#and then and only then I can actually properly determine whether I like it or not

[illgiveyouahint]

From someone who didn't really like eggs to someone who's excited about the delicious omelette I just made, I sure am making great strides in my pickiness

[lincolndjarin]

Not So Secret Santa

javier peña x fem!reader

this is a part of the @pedrostories gift exchange!!

summary : you get the only person you didn't want for your offices secret santa.

warnings/tags : 18+ mdni, enemies/friends to lovers, canon divergence, steve is your boss/close friend, reader and javier have a complicated relationship, reader is insecure, brief mentions of alcohol, porn with plot, smut, light angst, javier and reader fight physically but it's very light with no actual injury, masturbation, semi-public sex, p in v, idk how to properly tag this but javi likes boobs in this so he touches boobs, unprotected sex (don't do this, wrap it this holiday season), use of a makeshift gag, rough yet very loving sex because it's christmas and christmas magic means i can write what i want.

tldr : you and javi have sex in his office and you put his tie in his mouth to shut him up.

word count : 4.4k

✦ : merry christmas @taro-666 !!! i'm your secret santa !!! i hope you're well this holiday season and i hope you enjoy this fic !! i haven't written much peña, despite how much i love him so i hope i did him justice and i hope you have a wonderful holiday <3 <3 (also sorry this is a little late (20 minuetes left before midnight so we're good). i was out with family all day and was only just now able to get to my laptop, i promise i didn't forget about you lmao)

no use of y/n, reader has hair and painted nails & javier sort of half picks her up at one point, nothing else is described besides clothing.

lovely dividers by @saradika-graphics

“Please, Steve, I’ll give you a week's pay.” You lean across his desk, genuine desperation in your voice after an hour of begging. 

“Not gonna happen.” He doesn’t even bother looking up from his computer.

“A month.” Your voice is starting to pitch up, something similar to anguish in your tone. Your offer finally gets a reaction out of him as his eyes widen, head tilting up.  

“Jesus, you can’t be serious.” He’s examining your expression, trying to determine the sincerity of your claim. 

“My entire Christmas bonus.” 

“Okay, stop.” He sighs, giving you a sympathetic look. “We’re not allowed to switch.”

“When did you become such a stickler for the rules?” You cross your arms in front of your chest. 

“It’s just a secret Santa. He’s our friend, whether you like it or not, you two are close and this shouldn’t be this big of a deal, now go, please, I need to finish up here so I can leave at a reasonable hour.” He loosens his tie as you sigh. 

“It’s not just a secret Santa, Steve. It’s an opportunity for him to tell me that I once again didn’t do something right. No matter what I get him, it isn’t going to be good enough.” Even as you’re saying it you can see that he isn’t going to change his mind about this. 

“He’s a dick to everybody. That’s inevitable, it just means he’s comfortable with you.” He’s already turning back to his work. 

“Please, Steve.” 

“No.”

You glare down at him, giving him your angriest look as his gaze tilts back up to meet yours. 

When it’s clear that he isn’t going to switch you turn and leave, slamming his office door in the process. 

“Don’t forget, I need you here early to help set up for the party!” His muffled voice seeps out into the hall as you walk away. 

Once you’re out in your car and far away from prying eyes you unfold the damned slip of paper you’d drawn earlier today. 

Javier P. 

Of course, you got stuck with fucking Peña, a nickname you’d given him a few months ago. He absolutely hates it but the entire time you’ve worked for the DEA he’s gone out of his way to bother you. Sure, he’s your “friend”, in a strange, complicated way. But he still drives you up the wall with his constant need to one up you and the way he’s constantly making passes at women around the office. 

And it’s not like you have any problems with him sleeping around, lord knows you’ve had a fair amount of one night stands, but he just has to hit on every woman you work with. 

Every single woman, except you. 

You’d never admit it of course but a part of you will always be self conscious about that fact. It doesn’t help that Javier absolutely adores bothering you at every possible moment. He loves nothing more than to pester, annoy, and mock you, spending nearly half his day leaning over your desk despite the million complaints you’ve sent Steve about his persistent partner. 

He’ll sit on your desk, doing an endless amount of things to cause you distress. Like crowding you with his cigarette smell and vanilla cologne as he tells you you’re filling papers wrong, or telling you what colors to paint your nails, or solving your cases before you can even get to them, or teasing you about your shitty car. Today he wouldn’t stop bothering you about your weekend plans like he doesn’t already know exactly where you’ll be. 

“Are you doing anything this weekend?” He’d asked with that devastating smirk and eyebrow raise combo. 

“I have to go buy my secret Santa gift, just like everyone else.” You’d turned away, avoiding eye contact as he scoffed. 

“What about Saturday?” He continued to pry, you wanted nothing more than to shove his perfect ass off your desk. 

“The Christmas party, Javi. Just like everyone else.” You had sighed, squeezing the bridge of your nose as Emilia had walked past your desk. Javier immediately forgot your entire conversation as he turned to her. 

“I love your nails.” He’d pushed his hair out of his face, holding his hand out to take hers, getting a closer look at the well manicured designs. 

You had tuned out after that. Not wanting to be involved in the exchange as you went back to typing. Acutely aware of your own nails. 

Red chipped paint. 

You couldn’t help but wonder what it must be like to be the object of his affection.

It wouldn’t matter if he did hit on you, you would probably reject him anyway. 

Probably. 

It doesn’t matter, it’s never gonna happen so why let it bother you? 

With a sigh you toss the paper into your cup holder, reaching to turn on the radio, maybe some Christmas music will make you feel better. Of course nothing happens as you turn up the volume knob but it makes you want to scream regardless. 

Stupid fucking Peña. 

Stupid broken radio, stupid shitty car. 

“Fuck.” You mumble under your breath as you shift into drive.

Before you know it you’re back in your car in the DEA office parking lot, this time a few things are different though. 

You’re dressed nicer, trading your slacks in for a skirt and your dress shirt for a sweater. And of course you now have a small wrapped box in your lap. 

Since you had yesterday off for the holiday you spent your Friday at the mall, searching for a gift for Javier. Eventually you had settled on three little things; Nicotine gum, mostly because you’ll get more work done if he isn’t constantly dragging you outside for his smoke breaks. He complains too much about going alone and it’s always been easier not to argue, now he can stay at your desk with his gum. Beard oil, the fancy stuff he always insists on using in his mustache. You’d bought him the wrong kind last year for his birthday and you still haven’t heard the end of it. And a lighter, you had to beg the shop owner to make an exception and do a same day engraving of his birthday. 

Jesus. 

You know way too much about him. 

You arrived two hours early as requested by Steve to help him set up. With the wrapped box tucked under your arm you anxiously tap the patterned wrapping paper with your freshly manicured nails. 

“You should paint your nails green, I love green.” He had said through a drag of his cigarette. 

Why did you let that idiot's opinions influence this decision? You feel foolish. The green chrome polish shimmering in the street lights in the parking lot as you step into the building. You had extra time while you were waiting for the engraving and you just couldn’t help yourself when the salon was just a few stores away. The image of Javier holding your hand and examining your painted nails while telling you how nice they looked was just too tempting. Maybe he’d even ask if you did it just for him, and you could drag him into a closet at the party, the exact situation you watched unfold last year. Except in that scenario you weren’t the lucky lady he’d run off with that night. 

There’s no time to be thinking like that.

You shake off whatever filth you were imagining as you look around the hectic mess of garland and glitter.

Steve is already stressing, setting up tables as you set your gift under the tree before getting to work. The office is already mostly decorated but with his new position as supervisor Steve is insistent that everything be perfect his first Christmas in charge. So you plate food, and you mix drinks exactly as he wants them, and you hold the ladder steady when he insists on putting more lights up. When you’ve got about a half an hour before guests start arriving you’re finishing up and last minute touches, the two of you crowded around a drink tower. 

The tension from your conversation yesterday seems to have fizzled out as you become engrossed in your work, when you’ve both finished he gives you an appreciative look.

“Thank you, seriously, it means a lot.” You help him adjust his tie as he straightens out his shirt. 

“Anytime, although I’m surprised you didn’t just ask Javier.” You pat his shoulder as you finish, brushing a stray blonde hair out of his eyes. 

He laughs, a nervous chuckle that makes you raise an eyebrow but when you open your mouth to comment on it he lets out a relieved sigh as the first of your coworkers arrive.

More people show up than you could have expected. 

You stay near Steve for most of the beginning until he gets dragged away by one of the higher ups who had made an appearance, leaving you alone to sip your drink against the back wall. You hum along to a Christmas song that plays loud enough to drown out any conversation you might eavesdrop on to entertain yourself in his absence, your eyes scan the crowds as you try to match up the people you work with with their spouses. 

You’re getting ready to find another group to talk to when you catch a glimpse of him standing against the opposite wall, talking to Bonnie, the woman who works in the cubicle next to yours. 

Fucking Peña. Dressed in a stupidly tight green dress shirt. 

You should leave them alone, especially if he’s trying to make a move on her. But you can’t help it as you make your way around the room towards them, a vague sense of jealousy settling in your stomach. 

String lights twinkle across the ceiling of the office, creating a warm ambience throughout the space, just as you’re about to tap him on the shoulder you overhear their conversation. 

“I had to beg Steve to switch with me, took an hour of convincing and a week's paycheck but it’ll be worth it to see the look on her face.” His back is to you as he leans in closer to Bonnie. 

He’s probably talking about one of the other women from the office. Steve probably had someone Javier was trying to impress and that’s why Steve didn’t want to trade with you, he had already promised his pick to Javier. 

Whatever, you can’t be too bothered about that. It does make you want to return to your spot on the other side of the room but you don’t get the chance to as the music is turned down rather suddenly.

One of the secretaries, Benjamin, stands on a chair, making an announcement that it’s time to do the secret Santa. You manage to twist through the crowds so Javier never sees you, finding his gift and bringing it to where he now stands, simultaneously keeping an eye out for your own gift.  

You hand him the box, watching the way his face lights up. 

“You picked me?” He grins as you nod, carefully peeling back the wrapping paper as you feel a tap on your shoulder. Benjamin waits behind you, leaning in to whisper while you watch Javier open his gift. 

“It was short notice so we didn’t have time to get you a back up gift but your secret Santa told us at the last minute that he forgot to get you something, he promised to bring in something after New Years, I’m so sorry.” You feel a little disappointed as he murmurs but it isn’t that big of a deal, it’s a busy time of year and people can forget things. 

“No worries, do you know who it was? I’d like to at least tell them it’s fine.” You turn away from Javier as he smiles at the nicotine gum, Benjamin's eyes flicker from your face to Javier’s before he gives you a sympathetic look, walking away. 

Javier traded for your name? 

As your head tilts to look at him now you can see the smirk he’s now sporting. 

“ …but it’ll be worth it to see the look on her face.”

Javier had made a conscious effort to get your name just so he could not get you something.

Huh.

That doesn’t feel great. The look he gets to see on your face is betrayal and then just sadness. You don’t really care what the reason for his decision is, you turn and walk away from him regardless. If he tries to say something to you it’s drowned out by the music that starts once again. 

Why are you so upset over some stupid joke? If it had been anyone else you wouldn’t have cared, you’d have brushed it off as a harmless accident but this wasn’t an accident. 

Maybe he didn’t really think of you as a friend. 

Maybe all of the teasing and one-upmanship really was from a place of animosity and you were just too blind and too infatuated to see it. You want to cry but you don’t want to give him the satisfaction so you sift through the bowl of keys, searching for the Star Wars keychain attached to your lanyard but you can’t find it. The combination of the blaring Christmas songs with the frustration you’re currently feeling only makes you more emotional.  

You don’t want to go to the bathrooms where you might run into someone and you can’t go to Steve’s office because he might be talking to his supervisor, so you go to the only place you know there won’t be people. 

Javier’s office. 

You walk as quickly as you can, slipping inside as you slam the door shut behind you, clicking the lock in place before turning around, resting against the door as you feel tears spilling from your eyes. It isn’t until he clears his throat that your head snaps up.

Today is just not your day.

Did he know you’d come here? How the hell did he beat you here? He’s fidgeting with the lighter you bought him, watching it light and go out as he sits with your keys in his other hand. 

Your face feels hot as you take in the sight of him. 

“Give me my keys.” You hold your hand out, wiping your eyes with the other as you wait. Of course he doesn’t hand them over, that would be too easy and today is insisting on being difficult. 

“I really liked your gift. Seriously, this is… outrageously thoughtful.” He murmurs, seemingly unaware of your mood until he takes a closer look at you, his expression shifting as he realizes your eyes are rimmed with red. “Why are you so upset? What happened?” He slides open a drawer, tossing your keys into his desk while you consider calling a cab. 

What a foolish question. 

How could he possibly not know?

“I want to leave, I’m sick of this party.” You turn to leave, maybe Steve can drive you home. 

“Come on, the parties barely started.” He’s on his feet, he doesn’t try to corner you, if anything he sets himself against the wall. 

“And I want to leave.” When you reach for the doorknob he grabs your wrist, holding it as he stares at you, a look of impatience crosses his face. 

“Don’t tell me you’re mad about the secret Santa.” His brows furrow. 

“This isn’t about a stupid secret Santa.”

“It sure seems like it is.” He’s still holding your wrist, why is he still holding your wrist?  

This isn’t about the secret Santa. It’s a lot more than that, and after ages of keeping your thoughts to yourself in front of him you just let it out. 

“This is about the fact that you don’t even care about me enough to make any sort of effort. I know you deliberately chose me, you specifically chose to do this to me and I don’t care that it’s just a stupid prank. It still- It’s still a shitty thing to do.” Your voice starts cracking half way through and you can feel your eyes welling up again but it doesn’t matter anymore, you were wrong, the two of you aren’t friends. 

“So this is about the secret Santa.” 

Of course he wouldn’t get it. 

“You’re an idiot.” You finally pull your wrist from him. 

You aren’t sure what else to do so you shove him, his back hitting the wall with a soft thud as you push past him to get to his desk, hoping to grab your keys but he catches your waist first. 

“Can you stop being so stubborn for five seconds and just let me explain myself?” You can tell his patience is wearing thin, his voice is strained as he pulls you back against him, caging you against his chest with his arms. 

“Fuck Javi- let me go-” You try to kick his knees but he anticipates it, shifting his legs to avoid you.

“Just wait- listen to me.” He swings you around a bit as he tries to still you, you can feel his breath hitching, the buttons of his shirt digging into your back. The two of you thrash around for another moment until you freeze, feeling something poking your hip. When he realizes why you stopped putting up a fight he lets you go in an instant. “Shit- I-I’m sorry.” He stammers as you turn around towards him, eyes wide. 

You never thought you’d see Javier Peña flustered yet here he is. When you take a step back his cheeks are burning red, his fingers twitch nervously at his side, and as much as you try to ignore it, his pants are tighter than usual. (And considering how tight they usually are this is quite a feat.) He won’t look you in the eye. 

“It- It’s fine, Javi.” You adjust the hem of your skirt, trying to fix your hair. You just can’t catch a break today. “It was an accident, there was a lot of- of friction and it happens. I think I should just go.” You stutter a bit trying to find the right words. This entire evening has been catastrophic, and you’re more than ready to call it a night. 

“It’s not an accident.” He mumbles, finally looking at you, not bothering with subtlety as he adjusts himself. “You should probably go.” 

If it’s not an accident you don’t want to go. 

You want to stay and keep making accidents, starting with rushing forward into him, taking his face in your hands and kissing him. Which is exactly what you do. At first he doesn’t react and you worry you read the situation wrong but when you pull away, just an inch, his hands envelop you. 

Hips, waist, back, shoulders, hair. He’s everywhere, all consuming as his teeth graze your lips, in an instant your backside hits his desk.

When he finally does remove his lips from yours his are slick and a tiny bit swollen, his pupils swallow his irises whole. 

“I loved your gift, I wasn’t joking, it’s perfect and the last thing I want is for you to think that I don’t care about you. Of course we’re friends, you-” As he rambles on you ball up the end of his tie, unceremoniously shoving it between his teeth. 

“Talk later, this now.” You grab the bottom of your sweater, pulling it up over your head, watching his jaw tense at the sight of your chest, his hands playing with the strap of your bra as you hop up onto his desk. Hiking your skirt up, he slots himself between your legs, your own fingers push your panties to the side as he reaches behind you, easily twisting the clasp of your bra to release it, tossing it to the side as his enormous palms engulf your breasts. 

You dip your fingers into the wetness between your legs, briefly taking a moment to wonder how you found yourself here. Just moments ago you were ready to leave and consider your friendship with Javier over, yet now you’re spread out on his desk, on display for him as you sink your fingers into your eager cunt. 

You don’t get to linger on the thought for long because he groans into the fabric of his tie and you’re pulled back into the moment. 

Jesus you’re soaked. 

You have no trouble pushing two slick digits into yourself. You can feel the outline of him against your thigh and you know that you need to warm yourself up to take him. He’s too engrossed in your tits to do it right now and you’ve waited too long for this, you don’t want to wait, you just want to have him. 

He’s tender at first, squeezing and softly tracing the outline of your areola until he seemingly can’t control himself any longer and he pinches, rolling your nipples between his thumb and pointer finger as your whine. Back arching of the oak of his desk as you curl your own fingers. Even through the tie his moans are still somehow louder than yours, you’re briefly worried about someone hearing as you let out a whimper while he tweaks your nipple but the music’s so loud at the party you can hear Mariah Carey from here. 

You don’t stop for a second, putting your focus on reaching the peak that you find yourself already getting startlingly close to. You can feel yourself pulsing as you pick up the pace, reveling in the way his eyes devour the very sight of you. You’re agonizingly close when he grabs your wrist, removing your fingers carefully as you try and resist, wanting to finish what you started, you’re about to whine when he begins unzipping his pants. You can feel your pussy clenching at the very sight of him, of course he isn’t wearing any underwear under his dress pants so the second his zipper is fully down his cock springs free.

Javier fucking Peña has a gorgeous cock. 

Standing stiff and proud without either one of you even having to touch it. Pretty and pink on the tip, already leaking down the shaft. And heavy, as he takes it in his hand, his other hand gripping your waist as lines himself at your entrance. He takes a moment, eyes scanning your face, silently asking for permission. 

You can’t nod fast enough but the second that you do he slides into you. 

You could never conjure up something this good in your fantasies. The way he fills you, stretching you open as he whimpers into the fabric of his tie, you like that he listened, that he kept it in his mouth this long. His strokes are needy and fast, like he’s been waiting for this for so long and now he can’t help but be ravenous. You were already painfully close before he filled you with his perfect cock, it takes only a few minutes for you to be right back there. His fingers dig into your waist so hard that you’re certain he’ll leave marks as he slams in and out of you, pulling out almost entirely with every thrust. 

You’re vaguely aware of the sound of his trinkets rolling off his desk and onto the floor. 

“Javi, Javi, Javi.” Between gasps you chant his name, the sound encouraging him as he pushes in deep, his pelvis grinding against your clit until you see stars. Your cunt clenching around him as your orgasm is ripped out of you. Messy and loud and blurry, he fucks you through it. You’re so blissed out you can barely focus on the persistent pounding into you until you manage to come back to your senses and his hands leave your waist, instead intertwining with your fingers as his hips twitch forward and you feel him hastily pull out of you.

He spits his tie out, opting to instead bite your shoulder as he comes, the groan that leaves his throat is obscene. Raspy and filthy as he collapses down on top of you, the two of you sweating and gasping amongst the paperwork and pens now scattered across his desk. 

Did that really just happen?

He manages to collect himself first, leaning back and tucking himself into his pants before quickly tending to you. He grabs a few tissues, wiping your stomach where the product of your activities lay, before redressing you, slipping the flats that had slipped off, back onto your feet, pulling your skirt back down to cover you as he slides your panties back into place, and retrieving your bra and sweater, lifting you into a sitting position as he redresses you, kissing your cheeks, nose, and forehead the entire time. 

“All good?” He whispers, gentler than you’ve ever heard him as you nod, grinning. 

“Good enough to make me forgive you for not getting me a present.” You reach into his drawer, grabbing your keys before sliding off of his desk. 

“Maybe this was your present.” He tilts his head, kissing you again, smiling all the while. 

“That was the perfect gift then.” Probably the best you’ve ever gotten.

“Are you gonna stay for the rest of the party?” He takes your hands in his, his thumbs absentmindedly rubbing circles into your skin. 

“I think I need to go to bed after that.” You laugh as you jingle your keys, turning towards the door as he catches your lips in another kiss. 

It makes your heart flutter. The continued affection makes you think this isn’t a one time thing. You want more. You want conversations about feelings, and to talk about what just happened, you want to feel him inside you again, and the look in his eyes tells you that you’re going to get all of that. But right now you’re tired, so the rest can wait. 

“Can I walk you to your car?” You nod as he murmurs.

He doesn’t let go of your hand, walking you out of the building towards your car, opening the door for you and giving you one last kiss with a promise that he’d call you tomorrow, before you watched him walk back into the building.

Your phone buzzes as you turn your key in the ignition, the sound of Wham! fills the car, Last Christmas playing softly. You take your phone out of your pocket, checking the text notification from Javier. 

[ i forgot to tell you how pretty your nails are. merry christmas hermosa ]

Your head turns up in surprise as you realize your radio is working. A new radio system is installed in the center of your dashboard, with a little green bow taped to the top, and a paper tag with Javi’s familiar messy handwriting. 

from : your secret fucking santa

a/n : happy holidays everyone!!

[smuthospital]

⭐️Yandere Gym Buddy⭐️

Premise: You made a new friend at the gym, and he is determined to make sure you get a good pump.

Warning: Non-con, fem reader

Minors DNI

Working out with you is almost too much. You're cute, smaller body is too much. The way you look up at him and thank him when he takes the weight off you when you push your body to failure. The way you whimper when you can't do one more rep. He first saw you looking at a machine for biceps and you seemed ok, but your form could be a bit better so he decided he'd help you by correcting it.

The next time he saw you, you were trying a bicep workout, but you were lifting too heavy and it was messing up your form. Proper form is essential to any excersize and without it, you could risk pulling a muscle. He couldnt just stand by and let you do that so he became your gym buddy whenever he spotted you.

You always look so nervous when he talks to you. You can't even maintain eye contact, but when you do, you look up at him and smile sheepishly. It warms his heart. You thanked him for helping you with your workout and walked on your mary way.

He smiled and continued on with his until he saw you patiently waiting for him to finish his set from the corner of his eye. You're blushing all cute and averting eyes again. He takes out his earbud and looks over at you. "I-I feel like I didn't properly thank you before so thank you again. I really appreciate your help," You say, becoming cherry red by the end.

He wants to just pick you up and take you home. You're like a cute little bunny. He's a respectful guy so he's only ever looked at your body in the places he needs to for your form, but he'd be lying if he said they never drifted to other places. From your sweet-looking neck to the curve of your back, all the way down to your cute butt.

The way your workout clothes fit your body so tight in all the right places. He wonders if you want the attention. When you wear crop tops...or when he's lucky and you wear your super short shorts. The ones that barely cover your...He shakes his head. He can't get hard in the gym again. "No problem. You're very polite, you know," He says. You knod your head in thanks.

You scamper off to go do cute girl things, probably. He hopes you don't have a boyfriend. Actually, theres no way you do. No man would let a girl like you out of their site. Especially in a testosterone filled gym. And talk to other guys? No way. If you had a boyfriend, your boyfriend would be fighting him right now.

If you had a boyfriend, your boyfriend would be laying on the ground, broken and defeated, bleeding from every orifice. He clenches his fists, his veins protruding. He'd lay the bastard the fuck out without a second of hesitation. No mercy and no reasoning. He finishes his workout with more vigour than usual.

The next time he spotted you at the gym, he saw some guy about to walk up to you. They're like fucking flies. This is the third one this week. He speeds up his pace and gets to you first before the fly could get its chance. The other guy turns tail immediately, confusing you because it looked like he'd wanted to talk to you.

"Hey, nice to see you again," he says, smiling that usual charming smile. 'The ladies probably go nuts for this guy,' you thought. "Nice to see you too!" Your voice is so sweet. It's like honey. He's memorized the texture of your sound. "Your arms look really good," you say, your face completely red. That came out of nowhere. He wonders how long you've been working up the courage to say that to him. He chuckles and flexes. "Thank you, I'm very proud of them."

He swears he could eat you up. Just the way you look at his body, whether it be in admiration or otherwise, it's all the same to him. "Do you want to get protein shakes after this? I can make them really tasty." You're going. Whether you like it or not.

"Oh..uhm, you don't have to! I don't know much bout protein anyway," you say nervously. Bingo. "Protein is incredibly important for helping you repair your muscles after you work hard at the gym!" He knows he's gonna convince you.

"O-oh, really? I didn't know that. If it's that important, ok then." You look off to the side, unsure about going to a mans house. He's feeling cuteness aggression. He wants to hug you and squeeze you so badly. His hands twitch, fighting the urdge to do so. He has to look away when you're doing a tough workout.

Watching sweat drip down your face is captivating. He imagines that face when he's alone in his apartment at night, his cock in hand. He just wants to lay you down on your back with him in between your legs...his thoughts wander too much. "Great, you'll love it!" He could'nt be more pleased with himself.

After you both finished, he waits for you outside the changing room. He was so giddy. He loves looking down at you..and seeing your cute little wonderous eyes looking up at him, like a confused little bunny. He takes your hand and leads you out to his car. You blush furiously at the contact. You get in the passenger seat and he drives you back to his place.

It's a really nice and expensive looking apartment building. Modern and well kept. It even has a gym inside. You wonder why he travels to yours. He takes you up to his apartment and you gasp. "It's so big!" He closes his eyes for a moment, imagining those words in a different context. "I'm excited to try the protein shake," you say, snapping him out of his fuzzy daze.

"Ah yes." He takes you over to his spottless kitchen and takes out a blender, some bananas, protein powder, peanut butter and milk. You lean over the counter to peer at what he's doing. Hes really good at making protein shakes. You wonder if he can cook aswell. You wouldn't be surprised. While you're lost in though, he has the perfect view of your cleavage. He bites his lip. Fuck. He feels his dick twitch to life.

He groans. He's been trying not to get hard this whole day. Good thing you're behind the counter. He pours the smoothies into two cups, his being larger because you dont need as much protein as he does. He manages to hide is boner well enough to make his way over to his living room with your cups.

He hands you yours after taking a seat, making sure to place a pillow in his lap. You take a sip. He loves the way your mouth opens and the way you lick your lips of the sweet drink. Fuck. He downs his and watches you. "Hey, so I wanted to ask if you maybe wanted to hang out..outside the gym again sometime?" he asks, looking hopeful.

"Oh..uh," you thought he wasn't interested in you! You were sure of it! He's too handsome for you! He's way out of your league. You've never been romanticaaly interested in him. You know your place. You just get really nervous and shy around pretty people. He's an extremely athletic man and you're a snail in comparrison! You're not even looking for a relationship right now! This is a nightmare! You just wanted to focus on yourself. That's why you started going to the gym.

Oh god, what do you do!? You stare at your drink for a while, the silence thickening by the second. "I...uh...." You want to go home and hide under your sheets. How will you ever face him again? It's over. No more gym buddy. He looks down at you, his smile and hopeful eyes fading. You... don't want him. You don't want him!? But...he's perfect for you...and you for him!

He doesn't understand why you could possibly ever not want to be with him. He wordlessly puts his cup down. You just need some convincing is all. You look up at him. He can see emotions swirling around in your eyes. He stands up to his full height, casting a shadow over you. "(Y/n),... change your mind." His tone is eerily calm.

"But...I wanna focus on.. myself-" He cuts you off. "No! I will focus on you. That's what you need. I will take care of you. I'm dedicated to you. It has to be claer by now that I want you." He takes the cup from your hands and sets it down before pulling you up by your arm and forcing you deeper into the apartment.

"Huh? What? N-no, where are we going? Stop! I wanna go home!" You cry, trying to struggle out of his grip, the grip of the arms four times the size of yours. You notice now just how big he is. Hes...massive. Taller than most men...broad shoulders, a large frame, and incredibly muscular. Your face pails. You... can't stop him. You were right to be nervous to come here!

He drags you into his room, making you sit on his bed. He doesn't open the lights, but from the moonlight shining in from the window, you can see the glinting of his hungry eyes looking down at you. His chest heaves. He feels fuzzy and lightheaded as he looks down at you...all his blood...has shot right down to his cock.

He can't think of anything but the way your thighs meet at that special crevice that he wants to explore. You're probably still sweaty from the workout... he's trembling at the thought of your soft body pressed against his toned self.

He pushes your upper body down a bit too hard and splits your legs apart, settling himself between them before leaning down. Your faces so close. You turn your face away, which just makes him get even closer to you, his nose touching your cheek, his breath fanning over you. With him in between your legs, you can feel the heat emanating from his crotch as it presses into yours. You whimper under him and he groans a bit. His cock has never been so engored before. Its unbarable.

"Please...take off your clothes...I don't want to hurt you on accident," he breathes, using all the remaining blood in his head to think straight, trying to control himself. You shake your head. "I-I can't!" Not a second after you speak, his hands grip your poor clothes and rip them to shreds like paper. He's wanted to do that to your workout clothes for a long time. They were always taunting him with the way they squeeze your ass or the way your pussy shows through the crotch area a bit when you're bent.

You suck in a breath to scream, hoping one of his neighbors would hear you, but he covers your mouth with his palm just in time, muffling your cry. "Shhh shhh... it's ok shh. I've got you," he coos, trying to calm you. Your chest heaves up and down as tears stream down your cheeks. Your face feels like its burning.

He replaces his hand with his lips and kisses you gently. You continue sobbing quietly into the kiss, not wanting any of this. He doesn't cover your mouth after he lifts his lips from yours. Hope for getting another opportunity dies within you as he stuffs your underwear into your mouth and ties it shut with the drawstring of his shorts tightly behind your head.

He kisses your cheek and stays right there for a moment, just breathing in your scent. You decide now is a good time to at least try fighting him with everything you've got. You headbutt him in the face, sending his head back a bit. He grunts in pain and looks back at you with a blaze in his eyes. A trickle of blood escapes his nose. He wipes it off with the back of his hand. He shuts his eyes for a second, trying to maintain his patience. He sighs. He's trying his hardest to be nice with you.

He places a finger on your chin, turning you to face him. When you refuse to face him and turn your head in defiance, he grips your cheeks roughly and forces you to face him. His eyes are stern. "Bunny, I don't want to hurt you." Is all he says. You dont take his threat lightly. He looks more than happy to actually hurt you. You don't believe for a second that he's being honest about not wanting to hurt you.

He lowers his shorts with his free hand, taking your silence as compliance. You see the bulge in his shorts reveal itself to be a monstrous size when free. It's..scary. It slams against your bare pussy lips. It's heavy, thick and demanding attention. It's veiny underside is burning you.

You swallow hard, trying to wiggle out from underneath it. You don't make it far trapped beneath him with nowhere to go. Your hands are free, but every time you try to do anything, he swats them away and.. after his previous threat, you don't want to know what will happen if you annoy him enough.

His hand comes down to your cunt and plays with your lower lips. He releases your face, knowing you'll behave. You writhe underneath him, pathetically kicking and pushing at his hand down there. His other hand grabs your wrist and and squeezes it and a painful grip, looking dead in your eyes as he continues to play with your cunt.

Another tear slips down your cheek. He softens his grip a bit before leaning down to kiss your tears away. Your tear-stained face, the way you whimper and your face scrunches in discomfort..is doing things to him. He's learned something new about himself just now. He wants to be inside you so bad, but he knows he'd tear you in two, even with all his precum.

Your gasp as he flicks your sensitive pearl. He can't help but chuckle. Without any warning, he slips his index finger inside your cunt and relishes in the warm wetness hugging it tightly. He just wants you wet enough to take him without too much pain. He just needs to be more patient, but... it's so hard with you making all those cute expressions.

"Pleath shtop..I..." The muffled words you were trying to produce disappear in a cloud of smoke as he curls his finger upwards into your spongy walls. Fuck. He loves when you beg him to stop. You moan so cutely. Your pussy twitches around him. He bites his lip. You're.. wet enough. It's fine, it'll fit. He can't wait anymore.

He lines his fat cock up with your cunt and slides it up and down your shimmering folds. "W-wai-" He cuts you off by sliding the head of his cock in. It's so fucking tight. He grunts and can't help but sink himself further in. He feels like he's going mad.

He bucks his hips forward, meeting resistance. Your cervix. He pushes forward still, eventually managing to bottom out, the shape of his cock making an appearance in your lower stomach. Your cunt needs to know his shape for next time. It's a good thing he stuffed your mouth because you've been screaming and crying like crazy. "I'm sorry, bunny. I didn't mean to hurt you. I got a bit ahead of myself. I'll be more gentle." He kisses your nose, his cock driving in and out slowly.

You're sopping wet now, the two of you can hear your insides gushing when he pushes in. You're so embarrassed. The pleasure is undeniable. You scratch his back as he pressed in again, his hips meeting yours snuggly. You can't hold it anymore! you let out a long whine as you cum, your walls squeezing him deliciously. He moans, driving his cock in and out, rapidly pounding your cunt into a fine paste. You come down from your high as he's still churning your insides and cry out again. You're too sensitive now!

You tap on his shoulder, but it garners no response. He lifts your legs and presses them back into your chest, getting even deeper. He's pounding into you like a wild animal. You feel the familiar knot in your lower stomach tighten. Your nails dig into his back, your eyes crossing as you come again. He grunts as you tighten around him once more.

He thrusts into you so deep that you can see the imprint of his cock in your lower stomach even more than before. Your cervix needs an ice pack. He grips your waist, emptying the largest load he's ever cum. You're so tired. He continues pumping himself into you lazily. He rests his body weight on you, squishing you and pressing his still-hard cock against your stuffed insides.

Cum leeks past his cock onto the damp bedsheets. He pants, looking down at you. "I love you (y/n)," he says with the most love struck expression you've ever seen. You look like an angel to him. All you can do is twitch and bask in the afterglow of what he did. His cock began to completely re-harden at the beautiful sight he created before him.

You're no longer gym buddies, that's for sure. Thanks to him, you might be parents. You should have just accepted his feelings when you had the chance. Now your guts are filled and you're trapped under him with your knees by your head. What a workout.

[ohnococo]

How To Fight | MMA Fighter!Toji x Physical Therapist!Reader

You love your job as a Physical Therapist, and would rather avoid any complications. Unfortunately MMA Fighter Toji Fushiguro has taken a liking to you. Despite your better judgement, you've taken a liking to him too.

✧ wc: 6.3k

✧ notes: A song fic taking place in the MMA AU. The song lyrics referenced are from How To Fight by Eartheater

✧ warnings: eventual angst, mma!au, no curse au, widowed Toji, divorced Toji, single dad Toji, fem bodied reader, pronouns used (she/her), pet names (sweetheart), flirting, unwanted advances, pussy referred to as 'she', physical therapist reader, recurring injury, injury recovery, vaginal sex, cumshot

i've tasted metals of my own blood, and learned to like it

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

It was against everything you stood for to be happy to see a client again, given your line of work, but Toji was different. Against your better judgement, he had somehow managed to work his way into your mind, burrowing past that steely wall of professionalism you kept up at all times with those in your care. You were determined to never let him know that, though.

“Well, Toji, I would prefer it if you didn’t keep getting yourself injured.”

He breezes right past that. “Just let me take you out, it’ll be a lot nicer than pushing me around and cracking my joints.”

It was a simplification bordering on misunderstanding your work, as if you were some chiropractor, but you know he’s only saying it to get you shoving him around with that tinge of annoyance he feeds right into your veins. You try not to give in, because you’re always trying not to give in to Toji, really. Then he’s resisting, just enough to make you really have to work to guide him in the stretch you want him to do, and he’s managed to get you right where he wants you yet again. You tug at his hips, guiding him into movements he should be familiar with by now.

“Just let me do my job.”

You had no intention of accepting his advances, whether they were in the form of invitations to dinner, sparkling bedroom eyes, or flirtatious comments that would have had you kicking anyone else right out of your office. Not Toji, though. With him, you just find yourself slowly allowing him to speak to you more and more familiarly.

The corner of his mouth lifts smugly just as he’s turning away, taking his gaze off of you directly to watch you in the mirror along the wall next to the mat you were standing on. He allows you to move him for a moment, only offering light resistance now, as if you could truly make him do anything he didn’t want to, then continues the twisting motion on his own. You watch his body carefully, avoiding eye contact because you already know those green eyes are fixed on your face, trying to coax you into giving him the smallest inch to turn into a mile.

“If you want your hands on me you don’t gotta use your job as an excuse.”

You ignore him outright, drowning out any potentially untoward thoughts with a strengthened focus on your work. As always, it works, and you note on your assessment forms that his hip mobility was normal. You knew it would be, that Toji knew how to throw his punches properly, but you’re always thorough with your checklist whether it was for the reasons Toji accused you of or not.

“Stand against the wall.”

He lets out a whistle, hands up as he does, “Gonna frisk me?”

“I’m gonna refer you to Yaga so you can get wrung out like a wet rag if you don’t do what I tell you.”

“Ooh, that doesn’t sound too bad, actually.”

“Toji.”

He chuckles as he settles into the position he already knows you want him in, doing lunges with the wall as a marker for how deep to press forward as you watch his ankle and knee movements.

“All good there.” You tap his back, nodding as you make your notes while he stands in wait.

“Okay, upper body.”

You know this is where he’ll need the work, as usual, and you’re quick to go through your checks with the right shoulder, moving onto his problem area. You already knew from his post-fight medical, but are happy to find, as you watch his movements as he lifts and rotates his arm, that it’s no more serious than the last time.

“Left shoulder…” you say aloud as you note it.

He looks annoyed, at himself rather than at you, “Always is.”

It makes you feel bad for him, in a way. He wasn’t really reckless in the ring. He knew his body too well and was too calculated with how he approached his fights. Unfortunately, it was simply a recurring injury, as shoulder issues often were. Something that was always going to pop back up sooner or later, but with the way Toji took so many fights even as he neared his forties it seemed to be “sooner” more and more often.

As you rotate his arm, feeling where he tenses and softening your movements, you share a little of your optimism with him - couched in realism, of course.

“Don’t look so sad. It’s similar to the last one, so it shouldn’t be too long before we have you out there in the ring living your best life.”

He laughs at that, sounding a little dryer than his usual flirty chuckle, “I’m not living my best life in there.”

You glance up at him while you continue your assessment, brows raising in muted interest before he continues.

“Put it this way, I like it because I like the money. I don’t love fighting.” He thinks on it a little more before adding, “I do love finishing fights, though.”

To you, there was little difference between those two things, but then you weren’t the one doing the fighting so you accept his feelings on the matter. “That’s fair. I think it’s kind of rare to really love your job.”

As you firmly grasp his bicep, lifting his arm outwards, he flexes for just a moment, grin returning to its usual wolfish state, “Bet you love your job though. Groping men all day.”

You release his arm, letting it fall for only a moment, but catching it as soon as he winces, “I’d love it a lot more if you let me do it without those kinds of comments.”

“Ehh,” he tilts his head, brows raising in disbelief at your continued assertions that you didn’t get any sort of satisfaction out of this (and you didn’t… until him). “I think you get something out of them.”

You ignore him again, returning to your desk to note your recommendations. “Four to six weeks of sessions, as usual.” You look up at him then, indirectly threatening him to behave, “Four will probably do though.”

It shouldn’t have been a threat, getting him back up to snuff as efficiently as possible, but it had become one by now with Toji. It was a joke, of course. Toji would feign being hurt by the thought of it, but was always happy to be able to accept his next fight as soon as possible.

But sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke. Sometimes you did want a little more time basking in his flirtations. Toji Fushiguro had unfortunately grown on you and it often left you feeling ashamed. His reputation precedes him. He’d even been married when he first came into your office, and here you were worrying about missing those butterflies in your stomach at his little reminders that he is completely fixated on you.

When you find yourself smiling a little too widely at him, or even thinking about him outside of your sessions, you have to remind yourself that there was nothing actually there. It was just what he was like with anyone that caught his eye, even if it was only ever you he was assigned to once you’d started working there.

The why of it all wasn’t a mystery in the beginning. He was a relentless flirt that, based on how cagey some of your coworkers were about hearing he would be in your care, had apparently enjoyed his time with many of them before you. You didn’t mess around about your job, though. You loved your work, and you loved the convenience of this position, so you’d decided that you absolutely would not be added to his list of conquests.

At first keeping that professional level of disinterest was easy. It had seemed so obvious that he’d move on and request another PT work with him after the first of his recurring injuries led to several sessions worth of you rejecting his advances. That wasn’t the case, though. Maybe that was exactly why he kept coming to you and only you. The challenge.

And it was a challenge, for the both of you. You were intent on giving him nothing, and he was intent at making that as hard as possible for you without even really trying. By the third time he’s booked in for several sessions with you for post-fight recovery, you find yourself actually letting your guard down around him, if only a little. You might have even missed him.

i've gone under the knife of love, dissected every vein and vessel

Another week, another therapy session, another attempt to keep your composure, even with how relentless Toji is.

“How long are you gonna keep making me ask before you let me take you to dinner?”

You shoot him a look. The answer should be never, followed by asserting quite bluntly that you don’t sleep with clients, since he wasn’t exactly being subtle. That’s what the answer used to be, at least. It’s not quite that direct now, though. “How long are you going to keep getting yourself injured and winding up here?”

He puts his hand to his heart, feigning pain, “Listen, if I didn’t have a bum shoulder I wouldn’t get to come and be your favourite client.”

“I wouldn’t say favourite.”

He lifts his head from your massage table, flashing you a winning smile and the closest to puppy dog eyes a man like Toji could muster. “Cutest?”

“I wouldn’t say that either.”

He closes his eyes, relaxing onto your table as you move and massage his shoulder firmly, “Whatever you say, sweetheart…”

Toji really did enjoy testing you. Especially with his favourite little pet name for you. Sweetheart. ’Even though you’re not too sweet to me’ he’d said with a little pout, entirely undercut by his hungry eyes. You used to shoot him looks that could have killed a man on the spot in some other universe. Now you don’t look at him at all when he says it, it feels too risky. It feels like something in your eyes will give you away.

You throw out another of the many threats Toji knows are baseless by now, said as many times and with as little conviction as most of your defences against him. “You’re lucky I don’t kick you out.”

He peeks at you through barely opened eyes, as you stretch his arm outward, “That's what I’m saying, you’ve got a soft spot for me.”

That’s your final signal to put your proverbial work hat on a little more snugly as you push down, and he taps his fingers against you, indicating his limit for this particular stretch. He understands you’re truly done with the conversation as you pat his side and step back.

“Alright, time for strengthening exercises.”

This was the part he always got bored with. You weren’t touching him now, not after the first time to demonstrate what you wanted from him. You weren’t naive enough to believe him when he kept feigning a need for more hands-on guidance as he goes through the recommended motions. A man doesn’t get to the point of looking like Toji without knowing how to lift weights - especially not the small ones you had him on just to slowly get his strength back in his shoulder.

Even then, lying on the floor, raising a little 5 pound weight with his healing arm while you stand above him watching closely, he’s still ready to run his mouth.

“I like this.”

“It feels alright?”

“The weight is fine, but I like having you standing over me like that.”

You give him nothing, pursing your lips as you put the tip of your shoes between his arm and the ground, “Keep your arm up, don’t bring it down too far.”

Ignoring his comments is the best you can do sometimes. Even if it gets harder with every session as you start to actually look forward to it deep down. Even if it becomes your only defence until you’re spending a good chunk of these sessions in a near haze, trying to force as much emotional distance as possible once his flirting starts up.

His comments were uncalled for, and so was the way it made you feel. You were far from the type to be desperate for the attention of a man like him, and the way your body responded to him only pissed you off the more it excited you. All you can do, or all you’re willing to do, is shut it down, and remember that you have a job to do.

—

After three more sessions of this you’ve convinced yourself that you’re more than ready to discharge him and hopefully enjoy a peaceful several months without the risk of seeing his face again. The fact that it never used to take convincing to enjoy having the walking talking complication out of your life is something you aren’t willing to address.

“You’re gonna miss me, aren’t you?”

“Don’t start, Toji.”

You know you can’t really tell him what to do, unfortunately.

“You don’t have to if you-“

“That’s right, I don’t have to miss you, and I won’t. Hopefully you don’t go getting yourself injured again so you can come and bother me more.”

Your tone has him sucking in air through his teeth and grimacing a little.

“I don’t exactly like getting injured.” He looks away as he speaks and it’s strange not having his eyes on you like you were some sort of prey to be carefully observed. “I couldn’t even help my son move into his dorm. Cage fighter dad that can’t even lift a fucking box. It pisses me off.”

He shrugs, eyes back on you, lit up anew, “But at least I get to see your pretty face, huh?”

As much as you don’t enjoy Toji’s comments, you like these little glimpses of something else even less. Because he does talk to you. About his day, about little things that pop in his head when he’s bored of flirting for seconds at a time. And it makes it much harder not to get a little too attached when he isn’t just being a simple womaniser.

It sometimes makes you feel like Toji thinks you’re some sort of therapist - when he’s not relentlessly trying to get you into his bed. And you know that’s what all of his flirting is, of course.

Because his reputation precedes him. Yes, he’ll take someone out. Yes, they’ll have a good time. Yes, they’ll fuck. Except in your case you aren’t a part time receptionist or ring girl that might be able to avoid awkward situations with him during the nothing that comes after all of that. And you aren’t willing to mess up the good thing you have with your job, even though some of your coworkers seemed to be.

What wasn't mentioned to you as part of his reputation, was the little breadcrumbs of who he was beneath the charm and muscle. It’s known he was a prodigy in his sport. It’s known he retired young to be a family man. And it’s known he came back, 5 years later, newly widowed.

He doesn’t talk about his first wife much, because why would he? Any brief mentions of her are with an undying warmth and love that undercuts his reputation as a heartbreaker. She’s special. The mother of his child, his first love. The former is stated, the latter is obvious. Nothing short of that would melt that hardened mask of indifference.

His second wife, he doesn’t speak about at all. You only know of her because he mentions a step-daughter, and because when he’d flirted with you from the very first time he’d entered your care your eyes had locked onto the ring on his finger with contempt for how little it apparently meant. By the time you see him next, nearly half a year and another injury later, he isn’t wearing the ring anymore.

Something in you feels flattered when you ask Toji about how his son was finding college in front of a coworker who had been here much longer than you, and they’re shocked as they say they didn’t know he had kids. Then, you’re left even more annoyed at him for giving you more complications to maintaining a necessary level of professional distance in your job.

Small talk shouldn’t feel so heavy.

Helping people recover shouldn’t make you have to deal with these thoughts.

i know how to fight, how to fuck, how to die, how to resurrect my pride

When you give in, it’s in the worst way. He doesn’t even take you to dinner, you don’t give him a chance to. It’s his fourth time in your care, this time for an ankle injury. Something basic, something much more simple to deal with than his recurring problem. Something that will get him out of your hair in no time.

He isn’t simple to deal with though, telling you about the dogs his son adopted, how he never really got how people got so attached to animals growing up, but now he gets it. He’s got you comfortable, not even thinking about how your guard is down, nor about how you even smile at him as he shows you a picture of his son, buried under two masses of fluff and begrudgingly smiling at the camera.

“God, Toji, you really just have a little twin there, don’t you?”

He laughs, looking at the picture of his son, before setting his phone aside on the mat. “Nah, there’s a lot of his mom in there.”

You smile, patting his shoulder in a rare touch outside of professional reasons, “That’s nice.”

He lies back on the mat, out of your reach, “You’re nice, for once.”

You get back to work, wrapping your hands around his ankle and bending his foot slowly. “I’m nice to people who aren’t constantly trying to get into my pants.”

“Hey, who said I was trying to do that? I’m just trying to take you out.” He sits up and leans onto his elbows, “but if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in…”

“I’m interested in doing my job. I don’t mind talking to you when you relax with the inappropriate comments.”

“I’ve gotta prove myself to you before you’ll let me take you out, got it.”

“Is that what I said, Toji?”

Toji shrugs, fully relaxing back onto his elbows, and you pull on his foot gently. “That’s what I heard.”

You shoot him a look that you hope can put fear into the heart of even him. Instead, it only seems to inspire other emotions as he forms his scarred lips into a pout that misses the mark of garnering pity for his plight as a man rejected yet again, though you’re certain Toji knows exactly what he’s doing when he makes faces like that. Even with his lips puckered and sticking out slightly, even with his brows fashioned into a worried frown, his eyes telegraph exactly what he’s thinking about.

It crumbles your resolve, leaving you looking away first as you let out a sigh you hope comes across as frustration instead of weakness. You readjust your position squatting down next to him on the mat, trying to get a feel for the flexibility of his ankle before you start guiding him through putting some of his weight onto it as he straightens the other leg and lifts his hips off the mat before settling back down.

He’s quiet then, for much longer than you were used to, and you take the silence as an opportunity to work in peace as you rotate his foot again. When you look back up at him it has your heart beating a little faster than it should be. His teeth press lightly at his lower lip, his eyelids are only half open, and his brow quirks as if just your look had the same effect as having said something dirty.

“What is it now?”

You expect him to make some comment about your hands on his body, how they were lingering even now. He makes you wait for it though, tilting his head from one side to the other as he looks you up and down, smiling like he has a secret he’s debating keeping.

Another sigh falls from your lips, filled with actual frustration this time, and when he sits up it feels like he’s towering over you in a way you simply could not overcome, despite being able to easily stand and remove yourself from the pull of his gaze. The way he peers at you, even more intense than usual, has the back of your neck tingling and you’re forced to swallow hard even with the fear that something as simple as that would give you away.

His gaze softens, dipping back into something cooler, as if he’s backing away from an animal signalling that an approach would not be treated kindly. He takes a deep breath, and you don’t even notice you’re following suit until you both exhale at the same time.

It’s as if he’s settling whatever that moment was with just a look, deciding not to make the final jump to cross that imaginary line, and it puts you at ease enough that his words are like a punch to the gut.

“You’re pretending you don’t like it, but your neck is doing that thing.”

“What? What are you talking about?” You’re blowing it, far too defensive even though you truly aren’t actually sure what he means.

“Here.” He brings a hand to your neck, tracing a finger down the length of it, stopping just above your collarbones. “You always tense riiiiight there.”

He pulls his hand back, settling it on his thigh, and you let out the breath you’d been holding from the moment his hands were coming towards you. It makes you realise you’d been so focused on controlling everything you did or said that you’d been clenching yourself like a fist every time his words, or actions, left you melting inside. It also makes you realise that was the first time he’d put his hands on you in a way entirely unrelated to your work since he shook your hand the day you’d met.

You’re horrified at having been found out. You’re even more horrified as you realise you hadn’t really been hiding anything anyway. It’s left you with no clue how to respond, and you suddenly feel so aware of your every movement, unable to decipher how to behave when your little act had been so, so obvious to him from the start.

“Look, if you really want me to stop, I’ll st-“ he pauses, looking up as he thinks, scrunching his nose and tilting his head as if he’s weighing options. “Well, I’ll try to stop. I can’t make any promises…”

He’s pausing again, thinking again, looking you up and down as he licks his lips, before he crosses his legs, pulling his ankle out of your grasp and resting his elbows on his thighs as he leans forward. It forces you to react, as if on instinct, and lean back off of your feet to seat yourself with knees raised and acting as a final barrier between the two of you. He lets you keep that distance you’d gained, but brings a hand to hover over your knee so closely that you’re not sure if he’s touched you yet or if it’s just the heat radiating off of him setting your nerves on fire.

You can’t even bring your eyes away from his to check, and realise that you wouldn’t exactly want to move further away whether his touch was real or imagined. His gaze has you locked in place just as much as your own head as you find yourself thoroughly buried in your own pit of uncertainty as everything moves too fast for your mind to catch up.

“You don’t want me to stop though, do you sweetheart?”

His eyes, the heat of him, his low words digging through that pit in your stomach to reach for your core, it all has you feeling too lightheaded to be able to think at all. You can barely even feel yourself shaking your head, body much more honest than you had been willing to be all this time.

“Thought so.”

He leans in, brushing his nose back and forth against yours, smiling with the cute gesture, then that grin spreads wider as you tilt your head, your eyes fluttering closed as you wait for him to just kiss you. He doesn’t, waiting long enough that you’re forced to open your eyes and confront the sight of that hungry face yet again, and this time his gaze has you outright clenching.

“Big girls don’t get what they want by acting all shy, do they?”

It’s too much, you feel humiliated, you feel sick, you feel like you’ll pass out if he keeps working you up without even putting his hands on you properly.

“Kiss me. If you wanna.”

You don’t know who you are, needing to be told what to do like this. You question who you are again, as you follow orders in a way you never would have before you’d been called out like this and press your lips to his, letting out a breath that’s shaky enough to have you revealing just how desperate you were. When you start to wonder who you are for the third time, for kissing a client, at work no less, you drown out that thought by parting your lips against his.

He responds with softly parted lips of his own, wrapping his arms around your waist, pulling you into him as he slots his mouth against yours. You wait for his tongue, flitting the tip of yours against his lower lip, and when it does not come you’re clinging to his shirt, bunching it at his shoulders. You’re forced to hold onto those broad shoulders properly when he lies back and his hands on your waist bring you with him to settle you on top of him - wordlessly reiterating that you would need to pull yourself together and set the pace here.

It’s your final push, as you straddle him with hands braced against his chest and slide your tongue into his mouth. Feeling the body you’d had your hands on far too many times, this time beneath you and with your ability to lie to yourself about the effect it has on you stripped away, has you salivating. You set all shame aside for this moment as you grind down against him, indulging in the feel of his stiffening cock beneath layers of thin fabric.

That tense feeling threatens to return, prickling at the back of your neck as he laughs into your mouth, sliding his tongue against yours and guiding your movements against him with strong hands on your hips. It’s gone again as he lifts his hips gently, using your weight against you as you only press harder onto him. You squeeze at his pecs, groaning into his mouth as you finally goad him into kissing you back with the same intensity you were now pouring into him, and it’s as delightfully invasive as you’d tried your hardest not to imagine it would be time and time again. It sends a tremble through your thighs, the wetness pooling in your panties all too obvious to you as all of your hidden desperation pulses through you straight from your pussy.

You forget yourself while kissing him like this, unaware of how long you’ve been on top of him, unaware of how you were moaning outright with just the friction between you, unaware of anything but feeling and tasting and touching as much of Toji as you could.

He’s aware though, aware of everything just as he always has been. How your thighs squeeze at his hips, the way your moans start sounding more like breathy little whines, how your tongue stops moving for seconds at a time against his. And it’s all he needs to keep this momentum going so quickly that everything but the two of you is an unintelligible blur.

“You gonna cum just like this?”

You don’t really want to answer it, and the look you give him as you try to keep him kissing you rather than talking has him chuckling, light and breathy against your skin.

“Sweetheart… if you’d just let me take you out from the beginning you wouldn’t be so pent up and begging for it…”

It takes more concentration than you have available to you right now to steady your voice. “I’m not begging.”

He takes in your face, biting at his lower lip as he slides two fingers into your mouth. He wiggles them around, sliding over your tongue, practically fucking your mouth with those thick fingers, knuckles catching at your tightened lips. “You aren’t…”

His fingers leave your mouth just as you were starting to actually enjoy the intrusion, and he slips his hands into your leggings, past your panties, stopping you from pressing down against his clothed cock like you had been as he circles your entrance slowly, “but she is.”

Then, his hand is gone, resecured on your hips, steadying your movements. “But you’re the boss here, not her. So if you don’t want it…”

“Come on, Toji.” You’re chastising him, even if you’re in no position to do so with your thighs tensing and your hips begging to keep moving against him.

He clicks his tongue against his teeth, “Like I said, you’re the boss. So I don’t move without orders.”

And he doesn’t. He doesn’t keep kissing you, even when you press your lips against his again, sighing out your frustration against his soft smile. He doesn’t release your hips to let you keep stoking your fire on his body. He doesn’t do anything but look up at you with a hungry glint in his eye, enjoying every moment it takes you to push your pride aside to ask him for exactly what you’ve wanted longer than you can admit to yourself.

“I want to cum.”

“Just you? Not a very good boss, huh…”

You groan, frustration with him reaching a fever pitch, “I want you to fuck me.”

He closes his eyes, smiling wide and letting your words wash over him. It’s music to his ears, and when he looks back up at you his pupils are blown and you know he’s done holding back. “All you had to do was ask, sweetheart.”

His arm is around your waist then, keeping you steady as rolls you over, settling himself between your thighs and you’re now looking up at him. You feel the tensing of his body, and come back to yourself enough to give him a concerned look.

He catches it, pressing a hand to your cheek and rubbing his thumb over your lips in an attempt to soothe those worries.

“Shh, don’t worry, I’ll be careful.” He shifts so he’s not putting weight onto his ankle, pulling at your shoes until they’re sliding off and hitting the ground. You lift your hips as you work your own leggings and underwear down, straightening your legs for him to remove them for you before he’s spreading you wide with hands on your inner thighs. He slides a hand towards your pussy, rubbing his thumb through your wetness and sucking air through his teeth at the way it slips around with ease.

“You really were gonna cum like that, weren’t you?”

You run your hands over your face, unwilling to endure any more teasing, “Just fuck me, Toji.”

He whistles, releasing your thighs and tugging the waistband of his shorts down just enough to release his cock, and you look up to his face, refusing to give him a reaction until he’s sliding inside you just as you’ve asked. He braces himself on one of his elbows, leaning over you and letting his cock hang heavily against your stomach. His hair tickles at your face as he kisses you again before requesting a final affirmation before following the orders you’d given.

“Want me to go slow?”

He really does wear your patience thin, enough that you answer without thinking, “No.”

“Okay…” he sounds doubtful, but continues on as he grips himself at the base and rubs the head of his cock through your wetness.

You squeeze at his sides, prompting him to look at you instead of at his own cock below. “Do not cum inside me.”

It’s stern enough to make Toji laugh, your voice sounding much more like your usual self for just a moment. “Don’t worry, I don’t want any more responsibilities.”

You don’t know if you trust Toji, but right now you don’t exactly trust yourself either. Especially not when having this man you’d spent ages closing yourself off to split you open on his cock in one merciless push has you wincing and taking it like it was exactly what you deserved for being so weak to him.

Toji pauses, balls deep, eyes clouded as he looks down at you. “I asked if you wanted me to go slow.”

It’s said with a hint of pity and a look that says ’you did this to yourself’, though he does stay still, kissing you again and removing your need to try and collect your thoughts enough to reassert that you knew your body, not him.

He doesn’t hold back for long though, and once you’re sighing into his mouth again, your tongue’s movements sloppy and unfocused, he starts moving his hips slowly. He starts with shallow thrusts, hips barely leaving yours. Then, as your body relaxes and your pussy accommodates him with a telltale squelch, he pulls out further, fucking you harder. Once your thighs are gripping at his hips he sits up, gathering more momentum in his thrusts at the slight change of angle.

He presses his hand to your abdomen, thumb making out a steady pace on your clit as his hips make angled thrusts that have his cock working at you with purpose. The moan it draws from you is punctuated with your eyes rolling, trying desperately to refocus on the face of the man above you. He bites at his lip, nodding and groaning at the feel of you tightening as he finds the movements that have your hands trying to grip at something below, but only meeting the dull squeak of your fingertips sliding against the mat. He leans back, reaching up to grab at the back of the collar of his shirt and tug it over his head, tossing it aside. He grasps both of your wrists firmly, pulling your hands up to rest against his stomach as he looks down at you with a challenge in his eyes.

“C’mon, touch me.” He smiles, wide and wicked, “Like you’ve always wanted to.”

You do just that, running your hands over his abs, grazing your thumb over his belly button, tracing your fingers along the prominent vein on his abdomen that leads down below to where the two of you are connected. Then, your hands travel back upwards, gripping at his pecs. His hand returns to press at you, thumb back to playing with your swollen clit, and having that touch back so suddenly has you squeezing Toji’s pecs hard, drawing a moan from him.

“There you go.” It adds even more enthusiasm to his thrusts, speed picking up as he leans over you, propping himself up on one hand as he digs deep to have you squeezing him again.

This time your touch is intentional as you squeeze at the flesh, a slight give present before you reach hardened muscle, and when you graze your nails over his nipples he’s shivering above you, bucking into you harder. The way he rubs at your clit is almost mechanical in its precise speed and pacing, a steady climb punctuated by those thrusts that stroke your insides in a way that makes your body tingle and your toes curl.

“That easy, huh?”

The audacity helps you lock eyes on him, if only for a moment, and while his smug smile builds a small fury at the back of your mind, your receive vindication in the flutter of his lashes and slight twitch of his upper lip as he tries to ignore the call of his tightening balls. It gives you what you need to dig deep, rocking your hips up into his thrusts, unearthing the orgasm just below the surface for the both of you.

You find yours first, putting your trust in Toji as you let go and bounce into him as it rips through you white hot and powerful enough to have you curling in on yourself, head buried against Toji’s chest and legs clamping him until his hips are pressed to yours. He pushes past even the strength of your legs and pulsing pussy, thrusting until you release him, lying back, and your head has barely hit the mat below before he’s pulling out.

“Fuck…” it’s hissed out as he sits up and jerks at his cock roughly, head falling back while his hips buck up and into his fist. His cum spatters down, first landing on your shirt until you tug it up, hopeless as the task was with your clothes already ruined, and take the rest of it onto your bare stomach.

He’s left panting, you’re left panting. He looks like he’s won at something, you feel like you’ve lost.

[astroboots]

Every You Every Me Issue #3

Pairing: Miguel O'Hara x female reader

Summary: You are determined to meet your Spider-benefactor face to face and you go to ever increasing extreme lengths to do so. Problem is, Miguel O'hara is very uncooperative to your plans.

Word count: 5,500 words.

Content: Slowest of the burn, so slow you wonder if it's even burning. Near death experiences, the state of the economy and how expensive it is to live in a big city, the emotional whiplash of Miguel O'Hara.

Astroboot’s Masterlist | Series Masterlist | Spiderverse Masterlist

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You saw them in the window display of a bakery in Greenwich Village. Round sugar cookies with red frosting and white eyes, decorated as a tribute to everyone's favorite neighborhood Spiderman.

Before you had time to properly think things over (would he even like the cookies? Is he on a strict superhero diet and workout plan? What if he's gluten intolerant?) you were already standing in front of the cash register having a dozen of them wrapped up in fancy crinkly paper and were $72 dollars poorer. 

Charging six dollars per cookie is practically highway robbery, but that's par for the course with New York bakeries. You wouldn’t be surprised if every bakery in New York was already a part of Wilson Fisk’s criminal empire. 

As you push open the door, box in hand, you wonder wryly to yourself why Spiderman’s ruder alter ego isn't there to save you from that.

You wonder, for Superheroes, what classifies as an event worth intervening in and what everyday citizens need to be saved from?

Financial ailment doesn't quite seem to qualify from what you've been able to glean so far.

Tony Stark, for all the wealth he’s amassed (a large enough treasure hoard that he would be capable of buying the whole planet of Mars according to Forbes) isn't massively involved with charities. He only donates to the one: his own. And the Stark Foundation is really just Tony Stark paying reparations for the damage he and his buddies caused in the first place.

Thor is an actual deity, and you still remember that write-up in Esquire magazine, where local waiters in New Mexico had called him a terrible tipper and a habitual smasher of glassware.

Assault and battery is up in the air. There are accounts of Superheroes intervening; that Tiktok videos of She-Hulk breaking up a bar fight that went viral a few weeks back. But then equally, there are memes of Doctor Strange peeking out the window of Sanctum Sanctorum watching a street fight unfold,, utterly uninterested in getting involved. The internet labeled it as "mood". 

As for murder and mayhem, there's a longstanding public debate as to whether Superheroes cause more than they prevent. Case in point: that Moon Knight guy that paints the streets of London red.

There is no rule book written to explain how Superheroes decides who is worth saving and who is not.

Does one have to be important and have a material effect on the state of the world?

If so, you fall pitifully short. The most world-changing decision you made as of late was deciding to opt out of utensils on your last GrubHub order to help save the environment.

So it makes you wonder: Why on earth has this non-costume accurate Spiderman saved you, not once, not twice, but 13 times to date?

That’s just the first of many questions you’d like to ask him. What does he know that you don’t? Does he know why the universe seems to be out to get you lately? Or why death itself is following you everywhere you go, nipping at your heels?

You haven’t had the chance to ask him anything, because despite all of your encounters, you haven't met him face to face since that very first time. 

Inconveniently, you don't exactly have a way of contacting him. Superheroes aren't listed in the phone book. 

With no other way to reach out, you go at it the old fashioned way. You write him a note from a page you've ripped out of your notebook:

‘Thank you for saving me. Can we meet? I have questions.’

You place the note on the window sill. Setting the plate with $72 dollars worth of Spiderman cookies on top of the left corner of the paper to make sure it doesn't get blown away in the wind. Then you leave the window open for the first time since you've moved into this apartment before heading to bed.

There's nothing else to do but to wait. 

You wake to the spit and splatter of rain against your window. It's gray outside, and the cookies you set out the night before remain untouched. You frown at the sight, but you can't say you're surprised.

There was never any real indication that he was lurking around you. Superheroes are bound to have more interesting things on their schedule than stalking a random insurance employee.

You don't know why you thought this would work in the first place.

Getting out of bed, you walk up to your window to inspect the scene. The note is where you have left it, ink a little smeared from the rain, where the plate has kept it in place on the right corner.

That seems odd, now that you think about it. You stare at the note, eye drawn to the watermarks. Why are there water stains bleeding into the paper if your window was closed? As crappy as your rundown apartment can be, water damage is the one thing you haven't had issues with.

You draw your eyes to the closed window being smattered with the rain outside. Didn't you leave the window open last night? You're pretty sure you did, hoping that the open window would be seen as a gesture of invitation. You had left it open… right?

You did.

You're sure you did.

He must’ve been here.

Rude, not-costume-accurate Spiderman was here.

Right?

Your eyes flicker back to the window.

Or maybe you did close the window?

You close your eyes trying to recall your evening, packing the length of your apartment as you replay the memory. Suddenly, you're not so sure anymore. You always close your window, and even though you had every intention of keeping it open last night, who is to say you didn't close it out of sheer habit?

It's strange. Because if he was here, he would've spotted the note. But it's in the same spot you left it yesterday right under the plate on the left side of it...

You eye the undisturbed note tucked under the right corner of the plate.

Wait, wait. Didn't you put the note under the left side of the plate?

You did.

Yes, you definitely did.

Which means, he was here... Right?

You feel like you are going insane.

Are you seeing things that are not there? Was he actually here and if so why did he go to such lengths to pretend otherwise. Why would he passive-aggressively gaslight you into thinking he was never here?

You decide on a redo.

Because if you can't trust yourself and your questionable memory, you can trust a recording.

A teddy bear nanny cam sets you back $50. Not cheap, but not as outrageous as your stale-cardboard-tasting Spiderman cookies. 

You set it up on your dresser opposite your window and link it to your phone as per the instructions.

As for the bait. After having tasted those brick cookies for yourself, putting it out for a second night for a man who has saved your life repeatedly didn't seem right. You decide to bake them yourself this time.

The added bonus is that you get to mix blue food coloring into the frosting for the decoration that goes on top. In retrospect, the red Spiderman cookies from last time might’ve implied that you’re calling him a knock-off Spiderman. 

Besides, even with the cost of living crisis: a bag of flour, baking powder, unsalted butter, sugar and eggs cost a lot less than $72 dollars.

This time, you don't write him a sloppily put together note. You decide to write him a proper letter. 

If he did visit your apartment, (and you're not just going insane) the fact that he moved the note meant that he must've read it. 

This note didn’t work. 

It must not have been compelling enough, you were kind of in a hurry… 

You’ll have to write something better this time. Longer. More emotionally compelling. Surely if you take the time to really explain your plight, you can make him understand why it’s so important he talks to you! 

The problem is that it’s hard to sound serious when it’s written on lined paper from your ruled notebook. 

That won’t do. You go to the nearest stationery store in your neighborhood, a chain outlet of Paper Source to get yourself some decent looking stationary paper with a matching colored envelope to boot. 

You immediately regret this part of your plan, because it ends up setting you back another $26 dollars. Why is 6 pieces of paper so damn expensive anyhow? Surely there’s a few trees left in the world to chop down?!

$102 dollars down in your bank balance, you sit down at your dining table that night, pen in hand and begin writing. You pour your heart onto the pages, setting out in as precise words as you can manage the effect your near death incidents have had on you. 

How scared you are, how confused you are, but also how grateful you are that he's saved you, again and again and again. That you believe if you and him can just meet in person and talk, if you could ask questions and figure out why this is happening, then maybe you can find a way to stop it from happening again.

Then you fold the letter and tuck it neatly into the matching envelope and slide it under the left side of the cookie plate and go to sleep.

When you wake the next morning, nothing seems out of the ordinary.

The cookies are still neatly arranged on your plate. The letter snugly tucked underneath it.

On the left side this time, you note. 

It doesn’t look like he came. 

The only thing is that you swear that the envelope is now several inches further to the left than where you left it last night.

Again, maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

You pull up your phone, opening the app linked to the nanny cam and press play.

There is nothing but the still frame of your studio apartment, your bed to the right and your window square in the camera-view. You speed up the video, but the only thing that takes you by surprise is that you apparently toss a lot more in your sleep than you thought.

The camera footage goes well into 3am, and you’re resigning yourself to the fact that this was all down to your imagination.

He didn't come last night. Probably didn't come the night before. Most likely you woke up from the rain, closed the window and were too sleepy to remember.

You sigh, setting down your phone on the table, prepared to let this whole endeavor go.

On your screen, a smudged shadow appears in the corner of the window. You jump to your feet from your seat, knocking your chair over in the process with a raucous thud. The dark figure grows larger on your screen, dark navy blue and lines of stark red that perches itself onto your window sill.

YES! yes-yes-yes! You knew it. You fucking goddamn knew it!

You were right.

Adrenaline buzzes victoriously in your veins, and you grip your phone harder. Your heart is pounding so fast and hard in your chest you can hear the drumming beat of it in your ears.

He was here!

(You're not cuckoo for cocoa puffs).

You watch as his large figure sits on your window sill. He's still wearing his mask, and while you can't make out the expressions underneath, the outline where his eyes would have been, painted in dark blue, now narrow into a slit on your screen. 

There's a hostility emanating from that glare that you are able to sense all the way from the opposite side of the screen. He stares down at the plate of cookies suspiciously. Then he just stays there, unmoving, having a staring competition with the cookies you baked in his image.

In the privacy of your living room, you have the luxury of taking the time to get a proper look at him without interruption. It's hard to ignore the fact of just how tightly fitted to his skin that suit is. The dark blue fabric clings to every line of muscles on his body and it makes your cheek prickle with heat when you look. It feels voyeuristic somehow, but you can't help but think that the more modest alternative would be if he had worn nothing at all.

He's absurdly ripped. Muscular doesn't even begin to describe it. Broad shoulders and a narrow tapered waist segueing into obscenely thick and defined thighs that have your eyes linger for far too long. You shake your head to snap yourself out of it, Jesus you are acting like a creep. This isn’t OnlyFans, though lord knows you paid for this privilege! $102 for a cam video! 

On the footage, there is finally movement. He reaches for a cookie, bringing it to his mouth. The blue fabric dematerializes on his lower face until it reveals his tanned skin and that ridiculously cut jaw of his.

His mouth parts. Fangs protrude where his canine teeth are supposed to be and the sight makes you nearly drop your phone in shock.

Is this Spiderman a vampire? Or is he like a tarantula Spiderman with fangs to match?

You watch in suspended horror as he bites into the cookie, those sharp fangs of his are in plain view as he chews. 

He leans over to reach for a second cookie and all your trepidation is forgotten for a second, because if he’s reaching for a second one, it must mean he likes them. You grin at your screen, culinary pride beating out any caution or fear you may have had. 

Then he lifts up the plate, picking up the letter. The anticipation is too much. You press your face closer to the screen to try to get closer, because your screen is too small to pick up any possible nuances in his expression. 

He's carefully opening the envelope as he starts to read. It's impossible to tell what he's thinking. There's no visible change of facial expressions in the outline of his masked eyes. His mouth, which is bared to you, doesn't so much as twitch.

It doesn’t take long for him to read it. When he's done, he tucks the letter back under the plate. Then he bends down over the plate of cookies, and for a moment you think he’s going in for a third. Instead his hand lingers on the plate, before he starts to slide the remaining cookies around the plate to your confusion. You watch in confusion as he picks up the cookies one by one to space them out more evenly. You don't quite understand what he's trying to do, wait… is Vampire spider man re-arranging the cookies to make it less obvious he’s eaten them?!  

The bastard really was trying to gaslight you into thinking he was never here.

Once he’s seemingly satisfied with his work, he straightens up, turning until his back is against the camera preparing to leave.

To your surprise his face turns around to take one last look inside. The direction of his gaze settles on your bed where you're sleeping. His eyes lingers there for a handful of moments, inscrutable over the mask.

Is he sad? Angry? You can't tell.

He finally looks away and then he leaps off the window.

Politely asking him in writing is clearly not working out for you.

You decide the only recourse you have left is to try and physically catch him.

Such a simple sentiment that had sounded so easy in your head, but you quickly run into logistical issues when you try to put it into practice.

The man is built like a tank. Can leap off of skyscrapers (and the window of your sixth floor) without breaking a sweat. Potentially also a vampire.

You're not exactly sure how you're supposed to catch someone like that.

Your google research is off to a shaky start. Somehow you end up down a rabbit hole of tutorials for non-lethal mouse traps. It's not very useful inspiration. Because you can't exactly build a 7 foot large cage trap to catch him the next time he comes around to help himself to cookies.

But the concept of having a lure trap set with bait seemed transferable and so you decide to go for a classic spring trap that you’ll modify. No cage, instead you set up a DIY contraption with a sturdy string attached to a bell meant to quickly alert you to his presence next time he comes around. 

The game plan is to wake up and corner him before he has a chance to abscond.

As for bait, you google things that vampires might like in a half-thought of plan it might be applicable. Unfortunately, there are no young virgin maidens you know of as far as the eye can see in New York (yourself included) so that was a no go. 

So you default back to cookies (because hey, at least it worked last time).

Amazon has your whole set up shipped and delivered by the next day and you implement phase 3 of your rapidly escalating attempts to reach out to him.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. For one he doesn’t show up that night. Or the night after. It takes him four whole days to show up again and when he does, he spots your trap a mile away. When you review the footage on the cam the next day, he avoids the rope and the whole mechanism effortlessly. 

There's no sound on the nanny cam so you can't be sure of it. But you think from the way the line of his shoulders shake as he steps over the rope that he might be laughing at you. He’s definitely seen through few supervillain traps in his days so in hindsight the probability of success here was low.

He does however eat three of your cookies this time.

You get a little bit more desperate after that.

You decide that if a trigger trap to wake you won't work, then obviously, the next best thing is for you to simply stay awake.

The problem is that he doesn't show up every night. His visits are entirely random without an obvious pattern. Sometimes he shows up two nights in a row, sometimes he goes several days without making a guest appearance on your nanny cam footage.

It means you end up downing a whole carafe of coffee, and several energy drinks, every night for a week straight. Entirely unable to predict what night he's going to appear, you keep dooming your already tiny bladder to a dozen visits to the bathroom before the clock has even struck nine.

The saddest part of it is that despite being wired on enough coffee to power a nuclear power station by yourself, you never end up staying awake the whole night through. 

More often than not you end up falling asleep sitting upright by the dining table waiting up for him. Then the next morning you wake with a wry neck, a sore back and your face pressing up uncomfortably against the wooden surface.

But you're nothing if not tenacious. Tonight makes it the sixth night in a row that you’re doing this. You stare down the can of red bull on your dining table as you pick it up and lift it to your mouth. You’re going to keep going, hardness of the wooden table be damned.

You're surprised to find yourself waking up feeling well rested without any aches. Surrounded by the softness of your quilt and your even softer memory foam pillow. 

The luxurious comfort of it all is such a relief that you don't even question it at first. Don't question why you're in bed when the last thing you remember was nodding off against the palm of your hand and the hard discomfort of your dining chair.

In the sanctuary of your bed, you just dig your face deeper into your pillow and snooze for as long as you can. Ignoring the bright sun pouring in from your windows until it sears unforgivingly against your skin and you decide that it’s finally time to start your day.

By habit, the first thing you do as you get up from bed is to pull up the nanny cam app on your phone and press play on last night's recording.

There's nothing of interest. Seeing yourself read a book by the dining table and chugging down a series of Red Bull is hardly riveting television.

Yesterday you barely even make it until midnight because you can see yourself nod off at the table, head sliding off your palm and plonking down on the dining table. You flinch at the impact, vaguely impressed that the collision didn't wake you.

Your (maybe vampire) Spiderman turns up at 3 am.

Much like the times before, he perches himself on your window sill, peering inside (presumably to check for any new traps you might have laid out for him).

His broad frame stiffens, and then, with a smooth leap, he's inside your apartment.

Excitement rushes to your head, because this is the furthest he’s gone and the first time he's come all the way inside instead of just lurking on the window sill. 

He goes over to your bed, flinging the quilt to the side. He seems stressed, the dark shape of his eyes wide as he stands over the empty bed when it dawns on you what’s happening on screen right now. 

Oh, he's worried.

He looks over at you, hunched over the dining table, sound asleep and oh god, is that drool on your cheek? 

The line of his shoulder relaxes. The broadness of his chest rises then dips with a heavy exhale. Something warm trickles in your stomach at his obvious concern for you.

The mystery is confounding. You don't know him. You've never met him, but for some unfathomable reason he cares enough about you to genuinely care about your safety and you want to know why. 

He makes his way over to the table where you are. The mask slowly ebbs away, uncovering his familiar chin, cheeks and then finally his eyes. An other-worldly shade of crimson that has you spellbound and transfixed on the screen. 

You find yourself raising your phone closer to your face, trying to get a better look at him. Cursing the crappy quality of the video. You don't know what to make of the way he's looking at you. It's intensely focused, almost sad, and… and… And you don't know what, but it makes your heart leap up into your throat, chest clenching tight.

He bends over, wrapping his broad arms under your knees. He’s careful in his movements, cupping your head as it lolls to the side until you’re comfortably resting against his shoulders. It’s a practiced movement, as if he’s done this a hundred times before as he picks you up and carries you bridal style to your bed. Gingerly tucking you under the quilt with something that looks a lot like tenderness. 

It leaves you with more questions than ever.

Ever since you started your caffeine chugging marathon, work has become a new kind of hell.

You're already half-asleep and nodding off at your desk by 10.30. Eyes sore and strained as you stare at the bright screen and try to make sense of the endless columns that are all different and also all the same until your brain refuses to try to make sense of any of it anymore.

You need to go for a walk. Clear your head.

Maybe pop out for a coffee... smoothie. Definitely smoothie.

Outside, the heat is oppressive, far too hot for only being May. Definitely too hot when there are this many tourists around. The street is so crowded you can barely make an inch of headway, trapped behind a family with a stroller in front, trapped in front of a pushy businessman who keeps stepping on your heels every two steps, and trapped next to a guy who is really into his airpods.

With the excess of caffeine still trying to make its way out of your system and the unforgiving heat of the sun beating against your back, it all has the effect of making you feel like you’re hung over. Your breakfast is roiling in your stomach. Sweat plastered against every inch of clothing. You don't know why you do this to yourself.

Every morning you tell yourself never again, and yet every night, there you were, spending half of your disposable income on energy drinks.

Starting from today, you're going cold turkey on the stuff. You've finally given up on trying to stay awake long enough to catch your super-stalker in his cookie burglar routine. Endlessly chugging down caffeine every night is not working out for you. Neither are the DIY mouse traps.

You're running low on ideas of how to trap him. You have nothing else to go on anymore. No idea on how to summon the man. The only time you know he'll be there is the moment before each near-death when he's there to save you.

What are you supposed to do with that? Purposely throw yourself off another building to lure him out?

That's crazy!

…Right?

But maybe... No! Definitely crazy.

Someone screams, and you snap out of your thoughts. There's yelling and terrified shrieks all around you. You're caught in the throng of people, panicked bodies pushing and pressing up against you, all of them trying to run the other way.

You dig in your heels, bracing yourself against the stampede of people. They’re pushing in from every direction until it’s impossible to move an inch. It’s hard to turn your body, when second after second, someone is pummeling into your side, knocking into your bruising shoulder. You barely manage to crane your neck back far enough when you finally spot it. 

A red-green truck with a gigantic taco on its roof is careening towards you across the pavement, no driver behind the wheel. The sea of bodies parts around the out-of-control vehicle, people running left, right and forward to escape being crushed under the wheels.

There’s no time to react. It’s too close. Too fast. 

A hand clutches at your wrist and pulls you backwards, your vision obscured as your face is pressed up against a familiar solid warmth. 

"Hold onto me," he tells you, and you do. 

You're held firm against him as the ground underneath your feet disappears, and everything feels weightless. Then all you hear is a loud thunderous crash.

Your feet touch back down on the ground, and the strong protective hold on you unravels.

When you open your eyes he's already gone. You're left on the corner of Lexington Avenue, still trying to catch your breath. The mob of people is still there all around you, but the panic has passed now, everyone is standing still. Everyone is observing the wreckage of the run amok truck that is now flipped onto its side, rendered harmless.

Miraculously, somehow, nobody around you seems visibly injured.

From a distance, you can hear sirens approaching with a deafening wail. 

But your mind is elsewhere, on the shade of the familiar dark blue and red as you were being saved seconds ago. On his gentle voice in your ear that still thrums pleasantly in your chest. 

You want to see him again. 

It's Friday, and you break half an hour early for your designated 40 minutes of lunch, taking the elevator directly to the 72nd floor, which is under construction to renovate it into an open observation deck for the public next year.

The thing with commercial skyscrapers is that nowadays most of them have safety glass panels on all outside spaces of the upper floors to ensure that it is impossible to climb up the buildings and jump.

It's a safety feature that became standard after the financial crisis of 2008.

Turns out that imposing an 80 hour work week on your employees, where they don't get to see their family or friends or have a life outside of work, and then stripping them of their financial security makes a lot of people miserable and suicidal (who knew?)

The elevator pings open, and you exit into the construction zone, carefully avoiding the various tools scattered across the half-finished deck. On Fridays, the construction workers on the site leave by lunchtime, and the space is empty of people. 

Step by step, you walk up towards the edge of the terrasse, until you stand before the temporary safety rail, looking out over the sprawling city below you. Cars look like tiny moving pebbles and the people, a hive of ants scurrying from street to street.

It’s a dizzying view. Both beautiful and grotesque in its grandeur. The 72nd floor will be 28 more floors to fall from than the 44th was.

The air around you seems to thin, and your stomach wants to crawl down to your feet and hold on to steady ground.

Taking a deep breath, you lift the hem of your shirt, running your hand over the safety harness strapped around your waist, reassuring yourself it's still there. Then you feel along the attached cord, using the carabiner at the end to clip it around the rod of the safety rail. 

Being impulsive and daring in your quest is one thing. Reckless and stupid is another.

It’s not a real climbing rope and harness. Turns out professional safety gear is shockingly expensive, but you found a knock-off resistance training set, complete with harness and stretchy bungee cord rope, on Amazon for a very reasonable $15. You’ve already spent $72 on cookies, $50 dollars for a nanny cam set, and an extortionate $26 for stationary paper in your never-ending quest to lure out Fake Spiderman. You figure a rope is a rope, and you're not paying $100 more to get ripped off by the big climbing corporations. But you’re also not willing to go without.

After all, you've already fallen from the Chrysler building once, and you're not angling for a repeat.

As intent as you are on seeing your Spider-benefactor eye to eye, you're not quite prepared to die for the privilege. Your plan is just to make it look like you are going to jump.

Any superhero worth his dime wouldn't actually let you fall before they would be willing to save you.

That would be a real dick move.

You give your impromptu safety rig one last tug to make sure it's secure, then straighten your posture. Grabbing a hold of the metal rail, you hoist yourself up. You clamber onto it, gripping tight with shaking hands as you swing a leg over, straddling the bar.

Left leg then the right, until all of you are on the other side of the railing.

Then you stay there.

One second. Then two. You close your eyes and try not to look down at the many, many floors below, and how one gust of strong wind could probably knock you over and have you falling down the building again. You count the seconds that pass you by. 

Five. Six. Seven.

A strong gust of wind blows through your side, and your legs buckle at the strong resistance, hand gripping down on the metal railing to hold yourself steady so you don't fall off.

Eightnineten! Ok. Fuck. No. You're good. Fuck this! He's not going to come.

If he didn’t come when you climbed over, he's not going to turn up now.

You briefly let go of the railing with one hand, adjusting your grip so you can climb back to safety. The sun beating down on your back disappears and is eaten up by a large and looming shadow. Every hair on the back of your neck prickles in warning.

Your reaction is too slow, you don't even have time to turn around to see what caused it. Then all you hear is an angry booming voice right next to your ear.

"Have you lost your goddamned mind?!"

You panic, flinging out your hand to catch the bar, but the hard metal of the railings isn't there anymore.

There is a sharp metallic snap. The safety rope around your waist splits from the hasp.

He’s calling your name.

The world tilts and everything goes upside down along with it. Your stomach sinks with a sickening plummet, legs dropping through into zero gravity as you find yourself staring up at the blue and endless New York sky.

Then you're falling from the Chrysler building.

Again.

Fuck!

~ Next Issue

Dedication & Credits: To my dearest @thirstworldproblemss who has to constantly listen to me jabber on about this day and night endlessly and forever. She is in every sense of the word a collaborator on this project. She brainstorms, she pitches in, she edits and she beta-reads. This and so many of my works would not exist without her, please send her all the love if you enjoyed this story.

I don’t have a tag list but please follow me on astroboots-writes and turn on notifications to be notified when I post something new!

[floral-ashes]

Gender self-determination as a medical right

Florence Ashley, CMAJ, vol. 196, E833–35 (2024)

Transgender people face many formal barriers to gender-affirming care, sometimes known as “gatekeeping.” Gender-affirming care refers to a wide range of medical interventions that patients pursue to affirm, actualize, or embody their sense of gender. Common forms of gender-affirming care include transition-related surgeries, hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and hair removal. Health care providers may refuse to offer gender-affirming care to transgender patients without an assessment of the person’s gender identity or dysphoria. Adolescents may, moreover, need to show that they have experienced gender dysphoria for several years before receiving care and may be denied care until they satisfy a strict age requirement.

I argue that physicians should rethink barriers to gender-affirming care in light of the principle of gender self-determination. By considering gender self-determination as a presumptive right, physicians are more likely to avoid unnecessary barriers to care. This presumption can be rebutted by showing that encroachments are adequately justified under standards detailed later in this article. Presumptive rights contrast with absolute rights, which cannot be rebutted or derogated from.

Being transgender is a matter of diversity, not pathology. When providers create barriers to gender-affirming care, they impair their patients’ ability to live out their sense of gender. Not every transgender person wishes to pursue gender-affirming interventions — it is a deeply personal choice — but many do. In Canada, 73% of transgender people want to or have pursued some form of gender-affirming care, and another 16% are unsure.2 Yet, only 26% of transgender people have received all the gender-affirming care they desire.

Medical autonomy and everyday autonomy

At the heart of medical ethics lies the principle of autonomy, according to which patients must be free to act “in accordance with a self-chosen plan.” Autonomy is the reason that patients have a right to refuse care, and it underpins health care providers’ duty to properly inform patients so that they can decide whether to accept a proposed treatment. Medical autonomy is, however, asymmetric. Whereas patients have the right to refuse an intervention, medical autonomy does not typically afford them the right to demand a specific intervention from their doctor. Nor does medical autonomy generally prevent providers from imposing discretionary restrictions and conditions on access to care.

Gender-affirming care, however, also engages the principle of gender self-determination, which is related to “everyday” autonomy: a person’s right to decide the shape of the life they want to live. Gender is a critical factor in how others refer to you, what facilities you use, whom you date, which peers you have, how others treat you, and which social norms are applied to you. Furthermore, a person’s primary and secondary sexual characteristics play a central role in social and sexual intercourse; bodily features influence whether others perceive you as a man, a woman, or nonbinary, or as trans- or cisgender; and having certain body parts also influences your ability to do many things, such as use urinals or have penetrative sex. If you do not feel like your body reflects your sense of gender, you may experience persistent discomfort in everyday life and struggle to flourish in your social or romantic life. Feeling misperceived may also cause you to withdraw from meaningful relationships and can be a source of substantial distress.

Gatekeeping gender-affirming care therefore imposes important limits on liberty, dictating critical aspects of transgender individuals’ social, interpersonal, and embodied life. The impact on transgender people of gatekeeping gender-affirming care extends far beyond the medical realm, permeating the deepest reaches and crevices of transgender people’s lives and defining their ability to live as themselves.

The principle of gender selfdetermination

Gender self-determination means that individuals have a right to define, express, and embody their gender identity as they see fit. It is one of the cornerstones of the Yogyakarta Principles, developed in 2006 by leading human rights experts, which state that

Each person’s self-defined … gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity and freedom. … No one shall be subjected to pressure to conceal, suppress or deny their … gender identity.

The principle of gender self-determination can be derived from and is supported by many long-recognized rights, including the right to free speech, equality,  privacy, identity, and dignity, and to live and act with integrity. As explained by Loukēs G. Loukaidēs, later of the European Court of Human Rights: “For [someone] to be able to function freely, in the full sense of the term, [they] must have the possibility of self-definition and self-determination: the right to be [oneself].” Gender self-determination is implicitly and explicitly recognized by multiple international actors, including the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Gender self-determination as a medical right

The principle of gender self-determination shapes the ethical obligations of health care providers. Given the impact of gender-affirming care on people’s ability to express, embody, and live out their gender in everyday life, a presumptive right to gender-affirming care for transgender people would seem essential to supporting the principle of gender self-determination. Transgender patients are, in this sense, in a special situation that expands the traditional scope of medical autonomy, a reasoning perhaps best expressed in the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Van Kück v. Germany, which explained that “the burden placed on a person to prove the medical necessity of treatment, including irreversible surgery, in the field of one of the most intimate private-life matters, appears disproportionate.”

Medical care often constrains everyday liberty, but there are differences of kind and degree when it comes to gender-affirming care. Gender-affirming care is a way for the person to shape themselves from a gendered perspective, not a means of treating an underlying pathology. If transgender existence is understood, as it should be, in terms of diversity rather than pathology, gender self-determination comes to the fore as a medical right, and approaches to gender-affirming care rooted in a conventional diagnostic-and-cure model seem out of place. Gender-affirming care can be considered along similar lines as abortion, which is also desired for its own sake and often framed as a right.

Reconsidering barriers to gender-affirming health care

Gender self-determination is a presumptive right, meaning that it can be outweighed by other considerations. The burden of justifying barriers to care should fall on the health care providers who erect them and not on those seeking care to affirm their gender. A barrier to gender-affirming care would be justified if there were clear and compelling evidence that it prevents harms of sufficiently great magnitude to unambiguously outweigh the barrier’s negative impacts on gender self-determination and well-being. The harm that barriers seek to prevent must be sufficiently serious to outweigh individuals’ autonomy in defining the most fundamental aspects of their personal identity, bearing in mind also that impairing one’s ability to live out one’s sense of gender is psychologically and socially harmful. It is important to remember that autonomy includes the right to make bad decisions for oneself. The freedom to make only good decisions would be meaningless.

For illustrative purposes, I wish to briefly touch on 2 common barriers to gender-affirming care: the requirement that adolescents prove several years of gender incongruence and rigid age requirements. The requirement that adolescents experience “several years of persistent gender diversity/incongruence” before initiating hormone therapy or surgery is not grounded in evidence that immediate access to gender-affirming interventions, without waiting several years, is associated with regret or negative mental health outcomes. Similarly, the use of rigid age requirements for certain interventions lacks empirical evidence and does not take into consideration differences in youths’ cognitive and emotional maturation. Contemporary understandings of autonomy recognize its gradual development and heterogeneity across the population, an understanding that is recognized in Canadian law under the mature minor doctrine. In the words of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, youths’ views must be “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.” This calls for an individualized approach that is incompatible with rigid age lines. In the future, providers should also consider whether there is sufficient evidence justifying requirements for transgender adolescents and adults to prove their gender identity or dysphoria before offering care.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that providers of gender-affirming care have an ethical duty to respect the gender self-determination of patients and accordingly bear the burden of justifying the barriers they erect on access to gender-affirming care. Health care providers working with transgender communities should carefully examine their gatekeeping practices to ascertain whether they are justified by clear and compelling evidence and abandon those that cannot meet this justificatory threshold.

[fairuzfan]

hello!! I don't know if this is appropriate (pls do not feel obligated to answer) but i was wondering what were ur thoughts on the israeli grass-roots movement Standing Together. I first found out abt them through a tumblr post that shared this substack article (https://theconnector.substack.com/p/if-its-not-helping-then-shut-the). the article immediately put an extremely bad taste in my mouth towards the movement and its founders, but i dont know if i'm being overly-critical of them.

Hey thanks for sending this in. No worries, it's totally ok. I was actually debating whether or not to publish this, mostly because I was afraid this would distract from Gaza, but I decided that it's imperative to stop normalizers from squeezing their way into the movement. Remember, the demands of the Palestinian people begin and end with liberation. Everything else is irrelevant and pointless to the cause.

So first off — I don't think you're being overly-critical of them at all. The first red flag of both this article and the group themselves is that they often exchange "Palestinian" with "Arab" and "Israeli" with "Jewish." That right off the bat shows me they have no respect for Palestinians and see Jewish people and Palestinians as mutually exclusive categories. I've spoken on this blog before about how racist it is to assume no Palestinian is Jewish and vice versa and this group really illustrates the forced division they imagine within their own goals and wording.

The article itself is quite anti-Palestinian in its erasure — it talks about avoiding words like "genocide," and "apartheid," and "ethnic cleansing" because "they are serious people trying to actually get something done." I really don't understand why not using those words makes you a serious person. If anything, it erases a description of how to define what it happening to Palestinians.

The whole redefinition of "peace" in this article and group is just calmness. These people are not advocating for peace in which families are reunited and land is given back — they are advocating for a muted version of the status quo of the current political system, just with less obviously fanatical governments. Peace cannot be attained when the people directly affected cannot have a say in defining it. They won't even say the word "apartheid." It's not some scholarly word with no meaning — it has actual consequences and effects on people (click). Palestinians are tried in military court. Their movement is monitored and restricted. It means that there are different legal systems for different people (click)! If you reject that this exists, then you're not interested in making the lives of Palestinians better — you're only interested in making your own life more comfortable.

As soon as you remove our ability to say words like "genocide" and "apartheid", you remove our ability to determine what happens specifically to Palestinians based on racism. By only saying "Palestinians are getting killed" an Israeli can come in and say "well so am I, by Hamas! Let's work together to end the killing" when it ignores that this is a systematic effort to completely wipe out all trace of Palestinians from the world.

It's like saying, "Don't say you have arthritis, say your joints hurt. And well, that happens to everyone, so let's just find a way to stop all our joints from hurting!" Then you work with people who fundamentally don't understand your pain and symptoms, oversimplifying your situation to the point of malicious universality. Sure, everyone's joints hurt, but my joints are hurting because my immune system is attacking them, not because of old age. You can't help my arthritis the same way you can wear a heat/cold patch to sooth your joints — there are other problems you're ignoring that all work together to cause me systematic pain and might cause bigger problems in the future if left untreated properly.

Similar symptoms don't mean similar causes and ignoring that is fundamentally ignoring the root issue and attempting to trivialize Palestinian's suffering. As soon as you take away the words to describe our situation, it doesn't sound so bad, does it?

Now, basically, the... weirdest part of the article is this excerpt:

People like him in Israel are very aware of how the left here is talking about them, and it’s not helping. “You can call me a colonizer or a settler,” he declared, “but I’m not going anywhere. And neither are the Palestinians.” When people chant, “Palestine will be free,” he said, “we Israelis hear, ‘without you.’ In the same way that a lot of Palestinians hear the ministers in Bibi’s government speak and think they want to do the same thing to them.” The problem as they both see it is that we are caught between two polar opposites. “Hamas believes in Greater Palestine,” Green said. “And on the other side we have people who believe in the idea of Greater Israel.” Indeed, that concept is in the charter of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. “Both sides have very problematic governing bodies,” he added. And the status quo of maintaining the occupation and managing the conflict has been exploded now.

Well, first off, Hamas is not the only one who believes in "Greater Palestine." Palestinians around the globe have been fighting for that since 1948. Second off, it's quite odd that you would center yourself in the wake of the ongoing slaughter of 10,000 people, with no end in sight. Right now, I would assume you'd be advocating for an end to the mass killings first and foremost, but you seem to be more worried about your right to stolen land.

Third, this completely erases the violence done to Palestinians the past 75+ years in favor for a "peace" that will only allow citizens of Israel comfort in their lives. Sure Palestinian citizens of Israel might have more comfortable lives, maybe (although I doubt it). But what about Gaza, which has been ravaged by Israel? What about the people in the Occupied Territories, whose economy depends on Israel, which controls it? What about the millions of refugees around the world who can't so much as see the place where they grew up because they've been exiled? The colonization of Palestine by Israel is not so old — there are people STILL ALIVE who participated in the massacres of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 and walk around without facing any real consequences for that. My great-grandmother had seen both and she only passed away a couple of years ago. Where is the "peace" for her? Where is the "peace" for millions like her who still dream of going back to their childhood home?

This group AND the article tries to cloud your view into illustrating two opposing groups with equal power. They aren't. Palestinians, unfortunately, endure systematic oppression both within Gaza and throughout Palestine. Each and every time they try to resist peacefully, they've been shot, abducted, or imprisoned. The Great March of Return is one such example. BDS is also an example, yet that has constantly been outlawed by American governments. There have been a plethora of Palestinian artists, writers, and filmmakers who have been silenced or killed for advocating for a Free Palestine. Most recently, this included Heba Abu-Nada who was an award winning poet and writer who was martyred on October 20th after getting shelled by an Israeli missile. Ghassan Kanafani also was assassinated last century. The list goes on. Palestinians have no hope of "changing the system from within" because that internal change will always depend on the mercy of the Israelis that pretend to ally themselves with the Palestinians. Someone in Gaza cannot leave their refugee camp and go back to their ancestral home because no one in this group is advocating for that — and remember, the right of return is an essential part of the demands of the Palestinian people and we cannot ignore that for a forced "peace" that favors calmness over actual justice.

Now as we examine the group themselves, here is their mission statement/goal:

Standing Together is a progressive grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice. We know that the majority have far more in common than that which sets us apart and only a tiny minority benefits from the status quo. The future that we want-peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for everyone in this land, and true social, economic, and environmental justice — is possible. To achieve this future, we must stand together as a united front: Jewish and Palestinian, secular and religious, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, rural and urban, and people of all genders and sexual orientations. As the largest Jewish-Arab grassroots movement in Israel, we are committed to creating an alternative to our existing reality and building the political strength to make this transformation possible.

Yet again, they are separating "Palestinian" and "Jewish," reinforcing this dichotomy that's so harmful. AND they're interchanging "Palestinian" and "Arab," which erases the diversity within Palestinian society. A group that makes the distinction between "Palestinian" and "Jewish" shows that they are not interested in the restitution of Palestinians but rather solidifying their own position within society by emphasizing a false dichotomy between "Palestinians" and "Jews" with no potential for overlap.

They mention "true justice" but "true justice" doesn't exist if there are no reparations towards the people who have been exiled and displaced, murdered, and tortured the past 75+ years. Justice is not an abstract concept — it is adhering to the demands of the people most impacted by systematic oppression, which is the Palestinians.

Looking at their leadership, there are only a couple of Palestinians with the vast majority of them being non-Palestinian. Sorry, but I'm wholly uninterested in "peace" and "equality" movements that are not made up of majority Palestinians. It's only common sense that you would expect such a movement to be led by Palestinians themselves — but this group seems to use Sally Abed as a token Palestinian who furthers their narrative of wanting "peace" in Israeli society. And even looking at their action items, you can see they make a point about emphasizing safety for the *Israeli* citizens above all else, stating that their far right government does nothing to serve the citizens of Israel. They claim it will also bring safety for Gazans, but how? You can advocate for a change in the government, yes, but if the people in Gaza are subject to getting their rights taken away based on the whims of whoever happens to be in power then no amount of "internal" activism in Israeli society will help them. They will always be at the mercy of the people who have a vested interest in erasing the people of Gaza and the West Bank so that they may take over their land.

Please remember, the civil rights movement of the 60s and the BLM Movement of this century were led by and FOR Black people of the United States because they were the ones making the demands for a change in their circumstances. Because at the end of the day, the people who are the most oppressed deserve the right to decide how their future appears and should not be dictated by the oppressor in any way.

This group tries to make a separation between the "Israeli people" and the "Israeli government." Right away, I have to laugh. They act as if the colonization of Palestine is too old for anyone to remember its origins — no. I had family living in Palestine as recently as '67. Maybe *this* generation didn't choose to settle in Palestine, but the previous generation did. And the generations before that. Before 1948, Israel didn't even exist. Hell, before a couple hundred years ago, BORDERS didn't exist. Not to mention, mandatory conscription means that most civilians will have been directly part of the suppressing forces, making them liable for the material effects of colonization. Why are people so resistant to the idea of undoing colonialism and its effects? I cannot think of any other reason than because they have a vested interest in keeping those borders up, in emphasizing nationality because they're one of the groups of people that is benefited from the establishment of a "Jewish State."

So in that, unless you call for an end to the idea of the "Jewish State" in Palestine, then I cannot think of you as a sincere advocate for Palestinian rights — this group especially plays at normalization of a muted version of the status quo rather than actual justice and reparations. The "Israeli advocates" within this group will benefit first and foremost in their own activism — therefore it's hard for me to view them in a positive light.

All activism for Palestinians should center around giving Palestinians reparations, as well as giving reparations to all indigenous victims of colonization. I think this group only tries to muddy the waters to make people forget what they're fighting for. I honestly do not understand why liberation scares you, if it means that no nation-state will have complete and total power over you and your family.

"Free Palestine" is an anti-colonial movement. Such a thing is possible — but you have to try to make it possible. Those against the unending liberation of all people are one of those who have the most to benefit from the continuation of colonization.

Right now, your main concern should be the people of Gaza and the people of the West Bank, and ensuring their safety and longevity in the face on continued erasure. "Peace" is all well and good but who exactly gets to define that? Who gets to benefit most from it? Unless you can unequivocally answer "ALL Palestinians," then you're not an ally — you're only interested in helping yourselves.

Remember — the fact that we even had to fight for our rights is itself an injustice. At the very least, ask the people who are most affected what they want before you listen to Israelis who have a vested interest in keeping the state of Israel alive.

[allforhee]

ੈ✩ — 𝐘𝐎𝐔'𝐑𝐄 𝐀 𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇! (BLURB) | YANG JUNGWON

୨୧ pairing — non!idol!bf!jungwon x gn!reader

୨୧ synopsis — having jungwon as your boyfriend is full of surprises, and after dating him for a while, he takes you on once again another date. at this date, which happens to be an arcade date, you see the playful and child-like version of him, which makes you fall in love with him more.

୨୧ genre — established relationship, you guys were the best friends to lovers trope

୨୧ warnings — cute coupley stuff, jungwon being absolutely adorable, lovers only starting off their relationship aka still being shy with the lovey dovey stuff

୨୧ word count — 879 words, sorta proofread

୨୧ author's note — a bunch of moots on my twitter have been requesting a jungwon fic... so here it is! i hope you all enjoy and i hope i did my wonie girlies some justice ^^ pls i hope the ending line made sense ik it's cheesy but i love claw machines so i hope you enjoy wonie freaking over claw machines !!

"𝐍𝐎 𝐖𝐀𝐈𝐓, 𝐖𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 𝐓𝐑𝐘 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄!" an excited jungwon squeals as he pulls you by the wrist.

date nights with jungwon were not uncommon. whether it be cafe hopping or watching a horror movie, you had been on many dates with him.

even if it was only a few months into your relationship with him, he always had a surprise up his sleeve. he always made date nights interesting.

as jungwon grabs your wrist to run to what he was pointing at, you take in this new aura of your boyfriend. the surrounding bright neon lights and the glow in the dark carpeted floor made it clear. jungwon had brought you to an arcade.

as you finally reach your destination after what felt like an eternity of jungwon pulling you, you come across a bright light in front of you, a square cube filled with all kinds of plushes. a claw machine.

"ynnie! look! oh i have to win one! where's my game card?" jungwon exclaims as he frantically looks for his game card he bought, prior to the date night.

"wonie, you know this is a scam, right?" you explain to him, as he's still looking for the card in his totebag.

jungwon gasps wildly, and looks at you like you just stole all the stars from the sky. "how dare you?! these are little plushies just waiting to be saved! can't you see their little faces trapped in that horrid cage?"

you laugh at his exaggeration, his face all pouty from your 'insult.'

as he finally finds his game card, his smiling expression beaming, he enthusiastically taps his card on the scanner, before the arcade music starts, and the 30 second countdown begins.

jungwon looks up into the glass cage as he can now move the crane with the joystick. he beams up into the cage as he slowly moves the arm to which plush he wants to get.

"oh- so clo- wait- baby can you check from the sides to see if it can properly grasp it?" jungwon asks, his face beaming with excitement.

you sigh as you move aside, looking into the glass cage from the sides. you decide to play with him a bit, "oh! move it back just a tad bit! yes- a bit mor- right there!"

as jungwon presses the big red CATCH button with confidence, you smile at him menacingly from the side, as the claw completely misses the plush.

"wait— no! i was so close!" jungwon cries out, seeing the claw move towards the drop zone without a plush in it.

you giggle and jungwon spots you, before giving you a pout. "baby~ what was that for?"

"you looked so excited to get the plush! i'm sorry, we'll try again, m'kay?" you confessed, as his face begins to light up again once more.

jungwon smiles and jumps in excitement, before tapping the card once more, and the game starts all over again.

this time, you're actually determined to help him get the plush, after seeing his beaming face and glowing smile. you can't help but wonder how it would be like if you could have that smile embedded in your brain.

as he moves the joystick and the claw moves once more, you grasp his hand—which was holding the joystick and help him adjust. he looks at you with a smile before focusing back to the game.

finally, you make the last few adjustments before you grab his hand to hit the CATCH button. at first, jungwon was surprised with the sudden decision, "ynnie~ that wasn't in place yet!" he whined.

you smiled at him before looking back into the cage, only to find the claw grasping none other than the plush he wanted. as the claw lifted it up, jungwon's eyes were focused. his eyes stuck following the plush, where it moved swiftly, and finally landed in the drop zone.

jungwon let out an excited gasp, before squatting down and grabbing the plush out of the collect here drawer. he smiled at you with that beaming smile, and you could feel your cheeks grow red.

"baby see! i told you we could do it! i caught it!" he smiled, holding the plush in your face, showing it off.

you giggled at him before mumbling "no, you're a catch."

you had thought jungwon was too enthralled in the plush to hear you, but his super-hearing picked up what you said.

"hmm? what did you say?" jungwon questioned you.

you snapped back into reality, gazing into his eyes, "what? oh nothing..."

jungwon laughed, "you think i'm a catch, don'tcha?"

you tried to hide your face in your hands, hiding your red face, before jungwon pulled you in a hug. you continued to hide your face in his neck, embarrassed.

"you don't have to hide, baby." jungwon giggled, as he pat your head, and kissed your forehead out of habit.

you felt goosebumps run throughout your body, before looking up and smiling at him. you kissed his cheek shyly, as you felt a soft item land in your arms.

as jungwon placed the plush he just won in your arms, he beamed at your confused expression, "i don't need the plush, you're always going to be my catch anyways."

taglist; @riekiss @sesameoil721 @desistay (crossed out = i can't tag you)

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© 𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐇𝐄𝐄, est. 2024 | do not plagiarize, modify, translate, or repost my works on any platforms.

[rin-vana]

⠀⠀⠀⠀───◌┈┈─── ♡ 𝇄 𝇃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐂𝐓𝐎𝐑 𝐌𝐀𝐘 𝐒𝐄𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐍𝐎𝐖 ┋ 𝐅𝐓. 𝐊𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐎 𝐍𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐈

⎯⎯ ( 𝙋𝘼𝙄𝙍𝙄𝙉𝙂𝙎 ) : Doctor!Kento x Pregnant!Reader

⎯⎯ ( 𝙎𝙔𝙉𝙊𝙋𝙎𝙄𝙎 ) : Kento's favorite patient came to his office and he always looks forward to her visits, but she seems particularly down. Luckily Kento has the medicine just for her.

⎯⎯ ( 𝘾.𝙒. ) : Use of nicknames (love, angel mainly), reader has bad anxiety and hormones over all, public sex (in a patient room), Kento has been a little neglectful towards reader, angst to sex, heaaavyyy oral I mean Kento is literally obsessed, position switching (face sitting), reader has stretch marks n obviously black coded as well as thick coded, watersports (squirting), Kento is obsessed with reader, literally a filthy man

⎯⎯ ( 𝙒.𝘾. ) : 5,243

⎯⎯ ( 𝙉𝙊𝙏𝙀𝙎 ) : This took TOO damn long n its not even properly proofread I am so srry . College is fr a bitch but I hope that this piece gets as much love as Aisle 7 <3

Will he be annoyed to see me?

The very first thought that ran through your head as you sat in your car that was parked outside the large, and seemingly never ending, white hospital. Why you were there was because your dear husband worked inside that very hospital, and due to your mood swings, you wanted to see him. In fact you felt a tingle in your chest at the idea of being able to visit him during work, but the lingering idea that he'd be annoyed with your presence sat foremost in your head.

Your hands gripped onto the steering wheel, contemplating whether or not to go back home. You did make it this far though, and it'd be a waste to turn back, plus you were already there. So you got out before regret started to take its toll on you, locking the doors to your cute little Infiniti Q60. You made your way to the wide automatic glass doors that opened to the front desk, two familiar faces sitting behind them.

”Evening, Mrs. Nanami. I'm assuming you're here for Kento,” spoke one of them. You approached the pristine desk, setting your purse atop. The woman had decently long brown hair, and noticeable bags under her eyes. In a friendly manner you smiled at how she spoke to you, feeling a little more at ease about your visit.

”Of course. Why else would I be here with this stomach of mine?” You referred to your baby bump that only seemed to grow bigger by the day. If you weren't so determined to see your husband then you definitely would've stayed home. Either way you were already at the hospital, so there was no turning back.

”I was just about to head up, so I'll walk you.”

”Thank you Shoko.” The woman moved from behind the desk and towards another set of double doors, waiting for you as you waddled your way over towards her. With your purse in tow you two traverse through the hallways painted in crisp white, doors leading to a multitude of operating rooms and technology you can never wrap your head around. Shoko guides you towards the elevators but it seemed to be taking a bit so you decided to make light conversation.

”Has he been stressing himself again?”

”You know how he is,” she starts with a heavy sigh. Here we go. ”Once he starts something he just has to finish it. Paperwork, diagnostics, pretty much anything that keeps 'im busy.”

Yup. That had Kento Nanami written all over it, certainly something your husband would do. He was a workaholic at heart, a trait he's never been able to get rid of since his high school days. In all the years you've known him he's been like that, even after the birth of your first daughter, in fact all that did was make him want to become a better doctor. ”Actually, 'm glad you came here, maybe you'll distract him before he starts downing coffee.”

You shared a laugh with the woman before responding to her. ”Don't know how much of a distraction I'll be. He hasn't.. well– actually, nevermind.”

”By all means, continue.” Now the brown haired female was looking at you. You chewed your lip as the words seem to bubble in your throat, but you're quick to swallow them.

”It's nothing, I'm fine.”

Shoko didn't want to press further so she just shrugged and you silently prayed a thank you because the conversation would've become awkward with the way you'd pour your heart out to the woman. Luckily the elevator finally came by then, so you stepped inside as she followed behind. Instinctively you pressed the fourth floor, the very floor where Kento's office was situated. It felt like muscle memory, being in the hospital and navigating it. Hell, you could walk around the whole facility by yourself and know exactly where you're going.

The quick elevator trip was quiet and the walk down the bright hallways was done in the same fashion, save for a few doctors that threw basic greetings your way. You knew a good amount of the staff thanks to your frequent visits, however usually you'd be here under a more positive premise.

Shoko guides you towards one of the many patient rooms, opening the door and moving to the side so you can enter the room. ”I'll let Nanami know you're here. Can't say it won't take a while though, so get comfortable.”

”I assumed as much. Thank you.”

The door closes and now you're alone. The room itself is nice, a counter on one end with cabinets above, and the other with a bed covered in a thin white sheet. The wall in front of you was covered in large windows, so it felt bigger than what it was on the inside, but in that same breath it felt as lonely as your household. You move towards the bed and sit yourself on it, placing your purse down and allowing yourself to get comfortable while being mindful of the prominent bump on your tummy. C'mon, move with mommy.

You somehow manage to get yourself comfortable, heels kicked off and forgotten on the linoleum floor so your feet can rest on the mattress. A huff of relief leaves your lips once your back is rested upon the slanted part of the hospital bed, allowing you to fully be situated so you can wait for your husband. Though nothing could've prepared you for how long it was going to take. Sure, you know Kento is always busy during these hours and you respected that, but a slither of you hoped he'd try to quicken things knowing you were there.

It took a good two hours of waiting until you heard a knock on the door. You had no idea when you fell asleep, but you started waking up again to give the person a response. ”Come in,” you project.

The door opens, revealing a tall man in a crisp white button up and black dress pants, blonde tufts partially framing his face. Your husband, Kento Nanami. You begin to move in order to sit up some more and give your husband a proper greeting, but before you know it he's quickly rushing to the bed and helping you lay back down comfortably.

”You should've told me you were coming to visit.” It's all he says, but it makes you happy to hear the worried tone in his voice nonetheless.

”If I did y'would've told me to stay home instead.” Kento had a look of hesitancy, and even bashfulness in his face since what you said was extremely true. Ever since you started to significantly show he advised you to take it easy and drive less since you have a history of getting stressed behind the wheel.

”Would you have stayed home if I told you to?”

”Hell no.”

Kento heaved a sigh as his eyes trailed down to your ever so swollen tummy. The way it protruded out with his child in there all over again, it's no wonder he wanted another so soon. You couldn't exactly say no to him either when you both promised to have at least two kids together, and now that you were on your second pregnancy, the excitement should at least be there. So why was the excitement not there in the first place?

”Shoko already told me you were two seconds from doing overtime again. What time was you expecting to be home?”

There was an obvious pause coming from your husband, awkwardness quickly taking over in the silence that filled the empty room. Your point was proven by the way Kento opted to simply not say a damn word, your stress levels already elevating since this topic was long overdue and you were tired of dancing around it for so long. Every time you tried to confront him about it, the conversation would be dismissed under the excuse of exhaustion and it’s over. But the whole reason why you came to see him in the first place was to convince the man to actually come home at a decent time.

It was then he finally decided to speak up. ”I was trying to get it done as soon as possible before y’started stressin’ yourself out, Love.” While he spoke he kept your gaze with his own, his hands being gentle in the way they rested on your stomach. His watch had brushed up against you occasionally as he began in a circular motion to ease your heightened emotions, and even though it worked temporarily you still didn’t entirely calm down. Just as you opened your mouth to say something, Kento was already speaking. ”Was getting up here a challenge? You know you shouldn’t be moving too much. What about your hormones–”

”Ken, I’m pregnant, not handicapped,” you sternly reminded him, taking the chance to also remove his hands from your body. In turn you grabbed his wrists, leaving him standing there with an expression that shifted to an obvious stupor. He knew he was to blame for the reason why you took the journey to see him during his grueling hours of work, and as much as you appreciated his care there wasn’t an ounce of you that wanted to hear it. It was then that you wanted him to understand why you felt the way you did, and to be quite frank if he wasn’t going to listen then the conversation would be entirely different. You know he loves you, and vice versa, but there’s an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. ”I know how much you love your work baby, n’ I know you’re worried, but half the time it don’t feel like it. We don’t spend as much time together n’—”

Knock knock knock.

You don't even finish before Kento is moving towards the door to answer the person on the other side. You're left sitting on the bed with your legs dangling, mouth parted since you were mid-sentence. Can I not get my husband to myself no more? In your slowly building aggravation, you made out the voice on the other side to be a woman's, but with Kento's broad back you can't exactly see the other person, you just know you wanted them gone so you can finally tell him exactly how you felt. It's been what felt like months of you feeling like this, the shadow of loneliness finding its way to creep up on you in your home. Even with your little girl who can be a handful, there's an emptiness to your household.

”Sorry [ Name ],” Kento started as he approached you, placing his hands on either side of your body so that you're practically caged in his arms. ”You have my undivided attention. What's plaguing my wife?” It was now or never. But your confidence in telling him decreased at his words. The way he claims you as his wife and how close he was to your body. It reminded you of an intimacy that's been long forgotten.

”Ken, I know your work is important to you, but it feel like that's all you care about.”

You put your words in a blunt manner so the main cause of your stress and why you came to see him, but you didn't prepare for the way his face would show every bit of stunned on it. It didn't stop you, in fact it urged you on to continue. ”You could be home, but it doesn't feel like you're actually there, y'know? You work long ass hours then come home, say a few words 'nd go to bed. 'S been like this for the past few months.”

It felt satisfactory to get everything off your chest, you even heaved a little sigh due to your shortness of breath. You're too scared to look at your husband though, scared that what you'll face is something much harsher compared to the loving doctor you married. Did I sound ungrateful? Did I even make sense? You question your decision as the silence dragged on. Did I say something wrong?

”[Name], love, ” you hear his voice call out. Ever so smooth and gentle, that gravelly undertone making you want to look at him. But before you can do it yourself, his hand is reaching towards your face, cupping your cheek in a manner to get your attention. He tilts your head in his direction, and it only then makes you realize that Kento's face is so damn close to yours. You swear he can hear your heartbeat with how loud it sounds in your ears.

”Been doing this to my sweet wife for the past few months? Leaving her all alone 'n bothered, sweet thing I don't deserve you.” That name. He knew it was your favorite to hear.

Your eyes start watering subconsciously, you don't even realize it until Kento's finger is wiping away the tear that slides down your cheek, grazing upon your jutted out bottom lip that pouts at him. ”Y'missed me and I couldn't even tell. 'M so sorry baby. Don't cry, you know I love you.”

Fuck. You didn't want to cry, not like this. Your damn hormones were screwing you over, but to hear such three simple words that you've said all throughout your marriage had more tears coming down your face. Embarrassed, you look down again, but your husband doesn't allow it for long, tilting your head back up while his thumb rests on your lip.

”Can't leave my angel crying 'cause of me, tell me how you want to fix it.”

”Ken—” You're whining. You weren't supposed to whine, but you did. Not only did you mentally miss him, but you missed him physically too. You feel the fabric of his dress pants in between your thick thighs, keeping them apart even though you so badly wanted to close them tight.

”Tell me how you wanna fix it [Name]. I'll do whatever you want, I can't stand seeing my angel cry 'cause of me.”

His tone sounded so sweet again, even a little lower than before, but it still carried the same way through the air. You missed this part of him, all of him. You missed the long nights you'd spend of just loving on each other, pure and raw, drowned in one another. The way he'd take his time with you, waiting for your reaction to continue, you need that intimacy you had before, and you needed it bad.

”Kento.. all I want is your attention, your love. I just want you.”

”There's my girl. No more cryin' okay?”

You nodded to his sweet words like an obedient puppy, becoming subservient to the way you felt like you had his attention finally. Tears kept coming down your face still, but Kento was there to kiss them all away, just like he's gonna kiss any other pains and aches away from your body. It's his job after all, to fix any ailments and illnesses, especially for his wife.

You just need a little bit more love, that's all.

The blonde's kisses trail from your tear-stained cheeks to your pouty lips that he catches with his own. Immediately you whine at how much you missed having his mouth on yours, feeling yourself become like puddy when he begins guiding you to lay down on the hospital bed. It's then you're reminded where you are, and your kiss that lasted too long and too short ended.

”What– what if somebody comes in?”

You sounded exasperated even from such a short kiss when you and your husband have definitely done worse. You look so cute worrying and out of breath, he thinks to himself, but he can't get lost in the ocean of thoughts he has about you otherwise he'd be there staring at your pretty face for hours.

”Nobody is coming in any time soon, angel. I promise.” Even with his reassuring tone you still had your anxiety that you'd be caught being intimate in a public place, and as much as the risk had you rubbing your thighs together all over again, you also wanted to save yourself the embarrassment. ”How're you so sure?”

”I have the rest of the day off, [Name]. 'M all yours right now, jus' like you wanted me. I can't let my wife go untreated, can I?”

As much as you wanted to retort back with something, you responded with a small "no," and kept your silence. You finally have him to yourself. The idea of that alone leads to you initiating a fiery kiss, hands decorated with nails that are blue in color cupping your lover's face since now he was hovering above you. One knee was on your side supporting him on the bed, the other foot planted on the shiny floor as he kissed you with every bit of fiber in his body. God I missed you.

Your hands start sliding all over him, wanting to pry off that stupid button up the more his own large hands slide down your body towards your waist and tummy, one beginning to run circles around your womb area and it ignites all sorts of butterflies inside you. The way he can be so gentle and loving to your body always left you wanting more from him, and right now your mind was screaming at you to take this opportunity to love on your husband. Kento's hands continue moving south until they reach the hem of your decently long dress, pulling it up above your baby bump to reveal your cotton panties to him. So cute. The simple pair made you look all innocent even though he knew you were the opposite.

”Ken.. don't jus' stare.”

Your sweet sounding voice full of need urged him on, and along with your voice and body language he could tell you needed this badly. Don't worry, I got you baby. Prying a finger between the fabric and the side of your thigh where your stretch marks began forming, Kento tugged your panties off slowly, as if he was granting himself the blessing of revealing your semi-naked body to his eyes. He looked so sexy like this. Blonde tuffs framing his face messily, olive eyes staring at your now bare pussy. Just being under his gaze felt hot.

He tapped the side of your thigh to get your attention, noticing how you were drifting off. ”Spread your legs angel, keep 'em open nice 'n wide okay?”

Meekly you nod at his command, doing just as he said because you swear you can feel his breath fanning on your lower lips. All it does is make you want to feel more of that warmth tenfold and you'll lose yourself in raw need without it. Even though you so sweetly asked him not to stare, he can’t help it, the way you were literally oozing as soon as a long finger of his spread your cute lips open. Why couldn’t he go any faster? It’s like he was teasing you on purpose, but if only you understood why he was being so slow with you. His stressed out wife took the journey to see him at work, he has to treat her well or he deems himself unworthy of your care. After all, you’re carrying his child all over again.

Your lips had parted to voice your needs, but before you knew it you felt something hot and wet lick from your opening to your clit ever so agonizingly slow, lips closing on your protruding clit leaving such a long and satisfied sigh to leave your mouth. Your hand slowly made its way to his hair, only messing it up further as your fingers intertwined with his blonde strands. Kento can feel the way your body slowly starts to ease up and unravel with every slow, loving kiss he leaves on your little love button.

His sucking began to become more tenacious and eager, his eyes no longer locked with your pussy but now trailed up your half-exposed body to your lidded eyes that struggled to stay open. He couldn't blame you, after all you expressed how badly you missed him and what kind of husband would Kento Nanami be if he wasn't at his wife's beck and call?

”Baby..,” you moaned in such a darling-like manner. He knew he'd fall victim to whatever request you asked of him. ”More please…, I missed this.”

You're gonna be the death of him, he knows it, and yet he still complies and moves his tongue further down. Keeping a strong, sexy gaze locked on your eyes that peaked above your swollen stomach as he does so. You wanted to break eye contact as you felt your face heating up, as if he were a predator looking at his prey, but you felt his tongue probe at your entrance before entering you in full.

Your breath quicked feeling like the needs you repressed for so long were finally being met the more Kento’s tongue practically explored your insides with fervor. His hands maneuvered to your knees, only to spread them apart further as if he were granting himself more access to your hole. For a second his mouth pulled away, only to return to your clit that looked as if it were calling out to him. ”Y’know I missed you too right? I missed my pretty angel and I missed her pussy.”

”You’re so filthy”, you breathlessly commented, but it still filled you with emotions you haven’t felt in so long, and you were slowly becoming addicted to your husband all over again. The way you felt the vibrations from your aching core throughout the entire lower half of your body had your legs quivering like you wanted to close them, but Kento kept them nice and open to indulge in your flavor. He needed to show his wife how much he loved and appreciated her, how much he relished in the fact you were carrying his second child and enduring the pains all over again.

His right hand began making its way up your leg until his index and middle finger slid inside your sopping hole, the intrusion feeling a little awkward but you relaxed since he allowed you to get adjusted on his thick digits. ”Hohh, that feels good,” you absentmindedly mumbled, the small grip you had on his hair increasing once his fingers began pistoning in and out of your hole.

A feeling distant but familiar began building up within your lower abdomen once his fingers curled upwards, your hips slightly raising off the clean white mattress that began to become soaked in your essence. Kento had his eyes fixated on your body, watching every writhe and twitch.

You look so good like this. He wanted to see more, see the way you lose yourself on him again, see the way your lust for him grows after every orgasm. He needed it like the starved man he was. Your lips were babbling nonsense but the blonde simply blocked it out, hearing muffled ”not yet”s in between sugary moans.

You kept tugging on his hair to get the message across that you were about to cum, but your husband was already ahead of you. He knew. He always knew when you were about to give him your sweetest gift, it came with endless nights spent under his hold. Your thighs threatened to close around his head just to prolong the inevitable, squeezing so cutesy around his head as your whines just kept coming. His tongue felt so sticky and hot and good on your clit. Why was he so good at making you feel like this? Because a husband should know his wife and all her needs.

The bind in your core began to become detangled, feeling like a tight pressure was released as your nectar began coating Kento's fingers that continued to piston in and out of you and leak onto his chin. ”Kennnn,” you drag out through your high, grinding your hips on his face to ride out your climax. Feeling your body shudder less, his fingers finally pulled out your hole, leaving it fluttering so he couldn't help but coo at the sight. ”Get up f'me angel.”

Mindlessly you're doing as you're told, on trembling legs of course. It's been so long since you felt that good of a climax and the only thing on your mind was reaching it again. You watch your husband climb onto the bed in a lying position, making a "come here" motion with his index and middle finger so again you listen. You climbed on top of him until your naked sex is sitting on his clothed lower abdomen, juices staining the dressy material but that was the last thing on both of your minds.

”You know how this goes. Sit on my face.” As if it should've been obvious. You scoffed at the little smirk on his face, the one he usually gets when he knows full and damn well you get shy at the idea of making a throne out his face. Either way you listen because you've been deprived of this, and he knows that. Kento Nanami had always been a man of little words, so he let his actions convey how he really felt. This was his way of helping you release that pent up stress.

You scooch yourself up until you're just barely hovering above his collarbone, but Kento can't have that. You wanted him right? So why couldn't you let him please you like this? The very question had the blonde making his signature stoic face, that is until his hands reach to your thighs, trailing up the smooth skin he's traced without fail until he memorized your beautiful curves. His hands land on your ass, giving the flesh a tight squeeze before he's pulling your cunt on his lips once more. He could taste his own saliva on you, but in the mix of that is your sweetness as well.

Immediately you threw your head back once his tongue entered you, your hands scrambling to grab the railings on the side of the hospital bed. You were being so loud and your husband couldn't get enough of it. Kento knows he's filthy, in fact he's well aware, but it's worth it when you get like this over his obscene ways. Wet muscle leaving its imprint on your gummy insides, hands kneading at your thick flesh. This might just become his favorite thing to do.

Your pussy was still sensitive from your first orgasm, so the burning hot sensation in between your legs was practically screaming at you. Kento's tongue helped none at all and it was quickly becoming too much for you to handle, overwhelming your poor little brain past the point of stupid since you can't even remember the last time you felt pleasure this good in a while. Your knuckles turned a few shades lighter gripping on the sides, your teeth practically chewing your bottom lip as you tried to stay quiet but it felt so hard. Impossible even. Poor thing.

Tears flooded your eyes once his movements started getting more demanding, aggressive even. It was as if he was starved of a proper meal for weeks, consuming every bit of you. The droplets rolled down your cheeks right past your pouting lips. Kento had his eyes glued to your face, and upon seeing your tears his mouth finally pulled away from your sopping cunt.

”I thought I said no more cryin'?” His voice felt like a taunt almost, all sorts of rasp coming behind it. It only made you wanna fuck him more.

”Feels too good..!,” you respond as coherently as possible even though a finger of his was toying with your engorged clit again. He could never get enough of the way you lost yourself on top of him. It only made him wanna feed into your needs more if you were like this just because of his tongue.

Your mouth hung open looking down at him, watching the way he shamelessly kept eye contact with you while eating your cunt as if it were a full course meal, making out with your pussy in such a lewd and wet way it could've been porn worthy. The noises you made urged him on though, wanting to make you louder so nobody could bother him or interrupt your time. Kento refused to let this moment pass up where he has you to himself, soaking wet in between your thighs and singing a chorus of moans.

Fat tears kept rolling down your cheeks, feeling pushed past the brink of overstimulation since the fiery sensation in your stomach was too much. You couldn't even concentrate on the hand moving down to your dripping hole and pushing three fingers inside you. It made your thighs involuntarily close around his head in an attempt to get adjusted, but the doctor didn't give you no time at all.

”This the only time I wanna see you cryin' f'me, okay darling?”

All you can do is nod helplessly, hips instinctively rolling against whatever's giving you the most pleasure, that being his face. Fuck he loved the way you used him to get off like he was nothing but your little sex doll. If this was the only way you'd give him attention he'd be satisfied, you were sometimes too good to be true. Soft sounds filling his ears, the wet squelches of his fingers moving in and out of your hole. You were truly beautiful like this.

”Ken..— Ken! 'M about to cum again, fuck.” You're helpless like this, rendered a babbling angel. His eagerness showed once you finished getting out whatever you were gonna say, a hum that vibrated through your lower being telling you enough that your husband was gonna help you reach another climax. I got you baby.

The fingers inside you curled just a little bit, and it was the sweet pressure you needed to send you over the edge and more. A long drawn out whine left your throat as your gates flooded open. Beads of cum stained Kento's face and clear liquid getting damn near everywhere. He made sure to have his mouth practically latched onto you since he just couldn't let whatever you gave him go to waste. He has to appreciate every last bit of you.

Rendered breathless, you use your hand to push on his forehead to get him to stop, chest heaving as you peek from your belly to get a better look at him. His blonde hair was all sprawled out against the once clean white sheets, eyes blown with every drop of lust imaginable. Seeing him like this reminded you just how sexy he can be. Beneath you, a man with no sense of control around you, all he can do is stare at your face looking like a deer mesmerized by headlights.

You're giggling at the sight as you lift yourself up, him helping you by guiding your hips until you're sitting on his lap, again staining whatever clothes were right there. Catching your breath, the two of you are left to stare at each other in reflection of what you two had done, but all Kento was thinking about in that head of is that you two really need to go home.

[sugar-grigri]

I think I remember you making references to Fire Punch in a few analysis post so I assume you've read that one, but have you read Goodbye Eri, and if so do you have any particular thoughts you want to share on it? It might be my favorite, although it's hard to rank Fujimoto's works because there's something different I like about all of them.

Hi Yuta! or is it Fujimoto?

2022, Goodbye Eri is released and I'm in for a huge slap in the face! I've finally got the chance to talk about it, so thank you!

It's hard to come after the war after this one-shot has been the subject of so much analysis, interpretation and criticism. But I think it's a work that's deliberately designed to be a trap, and the first mistake would be to try absolutely hard to determine whether Goodbye Eri is true or false. 

Trying to detect the true and the false is futile, not that it's really impossible, but arguments could be several pages long and the theories put forward would remain mere hypotheses because no explicit confirmation is given. Quite simply because this is not the aim of the work, nor a satisfactory way of reading it. 

For example, when Yuta's father seems to be getting angry with Eri, we understand from Eri's "And Cut!!!" that it was all a set-up. So, as a good reader, we can only assume that what follows is pure reality. However, the father, now an actor, if he should play his line differently.

As another illustration, when Eri is close to death and Yuta are talking, there are a few hints that they might have a relationship, but this is denied by Yuta himself, in a discussion with Eri's friend. 

The film plays with this to such an extent that all sorts of theories are possible. It could just as easily be interpreted as there being only two films (on Yuta's mother and then on Eri's death), two films but in different ways: one about Yuta's mother and a second film about Eri, as a vampire, with the end scene played by Yuta's father and by Eri before her death.

This explains why, even after Eri's death, Yuta continues to film because the film isn't actually finished yet, the editing being there to reverse the scenes played chronologically, to make it look as if Eri was still alive, and so on. ..

As you can see, it all makes sense, and our preference is purely personal because they all work. But I'm not going to play that game, because it only shows me one thing, and that's that the plot surrounding Eri is deliberately obscure. 

I've seen a lot of people describe Goodbye Eri as a work about dealing with death - the way we want to remember those we've lost, etc... It's about mourning, symbolically saying goodbye, hence the title. Which is true! But it goes further than that.

Eri's plot is deliberately obscure because the right way to appropriate the work is not through her. She's the character we know least about. Physically alone, we learn that she wore glasses and braces. Mentally, she was more annoying than she seemed in the movie. Eri is a mirage in which we won't find answers, so we have to learn to say goodbye.

The only reliable information given in this OS is that everything is filmed by Yuta's phone. And in reality, you know Yuta better than Eri, so it's him you should turn to...

Hi Yuta!

Yuta is almost never shown in this OS, as he is always filming. And when he is shown accurately, it's when he's inspired by other films by watching them with Eri, in other words, he's continuing to work on his own film by watching others. 

Yuta's first film began as a result of his mother's narcissistic desire, as he was celebrating his birthday, discovering his gift, a smartphone, all of which was directly taken over by his mother, who asked him to film her until she died.

By keeping only the good sides of his mother, ignoring all the abusive parts of her, Yuta does not follow his parent's wishes, he does it for himself, showing what he himself wants to retain from his childhood, his story, in order to move forward properly.

But as everything is filmed, it gives the impression that the videos have been passively lined up without any sorting, without any choice. Yuta takes his revenge because he refuses to film his mother until the day she dies, stopping before then, preferring an explosion to conclude his film. It's brutal because it's as if Yuta's tastes, his little touch of fantasy, are suddenly surfacing, while the rest of the film is just as personal, just as him. So when his film is mocked, it's a work so personal that Yuta wants to die. 

It's not insignificant that it's Eri who intervenes, whose only certainty was that she loved not only the films but also Yuta's, simply because she saw not only Yuta's mother in this film but also him, whom she considered to be the best character. She wasn't revolted by the ending, because she was aware of Yuta's touch throughout the film. The same ambiguity then resurfaces, we don't know if Eri is in love with Yuta, she corrects him to say that it's these films, the two are so linked, that liking Yuta's films is tantamount to liking the teenager. 

Yuta follows Eri's desire to produce a film that is above all personal to him, to the point that when Eri sees her last moments narrated by him, she sees Yuta more than herself, because she is seen through someone else's eyes. 

For me, there aren't two or three films, but just one from start to finish. Because you see, we've said goodbye to Eri, we've got out of her tricky story to reflect on Yuta, but we still haven't stepped back enough. Because you know who made the film, and it's not Yuta, it's Fujimoto. So, third stage :

let's salute Fujimoto. 

The film we've just seen in this OS deals with a number of overlapping themes, the way in which a loved one is portrayed, the relationship with others, death, creation, but above all, the extent to which a work is personal. Goodbye Eri is a pretext for Fujimoto to show us the extent to which even the cutting is the fruit of reflection, is already a message.

In this OS, all the boxes are in the video format of a smartphone, each moving, static shot depends on Yuta, just as each shot is in the third row, drawn by someone.

People make the mistake, like the first audience of Yuta's film about his mother, of relating to works as linear stories to be trusted, even if they film his mother every day, Yuta's editing is his way of counting a story, it is certainly not the truth in all its neutrality. It's only at the moment of the explosion, which expresses the most of Yuta's personality, that people get upset.

This offbeat, absurd explosion is something that Fujimoto punctuates in his works, yet they are both thought out and personal to him. But they are often mocked as a way of poking fun at his work. What Fujimoto is saying is that the work doesn't become brutally personal for the controversial, offbeat moments, just the way he depicts a scene from life is personal. 

People believed this version of the author's mother, otherwise they wouldn't be outraged by this disgraceful way of portraying this nice woman at the end, so in itself, Yuta's film worked. But all this is just a pretext for Fujimoto to point out that he is the author of all his other works, CSM, Fire Punch, Look Back, Just Listen to the Song... They are just like another film made in response to the positive or negative reactions of the others.

Fujimoto likes to trace the common ground between these works, which respond to each other. Each one, placed side by side, is an attempt by Fujimoto to upset his audience a little more, a second or third try.

The mistake is to separate the author's touch from his work, just as we are tempted to focus more on Eri than Yuta. Just as Fujimoto reminds us through this OS, who writes, draws Goodbye Eri. The first part of CSM was turned upside down by the fact that Makima was a demon from the start, abusive to the point of being the antagonist.

A violent and abusive maternal relationship. The design of the mother is also a bit similar. Mentions of the breasts, something that also went down quite a bit and left its mark on a lot of readers because it was so out of sync. The emphasis on cats... A rejected boy. A work focused on female characters.

Goodbye Eri is a work in which Fujimoto makes fun of himself, his works and the things that bring them together. Yes, there will be an explosion if the author so decides. Yes, Eri can live again, be a vampire, if the author so decides, but what's to stop him making his characters die, and then bringing them back to life a few pages later? 

The characters' plots are the authors' playgrounds, whether you like it or not. You can't detach works from their authors, or read works as unrelated things because they were written by the same person. Talking about death, life, mourning, love, with a touch of fantasy is what Fujimoto does in each of them. 

So if you're lost, remember that what you're reading isn't in the title but in the author. 

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, y'all, it's rant time again. Buckle up.

A new report just came out from Public Citizen highlighting the dangers of using apps and AI foraging guides for identifying mushrooms, particularly when mushroom foraging. It's the latest in a string of warnings that are fighting against a tide of purported convenience ("just take a picture and get your answer instantly!")

I've ranted about this since last August, and I also wrote up a detailed post on how to identify an AI-generated foraging guide. I'm also including info on the limitations of apps and AI in The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go. I'm not just saying this to toot my own horn--it's because nature identification, and teaching it to others, is literally what I do for a living. So this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

I teach a very, very specific sort of identification class; whether we're focusing on animals, plants, fungi, or all of the above, I walk people through a detailed process of how to observe a given organism, make note of its various physical traits and habitat, and use that information to try to determine what it is. I emphasize the need to use as many sources as possible--field guides, websites, online and in-person groups, journal articles, etc.--to make absolutely sure that your identification is solid.

And every year, I get people (thankfully, a very small minority of my students) who complain because my two-hour basic mushroom hunting class wasn't just five minutes of introduction and one hundred and fifteen minutes of me showing slide after slide of edible mushrooms. There are so many people out there who just want a quick, easy answer so they can frolic in the woods and blithely pick mushrooms like some idealized image of a cottagecore herbalist with a cabin full of dried plants and smiling frogs or something.

While I do incorporate a bit of information on getting started with the app iNaturalist in my classes, it is as only ONE of MANY tools I encourage people to use. Sure, it's more solid than most apps because, in addition to the algorithmic I.D. suggestions it initially gives you, other iNaturalist users can go onto your observations later and either agree with your I.D.s or suggest something different and even explain why.

And yet--even as great as iNat is, it and its users can still be wrong. So can every other I.D. app out there. And I think that is one thing that the hyper-romanticized approaches to foraging--and nature identification in general--miss. In order to be a good forager, you HAVE to also be good at nature identification.

And nature identification is an entire process that requires you to have solid observational and critical thinking skills, to be able to independently research using many different types of tools, and be willing to invest the time, patience, and focus to properly arrive at a solid identification--if not to species level, then as far down the taxonomic ladder as you can realistically manage. (There's a reason even the experts complain about Little Brown Mushrooms and Damned Yellow Composites!)

People mistake one single tool--apps--for the entire toolkit. They assume any book they find on Amazon is going to be as good as any other, and don't take the time to look up the author to determine any credentials or experience, or even whether they actually exist or not. It doesn't help that the creators of these products often advertise them as "the only [book/app/etc.] you need to easily identify [organism of choice]!"

I mean, sure, the world isn't going to end if you never question the birdsong results on the Merlin app, or if you go through life thinking a deer fern is just a baby western sword fern. But when we get into people actually eating things they find in the wild, there's often no room for error. There are plants and mushrooms that can kill you even if you only eat a tiny amount. And even if they don't kill you, they may make you wish you were dead for a few days while you suffer through a whole host of gastrointestinal nastiness and other symptoms.

There aren't any shortcuts if you want to be safe in your foraging. You HAVE to be willing to do the work. And any teacher, author, or product that says otherwise isn't being ethical. I'm glad to see more people speaking out against the "fast foodization" of foraging in regards to overreliance on apps and the existence of AI foraging books; I just hope it's enough to prevent more people from getting sick or dying.

[ginnysgraffiti]

i didn't see any posts about art or patrick playing so i decided to write it myself :)

(forgive me if something's wrong, i haven't played tennis for a long time.)

this is just something random i've been keeping in my drafts, but don't worry i'll write some smut about art too.

also, tysm for all your requests, i swear i'm trying to keep up :,)

coach as reader, tennis obsessed art, determined art.

ART DONALDSON x yn.

that morning you were in a white tennis skirt and polo shirt, a cream-colored cardigan on top. a pair of new socks and a brand-new blindingly white pair of tennis shoes on your feet.

art was wearing his usual white uniqlo playing t-shirt with the blue collar, matching the sweat cuffs and shorts.

"okay baby, let's go over it again. patrick is taller, stronger, broad shoulders and definitely more confident. how will this affect your calculated and sharp strategy?" you asked, making sure he had perfectly locked his eyes into yours and was listening carefully.

"if he's stronger than me, i need to get him up to the net as much as i can, use perfect angles and always land properly. and he's probably feeling pretty confident, so i need to shake him, right at the beginning. if i can get patrick zweig worrying about whether his best friend is gonna beat him, then his best friend is gonna beat him."

"good answer." you smirked satisfied, resting your hands on your hips. you kissed him softly and caressed his cheek as he got ready and left the locker room.

when you walked towards the stands and took your seat, patrick won the toss and elected to serve first. you could visibly notice how tense your boyfriend was, but only an experienced coach could see how tense his muscles were.

art stood at the baseline and bounced the taut strings of his racket against his palm. he held the grip and turned it over in his hand.

patrick was standing across the court, in a black impatto branded sleeveless tennis t-shirt with red decorations on the right side and some checked grey shorts. as he stood up, you could see just how broad and tall she was, his cocky smirk playing on his lips as always as he searched for you in the crowd before turning around to art.

love serving love.

patrick tossed the ball up in the air and then cut across it with his racket. as art rushed for the ball, he calculated perfectly and thought that his best bet was to take it out of the air quick as you instructed him. but as he got in position, he saw his opponent approach the net. he was assuming art didn't have the power to hit a passing shot. and so, at the last minute, he hit a deep ground- stroke. zweig had to rush his return and hit it into the net.

the first point was art's.

love serving 15.

he looked at you as he made his way back to the baseline, and you smiled proudly.

your boyfriend crouched and waited for patrick's next serve. patrick's face was tight now. no more smirks.

suddenly, the ball came across the net, fast as a whip. art couldn't return it.

15-all.

serve after serve stunned both you and art, and you found yourself torturing the fabric of your skirt intensely.

30-15.

40-15.

and just like that, patrick zweig had won the first game.

art glanced over at your seat and saw your brows furrowed. tho, you couldn't tell what he was thinking.

now it was his serve. he landed each one exactly where he wanted it to go. he was setting up his shots a few strokes ahead. he kept him running all over the court. but every time, patrick returned it. their long rallies would inevitably end in patrick's favor.

art stayed alert. he met the ball each time, but regardless of how smooth and calculated his shots were, it just didn't matter. zweig took the first set 7-5.

you could tell art was exhausted already. during the break he wiped his sweat off with a towel, not even looking at you. you breathed in deeply. your boyfriend could not lose; it was not an option.

art thought that by getting that first point off him, he would have thrown him off. but he had actually awakened his opponent. art had given him a reason to play his fucking damn best.

art started to go for aces, each and every serve. it was risky; he knew he could double-fault and you had warned him about it, but it felt like his only shot. when the first one went well he looked at you, and you nodded with a serious look.

having your permission, he did it again.

his point.

his first serve was hard and bounced high. zweig dove for it and hit it out.

30-love.

your boyfriend glanced over at you as he went to pick up the ball, and you saw a smile creep over his face.

art hit another flat serve, whizzed past patrick.

40-love.

your boyfriend had him. just by looking at him from your seat, you could feel the tingle in the top of his head and down his back. you could feel the space in between his joints, the fluidity of hid muscles. you felt a hum in your bones.

art served the ball, low and fast. he returned it with spin that art understood innately, he knew where it would go, how it would bounce. art hit it back with the full force of his shoulder. pat's return went long and art went on to win the set. the score was now good for both, and it would come down to who won the next set.

zweig's first serve on the next game had art rallying back and forth for the point but ended in patrick hitting a low groundstroke that whizzed past him. you wanted to scream as you saw the ball bounce past art's racket. but you knew a coach like you wouldn't stand for that.

patrick zweig took control of the court. he broke art's serve, and he held him own. art showed up to the ball. he ran like hell. but it wasn't enough. when pat scored the last point, art fell to his knees. he held on to the ground for a moment and closed his eyes.

you stood up and focused your gaze on art as he approached patrick to shake his hand and pose for the photographers.

(...)

you and art made your way towards the locker room. as soon as he stepped in he immediately packed up his stuff and zipped his racket in its cover.

when he collapsed on the seat, you sat in front of him and looked at him closely.

"he said i played fucking amazing. amazing! he only said that because at the end i'm the one who fucking lost..." art said, his voice catching and breaking.

you shook your head. "you're wrong."

art raised his eyes and raised one eyebrow, annoyed.

"that was not the lesson you should take from this. try again." you continued.

"i hate tennis." he said, and then kicked his racket on the floor.

"no."

"i fucking hate patrick zweig." another kick.

"no."

at your word, he looked down at his worn out shoes. he was nervously playing with his fingers, and could not look at you.

that was the moment where he would think he had finally failed you, that he had proven himself unworthy of all the faith you had in him.

"are you done? -you said as he turned to look at you- with the hysterics?"

"i've never been prouder of being your girlfriend and your coach today than i have ever been in my life." you finished.

"how is that possible?" his lazy voice cracked before he could even finish.

"i know you're upset because you lost." you said, taking his racket so he wouldn't kick it again.

"i lost. which makes me a loser."

you shook your head with a smile on your face.

"i have been so focused on teaching you how to win that i have not taught you that everybody loses matches."

"i'm supposed to be the greatest, not everybody. art donaldson, the greatest player."

you nodded. "and you will be. today you proved that. you played the best you've ever played in your life today."

he looked up at you.

"have you ever hit that many groundstrokes that bounced just in front of the baseline?" you asked.

"no."

"have you ever served three aces in a row like you did today?"

he started tapping his foot as he listened to you. "no. but...m-my first serve was great today." he said, and it sounded more of a question than a fact.

"you were on fire, baby. you ran down the ball almost every shot."

"yeah, but then i hit it into the net half the time."

"because you are not yet who you will be one day."

he started tearing a bit, his guarded heart opening ever so slightly.

"every match you play, you are one match closer to becoming the greatest tennis player the world has ever seen. you were not born that person. you were born to become that fucking legend. and that is why you must best yourself every time you get on the court. not so that you beat the other person, or patrick, or-"

"but so that i become more myself." he finished.

"so...you're not gonna stop coaching me?" he breathed in a low whisper.

"never wonder again, baby. never."

"...we'll start again with training?" he asked shyly.

"we'll start again with training."

"and i'll beat patrick's ass?"

"and you'll beat patrick's fucking ass."

"...love you baby."

"love you too art."

"can we go for churros at the bar?"

"sure we can. the heart shaped ones."

[five-flavor-soup]

I personally think that basing your interpretation of how Ursa treated Azula on Zuko’s memories shown in ‘Zuko Alone’ is kind… incorrect. You can obviously — they’re the only real images of their childhood we get in the cartoon, other than the tiniest of snapshots in sepia — and that’s fine, but for me personally I just don’t think they’re complete enough.

These memories are from Zuko’s perspective. Not Ursa’s, not Azula’s, not Ozai’s or Iroh’s—Zuko’s perspective, his memories. And they’re all about him and Ursa together: every one of these memories have Ursa at their centre. We see her protect him and be kind to him, see her be physically affectionate and gentle, see her encourage him to be kind to himself and to Azula.

They essentially tell us that Zuko is Ursa’s son first, Ozai’s son second. Ozai remains a hovering, intimidating shadow on the sidelines (we still don’t see his face, we don’t see him genuinely interact with his children, and we see him irritating his father while being a very hands-off kinda dad himself) but Ursa is fully present. And ‘Zuko Alone’ is about Zuko trying to figure out who he is: the memories show that he views being his mother’s son as an exceptionally important part of his identity, which means they are about Zuko and his relationship with Ursa alone.

They are not supposed to tell us that Ursa neglected or abused Azula emotionally—that she only focused on protecting Zuko, while leaving Azula to suffer in Ozai’s incapable hands. Sure, we see Ursa scold Zuko for acting like Azula and cuddle him right after, and we see her scold Azula for acting mean and not cuddle her right after, but the key differences here are that Zuko shows guilt after frightening the turtleducks and Azula doubles down on trying to scare Zuko. The behaviour is different and will be, by any halfway decent parent, treated differently. 

I’m absolutely not saying that Azula wasn’t abused, because she 100% was. She was absolutely abused by Ozai, and I’m not ruling out that Ursa didn’t have a hand in how Azula ultimately turned out. But my point here is: these memories are far too limited and narrow for the viewer to properly determine whether Azula was treated incorrectly by Ursa. 

Zuko isn’t going to remember an intimate, lovely moment between Ursa and Azula when all that’s on his mind is his identity, and how it’s entangled with his mother and what she may have sacrificed for him. Additionally, he’s not particularly fond of Azula at this moment in the show (she did kind of kickstart his being a refugee, disregarding how the audience sees this sequence of events having begun), so he’s not going to remember her fondly either. Why would Zuko try to remember Ursa’s relationship with Azula at that point, instead of his own?

(Small tidbit: we also... don't know if Ursa's last words to Azula were 'what is wrong with that child', disregarding the comics which completely ruin azula anyway. Again, the memories are from Zuko's perspective and therefore won't show any private moments between Ursa and Azula. We're not even certain whether Azulon actually ordered Ozai to kill Zuko, or if that is simply what Azula interpreted it as/thought would be funny to say--causing the sequence of events that ultimately put Ozai on the throne. But whatever)

[lanawinterscigarettes]

um hi hallo :3 can i pls have dr gregory house x male intern reader… with feedism elements where the reader is the feeder role…….. :3

yeah, absolutely! just a disclaimer, I've never written anything relating to feedism/a feeding kink before so I'm not sure if this is all that good or not but I tried my best :]

(this IS something for kinktober just in case y'all are curious. I know because I got a previous ask for it) thanks for requesting something! <3

Kinktober 2024 Day 6: feedism (feeding kink) with Greg House x male reader

Warnings: smut/nsfw content, feedism, feedee House, feeder reader, alludes to House having slightly disordered eating, slight praise kink, belly rubbing/massaging, romanticizing/sexualizing weight gain (by the reader), brief solo masturbation from the reader at the end but no real smut other than that because I wasn't really sure how to incorporate that properly

House wasn't like most doctors. In fact, he wasn't like most people. His bedside manner was horrible and his social interactions could definitely use some work. Something that could also use some work was his strange eating habits.

It wasn't that he didn't eat. He wasn't anorexic, and he certainly didn't care what he looked like. He just didn't always put eating at his top list of priorities.

To be quite frank, he didn't view it as something he needed to do in order to survive. He needed to have cases to figure out, or else he'd go insane. And he needed his constant supply of Vicodin in order to help chase the pain away. But he didn't need to eat in order to live. The way he viewed it, he was better than that.

Sure, he had a habit of stealing Wilson's food from him, but that was more of a power thing than anything else. The bottom line was, if he had better things to do he most likely wasn't thinking about getting fed. Was it unhealthy? Most definitely, but it also wasn't exactly healthy of him to pop a pain pill every time a muscle of his tweaked wrong. Still, he managed.

Most people didn't notice this bad habit of his, and if they did it wasn't brought up. Obviously his addiction to painkillers was much more pressing than if he skipped the occasional meal.

You, on the other hand, thought it mattered a lot more than that. You noticed how he only seemed to be in the cafeteria at the hospital if he was either with Wilson or trying to avoid Cuddy. He went there out of boredom or if he was looking to kill time, not because he thought he had to eat. This was something you were bound and determined to help him work through, regardless of whether he wanted you to or not.

If he had any idea on what you were up to, he didn't say anything about it, too busy bossing around the ducklings to waste time with yet another intern, one that didn't really interest him at that. He was quite content to carry on as usual despite the plan you were forming to get him to change his poor eating habits.

There really weren't that many places in the hospital that he went in order to get away from Cuddy, which certainly made your job of finding him a whole lot easier. His office, Wilson's office, and funnily enough the chapel were his main choices. When he couldn't be found there, you figured maybe he was in an exam room down at the clinic, pretending to work. Turned out you were right.

You listened closely outside the door to Exam Room One to see if you could hear anyone in the room besides him on the off chance that he actually was with a patient. When you didn't hear anything, you decided to knock.

"With a patient!" He called out immediately in response, not even giving you the opportunity to speak first. Typical House.

Opening the door regardless, you found the unsurprising sight of him lounging in one of the chairs while playing on his Gameboy, the sound of beeping and video game music filling the room.

"Can you come back later? I'm a little busy right now." His attention was clearly focused on his game as he didn't even look up when he spoke.

Ignoring his request, you shut the door and entered the room. "When was the last time you've eaten today? And stealing Wilson's fries at lunch doesn't count."

"Well, hello to you, too," he muttered under his breath in response, purposely avoiding the question.

You weren't having it. "I'm serious. It's not healthy for you to go so long without having a proper meal."

"Yeah, I got that. You must forget, I'm also a doctor. A real one, at that. I'm not a temp or an intern like you are, I've got tenure."

His snarky reply didn't waiver you in the slightest. "If I go get you something from the cafeteria, will you eat it?" You knew how argumentative he could be, so you did your best to appease him through offering a compromise.

"I'm not hungry right now," he stubbornly insisted as he shut off his game and stood, grabbing his cane from where it was resting in the corner so he could use it to walk with.

Sighing in exasperation, you went to stand in front of the door so he couldn't leave. "I'll get you a Rueben, cold, with no pickles. That's your favorite, right?"

He paused, seeming intrigued by your offer, if not a little suspicious as well. "Go on."

Knowing you'd finally caught his attention, you decided to continue. "I'll bring it up to you in your office, and you can eat in privacy while you avoid everyone else."

"Except for you, apparently. You seem awfully eager to keep me fed." It was true, and you knew it. You had hoped it would come across more like you were just concerned (which was technically true) but clearly he'd picked up on your own selfish reasons to want to help him.

"One sandwich, that's all I'm asking. If you don't want to do something like this again after we're done, you don't have to."

At first you thought he was going to flat out refuse, but much to your surprise he actually seemed to contemplate it for a moment or two. "One sandwich. And I'm eating it in my office, away from other people," he wagered as if you weren't the one to suggest it in the first place.

Not wanting to miss the one chance you might have, you wholeheartedly agreed to his conditions and finally stepped away from the door so he could leave. It was a bit hard for you to keep your excitement at bay at the prospect of getting to feed him, though at first you didn't know why you were so intent on it. In any case, he'd agreed, and that's what mattered.

When you got up to his office, he was already lounging in the chair behind his desk, playing absentmindedly with a rubber band. "Oh, good. You brought me my lunch. And here I thought you were going to let me starve to death after you were so insistent on feeding me in the first place."

You rolled your eyes in response to his obvious sarcasm as you set the plastic wrapped sandwich down on the desk in front of him, along with a can of soda and a bag of chips.

"Hey, you said I only had to eat the sandwich," he pointed out in a whiny voice that was in the likeness of a petulant child.

"Just eat what you can." You sat down in front of him so you could watch him eat, something that he didn't seem to appreciate judging from the way he stopped opening the wrapping on his sandwich and stared back at you.

"What, do you want to feed me yourself?" He questioned in a mocking tone, obviously under the impression that you'd get offended and hopefully say no before getting up to leave. You answer was the exact opposite.

"Okay." That was the only thing you said before you stood and made your way over, taking the sandwich from him and continuing to unwrap it before handing him half. "Eat."

The command was soft yet firm, clearly not one that was meant to be ignored. For some strange reason he felt compelled to actually listen to you, something that didn't happen with him very often. Maybe it was due to the fact that you actually seemed to care and weren't just trying to spite him, like most people.

He took it from you, his icy blue eyes gazing upwards into yours as he began to eat. It seemed as though he was deadset on proving to you that he could eat when he really wanted to.

"There you go, good job."

House didn't get flustered, he was certain of it, but something about the way you said that gave him the little push he needed to keep eating, wanting to make you proud. The thought itself was utterly ridiculous, him needing someone else's praise in order to complete such a stupid and minor task. He finally broke his gaze from yours, instead choosing to focus on the sandwich he was taking slow yet deliberate bites of.

Once he was finished with the first half, you picked up the second and held it out to him. "Do you want the second half yet, or do you want to wait a couple minutes first?"

He let out a scoff at the question, as if he were offended by it. "What, did you think I was going to save it for later?" Your lack of a reaction at his usual snarkiness caused him to push down whatever he'd planned on adding to that, choosing instead to quietly take the other half of the sandwich from you to eat.

It was a strange and unfamiliar feeling, not having his stomach ache with its usual hunger pains. He didn't always immediately listen to the needs of his body unless it was the shooting pain he typically felt in his leg when he went too long without his pain meds.

For once, his stomach didn't feel empty and desolate, like how most of his relationships tended to be. It was odd, but not unwelcome.

Somehow you managed to convince him to at least start on the soda and chips, something that he didn't regret in the slightest. Nor did he regret it when you offered to rub his stomach afterwards, knowing it might ache a bit due to the expanding it was doing from the food intake.

"There you go. See, don't you feel better after actually eating something for once?" Your voice was low and soothing, your hand warm as it made slow, circular movements on his stomach. He could feel how gentle your touch was even through his clothes.

"I guess," he grumbled, making it clear that he still wasn't overly fond of letting you take care of him, even if it was only in one small aspect of his life. "This is just a one time thing though, alright? So don't get your hopes up."

Nodding your head, you made it seem as though you were agreeing with his statement that this was the only time it would happen. You, however, knew this was only the beginning. Somehow you'd get him to form the habit of eating more frequently, even if you had to be there with him.

You imagined what it would be like, getting to feed him everyday. The thought of being able to ensure his health and wellbeing while also helping him gain a few pounds... You wondered how he'd look with a little bit of extra fat on his stomach. You wondered if it would be noticeable through those band shirts he always wore to work.

The movements of your fist wrapped around your aching cock grew faster and more needy as you recalled your memories of what had happened earlier that day. The way he so willingly trusted you to feed him and even let you rub his belly after did nothing but bring you closer and closer to the edge until your seed finally spilled out onto your hand.

You panted heavily as you laid back on the bed, your eyes fluttering shut as you tried to catch your breath. You were sure it wouldn't take him long to realize your ulterior motives behind wanting to help him eat more, but you couldn't really find it in you to care. Not when the fantasy you had of him letting you coax him into gaining a little weight was far too delicous to let go of.

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[outsidereveries]

hello! I am new in kpop and i am starting to accompany enhypen,bts and IVE. They overall are good people?Because i don´t want stan bad people persona in behing camera ik. What cards say?

I asked about the members' overall personality (whether it's good or bad).

most likely to be nice

ive's jiwon (liz): the devil rx

might be the most nice out of all of the mentioned members in these 3 groups. she tries to show the most authentic side of herself - the good and bad. to me she's first because i appreciate the raw side more than anything. liz tries to be really pure with dives and her solo stans, so i can feel whatever she shows is genuine.

bts' jung kook: 6 of pentacles rx + 10 of cups

to me he is possibly the second most nice person out of these 3 groups, i feel so. jungkook is helping other people, sometimes even more than needed. this might make jungkook more naive than he really is like, but he actually loves to do that. he's very optimistic boy, very happy, there's only positive things i can see and feel. like i said before, a total sunshine. to you, he might be the most nice out of the members of these 3 groups.

enhypen's jungwon: 2 of cups

very communicative with people, he loves to get close with his audience and he actually cares for engene and not only them. it feels like he's someone who's willing to help even if he cannot to do it.

bts' yoongi (suga/agust d): knight of pentacles

very determinated to work what he loves! despite everything he's been through, suga loves to do music, beats and these things that are related to his idol job. suga is working for the feeling of the hobby itself and to him is pure admiration of the job itself. it makes him happy and if army and his solo stans are happy, like his work and so on, he'll be even happier. he lives for the job, it makes him happy and feel that there's purpose for his life. (compared to other people, i see suga has changed quite a lot and has grown up as a person. he'll do the same with his friendships and not only, the relationships with people)

bts' jimin: page of pentacles

he is pretty much a perfectionist. jimin's intentions to everyone are purely good but he tries to have the perfect friendships and etc. with people which sometimes isn't good because sometimes we have to get into any hardships. jimin seems to have this perfectionism as a habit. overall the vibes i am sensing are good but he has some traits that are hard to change.

bts' seokjin (jin): 2 of wands

since he got out of military recently, i see he tries to adapt. jin also seems really nice person, like without a doubt, but he has hard time with adapting and re-adapting. since i feel his thoughts rather than is he good or not, jin might not know either not because he did something but rather than the environment in hybe has changed too rapidly. jin seems to not be used into the corporation as it is nowadays.

enhypen's jake: page of cups

compared to jungkook, jake is also a bit naive. he might be a fool at times, but i sense he's not that experienced in real life for some reason. he might be introverted in some aspects and even have issues to communicate properly, but he's not as bad as some people might think. he's really nice person and might sometimes look like a lost puppy, but once you "get to know him", he's not that bad.

enhypen's sunwoo (sunoo): 5 of wands rx

also nice boy but doesn't like arguments. sunoo's very chill and hates quarrels. he'd prefer to either not take a side or give something to someone else just to not hear screams and feel bad. i am not sure if it's related to how he grew up in his family, though. this seems to be a side he has for some time.

bts' hoseok (j-hope): 7 of cups

he's also nice, like really nice. why he's low compared to his other members though for me is because he's extremely multi-layered. he's not only sunshine, he's not only the main dancer of bts. hobi has a lot to say, if you let him to do it. he wants to be raw and pure and just himself (to be as similar as liz) but considering his status and other circumstances, he cannot do that just yet. currently hobi is overthinking more than usual and if hybe just make him free to talk what he wants to say, he'll just do it, but just not yet..

bts' taehyung (v): the moon

even more multi-layered than j-hope. nowadays he is harder to get mainly because he wants to "break free". the freedom he seems to long for is rather related to his beliefs, they seem to be the main key. he feels too many emotions at once. why he's so high, though, compared to the other people, is because i sense this blockage is temporary and possibly because i've been in a similar situation before. he's not bad at all but he currently is going through a period that make him feel mixed. despite him being in the military, v seems to be around coworkers there that are trying to wake him up spiritually.

bts' namjoon (rm), enhypen's heeseung: 5 of swords rx

both boys are neutral to me. so, about namjoon, i see he's a bit better compared to heeseung. rm has been through a lot too but he seems to be in a "not this but not that" situation. heeseung on the other hand, i cannot sense much except that he might be currently really passive. heeseung seems to be harder to get. both boys are deeply in their thoughts and in different situations but they aren't as bad as they might be. currently they just are a bit harder to reach simply because they're overthinkers, especially bts' leader.

ive's gaeul, ive's wonyoung: 4 of pentacles rx

wonyoung is better to me. her mental health is so and so and that affects her a lot. despite how popular she is, wonyoung seems to get through the things in a odd way and it just cannot be explained by everyone. she's very generous and thankful for this lifetime but nonetheless she tries to be chill and to strengthen her mentality (psyche). gaeul on the other hand, my intuition said "uh she's so and so as a person". i don't have anything else to say.

enhypen's sunghoon: 5 of pentacles

he's currently getting through a lot and i am unsure where to put him. intuition-wise and through older readings, he's more introverted but despite that, he's also really nice.

enhypen's riki (niki): 9 of swords rx

from older readings i've sensed his personality differs a lot from most of the members, so that's why he's this down.

ive's rei: ace of pentacles

she's workaholic to the extent she doesn't think about anything else, like work is her only purpose. rei's "more nice" than yujin because she doesn't have ill intentions behind all of this and that's her way to cope with .. anything. i don't feel much for her too.

ive's yujin: king of pentacles

another workaholic to the extent her work is only on her mind. the difference is that she gets so obssesed over the work she has that she loses herself.

enhypen's jay: 4 of swords

.. very passive person, more than heeseung if i have to compare with him. he's down here because this trait of his is prominent.

ive's hyunseo (lesseo): 3 of swords

sometimes she's too brutal with her words. exteremely honest but also critisize a lot without working on herself for example. basically, she has traits that aren't good. i don't see she's manipulative but she has some work to do if she does want to change.

least likely to be nice

my ask was based on one card for each member and it's allegedly the "overall look". there might be some discrepancies here and there so i also used my intuition.

done on 29.06.2024

[sirfrogsworth]

I keep wanting to write the ultimate post on autotune but I just never quite finish. I think there are 3 versions of almost-done autotune posts in my drafts.

So I'm going to leave out the technical and try to simplify my points.

Autotune is not the devil.

It is not good or bad.

It is just a tool.

It can be used well.

It can be used poorly.

And most importantly...

Autotune cannot make you sound good.

In fact, reverb and EQ can do more to make a bad singer sound okay than autotune.

All autotune does is correct pitch.

Singer sings the wrong note.

Autotune shifts that note.

Nothing about that makes you a better-sounding singer. It doesn't change your tone. It doesn't give you more range. It doesn't give you more power or dynamics. It doesn't give you vibrato.

It just makes you... in tune.

I have never heard anyone say of a great singer, "Wow, they are so in tune!" No one cries over a beautiful performance because the singer hit all the right notes.

And I guess if you are wildly out of tune, people might say you are a bad singer, but I would actually say that makes you an *inexperienced* singer. And whether you are good or bad cannot really be determined until the tuning issues are addressed. (Which most of the time is just a matter of training and practice.)

Good singers can sing the wrong note. It happens quite a lot, actually. Especially with material they aren't familiar with yet. In fact, every singer hits wrong notes. Even people with perfect pitch hit the wrong note. They just know immediately when it happens. This is because singing a note is a physical action and if your vocal mechanisms are not warmed up or you have a cold or the temperature is hot or cold, it is impossible to know if you are going to hit the perfect pitch at any given time.

This is why people warm up and rehearse and do scales before actually singing anything.

Autotune's main use is to fix good takes that have a few sour notes. That is what it is used for 95% of the time. Otherwise you are burning through expensive studio time doing take after take until you hit every single note at the perfect pitch. Sometimes a singer will do an AMAZEBALLS version of a take and they hit one sour note and instead of trying to create that lightning-in-a-bottle moment again, they just nudge the one note and save the performance.

You do not notice autotune the vast majority of the time. If it is used properly, autotune artifacts are completely inaudible.

In fact, I would argue that autotune makes inexperienced singers sound worse. That robotic sound you sometimes hear means the singers were very out of tune. The more out of tune you are, the worse autotune sounds. The more in tune you are, the more invisible it is.

There are very few people who are actually tone deaf. Which means everyone can be taught to sing in tune with decent consistency. And so if there is an instance where someone uses a lot of very obvious sounding autotune, it means they weren't interested in practicing. Or that they got tired of doing multiple takes and had better things to do.

And it isn't that they are a *bad* singer necessarily, but they are probably a lazy one.

Now, there is a different discussion about using autotune to "fix" notes that probably don't need to be fixed. Some variation in pitch can be a good thing. It can show emotion and give notes some spicy flavor. Sometimes singers will start out of tune and shift up to the right note. Like a vocal guitar bend. Being perfectly in tune can sound sterile. And sometimes overzealous producers will let their perfectionism get the better of them and make sure every single note is accurate to the cent and it brings a lifeless feel to the song.

When musicians complain about autotune, this is usually what they are talking about. Not some nepo baby with a record deal who couldn't be bothered to practice their song enough to get it mostly in tune when they sing it.

You should only use autotune to fix pitch when a note truly feels wrong. Like, it is so out of tune that it breaks your immersion.

Otherwise, leave it spicy.