#a testimony without reason
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People will learn medusas "rape" was a later retelling in roman myth and then get all mad and insist it's the only version that matters..
I hate this. No, I don't care if you want to romanticize the pain of rape through greek myth. Fuck off. Most of these people aren't even victims, they just want to post faux feminist posts about how sad and evil it was that that happened to get likes and not give a single fuck about women who are actually experiencing the pain of SA every day. It's bullshit.
No regard for how triggering insisting she was raped in every conversation about greek myth could be for people, especially hellenic folk, no caring about victims of this shit. Just looking at the facts and going "okay but I want her to have been raped so I will keep that version as the sole valid interpretation of her story."
As a victim and a hellenic person it pisses me off to no end. All of these self proclaimed people who are "really deep into greek myth" parading around their poor understanding of greek myth every chance they get. Like you cannot even mention her or the gods in general, in a conversation outside of the roman retelling, without these people flooding to the replies to tell you you are evil and horrible for not "being respectful"..
FUCK MAN you can't even wear her head or anything without people insisting it's "rape victim exclusive", which I shouldn't even have to explain why that's weird. I hate it.
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little comic for disability pride month! HoH rouge is a headcanon i've had for a while but I never do anything with it... tragic... well now I've changed that :)
#sth#sonic the hedgehog#rouge the bat#amy rose#fanart#comics#id in alt text#umm my only reference for daily living with hearing loss is my grandpa#i wasn't able to find the sort of testimonials I would've liked to see online..#so if this is actually wildly inaccurate feel free to let me know </3#my vision is her hearing loss comes from repeated exposure to gunfire without proper hearing protection#hazard of working with GUN while having bat hearing </3#anyway yay done! that was fast! with the magic of Copy/Pasting Panels ^_^#had to save this as 26 separate files... for layering reasons...
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Between TF and my other fandoms like BG3 and TES, I keep finding myself making OCs that have some element of "battle hardened hero who is actually good and righteous, but so traumatized by the toll of war that even after the war ends they feel empty/wrecked and can't enjoy the fruits of victory" and I'm not sure if it's bc I gravitate to a certain type of media where such OCs fit in best, or bc I have a specific character archetype I like and gravitate towards media that contains those things.
#squiggposting#possibly a mix of both bc idk if i've gone into detail here but war stories are one of my favorite genre of stories#like for fun fictional reasons but also for real life political and moral and emotional implications#war stories are literally so fucking cool man i feel like they get a bad rap for just being propaganda tools#and obv a lot of them can be/are explicitly made to be but also like#(i feel like i'm stealing a quote from one such story) war stories are also a method for the soldiers of the war to tell their side#and usually the soldier's side of the story tells of the LESS glorious and propagandistic sides#maybe ive just had the pleasure of having really good teachers/professors but like#most of the war stories i've read are specifically ABOUT the bridge bt war propaganda and the actual experience of fighting in a war#and i think even the ones where the soldier in question supports the war (american sniper comes to mind)#it's very interesting and dare i say important to read it and understand when and why and how they came to support war#like idk i think it's one of those things where ppl shy away from war stories bc#'ew gross it's all pro war probably american imperialist propaganda written by oppressive killers trying to make us feel sorry for them'#without understanding... idk. the difference between an individual soldier's evil and the evil of an entire institution?#some sort of anti intellectualism regarding soldiers as being inherently evil ppl who aren't to be listened to or taken seriously?#it's not a matter of like. you don't need to like or sympathize with them per se. but i think part of understanding and criticizing#the institution of war is getting the ground level testimonies about it. and more of them are critical than some ppl believe#plus i mean FUCK usamerican imperialism it doesn't need to be about US wars! other countries lived thru other wars that are also important!#war stories may have their strongest association w american imperialism but that doesn't mean other war stories don't exist#idk sorry for rambling in the tags
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oh but I DID find a clean version of me myself and I and I genuinely can’t believe they actually made it
#these lies I feed myself; me and my selfish appetite#leave it up to me to blow it up without a good reason#it sounds so youth group testimony#like ‘I wanna cover dark stuff but I’m gonna censor myself so hard’#I mean it’s probably one of the better ones they’ve done#but the angst is not quite there#5sos#5 seconds of summer#5sos5#mm&i#like ik it’s cause it was a single. but luke really went and sang it a whole other time in the studio
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everyone has different opinions on whether or not neil and andrew get married. i personally think they do, but not for the medical reasons that i see a lot. i see people saying that they’d get married so andrew has access to neil when he’s injured, but there’s paperwork that could do that without them being married.
i propose a funnier solution. neil isn’t a citizen of the united states. his mother was visiting in the uk when she was pregnant and he was born early, and when she took him back to the us they never bothered correcting the paperwork or anything. fast forward to after baltimore and the fbi have done some digging, only to find out that neil “pain in the ass” josten is actually an illegal immigrant. needless to say, they gleefully hold this over his head, maybe as a way to make him more compliant with testimonies. neil, however, being the little shit that he is, proposes a green card marriage to andrew. andrew agrees to it without a second thought .
that’s how, to the shock and horror of everyone else, andreil ends up being the first married in their early 20s
below is part 2, kevin’s reaction (i added earlier but this is easier to see)
yes, they did have a basic ass courthouse ceremony. their one witness was kevin. he did not know he was going to be the witness. neil asked him if he wanted to go on a run, and he got slightly suspicious when andrew appeared with the car but neil told him andrew was taking them to a new location. so kevin is in his jogging outfit when they pull up to the courthouse. he’s confused but neil says they need to sort out a parking ticket really quick before. they go in and all of a sudden neil and andrew are getting married?!? the poor official is trying to get through the procedure but kevin is squawking like a chicken because what do you mean you’re getting married and im in my jogging sweats
after the ceremony neil and andrew have to listen to him rant for an hour about what is appropriate and what isn’t appropriate to wear to your wedding (neil you’re lucky i didn’t object you were wearing neon orange shorts)
they do go on a run after though and even andrew joins so kevin is satisfied and doesn’t blab. he really doesn’t care enough to, it just means neil’s exy career is even more guaranteed and he will play for the usa team in the olympics (and he wants to see his friends happy wait who said that-)
#they wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to fuck with the fbi#aftg#all for the game#neil josten#andrew minyard#andreil
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exhibit #4 - tickling.
an installment of the freak shit march gallery showcase.
pairing: yandere!dick grayson x reader (dc).
length: 1.6k.
warnings: non/con touching, mentions of kidnapping, explicit disregard of consent, tickling, prolonged captivity, and obsessive/delusional behavior. dead dove: do not eat.
You weren’t entirely sure how you ended up in this position.
Being held in an underground facility for an indeterminable amount of time, you were starting to grapple with. It helped to think of it as a kind of witness protection program – the city’s ever-expanding network of criminals wanted you dead and buried, Gotham’s most prolific gang of vigilantes wanted you alive and able to provide testimony at an upcoming trial, and the best place to keep you in the meantime was one of the many tucked-away safe-havens they apparently had, where only the damp chill and occasional lost sewer rat would be able to find you. It wasn’t that bad. Your temporary living space was more similar to a high-end apartment than a war bunker, and someone was almost always around to keep you company (even if you could survive without the taller, angsty-er Robin’s board games). If there’d been a few more windows, you might’ve been able to get used to it. You were still looking forward to getting home, of course, but you knew why you were here.
How you’d ended up tucked against Nightwing’s chest, his arms locked around your midriff and his face buried in the back of your shoulder was… less comprehensible.
‘Bonding time’, he called it. There was a movie playing in the background – some b-rated flick meant to make you scream and flinch and melt further into him – and he’d cornered you in the bedroom, insisted that both of you would be more than comfortable on your twin-sized mattress. Of all the bats, he was the most determined to treat you more like a little sibling than an endangered civilian. Part of it (most of it, even) was guilt. He’d been the one to find you in the back of that big, white van; the one to suggest putting you into hiding to the others. Of course he wanted to make you feel comfortable. If you didn’t, he would be the reason why.
You just wished his bids for your forgiveness were a little less tactile.
The leading lady let out a cartoonishly high-pitched scream as the killer’s axe broke through the ridiculously thin door of her bathroom, and you felt Nightwing’s hand flatten against your stomach, prepared for you to startle and shrink, ready to draw you closer at the first sign of a reaction. It took everything you had not to roll your eyes. A shirt that read ‘Sorry I got you sort of kidnapped, please tell me I’m a good hero!’ would’ve been more subtle.
Sighing, you started to push yourself up. He was quick to stop you, of course, drawing back without loosening his grip. “Going somewhere?”
“Mhm. I just need to—” A half-eaten bowl of popcorn sat on your bedside table, an untouched glass of water next to it. You could say you needed to use the bathroom, but you’d already used that excuse, too. Less than ten minutes ago, in fact. “—stretch my legs. I’ll be back in a second.”
He hummed, one of his hands falling to your side, where your oversized shirt had ridden up to expose skin. “If you’re feeling restless, you can say so. I’ll talk to B about moving some gym equipment in – let you burn off some steam while I’m gone.” He paused, laughed. “Or I could be your personal trainer. Promise I’ll go easy on you n’ everything.”
Your tense smile faltered. Great.Then he’d have yet another reason to put his hands on you. “Mr. Nightwing, sir, I’m really just—”
“I’ve told you,” he cut in, tone light and saccharine and so incredibly grating. “You can call me Dick.”
“I really don’t think I should know your real—”
“I don’t mind. It’s only fair, since I know yours.”
“That’s different.” It really wasn’t. You hadn’t wanted him to know yours, either. “I’m sorry, but I really just need a couple of minutes to—”
Again, you tried to pull away, and again, he stopped you. This time, though, the effort was hasty, sloppy, and his fingertips brushed against the tender skin just above your hip in just the wrong way. Before you could swallow it back, an airy giggling slipped past your lips – more reflex than anything. Immediately, you stopped moving, and Dick did the same – his hand clamping down around your waist.
You tried to speak, but he was faster, his delight blatant enough to be audible. “You’re ticklish?”
“I’m not.” And then, more defensively, “It hurts and I hate it.”
He didn’t respond, but he didn’t let you go, either. His hold on you shifted, one arm wrapping around your diaphragm while skirting his freehand along your lower stomach, his touch nearly too light to be felt. Your reaction was instantaneous, humiliatingly so. A crooked smile, a fractured laugh followed shortly by an awkward, painful wheezing sound. You threw your elbow into his chest, but he ignored you, only nuzzling into the nape of your neck. “Yeah, I can tell how much you hate it.”
He was practically dripping with that self-congratulatory, faux-sympathetic confidence. You grit your teeth, biting back a comment about Gotham’s heroes and their faulty sense of mortality, but it was a waste of breath. He was already moving onto his next target – the inside of your thighs, clamped shut as soon as his hand started veering in that direction. That didn’t matter. All it took was the pads of his fingertips grazing over that hyper-sensitive junction for you to lose your composure, kicking out blindly as you coughed up a sound that swung closer to death gasps than laughter.
Dick didn’t seem to mind. When he laughed, it was light, chiming, genuine. He propped his chin on your shoulder, watching your expression as his hands moved over your stomach, your sides, your midriff. “It’s cute,” he muttered, only half-focused on what he was saying. Most of his attention was dedicated to touching you, tickling you, making sure you didn’t have time to breath in-between thrashing fits – let alone resist. “And it’s good to see you lighten up. I don’t think you’ve smiled since the day we met.” Your recollection was swift, spotty. Darkness, adrenaline, terror, and then, relief, light, a smiling face. You couldn’t remember anything beyond that, not beyond what’d been told to you later on. You couldn’t remember whether you’d been happy to find yourself in Dick’s arms, or devastated that you were still being held at all. “You could afford to let your guard down a little, you know. It’s not like any bad guys are gonna be able to find you here – not with me looking out for you.”
“I don’t—” It was awful, not being able to spit out a coherent string of words without your own dysfunctional body cutting you off. It was awful, knowing he wouldn’t listen even if you could. “I’m not afraid of any—”
“Of course you aren’t. Not when I’m here to keep you safe.” His voice had taken on a strange drawl, blurring around the edges. You felt him shift against your back, his hands leaving your body for one merciful second before finding your shoulders and jerking you onto your back, the motion forceful enough to knock the air out of your lungs. You were never going to get used to it; the freakish strength, the inhuman speed, the bizarre flexibility that meant he was on top of you long before you’d had the chance to catch your breath. His knees dug into the mattress on either side of your waist, his hips slotted against yours. Against your will, you felt something stiff and warm press into your lower stomach, and choose not to put a name to it.
Your chest throbbed, like it was at risk of splitting open. Your body ached, too little oxygen in too many placed, and it took you seconds to remember how to make any sound other than short, pitchy whines. Dick took it all in from above, only partially cast in shadow. Unlike the others, he never wore his mask around you – something about ‘letting his guard down’ or ‘proving you can trust him’, you were sure. Still, you wished he cared more about his secret identity. Even blank anonymity would’ve been better than being able to make out the deep, scarlet blush spread over his cheeks as he loomed over you, to recognize the raggedness of his own breathing and force yourself not to acknowledge why he seemed so strained.
“You’re not smiling.” It was true. You weren’t. Your expression had fallen into a distinct, pathetic grimace – only a touch less strained than the alternative. “Are you going to fix that, or do you need my help?”
In your own defense, you tried. You did your best to force it, to contort your lips into something that could pass for an easy smile, but whatever mangled offering you managed to pull together wasn’t up to Dick’s standards. He sighed, bowing his head and raising his hands. For a brief, terrible second, you pictured his fingers curled around your throat, your body convulsing as you suffocated, but his intentions were elsewhere. The hem of your shirt was caught and drawn up to your chin, far past anything that could ever be considered appropriate. You felt his fingertips drag over the curve of your rip cage once, twice before it kicked in – a searing, full-body laugh tearing out of your chest while you thrashed, your back arching and your hips inadvertently crashing against his. Immediately, Dick buckled – falling against you, hiding his face in your shirt. A second later, you felt something damp start to soak into your shorts, so hot it could’ve burnt.
The minutes passed, but Dick didn’t move, content to keep his body pressed into yours. Teary-eyed and dizzy, you let your head roll to the side, staring blankly at the television just as the credits started to roll.
At least he couldn’t keep you here forever, right?
#yandere#yandere x reader#yandere x you#yandere imagines#yandere dc#dc x reader#dc imagines#yandere batfam#batfam x reader#yandere dick grayson#dick grayson x reader
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ode to a faux grecian urn
Howdy everyone,
Today's house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.
This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.
The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?
The theme of this house is, vaguely, "old stuff." Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.
The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.
Entering cheat codes in "Kitchen Building Sim 2000" because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.
Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I'm team Prince.
I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it's tacky right? That it's giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it's giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.
Something about the bathroom really just says "You know what, I give up. Who cares?" But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom...
Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.
If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.
Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let's take a nice peek at what's out back.
I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.
Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!
#architecture#design#mcmansion#mcmansions#ugly houses#interior design#bad architecture#mcmansion hell#illinois#2000s
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Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:
The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.
https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/
"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."
And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.
How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.
When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.
People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/
Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:
https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/
And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/
How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.
It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.
Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.
Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.
It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":
https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d
Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.
Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.
Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":
https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic
After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:
https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf
The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."
OK.
But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."
It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."
"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."
And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."
In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.
Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."
For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.
But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it
Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:
https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554
Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.
For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."
Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).
Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.
But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.
And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.
As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.
But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.
The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."
What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
#pluralistic#enshittification#semantic matching#google#antitrust#trustbusting#transparency#fatfingers#serp#the algorithm#telling on yourself
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pairing: boss!wonwoo x model!mingyu x f.reader
genre: smut, slowburn, poly!relationship
summary: after being happily single for years, when you develop a crush, you don't know what to do. you think your closest friend (with benefits) can take your mind off things. but when you ask for his help, you certainly didn't imagine this kind of help from him.
word count: 15k words
rating: NSFW 18+ MINORS DO NOT INTERACT PLEASE!!!
warnings: mentions of workplace sexism, minor sugar daddy x sugar baby dynamics, fwb dynamics, wonwoo and mingyu are both depicted as bisexual in this story and this does not imply anything from real life, asymmetric power dynamics (boss and employee), open relationship (not really but-), slight possessiveness, minor age gap (wonwoo is four years older than reader and mingyu).
smut warnings: sub!mingyu, dom!wonwoo, switch!reader, threesome, sir kink, usage of petnames (baby, pretty baby, darling, love, baby boy, doll), praise kink, degradation kink, minor (?) objectification, heavy descriptive mlm action, anal sex, usage of butt plug and cock ring, use of lube, orgasm denial, unprotected sex (pls do not do this irl), oral sex (m. receiving, f. receiving), nipple play (with both male and female), usage of traffic light system during sex, spanking, usage of degrading petnames (cockslut, whore, plaything), spitroasting, squirting, multiple sex scenes, PLEASE LMK IF I MISS OUT ON SOMETHING.
a/n: does anyone know how to get out of corporate!wonwoo brainrot? if yes, pls pls pls lmk i need it ^^ comments, reblogs, and feedback are so so much appreciated!! would love to hear your thoughts on this dynamic so beloved to me- i have some headcanons in mind too, could share if anyone wants!
(i)
You slowly sip the whisky on your glass, on the rocks, the liquid burning through your chest. You embrace the burn, as your mind wanders away from the beautiful night skyline in front of you. It’s been a couple of hours since you’ve returned home, the night edging towards midnight, but you can’t get it out of your mind.
You can’t get him out of your mind.
His voice, his scent, even hearing his footsteps give you sheer goosebumps.
God, you thought you were better than this. After spending so many years in the ruthless corporate world, you pride yourself on becoming a woman made of steel. Nothing affected you anymore. Disobedient juniors? Your reputation of being the most unforgiving boss in the entire building has permeated to everyone in the industry. Sexism? There’s a rumour that you once stabbed your stiletto into the hand of a man trying to grab your ass, and since then, no one’s dared to look down at you for being a woman. Disrespectful bosses? They knew better than to get their top employee against them, especially when you had a record of toppling over bosses and taking their position sheerly through merit.
It hadn’t been easy. Fighting into the corporate world as a woman with no contacts and no fancy universities on your CV had been tough, but it had made you strong enough to not let anything faze you anymore. It certainly helped that you were not interested in anything except your career, so you had every reason to keep fighting on without giving up. It also helped that you were married to your work- the way you regularly return home late, even in your tenth year at the company, was testimony to that fact.
And yet, he had managed to faze you. Your face grows red with shame just thinking about how your heart and body reacted when you see him, and you take another hurried gulp from your glass, eager to divert your mind away.
The door unlocks itself.
“You came.” You turn around in your swivel chair to see a tall man, wearing a long black trench coat enter your house, his cap and sunglasses not giving away any of his face. But you know damn well who it is.
“You called. You never call first unless it’s urgent.”
Mingyu steps out of the shadows, taking away his coat, cap and sunglasses, and you see that he’s wearing a fancy blue button down with jeans.
“Did you have a schedule before this?”
“Yes. Y/N, please tell me you have something to eat, I’m famished. I’ve been eating nothing but chicken breast for the last week because of this shoot today, but now I’m ready to break my diet. Do you have ramen?”
He makes himself at home in your open kitchen, as you watch on from your prime spot next to long glass windows which make up the wall of your living room. There are dim lights on, but Mingyu looks perfect even like this. “Of course I have ramen. Can you make some for me too?”
“Sure, I’ll add eggs too. I’m really hungry.” You smile at the way Mingyu quickly found his way through your house. This isn’t the first time he’s cooking in your kitchen, and you hope it won’t be the last time certainly.
You finish your glass and walk up to him, just as he’s pouring out the ramen into two bowls. “Thank you for the food, Mingyu.” You sit on the kitchen counter and he pulls up the stool next to you, your bare legs hanging next to him. He pecks your cheek, before handing you chopsticks and the two of you instantly begin inhaling the ramen which is made just perfectly. You’re silent while eating, and Mingyu finishes first. Once you’re done, he cleans up the dishes too.
“Mingyu, you’re my guest, stop doing all the work.” You swing your legs over the counter, and pull his hand until he’s locked in between your two legs. His hands land over your shoulders, and you lean in to kiss him, but he pulls away-
“Wash your mouth, baby. And wait for me in the bedroom.” You make a face, not looking forward to waiting because you want him now. He seems to read your mind, so he continues, “I won’t even take 2 minutes.”
So you do wash your mouth, brush your teeth too and dab some serum on your face.
“What happened that you had to call?” Mingyu comes and stands behind you in the ensuite bathroom, his face in your neck as he inhales your scent.
“I can’t call my friend from time to time?”
His giggles are warm against your bare skin. “Y/N, as much as I love you, you know it wasn’t just a call. Although I don’t mind,” he carefully begins to untie the straps at your shoulders, “you know I am always at your service,” then he lets the dress drop to your feet, and places his hands on your hips, his gaze scanning you through the mirror. You’re not wearing anything underneath, and it’s a treat for his eyes.
You turn around before he can touch you where he really wants to.
“I know we stopped after you…”
“God, don’t make it sound so sad. You know my boyfriend is okay with this.”
“Yes I know, but I thought it was a matter of principles?”
Mingyu’s canines are out as he giggles. “Darling, you do know what an open relationship means?”
You sigh. “I don’t know how you do it. Do you not get jealous? Does he not get jealous? Of me?”
Mingyu doesn’t say anything, bending down to kiss on the sensitive spots of your neck. “He does, sometimes. And then, he fucks me hard enough to remind me who I come home to, after all.” You shudder against his touch. “So, please Y/N. Don’t hesitate.”
He stops kissing you as you take his face in your hands, feeling the smooth skin under your nails. The hunger in his eyes, softened by his affection for you, are all the confirmation you need.
_
Mingyu is, for all his height and glory, no dom. He’s a service top at best. But you like it better if he’s pinned underneath you, squirming against the way your nails tease his nipples, his cockring tight, as you ride him, gifting yourself with endless orgasms. His hands are tied up above his head, leaving his arms left bare for you to savour. So you do so, biting, licking and sucking his arms which seem to have grown since the last time you did this, although admittedly, that was over six months ago. You know Mingyu is especially sensitive at his nipples, so at least one of your hands never leave his chest, holding on to the rock-hard muscle for both support and also to keep him down. Even with his hands tied, he’s strong enough to flip you over, but you know it’s not really necessary. With the way he’s drooling all over your pillows and begging you with his soft, puppy eyes, to let him cum once, you don’t think he’s aware of just how strong he is.
“Baby’s doing so well, hmm?” You whisper into his ear, leaning down to hear his moans and whimpers clearer. “Can you give me one more orgasm? Do you want to?” He nods feverishly, but you gently tap his lips. “I want words, pretty baby. Colour?” But he still doesn’t reply. So you sit up, and lift your body away from where you’re seated on his cock, wondering if you’re doing something wrong. But he instantly thrashes his feet and words come flowing out. “No! I’m sorry- all green, I swear.” “I’m sorry if I pushed you too hard-” “No! Y/N, please. Just zoned out for a second. Please. Green.” So you gently push his cock back inside, still red, weeping and imaginably hard.
“Can you give me one more? Mingyu? You’re doing so well.”
“Yes! Yes I can!” He moves his head forward, and you kiss him. Softly, unlike how you’re bouncing on him. The kiss is sloppy, leaving strings of spit between your mouths, but that’s how Mingyu likes it, you know. You also know he likes your tits, so you sit up, and let his mouth fall to your breasts. And he devours them, like a hungry man. Sloppily licking, kissing and sucking at your nipples, until they’re swollen.
And when you cum again, your warmth floods Mingyu’s still-erect cock, his head lolls, eyes rolling back, as you feel spent and tired. “Baby, you did so well. So good for me. You were made for me, I think. Made to give me heavenly orgasms,” you see the way his gaze becomes unfocused at all the praise. He eagerly kisses you, moaning when you suck his lip too hard, all while you untie the knot of his hands. When his hands are finally free, he gently flips you over into the bed.
“Let me clean you up-” you offer. But he shakes his head, pushing you down on the bed now, as he bends down towards your stomach. In spite of the five orgasms of the night, a spike of arousal shoots through you, as you realise what’s going to happen.
“I want my dessert, Y/N. Let me worship you for being so patient with your good boy all night. Please? Haven’t I been a good boy? ”
And he has been a good boy. Such a good boy, the way his skillful tongue laps all over your ruined, messy folds, licking the remnants of your cum still in you, and making out with your pussy. He drives you on the verge of overstimulation, so you yank his hair up and remove his face from your cunt.
“Let me take off your cock ring. You’ve been such a good boy. Cum with me as you eat me out?” It’s too good of a reward for him to not smile widely, his canines out and his eyes bright. He doesn’t care that he has to rut against the bed to chase his high. He does it fast, just how fast his tongue moves in your cunt, and he holds back to time it such that you both reach your climax at the same time, and you’re moaning out loud.
“Wonwoo!”
You don’t realise that Mingyu hears that too, as you pass out for a long second after squirting all over Mingyu’s face.
_
That night doesn’t end there. There are quick breaks from time to time, but it goes on until you’re positively sure the first rays of the sun are coming up in the sky, and you both are tired as fuck. Spent, wasted and high on all the hormones, you snuggle into Mingyu’s warm body, as he cages you into him with one arm on your side. His cock is finally flaccid after going all night long, and your body is too sore to move. It’s just a miracle that Mingyu smells good even after all night.
“Who was that whose name you called out earlier?”
Fuck. You’d forgotten about that.
At least Mingyu doesn’t sound mad. He just sounds mildly amused, and a little curious. You purse your lips and turn up to face him. Well, it would come out sometime or the other. And better if you admit your secret first to Mingyu than anyone else. At least you don’t feel that embarrassed in front of him, because of how you’ve both been friends.
“My new boss.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah. Was appointed a month ago. He used to manage the overseas operations first, but apparently he’s been wanting to come back and settle down for a permanent position here for a long time. Six months earlier, he shifted back with a temporary position to headquarters, and our CEO was so impressed with him, he got promoted to our branch as the Director.”
“And you like him?” Mingyu’s voice has a lilt to it, as if he finds it a bit funny.
He might as well. You yourself find it funny. “I- I don’t know. I think I’m a little infatuated with him? Fuck, Mingyu, this is so embarrassing but-”
“It’s not embarrassing. Even if you’re all steel outside, I know you’ve got a soft core. And who will you admit crushes to if not to a friend?”
You gently slap his chest, and he laughs. “You’re mocking me.”
“Am not. It is a crush, or is it more?”
“God, no! He doesn’t even know I like him. I mean I hope he doesn’t. It would be so embarrassing. God, I’m going to lose the entire image I’ve made in front of my peers and subordinates!”
“Why? Does he make you act irrationally?”
“Oh so irrationally. He makes me distracted during meetings. He makes my mind wander during work. I’ve lost focus, and I’ve lost my concentration. One time he put his hand on my thighs, and I swear I got wet. I don’t even get that wet during foreplay usually!”
Mingyu bursts out laughing. “Y/N, I think this is a pretty bad case. I’ve never seen you have this kind of an infatuation in all the eight years that we have been friends.”
You nod. You know that well enough.
“But the question is, why don’t you make a move on him? Why only hide? Is he married?”
“Nah. It’s worse. He’s not into women.”
Mingyu shifts a bit, turning his head towards you. “Are you sure?”
“He has a boyfriend. And as far as his record goes, he’s never dated a woman. Always rejected advances from females.”
Mingyu hums, before wrapping an arm around your waist. “But a girl can dream, hmm?”
“Don’t mock me, Mingyu! I called you here to get my mind off him but…”
“But you still called out his name when you came.” There’s a smirk on his lips. “What’s his name, you said?”
“Wonwoo. Jeon Wonwoo.”
In the darkness of the night, you don’t notice Mingyu’s smirk widening, because you’re too busy yawning. And as soon as you close your eyes, basking in Mingyu’s warmth, you’re out like a light.
_
(ii)
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Miss Y/L/N, I’ve spoken to my secretary to rearrange your schedule to accommodate the trip to Tokyo. Have you checked it?” Wonwoo asks you in the weekly meeting, and you have no option but to recollect your calm as you reply, because everybody’s watching. “I have, Sir. But I have to tell you, I hardly have any experience in dealing with international investments-”
“Then this is the perfect opportunity for you to get that experience.” His eyes are cold and fixed on yours, glaring at you from across the table. His gelled hair lifted off his forehead reveals slightly furrowed eyebrows.
You bite your lip. Any other time and you would jump on the opportunity. But this time, you have to hesitate because you’re afraid you’ll jump your boss on the trip and that would be enough to end your career then and there. But you have a point to prove, especially to the seven other men sitting on the same table. Even in the bright sunlight of the morning in the boardroom, their eyes glint like wolves, waiting for you to make the slightest mistake. They’re waiting for Wonwoo to disapprove of you, so that they can remove the single infiltrator in their male-dominated corporate world.
“Then I won’t disappoint you, Sir.” Wonwoo nods curtly. “Miss Y/L/N, please meet me in my office after the lunch break.” You nod and take his leave as the meeting comes to an end.
Fuck. Less than two days left for the trip, and somehow your confidence has weakened already. You take a seat in your office, staring at your open computer screen, wondering what has come over you. It’s shocking just how much your mind has started behaving and reacting to everything Wonwoo does or says. He’s just four years older than you, but there’s something in his aura which has you second-guessing your every move. Perhaps it's the way he dresses in nothing but the darkest shades of black every day. Perhaps it’s his horn-rimmed glasses, which do nothing to soften his piercing gaze. Perhaps it’s the way there are rumours floating about, but nothing seems to disturb him. In the three weeks you’ve met him, you’ve never seen him lose control even for a second. Not one loud voice, not one expression of unease, not one flicker of anger. In all of your life, you’ve never met a man with such force of character. Character that does not divert, that does not decrease. It intrigues you and excites you in equal parts.
You don’t bother to knock because Wonwoo’s blinds are up and his eyes have been on you since you left your own cabin to walk to his office.
“Sir?”
“Have a seat, please.”
So you do, but he stands up. He comes around the desk to sit on the desk next to you, and his scent engulfs you. Your body has an almost Pavlovian reaction to it- every time you smell his cologne mixed with his naturally masculine scent, you feel intoxicated. The hairs on the end of your skin have risen, as his eyes never leave yours.
“There’s a document on this tablet. I will send it to your email as well. Take a good look at it, I doubt you’ll face any difficulties at the conference in Tokyo.”
“I will check it.”
Wonwoo nods. He’s a man of few words. You secretly think he does it on purpose, to remain more mysterious, to leave you craving for his voice.
“How many days will we be away?”
“One. We’ll be back the next day in the evening. The conference is going to take up your whole day, but you’ll have some time to yourself, if you want.”
“I’ve been to Tokyo before, so I don’t particularly want to sightsee. I’ll treat it as a paid vacation,” you smile, before standing up. “Is there anything else you want to talk about, Sir?”
He doesn’t smile. “Sit,” there’s a pause, and your breath hitches, “please. I also want to talk about your new project. There’s been plenty of talk about the deal with the Spanish, but I want to ensure that it’s a safe source.”
His obsidian eyes burn into you as you sit down again. You couldn’t really deny him when he asked so nicely, could you?
_
If you thought spending all those days in a glass cabin ten metres away from Wonwoo’s office was torture, the trip is absolute hell, with no chance for redemption. This is the first time you’re on the company jet, thanks to Wonwoo. There’s no one else on this trip, except Wonwoo’s secretary, Jeong Yunho, a scarily efficient man who’s been with Wonwoo since before his transfer to your branch. Wonwoo and Yunho seem busy discussing something about the conference, so you stick to your laptop, avoiding eye contact with the man in question. But soon, Yunho leaves the compartment (room? segment?) where you two are sitting (you realise there must be seats beyond the curtain too).
And then it’s just Wonwoo and you. You keep your eyes on your laptop, although he’s sitting diagonally opposite to you, but oh, the only thing on your mind is him. The way his jaw tightens as he reads something on his tablet. The way his blue trousers fit him like second skin, stretching the right way near his thighs. The way his form-fitted blazer must be custom-tailored because there’s no way a commercially sold blazer would match the proportions of those shoulders and that slim waist.
Oh, how you envy his boyfriend.
“See something interesting, Miss Y/L/N?”
Your mouth goes dry when you realise you’ve been staring at him through your side glance, and Wonwoo has caught you in it, without even lifting his eyes once.
“No, I- I was wondering if you’d taken a look at the other companies interested in this conference.”
He still doesn’t look up. His voice is a dry, lazy drawl, but so sharp it cuts through your skin. “Did you? Was there anything you observed?”
“I did. In fact, I’ve also mailed you a report on them. They’re mainly tech giants spread across the world, looking to expand their investment in the AI market, like us. But they’re also top companies in their respective countries, so I’m a little concerned whether our offer will be enough to secure this deal. I understand that the other potential deals will also be substantial, although the chance of a big difference isn’t much considering the current global recession. There’s been few companies who have picked up pace with as much speed after the pandemic as ours, and I think that’s where our edge lies. But at the same time, I thought it best to warn you that the deal will not be easy. It will be a long, competitive negotiation.”
Wonwoo does look up now.
“I see you’ve done your research well, Miss Y/L/N. Do send me a portfolio of the other potential investors you’ve found.”
“Noted, will do so.”
“Good girl.”
And then he goes back to whatever he was reading on his phone, leaving your lungs sans air, and your heart racing. You surely didn’t imagine that- and if you hadn’t known better, you’d think he was encouraging the way you were reacting to him. Did he get off on that kind of thing? Knowing he had his employee squirming for him, begging for his attention?
You excuse yourself to the washroom to take a moment to recuperate. It felt embarrassing and exhilarating at the same time- a feeling you’d never felt yourself, but also a dangerous, forbidden zone of life you’d never explored. Is this how all the men you fucked and didn’t call back feel like when they asked you out on dates? Is this how your sister had felt like when she’d run away from home to marry her professor? Is this how Mingyu felt for his boyfriend?
God, no. This was not happening to you- your mindset, your work spirit, your concentration was not going to be ruined because of one man. You were not, are not that weak. He’s just a man, you tell yourself. At the end of the day, he thinks with his dick. Even if he may not be cishet, he’s probably an enabler or a silent acceptor to sexism and everything you’d fought your entire life for, because how could he have survived in the corporate world for so long?
You wash your face.
That is it. This is the end to your ‘crush’ or infatuation or whatever the fuck this has been. It’s just hormones, it’s just attraction. Nothing fatal, nothing rare. You know well enough that Jeon Wonwoo has got every female employee in the company swooning after him, so there’s no need for you to think his attention is unique to you. So even if your body may be weak to his charms, your mind is stronger.
You’re going to fake it till you make it.
_
Your confidence stays pretty much intact throughout the conference, especially when you put on your femme fatale face the moment you set your foot in Tokyo. It’s a city that really calls to you- with its modernity settled neatly in its heritage, nature and nightlife, it’s one of the cities in the world that you really admire. And you feel like you’ve come home, because the city truly is made for you. Fast-paced and unstoppable.
And so, you take your mind off Wonwoo and focus only on your work. You ignore the way he insists you sit next to him through the conference, you ignore his hot, raspy whispers in your ears whenever he wants to tell you something, you ignore the way his eyes never leave your figure even during lunch when you’re free to mingle with everyone, you ignore the way he’s booked connected rooms for the two of you at the hotel. You ignore the way he’s the first to applaud when your presentation at the conference is complete, you ignore the way he insists on introducing you to every big shot at the dinner party after the conference, you ignore the way he doesn’t leave your side through the night.
And in spite of your astute ignoring, you know you’re fucking lying to yourself. And even if you can hide your heart to the world, you can’t hide it to yourself. You cannot ignore the way your panties are just a tad bit sticky by the end of the night, you cannot ignore the way his smell lingers on your skin because you’ve spent the entire day beside him, you cannot ignore the way your body is running on overdrive and you absolutely need to cool yourself down. Your shower is not enough, so you head down to the swimming pool, with a bloody mary in your hands and lounge near the shallow end of the swimming pool in your skimpiest shorts and tank top because you didn’t bring a bikini.
Your eyes are shut, your head leaning against the metal rails near the pool, so you don’t notice how the other guests at the swimming pool dissipate and you’re lying there as it gets later in the night.
When you open your eyes again, feeling calmer after spending an hour in the water, Wonwoo stands in front you. He’s changed from his three-piece suit to a casual tank top and sweatpants tied low at his hips, a beanie over his hair, and for the first time, you have a clear view of his collarbones and the way his arms and chest are undulated with muscles.
Is this appropriate boss-employee interaction?
There’s no time to wonder, because Wonwoo sits down on a chair behind him, his eyes still on you.
“Relaxing after that long day?”
Oh, he’s really here to make conversation with you, is he?
“If I’m staying in a seven-star property, might as well treat it like a vacation.” You smirk. This is your third cocktail of the night, so you’re feeling slightly heady. It doesn’t help that the cold night is making your nipples pebble over the water.
“You did so well today. Did not disappoint,” Wonwoo hums as his eyes rake over your figure. You gently sip down the rest of the cocktail, before placing it on the side and floating over closer to him. “Really? You think so?” “So good. Everyone was so impressed. Someone even asked me if you were looking to shift jobs somewhere else.” You smile. “Did they, now? What did you say?” You know this is tipping away from your professional relationship, the way you’re swinging your hips as you get up from the pool. It’s definitely a violation of professionalism, when you walk right up to him, ignoring the water droplets dripping behind you, and bend almost over him to retrieve a towel from a stack behind him. There’s a warm current of passion running through your veins when you see the way his tongue sticks out slightly to lick his lips as he unabashedly checks your figure out as your thin clothes cling to your body. When you finally wrap the towel around your body to soak up the drip, he replies, “Why? Are you looking to shift away? Is our company not enough?” “I don’t know, sometimes it can get boring.” You harden yourself to not whimper at the way his gaze pins you, forbids you from moving. There’s a long pause, before he stands up and replies, “Then, as your boss, it’s my responsibility to ensure you stay. Make sure there’s enough spice in your job to keep up your interest. Wouldn’t want to lose my best girl a month into the job, would I?”
Fuck. He’s got you. Your heart skips a beat as you think of a quip to reply with, but you can’t. My best girl. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He smirks when you don’t respond, you jaw slightly agape.
“Goodnight, Miss Y/L/N. Don’t sleep in till late. We have a meeting at 8.”
_
Because you have some time until your company’s jet is scheduled to depart, so you’re roaming through the duty-free stores. You’re walking out of a chocolate store when you notice Mingyu’s life-sized poster, modelling for Calvin Klein. You smile and grab your phone to take a quick photo, before admiring the advertisement. It must be a recent shoot, because his hair is cropped short like you noticed when he last came over. His muscles look well defined in the photograph, where he’s posing shirtless with a single black tie tied loosely to his neck, and black jeans hung low on his lips. There’s a wildly sensual look in his eyes, as if begging to be taken as you pleased, and it makes you smirk. Now you have something more to tease him for, when you meet him the next time.
“Pretty, isn’t he?” You haven’t realised when Wonwoo’s sidled up to your side, and you notice a Bulgari bag in his hands. So that’s where he’s been shopping while you were busy browsing through chocolates. Wonwoo’s eyes are fixed on the poster in front of you, an appreciative glint in his eyes.
“Pretty indeed. For as long as I remember him.”
Wonwoo turns to look at you, his eyebrow raised. “Are you a fan? Or a friend?” “The latter. Mingyu and I have been friends since high school.” “How interesting.” Eager to impress him, you elaborate, “I was the one who pushed him to get into modelling. Couldn’t have let looks like that slip, could I?” Wonwoo chuckles. “Indeed not. I’m sure many must thank you, including myself.”
Wonwoo takes out a small box from the bag he’s carrying. Opening the box, you see there’s a bracelet inside. Set with at least sixty 24k diamonds. It makes your mouth water and your eyes shine, and you cannot help but envy his boyfriend, if he’s the one on the receiving end of such gifts. “What do you think?
You wonder if it’s too personal a question, but you’re also sure a lot of lines between professional and personal have gotten blurred over this trip. So you bravely ask him, “Is that for your boyfriend?”
Wonwoo doesn’t show any sign of displeasure, if he feels it. His eyes still focused on Mingyu’s poster on the glowing display in front of you, he says, “Hmm. Do you think it’ll suit him?”
Your throat goes dry. If he’s bought it for his boyfriend, why are his eyes fixed on Mingyu? But you don’t think about it. Mingyu’s looks are, after all, captivating.
“I’m sure it will. He’s very lucky to be receiving such a pretty gift. He must be really precious to you.” You laugh lightly, trying to hide the bile of jealousy rising in your throat.
Wonwoo puts away the gift. “He is, indeed.” His eyes now shift to yours. “Any favourite of mine is bound to be the most precious to me. And worthy of the prettiest of gifts, whatever they want.”
You fight the blush creeping into your cheeks, trying to stop your heart from racing on. This is ridiculous. Why on earth are you getting into your feels when he’s clearly thinking and talking about his lover? God, Y/N, get a grip on yourself. He’s not yours, and by the look of love and yearning on his face, he never will be.
It’s his voice that breaks you out of your trance. “Miss Y/L/N? The jet’s arrived. Don’t wanna miss it, do we?” You can’t help but nod dumbly and walk behind him to keep pace.
_
(iii)
After the trip, everything goes back to what it was earlier. To the outsider, that is. But you know that behind closed doors, so much has changed. It doesn’t have to be something tangible, but there’s something different in the way you’re behaving around each other. For one, you notice him checking you out more than once, and the fact that you’re catching him in the act means that he intends to be caught. He’s more reckless in the way he talks to you. More reckless in the way he picks you out to lead projects, asks you exclusively to accompany him to conferences and clients he’s meeting, wishing you good morning by looking you straight in the eye even when all eyes in the office are on him.
But then the rumours begin. Favouritism. Must be sucking his cock under his desk.
And it kills you. It poisons any joy you could enjoy under his attention. You’ve made it a point to not just avoid, but also fight against any such rumours about you, because you don’t want anyone else to get credit for your hard work and success, especially not a man. But you don’t want to confront him about this. For the first time, you know these rumours are absolutely false, because you know he couldn’t have any bad intentions towards you- a man who’s so loud and proud about having a boyfriend and has never even had a rumour with any woman before this, could not be looking for sexual favours. So you quietly keep your distance from him. Trying to finish work over emails instead of meeting him in his office. Trying to avoid eye contact and sit at least half the table away from him during meetings. You don’t want to embarrass him with these rumours, and you certainly hope the rumours haven’t reached his ears.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jeon, I won't be able to accompany you to this meeting with the Chois. I’m not feeling well tonight, and I really would like to go home and rest.” You keep a straight face when he comes to your cabin asking you if you’re ready to leave with him. His back is towards the rest of the office, so he misses the way everyone looks up from their work to look at the two of you.
“Unwell? You should’ve told me earlier. I would have cancelled the dinner meeting tonight.”
“No, of course you don’t need to do that on my account, Sir!”
He shakes his head, one gelled lock of hair falling into his eyes. “How do you travel home?”
“I have my car.”
“And a chauffeur, I hope?”
“No, I drive myself.”
“Well, then Yunho’s going to drive you home tonight. You’re in no a state to drive home yourself if you’re feeling unwell.”
Your eyes widen, “No- I don’t want to impose. How are you going to go to the meeting, then? You’ll need Yunho with you.”
He narrows his eyes, his gaze piercing. “You underestimate me. I do not need anybody for a meeting with a client. Especially not a secretary.”
You maintain his gaze. “But I don’t want to inconvenience you on my behalf.”
“I will be more inconvenienced if I worry about you going home alone in this state.”
God. Who’s gonna tell the man that you’re in the fucking pink of your health and you don’t need him to fuss over you like this? Maybe you should’ve just gone with him to the dinner, because this is going to create more fodder for rumours. But you can’t argue any more with him, he’s too stubborn.
“Alright. If that’s what you want.”
His lips tilt upward at the edge. “Good. Take tomorrow off too.”
“No-”
“That was not a suggestion, Miss Y/L/N. Don’t disobey me.”
And then he turns around and walks out of your cabin, leaving you speechless, and at least ten pairs of eyes staring at you. You can only hope the thin glass walls of your cabin prevented the conversation from floating out.
_
You must really be married to your work, because one day off and you’re fucking losing it. You realise, as you wake up at six in the morning, like any other work day, that you’ve not taken a single day off this year. The last time you took leave was last year when you’d visited your parents. You can’t even fall asleep again, which is awful because you slept fitfully last night. Because of him. He invaded your dreams, leaving you sweaty under the blanket, and an uncomfortable wetness between your thighs. But you still get out of your bed, intent on making it through the day, and not becoming unproductive.
All your work is completed within the next three hours, so by the time people your age are actually waking up on a holiday, you’re sitting on your sofa feeling listless because you have nothing to do. There’s no new books you need to read, no new recipe you want to try out. You don’t really watch movies or dramas. You ask Spotify to play a random song for you, but it turns out to be a sex song trending right now. The moans in the background of the track don’t help. The lyrics about someone older clutching your throat while taking you to heaven also don’t help. You turn off the song immediately, and again fall back on your couch, debating whether you should go out for a jog in this cooler weather, when your phone dings.
It’s a photo from Mingyu. When you open it, you burst out laughing at the caption. It’s just a picture of him eating a cupcake, but the caption says I feel like I might die if I eat this. Seemingly normal to anyone else, it’s incredibly funny to you because it’s a red velvet cupcake. And you both swore on red velvet cupcakes back in high school that you’d be best friends forever.
You type back, You’re still my best friend.
You can see that he’s started typing, but then he stops. A second later, your phone rings.
“People don’t go MIA on their best friends for weeks. I would not know even if you lay murdered in your apartment. In fact, no one would know. Not even your family or the police.”
“Well, I haven’t been murdered in my apartment. I’ll ask the murderer to let you know if they do murder me.”
He groans. “Don’t mess with me. Why are you checking messages and answering calls so early in the morning?”
“You have a problem with me checking your texts too?” You giggle.
“No, Y/N, I’m just- I don’t know, worried. Did you resign because of your boss?”
“God I could, actually. He forced me to take a leave today because I told him I was sick last night to avoid going on a meeting with him.”
“You lied to him and got a leave? That’s a win in my books, love.” He cackles, and you wish you could laugh with him.
“Not if it fuels rumours of favouritism, Gyu.”
He sighs. “Oh fuck. Not that shit again. But, really, are you well?”
“No. I’m just horny and mad, both because of Wonwoo.”
“Do you want to rant?”
“I could do with a ranting session. But are you free?”
“I am, the entire day. I could come over. And you could sit on my face and rant. How does that sound?”
You giggle as a spike of arousal shoots through you. “Sounds like my best friend.”
_
Mingyu arrives half an hour later, a little bit of stubble on his jawline. As soon as he steps into your apartment, you pull him to yourself, grabbing his collar, and he smiles against your lips as you press a kiss against his jaw, eager to feel the stubble against your lips. “God, you’re really horny, hmm? Did you touch yourself while I was coming?” He flips you and pins you against the wall, his hands straying down to your breasts as he finds your nipple already hardened. “I did, what took you so long?” “Didn’t know office traffic is so bad. I don’t get out of my house this early, you know?” You hum against his lips, his warm cherry lips which taste like iced americano and the red velvet cupcake he had earlier. “Let’s get you back to bed then, baby.” He pulls away and giggles, “You’re so impatient, Y/N.” But he follows you to the bedroom, as you tug him away. On the way he pulls off your top and shorts, and he lies down first in your bed. “C’mere. Give me a taste of that red velvet, baby.”
Oh, he looks good. Your mind goes back to the first time the two of you had fucked, back in your college dorms. You’d been so heartbroken that day- your crush had turned you down after one date because he’d wanted to have sex, but when you’d told him you were a virgin, he’d laughed at you and left you midway through the date. But Mingyu, forever your cheerleader, had shown you that you’d fallen for the wrong guy. When he’d gone down on you, giving you your life’s first orgasm using his tongue, you’d seen stars. You deserve the best, Y/N-ie. He’d left you speechless when he’d begun thrusting inside you, nothing on your mind except him and just how perfect he was, and how you were such a fool to not have realised it before. I love you, Mingyu. He’d smiled, the post-nut glow on his golden face, I love you too, Y/N.
But you were late. Mingyu started dating someone else within a week. And you’d suppressed your feelings forever, as you realised they were not mutual. You were better off as best friends, even better as best friends with benefits. You didn’t want to lose him.
Those feelings right in your throat again, right now, as he pulls you on top of him and kisses you gently. You’re moaning his name as he pulls you on your face in one go, kissing your thighs, his breath heavy on your core where he’s purposely not touching, leaving you whiny. But you’ve had enough of his teasing, so you tug his hair and pull him towards your bare pussy.
He dives in headfirst, and you grab the headboard as a scream escapes your throat. His tongue laps up your juices, and you see the way he sniffs your pussy, making you clench as his tongue enters you gently. “God, you’re such a tease, baby. Making me forget what I wanted to say.” You tug harder at his hair as he licks faster, and you grind down on his nose. He alternates between flattening his tongue at your clit and using his tongue to thrust into your cunt, already loose from your arousal. But his technique is top notch- just the way it was back in college, when twenty-year old nerdy you had lost your virginity to him. And you climax within a few minutes, your essence coating his smooth face, making his skin shine.
When you look down at him, his eyes fixed on you, he places a soft kiss on your folds, before whispering, “I thought you wanted to rant.”
You push yourself down on him, waiting for him to continue eating you out, but he moves his lips away. Clearly he wants you to start talking before he restarts. So you do start.
“Do you know I went on a trip with my boss?”
“Mmhm? Did not know that. What happened?” You forget your words for a second as Mingyu’s raspy voice sends shocks through your body. You have a wild urge to tug his face away from your cunt just to punish him, but you can’t help but give in to him.
“He…”
_
“Do you want to go out tonight?”
“Tonight?” You’re opening your mouth less because your jaw still hurts from how wide it stretched to deepthroat Mingyu’s cock earlier. You’d forgotten how much of a monster it was, but it was nice to be reminded again. Especially when he came all over your tits and licked it all off you, turning you on again because of how he eagerly nipped at your nipples. But you’re too sore to get up now, so you’re both casually lying across each other as you surf through work emails on your phone and Mingyu watches something on YouTube.
“Yes?” He props his head up on his elbow and looks down at you.
“Tonight?”
“You heard me the first time.”
“I did, but I’m buying time to make up an excuse against it.”
He laughs and kisses you on the corner of your mouth.
“If you don’t want to come out, then you can just tell me.”
“But I should be wanting to go out. I am free all day today, and it should be technically fun. Help me get my mind farther away from Wonwoo if I can snag a date.”
“Hell no. You’ll be my date. Think I’ll let another man flirt with you when I’m taking you out?”
You take a deep breath before looking away from your phone and looking up at him. You notice how pretty his red lips look, and how much you want to kiss him. How hard it is right now to remember that he has a boyfriend, and all this- whatever fragments of intimacy you get- is because his boyfriend is miraculously accepting of Mingyu fucking you and then going back to him. You’d never understand it, even though Mingyu’s said multiple times that it’s totally fine, but you won’t judge him for it. You take what you get and you won’t complain.
So you take one hand and cup Mingyu’s jaw to pull him down.
“Let’s go out this weekend, then? I need at least one business day to mentally prepare myself.”
He kisses you as your breath mingles with his. “Whatever you want, baby.”
_
(iv)
You step out of the elevator dangling your car keys on your fingers when you notice a strangely familiar car pulled up in front of your own smaller car. The window rolls down.
“Mr. Jeon?” Your mouth gapes in shock, when the man gives you that characteristic smirk of his, which is reflected more in his eyes than in his lips. “Good morning. Are you sure you’re well enough to be attending work today? I’m okay with you taking another day off.” Your eyes widen, as you wonder for a second if he’s caught your lie, but then you quickly regain composure. “No Sir, I’m feeling perfectly fit. I’ll drive myself, so there was no need for you to come all the way here-” “No, no. Yunho will drive us to work.”
He steps out of his seat, opening the door for you to enter the car. When you hesitantly take a step forward and are on the verge of entering the car, he says, his voice an octave lower, “You are of top priority, do you not realise, Miss Y/L/N?” With the way his gaze is trained on you, and with him coming all the way to your doorstep for no reason at all, you do somewhat realise now. But why he’s doing it is going all over your head. So you wordlessly enter the car’s backseat, and he joins you from the other side.
The journey is spent in silence, but you can feel the way his eyes flicker to glance at you through the back view mirror. The company car is comfortable in every way possible, and Yunho is a great driver, but you still can’t breathe through the entire journey because you’re on your toes. You quietly regret wearing a pencil skirt with a slit reaching up to your knees, because as you sit in the car, the slit rides up to your thighs and you have goosebumps all over. You can just hope that Wonwoo doesn’t notice.
The two of you entering the office together doesn’t do anything to reduce the rumours. There are even more eyes staring at the two of you now, but you realise it’s a futile effort to try and quash the rumours. People will gossip if they want to, even if there’s no grounds for their gossip. So you let Wonwoo walk you down to your cabin, and before leaving he tells you to check your schedule. “I will, Sir. Have any changes been made? I have just one video conference today in the evening as far-” “Yes, you’ll be accompanying me to lunch today. There’s a follow-up meeting with the Chois, so I want you to be there.” And then he doesn’t wait for you to reply before he struts out of your cabin.
Wow. Lunch too. Now you really can’t stop the rumours.
_
Thankfully, lunch is a solemn affair. You’re too busy looking at figures and prospective business plans for the success of your collaboration with the Chois to question why Wonwoo insists you sit as far away from Choi Seungcheol, the CEO of Choi Enterprises, as possible. So you end up sitting next to him, and there’s nobody else at the table except Yunho and Mr. Choi’s assistant. As the food gets served, you get started with the short presentation you prepared on your way to the lunch meeting, but Wonwoo quickly places a hand on your exposed thigh and stops you from speaking. “Let’s enjoy the lunch first, shall we? Seungcheol doesn’t need to be convinced any more, Miss Y/L/N.” Your lip twists when you wonder why Mr. Jeon is on first name basis with Mr. Choi, but Seungcheol quickly tells you the reason. “We’re old friends, Miss Y/L/N. We’re not here to discuss business, are we, Wonwoo? We’re just here to enjoy a meal at our favourite restaurant.” Wonwoo chuckles, and you open your mouth to say something, but his hand on your thigh squeezes once before moving away, as he whispers slowly in your ear, “Relax for a minute, Miss Y/L/N. You don’t have to always work your pretty brain all the time. Just enjoy the meal.”
To say that you’re stunned is an understatement. You don’t understand what’s going on, but there’s an unspoken conversation happening between Wonwoo and Seungcheol, and you don’t end up talking about work throughout the meal. Seungcheol is good enough to make you feel at ease as he asks questions as far away from work as possible. But nothing today seems to be going as expected- starting from the way Wonwoo came to pick you up, to the way his hand touches your exposed thigh more often than necessary. You eventually let it go- not questioning it, but just enjoying the attention, and the lasagna because when else will you eat at such a fine dining restaurant any time soon?
_
Thankfully, the rest of the day and the next passes by in a better fashion, without any unexpected incidents. It’s late on Saturday evening when you’re just finishing your workout at the gym near your apartment that you get a text from Mingyu. Coming to pick you up in an hour. Hope you’re ready to let loose tonight <3
Fuck, you’d forgotten about your plan about going out with Mingyu. For a minute or two, you debate the pros and cons of cancelling the plan last-minute. But then Mingyu’s whiny, puppy voice flashes in your head as you remember that in the last few months, you’ve cancelled more plans than him, and you’ve only gone out for once in every two months. Fuck it. You deserve to let loose too. You deserve to give a break to your heart and your mind. And you deserve another evening of pure fun with your best friend.
So by the time Mingyu arrives, you’re dressed in a black silk bralette paired with high waist black jeans- the most casual outfit that exists in your wardrobe right now. You tie your hair up, exposing your neck, and wear a simple necklace to finish the look.
“Damn girl. Did I tell you that you look hot?” Mingyu’s whisper is hot near your ears when he comes to hug you, and you giggle. “You’ve cleaned up well yourself.” That is sarcastic, and he knows it, because the smug look on his face says it all.
When the two of you enter the club, Mingyu’s arm is in yours, and you can see how people perceive the two of you as a couple, wearing matching all-black outfits. You don’t care, wishing to live your fantasy for a moment, and wondering what it really would be like to be Mingyu’s lover. To have him to yourself all the time, without sharing him with a boyfriend you’ve never met, and you probably don’t want to meet. To show him off to all the people in your office who straight up ask you why you don’t date even if you’re not getting any younger. To hold him close all night, his warmth acting like your personal weighted blanket, and not feel the ache in your chest every time he leaves in the morning.
As the first round of shots go down your throat, you head to the dance floor, Mingyu’s hands wrapped around your hips and you two move on your own beat. There are people around you who recognise Mingyu, but he doesn’t even look at them. His eyes are all focused on yours, so you maintain his gaze. Getting lost in his eyes, you want to lean in and kiss him. But it would be inappropriate. It’s one thing to sleep with your best friend in the privacy of your apartment, another thing to kiss him publicly when he has a boyfriend. So you just smile hazily as you stare at him to your heart’s content. If you’re just his dirty little secret, you’ll take it. Mingyu has more than enough love in his heart for you and whoever his mysterious boyfriend might be. You’re satisfied with just a place in his huge, beautiful heart.
You’re really getting into your feels now, as the songs change to more upbeat songs which you like dancing to. Right then, Mingyu bends down and whispers near your ears, to ensure you hear him. “Y/N-ie? I want you to meet someone.” You look up towards his face, mouthing a silent who, before he whispers again, “Turn around, love.”
And you do.
At first, you’re sure it’s an illusion of the flashing lights of the nightclub, increased by the effect of the alcohol running through your veins. But then Mingyu’s voice is again breathy near your ear, “Meet my boyfriend, Jeon Wonwoo.”
Time stops around you.
_
(v)
When you come back to your senses, you’ve somehow moved to one corner against the bar, far away from the din of the dance floor.
The man in front of you smiles, a dazzling, beautiful smile you’ve never seen before, and your head reels. You fall back into Mingyu’s arms, who swiftly catches and steadies you. You can’t believe the sight in front of you. You emit a loud gasp as Mingyu’s touch makes you realise this is, in fact, reality. “Your boyfriend?”
“Hi, sweetheart.” Wonwoo’s voice is unbearably deep, and he’s so close that you can hear him even in the noise of the club. But you still can’t register his presence, so you reach behind to grab onto Mingyu’s hands. “Gyu? Mingyu- is this a joke?” But the man you’re talking to merely giggles and lowers his face near your neck, so that you can feel his cheeks against yours.
“Mr. Jeon-” Wonwoo takes another step forward, trapping you in between the two men. “Wonwoo, please.” “Oh. Wonwoo- I- I’m sorry-” He smiles, and Mingyu giggles again against you. “Sorry? For what? God, she’s cuter than what you told me, Mingyu.” His eyes flicker to the man behind you before falling to you again. “Mingyu also told me that you have a lot to complain about me?” “No! No, I didn’t mean any of that? Mingyu!” It must look pathetic, how you’re leaning back towards Mingyu and grabbing to his hands from behind you, because you want him to be on your side. But Mingyu indulges you, as he says, “I’m here, baby, I’m here.”
But it’s clearly not enough, so you turn around to see him. “Is this real?” Mingyu’s smile is bright, “Yes, Y/N-ie.” “Why didn’t tell me before?” “What’s the fun in that?”
It really sinks in for you now. You turn back around, to see Wonwoo still standing there, the gentle smile still on his face. He lifts his hand to touch your hair, then your cheeks and finally cups your jaw. “Do you want to get out of here, Y/N?” God, he even makes your name sound pretty. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk more, hmm?” You nod your head, “Yes, please.”
_
That’s how you end up in Mingyu’s car, his long red sedan, which he’s currently racing off the streets of the city, the night air making you sober as you reach Wonwoo’s place, where Mingyu has moved in, as you learn. Through the journey, Wonwoo and Mingyu hold hands over the console, and somehow pieces connect in your more sober mind. Fuck, how did you never consider this possibility before? Bits and pieces from what Mingyu had told you comes back to you now. The boyfriend was initially a sugar daddy sort of thing because he didn’t live in the city- he would come around in between work schedules and pamper and spoil Mingyu for entire weekends or longer, during which Mingyu would not even check his texts. You’d thought it must have been some celebrity guy, if he’s so busy with schedules and so rich. But you were wrong. So, so wrong. Mingyu had officially started dating this boyfriend six months ago, coinciding with exactly when Wonwoo had moved back to the city permanently.
“What are you thinking in your pretty head?” Wonwoo looks at you through the back mirror as Mingyu’s pulling up near Wonwoo’s home.
“This still feels unreal. Why didn’t you tell me before, Mingyu? God, I can’t believe I said all that to you.”
Mingyu laughs, but doesn’t respond. It’s only when you three enter the house and get seated on the couch, you in between the two boys, that he starts talking. “What do you want to know, Y/N? Right from the beginning?”
“No, I get the beginning. I pieced it together in my head.” Somewhere from behind you Wonwoo chuckles, and mumbles smart girl. But you don’t dare to look at him, trying to ground yourself in reality. So you stay turned towards Mingyu. “Did you know he’s my boss even before I told you?”
“I did. After Wonwoo and I got together, I told him all about you. I showed him your photos, told him you’re my best friend, told him we also sleep together sometimes.”
“And you were okay with that?” You finally develop some courage to look into Wonwoo’s eyes, his beautiful black eyes that are so much sexier up close.
“Of course I was. How could I not be, when you made my baby boy so happy? You and I both know that Mingyu has too much love to give, so I knew that him loving you wouldn’t take him away from me.”
“Lo-loving me?” Your voice is feeble, and you look back at Mingyu. Your eyes drift to his cherry lips before looking back at him, and he smiles, his canines out on display. “I do love you, Y/N, you know that, right? I’ve meant it every single time I’ve said it.” “But as a friend…?” “That’s only because I didn’t want to lose you by confessing. And also because I had no idea how I was falling for two people at the same time. You and Wonwoo.” Your eyes drift to his lips again as you sigh. It’s so strange, how conflicted your heart had been just earlier this evening, but now your body is radiating with a slow-flowing joy. Noticing your gaze, Mingyu leans in and gently kisses you on your mouth, a chaste, soft kiss, but it’s sweet like nectar. “You want me? Mingyu?” “So much, Y/N-ie. And Wonwoo wants you too, you know.”
You finally turn around to look at the other man beside you, his patient smile beautiful. “Did Mingyu tell you everything?” He grins, “Yes, everything.” You close your eyes in embarrassment, but Wonwoo’s hands gently cup your cheeks, holding your face in his hands, upturned towards him. “How could he not? I pried every little detail from him.” “Was this the reason why you took the job at our branch?” “Yes. I came to the posting at the headquarters for Mingyu, but I shifted for you. Because I fell for you too whenever Mingyu described you to me. And after meeting you that first time at that meeting at the headquarters, I knew it was a lost case. My heart was yours before you even saw me.” “Oh, I saw you alright. You looked so handsome that day.” You can feel your cheeks heating up in a blush, and Mingyu coos at you from behind. His body somehow moves closer, trapping you between the two boys, and you feel hot with the attention from the both of them. Mingyu’s hands weave through your hair, untangling your hair at the scalp, making you almost purr with pleasure, but you don’t move your eyes from Wonwoo’s face.
“I want you so much, Y/N. I have wanted you for so long.” Wonwoo pauses and then chuckles, “Mingyu’s wanted to tell you for so long. But I wanted to wait, because I wasn’t sure of how you felt towards me. I’m still not sure… are you still mad at me?” You giggle, even more embarrassed by the second. “I could never be mad at you, Wonwoo.” “I genuinely, really wanted to take care of you, you know. Just take care of you.” Wonwoo’s smile is so gentle, so mature, and so warm. This is a new side of him that you’re seeing, and you realise you’re falling for him even more. “Wonwoo… you know my feelings already.” “But I want you to tell me, please. I need to know that it is the truth.” You pause for a moment, eyes taking in all the beauty of Wonwoo’s features. “I do want you. I want you so much I think I’m losing my mind over it.”
And that’s all the confirmation it takes. Wonwoo leans down, his grip tightening on your jaw, as he kisses you with all the affection he has. You can’t help it but melt into his mouth, and the kiss deepens. You’ve been so curious for so long to find out what touching Wonwoo would feel like, so when he explores your mouth with the intense kisses, you roam your hands all over his body. Feeling the hair near his nape, the skin along his collarbones, his biceps under his button down shirt, his sculpted back that feels so broad to you. From behind you, you can feel Mingyu’s hands wandering around your body, near your hips, the skin exposed at your stomach below the bralette, inching towards the bottom of your breasts. You shiver at all of the contact, all of the attention.
It’s only when Wonwoo breaks the kiss and you see Mingyu kneeling down on the carpet next to you, both the men facing you, that you realise that you want them both. So bad.
“Do you want us both, Y/N?”
“Yes,” Your voice comes out in a rushed squeak because you’re breathless. “Yes, but… can we take this to your bedroom?”
No more words are needed. Mingyu immediately lifts you up in his arms, and you latch your legs around his waist, as he begins to feverishly kiss you as Wonwoo leads the two of you to his bedroom. You’re dropped gently on the bed and Mingyu gets in right next to you. Mingyu makes quick work of taking off his clothes, and Wonwoo stands in front of you, at the edge of the bed, cupping your face with his hands again. “Are you sure?” You nod. “Never been more sure of anything in my damn life.”
Wonwoo bends down to kiss you again. But this time, the kiss is no longer sweet, or exploratory. It’s the kiss of a hungry man eager to devour what is his. He doesn’t let you do anything in the kiss, except match his tempo, and it’s shocking how easily you’re letting in to him. It helps that Mingyu’s also kissing your neck, making you arch your back into him as you lean your neck to give him more area to kiss. Mingyu’s big hands grope at your bralette, and Wonwoo breaks the kiss to let him tug it off. Finding that you’re wearing nothing below it, Wonwoo curses and kisses you again, hard, pushing you on Mingyu’s big body which is all muscles now that the clothes are off. Mingyu’s hands come from behind to fondle your breasts, moaning low in your ears as you wriggle between his spread legs on your either side. You feverishly grip onto Wonwoo’s hips, who’s still standing, and his hands weave into your hair.
“My turn,” Mingyu whispers before attempting to lift you away from Wonwoo, but the older man swats his hands away. “Baby boys don’t demand. You don’t want to get punished yet, Mingyu-ah.” Your head tilts back on Mingyu’s shoulder as you feel the shiver run through his body at his boyfriend’s words. The crystal black in Wonwoo’s eyes becomes unimaginably darker as Mingyu whimpers in your ears. You reach behind to rub your hands over his thighs, his strong, thick thighs, and you can feel his hard length twitching through his boxers near the small of your back. You arch your back to give more access to your tits to Mingyu, who abuses your nipples by pinching and twisting them recklessly. He really loves your breasts, so you let him play, but you can’t stop yourself from moaning out loud now that Wonwoo can’t muffle you any longer with his kisses.
Wonwoo takes a step away and takes in the sight in front of him. You can see the way his chest heaves with desperation, but his resolve is unbroken. You can see the way his cock is straining through his jeans, but you know his patience is crazy. He’s not going to break so soon.
And he doesn’t. A slow smirk spreads over his face when his eyes meet yours. “So pretty, my little sweethearts. Pretty baby, are you having fun? Playing with my doll?” A spike of arousal shoots through you at the pet names, and Mingyu whimpers at being called pretty baby. “So much fun, Sir, I swear.” Your body reacts on its own, as you feel another gush of wetness flow into your panties at the way Mingyu calls Wonwoo sir. Fuck, their dynamic is so hot. “Then take off her pants like a good boy.” Mingyu leans in and you help him to get you out your jeans, leaving in nothing but your soaked panties. They’re white which means your arousal must be so evident through the lace, and Mingyu groans when he sees it. But he doesn’t touch you- he knows better.
Wonwoo grins and coos at you. “So pretty in white.” He leans in to kiss you again, before quickly flipping you over until you’re on your hands and legs. His hands gently grope your ass, making you giddy with his large hands patting your soft skin. But then you hear the sound before you feel the impact. The loud smack, a ghost of a touch on your ass, before it starts burning and it’s only then that you realise he’s spanked you. You’re still processing it, when he smacks the same spot again with incredible precision, and you jolt at the touch. He doesn’t give you time to recover- he keeps smacking the same, sensitive area, and you’re sure the spot of arousal on your panties have spread into a larger spot now and he can see it. Because you’re all but whimpering and screaming in Mingyu’s arms now, who’s ravaging your neck with nips and bites, his fingers still pinching your now sensitive nipples. Your body is hanging on the brink of overstimulation, and you’re so wet you think you can come untouched.
Wonwoo seems to read your mind, because he says next, “Are you come from this, doll? Just a few spanks?” He smacks your ass again, and you jolt again, but Mingyu’s arms hold you in place. “Should I stop? Or should I make you come untouched like this if you like it so much?”
You don’t respond.
You can’t respond.
Your body shakes uncontrollably as you let go of yourself and give in to the first orgasm of that night. Wonwoo spanks you right through the orgasm, but once your shaking reduces, he gently pulls you up and takes off your panties. From how you’re pulled up against Wonwoo’s standing body, you can see how flustered Mingyu looks, his bulge straining through his boxers, the stain big and drops of sweat falling off his beautiful body. He looks gorgeous like this, and you’re dying to kiss him. Once your panties are off, Wonwoo loosens his grip on you, and you seat yourself on Mingyu’s lap, his legs still spread, and you both moan when your bare pussy comes in contact with the bulge in his boxers. You grind down on the hard length as you capture his lips in a kiss, your fingers leaving impressions on his shoulders with how hard you’re gripping him. He gropes your ass, still sensitive from the spanking, but his touch soothes you. You grind down on him harder, and it’s only when he breaks away from the kiss with a hiss that you realise he’s come in his pants as you feel the wetness from his boxers stick to your own wet cunt. “God, that’s so hot Mingyu.” You praise him, as he looks at you with unfocused, desperate eyes, and you kiss him again.
But then you feel a weight on the bed behind you, and you turn around to see Wonwoo joining the two of you on the bed. His clothes are off, except his boxers, and you gasp when you see how well-built his body is. He’s much leaner compared to Mingyu but his build is so impressive, and your eyes trail down to where his abdomen gives way to his dick, which is very much visible through his boxers. Your hands immediately reach out to grab his shoulders, which are so wide, but he doesn’t let you touch him, instead grabbing your hair and pulling you into a kiss as you’re seated, trapped between Wonwoo and Mingyu.
“Did you make my baby boy come without touching him?” He asks you between sloppy kisses, before his lips trail down to bite your neck, while Mingyu’s mouth is focused on your tits now, sucking at the nipples, soothing any abrasion from his pinching earlier. You nod unable to form words with all the attention, and Wonwoo understands as he laughs lowly. “Turns out both my playthings are little sluts for each other. So hot for each other, aren’t you?” Mingyu moans next to you, and you can feel how turned on he is by the dirty talk, as his dick twitches after having just orgasmed a few minutes ago. You grab his head and push his face into your breasts as he laps all over your tits.
Once Wonwoo’s left hickeys all over your neck, he extends a hand to cup Mingyu’s jaw and lifts the younger boy’s head to look at him. There’s an intense look shared between them- you can see Mingyu’s jaw slacken at the touch, as he bends forward for more attention from his boyfriend, so he gets it. Wonwoo leans in to kiss him, and his hand moves from his jaw to his neck, slightly grasping it and choking it while he sits up on his knees to kiss Mingyu out of breath. Mingyu’s back arches as Wonwoo towers over him, and you move backward, leaning against the headboard, turned on even more at the sight in front of you.
You’ve never had a threesome, and never imagined you’d be so okay with Mingyu being shared with someone else. He’s always been yours even if just as a friend with benefits. But you find that sharing Mingyu with Wonwoo gives you no problem at all- perhaps it’s because you know they’re already a couple, but also because you can see it in their eyes how much they’re in love with each other.
You pull your legs towards yourself, and Wonwoo soon pulls Mingyu into his arms, the younger man’s legs spread around Wonwoo’s legs, close enough that their dicks brush against each other through the clothing barriers, making Mingyu whine out loudly and Wonwoo hiss at the contact. They feverishly kiss each other, almost as if you’re not there in the room. But you don’t feel out of place. You feel somewhat like a voyeur, but a welcome one, because soon, Wonwoo makes eye contact with you even while kissing Mingyu and sees the way you’re flicking your own clit. He breaks the kiss, and says, “Y/N- I thought you knew better than to touch yourself without my permission.” He takes your hand in his own, away from your body. “Please,” you whisper, but he shakes his head. Mingyu turns to look at you two, his chest heaving. “She looks so pretty like that, Wonwoo.” Wonwoo’s head turns towards Mingyu, a smirk on his face. “You like it?” “Yes, so much.” “Then I guess I can’t be mad. But-” he breaks himself off, getting out of the bed to open the bedside drawer. “I’ll still have to tie you up.” You notice that he’s brought out a tie and a bottle of lube. He leans in to tie your hands away from you, and a part of you gets embarrassed that Mingyu’s seeing you like this, because you’ve never let him tie you up, because you didn’t know you were into it, you would rather tie him up. But your pussy throbs when your hands are tied behind you, leaving your breasts arched out towards the front, and Wonwoo extends one hand to enter two fingers into your wet pussy as he goes back to position and resumes kissing Mingyu, his other hand holding on to Mingyu’s hips.
It’s funny to see how quiet Mingyu is with Wonwoo, all pliant and desperate. When he’s with you, he’s running his mouth endlessly, babbling or being a brat, giggling whenever either of you slip up the slightest, and yapping even through the most intense of orgasms. But Wonwoo, no words seem to come out of his mouth. Only moans, pretty moans of varying pitches, whines and whimpers, the occasional grunt and groan, because any word he tries to form gets broken down into nonsensical sounds ending in whimpers.
Wonwoo removes his hand from your cunt, leaving you high on the impending orgasm, and feeling so, so empty. You almost whine at the loss, but Wonwoo speaks before you, clearly he’s having a moment with his boyfriend so you don’t want to interrupt greedily.
“Did you wear that all evening?” When Mingyu replies in affirmative, a breathy yes, Wonwoo grunts and twists his boyfriend’s nipples before kissing him again. You wonder for a second what that is, but then you twist your body to look at the spot where Wonwoo’s other hand is.
You find a crystal butt plug sitting snugly between Mingyu’s asscheeks, shining bright against his golden skin, and your pussy clenches at the sight. Wonwoo’s hand touches all around it, clearly teasing, before he pulls away from the kiss and leans over Mingyu to see the butt plug himself. There’s a sudden gasp as Wonwoo lightly slaps over the plug, and then slowly, excruciatingly slowly pulls out the butt plug. “Please, no- no, pl- I- Wo- sir!” Mingyu fumbles over his words as he feels his gaping hole become empty, and Wonwoo sighs at the sight, his bottom lip tugged between his teeth as he controls himself. “Such a whore, Gyu, wearing the prettiest plug in your pretty ass all night for anyone to feel up.” “No! O-only for- for you, sir!” Wonwoo’s fingers easily enter the slender hole and you feel your enter body get hot when you feel his other hand also at your pussy, his thumb flicking your clit. He’s fingering the two of you simultaneously but his face is so focused, so resolute, while the two of you are breaking apart from his touch.
Wonwoo’s hand soon leaves your pussy and you see him turn around Mingyu with the younger’s back towards him. “Ready?” He whispers in his boyfriend’s ear, biting his earlobe and taking off their boxers. Mingyu’s whining reply comes soon after, “Please, need it inside me, please sir!” Wonwoo chuckles, and he squirts lube into his hand before entering Mingyu’s hole one finger at a time.
Your eyes are blown wide at the sight before you, as you see Mingyu squirm and whine as Wonwoo enters nearly three fingers at once, pumping slowly. Mingyu can’t help but babble, “Please, I’m ready- so ready, don’t need prep-” “You’re right, whores do not need prep. Your ass was made for me, wasn’t it?” Mingyu whines again, and you move in front of him to kiss his bare chest, licking his nipples softly, and you suddenly feel Mingyu’s body jolt up.
Wonwoo’s cock has entered him, up to the hilt, all in one go. It’s not easy- seeing that Wonwoo’s cock is long and incredibly erect right now, but Mingyu takes it all in with a scream of his boyfriend’s name. “God, still so tight. Fucking heaven.” Wonwoo sets his own lazy pace, his hands casually gripping Mingyu’s hips. Mingyu’s cock is still so erect, its bulbous head red and sensitive as it leaks all over the bed without any attention given to it. You see Mingyu enter a completely different level of submissiveness, where he doesn’t even want to be a brat and tease back, he gives in completely as his boyfriend fucks him stupid.
“Gyu? How about you eat out this pretty pussy here, hmm? You like it, don’t you?” “Yes, I wanna- please- can I?” Mingyu looks up at you, as if for permission, but you instantly pull his head down towards your wet pussy and he dives right in, his tongue entering you immediately. You and Wonwoo both moan out loud at the sight, and he begins fucking Mingyu faster. He fucks Mingyu into you, and the additional force makes Mingyu suck your clit and make out with your pussy even better. You throw your head back in pleasure, feeling a knot in your stomach building up.
“I’m going to come all over his face, Wonwoo. Will you let him come with me?” Wonwoo chuckles, “Hold on for a second longer, look at the pathetic way his cock is leaking. He’s going to come untouched again, isn’t he?” Mingyu’s moans buzz into your pussy and your voice becomes desperate. “Please let him come now! I can’t hold it-” And that’s it. You climax right then, your essence covering all of Mingyu’s face, who licks you through the orgasm, and you see him hit his orgasm too, his cock wringing out ropes and ropes of cum as he comes untouched for the second time that night. “You were right, Wonwoo. He really is pathetic. He’s still hard after coming twice untouched.” It’s so hot to talk about Mingyu like he’s not even in the room, and you can see how much he likes it. Almost as if you both can use him as you please for your pleasure only. His big body falls limp on the bed, whining, when Wonwoo suddenly pulls out of him and leans over to kiss you.
As Mingyu lies down, recovering his breath, Wonwoo tugs you closer to him and kisses you. His mouth is warmer now, the kiss more sloppy, and the scent of Mingyu is not entangled with his own masculine scent, making you heady with pleasure. Wonwoo’s hands soon find your clit as he rubs you hard and fast while making out with you, his other hand gripping your hair to hold you in place as your knees almost buck and collapse under his ministrations. “I’m not done with you yet, doll. Tired already?” He pulls away but you chase him and end up licking all over his jaw. “Not tired. I’ll take whatever you give, Wonwoo.”
You almost miss Wonwoo’s low grunts when Mingyu whines from beside you, “Me too… Y/N-ie kiss me too.” Identical, indulging, fond smiles burst out on both your and Wonwoo’s faces, and even he can’t come to scold his cute boyfriend. “Attention whore,” Wonwoo’s words don’t sting, they’re filled with a gentle fondness that recplicates the one in your heart, and you both lie on either side of Mingyu to kiss him all over, you make out with him and Wonwoo lavishes his skin with hickeys that will leave marks tomorrow. Mingyu sighs and whimpers in the spotlight, and you notice how his dick chubs up again. Wonwoo notices it too, because he laughs, a mean undertone in his voice, as bends down to kiss the tip of his boyfriend’s thick cock.
“You’re so pretty all over,” you whisper to Mingyu as you kiss his stomach and eventually take his hardening cock into your mouth, inch-by-inch to avoid gagging on the thick length. Your hands are still tied behind you, so you can’t stroke the rest of the length that doesn’t fit inside your mouth. “Don’t praise him, don’t encourage him to be more of a cockslut,” Wonwoo says, his fingers fondling your breasts as he watches you suck his boyfriend’s cock. Mingyu’s dick spews pre-cum into your mouth with the simultaneous praise and degradation, and you relax your jaws to deepthroat him further.
“Y/N! You- god, Y/N-ie you’re so good at this, please- Wonwoo, can I fuck her mouth? Please?” Your mouth waters at the idea so you look up at Wonwoo, your tongue still licking at Mingyu’s tip, begging him to let Mingyu fuck his big cock into your mouth, but Wonwoo glares back, looking ready to devour you. You haven’t missed how his cock is still rock-hard, proud and red against his abs, so you move up from Mingyu’s dick and bend down to place kisses on Wonwoo’s tip too. He groans at the contact, cursing under his breath. Then he sits up and flips you around, until you’re on your stomach on the bed, your mouth inches away from Mingyu’s dick, and Wonwoo’s dick pokes at your folds, rubbing himself with the wetness of your pussy. He places a hand on the back of your head and pushes you down on Mingyu’s cock, right as he sinks into your cunt, the whole length inside you at once, and you moan around the cock in your mouth. Your hands still tied behind you, you feel your nipples brushing against the sheets, and all the stimulation is too much to take.
Your mouth full of cock, you push yourself back towards Wonwoo, to take as much of him as you can, desperate for him to set a faster pace, but you can’t take your mouth off the dick to tell him the same. Thankfully, he seems to read your mind, or rather, his self-restraint breaks, as he snaps his hips faster against you, moaning about how tight you are, so wet, so warm, so sexy and how he’s moulding you to fit his cock, shaping you to fit you, and how he wants to come inside. So you get up from Mingyu’s cock for a second, to say, forming words slowly, “You can, Wonwoo.” His pace stutters, “I can? You sure?” “Yes please. I want it. Want you to fill me up, Mr. Jeon!”
And that does it for him. He buries himself into you as he comes inside you, his thick cum being pushed further inside as he lazily thrusts you through it. You come seconds later as Mingyu himself comes inside your mouth, and you take it all in, your body eager to please. Mingyu sighs, his face red but the pleasure clearly painted on his features as he flashes you a sated grin. As Wonwoo pulls out of you, he gets off the bed to bring a piece of cloth from his washroom, and you move up to kiss Mingyu, the kiss slow, exhausted, but so warm. You’re smiling against each other’s mouths, the skin-to-skin contact feeling like heaven, and he runs his hands through your hair. When Wonwoo comes and sits next to you, he kisses his boyfriend first, another gentle, warm kiss that makes your heart full. “You did so well, baby.” He tells Mingyu, who gives him another dopey smile, before he turns to you, and kisses you too. “You too, darling.”
Darling. You melt at the pet name, stretching your hand to hug Wonwoo and Mingyu at the same time, the latter snuggling into you, needy after all the sex and Wonwoo chuckles. “Let me clean you up and then you guys cuddle.” “And you?” Mingyu’s voice is small, whiny, and Wonwoo laughs. “I’ll be right back with y’all. I need a shower, okay?” And when he kisses your and Mingyu’s forehead and disappears into the washroom in all his naked glory, you sigh peacefully and snuggle into Mingyu’s chest, the latter placing tiny kisses near your hairline as you both fall asleep.
_
(vi)
You know, somewhere in the middle of the night, Wonwoo had joined the two of you in that big bed. You’d ended up sandwiched between the two men, your head snuggled in Wonwoo’s chest, as Mingyu spooned you from behind. Safe to say, you did not need a blanket all night.
Like clockwork, your body wakes up at six am, just as the sun begins shining through the pale blue curtains. Wonwoo is not next to you, but the pillow isn’t cold. You can see Mingyu still snoring away, so you gently detach his legs from where it was tangled with yours all night, and get out of the bed. Your legs are still sore, but you manage to find Mingyu’s t-shirt from last night and slip it on and walk out of the room.
In the daylight, you can see just how elegant and posh the house is. Unlike your apartment, the walls are done in dark shades of blue, and you think how accurately it reflects Wonwoo’s soul. The furniture is all wood, and you know that the multiple appliances in the kitchen and the dressing room you see are additions from Mingyu’s end. You find Wonwoo standing in the open kitchen, leaning against the counter as he hums softly and sips his coffee. Seeing you, he looks up and a beautiful smile spreads across his face.
In the daylight, Wonwoo looks different.
In the daylight, Wonwoo looks attainable. You step closer to him and hug him, your arms finding your way around his slender waist, and he hugs you back, resting his chin atop your head. “Good morning, darling. Can’t sleep even on a Sunday?” You laugh into his shoulder. “Neither can you. There’s a reason why people say we’re dating our work.” “Not me.” He pulls your head away to face him, “I know I’m dating two beautiful people, the most beautiful people in the world, my favourites.” Your heart fills at the fondness in his eyes.
“Wonwoo, I know we talked last night, but are you s-” “Are you sure? What you say matters the most, baby.” “I am, but you and Mingyu are in an open relationship and all…” “That was another ploy, of course. You think I could share Mingyu with anyone except his pretty little best friend who looks like a dream?” His words make you cringe, and you wonder if anyone ever sees this side of Wonwoo except Mingyu… and now, you. You lean in to kiss his pouty, pink lips, and Wonwoo’s nose scrunches up into an adorable smile. God, that’s the first time you’re seeing this smile. So you kiss him again, eager to get him to react like that again. And he does. The nose scrunch becomes a permanent feature as he kisses you deeper, and you can taste the coffee in his mouth.
“Do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please. Should I wake up Mingyu? I don’t want him to feel sad later for missing anything.” You hug Wonwoo one more time before you feel another pair of hands grabbing you from behind and crushing the two of you in a bear hug. “I feel sad already, Y/N-ie. Thank you for thinking about me. Who do I even have in this world except you, hmm? Certainly not my boyfriend.” Mingyu’s morning voice is extra lispy and extra raw, but it feels so warm near your back.
You open your eyes to see Wonwoo kissing Mingyu from above you. “Please don’t gang up against me on our first day together.” Wonwoo’s quiet mumbling doesn’t go unnoticed and you and Mingyu both end up laughing. You hug the two of them again, and your heart settles into a warm peace you never want to get out of, for your life.
#simpxxstan#favourite wonwoo mingyu#seventeen fanfic#seventeen x reader#svt#svt x reader#seventeen x you#svt smut#seventeen imagines#seventeen smut#wonwoo smut#mingyu smut#seventeen poly#seventeen minwon#seventeen wonwoo#seventeen mingyu#mingyu x wonwoo#seventeen fic#Spotify
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wait ok genuinely kind of interested in your opinion on porn now......... if only because those big 3 you mentioned are always the reasons i see people throwing out so id love to hear a deeper take than that
I'm genuinely surprised anyone could follow me and not know my stance on porn, but that's okay. simplified and in no particular order and in no means exhaustive:
porn creates perverse incentives
porn normalizes the purchase of women as sexual objects for men to use
porn is often called "rape on tape" by feminists, which I mostly agree with in the sense that if a woman would otherwise not have had sex except that she is being paid, then she is not consenting. you cannot purchase consent, the consent is not meaningful then.
additionally, you can not verify if you are watching people be raped in any other way. porn sites are filled with stolen videos, coerced videos, actual minors, aggressive rape that was filmed with or without the victim's knowledge, and other videos of this nature. there is no way to verify this at all from videos that are somehow not these things. things like "amateur" are often just marketing by the porn company or pimp, or they're stolen videos.
porn creates a social script for sex. this social script is least of all - boring and predictable. it also reinforces the long standing conservative gender understanding (see 2). porn also reinforces ideas of homophobia and racism under the guise of "taboo." porn is literally so conservative, but because it's considered "shocking" to "puritans" (religious men watch porn all the time), people talk like it's this liberal fantasy. porn is constantly reestablishing the status quo in the most perverse ways.
it's been demonstrated that people who are porn addicts very quickly escalate to more violent porn, and that this plays out in their sex lives with their (often vulnerable) sex partners.
the violence that happens in porn is real. the idea that it's a "fantasy" is marketing by porn website and pimps. if a man slaps a woman across the face, that really happened. why does it matter if she says "yes" to it - that's her "job" so how can she say no? (see 3 and also 4).
there is so much evidence and testimony by porn stars of the absolutely awful and terrifying conditions in which they work, even in the quote unquote "real" industry. drugs, alcohol, violence, coercion, exposure to STIs, homelessness, pimping, prostitution, mental illness, suicide, lack of benefits. It's bananas that anyone would be surprised by this when it's pointed out, we're talking about an industry that films sex on video. The majority of people in the sex industry want out. It ruins their lives, and once in it's very hard to leave and lead a normal life. The idea that the industry needs regulation to be "fixed" is bizarre and just seems like pimp and porn industry marketing to get people to look the other way.
Poverty creates porn. Social welfare for the poorest of our women would prevent them from entering the industry in the first place. Women go into porn out of need, not desire. social media pushes that porn stars loooove their jobs is 1. porn site and pimp propaganda 2. literally marketing because men want to believe this.
I am not religious, I don't believe in god. I love sex and masturbation. it's the most natural thing in the world and people don't actually need to "learn" how to do it - it's innate within us. Porn is just one more way to humiliate women in a misogynist society that requires women to be fearful of sex and rape constantly, and uneducated in their own sexual desires and boundaries.
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hello today is Palestinian Prisoners’ Day
palestinians are the most resilient people on the planet and our detainees are the backbone of every movement for freedom. people love to talk about their strength like it’s some inspiring trait, but surviving the kind of brutality that happens inside israeli prisons isn’t a choice. it’s trauma. it’s torture. it’s kids locked in solitary. it’s beatings, electrocution, starvation, sexual abuse. and still,,,, thousands are in those cells. a lot of them are just children
but for some reason the world looks away again and again
so i’m begging you: please start giving a fuck. about palestinians. about their experiences about their dignity about their deaths. but also about their lives in these torture prisons. and their lives AFTER. bc that is long lasting trauma. and the ABSOLUTE bare minimum any of us can do is to care. dont let today pass by without speaking to at least one person about these conditions or reading a testimony. it really is the least u can do thx
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Much has been made of Mr Darcy's "confession" to Elizabeth that he does not converse easily with strangers. It is repeatedly used to support neurodivergent interpretations of his character. And I suppose that when taken at face value, a character confessing that they do not easily converse with strangers and struggle to catch their tone or appear interested in conversation can absolutely scream AUTISM! (I say as an autistic person myself)
But this line is often taken in isolation. When considered in terms of the passage in which it appears in Chapter 31, it appears far less of a smoking gun than may initially be suspected. After some discussion about Elizabeth and Darcy's prior acquaintance in Hertfordshire, Colonel Fitzwilliam asks Elizabeth for information about Darcy's behaviour there. She readily supplies it:
'Pray let me hear what you have to accuse him of,' cried Colonel Fitzwilliam. 'I should like to know how he behaves among strangers.' 'You shall hear then—but prepare yourself for something very dreadful. The first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire, you must know, was at a ball—and at this ball, what do you think he did? He danced only four dances, though gentlemen were scarce; and, to my certain knowledge, more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner. Mr Darcy, you cannot deny the fact.' 'I had not at that time the honour of knowing any lady in the assembly beyond my own party.'
What Darcy leaves out here is that it was he himself who chose not to be introduced to anybody. As we learn from the description of his behaviour at the Meryton assembly in Chapter 3:
Mr Darcy danced only once with Mrs Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being introduced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party.
Anyway, Elizabeth correctly does not buy his excuses. Not only does she respond with a cutting sarcastic remark, but she tries to bring the discussion with an end by speaking to Colonel Fitzwilliam:
'True; and nobody can ever be introduced in a ball-room. Well, Colonel Fitzwilliam, what do I play next? My fingers wait your orders.'
But Darcy does not get the hint and continues conversing with Elizabeth rather than quitting while he's ahead. However, I don't believe him to be missing a social cue here. Rather, this is an exceedingly conceited man who cannot conceive that anyone would not want to speak to such a Superior Being as he and more-so, is determined to defend himself from a perceived slight against his impeccable character.
Then we come to the passage containing the oft-cited line which allegedly contains proof of his neurodivergency:
'Perhaps,' said Darcy, 'I should have judged better, had I sought an introduction; but I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers.' 'Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?' said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. 'Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill-qualified to recommend himself to strangers?' 'I can answer your question,' said Fitzwilliam, 'without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble.'
Once again, Elizabeth does not buy his excuse for even a single second. She's fully aware of all the advantages a man such as he will have received in society (opportunities not open to women, might I add!) and draws attention to that fact. It's a brilliant, cutting line from her and she really set that one up for Colonel Fitzwilliam to deliver the knockout blow.
Not only do we have the testimony of Mr Darcy's cousin, that 'he will not give himself the trouble,' to appear cordial to strangers, but we have evidence from Wickham too. Although after this statement, Wickham quickly goes onto misrepresent Darcy's kindness to the poor, which contradicts Mrs Reynold's later testimony, I do believe Wickham to be telling the truth (for once!) here, when he tells Elizabeth in Chapter 16:
'Mr Darcy can please where he chooses. He does not want abilities. He can be a conversible companion if he thinks it worth his while.'
Which, again, demonstrates that Darcy is capable when he wants to be. That is the crucial point. Autistic people fundamentally lack the ability to understand social cues, they cannot turn it on and off as they please because they are snobs.
So, now we come to the infamous line about Darcy's supposed social struggles, and I hope that I've provided enough context to the line to make you see that it should not be taken at face value:
'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.' 'My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault—because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman’s of superior execution.'
Again, Elizabeth is not buying his excuses for even a single second and tells him if he feels like that, maybe he should put the effort in. She has seen him in numerous social settings and been thoroughly unimpressed with his behaviour which, when you consider his rudeness to her at the Meryton assembly, she has every right to be.
So, what do I make of the line?
Well, I think it's abundantly clear that Darcy absolutely can speak to people when he wants to. Perhaps, in his mind, he struggles to make that deeper connection and make friends easily. But making friends is not always easy, it's a process you must invest time and effort into. If you do not do that, it stands to reason that you will struggle. Plus, if you hold others to ridiculous standards (as Darcy does) without recognising and fixing the flaws within yourself, you're not going to have deep, lasting friendships.
While this quote may appear to be a moment of vulnerability where he does confess a fault of his, which is astounding given his pride, personally I do not think it was not a soul-searching exercise. It was to make Elizabeth stop grilling him. It was self-serving. Although, I don't think he's entirely lying. Darcy is veeeery careful with his words and though this statement is not considered and perhaps comes out rather abruptly, it doesn't necessarily follow that it isn't true. I can imagine that it is probably something he's felt for a while, yet it is a rather desperate attempt to defend himself from a woman who sees right through him.
I think perhaps Darcy does realise that he isn't as naturally gifted as other men he knows (such as Wickham, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Bingley) when it comes to forming acquaintances. However, he looks outwards and turns that bitterness against the world rather than looking inwards, reflecting upon himself and improving his manners which would be the correct thing to do. Thankfully, he later does this, but it took him twenty eight years...
In addition, Darcy appeared to have been under the illusion that he could coast by on Pemberley's reputation... which has always worked... until he met Elizabeth. For perhaps the first time, he encounters a woman who is not awestruck by him and his reputation and delivers the rebuke that he always needed.
So, while personally I'm inclined to believe there is some truth to his statement, as Mr Darcy is many things but he isn't a liar, I think it is said in desperation. His feeling stems from him knowing what he should do, but he can't be bothered to enact it... rather than any inherent social deficiency stemming from being neurodivergent.
Although, even if he does struggle socially, it's still no excuse for the rudeness he displayed to Elizabeth! My main issue with neurodivergent readings of Darcy is when they are deployed to defend his behaviour, when they attribute his rudeness to any potential neurodivergency and when they excuse his laziness. That is an awful message! Autistic people who struggle with social cues often do not, nor should they, go around insulting others. They should and often do put plenty of effort into being considerate and polite. In fact, I think, if anything, a love of rules makes us more likely to have good manners, rather than the reverse.
Ultimately, I'm not sure this line makes Mr Darcy the sympathetic-poor-sweet-innocent-shy-boy-autistic-representation that people want him to be. In fact it makes him look even worse, if anything. On matters such as these, he is every inch the conceited proud man he was widely believed to be at the Meryton assembly. Luckily, Elizabeth is an incredibly smart woman, who doesn't fall for it and immediately calls him out on his behaviour in a way that he has never experienced before. As she should!
#mr darcy#pride and prejudice#jane austen#elizabeth bennet#colonel fitzwilliam#mr wickham#my analysis#nd things#let darcy be flawed you cowards#<- but we don't necessarily need to pathologise him lol#now i'll whisper quietly in the tags lest the ableist sections of the austen fandom tear me limb from limb#(not saying EVERYONE who disagrees with nd readings of some of darcy's behaviour is ableist just some ways it's countered are... Not Great)#that i don't actually MIND nd!darcy headcanons when done WITHOUT a view to excusing his behaviour#and being clear that it is NOT what the author intended but. autistic boys get away with murder even today so it isn't hard to imagine that#especially with someone with as much wealth and status as darcy... his worst traits could've gone unchecked for so long#but he main reason i don't inherently have an issue with nd!darcy is because nd people existed back then but we weren't accommodated#i get that if he was nd there is an argument the narrative is just about him learning to mask but... a) the concept of masking didn't exist#and b) if he was a woman he'd have had to do it long before 28 sooooo. let the big boy face consequences for his actions!#i think there's something in darcy interpreting his fathers advice so literally with no room for nuance#that it leads him down that path of conceit when he's not actually a bad man at his core and never has been#bc that's very black and white thinking which makes me wonder... but on the whole i'm not sure#i'm not saying either way and ultimately it doesn't matter but it's fun to consider#within reason ofc... it's comforting to see evidence of autism in classics it's one of my FAVE things#but not sure darcy is the best example of this#if you want autistic characters in p&p mr collins and mary are RIGHT THERE lmao#but perhaps they are even worse representation so maybe not lmao#anyway wanted to make this post for a while and the Words came to me today so yay#also i didn't mention adaptations but they don't help... especially A Certain One but i've moaned enough about it for one week#and not in a fun way
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I really do hate the way people use the phrase "Conspiracy Theory" to refer to everything from "Supernatural Bullshit" to "Technically Possible but all the actual evidence is against it" to "We know for sure that this happened like we have declassified documents and decades of testimony from dozens of people and..."
Like it's just such an actively counterproductive conflation of different phenomenon that mostly serves to discredit actual investigation into the activities of those in power. Because sure, it's stupid to act as though the world is primarily driven by the hidden schemes of the powerful. But it's just as stupid to act as though powerful individuals and institutions don't ever get together and enact hidden schemes. Even though these sorts of entities invariably engage in many more equally bad (if not worse) activities in the open, for certain programmes the maintenance of some sort of secrecy does have worthwhile advantages. The fact of the matter is that high level conspiracies happen and they happen for a reason. Along with all the conspiracy "theories" out there, you'll find plenty of conspiracy facts
And sure, broader structural forces are much much more important than any individual project could be. State and Corporate conspiracies generally serve the ultimate purpose of maintaining or accelerating processes that were happening openly and/or "naturally" (i.e. without large scale co-ordinated planning) anyway. But these sorts of plots are still worth talking about not only because of their direct impacts (the greatest of which can change the fate of entire small countries) but also because of the ways they reflect and reinforce the overarching structures that produced them. At the very least, you shouldn't dismiss them out of hand because you think "A powerful entity did something and tried to keep it a secret" is a claim made only by people who've been watching too much X-Files
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DCxDP idea #3:
The police in Gotham ignore Crime Alley on principle, but the fire department and ambulance services, extremely unofficially, give them a higher priority than the wealthiest districts.
They know that the Alley hasn't been up to code since the murder of the Waynes. The rich can afford to fix their fire escapes. The Alley can't.
More people would die in the Alley during a disaster if they didn't do that; the Alley residents know that. There's a lot of people from the Alley in those jobs. The pay is crap and the hours are worse, so why not? And the Alley sticks to everyone who has lived there, so sooner or later the Alley has more than it's fair shared of decent first responders (ACAB).
It stays with them after they die, that feeling, that memory, of knowing that the man next door might be a mugger, but he's the first one of the volunteer firefighters to run into a raging fire and start pulling out people—that he went back into one just to save a girl's ESA dog.
So, when the Portal gets opened, no one in Amity even knows when the 42 ghosts from Crime Alley bolt straight home. They don't learn about them until much later.
Was the Alley surprised when the woman who died on the table at Gotham General showed up at 4 first-aid training clasd? The one who'd been delivered in time, but who'd been bumped down the list by an aide from the Diamond District until she'd been waiting for too long to survive?
Not really.
Gotham was weird—why not add ghosts to be mix? If she wanted to save lives, good for her. Just don't let her use the paddles—they short out before she can get them out of the case.
Soon enough, Crime Alley has ghosts in the firehouse. They can go through walls and fly; the mortality rate for apartment fires drops dead.
The news spreads, slowly, to the rest of the city. Crime Alley has ghosts, and the ghosts are saving lives just like the other first responders do. The Bats start working with them, and after that, well, the city knows that the ghosts are on their side.
(A few cops try to arrest them for the usual made-up charges, but handcuffs can do nothing to stop a ghost.)
(Gordon got a gift basket from three girls he'd caught the murderer of.)
It takes a while for the news to spread out of Gotham. When it does, the JLD swings by on the down low to investigate. They're more surprised than the Alley was, but hey, these are thinking, feeling people; if they want to take the graveyard shift on call, more power to them.
All this means that, by the time the Amity Park situation gets out, the Drs. Fenton and the GIW have one hell of a time gaslighting anyone into believing their anti-ghost bullshit.
Crime Alley has a shared ACAB mindset and enough testimony and evidence to kill that shit, and they aren't the only ones that those 42 ghosts have made an impact on.
Those 42 ghosts are the reason why Amity Park doesn't become the only example of what ghosts can do. Without them, things would have been much, much worse.
#dpxdc#dcxdp#look#I have feelings about this#also yes I did pick 42 for a reason#if you know you know#yastaghr
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Sacred Tradition
A/N: Hi again! This was a quick idea that was bouncing around my head for the past two days. This is a little shorter than my last, and I honestly didn't even read through it once I finished typing it out, so... try not to judge me too hard for silly errors. - Hy
Just a special shoutout to @bl0ssomanddie whose compliment made me cheese so hard that I couldn't help but continue trying this whole "posting my writing" thing out.
Warnings: ramblings, momentary angst, fluffy ending
Word Count: 2.8k
Per tradition, Thursday nights were movie nights at Eddie’s little apartment.
Since the whole Vecna thing had gone down, he and Wayne had gotten a good settlement from the government to keep their mouths shut about what they knew, and then another for the accusations and resulting manhunt that had caused Eddie mental anguish and physical harm. As soon as he’d graduated high school, he’d gotten himself a little apartment on the nicer side of town, moving out of the house he and Wayne had been moved into once the trailer park was deemed unlivable. As soon as the town was cleared for entry, you’d taken a flight from your college town on the east coast to head back to your hometown, where your friends were. (Not that it looked the same, since the government had to jump through hoops to fix up what Vecna had left behind. Or officially, the “earthquake.”) The only reason you knew anything about Vecna was because Eddie had written almost a journal’s worth of letters to you, with polaroid photograph evidence, and testimonials from his friends before he’d been sworn to secrecy. So naturally, when you’d come home, you’d been panicked to see him and hear about the story in person. You had just entered your junior year of college, but after the chaos of Hawkins splitting open, you couldn’t bear to be away anymore. You decided you were staying in town, and you’d finish your degree at your local college, while you worked locally. Fridays were the only weekdays you didn’t have class, and thus had started your movie night tradition.
By the time you’d gotten your degree and gotten your own little apartment in town, you’d both felt it was inappropriate to change sacred movie night tradition. Eddie didn’t work at the shop on Fridays, and you didn’t work the opening shift at the store, so Thursdays continued to work. Sometimes, however, Eddie liked to break tradition and hold movie night at your place instead.
That particular Thursday, Eddie’s oven unit had been acting up, so he’d called you to request the change in venue, and you didn’t mind it one bit. A functioning oven was a must, otherwise you couldn’t cook your instant stovetop popcorn, and neither of you would dare do movie night without your popcorn. He arrived early, as you were getting home from work, so you left him to his own devices while you went to shower and get into your comfiest sweats.
Typically, with Eddie’s endless supply of energy, he usually found something productive to do with it. However, he was typically in his own apartment, which meant he could pick up one of his current reads when he was bored and read until you gave him attention again. At your place, however, it was a little harder to find a way to tamp down his energy. He chose to just read anything and everything with text that was on your coffee table. This included a mailer ad you’d received for a car, an electrical bill that was annoyingly lower than his own, and a fashion catalog. The problem was that none of these things were near interesting enough, so when he saw an open journal tucked in the bottom shelf of the coffee table, he had to grab it.
He started flipping through pages of random notes you’d made: movies you wanted to watch, a word you wanted to look up in a dictionary, a D&D campaign idea for Eddie, and then a bunch of blank pages. As he was about to give up on that, he flipped to a later page on accident, and saw you’d doodled a bunch of hearts, and in the middle was your name… with his last name tacked on. It stopped him in his tracks, and he just stared down at the page awhile, trying to process if he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. After he gathered his bearings again, he flipped through more pages, and found his name doodled all over the edges of the pages, and hearts. He also found plenty more instances of your name with his Munson surname. Feeling that he’d definitely seen something he wasn’t supposed to, he closed the journal and put it on the coffee table, halfway covering it with a TV guide that was on the side table beside him, and sitting back on the couch, tense.
When you were done with your shower and fully dressed, you came out, scrunching your hair dry with your towel. You smiled when you entered the living room, “ready for some Gremlins?” He gave you a strange smile and a stiff nod, but you didn’t read too much into it, knowing Eddie had a tendency of being weird at times. Instead, you went to grab the movie from the shelf, tossing the box to him before going to prepare the popcorn. He was quiet while you did so, but again, you tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. When everything was ready, you headed to the couch with the bowl of popcorn in arm.
You were about to take your usual seat curled up with him when you spotted your journal on the coffee table, underneath a TV guide. Only you hadn’t left the journal there earlier that morning. When you realized what must have happened, your stomach sank to your toes, and you sat a respectable distance from him as the movie previews began. You put the popcorn bowl in the space between you, and tried to calm your now racing heart as the movie began. Usually, movie nights together were full of laughter and silly comments, especially when watching movies you’d already seen a million times. This time was not like those times. Unfortunately, he was too shocked at this new information to be normal, and you were too petrified that he knew how you felt to act cool. It meant that the whole movie night was weird and tense, and when it was time for him to go, you tried to act as normal as possible, waving before closing the door and locking it behind him, and then collapsing on the ground to stare at the hardwood and contemplate just about every life decision you’d ever made.
You shouldn’t have left your journal in your living room. It was such a stupid mistake. One you never made. But you hadn’t expected Eddie to change plans and decide to go to your place instead of his own, so it hadn’t even crossed your mind until you’d seen it there. You couldn’t be upset with him, he knew he was welcome to look through whatever you left in your living room. He knew not to snoop in your bedroom, but living room was fair game. He had seen your deepest, darkest secret. You had been so good about hiding your crush on Eddie. You’d never once let on, at least not in your eyes, and he certainly never seemed to notice. You thought you were in the clear. But the way he’d tensed around you today? That was all the information you needed. Not only did he not know prior to now, but he was uncomfortable around you now that he did know. Needless to say, you would not be speaking with Eddie anytime soon.
Eddie stood outside your door for a few minutes after you’d closed it, and he’d heard the lock turn. He stared at the parking lot a few yards away, just trying to process what he’d just experienced. If he’d understood correctly, his best friend was writing her name with his last name in her journal, surrounded by hearts… meaning she liked him. More importantly, she returned his feelings. He’d been in love with her for so long, but had never had the nerve to take things to the next level, for fear she’d reject him. Now, there was no more fear of that.
But he’d done something much, much worse, instead. He’d made it seem like he wasn’t interested. It was an accident! He had seen that information, and he couldn’t wrap his mind around what he’d read! So he’d let things get tense and awkward, and then he couldn’t very well do anything about it, because he had the distinct feeling she’d seen what he’d been doing. He’d succeeded at making her uncomfortable, and that was about it. He looked back at the door after his entire thought process had concluded, and noticed your living room lights were out, so you’d definitely retreated to your bedroom. He wouldn’t knock again, so instead he hurried to his car and raced home, before calling you and nearly chewing his nails off as he waited for you to pick up. When you didn’t, he called again. And again. On the fourth time, he got a busy signal instead of just no response. He went to bed with a heavy heart that night, afraid you hated him now.
You’d heard the phone ring the first time, and you just knew it had to be Eddie. Surely, he wanted to smooth things over and let you down easy, but you really didn’t want to hear the pity in his voice. So you’d covered your ears with your pillow, and hoped the phone would stop ringing. Instead, he called again, and again. So after the third time, you just took the phone off the hook and hoped he’d get the hint. You waited an agonizing twenty minutes before putting it back in its place and then finally letting yourself get to sleep, knowing you’d have nightmares that night. The next morning, you took yourself to your favorite coffee shop as a treat, figuring you could at least do something nice for yourself considering your relationship with your best friend was imploding entirely.
Unbeknownst to you, Eddie had gone to your apartment early to try and find you before work, only to find your car missing from the parking lot. He then tried the store you worked at, and didn’t see your car there, either. He waited a bit, in front of the store, before deciding to just go home and give you some space. On his way to his apartment, he found himself instead turning onto Wayne’s street, to try and get some advice. Wayne wasn’t home either, so he collapsed onto the old man’s couch and ended up falling asleep there. He’d get his uncle’s advice when he got home, surely.
You had no idea the trouble eddie had gone to to find you, so you went about your workday as normally as you could. Thankfully, your boss suggested closing early that night, and you grabbed takeout and headed straight home, refusing to speak to anyone. You found yourself watching one of your favorite romantic films, working yourself up about the whole situation despite not actually having spoken to Eddie about it all. You just didn’t want to see the pity on his face when he let you down easy. You’d much rather he just pretended nothing ever happened.
The next day, the only reason you’d had peace was because Eddie worked Saturdays at the shop. It was his longest shift. He got paid extra for it, since no one else wanted to work Saturdays. That meant that by the time he got home that night, he was too tired to pester you, and fell asleep quickly. But the next day, he was determined to follow Wayne’s advice. He woke up extra early, picking up your favorite drink and pastry from your favorite coffee shop, and headed to your apartment. He knew that knocking wouldn’t be helpful, so he had gotten there just in time to wait outside your car until you left for work.
When you opened your front door and saw the familiar mop of curls by your car, your heart nearly jumped out of your chest. You took steadying breaths, and tried to remain calm. Once your door was locked, you walked towards your car with your eyes on the sidewalk, then the asphalt. You unlocked your car door and he appeared at your side to hand you the drink and pastry. You looked up at him silently, before taking the treats with a soft thanks, putting the cup in its cupholder and the pastry on your passenger seat. He grabbed your arm, however, to keep you from getting in the car yourself. “Please,” he said simply.
You stared at the hand on your arm and closed your eyes a moment, before letting out a breath and responding, “I really don’t want to talk right now, I’m going to be late for work.” But that excuse didn’t work with him, because he knew what time you had to be at work to open the store.
“We need to talk, please. You haven’t talked to me in two full days. Thursday night, you avoided my calls. I’m not leaving until you talk to me, and I’m not letting you leave either,” he used his position to switch you, and close your car door - leaning on it for good measure. You took a breath and stared at him, expression unreadable, before shaking your head.
“No, I don’t really have anything to say, and I don’t need you to say anything either. Everything is fine and normal and great and I’ll talk to you later,” you tried to avoid the situation entirely, but your attempt proved fruitless.
“Nope,” he crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me, sweetheart. That’s not how we work, and you know it.”
“You shouldn’t have snooped,” you said simply, “you shouldn’t have gone through my journal.”
He blinked, surprised that you’d bring it up first. “Well- yeah, that’s probably true. And I’m sorry about that, really, I am. But I’m not mad I saw what I saw, you know?”
This time it was your turn to look surprised, your eyebrows scrunching together in confusion. “What do you mean? You sat there, stiff as a board, all night. If my feelings make you that uncomfortable, I don’t know what you possibly want to talk to me about. I got it, you’re not interested, okay? I don’t need you to-”
Eddie laughed and covered your mouth gently with his hand, effectively shutting you up, but shocking you as you stared up at him with wide eyes at the audacity. “Can you let me finish? I wasn’t uncomfortable about your feelings, okay? I was sitting there for an hour and a half, trying to figure out if the girl I’ve been totally pining over for ages actually doodled her name with mine, or if I was entirely insane. And then you got stiff as a board, and I thought for sure I’d messed everything up. Do you know how long I stood outside your door after you locked up? Probably like, fifteen to twenty minutes. Standing there. And then when I ran home to call you, you didn’t pick up. Those are mixed signals if I’ve ever seen ‘em,” he pointed out, slowly retracting his hand from your mouth.
“First of all,” you pointed your finger in his face in a familiar sassy attitude that made him feel a little more comfortable than your previous silence. “Don’t you ever shut me up like that again, I’ll kill you. Second of all, I- what?” You finally deflated, puzzled at his admission and not fully grasping it. “I don’t understand, so… you weren’t uncomfortable with my feelings? You were uncomfortable with… the not knowing? And I don’t understand, why did you stand at my door-” Eddie laughed warmly at your rambling, cheeks pink, and that time shut you up an entirely different way - by grabbing your face in his hands and leaning down to kiss you.
You felt like your heart might explode, and the butterflies in your stomach erupted like nothing you’d ever felt before. It took a moment before you finally closed your eyes and let yourself melt into it, before pushing him away from you with a pouty angry look, making his own eyes go wide this time. “I told you not to shut me up, Edward,” you huffed, though your flushed cheeks said you weren’t really angry with him. He hummed and brought his hands to your hips, pulling you closer to him as he leaned down to kiss your cheek this time.
“Oops. You should get to work, you’re really gonna be late…” he teased, and you smacked his arm.
“You’re driving me to work today. And you’re driving me home. And buying me pizza,” you told him simply.
“Yeah,” he grinned. “I think I can handle that.”
#my writing#eddie munson#eddie munson x reader#eddie munson x you#eddie munson fanfic#eddie munson drabble#eddie munson imagine#eddie munson fic#stranger things#x reader#hy's writing#chrissy cunningham#eddie munson fluff#eddie munson blurb#my fic#eddie munson oneshot
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Protect (Hannibal Lecter x Gender Neutral Reader)
Summary: You didn't care if people were against your relationship with Hannibal, calling you all names under the sun for managing to 'bewitch' one of Baltimore's highest socialites, but Hannibal was a different story.
tags: teaching a lesson, Hannibal really just wants to protect you, murder (duh)

"Hannibal, please tell me you didn't kill him." You whined, looking at your lover, who couldn't even bother to feign confusion, simply letting one of those small, knowing smiles grace his face.
You turned back to TattleCrime, reading all about the mysterious disappearance of Alan Wright, one of Baltimore's more notable socialites. Theories of who could've done it, along with useless testimonies from people who 'loved' him and wanted him back, filled the page. With a frustrated sigh, you closed the laptop and stood up from the couch.
"We talked about hunting too close to home. What if they trace it back to you?"
"They won't." Hannibal reassured, his voice laced with a smugness that you couldn’t help but resent. If you were a normal person, the knowledge that you were sleeping with a cannibalistic serial killer would have sent you running for the hills, but you weren’t sane.
Hannibal's ideology, while disturbing, was understandable, honorable even. Rudeness was intolerable (something you wholeheartedly agreed with), but you could overlook it under special circumstances—this moment constitutes as one.
"Hannibal, you can't kill every person who speaks unfavorably of me. That would draw even more unwanted attention from the police and FBI."
Hannibal’s jaw clenched, a clear signal that your words had struck a nerve. He knew you were right—lately, Will and Jack had begun to suspect him, their eyes narrowing in on the smallest inconsistencies. There was no need to get sloppy and provide them with the evidence they so desperately sought.
"Alan Wright wasn’t just unfavorable." he began, his tone measured and calm. "He was a vile creature, filled with envy and spite. He demeaned you, reduced you to nothing more than a trophy, a shallow figure climbing the social ladder." His words were sharp, each one cutting deeper as he continued. "He dared to belittle what we share, to trivialize it. How could I stand idly by while he poisoned others with his malicious lies?"
"Lies." you interjected, your voice firm but calm. "You said it yourself—baseless assumptions that hold no power."
Hannibal’s eyes narrowed slightly, his jaw tightening again as he processed your words. "Perhaps they were lies." he conceded, though his tone suggested he was far from convinced. "But lies, when spoken by someone with influence, can become a dangerous truth in the minds of others. Alan had a way of manipulating those around him, of planting seeds of doubt and suspicion."
You could see the frustration building in him, the way his control was slipping with each passing moment. "But those seeds would have withered without attention." you pressed, trying to make him see your reasoning.
"They didn’t deserve your time, your energy, or your wrath. It shouldn't matter what others think of us. That would be pedestrian, don't you agree?" You knew it was petty, but Hannibal had to understand the irrationality behind his actions.
"Pedestrian." He echoed, the word seeming to weigh heavily on his tongue. "Perhaps so. But it is not merely about the opinions of others. It’s about the principle of the matter, and the respect I feel you deserve."
Hannibal’s gaze softened, but the intensity in his eyes remained. "You underestimate how far I’m willing to go to protect you, to protect us." he murmured, his voice low and almost tender, though a dangerous edge lingered beneath. "Alan Wright wasn’t just a man spreading lies—he was a threat, one that I could not allow to fester."
You sighed, your frustration growing as you saw no change in Hannibal's mind. "But at what cost? You can’t kill every person who sees us differently, who doesn’t understand what we have. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not worth the risk."
Hannibal’s expression hardened, the control he’d been holding onto slipping further. "I won’t let anyone take you from me." he said, his voice rising, the calm facade beginning to crumble. "Not Alan Wright, not anyone. They will not diminish what we share, what we could become. I will protect you from all threats, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem to you."
His words hung in the air, heavy with the weight of his conviction. You could feel the storm building inside him, the way his emotions were beginning to spiral out of control. But even as he unraveled, you couldn’t help but feel a deep, conflicted pull toward him—a mix of fear, admiration, and something else you couldn’t quite name.
"Hannibal." you said softly, stepping closer to him, trying to bring him back. "I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. But we need to be smart about this. We can’t let emotions drive us to do something we’ll regret."
For a moment, Hannibal didn’t respond, his gaze fixed on some distant point as if lost in his own thoughts. But then, slowly, he seemed to regain control, his breathing steadying, the wildness in his eyes dimming. He looked at you, really looked at you, and the tension in his body eased.
"You’re right." he finally said, though the words seemed to come with difficulty. "We must be careful. But never doubt my commitment to us, to you. I will protect what we have with everything I am."
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