#Really put the fear of gods back into them

[roanofarcc]

YOU & ME

Pairing: JJ Maybank x reader

Summary: After returning to OBX, after the events of the past four years have cooled off, JJ realizes it's about time he asks you a very important question. 

Warning: JJ deserves a happy ending! Season 4 spoilers.

word count. 1k || masterlist

JJ found you out on the dock, leaning over the railing and looking at something in the water. He smiled to himself as he strolled toward you, running his fingers over the ring he stuffed in his pocket. 

“Find any treasure down there?” JJ asked as he approached you.

You threw him a look over your shoulder. “Not funny,” you replied, but there was a smile on your lips that told him otherwise. 

The Pogues had rightfully retired from their treasure-hunting days. Too many close calls and they weren’t willing to risk it anymore. They didn’t need to, not after finally cashing out for the last time. JJ, with your guidance and gentle threats, promised to be responsible with his share this time around. For the first time in his life, he saw a future illuminated brightly ahead of him. He had you, his friends, and even a God-daughter now. While his risky tendencies weren’t completely put to bed, he was comfortable where he stood and finally felt like he could relax. 

All in all, he was happy. But there was still something he had yet to do. 

He slung an arm around your shoulder, pulling you into his side as you both gazed at the water. As much as he had once enjoyed action and adventure, JJ partially used it as an escape. He felt like he had been running from something his whole life, trying to make sense of why he was the way he was. He used to think that, if he never slowed down, nothing would have the chance to hurt him too much. But then he found a family within his friends and a reason to stop running within you. He didn’t need to escape anymore or run. He didn’t need to make sense of anything anymore. JJ Maybank finally had everything he had been looking for. His world made sense for the first time, and he had no intention of screwing that up. 

“You okay?” you asked softly, reaching up and brushing a hand across his cheek. 

“Yeah, just thinkin’.”

“Uh-oh,” you teased, moving to stand in front of him. You hugged him lightly, peering at him with furrowed brows. “Thinkin’ about what?” 

JJ leaned forward, resting his forehead against yours. “You.” 

“And what about me?” Your breath was warm against his face, competing against the cool breeze off the water. The distant laughter of his friends sounded from up the dock, where they all sat around, eating and cooing at little baby Routledge. 

The worst years of his life, only peppered with good from his Pogues, felt like lifetimes behind him. All of the pain he experienced faded like his scars. He only had the good parts now, and there wasn’t a chance on Earth he’d let them slip away. 

“I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask you,” JJ said, hesitant not because he was unsure, but because there was still a fear in the far depths of his mind that you’d leave him. It was stupid, you had told him that a million and three times, but he couldn’t help the faint voice in the back of his head pestering him in a whisper. 

You silently waited for him to continue. As he worked up the courage, he closed his eyes for just a second, picturing the same little dream he’d created in his head not long after meeting you. 

“We’ve got a pretty good thing goin’, huh?” he started. 

A breathy laugh fell from your lips. “I’d say so.” 

“Right, and I, um, I don’t really want it to end, you know?” 

You leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to his nose. “I don’t plan on it ending, JJ. It’s you and me, remember?” 

He did; he remembered the promise you made not long after you first met. It started off as a pack between friends, but it morphed into something deeper. You and him. If he had anything, he had that to hold on to. 

“Yeah,” he whispered, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out the ring he had stolen a while back with the intention of, one day, slipping it on your finger. Leaning back from you, he held up the ring between two fingers, letting the dainty silver shine in the growing moonlight. “You and me. Forever, maybe?” 

It took a moment for realization to dawn on you, but it struck with force. Your eyes blew wide, and your mouth fell open in a humorous and bewildered laugh. “Are you asking me to marry you?” 

JJ nodded, sheepishly using his free hand to scratch the back of his neck. “I probably should have gotten down on one knee, right? To be fair, it’s my first time.” He went to lower himself onto the dock, but you stopped him, cupping his face in your hands. 

“And it’s perfect,” you said, tears welling up in your eyes. “I would love to marry you, JJ Maybank.” 

He felt like he was going to cry too from the pure excitement and love that swelled inside his chest. Blinking back his own happy tears, he took your hand and slid the ring on your finger. It wasn’t some extravagant engagement ring, but it fit like a glove on your finger like it had been made for you. The smile on your face was enough confirmation that you liked it. 

You kissed him, the warm metal of the ring pressed against his cheek. It was a feeling he was looking forward to getting used to. To kiss you forever, until you’re old and gray and yelling at kids to get off your lawn. JJ used to have a hard time looking past eighteen, trying to figure out what he’d become if he made it that far. Would he be locked up like every adult in his life used to tell him? Would he end up like his father or the man he used to think was his father? 

But he didn’t have to worry anymore, about any of it. He made it past eighteen and a different path awaited him, a good one, a happy one. 

[storiesbyrhi]

I can always read and feel how much thought you put into your writing. It's all so real, you know?

Suddenly it was like you were a child again, being dropped off at home after a weekend with Janet. It was the same sinking feeling. With a slow exhale, you worried your lip between your teeth.

That crushing dread has got to be one of the worst feelings of all time.

Goodness was a mantle. A weight that kept your shoulders back, your lips pressed tight. In the end it was goodness that moved your hand, grabbed the leather from between your legs and slid the heavy burden onto your lap. It was goodness that placed your fingers on the cold plastic handle and pulled. 

God that's gorgeous.

It physically hurts me to see how she lives through Eddie's eyes.

It occurred to you then, how deeply love and fear were intertwined. How tangled fascination was between them.

I don't always think that a couple's first time together is like, when the stars of destiny really collide and they know they cannot be apart. Sometimes that moment is in the first seconds of meeting. Sometimes it's much later, after they've already slept together and spent time together. But this chapter of their story felt like fate. Like they were missing a part of the picture but now they see it. See each other. And I totally get it.

You're an artist and I love you.

Don't Stand So Close To Me — Chapter 17

Eddie x Teacher!Reader

Chapter 17/? 19k. Series Masterlist

✏︎ Finally alone, tensions come to a head and feelings erupt.

✏︎ Series Summary: Forced to move back home to Hawkins after your fiancé cheats on you, you begin to fall in love again with an audacious 20 year old metalhead, only there’s one problem — he’s still in high school and you’re his English teacher.

While you struggle starting over in a place you never thought you would return, Eddie struggles feeling stuck in a place he can’t manage to leave — until you offer to help him. Of all the lessons learned, the most important are the ones you teach each other.

✏︎ Chapter CW: smut (18+ nsfw), emotional first time, heated conversations, hurt/comfort, love confessions, heavy petting, dry humping, body worship, unintentional edging, nipple play, cock stroking, piv sex (protected), aftercare

✏︎ For reference, here is a bingo score card map of Teach's apartment

✏︎ Special thank you to @the-unforgivenn @munson-blurbs @rip-quizilla @ladylilylost for holding my hand behind the scenes and rekindling my light with your own on a daily basis.

It was nothing like you had imagined. 

In your countless daydreams involving Eddie’s van, it was always things like the breeze gusting through a cracked window, or the bones of his knuckles as they stretched between yours that drew your focus. The details were always fuzzy. Staring into the open passenger door, they were coming into full view now under the yellow interior light. Cigarette butts crowded the ashtray beneath the radio. A nest of candy wrappers cradled naked tapes in the center console. McDonalds bags littered the seat that would soon be yours. Eddie crinkled them into hasty balls beneath his fists, arcing them over his shoulder to clatter against a cymbal somewhere in the back. 

“Sorry, I uh, wasn’t expecting company,” he said with a shameful shake of his curls. Bracing the seat cushion, he reached toward the floor before chucking two empty Mountain Dew cans into the rear abyss. French fry crumbs clattered to the weather mat with a brush of his hand against the plaid fabric. Coyly glancing from under his lashes, he sat back in his own seat and gave the space a final look. “Ok, should—should be good now.”

Like an open maw of caramel leather, it could have swallowed you. Securing your thumb under the strap of your bag, your boots left the salty pavement and found the ledge, lifting you out of the darkness and into the dim chaos. With a gracious smile, you slid into your place beside him. The seat was a comfortable cradle at your back; spacious and sturdy. Sliding your bag between your knees and feet, it found a home on top of the fry crumbs and other mysteries you decided not to entertain. 

You sat there for a beat as the details enveloped you; the scent of old cigarettes and leather, the stale hint of fast food, the exhaust on the cold night air wafting in through the open door. It squealed on its hinges when you shut it, sealing you behind its jaws as the light above you faded to black. 

Then it was just you and him. Just you and him in the dark leather cavern with nothing but the light from the dashboard and the soft floodlights making a halo of his frizz. Nothing but the engine rumbling idly, and the rush of your pulse in your ears. Nothing but short bursts of breath, and eyes that roamed with cautious amazement. 

It was strange for Eddie to see you here. You, in the passenger’s seat of his van. Out of your usual context. Surreal, like a dream he’d woken into. 

“Thank you,” you muttered into the silence, “for the ride.”

Eddie blinked hard, snapping from his trance. “Yeah—yeah. Sure thing.” Chains rattled against the zipper of his sleeve as he shifted the gear to reverse. Reflexively, his right hand braced your headrest, peering over his shoulder as he slowly backed out. “So uh, where are we going?”

His scent sucked the words off your tongue — the acrid remnants of grease on his fingers, the warm musk of his leather-clad wrist. Tearing your eyes away from his tendons flexing inches from your face, you eked out a response. “Oh—just make a left onto Randolph.”

With a nod, he hit the brake, removing his hand to shift forward toward the parking lot exit. Tail lights caught the soft glitter of snow as your small white sedan faded in the ample side-view mirror. There was a view from up here, like the van was swallowing the pavement as it careened out onto the road. Like you were seated in a leather throne, watching traffic below surge like a sea of subjects on the rush hour wave. 

Eddie tapped his hands against the wheel to a nervous rhythm before one of them reached toward the stereo—which might as well have been a button labeled detonate—because the thundering sound could have blasted you both back into 1984.

“SHIT—” he screeched with a manic twist of the volume dial, a stray curl wavering in his ragged breath. “Sorry.”

A laugh bubbled out of you. A wild, cackling thing, as if you were a toy wound up by nerves and the noise had released the crank. It was absurd—surreal—watching traffic lights change from the passenger’s seat in Eddie Munson’s van as Iron Maiden squeaked out the quietest guitar solo you’d ever heard. 

Eddie’s shoulders slacked in relief, hand relaxing against the wheel as he breathed a chuckle. The stoplight painted his cheeks even redder, and your spinning world stilled to a single focus as you gasped for air: his wild eyes, glimmering with soft bewilderment like you were an angel or a ghost he’d picked up along the road. Like he was struggling to believe you were real. Like he was struggling to believe you were here.

And just like that it was quiet again. The van rumbled idly beneath your seat, kicking up a smokescreen of exhaust. His soft lips parted and twitched. Straightening your shoulders and dipping your chin, you prepared to receive any words he had to offer. You even thought a soft smile might encourage their release, but nothing came out. The light turned him green, and with a sharp sigh through his nose he shifted his attention back to the road.

Smoothing your hands across the wool in your lap, you chewed at your own stubborn words as you did your bottom lip. But they were too big to make it out. Too loud, even with the rumble of the engine. Instead you cast your attention over your shoulder with a heavy sigh. Lately it was rare to find yourself out past dark. Even rarer that you looked past your own pained reflection in the glass. Passing below you like a panorama, Christmas lights wrapped stout bushes and glowed under a fresh blanket of snow. Plastic reindeers and light-up Santas crowded lawns amongst nativity scenes. Bright colored bulbs wrapped porches and rooftops. Through these dirty windows, you could almost call it beautiful. 

“Straight?”

You blinked out of your daydream. “Mhm, until Chester, then make a right.”

Eddie gave a single nod, keeping his eyes on the road. Typically by the time he made it past Melvald’s he would be fumbling in the pocket of his coat, pinching a cigarette out of the box and feeling for his lighter on the dash while his knee kept him out of a ditch. Today he had precious cargo. Chin locked dutifully forward, he still couldn’t keep his eyes from staying, from catching the lights as they danced across your holy form. You were watching them intently, lost in some daydream he could only speculate about. It was a vision he could get used to. Secretly he hoped you’d stay distracted, just a moment longer. Long enough to snap a mental polaroid, to shake it and save it for later. Tension splayed his hands on the wheel, and he firmly adjusted his grip with a slow exhale.

Shifting against the leather beneath you, your fingers found the stitching, running nervously along the smooth piping, filing it somewhere deep in your memory. It was good like this. Cruising like a tall ship above the sea of cars as Eddie palmed the wheel. Feeling his presence in the seat next to you; solid and stable like a captain at the helm. It was better than a dream. Absent of clasped palms and open windows, but rich in realness. 

Tin cans rolled hollowly in the back as the van veered right, and you wondered how many other lucky people had been given this place of honor after shows at The Hideout, or parties on the weekend, or long summer nights that bled into day. You could almost picture him pulling up to a gas station; the smoke wafting out of the doors as they opened, the crinkling of Snickers wrappers and cracking of pop cans, the laughter over the roar of the stereo. You were surrounded by remnants of good times past. Closing your eyes, you imagined for a moment that he was taking you somewhere else. Somewhere fun and exciting, somewhere you would surely leave behind remnants of your own.

When the van passed the baseball field and approached the tidy row of lights outside of each apartment door including yours, you wished he would just keep driving. Way out past the farms and forests, straight into the stars. You wouldn’t even look back.

“This lot here,” you gestured as a crushing feeling crept into your chest.

With a solemn nod, Eddie did as he was instructed. He braked and cranked the wheel, drove all the way to the end—to the last apartment on the single-story strip—and pulled into the empty spot in front of it. 

You sat there for a moment, idling as the large headlights illuminated a single red door, the number 8 beside it. Suddenly it was like you were a child again, being dropped off at home after a weekend with Janet. It was the same sinking feeling. With a slow exhale, you worried your lip between your teeth.

Eddie killed the engine. His hand splayed the wheel, brows pinching as his thumb dug into the leather with a heavy sigh. Your eyes connected, and the staring match began. It sucked the moisture from your mouth. All you could taste anymore was your heartbeat. All you could see were those eyes—dark and brimming with a million words behind them, almost loud enough to hear. Let me in, they begged. Please, I’m so close.

The door was right there, glowing and red. All it needed was for you to unlock it. Only you could do that. Words wrestled on your tongue. They grappled with each other, flung each other from the ropes and into the ring. You can come in, one side said. Help me find a mechanic. The angel—or was it the devil—pulled that voice into a headlock, gritted thank you, goodbye in a voice that sounded an awful lot like your mother.

Goodness was a mantle. A weight that kept your shoulders back, your lips pressed tight. In the end it was goodness that moved your hand, grabbed the leather from between your legs and slid the heavy burden onto your lap. It was goodness that placed your fingers on the cold plastic handle and pulled. 

“Wait—”

There was a sparkle in your eyes. It flickered in the darkness as you turned over your shoulder. 

“We need to talk.”

Your fingers left the handle as you settled back into your seat with a sigh. “I know, we do.”

“Like, now.” It was loud and insistent, much more than he intended, but it just leapt out. “I want to talk to you now,” he repeated softer this time, thumb digging into the leather of the steering wheel.

“Okay, yeah. Yeah—no you’re right.” Your stomach did a summersault at the admission.

The knot in Eddie’s gut released slightly. He chewed his lip for a second before continuing. “I mean, we could talk out here I guess but it’s like, twenty degrees out and I’m running low on gas.” 

Your front door glowed in the halo of his headlights. He didn’t have to spell it out. You weren’t going to make him. But it had to be him who was asking, because all your lips had space for were four words, pinning their opposition to the mat, buying just enough time to sneak out. “You can come in.” It was quiet, but clear as you tugged the plastic handle, nodding over your shoulder for him to follow.

Eddie’s eyes grew wide, and in an instant he was throwing off his seatbelt, fumbling his keys into his pocket, and scrambling out the door into the cold.

It was like your fingers were moving through molasses, like they’d never held a key before, less found the right one on your keychain, placed it in the slot, and turned. It didn’t help that he was watching so intently, that you could feel his breath in clouds over your shoulder. Still, despite your churning nerves and roaring conscience, one of the voices—whether it was the angel or the devil, you hadn’t decided—rose up in hope as you turned the handle and pushed in.

It was nothing like he had imagined. 

Then again, he wasn’t really sure what he had imagined, just that there was something—some sign of life—like posters, or paintings, or something that suggested you even lived here. Instead as you flicked on the lights to the narrow hallway, he saw nothing but white walls. He froze for a moment, glancing down at his boots weeping onto your clean white carpet. He was struck by the impulse to remove them, to preserve the cleanliness of such a sterile environment, but when you kept on walking, the impulse was greater to follow. 

In a few strides he was passing a kitchen to his left; plain with a small formica table and chairs. He couldn’t get a glimpse of much else before the hallway emptied into the living room. This space looked slightly more lived in, but barely. There was a crocheted afghan in shades of brown draped over the cream floral couch. A remote and papers on the coffee table. A TV in the center of the room. In the corner by the sliding glass doors were few cardboard boxes labeled with words he couldn’t make out. Even the Christmas tree beside them was bare. It was amazing to him how much nothing there could be in a place somebody lived, how it was even possible. The only piece of furniture that seemed to hold some fragment of personality was the long record cabinet pushed up against the wall to his right. On top there were even a few records leaning between the speakers and the record player. It was hard to make out what they were from the track list on the back, not that he had much time before you turned around.

Eddie Munson was standing in your living room. Right behind the TV. You had to blink a few times to believe it. The dark, broad angles of his shoulders jumped out against the stark wall behind him as if he was a cardboard cutout. Out of place, out of time. He was moving though; stuffing his hands in his coat pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels as he chewed his bottom lip. 

You’d really done it now—invited a wolf inside your den. And now you were alone with him. Truly alone. Hidden from the outside world behind a door you’d locked yourself. You could say anything—do anything—you wanted. Fingers moving to the top button of your coat, they froze just as they did when you passed the front closet. As if removing it would render you vulnerable, would encourage him to do the same, encourage him to stay. Goodness drew your fingers from the plastic, tucked them safely inside your pocket.

“Thank you for the ride, I really appreciate it.”

“Yeah, no problem.” He took a step forward, and a knot began to twist low in your belly. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said last week. About it not being a big deal,” he began with a slow, deep breath. “It was like, really fucking stupid a-and just—god,” he pinched the bridge of his nose, “insensitive of me and I’m sorry.”

You could tell he’d really thought about it. By the look in his eyes you were sure it had eaten away at him ever since you’d left him in your classroom. “Thanks, I appreciate the apology.”

His shoulders relaxed a little.

“I’m sorry too, honestly. This whole situation is…” you shook your head, breaking his gaze with a bitter sigh, “a mess. I never—” you sucked your teeth, searching for the words like they were stones on a dark path through the woods. “This is my fault.”

Eddie blinked in disbelief, offering a hollow laugh. “No, it isn’t.”

“No, it is.”

He rolled his eyes, unable to mask his annoyance. “What, like I didn’t ask you out? Ask you to smoke with me? Ask you to kiss me?” The last question lingered in the air between you, hanging for a second before you cut in.

“I should have said no,” you doubled down. “It’s my responsibility—”

“Stop.”

“I never should have put you in this position—”

“STOP.”

“No, it is my fault, Eddie. I’m your—”

“What, you’re my superior?” He strode forward, spitting fire like a volcano. “What like—like I’m some helpless child?”

“No—”

“Then talk to me like I’m an adult, because I am.” He was yelling now. Suddenly it felt like you were shrinking, dwarfed by his imposing silhouette. He must have seen the fear flicker in your eyes because he doubled back, raking his hand through his hair with a ragged sigh. “I’m twenty years old,” he leveled. “I’m twenty years old and still in fucking high school for some reason.”

Folding your arms across your thick coat, your lips twitched but nothing made it out. It was swallowed by the emptiness of the room, by the silence he left you in, by his dark eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t come here to argue, I—” he balled his fist and lowered it with a sharp breath through his nose. “I’ve barely been here five minutes and I’m already fucking everything up.”

Tentatively, your boot met the carpet in front of you, approaching as if he were a wounded animal. “You’re not,” you soothed.

Eddie took a deep breath, eyes smoldering like coal. “I hate this.” 

“Yeah, me too,” you stated quietly.

“I hate that has to be like this. That I’m like this and you’re—” he gestured toward you, hand falling dejectedly as if the next word was too painful to speak, “that I can’t—” he swallowed the wavering threatening his voice, “can’t be with you the way I really want to be.”

The heat in his voice could have melted you—leaked you out of your coat, and your boots, and your blouse until you seeped into the carpet. Until there was nothing left but the puddle he had rendered you. “I know,” you breathed. “So do I—”

“Then why don’t we just—?” He stepped forward, a hunger growing in his eyes like he’d glimpsed his first meal in days. Like he wanted to devour you.

And you wanted it. More than you cared to admit. The heat creeping up your neck didn’t lie, but your feet were far more self-preserving, treading backwards on the carpet. “It’s dangerous.”

He took a deep breath, straightening his shoulders with a frustrated sigh. “You know what, how ‘bout I just drop out?”

“Eddie—”

“No, really. As soon as we come back from break.”

You shook your head, pulse pounding in your temples. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Why not? It would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?”

Your coat was suddenly suffocating, the room closing in like the narrowing space between you as he encroached with another step. “No. I’m supposed to be helping you a-and now I’m just getting in the way.”

Eddie fumed, nostrils flaring. “Getting in the way of what, some stupid piece of paper? I mean what the fuck do I need a diploma for anyway?” He gave a hollow laugh. “W-what you think I’m gonna be like, a doctor or some shit?”

His words were like daggers, aimed at himself but they sank into you. “It’s important to you. I know it is because you would have dropped out a long time ago if it wasn’t. I’m not gonna let you throw that away. Not when you’re this close. Not for me.”

The anger was rising again, building like steam in his chest. “Then what do you want me to do? Stay in school, risk your job?”

You paused for a moment, eyes flicking back and forth over the carpet. “Even if you did drop out, how do you think that would look to this whole town? You suddenly drop out of school and then… what? We just happen to start dating? You don’t think that would raise a few eyebrows? Most of my coworkers know that I’m tutoring you. It’s easy to put two and two together. People talk.”

Eddie heaved a sigh, glaring at the tidy stack of papers on your coffee table, the neatly folded afghan on your couch, suddenly swallowed by the order, the evidence of both of your positions. “Then what should we do?” He felt like he was on trial, like you held a wooden hammer, like he was waiting for it to fall. 

In the end, all you could offer was your honesty, like a hollow whisper. “I don’t know.”

It sunk like an arrow in his chest, shocked him with the depth of its sting. “Why not?” The words just shot out, and the pinch in your brow let him know where they landed. “I’m sorry—I mean of course I know why not—like practically speaking but—” His retort was drying up on his tongue, pounding feebly in his chest. “I just thought that, I mean we both—we both have feelings for each other.” A tangible pain flickered in his eyes. “Don’t we?”

“Yes, but—” The words caught in your throat at the sight of him. Those enormous almond eyes that haunted you whenever you closed yours. The way his lips twitched and trembled and begged you to capture and still them. And those hands, capable of so many things. Under stage lights they were sure and nimble, plucking complex melodies with ease and precision. Under fluorescents they fumbled carelessly, left everything they touched either bent, broken, or beaten. Did you trust them to protect you? Trust them with your career, your reputation, your heart? Did he know what he was truly asking you? When you finally collected the words, they came out low, and quivering. “You could ruin me.”

He wasn’t sure what hurt more, the fear in your eyes or the sting of your mistrust. Eddie took a step forward, placing a hand on his chest in earnest. “I would never do that.”

Anger startled you as it rose up, clawing its way out of the grave you buried it in when you slammed your car door shut outside the pawn shop. “I’ve known you for four months, Eddie.” Your lips formed a hard line, tears threatening behind your eyes as you gestured to the boxes in the corner. “I knew him for five years.” 

Eddie seethed, a fury rising in his chest at the man who’d hurt you, at the whole situation. “I can’t change that,” he snapped. “I wish I could. I wish I could just-just wave my hand and make it all better. I wish—” he breathed a hollow laugh, “that everything was different. That we’d met at some bar and I was some—some… I don’t know, just some guy instead of some fuckup who needs your help with his chemistry homework.” His voice betrayed him, fracturing the last few words. He swallowed, tears welling behind his eyes. After a deep breath, he finished. “I wish I could change a lot of things, but I can’t. All I can do is ask for you to trust me because the only thing I want in this world is a chance to show you how much I love you.”

The words bloomed in your chest, stung behind your eyes, hung like the aftershock of a bomb in the space between you. All your life you had wanted so many things. All of them ended up stored in boxes, sitting in drawers, held in secret daydreams. Remnants collecting dust. Fantasies no one would ever know. Eddie Munson stood there in your living room and told you that he loved you, and never in your whole entire life did you want something as badly as you wanted to believe him. To tell him that you loved him too. To crash into his arms and never leave. But fear held its icy grip, kept you frozen in place. Tears burned behind your eyes but you buried them too. “Those are big words, Eddie,” you whispered. 

Molten feelings churned in his gut, came spewing out before he could stop them. “I’m not illiterate,” he snapped.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what this probably looks like to you,” he wavered hotly, nostrils flaring as his mouth became a thin, hard line, though his eyes were welling and wounded. “That—that I’m just some young, reckless guy who has the hots for his—” the last word caught in his throat.

“I don’t think that,” you whispered.

“Then what do you mean?”

The pain in his voice fractured the ice around your heart. “I just...” You breathed a deep sigh, searching for the words in the carpet before meeting his gaze again. “I just need to make sure you mean them, like really mean them, because—” your voice snagged. Through the hot blur, you glanced at your full moving boxes. Your empty Christmas tree. Your empty walls. Empty as the day you left Indianapolis. Empty as the day you moved in. “I can’t do this again.”

The crack in your voice could have shattered him, much less the image of you, shrinking in your stiff wool coat, swallowed by the sparseness of the room. You, trembling like prey, smaller than he’d ever seen you. 

“I mean them,” he uttered hotly. “I can’t do anything about your position, or mine, or your past, or how difficult this is for both of us. But…” he drew a deep breath, treading his words like rocks on a river. “I want you to give me a chance. A chance to be like—like a real person with you. Someone who can take you on a real date a-and—” The rest of it snagged in his throat, eyes welling as he swallowed back tears. He clenched his hand into a fist. Steadying himself with a deep, convicted breath, he continued. “I promise you will never have to worry—at least about how I feel—because I love you. And I mean it.” He let it hang in the air for a moment, straightening his shoulders. “All I’m asking for is a chance to show you.” 

You closed your eyes, tears cascading down your cheeks as you stifled a sob. When you opened them to a blurry room, Eddie was standing there, waiting for you. In your whole life you could count on one hand all the truly bad things you’d ever done. This, by any technical account, would be the worst of them all by a long shot. But when you searched your heart for the right answer, all you could find were fragmented dreams of the wind in your hair, and your feet on the dash, and his hand clasped in yours, and the wild open road, and every soft, quiet want you had ever locked away. When you finally opened your mouth, all you could manage were two words—broken, half-whispered, terrifying, and true. “Show me.” 

Swiftly, like a summer wind, Eddie crossed the room in two quick steps, snatched your face in both his hands, and kissed you. And just like that you were swept away. Stunned and breathless and whole all at once. Crushed between his hands and mouth, hot tears pinching through your lashes to cascade over the rough pads of his thumbs. You blindly grasped for him, fisting the leather of his coat to keep him from evaporating, to keep you from floating away. An exhale shook from both of you—wet and shuddering—as he parted just a fraction, just enough to capture you again. You melted there against his lips, wept like melting snow into his palms, dripping toward the carpet as his thumbs swiped the remnants from your cheeks. It was sniffling and sloppy, messy and real, and here—in the absence of bells, and desks, and lights that made everything wrong—it was the rightest thing that you had ever known.

With both his agent hands, Eddie kissed you for every time he wanted to but couldn’t. A thousand fervent daydreams pressed against your lips. One for every time he saw you in the hall, every time you’d brushed against his arm, every time you’d looked at him with kindness when everyone else saw a freak and a waste of their time. 

“I love you,” you whispered against his lips. A shallow sob escaped through the corners of his mouth and you kissed it away, thumbs soothing over his wet cheeks. “I love you.” Kiss. “I love you.” Kiss. “I love you.” And you meant every word.

Eddie stilled against the bridge of your nose and sighed, eyes closed, relishing as the words washed over him like a balm. Your breath mingled in soft pants as you rocked against his forehead, swaying to a rhythm only the two of you could hear. As if on cue, you opened your eyes together and were swallowed by two massive brown spheres. 

His thumbs gave your cheeks another swipe before dropping from your face, and yours did the same. You both took a moment to reset yourselves, wiping your eyes and noses on your palms and sleeves, soft chuckles escaping through giddy, disbelieving smiles at one another. His lashes were wet and clinging in a way that made him impossibly more beautiful.

Until now, your touch had belonged to the shadows. A timid trek across the ridges of his knuckles under the cover of a desk. A fenced exploration over the landscape of his ribs in the dark outside The Hideout. Now—in the gentle glow of the lamp beside your couch—you boldly cupped his face with both your hands. 

He was real, all of a sudden. The oval face that shot you smirks in the hallway and haunted your waking dreams, now here in the palms of your hands. Dragging your thumbs over the apples of his cheeks, they dimpled with a smile. Warm and flush in the golden light, softer than you’d ever imagined. Every subtle angle of his face, drawn together to make him—the ridge of his jaw under your fingertips, the phantom brush of stubble as you traced it. With gentle awe, your thumbs grazed over the crinkles in the corners of his dark, roving eyes. Real. Here. Yours. Now.

“I read your assignment,” you softly admitted. 

Eddie’s eyes widened with a gentle puff through his nose. “Oh yeah, how’d I do?” he murmured playfully. “B minus? I mean I didn’t exactly finish so it’s probably more like a—“

You silenced him with your lips. After a breathless, five second eternity, you parted with a heavy smack and looked him dead in the eyes. “A plus.”

Eddie melted between your palms. Trailing your hands down the soft contours of his cheeks, jaw, and neck, they flattened against his chest for a moment as it rose and fell beneath his black hoodie; steady and strong. He glanced down at your hands through gentle lashes, and then back up at you. With a coy flick of your eyes, you slipped up and over his shoulders, fingers diving under the silken liner of his coat. With both palms, you traced the strong angles, guiding the leather off of them until it thudded to the floor.

There was a single beat before he kissed you. Hard. Drawing the air from your lungs and the sense from the rest of you. When his tongue asked for admission there was no hesitation. You let him in, parting your lips to accept his wet heat, swept away by his current—breaking and cresting over and over. Hands hanging limply at your sides, he captured and devoured you, drawing you into his maw with every slip of his tongue against yours.

Your chest lurched forward as he tugged the buttons of your coat, working them from the thick wool eyelets with an urgency that bordered on frustration with the garment’s existence. His lips parted slightly as he glanced down, noses still touching, panting into the fractional distance as the eagerness of his fingers threatened the strength of the thread. Your mantle fell to the floor in a heap, and his hands—greedy and splayed at your waist—pulled you close.

His kiss came in waves, taking you under, again and again. It was the most delicious thing, to drown. To go slack and let the slick heat of his mouth take you under. You were learning to love drowning. Learning to love the darkness and the lack of air, the crushing of his body, the lapping of his mouth—bringing you to surface just enough before plunging back in. It was safe, to drown with him. 

Both hands twisted into his hair, tugging with fervent desperation as need rose up in you like a bubble that had been trapped at the bottom of the ocean, so sudden and consuming. Your teeth dragged along his bottom lip, tugging the plush membrane with a boldness that earned you a groan, a tightening of hands around your waist, a warm, wet tongue which you eagerly accepted. Yours danced against the gummy muscle, tasting everything—the hint of acrid smoke, the wistful sighs that echoed in the cavern of your mouth, the satisfied fulfillment of being truly alone.

His hands were burning through your blouse, splayed open at your waist like he was trying to make contact with every atom, pulling you so close it stifled your breath. There was a whole landscape here, a hill under your soft red cardigan where your back dipped toward your spine. He trekked it with his fingers, up and over, back and forth, feeling the muscle bend to his touch, and the subtle arch in your back when he did.

A feeling prickled through him. Up through his fingers, low in his belly. Desire—so familiar, and yet foreign as it ignited in a way that satisfied this time. There was something else too, rippling through his chest, seating somewhere in his sternum as he dipped his fingers—just the middle and ring—beneath the wool barrier of your skirt. The zipper grazed his knuckles, and he tasted something even sweeter than the strangled moan that ushered past your tongue:

Power.

He did it again. Pressing his fingers into the curve of your spine, splaying beneath the wool and pulling back in a firm grip around the muscle of your lower back, letting his fingers drag firmly over your skin like he was trying to claw through the cotton. 

It burned in a slow, delicious way. Burned in a way that made you dizzy, made your pulse jump from your throat and thrum in that low, forbidden place, beating life into a space that could no longer be ignored. You clenched your thighs together, arching your back at the demand of his touch, dipping your tongue into his sopping mouth as a helpless sigh escaped you. 

He lapped it up eagerly. Again, fingers splaying, clawing, burning. Like a sorcerer weaving a spell through the fabric—drawing you nearer, making you pliant. He met your sighs with approving hums. Bright, like the timbre of his voice, but the color was deeper, thick with a coaxing desire. They slipped down your throat like water in a desert, leaving you thirsty for more. 

There was an animal in you. Eager and starving. Pawing at his chest as his lips slid between yours in a rhythmic cadence. His hand burned at your back, clawing with insistence, warring with the few remaining shreds of his decent will. You obeyed with a cant of your hips, more than was proper, more than was chaste. Your rational mind flickered in for a moment, but the throaty, approving hum it earned you and solid mass of his waist molding and conforming to yours hushed it quickly. 

Eddie nipped at your bottom lip—testing, eager. A tingling rush flooded your core, tugged at your wrists like marionette strings, draped them over his shoulders and around his neck. Do it again, you begged with an arch of your back, pressing your chest to the contours of his. Eddie obliged with a drag of his teeth.

There was an animal in him too. Stirred by rocking of your hips, taunted by your boldness. It was like a waking dream, more unbelievable than any fantasy he’d ever had. You, draped around him like a doll, begging him to play. Boldly, he splayed his hand, starting between your shoulder blades and dragging firmly down your soft cardigan as he traced the length of your spine. You, bending like a string on a guitar, molded by his touch to sing the sweet release of your sigh. It ghosted hotly on his tongue, swirled in the pit of his belly. What other melodies were locked inside, waiting for his hand to be expressed?

Boldly, he breeched the barrier of your skirt, palming past the ridge of rough fabric, down, slowly down, over the mound of your rear. He rested there, grabbing with the full spread of his hand. It was sinful, how taught and plump the muscle was, how he’d watched it move for countless days from his station in the back of your classroom, eyeing how it shifted as you leaned on tired feet, etching words onto the board while he memorized your figure. Eddie tightened his grip, drawing upward, letting the swell of it pinch through his grasp.

Music—in the gasp of your mouth against his, the quick suck of air hushed by his lips, relinquished in a sigh. Guiding you closer, rocking you into him with the strength of his wrist, repeating the motion, reveling in the waves he made with every grapple of his palm.

The ice in you was melting, tingling to life like a limb half asleep, radiating through the pinch of his hands to that dormant place again. He was using both of them now—spreading and massaging as his tongue probed deeper. Your arms relaxed, limp on his sturdy shoulders, eyes closed, letting him do as he pleased—mold you like putty in his palms. Letting him lead you with the dance of his lips. Letting him sway you to his own silent rhythm. Letting him, letting him. 

It was like a waking dream to feel him in this way. To feel the angles of his body rock into yours, timed with the rhythm of his mouth. Such sensual movements coming fromthe man whose heated glances often gave you pause to wonder. It was a fantasy you could get lost in. Words—as they had been since you had met—were too bold, too brash, too loud. But here, you could tell him anything you wanted. So you told him, whispered the deep desires of your heart with a slow grind of your pelvis. He answered with a moan—sticky sweet, rippling across your tongue and down your throat. 

Your arms released slightly from their seat atop his shoulders, unable to mask your delight in the softness of his curls against your wrists and fingers, how the ringlets slipped through them like silk. How desperately you’d longed to touch them. How suddenly evident that was. 

It felt so good to feel him with the wholeness of your hands—free now to wander wherever they pleased. Possessed by the animal stirring inside you, they padded up the ridges of his neck, tangled in the hair at the nape and tugged. 

Eddie groaned into your mouth, surprise and delight ghosting hotly on your tongue. It jolted in the space between your legs, aching alive with every movement of his body, every sigh and sound. It ached for more, curious about what else you could coax out of him. Breaking from his lips, yours traveled south, over and under the ridge of his jaw, delighting in the barely-there brush of sandpaper stubble as you tracked it, the way he tipped his head to expose the pale column of his neck. 

His scent was so present here—concentrated, rich, and sweet all at once, clinging to him in the delicate oils of his skin and hair. It spoke to you in a silent language, one that the animal in you was fluent in. Heady and intoxicating with green lights, and safety, and irrepressible desire. You pressed your lips to his neck, inhaling deeply as his pulse thrummed with life beneath them. It was a chaste and reverent gesture, honoring his life-force with your mouth as you trailed slowly down. 

Eddie sighed at the contact, closing his eyes, presenting his neck to you like a feast. It occurred to him here—in the fuzzy, swirling mush his brain was becoming as the blood rushed south—that he had never been kissed like this before. So reverently and lovingly, as if you painted worship with your lips. 

Tendons rippled as he swallowed, and the animal in you stirred to gather a taste. Starting with kitten licks, innocent flicks of your tongue peppered between kisses against his beating flesh, so salty and musky and sweet. His chest dipped in a sudden exhale against yours. Tightening your grip in his silky curls, you angled him to you, jaw unhinging with a mind of its own before swiping a long, greedy trail up his tendons.

“Ohh—” The sound leapt out of Eddie’s throat, surprising even himself. Not that he would have wanted to catch it. He wanted to let you know, wanted to ensure that you continue.

You tasted the velvet vibration under your tongue. Felt the release of his hands, the warmth at your waist, dipping under your cardigan to feel you as closely as he could. Buried in the shadow of his hair and scent, you continued your trek—licking and kissing while his palms pressed you closer. 

Eddie was turning to putty by the second, all logical thoughts escaping out his rushing ears like steam. The animal was stirring below his belt; stretching and yawning, tingling awake. Suddenly he was clawing at the starchy cotton barrier, digging up the fabric from where it was secured beneath your skirt. 

The air was cool all of a sudden there, tingling from exposure but quickly soothed by a clammy warmth. The animal in you preened, arched into his touch, dizzy from the contact with your skin. It bared its teeth, dragging them slowly along the column of his neck with the next pass of your lips.

“Oh fuck,” Eddie groaned, unsure in his haze whether it was from the rush of your teeth or the bareness of your flesh under his fingers. Finally. Lids twitching as his eyes rolled back in his head, a memory flickered in—a bustling, crowded hallway. You, standing front of his locker clutching books in your arms. Him, ushering you forward. The first time he’d ever touched you here. He had stored the memory away safely, memorized the dip of your waist under his palm, played it over and over until it wore out like an old tape. Your skin was alive under his fingers now—smooth and warm and real and reacting. 

With one hand resting on his shoulder, your other twisted deeper into his hair. Silk between your fingers, nails grazing up the back of his skull. You mumbled nonsense into the wet trail of his neck, nipping and kissing and licking, tasting his swallow as his hand splayed across your skin. There was a whisper of perspiration at his hairline as the room became incredibly hot all of a sudden. 

You were reacting. Arching under his fingers, growing bolder and bolder with every pass of your mouth across that incredibly sensitive spot. It made him dizzy, stupid. Absolutely set his blood on fire. With a slow, upward swipe, his hand climbed the column of your spine—up, up, up—until his fingers grazed the clasp of your bra. Jesus Christ. It was hardly the first time he’d touched a bra, but it was your bra, and you were the one reacting beneath it.

Eddie was reacting too. He could feel himself unfurling in his boxers, rising fully to attention. God damn it, Munson. It’s just a bra for crying out loud. But there was no hope of taming it now, not when your teeth were grazing that sensitive spot that made his entire body flush with heat. It throbbed as your tongue dipped below the collar of his shirt, your hips so dangerously close. He wasn’t exactly ready to give you an anatomy lesson, fearful it scare you with its realness somehow. 

But you were gone, lost in the smoke-acrid scent of his clothing, in the salt of his skin yielding under your tongue, in the hiss of his breath as it left his lungs. Lost in the warmth of his hand sliding down your bare spine. Pressing raw, wet kisses to the humming stretch of his neck, you concluded that you couldn’t feel nearly enough. 

You captured his mouth again, and this time the kiss was open and hungry, sweeping and led by your tongue. Hands breaking from around his shoulders, you trailed over the firm swell of his pecks, down his ribs, around his waist. You pawed down his back with a slow, greedy swipe, admiring the firmness of his muscles under the thick cotton, the way his hips tilted from the pressure as you neared his belt. You did it again, more pressure this time, trekking your pelvis upward across the landscape: stiff denim zipper, steel belt buckle, and—

A hard jab to the hip. 

Eddie gasped into your mouth and drew back in horror, lips gaping and sputtering the beginnings of an apology. “I—um—”

Your eyes flicked down at the tent in his jeans, unable to stop yourself. “It’s—it’s ok, we were just—” 

“Yeah I know, but—” he swallowed, face like a roaring furnace under your gaze. His hand twitched with the impulse to cover himself, but he redirected it behind his neck, wringing it through his hair with an embarrassed laugh. “I got a bit carried away.”

Your eyes shot back up to his and you fought to keep them level. “No, it—it was me. It’s ok, we can stop—”

“I don’t want to,” Eddie blurted out.

Your eyes widened, lips parting as the gravity of his words set in. It was suddenly quiet enough to hear the clock ticking in the corner, the heat rushing through the vents in the floor. 

“I think that’s um,” he sucked his lip, glancing to the side before meeting your gaze again, “kind of the problem.”

The look in his eyes was darkly threatening, brimming with a wild heat. A feeling stirred deep in your core, something like fear but it fluttered and trembled like yearning. 

“We can if you do though—want to stop, I mean.”

It was suddenly so real—Eddie Munson standing in your living room, offering himself to you in this very bad way. You wanted to think you’d be good, but as the words left his kiss-swollen lips, all you could think about was how badly you wanted to know how it felt.

Eddie just stood there, forcing his shoulders back against the fear closing in around his heart as he awaited your possible rejection. He followed your eyes as they slowly scanned his form, flushing under your gaze, suddenly so aware of himself. It was a look he’d never seen on you before, a heat that simmered beneath curious amazement. 

He wanted you to look.

In all your years of discipline, there had always been a series of events in between you and a moment like this. Coffees, dinners, chaste kisses outside the door of your apartment. It was a long time before you let anyone in, and even still, it had only been one man. One whose cues and advances had become familiar. Predictable. Monotonous. Boring.

You wondered what he looked like under there; that forbidden line protruding under denim, attentive and alert, made ready by your touch. An offering to you, if you would have it. You thought about his skin under the bulk of that sweatshirt as his chest rose and fell, how good it would feel pressed to yours in the dark. How you ached to feel him move in that way. How badly you wanted to know. So terribly bad. 

Finally, you whispered the truth. “I don’t want to stop.”

Eddie’s eyes widened, face falling in near disbelief. Suddenly he felt like a dog that caught a car. 

Show me, your voice echoed in his mind as the carpet, and your records, and your tree came into focus. Show me, as the lamp beside your couch painted your features with soft anticipation. Suddenly, a dam broke, flooding him with images of Fs thrown face up on a small desk in front of him. Of folded arms and disapproving glares. Of a corner somewhere with his back to his classmates as they played with blocks and snickered as he sulked in time-out. 

Show me.

The memories coiled in his belly like a serpent, struck him with a fear that if he did, you might be disappointed. But the way you were looking at him—like a virgin on prom night with your wide eyes and fingers tangled in a knot in front of you—made it all subside.

Slowly, he closed in, umber eyes flickering with a blended hue of want and trepidation. His hand came to your cheek, delicate fingers tracing your jaw as if you would disintegrate beneath his touch. When you didn’t, his thumb grew bold enough to swipe across the apple, palm sure enough to cup your face, angling it upward to meet his lips. It was chaste. Reverent. Different, somehow, than any other kiss you’d shared. His exhale mingled with yours as you melted against his mouth, hand snaking around your waist to pull you close. Every angle of you against every angle of him. No gaps. 

And then he showed you. Open mouthed, tongue scooping in a desperate rhythm with yours. The kind of kiss that left you bruised and breathless. You tasted every aching unsaid word between you, cupping his face to capture all of them. Tasted the power of his want, the demand of his tongue dancing against yours. The taste was deep, heady and complex with the knowing where all of this was heading. He showed you with his palms, clawing at the fabric of your blouse, bunching it up to slip his eager hands beneath it. 

He showed you with a roll of his pelvis, hardness pressed against your hip, splitting your mouthes into a shared sigh from the satisfaction of the friction. It rippled through every dormant part of you, blooming deep and low. Heat raced to your cheeks, heart thumping in the cage of your chest. It occurred to you then, how deeply love and fear were intertwined. How tangled fascination was between them. How desperate you were for him to show you. Desperate to feel every inch of him. Desperate to experience it all. You responded with a tilt of your hips, reveling in the feeling of his length as it dragged, in the delicious sin of it all. And his touch transformed you, made that deeply-buried need rise up in you full-force. 

You kissed him deeply. Eyes closed, swaying under the direction of his palms, tongue dancing in time to his rhythm. How good it felt to just be led, how satisfying his leadership tasted. Abandoning all thoughts, listening only to the soft desires of the animal in you. Yes. Good. More, it whispered. You arched your back, grinding your pelvis sinfully along his length, lost in the feeling. 

Eddie was gone. Consumed. Possessed. Directed solely by the need to feel that delicious friction spark and soothe. He braced you, tightly gripping your rear, guiding your movements just how he wanted. Suddenly—as if something snapped in his brain—he was pivoting you in a 180 motion to trade places. Lips breaking only to glance where he was going, he backed you into the wall shared by your kitchen. 

“Mmnh!” The noise was pressed out of you as your back met the solid surface. Eddie descended on you, lips locking with your neck, pelvis pressing you firmly to the wall. His hand wandered down your right leg, hiking it up around his hip for better leverage. And you just let him. Pliant like prey, encouraging his savage nature with your sounds. 

It was a position you had never been in before—skirt pooling at your hip, thigh-high stockings and panties exposed like a scene from a book you’d gotten in trouble for reading back when you were in high school. It was something you’d resigned to fantasy, to dog-eared pages illuminated by a flashlight under your blankets. Suddenly you were on the cover—chin tipped toward the ceiling, head dragging against the plaster as Eddie trailed a dizzying path down your neck. He pressed you into the wall with a grind of his pelvis, dragging his stiffness along your most intimate seam. You groaned, eyes rolling into the back of your head as the last remaining shred of goodness dissolved. What was left spoke only the language of desire. A language that felt native, yet foreign, like one you learned before words. Before rules and desks and pencils and report cards and curfews and diplomas. Before your goodness forced you to forget. 

It almost hurt, in the best way though—his fingers digging into your thigh, the muscles threatening to cramp as you squeezed your heel under his ass to hold your position, sweat tingling the back of your knee. A fair price for how good he felt there. Even under the barrier of the stiff denim, you could feel the way he tapered off, the fat ridge of his cockhead as it rutted over your mound. Firm and insistent.

There was a fire in you—alive and insatiable. Stirred awake with every pass of his hips, by the look on his face when you met his eyes—savage and dark, pinching in pleasure, mouth hanging open like he wanted to devour you. His curls were a curtain between you and the light, a shadow both of you could hide in, swaying in his ragged breath. You snaked a hand over his shoulder, tangled it in his mane and gripped hard at the back of his head.

The sound he made was somewhere between a purr and a whine, thick and desperate as he met flesh below your ear again. It rushed through every cell of your body—dizzying, pulsing through the veins in your hand as you raked your fingers across his scalp. You arched against the wall, straining to present your neck to him. 

It was almost too much. You, in his clutches, writhing under the drag of his teeth, the scent of your skin and clothes, the tingle of your nails against the base of his skull. Eddie’s hand wandered down your thigh, swept up in the current of that doughy flesh and the mound of your cunt with only cotton and denim between you. He broke from your neck to get a look at you—stiff blouse disheveled, wool skirt rumpled, skin sinfully exposed, that heavy-lidded, fucked-out look you wore better than all of it. All by his doing. Your breaths exchanged in silence for a moment as his pelvis kept the pace; slow and undulating. His mouth became a gaping O, brows pinching as he reached the apex of his movement before drawing back again.

There was a scent hanging in the air between you. Warm and heady. Deep and complex. One you recognized surely as your own. It was emanating from under your skirt, from that slick, throbbing place. Heat burned your cheeks as Eddie inhaled deeply through his nose, eyes pinching, mouth parting in recognition.

You. So warm and rich and you. Even through the barriers he could feel a slickness, a non-resistance as he thrusted upward over your mound. It drove him absolutely crazy, made the part of his brain that spoke only the language of friction and pheromones take over, made him tingle and twitch and clench with that tell-tale sign of immanent conclusion. Eddie had to brace the wall, close his eyes, collect himself before he lost all sense of control. 

“Oh Jesusfuck—” he panted, “I—ohgod—mmm-hmm-hmm—” Eddie trailed off with a crazed and slightly nervous chuckle, biting his lip as he mustered every fleeting ounce of self-control to draw back from the edge. His cock protested, weeping furiously at the denial. Blood was racing through him at an alarming rate. Sweat tingled his forehead, his chest, his hand still locked under your knee. The animal in him was chomping at the bit, pleading for him to unlatch his belt, undo his zipper, push aside those white cotton panties and slide home. He stiffened his jaw. Clawing into the wall, he hung his head with a sigh. “I want you,” he gritted. “You want me?”

The words throbbed. Buzzed. Ached. You looked up at him fuzzily and responded without a second thought. “Yes.”

“Here?” he breathed before sobering to his own suggestion. “Fuck—sorry.”

The lewd heat of his question sent a pulse deep and low, a question that the animal in you had no qualms about answering. But the human in you wanted so much more. 

“Forget I asked that, I’m just—hah.” He lowered your leg with a deep sigh. Delicate curls clung to the sides of his neck, tingling from perspiration. He cleared them with a wring of his hand, chest heaving beneath a sauna of clinging cotton. “Just need to cool down.” Suddenly he was tugging up sweatshirt from behind his shoulder blades, pulling it up and over his head. It hit the floor with a thud. His shirt went with it.

He stood there for a moment, filling the silence with his breath as you drank him in; a landscape of smooth, pale skin. You swallowed a rush of feelings coursing through you at the prospect of his bareness. A whole new world to your eyes. Ink mapped the space under his collarbone. Delicate curls dusted the valley between his pecks—subtle hills which plateaued to rows of heaving ribs. You followed the trail of dark hair below his navel until it disappeared beneath his belt. A breathtaking vista. 

His skin drew you in like a magnet. Stepping into the sphere of his radiant heat, you traced the swell of his pecks with your fingertips, flattening your palms against the smooth, warm terrain. His heart pounded beneath them. Living, breathing, and bare. With a coy, tentative finger, you traced a path over the ink beneath his collarbone, offering a soft chuckle at the cartoon zombie there. 

“I think he likes you,” Eddie joked, mentally kicking himself the moment he said it. But your smile only grew.

“That’s good, I think I like him too,” you offered playfully, tracing the lines of its wispy hair as your teeth caught your bottom lip.

“Good, ‘cause uh,” Eddie snaked a hand around your waist, eyes crinkling warmly, “he’s not going anywhere.” His words were so suddenly earnest, trailing to almost a whisper.

You melted, eyes flitting to his with a foreign but effortless sultriness as your fingers walked the ridge of his collarbone down into the valley between his pecks. You raked over the delicate curls dusting the path, nails dragging bluntly against his skin. A wonder to explore.

Eddie’s expression darkened at the gesture, filled with a sudden awareness of his own body, his own solid strength reflected back at him through your eyes. Carding your fingers through the whisper of hair, you flashed him a glance before trailing lower. The sensitive skin of his stomach rippled softly under your touch before you hopped the ridge of his navel, entering new territory. 

Thick, dark hair spread between your fingers—down, down over the swell of his belly, following the trail until it disappeared below his belt. There was a hesitance, a coyness that colored your pause before you tucked them curiously beneath it, feeling soft curls against your knuckles. Eddie swallowed thickly, eyes growing wide with anticipation, flitting to yours like a dare.

A strange, thrilling darkness coursed through your hand, gripped his belt buckle and tugged. You were mesmerized by the flex of his abs, by the buck of his hips in response. His nostrils flared, and a sharp puff ghosted over your arms. The tip of his cock almost grazed your palm, flexing against the black denim, perfectly outlined, flooding you with that darkness again. Pulsing deep and low, it bared its teeth and purred its next command.

You obeyed, dropping your hand to the space between his legs. Eddie’s breath hitched, hands freezing in flexed position at his sides. The denim seam stretched out like a runway beneath your fingertips, bulge heavy and round on either side, hot and humid. It was sinful, the way his balls drew upward under your touch, how clearly you could feel their outline, their weight. It filled you with that irresistible darkness, a badness that swelled as your hand trailed upward. His anatomy was evident even through his jeans—roughly six inches, stiff and thick, veering off to the side to seek space inside the tight cage. The ridge of his tip plumed under your palm, fat and damp as your fingers trailed behind. You swallowed, throbbing at the realness of it all.

Eddie hissed, rapidly disintegrating as he watched your hand trace his cock like it was the most mesmerizing thing you’d ever seen. And it was. Watching him fall apart as your fingertips reset themselves under his package, as they drew slowly across every aching inch. The way he twitched as you neared his leaking tip, the strangled sound trapped behind his bitten lips. You pressed against him firmly, dizzy from how sinful this all was, from the ridge of his tip so evident under the denim, from how badly you ached to feel it raw, feel it sink between your thighs and fill you. A purr rippled in the back of your throat as you offered him another slow stroke, pausing at the tip to draw a slow, firm circle with your thumb.

“Holy fuck—“ he breathed, tipping his head back toward the ceiling as his most sensitive nerve endings wept alive. He was desperate—for you, for your touch, for any friction you could offer. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he should stop you. But that voice was distant, tiny, barely a whisper. What was louder was the rush of satisfaction emanating from under your thumb. 

The darkness was growing in you—coiling in your abdomen and stretching through your fingers as you watched his Adam’s apple bob with a thick swallow. Fluid seeped through the denim, and your contact with it flooded you with feelings that made you want to rub harder, faster, to draw other things out of him.

A strangled groan caught in the back of his throat as Eddie tried to tamper down the feelings rising up in him again. The ones that tightened deep within his body, made him twitch and buck his hips to seek your hand. The friction was delicious, overdue, a feeling he was both desperate and fearful to chase. 

“Mmm, yeah?” you purred with a voice you almost didn’t recognize, sliding your thumb right under his heart-ridge where it met his shaft, rubbing up and down in short bursts.

“Yeah,” he choked. It was his favorite spot. The one that sent fireworks straight to his brain, made his brows pinch and knees turn to jelly. He closed his eyes, lost in the feeling, drifting away until the sudden absence of your hand had his eyes snapping open. He whined, flooded with equal parts relief and disappointment.

The rise and fall of his stomach had your body suddenly—violently—crying out for the warmth of his skin against yours. Fumbling with the top button of your cardigan, you slipped it free, working the others until it peeled off of you to join Eddie’s sweatshirt on the floor. Heart hammering with eager anticipation, your fingers met the starch of your blouse.

“Wait—”

You froze over the top button. 

“I wanna do it,” he uttered. 

Hands falling to your sides, you granted him permission with a dip of your chin. 

Slowly, delicately—as if sudden movement would cause you to flee—he feathered the stiff collar with his knuckles, brushing it back to expose the slope of bone beneath it. Tracing the stitching down to the first button, he padded the bone-white plastic, ushering it through the slit with his trembling thumb. 

You swallowed, heart pounding under the intensity of his gaze as the V in your shirt grew deeper. How soft his eyes were—wide and alive but dipping in a way that could only be described as reverent. 

He worked the next button free, exposing a pink satin bow at your sternum, breath fanning the skin beneath it in awe. Like a pearl in the shell of your blouse, nestled between two heaving cups. Unable to help himself, he brushed it with the ridge of his knuckle, smiling as his chocolate eyes lit up.

It was beautiful to watch—the subtle twitching of his cheeks, the angles of his working hands, the curious amazement hiding under his lashes as he exposed you. Such careful movements from a man who could destroy you. 

It was nothing like he had imagined. In his countless daydreams involving him taking your clothes off, he’d failed to capture the subtlety in it. The shy dip in your eyes, the rippling of your heated skin as it met the cool air, the brush of peach fuzz hair under his knuckles as he slowly worked you free. So alive. So real. 

When he was finished, he stepped back and admired his work, checking in with a meeting of your eyes before continuing. With a warm brush of his hand, Eddie slipped the stiff fabric over your shoulder, exposing your bra and the soft, forbidden slopes of it all. You shrugged off the blouse like a shell you’d outgrown, let it fall from around you till it crumpled at your feet. 

You stood there a moment as he drank you in, a sense of power rising in your stillness like a statue at a shrine. With a dip of your eyes, you granted him your divine permission.

Eddie traced the strap with his finger; a shimmering runway of elastic. He’d seen it once before, stored it safely in his memory—black and daring like caution tape, taunting him at a distance as your lips popped from a bottle in The Hideout. Here it was baby pink, rising and falling with the swell of your breath as your lashes dipped shyly toward his roaming hand. He tucked a finger beneath it, impossibly soft skin gliding against his knuckle as he ushered it off of your shoulder. 

Your smile was unstoppable, puffing softly through your nose at such an innocent gesture, the way it made his eyes light up with boyish wonder as the straps yielded to his touch. 

Eddie swallowed thickly, heart racing as his fingers walked along the underwire ridge, across the well-washed pilling satin under your arm and around your back. He located the clasp, eyes dipping down into your cleavage with anticipation as he pinched you free.

The cage fell, straps trailing down your arms until it landed on the ground between you. The chill of the air had you reacting; puckered and alert as you bravely drew back your shoulders.

Eddie’s mouth fell open. 

There was a coyness in your smile that surprised even yourself. A sudden rush of girlishness watching his hungry eyes roam your figure. Not because it was the first time a man had seen you like this, but because it was the first time a man had looked at you like this. Flickering between boy-like awe and man-like heat, you realized that you had never felt more beautiful exposed. 

They weren’t the first pair Eddie had seen. Between all the magazines under his bed and the few real girls that had been desperate or curious enough to show him, he had seen all shapes and sizes. Yours were different. Yours he had memorized from the back of the classroom, dreamt about with his elbow propped against the small desk. Yours had existed as only speculation from stolen glances in the small chair next to yours, as a fantasy just out of reach. 

Jesus.

Christ.

Eddie blinked hard and swallowed. The details were mesmerizing. Holy in their you-ness. The pebbled skin which puckered into hardened peaks, their unique color, the soft flesh around them. Full and round. Rising and falling with shallow, anticipating breaths. Impossibly real. Impossibly you. You, who he adored from far away, trusting him enough to bare yourself up close.

Tracing a featherlight knuckle along the soft underside, Eddie flicked up to your eyes with a heat that could have melted you. All you could muster was a fluttering sigh, and he took his cue. Cupping your breast with his whole hand, he drew his thumb upward across your nipple, watching the peak of it bend to his touch and pop from underneath it. Mesmerized. On the downstroke he captured it against his forefinger, pinching and rolling the sensitive peak. 

A soft hiss escaped you, strangled and desperate to escape. His touch sent a jolt that buzzed through your whole body. All rational thoughts were just noise now, fading away as the angles of his hand came into focus. His hand. There was a roughness to it, a calloused graze that sparked pleasure with every pass. Timid at first, but growing bolder. Through the thickening haze, you watched him watching you—those lust-blown eyes under heavy lids, his features pinched in reverent disbelief. A look he wore unspeakably well.

Eddie swallowed. It was absolutely brain-blanking—the soft, supple skin yielding to his thumb as he cupped that forbidden curve. How your back seemed to arch as though you were a puppet and he held the strings. How your chest—your chest—rose and fell to a rhythm of his making. So much power in a single digit. He extended it in tight circles, studying you, committing every atom to his memory. But watching you slip between his fingers was nothing compared to the look on your face. Your pinching brows, your bitten lip, your begging eyes. A puddle, rendered by his touch.

With sudden animation, both his hands splayed wide, palms clamping over your breasts to grapple in a firm squeeze. Your skin dimpled like dough between his slowly tightening fingers. He did it again, relishing in your fullness, watching with rapt attention the way they yielded to his digits; heavy, soft, and round. Licking his lips, he removed his hands, hovering just above your nipple to rasp a question. “Can I kiss you here?”

“Yes,” you managed, struck with a sudden pang for the fact he even asked. Your answer barely faded out before he descended on you, pressing his pillow lips around your peak, flicking out his wet tongue, taking you into his furnace mouth. You heaved a deep sigh, eyes rolling back into your head. It tingled like a limb that was asleep. You hadn’t known it though, not until he’d kissed you there. It occurred to you—in the thickness of your haze—just how many parts of you had been sleeping. For how long was uncertain, but as you thawed under his touch, the rest of you begged to know what it was like to feel awake.

Eddie lathed his tongue around the peak, pressing his hands to your back to draw you closer, as if he couldn’t possibly be close enough. A hunger had arisen in him, one he’d suppressed on a daily basis since he first laid eyes on you. It coursed through his veins as he latched, surged into his fingertips as he dragged them down your back. His lips locked tight, tongue flicking over that attentive bundle of nerves, sucking it. He was gone, lost in he arch of your back, the heave of your breast against his chin on your sharp inhale, the reward of your moan on your exhale. And just like that, he devoured you. It was sloppy, careless, and yet somehow deeply reverent. The unhinging of his jaw, the way he dragged his whole tongue across your nipple as his bottom lip trailed behind, lathing and sucking again and again until he’d had his fill of one and transitioned to the other.

You’d never had a man consume you in this way; devour you like he was starving. No desire had ever possessed you this badly. But for him, you were a willing feast, and it had never felt so good.

Your nipple left his lips with a pop, eyes darting darkly to yours as he panted through the hanging O his mouth became. This sparked a hunger in you; a fierce desire to taste him again, to feel his bare skin against yours. As if both of you shared the same thought, your bodies collided, slotting at the hips like a puzzle as his arms coiled around your waist. You captured those puffy lips again, delighting in the wet heat behind them. They pressed fervent wishes to yours, ones too bold to utter but distinctive in their taste. His mouth found a rhythm, ferocious and insistent, tongue sliding home against yours, in and out. 

Excitement turned his body to a live-wire at the feeling of your bare curves pressed to his, animated with a sudden urge to rid you of the rest of your clothing, to drag you to the bed and make you his. Images zapped through his brain at lightning speed, raced through his blood with every pump of his pounding heart. Suddenly his lips were at your collarbone, lathing a hot trail up the ridges of your neck as the heat sung through his veins. It came out as a mumble against the skin below your ear. “Bedroom?” 

It was one word. His voice. So heavy and colored with lust that it tingled through your entire body. A million images shot through your head, rippled and throbbed with the want to experience every one. Eddie paused there for the answer, breathing hotly against the skin of your neck, pressing insistently into your hip. It was a sobering word, and yet the weight of it clouded all logic. The clock ticked on in the corner. Your pulse hammered in your ears. The animal in you responded, met his eyes, took his hand, and led him down the hallway through the door on the left.

It was dark in there. Between the glow coming in through the cracked door behind him and the street lamp shining through the slats of your blinds, Eddie could make out the shape of a dresser, a desk, a bookshelf, the rectangular mass of a bed against the wall to the left. And you—a soft silhouette—stopping in the center of the room to look at him. 

There was a small part of you that still could not believe you were about to do this. That Eddie Munson was standing in your bedroom, shirtless and heaving his breath as the faint hallway light made a halo of his frizz. He shut the door behind him, leaving you both in near darkness. There was a pause. A space filled with both your anticipating breaths for just a beat until he descended on you, and then there were no thoughts anymore.

Suddenly it was like you were drunk at a party. Between the wet smacks of his crushing lips, you could almost hear the thud of the bass from the living room, the din of voices bleeding into one outside the door. Every party you had never attended, every bad thing you had always craved to do—flashing behind your eyelids as his kisses intoxicated you.

You surrendered completely. To the fantasy, to desire, to him—parting your lips, receiving his tongue, giving in to the rush of his skin pressed to yours, the waves of him taking you under, his crushing arms around you. In the dark, all hesitance dissolved, all trepidation vanished. His mouth was hot and insistent. His hands, completely in charge. A whine escaped your lips, one that you had never heard before. It was needy and desperate and only stoked the fire in his kiss.

Desire spoke plainly, simply. A language you were learning with each pass of his demonstrating tongue. Soft syllables of “yes” and “good”. Sounds that transcended meaning, reverberated in your chest and throat, distilled down to its essence—love. Pure and true. Rising with each breath. Singing in your veins. You were learning to listen. Learning to forget all you had been taught. Learning to remember. When all was dark and there was nothing left but desire, there was so much to hear, so much to feel, so much to learn, and he was a masterful teacher.

Desire spoke volumes through your fingertips; clawing across the thick muscles of the back of his neck as you collided. It spoke in verses in the breath exchanged between you. Soft stanzas in the rush of skin-on-skin. It moved in daring undulation, a dance laid dormant in your bones, sparked to memory by the soft hair below his navel, by his strong arms around you. 

In the dark, there were only feelings. The tangle of his curls around your fingers, the angle of his jaw between your palms. The friction of your dewey bodies pressed together, nipples dragging against the sparse hair of his hammering chest. The muscles of your hands and mouth burned with desperate heat. Every nerve heightened. Every cell aware. 

Eddie lead the dance with his hips, his tongue, his impatient fingers—free to seek and roam. It was like every fantasy he’d ever had about you was coming to life beneath his palms. In this one he didn’t need to imagine. It could have been any of them—backstage in a dressing room after a sold-out show, at a hotel somewhere along a desert highway, right here in your bedroom just being real people. There was a boldness that came over him, an agency the darkness provided, one where he could be the sort of man he always dreamed he was. One where his hands were sure and stable, never fumbling. One where he impressed you with his prowess, rendered you awestruck and proud. 

Breaking to kiss his neck, you savored the oily sweetness of his skin, the richness of the scent emanating from under his arms—musky and spicy and so indescribably him. You’d caught it a few times in the past when he’d propped his head in his hand on the desk, or stretched toward the sky against the stiff wooden chair. It made you dizzy, filled you with a pang so deep you had to bury yourself in the textbook to sober you human again.

Presently, all rational thoughts were clouded by the tightening of his biceps around you, the tendons rippling under his skin as he swallowed. You flicked out your tongue to taste them, pawing down his smooth back, dragging your nails over his shoulder blades, down, down, down over the dip in his spine, the muscles of his lower back. 

In the dark, only the animals in you remained; ferocious and insatiable. Yours felt like nipping at his jaw, his clawed impatiently at the zipper of your skirt, yanking it down, working it free to pool at your feet. You stepped out of it like an old skin, kicking it toward your dresser. Feeling for the zippers on your boots, you steadied yourself on Eddie’s shoulder, tugging them down with a few clumsy hops before toeing them off. Tossing them into the darkness, they clattered against your dresser before thudding to the floor. The same with your stockings, which landed somewhere by your desk.

Eddie’s kisses became sloppy, erratic, barely a split second before his sweaty palms descended on your rear. They clung to the thin cotton fabric—one at each cheek—and dragged slowly, tightly upward. The burn was delicious, stoking the fire in you as the delicate cotton bunched under his palms to expose you. 

“I have a condom in my wallet,” he mumbled into your neck.

The words struck you dumb, dizzy, rippled up your spine to loll your head backward. He reset his hands, fingertips raking over your naked flesh, clawing into you like dough. All you could respond with was a thick, fuzzy laugh as your cheeks splayed under his touch—back arched, chest sparking against his, brain quickly turning to putty. 

There was no masking his delight as he clawed the cotton fabric, spreading your cheeks like dough under his palms. How pliant you were. Eager. A willing landscape for him to explore. His fingers trekked lower, dipping under your cheek until they brushed a hill of wet cotton. Eddie choked on the sound leaping out of his throat, zapped senseless with need. Snaking his arm around your back, he swiped his fingers slowly over your mound. You were saturated. Soaked through to slick between your thighs. For him. 

The thickness in his breath could have rendered you to ash. You arched your back like a cat in heat; fluttering open, throbbing with emptiness. The sound that came out of you was unrecognizable, rising from that deep, foreign place to purr against his neck. You were learning how much you liked this position—like a ragdoll in his arms, eyes closed as his finger dipped under the seam of your panties, as it slipped against your folds. You loved the way he explored you—heated but tentative. Loved how it made you feel—desired, craved. Loved most of all how it made him react, his breathless cursing, how now two of his fingers were spreading and sliding, parting your folds, exploring your heat. It felt unbelievably good. You spread your legs a little, hoping to encourage one of them inside you. 

But he didn’t. Instead, his hands retreated. Eddie sucked his fingers, eyes pinching as he savored your tang. They left his mouth with a pop. “I need you, now. Like—like right now,” he wavered thickly. Metal jingled, leather snapped against his palm. There was a pop of a button, the sound of a zipper, a sigh of relief that ghosted over your face. He shoved his jeans down around his ass before pausing with an irritated huff. “Fuck, my boots.”

“Let me,” you offered, crouching down until your knees met the carpet. You felt for the laces, padding around his ankle to find the loops, impatiently digging your nails into the tight double knots to work them free. 

It was all he could do just to look at you. You, kneeling before him, fumbling and cursing and so incredibly real. When you finally pried the boots off his ankles, you stood up on your knees, eye-level with his open zipper.

The moonlight bleeding in from behind your curtains made his pale skin glow, accenting the dark trail below his navel. It looked delectable—the swell of his belly before it tapered off to dip below the waistband of his boxers. You pressed your lips to it, nuzzling into the hair before your teeth caught the swell of fat under his navel. It flinched against your lips with his gasp.

You couldn’t help yourself anymore. Your fingers—so trained in good behavior—were suddenly behaving very badly; moving on their own, dipping between his legs to cup his balls. They lurched against your hand, sliding up on either side of the humid cotton. Show me, you begged with your hand as it tracked slowly upward. It felt so bad, in the best way bad could feel. The carpet burning into your kneecaps, the jagged metal zipper grazing the backs of your fingers as you traced upward, the burning stretch of his hardness underneath the cotton, the soaked plume of his tip. So unbelievably bad. Your eyes darkened, and your nose dove into the checkered fabric without a second thought. All remaining fragments of your rational mind were melted by his musk into a fuzzy haze that only understood one thing. It spoke in flutters and wet, aching throbs. Your hand returned beneath his package as you began to track kisses up his clothed, attentive length.

Eddie’s breath hitched, belly ripping in your peripheral as your lips met the ridge of his tip. You pressed a lingering kiss against the soaked cotton. “Fuck,” he hissed, tipping his chin toward the ceiling. He gasped when he felt the warmth of your tongue bleed through the fabric. “Oh—ohhhmyfuckinggod.” 

His whine was almost enough to unravel you. Dragging your fingers coaxingly under the weight of his sack, your tongue got acquainted with his tip, flicking up under the fat, heart-shaped ridge, tasting the slick reward which you lapped through the fabric. It was bad. So terribly bad, yet nothing had ever tasted as satisfying or sounded as sweet as the ragged sighs your bad behavior earned you. 

You purred, giving him a couple generous pecks before your fingers wedged under his waistband. 

Show me, you said as your cool fingers met his molten skin, and Eddie found the strength to open his eyes and look down at you. You, from a thousand aching fantasies kneeling before him with heavy lids and mouth agape as you peeled down the fabric to free him. 

It was a proud thing. Holy in its him-ness. Like a singular painting, the motifs were consistent; a collection of lines and shapes that came together to make him. In the plume of his tip you could almost glimpse echos of the wide, pink bow of his lips, the ball of his nose. It curved attentively upward, bobbing with his breath as you admired it with equal parts reverence and heated curiosity until your hand closed the gap.

There was a breath you both let out together, a silent oh breathed in unison at such intimate contact. Eddie had to bite his lip, close his eyes, tip back his head toward the ceiling as your fingers—the ones he’d ached to touch a thousand times—so intimately explored him. He assumed he was not the first man you’d touched in this way, but the way you were grazing with such delicate wonder gave him pause to consider. 

Desire flooded your entire body, heightened and exhilarated, tingling with curiosity. Fingers trailed over velvet veins, eyes alight as your knuckle swiped upward along the underside, testing its weight and reactivity until it met the dimple of his weeping ridge. A whine left Eddie’s downturned lips; a guttural plea to continue. Obliging, you gripped him, tightening as he bucked into your hand, velvet skin gliding under your firm grasp. “Mmmm,” you purred on an upward stroke, a darkness rousing in you from his complete undoing.

Eddie half-buried his face in his hand, fingers raking across his scalp as your thumb breeched the ridge, padding over his most sensitive spot before circling his slit. “Ohh fuck,” he moaned. “Jesus fuck.”

It wept under your thumb, sticky and gushing another wave of arousal as you squeezed. “You like that?” came a voice you’d never heard before but liked the sound of.

“Ahhhh-hah,” he breathed a crazed laugh as his balls twitched from the friction and the sound of your voice saying that.

His tip was soft and rigid all at once. Slick and inviting to your thumb. You couldn’t stop yourself from rubbing it, from delighting in the way he bucked and melted and breathed under your touch. Your other hand dipped curiously, zipper scraping your knuckles, hair so soft against your palm as you cupped his sack—heavy and actively tightening against his body. 

Eddie’s eyes rolled back into his head, heaving a breath from the pressure mounting inside of him. The animal in him was desperate to chase it—to clench, and spill, and explode—but he wanted to be good for you. Good like he always imagined. He wanted to make your back arch, your toes curl, to drill you till your claws drew down at his back until you howled with your own release.

Mesmerized by his display of pleasure, you pumped your hand, twisting slowly at the top, delighting in the way he rutted into your grip, how effortless his hardness slid within your grasp, the way his breath hissed from behind clenched teeth. 

It felt so good. Ungodly good. Too good. Biting his lip, he sent a silent prayer toward your popcorn ceiling, searching for something—anything—in his bank of horrible memories to bring him back to Earth. But as your thumb settled into the spot that had him seeing stars, a sudden wave of fear crashed over him. “Stop,” he barked, hand clamping tightly on your wrist. “I’m gonna—hah—oh fuck.” Eddie hissed a long breath, drawing himself back from the edge with every last ounce of his will.

“Sorry,” you breathed, releasing your grip. His clammy grasp lingered a second before letting go.

“No, don’t be sorry, fuck, I just—” he released a slow, steadying breath through pursed lips before continuing, “I just don’t wanna totally ruin this. Know what I mean?”

You did, and you imagined it for a second; pumping his cock, feeling his balls twitch against your palm as he exploded to paint your chest white, how it would cream under your fingers as he painted the ceiling with the colors of his voice. It drove you mad with wanting, but the throb between your legs was more demanding. 

“Don’t get me wrong, it—it feels really good. Just… a little too good,” he said, wringing a hand behind his neck. 

With a sensual flick of your eyes, you tugged his jeans and boxers down until he was able to step out of them. Eddie extended a chivalrous hand, and you rose to your feet. Effortlessly, as if they belonged there, your lips found his in the dark, drawing his face between your palms and planting a kiss that lasted a whole breath. His lips parted, tongue seeking yours as his fingers found the waistband of your panties. He looped them through the leg hole with a pointed tug that had you stumbling into him. 

“Mmm?” he mumbled against your mouth.

“Mmhmm,” you sighed. 

He peeled them off of you, leaving a wet trail that clung to your inner thighs as they passed your knees and ankles. Breaking the kiss, you kicked them aside. 

There was a single beat as you both stood naked in the darkness, just breathing as you drank each other in. Bathed in moonlight, stripped away to reveal the truth of what you had been all along: simply a man and a woman. Then, suddenly, as if a trigger snapped in both of you at once, there was a collision. A smashing of lips, a tangle of arms, a slotting of hips as you entwined. 

Your whole body came alive at once, zapping with life as his velvet length pressed to your hip, zinging as his lips tracked down your jaw to seek your neck. It was bliss to come undone, to loll your head back and just give in. To let him lead the dance toward your mattress. To let his hands cup your rear, spread your legs and wedge his thigh between them. To let him do whatever he wanted. The sparse hair of his leg sparked along your delicate flesh. It had you clawing at the muscles of his shoulders, arching your back, grinding your pelvis in a way that would have put the novels you kept in your nightstand to shame.

Eddie propped his foot against your the boxspring of your mattress, kneading his hands against your ass as he made a meal of you. The wet trail you left against his thigh had his brain short-circuiting, leaving nothing but the animal in him to grapple with the living fantasy of you, naked in his arms. He could not possibly touch you enough. There was not enough flesh on his palms, nor nerves in his whole body to feel you in the million ways he wanted to at once. All at once, every fantasy he’d ever had, crashing like a tidal wave as his hands steered your hips in real time. 

It felt better than you’d ever imagined; the rush of his bare skin under your palms as they glided down his back, the estranged pleasure mounting where his thigh met your most intimate seam, the friction of his teeth against your neck. You were drowning in the most delicious way. Drifting toward some place on the horizon that spoke only the language of heavy palms and panting breaths. Letting him carry you there.

You whined when he lowered his leg—quickly replaced by his hand, spreading and exploring, breaking from your neck to watch it happen as his mouth became a silent, hanging O. There was a fire in his blood that was mounting, throbbing in his temples, blinding him with need as his fingers parted slick hair, carded through your folds, slipped against your eager entrance. Every inch of you. The fever broke, and the sliver of his brain that had urged patience snapped silent. Now, a much deeper voice barked. No more waiting. No more wanting. 

Your calves hit the edge of the mattress, sending you tumbling backwards onto the chilly comforter. Eddie was quick to pounce, climbing on top of you, prying your legs open with his. You fluttered eagerly, melting into the heat of his chest as he pinned you to the bed—trapped in the sweetest cage of his arms. 

In the course of your relationship, it was always your position that had wedged itself between you. Yours, behind the big desk. His, behind the small one. Your position—a thing at risk of being lost. A mantle. A standard for you to uphold. This one defied them all. Wrong, by all technical accounts, but in all your life, nothing had ever felt so right as your position beneath him. 

You breathed together for a moment, chests expanding into one another, foreheads pressed together, exploring the bridge of his nose with your own. Thighs splayed open, heart beating rabbit-fast, completely at his mercy. A faint terror whispered in the back of your mind at the prospect of his bareness, at the ways he could ruin you. And yet you ached for ruin all the same.

Eddie’s tip kissed the wet heat of your lips and the animal screamed from the base of his brain to push. But he caught the hitch in your breath, the way your hips flexed backward in response. He bucked reflexively but stilled, biting his lip with a pained huff. “I’m not—I’m not gonna, I just…” 

A soft sense of trust flooded in as Eddie drew a deep breath, dragging himself through your folds. It was a delicious sort of torture, the ache enough to drive you mad. Empty and thrumming with anticipation at the prospect of fullness so near. Drowning in the fantasy of him sinking deep, of feeling him leak from you later. You whined, drawing your fingers down his back as his hips rolled slowly. So dangerously close.

It took all of his strength to hold his position, all his control to keep from sliding in. He liked how it felt; you beneath him, writhing in the cage of his arms. He liked the little sounds you made, how evident your wanting was, how he could feel you almost take him in, how his cock would dip ever so slightly against your entrance like you wanted to. He was stunned by it, delirious from the rush of sensation. “Hmm—” he winced after a few more agonizing seconds, “fuck, I can’t take it anymore.” Peeling himself from your body, he shifted off the side of the bed with a creak of the mattress and into the darkness. 

You laid there on the comforter, staring dazed at the ceiling as he padded across the room. Lifting your head to glance, it struck you just how real this was, and yet more startling than his naked form making his way across your bedroom was how comfortable you felt with all of it. How at peace you were as his belt buckle jingled from the darkness, as his pants returned to a heap on the floor, as his wallet snapped shut. 

It was suddenly all very real—the cool sheets under his knees as you drew back the comforter, the condom wrapper crinkling between his fingers as he felt for the jagged grooves, the anticipating silence filled with both your breaths. The soft metal split, and he fished the rubber from the package with a trembling finger. Tossing the wrapper into the darkness, he felt for the nub that indicated the tip, the ridge that indicated which direction it should roll. He’d done this enough times to know by now but for some reason it felt like a foreign object; clumsy, slippery in his hands as he grasped himself. Finally, he got it; pinching the nub to roll it down over his flinching tip, he unraveled it until it was flush with him.

You watched his silhouette quietly through the frame of your legs, heart kicking up with a sudden, surprising nervousness as you felt the warmth of his hands on your knees. He resumed his position, settling between your thighs, propped on his elbows. The return of his warmth was a welcome thing; comforting and soothing, familiar and indescribably correct. You both laid there a moment just breathing. Just being. Sobering to the tickle of his bangs against your forehead, the sweat beneath them as you rocked against it, the tang of salt when you captured his lips. 

A sudden wave of nerves coiled through his belly as his tip kissed your entrance again, how it gelled with the rush of desire, the fire licking through his veins. His arms trembled under his own weight, the anticipation, the now-ness of it all. “Ok,” he breathed, “you want me?” 

You swiped down his face, clearing the stray hairs that clung to the sides of his mouth and sweaty temples. It was easy to answer. Easy to admit. “I want you.”

It soothed him like a balm, washed over his trembling shoulders, his hammering chest. Imbued him with an urgency that had him splaying his knees, rocking his hips, and inviting himself in.

There was a pressure at your entrance—a filling of that aching space that had you seeing stars. When he asked for admission there was no hesitation. You welcomed him with open thighs and hands that tracked the muscles of his back as you received him in one slow thrust. Your inhale stuttered at its crest, caught in your throat before hissing from your lips as you ached alive, ached awake. Finally, with no resistance. Only the sparks of ineffable pleasure as the emptiness inside you was filled at last. 

A shudder escaped both of you at once, something closer to a sob. Yours directed toward the ceiling, his ghosting over your neck. You stayed like this a moment—locked, seated, stunned by the pleasure of your joining. 

Eddie hung his head with a groan, curls waterfalling around your face as he rutted impossibly deeper. He could have died here, buried himself and made you his tomb. He was crumbling, coming apart, actively deteriorating from the warmth of your body around him, from the all sensations of you, from the stunned satisfaction flooding through every inch of him. Finally, it cried. Finally, finally. The edge was close, a few pushes away. He could feel the components preparing, desperate for release, begging the rest of him to push, push, push. His whole world was spinning, threatening to collapse in on itself. Dragging himself away from the edge with a deep breath, he reeled in the parts that threatened to unravel at at the way you accepted him. How effortless it was, how tightly you hugged him, both inside and out. How your palms gripped his shoulders, soft inner thighs like a cradle for his hips. He swallowed thickly, blinking hard to open his eyes up to you, beneath him, around him like a home he’d been missing his whole life. Finally, he allowed himself to relax into the feeling, to let his weight fall against your belly. Flush with every angle, gasping into the soft crook of your shoulder.

You drew him impossibly closer, tucking your ankles under his rear, raking your fingers across his scalp as he settled. The fullness was ecstatic, the stretch so deep it was like he was burrowing behind your navel, radiating dull pleasure from the space he occupied. It was a perfect fit. Tailor-made to reach the points that pined for pressure in both of you. So full you felt like you could burst. So full it prickled at the corners of your eyes, exited your downturned mouth in a gasp—a silent prayer, a thank you toward one that was answered. One you had asked for in secret, pressed into the folds of linen napkins, whispered into the ceiling of The Hideout as the stage lights touched your face. You could have stayed like this forever, merged and crystalized. Deliriously, you prayed you would, and yet you ached to feel his love animated. To be battered by it. Bruised by it. Bullied by his fierce, frenetic love. By an energy you had glimpsed in stolen moments, witnessed him harness on stage, tasted in the smoke on his tongue.

Eddie raised his head to look at you, admiring the shading of your features in the near darkness, the bliss painted across your lips, your heavy lids. A waking dream. You tipped your chin, feathering his mouth with yours; sensual, playful, eager. He brushed against your parted lips, twin breaths mingling in soft pants before an urge arrested him. It was loud and all-consuming, shouting from the base of his brain, seizing his hips to draw back and roll forward. It had both of you seeing stars, grunting soft exclamations into the fractional distance between you. The sound and the friction gelled like a gas to feed the fire coursing through him, igniting a fierce urge to move, to show you, to deliver his promise. 

And just like that he was gone. Possessed. Arrested by a driving need that had him hunkering forward, rocking his hips to a rhythm older than either of you could imagine. Familiar, ingrained, and almost involuntary. The pleasure had him drilling down to chase it; open-mouthed, eyes pinched, swept away by the current of his own making. He was dizzy with it. Lost in it. Fisting the sheets as his hips met your thighs with quick, heavy smacks. Desperate and frantic, hurtling toward his edge at a terrifying speed.

A moan was punched out of you—guttural, gasping. One that had your neck craning against the pillow as your chin reached toward your headboard. And you just held on; winding through his hair, dragging drown his back, drowning in feeling. Tight ripples of pleasure radiated from every thrust, stirring something so deep you had forgotten you had buried it—the fear that you would go your whole life and never feel this way. It bubbled up through your sternum, burned at the corners of your eyes, surfaced in strangled sounds at the back of your throat. 

The friction roared like wildfire between you, and a tightening deep in his body warned him with flashing lights that looked red but felt green. A blended hue of pleasure and fear coiled its way through his abdomen, but he was consumed by you—warm and wet and tight around him. Gasping to his rhythm, making music that he’d never heard before. He harmonized with it, quickening his pace with grunts through gritted teeth. His mind was a swirling mess, forearms burning and trembling, sweat dripping down his neck, but none of it even registered in the wake of blinding pleasure. So good. So fucking good. How badly he wanted to show you, to hear those sounds escalate to screams. 

You sobbed a moan, splitting at the seams as time and sense slipped away down the current. Unraveling like a spool of thread rolled down a hill. Becoming blissfully undone after a lifetime of being wound so tight. Pleasure sparked through your channel, tears flickered in the corners of your eyes. It felt as though you might break open. “Eddie,” you whined, clawing into his shoulders as you arched against the mattress.

It swirled between his ears, rushed down his spine to throb in that deep, low place. His name, your voice, this way. There was a kick inside. A switch that flipped. An urge that he was helpless but to follow, unable to control. His heart rate quickened, breath heaving as he spiraled down a tunnel with nothing to brace but the mattress. “Oh fuck, oh god, oh no, OH—”

It was the moment right before the release that was the sweetest. The tingle he could feel radiating from deep inside like a big yawn. He drew a deep breath with a skyward tilt of his chin, and for a few precious seconds there were no thoughts; no guilt, no shame, nothing at all in the midst of his blackout collision with pleasure. Eddie fisted the sheets, lurching forward as he slammed into you. 

Colors. Vibrant and rich. Painting the air between you with each shallow gasp. Escalating in pitch toward a spectacular display. It poured out of him. Every ounce of frustration, every bottled feeling, every unlived fantasy, erupting all at once. He buried it inside you. Hips pressed flush against your thighs, burrowing deeper with every pulse. Wave after white-hot wave. Crashing over him, coursing out of him with open-mouthed gasps. Waves of relief so good it threatened tears. 

It was breathtaking—the hue of each pitch. Sharp inhales through gritted teeth that melted into deep grunts on the exhale. Each twitch ignited inside you—sparks that had your eyes rolling back, had you drawing your knees toward the mattress to take it all. You grappled his shoulders, nails bluntly dragging down his sweat-kissed skin, grazing up the back of his neck as his moans faded to soft whines. So full. 

There was more. Still more. Coming out in dribbles now, petering to heaves with nothing left behind them. The spasms sent sparks inside you, and you fought to savor them—spreading wider, tucking in your ankles under his rear to draw him deeper. Finally, he collapsed, ragged with relief. He stayed like this a moment. Spent. Deflated. Chest expanding into yours as sharp pants dulled to steady breaths. 

Slowly, Eddie raised his head from where he’d hung it, sobering to the clock on your nightstand. It mocked him with glowing red numbers, of which he hazily calculated that only three had passed since he’d put the condom on. A surge of guilt rushed into the vacuum that pleasure left behind. “Fuck, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t—” he winced, hips jerking in the echoes of his climax. 

His words almost didn’t register through the fog of your bliss. “Sorry?” you breathed, blinking back into the room. 

“I—” he flinched again, fisting the pillow beneath you. “I came like, immediately. And you didn’t.”

“Oh—oh no it’s ok,” you soothed, running a hand down his back. “It felt unbelievably good. Like… the best I’ve ever had.”

Eddie heaved a sigh, overtaken by a strange mixture of shame for himself and pity for you. Suddenly he felt like he was back in your classroom, like you were ignoring his spelling mistakes, praising the C he got on his chemistry test. He shifted his weight, becoming increasingly aware of his chest sticking to yours, of the hair clinging to his neck, of the rubber around him straining with his own fluid, tight in the midst of hypersensitivity. 

He was quiet. A tense sort of quiet you’d seen from him before. Slowly, gently, your fingers found his temple, stroking away the sweat, tracking down to cup his jaw, settling just under his ear as your thumb busied itself with his soft cheek. “Eddie,” you whispered. 

It was soothing. Attentive. The kind of touch a hurt child might receive. A touch he’d craved for longer than he cared to admit, yet in this context, it was the last way he wanted to feel. “M’ gonna make it up to you,” he mumbled. Drawing on his quickly waning strength, he peeled himself from your body to sit back on his heels, still inside you. 

It was almost a shock—how chilly you felt in the absence of his weight. How bare and vulnerable. A soft cry escaped you, arms drawing around your body to shield against the cold creeping in.

The sound stirred him, dredged up and compounded the gnawing disappointment in himself. The nagging sense that he was fucking this up too, just like he did everything else. Desperate to hear something more satisfied, his fingers found your clit, drawing tight circles there. But you were still reeling in the pain of his absence, could still feel the shame radiating from him, and it dulled any chance of good feeling. 

“Stop, Eddie—” You grabbed his wrist. Eddie sighed sharply through his nose, stilling his hand. 

It was flooding in now, that hot tingling feeling he’d felt countless times under the fluorescents. How he’d fucked it all up, how he was making it even worse now. He could feel himself start to go soft, the condom becoming loose, sticky and uncomfortable. He drew back his hips to exit, but your knees locked around him.

“No, please—” The tears were close, right there. Stored from moments before in the height of your pleasure, just waiting behind your eyelids. You took his hand and tugged it gently toward you. “I just want you.”

There was a twinge in his chest that burst at your words, at how they wavered and threatened to crack. At how honest they were, how they felt to hear coming from you. Lead by your hand, he gave in—to gravity, to exhaustion, to a weight he’d carried for so long it seemed to be a part of him. Settling on top of you, resting his cheek against your sternum as heart thrummed steadily in his ear. The pain in your voice still echoed there, the thought that he’d caused it, unbearable. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—” 

You shushed him, stroking over his temple, clearing the hairs that clung to his face. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.” Your lips found the crown of his head, pressing a long kiss there, inhaling the soft scent that filled you with an indescribable warmth. “I love you,” you whispered. “I love you.”

The words reverberated through your chest into his ear, softening the clench in his jaw, the tightness in his shoulders. Eddie took a shaky breath through his nose. “I love you so much,” he wavered thickly, “I just—I just want to show you—”

It nearly broke you; the pain behind his words, the sudden realization of where they came from. You shushed him again, thumb soothing over his cheek. “You have.”

A knot released in his chest, undone by your careful fingers, exiting as a shallow sob he’d been harboring for longer than these last few moments. For longer than he could remember. The weight of it shook you, but you still remained. Solid, tangible, real as he collapsed into you, a haven for his tired bones to rest. It was all ebbing now—the adrenaline pounding through his veins since the moment you got in his van, the heightened sensations across every inch of his body, the sudden rush of pleasure, crashing all at once. Softening everywhere. A numbness settled over his limbs, all doubts ushered away by your thumb.

And then it was quiet. Absent of even the hum of the heat through the vents. Engulfed in a protective darkness with nothing but the sound of your own steady breathing—slow and soothing. Chests rising and falling against one another, lulled by a rhythm only the two of you could hear. 

His hand found yours in the dark, trailing across your wrist, sliding up your palm to lace his fingers between yours. The bones of his knuckles filled the empty space with a comforting stretch. Just like he’d done a dozen times in the shadows, like he’d done a thousand times in your daydreams. You squeezed back tightly, and for a still, silent moment, there was no separation. No gap to close between what you had and what you wanted. 

It was good like this. Alone. Together. Stroking his temple, feeling the crinkle of his smile against your palm, the cadence of his breath as it slowed nearly to sleep. Drifting off to some place on the horizon where neither of you had been before. Who knows where it would take you, what perils awaited out over the edge, when the sun eventually rose, when the halls filled once more with the echos of a hundred voices watching. But for now, there was only the soothing sound of your breaths, the rhythmic thrum of your two tired hearts as you drifted there together. 

______

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There will be a celebration hosted by the lovely @teddiemunson86 and @ladylilylost on their discord server next Sunday, Sept. 1st at 2pm EDT where I will be talking about the chapter and what the future has in store for our forbidden lovebirds! If you're interested in joining, the link to the server is here. I also frequently post snippets and memes in the discussion channels. Hope to see you there!

📝 MASTERLIST ⎮📖 AO3 ⎮☕️ KO-FI

[gingernut1314]

Sack of Potatoes ch. 3

Summary: You messed with the wrong gang and just as you think you've lost, a familiar face comes to your rescue.

Content: female reader, gendered terms, pre-season 1 arcane, introduction to Vander, Canon typical violence (description of being jumped), young Silco, young Vander, young reader, the boys come to your rescue, slight Arcane season 2/League of Legends spoiler (Janna)

Word Count: 2.9K

A/N: Okay, so I've kind very loosely planed things out and there is only going to be one more chapter as them as teens and then we are officially aging up! I hope you all enjoy!!

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You had royally fuck up. 

More so than usual, which was saying something because you had a tendency to fuck up on a daily basis. But today, gods, today you’d pissed off the wrong gang of Undercitians. A group known to put fourteen-year-olds six feet under for fun. 

What had you done, exactly? Well, this gaggle of idiots tended to take trophies from whoever they terrorized, and one item in particular had caught your eye instantly. 

In lack of better words, it was pretty and shiny and you wanted it. 

And it had been too easy to steal it off them. Some would say they deserved to have had it stolen just for that fact alone. 

You cut sharply down a crowded road, pushing and shoving people out of your way. The gang was too close for your liking. You could clearly make out every curse and insult they threw your way. 

If you could just get to the docks, you could take them head-on without fear, but you were in the heart of the city and nowhere near the docks. 

Just as you made to push out of the crowd and run into any building you could get into, a pair of hands grabbed you around the waist. You screamed, but a hand was shoved over your mouth before you could really get a strong bellow out. 

“Thought you could get away, you fucking cunt.” The guy who’d grabbed you hissed gleefully. 

You were dead. Oh gods you were so dead. 

“I caught our little fishy!” He shouted, his gang throwing up wicked laughs as he dragged you away. You wriggled and thrashed and kicked about, trying desperately to get away, but it was no use. He was stronger than you by a mile. 

You were going to endure a slow, truly horrible death all because you’d wanted something shiny. Because your greed had gotten the best of you. 

Weak! Pathetic!

If only you had listened to Janna. If only you stayed put when she told you to stay put. Of only you had stayed in the dunk little cave you called home and practiced your magic like she said.

Stupid. So, so stupid. 

You were dragged down a dark alley and thrown roughly to the ground. The skin on your hands and knees split, but you pushed the pain down and got up as fast you could muster.  

Get away. 

You needed to get away-- 

“Where do you think you're going little fishy?” You screamed as another pair of hands grabbed you, Before you could even throw a punch, you were shoved into one of the brick walls of the alley, nose giving a blood-curdling crunch. The pain made it so you could only give a pathetic whimper. 

If there was anything you hated more than enforcers or fancy Piltover pansies or gaggles of foul-smelling boys, it was breaking your nose.

More hands grabbed you, tossing you against the wall, to the ground, and into more awaiting hands. Hands that grabbed at you shirt and hair. Everything was happening so fast. Too fast for you to get a hold of yourself and fight back. 

Weak!

There was no hope of being rescued, you knew that. 

In The Lanes, it was kill or get killed. Fend for yourself and expect nothing from anyone. 

And Janna was nowhere near the city right now, her winds having been called back to the sea for some reason unknown to you.

It was over--your life. Over when it had only truly just begun. 

“Giving up so quickly, fishy?” One of the cruel boys teased, grabbing a fist full of hair and pulling you to your feet. A small, sad sound escaped your lips. “We’re not done playing yet.” The guy, who was as butt ugly as you could get, got right up in your face. His yellow teeth were on display for your eyes and yours eyes only. His breath was so vulgar it nearly made you puke. 

“I think,” You gasped out, “you need a breath mint.” 

Rotting teeth did not like that. 

The guy dealt a swift punch to your temple, your knees nearly giving out from under you but you fought too damn hard to keep yourself up.

Gods , your vision was getting spotty. You tried to blink the blackness away, but it only made it worse. 

“You little whore. You’re gonna--” 

“That’s not a very kind thing to say to a lady.” A voice spoke from behind you and the gang. 

It was a voice you’d heard before…but your mind was too foggy to truly pinpoint it. 

“Don’t you know not to stick your nose in our fucking business?” One of the gang memebers hissed. 

“If you can call beating a kid to death business.” The voice said something else but your hearing was faded in and out. 

Child?

You were not a child. 

Suddenly, you were thrown to the ground, pain flaring in your elbow as more skin was ripped open. If you made it out of this, you were going to be in pain for days.  

And to top your horrid day off, you landed in something wet. Something you prayed to any god listening was just street water and not piss. 

Shouting filled your ears, but faded out in seconds. 

Shit, that couldn’t be good. 

The screaming and your hearing loss. 

Get up, get up! Your fogging mind screamed at you. It was the only thing you could hear anymore, so you were inclined to listen. 

With gritted teeth, you struggled to get to your hands and knees, your open wounds screaming almost as loudly as your brain was. Before you could shove to your feet, a pair of hands grabbed you under your armpits, trying to get you up.

No, no, no! Not again! They’ll kill you!

And you found you really, really didn’t want to die. 

You clenched your fist and swung without a second thought. 

Knuckles collided with someone's jaw. 

Pain flared in your fingers brightly. 

You’d fucking broken them --gods damn it!

The person, a man by the sound of it, gave a grunt, his grip on you loosening. You ignored the new pain in your hand and wiggled out of your captor’s grip, falling back to the ground in the process. 

Someone was saying something, but you couldn’t make it out past the pounding of your heart and buzzing of your ears.

Your vision slowly started to fill with color again just as another pair of hands placed themselves on your shoulder. 

“--ts me! It’s me, remember?” 

That voice. You knew that voice. You liked that voice.

And that voice was calling your name. You didn’t just give your name out to anyone and the only person you had given it to in the past few months was…

You blinked rapidly, turning to look at the boy who was calling your name. 

Long, dark hair attached to a thin, sharp face. A face that bore two blue-green eyes.

Seafoam eyes.

“Silco?” Your voice came out cracky and hoarse from all the screaming you’d done. The boy nodded, thin lips set in a frown. 

“Yes.” You looked back towards the alley you’d been dragged into, finding bodies sprawled out down the tiny space. Some of the bodies looked like they’d been beaten to hell and have one hell of a headache when they woke up. But the other bodies--they didn’t move or breathe and sat in pools of red. 

What the hell…had--had Silco done that? 

Why?  

Why the hell was he here? 

Better yet, why the hell would he risk his life to save yours? 

Your heart gave a painful twist in your chest. 

What if he was here to finish you off? 

You pulled yourself out of Silco’s grip, all but throwing yourself at the closest brick wall. All your wounds screamed at you to stop, be you had to keep moving. 

“What are you doing?” Silco asked, seemingly unamused. You hissed through your teeth and pulled your feet under you, using the wall as support. “You’re just going to hurt yourself further.” 

“What the fuck does it matter to you?” You snapped, taking Silco in again. He had stood back to his full height, a smirk on his thin face. 

He found this funny. 

“You’d think she’d be more appreciative, seeing as we saved her life.” He spoke, but he wasn’t talking to you. No, what you had failed to take in was the other guy standing in the alley with Silco, rubbing his jaw. A tall, hulking guy who could no doubt squeeze the life out of you with little to no effort.  

“Throws a mean punch, I’ll give her that.” The gigantic man’s his voice was warmer than that of Silco’s. Not that Silco’s voice wasn’t nice. You much preferred it over this stranger’s. 

“Who the fuck is that?” Silco ran a hand through his longer hair, casting a glance toward the other guy. 

“I’m Vander. A friend.” The other guy spoke, seeming to try and come off as unintimidating as he could. It was working, but only a bit. Like--a hair’s width bit. 

“Why were those halfwits after you, anyhow?” Silco asked, changing the subject off his friend quickly. You sniffed sharply, your nose so clogged with blood it was a struggle to breathe. 

You’d have to fix that quickly before it healed crooked. 

You reached into your jacket pocket, pulling the golden flask you’d stolen out. Silco caught it with ease when you tossed it his way, though his eyes widened like it might explode.

You nearly laughed, remembering the last time he saw you throw a flask. A flask that had exploded. 

“They stole that off some rich guy from Piltover. I thought it was an okay replacement for the one I broke.” 

“Wait--this is the girl that chipped your teeth?” Vander gave a deep laugh that lifted your spirits near instantly. You looked back to Silco whose lips were purposely glued shut, his arms crossed. He was the embodiment of annoyance.

“You’re kidding?” 

“Made a V shape and everything.” You all but slapped a hand over your mouth, a small laugh escaping your lips. 

“Need I remind you I just saved your ass.” Silco seethed, giving you a direct look at his front teeth. 

They were chipped, alright. In that same V shape Vander had said. 

You let out a chest-rumbling laugh you couldn’t have helped stop even if you had wanted to. A laugh that had most, if not all, of your wounds barking at you again. Vander joined in with a bellowing laugh right alongside you. 

“Holy shit! Oh gods, that’s horrible.” You spoke, trying to stifle your laugher. Silco’s face flushed red and his eyes narrowed. He was pissed now. “I guess I owe you more than some fancy flask, huh?” 

“Oh, you owe me for more than my teeth. I just saved your life.” Vander walked over then, slapping Silco on the shoulder. 

“Come on, brother, don’t be like that. We’re just having a little fun.” Silco gruffed, shrugging Vander’s hand off his shoulder sharply. 

“Well, I don’t share in your amusement.” 

“I know, I know,” A bright smile pulled to his lips, “How about we get a look at you, yeah?” He asked, turning his attention back on you. 

Your heart twisted in your chest again and you tried to stand straight. Tried to look like you weren’t some weak, pathetic little creature.

He isn’t going to hurt you. He just helped save your life for god's sake! But as Vander got closer, you couldn’t ignore the fear that burst from your chest. 

“Thank you, really, but I can manage on my own,” You stumbled out a bit too quickly, trying to push off the wall to walk away. Your knees nearly gave out again and you fell back to the wall with a frustrated hiss. 

“You can hardly stand on your own. My father owns The Last Drop, just over there. We’ll get you patched up and you can be on your way.” You cut a look over to Silco who was still sulking behind Vander. When he noticed you looking his way, his eyes narrowed in that calculating, all-seeing way they had when you’d first met him.

“Vander, you’re scaring the kid.” He briskly made his way over to you.

“I’m not a kid.” You hissed as Silco came to a stop before you. 

“I feel as though we’ve already done this.” He extended his hand for you to take. You eyed it, then Vander, who smiled your way, before your gaze landed back on Silco. His eyes hadn't left you. Not even once .

“Nothing is going to happen to you. Not with us around. Promise.” Silco softly said. 

It shocked you, his tone. Though you didn’t know him in the least, you could tell just by the look on Vander's face this wasn’t a regular occurrence. 

But what did that mean? Was it something to worry about?

You pushed your thoughts down as your pain began to bubble up once more. You really needed to sit down and these two didn’t seem horrible . 

Hesitantly, you reached out your unhurt hand. 

Silco was quick to change his position to accommodate this, taking your hand up in his steady one. He gave a kind nod, pulling your arm over his shoulder and wrapping his other around your waist.

Damn-- he may be built like a sting bean but there was muscle under those clothes of his. Muscles you could feel work as they helped you along. 

Your nose took another clogged inhale of breath and you felt your heart untwist and flutter against your ribs. 

It was very hard for anyone in The Lanes to smell good, thanks to the overall nasty atmosphere. It was very rare to come across anyone who didn’t smell like the polluted air they all lived in, but Silco-- Gods he smelled good. Fresh. Like he’d been able to take a shower recently.

It almost had you forgetting about all your aches and burning pains until he started all but pulling you back down the alley. 

“OW! Fuck ! You could try to be gentle .” You whined, grabbing a fistful of his jacket and tugging like he might stop him.

“Oh, would you stop your complaining?” Silco huffed. “This is me being gentle.”

“I’m a complainer . I complain.” You huffed right back at him. 

“I can tell.” Silco was quick to shoot back. A quick response that stirred a sort of-- excitement in your chest. There were very few people who didn’t find your ability to go on and on annoying. Very few that did this sort of--back-and-forth. A back-and-forth Silco was and had engaged with you. 

You wondered for a moment if he was annoyed. If he would tell you to shut up and drop you right back into the bloody alley and leave you there.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have to complain if you weren’t dragging me along like I was a sack of potatoes.” You continued.

“Might as well be a sack of potatoes.” 

“I have dense bones.” 

“I can tell.” You have a mockingly offended gasp.

“I’ll have you know my dense bones are a veryyy sensitive topic to me.” Silco gave a scoff that sounded more like a stifled chuckle. 

“Wasn’t it you who compared yourself to a sack of potatoes?” 

“I don’t remember that.” Silco shook his head in that same held-back amusement. “I bet your bones are brittle. Like a strong wind would knock you right over.” 

“I’ll have you know my brittle bones are a very sensitive topic to me.” You pressed your lips together tightly, trying your hardest not to let the laughter bubbling in your chest out. But the longer you held it in, the more it leaked out in sharp pfftted spurts. 

“O-oh yeah?”

“Oh yes.” Silco continued, a glimmer in his eyes that made it all the more difficult to not burst into laughter. “Ever since I was a child people would point out my brittle bones. And here you are now, doing the same.” He gave a mocking forlorned shake of his head. “After I just saved your life as well.”

“I didn’t need saving.” 

“Oh really?” You nodded matter-of-factly.

“Really. I was this close to getting the upper hand.” You showed just how close with your hurt fingers, wincing at the pain that shot through your hand at the movement. “You ruined my plans.” 

“Well forgive me. Shall I stop carrying you too?” 

“If my dense bones are a hindrance then be my guest. I can walk on my own.” 

“I doubt that.” 

“I can . Be better than getting dragged around so brutishly.” Laugher filled your ears. Not Silco’s laughter which you were so close to hearing again, but a deep, bellowing laugh. You turned your head just as Silco did to find Vander there. You’d almost forgotten all about the hulking man. 

“What’s so funny?” Silco shot his way. Vander merely held his hands up as if to ward off his friend. 

“Oh nothin’, nothin’.” Vander gave Silco a look you couldn’t quickly figure out. A look that had Silco’s cheek grow a bit of a pinkish hue.

You were once more annoyed at your inability to fully grasp all emotions and silently cursed Janna and her near-robotic ways. 

You watched Silco grit his teeth Vander’s way, that pink hue only deepening when he glanced your way and found you watching him closely.

You liked that color on him. You liked it very much.

Previous | Next

[danikamariewrites]

Hi I hope it’s ok if i request this you really don’t have to do it. But a Xaden riorson fluff and angst where the reader gets really hurt but they are trying to help people so she hides it from Xaden and when he finds out he’s really mad at her but he’s really just scared of losing her and hates seeing her hurt with a happy ending. I hope this is ok and there is no pressure to do this I completely understand if you don’t want to.

My Greatest Fear

Xaden Riorson x reader

Note: I haven’t written for Xaden in so long, I’ve missed him. I’m so ready for Onyx Storm and I kind of want to do something to celebrate. Should I do a countdown with fics for each FW boy for the week leading up to the books release? I hope you like this fic anon and thanks for requesting :)

Warnings: mentions of blood, injuries, and stitches

More than anything you want to sneak away from the crowded hall. To blend in with the shadows of Riorson House and limp away to your bedroom. Clutching your side you skillfully dodge riders, healers, and everyone in between.

“Y/n! Can you assist over here?” Violet calls to you, her arms full of bandages. You meet her pleading gaze, putting on a generous smile and nodding as you make your way over to her. The slash on your ribs can wait. Others with worse injuries need help.

Pulling the laces of your vest tighter with shaking hands you take the bandages from Violet to help distribute them. “Thank you,” Violet breathes out. She rushes off to take another box from Liam, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek.

A small sigh escapes your lips at the sight, making you wonder where your own boyfriend is. Xaden wasn’t among the injured, not that he would ever let himself be seen like that thanks to the Colonel’s words in the last Assembly meeting. But this wyvern attack has been the worst one yet. Healers are still bringing people in and you don’t want to thank the gods until you lay eyes on an unharmed Xaden.

————

After an hour you were exhausted and light headed. The more you felt the cut on your side dripping blood the tighter you pulled your vest, hoping to keep your skin together. Slumping on the ground you rest for a moment.

Taking deep breathes you try to focus on the chaos around you, tuning out the pain.

Opening your eyes you see Liam staring down at you, a worried look on his face. “Hey,” he says softly. “Xaden is back and asking for you.” Your heart picks up at the mention of your boyfriend.

“Is he ok?” Liam smiles at you. “Of course he is. He’s Xaden.”

You chuckle, “Don’t let him hear you say that. It’ll go right to his head, it’s already big enough.”

Liam holds his hand out to help you. You brush him off, using the wall to help you stand. Liam eyes you as you take a shaky breath. Pulling yourself together you do your best not to limp toward Xaden. You can feel Liam’s gaze burning on the back of your head at your slow movements.

Whipping around — as slowly as possible — you scowl at him. “Stop it. Are you coming or not?” You snarl. Liam holds his hands up in surrender, hurrying his steps to catch up with you.

Stepping into the throne room you take another steadying breath, using the wall to help keep your balance. As leaders of the rebellion mingle, discussing the wyvern and Venin, your eyes immediately find Xaden. You let out a sigh of relief at the sight of him unharmed.

Before you can make your way to him Liam waves him over.

The first thing Xaden notices is how pale you look along with the dark spot growing on the side of your uniform. He wordlessly reaches for your ribs, watching for your reaction. Your hand flys out to grasp his wrist. Your grip weak. “Don’t,” you whisper harshly.

“What’s wrong?” You shake your head. You’re struggling to breathe now. Xaden looks to Liam for answers but all his brother can do is shrug, mirroring his worry.

Your other hand grips Xaden’s bicep as hard as you can. “I can’t…I need,” Xaden holds you closer to his body. His hand gently touching your side. You hiss at the contact and try to push Xaden away. “What do you need baby?”

You don’t know what happened after that. When you blacked out all you heard was Xaden yelling for help and your vest being ripped apart.

When you came to the dizzy feeling is still with you. You try to sit up but a large hand on your shoulder stops you. “Don’t even,” the worry clear in Xaden’s voice. You stare up at him with big eyes, remaining flat on the bed.

Xaden sits on the edge of the bed with a huff. He looked like he was struggling not to scold you. “Why?” Is all he asks.

You knew what he meant. Why walk around tending to the injured when you were bleeding out. Truthfully, you knew it was bad. The Venin you went hand to hand with fought nasty.

“Colonel Gerault yelled at me last time, saying leaders shouldn’t look weak even if we feel weak. You know how he gets about image. Violet needed help and so did our other riders. I needed to know they were ok before I asked for help.”

Xaden let out a deep sigh, annoyed with your selflessness. He rolled his neck while simultaneously clenching his jaw. The tension this man holds in his whole body is astounding. “That’s not true and you know it.”

The two of you sit in silence for a while as Xaden contemplates his next words.

He gently holds your hand, running his thumb across your knuckles. “Do you know what the biggest loss in this war would be to me?” You shrug as the possibilities run through your mind knowing Xaden can hear your thoughts.

With each passing thought his frown deepens. “Not this house, not my dragon, or my father’s legacy. It’s you, sweetheart. You would be the greatest loss for me. I can replace a house and all that other shit. But there is no replacing you.”

A tear escapes down your cheek. Squeezing Xaden’s hand you give him a sad smile. “I need you.” He whispers, leaning down to press a kiss to your forehead. “I’m sorry.”

Xaden shakes his head. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, baby. I just need you to get better.” You hold out your pinky for him. Your sacred tradition when making sure one sticks to their word. “Promise.”

He wraps his pinky around yours before adding, “And, you will stay in bed until that wound is fully healed.” You open your mouth to protest but Xaden gives you a look, lifting your entwined fingers. Showing that you are bound to do as he wishes while you’re hurt.

“Fine.” You agree begrudgingly. “Thank you.” He drops your finger, pressing another kiss to your head, then your lips. You grab the back of his head to deepen the kiss. Xaden moans at the feeling of your tongue swiping against his bottom lip. After a few more minutes of passionately making out Xaden pulls away.

You whine at the lack of lip contact. “You need to rest. If we do what I want to do you’re going to need new stitches.” He smirks at you. “Guess I better get to healing.”

[newkatzkafe2023]

Hello! So sorry if this is a useless request. Just gathered the courage to give my first ask. Can you please do one similar to a show called the ghost and Molly McGee, where the genderbent us accidentally cursed ourselves to stay with them for life 🥺❤️

HEY NOW Never call your request useless, if I can't do a request I'll will tell you privately, but in other news...I LOVE THE GHOST AND MOLLY MCGEE🤩🤩🤩

(Lmk) I can't believe your all mine🎶🎵🎶🎵🎶🤩

(M/n) What?🤨

(Lmk) you and me for all time🎶🎵🎶🎵🥰

(Lmk Wukong) You met her during her journey to the west, and her dumba** master and the pilgrims decided to stay at your abandoned house. You spent nights terrorizing those guys, but frustradingly, Wukong is the only one not scare of you, infact she giggled in your face. The final straw was when you tried to jump scare her, but instead, she kissed you, you swear that you would torture her for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, you put that vow in a spell form, and when they finally left, you found yourself being dragged around and following Wukong. You both were confused until you remembered what you said earlier, and before you knew it, Wukong was so stoked, and it was too late for you😨

(M/N) ugh🙄😒

(NR) I'm never ever ever gonna be alone again🎵🎶🎵🎶🎵🥳

(M/n) Oh man😨

(NR) Lovebirds you and me😍

(NR Wukong) Ohhhhhhhhhh god this a extremely hellish situation, that women did nothing but chirp and flirt with you in a club you would often hang out in. You would use your ghost abilities to try and scare her off but it did nothing but make her purr at your sharp teeth and claws. Wukong would never leave you be despite your best efforts, so you decided you want me so bad how about you deal with me scaring you for the rest of your life! Unfortunately you dug your second gave when you found that you bounded yourself to her like a freaking noob and now your stuck with her flirting and making moves on you🤦‍♂️

(M/n) For all eternity??😰

(MKR) FOR ALL ETERNITY!!!!!!!!👿

(MKR Wukong) She's just as pissed about this as you are about this whole situation. She yelled at you for hours on end and you would argue back at her. This all started when that woman and her friends crashed at your house, unknowing to them that you lived there and wasted no time scaring pigsy and sandy right out the house but the monk was annoying and Wukong in not scared of you but you did make her angry. You both would get into huge fights until you got so upset that you vowed to make her suffer in fear forever and unfortunately for both of you, the vow was a curse and now you really are stuck together for all eternity 😰

(Both) it's the ghost, it's the ghost and the monkey queen 🎶🎵🎶🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️

(M/N) We've been cursed its the worst😫

(HIB Wukong) Oh jeez, well, this is annoying. You thought you could scare her, but you're apparently the least scariest demon she's ever met. This pissed you off and when out of your way to find different things to scare her with, but most of her looks and reactions are like are you done yet??😐🤨 The final straw was her brushing you off and humiliated you, so you created a spell to make you become Wukong's worse nightmare but unfortunately for both of you. You had cursed you both to be together forever.

(Netflix) Now your stuck with me🥰

(Both) We're never gonna be a part😊😮‍💨

(Netflix Wukong) Ohhhhhhhhhh man. She's way too happy about this, a cute guy she can brag and flaunt her achievements and skills to. Well that is if you cared about anything she was saying to you, she's annoying, vain, and never shuts up at all. So the next best thing you did was try to scare her away from you, but unfortunately it seems she's to dumb to be scared of you and you finally had it. You finally had enough and vowed to scare Wukong and make her life miserable. Well that was until your vow turned into a curse and Now your both technically Married to each other forever now.

(M/n) is their a way to hit restart?🎶🎶🎵🎶😓

(BMW) Nope😃

(Both) We're the ghost, ghost and the monkey Queen🎶🎵🎶🎵🎶🎶😮‍💨😄

(BMW Wukong) OH GOD DAMN IT YOU HAVE A BETTER CHANCE OF SCARYING ERLANG THEN YOU DO WITH HER. She's so irritating and loud and never wants to leave you alone, she's always boasting and flirting. Worse of all no matter how many times you turned around and roar at her with your unhinged jaw and all, all she did was just purr and kiss your face. That's when in a fit of anger, embarrassment and frustration you had cursed yourself to stay with her forever, which you really wish you can take back. Though she seems to be really, really into it😳

(D.O) that's me🙂

(M/n) Well that's she🙃

(Destined one) You are no more than an annoying chittering voice on the side of her head. She and Bajie met you when she made camp by your old abandoned manner, and ever since then, you made bajie have at least 3 heart attacks and have 5 strokes but the destined one certainly been a fair challenge. So until you have finally made the destined one scream, you have vowed to be by her side and make her suffer for all eternity. Well, that was the goal, but had two little booboos. First you had accidentally curse yourself to be stuck with her forever, and the second being, you actually started to like her.

The Ghost Husband and the monkey Queen🎵🎶🎵🎶🎵🎶👻👸😅🥰

FEEL FREE TO REBLOG

[bellysoupset]

Max Meeting The Gang

"A whole weekend?" Max raised his eyebrows, watching the football practice as if he understood a single thing about the game. Next to him, Vince was his perfect opposite, actually enthralled by it all and occasionally cheering.

Vince was wrapped up in a cardigan on top of his sweater and he hadn't shaved in a couple days, so his perpetual five o'clock shadow had leveled up into a full beard. He still looked pale and gaunt from that horrible flu bout, despite more than a week having passed since. Frankly, Max had been surprised when Vince showed up to his classes on Tuesday, instead of taking the day off.

"Yeah, we leave Friday after class and come back Sunday night," Vince answered, waving to his sister as the cheerleaders entered the field, "it'll be fun, Max."

"I don't know, Vince," Max shrugged, rolling his eyes as he saw a bunch of girls look in his direction and start to giggle, "they're your friends, not mine."

"Yeah, that's how you make new friends," Vince reached in and squeezed his nape in affectionate manner, shoving Max slightly, "you know my girlfriend already, that's two."

Max crossed his arms, chewing on his bottom lip, "I guess... I'll think about it."

"Well, don't think too hard, I need to know by Thursday because I'm grocery shopping before heading there," Vin shivered violently, pulling his cardigan tighter around himself and Max eyed him worriedly, but didn't say anything, "if it's anything, I think you'll really like them."

That wasn't what concerned Max. Vince clearly was really really close with his friends, if anything they seemed more like family than just friendship, and Max had a weird fright deep in his guts, like he was just about to meet Vince's parents. Not that it made any sense, he had never been the type to meet the parents of the people he dated, he knew Mr. and Mrs. Monacelli already and, oh yeah, he was not dating Vince.

However the fear was the same, that he was going to meet Vince's friends, they'd decide they hated him, and he'd kiss his friendship with Vin goodbye.

"Get out of your head," Vince jabbed his elbow in Max's tummy, not too hard, "it's going to be fun... I'd like if you came."

And really, did Max ever stand a chance against such words?

-------------

Since Max had a car and Vince was going to go grocery shopping beforehand, they decided to go together. Max wasn't so sure about all of this, he wanted to bolt and his stomach was churning with nerves, but Vince was making a damn good job of making sure he couldn't, like by riding along with him.

"VIN!"

Max looked up in time to see a blur of dark hair and then Wendy was tackling her boyfriend into a hug, kissing his face all over, "oh my god, you look horrible," she whined mid kisses and Vince chuckled, planting her down on the ground.

"Thanks?"

"You look so pale, doesn't he look pale, Max?" Wendy cupped her boyfriend's face, "this is like the third stomach flu you had in six months, I'm putting you in quarantine."

Vince laughed at that, wrapping his arms around Wendy and giving her a hug from behind, pressing a kiss to her temple, "you sound like my mom, honey."

Wendy let out a little scoff at that, but it vanished quickly as her green eyes paused on Max and her pout melted into a smile, "hey, I'm so happy you decided to come," she perked up to give him a hug, leaving him stunned.

Max's whole face was a shade of red, when the front door of the cabin opened and a group of people stepped out. He recognized Vince's friend, Luke, immediately, the one with dark wavy hair and just as tall as Vin was. He was chatting with two other men, who were holding hands and clearly a couple.

"Guys!" Vince called out their attention, "Max, these are Luke, Leo and Jon. Guys, this is Daniels," he introduced them with a smile and Max wanted to shrink in his shoes. He felt clammy and nauseous all of sudden, but forced up a lopsided smile that communicated he wasn't so anxious he could vomit.

The man Vince had pointed out as Jon, raised a hand, all smooth and formal, "nice to meet you, Daniels."

"Just Max," he cleared his throat, shaking Jonah's hand and then Leo perked up to do the same, although he looked much more friendly than his boyfriend.

Luke didn't shake his hand at all, only offered him a tight smile, "hi Max."

"Where's Bell?" Vince asked, frowning and squeezing Max's shoulder, "oh there she is."

Max followed Vince's gaze and then raised his eyebrows as he saw a stunning ginger getting out of the house. She was wearing a black bikini top and jeans shorts, curly hair falling like a mane around her face and Max's jaw all but dropped.

He stepped aside in order not to be stepped on by her, as Bella apparently didn't even register him before tackling Vince with a hug. She squeezed him tightly, murmuring in a strained voice, "I've missed you."

Then her eyes landed on Max and she raised her eyebrows, scrutinizing him, "that's Daniels?"

"In the flesh," he answered before he could think better of it and she seemed momentarily surprised she had asked that out loud and that he had answered. Bella measured him up and down, then smiled.

"I thought you'd be taller."

"Well, this isn't awkward at all," Vince teased, while Wendy wrapped an arm around his waist and laughed, "let's go inside the house."

Max was more than a little dizzy with the amount of information he had to absorb in such a short time. Vince and Wendy shared a room upstairs, as well as Jonah and Leo. Downstairs, Luke and Bella had the third room and Max was delegated to the sofa bed, in the living room — which he didn't mind in the least but still made a big show of complaining about, just because he enjoyed watching Vince fumble over himself in search of a solution.

"You're mean," Leo whispered, leaning in his direction, as Vince continued to try and argue with Jonah and Luke that they should all draw straws.

"I prefer fun," Max retorted, smiling back at the other man, "so how long have you known Vince?"

"Since his first week of college," Leo shrugged, resting his back against the kitchen counter, crossing his arms to his chest, "he came to college already in the team, but I was doing try outs. Adopted me on the spot."

"And here I was feeling special," Max rolled his eyes, "he does that a lot?"

"Adopt strays? Not as much as Luke does," Leo let out an amused huff as his boyfriend told Vince he was not switching room and that was final, "not you though, he hates you."

"Couldn't have guessed," Max snorted, as if he could ignore the way Lucas was all stiff around him or the over the top PDA he was displaying with his wife simply because Max had looked at Bella.

"He's just jealous that Vince likes you," Leo shrugged, patting Max's arm, "it'll wear off by the end of the weekend, Luke can't hold a grudge."

Across the kitchen, Luke said something in a low, snappy voice that caused Jonah's eyebrows to jump and Vince to frown, shutting his mouth in a tight line.

"Maybe we should intervene?"

"Nah, let them hash it out," Bella's said, pushing herself between them and resting her back comfortably against Leo's arm. She was holding a beer and looking Max up and down like he was a zoo animal, "so how long you were in?"

"Jesus, Bell, you can't just ask people that," Leo exclaimed, while Max let out an amused snort. He hadn't ever told Vince that he had done time, so he wondered how she knew this.

"Just two days, protest arrest," Max answered, but never quite started that conversation, since Wendy wrapped a hand around his wrist and tugged at it, all the while saying loudly:

"Enough with the gossiping, we were all gonna go in the lake."

He did not, in fact, want to go in the lake. Ever since the day before his stomach had been a mess, which Max was chalking up to nerves, and he felt weirdly self conscious of stripping before this group, when his belly was sticking out, bloated and crampy.

Still, it was a warm, sunny day out and he had no excuse not to go in. He paced around the shore, as Bella raced Wendy down the pier and they both jumped, followed by Luke and Leo, the blonde spluttering up water and pushing his hair back as he yelled, "c'mon guys! Jon!"

Jonah was all smooth, unlike his friends who still behaved like kids, he took his time to strip and neatly fold his clothes, before walking into the lake instead of jumping from the pier.

"Aren't you gonna get in?" Vince patted Max's shoulder and the man shrugged, feeling horribly out of place.

"I don't know about this whole weekend, man," he started to complain, but Vin cut him off with a dramatic gesture. He always talked with his hands, really not helping the stereotype.

"You haven't been here for an hour," he said with a heavy sigh, kicking off his shoes, "if you still wanna leave by night, I'll drive you back, alright?"

Sounded good enough, even if Max felt a pang of guilt at the idea of Vin wasting another 3 hours of his weekend by driving Max back to Doveport, then back again to the cabin.

"Alright-" he stripped off his shirt, wincing slightly when his stomach let out a nauseated growl and rolled, breakfast sitting like a fucking brick.

Next to him, Vince stripped his shirt and threw it on top of Jonah's carefully folded pile, messing it up and causing the man to shout all the way back from the lake, "VINCE!"

"C'mooon, get in, Vin! Max!" Wendy squealed, drowning Jonah's shout and climbing on his back so she could have some leverage. She was the shortest of the group and while Luke was standing on solid ground, Wendy was panting as she struggled to keep her head afloat.

Max let his eyes wander, roaming over the expanse of Vince's naked back and biting down a dreamy sigh. By now he had seen Vin shirtless - and fully naked, thanks to the recent flu from hell - more than he ever thought he would. Still, the guy was a vision.

He removed his own shirt and grimaced at his stomach, wondering if it was visible to anyone else how upset the organ was, then dumped his wallet and cell on top of his shirt and kicked off his shoes, joining the group.

The water felt extremely cold against his skin and he shivered violently, letting out a string of curses when Vince promptly dunked his head in the water as soon as Max was close enough.

He came up spluttering and cursing, only for Wendy to be smiling at him and shut him up easy like that, "Welcome to the group, Max," she whispered in his ear and Max opened his mouth to reply, only for Bella to dive and tug at his feet, causing him to go underwater once again.

[babybluebae-933]

I haven’t heard a word you’ve said, and… I’ll get you to Vulcan somehow.

One day I will write an entire essay about this moment but for now this is all I have in me.

This is the kindest thing Kirk could have said to Spock in this moment, and it shows how well Kirk knows him. He doesn’t try to convince him that he shouldn’t be embarrassed about it (well he does at first, Vulcans are not the birds and the bees captain) he doesn’t try to convince him to be logical about it. Being embarrassed is SO illogical and Spock fucking knows that and reminding him of that fact would only make it worse.

He literally begs to be locked away, he begs Kirk to basically take him out back and put him out of his misery old yeller style. SPARE him the indignity of explaining himself to anyone or being subjected to the will of his own deep dark desires and motives. Kirk orders him to explain and Spock says no that some things transcend even the discipline of the service (then Kirks like ok what if I pinky promise I won’t tell and Spocks like ok fine, which is also so cute but a whole other thing) either way it’s obvious he would literally rather die than tell anyone what’s going on, and he’s actively trying to run away from it.

I thought I would be spared the indignity… but the ancient drives are too strong, eventually it catches up.

This is why Kirk is so special, and this is why he understands Spock better than anyone else. Humans have pride, humans have ego. Spock decided to live the Vulcan way and swear off all that stuff but it’s still inside him. We can assume one of two things, either he truly never has any emotions, or he has them but won’t show them. And God damn if being that fucking stubborn isn’t the most human thing about him. I can’t remember which episode it is but some other time when a red shirt is laying into him for being so cold and insensitive Bones gets defensive, and Spock says it’s okay doctor-

Sometimes they forget I’m half human too.

You can be half human, but you can’t be half Vulcan, you can’t be “half” emotionless. He would be ashamed to let the mask slip, and he’s ashamed that he would feel shame for this. For showing his human nature, because that is the MOST un-Vulcan thing to do. What do they expect from him? To show his feelings would be humiliating, hiding them gets him ridiculed, they bully him for it, yet no one ever treats him as if he could have any feelings about the matter at hand, whatever it may be.

When Spock is insisting that he never feels such trivial emotions as anger or annoyance or fear he is convincing himself as much as anyone else, that is his comfort. It’s true as long as he and everyone else believes it. It’s his comfort and everyone else’s in some cases; if all else fails we can at least count on Spock being cold and logical.

It’s no use to convince him that he shouldn’t be embarrassed because it’s natural or because it happens to everyone or whatever the reason is; because

Spock knows that already. Biology and nature are factual and neutral

Spock knows that being embarrassed is totally illogical

He also knows that being embarrassed especially about something that IS so natural and normal is super-duper un-Vulcan like

The human side of him is what makes him defend his emotionality (non-emotionality?) with such fervor. Motherfucker is so stubborn and so prideful, so Vulcan, but distinctly human.

To assure Spock “aw it’s okay buddy don’t be embarrassed it happens to everyone!” would be a triple knife; acting like he doesn’t know that the facts of life are neutral, unavoidable, and imminent. Acknowledging that he is embarrassed which is so non-Vulcan. AND telling him how being embarrassed especially about this particular instance is extra illogical.

Kirk gets all that, he knows Spock gets all that, and he sees him for who he really is, not the human side or the Vulcan side, just Spock. So, he gives him a very specific brand of mercy, “None of this ever happened, I saw nothing. But now I at least know enough to help you.”

(If we want to take this further I could also remind you of the Edith Keeler conversation when Kirk basically tells her that “let me help” means more than “I love you”.)

I just love this moment so much and I love them.

[veilkeeper]

The Sacrifice of Souls, Part 2

alt title: why im putting corentin in the torment nexus

this is the second instalment of a 2-part essay series. the first part focused on the events of emmrich's quests, as well as my analysis and critique of his quest line overall. this part will focus specifically on the effects these choices have on the romance, as well as my thoughts on how i'm handling the events for my emmrichmancing rook, corentin.

spoilers ahead! beware that both essays are going to assume you have completed The Sacrifice of Souls and at least one of the follow up quests, Heir to the Dead or Will and Testament. if you have not, i suggest returning to this later and playing it out yourself.

so let's start with the most important question of the day:

what happens to the romance after the sacrifice of souls?

good news! no matter what you pick, the romance can continue on unabated. there's just some long-term details and tone changes that need to be considered.

if you choose to save manfred, be prepared for parenthood. previously, the game had poked at the idea of manfred being emmrich's kid, but now that manfred is talking and progressing at a rapid pace, he is in full "magic-flinging skeleton son" territory, and a romanced rook is going on that journey with emmrich. there is also now a near certainty that rook is going to outlive him—regardless of your personal headcanons, the game assumes that rook is younger than emmrich, and now that he's locked into a mortal lifespan that's something that needs to be considered. especially since, as discussed in part one, emmrich's fears of his own mortality haven't really been addressed at all.

but if you're into co-parenting a rambunctious skeleton with an older, gentlemanly necromancer (which, let's be real, is what most people signed up for when they hit those first flirt options anyway), then this path is probably exactly what you were looking for.

that said, let's talk about the lich romance angle. i was worried when i went down this path that the romance would just immediately end, but it actually doesn't! emmrich certainly wonders if it will—before he undergoes his rites, he has a conversation with rook about how they'll navigate a relationship once he's undead. he says that his senses will change, the way he feels (not about rook, but literally the way he feels) will change, and his body will be different. but they agree they can make it work, so hell yeah.

and if you like the whole "immortal lover" trope, there's some stuff here to like. the lich lords, when you arrive to bear witness to the rites, refer to rook as "challenger of the gods, volkarin's beloved", and emmrich waxes poetic about how even after rook passes, the way he feels about them will be immortalized alongside him. there's also a very sweet kiss before he goes into the rite, and rook has the opportunity to tell him they love him, just in case he doesn't come back out. and afterwards, they have a powerful, immortal skeleton boyfriend, so for the monsterfuckers in the audience.... nice.

so what's the catch?

if you're looking for a fairly unambiguously "happy ending", and if you like the idea of your rook parenting for the foreseeable future, saving manfred is your easy option. on this path, rook and emmrich will have many good years together before he dies. there's absolutely still room for angst here because of emmrich's unresolved issues, but there's definitely a more... domestic, low-key quality to this path.

the lich romance has some pretty glaring obstacles, and that's probably a big part of why a lot of people doing the romance might not pick this. first of all, he wasn't joking, he's literally a skeleton. he can put on a glamour for polite company, but he is a skeleton. realistically, intimacy is going to be complicated by that. on top of that, as a lich for the mourn watch, he's going to have certain duties that he can't get away from. myrna herself asks if they're going to be seeing less of emmrich now that he's a lich, and his answer is basically not yet. at some point, some time in the future, he is going to have to go into the necropolis to begin his lich duties and he won't really be coming back out after. so in a very real way, there is an invisible timer on the relationship where it'll basically be dead in the water unless rook makes some serious lifestyle changes* to accommodate that (assuming they're allowed to). so there's some built in angst with the lich romance that may or may not be your preferred flavour, because his job might end their relationship long before rook's mortal lifespan even becomes a consideration.

*theoretically a mourn watcher rook is going to have an easier time with that particular adjustment, but i'm speaking from my perspective as a LoF rook

decisions, decisions

this is the part where i start talking about my rook, but do us both a favour and keep reading, because believe it or not there is still some emmrich analysis in this part, and it might inspire you to do your own dissection for your rook, too.

so my rook is corentin laidir, and from the moment emmrich said the word "lich" he's been quietly freaking out about it. largely because of the whole "you're going to leave me to be a lich in the necropolis" thing.

i had hoped that resolving emmrich's quest line would give me a very clean solution to the lich freak out issue, and it does! ....if i liked the ending where we save manfred. which i don't. controversial opinion, but i don't actually care about manfred enough for corentin to be his second dad, and from a roleplay perspective i don't think corentin would advocate for bringing manfred back.

but on the other hand, the lich!emmrich option is quite literally corentin's nightmare. what corentin wants, at his core, is for emmrich to accept both manfred's death and his own, whenever it may come. he wants emmrich to understand that running from his own fear of death like that is beneath him. is it honouring death to defy it like that, even (supposedly) in the name of service? corentin would argue no, if he could bring himself to argue with emmrich about anything.

selfishly, corentin is also afraid of what eternity means. sure, emmrich says now that he'll always remember corentin and what they have, but what about a thousand years from now? he's afraid of being replaced, and of becoming insignificant to someone who is so, so important to him right now. in this life.

so the question becomes: do i choose an imperfect, happier ending that maintains emmrich's mortality, or do i throw corentin into an emotional blender?

why i'm putting corentin in the torment nexus

one of the problems of being a creatively-minded person while playing decision-based games is that there comes a time when you have to make a choice:

do i work with the options available to me, or do i pull out my scalpel and gut this thing?

and in moments like this, where neither option is quite right, i have no choice but to get surgical. pick what's interesting, and frankenstein that thing into something that works well enough to carry me to the end.

and the fact of the matter is, the lich path is just more interesting to me in this case because it's an angst machine, and because it makes sense for him to get stuck in it. if i dig into corentin's character, in that exact moment when a decision is made, there's no world where he's going to tell emmrich to give up on his life's work just to bring manfred back and stay mortal. but there is a world where he'd recognize that telling emmrich to give up on his life's work for a guy who loves him who he met five minutes ago is a dick move, and then he'd get completely caught off guard when emmrich says he's going to start preparing for his rites now.

so where does this leave corentin?

here's how i'm handling the situation for the time being, unless something comes along that completely revolutionizes how i feel about all this.

every time emmrich has talked about becoming a lich, it's always been a vague future thing with no real timeline attached. in hindsight, it's pretty clear that the only thing delaying the process was himself—emmrich was uncertain if he was willing to risk the danger of the rites. this uncertainty, however, has left corentin with the impression that even if he was 100% sure and raring to go forward, there would be tests and preparation that needed to happen first, and there would be time before the rites could happen.

so when the question of whether or not to save manfred comes up, corentin does what any good boyfriend would and he tells emmrich that he's dedicated his life to potentially becoming a lich, and he needs to be really certain before throwing that away.

corentin is allergic to being a bummer; even when he's really struggling with something, he feels like he can't talk about it if it'll upset someone else. emmrich is desperately afraid of death, and corentin is desperately afraid of being alone, so he's gotten very good at keeping himself... palatable. so when emmrich responds to his encouragement by saying that he'll start preparing for the rites immediately? well, corentin feels locked into the supportive boyfriend schtick. he feels like he has to be unerringly supportive and not question emmrich's decision, even though it is definitely something that effects him, too.

the whole time emmrich's preparing to become a lich, corentin is thumbs up "you got this babe!"-ing his way through it, all while frantically trying to squash down the feeling of impending doom. because he is 100% completely convinced the other shoe is going to drop at any moment and emmrich is going to go to the Lich Corner Store for cigarettes and never come home.

though it should be noted, the skeleton part of "skeleton boyfriend" is really the least of his concerns. it's just everything around that.

and where does this leave emmrich?

he doesn't know it, but it leaves him with a pretty miserable boyfriend. they're going to have to reckon with corentin's issues at some point.

just like they're going to have to deal with emmrich's. becoming a lich is maybe not 100% a good thing, at least not right this second. he says that he "thought he knew its price," and in keeping with that banter i linked in the first part, he seems unprepared for the reality of losing people. it feels a little like he's rushing into it headfirst before the grief can hit him full force and he can get cold feet.

i'm really curious how he's going to feel if something happens to corentin (or almost happens), and it gives him a reality check on his boyfriend's mortality. losing manfred is already unimaginably hard... is he prepared for what it's going to be like when he loses corentin?

because i don't think he's realized that he isn't, yet.

[have-you-seen-my-sanity]

OI characters with tourette s/o headcanons

This has been a request but I wasn't able to find it again. :(

Poe Dameron: Poe would be the most caretaking of you. This man puts you above anything else, even important meetings with Leia.

Whenever a tourette tic happens, (depending on what the tic is) and how much it may affect the people around you, he will take you into his arms, telling you how nothing should make you feel out of place, especially not your tourette.

If Poe can't be with you at the moment, he would ask BB-8, Finn or Chewie to look out for you. It breaks his heart knowing he can't be with you.

Whenever you feel particularly shy to go under the crowd out of the potential fear of getting weird looks or worse, Poe takes you out for a trip in the Millennium Falcon, visiting all your favorite places and planets.

If Poe and you aren't sharing quarters, he'd send BB-8 into yours for whenever you need some comfort. Ask BB-8 to get Poe and the droid will zip out to get him.

Poe wouldn't spare even a fracture of a second if you'd ask him to stay for the night. Has you in his embrace within a second.

Jake Lockley: Jake fights the urge to pull out a gun everytime he would see people looking at you in the wrong ways.

Jake always carries some meds for you if you think you'd need them.

If some of your tics causes something against him, Jake's face softens, his heart sinks down inside his chest at seeing your regretful gaze looking back at him. Will calm you down, wrapping his arms around you and telling you how strong you are.

Whenever you had a specifically bad day he would drive you around in his cab with comforting music, and if you fall asleep will carry you bridal style back inside your place.

If you think you don't deserve Jake with how good he's treating you, Jake will always prove you wrong, showing you the opposite.

Jake may be the ruthless menace working under Khonshu, but with you he is tame and understanding. Even Khonshu is surprised by how soft Jake could actually be if he really wants to. That stupid god won't understand anyway.

Steven Grant: This man has a whole row of books dedicated to tourette and how it may affects you.

Steven will try his absolute best in making you forget you even have tourette. If you're having your tics(again, depending how strong they are), he slowly calms you down, one hand on your back and the other holding your hand.

“'s okay love, breath with me. Breath. It's going to be alright, 'm here.”

Whenever you're having strong tics or getting looked at, Steven takes you into his arms, wanting nothing more than to shield you.

Just in case, Steven carries your meds and depending if some tics cause even harm to yourself, he has first aid always near him.

He won't get hurt or mad if you insult him because he knows it wasn't your intention to do it, then tries to comfort you.

Marc Spector: He literally is a mix between Steven and Jake. Marc himself has some trouble/drama going on in his life, so seeing you struggling with your tourette is tugging on his heart strings.

Just like Jake, he's ready to throw hands if someone makes a comment about you. Marc hates people insulting others for something they have no control of.

Marc does the same breath in-calm down with you like Steven does, mainly because it helps him with some situations too.

He knows life itself can be a pain in the ass sometimes and your tourette may make things harder, so he's always supportive of you no matter what.

Goes with you to the doctor and makes mental notes of everything that will help you.

Kindly reminds you to take your meds if you haven't already(they all do by the way).

Leto Atreides: Leto will spend 99% of his freetime with you. If he can't, a servant will take care of you, though he prefers to have a doctor near you if something happens.

Leto's guards will keep you safe and make sure no one even gets the thought of saying something bad to you.

The good behaved leader that he is, Leto has strict rules for his guards and servants if you're near them, especially the servants, he wants them to carry the best medicine.

He will always re-schedule his meetings for you, he knows it can be tough for you having those tics, so Leto stays with you all night, all day.

Leto tells his troops to not only defend house Atreides, but also you.

---------------------

Tags:

@nekoyin @steven-grants-world @iolaussharpe-24 @buckyssugarchick @krakenkitty

@deceasedream69 @lunaana-02 @sugarplumz100 @cordeliaelise @mochiitoby

@mooksmouse @my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction @minigirl87 @chaithetics

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[spacedlexi]

i actually love thinking about preS4 vinerva and how their relationship deteriorates throughout the season and how it relates to the clemvi romance and just violets character in general but unfortunately some people cant be normal about them so instead i just gotta keep it to myself

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

this is a tiny pet peeve but i think its kinda odd that people seem to like. forget, or maybe just neglect to take into account, that yellow, for whatever reason (whether he's an alt universe john or a fresh piece of this universe's KIY that kayne went and ripped off) has ALSO been trapped in the dark world prior to being with arthur and has exactly as many Feelings about it. this is a very load bearing character trait imo

[moeblob]

I kinda maybe put a lot of my OC plot tag lines on a Wheel and gave it a spin so outta 79 options, it landed on "Cellphone Justice" which is... these two.

Matthew "Skittles" Mouse and Daisy Eddington

Partners in justice (of sorts). They're basically vigilantes and their orders are simply text messages. They don't really know who their bosses are but they do as they are told.

Skittles is a very mediocre guy. Doesn't stand out. The most color he has in his wardrobe is blue jeans. He's amazingly asexual and has zero interest in romance regardless of intimacy and yet he gets partnered with Daisy. The gayest lady he has ever met. Great start. She enjoys calling him fun little nicknames but seeing as they're monitored closely (via cell phones/technology) she is scolded and told to pick a single one. So she does. She dubs him Skittles. The candy as gay as her.

The one thing they have in common is their number one weakness: cute girls.

Daisy turns into a stuttering MESS of a human being. A disaster. At the mere sight of a cute girl. Skittles on the other hand is TERRIFIED of them. When asked, he simply blames his life growing up. Daisy doesn't really push the matter just thinks it's a little weird to be scared of every single cute girl (no offense to the not being afraid of her taken).

[thatssolavellan]

Oh my god. I finished. I finished the g a m e

I literally JUST finished. So I'm collecting my thoughts rn but I already have some opinions. Some of them need time, but I already have to say: I now understand why so much solavellans had strong feelings for it, but for me, it was good.

(Some late game spoilers under the cut + English is not my first language)

Overall, I like how they managed the Solas/Mythal relationship. It didn't bother me except for the absence of at least a strong citation about the Well of Sorrows, which looked like a huge choice in DAI, and I think it could be included along the Inquisitor's plot. But it's ok for me, I guess. *shrugs*

I think I understand now why that many people got upset. We had 10 years to invest in those characters, and our headcanons are impossible to squeeze in a game which wasn't even about Solas and Lavellan. So, it was impossible to make sense for everyone since they had only one "Solavellan ending". Leaving to go with Solas wasn't a real choice to every Lavellans. I still don't know if I liked it more because it fits my headcanon like a glove, or if I liked it because it is much less tragic that I expected lol (those words from Corinne saying that it would hurt haunted me). But I really think that it was a fair ending for both of the characters.

And, about the ending of the game in general, my biggest surprise was the Varric thing. I got really angry when he didn't die at the prologue after Solas stabbed him. I hate this Gandalf stuff when a major character dies and comes back like a miracle, just for make us suffer then immediately soothing these feelings. So when I found he was actually dead it was really a plot twist - I didn't even imagine it during the game. Same with the character who died with Ghilan'nain (for me, it was Harding).

I really liked all the new characters and the writing in general. Some bits felt kinda "rushed" for me, but not too much. The quest about Solas's regrets was a great way to put new players into the lore and answered everything we needed about what concerned the game. And I found it really fun, like us people digging around the lore and our wild theories in Reddit and here in Tumblr lol

Anyways. I'm relieved the ending didn't totally destroy the characters or put them in a lot of situations which didn't feel true for them. I trusted the work of the writers since the start, but with so many problems during the development (including the awful layoffs), I expected the worst. And I'm glad BioWare sticked with its expertise. As a fan of ME2, I loved the combat, progressions, maps and everything. And the "cartoonized" art style bothered me in the beginning but I kept my mind open, and now I even like it.

(Still hate Hans Zimmer's OST tho. Doesn't even get close to the toes of DAI and Trespasser OSTs.)

And look at her. She's a fucking looker. House de Riva has only the finest 🧑‍🍳👌 Having Viago and Teia made me rush immediately to the Antivan Crows and I'm not disappointed. Being latina I had my share of annoyance with all the stereotypes, but hey... I also really like coffee.

Lucanis's romance was a downer, okay, but it gives us more room to fanfiction lmao (here we go again). I'll cope with it doing a new gameplay and romancing Emmrich >:)

Dragon Age has a special place in my heart forever and I feared for the franchise. So I'm relieved and happy for being here.

Shout out for all us Solavellans. I remember when I saw people mocking us in the fandom for asking for more Solavellan content in the game. Devs, I love you all. Here's for better days in the future.

I didn't even finish the game yet and I almost threw up of anxiety when I was going to meet my inquisitor for the 2nd time. And since I cannot get off Tumblr I already had several spoilers about the ending. Almost regretting asking for all these cameos with Ellana. Boy I'm SO ✨not ready✨ for this

[kraviolis]

with the rising fascism in the world, im not gonna trust any new medias with stories that make the villain an agent of chaos & terror while the hero/es fight to preserve the status quo.

[bunnyb34r]

Still baffling to me how somedays I get a physical ticket at the movies and others I don't

I dont think it's based off of when I use my movie credit, bc I didn't get them most of the times I've used it

But I know I got one for Oppenheimer, I think shrek 2? Idr, and I got one today for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Movie was okay. I mean it was good, but I don't think I'd watch it again. I might see if i can find the previous movies and watch them, bc the overall lore seems cool

Got to cut in line for snacks lol bc there was a middle school class there and the kids were weaving in and out back and forth in line and there was like me and 4 other adults that didnt come with the kids in line. So one of the teachers/chaperones escorted us (by slipping under the rope barrier lmao) to the front which was really nice

I mean I was early early to the show today anyway so I could have waited (would've been annoyed but I'd have waited) but it was really nice. I hope the kids enjoyed their movie day though

[floorpancakes]