#One Manhattan Square | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sook9i · 4 months ago

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— NAKED IN MANHATTAN

⋆｡°✩ After a drunk conversation leads you to question your feelings for your bandmate and friend, Hueningkai, maybe a night together in Manhattan is just what you need to clear the air.

. . . GENRE ! Hueningkai x reader | smut | fluff | friends to lovers

. . . CONTAINS ! virgin!kai, virgin!reader, 6th member!reader, afab!reader, talks of virginity, mentions of alcohol and alcohol consumption, swearing, loss of virginity, unrealistic first time? (not that i would know), no established dynamics, fingering, protected sex 🙏, some aftercare, a little too much foreplay, consent checks, kinda just porn with plot, the other members tease them about their virginity (don’t do that)

. . . WORD COUNT ! 4660

. . . NOTES ! i’ve been writing this for,,,literally ever and i’m so glad it’s finally done !! this is inspired by naked in manhattan by chappell roan however considering that it’s a sapphic love song i’m still kinda unsure if i’m going to keep the title of it for this fic. if anyone has any opinions let me know!! anyways i hope you enjoy!!

. . . ADMIN ! written by callie 😼

Bright lights twinkle across the floor like stars. You can’t see the real stars up in the sky, but you make do with the high-rises lighting up the horizon. Cars beep and blare their horns stories below you. This sweet symphony fills the cold, empty hotel room like a lullaby. However, it isn’t really empty. You’re there, staring out across the Manhattan skyline. Kai’s there, just there behind a closed door in the bathroom. Bare only for the comforting hot water of the shower he was in. He’s there, racing through your thoughts like always. Around and around; an ever-looping track of vice. This boy, your friend, your bandmate, driving you crazy just by standing beyond a wall.

This isn’t exactly how you imagined spending a night in New York City. The rest of the boys took full advantage of the free night. Taehyun had wanted to explore, last you heard he was in Time Square. Beomgyu and Yeonjun had gone out to get some dinner and god only knows where they ended up, now five hours later.

Soobin, on the other hand, was the reason you ended up in this position. Having approached you after your radio show taping and apologetically begging you to let him have the single hotel room for the night. And how could you say no? You cared for your members, and your leader especially seemed like he could use a night with just himself. He was probably spread-eagle on the hotel bed, 5-steps deep into his skincare routine right now, and watching whatever show he’s been raving about for the past week; probably having the time of his life. However, when you agreed to give up your room, you failed to think about the implications. You didn’t consider that you’d now be rooming with whoever Soobin had left behind. You didn’t even think about how he usually roomed with Hueningkai. Not a single thought passed through your head, except sweet old sympathy for your leader. Now, you were considering disavowing kindness for the rest of your life because of where that nice gesture landed you.

You heard the water shut off in the bathroom like the final clock strike right before midnight. Face embarrassingly hot, you keep your back to the door as it opens. New light slants across the floor, fluorescent and harsh. It mingles with the soft rush of humidity into the room and claws at your pajamas. Begging you to turn, to look, to face the perpetual inhabitant of your dreams. You tried to ignore the way your heart sped up simply hearing him shuffle around behind you. Still, your blood ran hotter, building up in your cheeks and neck.

You’ve had your fair share of innocent crushes over time, including the one you’ve harbored for Huening over the past 4 years. However, none ever left you feeling like this. This disoriented, this flustered, this desperate despite actively trying to dismantle your feelings for months now. He’d manage to send you tumbling back down, head over heels, in one quick night. Just the thought of his voice, the way the words came to him so easily, kept you spiraling.

The night’s high spirits had long settled down. Celebrating the start of your world tour with drinks and food had kept the mood quite energetic. Now, spread out on the dorm floor, nursing a half-empty soju bottle, you find yourself prattling off to silence.

“Sooo…what are you guys most excited for in America?”

Yeonjun snorts from the couch above you, “You sound like every American interview we do.”

“Okay, well…you can be like 100% completely honest with me.”

“I wanna try some cool food and drinks or something.” Beomgyu jumps in, “Like the themed ones from specialty bars that people always post.”

The oldest hums in agreement, “It would be pretty nice to go out one night.”

“We’re in New York for a few days, I’m pretty sure we have an open night there.” Soobin pipes in, curled up in the couch corner.

“Maybe I’ll go visit the Lego store.”

A sudden chorus of laughter erupts at your words. Struggling to sit up, you frown at all the amused faces now in view.

“What’s so funny, assholes?”

“Y/nnie, you should get out more.” The words coming from Beomgyu were almost hypocritical.

“You’re one to talk! And, yeah, that’s why I’d go shopping.”

“We mean, like, get out and meet people. A different country is a great place for that, especially for us.” Taehyun sits in an armchair taking a slow sip from his can, “Go out, have a fun night, and just make sure they sign an NDA afterwards.”

Another round of laughter strikes up and it dawns on you what they’re actually talking about. Your face feels hot and a pout stretches on your lips.

“You guys all suck! I told you, it’ll happen when it happens.” You cross your arms, almost whining like a child, “Why don’t you ever tease Huening about this? I’m not the only virgin in the group!”

Yeonjun snorts, “Damn, way to throw Kai under the bus.”

“Wait, no,” You frantically turn your head around to his seat behind you. “Huening, I didn’t mean-”

He breaks a small smile, “It’s okay, Y/n, I get what you meant.”

“We’re, like, virginity pals.” You stupidly bump your shoulder into his which elicits a very awkward laugh.

“Let’s talk about something else.”

Beomgyu is quick to the draw, immediately beginning to ramble on about his latest meet-up with Jeongin. You don’t get a chance to catch much of it as lips brush along your ear.

“You know, if you ever want to fix that, you can just ask me.” His voice is low and even, his breath leaves goosebumps along your neck. The words swim up and around your head, wiping away some of the haze; snapping you into a brief sense of clarity to process what he just said. You feel your heart almost sputter to a stop. Unable to choke out a response, you turn to look at him only to find cold air. Huening is up and away in the kitchen getting another drink, leaving you alone and flustered. Caught in his words’ web like a helpless fly.

They’ve been plaguing you since their utterance 5 days ago. Orbiting your brain like an ever-present moon. Driving you so far up the proverbial wall that, once you come back down, you will surely die on impact. You’ve never felt this confused, wondering if he meant what he said, if he even remembered it. Perhaps you were driving yourself insane over something inconsequential to him. How were you going to survive this night?

“You wanna watch a movie?”

So easily, he has you trapped. You have to face him, face this, and act completely normal. Act like your thoughts haven’t been full of him; the things you’d let him do to you and the things you’d do to him in return. Act like the way water drips from the edges of his hair, tracing his bare collar, isn’t driving you mad. Wet spots decorate the thin, white shirt stretched across his shoulders. It sticks to the vaguely visible skin trailing down his torso. A pair of sweatpants hang dangerously low off his hips, you struggle to bring your eyes away back up to his face. There his face is soft, head tilted and eyes crinkled, expecting an answer. You want to shrivel beneath his sweet gaze.

“I-um, yeah, sure. W-what movie?”

“Oh, I don’t really know. I was just going to see what’s streaming, maybe order some room service.” He drops a laptop onto his bed. Crawling atop the sheets, he flips it open and looks back at you. Waiting, expectant. His hand softly pats the duvet beside him and you have nowhere to run.

The sheets are standard fare for a hotel and the mattress is stiff as you sit. You’re practically almost hanging off the edge trying to keep a safe distance from Kai. If your skin so much as brushed his, you’d be broken. You weren’t willing to risk bumping knees. If he thinks it odd, he doesn’t say anything. Looking at the screen, he’s now scrolling through a bunch of movie options. Title after title flys by. Two of his fingers push along the mouse pad. The muscles of his hand twitch with every movement; veins shifting, knuckle tucking in and out. From fingertip to wrist his hands are huge, probably enough to completely cover your face. His fingers especially, are very long, so thin-cut and delicate. It can only make you wonder just how deep they could reach. If he knew how to really use them.

You feel your brain melting into a cesspool of depravity the longer you’re around him. Squeezing your eyes tight, the thoughts barely dissipate. Although, you’re granted a small peace as he picks your mind with something else.

“How about Spider-man?”

“Hm?” Peeking back at the screen, his cursor had landed on a Spider-Verse movie. Although, you didn’t really know which one. Your head feels so cotton-stuffed, you simply nod without a thought. So he clicks on the card to play. Opening credits roll in and you fall further into the static. This movie should’ve been the perfect distraction, something exciting and enjoyable. However, the soft heat of the boy curled beside you permeates your skin like a fever. It’s no use, you can’t fight the speed of your heart. The blood rush through your ears takes up everything in the room. Eyes, laser focused to the laptop screen, yet mind somewhere far away. So far you don’t notice the sound of the movie stopping suddenly.

“Y/n?”

Kai’s knee softly bumps yours as he faces you. It’s like a lightning strike right to the chest. Heartbeat rocketing, your words get jumbled. “Wha-um-what?”

“I…Is something wrong? Did I do something?” He avoids eye contact, hands twisting up.

“N-no, no-um, Huening…what’s up?”

“I just…I feel like you’ve kinda been avoiding me? His eyes slowly drag up to your face. “Like, you won’t even look at me.”

All you can hear is the blood rushing over your chest and cheeks, it’s all you can see as well. Kai’s eyebrows are knit together in an expression that should not be nearly as hot as your overdriven brain thinks it is. The words jumble up in your throat, a 4-year confession and a week-long confessional-in-the-making. Your brain goes blank. Everything seems to spill out.

“I-I’m not…upset. I’m-Kai-it’s um, just…do…do you remember that conversation we had…like the night of the first show?” Your stomach twists, ready to eat itself up in embarrassment.

“Um, maybe…” His eyes flit around as if trying to grasp the memory from the air. Brows draw in tighter before he stills. A chill settles between you two. His face explodes in Saharan heat. “Oh god.”

The realization fills up the room with its horrible heated mortification. Your head hangs, guilt pooling in your lap.

“Oh-oh god, Y/n, I’m so sorry! I’m so so sorry! I should’ve never said that, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I’m so sorry-”

“No-no, you-you didn’t. I just-” You bury your head in your hands. Your cheeks burn the skin like a radiator, your heart feels like a supernova. The room is caving in on you. This wall you’d built up, a protective shell around your fragile heart, crumbled. The words taste sour on your tongue. “Did…did you mean it…what you said?”

Silence sinks into your bones, shriveling under the weight of your humiliation. You can’t bring yourself to look at Huening. You want to run, hide, jump off the roof, but you're stuck to the mattress; to the darkness of your eyes; to his sharp intakes of air.

“I did.” An angry red flush covers his face and a pillow now covers his lap. His voice and eye contact remain steady, nonetheless.

The room is too small, too hot. You need to crawl out of your skin and cool off, but the words just keep coming.

“S-so…if I wanted to-um-take you up on your offer…”

Your hands fist the sheets fitfully, you can’t meet his eyes beneath the weight of your shame. This is all you have thought about for the past week, and, suddenly living in your fantasy, you feel like a creep.

The touch of soft fingertips brushing over your jaw jolts to your already frayed nerves. He turns your gaze up to his. Something deep and unfamiliar has settled in his eyes; a darkness that bores right down into that depraved nest in your heart.

Somehow, his voice keeps calm, “Can I kiss you?”

“Please-“ You can't finish the word before you’re silenced. Smooth, honey plush lips blanket yours, like something out of a daydream. The first sensation to hit is his taste: mint toothpaste and vanilla chapstick; you have to fight the urge to bite at his lip for more. Your crossed-knees touch, bodies leaning forward to meet in the middle. Your noses knock and bump awkwardly before you settle into a rhythm. He borders an intense line between inexperienced eagerness and hesitant care. Keeping your hands firm at your sides, unsure how to move, he runs his fingers up and over your arms, coaxing them to cradle the nape of his neck. In turn, he does the same.

He unravels you. The rigid rod holding back your shoulders dissipates; fingers curl into the soft, still damp hair at the base of his neck. A sigh pulls at your lips as you lose yourself to this building heat. Slowly, inhibition slips away. You find yourself moving with an unprecedented fervor. Kai leans further into you, tilting your head back to his will, nails scratching deftly at your scalp. A conflicting pain trembles over your skin, swirling with an untapped pleasure until the two are indistinguishable. He pulls a jolting gasp from your chest. The sound which follows, you can only categorize as embarrassing. A strangled sort of noise; something long built-up, catching in your throat and struggling out in a breathy whine. Your face flares up, you wanna disappear as Kai pulls away slightly. Softly, his breath hitches. Creaking open your eyes, you’re met with a sight that almost drags the sound out again.

Kai’s eyes, half-lidded and dark, bore down on you, haloed with pink, heated cheeks. His lips are kiss-bitten red and glossy. A wet dream come true. You tug him back to your lips, a new heat building in the kiss.

You aren’t sure who makes the first move, who bites first, but when his tongue pushes up against yours, you succumb fully to this new feeling filling you up. An unfamiliar greed beats in your chest, a rabid craving for more. More and more sounds mingle between both of you, unabashedly. With every sweet whine of Kai’s, the hunger grows. Your fingers tug at his hair, his press hard into your waist. Air is inconsistent and unnecessary.

“Kai-” Lips keep moving against yours. “More.”

“Can I-”His hands fumble around your waist a bit, mouth still keeping in time. “Your shirt.”

You begin nodding without even thinking about it. Finally, you break from each other. His hands hike your shirt up your chest before you peel the rest off. You move to do the same for him but he’s already ahead of you. His shirt comes up and over his head before being tossed alongside yours. The porcelain skin of his chest lays out before your eyes. Heart beat picking up, you trace each ridge and jut and mole back up to meet his gaze, one just as entranced as you are.

As your lips meet again, they move with much more care. Something deep and unspoken swimming on your lips and stirring up your chest. Fingers drift gently over freckles and goosebumps running up both your sides. Your back melts into the mattress; Huening’s intoxicating touch burning up your brain. His hands glide up and circle your chest softly. Brushing the sensitive, supple skin, more whimpers tumble out. Your hands copy his, nails dragging faintly down his soft stomach. His lips shudder against yours, breathing groans over your tongue. Knees sit on either side of your hips, keeping Kai’s body hovering precariously over you. The tantalizing promise of his weight above you draws your fingers lower. Just a fingertip dipping into the waistband of his sweatpants. The hitch in his breath is slight.

The kiss disconnects once again as you look at each other, drinking in the sight. His hair mused back wildly and eyes blown wide, a million emotions fly between you. Keeping your eyes locked, that curious hand of yours hesitantly slips from its place. Pulling out of Kai’s waistband, it snakes atop the fabric, coming to cup the prominent bulge beneath it. Your heart stutters at the heavy feeling of him in your hand. Kai’s eyes widen infinitesimally. Your curious fingers squeeze softly and you watch as the last bits of his composure crumble. Head dropping into your neck, his moan is guttural and desperate. His hips buck further into your palm and it becomes incredibly apparent just how big he is

“God-y/n, please…” The desperation with which he speaks your name, the whine and groan and guttural need pouring from his throat, finally breaks you.

For a moment, the only thought running through your head is how quickly you can get his sweatpants off. He seems to be thinking the same as his fingers pluck at your own waistband. However, as you’re about to give in, something stops you.

“Kai…” Embarrassment floods your face, “Do you…have a condom?”

His eyes widen, jaw dropping softly. A subtle red paints his cheeks as he slowly crawls off your body.

He awkwardly shuffles over to his bag on the floor before pulling out a small box of condoms. “I-I wasn’t, like, planning on using them. Or anything…Yeonjun-hyung put them in my bag…”

“Well, thank god for Yeonjun, I guess.”

Laughter eases the embarrassed tension as he rips open the packaging. Although he hesitates to take out the latex. You eye the clothes still covering both your bottom halves.

“I-I can…take mine off first. If you want?”

He matches your gaze, moving back towards the bed, “Are you-Do you want this? Like, 100%?”

“Yes.” Your head nods before you can even think about it, “Yeah, I-I do. Do you?”

“Yes.”

Leaning up, your lips meet his in a soft, sweet kiss. You slowly take his hand in yours and move it back down to your hip, to the bare skin beneath your waistband. Then, you tug your shorts down with his fingers. Finally, fully unclothed, you muscle through the timidity to open your eyes. The pure reverence in his face nearly calms your beating heart.

“Kai, please. Touch me.”

Huening makes quick work of his own bottoms. They pool at his ankles though your eyes are glued to the way his cock smacks against his stomach. He rolls the smooth latex down his skin and your eyes follow with a shiver. Even with little-to-no frame of reference, you’re all too aware that he’s big. Standing at the edge of the bed, towering over you, he is just as entranced with you as you are with him. Any room for embarrassment melts away into an unrelenting need.

You yank him back and his lips messily onto yours; tongues mingling and meshing. His fingers wisp up your bare thighs, sparking a lingering electricity. Your mouth lands on his neck with kisses and kitten licks. The breathy groan you pull from him with a soft bite sounds like heaven. Hands move further toward the inside of your thighs, brushing over your core. He fumbles for a moment before you reach to take his hand in yours. Awkwardly, you guide two slender fingers up to your clit, starting them in a circle motion. Your back arches into the feeling, head sinking into the pillows. Huening watches your reactions diligently, slowly gaining more confidence in his movements. The fingers slip away from the nub as one of them trails down to cautiously push into you. It takes a moment for the odd stretch to settle and melt into pleasure, but as your hips buck into his hand, Kai takes the hint. He uses his thumb to keep circling your clit while experimentally curling two fingers against your walls. This foreign pleasure is overwhelming and not enough.

“I-is this okay?”

Your voice feels stuck so you nod enthusiastically, eyes screwed tight. Fingernails dig into Kai’s scalp as you frantically pull him back to your lips. You work your tongue over his lips and onto his. Running your teeth down his jaw into the juncture of his neck, you litter the skin with soft bites. Lost in the pleasure, your movements feel crazed; desperate. That ever-looming climax is so close yet so far. You need it, like oxygen.

“Need more. Need you, please-please, Hyuka-”

Emptiness only fuels your desperation. Kai’s hips shift squarely over yours as his hand moves up between your bodies. His hard cock brushes your oversensitive thighs; the fog in your mind thickens. In the haze, you take Huening’s, now messy, hand into your mouth, licking over the fingers and tasting yourself on them. They tickle at the back of your throat, freeing a pleased hum.

Kai’s poor cock twitches against your leg and his chest stutters as you keep two lidded eyes on his. The fingers slip from your lips with a slight pop. His agape mouth falls onto yours, devouring your taste on your own tongue. That spit-slick hand guides his weeping tip down through your folds. It catches on your clit and teases your entrance. A gasp breaks your mouths apart. Kai’s fluttering breaths paint your cheeks.

“I-I’m gonna…can I…?”

“Hyuka, just fuck me. Please.”

“Oh-okay-uh, tell-tell me when to move.”

With a deep breath, his hips begin pushing into yours. The stretch sets in; a fire rippling between your legs. Like being ripped apart while still getting stitched back together. A contradicting pain, spreading slowly with Kai’s hesitation. He breathes sickly sweet whimpers into your ears and cradles your hands with his. They mingle in the sheets; an echo of heaven. It’s nearly enough to distract you from the pain as he bottoms out.

“F-fu-shit-ah…you-you’re so…” His forehead hits your shoulder, punctuated with fluttering kisses. “…amazing.”

Pain subsides steadily in a flurry of sensations. The excruciating stretch melting into numbing pleasure. Kai’s touch and affection; everything about him surrounding you everywhere. His heat pressed into your skin, his breath mixed with yours, your hearts beating in tandem as you join completely. You are full of him, of love for him, of need for him. Like you’ve pushed all the air out of your body to make more room for him. Every part of you yearns for everything he has to give.

“Kai-god-” You gasp out. “Y-you can move.”

Shakily, he draws his hips back. You feel every ridge and vein run along inside you. And when he pushes back in, your chests shudder in unison; moans and groans filling the hotel room. He continues slowly; falling into overwhelming pleasure. It muddles your thoughts and weighs down your tongue. And—when Kai’s sloppy thrusts settle into an eager, consistent pace—it numbs your mind in ecstasy.

The room devolves into heady grunts and sharp whines echoing in your ears. A mantra of his name builds—a plead, an oath, a prayer—spilling from your heart, coating your lips. Huening answers the call, swallowing your desperation with his own. You lose yourselves in each other. In the heat of your skin and lips meeting recklessly again and again. You need him closer, deeper; filling up your lungs and pumping through your veins. He wants more. Fingerprints and hickeys litter their way down your body at his discretion. His teeth sink in your shoulder, your nails scratch down his back. It’s instinctual and awkward, yet perfect.

The whirlwind in your stomach grows stronger, closer and closer to imploding. You felt yourself teetering, standing on the edge of an unfamiliar precipice. With his breath and pace picking up, it seemed Kai was right there as well. His hand detached from its bruising placement on your hip. Moving his thumb over your clit in deft circles, an extra jolt of pleasure arcs up your spine.

“K-kai, there-please, please, please.” His name tumbles out in whimpers, as does to yours from his lips.

“F-fuck-close-I’m-” A shudder runs through his body, his pace becoming sloppy and erratic. His finger keeps tight to your clit. Your lips clash as the bubble between you pops.

White explodes behind your eyelids. Mind-numbing pleasure fills your every limb. You’re floating on bliss like you’ve never experienced and everything else falls away. Except for Kai. He surrounds you, he fills your lungs and makes you whole. His weak whimpers and moans trail off in your ears like the sounds of heaven. His hips keep moving, stopping jerkily as pleasure seeps into overstimulation. Kai’s arms buckle trying to keep his full body weight off you. He rolls off of you, landing on his back.

Silence fills the air in the aftermath. You exchange heavy breaths, staring off at the ceiling. As the high slowly fades, so does the fog in your head. Realization settles sharp in your bones. Dread and elation stir in your stomach, brewing a dangerous cocktail of words.

“I like you.”

Huening sits up a little, “Huh?”

“I…god, I’m so sorry-” You pull yourself up and look back down at the man, turning the words over in your head until they spill out. “Kai, I really really like you…I have for the past 4 years! And I know this is probably a horrible time to be saying this, but I just…I don’t want this to ruin us or-or the group and I-”

“Y/n! Y/n…” He pulls your hands into his. A bright smile splits his cheeks, shining on your face. “I really like you too.”

Air collapses in your chest, soft and scared. “…R-really?”

His eyes shine and melt into raspberry cheeks with an eager nod. “I didn't mean for it to come out like this, but…”

“Maybe you should get tipsy more often.” Both of you spill over with giddy giggles. A brand new kind of ecstasy fills up your chest, beating in time with Kai’s heart.

“Maybe…”

Your heartbeat speeds, building with each passing second as you look at Huening. Sweet chocolate eyes you could drink in, overindulge, and just never stop. And they look right back at you with the same adoration that’s pumping through your veins.

“I’ll, uh, go get a towel so we can clean up.” Kai shifts off bed, disappearing into the bathroom to discard the condom. He returns with a warm towel, as promised, and begins to gently wipe up your thighs, staying cautious around your still-sensitive folds. The heat soothes some of the worse marks littering your skin, combined with Kai’s delicate kisses over them.

After he works his way up, he ends with your lips. You move in harmony, swapping sweet giggly pecks, fitting together like perfect puzzle pieces. The way his hands cradle your cheeks—all encompassing, trapping their heat—feels like home. Neither of you can contain the joy flooding your faces with huge smiles. They remain even as he pulls away.

“Can we still finish that movie?”

“Sure, hyuka.”

Peace fills the space between you. Love wrapping around and around, building and keeping you safe in its embrace. The world melts away leaving only this room, this moment, the breaths shared between you, the heat of your bare skin melding into his. Curling together beneath the sheets, you bask in it; this revelation of reciprocated love. For a moment, nothing exists beyond you and Kai among the Manhattan skyline.

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mrs-stans · 2 months ago

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Sebastian Stan Tells All: Becoming Donald Trump, Gaining 15 Pounds and Starring in 2024’s Most Controversial Movie

By Daniel D'Addario

Sebastian Stan Variety Cover Story

It started with the most famous voice on the planet, the one that just won’t shut up.

Sebastian Stan, in real life, sounds very little like Donald Trump, whom he’s playing in the new film “The Apprentice.” Sure, they share a tristate accent — Stan has lived in the city for years and attended Rutgers University before launching his career — but he speaks with none of Trump’s emphasis on his own greatness. Trump dwells, Stan skitters. Trump attempts to draw topics together over lengthy stem-winders (what he recently called “the weave”), while Stan has a certain unwillingness to be pinned down, a desire to keep moving. It takes some coaxing to bring Stan, a man with the upright bearing and square jaw of a matinee idol, to speak about his own process — how hard he worked to conjure a sense Trump, and how he sought to bring out new insights about America’s most scrutinized politician.

“I think he’s a lot smarter than people want to say about him,” Stan says, “because he repeats things consistently, and he’s given you a brand.” Stan would know: He watched videos of Trump on a loop while preparing for “The Apprentice.” In the film, out on Oct. 11, Stan plays Trump as he moves from insecure, aspiring real estate developer to still insecure but established member of the New York celebrity firmament.

We’re sitting over coffee in Manhattan. Stan is dressed down in a black chore coat and black tee, yet he’s anything but a casual conversation partner. He rarely breaks eye contact, doing so only on the occasions when he has something he wants to show me on his iPhone (cracked screen, no case). In this instance, it’s folders of photos and videos labeled “DT” and “DT PHYSICALITY.”

“I had 130 videos on his physicality on my phone,” Stan says. “And 562 videos that I had pulled with pictures from different time periods — from the ’70s all the way to today — so I could pull out his speech patterns and try to improvise like him.” Stan, deep in character, would ad-lib entire scenes at director Ali Abbasi’s urging, drawing on the details he’d learned from watching Trump and reading interviews to understand precisely how to react in each moment.

“Ali could come in on the second take and say, ‘Why don’t you talk a little bit about the taxes and how you don’t want to pay?’ So I had to know what charities they were going to in 1983. Every night I would go home and try not only to prepare for the day that was coming, but also to prepare for where Ali was going to take this.”

Looking at Stan’s phone, among the endless pictures of Trump, I glimpse thumbnails of Stan’s own face perched in a Trumpian pout and videos of the actor’s preparation just aching to be clicked — or to be stored in the Trump Presidential Library when this is all over in a few months, or in 2029, or beyond.

“I started to realize that I needed to start speaking with my lips in a different way,” Stan says. “A lot of that came from the consonants. If I’m talking, I’m moving forward.” On film, Stan shapes his mouth like he can’t wait to get the plosives out, puckering without quite tipping into parody. “The consonants naturally forced your lips forward.”

“If he did 10% more of what he did, it would become ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Abbasi says. “If he did 10% less, then he’s not conjuring that person. But here’s the thing about Sebastian: He’s very inspired by reality, by research. And that’s also the way I work; if you want to go to strange places, you need to get your baseline reality covered very well.”

A little later, Stan passes me the phone again to show me a selfie of him posing shirtless and revealing two sagging pecs and a bit of a gut. He’s pouting into a mirror. If his expression looks exaggerated, consider that he was in Marvel-movie shape before stepping into the role of the former president; the body transformation happened rapidly and jarringly. Trump’s size is a part of the film’s plot — as Trump’s sense of self inflates, so does he. In a rush to meet the shooting deadline for “The Apprentice,” Abbasi asked Stan, “How much weight can you gain?”

“You’d be surprised,” Stan tells me. “You can gain a lot of weight in two months.” (Fifteen pounds, to be exact.)

Now he’s back in fighting form, but the character has stayed with him. After years of playing second-fiddle agents of chaos — goofball husbands to Margot Robbie’s and Lily James’ characters in “I, Tonya” and Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy,” surly frenemy to Chris Evans’ Captain America in the Marvel franchise — Stan plunged into the id of the man whose appetites have reshaped our world. He had to have a polished enough sense of Trump that he could improvise in character, and enough respect for him to play him as a human being, not a monster.

It’s one of two transformations this year for Stan — and one that might give a talented actor that most elusive thing: a brand of his own. He’s long been adjacent enough to star power that he could feel its glow, but he hasn’t been the marquee performer. While his co-stars have found themselves defined by the projects he’s been in — from “Captain America” and “I, Tonya” back to his start on “Gossip Girl” — he’s spent more than a decade in the public eye while evading being defined at all.

This fall promises to be the season that changes all that: Stan is pulling double duty with “The Apprentice” and “A Different Man” (in theaters Sept. 20), in which he plays a man afflicted with a disfiguring tumor disorder who — even when presented with a fantastical treatment that makes him look like, well, Sebastian Stan — can’t be cured of ailments of the soul. For “A Different Man,” Stan won the top acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival; for “The Apprentice,” the sky’s the limit, if it can manage to get seen. (More on that later.)

One reason Stan has largely evaded being defined is that he’s never the same twice, often willing to get loopy or go dark in pursuit of his characters’ truths. That’s all the more true this year: In “The Apprentice,” he’s under the carapace of Trumpiness; in “A Different Man,” his face is hidden behind extensive prosthetics.

“In my book, if you’re the good-looking, sensitive guy 20 movies in a row, that’s not a star for me,” says Abbasi, who compares Stan to Marlon Brando — an actor eager to play against his looks. “You’re just one of the many in the factory of the Ken dolls.”

This fall represents Stan’s chance to break out of the toy store once and for all. His Winter Soldier brought a jolt of evil into Captain America’s world, and his Jeff Gillooly was the devil sitting on Tonya Harding’s shoulder. Now Stan is at the center of the frame, playing one of the most divisive characters imaginable. So he’s showing us where he can go. The spotlight is his, and so is the risk that comes with it.

Why take such a risk?

The script for “The Apprentice,” which Stan first received in 2019, but which took years to come together, made him consider the American dream, the one that Trump achieved and is redefining.

Stan emigrated with his mother, a pianist, from communist Romania as a child. “I was raised always aware of the American dream: America being the land of opportunity, where dreams come true, where you can make something of yourself.” He pushes the wings of his hair back to frame his face, a gold signet ring glinting in the late-summer sunlight, and, briefly, I can hear a hint of Trump’s directness of approach. “You can become whoever you want, if you just have a good idea.” Stan’s good idea has been to play the lead in movies while dodging the formulaic identity of a leading man, and this year will prove just how far he can take it.

“The Apprentice” seemed like it would never come together before suddenly it did. This time last year, Stan was sure it was dead in the water, and he was OK with that. “If this movie is not happening, it’s because it’s not meant to happen,” he recalls thinking. “It will not be because I’m too scared and walk away.”

Called in on short notice and filming from November 2023 to January of this year (ahead of a May premiere in Cannes), Stan lent heft and attitude to a character arc that takes Trump from local real estate developer in the 1970s to national celebrity in the 1980s. He learns the rough-and-tumble game of power from the ruthless and hedonistic political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), eventually cutting the closeted Cohn loose as he dies of AIDS and alienating his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) in the process. (In a shocking scene, Donald sexually assaults Ivana in their Trump Tower apartment.) For all its edginess, the film is about Trump’s personality — and the way it calcified into a persona — rather than his present-day politics. (Despite its title, it’s set well before the 2004 launch of the reality show that finally made Trump the superstar he longed to be.)

And despite the fact that Trump has kept America rapt since he announced his run for president in 2015, Hollywood has been terrified of “The Apprentice.” The film didn’t sell for months after Cannes, an unusual result for a major English-language competition film, partly because Trump’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter attempting to block the film’s release in the U.S. while the fest was still ongoing. When it finally sold, it was to Briarcliff Entertainment, a distributor so small that the production has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money so that it will be able to stay in theaters.

Yes, Hollywood may vote blue, but it’s not the same town that released “Fahrenheit 9/11” or even “W.,” let alone a film that depicts the once (and possibly future) president raping his wife. (The filmmakers stand behind that story. “The script is 100% backed by my own interviews and historical research,” says Gabriel Sherman, the screenwriter and a journalist who covers Trump and the American conservative movement. “And it’s important to note that it is not a documentary. It’s a work of fiction that’s inspired by history.”) Entertainment corporations from Netflix to Disney would be severely inconvenienced if the next president came into office with a grudge against them.

“I am quite shocked, to be honest,” Abbasi says. “This is not a political piece. It’s not a hit piece; it’s not a hatchet job; it’s not propaganda. The fact that it’s been so challenging is shocking.” Abbasi, born in Iran, was condemned by his government over his last film, “Holy Spider,” and cannot safely return. He sees a parallel in the response to “The Apprentice.” “OK, that’s Iran — that is unfortunately expected. But I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Everything with this film has been one day at a time,” Stan says. The actor chalks up the film’s divisiveness to a siloed online environment. “There are a lot of people who love reading the [film’s] Wikipedia page and throwing out their opinions,” he says, an edge entering his voice. “But they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. That’s a popular sport now online, apparently.”

Unprompted, Stan brings up the idea that Trump is so widely known that some might think a biographical film about him serves no purpose. “When someone says, ‘Why do we need this movie? We know all this,’ I’ll say, ‘Maybe you do, but you haven’t experienced it. The experience of those two hours is visceral. It’s something you can hopefully feel — if you still have feelings.’”

After graduating from Rutgers in 2005, Stan found his first substantial role on “Gossip Girl,” playing troubled rich kid Carter Baizen. Like teen soaps since time immemorial, “Gossip Girl” was a star-making machine. “It was the first time I was in serious love with somebody,” he says. (He dated the series’ star, Leighton Meester, from 2008 to 2010.) He feels nostalgic for that moment: “Walking around the city, seeing these same buildings and streets — life seemed simpler.”

Stan followed his “Gossip Girl” gig with roles on the 2009 NBC drama “Kings,” playing a devious gay prince in an alternate-reality modern world governed by a monarchy, and the 2012 USA miniseries “Political Animals,” playing a black-sheep prince (and once again a gay man) of a different sort — the son of a philandering former president and an ambitious former first lady.

When I ask him what lane he envisioned himself in as a young actor, he shrugs off the question. “I grew up with a single mom, and I didn’t have a lot of male role models. I was always trying to figure out what I wanted to be. And at some point, I was like, I could just be a bunch of things.”

Which might seem challenging when one is booked to play the same character, Bucky Barnes, in Marvel movie after Marvel movie. Bucky’s adventures have been wide-ranging — he’s been brainwashed and turned evil and then brought back to the home team again, all since his debut in 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Next year, he’ll anchor the summer movie “Thunderbolts,” as the leader of a squad of quirky heroes played by, among others, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Florence Pugh. It’s easy to wonder if this has come to feel like a cage of sorts.

Not so, says Stan. His new Marvel film “was kind of like ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ — a guy coming into this group that was chaotic and degenerate, and somehow finding a way to unite them.”

Lately, knives have been out for Marvel movies as some have disappointed at the box office, and “Thunderbolts,” which endured strike delays and last-minute cast changes, has been under scrutiny.

“It’s become really convenient to pick on [Marvel films],” Stan says. “And that’s fine. Everyone’s got an opinion. But they’re a big part of what contributes to this business and allows us to have smaller movies as well. This is an artery traveling through the system of this entire machinery that’s Hollywood. It feeds in so many more ways than people acknowledge.” He adds, “Sometimes I get protective of it because the intention is really fucking good. It’s just fucking hard to make a good movie over and over again.”

Which may account for an eagerness to try something new. “In the last couple of years,” he says, “I’ve gotten much more aggressive about pursuing things that I want, and I’m constantly looking for different ways of challenging myself.”

The challenge continued throughout the shoot of “The Apprentice,” as Stan pushed the material. “One of the most creatively rewarding parts of the process was how open Sebastian was to giving notes on the script but also wanting to go beyond the script,” says Sherman, the screenwriter. “If he was interested in a certain aspect of a scene, he was like, Can you find me a quote?” he recalls.

Building a dynamic through improvised scenes, Stan and Strong stayed in character throughout the “Apprentice” shoot. “I was doing an Ibsen play on Broadway,” says Strong, who won a Tony in June for his performance in “An Enemy of the People,” “and he came backstage afterwards. And it was like — I’d never really met Sebastian, and I don’t think he’d ever met me. So it was nice to meet him.”

Before the pair began acting together, they didn’t rehearse much — “I’m not a fan of rehearsals,” Strong says. “I think actors are best left in their cocoon, doing their work, and then trusted to walk on set and be ready.” The two didn’t touch the script together until cameras went up — though they spent a preproduction day, Strong says, playing games in character as Donald and Roy.

After filming, both have kept memories of the hold their characters had on them. They shared a flight back from Telluride — a famously bumpy trip out of the mountains. “He’s a nervous flyer, and I’m a nervous flyer,” Stan says. Both marveled at the fact that they’d contained their nerves on the first day of shooting “The Apprentice,” when their characters traveled together via helicopter. “We both go, ‘Yeah — but there was a camera.’”

Stan’s aggressive approach to research came in handy on “A Different Man,” which shot before “The Apprentice.” His character’s disorder, neurofibromatosis, is caused by a genetic mutation and presents as benign tumors growing in the nervous system. After being healed, he feels a growing envy for a fellow sufferer who seems unbothered by his disability.

Stan’s co-star, Adam Pearson, was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis in early childhood. Stan found the experience challenging to render faithfully. “I said many times, I can do all the research in the world, but am I ever going to come close to this?” Stan says. “How am I going to ever do this justice?”

Plus, he had precious little time to prepare: “He was fully on board, and the film was being made weeks later,” director Aaron Schimberg says. “Zero to 60 in a matter of weeks.”

The actor grappled for something to hold on to, and Pearson sug gested he refer to his own experience of fame. “Adam said to me, ‘You know what it’s like to be public property,’” Stan says.

Pearson recalls describing the experience to Stan this way: “While you don’t understand the invasiveness and the staring and the pointing that I’ve grown up with, you do know what it’s like to have the world think you owe them something.”

That sense of alienation becomes universal through the film’s storytelling: “A Different Man” takes its premise as the jumping-off point for a deep and often mordant investigation of who we all are underneath the skin.

The film was shot in 22 days in a New York City heat wave, and there was, Schimberg says, “no room for error. I would get four or five takes, however many I could squeeze out, but there’s no coverage.”

Through it all, Stan’s performance is utterly poised — Schimberg and Stan discussed Buster Keaton as a reference for his ability to be “completely stone-faced” amid chaos, the director says. And the days were particularly long because Oscar-nominated prosthetics artist Michael Marino was only able to apply Stan’s makeup in the early morning, before going to his job on the set of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

“Even though I wasn’t shooting until 11 a.m., I would go at like 5 in the morning to his studio, or his apartment,” Stan recalls. The hidden advantage was that Stan had hours to kill while made up like his character, the kind of person the world looks past. “I wanted to walk around the city and see what happened,” Stan says. “On Broadway, one of the busiest streets in New York, no one’s looking at me. It’s as if I’m not even there.” The other reaction was worse: “Somebody would immediately stop and very blatantly hit their friend, point, take a picture.”

It was a study in empathy that flowed into the character. Stan had spoken to Pearson’s mother, who watched her son develop neurofibromatosis before growing into a disability advocate and, eventually, an actor. “She said to me, ‘All I ever wanted was for someone to walk in his shoes for a day,’” Stan recalls. “And I guess that was the closest I had ever come.”

“The Apprentice” forced Stan, and forces the viewer, to do the same with a figure that some 50% of the electorate would sooner forget entirely. And that lends the film its controversy. Those on the right, presupposing that the movie is an anti-Trump document, have railed against it. In a statement provided to Variety, a Trump campaign spokesman said, “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.” The campaign threatened a lawsuit, though none has materialized.

Asked about the assault scene, Stan notes that Ivana had made the claim in a deposition, but later walked it back. “Is it closer to the truth, what she had said directly in the deposition or something that she retracted?” he asks. “They went with the first part.”

The movie depicts, too, Ivana’s carrying on with her marriage after the violation, which may be still more devastating. “How do you overcome something like this?” asks Bakalova. “Do you have to put on a mask that everything is fine? In the next scene, she’s going to play the game and pretend that we’re the glamorous, perfect couple.” The Trumps, in “The Apprentice,” live in a world of paper-thin images, one that grows so encompassing that Donald no longer feels anything for the people to whom he was once loyal. They’re props in his stage show.

“The Apprentice” will drop in the midst of the most chaotic presidential election of our lifetime. “The way it lands in this extremely polarized situation, for me as an artist, is exciting. I won’t lie to you,” says Abbasi.

When asked if he was concerned about blowback from a Trump 47 presidency, Stan says, “You can’t do this movie and not be thinking about all those things, but I really have no idea. I’m still in shock from going from an assassination attempt to the next weekend having a president step down [from a reelection bid].”

Stan’s job, as he sees it, was to synthesize everything he’d absorbed — all those videos on his phone — into a person who made sense. This Trump had to be part of a coherent story, not just the flurry of news updates to which we’ve become accustomed.

“You can take a Bach or a Beethoven, and everyone’s going to play that differently on the piano, right?” Stan says. (His pianist mother named him for Johann Sebastian Bach.) “So this is my take on what I’ve learned. I have to strip myself of expectations of being applauded for this, if people are going to like it or people are going to hate it. People are going to say whatever they want. Hopefully they should think at least before they say it.”

It’s a reality that Stan is now used to — the work is the work, and the way people interpret him is none of his business. Perhaps that’s why he has run away from ever being the same thing twice. “I could sit with you today and tell you passionately what my truth is, but it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Because people are more interested in a version of you that they want to see, rather than who you are.”

“The Apprentice” has been the subject of extreme difference of opinion by many who have yet to see it. It’s been read — and will continue to be after its release — as anti-Trump agitprop. The truth is chewier and more complicated, and, perhaps, unsuited for these times.

“Are we going to live in a world where anyone knows what the truth is anymore? Or is it just a world that everyone wants to create for themselves?” Stan asks.

His voice — the one that shares a slight accent with Trump but that is, finally, Stan’s own — is calm and clear. “People create their own truth right now,” he says. “That’s the only thing that I’ve made peace with; I don’t need to twist your arm if that’s what you want to believe. But the way to deal with something is to actually confront it.”

#Variety #Sebastian Stan #Photoshoot #A Different Man #The Apprentice #Thunderbolts*#Marvel #Interview #mrs-stans

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rabbitcruiser · 2 years ago

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Clouds (No. 893)

New York City

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transit-fag · 3 months ago

Note

Was just doing some back of the envelope math to explain the efficiency of trains to someone. Penn Station in New York saw about 600,000 daily passengers on weekdays in 2019. If every one of those people were to hypothetically drive a modern mini cooper instead (which, at 1.5m by 3.8m takes up an area of 6.4 square meters), it would require 3,876 square kilometres of parking. The combined area of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island is 3,738 square Kilometres.

ALL OF LONG ISLAND???

#asks

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visit-new-york · 1 month ago

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This Skyscraper is New York Blue

The form of this building is unconventional. While it features a traditional setback at the base of the office section, the design departs from convention with three volumes that recess at loggias instead of stepping back. This approach, though rare, has some precedents—One Madison in New York, the Silberturm in Frankfurt, and Calatrava's Turning Torso in Malmö offer similar gestures. The result is a visually striking and highly functional design that includes large decks for fresh air, with additional balconies on alternating floors to ensure outdoor access is easy.

As FXCollaborative’s Gustavo Rodriguez explains, the goal was to "break down the massing so it becomes more digestible." They aimed for a design that felt personal, giving tenants the ability to say, "That’s my floor" or "I’m two floors above that," fostering a sense of identity and ownership within the larger structure.

By 2023 standards, the building has remarkably little glass—just 33% of the facade. The rest is brick, carefully patterned and paired with pre-cast concrete spandrel panels. Inspired by the decorative brick piers of Ralph Walker’s designs, the facade isn't flat; it features a pleated brick pattern designed to interact dynamically with light. Avoiding disruptions at the building's corners posed a challenge, so the team created custom hand-pressed chamfered bricks to ensure a seamless look. This attention to detail extended even to the choice of brick shade, with Rodriguez noting, "We needed a New York blue; it couldn’t be a Texas blue or a Mexico blue."

The design also incorporates traditional methods, wrapping the building in elegant sunshades. These sunshades, reminiscent of divided-light industrial windows, maintain the visual integrity of the 16-to-18-foot-high windows while only attaching to mullions between panels. This approach allowed the use of low-reflectivity glass, which significantly boosted the building's energy efficiency.

Thanks to these thoughtful design elements, FXCollaborative’s office in One Willoughby earned the first LEED Platinum v4 Interior Design and Construction certification in New York City and the highest-scoring LEED v4 Commercial Interior Design and Construction rating in the country.

FXCollaborative Brings it All Together

FXCollaborative embraced an unconventional approach for One Willoughby, adding an unusually high number of exterior columns—spaced every 15 feet instead of the typical 30. This decision allowed for fully unobstructed, loft-like floors spanning 140 by 60 feet, creating expansive open spaces without sacrificing structural integrity.

The design also includes internal open staircases that connect the firm's three floors, a feature that can be replicated on other levels throughout the building. The floorplates, while open, are modest in size. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the firm questioned the value of massive floorplates. Gustavo Rodriguez notes, “A lot of people realize they don’t need 300 desks; they need 150. They’d rather have a smaller floor plate where they can see each other than one that wraps around a huge core, where visibility is limited.”

Flexibility was a key consideration throughout the design. Larger tenants can connect office floors with staircases, while smaller tenants can easily subdivide spaces. Now, about 60 percent of the building is leased. Before the pandemic, only FXCollaborative and a public school had committed, but the building has since attracted tenants like the Architectural Research Office, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Propel, and Gemic. Additionally, a loggia-level amenity floor provides an extra incentive for potential tenants, as highlighted by Adrian Madlener in Metropolis.

Rodriguez describes the building as a culmination of FXCollaborative’s recent work across various projects, saying, “This is the first time we were able to bring some of our areas of exploration into one building. It was a chance to synthesize all of our ideas.”

The only challenge? “The biggest trouble,” Rodriguez quips, “is having 120 architects as your clients.”

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chvoswxtch · 17 days ago

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part five: the ghost from the past

[series masterlist] | [previous part] | [part six]

pairing: billy russo x fem!reader

summary: it's time to confront the ghost from the past, and the truth.

warnings: swearing, mentions of alcohol, explicit sexual content (minors dni), domestic violence, graphic violence & gore (this is a slasher people)

word count: 6.4k

a/n: welcome to act three. I want to reiterate that this is a slasher. if gore is not your thing, or even reading about it makes you squeamish, this is your final warning before you get into this part. as always, feedback is welcomed/appreciated!

Billy’s penthouse was spacious and luxurious, a far cry from the simple apartment you could never return to. It looked like it had been ripped right out of a page of some high end magazine, from the neutral color scheme to the expensive looking furniture, the minimalist decor and artwork, and the large floor to ceiling windows that had a dazzling view of the Manhattan skyline.

You couldn’t see the beauty in this city anymore.

Staring out the windows, all your brain could detect from the magnificent sight was the impending threat weaving through the villainous shadows, coming closer and closer. As you stood in front of the thick glass, you almost didn’t recognize your own faint reflection in it. You swore to yourself you would never feel helpless again, but that’s exactly what you felt tonight.

Footsteps sounded behind you, growing louder the closer they came, until they stopped and Billy cleared his throat. When you turned around to face him, he held his phone in his right hand and regarded you with a cautious look, holding it up slightly.

“They found John’s body.”

You should’ve felt sad. You should’ve felt something. But you didn’t. Billy was eyeing you warily, trying to decipher your reaction, or rather lack of one. He didn’t know if you were simply still in shock, and you didn’t know either. You didn’t know what to feel. You weren’t quite numb, but you weren’t raw.

“He’s not gonna stop.”

Billy didn’t break eye contact with you. His apprehension shifted into determination, and he took a step closer, his tone unwavering when he spoke.

“I’m not either.”

You wanted to ask why. Why Billy cared so much. Why he was risking his own life to protect yours. Why was he still here and not running for the hills. But before you could voice any of those questions, he placed his palm on the small of your back and gave you a gentle nudge in the direction of the expansive kitchen.

“C’mon, I’ll make you a drink.”

A few moments later, he held out a small glass towards you, with one clutched in his other hand, both generously filled with a dark amber liquid.

“I don’t have tequila, but I do make a decent Old Fashioned.”

The faintest of a smile graced your lips as you nodded, reaching out with your bandaged hand for it.

“Thanks.”

The strong scent hit your nose before your tongue, making the flavor that much more intense as it slid down your throat, turning into molten lava in your stomach. There was a faint citrusy aftertaste from the orange slice floating between two square ice cubes.

As he took a sip from his own glass, Billy watched you intently while you glanced around the kitchen, taking in the black granite countertops and dark marble flooring. After following your line of sight for a moment, he eventually looked at you again with a small amused smile and chuckled. Turning your attention towards him, a look of confusion settled over your features.

“What?”

“I can hear the judgment on your face.”

Granting him another tiny smile, you shook your head slowly, glancing around again.

“It’s…nice”

Billy lightly chuckled, rubbing his hand down his bearded face.

“You never fail to keep me humble, sweetheart.”

“Sorry. If I spent years in a tent in the desert, I’d probably want a fancy penthouse too.”

Billy tilted his head to the side slightly, tapping his finger against his glass. His dark brown eyes slowly moved around the space, like he was taking in his own home for the first time. He had a thoughtful expression on his sharp features, and you were about to say something to break the silence when he finally spoke.

“I grew up in a group home.”

Billy met your eyes again, and he could see the shock and surprise in them. That was the last thing you had been expecting him to say, and he could see it.

“I’m sorry-”

“Don’t be. Made me who I am. Made me more tenacious in goin’ after I wanted, no matter what it took. And now, everything I want is right here.”

He gestured around loosely with his hand holding onto his glass, and you weren’t sure if it was a coincidence or not that he ended that statement while looking right at you.

“Everything?”

Your voice was quiet when you asked him that, but it sounded loud in your ears due to the silence in the grand space. Billy didn’t look away from you. He gave you a faint nod of his head, and there was a look in his dark eyes you couldn’t quite read, but it made you shiver.

“Almost.”

Maybe it was the grief. Maybe it was because you were scared. Maybe it was because Billy was the only person you had in this city right now, in the whole world it felt like. But you felt vulnerable, exposed to the chill of loss and bite of terror that nipped at your bones that had been stripped bare. You were exhausted, not just from the attack, but from running and looking over your shoulder for so long. The emotional burden of your past and present was growing so heavy it felt like you couldn’t breathe. There was this massive weight on your chest, and all you wanted to do was let go, just for a little while.

Feeling the familiar warm sting pricking at the corners of your eyes, you set your drink down on the counter and surged forward, and Billy didn’t hesitate to abandon his own drink to pull you in with both arms. For the first time in so long, you felt safe. You felt secure enough to let the facade drop, letting all those pent up emotions out, flowing freely to soak through his shirt. You didn’t have to pretend with Billy, and you hadn't realized just how exhausting it had been to keep holding up your own carefully crafted mask.

Billy didn’t owe you anything. He had every reason to stay out of this, and every reason to leave you to fend for yourself. But he didn’t. He chose to be here. He chose to do all of this. And despite everything, he was choosing you, and you couldn’t wrap your head around that.

“I’m sorry-’ “Don’t. It’s alright.”

Pulling back slightly, Billy gently cupped your face in his hands, brushing the tears away from your cheeks. There was no pity in his gaze, no flicker of regret or apprehension. The tone in his deep voice was firm, and the cadence was smooth as ever as he delivered reassurance you hadn’t even realized you were craving.

“You ain’t gotta hide. Not from me.”

All the conflicting emotions rushing through you currently were so overwhelming, and so many of them were negative.

You just wanted to feel something good.

Staring up into his dark brown eyes, searching them for answers to questions you didn’t even know how to ask, a wave of longing crashed over you, carrying you away from the logical side of your brain to float in the middle of just pure feeling. Grabbing onto the back of his neck, you swiftly pulled Billy down to kiss him. It wasn’t soft or tender; it was deep and needy, insatiable with a hunger only he could satisfy in that moment. It didn’t grow steadily like an ember being wafted beneath perfectly positioned kindling in a fireplace, controlled and contained. It blazed all at once like a lit match being tossed onto gasoline soaked wood, erupting in a hasty bonfire, burning hot and high enough to reach the heavens.

Billy allowed himself a moment to enjoy tasting your lips before abruptly breaking the kiss. He pulled back to catch your eyes, both of you already lightly panting.

“Sweetheart-”

Whatever in his voice was supposed to sound like a warning or concern just sounded like barely concealed desire, and it fueled your need further. You didn’t want rational thinking. You didn’t want figuring out the next step. You wanted out of your own head.

“Please.”

Billy couldn’t deny you a damn thing if he tried, certainly not when you begged in that breathless voice. Immediately his hands tightened their grip on your waist, and he pulled you flush against his body. With all the consent he needed to continue, he leaned in and kissed you like he was trying to steal the very elixir of life from your lungs. He backed you up until your back hit a wall, parting the seam of your lips with his tongue, demanding entry. His hands were everywhere, roaming over your lower back down to your ass to squeeze firmly, slipping under your shirt to brush against the soft skin of your waist, grabbing your hips once again to lift you without warning.

Instinctively your legs wrapped tightly around his waist, and one of your hands slipped through his gelled back raven strands that were surprisingly soft instead of stiff, while your other kept a tight grip on the back of his neck. Billy caressed your tongue sensually with his own, his teeth gnashed against yours in hunger, and he nipped at your bottom lip almost hard enough to draw blood. He blindly carried you down the hall towards his bedroom, bumping into walls and doors along the way, kicking his bedroom door open with his foot.

He refused to let go of you or break the kiss, keeping one arm securely wrapped around your back while his other reached for the bed, laying you down beneath him as he instantly climbed on top of you. The two of you seemed to be lost in a dark red cloud of lust, driven purely by instinctual and primal desire, in a frenzy to satisfy your mutual craving.

Billy’s bedroom floor was quickly decorated in each of your articles of clothing, until there was nothing left separating his heated bare skin from yours. His firm chest brushed against your sensitive nipples when he covered your body with his own again, and it drew a soft noise from the back of your throat. He forced your thighs apart with his knee as his teeth grazed over your pulse point before sinking them into your neck, making you grip his biceps and let out a sharp gasp, arching your back slightly in the process.

His warm tongue snaked out to glide over your flesh, soothing the sting of his bite, causing you to shiver and goosebumps to prickle your skin. Billy reached down between the two of you, grasping his achingly hard cock, teasingly gliding his thick girth through your soaked folds to coat himself in your wetness. He pressed his forehead against yours, and his pupils were blown open so wide with lust that his eyes looked black as night.

“I’m not gonna be gentle.”

A shudder went through you at the husky warning in his deep voice, and a rush of excitement tingled in your nervous system at the potential of that promise. You didn’t need gentle. You didn’t need slow and sweet and romantic. You needed to be fucked, hard. So hard you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else other than him. So rough you wouldn’t be able to feel anything other than him. You needed this.

“I don’t want you to be.”

As soon as those words left your lips, something in Billy snapped, and he transformed right before your eyes. He wasted no time in forcefully pushing his hips forward, filling you in one swift thrust, nearly knocking the breath out of your lungs as he abruptly buried himself deeply within your snug warmth. He didn’t give either of you a moment to adjust or savor anything. Pulling your legs around his waist, allowing him to angle his hips and thrust even deeper, Billy quickly started to fuck you at a brutal pace.

“Fuck, you feel so good.”

Billy grit out through his teeth, his face contorted in absolute hedonism. He tore moan after moan from your parted lips with every powerful snap of his hips, the sound of skin slapping against skin echoing in the spacious bedroom, almost rivaling your vocals. Billy grunted in your ear, gripping onto your hips and thighs, digging his blunt fingernails into your skin, grasping at whatever he could and embedding himself in every inch of you. His teeth left several more marks on your neck and shoulder, decorating your skin in bruises like he was draping you in precious jewels.

“This what you wanted, sweetheart? Huh? This what you needed?”

Billy brought his hand up to wrap tightly around your throat, applying just enough pressure to capture your full attention. It didn’t send you into a panic like Roman’s hand around your throat used to. Billy wasn’t squeezing hard enough to hurt you. He wasn’t trying to hurt you. He was giving you what you wanted, what you asked for. Billy was in control, but he was willingly submitting to your desire.

His forehead was pressed to yours, and he was staring down into your eyes that were wide with raw desperation, reveling in the way that your mouth was hanging open, nothing but echoes of the pleasure that he was bringing you leaving them. All you could do was nod, but that was enough for Billy. He wanted more. He needed more.

“Say it.”

His voice came out in a low growl, and your nails sank into his back in response, leaving your own crescent shaped marks behind in his skin that earned a soft hiss from Billy.

“Y-Yes…yes…”

He nuzzled his nose against yours, making a low sound in his throat, capturing your top lip in a messy kiss.

“Good girl.”

You didn’t know you could be affected by two little words so much, but the praise sent electric shocks right down to your core, and the only signal your brain could send to the rest of your body was more more more.

“Billy-”

His name left your lips in a strangled moan that seemed to get caught in your throat, and the sinful sweet sound made Billy’s cock twitch inside you as he continued to piston his hips.

“Say it again.”

“Billy-“

This time it didn’t get stuck. It erupted from the depth of your chest, carrying with it a note of exigency interwoven in a clear plea. Hearing it again made something dark sparkle in Billy’s eyes, his top teeth raking over his bottom lip before he leaned in to drag his tongue along the underside of your jaw.

“That’s my girl. You need to come, don’t you sweetheart? This pretty pussy needs to come all over my cock, doesn’t it?”

Managing to slip his hand between your bodies, Billy’s fingers found your sensitive clit and began rubbing furiously back and forth, making you jolt and cry out as your jaw went slack. He was relentless, fucking you hard and fast without mercy while rapidly strumming your clit at an inhuman speed, causing a tremor to spread in your thighs.

The relief you so desperately needed was right there, just within your reach. You clawed at Billy’s back, the only way you could communicate for him to not stop. Your moans were incoherent, rising in pitch and volume, becoming more and more breathless as that balloon of pleasure grew and expanded within you, taking up space in your ribcage and pressing against your lungs.

“Be a good girl and come for me. Don’t you dare hold back. Let it all go. Let the whole goddamn city hear you. C’mon, pretty girl. Let me have it.”

When that balloon finally burst, your eyes nearly rolled into the back of your head, and all at once, the tightly coiled tension in your body melted away into pure bliss, leaving you feeling completely boneless and relaxed. The waves of ecstasy that had been built up catapulted you into the stars when they finally crashed down, causing you to explode like a firework, raining down in tiny burning sparks of white hot gratification.

Billy let out a feral grunt in your ear as his hips stuttered, slamming into you hard one final time, tightening his grasp on your neck with a groan of relief when he reached his own climax hearing the way you called his name like a sacred prayer. It was the most intense orgasm you’d ever had, shattering you into a million pieces in his silk sheets.

The bedroom felt ten degrees hotter, and it smelled like sweat and sex and Billy’s expensive cologne. He nuzzled his nose against your neck as he slowly let go of it, the coarseness of his beard rubbing against your sensitive bitten skin making you shiver. His lips were considerably more gentle as they trailed along your jawline, his voice murmuring sweet nothings into your ear that your fuzzy brain couldn’t focus on at the moment.

All you could do was feel.

»»———　　———««

“Billy?”

“Hm?”

“Why did you say six cameras?”

Billy’s hand that was slowly carding through your hair paused, and you lifted your head from where it was laying on his chest to look up at him. His lips parted before a furrow nestled between his dark brows.

“What?”

“Earlier, at the hospital. You said there were six cameras in the apartment. I thought there were only five.”

Billy looked at you silently for a moment, that same indecipherable look in his eyes from the kitchen. Softening the creases along his forehead, he brought his other hand up to run through his raven strands, pushing them back into place with a faint shrug.

“I meant five. I don’t know why I said six. There was a lot goin’ on, guess I got confused.”

A faint buzzing noise abruptly sounded on the nightstand, and Billy glanced over at his phone, turning his body slightly to pick it up and read the notification before muttering under his breath.

“Shit.”

“What is it?”

When he sat up, you had to untangle yourself from him, and you looked at him curiously as you sat up too, holding the sheets over your naked chest. Billy typed something on his phone with a serious looking expression before locking it and turning to look at you.

“I gotta head to the office right quick.”

“What? Right now?”

Glancing at the digital clock on the nightstand, the red glowing letters showed that it was eleven thirty at night. Billy gave you an apologetic look before he leaned in to press a soft kiss to your forehead, softly cupping your face in his hand.

“Downside of ownin’ your own company sweetheart, you gotta be available at all times to put out the fires. I’ll be quick, I promise.”

Watching as his naked body slipped out of bed to start getting dressed, you glanced down at the silk sheets you were tangled in for a moment, feeling a pit of unease at the thought of being left alone. Your mind started to wander, and in a matter of seconds, you were spiraling with worst case scenarios. Lifting your head to look up at Billy, you hesitated to ask the question you didn’t know if you wanted the answer to or not.

“Does this…does it have anything to do with-”

Billy immediately paused in the middle of zipping up his pants, turning his head to look at you. He could see the worry written clear as day on your face. Pressing his knee onto the bed, he reached out and cupped your face in his hand once again, brushing his thumb along your cheekbone.

“Hey, everything is alright, yeah? Just relax, sweetheart. Don’t worry your pretty little head. I’ll be back in an hour, tops. I promise.”

»»———　　———««

In the midst of rummaging around in Billy’s fridge, you heard the front door to the penthouse open and close in the distance. Glancing at the clock on the microwave, you saw that it wasn’t even midnight yet. Billy hadn’t even been gone twenty minutes. Closing the doors of the stainless steel fridge, you started to walk out of the kitchen, your bare feet padding along the cold floor as you rounded the corner and headed towards the foyer.

“That was fast. I guess it wasn’t that-”

The second your eyes landed on him, you froze. Fear trickled through your nervous system, leaving your limbs numb, and your feet seemingly rooted to the floor.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Roman’s voice had a hint of humor in it, but his face showed no signs of amusement. His eyes roamed over your figure, slowly looking you up and down, taking in your bare feet and legs, and the wrinkled white dress shirt covering your body that clearly did not belong to you. When his intense stare landed on it, the edge of his top lip curled faintly in a snarl, and then he quickly met your shocked and terrified expression again.

When you had first met him, you’d thought Roman had the most beautiful ocean blue eyes. But then you’d seen them cold and full of rage so many times that they lost their beauty. They no longer looked like two sparkling sapphires; they made you feel like you were staring into the eye of a perilous storm.

He’d grown out his light brown hair, and it was messily slicked back, a few curls sticking out around his neck. Instead of the usual clean shaven face you were used to seeing that made him look deceptively harmless, he’d grown out a mustache and the facial hair on his chin. Somehow it made him look older, and more menacing. He didn’t look like the unassuming nice guy you’d once believed him to be anymore. He looked more like the volatile angry man you knew he was.

“Roman-”

“So this is what you wanted, huh? This is what you left me for?”

He completely disregarded the fear trembling in your voice, tilting his head to the side as he looked at you in disdain, gesturing around to the luxurious penthouse with his hand.

“You were never such a shallow bitch before, Cassia.”

“That’s not my name anymore.”

A flicker of surprise registered in Roman’s eyes when you snapped back at him like that. You had never done that before. It was just a split second of surprise, but it quickly became clear that it only incensed him further, and he clenched his jaw as he took a step forward.

“I don’t give a shit what your name is now. You can change your name a thousand times baby, but you’ll never be able to change the fact that you’re mine.”

Swallowing thickly, you clenched your hands into tight fists, ignoring the sting of the pressure it inflicted on the stitches in your palms.

“How did you find me?”

“Oh I’ve been looking for you for three years, baby. I never stopped. Had a little help, too. And last week, I got a picture of you with two words. New York.”

Roman had a smile on his face, but it wasn’t warm or loving. It was a predatory smile a wolf would give a sheep. The knowledge that someone had sent him your picture and told him where you were filled you with confusion. Had he hired people to locate you? You had been so careful for the last three years, at least you thought you had, but someone managed to find you.

And it was a terrifying thought that you had no idea who.

Someone had been watching you, for God only knew how long. A sinking stone of uneasiness settled in the pit of your stomach with that knowledge. But Roman didn’t allow you a second to overanalyze every moment of the last three years to find the mistake that led to this one, to find the face that had been lurking in the background of your new life. He took another step forward, and the inauthentic smile slipped from his face like it had never existed.

“You’re coming home with me, where you belong. Tonight.”

There was an imbalance of emotions warring within you. Even though you were terrified of the man standing in front of you, there was an overwhelming hatred and anger you felt towards him. You weren’t going to cower, not this time. You weren’t going to willingly submit to him and the fate he had planned for you, not like you used to. The old version of you he knew was gone, and you were going to make goddamn sure he knew she was never coming back.

“No.”

Roman looked genuinely taken aback by your refusal, his anger faltering for a moment with shock. You’d never told him no. You’d never stood up to him. But your defiance clearly enraged him.

“Excuse me?”

“I said no.”

Roman stared at you like you’d grown two heads. His face was a murky mess of perplexity and irritation. He let out a harsh exhale through his flared nostrils.

“I don’t want to fight with you-”

The audacity he had to say that instantly set you off, and you didn’t allow him to finish his blatant lie.

“Yes you do. Because it makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it? Hurting me? Makes you feel like a big, strong man? Is that why you killed them, Roman?”

The question seemed to reduce his vexation momentarily to pure ignorance. His face twisted up in puzzlement that was entangled with annoyance.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You murdered four people, you sick fuck. You’ve gone completely psychotic-“

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! I didn’t kill anyone-”

The accusations seemed to piss Roman off, lighting the short fuse on his temper that was sure to explode at any second. You weren’t sure why he was denying it here right in front of you when he’d already confessed over the phone, but you were done playing his bullshit games.

“You want me to leave here with you? You’re gonna have to kill me too you fucking coward. Because that is the only way in hell I would ever go back to Woodsboro with you, you sorry ass mama’s boy.”

Immediately, Roman lunged for you with a growl. He grabbed you by the arm and struck his fist against your face hard, sending you to the floor. Pain instantly started to throb in your cheekbone, but when Roman grabbed you by your hair to tug you up to your feet, you mustered all the strength you could to throw a punch of your own, your knuckles colliding with his nose resulting in a sickening crunch.

He let go of your hair and stumbled backwards with a loud grunt of pain, clutching at his nose. Pulling his hand away to look down at the evidence of your defiance coating his fingers, Roman turned his head to look at you in shock and rage as blood leaked from his nose.

“You fucking bitch.”

Grabbing you once again by the throat, he punched you right in the stomach, nearly knocking the breath out of you, and then he struck you across the face again, sending you backwards to crash through a glass coffee table that shattered into several glittering pieces. Pain shot through so many different parts of your body, you couldn’t even tell which part of you was injured the worst. Roman was on top of you in a flash, wrapping both of his hands around your neck, gritting his teeth as he started to choke you.

Your eyes went wide with panic, and you struggled to breathe, your hands frantically clawing at his arms and reaching up to grab at the collar of his shirt, and eventually his face. He pulled his head back and away from your reach, letting out a grunt as he lifted your head to slam it back down against the floor, causing a throb to resonate in the back of your skull. In a split second, you were transported right back to the night you ended up in the hospital.

It was all too familiar. Roman holding you down, staring down at you with toxic rage in his eyes, his hands restricting all air flow to your brain as he choked the life out of you. Somehow, you’d ended right back up in the place you’d worked so hard to avoid. This time, there were no neighbors to call the police on your behalf. This time, no one was coming to save you. Blackness was slowly closing in on your vision, like the Iris shot of an old movie, signaling the end.

But this wasn’t your ending.

Blindly feeling around on the floor beside you, glass shards got stuck in the gauze that was still wrapped around your injured palm, and your fingertips brushed against a large jagged piece. Grabbing it tightly in your hand, you used every ounce of remaining strength to drive it into Roman’s thigh, and he roared in pain as he let go of your throat, looking down at where you’d just stabbed him. Taking advantage of the moment, you grabbed one of the heavy decorative pieces that had been on the coffee table and struck him across the face with it. Roman fell over onto his side with a grunt, bringing his hand up to his temple that now had a gash in it.

Immediately you began to cough and suck in deep gasps of air, clutching at your chest. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw a revolver tucked into the waistband of Roman’s jeans, and your eyes widened with panic when you saw him start to reach for it. Scrambling to your feet, ignoring the sharp sting of glass shards scratching and piercing your bare skin, you took off running towards the bedroom, slamming the door shut and locking it before dashing into the large walk in closet. Billy had to have a gun somewhere. You began searching through drawers and cabinets in a frenzy, searching for a gun or a knife, anything.

As you pulled open one of the bottom drawers of a dresser and started to search through it, a flash of white caught your eye, and your breath hitched in your throat.

Grasping the chin of the mask, you tugged on it to pull it out from underneath a thick piece of black fabric. It was the very mask you’d seen earlier. The white rubber stretched in a ghastly expression, emphasized by black soulless pits for eyes and a mouth. Your breathing grew heavy as you grasped the black fabric, and your blood ran cold spotting a tiny shard of emerald green ceramic embedded in it.

All the color drained from your face in horror, the truth spreading confusion and betrayal through your bloodstream like a poison.

It wasn’t Roman.

It was Billy.

You didn’t have time to process that revelation before a loud banging started sounding on the bedroom door, Roman’s angry voice yelling out your name as he tried to break it down. Your eyes frantically darted around the large walk in closet. You still hadn’t found a gun, and you were panicking when the glint of something caught your eye. On one of the shelves, a diamond shaped thick piece of glass sat proudly, engraved with Billy’s name and the details of the award. It looked heavy, and the pointy tip appeared sharp.

Hearing the wood start to splinter under the weight and force of Roman’s relentless effort to break it down, you snapped out of your panic and shock, and in a split second, you made a decision. Pulling the black robe on hastily along with the mask, and the gloves that had been balled up in the middle of the fabric, you stood and swiped the award off the shelf. Slipping out of the large walk-in closet, you pulled the door shut just slightly, leaving an intentional crack in it. Just as the bedroom door had burst open, you’d snuck into the dark bathroom, hiding in the corner behind the door, the black robe keeping you concealed in the shadows.

Roman’s footsteps were heavy and angry, and you could even hear how hard he was breathing.

“You stupid whore. Where you gonna run now, huh? You got nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. You’re locked in here with me baby.”

You kept your breathing as quiet as possible, and the mask aided in muffling the sound. A humorless chuckle sounded from Roman, and you heard his footsteps leading him exactly where you wanted him.

“You know, you can pretend all you want, but you haven’t changed. You forget baby, I know you. Better than anyone. You haven’t changed, and you haven’t learned a goddamn thing. You’re still that stupid little girl, always running for the fucking closet-”

Roman kicked the door of the closet open, aiming his revolver towards where he thought your cowering form would be. A crease of confusion nestled between his brows as his stormy blue eyes glanced around, finding the space empty. Gripping the door handle in his other hand, he yanked it forward and pointed the gun towards the corner behind it, but to his annoyance, you weren’t there. Shoving the door against the wall, he angrily looked around the large walk-in closet, looking over spots he might have missed while blinded by rage.

Silently slipping out of the bathroom, you slowly stalked towards him, the thick glass heavy in your gloved hand. Roman was standing in the doorway of the closet, his broad shoulders taking up most of the frame, his back to you. Clutching the award tight in your hand, you raised it slowly, and with a feral yell, you drove the sharp end right into his back, making him drop the revolver and shout in pain as he reached behind him. As soon as he turned around, you let out another yell as you struck him across the head with it as hard as you could, knocking him down to the floor.

Blood immediately started to flow from a fresh cut above his eyebrow, and Roman grabbed at his head as he turned onto his back, grunting in pain. But as soon as he looked up and saw you standing there in the black robe and Ghostface mask, the bloodied award grasped in your gloved hand, his blue eyes widened, and his face paled. You saw an emotion paint his features you’d never seen in Roman before.

Fear.

Power surged through your body, electrifying every nerve ending inside you. Grasping the mouth of the mask, you slowly pulled it up and over your head, staring down at him in pure hatred, your chest heaving from how heavy you were breathing. The anger pumping through your bloodstream was more intense than anything you had ever felt. Standing above Roman, staring down at him and seeing him being the one cowering on the floor looking scared, it awoke something dark in you that had always laid dormant, waiting for this moment.

“I have changed, Roman. The girl you knew, is dead. I fucking killed her.”

Roman slowly held his bloodied hands up, his wide blue eyes staring up at you as he began to plead.

“Cass…baby…just let me-”

“And I am not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me. Only one of us is walking out of this room alive, and it is not fucking going to be you.”

Before he could say another word, you dropped to your knees and struck him with the thick glass again. Climbing on top of him, you let out another feral scream as you started to strike him, over and over and over, unleashing every ounce of pent up rage that had been festering within you, bubbling up to this eruption. Everything all came rushing back at once. Every sharp sting from a slap, every taste of blood in your mouth from his fist connecting with your face, every broken bone from being thrown to the ground, the physical and metaphorical loss of your voice when he crushed your windpipe, the paralyzing fear that had caused you to uproot your life and change everything about yourself, the isolation that had come with it, and the fear for your fucking life; all of it fueled your unhinged retaliation.

You didn’t stop. Not when he begged, not when he held his hands up in defense, not when he cried out in pain. He had never stopped, not with you. You repaid him in the exact same ruthlessness he’d always shown you, until your arms ached and the face you used to be terrified of in your nightmares was reduced to a disfigured pile of meat and bone.

Dropping the award to the ground with a loud thud, your eyes were wild and your pupils were blown wide open, like a feral animal after an attack. Your chest was heaving from the physical exertion and your lungs felt like they were on fire. A twisted sense of euphoria spread through you like a wildfire, and that heavy weight of fear that had been suffocating you was finally gone.

A sudden noise made your head snap up. Billy was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, his gun grasped tightly in his right hand. His dark brown eyes glanced down at the lifeless body beneath you and the puddle of blood surrounding the carnage. His gaze slowly wandered over the sight of you in the black robe, the Ghostface mask forgotten on the floor behind you, the bloodied award of his on the floor beside you, and the splatters of deep maroon on your face and in your hair.

When he finally met your gaze, he was struck by the untamed rage burning in your eyes.

He slowly slipped his gun into his holster, raising his hands up in a show of surrender. But he didn’t look scared. Staring up at him, you saw a flicker of what looked like…pride, in his eyes. He was staring at you in awe, like you were the most magnificent creature he’d ever seen. All of a sudden, his lips slowly spread into a wicked grin.

“I knew you had it in you, sweetheart.”

tags: @thyme-in-a-bubble @ferns-fics @danzer8705 @to-thelakes @simonsgirl @sweetserendipity65 @zomtart @day-dreaming-goddess @caroblogsthings @thomasshelbyswife @snowkestrel @hallowedtangerine @ameliaswife @dreadfulxives18 @ebsmind @lllla717 @slumnit @fireeyes-on-teller-dixon-grimes @nolita-fairytale @oliviaewl @r1kk @unlikelystarlightcowboy @imperihoe-writes @dumb-fawkin-bitch @merc12-us @moonyinthestars @sweetttart@i-caught-a-pidge @fruityfucker @strangerfromketterdam @whosprettynow

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ghoststyles · 5 months ago

Text

Missed Connections

Harry X YN WC: 6K

No smut in this one. Didn't feel right! Hopefully you like this as much as I do :)

______________________________________________________________

New York City, 1998

This dive bar is abysmal.

Your Coach shoulder bag is sticking to the bar top while a ZZ Top-esque biker gang member chain smokes in the corner, blowing the smoke straight into your face, as One Headlight by the Wallflowers plays at a volume far too loud for your liking.

The bartender places a poorly laminated menu, riddled with ring stains from the thousands of beers and simple cocktails poured over them. You’d be shocked if the vinyl seats don’t carry some sort of venereal disease, making you pull your jean skirt down, minimizing the direct contact with your skin.

It’s a Thursday, your long days in the office, and the start of your best friend, Marcie’s, bachelorette party weekend. When did bachelorette parties turn into a weekend affair, anyway?

You suppose it’s because you’re the only single girl in the group; the only one to actually leave your suburban, central New Jersey upbringing to attend college and build a career in New York City.

This is how you found yourself hosting 4 girls in your 550 square foot apartment for 3 days. Chickie’s the one with the fabulous life in Manhattan, why don’t we visit her! And who are you to say no? If it weren’t for her sister, you’d be Marcie’s Maid of Honor, so an unmitigated amount of guilt fell on your shoulders as the long distance bridesmaid.

“Smile, Chickie, you look miserable. That’s not gonna get you a boyfriend any time soon,” Jenny teases you as she sits on the stool between you and the biker, her nose crinkling as she smells the vapor of the Marlboro reds.

Jenny is the powerhouse of the group; the loud mouthed, opinionated friend who takes pleasure in picking on the other girls. You never pay her any mind. You thought for sure she’d eventually phase out after high school, but here she is nagging you, as usual. Even worse, she used your childhood nickname.

“I’m good, Jen. It’s not looking like my husband is going to walk through the door, anyway,” you laugh exasperatedly, looking around at the empty bar room illuminated by red lights and tons of novelty beer branded mirrors. The biker man leans back on his stool, furrowing his brows at you.

Jen laughs, lighting up her own cigarette and taking a long inhale. “You know, Andrew and I can set you up with any of his colleagues. Most of them are divorced once or twice, but, still good looking.”

Your lips purse out in preparation of a smart comeback, but your eyes divert to the door, where a group of late twenty and thirty something men walk through the door, taking seats at the corner of the bar. They huddle around one another, blocking your view of their faces.

By this point, your girlfriends have changed the music and begin to dance on the tiny checkerboard dance floor, garnering the looks of everyone in the crowded space. Marcie is sloshing her drink around, the miniature veil in her hair slipping down as she moves.

The biker man, your only ally for the evening, is now on a stool by the dartboard, dozing off as he nurses his umpteenth Budweiser. The bartender has refilled your gin & tonic a few times already, to which you place a few bills in his jar to your left.

Marcie and Grace are now twirling around to You’re Still the One by Shania Twain, narrowly bumping into the group of men who walked in earlier. Marcie’s veil is barely grappling onto the top of her head, sending the two into a laughing fit.

You smile gently, still feeling the wave of exhaustion from your day in the office. In your own little bubble, your pocket of peace is disturbed when the stool next to you scrapes across the cement floors, sending an unstoppable shiver up your spine.

“I’ll have a Budweiser, and whatever she’s having,” the new character quietly says to the bartender. Your head whips around to the gentle, but domineering tone, to find he’s not even looking at you. He fishes a twenty dollar bill from his wallet, sliding it in the direction of the barman. His brown, curly hair is unkempt, slightly hanging in his eyes as he looks down at you.

“Thanks, but I can take care of it myself,” you brush him off, immediately turned off by the lack of eye contact.

“You’re the only one in here matching my energy tonight,” he chuckles, before turning his head to the biker in the corner. “Well, except for that guy.”

“I’m sure he’d love a drink,” you smirk, thumb picking at the laminated drink menu in front of you.

The stranger takes a swig of his beer, before placing it gently on the coaster. He finally turns to look at you, and you have to stop yourself from gawking. His striking eyes and perfectly chiseled jaw is the first thing to stand out. Looking down, his sleeves are rolled up to reveal a few sparse tattoos around his wrist and forearm.

“You’re the most miserable bridesmaid, and I’m the most miserable Best Man.”

You scoff, taking a sip of your cocktail before meeting his eyes over the rim of your glass. You place the cup down, jiggling the ice with it.

“Bold of you to make any assumptions about me. I’m just here minding my own business.”

He purses his lips, now fully turning to face you on the stool next to him. “I’ve been here 30 minutes. You’ve only given blank stares to everyone in here, and exchanged glances with the motorcycle guy over there in whatever morse code you two have developed.”

About ready to hop off the stool and storm out, you’re intrigued at the next sentence out of his mouth.

“I’m serious. We might as well get through this night together," he leans on the bar top, fist now supporting his chin. "How about we play 20 questions while your girls take shots and my boys stand there awkwardly watching.”

You scoff indignantly, unbelieving whether or not this twenty-something (thirty something?) man really wants to play 20 questions in the middle of a dive bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Laughing to yourself, you turn to face him.

“I’ll go first. Break the ice a little,” he licks his lips, placing his bottle down on the disintegrating coaster on the worn bar top. “Most traumatic childhood memory?”

As the question pours out of his mouth, you take a sip of your watery G&T, eyes bulging at the blatant bold question.

“That—That, is what you start with? What about the name of my first pet? Name of my elementary school?”

“Who am I, your bank?”

A smile finally— finally, makes its way to your lips. The tattooed stranger you met 35 minutes ago doesn’t seem so scary anymore.

From the dance floor, Marcie shoots you a knowing smile before pursing her lips and gyrating, taunting you, since you’re the notoriously modest friend.

You roll your eyes before meeting his — Blue? Green? You can’t really tell in the dim lighting. The Rolling Rocks neon sign is casting a hue over the left side of his face, a smile makes its way onto his face while he awaits your answer.

“My mom left me at a Walmart and didn’t realize for about thirty minutes. I stood with the old man who greets everyone at the door until she came back. Then he bought me a bouncy ball out of the machine in the vestibule so I’d stop hyperventilating.”

He sucks his lip in, clearly trying to stifle a laugh. Hesitating, he speaks again. Reaching for your hands folded neatly in your lap, he places his grotesquely large ones over them, staring into your eyes earnestly.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” his voice dripping with sarcasm and mirth.

Balling up your fists, you shake his hands off of yours. “You asked! I was only 7. It took me months to go back to Walmart, let alone look that poor 75-year old greeter in the eye.”

He chuckles, taking another swig of his beer. “Okay, next question—” he starts, before you interrupt.

“Wait, I don’t get to ask a question?”

He hums, pretending to ponder it.

“Mmmm, nope. I got some good ones,” he replies, gently tapping his temple with his middle finger. He sighs, taking another drink of his beer.

“Is the hokey pokey really what it’s all about?” He slightly tilts his head in your direction, shrugging.

You don’t know if you want to laugh or cry. What higher power above sent this creature over to talk to you? Your lip juts out into a pout as your eye contact cuts over to your safe haven — biker man. He seems to have more to worry about, like not falling asleep in the bar.

Recognizing the shock that washes over your face, the man recoups, “Shit, I know — I know, that was so bad.”

It’s the gin. The giggles pour out of you, sending a sharp pain to your stomach. You grab his bicep so you don’t fall off the stool, squeezing the solid muscle there. He snorts, tilting his head back. Your kitten heels scrape the metal bar at the foot of the counter, barely giving you anything to grip on to.

“I’m gonna pee my pants,” tears are fully flowing from your eyes at this point. “I can’t, I can’t.”

The man cackles, placing a hand on your lower back. Now, your group of girls gravitate to your corner of the bar, bumping into one another and spilling their cosmos. His boys have now gained their liquid courage to morph the two groups together. You’re the only single one, but you won’t ruin anyone’s fun.

“And I don’t wanna miss a thing! Even when I dream of you…” Marcie belts out Aerosmith into her pretend microphone. “The sweetest dream will never do, cause I miss you, babe, and I don’t wanna miss a thing!”

In that moment, Christina strides over to the two of you with her disposable camera, ushering you to get in frame with him. He smiles down at you — how tall is this guy? Even sitting down he has at least a foot on you. You smile gently, leaning into him as the disposable’s flash goes off.

“So cute!”

You break the tension by latching onto his built body. He’s standing now, making sure not to block you from view of your friends. With just a few minutes from midnight, you finally feel loose and that you could actually have a good time with this guy. His hand hasn’t left your lower back, so he presses you into him before staring down at you.

“Chickie! Come to the bathroom with me,” Grace slurs, grabbing your hand. “It’s upstairs and I don’t think my legs will carry me.”

You inhale through your nose, trying to find a moment of patience for your friend and her unpleasant interruption to the moment you’re sharing with this stranger. You glance up at him, unsure if you should go. The comfort his large frame is intoxicating on its own.

“It’s okay, Chickie. I’ll be here,” he gently touches your lower back.

You nod, smiling up at him gently, allowing Grace to pull you toward the small staircase leading to the bathrooms. The walls of the corridor are riddled with graffiti, old dollar bills and questionable amounts of gum.

Grace pulls you past and inconspicuous second bar (what kind of dive bar has a second floor? Who do they think they are, Le Cirque?) and through the crowd to the bathroom.

The alcohol never feels like it hits until you come face to face with yourself in the dingy bathroom mirror. Despite your long history with drinking, (hellloooo football games in 10th grade drinking Burnett’s from the bottle) every heavy drinking night feels like the first time. You wait for Grace to finish up before hovering yourself over the toilet, unwilling to touch skin to porcelain.

You both wash up, taking a moment to sniff each other’s pits, fluff each other’s hair and dab a damp paper towel on the backs of your necks to cool you off.

The burst of hot air upon opening the bathroom door is enough to knock you out, but, nevertheless, the two of you persist through the throng of bodies that appeared out of nowhere. You’re the blind leading the blind at this point, but you drag Grace’s half-limp body to the top of the steps, peering out over the crowd in hopes of spotting your guy.

You trudge down the stairs, the pounding of the wood reverberating straight to your brain, heartbeat picking up when you don’t spot him towering over the group anymore. You situate Grace on a stool next to biker man, silently nodding at him to watch over your friend before finding Jen, Christina and Marcie.

“Jen, where did that group of guys go?” You tried to keep cool, not wanting to fall victim to her taunting, even if she’s inebriated.

“Mmmm, who? OH! The bachelor party. They left.”

Your heart drops, cursing yourself for letting your guard down. Of course it was only a love connection on your end. As a last ditch effort, you look over the crowd, only to find biker man exiting the bar into the night.

“O-oh, um, did the — did the taller guy say anything before they went?”

“No, the groom was pretty fucked up. They basically carried him out. Sorry, Chickie.”

Marcie suddenly bursts between the two of them, placing her arms around their shoulders.

“I’m ready for some McDonald’s!”

Why the fuck are you at the internet cafe?

It’s 1:30 PM on a Wednesday, and your boss thinks you’re on a lunch break. After being talked off the ledge by your girlfriends while flipping through the Sunday Times after draining a bottle of cabernet, you decided to take matters into your own hands.

Your mystery man from the bar hasn’t left your mind all week. Replaying the initial interaction — a bit cold, on both of your parts. But, the way he so easily opened you up and turned your night around kept you hooked.

In a city of 7 million, the odds of finding him again were slim to none, so you assessed your options:

Going back to Mick’s.

Recruiting biker man to scour the city with you Ghostbusters style. He gave you his business card for exactly that purpose.

Or writing a missed connections ad on Craigslist.

So, here you are, sat between a high schooler instant messaging on AOL and an old man using Ask Jeeves to diagnose a very personal medical issue. Taking a deep breath, you start the ad.

Every stroke of the keyboard was painful. This is so insanely out of your comfort zone, but the longing in your chest is too strong to ignore. The ad is the perfect mixture of nondescript and casual, but gives enough context that even if he were as dense as his friend group, he’d know it was him.

Pressing post, you immediately exit the window, paying your $0.75 for internet time and a print out and fly out the door, a bell jingling in the path of your haste. You shove the ad in in the book in your purse and stomp down the street. The old man makes eye contact with you through the window, snarling a bit at your startling movement. It makes you want to yell at him through the window to go see a fucking doctor!

The heels you have on were not made for walking; exactly the opposite of what that insufferable Carrie Bradshaw promotes on that new show. It’ll be off the air soon enough. Reluctantly, you call a cab and head back to the office in hopes of taking your mind off the possibilities — a happy ending, or heartbreak.

The nervous tapping of your foot echos across the marble floor of Effie’s Café. Arriving 20 minutes early, you rotated back and forth between the wicker chairs at this clearly 4 person table. Should you face the door? He’ll see you in the daylight and make a run for it. How about your back to the door? No, he could actually be a murderer and attack you from behind. From the side? No, these are standing jeans only.

Sigh. You decide to push your anxieties aside and order a glass of white wine, sitting with your back to the door to play up the mystery a bit more. One glass turns into two, and now you’re slightly sloshed for a Thursday at lunch time, hoping and praying you unlock the sweet, cool-girl personality you left him a taste of.

The café starts to pick up for the lunch rush, so you don’t immediately recognize the familiar deep voice of someone is trying to get your attention from behind you.

“Ladybug, is that you?”

Ladybug?

Slowly shifting your head to look over your right shoulder, your heart flutters at the tattooed forearm attached to the hand gripping the back of your chair. Only this time, the arm is attached to a tall, clean-shaven, blonde man.

You look up, making contact with his blue eyes. Now you’re certain that mystery man had green eyes. The man in front of you smiles down at you as he pulls his chair out to sit. It’s like he’s not even recognizing everything wrong about this situation.

He’s the wrong guy. You’re the wrong girl. Ladybug is the wrong nickname.

“Um, hi. I’m no—

“It’s nice to meet you, officially. I’m Garrett,” he extends his hand to shake yours. You stare at it, dumbfounded and scheming your next move.

“I think there may be a misunderstanding. I was trying to contact someone —.”

“No misunderstanding. You sounded like a sweet girl in the ad. I’m just lucky my impression matches you physically. You’re stunning”

No. Nope. Absolutely not. It’s not an honest mistake. He didn’t happen to speak to a girl in a dive bar with a silly nickname and tell stupid jokes just to get them to smile. This is the epitome of all of the warnings your parents gave you on computer safety. Sucking in a sharp breath, you locate the nearest exit, and look around in the most subtle way possible to flag down an employee.

“So, tell me about yourself. What do you do for work?”

“I think I need to leave, this was a mistake —.”

“Mm, I don’t think so,” Garrett fakes interest in your unsettled body language. “You asked for this.”

You finally spot your server, grabbing crumpled bills from your purse to give to her on your way out. Garrett grabs your wrist firmly, preventing you from reaching your wallet. “I’d like to get to know you. We just got here.”

Panic. A feeling you’ve felt everyday since you could remember. Whether it’s being forgotten at a superstore, or sending an incorrect document, destroying the contract for your largest client, panic claws its way out of your central nervous system at any opportunity.

You look down at your shaking hands, trying to conjure up a plan. Do you run? Scream? Throw your wine at him as a distraction? This man, while he hasn’t intimidated you physically, he’s loud and clear with his intentions.

“Hi! Welcome to Effie’s. I’m Alannah. Can I start you off with any drinks?”

Garrett smiles up at the young girl sweetly, opening his mouth to speak. You decide to play it cool for another few minutes to minimize the risk of retaliation.

“I’ll have an iced coffee — black. and the lady will have a green tea with lemon.”

You scowl, as if you’re more concerned about what he ordered for you than the fact that you feel threatened by his presence all together. Luckily, you still had your glass of wine from when you thought you would find mystery man.

“Great, I’ll be right back. Let me know if you have any questions about the menu,” Alannah smiles at both of you before spinning on her heel, ponytail flinging over her shoulder.

Your jaw is tight, unwilling to make eye contact with your dining partner. Your heartbeat has steadies out tremendously as more people filter into the café. Remaining casual, you begin to unroll the silverware placed neatly on the teal plate. You place the napkin on your lap, lining up the two forks and knife on the table.

Garrett has been talking this entire time, unbeknownst to you as you gather the courage to carry out your plan. You smile tightly, nodding to give some semblance that everything this okay. Glancing at your fork, you lock your eyes on his left hand sitting limply on the table, moving every so often as he drones on.

You send him one last sickeningly sweet smile before grabbing the fork nonchalantly. Twisting it around in your fingers, you inhale deeply and swiftly sink the salad fork into the flesh of his hand and shoot out of your chair, purse in hand. The chair scoots across the floor and ultimately tumbles to the side of you bringing on some stares from other diners. Alannah screams, dropping the drinks and covering her mouth, staring at the fork sticking out of his forehand. Adrenaline pumping through your blood stream, you waste no time taking your platform sandals off and making a run for it. Disgusting New York City streets be damned.

Garrett is red in the face, gritting his teeth as he screams after you, a death grip on his now injured hand. Diners and workers of the café gather around him, giving you an extra few seconds to escape.

Flying down 96th street, you expertly weave through the Upper West Side lunch crowd, feeling every wad of gum and broken beer bottle under your feet. Eventually, as your adrenaline-induced track meet is quickly dying out, so you stop on the corner between the flower shop and laundromat.

The street looks familiar. The bodega with the yellow awning illuminated by the red ‘Bar’ sign to its right. The sounds of the city are drowned out by your heavy breathing, but you’re certain your heart stops beating for a moment.

Mick’s Bar.

Look at it this way — a full circle moment. You can wash away the utter shit show of a day and raise one last glass to close the chapter of pining over the mystery man. Somber mood and slightly sweating, you bow your head and head down the clump of 3 steps to the street-level establishment.

The smell of stale beer and popcorn infiltrate your senses, sending you straight back to that night. Retracing your steps to the end stool, you sigh, pulling it toward you with your still bare feet. You’ll find a way to soak them in acid later.

The same bartender acknowledges you, most likely not even remembering your previous interactions. You're glad he doesn’t think you’re some pathetic woman trying to chase after a man. You are, but he doesn’t need to know that.

The barman places a coaster in front of you, silently waiting for your order.

“Gin and tonic, please. A double. With lime.”

He nods, ducking down to tend to his well, filling up a pint glass with ice and heavy-pouring the gin. You sigh again, gently grabbing the back of your neck and rubbing the muscle, willing away the inevitable tension headache coming later.

There aren’t many people in here; Just a few couriers and other non-office workers. You’re slightly envious of them being able to spend their days outside of a beige and cold office building. Quiet chatter amongst them stops when the bell chimes above the door.

Like straight out of a movie, Biker man stumbles through the door, his leather vest swiping the handle of the door. The bartender snickers and shakes his head as he pushes your drink towards you, indicating he wants your credit card. You nod, handing over your MasterCard, expecting no other interactions in return.

He looks at Biker man. Then you. Then back to Biker man, nodding his head knowingly. You’re not sure what this means, but you're trying to erase the last 2 hours from your memory.

Biker man’s thick, heavy boots thunder across the wood plank floors, sending the rickety stools into a rattling chorus of squeaks. He coughs up what sounds like a lung and waits for his beer, not even acknowledging the bartender. He’s now a stool over from you, staring at the screen portraying some sort of horse race.

Taking one long gulp of your drink, you turn to face him, the liquid courage hitting you immediately.

“Sir? Hi, I’m so sorry to interrupt. I’m not sure if you remember me—” you trail off when he doesn’t even face you, his salt and pepper beard making it hard to read his face.

Waving slightly, you confirm you’re in fact talking to him, so now his bloodshot eyes make contact with yours over the frame of his sunglasses.

“I, um, I was here with a few of my girlfriends, um, the other night. A-and I met a man—”

“Tall fella? Came in with a group of guys and they drug one out of here like a corpse?”

“Yes! Yes, oh my goodness, I can’t believe you remember.”

“My bar sweetie, I need to remember who comes in.”

“You’re Mick?” you choke out in disbelief. You want to laugh, because the imaginary life you made up for biker man did not live up to reality.

For your whole life, you tended to grasp onto little moments with strangers that others wouldn’t think twice about.

You still remember the Walmart greeter that waited with you until your mom came back to get you. You remember your sixth grade bus driver who pulled you aside to give you a pep talk when the older girls picked on you. You remember the woman next to you on a plane who held your hand during turbulence. You grow attached, dreaming up scenarios that are probably so far from the truth. It's harmless fun for you.

It’s why you’re clinging onto your mystery man. There are alarm bells going off in your brain you've never felt before, refusing to let it be a fleeting moment.

“I’ve owned this place for 35 years. Seen everything you can imagine happen here. Celebrations of life, death, marriage. Lots of heartbreak.”

You’re not sure if you’re too tipsy, but his words make you want to cry. What is he trying to say?

“Teddy, two rounds here, please,” Mick signals the barman who promptly whips up four… lemon drop shots? Biker man — Mick— didn’t strike you as the type to take shots like a sorority girl.

He shrugs, pushing two shots over to you. You clink your tiny shot glasses together, tossing your head back and licking the sugar on the rim.

Both of you push your glasses toward Teddy and reach for the second, as the bell jingles above the door. With the bar being street level, the sun reflects off the cars outside, slightly blinding you as someone walks in, footsteps thumping.

You and Mick continue on, throwing back your next shot. You wince, this one slightly more lemony than the previous. Mick exhales loudly, shaking his head.

“Careful, Chickie. It’s too early to be having this much fun.”

You freeze, unwilling to believe this is happening. It has to be an alcohol induced hallucination.

“Uhm, ah, hi,” you stutter, looking between the three men staring at you. You feel like you’re on an episode of Maury.

“Sweetheart, he’s been in here every day at the same time to ask Teddy if you’ve stopped in to try and find him, too. The shots were just to ease your anxiety since I knew he’d be in on his lunch hour.”

Due to a short circuit in your brain, you can’t decide who you’re more mad at — Mick, or Teddy. They could’ve told you mystery man has been searching for you, too.

The mystery man blushes, sticking his hands in the pockets of his pleated khakis, staring down at his worn Dockers loafers. His striped rugby shirt reminds you of Steve from Blue’s Clues, but you're willing to over look that.

“We’ll leave you to it,” Teddy smiles gently, ushering Mick to the office.

The man sits on the stool previously occupied by Mick, and as he sits, he uses his ankle to pull your stool closer to him.

“I’m Harry. Nice to officially meet you,” he smiles, making two dimples you didn’t previously notice appear.

“Chick—Y/N. I’m Y/N,” you giddily grab his massive hand, shaking it gently.

He sighs, taking a swig of his Budweiser, “So, let’s get this out in the open. How pathetic am I for coming back here every day for a week straight to ask about you?”

Cackling softly, you shake your head, ducking down to retrieve your bag from the hook under the bar. You pull out your copy of A Beautiful Mind, pulling the slip of paper out from the slightly worn pages.

“Not as pathetic as this,” You hand it to him, waiting for him to open it. “You ever read the Missed Connections ads on Craigslist?”

Harry smiles, reading the ad. He’s glad you remember the small details of that night like he does. He’s not making it up in his head.

“I don’t have a computer. But, they usually print these in the Times on Sundays. I would’ve seen it, but about a week late,” he giggles, his green eyes meeting yours when he looks up.

“Well, I’m glad this nightmare has a happy ending. I went to the café, and a random man showed up pretending he was you! I ran out of there so fast. I’m scared to think about what would’ve happened if I stayed.”

Harry grabs your lower back, the light touch comforting you as you recount the horrors.

“Chickie, I’m so sorry that happened. The internet is scary. I’m honestly terrified of what it’ll be like in 30 years.”

“And to make it worse, he called me Ladybug. Ladybug! I’m clearly a Chickie,” you giggle. “I’ve been dying to hear another one of your terrible jokes.”

Instead of opening his mouth, he leans in to place a chaste kiss on your dried lips.

The alcohol is hitting you much harder than it should be, so you kiss back, forgetting about the entire audience in the bar. You can’t even begin to care that you’ll be two hours late returning to work, drunk as a skunk.

You’ll blame it on fate.

~ New York City, 2000

“I wish I could travel back in time to prevent us from signing a lease on a 5th floor walk-up,” you sigh, plopping down with your boyfriend on the red bean bag he got from Sears. He’s out of breath, having just carried up 3 boxes while you followed behind him clutching lamps, hangers and basically anything you could get your small hands on.

Harry kisses your slightly sweaty hair, petting any of the strays out of your eyes.

“You’ll have a really toned butt by Christmas. Not a bad investment on my end,” Harry laughs as he dodges your sharp elbow digging into his side.

“I can’t even fathom getting groceries and making dinner. Okay if we order in?”

“You don’t want to meet our new bodega guy?”

“He’ll see me at my worst soon enough. Let’s leave him wondering a little longer. I do love a bacon, egg and cheese on a bagel when I’m hungover,” you giggle, inhaling Harry’s natural scent. If you weren’t so exhausted, you’d hop into bed (your bare mattress on the floor of your 800 square foot apartment) right now.

“Sure, baby. We can order in,” he pats your thigh, signaling you to let him stand up. He stretches, examining the room.

His heart swells at the perfect mix of the two of of you in your first apartment together. Your excessive shoe collection. His beloved Gibson guitar that he serenaded you with your favorite song on one of your early dates. He sang Lady by the Styx, not realizing you meant Lady by the Commodores. But, you didn’t have the heart to tell him until your first anniversary.

Now you’re here, two years later and stronger than ever. He spots a film strip hanging on the fridge from Marcie’s wedding. You hogged the booth for well over 15 minutes, kissing, touching, exploring.

You begged for a plus one at the last second, forcing her to tell her uncle he can’t bring a date. Neither of you feel bad. Next to that film strip is the photo Christina took of the two of you the night you met, held up by a Mick's Bar magnet. She didn't get the film developed until weeks after the bachelorette.

The photo would've helped your search efforts!

The empty walls are begging to be filled with canvases, knick knacks and music posters. You learned Harry works at a music recording studio as a fill-in guitarist and a part-time artist. His art style itches something in your brain you can’t describe — falling in love with every piece he comes home with.

The boxes will consume you for a few weeks, but he’s excited to be taking this next step with you.

Harry tosses the Sunday Times at you, “Why don’t you read me the missed connections from this week while I put some stuff away. You did a lot to organize the closet this morning, so I don’t want you to move for the rest of the night.”

Harry putters with the dishes, praying they’re clean enough to go in the cupboard. He's haphazardly putting things away, trying to calm his nerves.

“Ooh, yes. I missed last week,” you flip to the section, adjusting the paper in your hands so you can see better. Clearing your throat, you read aloud.

“I was reading a book on the Q train, you were the cute woman sitting next to whom I assume was your mom, but you get kept sending glances my way when she wasn’t looking. I get it, no matter what your age, it’s weird to flirt with your mom next to you. I got off at Atlantic and you shot me a smile. Dunno why I’m even posting here lol almost zero chance of you seeing this. Oh well, gotta try at least.”

Harry smiles, glancing at you as you peruse the page. He can’t pretend to be busy for much longer. You giggle before starting the next one.

“Did you lose an entire ham? It's a bone-in ham, not sure it's obvious from the photo. It's been eaten on some parts, but there's definitely some serious meat left on it. Looks like it was pretty tasty in its day.”

He laughs, his leg anxiously bouncing against the lower cabinet. He leans on the counter for support, gently swiping over his sweat pant pocket. Closing his eyes, he waits.

Scanning the page, you gasp.

You drop the paper in your lap, watching your boyfriend leave your tiny kitchen with the black and white checker floor tile to kneel in front of you on your ratty bean bag chair. Your hands cover your mouth as some tears threaten to spill over your eyes. It’s like everything is in slow motion.

Harry’s tearing up, too, as he pulls a velvet box from his pocket, opening it slowly to reveal an emerald cut diamond ring on a simple gold band. Elegant and timeless, like you.

He swallows thickly, finding the courage to speak.

“I could’ve gone on and on in the ad, but I figured I’d save it for now,” he laughs nervously. You still have your hands in front of your face, scared to move them in case this is a dream.

“Since the night we met, I knew we were meant for each other. I haven’t had many moments in life where I’ve made the right decision, but I can say with my whole heart that I love you and want you to be my wife.”

You sob slightly, still donning a wide grin. You let him finish.

“I would’ve married you the day we found each other again at Mick’s. But, I didn’t want to scare you,” he laughs again, a small tear escaping.

“Chickie, will you marry me?”

“Oh, Harry,” you blubber, jumping to your knees to wrap your arms around his neck. “Of course! Yes, yes, please.”

Pushing him to the ground, you lay across him, peppering kisses on his face and neck.

When you’ve both calmed down, you’re laying in between his legs, leaned back against the bean bag, basking in the moment. You haven’t even called any friends or family, yet. There’s an uncorked bottle of wine on the floor that you’ve been taking swigs of, absolutely over the moon and tipsy.

"Why did you let me read the one about a ham before asking me the most important question of your life?"

He kisses you to shut you up. You sigh contently, thinking about your future.

After some silence, Harry quietly asks, “Do you think we can force Mick to become an ordained minister?”

You cackle, turning your head to look back at him.

“That was the first thing that came to my mind.”

________________

EEEEEE! I HOPE YOU LIKED IT :))))))) IT WAS SO FUN TO WRITE ABOUT OLD REFERENCES EVEN THO I WAS A BB DURING THAT TIME

Pls let me know what you think <3

ALSO BIKER MAN IS THE REAL MVP I WAS SO HYPE TO KEEP REFERENCING HIM LOL

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