#and I was talking about that briefly with Alice last night too

[captivemuses]

Wriothesley #3

Wriothesley has an extra soft spot for Sigewinne because for all the trouble he went through during his own time as an inmate down in the Fortress, Sigewinne was the only person who was consistently nice to him and who he knew he could trust.

She always treated his work related wounds, or injuries he got from other inmates from fights in the Pankration Ring, or just injuries from other inmates because they got in an argument with the teenager. Sigewinne never judged him for his crimes, or what he did while he was trying to survive in the rather chaotic environment down in the Fortress while the previous administrator was in charge. She just took good care of him, patched him up, gave him that little extra TLC that he didn't know he needed (nor was he aware that some of it was influenced by Neuvillette himself), and became the one safe place for him in the entire hell hole.

So now that he's in the position of authority to ensure that Sigewinne always gets treated kindly, there won't ever be a time that the head nurse is allowed to be talked to with anything but kindness and respect. Not without the Duke having something to say about it.

[gothicgaycowboy]

𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒉𝒊𝒎 𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒌

𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙙 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩: 3.1k

𝙨𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙮: you make Aemond’s longtime librarian fantasy come to life.

𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨: 18+ no minors, fem dom, sub aemond, a cock ring, oral sex (m receiving), deep throating, role play (kinda), unprotected sex, creampie, no use of y/n, edging (m receiving), both reader and aemond are little losers, established relationship, pet names, embarrassing family dinner conversations, a cameo from aemond’s lesbian moms and aegon.

𝙖/𝙣: this was originally going to be the beginning of my kinktober but I didn’t even get a chance to write out any of my other ideas in time. also big thank you to this anon who inspired this fic. hope you enjoy 💋

Up until now you thought you and your boyfriend had no secrets between you, but as it turns out you were wrong.

It started a week ago, you and Aemond drove up the countryside for a weekend to visit his family for Alicent’s birthday. Everyone tried their best to make it up there for big celebrations.

After three years together you feel like a member of the family yourself, Alicent and Rhaenyra even refer to you as their second daughter. You feel more at home with them than you do with your own family — and more importantly you felt like they couldn’t shock you anymore. That lasted until dinner.

Aegon and Aemond had gotten into a tiff about something juvenile that you can’t even remember anymore. Words tossed back and forth at one another from across the table like a tennis match. Rhaenyra was about to interject when Aegon blurted out: “Did you ever tell your sweetheart about what you did with my rag mag?”

Now that caught your attention.

Aemond’s face became beet red. His eyes practically bulged out of his skull in fear. Aegon smiled cockily at his brother’s expression, poking a forkful of their mothers dinner into his mouth.

Alicent and Rhaenyra tried to object to this conversation as soon as the word ‘rag mag’ was tossed out, but were cut short by your boyfriend.

“You wouldn’t.” It was clear Aemond was attempting to sound intimidating when it was obvious to everyone else he was fearing for his life.

“Oh, but I really would.” You vaguely remember overhearing Rhaenyra warn Alicent to cover her ears. Aegon turned his full attention to you, his eyes locked with yours. “When your precious boyfriend was still shorter than me he snuck into my room, snooped through my collection, and ripped out the naughty librarian spread all for himself.”

For the first time since you had met him Aemond became shy. You didn’t quite understand why exactly. Your boyfriend was no saint when it came to sex. He was the one who suggested most of your perverted ventures thus far, so why had he never told you this story himself?

After the table was cleared and conversation changed Aemond popped outside to take a quick smoke break — the perfect opportunity for you to interrogate Aegon a little more. You slid beside him as he washed that night's dishes like the good little son he can be occasionally.

“What was all that about?”

He glanced up at you briefly from the task in front of him. “What was all what about?”

“You know…” you suddenly realised how humiliating it was to talk about sex related topics with your boyfriend's brother. “The magazine drama?”

A knowing smirk crossed the​ Targaryen’s lips. “Ah, you want to know why Aemond threw such a fit about his little secret being outed.” He placed a white salad bowl onto the drying rack before facing you. “Well there are a few theories I have about it — first and most simple of all: maybe he was just embarrassed to have his middle school perversions exposed to our parents. I’m not too convinced by that one though given the simple fact that you two have been fucking at practically every family event you have been invited to thus far.”

It was then your turn for your cheeks to heat up with embarrassment, the memory of being caught half naked by Rhaenyra in the shoe closet still haunts you.

“So that leads me to my second theory: he’s ashamed of you knowing about his librarian fetish.”

Your brows pinched together quizzically. “But that doesn’t make any sense, we’ve done way crazier things together than a little kinky roleplay.”

Aegon closed his eyes and let out a long exhale like he was about to be sick. “I can’t express to you how much I didn’t want to know that.” You smiled at him apologetically letting out a timid ‘sorry’.

The purple eyed boy rubbed at his temples before opening his eyes again. “Okay, I’m probably gonna throw up later and really regret asking you this but: have you ever been in charge? Ya know, taken on the reins while you two are…” He held his hand over his stomach dramatically. “Having sex?”

your gaze remained on the clean kitchen floor as you answered his question. “No…”

“Well there you go, now if you’ll excuse me I need to go drink this conversation from my memory.”

Since that night you have been on a mission: make Aemond’s fantasy come to life.

It started like all good missions did — with a bit of thorough research of course. Aemond is a stickler for details and you needed all of them if you were going to pull this off successfully. The magazine from all the detail you managed to pull out of poor Aegon was a Hustler and based on the years Aemond would have been in middle school you managed to comb through every edition of Hustler during that time until you found it: the librarian spread.

This took you to the next step in your plan: the outfit. There wasn’t really much to it, obviously most of it was pulled off the models body in favour of showing off what was underneath, but you focused on what remained. Petite framed glasses, a white button up (tossed aside on the desk she sat on but you figured she was probably wearing it at some point in time), black pencil skirt, stockings, garter belt, and most importantly no panties.

All of this planning and waiting had finally led up to today. You have a day off to get your shit in order and Aemond’s shift ends early. You are quite proud of yourself honestly. Who knew being a research nerd could come in handy in the bedroom?

Now it was just time to see if Aemond appreciates it as much as you do.

From your spot in the kitchen you hear your boyfriend's keys enter the lock to your apartment – your cue to bolt into the bedroom. Inside the bedroom your heart races, nerves suddenly getting the best of you. What if he didn’t like it? What if he thinks you’re trying to belittle him? What if he thinks you look stupid?

“Baby?” Aemond calls from inside the main hallway.

“In the bedroom!” Well there was no going back now. Fuck it. You press play on the playlist you curated and pose yourself sitting on top of Aemond’s desk, just like the picture.

The door creaks open, revealing the white haired man to you. For a second he doesn’t look up, good eye still locked onto his phone. “What’s with the mu–” His eye meets with yours and stops him in his tracks. The bag he is carrying falls off his shoulder. The way he blushed at the birthday dinner has nothing on the state of his face now.

A few long moments pass by and the two of you remain perfectly still. It makes the knot in your stomach worse. “Please say something.” You beg as Aemond remains gobsmacked.

“You– how did – wh – you look–” He babbles like a small child.

“Please make it intelligible.” you try to lighten the mood as your hands play with each other anxiously.

It seems to shake Aemond out of his idiotict trance. “You look like the librarian from my magazine.”

“I do.” You change your tone to sound calm and collected while feeling like you’re about to explode inside.

“Why?”

“I thought you might appreciate it if I initiated something for once.”

Aemond soaks in the vision before him giving you a swift up and down glance. The pit continues growing in you but you refuse to let it show. “Do you?” You ask, impersonating all those sexually confident people you’ve seen in movies.

“I do.” Thank fuck.

Aemond rips the jacket from off his shoulders, practically running across the bedroom to reach you. He pulls you up off the desk but before he has the chance to kiss you you put a stop to him. Both hands push his face away but remain holding it so he’s forced to look at you. “Not so fast there mister.”

His face is priceless, a perfect mixture of confusion and desperation. “From now on I’m in charge, alright? You are going to lay there like the good boy I know you can be, while the sweet little librarian takes good care of you, understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” His pupil dilates so wide you can hardly see the usual violet colour of his iris.

“Yes you understand who?”

A surprise smirk graces your boyfriend's beautiful face. “Yes, I understand…ma’am.”

“Good, now take off your clothes and get on the bed.” In a flash Aemond’s clothes came flying off you like you have never seen before. You knew this would get him worked up but you did not expect him to be this into it.

As the Targaryen’s boxers hit the floor and he hits the plush mattress you pull open a bag holding your secret weapon for the night. With the ‘weapon’ hiding behind your back you move up the bed straddling his muscular thigh, sitting your bare cunt directly on his skin. His already hard cock twitches with excitement. “Fuck me, are you not wearing any–?”

“No.” you say plainly, like you did this everyday. “Now I’ve got a little something special for you before I completely blow your mind.”

“I really don’t see this getting better than it is but if you say so,” He shrugs his shoulders. “I trust you.”

From behind you you reveal it: a black rubber cock ring. “I wanna see you squirm.”

Aemond’s silver-blonde locks splay out onto the pillows as he plops his head back onto the pillows. “You are trying to kill me, woman.” He groans.

“Oh you love it.” With that you wrap your manicured hand around his cock, stretching the black rubber around the base.Your boyfriend jumps slightly at the contact. “How’s it feel?”

“Wonderful, now can we get on with the main event, please?”

“Don’t forget baby, you’re not the one calling the shots tonight. Be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you.”

“Always.” He smiles. You can’t help yourself against his charms, flopping onto him to plant a sweet kiss to his lips. He wastes no time reciprocating it, taking the kiss from zero to a hundred faster than you can snap your fingers. His tongue slithering its way into your mouth. Your moans vibrated against his lips. Aemond was definitely the best kisser out of all the guys you had been with.

You reach your right hand up pushing it between the two of you, separating your lips. Aemond is clearly about to protest as you cut him off. “Spit.” No bullshit, just straight to the point. Based on the focused expression on his face the dots are taking their sweet time to connect in his pretty little head. Then it clicks and Aemond looks like a kid in a candy shop. He leans over your palm, saliva dripping down into your hand.

As the spit sinks across your palm you reach down to rub the wetness around his throbbing cock, stroking him up and down painfully slowly. Your other hand makes its way to his heavy balls, massaging them delicately in between your fingers.

You always loved playing with Aemond’s cock, but you were never allowed to take your time with it. It’s the one thing you despise about your boyfriend constantly being the one in charge. This was your time to truly tease him like he had been teasing you since you got together.

“Are you gonna be a good boy for me?” You eye him over the glasses perched on your nose.

“Fuck yes!” Aemond yelps with pure euphoria.

“You kiss your mothers with that mouth?” You continue your teasing, the sound of the shucking filling the bedroom.

“No but I really wanna kiss you again — ma’am.” You appreciate that even though he was struggling through it he still uses your proper title.

“Come here baby.” Like a man starved Aemond pushes himself up to meet your lips once more. Now was your chance. With Aemond distracted by the kiss you slowly pull away your hand from his sack to grab the remote for the cock ring off the dresser. Time to hope he enjoys this little extra surprise.

Bzzz…

Aemonds hips slam up into your fist in shock. “Jesus- fuck!”

“Now you know how I feel, huh?” You say recalling all the times that the blonde had used your vibrators on you.

The vibrations make his rod jump, shaking so fast your eyes can’t even comprehend its moving at all. God it’s hot. It had become far too normal for Aemond to watch you shake and your eyes roll back into your head with ecstasy but never you with him. It makes you feel powerful.

“F-feels so fucking good—” Aemond struggles to be coherent through the throws of pleasure.

Your hands pick up the pace, tightening your grip around him. His eyes are becoming more and more glassy as the moments pass by. Settling down till your stomach touches your knees, skirt (barely) coved ass poking out to the air. You kiss your way down his chest, leaving lipstick marks as you go until you reach the base of his vibrating cock.

Your mind swarms with ideas of how you can possibly torture him, but you decide against anymore prolonged suffering because of how desperately you need him in your mouth. You lick your way up to his leaking tip, keeping eye contact the entire time.

You run your hands over the sides of his hips as you suck the tip into your mouth. Preparing yourself with a deep breath through your nose, you dive down, deepthroating the rest of him into your throat. The tip of your nose touched the smooth base of his pubic bone. He always filled your holes so perfectly.

The sounds of your throat bobbing over him mixed with muted vibrations and Aemond’s moans make your cunt pulsate. You and Aemond are not new to dirty but something about this type of dirty got you going in a way you have never felt before.

“I’m gonna come—fuck! I’m gonna come down your perfect throat—” That is all you need to hear to pull yourself away from him (as much as you hate to).

Wiping the saliva from the corners of your mouth you press the button on the remote of the cock ring, turning the vibrations off. Aemond whines like a scorned child. A sound you're not familiar with from him, but you could picture yourself getting used to.

“Did you really think that I was going to let you come that fast? I need to make you earn it first, baby.”

He looks up at you, begging. “How? Please just tell me how I’ll do anything, I just need to be inside you. I wanna be your good boy.” His voice cracks like he’s on the brink of tears.

“You have to address me properly.”

“Anything for you ma’am.”

“Now, beg.” You tug the base of his cock into your hands, jerking him off like you were in no rush.

“Please…?” His brows knit together like a kicked puppy.

You halt your movements and grip your boyfriend’s length, not enough to actually hurt him, just enough to make Aemond whine once more. “God do you even want me to fuck you? I said beg.” You say while pulling the almost sheer white top from your body, leaving the skirt and stockings in their place though.

“Please fuck ma’am? I promise I’ll be good for you, I need to be inside of you so bad. I love your cunt so much, I need it around me. I need to feel you come on me, please?”

“Aw, look at that, you are my good boy after all.” With that you are fully on top of him. Hands planted onto his firm chest while you lean forward to tug your skirt up, revealing the lack of underwear beneath them. With his eyes thoroughly distracted by your bare cunt you pull his aching tip inside of your soaking wet entrance.

You had sex not two days before now but somehow the stretch of Aemond inside was still a shock to your system. Maybe it’s because you had never had him like this, crying below you like just being inside you was already the greatest pleasure he could experience.

“Jesus—Christ!”

You take your time adjusting to him, gradually sinking lower towards his abdomen. Your clit grazes the black silicone, alerting you that you’ve reached the bottom. Pushing yourself all the way back up to his tip you slam down as you speak. “Did all that begging make your cock harder, Aem? Do you like begging for me?”

“So much…” The words are almost inaudible through his moans.

“You don’t come until I let you, understand?”

“Yes ma’am.”

It only eggs you on more. The sound of wet skin smacking and whimpering fill your ears. No thoughts pass through either of your heads.

The rocking of your hips became more frantic, desperate. Your soft wet walls hugging your boyfriend like a vice. Aemond’s reach up into the pillows, gripping so hard they change from pink to white instantly.

Your mask begins to fall at the pleasure building in your core. Legs shaking at either side of Aemond’s hips. Just like that you pull the blonde up from his horizontal position, his grip falling from the pillows. Lips crashing together in a blur as sweat pools down both your backs. “I’m so fucking close, can I come, please?” His begging is muffled against your mouth.

“Soon, I promise. Rub my clit for me baby?” He obeyed immediately. His pointer and index finger caressing against your pulsing clit. “Fuck yes! so good Aem.” Your hands wander to his hair, like you are the master and he’s your little puppet.

You can’t hold back anymore, the sensation of his lips against yours mixed with Aemond’s precise movements against your bud send you hurdling towards your orgasm. “M’coming, come for me aem, do it for me baby—” Aemond follows fast behind you, crying out your name as he reaches his peak. His cock painting your insides with his cum.

You come back down to earth together, a jumble of words spilling from both of your lips: I love you, thank you, so good, kiss me.

You collapse into a puddle on your boyfriend’s sweat soaked chest. His fingers travel through your hair as you both catch your breath. As he tucks the lock behind your ears he finally speaks coherently. “So, are you gonna tell me how you managed to replicate the exact outfit from the original photo I used to wank off to or…?”

You smile, lifting your head to face him and his pink flushed cheeks. “A great magician never reveals their secrets.”

[wildemaven]

caught kissing santa | dave york

-> pairing: dave york x f!reader

-> word count: 1586

-> content warnings: 18+ blog; established relationship/reader is married to Dave and stepmom to his kids, mentions of food and drinks, non-religious Christmas celebrations and Santa beliefs, alluding to sexy time but no smut, kissing, mentions reader is wearing pajama pants, fluff, soft Dave, one use of ‘good girl’.

-> note: this literally came to me this morning and i whipped it up during nap time. Not beta’d, so all mistakes and misspelling are my own fault!! -> masterlist / holi-dave masterlist

“So let me get this straight. You saw Santa last night. In the flesh. Just standing in our living room?” 

You hear Dave ask Alice to retell her story again from where you’re standing at the kitchen counter, pouring steamed milk into your coffee. Except this time, he encourages her to tell it at a slower pace  so you both could catch every word of it. 

“Yeah!! I was thirsty and wanted to get some water. So I got up to go downstairs, but when I got to the stairs I could see him in the living room.” Alice says, sitting across from Dave at the kitchen table where there’s a huge breakfast of pancakes, waffles and all the sweet toppings laid out. Her excitement is infectious. Her innocence is still palpable and going strong, as she states she saw Santa with her own eyes. 

“And what was he doing?” Dave encourages Alice to share more as he spoons several helpings of  mini chocolate chips onto his stack of pancakes with a hearty serving of peanut butter melting over the top. 

“Putting our presents under the tree.” Her words were muffled by a mouth full of sliced strawberries. 

“Hmm. I guess that makes sense. Where were you Molly, when all this excitement was going down?” Dave looks over to the youngest of his two girls, who’s been enjoying her own helping of pancakes with a mixture of berries and chocolate chips piled on top. 

“Sleeping.” You snicker into your cup at Molly’s blunt response. Her mild temperament was proof enough that the apple doesn’t fall far from the Dave York tree. 

You turn and lean against the kitchen counter, so you can watch the rest of their conversation unfold. 

It took some convincing to get Dave to go along with your idea of dressing up as the Jolly Man in Red this year. Knowing that Alice gets up every night to get herself a glass of water, it was the perfect set up for her to happen upon. Thankfully Dave folds easy to your convincing pleas and a good make out session on the couch late into the night seals the deal. 

Alice had come to you a few weeks ago about the matter. Asking about the validity of whether or not Santa was real. She had heard her friends talking about how they were getting too old to believe in such a silly thing and how it was their parents all along. You could sense the turmoil of her wanting to still believe in the idea of Santa, but also wanting to feel a part of her friend group who seem to be eagerly growing into their not quite pre-teen selves. 

As her stepmom, you didn’t feel like it was your place to have such a turning point conversation with her. Wanting to leave that for Dave and Carol to broach the topic with her if it were to come up again, supporting whatever their approach would be. You told Alice that Santa is real and he makes sure to bring a little holiday magic each year to everyone, no matter how old they are. Your answer seemed to satisfy her inquisitive mind and gave you an idea to give her a little extra Christmas gift in case this would be her last year believing in Saint Nick. 

“What was Santa doing?” Dave sits back into the chair to take in the rest of what Alice had to say. His arms crossed over his broad chest. Your attention is briefly drawn to the way his gray nightshirt pulls tight over his shoulders and back, then quickly refocusing back to Dave and the girls. 

“Putting all the presents under the tree. He had a big bag of them, too.” Her arms stretched out to give him an idea of how big the bag was. 

You smile at the way Dave is giving her his full attention. Never letting on that he was the one wearing the suit late into the night as he placed each present under the tree in the living room, while you watched him from where you sat under a blanket on the couch. Snapping a few photos of him as he really got into character with each gift. Pausing every so often, his hands on his waist, complaining how miserable and hot it would be to actually be Santa in the thick red suit and beard for an entire evening. He even warned that your gifts would be lost if you continued to laugh at his misery. 

Pushing off the counter, you join the three of them at the table. Settling into the open chair next to Dave, as you continue to sip from the warm coffee in your mug. 

“So did you say anything to him? Ask him if he brought you anything special this year?” You ask Alice. 

“No! I was worried I would scare him away and that he’d take our presents with him.” Her eyes widened as shakes her head no. It warms your heart hearing her response to this whole situation, the exact reaction you were hoping for. 

“Oh! I didn’t even think of that. We wouldn’t want him to take everything away that he brought for us.” You say looking over to Dave who’s smiling into his own cup of coffee. 

“He also seemed a little busy once he was done putting all the presents out. So I just went back to bed. Wanted to be surprised when I woke up this morning.” You’re confused by what she means when she said he was busy.

“Busy? How so?” You ask before taking another drink. 

“Well—“ She pauses and looks at Dave, as if to search for the right words before continuing, then back to you. “I saw something else before I went back to bed.” 

“What would that be?” Dave’s gaze shifts over to you momentarily when he inquires about what exactly Alice saw. Clearing his throat as he adjusts his position in the wooden chair and grabbing for his mug to keep his hands busy, his grip on it tightened and his knee bouncing at a steady pace. His fidgety movements are a telltale sign that he’s anxious— valid, given the way Alice has you all hanging by her every word at the moment. 

“I saw you kissing Santa under the mistletoe that’s hanging over the fireplace.” Alice looks you straight in the face when she says it. 

Dave nearly spits out the sip of coffee he had just taken. Coughing into his napkin as silence takes over the entire room. Molly halts her pancake devouring to stare at you with a shocked expression. 

“Oh! Umm, well—“ You fumble over your words. Sheer panic runs through your body as you try to come up with something quickly as to why Alice would have seen you kissing “Santa”. 

“Hey, girls look at what time it is. Your mom is going to be here in 20 minutes to pick you up. How about you go on upstairs to get your stuff together. Brush those sticky teeth and get dressed so you’re ready to go when she gets here.” The girls cheer in unison as they both hop off their chairs and run in the direction of the stairs that lead to their rooms. The bombshell revelation is long forgotten now. 

“Oh my god!” You let out a big sigh and slump down in your chair, your head turning to see Dave silently laughing to himself. “She’s going to ask me again why I was kissing him— but I think you bought me enough time until they’re back from Carol’s.” 

Dave reaches over and grabs your hand, pulling you from your chair and into his lap. Your arms drape around his shoulders, your temple resting against his forehead. His hand smooths over your pajama clad thighs, the other resting at your hip where he gives you a few gentle squeezes. 

“Thank you for doing that for her. She might not believe in him next year, but she’ll have this Christmas as a fun memory to tell her kids when they’re asking whether or not Santa is real.”

“Thankfully all she saw was the kissing— or she would have been scarred for life.” Dave says between the soft kisses he’s giving to your neck. 

“You’re the worst!” Playfully hitting his shoulder. 

“That’s not what you were saying when Santa was showering you with all those gifts last night.” His eyebrows waggle as he looks at you, rolling your eyes back at him. Your face heats up at remembering just how many gifts you were given.

“How about when the girls leave, you slip back into that red suit— forget the beard. And you can give me some more of those wonderful gifts.” You whisper, as if your suggestion might be heard by two sets of small ears. “I might be in the giving mood and have a few for you as well.”

“I don’t know. Have you been a good girl this year?” Dave asks in a low sensuous tone. 

“The best!” You manage to say before his hand is pulling your face to his, kissing you with earnestness. 

The sound of feet bounding down the stairs cuts the kiss short. Alice and Molly making their way back into the living room to pick up where they left off with their new toys. 

“Merry Christmas, Sweetheart.” Dave places the softest kiss to your lips. 

“Merry Christmas, Dave.”

[cwritesforfun]

please please please i beg you write another Emma Darcy x Fem!reader pleeeeeeasssee

Emma D'Arcy x Fem!Reader: Fake Dating

You work as an actress as well. You were Alicent in House of Dragon.

Prompt idea from @prompts-of-the-pond - “I’m auditioning next month for the love interest of a new movie they’re making, but I’ve never been in a relationship… Can you tell me what it’s like? Or, actually, show me, it’ll be easier.”

Y/N = Your Name using She/Her/Hers pronouns Emma's pronouns are They/Them ** I do not own any House of Dragon plot points briefly mentioned

Masterlist

Y/N's POV

You call Emma.

((Start of conversation)) Y/N - Heyyyyy Emma - Hi are you drunk? Y/N - No and you took forever to respond. Emma - What? I answered immediately. What are you drinking? Y/N - A whiskey neat. It's not usually what I drink, but I needed a drink tonight and it was all I could find in my house. I don't even know whose it is. Emma - Haha are you going to be sober for our interview tomorrow? Y/N- Yes of course. I know how to hydrate. Water water water! All anyone talks about is water. Emma - You crack me up. Why did you call? Y/N - Wanted to hear your voice. Emma - Ok well I'm actually busy, but I can call later to talk more. Y/N - No, I'm fine. Bye. ((End of conversation))

You fall asleep immediately after.

Your interviews with Emma for House of the Dragon are borderline flirty every single time. You've thought about asking them out, but you're worried about what would happen if season 3 happened, and what if you didn't work out? It's messing with your head to think about dating your co-worker. Not to mention, you drank too much last night and it went to your head. You have a major hangover and are struggling.

The next day, you finish making a home-cooked dinner and pour yourself a glass of wine. Emma arrives on time and is excited for the dinner.

Emma asks, "So what's the occasion?" You answer, "I had something to run by you. It's kind of help for an upcoming role." Emma asks, "Oh and you need my help? You're more than capable of anything you put your mind to. You don't need my help." You reply, "Thank you, but no. I’m auditioning next month for the love interest of a new movie they’re making, but I’ve never been in a relationship… Can you tell me what it’s like?" Emma asks, "You've never been in a relationship?" You answer, "No, I mean I've made out with plenty of people at parties and been on a couple of dates. But, I just thought of it as something fun that happened for a day or a night. None of them felt long-term." Emma asks, "You say people, so you're into everyone?" You answer, "Yeah, I'm pansexual and like just about everybody, except for jerks." Emma laughs and says, "I can show you what it's like to be in a relationship, it’ll be easier.” You ask, "What do you mean?" Emma answers, "I mean, we take each other out on dates and we act like a couple. It'll be good for me too. I haven't dated a woman in a while and I already like you, so it'll be easy for me." You reply, "I like you too. I just don't want to ruin our friendship because we still work together, especially with the renewal for the next season." Emma replies, "Every great romantic relationship is based on a friendship." You reply, "Ok. So what do we do now?" Emma answers, "Now, we enjoy a nice meal together and maybe watch a movie then we see where the night takes us."

You spend the next month going on dates and you feel yourself starting to fall for Emma.

You're watching TV when you hear someone knock at your door. You open the door to see Emma standing with roses and dressed very sexily. Emma exclaims, "They’re offering a free bottle of wine to couples on Valentine’s Day. I made us reservations for 2 hours from now. Get dressed. We need to leave in 30 minutes to make it." You nod and Emma follows you to the bedroom. You show Emma outfit options and they decide on the outfit that matches theirs.

You arrive at a restaurant that overlooks the valley and its sunset. How did Emma score this prime space on Valentine's Day? OMG! The waiter walks up and exclaims, "Welcome lovely couple. We're running a special promotion for those who booked a month ago to receive a free bottle of Chardonnay wine to thank you for booking early. May I pour you both a glass?" A MONTH AGO?!?! You nod and Emma answers, "Yes for both of us, thank you." The waiter tells you the special menu and then they bring out the appetizer.

Emma asks, "Hey Y/N, you went silent when we got here. What's going on in that pretty brain of yours?" You answer, "Um first off, the location is beautiful and this is so perfect at sunset. And second, the waiter said you booked a month ago. Did you mean to take me here or did you mean to take someone else? I'm so sorry if you couldn't bring who you wanted to this because it's truly spectacular." Emma places their hand on yours before saying, "I like this spot too. I came here once with my parents, but we didn't get to sit by the window... I made the reservation right after you asked me to date you to help you with your role. I knew this holiday would fall within the month, so I knew you had to experience Valentine's Day as my girlfriend... I did want to bring you here. I don't want to be here with anyone else." You reply, "Ok uh cool. Thanks then." Emma nods and smiles.

Emma drops you home after your dinner and you go back to study your lines for your audition. It's tomorrow.

Emma drives you to your audition because you're way too nervous to drive right now. Emma tells you that they'll be at the coffee shop across the street until you're done.

You wait your turn for your audition and it comes pretty quickly. You walk in, deliver your dialogue, and then they ask you to read with one of your character's prospective love interests. So you do. You think it went well.

Emma takes you out to eat afterward and then you decide to go back to your place where you both spend some time in bed.

You keep dating... you start to fall even more in love with Emma. More days and weeks pass...

You're sitting eating lunch at Emma's place when you get a call from your agent, which you answer and you get the role of the love interest.

You stand up and start jumping around. Emma asks, "What is this about?" You put your hands on either side of Emma's head and exclaim, "I did it! I got the role of the love interest! You helped me get the role! Thank you!" Emma asks, "So we're done dating now, is that it? It was all just for the audition?" You move your hands to Emma's and answer, "No no no. I don't want to stop dating you. I want to keep being your girlfriend who is falling madly and deeply in love with you, Emma D'Arcy." Emma smiles and asks, "Are you being serious?" You answer, "I've been falling for weeks. You're everything I could have ever dreamed of as a partner." Emma kisses your cheek and says, "I'm falling ... what did you say? Oh yeah, I'm falling madly and deeply in love with you, Y/N." You smile and you both kiss.

More Emma D'Arcy fanfic - here

[euphoricfilter]

like crazy ~ part one

☆ﾟpart one of four

pairing(s): namjoon x reader, seokjin x reader, yoongi x reader, hoseok x reader, jimin x reader, taehyung x reader, jungkook x reader

genre: fluff || smut || angst || non-idol au || reincarnation au || strangers to lovers || established relationships || regency era au || gang au ||

summary: the story of why you loved to dance in the rain.

word count: 14k

tags/ warnings: duke! taehyung, jimin, fluff, so much love, angst, death(s)/implied murder, mentions of blood, mentioned suicide, mentioned puking, friends to lovers, strangers to lovers, smut in the forms of: implied loss of virginity, unprotected sex (don't be stupid, this is fiction), oral (fem receiving), multiple orgasms, creampie, cum play, talks of pregnancy and babies

notes: this mini series is very loosely inspired by an au idea i wrote a while back about an immortal m/c. i'm going to try and keep updates every other week but i am moving home really soon so if there's any change in the schedule then i'll post about it!! and as always, feedback is always encouraged <3

‘like crazy’ mini series masterlist || my main masterlist

🪐 🌠 ∘₊✧─── *ੈ✩‧₊˚ ───✧₊∘ ✧ ˚ 　· 　　 . 💫

“A lot has happened since we last spoke” You look down at the gravestone, moss and mud having found home over unnerving death, “Sorry it took me so long to visit” Maybe it helped that the sun was out, tears that were meant to fall soaked up in golden rays of light that warm your cheeks rather than wet them. 

You place a bouquet of red chrysanthemums before the thick slab of stone, closing your eyes briefly. Not a thought in your mind as you revel in the peace of what was once a roaring home. 

“Now, where should I begin?” 

The day you remembered your first life, it felt as though your world had tilted off its axis. That everything you thought you’d learnt about yourself was nothing more than a singular star in a galaxy that sat in the vast universe. A mere atom in the formula that builds you as a person. 

It was like a never-ending spiral. Little pockets of a past life you were never supposed to know, hidden between rouge pieces of space rock and black holes of a different time. Where one misstep had you slipping down a rabbit hole of the unknown with nothing to grab onto. Spiralling down like you were Alice, except you were far from Wonderland. 

You weren’t even sure if you were in denial, or if it was all a far-fetched dream crafted by a wild imagination. Perhaps it was something more like guilt, because as much as Jimin was most definitely the love of your life; he was simply the love of this life.

Strange, heart-wrenching emotions had weighed on your shoulders as you remembered a past lover, who had held your heart ever so delicately in soft hands. And you’d held his, cradling it to your chest until your hearts had beaten in unison. Where wild fantasies had painted a forever, that was never going to be forever. 

Your skin had crawled as fingertips that no longer exist had danced over your body, and burning lips, kissing you in places that should only be Jimin’s. A touch not that of your lover’s, digging into sacred places, secret places that you had only ever worked up the courage to show Jimin. 

The sudden force of having to re-live grief when you yourself should also be dead had sent you into a frenzy. With too many sleepless nights, and too many harsh words sent Jimin’s way as you tried to navigate so many new stimuli at once. This love for another man was like a phantom hand latching onto your heart and squeezing, pulling, and sinking you further down. Sinking down, down, down until a whirlwind of emotions had flushed over you. Joy. Excitement. Sorrow. Heart-ache. Hatred. Love. Too much love. So much more love. A different sort of love you had never felt. Love love love. 

There were too many secrets. Secrets you didn’t truly understand, a jumble of words that melt into slush and clog your brain, sparking against neurotransmitters and mingling with more information than you knew what to do with. Secrets that go away when Jimin is stood before you, and you’re reminded of who your heart now belongs to. The world finally silent, and hands stop grabbing you, and you can finally breathe again. It was as if Jimin had become a catalyst for your fraying feelings. 

The story of Jimin had bloomed in spring. 

When the sky felt as though it were at the tips of your fingers if you were to reach up high enough. And the world smelt of flowers and herbs that sat on window-sills of rundown houses. Where skin was sun-kissed, tender and pink on the back of your neck. And all the evils of the world were taking a nap for the afternoon with the cats that lounged in the shade under trees. 

“Excuse me”

You perk up, squinting when the sun hits your eyes. 

The memory of your first encounter with Jimin will always be one you find yourself going back to. Vivid enough that when you dream of this day, you’re often tempted to reach out and touch him as if he were really there. 

His name on the tip of your tongue, tickling the back of your throat and mind, though nothing comes out as the scene replays itself for the thousandth time. 

It’s like a well-practised play, where you pose as the main cast while simultaneously being the audience. (Maybe it was more of a tragedy, a shame when you know how this one ended.) A little jarring that you have no control over your own body, lips moulding around words so many times you could recite the first conversation the both of you had over and over again. 

Sickly regret holding you in its palms, because there are so many more things you want to tell Jimin, words that he’ll never get to hear. 

It mustn’t have been very long after midday when you’d met. Sweat tickling the back of your neck and untamed grass pocking at your ankles and between bare toes. 

The air smelt of burning wood, crackling fire nothing but a whisper in the wind as footsteps crunch over gravel, and children thump into the tall grass and crush delicate flowers under the weight of their tiny bodies. 

The dress you were sewing is dropped into your lap in favour of cupping your hands around your eyes to see the face of your visitor. Your cheeks dusting the lightest shade of pink when you finally get a look at his face. 

You knew of Jimin, as did most on your estate. The other seamstresses never knew when to close their mouths, always tittering away about everyone and everything that lived in the area. Mindless gossip that you always found yourself turning away from when their giggles would get too loud, or opinions too crude for your liking. 

Jimin had become somewhat of an enigma since turning into an adult. Names were thrown around like he weren’t ever to hear them; though you know his mother works in the building next door. Sure to have heard what her friends had been saying about her son behind her back. How much of a shame it is that he has such a nice face but no money. That no woman would ever want to settle for a man with nothing to his name, even if their babies were to be beautiful. 

Or how their daughters had wandered into the city and found wealthy bachelors, who bought them dresses lined with thread made of gold, and jewellery that weigh down their necks. Who eat like royals, and prance around well-kept gardens into their husbands’ arms. 

Thoughts ever so shallow you never found yourself stooping to their level when they’d nudge you for your opinion. The bitter remark that their children had abandoned them had always clung to your lips, because surely if they cared they would have lifted their parents out of commoner status and housed them in luxury. 

The rumours of Jimin’s beauty were true, that much you now knew. Whatever child-like innocence you had left inside of you dubbing him as something akin to a garden fairy; just as you imagined them when you were young. 

Not quite dainty, yet not thick muscle, something a little softer around the edges. And with his overgrown hair haloed by the sun as he takes a step to the side, blanketing you in shade, you think he looks like a dream. 

“Yes?” your head tilts, gaze flitting to the scarce bouquet that he holds. Tips of his fingers evidence that he’d dug them up himself, wet soil clinging to his skin and boots; just as rough and old as the rest of his clothes. Though really you find you have no place to judge when you, yourself are dressed no better than him. 

“These are for you” He thrusts the flowers into your face, entirely too eager as dirt falls into your lap, though you find yourself laughing. Uncaring that your mother’s dress bears the brunt of his enthusiasm. 

You clear your throat when he avoids your eyes, “From you?” 

And he nods, watching from the corner of his eye as you take them in gentle hands as not to let any of the smaller flowers fall out of place. You lay them delicately over your lap, feeling around the grass for your thread. 

You snap it with your teeth, tying the stems of the flowers together so you wouldn’t lose any of them. A pot already in mind that you keep beside your mattress in the bedroom. Dust had collected around the rim, and lime scale clung to the insides, though you think the flowers would look lovely beside you as you slept. 

“And–” he rubs his hands over his pants, bottom lip tucked between his teeth, “And this” He pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. 

The tips of your fingers brush against one another as you take it from him. Curiosity wins over the heated flush that threatens to dust over your cheeks at the accidental contact. 

‘I think you’re pretty’ 

“Would you like to join me?” you smile, patting the space beside you, Jimin’s own lips curling up at the corners. 

“I’m Jimin” 

And you refrain from telling him you know. Because the Jimin you knew was the one that had been tossed from mouth to mouth, built on flimsy lies and stupid expectations. Entirely built by rotten imaginations and women who had nothing better to do than chatter about other people’s lives when their own was crumbling just as much. 

“Y/n” you giggle, outstretching your hand for him to shake. 

Jimin’s eyes curl into little crescents as he smiles, a laugh bubbling up his throat “Nice to meet you, Y/n” 

“Nice to meet you” You nod, “Oh! And, I think you’re pretty too” 

“Do you think I can take you on a date? Tomorrow?” he turns to you, and you blink up at him. 

“So soon?” 

“Too soon?” he winces. 

The corners of your lips turn upwards, busying yourself with finishing mending your mother’s dress, “No, I quite like how straight to the point you are” 

Jimin’s chest deflates as he sighs, “I thought it might have scared you a little” he admits. 

You hum, “No one’s ever asked me on a date before” you admit. 

A wave of ease falls over the both of you, a unanimous understanding that there weren’t any expectations between the two of you. That as much as love was thrown onto the table, it didn’t have to be what the two of you got out of this. 

Friendship, when you’re alone, is just as precious as a lover. Another human being with very human emotions and morals that match yours is just as special as something a little more than platonic. 

“No way” he laughs, shoulder knocking against yours, you bite back a smile, “A girl as pretty as you?” 

“Mmhmm” 

“Then it’d be an honour to be the first” feeling bold, Jimin’s arm slips across your shoulders, “And hopefully the last”

“Ah is that so?” you drop the dress onto the grass beside you, pushing yourself to sit on your heels as you turn to face Jimin. 

He nods, eyes flicking from your own to your lips, then back up again. Perhaps only mapping out your face into his mind, carving out every little crevice that makes you, and burning it into his brain. Or maybe it’s something a little less innocent. 

You lean forward, a chaste kiss pressed to Jimin’s cheek before you pull back; a shy smile mirroring his, flushed cheeks probably matching his too. Though you find yourself liking the feeling, something ever so foreign yet welcome, you can’t help the airy laugh that spills from your lungs. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

It had been the incessant tapping at your window that had woken you up like a little bird was pecking at the old glass. Understandably, fear had settled in your heart, it wasn’t often you were woken up in the middle of the night like this. 

The floorboards creaked under the weight of your body as you slipped off your mattress, socked feet barely making a sound as you plan an easy escape without your uninvited visitor knowing you were going to find your mother. 

You almost trip over your own feet when the tapping stops, Jimin calling out your name. 

You scuttle over to your window, tugging your curtains open, “What are you doing here so late?” you whisper when you unlatch the window, pushing it open. 

“I forgot to give you this” he raises his arm, a singular sunflower clasped between his fingers. 

“You came all the way here to give me this?” you ask, baffled. 

“Yes, I forgot to pick you a bouquet before our date this afternoon” he nods, “That…and I just missed you” 

“Would you like to come in?” you take a step away from your window. 

You see the unfiltered surprise on his face, “Too soon?” 

He shakes his head, “I just wasn’t expecting it is all” 

You pluck the sunflower from between his fingers, turning to place it in the vase with the other flowers he’d gifted you over the last week. 

You turn back to Jimin as his boots thump against the floor, he kicks them off, shuffling in one spot as you take a seat on your mattress. 

“Come here” you hide your smile, biting your bottom lip. He’s ever so careful as he takes a seat beside you. The both of you fall onto your backs like you often did in the grass at the park. 

Soft silver moonlight spills into the room from the open curtains, cool night air washing over the both of you as you stare at the ceiling. 

“I really like spending time with you” Jimin breaks the silence, though his gaze remains trained on one spot of your roof. 

“I really like spending time with you, too” You tilt your head to look at him, unexplainable happiness filling your body until you felt like bursting. 

He hums, next words barely above a whisper. “I hope we can be together for a long time” 

“I would like that” 

Jimin turns his head to face you, the softest smile on his face, “I’m glad” 

 Love with Jimin was pure. The both of you were young enough that it didn’t matter if it were rough around the edges, imperfect; though you wouldn’t have changed it for the world. It wasn’t hard to fall in love. Not when it was Jimin.

For every date he took you on, he would spend hours in the park picking flowers for you. 

His mother had always adored them and could talk about anything botanical for hours. She knew all their meanings and all their worth. Her love for one of the world’s tiny treasures brushing off on Jimin growing up. Over the years the reason for his love had changed, something special to his mother was now something special to him. 

Because flowers now reminded Jimin of you. Where soft petals between the tips of his fingers felt like your skin under his hands, always reaching out for you, holding any part of you he could. How the world around you smelt of flowers as he braided them into your hair or you made promise rings with wilting stems that needed a little bit of love; a new life, a new purpose. 

And of course, Jimin had heard all about the men in the city who bought acres of land for their lovers. Gardens tended to with warm hands but barely there love. And Jimin’s dream was to spend afternoons in a garden, your knees brushing as he plants flower beds and vegetables. So he could wake you up each morning with a new bouquet and a letter as to why he loves you so much. 

“What’s this one?” you tuck Jimin’s hair behind his ear, pressing a kiss to his nose. 

“A red chrysanthemum” He tilts your face, thumb caressing the skin behind your ear. 

“Yeah?” you breathe, eyelashes brushing against your cheeks as his lips barely brush over your own, and Jimin hums. 

You smile into the kiss, “And what do red chrysanthemums mean?” you whisper, arms wrapping around his shoulders. 

“I love you” 

You pull back, eyes widening a fraction. Three words that felt like they should be whispered, a secret that the two of you shared but never spoke about. You knew you loved Jimin in some capacity, you weren’t stupid. And you knew he liked you back, he’d made that known; and yet those three words had you feeling as though love was the only emotion that mattered. That the only thing you could ever do was love Jimin.

“Too soon?” he smiles, thumb running over your bottom lip. 

You shake your head, “No, not at all” 

“This is for you too then” His free hand slips into his pocket. Piece of paper tucked between two fingers, he drops it into your awaiting palm. 

‘I love you ♡” 

Young love didn’t have to be rushed. You didn’t have to stagger after Jimin as he pulled you along, or him chase after you as you sped ahead. It could be late-night talking about all the seemingly insignificant things in life. How hard growing up was or the insane expectations for success that neither of you had a chance of grasping. 

Marriage didn’t have to be your only reason. Not when Jimin had become many of the reasons you liked waking up in the morning, or making lunch for the both of you to share on scarce breaks at work. 

It could be slow dancing in the moonlight, as Jimin hums and crickets chirp. Or afternoons spent lounging in the sun with pinkies intertwined and breaths in sync. Or, now whispered ‘I love yous’ melting into soft kisses to cheeks and lips and noses. Or pink flushed cheeks and smiles that hurt your face, the good kind of hurt that makes you giggle and want one more gentle press of his lips to your own. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

You dip your fingers into the shallow edge of the lake, “It’s pretty cold” 

You peek over your shoulder as Jimin pulls his shirt over his head, lithe muscles flexing under the motions of his movements. Every sharp line and soft ridge of his body was illuminated by the silver light of the moon. 

“Guess we better warm up then” he grins, eyes raking down your body. They then linger on your face, and it’s not often you wonder what Jimin’s thinking. He usually speaks his mind, clingy shyness about his feeling for you never holding him back when it came to his thoughts. 

You laugh, “Perv” your own shirt haphazardly shucked off your body, thrown into a pile with the rest of Jimin’s clothes. 

His arm slips over your waist as you kick your panties off, goosebumps prickling the skin of your arms as your boyfriend takes a step into the lake. 

His chest opens as the initial shock of the cold crawls up his spine. Jimin watches you fidget, arms wrapped around your bare breasts, “Come on, baby” he reaches a hand out for you, walking further until he’s waist-deep in the water. 

An easy smile is on his face as he beckons you over, wading closer to you when you work up the courage to slink into the water. Your breath hitches as you take Jimin’s hand, legs wrapping around his waist. He throws your arms around his shoulders, murky water rippling around the both of you as he spins you around. Your bare chest pushes up against Jimin’s as you pull him closer, your body easing a little at the extra heat. 

“You’re pretty” he murmurs, fingers digging into the meat of your thighs, hoisting you up a little higher. 

You push his hair from his forehead, lips lingering over warm skin when you lean down to press a kiss over his hairline; your hands cupping his cheeks, eyes flickering across his face. You weren’t sure how to explain how you felt, Jimin had always been better at words than you had been. 

It’s just, Jimin in the moonlight always felt right. Because for once the world fell silent, it felt like it finally belonged to just you and him. He looked ever so pretty dusted in silver, honeyed skin kissed by the wonders of the sky. Blemishes nothing but pretty places to kiss, each moment your lips touch his skin another reason for you to wonder how you even ended up here. 

“I love you” you whisper.

But that never felt like enough. Three frail words that you utter over and over again, that should really lose their meaning over time, are the only words that ever seem to come to mind when it’s Jimin. Nothing fancy. Nothing poetic. Nothing that’s more than an ‘I love you’ because no matter how many times you seemed to say it, the weight of your words is always understood by Jimin.  

And he laughs, “How abrupt of you” 

You bite back a smile, “Sorry, it just came out” 

“I might love you more, you know” His eyes close. 

You press a kiss over his eyelids, “I think that’s impossible”  

He hums, “I don’t” 

He peeks an eye open, smiling when he sees the frown on your face. 

“Every breath I take, and for every beat of my fragile heart, I will love you. Until the day I lay on my deathbed, and we must part ways, my love will be yours.” his eyes meet your own, “Though I know we’ll meet in the sky, and I’ll hand you my heart once more” 

“And I’ll hand you mine” Your eyes search his, nails digging into the skin of his shoulders. 

“I’m glad, my love. And I’ll cherish it for as long as you’ll allow me” 

“Forever.” you say, wondering if his eyes really held galaxies or if they simply reflected the sky, “It’ll be yours forever” 

“Then I have something to tell you” 

Your eyebrows crease, and a strange sense of dread and excitement mixes inside of you. And you aren’t sure if you’re jittery from the cold or nerves or fear. 

“What is it?” you urge. 

Jimin swallows, hands travelling over your bare back and down your waist, “I’ve put down two gold coins for that house we had been talking about” 

Your chest deflates, lungs wringing themselves out of all the air you had until you’re laughing. Almost falling backwards into the water if Jimin hadn’t pulled you closer to his body. 

“Have you really?” you breathe, hand tangling into the hair on the back of his head, “Park Jimin, don’t lie to me” 

He smiles, chest shaking with his own breathy laughter, “Never, my love. Truly it is going to be ours” 

You shake your head, “How did you find the money for it” 

“You know I have been working double shifts as of late” he hums, wet hands pushing your hair from your face, eager to see your blooming happiness. 

“Yes, but I thought it was for your mother” 

“She earns enough to feed herself, and I wanted a place of our own. And I know how much we’ve both dreamed of this moment, I had to do it” 

“You’re perfect, you know that?” your lips mould into his, a moan of appreciation swallowed as you tilt your head; tongue poking at the seam of his lips. 

“I do now” he huffs, pulling you in for another kiss by the back of your neck. 

“We’re really going to have a home” 

“Yes” he laughs, “Forever ours” 

“I can’t believe it” you whisper, “Pinch me so I know it is real” 

A moan gets caught in the back of your throat as Jimin’s teeth nip at the tender skin behind your ear, plush lips kissing over your skin, saliva slicked and heated. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

You think you can find your and Jimin’s love in the little wonders of the world. Because as much as he wanted to hand you the universe, both of you knew that was impossible. That your love was tucked away, safer when hidden in dreams of a shared future. Tucked away in a home that was now yours forever, because neither of you had plans of going anywhere. 

As selfish as it may seem, you’d stolen spring to be your own. You’d met in the spring and found a place for yourselves as flowers bloomed. You were Jimin’s spring flower and he was the sun and the moon and all the pretty things in between. 

It wasn’t hard to fall into a routine, your lives were like clockwork, never stopping. It had always been that way, except now you’d stay within the precious walls of your home, and Jimin would return to you before the sun slipped behind the horizon and dinner was finished cooking on the fire. 

Most mornings the both of you would wake up before sunrise, and you’d eat near-stale bread on the chairs Jimin had made outside the front door. Where once or twice a butterfly had come to kiss your nose in good morning, and then Jimin would kiss the same place over and over until you’re both giggling like it was the first time you’d kissed. 

And for the days he slipped out of the house before you woke, he would leave little letters around the house for you to find throughout the day. 

‘Last night I saw a star as you slept, and it reminded me of your eyes. Briefly, I thought to wake you but after seeing you so at peace, I decided to join you instead ♡’  

He’d always had a secret liking towards poetry and found himself sitting with a quill and paper as the moon sat in the sky, thinking of poems about you. And only the ones that made him smile, and made his heart jump up and down inside his chest did he ever leave on his pillow for you to wake up to the next morning. 

You’d clean the floors between sewing as Jimin worked as a blacksmith, lithe frame bulking up over the last couple of months. And he would make sure to leave you a note before leaving the house, with every little thing he would find that he loved about you. 

‘Today’s reason is your smile ♡’ 

Evenings were your favourite, as were Jimin’s. Both your bodies ease into one another’s as you sit on worn-down cushions while playing checkers that your father had carved for you as a child. 

Or you’d simply lay your head over Jimin’s thigh as he sings for you under the stars. Bellies almost full and hearts the most content as the universe writes your love in shooting stars, its ink the soft glow of the moon. 

“I have a surprise for you next week, so take the day off” Jimin’s fingers rake through your hair, tucking it ever so delicately behind your ear. 

You peel your eyes open, “And what about your own work?” 

“I have already asked for a day away, no problem” He smiles down at you. 

“What sort of surprise is it?” your voice comes out barely above a whisper, carried by the wind to Jimin’s ears, who hums. 

He runs his thumb over his bottom lip, “I mustn’t say, it will ruin it” 

“But I’ll be curious” You jab a finger into his stomach, lips curling into a smile when he leans down to capture your lips. 

“Poor thing” he whispers, stealing another kiss. 

‘A clue to your surprise: It reminds me of you ♡’ 

“I still don’t know what it is” You slide Jimin’s most recent note across the table, and he shrugs. 

“Your final clue” He hands you another piece of paper. 

‘Think of when we first met’  

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this excited” Jimin laughs, arm slung over your shoulders. 

You skip ahead a little, walking backwards as you smile over at Jimin who takes one of your hands, helping you twirl as if you were a princess and he was the prince. You’d spent every night sewing a new dress with leftover fabric from the tavern; a special occasion called for a special outfit.  

And Jimin had smiled and laughed so much he’d almost fallen off the back of his chair as you’d spun for him. He’d called you utterly beautiful and then tugged you over his lap for a kiss, maybe two. 

“Of course, I’m excited. I’ve been eager to know what your surprise is” 

“Happiness looks good on you, my love” Jimin stops walking, pulling you to his chest. 

“Then I must look good all the time, with you around” 

“Where do you learn these things” His hand covers his mouth, a lame attempt at covering his smile. 

“You” 

Jimin raises his eyebrows, astounded, “When have I ever been cheesy?” 

“All the time. I’ll show you when we get home, I have all those letters you’ve left me” 

“You kept all those?” he gapes, footsteps falling in time with your own as you both start wandering back down the gravel path. 

“Of course. I still have the first ever one you gave me, and then all the ones that came after that” 

You bite your bottom lip, willing yourself not to laugh when you catch sight of Jimin’s rose-dusted cheeks. 

“Then you may think I’m extra cheesy today” he announces, fingers interlacing with your own. 

“Is that so?” you hum, shoulder knocking against his arm. 

Jimin turns to you, “Do you trust me?” 

You blink. 

“Of course” 

“Then please close your eyes” 

“Right now?” your head tilts, eyes squinting to gauge how far away the end of the pathway is, “It doesn’t seem like we’re anywhere that a surprise could be” 

“We are” he turns to you, “It won’t be a surprise if you keep looking though” 

You nod, eyes narrowing; sceptical. 

“If this is where you secretly murder me then I swear on my grave I will come back from the dead Park Jimin” 

He laughs, “It would be impossible to live in a world without you, I wouldn’t dare lay a hand on you if it weren’t for your own pleasure” 

You bring your hands to cover your eyes, back straightening when Jimin takes hold of your arm, turning you in the direction of the forest. 

“Careful, the path is uneven this way” He pulls you further under the blanket of trees. 

“Are we almost there” you stumble, amused laugh shaking your shoulders as Jimin’s other hand falls onto your waist to keep you steady. 

“Almost” 

The both of you stumble to a stop, your eyes squeezing shut behind your hands as you wander into the sun, out of the shade. 

“Are you ready?” 

And you hear the unease in his voice, a week of pressure building up. Bubbling until it’s now fizzling out of him in nervous rivulets, hands clammy as they run up and down your arms. His feet shuffle against crunchy grass, and this might be the most jittery you’ve ever seen Jimin. 

“Yes,” you tell him, keeping your eyes closed as you take hold of his hands, squeezing his fingers between your own. Jimin swallows, Adams's apple bobbing under the weight of it. 

His eyes wander over your face, “May I kiss you?” 

The corner of your lips curl up at that, “Yes” you nod, leaning into his touch when he cups your cheeks. 

The tension in both your shoulders releases as your lips mould together, ever so slowly, neither of you rushing as Jimin’s tongue teases into your mouth. He laps up every little noise that slips off your tongue, sweet like nectar. 

Your eyes slip open, entirely focused on Jimin’s. “I really hope you like it” He keeps your focus on him, foreheads still touching, noses knocking against one another. 

“May I be honest with you?” 

And he hums, “Yes, of course” 

“If it’s from you, then I will always love it” 

“That seems a little extreme” he laughs, though unease still chews away at his mind. 

“I don’t think so. Surely you would like anything I gifted you” 

He nods, “Of course, I would” 

“Then it’s no different for me, so please don’t worry” you whisper, eyes slipping closed once more as you press a featherlight kiss to his plush lips. 

“Keep your eyes closed for a moment” he whispers back, and you hum. 

Jimin’s hands fall away from your body, shadow slipping away from behind your eyelids as he steps away from you. 

“Open them” 

And you do. 

“Oh Jimin” you whisper, a twitch of your lip the first sign of a smile. 

As far as you can see, there are just flowers. The most vibrant you have ever seen, almost glowing under the warm light of the sun. For all the flowers Jimin had given you over the years, you think there must be every colour he’d ever thought to bring you; all swaying in tandem as if it were the most beautiful ocean. 

The field stretches until it meets the sky, land completely hidden by a blanket of wildflowers. 

You don’t know where to look, so many places to look but only two eyes. Your head is pulled in every which direction, mouth falling open in awe. 

“Where did you find this place?” your voice comes out breathless, gaze only briefly meeting Jimin’s before you’re drawn back to acres of untouched land. A whole ecosystem thriving on its own, untampered with by human life. 

“On the way back from a job. It reminded me of you, and I knew I had to bring you here” he steps closer to you, fingers brushing against your own. 

You turn to face Jimin, “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. Thank you for sharing it with me” 

You slip your fingers through Jimin’s, “Would you like to dance with me?” 

“Right here?” his eyes widen. 

You nod, tugging him towards the sea of flowers, “Yes” 

“But we have no music” his resistance nothing more than a show as he makes no move to stop you. 

Wild grass tickles both your ankles, delicate petals of smaller flowers caressing your bare legs as you hike your dress up. 

“That doesn’t matter” you laugh, pulling him further and further until overgrown flowers dust over your waist like gentle fingers, and a butterflies’ wings tickle your cheek. 

Jimin watches as you twirl, hands outstretched for him to come closer. Your body knocks into his as he pulls you into his chest. Both of you fall in sync, as curious hands wander over arms and backs, down to waists and hips. 

You flinch when something wet hits your nose, Jimin turning his face to the sky. 

“It looks like it’s about to rain,” he says, and you tilt your head to look, “Perhaps we should go home” 

You shake your head, “But we only just got here” 

“But the rain, my love” he takes your hands, taking a step back, though your feet stay planted in their spot. 

“A little bit of rain never hurt anyone” You pull him back into your body, eyes squeezing shut as a raindrop collides with your lashes. 

The both of you are washed in a gust of shade, the sun hidden behind dark clouds that bleed into the horizon. 

“Won’t you dance with me?” you look up at Jimin, clothes starting to mould into your skin as the sky rains more unshed tears. 

“I suppose” he grins, arm falling around your waist. 

Your hair clings to your foreheads, sodden leaves wetly slapping against your arms and legs. Rouge petals that had plans of rotting on the soil now hanging on to your dress and Jimin’s pants. 

Your dress doesn’t fan out like a royal’s would when Jimin spins you, neither is he really dressed like a prince but the both of you feel as though you could be of that status in that moment. 

Your eyes fall shut, smile never leaving your face. It’s as though your body evaporates, that the world around you fizzles upwards in little bubbles and you follow their lead. Chasing after the light that shines down on you like a beacon. 

Something strange tugs at your heart, sinking you further and further into the darkness as you kick upwards until you’re spinning and the world is spinning with you. And the darkness feels all too familiar, your footsteps practised perfectly as if a routine. 

Hands roam your body. Both yours and his laughter muffled underwater, a whisp of a soul slipping through your fingers when you turn towards the deep timbre of another voice, a voice far deeper than Jimin’s. His laugh vibrates in your chest as phantom hands graze against your naked skin. And he’s calling your name, your mouth opening to call back except nothing but air puffs past your lips; air bubbles caressing your cheeks as they float upwards. 

Your feet move on their own without much thought as you turn in every which direction, only to ever be met by darkness; feet caught in quicksand that has you sinking further away from the light. 

There’s something on the tips of your fingers as you reach out and an awful pressure squeezes at your chest and the echo– the echo of a voice you’ve heard before. Everything is awfully jumbled, words shoved down your throat, acidic in your stomach– poison as it absorbs into your bloodstream. 

You stumble over your feet chasing after where the stranger’s voice had come from and suddenly your eyes are open as you collide with the floor. Brain rattling within the confines of your skull and your whole world shakes a along with you. 

Jimin’s arms cage your head, chest heaving as he holds himself up over your body. 

You feel puddles of water and sodden soil soak into the back of your dress as you sink further into the ground. 

“Sorry” he whispers, droplets of water from his hair falling onto your cheeks. 

“It’s okay, I forgot where I was for a moment” you admit, a smile pulling at the corner of your lips. 

“I could tell” he laughs, falling back onto his heels. 

Jimin tugs you up by your arms, pushing your wet hair out of your face. 

“Maybe we should go home” he murmurs, “I’d hate to have another accident” 

You nod,  “I think that’s a good idea”

“Let’s go home, my love” he pushes himself to stand, and you glance down at your hands. 

“Did you hear another man’s voice?” you blink away the rain from your lashes, Jimin’s eyebrows furrowing. 

“No? It’s only the two of us here” he takes your hands, helping you up, “Did you hear someone?” 

You shake your head, “No, it must have been something else” 

“You know” Jimin starts as you trek out of the flowers, “I’ve never met anyone that loves dancing in the rain as much as you” 

“I can’t explain the feeling” You turn to him, the smallest of smiles on your face. 

“Then should we dance every time it rains?” 

“I always dance when it rains” You pull him closer to your side, a futile attempt to steal some of his body heat. 

“Yes, but I always watch. Maybe I’ll join you from now on” 

“I would like that” you hum. 

And that should have been the end of it. A conversation left in the past where its only leeway into your future is Jimin joining you the next time it decides to rain. Except, you couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

It was rotten how for those few moments the world hadn’t been yours, and Jimin hadn’t been Jimin, and you hadn’t been you. Or that the other voice that had definitely been in your head, a whisper in your ear, an echo on the other side of the dark plane. A siren’s song pulling you further into your own demise, forbidden land you should have never passed over. 

It shouldn’t have been anything more than how much you truly loved dancing in the rain, where it was just something you had always loved and always done without thinking much about it. 

You turn your head to look at Jimin who lay beside you, finally asleep after the both of you had taken a bath. So at peace with himself and the world, as the weight of emotions, you’re unfamiliar with breathe down the back of your neck and you lay awake. 

It’s when you close your eyes, you start to fall. And the eyes that meet yours when you open them aren’t Jimin’s. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

For every life you lived after this one, the love you had here will cling onto you forever, sticky like you’d dipped your fingers in molasses. And maybe it’s because this had been the first time you’d learnt what love truly was, or maybe Taehyung had carved such a large hole in your heart that only he could ever truly fill. So even in life after him, he continues to burrow inside of you as his soul finally rests. 

Pure love was an addicting feeling. And maybe Taehyung had made you greedy, grabbing onto such a wonderful feeling over and over until it destroyed you. It wasn’t fair to blame him, but surely your greed had stemmed from somewhere.

And love could only ever be as magical as you’d imagined it if it begins with Taehyung. 

And so, the story of your first life, and therefore your first love starts with Kim Taehyung. 

Taehyung and Jimin had been the most similar of your loves. Both of them had always liked the more delicate things in life. 

Taehyung liked to read how whimsical the ocean was, white seafoam as gentle as clouds, and waves that caressed ankles that wandered the shore. Or how the stars always seemed that little bit brighter when you were in love, the universe shining its approval of something so perfect. He liked the idea of faeries that danced under the light of the moon, or reading forbidden love stories and poems that hurt his heart. Only to be mended with stories of truer love and lifetimes dedicated to another being. 

Taehyung’s sole purpose in life was to become a duke and run the estate after his father passed. Except he had never liked to be shoved into a mould, crafted by hands that had no care, rough as they shaped him. He despised the fact his life was gifted to him just so he could be chained to a role he had no purpose of fulfilling. 

His spirit had always been that of a wild bird, curious about things he had no business knowing, and wanting to wander where forbidden. 

He loved the freedom that birds had, how beautiful their feathers were, gliding through the sky without a care in the world. They had something he didn’t, and maybe his admiration had stemmed from some weird sense of jealousy. But, that never stopped the look of pure joy on his face whenever he caught a glimpse of a dove dancing on the waves of the wind. 

One of Taehyung’s hobbies had become complaining about his classes. The both of you giggled under one of the trees outside his window, shoulders knocking against each other’s as he told you stories of how his politics tutor was surely a witch, and there was no doubt in his mind that his literature teacher was a ghoul. 

The world felt as though it were crumbling at his feet on the days the two of you couldn’t meet. And so, he’d send you letters in secret, asking to meet at the front gate of the estate; where he’d hand you flowers through the bars, or kiss the back of your hand, only to beckon you closer when that doesn’t feel like enough. His plush lips warming your cheeks until he finds your lips and the both of you are melting into cold metal bars, the shyest smiles on both your faces when a maid catches the both of you. 

Most days were spent in the garden, or the drawing room where the both of you could talk for hours. You liked flicking through catalogues of dresses for the coming seasons, always asking Taehyung what he thought. Wondering if he’d like a new broach for his jackets, or if a new waistcoat would suit him. How wonderful the both of you would look matching, with a handkerchief you’d embroidered for him sat in his breast pocket– every gentle prick of the needle through fabric and each delicate line of tread, laced with love that lays beside his gently beating heart. 

Taehyung liked to recount all the things he adored about love, reciting poems and lines of novels he’d read before bed, and then telling you everything he adored about you. Because ‘love’ and ‘you’ should always fall in the same sentence in his eyes. Love would never truly be ‘love’ if you weren’t in the picture. Your silhouette was painted within each frame of his life, tucked in corners of the canvas or slipped far within his heart and mind. 

Taehyung and love were perhaps a synonym of one another. 

He was the epitome of love. 

All things romance and passion, and all things special between two people that have you shy and kicking your feet. Every moment feels like the long-awaited kiss after chapters of build-up and tension, where you have to look away from the book for a brief moment to recollect your thoughts and then bite your nails to hide a smile. 

If you had to describe Taehyung in one word, you think you’ll always gravitate towards eccentric. 

“I think the reason I was born, was to love you” he’d told you one evening, the stars like a halo around his head as he’d taken your hands into his own. 

You hadn’t known what to say, the corners of your lips quirking up at the sides because, of course, he’d utter such sweet words while the both of you laze in the gardens. Not quite ready to part ways just yet. Even if your carriage had been sat outside the house for over an hour, and your supper was probably sat on the table at home. 

“What a sorry reason to be born” you’d whispered back. 

“I don’t think so. The opposite, in fact” he tugs you a little across the grass, closer between his legs, “What is the point of life if it isn’t for unconditional love? And a mind that functions with the sole purpose of loving another?” 

Maybe it was that moment that you realised you loved love. That you loved loving Taehyung and you loved that he loved you just as much as you loved him, if not more. 

“Then, you’re my reason for living” It had fallen off your tongue quicker than you had thought to catch it. Though the smile that had stretched onto Taehyung’s face is one that will forever be etched into your mind, it had been innocent, content. 

You’d seen him smile so many times and yet, something had shifted in your mind, any qualms you had about letting go and succumbing to the purest form of adoration had fizzled out in both your hands. 

Because life wasn’t so bad when you had someone to love. 

“Just as you are my reason to live” he says. 

“I hope the both of us live forever so I never forget this feeling” you’d interlaced your fingers, cheeks flushing the lightest pink that’s veiled by the silver moonlight. Though he probably feels how warm you are when he cups your face, pressing a kiss over the tip of your nose. 

“Forever?” he hums, “Even if you were to forget, I would remind you over and over for as long as we’re together, and every life after that” 

“I’ll remind you too then” you promise, though Taehyung laughs, chest vibrating under the weight of his voice. 

“I could never forget, not when it comes to you, my love” 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

You don’t remember when you’d met Taehyung, you think he’d always just been there. 

Perhaps the both of you had snuck out of a ball back in the day, two rowdy children giggling on the balcony as you whispered about guests. Which ones you liked, or the ones your mothers’ would mutter about under their breath. The both of you had done it so many times that it would be fitting for your first encounter. A habit the both of you would keep up as you grew older as well. 

Or maybe the both of you had camped out under the tables while your mothers flitted from group to group, and you’d stolen cakes from plates and perfectly cut sandwiches from unattended trays. Where you’d exchange slices of tomato for his pieces of cucumber, and you’d both share squares of cake from one fork. 

Friends from childhood had started bleeding into something a little more as the two of you grew and realized that maybe friendship wasn’t enough for either of you. And maybe that had been the little seedling from where your never-ending greed stemmed from. A constant feral need for constant love that was depicted in careful strokes of paintings and well-thought-out words bled onto a page with dark ink. 

Taehyung had known early on that it was always going to be you he married. There was no doubt in his mind that you were going to wed. It was not often he put his foot down when it came to the choices made for him in life, and making it a point he had no interest in any other woman than you, had always been a point he’d made extremely clear. 

Marriage hadn’t been something you’d put much thought into until Taehyung would bring it up as you drank tea together of an afternoon. And after the little seed of possibility had been planted in your mind, you knew you wanted to marry Taehyung. 

And you’d never second-guessed yourself, because if it was going to be anyone, then it was going to be your best friend. 

“If I were to wear a white dress, would you wear a white suit?” you lay the magazine over your chest. Taehyung pushes his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose when he tilts his head down to look at you; head resting over his thigh. 

“If that is what you want” he hums, “White flowers may be too much, so let’s add colour” 

You run a finger over your bottom lip, “Purple?” 

“Of course” he nods, “I’ll braid them into your hair too” his fingers tickle over your hairline. 

You push yourself to sit up on your elbows, “I think it’s bad luck if the groom sees the bride in her dress on the morning of the wedding” 

Taehyung runs his thumb over his bottom lip, “To hell with tradition” 

“Your mother isn’t going to be very happy” you smile, “All she ever talks about is the perfect wedding” 

Taehyung smiles, “Yes, but it isn’t her wedding. I think I’d be beyond miserable if we weren’t to see each other, I must tell you how beautiful you look before we meet at the end of the alter” 

“It would only be a few hours” you press, eyebrows raising. 

“A few hours too many. Who is supposed to help me with my tie if not you?” 

You fully sit up now, “You’d have a maid or two aiding you” 

Taehyung frowns, whatever paperwork he was reading long forgotten on the couch as he tugs your legs over his thighs, fingers dancing over the bare skin covered by your skirt. 

“But they don’t do it as you do, and I have to look my best the day we tie souls and vow to be lovers for the rest of our time alive. It’s an important day” 

“I suppose you’re right” you hum, brushing his hair from his forehead, “I too, would be lonely if we were to part on such a joyous day” 

It hadn’t been long after the both of you had entered adulthood that Taehyung’s father had died, and only a few months after that the two of you had gotten married. 

You’d worried for Taehyung, knowing that even though his relationship with his father had never been the best, at least a small part of him should have been sad that his soul had left to rest. But no matter how much you lightly prodded, and made sure to ask if he were okay, Taehyung never shed a tear. 

He never truly found a way to articulate his feelings; losing someone he never saw as a father left the smallest hole in his heart. A pinprick, because Taehyung wasn’t heartless and knew the old man had brought him into this world, something he will forever be grateful for– but that was it. 

For the thousands of days you and Taehyung had spent together, the day he had proposed would be your second favourite of them all. He hadn’t made it extravagant, nor did he make it a huge point by proposing at a large gathering. He knew you despised those sorts of events, so he had asked you to be his bride at your favourite spot. 

The pond in Taehyung’s gardens had always been your favourite. It felt as though the world only belonged to the two of you when you spent evenings alone, sat on the bench, where fireflies danced over the water, their reflection like little stars scattered across the pond, the moon so much larger in its reflection than it looked in the sky. 

The day of your wedding, and all the days after that would forever take the top spot.

Taehyung had always loved your soul. He knew you were pretty, of course, you were; you were the most ethereal being he had ever come across. 

The faeries and pretty little wonders he read about, he always pictured you in their place. But it wasn’t always about the way you looked that had Taehyung coming back for more, or his heart thumping ever so hard against the skin of his chest whenever you were around. 

He thought you had the most wonderful soul that he liked to dip his fingers into, gentle like the softest waves, or cradle it to his chest. The most delicate part of you, ever so precious, the rawest form of yourself that he’d hold on to for as long as he was allowed. Because if one day the two of you were to ever part, he’d find the path of your soul, trace his fingers through every dip and curve he’d memorized, and make his way back to your side. 

The night of your wedding, the night the both of you had given yourself to one another fully, was never a moment Taehyung thought he’d be ready for. It’s not that he was second-guessing his choice– sometimes in life the moments we’ve been waiting for feel like a lifetime away. So many hours and even more minutes between now and then, that when the day stumbles before you in all its joyous glory, no amount of falling into your mind in silent preparation had ever truly prepared you for this. 

Taehyung had worshipped your body like you were his only goddess, you were his religion, his reason for life and death and everything he breathed and consumed in his fragile mortal body. Your souls knotting as your lips pressed so gently against one another, their pinkies forever intertwined as they melted like candle wax and hardened as one lifeform. 

Taehyung particularly loved the feeling of your nails digging into the delicate skin of his shoulders. A feeling forever ingrained into his mind, sending a shiver up his spine when his mind wanders to how you looked in candlelight, spread bare for him to defile. 

The both of you felt as though the honeymoon phase was nothing but lies, an easy scare for those who fell too fast, drowning in acidic love that dragged two people away from one another in harsh waves. Because for you and Taehyung, it never ended. 

Every day that you woke up to Taehyung beside you, had you burying your face in your pillow, smile so hard to contain you covered it up with a kiss to Taehyung’s lips as he slowly woke up. 

“I love you” he’d murmur, eyes barely open. 

“I love you more” a hand cupping his cheek, you’d press a kiss to his jaw; sometimes tickled by the stubble that had grown in. 

Something ever so mundane, yet it always seemed to bring you so much happiness. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

For a week during the summer, Taehyung would hand his duties over to his assistant and take you away for a short vacation. 

You liked the little house the both of you owned on the other side of town, secluded from the rest of the world. 

It had been one summer when your love for rain had started. You often found yourself reading by the window when the summer showers would pay you a visit, dousing the garden in muddy puddles and the gentle pitter-patter of the world’s tears hitting the ground easy white noise as you danced across pages of books. Or simply watched Taehyung sits on the piano bench, only so he could sit in your company.

Taehyung had always loved playing the piano, one of his many loves that he’d buried with the immense amount of work that had piled on to him since taking the seat as head of the household. The grand piano that sat in the far room of the house was his secret door of salvation. 

“Will you play me a piece?” you motion towards the piano, doors to the garden hooked open. Sure to slam shut with the wind picking up. The air was a little sweeter that afternoon, a gentle breeze raking through your hair, licking at the tops of the pages of your book. 

“I haven’t played for a while” Taehyung closes his own book, “But if it’s for you, I could never say no” 

You take a seat beside Taehyung as he flexes his fingers, gently running his hand over the ivory keys. 

“Would you like me to get your music book?” you lay your head on his shoulder. 

He shakes his head, “No, it’s alright. I doubt I’d remember how to read much of it anyways” 

“Do you remember my favourite piece?” 

Taehyung’s tongue wets his bottom lip, “I should hope so” 

Your eyes close as the first note penetrates the air, your head jostling slightly as Taehyung reaches the other end of the keys, his cheek knocking against the top of your head. The tips of his fingers dance elegantly, gentle with each deep hum of the piano’s song. 

You perk up at the first sound of rain, barely there, almost concealed by Taehyung as his movements become bolder, each thick note more pronounced, each deep hum vibrating through your skin. 

You lift your head from his shoulder, “I didn’t think it would rain today” 

You take one look at Taehyung, the smallest smile teasing at his lips when you stand. You kick your slippers off by the open door, toes curling into the damp grass as you step outside. 

You blink as a raindrop falls on your nose, slipping until it’s wetting your lips. You turn back to look at Taehyung, waving when he lifts his head to look at you; and he winces when he presses the wrong note. 

You wander further into the garden, hiking your skirt up so it won’t drag across the wet soil. 

As the rain gets heavier the sound of the piano is slowly drowned out, the world yours for the moment before you’re turning back to Taehyung. 

“Tae” you call back inside, beckoning him over when he turns towards you, “Come dance with me” 

The piano is left and forgotten as Taehyung pushes himself to stand, shoes piled with your slippers as Taehyung steps into the garden. He slinks towards you, hair starting to cling to his forehead as the rain gets heavier. 

“You’ll catch a cold” he takes your hand, tugging you into his chest. 

“But the world is so beautiful when it rains” 

“Just this once I’ll indulge you” he presses a kiss to your forehead. 

As much as the world looks wonderful in that moment, Taehyung outshined it all. Your clothes stuck to the both of you like a second skin, your hair tickling the side of your face, clinging to you like sticky wet vines down the back of your neck.

Taehyung’s hands wander your body, pulling you closer when you start to drift away– your hips finally falling in sync. All those hours of classes on how to dance are washed away by the rain as the both of you stumble, almost falling over each other’s feet. 

“Look” you point towards the back of the estate, “there’s a rainbow” you laugh. 

Taehyung follows your line of sight, “How pretty” he hums, his hands falling to your waist. 

Your fingers tease over his chest, heart hammering under his skin, mere seconds away from jumping out of his skin. Taehyung’s hands wander further down, a surprised moan catching in the back of your throat when he grabs the meat of your ass; tugging you into his body. And you can feel his growing erection against your stomach.  

“Not in the garden” you whisper, fingers trailing lower until you’re gently tugging at his belt. 

Taehyung leans down, warm breath fanning the side of your neck. He presses a wet kiss to the unblemished skin, “I wouldn’t give the serving staff the pleasure of seeing you fall apart for me” he whispers, sodden hair falling over your shoulder.

You take his hands from where they’re teasing over the top of your thighs, “Let’s go” you take long strides back towards the house. 

“Where to, my love?” he trails after you, the most giddy smile on his face. 

You look at him over your shoulder, “Our bedroom” 

Your feet slap wetly against the tile floors, muddy footprints trailing behind the both of you. Youthful joy thrums throughout your body, giggles hard to keep down as the both of you stagger through the hallway towards the bedroom. 

Taehyung’s overzealous in the way he opens the door, and you both wince when it bangs against the wall. The briefest clarity grazes your mind before lust sets back in, and all you can focus on is the incessant throbbing between your legs, and the man stood before you. 

You kick the door closed, Taehyung pulling his wet shirt over his head when you turn back to him– your dress is soon to follow. 

“Would you mind helping me?” you turn your back to Taehyung, shoulders curling inwards as his fingers trace over the intricate ribbing of your corset. 

He’s gentle as he tugs at the ribbons, and you heave a sigh of relief, muscles finally easing a little. Dull throb sinks out of your ribs as you heave a deep breath. 

You turn around, Taehyung’s eyes trailing to your bare chest, curving down the slope, fingers itching at his sides to sink and dig his nails into the plush flesh. He swallows, Adams's apple bobbing under the weight of desire. 

“My beautiful wife” he whispers, hands running up the length of your arms before he’s teasing the edge of your breasts. You trace over his belt, tugging impatiently as he pulls you towards the bed. 

You fall backwards onto the mattress, air momentarily punched from your lungs. Taehyung’s arms cage your head, thigh nudging your legs open for him. 

Your wet hair sticks to your neck, small droplets of water falling over your cheeks from Taehyung’s own hair as his eyes wander over your face. Windows to his soul wide open as sickly sweet love dances within his eyes, adoration you know you’ll never get from another man bared naked, yours for the taking. 

You rut up against his knee, damp cotton panties dragging deliciously against your clit. 

Taehyung’s arms flex as he leans down, plush lips trailing down your jaw, gently plucking soft moans from the back of your throat with every mean nip of his teeth over delicate skin. 

Your thighs clamp around Tae’s leg, arms slithering around his shoulders as you use him for your own pleasure, short bursts of pure arousal wracking up your body with every purposeful tense of his muscles. 

“Good girl” he groans, falling to hold himself up by his elbows as his lips map out the rest of your body– kissing over your neck, the underside of your breasts, down towards your stomach. You whine as he kneels before you, hips bucking upwards to try and chase the slowly fizzling pleasure. 

He kisses your mound over your underwear, tips of his fingers barely brushing over your clit as he trails them down towards your covered folds. Thumb splitting your labia, guttural groan rumbling from his chest as he feels your slick heat.

He can’t seem to stifle the chuckle that slips past his lips either as you whine, the most pitiful pout tugging onto your face as he teases you. 

“How needy” he croons, adding a little more pressure over your entrance, “I’ll make sure to make you feel good” 

You lift your hips, a silent invitation for him to tug your panties off, and he does, dropping them beside him; forgotten as he looks at your slick soaked pussy. 

“Tae” you whisper, impatient as your fingers tangle into his wet hair, careful as you try and tug him closer to where you needed him most without hurting him.

“Hm?” he hums, fingers digging into the meat of your thighs as he pushes them open a little wider, making it easier for him to slip closer to his favourite place. 

Your toes curl as he bends, placing the lightest kiss over your clit, “Want you” 

“Want you too, my love” he murmurs, hot breath fanning over your folds. 

He licks a bold stripe from your entrance to your clit, tongue dipping past your walls before he’s pulling back, wad of spit dribbling over your already sodden cunt.

Your thighs threaten to twitch closed, and when Taehyung notices this he tugs them over his shoulders, dragging you a little further to the edge of the bed. 

His thumb teases over your clit, thrumming at the sensitive little bud as he pushes his tongue back inside of you. The moan you let out is sure to have echoed down the halls, your embarrassment only amplified when you feel another dribble of slick gush past your walls, sure to coat Taehyung’s chin shiny. 

“M’ gonna cum” you hiccup, hips frantically bucking upwards as Taehyung further smothers his face into your pussy. 

He hums, a new wave of arousal coursing through your body at the unexpected vibrations. 

It’s a haphazard flick of your clit that has you tumbling head first into your orgasm, thighs quivering as they clamp around Taehyung’s head, though that doesn’t seem to deter him as he licks into your cunt, swallowing down your release. 

“S’ too much” you sob, hands pushing your lover from between your thighs. He kisses your knee, head flopping across your leg as he looks up at you. 

Your stomach clenches at the dopey smile on his face, thumb running over his bottom lip, still shiny with your arousal. 

“Are you tired, my love?” he asks, fingers curling around your wrists, kissing your palm, then the tips of each finger. 

You shake your head, “I can still go if you’d like” 

“This isn’t about me, it’s about you”

You swallow, unexplainable love swelling inside your chest. 

“Please make love to me” you whisper, pink hue deepening in shade on your cheeks as Taehyung stands at full height, shucking off whatever clothes he still had on. 

You can’t help but wet your lips, watching as he runs a gentle hand over his length, slicking his cock up with pearly beads of precome. 

You push yourself up further on the bed, legs falling open as Taehyung kneels before you. 

He runs a finger through your folds, barely dipping a fingertip inside of you before he’s pulling out, pushing your thighs further apart. 

He guides his cock to your entrance, slicking the head with your cum before he’s gently pushing into you. Your mouth falls open in a silent moan, cunt clenching around Taehyung’s length as he gently rocks into you. 

He groans, barely pulling out before feeding you another inch. His hands roam up the length of your body as he finally bottoms out, hips rutting into you by habit. 

You wrap your arms around his shoulders, pulling him down for a kiss which he melts into, eyes fluttering shut as he tilts his head, tongue teasing over the seam of your lips. 

He licks up into your mouth, concoction of your saliva clinging to his tongue when he pulls back. 

“Ready?” he murmurs against your lips. 

“Mmhmm” you hum, muscles falling lax as Taehyung pushes your thighs up to your chest. He almost pulls out, the air punched from your lungs as he snaps back into you. 

Unabashed, you moan, Taehyung’s name tumbling from your lips like it were the only word you knew as he thrusts into you. 

It’s wet when Taehyung’s thighs meet your ass, sticky with arousal that clings to both your skin and moans a harmony with one another. 

Your hand snakes down the length of your body, between your thighs, teasing over your clit as Taehyung throws his head back, utterly consumed by unadulterated pleasure. 

“Together” he groans, hips losing their calculated pace. 

His cockhead nudges over your sweet spot, a whine dripping off your lips that Taehyung catches, kiss messy, teeth clashing. 

You pick up the pace on your clit, fizzling pleasure slipping down your spine, slick gushing from your hole, so many feelings, so many emotions– all amplified as endorphins buzz at your brain, a shockwave of dopamine setting you alight.   

You feel Taehyung twitch between your walls, your pussy clenching sporadically around his length as he nears his orgasm. 

Taehyung tips over the edge before you do, creamy white cum painting your walls in thick ropes. Your own orgasm following as you feel another wave of Taehyung’s seed flood your cunt. 

His hips twitch as you continue to clench around him, pushing his release further into you. 

Your chest stutters as you try and catch your breath, fingers splayed over your mound as you fall back into reality. 

Your moan as Taehyung pulls out, a hiccup following as he presses a kiss to your cheek. His fingers gather up the dribble of cum that follows his cock, pushing it back inside of you. And you twitch at that, overstimulated. 

He reaches behind your head for a pillow, your thighs falling to the bed, to which Taehyung tuts. 

“Lift your hips up for me, darling” he soothes, singular hand gathering both your ankles, pulling the lower half of your body from the mattress so he can slip the pillow underneath you. 

“You’d look awfully pretty baring my child” his hand trails down your stomach, over your womb. 

“I hope this time we are lucky” you tell him, finger interlacing with the ones over your stomach. 

“Me too, my love. Our child would be the most precious little thing” 

You smile, eyes slipping shut as you paint the image of what your baby would look like, “I hope they look like you” 

“I’d always wished they’d look like you. Their mother holds all the beauty of this cruel world” 

You can’t help the laugh that bubbles from your chest, “Then how about they look like the both of us, as their father shares all of that beauty” 

“That would be wonderful” Taehyung pushes himself off the bed, slipping on a robe that had been forgotten on one of the chairs that morning. 

“What if they aren’t a boy?” your hands fall over your chest, watching Taehyung as he gathers the bowl of water and towels. 

He turns to look at you, “What would it matter if they were a girl?” his eyebrows furrow. 

“Wouldn’t you need an heir” 

He wets his bottom lip, “Boy or girl, I’m not bothered, my love. If we were to have a son then I would never subject them to the horrors of becoming heir. And if we have a precious little daughter, I would love her all the same, and if one day she decides she wants to take over the estate then I would let her” 

The corners of your lips tug up into a smile, “Then I am glad” Your hand finds his as he takes a seat beside you on the bed, dipping the towel into water, gently dragging it over your sweat-slicked skin. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Falling in love with Taehyung had made you a lot of things. 

Juvenile had never been on top of that list, though when you think about it, it really should have been. Or that somewhere written in the fine print of your story, neither of you would die, that you’d both freeze in time and continue your lives for the rest of eternity. 

Some days when you’d sit alone, you wish Monet had been around during your life with Taehyung. His paintings as beautiful as the love you shared. Paintings full of purpose, the world through the eyes of a man– impressionist paintings that had so much raw colour, so much more vibrance than the real world. 

You wish he’d have been able to put paint to canvas, where every gentle stroke of his brush was a piece of stupid, young naivety put into breath-taking art. Meaningful, purposeful, and beautiful. Because your ignorance would have made a beautiful collection, a series of a time when the future wasn’t as perfect as his art. Bringing both you and your lover to downfall. 

Your life was not the art of Monet, nor was it as mesmerising as Van Gogh’s Starry Night. You weren’t frozen in time like you were part of history, forever documented on paper and hung for the world to see. 

You were naive enough to think that with Taehyung’s new rise to power, somewhat unexpected in high society, he wouldn’t have one or two enemies. 

The end of your first life hadn’t been what you had wanted it to be. 

As much as you remember the day you had gotten married or all the afternoons you and Taehyung had spent in the garden, dancing in the rain, under rainbows and the sun that peeked through the clouds, there to celebrate your love just as much as the both of you were; what was supposed to be the perfect ending like all the far-fetched stories Taehyung read, this was more of a tragedy. 

Because that’s what it was– farfetched. 

You remember the afternoon that the perfect life you had, had crumbled. Sand slipping through your fingers, falling to the bottom of the hourglass. 

You lay on the couch, your foot tapping against the arm, Taehyung’s quil tinking against the bottle of ink. In recent months you’d found yourself reading Taehyung’s favourite books, all of their spines worn down, loved and read over and over. 

“Do you smell that?” you push yourself up onto your elbows, the book laid over your lap. 

“Smell what, my darling?” he takes off his glasses, hand running over his tired eyes. 

Your eyes meet Tae’s, “Something smells as though it’s burning” 

The both of you sit in silence for a moment before Taehyung pushes his chair back, peering out the window. His fingers try and pull at the latch, finding it stuck, and he turns back to you. 

“Maybe I’m imagining it” you tell him when you see his eyebrows furrow. 

“I can definitely smell something” he turns back to you, “I can’t tell what. Go and call someone to open this window, it’s jammed”

Your book is dropped onto the couch as you push yourself up, you go to open the door to Taehyung’s office, only for the door not to open. You push a little harder, shoulder knocking uncomfortably against the hardwood. 

You press an ear to the door. 

“What’s wrong?” Taehyung asks, stalking towards you. 

“It won’t open” 

Taehyung makes a noise from the back of his throat, and you step out of the way when he takes hold of the door handle. 

He mirrors your earlier action, shoulder knocking against the door. 

“It won’t open” he turns to you. 

“I know, my love” A gentle smile moulds onto your lips. 

You press your ear to the door again, “Do you hear that?” 

Taehyung follows; ear pressed to the door, “Burning?” 

“Burning?” you stand straight. 

You crouch down, fingers feeling over the gap between the floor and door, “Hello?” you call out, hand flinching away as heat licks over your fingers. 

“Is anyone there?” Taehyung shouts, fist banging against the door. 

“Taehyung” you tug at his shirt, trying to pull him away from the door. He relents, taking a step forwards, “Taehyung, it’s a fire” You take his hand. 

“What?” 

“It’s a fire” You show him your fingertips, hands shaking slightly as the reality of what was happening settles in. 

“You’re hurt” he murmurs, “If one of the staff would just answer we could treat your wounds” his lips barely brush over the burn. 

“Taehyung it’s barely an injury, not when we’re locked in here with a fire right outside that door” 

He swallows, “We’ll find a way out” 

“How?” you dare ask, “We can’t go out the window, that’s suicide from this high up” 

His foot taps against the floor, hand running over his jaw in thought. 

Your focus is snatched away from your lover when something creaks, burning flames slithering under the crack under the door, molten snakes with no goal in mind. 

Taehyung pulls you further into his office, the door crackling as the flames start to chew it up, an onslaught of heat spilling into the room. You can smell the gasoline, splintered wood glistening in it as the door creaks off its hinges, flinging the fire further into the office, and you watch as it singes over the carpet. 

The flames dance before you, a mesmerising dance, crawling up the walls, heated footsteps stalking across the rug, heady puffs of carbon monoxide smoking into the air. 

Your hand flies to cover your mouth when a thin wisp of smoke slips down your windpipe, tickling your throat and searing at the inside of your lungs. 

Taehyung pulls you into his chest as you back into the wall furthest away from the fire, “It’s going to be okay” he heaves, his own hand covering his nose and mouth, dry cough spluttering past his lips. 

Your eyes squeeze shut as the fire slinks closer to the both of you, dangerously close, teasing as it flicks at your ankles, its amble arms chewing up the bookcases, rage only amplifying with each novel it consumes. 

You catch sight of a silhouette standing outside the office, body veiled by thick flames that continue to slink into the office. Another splash of gasoline only makes it burn brighter, sweat tickling the back of your neck. 

Your arms slip around Taehyung’s waist, and he helps you both sit on the ground, arms now holding your shoulders. A lame attempt at holding you away from the blazing fire that creeps closer. 

Your lungs can’t seem to get enough oxygen, panic setting into your bones as you heave for a full breath. Your eyes water as you choke on what should have been a rush of oxygen, only your lungs burn with the ash that settles inside of you, clinging to your windpipe– coating the inside of your mouth. 

“Try not to–” Taehyung coughs, hand lifting to clasp around his throat, cheeks flushing a deep red “-breathe it in too much– cyanide” 

A yelp gets caught in your throat as the flames flicker too close to you, singing the hem of your dress. You try and kick it away, hand flapping down to make sure the fire doesn’t chew at any more of your clothing. You try to ignore the prickly burn to your bare skin, eyes squeezing shut as you try and curl in on yourself to make you smaller. 

You tug on Taehyung’s shirt, dry cough lurching your body forward that Taehyung tries to catch only to heave. 

“I love you” you whisper, the both of you cornered. Nowhere to run. 

The figure stood outside the office long gone, fire now out of their control. A wild beast that had no plans of stopping until it had chewed and gnawed at your home, until it had nothing to fuel it anymore, leaving behind piles of ash and broken dreams– charred bodies and guilty minds to the ones who had started this. 

You flinch backwards when Taehyung’s desk folds in on itself, flames spitting out its joy as the planks of wood slowly char under the heat; a warning for your own destiny. 

His fingers lace into the hair on the back of your head, pulling you into him, “And I love you. When the both of us are reborn, I will find you, and we can fall in love all over again” he manages, the flames looking like hellish wings behind his back, slowly licking at his shirt, sizzling the fabric– more chemicals sifting through the air and into your fragile lungs. 

Taehyung curls further into you when the fire licks at his shoes, easily chewing through the leather, deft fingertips tracing up his legs, and over his body.

“Don’t say that” Your fingers loosen their grasp on his shirt as you heave for another breath, mind entirely gone as you spin, the world spinning with you. Your brain felt as though it were being flushed out with helium, pressure so much you think it might explode. 

Your eyes squeeze shut.

And when you open again, Jimin’s there. 

His eyes still wide with shock. 

You feel bile rise up your throat at the sight of him, blood smeared across his perfect face, puncture still oozing red from his neck soaking through his shirt fully. Your floor is in no better shape, though you think there's as much of your own blood as there is his. 

“Jimin?” you whisper, vision momentarily veiled by salty tears that fall down your cheeks like pitiful pearls, mixing with the crimson the drips from a gash in your head, dull ache migrating to behind your eyes. 

“Jimin you have to wake up now. Please” 

He doesn’t move, not when you hear footsteps from the other room– heavy boots that clatter against old wood– not when you call his name. Not when the front door creaks closed and the world is silent once more, or when your chest stutters out another breath and you feel another wave of blood gush out of your stomach, adding to the puddle below the both of you. 

“Jimin” you call again, choking on your own sob, fists balling up, “Jimin, please don’t leave me. I’m scared” 

You look into his eyes. Nothing. All signs of life spilt onto the floor. 

In a sick and twisted way, you’re glad Jimin had gone before you. 

You’d have hated it if he had to watch you dead on the bedroom floor while he slowly follows you. At least now you could be with him a little longer, even if you couldn’t tell him goodbye for the last time. Or tell him how much you love him, or how happy he’d made you, or how grateful you are. 

So many words left unsaid, that you swallow back down with a sob. And they mix with the bile that singes your throat, so close to spilling onto the puddle of red as you make eye contact with your dead lover. 

You drag your body through the blood on the floor, closer until your chest is pressed against Jimin’s and your body falls lax against him, arm slung over his side. 

You press the palm of your hand against your open wound, what little hope you had left inside of you, the smallest voice whispering that maybe you could survive. Though somewhere deeper down you know that your soul will soon follow Taehyung’s, and now Jimin's too. 

You push your head into the curve where his neck meets his shoulder, tangy, metallic blood staining your lips as you kiss over the tainted skin. 

He was still warm, skin still very much his as your fingers skim over his back. Ever so gentle as though he would crack if you weren’t careful. And you would have gathered him up in your arms if you’d had the strength. 

And at that final moment when it settles within your mind and your heart that your body can no longer hold onto the slither of life still inside of you– the easing thump of your heart mellowing inside your chest. You remember the little note Jimin left on his pillow for you to wake up to that morning. 

“When you and I hug, our hearts are locked behind our ribcages and touch through our skin. Always beating in sync. And for as long as my heart beats beside yours, it will belong to you. For those moments we part, perhaps it falls out of sync, and when we reunite, my heart may just be reminded who it beats for. And we will be in sync once more ♡’

☆ﾟ thank you for reading!! reblogs are always appreciated, and please let me know what you think!!

permanent taglist: @m1sss1mp @supernoonanyc

[cetaitlaverite]

Anything to Anywhere

Masters of the Air - Bucky Egan x OC

masterlist is here <333

06. King and Country

When operations eventually managed to locate where Curt and his crew had landed - somewhere on the Scottish coast - it was Stella who was tasked with flying up there to bring them back down. So, in one of the less-mangled B-17s which had returned from the last mission, already repaired by the speedy mechanics at Thorpe Abbotts, Stella flew up to Scotland, armed with a hastily labelled map and a flight engineer who had never actually flown in a plane before.

Stella was glad when they finally landed. The flight engineer was really a lovely girl, but she was so excited to be out on her first assignment that it almost seemed like she was hoping something would go wrong if just so she could fix it. While it wasn’t a difficult journey, Stella didn’t like to jinx it, especially in such a recently repaired plane.

Curt and his crew greeted them with waving arms and wide grins. They regaled Stella and her flight engineer with the tale of their crash landing many times over, with different details added in each time, as they waited for the plane to be refuelled, and the instant it was ready everyone was piling back in, the men clearly eager to get home and back in amongst the action - there was little in the way of it all the way up here.

Upon their return to Thorpe Abbotts, it seemed like all of the Americans on base came out to greet their returned charges. Egan and Buck were at the front of the gathered group, hands on their hips and wry smiles on their faces as they watched Stella taxi down the runway. The cheers which greeted the airmen when they first disembarked the plane, too, were jubilant; Stella found it both heartwarming and unbearable, so she kept her head down as she made her way to the jeep waiting to take her to the ATA hut so she could write up her flight report.

It wasn’t until that night that Stella saw Curt again. Leaned up against the bar in the officers’ club, telling a story to a gathered crowd of airmen that had them all fascinated, Curt talked with his hands and looked at each of the gathered faces in turn. He must have felt Stella’s eyes on him when she entered, for in turn his eyes swept across the room and found her in the doorway, and he promptly shot her a wink.

“Y’know, I like him for you, Fin,” Alice said, her eyes darting between the two of them. “I know you’ve sworn off men but if you were going to break it for anyone I think he seems like a good idea. Not as much of an arse as Egan, at the very least.”

Stella chuckled under her breath. While Alice had initially been critical of Stella’s newfound animosity towards Major Egan, she had soon changed her tune when she’d overheard him trying to convince one of the wireless operators to dance with him after she’d already resolutely told him no. The girl’s name was Freddie - Stella remembered because she was jealous of it; she fancied herself a Freddie, not a Stella - and she was almost universally well-liked across Thorpe Abbotts for being sweet and doe eyed and having an inexplicable air of sadness about her which inspired the instinct to protect.

In any case, Stella had only very briefly spoken to Freddie Leroy herself, back when Freddie had first transferred from a different airfield. She’d been weepy back then but still kind, had complimented Stella’s necklace when no one else had ever even noticed it, before offering a watery smile and continuing on her way. Stella didn’t know Freddie at all beyond that and seeing her in the officers’ club with the other wireless operators, but if Egan had pushed his luck with her then it was still another nail in his coffin as far as Stella was concerned.

“Very few people are as much of an arse as Egan,” Stella replied to Alice at length as they crossed over to the bar. She avoided the eyes of the man in question, though she could feel them on her as he stood huddled in a corner with Buck. She wasn’t forced to concentrate on this avoidance for long, however, as soon enough Curt sidled over accompanied by who Stella now knew as his co-pilot, Dickie, each of them with two beers in hand.

“Evening, ladies,” Curt greeted. He held out one of his beers to Stella while Dickie held out one of his to Alice.

Both women accepted their drinks, and then Curt was raising his pint glass. “To flying home in style,” he declared, offering Stella another wink.

She rolled her eyes as the others echoed the sentiment but cheers’ed her glass with theirs all the same and took a long draw on it.

“If that’s your way of saying thank you for picking you up,” Stella said once she’d finished sipping, “then you’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” Dickie said, raising his glass to her once more.

“Yeah,” Curt agreed, grinning. “Thanks, Fin. How about a dance so I can give ya a proper thank you?”

Alice laughed. Stella frowned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now. We hardly know each other.”

Alice scoffed. “You know each other plenty. Go dance. I’ll look after your drink.”

Stella thought about saying no. In fact, her mouth was open and the word was all but halfway out. But then she accidentally locked eyes with Egan over Curt’s shoulder. His were narrowed, his beer raised to his lips but his mouth shut. And then Stella recalled how he’d asked her repeatedly to dance and she’d repeatedly told him no and she felt a mild thrill race through her veins at the prospect of irritating him and taking him down a peg all in one go.

“Okay,” she declared, turning back to Curt. “One dance and that’s it.”

Curt’s eyes lit up. “One dance,” he agreed, holding up his pointer finger as though to assure her he knew how many that was. “Dickie, look after my drink, alright? And if you drink it you’re buying my next one.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dickie answered him, accepting the half-drunk pint. “Just go already.”

Stella laughed to herself before handing off her own drink to Alice and accepting Curt’s hand, following him across the room to join the other couples on the dance floor.

Curt wasn’t a great dancer. Stella hadn’t honestly expected him to be. He had a lot of enthusiasm but little coordination, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he was the exact same height as Stella. They weren’t compatible as dancers but at least he could make her laugh. He made cutting observations about other dancers - never unkind, simply incredibly specific and unflattering - and told Stella about his life back in New York City.

When their dance was over Stella could tell he was hoping for another one, but great as he was, she was resolved. One dance was more than she’d intended, any more than that and she’d be compromising herself.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” she informed Curt as he prepared to lead her back to Alice and Dickie to retrieve their drinks. “You go on ahead and make sure Alice hasn’t drunk any of my beer.”

Curt shot her a grin sidelong. “If she has, I'll buy you another one. Hell, I’ll buy you another one anyway.”

Stella laughed, rolling her eyes. “We’ll see.”

Curt pointed one finger at her. “We’ll see’s better than no!”

“We’ll see!” Stella insisted. She turned on her heel to head for the ladies’ toilet, laughing to herself when she heard Curt laughing behind her.

Turning the corner into the hallway, Stella sighed out a long breath. The wood of the door to the bathroom was cool against her sweaty palm as she pushed it open, and Stella was considering heading for the tap before the toilet if just to cool herself down with some cold water when a voice behind her halted her in place.

“Thought you didn’t dance.”

Immediately, Stella’s lingering smile turned into a scowl. She didn’t look behind her as she retorted, “Maybe not with you.”

Egan chuckled quietly. “You told me no even when we were friends.”

“We were never friends,” Stella replied airily. She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “I thought we were but you made it quite clear that it was a calculated fabrication. Are we done here?”

“For the last goddamn time, Finley, I did not come up with a master plan to sleep with you. Whatever idea you have in your head about me being obsessed with you isn’t real.”

“Right,” Stella agreed with a fake smile. “Because no one cares about me as much as I think they do. I remember you saying.”

Egan stared back at her for a beat and then huffed, his jaw working as he clenched it and looked away. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

Stella’s gaze was hard. “No, I think that is what you meant. Maybe you didn’t mean to say it to my face but you meant it.”

“Would you stop telling me what I do and do not mean?!”

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d just be honest!”

“I am being honest!”

“I don’t believe you!”

“That’s not my goddamn problem, Finley!”

Stella huffed, crossing her arms and shuffling on her feet. “Why don’t you do us both a favour, then, and not talk to me at all. Then neither of us has to worry about whether or not you’re telling the truth.”

With a roll of his eyes, Egan adjusted his jacket and looked away. “I’m always telling the truth.”

Stella’s jaw was hard. “Go tell the truth to someone who’s not me.”

“I’d love to.”

“Good.”

“Great.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t say thank you.”

Egan opened his mouth to reply but was cut off when he turned back to Stella and found her with her eyes focused somewhere over his shoulder. When he turned to follow her gaze he saw nothing, but even when he looked back at her she was still staring into the thin air behind him. 

“Finley?” he ventured warily.

Stella was confused. Someone had just walked past the entrance to the hallway in the room beyond, someone tall with terrible posture and neatly combed dark hair, thick eyebrows and his hands in his pockets, a uniform which would always look too small for him even if it was his size.

“Will?” Stella called, but of course he didn’t hear her; he’d already passed the hallway and continued on his way to wherever he was going next.

Egan stared at her with furrowed eyebrows as she stepped aside to peer around him. “What?”

“Will,” Stella mumbled under her breath. She headed back to the main room with slow steps, shaking her head as she realised how absurd her assumption was. Of course Will wasn’t here. Why would he be here? He was stationed over at Duxford.

Nonetheless, she followed after him like a woman in a trance, scanning the faces gathered in the club until her eyes once more landed on the familiar figure, now seated at a table and talking to the 100th Bomb Group commanding officer who had made a rare appearance tonight.

“Will,” Stella said, starting to smile. “Will!” He didn’t look up but she started towards him anyway, heedless of the colonel locked in conversation with him - he wasn’t her CO.

“Will!” Stella exclaimed once she’d reached the table.

And finally he heard her, finally he looked up. “Stella?”

“What are you doing here?!” she asked, bounding forward to take up one of his hands and squeezing it in both of hers. “Aren’t you meant to be super busy at Duxford?”

“Right,” Will said. He spared a sideways glance at Colonel Huglin beside him before adding, “I’ve been doing some rounds the last couple of months to check on some of the other bases, taking some time in between to greet our incoming Americans.”

Stella shook her head, her smile wide but confused, now, with this new information. “You haven’t been replying to my letters,” she said. “I just thought -”

“I’ve been busy,” he cut across her. He retracted his hand from her grip under the guise of clasping both of them together in his lap. “I look after a lot of men.”

“Right,” Stella agreed. “You were always good at that. Looking after people, I mean.”

Will gave her a tight smile and no reply.

Stella waited for him to say something else but, when it became abundantly clear he wasn’t going to, she cleared her throat and refixed her smile. “Will you dance with me?”

“Stella -”

“I’m sure the colonel won’t mind sparing you for one song,” she reasoned, inadvertently cutting right across him. “I haven’t seen you in more than a year.”

“It’s been a busy year.”

“I’m sure it has. But we can dance now, can’t we? Like old times? Like we did in the living room when we were younger?”

Will kept shooting hasty sidelong glances at Colonel Huglin. He hemmed and hawed as he searched for a reply.

Stella’s smile remained fixed firmly in place but she knew how to take a hint. “Maybe later?” she suggested softly. She tucked her hands behind her back, digging her nails into her palms as she curled them in on themselves. “When you’re not so busy?”

“Yes,” Will decided immediately. He looked relieved, grabbing hold of the rope she’d thrown him without hesitation. “Later, yes. I’ll find you later.”

“Okay,” Stella agreed. Nodding, she took a small step backwards. “Later, then. And you can tell me about Harry and all the others.”

“Yes,” Will confirmed once more. “I’ll come and find you later, Stella.”

Stella nodded. “Later,” she mumbled under her breath. Then she turned and ran straight into Egan where he’d evidently been observing the scene.

Stumbling back a step, Stella looked up at him with a frown.

He looked back down at her, his expression unreadable.

Stella didn’t linger. She sidestepped him before he could make any comments, heading for the door and pushing outside into the quiet of the summer air.

She didn’t know when she’d started sweating, only that the night air was cool on her damp skin. Raking her fingers through the length of her hair, Stella tilted her head to one side and exposed her neck to the breeze, then shut her eyes and hummed softly to herself while she worked on slowing the thumping of her heart.

“So,” said Egan from the doorway.

Stella’s eyes shot open as she whirled to face him. She dropped her hair and took a step away from him, blinking hard, swallowing around the lump in her throat. “Can you just leave me alone?” Her voice didn’t sound as strong and authoritative as she’d intended. It sounded weak and wobbly and horrible, like a child’s. She turned back around and said nothing more.

Egan didn’t speak for a moment. Stella wondered whether, if she stayed still enough, he might leave. But finally he spoke up from the darkness behind her, just one word. “Stella,” he said.

Stella didn’t say anything.

“That’s your name,” he went on. “Stella. Stella Finley.”

Slowly, warily, without turning back, Stella nodded. “Unfortunately.”

“You don’t like it?”

She swallowed hard once more. “I don’t feel like a Stella.”

Egan considered her. “I think it suits you. Stella.” He rolled the name around in his mouth, tested it out on his tongue. “Not what I was expecting.”

“You were expecting something more masculine,” she deduced.

Egan laughed a little bit. “I’m not sure what I was expecting.” Again, he tested her name out. “Stella.” Then he shook his head, smiling to himself. “I like that name.”

When she turned back to him, Stella’s eyes were narrowed, always wary, always suspicious. “Why are you here?”

He shrugged, tilting his head back to look up at the night sky. His hands were in his pockets, his posture slumped and casual. “Nowhere better to be.”

“Why did you listen to my conversation?” She had a couple of guesses. Enjoyment of her humiliation, snooping for extra information - both seemed equally likely.

Again, he shrugged. “I was curious.” When Stella didn’t ask any further questions, he tilted his head back down to meet her eyes and smiled a little bit across the space between them. “At first I thought boyfriend. Woulda made sense why you’re so pissed at me for daring to have eyes when I first met you. But now I’m thinking brother.”

Stella looked away. She turned back to the expanse of grass and scattered buildings before her, tried to make herself focus on the way the moonlight hit each of them differently depending on their size and position. “Brother,” she confirmed after a beat. “My eldest brother.”

“How many you got?”

“Eight.”

“Eight brothers?” Shaking his head, Egan whistled quietly.

“I’m the only girl,” Stella added with a twist to her lips that wasn’t quite a smile. “And I’m the youngest. Gives you a better idea of what my childhood was like, I imagine.”

“All of you between the ages of eighteen and forty-one?” Egan asked.

“Youngest twenty-two, oldest thirty-three,” she confirmed. “We’re all in the service of king and country.”

Egan didn’t say anything for a moment, but when he did his voice was quiet. “Your parents must be climbing the walls with worry. Even their little girl’s not safe in some office job on the ground.”

Stella looked over at him, considered him thoughtfully. After a while’s contemplation, she said, “No one in this entire country has been entirely safe since 1939. Little children have been bombed in schools, old people in their homes. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone over here who hasn’t lost someone in some capacity. But we count ourselves lucky and try not to get too weepy about it because it’s much worse on the continent.” She shrugged. “And anyway, not all of my brothers are in the line of fire. Will’s high up enough that he hasn’t ever had to go abroad and Arthur is in air exec in an airfield further south, so he’s reasonably safe nowadays, too. But, yeah,” she relented, turning back to the expanse in front of her, unable to force herself to meet his eyes any longer, “the rest of them are all spread across Europe and Africa.”

“All in the air force?”

“Most,” Stella acknowledged with a small nod. “George decided to go rogue and join the infantry and obviously I’m in the ATA. But everyone else is in the RAF.”

“Right.” John had a hand on the back of his neck, rubbing it back and forth as he recalled with a grimace the conversation they’d had in the pub last week. “Right.”

Stella nodded. She didn’t turn to look at him but she was remembering the exchange, too. “Right.”

“They all pilots?”

“Most. A mix of bombers and fighters. But we have a navigator and a flight engineer among our ranks, too.”

John wanted to ask whether they were all still around. Whether the devastating Battle of Britain she spoke about with such high regard and so little room for argument had taken any of her eight brothers from her. But that was a bad idea and he knew it, and he didn’t want to put his foot straight back in the mud after only recently managing to wrench it free.

Stella didn’t give him time to ask any further questions, anyway, turning to him with a collected expression and wondering, “What about you? Any siblings?”

“Two sisters,” John replied easily. “Frances, who’s three years older than me, and Eileen, who’s six years younger.”

Stella hummed her acceptance of these facts. “Who’s your favourite?”

John sputtered a scoff. “What?”

“Who’s your favourite sister?” Stella asked, arching a brow at him. “Frances or Eileen?”

“I don’t have a favourite.” His eyebrows were furrowed. “Who the fuck has a favourite sibling?”

“Harry’s my favourite,” Stella informed him prosaically. “He’s closest to me in age, one year older.”

“Pilot?”

“Hurricane pilot,” she confirmed.

John grinned. “Shoulda guessed.” He gazed at her for a moment before laughing a little under his breath and giving a brief shake of his head. “I guess when you’ve only got two siblings it seems a little harsher to choose.”

Stella shrugged. “I suppose. When I was growing up my favourite used to change all the time. Will, who’s back in the club, was my favourite for a long time. He’s the oldest so he looked after me most when I was little.”

“What are all their names?” John asked.

Stella smiled in spite of herself. People often wanted to test her to see if she could remember all of her brothers’ names, which was absurd because they were her brothers - of course she knew their names. “In order of oldest to youngest: Will, Arthur, David, Alfred, Peter, George, Thomas, and Harry. Then there’s me.”

“The baby of the family,” John said with a grin. “Stella Finley.”

“That’s the one,” Stella agreed.

“Middle name?”

“May.”

“Born in May?”

“Born in November.”

“Then why May?”

“That was my grandma’s name.” She shrugged. “What’s your middle name?”

“Clarence.”

Stella barked a laugh, clapping her hands once together. “Unfortunate.”

John rolled his eyes. “That was my grandpa’s name.”

Stella simply laughed at him again. “Unfortunate.”

“Anyone ever call you Stels?” John asked next.

“No,” Stella replied simply.

“Can I call you Stels?”

“No,” she replied again. “It’s with great reluctance that I let you call me Fin.”

“You look like a Stella, you know,” John went on, ignoring her. It was a name which felt like a mixture of softness and sharp edges. Pretty but not delicate. “Like a Stels,” he added after a beat, because as much as she looked like a Stella, she really looked like a Stels. There was something about that extra S which added familiarity, peeled back a layer of hardness; she was a Stella at first glance and a Stels once you got to know her, all indignant assertions of authority and sharp comments until you discovered the bird facts and hastily choreographed dance routines.

“No one calls me Stels,” Stella protested.

John shrugged, smiling to himself. “Not yet.”

[inthefallofasparrow]

I think the main problem with House of the Dragon's interpretation of that scene from the end of episode 1, is that the lead up is from Blood and Cheese's point of view, not Helaena's. A good chunk of time is devoted to them. Far too much, in fact. We see them talking to Daemon, we see a montage of them randomly wandering through the castle, we see them arguing with each other, Cheese brings a dog for no other reason than to kick it to make sure the audience knows he's a cowardly bad guy, and because all of that time is spent with them, we know their motivations, limitations and incompetence.

Normally that's a good thing for humanising characters, but it means they are no longer a scary, unknown, unseen threat that suddenly and maliciously attacks without warning; they're just a couple of hapless knuckleheads. And that sucks a lot of the built-up tension out of the impact of the scene. It'd be like watching a horror film entirely from the killer's point of view. It's still gory, but it's not that scary because the suspense comes from the victim's limited viewpoint.

The Red Wedding for instance works so well because we see the buildup entirely from the Starks' point of view. We can sense some danger is brewing, but we don't know what it is. There are a couple of odd moments and interactions, as well as some ominous sound cues to clue us into something not being right, but otherwise we just see the Starks celebrating and talking about the future. The betrayal by Roose Bolton and Walder Frey is understandable in hindsight, but we don't see it until it's happening. We don't know they've been in contact with Tywin, planning a massacre. And the shock drives the impact of the attack, because we find out at the same time the Starks do. Whereas, as soon as Cheese asked Daemon what they should do if they couldn't find Aemond, it was pretty clear they weren't going to. So, we knew something bad was coming well beforehand either way, and then watched them bumble into it.

I think what the show needed to do was this:

After Rhaenyra made her wishes known, show Daemon writing an unexplained letter to Mysaria (who is still in King's Landing).

She receives it, and then meets with and passes it on to the only spy she has left, a goldcloak loyal to Daemon (Blood), after Larys killed all her spies in the Red Keep.

Add more scenes of Helaena interacting with Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, so we get to know them and their relationship better.

After Helaena had mentioned worrying about 'rats' earlier, briefly introduce the ratcatcher (Cheese) summoned to deal with them. He says there's an infestation in the children's room and suggests they temporarily move to Rhaenyra's empty old room.

Show Helaena getting more and more upset and paranoid about a looming threat that she tries to explain to Aemond, but can't.

Then that night, two men in hoods suddenly enter Rhaenyra's old room (through the secret passage we saw Rhaenyra and Daemon use last season) and hold Helaena and the children hostage there. (Though their faces are hidden, we can intuit who they are)

One reads the letter to her which Daemon sent, revealing it offers gold for anyone who can deliver 'the prince's head' to him. They demand to know where Aemond is, but Helaena doesn't know, so they decide to misinterpret the letter, and take Jaehaerys' head instead, and ask which one is him.

The rest can play out the same, I guess.

(Having Alicent in the room at the time too, like in the book, would obviously heighten the tension as well, but that's another thing.)

As a 'home-invasion-with-kids-involved' scene, this could've potentially had real 'Funny Games' (2007) vibes to it. But because we followed the invaders most of the time, not the victims, the set-up read closer to a non-comedic version of 'Home Alone' (1990).

[littlehaize]

got an idea last night

a star trek!dbh au (or how to put my current hyperfixation in my old but still current hyperfixation (next thing you know i'll put dbh in supernatural and i'll die from it))

just. just hear me out

they would of course be on the uss enterprise, because that's how it works

markus as the captain, he would totally be half-human half-vulcan, but raised on earth by human(s?) and miss completely the vulcan logic, he has a few of it but most of the time, if nobody knew or saw his ears, they would think of him as a human, he enrolled in starfleet without really thinking he would make it, it just made sense for him at first and now he has a whole ship under him

north as head chief of security, an orion woman that escaped her status as a sex-slave (if that's not canon, i don't know what is) and took refuge on earth, then went to starfleet to be able to escape her previous captors, she's still search but has a good protection within starfleet, she doesn't take anyone shit about her former condition or her origins, she takes medication for her pheromones and never forgets it, she briefly thought about undergoing surgery to change her appearance and not look like an orion anymore but was talked out of it for her physical and sanity safety

josh as the communication officer, it just works for reasons i can't explain because it just makes sense to me, he would be human, enrolled in starfleet by himself, not a family thing or anything, he's an extraordinary peacekeeper and almost always send for first contact mission

simon as the head medical officer, he would have been predicted he would be captain of a ship but changed direction to anyone surprises, and knows he made the right choice with that, he also balance out the recklessness of their chief of security, second in command and captain, by being the only one who has the power to put them out of commission if he judges they need it (it works with everyone else on the ship and he's not afraid to use that power)

connor as the second in command, he was the head of security before north, but was promoted as second in command, contrary to markus he's logically and thoughtfully reckless, it's always rightfully calculated, but sometimes he's bad at math as we say, he's also half-human and half-vulcan, but was raised on vulcan by vulcan(s?), that's why both of them balance out perfectly, he was coerced into joining starfleet and now found his place

lucy as the ship's counselor, do i really need to explain this one? no i didn't think so too

hank as a starfleet admiral, former captain of the uss enterprise, now they respond directly to him, he's tired of their shit but will do everything to help them, even going against starfleet regulation, which he did when he was the captain

i still have yet to think about kara, alice and luther, or even others characters, but i do like what i just came up with. some things may change if i think about it more but for now it looks good to me

[besidesitstoowarm]

"Midnight" thoughts

i'll be honest i did not super enjoy this rewatch. everyone was so goddamn stupid and annoying it was kind of hard to sit through

i do like bottle episodes and wish we got more of them. donna has a nice relaxing spa day and the doctor tries to go on a field trip and has the worst day of his life. i like how he short-circuits the various bits of entertainment so that they can all talk to each other instead, it was cute. we briefly see rose on one of the music video screens when the doctor's back is turned

bus stops and something outside starts knocking. it starts with two, the dad knocks back 3 times and it repeats, the doctor knocks 4 times and it repeats. there's only one thing i think of when i hear 4 knocks and i'm not sure if it was an intentional reference or not

so the power goes out briefly and something enters the newly divorced lesbian and she's frozen, unable to do anything except repeat what everyone is saying. first normally, then it speeds up so she's speaking at the same time. it's suitably creepy and interesting that this thing is learning, mimicking. i also like that we never see it, learn nothing about it, and have no idea what it is or what it wants. the professor continually insisting nothing could possibly live on midnight just pissed me off, motherfucker do you know what lives in deep sea vents?! have you seen what tardigrades can do?! extonic sun or not

it's a classic hysteria story, like the house md episode set on an airplane. if i were there i would simply not become hysterical so it's hard to relate to these people, lol. eventually the doctor gets possessed too and they go to throw him out the airlock but the hostess realizes the thing never left sky so she murder-suicides them and everyone is saved. the doctor asking at the end what the hostess's name was and no one knows cause they never asked was a good touch

i think i must be spoiled from the last episodes or something cause everyone felt so goddamn annoying. no one was likable and i would have started throwing hands with that annoying ass couple like immediately. i do want to give a shoutout to colin morgan, who was cast in "merlin" bc of his performance in this episode, and the professor who was played by david troughton, son of patrick :) the episode was also directed by alice troughton but she has no relation

so yeah, kind of mid (-night) tbh. really curious about how i'll feel about the next one as i've never rewatched and didn't get all the hype last time

[rickie-the-storyteller]

Another snippet (this time from El's POV):

"Never been in trouble before."

That's what my mum said when I told her. Shows how much she knows... because that isn't actually true.

I had a lunchtime detention back in Year 8. Which was nearly five years ago, so I guess it's understandable that my parents wouldn't remember that all too well. And it likely wouldn't bother me quite as much as it does if they weren't so busy with being all successful that they forget other pivotal moments in my life. And my brother's, when he used to live here. I know they never mean to push us aside, and to their credit, they've gotten better at not doing that. But they straight up forgot to do anything for my 17th birthday last year. I brought it up the night before, and Mum was actually shocked! Which is just so... bad. I told Adam over the phone later that day, and he just laughed and was all like, "Glad I don't have to put up with that crap no more!"

I'm glad somebody was able to enjoy themselves that day.

As for the rest of us at home, we had to order some last-minute food and cake. We ended up pulling off a nice little super short-notice party just for us. And then the following weekend, Steph put together a surprise party at her place which cheered me up.

Mum and Dad did make it up to me at Christmas a few months later, though. I got a ton of cool stuff. Including my car!

I love my parents so much, and I appreciate everything they've done (and continue to do) for me. But sometimes I almost feel envious of Adam. The freedom he has now. Even though it has come with the price of never seeing or talking to either of his parents ever again. And not being with me anymore. Since I'm still stuck here and all.

Life is so complicated for no reason... Why can't we all just get along?!

But yeah... I've been in trouble before. It's not a common occurrence for me, but it has happened before. I remember that day so clearly. Not even really because of the detention, but because of the conversation I had during detention. It was the first time I made a connection with Alice Johnson. She was a relatively new student at the time, and we're still friends to this day!

___

Here's how the conversation went (more or less):

Mr Peters (our main supervisor for the hour) had briefly left the room, and I used that as an opportunity to go talk to B. Alice had apparently overheard our conversation, because as soon as I got back to my seat next to her, she immediately felt the need to address it.

"Wow," she murmured to herself, her tone dry.

I turned my head to face her for the first time since I got there when I heard that. "What?" I asked, wanting her to elaborate.

And then this... imp, this short, ginger-haired little brat has the nerve to elaborate with this: "Watching a wholesome nerd pretend to be all cool for the sake of flirting is always the saddest thing ever…"

Can you believe her?! There are so many problems with that sentence... like for one thing, who the hell is she calling a nerd?

But there's also the implications behind what she's saying. The hidden meaning. The unspoken words. The innuendos, if you will.

“Hey!” I immediately pushed back. Admittedly, I was at a loss for words... but I still tried to argue. Because that's just me sometimes. The debate team captain spirit has always been with me, I guess.

Alice, smug as ever, retorted, “Oh, come on, Elise. You know I’m right."

"Right about what?"

"You’re a nerd that can’t flirt to save your life. And there’s no shame in that.”

Can you believe that this was one of the first real conversations I ever had with this girl? She barely knows me, but she believes she knows enough to know what my intentions are when going across a room to talk to a friend.

"I wasn't flirting," I argued.

"You sure?"

"Yes!"

"Ellie. Honey. Sweetie," Alice chirped in her chillax-it's-not-that-serious tone that she often uses in situations like this. I've grown to be quite used to it over the years, particularly when she's jokingly criticising someone. "We all know you’re into Bret. It’s obvious.”

This comment had me shook for a brief moment, because... well, I had never thought about that. I didn't think that I was being "obvious," or that others might pick up on a change in my behaviour or anything. It wasn't even obvious to me before this point (which I guess is another reason why this conversation has stuck with me for so long, I suppose. This was the moment I realised my true feelings towards Bret. Not that I properly admitted it or confirmed Alice's theory to her in the moment, but still).

“What?!”

“Yeah. I mean, for what reason, I’ll never know," Alice went on. "But people have picked up on it. I bet everyone in school knows except for him. Cuz he’s an idiot.”

At this point, I felt the need to defend B, since I know him well enough to know that he isn't nearly as hopeless as the majority of people seem to think he is. “Ok, stop. Bret isn’t an idiot. And again, I’m not flirting with him. Nor am I 'into' him.”

Alice frowned. “Really? You’re not even the slightest bit interested?” She looked somewhat disappointed with that. Good. I mean, she was right. I know that now. But this is why people shouldn't make assumptions.

“No! I… I just care about him. A lot." I shrugged. "He feels like home to me.”

"Oooooh-"

"Stop."

Alice laughed at my deadpan cutoff. “Sorry, sorry. But like... that sounds like love to me.”

"Right. And what would you know about that? You're 12 years old."

"Uh, I know more than you think. I've seen all the best romcoms."

Like that means anything... she didn't stop there, though.

"I've read all the best chick lit!"

Which, me too! I love to read a good love story. Still doesn't mean anything, though.

"And I just believe in true love, you know?" Alice continued. "I'm a romantic at heart."

"Mmmm." At this point, Mr Peters had returned to the room, so we all settled down and got back to work. But Alice wasn't finished yet...

"Meeting your soulmate is like finding home in another person," Alice whispered to me. "Or so I've heard."

“Shut up," I whispered back. I tried to explain myself. "I didn't mean anything when I said that. It's just that we grew up together. We went to the same primary school, so I’d see him every day. And before I met you and Dylan, he was, like, my only real school friend.”

"AW! I'm your friend?!"

At this point, Mr Peters chimed in and lightly chided Alice for her little disruptance of the quiet room. Fortunately, she was able to brush it off, and we were both able to laugh at it. Quietly, of course.

"Sorry about that," I mumbled.

"Oh, it's alright. It's not like it was ALL your fault... it just mostly was."

"Hey!" I gently nudged her arm and pretended to be offended.

Eventually, the hour came to an end. Alice and I left the classroom together since we both had biology class next.

"So, yeah. There's nothing going on there," I reiterated on the way there. "We're just very good friends. And I mean... lately, things have been feeling a bit different with him, but-"

"Right. That's because you're in love!

"STOP."

I love Alice. I did back then, and I still do to this day. But she needs to learn when to shut her mouth. She's going to get herself in some serious trouble one day.

(This snippet is an early draft of book 1. El is recounting her small bit of history of getting into trouble in school, as well as the beginning of her friendship with Ally.)

[ripeteeth]

HI! This is my first ask I've ever done on this app so please, do let me know if I've made any mistakes or if I've violated any of the etiquette rules.

That aside, I discovered your writing account/s in the comment section of a post asking for beautifully written fanfiction on Reddit and was instantly enchanted by the lushness of your writing and the imagery found in so many of your works, not to mention the unique concepts and plotlines they contained. And you wrote for a lot of my favourite ships too.

The number of screenshots I have of various passages I found particularly moving or breathtaking in its detailed description of love, or the world surrounding these characters is ... it's a lot yea. It seems I've gone on a bit of an unrelated ramble to what I would like to ask, so apologies. Ehem

I was wondering, what are some of your favourite authors? Or favourite writers that you tend to go to for a re-read or just a damn good fanfic? It's just that you write so beautifully and breathe such life into these characters that I'm curious as to the fics/books you've taken inspiration from or enjoy!

Hi! Omg, thank you for such a lovely ask. I've been really feeling rough about my writing lately and this was such a bright spot in my day <3. I'm so happy that you've been enjoying my stuff!

And I will ALWAYS talk about books and writers I love, and I'm gonna list far too many here because I have so many favorites and also do not know how to shut up. These are all books I've absolutely loved and have had some influence or impact on the way I write, or I hope that they do.

Fiction Frankenstein (1818 edition) - Mary Shelley Written On The Body - Jeanette Winterson On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong Cassandra - Christa Wolf Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson Grendel - John Gardner Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor Simple Passion - Annie Ernaux An American Childhood - Annie Dillard Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy Lote - Shola von Reinhold Crash - JG Ballard Hunger - Knut Hamsun Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Süskind Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis Outside the Gates - Molly Gloss Shadow & Claw - Gene Wolfe The Pearl Diver - Jeff Talarigo The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki A Map to the Door of No Return - Dionne Brand Piranesi - Susanna Clarke Near to the Wild Heart - Clarice Lispector Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys The Master & Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov We Have Always Lived In The Castle - Shirley Jackson How To Be Both - Ali Smith Non-Fiction Erotism - Georges Bataille A Lover's Discourse - Roland Barthes Blood, Bones, and Butter - Gabrielle Hamilton Just Kids - Patti Smith Consent - Vanessa Springora Stigmata - Hélène Cixous Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets - Svetlana Alexievich

Poetry All The Flowers Kneeling - Paul Tran Night Sky With Exit Wound - Ocean Vuong The Descent of Alette - Alice Notley Our Andromeda - Brenda Shaughnessy Desire - Frank Bidart

[matan4il]

Good morning, sweet Alice!! Sorry, not Buddie related. This is just a question for you? Have you watched iMordecai yet? Did you love it if so? I got to spend a lovely evening with my best friend and her grandmother the other night where we watched it and drank too much wine. Her family comes from holocaust survivors, and I just have always loved them. Her grandmother is such a beautiful, striking woman. I think I mentioned to you before that she was the one who introduced me to the ballet. We always had to dress our best and present well.

Any ways there has been a lot of ugly lately. Especially a heinous speech given at one of our colleges recently. I was happy to have a joyful experience and immerse myself in your culture. I hope you are staying safe and strong 🩷🩷🩷

Hi darling! *HUGS* How are you? And please, never apologize! I'm always happy to hear from you.

I have actually not heard of iMordecai yet. Thank you so much for bringing it to my attention! Briefly looking at the casting list, I see three actors who I know are Jewish / of Jewish descent, and that is hopefully already a good sign.

"We always had to dress our best and present well" > And now I'm missing my own savta, who was also a Holocaust survivor. I think a lot of them had that reaction to being de-humanized, where they sort of... re-humanized themselves by always trying to look their best, no matter what. My savta had a stage where she could no longer walk safely in high heels, but she didn't want to wear any other kind. At the time, it was frustrating, scary even due to the possibility that she might fall. Looking back, I get why it mattered to her so much and I can't fault her for it.

Regarding that speech... yes. I don't think there's one Jewish person out there who's concerned about the current rise in antisemitism who hasn't heard about it. The worst thing is the way that Jews are not listened to when we talk about what is antisemitic. The way we're accused of "weaponizing antisemitism" which is ironically an antisemitic accusation in itself. That's maybe not surprising. The last people who will want to hear what racism is are racists. What's more disheartening is that I think with most types of bigotry, the average person is more aware of who should be listened to. It's insane to me that very serious intellectual debates on what is antisemitism are being conducted by non-Jews, some of them are themselves identified by the Jewish community as antisemites, and most people are not even raising an eyebrow about it.

I'm so happy that you have such a wonderful "adoptive" family in your best friend and her grandma! And that you get to joyfully immerse yourself in our culture. It's a pleasure to share it with someone as lovely as you! I'm sending all three of you the biggest hugs from Jerusalem and wishes for a shabbat of peace! (as always, here's my ask tag) xoxox

[sliebman10]

On the Cutting Room Floor: Meet Cute

Alice was not interested in dating an actor. She's a talent manager, after all. It's just not a good idea. Until Frank Longbottom started paying attention to her.

Snippet: 

They were quiet again until Frank said, “Tell me more about the wine.”

“Um…it’s from a winery I’ve been to in Sonoma, that’s why I get it here,” she said, fidgeting with the stem of the glass. “It has some peach notes too, but the grapefruit is pretty strong. Want to taste?” she asked. Frank held out his hand for the glass, and she passed it to him, their hands brushing in the process. She looked up at him sharply and he smiled, a different smile this time, not the one he got paid for; a smaller, more intimate thing.

She watched him drink it.  He didn’t do any of the showy glass swirling or swishing in his mouth that people who thought they knew what wine tasting was did. He sniffed it briefly and took a small sip, apparently concentrating and then swallowed it. “You’re right about the grapefruit,” he said thoughtfully as he sniffed it again. “But there’s none of it on the nose.”

They continued to sit at the bar and talk about the wine and then many other topics that Alice could never remember, until Sirius and Remus appeared with their jackets in tow. “See you guys tomorrow,” Sirius said, waving on his way out, with one arm around Remus’s waist.

Frank chuckled a little. “I suppose we’re the last ones here.”

“I suppose so,” Alice said, suddenly not wanting the night to end.

“Can I call you, Alice?” Frank asked, giving her the full effect of his eyes.

“I - really? You want to call me?” she stammered.

He covered her hand with his. “If it’s ok with you.”

Read the rest here.

From the beginning. 

[kamreadsandrecs]

It’s 10 a.m. on a Monday, early February, and I’m stepping off a plane in Sarasota, Florida. I’ve come to visit Caroline Calloway, scandalous internet celebrity. (“Scandalous internet celebrity” is what I’m tagging her with now because I have to tag her with something, and it’s accurate if inadequate. Tagging her properly is, you could say, the point of this entire piece.) 

A short Uber ride takes me to a building that’s very clearly a retirement home though not explicitly billed as such. No one in the lobby or on the grounds is a day under 80. Lots of bright white sneakers and denim pantsuits. I hold the elevator for a woman with a walker who wants to show me the package she’s just received from QVC. 

I exit the elevator and there’s Calloway, framed in the doorway of her condo, one foot forward, the other back. She’s 31 but looks like a girl, like Alice in Wonderland: small and slender with smooth, honey-hued skin; a precisely molded forehead, chin, and mouth; large, clear eyes. She has an armful of cat, stuffed, I think at first, only realizing my error when it slow-blinks at me before turning away in feline disdain. A ribbon ties back her long hair, brown, though somehow not, somehow giving the impression of fairness, blondness. Her clothes are plain yet stylish—oversized white oxford, fitted blue shorts, blue flats.

How you know she’s Caroline Calloway and not Alice in Wonderland: her press-on nails, long and painted, a different theme for each nail, the theme for her thumbnail a fiery car crash. Calloway is a writer but one better known for what she hasn’t written than what she has. It’s the Instagram captions she wrote in 2014 and 2015 about her life as a bright-eyed American undergraduate among a glamorous and decadent elite at Cambridge University that made her (Instagram) famous. It’s School Girl, a book that was supposed to be an extension of those Cambridge captions, a book she never wrote, though she signed a contract worth half a million dollars to do so, that made her—started to make her—(real-world) infamous. In any case, she has a nonfiction writer’s eye for vivid detail. So I’m certain the nail is a vivid detail she’s planted. She means for me to pick up on it, include it here. 

As she bends over to reposition the cat, her breast—the left one—is briefly exposed. That she’s without a bra in a shirt unbuttoned almost to her navel is also a vivid detail. It too might be planted. After all, she made her breasts part of the public discourse when, in 2020, she opened an OnlyFans account in order, she claimed, to pay back the advance for School Girl. And maybe she’s flashing me now so I won’t forget to mention that she was, for a period, the purveyor of what she termed “cerebral softcore porn.” (Translation: She dressed up as famous female characters in literature, except topless. Daisy Buchanan, topless. Juliet Capulet, topless. Arwen—“the hot elf in Lord of the Rings, the one Liv Tyler played,” she explained at my bewildered look—topless.)

Or maybe she’s just behind on her laundry.

Calloway and I have been talking for a year and a half, but this is only our second in-person meeting, so instead of hugging her, I say hi. She raises the cat’s paw in greeting, then scampers off. From another room, she calls out that she’s trying to find the bellhop cap she bought Matisse. (Matisse is the cat.)

While I wait for her to come back, I wander inside—the moment I remember the words my friend Mitchell, who is also Calloway’s friend Mitchell, said last night. He knew I was interviewing her at her condo this morning and wanted to prepare me for what I was about to see. “It’s Instagram Grey Gardens,” he told me.

He’s right, I think, looking around. That’s exactly what Calloway’s condo is, only Calloway’s condo is actually Calloway’s grandmother’s condo. Or was until Calloway’s grandmother died last June. Calloway had moved in after moving out of her apartment—a studio in Manhattan’s West Village—in the spring. She was staying to help take care of her grandmother. Then, when her grandmother no longer required caretaking, she was staying to pack up her grandmother’s things. She was also staying just to stay since she’d sublet (illegally) the West Village apartment to Rachel Rabbit White, former sex worker and poet, and White’s husband, convicted bank robber and novelist Nico Walker.

Everything about the condo is musty fusty old-lady: the furnishings, the fixtures, the smells. But then overlaying the musty fusty is the “girly bohemian chaos” Calloway prides herself on. Scattered across the dark wood surfaces of antique tables and nightstands and armoires are Glossier products, Diptyque candles, arts and crafts supplies, a MetroCard, mismatched earrings, real flowers in glass vases, fake flowers in glass Coke bottles. On a doily, a bottle of antidepressants (Fluoxetine). In front of a dollhouse, a bottle of anti-anxiety meds (Gabapentin). On the bookshelf, intermingled with her grandmother’s movie-star memoirs—Lauren Bacall’s By Myself and Then Some, Myrna Loy’s Being and Becoming—her reality-star and YouTuber memoirs—Audrina Patridge’s Choices: To the Hills and Back Again, Stassi Schroeder’s Next Level Basic: The Definitive Basic B*tch Handbook, PewDiePie’s This Book Loves You.

​I crouch down to better examine the workstation Calloway has set up on the carpet. She’s assembling packages of “Grift (not gift) Cards,” an inside joke between her and her fans. In early 2019, she went viral as a grifter for launching a national “creativity workshops” tour that failed, rather spectacularly, to come off. She forgot to book venues; promised “mason jar gardens,” then, after 1,200 jars were delivered, had nowhere to put them; promised “orchid crowns” but only managed a single measly non-orchid flower per attendee; etc.

Months later, she went viral again as a different kind of grifter when her former best friend and NYU classmate Natalie Beach wrote an exposé for The Cut. In it, Beach claimed that she was Calloway’s ghostwriter: editor of the Instagram captions, cowriter of the School Girl proposal. “I Was Caroline Calloway” was an absolute sensation, The Cut’s most read story of 2019. (“It was supposed to come out the day Jeffrey Epstein died,” says Beach. “But fact-checking took so long that it got pushed back a month. You get lucky with how things hit and when.”) By the end of the year, Calloway was all-the-way infamous—a grifter two times over; canceled for being a grifter two times over. 

Calloway, back with Matisse, looking très sportif in his bellhop cap, stops in front of a gilt-edged mirror to confirm her prettiness. She smiles at her reflection, the smile spilling onto me as she turns. We talk for a few minutes about how her lawsuit is going. (In March of last year, the landlord of that West Village apartment accused her of skipping out on $40,000 in back rent.) When she’d first informed me of the financial pickle she was in, she’d said, widening her eyes, “At a certain point, I realized I could either live luxuriously or pay my rent.” A statement so dumb, it’s funny. I remind her of it now with a laugh.

Instead of laughing back, she nods gravely and says, “Yeah, I made a choice. Honestly, I’m not even sure it was the wrong choice. The underlying humor is like, ‘Ha, ha, and I regret it.’ But do I? A bank wouldn’t have given me a loan with that low an interest rate to go party like a princess.” (She and her landlord have come to an understanding, she says: She’ll pay him $5,000 a month until she reaches $40,000, throwing in an additional $5,000 to cover his legal expenses.) 

She chews her bottom lip as she thinks. “I’m often reductive about myself in a jokey way. Like, ‘Oh, 40 grand to party.’ But it was an opportunity. I didn’t know when we’d see again the white-hot molten center of what’s cool in downtown New York embracing cancel culture in the ways that it did in the summer of 2021. It was a pop-culture lunar eclipse that I wanted to take advantage of. I’ve created a brand out of thin air. I’m a business. But banks don’t see me that way. Nothing but writing a book could ever make me a writer, but being there, with the right people in the right places having the right conversations, could make me in a much better position culturally for when my book did come out. And being there took money. I want to be an It girl. It girls are start-ups, and start-ups need funding.”

I’m so astounded by the whole speech, the last line in particular, that all I can do is stare. Calloway does this frequently: Right at the moment I’ve condescended to her, she knocks me flat by offering an insight both radical and renegade in that sweet-girl voice of hers, high and bright and harmless. And then I remember: She looks like Edie Sedgwick, thinks like Andy Warhol. Is a living, breathing contradiction in terms, and my response to her is contradictory. 

The writing on which she built her reputation, the Cambridge captions and the School Girl proposal—think Daisy Miller crossed with The Princess Diaries; think Brideshead Revisited but coed—I don’t like. It’s wish fulfillment for adolescent and postadolescent girls of the slurpiest, most trivial sort. It stirs my imagination not at all. And my official reaction to her stories is rejection.

My unofficial reaction to her stories, however, is rapture. Not the stories she writes, the ones about castles, gowns, garden parties, and impossibly handsome young men all bucking for the title of Prince Charming, which are silly shit and kid stuff and old-fashioned. The stories she tells, the ones about engagement rates, hashtags, clout fucking, and Dimes Square—about making it in America in the first quarter of the 21st century—which are serious shit and grown-up and wildly, emphatically contemporary.

Calloway on how she mastered Instagram:

“I got my Instagram handle in 2012. The app was up-and-coming. A typical post was an aerial shot of avocado toast and, for a caption, hashtag ‘Valencia.’ That Dior would one day hire Instagrammers to cover its shows, or that The New York Times would break news on Instagram in tandem with the website was unthinkable. It was in January 2013, after Cambridge accepted me, after I dropped out of NYU, that I really started investing in Instagram. I bought 40,000 followers for maybe $4.99, which makes me sound like”—she breaks into a mincing parody of an old person—“ ‘I remember when soda pop was a nickel.’

“I knew I wanted not just followers but readers, and not just any readers but readers who were predisposed to become obsessed with what they read. I targeted book fandom accounts—Harry Potter, The Hunger Games—and bought ads. So, I spent all of my savings on this, plus more of my dad’s money, which I would later learn he didn’t even have. I’d buy a package of 10 posts for $50, which sounds insane. But the thing is, the people I bought the ads from thought I was insane, that I was throwing away money. And they were like, ‘Oh, are you sure?’ Then I would take every ounce of my ability as a writer to study the way they wrote their captions. When they liked something, did they say it was ‘awesome’ or ‘amazing’? What emojis did they use? How many exclamation points? I would write the ads in the voice of the account owner so that they didn’t look like ads, they looked like captions. 

Now the FTC has rules about that, but not then. And I’d be like, ‘I found the most amazing new account, her stories are so great.’ I’d time these little ad campaigns to go up just as I was posting original stories on my own account. And that’s how I started to get real followers.”

Calloway on how she survived getting canceled the first time after the creativity workshop fiasco:

“The rules that apply to surviving a riptide apply to surviving getting canceled. Your first instinct is to struggle. You want to clear your name, set the record straight. Don’t. If you do, you’ll expend your energy too quick and drown. What you do instead is follow the current, even if the last thing you want to do is go in the direction public opinion is carrying you. If you’re me, that means leaning into your scammer identity. You don’t point out that you offered everyone a refund. Or that the people the workshop was meant for actually had a good time. No, you name your next book Scammer. And then, once the undertow subsides, you can make your way back to shore.”

Calloway on how she survived getting canceled the second time after the “I Was Caroline Calloway” fiasco:    

“Natalie stole my identity with that piece. We did write captions together in the beginning, when we were writing for an audience of no one—for bots. But my first two years at Cambridge, we barely spoke. I alone wrote the captions that got me real followers, that got me fame. And then we wrote the book proposal together, half her words, half mine, because I was too high on Adderall to do it myself. Natalie was never my ghostwriter. A few years later, I got an email from her. She told me she’d written about our friendship and that I’d be hearing from a fact-checker. There are a lot of things that I give myself credit for anticipating correctly. When I imagined how many stories would come from the piece, how many press miles, I almost nailed it. I knew it would be life-changing. What I didn’t know was that Natalie would utilize this regressive, misogynistic model of beauty equals dumb, ugly equals smart. But it wasn’t all bad for me. Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal. Whereas if you have one scandal, people remember, and it defines you.”

I’m still recovering from the “It girls are start-ups” line, my mouth hanging open as if on a hinge, when she suggests we begin the interview. With effort, I close my mouth and nod, follow her to the front of the condo.

We’re sitting on what Calloway refers to as the lanai, a word I’ve never heard outside of a Golden Girls rerun. She’s written something she wants to read to me, is scrolling through her laptop to find it. I await with interest.

It isn’t quite true that I reject her writing. It’s the pre-cancellation writing that I reject. Six months after Beach’s tell-all dropped, Calloway posted on her website “I Am Caroline Calloway,” a novella-length essay. She called it a response to Beach, but really it was the latest version of the Caroline Calloway story. The first version, the Cambridge captions, was the story told as a YA fairy tale. The second version, “I Was Caroline Calloway,” was the story retold as a gritty bildungsroman. According to Beach, the real Caroline Calloway wasn’t Caroline Calloway, a magnetic beauty whose life was a series of madcap adventures that demonstrated again and again the world’s inability to say no to her. Rather, the real Caroline Calloway was Natalie Beach, a smart and unhappy plain Jane, ignored by men when she wasn’t brutalized by them. In one scene, Beach recounted a sexual assault. An older guy took her for drinks, then to bed, where he choked her and hit her without her consent. The de facto takeaway: She was the brains behind Caroline Calloway; Calloway merely the body. 

In “I Am Caroline Calloway,” Calloway is retelling the story yet again, this time as a lesbian gothic: the subtext of “I Was Caroline Calloway” made text. This version is about sexual repression and psychological vampirism and the domination of one personality by another—first Calloway’s by Beach’s, then Beach’s by Calloway’s. It’s also about addiction. (Beach, Calloway claims, turned her on to Adderall. “If Caroline says I introduced her to Adderall, she’s not making that up,” says Beach. “It’s a guilt and anxiety that I carry knowing how much she’s struggled with that drug.”) It’s about the fear of inherited madness as well. (Calloway’s father died by suicide, his decomposing corpse discovered in her childhood home in Falls Church, Virginia, two days after “I Was Caroline Calloway” went viral. In the second half of “I Am Caroline Calloway,” she does a literary exegesis of his autopsy report. “The medical examiner’s office still found living in his chest cavity a colony of maggots,” she writes.)

“I Am Caroline Calloway” isn’t without flaw, but it’s a mature work, dark and raw and powerful.

Calloway, unable to find what she’s looking for, shuts her laptop and just starts talking, telling me her plans. She’s been full of them for months now. Why she’s galvanized: the announcement that Adult Drama, a book of personal essays by Beach, will be published by Hanover Square Press in June.

Calloway on her initial reaction: “The first night I didn’t do anything. I just tried to sit with my feelings. Guess what? Didn’t work. Next night, absolute bender. I drink two bottles of wine. I’m super hungry, so I just start hitting up Hinge for someone who’ll take me out for what I refer to in my mind as a scamburger. I basically ask everyone on Hinge if they’ve tried hamburgers at this one spot where the hamburgers are like $20—not a cheap hamburger, but I’m not kept up at night for making them spend 20 bucks on me. It’s a good moral medium. So I find someone, a guy in a polka-dot shirt. He tries to go home with me, but I’m not feeling it. And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to hook up with a girl. I’ve never hooked up with a girl, but I’m just going to go find a girl at a bar and take her home.’ And do you know what I do instead? I take home a guy who looks like Henry VIII—same belly, same beard, same haircut. Hooking up with a girl almost felt like a treat and this felt like a punishment.”

Calloway’s original plan was to do nothing. “I stay completely quiet, cut off Natalie’s oxygen source. Her book only works if I’m around and present and making headlines.” A solid plan but quickly discarded. Too low-key, I suspect. Too un-splashy.

Her plan—the opposite of low-key, ultra-splashy—is to self-publish the “Internet Trilogy,” bam, bam, bam: Scammer, which is “about 2019” (or was about 2019 when she first announced it in 2019) and which has been available for preorder since January 2020, will come out on March 23; I Am Caroline Calloway, an expanded version of the essay, on May 5; The Cambridge Captions, self-explanatory, on May 16. “I’d cap it at a thousand copies,” she tells me, “so that I could then resell and get an advance from publishers so they could have the mainstream rights.” She’ll finance the trilogy, she says, by peddling Grift (not gift) Cards; Snake Oil, her skin care product; Caro Cards—just like tarot cards but different—and other similarly themed merchandise for sale on her website. 

Scammer she’s dedicating to Lena Dunham, who wrote a script after Paramount optioned her life rights back in 2019. The option, though, has expired. “The names Caroline Calloway and Lena Dunham are doused in internet gasoline,” says Calloway. “All you need is a match. Even the dedication will be a minor news story. Also, what else can I do to get this movie made except dedicate my book to her?” I Am Caroline Calloway she’ll dedicate to Greta Gerwig; and The Cambridge Captions to Sofia Coppola. “I’ve decided I want three movies about my life,” she says.

I’m nodding encouragingly at her but with a sick sinking feeling in my stomach. It used to be that all the plans she constructed, no matter how pie-in-the-sky, she made happen. She thought she belonged on the big screen and so climbed up there with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, delivering her single line—“Sir, this was on our roof”—with conviction in 2007’s The Invasion. (“Yes, I was a child actor—a key piece of my villain origin story.”) She likewise thought she belonged at Cambridge University, got in on her third try. (“I couldn’t live the rest of my life with an NYU email address.”) The name her parents gave her at birth, Caroline Gotschall, didn’t fit her conception of herself, which is why at 17 she swapped it for a name that did. (“I decided Caroline Calloway would look better on the cover of a book.”) She believed she could use the social networking service known as “Twitter for people who can’t read,” i.e. Instagram, to score a book contract and scored one with Flatiron. (“The US deal was for $375,000, but foreign deals brought that number up to just over $500,000.”)

Then in 2017, she took to Instagram to declare that she was withdrawing from her contract because she’d changed her mind about writing School Girl, now called And We Were Like. “I promised a memoir where the only thing that happened to me were boyfriends,” she said in a 2018 interview. “It wasn’t long before I realized the boy-obsessed version of myself I planned to depict as my memoir’s protagonist was not one I could stand behind.” She was spinning her renege as a bid for integrity, and perhaps it was. But she was also in the throes of a debilitating Adderall addiction. (She’s since stopped using. Adderall at least. “I don’t take uppers anymore,” she says. “Well, I do a little bit of coke. A holiday amount of coke, you know? Like, I don’t do coke more days in the year than there are holidays.”) And there might have been something else going on as well.

She continued to make plans after 2017, yet, one by one, they’ve sputtered, conked out. There’s a Reddit thread created by SMOLBEANSNARK dedicated to tracking and annotating her Instagram posts about Scammer. She’s blamed holdups variously on the return of her mother’s cancer, excessive partying, solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Shipping dates have come and gone many times. On November 8, 2020, she vowed that Scammer would be “AT LEAST 400 pages, more likely 450.” (Flash forward: One month after my Sarasota visit, I receive a text. “Scammer update: It’s taking shape before my eyes into more a book of 65 prose poems than a ‘memoir.’ ” Second flash forward: As of the printing of this issue, Scammer has not yet shipped. Neither has I Am Caroline Calloway, nor Cambridge Captions.)

Calloway is still talking, and as I watch her mouth move, the realization dawns: Natalie Beach, c’est moi.

Beach isn’t who I want to be. That, though, is who Calloway has turned me into. First of all, she makes disinterested journalism impossible. You can’t stay detached. She simply won’t allow it.

For example, a few weeks ago, over Zoom, I was listening to her read out loud a paragraph she’d written: “For months, I let a pool boy who is also a plumber fuck me without a condom. I haven’t used a condom in years.”

Unable to help myself, I interrupt. “You should stop having sex without a condom.”

She looks up at me, looks down, then gives a small shake of her head. “Oh,” she says. “No.”

I sigh.

For another example, over a different Zoom, I notice that she keeps pausing to suck on a lemon wedge. I ask her what she’s doing. She’s just taken mushrooms, she explains, and the lemon enhances the mushroom’s potency. I express irritation because I’d blocked out two hours for this interview, and now she was going to be too high to answer questions. No, no, she assures me, she won’t be too high to answer questions. Five minutes later she whispers, “I’m too high to answer questions.” I sigh.

She can be sweet and funny and charming, yet she has no respect for boundaries, personal or professional. In the middle of a conversation, she’ll fasten her eyes on mine, say breathily, “I’ve always thought I’d meet a journalist that I’d be friends with. I really hope it’s you.” Last March, she randomly sent me a video of herself getting ready to go out for the night. She was wearing a minidress and kept flipping it up, flashing her Red Scare thong, and doing this obscene darting thing with her tongue. My sons, then nine and seven, were constantly stealing my phone to watch.

If I continue talking to her, researching her, writing this piece on her, I’ll end up scrubbing the period blood out of her comforter, same as Beach. (Well, Beach didn’t scrub the blood-stained comforter, but she did stash it.) 

Really, though, Natalie Beach, c’est moi because Calloway makes me her collaborator. She needs one more than anybody I’ve ever met. There’s an air of purgatory about her. She’s been locked in a moment for six years, the moment she broke the contract with Flatiron. She’s doomed to try to write the book and fail to write the book over and over. She gives the book different titles—And We Were Like, Scammer, I Am Caroline Calloway—but it’s all, I’m convinced, the same book because it’s all the same story, the only story she has to tell: hers. And yet, for some mysterious reason, she can’t tell it. Not by herself, anyway.

How Calloway makes you her collaborator: She does cold reads on people. Is doing them on me all the time. Is alert to what I’m responsive to and then goes from there. 

For instance, she knows I like “I Am Caroline Calloway.” And once I call it a lesbian gothic, she starts calling it that too. I ask her if she’s going to change it substantially when she turns it into a book, and she says that she wants to make it “more of a lesbian gothic.” I point out that that’ll be tricky since she and Beach weren’t actually physically involved. She nods thoughtfully. “I’m sure there’s a way to write this, and that way might just be me fucking saying it, but Natalie’s sexual assault story—she actually didn’t tell the full extent of it in The Cut.”

She checks to see if she has my attention. When she sees she does, she continues:

“Natalie called me out of the blue, crying, even though we hadn’t spoken in months. I just sat down on the sidewalk because I was so sad for her. I remember being interrupted because people kept being like, ‘Caroline, are you okay?’ No one just sits down on the ground in England. The thing is, I’m such a good crisis friend. It’s something that, especially during my addict years, I really doubled down on because I knew I was dropping the daily ball. I wasn’t returning texts or asking friends, ‘How are you?’ And it was great because I was awake for three days at a time. People could call at any hour and I’d pick up. When Natalie was talking, I was high on Adderall, and I wanted to speak so badly. But I was quiet. That was one of the only times I was a good friend to her during all those years.”

Calloway then proceeds to tell me the same disturbing story that Beach told readers, with a few additional lurid details. Perhaps the most lurid detail of all: that Calloway wasn’t disturbed by the disturbing story. At least, she wasn’t only disturbed by it.

“I’m thinking that there’s something really sad about it but also fucked up and hot,” says Calloway. “I’m with someone. It’s very trusting, lovey-dovey. I say to him, ‘Okay, I’m going to get blackout drunk. Let me be very clear with you about what I want.’ And then he did to me some of what that guy did to Natalie. I never told Natalie that.”

So, if Calloway never quite manages to get her revised lesbian gothic into book form, she sort of does because I’ve put it in this piece. Her new version is out there, and the new version—a fourth version of the Caroline Calloway story—feels like one we wrote together even though I had no clue that’s what we were doing. Which makes me yet another worker bee on the Caroline Calloway hive project.

As Beach was with “I Was Caroline Calloway,” is again with Adult Drama. 

As Darren Star is. (He figured out how to write the big pop commercial Caroline-in-Cambridge book, only he wrote it as a TV show and the young woman is called Emily and she’s in Paris.) 

As Ryan Murphy will be if he adapts Beach’s piece. (According to rumor, he snapped up the rights for a whopping million dollars.)

As Dunham will be if she ever films the script she wrote.

As Gerwig and Coppola will be if Calloway succeeds in turning their heads with her dedications.

Writers whose books are released by name publishing houses, whose pieces appear in name magazines, are, for the most part, bourgeois professionals, integrated into mainstream society. Calloway isn’t. She’s authentically on the outside and in opposition. Is, in other words, authentically avant-garde. Is also, I believe, authentically criminal. I don’t mean criminal in the literal or legal sense. (I seriously doubt she’s broken any major laws. The comparisons to Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey always struck me as not just wrongheaded but flat-out wrong.) I mean criminal in the sense that she doesn’t do things on the up and up. The way she “gamed” Instagram is the way she “gamed” Cambridge University. (“I lied on my application,” she says. “I forged my transcript when I got in.”) And there’s an improvisatory recklessness to how she conducts her life that’s both thrilling and frightening. Like it’s all one big spree.

The term I’m groping for is con artist, emphasis on the artist because she’s authentically that too. It could be argued that she isn’t a writer but a performance artist’s take on a writer. Look at all the fascinating things she’s done with her failure to finish a book. There’s her foray into porn—paying off her publishers by desecrating the classics!—a desperate move, though also a witty and subversive one. There’s the “FACTS” section of her lawyer’s response to her landlord’s suit that’s written not in legalese, but Calloway-ese. (“Ms. Calloway had a very troubled childhood, which is why she spent so much money and time making improvements to the property—because 205 [West 13th Street] was not only her favorite home, but also her first.”) There’s the Reddit thread she inspired, which reads like Pale Fire for the internet age. And then there’s her feud with Beach, featherweight yet bloodthirsty, and the only game in town since literary types have gotten so milquetoast.

Beach, who understands what it means to have a career, to fulfill contracts and meet deadlines, did finish a book. Adult Drama is a respectable effort, if a little derivative—imitation Jia Tolentino crossed with imitation Sloane Crosley. It really only snaps to life when Calloway appears, which she does, first in “I Was Caroline Calloway” (retitled “Self-Centered”) and again in “Adult Drama or the Virgin Cunt Club,” the strongest piece in the collection by far. The problem could be Beach’s personality, the opposite of Calloway’s: self-deprecating, restrained, unpersuaded that she’s interesting enough to carry an essay, never mind a whole book. Calloway, on the other hand, is convinced she’s the heroine of a great drama. This belief gives even her shitposts a certain verve and flair. She might be shameless—“I’m a genius, Lili”—might be corny—why so many pictures of herself dressed like a Disney princess?—might even be nuts—“I’m not not mentally ill,” she once told me—but she’s always original, ever watchable. 

Yet it could also be argued that Calloway is a writer. A new kind of a writer. A writer who’ll never finish a book because to finish a book is to kill the story. And a book is already a dead thing since it can’t change or adapt, be revised or edited or added to or commented on—not without a cumbersome reprinting, anyway. (Books even look like little coffins.) Digital media allows for an ongoing, interactive story, and maybe that’s the future and Calloway’s it.

Or maybe she’s what her haters have always said she is: an amusing fuckup so fame-hungry that she’s willing to turn her inability to function into a brand.

Or maybe she’s all of the above.

I don’t think Calloway can admit, even to herself, that the chances of her publishing Scammer in anything like the form she originally promised are slim. Except that she did admit it. On January 27, 2021, in a now deleted post, she wrote:

How will you expect me to deliver on writing when I am historically, famously, bad at doing exactly that?… If I could travel back in time and prevent myself from crumbling under the overnight public scrutiny into an avalanche of panic attacks, I would have liked to have tweeted out exactly this to the haters calling me a criminal during January, 2019: CHAOS IS THE BRAND, YOU DUMB, SNARKY FUCKS!!!!!

As afternoon turns to evening, I catch a plane back to New York. Leave Calloway in her old-folks home in boondocks Florida with Matisse, now in a Dr. Seuss hat. If Calloway weren’t the supreme comic ingenue of her day, her ending would be tragic. Her ending would, in fact, be that of the protagonist/antagonist of Todd Field’s #MeToo thriller, Tár. That Lydia Tár, like Caroline Calloway an American self-invention and natural transgressor, is exiled from the cultural establishment is treated as a calamity. What a devastating fall from grace we’re supposed to think when, in the final scene, we see this onetime maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic conducting the score for a video game before a collection of cosplayers in an unspecified Southeast Asian country.

But Calloway is the supreme comic screwball ingenue of her day. Therefore she understands that an audience of plushies and freaks—or retirees and kitty cats—is preferable to one of simpering, self-congratulatory members of a dwindling and increasingly irrelevant intelligentsia. Her fate is a joke, but the joke isn’t only on her. It’s also on the scared and conformist culture that laughs at her because it can’t laugh at itself. 

Embrace the chaos, you dumb, snarky fucks. 



[kammartinez]

By Lili Anolik

It’s 10 a.m. on a Monday, early February, and I’m stepping off a plane in Sarasota, Florida. I’ve come to visit Caroline Calloway, scandalous internet celebrity. (“Scandalous internet celebrity” is what I’m tagging her with now because I have to tag her with something, and it’s accurate if inadequate. Tagging her properly is, you could say, the point of this entire piece.) 

A short Uber ride takes me to a building that’s very clearly a retirement home though not explicitly billed as such. No one in the lobby or on the grounds is a day under 80. Lots of bright white sneakers and denim pantsuits. I hold the elevator for a woman with a walker who wants to show me the package she’s just received from QVC. 

I exit the elevator and there’s Calloway, framed in the doorway of her condo, one foot forward, the other back. She’s 31 but looks like a girl, like Alice in Wonderland: small and slender with smooth, honey-hued skin; a precisely molded forehead, chin, and mouth; large, clear eyes. She has an armful of cat, stuffed, I think at first, only realizing my error when it slow-blinks at me before turning away in feline disdain. A ribbon ties back her long hair, brown, though somehow not, somehow giving the impression of fairness, blondness. Her clothes are plain yet stylish—oversized white oxford, fitted blue shorts, blue flats.

How you know she’s Caroline Calloway and not Alice in Wonderland: her press-on nails, long and painted, a different theme for each nail, the theme for her thumbnail a fiery car crash. Calloway is a writer but one better known for what she hasn’t written than what she has. It’s the Instagram captions she wrote in 2014 and 2015 about her life as a bright-eyed American undergraduate among a glamorous and decadent elite at Cambridge University that made her (Instagram) famous. It’s School Girl, a book that was supposed to be an extension of those Cambridge captions, a book she never wrote, though she signed a contract worth half a million dollars to do so, that made her—started to make her—(real-world) infamous. In any case, she has a nonfiction writer’s eye for vivid detail. So I’m certain the nail is a vivid detail she’s planted. She means for me to pick up on it, include it here. 

As she bends over to reposition the cat, her breast—the left one—is briefly exposed. That she’s without a bra in a shirt unbuttoned almost to her navel is also a vivid detail. It too might be planted. After all, she made her breasts part of the public discourse when, in 2020, she opened an OnlyFans account in order, she claimed, to pay back the advance for School Girl. And maybe she’s flashing me now so I won’t forget to mention that she was, for a period, the purveyor of what she termed “cerebral softcore porn.” (Translation: She dressed up as famous female characters in literature, except topless. Daisy Buchanan, topless. Juliet Capulet, topless. Arwen—“the hot elf in Lord of the Rings, the one Liv Tyler played,” she explained at my bewildered look—topless.)

Or maybe she’s just behind on her laundry.

Calloway and I have been talking for a year and a half, but this is only our second in-person meeting, so instead of hugging her, I say hi. She raises the cat’s paw in greeting, then scampers off. From another room, she calls out that she’s trying to find the bellhop cap she bought Matisse. (Matisse is the cat.)

While I wait for her to come back, I wander inside—the moment I remember the words my friend Mitchell, who is also Calloway’s friend Mitchell, said last night. He knew I was interviewing her at her condo this morning and wanted to prepare me for what I was about to see. “It’s Instagram Grey Gardens,” he told me.

He’s right, I think, looking around. That’s exactly what Calloway’s condo is, only Calloway’s condo is actually Calloway’s grandmother’s condo. Or was until Calloway’s grandmother died last June. Calloway had moved in after moving out of her apartment—a studio in Manhattan’s West Village—in the spring. She was staying to help take care of her grandmother. Then, when her grandmother no longer required caretaking, she was staying to pack up her grandmother’s things. She was also staying just to stay since she’d sublet (illegally) the West Village apartment to Rachel Rabbit White, former sex worker and poet, and White’s husband, convicted bank robber and novelist Nico Walker.

Everything about the condo is musty fusty old-lady: the furnishings, the fixtures, the smells. But then overlaying the musty fusty is the “girly bohemian chaos” Calloway prides herself on. Scattered across the dark wood surfaces of antique tables and nightstands and armoires are Glossier products, Diptyque candles, arts and crafts supplies, a MetroCard, mismatched earrings, real flowers in glass vases, fake flowers in glass Coke bottles. On a doily, a bottle of antidepressants (Fluoxetine). In front of a dollhouse, a bottle of anti-anxiety meds (Gabapentin). On the bookshelf, intermingled with her grandmother’s movie-star memoirs—Lauren Bacall’s By Myself and Then Some, Myrna Loy’s Being and Becoming—her reality-star and YouTuber memoirs—Audrina Patridge’s Choices: To the Hills and Back Again, Stassi Schroeder’s Next Level Basic: The Definitive Basic B*tch Handbook, PewDiePie’s This Book Loves You.

​I crouch down to better examine the workstation Calloway has set up on the carpet. She’s assembling packages of “Grift (not gift) Cards,” an inside joke between her and her fans. In early 2019, she went viral as a grifter for launching a national “creativity workshops” tour that failed, rather spectacularly, to come off. She forgot to book venues; promised “mason jar gardens,” then, after 1,200 jars were delivered, had nowhere to put them; promised “orchid crowns” but only managed a single measly non-orchid flower per attendee; etc.

Months later, she went viral again as a different kind of grifter when her former best friend and NYU classmate Natalie Beach wrote an exposé for The Cut. In it, Beach claimed that she was Calloway’s ghostwriter: editor of the Instagram captions, cowriter of the School Girl proposal. “I Was Caroline Calloway” was an absolute sensation, The Cut’s most read story of 2019. (“It was supposed to come out the day Jeffrey Epstein died,” says Beach. “But fact-checking took so long that it got pushed back a month. You get lucky with how things hit and when.”) By the end of the year, Calloway was all-the-way infamous—a grifter two times over; canceled for being a grifter two times over. 

Calloway, back with Matisse, looking très sportif in his bellhop cap, stops in front of a gilt-edged mirror to confirm her prettiness. She smiles at her reflection, the smile spilling onto me as she turns. We talk for a few minutes about how her lawsuit is going. (In March of last year, the landlord of that West Village apartment accused her of skipping out on $40,000 in back rent.) When she’d first informed me of the financial pickle she was in, she’d said, widening her eyes, “At a certain point, I realized I could either live luxuriously or pay my rent.” A statement so dumb, it’s funny. I remind her of it now with a laugh.

Instead of laughing back, she nods gravely and says, “Yeah, I made a choice. Honestly, I’m not even sure it was the wrong choice. The underlying humor is like, ‘Ha, ha, and I regret it.’ But do I? A bank wouldn’t have given me a loan with that low an interest rate to go party like a princess.” (She and her landlord have come to an understanding, she says: She’ll pay him $5,000 a month until she reaches $40,000, throwing in an additional $5,000 to cover his legal expenses.) 

She chews her bottom lip as she thinks. “I’m often reductive about myself in a jokey way. Like, ‘Oh, 40 grand to party.’ But it was an opportunity. I didn’t know when we’d see again the white-hot molten center of what’s cool in downtown New York embracing cancel culture in the ways that it did in the summer of 2021. It was a pop-culture lunar eclipse that I wanted to take advantage of. I’ve created a brand out of thin air. I’m a business. But banks don’t see me that way. Nothing but writing a book could ever make me a writer, but being there, with the right people in the right places having the right conversations, could make me in a much better position culturally for when my book did come out. And being there took money. I want to be an It girl. It girls are start-ups, and start-ups need funding.”

I’m so astounded by the whole speech, the last line in particular, that all I can do is stare. Calloway does this frequently: Right at the moment I’ve condescended to her, she knocks me flat by offering an insight both radical and renegade in that sweet-girl voice of hers, high and bright and harmless. And then I remember: She looks like Edie Sedgwick, thinks like Andy Warhol. Is a living, breathing contradiction in terms, and my response to her is contradictory. 

The writing on which she built her reputation, the Cambridge captions and the School Girl proposal—think Daisy Miller crossed with The Princess Diaries; think Brideshead Revisited but coed—I don’t like. It’s wish fulfillment for adolescent and postadolescent girls of the slurpiest, most trivial sort. It stirs my imagination not at all. And my official reaction to her stories is rejection.

My unofficial reaction to her stories, however, is rapture. Not the stories she writes, the ones about castles, gowns, garden parties, and impossibly handsome young men all bucking for the title of Prince Charming, which are silly shit and kid stuff and old-fashioned. The stories she tells, the ones about engagement rates, hashtags, clout fucking, and Dimes Square—about making it in America in the first quarter of the 21st century—which are serious shit and grown-up and wildly, emphatically contemporary.

Calloway on how she mastered Instagram:

“I got my Instagram handle in 2012. The app was up-and-coming. A typical post was an aerial shot of avocado toast and, for a caption, hashtag ‘Valencia.’ That Dior would one day hire Instagrammers to cover its shows, or that The New York Times would break news on Instagram in tandem with the website was unthinkable. It was in January 2013, after Cambridge accepted me, after I dropped out of NYU, that I really started investing in Instagram. I bought 40,000 followers for maybe $4.99, which makes me sound like”—she breaks into a mincing parody of an old person—“ ‘I remember when soda pop was a nickel.’

“I knew I wanted not just followers but readers, and not just any readers but readers who were predisposed to become obsessed with what they read. I targeted book fandom accounts—Harry Potter, The Hunger Games—and bought ads. So, I spent all of my savings on this, plus more of my dad’s money, which I would later learn he didn’t even have. I’d buy a package of 10 posts for $50, which sounds insane. But the thing is, the people I bought the ads from thought I was insane, that I was throwing away money. And they were like, ‘Oh, are you sure?’ Then I would take every ounce of my ability as a writer to study the way they wrote their captions. When they liked something, did they say it was ‘awesome’ or ‘amazing’? What emojis did they use? How many exclamation points? I would write the ads in the voice of the account owner so that they didn’t look like ads, they looked like captions. 

Now the FTC has rules about that, but not then. And I’d be like, ‘I found the most amazing new account, her stories are so great.’ I’d time these little ad campaigns to go up just as I was posting original stories on my own account. And that’s how I started to get real followers.”

Calloway on how she survived getting canceled the first time after the creativity workshop fiasco:

“The rules that apply to surviving a riptide apply to surviving getting canceled. Your first instinct is to struggle. You want to clear your name, set the record straight. Don’t. If you do, you’ll expend your energy too quick and drown. What you do instead is follow the current, even if the last thing you want to do is go in the direction public opinion is carrying you. If you’re me, that means leaning into your scammer identity. You don’t point out that you offered everyone a refund. Or that the people the workshop was meant for actually had a good time. No, you name your next book Scammer. And then, once the undertow subsides, you can make your way back to shore.”

Calloway on how she survived getting canceled the second time after the “I Was Caroline Calloway” fiasco:    

“Natalie stole my identity with that piece. We did write captions together in the beginning, when we were writing for an audience of no one—for bots. But my first two years at Cambridge, we barely spoke. I alone wrote the captions that got me real followers, that got me fame. And then we wrote the book proposal together, half her words, half mine, because I was too high on Adderall to do it myself. Natalie was never my ghostwriter. A few years later, I got an email from her. She told me she’d written about our friendship and that I’d be hearing from a fact-checker. There are a lot of things that I give myself credit for anticipating correctly. When I imagined how many stories would come from the piece, how many press miles, I almost nailed it. I knew it would be life-changing. What I didn’t know was that Natalie would utilize this regressive, misogynistic model of beauty equals dumb, ugly equals smart. But it wasn’t all bad for me. Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal. Whereas if you have one scandal, people remember, and it defines you.”

I’m still recovering from the “It girls are start-ups” line, my mouth hanging open as if on a hinge, when she suggests we begin the interview. With effort, I close my mouth and nod, follow her to the front of the condo.

We’re sitting on what Calloway refers to as the lanai, a word I’ve never heard outside of a Golden Girls rerun. She’s written something she wants to read to me, is scrolling through her laptop to find it. I await with interest.

It isn’t quite true that I reject her writing. It’s the pre-cancellation writing that I reject. Six months after Beach’s tell-all dropped, Calloway posted on her website “I Am Caroline Calloway,” a novella-length essay. She called it a response to Beach, but really it was the latest version of the Caroline Calloway story. The first version, the Cambridge captions, was the story told as a YA fairy tale. The second version, “I Was Caroline Calloway,” was the story retold as a gritty bildungsroman. According to Beach, the real Caroline Calloway wasn’t Caroline Calloway, a magnetic beauty whose life was a series of madcap adventures that demonstrated again and again the world’s inability to say no to her. Rather, the real Caroline Calloway was Natalie Beach, a smart and unhappy plain Jane, ignored by men when she wasn’t brutalized by them. In one scene, Beach recounted a sexual assault. An older guy took her for drinks, then to bed, where he choked her and hit her without her consent. The de facto takeaway: She was the brains behind Caroline Calloway; Calloway merely the body. 

In “I Am Caroline Calloway,” Calloway is retelling the story yet again, this time as a lesbian gothic: the subtext of “I Was Caroline Calloway” made text. This version is about sexual repression and psychological vampirism and the domination of one personality by another—first Calloway’s by Beach’s, then Beach’s by Calloway’s. It’s also about addiction. (Beach, Calloway claims, turned her on to Adderall. “If Caroline says I introduced her to Adderall, she’s not making that up,” says Beach. “It’s a guilt and anxiety that I carry knowing how much she’s struggled with that drug.”) It’s about the fear of inherited madness as well. (Calloway’s father died by suicide, his decomposing corpse discovered in her childhood home in Falls Church, Virginia, two days after “I Was Caroline Calloway” went viral. In the second half of “I Am Caroline Calloway,” she does a literary exegesis of his autopsy report. “The medical examiner’s office still found living in his chest cavity a colony of maggots,” she writes.)

“I Am Caroline Calloway” isn’t without flaw, but it’s a mature work, dark and raw and powerful.

Calloway, unable to find what she’s looking for, shuts her laptop and just starts talking, telling me her plans. She’s been full of them for months now. Why she’s galvanized: the announcement that Adult Drama, a book of personal essays by Beach, will be published by Hanover Square Press in June.

Calloway on her initial reaction: “The first night I didn’t do anything. I just tried to sit with my feelings. Guess what? Didn’t work. Next night, absolute bender. I drink two bottles of wine. I’m super hungry, so I just start hitting up Hinge for someone who’ll take me out for what I refer to in my mind as a scamburger. I basically ask everyone on Hinge if they’ve tried hamburgers at this one spot where the hamburgers are like $20—not a cheap hamburger, but I’m not kept up at night for making them spend 20 bucks on me. It’s a good moral medium. So I find someone, a guy in a polka-dot shirt. He tries to go home with me, but I’m not feeling it. And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to hook up with a girl. I’ve never hooked up with a girl, but I’m just going to go find a girl at a bar and take her home.’ And do you know what I do instead? I take home a guy who looks like Henry VIII—same belly, same beard, same haircut. Hooking up with a girl almost felt like a treat and this felt like a punishment.”

Calloway’s original plan was to do nothing. “I stay completely quiet, cut off Natalie’s oxygen source. Her book only works if I’m around and present and making headlines.” A solid plan but quickly discarded. Too low-key, I suspect. Too un-splashy.

Her plan—the opposite of low-key, ultra-splashy—is to self-publish the “Internet Trilogy,” bam, bam, bam: Scammer, which is “about 2019” (or was about 2019 when she first announced it in 2019) and which has been available for preorder since January 2020, will come out on March 23; I Am Caroline Calloway, an expanded version of the essay, on May 5; The Cambridge Captions, self-explanatory, on May 16. “I’d cap it at a thousand copies,” she tells me, “so that I could then resell and get an advance from publishers so they could have the mainstream rights.” She’ll finance the trilogy, she says, by peddling Grift (not gift) Cards; Snake Oil, her skin care product; Caro Cards—just like tarot cards but different—and other similarly themed merchandise for sale on her website. 

Scammer she’s dedicating to Lena Dunham, who wrote a script after Paramount optioned her life rights back in 2019. The option, though, has expired. “The names Caroline Calloway and Lena Dunham are doused in internet gasoline,” says Calloway. “All you need is a match. Even the dedication will be a minor news story. Also, what else can I do to get this movie made except dedicate my book to her?” I Am Caroline Calloway she’ll dedicate to Greta Gerwig; and The Cambridge Captions to Sofia Coppola. “I’ve decided I want three movies about my life,” she says.

I’m nodding encouragingly at her but with a sick sinking feeling in my stomach. It used to be that all the plans she constructed, no matter how pie-in-the-sky, she made happen. She thought she belonged on the big screen and so climbed up there with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, delivering her single line—“Sir, this was on our roof”—with conviction in 2007’s The Invasion. (“Yes, I was a child actor—a key piece of my villain origin story.”) She likewise thought she belonged at Cambridge University, got in on her third try. (“I couldn’t live the rest of my life with an NYU email address.”) The name her parents gave her at birth, Caroline Gotschall, didn’t fit her conception of herself, which is why at 17 she swapped it for a name that did. (“I decided Caroline Calloway would look better on the cover of a book.”) She believed she could use the social networking service known as “Twitter for people who can’t read,” i.e. Instagram, to score a book contract and scored one with Flatiron. (“The US deal was for $375,000, but foreign deals brought that number up to just over $500,000.”)

Then in 2017, she took to Instagram to declare that she was withdrawing from her contract because she’d changed her mind about writing School Girl, now called And We Were Like. “I promised a memoir where the only thing that happened to me were boyfriends,” she said in a 2018 interview. “It wasn’t long before I realized the boy-obsessed version of myself I planned to depict as my memoir’s protagonist was not one I could stand behind.” She was spinning her renege as a bid for integrity, and perhaps it was. But she was also in the throes of a debilitating Adderall addiction. (She’s since stopped using. Adderall at least. “I don’t take uppers anymore,” she says. “Well, I do a little bit of coke. A holiday amount of coke, you know? Like, I don’t do coke more days in the year than there are holidays.”) And there might have been something else going on as well.

She continued to make plans after 2017, yet, one by one, they’ve sputtered, conked out. There’s a Reddit thread created by SMOLBEANSNARK dedicated to tracking and annotating her Instagram posts about Scammer. She’s blamed holdups variously on the return of her mother’s cancer, excessive partying, solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Shipping dates have come and gone many times. On November 8, 2020, she vowed that Scammer would be “AT LEAST 400 pages, more likely 450.” (Flash forward: One month after my Sarasota visit, I receive a text. “Scammer update: It’s taking shape before my eyes into more a book of 65 prose poems than a ‘memoir.’ ” Second flash forward: As of the printing of this issue, Scammer has not yet shipped. Neither has I Am Caroline Calloway, nor Cambridge Captions.)

Calloway is still talking, and as I watch her mouth move, the realization dawns: Natalie Beach, c’est moi.

Beach isn’t who I want to be. That, though, is who Calloway has turned me into. First of all, she makes disinterested journalism impossible. You can’t stay detached. She simply won’t allow it.

For example, a few weeks ago, over Zoom, I was listening to her read out loud a paragraph she’d written: “For months, I let a pool boy who is also a plumber fuck me without a condom. I haven’t used a condom in years.”

Unable to help myself, I interrupt. “You should stop having sex without a condom.”

She looks up at me, looks down, then gives a small shake of her head. “Oh,” she says. “No.”

I sigh.

For another example, over a different Zoom, I notice that she keeps pausing to suck on a lemon wedge. I ask her what she’s doing. She’s just taken mushrooms, she explains, and the lemon enhances the mushroom’s potency. I express irritation because I’d blocked out two hours for this interview, and now she was going to be too high to answer questions. No, no, she assures me, she won’t be too high to answer questions. Five minutes later she whispers, “I’m too high to answer questions.” I sigh.

She can be sweet and funny and charming, yet she has no respect for boundaries, personal or professional. In the middle of a conversation, she’ll fasten her eyes on mine, say breathily, “I’ve always thought I’d meet a journalist that I’d be friends with. I really hope it’s you.” Last March, she randomly sent me a video of herself getting ready to go out for the night. She was wearing a minidress and kept flipping it up, flashing her Red Scare thong, and doing this obscene darting thing with her tongue. My sons, then nine and seven, were constantly stealing my phone to watch.

If I continue talking to her, researching her, writing this piece on her, I’ll end up scrubbing the period blood out of her comforter, same as Beach. (Well, Beach didn’t scrub the blood-stained comforter, but she did stash it.) 

Really, though, Natalie Beach, c’est moi because Calloway makes me her collaborator. She needs one more than anybody I’ve ever met. There’s an air of purgatory about her. She’s been locked in a moment for six years, the moment she broke the contract with Flatiron. She’s doomed to try to write the book and fail to write the book over and over. She gives the book different titles—And We Were Like, Scammer, I Am Caroline Calloway—but it’s all, I’m convinced, the same book because it’s all the same story, the only story she has to tell: hers. And yet, for some mysterious reason, she can’t tell it. Not by herself, anyway.

How Calloway makes you her collaborator: She does cold reads on people. Is doing them on me all the time. Is alert to what I’m responsive to and then goes from there. 

For instance, she knows I like “I Am Caroline Calloway.” And once I call it a lesbian gothic, she starts calling it that too. I ask her if she’s going to change it substantially when she turns it into a book, and she says that she wants to make it “more of a lesbian gothic.” I point out that that’ll be tricky since she and Beach weren’t actually physically involved. She nods thoughtfully. “I’m sure there’s a way to write this, and that way might just be me fucking saying it, but Natalie’s sexual assault story—she actually didn’t tell the full extent of it in The Cut.”

She checks to see if she has my attention. When she sees she does, she continues:

“Natalie called me out of the blue, crying, even though we hadn’t spoken in months. I just sat down on the sidewalk because I was so sad for her. I remember being interrupted because people kept being like, ‘Caroline, are you okay?’ No one just sits down on the ground in England. The thing is, I’m such a good crisis friend. It’s something that, especially during my addict years, I really doubled down on because I knew I was dropping the daily ball. I wasn’t returning texts or asking friends, ‘How are you?’ And it was great because I was awake for three days at a time. People could call at any hour and I’d pick up. When Natalie was talking, I was high on Adderall, and I wanted to speak so badly. But I was quiet. That was one of the only times I was a good friend to her during all those years.”

Calloway then proceeds to tell me the same disturbing story that Beach told readers, with a few additional lurid details. Perhaps the most lurid detail of all: that Calloway wasn’t disturbed by the disturbing story. At least, she wasn’t only disturbed by it.

“I’m thinking that there’s something really sad about it but also fucked up and hot,” says Calloway. “I’m with someone. It’s very trusting, lovey-dovey. I say to him, ‘Okay, I’m going to get blackout drunk. Let me be very clear with you about what I want.’ And then he did to me some of what that guy did to Natalie. I never told Natalie that.”

So, if Calloway never quite manages to get her revised lesbian gothic into book form, she sort of does because I’ve put it in this piece. Her new version is out there, and the new version—a fourth version of the Caroline Calloway story—feels like one we wrote together even though I had no clue that’s what we were doing. Which makes me yet another worker bee on the Caroline Calloway hive project.

As Beach was with “I Was Caroline Calloway,” is again with Adult Drama. 

As Darren Star is. (He figured out how to write the big pop commercial Caroline-in-Cambridge book, only he wrote it as a TV show and the young woman is called Emily and she’s in Paris.) 

As Ryan Murphy will be if he adapts Beach’s piece. (According to rumor, he snapped up the rights for a whopping million dollars.)

As Dunham will be if she ever films the script she wrote.

As Gerwig and Coppola will be if Calloway succeeds in turning their heads with her dedications.

Writers whose books are released by name publishing houses, whose pieces appear in name magazines, are, for the most part, bourgeois professionals, integrated into mainstream society. Calloway isn’t. She’s authentically on the outside and in opposition. Is, in other words, authentically avant-garde. Is also, I believe, authentically criminal. I don’t mean criminal in the literal or legal sense. (I seriously doubt she’s broken any major laws. The comparisons to Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey always struck me as not just wrongheaded but flat-out wrong.) I mean criminal in the sense that she doesn’t do things on the up and up. The way she “gamed” Instagram is the way she “gamed” Cambridge University. (“I lied on my application,” she says. “I forged my transcript when I got in.”) And there’s an improvisatory recklessness to how she conducts her life that’s both thrilling and frightening. Like it’s all one big spree.

The term I’m groping for is con artist, emphasis on the artist because she’s authentically that too. It could be argued that she isn’t a writer but a performance artist’s take on a writer. Look at all the fascinating things she’s done with her failure to finish a book. There’s her foray into porn—paying off her publishers by desecrating the classics!—a desperate move, though also a witty and subversive one. There’s the “FACTS” section of her lawyer’s response to her landlord’s suit that’s written not in legalese, but Calloway-ese. (“Ms. Calloway had a very troubled childhood, which is why she spent so much money and time making improvements to the property—because 205 [West 13th Street] was not only her favorite home, but also her first.”) There’s the Reddit thread she inspired, which reads like Pale Fire for the internet age. And then there’s her feud with Beach, featherweight yet bloodthirsty, and the only game in town since literary types have gotten so milquetoast.

Beach, who understands what it means to have a career, to fulfill contracts and meet deadlines, did finish a book. Adult Drama is a respectable effort, if a little derivative—imitation Jia Tolentino crossed with imitation Sloane Crosley. It really only snaps to life when Calloway appears, which she does, first in “I Was Caroline Calloway” (retitled “Self-Centered”) and again in “Adult Drama or the Virgin Cunt Club,” the strongest piece in the collection by far. The problem could be Beach’s personality, the opposite of Calloway’s: self-deprecating, restrained, unpersuaded that she’s interesting enough to carry an essay, never mind a whole book. Calloway, on the other hand, is convinced she’s the heroine of a great drama. This belief gives even her shitposts a certain verve and flair. She might be shameless—“I’m a genius, Lili”—might be corny—why so many pictures of herself dressed like a Disney princess?—might even be nuts—“I’m not not mentally ill,” she once told me—but she’s always original, ever watchable. 

Yet it could also be argued that Calloway is a writer. A new kind of a writer. A writer who’ll never finish a book because to finish a book is to kill the story. And a book is already a dead thing since it can’t change or adapt, be revised or edited or added to or commented on—not without a cumbersome reprinting, anyway. (Books even look like little coffins.) Digital media allows for an ongoing, interactive story, and maybe that’s the future and Calloway’s it.

Or maybe she’s what her haters have always said she is: an amusing fuckup so fame-hungry that she’s willing to turn her inability to function into a brand.

Or maybe she’s all of the above.

I don’t think Calloway can admit, even to herself, that the chances of her publishing Scammer in anything like the form she originally promised are slim. Except that she did admit it. On January 27, 2021, in a now deleted post, she wrote:

How will you expect me to deliver on writing when I am historically, famously, bad at doing exactly that?… If I could travel back in time and prevent myself from crumbling under the overnight public scrutiny into an avalanche of panic attacks, I would have liked to have tweeted out exactly this to the haters calling me a criminal during January, 2019: CHAOS IS THE BRAND, YOU DUMB, SNARKY FUCKS!!!!!

As afternoon turns to evening, I catch a plane back to New York. Leave Calloway in her old-folks home in boondocks Florida with Matisse, now in a Dr. Seuss hat. If Calloway weren’t the supreme comic ingenue of her day, her ending would be tragic. Her ending would, in fact, be that of the protagonist/antagonist of Todd Field’s #MeToo thriller, Tár. That Lydia Tár, like Caroline Calloway an American self-invention and natural transgressor, is exiled from the cultural establishment is treated as a calamity. What a devastating fall from grace we’re supposed to think when, in the final scene, we see this onetime maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic conducting the score for a video game before a collection of cosplayers in an unspecified Southeast Asian country.

But Calloway is the supreme comic screwball ingenue of her day. Therefore she understands that an audience of plushies and freaks—or retirees and kitty cats—is preferable to one of simpering, self-congratulatory members of a dwindling and increasingly irrelevant intelligentsia. Her fate is a joke, but the joke isn’t only on her. It’s also on the scared and conformist culture that laughs at her because it can’t laugh at itself. 

Embrace the chaos, you dumb, snarky fucks. 

[xwildheart]

The issue was that they BOTH fucked up. Neither of them had the courage to say what the felt, what they'd BEEN feeling for months in that moment. And it had made things harder in the end. But Alice knew deep down that had they had the chance to talk that night? All of this would be resolved. They'd be happy, they'd be taking on Hollywood together instead of having to be stuck here right now. There had been that moment of her opening her mouth to disagree, but Alice stood back and let him speak, let him get out what he needed to before attempting to talk again.

'I understand Landon I do, and I'm sorry if I've--' But at that last little comment, talking about Frank? Alice's demeanor shift is instantaneous. 'What did you just say?' It's rhetorical, coming out half a whisper because truly she hoped her ears deceived her. Squaring shoulders as she stood up as bit straighter is a defense. To guard herself from some sort of onslaught of accusations. Not something she isn't used to thanks to her step mother. 'The only person who has caught my attention Landon? Is you.' She's angry, but Alice doesn't yell when she's angry. It's that eerie calm, level headed speech that is unnerving.

'I know you're having an---incredibly hard time right now, but do not insinuate that me speaking to the man who sat outside my door for three weeks means I'm remotely interested.' Inhaling through her nose before she continued, not really giving him a chance to cut in. 'I barely ate, Landon. Out of sheer unease at the thought that something may have happened to you. YOU.' She knows he noticed the difference in her. Or that someone told him how poorly she'd handled the whole situation. 'That the last thing you heard from me was me demanding to speak to you or I'd walk away from this story that we worked so hard to tell. I told you last night, but I'll tell you again now and hopefully you will hear me this time. It's you that I want, I have since I met you. And no amount of shitty stories written about you or me is going to change that. A misstep in communication is what this was, and it was made worse by an unforeseen event.' Still calm, no raise in her voice but her anger is palpable.

'Yes, it hurt, it stung deeply to wake up alone, to feel a bit used in a sense but I do not blame you. I don't even think I blamed you then. I knew I loved you then too and I didn't speak up either. I just wanted to know what was wrong. If I had done something.' Memories of that morning flashing through her mind briefly. But being with him last night had dulled the sting of it considerably now.

'All I did? Was ask him if he could get rid of the media that has been camping out on this street for a month. So that YOU could feel like you could go outside because he was good at keeping them away when I was. I know it's awful being stuck inside the house in this way.' Because now the director has been stuck in two ways. Captive, and wheelchair bound. Another deep breath but Alice knows now she needs to step away from this lest her anger, her tune change. He's hurting. He's miserable. He's been through hell and back and the blonde understands that and will never diminish what Landon's been through but that statement crossed a line.

She stepped forward, placing the damaged cellphone on a side table but continued to walk passed him. 'I'll be upstairs.' Cruel in a way, to go somewhere he cannot follow at present but she needed space to come down from this. Maybe take a shower and wash the negative away. Regardless she'd come back down before the day was done.

In a moment he went from zero to sixty back down to a melancholic single digit. Moods are hell when they’re attached to a series of unfortunate events. Landon heard her voice but barely could register at first. He slowly looked up to see her standing back. Smoothing over whatever he heard on his phone but he knows. He knows they’re old. Old messages before she knew what was really going on with him. “No, I couldn’t know. Still left that night.” Brimming on his tongue comes all those truths. “I fucked up, Alice. I did. And don’t tell me I didn’t. Just let me talk.” Insisting he get his point across, he leaned back, dragging hands down along his face. Sinking fingers through his hair and letting himself ruminate in his misery.

Settling hands back in his lap, he shook his head, disgusted with how he currently is. Stuck in a fucking chair. Fucked with the woman he loved. Who seemed too damn keen to talk to that fucking cop! “My mistakes made this happen. My mistakes put you in the crossfire. I did that. Because I was fucking terrified. Alice. I was afraid that night we were together. Because I knew then how much I loved you. How much I wanted to shout out to the fucking rooftops and let everyone know. Fuck the media. Let them know but instead I ran.” Tumbling out with no filter he’s an unstopped drain leaking his true reasons. Whether they justify has nothing to do with it but he needs her to know why! “I’m so fucking tainted from my ex… I was afraid I’d screw you up. I’d screw everything up.”

Pathetic. Pitiful. What kind of man are you? Words that echo in his head, perfectly cast against him as public lies these days. Landon stared off into the distance, looking somewhere near the shelf behind Alice. Where several accolades for documentaries sit, only one little Golden Globe statuette for a small supporting role in musical or comedy stared back. Comedy much like his joke of a life and career, right? “I wanted to tell you the night I asked you here. Everything. Even if you hated me. You needed to know but I see it’s still hurting you. The way you been so distant. The way that cop got your attention.”@xwildheart // prev