#Sprouting temperature

[sproutinglupine]

I finished my temperature chart design for 2024 really early this year! There are 12 vines, one for each month, and the leaves get stitched with a specific color based on the temperature for that day. This mock up uses my Verdant colorway, but there are 3 other colorways that come with the pattern. I'm really excited to stitch my version in 2024!

Weather Vines Temperature Chart Pattern | Sprouting Lupine Shop

[skyedancer-system]

Had an interesting system realization over the last few days because of the weather:

We have WILDLY differing temperature tolerances and honestly it’s hilarious

💥Shadow goes out wearing a light jacket when there’s snow piled up on the ground and it’s kinda windy. He’s perfectly fine walking between classes and just has his hands in his pockets.

I switch in and go out in the same weather the next day wearing a thicker hoodie and FUCKING HELL ITS COLD HOW DID SHADOW DO THIS IN THAT THIN ASS JACKET-

-🍓Sprout (He/It)

[st4rsinthenight]

★help I'm so stupid, today I saw that some vines had out of our potatoes, (which turned out to be sprouts after some googling-) and I was confused and my first dumbass thought- which I asked out loud was 'when did we grow potatoes'. Cause they didn't look like we got them from the grocery store, they looked more like they were ripped from a farmers garden or something. Spoiler alert, there's not possible fucking way we could have grown potatoes as they can't really grow in a small little balcony with just a few of old dusted flower pots. Plus we don't have potato seeds. Help my dumbassness has reached it's peak, I suppose. I don't even know if what I just wrote makes any sense, he-★

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Another List of "Beautiful" Words

to include in your next poem

Avidulous - somewhat greedy.

Breviloquent - marked by brevity of speech.

Compotation - a drinking or tippling together.

Crimpy - of weather; unpleasant; raw and cold.

Desiderium - an ardent desire or longing; especially, a feeling of loss or grief for something lost.

Dyspathy - lack of sympathy.

Ebriosity - habitual intoxication.

Epitasis - the part of a play developing the main action and leading to the catastrophe.

Fantod - a state of irritability and tension.

Graumangere - a great meal.

Grimoire - a magician's manual for invoking demons and the spirits of the dead.

Hiemal - of or relating to winter.

Illaudable - deserving no praise.

Impluvious - wet with rain.

Innominate - having no name; unnamed; also, “anonymous”.

Juberous - doubtful and hesitating.

Noctilucous - shining at night.

Poetaster - an inferior poet.

Psychrophilic - thriving at a relatively low temperature.

Quiddity - the essential nature or ultimate form of something: what makes something to be the type of thing that it is.

Repullulate - to bud or sprout again.

Retrogradation - a backward movement.

Semiustulate - half burnt or consumed by fire.

Tenebrific - causing gloom or darkness.

Unparadiz’d - brought from joy to miserie.

If any of these words make it into your next poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

More: Lists of Beautiful Words ⚜ Word Lists ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[pancakeke]

how is tin's melting point only 230°C / 450°F. that's the temperature I roast brussels sprouts.

[grahtgustin]

Sheet Pan Roasted Chicken Thighs with Brussels Sprouts

Chicken thighs, sausage, and Brussels sprouts are coated and roasted in a seasoned, herbaceous mixture in this easy sheet pan dinner.

[fattyunbound]

Sheet Pan Roasted Chicken Thighs with Brussels Sprouts Chicken thighs, sausage, and Brussels sprouts are coated and roasted in a seasoned, herbaceous mixture in this easy sheet pan dinner.

[spencerjohan]

Sheet Pan Dinner - Sheet Pan Roasted Chicken Thighs with Brussels Sprouts In this simple sheet pan dinner, chicken thighs, sausage, and Brussels sprouts are coated and roasted in a seasoned, herbaceous mixture.

[saerino]

Soft and Tender Brussels Sprouts

Low-temperature roasting of Brussels sprouts results in a soft, tender texture without any charred bits.

[distantdarlings]

OUT OF IT // t. nott

RATING: R / 4.4K WORDS

Theodore Nott x Fem Reader Insert

+ SUMMARY - *Requested - based on this* Theodore Nott has been your best friend for years, but the closeness that you’ve gained throughout your friendship proves to be a little too intimate for the two of you to handle.

+ WARNINGS - SMUT! PIV - no protection, fingering, light nipple play (f!receiving), dirty talk, tension, top!Theo, bottom!Reader, fem reader, language, super NOT proofread (lmk if I missed anything!)

+ MUSIC (listened to while writing) -

Again (Sped Up) - Noah Cyrus

(Okay! So prep for this was super rushed bc I am about to go on vacation and just got done with a ton of work. I’m very sorry this is so quick and frazzled—hopefully you all can look past it. Thanks for your patience.)

- - -

The dimly-lit corridors always felt so cozy around this time of the evening. The skies outside were pitch black and the only form of light was the flickering, honeyed candles mounted to the stone walls every few paces or so. A rather clever spell had been cast on them to keep them from dripping wax all over the floors.

You combed your fingers through your hair, letting the strands slide across your skin. Keeping your hair pinned up always gave you just a bit of a headache, but being able to take it down after classes was a relief like no other. Your fingernails scratched lightly over your scalp in an attempt to reestablish some blood flow throughout.

After a particularly difficult day, you wanted nothing more than to eat a quick dinner and then crash into your bed. You felt as if you’d been going non-stop since waking up this morning with nothing but a bagel and some tea in your stomach for the whole day. You were sure if you spoke to a muggle physician, they’d have some choice words for you. You could practically feel the dark circle sprouting beneath your eyes.

You turned one final candle-adorned hallway before arriving in front of the Great Hall. You arrived on the later side of the allotted dinner times, but you knew the food would stay on the table until the last student who intended to eat arrived. That was part of Hogwart’s lovely charm.

A wave of warmth from the fireplace in the corner washed over you like a blanket. The sudden temperature change brought on a case of chills across your body. A small shudder flowed through you.

Your eyes scanned the table on the far end of the room—its dark wooden surface topped with deep green runners and dishes of food. Sitting alongside the farthest end of the table were the most familiar faces in the entire school. A gentle smile appeared across your lips at the sight of your friends chatting and laughing together.

You approached the table with the same smile painted on. As you drew closer and caught a few eyes, you raised your hand for a polite wave. All of a sudden, you were a bit more awake than you had been.

A set of bright eyes turned and locked with yours, prompting a jolt of energy through your chest. You settled in next to the owner of those special eyes, allowing him to wrap his arm around you and pull you in close.

“How are you, tesoro?” Theo asked, pressing a small kiss to the side of your head.

“It was good. What about you?” you asked. He shrugged and flashed you a smile. He’d never been one to talk much about his day.

You gathered some food onto your plate, Theo never taking his arm from around you even when he went back to eating.

“So, how was everyone’s day?” Enzo asked cheekily, eyeing the two of you. The young man in front of you had always had a deep insistence that you and Theodore Nott would be the perfect couple.

“You’re perfect for each other,” he would say. “You compliment each other so well, plus you’re already so comfortable around each other!” To which, you’d always laugh and shake your head, only mostly ignoring the fantasies that would twirl through your mind after the fact.

You were not going to date Theodore Nott. He was your best friend—had been for years.

“Fine, thanks,” you replied snarkily, popping some kind of berry into your mouth. It crunched between your teeth pleasantly, bleeding dark, sweet juice. It was unlike any other fruits you’d ever tasted, but you never knew what you were going to taste at Hogwarts.

“Mm, you’ve got a bit of—” Theo started. Still chewing on a bit of food, he ran the thumb of his free hand over the corner of your lip and promptly placed it against his tongue. He sucked the flavor off of his skin, then turned back to his dinner.

It didn’t much bother you, just ignited a bit of heat against the wall of your gut. Mattheo and Enzo, however, acted like they’d just seen someone hurl into the dinner bowls.

“Hello, friends!”

The group turned to face Pansy Parkinson. A dainty, but lean girl with striking black hair cut across her cheeks in sharp, even lines. She was truly one of your only female friends, considering how often you hung around a male party.

“Hey, Pans!” The group chorused, offering lazy waves and full-mouthed smiles. She smiled a bit and took a seat next to Enzo. She selected an apple from the bowl just before her and took a large chunk out of it, her pale eyes flicking around the table.

“Why are you all so quiet?” she mumbled around chunks of apple.

Enzo snuck his arm down beneath the table and discreetly bumped Pansy’s ribs with his elbow twice. They were sure you hadn’t seen their little gesture that translated to ‘I’ll fill you in later,’ but you most definitely had.

You struggled not to roll your eyes as you knew they’d gossip for hours about how you and Theo would be the perfect couple. Honestly, it used to bother you a bit, knowing your friends were talking about you behind your back. But with a quick and direct questioning of Enzo, you realized that they weren’t so much gossiping about you as they were rooting for you. Their support didn’t matter, though. You would not be dating Theodore Nott.

***

That night, as you had begun to settle in for bed, you found yourself thinking of Theo. You always thought of him around bed time. There was never really a time when your best friend wasn’t floating around your head, but at night, when you were recapping your day, you thought of him.

Theo had a nasty habit of popping into your head at the worst of times. During tests, holidays with your families, your dreams, and even when you…when you would get into bed and slide the velvet drapes hung around the frame shut, and let your hands slide beneath the covers.

You swallowed thickly at the thought. You would not be dating Theodore Nott. No matter if he did cross your mind when you touched yourself. You inhaled shakily and slid beneath the covers, ignoring the ache in your chest and the pulsing between your legs.

***

The next morning, you found yourself wandering down to the Great Hall just as you had done the night before for dinner.

And just like last night, Pansy, Enzo, Mattheo, and Theo were waiting for you just like they always were.

You slid into the space beside Theo and laid a sleepy head against his shoulder, letting a slightly dramatic huff out.

“Oh dear, looks like someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” Theo teased, placing a kiss to the top of your head. The audience members before you each made a different face at the show of affection. It never bothered you and it had seemingly never bothers Theo, but your friends had a habit of turning it into something it didn’t need to be.

“Yes, I did,” you sighed. “I barely slept a wink last night—I was tossing and turning all night.” Which was not a lie, but a bit of an understatement. Your sleep had been plagued with visions of Theo.

Theo looking at you, Theo kissing you, Theo touching you, Theo Theo Theo. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Theo looked down at you. You met his eyes.

“Is everything alright?” he asked.

“Yes, why?”

“You’re clenching my arm really hard,” he chuckled, glancing down at your clutched fist around his arm. Oh. You quickly let go of him and apologized, embarrassed that he was having such a physical effect on you. You’d never been so distracted before. Sure, you’d had these thoughts of Theo before but it had never affected you in your everyday life, and certainly not in front of him.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” Enzo interrupted. You turned and the three sitting across from you all seemed to be staring with concern.

“You seem out of it…,” Mattheo said, looking you up and down. Pansy voiced a small agreement.

“I’m fine,” you chuckled nervously. Theo placed a hand on your back and began to rub comforting circles around the center of your spine.

His touch against you was almost too much to bear.

You shied away from him and, forcing a smile, you got to your feet and quickly excused yourself. You knew if you looked back, all of them would still be staring at you but you needed to get away. Theo’s hand on your back was nearly enough to make you come undone.

These altered feelings of him had your mind running haywire.

You scurried off down the halls, twisting and turning, and avoiding any and everyone. The Slytherin dungeons weren’t that far from the Great Hall, but every step you took made the hallway feel as if it was elongating. It felt as though you would never reach it and as if you’d be walking for the rest of eternity, when you came upon the secret entrance.

You mumbled the password then slipped through the doorway.

Other than a few scattered students, there was practically no one in the common room. Hopefully you’d be able to get a bit of privacy upstairs in your bedroom.

Thoughts of Theo swirled around your head, threatening to fall in on you and drown you in your own desire. You had no idea why he was having such an effect on you.

Once you came upon the door to your dorm, you pushed through the door, slammed it quickly behind you, and collapsed onto your bed. A quick survey of the room told you that it was empty, except for your panting body.

You set yourself against your pillows, drawing your knees to your chest and wrapping your arms around them. If you kept having such an issue, you were just going to have to avoid your friends for the next few days.

You refused to let any silly thoughts get in the way of your friendship with Theo. You’d had plenty of intrusive thoughts pertaining to him in the past. That didn’t mean you were in love with him or had any feelings for him other than platonic. People had weird thoughts about their friends all of the time—it didn’t make them true.

A knock on the door drove its way through your train of thought. A small jolt ran through your body at the sudden sound.

Assuming it was just one of your roommates, you invited them in. But one of your roommates did not walk through the door. Theo did.

Upon seeing him, you shot up to a sitting position almost immediately.

“Theo—I didn’t know it was you, I’d really like to be alone right now if—”

“That’s fine. I’ll leave as soon as you tell me what’s wrong.”

His eyes were stern with his jaw clenched tightly, the muscle running across the bone rippling with every grind of his teeth. If you didn’t know this boy like the back of your hand, you might’ve mistook his concern for fury.

“Nothing’s wrong. Like I said, I’m just tired.”

“There’s something else,” he spoke. “I can tell. I’ve known you for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. Do you seriously think I can’t tell when something’s bothering you? You brushed away my hand, you—you barely looked at me earlier. You’ve never, ever turned me away like that—and if you decide you’re done with me, w-with us—that’s fine, but I deserve an explanation.” He stepped forward and left nothing but a few inches between the two of you. “I demand one.”

His ramble ended with deep, heaving breaths, his eyes staring down at you with longing and panic, and your saliva nearly getting caught in your throat. If you hadn’t closed your mouth that had been gaping open, you might’ve choked.

He stood so closely, you could feel his breaths on your chest. You attempted to avoid his eyes but it was as if he’d locked you to him. You couldn’t pull away.

“Theo, I’m not…done with you,” you exhaled shakily, “I always want you.”

His eyes softened a bit.

“Er, to be here with me as my friend!” you gasped out quickly, trying to ease the landing of the borderline confession you’d just spouted out.

His mouth dropped a bit as he seemed almost disappointed. Surely he didn’t feel the same way.

“What if I want to be here with you…but as more than just a friend,” he whispered. His deep voice rumbled beneath the pressure of his chapped lips. You couldn’t help but glance down at them briefly.

Once you had, his breath hitched in his throat just a bit, and you knew he’d seen you. You knew he’d seen your eyes dart from his deep, crystalline eyes to his barely parted lips. His tongue swiped over his bottom lip, just enough to grant them some hydration from how deeply the two of you had been breathing. A shudder passed through you at the sight.

“What’s…more than a friend?” you breathed, your voice wavering as you found it increasingly harder to pull your eyes away from his lips.

What a stupid thing to ask.

“I want to show you what it is,” he said. “I want you to feel what more than a friend is.”

You almost jumped out of your skin when the tips of his fingers brushed against your forearm. He seemed to be testing the waters and, though your reaction wasn’t exactly calm, must have decided that it was okay to move forward again. The fingers from the opposite hand brushed alongside your other arm.

“Let me show you what it feels like,” he whispered.

“I don’t want to lose anything we have because of one stupid mistake—because we couldn’t control ourselves,” you said, biting your lip nervously. You knew it was a cruel thing to say but it was the truth. Theo was the best thing that had ever happened to you, even before you couldn’t escape the feeling of his eyes on you.

“I won’t let anything change us,” he said. “Let me give you all of me before you decide you need some of me.”

Shakily, you pressed your lips together and nodded slowly. You were all his.

He smiled just a bit, a shaking breath pushing through his lips as if he’d been holding it for a while.

His hands were slow and patient, carefully mapping out every place he intended to touch and ensuring that it was completely okay with you before doing so.

Fingers traced over your hips and across your ribs through your uniform shirt. Even through the material, you felt his simulated touch eliciting chills across your stomach and arms. He smirked a bit at the way the small hairs there stood up.

“Can I touch your skin?” he asked, his eyes finding yours. You nodded in response.

At your immediate consent, he took no time in easing the hem of your shirt out from beneath your skirt. The tucked-in material had created indentations along your flesh from pressing into it all day. His fingers traced along the swirls of marks across your hips.

His hot skin on yours was nearly too much to handle—you swore you felt your knees buckle.

After the initial shyness of skin-on-skin, you could feel Theo’s hands splay wide on either side of your hips and move across your abdomen and all the way to the back. His fingers brushed across the strap of your bra just as a raging heat split your stomach in two.

“Can I?” he asked. Of course, you nodded.

With a second set of permissions, he felt even bolder. He sucked in a strong breath and, with quick and intense movements, brought his hands out from beneath your shirt and began to unfasten the buttons.

With each button he pulled open, he placed a hot kiss to the skin revealed. Your breaths came in deep heaves, your chest lurching towards him pathetically.

His tongue brushed over the cleavage split evenly by the pressure of your bra. With your chest nearly completely revealed to him, Theo’s eyes darkened severely.

His eyes found yours again. The two of you regained consciousness for only a moment to realize where you were and what you were doing, before you clasped your hands around his head and pulled his mouth to yours.

With a fiery desire, he slipped his hands beneath your thighs and, with subtle clumsiness, lifted you off the floor just enough to push you up against the stone wall in the corner.

A shy moan slipped from between your lips at the feeling of your body trapped in between him and the wall.

His lips devoured yours like a man starved. He drank up every drop of saliva granted by each slide of your tongue along his, never wasting a single bit. His hands gripped at you mercilessly—at your hips, your chest, your ass. It wasn’t long before your shirt was completely unbuttoned and slid messily down your shoulders and your shoes slipped off and kicked somewhere into the corner.

As the two of you took a moment to breath, noses pressed to each other and breaths intermingling, Theo contemplated his next moves.

“I want to take care of you,” he heaved, a bead of sweat sliding down his sharply detailed throat.

“Please… have me as you will,” you whined, hardly able to stand being away from him in these few seconds.

The sounds of your begging did nothing but urge him forward, cutting through every strap of restraint he may have still had. He fucking loved it.

“Let me make you feel good,” he whispered.

He slid his finger down across your neck, tightening his grip just barely around your throat, then sliding them down across your breasts. He kneaded the sore tissue there, reveling in the way your lips parted at the feeling.

His fingers slid over the metal clasp that sat squarely between your breasts, shining in the firelight, waiting for him to separate it.

Before touching your chest any further, he wrapped his hands around your thighs once more and wrapped them around his waist, balancing you against the wall behind you.

His fingers then returned to their post at your bra and effortlessly split the clasp. The pressure of your breasts popped the fabric apart, quickly revealing your chest to the boy before you.

He moaned at the sight of your gorgeous chest and could not resist from placing his lips around each nipple, swirling his tongue around them perfectly. Your head fell back against the wall, your hands clutching at this hair, your legs wrapped around his body.

“You’re so perfect—gonna make you feel so good,” he mumbled.

His hands and lips reluctantly separated from your chest and pulled you away from the wall for just a moment. He walked you over to the recession in the wall where the windowsill waited for your body weight.

The drapes were pulled together but you imagined that you wouldn’t be so angry if they weren’t.

Theo set you down against the cool stone and slid your hips against him.

With no regard for what you were going to do for your next day of classes, he roughly split your tights to reveal the bottoms beneath.

He let out a moan at the sight of you—you were better than he’d ever imagined.

Flipping your skirt up, he traced a single, trained finger over the slit of fabric covering the most sensitive part of your body. You let out a wavering moan at the sensation, gripping onto his shoulders tightly.

“Please, Theo, no more teasing,” you groaned, sliding your hips closer to his. The motion pressed your core against his, creating a type of friction that was more than delicious. The both of you paused and shuddered against each other’s mouth.

If Theo had any restraint left in his body, it was this that destroyed it.

He slid a finger beneath the material of your bottoms and slid them to the side, revealing you to the cool air. You shuddered a bit at the feeling, not prepared for the sudden change in temperature.

He traced his fingers along your folds again, collecting slicks of moisture along them. You could barely keep up with his pace, not sure whether to moan or cry or beg for more.

Once soaked enough, he slid a finger into you, allowing you to stretch around it. You cried out to the night air, clutching at his shirt like you might slip away from this world if he kept easing you open just as he was.

There were blinks of time where he’d slip another finger in just beside the other, stretching you farther than you’d ever been before, but you could hardly grasp where you were in time and space. All you could feel, think, smell, hear, taste was Theodore Nott.

When years had passed and he’d built you up to your climax twice already, he decided that he was ready to give you all of him.

The layer of sweat across your body and cloud of exhaustion that plagued your mind seemed to be no obstacle for a still very wired Theo. He was ready to fuck himself into you until you were begging for mercy. He’d been waiting for this for years.

“Turn over for me, sweetheart,” he said lovingly, a stark contrast to the brutality with which he’d worked you apart.

Slow-moving from exhaustion but still eager for more of his touch, you forced yourself onto your stomach. Your hands gripped onto the drapes for some sense of purchase—hopefully they wouldn’t collapse down around the two of you, revealing both of your bodies to the world.

When the rustling of his clothing and the clinking of his belt hit your ears, the entire lower half of your body twinged in anticipation. You gasped lowly as his hands slipped beneath your skirt, slowly smoothing his fingers over the fabric of your bottoms before gripping them and sliding them down your legs.

He allowed you to step out of them before he pushed you back up against the stone and slid himself across your entrance. You sucked in a breath sharply at the sensation, your fingers digging into the canvas drapes so tightly they burned white around the knuckles.

One hand gripped your bare hips while the other slowly guided himself into you all the way to the hilt. The slow stretch he had provided you before was nothing compared to the fire burning below now. Your eyes clenched shut, bursts of tears slipping down your cheeks.

“Breathe, bella,” he groaned softly as he allowed you to adjust while refraining from going as fast and as hard as he could.

It took only a moment before you asked him to move, and begged him to claim you fully. And then he was controlling every inch of what you received, ruthlessly, yet lovingly.

The silence of the room was filled with his breathless groans, your stuttering words, and the force of his hips hitting yours. You’d hardly be able to stand if it weren’t for his strong hands holding your hips up, keeping you just where he wanted you for each force of his hips.

With each passing second, you found your grip on the fabric above you becoming weaker and your ability to hold yourself up diminishing. With the pace he’d set, you’d be finishing any minute and he knew it.

And by the way his speed stuttered every so often and his hands gripped onto the fabric of your skirt, you figured he couldn’t be far behind you.

Your naked breasts lightly scraped against the stone with every push from behind, rubbing the sensitive skin just enough to push you over your edge and crash within yourself. You cried out from the force of the pleasure that hit you.

As soon as you had managed to finish against him, the tightening of your muscles tipped him over the cliff side he stood atop, forcing him to the waves below.

He worked himself through his climax before slowing to a stop and collapsing against you. The sweat on your skin mingled together, creating a hot seal between your bodies. You could hardly catch your breath between the windowsill pressed against you and the strong man behind you.

“Theo,” you whined. “Get off…”

He responded with a huff and a moment’s silence, before pushing off of you. Your skin separated with a sticky pull.

He gently pulled you away from the window, slid your messed skirt down and helped you slide into your bed. He slid in next to you for just a moment.

“I think I’m about to pass out and sleep for the next 48 hours,” you chuckled lazily.

“Would you say I gave enough of myself?” he smirked, brushing a strand away from your forehead.

“I’d say it was more than enough,” you said, rolling your eyes at his confidence.

“Well, I’m yours anytime you want me.” He pressed a sweet kiss to your forehead, before getting to his feet and beginning to redress.

“No,” you fussed. “Why are you leaving?”

“Because it’s the middle of the day and I’m missing my classes,” he laughed, tightening his belt back to its proper place.

“I am too—just skip with me today,” you begged.

“No, darling, I’ve got to get back to class. I’ve got too many assignments due today. I’ll let them know you won’t be making it in today, though.”

“What are you going to tell them if they ask?” you asked, quirking an eyebrow.

“Mm, I’ll let them know that you had a rough morning and you’re gonna sleep it off.”

He smirked meanly before slipping through the dorm door and leaving you in silence, bundled up in your bed and nearly too tired to even try and get ready for classes.

One day off wouldn’t be too big of a deal.

- - -

Tag List: @lilymurphy03 , @mypolicemanharryyy , @clairesjointshurt , @bunbunbl0gs , @acornacreacure, @niktwazny303 , @thestarlithideout , @sarahskakskskskajakwwnwjw , @yhiiil, @ravenclawprincess33 , @xxrougefangxx , @thatblackthorn, @robinyx , @starsval , @jolly4holly , @blvebanisters , @chgrch, @abaker74, @ilovehotmenandwoman, @kissesbyarabella, @synicaljah (If you would like to be added to the tag list, please shoot me a DM! Thanks!)

[ventique18]

Warning: intimacy topic, semi smutty

I've established in my head that 🌸🐉's first night would be really sloppy. Not only because he probably doesn't fully understand what he's supposed to be doing, but because he's so excited, but he's trying to hide it by acting cool, but his body language is giving him away.

🌸 wouldn't verbalize it to preserve the calm and collected image he's trying to project, but his heart's beating so loudly it feels like someone's already thumping on the bed before they even go at it. His hands would shake from nerves but he's trying to hide it so he'd grip their thighs a little to tightly. When he finally learns to relax, he'd be too relaxed and forgets his control over his body parts so he'd randomly sprout wings from his back and they'd feel a cold limb snaking around their ankle. His tail has suddenly joined the fray.

Not to say that didn't get them even more excited.

But the highlight would be when their night together reaches its peak. Suddenly the cold air gets hotter. Literally hot. Because the overload of sensations he's suddenly feeling for the first time has him overstimulated, and his body's instinct is to release the heat blazing inside him in the form of steam leaking through his gnashed teeth. He'd be conscious of this and would try to regulate it by wrapping them with a cold mist.

Suffice to say that the overwhelming temperature play is an experience not to be easily forgotten.

To top it off, concerned people would come knocking at his door at intervals, "My lord! We saw smoke coming from your door! Please respond if you need help and we will break down this door without hesitation!"

"I'M FINE! GO AWAY!" He would shout back, trying to put out the bouts of pleasure vibrating through his entire body; but it's such a pitiful attempt that he ends up sounding like he's being strangled instead.

Honestly, 🌸 is surprised he's passionate enough about them that he continues with their lovemaking, as if nothing happened, after having shouted "I. AM. FINE. STOP. BOTHERING. ME. I. AM. AT. A. VERY. IMPORTANT. MEETING!!!" with each thrust.

They really would never forget that unique experience. In fact, they loved the memory so much that they'd sometimes tease him about it, to which he would respond by being more intense than usual, as a punishment for digging up his personal most embarrassing experience.

They don't know if he understands that his response is more of a reward rather than a punishment, really.

[sproutinglupine]

January for Birds of a Weather has been fully stitched! The colors each correspond to the temperature high for my town for every day in January.

[netherfeildren]

FABLE OF THE DOG : 1. The Two Headed Calf

Series Masterlist;

Pairing: Joel Miller x FMC

Summary: Welcome home and buck up, cowgirl.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Cowboy/Heiress AU; Slowburn(ish); Original Characters; Alcohol & Drug Use; Discussions of Grief; Daddy Issues; Graphic Descriptions of Vomiting; Description of a Dead Body; Death of a Parent; Parental Neglect; Older Man/Younger Woman; Jealousy; Past Teenage Crush; Unrequited Pinning; Yearning and Longing Galore; Boss’s Daughter; Complicated Family Relationships; A Home is a Place but ALSO a Person!; Found Family

A/N: Disclaimer, I know nothing about Wyoming and it’s geography, ranching, or being a cowboy and just made all this up. Any and all misrepresentations are fallacy of my laziness.

The FMC tag was decided because she has a last name. It was just too difficult for me to speak in depth about her father without giving him a name, and thus her one too. After that decision was made, she kind of went away from me and devolved into her own person who I have come to be quite obsessed with. It’s still written in ‘you’ format, anyhow.

I’ve been having a whole lot of fun with this, I hope you do too.

Word Count: 10K

Read on AO3

1: The Two Headed Calf

“She’s been shut up in that house goin’ on three days now, Joel,” Tommy says as the two brothers make their way across the lawn. 

The ride had been long and hard, and Joel is tired—he levels a dark look at him. “Just sayin’. Nothin’ you find in there’s gonna be pretty to look at.” He raises his hands in surrender at the brooding glare, that non-confrontational shrug that’s set Joel on edge since they were boys. 

“One of you’s should’a gone in there. Made sure she’s okay.”

“The housekeepers’ve been keepin’ an eye. And Frank tried to go in there and check on her himself, but she’s angry as a barn cat. Hissin’ ‘nd yowlin’, and just bein’ downright scary as hell, to be honest. You should be prepared is all I’m tryin’ to say.”

“Her father just died, Tommy. I’m not expectin’ pretty sights right now,” Joel gruffs, trying to swallow the panic that flutters in his throat as they crest the final hill up to the big house. 

The beautiful stone, oak, glass monstrosity that’s stood as monument to this place, this home that is not truly his, for over a decade now. The Kelly Ranch. The sky above is still a sultry, yawning blue, deep and tired, basking in the throes of dawn as the sun just now makes its way over the crest of the Tetons in the distance so that the house sits for just a moment longer in its pool of shadowed blues. 

Joel pauses on the border of that somber darkness, afraid suddenly of what awaits him inside; boots glued to the ground with the gum of cowardice. He doesn’t want to see her broken. He doesn’t want to see her hurting. But there’s no other recourse, he knows this. The death of the estranged father she’d fought with all her life, the inheritance of this world that seems suddenly too big for just one orphaned girl, all alone now. 

He’s afraid that he’ll walk into that house he’s always seen as other and home all wrapped into one—that Olympus that was so far removed and out of reach even when he walked through it’s halls to the man who’d given him sanctuary and salvation, to the man he knew mistreated her sometimes, didn’t love her enough—and not have the capacity to recognize her, this girl who’d always been familiar and stranger all in one also. 

Joel Miller suddenly feels afraid of the memory she exists as in his mind, in the face of the woman he knows she is now. 

When he lets himself in the back kitchen door, it’s still nighttime within. The cool dryness of the AC cranked up to inhuman temperatures makes him shiver once while sprouting a damp sweat along his nape. He should’ve showered before coming, should’ve washed the ride and the days of camp off his skin before walking into her presence, but all he’d managed were his hands and face. There’d been panic to make sure she was well, if not then alive, at least. But he should be more presentable for her. 

Hell, he should’ve been here for her when she came home for the first time in two years to the house where her father had died. He should’ve been here when the man died. 

But the herd had needed moving. He hadn’t thought it’d all happen so quickly, thought he had more time, that they all had more time. He’d hoped she wouldn’t return at all, if he was being honest. There was nothing here for her. Nothing except memories of a gilded and loveless, already motherless childhood. The reality of all she was set to inherit. The truth of an aloneness Joel didn’t know if she was prepared for. 

He moves through the house slowly, afraid to disturb the ghosts and the silence. The interior, immaculate and beautiful and solemn. Something out of a movie picture or the gloss of a magazine. Something covered not in dust but in sadness. The stairs are silent as his spinning mind makes up for the creak, the boots she’d sent him on his last birthday hit the richly piled rug at the top, and the hallway to the bedrooms yawns long and frightening in front of him. Two grand a pop, the boots—Lucchese, he’d looked them up on the iPhone she’d sent him the year before. A gift giver, generous to a fault, kind to a detriment. She sent something to all the ranch hands that’d worked for her father since she was a girl. Something for the entire ranch at Christmas. And all he managed each time was a perfunctory thank you card, like he did every year because he remembered, years ago, in her little voice, polite people send thank you notes, Joel, my grandmother told me so. Last year he’d written that they were too much, that she shouldn’t have, that he was grateful. There wasn’t much else to say. 

That was the extent of their communication, familiar and stranger in one, the far removed golden child of the Kelly. They’d all called him that, the Kelly, for as long as he’d known the man. As if he was some Scottish laird of old, ruling over his clan and half the world. Egotistical, was what it really was. He’d thought himself a god among men, in the face of his only child. Ridiculous was what Joel saw it all for, a put on play, a farce.

And wonder of wonders, she was entirely unlike him because of course she would be. Of course a man ruled by nothing more than ego and narcissism had been sent his polar opposite in the form of his only child. Kind hearted, was what she was—sending him a birthday gift every year. Remembering them all here always no matter how far she’d gone. He sent her a thank you note for each benevolence in return, a word of respectful gratitude for the fact that a person like her could ever remember a dog like him. 

Sometimes, Joel had wanted to go to him, the old man, Oswald Kelly, and ask him where his daughter was, why he wasn’t looking for her, keeping her closer, caring for her. He wasn’t the sort of man that could’ve ever understood such callous behavior towards one’s child.

The last time she’d been here, over two years ago: less than forty eight hours that had ended in screaming so terrible they’d all heard it down from the barn, sitting in uncomfortable, swollen silence, the spinning of tires ringing as she yelled at her father that he was never going to see her again, the man’s echoing laugh as she’d fled him. 

Joel hadn’t seen her on that visit, it’d been so quick and angry. Flying down on the jet from New Haven for her father’s seventieth birthday and not even making it long enough for the festivities. This was what her life was, as he’d observed it from a distance for all these years, the singular daughter of this great house, coming to her father, attempting joy and finding nothing but disappointment at the end of him. 

She’d been right, a knowing streak running through her. Kelly had never seen her again, and Joel didn’t know if the old man had regretted it or not, the anger and the estrangement and the lack of love. But the last time he’d spoken to him, hours before setting off on their move, the herd always came before everything else, the ranch was all that mattered is what the man had always said, with death scratching at the window, his frail and withered body licked down to almost nothing from the austere and imposing figure Joel had always known him as, he’d asked for her. His only child. Do you think she’ll come, Joel? The dying man had asked him. My girl, do you think she’ll come see me? Joel had lied a lie he hadn’t known was one, said she would, that he’d call her as soon as he was back. 

In the end, he hadn’t even afforded her that decency, a personal call.

He comes to her open bedroom door now, pitch dark as grief within, and the stench of sorrow and liquor seeping from the living grave. He looks down the long and empty hall for a brief second, wishing it didn’t have to be him, that again, he didn't have to see her any way other than okay. And he realizes that there’s something about her, as she will exist now, that makes him cowardly. Something about this house without the man who’d granted him the absolution of a hiding place all those years ago, who’d understood and sheltered Joel in the midst of his own past grief, that makes him cowardly. The house feels wrong without Kelly within it, wrong with only her as its holder now. 

Joel steps into her dark, and it’s a battleground—

—You are silent and motionless in the blue room. 

Nothing of the gleaming splendor that dresses the rest of the home sleeps in here. There are clothes everywhere, an exploded suitcase lies open and massacred in the middle of the plush white rug, a turned over bottle of red wine bleeding into your clothes. Shredded pages with scratched on writing slashed across them, the dusted white mounds of crushed pills, as if you’d smashed each one individually beneath the thumb of your grief. The sight makes him more afraid, the scent of weed and cigarettes heavy in the air, as he takes the final step towards the wrecked bed, and a single small foot hangs limply from the edge.

He stares at it long and hard for a second, afraid, afraid again, still, of what he’ll find. He says your name once, short and gruff like a dog’s bark. It’s what he feels like. Animal, bestial, lacking any sort of cognizance amidst this minefield. His heart beats against his spine, and he thinks he should do something else, shake you, check for a pulse, his bones throb inside his skin. He needs to fucking move, but the smell of smoke is so cloying he’s choking on his own tongue. 

Your ankle twitches.

And Joel sucks in a sigh of relieved air without panic, saying your name again. His voice is level now, maybe gentle, no more barking dog. His eyes move up the length of one pretty leg, and then quickly, he averts his gaze when he gets high up enough he’s met with soft-creased asscheek covered in silk. Swallowing his tongue, his eyes roll in their sockets, looking for anything else to look at besides the sight of panty clad ass. He steps closer again, gripping the edge of the sheet to pull it over your scantily clad body, eyes flitting to the silver spun clock on the nightstand, the warm glow of the hall light shows that they have two hours to get you sober and presentable before the funeral. 

Joel should have been here. He does not feel that he is even here now. And the guilt eats at him like acid. The fear too. 

“Darlin’, you’ve gotta get up now,” he says softly, taking hold of your shoulder, scalded by the feel of fragile skin, realizing with the suddenness of a gunshot that you’ll be the Kelly now. He gives you a gentle shake, “We’ve gotta get you ready,” and his heart pumps blood like a machine. The sight of the dry liquor bottle toppled on the nightstand, the shattered glass glittering the floor in crystal, the empty pill bottles, it all taunts him. His guilt is a cacophony in his mind. He knows he’s going to have to stick his fingers down your throat, make you spit it all up, that you’ll hate him for all of this afterwards, but when his gaze meets streaked rust, dark and shocking against the white sheets, he’s kicked into terrified action. 

He turns you over, your head lolling sickeningly in unconscious stupor, hair a tangled mess strewn about your face so that he has to dig for your eyes, parting the curtains of your fringe to uncover you. He focuses on your closed eyes, the too long lashes clumped together, lips cracked and parched. 

He should’ve fucking been here. 

Smoothing his fingers along the lengths of your arms, he keeps his eyes on your face and averted from all the skin that keeps peeking out below, searching the divots and slopes of your arms for hurts. When he gets to your right hand, battleground of a long ago broken hurt, he finds the drying crust of blood, the ragged split in the soft, small palm, thankfully shallow.

 His eyes smart, looking down at the broken glass, feeling the tear in you. 

Gripping you gently below the elbows he pulls you into his arms, cradled like a child, light as loss. Your head lolls again, neck crooked at an unnatural angle as he carries you into the restroom, careful of your head, knocking the lights on and putting you down in front of the toilet bowl. He pulls your camisole to rights, making sure everything is covered, and gathers your mess of hair as carefully as he can, trying his best to not snag the fragile strands in his too rough hands, but gripping you firmly in position. And ignoring the sound of your awakening cry, he sticks two fingers into your slack jawed mouth and down your throat until he feels the hot rush of vomit. 

Crouching behind you, his thighs bracket you, keeping your form from slumping over as you empty the poison from your belly, flushing the alcohol soaked bile as you struggle. He wipes his messy hand on the leg of his jeans and rubs soothing circles on your back, his fingers woven through the soft silk of your hair to keep your head in place and your face clear. His heart thumps in rhythm with your heaves, your too quick, panicked breathing. There seems to be not enough oxygen for the two of you and your grief in the too small room of the commode, and Joel gasps like a dying fish, trying to swallow calm breaths. 

When you finally stop your heaving, you rest your arms at the edge of the gleaming porcelain, head hung low, defeated, wracked with shivers or silent sobs, he isn’t sure, a strange and horrible keening noise, so small he barely catches it, held in your throat. There’s the finest down of peach fuzz that covers the tender slope of your vulnerable nape, and it makes Joel feel suddenly, just as vulnerable, just as unprotected. At a complete loss for how to help you. 

“Finally decided to show your face,” you croak, voice ragged with your sick. 

His fingers tighten once around your shoulder, a panicked tick of reminder that he’s here now, that he’s him. “I was moving the herd. It had to be done. Your father, he—” he stutters, trying explain, tripping over his own guilt ridden words. “I didn’t think it’d happen now, so fast, that you’d get here so soon. I thought we had more time.” 

We. 

Your skin seems to cool by the second beneath his fingertips, and then you’re shrugging his touch away, huddling closer to the porcelain bowl, further away from him. 

“Get out.”

“Let me explain. I—” And he’s begging now. He can hear the note of it in his voice. Begging for forgiveness. For a chance. 

“I don’t want to see you.” You don’t say his name. “Get out.” It feels worse than anything. 

“I’m here now. I didn’t know— I didn’t think.” He reaches to grab for you again, but you turn to face him suddenly. Wiping the back of your hand against your mouth, pushing your heels at his shins to kick him away. Your eyes are red rimmed, the hollows beneath bruised with lack of sleep. But fire spits from the deep color, all anger and hurt. 

“Go deal with your fucking ranch,” you fling the words at him. “It’s all you care about anyways.” And they weren’t shivers, he sees now, they’re tears tracked as proof of all his guilt, all his lacking, along the slopes of your fine grained cheeks. 

Your, you say. As if this place and anything in it has ever been his. He’s never wanted any of it like that, only ever seen a thing that needed taking care of, and him, with the ability to care for it. 

“I needed you,” you whisper as if the thought comes along on a second wind of anger, a realization that sends your voice breaking, hitching, your chest caving in on itself as the tears come faster and faster now. “He’s dead, and I needed you.”

“I’m sorry,” he begs. “I’m so sorry.” His voice breaks now too. He thinks he’ll cry now too, for the man who he also lost, who despite it all meant something to him, as well. For you, who’s lost even more. For Joel’s own guilt. 

But he doesn’t think you see any of that, not his apology, not his regret, not his own grief. You turn away from him again, laying your temple down again on your forearm. “Get out. I’ll be ready soon.”

And so he goes.

-

Your father is made small and withered in death. 

One of the wealthiest men in the entire world. A stranger, a titan, a nightmare of a man. 

It wasn’t something you’d ever considered, that a human body could look so colorless and frigid and not alive. Like a shock or a ringing bell, it’s a realization that you’re an orphan now. That you’re all alone. 

You feel something like a memory of regret. Or something that’s like the idea that you should feel regret, that you should feel guilt for how it was between the two of you. But all that is overshadowed by the reality of what you weren’t. All you feel even more, or in actual reality, is the old loss of what you’d never been to each other. That, you realize, is the seed of your grief. That long ago wound, that child’s understanding that he wasn’t like all the other fathers, that he’d never care for you the way other children were cared for. 

Looking down at the frozen face that looks nothing like the one he’d worn the last time you’d seen him, the wispy thatch of hair that hadn’t been so jarringly white before sickness had ravaged his body, you realize that this is no new loss, it is only a continuation, a reopening of a very old one. 

The cavernous cathedral at your back is silent, vacated by the sea of people that had congregated here earlier. And with sickening curiosity, you uncoil an arm from where you’ve got it wrapped around yourself, reaching out to press a finger against the ice cold back of his hand. Shockingly not alive; he feels made of rubber. 

Everyone that’d been here to bid farewell to this behemoth turned slip of a man, to catch a glimpse of you, packed like teeth into Jackson’s grandest cathedral; business men and heads of state from around the world, the oldest family names in the country, figures of the highest echelons of wealth and society, vipers circling the barrel—half the world here to see this person who was supposed to have been your father but was really only a stranger. 

You take your hand back, and you don’t say goodbye as you turn away from his body. There’s no farewell to really tell. 

And at the back of the church, hiding in a bright ream of sunlight, Joel stands propped against the face of a saint. Dark and silent and maybe even more far removed than your dead dad. Watching sentinel. Oswald Kelly’s hovering man—come to watch over him one last time. 

The silk of your stockings slide against each other at the junction of your thighs, the hiss of your skirt around your calves as your reed thin heels click against the stone, and you pull your armor as tightly around yourself as you can. There’s a hollow echo inside of everywhere and everything, your mind like a gong, reverberating, and his gaze is so steady, hazel bright, deeply shaded by the lip of his dark hat, beckoning you towards him from beneath the brim. 

Large and strong and steadfast, your heart gives a painful, longing thump—stupid, writhing thing—and you can only bear to look him in the eye for a second, and if you were to really think about saying goodbye to that father that never really was, lying behind you, slipping further and further away, you’d say it to the man that always stood as his shadow before the world, before you ever said it to the man himself. 

-

The drive back home is cast in frigid silence and made all the more uncomfortable because you can practically hear Joel’s brain clicking and ticking away with worry. 

He’d sent your car and driver away with a harsh word while you collected your final goodbyes and words of respect from the last smattering of people congregated and waiting for the newly birthed heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. 

Hovering over your shoulder, he’d kept anyone from stepping too close or getting too friendly, so close you could feel the heat of his chest through the silk of your blouse, and then going suddenly full on aggressive when a reporter from the New York Times had approached, fishing for a quote on the future of the Kelly empire. Ushering you away with a hovering hand at the small of your back before the man could get half a question out, he’s opening the truck’s door for you as a haze descends over your eyes, the distant shutter and flash of cameras bursting in your peripherals, a latent hangover and sleep deprivation and not enough to eat in the last forty eight hours causing you to sag in his hold. Then it’s only his big fist wrapping around the span of your wrist as he lifts you into the truck, your eyes downcast and unable to take in sight or sound, vision all a blur. You murmur a barely there thank you with his hand fitting at the dip of your waist, big body blocking yours entirely from prying eyes trying to catch a glimpse or a stumble, and for a single second, your entire weight is suspended in his hold, allowing you to bypass the struggle of balancing your high heel on the step up, and then you’re sliding onto the leather of the seat, the whisper of your cashmere and silk rustling around you as he handles you like a child being spirited away from the scene of a crime. 

The door shuts gently behind you, face turned away from the flashing lights, the watchful eyes of the whole world, and worst of all, the assessment of his concerned gaze. All you’re afforded are thirty seconds of privacy to let out a single gasping sob. 

And now, an hour and a half of silent purgatory. 

You slip your heels off, flexing your smarting toes against the damp of your stockings and tuck your folded legs beneath you on the seat. Paying the frantic energy of his anxiety and lodged words no mind, you consider instead: your new reality. The burden of it all means very little to you now. The last of your worries is being readied for entombing as the two of you speed down the eighty nine, zinging past the bright Wyoming green. The thrum of his truck drowns out your thoughts, brand new, probably over a hundred grand, only the best for your father’s right hand man, and the Kelly Ranch insignia emblazoned proudly on the sides. A brand for the whole world to see just who exactly is being whisked away to her old home turned brand spanking new grave. 

You might be feeling a little bit dramatic. But then again— you’d just put your last remaining parent in an actual grave, surely that provides you some allowances. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his big paw gripping the leathered steering wheel in a death clutch, knuckles white with his frustration at the dilemma you pose, his own discomfort. You’re sure if he thought you wouldn’t catch him, he’d be squirming in his seat. 

You do something to him sometimes, you know this. Not in any way you’d like, not in any interesting way, that of a woman affecting a man, but something respectfully harrowing. Maybe something a little bit like fear. 

There has existed between the two of you, always, that strange intimacy of two people who’ve known each other for a very long time, and yet, have always remained at a far removed, arms length distance from one another. 

A professional intimacy of sorts. Your father’s foreman, shadow, fixer. The man who guarded that treasure trove you’d inherit one day, today; the thing your father loved most in the world. Two people who’ve known each other a long time, and yet, don’t really know each other at all. 

There has always been, however, the fact of the birthday. 

The birthday. Your birthday.

The way you’d latched onto that small, immense, detail when you’d first discovered it at fourteen, when he’d newly arrived at the ranch and the true weight of your first real crush had really hit you, it was probably not entirely healthy. But you’d thought yourself in love with your father’s man, the first figure of the male species who’d ever drawn your attention in such a way. 

He’d never paid you any mind; you were the boss's daughter, a figurehead or a responsibility, maybe a nuisance, although he’d never ever treated you as one. But the day someone had let slip it was his birthday, on the same day as yours, your teenage heart had swelled with the naive hope of fate. It was meant to be, the two of you were connected, so on and so forth, swallowed by girlish innocence and made buoyant by fantasy. 

But you’d had something to share with someone, which was what really mattered. Something tangible, even if only in your inexperienced little mind, something to wield as comfort so that the first time your father had forgotten your special day, fifteen, and what a tender age it had been, you’d had something to cling to. That's when your gifts to him had started. It was your way of making sure there was at least one person in the whole world who’d remember that was your day too. That you were alive, that you mattered. A reminder of yourself. And as the years and birthdays passed, sometimes, when he sent those coldly gracious notes of his, you’d wished you could’ve written back with honesty. Said something like, I’m so lonely, wish you were here, wherever it was in the world you’d found yourself at the time. 

And of course, he was gorgeous and older, strong and patient and capable, entirely unattainable. Impossible to forget. You’d gone so far, traveled wide, gotten yourself an overpriced education that would probably serve you for nothing, had lovers and parties and splendor, and always, you remembered your gifts for him, you remembered him. It was the single most important detail of your birthday every year. 

The leather creaks beneath his fist again, chapped knuckles set to burst before he flexes his fingers out, long and straight. Thickly built hands, strong, made for working or hurting, on a man who you’ve never seen be anything but stoically patient. 

He was strange in that way, neither wholly impulsive nor precisely intentional in his mannerisms. More so, it was that there was something extremely neutral about him, a middle buoyancy of personality. Strict with the cowboys, exacting, wielding his title as ranch foreman with an iron fist and your father’s blessing, and yet still, quiet, serious, with that patient gentleness about him. You’d seen it in the way he’d handled Ellie when she’d first come to the ranch, young and skinny with that hollow look of trauma kids who’d seen things they shouldn’t have shamed adults with. She’d been a little older than you, and with an air you’d not understood, a sort of lived past you’d been naive to the existence of, frightened when confronted by it, and yet inevitably, the two of you’d become fast friends eventually.

You’d even experienced it yourself, on two treasured occasions, that gentleness that you’d held onto for years. Nurturing the memory of him in your mind like a delusional bloom. 

He stretches his hand again, wheel caught between his thumb and forefinger, cinching it there, back and forth. His nails are meticulously clean, cut to the quick, and you imagine he must spend a great deal of time cleaning himself up when he works so hard at getting himself so dirty most days. 

You can see him sneaking glances at you, and he coughs once, a clearing of his nervous throat. Averting your gaze, you turn your face away so that you’ll be able to watch him through the reflection in the window. He monopolizes the space in the cabin of the truck, broad shoulders and hulking form, all the fine leather smell washed away in the scent of him. That bay rum aftershave he’s always worn, the one with the distinctive notes of bay leaf, cloves and citrus. An old fashioned scent, masculine and crisp. 

You’d snuck into the bunk once with Ellie, before he’d moved into the foreman’s cabin, before Switzerland, when the two of you were still girls running rampant and free through the ranch, clutching desperately at the last vestiges of any sort of happy childhood you could scrounge up for one another. You’d peeked in his things, found a whole world of Joel shaped curiosities. The glass etched bottle of aftershave, a hole spotted t-shirt with a burnt orange longhorn across the front, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories—something you found comforting, knowing he could read about the small, the freakish, real life; thinking that perhaps he was homesick for the comfort of the South, hungering for a taste of the life he’d had then, through books. And then, in a spine cracked copy of Suttree, the pages almost falling apart beneath your fingertips, dog eared and well loved, her picture tucked between the pages.

It had been the first time you’d done something you knew you shouldn’t have and actually regretted it, looking down at that green eyed photograph. 

You’d run back to your room after that, ashamed and something a little bit like jealous, desperate to know who she was, desperate for someone to keep a picture of you like that—as if they loved you. And years later, you’d found the scent for yourself. The little molasses glass bottle you still have and pull out on occasion, when you’re feeling extra bad, extra lonesome, extra far away from the whole world, just for a reminding of home. 

Beside you, he sighs again, coughs again, brings you back to himself and the present. Just spit it out already, you think exasperatedly, say something, anything else besides how sorry you are. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he starts, and you roll your eyes, scoffing quietly. 

“You already said that.” Sullen. Mullish. You wish you were a child who could still throw a tantrum and get away with it. Letting your eyes go unfocused from his reflection in the window, you brood at the sight of everything that’s yours now as he turns off the highway, passing below the iron eave of the Kelly Ranch entrance. Eight hundred thousand acres of pristine Wyoming land nestled into the deep valley surrounded by the Grand Tetons mountain range. 

“Well, I’m sayin’ it again.” He’s driving too fast, and you refuse to turn and look at his face. Your heart beats blood in your ears, and you screw your eyes shut to the dizzying blur of green legacy, not wanting to see any of it—him. 

Your belly swoops, going slightly nauseous and gurgling. 

“I didn’t think you’d get here so quick.” He swallows, “Hell, I didn’t think it’d all happen so damn fast.”

“I was already in New York,” you tell him, voice clipped with breathlessness. “I left Paris last week.”

“What? I didn’t know— I—”

“Why would you?”

“I would’ve called you. I would’ve gotten you out here quicker.”

“Ellie called. It’s better like this, Joel.” Finally letting yourself say his name out loud, it feels wrong and molten on your tongue, a heaviness being spit up from the depths of your stomach. “We don’t have to pretend anymore. He’s dead now.”

“There’s no pretending. He wanted to see you—”

“Please, stop.”

But he urges on unheeded: “He told me so before I left. Told me—”

“Stop,” you snap. Finally turning to look at him and hating him for it. For how gorgeous he is, for all the things he’s always made you feel for as long as you can remember what it was to feel something for a man, for all he did or did not have with your father when you had none of it or so much of an entirely different thing. “Stop. I don’t want to hear any of it. It doesn't matter anymore, Joel.”

“But you should know. You deserve to know that—”

“What?” Because that one hurts. “I deserve to know what?” That he actually had loved you but had just never been able to show it? That now it was too late? That the only person the great Oswald Kelly had ever been able to speak to of the supposed care he had for his only daughter was the hired help? You’d read once that one should never let their parents anywhere near their real humiliations. You’d tried your damndest to follow that as soon as you’d grown up. “It’s not your place,” you seethe with teeth bared, an animal shoved into a corner and made to fight for its life, deciding you won’t ever let Joel near them either.  

He spits a cursing, growled sound of frustration, but doesn’t continue. The two of you find yourselves at an impasse, and you turn back to your windowed mirror of him, eyes pinching hot, filling with tears. One of the things your father disliked most about you, your easy tears, and a single salt marred inadequacy tracks down the slope of your cheek, dripping off the edge of your jaw into the bandaged cup of your palm, and you breathe slow and measured through your open mouth, watching the fog cloud grow and shrink against the glass obscuring your vision of him. 

-

The last time you’d missed your mother, the one you’d never known, in any sort of real and true way, you’d been eighteen. Returning to an empty house after celebrating your high school graduation in a far off school, alone. 

In the midst of your sophomore year, you’d been sent away to a Swiss boarding school. It had been something worse than devastating, losing your life in Wyoming, the only home you’d ever know, Ellie, the other people on the ranch… But it was far removed enough that you couldn’t bother, where you couldn’t ask for things like attention or consideration. The education had been excellent, the upbringing desperately lonely ending on a whimpering sigh despite your many accomplishments. You’d wanted her very badly then indeed, your mother. To have been there, to have helped you pick your dress, kissed your cheek after watching you walk across the stage. To have wiped your tears when she told you that your father wasn’t there because he was busy managing the whole world, but that he was proud of you, that he’d have been there if he could. You’d wished she could’ve been there to lie to you so that you wouldn’t have needed to lie to yourself. 

Peering down from your balanced perch atop the deck’s bannister, you survey the deep bed of Lily of the Valley, destroyed beneath the vindictive soles of your bare feet. He’d planted them for her all around the house after she’d died, her favorite flower. 

You’d always hated them. 

And that was the thing of it all, which you’d learned when you grew old enough to recognize such things like disdain. He couldn't stand you because you reminded him of her. Clichéd and old and tired. An excuse for being a neglectful father. The daughter who was too much like her dead mother, and thus did not deserve to be loved. 

You tip your head back, nursing at the lip of fine aged Macallan, and the sky is a glass mirror of blackened silver streaks. You’re almost positive that all the stars in the Milky Way are visible from right here at this very spot in the heart of Wyoming. The sight makes your broken heart feel full and falsely mended. 

You’re certain you’re painting a pretty picture right now: tipsy on a bottle of your dead dad’s sacredly hoarded whiskey that probably cost as much as someone’s house, staring up at the stars in your newly inherited home with a whole unappreciated life full of possibilities ahead of you. Basking in the title of your newly minted— orphan-hood? Orphan-ness? A peer of the orphans. 

You snort softly, sucking on the bottle again, letting the heat of it settle in your belly, smolder in your heart. Your head feels full of bubbles and sugar and sad. 

There’s a part of you that feels a little ridiculous, despite the circumstances. You’re good at compartmentalizing, good at being objective of your realities. Obviously: sad because your father is now dead, and it’d been nine months and eleven days since you’d last spoken to him. Sad because he’d never given a shit about you. Sad because you’re alone, dumped by the stupid French jockey boyfriend who you’d not even liked very much, just a few days before this whole pathetic ordeal of acquiring your orphan-hood, yeah, that’s what you’re sticking with, had occurred. Not to mention the army of looming lawyers and financial advisors and various heads of business vying for your attention, waiting for the what next?

And Joel.

A one man army of looming Joel. 

So you’re feeling morose, blue, maybe a little spoiled, but brought low and cut short. Depressed and unsatisfied with your life thus far. 

Poor little rich girl. Poor little orphan. Poor little me.

What you want? 

Someone to care. 

Someone to love you. 

Hard to come by. Impossible to buy. 

The stars gleam purple silver, winking at you. The bracketing black so dark it swallows the eye. Another taste of the nutty bouquet of smoked apple oranges, and soon you’ll be tipsy enough you won’t be able to balance your butt on the bannister’s ledge anymore. Maybe you’ll go humpty dumpty over the edge and crack your skull against your mother’s valley of destroyed Lily’s. 

You laugh again with sound now, not crazy, only an orphan, ha, but you think that it’s only that it feels shockingly as if you’ve fallen through the surface of your life. As if you are still falling with nothing and no one to grab on to, to help stabilize you. A really terrible, shit-out-of-luck feeling. 

Your eyes continue their infernal leaking, and you blow your nose loudly on the inside of your sweater. You’ve given yourself three days to do whatever the hell you want, be as disgusting as you may. When the three days are up you’ll plan to get your act together, take responsibility and hold of your life and become the woman you should be. 

Who that is? Still being decided. 

You think that maybe you’ll buy another jet before that time’s up. Or an island. Something ridiculous. Maybe you’ll sell the goddamn ranch. 

You eye the dark rolling hills of the valley with seething suspicion. Let’s see what Joel says about that. You, marching up to the highway entrance and spearing a For Sale sign in the dirt of the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the continental United States. Way more than that God forsaken surly frown is what you’d get. 

So long, Joel, it’s been swell. I’m done with this place. It’s time to pack it up and find some new hunk of land to care about more than you care about me or anything else. 

Maybe you’ll be real funny and put up a Craigslist ad. 

And it isn’t that you don’t love this place, the only home you’ve ever known. You do. In a way that is passionate and consuming and irreconcilable. Everything about it, the serenity, the guarding mountains and the deep woods, the home you’d been born in, that both your parents had died in. You do love it in your way. 

It’s only that every man you’ve ever loved—loved—had always cared more about the place than he’d ever cared about you. 

For the longest time, most of your youth until you’d decided that you officially felt an adult, you’d thought you’d hated your father. There was just so much anger and resentment and the resound of his ever furious words and insults and endless disappointment. The echo of no mother ringing so loudly in your ears that the confounding feelings had all been mistaken for hatred. But with age and distance and life, you’d realized you didn't hate him. You never had. You thought, actually, and this was a very good and mature thought of yours, that you were the only person in the whole world that had ever seen him as only a man and not a god. 

He was only a man, full of greed and grief and missing the mother of the child he’d probably never wanted. Nothing more or less. 

Maybe it was that you felt sorry for him. Not in the way of pity, but in the way of one person feeling empathy for another in a clinical and helpless sort of manner. And a numb, detached sort of sadness. A longing for something that you’d never had and had always wanted but eventually learned to live without. 

Ultimately, his disappointment had turned on him, and now it was all you felt you had for him at the end of it all. 

But, for some reason, and an annoying one at that, you do think that, if you try very, very hard, you could bring yourself to hate Joel Miller. There’s satisfaction in that possibility, vindication—resentment that even now, as practically strangers, you know he’d be able to pull that sort of feeling out of you which could result in hatred. Something strong and overwhelming and not easily escaped. 

Your stomach rumbles, and you smile blithely at all your inherited legacy, filling the hollow with more drink. Three days to behave very badly, as badly as you can. The whiskey is so good, and swishing it around in your mouth, you tip your head back further, gurgling it loudly at the back of your throat. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

You jerk, scrambling to keep your balance, choking a little on smokey apples and your own spit. A trickle of the golden amber liquor drips out of the corner of your mouth as you find him hiding in the dark across the deck. Accustomed to drooling over him, you wipe it away with the back of your hand. 

“Having a party. Would you like to join?”

“Are you drunk again?”

Tough crowd. Ugh.  “Never mind. You’re not invited. Go away.”

“You need to go inside and go to bed.”

You tip your chin at him, putting on doe eyes. “Alright. And are you going to be my new daddy also?” You say in a baby voice.

Fucking Christ, you hear him whisper under his breath, turning away to run an exasperated palm over his mouth. Frustration seethes off of him like sulfur. He’s tired. Of you maybe. Of the whole circus this place has become in the past few days—and rightfully so. 

“What do you want? I’m extremely busy, if you can’t tell.”

“Just thought I’d check on ya.” Courteous, always the gentleman, bullshit. You roll your eyes at him. 

“I don’t need you to check on me.” And you, ever the child. One day you swear you’ll grow up. 

But it can’t be said that you’re entirely selfish either. You have considered the fact of Joel’s own grief at the loss of your father. After all, they’d been much closer than you’d ever been to him for many years. And maybe, in his own cold and removed and superior way, your father had seen this man who you’ve thought yourself in love with since you were a teenager, as something like a son. 

Probably, that’s just your own wishful thinking: that Oswald Kelly had ever been capable of such tender feelings.

Maybe the fact of Joel’s own grief is the thorn beneath your nail bed that’s making you so angry with him, so needing of his attention. Maybe it’s that he’d failed to fulfill your silly and girlish fantasy that upon receiving the news of your only remaining parents death, he’d have been here waiting for you, at this home he’d guarded for you for so long, ready to take you into his arms and console and care for you. 

When instead, he’d been off doing what he’d always done for as long as you’d known him. Protecting your father’s interests, his legacy. 

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“How?”

“You, being difficult.” Driving me fuckin’ crazy— he adds again under his breath. 

“I’m an orphan now, Joel.” You’re becoming quickly addicted to the word. “I think I should be afforded a tiny bit of leeway to drive people fuckin’ crazy,” you mock his Southern drawl. Enough of your time had been spent in Europe over the past two years, kissing Europeans, that you’d sloughed off the last of your American twang; something of a vaguely European lilt peppering your words every now and then that Ellie likes to tease you for whenever the two of you speak on occasion. 

A muscle under his left eye twitches at the jab, and you take another deep swig of the bottle, provoking him with your gaze. Wishing you had whatever it is a woman needs to entice this man. Like the fucking vet. Fucking world renowned, brilliant, highly coveted, beautiful veterinarian. You know about her. You’re sure he thinks he’s been discreet over the years with their whatever they’ve had, Tess, but you know. 

Maybe you’ll be insane and irrational and possessive, taking advantage of your three crazy days, and fire her with your new found power. See what he has to say about that. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. 

Obviously not. 

Despite your current hysteria, your goal is not to send the ranch head over heels into a tailspin.

But the imagining is soothing. 

“Want some?” You hold the heavy crystal out towards him in a peace offering, held precariously between two sweaty knuckles. “It’s probably worth as much as your truck. Would be a waste for me to finish on my own.” You eye what’s left of it, about half, and give him a sheepish grin. It really is very good. 

He looks at you for one long, solemn moment, always so silent and pensive, this strange enigma of a man. You get to watch in real time as he loses whatever fight it is he’s trying to fight against you, victorious when he shrugs and comes over slowly, resting his butt against the bannister—a carefully respectful distance away from you. 

When he takes the bottle from your swinging clutch, gripped from the base, careful not to touch you in any way, you see the real sad in his eyes. The dim lights bleeding out through the big windows of the family room without a family shine on his face in strips and bursts. A shadow here, golden warmth there. He’s got more lines around his eyes than you remember from the last time you’d been this close to him. Smile lines made bright white in the center and gold burnished at the edges from too much sun. There’s little bursts of silver threaded at his temples now too, a gleam here and there in his dark beard. Forty four years old, he’d turned on your last birthday. 

You dig your nails into the soft meat of your palms, and your belly smolders as he brings the bottle to his lips, tasting the exact place your own mouth had just been moments ago. You press your knees together as hard as you can, head a little woozy with the color of his eyes; the most gorgeous green, caramel hazel. 

You’d graduated two years ago with a degree in art history and had done absolutely nothing with it since. It was just that everything appeared boring and pointless and shallow. Your whole life had one day suddenly seemed just a little silly. Useless, overpriced degree, nothing to be done with extensive knowledge in color theory when your world is expecting such different things from you now. 

But you sure as hell can appreciate the color of his eyes in extensive and meticulous detail. There is that. 

Watching the slow slide of the amber liquor down the bottle-neck, the long pull of his lush mouth, the ripple of his strong throat, and the way his eyes go a little wider, shocked at how good it is. You laugh soft: “I know, right.”

He takes another pull, another swallow. That’s what you want to be—swallowed just like that. “Damn, that’s good.” His mouth is a little wet, bottom lip shiny with thousands of dollars worth of your father’s favorite whiskey, and his eyes are sad. 

You’d said you were going to be bad, but you don’t want to be bad to him. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.

He swallows again, tipping his head towards you, trying to catch your too soft words—he’s got a bad ear, you know why—and turns to peer at you from beneath his low pulled brow, the tip of his tongue peeking out to swipe at the drop of liquor you wish you could suck off his tongue. 

“You’ve got nothin’ to be sorry for.”

The first time he’d shown you that gentleness of his: You’d fallen from your horse at school in your junior year. Something had frightened the beast, and she’d bucked you, sent you flying ten feet in the air, ragdoll-like, before you’d landed badly on your right arm, a comminuted fracture in your radius that you’d needed surgery to fix. At your insistence, and with only a few weeks left to spare, you’d been sent home for the remainder of the semester. Your father had been incensed but eventually allowed it. He’d been away from the ranch on business, after all, at no risk of being truly disturbed by you. But when you’d been readying to return to Switzerland at the end of the summer, arm healed, courage not, you’d not been able to get back on a horse no matter what you tried. Joel had helped you, before they’d shipped you off again. Trotted the corral with you for hours and hours before you’d finally been able to relax and sit on your own without tears and vertigo. No questions or admonishments, nothing but the quiet burr of his deep voice, guiding you and the mare along. 

It had been a kindness unlike any you’d experienced in maybe your whole life. 

“I’ve been bad.”

“Nah. You couldn’t ever be.”

The second time: “Did today make you think of Sarah?” Years after you’d found that green eyed photograph, he’d shared her with you. 

His gaze turns suddenly sharp, but you’re not worried you’ve stepped in unbreachable territory. “Yeah.” The echo of her name rings around the two of you. 

“In a bad way or a good way?” He takes another long swig, a low whistle through his teeth and a shake of his head before he’s handing the bottle back to you—again, carefully. 

“Both.”

You take your own swallow, slicking your tongue all around where his just was, and you’re drunk for real now. Drunk on a man. 

“Do you ever regret telling me about her?”

“Nah.” He tips his head back, looking up at the thick beams of the deck’s awning. He’s got the longest lashes you’ve ever seen on a man, thick and curling. The deepest voice you’ve ever heard too, sultry, a bedroom voice. A voice for fucking. Your belly swirls and dips, and you want so much you’re dizzy with it. 

Heart beating like it’s about to burst, out of breath on the verge of hyperventilating, you can taste his mouth in your mouth, the imagination flavor of it. This is what it must feel like to die. This is what your father must have felt like three days ago, this agony. 

His Adam’s apple bobs, and it’s so pronounced, the skin of his throat sun pebbled. There isn’t an inch of him that isn’t all rough-hewn man. “You needed to hear about her then, I s’pose.” 

Yes. “You told me when I needed you to.” After that lonely graduation, the last time you’d missed her really very badly, longed for a mother. Alone, alone, alone little girl. 

“You were missin’ your momma somethin’ fierce. Needed to know you weren’t the only one that felt like that sometimes.”

You laugh a not-laugh, butt scraping against the railing, slipping off your perch, socked-feet thudding beside his gifted boots. The pleasure you feel whenever you see him use one of the things you’ve given him is indescribable. 

“Silly,” you say with barely any sound, his bad ear reaches for your voice again. “At the time it felt like I was the only person in the whole world that had ever felt like that.”

“We all feel like that at one point or another, I reckon.”

“Will you miss him a lot?” You ask looking up at him, the beautiful profile, the strong jaw. You’ve always wondered how he sees you. If he’s ever thought you were beautiful. Other men do, it’s a common thing, a nothing sort of thing. There are always men, there will always be men. But this singular man—this one is not like the rest. 

“Maybe. Can’t tell yet, don’t think. But it felt wrong earlier, walking through his house without him in it.” His house, not yours. 

“Do you wish he’d been your father?” And he turns to look down at you at that, gaze snapping, and you can tell you’ve shocked him with the question. But you’d always wondered. 

“No. Never,” he says with such assuredness, an uncompromising shake of his head. 

And the answer doesn't necessarily shock you in turn. You don't think anyone could have ever wanted a father like that. But it also doesn't help you understand what it was that lived between them either. 

He sighs, perhaps reading the confusion in your gaze. “He helped me at a time when I needed it real bad. Gave me a place and a purpose and a thing to do and take care of. You get me? It was gratitude—maybe. He saved me in a way, after Sarah. Nothing more.” He thinks for a moment, and then, “Perhaps it was that we understood each other about certain things.”

You gaze across the sprawl of dark land as far as the eye reaches, that point of no return where the earth shoots up into the sky, purple blue behemoths in the shape of mountains. 

From this spot, rooted to the deck of your family home, it seems like the whole world is yours to keep. Also, like you’ll never be able to touch any of it with fingers or taste or meaning. 

Your love for this place is complicated—tied up in the people, the memories, the could’ves and should’ves, the whole dreamscape idea of the monument of childhood and all it’d really never been. The time away had felt eternal, like you’d never really been here to begin with, like the young girl who’d grown up on this land had never really existed. But you’d not forgotten them, this, despite your distance. Your home, the father that wouldn’t want you, Wyoming and all its splendor, the people you’d left behind, Joel and Ellie and shared birthdays that meant a secret world to you. Morsels of small happinesses interloped amidst a largely lonely and sad childhood. That’s what it was at its core. 

“Would you be angry with me if I gave it all away?”

He thinks for a moment, maybe you’re making him sadder, but then finally says with a swallow, “No. It’s yours to do with as you please.”

You eye the quarter of whiskey left, but your belly isn’t hungry for its warmth anymore. You want something heavier now. 

“Could you even do that—legally—sell it or somethin’?”

“Probably not. He probably tied it to my fucking life. Sell and die.” You mime your name in an imitation of your fathers deep voice, frowning at yourself the way he’d always frowned when he looked at you, but it pulls a laugh from him, and the painful memory is worth it. “But I have a billion dollars to spend now. More?” You tap your chin—you want to make him laugh again. “Gotta think of something interesting to do with it all.”

His mouth slides into an easy half grin. Like the moon—that beautiful. And he turns to face you fully. “You’re gonna be just fine. You know that, right?”

You turn to face him too, gripping the bannister for dear life. “What? Will you make sure of it?”

“That’s my plan.”

“How’re you gonna do that, d’you reckon?” The American twang bleeds back into your voice, and you’re all swollen lush on the inside, heart a beating fist in your chest. 

“Haven’t gotten that far, if I’m bein’ honest with you.” God. His eyes, the strong bridge of his nose, his mouth. He’s so tall your head has to crook back to look up at him. “I’ll figure something out.” And after another pensive second, and still with that soft, sloped eye smile, he asks, and nicely, “Will you stop drinking now—for me?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” you say with the same sort of smile in return. 

And then suddenly, like vomit again but maybe more humiliating this time: “Did you respect him?” Because you don’t know all the things about him that there are to know, but you do know that Joel Miller’s respect is a thing hard earned. 

He clicks his tongue, and you hear the pop of his jaw as he shifts it like he’s chewing on an honesty. His eyes, his eyes, they’re serious, mercurial, warm and deep also. You worry he won’t answer, that he wouldn’t want to disappoint you or something, but then: “No,” said real simple like.

“Why not?”

And the way he looks down at you, you know already, and it makes that falling through the surface of your own life feeling rise up inside you again, makes your ears pop with embarrassment. Ah. “He never did a very good job of hiding the way he treated you, sweetheart. I couldn’t ever respect a man like that.” 

This is reality right here, this is you falling through your life, this is the realization that it wasn’t only you imposing yourself, your existence, on someone with gifts they didn’t want or ask for. Joel had seen. Joel had understood. 

Someone else had noticed that you exist, and it had been him. 

What else had you ever wanted?

And in the blink of a desperate, yearning eye, drunk on a man still, you’re throwing yourself at him, pressing your mouth hot and heavy to his, kissing him full on the way you’d dreamt of since you knew to dream of such things.

Chapter 2; Sugar, Not so Sweet

Netherfeildren's Masterlist

Updates Blog

[2kiran]

HI! HELLO!! 🤍🫶🏻

first of all i really love your writing! the way you write is just amazing! i absolutely love your works and always come back to re-read some of them!! keep writing and don't forget to take care of yourself and drink lots of water!!! 🥺🩷

anyways i wants to request something if it's not too much of a bother askjkasksj

dom!m!nerdy reader and sub!badboy with a whole load of crying from overstimulation, praise k!nk, size diff (tall!reader) and dumbification OOOHHHH IM GONNA GO FERAL 😵‍💫

[also can i be your 🎀 anon?]

THREEKVENT NAVIGATION

2knote. aww, this is so sweet of you. I appreciate it, thank you so much and I hope you enjoy this one. take care of yourself too and get some rest. lmk if you aren’t actually anon angelwing.

Every nerve was set on fire, blood pumping hot in his system as beads of sweat tingled down his forehead to his chest. It doesn’t help with the sudden high temperature of the room, especially not the uncontrollable throbbing in the center of his thighs. “Shhh,” your voice brings him back from his clouded state, grounding him. “won’t you look at that? You’re doing so great, practically sucking me in.”

He whimpers, oh how badly he wanted to punch off the smug way you were holding him up with his knees that threatened to buckle. His head tilted up to look at you, eyebrows knitting together in an attempt to appear threatening. Instead, he seems even more fucked out, tight hole squeezing your length with every push.

“Sh- shut up.” He grits, though tears sprouted and occupied his vision. Fuck, he hated you. The complete opposite of him, a reckless bastard, and you, the smart and adored one.

He hated how he’d perk up when you’d speak, listening to how your voice practically caressed the words you were uttering. Wishing that in lieu of you giving out the correct answer, you’d say his name and and — he’s definitely out of it. “Don’t say things like that, pretty thing,”

That fucking glint in your eye and how you’d scold him if he stepped out of line, he despised that even more. He clenched around you, gripping your cock tightly, silently begging for you to cum inside of him. It was overwhelming, flushed and sweaty skin bumping rhythmically against each other and making his mind hazy with pleasure.

You were supposed to hate him, not treat him as if he was the most valuable thing in the world. “Shit, that’s it.” You groan, rolling your hips into the spasming warmth that warned to milk you for all you were worth. “So good for me, haaah, yeah, take my cock.”

And he was. “Nnnggh–” stop talking is what he’s unable to retort with. Each thought is combining with one another, jumbled nonsense forming in his head and his mouth agape, only to gift pretty little moans and hushed whimpers to your ears.

He can’t stop the tears, bottom lip trembling and he’s clamping down all over again. You’re brushing against that spot which causes his back to arch off the wall, eliciting a breathy groan from him. He’s leaking on his stomach, pre-cum pathetically gathering up and slicking himself with his own fluid.

“It’s okay, let it out. You’re okay, yeah?” You grind your hips, aiming for it and he swears he’s going to kill you when he cums hard from just that. His body trembles, numbed, gasping for air and the only thought echoing is your damn mouth that can’t shut.

“Listen. Ah– look so pretty like this, all for me.” He can barely move a muscle, your thumb smearing his release around the sensitive tip. Briefly, he wonders if you’ll stop.

You don’t.

One of his palms reach out to you, weakly pushing at your arm as he sniffles. You’re rolling — on the brink of pounding — into him, set on getting him brainless beneath you. He can’t say it, can’t tell you to fuck off because you feel too good and he’s still got energy left. The overstimulation has a faint hint of pain pinching him, but he’s too distracted by the way you don’t quit.

You must’ve gotten to him. “Doing such an amazing job for me, sweetheart.”

He sobs, not quite recovering from his orgasm yet. How you’re crowding him sends him reeling, dizzy, and incredibly horny. He grabs the back of your head, tugging on the strands as he yanks you down to capture your lips in a bruising kiss. You can make out the salty taste of his tears due to the unrelenting thrusts, his poor body not catching one break, and that has you pushing your tongue inside of his mouth.

When you finally pull away, he whimpers in disappointment. But then, you speak up;

“You can give me one more.” It’s not a request. It’s a demand.

[bogleech]

MORE SUNDEW KITS AVAILABLE! A tiny carnivorous plant swamp that should grow for you even if you IGNORE IT ENTIRELY, by which I mean the following are some jars I have never touched (let alone opened) in over six months to a year:

This is the scale of the little baby sundews I will send you:

Here's how the sphagnum moss can grow depending on conditions:

Tinier little plants and liverworts will also come in your moss! Includes instructions in the box but here's some FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Don't they ever need air?!

-No! Some plants can't handle but the processes of Photosynthesis and a symbiotic microbiome allow many plants to live in an airtight container as long as it holds any moisture.

Do I need to water these?

-No! If they're in a properly sealed clear container that never loses moisture, you will never have to water these. If you do need to add water for any reason though it HAS to be distilled, reverse osmosis water, or fresh rain water, not just filtered or purified water. Luckily you can buy distilled water by the gallon at any grocery store! This is the one rule you have to take to the letter; carnivorous plants grow in such a strict type of wetland, even water from most healthy natural ponds will kill them!

How often do they need to be fed?

-Technically never. As carnivorous plants they will grow bigger, faster and more colorful if you give them tiny prey, such as ants or fruit flies, and some people have success with crumbs of fish food, but be sure to remove any food that gets moldy. If you NEVER feed them, they will still grow anyway, just scrappier.

What about climate?

-Sundews are generally fine as long as they don't freeze solid or roast at over 100f for too long, but can still bounce back even from a little frost or a heat wave, basically more temperature-resistant than you probably are! What are their light requirements? -ANY light that plants can live on, including plant-friendly indoor LED lights! Sundews can make do just fine in fairly low to medium light, but also enjoy intense, full blast sunlight, which can even turn them reddish pink over time. As long as they aren't in total darkness, they should do alright! What about the mosses?? -Sphagnum moss grows right alongside sundews in the wild and enjoys all the same conditions!

What if it dies anyway?!

-Sometimes a sundew dies down naturally, especially after it produces a flower or under prolonged winter cold, but leave it be and you might eventually notice new growth. Here's one of mine that turned completely brown and rotten looking, then months later, every leaf sprouted a baby one:

[mikkomacko]

Suspect Gone Wrong

A little Mob Nico blurb inspired by @angelinethompson 🫶

____________________________________________

“Where’s Nico?”

You turn to the open patio door, smiling at Jack standing there, hair damp from a shower and the clothes he slept in last night thrown back on.

“Went on his morning run.” You reply, looking back out towards the yard where Moose is roaming around. Pawing at the fresh soil you and Alex spread throughout the flower beds, nose twitching and sniffing. Nico always tries to take the poor things on runs with him, spend some father-puppy time together but Moose isn’t a running dog. He’s get him down the block maybe and then have to carry the giant pup back to the house.

So he stays with you, who also hates running.

“Lame,” Jack comments, joining you on the top porch step. You watch Moose mosey around the yard, note the budding trees and sprouting flowers that are growing with the warmer temperatures. Jack scrolls through his phone for a moment, then turns to you.

“Wanna make a TikTok?”

~~~~

Giggling, you aim the camera at Jack. He’s stretching out his muscles in a low lunge, eyebrows furrowed in concentration and you hit record, nodding for him to go.

He springs into a jog, you following him and trying to hold the phone steady. “Suspect’s biggest fear is getting something in his eye.”

Jack stops, turning to look at you wide eyed. “I can’t do eyedrops!” He defends, and you pause to switch places with him. You run this time, ducking around the bare branches of the backyard trees.

“Suspect treats her dog like he’s her son and it’s really scary.”

“Hey!” You laugh, already grabbing at the phone. Jack chuckles, getting into place and you hit record.

“Suspect got his license taken away by his boss and now has to passenger princess with his baby brother.”

His face immediately turns red, excuses falling from his mouth that you can’t hear over your own laughing. Jack ends up just ripping the phone from your hands, grumbling for you to go.

“Suspect went to an Ivy League school but gets love dumb every time her boyfriend is around.”

You bust out laughing, not at all taking Jack’s jab seriously but by the way he just grumbles at you, you think the intention was to bug you. Hesitantly, you swap places, thinking carefully about your words.

“Suspect has a longer hair care routine than me.”

Jack doesn’t laugh, but he smirks proudly, tousling his messy hair with a wink at the camera. “Worth every penny, now hand it over.”

You guys switch again. “Suspects whole personality is her boyfriend.”

“It is not!” You argue, pointing at him. “I have a dog too!”

Jack snickers, swapping with you again and you bristle. Any feelings of sympathy or playing nice has quickly faded.

“Suspect has a boy crush on my boyfriend and copies everything he does.”

Jack gapes, the two of you exchanging heated glares as you hand off the phone.

“Suspect doesn’t even have a real job but sleeps like she pays the bills.”

That ticks you off even more, anger and offense growing between you two with each role reversal.

“Suspect will give drinks to five girls every night and still end up going home alone with his baby brother.”

“Suspect gets one drink in her and is bending over in public for her boyfriend!”

“Suspect says he’s 5’11 but is actually 5’9 and a half!”

“Suspect has one friend and it’s because he gets paid to follow her around!”

You falter, heart hammering painfully in your chest and almost immediately tears sting at your eyes. Staring at Jack, the wicked gleam in his eye slowly fades as he realizes you’ve got wet eyes and your cheeks and neck have turned a splotchy red.

“Wait, no-“

“S’fine,” you cut in, yanking your phone from his hand and locking it. Then you turn, hastily crossing the yard to head back inside. You can hear Jack yelling after you, scrambling to keep up and Moose rises from his slumber on the porch as you near.

You duck into the house, Moose growling behind you and you hear Jack mutter a “damn dog.” But he doesn’t follow, most likely to smart to challenge the dog Nico trained to protect you.

Sniffling, you curse yourself for not being able to just take the fucking joke. You’ll be fine and you can shake it off in a bit but it’s too embarrassing to face Jack right now. You just need a few minutes to hide.

Unfortunately any attempts at hiding in the house are ruined when you run smack dab into Nico’s damp shirt.

“Whoa, whoa what’s going on?” He steadies you by the elbows, “what happened?”

Looking at his feet, you try to stealthily wipe at your eyes but he’s already seen your tear stained face. Nico grabs your chin, makes you look up at him. His hair is darker than usual, damp with sweat and his cheeks look all ruddy and shiny. His eyes search your face, worried and sympathetic.

Your lip wobbles and you can’t help it. You fall into his chest, curling in on yourself when he immediately wraps you up in his arms. He doesn’t smell great, not at all but you don’t care.

“Jack hurt my feelings.” You sniffle, and Nico strokes your hair.

“What did he say?”

“That Timo is only my friend because you pay him to be.”

You can hear the sharp inhale Nico takes, arms tightening just the slightest bit. Somewhere behind you, Jack has gotten back into the house.

“It was a joke Nico!” Jack pleads, that nervous pitch raising his voice. “For TikTok, I didn’t mean to-“

“Out,” Nico orders firmly, effectively quieting Jack. “Go home.”

Embarrassed, Jack mumbles “I can’t drive.”

It would be funny if you weren’t still upset about his comment. Nico doesn’t think it’s funny either by the way he sighs in annoyance. “To your room, now.”

You hear Jack scramble to get away from Nico, disappearing up the large staircase.

“I’m just being a baby,” you mutter sadly. “It was a joke but I-“

“It’s not a joke,” Nico assures, “that’s not a joke. He’s lucky you cried and didn’t swing for the jaw instead.”

Wetly, you giggle. Nico pecks a kiss to the top of your head. “Musli,” he calls softly, “guet hund.” Th dog pads away happily, pleased with the affirmation from Nico.

“You really need a shower,” you say into his shoulder and he snorts.

“Alright, let’s go.”

~~~~

Two days later you and Jack are fine. He apologized, you accepted it and told him you were just caught off guard. Nico glared at him, thumped him on the back of the head just once and then everything went back to normal.

Well almost normal.

“What are we doing Nico?”

He stops at the end of the large hallway, flicking on the light. “Making a better video.” He says casually.

Your heart warms, filling with love to the point that it almost hurts. “You want to be in my TikTok?”

Nico chuckles. “Not regularly but I’ll do it for this one, ok?”

Not wanting him to change his mind, you dig out your phone. He knows how the video works having heard about and seen yours with Jack. So he starts recording, urging you to jog down the hall with a nudge to your hip.

“Suspect is so pretty men will trip trying to hold a door for her and she’ll still say they’re just being polite.”

“They are!” You laugh, butterflies swarming your gut when Nico giggles too.

He just grins, the two of going back to the end of the hall and switching places.

“Suspect is so handsome his workers copy his haircuts and style.” You tease, and Nico shakes his head in amusement.

“What can I say? I have good taste.” He takes the phone from you, resetting for the next clip.

“Suspect has the best ass I’ve ever seen. I mean smile, the best smile.” Your cheeks flame, eyes widening in shock as you look to Nico. He’s grinning like a fool, eyes crinkled and dimples in his cheeks and you think you’re gonna melt just looking at him.

“Keep it PG,” you scold halfheartedly, willing away the blush in your face and taking the phone.

“Suspect has the prettiest baby cow eyes and dimples but refuses to smile in public.”

Nico doesn’t even argue, shrugging as if it’s common knowledge but you can see the slightest tints of red crawling up his neck.

He motions for you to go, clearing his throat and hitting record. “Suspect owns a hundred pajama sets but only sleeps in my clothes.”

“They’re warmer!” You laugh, bubbly and infectious. He laughs with you, pinching at your cheeks teasingly. Then he’s lining up, lightly jogging ahead of you.

You press record, glad you set the video to ten minutes before starting. It seems Nico is pretty good at this. “Suspect eats three servings at dinner and still has room for dessert.”

“I’m a big man,” he defends with a chuckle, patting at his belly through his shirt. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“Suspect will say the most inappropriate words I’ve ever heard and then flash her Bambi eyes to get away with it.”

Hunch over into the wall, you laugh and clutch at your cramping side. Maybe you get away with saying crazy things to Nico in public by batting your eyelashes at him, but he plays the same game.

“You’ve never even seen Bambi,” you pant, breathless from laughing and fake jogging. Nico scoffs, handing you your phone.

“I know what he looks like though,” he scoffs.

Still fighting back giggles, you take your turn. “Suspect says he didn’t go college because he’s stupid but is somehow fluent in four languages.”

It’s his turn to laugh, holding his stomach and shoulders shaking as you two swap yet again. His next one has you clinging to the wall again, that blush in your cheeks returning ten fold.

“Suspect has a lethal face card.”

“Suspect has a lethal everything.” You compliment back, looking him up and down as he laughs, like you’re proving your point. Which you are, to be honest.

Nico takes his spot, eyes lovingly looking over your flustered and smiling face. Fighting your overwhelmed grin, you move down the hall again with Nico trailing.

“Suspect doesn’t know it but she is perfect and makes everyday easy.”

He’s still recording when you stop, turning to him with moony eyes and a dropped jaw. “That’s so sweet,” you say in awe, ducking around the phone to hug his waist. Nico turns the phone, arm at an awkward angle to still record you two and he kisses the top of your head.

“Suspect is a big ol’ teddy bear and I love him.” You say sweetly, rising to your toes to kiss his jaw. He grins, bringing the phone back down and blinking at you with those pretty brown eyes.

“I love you too.”