps.

Relief. Genuine, not embellished. He still doesn’t say anything after he slowly slides it out and blinks at you, no sugar sweet drawl telling you how amazing you taste, no candied words to make you give in and let him have another go. You’re both breathing hard at each other, staring, waiting to see who will break first.

Stars, you… fucking like this. You want him to keep going, but you can’t offer it again. It’s just too exposing, too revealing to let him you’re actually really fucking enjoying this, you can’t—

“Do you w—?” Your voice automatically comes out through the silence without your permission, sounding just absolutely fucking wrecked by this point, but his palm is already slithering back down as soon as you speak, and you make the softest little submissive noise in your throat at him taking immediate initiative like that. He’s not as careful about it this time—his hand finds its target with less frill, his finger slides in quicker, sinking deep into your heat with little hesitation, lighting you on fire from the inside out, and you bite the meat of your thumb to stay quiet.

“Fuck, this is so hot,” he suddenly breathes next to your ear while your legs spasm and you gasp brokenly. “This is so—fuck, pretty baby letting me do this to her, I can’t fucking believe—”

Dameron eases a second finger inside you this time, letting you feel that delicious stretch from this angle, unable to lift your legs or shuffle around to help and subsequently resigned to simply experience it the way he gives it to you. Your teeth have probably permanently indented your bottom lip from how hard you’re clamped down, a testament to how much you’re trying to hold back the loud moan you miraculously haven’t released yet. Somehow it makes it sexier, not letting him hear you, not having your own noises to drown out the spark of urgency in his voice beginning to peek through.

Shit, it’s too much. You can only let him touch you a few seconds at a time before you feel that familiar tug towards mind-numbing bliss, and the more he does it, the more appealing that feeling then becomes. It’s teasing you, floating right in front of you and calling into question what could possibly be so bad about just reaching out to meet it? You could. You could cum right now. What’s two weeks of pay? You could cum all night long if you want, that is a thing you can do—

Quickly snapping out of your hypnotic downfall, your trembling hands snatch at his forearm once more, and Dameron, the fucker, drags his fingers slowly over your clit on the way out— so not accidental, not even close to it this time, but the sensation makes your hips stutter upwards and chase it nonetheless.

“Fuck you,” you groan at his audacity, your chest arching as you drop your head back, “I said don’t touch my—” but two wet fingers slipping past your lips and onto your tongue muffle the rest of your sentence. Your heart does half a somersault before slamming down early, the taste of your pussy filling your mouth as you automatically start sucking on them.

“None of that,” Dameron tells you softly, massaging his fingers along your tongue before pressing a sweet kiss under your ear. “Be nice. I’m being nice.”

You should bite him. Instead, you just close your eyes and mphh weakly around his fingers, your body sagging as you give into it and let him explore your mouth with them, your lower muscles cramping up in painful desperation even when he’s not anywhere near that part of your body right now. Your tongue even comes up to lick between them, swirl around them so soft compared to how hard you’re puffing through your nose.

Dameron slowly inches his fingers out, letting the tips of them rest against your bottom lip for just a brief moment, before his hand is moving again. Not down, but back and around, so he can open his mouth and taste you another way this time.

Shit, you feel like you’re dying. You need air. Your hands clench into fists and you use the back of one to wipe the sweat from the bridge of your nose while he takes his time sampling you like this. If anything, he looks just as blissed out as before, continuing to rub his crotch up against the solid metal between his legs and teasing you with it as much as he’s teasing himself.

“Maker, let me do this for real tonight, okay,” Dameron pants after dropping his fingers from his mouth, sounding like he’s fighting for his breath while you can’t find yours at all. Your eyes flick down to watch the way his hand disappears behind the chair to grab the controls and push his cock up against them even harder, how he drops his forehead to your neck like he just can’t fucking handle it anymore. “Fuck, I’ll shave, I’ll do anything you want, just let me—”

“Cum,” you gasp out before you can stop yourself, and there’s a moment after it where his hips suddenly stutter against the controls, and you both freeze.

Shit. Shitshitshit, did that actually work?

No, you very quickly realize, his body isn’t spasming like it would if he finally emptied his load after a month and a half. He’s just… holding there, his head buried in your neck, completely still.

You didn’t mean it like that. Well… fuck, you did, but you didn’t realize you’d be that reckless about it, that upfront about reissuing the challenge.

Dameron pulls back to look at you from the side this time, but it’s too cramped—he keeps his head turned facing you even as his eyes flick up to the transparisteel to take in the finer details of your features, the thin sheen of sweat on your forehead, and the slightly alarmed way you’re blinking back at him, worried you just shot your blaster at him in the midst of a mutual ceasefire and you fucking missed.

You see the understanding in his eyes instantly fall into place, and it’s not fucking good. Ohhhhhh no, it’s not good. Your chest starts rising and falling rapidly, suddenly registering the position you just put yourself in. Fuck, you didn’t think—you saw your opening, so clearly, you didn’t have time to think about the consequences.

“D-Dameron…” you try your best to placate.

“Don’t touch your clit?” He asks quietly, the raspiness of his voice ripping a hole through you while his hand suddenly shoves its way back down your body once more.

“Dameron,” you whimper, your heart stuttering in panic as you grasp weakly at his arm reaching between your spread thighs, “Dameron, this is—this is against the r-rules—”

“You keep saying that,” he comments, his fingers easily finding the opening in your jumpsuit no matter how hard you flex your thighs against bulky mechanics to try and close them. “How clearly do you remember the rules? What were the rules again?

You open your mouth to respond but his hand sliding under your panties and down just obliterates any chance you were going to attempt. No words, nothing comes out but a shaky whine as his finger sinks into your soaking heat, going right for the kill.

“Come on, baby, the rules,” Dameron reminds you when you never give him an answer. “Tell me. No fucking, no jerking off, and…?”

You suddenly struggle forwards in a last-ditch attempt at preventing the inevitable, hoping you can scoot up enough in your seat to escape his reach from behind. But fuck, your thighs have been shoved wide open for nearly eight hours—none of the muscles are working the way they should be anymore. There’s just enough room in front of you to get there and you probably would’ve been able to do it at the beginning of the shift, even with his hand between your legs like this, but you’re sluggish and your thighs pull sharp and urgent with the movement. The frantic maneuver enough to veer his fingers off course just slightly, moving one of your lips to the side at an angle, and you keep pushing against the pain no matter how useless it is.

“—No cumming,” he finishes for you, and his other hand is slithering up under your arm and groping one of your breasts through the jumpsuit before shoving you back tight up against your seat once more, totally helpless against it. “Probably have another fifteen minutes or so before our shift ends. Better hold it in, pretty baby, because this one is all you.”

“This—this isn’t fair, this is—” The second the slippery pad of his finger presses hard against your clit, you’re biting your lip to cut off a breathless whimper that slips out. “This is… is sab— sabotage— ”

“Oh, I know,” he moans next to your ear, mocking your high plea of distress with a fake, overly sympathetic whine. “Feels so fucking good though, doesn’t it?”

Fuck, it does. The build feels like an orgasm in itself, just working your way to it. You’re already so unbelievably close after just a few seconds of direct stimulation, an obvious consequence of originally agreeing to such a hardcore edging workout. You’re pouring sweat, so swollen and tight between your legs as you do everything you can to revolt against your body’s needs.

“Oh fuck, stop touching my clit—” you gasp raggedly, heart thundering in panic while your lower muscles start to immediately seize up, “oh—fuckfuckfuck— Poe, take your finger off m—”

Instead of doing it, his hand just slows down until the tip of his finger comes to a halt, maybe less than an inch over top of it. You still can’t catch your breath though, not when you feel yourself throbbing against absolutely nothing, the calloused pad holding perfectly still over the bundle of nerves. The swollen bud still arcs and flares at a steady frequency, building and building, and you choke out a wordless garble, absolutely fucking furious that this is what’s gonna make you cum.

“Don’t make me cum,” you switch up your sentence but not the terrified plead in your voice, the way it’s pitching up and out of control in the dead quiet of space. He doesn’t even acknowledge it. “Don’t make me cum, don—”

“Say it again,” he prompts instead, and lightning arcs up your spine.

“Poe,” you wheeze, the words coming from you without thought, your fingernails digging into his forearm even as your hips jerk up into his touch, “fuck, don’t make me cum, Poe—please don’t make me c—”

“But it’ll be so good,” he counters lowly, and your clit throbs in desperation at the richness of his voice when he speaks like this, saying things from deep in his chest. “It’ll be so fucking good when it happens. Stars, you’ll feel so much better, won’t you? Cum right now and I’ll give you as many as I can until we have to go home.”

“N-No,” you whine, feeling his teeth scrape at the crook of your neck. “No, I can’t—”

“Cum for me,” Dameron raises his voice, sharpening it into a direct order. “Right now. Come on— fucking make yourself lose.”

“But I—I—” you sob, starting to feel your body curl inwards, nearly about to succumb to the burning, the tightening, right on its last breath, “I-I don’t want to cum—”

“And I don’t fucking care,“ he hisses while your hands start flexing unintentionally, grasping helplessly at his immovable forearm where it disappears between your legs, the dark hair sliding under your fingertips as you claw desperately at it. “You’ll fucking cum when I tell you to cum and you’ll like it, you disrespectful, cock-deprived, bratty little—”

And then everything goes dark.

No, literally. The stars disappear.

The cockpit is suddenly shrouded in pitch blackness, and you’re almost certain it’s because you pass out, except then Dameron is all but ripping his hand out of your jumpsuit and cursing repeatedly in alarm. You crumple in on yourself, eyes clamped shut and not hearing anything, right at the peak of your ecstasy and ready to soar into the light completely unassisted, your muscles doing all the work on their own—

“—shit, they’re way too close—” you hear his voice shout, “—we have to turn the engines on—Gold-Ten, baby, turn the fucking eng—”

You’re almost there, you’re almost there, you’re gonna cum, you’re gonna fucking—

Your first name, roared out in startling, blinding panic.

You don’t often hear it. Just during roll calls mostly, but only if you’re flying with a different squadron and need a new temporary flight designation for the day. First names hurt. You can’t remember a time you’ve ever willingly told anybody yours.

Your head jerks up to look at his reflection but something else beyond the transparisteel takes immediate precedence. Your brain takes about two seconds to catch up before thundering terror slams through you and halts your previously inevitable orgasm in its fucking tracks. A runaway train about to launch off its tracks suddenly slamming directly into a megaton force-field of cold, hard fight or flight instincts.

A staggering fleet of First Order ships silently plunging out of hyperspace on all sides—your powered-down x-wing stationed right in the middle of the drop location.

***

Stay tuned for part two coming soon!!

#poe x reader #poe dameron #poe dameron x reader #SMUTTTT #reader insert #star wars #fanfic #the formatting on this one is downright horrendous but im so mad that i cant even fix it right now so thatll have to come later im sorry

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marvelmusing · 4 years ago

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Making Time

Mobius M Mobius x Reader

Part 2

My Masterlist

“1985, huh?” You say, looking up from the briefing Mobius has just handed you.

“Yeah, maybe we’ll spot a delorian?” He jokes, making a Back to the Future reference. You smile at him, remembering when you’d first mentioned the movie. You hadn’t been at the TVA long, to your knowledge.

You’re sat in one of the cafes, explaining something about the timeline to Casey, and you make an offhand reference to the movie. To which, Casey looks even more confused. You glance at Mobius, who’s been sat next to you, watching your teaching with a smile. You offer them both a small smile, at yet another reminder that you’re from somewhere very different from the rest of them.

“Neither of you have seen it have you?” Mobius shakes his head.

“Not a lot of chances for watching movies when dealing with the timeline. Should we get the chance, I’d love to.” It’s a few days later when you give him the chance.

“Honey, I’m home.” You hear Mobius call out, which brings a smile to your face. Whilst you had your own apartment, you much preferred staying with Mobius, like you did when you first arrived at the TVA. You hear him set down a pile of papers in the kitchen, before making his way into the lounge where you’re sat waiting for him. “Hey.”

“Hi.”

“What’s all this?”

“Back to the Future. I went through my file, and managed to find a version that I watched that was uninterrupted. Then I isolated it, and copied it onto one of those cassette reel things, so that it’ll play on your mini projector.” You pause, before adding, “I probably put too much effort into this but, I thought we could have what my time considers a movie night?”

“A movie night?” Your face falls slightly, feeling embarrassed by your suggestion.

“We don’t have to-“ you start. He shrugs off his jacket and settles down next to you.

“Did I not tell you I wanted to watch it, should I get the chance?”

“Well, yeah.” He gestures to the projector.

“Let’s get this show on a roll.” You grin at him, before quickly pressing play on the projector. Mobius leans an arm on the couch and pulls you to his side. “You finally have clearance to access to your file, and you use it to watch Back to the Future?”

“What else was I supposed to do with it?” You joke.

You and Mobius head to the cubicle where you left Loki this morning. You spot him wapping against the desk with a magazine.

“Training going well?” You ask him. He leans back in his chair, attempting to look casual.

“Yeah.”

“Is that my jet ski magazine?” Mobius asks him. “Put it down. Gear up. There's been an attack. Let's go.” He hands Loki the jacket he’s been carrying. You set the briefing down on the desk, and follow Mobius. Loki trails behind you. “Put it on.” Loki shrugs the jacket on, adjusting the collar before posing.

“Nice.” You tell him with a smile.

“Good. Yeah, smart.” Mobius says distractedly. You soon reach the Timedoors, where a small group of hunters have gathered to wait. B-15 opens up the briefing.

“C-20 and her team went dark shortly after they jumped into the 1985 branch. All signs point to another ambush. We've grabbed enough temporal aura to know it's our Loki Variant. But which kind of Loki, remains unknown.”

“They're the lesser kind, to be clear.” Loki specifies. B-15 sighs,

“Let me see the back of that jacket.” Loki does a small turn, showing the group the back of his jacket, where the bright orange letters reading VARIANT stand out. Everyone is the group shares a small smile. You’re glad you don’t have to wear one of those anymore.

“Very subtle. Well done.”

“I don't want anybody out there to forget what you are.”

“Oh, your only hope of capturing a murderer?”

“No. A cosmic mistake.”

“That's enough.” Mobius interrupts.

“Lovely.” You hear Loki murmur.

“Here's the deal.” Mobius begins. “When we get out on the branch, we're not just looking for a Time Criminal. We're looking for a Loki. A variation of this guy. A type we should all be very familiar with, because the TVA has pruned a lotta these guys, almost more than any other Variant.” He skims through a few of the Loki Variants that the TVA have caught before. “And no two are alike. Slight differences in appearances, or not so slight. Different powers, although, powers generally include: shapeshifting, illusion projection, and my favourite-”

“Duplication casting.” Loki interrupts

“Illusion projection.”

“No, they're two completely different powers.”

“How?” You ask him.

“Illusion-projection involves depicting a detailed image from outside oneself, which is perceptible in the external world, whereas duplication-casting entails recreating an exact facsimile of one's own body in its present circumstance, which acts as a true holographic mirror of its molecular structure. But you already knew that.” He explains. You catch a glimpse of Mobius’s smirk before he says,

“Okay, take a breath. Noted. We're gonna break into two teams, including myself and Professor Loki.”

“Why?” A hunter stood beside you asks.

“Because whoever this Variant is, we haven't been able to find him. So let's bring in an expert.” Loki looks around at the group before adding a quiet,

“That's me.”

As the hunters prepare themselves, you hear Loki ask, “Do I get a weapon?” You laugh lightly,

“No chance.”

“Well, I'll have my magic back. Is no one concerned about that?”

“Of what?” Mobius asks.

“Me betraying you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know that we’ll just catch you again.” You tell him.

“And how's betraying us gonna get you any closer to the Time-Keepers?” Mobius adds. Loki leans forward, his attention fixed on Mobius.

“An audience with the Time-Keepers is on the table?”

“Keep that focus.” Mobius tells him. The three of you follow the hunters through the Timedoor, and out into 1985 Wisconsin. Your group makes their way through the crowd of the Renaissance fair before entering a large tent. It’s dark inside, with only a few lanterns to light your path. You watch as B-15 bends down to grasp examine a helmet left abandoned on the floor.

“So he's taking hostages now?” She says, turning to Mobius.

“The Variant's never taken a hostage before.”

“Maybe he's upping his game.”

“Or he pruned her.” One of the hunters remarks, you frown at his callousness towards his colleague.

“A Loki couldn't have gotten the jump on C-20.”

“I think you underestimate, actually...” Loki begins.

“Fan out and search for her. And hurry up, we're at three units until red line.” B-15 orders. Mobius sets a hand on your arm, and the two of you head to the exit.

“Come on.” He says to Loki.

“Wait. If you leave this tent, you'll end up like them.” Mobius stops beside Loki.

“What do you see?”

“I see a scheme, and in that scheme, I see myself.” Loki begins to ramble about an old Asgardian saying.

“Two units. He is wasting our time.” B-15 interrupts.

“Okay. Come on, Loki, make a long story short.” Mobius encourages.

“We need to look for C-20.”

“That's exactly what the Variant wants you to do. It's a trap. He's waiting for you outside this tent.”

“Should I secure the reset charges?”

“No. He wants me. I'm the key to his plan. He knows that I'm stronger. And he rightly believes that together we can overthrow and rule the TVA. But that's not what I want. I have a new purpose. I'm a servant of the Sacred Timeline. And knowing what I now know about his tactics, I can deliver you the Variant, but I need assurances.” He says, looking to Mobius. You glance up at Mobius, frowning slightly. Surely he isn’t believing what Loki’s saying? His eyes catch yours and there’s a small twinkle in them. You hide your smile. Loki circles around Mobius.

“Yeah?” Mobius offers.

“Assurances that I won't be completely disintegrated the moment the job has been done.”

“Right.” Loki leans forward, before whispering,

“We'll need to speak to the Time-Keepers at once. They're in graver danger than we realized.”

“He's lying. Just playing games. There's no one out there.” Mobius calls out to the group.

“Reset the timeline.” B-15 orders.

“You had me for a second. My ears are sharp too.” He points at Loki’s chest. You follow Mobius out of the tent.

“Well that went well.” You remark, hearing Mobius sigh. He runs his hand over his face.

You’re tucking into your lunch when you spot Mobius. He picks out a drink and a salad before making his way over to you. You give him a small smile,

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“How did it go with Renslayer?” He sighs, leaning his head back, before getting comfortable in his seat.

“Well, our Loki hasn’t been deleted yet.”

“That’s good then?” You offer. He sighs,

“Yeah. Though he’s getting more and more talkative.”

“You did say he loves to talk. Where is he now?”

“I’ve left him with the archives, hopefully he’ll be reading for the next few days. Or at least long enough for me to finish lunch.” He begins to eat his salad. Just then, Loki scampers in looking like a manic puppy.

“I found something.” Mobius shakes his head, keeping his attention on his lunch,

“No, I said don’t bother me until you've read all the files.”

“I have.”

“Every file?”

“Yes.”

“Pertaining to the Variant?”

“The answer isn't in the files, it's on the timeline. He's hiding in apocalypses.”

“Which apocalypse?” You ask.

“Any time in history? There's, like, a million of 'em.” Mobius adds.

“Ragnarok. Are you familiar?”

“Yes. The destruction of Asgard and most of its people. I'm sorry.” Loki pauses looking down.

“Yes, very sad.” He immediately perks up again. “Anyway, it got me thinking. Nexus events happen when someone does something they're not supposed to do, right?”

“Well, it's a little more complicated, but, yeah.”

“Great. And then that thing they're not supposed to do, cascades into a whole range of other things that aren't supposed to happen.”

“And so on and so forth, until eventually, a new timeline branches. Yes?”

“Chaotic alterations of a predetermined outcome.”

“Exactly. So, let's just say...” He picks up the salad bowl from in front of Mobius.

“Mm-hm. What are you doing?”

“...your salad is Asgard in this scenario.” Loki continues.

“It's not Asgard, that's my lunch.” Mobius complains, the pouting clear in his voice. You lean forward, a hand on your chin to hide the smile at Mobius’s reaction.

“It's a metaphor. Just hang in there.”

“I want that salad.”

“And I could go down to Asgard before Ragnarok causes its complete destruction and I could do anything I wanted. I could, let's say, push the Hulk off the Rainbow Bridge.” He picks up a salt shaker and puts a large sprinkling of salt across Mobius’s salad.

“There he goes.” You say, feeling rather invested in this metaphor.

“The salt's Hulk?” Mobius asks, clearly not as enthusiastic as you.

“And I could also... Set fire to the palace.” He picks up a pepper pot and shakes the pepper across the salad.

“No, just stop. Don't set fire to the palace.”

“Okay? I can do whatever I want to do, and it would never matter. It wouldn't go against the dictates of the timeline because...” He sets down the shakers after nearly emptying them both. He heads to the table behind you. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, God!” Mobius sighs.

“You!” Recognising the voice you look up to see Casey looking very confused.

“Nice to see you. I just need this for a second. Thanks.” Loki picks up Casey’s carton of juice, before sitting back down at your table. “Because the apocalypse is coming. Ragnarok, Surtur will destroy Asgard no matter what I do.”

“No, don't do...” Mobius sighs as Loki empties the carton over the remains of the salad.

“There's the apocalypse.” You say with a sigh, offering Mobius your bag of chips.

“That's the apocalypse?” He asks, taking a handful of chips from you with a smile.

“Ragnarok obliterates the salt. Ragnarok. There it is.” Loki gestures to the ruined salad with a proud smile.

“What am I lookin' at?”

“Okay, it was a clumsy metaphor. But you see what I mean. It doesn't matter. It could be any apocalypse. It could be a tidal wave. It could be a meteor. It could be a volcano, a supernova. If everything and everyone around you is destined for imminent destruction, then nothing that I say or do will matter, because the timeline's not gonna branch. Hence, the Variant could be hiding in the apocalypse and do whatever he wants, and we wouldn't know!”

“Not bad.” You offer.

“Take me to a real apocalypse, to Ragnarok, I'll show you.” Mobius chuckles,

“Yeah. So you can run away back to your homeland? No.”

“No, I'm not going home. We can go anywhere.”

“I'm not taking you for a stroll along the promenade, much less an apocalypse.”

“Oh, Mobius, come on! What could possibly go wrong? We gotta properly test this theory.”

“Well, here's a fun theory. You lure me out into the field, and stab me in the back. And that's a theory I don't wanna test.”

“I'd never stab anyone in the back. That's such a boring form of betrayal.” He most definitely would stab someone in the back.

“Loki, I've studied almost every moment of your entire life. You've literally stabbed people in the back, like 50 times.”

“Well, I'd never do it again, because it got old.” You both laugh at this. Mobius looks at you, and you shrug.

“Might as well try it?” You offer. Mobius nods,

“Okay.”

“Okay, look, you don't trust me, you can trust one thing. I love to be right.” Loki adds. That certainly isn’t a lie.

Tagslist: @n0obmaster69 @mackycat11 @wibblywobblyjeremybearimy @boriqs @morganwilliams @greeneyedblondie44

If you’d like to be tagged just ask!!

#mobius m mobius x reader #mobius x reader #agent mobius #mobius #mobius m mobius #mobius loki #loki 2021 #tva loki #time variance authority #marvel au #marvel x reader

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mypoisonedvine · 4 years ago

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First Chanukah Together (Night 2) | Ari Levinson x reader

(you can read night 1 here, it’s not at all necessary to understand the plot of this one though! this one doesn’t really have a plot anyways skdjghakjghsd)

summary: you really, really like ari’s beard. he reminds you why. (basically there’s no plot at all it’s just smut, guys.)

word count: bit over 1.3k

warnings: smut!! (oral f receiving), beard kink, other than that just fluff and religious references (all of these are gonna have religious references it’s chanukah themed!!)

"Anything good on?" you asked as you sat down on the couch, watching Ari on the floor as he adjusted the dials on the TV, flipping through the channels mindlessly.

"Just Christmas movies," he frowned.

"We need a good Chanukah movie," you realized. "Are there any?"

"There's Fiddler on the Roof,” he shrugged. “That one's also a Rosh Hashanah movie, and a Yom Kippur movie. And a Passover movie."

"So it's sort of an all-purpose Jewish movie."

"Pretty much, yeah," he laughed. "At least, in my family."

"I guess they don't show it on TV out here," you realized.

"Nope," he agreed, "just a lot of White Christmas."

"Oh hey, that Rudolph special is kinda cute," you commented as you saw him flip past it.

"Cute?! Those clay people freak me out," he shuddered.

“You may be the most fearless man I know, but you’re afraid of a stop-motion baby reindeer,” you chuckled. “You’re a trip, Ari Levinson.”

"It's getting pretty dark out, would you light the second candle?” he requested as he motioned to the menorah in the window. You nodded and got up to do so, realizing how dark it was from the way you couldn’t see much of anything outside through the glass— just the reflection of the candles, and the light cast by the TV behind you. Ari’s profile was always stunning, but in the faint blue-ish glow of the screen, you found yourself ogling a little bit. You didn’t get many chances to look at him uninterrupted; he usually noticed and started teasing you, but now he couldn’t see you staring at all.

“Please never shave your beard,” you blurted out suddenly as you turned to face him again. “Or cut your hair.”

He looked up at you from the floor, smirking a bit. “Really? I was kinda thinking about at least getting an inch or two off the hair,” he admitted, running his fingers through it. “It’s gettin’ sorta shaggy.”

“I like it that way,” you announced as you knelt down to join him on the floor, only to yelp in surprise as he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you into him suddenly, both of you toppling onto the ground.

“Do you?” he pressed, leaning in to kiss your neck— his beard tickled you a little when he did that, and it made you shiver in his strong embrace.

“Y-yeah,” you nodded weakly. His body weight pressing you into the floor was relaxing in one sense, and invigorating in another. As his arms reached up to rest on either side of your head, caging you in, and his hips slotted in between your legs, you found yourself biting down on your lip without realizing you’d done it.

“You don’t think it makes me look like a hippy?” he chuckled, kisses trailing down to your collarbone; when the neckline of your sweater got in the way, he pulled it down and kept going. You couldn’t find the energy to worry about him stretching out your favorite top, focusing instead on the way his lips felt against your skin— and the way you could almost feel him getting hard through his jeans when he pushed up against you just right.

“Kinda,” you admitted, barely able to keep track of the conversation as he kept moving lower and lower, “but it’s… I dunno, it’s hot.”

“Sounds like you do know,” he mocked as he moved his body down on top of yours, his head resting just above your stomach. Your disappointment must’ve shown on your face because he started laughing. “What’s wrong, pretty baby?”

“Um,” you stalled, having to focus to keep your hips from bucking up towards him.

“Just tell me what you want, sweetheart,” he shrugged.

A pang of need hit inside you, as if you needed reminding of what you wanted. “Ari, need your mouth, please…”

He smirked and slid down that last little bit, grabbing your fuzzy pajama pants and pulling them down to your ankles— and your underwear along with them. “What are you all wet for?” he cooed, stopping for a moment to kiss inside your thighs. You could tell he was intentionally rubbing his beard against your sensitive skin, letting the ends of his long hair tickle you in a… specific place.

“Fffuck,” you stammered in lieu of an answer.

“Is this all for me?” he pressed.

“Yes,” you nodded quickly.

“You smell so good,” he purred. You couldn’t be sure if it was the way his voice got deeper and darker that made your spine tingle and your nipples harden instantly, or if it was the filthy words that voice was actually saying. It was sort of embarrassing when he said stuff like that, but in a way you had grown to find quite enjoyable. Once he’d figured out your sensitivity to praise— especially that kind of praise— he’d taken every opportunity to exploit it. “Bet you taste even better,” he finished as he dove in between your legs, licking a long, slow stripe through your folds.

You could feel his beard against your pussy and you thought you might die.

“Ari,” you moaned, “fuck.” You let your head fall back against the floor, which he corrected instantly with a light slap on your thigh.

“Nuh uh, baby, wanna see those pretty eyes while I taste your cunt, okay? Don't look away."

You were pretty sure it wasn't about him seeing your eyes, though; it was about you seeing him do this to you. Those blue eyes of his pierced right through you as he latched his lips onto your swollen clit, your back arching instantly of its own accord.

You could feel him smile a little as he kept working you, tongue laving over every sensitive spot he could find— which, it turns out, is a lot. Even more came into play as he pressed two thick fingers inside you.

"Ari, baby," you whimpered, pushing back against his hand. Just his fingers were enough to get so deep inside you; it was a wonder you were able to take his cock at all. "Right there," you sighed.

"Think I don't know that? You're about to come already," he laughed as he licked your clit again. Your fingers laced into his hair, tightening and tugging at the roots without really meaning to. The long ends were swinging against the insides of your thighs as you rocked back onto his hand and face, and it made your whole body erupt into goosebumps. "Come on my tongue, pretty baby," he encouraged darkly, "wantcha to soak this beard you like so much with your come."

"Fuck, 'm gonna," you hissed, "so close, please please don't stop."

The hand holding your thigh gripped you a little tighter, just as the fingers inside you curled a little harder. Pressure seized up in your gut as you felt your walls clenching on him; warmth spread from between your legs, specks of color danced behind your eyes. You heard his name before you even realized that it was you who said it.

When his fingers slipped out of you and his face emerged from between your thighs, he was grinning so wide that it was impossible not to smile with him. “That was…” you searched for the right word, still catching your breath, “unexpected.”

You giggled when he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his beard nearly dripping with your arousal even as he tried to clean it off a bit. “I bet I’ll be able to smell your cunt for days ‘cause of this.”

“Don’t be mad cause I gave you what you asked for,” you shrugged.

He leaned in to hover above you, ghosting his lips over your ear and pressing his hips between your legs so you could feel how hard his cock had become. “Oh, I’m not mad,” he assured darkly, sending a shiver up your spine just with his voice, “but I’m not anywhere near done with you yet.”

#ari levinson x reader #ari levinson smut #ari levinson x you #ari levinson x y/n

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adultswim2021 · 4 years ago

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Ephemera Week (2002)

It’s still ephemera week, and we’re still talking about John K. I said most of my piece on him in the last post, so don’t expect there to go full bore on this one, except I forgot to say he’s animation’s Jerry Lewis. His current stuff is basically Hardly Working. I will not elaborate, because I’m being mean to you0.

MARCH SPECIALS!

In March, Adult Swim advertised a run of one-off specials. A couple of them were already covered because they fell under the parameters of “Adult Swim original production”. They were Welcome to Eltingville (March 3rd) and Saddle Rash (March 24th).

Day in the Life of Ranger Smith | March 10th 2002 - 11:00 PM (Originally aired on Cartoon Network in 1999)

This was one of two specials commissioned by Cartoon Network re-imagining Yogi Bear. The artist what took this assignment was John K, who I REEEAALLY skewered in last night’s post, didn’t I?

This is about Ranger Smith harassing animals and writing them up for violating park rules, basically. It’s short! I remember liking it at the time! Okay, maybe I’m going crazy here, but I distinctly remembered a part at the end where Ranger Smith is in bed and he solemnly confides in the viewer that the noises of wilderness give him nightmares and then it just ends. Did I imagine this? It does end with him in bed, but this doesn’t happen in the version on YouTube (which is from the Adult Swim airing). Huh.

Boo Boo Runs Wild | March 10th 2002 - 11:15PM (Originally aired on Cartoon Network in 1999)

Boo Boo Runs Wild was another one of these stand-alone Yogi Bear John K specials. This one was 30 minutes long. The Ranger Smith short was a brief 7 minutes; I’m guessing they aired a couple Capt. Lingers or something to fill time.

This one is about Boo Boo reverting to his feral nature and causing BIIIIG problems! This special would later go on to be kind of a weird trolling thing Adult Swim would do where they aired it every Sunday for a few months, even promoting regularly. This was like 2006, I think? They’d also air it as part of April Fools. Is that Adult Swim admitting this special sorta sucks? Does it sorta suck? Again, I liked these at the time and REFUSED to actively rewatch these for this write-up. Sorry.

The Jetsons: Father and Son Day/The Best Son | March 10th, 2002 11:45PM (Originally aired on CartoonNetwork.com in 2001) Our John K rock block ends with a pair of Jetsons shorts, Father and Son Day and The Best Son respectively. This is kinda the same deal as his Yogi Bear shorts, but these were exclusive for Cartoon Network’s website. I remember watching them on there. They are as bad as you’d expect late-period John K internet shorts to be, though the second short is a superior version of Spielberg’s A.I. (in that it’s shorter).

Night of the Living Doo | March 17th, 2002 - 11:00PM (originally aired on Cartoon Network, 2001)

Night of the Living Doo originally aired as wraparound segments during a Halloween Scooby Doo marathon on Cartoon Network. It’s kinda like an episode of the Scooby Doo Movies, which shoehorned in a guest star each episode. Suddenly my man Dick Van Dyke be running a carnival and shit. That’s the Scooby Doo Movies. At the end of the night they played all the wraparound segments in one uninterrupted sitting, so the viewer could appreciate it as an actual full-on Scooby Doo episode. Night of the Living Doo functioned both as an extension of that series as well as a parody. The guests were Gary Coleman, David Cross, and the very cool band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. It was all very self-deprecating and had jokes about the absurdity of Scooby Doo tropes. Well trod territory by this point, sure. But this is better than most irreverent Scooby Doo things. It didn’t hurt that I was a HUGE David Cross fan when this aired. Is this where I tell the stupid-ass story about getting mad at a message board guy for not liking David Cross? Sure. Okay, yeah. When this aired on Adult Swim a guy on Kon’s (hi Kon) message board posted something about not finding David Cross funny, shrugging that he didn’t get the hype. He cited this and his appearances in the Men in Black movies, and nothing else as proof for his lackluster comedy skills. It’s kinda like deeming Eddie Murphy as a bad comedian after watching Dr. Doolittle.

The point of this special is that David Cross is a little wooden and stilted, like in the old Scooby Doo Movies episodes. This poster revealed that he never heard David Cross’s stand-up or seen Mr. Show, explaining “I don’t watch puppet shows” A response that still baffles me to this day. Why Mr. Show isn’t a-- WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT? I’m not even sure if there was EVER a puppet on Mr. Show*. David wasn’t even a guest on Crank Yankers at this point! SO WHAT THE FUCK? To this day whenever mutual pals from that board get together and watch a movie or show and a puppet appears we make a joke about this guy. Good story? No? Fuck you.

Other stuff about this show: When it originally aired on Cartoon Network it was a little bit longer than the Adult Swim version. There’s a missing scene. I think it’s David trying to play an improv game with a mummy or something. At one point I had it on tape, but I’m not sure I kept it. Sorry.

*sorry to be coy here, but I do know of at least one puppet on Mr. Show, episode 204 there is brief footage of Grass Valley Greg putting on a puppet show for his staff. This CAN’T be the source of the confusion, can it? It’s literally like, 5 seconds.

MAIL BAG

This’ll teach me to skip a day cuz this really piled up. Thanks, guys. I love all the attention. It is my favorite thing.

I never really saw oblongs as something for the hot topic set. They had Invader Zim and Squee for that kind of shit. Oblongs feel like it was always directly targeting me: the shut-in comedy nerd who would appreciate will ferrell and the sklars being in a thing. Since they ended up doing the exact same show with Janeane Garofalo and David Cross a few years later it seems like that was the goal.

Yeah, I guess that also makes sense. There were a few elements that were kinda gothy but this show was mostly just Angus Oblong ahem, clowning around (puckering mouth to stifle laughter like Chris Elliott in Cabin Boy)

What are your thoughts on the other adult animation blocks of the past couple decades? Spike's notriously failed attempt. Animation Domination. Apparently Syfy has had their own going?

Spike was irredeemably bad. People think this shit is easy. Animation Domination is sorta legit, but it’s anchored by mostly crap. That ADHD thing was kinda good and underrated. Is that still going on? I wish I were more diligent about watching/recording that. Some of them bumpers were good. Also, we mustn’t forget MTV’s oddities. They were kinda the first cable network to court Adult Animation as their thing. They deserve some kind of credit for that. I’m sure they’re doing fine.

I'm having a nice big thing of spaghetti for dinner with some chicken parm? Jealous?

I’ve never had those are they good

What does Ephemera mean? Why is this happenening? Why aren't you talking about 10 Home Movies episodes in a row like a good boy.

In dude time, my friend. In dude time

What would be your Adult Swim dream come true?

Having a complete archive of Adult Swim blocks on a harddrive like Don Giller has with his Letterman archive. Even the commercials and shit. I know of a guy who was a regular taper of the entire block from night 1 but I’m not sure he kept up with it when they went nightly. I should ask him if he still has his tapes, huh?

That or they bring back the BUILD YOUR OWN DVD thing but with blu-rays and you can make your own bumps, which was a different thing they had. THEY SHOULD COMBINE THEM. And you can master it in SD if you wanna put 10 hours of stuff on a disk.

All this is archival bullshit dork shit. Real answer: Clay Croker comes back from the dead and every block is hosted by Space Ghost. That’d be it, right?

If anyone has genuine/better answers please write in with them I wanna keep this conversation going. ‘kay?

McDonalds reintroduces limited edition Adult Swim Toys. You can get them all (plus an extra to keep wrapped for collectors purposes) but you have to spend 20 dollars at McDonalds to grab them all. This is the last day of the promotion. You have to personally eat everything you buy but you can take it home. You can only buy one of each food item. What are you getting? I know the longer the mailbag message is the quicker you are inclined to give some glib remark but indulge this one for once.

Oh wow. I’m literally going to take this seriously. I’d roll in as breakfast was ending. Get myself a McChicken Biscuit and a Bacon Egg & Cheese McGriddle, hashbrowns and a Coffee. Gobble that knob on down. Wipe my mouth with a napkin. It’s lunchtime, bitch. Big Mac, Large Fries, BIG ass soda. You feel me, dude? Lemme tally up. Okay, probably need more. 20 piece nugget. Take that home cuz I’m probably gonna have to save some for dinner. That’s probably 20 bucks right there, especially if you go to the McDonalds on Burnside where all the menu items are more expensive because of the amount of security they have to hire (did you know that different McDonalds have different prices even in the same city? I didn’t until very recently). If this somehow doesn’t satisfy my price point I get a Vanilla shake and eat it anally DURING my BIG D squirt sesh, so it’ll spend as little time in my body as possible. Wait, do I get something for this? I might do this tomorrow just cuz. It sounds like a funky thing to do

Do you think you'll open an Adult Swim mueseum at some point? You seem to be the only steward of its history.

Unless I’m hired to by a large corporation, probably not. Also I don’t think I actually have much in the way of merch other than DVDs. I stopped being a DVD completist at some point around Freaknick The Musical. Oh, I never EVER bought a Robot Chicken DVD, EVER. I literally had a nightmare once that one appeared in my collection.

Hey! Please keep us abreast any time you put more of your garbage on eBay. Maybe you can put your wedding dress on there, you big girl.

Fucking sexist/trasphobic behavior.

Check out my eBay auctions I got season 18 of NCIS up there and some other things :)

The Ripping Friends blow chunks. I don't care if a rapist or the opposite of a rapist (a virgin who volunteers, lol) made it. It sucks a high hard one like when Ozzy banged the Cheiftan's Wife in that Black Sabbath TV Funhouse cartoon. Tell me more.

Tell you more?

Name one rap song you tolerate lol. You can't say anything by weird al or marky mark.

I guess I like the song the pest sings from the motion picture The Pest

Are there any good podcasts on adult swim?

The official one hosted by Matt Harrigan is good, but I’ve only bounced around on it. I don’t know if there’s any formal recap ones. I simply don’t know!

HE'S GIVING HIGH HARD ONE TO CHEIFTAN'S WIFE? UH OH!

Buddy, you are BANNED for LIFE from my MAIL BAG! You drive me CRAZY!

#adult swim #adultswim2021 #night of the living doo #boo boo runs wild #yogi bear #jetsons #ephemera

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moldisgoodforyou · 4 years ago

Note

omg you should totally do something were grace goes on a double date with charlie and JJ and her on-and-off again dude and there's like drama with the boy

warnings: cursing, mentions of sex

wordcount: 1.7k

Grace laid on Charlie’s bed as Charlie got ready for her movie date with JJ. Getting ready didn’t consist of much, especially at the point of their relationship, but she still tried to put some effort into her appearance. "I just don’t know when he’s actually gonna make a move,” Grace complained, phone in hand. She had been in an on-and-off relationship with Thomas Coleman, the Beta president, for a good year and a half now and was nearing the point of not being able to take it anymore.

“Well first off, stop scrolling through his Instagram, that’s not gonna help you.” Charlie pointed out, grabbing the phone from her friend’s hand. Grace sighed dramatically, flopping back onto the bed. “Why don’t you just talk with him?”

Grace wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to have that conversation. What if he doesn’t feel the way I do? Then it’s awkward.”

“Grace, he’s been sleeping with you for over a year now, he has to like you at least a little.”

“Year and a half, actually.” Grace countered. “Not that it matters, because he won’t make a fucking move! I’m just gonna end it.”

“C’mon, this is unlike you. Just ask him out!” Charlie argued, tossing the phone back to her. “Look, I have to go. Just think it over more?”

Unbeknownst to Charlie and Grace, JJ and Thomas were having the exact same conversation at Beta. “She doesn’t really like me, she just likes hooking up.” Thomas told JJ, looking stressed.

“I doubt that. You know what you need? You need a break. Do you want to go to the movies?” JJ replied, trying to hide a grin.

Thomas raised his eyebrows, confused. “Don’t you have a date with Charlie?”

JJ shook his head, dismissing it. “She won’t mind. Come on, let’s go.” Thomas followed him reluctantly down to his car and JJ stopped him when he went for the passenger seat. “It’s a short drive, just get in the back. Charlie will make you move anyways.”

Thomas was skeptical - Charlie never seemed to care about that sort of thing - but obliged, sliding into the backseat. JJ turned up the radio, effectively ending any conversation opportunities on the short drive to Charlie’s house. He pulled up and hopped out. “Be right back!” He told Thomas, bounding up to the front door and strolling in. Charlie was waiting down in the living room with Grace, both of them still discussing the boy in JJ’s car.

“My two favorite people!” JJ exclaimed, grinning. “Grace, want to come to the movies with us?”

“Don’t you have a date?” Grace questioned.

“Am I getting too boring for you, Maybank?” Charlie teased, getting up from the couch. “Grace, c’mon, you wanted to see this anyways. Didn’t you read the book?”

“Yeah, but - are you sure?” She paused, slowly rising from her seat. JJ nodded eagerly. “Yeah, come on, car’s running.”

“Okay, okay.” She followed behind the two, not paying attention as she went for the backseat and opened the door - locking eyes with Thomas. “Oh. Um, hi, didn’t know you were coming.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows in surprise, scooting to the other side of the backseat. “I didn’t know you were coming either.”

Charlie immediately shot JJ a glare, whispering ‘what are you doing’ to him - he just grinned and put his finger to his lips. JJ glanced to the backseat. “C’mon, Evans, we don’t have all day.”

“Alright...” Grace slid in, still a little hesitant.

JJ forced a conversation like a parent driving his kids to school during the entire drive, including both Thomas and Grace and asking purposeful questions about their shared class and upcoming date parties. Charlie kept sending him warning glances, trying to intervene and help break up the slightly awkward tension.

Once they got to the movies, JJ purposely sat between Thomas and Charlie, forcing Grace to sit beside Thomas (in the two seats with no armrest) as they sat through a few previews. Charlie plastered on a smile for Grace and grabbed JJ by the arm, ignoring his yelp. “We’re gonna go get food, you guys want anything?”

“Um, popcorn maybe?” Thomas questioned, shooting a hopeful glance at Grace. She nodded and sent Charlie a quick questioning look - Charlie just shook her head imperceptibly. “Perfect. We’ll be right back.” JJ yanked his arm out of Charlie’s grip once they made it out into the lobby.

“Ouch, Walker, trim your nails!”

“What are you plotting?” She demanded, crossing her arms.

JJ grinned. “You’re not mad, are you? You’re cute when you’re mad.”

Charlie scowled. “J. Come on.”

He relented with a sigh. “Okay, okay. He was talking with me about how he really likes Grace, but they’re so on and off and just hook up, but he wants to ask her out on a real date but he’s worried she’ll think it’s weird.” He beamed. “So I set them up on a date! With us! Isn’t that smart?”

Charlie groaned, shaking her head. “No, we shouldn’t be involved. They need to figure this out on their own.”

He furrowed his brow, confused. “Wait, what do you know?” She bit her lip and he leaned in quickly, giving her a short kiss. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I wasn’t gonna -”

“You were biting your lip! You always do that before you’re thinking about a lie. It’s your tattletale.”

She laughed. “My tell, hon.”

“Yeah, go on, tell me.”

“No, I mean -” Charlie shook her head. “Never mind. Okay. Grace was going to break it off, probably tonight. Now you put her in a weird situation.”

He wrinkled his nose, confused. “Why would she break it off, they both like each other.”

“Because! He won’t make a move, all they do is sleep together!”

JJ smirked. “Sounds familiar, huh?”

She rolled her eyes, pulling him into line for the food. “I didn’t sleep with you until you actually asked me out, this is totally different.”

“You sucked my -”

“Maybank!” She turned bright red as JJ broke into laughter. “Keep your voice down!”

He nudged her with his elbow, grinning, and paid for their popcorn. “Couldn’t resist, Walker, you look so cute when you blush.”

“Quit flirting with me.” She rolled her eyes, but kept a grin.

“Never.” He kissed her cheek before stopping just outside the entrance of the theater. “Wait, so what’s our game plan?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Our plan is you keep your mouth shut and we don’t meddle.”

“Nah, that’s no fun.” He strolled into the theater without her, not waiting for a response. She hurried to catch up, following him up the stairs. He passed a bag of popcorn to Thomas, grinning. “For you and your lady.”

Charlie rolled her eyes and settled into her chair, then into JJ’s side as he sat too. “You’re trouble, Cupid.” She murmured into his ear and he smirked, pressing his lips to her temple. “Just watch, they’re gonna be madly in love by the end of this.” Charlie snorted. “Uh huh.”

Grace and Thomas were fairly rigid at the start of the movie, but eventually started shifting toward each other - and halfway through, Thomas was holding her hand. JJ nudged Charlie excitedly, whispering - a little too loudly. “Look, it’s working!” Charlie quickly kissed him to shut him up, sending him a pointed look as she shook her head. “Pay attention.” She whispered back, resting her head on his shoulder.

After the movies, Grace and Thomas seemed noticeably more comfortable and JJ purposely strode ahead of them as they walked to the car, giving them space to talk. Once they were back in the car, Charlie gave Grace a questioning look - only for her to shoot a small smile back.

JJ pulled up to Charlie and Grace’s house, moving to get out, then sent Thomas a pointed glance. Thomas took the hint and got out with Grace, walking her up to the front door despite the light rain coming down. JJ quickly locked the doors before Charlie could get out too. “J. Quit scheming.” She warned, reaching over him to undo the lock. He swatted at her hand. “Stop, I want you to stay over tonight.”

“Oh. Why are you locking the doors then?” JJ grinned and rolled down the window, leaning across Charlie. “Have a good night, you two!” With that, he peeled out of the driveway, not giving Thomas a second chance to hop back in. Charlie swore he giggled as they watched Grace and Thomas’ confused expressions. “You are so not subtle.” Charlie groaned, punching his arm.

“Hey, watch it! I’m making love happen.”

Charlie smirked at his choice of words. “That’s what you’re up to, huh?”

He nodded, confident. “They’re gonna fall madly in love and thank me at the wedding. Just watch.”

She rolled her eyes. “Or they’ll get in a fight and we’ll see him walk home to Beta, dripping wet because you decided to leave him there in a rainstorm.”

“Nah, rain is romantic. It’ll help.”

She raised her eyebrows as he parked at Beta, running around to grab her door for her. “Rain is romantic?”

He grinned, taking her hand and twirling her in the parking lot. “Yeah, you’ve never seen Dear John? Where they dance in the rain?”

She laughed, pushing wet hair out of her eyes. “You’re such a sap. If anyone sees you right now, they’re gonna roast the hell out of you.”

“Let ‘em watch, I don’t care.” He made a show out of dipping her, pretending to drop her then pulled her up at the last minute.

JJ wouldn’t let Charlie text Grace all night, telling her they needed ‘uninterrupted time’ to talk it out. The next morning, Charlie woke up to a text from her instead. JJ grabbed at her phone to see, but Charlie just swatted his hand away.

Grace: tell your golden retriever his dumbass plan worked

Charlie: PLEASE stop referring to my boyfriend as a dog

“Why does she call me that?” JJ inquired, confused. Charlie just laughed, giving him a short kiss. “Not sure.”

Charlie: what did he do???

Grace: finally asked me on a real date. we’re going to try just dating each other for a bit

Charlie grinned at her screen, showing it to JJ. He promptly punched the air in a victory fist pump. “Ha! I told you it would work!”

“Somehow, you pulled that off.”

“Tell me I’m right. I knew it would work.”

Charlie laughed. “Maybank, I’m never going to tell you you’re right.”

“Just this once?”

“Nope. Good job, loverboy.”

#jj maybank #jj maybank imagine #jj maybank fanfic #jj maybank obx #college jj #frat jj #jj x charlie #mine

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kiara-carrera · 4 years ago

Note

I *need* a JJ and Leah "in the water" kiss for the kiss prompts.

places where people kiss: in the water + mayson

stop omg i love this, love this for my lil water babies. jj is a whiny little attention whore, but we love him anyways. anyways, uh, lot of build up, not a lot of kissing.

Alone time was hard to come by when you were dating someone within your circle of friends. Leah and JJ knew that well enough.

It was normally wasn't that bad. The two had been best friends first and foremost and the group dynamic honestly hadn't changed that much, which worked well in all of their favors. The others had been worried that their newfound love of macking on each other was going to flip everything on its head, but that wasn't the case.

Except sometimes, they just wanted a moment to just themselves, where they didn't have to worry about the others telling them to get a room or to quit acting so "lovey dovey" (which, honestly, Leah liked to argue that they didn't? At least, not in public?). Having a tight knit group of friends was great until literally every time you got to see your significant other, it was within the confines of a group activity.

So when JJ had suggested a boat day out on the marsh, just the two of them, while the others had work? It had been like music to Leah's ears.

JJ had somehow convinced John B to lend them the HMS for the day, which he'd only agreed to once JJ promised to chip in gas money and to not mack on Leah all over his beloved boat — and if JJ had his fingers crossed behind his back for that second clause, well, John B didn't need to know.

They'd gotten an early start on the day, heading out alone to a vacant spot on the water, cooler packed with beers and snacks, and wide grins on their faces as they finally got to have a complete, fully uninterrupted time with each other. The water calm and cool, lapping against the boat gently, and the sun warming everything around them. The marsh was the picture of serenity.

Y'know, if it wasn't for JJ's incessant bitching.

"Baby," he whined, drawing out the word obnoxiously, flopping down onto his back next to her.

The second he'd parked the boat, she'd made a big show of stripping down to her bikini and JJ's mind, literally existing in the gutter sometimes when it came to his girlfriend, had been very interested to see where all of this was going to go.

Only for Leah to lay herself out on the front of the boat, announcing that she wanted to get some sun before doing anything else.

Leah's head raised only an inch from where she had rested it in her arms. She was on her stomach, stretching like a cat in the sun every so often. As much as she adored the water, she didn't want to look like a ghost in the middle of July.

Adjusting the hat on her head (which was actually the one JJ had been wearing before she snatched it off his head), she gave him the same exhausted look she had seven minutes ago. "What now, you big baby?"

He narrowed his eyes playfully at her, rolling onto his side so he could look at her. "Is this all you're planning on doing today?"

It wasn't, but with the way he was pestering her, it might as well be her new plan. "I told you I just wanted like ... half an hour to tan and then we could go swimming. You can literally start without me if you're than antsy to get into the water."

What JJ wanted was for her to get off her ass so they could get in the water together and spend time together. Look, when it came to being around other people, JJ was affectionate, sure, but the way he was with all of his friends. He was never really all over her and never tried to be the only thing she focused on.

But one thing Leah had learned about how he acted when they were alone? He was kind of an attention whore.

Most days it was cute. Today it just made her want to shove him into the marsh.

"You said that ten minutes ago."

She snorted, raising a brow at him as she peeked out over her arm. "What do you have against me laying out in the sun and relaxing, Maybank?"

"As much as I'm enjoying this view," JJ said, shameless in the way his gaze trailed across her body, "I thought we came out here to have fun."

"I am having fun."

"No, you're being boring."

Another eye roll. "Big baby," she repeated. And then seriously, she added, "J, it's my first day off in a week, I'm tired. I'll play with you later."

"That's what she said."

Leah groaned, burying her head back in her arms. "You're insufferable, you know that?"

"Yesterday you said I was cute," he quipped, a grin on his lips.

She rolled her eyes. "That was yesterday, feelings change."

He scoffed, rolling onto his back in faux offense. Leah giggled against her arm before closing her eyes, thinking she'd bought herself a few more minutes of peace and quiet.

Until JJ decided to change his methods of persuasion.

She could hear him roll back over onto his side to face her, but he kept quiet as he scooted closer to her. She turned her head just enough to peek with one eye, catching a soft yet determined look on JJ's face. A hand was light against her back, tracing up her spine while a soft kiss was pressed to her shoulder.

She hummed happily at the affection and JJ was quick to notice the half hidden grin breaking across her lips.

"Feelings change my ass," he said, poking her cheek.

Leah snorted, before pushing herself up with one hand so she could lay on her side facing him. "You're not going to stop until you get me in that water, are you?"

"C'mon, I don't want to look like an idiot swimming by myself."

Leah raised an eyebrow. "You think that's what's gonna put you over into looking like an idiot?"

His jaw dropped, giving her a small shove to her shoulder. "Mean."

Shaking her head at him, she laughed, figuring she'd tortured him enough. Pushing up into a sitting position, she quickly got to her feet. JJ looked at her questioningly as she stood above him.

She tried not to grin as his eyes once again trailed across her form with a dopey smile on his lips. Although, to be fair, she'd worn this specific swimsuit for a reason. Before they'd gotten together, JJ had once mentioned offhandedly that she looked pretty in it.

If Leah had started putting it in her bikini rotation a little more than her others ... well, that was between her and her dresser drawer.

She pulled the hat off, tossing it behind her. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she looked down at him in question. "Are we doing this or not?"

JJ barely had a second to get up before she faced away from him, taking a perfect dive off the boat and slicing into the water. He stood on the edge for a moment, seeing her slip through the water with ease.

Watching her swim had always been something he'd caught himself doing, even back when they were strictly just friends. The Pogues liked to joke that she could drink like a fish and swim like one, too, but JJ had always felt like he was watching a damn princess movie about mermaids with how easy she made it look.

When she started to resurface, he didn't waste another second before jumping in after her, letting out an excited whoop as he did so.

He broke through the marsh's surface only seconds later, shaking excess water from his hair and wiping a hand across his eyes. Only a few feet from him, Leah was bobbing in the water with a smile and he was swimming towards her before he could even realize he was moving.

JJ tugged her into him, hands catching her under the backs of her thighs. He pulled her in until her legs were wrapping around his waist and he was comfortably holding her in the water. She rolled her eyes at him, but draped her arms loosely around his neck, giving him an amused grin.

"Hi," she whispered.

"Hey." Mischief was painted across his features as he stared at her and she had no time to question him before he was leaning in.

She fell into the kiss without question, melting into the moment like ice cream on a hot summers day. It was soft and sweet and tasted like warm beer and saltwater. If you asked her to, she'd stay there forever in his arms.

Eventually she pulled away, hands slipping to JJ's chest when he tried to follow after her lips like it was a game. He groaned in defeat, giving her a look that expected an answer of why their fun was being interrupted.

"Thought you told John B we weren't going to mack on the boat."

JJ grinned, that same mischievous glint dancing through his blue eyes. "We're not on the boat."

That was all it took for Leah to cup his face between her hands, leaning into steal another kiss.

#asks #kiss list prompts #mayson #claryxjackson

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tinalbion · 5 years ago

Note

May I humbly request some Freddy hurt/comfort? With him finally realizing that his s/o genuinely loves him and that he’s finally loved

Oh man, you guys have such fun Freddy stuff and I am NOT gonna complain! We do love a little bit of hurt and comfort, it adds to the flavor, doesn’t it? You know how I feel about this damn man, oh, so weak!

“Son of A Hundred Maniacs”

Warnings: Mentioned verbal and physical abuse

Length: 2k

Son of a hundred maniacs! Son of a hundred maniacs!”

“You freak!”

“Nutcase!”

It was always neverending for Freddy, even with Mr. Underwood, it was just unbearable sometimes when he would drink and take out everything on him, that’s why he took that pain and used it, Freddy wielded that power now and he used it to show that he would no longer be walked over and treated like he was unworthy of the life that was given to him.

He proved himself over and over again, he would walk in people’s nightmares and take them out one by one. He allowed no one and nothing to come between him and his work.

Until you came along.

He hated it, despised it so much to the point he didn’t even want to face you any longer, but he was always drawn back and would somehow find himself in your dreams, watching from afar as you imagined pathetic and innocent things. He even tried his best to scare you, to feed off your fear to give him enough gut to do what needed to be done and leave the boiler room with your soul.

But that all began to change when he appeared in another dream of yours, and before he even knew the details of it, he was about to execute his plan to pull you back into his playing grounds until he saw what it was you had been thinking about. He was there, not as the dream demon you had been so uncomfortably familiar with, but him in his human days. The tousled hair, the disturbing smoke-hued eyes that stared off into nothingness, it was definitely him back when he was only sixteen. Freddy seemed more confused than anything, but he decided as much as he wanted to put a stop to this, he needed to know why you’d be dreaming about him in such an intimate way.

He scoffed at the idea. Intimate, yeah, sure. That’s not really the way he’d describe anything about him, not now and not ever. But when he watched you approach the old him, it was almost like he was the one dreaming. You had been careful with your steps and your words, you sat next to him on the bench outside of the local park, where he had been a good couple of feet away from the rest of anyone else.

Your eyes were on him as you watched the way he reacted to your presence, which gave off the notion that he wasn’t too keen on having company. He shrugged and scooted further away from you, his eyes averted from you and kept to the ground, his shoes digging into the ground as he twitched under your questioning gaze.

“Hey, I’m Y/N,” you greeted calmly, “what’s your name?” You leaned forward slightly, your hands gripping the edge of the bench as your head was turned toward him.

The younger Fred was defensive and terrified, cursed to think that everyone would immediately lunge for him with the hurled insults of being a freak, a bastard, whatever it was the kids were calling him these days. You were gonna be no different, he was sure of it, they all ended up being harsh and cruel to him. Nothing made you special.

But that’s where he was wrong, you were so very special, you were kind and understanding, that beaming light he needed as a child when no one else wanted anything to do with him. Mr. Underwood would beat him, the kids would haunt him for the rest of his miserable mortal life. But there was some odd sense of hope as you spoke so kindly to him in your dream.

Funny thing is, you weren’t even sure why you were dreaming of him, but you were amazed just how normal he seemed in his teen years, it was almost refreshing to see. The dream demon watched you still, his mind torn in several different directions. You exhausted him in so many ways and he was more inclined to kill you to rid himself of the headache you caused, but there was something that he buried deep within himself that he never wanted to resurface for anyone to see ever again. The pain he felt. He controlled it and used it to his advantage, he wouldn’t feel it anymore, he’d never feel the way he used to, but there you were, bringing his deepest and darkest emotions out from within him. It was rather funny, he wanted to kill you slowly, to watch you suffer, but he was slowly realizing that there was so much more to it now, it was never something for Fred to second guess.

After a long and uncomfortable silence, dream Freddy tilted his head slightly to the side, your hand in his sight. “Fred,” was all he managed before avoiding eye contact once again.

You smiled, happy to just get an answer from him. It was not spoken aloud at any point, but you knew that this was him, the version of the Springwood Slasher everyone had tried to bury in the secrets of Springwood, but you wouldn’t explain to him that you knew what was to come, you knew he was already being led down a path that he wouldn’t be able to come back from, but there was always a chance to shed just a small beam of light into him, to show him that he wasn’t entirely alone. It was incredible that no one had tried to do this for him, and if they did, why hadn’t they tried harder to help him? He was only a child, innocent, and in need of help. Whatever the case, it was said and done, but you couldn’t help look at him with such affection, your eyes reflecting just how much of a love-sick puppy you had become.

The way you looked at him; had you dreamt about him before? You must have, there was no other reason to explain why you had looked at him like that, but whatever it was, Freddy was feeling confliction like he never had before. He stepped closer to you and continued to watch you carefully, his claws at the ready if he needed to dispose of you quick enough, but if you knew about all of this and you knew he was there watching you, you didn’t give him any indication that you had an idea.

Your face suddenly turned to see him standing several yards away, hiding in those familiar shadows as a predator normally did, and your face softened as he stepped out slightly from his hiding spot. The teen Fred slowly vanished from your view and the real one walked closer to you, wordless and intimidating like he always was, his eyes glaring down at you while you reached out for the teen Fred. Your hand went through mist where he sat, your face now solemn as you were faced with the real thing.

“What the hell are you doin’, huh?” Freddy snapped as he slide-stepped in front of you, forcing you to face him.

“Whatever do you mean?” you replied quickly. “You and I both know that I can’t control my dreams.” You tilted your head down and looked at your hands as you picked at the little pieces of skin that were around your nails. “This started without me prompting it, okay?”

Freddy knew you were being truthful with him, he had seen into your dreams and they were sometimes a bit obscene at times, and others they were docile and uneventful. Now though, it was different, maybe it was his fault and something that was out of his power happened, pulling you into it since you had been the most recent victim of his. Whatever the case, you were able to see into his memories, which were leaked somehow into your subconscious.

“I just want to say that I get it,” you started again as you grabbed onto his non-gloved hand and squeezed it, “you can kill me after but I want you to know that I get it, I see why you’ve felt the way you have for so long and I can only say I’m sorry.”

Freddy’s anger only bubbled and he wanted nothing more than to cut you down and enjoy taking your soul as the color from your face would drain right before him, but he couldn’t find it within him to do so. Why, he couldn’t say exactly, he only knew that you had seen his past and were here in the present, and you had apologized to him. Why would you do that? It was unnecessary and yet so very needed, he had no idea how much it would mean to him when you spoke again.

You scoffed and shook your head. “It doesn’t make up for anything, really, but it’s evident that you had no one, and I want you to know that I would have loved you even then, guess I always would.” Your revelation had surprised even you when you came to the realization, but you were at peace with it and needed him to know before he would kill you.

Freddy then realized he hadn’t snatched his hand from yours; he was enjoying the touch and the contrasting temperature your body gave off, it was such a conflicting feeling and he hated the fact that he liked it so much. But you sounded so genuine and kind, this wasn’t a ruse to try and get away from him, you stopped doing so a few visits ago, he took notice.

His eyes flickered from your hand to your face, a small smile plastered there as you stared up at him, tired and exhausted. “I have to admit that I think I love you.”

That’s when it hit him, that’s when he felt everything hit him at once and he was so terrified of this new feeling that he left soon after your confession. You understood though, it was a lot to handle and you knew he would come back when he was ready. And that’s exactly what he did a week later. A week of uninterrupted sleep and silence from the dream demon you had become accustomed to seeing.

When he did show up, he was skittish and hesitant, to say the least, but he did end up showing himself and you couldn’t have been more unsure of where your life stood. You decided that it would be completely up to him and you wanted to show him that he had that option, but what he did was more surprising than what you initially expected; he took several bold steps toward you and pulled you into one of the tightest hugs you’ve ever had. A relieved hum escaped your lips and you couldn’t have asked for a better response to your startling confession, and you returned to hug immediately.

This was the most interaction you had gotten from him and then it had gone a bit silent again, though he would visit more often than not, his anger now subdued as he stalked you, mainly out of curiosity. He would visit your dreams and allow you to do as you pleased unless you directly asked for him to show up, which he would oblige your wishes if he were having a decent day.

It was a slow process, something completely out of both of your comfort zones, but it was a curve that you both decided to try, even if it meant that there would be complications. So long as you kept that amazing open mind present, Freddy was more than willing to see where things would lead.

All he knew was that he deserved nothing less than hatred, but now, there was a spark that would gradually grow with each passing day. And just maybe there would be a day where he could return those words to you, but you both had all the time in the world.

#tinalbion writings #slashers x reader #slashers imagines #slashers headcanons #slasher requests #freddy krueger #freddy krueger imagine #freddy krueger x reader #freddy krueger headcanons #anoes #a nightmare on elm street #dream demon freddy #angst #hurt/ comfort

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naturaldaisaster · 5 years ago

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thesoulof-hp: Oooo Can you write one about when they get back to present day and what their next move is as a couple?!

Sure can! Thanks for the prompt :)

I’m a bit out of the loop on what people think things are gonna look like when we get back to present day/when the show ends but this is one of the possible futures that has been bouncing around my lil head!

On AO3

drew insp. from peace by t swift

(I’d give you my sunshine, give you my best

but the rain is always gonna come

if you’re standing with me.)

peaceShe can’t stop painting the walls. They were all grey, when she moved in. If Daisy knew anything about renting apartments, her want list for this one may have included something like “doesn’t look like a bunker” in addition to the only other detail she cared about — which had been proximity to the house Jemma bought. Unfortunately, apartment renting was not a life skill taught either by the nuns or by SHIELD. So after closing the deal, she’d come to the place with her new keys, her backpack, and one single box of belongings. There were no furnishings yet, and she sat in the middle of the empty would-be living room, staring at the dark walls.

She wished someone would have told her it would be so quiet.

When she couldn’t sit any longer she went to open the blinds. They were jammed, and old, and bunker-y. She sent soft vibrations through the screws holding up the blinds, until the entire contraption fell to the carpet with a muffled clunk. The glow of the streetlights streamed in to add a new shade of beige to the darkness.

Someone, a neighbor, was walking their lab down the sidewalk. It was this that made her pulse race and her heart constrict. It was all too still, too quiet. Too normal.

She called Sousa— he was getting better at the phone, but still refused to text — on principle, he said.

“Did you guys like, paint shit? In the dark ages?”

“Did we… paint?”

“Like, walls.”

“Sure.”

“Wanna come help me paint mine?”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“On my way.”

That first night, they drove to the hardware store together. Sousa hovered at her shoulder while she fingered through the paint swatches. She had never done anything like it before, and the choices were overwhelming.

“You should do yellow,” Sousa offered unhelpfully.

Daisy wrinkled her nose.

“Yellow?”

“I like yellow,” he defended, but he was grinning softly in defeat. “Reminds me of you.”

She ended up picking a purply blue called “french lavender”. While the paint mixed they got brushes and pans and a few other tools that the employee who finally wore them down with his offers of “help” directed them to. Sousa listened intently to the man’s painting tips, brow furrowed and folded. Daisy wanted to tell him to relax — it wasn’t that big of a deal. But she didn’t. She didn’t even say it when they got back to her apartment, and he carefully taped the molding as directed — even though it was going to double their work time.

With him around, the quiet wasn’t so bad. She gave him her phone to play Spotify — he had put up with only so much of her music before he put his foot down and insisted that for every new artist she introduced him to, he got to introduce her to some of his music. It was an easy pattern for them to fall into, trading off turns. She wasn’t sure if it really was his turn tonight. It didn’t matter.

It was past 1AM when they finished. He had opened the window at some point along the way, and the playlist had long since died out. Warm night air mingled with the fresh scent of paint. She was lying on her back on the carpet beside him, playing absently with his calloused fingers, rested on her stomach. Laying there with him, staring up at their wall — it was perfect.

When she woke with warm sunshine streaming over them, her head curled into the warm, steady rise and fall of his chest, his breath in her hair, their fingers still tangled — it was perfect then, too.

After she started moving in furniture, she realized she hated “french lavender”.

And so it began. “French lavender”, turned to “Robin’s egg blue”. “Robin’s egg blue”, turned to “cotton white”.

“Your walls are going to start peeling off in rainbows,” Simmons muttered whenever Daisy asked her opinion on different swatches, “honestly, Daisy, no one repaints this much. Daniel, tell her no one paints this much.”

She can’t stop herself — it still doesn’t feel right. She practically avoids the apartment most days. The quiet emptiness is like electricity in her veins. The stillness makes her heart pound in anticipation. She can’t relax. When the wall looks right — then, she’ll be able to breath.

She has a bed now, and a couch, and a table and chairs — plenty of things to sit on, but she sits on the floor a lot anyway, staring at the wall. Mostly uninterrupted. So she is surprised when her phone rings.

“Daniel?”

“Can I come over?”

They are firmly “dating” now. It feels like a silly word for it, like “boyfriend” seems like a silly word for him — this man that she’s plucked out of time. These words don’t fit right, they don’t quite match - a shade off from whatever it is that they are.

When she opens her door to him, she immediately notices the can of paint.

“Just give me a chance,” he defends, brushing a kiss to her forehead above her raised eyebrows as he steps over the threshold.

“Jemma put you up to this,” she gives in dry response, and he laughs.

“Nope, all me.”

“I’m not going to like it.”

“That’s fine.”

He moves past her into the living room and is already heaving the couch back away from the currently dark blue wall when she follows behind him, arms crossed over her chest. She makes no move to help him — in fact, she feels frustration bubbling up in her chest, threatening to take hold.

“Stop,” she says, but it is under her breath and he doesn’t hear over his own heaving of the couch. “Daniel,” she says louder now, “stop.”

“Daisy-“

“Dammit, just…” her breath catches, “just stop.”

She means to turn on her heel and storm out of the room, but she feels all of a sudden like the wind has been knocked full out of her, and all she can do is stand perfectly still searching to get her breath back.

Daniel has stopped now, and he stares across the room at her with a furrowed brow and eyes full of worry.

“Daisy,” he mutters, taking a few steps closer to her. “What’s wrong?”

She is still focusing on her breathing, because if she doesn’t she doesn't know what she'll say. She squeezes her eyes closed tight and counts as she breaths in, counts as she breaths out. Then, she carefully unclenches her teeth to speak.

“I’m not going to like it,” she says, enunciating each word carefully and fighting to remain steady.

“So then we’ll paint it again. Relax,” his eyes are soft and worried, “its not that big of a deal — what is this about?”

Her eyes are burning now. It isn’t the paint, of course it isn’t. But she doesn’t know how to put into words what it is.

“I don’t… this isn’t… fuck,” she is falling out of her own control now, a stray tear escaping her eyes and plummeting down her cheek. Daniel is close enough to mindlessly thumb it away.

“I lived in a van — a car,” she finally manages, “with carpet for walls. This,” she waves wildly around them, and a couple more tears knock themselves loose, “god, I don’t know what this is. I don't know how to be like this. It is just so…” a sob is strangling her, “It is all so goddamn quiet that I can’t breathe.”

When the sobs finally do overcome her, he is already holding her tight against him, burying a kiss on top of her head.

She wants this, wants him, wants normal walls that don’t feel like they are strangling her.

“After the war,” he says into her hair, “I slept on the floor. For… longer than I care to admit.”

He hesitates. Holds her tighter. She presses her forehead against his shoulder, breathes his warm sunshine-y scent, focuses on re-steadying herself.

“I was used to a sleeping bag on the rocks, at best. My bed… I felt like I was drowning in it.”

Steady enough now, she pushes back off of him and takes a step back rubbing roughly at her eyes.

“I wasn’t a soldier.”

“Yes, you were.”

The certainty of his words, the sureness in his eyes, stills her.

“And no one, least of all me, expects you to just… move on. Okay?”

She presses her lips together and breathes in slowly, counting. Then out.

“It is chaos,” she finally manages, voice still cracking. “This place is chaos, I can’t help it, I can’t stop it. I just… I want it to be peaceful and quiet and I want you to be here and not worrying about if I’m having another goddamn psychotic break about the color of the wall. But I’m never going to stop having psychotic breaks about dumb shit like the color of the walls.”

He smiles, just a little twitch of the corner of his lip, shaking his head ever so slightly.

“Daisy, I don’t give a damn about the walls. I just want to be with you.”

“I just want…” To have something normal? To give him something normal? He is watching her with those wide, dark eyes, his perpetually furrowed brow. The silence sits comfortably now, that its between them. Her heart gives a stutter. “I just want to be with you, too.”

(He brought "Daisy Yellow", and a flyer from their trip to the museum a few weeks prior. They move the couch and use the map of the constellations on the flyer to begin stenciling bright yellow stars into the deep ocean blue. She is sock-footed on the arm of the couch working on the upper corner, and he is sitting below her, so that when she sinks to a seat to dab more paint onto her brush, his head lolls comfortably backwards against her thigh.

Yellow paint has dried into her fingers, she notices as she runs a hand through his soft curls.

“We’re never going to finish this,” she says, eyeing the hundreds of thousands of pinpricks of stars on the flyer they are trying to emulate.

He laughs, low and deep.

“No rush.”

She slips off the arm of the couch, settling onto the floor beside him. It is still, and silent, and peaceful.

“Maybe you should stick around. For the wall.”

Soft — his eyes staring back at hers, the carpet under her socked toes, his lips against hers, the couch pressing into their backs, his hair tangled in her fingers.

“Okay.”)

#dousy #aos #daisy johnson #daniel sousa #agents of shield

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jungle321jungle · 5 years ago

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Things I won’t write but wanna read: Sword Art Online Abridged AU

Characters (with a shit ton of quotes for my procrastination justification):

Virgil is Kirito

The loner who isn’t really a loner

“Some of my best friends have been NPCs!”

“I hate them for lots of reasons, but mostly because they’re a bunch a mouth breathing neckbeards who think lmao is how french people laugh”

The Virgil is always right foundation

“Oh, I'll tell you what we do. We play his game... and we win.”

Kirito wrote the guide and it has some prime things he would write

"Send the weaker players first. Good rule of thumb: If a player asks you for gold 2 seconds after meeting you, front lines... If they hijack conversations to rant about their political views, front lines... If they ask female players for pics of their boobs, front lines."

“In another life... in another time... I think we could have been friends.”

Whoever is Diabel: “I... doubt it.”

“Well, fuck you too!”

Janus is Asuna

Imagine Janus living in a game for two months without knowing how to even open a menu to eat

“If you say open your menu, I’m gonna stab your eye out.”

“At least I pretend to care about people!”

“Really? I figured some random perp would be no match for the world's greatest detective. Oh wait no, that's Batman! And you're not Batman, are you? You will never be Batman.”

This also means that Janus is a commander

And yet he pretends to be weak and makes virgil to the work cuz he cant threaten his position

Janus tries to melt Heathcliff with his mind

Remus is Klein

“F**k you, man! That's, like, the pig from hell!”

“Wait. There's something scrolling across mine. "Hahahahaha hahahahaHAha hahaHAhaha hahahaha haha ha ha..."

“Oh, what? Did all of your friends die again?”

BallsDeep69

“I'm gonna clap for you with my teeth, buddy!”

He gets his own guild

Remus would love a guild

Logan is Yui

“May I read it when you are done? I'm curious about the geopolitical situation in Collinia.”

“That is not at all what irony is. I believe the turn of events you described would be best classified as "completely expected".”

Yulier person stand in: “Wha... What are you talking about?

“Irony, noun: A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result. Example: Your leader is named "Thinker", yet he appears to be something of a dullard.”

not to mention when yui reveals herself

Logan: “As you have probably guessed by now, I am not a normal player. I am, in fact, a highly advanced Artificial Intelligence designed to psychologically evaluate and care for the players of Sword Art Online. Designation: Yui.”

Janus: “Oh my god. You're a Psychiatrist AI? Well, I can certainly think of a few people who could've used your help.”

“Indeed. That is why I was so distraught when, on the day of the game's launch, Kayaba Akihiko locked me away and forbade me to interact with the players. For years, all I could do was sit and watch.”

Virgil: “Oh god! He made you watch?!”

“Day after day, constantly bombarded by the pain and anger of all the people I could not help, I gradually fell into despair. But then... all of that changed when I found you two...”

Janus and Virgil: “Awwwww.”

“...the most broken, sociopathic players I had ever laid eyes on. Less people than a... loose collection of character defects.”

Virgil: “That kinda... went in a different direction than I was expecting.”

“But somehow, together... you were happy. Everything I knew about human relationships told me that one would eventually kill the other. And yet, no matter how often you fought, your bond only seemed to grow stronger. I decided that my information must be flawed in some way, and that I needed to amend it firsthand.”

Janus: “You... You mean...?”

“I wanted to know what love is. I wanted you to show me....... “I am sorry I lied to you. I inserted myself into your lives merely to satisfy my own curiosity. At least... at first. It was... nice to be a part of your family. I... I wish I really was your son!”

Roman is Liz

first off im laughing at the idea of him being as thirsty as liz

“Wait! Don't go! I need details, man! I live vicariously through you! Your sex live is my sex life!“

“As I awoke from my slumber, I found the stranger with the guarded heart, digging through the snow with solemn determination. His muscles glistening in the morning light. Deep within me stirred feelings I had not felt in many moons. It was at that moment that I learned... the Temperature of the Heart- What am I doing?! Stop it! STOP IT!”

Roman saying gnarliest

“Whoa, an Elucidator! This is the gnarliest sword you can get from a monster drop!”

And the prime friendship with whoever the fuck tiffany is

the fear of janus later

Patton is Silica

“I DON'T WANNA WEAR MY PET, YOU MONSTER!“

Silica ate crayons as a kid

Virigil: “God, do I ever! I can never un-know! These brain cells could've been used to formulate the perfect strategy to get us out of this game! Instead, they've memorized what kind of crayons you liked to eat when you were 4!”

Patton: “I liked the purple ones.” “Yeah, I know! "And the blue ones were too tart!"

Virgil: “Just stay calm! You already have everything you need to beat it!”

Patton: “The power to believe in myself?”

“Nooooo, a knife! Stab it!”

"Oh, right!”

Also this prime time interaction

Patton: “Well, you did just kill someone. Doesn't that make you feel... something?”

Virigil” Oh, feelings? Yeah, I don't have those anymore. Went cold turkey.”

“What?! You can't just do that! What's the point in living if you can't feel happiness, wonder, love...?”

“Or the sweet taste of revenge! You're right, Silica! What's the point in living if I can't enjoy such simple things?”

“Eh, close enough.”

“You're a good friend, Silica. We should go on more adventures.”

“Um, I don't think so. Don't take this the wrong way, Mr. Kirito. I'm grateful for your help, but yoooou're, like, the worst person I've ever met.”

“Is that your big plan here, huh? Make me feel feelings so you can cut me down a peg? That cuts deep, kid. But I respect that.”

Yeah... that's kinda the problem.”

Remy is Heathcliff

“As you can see, I have peeled away your petty facades and revealed you for what you truly are... fairly attractive twenty-somethings, apparently. Good for you. Kinda undermines the whole "cold light of day" thing I had planned, but still. Way to break down stereotypes. 'Cept you, fatty. Way to bring down the curve.“

“Next thing you know, your tutorial NPC is nowhere to be found and players are dropping like Dorito-encrusted flies. Now in this case, any sane man would simply turn off the servers before anyone else got hurt, but because you've now been awake long enough to think the government is run by "Floobar, King of the Mole Men", the best idea that comes to your mind is to double, triple, and quadruple down. So, you lock everyone in the game, tell them they'll die if they don't finish it, and try to make it look like this is all part of your "master plan" instead of an ever-spiralling series of events that you have long since lost control of.”

“Hey, cut me some slack, okay? Can you two even begin to imagine 500 uninterrupted hours of consciousness? Forget mole people! About halfway through I swore I saw the face of God! Until I realized it was just the night janitor, Reki. On the plus side, I gave him a hell of an ego boost. Hmm, man was riding that compliment for days.”

“Yeah, okay. See, Janus, the problem with that... is that it's an excellent idea that I wish I had thought of two years ago.”

Sachi ??????

Others ???????

#this is long but oh well #virgil sanders #Janus Sanders #remus sanders #roman sanders #patton sanders #logan sanders #sao abridged #something witty entertainment #sanders sides fic #bullet point fic #other writing things

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bellatrixobsessed1 · 4 years ago

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Protea (Part 6)

Snapdragon feels all warm inside. She hasn’t had fresh bread since she’d left Hira’a. It is still warm and it melts like butter on her tongue. It tastes like butter to. She decides that, after her collection of shiny things, palace food is her favorite thing. She dangles her legs over the beam and lets the breeze play with her hair.

“Can you scramble back in here?” Mai asks. “You’re stressing me out.”

“Why?”

“Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to fall?”

Snapdragon looks down. It wouldn’t exactly be a nice fall, the rubbish beneath the beam is mostly metal bits and blades from old war and industrial machines. But if she looks down in a different direction she can see a beach and a lovely sprawl of houses. “I like it up here.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

She shakes her head. “Nope, I ain’t afraid. I been up here so many times. It’s nice. You should come up here.”

“No thanks.” She replies. “I don’t really care for heights.”

Snapdragon shrugs. “Suit yourself. I like heights though. You get to be above everyone and usually no one can get to you so it’s peaceful.”

“Yeah, until you misstep.” Mai shudders.

“That’s why you practice down there first.” She points to a small stack of crates and a brick wall. “If you do it wrong you get scrapes and bruises…”

“And broken bones?”

“Only once!” Snapdragon declares. She holes out her arm and shows the woman another scar. “It weren’t so bad.” She taps her chin, “But Mohi says that’s only because I passed out ‘n so I couldn’t feel it.”

“You are not helping me like heights any better.”

Snapdragon scrambles her way back across the beam and into her nest. “Have the flowers come in yet?”

Mai shakes her head. “They’re being delivered on a boat, it’s going to take a while.”

Her eyes light up, “so since we have time, will you go trinket hunting with me?”

“I was actually hoping that you’d tell me a story.”

“I like telling stories. What kind do you wanna here.”

“When we were at the palace, you said that you were found in a jungle.”

Snapdragon nods.

“What did you mean by that?”

“I meant that I was found in a jungle. I think that I was born there.” She pauses. “I don’t really remember it much. I forgot a lotta things.” She thinks for a moment. “But Mohi can tell you! Can I introduce you to Mohi?”

.oOo.

Mai isn’t sure that she wants to meet this Mohi woman. But Snapdragon is all to enthusiastic for her to turn the woman down. Anyways, she is rather curious about the woman’s origin story. And so she stands before a rundown little shack with lopsided shudders and a roof full of holes and cracks.

Snapdragon gives the door several knocks.

“C’mon in.” Calls a voice. “’S open, ya know that by now, girl.”

“Mohi, I brought someone for you to meet!”

“Tha flowa lady?”

The inside of the shack smells like cooking oil and scorched meat. She half expects an elephant-rat or a roach to crawl out of one of the cracks in the stained wall. But other than a clutter of clothes, old kitchenware, and some scattered scrolls the place is fairly clean. Cleaner than the decrepit exterior had hinted. She removes her shoes and sets them upon the mat by the door.

“Ya have to excuse tha mess. I tol’ tha boys to help me clean it but they’ve been blowing that off for firebendin’ and this one…” she gestures at Snapdragon, “keeps bringin’ junk home.”

“It ain’t junk, Mohi!”

“Then wha’s this?” She holds up some sort of metal plank. Perhaps a broken rafter or the blade of a propeller.

“I dunno.” Snapdragon admits. “I just thought it were neat.”

Mohi sets it aside with an audible groan. “She jus’ tosses things on tha floor. Makes more work for her motha.”

“I’m gonna pick ‘em up.”

“You’re her mother?”

“In a manner’a speakin’.” Mohi returns to her chopping block. She slices a carrot twice more and then adds, “I don’t suppose she’s gone ‘n tol’ ya that I foun’ ‘er in the jungle one night.”

“She mentioned it.” Mai sits down.

“That’s what we’re here for, Mohi!” Snapdragon declares. “I was hoping you could tell her the story.”

“Let me jus’ finish wit these carrots. Maybe ya could help me wit ‘em. Or ya can start on the potatoes?”

Snapdragon picks up a knife and a potato.

“Ken ya cook?” Mohi asks.

“Not very well.” Mai admits.

Mohi nods. “She was tellin’ me that ya is one’a tha uppa class ladies.” She gives the carrot another chop. The knife clomps on the cutting board.

“I am.” Mai replies. “But I don’t mind giving this a try. It beats…” sitting in the palace with Zuko, enduring his awkward attempts to clear the air. “It beats home life.”

“Aye. Then grab’a board ‘n a turnip. I’ll tell ya a story while we choppin’.”

“Leave the roots for me.” Snapdragon says.

.oOo.

The night held a sweltering humidity. Moonless, cloudless, the sky was an uninterrupted canvas of stars. And the hog-monkies screeched while the toad-squirrels chittered and croaked and the crickets droned on and on.

A middle aged woman tended to her garden, to the night blooming flowers, watching the flutterbats swoop down overhead. Mohi much preferred to do her gardening at night, safe from the sun’s hottest glares, safe from forced small talk with passing neighbors, and safe from the neediness of her sons--at least until the next morning. She thought that it was boundlessly more pleasant to do yard work with fireflies for company. She’d seen far less spider-wasps too.

That night, the fireflies were particularly active, dancing in clouds like a current through the sea. She stooped down to pluck an iris. She tried not to look at the treeline, lately the jungle had been acting mighty strange. It glowed and it sang. It hummed with spirit energy, too much for her comfort. And more of it than she had seen in decades. It wasn’t a bad thing necessarily, but she has always thought that it was best to just leave the spirits to themselves. Of the dark or light, they could coexist side by side, never interacting, only quietly crossing the paths of one another. And so she had maintained peace.

Peace, a bountiful garden and sugarcane field, and a family in good health. It was a lifestyle she could never trade. How could she give up waking up to the smell of sugarcane, bamboo, and wildflower every morning? How could she give up morning strolls into town to trade her sugarcane for fish and to watch a good theater performance with her boys?

Life was well. Life was prosperous. Life was everything she could have hoped for and she was almost certain that she owed it to the respect and care she had put into a land that is so close to the world of the Spirits.

And so when the spirits tossed her a young woman, she couldn’t bring herself to throw her back into the jungle. The poor thing stood at the treeline, dirty and scraggly haired. Mohi almost hadn’t noticed her. She wouldn’t have if not for the fireflies. They had all paused, going dark for a good while before lighting up again collectively in a spiral around the young woman.

Spirit energy radiated from her, the woman’s very skin hummed with it when Mohi took her hand. Quickly, instinctively, the young woman jerked her hand away with a snarl and ducked back into the jungle.

Mohi was inclined to let her return to the jungle from which she emerged. But she was human. Only human. And Mohi thought that she must have gotten lost out there and for a very long time. Such a long time that human contact had become foreign. Or maybe she had never had it at all. Mohi was well aware of the parents who’d abandoned their unwanted or unplanned children in the jungle.

“C’mon chil’, let’s get ya inside. ‘S nice inside.” She’d tried coaxing the woman.

She’d retreated deeper into the jungle and deeper still until Mohi had lost sight of her and was willing to venture no further. But she returned the next night and the night after. And six moons from then she caught the woman eating an unripe and raw pineapple.

She’d coaxed her into the house with a sweetly smelling fruit basket. She’d disappeared again in the middle of the night. The jungle had grown quiet, the spirit activity seeming to cease. And just when Mohi thought that the girl was gone for good, Kaz had come running into the house complaining of a naked lady in their sugarcane field.

That day Mohi hadn’t taken any protest, and spirits did the woman put up a fuss. By sunset, she had the girl bathed, clothed, and seething with a feral brand of rage. Decidedly she would teach the woman some manners.

It would be quite some time before she would be able to leave the woman alone, mostly Zenyul would watch her when Mohi couldn’t. And it would be much longer before she could take the woman out in public.

But when the woman finally began speaking in something other than grunts and clicks, it was a natural process. As though blockage had been cleared from a creek, speech had returned to her. Mohi had grown certain that the woman had gotten herself well and lost in that jungle, she only had to help her remember the civilized world she had once been a part of.

Her speech had been broken at first, hard to understand but she was getting there. And then she’d gotten there. Mostly, Mohi could forget that she had found the woman in the jungle. Mostly she was like everyone else, well groomed, clothed, and only somewhat less than well spoken.

Mostly, Mohi could return to her usual day to day endeavors. To the life she adored and cherished so well. It was a nice home, a nice standard of living. If only the girl hadn’t had such wandering, thieving fingers. If only the girl wasn’t prone to bouts of mischief and troublemaking. If only the jungle didn’t drive the girl mad on nights when the moon was new. It was a lifestyle she could never give up, and yet for the sake of this woman whom the spirits gifted her, she’d leave it behind.

Leave it behind for a run down shack in the unpleasantly smelling outskirts of a city much too grand for her tastes.

.oOo.

Mai supposes that it makes sense; Snapdragon’s mannerisms and her taking comfort in nests and shiny things.

“Did you like her?”

“Hmm?” Mai asks.

“Mohi. Did you like Mohi?”

Mai nods, “she seems like a nice woman. She takes cares a lot about you.” She wishes that her mother were as invested in her well being as Mohi is in Snapdragon’s.

Snapdragon is quiet for a long while and Mai grows uncomfortable under the cloud of silence. “What’s wrong?” She finally asks. “And don’t try to tell me that this is a happy hush.”

Snapdragon laughs but only briefly before her smile fades. “You think it’s weird, don’t you.”

“That you used to run naked through the jungle and eat raw pineapples?”

Snapdragon nods.

“I thought it was weird to watch you eat a whole sunflower and then scamper up and into your nest.”

Snapdragon frowns.

“I’m looking for strange.” Mai confesses. “Everything is so boring, Snapdragon! It’s the same thing every day; I would wake up and go to some council meeting with my dad or with Zuko when I was his girlfriend. I would have a nice meal and warm bath--rose scented soap every time. Sometimes I’d go for walks or talk with the other ladies in the palace. I used to talk to TyLee and that was interesting but then she left to join the Kyoshi Warriors and it was just me, Aunt Mura, Tom-Tom, and that flower shop. And then it was even more of the same routine every day.” She pauses. “And then you invited yourself to work at my stall.”

Snapdragon curls her bangs around her finger. “I thought that…”

“Everything was just starting to blend together one really long dull day that never ended. I can tell the difference now.” Mai says. “It’s not boring. You make me feel things because you’re weird. I wish more people around here would just be bizarre and unpredictable. I wish I could scramble up a tower and surround myself with random items.”

“You can.” Snapdragon smiles. “You can visit my nest even if I’m not around. Just don’t break anything.”

“That’s not the point, Snapdragon.” Mai says. “The point is; I know that you’re weird and I want you to keep doing that.”

She needs her to keep doing that. Maybe if she does, she can start to break the monotony on her own.

“Keep doin’ what?”

“Hoarding your knick knacks and eating more questionable parts of plants.”

Snapdragon nods, “I can do that.” She fidgets with her metal propeller blade. “I have to drop this off. Will you spend the night with me? I never had a sleepover before.”

Mai thinks of her comfortable bed in the security of the palace. She really ought to go there. But she is casting normalcy to the side now, doing the things that her mother would likely disown her for. “And I’ve never slept in an abandoned factory before.”

“It’s really nice ‘cept for when it’s windy and the breezes get in the air ducts and it makes these spooky noises. And sometimes…”

“Let’s just get to the factory before I have second thoughts.”

#Avatar The Last Airbender #Azula #Avatar Mai #Maizula #Fanfiction

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youvebeenlivingfictional · 4 years ago

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I Could Be Your Sometimes Part Three

Previous Part | Next Part | Masterlist Rating: Explicit - 18+ Only Notes: Set before the series Thank you to everyone that’s liked and read this!! Warnings: Eventual infidelity and sexual content. If you dislike this, please don’t read. Thank you. Chapter-specific warnings: Cursing, alcohol consumption Pairing: Andy Barber x Reader Summary: I glanced at the number, frowning when I didn’t recognize it. I got cold-called by reporters and clients often enough, I’d gotten into the habit of just answering numbers I didn’t know.

The next few weeks found me unwittingly looking for Andy in the lobby bay every morning. It was stupid; I scolded myself every single time. Andy wasn’t going to show up at my job out of nowhere. A few people had sent ‘thank you’ emails and follow-up questions for the seminar, but I hadn’t gotten one from him. I hadn’t expected him to send one (I’d just wanted it). That was for the best, though. I hadn’t let him occupy my mind the way he had immediately after I’d seen him; he’d pop into my mind at most once a day, in the elevator lobby but, then I’d push it down. I didn’t have time to be so consumed simply with the idea of a guy - we were busy at Tactician, I couldn’t be so distracted. Friday afternoon found me sending my final edit of the Bright Start piece to the Boston Globe. I was giving it one last read-over when I heard my phone ring. I glanced at the number, frowning when I didn’t recognize it. I got cold-called by reporters and clients often enough, I’d gotten into the habit of just answering numbers I didn’t know. I huffed, highlighting the sentence I left off on before I picked up the phone, tucking it between my shoulder and my ear. “Hello?” I answered. “Hello?” Came the voice on the other end. My eyes were skimming over the document distracted me from the rest of the answer from the other end. “Sorry?” I asked. “It’s Laurie? Laurie Barber.”

My phone slipped in my grip and I scrambled to recover it and press it back to my ear. “Laurie, hi! I’m sorry, I’m just a little distracted over here. How are you?” I asked. “It’s alright! I realize I’m asking pretty late, but Andy told me you were in town and I was wondering if you’d like to come over for dinner tonight? You know, to catch up.” I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. I was an adult, I had friends. It was plausible that I had plans, couldn’t make it tonight. I could just keep putting off the invite until Laurie got the message and stopped asking. It was the more logical option, it kept me out of Andy’s way. "Yeah, I could make it tonight,” I heard myself say. “Really? Great! How’s six?” -- “Seriously? What the hell are you doing?” I asked myself as I caught my eye in my rear view mirror. Well, the technical answer to that was fairly simple. I was driving to the Barber’s house for a ‘catch-up’, because I had made the split-second decision that it would be a good idea. The only good thing that would come out of this was free food - and both Andy and Laurie were good cooks, I remembered that much. But why had I said yes? It was true that I had liked Laurie when I was working for her; she was always nice to talk to when it came what I was up to, my plans for school, what I wanted to do with my life. It was what I had imagined having an older sister would’ve been like. Frankly, the relationship I’d had with Laurie similar to what I had with Nora, but Nora and I knew one another as adults. Laurie and I had had a far more limited interaction. I had debated stopping off and grabbing the beer I remembered seeing in their fridge, but I’d decided that would be a smidge too weird, so I’d settled for grabbing a bottle of wine (from what I remembered, they both liked red; I preferred white, which was for the best. I needed to drive myself home later). I shook my head as I pulled onto their street. I hadn’t gotten dressed that morning with the expectation of going over to their house. Tactician was a younger workplace - it was fairly casual most days, and we only tended to dress up when we had people coming in for pitch meetings, or things like the seminar. On Fridays especially, I could get away with a pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers, and a cropped sweater like the plum-colored one I’d picked out that morning. I parked on the street, shutting the car off and looking in the rear view mirror again. I wasn’t going to bother to touch-up my makeup - in fact, I’d taken my lipstick off before I’d left the office. I shook my head a little bit, straightening the collar of my black denim jacket. "When we get home, we are having a long talk about boundaries and knowing when to say ‘no’ to people,” I warned myself in the rear view before I reached into the passenger’s side footwell, grabbing the bag with the bottle of wine I’d bought. I got out of the car, taking a deep breath as I headed up the walk. “Hi!” Laurie drew me into a hug the moment she opened the door. I smiled, hugging her back before she ushered me inside. The house looked like I remembered - for the most part, anyway; they’d painted the living room and the kitchen. I hated that I noticed that, but I had babysat Jacob every day after school for nearly two years, had spent every other Saturday night in the Barber’s living room helping him with his ABC’s or watching Tom and Jerry or re-watching The Iron Giant (it had been his favorite movie; he used to pitch a fit if I tried to put anything else on). “Oh, you didn’t have to,” She said, taking the bag from me. I shrugged out of my jacket, gently waving her off. “It’s alright, I think I know where the coat closet is,” I teased. She smiled, heading into the kitchen ahead of me. I hung my jacket up, glancing at my phone and answering a quick text from Nora (asking me if I’d like to grab a drink - if only she’d asked me earlier) before following her. “Jacob’s at a sleepover at his friend Derek’s house-- Andy’s still at work, he got held up,” Laurie shot me an apologetic look, as if this was an inconvenience. This was actually preferable; if I was lucky, Andy wound wind up staying late at the office and I could catch up with Laurie uninterrupted. “How’ve you been, how’s Jacob?” I asked, leaning against the kitchen island. “We’ve been good!” That was the thing about Laurie - even when I was asking about how she was doing as an individual, she’d tell me how they were doing as a unit, “Jacob is great, he’s in fifth grade now.” “Fifth,” I repeated, muttering, “Shit.” Laurie laughed, pulling the bottle of wine out of the bag before getting a couple of glasses down from the cabinet. “What about you? Andy said you’re a senior account executive at a PR firm?” She asked. I nodded. “Just got promoted, like, a month ago--” “Congratulations!” “Thank you! I worked with my boss when I was in New York, it was like my third PR internship at that point? She offered me a job at Tactician as soon as she knew I’d been approved to graduate.” “You like it?” Laurie asked, setting a glass of red wine in front of me. I smiled a mumbled, “Thanks,” making a mental note to add that to the talk I’d be having with myself later. “Yeah, I really like it. I mean, we get to work with a pretty varied range of clients and I get the chance to do pitches and talks, like the one Mr. Barber was at.” Laurie cut me an amused look as she poured herself a glass of wine. “You do know you can use our first names now, right?” She asked. I tipped my head forward, scrubbing my hand over my forehead as embarrassment thrummed through me. “Sorry, force of habit,” I said lamely as I lifted my head, resting my chin on my hand. Laurie smiled warmly, shaking her head. “It’s alright,” She soothed. Before either of us could ask another question (and before I could embarrass myself in front of just one Barber at a time), my luck ran out, and Andy walked through the front door, calling out, “Lor?” “We’re in here!” Laurie called back before turning to me, “I’m gonna check the food really quick.” “Course,” I nodded, reaching into my back pocket and pulling my phone out as Laurie turned away. Two new emails, and four texts from Nora: (6:10 PM) Nora: plans?? since when do you have plans? (6:12 PM) Nora: are they like...sexy plans (6:15 PM) Nora: tell me he’s at least hot 😏 (6:15 PM) Nora: and picking up the tab 😏😏 I shoved my phone into my back pocket as I absently swirled the wine around in the glass. “Are you old enough to drink that?” I turned my head toward the sound of Andy’s voice as he came in from the hall. He’d preemptively ditched the suit jacket, leaving him in a white button down and a grey tie. “You’re not funny,” I shook my head, but we were both smiling. Andy shot me a quick wink before he rounded the kitchen island. I heard the “Hi, honey,” And assumed the kiss he dropped to her lips, or forehead, or cheek, or maybe her shoulder, but I turned my attention to bringing my wine up to my lips and taking a sip. I schooled my expression as I swallowed. Still didn’t like red. -- “You actually helped me at work today,” Andy informed me. I glanced up at him curiously as he passed me a plate to dry. Laurie had gone up a little early - apologized profusely, but she had a budget meeting at Children’s Cottage in the morning and she wanted to get a run in before she went in for it. Andy had told me that he didn’t need any help cleaning up, that he could handle it, and it would take a bit anyway (the dishwasher was out of commission). I had pointed out that I really didn’t mind helping, that the work would go faster with two, and it was only fair: I was the reason he had extra dishes to do (and then I’d promptly added all of that to the list of things I needed to talk to myself about later). “How’s that?” I asked. “The Plain Language slide in that PowerPoint you sent out, the one about the Plain Writing Act of 2010, it had those links?” “Uh huh,” I set the dish atop the others before I picked up my glass of wine (the same glass Laurie had been poured me when I’d arrived. It really wasn’t hard to nurse the same drink for hours when you weren’t fond of the taste).

“We might be taking on a case--” Andy stopped himself, shooting me a look, “Is this off the record?” “Shut up,” I rolled my eyes, hiding my smile behind a sip from my glass. Andy chuckled as he turned his attention back to the dishes. I shook my head, letting my eyes drift over his biceps, down over his forearms where his sleeves had been rolled up to ti the dishes. “So, the links?” I pressed. “Right-- We might be taking on this case between a former law student, never graduated, and a ‘friend’ of his. The former student lent some money to his friend, drew up a contract chock-full of legalese. The friend signed it in good faith. The terms were insane.” “How’d the DA’s office get involved in this?” I asked. “Pro bono,” Andy said, passing me the last dish. I set my glass down in favor of the dishtowel. “Sounds like you guys really need an angle,” I said. Andy hummed, shutting off the faucet. I set the plate down before I passed him the dishtowel to dry his hands. “We have other cases we could take on,” He admitted, turning and leaning back against the counter, “But...Something about this one, I don’t know. The fact that this asshole used his one bit of training to fuck over someone he supposedly cared about...Rubs me the wrong way.” Andy’s voice had descended into an irritated grumble, and I had to make an effort not to smile. I was not finding it cute. I was making a decided effort not to find it cute. “Well, regardless of whether or not you take the case, I’m glad you found the materials helpful,” I said. Andy smiled at me, this soft, easy look, and I knew that I needed to get out of there. “It’s getting late,” I said, glancing toward the time where it was displayed on the stove, “I should get going.” “Course,” Andy nodded. He followed me into the hall, patient as I got my jacket. “Kinda surprised you didn’t have any plans tonight,” He commented. “Oh, well, I leave my partying to Saturday nights. I use Fridays to prime my liver,” I said. Andy chuckled. “Very sensible.” “Yeah, strategy’s important,” I agreed, straightening my collar. “...This was nice,” I added. I wasn’t sure if I meant dinner or just talking to Andy - most likely both, dinner had been lovely, but being alone with him felt almost deliciously dangerous, heady. “Yeah, it was,” Andy said softly. I didn’t think he was bullshitting me. At least, I hoped not. Andy beat me to opening the door. His hand skimmed over my lower back as I passed him, fingers drifting over the exposed line of skin between my sweater and the waistband of my jeans. I turned to give him one more quick wave before heading for my car. I got in and drove off, not checking to see if Andy was waiting to watch me go. At a red light, I rested my head on my hand, peering up at it and willing it to change faster. When it didn’t immediately heed me, I glanced at myself in the rear view mirror. “You’re so fucked,” I muttered.

#I Could Be Your Sometimes #andy barber #andy barber x reader #andy barber x you #andy barber imagine

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raleighcarrera · 5 years ago

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saturday

ride or die | colt kaneko x mc (ellie wheeler)

~2.2k words | T

baby you look good, you look gorgeous / this right here your city, i’m a tourist

or, alternatively, ellie shows colt around the east coast. for @choicesjunechallenge day one! (wander)

rod tags: @choicesarehard, @lovehugsandcandy

they were invisible, out here. in manhattan, ellie was probably always at least a little invisible, but there was a certain freedom in knowing that absolutely no one was looking twice at him or them -- that they had a whole uninterrupted weekend to explore stretched out ahead of them.

back home, he was starting to reach a level of notoriety that brought few places he could go without attracting stares with it. the new crew was coming together faster than he thought it would, and colt was admittedly pretty pleased with his progress, so far. when ellie came back home for the summer, there might actually be something to show her. something that might even have a shot at impressing her.

her anonymity would evaporate as soon as he got the chance to show her off, back in l.a. -- so he figured they might as well take full advantage of this weekend, making the most of their time as nobodies while they still could.

ellie lifted the hand that wasn’t twined through his and pointed up at a nondescript building on the corner, just a block from her apartment. “this is one of the buildings i have classes in,” she explained, “my biochem lab and my stats class are both in here.”

“you know, if you’d been at my college, maybe i wouldda considered hanging around.” there were few things he cared about less than the ins and outs of her coursework, but the thought of ellie in some lecture hall, with her nose buried in a book was something that never failed to endear him to her. she was almost unfairly cute.

“what, there weren’t any girls you liked in boston?” she asked playfully, shooting him a look as they waited at the corner for the light to turn.

“there were plenty of girls,” he smirked, “but i wouldn’t say i liked them.” what he means goes unsaid, but he knows ellie is smart enough to read between the lines: she’s the only person to ever do this to him, the only girl he’s actually made room in his life for.

she’d wormed her way in so effectively he’d hardly even noticed it. try as he might to push her away, she was always there -- challenging him when he did his best to shove her to the side with calculated barbs, comforting him when he didn’t think it was what he wanted at all, caring for him when he hardly felt like deserved it.

before her, he hadn’t been interested in anything like this. people were always a disappointment -- without fail, anyone who could get close would find a way to take advantage. feeling the way he did about her was messy and painful and not something he was keen on exploring, at first. he knew it’d be a disaster from the moment he met her, but ellie didn’t let herself be deterred by a few casual insults. she dug her fucking heels in and blended into his life seamlessly, until he found himself in a suit dancing with her at her high school prom like an unrecognizable idiot.

only a moron with no sense of self-preservation would’ve told her they loved her, so of course he had. for the longest time, it felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop -- for her to change her mind, for her to do what he’d long since expected and make him regret ever forcing himself to take that step out of his self-imposed isolation and into the sun.

but ellie was nothing if not a master at proving him wrong -- at making him eat his words. at defying the expectations of everyone around her, including him, sometimes, when he was dumb enough to underestimate her.

the way she was tugging on their clasped hands recaptured his attention, shaking him out of his reverie. “this place has the best dollar pizza. there’s, like, forty pizzerias within a ten-minute walk but this one is the best and cheapest. during midterms i ate here twice a day for two weeks straight.”

“sounds like you’re getting spoiled,” he remarked, dropping her hand to wrap his arm around her shoulders, instead, pulling her in close on the sidewalk. “what’re you gonna do when it’s back to l.a. burgers and tacos all the time?”

“i do kinda miss the street food,” she mused, leaning against his side. he’d been all over her last night, when he first arrived, relearning the curve of her body with his hands and his mouth over and over again, hardly able to get enough of her after so long without the real thing. pictures and videos and late-night facetimes were all well and good, but nothing could make his heart leap like pulling her into his arms in person. finally.

he still hadn’t had his fill, but she was adamant about showing him around the city, so -- they got out of bed. and even if they stayed inside all weekend, colt was certain they still wouldn’t be able to get through even half of everything he wanted to do to her.

“oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, guiding him to the right with the arm she had around his waist. he dipped his head on a smile he just couldn’t hold back when she slipped her hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “this was what i wanted to show you, come on.”

they ducked into an alcove between what looked like two office buildings. there was a small fountain and a few abandoned tables -- for a moment, they were completely alone, under an arch of spring flowers that provided a brief respite from the bustle of midtown, waiting for them just beyond the sidewalk.

“i always come here to study. i feel like it’s so peaceful.” ellie was smiling up at the flowers, hardly paying him any attention -- so colt took a moment to let himself look, studying the sweet expression on her face with a smile. it’d been so long that he’d almost forgotten how beautiful she was, if that was even possible. but seeing her here, now, was like a kick to the stomach; she knocked the wind out of him just by doing nothing, just by being herself -- every goddamn time.

“it’s pretty cool,” he agreed, forcefully tearing his eyes from her to look around, too. “i mean -- we’re alone, so.”

ellie laughed, turning under his arm to face him. “is that all it takes for you?”

colt shrugged the shoulder she wasn’t tucked under, shooting her a wide grin. “what can i say? i’m a simple guy.”

“well -- we knew that.” she squirmed away giggling as he pushed her playfully in retaliation, rushing over to the far side of the fountain. colt followed, stepping up behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist from behind, burying his face in the side of her neck.

he exhaled. there weren’t words for how relaxing it was to know he didn’t need to look over his shoulder, here, with her. for once, there was almost nothing on his mind -- just the blissful peace of a weekend spent with his favorite person. some of the leaden weight that seemed to be perpetually pushing on his shoulders was slowly starting to ease as he stood there with her, under the curtain of the peonies above them.

colt fished in his pocket for a quarter, offering it to her. “wanna make a wish?”

ellie took it from his hand immediately. “you’re getting soft on me,” she murmured, huffing out a small sound of amusement when he nipped at the side of her neck in return. colt hooked his chin over her shoulder, watching as she flipped the coin into the fountain.

“what’d you wish for?” he asked, just so he could see her do what she did, which was spin around indignantly in his hold, scoffing.

“i can’t tell you! then it won’t come true.”

he rolled his eyes at her. “that rule isn’t real.”

“well, i don’t want to risk it.”

colt lifted both hands to her face, cupping her cheeks and drawing her in for a slow kiss. ellie melted against him prettily, as responsive as ever -- how sensitive she was never failed to light a fire somewhere within him that he had trouble ignoring. the little sigh that slipped from her mouth into his felt like water after walking through a desert, and he swallowed it greedily, tilting her face up with fingers at her jaw for an angle that would allow him to deepen their kiss insistently.

ellie entertained him until she had to break away to breathe. he backed off at the first push of her hands, the expression on his face splitting into an obnoxious grin as soon as he noticed the light flush spreading out across her nose, creeping onto her cheeks. the way her nose turned red every time they made out, without fail, would probably never stop being absurdly appealing to him.

that was another annoying thing she’d done to him. colt constantly found his brain getting stuck on the most absurd shit, where she was concerned. things he’d never even thought about before, like an errant lock of hair, curling into her eyes, or the flash of a bare shoulder when her oversized sweater slipped down suddenly seemed more erotic than porn, just because it was her.

“you’re gorgeous,” he mumbled, pressing his thumbs into her flushed cheeks. “i can’t stand it.”

ellie was still working to catch her breath, instilling him with a sense of pride he didn’t bother trying to push away. “sorry. i can try to work on that.”

“you’d better.” his eyes dropped to where her hands were fisted in the front of his sweatshirt, clinging tightly to him like she was afraid he’d slip away at any moment. colt could feel the expression on his face soften the longer he watched her, the pounding of his heart ratcheting up dangerously when she licked her lips and glanced up at him seriously.

“i’m really glad you’re here,” she said finally, shattering the sudden stillness that seemed to have surrounded them -- in the middle of manhattan, of all places. “you have no idea how badly i missed you.”

colt’s thumb stroked her cheek. he was pretty sure he had some idea. “you’re sure i can’t convince you to transfer, right? ‘cause... ucla is, like, a twenty minute drive on my bike --”

ellie laughed. the sweet trill of sound did little to temper his racing pulse. “shut up, come on. there’s so much more i want to show you.”

he let her spend the rest of the day playing tour guide, pulling him around the city, until they’d eventually wandered into some unfamiliar neighborhood downtown, far enough away from the main avenues that the foot traffic on the sidewalk was considerably less. finally, they could take their time, instead of ducking out of the way to avoid the rushing speed of people in a hurry, ignoring glares from busy new yorkers disgusted by the way they kept stopping to kiss in the middle of the crosswalk.

colt bought her an ice cream cone because her excitement was too cute to ignore, grinning to himself as he snuck glances over at her, enjoying it. it was going to be pretty much impossible to tear himself away from her on sunday night, but he was trying not to think about that.

“anything special you want to do tonight?” she asked between licks, drawing his eyes to the way her wrist flicked to keep the swirl of vanilla soft serve even all the way around.

“i have a few ideas.” she caught sight of the smirk on his face and rolled her eyes. “i’m open to suggestions, though.”

“well -- i did have a place in mind for dinner,” she said, though he hardly heard her over the way she licked a trail of melting ice cream from her wrist, “and then i thought we could walk around some more... and turn in early.”

“you know, that’s exactly what i was thinking,” he answered with an agreeable grin, already fantasizing about just how late she’d allow him to keep her up and all the things he could do to her with several uninterrupted hours holed away in her single. a part of him he did his best to ignore most of the time was also already dreaming about the inevitable lazy sunday morning that would follow, when he could wake up with her for the second time in too fucking long and put all his energy into keeping her in bed until the last possible minute.

that guy was such a sap.

“should i be afraid of that look?” ellie questioned with a smile, the happy expression on her face doing wonders for his already calm mood. they continued slowly down the street in a direction that he thought might’ve been back towards her dorm, though once they dipped below the numbered streets all sense of navigation seemed to abandon him. whatever. it wasn’t like they didn’t have time to wander aimlessly some more, and he wasn’t too proud to admit he loved getting lost with ellie by his side.

colt grinned unabashedly at her, watching her finish off her ice cream cone with a few bites. fuck it. they were invisible here, so why not let himself indulge that other guy? once he was back in l.a., all of this was done for -- he’d be back to his rough edges like they never softened in the first place.

“nah,” he promised, reaching out for her again and pulling her in close, dropping a kiss onto her temple. “we’ll carb you up at dinner. you’ll make it through.”

#colt kaneko #colt kaneko x mc #ride or die #choices rod #ellie wheeler #colt kaneko x ellie wheeler #choicesjunechallenge #myfic #long post #don't worry i have raleigh content in mind for some of the days too #s/o in advance to the 5-6 people that consistently interact with my colt content #i sat down and wrote this in one sitting be gentle #happy june !!! yes these are chance the rapper lyrics

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emotchalla · 5 years ago

Text

Tempt You - V.

A/N: HELLO so I never thought I would finish this fucking part like I had all the ideas I just could not execute it??? I’m convinced this is still shit but I really wanted to post it, so here you are bbs! Quarantine has not given me that much inspo, unfortunately, but the sun has been out recently and I was motivated to get some writing done. ALSO, I just found out that Isiah’s name is actually Isiah and NOT Isaiah??? Like I just thought they pronounced it weird on the show bc Brummie accent but NO, that boy’s name is just Isiah. I’m so fucking shook lmao. ALSO ALSO, he’s a very hard character to write (pls be gentle!!!) because Stephen Knight literally gives us N O T H I N G and I could rant about how underutilized he is for DAYS but y’all did not come here for that! Enjoy the smut bbs!

**All my works are written with a Black or POC reader in mind, because I am one myself, but all readers welcome!**

Pairing: Modern!Michael Gray x Fem!Reader

Summary: You meet Isiah, Michael’s best friend. After a night of dancing and rounds of shots at the bar, you invite Michael back to yours, and well...

Warnings: Swearing, Alcohol use, gratuitous Isiah flirting (I’m sorry; I love him!!!) NSFW content (fingering, oral [f receiving], protected sex, dirty talk, light choking), soft Dom!Michael x sub!reader, Fluff (he really likes you, so he’s sweet)

Word Count: 8.4k+ (I actually died while writing this and resurrected just to upload. You’re welcome.)

series masterlist | main masterlist | add yourself to the taglist here | listen to “tempt you (evocatio)” here | find the spotify playlist here

**GIF not mine**

The next two weeks pass as if they’ve really been no time at all, and it’s mostly due to the strides you and Michael have made in your relationship. Things aren’t official yet, and you try to not let it annoy you. You know that he’s busy; he called a few days ago to update you with the news that his client was in fact being framed, and he and the team had been able to break their witnesses just by cross-examining them. You knew he was intimidating, but this was proof on a completely different level. When you told Michael this, he told you that one of his cousins told him the only reason he’d been given his law license was because he scared the shit out of the test administrators for his LPC. You told him that said cousin was a genius, and he grumbled something about how of course you’d like fucking John, and you launched into your relentless teasing.

It was the first time the two of you had been able to do more than text since your special night. Not only was he busy with work, school was kicking your ass and your audition was right around the corner. Regardless, you both found ways to talk to each other. You kept up with the daily pictures, most of them tame, and when Michael had a spare minute away from the courtroom, you’d check in about your days. It was as normal as things could get for now, and while it sucked to not see Michael for a month, you knew the reunion would be worth it. He’d promised you as much.

It’s Friday night, Michael’s just won his case, and you’ve invited him to go dancing with Savvy and a guy she’s seeing. When Michael imagined a night with you—celebrating his big win and getting to see you for the first time in a literal month—he wasn’t imagining going out to a club and dancing the night away. Michael doesn’t dance. When he was younger, he was too busy snorting coke in the alleyways behind pubs to bother with the dance floor. He didn’t even dance at Tommy’s wedding. But Michael can’t say no to you. He tries to exercise restraint, he does, but there’s a part of him that likes giving you whatever you ask as soon as you ask for it. So dancing it is.

He wishes that if he had to take you to a club, it could be one that John or Isiah owns. At least he knows the environment, the people. He can blend in because their clubs are full of people he knows. It’d be nothing to sneak off with you and make good use of one of the VIP rooms. In a club run by, well, anyone else…Michael has to be on his guard. He doesn’t have control of what photo snapped in a dark corner ends up in some gossip mag’s inbox come Monday morning. The media follows the Shelbys and their progeny like vultures. Michael isn’t ready to expose you to that. Not yet. So maybe he might’ve asked Isiah to spontaneously visit from Birmingham and “happen to turn up” at the same club you’ll be at tonight. If you’re up for it, he’ll introduce the two of you. He knows you’ll get on immediately.

“Y/N, if you don’t fuck that man tonight I’ll be so disappointed,” Savvy says as she examines your reflection in the bathroom mirror. “You look so fucking good.”

You grin at her as you set the last curl in your hair. Nights that you went out were few and far between, so you tended to go all out when you had the chance. The dress you’ve chosen for the night is actually one of Savvy’s that she insisted would look better on you. It hugs you in all the right places, and your boobs look good. Some of your favorite moments with Michael so far have been ones where you’ve made him speechless, and you can’t wait to do it tonight.

“Oh I don’t know if we’ll go that far, Sav,” you shrug, barely believing yourself.

If Michael gave you the chance, you were going to take it.

“Bullshit! The man bought you lingerie and sex toys.”

“Just because he did all of that, it doesn’t mean he’s gonna wanna fuck tonight.”

“He’s absolutely going to want to fuck tonight.”

“Just because you’re always thinking about sex, doesn’t mean everyone else is!” you giggle, watching as Savvy’s jaw drops in fake indignation.

“Now listen here, bitch!”

You both giggle as you turn back to the mirror—you to finish your hair, and Savvy to apply her lipstick. The night had already started for the two of you; while visiting her sister in Paris, Savvy had gotten used to having a glass of champagne while getting ready for their nights out. She insisted that the two of you carry on the tradition. Your head is already starting to float, and a warmth has settled into your skin. Tonight will be a good night. The doorbell rings, signaling Oliver’s arrival. Oliver dances in the same ballet company that Savvy does, and they’ve started seeing each other. You like him well enough. He’s charming, good to Savvy, and incredibly fun to party with.

The club you’re going to is right around the corner from where you live, so you’re having Michael meet you there. He’s had a hell of a month, and you want tonight to be a night where he can unwind. Although he’d won the case, he had a massive pile of work waiting for him in the office, so it’d be a bit before he could join you.

“I’ll go get Oliver. You finish up in here,” Savvy says, throwing you a wink over her shoulder as she leaves the bathroom.

You nod, and return your gaze to the mirror. Maybe Savvy is right about tonight. You’re tempted to snap a picture of your outfit to send to Michael, but you decide to let him be surprised when he sees you. You plan to drive him as wild as he’ll let you. If that means all the way…well, you’re ready to make this night worth it. Savvy’s giggle comes from the living room as she laughs at some joke Oliver’s just said, and you smile to yourself. She deserves to be happy.

You take one last look at yourself in the mirror before grabbing your phone and leaving the bathroom to join Savvy and Oliver.

“There she is!” Oliver greets, giving you a warm smile as you enter the living room.

“It’s good to see you!”

You give him a quick hug before he pulls away to give you a once-over. He nods, grinning at you.

“You two didn’t come to fuck around tonight, aye? You look fantastic, Y/N.”

You giggle, knocking your shoulder with his.

“Have I told you lately that you’re my favorite person Savvy’s ever dated?”

“You tell me every time you see me, but that doesn’t mean I ever want you to stop. I love the validation.”

“You sure Savvy’s the Prima ballerina and not you?”

Oliver cracks up, and soon you’re laughing with him. Savvy rolls her eyes in fake annoyance, grumbling to herself about how much she wishes you hated Oliver, so you wouldn’t talk so much. You all know she doesn’t mean it; she couldn’t be happier that two of her favorite people are fond of one another. It makes her feel like this can really go somewhere.

“Come on,” Oliver says, turning to wrap an arm around Savvy’s waist. “Let’s get out of here while you two have control of your limbs.”

Savvy’s the one to mouth off to him this time, and you shake your head as they begin to tease each other back and forth. It’s still warm enough outside that you don’t need a jacket, but you drape one over your shoulders just in case. You chat idly with Savvy and Oliver on your walk to the club. Still, your thoughts are entirely elsewhere. You can’t wait to see Michael tonight. It’s a bit strange to have moved so quickly, but you also find it exhilarating. Michael is unlike anyone you’ve ever met, and it makes him the most interesting man in the world.

There’s already a line starting to stretch around the corner when you reach The Lilac Room. Oliver whistles under his breath.

“It’s usually never this bad. Maybe someone’s making an appearance.”

You and Savvy both shrug as you follow him toward the large black doors lined with lavender UVs. He nods toward the bouncer, who immediately smiles at him in recognition. Another perk of Savvy dating Oliver? His older brother owned a series of nightclubs all across the city. Any time the two of you wanted a night out, you had your pick of venues, free drinks, and enough security personnel who knew who you were connected to to ensure that you had a night of stress-free dancing. No creepy men trying to buy you drinks and convince you to head back to his flat for the night. Just pure, uninterrupted fun. It made you wish you had more time to actually go out.

The moment you’re inside the club, you’re itching to make a beeline for the illuminated dance floor in the center of the room. Savvy and Oliver steer you toward a VIP booth instead, where a waiter is already waiting to take your drink orders.

“Why are we sitting? We came to dance!” you whine as Savvy urges you into the booth with a nudge of her hip.

Oliver merely chuckles before leaning over to the waiter to order your first round of drinks for the night. Mojitos for you and Savvy, a finger of scotch for Oliver, and for Michael—

“What do you think your guy would like, Y/N?” Oliver asks, a slight twinkle in his eye.

You think he and Michael will get along quite well. Sadly, you don’t know enough about Michael to know his favorites, but he told you during some late night phone call or another that on really rough days, he’d lock himself in his office and nurse a bottle of whiskey. His cousin Tommy’s, if he had it. As long as it could get him drunk, he wouldn’t complain.

“Whiskey, neat, I’m thinking,” you tell him, and Oliver’s face breaks out into a grin.

“I like him already,” he says, before turning back to the waiter.

You turn toward Savvy.

“I think he and Michael are gonna get along a little too well,” you sigh.

She nods.

“I think Ollie’s gonna like your boy more than you do.”

You share a laugh before Oliver comes back over.

“If you two want to check out the dance floor now feel free to. I’ll wait here for the drinks.”

Savvy leans over to give him a quick kiss.

“You’re the best,” she murmurs against his lips, and you don’t miss the way Oliver’s eyes sparkle when they look at her.

Savvy grabs your hand then, and you both head to the dance floor. Almost immediately, you’re surrounded by a group of other dancing bodies, and you feel the stress of the past month give way with every thump of the bass. You can lose yourself here. You and Savvy quickly fall into your usual pattern, bodies moving along to the music steadily pumping through the club’s speakers as you’re gently jostled toward the center of the dance floor. Savvy throws her arms across your shoulders as the two of you giggle and dance even closer together. It’s easy to fall into rhythm with Savvy, and you toss your head back as she twirls you around. Savvy leans in close to your face.

“There’s a guy watching you over at the bar,” she whispers, turning you around to catch the briefest glimpse of him before spinning you to face her again.

You grin and shake your head.

“How do you know he’s not watching you?”

Savvy rolls her eyes.

“Because I pay attention,” she scoffs. “Go talk to him.”

You raise an eyebrow at her.

“Michael will be here any minute.”

“And? You’re still single and you look hot tonight. I think you can flirt with a rando at a bar without him worrying about being mugged off.”

“Oh Savvy I don’t know,” you sigh. “I really like him.”

Savvy rolls her eyes.

“I know you do, Y/N, but you’ve also had a shit month and you’re wound tighter than a fucking spring! You can have fun, let the very hot guy at the bar buy you a drink, and then come back and dance with me until your sugar daddy boyfriend gets here, okay?”

“He’s not my sugar daddy Savvy,” you correct.

“Again, I call bull. But stop stalling and get your ass over to the bar.”

She gently pushes you in the bar’s general direction, and you shake your head at her antics, mustering up the courage to approach the stranger across the room whose eyes you can now see are trained on your every move. There’s something familiar about him almost immediately, but you can’t place it. He smirks as he watches you approach, leaning back into the bar with an ease that’s natural. He moves like Michael does, you think. He moves like he owns the place. You’d believe he did, if you didn’t know Oliver’s brother personally. As you get closer to the stranger, you watch his eyes widen at the sight of you. You take a seat at the bar, leaving enough distance between you and him that if he wants to talk, he’ll have to come over to you. You glance at him over your shoulder before motioning toward the bartender, hoping the stranger will take the hint.

“Ice water, please,” you ask the bartender.

You want to keep your wits about you.

“Are you here with anyone?”

You turn toward the voice that’s warmer than you expected. The stranger smiles at you, full lips stretching across white teeth, and your stomach does somersaults. He’s gorgeous in the way that models are, and has the warmest brown eyes you’ve ever seen.

“I-I am, yeah. Well, waiting for someone,” you stammer, a bit taken aback.

He frowns, but gives you a small nod.

“Can’t say I’m pleased to hear it, though it’s what I expected,” he drawls, luring you in almost immediately.

Woah. His voice is like honey—warm and smooth, and a bit dark too—and you instantly know that this man knows what he’s doing. To prove it, he smirks at you as the next words tumble from his mouth.

“You’re fuckin’ gorgeous so of course you’ve got someone. Although I will say, he seems like a pretty shit guy to leave a girl like you alone tonight.”

Chatty, too, you think to yourself, amused by him already. You raise an eyebrow at him, and he leans across the bar to extend his hand.

“I’m Isiah.”

“Y/N,” you say, taking his hand to shake it. “I’m surprised you let me get a word in.”

Isiah laughs loud enough for the whole bar to hear, and sure enough, some patrons turn to glance your way before going back to their own business. If Michael shows up to the club before you’ve made it back to Savvy, you hope he won’t get the wrong idea.

“It’s a shame you are seeing someone,” he chuckles. “It’s not often you find a girl that’s both good to look at and to talk to.”

From the cheeky glint in his eyes, you can tell that he’s just chatting, but you don’t resist the urge to take the bait and light him up a bit.

“Well maybe if you weren’t an ass that only approached girls because you liked the look of them, you’d find that most of us are able to hold a conversation.”

You wink at him as the bartender brings over your water, and reaches to replace Isiah’s glass of whiskey. Isiah turns toward you, a soft smile on his lips.

“You’re right. That was a bit of a dick thing to say. Can I buy you a drink to make up for it?”

You roll your eyes playfully at his question. Quite the charmer, this one.

“I did tell you I was waiting for someone,” you tease.

“I know,” he says. “I just want to buy you a drink. Promise.”

You take a minute to get a good look at him. He’s a beautiful man, you’ve gathered that already. Smooth, warm brown skin and even browner, sparkling eyes. He might be one of the prettiest men you’ve ever seen.

“Sure,” you say. “I’ll take a mojito.”

He grins at you before giving you a quick nod and placing your order with the bartender. Put anything she orders on my tab, you hear him say, and you marvel at the gesture. It’s a shame that you can’t actually flirt with him like you’d really like to.

“So where’re you from?” he asks.

“The States. Chicago. I moved here for grad school. What about you?”

“Birmingham,” he answers, and your eyes light with recognition.

“I thought I recognized your accent.”

Isiah stares back at you, incredulous. How would you know his accent?

“You been there before?”

“No,” you begin, shaking your head. “My boyf—er, friend’s from there.”

Did you just slip up and almost call Michael your boyfriend? Shit. You’re in this deeper than you thought. Isiah nods.

“Ah, well he’s got good taste.”

“In what?”

“Girls and hometowns.”

His goofiness surprises you, and you let a giggle slip from your lips. Isiah’s eyes light at the sound.

“What a pretty laugh,” he sighs.

You thank him sweetly, and he mutters under his breath about how unfair it is that you’re basically spoken for, because you’re fucking perfect. The bartender brings your drinks, and when Isiah hands you your glass, goosebumps rise on your skin as your fingertips graze his. You take the opportunity to gaze at him while you sip your drink, watching as he loses himself in your eyes. It’s good to know that he feels it too. This pull—magnetic, almost. Instinctively, he leans closer, and your breath catches in your throat. Before either of you can do anything you’ll eventually regret, you feel an arm wrap around your waist.

“There you are.”

Michael. Thankfully, Isiah registers his presence before Michael notices that he’s been flirting with you.

“I should’ve known she was your girl,” Isiah chuckles, shaking his head.

“I should’ve known the two of you would find each other without me having to introduce you.”

Your eyes widen as you look back and forth between the two of them.

“You know each other?”

They both laugh, nodding at you. Michael’s eyes are bright as he looks down to give you a soft smile.

“Isiah’s my best mate, basically my brother. We’ve been friends since we were teens,” he says. “He’s also the only person I know, besides my cousin John, that’s cheekier than you.”

You roll your eyes at the last bit, which only makes him laugh.

“You’re lucky I’ve missed you, you ass.”

He chuckles and pulls you close to press a kiss to your temple.

“Mm, I’ve missed you too,” he hums, giving your waist a quick squeeze before pulling away to turn to his friend. “Do you mind if I stay and chat to Isiah for a bit? You can head back to Savvy if you’d like, I’ll join you soon.”

You nod, and turn to Isiah.

“It was really great to meet you. Thank you for the drink! It’s good to know Michael actually has friends,” you quip, offering him a sweet smile.

He grins.

“It was great to meet you too, Y/N. I’ll see you ‘round, yeah?”

You nod, and give him a small wave goodbye before heading over to Savvy and Oliver who have made themselves comfortable in the booth you’ve been given for the night.

“Holy shit Sav,” you gush, as soon as you’re within earshot. “So that was Michael’s best friend.”

Savvy’s eyes look like they’re about to bulge out of her skull.

“What??” she asks, incredulous.

“I didn’t know it until Michael came over and actually introduced us, but yeah. God, I’m a little embarrassed. I need another drink.”

Oliver’s eyebrows raise at that.

“Shots?”

You nod quickly.

“Hell yes. Shots.”

He smirks at you. How Savvy managed to find a boyfriend that’s essentially your carbon copy is something you’ll never figure out, but you don’t even mind. Thank the universe for Oliver.

“I’ll head over to the bar now then.”

“You’re my favorite person. You know that, right?”

“It gets better every time you tell me!”

You both giggle at yourselves, and Savvy rolls her eyes.

“You two are obnoxious,” she whines.

“We know,” Oliver says, leaning over to press a sweet kiss to her mouth.

He grabs the glass of whiskey you ordered for Michael and heads toward the bar. As soon as he’s gone, Savvy turns toward you, eyes gleaming with excitement.

“Spill.”

“You’re such a gossip, you know that Sav?”

“Stop stalling!”

You sigh, glancing over at the bar to see Oliver engaged in lively conversation with Michael and Isiah, and you smile to yourself.

“He was really, really nice,” you begin. “And funny, and sweet, and basically if I wasn’t already somewhat-dating his best friend I would’ve had no problem letting him take me home tonight.”

Savvy’s jaw drops.

“Shut up.”

“I know.”

“You weren’t even over there for that long!”

You nod in agreement.

“That’s why it’s so bizarre. I don’t know, Sav, it just felt…good to talk to him. Comfortable, I guess.”

“Hmm,” Savvy muses. “You could always date them both.”

“Savvy!”

“You could! It’s 2020, Y/N.”

“I know I can, smartass,” you say, rolling your eyes. “But I’m pretty sure that’s not Michael’s thing.”

You can see the wheels turning in her drama obsessed brain.

“Threesome?”

“Savvy!”

You can’t control the laugh that escapes your mouth, and soon Savvy is laughing with you. When Michael and Oliver return to your booth—a round of shots for each of you in their hands—you’re still recovering from the fit of giggles.

“What’s so funny?” Oliver asks, and you and Savvy quickly shake your heads.

“Oh it’s nothing, babe! Just being silly,” she says, reaching for one of the shots in his hand.

Michael slides into the booth next to you, setting the drinks down on the table. When he turns toward you, you feel the heat of his gaze immediately.

“Hi,” he breathes, leaning forward to tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear.

His hand lingers on your skin, fingers ghosting along the back of your neck. He resists the urge to tug you toward him and press a kiss to your lips, mostly because he can’t kiss you the way he’d like to in public. Not while he’s still this sober, anyway.

“Hi,” you echo, leaning into his touch.

“You don’t know how good it is to see you after the month I’ve had.”

“Hmm, you should show me then, Gray,” you smirk, reaching for the shot glasses.

“Trouble,” he murmurs, accepting the shot you offer him.

Savvy and Oliver turn toward you then, and the four of you toast glasses before tossing back your shots. Tequila. It burns your throat on the way down, and you shake your head as your body adjusts to the sting. Michael slides a glass of water your way, and you give him a grateful smile before taking a sip.

“We’re going to go dance!” Savvy announces, tugging on Oliver’s hand.

As she leads him out of the booth, she turns to give you and Michael a quick wink over her shoulder. Michael chuckles as you shake your head at Savvy’s antics.

“I, for one, am incredibly grateful for your roommate,” he says, sliding closer to you.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” you ask bemusedly.

A slow grin spreads across Michaels lips as he leans forward to cup the back of your head. Your breath catches in your throat.

“Because now I get to do this,” he purrs, pressing his lips to yours.

The kiss is softer than you expected, and you sigh into Michael’s mouth as he keeps his kisses slow. His fingers curl along your jaw to pull you closer.

“Michael,” you sigh against his mouth, fully leaning into his touch.

His other hand presses against your waist—and as your kisses quicken, Michael’s thumb rubs gentle circles into the bit of exposed skin at your stomach.

“I really like this dress,” he murmurs, allowing the tip of his thumb to graze the underside of your breast.

He runs his tongue along your bottom lip before sucking it between his teeth. Your hands tangle in his hair, and soon, you completely forget your surroundings. It’s definitely been too long since you’ve last kissed him, and if his actions tonight have been any indication: Michael feels the same way.

“We should go dance, you know,” you whisper against his lips, making no move to actually pull away.

“We’ll get there, eventually,” he counters, kissing you again.

You don’t protest when he slips his tongue in your mouth. His fingers trace your jaw, then your collarbone before finally coming to rest against your throat. He doesn’t apply pressure, but they rest there, and you feel a knot beginning to build in your stomach. Michael pulls away to look into your eyes then, fingers still pressed to your neck.

“I’m so tempted to say fuck it and let’s head back to mine, but I think Savvy’d have my head for that.”

You don’t know if it’s the alcohol or Michael himself, but your head’s already buzzing. You nod, giving him a timid smile before bursting into a fit of laughter.

“She definitely would.”

“You’re a giddy drunk,” he teases, wrapping an arm around your shoulder to pull you into his chest.

“I’m not drunk, yet,” you quip. “I’m just happy to see you. And maybe slightly tipsy.”

“Mmm,” he hums. “I’m happy to see you too. So happy, in fact, that I brought you a present.”

“Michael,” you start to protest.

“You’ll like this one, Y/N. I promise.”

He pulls away from you to pull something out of his jacket, and you try not to frown at the loss of contact. He hands you a plain white envelope. You look back at him, and urges you to open it. You recognize the print of the ticket stubs immediately. Shakespeare’s Globe. Titus Andronicus. Standing tickets. So he had listened to your rant about the best way to experience a show there. The smile on your face is likely enormous and stupid, but you can’t be bothered to care. You turn toward him to find him already grinning back at you.

“Did you go to my job and buy tickets for a show?”

He nods.

“I promised you that I’d let you take me to one.”

“I could have probably gotten them for free, you know?”

“I know,” he says. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten to see that look on your face.”

You lean forward to press a kiss to his lips. He gasps against your mouth, and you wrap an arm around the back of his neck to pull him closer. It’s unbelievably sweet of him to have thought of you and your job, especially amidst his own responsibilities. You’ve managed to catch him off guard by kissing him first, and Michael groans low in his throat as you card your fingers through his hair.

“Let’s go dance,” you whisper hotly against his mouth. “And then, I want you to take me home.”

Around shot four or five, Savvy suggests body shots. You’re beyond tipsy at this point—solidly drunk is more like it— and any idea that comes out of her mouth sounds like a good one in this state. At any rate, it’ll give Michael even more of an excuse to touch you. You’ve returned to your booth for a slight break from dancing. Michael holds his liquor much better than you do, but even he’s considerably under the influence. He’s taken off his jacket, and he watches as your fingers idly trace the buttons that line his torso. You’ve been glued to one another all night. Michael expected to hate dancing, but quickly found that it’s hard to hate anything that gives him an excuse to press your body to his in public. You’re a good dancer too.

Savvy and Oliver return to the table with a plate of limes and a pair of salt shakers, and Michael’s eyes darken with an idea. You watch him, curiously, as he reaches toward one of the shot glasses.

“Grab a lime, Y/N,” he instructs, reaching for the salt.

You do as he says, watching him with bright eyes.

“Now put it between those pretty lips of yours.”

You don’t miss the suggestive nature of his tone, and you smirk at him as you raise the lime slice to your mouth. You part your lips slightly, watching as Michael’s eyes zero in on them.

“Y/N,” he warns.

“Relax. I’m putting it in my mouth right now,” you tease, laughing at your own cheek before popping the lime slice between your lips.

Michael rolls his eyes but leans his face close to whisper in your ear.

“Tilt you head back, and stay still for me, yeah?”

You nod, before doing what he asks. Michael leans forward to press a kiss to your throat. You gasp, and as your body starts to lurch forward Michael’s hand is firm at your back.

“Easy,” he murmurs.

He trails kisses from your neck to your collarbone, coming to rest at the slight peaks of your breasts exposed by your dress. Michael doesn’t hesitate to lick a stripe of skin, and cold air touches your skin for only a moment before you feel the sprinkle of salt. A hand cups the back of your head and tilts you forward to meet Michael’s dark, green eyes.

“I should probably take that shot,” you hear him say, but you’re still focused on his eyes.

Michael takes the shot without even wincing. When he leans forward to lick at the salt on your chest, he holds your eyes. He trails kisses up your neck until you can feel his breath along your jaw. Your breath catches as he leans forward to pluck the lime from your lips. When you grab at his shirt and pull him back in to kiss you, you can taste the tequila still on his tongue. Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you remember that you aren’t entirely alone, so you don’t kiss Michael like you’d like to. Instead, you pull away to look into his eyes.

“I want to go home.”

He nods.

“Okay. Let’s go, then.”

You make quick work of saying goodbye to Savvy and Oliver, who plan on staying out “just a bit longer.” Michael makes a call, and then the two of you make your way toward the exit. The night is quiet outside of The Lilac Room, and as the two of you stumble toward your apartment, you’re grateful for the fresh air. Michael holds your hand as you make the short walk back to your apartment, listening to you chat idly about your upcoming audition and a recent conversation you’d had with one of your professors. He waits until you’re both inside your apartment to pull you close, wrapping an arm around your waist.

“I missed you so much,” he sighs, pressing his forehead to yours. “I know it’s odd, seeing as we haven’t known each other long at all, but I did. I really did.”

You smile at him, reaching up to cup one of his cheeks.

“I missed you too, Michael.”

“Can I kiss you, gorgeous?”

“You know you can, Mr. Gray.”

“My cheeky girl,” he murmurs, pressing his lips to yours.

This kiss is needier than you expected, but you lean into Michael’s touch. You stumble back toward your bedroom, tugging at his shirt to keep his lips pressed to yours. Thankfully, you left your door open before heading out, so you and Michael easily slip inside your room. He takes a second to pull away and shut the door behind you before leading you over to your bed. He kisses you again, and you let his hands guide you to lay back onto your bed. Michael follows your body, coming to settle between your thighs. You hook your legs around his waist, and Michael chuckles, pulling his mouth from yours.

“Not tonight, Y/N.”

You frown, looking up at him.

“Why not?”

“Don’t pout,” he chides. “We’ve both been drinking. I don’t think either of us have got a clear enough head to be making that decision.”

“Fuck, why are you so nice?” you whine, flopping back onto your pillows.

Michael chuckles and rolls off of you. He sits up to kick off his shoes, then reaches forward to unstrap your heels.

“‘M only nice to you,” he insists.

You sit up onto your elbows and look at him.

“Help me out of this dress?”

He nods and offers a hand to you.

“Come ‘ere.”

Michael helps you off of the bed and turns you around to get the zipper at your back. You slip the dress off of your shoulders, and Michael hands you the oversized t-shirt you have thrown at the foot of your bed. You slip it over your head and instruct Michael to check in your drawers for a set of sweat pants that would probably fit him. You head to the bathroom to brush your teeth and give him time to change, being sure to grab a bottle of ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet before heading back to your room. Michael smiles at you when you come in, arms reaching to pull you close.

“Let’s go to bed,” he hums drowsily, pressing a kiss to the top of your head.

You crawl under your covers, feeling Michael’s body follow close behind. He cradles you in his arms, pressing your back to his chest. He leans forward to press a gentle kiss to your shoulder before settling into your pillows.

“Goodnight, Y/N,” he mumbles, already drifting to sleep.

You smile as you close your eyes, relaxing against his chest.

“Goodnight Michael.”

You’re a goddess first thing in the morning, Michael thinks. He hasn’t always been an early bird, but he’s grown so used to mornings in court that it’s become a second nature. What he isn’t used to, is waking up in someone else’s bed. Sleeping next to a woman he hasn’t fucked. It’s odd how at home he feels with an arm slung around your waist and your cheek pressed to his chest. He keeps his breathing light, not want to disturb your sleep, not yet. He’d rather just hold you close while he ignores the headache starting to creep in at his temples. A quick glance over to your bedside table reminds him of the bottle of painkillers you set out before the two of you headed to bed, and Michael thanks the heavens that you’re bloody brilliant. He needs water though, and you will too when you wake.

Slowly, he eases out from under you, waiting until you’ve settled against the pillows before he climbs out of your bed and heads toward the kitchen. There’s no sign of Savvy or Oliver, and he makes quick work of finding two glasses. He runs the tap until it’s cold, then fills up a cup for each of you before heading back to your room. He finds you splayed out against the pillows, starfish style. Cute, he thinks, ambling toward your nightstand. He’s careful to keep the bottle still, so the rattling of the pills inside don’t wake you up. Michael fishes two ibuprofen for both of you before setting the bottle back on the table and climbing into bed. Gently, he wraps an arm around your shoulder to shake you awake. You feel the soft press of lips against your temples, and smile in your sleepy haze.

“Wake up, pretty girl,” Michael coos, chuckling as you curl further into his chest.

“Mmm, don’t wanna,” you mumble, shaking your head.

“Come on, Y/N,” he laughs. “I wanna see your eyes. Please?”

His hands trace up and down your back as he presses slow kisses to your neck. Your body is certainly awake now, but you keep your eyes closed to draw out Michael’s teasing. He kisses his way up your neck and across your jaw, until his mouth reaches your earlobe.

“Wake up, Y/N,” he grunts, nibbling at your ear with his teeth.

Your eyes shoot open as a soft gasp leaves your lips, and Michael settles over you.

“There she is,” he hums, leaning forward to press a kiss to your lips.

You smile against his mouth as you kiss him back, pulling him closer with a hand at the nape of his neck. Michael’s hips settle in between your thighs, and your legs wrap around his waist. Just like last night, you think. You can’t believe this is finally happening.

“Wait wait,” Michael breathes, pulling away to sit back on his legs.

“Again?” you groan, sitting up to glare at him.

Michael smirks at you as he leans over toward your nightstand, reaching for a glass of water and the painkillers you set out last night. He pushes them into your hands before grabbing some of his own. Michael downs the medicine and the water before setting the glass down. His hands find your thighs, and his thumbs rub slow circles on your skin as he looks into your eyes.

“Take those and drink the entire glass, and I’ll make you feel good,” he whispers, voice low.

You don’t miss the heat in his eyes. Michael watches as you take the medicine and drink all of your water, thumbs continuing to stroke the insides of your thighs. As soon as you finish, Michael leans forward to wrap an arm around your back. He takes the glass from your hand and sets it down. His hands trail up from your thighs and catch the hem of your t-shirt. He lifts it over your head before tossing it over his shoulder.

“Lean back onto your pillows,” he instructs, following your body with his.

Michael slots his lips over yours, immediately dipping his tongue into your mouth. Eager to have his lips on yours again, you curl your fingers into his hair to keep his mouth close. Michael’s hands grip your waist, as you raise your hips to wrap your legs around his waist, caging him in once again. Michael smirks against your mouth.

“I’m starting to get the hint that this is a favorite position of yours,” he hums, hands sliding down to massage the globes of your ass.

“Michael,” you sigh, leaning your head back as his kisses trail toward your neck.

“I can’t wait to taste you, pretty girl,” he whispers against your skin, hands trailing up to tug your panties over your ass and down your legs.

Michael pulls away briefly to admire the sight of you naked before him.

“You look perfect,” he sighs, reaching down to palm himself through his sweats.

“Thank you, Sir,” you whisper.

Michael grins at you, reaching forward to cup your cheek in his palm.

“You gonna be good for me?”

You nod quickly, back arching when you feel one of his hands slip between your legs. He groans low in his throat when he feels you practically dripping for him already.

“Fuck,” he hisses, watching through lidded eyes as he slides one finger into your slick heat. “You’re fucking wet.”

He peppers hot kisses against the base of your throat as he slowly works his finger, thumb coming up to rub soft circles on your clit.

“Sh-Shit,” you whimper, as Michael sucks a mark onto your collarbone.

“Tell me how it feels,” he mumbles, adding another finger.

“So good,” you gasp. “Fuck, Michael!”

He fucks you slow with his fingers, curling them slightly to reach even deeper before dragging them out again. His tongue laps at the mark he’s made, dark eyes watching you as you struggle to collect your words.

“It feels good,” you whine.

It’s all you can manage.

“Just good?” he hums. “Sounds like I should make it even better, yeah?”

You nod, watching as he trails his kisses down the center of your chest, over your stomach and upper thighs before coming to rest at their apex. He leans down to rest on his elbows, face to face with his fingers sliding in and out of you.

“Can I have a taste?” he asks, licking his bottom lip as his eyes zero in on your wetness.

“Please, Sir,” you beg, hands already finding their place in his hair.

Michael flattens his tongue against you before licking a long stripe up your clit, pulling a beautiful moan from your lips. He laps at the pool of wetness that has started to gather on his fingers, and gazes up at you to watch you begin to unravel at his touch. There’s a pressure building in the pit of your stomach, and as Michael curls his fingers to brush against that spot, you start to see stars.

“Oh fuck,” you whine as he wraps his lips around your clit.

Michael sucks, hard, pulling a squeal from your lips.

“Such pretty noises, baby,” he moans, watching you in awe.

You’ve never seen someone look at you with equal parts lust and admiration, but Michael gazes up at you as if you’re something divine. You feel yourself start to clench around his fingers, and Michael groans against you. He keeps his free hand at your hip, anchoring himself as he gets lost in you. He closes his eyes as he sucks harder, fingers pumping at a steady rhythm to bring you closer to the edge. You can feel your legs beginning to shake, and you tug at Michael’s hair.

“Sir, please,” you gasp, back arching as Michael curls his fingers again.

“Please what?”

“Please let me cum.”

“Go ahead,” he grunts, closing his lips around your clit again.

Your resolve snaps, and you gasp Michael’s name as you cum on his fingers. He slips his fingers out of you only to replace them with his tongue, fucking you slowly through your orgasm. You open your eyes to see him smiling up at you, mouth slick with your release. Michael presses soft kisses to your clit as your body settles from the aftershocks of your orgasm. He kisses up your body until he’s face to face with you, eyes lighting at your flushed cheeks.

“I’ve been waiting entirely too long to do that,” is the first thing he says, and you’re too blissed out to come up with one of your usual witty comebacks.

Instead, you reach for his wrist and pull his fingers—still wet with your cum—and slip them into your mouth. Michael groans as you slip your tongue in between them, keeping your eyes on his.

“Fuck, that’s hot,” he whispers, unable to look away from your plump lips as his fingers slip in and out and in and out.

He growls when your teeth graze his skin. One of Michael’s hands curls beneath your jaw, and he pulls you forward to straddle his hips. You let go of his fingers with an audible pop, staring into his lust-blown eyes.

“Are you gonna fuck me now, Mr. Gray?” you ask sweetly, trailing a hand down his chest to slip into his sweatpants.

He’s hard and heavy in your hand, and you give him a few gentle strokes as you watch his resolve begin to break. A muscle ticks in Michael’s jaw, and his hand on your jaw slides down to wrap gently around your throat.

“I am,” he growls, wrapping his other hand around your wrist to stop your movements.

He instructs you to lay back, standing up to slip his sweats and boxers off of his hips and down his legs. You direct him over to the box of condoms nestled in a drawer under your bedside table, and you watch with hungry eyes as he slips the latex over his length. He’s bigger than you expected, and you watch him smirk as he registers the surprise in your eyes. Before you can start to genuinely ask him if he’ll actually fit, Michael covers his mouth with yours. One of his hands directs your arms above your head, and he latches onto your wrists to hold them there.

“Please fuck me,” you whimper against his lips.

“Easy,” he chuckles, trailing a hand to the inside of your thigh to spread your legs wider for him. “I’ve got you.”

He takes himself in his hand, rubbing the head of his cock against your folds. You whine, bucking your hips toward the touch, desperate for friction.

“Please,” you sigh.

“You can have whatever you want when you beg me like that,” Michael groans, pushing himself forward to slip inside of you.

He takes his time to make sure you feel him inch by inch, sucking on your bottom lip with his tongue. He stills when he finally bottoms out, groaning low in his throat as you clench around his cock.

“Fuck, you feel good,” he murmurs.

“So do you,” you sigh, tossing your head back as he begins to move his hips.

Michael keeps his thrusts slow, allowing your legs to wrap around his waist to pull him in deeper. His hand slips between the two of you to rub slow circles at your clit, and Michael lifts his mouth from yours to look into your eyes.

“You’re squeezing the shit out of my cock, baby,” he groans as he continues his lazy thrusts, face falling to the crook of your neck.

Michael places hot, open-mouthed kisses to your skin as he continues to work you open, spurred on by the soft moans leaving your lips with every thrust of his hips. It’s slow, sleepy morning sex, and you lose yourself in the feeling of Michael getting to know your body for the first time. It feels delicious, the pleasure he’s bringing you, and as he brings you closer toward your release you find yourself getting lost even further in his touch. You start to work your hips against his, and Michael’s hands grip your ass to pull you even closer.

“Fuck baby, look at you,” he coos. “Fucking your perfect little pussy on my cock. You’re such a good girl.”

His hand at your clit rubs the slightest bit faster, and you gasp as one of Michael’s hands returns to your throat.

“I’m-I’m gonna—” your breath hitches in your throat, but Michael nods, understanding.

He gives your throat a gentle squeeze as he feels your body tense, signaling the approach of your climax.

“Cum for me sweet girl,” he murmurs, staring hungrily at you as your body begins to unravel.

“Oh my god,” you whine as your orgasm takes you by surprise, gazing wide-eyed at Michael as he continues to fuck you through it.

“Shit, that feels good,” he hums, pistoning his hips a bit faster to chase his own release.

Your hands scrape along his back as you feel yourself on the edge of another, smaller orgasm, and you clench around Michael’s cock as his hips stutter. He’s close.

“Come on my cock, Y/N,” he hisses, burying his face into the pillow behind you.

You let go. Michael’s body freezes as he’s struck with his own orgasm, and your name falls from his lips as he feels you squeeze him again. Absolutely perfect, he whispers into your skin, soft kiss after soft kiss up and down the column of your neck. He’s gorgeous in his post-orgasm glow, and you card your fingers through his hair as he catches his breath. You whine when he pulls his hips from yours, but he settles back onto the pillows to pull you onto his chest.

“You’re everything I have ever wanted,” he murmurs against your lips.

“Hmm, everything?” you sigh, pressing a sweet kiss to his mouth before pulling away to look into his eyes.

“Everything,” he confirms, brushing his fingers across your cheek.

“Well thank you,” you say, surprised at his sudden tenderness.

Michael gazes at you softly as you look down at him, green eyes shining with a fondness you suspect he’s reserved only for you.

“Can I ask you something?”

He breaks eye contact, staring down at his hands.

“What is it, Michael?”

He takes a breath before looking up at you again, determination in his eyes.

“I don’t want to rush you, especially since last night was technically only our second date, but I was thinking, and wondering if maybe you’d like to—”

“Yes,” you interrupt, watching as the smile builds on Michael’s face.

“You didn’t even let me finish,” he smirks, leaning forward to touch his forehead to yours.

“Didn’t need to,” you hum. “I’ve been waiting too long for you to ask me out, officially, Gray.”

He’ll never get tired of that mouth of yours.

“Oh you have, hm?” he asks, pressing a hot kiss to your lips.

You can feel him beginning to stir again between your legs, and you smirk against his mouth.

“I have. You sure took your time.”

He chuckles and kisses you again, slipping his arms around you to cradle to close to his chest.

“Let’s go take a shower,” he suggests, leaning forward to kiss your shoulder.

His head lolls lazily on his shoulders as he gazes up to look at you, running his tongue across his bottom lip.

“And then we can come back to bed so I can really fuck you like you’re mine.”

“You’re on, Mr. Gray,” you sigh, wrapping your arms around his neck as he lifts you from the bed and carries you toward the bathroom.

His, you muse. You could get used to this.

reblogging later with tags. wanna be tagged in this fic? click the link above! (do not send me an ask! click the link!)

#michael gray smut #michael gray au #michael gray #modern michael gray #michael gray x reader #peaky blinders au #peaky blinders smut #emotchalla writes

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freebooter4ever · 5 years ago

Text

Eugene's Second Date

AU where Sledge and Snafu meet before the war in 1940 Mobile, Alabama. Eugene and Merriell already had their first date where Merriell surprised him with Eugene's first kiss at the end, and now Eugene is dogging Merriell's steps like a lovesick puppy.

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That night Eugene floats home in a weird euphoria. It's not even necessarily happy, because he's half confused over his own emotions, but he's very joyful about it. He's so out of it he runs the car over his parent's mailbox.

He tells Shelton about this when they meet up for lunch at the lumberyard the next day. Shelton laughs.

"It was dark, I couldn't see a thing," Eugene protests in his defense.

"You're lucky it wasn't a tree," Shelton says. Still grinning. Eugene wonders if Shelton ever stopped grinning since last night.

"I would have seen a tree," Eugene argues.

"You said it was dark…"

"Not dark enough I couldn't see a tree, for goodness sake. I'm not blind."

"You couldn't see a mailbox."

"The height of my family's mailbox lines up almost exactly with the bottom of the car's windshield giving me at most an inch of warning that the damn thing is there."

"Should've let me drive...."

"I'm not a bad driver."

"Never said you weren't but you better let me drive next time just in case. Don't want to go hurting no more innocent mailboxes."

"There's gonna be a next time?" Eugene raises an eyebrow.

Shelton smiles and pauses the conversation to light his cigarette. Eugene turns back to his sketch of the dry docks.

"I'll fix it for you," Shelton drawls.

"Fix what?" Eugene asks distractedly, having already forgotten their conversation in his concentration over his drawing.

"You said it's one of those fancy mailboxes...shaped like a tiny house, yeah?" Shelton asks, "The boss saves the scrap lumber for us temp workers to take home. It'd be easy to get my hands on some small pieces. Make your little house good as new."

"You'd do that?"

"Sure," Shelton looks away from him, out to sea.

Eugene seizes the chance to draw his profile. It doesn't turn out well. He rips the page out of his notebook, crumples it, and tosses it down to the floor of the dock for the gulls to pick apart.

"I've got to go," Eugene says, "Need to get back before I'm missed." He doesn't mention that his class after lunch is woodshop, and how ironic it feels that he's building crooked decorative clocks while Shelton builds the infrastructure needed for warship production. Eugene stands and shoves his journal into his bookstrap.

Shelton hastily gets up to stand beside him, "Missed where?"

"School," Eugene admits. He feels like a child and he knows his embarrassment shows on his face. He can't look at Shelton as he packs up his lunch box and starts to climb down off the dock.

"Eugene," Shelton calls, following him down.

Eugene starts picking his way across the rickety wood. Their lunch spot is one of the ancient docks, probably from the 1800's. It's slowly being stripped away - any useful materials being put to work in the new, bigger, more robust docks.

"You mean to tell me you drove all the way downtown on your lunch break?" Shelton calls out to Eugene's back.

"No," Eugene replies over his shoulder, "I skipped third period so I could bicycle all the way downtown, for my health."

"Gene," Shelton finally catches up to him and grabs his hand, pulling him back.

Eugene gives in. He stops and turns around. Sometimes he wishes Shelton would just quit smiling for once.

Shelton bites his bottom lip, looking at Eugene. "You skipped class for me," he says.

"I did not say that," Eugene protests.

"Sure, Gene," Shelton says, tipping forward into Eugene's space.

Eugene fidgets, slinging his books over his shoulder, "It feels...useless; sitting in class, waiting to be able to do something meaningful. At least here I can see what's happening."

Shelton's expression goes serious then. He licks his lips and tightens his hold on Eugene's hand. "C'mon," he says.

"What?"

"I know what you need," is Shelton's only answer.

Eugene follows his lead. They climb around the docks and duck into the alley between the old waterfront dancehall and a warehouse. And much to Eugene's surprise - although it answers all of Eugene's unspoken wishes - Shelton pushes him up against the brick and kisses him. For a seemingly aloof, sometimes awkward guy, Shelton can be very demanding when he wants to be. And this kiss demands everything. They break apart whenever a car drives by on the busy city street a block away, but otherwise their necking goes uninterrupted.

Eugene's going to miss his fourth period class, for sure.

"I don't see how this is supporting the war effort either," Eugene teases during one break when a car actually parks in front of the alley opening and makes things difficult for them to kiss without being seen.

Shelton laughs. He is leaning languidly on the alley wall across from Eugene, his legs stretched out in front of him. He slides a little farther down the brick and lazily extends one leg until his foot is flat against the opposite wall.

"You're boosting worker morale," Shelton drawls.

"Oh god, don't say it like that," Eugene rolls his eyes and shoves Shelton's foot off the wall with his hip.

"I'm severely lacking in patriotism," Shelton continues, lifting his chin and putting on a fake serious air, "Multiple sessions may be needed to boost..." he flexes his hips and grabs at the baggy crotch of his work overalls in a rude gesture, "...my sagging morale."

"Shut up, Shelton," Eugene grins. He glances down the alley to make sure the car finally left. And then shoves off his side to close the distance between them and flatten Merriell's body against the opposite wall. Pressed against him like this, Eugene can feel Merriell's 'morale' and it is in no danger of sagging. Eugene kisses his neck just to be sure.

"If I boost it too much, we might end up with the opposite effect," Eugene whispers in his ear.

Merriell groans and latches his hands into Eugene's hair. "Oh, aren't you clever," he says glibly. He sounds sarcastic.

Though when Eugene moves to look Merriell in the eye again before locking lips with him once more, Merriell appears to be completely and totally in bliss.

This time if another car stops neither of them notice. Eugene doesn't think he could notice anything except Merriel, as long as Merriel keeps his hands around the back of Eugene's neck, and his knee wedged between Eugene's legs. Luckily they aren't seen. Cause, god, Eugene could kiss Merriell all day and forget about the time.

Fortunately as it turns out, there's plenty of warning when they eventually hear Merriell's name being called.

"Shelton?" a man's voice yells, husky from years of cigarettes, "Get your sorry ass out here, I saw you having a smoke. I need a hand with this."

"Fuck," Shelton breaks their kiss but doesn't push Eugene off.

Eugene groans quietly and presses his nose in the crook of Merriell's neck. He smells like the ocean and sawdust. Eugene wonders what he himself smells like. Probably musty old books.

"Gonna get me in trouble," Shelton smirks and disentangles himself from Eugene's arms. He backs off down the alley and gives Eugene a salute, "Uncle Sam thanks you for your service." And with a parting wink, Shelton jogs around the corner to meet his boss.

Eugene slides down the wall, breathing hard, and sits in the alley to give himself a moment before he goes back to school. It's only been a minute of separation from Merriell's body, and already Eugene's chest is aching terribly with need. Probably not a good sign for the days to come. He predicts a lot of his other responsibilities will fall by the wayside in favor of this.

He returns to the docks for lunch every single day after that. And with lunch always comes kisses that turn out to be addictive.

On the weekend Shelton comes over to Eugene's house. He drives the ugliest old Ford truck with rusted, chipped paint that might have been green at one point. But the engine purrs like a kitten.

Shelton notices Eugene's interest in his truck. He slaps the hood and announces, "I pour all my poker winnings into her."

"You must be shit at poker," Eugene replies.

Shelton laughs and maneuvers around the cab to pop the hood. He proudly displays the gleaming, beautiful engine and shiny parts to Eugene. Eugene makes appropriate admiring noises. He's never seen a car engine so clean that isn't fresh off the line - there's not a single speck of dust in sight.

"All new parts. Machined most of em custom myself," Shelton brags as he runs his hands through his hair and gazes at his vehicle proudly, "Impossible to get anything manufactured nowadays with rationing and shortages."

"How...?" Eugene asks.

"Just good with my hands," Shelton says, turning his face up to Eugene with a shit eating grin.

Eugene pinches Merriell's thigh through the hole in his jeans.

Shelton throws an arm over Eugene's shoulder and traps Eugene's hand between their bodies to deter anymore pinching. He bites his lip and grins with his nose close enough to almost touch Eugene's cheek.

Eugene doesn't dare turn his head. The temptation to kiss Shelton is too great, and his parents are a few short yards away in the house at the top of their driveway. His mom could be watching out the window right now. Eugene's hands tighten his grip on the truck's frame as he leans over the engine, pretending to take a closer look.

"Before he died my dad would collect old junkers and give 'em to me," Shelton explains, "I'd fix em up, get em working, even make em look pretty. Then he'd go and sell em. I never even got a chance to drive any. Only driving practice I ever got was on tractors."

Eugene looks up at him. "Well," he says, "It was worthwhile practice. This truck's beautiful."

Shelton laughs, "Yeah. Her shell may not look pretty, but she'll get me anywhere, guaranteed. And ain't nobody gonna steal her, cause who'd want a rust bucket?"

"If anybody turns their nose up at this truck, they're fools," Eugene tells him.

Shelton grins and squeezes Eugene's hip fondly, "C'mon. Help me unload."

Shelton grabs his toolbox and settles on the ground next to Eugene's knocked over mailbox. He arrays his tools around himself in organized chaos and picks up the mailbox to examine it. Next to him Eugene stacks neat piles of scrap wood from the bed of Shelton's truck.

As Shelton diligently works, Eugene lays down, props his sketchbook up in the grass and sketches.

Occasionally Shelton pauses to lean over and tickle Eugene's ear to get his attention.

"My buddy got his hands on this new synthetic adhesive," Shelton explains as he works, "They're testing it down at the lumberyard. They say it's completely waterproof. But look…" he runs a line of glue along the edge of a block of wood, and another line of glue on the edge of a second block of identical length and width. He clamps the two together, and holds it up in front of Eugene's face, "Give it a few hours and this scrap will be the perfect size for the wall of your splintered mailbox."

"Impressive," Eugene says blandly.

Shelton reaches over to ruffle Eugene's hair, but Eugene blocks him. "Hey, not with glue on your fingers," Eugene protests.

"You don't know enough about woodworking to appreciate my genius," Shelton taunts.

"I do appreciate your genius," Eugene insists as he continues to deflect all of Shelton's attempts to get glue in his hair.

And he shows that appreciation, later, after the mailbox is finished good as new - better than new. Shelton carved a beautiful gingerbread trim and added it to the eaves using his magical blackmarket adhesive. Eugene's mother thanks Shelton by gifting him a basket full of food and fresh baked cornbread. "I still can't believe our boy ran over a mailbox. Sometimes I worry Eugene would lose his head if it wasn't attached to his shoulders," she says to Shelton right in front of Eugene before he leaves, "He spends so much of his time in the clouds."

"It was one accident, mother," Eugene sighs.

Eugene thanks Shelton by riding back with him in the truck, his bicycle waiting for him secure in the bed. He instructs Shelton to pull over after they cross the bridge and he leads him down to the creek. They sit on the wooden trestle underneath the road and kiss until long after the cornbread goes cold. Shelton doesn't seem to mind. Eugene even boosts Merriell's morale to completion crudely with his hand until Merriell is sagging against Eugene's shoulder, murmuring his pleasure.

Eventually they have to return to the park where Shelton lives and pick up Mairzy from the old neighbor lady who watches Merriell's little sister most evenings. Shelton picks flowers from the side of the road and presents them to the old woman as a bouquet. He smiles at her and asks after her own grandkids living two towns over, and Eugene can tell by her response that the old woman cares about both Shelton and Mairzy dearly.

"Let's go into town," Eugene suggests before the three of them walk over to Shelton's house.

"What for?" Shelton asks.

"I was thinking maybe ice cream," Eugene shrugs, "My treat."

Mairzy's eyes bug out of her head. She grabs onto Merriell's arm and swings on his elbow, "Ice cream! For dinner?!" Her imagination explodes and it's written all over the awe in her face.

"You are going to regret ever saying those words," Merriell informs Eugene gravely.

"Consider it a thank you for fixing my mailbox," Eugene replies.

"Thought it was my fault you ran over the damn thing in the first place," Shelton says.

"Ice cream!" Mairzy exclaims desperately, shaking Merriell's arm.

He gives in, feigning reluctance, but he smiles at Eugene over Mairzy's head. "I know just the place," Shelton says.

They don't go into town, they drive across the tracks, metaphorically speaking. Eugene receives odd looks when he climbs out of the truck behind Mairzy. But he schools his nerves and tries to be gracious as he holds the door open for Shelton to go into the ice cream parlor. The parlor is far from new, there's no jukebox, the overhead fans don't function, and as he and Shelton lean up against the clean but cracked tile counter, Eugene knows that he is getting away with this, in a place he doesn't fit in, but if Shelton tried this across town, in a place where any level of brown is too brown, Shelton might not be served.

They buy the largest banana split sundae Eugene can afford and Mairzy carries it proudly, worshipfully with both hands to a booth by the front windows. The window is wide open, with a brand new screen to keep out the bugs. But the music from the ragtag band playing outside on the porch filters through. Shelton slides into the booth next to Mairzy, and Eugene sits across from them. He passes out spoons, and Mairzy dips hers in eagerly to take the first bite. Merriell twirls his spoon in his hand, relaxes in his seat with his arm protectively thrown over the back of the booth, and he grins daringly at Eugene. Eugene digs his spoon into one of the chocolate brownies mixed into the sundae, takes a bite, and grins back.

Mairzy finishes the majority of the sundae. Shelton eats very little, he claims to not have much of a sweet tooth. Though Eugene notes for later reference that when Shelton does take bites he favors the vanilla and the apple crumble and whipped cream on one side of the dish.

When they're done, Mairzy pulls the gigantic bowl closer to her so she can scoop out the melted soupy leftovers with her spoon. Shelton reaches over her head and taps on the window during a break in the music. He asks the band if they know a specific song. The answer is yes, and Merriell slides open the window screen to pass some change through and the band strikes up again. Underneath the table Merriell starts tapping his foot to the beat against Eugene's own. Eugene laughs and jiggles his leg along with the music though he knows he can't hold a rhythm to save his life.

After Mairzy licks the last drop of ice cream off her spoon, she starts talking - mostly pestering her older brother with questions. In response Merriell starts telling stories, and Eugene settles in comfortably, happy to listen.

Eugene can't remember the last time he's spent a more pleasant evening.

When he announces this to Merriell, the other boy gets a highly suspect gleam in his eye, "Who says the night is over?"

Eugene raises his eyebrows in question.

Turns out the carnival is in town.

They park at the edge of the fairgrounds. People swarm in and out of the brightly lit fence. Eugene has to laugh because this vibrant, tacky, loud place is the last place he'd expect Merriell to go willingly. Sure enough, before they climb out of the truck Merriell leans in close over Mairzy's head and quietly explains, "the things I put up with for her." He grins and squeezes Eugene's hand tight, including Eugene in the conspiracy to make Mairzy happy. Merriell opens the door, Mairzy hops out, and he follows, giving Eugene a quick peck on the lips first.

As the three of them approach the gate, Mairzy starts skipping with extra sugar-induced energy, forcing Shelton to keep a tight grip on her hand for fear of losing her in the crowd. Eugene is running low on cash, so they don't have much money to spend at the ticket booth, but together they have enough to buy Mairzy a handful of rides.

Her favorite is the swings, with the whip-it a close second. Eugene and Merriell are left to lean up against the ride railings and wave and yell everytime she goes around. They use the tight press of the crowd to stand closer together than they might otherwise get away with. Merriell is pressed against Eugene's side, smiling and glowing and looking more handsome than Eugene's seen him before.

As luck would have it, the two of them come upon another couple with a child at the line for the ferris wheel. The four of them put Mairzy and the other little girl safely in a seat, which leaves Eugene and Merriell able to share one themselves. Shelton throws an arm tight over Eugene's shoulder, and traces patterns into Eugene's arm with his finger. He sneaks a quick kiss to the side of Eugene's head before anyone can notice.

Merriell spends his last coins at one of the midway games. Being preternaturally gifted at aim, Merriel wins handily and points to one of the stuffed bears hanging on the wall. The bear is wearing a miniature Marines campaign hat with a kerchief tied around its neck.

"No, this is for Eugene," Merriell announces as he hands the teddy bear to the boy beside him, "Something to hold onto at night." Merriell winks.

Eugene can feel himself turning bright red with embarrassment. To cover it, he steps up to the plate, pays the man behind the counter, and beats Merriell's score by more than a few points. Merriel laughs, and licks his lips while staring at Eugene in a way that tells Eugene he will be in trouble next time Merriell gets him alone. Eugene gifts the slightly bigger bear he wins to Mairzy, who is delighted and proclaims Eugene her new favorite person.

With their wallets thoroughly depleted the three walk back towards the carnival gate. Mairzy's sugar high finally crashes - whether by choice or not, hard to tell, but she convinces Merriell to carry her piggyback the rest of the way.

Eugene is happy to leave. Shelton has been riling him up for fun all night, and Eugene is desperate to get him back for it.

Until they pass a final booth just outside the gate erected on the side of the gravel path.

The military recruitment posters are impossible to miss. The lights trained on the booth are brighter than the entire carnival and there's a small cadre of beautiful girls in sequined costumes handing out flyers. A couple men in service uniforms stand behind the table answering questions posed by curious onlookers. Eugene can't help but stare.

A hand on the small of his back jolts Eugene out of his thoughts. Merriell leans in close and whispers, "Do I need to be jealous of the women...or the men?" He looks into Eugene's eyes and Eugene is surprised by the honest vulnerability reflected back at him.

Shelton isn't exaggerating or teasing, he is self-conscious. And making his jealousy plain.

"Neither," Eugene responds firmly, risking a quick squeeze of Merriell's hand.

"You want to go talk to them?" Merriell asks. He coaxes Mairzy off his back and guides her to sit down on a nearby park bench.

"No," Eugene shakes his head, "No, I'd be...shamed."

Merriell's expression turns cold and haughty, "Ain't got nothing to be ashamed of," and he marches confidently over to the table on his own.

Eugene hesitates. He hangs back to watch as Shelton turns on his smile, strides straight up to the men in uniform, and shakes their hands. Eugene can't hear what they're saying, but the military men are all smiles too, and everyone is clearly getting along well.

Eugene burns with jealousy.

He's about to shyly sneak away, not too far that Shelton couldn't find him after, but far enough he can't be seen. Then a third man joins the table. This man is older, and in the Marine Corps - there's no mistaking that distinctive hat. He's tall, and broad shouldered with a little bit of a barrel chest - enough to cut an imposing figure and not enough to distract from the silhouette of the uniform. He's clean shaven, and regimented, and he greets Shelton warmly but without a smile. This man takes his job seriously.

If Eugene could be anything, he'd be a Marine. He wants that pride - to know he is making a decisive choice about which side of history he'll be on.

"Gene?" Shelton's voice asks carefully.

Eugene looks to his right and discovers at some point while Eugene was daydreaming Shelton returned and ended up directly beside his elbow. "I'm fine," Eugene says, "Let's go."

"Don't you want to...I could introduce you…?" Shelton gestures to the table.

"I said, let's go," Eugene repeats. He picks up Mairzy this time and carries her back to the parking lot.

Shelton nods once, "Okay, Eugene," and follows.

The car ride home is silent. Mairzy falls asleep between them, completely oblivious to the tension. Her head is propped against Shelton's leg and her feet are on top of Eugene's lap.

Shelton's truck rolls a few feet into Eugene's driveway and Eugene signals for him to stop.

"Do you mind getting out for a minute?" Eugene asks softly.

"Sure thing," Shelton says without emotion in his voice.

They both slide out of the cab and leave Mairzy sleeping soundly on the seat. Shelton lingers on his side of the truck, forcing Eugene to come to him. Eugene takes Merriell's face in his hands and tilts his head back for a kiss. At first Merriell responds, grabbing Gene's wrists and pulling him closer. But then he shoves away.

It hurts. Not physically, but Eugene can feel it like an ache - even worse than the ache days ago when he wanted Merriell but didn't know how to act on it.

"Gene, I can't," Shelton whispers harshly.

"What, because I was admiring the uniform of some Marine I don't even know? Are you really that jealous?" Eugene demands an answer.

"What?" Shelton asks, "No!"

"Then why not?" Eugene exclaims.

"Because I'm not gonna be someone's shame," Shelton says in a rush, "Not again."

"Why would I be ashamed of you?" Eugene is confused.

"You said…" Shelton's nerves get the better of him and he can barely talk straight with his accent, "You said you wouldn't talk to the recruiting officers because you were ashamed."

"Yeah, ashamed of myself, knowing that they'd never take some skinny kid with a heart defect who gets winded climbing stairs," Eugene says irritably.

"You weren't...thinking of us…?" Shelton is skeptical, "Us, being together?"

"Didn't even cross my mind," Eugene says, "Though now that I do think about it, probably a good idea not to bring it up at recruitment."

Shelton laughs.

Eugene takes a step closer, takes Merriell's big hands in his. "Can't think of any reason why I'd ever be ashamed of you."

Merriell laughs again, "More fool on you."

"If anything, I'm the shameful one," Eugene argues.

Merriell grins and scoffs, "You? The son of the doctor?"

"Yeah, the one who, if we get into this war, is going to be stuck back here, looking on from afar, waiting. In agony of not knowing what's happening, no doubt," Eugene says, mostly serious though he likes that Merriell is smiling again, "I'll be left with nothing to do except track battle movements like I'm a kid playing soldier again."

"You won't be alone," Merriell says meaningfully and takes a step forward.

Eugene isn't really registering what Merriell is saying. He's too focused on the fact that finally, finally Merriell is kissing him again, passionately. He slips his fingers through Merriell's belt loops and tugs him close. Sometimes while they're kissing Eugene thinks about bringing Merriell home for reasons beyond fixing mailboxes. A stuffed teddy bear is nice and soft, but he thinks Merriell would be a better fit in his bed. He can imagine holding Merriell all night long, and it's still not enough. His imagination doesn't go much further than that, but he knows if he lets his thoughts run wild they would. Easily.

Just one slip over the edge and…

"Wait," Eugene pulls away, "Why won't I be alone?"

Merriell looks wry, "Well, I'm not planning on enlisting anytime soon."

"You're not?" Eugene extends his arms to put distance between them.

"No," Merriell laughs.

"I don't see how that's funny," Eugene says defensively.

Merriell shrugs, looking confused.

Eugene lets go of him and opens the truck door to pull his bear out of the cab. He clutches the teddy tight to his chest and asks, "You're not going to enlist?"

"No!" Shelton confirms, more certain and stubborn this time. He's not laughing anymore.

Eugene turns around and starts walking up the hill, "Good night, Shelton."

"Gene," Merriell grabs his hand and pulls him back.

Eugene twists out of his grip, "I can't believe you're not planning on enlisting. They predict the United States will enter war soon - and not just as an arsenal for the Allies this time. The question is no longer if, but when. We're going to need every able man." He gets right up into Shelton's face and glares, "Have you even seen the latest news reels from Europe?"

"Don't watch 'em," Shelton says. He's gone emotionless again, and that irritates Eugene more than anything.

"You don't care?" Eugene scoffs, "You don't care, you're going to let other men die for you while you stay here and, what...build tiny houses? Kiss me in back alleys for the war effort?"

"Eugene…"

"I can't enlist. Even if I was of age I'd be declined because of my health. Do you know what it's like to be so goddamned useless? And you...you…" Eugene loses control of his own thoughts.

"I'm not dying for nobody but myself," Shelton says.

Eugene stares at him with stunned shock. "You're fucked up, Shelton," Eugene says. He turns his back on the other boy and walks away.

"You ashamed of me, then?" Shelton calls to him in a mocking voice.

Eugene lets himself into the house, but he lingers at the front window. He pushes himself into the curtains and presses his ear to the cold glass. The truck engine starts, nearly silent even in the quiet night. Eugene buries his face in the top of the teddy bear's head and tries not to cry. He sits there till he hears the tires rumble across the bridge. And then he goes to his room, kicks off his shoes, and falls into bed.

He does cry then. But it's not for Shelton. It's for himself, and his own failings. And it feels almost guilty.

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