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incognit0slut · 2 months ago

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was i stupid to love you?

in which a lingering glance at Rossi’s wedding threatens your engagement.

content: angst, 4.8k, takes place right after truth or dare (14x15), a lot of dialogue, mention of prison arc, emotional distress, relationship conflict, not proofread a/n: when was the last time you saw me write angst? exactly. this is inspired by malcolm & marie bc i really like the idea of having an argument while moving around the house (also disclaimer i have nothing against JJ i just like being dramatic)

The lock clicks open. The door swings with a creak. Your heels tap against the hardwood in a hollow rhythm that feels almost too loud. There’s a tightness in your chest, that prickling behind your eyes, and a familiar ache pressing up from the pit of your stomach, churning into a faint nausea that you try to ignore. You’re trying to hold it back.

Not here.

Not now.

Spencer doesn’t even look up. The keys slip from his hand with a soft clink as they hit the side table, and he turns away with a quiet sigh that reverberates deep in your bones.

“Are you hungry?” he asks, tossing a glance toward the kitchen. “Think we could order something?”

You trail after him, the sharp click of your heels echoing as you step onto the kitchen tile. “We just came back from a wedding.”

He’s rifling through the cupboard, his fingers brushing over the mismatched mugs and neatly stacked plates before he pulls down two glasses. “I barely ate anything at the reception.”

You watch him, biting back a response as memories flicker to mind. The slice of cake he’d poked at absentmindedly, washing it down with sips of water instead of real food.

It wasn’t hunger he seemed focused on tonight. No, it was his quiet glances across the room you keep on catching from the corner of your eye, and that conversation he’d had at the bar. The one where his posture softened, his gaze so intent you’d found yourself staring at the back of his head, trying not to read too much into it—and obviously failing.

“Why didn’t you eat?”

He shrugs, his back still to you as he fills the glasses with water. “I don’t know,” he says, sounding almost absent, like it’s something he hasn’t really thought about. “I didn’t get around to it, I guess.”

The muscles in your jaw ticks as you bite the inside of your cheeks.

Spencer turns, offering you a glass. “I was thinking of Chinese, or maybe we can check if that Thai place you like is still open.”

You take the glass from him, barely sparing it a glance before setting it back down on the counter. “Whatever you want is fine.”

A subtle crease appears between his brows. “You sure? You usually have some opinion when it comes to food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You don’t want to eat anything?”

You suppress a sigh. "No. I'm tired."

The soft amber of his eyes dims slightly as he studies you. There's a flicker of uncertainty passing through them before he nods. “Alright,” he concedes. “We don’t have to order anything.”

A faint, humorless laugh escapes you before you can stop it. It tastes bitter, a little unfair, but it slips out before you can pull it back, “You don’t have to change your plans on my account, Spencer.”

“I’m not changing any plans,” he responds. “I’m just making sure you have something to eat in case you’re hungry.”

Your shoes dig uncomfortably into your feet. You shift your weight, starting to pace a few steps back and forth. "It's dinner, you don't have to check on me for every little thing. Do whatever you like."

He blinks, looking genuinely perplexed. "What are you saying? I was trying to be considerate."

"Right. Considerate.”

There’s an unmistakable bite in your tone.

“Yes, because we like doing these things together," he observes, watching your uneasy pacing. "Am I missing something here?”

You shake your head. “Nope.”

"Honey."

The term of endearment lands softly, slipping from his lips like he believes it has the power to melt whatever tension has suddenly crept between you. But it only tightens the knot building in your stomach. It’s stirring the words you’re trying to hold back, tangling them somewhere between your chest and throat.

He calls your name this time, his eyes narrowing into sharp lines. “You’ve been awfully quiet on our way home, and now you’re… honestly, I don’t know why you're acting this way.” His voice dips with a tinge of exasperation. "What’s this really about?"

The words you’ve been biting back feel like a stack of stones in your throat, rising up, up, up, each one pressed tighter by the gnawing nausea in your stomach. You can feel them gathering, and before you know it, they tumble out messily.

“I’m just saying, don’t let me hold you back from getting what you want. I wouldn’t want to stop you from anything—or, god forbid," you add, letting your gaze drift away as if a little distance might soften the blow, “anyone.”

The soft, almost stifled inhale he takes is audible. You don’t even have to look up to see his expression shifting. You’ve known him long enough to recognize the way his shoulders tense, the way his breathing slows as he processes your words. You know his reaction by heart, yet right now, you wonder if saying this was a mistake, if this is the start of something neither of you can take back.

His fingers twitching at his side slip into your line of sight. He's angry.

Maybe this isn’t the time to start a fight.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Your heels click softly as you turn.

“Forget it. I shouldn't have said anything,” you mutter, already moving toward the bedroom that’s been yours, too, for the past year. Although it feels strange tonight, like a space that belongs to someone else. A life you’re not entirely sure you belong in.

“No." His voice is somewhere behind you. “I think you should explain to me what you mean by that.”

You don’t respond, choosing instead to sink onto the edge of the bed, hands fumbling as you try to undo the straps of your heels. You twist the stubborn leather with more force. His shadow fills the doorway.

“Honey.”

Not again.

You decide to ignore him.

“Is there something you’d like to say to me?”

You tug harder at the strap. “No.”

He doesn’t buy it. “You’re clearly bothered by something.”

You shake your head, fingers still fumbling, the leather cutting against your ankle with each pull. “I’m just tired. Can we leave it at that?”

There’s a flicker of frustration in his gaze now, a crease forming between his brows as he studies you. He moves into the room. You barely have the chance to react before he lowers himself, bending one knee to the floor as he reaches toward the strap you’ve been fighting with. “Here, let me—”

“Don’t,” you interrupt, pulling your foot away. “I can do it myself.”

“I know you can. But let me—”

“I can do it myself!”

Your heartbeat thuds loud in your ears, each pulse feeding the frustration that’s wound its way up from your chest. He rises slowly, not a word passing his lips, but the tension radiates off him like heat. He’s close enough that his warmth presses against your skin, although it’s not the kind you usually find comforting. It’s almost suffocating.

You turn your focus back to the stubborn strap, your fingers trembling slightly as you struggle to grip it. Out of the corner of your eye, you catch him slipping off his shoes, one after the other, the soft thuds barely audible over the rush of your own heartbeat. He pulls off his suit jacket, carefully smoothing the crumpled fabric before hanging it in the closet. For a moment, it seems like he’s going to let it go… until his gaze drifts back to you.

You can tell his patience is fraying, and you’re proven right when he asks again, “What did you mean by that? When you said you wouldn’t want to stop me from anyone… what was that supposed to mean?”

You finally manage to tug the strap loose. The heel drops to the floor with a muted thump. “It was nothing.”

“I don’t think you’d say something like that if it was nothing.”

Your focus shifts to the other shoe. “Just drop it, Spencer.”

"How am I supposed to drop it when you're implying... whatever it is you're implying?"

You keep your eyes down, wrestling with the strap in silence. He cuts through the quiet before it has a chance to grow.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t brush it off like it’s nothing when it clearly means something. I need to know why you said that.”

You kick off the other heel and meet his gaze for the first time since you walked into the room. “You really want to know?”

He reaches for his bow tie, yanking it loose it with one hard pull. “Do I want to know why you’re giving me this attitude right now? Yes. Yes, I do.”

Oh. So this is going to be that kind of fight.

You hadn’t expected it to go here. Fights with Spencer are very rare, usually more a clash of misunderstandings that you both laugh about with limbs tangled between sheets by the time you’ve made peace. But seeing him standing there with the tie hanging loosely around his neck and his five o’clock shadow casting an even darker line along his jaw, it hits you differently.

This is real. And this time, you don’t know if brushing it off will fix anything.

“Fine, let’s talk about it then.” You rise from the bed, tension carrying you to your feet. “Emily’s speech tonight.”

His brow furrows, not quite a scowl, more a cautious crease as he processes your tone. “Emily’s speech? What about it?”

“What do you remember of it?”

There’s a slight pause, and you can tell he's clearly caught off guard by the question. “She mentioned how Rossi and Krystal are twin flames."

“Right. Two souls that are always meant to be together.”

His face is still marked by confusion, but there’s something else creeping in. A subtle tightening around his eyes tells you he’s starting to piece it together. “I don’t understand what that has to do with—”

“You looked at JJ the second Emily made that speech,” you cut him off. “Spencer, you didn’t even spare a glance at your future wife because you were too busy making eyes at the woman who’s apparently been in love with you all these years.”

There. You said it. The words that have twisted around your insides all evening are finally out. And maybe they taste a little bitter, but at least they're not choking you anymore.

A second passes, then another, and by the time the fifth heartbeat ticks by, he’s standing there with his hand on his hip.

“That’s not what happened."

“Then what was it?” you demand. "I sat beside you the whole day, you didn't even try to hide it."

“That’s not—you’re twisting things.” His hand moves through his hair, fingers digging in as his curls tumble forward onto his forehead. “And you know what happened that night wasn’t real. It was a forced confession. She was under duress, we both were. JJ and I are just friends.”

You arch an eyebrow. “You look at all your friends like that?”

His hand drops to his side. "I don't know what else you want me to say. JJ said what she did because she thought we might die. She has a family, and a husband who she loves. We already went through this, I don't understand why this is suddenly an issue again."

“Maybe I wouldn’t be bringing this up if you didn’t look at her tonight like you were ready to break up that marriage yourself.”

A flash of shock and anger crosses his features.

“That’s not fair,” he snaps, his voice sharper than you’ve heard in a while. “Do you really think I’d disregard everything I have with you because of a look? Because of a history that has never gone anywhere?”

“I don’t know what to think. It's not like it happened just once, I saw you looking at her the same way at the bar." You step forward, accidentally kicking your discarded heel as you move. "What were you two talking about, anyway?”

He lets out a tight breath. “She was checking in on me. She… we haven’t talked much since then.”

The corners of your mouth pull down. “Mhm. Another round of truth or dare?”

“I can’t believe you’re using that against me." His hair flops forward as he shakes his head, falling messily over his brow. "If there were anything unresolved with JJ, I would’ve said something. But I didn’t, because there’s nothing there."

“And yet, she’s always been an important part of your life, hasn't she?"

He tilts his head. "What are trying to say now?"

Your tongue darts out, briefly brushing your lips. You're not sure you should say it, but it feels like a door has swung open—a door to words that have been waiting for their moment.

You take a slow, deep breath, filling your lungs with as much air as you can.

“When you were in prison, you put her on your visiting list ahead of almost everyone else. Doesn’t that say something about where she stands with you?”

He exhales sharply, dragging a hand over the back of his neck.

“She’s part of the team,” he says, as if he’s trying to spell out something he’s already explained a dozen times. "There were strict rules, I already told you that only a handful of people were allowed to visit. It wasn’t like I could just put anyone on the list.”

“But you could’ve put me on there!”

The familiar burn of tears prickles at the edges of your eyes, but you blink them back, refusing to let them fall. An explanation or protest is poised on his lips, but you’re already moving, closing the distance with a single, decisive step. A finger lands on his chest.

“I was your girlfriend, Spencer. Were you that determined to keep me out? Was the thought of seeing me really so unbearable? Do you even understand how hard it was to sit at home, knowing you were locked up, feeling completely helpless? Do you have any idea how much I hated myself day after day because I couldn’t do anything to help you?”

Your lips quiver. You feel like your heart is about to leap out of your throat.

“I was out here, just… waiting. Wondering if you were okay, if they were treating you alright, if you even had someone to talk to. And meanwhile, she’s there, with you. Every single time, she’s the one who gets to be by your side.”

Your nail digs into the fabric of his shirt.

“So forgive me if I can’t just let that go. Because when it mattered, it felt like you didn’t want me to be there for you. And now… now I don’t even know if you need me the way you seem to need her.”

Your breathing turns shallow, each inhale catching in your chest. The tears you’ve been holding back are dangerously blurring your vision. You swallow the knot lodged in your throat.

“I need a minute.”

Without another word, you turn and walk out of the room, leaving him standing there in stunned silence. You slip back into the kitchen, leaning against the counter as you finally reach for the glass of water that’s been sitting there untouched. You take a sip, barely feeling the cool water on your lips, when you hear his footsteps behind you.

“You think I don’t want you in my life?” he demands. “You think I somehow need her more than I need you?”

You set the glass down. “What part of ‘I need a minute’ do you not understand?”

“You really expect me to wait quietly after you unloaded every doubt you’ve ever had about us?”

You life your chin up. “Yes, I do. I need space to think right now.”

“What more do you want to think about when you’ve already convinced yourself that I’m always going to fall short? Is it so hard to believe that you’re the one I want?”

“You want to know why it’s so damn hard to believe?” You turn towards him. “Because every time I try to let this go, there’s always something. A confession. That—that not-so-subtle look. And when those things happen, it reminds me that I’m not as close to you as she is. I’m fucking tired of feeling like I’m fighting for space in your life.”

“Do you think I want you to feel like that? Do you think I’d go through everything we’ve been through if you didn’t matter to me?”

“Then explain to me why I wasn’t on that list!” you cry out. “Explain to me why, in one of the hardest times of your life, you couldn’t make space for me?”

“Because I was trying to protect you!”

A heavy, dreadful silence falls between you. He takes a step back, his eyelids fluttering shut briefly, and when he opens them again, there’s a softness in his gaze that mirrors the gentleness now threading through his voice.

“I know it probably doesn’t make sense to you, and maybe it never will, but I couldn’t stand the idea of you seeing me like that. Living through it was hard enough, but having you there, seeing me so helpless… It would have crushed me. I didn’t want that to be your memory of me.”

His Adam’s apple dips as he swallows, a quick, almost anxious movement you’ve witnessed countless times.

“And when JJ came to see me,” he continues, “the way the inmates looked at her, the things they said after she left… it was disgusting. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—let that happen to you. I couldn’t live with thought of you being subjected to that because of me.”

You lower your head with a sigh. “I don’t care if they looked. I don’t care what they would’ve thought.”

“But I care,” he fires back, taking a step forward. “Because you mean more to me than anyone. All I wanted was to keep you safe, and maybe I didn't handle it right, maybe I made the wrong call... but it was only because I—" His voice drops into an even more gentle note. "Because I love you."

Your heart stumbles, an uneven beat that feels almost bruised, pounding hard against your ribs.

"I-I love you so much. More than I know how to put into words." The ache in your chest sharpens as his hands come up to cup your cheeks. "I don't like fighting with you. I hate it, actually. I hate seeing you look at me like this."

You also hate the way he’s looking at you. There’s a depth to his annoyingly pretty eyes that makes it impossible to hold up your defenses without feeling them crumble. You let your eyes flutter closed.

“Why don’t we… call it a night?” He suggests. “Let’s lie down. We don’t have to talk about this now.”

The blackness behind your eyelids does little to quiet your mind. Nor does his voice. Or his touch. Instead of offering peace, his presence throws every glance, every moment of tension from tonight into sharper relief.

You draw in a breath, trying to find some comfort in his palms against your cheeks. Yet, even this can’t smooth away the doubt that’s settled in. With a resigned sigh, you release the breath you’ve been holding along with the words that have been pressing at the back of your throat.

“You haven’t explained it to me.”

The shadows in his gaze seem to deepen when you open your eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been going in circles, but you haven’t explained to me what happened tonight,” you say quietly. “Why did you look at her, Spencer?”

His thumb absently strokes your cheek in a way that feels more hesitant than reassuring.

“Be honest with me,” you press. “Was there a part of you, even the tiniest part, that still wanted something with her? Some small part of you that… wondered what it might be like?”

The silence between you presses in from all sides, broken only by the faint hum of the refrigerator and the distant, muffled ticking of a clock on the wall. It’s the kind of quiet that sharpens even the smallest sounds, yet his lack of response feels like the loudest thing of all.

You pull back from him with an incredulous laugh.

“Unbelievable.” The word barely makes it past your lips, then louder as you start to move, pacing the length of the apartment. “Unbelievable.”

“Wait,” he says, trailing after you, “I didn’t even say anything.”

You stop short by the couch and whip around to face him.

“You didn’t need to! You—you hesitated," you stammer, searching his face for any flicker of denial, but it’s there, plain as day, that split-second of doubt you caught. “That was already an answer.”

He inches closer. A hand closes in on you. “Please—”

You flinch, pulling back, and every muscle in your body tightens. “Don’t. Don’t touch me right now.”

His hand falls to his side. “Please… let me explain."

You watch his hand drop, fingers twitching like they’re not sure if they should retreat or reach out again, but he keeps them there, hovering in some invisible line you’ve drawn. He looks at you with those big, pleading eyes, and for a split second, you almost feel bad for him.

Almost.

A bitter sort of smile tugs at the corner of your mouth. "So now you want to explain?"

He takes that as permission, and his voice comes in low, almost cautious. "When I first started at the BAU, I had… maybe a crush. A passing thing, barely anything, really. But that was fourteen years ago.” His hand scrubs through his hair in a frustrated sweep. “Fourteen years."

Your brows pull into a frown. “Why am I only hearing about this now?”

“Because it was nothing,” he says, almost too quickly. “I was young, it didn’t matter. I didn’t think it was worth bringing up.”

“Oh, I get it now. All those old feelings came rushing back the night she confessed, didn’t they?”

He mirrors your frown, a visible line of tension etching itself between his brows as he protests, “It’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is it?” you press. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks a whole lot like you’re caught between us because some part of you is still hung up on what might’ve been with her."

He shifts uncomfortably, and you notice the muscles in his jaw clenching the moment his gaze falters, dipping away for just a heartbeat before he looks back at you.

“It’s not that I don’t know what I want,” he starts to explain. “I didn’t expect her to say those things, and, yes, it threw me off for a moment. But that doesn’t mean I’m looking back, or that I want her. I want you.”

You shake your head, feeling a tired sort of frustration settle over you, and walk over to the couch. The soft cushions give slightly beneath you as you sink down.

“If you really wanted me, this wouldn’t be happening. You wouldn’t have let her get into your head like that. And now, you expect to believe that none of it meant anything?”

He’s quick to follow, closing the distance in a few tense steps. “It’s not—” His hands flex open and close at his sides. “You’re acting like one single look tonight is enough to decide I’m not committed to you. Do you really think I’d let some confession I didn’t even ask for get in the way of what we have?”

“It’s not just about that single look. It’s the way she could say something and suddenly, you’re pulled back to something you swore you’d put behind you. How am I supposed to feel secure when she still has that power over you?”

“And what am I supposed to do, then? Apologize for things I don’t even feel anymore?”

You flinch at the sharpness in his voice. A low, frustrated noise rumbles in his chest when you don’t respond.

“You’re always going to question me no matter what I say, aren’t you?"

You glance over at him, catching the disheveled strands of hair falling over his forehead, and it pulls you back to that night he came home after that dreadful night. He’d walked in looking worn in a way you’d never seen before, his whole posture weighted down as if he was carrying more than just the fear of being held hostage.

You remember sitting with him on this same couch, fingers brushing his, and asking what was bothering him.

JJ said she loved me.

Your heart lurched, a quick, quiet ache that you tried to swallow down. Really?

Don’t worry. It’s not true.

But with that same haunted look in his eyes right now, you can’t help but wonder if it really was just a well-intentioned lie.

“One glance and you’re accusing me of things that are never going to happen,” he starts again. “Do you really think so little of me? After everything we’ve shared, you really think I’d betray you like that?”

In true honesty, you don’t believe he would ever cross that line. But the doubts still linger, fed by those small hesitations, the moments when his eyes seem somewhere else. It’s not that you think he’d betray you. It’s that a part of him might still be holding onto something he won’t let you see.

“It’s like you don’t know me at all.”

Now those words you might actually believe.

“Maybe I don’t,” you say quietly, eyes drifting to the ring on your finger. You twist it absently, remembering the night he proposed. How he’d stumbled over his words, his cheeks flushing as he tried to make the moment perfect but ended up rambling in that endearing, nervous way of his. You’d laughed, reassured him that it was exactly right, that you didn’t need grand gestures. All you needed was him.

And yet, you don’t think he needs you as much you need him.

A hollow ache settles around your hand as you slip the ring off.

“What are you doing?”

You stare down at the gold band in your palm, blinking back the sting of tears.

“Tell me what you’re doing.”

Panic. Desperation. There’s a sudden rush of melancholy in his voice, a heaviness that wasn’t there a moment ago.

You swallow the lump in your throat. “I don’t know,” you whisper. “I—I don’t know anything right now.”

His face crumples, and in a sudden, almost instinctive movement, he drops down to his knees.

“No, no, you do know me. I’m sorry… I’m so sorry. Isn’t this—” he stops, then dips his head, trying to catch your gaze. “Isn’t that what couples do? They argue, they mess things up… but they work through it, right? Right?”

You look down, feeling the cool weight of the ring pressing into your skin.

“Spencer…” you begin. “I trust you. I do, and I’m sorry if I made it seem like I didn’t. But… I need to feel secure. I… I need to know that I don’t have to wonder or worry about where I stand. I never thought you’d be the one to make me doubt that.”

There’s a sharp ache in your chest.

“I didn’t think it could hurt this much. Not from you.”

Your pulse ring in your ear.

“I can’t—” The words catch in your throat, a stinging burn rising as you force them out. “I can’t be your wife when I’m constantly questioning if I have all of you. When I feel like… there’s always a part of you that isn’t mine.”

“I’m yours, honey. I’m always yours.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

There’s a slight falter in his voice. “Don’t—please don’t do this—”

“I can’t keep pretending it doesn’t hurt.”

He falls silent, and for a moment, the only sound is the rough, uneven rhythm of both your breaths filling the space between you. Then, like something inside him finally cracks open, he sinks down, pressing his forehead against your lap. The sudden weight of him forces a broken sob from your throat.

“Please,” he begs, fingers clutching at your sides. His chin presses deep into your thigh. “Tell me how to fix this. I can’t— I can’t lose you.”

“Spence…”

“I love you,” he blurts out, the words tumbling from him in a rush. “I love you.”

But what is love, really? Is it just a word people reach for when they’ve run out of things to say, a way to patch over bruised hearts and broken promises? Or should it feel like something more solid, something that doesn’t leave you questioning or aching? You can’t even tell anymore.

You wonder, too, if maybe you’ve been wrong all along. If this feeling in your chest isn’t love but something dressed up as it, something that fills the gaps while slowly hollowing you out. Because here you are, clinging to a love that somehow makes you feel like you’re both needed and unseen. Everything and nothing all at once.

You feel like a fool.

“I want to go to bed.”

His head lifts from your lap, a flash of surprise darting across his face, as though he hadn’t expected you to say anything at all, let alone that. “Yeah, okay, let’s go to bed. We’ll… we’ll figure this out in the morning.”

“I’d rather be alone.”

The words hit him visibly. His mouth opens, an argument forming there, but he catches himself, letting the silence stretch before he nods slowly.

“Then… I’ll stay out here. On the couch,” he offers softly. “Just… in case you need anything.”

A pang cuts through you at the thought of him stretched out on the couch, his legs too long, his shoulders folded in to fit the cramped space. But the idea of sharing a bed right now feels impossible.

You reach down, holding out the ring towards him.

“No,” he says firmly, gently pushing your hand away. “Don’t do that. This… it doesn’t mean we’re giving up. It just means we need time. That’s all.”

You’re not sure if your mind will change in the morning. The ring presses into your skin, but finally, you close your hand around it, nodding faintly before you peel away from him.

The tears start the moment the bedroom door clicks shut behind you. It spills over in a jagged, helpless cry that sounds nothing like you imagined heartbreak might sound. It’s messy, a kind of aching grief that feels too big for your chest, clawing its way out with no grace at all. You can practically hear how pathetic you sound, and yet you can’t seem to stop.

Even when the hem of your dress trails across the floor. Even when you finally collapse onto his side of the bed. There’s no stopping you. With the ring sitting cold in your hand, your tears keep coming, soaking into the pillow as you cling to the last trace of him woven into the sheets.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x self insert #spencer reid angst #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x female reader #spencer reid fem!reader #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid fanfiction #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds x reader #angst #angst with no happy ending

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whytheylosttheirminds · 3 months ago

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It took me so long to read this chapter because I had to keep stopping to savor it I just love it so much. There’s something about how much they truly just like each other and how well their dynamic is written that makes me cry (real). Zach’s struggle with letting himself feel his emotions is so relatable!! Also the smut is just next level, the intimacy…

Nadia you’re just the greatest to ever do it idk what else to say 💕

out of bounds (part six)

pairing zach maclaren and soccerplayer! female reader

rating mature 18+ for smut

summary zach has never been the type to rebel, but when he meets you at a soccer camp where you’re both working as counselors, which has a strict policy against dating between staff, he’s tempted to break the rules for the first time.

» part one | two | three | four | five

» masterlist

Every made-up explanation you can think of won’t cut it. Nothing you say will be believable. You’ve been found out.

“They’re bug bites?” you say weakly, pulling up your shirt so the hickeys aren’t in clear view anymore. Ami laughs, shaking her head.

“I knew you and Zach were a thing,” she says. “Why didn’t you just tell me? I wouldn’t judge. You know that I’m breaking the rules, too.”

You sigh, dropping back into your bed.

“We really don’t want it getting around,” you say.

“Then you should be more careful about where you let bugs bite you,” she laughs.

“Ami,” you groan, half-chuckling. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t. You can trust me,” she says. “When did this start?”

You sit back up and give her surface details, recapping when you two kissed by the lake, then tried and failed to wait until after the season to pursue anything.

“Have you guys…” she asks with raised brows. Your cheeks burn.

“Last night,” you admit. Your stomach goes numb at the memory. “But seriously, you can’t mention it to anyone. If people find out and he gets fired, it’d crush him.”

The amusement in Ami’s eyes fades, replaced with compassion.

“Wow. You’re really worried, huh?” she says.

“He’s the sweetest guy I’ve ever met. I don’t want him to get in trouble,” you reply. “We decided today that we’ll keep things on hold. For real this time.”

“Can you keep it on hold?” she asks. “I don’t know about you, but it being forbidden makes it ten times hotter.”

You shrug. You’re unsure if you’d be doing this much this fast with Zach if you met outside of work, and he did tell you last night that he never moves this quickly with a girl.

“I’m going to have to try,” you say. Zach’s hard to resist, but for his sake, you don’t want to give in.

“Fair,” Ami sighs. “I knew it, though. Malcolm called me crazy.”

“You talked about it with him?”

“Yeah, the night you went shopping,” she says. “I said that I think there’s something there and Malcolm was like, I can tell he likes her, but there’s no way he’d break the rules. I wish I could rub it in his face.”

You shoot her a look.

“But I won’t,” she promises. You nod gratefully.

“He can tell he likes me?” you ask.

“He said when you’re around, Zach smiles way more than usual,” she recalls, “which is already a lot to begin with, apparently.”

Your heart flutters. Zach is already such a cheerful person, so to think you make him even happier, and very obviously at that, is flattering.

“I guess Malcolm would know since they’ve been best friends for so long,” you say.

“Yeah,” Ami agrees. “He actually…”

She chuckles.

“What?”

“He was randomly talking about Zach the other day,” Ami continues, “and he said that he treats every girlfriend like he’s gonna marry her. I guess he’s a hopeless romantic, so I hope you’re prepared for that.”

You chuckle, wholeheartedly believing it. Zach is sweet and sensitive and while you didn’t doubt his sincerity for a second, hearing that he’s not one for flings is a relief. Because you want so much more with him.

“Good to know,” you reply. “And you and Malcolm are still keeping things casual or…?”

“I don’t know,” she says with a hopeful smile. “But if it gets more serious, I wouldn’t be mad about it or anything.”

You laugh together and finally, you allow yourself to gush about the man who’s thrown you for such an unexpected loop. It feels nice to not have to keep it in anymore.

You’re relieved when Saturday rolls around. Even though fun days at camp are just as busy, you welcome a break from running training drills.

After breakfast in the dining hall, Ruby announces to the campers to prepare for a morning of hiking, an afternoon of swimming, and a camp-wide relay race before dinner.

The sky is cloudy, but the chance of rain is low, so you stay optimistic that you won’t be forced to spend the day inside.

You quickly realize it’s not going to be as easy to keep your distance from Zach today, because you’re put in a hiking group with him.

As you set out on the trail with your cohorts of campers, their chatter loud over the sounds of shoes crunching over the dirt and birds chirping in the sky, Zach leads the crowd under towering trees that line the perimeter of the campground.

It’s only been a couple of days since you spoke with him about cooling things down, but not talking how you used to has been disheartening. Neither of you have been scheming to find ways to be alone like you used to, settling for friendly conversations whenever your paths cross.

“We’ll get a pretty cool view at the midpoint,” Zach says loudly to the campers, turning back. He meets your eyes for a second, a small smile flashing on his face, before he looks ahead again.

You wonder if he took your words as you suggesting you two shouldn’t talk at all, when that’s far from the truth.

You make conversation with your campers while you hike, and when you reach the height of a steep trail, you approach Zach as he looks out at the view of lush forestland.

“Hi,” you say quietly. His eyebrows raise when he sees you, like he’s surprised you’re speaking to him. It’s your first moment out of earshot from others in too long.

“Hey,” he says.

“You know, I didn’t mean we can’t talk at all,” you say with a soft laugh.

The pang of rejection has been burrowed in Zach’s chest since your last private conversation. He’s hardly ever one for overthinking, but since you came into his life, all he does is mull over everything you do and say to him, anxious that you don’t like him as much as he likes you.

But now, as he gets lost in the softness in your gaze, he realizes what an idiot he is for worrying that you don’t also think that what you have is special.

And although he wants you to say he wants to hear that you’ll keep trying to hide your relationship, he needs to remind himself that you’re just being careful. He shoves down the prickly feeling and smiles at you.

“I thought I wasn’t even allowed to look at you,” he jokes to dismiss his uneasiness.

“Stop,” you chuckle. “How’ve you been?”

Zach’s blue eyes dart over his shoulder, his lips flattening.

“I miss you,” he half-whispers.

You tilt your head as you gaze up at him, your lips in an endeared frown. You’ve gotten used to there always being a sense of a playful smirk on his face, a look of mischief in his eyes, but right now, he’s completely doleful.

“I miss you, too,” you say. “Forcing each other into the friend-zone sucks.”

Zach laughs, his heart warming.

“No kidding,” he says. At this point, he just needs to get through a few more weeks as just your friend. It feels like forever, but he’ll get through it.

After lunch, counselors work together to set up for an afternoon by the lake, handing campers life jackets and inflating water toys.

After set-up, you stand on the dock, shades shielding your eyes now that the sun has peeked out from behind fluffy clouds.

You look out at the beautiful water, surrounded by campers talking and laughing, feeling that calming sense of being where you’re meant to be. Even though the days are tiring and the kids can be difficult, you’re so glad you came here.

You hear Zach’s familiar voice as he chats and walks past you, followed by two boys. He leans down to grip the edge of the empty canoe bobbing in the water on the dockside, gently reminding them to enter the boat slowly.

You can tell he’s been running around tirelessly, his lips parted as he pants, sweat sheening his skin.

When he stands to collect the ore, he quickly lifts the bottom of his shirt up to wipe his forehead, giving you a glimpse of his chiseled body. You’re glad you’re wearing shades because you can’t take your eyes off of him.

You clasp your hands together, your body rushing with heat as you remember what happened a few nights ago. How taut his body looked when you were on top of him. The way he breathed and moaned when you slowly sank onto him.

You force yourself to look away. Seeing him like that and knowing you can’t have him is only making things harder.

A couple of hours later, the relay race is underway on the north soccer field. You’re standing at the touchline on your own, stationed to hand out water and snacks to any campers or staff who need it.

Your stomach goes wild with butterflies when Zach makes his way towards you, offering you a charming grin as he pushes his sunglasses up to rest on his head.

“No way,” he says when he approaches, squinting, his voice low. “You got the easy job.“

“Rude. It’s actually way harder than it looks,” you reply.

“Standing there looking pretty is hard?”

“Very,” you say, his compliment making you a little lightheaded. You mirror him, perching your sunglasses up.

“I don’t believe it.”

Zach opens the cooler, not giving you a chance to get a drink for him. He collects a water bottle and unscrews the cap.

“You remember when you told me I can’t look at you a certain way when we’re at work?” you say, pushing the lid of the cooler shut.

He smirks, tipping his head back as he gulps down water. You’re gazing at him like that now, your stare hard on him. It’s addictive being on the receiving end of that look. It makes him feel like he’s floating.

“Yeah, and it still stands,” he nods. “So, stop it.”

“I’m not even…” you scoff, crossing your arms. “I have a rule for you, too. You can’t lift up your shirt when I’m around.”

“What? When did I do that?”

“By the lake. And I don’t appreciate it.”

“Why not?” he chuckles.

“Just stop,” you flirt with a roll of your eyes.

“I need a reason.” By the smug smirk on his face, you can tell he already knows. Because he’s so cute, you give in.

“It’s hard not to stare,” you say. “And we’re not supposed to stare at each other.”

The flattered look you’ve quickly grown to love flashes on his face.

“Oh, you mean when I get hot?” he teases. “I can’t control the sun.”

“Zach,” you warn. He says your name with the same teasing tone.

“I’m serious,” you say.

“So am I,” he laughs.

You shake your head at him when he lifts up the bottom of his shirt to wipe the water off his lips. His eyes stay locked on your expression as yours drift down the cut of his abs.

Zach’s entire body buzzes when you look at him like that. He so deeply loves feeling wanted by you.

“You just don’t listen,” you mumble, taking your eyes off of him. He chuckles, letting his shirt fall back down.

“Come on, baby, it’s my fault it’s hot out?” he murmurs.

You can’t stifle your grin. Maybe he technically shouldn’t call you that if you’re pretending to be friends, but nobody can hear, and you love when he’s sweet like that.

“Everything’s your fault,” you say.

Zach winks at you before he turns to rush back to the game. It’s the type of silly banter that made you develop a crush on him so fast, and you’re glad you can at least flirt if you’re not going to sneak around anymore.

After the relay race, Tom reminds the campers that in a week and a half, you’ll be hitting the midpoint of the camp season, and as tradition goes, a staff soccer game will be held.

Even though it’s just a no-stakes match at camp to give the kids a fun chance to cheer on their counselors, you feel nerves twist in your stomach at the reminder.

Despite the fact that your love for soccer has slowly been finding its way back to you, your confidence still isn’t quite where you want it. And your instinct is to talk to Zach about it, to be comforted by the one person you’re trying to stay away from.

As you settle at your table for dinner that evening, you look for him in the crowd. He’s sitting at the head of his usual table, laughing in conversation. When he meets your eyes, you give him a smile. He returns it.

That evening after lights out, you’re lying in bed scrolling on your phone while Ami watches something on her laptop when you realize the nagging desire to see Zach is only getting harder to ignore.

You’ve also been considering telling him that your cabin-mate knows about him. It may just serve to worry him, but it feels wrong keeping something from him.

The way he looked on the hike when he said he missed you is stuck in your head. You miss him, too. As if you haven’t seen him in weeks.

It feels silly to keep your distance. You’re being too careful. You’re sure you can manage to hang out and keep your hands off of each other.

You hung out platonically before. Why can’t you do it again? There’s no rules against that. In fact, being friends is encouraged. You open your text conversation with Zach.

When Zach steps out of his cabin into the brisk air that night, he looks up at the sky to see he can hardly spot any stars. The air is thick with the threat of rain, but it’s stubborn, refusing to fall.

He heads out to the dock, sitting on the cool surface, his phone in his hand. Malcolm already fell asleep, so he decided to take his call outside to not wake him.

It’s never easy for him to be away from his family for very long. He appreciates checking in every so often, making sure his parents are doing okay, hearing how his sister’s summer is going.

As he catches up with them during the video call, at one point, his dad asks his mom where his glasses are and when she points off screen and his dad thanks her with a kiss to her temple, the simple, passing moment is a reminder to Zach of how loving his parents’ marriage is.

He grew up knowing that his mom and dad adore each other, that they believe they’re meant to be together. It’s fun to act grossed out by their affection, but in reality, he admires them. He’s never wanted to settle for less in a relationship.

Zach has always desired to be surrounded by love and approval. He’s sure his heart will never fully heal after his childhood, but when he knows he’s around people who like him, that wound feels much smaller.

And the way you accept him for everything that he is, never once looking at him with judgement, unconditionally offering compassion, gives him a sense of being complete, of that wound actually being gone. He hasn’t ever felt that before.

He looks out at the dark water, breathing slowly. He’s always thought of himself as an optimistic person, so it’s uncomfortable to be wallowing over his circumstances with you this much.

He forces himself to see the bright side. He may be facing weeks of not being able to be with you the way he wants to, but when the camp season wraps up and he goes back to his normal life, you won’t be living under any of these rules.

He’ll take you out on dates. He’ll hold your hand in public. And hopefully, you’ll still like him enough that he can introduce you to his family and officially be your boyfriend.

At that moment, his phone buzzes with a text. It’s you. havent worked on my defense in a while... do you have time to help a friend practice?

He grins, feeling the tension in his body dissipate.

You agree to meet on the field farthest from the staff cabins, positioned at the far edge of the campground. When you approach the pitch, Zach’s practicing kick-ups by the net under the bright moon.

“Show-off,” you say once you’re close enough. He looks up to see you, letting the ball roll away. His smile fades once he sees your bare arms under your t-shirt.

“Aren’t you cold?” he asks.

“No.” His concern remains etched on his face, quickly unzipping his hoodie and stepping closer.

“I’m fine,” you laugh, unsuccessfully protesting as he drapes his hoodie over your shoulders.

“Now you are,” he says, looking down at you with a relieved smile. He leans down to leave a chaste kiss on your cheek, then quickly pulls back.

“Sorry,” he says. “Not allowed.”

You chuckle, looking around into the silent darkness surrounding you.

“I think we can get away with it here,” you tell him. “But I figured if anyone sees us, we’re just two coworkers innocently practicing for the game.”

“I ever tell you you’re a genius?” he asks, cocking his head, his eyes trailing down your face.

“Don’t think so,” you reply.

“Well, you are,” he says.

“Thanks, baby.”

“Okay, you can’t call me that and not expect to be kissed,” he murmurs, cupping your jaw with his cool palm. He leans down to kiss you, slow, his lips just barely parting.

“We still have to be careful,” you sigh amusedly when he pulls away. “Let’s practice.“

“Right,” he says. “As friends.”

“As friends.”

Zach smirks, rushing to get the ball as you stand in front of the net, stretching to warm up your legs.

“How was your day?” he asks once he stands a few feet across from you, gently kicking the ball to you. “Barely broke a sweat, huh?”

You trap the ball below your foot with a gasp.

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re still gonna pretend standing next to a cooler is hard?” he asks.

You laugh and kick the ball with unexpected force, watching him dramatically dodge it as it whirls past him.

“Whoa, you mad or something?” he laughs.

“I don’t need your attitude or your hoodie,” you tease, pulling the sleeves off.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” he relents, laughing harder. “Please put it back on.”

You roll your eyes and comply, loving how soft his sweater feels on your skin, loving how much it smells like him.

“Just go get the ball,” you say in resignation, a smile pulling at your lips.

“Yes, ma’am,” Zach replies.

You watch him jog towards the center line, expertly dribbling the ball when he reaches it. He comes forward and stops a few feet away from you.

“Hey, I have something to tell you,” you say. The guilt weighs even heavier on you when you see the worry in his gaze.

“What?”

“Ami knows about us,” you confess. “She saw my hickeys the other day and I couldn’t think of a lie fast enough. She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone. I’m sorry.”

His heart aches when he hears the distress in your voice.

“You’re sorry?” he says. “I’m the one who left them.”

You breathe out a chuckle, tugging at the sleeves of his sweater over your knuckles.

“You can be upset with me,” you mumble. “I know you didn’t want anyone knowing.”

“I’m not upset,” he replies. “It’s okay.”

“Really?” you ask.

Truthfully, hearing that someone else knows about you two makes him tense. It increases the risk of being found out, of disappointing his family, of ruining his reputation. But he can’t bear to make you feel any worse.

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it,” Zach says, keen to push past the topic. He kicks the ball to you. “So, your day?”

“It was good,” you say. “The hike was nice. But thinking about the staff game made me nervous. I guess I’m still not all that confident yet.”

“And you came to the best for help,” he says. You kick the ball back, laughing softly.

“I did.”

“You’ll get into your stride again,” Zach tells you. “I wasn’t just trying to flatter you the first night. You’re a really good defender. Honest.”

“Thank you,” you say, stopping the ball when he kicks it to you again. This is exactly why you wanted to come to him. He consoles you so effortlessly, already making the nerves unravel. “How was your day?”

“Good,” he says. “I actually just got off the phone with my family when you texted.”

“How are they?”

“Falling apart without me,” he answers sarcastically. “My sister was saying my dad doesn’t do monster checks right.”

“I’m sorry, what’s a monster check?” you laugh.

“A check for monsters, obviously,” he replies. “I’m usually the one that scouts out Avery’s room before bed, but since I’m not home, my dad’s in charge. And his heart’s just not in it.”

“That is not something to slack on,” you play along.

“Right?” he says. “I couldn’t live with myself knowing a monster might’ve flown under the radar.”

You laugh again, touched by how sweet of a big brother he is. You kick the ball to him and start training together.

It’s been just under ten minutes of practice when you feel a cool raindrop on your cheek. Zach’s towering over you, your legs brushing as he tries to gain possession of the ball, when you freeze and look up.

“I just felt rain,” you say, gently panting. He takes the opportunity to gaze at you as you stare up at the night sky, the moonlight washing your pretty face in its glow.

You lower your gaze to meet his eyes, revelling in the feeling of him looking at you like that, like you’re the only girl that exists. It reminds you of the way he stared at you when you met, needing you to repeat yourself because he was too out of it to pay attention to your words.

“Zach,” you giggle. “It’s raining. We should go.”

In that moment, he feels a raindrop on his head.

“Oh. Yeah,” he says. He bends to pick up the soccer ball, dreading how long the walk back to the staff cabins is.

You rush off the field, letting him grab your hand, enveloped in the darkness of the night. Drops of rain start to hammer down within seconds, cold moisture covering your clothes.

“Shit,” Zach chuckles, running faster, pulling you forward. “We won’t make it.”

You’re both laughing breathlessly when you run into the closest storage shed, shutting the door behind you, clothes sticking to you.

When Zach stumbles over something in the dark with a grunt, you laugh even harder, asking him if he’s okay between your cackles.

“I could have broken something,” he says, pretending he’s insulted, “and you’re laughing.”

You feel for him in the dark, cupping his bare forearms as he stumbles over the disorganized supplies scattered on the floor.

“Are you okay?” you repeat, facing him, trying to make out his features in the dark.

“Why don’t people ever clean up?” Zach complains. “It’s a safety hazard.”

“For the third time, are you okay?” you say amusedly. Your hands feel up his arms, cupping his face as the rain loudly drums on the roof.

“Yes,” he finally murmurs. He wishes it wasn’t so dark so that he could see you, but if he turned on the light, it’d be too easy for someone to notice.

“Good,” you whisper. You gently stroke his cheeks with your thumbs, feeling a bit of stubble over his jaw, his skin cool from the night air as he leans into your touch.

“That feels nice.” His voice is low and rough beneath the sound of pouring rain. You smile to yourself, adjusting to the dark, seeing that he shut his eyes.

“Then I’ll keep doing it,” you respond.

“You looked good out there,” he murmurs. “I mean, you’re skilled. You don’t have anything to worry about. You’re a solid soccer player.”

“So, to clarify, my playing looked good, but I didn’t?”

Zach lets out a tsk, finding your waist.

“Cut it out,” he scoffs. “You know how pretty you are.”

“I do?”

“Come on,” he mumbles. “Don’t even pretend to say bad things about yourself.”

“Or what?” you ask.

“I’ll cry. Is that what you want?”

You giggle, loving how easily he makes you laugh, feeling like you’ll be falling victim to your own impulses. And fast.

Cool down. You said you’d cool down. But there’s nothing cool about his lips pressing against yours when you pull him closer.

It’s only been a few days since you had a moment totally alone together, but when he kisses you with abandon, it’s like your body is getting its first drop of water after being parched.

As your kisses grow hungrier, Zach’s body melts into pure contentment. It’s perfect how you fit into each other, how his mind goes completely blank when he holds you, letting him ease into the bliss of your touch.

Your lips brush and your tongues graze and your breaths catch as you kiss, his grip on your waist tightening as your palms press on his cheeks.

“We’re bad at this,” you whisper when your lips part. “We’re bad at staying away from each other.”

“I’m okay with that,” Zach rasps, pulling you in tight, his body curving into yours.

You’re in a fog as you continue to make out, surrounded by him, listening to your shallow breaths and the heavy rain.

Your knees are weak by the time you pull away from each other, the roar of rain now reduced to calm droplets.

“What now?” Zach breathes. He needs to know if he’s going to go through the agony of not sneaking around with you anymore.

Every inch of his skin tingles with warmth. He wishes he could just lie down with you, not because he needs anything sexual, but because he hates the thought of saying goodnight and parting ways.

“I don’t know,” you reply. “I don’t like not kissing you. But I don’t like getting fired, either.”

Despite himself, he smirks, dipping his head to pull you into a hug and bury his face in the crook of your neck. You drape your arms around his broad shoulders, shutting your eyes as he squeezes you.

Zach breathes you in, feeling safer than he ever has in his life.

“I’m really glad you texted me,” he mumbles.

“Me, too,” you say.

When you sneak back into your cabin, still wearing his sweater, the fear you felt of getting caught the whole walk over reminds you of why you suggested you cool things down in the first place.

If you’re found out, it’s over. You’re still not sure what to do, if you should keep trying to stay away from him or just continue meeting in secret. But you do know that whatever you decide, Zach will respect it.

The next morning, you wake up with a sore throat. You realize you caught a mild cold from last night. And being sick in the middle of the summer while working an exhausting job is not ideal.

You barely make it through the day, then have an overnight shift in one of the campers’ cabins. By the next day, you’re a bit better, mainly dealing with muscle soreness.

After dinner, Zach notices the faraway look in your eyes as you sit across the fire and talk with campers. You were together just two nights ago, kissing and laughing, but you haven’t had a chance to speak privately since. And something seems wrong.

He discreetly pulls out his phone to text you: Are you ok?

You feel the buzz in your pocket and when you read his text, you meet his eyes, melting at the concern in his gaze. In an effort to ease his worry, you speak a little louder to the kids around you.

“Nobody caught my cold, right?” you ask. They shake their heads no.

“You’re sick?” Zach asks from the other side of the pit, over the chatter.

“A little,” you reply, your nose scrunching. “But the worst of it is over.”

Zach’s heart aches, upset that you’re in pain and that he didn’t notice sooner. It’s from the night you got caught in the rain together. He’s sure of it.

When he knocks on your door after lights out, even though he’s still uneasy about your cabin-mate knowing about you two, at least he doesn’t have to worry about how to look like a concerned friend and nothing more.

You’re sitting in bed when Ami swings open the door. Zach is standing on your front step, cupping something in his hands, his eyes darting between her and you.

“Hey,” he says, looking at you. “Thought I’d drop off some tea.”

Ami looks back at you, a grin on her face.

“You brought her tea?” she says. “That’s so sweet.”

“It is sweet,” you say with a shy smile. “Thank you.”

“Come in,” Ami says, stepping back. “You can hang out. I was about to go see what Malcolm’s up to anyway.”

“Really?” you ask, not buying it.

“He’s on an overnight,” Zach says.

“Is he? That’s crazy,” she says with a coy smile. She looks at you. “Text me.”

You know what she means; you need to let her know when she can come back since you and Zach might be in doing more than just hanging out.

Ami pulls a sweater over her pajama top and rushes out, leaving you and Zach alone in the cabin.

“Where’d you get tea?” you ask once the door shuts.

“From the office,” he says, crossing the room and setting the mug on your nightstand. He settles on the edge of your bed, inches away from you, gazing at you worryingly.

“I can get more if you need it,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re sick?”

“It’s really not that bad,” you tell him. “It’s just a headache now.“

He purses his lips, reaching forward to put the back of his hand on your forehead.

“I don’t think I have a fever,” you laugh.

“No other symptoms?”

“Just a sore throat yesterday, but it passed.”

“From being in the rain the other night?”

“That, and the stress of being scared we’ll get caught,” you laugh. He knows you’re joking, but his chest twists in pain. “Should I have told you?“

The question sets him aback for a moment, uncertainty rushing through him. You’ve been acting like you want a relationship, too, but maybe he’s being unrealistically hopeful.

Even though he’s been afraid to come on too strong, he needs to know, so he speaks before he can talk himself out of it.

“If I’m going to be your boyfriend, I need to know when you’re not feeling well,” Zach says.

You gaze at him for a silent few seconds. He’s unbelievably grateful when you lean forward and press your forehead into his chest, hugging him as best you can while you sit across from each other.

“It was just a little cold,” you mumble. “But I bet it would’ve been worse if my boyfriend didn’t make me wear his sweater.”

He cracks a smile, relieved, loving the way it sounds coming from you.

“Which you stole, by the way,” he says, making you laugh. He kisses the top of your head, then leans over to hand you the mug, steam curling from the top.

“Thank you,” you say. “How are you?”

You talk to each other about your days, swapping stories as you lean against the wall, taking slow sips.

“I’m cured,” you say once you’re done, setting the empty mug on the nightstand.

“Can I get you anything else?” he asks.

“Hugs,” you say, feeling desperate for his touch.

Zach grins, standing to let you comfortably lie down before he settles next to you. Your cheek is on his shoulder as he holds you in his arms, and when he lifts your chin to guide you into a kiss, you shake your head.

“You’ll get sick,” you warn.

“What? You said I cured you.” He pecks your lips gently, then shifts to kiss your forehead. “Where’s it hurt? Here?”

“Mhm,” you mumble.

“I don’t think it’s the cold,” he says. “Your head hurts because you think about me too much.”

You giggle, your hand trailing up and down his firm stomach.

“Oh, that must be it,” you say.

“I think about you too much, too.”

“You do?” You close your eyes as he continues to plant gentle kisses on your forehead. “What do you think about?”

“I mostly wonder when the next time I can be with you is,” he murmurs, “and how it can’t come fast enough.”

You stroke his chest, stopping to feel his heartbeat over the fabric of his shirt.

“Me, too,” you say. You trail back down his stomach and up again, arousal twisting in your core the more you feel him.

He sighs quietly. It’s unreal how just a minute of your touch does this to him. He’s already hard.

When you gently tug at his hip so he’ll turn on his side to face you, you feel him stiffen once his erection presses against your stomach, letting out a heavy exhale.

“I swear I didn’t come over to do this,” Zach murmurs, worried you’ll think he’d try to come by under false pretences just to hook up.

“I believe you,” you whisper against his neck, kissing softly, breathing in his scent.

Zach kisses the top of your head, cradling your jaw, revelling in the feeling of your affection, sure you can feel him growing even harder against you.

“I don’t know if – I mean, are we back to seeing each other?”

You shuffle back to meet his eyes, sympathy in your gaze.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been confusing,” you say. “I know I told you we should cool down just to make out with you like, two days later.”

“I’m not complaining,” Zach says with a soft chuckle. Maybe someone else would be frustrated, but everything about this summer has been unpredictable and he’s always been quick to adapt.

“I can’t decide what to do. I feel like you,” you tease.

“Hurtful,” he jokes, squinting.

“Remind me of how much time we have left before the season ends,” you say sadly.

“A month and three days.”

“It’s cute that you know the exact number.” The compliment makes his cheeks flush pink.

“Yeah, I’m pretty cute,” he replies. You laugh, your fingers dipping beneath the hem of his t-shirt. He bites his lip when he feels your skin against his, eyelids low.

“You’re very cute,” you say. “And very kind for coming to check on me.”

His heart is racing. You’re looking at him in that way he said you can’t look at him at work. It gets him all flustered, making him feel like you want him as bad as he wants you.

“And so sweet and so handsome,” you continue, your hand sliding up his back under his shirt. “And so good for me.”

“Baby,” he sighs happily, the praise making his head swim. “You know what that does to me.”

“That’s why I’m doing it,” you breathe. “One more night? Then, we cool down, for real?”

“But your head hurts.”

You shrug, admittedly still feeling tension in your temples.

“You made it better,” you say. He shifts lower to kiss you, gently sucking on your bottom lip, breathing heavily.

His thoughts are rushing like a current, the desire to make you feel good, to relax you in the best possible way burning deep inside him.

When he pulls back a bit, his lips brush against yours when he asks, “Can I kiss lower? Make you feel even better?”

You catch the weight of his words, the coil in you tightening even more.

“Yes,” you breathe. “Please.”

“You never have to say please to me,” Zach says. “Not for that.”

You groan when he lowers to kiss your neck, down to your collarbones, over the swells of your breasts. He’s on his knees as he pulls up your shirt, trailing kisses up your stomach as he hungrily pulls down your pants.

You lift your hips to help him push them off, left in your panties in seconds.

Zach settles on his elbows, his eyes meeting yours as he rests with his head between your bent legs. He doesn’t take your eyes off of you as he puckers his lips against your inner thigh.

“You want this?” he murmurs.

“Yes,” you sigh happily.

“Me, too,” he says. “So bad.”

He kisses harder, surely going to leave a mark. His big hand drags over your knee, down your other thigh, resting at your pelvis.

His gaze refuses to leave yours, his lips still on your skin, when he lowers his hand to stroke his thumb over your middle. You moan softly, blinking slowly.

Like every other time he touches you, it feels like a dream. He can’t believe he gets to do this. The anticipation of knowing he’ll be tasting you soon makes his skin tingle.

Zach is agonizingly slow with his kisses, planting them all up one thigh, then moving to the other, then dipping to kiss right above where you need him most, over your underwear.

You lace your fingers in his messy hair, not pushing or pulling, just feeling his head move with every kiss, trying to be patient.

Finally, he puts his mouth over your core, kissing over the fabric, pulling a shudder out of you.

He can feel how wet you are, earning a taste of you, and it makes him ache with need. He looks up at you again as he gently pulls at the band of your panties.

Once you kick them off, his lips part in awe when you readjust to slightly spread your legs.

“Fuck,” he breathes. It’s almost nerve-racking, the way he’s staring at you. You’ve never been looked at like this. He gently pushes your knee down so he can see more of you.

“Fuck,” he says again, groaning through the word this time. He can’t wait any longer, lowering to press his lips against you. Your body rolls with pleasure when he makes contact, his lips warm and wet and soft, puckering against you.

Zach leaves countless kisses on you, angling his head so that he can give every part of you equal attention, licking his lips in between so that he can savor you.

You arch your back as he starts to languidly tongue you, letting out low moans and warm breaths. His nose presses against your groin, the sound of his wet kisses filling the room.

You run the heel of your palm over his head, caressing him, and he starts to suck your clit, his lips locked tightly.

“That feels so good,” you whisper. The way his mouth is working you sends waves of easy, soft satisfaction through you.

He threshes his tongue, gazing up at you as your face pinches in pleasure. You meet his eyes again, seeing how utterly intoxicated he looks to be doing something so intimate with you.

Zach pulls back, lips smacking off of you, panting now. He runs his hand up to your hip to find your hand and lace his fingers in yours.

“You taste so sweet,” he says, his tone thick with ecstasy, before leaning down again. It’s even better than he even imagined. You’re so slick and hot against his tongue. He could do this for hours.

You continue to run your fingers through his hair with one hand as you squeeze his fingers with the other, soft sighs spilling from your mouth. When you feel his tongue dip into you, you have to bite your bottom lip to quiet your moan.

His groans vibrate against you, guiding you into a state of pure solace. He pulls his hand away from yours to stroke his thumb in gentle circles over your clit as he tongues you. Every inch of your body tingles.

“Don’t stop,” you breathe. “That’s perfect.”

The praise spurs him on. His jaw is sore from how much his tongue is writhing inside you, but your pleasure is worth it.

The orgasm reaches you quickly, a million fireworks of ecstasy bursting through you, pushing you to quiver beneath him.

Zach kisses you as you come down from your high, shifting up to kiss your thigh, then your sternum, then finally your lips.

You meet his lips lazily and tenderly, tasting yourself on him. When you slowly trail your hand down his stomach to palm him over his sweats, he pulls back.

“No, baby,” he murmurs. “I don’t want you doing any work. Just rest tonight.”

He’s rock hard. You can tell how bad he needs the release. You want to do this for him, no matter how dazed you are. But you know he’ll feel guilty if he feels like you’re straining yourself.

“Then you do the work,” you whisper. “The condoms are in the bottom drawer.”

Zach sighs, kissing between your eyebrows, breaths shallow.

“I made you sore last time.”

“A good sore,” you breathily laugh.

“You’re sure?” he asks.

“I want you,” you say.

Your lids are low as Zach shifts to find a condom, pulling down his sweats and boxers, rolling it on carefully. His large frame leans over you, a flush coloring his cheeks as he looks down at you.

“I’m going slow,” he tells you.

“Whatever you want,” you say, and you mean it.

He holds himself at his base, slowly dipping himself into where his tongue was just minutes ago. His breath is strained as he sinks into you, wrapped in your soft heat.

He’s close to bottoming out, and stops, stroking your cheek.

“Still good?” he rasps.

“Yes,” you say. “Keep going.”

Zach sinks into you completely, taking a moment to savor how nice it is to be deep inside you again. His mouth is at the crook of your neck as he slowly starts to thrust back and forth, your bodies meeting with soft smacks.

The pressure of him is hard and perfect as your body rocks with his movements. You shut your eyes, swimming in bliss, breathing out short sighs into his ear as he rocks in and out.

He can’t believe how nicely you’re squeezing him, how perfect you feel, how lucky he is to be here right now. Your bed squeaks when he starts to move faster, his muscles tensing as you wrap your arms around him.

“Still okay?” Zach whispers.

“Yes,” you say. “Come for me.”

Your words are everything to him, the tender dominance he so deeply loves spinning him into a euphoric high. The way you make him feel makes the world stand still, makes him feel like perfection can exist.

He kisses you deeply, his stomach tautening as he comes. He continues to thrust slowly as he rides out the pleasure.

When he collapses, you kiss his cheek over and over, running your hand over the back of his head.

“Thank you,” he whispers. You smile weakly.

“Thank you,” you say.

Zach doesn’t let you stand up. After he gets dressed, he grabs a towel to help clean you up, gentle and slow. You’re still lying on your back when he sits at the end of your bed to pull your panties up over your ankles.

“You always gonna do that?” you tease quietly. “Put my clothes back on after?”

“Yes,” he says. He pulls them all the way up, then drags your pants up, too, before lying down next to you. You shuffle into the position you were in before, your cheek on his shoulder, his arms around you.

“My headache’s gone,” you tell him, “and I’m not just saying that.”

Zach’s chest gently bounces as he laughs.

“Good,” he says. He rubs up and down your arm. “Just tell me when I should go.”

“How’s never?” you ask. He smiles. His heart has never felt warmer.

“Doable,” he chuckles, kissing your forehead. “And… I’m with you. We’ll wait until the end of the season. I don’t want you stressed out, baby.”

“Okay,” you agree. It’s bittersweet and a month and three days have never felt so long, but you agree.

Eventually, you pull yourselves apart. You kiss Zach goodbye and text Ami that the coast is clear.

The next few days are a busy haze, full of stolen glances between you and Zach, and before you know it, it’s the midpoint of the season, the day of staff game.

It’s a scorching afternoon as you warm up on the pitch, eyes flitting to Zach as he jogs on the other side of the field.

Both teams were randomly assigned, and when you noticed that Zach was wearing a red vest over his t-shirt, not matching your blue one, you internally sighed.

You miss him. And if you were on the same team, at least you’d have a perfectly valid reason to talk with him right now.

The campers are seated under canopies on the touchline, already in a spirited cheer-off, rooting for the team their counselors are on.

Ruby blows the whistle to signal the start of the game. Your team keeps the ball on the other side of the field for the first little while, but remain goalless, until eventually, the red team starts to move in.

You’re focused, feeling more confident about your playing than you have in a while. You know you have Zach to thank. You hope you have the opportunity to tell him soon.

You’re quick on your feet as you watch the red team retain possession, the ball quickly spinning back and forth over the grass.

Finally, they make their move, with Zach leading. With slightly bent knees, you watch as he approaches the goal. You’re the only person left between him and your goalie.

He fakes left, but you call his bluff, stepping right to successfully kick it away. A chorus of groans sounds from the campers and some of his teammates.

“Oh, come on, Zach!” Malcolm shouts from the halfway line. “Obviously you want to go easy on your girl, but have some pride.”

“Chill, Malcolm,” Ami shouts back, laughing uneasily. You look back at your teammate, wondering if she broke her promise and told him about you. Or maybe Zach let him know at some point.

Or maybe Malcolm doesn’t know anything and you’re just reading into it. Your eyes dart to Zach as he jogs away. He looks back, his expression tense.

The game ends in a 0-0 draw, and Ruby decides it should come down to a penalty shootout just to end it with a bang. To your surprise, Zach misses, hitting the post. He looks rattled. Your team wins.

After lights out, you replay the moment on the field in your head, wondering how many people heard Malcolm. You want to question Ami about it, but you don’t get a chance to before she leaves for her overnight shift.

You step out into the humid night, figuring a walk will be a good way to clear your head. The anxiety eventually is too big to avoid, so you text Zach: everything alright? does Malcolm know?

As you pace past the camper cabins on your loop around the campground, you see that he replied. I asked him after the game. He knows. Ami told him.

You send a sigh up to the starry sky. She promised. Now not only is the secret out to two people, but considering that Malcolm is Zach’s best friend, maybe he was offended that Zach didn’t tell him, causing even more issues.

You text him: crap. sorry. do you want to talk about it?

You’re surprised and a little slighted to see him text back: It’s all good.

When you reach the staff area, you see Zach’s tall figure heading down the steps of his cabin.

Zach never thought he wouldn’t be glad to see you. But after the tense conversation he just had with Malcolm, he knows that the worry he’s harboring over the very real possibility that his aunt heard Malcolm’s words on the field today won’t make him good company.

He knows it’s not your fault. He willingly went into this with you. He pursued it. He left the marks on your body that exposed you. He should be mad at Malcolm for what he shouted today, and Malcolm only.

But he has a voice in the back of his mind pestering him, frustrated that you didn’t just hide it better and not tell Ami. And he feels like shit for being a little mad at you.

You already saw him. He’s not going to be a dick and ignore you. He’s going to pretend he’s fine.

“Hi,” you say softly, stopping in front of your cabin.

“Hey,” he says. “Out for a walk?”

“Are you mad at me?” you ask.

“What? No,” he says. “Why do you think that?”

“It feels like…” You hold up your phone. “I don’t know, this is the type of thing you’d want to talk about. But you just brushed me off.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “We’re keeping our distance, right?”

You cross your arms, unable to shake the feeling that he’s not being totally honest. You know him well enough by now. Maybe he’s good at putting on a show for other people. But it’s not working on you.

“Zach, is this… is this what you talked about before?” you ask over the crickets chirping loudly around you. “When you said you don’t like to admit it when something’s bothering you?“

He looks down, his tongue jutting from under his cheek.

“Are you mad at me?” you ask again.

He’s silent. His mind is totally blank. He’s never been good at this. He hates that he can’t control how he feels. He feels like a bad person for being upset with someone so sweet who didn’t mean any harm.

“This just… it sucks,” Zach mumbles.

You nod slowly. It’s not a clear answer, but it’s enough. Your heart feels too heavy to force a conversation.

“Yeah,” you say. “It does.”

You turn to go up to your cabin. It hurts when he doesn’t stop you.

(to be continued)

if you want notifications on when i post my fics, follow @xorafe-library and turn on notifications 💘

#this fic is my whole personality #I want a hard copy to keep on my mantle #he’s just a babyyyy #the hard launch!!!!#Malcolm when I catch you I stg #Zach maclaren

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

Sympathy for the spammer

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/

That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:

http://thebezzle.org

Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.

A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.

MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.

It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."

The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468

This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.

One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.

Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.

But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.

The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."

This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.

The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.

But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.

The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.

They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:

https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings

No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:

https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/

The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.

And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.

Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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amomentsescape · 11 months ago

Note

Eldritch monster anon here! So to answer your question, yep that image you shared is what I have in mind ^^

Slashers with Reader Who's Secretly an Eldritch Horror

Slashers x Reader

Includes: Freddy, Michael, Jason, Thomas, Bubba, Brahms, Norman, Billy, Stu, Vincent, Bo, & Lester

A/N: I'm not super confident I wrote Reader correctly, and I didn't go into too much depth about what they look like or everything they're capable of, so I hope you still like it! You can find the original request here.

Freddy Krueger

He can't help but fantasize of the damage you two can cause when together

He sensed something was a little different about you from the beginning

But he didn't think it would be quite this drastic

What's funny though is that he thinks you don't know that he's found out about you

He's dead wrong

But it's kind of a game to you, and you're having fun with it

He's "secretly" caught you distorting the people and things around you

And he admires that fact since he does the same thing in his Dream World

You were hoping he'd catch on sooner

But oh well

It's just more fun that way

Michael Myers

He somehow doesn't know already, and you kind of want to keep it that way

Michael has this thing with power

He knows he's unstoppable, chaotic, and deadly

And he likes it that way

If he ever found out about the things you're capable of...

It would not be good

Your partnership would go from providing to battling

He wants- needs to be the monster in the relationship

And although you have the upper hand on him, he would not go down without a fight

He knows there's a darkness brewing in you

He just doesn't know quite what it is

And let's hope it stays that way

Jason Voorhees

He honestly learns about what you are pretty early on

He didn't really assume anything was off about you, but he was so open and sweet to you that you felt comfortable enough to tell him about everything

And knowing that he's not the most dangerous being around is somewhat... nice

He really admires your power and strength

And it feels good to be able to leave for a while and not worry that something will happen to you

You are more than capable of protecting yourself, and that lifts a huge weight off of Jason's shoulders

Perhaps he's too trusting, but he doesn't worry about you turning that dark power on him

You've only showed him genuine love and care, so he feels like he has nothing to worry about

Thomas Hewitt

Perhaps he's being a little naive

The way you immediately ate his "dinner" without so much as a question

The sudden increase of people coming by the house and being captured

How you come out of the most dangerous areas unscathed

There is clearly something about you that isn't... normal

But it's not his place to question it

He loves you, and you love him

End of story

Even if he did start to question what's really going on, he wouldn't press the matter

He figures you'll open up to him whenever you're ready

And if that's never, then so be it

Bubba Sawyer

He's just a sweet, naive man

You could literally show your true colors right in front of his eyes, and he'd still have no clue

But it doesn't really matter

He loves you for you no matter what you look like or what you're capable of

As long as you still care for him like this, you can do whatever you want

He will admit that his family has had a much easier time getting "food" than ever before

And those that do come by are really easy to capture since you've been with him

But those are just coincidences, surely

You're his sweet angel

He has to protect you

Little does he know that you really can handle yourself...

Brahms Heelshire

He has found it a little odd that the food still arrives on time without so much as a word from Malcolm

And he hasn't seen a single soul since you began to staying with him

But he's very happy with all of this, so he doesn't question it

He can sense that you're a little... different than other people

But that's part of the reason he likes you so much in the first place

He only realizes the true extent to this theory when you somehow force him to bed without so much as a touch

He was completely flabbergasted at this, but he didn't dare question it

Safe to say that he has no intention on giving you a hard time again

Norman Bates

He doesn't question a thing

If anything, you're his good luck charm since all of these good things started to happen when you showed up

The motel business is booming

Any issues he was dealing with seemed to disappear in plain sight

Everything seems to be going his way for once

Mother keeps telling him there's something off about you, but he ignores her

What does she mean?

You're his sweet and perfect partner

There's nothing else to it

You want to show him the truth at some point, but he just seems so happy right now

Maybe you'll tell him later

Billy Loomis

Billy straight up demands for you to tell him what's going on

Unlike a lot of people, Billy follows his gut instinct

He's known something was up with since you two started seeing each other

His world was just too... perfect

And he swears that there's this dark aura that surrounds your head at all hours of the day

It's only after his latest kill went too well that he interrogates you

When you tell him, he asks you to prove it

The look on his face when you showed him just what you were was enough to send you into a fit of laughter

To be honest, Billy is a little bit scared of you now

Knowing that you're capable of literally taking him out of existence is intimidating to say the least

Best believe Billy is going to do his best not to get on your bad side

Stu Macher

Stu is true golden retriever energy

Meaning, he is very sweet and loving towards you, but there's not much else going on inside that brain of his

He doesn't suspect a single thing with you

You are his perfect partner, and that's about it

Sure, his killings with Billy have been going super well, and he always comes out unscathed

Yeah, that person who shushed him in the movie theater was found completely mutilated the next day

What about it?

You wouldn't have anything to do with it

Stu just thinks that you are made out of 100% innocence

And you kind of like it that way

You'll tell him when you're ready

Until then, you just appreciate Stu treating you like a person and not some powerful God

Vincent Sinclair

Vincent has been finding himself with a new sense of inspiration for his wax art

He dreams of this ethereal yet terrifying being he has never seen before

He's told you about the dreams, and you always respond with a soft smile and a "that's interesting"

Vincent as no clue that you're the creature he's been seeing

And you must say, his art is pretty damn accurate

You didn't have any intentions on telling him the truth, at least not right away

But the way he sees this version of you as his muse makes you want to say something sooner

He's basically idolizing you, and he doesn't even know it

Not that he doesn't act this way with you normally

But how fun it could be to see his reaction once you tell him the truth

Bo Sinclair

Maybe he suspects something is going on, but he doesn't say anything

Ignorance is bliss

And although he's usually one to demand what he wants to know, he doesn't quite feel comfortable doing that with you

There's something in those eyes of yours that tells him he may be better off not knowing

Plus, things for him and Ambrose have been going suspiciously well for him

He literally had some random man run up to him begging to become one of the wax figures

This is all just odd

And he knows you're hiding something by the way you smile at him

But everything is so perfect that he doesn't want to ruin it

So for now, let him be ignorant

Lester Sinclair

He's never really been in a relationship as passionate as this one before

So you best believe any single thought or doubt that goes through his head is immediately thrown out

He loves you, and you're so nice to him

There's no way you could be hiding something from him, right?

I mean, it's a little odd how you seem to appear from thin air, and your hair never has a single strand out of place

There was something that feels... not real

But that's just crazy

He probably only feels that way because of how perfect he thinks you are

Until you explicitly stand before him in your true form, he's going to just ignore these thoughts

506 notes · View notes

bullet-prooflove · 5 months ago

Note

I thought I’d lost you…

For Rip Wheeler

Tagging: @readmetosleep @kierawashere01 @hangmanscoming @goldensunshine91 @kmc1989

Companion piece to The Vet - Rip comes face to face with a nightmare.

The attack on Gina gives Rip nightmares.

When he steps inside the cottage, he sees the pool of blood on the floor, the crimson smears on the counter, he hears the laboured breathing, the pained whimpers. Malcolm Beck stands over her, his fingers unthreading the buckle on his belt. Rip knows what he intends to do, men have been using rape as a weapon against women for centuries and Beck, he needs to reassert his control, he needs to prove his dominance.

It doesn’t get that far, Rip stops it before he can get his dick out. He leaves that son of a bitch lying out cold before he takes his jacket off and drapes it over Gina before he gentle turns her to face him.

In his dreams it’s your face that stares back at him, it’s you that is bloodied, you that is broken.

“Baby…” He whispers, his thumb chasing over your cheek and you stare at him with vacant, lifeless eyes because in his nightmares he’s too late, he’s always too late.

He wakes up in the dark with his heart racing. His chest constricts as he struggles to catch his breath, his hand reaching for you in the depths of the night. Only you’re not there and that sends him into a spiral. He’s on his feet in an instant, black boxers clinging to his form as he slips from the sheets. He opens the bedroom door and sees the light glowing from a lamp downstairs and something in him starts to settle because you’re still here, in his life, in his home.

When he gets down the stairs you’re sitting on the couch, wearing one of his t-shirts. There’s a blanket draped over your lap as you read from one of those mystery novels you like.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” You say as he approaches you and Rip, he doesn’t speak. He just sits down alongside of you and gathers you up into his arms, burying his face into the curve of your throat.

“Bad dreams?” You murmur against his temple, your fingertips combing lightly through his unruly dark curls and his breathing starts to fall into its usual rhythm.

“I thought I’d lost you.” He whispers, his voice breaking. “That it was you not her…”

“It wasn’t me.” You remind him, using your fingertips to tilt his chin up so that he can meet your gaze. “And Gina, she’s alive and she’s healing because of you. You got him Rip, he can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

“I know that honey.” He whispers, his lips brushing over yours as his palms chasing underneath your t-shirt so he can feel the thrum of your lifeforce underneath his hands. “It’s just my nightmares that don’t.”

Love Rip? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

#rip wheeler #rip wheeler x reader #yellowstone

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kissingarthurclaus · 5 days ago

Text

AND AGAIN WHEN HIS DAD BLOWS HIM OFF TO TALK TO STEVE INSTEAD!!!! HE'S A BIT SHAKEN AT FIRST. BUT HE'S HAPPY FOR STEVE, HE'S ALWAYS HAPPY FOR EVERYONE ELSE HE'S THE FUCKING HEART OF HIS FAMILY AND THE SWEETEST MAN ON EARTH I WANT HIM I WANT HIM I WANT HIM

I don't know if I've ever talked about it HERE but god it always kills me the way Arthur's face shifts when Steve tells him not to be in mission control

Its such a neurodivergent mood to just be YOURSELF and not realize that others are seeing you as a burden. Arthur genuinely wants to be helpful, but as he realizes that steve thinks he's just in the way he goes from surprise that 'oh' moment because he didn't know he WASN'T helping, then to sad but UNDERSTANDING 😭 Arthur always ALWAYS turns the other cheek and keeps smiling, he keeps doing his best to be supportive even if he has to do it where no one else can see him

FUUUUUUUUUCK

#self rb #🎄 my christmas wish 🎄#MALCOLM WHEN I CATCH YOU #WHEN I CATCH YOU MALCOLM #HE LEARNS HIS LESSON BY THE END BUT ITS KINDA HARD NOT TO HATE HIM JUST A LITTLE #IM SORRY OSCAR I KNOW U LIKE HIM #KISS HIM BUT TELL HIM OFF FIRST #TELL HIM TO BE NICE TO HIS SONS #AND ARTHUR UR ALWAYS FIRST TO ME

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sunlightmurdock · 6 months ago

Text

The Odyssey | 1.6 | Bradley Bradshaw x Reader

previous chapter | next chapter | masterlist

synopsis: desperate times call for desperate measures when repairing bridges burned.

warnings: enemies to lovers, power imbalance (professor / student relationship), age gap (22 / 33), swearing, infidelity, nudity, mentions of erections, them being mean to each other, idiots in love.

…

The sun sets over the city. Tears streak your cheeks. Bradley’s blue shirt sits dry-cleaned and hung on a borrowed wooden hanger against the doorframe. A chill catches your shoulders and your first instinct is to look over at it. You should hand it back.

“Honey, talk to me,” He pleads, his voice static through the worn out reciever. “I love you. You know I love you. That was just— it was just a stupid fight—“

Venom sits on your tongue, your nose wrinkling like the sound of his voice put that foul taste there.

“If you say that to me one more time,” Your voice wavers and cracks. The lump in your throat aches with each swallow. You close your eyes as another roar of laughter comes from outside of your window. “Then we’re done.”

Malcolm falls silent.

He’s standing in the twelfth floor apartment facing the Hudson that you had been so desperate for a few months ago. The phone line is just about the only thing connected, the movers are due next week with the furniture you had picked together.

He wanted it to be perfect for when you got back.

After the wedding, your new home would be ready for you.

Stuck in the entryway, the phone cord tugs as he lets his head fall back against the wall. It’s midday for him, late evening for you. He hasn’t told you that he has taken the past two days off of work; that he hasn’t slept with the thought of never hearing from you again.

He’s sick to his stomach.

“I won’t.” He all but whimpers. Rubbing a hand over his jaw, it’s dusted with a stubble he never usually allows to grow. “I won’t. You’re right. It wasn’t. I’m sorry, honey, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry.” You say it back to him without an ounce of question in your tone. Repeating it to him like it’ll make him realize that those two words are far from being enough.

“Yes, I’m sorry!” He pleads. Even while staring at the painting of a boat hung above the hotel dresser, you can see the exact look that would be on his face. “I’m so sorry. I would never hurt you. You know that, sweetheart. Right?”

You would hurt him. It occurs to you suddenly that you wouldn’t just do it, you might even enjoy doing it. You could, in six syllables. I slept with someone else. This morning, you were perfectly content in bed with someone else. You had told Bradley that you were ready.

Maybe that was just a heat of the moment thing, maybe it wasn’t. You aren’t sure. It would hurt Malcolm either way; to know you had, or to find out you hadn’t but had so badly wanted to.

And you had, so badly, wanted to. When you close your eyes you’re confronted with memories of his weight above you, and his mouth on your skin and that half-smiling look he gets on his face when he really wants you.

A month and a half ago, you couldn’t have dreamed of hurting Malcolm.

Right now, you should be sitting against his thigh while he strokes at your hair and the two of you are laughing about a work story. Maybe the two of you would take that little pre-wedding trip up to Cape Cod, like you had talked about.

When you close your eyes and picture yourself there, looking into his steely blue eyes, you’re colder than ever. Wondering just how long exactly he had been planning to pretend like he hadn’t acted like a complete pig. Wondering how long it would be, really, before he would disrespect you like that again.

“I don’t forgive you,” You tell him, colder than he has ever heard you be. “You’re a pig, and a liar — and I’m going to take as long as I want to decide if I ever want to speak to you again.”

He’s quiet for a long while.

“I understand.”

He doesn’t. He can’t possibly understand the way he has made you feel.

Your teeth are gritted, tears burning in your eyes. “I don’t know if I want to ever even look at you again. Do you understand that?”

“I do, honey, and I’m so sorry. It was a drunken mistake and I wish I could take it back, I do—“

You don’t want to listen, and it occurs to you suddenly, that you don’t have to. You weigh the reciever in your hand.

“I’ll call you. When I’m ready.”

Then, you drop it down onto the stand, ending the call. Bradley has made it very clear that he has no interest in seeing you today. According to Pasquale, he has been back for a few hours now already. You don’t have your ring back just yet.

Your bed feels strange without the weight you spent the last six days growing familiar with, but sleep comes for you in a few restless, hour-stretched intervals anyway.

All the while, Bradley rolls the band between his index finger and thumb, watching the light catch on the twinkling diamond. Silence all around him, the hotel sleeps peacefully while he sits alone on the veranda. He’s up earlier than anyone else.

You were right— this ring probably would have cost more money than he makes most years. He could make more, if he put his personal research on the back burner. He just hadn’t realized that’s what it would take to be with you.

There’s a bitterness to the thoughts that bite at him; when he’s laying in your bed, kissing you, is it something that crosses your mind? Are you concerned about if he’ll be able to provide for you? He could. He already has been, beyond monetarily. With him, you don’t have to worry that one of his touches wouldn’t be gentle.

It brings him back to the first image he had of you — self-centred, arrogant, spoiled. In this time he has spent with you, he had seen something more. He’s not wounded enough to pretend that he only sees the worst parts of you. There’s so much more.

There’s a spark to you, when he really gets you talking that captures his attention in a way he wasn’t prepared for. A thoughtfulness, a softness. There are so many things about you that draw him in. But, it’s not up to him.

If you want to be that spoiled little girl, he can’t stop you.

He has been awake for hours already, watching the city of Siena, trying to make peace with the fact that this is surely over. He should have handed your ring back when he arrived. Back then, he had told himself that he kept it because he hadn’t wanted to wake you. At 6pm.

Faced with solitude and views of the Piazza Del Campo, he can be honest with himself; he just doesn’t want to give it back.

And, that seems to be the worst part. He’s got a decade of years on you, and infinitely more experience with the way the world really works, and he still can’t settle on the right answer. He knows what the correct move would be — to let you go home and pretend this never happened.

At the precipice of your adult life, he has thrown such a damning spanner into the works by letting himself get wrapped up like this. If the ring cost as much as it did, Bradley can only imagine the kind of money your families must have spent on the wedding. He’s an idiot for thinking you were ever going to give it up.

He should have just curved your grade, or told you earlier that you should switch out of his class. Maybe he wanted to teach you a lesson, of sorts. Having to work for things rather than having them handed to you, something like that.

He shouldn’t have let you kiss him, or kissed you back. It’s a little late for all the ‘shouldn’t have’s’ now, but Bradley figures that it’s about time to stop adding to the list of them.

Before his meeting, he slides the ring under your door and leaves without a word. Giving it back is one thing— having to look you in the eye while he handed it over would be another thing entirely.

Then, straightening and fiddling with his tie as he walks, he takes his short walk through Siena’s streets.

His meeting takes him through the early morning, and right past the time he promised Pasquale he’d be back to lead this morning’s event.

He rushes into the hotel lobby, finding his group strewn around couches and the ground, all bored to the point of silence. And then you, staring right at him.

You’re wearing a white blouse and linen shorts, sunglasses and sandals. He’s wearing a thick white shirt and a blue tie, tucked into dress pants that are a little darker than cream. His hair is windswept and messy, his tie loosened and his top button undone.

Even all dressed up, he finds a way to be a little bit himself. Just a little bit rugged, out of place — exceptionally handsome, his tie bringing out the gold in his tan.

He looks back at you, brown eyes trailing you head to toe, then looks away with a discernible disconnect. The adam’s apple in his throat bobs as he tugs at his tie, wiggling it out of place.

“So, did you get it?” Luke prompts.

Your head turns, and Bradley looks back to you in the absence of being watched. You frown, confused as to why you don’t know as much as Luke does. You’re the one spending afternoons and evenings with Bradley, cuddled against him.

“Yeah,” Bradley says, still looking at you, “I did.”

He’s staying in Italy, for two more weeks after he sends the rest of you home. He’ll need just one research assistant. It should be Luke. It could have given him two more weeks with you.

He shakes his head as Luke opens up his mouth to continue this conversation, pushing his fingers through his hair. “I need to shower. Why don’t you guys head down to the piazza, and I —uh— I’ll catch up with you all.”

He needs to get away from you and the way you’re looking at him. He can’t stand that look on your face now that you’ve slipped that ring back onto your left hand. It was the first thing he saw, glinting at him ostentatiously in the morning light.

Bradley doesn’t give anyone a chance to dispute, either, digging his hand into his front pocket to grab his key.

He hates you. You freaked out at him, and he doesn’t want you anymore. You watch him go, eyes wide. As the group begins to bustle, you’re left with a wounded feeling in your middle. No one has ever wanted you the way Bradley does, and you ruined it.

He turns, and starts for the stairs. Broad shoulders tapering into his waist, long legs in loose pants. You never thought you would miss the sight of his jean shorts, and the way they hug him in all the right places.

Robin watches you looking after him, just waiting to see if you’ll follow.

Pressing your lips firmly together, you adjust the strap of your bag to sit more comfortably against your shoulder. Then, you march right past her and join the rest of the group outside.

She almost hums. Surprise coats her features unmistakably as she wanders out into the cobbled street and loops her arm through Luke’s. Maybe it is over between the two of you after all, whatever ‘it’ was.

Pasquale compensates for Bradley’s absence with plenty of breaks in the shade that Bradley’s rigorous lecturing rarely allows for. As much as his content remains the same, he lacks the same conviction with which Bradley is able to talk about all of this.

You’re practically asleep standing up, dragging your heels against weathered streets as he rattles on about Saint Bernardino. Heat prickles at the back of your neck, a bead of perspiration trailing down under the neat collar of your white blouse.

Sparks tickle the base of your spine as fingertips skim across your skin.

“Excuse me.” Bradley’s deep voice makes you jolt as he angles his shoulder and moves to brush past you. Exactly an hour late to the tour he was supposed to be leading, he doesn’t even look down at you as he passes by.

He’s wearing a faded white graphic t-shirt and those offensively short trunks he wears sometimes even when he doesn’t plan to swim, his sunglasses settled onto the bridge of his nose and his curls still damp from his shower.

Your fingers catch on his forearm.

“Can I speak with you? Please?” You huff out, gnawing at your lip as your chest rises and falls with each deep breath. The sudden silence draws some attention, as Pasquale stops speaking up front.

Bradley pauses. Everyone, again, is staring at the two of you. You couldn’t just let him pass you by. A muscle in his jaw ticks as he looks you over, white sandals and a simple blue dress, Dior sunglasses set atop the bridge of your nose and a ridiculous, impractically small bag set against your shoulder.

He can’t act like a jilted lover. He isn’t one. He can’t act like this is a break-up. This isn’t one.

“Make it quick, Ashworth — some of us have work to do.”

You flinch. A few chuckles come from somewhere in the group. Humiliation burns through you in a foreign way, something so much worse than the other times that Bradley has called you by Malcolm’s name. It’s tainted now.

Bradley watches your bottom lip wobble. You swallow it down and straighten up, squaring your shoulders and settling your chin up high. He bites at the inside of his cheek, tucking his paperwork under his arm.

“Fine. Let’s talk right here.” Your voice shakes just a little. Enough to let him know that you’re only provoking him now because he has backed you into a corner. “Would you like me to apologize first for insulting your salary or for intruding on this stupid little trip to begin with—“

He shakes your hand off of him and catches your bicep. Your mouth hangs open as he hauls you backwards, dipping into the shade of an alleyway.

“No, no! — If you want to be mean, then I can be mean too—“

He finally stops dragging you with him once he has thrown you around a corner and backed you up against a crumbling wall. He gives a small shake of his head, the warmth of his eyes lost behind his dark lenses.

“I don’t want to be mean to you,” Bradley says softly. “But I don’t know how I’m supposed to get through these last three weeks with you staring at me like I broke your heart. It isn’t fair.”

“So talk to me!” You urge him. He steps back as you step forwards. As you reach for him, he turns and paces a few steps away, then takes a seat on the little stone bench in front of the opposite wall.

“Okay,” He rubs at his temple, then pulls his sunglasses from his face. “I think that we’ve been kidding ourselves here. All that I’ve been doing is screwing up what you’ve been working towards — if you want to marry that jackass, I won’t stand in your way.”

The corners of your lips twitch for a second before you tug them downward into a discernible frown. Maybe something to do with hearing Bradley call Malcolm a jackass. Still, your brows furrow and your face becomes stormy.

You step between his parted knees. “Kidding ourselves? — That’s what this was to you? — A joke?”

He shakes his head, sitting back against the wall, grabbing your hips in his hands. “No. That’s not what I was saying and you know that.”

“So, what are you saying?” You challenge him.

There’s a beat between you. It gets about as silent as Siena ever does in the middle of tourist season, and for a second the two of you feel alone on that little side street.

Tucked between two weathered, orange painted buildings, Bradley strokes his thumbs across the space between your shorts and the hem of your blouse. The pads of his thumbs feel like fire against your bare skin.

Maybe the wind changes directions; something switches between the two of you briskly. He softens, closing his eyes for a moment.

“I think that this needs to stop.” He whispers, pressing his lips to the smooth skin of your stomach. Your fingers trail through the soft curls at the crown of his head, following where deep brown becomes soft auburn.

“I don’t want it to.” You whisper.

“It’s selfish,” He looks up, endlessly warm brown eyes locked on you. His thumbs circle your hipbones, cursing the soft linen for being in the way of him getting to feel your skin one last time. “Of me, to mess with your head like this.”

And of you, to let Bradley get as attached as he is. He holds your waist in his hands, thumbing at the waistband of your shorts just enough. His eyes fall shut with the glimpse of your skin as he nips at your hipbone, kissing from the right side to the left.

“I can speak for myself,” You tell him, watching his warm mouth work across your navel. Right here in the open, just around a quiet corner, where anyone could see the two of you. Excitement pools between your legs, your hips angling toward his mouth. “And I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.” Bradley looks up, cocking his head like he dares you to continue this arguement.

“Stop telling me what I am,” You scowl defiantly. “I’m fully capable of telling you myself.”

He stands up swiftly, towering. “So tell me.”

Your neck cranes uncomfortably, all to see the challenging look in his eyes. “Tell you what?”

“Tell me how this works. How this goes. How the fuck I’m supposed to watch you go back to him after all this?” He bites. Suddenly, you feel the weight of his palms holding onto your midsection. Your gaze flickers downward as your mind ponders over the depth of his tone.

He almost flinches as you look him in the eye again. Something downright analytical in the way you’re staring at him. Weighing up exactly what about what he had said that made it feel so different. Something far different from anger.

He doesn’t give you a chance to answer him.

“It’s over, I can’t keep doing this.” Bradley is unwaveringly firm.

The first thought that crosses your mind isn’t the loneliness you had felt in the first two weeks here. You could survive that for your remaining three weeks. You’re going to miss the gentle graze of his fingertips on your knee, and the way he smiles at you sometimes, and the things he holds onto to tell you at the end of the day.

Undoubtedly, you would miss him.

“That’s final.” He can’t hear you out; he doesn’t want to. He would change his mind too easily. It’s time to finally act like a grown-up and stick to what he says.

Your lips part and hang, eyes wide. That’s final. He doesn’t speak to you that way— not unless he wants an argument— and he’s going to get one. He gives you no chance, adjusting his sunglasses and walking way ahead in his long strides.

It’s strange how fast your anger just becomes shame.

Maybe standing in the street and screaming at him would have made you feel better, maybe it would have changed something. In its absence, you’re left silent and surrounded. Crowds bustle around you, but Bradley’s not as easy to lose as you are. His brown curls stand out over the crowd, as his American accent carries across the blending conversations, starting his ongoing lecture about Siena’s economic role in early Italy.

You don’t want it to be final.

It’s not fair. He can’t just toss you aside— even if it’s a defensive gesture. Your feet find their rhythm and you start to move finally, making minimal effort to catch the group. You’re stuck on that idea, realizing that you have put him in a very familiar position.

He learned his lesson with Natasha, he hurt her trying to hold on and she left him anyway. Maybe he’s just trying to save both of you from the hurt this time.

Bradley’s accent fades and fades until you’re in a crowd of just unfamiliar conversation, your pace slowing until you’ve stopped all together. He doesn’t want to be around you, fine. You can give him space, you’ve got a severely neglected checking account and a seriously fogged mind to clear up.

You close your eyes and gather your bearings, turning in a tight circle to survey the streets around you. Swallowing at the lump in your throat, you take a breath and reach into your bag.

Headphones settled over your ears, Walkman playing a Roy Orbison classic, you straighten your shoulders and start walking.

There are a pair of shiny, dangly earrings that you pick up in a little boutique. A pair of heels that you most definitely don’t have room in your suitcase for in a designer store. A brand new blue swimsuit from a store with a male attendant that had been far too eager to help you.

You’re just about considering yourself done spending, walking along a street that must be about a mile from your hotel given how long you have been walking.

Then, you catch sight of a woman leaving a store. She’s supermodel tall, with a long, slender neck and a serious face. Serious in the kind of way that makes men go weak in the knees.

Your head tilts just slightly, watching her strut through the street ahead of you in six-inch heels and a tight little mini skirt. You’re not the only one watching, either. At least three men ahead of you turn their heads, watching in awe as she passes them by. Your gaze flits down to the little red bag in her hand, stuffed with black tissue paper.

Turning your head, you find the store she had appeared from.

Three tall mannequins stand proudly posed in the window of the little boutique, dressed in bustiers and bras and stockings and… something even smaller than a thong.

You look between her and the store. It seems like a good idea in the moment. It seems like a good idea at the checkout, even.

It seems like a good idea until you’re standing in the strange little bathroom at the very end of your hotel floor, feeling utterly ridiculous. Standing in a pink babydoll and it’s adorning thong, you try to picture yourself posed like one of those mannequins.

Sprawled across the bed in your hotel room with one knee bent and a hand on your hip, maybe, your finger poised against your lip. The idea makes you shiver. The thought of Bradley watching makes it worse.

He finds you sexy, sure. You’ve felt his erection pressing into you enough times to know that, at least. But that was when you had his attention, his affection. Now, it’s different.

You bite at the inside of your cheek, scrutinising the sheer fabric coating your reflection. You wonder if this is supposed to feel natural, if you’re supposed to feel sexy, if it comes naturally to everyone else except you.

You lift your hands and sweep your hair back over your shoulders, screwing your mouth into a displeased frown. You brush it forwards again, fidgeting and fidgeting with the way that you look.

At once, the door whips open.

You haven’t even had time to open your mouth to shriek before Bradley barges in with his size thirteen Nikes and his papers under his arm, desperate to take a leak after spending his afternoon searching Siena for you.

He hits you like a stack of bricks. He never makes the choice to save you over his work, it’s something instinctual instead. The papers all go flying as he grabs you by your arms to keep you from landing completely on your ass.

“Shit— shit.” Bradley’s hands are off of you from the second he realises who you are and what you’ve done to his neatly organised stack of sources. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck.”

The weighted door swings shut behind him and you’re trapped with the man you’re trying to seduce, as he considers fishing three pages of work out of the toilet. He hasn’t even looked at you yet.

Your eyes are practically bulging out of your head, and your arms finally strike into motion, crossing over your chest in an attempt to cover yourself.

Bradley seems to decide that he is going to attempt to salvage the papers. He reaches out and the first time he touches you in forty-eight hours is to try to manhandle you out of his way. His fingers curl around the chiffon mix.

Instantly, the papers are forgotten and his eyes are on you. Dark and heavy, his pupils fade into the deep brown hue of his eyes.

Without restraint, his gaze drops. You stand, frozen, hugging your arms to your chest to cover your breasts, heart thudding through the thin fabric.

He starts at your ankle, noticing the new anklet secured around it. You squeeze your eyes shut, veering away from the scrutiny of his gaze.

Bradley’s thoughts are far from scrutinising you. He eyeballs the pale pink underwear through the fabric, taking his time in moving on until he finds the way you’re trying to cover your chest with your hands. You’re trembling, eyes squeezed shut.

The tag pokes out by your ribs. He cocks his head slightly as his gaze flickers downward, reminding himself that he’s still holding onto your hip. His thumb twitches toward the pink fabric, smoothing over the thin line where the g-string covers your skin.

“What’s this?” He’s still holding it, his big, stupid, hand is still holding onto your hip.

“… Lingerie.” You answer him quietly, shrinking backward like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. He follows you without moving, curling his fingers into the skimpy fabric.

“Right,” Bradley acknowledges. His gaze flickers downward again, willing his cock to keep it together and not stretch the fabric of his jeans. “Where’d you get it?”

“I wasn’t— I just wanted— this isn’t—“

Bradley straightens up and finally remembers to take his hand off you. The stumbling step he takes back makes him hit the lock on the door, and finally he thinks to lock it for real. His tongue dips from his mouth, wetting his pink lips as his hand palm scrubs at his clean shaven jaw.

“You drive me crazy,” He whispers, almost in disbelief. “You’re driving me crazy. What is this?”

“It’s…” You pause, and fidget and throw your arms up exhasperatedly. “It’s supposed to be… I just wanted you to look at me again.”

If he wanted to be cruel, he could tell you that you’re being ridiculous and that playing dress up isn’t the way to make an apology. He would’ve, at the beginning of this trip. Now, his heart just sinks to his stomach at the thought of you so desperate for his attention. He wants to give it to you.

A muscle in his jaw ticks. He looks you up and down once more, this time pausing for longer. With your arms out of the way, he can see your flushed nipples peaked against the fabric and the way your chest trembles with each breath.

He swallows thickly, suddenly forgetting that his work is disintegrating in the toilet water.

“I’ve been looking at you this whole time,” He says tightly, kind of like it pains him to compliment you with what you’re putting him through. “But I meant what I said, baby, I’m done.”

He takes a step back and bumps the door, cursing this country for building its bathrooms without guys like him in mind. He crowds the space, finding it impossible to back away from you and somehow even harder to keep his hands to himself.

Your mouth straightens into a line and he just knows that he’s got another argument on his hands. He isn’t in the mood to be argued with in a bathroom.

“Whatever you’re about to say, don’t.” He says firmly, willing himself to keep his eyes on your face and hoping you’ll offer him the same courtesy, so that you don’t notice the semi straining against his jeans.

He glances down at the strewn around pages.

“Now will you give me a minute?”

“No, not unless you’ll talk to me. You can’t avoid me forever.” You bargain, taking a step towards him and resting your fingers against his bicep. Bradley practically flinches, taking a step back and letting your hand fall to the space between you.

He successfully avoided you noticing that even now he’s trying to protect the both of you from this, you’ve still got him wrapped around your finger. Your lip trembles. He can’t help himself, taking another glance downward at the pink chiffon on your body.

His hand flies up to rub at his temples, an exasperated sigh forcing its way out of his lips.

“If I say you can work with me, you’ll get out so that I can take a piss?” He huffs, already irritated with how much of a struggle that’s going to be because of the southbound blood situation. Your eyes widen at the promise of time with him. “Fine. Get out.”

Leaving your original clothes on the counter, you turn swiftly and push open the door to your side of the bathroom. Bradley stares at your ass, covered by a thin layer of chiffon and a thong. He has never seen you in a thong. His mouth dries.

As your door swings shut behind you, Bradley instantly steps forward to lock it. Then, he turns his head and examines himself in the mirror— straining against his jeans and pointing right for you. Wrapped. Around. Your finger.

Scrubbing a hand along his jaw, he exhales deeply and closes his eyes for a moment. Painted on the inside of his eyelids is the image of you in his shirt a week ago, your hip popped and skin spilling out from inside, as you had waved at him from that window. How confident you had looked.

The way you’d keened into his touch.

He doesn’t know how to explain this part. It’s why it’ll never work. He doesn’t want lacy, frilly clothes that make you hide yourself. He wants that look in your eyes, and that smile on your lips — the tone your voice takes when you know you’re really riling him up.

Sure, the sight of you in that pretty pink get up damn near made his brain stop functioning, but he didn’t like the look on your face. He doesn’t like the way you spoke to him yesterday, and he knows that he can’t keep playing with your head like this.

But then, his gaze flickers downward towards the countertop. Nestled to the right of your neatly folded clothes, glinting at him once again, is that stupid fucking ring. All by itself, far from where it should be sitting around your finger.

…

tags: @thedroneranger @batdanceq @cassiemitchele @himbos-on-ice @bradshawsbaby @damrlova @fudge13 @xoxabs88xox @sihtricswife @callsignvenus @callsign-joyride @harper1666 @krismdavis @sheisanangell @cherrycola27 @kmc1989 @sugarcoated-lame @mshistorylover

#bradley bradshaw #bradley rooster bradshaw #miles teller #bradley bradshaw smut #rooster bradshaw imagine #rooster x you #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley bradshaw au #professor bradley #the odyssey #professor bradley x honey

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death---dealer · 7 months ago

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Imagine joking with like Malcom and the other humans and reader says "I like older men" and Malcolm's like "clearly" while point at caesar. Old man caesar we all say in unison.

YOU DID THIS TO ME I ---

It was nice to have a conversation with another Human, you thought dimly and handed Malcolm a wrench. Rusted around the edges, but it was still sturdy enough to use as he muttered a small ‘thank you’ to you. There was nothing of consequence to be said, other Humans liked to shoot the breeze. Apes… Not as much, you smiled at that. They took things in stride, surely, but the idea of small talk was not well established and most conversations were of substance and had deeper meaning.

The topic on the docket today as you helped Humanity out in a good deed set by the King of Apes himself, setting you to assist in getting the power back at the Dam so they could leave and never return, was the concept of actors. Primarily the ones you liked, having cringed a few times at Malcolm’s favorite choice, understanding and leaning more into Ellie when she began pestering about how much of a looker that Jeff Goldblum had been. Malcolm’s face contorted in confusion, “Really? Outta any guy out there,” He scoffed at his wife and it left her smiling towards you with a mild flushing and a roll of the eyes, “You pick that goofy lookin’ dude?” “We like funny guys.” You commented hap-hazardly, grateful on the inside that nothing you were saying was being analyzed into oblivion by the Apes carrying rocks behind you, out from the bellows of the Earth and teetering upwards to sit on the Sun. You thought about that briefly, how even now in the more primitive nature of the Apes, they were still able to metaphorically move mountains and level plains.

“The funnier the better.” Ellie noted, looking back at Alexander as he pulled her attention away. Malcolm nodded and processed that, letting his gaze fall back on the great King himself for a split second as he bargained a bit before drawing his eyes back to yours, “Funny?” “Funny.” Grinning down at your hands, the heat hit your cheeks and suddenly the chill that was brought against your spine was gone and replaced with static sitting uncomfortably, but not unwelcomed by any means, against your tailbone. You shuffled your feet stagnantly in your crouched position, resting your fingertips on the ground momentarily so as to not lose your balance and fall down the small flight of stairs behind you.

His gaze said it all, you knew, he knew as he nodded again in acceptance, this time with a wry chuckle and a small sarcastic ‘Never would have thought.’

“Let me guess,” Malcolm said clearly this time and squinted his eyes to focus on a particular yellow wire, used you assumed, to plug into the dashboard to get the power flowing freely, “You like them hairy?”

“Nah,” Joking, you could feel the density of Caesar’s fur on your fingertips at the mere idea hitting your mind. So hard on the surface, but once you dug deeper in, it became soft to touch and you yearned to grasp it and yank hard enough to command his attention. “I like them older though.”

Wiggling your eyebrows at your fellow Human, you raised your eyes to meet the ever piercing gaze of Caesar as you finished your statement staring straight into the green embezzlement that could get you to submit without even a word, “More experienced, if you catch my drift.”

#planet of the apes #pota #caesar #caesar x reader #caesar pota #pota fanfiction #emmy writes #AH

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agaypanic · 4 months ago

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Making a Little Genius (Malcolm Wilkerson X Reader Smut)

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Summary: You and Malcolm have a big party with your friends and family to celebrate you getting engaged and graduating Harvard with doctorates. During said party, you and Malcolm go to the bathroom to have a different kind of celebration.

A/N: based on this ask and this ask, plus some others i probably forgot about. Idk anything about doctorates, graduating college, or tbh probably anything in this fic. Year isn’t specified, but malcolm + reader are like 25. Francis is about 29, Reese 26, Dewey 19, Jamie 10, and the new kid is like 6. I made the newest kid a girl bc i feel like lois deserves it. You don’t need to know any of this, I just thought I’d say just in case lol

C/W: unprotected p in v sex (wrap it before you tap it!), breeding kink, dumbification kink, degrading kink, semi-public sex (empty room at a party), mommy and daddy kink

***

Malcolm had been eyeing you the entire day. It started out innocently. In the morning, he watched you fondly as he helped you decorate the house for the party you were having today. Malcolm paid extra attention to how the engagement ring he had given you shone in the light. After all, it was part of the reason you were having a party in the first place.

At first, Malcolm was against a big celebration. The last thing he needed was his crazy family, mainly his brothers and their children, messing around and breaking everything valuable around his house.

He finally knew how his parents felt about him and his brothers.

But you were always able to convince your boyfriend, now fiance, to loosen up a little. Which was why your little backyard was now crowded with your families and friends. Malcolm tried to stay close to you, but eventually got distracted by Jamie trying to give their little sister Maggie a string of firecrackers. Usually, he wouldn’t be so concerned, despite every Wilkerson child’s destructive streak. But Maggie had grown out of her phase of putting everything in her mouth and had now become very interested in fire and “making things go boom!”

When Malcolm was finally able to wrestle the tiny explosives and lighter out of Maggie’s hands, you were on the porch cooing over your new soon-to-be niece. “I can’t believe you’re a dad now, Reese.” You said, letting baby Olivia grab at your fingers. “It’s like you’re a real grown up.”

“I still have my moments.” Reese smiled with a shrug. “Don’t tell Jen, but sometimes I let Livvie lick the spoon a little when I’m making cakes.”

You snorted, surprised that that was the best example of mischief Reese was able to come up with now. You weren’t going to complain though. It was definitely better than his days of fighting rabid packs of dogs and beating on his brothers. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“What secret?” Malcolm startled you, making you hold your future niece extra close to you. When you realized it was your fiance who had snuck up on you, you relaxed a bit and smirked at his brother.

“Nothing. Just that Reese isn’t the bad boy he used to be.” You chuckled before catching a glimpse of what Malcolm was holding. “Where did you get firecrackers?”

“Maggie.” He sighed, jerking his head towards the house. “Come on, help me find a place to hide these before we have to buy our neighbors new mailboxes.”

Carefully, you handed Olivia back to her dad before following Malcolm inside the house. While wandering around, looking for a place to hide the tiny explosives, you and Malcolm basked in the rare moment of solitude after hours of being surrounded by your family.

“Olivia’s the cutest thing.” You said as you opened the medicine cabinet in your bathroom. Malcolm nodded, watching you sit on the counter. “Just think. One day, we’ll have some little geniuses of our own running around.”

“Oh yeah?” Malcolm smirked, closing the cabinet and moving to stand in front of you. “How soon do you think?”

The look in his eyes made you smile coyly. “I dunno.” You shrugged, wrapping your arms around Malcolm’s shoulders. “After we’re married with better health insurance would probably be the ideal scenario. But…” You trailed off, letting a hand play with the hair at the nape of Malcolm’s neck.

“But…?” Malcolm encouraged.

“But,” you repeated, lips inching closer to his. “There’s no harm in practicing.”

Malcolm pulled your body against his as he kissed you feverishly. His hands roamed your body, groping your boobs and hips before hiking the skirt of your dress up. You moaned into Malcolm’s mouth as he squeezed your thighs and rutted his growing erection against you. Overwhelmed by desire, you did your best to move your hips in time with his to relieve your aching need for friction.

A whine escaped your lips as Malcolm pulled your top down, making your breasts victim to his licks and bites that were now trailing down from your neck. “Perfect tits.” He muttered against your skin. “Gonna be even more perfect when I make you a mommy.”

While Malcolm pinched your nipples, your somewhat shaky hands traveled down to unbuckle his belt and pull down his zipper. You reached in and started palming him through his boxers, and you bit your lip from how hard he was against you.

“You want Daddy’s cock?” You moaned in response. You never thought that Malcolm would have a daddy kink, or that it would make you this horny. Yet here you were, tugging at Malcolm’s clothes just enough to allow his cock to spring free and spreading your legs as wide as you were able. Malcolm pulled your panties to the side before fisting himself, staring at your pussy that was begging for him. “God, you’re so wet, baby. Gonna fill you up so good.”

When he was fully stiff, Malcolm slowly guided himself into you. It took all his strength to not immediately ram into you; you just felt so good. He started with slow thrusts, allowing you to get used to his size while also trying to release the mutual desperation.

“Mal…” You sighed. “More.”

“Oh yeah? You want more? Want Daddy to fuck you harder?”

Too overwhelmed to speak, you instead nodded furiously and swung your arms around his shoulders to brace yourself for what was to come.

Almost instantly, Malcolm started pistoning in and out of you. You’d never understand where he got the stamina for such a rapid pace. Maybe all the coffee he consumed during finals had made him permanently jittery and speedy. But you weren’t about to complain, not when the drag of his cock against you sent electricity up your spine.

Malcolm reached down to thumb at your clit, and he couldn’t help but let out a breathy laugh when he felt you squeezing him in response. “You like that?” Although the question was genuine, his tone was entirely condescending. It only made you wetter. You tried to respond, but all that came out was a cockdrunk babble. “What was that?” Malcolm slowed his pace a bit, making you whine in protest.

“Fa-...” You could barely finish the word. The hand that wasn’t playing with your clit cupped your face, squeezing your cheeks and forcing you to look at Malcolm. He raised an eyebrow, waiting for you to continue, and all you did was grab his arm and try to move your hips to get him to keep fucking you.

Malcolm laughed, realizing what was happening. “I’m really fucking your brains out, aren’t I? Nothing but a cocksleeve for me.” His degrading just made you even wetter. Deciding to have some mercy on you, Malcolm started pounding into you again. “How much of a genius is this kid gonna be?” He panted, circling your clit vigorously. “Mommy’s a Harvard graduate, but gets too dumb to speak when I fuck her.”

“Gonna…” You took a deep breath, feeling yourself inching closer and closer to the edge. You had an iron grip on Malcolm’s shirt, no doubt wrinkling the fabric in your fist.

“Oh!” Malcolm looked at you with faux surprise. “Got something to say? Come on, tell Daddy what you’re thinking, if you’re even able to form a thought.”

His condescension spurred you on. “Gonna come.” You finally spat out.

Malcolm nodded. “Good girl.” His breathing got heavier with every thrust. “God, I’m so close.”

“In me.” You moaned. “Come in me. Please.”

“Yeah? Want me to fill you up?” Malcolm’s hips stuttered, trying to restrain himself from coming for just a little while longer. “Want me to make you a mommy?”

“Uh huh.” You whined. “Make you a daddy.”

The intensity of your orgasm made you shake, and Malcolm’s quickly followed from your cunt spasming around him. The foreign feeling of his hot seed filling you was intoxicating, and part of you hoped that you wouldn’t get pregnant right away so you could get more of this feeling. Malcolm seemed to like the rawness as well because instead of pulling out, he seemed to be pressing into you as much as he could.

Even when you both came down from your climaxes, you didn’t want to pull away. But you both knew you had to eventually.

“I don’t wanna go back out there.” You mumbled tiredly into Malcolm’s shoulder. He laughed, seeming to share the sentiment as he rubbed your back.

“Yeah, I don’t know how we’re gonna explain us being gone for so long.”

“Or why I’m suddenly walking with a limp.”

Malcolm laughed again, lifting your head up so he could press a kiss to your lips. His gentleness starkly contrasted how he was a few minutes ago.

He rubbed your hip, giving you a few more kisses before speaking again. “You really want a kid?”

You nodded, a grin slowly forming. “I wouldn’t mind a bit more practicing though.”

***

Malcolm in the Middle Taglist: @rattilol

#agaypanic #malcolm in the middle #malcolm in the middle x reader #malcolm wilkerson #malcolm wilkerson x reader #malcolm wilkerson x reader smut

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mediumgayitalian · 10 months ago

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At around half past one, Nico gets a Feeling.

He gets feelings a lot. Nothing he can quantify, just something telling him that something is up, somethings wrong. Or something’s about to be. At this point, he’s learned to trust his intuition, based purely on the number of times it has saved his life; a number he’s long since given up counting. (He’s only ignored his gut feelings three times in his life: when Bianca went on her quest, when his father promised not to hurt Percy before the Titan War, and when he went looking for the Doors. He has learned his lesson.)

So when something at the bottom of his stomach tells him to get up, to check things out — he does.

He knows it could be nothing. (The last time he had a Feeling, it turned out that he had placed a book precariously on the edge of his desk, and it had been about to fall. Not exactly world-saving stuff.) But regardless, he steps out of bed, shoves his feet into his shoes, and creeps out of his cabin.

Camp is kind of beautiful at night.

There’s an eerie calmness to it without so many human disasters running about, and the quiet reflects that. All Nico can really hear is the hooting of owls in the distance, the chittering of nocturnal animals and monsters alike, the distant screeches of curfew harpies, and the pleasant crashing of the waves. The air is clean, when he inhales, and he takes the time to hold it in his lungs for a bit, imagining the sweet breath is healing his burned lungs, turning the scar tissue back to something flexible and normal. Whether or not it actually works, he doesn’t know, but it feels nice.

Under the light of the brightly shining new moon and billions of stars, he starts his patrol. Around his own cabin first — there’s nothing, as he expected, the warning doesn’t seem overwhelming like threats tend to be — and then he makes his way around the circuit, checking behind gardens and shrines and inside braziers. He hums quietly as he walks, something preppy and bright the Apollo kids have been hollering for days, and waves to Lady Hestia, sword heavy at his waist.

“Come sit,” she calls, patting the seat next to her.

Nico does.

“Haven’t seen you out at night in a while.”

He hums, toneless this time, leaning back on his hands and mirroring her gaze at the sky.

“Been sleeping, for once.”

“I’m glad.”

He smiles, knowing that she means it. He watches out of the corner of his eye as she picks up his sword, sliding it from his belt loop, and uses it to stoke the flames. She doesn’t seem afraid of it, or wary. To her it’s just a stick of metal. It’s nice.

“You have you been, my Lady?”

She pokes at the embers a few more times, scooping a few to balance at the tip of the blade for a while. It glows with the heat, and he knows he’ll have to sharpen it tomorrow, but he doesn’t mind. Maybe he can do it while Will is in the archery range. It’ll give him an excuse to be at the armoury at the same time, anyway.

“I’ve been well.” She breathes deeply, small smile pulling at her face. “It’s calmer, and more people wave to me. I like it.”

“Good.”

She dismisses him a few minutes later, sending him off with a promise to chat again soon. She doesn’t need to worry about him promising — he makes a point to sit with her at least once a week — but it’s nice to know someone wants his company, so he appreciates it. He leaves with a wave, walking towards the eastern half of the cabins.

Nothing’s amiss. He can hear campers snoring, and see the odd reading light. Malcolm catches his eye as he walks past the Athena cabin and winks, sending a cheeky salute when he sees the sword held loosely in his hands. So far, everything seems fine. He’s beginning to think the Feeling might have simply been about Lady Hestia, so he decides to do one last check around the Big House and then head back.

Of course, that’s where the issue is.

The infirmary lights are always on. They’re dimmer in the night, more of a glow than anything, but there’s an extra brightness streaming out from the windows, and when Nico peeks inside, he sees Will, standing with his back turned at the nurse’s station.

He takes a moment to check his strength, making sure he has the energy for it — dinner last night was pho and he had three bowls, he most definitely does — and sinks into the shadows by the door. He materializes back in the little alcove by the bandage & wraps cabinet, lurking silently while he blinks the dizziness away.

The first thing he registers is soft singing.

He’s facing Will, now, and can see the glow coming from his hands, enveloping a bowl of some kind. He has both hands coated in some dusky pink substance, massaging and gently pounding it against the sides of the bowl, working it through with great care. As his voice gets higher, the glow gets brighter, fading as he dips lower. He sings something about hills and meadows and the breeze, about wing-song, about the sound of flower stems bending in the wind. For a while Nico stands, listening to the melodious ancient Greek, swaying with every pitch and hold. It’s captivating.

Will is almost haunting when he heals.

There’s a divinity in him — in all of them — but he glows when he sings. Not just his hands, and sometimes his head if he puts enough power in his words, but there’s an almost shimmer to the air around him, a shining warp. His skin gets clearer, and his hair goes more metallic, almost, like spun gold rather than blonde. His freckles make his skin into an inverse replica of the night sky, dark specks surrounded by bright empty between them. His long fingers pluck through bright strands of light like a harpist strums their chords; lightly, carefully, skillfully; like a braider weaves their hair. There’s an undeniable age to his magic, a practice that’s visibly replicated millions of times over thousands of years, as if every healer who has come before him links their arms with his, breathes their strength in his lungs. Sometimes, when he does something truly unbelievable, amazingly beyond reason, he flickers — his orange camp shirt fades into a white chiton, or long robes, or a white coat, or a blue tunic. Watching him heal is like watching the sunrise — breathtaking and unique, every time, but powerful in its cyclic archaism.

It takes Nico a long time to realise Will is swaying.

Snapped out of his trance, he begins to notice Will’s long, slow blinks, the unsteady way he stands, the weight he has leaned on the counter. Even his face looks plainly exhausted under the glow, face pillow-creased and eyes bruised, hair mussed, limbs leaden. Footsteps as silent as he can manage, Nico creeps over to the schedule posted by the door, scanning through the scrawled pen ink.

He curses quietly. Will is not supposed to be awake.

There are really only three people who can work the infirmary to its fully capacity, barring Chiron. Kayla, Austin, and Will are the only ones who can magically heal, as much as the volunteers are imperative, so when the camp is in full swing one of them must be stationed at all times. That’s how Will sets it up. A bit of a waste of time, he acknowledges, but Nico knows he has memorized every time a camper who should have been saved. He carries far too much guilt to ever let it happen again, as inconvenient as his rules may be.

Night shift, though, is a need-be basis. If the infirmary is as empty as it is right now, then there truly is no need to keep one of the three of them awake outside their circadian rhythm, staring at nothing. Instead, they take shifts in the on-call room — asleep, but prepared should anything go wrong, should a monster chase a new camper at an odd hour. It’s Will’s turn for on-call. It’s two in the morning. He should be asleep.

And, yet.

Nico recognizes the look in his eyes. There’s a — frailty, to them, a deep-seated, animalistic fear, one he recognises from the hours after his own night terrors. A single-minded panic that cannot be unseated in any logical way, cannot be comforted with any gentle hands.

Nico handles his fear with slashing swords and bruised knuckles. Will, he knows, handles his fear with obsessive, endless preparation.

Knowing full well nothing is going to drag him away from his focus bar actual cardiac arrest, Nico walks right by him. Will doesn’t move. He settles behind him in the old, creaky leather office chair, curling his legs under him and resting his head on the soft arm. He watches Will, watches the almost machine-like movement to his kneading arms, and falls back asleep to his humming.

———

“…Nico?”

He wakes up warm and a little cramped, in the same position he fell asleep. Sun is streaming on from the many issues, blocked from burning his eyes by Will’s hunched frame, facing towards him now, hands and shoulders shaking with equal violence.

“What time is it?”

His voice is croaky and wrecked from hours of singing. Nico is willing to bet his throat is burned as badly as his hands, cooked from non-stop, sun-borne glowing. The divinity that had emanated from him before has abandoned him and he looks young, lost.

“Early,” Nico says softly. He unfolds himself from the chair, stretching slightly — gods, he is going to ache today — and wraps a slow, careful hand around Will’s wrists. “Probably around six, if I have to guess.”

“I don’t remember waking up.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’m tired.”

“That’s okay.”

His breathing is heavy, laboured.

“I don’t —”

Nico squeezes gently. “It’s okay, Will.”

Will swallows and says nothing.

“Come on.”

Carefully, letting Will’s stiff joints set the pace, Nico guides him out of the infirmary. The sun shines brighter as soon as he steps outside, but he doesn’t seem to notice bar a tiny, almost imperceptible flinch at the change in lighting. Nico switches from holding his wrists to laying a hand on the small of his back, half-worried he’s going to fall over.

Luckily, he makes it to the Apollo Cabin upright, although the stairs take them a while. The hinges of the old screen door creak as Nico pushes it open, and he sees both Kayla and Austin, up and dressed, jump.

“…Will?” Kayla asks softly, eyebrows creased in concern. She walks over to him when he doesn’t answer, frozen still, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”

Will leans — almost hesitantly — into the touch. The same blankness from before clouds his eyes, although this time there’s less of the fear.

“Hey.” Nico walks over to stand in front of him, waiting patiently for him to meet his eyes. In the minutes it takes, he hears Austin pad over, standing opposite to Kayla, hands clenching and unclenching like he can’t decide what to do with them. “You think you can sleep?”

Will doesn’t answer verbally, but drifts after a moment to his bed. Nico follows, helping him out of his shoes and shirt. After a beat of hesitation, Austin hurries over, turning down Will’s sheets and helping him crawl in. Soft guitar music begins to play, and when Nico looks over Kayla is fiddling with the CD player, turning the dials carefully. Without much fanfare, Will’s eyes flutter closed, and his breathing slows to something deep and even. His twitching fingers still.

“I don’t think today’s an activity day,” Nico murmurs. “I checked up on him a while after midnight; he’d been at it for hours. He didn’t stop ‘til sunrise.”

Kayla rubs harshly at her eyes. “Fuck.”

“He’ll be okay,” Austin whispers. He runs a gentle knuckle over Will’s forehead, then turns his careful, imploring gaze to Nico. “You kept an eye on him?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

Nico inclines his head. “Had a feeling.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Kayla admits. “He was —” She trails off, staring at something in the left half of the cabin — the empty half. “He was like this after the Titan War, too. I think he spoke maybe two words for the entirety of September.”

Nico almost can’t imagine it. The very thought of it makes something twinge in his chest, clench in his stomach.

“We’ll figure it out.” He nods, to convince himself as much as Kayla and Austin, who look to him with way more trust than he deserves. “We won’t let it — it won’t get that bad. We’ll help, and if we can’t figure it out we’ll get help. It won’t be as hard as last time.”

It won’t be as hard as last time because there won’t be twelve shrouds, Nico doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to. Both Kayla and Austin nod, looking at their sleeping brother with firm resolution.

“This time, we’ll be there.”

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