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waynes-multiverse · 3 days ago

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Giiiiirrrrrl, I'm back. Finally 😅

(It's been awhile lol We need to catch up in dms 👀)

I was so excited to get into this story, this universe, this character, and, most of all, your immaculate writing 🤓😍 (I finally caught up on all things Tracker, so nothing is stopping me from devouring this deliciousness now 😋)

First of, Professor Goldstein is a piece of work... 😒 I wouldn't blame her for spitting into his coffee every time he calls her sweetheart. But Russell, I see you. She's gonna be so annoyed with him 😂

As a Professor of History with two doctorates in your name

Ooooh, another professor character paired with some rugged Mountain Man 😏 I'm addicted to those couples. She's all business up front, and he's all party in the back (seat of his Chevelle) 🤪

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to run. Meeting my massage therapist at noon,” he said

UGH. The nerve!!!!! Massage therapist????? How about I step on your back with my high heels, bro...

And then to go on about his trip and parasailing... Guess it's true. Ignorant people are happier 😂

Why, oh why did the Sciences building have to be on the other side of campus?

Or why are campuses so big in general? My university actually had several faculties strewn throughout the city. Sometimes it took an hour and several subway rides to get to your next lecture 😅

and these heels were killing your feet.

She needs a pair of sneakers in her purse. Or rollerskates!!! One of those electric scooters? 🤓 (Dory's or Russell's next Xmas present for her would be something like this after they listened to her complain for months lmao)

Goldstein’s up my ass again and all I’ve had today is a crusty donut from the teacher’s lounge, which I’m pretty sure was stale,” you said, with your brows furrowed in frustration.

Please tell me Russell's in the room when she said that 😄🤞

When you finally looked up from your struggles, you realized that Dory wasn’t alone. She smiled at you in amusement, sitting at her desk beside a man who made you pause. Your eyes widened.

Yes, he is. Bahahahaha!!! 🤣🤣🤣

He's gonna love her 😝

Dory had told you some…interesting things about her family, including the fact that she had two older brothers.

Ooooh, right! I wonder how much she knows about the Shaws. Not something that comes casually up in the cafetaria I imagine 😅

“Sriracha on fries, huh?” you remarked, gesturing at the man’s plate. Your brow was quirked, but he shot you a smile. “I said avert your eyes,” he teased. “Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, sweetheart.” Ugh. Another sweethearting man.

Love this whole exchange. You're making my dreams come true, babe 😘

“You gave her some PTSD,” Dory said with a laugh.

Dead 🤣🤣🤣

His tousled hair and beard, while well-trimmed and neat, still gave him a roguish quality.

I keep thinking he probably has that look now because he was in the army for so long. Young Russell was pretty much young Dean Winchester in a uniform (hello there, soldier 😏)

“Guilty. Though I’m the handsome one,” he said with a wink.

Well... It's a toss-up, I'd say 😆

You raised a brow at that. “You make your own beer?”

In. His. Car 🚩🚩🚩😂

“Next time I’ll bring you some. You can tell me what you think.”

If any strange man said that to you... 🚩🤣

“You know, it’s amazing how much you and Colter have in common,” Dory said.

Well, at least, Colter has an Airstream 😅🤷‍♀️

His intentions couldn’t be any clearer than a mallet over the head, but you kind of found it endearing.

He is a professional flirt. Kind eyes...

“So you’re on board with a ‘next time.’ Good to know,” Russell remarked.

Dear God, he does not stop, does he? 😆 (On the show, I loved his persistence with Reenie too, even though it was mainly just to annoy Colter. But you captured him beautifully here with this sort of charm 🥰)

PS: schmutz, schlep... I love the sprinkles of Yiddish in this 🤓

“Anybody ever tell you, you got soulful eyes?” he asked.

STOP IT! And he upgraded too!!! 🤣

Which only left the alternative: something…casual.

I mean... Why not? 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️ I'm with her on this. Red flags be damned 😂

I AM SO EXCITED FOR THIS! Gah, this was fabulous! I'm hooked! 😍👏

Are they gonna stay casual? Something about her brooding and reluctance tells me it's not usually her style? Which means, will he eventually settle? Get out of the dangerous hitman-nomad life? And then there's the stories about their respective families. We already know some about Russell's. How is she gonna react if she learns everything? And there's something odd about her private life as well. Can't wait to dive into that bombshell 😂

Zep, my sweet genius Alex, you've outdone yourself once again. Bravo!!! 👏👏👏

A Line and a Half

Pairing: Russell Shaw x F. Reader

Summary: When Dory’s eldest brother comes to visit her at Wyoming University, you don’t know quite what to make of Russell Shaw. But he knows exactly what he wants to make of you.

AN: Okay, here’s my first toe-dip into the world of Tracker with Russell Shaw! 1x12 gave me too many ideas not to explore this intriguing character. This is set before episode 12, but I have a little series I want to sketch out that will continue after this one-shot, so think of this as a “Part 1,” if you will. 😉

Word Count: 3.2K

Tags/Warnings: A kind of “meet cute,” attempts at flirting, and hints of setup for more to come…

You watched, silently simmering, as Dr. Goldstein added yet another packet of internship applications from his graduate students onto your desk.

Applicants that he, as the History Department Chairman, was supposed to review himself. Instead, he’d been adding these hours quite literally onto your desk.

“If you could review these for me as well, sweetheart. Thank you,” he said. “Get ‘em back to me by Thursday, okay?”

As a Professor of History with two doctorates in your name, you once again grated internally at sweetheart, but you tried to keep that cringe off your face as well.

Goldstein barely even met your eyes when he dropped off his burden, and then aimed to leave your office.

“Uh, Paul,” you called out, raising a finger. You stood from your desk as quickly as you could in your pencil skirt, but the man was already out the door. You followed him out, your heels clacking on the tile floor.

Damn it. Knew I should’ve gone with pants, you said, continuing to hasten after your boss.

“Paul! Just a second,” you said. That finally managed to turn the man’s head off of his phone. He glanced at you while checking his watch.

“About the internship applications…and your midterm exam essays for that matter. Don’t you think—” you started to say, but the man spoke over you.

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to run. Meeting my massage therapist at noon,” he said, and rolled a seemingly stiff shoulder under his tailored blazer. “Something’s just not right here after my trip to Cali last weekend. I don’t know what I did, pulled muscle or something. But hey, they do say parasailing is a sport.”

You quirked a brow. “Do they?”

You weren’t sure that being strapped into a parachute for a nice air glide over the Pacific counted as a sport.

Goldstein shrugged at your question and he kept walking down the hall. Though he turned back to toss you a pointed finger.

“Need those by Thursday. Thanks, you’re the best,” he said.

You watched him go, as proverbial steam began to escape through your ears. Slowly you pivoted on your heels, and you went back to your office. You grimaced at the large stack of applications. You were pretty sure he padded them with an extra section of midterm exams.

Tapping your nails on your desk, you grabbed your phone next to your desktop and checked the time. 11:30 a.m.

Screw it. I’m going to lunch, you thought.

Dory had to be out of her Intro Physics class by now, which meant she’d be in her office, ready for you to drop in on her a little early. You took up your purse and almost made it out the door…but at the last moment, your anal brain made you turn back to grab a shoulder bag and the pile of applications. Maybe you could knock out a few during lunch.

Friggin’ doormat, as your brother would say. Laughing at you, probably.

You rolled your eyes and headed back out the door with your haul of papers, purse, work bag, and keys, locking your office behind you.

Why, oh why did the Sciences building have to be on the other side of campus?

It was damn near a mile walk from your Humanities building over to Dory’s office on the second floor. Your hands were laden with packets that couldn’t be contained by your heavy work bag, your purse was slipping off your shoulder, and these heels were killing your feet.

It was a miracle you and Dory had ever met on this campus. On your first day of teaching, you’d of course been hopelessly lost. Somehow you ended up at the tail-end of one of her classes in one of the science auditoriums.

She’d been gracious enough to help you, and even walked you all the way to the Humanities building so you could find your World History class before the students decided to just get up and leave. (And after fifteen minutes, they very well would.)

That day, she became your first real friend at Wyoming University. In the three years since, she’d become your best friend.

And now, her door was mercifully open halfway. You pushed it open and stumbled just a little from the transition of tile to carpet inside her office. Your papers nearly flew from your hands, so you struggled to right yourself and contain them all back into the semblance of neatness.

“Hey, girl. You better be ready for lunch because Jesus fucking Christ. Goldstein’s up my ass again and all I’ve had today is a crusty donut from the teacher’s lounge, which I’m pretty sure was stale,” you said, with your brows furrowed in frustration.

When you finally looked up from your struggles, you realized that Dory wasn’t alone. She smiled at you in amusement, sitting at her desk beside a man who made you pause. Your eyes widened.

He was leaning casually with an elbow propped up on her desk, dressed in jeans and a worn, pale green jacket—a good match for his eyes. He looked a little rugged for Dory’s tastes, but you couldn’t fault her, with the cut of that bearded jaw, and the smile raising the corners of his lips.

“Hey,” Dory laughed. “I see you’re having a good day.”

You bit your lip in embarrassment, probably smudging your lipstick.

“I’m so sorry. I should’ve knocked first,” you said, though you could see she seemed to be having an actual good day. Office picnic? Or maybe the handsome stranger was getting ready to take her out.

Dory just waved you in. She stood and set a hand on her companion’s shoulder, and he got up along with her.

“It’s okay. This is my brother, Russell,” she said, and she introduced you in kind.

“Well, hi there,” he said. He subtly took you in with his eyes as he held out his hand. Already you felt your face heating up with more than just embarrassment.

You were a bit shocked as well, to say the least. Dory had told you some…interesting things about her family, including the fact that she had two older brothers. You wondered which one this was, the middle child, or the eldest.

“Hi! Sorry. Again. Nice to meet you,” you said. You tried to hold your hand out to reach his, but a few papers began to spill out. You clutched at them on reflex, but Russell drew in quickly to help you.

“Got yourself a load there,” he said. You agreed with an awkward laugh and a shrug of your shoulders.

“My boss’s idea of extra credit,” you said wryly.

“You can set it down on that chair over there,” Dory said, pointing to one against the back wall, next to a tall filing cabinet.

You and Russell meandered over and managed to set down the stack without casualty. You were able to pull up the straps of your bag and your purse from falling off your shoulder and give him a grateful look.

“Thanks,” you said.

“No problem,” he said, giving you an easy smile back. “I actually crashed in unannounced, so if you two wanna to head to lunch, you go right ahead.”

“Uh, no. I haven’t seen you in months! You should come with us,” Dory said. She grabbed her purse to join you and Russell by the door.

You raised your hands in placation. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to intrude, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve seen each other. You guys should catch up.”

Dory shook her head and grabbed your hand.

“Uh, uh. I want to hear the latest on Paul’s bullshit, and why you’re carrying half your office across campus. Let’s go,” she said, and gestured at your work bag. “Leave that here. You’re gonna eat and talk to me. No working involved.”

You laughed, but you agreed to her cajoling. With another glance at her brother, and those green eyes that seemed to be dancing, you joined them for lunch.

The three of you ended up at a diner that you and Dory frequented at least once a week. The food was good, the service was quick, and it was close to campus. Wins all around. Russell seemed to be enjoying himself, as he hummed in delight after the very first bite of his Philly cheesesteak.

“Sriracha on fries, huh?” you remarked, gesturing at the man’s plate. Your brow was quirked, but he shot you a smile.

“I said avert your eyes,” he teased. “Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, sweetheart.”

Ugh. Another sweethearting man. You narrowed your own eyes at him a bit. He caught the look and raised a hand in defense (the one that wasn’t holding his cheesesteak).

“Uh oh. What’d I do?” he asked.

“You gave her some PTSD,” Dory said with a laugh. “Dr. Goldstein likes to sugar coat his demands with sexism.”

Russell noted your souring look with apology. You’d just finished recounting your morning for your friend, and recapping years of “sugar-coated demands” for Russell.

“Why don’t you just tell him to cram it up his…uh…” he paused. Seeing his little sister’s look of amusement, he amended. “Or you know, stuff it.”

A smile twitched at your lips. “Oh, believe me, I’d love to tell him to stuff it. But he’s technically my boss, and the department chair. Even though I’ve basically been doing his job for two years now.”

“Well, that sucks,” Russell said. “And I feel for ya. I’ve had my share of shitty bosses in my time.”

You sighed and accepted his commiseration with a nod.

It wasn’t fair, but Goldstein planned to retire early in a few years. Must be nice.

When he did, it would make you the most likely candidate to replace him as department chair. The way you saw it, this was giving you plenty of practice before you (hopefully) inherited the position.

Anyway, you shook your head. You didn’t want to talk about it anymore. You were more curious about one Russell Shaw. You now knew he was an army vet, and he carried himself like one. Calm, controlled, even though his smiles came easy. His tousled hair and beard, while well-trimmed and neat, still gave him a roguish quality.

“So let me guess. You’re…the eldest?” you asked. You blotted at your mouth with a napkin, having finished your chicken panini.

Russell treated you to another one of those smiles, though this one held a hint of more.

“Guilty. Though I’m the handsome one,” he said with a wink.

You found yourself smiling behind your napkin.

“I’m sure,” you replied.

Dory rolled her eyes. “Don’t mind him. Apparently my brother’s an incorrigible flirt.”

He chuckled and sipped at his beer, but then he grimaced.

“Ech. Friggin’ weak,” he said. “I brew better than this outta the trunk of my car.”

You raised a brow at that. “You make your own beer?”

“Damn straight,” he said. His gaze turned a hint more playful. “Next time I’ll bring you some. You can tell me what you think.”

You shared a telling look with Dory.

“Next time, huh?” you asked.

“Sure,” he inclined his head. “I pop into town from time to time. Gotta check in and pester my little sister, the physics professor.”

He laid a hand on Dory’s shoulder, squeezing warmly. You could see the pride in his eyes, and it warmed you as well.

She turned to him with a smile, reaching up to cover his hand with hers.

“You don’t pester me. I’d love it if I got to see you more often,” she said.

“Ah, I know, I’m sorry,” he said, releasing her. “My job’s got me all over the place. But I’ll be here for a week or so on this gig.”

That intrigued you. “What do you do for work?”

“Ah, well, you could say I'm a contractor. Private security mainly,” said Russell. His shoulders shifted as he became a little more guarded, you noticed. “My company connects me with the client for as long as the job lasts. Could be a few months, sometimes a few days, depending.”

“Oh, wow. Do you live here in Wyoming?” you asked. He paused, but tilted his head a little, back and forth as he considered your question.

“I kinda bounce around,” he said. “Just go from one job to the next. Sounds a bit unorthodox, I know, but it’s a living.”

“Interesting,” you nodded, but inside, you thought that sounded like a hard way to live.

Unstable…and lonely.

“You know, it’s amazing how much you and Colter have in common,” Dory said. She folded her hands on the table and met her brother with a pointed look.

He huffed in response, though he glanced at you, then back at his sister. As if he was saying, You really want to do this now?

Dory had told you before that Colter was a “rewardist,” or some kind of bounty hunter. The nature of his work kept him busy, and seemingly too busy for his sister. But you also sensed there was an edgier history here.

For the first time, you felt like you were intruding in a moment between brother and sister that went beyond words.

After a moment, Russell shook his head.

“Look, I tried with him, all right? He won’t talk to me,” he said. He went back to eating, polishing off his fries. He offered you one that was half-smothered in sriracha.

“Come on. Live on the edge with me,” he teased.

You eyed the sauce-covered fry in distaste, but after glancing up at his more playful smile, you accepted his offer. You chewed in contemplation, and found that the tangy hint of kick wasn’t so bad.

“Eh? Eeeh? Delicious, am I right?” he said, his hands going wide.

You rolled your eyes, but you nodded in agreement.

“It’s all right,” you replied.

“Yes!” Russell’s hands swept up higher, like he was celebrating a touchdown. "See, I told ya."

You couldn’t help but laugh. Dory shook her head fondly and gave him a clean napkin for the bit of schmutz she spotted at the corner of his mouth.

“Here, wipe your sriracha face.”

“You really don’t have to,” you said, as Russell helped you gather your stack of papers and slung your work bag over his shoulder.

“No, no. I’m a bonafide gentleman. Ain’t that right, D?” he asked his sister. She barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes again, but she did give you a knowing smile.

“Oh, his intentions are pure,” she said.

And by that, you both understood her meaning. His intentions couldn’t be any clearer than a mallet over the head, but you kind of found it endearing.

This man really carried your stuff from the Sciences building across the entire campus to your office. All the while, he asked you about how you and Dory met, the kinds of things you two did together, and if you thought she was happy working here.

You had a feeling he was trying to learn more about his sister’s life. On one hand, it was rather sweet. On the other, it made you realize that there was distance in this family, both literal and figurative. You were glad to hear that Russell, at least, was trying to bridge that gap with his sister. Dory deserved to have more of that in her life.

As you explained to Russell while you led him down the hall to your office, your friendship with her had just…clicked. From the very beginning.

“Dory, you know. She’s more than kind,” you said. “She’s a real one. I can rely on her, even when I can’t rely on my own family.”

Russell hummed at that. “That sounds like a story.”

“Yeah,” you said, glancing away for a moment. You smiled and met his gaze once more. “Maybe one for another time.”

“So you’re on board with a ‘next time.’ Good to know,” Russell remarked. Your smile deepened.

It was good timing when you two finally reached your office. You unlocked it and let him inside, so he could set down your bag, and the god-forsaken stack of internship applications back onto your desk. You’d probably be stuck here working late on those.

“Well, thank you so much. You really didn’t have to schlep for me,” you said.

When you turned, Russell was a bit close. Not uncomfortably so, but enough to make a trill of something zip up your spine. You smelled more intensely his cologne, woodsy and warm. Looking up at him, you once again found his smile.

“It’s no problem,” he said, but his eyes met yours for a moment, as if he lost his train of thought.

“What?” you asked, a bit nervous.

“Anybody ever tell you, you got soulful eyes?” he asked.

It took your brain a second or two to compute, but when his words registered, you had to laugh. You held it behind your hand, while the other went to steady yourself on your desk.

“Well, that’s a line if I’ve ever heard one,” you said, shading your “soulful” eyes with a hand.

You didn’t know it, but Russell’s face warmed in slight embarrassment. He recovered though, taking in your pretty laugh, and the shade of your hair, let loose around your shoulders, and yes, your eyes, when you let him see them again.

If he hadn’t known before, now he was convinced.

He wanted to see more of you before he left town.

“Hey, now that was 100% genuine,” Russell said, but his grin spoke volumes. When your mirth died down, he scratched the back of his head.

“Okay, cards on the table. Would you be interested in grabbing a drink with me sometime?” he asked.

You took in a breath at that. You actually did consider his offer, because homebrew and sriracha fries be damned, there was something more to him. It was lying in wait, behind those eyes that were drawing you in.

However, this was also a man whose job basically made him a nomad. It didn’t exactly scream relationship material.

Which only left the alternative: something…casual.

You just didn’t know if that alternative was such a good idea. Not with your best friend’s brother.

“Just a drink. No frills, no more grilling you about my sister,” Russell said, breaking you from your deliberation. He gestured a hand between the two of you. “Just this. You and me.”

Eventually, you sighed. Your lips raised into a more genuine smile.

“Sometime, huh?” you asked.

He smiled back. “Tonight?”

You hesitated, but despite your better judgment, you nodded before you could change your mind. You still weren’t sure what to make of this guy, but you were willing to find out.

“Sure,” you said. “Howley’s at eight?”

“Well, all right,” Russell said.

He surprised you by sweeping up your hand into his. You looked up at him, curious, but not wary. Anticipation tingled down your spine.

He pressed his lips to the back of your hand. Soft shock made your eyes widen as you blushed, feeling the subtle graze of his beard against your skin.

Who is this guy, Cary Grant? you thought.

But when he pulled away, you had to remind yourself to breathe. Again, you caught sight of his cheeky grin.

“See you tonight,” he said.

AN: He is beauty he is grace, he is Mr. Sriracha Face. 😆

Let me know if you guys liked this! 💜 It's my first time writing a character based solely on one episode, but next up is a series that will continue this one-shot. It's called Every Second Counts.

Next Time in Part 1:

“Are you absolutely sure?” you asked, with your hands on your hips.

You wanted no miscommunication here, no read-between-the-lines mishaps, no subtext or nuance to bite you in the ass later. So here you stood in the middle of your best friend’s office, still on the Wyoming University campus after your last class.

Dory had to laugh at you. She pushed away from her desk and threw her hands up.

“Yes, for the love of God, you can grab a drink with my brother,” she said.

▶️ Keep Reading: Part 1

Ko-Fi Me ☕

Russell Shaw Masterlist

Main Masterlist

Russell S. Tag List:

@kazsrm67 @letheatheodore @agothwithheavysetmakeup @jacklesbrainworms @foxyjwls007

@wincastifer @ades106 @iamsapphine @simpforbuckyb @roseblue373

@brianochka @branj19 @hazel-eye-coffee-shop-girl-blog @globetrotter28 @charmed-asylum

@waywardxwords @deanwinchestersgirl87 @this-is-me19 @rachiem4-blog @sweettimelady

@leigh70 @clinicallydepresso @xiphoidbones @skoveu @nyotamalfoy

@kmc1989 @jackles010378 @emily-winchester @waynes-multiverse @jessjad

@my-stories-vault @deans-spinster-witch @syrma-sensei @stellasfictionalworld @ultimatecin73

@jesllianaquilesrolonsworld @pieandmonsters @lhymer1995 @taehyungxjungkookistaekook @lovelystoriesaj

@nicksalchemy1 @spnwoman @onlyangel-444 @sexyvixen7 @illicithallways

@wolkenprinzessin007 @alwaystiredandconfused @carpenterswife @cheynovak @grilledcheeseandtomato

#wayne reads #russell shaw x reader #russell shaw x female reader #russell shaw

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everpresence · 3 days ago

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I was wrong.

over the last few weeks, i started heavily questioning my beliefs.

i noticed that some of my desires came in faster than other desires. some of them (as you may see in my recent posts) took years to reflect, but some of them got reflected so fast at the speed of light.

i’ve been told by various people that there’s usually a time delay for desires to materialize in the 3D, and for some reason, it resonated with me. that’s why i mention it in my answers because i was merely basing it off of my own experiences with the law.

but something clicked for me recently. i watched a video by missy renee, about why people haven’t seen their manifestations for years. i’m just going to put it out there that you don’t need to pay for coaching. there are a lot of manifesting coaches that don’t know what they’re talking about, and when you read source, it’s a lot more telling. missy renee is not one of those coaches. she has read source and has even applied those teachings into her life. if i have to recommend a coach for you to watch, though, it would be her.

anyways, there was a line that she said that i immediately wrote down because it caused so much confusion in me. basically, she said that the reason why we have yet to see things come to pass is because we are still identifying with our old beliefs — our old story — and due to this, we become double-minded. this double-mindedness is then perceived as the “time delay.”

in that moment, i slowly leaned back in my chair. it was an “a-ha” moment for me, but it was also a little harrowing.

how long have i held myself back from just accepting that i am the person that i wanted to be? how long have i been limiting myself, telling myself the old story over and over again like a broken record? more importantly, i’ve been telling other people that there is such thing as a “time delay” because i decided that i should experience the delay.

so when i wrote a list and just allowed my higher self to figure it out, some of them came in so fucking fast at the speed of light. it stunned me. that’s when i realized that i was holding a false belief.

i never thought that i’d be writing an apology post, but here i am. i’m holding myself accountable because i was the one that wrote that there is such thing as a “time delay,” but in reality, there isn’t. sure, you don’t have to be pitch perfect with your beliefs, but when this desire has no conflict with your beliefs — when you have no resistance, when you aren’t arguing with yourself about whether you have it or not — then there’s no delay.

i remember some people said that it should not take more than thirty days, and i used to think that it’s bullshit, but now i can clearly see that there is a reason why they believe this. it’s not even about the length of time, but about how frequent you return to the state. it’s all about you accepting that the person you want to be is who you are now.

besides that, i want this post to be a reminder that everyone’s beliefs are constantly changing. there is always going to be expansion, growth, an inevitable withering of the old beliefs and the blossoming of new beliefs the more we learn about how this all works. this is why i want people to go back to reading source, to not always take everyone’s posts as “truth” or “the gospel” because we are all still learning in the end. learning never ends.

edit: i don't mean to say all this for you to start focusing on the physical reality as your primary reality. i still wholeheartedly believe that this is merely a reflection of your beliefs, and ultimately, it is all about who you are choosing to be right now despite what it looks like.

#♡

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brainddeadd · 1 day ago

Note

hughes sister x oscar and maybe she works something in f1 that’s how they met and they have been dating for a little while now and they finally found time for her to meet her family and she takes him to his first nhl game

Meeting the Family

The weekend had been carefully planned, squeezed between Oscar’s racing calendar and her brothers’ grueling NHL schedules. It was the perfect opportunity for Oscar to finally meet the Hughes family—and for her to take him to his first hockey game.

As they drove toward the Hughes family home, she could feel her nerves creeping in. She glanced over at Oscar, who seemed calm as ever, one hand loosely resting on the steering wheel.

“You know,” she began, fiddling with the hem of her hoodie, “Quinn, Jack, and Luke might come off a little... intense at first.”

Oscar smirked. “Intense like Turn 1 at Monza or...?”

She rolled her eyes but laughed. “More like three defensemen deciding whether you’re a threat to their baby sister.”

Oscar reached over and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll survive. I’ve met team principals scarier than your brothers.”

When they arrived, the Hughes house was buzzing with energy. Jack was the first to open the door, taking one long look at Oscar before pulling his sister into a tight hug.

“So,” Jack said, stepping back and folding his arms. “This is Oscar, huh? The guy you’re always FaceTiming?”

Oscar extended a hand with an easy smile. “Nice to finally meet you.”

Quinn and Luke appeared in the hallway, both sporting curious expressions. Their little sister could feel the weight of their stares as the introductions unfolded.

“Alright,” Luke said after a beat, “he seems normal. But we’ll see after tonight’s game.”

That evening, they piled into the arena, the excitement in the air almost tangible. It was Oscar’s first NHL game, and she couldn’t help but notice how fascinated he looked as the players skated out for warmups.

“They’re fast,” he said, leaning close so she could hear him over the roar of the crowd.

“You’re fast,” she teased. “This is... different.”

As the game began, Oscar quickly picked up on the intensity of the sport, asking questions about the rules and commenting on the sheer athleticism of her brothers.

When Quinn executed a flawless poke check to stop a breakaway, she nudged Oscar’s arm. “That’s Quinn. Pretty good, huh?”

Oscar grinned. “Not bad. But I’d like to see him take Eau Rouge at full speed.”

By the end of the game, the Devils had won, and Oscar was fully converted into a hockey fan.

Back at the house, the family was more relaxed. Jack and Luke took turns grilling Oscar about racing—his craziest moments, the rivalries, and the mechanics of the car. Oscar, to his credit, answered everything with patience and charm, even cracking a few jokes that made Quinn chuckle.

As the evening wound down, she leaned against Oscar’s shoulder, watching her brothers laugh at one of his stories. He fit into her world better than she could have imagined.

Later that night, as they left, Jack pulled her aside.

“He’s alright,” Jack said begrudgingly, but she could see the small smile tugging at his lips. “But if he ever hurts you...”

“I know,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes. “You’ll destroy him.”

As they drove away, Oscar glanced over with a playful smile. “So, did I pass the test?”

She laughed, leaning her head against the window. “Barely. But they like you.”

“And you?”

She smiled softly. “I love you.”

Oscar’s hand found hers again, and with a quiet grin, he said, “Good. Because I love you too.”

#oscar piastri x reader #oscar piastri fanfic #oscar piastri imagines #° braindead writes #quinn hughes x sister!reader #jack hughes x sister!reader #luke hughes x sister!reader

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anemptypuddingcup · 3 days ago

Text

Love-Bombing.

Corazón (Rosinante Donquixote) x Female Reader.

I’ve been working on this for a good long while and I wanted to post it not only because I enjoyed writing Corazon’s personality but because I wanted to practice a bittersweet story. Writing dark stories kinda helps me practice and also makes it easier to write them the more I do, even if I shrivel up like a balloon while I do it.

Contains: SOMEWHAT UNCOMFORTABLE THEMES AHEAD! Use of sign language (Headcanon). Corazon is mute for the majority of this fic. An obsessive Corazón. Just about Corazón rushing a wanted relationship. Corazón and Reader are neighbors. Reader just recently moved in. Reader loves to cook. Reader and Corazón having a healthy relationship as neighbors. Corazón rushing their relationship a bit. Law makes an appearance. Mentions of Law being Corazón’s adoptive son. Non-consensual to consensual touching. Corazón breaking into Reader’s home. Dub-Con. Size difference kink. Oral & Fingering. Next part will contain…Y’know. This fic is a very long and also has a bit of time-skipping.

Corazón was sitting in the living room, his fingers softly pulling down the blinds as he stared out of the window observantly. He was paying attention, looking out for something…or rather someone.

A beautiful woman had just moved into the neighborhood a few weeks ago and boy could Corazón have not been more happier.

Ever since this beautiful woman has moved in, he hasn’t done anything else but stare out through his window, waiting for her to step outside for a bit or sit on her porch.

As he watched and waited patiently, the sound of his son’s voice startled him and causes him to gasp out shakily as if he’d just had a heart attack.

“Pops…You keep staring out at her yard…”

Corazón’s eyes widens in shock as he jumps from the sound of Law’s voice behind him, his hand nearly tearing the blinds before he quickly fixed them back up and whipped his head around. He looks down and see’s his adoptive son’s worrisome eyes staring up at him. His arms were crossed as he’d just witnessed and grew disappointed in his adoptive father’s distasteful behavior.

“L-Law!-“

“If you like her so much, why don’t you just talk to her more? It’s weird to just…watch you stare at her porch all day…” Law asked, patting him on the back while Corazón sighs out nervously. Corazón pouted and looked away before pulling his turtleneck up a bit more in slight shame.

“I’m a bit nervous to speak to her. She did just move into the neighborhood…Maybe she doesn’t want to be bothered…or pestered by my persistence..” Corazón admitted, asking himself if you’d be annoyed by his behavior. Law huffs out irritably and scratched at his raven strands before patting at his father’s back.

“I’m sure she’d be happy to talk to you since she’s new around here. It wouldn’t hurt to try and speak to her a bit more…” Law sighed to himself, his hand slowly lifting up off of Corazón’s back before he began leaving the living room. Corazón watched as his son leaves the living room before continuing to peek out the window, his eyes widening in sudden delight as he watched your beautiful figure step out onto your front porch.

You had brought a beautiful pot full of azalea flowers out onto your porch before you began watering them. Watching you water the flowers out on your porch made Corazon’s heart skip a beat. How could he speak to a beautiful woman like you when he himself was a clumsy loser?

He felt as if you both were on different levels and him putting you on such a high pedestal was exactly what brought his himself down even more.

He’s only spoken to you once or twice since you’ve moved into the neighborhood, but he pressured himself to speak more regardless if he was so nervous to. Law always told him to make a good impression for himself around the neighborhood, but he’s never spoken to anyone else but you.

Maybe his body was attracted to you the moment he saw you. That pretty smile and adoring demeanor is exactly what brought him out of that hard shell of his. All he could really do is hope that he could possibly speak to you again or even more in the future.

Your moving frame suddenly pulled him from his negative thoughts, his eyes squinting as he noticed you holding a glass pan in your hands.

It looked as if…you were walking over to his home, his eyes trailing across as he followed your frame.

You continued down the sidewalk and turned down to his driveway, the sight of your frame growing closer and closer to his front porch.

She’s coming over!?

And with sweets too!?

Corazón immediately begins panicking out of nervousness and a sudden shriek left his lips as he slips a bit along the floor, his hands accidentally tearing the blinds before he falls down onto his back a bit hard.

“Owww…” He groans out to himself and reaches his hand down towards his back before rubbing in slight discomfort. A knock at his front door causes his eyes to shoot open and his body to freeze up in place.

“Hello? Anyone home? I have some brownies to share!”

Hearing your voice on the other side of the door immediately causes Corazón’s face to flush and he quickly shot up to his feet before rushing to the front door. He swallowed thickly before his hand grabbed at his doorknob, his other hand unlocking the top lock before he’d steadily began to crack the door open.

You watched as nervous eyes peeked through the crack of the door before trailing down your figure and back up to your face.

“Corazón? Is that you?” You asked all sweetly, your hand still holding that glass tray which was full of those brownies that you’d mentioned. Corazón huffs out shakily before steadily opening the door for you, his eyes looking down at your smaller frame while you smiled up to him.

“It is you! Good afternoon, Corazón! I hope you don’t mind but…I was baking some brownies and ended up baking too much for myself. So, I thought I’d give the rest to you…if you want them.”

Your sweet words and loving tone made Corazón’s heart pump with anxious, and his vision grew a bit blurred as if he were about to faint any second now. He shakes off the feeling and smiles before nodding to you, his hand taking the brownies from you while your face began to flush.

“I-I hope you enjoy them! If you’d like anymore again then, just let me know!” Your hand reaches up to your warm cheek and you begin to watch as Corazón opens the tray before he’d take a brownie from the it. He takes a big bite and chews softly, tasting all of the fudgy flavors that melted in his mouth. He himself out softly in delight, his taste buds adoring the taste of the sweet treat.

He nods profusely as he continues to chew and you looked down in nervousness as you listen to him finish up his brownie. Corazón reaches a hand down to your temple and pats it softly, your eyes widening before you looked up into his sweet little eyes. His lips were slightly covered in chocolate which causes you to let out a little snicker while he smiled nervously.

“I’m…I’m happy you love them! Please, come by my home any time and I’ll promise to have something ready. I…do enjoy cooking for my family and friends.”

Corazón freezes as he heard you mouth those words and he watches as you begin to step down off of his porch. You waved to him and walked all the way out of his yard, his eyes following your body as he watched you walk back over to your home.

Corazón stayed watching you as his heart pounded out of his chest, his body and growing breathless and his mind infatuated on the mesmerizing sight of you walking back to your home. As your small frame faded from his keen sight, he blinks a few times before looking back down to the glass tray in his large hands.

Corazón’s eyes softens and he smiles while continuing to look down at the brownies before steadily stepping back into his home, his hand closing the door behind himself. He twists the top lock before he sets himself down on the couch, his hand reaching for another brownie before he popped a bite into his mouth.

Your baking was filled with as much love as he had for you, if only you had knew how much he love and feelings shared...

He couldn’t help himself but to eat another brownie…

And another…

And…another…

Corazón ate mindlessly at the brownies, unable to stop and neither contain himself from the thought of eating your beloved cooking.

It was too good…and he couldn’t stop…

The pan was nearly empty, and he’d finally stopped at he looked down at the pan in slight shock.

He ate all of that…? Already…?

…

You stood at the stove and rocked your hips to the tempo as music blasted out of your radio, your voice humming along to the lyrics as you cooked at some breakfast all excitedly. You had already cooked more than enough for yourself, but of course you wanted to cook more just in case if a certain guest decided welcome himself over to knock on your door.

Your next-door neighbor happened to be the most friendliest one out of everyone in the neighborhood. The two of you had ended up taking a liking to each other after meeting for the first time which happened to be a few months ago after you moved into the neighborhood. It was as if…you both just clicked immediately, which wasn’t a bad thing at all.

It honestly made you more feel more welcomed and more comfortable.

The sound of your doorbell ringing causes you to crack a wide smile as you slide the last pancakes off of your skillet and onto a plate of other fresh pancakes. You quickly washed your hands and rushed out of your kitchen, the doorbell ringing once again as you quickly ran into your tidy living room. You swiftly opened your door and look up to see your neighbor, Corazón, staring back at you with those adorable doe eyes of his.

An ecstatic smile spread across his face as your face immediately lightens up at the sight of him, his hand lifting up before waving to you while you giggled all nervously. “Good morning, Corazón!” You greeted him, your hands brushing down at your apron while he hummed warmheartedly in response to the sound of your adorable voice.

‘Good morning!’ He signed, his greeting making you smile even more before you’d grab his large hand. “Please, come in! I’ve made enough breakfast for you to eat this time since you always come so early.” Your tone grew a bit higher as you grew flustered from Corazón tall stature, your body feeling as if you were expressing yourself a bit too much to Corazón.

You watched as Corazón ducked his head down before stepping inside of your home, his body so much taller than yours could ever be. You gulped as you stared up at him before turning away, a shaky exhale leaving your lips while Corazón tilted his head and quirked a brow.

“Come, my kitchen is this way…”

Corazón followed you throughout your home as you guided him into your clean kitchen, the fresh aroma of maple syrup and bacon filling his nose as his eyes met the all of the breakfast you cooked for him. His stomach growls at the sudden smell of fresh hot food and you giggled as held a porcelain plate up to him. He lifts his hands to sign to you once again and you wait for him as he did.

‘Isn’t this a bit too much? I wouldn’t want you cooking too much just for me…’ He signed, expressing both his gratitude but also his worries as he looks away all shyly. You placed the plate in his large hands before handing him a fork. “It’s fine, really. I know you have a hearty appetite to match.“ You replied, your hands reaching behind your back before you’d untie your apron and hung it up on your coat-hanger on your wall.

Corazón held his plate up to his face and watched as you grabbed yourself a plate from the dish dryer rack before proceeding to place one of everything on your plate. You grabbed a few extra pancakes and look up to Corazón while standing in place, watching as he grabbed a few breakfast items while you waited for him.

Once he grabs enough for himself, he walks over to the kitchen table and takes a seat. You followed behind and sat down beside him, your head bowing as you prayed over your breakfast before looking down at your plate. You look over to Corazón who was already eating, a hungry hum leaving him as he immediately began eating at the sausages on his plate.

Corazón huffs out in satisfaction, tasting every bit of love and energy that you put in the breakfast in each bite he took. Your eyes focused on his expressions, observing at what he’d like the most and what he’d like the least. He blinks before glancing over to you, his eyes causing you to quickly look away before your face began to flush.

You hoped he didn’t notice your bothersome staring…but he did. Though, he found it to be more flattering than anything else.

You look down at your plate and realized that you forgot both the maple syrup for your pancakes and a fork for eating. You chucked nervously and looked up at Corazón, who happened to be returning the interested stares back to you. You blushed before looking down at your plate again.

“You can always get seconds whenever you’d like.” You tell him, your frame slowly standing up from your chair before you’d went and grabbed the maple syrup off the kitchen counter. Corazón nodded and continued eating his food, his mind melting at the flavors of your cooking that coated his tongue all evenly yet delightfully.

You grabbed yourself a fork and grabbed a knives for the two of you before grabbing the bottle of maple syrup. You brought everything back to the table and walked away front the table once again. “Would you like some orange juice as well?” You asked him, your eyes watching as he turns to you and nods in response.

You opened your cupboard and grabbed two cups before placing them on the counter. You opened your fridge and dug through it for the orange juice, your hands pushing through sandwich meat and packaged foods before you finally found the carton.

You grabbed the carton out of the fridge and closed the fridge door, your hand grabbing the cups as you poured a bit of juice in them one by one. You grabbed the cups and walk back to the table before finally taking your seat, your eyes glancing down towards Corazón’s plate which happened to already be half eaten.

“Sorry about that…I’m not getting back up now.” You responded, your hand grabbing your fork before you began eating your scrambled eggs. Corozón gave you an adoring smile as he continued eating, his hand grabbing the maple syrup as he popped the top open.

…

‘Sorry if that I ate a bit much…’ He signed to you, his face shifting into a pout as he began to feel bad that you’ve cooked so much for him. You chuckled in response and waved him off.

“It’s no problem, Corazón. I always have enough for us both or even more.” You reassured him, a soft huff leaving him as you

You rubbed at Corazón’s shoulder to comfort him, continuously telling him that eating too much was perfectly fine especially for his size.

He smiled at your kindheartedness…and then it slowly grew silent and more comforting rather than awkward.

“…Did I cook everything well enough? I-If I didn’t, I can always try again and do better!” You stammered, your hand taking his perfectly clean plate and placing it on top of your own which was also clean. Corazón grabs your hands softly, causing you to stop and slowly look up at him with anxious eyes.

He stares blankly into your pretty eyes, his stare hiding his strong love behind it while you blinked a bit. He smiles and lowers his head, his lips peppering a loving smooch to your hands while a soft sigh leaving his lips as he did. Your face flared up in slight excitement and it flushed as you watched him lift his head, his lips curling into a sweet smile.

You watched as he softly wrapped his strong arms around your smaller frame, a surprised gasp leaving your lips as he hugged you delicately yet so tenderly. You shuddered within his arms in delight, your face burning a deep shade of scarlet while your sparkles began to appear within your eyes.

You softly wrap your arms around his neck, hugging him back while he begins to smile all erotically at the feeling of your touch. “I’m glad y-you liked it so much…” You sighed softly, your lips curling up into an adoring smile as you rubbed at his upper back. You both sat there for a moment embracing each other for a few minutes, the two of you enjoying each other’s warmth in the silence of your kitchen. A soft sight leaves your lips as you finally pulled away from his embrace, your eyes trailing up and looking into his.

Staring into his eyes for so long slowly causes your stomach to grow butterflies, making you turn your head away from him before pressing your hand against your cheek. You hesitated to speak and Corazón tilted his head in question as if he was wondering as if you had something to say.

“W-Would you like to go in the living room. I-I know my kitchen chairs and be a bit small and uncomfy for you…”

Corazón smiles and immediately nods before shooting up from his seat in excitement, his hand softly pulling your seat back from the table before he helps you up out of your chair. You blushed at his sweet gesture as you grabbed the two porcelain plates off of the dining table, your eyes watching as Corazón ducks his head while he walks through the doorway while he walks into the living room.

You walk over to your sink and softly slide the porcelain plates into the sink full of soapy dishwater before leaving them to soak. You walk through the doorway and see Corazón sitting on your couch, his eyes sharply staring down at his hands as he waited patiently for you to sit down beside him. You smiled and walk past him before setting yourself down beside his larger frame, his eyes looking down at your body seductively while you sat there playing at the hem of your blouse.

Before you could even utter another word past your lips, Corazón sneakily slide his large hand over your thigh. His sudden physical contact causes you freeze in place while your face begins to burn up. Your eyes slowly trailed up to his which happened to be full of love and a hint of lust while he moved in closer to your adorably flustered face. You could feel his hand sliding up higher and you felt your heart beginning to pound out of your chest while your body sat there…frozen.

“Ah…C-Corazón…” You gasp out a bit fearfully as your face begins to twist and brows began to furl, your body a bit bothered that Corazón was beginning to rush the process of his affection and yours. His hand softly grasps your chin and he smiles all sweetly before moving his face in closer to yours.

So pretty…How could he think to miss this only opportunity he had for himself to confess his feelings or at least make it known.

He pressed his lips against yours, causing a sudden moan to erupt from his throat while your eyes widened in sudden fear. “Mmh- M-Mhh!” Your body immediately goes into panic mode and you began to squirm uncomfortably while you felt Corazón trying to allow his tongue past your lips.

Your hand reached down towards his hand that rested at your thigh and you gripped it tightly before you’d hurriedly pull away from his lips. You exhaled shakily as you stare up into his eyes, his head tilting in question as if he was trying to figure out why you looked so…pale.

Didn’t you feel the same way?

“A-Ah…Cora…” You call out to him shakily, your hand holding his larger one before you lifted it off of your thigh. Corazón brows twisted into a look of slight sadness and he turns away from you, realizing that maybe you didn’t the same way and that he may have just made a rather terrible mistake.

You shook off the feeling of unease and hid it with a smile as you stared up at him, your arms slowly wrapping around his larger frame. “I-It’s okay…Let’s just…Let’s not rush things…alright?” You tell him, looking up into his eyes with slight concern while he stared down at you with a rather fearful expression on his face.

Corazón pulled away from you, his body scooting away from your smaller frame all together as he…genuinely felt sorry for kinda rushing things.

Though he didn’t know how to express them…At least not well enough.

‘Sorry…I’m so sorry-‘ He signed to you, his hand pressing over his mouth as he turned away from you.

“It’s okay, really! I know how much we express a passion for each other…but…may we go at it slowly…please…?”

Corazón stared back at you blankly as he listened to your words.

“I…I like you too Corazón…I really do. I just want to take my time with this though…at least go at a slow and soft pace, Y’know?” You confessed to him but putting your foot down gently in the process, hoping he would get the message and respect your boundaries and give you time.

Corazón’s eyes glistened as if he was seeing a diamond in the light, at least he finally knew that you shared the same feelings for him. He looks away as his hand begins to play at his sweater, his throat swallowing thickly before he’d finally decided to speak to you for the first time.

“Y…Yes. I…understand. Sorry…” He said in such a gentle and quiet voice, his voice suddenly catching you off guard as you heard it for the first time. Your eyes widened in shock as you lifted your head up to him, his hands covering his face as he looked down. His face burned a deep shade of red as he spilled out his voice to you.

“C-Cora…”

Your face slowly began to burn up from how attractive he sounded. Honestly…

His soft tone and the way he executed his sentence, it was just…so cute.

It was so unexpected…Hearing him speak for the first time…Then he spoke again, this time slightly more fluently than the last sentence.

“May…May I ask…Would…it be okay to…at least touch you…here and there…?”

His question caused you to stiffen and you hum out slightly, your eyes looking down as he asked you that question. You blinked before looking away, your hand pressing against your cheek as you sat there and thought to yourself…

He did ask…after touching you without your acknowledgment…but…It was still…a slightly uncomfortable situation.

Though, you didn’t even want to deny him after he went through the trouble to speak to you…

So you obliged and gave him permission.

You placed your hand against his, the skin at the top of his hand soft as you ran your palm along it.

“Y-Yeah, y-you can…” You accepted, your hand grabbing his larger one before you rubbed your thumb along the soft skin of his hand. He sighs out shakily and ran his fingers along your smaller palm before intertwining his fingers with yours all together, his large fingers overlapping over your smaller hand. He rests his head against yours, his eyes looking down at your smaller frame while his hand continues to grab at soft and plushness of your thigh.

‘So cute…and so soft…’ He thought to himself, watching as you squirmed at his touch while you soft whimpers left your throat.

You couldn’t help but to feel uncomfortable. You weren’t ready to move this quickly with Corazón, yet nothing came out when you wanted him to stop since you knew this is what he wanted.

You were hoping to take your time with him, to get to know him even more before you’d get to this point. Though…It couldn’t be helped…Not when you knew that Corazón preferred to show rather than to tell since he was mute.

While you were deep in your thoughts, Corazón peeled his hand away from your thigh and ultimately lets go of your hand. His sudden movements caused you to look up at him and he smiled before pulling away from you. You watched as he stood up from the couch, your body wanted to reach out yet feeling constricted to do so.

“Corazón?” You called out to him, your face giving him a slight pout as you grew a bit upset to see him go.

He lifts his hands and blinks softly, your eyes focusing as you realized that he was about to sign again.

‘I hate to leave so soon but…I’ve got errands to run…’

His hands signed his sentence before he lowered them down, his arms opening out to you as if he wanted a hug. You smiled softly and slowly stood up from your couch before falling into his embrace, your body relieved but your mind saddened to see him go so soon.

“I’ll…see you tomorrow. Mi Amor…”

Your body shudders at his voice as he called you those words, your hands clenching on to his shirt tightly as if you really…really didn’t want him to leave. You sighed out at your mind’s indecisiveness and felt as his arms slowly loosened up and pulled away from your frame.

“Be safe…” You say to him softly, his head nodding in response to you while you as he rubbed his hands along your back. You slowly pulled out of his embrace and he waves before walking out of the front door, his hand locking the bottom lock on the doorknob on his way out.

You stood there still for a moment before exhaling shakily, your body falling back onto the soft cushions of your couch before you slowly sunk deeper into them. The cushions nestled your body as you sat there in silence, your body and mind reflecting on what had just happened moments ago. Corazón obviously liked you…but disrespected your personal space.

Part of you wanted to give him another chance…while another part thought that you should just stop talking to him. You didn’t want to, you really didn’t…yet you knew what he did was wrong. You hum to yourself and turn over on your couch, your couch cushions cradling your body as you rested there in the returning peace and quiet of your own home.

A heavy sigh spilled from your lips as you slowly stood back up and walked back into your kitchen, your mind deciding to clean up to keep itself occupied from what had just occurred.

… (Bonus scene??)

Law sighed out heavily as he slowly inserted his house key into the keyhole of the doorknob, his hand twisting the knob before he’d let himself in and pulled the key out of the knob. The entirety of the house was dark and nothing but silence filled the empty house as Law slowly looked around in the slight darkness.

He flips the light switch on that connected to the living room, the bright light burning his eyes slightly as he lifted his arm in slight reflex which provided slight shade to him. Law throws his work bag onto the floor and slowly stumbling into the kitchen, his stomach growling as he groaned from the hunger whcih cased his stomach to eat away at itself.

“Pops? Ya home?” Law called out into the empty house, his voice echoing throughout the house for a few seconds after he called out for Corazón. A heavy sigh leaves his lips as he stood there alone in the kitchen, his stomach growling once again as it yearned for food to feed and fill it.

He fell deep in his thoughts for a moment, his pockets empty with nothing but crumpled paper and lint while his back barely had any change left in it. As he stood there in his thoughts, he pressed as hand to his chin as he slowly began remembering his adoptive father’s words about food.

“If you ever get hungry and have no money, just go to our neighbors house. She loves to cook and to told me that I’m free to come or invite anyone who’s hungry here at home…”

“Ms.________’s house yeah? It’d be worth a shot.” He said to himself, his feet turning him around before he walked back through the front door. He made sure to lock it behind himself before he’d shut the door and settled on walking to your own home next door.

Law was very skeptical. Not only because he didn’t know you well, but because he had never been over to your home before. Even if you seemed more friendly than ever, he didn’t know how you acted when it came to things like this. Though on a hungry stomach, he’d rather risk it than sit in his home starving while his stomach swallowed itself.

As he walked over into your yard, he slowly crept up along your front porch, his boots clacking against the wooden planks of the porch as he nervously walked up to your front door. He lifts his hand but immediately pulls back, hesitating as he began to have second thoughts.

Just wing it Law…

He lowered his knuckles repeatedly against the wood of your door, swallowing a gulp as he grew anxious for who was on the other side.

…

A knock to your door pulls you from your television and you grab the remote before turning down the TV. You stood up off of your couch and walked over to the door, your hand unlocking the bottom lock before you opened it. You look up and were immediately met with drained golden eyes staring back down at you. You fluttered your eyes a bit before tilting your head, your hand gripping the doorknob as you stared at the young man for a few seconds.

“H-Hello…May I help you?” You asked, wondering what exactly this stranger was doing on your front porch. The young man scratched at his temple before sighing out to himself. He didn’t necessarily want to bother you, but as someone who sought out something he needed, he had to ask.

“Sorry to bother you…We haven’t met before…I’m Corazón’s son, Trafalgar D. Water Law.” He introduced himself, your eyes lighting up as soon as he’d mention Corazón’s name. Your eyes widens and sparkles in delight and interest at Law’s response.

“Oh! I wasn’t aware of him having a son! I’m so happy to finally meet you then!” You exclaimed in excitement, your hand pulling the door open even wider to let him in.

“Come in! Come in! Make yourself comfortable!”

“A-Ah- I didn’t say exactly what I wanted yet-“

“It’s fine! You can explain it to me inside! It’s getting chilly out here anyways and we don’t want you getting sick.”

Law huffs out and reluctantly walks inside of your home, listening as you closed the door behind him before he’d steadily set himself down on your couch. You immediately begin walking over to the doorway of the kitchen, your eyes peeking over to Law who had his arms and legs crossed so politely.

“Can I get you anything? Tea? Cookies maybe?” You asked, already wanting to provide hospitality towards Law. Law’s eyes widens in surprise to your kind nature and he looks down before clearing his throat.

“Actually…That’s what I wanted to talk about…”

You stood there and patiently waited for him to continue speaking, your smile not moving an inch as you happily listened to him.

“My dad said that you liked cooking…and he said that I was welcomed to come over if I was ever hungry…Is…Is that true?” He asked you, his hand tilting his hat down even more as he tried his best to avert his eyes from you. You smiled wider and nodded in response to his question, your sweet demeanor slowly calming Law down to where he could get a little comfortable.

“Y-Yeah! That’s right! I told Corazón that he could come by any time for something to eat. Though since I’m just now finding out that he has a son, you’re absolutely welcomed into my home!”

You words makes a soft smile appear across Law’s face and he huffs out happily as he stared down at his spotted jeans. His growling stomach cuts your conversation short and it alerts both you and himself.

“S-Sorry-“

“Hungry aren’t you? What is it that you wanted by the way?”

“W-Well…We don’t have much at home so…I was wondering if you had anything I could eat anything you had…If it’s too much then I can just go back home-“

“Nonsense! Of course I have something for you to eat! I just cooked pasta not too long ago for dinner! It’s still fresh if you’d like some!” Your words had cut off Law and your excited tone startled him a bit. Hearing you speak so enthusiastically about feeding some stranger honestly made him feel safer around you. You were a genuine kind and gentle woman, someone who probably cared more about the people around herself rather than being selfish.

Law smiles and lifts his head to look up at you, his golden eyes filled with a sense of comfort as he stared into your eyes.

“That…That would be nice…Thank you ma’am…” He thanked you, his eyes watching as you motioned for him to come inside the kitchen.

He obeyed, and immediately got hit with the strong smell of garlic and butter.

“I hope you like Shrimp Alfredo! I made a bit too much so if you want to you can just take some home!”

You watched as Law takes a seat at the dining table, his eyes scanning your tidy kitchen before he’d look back over to your frame. Law watched as you grabbed one of your clean porcelain plates before you began placing a scoop of Shrimp Alfredo onto the plate. You followed up with two slices of garlic bread and turned over to him before bringing him his plate.

The sight of bread immediately made him froze and his face immediately scrunched up in distaste as he saw the two slices of bread on the plate.

You softly set the plate of pasta down onto the dinner table in front of him, the strong aroma of the food already making Law’s mouth water as he grew anticipated to try your food.

Though part of him wanted to push the plate away due to the sight of the bread.

You handed him his silverware before stepping away from the table, your hands grabbing your kettle off of the dish-drying rack before you ran it under the sink’s faucet.

Law shuddered and gulped before groaning out, knowing that he had to eat the bread to be polite. After all, he was the one who asked to eat some of your food. It would be wrong to not at least eat one of the two slices that rested on his plate.

Law lowered his head in defeat as he grabbed his fork, his stomach growling as he stared down at the delicious-looking plate in front of him.

“Thank…Thank you, Miss…” Law said, his eyes looking over to you as he watched you begin to make a fresh pot of tea. You giggled to yourself as you dig around in your cupboard for your tea leaves, your eyes occasionally glancing over to Law as you observed him saying a silent prayer before eating.

“Just call me ________! No need for formalities when your father knows me good and well.”

Law nodded before humming out in delight, his fork giving him a mouthful of pasta before he chewed profusely out of slight hunger. He already adored the flavors that melted in his mouth. While he wanted to avoid the bread, he decided to be respectful and eat a slice. While the bread made him want to spit it out, part of him couldn’t deny that it didn’t taste so bad.

Though that didn’t mean he didn’t want to spit it out.

God, it was super good. You definitely put your foot into the pasta if not your whole leg. It was a plus that he got good-tasting food even though he was looking for something to satiate his hunger.

…

“Thank you so much for the food ________, it was so so good…” Law thanked you once again, his stomach now full of delicious food while his hands held on to a little plastic bowl with a top on it. “Of course Law! I’m happy to feed you and your father any time!” You smiled, your face flushing as you fell rather ecstatic to feed someone full and happy once again.

Law waves and turned around but stops before turning back to you for a moment, it seemed that that’s not all he wanted to say. You tilted your head out to curiosity and watched as Law spoke for a final time.

“My dad…really likes you. I hope…I hope you two can get along well.”

“I know he may be a bit shy at times but…he’s a good guy once you get to know him. Affectionate too...”

You smiled to Law’s words, happy to hear that he thinks sweetly of his father and cares about him.

“I…I honestly hope you two can get together…He really…has a huge crush on you. He just refuses to confess.”

Law’s face suddenly flushed and he quickly turns away before walking down the steps from your porch, his tatted hands clutching on tightly to the bowl of food within his hands. You chuckled as you noticed his flushed face, your eyes focusing on his frame as you stayed to watch him get back home safely.

“Come back anytime! I’m always open to feed you two!” You exclaimed, your hand waving to a flustered Law as you watched him make it back over to his home beside yours.

You slowly stepped back into your home and close the door, your fingers twisting at the bottom lock before you twisted at the top as well. You hummed to yourself as you stood at your front door, buried deep within your thoughts as you found yourself wandering in that brain of yours.

Corazón really did like you…didn’t he?

If that wasn’t obvious enough, Law’s words was definitely enough to convince you that he wanted you as a whole and not just for something you were special at.

Then again, you were still taken back by his disrespectful behavior earlier. Yes, you still loved him. Though sometimes, even actions can push past your genuine love for someone. You sighed out loudly to yourself and shook your feelings away, a yawn now leaving your lips as you fell sleepy.

You slowly drug yourself down the hallway and into your bathroom, your body bending down as you began running hot water into the tub.

Maybe tomorrow, you can forget about it and try again….Yeah.

Maybe you can…

#puddingcupfics #lovebombing mini series #one piece #one piece smut #one piece fluff #op smut #op fluff #one piece x female reader #one piece corazon #op corazon #corazon smut #donquixote rosinante #corazon x reader

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bluedalahorse · 23 hours ago

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I feel like there’s some meaningful stuff here about Sara and August’s relationship, so I wanted to reblog and lift those up here! Sara has traditionally been unfairly slammed by the fandom, even though her actions were meaningfully different from August’s in season 2. And a lot of times saraugust is held up as this ontologically evil foil to wilmon, even though both pairings juxtapose the capacity to be sweet and loving with some pretty intense teenage flaws.

Personally, while I understand why they happen, I’ve always been a little wary of discussions of “is Sara a bad person/is August a bad person.” I understand why this framing works for some fans, but it doesn’t work for me. Mostly because a while back, Omar was talking in an interview, and he talked about Lisa’s writing philosophy being that there aren’t good and bad people in her stories, there are people in her stories who are capable of good and bad actions. Now, authorial intent can only go so far, I get that. But I do think this is a theme that underpins the series. I think they did a great job of showing Sara’s complexity and growth over the season. I do think there were some fumbles to August’s writing in season 3 that led a portion of the audience to believe he never changed, ever, over the course of the series. I think the show would have benefitted from him and Simon having a chance to do restorative work outside of their relationships with Wille. At the same time, I don’t think season 3 was without growth for August. @sflow-er’s post on the Fleabag parallel does a great job of breaking down August’s arc. I’m not saying any of this negates the harm August does—far from it—but I do think the show is inviting us to envision a better future for August where he grows and changes, especially in our fanworks.

And that’s what I want to talk about in this reblog: fanworks. It’s been a long time since people were acknowledging the saraugust nuance in season 2, and ultimately how fascinating the pairing is, but there’s still only 96 fics tagged Sara/August on AO3 and only a few are actually about them.

I think, what I’m sad about most when it comes to Young Royals fandom, is that there is no fanworks community around Sara and August the way there is for wilmon, at least on tumblr. There are individual people who are interested in their dynamic, and some of them create fanworks from time to time, and some of us reach out to one another and have meaningful and wonderful one-on-one conversations in our inboxes. But there’s very few reblog chains about them where people are just expressing fun headcanons, there’s very little circulating fanart, there’s some gifsets and edits but they don’t circulate as frequently, no fandom events or challenges themed around them, no following and cheering on of Malte and Frida’s careers, (to my knowledge) no epic multichapter saraugust fics we discuss together and swoon over and make starry eyes over.

To be clear: I don’t think I’d ever expect saragust to have the same size of following wilmon does. There are many factors that make wilmon more popular, first and foremost being that August does real legitimate harm and is annoying and kind of sucks. Like, hey! I get it! Not everyone is going to like him, and that’s perfectly okay. And then there’s the fact that not everyone who’s drawn to an m/m show is going to feel excited to ship a f/m pairing. As @crownedwille points out, fandoms sure can do some stuff when female characters are involved. Of course saraugust will get smaller numbers.

But as someone who’s been tracking the saraugust breadcrumbs in fandom for a while, and has been following their tag on AO3, what I’m noticing is not exactly a natural absence of interest in the pairing. It’s more like I see a lot of people who have an interest in the characters and the dynamics, but something about the way YR fandom interacts socially reinforces the notion that you keep your saraugust feelings to yourself. Or, for a while if you were expressing those feelings, you were encouraged to express them in ways that are full of apologies and disclaimers. When you’re spending all your time doing that, it becomes a lot harder to create fanworks. Like, even in the tags of this post, I see a lot of people saying they liked them or found them interesting or cute or they’re hooked in by the drama or whatever else! Clearly the enjoyers exist and are out there. I think the discourse (and the harassment of actors/writers/creative team on social media) has died down a lot since the finale and there’s more space to like the characters, but I also think that some of the patterns of fandom interaction that sprung up post-S2 have had a continued impact on how people express themselves.

And yes, it’s important to be mindful of the morally dubious sides of this pairing, but we can do that while creating space for people to openly enjoy it through fic and headcanons and edits and such the way that many people in the fandom openly enjoy wilmon, even if it’s a smaller group of us. (Heck, some people enjoy saraugust because of the moral dubiousness and that is part of a Valid Fandom Tradition of enjoying morally dubious pairings.)

As someone who’s currently feeling a little burned out on wilmon by itself and doesn’t really have a desire to read works centered on them, but who’s still in love with the broader YR world and its characters, especially my two favorite characters—I am desperate for a little bit less saraugust discourse and a little bit more joyous fannishness about them. I’m not entirely sure how to make that happen. I’ve been writing fic, blogging about the characters, creating ask games, posting pictures of the plushies, and also doing some other stuff behind the scenes. But I often don’t post or reblog as much as I could for fear of discourse returning, and I feel disconnected from fandom most of the time, even though I have some strong individual ties to individual people. (I also feel like I may have burned some bridges at times when I was upset.) It’s a bit of a sisyphean conundrum, isn’t it? I wish I could wave a magic wand and make more fanworks and community happen around this pairing in particular, but also around other pairings and characters on the show for the fans who want those other pairings and characters. I just wish there was a little more variety in the characters and pairings talked about.

Anyway, I don’t have any answers and it’s time for me to acquire groceries for the week, so. Blue out.

There's so much discourse around Sara and August. Whether they were good together or not. Whether they loved each other or not.

What we tend to overlook is the fact that they talked to each other. Enough that they knew each other.

He wanted someone to talk to and he thought about her. So he went to find her and he knew to find her in the stables. Then he immediately proved to her that he was someone "safe" by petting her horse. She misunderstood his invitation that evening but he didn't make her feel bad about it. We know she talked to him about the Felice Horse Selling Thing™️ because when she comes to say that Felice was officially selling the horse, he just said "I thought you already knew that" because she had already told him.

Sara talked to August. The same why August talked to Sara. He opened up about the drugs and why he used them. He opened up about being Wilhelm's back up. He opened up about his guilt and about feeling like a horrible person.

She talked to him about her horse and about Felice. Two things that she considers the most important in her life. She also opens up to him about wanting to fit in. Wanting to "be like him" meaning that she wanted to be like the Hillerska crowd.

They talked to each other.

So like, yes, they did horrible things. They are bad people. But they aren’t incapable of caring. And they aren't entirely self centered. That's what makes their individual betrayals even more heartbreaking. Because we know they're capable of caring and they made the choices they did anyway.

#young royals #saraugust #sara eriksson #august horn of årnäs

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xxcallmemaryxx · 2 days ago

Note

hi!!! i love your works<3

could you maybe write vessel x reader first date?

A sappy first date with the big guy. He’s a bit nervous. But so are you.

Vessel x GN reader.

Under the cut ~ <3

It’s a nice place. It’s quiet, the lights are dim, the booths are made in such a way that it’s like you’re on a whole other planet when you sit in them. Which normally, would be phenomenal. Having such a level of privacy while enjoying your dinner, it’s perfect. But this time it feels like a curse. Like the world is working against you. Because sat across from you is Vessel. He’s in a freshly ironed button up, a dark blue that looks almost black under these lights. His hair is combed back out of his face and he looks at you like you hung the stars. It’s awful.

It’s your first date.

And he’s doing absolutely everything right.

The problem is, every time your eyes meet you’ve half a mind to tell him you love him.

You’ve known each other a while, and he’s always had that effect. But here, on your first date, when the tension between you two is burning up the room and the feelings you kept hidden for so long are pretty much sitting on the table in front of him? Yeah long story short you’re both clearly nervous as all hell and neither of you know how to approach it. Telling him you love him in a panic attempt at easing into the night probably isn’t the way to go. But this date is just so different and it feels so real, your panic stems from more than just wanting to break the ice, it’s coming from the little voice in your head that’s telling you if this date goes the way you want it to… he’s it for you.

You can only hope to the god he spends so much time worshiping that he feels somewhat the same way.

You like Vessel.

You want him to like you back.

“Look, uh… we don’t have to do this. I’d never want to push you.”

His voice, which you’re sure is proof of heaven alone, snaps you right out of your panic. Then, gives you even worse panic.

“Huh? Why?”

There’s obvious worry in your tone, you know it. He picks up on it, because of course he does.

“I just worry you’re not really present. I’d hate for this to be something you’re just trying to get through, sometimes two people just aren’t supposed to go there… you know?”

His eyes are cast down. He doesn’t want to watch you agree with him. He can’t do it. He can’t make himself watch you sigh in relief. He can’t make himself watch you realise this was indeed a mistake. He can’t make himself smile at you as you tell him you’re sorry but he’s right.

“Oh god… Vessel I’m so sorry.”

Hm. If you listen close enough… you might just be able to hear the sound of his heart shattering in his chest over the clinking of the cutlery throughout the restaurant.

“No, please it’s okay. It happens. You’re still my-“

“It’s just been a long time since I’ve been this excited about a date, got a bit lost in my own head there for a moment. I’m sorry. I’m here I promise.”

Oh fucking Christ thank Sleep one hundred times to the moon and back again. His heart thumps wildly against his ribcage, he’s almost positive you can hear it. And he doesn’t even attempt to hide the sigh of relief that escapes him and the happy smile that graces his lips.

“That is… yeah that’s a relief. I won’t lie to you.”

He huffs a nervous laugh as he fiddles with the tablecloth hanging over the side of the table between you.

“I mean, there wouldn’t have been any hard feelings of course… but I’m really happy you still want to be here.”

You’re silent for a moment while you decide whether or not what you’re about to do is a bad idea or not. But you want to show him you’re serious about this date, you want him to see you enjoying his presence. You need to snap yourself out of it and make some moves.

So you get up.

His head snaps up and he watches you slide out of the booth with a look of complete dread. He straightens up. His hands fall to his sides and his face turns beet red. His jaw opens and closes as he tries to force words out but no sounds escape him. That is until you round the table and slide in next to him.

You offer him a little smile as your side presses against his. Your knees bump together under the table and your hands brush as you situate yourself. He uses his other hand to press his face into it. His voice muffled slightly as he groans quietly into it.

“Fucking Christ… you’re going to send me into an early grave.”

You can’t help the laugh that escapes you. You purposely bump his knees with your own this time, trying to lighten the mood a little.

“I’m sorry… did I scare you?”

“Yes. Yes you did. I thought I’d ruined it all.”

He laughs a little, and he looks down at where you’re pressed up against him. His cheeks are flushed but he looks happy. His eyes sparkle and when he grins down at you, all his teeth are on full display. It’s the kind of smile that would make your cheeks hurt a little bit. The kind that’s a bit awkward and feels too big for your face.

It suits him.

“I’m sorry, Vess. I really like you, I was worried about it not working and kind of got too deep into worrying about it.”

He blinks down at you, it’s a slow blink, his cheeks are still tinted red from your close proximity and you swear for one moment it looks like he’s got hearts in his eyes.

“Don’t panic, love. It’s definitely working.”

His voice is low, it changes the mood almost immediately and all of a sudden it’s too warm in this booth. Who’s idea was it to cozy up to him like this. It feels like you’re suffocating again, he’s so overwhelming when all he’s doing is speaking to you.

He was right before, the tablecloth that hangs over the side of the table really is that interesting. You can’t stop yourself from fiddling with it, you’re starting to feel awkward again. You hear him force a deep breath into his lungs above you before his very large very beautiful hand encompasses your much smaller one, and intertwines his fingers between yours. There’s a slight tremble, you can feel it when you squeeze his hand tight enough. You’re positive doing that made it worse but it’s so endearing that you can’t even feel guilty.

Everything about Vessel is so endearing.

“Thank you for saying yes to me.”

If you weren’t sitting so close you probably wouldn’t have heard him. He gazes down at you, eyes so full of hope. It makes your throat close up and need prickle through your chest.

“Of course, Vess. You thought I would have said no to you?”

“No. I didn’t think you would…”

Cheeky fucker.

“… but I’m just so happy you said yes. I’m excited to be here, like this, with you. I’m sure it’s obvious.”

You lean up and press a soft kiss to his cheek, this causes a chain reaction, starting with his furiously blushing cheeks (yet again), then he smiles so wide he has to look at the ceiling just to calm himself down, his breathing picks up and his hand squeezes yours where he’s holding it in his lap. He looks back down at you with a smile that says a lot. It’s a wobbly smile, his chin wrinkles up and his eyes squint a little. It screams hope. Like most of his body language does tonight. But this smile is the epitome of ‘I know you know exactly how I feel about you and I know you feel the same way.’

Nerves and excitement crackle in the air between you.

“I’m excited too. For tonight. And for our next date. And the ones after that. I’m sure that’s obvious.”

He nods at you, his wobbly smile grows. Somehow, you didn’t think it could get any bigger but it does. He’s gotta cast his eyes down, he looks at your intertwined hands and nods again, at them… to himself… to you? You’re not sure, but he’s sure of whatever he’s nodding about. And that feels good.

<3 <3 <3

Thank you for reading.

#hehehehehee nervous first date with vessel #he’s so sweet on you #wants it to work so bad #sleep token #sleep token fanfiction #sleep token x reader #vessel #sleep token vessel #vessel sleep token #vessel x reader #vessel sleep token x reader #sleep token vessel x reader #wine spilt #marys musings

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zara-renata · 3 days ago

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And everything that is now already existed then | ao3 | masterlist

Summary: Sylus shows you his favorite parts of his house, you are haunted by a strange feeling of familiarity, you spend some time with the twins and Noah, you learn about the bet they have going, no this is not a wattpad bet story that will be turned into a multi-part tv series even though i love that trope so much, the self control i exerted should be acknowledged if not praised. This part has less humor than other parts, I've been in a contemplative mood recently, sorry. Part 17 of the Sylus series.

Notes: Sylus x gn reader, Sylus x mc, second person POV, some Sylus POV. They/them pronouns are used to refer to reader as a placeholder for your preferred pronouns. The slowest of slow burns friends-to-lovers. This story contains: angst, fluff, banter, poetry, questions of morality, video game violence, discussions of real life violence, profanity, alcohol mention, self-harm mention, mc with self-esteem and guilt issues.

The water is warm. The man underneath you is warm. Your heart, you realize, is also warm. Quiet. Nothing hurts. You marvel at the feeling. How long can you get away with this? Plastered against Sylus’s big body, his rough hands just resting on your back. You feel guilty for keeping him from doing something else. For not being at work. For doing absolutely nothing useful to anyone. For feeling so good.

Sylus holds you, seemingly content to just sit here with you as the water laps against the sides of the pool.

“Don’t you have business to attend to?” you reluctantly ask, because you’re incapable of just trusting that good things can last. That the fulfillment of your deepest desires won’t be snatched away when you least expect it, so you push, push, push, seeking the weakness that will ultimately crack and cause the moment, finally filled, to break.

Sylus holds you a little tighter. “No.”

You wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. You should just accept it. Just enjoy this moment. All you have in this life is each moment—that’s all there is. Why can’t you just experience each one, savor it, suck it dry, until the next? Why must you always waste the pleasure of each moment by being in such a rush to get to the inevitable end?

But you can’t just accept it. You don’t know how. Your whole life has taught you that the moment you trust the permanence is the moment that the moment shatters. Might as well ruin it first, instead of fearing the end. And who are you to complain? What have you done to deserve it in the first place?

“Business slow in the Onychinus economy?” you ask.

“Tch,” he responds, seemingly indignant at the mere suggestion that his business isn’t printing him money even as he canoodles in a hot tub with you. “Business is booming, darling. The human capacity for cruelty is an endlessly growing market.”

You press your cheek harder against the sweaty skin just under his collarbone. You don’t want to think about what he offers people to enable that endless cruelty right now.

“Then how do you have the luxury of lazing about with me?”

“I’ve tasked Aidan with handling business that requires executive decisions for the foreseeable future. As much as it annoys me, I will likely have to answer calls like this morning, but I’ve informed him that I will not be leaving the base unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

You lift your head, curious. He looks down at you, relaxed, eyes glowing in the low light from the pool.

“Why?”

One corner of his beautiful mouth lifts. “Guess.”

You stare at him. He’s taking time off, not pursuing new deals, not focusing on growing his wealth… for you? Ridiculous.

“What will you do while you’re not doing business?” you ask, not able to bring yourself to guess out loud that he took time off for you, to spend time with you while you’re staying with him.

“What do you want to do?” He runs his fingers along your temple, brushes a lock of hair behind your ear, traces the shell of it with a fingertip.

“That’s not an answer,” you say, softly.

“Yes, it is.”

You can’t believe it. The man who is always on the go, from one deal to the next, disappearing for weeks at a time, doing who knows what, who knows where—the man who probably gets bored out of his mind while instigating a riot—says that he just wants to do whatever you want to do. You, whose idea of excitement is a new pair of sleep pants and a night off to watch let’s plays of horror games that you don’t have the time and energy to play yourself anymore.

“You can’t mean that.” You frown at him.

“Try me,” he challenges.

You try to think of something that he’d hate just to prove your point that he doesn't actually mean it when he says he’ll do whatever you want.

“Oh, kitten’s plotting,” he snickers after seeing your expression.

“I want to watch every Justin Bieber documentary ever produced,” you say defiantly. You really don’t. But you’re sure he’ll balk at this outrageous suggestion.

He shrugs a little. “Okay. We can see if they’re on demand in the theater room. If not, I’m sure we can pirate them.”

You narrow your eyes. He can’t mean it. Fuck, if he’s going to call your bluff, you’re going to have to actually sit through who knows how many hours of Justin Bieber: Our World. You barely suppress a shudder.

“Actually, I want to fly to a warm seaside resort and swim with dolphins,” you try, the picture of casual entitlement. You do not want to do this. You’re fucking tired. The last thing you want to do is get on an airplane.

“Dolphins can be as vicious as humans, but if you really want that, we can pack some things now and be on our way by dinner,” he says calmly. As if the suggestion isn’t utterly outrageous.

Is he being as petty as you, intent on not admitting that he didn’t actually mean it when he said he would do whatever you want, or does he actually want to do whatever the fuck you want? You can’t read him at all right now.

You’re desperate and stubborn. “Actually, I think the amusement park in Linkon City is having a furry event all week. I’d like to dress up as our respective fursonas and ride the roller coasters all day.”

Sylus doesn’t even blink. “Do you have a fursuit already, or do we need one tailored before we can go?”

You laugh in disbelief and rest your forehead on his shoulder. “What about you? Do you have a fursuit already?”

“No, I don’t have a fursuit, because I’m not a fucking furry,” he says drily. “But I do think I’d make a very majestic caracal cat. Which goes nicely with your kitten fursona.”

You blink. “That's quite self-aware of you." And then you scowl. "My fursona wouldn’t be as lame as a kitten.”

“Oh? What animal do you think accurately portrays your personality?”

You lift your head and think. You’ve never really thought about it. Something small and mean, probably. “A mongoose.”

He tilts his head, considering. “That actually fits you quite well. Good at hunting snakes, and very, very cute.”

You can feel yourself blushing. “Yeah, well. I’m not a furry, so it doesn’t matter even if it doesn’t fit,” you mumble a little.

“And yet you want to go to the furry event at the amusement park,” he lifts an eyebrow.

You stare at him, mulishly. You’re not going to admit that you’re trying to poke holes in his patience because you can’t trust nice things.

“But I don’t think that’s what you actually want to do,” he continues, with a gentleness that hurts your heart. He urges you to wrap your legs around his waist. “When I said you could test me, this is not exactly what I had in mind,” he teases. “How about you test me by telling me what you actually want to do, and then you’ll see that I mean what I say when I refrain from complaining about being bored while we do them?”

You wrap your arms around his neck as he stands gracefully, the water sliding down both your bodies. “I don’t want you to just not complain about being bored,” you argue. “I don’t want you to be bored at all. You don’t have to entertain me while I’m here. You can do whatever you really want to do.” You mean this. It’s enough, just being in the same house as him right now. Knowing that in the evening he’ll end up in the same bed as you. You don’t want him to tire of you too quickly by insisting that he spend every moment with you.

“Then I repeat—what do you want to do?”

Okay. Okay, he asked for it.

“Show me your favorite things to do at home, when you’re not being a warlord.”

He looks surprised. “That’s it?”

“Yeah. I’m really tired. I never get a chance to just relax. I don’t want to go anywhere, or do anything exciting.” You bite your lip, unwilling to admit that you’re desperate to learn more about him and that worried he’s going to think you’re boring.

He leans forward and catches the side of your lip not caught in your own teeth with his. With your lip between his sharp teeth, he pulls back, gently, until you release it from your own. He pauses, inhales, and then lets go, licking your bitten lip with a quick, soothing flick of his tongue.

“That’s my spot,” he murmurs, pulling back.

Your brain is offline. You have no idea what you were just talking about, or what just happened. All you can feel is the slick of his saliva on the plush of your lip.

Fuck.

You want to fuck him so badly.

You search his face. Can he tell? Does he feel the same way? He touches you like this, and then does nothing. What does he want?

If he can tell what’s going on in your head, he doesn’t comment on it. “Then we can stay home. I’ll show you what I like to do when I’m tired and don’t want to do anything exciting.” His faint smile is tinged with self satisfaction.

“Okay,” you choke out. You will not slide down his body, push him onto the soft moss, and jump on him.

“But first, I will feed you.” The tendrils of his evol bring the fluffy towels to his waiting hand, and he wraps one around you, all while you cling to his torso. He just drapes the other around his shoulders, over your arms still wrapped around his neck. His evol then ferries the two cocktails that remained untouched for the whole time you were in the hot tub, following you back through the pool room and into the chill hallway as Sylus carries you to the kitchen. Between the heat of Sylus’s body and the towels blanketing you, you’re still warm. You watch the drinks following you over his shoulder, and then glance at him.

At your look, he says, “What? It would be a shame to let perfectly good drinks go to waste.”

“What time is it? Don’t you think it’s a bit early to start drinking?”

He shrugs. “It’s probably past midnight, sweetheart. That’s when one normally drinks alcoholic beverages, isn’t it?”

You sigh. “So it’s basically noon in your day-night cycle.”

“Time is a construct, and inherently meaningless,” he says serenely.

After this insufferable response, you give up trying to save his liver for the moment.

____________________

Later, after Sylus serves you a meal packed with protein that pairs nicely with the cocktails as the fire crackles pleasantly and the clouds, reflecting the N109 Zone’s bright lights even at night, sweep across the sky outside his kitchen windows, after you’ve showered and put on warm, comfortable clothes, you find him in the sitting area of his bedroom, reading a book, the Beatles playing on his record player. You recognize the song— The long and winding road.

You stop, suddenly overcome with an overwhelming sense of sorrow. He looks up from his book and watches you curiously.

You left me standing here, a long long time ago

You feel like you’re forgetting something very, very important. Like your dream last night, but not about your family. About the man watching you inquisitively, his long, graceful fingers holding the book gently, the outline of his aquiline nose limned in the soft lighting of his bedroom.

Don’t leave me waiting here, lead me to your door

You suddenly can’t bear to be separated from him for one more second. You pad to him on your freshly bandaged feet, knock the book out of his hand, clamber into his lap, and hug him.

His arms come around you as if he doesn’t mind that you’ve just bulldozed your way onto his lap. After a few minutes, the song ends, and a new, more upbeat one begins.

You feel like you can breathe again.

You sit up, looking down into his face. You want to kiss him so badly. You’re afraid that he’ll gently push you away, as he pushed your hand away from the tie of his sleep pants that you were fiddling with recently. With such kindness, but a loud, resounding rejection of what he perceived to be you offering your body to him.

He’ll bite your lip, but you’re so scared that he doesn’t want to kiss you. Sometimes it seems like he wants you, you, not just a body, not just anyone praising him or challenging him, but you. Do you really still not know? My beloved is perfect to me.

But what if you’re wrong? What have you done to earn this incredible man's devotion?

“Will you tell me what you’re thinking right now, without the guessing game?” he asks softly.

You shake your head. “No. And I don’t want to play the guessing game right now.” You can’t bear to think about what you may be forgetting as you look into his blood-bright eyes. You can’t bear to reveal how badly you want to kiss him, only to be rebuffed.

“Not even a hint?” He nudges your nose with his. “Otherwise I’ll spend every free moment sitting around reading, listening to classic rock music.”

You look at him in confusion. “Why?”

“It seemed to work in luring a kitten into my lap this time. Maybe it works every time.”

Your heart is doing something funny. It doesn’t hurt. It feels… it feels so fucking warm. Like in the hot tub. What is happening to you?

“The music made me sad,” you offer this truth, as a reward for his sweet response.

“Not a fan of the Beatles?” He fiddles with the hem of your shirt, his knuckles brushing against your skin underneath.

“I do like their music. My gran used to listen to them a lot.”

“Is that what made you sad?”

You give him a look. “I said I didn’t want to play the guessing game.”

“I’m just asking questions,” he protests, the picture of innocence. “Is it a crime to want to get to know you?”

You gaze at him. Weren’t you just thinking about how you’re desperate to know everything about him? “Not one I’d arrest you for,” you say, looking down, smiling a little.

He laughs softly. “Lucky me. It would be hard to uphold my end of our deal and show you the music room, the library, and my favorite part of the greenhouse from behind bars.”

“That sounds like a busy itinerary,” you say, lifting a finger, tracing his clavicle revealed by his soft v-neck sweater.

His knuckles sweep over your skin just above the band of your soft pants.

“We have time—we don’t have to do everything today. Which one do you want to see first?”

You don’t care. Your heart is being weird and Sylus is touching you, and you’re touching Sylus. You could just sit here, forever, and enjoy whatever this… feeling is. But you’re afraid you’ll ruin it. Like you always do. If you take too much, he will actually get bored. You should pick one.

“Library,” you say firmly.

“As you wish,” he says, standing, holding you all the while. You can’t bring yourself to protest. You can walk on your own feet. Your feet already feel a little better after just a day. But he’s warm. And he doesn’t seem to mind at all. You drape yourself over him, and let him carry you through the dark halls to his library.

He sets you down outside one of the ubiquitous black doors, and then opens it for you.

His library, like the greenhouse, the pool, the room like a mountain hot spring, is lovely in a way that the rest of his house simply isn’t. Soaring ceilings, heavy built-in wooden bookcases lining the walls, a huge fireplace, electric as opposed to the wood-fireplace from the kitchen, at one end of the room. A wrought iron spiraling staircase leads up beyond the heavy wooden rafter beams to a space you can’t see. Deep red, plush rugs in antique designs hush your footsteps. Plush, deep seated chairs and loveseats, side tables with Tiffany lamps gently illuminate the space. One wall of his preferred floor-to-ceiling windows letting in the N109 Zone night, the red moon bright in the sky as the clouds scuttle past.

It’s like a library from an old, prestigious university. The kind of university you always wished you could have gone to, if you lived in another world. If this world didn’t need people prepared to kill and die for existential threats to humanity. Where you could study something functionally useless, but enriching to the human experience. Like French literature or poetry. The room smells of wood oil, old paper.

You turn in a circle and find Sylus leaning against a bookcase, watching you take in the room. “This is one of your favorite spots in the house?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s quiet. The twins aren’t big readers, so they don’t come in here. It’s a good place to think, and concentrate.”

“Have you read every book in here, like you’ve seen every film in your collection?”

He straightens from the bookcase and walks to you. As he comes to a stop in front of you, he reaches for your face, holds your cheeks gently in his hands. “No. This room is more about the future. Books I’d like to read when life is a little less busy. I’ve read some, but not as many as I would like.”

“Do you think that someday your life will be less busy?”

“If I have my way, yes.”

“And you’ll spend your days quietly reading in the solitude of your lovely library?”

“Not in solitude. But yes. You think it’s lovely?”

You look at him strangely. Didn't he just say he enjoys it because it's quiet and no one bothers him here? “Of course I do. It’s like someone designed it just for me.”

He looks down into your face, thumbs brushing across your cheekbones.

“Like I said. This room is about the future.”

You tilt your head at his non-sequitur. What does your loving the library have to do with his quieter future?

It almost sounds like…

The moment is full. You refuse to shatter it by considering such outrageous thoughts. You will enjoy this moment for what it is. A peek into the mind of this enigmatic man. The opportunity to explore a beautiful, private space in his home.

“Read to me,” he orders, striding to one of the soft couches and plopping down.

You snort. “What do you want me to read you, your spoiled highness?”

“Anything you want. Look around, pick something that catches your interest.” He lets his head drop onto the back of the couch, eyes half-lidded as they follow you walking to one of the bookcases, as you let your fingertips run along the spines of book after book. You see a lot of titles you don’t recognize. You see a lot that you do—classics as well as newer publications. You and Xavier spend enough time in the bookstore that you know a lot of titles by sight, even if these days you rarely have the time to read beyond the manga you share with your partner.

Your eyes catch on a familiar title.

“Oh,” you breathe.

“Find something?” Sylus asks languidly.

“One of my favorite poets. Gran had a copy of this.” You pluck the book from the shelf and walk back over to where Sylus is sprawled on the couch. The moonlight through the windows makes his eyes look even brighter than usual, glowing in the soft light.

“You’re a fan of poetry?” he asks, eyebrows lifting.

“Don’t act so surprised. I’m not entirely uncultured.”

“Your manga collection could have fooled me,” he teases.

“Manga is art. You’re a pretentious fool if you can’t recognize that.”

“No need to get your knives out, kitten,” he smiles, one sharp tooth peeking from behind his full lip. “I have a collection of manga here as well.”

“You do?”

He just steadily stares at you.

“Where?”

He closes his eyes. “Guess you’ll have to stay long enough to explore and find it.”

You stand over him, drinking in the sight of him. Surrounded by the scent of books, polished wood, the moon’s red light rendering him slightly otherworldly.

You want to stay long enough to find out. It’s only been two days, and you want to live in this moment forever. You're so greedy. You're so unworthy.

“Still want me to read to you?”

Instead of answering, the tendrils of his evol wind up from your ankles to your waist, lift you, deposit you on the seat next to him. He scoots down, places his head in your lap.

“You could have just said yes,” you say drily. “No need to be dramatic.”

“I don’t hear any reading. Chop chop.”

Oh hell no. You scowl down at him, but his eyes are closed. “Lap service costs extra.”

“Good thing I’m filthy rich.”

You scoff. “I don’t want your money.”

He opens his eyes. “I suspected as much. It makes taming you all the more difficult.”

You look at him curiously. “Is that what you’re doing? All of your generosity, in order to acquire a tame hunter?”

“What use is a tame hunter?” He dismisses your suggestion. “Your imagination is distressingly limited.”

“Once again, I disappoint,” you murmur. He clearly isn’t in the mood to answer your questions.

He tsks and closes his eyes again, wiggles a little to get more comfortable in your lap. “Make up for it by reading your favorite poetry to me.”

You want to lean down and kiss the smug look off of his face. You don’t want him to turn away if you do.

You begin to read.

“Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June's long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.”

He interrupts you. “I see why you like Zagajewski. Someone else who shares your taste in middling wine.”

“No comments until the end, thank you,” you jostle his head by bouncing your thigh a few times.

He scowls, places one big hand on your thigh and presses down. “Stingy. This should be interactive storytelling.”

You ignore the howling need in you to grab his hand, to guide it further up your leg. You continue to read.

“The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You suddenly think of the N109 Zone and all of its misery. Paying the price of some shitty corporation’s greed. But you keep reading.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.”

You pause, thinking about Sylus’s wealth, the wealth of people like him, and everyone else. The yachts, versus the ships that will sink.

“That’s not the end. Why have you stopped?” Sylus's voice jerks you out of your thoughts.

“You know this poem?”

“I own the book, don’t I?”

“You said you hadn��t read everything in here.”

“Point,” he concedes. “But yes, I know this poem. I’m also an admirer of the poet.”

You think about him calling you kindred spirits, when you first met. How angry that idea made you. Now, you want to lean down and kiss him. You shake your head a little. You keep reading.

“You've seen the refugees going nowhere,

you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.”

Sylus interrupts you again. “I always liked the imagery of the moments spent together, the simplicity of the white room, the curtain fluttering. What more can one desire, when at their love’s side?”

You don't think you've ever heard him say something so romantic. But why would you have? You're not in a romantic relationship with him. Your heart doesn't seem to understand that fact—something inside you thrills that his idea of romance mirrors yours so closely. But his focus on the gentle moment, instead of the rest of the poem, strikes you as strange. “That’s what you see? Not the lovers enjoying simplicity, safety, while the refugees are going nowhere, and the executioners are singing joyfully?”

“The point of the poem is that you must wrest joy from an imperfect world where you can. You’re not helping the condemned by moping about their fate.”

“Is that the point? Perhaps the point is that all you can do is try to praise the mutilated world, but it’s fruitless. If that were the point, he would have entitled it 'Praise the mutilated world,' not 'Try to praise the mutilated world.' ‘Trying’ isn’t succeeding—try all you want, but it’s impossible to praise the world as it is. Better to use your yacht to save those drowning in the salty oblivion.”

“Idealist,” Sylus scoffs, as if the label is a profanity instead of a compliment.

You jostle his head again. “Cynic,” you retort.

“You’re not done,” he sniffs, closing his eyes again.

You resist the urge to buck your hips in order to dump him on the floor. You read again.

“Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.”

You finish, filled with a strange feeling. You’ve loved this poem ever since the first time you read it with the sunshine gushing into your gran’s living room on a slow summer day. As you grew, you loved it for different reasons, for its ambiguity, its hope and its resignation, its acknowledgment of the horrors of life and its simple pleasures. It always felt familiar to you, but the specific imagery reading it this time around is familiar in a way that feels concrete.

You think about the gray feather, the light that strays and vanishes and returns. You think about the feeling while listening to the Beatles, that you’re forgetting something important. You think about Sylus’s casual dismissal of the suffering of others.

Calling suffering fate seems like a convenient excuse to you. Why bother trying to make the world better, if fate deems that it should be miserable?

You think about sipping the rosé, biting the strawberry Sylus offered you. Your curtains fluttering in the breeze in your room, when Sylus has come to your place at night. These things you have enjoyed, as people suffer beyond the safety of your apartment and Sylus’s fortress walls.

“Stop torturing yourself, darling,” he says through your racing thoughts. He turns his head, presses his lips against your thigh, inhales deeply. It’s not a kiss, but you feel the press of his mouth through the fabric of your pants as if it were. You resist the urge to spread your thighs further.

“Should I read another?” you ask quietly. You don’t want to think about these things. You want to live in the moment. What kind of person does that make you? The desire to ignore the cost of this pleasure, your enjoyment of Sylus's home, proves that you don’t deserve it.

“Of course,” he says, but his phone vibrates in his pocket. He grunts unhappily as he reluctantly sits up, sliding the phone from his pocket. “Keep exploring,” he says, heading to the door. “I’ll try to make this quick.”

So you do. Wandering amongst the books, finding other titles that are your favorites, but so many that you’ve never read, never heard of. Many of them are not in your native language. You wonder how many languages Sylus speaks.

After a surprisingly short amount of time, he returns. "Read more to me," he orders, sprawling on the couch once more.

You look back at him, admiring the wrought-iron staircase spiraling up, the moon through the windows, his long, strong body casually stretched along the couch.

“Can we light the fire?”

“Of course. Fire," he says, and the fireplace flares to life at his command. You wonder if such a system is in place in each room. You wander back to the couch, and he pulls you down. You read him the rest of the poems from this collection, arguing here and there, learning his favorite parts, both matching and diverging from your own. Until your stomach growls, causing him to nuzzle it, insist on taking you to the kitchen and feeding you another meal. After you're once again full, he offers to show you the conservatory.

“Okay,” you say, relaxed, satisfied. He wraps his arms around you, lifts. You let him, wrapping your legs around his waist. You think about a gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. What are you forgetting?

He takes you to the music room. It’s behind another black door. You would never be able to guess, walking through his solemn hallways, each expansive room unfolding behind each uniform door.

As you walk into the beautiful space, you’re struck with the realization that Sylus’s home is strange in many ways, and not just because it serves as both his home and his fortress, an armory and an indoor playground. The halls are winding and despite the height of the ceilings on each floor, they’re oppressive. There is no open floor plan for the house itself. Each room’s door can be closed, barricaded, turning the room within into a bunker. But behind each door, each room fans out, soaring windows, high ceilings, glass giving way to a savage view of the harsh landscape in a way that renders even the ugliness of the N109 Zone beautiful in a stark, barren-planet kind of way. You suspect that the glass is bullet-proof. You wonder what kind of impacts it can withstand beyond firearms. Could it survive a thrown grenade? A direct strike from a drone? Would anyone dare actually wage a full-on assault on the leader of Onychinus’s home?

“Not even the greenhouse rendered you speechless, kitten. Does that mean you like it, or hate it?”

You blink. You had been so busy wondering about the strategic choices of Sylus’s architectural design that you hadn’t even begun admiring the metal support beams, curling like vines in a distinct art nouveau style between multiple panes of glass, each meeting at the pinnacle of a glass ceiling. Two of the larger glass panes are not the standard window glass, but are stained glass, continuing the art nouveau theme, depicting colorful curls of plants, flowers, as well as animals—beasts from mythology, dragons, phoenixes, winged chimeras. Luscious potted plants scattered along the white marble floor. A white grand piano sitting in the center of the circular space. Instruments of all kinds, from all parts of the world, hung or resting on more organically wrought metal display mounts along two-thirds of the glass walls. A seating area, filled with comfortable, low furniture, carved blond wood in flowing, plant-like designs, sits between the piano and the view of the landscape through the clear glass, framed by the murals of stained glass.

It’s breathtaking. But you’ve had your breath taken by the greenhouse, the pool, the room with the hot tub, the library. Each in a distinctly different style from the rooms of the house that see daily use by their owner: Sylus’s bedroom. The kitchen. The hallways. The imposing dining room and its equally imposing banquet table. The cave-like theater room. Each dark—black marble, maroon accents, deeply masculine, modern, abstract art. But the rooms that have taken your breath instead of making you feel oppressed are so startlingly different from Sylus’s often-used spaces.

You can’t accept the moment. You can’t stand not knowing, even as you are afraid to know. You have to ask. “I don’t understand,” you say, turning to him.

He glances around the room, and then looks back at you. “It’s a home conservatory, sweetheart. Not a trick question.”

You ignore him. Your curiosity will eat you alive if you don’t ask him. You want to know. You don’t want to know. “Why does it feel like two different people designed your house?”

His eyebrows lift in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Half of your house is edgy, big-dick rich vampire man-cave, and half is this,” you sweep an arm to indicate the delicate yet sturdy steel beams, organically curving into the height of the room, the chairs carved like palms, stained glass, the lush vegetation.

“Can one person not appreciate more than one style of home decor?” he asks, walking over to you, winding an arm around your waist.

You stare at him. Nothing Sylus does is by accident. You know this much by now. You know a lot about him by now. You don’t know enough about him by now.

“The parts of the house you spend the most time in reflect your style. But the other parts… the parts that wait for an owner that rarely comes. Did you choose the design yourself? Or did you let your architect run wild?”

His smile is faint as he gazes down at you. “How very observant of you, darling. But I designed every room in this house. The architect modified the plans where necessary to ensure the structural integrity was sound, but I chose the decor.”

You wait. It sounded like he ended that sentence with a ‘but.’

“You’re right. I didn’t have just my preferences in mind as I was planning each room.”

You want to know. You don’t want to know. What if you’re wrong? The very idea is insane. Presumptuous. How could he possibly know? You only met him a few months ago. This base isn’t newly built. You have no idea how long I’ve already waited, his voice whispers through your mind.

“Whose preferences did you have in mind?” you ask, your heart doing that thing again. That weird thing that doesn’t hurt but scares you with how good it feels. Don’t leave me waiting here, lead me to your door.

His smile widens, just a little. “Do you really not know?”

You can’t process this. How could he have known?

It’s like these oases in his dark fortress of a home were designed with your deepest heart’s desires in mind.

You want to kiss him. You want to resonate with him again. You want to drop to your knees in front of him.

The enormity of your feelings is terrifying.

What if you’re wrong?

How much worse will it be, if you let yourself believe, and he turns you away. What if he designed all of this for someone else. Because how could he have known, before you met just a few months ago—how could he have known the contours of your tastes, the things that make you most comfortable, the yearning of your heart in your small apartment, of what you’d give yourself if you could ever afford to make your home exactly how you would want? A refuge from the harsh world. Space to breathe.

Your feelings are choking you. You step away from his embrace, turn. You have time. He said he’ll wait. You focus on this room.

It’s beautiful. Because of course it is. You don’t recognize even half of these instruments.

You turn back to him. He has moved to the piano, straddling the white bench, legs spread, just watching you.

“Do you know how to play all of these?”

He shakes his head. “No. Most of these are collector’s items, antiques. But I do know how to play the piano.”

You stand, resisting the constant pull towards him. You want to go to him, run your hands through his hair, tug his head back, expose his throat, bite.

“Only the piano?” You satisfy your need to move by walking over to the sitting area, forcing yourself to sit away from him. You need to control yourself. You plop down on one of the beautiful chairs, carved like a ginkgo leaf.

He turns, sitting properly on the bench in order to face you, and opens the cover over the piano keys. He leisurely presses down on one key, and the note resounds through the lovely room.

“I can also play the organ,” he murmurs, before beginning to play in earnest.

You don’t recognize the piece. You know you’ve never heard it before. But the longer he plays, the more you’re overcome with the sense that you know it. The blood under your skin, your lungs, your bones—you feel pulled to him, to his long fingers sweeping over the keys, unseen from your vantage point in the room. You know what’s coming, the crescendos and the pauses. It’s beautiful. It hurts. Your thoughts drift to the poem. Its strawberries, its rosé wine. Its familiarity. Return in thought to the concert where the music flared. You want to ask Sylus if he owns a yacht. You’re convinced that there will be a park, and acorns, and you will pick them up and offer them to him on a sunny summer morning after a long, long night. It has already happened. It will happen in the future.

You can’t resist the pull any longer. You stand and walk over to him, stand next to him at the bench. His hands hypnotize you. Big. Rough. Delicately pressing the keys—sure, confident, flowing. Like his evol. Like him.

“Sit,” he orders, and you obey, sliding in next to him. You try to give him space, but he takes one hand, still playing with the other, and pulls you by the waist until you’re shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.

You watch his hands, lost in the moment, lost in the feeling of recognition, of … something. That warm feeling in your heart, threaded with the pain of having lost something that you can’t remember.

Slowly, the piece comes to an end. His hands become still on the keys.

“What song was that?” you ask.

He flicks his eyes to yours.

“It doesn’t have a name.”

“Who composed it?” You hope that perhaps you can track it down later and listen to it again when Sylus isn’t around.

“Me,” he says, turning his head to look at you.

Wait, what?

“It’s already shocking enough that you play, but when do you have the time to compose?”

He lifts one of your hands and threads his fingers with yours. “Why so shocked that I have hobbies, like anyone else?”

“I just figured you’re always too busy with murder, mayhem, and munitions to have hobbies like a normal person,” you squeeze his hand as it swallows yours.

“I don’t have a lot of free time, but when I do, I like to spend some of it practicing and composing. Sometimes when I’m bored during business meetings I compose a little in my head and then write it out when I get home.”

At your incredulous look, he flicks your forehead gently with his free hand. “What would you have guessed that I spend my free time doing if it occurred to you that I do not, in fact, work in every waking moment?”

You consider it. “I would have assumed you spend all your free time hanging out in your shady nightclubs.”

He frowns at you. “I own classy nightclubs because they make me money and provide convenient venues for business deals now that I no longer host such deals in my own home. I do not spend any more time in them than necessary.”

“Is that what you meant when you said that Amnesia isn’t really your vibe?”

“You remember,” he says, sounding pleasantly surprised.

“Even though it feels like weeks ago, you did just tell me that like, two nights ago,” you flick his forehead in revenge.

“Fair point,” he concedes. “All right, then, yes. That’s what I meant.”

“So what is your vibe?”

“Curious, kitten?”

“Yes.” That warm feeling you have is overriding your fears of admitting this to him. You want to know him. You want to know everything about him.

“It’s easier to show you my vibe,” he shrugs. “We’ll make a date of it.”

He dropped the “fake” part again.

His phone begins to vibrate in his jeans pocket again.

He frowns in irritation. You stand, forcing yourself to move away from him.

“I’ll entertain myself,” you smile at his questioning look. He holds onto your hand as you move away, until your arm and his are stretched between you, and then he lets go.

You’re thankful for the interruption. Too much unadulterated time being the subject of Sylus’s entire focus makes you think insane things. Like that he designed parts of his house with you in mind. That you know music that you’ve never heard before. That you’re forgetting something important about him, even though you only met him recently. That a poem you read in your youth is a roadmap of things that have already happened between you and the man pacing behind the door, and what will happen before the light strays, vanishes… returns again.

You step into the hallway and wander back toward the kitchen. After a few minutes, you hear the flap of Mephisto’s wings. He’s keeping you company again. You keep walking.

You’re distracted halfway to the kitchen, however, when you hear voices coming from the theater room. It sounds like the twins, and someone else whose voice is familiar, but you can’t pinpoint it. You knock.

“No need to knock,” one of the twins yells.

You open the door and peek into the room. It’s dark, with all the lights dimmed.

On the large screen where you almost watched a movie with Sylus the other night, a video game is playing.

Luke sits on one of the loveseats, holding a game controller, while Kieran is squished onto the same small loveseat with him, their two big bodies barely fitting, hiding his face in Luke’s shoulder.

Noah is sprawled out on another loveseat, perfectly at ease. She gives you a lazy wave.

Luke pauses the game and looks over his shoulder at you.

“Boss busy?” he asks as Kieran lifts his head, a look of relief on his face at the interruption.

“Business call,” you say, nodding. You stare at the screen. It looks like…

“Are you playing the Silent Hill 2 remake?” you squeal.

“Yeah! Since boss is on a little holiday, he gave us the time off as well. Figured we’d finally play it.”

“Are you a fan of the original?” Kieran asks.

You nod. “Huge fan. I was so excited when they announced the remake, but I’ve been too busy with work to play it.”

“Wanna join? Kieran is too scared to look half the time. We can take turns, if you want,” Luke offers, sounding pleased to have another person to share the game with.

You seriously consider his offer, but you’re still so tired. You don’t really want to learn the controls mid-way through a playthrough. Weren’t you just thinking about watching let’s plays of horror games you haven’t had a chance to play yet? You can watch Luke play without having to do a thing.

“I’m good, but do you mind if I stay and just watch until Sylus is done?”

“Is that even a question? Get in here.”

Luke unpauses the game, and the familiar sounds of the world of Silent Hill, with amazing, updated graphics fills your vision. You slink inside the room and sit on another love seat, preferring to give Noah her space since she’s sprawled out like she already owns the place.

You watch as Kieran hides his face in Luke's shoulder again as a lying figure jerkily lumbers towards James Sunderland.

Apparently Noah notices Kieran’s fear as well.

“Aren’t you one of the feared Raptors of Onychinus? Like, you’re famous in the Zone. How can the same person who is known for intentionally leaving mutilated corpses in public as warnings to your boss’s enemies be afraid of video game monsters?”

You turn and stare at the twins, a little horrified. Not entirely surprised, because you know what kind of man Sylus is. You know what his organization stands for. But mutilated dead bodies? Where normal people just trying to get through their shitty workday, where kids can see them?

“That’s fucked up,” you say out loud.

“Hey, you’re a fucking cop. We know what cops are capable of,” Kieran says softly, with a flatness in his tone you’ve never heard before. Noah looks between you and Kieran like she wishes she has popcorn. “Don’t act like what you sometimes do is any better than our calling card.” Luke kills a monster shaped like two shapely pairs of legs attached at the waist with a metal pipe, and it dies loudly. He stomps on it for good measure. “At least we’re honest about it, and don’t hide behind a shield of so-called legitimacy. People know what they’re getting when they deal with us.”

You look at Kieran thoughtfully. It’s difficult to admit, but he has a point. You know that there are corrupt hunters. The so-called Tenebrae. You also recognize that dark part of yourself, when you’re faced with someone who you know has done terrible things, and the itch to pull the trigger before you can bring them in. You know that innocent people suffer at the hands of criminals and law enforcement alike.

Kieran stares steadily back at you, his normally cheerful face serious. “How did you come to work for Sylus?” you ask.

Luke pauses the game. “We don’t talk about that,” he says in the same flat tone that his brother just spoke in.

“Oh?” you say, because you don’t want to continue to pry, and you don’t know what else to say.

“Boss says it doesn’t matter where we come from. Only where we’re going. So there’s no use talking about the past if we don’t want to.”

“And you don’t want to?” Noah asks, the look of entertainment morphing into something else on her face.

The twins shake their heads in unison.

You think she’s going to say something snarky, but she just nods. “Then you shouldn’t. No one is entitled to your story.”

“That’s what boss says. I see why he hired you now,” Kieran says, smiling at her, the odd stillness broken.

“He hired me because I’m fucking awesome,” Noah sniffs, flicking her braids behind her shoulder. They’re down now, spilling over her back.

You tilt your head. “Are you a new hire?” For some reason you thought that Noah had been Sylus’s driver for a long time.

“Did he not tell you?” she asks, looking at you strangely.

“Tell me what?”

“I’m not gonna do his work for him,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she smiles at you, and it’s unnerving instead of soothing. “Anyway, yeah I’m a new hire. You’re gonna be seeing a lot of me in the future.”

Although Kieran seems to have reached some sort of approval of Noah, Luke still shudders and starts the game again.

You let it go. You’ll ask Sylus about Noah’s weird comment later. Instead of dwelling on it, you sink into admiring the awesome graphics, the atmosphere, your childhood nostalgia rendered in state of the art graphics

When the sirens go off as James is about to enter the Other World, you have a sudden flashback to playing the original Silent Hill 2 with Caleb. You were also too afraid, like Kieran, to play yourself, so you just clutched Caleb’s arm as he held the controller, and you delighted in the safety of vicarious thrills, of Caleb’s reassuring, solid presence at your side as you experienced the story. You suddenly miss him so, so much. The feeling of loss is overwhelming.

The sudden punch of grief leaves you breathless. Everyone else is so focused on the screen, they don’t notice your gasp. You want to watch. You’ve been wanting to experience the remake ever since the developers announced it, over a year ago. You want to experience it with who you are tentatively thinking of as your new friends. But you need a second to ground yourself before you can bring yourself to keep watching.

Your force your voice through your throat. “I’m going to grab a snack. Do you guys want anything from the kitchen?”

“Popcorn!” Noah calls.

“We’re good,” Luke answers, because apparently Kieran is almost catatonic with terror.

“All right, be right back.” You take your time getting to the kitchen, Mephisto following you out the theater room door. You rifle through the fridge, shove some snacks into your mouth. You’re shocked to find microwave popcorn in one of the cupboards. Sylus strikes you as the kind of snob who insists on popping loose kernels on the stove, or over the fire in the fireplace. Nothing so pedestrian as store-bought and in the microwave. You snicker, that feeling of sorrow fading as you engage in everyday tasks, with company to look forward to. You’re not alone right now. You’re excited to see more of what the devs retained from the original game and what they added or changed in the remake. You head back to the theater room, but accidentally drop the bag of popcorn before you can open the door. As you pick it up, you can hear Noah.

“You know you don’t actually have to kill every monster you encounter, right?” She asks in barely disguised disdain.

“You know that you don’t actually have to offer your opinion when no one asked, right?” Luke snarks.

“Oooh, someone’s grumpy because he isn’t going to have an advantage in the bet like he thought,” Noah says through a snicker.

“What advantage? We agreed not to interfere. Boss is gonna have it in the bag even before the two weeks are up even without our help,” Luke responds.

“If he doesn’t fumble it by being too passive,” Kieran adds, thoughtfully.

“What ‘help?’ I bet your help would result in more delay than progress,” Noah taunts. “I probably don’t even have to do anything to counter your nonsense. You’ll do all my work for me.”

“Hey, flooding the guest floor was a good idea,” Luke protests.

This is just met with a cackle.

You stand, frozen. You didn’t mean to eavesdrop. But what is their boss going to have in the bag without their help? What bet?

Something inside of you already knows. Hadn’t you thought earlier that the twins probably made a bet out of your obvious, pathetic crush?

But they said it was about their boss achieving something. Not about your feelings.

You don’t want to know.

You try desperately to cling to that warm feeling you’ve had since the pool.

Boss is gonna have it in the bag.

You spin on your heel, intending to return to the kitchen without them knowing you heard anything, just to buy yourself time to process. But of course, you promptly knock over another ugly sculpture. It shatters on the floor.

You stand there in your bandaged feet, holding the popcorn, staring down at the mess you just made.

The door swings open and Kieran, Luke, and Noah jostle each other to see what just happened in the hallway.

“Sorry,” you say. What the fuck else can you say?

“What happened?” Kieran asks.

“Just me being clumsy,” you say, trying to smile.

Luke squints at you. “Oh shit.” He turns to Kieran. “They’re making that horrible face again.”

Kieran stares at you.

Noah flicks her braids and tilts her head, examining you like an art critic trying to find meaning in a child’s finger painting. “What does that face mean?”

“It means they heard what we were discussing,” Kieran says grimly.

Luke glares at Noah. “What are you even doing here? Now the bet is fucked and boss is gonna be mad because his hunter’s making that expression again. Look at them. We’ve hurt their feelings!” He gestures at you.

She glares back. “Boss told me to report here for duty every day to remain on standby in case the hunter wants to go anywhere. What are you doing here?” she sneers.

“We live here,” he answers, looking confused that that’s even a question.

You take a step back, away from the sharp shards of the broken sculpture. Maybe they’ll be too busy arguing to notice.

That good feeling is gone.

You think about every move Sylus has made since the auction. All of his attention, his gentleness, his kindness, his dogged reappearance at your home, his arranging for you to have sick leave.

Would Sylus do all that for a bet?

Is he that bored? Is he that good of an actor?

How on earth would you even know? You don’t know shit about him. You’ve known him for a few months. In that time, you’ve seen him a handful of times. What the fuck are you doing?

You think about that feeling you had while listening to the Beatles, while listening to Sylus play the piano, of forgetting something really important. You want to throw up.

Yeah, you’re forgetting something all right.

You can’t stand the feeling inside you right now. It’s too big. It’s eclipsing everything you’ve felt up until this point.

You think about what it will take to get out of here.

You think about picking up one of the sculpture’s shards and digging it into your thigh, anything to override this feeling inside you now.

You think about the resonance with Sylus when you woke up. Could he fake that?

His evol is unearthing a person’s deepest desires. But is it more than that? Could he make you feel adored without using his aether core? Did he promise not to use his evol on you because the terms of the bet forbade interference? Your fears send you spiraling.

“Oh no. No, no, no, no,” Luke says, peering at your face again. He takes a step forward, reaching out to you like someone trying to calm a wild animal, his house shoe crunching on the broken bits of sculpture.

You take a step back.

Noah just looks between the twins and you, confused.

“I’m just going for a walk,” you lie. You take another step back, turn, and start to walk down the hallway that will eventually lead to the lift. The lift that goes to the underground garage.

As you round the corner, Luke says,“Get—”

“On it,” Kieran says, with his phone to his ear.

Noah looks thoughtfully down the now empty hallway. “The hunter’s fucked up, huh?”

Luke shrugs. “Aren’t we all?”

Noah frowns at him. “Speak for yourself. You don’t know shit about me.”

“I know that boss hired you after looking into your soul. Which means you’re fucked up too. He isn’t interested in wholesome things or people—too boring.”

“And you?”

“You said it yourself. I really enjoy carving people up.” He shrugs. “Soothes something from our shitty childhood.”

Noah considers him. “Your brother seems to be okay with me now. Are you going to have a problem with me?”

Kieran grins at her. “What makes you think I have a problem with you?”

“You were mean when I suggested you try to stealth around the monsters. And don’t think I didn’t see your reaction when I said I’d be around more often. And acting like the hunter being upset is solely my fault, when we all made the stupid bet.” She counts each piece of evidence on her pretty fingers.

“Who the fuck likes backseat gamers?” He pouts a little. “And I didn’t like being hit on within an hour of meeting you. I don’t like people like that.”

Noah scowls back at him. “You don’t like people like what? ”

“I mean, I don’t like, like people. I get the creeps when people hit on me.”

Her lovely eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Oh.”

“But boss likes you, so I like you. We’re cool, so long as you don’t hit on me again.”

Noah nods.“I was just giving you two shit since you hauled me in front of your scary fucking boss. But I promised boss I wouldn’t do it again.”

“Then we’re cool. And if you don’t like how I play Silent Hill, then you can play if you want.” He opens the door again, gesturing for her to go in ahead.

“Nah man, I like being in the peanut gallery.”

“Does that mean you’re not gonna shut up?”

“You know it.” Noah gives him a big, feral grin.

Luke grins back at her, equally frightening. “Then I’ll be sure to kill every single monster we come across, no matter how much ammo it wastes.” The door swings shut on Kieran standing in the hallway, looking thoughtfully down at the phone in his hand.

_____________________

Sylus hums the melody of the music he played for you as he ends the call with Aidan. Luckily the issue this time could be settled by answering Aidan’s questions, and he can still look forward to a mostly uninterrupted day with you. He wonders where you’ll like to go next. Back to the library? To the greenhouse?

He’s in a great mood, despite the interruption. Every conversation with you convinces him that you’re closer and closer to accepting the truth. That you’re his, and he’s yours. He wants to drag you back to the library, listen to you read to him, argue about poetry—the way your eyes flash when you’re making a counterargument, the sneer in your retorts to his needling you—he wants to kiss you. He wants to kiss you so much it hurts.

His phone vibrates in his pocket again. He clenches his jaw, pauses. He wants to throw the damn thing against the wall and just continue looking for you, business be damned. But he also doesn’t want to leave Aidan in an awkward position. He fishes the phone out of his pocket and accepts the call.

“Boss, your hunter is making a strategic retreat again,” Kieran says breathlessly.

Sylus jerks to a stop.

“Repeat that?” he demands.

“They overheard us talking about the wager,” Kieran explains, sounding pained.

It takes Sylus a second to remember what he’s talking about. “The bet about how long it will take for kitten to realize that I want to date them?”

“Yeah.”

Sylus thinks. Why would you be spooked by a stupid bet between his henchmen and your driver?

“But they—well, they overheard us talking about it, and they don’t know what the wager is actually about. I am afraid that they might have misunderstood something,” Kieran says carefully, like he’s waiting for Sylus’s wrath.

Sylus immediately realizes what probably just happened.

“I left kitten alone for less than twenty minutes,” he sighs. Just his fucking luck. It’s like the universe or some cruel god wants to create obstacles in his path to winning your precious heart.

“Your bet is over,” he barks.

“Understood.”

Sylus ends the call and pulls up Mephisto’s app. You’re walking quickly, with purpose. He squints, trying to figure out which part of the house you’re in. It looks like you’re trying to get to the lift that leads to the underground garage. Sylus dissipates into red and black mist.

_______________

As you walk, you make your way to the garage, not even sure what your plan is. You have that hollow, manic feeling filling you—the feeling that always fills you when you’re hurt like this, when you just need to get out, to outrun your own body and the feelings it contains. This time though, through the noise in your head, you remember your promises to Sylus. About not hurting yourself, but going to him. If you have doubts about his intentions, to go to him. To ask him when you have questions, instead of making assumptions.

But how can you? What’s the point of honoring promises made to a man who thinks your feelings are fair game for a bet?

You need to think. You don’t want to think. You’re hurting so, so much. You need time. Your body feels like you’re out of time. You miss Caleb. You miss your grandmother.

It takes all of your self control to stop moving. You hear Mephisto’s wings flapping behind you. You close your eyes. You resist the urge to punch yourself, barely. If you’re just a bet to him, you should punch him instead. You open your eyes and realize you stopped next to a door with an electronic lock blinking on the handle. You turn and look at it fully, and you hear the lock click.

It recognized your face. Just as Kieran and Luke told you all the locks in this house would. Why would Sylus bother programming your face into his home if you’re just a bet?

You watch your hand reach out, grasp the handle. You pull, and the door opens easily. You slip inside and let it close before Mephisto can follow.

The lights flicker on.

You gasp.

It’s like standing inside an upscale jewelry store, built inside a bank vault. Except instead of sparsely filled display cases, designed to emphasize and showcase a select number of precious jewels, each glass case is stuffed with the things. Diamonds. Rubies. Emeralds. A mind-blowing variety of beautiful stones that you don’t even know the names for. Loose stones, as well as jewelry—necklaces, rings, earrings. Where most of Sylus’s house is the picture of meticulous order, this vault looks like a dragon’s hoard of priceless treasures, casually piled high without much thought.

Why would Sylus trust you with access to such wealth, if you were just a bet?

But more importantly, how much death must Sylus Qin sell, to afford such a vault?

How many lives in exchange for each gem?

You turn in a circle as you slowly process the fact that you’re standing in the middle of a sea of blood diamonds.

What are you doing?

What the actual fuck are you doing?

You were just marveling at the luxury of the rooms he designed, filled with the thrilling possibility that he had built them for you. You had thought about the cost of the heating in the hot tub, the pool. And yet you were willing to overlook such expenses. Why? Because at least the pool, the lovely architecture are useful? Because they provide some value to the human experience, even if only a select few will ever get to experience them at Sylus’s house?

But what value do diamonds have? Shiny clumps of compressed carbon. You can’t burn them for warmth. You can’t eat them. Okay, so maybe they’re used in some industrial processes, but for fuck’s sake, artificially created diamonds could serve that purpose. And you’re absolutely sure that the diamonds Sylus has hoarded in this vault are real, products of millions of years of pressure, and not made in some lab.

You sink to the black marble floor. It’s cold. You draw up your knees and hug them.

There’s too much happening in your brain right now. Your grief. Your uncertainty about Sylus’s intentions—the question of who his beloved is. The bet.

The realization that you’re falling in love with a man whose life’s work is bringing misery to others.

You hate yourself. Here you are, thrown into a tailspin from the idea that Sylus may have spent all this time on you because of a bet with his minions, when you should be in a tailspin about the fact that it’s probably already too late for you to stop falling for a man who not only praises the mutilated world, but is one of the people shoving the knife in deeper.

There is so much you don’t know about him. But what you do know is that Sylus is too busy pouring salt into the wound of the world to dedicate so much time and resources to something as frivolous as a wager about how long it will take for him to get you in the bag. It’s pure, self-pitying hubris to assume otherwise.

You’re focusing on the wrong things, again. You’re forgetting what’s important, again.

What do you want? What can you live with? Why do you feel a connection with this complicated, cruel, ruthless man, as if you’ve known him for more than a few months? What kind of person are you, if despite sitting in a sea of diamonds paid for in other peoples' blood, you still want this merchant of death to come find you, to hold you in his arms, tell you that he wasn't placing bets on how long it would take to have you in the bag?

You begin to rock, somehow resisting all of your terrible urges: to hurt yourself, to run, to set this awful room on fire. You rock, and you hurt, and you wait for the terrible man you’re falling in love with to find you, as he always does.

______________

Sylus finds Mephisto pacing on the floor in front of his gem vault. He caws in distress when he sees his owner re-materialize in the hallway. Sylus finds the fact that you’re in the gem vault, and not currently trying to procure a getaway car, to be a source of hope—a strange feeling for him. What use does he have for hope? He has plans. Plans with contingencies, alternatives, backups. They either succeed because he planned well enough, or they fail because he did not plan well enough.

Hope has no place in his world.

People suffer and die. Deals are made and broken. Fate is cruel, inflexible. He knows this all too well, no matter how much he’s struggling against fate this time around.

Hope has no place in his world.

But.

You could have kept running. You could be in any one of his vehicles right now, trying to break land speed records to get the fuck away from him, convinced that he was involved in a bet about the biggest gamble of his life.

But you’re not. You’re in his gem vault, for some reason. You strange, unpredictable, delightful creature.

He finds himself hoping that this misunderstanding hasn’t just caused you to retreat beyond his reach again.

Your fingers in the dip of his clavicle.

The yearning look on your face, that he doesn’t think you even knew you had, when he bit your lip—the closest he’ll allow himself to a kiss until he’s one hundred percent sure you’ll welcome him while awake.

He opens the door.

He pauses, struck with the strange sensation of viewing his greatest treasure surrounded by so much of his material treasure. You belong here. The value of all of these precious stones nothing in comparison to you, shining like a beacon to him at the end of a long and winding road from the marble floor, dimming everything else in this room by comparison.

His house shoes whisper along the cold marble floor where you’re sitting, curled in on yourself.

He has watched you take down wanderers the size of an elephant. All that strength, contained in your huddled body. You look so small to him. He wants to protect you from all the horrors of the world. But of course, he’s the biggest horror of all. Is it any wonder that he keeps hurting you instead?

A better man might keep his distance in an effort to protect you. Like your partner. A better man might know when to quit. Like your dandy artist friend. A better man might be content with loving you from afar. Like your fucking doctor.

But Sylus is a terrible man, because he’s not going to stop trying to get it right, even as he hurts you in the process, until you order him to stop and mean it.

You don’t look up at the sound of his footsteps, but you also don’t retreat as he approaches.

He sits on the floor next to you, wraps an arm around your shivering shoulders. He pulls you into his arms, feels the rush of hope when you let him.

He cradles your head in his palm.

“The twins bet on everything. Which snail is the fastest on a leaf. Whether it will rain or snow tomorrow. How long it will take someone to bleed out. Whether the traffic light will change in five versus ten seconds,” he says softly into your hair.

“About how long it will take to get your pathetic hunter in the bag?” Your voice is small, just as your body feels in his arms.

“About how long it will take for my beloved to realize how I feel about them,” he sighs.

You stiffen, and he feels a moment of paralyzing fear, before you melt into him. He breathes again.

“What did you bet?” you ask, and Sylus feels the sorrow in your voice like a gunshot in his chest.

You ran, but you stopped. You assumed, but you’re asking questions now. You’re allowing him to touch you, to hold you. The hope in him surges again.

“I didn’t place a bet in this particular wager,” he manages through the unfamiliar feelings. “But if I had, the gamble would be my whole heart.”

“Does a man who has a dragon’s hoard of wealth, bought with the blood of the guilty and the innocent alike, have a heart?” you ask, finally looking up, your eyes hollow in a way that he doesn’t like.

Sylus is a terrible man. He has never lied to himself about this, or to you. He showed you the worst of himself, the day you met. He has to hope that the fact you’re still here, still asking him questions, means that he hasn’t lost you yet. An unpleasant feeling of doubt slithers through him. Is it the bet upsetting you, or something else?

“Even dragons have hearts, darling.”

You close your eyes. He wants you to open them again. He wants you to look at him. He never wants you to look away from him. Even if you’re looking at him with doubt, or hate, so long as you’re looking at him, that means you’re not leaving him.

“What do you want?” he asks.

You open your eyes again. He is terribly tempted to use his aether core on you, because for once, he can’t read how you’re feeling.

“You offered me time.”

He leans forward, rests his forehead against yours. “And I will give you time.”

��I want to see your favorite part of the greenhouse.”

“And I will show you my favorite part of the greenhouse,” he whispers, breathing, breathing. He can’t tell how you’re feeling, but you smell like home, a door at the end of a long road. The hope grows.

“I want to see Luke and Kieran and Noah play the remake of Silent Hill 2.”

The hope shifts, dissipates. There is no need for hope, once it is fulfilled. You want to stay, for now. He can work with that. Whatever damage learning about the bet caused, he can work with your willingness to stay. If that look in your eyes isn’t about the bet, he has more time to dismantle your walls, to pull it out of you. Just two nights ago, you were running barefoot through the dark. Tonight, you stopped yourself and waited for him to find you. “You’re in luck. They’re still playing.”

You watch him, as if you’re weighing something behind your hollow eyes. “Will you watch with me?”

Of course, he thinks. Of course. You could ask for so much more, and the answer would be the same. “Do you want me to watch with you?”

“I want you to want to watch with me.”

He smiles, his mouth a breath away from yours. You smell like popcorn. He wants to throw a piece in the air, catch it in his mouth, feed it to you. “Again, you bring me luck. We have a win-win deal.”

He stands. Carries you out of his gem vault.

“Why do you have so many jewels?” you ask, quietly.

“In case the authorities freeze my accounts, physical currency will be useful. A sort of insurance.”

You gaze at his face, and he wonders what you see when you look at him. “You’ll escape with a truck full of precious stones?”

“Something like that,” he says.

“No other reason?”

He tells the truth. “I’ve always been fond of shiny things.”

“Do you have a favorite stone?”

He laughs softly. “Whatever stone you’re wearing.”

Instead of looking at him with suspicion, a helpless look crosses your face. Like you’re in pain from his admission. He doesn’t like it. But then you lean forward, press your face into his neck. He tells himself that he has time. He’ll figure out what’s bothering you, and he’ll fix it.

Outside the theater room, he pauses. Looks down at the pieces of shattered sculpture. "If you didn't like it, darling, you could have just said so."

You just mumble that you're sorry.

"We've talked about your apologies," he says, frowning down at you in his arms.

You huff. "Fine. I'm not sorry. That sculpture was edgy and ugly. You should replace it with something beautiful."

"Deal. But only if you come with me to choose something," he says.

"Deal," you say softly, and he still can't tell what's going through your head.

When you enter the theater room, Luke pauses the game. “We’re really sorry for hurting your feelings and shit. The bet was about boss’s rizz, not about you. Please don’t leave.”

Kieran nods in approval, as if he had helped Luke compose this little speech.

Noah just looks at you, face unreadable, as you rest your head on Sylus’s shoulder.

“I had planned to give you a lot of shit. But I think I would’ve lost anyway,” she says, not looking apologetic at all. “It’s only been two days and you’re practically merging into one person.”

Sylus carries you to a loveseat next to the twins, with Noah on their other side.

“Thanks,” you say. “No worries.”

Everyone is awkwardly silent for a moment after your brief response. You seem to notice, and smile a little. “Can we hang out while you play?”

“Fuck yeah,” Luke says, and Kieran groans as the game is unpaused.

After a while, you, Luke, and Noah start discussing the difference between the remake and the original. What everyone likes, what they don’t. Sylus leans back, draws you onto his chest. His relief remains intense as you let him. The discussion moves on to which Silent Hill games are the best in the franchise, which are the worst. Luke and Noah have a good-natured clash about Silent Hill 4: the Room, with only a few insults flung at each other. You and Kieran share your admiration for Bloober Team's Layers of Fear, which Kieran liked because he didn't think it was scary, and which Luke hated, because he thought it was boring. Sylus doesn't give a shit about video games, and certainly not horror games. Life itself is already horrific enough, he doesn't have the patience for manufactured terror. He just listens, feeling your heartbeat against his chest, breathing in your comforting scent.

A feeling of wholeness settles in him, as unfamiliar as hope. As unfamiliar as the happiness from your movie night, just last night. You, Luke, and Noah have moved on to animatedly arguing about some character’s outfit changes between the original and the remake.

He feels like he’s been standing, left behind in the dark for so long, and he’s finally being allowed home. Whatever is bothering you, he’ll fix it. He’ll destroy the world if he has to, to preserve the scene in front of him, so that he can offer you this, so that he can experience this with you, again, and again, and again. His gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

End notes: I had planned shenanigans for the twins and Noah to increase their odds in winning the bet, but this story is already out of control with how long it is, and some of the things I thought of were really manipulative and fucked up even if I personally thought they were hilarious, but my brain is craving a softer vibe for this story I guess (lmao if this can be considered soft), so I hope this isn't too much of a let down for the resolution of the bet subplot. I've given up hinting at what's coming next because it turns out I'm very bad at guessing what's next.

#love and deepspace #love and deepspace sylus #sylus x reader #sylus x mc #my fanfic #hope it's enjoyable despite the somber tone

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bullet-prooflove · 17 hours ago

Note

Hello ~~ How about "Moustache - accident - hot" for Eddie Diaz? There's so many ways, it could go wrong or right

Tagging: @kmc1989 @gatefleet @tigolebittiez @mckinleysbones @totalstitchlover19

Companion piece to:

Box Breathing - Eddie's been struggling since Christopher left.

Always - You make a promise to Eddie.

Real - Eddie tells you he wants something real.

A Future With You - Eddie makes a realisation during a one on one game of basketball.

Eddie finds your secret Instagram entirely by accident. He’s scrolling through his feed one day when app pops up ‘people you may know’.

Mostly it’s people who are connected to Chris, his math tutor, his bestie’s mom, people he really doesn’t want to associate with on social media but then he comes across one that catches his eye.

That_bookish_bitch.

The profile pic is of a book he doesn’t recognise propped up on a coffee table that he does. It’s one he helped you upcycle not too long ago. He still has the color Nebula Blue smeared across one of his old t-shirts.

He spends his time in-between calls studying the account. It’s a very popular bookstagram, showcasing the novels that you’ve been reading. They’re all filthy books, books that make even him blush because the stuff in them, it’s stuff that he’s only ever fantasied about.

Knowing that you’re into it too, well it does a little something to him.

It’s when he comes across the post about ‘Cash’ that he learns your views on moustache riding and the thought of you sitting on his face, taking your pleasure it’s hot, so hot that he ends up fucking his fist in the bathroom because he can’t get the idea out of his head.

It’s three hours later that he runs into you, he’s coming off shift and you’re coming on. He thinks he has a mind stutter in that moment because the words are already out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“With Christopher away in Texas I’ve been trying to do a little more reading. Anything you’d recommend?”

“Yea.” You say reaching into your satchel, it’s packed with two or three books that he can see, it takes you a minute to select one before you pull it out and hand it to him.

He looks down at the cover and his cheeks start to flush because it’s that damn book.

Cash…

“Thanks for the like by the way.” You say patting his shoulder as he stands there in daze, because of course his fucking finger must have slipped when he was reading your review. “Let me know what you think about page 103.”

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#eddie diaz #eddie diaz x reader #eddie diaz imagine #911 on abc #911 #911 abc #911 show #edmundo diaz #edmundo eddie diaz

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ink-and-dagger · 2 hours ago

Note

Hi Legacy, thank you for your comment and for your compliment about my writing. Unfortunately, Tumblr wouldn’t let me leave this response to your comment under the fic, so I am having to add it onto your reblog. Something I really, genuinely, did not want to have to do.

I hear what you are saying, and am in full agreement with you - tags play a vital role in reader protection, and there’s nothing more frustrating (and in some cases dangerous) than people misusing them.

However, a few words now in my own defence.

I am not new here. I have been writing and posting Silco fics since Arcane first aired back in 2021. It seems more likely in this case that you are new if not to the Arcane fandom then to my blog/writing specifically - so allow me to provide a bit of context which may help, because I don’t believe this case is as cut-and-dry as you believe it to be. I began posting my multi-chapter Silco x Reader fic Drink With Me in January 2022, and updated regularly until its completion in July of that same year. I was extremely lucky in that my story gained a lot of traction and interaction within the fandom throughout that time. People became extremely invested in the Reader character, and would ask me all sorts of questions about her. That’s how Astrid was born. She became a point of reference outside the fic for those who wanted someone to visualise, whilst the fic itself remained strictly a Reader Insert. In the few years since this story wrapped up, my followers have remained invested in the ‘Drink With Me’ universe (again, I’m incredibly lucky and thankful for this), and to this day I receive tons of requests for bonus content set within this universe that I try to fulfil whenever I can. Despite these ficlets being connected to a main multi-chapter fic, most of them can easily be read as a standalone and do not require the context or any prior knowledge of the main fic to make sense. Additionally, as I did with the main fic, they are always written in 2nd person, the character is never referred to by name, and I never use any physical descriptors beyond anatomical ones during smut. If you were to take away any and all tags and look purely at the text alone, it reads as a traditional reader insert, which is why I tag it as such. I include the ‘Astrid’ and ‘OC’ tags for those people who are familiar with the DWM fic and universe and who specifically follow me for this reason, so that they know in their minds that the ficlet relates to the world/timeline of Drink With Me in some way shape or form. I think the point I’m trying to make is that those who are familiar with me and my work will see the ‘Astrid/OC’ tag and go “Ah cool it’s this universe”. Whereas for everyone else I add the ‘can be read as gen!reader insert’ note at the top so that they can go “Ah cool, let me just ignore that character tag then” and happily read it as a general reader insert fic perfectly fine. I hope that makes a bit more sense as to why I tag this way, why I’ve always tagged this way, and why I will continue to tag this way for my Drink With Me adjacent works. If I ever were to write something in 1st or 3rd person or that described the MC in a very specific way, then I would of course not tag that as a reader fic.

Now, so long as we’re here discussing fandom etiquette, I’d like to politely point out that adding your grievance onto the reblog of a specific fic is not a ‘gentle reminder’ - it’s a full-frontal attack on the author who wrote that fic. It would have been far better for you to create your own, separate post addressing the fandom as a whole, or to send me a quiet, private comment/DM on the side.

As I’ve already said, I empathise with your point of view, and I hope you are able to empathise with mine. If the way I choose to tag my work bothers you, then please feel free to block my account so that I don’t show up whilst you are searching for content. At the end of the day we are all individual humans - you cannot expect everyone to interpret/measure/categorise everything in the same way you would, and it’s imperative to take some measure of responsibility for cultivating your own online space, instead of relying on others to do it for you.

What if Astrid find a pic of young Silco by accident hehhehehehhehehehehhe

Snapshot

A Drink With Me ficlet

870 words || Established relationship || Silco x Astrid (but can be read as gen f!reader) || SFW but suggestive || MDNI

“Oh my Gods.”

“What?”

“Oh. My Gods.”

Time has stripped the photograph between your fingers of its glossy sheen and has left the edges blunt and frayed, but you would recognise those features anywhere; no less sharp nor striking through the faded sepia.

“This is you.”

It had slipped from between two ledgers as you’d perused Silco’s bookshelves – an activity more to entertain your idle hands than a genuine search for reading material. The image itself is simple and candid: A young man, seemingly oblivious to the fact his portrait is being taken, sat at a familiar bar, with eyes downcast toward a spread of papers.

That same man looks up at you now from a very similar spread of papers. “What is?”

“This.” You drift over to his desk and perch on its edge, all the while unable to tear your gaze from the photo in your hands. The pitch dark hair swept back into a low bun. The familiar strays – the same ones that even now will always be the first to escape any styling under the combing of agitated fingers – falling forward into his face, only far longer and thicker than you’re used to. His skin, unblemished and smooth, save for the chronic furrow between his brows – etched there long before time and tragedy ravaged the rest.

Silco hums absently; an indication that he acknowledges your discovery but finds little interest in it. You can imagine the man in the photograph making the exact same noise, were someone to distract him from his paperwork for a reason he deemed benign. You flip the photo over. No date.

“How old are you here?”

Silco exhales through his nose, places his pen down with a pointed clack, and extends his hand wordlessly toward you.

“Hah! Do you think I’m wet behind the ears?” you hold the photograph out of his reach, “You can tell just fine from over there thank you very much.”

He cuts you a scathing glance, before leaning forward in his chair with a foreboding creak to peer more closely at the image. His scarred lips purse slightly in thought.

“Mid–late twenties. I can’t say for certain.”

“You were hot.”

“Were?”

“Were and are,” you coo, reclining backwards over the desk into his space, one elbow pitched on his paperwork to hold your weight whilst you flap the photograph in front of his face, “Can I keep this?”

“For what reason?”

“Dirty ones.”

“Hardly necessary,” Silco says, the very corner of his mouth creasing upwards as he catches your wrist to halt your photo-flapping, “You have access to the real thing.”

“True, true, and you can be sure I’ll continue taking advantage of that.” You grin, shoving your captured, photo-wielding arm a little closer to him in emphasis, “But right now I’m talking about some alone time with this guy.”

Silco scoffs under his breath and releases your wrist. You twist onto your front, weight propped on both elbows as you admire the photograph in your grip. You trace a finger down the slender throat of the man in the photo, over the generous wedge of chest exposed by his open crimson collar.

“D’you think he’d notice me? If I came into that bar?”

“Oh I’m certain he would.”

“Yeah?” You lift your gaze from the man in the photo to the one before you – as equally breathtaking. More so. You catch your lower lip between your teeth. “What line would he use?”

Silco hums, low and thoughtful, leaning forward in his chair, closing in on your space. He picks up his abandoned pen, briefly twirling the implement until it’s poised between his elegant fingers like a cigarette. Nib safely facing his own palm.

“After downing the dregs of his drink for courage... he would have approached you.”

With sensual tenderness, he brushes the barrel of his pen along your cheek, warmed metal against warmer skin. Catching at the curve of your jawline, and tracing over your pulse in a way that makes it fumble a beat.

“Cast his gaze over each of your pretty, pretty features. One by one,” he murmurs, slowly drawing the end of the pen down your jugular, down the slope of your collar bone, to leisurely trail through the cut of your cleavage. The corner of your mouth hooks up. The warmth low in your belly coils a little tighter.

“He would have leaned in close,” Silco whispers, demonstrating just so, “Close enough that you’d almost taste the whiskey on his breath.”

Blunt metal drags a purposeful line up your throat, and your lips part softly as he tilts your face toward his with the barrel of his pen flat and firm beneath your chin.

“And asked you – very nicely – to stop leaning on his paperwork.”

You press your tongue against the inside of your cheek while Silco’s dual eyes sizzle with smug mirth. It’d be unthinkable, really – to forfeit either one for the sake of a matching pair.

You straighten and push off his desk, hips swaying as you saunter over to the bedroom with the photograph in hand.

“Well,” you say, pausing in the threshold and turning to him with a smirk, “If you need us, you know where we’ll be.”

#inky has spoken #fandom etiquette

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artificiallita · 1 day ago

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i got bit by the butch wolverine bug and trust me im in lov w her BUT have we considered futch deadpool???

(headcanons and upcoming fic snippets under the cut)

working on a big silly fanfic about this hot mess boinking logan in the odyssey. here’s some headcanons while the story finishes cooking.

- so. kept her first name as wade. i’ve seen a few alt names floating around for f!deadpool (big love for the winnies, winonas, and wandas of the ladypool extended universe) but genderfuck ‘not rlly a name’ just fits my vision for her. her parents were weird idk.

- deadpool is a woman in all variants except one in my personal headcanon. he is called dudepool. also her corresponding nicepool is male gaze-ified pre-mutation wade. she’s bleach blonde and her suit has a titty window.

- ex special forces turned mercenary whose life shit the bed when she was diagnosed with cancer. tried to be proactive about it long enough to get a mastectomy, then found out said cancer was pretty much everywhere else, and we know the story from there. since this predates her healing factor, she’s permanently single-boobed. has padding in her suit to even her out since it doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, wears big t-shirts and ignores it in her civilian life.

- bisexual disaster zone. spent many years in a very happy and deeply perverted relationship with a male stripper named van carlysle, until that went down the toilet. a solid 70% of the casual sex she has is with women.

- dresses like the shitshow nightmare we know and love, loves an awful t shirt and a pair of crocs. put little to no effort into her appearance pre-mutation and that hasn’t really changed, had a brief phase of screwing around with makeup and wigs and then decided it was basically - to use a line of internal monologue from the pending fic - rolling a turd in glitter.

- speaking of, has a real complex about the changes to the way people perceive her post-mutation, namely that they seem to find her super fucking irritating and odd in a way that they very much Didn’t when she was still conventionally hot. between her military background and the general company she keeps, she’s quite often the only woman in her circles, and has always been a dysfunctional mess of adhd and unfiltered word-vomit, but that was generally read as mpdg ‘cool girl’ behaviour prior to her transformation, and now people seem to just think she’s a lunatic. less ‘oh god im hideous’, although she *absolutely* has those moments too, more ‘oh god everyone i know has thought i was a weird pain in the ass this entire time and only tolerated me because they wanted to fuck me’

- wears a lot of poorly applied eyeliner and purposely sleeps in it because she thinks it looks cool. it does not.

- had absolutely zero plans to snitch to cassandra about johnny’s rant, right up until the ‘bald hell’ line. she took that shit personally (almost definitely didn’t need to but whatever. i support women’s wrongs.)

and some snippets from the fic, all of which are me wade objectifying logan. technically spoilers but also what else did anyone expect

#deadpool and wolverine #deadpool fanart #deadpool #lady deadpool #ladypool #Wade Wilson #x men #x men fanart #digital illustration #digital art #butch wolverine #poolverine #deadclaws #lesbian deadpool #f!deadpool #gender bend #rule 63 #marvel fanart

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hyukascampfire · 6 hours ago

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𝑯EART 𝑊ORM ⸺ hueningkai ℘˒´ˎ˗

⨾𓍢ִ໋ ˒˒ 𝚑𝔢art𝚠𝔬rm

[𝑛]. a relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.

⸺ listen to the playlist .ᐟ ‧˚

〝﹙ 📼 ﹚“I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?” ˛ ､､

wc ➛ 17.9k

𝔭airings childhood bsf!kai x reader (lowkey soulmates?) ⤷ ft. asshole!yeonjun x reader

𝒢 ‎; smut ˒ angst ˒ some fantasy

𝔴arnings angst, family issues, fingering, jealousy (i’m sorry i just love ts), yeonjun really is an asshole, orgasm denial, thigh fucking, unprotected sex (they're stupid!), strength kink a lil bit, breeding kink, possessiveness, cream pie, choking... i think that's all, lmk if i missed any

✎୭ ashlynn's note omg. this was such a fun palate cleanser to write. this wasn't supposed to be as big as it is, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and i got super into the story. this kai is SOOOO!! yeah. i’m so nervous posting this because i’ve only ever posted TSFAWC, but…. here you areee (^^;; this is not proofread, so if you see a mistake... give me a sec. i'll get to it. hehe

Though you fan your hand furiously over your face, the little breezes washing over your clammy skin are not enough. The air is thick and heavy with summer’s heat. So thick that you almost feel it each time you swallow. It’s better than just letting yourself melt away, though. The cushion at your back doesn’t help much. It holds your warmth and returns it to you the longer you sit slumped back into it. You suffer it though—you’ve gone too sluggish to move.

You let a leg dangle over the arm of a chair, watching a hopeful moth dance in the light of the buzzing porch light overhead. It flutters frantically in it, making a grand fight to reach that false moonlight, only to drop away when it realizes that it’s being burnt. You watch it rinse and repeat, relentless and sure, for who knows how long. It’s no special moth—no luna moth or the ones with the pretty pink wings—but the light falls down on it and colors it a pleasant stardust silver.

You delight in letting your conscious brain turn off to watch it. It lets you forget the sweltering under your skin, and also that Kai had drug you out here. His dad gave him shit when he plays inside, but it’s way too hot to be out here. Isn’t it supposed to cool off after the sun goes down? It doesn’t feel like it. The deep acoustics are drowned out each time a car whirrs by. Playing outside should be the best option, but you and Kai live right on a busy road.

When the roar of some car going ten miles over the speed limit doesn’t obscure his playing, though, you admire the intricacy of it. His fingers work up and down the neck, jumping frets that you imagine would be impossible to anybody without those long fingers of his. You had always been a loud supporter of his playing, even way back when the most he could play were simple chords, but you became especially so when a few years back he put a guitar in your hands and tried teaching you. Even with his fingers guiding yours, it was quick to learn that the effortlessness with which Kai handles the instrument is hard earned.

He practices on the acoustic guitar, but that’s not his domain. With houses just a dash across the street from each other, Kai had grown up at your home more than he had at his own. So vividly, you remember the stars in his eyes when he’d listen to your dad’s music. Metallica, The Smashing Pumpkins, Linkin Park, any of it. He had fallen in love with it a long time ago. Your whole life you knew that it was only a matter of time before he was in his own band, chasing his dreams with a boundless mind and an indelible vision of himself on stage. How had that time come so soon, though? You don’t know if the notebooks full of inky lyrics that live wherever he deems inspiration might hit him make you proud or nervous. He’s making good on his dazzling aspirations, and you?

You speak finally into the air, cutting through heat waves and his music and the night. “Isn’t it weird that we’re not going back to school after this summer?”

He doesn’t have to even stop playing to answer you. Playing comes to him as a second nature. “Kinda,” he answers, brown eyes flitting up to you. “But it’s not like you won’t be back to it in September. College is the same shit.”

The leg you’d been dangling and bouncing pauses. That’s right; you’re supposed to be going to that college you’d chosen because it was only a three-hour drive away from here. You pluck at the seat’s threadbare fabric, and the moth, still there, becomes oh-so-interesting once again. When his playing stops, you drop your head back with a cushioned thud and a groan that you wrangle in your throat.

“Why are you acting like that?” he says, voice gone sharp like accusation. He doesn’t even know the truth, but he’s known you too long.

Can’t you just keep secrets for yourself, sometimes?

Kai, arms clad in a well-loved hoodie even in this dreadful weather, lays the guitar down. You maintain your silence. “Seriously, what?”

Some secrets have timers, though. This one could only last you until about September, or even August when he realizes that you’re not preparing to return to school. A controlled sigh from your chest isn’t enough to soothe the nerves that sparks. “Nothing.”

“Secrets, huh?” Kai says. When you do finally look to him, black spikes of hair frame his eyes and the accusation in them.

It’s a simple poke, but it gets under your skin as sharp as any thorn might. It’s not like you don’t keep secrets from him, and you’re sure he keeps some from you too. But those are the little kinds, the inconsequential ones—like I ate already when asked why you’re not eating or like Yeah, I’m fine when it’s been a bad day. You don’t hide this kind of stuff from each other. Usually, you’d run over to his place to tell him whatever’s bothering you. Why not, when he’s known even the worst details of your life for almost the entirety of it? You’ve been holding this one close to your chest since somewhere around the end of senior year, though. The longer you let it fester, the worse your nervousness snowballs. “C’mon, Kai. Let’s not do this. Can you keep playing?”

He doesn’t like that, of course. But you watch recognition dawn over his chocolate brown eyes, helpless to stop it. “You’re not going,” he says. It’s not a question nor a suspicion, it’s a bone-dry fact.

Well. There that goes. You want to tear every hair on your head right out. Why had you even thought you’d keep him in the dark about it? When he’s not out in some garage making music, you two are together. The conversation was going to stroll by at some point; this was only inevitable. His disappointment radiates off him in waves and blisters you. He hasn’t even said anything yet, but you know exactly what he thinks of it. It’s why you kept it from him in the first place.

Your silence is enough confirmation from him. “Why?” he says. “I thought you were excited to move out.”

Wincing, you nod slowly. You were. Even went through the whole application process, along with most other kids your age. Ultimately, you never went through with declaring a college. You don’t exactly know why, but somewhere weaseled down in the shadowy recesses of your soul, you know. Taking those steps, the massive and terrifying ones from adolescence into adulthood, meant agreeing that this form of your life was over. It meant that at some point, you’d be moving away from here to where living your days away in Kai’s room would not be a choice. Everybody has to do it eventually, you know that. Kai’s music gig could take off any day, too. He’s going to make it happen. And then what? All this stalling and wishing on just a bit more time would mean nothing, he’d be off and chasing that dream. As excited as you are for it to finally become reality for him, there’s a nasty bitterness that’s budded in your chest, infecting your person.

Can’t things just stay like this?

“I was,” you say. It comes out of your mouth heavy.

“Then why aren’t you going?” he says. Crickets, never seen but always heard, sing their song into the night’s darkness. “You didn’t get rejected. You’re too smart for that.”

An ache sits heavily somewhere near the center of your chest, maybe over your heart. All those good grades, nights spent bent over a desk and AP paperwork—you’re wasting it. You shake your head. “No... just...” It’s an effort to dress your thoughts in a way that might appease him. A quiet moment stretches with your thinking before you continue, “I don’t know what I want to do.”

He doesn’t like that, the yellow wash of the overhead light dancing over his taut lips and hard eyes. “Don’t know what you want to do?” he says, bringing his legs up onto the seat to crisscross them. He wears his favorite jeans. They’re heel-bitten and baggy enough over his legs that he can wear them around the house without any bother. “You’ve wanted to be an artist your whole life. You know exactly what you want to do.”

Your chest only seems to ache harder. When the both of you were only young and hopeful, you both had big dreams. Kai was going to be the face of a metal band, and you were going to be an artist. A painter, potter, sculptor, even doing animation for those big companies like Dreamworks and Disney. You wanted any of it, just as long as you were doing art. You’d even promised him that you’d do the cover art for his albums with interlocked pinkies and flushed, hopeful cheeks. That passion and love wasn’t gone from you, it blazed strong in your veins. This blaze wasn’t the kind that kept you warm and excited to push forward into life, though. It had morphed into something that scalded you when you got to close, or started imagining yourself pursuing its call. It’s a taunting silvery glow, no longer a guiding north star. Taunting words of family members stamped down on that hope hard. When you were little, it was said lighthearted and in passing. The older you got, though, the more serious their faces became. They wouldn’t say it outright perhaps, but you hear what they think well enough. Art is a dead-end career.

Shifting in your seat, you tell him, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” Kai says. “There are good colleges for that.”

“I just... don’t know.”

Shaking his head, he tells you, “But you love it.”

You do. In its every form, you love creating. But loving it doesn’t mean that it’s right for you, or that you should trust your future in its hands. “I think I can do it in my own time,” you say, finally pushing yourself upright from the cushion. “Don’t wanna kill the passion by doing it for a living, you know?”

He thinks on that for a moment. “If you love it, you should do it,” he says.

An awful frustration bubbles in your chest. Kai has always had a clear life path, the steps ahead of him set in stone and waiting for him to follow in them. It’s hard for him to see why you might not want to do the same. There’s nothing that makes you as happy as the fact that he has it all figured out, that he knows just where he’s going and that he’s so incredible at it that he doesn’t have to worry about meeting the requirements, but your path seems obscured and untrodden. Punctuating a deep, resonant sigh, you say, “It’s not that easy, Kai.”

“If you’re not doing that, then what are you going to do? Are you just going to settle for a nine-to-five?” he says full of accusation, the tapping on his knees gone still.

A dry laugh, you say, “Maybe I’ll marry a super rich guy and just do my art for a living. No nine-to-five.”

His face flashes. He’d always been a bit reserved, especially around others, but he bared his emotions freely around you. You hold them dearly to your chest and made sure to do your best to make good on that trust. He says, “You’re more than some guy’s housewife.”

Cheeks radiating in the heat, you snort. “I know, dork. I’m a rockstar’s best friend. It’s my personal favorite achievement.”

His face sours when you reach out and pinch hard at his cheek, but he doesn’t pull away or brush you off. The skin there is warmed and clammy. Really, the two of you should go meet the cool AC inside before you suffer heat stroke. But this moment feels so nice—your shoulders feel tons lighter without something to hide. If you had it your way, things would stay like this forever. Just the two of you, sat here like you have so many times before, just taking for granted the time you’ve got together.

His mouth opens to banter, probably something about how he’s not a rockstar yet or to get you back for calling him a dork. Wingbeat and sterling dashes about your face send the image into a blur, though. You’re a quick mess of limbs and a whipping head, as if it’ll chase the thing away from you.

“Seriously?” Kai says. You’d climbed halfway over him, elbows digging into him and knee doing a number on his thigh. “It’s a moth. You’re not scared of moths.”

Lingering for a few moments later to ensure the flying thing was nowhere on you or around you, you hold back a laugh before you climb off him and fix your hair with undignified tucks behind your ears. “He was in my face,” you say around a laugh, because you know it was a bit too much. Nobody likes wings in their ears and spindly legs in their face, though, and you’re in no control of what you do when anything with six legs tries and get too friendly. Even moths.

“You just wanted me to protect you,” he says. A sarcastic, shit-eating smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh,” you scoff, batting your eyelashes and clasping your hands together all saccharine-sweet. “Yes, Romeo, won’t you kill that bug for me? This girl’s heart just can’t take it!”

Kai’s nose crinkles, and the playful light twists into a glare. “Nasty.”

“That’s how you sounded,” you say. “I only reacted accordingly.” Laughing, you kick your legs out over his lap and sprawl back out. He takes the guitar back into his hands.

As much as you want to escape the mugginess, you’ll survive it for just a little while longer—if only with the force of an indulgent heart. The eternal moments are those you allow to linger.

⚝⭒

Some things, you forget when you’re older. Maybe it’s time’s hand, eroding memories down and stuffing more in the longer you live to experience them. But also maybe because they’re the sort of things you can’t say in the adult world without a laugh in the face and a look from down their noses.

This memory is one of those forgotten things. It’s moth-bitten and dusty, something you one day folded up in a moving box and decided to never revisit.

You’d been down at the creek. Kai and you had spent so many summer days there. It wasn’t too far from home, just past the filbert trees and into the shallow neck of the backwoods, but there you were out of sight and free to get up to nothing good. It was a wonder your mom ever let you do it. Kai’s dad didn’t care too much where he went or what he did, but your mom dug her claws in deep. You like to think that she imagined you two would have each other, if anything ever happened.

Usually, you’d be there holding your jeans up from the stream and Kai would be letting his jeans go dark with it. The bite of water was nice as it washed over warm skin. Fun was a simple thing to find, then. You dug your fingers into the mudbanks and tossed stones way too big to be throwing at each other, just because you two remembered how much the adults hated it when you did. Then, you’d drag tired limbs home avoiding sweetgum tree spikes that had fallen to the ground and dug splinters out from your feet.

This day, you had been in the blackberry bushes. It was maybe late June or early August, and they’d gotten heavy on their branches. You’d waited until the smell of them, summer-warmed, was sweet and cloying in the air to pick them. With buckets in your hands, you plucked only the fattest berries from their bunches. Your fingers were stained a delightful purple and perhaps a bit thorn raw, but you didn’t mind much then. You plucked for hours, and it was dusk before you could catch it. Dinner was no doubt waiting for you back home.

“There’s a bunch over here,” Kai had said. He reached a long boyish arm, still awkward and lanky with puberty, up high for ripe bush. You finished off picking before climbing around thick branches sticking out to take a peek. A bunch, there was.

When you went to drop a handful of them into your bucket, Kai hissed. He’d been snagged by a vicious looking branch, those ones as thick as a finger with thorns to match and you’d warn each other tongue-in-cheek to watch out for that one. He’d worn those ridiculous shorts that day, the ones that looked half pants half shorts with how long and baggy they were, and the claws of the bush had jumped at the opportunity. At first the scrapes were white, but then red blood crawled out and down his leg.

“Kai,” you said, some parts chiding and some parts just wondering how he’d managed that. You surveyed his leg for a bit, and then determined that he should wash his leg off in the stream. He walked there strong, but of course you noticed the hobble beneath his acting. When you squatted down into the dry grass and cupped water to wash off his leg, you laughed.

“What?” he had said, holding the shorts up. You covered your laugh with a hand, but it erupted past your palm. You remember the glare on his face very well.

You still laughed. “You’re stupid,” you had told him.

“I didn’t see it,” he said. “I tripped over it because it was sticking out.”

That time when you brought your hands to catch some water, there was a twinkle in its surface. You didn’t notice it for a second. The creek moved fast and you could see a lot of things in its reflection. When it lingered, that’s when your brows furrowed. It seemed to twirl, dancing around like alive over the stones.

The sound of Kai’s voice remains with you. “Hey,” he had said, strong to call your attention but also wavered with uncertainty.

When you looked up, there was silver dust dancing around you.

It was fluffy and whorling, fine silver stardust. It’d moved weightless in the air, as though it barely existed. In the center of it were a few moths. They seemed to be made of sterling powder just as the dust was, and they glowed against dusk’s backdrop. If your memory serves you right, there had been a sweet hymn of coos from them. They beckoned you. Summer’s heat felt lighter, and so did your chest. You wondered where they had wanted you to go.

Almost afraid that if you spoke they might have fluttered away, you whispered soft and low to Kai. “What is that?” He was stood frozen there, pant leg still scrunched up in his fist. Stardust glowed soft in his brown eyes while he took it all in, you remember. It wasn’t a scared frozen. You weren’t scared, either—rather, it was as if that lightness had found its way into the core of your being and brushed over it with mending hands.

He whispered back, “I don’t know.” How could he have known? It was absurd.

Those whisps had beckoned you, flowing toward the deeper woods. The soft moths, their murmuring brushing up against your ears, seemed to wait for you to follow. You remember a pull, soft tendrils wrapping themselves around your heart and the yearning it planted there.

But there was also this reluctance, a bone-deep answering that had told you: No. You’re not ready.

“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him.

You didn’t even need to tell him twice. Berry buckets forgotten; the journey home was a stranger one. When your dad asked why you returned from berry picking emptier handed than you had left the house, Kai and you only shared a look. You pair kept that evening at the creek hidden so well that it became more forgotten than shared secret.

⚝⭒

Once, you had been the type of girl that loved being around family. Some of your favorite days of your life were spent in this living room, T.V. roaring over bouncing conversation. Some of those nights ended in rosy cheeks and laughs, and some ended with words thrown angry like fireworks. You never knew which you’d be getting, but you endured the fear of not knowing because it was a simple love—the basic kind built with biology into you the moment your infant skin touched your mother’s. You endured it because eventually, sleep washed away the bad taste left in your mouth and you forgave them quick, sometimes quicker than you ought to, and things would go on as if it hadn’t even happened. You endured it because you could handle its burden, if only to feel the warmth you feel when it’s a good day.

Kai was always there—his dad was hardly home, so he found family in yours. When you were younger, you’d been embarrassed he was there for caustic, spitted words and intimate fights. Now, you’re just grateful for his shoulder.

So, yes. Once, you had loved being around your family. But things feel tenser now, nights spent all together less frequent and when they do happen, they’re tainted by a strange air. You think that this strangeness is new, but an awful worry also makes you think that it’d always been there, that you only feel it now because you’ve grown into your adult mind. A hollow ache stakes its claim in your chest, declaring that it won’t leave until you find that youthful ignorance and joy once more. You think that it might stay there forever.

Bare feet bounding down the stairs, you make a rare appearance downstairs. The cupboard is only half open to make way for a snack raid before your mom’s voice cuts through the air. You know quickly just by the look on her face that you should’ve stayed upstairs.

“Hey,” she says, gathering laundry into a basket. “You’ve been applying to jobs?”

With an anxious belly, you tell her, “Yeah. A few. They’re not really, like, ideal, but I sent applications.” You don’t remember when it got hard to look into your mother’s eyes, but you can’t bring yourself to do so now.

“Not ideal?” she says. “It’s not like you can be picky. Mcdonalds or wherever, I don’t care, you’re going to need to get a job if you’re staying here.”

“I know. I applied,” you reiterate around a mumble. You close the cabinets, not so interested in a snack anymore. “I just... I don’t know, ma. I don’t want to do that for a living, going between those sorts of jobs.”

Face hard and abrasive against the truth you bare, she does that awful taunting smile that makes you feel small. Stupid. “You’re not going to college, so that’s what it’s gonna be. You can’t sit up there and draw for a living. You’ve gotta get into the real world, get some real experience.”

There’s a burst of hurt in your chest, dazzling and gnawing. She’s getting closer to saying how she really feels about your dreams out loud every day. Your face burns and so do your eyes, knot thick in your throat. “Yeah, okay. Got it,” you say, nodding. You’re at the front door before you even know it slipping on shoes and fighting the greatest internal battle to will back tears. She’d use those against you, no doubt about it. “I’m going to Kai’s,” you throw over your shoulder.

Whatever she barks back at you, you’re glad you don’t hear. Bells on some old Christmas decoration hung on the door that had yet to be taken down, even into summer, jingle and wash it away for you.

Kai’s brows shoot up when he opens the door to your face crumpling. You’d done so well at damming it up, but the wall cracks and the water crashes through once you see him. If it were anybody else, you’d feel icky and attention seeking, but you’d held Kai to your chest through gut-wrenching sobs as much as he’s done it for you. Without question, he takes you into his arms, warm hand running up and down your back. The warm soothing is so familiar. You melt right into it.

He keeps you there for a long moment. Then, his chest rumbles as he tells you, “Come on.” The walk through the AC to his bedroom is nice. Having a house like Kai’s to come to where it can just be you is nice, too. You step around the mess of clothes and scattered belongings on his floor like you have a muscle-memory roadmap of his room. Boxsprings creak and hard mattress welcome you back home. His room is dark as always, a night-dweller you call him. The array of peeling band posters plastered over walls you two had painted blue some years ago, when it’d been his favorite color, don’t help to lighten it up. He keeps a low lamplight on.

“She never listens to me,” you say, crying gone to occasional sniffles from your chest. You rest your cheek on your bent knee.

“I know,” he says. “But at least she cares about you. Pays attention to you.” His voice is soft and deep and right next to you. Always right next to you, there for you even when you might not appreciate it as you should.

His dad cares too little what he does, and yours care too much. The grass is always greener on the other side, you know it. Still, you hold a fantasy where you’re able to do teenager stuff. Where you’d allow yourself to do bad things, because you weren’t so intent on painting yourself with their will. You two hold eyes for a long moment, your twinkling ones caught in that steady brown. “I just want to get away. Be my own person.” Your words are muffled in the softness of your skin.

“You had the chance to do it,” Kai says, hand playing with your fingers. “But you didn’t.”

Holding your legs closer, you lick your lips. What do you say to that? Would it ever be the time to tell him that you did it because you think that your soul is pathetically intertwined with his, and that it might snuff your lifeforce out to even try pursuing life without him? Without this? How do you tell him that you’re so frozen and unwilling to pursue any sort of future because it means accepting that this chapter is over? You clutch childhood to your chest like a wild animal guarding scarce food; you refuse. You refuse to acknowledge its end.

“Kai,” is all you say, trembled and thick. It’s not just your mother’s words that dig at you and tear to shreds the last bits of what dreaming you had left in you, but so many other reality checks too. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard those sorts of words, urging you forward. You can only dig your heel into the ground for so long before you’re swept away in time’s ruthless, endless moving.

He understands. Lifting your face with warm fingers against your cheeks, he says, “Hey. How about we go get ice cream, or something?”

Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?”

Smirk tugged over his mouth, he says, “Yes, Dairy Queen. A blizzard. C’mon, let’s go.” Sliding off the bed, he offers you an urging hand up.

But you falter. “I don’t know if we can. She’s mad at me. I don’t think she’ll let me go.”

“Let you go?” he says, eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t have to let you go. You’re an adult now, you go if you want to.” He offers his hand to you again.

It’s so him, freely going wherever he ordain it. The bullheadedness is very him, as well. Always the devil on your shoulder, he was the root of any rebellious thing you’ve ever done. He could never understand your apprehension, or why getting in trouble was such an awful thing to you. “I have to ask to get money.”

Brows pinching, he says, “You think I’m not gonna pay for you? You don’t need them to give you money, I’ll pay. I’ll take care of it.” He drags you up from the bed this time. “Live a little. Do you want to go?”

It was never the punishments or the getting in trouble that you were scared of, though. Disappointment was a scarier word than grounded. Sneaking out and those sorts of things, it’s not like you had angel wings at your back and never considered them. It’s that you are deeply, utterly terrified of changing how they look at you. You begin to tell him, “I do, but—”

He cuts you off, adamant. “Then do it. Let’s go. If you want to go, then go,” he says. “At some point, your life needs to become your own. It’s not sneaking out when you’re graduated and nineteen years old, it’s going wherever the hell you want. You’ve... You’re gonna end up stuck here, in this town, forever. You don’t deserve that.”

That sounds like both the best and the worst thing you’ve ever heard. You take his hand.

⚝⭒

Your frozen fingers nurse your ice cream. The cup itself is cold, but the Dairy Queen on your side of town is always thirty degrees below what it should be. It’d always been that way. Even way back when you two couldn’t drive, you’d get dropped off here to escape the melting weather and get a frozen treat with a handful of dollars. Each time, you’d start off sagging with the relief of summer’s weight off your shoulders and left the place shivering and sugar-mouthed.

It’s really only you two in here. You crinkle your nose when he takes a spoonful. “Out of all the flavors...”

Unbothered and no doubt expecting you to say it, he offers you a flat, “You get your flavor, I get mine.” He makes a point of taking an extra-long bite. His lips linger around the red plastic of the spoon and his brows rest high in silent challenge.

The corners of your lips twitch up. “Hmm. Well. I just have a hard time believing that Oreo... or, like, brownie fudge, is right there, and you actually want M&M. I don’t get how M&M your favorite.” A familiar banter falls over your tongues. Your heart buzzes and your cheeks radiate. This is the first you’ve done this all summer, and it’ll be weaning off into fall soon. Any other summer, you would’ve been here on all the hottest days. You hate that Kai’s been so busy with his music; you hate that you can hear the resounding ticks of the clock counting down your time. You also hate that the stubborn depths of you still believe that if you freeze yourself here in stasis that the world will relent and stop along with you.

You look over the sharp lines of Kai’s jawline as it feathers with his chewing, and the broadness of his shoulders where his jacket stretches around it, and the starkness of his collarbones against his chest and the bobbing of his adam’s apple when he swallows. No, time doesn’t stop. Some of him remains the same, though. In it, you see the boy that had love creeping up on you so long ago, with all its aching and all its hope. That freckle on the column of his neck, the bump in his nose leading down to the button tip that beckons your lips to steal a quick kiss.

And, those lips. They’re as soft as ever around the discontented grimace he pulls. “M&M isn’t my favorite.”

With a pursed mouth and patronizing brows arched over your eyes, you say, “Oh, huh. That’s funny, because if my memory serves me right, it’s the only flavor you’ve ordered for the past... six years.”

Kai husks a laugh at that. “That’s because they haven’t had my favorite for years,” he tells you, scooping up the final bit and then pushing it off to the side. “It was a blizzard of the month that they discontinued. The blackberry cheesecake one. I made peace with it, though. It lives on in my heart.” He grins, arms crossed over his chest and his back settled into the booth seat to let you finish your cup.

“Blackberry cheesecake,” you say, voice made taunting. Your nod is slow and taunting, too. “Well, forget M&Ms.Why would blackberry cheesecake be your favorite? Ever?”

His face falters, a moment where something flows over his eyes as if reliving a memory in a few short seconds. Then, he shrugs. “It just is.”

You roll your eyes. “Whatever,” you laugh. “Maybe my palate is unrefined.” Imagining the tarte fruit in purple swirls of ice cream, you’re taken back to a humid July day and the scent of churned mud.

The strange memory unfolds itself quick. As if it were waiting for you to find wherever it’d hidden itself away. With a sharp gasp, you say, “Oh my god, Kai. Do you remember that one day? That weird stuff we saw down at the creek?”

He nods. “Yeah. I was just thinking of that the other day, actually...”

Less interested in finishing your cup now, you let the spoon rest. “What?” you say, the word peaking in the middle. That day hadn’t crossed your mind once since it’d happened. “How weird is that?”

Scoffing a laugh, he says, “Weird, yeah. Just as strange as two kids high on fermented berries.”

That draws a breathy laugh from you. “Is that what you think it was?” you ask him with knitted brows. The berries had been fresh, and you two had popped plenty into your mouth. But no doubt, you’d have spat them right back out if they were that ripe. “I mean, we saw the same thing.”

“It happens to animals all the time. Squirrells, and stuff.” He lends you a gallic shrug. “We just freaked ourselves out. Like that one time you said you saw the shape of something in the dark and we freaked out. And it was clothes.”

Well, hallucinating, in tandem, a glowing mist because you two by chance ate fermented berries is a very long shot. However nonchalant he acts about it, he seems to have thought long and hard about it. Enough to reason it away with some far cry explanation. Would you have even been able to get drunk off a handful of fermented berries? And, god, you’re really sure that you’d have noticed. That taste isn’t really one you just don’t notice.

Whatever. Maybe you were just drunk idiots. That’s a lot easier to swallow, anyway.

“Okay, but you saw that. Did it not look sinister?” you say. With your spoon back in your hand, you punctuate the sentence pointing it at him. “You freaked out with me, too.”

An unsatisfied scowl on his lips, he steals a spoonful of your dessert. You don’t even swat him away—your phone buzzes in your pocket.

Catching sight of who’s calling, you share a long look with Kai. It’s funny, how fast those three white letters scramble you up. When you hesitate to answer, Kai tells you, “Answer.”

You hope she can’t tell you’re not at Kai’s by the refrigerators’ dull buzzing. It’s an effort to tussle that invasive worry back. You’re at Dairy Queen. Getting ice cream with the boy she’s known since childhood. She should clutch her hands and thank the sky that you’re here, not out in some nasty frat house like you could be. You thumb the green button.

Her voice comes through the speaker crackled and asking you to run over to do a quick dish load. For a heartbeat you consider telling her that you will and then start rushing home. Instead, you fork out the truth through resistant lips.

The hangup tone sits heavy on the air between you and Kai. Having listened to the whole thing on speaker, he says, “What was so hard about that? The world didn’t end, did it?”

The plush of your lip takes a hard gnawing. No, it hadn’t. “I know she’s not going to get mad at me for just going here,” you say as you rest your elbows onto the table. “It’s that they’re supporting me right now. I still live under their roof. The more I go around and insist I can do whatever I want, they’ll start reminding me of it.”

His face drawn, he lets his mouth twitch to one side. “Yeah,” he muses. “I never thought yours would be the type to kick you out.”

Kai’s dad had started threating him with getting kicked out years ago, when he first started telling him that he wanted to do music. How many times had he let reluctant tears flow into your shoulder over it? Because music wasn’t a real job? Back then, you’d whispered in his ears that he’d become everything he’d dreamed of and more as your fingers carded through shaggy locks of hair.

“I don’t know,” you say, humming it out noncommittally. “Is your dad still... y’know?”

Nodding slowly, his eyes tell. “Yeah. Always.”

“Because you’re taking the band seriously, now?” you ask.

“Probably. I don’t give a shit what he thinks about it. If I’m just his goddamn problem, I’ll give him what he wants soon enough.” His eyes blaze with promise of it.

It takes a bit out of you to not wince. Kai living anywhere but in the house across from yours is wrong. “I don’t think he necessarily wants that, Kai...” You take his hand in your icy ones, the urge to reach out to him thinly veiled under the guise of searching out warmth. He’d always run warmer than you—your personal heater. “It’s probably because he can see that you’re doing it for real. Not just saying it anymore.”

“Yeah, well,” he spits, “I can’t fucking wait to see what he’ll say to me when I make it. That piece of shit, though, he wouldn’t even care. It’s not like he ever gave a shit about me enough for it to matter.”

But, it matters to you, you want to tell him. You understand his need to throw it all in his face. Though. “Is that one label going to sign you? The one you were talking about?”

His tongue darts out to wet dry lips. “They haven’t yet. I don’t know. But I don’t need that money to get out of here, I’ve been working on it.”

“They will,” you say. “But, where would you go? Not too far?” You try and keep it light and playful, even as your heart aches.

“Come with me,” he says. It’s painfully blunt, as if it were that simple. “Let’s go get and apartment; you and me.”

“Kai...” you say. “You don’t have to drag me along because you feel bad.”

The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.

“What?” His face tightens, as if somewhere under the surface your words had scraped somewhere tender. “You don’t have to stay here forever. Please. I want... I want you to come with me. You wouldn’t have to even tell them; just bring all your stuff and go together. We could do it together. Like we said we would.”

“We were like, five. Everybody tries to pretend running away at five,” you deadpan. It’s a washy attempt at lightening things back up.

Living with him, moving out together, should feel like everything you’ve ever wanted. And, maybe it is. But, he’s not asking you to live with him the way you want him to. Not in the way that your aching heart wishes he would.

Kai doesn’t share the laugh you give him. “Yeah, okay,” he says, leaning into the table.

Perhaps you should consider the potent disappointment he’s terribly masking with a face of indifference, though.

⚝⭒

Slowly, the knots in your belly have worked themselves out. When Kai had dropped you off, they’d been so awful that you felt borderline sick. You sat the whole ride there in his old beat-up truck picking at your nails and rambling to him. He listened to you the whole time. And then when it was time to walk in, it had least felt a little easier to do so with his eyes on you, watching to make sure you made it in safely.

You’d gotten a job. It’s not too bad, folding clothes out on display. It would be nice if they kept the lights a bit brighter, but you’ll get used it eventually, you hope.

Most of your coworkers are around your age, but the one showing you the ropes... your heart had fluttered.

“You’ll get it,” Yeonjun says. The smile you find on his lips once he straightens up from placing product on a display is smooth and smug. Sleek strands of black hair fall over his eyes. You fluster under his gaze.

With arms crossed over your chest you say, “Yeah, probably.” You reach into the cardboard box for stock to practice on.

“Where’d you work before this?” he asks, leaning back into a wall to watch you. Suddenly, you make sloppier work of your folding. “Your first retail job?”

Some obnoxious pop song falls down from the speakers over the store. Nobody’s in here yet, thankfully; you’ve got some time to try and get a handle on everything. “No, this is my first job. I was so nervous walking in.”

Interest catches in his eyes. It encourages that smooth smile on his lips further. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll show you the reins.”

Your mind stalls. The suggestive, sly flicker to it—are you looking too much into it? Maybe that’s just how guys like Yeonjun act. It’s hard to pretend that you don’t see how he’s looking at you, though. It has your belly twisted up in fluttery knots. It’s not like you hadn’t had your share of his type. But, for some reason you’d rather not address, he’s got your heart thumping in your chest.

He laughs at your fifth attempt to fold up the shirt. When he takes it from you to help, he smells of musk and vetiver. “You going to college near here?” he continues.

“Nah, just doing this, I guess,” you answer, watching him fold it up to try and soak it up.

“Really? Why not?” he hums, crossing his arms about his chest. “You seem like a smart girl.”

Buffering, your blood buzzes in your veins and your cheeks burn. “Dunno. Not really sure what to do. Are you in college?”

“Nah. I’m trying to figure things out, too.”

The both of you pop your heads up when the bell rings to announce the arrival of a customer.

“Yeah,” you say, eyeing him. He’s a few years older than you, no doubt, and yet his life hasn’t fallen apart because he’s not done anything grand yet.

Time’s hand around your neck loosens. Just a little bit.

⚝⭒

You sit crisscrossed on top of Kai’s bedsheets. He’d thrown the windows open because the AC died, but it’s no help. The hot air wafting about the room sits heavy on your skin. You’d dressed in as little material as possible to let it breathe, bare thighs clad in a pair of loose shorts and a thin tank top, but it’s still miserable.

Perhaps you two should be going over to yours, but you haven’t had time alone with him for a few weeks now. You hate this busier life, where you struggle to make room for this.

Your new job isn’t so awful, though. Especially with Yeonjun there. A bout of nerves flows up through your stomach. That reminds you.

Sitting up a bit straighter, you consider not doing it. In fact, you really shouldn’t. But your mouth moves before you can put a stopper on it.

“Hey, Kai,” you say. The thickness in your throat makes you believe that your heart’s jumped up into it, caught. God, what are you doing? The unsure waver in your words has you regretting.

His eyes flicker up to yours. He hums out a, “Huh?”

No, this is wrong. You mess with the thin cotton strap of your tank top where it’d slipped down. “Never mind,” you tell him, trying to shrug it off.

That piques his interest. “No, what?” His brow pinches.

You lick your lips and shake your head. “Nothing, never mind. Really.”

His eyes search you from where he sits up against the wall. “Tell me,” he demands.

Really, you shouldn’t have said it in the first place. It was a ridiculous idea. But now you know he’s not going to let it go. And, ridiculously, you say it. “I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?”

Insects buzz outside as he looks at you, frozen in spot. You reject the urge to dart away or throw up. You’re honestly just as shaken as him. But really, who else could you trust with something like that? You don’t want Yeonjun to be disappointed if he kisses you, or to seem inexperienced to him.

And, perhaps, the hopelessly in love part of you hopes to at least feel his lips on yours at least once. If you’re going to be alone forever in your longing, you just wish that you can have this.

“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.

Of course, he’s shocked. You shift. “Forget I said that,” you tell him, unable to meet his gaze.

String-roughened fingers wrap around your upper arm. “I didn’t say anything,” he says, voice strained and face less shock-fallen and more darkened. “But... I mean, you want me to teach you to kiss for some other guy.” He spits out the last bit as if bitter in his mouth.

“You don’t have to do it,” you say. “I just... thought that I might ask you to do it. I don’t know, I’m sorry I said it. I’ll just wing it or something.” His room’s grown ten degrees hotter, if that was possible. Especially where you feel his eyes on your face.

Almost imperceptibly, his hand tightens around you. He swallows hard. “You want to learn how to kiss?” he says. “Fine. I’ll teach you.”

In a heart-stopping moment, your eyes snap to his. Brown and familiar, they hold you with an intensity that turns your limbs into jelly. The air is stifling. “What... do I do?” you ask when the silence becomes too heavy.

A muscle feathers in his jaw, reflected in the low light of his room. It’s quick and so easy to miss, but it tells you everything you need to know about how this is making him feel. How much disbelief he’s in. “Come here,” he says, stilted around the absolute absurdity of it. He pats on his lap.

You make a hesitant crawl across the bed toward him. It seems as though your elbows might buckle beneath your weight, but you make it despite the odds. A fog settles over your brain when you rest your hands on his shoulders and bring your legs to straddle his lap.

But you shove it back; you want to live and breathe every last second of this. No matter how unbelievable or blistering it is.

Breaths fan out over your face. It’s seizing your mind like undiluted liquor. “Where do I put my hands?” you ask him. It’s breathless, the air stolen right from your lungs though your mouths haven’t even touched.

“There is fine,” he says. His words sound breathless, too. The weight of his touch on you as he runs his own up to support your back is unsure. “And then...” he says. It falls out on your mouth slowly, and then he’s taking your lips onto his.

The walls melt away, sound does too. All that is real is the taste of his lips and how they move against you. Your lips start tentative, but you try his mouth movements yourself. It feels like a timid dance—it feels like deep, deep down, finally everything is right. That mist, thick and blinding, falls back over you.

Something changes. Something in it, where you two meet, changes. He becomes hungry. Softly locked lips turn biting and nipping, shaky breaths exhaled slow through your nose. His hands on your back become surer, and one even ventures off to grab your chin. The other holds you to his chest, melded together despite the intense smoke and flame rolling off your bodies. You wonder if he can feel your heart beating a mess there.

Reluctance paints you both when you pull back. You’re panting deep drinks of air. It’s hard to think; your mind’s run off and sits just out of reach. Licking your messy lips, stained with illicitness, you can only manage to brush your fingers against it to form words. “How... was that?” you say, searching his eyes. You find his pupils blown so wide that they consume the warm brown. You’re ready to jump out of your skin with that look pointed at you.

Kai doesn’t answer, though. He slams your mouths back together as if starved by just the brief moment you’d parted for air. Nips on your bottom lip and emboldened hands—he moves like roaring water through a dam. A dam that he’d worked hard to fortify, and yet, at a crack it’s all falling down. Fingertips digging through the fabric of your shorts down to your soft hips, his chest rumbles. You feel it reflected in your core, electricity charging there and shooting up your spine and down your thighs.

You kiss him for all the times you wish you would’ve, but didn’t. The slight rolls of your hips down onto him come easy. You love how it has him making a sound into your mouth and taking the fat beneath his fingers harder into his hands. He helps you.

He drops his head into your neck. Your head swims for air and he has you shuddering with just the brushing of his nose against the column of your neck. The walls of his room spin around you. “Kai,” you whine, every bit of friction his jeans provide, even clothed as you are, just enough to rile you but not to give you what you need.

“God,” he growls, thumbs hooking under your waistband. “You always fucking run around dressed in nothing,” he says, letting his fingers linger like a suggestion of undressing you. “Did you do it on purpose? Expect to make me crazy, knowing I couldn’t touch you?”

And, in those words, it seems that he steals every last bit of breath from you. How often had you gone braless or worn something like this around him? Laid here, in his bed, like that?

Grown tired of your fruitless grinding, he brings a hand down to support your lower back and says, “Turn around.”

Though you explode with the prospect of what he might be intending to do or what’s next, if you’re really going to do this, you do so in a flash of eager limbs. His chest is solid against your back, you melt against the feeling of it. He’d become such a man lately, filled out, and you watched it happen. It was hard for your eyes not to catch on muscle-corded forearms while he picked at strings or to not appreciate the timbred rumble of his voice when you’d feel it come from his chest. How could it not do things to you? Now, he’s dragging your shorts down your legs and you’re in disbelief.

“Fuck,” he breaths out. His fingers find your panties soaked through. “So, you’re the type to get dripping wet.”

An embarrassed blush decorates your cheeks. Kai drags his index finger in circles around your clit through the fabric as if enamored with how much of a mess you’d made of it. Your hips twitch every time he rolls right over it. It’s strange how he’s got your body acting on its own volition with his touches. Even stranger that it’s your best friend doing it. “Sorry,” you tell him, wavering.

He continues those terribly slow circles. “Sorry?” he says, chin on your shoulder. He’s got you wrapped up in him, with nowhere to go but to melt back into him and let his fingers work. Free hand on one of your inner thighs digging divots into the plushness there to hold it still, he tells you, “It’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s hot as fuck. You’re so excited for me to touch you, huh?”

The words wreak havoc on you, feeding the flame that has your belly twisted up tight and the ignition point between your thighs pounding. To hear them coming from him, reserved Kai, has you digging your fingers into his forearm to prove that it’s real. You’d never have imagined him being so... filthy. You imagine him behind falsely nonchalant eyes, devouring you with a perverted mind all the times you’d spent innocently sitting together in this room.

Your cheeks squish beneath his fingers as he takes your face and turns it to him. He wants to make sure you’re look at him as he asks you, “Do you want me to finger you?”

Like a record, your brain skips. Between the blunt, lewd question and his hand on you, it’s in overload. How could ask something like that so simply? Stunned as you are, of course you want him to. You want him to do anything to you. You nod.

Every last nerve and neuron in your system, just below the skin, cry out when his fingers slow down to nothing. “Hmm?” he says, ignoring the chasing of your hips and the opening of your thighs to invite him into paying your poor pussy the attention he’d ripped from it. He wants to hear you say it.

About ten minutes ago, you lost your mind. It does not return to you now. “I want you to,” you say, chest beating in tandem with your cunt.

“You want me to, right? Not some dumbass you met a week ago, huh?” he says. “Because you know that this is what it’s meant to be. Me, doing these things to you. Not some twenty-five-year-old piece of shit. He doesn’t deserve you, baby. Understand?”

His fingers slider under your panties. Dumb brained and cognition gone muddled, you nod. All you can really think about is the moment his fingers slide over you. Fire licks up your lower belly and your insides as he brushes calloused finger tips finally right against your clit.

Puffed breaths of a scoff raise goosebumps over your skin. “Teach you to kiss so that you can go over there and get his hands on you,” he says, middle two fingertips prodding at your entrance. “As if you were ever anybody’s but mine. You’d come crawling back to me, baby, because it was always meant to be us. He could never satisfy you.”

His words might alarm you or have you asking questions if he hadn’t pushed his fingers into you and begun curling them with strong, pointed presses, pulling soft mewls and hums from you until he finds a spot that twists up your insides. Even through the palm you press over your mouth, your moans come out more like wavering grunts and croaks. Your thighs quiver and twitch, threatening to snap closed against your own will with each. Only your feet stay planted to the mattress. Like a cone of soft serve under the sun’s blistering attention, you melt down him. Just his frame keeps you upright.

“Right there, huh?” he says. The smirk on his mouth filters his words into something taunting. “That’s where you like it.” It’s like he’s learning your body step by step, fulfilling all the questions he’d been forced to only guess at before this.

“Uh-huh.” It comes out whiny and cracks in the middle, but you can’t find even an ounce of you to care right now. If this moment had been a long spiral, a fall from grace, down into a dark pit of forgotten inhibitions, you’ve just hit the bottom. Cheeks blazing cherry blossom pink and with your fingers curling into his pant leg, you don’t doubt that you are a picturesque mess. The kind of mess that’s beautiful because it’s dirty. Your teeth are not gentle on your plush bottom lip. It stings, tugged back and bitten and still a bit swollen with kisses. Perhaps you taste the tang of metal on it, but you pay it no mind.

Kai redoubles his efforts. Now that he knows exactly how to play you, he’s fucking you on his fingers without mercy. The sounds coming from your cunt were wet, but now they’re different— nasty squelching. The only noises coupling with your pathetic keening. Forget anchoring yourself on his thigh, forget muffling your sounds. Instead, your hands fly to encircle his flexing forearm. Under your nails, angry red crescents dig into the muscle there. What had been a languid, building pleasure suddenly becomes everything. Your breaths run away from you, and you chase them frantically. Deep down in your core, the muscles spasm and rage against his fingers. “H—oh god,” you groan. Even the muscles in your thighs and tummy tighten up.

“So whiny...” Kai mumbles, voice taut with the effort of eroding you down into pure, blinding-white pleasure.

And then, in a swoop of mercy, your belly tightens. You hover here, on the precipice of something so consuming and voracious that your muscles and bones reject it, and yet your heart sings. Your eyes and cheeks and lungs and belly burn, the flame charring the edges of you in a beckon. You answer its call. Kai doesn’t mind the snapping of your legs shut around his arm, nor does your bucking or shaking deter him. He just holds you through it, arm like a metal bar around your waist. He’s everywhere, in this moment—the smell of him, leather and utterly familiar, his mouth dusting hot kisses over your skin, his fingers guiding you through orgasm. Where you’d gone silent in the initial crash of it, you devolve into mewls and grunts as you come down.

He holds you even as you slump against him boneless. Afterglow simmers in your veins and has your brain all lethargic and lazy. Neither of you speak for a while, your pulse thumping a rhythm. His breaths rise and fall against you; it grounds you in this moment where you feel all spacey and gone. You become aware again of how disgustingly sweltering it is in his room, your skin sheened.

That brainless bliss only lasts you for so long, though. When rational mind returns to you, no matter how you wish it wouldn’t, you’re hit in the chest with regret so hard it knocks the wind out of you.

How will anything ever be the same after what you’d just done? Stricken still by the thought, you barely register him pulling his fingers out of you. After all your worrying about making sure no wedge comes between you two, look what you’ve gone and done. No; nothing ever will be the same again.

⚝⭒

A couple of weeks ago, you ruined the one friendship you were supposed to have forever. It presses down heavy one you while you sit sprawled out on Yeonjun’s couch, his arm around your shoulder. His phone casts a glow over his features with all the lights out.

It doesn’t smell like home. He, pressed against your side, doesn’t smell like home.

Some stupid movie that he’d picked out, yet somehow you’ve ended up the only one still watching it, weaves a hum into the quiet of his apartment. Tangy hurt wells up in your throat. Even the moments when you and Kai would sit in mutual silence on your phones never felt like this. This is different.

You haven’t seen Kai since that night. He’s been busy getting ready to move out, and you’ve been here most days. How fast all of it had changed. You wish you’d feel whiplashed, left empty, by the drifting that you’d been so terrified of. But you don’t. It’s just been you, locked on land, watching him being taken away by the ocean’s tide with no way to change its course. You tried and screamed to call him back, but now your voice has gone hoarse.

And instead of watching him go, you choose to look elsewhere. It’s all you can do to protect yourself from the hurt.

“Hey,” Yeonjun says, finally addressing you rather than whoever’s he’s got in his phone. “Did you bring anything to change into?”

“I brought stuff to sleep in,” you say, eyeing him. You know that’s not why he’s asking. If it came down to it, you could just steal something from him and pull it on. He means going out clothes. Your jaw tightens. “But nothing nice. Why?”

He stretches his arms behind his head in a flaunt of long arms and tanned muscle. Hours spent at the gym lent him those; you appreciate the look of it with a watering mouth. Kai had earned his build by hours spent outside with your dad, because his own could care less, helping him fix up cars and vehicles of all ridiculous sorts. You remember when Kai had first gotten his truck—junk on wheels, honestly—he’d spent so much of summer out there getting it running. And, well... the sun-kissed bronze of his skin and frame that came with it, you had no qualms with.

But those memories only sit heavy in your chest as you’re sat here beside Yeonjun. You banish them elsewhere; you need to let him drift off. If you can’t have each other, and your feelings won’t permit just being friends, then you have to. You want him to do amazing things, and you fear that it’s your presence in his life that will interrupt that. As much as your feelings are real, they are selfish. You, your unsure direction and all your dead weight, should let him go. Because you love him.

“The guys want to come over,” he tells you, pushing off from the couch. “You should probably into change into something less showy.”

Less showy. Your mouth drops into a scoff of disbelief, looking down. A pair of shorts and a shirt, showy? You have to laugh, or else you’ll succumb to the strange embarrassment crawling at the back of your skull. What’s he trying to say? Is that what he thinks of you? “What’s that supposed to mean?” you say, face tilted up to him in a twist of distaste. “I’m wearing something comfy.”

He shrugs, hands shoved into the pockets of his black sweats. “Don’t want to give them the wrong idea about you, that’s all, baby. They’re guys; I just want to protect you.”

“No,” you say, the word falling out in a barked laugh. “Why would you even be bringing over dudes that you think will look at me like that? Why are you even friends with people that you think are gonna make moves on your girlfriend?” He holds a hand out to you, but your hands stay right where they are: crossed solidly over your chest.

Throwing that hand up in audacious exasperation, he gives you a look that makes you feel small and petulant—like you’re throwing an overblown fit. And, maybe you are. You should probably just do it; him seeing you as some overbearing or high maintenance girl has that embarrassment flaring like wildfire that’s found dry brush. “C’mon, baby,” he says, a lazy smile on his mouth that gets under your skin. “Let’s just have an easy night. Don’t make it a big deal.”

Let’s just have an easy night. As if you’re the one ruining the night. Something snarky tries to seize your tongue, but you hold it down. “I thought it would be just us. We wanted to watch the movie together, Yeonjun. Can’t you wait to hang out with your friends? Let’s enjoy our time together; you’ve got your shift tomorrow.”

“My fucking god,” he groans, running a hand through his hair furiously. “You’re needy, you know that? The neediest I’ve ever had to put up with. I don’t put up with needy, baby. Can’t you just chill out a little? My last didn’t mind when I’d have friends over.”

Your eyes burn. Your cheeks burn. He’d been with plenty of other girls before you; that, you’re well aware of. It’s been a corrosive source of self-doubt for you. You don’t want that title: the neediest he’s ever had. Don’t want him to think of you as some prude that won’t let him have fun. Just... hearing him bring up the other girls he’d been with before you stings and leaves welts no different from a slap in the face. Feelings of inadequacy shackle you and have you saying, “Fine. I’m gonna borrow some of your clothes.”

Heavy resentment blooms on your skin where he bends down and presses kisses to your cheek, and then mouth, and then down your neck. “Thank you, baby.”

And, where those ugly, wilted flowers of it bloom, you hear echoes of something. Something that tells you that Kai wouldn’t treat you like this. But you’ve made your bed, decided to do it yourself, and now you’ve got to lay on it.

⚝⭒

The frat parties are the worst kind of social outing that Yeonjun insists upon. The smaller kinds, more intimate gathering with just his closer friends, you tolerate much easier. You’re not fond of the circles he chooses. Breathing in thick, smoked-out air surrounded by alcohol-coated breaths is not your type of fun night. Somehow, you end up doing that more than date nights. But that’s better than being here. The base rumbles up through your feet and makes your stomach sick, and it reeks of grinding bodies and body odor, and condensation coats your fingers from the red solo cup as full as when you’d first gotten it.

But, still, you come along. Not every time, but when you don’t, you lay in his bed sickening yourself with images of what he might be doing here. How pathetic is it to attend parties with your boyfriend because you fear that otherwise, he might stick his tongue down the throats of other girls?

You’re looking for him right now, awkward and left alone. He’d promised to stick around; you had begged him to. That was pathetic, too. You know that you put up with too much. If he loved you, or honestly even liked you, you two would be in the thick of the throngs dancing or off somewhere talking with others. Together. The frantic skimming and weeding of your eyes through the blur of faces is not right. That’s not how he should make you feel. It’s not how Kai would make you feel.

Well, Kai would never have you here in the first place.

Venturing out from your little corner, you sift between the bodies of people have a hell of a lot better time than you. Drunken, some you bounce off of like bumper carts. You press your palm over the round face of your cup to spare the floor from spillage threatening to pour over the lip. It’s not like a splash from yours would matter much, though. The linoleum has already been made a fetor mess of dirt off shoes and the sticky sugar of liquor. Your shoes peel from it as you walk. God, what would your parents think of you being here?

You peek around corners and eye big groups. He’s not in the kitchen when you look there, either. Your stomach feels sick in a knowing way—a gut feeling that doesn’t justify anger or tears just yet, but you know. Right in the center of your chest, you know.

It’s in some room that you find him. Sat on the floor along with a few faces you don’t know, he pulls from his bottle. And on his shoulder, he lets a girl with shining curls and pink cheeks rest her head. At your busting in on the intimate gathering, Yeonjun’s eyes slide to you. Recognition flashes over them and wars with bleary drunkenness.

“Hey, baby,” he says. Their gazes all fall on you, but you can hardly see them through blurry eyes.

The girl lifts her head from his shoulder. She’d caught the memo.

“I think I’m gonna go.” You make it sound resigned, try to not let them see your shame, but your voice betrays you and crackles. Maybe it’s better to pretend it doesn’t feel like you’ve just been kicked in the stomach and left to reel against the force, but you can’t. You’re nowhere near shocked, nowhere near blindsided, but still you hurt.

He follows you down the hall. “What’s your problem?” he says, the few, plain words mending and waving into a slurring.

You’ve got one goal: get to the front door, away from the shitty music and him. His words, sharpened, fall off your skin despite his efforts. What good would fighting do you, anyway? It was always going to end up this way. This is just who he is, and he doesn’t give two shits enough about you to want to change that.

“Baby, seriously? That made you this mad? I didn’t even fucking do anything. Stop being insecure,” he says. At the gritting of your teeth, he sees an opportunity and pounces on it. “You don’t need to be jealous. I don’t do jealous shit. We can dance, or something. Shit, I don’t know what you want! Just stop throwing a fit.”

Didn’t do anything? You have to laugh. Maybe you didn’t walk in on him fucking someone else, but that’s not what this is about. Not even a little bit. You’ve checked out, and the fact that he thinks he can make you believe that it’s your fault this time only drives the killing stake in harder.

Maybe you’re bitter. It claws at your insides—turns your face hot and screams in your face that you’ve been used. But beside it sits a sadness. Not the slow kind, but the quick sadness of hurt. Why hadn’t you been good enough for him to love you? To like you? You’d left behind Kai and rested your new life on Yeonjun’s shoulders. You’d wanted so badly for his approval, or for him to want you. You did your best to try and make this work out because you needed it to. You needed so desperately proof that you could fall in love with somebody else. But your best was not what Yeonjun was interested in.

Pins and needles prick your skin as you step outside, like jumping into an ice bath. It shocks you out of dizziness. Words surge up and out in a flash flood like hard reality. You spin on him. “Jealous?” you say, choking out a scathing laugh. “The last thing I’d ever let myself suffer over you is jealousy. Get over yourself. I’m going, stay here if you want. I don’t care.”

“How are you gonna do that, huh?” he says. The flickering yellow of the porchlight paints his features. The shadow of something fluttering around it cuts dark spots in the light, and then a small little moth comes down and jumps around in his face. He waves it off. “Gonna have bitch boy come pick you up? You can’t leech off him forever; he’s gonna get sick of picking up another man’s girlfriend.” It seems like you walking in on that had sobered him up, but his breath still curls out onto your face with the reek of alcohol. “It’s not a big deal. You’re making this a bigger deal than it has to be. Do you not trust me?”

“You are such a piece of shit,” you grit out. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Ever. I don’t know how I let this go on for so long.” You don’t like him having Kai in his mouth, don’t like him trying to act like you’re conflating things, and especially don’t like that face he’s making. As if you’re acting crazy and overblown. “No, I don’t trust you. You didn’t fuck her, but come on, Yeonjun. Seriously? You think I’m stupid, and I’m sick of it. You thought this would be easy because I didn’t have the experience you have, but I’m sorry. I don’t like being walked over.”

“If you’re gonna be so goddamn jealous, then maybe we aren’t gonna work,” he says.

That moth, floating light in the air, is right back in his face. Yeonjun takes two hands and smashes it between a clap of his hands. He shakes its flattened, broken body off his hand. Looking down at it laying there on top of dirt-caked concrete, you get this... feeling. A tickling around your person.

“See if I care,” you snap, throat aching against the onslaught of emotion and held back tears.

⚝⭒

Rivulets of raindrops dilute the tears on your cheeks. Your hair plasters to your face and your clothes to your body.

For a week, you’d went about it all as if it hadn’t happened. And then you came here.

It’d not been this rainy when you first got down to the creek—just a gentle trickle, really. You hadn’t been crying then, either. But, watching the water work at babbling over stone, you let yourself feel it. Here, where you’d had so many good memories. You’ve gone and tainted it, now. But for whatever reason, you’d just wanted to be here. Arms curled around yourself and fingers digging into drenched sleeves, you don’t wipe away the tears or cover the sounds of your crying. You let the stream hear it; it’ll sweep it right up and down the way. Somewhere far off, where you don’t have to feel it anymore.

You realize that, usually, you’d be over at Kai’s right now. The fact that his room was not the first place you thought you could go to anymore is a punch to the gut. You drop your face into your hands and cry harder. Really, you’ve got to stop doing that to yourself. Thinking of sad things—putting your hurt under the microscope to see it closer. It’d be easier to just fold it up and tell yourself that it’ll pass, and that relationships end all the time.

It’s not him that you cry over. Well, maybe some of it is. Rather, it’s that you have absolutely no idea where you’re going. Where you are. Finally, you’d built yourself a raft to get off the shore and go out to sea, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it’s breaking apart right beneath you. And, stranded and alone in the water, you’ve got no way to get back to shore to build yourself another raft. You’re stranded, and the scariest bit is that you’re doing it all alone. You weren’t supposed to do this alone. You two made promises back then.

You suppose that a promise is one of those things you were supposed to leave faith in back on shore.

The raindrops are heavy over you. The fall of it roars against the ground, a torrent downpour. It’s not coupled with whipping wind or flashes of lightning—just straight, still falling. It’s a somber feeling no different from the gnawing in your chest.

Like chimes, there’s a distant, gentle sound. Maybe water falling over creek rock, but it’s more like suggestion. A sweet sound that you shouldn’t even be able to hear over the rest of it, it’s as if it’s right in your ear. A whisper.

You fix your blurry eyes with a wet sleeve. Rain falls right back into its place, but you see it: a silvery, whimsy haze. And the moths. They jump and call you, this time. Their glow bounces off the rainy mist against the grey of night’s arrival. Then, all you can hear is the whispering. Where you stand frozen, your feet beg to move. To follow them.

So you do.

Their entourage of moondust trails them where they go, wrapping you up and weaving between raindrop and space. You don’t worry where they’ll take you, or even try to wrap your head around this happening again. You just follow, mind glossed over and entranced with how beautiful it is. When you’d seen them before, it’d made you uneasy. Mostly because it looked so unearthly and unbelievable. But this time you just follow.

A far-off voice, one oh-so-familiar, peaks through the haze. It’s not enough to stop you, but then you hear it again, louder and closer.

You blink a few times. Once to break away the fog, and then twice to focus your eyes on Kai stood in front of you. His hair lays in wet spikes over his eyes and beads rain trace the planes of his face. He’s as soaked as you.

“Kai?” you say. Looking around you, you’ve ended up somewhere in the field between your houses and the creek. But you’ve got no recollection of walking here. Whatever that mist is, sentient or not, had swept you here.

His voice is strained, but you appreciate hearing it. “Break up with him,” he tells you.

In his eyes, as you search them, there’s stardust glowing like reflection. Your face twists up. “What?” you say, breath a puff of smoke ahead of you. Summer had come and gotten away from you so fast, and now it’s gone all cold again.

“Break up with him,” he echos, face solemn. He looks ruffled.

“Why?” you ask, “And why are you out here?”

“Because I’m moving out today, and I think I deserve to at least see you before I go.” His eyes look over you. “And... your dad said you went down to the creek.”

He’s moving out today, and you had no idea. And really, it’s your fault. You’d driven that wedge between the two of you. “I did break up with him.”

Downpour fills his quiet for a few moments, his face swirling with emotion like the clouds above you. He nods. “Good.”

There are a few more long minutes between you; just you two searching each other's faces, antsy to say so much that it bunches up in your chests and stalls. It’s what a summer of longing does to you. Even with Yeonjun, even trying to slowly chip away the stitching that had connected the two of you at the hip, you were helpless to stop the gnawing of the love you bear for him. Even just seeing him now, you feel those threads mending back up. God, why does it have to be so hard?

He just looks at you. For a few beats, he just looks at you. There are so many questions in his eyes. They flit across and turn over, but all he settles on is, “Why?”

There’s so much you want to tell him. Words pile up to the top, some threatening to spill over. But you know that if you tell him some of it, just to make up for all the time you’d missed out on together, it’ll all come crashing out. And you don’t think you want him to know just how much you accepted, the way you let yourself get treated. So, you shake your head and say, “It doesn’t matter.”

Kai looks like he wants to push that issue, but whatever look he finds on your face deters him. “Come with me,” he pleads. “I want you to come with me.”

Your throat tightens. Curling your arms around yourself harder, the rain only coming down on you harder, you say, “Kai, I want to. I want to. I just... I don’t want to freeload off you, because you’re doing great things, and I’m just...” Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, but they’re already as soaked as the rest of you. “I’m just going nowhere. And I don’t want to be a burden, or ever be the reason that you can’t do what you dream of. If staying here means that you become everything that you’re destined to do, then I’m happy with that, Kai. I am.”

He shakes his head, stumbling toward you. “No, no you don’t get it,” he says, frantically taking your shoulders into big hands. Under his touch, every taut muscle goes slack. You melt. “You don’t get it. You are the music. Every single song is about you. Every single fucking song is about you. I want you to come with me, please. I love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you, and I thought you’d loved me too, and I don’t want to do this alone. I can’t do it alone.”

He loves you. Kai loves you. The enormity of it rumbles the ground where you stand on legs you fear might just give in. You flex your fingers to combat the tears pricking your eyes. It doesn’t work; they brim and well up, spilling down over your cheeks. “What?” you say, voice softly breaking. “Kai, I didn’t...”

“And just when I thought I finally had you, you left me,” he says, throwing a hand up beside him in a big gesture. “You left me! I woke up thinking you’d be there, and that maybe you loved me too, and you had left me. And then you threw me away for some piece of shit, and you stopped coming around.” His chest heaves for breaths.

Your face contorts. That night, the one where you two had slipped up, you’d fallen asleep curled up against his chest on undiluted contentment. When you woke up, you had panicked. You thought he’d wake up and pretend it hadn’t happened, or he’d be uncomfortable, or even be disgusted and regretting. You couldn’t handle that, so you slipped out before he woke up. It’d been an attempt to protect your tender heart, but looking at the twitching of his lip now, you begin to think it’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done. He thinks you used him and left him. Your stomach twists. Voice thick, you say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you, Kai. I thought you didn’t... I thought you didn’t see me that way. I was scared. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Brows knitted together, he says, “Thought I didn’t love you?” His hand cups your cheek, warm against the soft frozen skin he finds there. “I’ve... I’ve dreamed of you almost every night of my life. In my sleep, I see you, and you’re happy and glowing, and that damn... mist is all around you. I couldn’t get away from you even in my sleep.”

Darting between his eyes, soft and reflecting your face back to you, it’s hard to breathe. Kai’s dreamt of you; he’s as sickly in love with you as you are him. Thunder claps, and the ground shakes, and the heavens open up above you, the trumpets belt, and you two are in love. Somewhere deep in your center, you feel it—your soul nodding yes.

The mist. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I saw it. That stuff, those moths. The stuff we saw back then.”

“I did too,” he says, wet spikes of hair bouncing with a nod. “Not that long ago. It was the first time I saw it out of a dream since that day.”

Back then, you two had only budding, innocent love for each other. Things hadn’t become mangled and lost to confused hearts or expectations. When they’d appeared to you, you hadn’t needed it. This time, you’d followed it. And it had led you here—somehow had led you right to the very spot you needed to so that every last piece might fall into place. For this moment to happen. You know why it did.

“I’ll go with you, Kai. I’ll go wherever you go; I love you. I’ve loved you since forever,” you say, each and every word massive and lovely on your tongue. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier.”

So unlike the last times your mouth had met, he brings his mouth to yours with a dazzling clarity. No longer is it confused kisses; he locks his lips against yours with the urgency of so many years being unable to. Kai’s hands cradle your wet cheeks, hold you so tenderly into his kiss. His touch grounds you, makes the moment real. You melt into him—your fingers curled into his shirt as if holding him there so that he won’t disappear like something of an incorporeal dream. He sighs through his nose, kissing you harder. Even if it all were fake and this was nothing more than a feverish figment of your imagination, you think you could die happy just knowing this once.

But it is utterly real, and utterly yours. You kiss him harder, too.

When your lungs start to burn and plead for breath, you two pull away from each other. Your eyes flutter open to capture his. Warm and brown and the same ones you’ve stared into so many times before, but not like this, you sink into them. He runs his thumb over your cheek as he sinks into yours. His tongue darts out to lick lips painted with you. In the inches between you, space no longer feels heavy or charged with grievances. Every last unsaid thing had been answered.

“I have my stuff up in the truck,” he says, breaths soft. Brown eyes dart around your face. “I’ll help you add your stuff to it.”

You shudder out a breath. Add your stuff to it. A nervous energy settles down over you, but it doesn’t seem so bad if you’re doing it with him. Together.

“Okay,” you whisper, a balmy secret just like the ones you used to share in small, giggly voices so many years ago. “Okay.”

⚝⭒

Shivers seize you like jittering bones, all wrapped up in a blanket. The velour cushion seats beneath you have soaked up water and become damp, but Kai’s got the heater blasting. You wind around back roads, headlights illuminating the way ahead of you. Stray droplets whip in them, but nothing much. Isn’t it funny how the rain had just stopped like that? That’s just how the weather is, out here. You wonder how the weather might act wherever you’re headed.

Your teeth chatter as if your jaw had its own will. The two of you had the windows down thinking that the wind might dry you off, but all it’s done is lap at your bitten cheeks. You reach down for the handle to crank it up. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you—either you’ll eventually dry off, or you can pull off at a rest area to change in a bathroom. The wet clothes are really not helping.

With an arm up on the steering wheel, Kai turns his attention on you. You know that smile. “Cold?” he asks, eyes darting between your face and the road. With the hand he’s not got working the steering wheel, he runs fingers over your thigh. Soft, gentle massages, yes. The number it does on your core is absurd. Each mindless digging into your thighs and brush of his thumb, sparks sputter there. You’ve sat here, right in his passenger seat, so many times before. Day trips up to the lake, the one he’d joined your family camping at for so many summers, all the times he’d driven you to school in this truck, and even just a quick run down to a convenience store for a late-night snack. You’d deemed it your seat. But never once had you sat in it like this. Your heart does a flip. All those times you’d wish he’d reach over and do just this—a small gesture that would’ve been so big then. And it’s your reality, now.

“Freezing,” you say. A brush of his fingers nearer the apex of your thighs sends you pressing them together and shifting in your seat. “But not everybody runs as hot as you, though, so.”

His eyes catch the movement in just the split second he looked over to you. “Huh,” he says. He turns to look at you, his gaze flickering with something anew. Something that you’d only ever seen once before. “Is that it?”

It’s hard to swallow. His fingers brush higher, and higher, feather-dustings of calloused fingertips that sends tingles shooting up your spine at the slightest suggestion of where he’s headed. “Yes,” you say, feigning indignance to cover the shiver that threatens to overtake you. When his fingertips dance at the waistband of your bottoms, it does so anyway. “Kai,” you say, blood hot in your veins. “You’re...driving.”

His eyebrows pinch into a taunting furrow. “I am,” he says, nodding. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I’ve got us.”

And he does; fingers slipping under the band of both your bottoms and your panties, he doesn’t even tear his eyes off the road. He’d driven these roads so much, you think he might be able to do it asleep. Even drawing a mewl from you with a brush over your clit, he doesn’t look away more than a quick glimpse at your pinkened cheeks.

Two fingers dragging up your folds, right over the source of the mess. “You get excited so easily, huh?” he hums. “You like it when I play with you.”

When he presses those fingers at your entrance, you can’t help but be taken back to that night. It echoes and reverberates through you. Long fingers, strong and punctual brushes against the sweet spot—he was criminally good with his fingers. Playing guitar did more for him than just music. He seemed to know exactly how to utilize those roughened fingers and trained flicks. Your muscles flicker as he abandons your hole for more brushes at your bud.

Those teasing, sly touches turn to something more serious. His fingers roll over your clit, slow but enough to have you sighing and rolling your hips against the seat belt. But last time had gone just like this, him touching you and receiving nothing. He should feel good, too. “Shouldn’t you pull over?” you sigh, muscles taut. Your breaths come out shuddering and half-controlled, interrupted by the tightness that each delicious swirl provokes. The door takes the brunt of your grip, white-knuckling the interior.

He laughs, a husky sound that is tinder to fire. He knows what you mean. “Maybe,” he says. “But I think I’m enjoying this plenty. I think I want to see you cum on my fingers again.”

Fingers pinching and flicking faster, you grow breathy and whiny, hips rolling against the seatbelt and back into the seat. Your muscles, all the way down your thighs and deep in your belly, jump and twitch each time his fingers run over your clit in just the right spot—that tender spot that’s so good that it teeters on overwhelming. The kind that makes you hiss and then want more. “Shit, Kai,” you whine. “Right—there, keep going."

He doesn’t answer with any teasing words. No, he just doubles down right at that angle and pressure, leaned back into his seat and driving as if he wasn’t fingers-deep in your panties right now. His sculpted profile at total ease—it does something for you. A delicious tightness curls its fingers over your center, promising a sugary ecstasy that you can’t help but chase. Bucking into his hands as best you can, you go quiet. Right there—right there, you feel it. The cusp. Your fingers brush over it, clenching around nothing and squeezing your thighs tight around him. Every last drop of blood in your body reaches for it, singing and dancing through your veins and making you dizzy.

And then he stops. Your mouth drops open, whiplashed and helpless to its slipping away from you. You whittle your gaze into something sharp and turn to him. “What—why?” you complain. The tide slips further and further and further back, but you still taste sea salt on your tongue. Frustration sets in its place as you feel it go. Seriously, you’d been right there. “You’re so mean.”

He slows and then with the clicking of the turn signal, he’s off the road and pulling the truck into park on a little secluded side road. Where the headlines pierce the pitch black, nothing but gravel and field surrounds you. He doesn’t kill the engine, instead pulling his hand free from you.

Your heart, still stuttering with your lost orgasm, kicks back to life as he smears your slick over your mouth, dragging it over your lips and then taking his thumb to run it right over the plush of your mouth. “Am I?” he says, fingers taking your chin to meet your eyes with his. Endless hunger, pupils so blown that his eyes look black, pins you. “I don’t think you’ve seen mean yet, baby.”

Darting your tongue out to clean your lips, you look at him through your eyelashes. “Show it to me, then.”

Something dark passes over his face. It has your skeleton jumping out of your body. Then, he says, “Is that what you want? You want mean?”

Brain gone to mush that can only really think about him touching you, a slow nod is all you can manage.

The engine’s hum prevails for some long, thick seconds. And then, he tilts his head in a gesture. “Get in the back.”

Holy shit. You want to sit there frozen in an overwhelming sort of excitement, but his seatbelt clicks undone and you’re set into motion. In a flurry of giggles and clumsy limbs, you climb up over the center console and into the backseat. He slips out of the front seat, not bothering to even kill the engine.

The door beside you opens in a swirl of cold wind. In nothing more than a blink, a strong hand has both your wrists pinned to the cushions and your back flush against it. Nose-to-nose, his breath his hot over your face. “I’ve got plenty of ideas as to how I can warm you up.”

You appreciate each other’s faces for a beat more, you looking up at him big-eyed and waiting. Kai breaks the moment to attack your neck in a procession of bites and kisses. Your mouth falls into a silent sound.

“You know,” he says, free hand working your pants off. His eyes are trained on you, though. “I thought about doing this to you all summer. Touching you again.” He moves on to your top, pushing the fabric up until your chest is freed, clad in soft cotton. He eats the sight up. You want to reach down and cup the back of his head or feel his hair between your fingers as he presses his mouth against the soft beginning of your cleavage, but he’s got your wrists firmly planted. So much so, that you wonder exactly how he’s got you so secure with just one hand. Kai is strong, but maybe you hadn’t seen just how strong. Your skin aches under the purple bites he decorates you in. The sight of him—face in your chest and marking you up so lazily—has your teeth abusing your bottom lip. Whatever sounds you might make otherwise would be embarrassing. Kai lifts his eyes to you. “And I think you thought of me, too. Didn’t you?”

“Oh, god, yes,” you say, writhing beneath him. He’s going so slow. You want him all over you. “So much.”

He likes that. He takes your pebbled nipple into his mouth through the fabric. Soft grazes of teeth and sucks, you’re burning all over. When he pulls back, he’s left you dark wet patches when the bra had only just dried against your body heat. “Good,” he rasps, taking his big hands demanding and hungry over your torso. They swallow your frame up, soothing skin but lighting it aflame all the same. “Good girl.”

You never thought just words could unravel you, but those did the job. Not a gasp, nor a sucking in of breath—no, you go silent and brainless, fumbling for rational thought.

The dropping of your jaw has Kai delighted. “You’re so pretty,” he says. In a swift and powerful hoist, he’s tugging you down the cushions toward him with greedy fingers. He’s got your thighs pressed up to your chest. You’re bent right in half.

Out of breath, you huff out, “You too.”

A quick laugh falls from his mouth, lips pulled into a smug tilt. He nips at your calf up by his face. “So sweet, it almost makes me feel bad for what I’m about to do to you.” Reaching down for your panties, he pulls back on the suffocating press for only enough time to drag them up your legs. Those get discarded somewhere on the floor. Who cares about that right now, though? All you can register is the metallic clinking of his belt being undone. It’s got your nervous system twisting up.

And, those words. Electricity shoots bolts of pure, sizzling revery into your core. What I’m about to do to you. You imagine a great deal of things that he might mean, but still, you think that none could hold a candle against the promise his voice held in saying it.

Kai presses his body to your thighs and hooks your calves over his shoulders, and it all becomes real. The press of his heavy cock to your folds, the digging of his fingers into your outer thighs, his pretty eyes sparkling with something feral. As real as it gets—more real than anything you’ve ever felt in the entirety of your life. Your hands find perch flattened to his broad chest.

The position leaving you two no option but to look right into each other, he holds your gaze and begins slow drags of his hot length up and down your slit. Tantalizing, awful, awful drags. When his tip nudges your eager clit, you jolt. And then he does it again. And again.

“Kai,” you mewl. A press against your hole has you hopeful, and he lingers there for a moment, but doesn’t give it to you. Can’t he just fuck you? You’ve never been more pitifully in need of something in your life.

“Shh.” His ruts get more daring, smearing your slick up onto your belly. “Take it.”

You wiggle your toes in the air and make passes at arching yourself into him in search of better friction. He’s got you pressed so suffocatingly into the seat that it does absolutely nothing for you. In fact, he holds your harder and changes tack so that your thighs press together. At the very apex of them, his weeping cock slips through the seam.

Pressing his cheek into your calf, he watches you. Every gasp and shaky inhale, he watches. It spurs his rutting on, sticky sounds and pants eating up the air. Your nails claw at his hands as, finally, a knot tightens in your core.

“Yes, please,” you breathe. He fucks your thighs harder. Faster. Every nudge at your clit and hole becomes euphoric. “Kai, baby—I’m gonna—”

Just as furiously easy as last time, he rips it all away from you. The rushing away of the buzzing and promise of shaking thighs—he takes it from you again. It brings prickling tears to your eyes. “Kai?” you hiss. “Again?”

His eyes aren’t playful. He pulls your calves back over his shoulders, handling your hips into a better position to press his cock right at your entrance as if you weigh nothing. Face utterly straight, he says, “I don’t think you deserve it, do you? Not after what you did with Yeonjun.”

A swallow goes down your throat hard. He presses himself just a bit harder into you. Not in yet, but right there.

When he does begin sliding in, the stretch of it... You cling to him and squirm between him and the warm cushions behind you. Each inch is a heady feeling, all the way up to the hilt of him. He shudders a controlled breath. “You’re so fucking tight, though,” he grits out. “Did he not fuck you right?”

Slaps of skin bounce off the car interior and between your bodies. He starts off at a brutal pace; you know it’s meant to make your brain go foggy. Squeezing your eyes closed, you manage, “I... didn’t fuck him.” It comes out strangled, voice bouncing as he fucks you into the car seat.

Thumb tugging your bottom lip down and then dipping into your mouth, he watches the show of your ecstasy down to every last detail. “Yeah?” he says, voice shaking and almost desperate. “Always thinking of me, huh? Such a good little princess. You know exactly where your heart belongs.”

You want to answer him, even just with a whine or moan. You try to. But with his thumb pressing down on your tongue, enough to pin it to the floor of your mouth, it’s not gonna happen. He tastes salty in your mouth.

His truck consists of his grunts and whines, and your taut groans for some moments that seem to stretch forever. The planes of his groin grind against your clit when he delivers occasional pointed rolls, but mostly it’s just an animalistic, feverish dancing of your two sweaty bodies, holds growing more frantic the closer you get.

Thumb wet with saliva; he frees your mouth. The hand trails slowly down your face and your chin, brushing feather touches, until he finds your neck.

Your eyes fly open, wide. He pressed his fingers into your neck—no real pressure yet, he looks at you through damp strands of dangling hair and says, “Want my fingers around your neck?” His thumb brushes over the buzzing pulse point there.

“Yes,” you grit out, body bouncing and back raw with friction against the coarse cushion’s surface. Your breath stutters, your mind stutters. Even your blinks stutter, eyelids too lazy to keep up. “Please.”

The pressure of his fingers there—it frightens you and has you tightening around him at the same time. But you would trust nobody more with your life than Kai.

He presses his cheek to your calf to indulge in the sight of you like this: underneath him, folded in two, nowhere to go but to take his pistoning hips, cheeks blazing, and his fingers pressed into your windpipe. If the way he becomes sloppier and more desperate in his tempo has anything to say for it, it does something for him.

“Gonna be my pretty little girlfriend, huh?” he says. His voice is tight—so is your belly. You’re both so close. Hopefully, this time he’ll let you cum. “Take you to every show; show you off to everybody. Fuck.”

Brain like static and swimming with a pinched flow of oxygen, you slur your words. “You’re—hah—gonna have other girls all over you.”

The taunting, split-second raise of his brows flips your belly. You tighten him again. If he keeps hitting that spot, tip ramming into the soft spot deep inside you that he’d taken such delicate care of finding last time, you’re going to burst into sparkling flame and firework. He growls, “Well, I’ll just have to knock you up so that they know I’m yours, huh?”

Holy shit. You like the sound of that. Your nails dig into his wrist around your neck, but you cry out a pitchy, “Yes!”

“Oh, you like that?” Kai releases your throat to take both your hips. You gulp for air, finding nothing but the thick air of sex and humid breaths, at the opportunity. He’s ramming into you like he’s found a purpose. “Isn’t this the perfect position to do it? Get you pregnant?”

With every last bit of brain power you’ve got, teetering on the edge excruciatingly close to salvation, you groan a long, hoarse sound. “Fuck, yes! Please, Kai, inside—” A hot trail of tears roll down your temples.

It’s all he’s got to hear to still inside you. His growl rumbles deep in his chest, holding you in place and filling you with his hot cum deep in your cunt. That feeling, coupled with his short grinds against your clit as he fucks his seed deeper, takes your soul by sinful claws and crumbles it down into nothing. You burst into a shaking, whimpering peak, sucking your lips into your mouth to bare through the sheer twisting of your insides and the flame that consumes up your thighs and cunt.

He falls on you heavy, face in your neck. Warm kisses against your clammy skin meld with your slow floating down, the two of you a beautiful, nasty picture of fucked out. He stays right inside you—the absolute stillness of him, you think he has no plans of pulling out any time soon. His long fingers card through your sweaty locks of hair.

Finally, he presses himself off you. You get a glimpse of the window behind him—fogged up and filthy with your affairs. Anybody to see the truck from the outside would know exactly what went on inside, but right now, you don’t care. Not one bit. Your panted breaths drag in nothing but musk and thick, hot air. The drumbeat in your chest tells you that, despite how you feel ripped straight from your body, you are very much still alive. More alive than ever.

“Warm?” he says, pushing sticky hair off his forehead. He’s a mess, too. His hair is ruffled with your touch, his clothes rumpled the same, beads of sweat rolling down the planes of his cheeks and neck, and his eyes a lazy smolder. As much as he looks like sex personified, a soft smile twitches at his lips.

You snort. You can’t help but feel giddy, here with him. You’re with him. Nothing has ever felt more right. Unplugged when he pulls out of you, your mess trickles down onto the seat below you. “Yeah,” you say. “Very.”

Warm is not enough to begin to describe how you feel. In your ears, you hear whisperings. Soft and gentle. Perhaps it was divine intervention, or the fates lending you their word, or maybe just rational thought. It says:

Home. You are home.

✎୭ ashlynn's note how do we feel about this pair? i really didn't mean for this to get so long, but i ended up RLLY liking their chemistry. i had to do their story justice. also, i finished this with kai as a guitarist and then his drummer performance came out... hmm.

﹙🏷️ ﹚@lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

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jazzthatonewriterchick · 2 days ago

Text

The Laws of Attraction (Lawyer!Higurnami x Law Student!Reader 18+ One Shot)

Pairing: Nanami Kento x Black!Fem!Reader x Hiromi Higuruma

Synopsis: You are a law school senior and intern juggling schoolwork and your job who attends your firm’s anniversary party one night. While there, Higuruma Hiromi and Nanami Kento, your bosses and the two sexy attorneys you’re secretly attracted to, help you celebrate your final grades and receiving a brand new position at their firm….just not in the way that they should. But who cares about what’s right or wrong when it feels so good?

Warnings: Smutty Smut; 18+ (MINORS GTFO); Black-coded!Fem!Reader; Lawyers!Nanami x Higuruma; Law Student/Intern!Reader; Eye-Fucking; Secret Crush; Mutual Pining; Threesome; Coworkers to Lovers; Mild Power Play; Lowkey Flirting; Office Sex; CMNF; Dual Cunnilingus; Deepthroating; Doggystyle Over Desk; Spitroast; Facefucking; Dom/sub Undertones; Throatpie; Cum On Ass; Sneaky Sex; Aftercare

Disclaimer: I own none of the characters mentioned in this fic. However, as this is my writing, I do not give permission for my work to be reposted on any other sites that are not from my own accounts. Thank you!

Writer’s Note: I’ve had this idea rolling around in my head for DAYS now. I’m so happy I’m finally able to share it after finally writing it. I hope y’all enjoy! KISSES!! 💋💋 -Jazz

**********

You know that a second glass of champagne probably isn’t logical or practical.

But if you have to listen to your fellow intern and total preppy asshole drone on about his vacation stories, you’ll definitely blow your brains out.

You stand in a small circle with the other interns that started with you last year for the internship program. The firm has one that stretches all year long, starting in the spring and ending in the winter. You’ve known these people for months now and while you like some, there are others than you’d gladly avoid.

Like the preppy exchange student from Upstate New York who came to Japan to study abroad. Of course, he’s standing beside you in his Armani student, buzzed off of his second beer and oozing arrogance and ignorance. “My friends wanted to go to Bora Bora again, but I always found Bora Bora to be sooo overhyped,” he groans. “That’s why we went to Hawaii. It was cheaper.”

He takes a sip of his beer, dripping some down his tie. You don’t warn him. ”I heard Hawaiians didn’t want tourists anymore,” Yuki points out, standing next to you. “Something about them pushing natives out of their homes because of construction.”

She sips on her champagne and eyes you as she does it. You fight the urge to smile. “Well, that didn’t kick me out,” the exchange student chuckles. “I had a ball! Lotta beer on the beach and a lot of girls too.” He turns to you now, your worst fear coming true. “You ever been to Hawaii, Y/N?”

You force yourself to turn towards the young, blonde jock who only came to work here because his father has connections in the legal system as a hotshot judge in New York. As a young, Black woman, you worked your ass off to get into this program and into law school. As you can imagine, juggling both is a damn job in itself.

You purposely kept quiet for half of the night to avoid exerting energy in boring conversations, but to avoid dissociating for the fifth time tonight, you fix your mouth into a smile. “No, but I prefer Costa Rica. The water is prettier. Excuse me, I’m gonna fill myself up.”

Quickly, you excuse yourself from the group and walk over to the alcohol table located on the other side of the gorgeous ballroom. “Oh, pass me another beer if they got one,” the jock suggests. “We can share, if you want. I know you like a good beer too.” He gives you a lopsided smile that’s supposed to get you hot and bothered like it has to all of the other girls he’s screwed.

You stifle the urge to vomit and give him a tight lipped smile before quickly walking off…or as quickly as you can in your Jimmy Choo heels. Your friend and roommate forced you into them, telling you that only these shoes brought out your skin and meshed with your slim, strapless, black dress.

You will admit that you feel the sexiest you’ve ever felt in it. Even when you tried it on and had your friend tie the strings behind your neck to hold the slinky article of clothing up, you felt like the baddest bitch walking. As soon as you walked into the ballroom, you caught eyes….just not the eyes you truly want.

As you walk across the ballroom, nodding and smiling at guests (lawyers, politicians, city officials, etc.), you admire the beautiful decor of the room. The decorators rearranged cushioned furniture, added gorgeous white flowers as centerpieces, and polished the marbled floor so much that you can see yourself in it. The scent of cinnamon and cloves drift through the air along with the bitter winter breeze pouring in from outside as people come and go for cigarette breaks.

They truly went all out for this anniversary party.

Your firm is located on the sixth floor of a twelve-story building in downtown Tokyo, specifically in the business district. Every weekday you catch the train at 7AM with fellow bright-eyed, bushy-tailed workers in their uniforms and weary, hungover students preparing for an 8AM course. You’ve always loved the hustle and bustle of the city; the constant activity; the sense of determination and purpose in the air when you do your eight-minute route to the train station to work.

Maybe that’s why you decided to take the internship offer when you were picked last spring. You were a law student, a senior-to-be, in need of a legal position that would give you more experience and had a decent pay. Your job as a waitress could only do so much. After you were interviewed by the program director, she set you up for another interview with the attorney you would be working for. When you realized that you would be interviewed by two attorneys instead of one, you thought it was some kind of mistake.

But you were reassured by the director that Kento Nanami and Hiromi Higuruma, the top attorneys at their firm, wanted you specifically. “They picked you out from ten other candidates,” she gushed to you over the phone. “They’re so impressed with your resume and our interview notes.”

You smile to yourself as you take another glass of champagne. You can’t believe that this was twelve months ago. Now if you can only snag a full time position here and ace your final exams so you can graduate next spring, your life will be complete.

Yuki appears beside you, dressed in a red dress and wearing her blonde locks in waves. ”He likes you,” she giggles. You roll your eyes beneath your full lashes. “I could give less of a fuck,” you mutter. “I felt like shovin’ a cupcake in his mouth to shut him up.” Yuki laughs despite your deadass statement. “So where’s your date tonight?” she asks. “Since preppy white jocks don’t float your boat.”

No man floats your boat nowadays, it seems. Not when you’re in law school. What guy would want a girl who stresses over essays and exams every other week? “Well, my roomie has a cold and couldn’t come,” you explain. “I wanted to stay, but she forced me to put on this dress and come.”

“And it’s a damn good thing she did!” Yuki scoffs. “You look amazing!” You smile shyly, feeling your cheeks flush. “And I’d rather you be here celebrating the 10th year of the firm with me than at home. Intern or not, you’re a part of this team too, Y/N.”

Though Yuki’s words are sweet, you’d much rather be at home with your roommate watching Netflix in your sweatshirt and booty shorts, shoveling ice cream down your throat and maybe popping an edible to ignore the impending anxiety of your exam scores tonight.

Anything than being a room with a bunch of preppy folks and pretending to be interested in anything they have to say. But you got yourself into your pretty gown for two important reasons: one because this party is a good distraction from your incoming grades and two, you’re waiting for two guests in particular to show up. Your bosses…or as your friend would call them, your sexy lawyer baes, Nanami and Higuruma.

These are two names that pop up often at your firm and in the legal world. As two Harvard graduates and prominent lawyers in business and corporate law, they were among the original ten lawyers who started out at the firm when it was still very small and upcoming. Now expansive and holding over a hundred attorneys, Nanami and Higuruma are still the top in the game in their thirties.

They are intelligent. They are virtuous. They are calm, cool, and collected when needed in the court. And they are also fine. As. Fuck.

And you know all of this because you work underneath them and have been for over twelve months as an intern. You never knew why they hired you to personally work for them, but you jumped at the chance to take the offer when it was given to you after your one-on-two interview with them.

As unapproachable and cool they seem, the two lawyers are pretty lenient with you. They allow you to use their shared office to do your work, they work around your class schedule, and don’t make you work overtime. Most of your duties are fetching coffee for them in the mornings from the lobby cafe, editing and proofreading documents, delivering files to different departments, and drafting papers.

They truly make it easy for you. They aren’t hard or difficult like a lot of other lawyers in your firm who run their assistants ragged. They answer all of your questions and push you to give your all. “But remember to rest,” Nanami always tells you. “Burnout is a killer.” He is the softest of the two and a true sweetheart at heart.

Higuruma is more of the sterner one, always giving you constructive criticism with any underlayer of encouragement. He has a dry humor that reminds you of a boring dad and has you giggling while you’re doing your work. The two lawyers bounce off of one another, having disagreements and arguments but always coming together to win a case.

They are truly a duo made in heaven, especially in the looks department. It isn’t a surprise to you that the entire firm has their eyes on them as handsome as they are—soft-looking lips, firm stares, and eyes that make your blood run hot. Your dreams are often filled with hot visions of doing very nasty things with Higuruma’s nose and stroking Nanami’s cheekbones with your fingers.

As far as you know, they’re single and unmarried, but things can change. Not to mention that you’re their intern! There is a very clear line that you don’t cross at a job and that includes not fucking your bosses.

No matter how sexy they are in their suits, or how intoxicating their cologne is, or how you wish to feel their big hands on you, you can never ever destroy the work relationship you have with them and fuck up your entire life. Besides, how else are you going to get a job here when you graduate law school?

So you disguise your interest in them as kindness and shove your horiness away, never acting on your attractions to them. But sometimes, you do think that the feeling is mutual. Just in November before your final exams, your bosses graciously offered to help you study. You were studying from your self-made study guide over lunch with them in their office. You had five classes during your fall semester you had final exams for: four tests and one paper due the same week you took your tests.

“Well, I can tutor you for the tests,” Higuruma said, taking a peak at your guide. “Clearly, you need someone to break this shit down for you and test you.”

“And make sure you don’t completely blow your top over your grammar,” Nanami added, referring to your paper. “I was a 4.0 in Harvard, don’t you know?” As usual, you laughed. They always knew how to take your head out of your work with their teasing and dry humor.

That month, the three of you would meet during lunch and work. Higuruma would time you on definitions for legal terms, answering open-ended questions, and knowing which court does what. Nanami, in contrast, would take a look at your final paper and make alterations, highlighting anything that needed to be edited and giving suggestions.

It was the most help you got in your three years of law school. And unfortunately, it made you fall deeper for them. You weren’t even planning to attend the firm’s tenth anniversary party, but when you found out Higuruma and Nanami were attending through an invite to your work email, you knew you had to show up.

You smile at Yuki now, raising your champagne glass. “Well, cheers to that,” you giggle and clink your glass with hers. “You’re sweet, Yuki. Definitely makes this whole environment worth it.” The two of you giggle to each other and gossip about the other guests as you sip champagne and much on veggie sticks from the snack table.

At some point during your third glass, you hear a buzz come from your purse. Your heart skips a bit and you race to fish it out, thinkin that it may be Nanami or Higuruma texting you that they’ve finally arrived. But when you see that it’s your Canvas notification, your stomach drops.

Suddenly, the champagne tastes sour and all of the sounds of the party sound muffled like you’re underwater. All of your grades are in, including your final paper. You swallow hard as you stare at your phone screen, your vision becoming fuzzy. You feel like you’re about to faint. Oh, where are Nanami and Higuruma when you need them?

“…Y/N?” You turn to Yuki as if you just realized that she’s standing there. “Sorry, what?” You dumbly ask.

“They finally brought out the chocolate fountain!” She announces, pointing excitedly at the fountain bubbling chocolate fondue just a few feet away. “Let’s get some before we have to fight off the entire party.” You force a smile and wave her off, trying to hide your oncoming anxiety attack the best you can. “You go ahead. I need to powder my nose first.”

It’s enough to make Yuki agree, telling her that she’ll get you a plate. Once she’s strutting off in her heels, you make a beeline for the bathroom located down the hallway from the ballroom. You move as quickly as possible in your heels, scrolling for your friend’s contact at the same time. By the time you reach the bathroom, you feel like you’re about to throw up.

You barrel through the door, sighing in relief when you find it empty. Quickly, you shut the door and will your friend to answer the phone, gripping the sink for support. You feel as if your knees are about to buckle from the anxiety you feel bubbling inside of you. “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” you mutter. Finally, your friend does, coughing into the phone. “What’s up, babe?” she crokes out. “Did your lawyer baes come yet?”

“No, but my grades just came back and I’m in the bathroom so I don’t have a panic attack, but I am having a panic attack.” You face yourself in the mirror. You thought you looked so pretty with your Fenty Beauty foundation, plumping gloss, and long lashes framing your gold eyeshadow. But now? All you see is anxiousness.

“Okay, relax,” your bestie soothingly says. Only she knows the stress you’ve been under for three years. “Breathe. Tell yourself your affirmations. I already know you did amazing, Y/N. You already know that too. You studied your ass off, remember?”

You do. You had to. Only you have the power to make all three of these years of constant stress mean something. You need that degree. “Yeah,” you exhale before inhaling again. You do that a couple of times, egged on by your friend who tells you how smart and determined you are. Finally, you feel like you’re ready. “Here I go…I’m opening them now.”

You put the call on speaker, but your friend is silent as you shakily open the Canvas app. You check each one of your final grades, your heart damn near exploding one after the other. All high scores. Three As and one B. “Oh, my God,” you gasp.

“What?” your friend urges. “What’d you get?”

You nearly drop your phone as your body trembles from excitement and relief. “I passed,” you whisper. Then again, louder this time: “I passed!” you squeal. “I fucking passed!” You feel tears prick your eyes and you have to rapidly blink to keep from ruining your mascara.

You can’t believe it. You’re done! You’re going to graduate law school next spring! “Congratulations, girl!” your friend cheers. “I knew you could do it! Now go out there, turn the fuck up, and celebrate with your lawyer baes.”

You scoff, taking some tissue to tab at your cheeks and temple. “For the last time, they’re not my baes or boos or boyfriends.” She swears that Higuruma and Nanami are your future husbands. “Not yet!” she argues. “You just wait till they see you lookin’ fine as fuck in your dress and next thing you know, you’re going home with one of ‘em…or both!”

“Goodbye, you perv,” you giggle. “Thank you. I love you.” Your friend bids you farewell and tells you to text her later before you end the call. You take a moment to check yourself out in the mirror, admiring the bad bitch in your reflection.

Finally, you put your phone away and strut back to the party, feeling like you’re the sun and the moon. You feel sexy, exuberant, and like you’re on top of the fucking world. Nothing and nobody can get in your way.

You suddenly bump right into someone’s back, causing you to stumble. “Oh, excuse me!” you gasp. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…” Your words die in your throat when the stranger turns, revealing himself as your favorite handsome blonde attorney. Nanami is usually in suits for work, but this one is especially tailored. “Ms. L/N,” he says in his smooth, eargasmic voice. “I didn’t expect to bump into you so early tonight.”

You gape at him, unable to speak. You’re at a loss for words. Just then, before you can look any dumber, Higuruma appears with two champagne glasses in hand. He, too, is in a designer suit and red bottom shoes, looking so sexy that it should be illegal. “Oh, there you are. We were actually looking for you.”

His tired-looking brown eyes scale down your outfit. “That’s…some dress. You look nice.” Maybe you imagine it, but his cheeks look pinker in the light. Nanami clears his throat and awkwardly pushes up his framed glasses, snatching one glass from Higuruma and taking a sip.

”T-Thank you,” you stammer, finally finding your voice. You spot a passing waiter on your left with a tray and snatch a glass from it. You’ll need it. You clear your throat, conjuring that bad bitch from the bathroom. “U-Um, I’m actually glad you’re both here. I was looking for you too.”

The lawyers’ brows raise expectantly. “Oh?” Higuruma asks. “Why is that?” You break out into a smile, unable to contain your joy. “I got my grades back for my exams!” you excitedly announce. “All As and Bs!” You fish your phone out of your clutch and shove the screen into your bosses’ faces. “See for yourselves,” you proudly giggle.

Nanami takes your phone and peers down at it, squinting into the blue light. When he sees your grades, a slow smile creeps across his face that gives you butterflies. “Let me see,” Higuruma mumbles, snatching your phone from Nanami.

He mutters to himself, something he always does when reading. You find it so endearing. When he finishes, he scoffs in surprise. “Well, damn,” he huffs. “This is impressive, Y/N. You really locked in as the kids say these days.”

“You’re not that old, Higuruma,” Nanami scoffs, snatching your phone back and handing it to you. “Nice job, Ms. L/N. We’ll have to celebrate.” The two lawyers smile at you like you’re the best thing in the world. You feel it. Standing with them, you feel as if nothing can touch you.

Higuruma raises his glass, a small smile playing on his lips. “A toast to good grades and an even better future.” You all raise your glasses and clink them before taking a sip. You can already feel the effects of the champagne taking over. You feel bubbly and light as a feather. Beautiful and carefree. Sexy, even. Very dangerous.

“Thank you,” you happily sigh. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without your help with the studying. I really appreciate you both for doing that.” The lawyers look happy hearing that kind of praise and gratitude from you. “Well, you can thank us by helping us make it through this party,” Higuruma sighs. “After all, we need to show our law school graduate around to all of these fine, fun folk.”

He looks around the room, looking like he’s thinking anything but nice things about the guests. You snort to yourself. “Don’t we, Nanami?” he asks, smirking at the blonde. Nanami sighs to himself, looking absolutely done with being here. “I barely even want to be here. I almost want to be back in traffic.”

He turns to you now, a small smile playing on his lips. “But hearing about your grades makes it worth it all.” If only he could know how that makes you feel. The butterflies in your stomach have gone haywire.

You swallow, feeling the confidence of the champagne taking over. “W-Well, maybe next spring when I graduate, you both can come to the ceremony,” you nervously suggest. “It’s only right since you’re my bosses and mentors.” You give them a shy smile, peering up at them through your lashes.

The two lawyers look at each other blankly and then back at you. “Mentors?” Higuruma parrots. “We’re your mentors?”

Immediately, your confidence slips. “Well, you did help me study and you’ve shown me so much about the legal system. I look up to the both of you.” You bite your bottom lip, feeling as if you’ve said too much. You’re moving too fast. You’re overdoing it! “I-I’m sorry I assumed—“

“Don’t apologize,” Nanami firmly interrupts. His eyes are all aglow with a quiet passion you’ve never seen before. “We’d be honored to be your mentors…if that’s what you want.” Higuruma looks just as interested in the position, looking ready to drop everything and sign up.

You feel a big, dumb smile split across your face, giddy and joyful. “Then I’d be honored to call you my mentors,” you giggle. “Let’s toast to that too!” You raise your glass to clink with theirs, leading to another joint sip. You open your mouth to say more, to keep them standing here with you, but everyone at the party is just as excited to see the two attorneys as you are.

“Oh, there they are!” someone announces. You turn, finding one of the firm’s oldest lawyers walking over to Nanami and Higuruma. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you two! C’mon, the chairman wants to see you.” He practically drags them away, blabbering on about the many guests here who want to meet them.

You watch them leave just as they turn to give you one last look, an apology in their gazes. You feel an immense pang of disappointment inside of you and you feel stupid for feeling that way. It’s a party! This is their job! Of course, they need to mingle and talk to other important people.

Yuki luckily comes to your rescue, strutting over to you with more snacks. “Oh, Y/N!” she exclaims, taking your hand. “There you are! Come here, you have to try these white chocolate raspberry bars before they’re gone!” She drags you off in a different direction from Nanami and Higuruma, widening the gap between you.

For the next hour, the party wears on like this: you on your side and your bosses on the other, all of you stuck being pulled in directions other than each other’s. You watch as they chat with chairmen and CEOs; attorneys and paralegals; city officials and policemen. It’s honestly annoying…probably because of the champagne you drink.

With every passing minute, you sip a bit more, feeling even lighter and riskier than your first glass. You’re pretty sure you’re on about four ½ glasses at this point, so much so that you start seeing things. You believe you feel Nanami’s eyes on your ass from across the room or Higuruma’s gaze straying away from a guest to check you out. Your risky, reckless behavior makes you smile at them from across the party, not realizing how flirty it may come off to them or someone else watching. But the idea of that doesn’t embarrass or mortify you. In fact, it turns you on.

But nothing even comes from it. You never find your way over to your lawyers. Disappointed, sleepy, and exhausted from walking around in heels, you decide to give your dogs and the alcohol a break. You go up to the bar situated on the left hand side of the ballroom and take a seat on one of the stools, ordering a club soda.

“That’s the easiest thing I’ve made all night!” the bartender exclaims, making you laugh. “God bless you!” After they finish whipping up your drink, you’re in the middle of a few needed sips when someone sits next to you. You turn, finding a young man in a suit that looks like Tom Hiddlestone and Timothy Chatlane had a baby.

The wavy-haired man in his suit smiles at you. “Your Nanami and Higuruma’s paralegal, right?” he asks. You shake your head. “Intern. Not a paralegal…yet.”

He nods, chuckling at your humor. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around the office before. I would’ve remembered a face like yours.” His tone is flirtatious and you pick up on it immediately. Usually, you’d disregard and ignore this, but tonight? You may just play along.

“Possibly,” you reply, lowering your soda. “I have one of those faces.” Feeling particularly chatty, you put a hand out for a shake. “I’m Y/N,” you blurt. “I’m an intern for the law firm on the sixth floor.” The man races to shake your hand, hanging on for longer than necessary. His palm is sweaty. “Ah, yes, the law interns,” he chuckles. “I’m Mark, an associate for an accounting firm. I’m up on the eighth.”

He flashes a pearly white smile that is probably supposed to make you swoon. “That explains why we haven’t seen each other,” you giggle. He laughs with you and you decide that he’s cute enough to waste time on at the party.

“Maybe this party is good for something then,” he flirtatiously says, his smile turning suggestive. “I was plannin’ on leaving soon ‘cause this crowd is dead, but you just might make me wanna stay.” And just like that, he pops the bubble on your fantasy plan. “Oh” is all you can say.

No doubt he is trying to get into your pants…or rather under your dress. You turn to sip your water in silence, trying to think of something to say to let him down easy. “Are you here with someone?” he asks and his hand goes crawling to yours again.

Now you really need to think of something fast. “Um” is all you can get out before a shadow descends upon you and him. You both turn to find Nanami standing there. “Oh, sorry, am I interrupting, Mark?” he asks. He sounds apologetic, but you can tell he isn’t by the firm set of his lips.

The attorney beside you gives your boss a lop-sided smile. “Just my drink,” he jokes as the bartender passes him a whiskey. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Mr. Nanami?” He cocks his head to the side, drunk and cocky. “Sorry to cut in, but I need to steal Y/N away for a moment,” Nanami explains before turning to you. “We hate to do this now, but since you’re here, we’d like to plan out the schedule ahead of the holidays.”

“Oh!” you exclaim, your brain already switching into work mode. “Um…yeah, sure, of course.” You turn to Mark who looks less than pleased about being cockblocked. “It was nice meeting you, Mark. I’ll see you on the seventh floor one day.” The attorney only gives you a smile and side-eyes Nanami as you leave with him.

In silence, you two head to the elevators and Nanami presses the up button. You aren’t too sure why he and Higuruma are doing this now during a party, but you’ll wait to find out. When the elevator comes, Nanami lets you inside first and then follows behind you. When the doors close, you become hyper aware of him standing so close next to you. You can smell his cologne—spicy and musky like cinnamon. It makes your body react in very nasty ways.

“You won’t be seeing him,” he says. You blink, your fuzzy brain almost not catching that. “What?” you ask.

He turns to you, his eyes firm. “You won’t be seeing him,” he repeats. “Not to gossip, but the man is known to stick his dick where he makes his business. He’s slept with half of his department and a lot of his clients.”

You almost forget who the hell he is talking about until you remember (of course!) Mark. “Damn,” you scoff. “Well, thank you for the save…not that I was planning on sleeping with him or anything. He’s not my type.” You immediately flush, hot with shame and embarrassment. You shouldn’t have said any of that. ‘Fuck that champagne,’ you think.

However, Nanami silently chuckles to himself, finding it funny. But still, you beat yourself up. At least until you get to your floor. Nanami and Higuruma share an office space, their offices separated by a door where one can easily enter one room and exit the other. Nanami’s office consists of tan furniture, a plush couch where you often do your work, and his book collection while Higuruma’s office is all dark colors, polished Mahogany wood, and a mini bar. Some things they do share though are private bathrooms, personal thermostats, and a beautiful view of the skyline.

You walk down the hallway to the office with Nanami and enter his, finding Higuruma already there. “Took you two long enough,” he grumbles. Nanami’s office is dark, only lit by the full moon coating the floor in silver and illuminating Higuruma’s manly, handsome features.

Suddenly, your heart begins to pound. “S-So where’s the schedule?” you stammer. Nanami shuts the door behind you and walks up to stand beside Higuruma. “There is no schedule,” he confesses. “Sorry to bring you up here so randomly, but we didn’t want to do this in front of everyone.”

You scowl, confused. “Do what?” you ask, looking between them. The two give each other a look before Higuruma provides you with an envelope from under his suit jacket. “To give you this.”

You stare at the envelope, even more confused. Tentatively, you take it and look at them, unsure. “Open it,” Higuruma silently says with his eyes. Swallowing hard, you take a millisecond to mentally prepare yourself for what will be in the envelope and tear it open like you would a bandaid.

A folded letter flutters to your feet and you pick it up to read it. “On behalf of [the firm] and the departments of business and financial law, we would like to offer you a full time position as a legal assistant in the spring of 2025. Signed…” Your eyes grow big at the signatures. “Kento Nanami and Hiyomi Higuruma,” you exhale.

The two handsome men standing before you smile while you’re busy trying to resist the urge to pinch yourself. You have to be dreaming! You’ve gotta be! “Y-You’re offering me a job?” you softly ask. Higuruma smirks. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

Nanami nudges his partner in the arm. “We’ve noticed the work you’ve been putting in for us all these twelve months. Don’t think your hard work went unappreciated, Y/N. You’ve helped us a lot, even without us telling you, and for that, this is what we have to offer.” His gaze is soft, intimate. “This is just to get your foot in the door. Of course, you don’t have to stay forever and we’ll help you study for the BAR if you want to take it.”

Higuruma doesn’t add on, but he doesn’t have to. He, too, gazes down at you like everything Nanami is saying is true. You look down at the letter and then back up at them. “I….I don’t know what to say.” Higuruma’s smirk widens. “Say you’ll take the job.”

Finally, you break into a humongous smile and you jump up and down. “Yes!” you squeal. “Yes, yes, I’ll take it! Thank you both so much!” You go to toss yourself at them for a hug, but you make one misstep and nearly trip. You gasp, trying to find your footing.

Quickly, Nanami hooks his arm around your midsection, securing you in his arms. “Careful!” he exclaims, catching you. “That would’ve been nasty.” You should just tell him thank you and leave the comfort of his arms. You should just take the L now and leave before things get bad.

But you don’t. You make the mistake of staring up into his inviting eyes and soft, pink lips. His eyes gaze down to your mouth, his pupils dilating as if he sees something he likes…wants even. He leans down and so do you, and suddenly your lips are on his as you stand in the comfort of his embrace.

The kiss is short and gentle, but it’s sweet enough to steal your breath away. It is a kiss fit for a Disney movie ending. But just as soon as it happens, it ends and you both pull away, stunned. “Whoa,” he exhales.

Yes, whoa. Whoa, that was the best kiss you’ve ever had. Whoa, you just kissed your boss. Immediately, you jump back as if burned and over your mouth. “Oh, God,” you gasp. “I-I’m so sorry. I…oh, God.” You begin to shake, your eyes welling with tears. Regret and shame instantly fill you.

Higuruma steps forward, placing a hand on your shoulder. Nanami tries to come near you too, his gaze soft. “Y/N,” he softly says. You quickly side-step him and step away from Higuruma’s touch. “I have to go,” you sob. “I can’t be here. I shouldn’t be here.” You begin to panic, dropping the job acceptance letter in the process. You don’t try to pick it up.

“Wait, Y/N,” Nanami pleads. “Stay. It’s okay.” He walks toward you like you’re a wounded animal, gingerly and slowly. “No, it’s not!” you whimper. “I can’t believe I did this! I’m gonna ruin everything now! I-I—“

A hand grasps yours and pulls you close into his big, warm body. “Sweetheart, calm down,” Nanami soothingly says. “It’s okay.” He wraps his arms around you, pulling you into his chest. There, you begin to cry, big, fat tears rolling down your cheeks and ruining your makeup. “It’s okay,” Nanami murmurs into your ear.

At the sound of his voice, you look up into his eyes and see that they are hooded and soft. Affectionate. When he leans in again, you don’t pull away. You let him kiss you, slow and deep, your lips moving in perfect tandem with each other. It is almost as if your lips are meant to kiss. Nanami’s big hand cups your face, tilting your head slightly to the side to meld your mouths together, earning a soft moan out of you. His hands slide down to your ass, caressing the bump made underneath your dress from it.

From the back, you feel Higuruma presses himself against you, his big hands sliding across your naked lower back and shoulders. His touch electrifies you. So do his kisses. When he begins to kiss your neck and shoulders, you pull away from Nanami, gasping. “H-Hang on,” you stutter.

He stops, his hands still on you. Questions flare in his hooded, brown eyes. “Tell us what you want, Y/N,” he says, his voice strained. “Tell us to stop and we swear to God, we’ll stop.” Nanami pauses too, slight pants leaving his lips. You want to apologize, to tell them that this isn’t right or proper or appropriate to do. This is so, so wrong.

But as you stand here in the dark sandwiched between your bosses, you’ve also never felt more right. “Keep going,” you softly beg. The lawyers descend upon you immediately, kissing, touching, and grinding their hips into you. You feel their hardened cocks press against your groin and your ass, giving you a taste of how you’re making them feel…and have made them feel for months now.

“We wanted this for so long,” Higuruma whispers into your neck. “You have no fuckin’ idea, Y/N.” His thick lips press down your spine, peppering your skin in wet kisses. “You don’t know how many times I wanted to pull your ass aside and do this to you.”

“So many times,” Nanami growls, his hands sliding up to your hips to indulge in them. “You make it so hard to control myself, darling.” You’re feeling the last of your self-control slipping, the pleasure too much to handle. You moan at every touch and kiss, loving that you can feel their defined muscles through their suits.

“Take it off,” you whisper and motion to your dress. The lawyers share a surprised look with each other that quickly melts into lust and need. “You tell us if you want us to stop, you understand?” Higuruma sternly asks. You nod, but that isn’t enough. “Words,” he states. “Give me your words. Speak up.”

Your nipples harden at his firm tone, loving how he puts you so effortlessly in your place. “Yes, sir,” you reply, the words feeling so natural to you. Higuruma sharply inhales, greatly affected by this. He quickly snatches one string out of the perfectly-tied knot at your neck, loosening your dress in one single act. The front slips off of you, revealing your hardened brown nipples and ass only covered by a black thong.

“Shit,” Nanami exhales while Higuruma chuckles. “So that’s why that ass looked so good tonight,” he murmurs, taking a handful of it for himself. “You should be forbidden from wearin’ dresses and pencil skirts around us, y’know. You make it very hard to concentrate on much.”

One of his big hands glides down your asscheeks to slide between your inner thighs. “But you know that, don’t you?” he whispers. His thick fingers slide against the wet cloth of your thong while Nanami feasts on your tits, molding and massaging them while his lips coat your nipples in saliva. “Oh, fuck,” you moan, tilting your head back at their ministrations.

“Naughty little thing,” Higuruma tuts, still rubbing you. “You’re so fuckin’ wet. You must’ve needed this from us, hm?” He presses his fingers up, rubbing your clit in circular motions. Your moans grow louder, leading Nanami to capture them with his mouth.

“You need to quiet down, baby,” Higuruma says, humored. “You’ll have the entire party comin’ up to see why our good little intern is makin’ so much noise.” Nanami pulls away to hold your chin, forcing you to look at him. “I bet she wants that,” he whispers. “Bet she wants everyone to know what she’s doing to us.”

“I’m sure they do,” Higuruma chuckles. “This ain’t the first time we’ve walked around the office hard as rocks for her.” He rubs you a little harder, making you bite your lip at the sensations. Jealous, Nanami glares at his partner. “That’s enough, Hiromi,” he growls. “You need to share. You’re not the only one here.”

Higuruma glares back, but allows the blonde to take over. You watch with shaky breath as Nanami slowly kneels down, staring up at you as he does. “I wanna taste you,” he confesses. “I wanna make you feel good. Will you let me?” Delirious from the foreplay, you nod and in an instant, your leg is hiked over his shoulder and he is sloppily French kissing your pussy.

“Now look who’s bein’ fuckin’ greedy,” Higuruma growls, impatient. “I need a taste too. Scoot over.” “We’re both gonna tongue fuck that pussy now,” he whispers. “When you need to cum, you let yourself do it, got it?”

Once again, you gush at the tone of his voice, much to Nanami’s enjoyment. “Y-Yes, sir,” you whimper. Then all words cease to exist when Higuruma kneels behind you. For the next couple of minutes, your world is blinded by pleasure as you receive dual cunnilingus from your two bosses. “Oh, shiiiit!” you groan, grasping Nanami’s head and Higuruma’s hand on your hip just to hold onto something.

You feel as if you’re on a rollercoaster, getting pulled this way and that, your stomach fluttering from the bumpy ride and the rush. Your stomach flutters and your heart pounds with every grip of Higuruma’s hands on your ass holding you steady; every lap of Nanami’s tongue against your clit. Higuruma is busy sliding his tongue along your slit, his nose rubbing against your ass…which feels oddly good too!

Everything they do feels good. Your juices and their spit collide, mixing together and making everything way more stimulating and sensitive than normal. You grip Nanami’s blonde hair, pushing him closer to your clit, your breathing coming out in huffs. You can feel that knot in your core tightening the more your lawyers lick, lap, and suck at your sloppy, juicy little pussy, drinking away as if they’re both starving for you.

You don’t realize how loud you are until you hear yourself moaning throughout the empty office. “O-Oh, fuck!” you wail. “I’m gonna cum! You’re gonna make me—“

“Wait,” Higuruma hisses, suddenly shooting a hand up to cover your mouth. He stands up so fast that he scares the shit out of you, almost as if he teleported. “I hear footsteps.” Your heart explodes in your chest and Nanami immediately stops his pussy-eating to listen too.

There, outside in the hallway, you hear footsteps and muffled laughter. Neither one of you moves or even breathes, standing still as statues in the dark. Luckily, the voices and footsteps disappear when a door opens and closes, leaving you in silence once more. Higuruma looks down at Nanami, still shaken but also very horn. “Let’s get her on the desk,” he suggests, his gaze lustful. “She needs somethin’ for that mouth if she won’t shut the fuck up.”

A smile that you’ve never seen before grows on Nanami’s face, his glasses foggy and nearly falling off of his face. Quickly, he stands and scoops you up without a word, wrapping your legs around his waist. You squeak as you’re picked up, your heels dangling from around his hips. He is fast transporting you from the floor to the desk that is luckily free of any files or papers.

Nanami places you on his desk and takes off his glasses before proceeding to duck between your thighs. As he begins lapping at your cunt again, Higuruma comes over to your side, his groin at eye level. Ziiiiip goes his fly and out comes his big, thick, hard cock. Your body and pussy throb at the sight of him.

He stares down at you, lustful and demanding. “Open your mouth for me, baby,” he demands, taking off his suit jacket. “Put those pretty lips on me.” He rapidly begins uncuffing his sleeves and unbuttoning his top, revealing his mouthwateringly broad, hairy chest you want to nuzzle. You do as he says and wrap a hand around him to stroke him as you wrap your lips around his shaft.

Higuruma smiles…and he barely does that, so you must be doing a good job. “That’s it,” he groans. “Such a fuckin’ slut for me.” He wraps a hand in your hair and pulls you closer as he uses his other hand to pull his pants down farther, exposing his firm, plump ass. You become handsy, using one hand to feel up his body and delicious happy trail while you use the other to run your fingers through Nanami’s blonde locks.

You feel like a princess and a slut all at once, receiving the best of both worlds. Finally, that urge to release comes again and you whimper and slobber all over Higuruma’s cock as you get close. “Cum for me, darling,” Nanami groans into your pussy. “Do as you’re told. Cum all over my fuckin’ face right now.”

With a high-pitched squeal, you do, leaking and creaming all over Nanami’s tongue. He greedily laps you up as you write and shake on his desk, much to Higuruma’s enjoyment. He loves watching you ride out your orgasm with his dick in your luscious mouth, but fuck, is he jealous watching Nanami eat you out. “Don’t be greedy, Nanami,” he growls. “Give me some.”

Nanami rises from between your thighs, his hair a mess and his lips coated in you. Higuruma grabs him from the back of his neck and smashes their lips together. Right in front of you. You gape at them, shook and totally confused as they sloppily kiss, swapping spit and your cum between their mouths.

You had no idea they had a “thing” going on, but then again, you wouldn’t think you’d know. Nanami and Higuruma are very private people. But shit, is it hot to see them make out in front of you for only your eyes only.

When they pull away, Higuruma smirks down at you. “Look at this naughty girl gettin’ off to us,” he snorts. “You won’t go tellin’ people about us, right, baby?” You shake your head as best as you can with his cock still sliding in and out of your mouth, making him groan at the vibrations.

Nanami watches, quickly stripping off his jacket and shirt to expose his beautiful muscles and chest pebbled in fine, blonde hair. “I can’t fuckin’ take much more,” he huffs. “I need to fuck you now or I’ll lose my mind.” He begins toying with your tits, massaging one while Higuruma plays with the other. “Tell me you want that too. Tell me what you want, Y/N.”

Higuruma pinches one of your nipples, causing your mouth to open wide on a gasp and his big cock to slip out. “Need you,” you gasp out. “Both of you. I don’t care how! Please just fuck me!” You’ve never been so fucking horny in your life. You feel as if you’ll die if you don’t cum again now.

The two lawyers look at each other, both contemplating how to maneuver this as if you’re a case they can’t quite figure out how to win. “You go first,” Higuruma suggests. “I wanna fuck her throat a little more.” Nanami doesn’t need to be told twice, his eyes molten with lust. “Bend over,” he demands and you do, assuming the position.

The two groan at the sight of your plump ass exposed over Nanami’s desk, your heels still on. They both give your ass an open-palmed smack, making you gasp at the pleasurable sting. “So good at taking orders,” Nanami murmurs in your ear. “I like that. That’s what good girls do.” He gives your cheek a peck before finally, he slides his cock against your pussy and slowly slides himself inside of you.

You both gasp at the sensations, your pussy walls squeezing around him as they become accommodated to his size. He is thick and long, making you feel so full and so stretched. Nanami murmurs sweet nothings in your ear as he coaxes you to rub your clit, making you wetter. Once you’re finally relaxed is when he proceeds to grab your hips and fuck your shit up.

His desk shakes slightly as he pistons into you, his hips slamming into your ass, causing the sound of skin slapping against skin to echo throughout the room. Your moans and cries are loud and clear, possibly audible even to the party. “Fuck!” you loudly moan. “Oh, my God, yes!”

Another cock slaps against your mouth and slides in, not stopping until it is in your throat. “Uh-uh, baby,” Higuruma chuckles. “Too loud. Little slut just can’t help herself, can she, Nanami?” His partner is too busy ramming your cunt to answer, doing his best to hold back his moans and gasps.

Higuruma snorts. “Neither can you, apparently.” Nanami glares at him, silently telling him to fuck off as he presses his front into your back, pushing himself deeper. “Push back on me, darling. Fuck me back.” You do as he orders, tossing your ass back into him and pushing yourself farther onto his wonderful cock. “Good girl!” he moans. “Needed this for so long. Needed you so bad.”

He murmurs and babbles into your shoulder, suckling on it as he pounds into your wet heat over and over again. It doesn’t take you long for you to feel the urge to cum again as Nanami’s balls slap against your needy clit, stimulating you further. “M’cwumming!” you whine around Higuruma’s cock just as that second intense wave washes over you.

“Good girl,” Nanami grunts, holding your shaking body close as your pussy walls grip and stroke him. “Such a good, good girl for me.” He slows his pace but continues to fuck you, edging you and making your orgasm last even longer. Your head feels dizzy and your thighs are slick with cum, but they’re not done yet.

“Let’s switch,” Nanami tells Higuruma. “I need to feel her mouth.” Higuruma looks ready to fuck a hole in a wall with the wild look he has in his eyes. They slowly pull out of you and switch spots, Higuruma now behind you while Nanami is in front. Just as quickly as they switched, they slide back into your holes again.

“Shit, baby,” Higuruma hisses, gripping your hips in his big, calloused hands. “You’re so fuckin’ wet. I can get so deep.” His hand wraps around your throat while Nanami fucks it, groaning at its tightness. “You want it deeper, don’t you?” he teasingly asks. “You want me to fuck this pussy till it cums again?”

“Mmm-hmm!” you desperately whine. Nothing sounds better to you right now. You are drunk off of the pleasure and these two sexy men, needing their cocks and cum like you need air to breathe.

The two begin to fuck you in tandem with each other, one pulling out while the other pushes in, filling up one of your holes. You have never loved being used before, feeling like an office slut for them. Maybe this can be one of your duties—sucking and fucking them when they are stressed at work. Wouldn’t that be so nice? Your body certainly thinks so.

Higuruma’s heavy balls slap against your clit as he pistons into you, making the desk shake. “Fuck, baby!”he grunts. “You’re gonna make me cum soon.” Nanami lets out an agreeable moan, fucking your throat. “M-Me too,” he stammers. “You’re gonna be our good little assistant and take our cum for us, darling?”

Before you can even think about answering or trying to, you hear something. Knock, knock, knock. “Um…Mr. Higuruma?” someone calls outside the door. “Mr. Nanamin, are you in there? It’s Itadori!” Instantly, the two lawyers grow still and anxiety pushes your hormones out the door.

“Shit!” Higuruma hisses. He clears his throat, doing his best to sound like he wasn’t just pumping you full of his cock. “Y-Yes, we’re in here,” he calls. “Do you need something, Itadori?”

Yuji Itadori is by far one of the cutest and sweetest interns in the firm, so you don’t feel too angry about being interrupted. Just extremely sexually frustrated. “One of the lawyers sent me up here to fetch you,” Itadori explains. “They’re about to start the anniversary speech in about fifteen minutes!”

Slowly, Higuruma and Nanami begin to fuck you again, moving tortuously slow. You can feel yourself growing closer to orgasm and do your best to keep quiet, glad to have something in your mouth. “We’ll be down soon,” Nanami replies. “Thank you, Itadori.”

“You betcha!” Itadori chirps. “Oh, and if you see Y/N, tell her that the cake is out! I saved her a slice!” Then off he goes, his footsteps disappearing down the hall and the ding of the elevator slicing through the silence. Once he’s gone, you all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

“Now then,” Higuruma growls, “let’s make this little slut cum before we get caught.”

Your bosses make do with the time they have and fill your holes with each vigorous, pounding thrust that makes both your mouth and pussy salivate. The office is filled with the sounds of your hushed moans, creaky desk legs, and the light slapping of skin as Higuruma fucks and fucks and fucks your pussy like a machine.

When he finally feels you squeezing around him, he slides one hand down between you to rub your clit. “Cum for me,” he urges you. “Give it to me, baby. Cum on that dick now.”

Maybe it’s the way he talks you through it or how Nanami sounds fucking your face or the fact that you’re on a time crunch, but the third orgasm quickly crashes down onto you as despite its slow buildup. It is just as tense as the first two, making you whine around Nanami’s cock as your cunt massages and strokes Higuruma off.

“Fuck!” he grunts. “I’m about to cum too. Where you want it, baby? Tell me now before I make the decision for you.”

“O-On me!” you gasp out, still in the throes of your orgasm. “Do it on me! Anywhere you want!”

Quickly, Higuruma pulls his cock, sobbing wet with your cum, out of you while Nanami ruts into your mouth, chasing his orgasm. Their sexy, deep moans and grunts of release fill the air as each hot load of cum coats your ass and your tongue.

You shudder and deliriously giggle as they cum, feeling all of that pleasure and the high from your orgasm collide. As your orgasms pass, you three pant and huff in the darkness, recovering from the activity.

Clearing his throat, Nanami pulls out of your mouth, allowing you to swallow his load. Meanwhile, Higuruma takes some tissues from the desk and sops up his cum up from your ass. Though it is sweet, it is also very, very awkward. ‘Of course, it is, you slut!�� you critically think. ‘You just fucked your fucking bosses!’

Once Higuruma finishes, he tosses the tissues away and steps away to allow you to freely move. You stay laid across the desk, not wanting to look up and see the regret in their eyes. You clear your throat, trying to ease the awkward tension. “Well, that’s one way to celebrate a job offer,” you breathlessly say.

It works. The two lawyers begin to laugh, their deep, rumbling chuckles appealing to your ear. Finally, you look up and find them smiling. “Yes, it is,” Nanami chuckles, eyes and cheeks aglow. “You were amazing, darling.” His pet name and the praise makes your stomach flutter like a school girl’s when she sees her crush.

“Hope you don’t go givin’ that to any other employer in your future,” Higuruma chuckles, his body and forehead glistening in sweat. Your eyes drink in his body, committing his and Nanami’s to memory.

Your stomach flips, glad to see that things aren’t awkward or weird anymore. You move to sit up on Nanami’s desk, facing both of your bosses. “Oh, trust me…I won’t. I doubt I’d have any employers as sexy as you two.” You stare up at them through your lashes, earning two sweet kisses on the lips in response as if they are your boyfriends. Not your bosses.

”The feeling is mutual,” Higuruma sighs. “You have no idea how long we’ve wanted to do that with you.” Nanami hums in response, gently moving a strand of hair behind your ear, but it’s really just an excuse to touch you. Despite the tenderness, you can’t keep denying the pink elephant in the room. “So…what now?” you ask.

The two lawyers stare at you blankly, obviously not quite getting what you mean. Higuruma laughs, already buttoning up his shirt. “Well, if you mean in the present tense, I suggest we all get cleaned up and go back to the party before someone comes lookin’ for us again.”

Nanami pulls his pants up, fastening his belt. You watch, doing your best to swallow that lump in your throat. That isn’t what you meant….but what else could you mean? Surely, you don’t think this can be anything real or official. Friends with benefits or fuck buddies, sure. But actually dating your bosses? Your employers and mentors? That would be a tale for the entire firm to gossip about.

So you hang your tail between your legs and push away your disappointment. “Oh…yes, of course,” you softly say. “We definitely should. Uh…can one of you help me with my dress?”

You stand and turn around for Nanami to help you tie your dress behind your neck. You do the rest, hiding your face from them as it flushes with embarrassment. You don’t want them to see you cry if you do. You can’t tell what you’ll do off of the Brüte champagne. After you finish dressing and checking your hair to make sure it doesn’t look too suspicious, the lawyers first check the hall to see if it’s empty.

Then they lead you down the hall to the elevator. None of you speak. The air is tense again with silence and your shoes clicking across the floor, the gravity of your decision swirling in the air like cigarette smoke. Pungent, heady, and inescapable. You feel regretful of your decision immediately despite how good and right it felt in the moment. You wouldn’t be surprised if Higuruma and Nanami revoked the job offer tomorrow morning.

You press the elevator button and the box luckily comes pretty quick. The lawyers let you in first before moving in behind you. Higuruma presses the button to the lobby and the doors close. Now in close proximity to them again, you’re aware of both men standing on either side of you, facing ahead. You clutch your purse to your stomach, biting your lip to avoid blurting something dumb.

“If you meant “what now” as in what about us, I hope you realize that this isn’t just a fling for us,” Higuruma says, his deep voice filling the tight space. “It can be if you want it to be, but if you’d like this to be more official, I wouldn’t be opposed to that.” Your mouth falls agap as you gape at him. He stares back, his eyes intense and unmoving.

“Me either,” Nanami adds. “Excuse my language and call me a selfish motherfucker, but I can’t say the idea of seeing you with another man other than my partner doesn’t tick me off.” His fingers dance across your lower back, giving you shivers. Delicious shivers that only grow as the fact of the matter processes in your mind: this is real now.

Better say this now than never then. You slowly take their hands in both of yours, your heart stuttering. “I’d like that too,” you shyly admit. “But maybe we can keep this on the low for now? Just until I start my new job, at least.”

Ding the elevator goes as you finally arrive to the lobby. Nanami smiles, running his thumb along your knuckles. “If that’s what you want, Ms. L/N,” he teases. “See you after the speech.” Higuruma gives your hand a squeeze before he releases it and fixes his tie just as the doors open onto the lobby.

As you walk out of the elevator, you feel two hands open-palm smack you against your ass. You squeak, hiding your smile as the two lawyers stride away to the stage entrance to the ballroom as if nothing happened.

You take another entrance, walking through the one that cuts into the middle of the ballroom. You immediately find your intern group standing by the stage waiting for the speech to begin and strut over to them, unable to keep your hips from swaying. It is as if your lawyers amped your confidence up to about one hundred.

Yuki turns to you, a slice of cake in her hand. “There you are!” she announces. “Look, Yuji’s cute ass left you some cake! Where the hell have you been?”

You give her a smile and take the plate from her, needing something sweet to end your night off right. “I just got a job offer.”

THE END.

#higuruma x black!reader #black fanfic writer #smutty smut #black coded reader #black writers #jjk smut #jjk x reader smut #nanami x black!reader #my works #my one shots

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