#and he does so going around and letting his bros know of the cities he finds here and there

[turtleblogatlast]

The fact that Leo can go literally anywhere on earth to be alone with his thoughts at a single moment’s notice is something that shakes around in my head all the time. Like, portals and teleportation are amazing and convenient abilities both in and out of battle, but they could also so easily be used to run away as well.

I don’t think Leo ever would, at least not most of the time. He loves his family too much, and is too dependent on their love and attention to cut himself off so suddenly like that, but it’s a very real possibility nonetheless.

It’s a good thing Leo’s overall temper is more on the mild side and he prefers going to his room or something to complete solitude, because it really is dangerous for a kid to have the ability to isolate themselves like that at their fingertips.

[rosie-read-that]

bad blood / scott miller x reader

summary: set after twisters. when scott initiates a lawsuit against javi and his new business partners, they choose to take you on as their attorney—no matter that you and scott were once high school sweethearts, that you still have his ring in your closet, or that things between you ended catastrophically six years past. this is business. no need to go down memory lane… right?

content warnings: f!reader, alcohol use, language, offscreen parental death, one open door scene (unprotected piv), couple angst, riggs is his own walking red flag, questionable legal ethics

word count: 21.6k (sorry, guys 😬)

author’s note: here it is! i tried to rein in the length, but clearly i failed ✌🏼 shoutout to @hederasgarden and @sailor-aviator for giving scott his fandom-approved surname. on a final note, i am not a lawyer, i took one (1) business law class in college, so don’t take my word on any of this and definitely don’t do stuff with your ex while he’s the opposing party in a case you’re working (but if it’s david corenswet, i meannnn… should anyone be blamed?)

PRESENT DAY OKLAHOMA CITY

Well-meaning, and with typical Arkansan practicality, Tyler Owens leaned back in his chair and said, “Javi, you need to chill out, man.”

Immediately, you knew it was the wrong thing to say.

“What makes you think I’m not? It's not like my entire livelihood is on the line or anything, so why would I not be chilled out?—Dammit!”

“Actually, lose the tie,” you suggested, having watched him fumble for the last five minutes. You were sure it was nerves that did it, not a lack of dexterity.

Javi sighed and let the two ends hang pathetically around his neck. “I thought I was supposed to wear one…”

“I think that’s only for court,” Kate put in, “like with an actual judge and stuff.”

“Maybe in the 1970s,” remarked Tyler under his breath. Javi glared. “Bro, it’s gonna be fine.”

“We should be out there, tracking tornadoes!” There was a mounted television in the little waiting area, playing a 24-hour news channel on mute. Javi gestured at the weather report. It was March, and Tornado Alley was looking active, “robust,” as the weatherman put it… not that your clients would know firsthand, seeing as they were stuck in a high-rise in the city instead of out in the fields of Sapulpa County. Kate and Tyler were watching the radar images with twin expressions of restless longing. Javi yanked the tie from his neck. “That son of a bitch knew exactly what he was doing, tying us up in meetings at this time of year.”

“Yeah, he did,” you replied. “I know it’s inconvenient as shit, but believe me, I’m going to do everything I can to get you back out on the field. There’s no reason for all three of you to be here. I mean, it’s the modern age: some of this could be a Zoom meeting.”

 “You think we’re gonna Zoom in the middle of a storm?” Tyler quipped. Kate turned to him with a chastising look.

She was clearly just about as done as her other two partners, but a lot more level-headed about the fact that they were being sued for everything they had. Which you appreciated. Suits between friends and former business associates had a tendency to turn into mud-slinging wars, and there was nothing you hated more than a client stuck in denial. Kate was the opposite. She was cool-headed, calm. A happy medium between Tyler’s annoyed outrage (“who does this guy think he is!”) and Javi’s frustrated melancholy (“guys, I’m sorry, this is all my fault”).

Right now, Javi was sinking well into the latter.

“Just remember we’re here for you, Javi.” Kate rubbed a soothing hand across his back. “All the way. We know this is personal.”

“Yeah, which means it’s gonna get ugly. I hate the thought of our company going under because I had shitty taste in business partners, you know?”

“Well, you don't anymore. That’s character growth,” Tyler pointed out. “Now, I’m no legal expert, but as far as I can see, he’s got no legs to stand on—”

You held up a finger. “Uh, that’s not entirely true…”

“—and he’s going to come out of this looking like a complete and total tool. Which he is! If he wants to spend all this time and boatloads of his uncle’s money on a belligerent witch hunt, then so be it.”

“You mean our time, our money,” said Javi.

Kate looked at you. “If this ends up going to court, is it likely he’ll win?”

You sighed. “Okay, listen.” You sat on the coffee table. There was no avoiding the sight of three pairs of eyes with varying degrees of hopefulness trained on you, hanging onto your every word. Javi you had known before, but after a brief acquaintance, you’d decided that you liked Kate and Tyler too, had even spent an hour or two watching Tornado Wrangler videos on YouTube, and, while storm chasing seemed, well, kind of unhinged, their enthusiasm was contagious. They were passionate, not in a purely thrill-seeking or overly scientific way. They actually cared. And you wanted them to win. “The whole point,” you explained, “is that we’re trying to avoid this going to trial. If you’re looking to cut down on the cost to your bottom line—not to mention how this could drag on for literal years—it’s best to reach a settlement before this ever sees the inside of a courtroom. Either way, things are going to get a little worse before they get better. But the point is a clean break, right? When all this is over, StormPAR will never have any sort of claim over you. You’ll be free to chase storms, build your doo-dads—”

That got you a trio of chuckles. Good, let them think you were a meteorological idiot; all the better to make them feel like a united front.

“—and it’ll be like Scott and Riggs never happened.”

“Sounds good to me,” Tyler said, that steely determination from his old rodeo days coming through.

Kate gave a nod. “No matter what, we’ll be okay”

Javi put his hand on your knee. “Thank you… for everything. I know this has gotta suck for you too.”

“Who, me?” you asked, feigning ignorance. “I’m fine.”

“Mm-hm…”

“Do I not look fine?”

“You look great,” Kate said honestly.

“Miller’s gonna shit his pants.”

“Tyler!”

“Hey, we’re up,” your assistant announced, her fingers not pausing for a second as she typed on her phone. Abby may have the social skills of a polar bear, but her organizational skills were top-notch and you relied on her predatory instincts. Plus, you were sure that her geometrically perfect French bob had magical powers.

Signaling for the others to follow, you made your way down a hallway bordered by walls banded in frosted glass, the sound of typing and muffled phone calls familiar and yet not. This was enemy territory. Having you meet here instead of at the offices of Conway & Fine was a calculated move.

Before entering the conference room, you took Tyler by the elbow. “Please just… try to behave yourself.”

Me? He pointed at his face.

“Yes, you! Don’t provoke him—as a matter of fact, don’t even look at him—don't piss him off unless you want to make this a hell of a lot worse for everyone. Capisce?”

“I’ll be the picture of civility.”

You shot him a skeptical look.

“I’ll be a gentleman!”

You glared. “Tyler Owens, I’m holding you to that.” Adjusting your power suit, you put on your best Professional Face. “Alright guys, it’s showtime.”

Through the glass, your eyes landed on Scott. The temptation to bolt left you breathless, though you couldn’t say whether you wanted to run towards or far, far away. You wouldn’t. You were all too aware of the people standing behind you, counting on you, while Scott himself had been a stranger to you for the last few years.

You owed him nothing; this was simply business, you reminded yourself.

Simply business.

He turned his head and spotted you, and kept his eyes on you as you opened the door.

TEN YEARS AGO PARK HAVEN, PENNSYLVANIA

You’d been working on the same calculus assignment for the last three-quarters of an hour, the sound of rain lashing against your window doing nothing for your frazzled nerves.  While math was by no means your obvious strong suit, you would have finished by now if you hadn’t spent most of it staring at the wall beneath your windowsill, bouncing your leg, tapping your pencil compulsively against the edge of your AP textbook and imagining all the ways in which your life could go horribly, unfixably wrong. An outcome that now seemed likely.

“You still have time, sweetheart,” your mom tried to say at dinner that night. She smiled at you and patted your hand. “It’s only March.”

“Exactly—it’s March!” you’d wanted to say, but bit your tongue. There wasn't any point; your mom would always believe you were capable of walking on the moon, which was lovely, you guessed. Or it would be, if all your classmates weren't overachievers and if a lot of them hadn't already received acceptance letters and stuck pennants to the inside of their lockers for all the rejects to see.

It was hopeless… you should’ve gotten an answer by now.

Tossing the book and papers away, you buried your face in your hands and tried to hold it together. The sleeves of your sweatshirt emanated a woodsy, clean smell, kind of like rain in a forest, and you breathed in deep to let it ground you.

Slowly, the intensity of the storm outside faded to background noise, no longer angry, insistent—it was only rain after all, only weather. You sniffed, feeling silly, and snuggled into the navy-blue sweatshirt, wrapping your arms around your knees. The gold lettering read NICHOLS ACADEMY ATHLETICS. On you, it was practically a dress, and you’d been living in it all week, ignoring Mom’s teases about how “you’re going to have to wash it at some point!” while your dad watched you pass by, saying nothing, only flipping the page of whatever biography he was reading, not wanting to comment or so much as reference your boyfriend of two years, who played center field on Nichols’s prize baseball team and from whom you’d stolen the sweatshirt after a date at the park.

Try as you might, your dad had never warmed up to Scott, but you thought it had more to do with an objection to Scott’s father rather than to Scott himself. The whole family’s trouble, he said once, prompting a fight that ended with you slamming your bedroom door and not speaking to him for two days, until your mom laid down the law and said she wouldn't have that sort of tension around the house.

He didn’t get it. Scott wasn't like his father—if anything, you saw the way his jaw tensed whenever he heard rumors (whispered, unless intended to get a rise out of him by a school rival) about the private club scenes, the drinking, the reckless gambling, the other women. Of course your straitlaced dad assumed the apple wouldn't fall too far from the tree, but you knew Scott. You trusted him. And, fine, so you were seventeen, but you knew you wanted to spend the rest of your life with him—it happened, didn't it?

Granted, this was why that damned letter was so important. It was the perfect plan… so long as Scott got into MIT, which seemed like a given, and you into Harvard, the culmination of four years of meticulous planning and candle-burning work. But what if it didn’t happen? Could your relationship survive the time and long distance? As much as you hoped so, you didn’t want to find out.

Out of nowhere came sharp rap at your window. Startled, you looked up to see a familiar face peering through the rain-lashed glass, and automatically you sprang to your feet. “Scott! What the hell were you thinking!” you hissed, mindful of your parents, probably in bed at this hour. He paused halfway through the window, pretending offense.

“Wow, okay, here I thought I was making a big romantic gesture…”

“You’re soaking wet! You could’ve fallen and broken your neck!”

As you lowered and latched the window behind him, trying to be as quiet as possible, he defended, “I’m a tree connoisseur. If anything, I’m a that-tree connoisseur and she’s never let me down before. Literally. Sturdy branches on her.”

He had a point there. The tree directly outside your bedroom window had played makeshift ladder to him over the last couple of years—not that your parents were any the wiser. If your dad knew, he’d go straight to the nearest hardware store and buy the ax himself. (What he would do with that ax, having never done a day’s manual labor in his life besides recreational fishing, was beyond you.)

You shook your head, watching Scott drip all over the hardwood. God, he was stunning.

And there was a chance you might lose him forever in a few months.

You felt the sting in your throat and behind your eyes. “I’ll go get you a towel,” you said, averting your face and turning towards the ensuite so you could get a few seconds to yourself. He caught you by the wrist and spun you into his body.

“Wait a minute, kiss me first,” he demanded, a cocky grin on his face. You managed to see a flash of it before his lips met yours. You closed your eyes in spite of everything, melting into the kiss, into Scott, because it was as easy as breathing and just as pointless trying to resist.

His cheeks were cold, his mouth warm. Coaxing. The pressure of his hands on your waist like an anchor in the storm. He was perfect for you. How could you belong with anyone else? It was impossible.

His tongue brushed your bottom lip, and it was a move so practiced, so instinctive, so perfectly well-known, that it made the fear swell in your chest again. You held onto the front of his rain-drenched hoodie, breaking the kiss. Your breathing was ragged. You felt you could burst.

“You’re insane,” you tried to cover, burying your head in his chest. “My dad will kill you if he catches you.”

He took a step back and tilted your face up, gently, by the chin. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” you replied.

“Tell me.”

Instead of answering, you made your way to the bathroom and got a towel out of the linen closet. You could feel Scott’s questioning gaze, but he waited, rubbing the towel across his head, brows knitted together as you hesitated, still trying to hedge. “I just—we have that exam next week and I’ve fallen behind on calc and I think I’m going to have to start over on my AP Civ end-of-the-year project, and my mom—”

“Your mom’s great,” Scott interjected.

“Why, d’you want her?”

He pursed his lips. As soon as you said it, you knew that it had sounded kind of bitchy.

“Fine, okay. She’s great, she’s just… trying to help.”

“Is this about Drexler getting her Harvard letter? Because it’s only—”

“It's only March. Yeah. That’s what Mom said. But I’m cutting it close, right? Some people got their letters in December, Scott—December!” You looked down at your feet. “I’m not going to get in.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, it sure feels like it!”

“C’mere.”

“No.” You shook your head.

“Come here,” he insisted, tossing the damp towel onto your bed and holding your arms loosely, his hands stroking up and down. No matter how much you held onto the scent-memory of him on his Nichols sweatshirt, nothing compares to the real thing. He made everything better; and if not, he made everything feel like it could get better, because he was Scott Miller, and the world bent to his charm or else. “You’re going to get in,” he said, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. “They’d be crazy not to have you.” And the thing was, despite being utterly convinced only two minutes before that the worst was inevitable, you wanted to believe him, wanted to convince yourself that everything would settle into place as it should.

Scott dipped his head to brush his lips against yours, a deliberate barely-there sweep that made your eyes flutter closed and your arms lace around the wide breadth of his shoulders. Scott’s hands traveled down your back, pressing into your hips until you were flush against the length of his body. You felt him smile as he let you deepen the kiss, and the little rumble of his almost-laugh pinged all the way down to your toes, warming you from the inside the way only Scott could.

As his mouth moved down to your jaw and then the side of your neck, you slid your hands down his chest and then stopped, feeling something other than the hidden planes of his stomach through the fabric of his dark hoodie. You pulled away. Scott’s face had frozen into a look of mild panic and his hands wrapped around your wrists, holding them loosely, which only made the alarm bells ring louder in your head. That was not the sort of face he would make if he was hoarding old receipts.

“Scott?” you asked. He looked away, exhaled, and let your wrists drop with a resigned expression. You reached into his pocket, pulling out a sheet of white letter paper folded into quarters, carefully and with Scott-like precision. “What…” you began, glancing at him briefly and opening the sheet.

At the top, in cardinal red: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

You might have gasped. At the very least, one of your hands flew up to your mouth. “Oh my God… Scott…”

“We don’t have to talk about it now.”

“Scott! This is from MIT! You got in?”

“It's really not a big deal.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, his shoulders curved slightly inward.

Not a big deal? “Scott, shut up! You got in!” you exclaimed, aghast.

“You’re not upset?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” You set the letter down to the side, knowing he’d want to keep it—that so much as folding it and putting it in his pocket so he could make the ten-minute run to your house in the middle of a downpour must have been a minor sacrifice on your account. Because he wanted to tell you. Because he wanted you to be the first person other than his mom to hear the good news. “We’ve talked about this. This is your dream school, babe.”

“Yeah, well, it feels kinda shitty celebrating now.”

“Stop.” You reached up and gave him a peck on the lips, stroking his cheeks, resting your forehead against his. “I'm so freaking proud of you. You’re going to be the best, most kick-ass engineer.”

You looked into his eyes so that he’d know it was true, and for a moment you could tell he was letting himself feel the achievement—his shoulders relaxed, he caressed your hands gratefully, but there was something about his smile that signaled not all being well.

“I heard Mom talking on the phone with my uncle today,” he confessed.

“Your uncle Riggs? Down in New Orleans?”

“Yeah. She doesn't want me to know, but I heard her talking about college and…”

You placed your hands on his chest. “Is it that bad?”

He didn't like talking about it but you knew his father had made a few bad investments lately, and from your own dad, who had confided it to your mom in secret one night—not that he saw you lurking outside the kitchen, drawn by the mention of the name “Miller”—you were aware that he had made a truly catastrophic impulsive bet with some Swedish businessmen he’d been trying to impress. Add to that the drawn look on Mrs. Miller’s face whenever you saw her, and the overly sympathetic way your mom referred to “poor Pamela,” and you had enough evidence to assume that Scott’s father had royally fucked up this time. 

“They’ve been talking about selling the house,” he said with a dark look. “I think my parents are going to split up… for good this time.”

“Oh, Scott…”

“So who knows? I might not be able to go to MIT anyway—even with this.”

“Are you okay?” you asked, aware that nothing got his back up more than pity. But you had to ask.

He shrugged. “It is what it is.”

This was a side of him you’d never learned how to handle, not even after two years of dating. For all that he was an expert at making you feel like the world was yours for the taking, when it came to his own struggles, he was a tightly closed book. Instead of admitting when he was hurt or disappointed, he resorted to indifference and the kind of dark humor that could put you in a bad mood if you weren't careful.

Right now, all you wanted was for him to know that you were there for him. Nothing you could say or do would make Ray Miller grow practical common sense or an ounce of familial consideration—you weren't even sure that he knew your name, despite being Scott’s long-term girlfriend; he was hardly ever home, and never present even on the occasions when he was. But you could state the obvious, just in case he’d doubted it for a second.

“Hey, I love you,” you said to him.

“I love you, too,” he replied. “Now, no more shop talk—why do you think I risked my neck climbing up here?” And just like that, the matter was closed, the dark look disappeared, replaced by the telltale lowering of his dark lashes as he dropped another kiss at the side of your neck, his arms tightening around you, turning you so that the backs of your knees hit the edge of your bed.

“And here I thought your intentions were pure,” you replied, trying to downplay the butterflies in your stomach.

“Darling, there’s no such thing… especially when it comes to you.”

“What an idealist,” you rejoined, then fell quiet when he kissed you again. Without missing a beat, he lowered you onto the bed, hands gliding beneath your sweatshirt with apparent purpose. “Scott,” you protested, “my parents are across the hall.”

“So we’ll be quiet. Or we’ll get caught. What's the worst that could happen?”

“Um, you flying headfirst out that window?”

He pretended to think about it, then, by the warm glow of your bedside lamp, you saw his mouth quirk into a smirk before he dove towards your lips, eyes twinkling. “I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a price I’m willing to pay.”

PRESENT DAY OKLAHOMA CITY

“The damages your client is seeking are absolutely unreasonable. I would even say they border on the ridiculous—and, quite frankly, even frivolous!”

“Frivolous! Your client founded his new company with StormPAR assets—”

“His assets!”

“—accumulated during his tenure as a business partner to my client. Assets which came out of the pocket of Mr. Riggs as well, might I remind you!”

“We were equal partners!” Javi exclaimed, no longer able to keep his temper in check. You supposed the moment you snapped at Mr. Rankin, Javi figured the gloves were off.

Maybe instead of worrying about Tyler, you should've worried about yourself.

Rankin stabbed a finger at the files stacked in front of him. “Exactly, and Mr. Miller deserves to be compensated for the financial losses incurred from your breach of contract.”

Javi balked. “What, I can’t decide to leave my own company?”

“You can do whatever the hell you want, just not with my money,” Scott said in a dangerous monotone. For the last half-hour you’d been trying not to look at him, focusing instead on his middle-aged bespectacled lawyer, but to say you weren't losing your shit would be disproven by the Montblanc you’ve been fidgeting with since the meeting began. When he wasn’t glaring daggers at his former business partner, you could feel the power of his gaze, daring you to meet his eyes again.

“Oh, you mean your uncle’s money?”

“Javi.” You touched his hand in warning.

“You weren't turning your nose up at my uncle’s money when you were trying to found StormPAR.” Scott gibed. In your periphery, you saw Kate rubbing her left temple.

“Me? I thought we were partners, partner.”

“Like you give a shit! You jumped ship, Javi—you jumped ship, set up shop with the opposition, then hired my ex-girlfriend so you could get away with robbing us blind!”

You gritted your teeth. “Mr. Rankin, control your client.”

“‘Control your client’?” Scott spat out, leaning forward and turning the dial up to ten. “What the hell is wrong with you? What are you even doing here?”

“My job, Mr. Miller.” This time you did risk staring him in the face, ignoring the play of light on his cheekbones, the shape of his lips, the triangle of exposed skin at his throat that you used to know so well. “I work for StormLab. You might find my presence objectionable, but that’s neither here nor there as long as my clients choose to keep me on retainer. If you don't like it, you’re free to leave and we can negotiate with Mr. Rankin directly.”

He said nothing. Scott was never at a loss for words unless he was well and truly pissed, the force of his intelligence diverted into barely suppressed anger. You could've heard a pin drop in that conference room. His hands were on top of the table, tense, almost shaking, and the rise and fall of his chest was visible even to you. Against your will, your brain threw up images of those same hands holding yours, threaded through your hair, brushing gently against the small of your back; those same arms drawing you close; the same mouth smiling.

You cleared your throat, shuffled a few papers around, and once again addressed the general room and Mr. Rankin. “Now, if you turn to page 16, you’ll see that Mr. Rivera is willing to formally sell his share of StormPAR for less than he’s entitled—if both Mr. Miller and Mr. Riggs agree to desist in interference with StormLab, which, need I remind you, was founded two-thirds of the way with assets entirely independent from the former. If this action’s purpose isn’t frivolous, then Mr. Owens and Ms. Carter should be removed from this suit.”

“Like hell,” Scott interrupted, prompting Javi to fire back with:

“What, you think we’re not good for it? I’ll have you know—”

“You expect me to believe you started your little company on the merits of an NWS salary and a fucking YouTube channel?”

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Tyler lean forward, ready to pounce. Rankin muttered, “Language,” and pushed his eyeglasses up his nose. You knew he was a personal friend of Scott’s uncle—you could also tell that he would rather be out on the golf course than in the middle of this friend-divorce and embarrassing squabble, one where his input seemed superfluous and his counsel went unheeded even by his client.

Scott went on, full of accusation. “You used StormPAR money, didn’t you?”

“If you want to request any financial disclosures…” you began.

“We’re talking.”

Bitch. “No, you’re berating,” you shot back.

Javi put his hand on your wrist. “It’s fine. Yeah—I guess if you want to look at it that way, if I was making a living off StormPAR and taking Riggs’s money, then yeah, technically my share of StormLab exists because of what we had.”

“Javi.”

“No. Fair’s fair and all that. I don’t want any part of it anymore. Hell, you can have it. But come on, man, don’t pretend you’re doing any of this because you’re broke. Even if I gave you half of whatever StormPAR’s worth, it wouldn’t make a difference. You’re mad that I left. I get it. Let’s settle this, you and me. Leave Kate and Tyler out of it.”

“You stole our data!”

Now, that couldn't stand. “He made the executive decision to share data with Mr. Owens’s team.” Sure, it was a technicality but it was a true technicality.

“Bullshit!”

You sighed. “Are we getting anywhere here, Rankin?”

The lawyer glanced down at his watch and shook his head almost mournfully. “It’s not looking likely.”

“Wonderful.” You stood up, gathering your things and motioning for Kate, Tyler, and Javi to do the same. “Well, we’re all very busy people and clearly meeting in-person is counterproductive. Shall we agree to make this a video call next time? My clients have places to be.”

“I’ll bet they do,” Scott mocked, staring not only at Javi but at his new partners for probably the first time all afternoon. “How’re your investors doing, by the way, knowing you’re getting sued for infringement, breach of contract and fiduciary duty…”

You wanted to strangle him. In a voice that matched him venom for venom, you turned to your assistant and said, “Did you get that on record, Abby? Please, keep going,” you urged Scott, “you might just win us a dismissal.”

After a moment of charged silence, you told your clients: “We’re done here.”

“You’ll be hearing from me,” said the reluctant Mr. Rankin.

You snatched the chrome door handle from Tyler. “Boy, am I looking forward to it.”

Outside, you didn’t stop until you’d turned the corner into another section of the office, not wanting to be within eyeshot of Scott when you gritted your teeth and let the mask of cool indifference fall.

“Well, that went…” Tyler trailed off, leaning against the metal doorframe of Copy Room 3. The smell of toner and ozone was strangely comforting, bringing you back to your professional self now that Scott and his stupid, handsome-as-ever face were out of view. That, and you were noticing that Tyler Owens in a corporate-adjacent setting didn’t sit well with you; you couldn’t decide whether it was the outdoor tan or the in-your-face belt-buckle that gave it away. Regardless, he seemed too big for the confines of a downtown law office.

“It went like a garbage fire,” you confirmed, “which means about as well as I expected.”

Kate crossed her arms. “So we’re going to court, then.���

“I’m going to keep pushing for him to drop StormLab from the suit.”

“That just leaves me,” Javi remarked, downcast, but still willing to take one for the team.

“I mean, Javi, dear, you did abandon the partnership without ironing out all the kinks first.”

“How was I supposed to know I needed to hire a lawyer?”

“Um, literally everyone knows you’re supposed to hire a lawyer,” said Tyler, “especially if you’re dealing with someone like Textbook Type A over there.”

Javi ran a hand down his face, then shook his head. “What can I say? I-I thought he was my friend.”

“I know.” You clapped your hand on Javi’s shoulder. I understand. “But sometimes all that does is make it worse.”

After a bit more commiserating you parted ways with the three, hanging back with Abby to touch base on a few points and clear up the rest of your schedule, which included a deposition in an hour-and-a-half and witness prep at 4:30. Understandably, you were in the mood for none of this and wanted nothing more than to retire to your apartment with a glass of red and a bowl of popcorn as big as your head à la Olivia Pope, but alas… you were trying to make junior partner.

No rest for the wicked and all that.

You released Abby for a late lunch and made your way to the bank of elevators after a brief pit stop at the restroom, side-eyeing the fancy automatic taps and the whiff of something hotel-like emanating from the vents. You’d have to tell the office manager at Conway & Fine to up your game.

Fishing your phone out of your bag, you pushed the elevator button and began scrolling through a frightful amount of emails—there were intraoffice communications and check-in requests from clients, a few items of junk not caught by the email filter, the latest newsletters from PennAlumni and the Oklahoma Bar Association, as well as an invitation to an old mentor’s golden anniversary celebration. You were in the middle of responding to this when Scott sidled up next to you, giving no indication other than the familiar scent of his cologne and the tap of shined leather shoes against the polished tile. Of all the bad luck…

“So what is this, some kind of a decade-old revenge plot?” he finally asked, disconcerting you with the fact that he was standing so close to you that you couldn't glance at his expression without craning your neck. “Maybe I should’ve expected it from you, but Javi? I didn't know he had it in him.”

“Go away, Scott. This is business.”

“Really, is that what you want to call it? He could've hired anyone.”

“Well, he chose to hire a friend.”

“Right…” A laugh. Dry, cynical. “And what's your excuse?”

You stared at the light above the door, willing it to flash green and put you out of your misery. “Believe it or not, my taking this case has nothing to do with you. Forgive me if I thought you could be a fucking adult about it—clearly I was wrong.”

Ding!

You walked into the elevator without looking back. As parting words went, you thought they passed muster. Except, instead of being a regular person and taking the next car, Scott followed you in, ignoring the outrage written plain on your face.

You looked at him as if to say, “Do you mind?” It was obvious that he didn't. Whatever composure he’d lost in the conference room had been regained now that it was just you, and him, and the shared knowledge that you would have avoided being alone with him if you could.

He stood next to you, towering. As the floor number inched downward from 22, you were all too aware of his presence: the Scott smell of him, the warmth of his body, and the brush of his dark linen jacket against your arm. You wished you handed discarded your own in the restroom; you needed armor, and while Scott had donned his as soon as he was able, he had caught you unawares, expecting him to play fair even when all the evidence of the last two hours had told you that “fair” was no longer in his vocabulary.

As if to illustrate the point, you felt him lean in, his voice the closest it had been in over six years. “You always did love making a show of taking the moral high ground. How’s the view, sweetheart? You must love getting the chance to look down on me for change.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Not bothering to contain your disgust, you stepped away from him, clutching your bag in a white-knuckle grip. For a moment you felt struck by lightning. There was a time when you knew the planes of his face better than your own—the slope of his nose, the variations of blue in his eyes; you knew the shade of his hair in every light; how to tell a false smile from the true. But this Scott… the one with the shuttered expression, the see-if-I-care set to his shoulders, “how’re your investors doing, by the way”… It wasn’t like those things came out of left field—Scott had always been capable of a certain amount of pride, petulance, vindictiveness, even. But it was like the best parts of him had been filed away, or else hidden so deep that you couldn't find nary a sight of them when you looked into his face. “What happened to you?”

You saw his jaw clench. “If you want to know, then you shouldn’t have left.”

8…

7…

6…

You took a breath. “That whole last year—you pushed me away and you know it.”

Instead of answering your honesty in kind, Scott hitched up his sleeve so he could glance at the time on his fancy Swiss watch, a present from Good Old Uncle Riggs on the event of his graduation from MIT. “Yeah, well, you made it easy.”

4…

3…

2…

The doors opened onto a vast lobby. Incredulous, you kept waiting for him to take his words back, to apologize, to so much as glance at you, damn it. When you saw there wasn't any point, you swallowed the knot in your throat, stepping out of the elevator car and feeling twenty-one all over again.

This time, he didn't follow you. He leaned against the back handrail, not reacting even when you mustered every remaining ounce of dignity to say, “Go fuck yourself, Scott.” Then you turned on your heel and walked away.

TEN YEARS AGO PARK HAVEN, PENNSYLVANIA

Once more on your bedroom floor. Scott sat at your back, his arms wrapped around you and his head bent over yours. “Hey, listen to me… we’ll make it work. I’ll call you every day.”

“With a full slate of classes? That doesn't make any sense.”

“I don’t care if it doesn't. Hey,”—he kissed your temple—“it’s you and me. That doesn’t need to change”

“You say that now…”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do.” You sighed. “It’s the hot nerds I don’t trust.”

You felt him laugh. “You’re a hot nerd.”

“Stop it.” But you smiled anyway, probably for the first time since you’d opened the rejection letter from Harvard. Concerned, your mom had called Scott while you were holed up in your room, ugly-crying into the bedspread, and it was enough to make you regret having been so bitchy about her the week before. She really had been trying to help… not that it mattered now that Harvard had given you the hard pass.

It wasn’t like you had no other options—you’d have been crazy not to line up a contingency plan or two. But Harvard had been your dream since you could remember caring about college. It was your castle in the sky, the thing that kept you going through four years of grueling hard work, a neverending grind of AP and Honors classes, student clubs and extracurriculars. And still it wasn’t enough.

“We regret to inform you…”

Well, not as much as you regretted it.

As if reading your mind, Scott wrapped his arms a little tighter, his tone light when he said, “UPenn’s nothing to scoff at, you know. You’re upset because you got into an Ivy League?”

“An Ivy League in Philadelphia,” you protested.

You didn’t add “and not the one I wanted” because you knew, objectively, that he and your parents and Ms. Andersson, your favorite teacher, were all right. You were incredibly lucky to have gotten into the University of Pennsylvania—the campus was beautiful, it was close to home, and, like Harvard, it boasted its own fair share of Supreme Court Justices and legal luminaries. It wasn’t like your future was in complete and utter shambles. You would still have everything you wanted… except Scott.

You felt him shrug behind you. “So what? It’s just a five-and-a-half-hour drive—or an hour-and-a-half by plane if we’re desperate.” You shifted so you could shoot him a funny look. “I might have googled it,” he admitted, “right after you told me you got in.”

“Of course you did…” The fact that he had started making plans without waiting on Harvard made you feel better; it meant he had every intention of making it work and maybe you were the downer, seeing the situation as near-hopeless when, really, there had to be couples who didn't let physical distance stop them from being together.

Glass half-full. All you needed was a little faith, a little more optimism.

“At least we’ve got the whole summer,” you said, trying to implement this new, sunnier outlook.

You felt Scott stiffen.

“What?” You turned around properly, anchoring your hand on the side of his neck. You had a minor panic when he wouldn't look at you, and at the guilt written on his brow. “Tell me,” you said.

“Uncle Riggs wants me to spend the summer down in NOLA—something about getting to know me better. I think he must’ve worked it out with Mom. She’s finally put the house up for sale, doesn't want me around when strangers start traipsing through and asking about whether or not she’ll throw in the vintage furniture for an extra few grand.”

At last, after years of painful back and forth, the Miller divorce was imminent. True to Scott’s prediction, “poor Pamela” had hired an attorney and filed paperwork on the very week he climbed through your window. So far his dad had been uncharacteristically passive, perhaps figuring he had put his family through enough, or else fearful of the very same Marshall Riggs who had been summoned from the rafters to come through for his sister after a period of long estrangement.

It was Riggs who had retained Pamela’s ace divorce attorney, Riggs who agreed to pay most of Scott’s tuition. Spending a few months with him seemed like the least he could do. You were disappointed. But you understood.

“When do you leave?”

“Two weeks after graduation.”

“So we have a month,” you said. “That’s thirty days.”

“More like twenty-six… and three quarters.” He smiled the same wistful sort of half-smile that was on your face, and you kissed him, savoring the familiar taste of mint on his mouth from the gum he chewed out of habit.

“Then let’s not waste a second,” you answered back.

He placed a kiss on your forehead. “I love you.”

When he said it, it sounded like a promise that everything would be all right, and in spite of your worries you chose to believe him.

PRESENT DAY OKLAHOMA CITY

For the last ten minutes you’d had trouble hearing Kate’s voice clearly over the phone, but you figured it was to be expected since she was calling from the middle of nowhere (at least to your urban- and suburban-bred estimation), and really, after almost three months of similar experiences, you’d grown tired of plugging your ear and saying, “Kate? Kate? You’re breaking up!”

On the upside, your cognitive skills had to be getting a real workout from filling in the weather-induced gaps in your conversations. Case in point:

“—bad luck with the last two, but I—feeling—building in the east—”

“Yeah, her Spidey Senses are tingling!” you heard Javi yell in the background.

Kate laughed. “Go away!”

“Ask her if she caught the livestream!” Tyler said, no doubt from the driver’s seat.

It sounded like she had you on speakerphone, so you spoke to him directly. “Ty, need I remind you that I have an actual job.”

“Ouch! Did you hear that?—thinks we don’t have real jobs!”

“I did not—”

The clarity improved, and you could hear the sound of car doors slamming and voices cracking jokes in the background, which usually meant they’d returned to Kate’s mother’s farm in Sapulpa, where StormLab kept a satellite office in Cathy Carter’s barn. It was makeshift, but what you saw of it during one of Tyler’s Facetime calls had a rustic charm completely at odds with the glass-and-chrome offices where Herb Rankin worked.

Actually, now that you gave it a moment’s thought, not even Herb Rankin fit into his office.

“Listen to her, the Big City Bigshot slumming it with the rednecks,” Tyler went on, earning a few spirited hoots and howls from the other Wranglers.

“Kate is from New York!” you objected. You waved an arm in the middle of your dim-lit apartment as if anyone could see you, vaguely aware that you were holding a pair of chopsticks and had probably sent a strand of shredded cabbage flying behind your couch.

This assertion was too much for Javi to bear. “Excuse me! Kate is OK to the bone, New York’s just where she keeps her apartment.”

Kate laughed as she said something you couldn’t catch, then Tyler’s voice came, audibly close to the phone. “Hey, that reminds me, where’re you from, again?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“That is not a Philly accent.”

You were about to say that not everyone in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sounds like Rocky Balboa when Javi replied, “That’s ’cause she’s from the fancy part of Pennsylvania—but we don't hold that against her.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Tyler asked, “Wait, you’re not billing us for all this shit-talking, are you?”

You let out a snort, picked up your phone, and held it close to your mouth. “You know, maybe I should, Arkansas.”

At first you couldn’t work out what the hell was going on when Tyler broke out in “It's the spirit of the mountains… and the spirit of the Delta… it's the spirit of the Caaapitol doooooome,” but by the time the other Wranglers pitched in, with all the gusto of a drunk karaoke night despite being stone-cold sober, you understood that you had been treated to a rare and hopefully never-to-be-repeated rendition of one of the state songs of Arkansas. A short while later you hung up, cheeks sore and still laughing to yourself. The silence in your apartment was deafening by comparison.

Sometimes, you called them just because you lacked company. There wasn’t much to report on the Rankin front—as much as you had tried to negotiate on Javi’s behalf for a less hostile resolution, Scott insisted on keeping Kate and Tyler in the suit and seemed determined to take their tiff before a judge if his terms weren’t met.

Even Rankin seemed fed up.

Maybe it was a bad idea, maybe it was the two glasses of wine you’d had with dinner or the post-ballad high. Maybe you wanted to be the one to make StormLab’s problem go away. Whatever the reason, after you put the dirty dishes in the sink, you found yourself calling the one person you swore you’d never speak to ever again.

For good measure, as the dial tone rang you poured yourself another glass. When he answered, you nearly choked.

“Can we talk?” you managed to ask, swallowing down a mouthful of Syrah. There was a long silence on the other end. You didn't know if he had your number saved, if he knew who had called him, or whether he’d recognized the sound of your voice. You remembered that the last thing you had said to him was “go fuck yourself,” and added it to the mental list of why maybe you shouldn't have called him after all.

Tyler’s impulsiveness seemed to be as contagious as a rash.

Scott answered: “Not without my lawyer present.”

Okay, fair. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. He sounded clipped, like he’d rather be lowered into a tank of leeches than be on the phone with you. You were reconsidering the wisdom of your actions when he asked, “What do you want?”

Your eyes darted around the living room. Thinking on your feet wasn't new to you, it couldn't be, in your profession. But a part of you knew you’d taken a stupid gamble in pressing the call button, and now that the die was cast, you had to make it count.

You opted for the aggressive approach.

“Rankin says you're being uncooperative.”

You could feel the animus on the other end. “No, he didn't.”

“It was implied. No one wants to keep drawing this out, Scott. So, come off it. What is it that you’re actually looking to get out of all this?”

If he opted to tell you to go fuck yourself, you figured it would be fair play. This really was business, and not having to look him in the eyes made it easier to feel the rush of adrenaline that came with making a risky move in the name of work. You knew that technically, and in the strictest interpretation of the word, reaching out to another lawyer’s client crossed the line into inappropriate, but you were also a couple years beyond green. If you could cut out the middleman and get Scott to come to the table in a serious way, it would all be worth it. And Rankin could go back to playing 9 holes without losing face in front of his old school mate Riggs.

You waited for Scott’s response with bated breath.

“I want StormLab run into the ground.”

The answer came as no surprise but his tone did. Dark, intense, almost as bad as one of the nights he snuck into your room after a fight with his dad. It was the one and only time you’d ever heard him say he hated his father—his lack of control, his thoughtlessness, his inability to keep his word. Afterward he’d pretended he never said it, or rather, he was careful to never bring it up again, but you knew he had meant it.

And he meant it now. He wanted to take StormLab down. He’d succeed over your dead body. Javi and the others were counting on you.

You moved the phone to your other ear. “Right, well… that's not gonna happen, so any other alternatives?” You could feel he was about to end the call, so you tacked on, “Wait, just… hear me out, okay? Forget about Tyler and Kate—this isn’t about them, really, this is about StormPAR. Compromise on this one thing and you have a better chance of being compensated for what went down last year. You and Javi can just… move on with your lives. On paper it's about money, right? Riggs’s investment? So let’s settle this as soon as possible.”

“You and me?”

“And Rankin,” you added, your conscience getting the better of you.

There was a pause before Scott repeated, “You and me.”

“I don’t…”

“That’s my final offer.”

Alarm bells of a different sort rang in your head. On the phone was one thing, but in person, alone? Could you really sit across from Scott and keep your cool?

You had to. More than that, you wanted to prove to yourself that you’d grown up since you were twenty-one, that you were assured and confident and could handle messy things like sitting across from your ex. There were many things you regretted from that time; the one you regretted most was a reluctance to stand up for yourself. What was Tyler always saying? You don’t face your fears, you ride them. Frankly, you still weren't sure what the hell he meant by that, but it sounded a lot like “put your money where your mouth is.” At some point you had to choose to take action.

“Okay, fine,” you said. “When and where?”

“You busy tonight?”

You scoffed, casting a glance at your open laptop and the piles of paperwork lying on top of the coffee table. “I’m busy every night.”

“Perch. In an hour. Don’t be late.”

THREE YEARS AGO PARK HAVEN, PENNSYLVANIA

As a rule you’d been avoiding your hometown for the last three years, ever since your breakup with Scott. It was easier to stay in Oklahoma, where the possibility of running into someone who knew the Millers or would ask “are the two of you still together?” was slim. After your father died, you started to regret being such a coward. So much lost time… although your mom kept telling you that your dad understood the need to have your own life and never held it against you.

You held it against you, and all the more when your mom decided to downsize and move in with a friend.

After requesting two weeks off you got on a plane to Philadelphia and drove south to Park Haven to help her pack. You stayed up late, wore holiday pajamas, filled your hand with paper cuts, and inhaled about four pounds of dust in the attic. It was nice to spend time with your mom. All the old grievances seemed minor in comparison with the massive changes that lay ahead. Always one for sentimentality, sorting through boxes full of clothes, keepsakes, and old mementos put your mom in an especially chatty mood, and you soaked everything in, not having realized before how little you knew about your dad. He was so reserved in life, so buttoned-up, with clear expectations of himself and others that you were surprised to learn about his stint in an amateur dramatics troupe, the year he tried his hand at playing the alto sax, his fear of geese.

“Geese?” you asked your mom.

“Yes, geese. Those fuckers are vicious!” Having never heard your mom swear before, you froze while elbow-deep in a box of photographs dating back to the 70s. All she did was shrug and finish the rest of her margarita while lightbulbs flashed on her navy blue Rudolph sweater. “What do you want me to say? Parents have secrets, too.”

“Well, I think this parent went a little hard on the tequila,” you said.

Your mom plucked a faded Polaroid from the box. “You know… he didn’t look it, but your dad was actually a lot of fun. We both were. Then… life gets in the way, you start caring about PTA meetings and getting the HOA off your back…”

“Fuck the HOA.”

“Right on! Can’t say I’ll miss any of those jerks.” She sighed, and with a little shake of her head, put the Polaroid back in the box. “Sometimes I worry—” She stopped herself and glanced at you nervously.

“What?”

“Sometimes I worry that you think about us, about your dad and me, and that you don’t see us as having ever been in love. Especially after you and Scott—”

“Mom,” you warned.

“I know, I know, me and my big mouth.” She held up her hands, chuckling to herself. Normally you’d seize the opportunity to change the subject, but you were thinking a lot about how you could’ve been a better daughter, all the times you shut the door in their face because you didn’t want to feel scolded or uncomfortable, because you weren’t interested in what they had to say.

Your mom was trying to respect your privacy. The least you could do was not leave her with the impression that you thought she had a “big mouth.”

You reached across the box and touched her arm. “That’s not what I meant.”

“All I mean is… I know you’re not dating.”

“How do you know that?”

She grinned. “Mothers have their ways. I just don’t want you giving up, is all. If Dad and I weren’t the model marriage—”

“What are you talking about?” you asked. “Half of my friends have divorced parents. And even if you were divorced, the whole ‘nuclear family or you’re a failure to society’ thing is so five-decades-ago.”

“Well, good! Because I was happy—I want you to know that. Maybe it wasn’t the sort of romance people write songs about—God knows your dad had his faults. He wasn't perfect. No one is. But when you love someone… it’s less about keeping score and more about what you build. Together.”

She looked off to the far wall, where their wedding portrait sat propped in its frame, ready to be wrapped in old newspapers and put away. You turned around and looked at it, too—at your mom’s curly updo and poofy skirts, the sleeves that looked like pool inflatables, at least to your modern eyes, at your dad before his hair went gray, the sheepish smile on his face like he couldn’t believe he’d gotten away with the steal of the century.

You’d gotten so used to its presence in the living room that you couldn’t remember the last time you gave it more than a passing glance.

Lit by an alternating flash of blue and purple lights, your mom’s face was cast in an otherworldly glow. Then the spell was broken, and she was your mom again in an ugly Christmas sweater, smiling fondly at an old memory to which you weren’t privy. “For some reason, we brought out the best in each other. That mattered to us more than anything we ever did wrong.” And that was that, a twenty-nine year marriage summed up in a few sentences.

You said, “I guess that does sound romantic… in a super-practical, boring, construction-analogy sort of way.”

She laughed and threw a wadded-up newspaper at your head.

“Dad never liked Scott,” you said after a while, rolling the ball between your hands.

“What makes you say that?”

You threw her a pointed look. Her expression said, Oh, alright.

“He wasn’t disapproving, exactly. He was worried about you. Who wouldn’t be? Your first boyfriend, your first love… I don’t think he was quite ready to see his teenage daughter all head over heels over some guy on the baseball team. And the Millers, well… they had their issues, as a family. Maybe your dad didn’t want you becoming collateral damage. But, oh sweetie,”—it was her turn to touch your arm, Rudolph’s nose squished against the cardboard—“it was never about Scott. When you told us you were engaged, we were so pleased for you! And then a few months later… just like that…”

You swallowed the knot in your throat. How much time would have to pass before you could think of Scott without a tidal wave of sadness hitting you square in the chest? Collateral damage, that was one way of putting it. “I guess Dad was right, after all.”

“He never said ‘I told you so,’” your mom pointed out, “and he never would’ve wanted to.”

You squeezed her hand. “Yeah, I know.”

A phone call from your mother’s friend Rose prompted a break in packing. She went into the kitchen to discuss sideboard dimensions, and you went upstairs, where you were slowly going through your childhood bedroom and putting things in boxes marked Keep and Donate, or else in bags to be discarded when trash day rolled around.

You were almost finished, the walls empty of medals and photos, the corkboard of mementos lying in the recycling bin outside. Already it felt like a bedroom that had belonged to someone else, and while you were sad to know that, after the house was sold, you would never step foot in it again, the process of taking things down one at a time had given you a sort of detachment. There were items, like the snowglobe your friend Tash gave you when she got home from a skiing trip in the Alps in the seventh grade, that you had once thought you could never do without. But now Tash lived in LA with her wife and kids, and you hadn’t spoken much since high school except for a few text messages now and then.

You’d decided to keep the globe but you knew it would live in a box in your closet, a relic rather than an everyday part of your life in Oklahoma.

Speaking of closets, you tackled the wardrobe next, marveling at how many items would be considered “trendy” now that the fashion cycle had taken a turn—or God forbid, “vintage.” There were stuffed animals shoved into the top shelf, your old 50 State quarter collection, debate club certificates, a landscape picture from your senior year mock trial, and a shoebox falling apart at the seams.

You took it to the stripped bed with shaking hands, knowing you’d been dreading this most of all but that it had to be done, so why not now.

After you broke your engagement off with Scott, you’d gone home to lick your wounds. This was before you found a job, before you decided to move to Oklahoma on the literal toss of a coin, knowing only that you couldn't stay in Pennsylvania and that you needed a fresh start. Left with no other options, home had been your best bet, even though the weeks spent living with your parents and avoiding their worried questions had seemed at the time like cruel and unusual punishment. When you moved out you had left something behind, hidden beneath seashells and baubles and silly notes you had passed during class, movie stubs, train tickets, an inexplicable piece of gum, the collar that had once belonged to Clover, your old childhood dog.

You lifted a school ribbon and found it: a blue velvet box with a golden clasp. Your heart pounded in your ears. You took a deep breath, let it out again before lifting the lid… and there it was, glinting in the light of late afternoon.

“Honey, Rose wants to know if you’d like to join us for dinner at her place!”

Box, ring, and all tumbled onto the hardwood. Though you were alone, your mother calling to you from the bottom of the stairs, you felt incredibly guilty. “I’ll be right down!” you yelled back. You got on your hands and knees and slipped the ring back in its cradle.

It felt dangerous somehow, like a live grenade. But you couldn't get rid of it. When you went back home at the end of the month you packed it at the bottom of your suitcase and it’d been living with you ever since, moved from closet to closet, unseen but never quite forgotten.

PRESENT DAY OKLAHOMA CITY

The jewel twinkled in your hand, an oval diamond surrounded by small clusters and set in a ring of yellow gold. It was one of a kind. Scott told you he found it at an antique jeweler’s who dated it to the summer of 1880; it was a genuine Victorian piece, and for nearly four months it had been your most prized possession.

The same foolhardy impulse that made you call Scott and agree to meet him made you dig it out of your closet, right after you spent twenty minutes agonizing over what to wear and the state of your hair. This isn’t a date, you kept reminding yourself. If anything, it might be a trap. He was, after all, Marshall Riggs's nephew.

Letting your lesser sense win out, you slipped the ring on your finger and watched it catch the light. It truly was a beautiful ring. And it was sentimental, as though its selection revealed a hidden truth about Scott.

Its weight on your hand, present and comfortable, calmed your racing thoughts and the nerves roiling in your belly. You kept it on as you dressed and got ready, then chalked it up to a desire for punctuality when you rushed to the elevator, through the lobby, and into your waiting Uber still wearing it. The driver’s presence snapped you out of your momentary lapse in sanity. They were chatty, and the more you talked about work and the weather and what you liked doing in the city, the sillier it felt to be wearing your ex-fiancé’s engagement ring. Before getting out, you stuck it in the pocket of your linen duster… which was also, admittedly, kind of a stupid thing to do.

(You blamed Tyler for all of it.)

Located at the top of a fifty-floor high-rise, Perch was a bar and restaurant with full views of the city and a James Beard Award-winning chef. The atmosphere was relaxed and unfussy, the lighting unobtrusive, and the cocktails reasonably priced. At the door, the vest-clad host directed you through the assemblage of diners and beyond a decorative glass partition to the tables reserved for business meetings, minor celebrities, and men who didn’t want to be seen with their mistresses. Scott was there in rolled-up shirtsleeves. You watched from a distance as he rubbed his stubbled cheek and his pointer finger came to rest at the seam of his lips.

You would not stare at his mouth or let your eyes linger anywhere on his person. This was business, goddammit.

But hell if he didn’t look good. You hated that after all this time you still found him maddeningly attractive.

“Seriously?” he asked, casting a pointed look at the portfolio in your arms.

“Well, this isn’t a social call.”

“By all means.” He gestured at the seat in front of him, mockingly formal. You glanced at the coupe waiting on your side of the table, a cheerful yellow with a perfect white foam on top and a twist of lemon peel. “I took the liberty of ordering your usual.”

You sat down and set the portfolio to one side, adopting an air of casual indifference. “Actually, it’s not my usual anymore.”

“Really?”

“But thanks anyway. So, from previous conversations with Javi—”

“What is this mythical new usual?”

“Are you kidding?” you balked, narrowing your eyes.

“No, I’m just curious.” He propped his chin in his hand. Maybe lying had been a petty move on your part but you’d be damned if he forced you to backtrack and you came out of this looking a fool.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but at some point you’re gonna have to learn to live with uncertainty. Anyway—”

“You don’t have a new usual.” Scott smirked. “It’s still a gin sour and you’re just being difficult.”

“Difficult… Wow, okay! We”—wagging your finger in the space between you—“are not together anymore, so these mind games you’re trying to play are highly inappropriate and also kind of a dick move—”

“A dick move!” he repeated.

“Yeah, a dick move! Which I know is, like, your whole personality now—”

“Is it?” he laughed.

“—but I’m trying to settle this like an actual grown-up and all you’ve done for three months is make that very difficult for everyone involved!”

He rolled his eyes. “This is such a fucking boring conversation.”

Incensed, you had the fleeting thought to throw your drink in his face, but people only did that in soap operas. “You were the one who wanted to do this in person!” you fired back, shrill and drawing the attention of a server who promptly beelined to a different table and pretended not to hear. Which only made you wonder what sort of clientele frequented her section.

“And you were the one who called me,” Scott pointed out, “not the other way around.”

His being right made you even angrier. You had thought you were prepared, that magically you’d be able to have a civil conversation that settled the matter in a way that left you with your pride intact and StormLab the clear winner on the side of good. Clearly, you’d miscalculated. “You know what… fuck this.” After downing half your cocktail in a single gulp, you gathered the portfolio in your arms and made to stand before deciding that, actually, you wanted to get a few things off your chest first so that abandoning your PJs would be worth it. “I am so over this whole… fucking… stupid… mess. I’ve had actual divorces that were easier to mediate, Scott. Whole marriages—and not short ones either! Just take the fucking shares! Please… take the shares and go back to Riggs and leave us all the hell alone. We’re tired, okay? This is just… so unbelievably tiring. And fuck you, by the way—yes, it’s still a gin sour.” You finished yours, figuring that if Scott was paying, you might as well.

And now I’m ready to leave, you thought.

But Scott had other ideas.

“You spoken to your mom lately?”

“What?” You gaped at him, wondering if you were losing your mind. Was he? Was there a dimensional shift happening that you weren’t aware of?

“Pardon the observation,” Scott went on, “but you don’t seem… well.”

“Are you being for real right now?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

And how else could you mean it? was on the tip of your tongue. But the look on his face made you stop. No bullshit, no smug provocation. He was serious. Somehow, that was more unsettling than when he was fucking with you. It brought back too many memories.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

He looked you straight in the eyes when he said it. You wanted to burrow into a hole in the ground—into him, if you were being honest. It didn’t matter how many years had gone by. A part of you was still twenty-seven and glancing at the door wondering if maybe, just maybe…

“Oh, I’m gonna need another one of these,” you whispered to yourself, stunned back into a seated position. The server came around and eyed your empty glass, asking meekly if you would like anything else. “I might as well,” you answered, sounding patently glum. All the while Scott kept a neutral expression, even waited until you had another drink—and a glass of water—in front of you, giving the server a soundless thanks before she scurried away.

Probably off to the kitchen to tell her coworkers about the crazy lady at B25.

“I thought about showing up to the funeral, actually,” added Scott when you had regained most of your composure. “But I didn’t know if I’d be welcome. Mom, being a firm believer in Emily Post, thought it’d be better if we skipped it. She sent flowers, though.”

“She what?”

“She sent flowers. Your mom never said?”

You shook your head. She must’ve been trying not to upset you. But you had been upset anyway, thinking about how Scott should’ve been there, how you had always expected him to show up and make things better.

All this time you had used his absence as yet another example of how little you must’ve mattered in the end. Which made no sense, because you were the one to break things off—and yet, that entire winter’s morning, you had bargained with yourself that if he showed up through those chapel double doors you would forget everything and beg him to take you back. It was too late for that. But knowing that he’d thought about going loosened a painful knot in your chest that you weren’t aware you even had.

You cleared your throat. “How’s your mom, by the way?”

“She’s doing all right. She’s part of a sewing circle, believe it or not.”

“Please tell me that isn’t a euphemism.”

“God, I hope not.”

You smiled involuntarily, picturing Pam Miller in her sweater sets and pearls. “I’m glad she’s doing okay. Your dad…?”

He picked up his drink, a Macallan on the rocks. It was his uncle’s drink, too. “I haven't heard from him in years. Guess neither of us ever saw the point.”

“Scott—”

“How’d you and Javi become an ‘us’ anyway? He never said.”

Fair enough. It made sense that he wouldn’t want to talk about his dad, let alone with you. But talking about Javi? When an hour ago he had admitted to wanting to bankrupt Javi’s company?

“I’ll be on my best behavior for the next”—he looked down at his watch—“fifteen minutes. Promise.”

“I don’t know, I think it’s better if we table all the personal talk,” you hedged.

“Better for whom?”

“Better for my clients. And better for me, too. We’re not friends.”

“We’ve never been friends,” Scott pointed out.

“Exactly. So why lie and pretend like we are?”

“Call it a term of this negotiation.”

“Scott…” Already this night was going nothing like how you’d planned. Your defenses had all the strength of a thin paper bag; he was in front of you, all dark-haired, blue-eyed, 6’4” reality and you weren’t unaffected. You wanted to keep talking to him, make the moment last… and all the more because you knew it had to end at some point. Scott would never be yours—not again. You’d made your peace with that a long time ago. But he has a right to know. Maybe if you could convince him that there was no grand conspiracy against him, he would be more amenable to Javi’s offer.

This is business, you reminded yourself. Redirect, bring it all back to StormLab.

“Fine,” you decided, settling in to tell the story of how you and Javi first met. “It happened maybe a year after I moved to Oklahoma City… I was out with a new friend and she took me to this bar after dinner to meet a bunch of people, one of whom was Javi. We get to talking, he tells me all about this new company he’s starting with a friend of his, says it’s a lucky coincidence or maybe fate having a twisted sense of humor because—”o

You broke off. You hadn’t considered how to broach this particular detail in the story. Obviously, Javi had no idea at the time how messy your backstory with Scott was. He had only thought to poke fun at his friend and seemed delighted to have solved a long-standing mystery for himself.

“So you’re the girl!”

“Come again?”

“The girl, you know. He has a picture of you in one of his old notebooks from college. What a small world!”

“What?” Scott prompted. You felt your face heating up and took a sip of water to hide it. You couldn't well omit the rest having already begun, but the knowledge that Scott had kept a photograph of you, whether by accident or otherwise, made you flustered then and it flustered you now.

You settled for: “He said he recognized me, and that he thought we might have a friend in common. Obviously, he meant you. He was dating one of Christa’s friends at the time—”

“Rachel.”

“Yeah. So he’d show up, be around… You know how Javi can be.”

“Like a persistent terrier.”

“Sounds like your kind of business partner.”

Scott looked away.

Not wanting to push things further in that direction just yet, you explained, “I work a lot, so it’s hard for me to make friends. Javi seems to make them wherever he goes. It’s nice having people like that in your life, to open you up, remind you there’s more to all this than billable hours and senior partner tracks. But we never talked about you. Not until this whole thing happened.”

“What thing did he say happened?”

Tread carefully now. Scott was watching you intently—if you said the wrong thing it might start a new argument between you and make his relationship with Javi a hell of a lot worse. In polished business-speak, you recited: “Just that you had a fundamental disagreement about the direction of the company.”

Your reward was a skeptical laugh.

“Also, that he might have left you on the side of the road during a tornado… which he feels bad about, by the way.”

“Not bad enough.”

“Scott, you can’t really want to ruin him, can you? I mean, this is Javi we’re talking about.”

“That’s not part of this discussion.”

“Okay?” you shot back. “I don’t remember agreeing to that condition.”

“You’re still at this table.”

“And that can easily be fixed!”

“All right, calm down.” Maybe it was you in danger of starting another fight. Scott, holding up his hands in a show of good faith, said, “I thought we were playing nice here, being civilized, acting like adults… What else have you been up to?”

“You want to know about my life?”

“Like I said, I’m curious. And seeing as this is a momentary parley, I plan on making the most of it.”

Again, you took in his face in search for any signs of subterfuge and found none, only the barest hint of levity in his eyes at your willingness to argue. It reminded you of the old days, when Scott would delight in teasing you for the sole purpose of seeing what your reaction would be. “Fine. But it’s going to be quid pro quo,” you demanded. “Call it a term of this negotiation.”

His mouth curved into a smile. Then he held out his hand across the table and waited for you to take it before saying, “Term accepted, counselor.”

In the end, playing nice with Scott turned out to be a lot easier once you’d established a few ground rules, mainly the stipulation that either of you could say “pass” if you weren’t willing to answer a question.

You went through the whole gamut of discussing your first jobs after college, gossiped about the old Park Haven crowd, the who-married-who and the who-got-divorced of it all. It turned out that, like you, Scott hadn’t returned to Pennsylvania much in the last few years. StormPAR kept him traveling through the Great Plains for most of the spring and summer, and during the rest of the year he lived in New Orleans, where Riggs and his mother lived. You got the sense that his life revolved around work, and that StormPAR, while not the be all and end all of his professional fate, had been an important part of it until Javi called it quits. You figured this explained, in part, why he took the loss so personally, and though you kept your thoughts to yourself you lamented that his one attempt to branch out for himself and away from his uncle—if you could call taking a major investment from Riggs “branching out”—had gone badly.

Either way, by the end of the evening you felt you’d been a little hasty in believing the old Scott had left the building for good. You exited Perch in higher spirits, glad to see that the night was clear and that the air felt good on your cheeks. When he asked if you were getting a car, you shared your desire for a long walk and he responded with mild horror until you explained that you didn’t live far. “Maybe twenty minutes? Thirty at most.”

“I’ll walk you home,” he insisted. You didn't argue because you were secretly pleased. The only thing you had to guard against was the urge to take his arm as you used to do. You felt giddy with it, which you were sure had to be the alcohol, but it was also the fact that Scott was here, in the flesh, that you were cracking jokes and sometimes even pulling smiles from his otherwise deadpan expression. You’d forgotten how that could make you feel like you’d won the jackpot.

“I’m sorry, I know you’re going to take this the wrong way,” you prefaced while walking backwards on the sidewalk, “but I have a really hard time imagining you as a storm chaser.”

“Excuse me!”

“I mean…” You stopped and full-body gestured. “I mean, look at you!”

“What?”

“Even your slacks are pressed!”

“Objection, why are you studying my slacks like a degenerate?”

“Don’t make it weird,” you replied, and fell into step beside him, if only to keep him from seeing that you were embarrassed by the implication that you might’ve been checking him out. “All I meant to say was—”

“That I don’t look like a rugged adrenaline junkie? Maybe ‘Rodeo Clown’ is more your thing these days.”

“Don’t—Tyler’s actually quite decent, you know.”

“But you knew exactly who I was talking about.” Scott snapped his fingers as if to say, Gotcha! as you ruefully shook your head. Something about Tyler Owens tended to evoke a Neanderthal-like competitiveness in certain men—Scott, being competitive by nature, fell for it all too easily.

“This is me.” You pointed at your building. It was a relatively new construction with climbing greenery and pop-out balconies where you’d lived for a year-and-a-half after a not inconsiderable raise, and the reason why you worked sixty hours a week.

“Can I come up?” Scott asked.

You whipped your head so hard that your temples throbbed. “That’s…” A no good, awful, terrible, ill-conceived, perilous idea?

Scott seemed to find your distress highly entertaining. “Jesus, would you relax?” he said. “I’m not asking to tuck you in—unless, if there’s someone—”

“There isn’t,” you hurried to say.

“Oh? How come?”

The knowledge that the man with whom you were formerly engaged was inquiring as to the current state of your love life with all the breeziness of do you have the time? was enough to make you believe in karmic punishment. “Like I said, I’m busy,” you managed to eke out, which only made him lift his shoulders as if to say, Then, what’s the big deal?

Scott Miller was good at that, getting his way.

“Fine,” you caved. “But only for ten minutes! Fifteen, tops!”

“Scout’s honor.”

In the elevator car you stuck your hands in your pockets, searching for your keys only to find the cold hard metal of your engagement ring. You looked guiltily at the oblivious Scott, who was staring at the floor display with a contented expression and was none the wiser about your having worn it earlier in the night like some kind of weirdo. Should you give it back? At the time he’d wanted nothing to do with it, but was keeping it the proper thing? Was it good for you to even have it?

At last you found your keys at the bottom of your purse. You opened the door, trying to remember how well you’d tidied after dinner as he walked in, inspecting everything. You watched as his gaze traveled over the open-plan kitchen and living area—the work files, magazines, and old mail stacked on various side tables; the midcentury beechwood couch you got for a steal at a secondhand warehouse when you first moved; the shelves, filled with books and framed photographs and trinkets you’d brought from home; and the view from your window, which wasn’t nearly as spectacular as the one from Perch, but it faced west, and if you were home during golden hour you could see the other buildings lit orange and gold.

“Yeah, this is exactly how I pictured it,” Scott mentioned at last.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, it’s just… you,” he answered. Your stomach turned to knots. He made you feel seen like nobody else could, not least of which because you’d let him back when you were younger and less guarded. Your heart kicked wildly in your chest, urging you to go to him, go to him, explain everything, get him back, because he was the one. Then Scott looked away, pointing at a sad fern that sat on a pedestal next to your mounted TV. “You still can’t keep a plant alive worth shit.”

“Rude,” you fired back, grasping at levity in order to shove the other thoughts away.

Scott drifted back to your bookshelves, seeing a few paperbacks he must’ve recognized from your old room at Park Haven. “And yet you keep trying. Do you actually use any of these?” he inquired, motioning towards the half-dozen board games you kept piled on an open top shelf. There was Clue and Monopoly, Candy Land, Sorry!, Scrabble and Life.

“Sometimes,” you replied, “when I have friends over. Which hasn’t happened much this year, if I’m being honest.”

“Let’s play.”

You laughed. You didn’t believe him. He pulled one of the boxes out and took it to the coffee table and all you could do was stare, incredulous, as he took his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves, actually sitting on the floor and looking expectantly at you to join him.

“You want to play Life with me?” you challenged. “Doesn’t that seem a little…”

“And you call me uptight.” He waved you over, determined not to take no for an answer. “Come on, hotshot, live a little.”

Despite your better judgment, and after a moment’s panicked hesitation, you lowered yourself next to him. He still smelled the same, like rain and sandalwood and pine. You wanted to curl into his side and feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath your ear, like you’d done on the nights he spent hidden away with you in your room. You had never gotten to live together; all you had were countable memories of waking up next to him and thinking, One day… one day we’ll have this every day.

As he set up the board, all you could do was stare at his hands.

SIX YEARS AGO NEW ORLEANS

Marshall Riggs greeted with you a double-kiss at the door, one on each side of your cheeks. Then he held you at arm’s length so he could look you up and down. “Would you take a look at that,” he said to Scott, “pretty as a picture! I suppose this is the part where I welcome you to the family?”

It was midsummer in Louisiana, on the hotter side of balmy and with the cicadas out in force. Shortly before you graduated Scott traveled to Philadelphia and asked you to marry him. Saying yes had been a no-brainer. You were in love, had put up with four years of distance and near-breakups, and now here was the culmination of all your compromise, communication, and hard work. For a second there you’d thought it would end badly; you were both in highly-intensive undergrad programs, there was only so much you could hash out over phone and video calls, and you were young. The question of “do we really want to make a life-changing decision at twenty-one?” had crossed your mind. But upon further reflection you realized that the answer was yes—had always been yes. And Scott seemed to agree.

In the absence of his father, “meeting the family” entailed paying court to his Uncle Riggs, a man you had spoken to a few times, at holiday parties and summer outings hosted by Pam, now settled in New Orleans and much happier than you’d known her before. But all those other times, you’d met Riggs as Scott’s girlfriend. Now you were his fiancée, with a fancy law degree and a diamond ring and everything, and while you would’ve preferred keeping your distance you knew this was important to Scott—that Riggs was important to him.

So you put on a smile and indulged the old man. Do it for Scott, you said to yourself. You’ve come this far. No point faltering while you were at the winning stretch.

You bowed your head. “Thank you for having us, Mr. Riggs.”

“Please, just Riggs,” he laughed. “Or Marshall—but only my ex-wives call me that.”

You soon found he had a way of twinkling his eyes that made you feel like you were sharing a joke. As he pointed out the features of his home—the old tapestries, the mural commissioned by Candice, his second ex-wife, the wall he knocked down because he wanted to “open up the space”, and his plans to expand the front garden, which, as it was, made the house look like it was in the middle of a tropical rainforest—he regaled you with stories about the people he knew, going off on tangents and bringing it back to the topic at hand. He was genteel and witty, and though he carried himself with Southern indifference there was no doubt he had power: he cocked his head, and a woman in an apron appeared with a tray of mint juleps; Scott held onto his every word; and when you were led into a dining room that might’ve fit forty or fifty at least, it was taken as a matter of course.

He pulled out your chair and sat you at his right hand because it was “the place of honor,” and Scott smiled encouragingly. You were doing so well.

You only wished that you could feel it.

“So, you want to be a big-deal attorney,” Riggs announced, digging into a perfect roast chicken. “What kind? Criminal?”

“Oh, no,” you replied. “Civil all the way. I’ve got a few offers but I want to shop around, make sure I’m making the right first move.”

“The right first move!” He pointed his knife at you. “I like that. By any chance, are you a chessplayer, sweetheart?”

“Can’t say that I am. My family are more into board games, really. Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick?” you explained.

He got a kick out of that. But he was partial to chess. “Opening moves—if you look at the big picture, they don't seem all that important. But well, in that case, why the hell’re there so many of ’em? Napoleon Opening, Greco Defense, Bled Variation, Balogh Defense… Sometimes how a thing starts dictates how the rest of it’ll unfold, from midgame all the way down to the end. If you're gonna do something, might as well do it right the first time or so I always say. Don’t I, boy?” He turned to Scott for confirmation.

“Yes, sir.”

“Yessir…” Riggs chuckled, spearing a roasted sprout. The ends of his bolo tie shifted on his neck. A turquoise the size of an acorn sat between his collar, and he was dressed to the nines—for your benefit, the guest of honor’s.

Nevertheless, there was something of the austere in his eyes. You couldn’t shake it when he put down his fork and sat back, looking from you to Scott, nodding like a king about to give his blessing to a pair of kneeling courtiers. “Pretty as a picture…” he repeated. “Look at you both—young, on the cusp, and none too hard on the eyes, if I do say so myself. A real golden couple on our hands! To opening moves”—he raised his glass—“may we always know when to make the right one.”

You raised your glass to be polite.

Scott leaned across the table. “Before you ask, yes, he is always like this.”

His uncle laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, and called for “champagne! To my nephew and his beautiful bride!”

As the night wore on, you convinced yourself that any discomfort was all in your head. You worked your way through three dinner courses, all impeccably cooked, and by the time the doberge was served you decided that you had judged the man too harshly. Sure, he was old-fashioned, but he was also jovial, polite, and he clearly doted on Scott.

“How nice it is to spend some quality time,” he remarked when Scott left the table, saying Pamela was on the phone. She wanted to know what plans you had for the rest of the week, whether you were still on for the garden fête on the 25th, and what dates you were considering for your engagement party, whether that would be here or in Pennsylvania, but I really do think you’d better do it here.

“I’ll just be a few minutes,” he said to Riggs, leaving you alone with his uncle. Now he had focused all of his attention on you, the full glare of his eye-twinkle and magnetic allure. He wasn’t a handsome man; it wasn’t about his looks—which were well past their prime—but about the knowledge that he could get almost everything he wanted simply by wanting it.

“It’s a shame we never did this sooner,” he went on. “Why do you think that is?” You shifted guiltily. The truth was, Riggs had always made you a bit uneasy. He had a reputation as a difficult man—ruthless, exacting, guileful, hard to please, and he liked doing business in the gray, always legal but never quite on the up-and-up.

Over the last four years, you may have avoided him on the grounds of self-righteous principle, but you couldn't admit to that if you were trying to leave a good impression.

You hedged, “I’m afraid law school doesn't leave much time to spare.”

“Very true… Not that I would know—it was always too much book learning for me, I’m a man of action,” Riggs explained, sipping his whiskey and looking happy as a clam. He had polished off two slices of cake earlier, but only because we’re celebrating. “Now, my nephew… he’s a bit o’ both, isn’t he? Either way, he’s got too much of his mother in ’im.”

You frowned, wanting to say a word in defense of Pamela. Riggs waved you off. “Don’t mind me, I’m just a silly old man with too many opinions. It tends to rub people up the wrong way—don't think I haven't noticed!” Another laugh, another narrowing of the eyes that could have been humor but which you felt like a lightning strike down your back.

He knows and you’re making something out of nothing struggled for dominance within your head, and still he kept on talking, forcing you to pay attention and leave the question unresolved.

He pointed in the direction where Scott had gone. “That nephew of mine—I don’t have any children of my own, did you know that? It never happened for me. Four wives and nothing to show for it—imagine that! But that boy… good thing his father never knew what to do with ’im—smart as a whip he is, and like a dog with a bone once he’s got an idea in his head. That part I’d say he got from me,” he said with a chuckle, wagging his finger in the air. He gave your hand a few avuncular pats and then kept it there, meaty and warm.

“I can see that you love ’im… I can see that you really love ’im. What bright, young, sensible girl wouldn't? You should see him ’round the office! He breaks hearts left, right, and center wherever he goes—a real catch, my secretary always says, and she’s been with me since Scott was yea-high. He’s got his mother’s looks, which I’ll say not to sound too self-serving, heh!” A slight tug on your wrist. You kept your objections to yourself, saying, He’s just a strange old man. As your discomfort grew, stretched to its very limits, he removed his hand and was back to being an innocuous grandfatherly man again. He seemed a little sad, wistful, even. Almost frail.

“I don’t know what I would do without him,” said Riggs, staring at his empty plate. “I really don't. Oh, here! before I forget—I have something for you.” He reached into the inner pocket of his cream suit jacket, extracting a long envelope which he slid across the table with a paternal expression, his gaze warm. You began to object, and, “Go on, now!” he insisted. “I don't hold with false modesty! Nothin’ but a waste o’ time in my book. Open it! Call it a graduation present to help you get started. Scott said your old man was taking some time off from his job, feeling under the weather.”

You opened the flap to find a check with more zeros on it than you could’ve reasonably imagined, payable to your name and typewritten in official font.

“Mr. Riggs, this is…” Your hands shook, you felt too hot in the enclosed dining room. Where was Scott? What was taking him so long? You slid the check in the envelope and tried to push it back to Riggs’s side of the table. “There is no way I can accept this,” you said. “It’s too much money, and while I appreciate the gesture—”

“Nonsense! It’s my pleasure and I won’t hear no can’ts or won’ts about it! I want you to know how well Scott’s been doing here since he finished school. He’s flourishing, all my business associates love him. I can’t possibly make do without him now.”

“I don’t understand,” you said, a pit growing in your stomach.

Once more Riggs pinned you with that twinkle in his eye. “I think you do, a smart girl like you. A man should sow his wild oats while he's young. I had a pretty young wife when I was his age. Marjorie, her name was. My first. It's true what they say—you never forget your first… By God, she was beautiful! and we had all these plans… so many plans! Dreams, really. But mine were always just a little too big for her, you understand, and at first that didn't matter much—we were in love. But then… the kids never came, and Marjorie had too much time on her hands—at the very least, she had more time on her hands than I did, that’s for sure! That gets to a woman sometimes.

“I know you won't have that problem, big city lawyer and all,” he said to you, as if in you he had the fullest confidence and he was speaking about other, less distinguished women. “But really, even if Marjorie’d been an ambassador to the United Nations she’d still have had a compunction about something or other… Ambition’s a hard pill for most folks to swallow.

“Now, you seem like a nice girl… really, I like you plenty! But let’s talk facts here for a minute. You are not the girl for Scott—not when he’s trying to become the man that he’s trying to become. The boy’s got the instincts of a killer. Really! All I’ve gotta do is stand back and look at him! But you, my dear, you’re nothin’ like him. You’ll never be. For most of my life, I thought the perfect woman would be someone to ‘balance me out,’ as they say. It’s taken me almost fifty years to find out that ain’t nothin’ but bullshit made up by Hallmark or whoever to sell us some cards. There ain't no use fighting one’s true nature. You and Scott are doomed to fail—if not now then in five years, if not in five then in another ten! You’ve seen the cracks, haven't you? He’s not the boy you met in Park Haven. He’s becoming his own man. He doesn’t need you anymore.”

You were almost too stunned to speak. Between the casual misogyny, the callous worldview, and the envelope that lay between you on the table like a coiled snake, you felt like you had left reality—there was no way this conversation could be taking place with Scott just in the other room.

“Let me get this straight,” you began, willing your voice not to shake, “you’re offering me money to break up with Scott because you think I’m not good enough for him?”

“No, no, no!” Riggs drew in close to you and took both of your hands, his face earnest and pained. “You’re getting this all wrong. I’m not some mustache-twirling villain trying to thwart the course of true love! You’re a wonderful girl, I’m sure Scott’s been very happy with you. But everything has its season. The time for moons and Junes and Ferris wheels is over. You can leave him to me now.”

“With all due respect, you’re out of your mind!” You slid your chair back, making an angry scrape along the tile. Riggs closed his grip around your hands.

“Sittdown before you wreck the boy’s life.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did Scott ever tell you about his old man? How he squandered the family fortunes and left him and Pamela all but bankrupt? Now, me, I’d have done the decent thing—put a pistol to my head for all my sins—but the man has his pride, though I don’t know where-all he gets it from. You see Pam now, up in her French colonial sunning her face and drinking cocktails like the belle of the ball?” He pointed to his chest. “I did that. Scott’s shiny new diploma from M-I-T? Right again! Now, I don't believe in somethin’ for nothing. Everything in this here world has its cost, sweetheart. Everything. I have invested in that boy—not just money, but my blood, sweat, and tears! I won’t abide a loss. I won’t abide it.”

“Scott isn’t an investment,” you shot back. “He isn't yours to own.”

“And yet it would seem he’s worth more to me than he is to you. If he marries you, he and Pam won’t see another cent from me even if I have to drive past them through the gutter. I’m telling you I would throw my own sister out on the street for him—my own flesh! Can you say the same? Could Scott? Would he choose you over his poor, silly mother? Now, I highly doubt that.”

The crazy thing was, he seemed genuinely aggrieved by this predicament of his own making. In his face you could see him imagining the scene—him in his black town car, driving past Pam. And yet he remained immovable. Either you gave up Scott or he would make good on his threat.

It was callous, immoral. I have invested in that boy.

The sound of Scott’s shoes came up the hallway. Riggs folded the check into your hands and said, “Don't make a scene. Think about it.”

“What did I miss?” Scott stopped to kiss the top of your head before resuming his seat. You felt nauseous, your hands clammy around the paper you hid in your lap. To you, Scott seemed like he belonged in another world, another time—a Before-Time.

As you tried not to cry, Riggs smiled at him broadly and said, “Oh, nothing much. But I have a little present for you.”

He pulled a box from the bottom of his seat, crimson leather and beautifully stitched. Scott lifted the lid. Inside was a silver Patek Philippe, the watch he would wear when you saw him six years later, sitting across from you at a conference table with a strange coldness in his eyes. He showed it to you, beaming with pride, and while you couldn't remember what canned response you gave, you did recall that he pulled Riggs into a hug, and said, “Uncle, you really shouldn’t have…”

PRESENT DAY OKLAHOMA CITY

For nearly an hour you and Scott sat on the floor of your living room, playing at marriage and midlife crises and how many babies you would have, which on any other occasion would have made you hysterically laugh or, as Javi said on the night you met, remark upon the universe’s odd sense of humor.

But you were strangely levelheaded. If anything, you felt slightly out-of-body and yet entirely in your body, if that made sense.

You were aware of every piece put on the board. You watched the spinner turn in a rainbow of colors, the clack of the spokes sounding faster and faster before it slowed and then drew to a stop. You felt the couch cushions at your back. Scott’s shoulder brushed against yours sometimes, when he reached for one of the tiny bright pegs that went on top of the tiny bright cars. It felt like you were inside of a dream, and because dreams didn’t matter and had no consequences unless you let them, you started to ease into surrealism.

You played the game, and gradually your body began to relax. This was familiar to you—Scott taking it way too seriously, you poking fun at the furrow between his brows, the way you alternated between cold-hard strategy and chaotically negligent gameplay just to see a reaction flicker across his face. He stretched his legs out beneath the table, threw an arm across the seat-edge of the couch; sometimes, you would recline further back and your neck would touch his arm. You did it a few times, feeling embarrassed at first. But when you saw he didn’t mind, you let your head fall back, waiting as he picked a card.

Something was building beneath your skin. You felt restless, and a little reckless. Despite the law you laid down at the restaurant, you couldn’t stop your gaze from lingering. It lingered everywhere: on the hollow of his throat, the shape of his nose, the play of light across his cheeks, his mouth, the spaces where his white shirt gapped between the buttons and you could see his bare chest underneath. Oh, you’re in trouble… you said to yourself, and yet it didn’t matter. You didn’t care. This was a liminal space, a void where you could be honest and unafraid of the truth.

Even when Scott caught you looking, all he did was look back. He let the tips of his fingers touch yours when sliding a card from your hands, knocked his knee against yours. There was a time—or maybe you imagined it—when you felt his hand stroke your shoulder and you almost did something out-of-line. Because there was a line, blurred, but it existed; you kept within the bounds because you knew it was the sole condition to prolonging this state, so you bought owner’s insurance and traded in stocks, changed careers, had twins, repaid a loan (with interest) and made your slow and steady way to retirement at Countryside Acres.

At the end of the game, after all the remaining play money had been counted, it was Scott who said, “Looks like I win,” and all you said was, “Why am I not surprised?”

Then you glanced at the clock. “It’s late.”

“And we haven’t killed each other. How’s that for a détente?” Scott began putting all the parts away, pulling the pegs out of the cars first, sticking each one inside its appropriate little plastic bag. You would’ve thrown them straight in the box and not had a care in the world about it, but you liked that he did.

It was a Scott thing—patient, methodical, kind of annoying, and mostly well-intentioned. You sat back and watched him do it.

“Wow… they teach words like that at MIT?”

“They tried it out with our class—apparently, word was going ’round that STEM nerds lack empathy.”

You smiled. “Now where would they go and get an idea like that?” His eyes flicked down to yours. Having finished, he went back to reclining against the couch, one arm draped over his bent knee.

His gaze on your skin felt like a physical touch, and when it stopped at your lips, a shock of heat went through your body, from the crown of your head down to your toes. You watched him swallow. The urge to kiss him was vicious, urgent and unrelenting, and when you saw his mouth part, his tongue emerging to wet his lips, you thought, Now now now, but then Scott stood so fast he almost upset the table.

“I should go,” he managed to say, his voice ragged. He sought sightlessly for his discarded jacket, found it lying over the top of the couch, and he couldn’t escape fast enough. Frustration rolled off him in waves.

“Scott!” You scrambled to your feet. You might have touched the very edge of his sleeve, but he held up his hand to stop you coming any closer.

“This was a mistake.”

You went stock still. The spell was broken—this was no longer the dreamworld where nothing mattered, this was the Real World. The one where everything had been broken, not least of which because of you, and it was all a mistake. Calling him had been a mistake, meeting him had been a mistake, thinking that you could control anything you felt about him had been a mistake.

And now there was this: Scott raking his hands through his hair, turning in the middle of the room, almost a decade’s worth of anger and disappointment and confusion and, why not, maybe a little hatred thrown into the mix.

“You never trusted me!” he threw in your face. “And I mean never—even when we were in high school, especially not in college—”

“Why are you talking about college?” you demanded, your voice rising to meet his.

“Every time I called, it was like you were expecting me to tell you it was over. Every girl I so much as spoke to when you came to visit—”

“I was eighteen! What the fuck do you want me to say? That I was insecure and kind of an idiot? Yeah, no shit! I thought we’d moved past that!”

“No, we didn’t move past it because it never changed! Maybe it stopped being about other women, but then it was about work, about the time I spent shadowing at my uncle’s company. Do you have any idea how exhausting it was to keep having to convince you that I was all in? And what, somehow we went from that to ‘you’ve changed, Scott, I don’t think I like who you are anymore, Scott’—?”

“What the fuck? I never said that!”

“The night we had dinner at my uncle’s—the night you left! And again in the elevator—”

“Can we not do this?” you plead. “I thought we weren’t going to do this. We agreed!”

“Well, maybe I'm changing the terms.”

“Then this ends right here.”

There was silence. You knew it was coming, and yet it still hurt like a freight train hitting you square in the chest when he looked you in the eyes and said: “What else is new?”

You flinched. You felt your whole body recoil, your eyes sting. Your fault. The one who couldn’t stand up for herself, couldn't commit, who ran at the first sign of trouble. You and Scott are doomed to fail. Riggs had laid down his vision for the future and you had believed him, had chosen to believe him more than you had ever believed in Scott, or in yourself.

You’re not the girl for him. You’re nothing like him.

Hadn’t you always told yourself the same in the darkest recess of your mind? Hadn’t you, in truth, been just a little bit relieved when you packed your things and moved back to Park Haven, play-acting ended, no more trying, no more waiting for the other shoe to drop?

“I’m sorry.” Scott took an immediate step towards you. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did,” you shot back with more vitriol than you intended.

“Don’t do that—don’t pretend to know how I fucking feel.”

“You forget, Scott. I know you.”

“I thought the whole point was that you didn't! That I was so… unrecognizable!”

“Well, you are!” you exclaimed, shouting again. “Suing Javi? Trying to take down his company? Being Riggs’s, what, fucking loyal dog—”

“Oh, spare me the hysterics…”

“Did you say it?” you cut in. “Did you really say you didn’t care about that town full of people?”

Scott froze. You watched his jaw clench, and you knew in that moment that he'd been counting on Javi’s discretion on that score.

If your intention had been to preserve any goodwill between them, that was all going up in flames now. Hell, after tonight, you and Scott might be incapable of being in the same room together, let alone working towards a peaceful resolution to a civil suit.

“You weren’t there,” he ground out. “There were other things going on.”

“Did you say it, Scott?” It was obvious that he had. The shame kept him from saying another word when you finally stepped around the coffee table. “But God forbid I say a word against Marshall Riggs, the undoubted patron saint of Tornado Alley. I'm sure his real estate empire only exists so he can share his considerable wealth with the downtrodden and needy!”

“What do you want me to fucking say? Do you want me to apologize for who my family is? I'm sorry if you find my uncle objectionable, but he is the only reason I ever made something of myself—you ever consider that? I’d be nothing without him—nothing! You think my father could have lifted a finger? Riggs is the only reason Mom and I made it through that summer. I owe him everything! So he makes business decisions you don't agree with—”

You scoffed.

“—but Javi knew exactly where all that money came from. He wasn't duped, I didn’t trick him… he made a choice. He made a choice! And then, what, Kate Carter comes along and he grows a fucking conscience? Give me a break…”

“And where the hell is yours! You think I give a shit what Marshall Riggs does? I care about you, you fucking idiot! Are you really going to stand there and tell me you’re happy? That it… that it feels good to know you’re suing your best friend, that you seemingly have no other friends, that you’ve hitched yourself to your uncle and the most you can say is you’re doing it out of obligation? You used to want more for yourself, Scott!”

He laughed at that. Rubbing his hand across his mouth, he regarded you with a derisive humor.

“Tell me, how’s the trust fund going? Your dad—he was always a pretty shrewd investor, right? and your mom’s family… they’ve got those boutique hotels along the eastern seaboard, the ones that get their pictures in the magazines and all over social media? It’s pretty easy to talk about wanting more for yourself when your father didn’t sink your family prospects on a deck of cards. I do what I have to do. Not that you’d ever understand.”

Money—had it been this big of an issue the whole time? Had you ignored it all the years of your relationship? Money… and jealousy of your father, Scott’s resentment towards his. You felt so blind, so stupid. The “cracks” Riggs had referenced had been there all along, and instead of talking about them you had stuck your head in the sand, worried that if you said the wrong thing all your insecurities would be proven right. That Scott would leave.

Scott… Did you ever stop to consider the damage that leaving him alone with Riggs might cause?

“You only think you can’t make it without him,” you dared to say. “But he doesn’t care about you.”

“What, not like you do?”

“No,” you affirmed. “Not like I do.”

Scott frowned at you. He appeared almost childlike, vulnerable. A boy calling “no fair!”, probably with Riggs’s voice in the background saying, Life isn't fair. “You don't get to do that. You don’t get to do that after all this time… you—you fucking left!”

“He offered me money. Did he ever tell you that? How he tried to buy me off to leave you? You talk about my trust fund, and it’s true—I grew up lucky, but we never had Marshall Riggs Money. There’s rich and then there’s capital-R Rich, the kind you only get when you’ve turned being a ruthless son-of-a-bitch into an art form.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yes, you do. I can see it in your eyes—you know I’m telling the truth. I never liked him. What's more, he could tell I didn't like him, and he couldn't have that… no, not Riggs. He’d gotten used to you being his right-hand man and he wasn’t about to lose you. So he waited until you left the table—”

“I’m not going to listen to this.”

“—he waited until you left the table,” you repeated, almost toe to toe. You forced yourself to continue, even in the face of Scott’s patent distress. You couldn't live like this, not anymore. Keeping secrets, taking the biggest share of the blame. “‘If he marries you, he and his mother won’t see another cent from me even if I have to drive past them through the gutter,’” you recited. “Those were his words. I’m not lying to you—I wouldn't, not about this.

“He was never going to let us be together. Obviously, I didn’t take the money, but he was dead serious about his threat. And I was angry. I thought if only you’d stood up to your uncle before, if you weren’t blind to what he really was, I would never have been put in that position. So I took it out on you. I blamed you. And I said things…”

You faltered, remembering the night you returned to the hotel. You couldn’t stay, not with Riggs’s check in your pocket and the memory of his hand gripping your wrist. But Scott didn’t understand. He didn't know what had made you so upset, why you were throwing your clothes into your suitcase and talking about flights and returning his ring and about how it was time you stopped pretending. And, yes, you took to heart what Riggs had implied about other women. You weren’t picky. You weren’t careful. You just had to leave.

You were ashamed of it now. The knowledge of how you’d acted lodged in your throat like a stone you couldn’t swallow down. Scott remembered it, too. His eyes flickered this way and that, recalling, wondering how much of it was true.

“I said things to you that I wish I’d never… that I still think about, and I still regret, because I love—” Your voice broke. You placed your hands over his chest, then cradled his face, willing him to believe you, willing yourself to be brave. “I still love you, Scott. I love you. I should’ve told you the truth, but I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“No… you left,” he said weakly, bracing his hands around your wrists.

“I know I did… I know, but he can’t have you.” You kissed his mouth, once, twice, as many times as he allowed, and all the while you said the things you should’ve said that night in New Orleans. “I won’t let him have you… not this time… not again.”

Scott turned his head and the heat of his tongue met yours.

One second he was all coiled tension and the next he was all over you, walking you back towards the couch, kissing a trail down your neck, one hand tangled in your hair while the other was already up your skirt matching his strokes to the curl of his tongue. He laid you down on the couch, settling between your thighs, and even clothed the weight of him felt familiar—the pass of his hand up and down your leg, the way he liked to tease you by wandering just close enough to where you wanted before pulling away, distracting you with a searing kiss or a shallow roll of his hips.

In the past, there were times when he would draw it out for hours, taking you to the brink and back until you were sure you wanted to curse him.

At a friend’s New York wedding, he made you come three times before he entered you, and you weren’t too proud—now, with the real Scott on top of you, all over you, soon to be in you if there was any justice in the world—to admit that you had replayed that night in your head sometimes when you were lonely. When a bad day at work or an ill-advised night of drinking too much ended with you trying to chase sleep on the heels of an orgasm that was never as satisfying as the ones you got with Scott.

Even when you managed to make yourself come—really come, that full-bodied electricity-followed-by-deep-silence feeling—you had been all too aware of his absence. What was the point, you had wondered, if you couldn’t curl up next to him or listen to the steady flow of his breathing or hear him sigh into your neck when he wrapped his arms around you and went to sleep? What was the point if, upon waking, you wouldn't have Scott and his early-morning voice, the clarity of his eyes, the smell of the coffee he made in his stupidly expensive espresso machines? (God, you missed that coffee.)

It was Scott… it was only ever Scott.

The couch was a perilous place to be doing any of this. You weren't sure that he fit in it, for one, and for another, you were mildly worried about the potential costs of fixing a broken midcentury piece of furniture. Oh, well, you thought, life’s too short. Not bothering to undress, you pushed aside articles of clothing, hands bumping into each other, scraps of fabric pushed aside, belt buckle rattling as it landed on the floor, until finally he surged into you, gripping the side of the couch and burying a curse against your neck as you stretched around him.

He slid a hand below your hips and fixed the angle. The sex was hurried, messy and it had nothing of grace; it was imperfect and rather cramped, really, but all that mattered was how he felt. He felt like home. As you came, he entwined his fingers around yours, and then he finished, trembling, prolonging a wave of pleasure that took your breath away.

Don’t go, you want to say into his heaving chest.

Somehow, he turned you on your side so you could stretch along the couch. He wrapped his arms around you, stroking feather-light touched along your arm as his breathing slowed. You felt tired, hollowed out, but not in a bad way. In a quiet-before-the-storm way, when you can smell water in the air and the breeze picks up, and the world sits on the cusp of being new.

“I miss you,” he confessed, his voice barely above a whisper.

“I miss you too.”

After that, there was a silence so long it made you think he’d dozed off, but then he spoke again, painfully honest and a little scared. “I don't think I can do what you need me to do. I’m not… that’s not who I am anymore.”

“I think you are,” you said back. “I think he’s who you’ve always been.”

THREE WEEKS LATER

You were enjoying a rare weekend off from work. Figuring you could do with some real time off the clock, you’d let the office know you’d be holding all work calls and emails until Monday. Abby’s eyes had nearly popped out of her skull in a rare show of feeling, but after the emotional turmoil of the last few months, you knew you needed to walk around the city, have a massage, touch some grass, maybe eat a pint of ice cream in front of a frothy period drama—a true-blue staycation.

The morning after you and Scott slept together, you’d agreed that it was in everyone’s best interest to let things be. He needed time to think about a few things, and regardless of your shared history, you were still Javi’s lawyer. You distracted yourself by doubling down on other cases. It helped that dealing with Mrs. Richardson-Burkhardt and the four Barone siblings was as eventful as watching an HBO television series—between the scathing one-liners and last-minute twists, there was little bandwidth left over to think about Scott.

And yet you always managed.

For better or for worse, Scott had always been good at making you hope for things. Even when you wanted to err on the side of caution, expect the worst and thus avoid disappointment, just the fact that he loved you made you feel like anything was possible, like you could make things happen.

“We brought out the best in each other. That mattered to us more than anything your father and I ever did wrong.”

At a department store downtown, you watched across the way as a young couple studied a tray of rings at the jewelry counter, diamonds sparkling in the light. The woman grabbed her partner’s arm and pointed at one of the selections as if to say, “That one!”, and for a moment they were in perfect sync. The salesman offered up the band with elaborate flourish, the groom-to-be took his bride’s hand, slipped the ring on her finger, and they admired it together, the play of white gold on her black skin.

The woman beamed. So did he.

“Looks like we have ourselves a winner,” the pleased salesman declared.

After lunch and an overpriced iced coffee, you arrived home with a gift for the Travises’ golden anniversary party, a pair of gold-accented crystal champagne glasses you hoped would survive the flight. It would be nice to see your mom again, to reunite with your old college friends, and revisit old haunts.

The thought of going home no longer filled you with dread—for which, even if nothing came out of your night with Scott, if he decided that upending his life was too much for him to handle right now, you would always be grateful. For years, your idea of a worst nightmare was running into him and having the truth spoken aloud, plainly, and for both of you to hear. Nothing will ever be as bad as this, you told yourself.

But it was a half-lie. Not seeing him again would be worse.

Already, you felt his absence like a hollow in your chest.

On the kitchen counter, you saw that your phone began to ring. “Javi, how’s the weather looking?” you asked, putting him on speaker as you poured yourself some water.

 “She’s a fickle mistress, I’ll tell you that! Hey, I just wanted to let you know… Scott called this morning. He says he’s dropping the suit.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t sound too surprised. Any of that you're doing?”

“No,” you replied, picking up your phone, “that’s all Scott. I haven’t spoken to him in weeks, actually.”

“Well, he sounded different. Still Scott, but a shorter stick up his ass, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I know a part of how everything went down was my fault—business is business, as my Ma always says. I sold him my share of StormPAR, which means I also have to pay back some of the money we took from Riggs. That’ll hurt like a—well, you know… I’m not the guy’s biggest fan these days. But if I don’t have to hear the name Marshall Riggs ever again, I’ll count myself lucky and say it’s a price well-paid.”

“And Scott?” you ventured to say.

“Honestly, I think he’s done with the whole thing. Sounds like he’s closing up shop, which makes sense. He’s a damn good engineer but kind of hopeless as a chaser.”

You laughed. “Yeah, I guess I can see that. Are you okay?”

“Me, or me and Scott?”

“Both.”

To Javi’s credit, he took a few moments to actually think about it. “Yeah, I’m good. You know me… I never stay down for long. Man with a thousand plans. Me and Scott? Man, I don’t know about that one… I did leave him by the side of the road. Ruined one of his immaculately pressed shirts.”

You snorted. “God forbid.”

“Yeah, God forbid. Listen, if it were up to me, I’d just let bygones be bygones. Life’s too short, you know. Shit happens… I don’t want to be a guy who burns bridges over money.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“What I mean to say,” Javi spoke over a sudden burst of wind, “is that if Scott ever wants to give me a call, I’ll answer. You can even tell him I said that.”

“Me?” You set your glass down with a clatter, heat rising to your face.

“Yeah, you! I’m not an idiot, hotshot, that history’s not gone ancient yet.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Mhm… Anyway, the wind’s picking up. Kate’s off reading her dandelions.”

“You know, I kinda wish I could see her doing that…”

“Watch out, we might make a chaser of you yet!” Javi crowed.

You shook your head, said, “I wouldn't hold my breath,” but you were smiling. The sun streamed through your open windows and anything was possible.

Once Javi ended the call, you stared at your phone, wondering… And then you decided to be reckless one more time. Call it a calculated risk, you thought instead. You held the phone up to your ear and listened to it ring. The dial tone sounded a few times, and then it stopped.

He’d answered.

“Scott, it’s me,” you said, trying to relax the thrumming in your heart.

There was a pause and then you heard his voice: “Did Javi tell you?”

“Yeah, we just got off the phone.”

“Open your door.”

You made a face, glancing at the screen and holding it against your ear again. “What?”

“Open your door, UPenn!”

You dashed to the entryway, patting your hair, blotting your face, wondering if your shirt was wrinkled. When you pulled the door open, you saw Scott in full view, in the middle of the day. Not wearing white. The blue of his shirt brought out his eyes, which looked tired but less burdened, too.

He seemed lighter, if not happy then trying to get there.

“Thought I’d skip out on being a sore loser this time.” He gave a half-shrug.

“I don’t know, Miller… from here it doesn't seem like you're losing.”

He smiled at the floor, almost shy. And when he looked into your face you saw the boy you fell in love with at Nichols Academy, the one who took baseball too seriously, who loved Hemingway and your mom’s apple crisp, the one who sang bad Sinatra and got into fights and thought James Watt was something of a god. It was like the worst of the last few years had gone away, leaving only space for something new to grow, to be built—together.

“All I want is you,” promised Scott, taking you into his arms.

You stuck your hand in your pocket, extracted the ring you’d kept there for almost a month like a talisman, like a good-luck charm, and held it up to Scott. He stared at it, and then at you, with something like shock.

Something like awe and wonder.

“Don’t you know? You've always had me.”

And in that hallway, Scott Miller, a man who’d never cop to having a romantic bone in his body, spun you around and kissed you and wouldn’t have cared if your neighbor at Apartment 424 had noticed or if one of his investors appeared. Maybe there was something to Tyler’s corny catchphrase, after all: If you feel it, chase it—no matter the odds, no matter the obstacles in your path, because feeling it was purpose and inspiration and direction when you lost your way.

It took you a while, but you understood it now.

[retroaria]

Michael Kaiser. That’s it. That’s the post.

i’m having kaiser thoughts. i’m pondering my orb, and all it’s showing me is michael kaiser. the evil voices in my head (my ask box) are taunting me (sending very nice requests) to sell my soul to michael kaiser (finally write something about him) and so here i am.

summary: random kaiser hc’s (lmk if you want more/nsfw ones)

BLUE LOCK M.LIST | enjoy 🪽 - aria

• thinking about how possessive he would be in a relationship. it isn’t overbearing, in the sense that he trusts you and lets you do you’re own thing. however, he’s a rather insecure man behind all that smug douchebaggery that he puts off and he has a hard time watching you interact with other men of his same stature. because truly, no matter how good he is to you, he isn’t the best person all around. there are guys out there that would be better for you and he can’t help be fear that you’ll be swept off your feet and taken from him.

• Kaiser is gentle with you. you actually turned him into a completely different person. It’s not that you’ve really changed him at his core, but you’ve opened him up to love he didn’t know before, and so he feels like he has nothing to be afraid of with you. he’s vulnerable and expressive and happy with you. he makes sure to provide that same experience for you in the relationship, making sure you always know you can go to him for anything and you don’t have to hide anything from him.

• In the beginning of the relationship, Kaiser is very protective of your privacy. He’s really afraid of the consequences that may come with the world knowing who you are and who you are to him. he’s not naive, he knows there’s bad people out there. not only that, but it’s no one else’s right to know you’re love for each other. i see him doing a soft launch and that’s it. after that he’ll post you on occasion and be a little less aggressive about hiding from paparazzi, but he still doesn’t want to share you. you’re his whole world, keyword HIS.

• kaiser LOVES intimacy. physical or emotional, he loves those sweet loving moments that come to fruition from the trust and bond the two of you have cultivated. he loves showering and taking baths with you, relishing in the gentle touches as the two of you clean each other up. they’re always filled with soft giggles and quick kisses, before drying each other off and snuggling up. he loves listening to you talk about your day, not sparing him from details you may have spared others from. telling him all the thoughts and actions you aren’t proud of, unafraid of being judged in his eyes. the vulnerability of it all makes his heart beat fast, but you’re both so trusting and in love that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

• this might be a hot take, but i feel like the concept of marriage would scare him a bit. it’s not that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life with you, because he absolutely does and already plans on it. it’s just a level of commitment that he never thought anyone would dedicate to him. he doesn’t want you to end up regretting it in the future. he doesn’t shy away from conversation about it though, he actually wants you guys to talk about it and get a feel for where you both stand. when the time comes to take that next step, he’s as ready as ever. just make sure you don’t break his heart please (or i’ll find you bro.)

• dates with kaiser can either be extravagant and classy or they can be chill and sweet, he can do both. sometimes he wants to take you to the nicest restaurants he can fine, see you all dolled up looking absolutely stunning for him, and pamper you the entire night. other times he just wants the two of you to do something fun and spontaneous, would take you to a fair and win you all the stuffed animals you want, or would take you on a stroll around the city, letting you frolick through the shops while he holds all your bags for you. he’s such a gentleman either way.

• kaiser loves being domestic with you. doing the laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, making dinner, he loves it. in those moments he finds himself wishing they would last forever, just the two of you existing in each others presence, he has nothing to worry about.

moon divider- @strangergraphics-archive

[littlediscoveredstars]

I have a fanfic idea that I haven’t really committed to writing, so you can have it here.

Idea: Batman and Superman decide to finally put the bro-mance to rest and go on a proper date. The thing is, they both plan to reveal their identities at the restaurant.

Bruce focuses so hard on looking like Bruce Wayne, but also more himself that he does at galas. He’s wearing a turtleneck and his comfy work shoes. His hair is less organized and he lets himself slouch.

Clark isn’t sure whether to slick back his hair like Superman but keep the glasses or keep everything Clark Kent but leave the glasses home. He decides to just wing it and go as much like himself as he can: jeans, boots, and glasses. After all, he’s a Kansas farm boy under every layer of identity he’s created.

So, then comes the day for them to meet. They expect to see each other, be a little surprised, then go about their date as normal.

It turned out…not like that.

With neither knowing what name the table was reserved under, they both assume they’ve arrived first and watch every man that fits their date’s general build pass them by.

Clark sees Bruce Wayne and thinks, “Wow! What are the odds Bruce Wayne happens to be at the same restaurant? Funny.” Then he sits down at a booth and waits for Batman.

Bruce, to his credit, watches Clark pass by with suspicions. The guy looks kind of like Superman but those curls are so dense and he honestly cannot imagine Big Blue dressed like a cowboy, so he waves it, especially when the man doesn’t stop to confront him. He just stares the way everyone else has after seeing a celebrity out in public and moves on.

An hour passes. Then two. Both are sitting a few tables apart, looking around desperately for their hero coworker to show.

Bruce gets impatient first. He understand Superman has a lot on his plate and a single free night is a lot to ask. Maybe they’ll try again. Or they won’t, since Bruce has convinced himself this was stupid to begin with.

It’s as he’s preparing to go that he sees that cowboy again. The gorgeous man is looking down, crestfallen at also being stood up.

So, Bruce does something a little spontaneous. Bruce sits in front of the guy. He blames it on the glasses of wine he had while waiting.

Bruce: “I’m Bruce. May I be blunt?”

Clark, blinking in surprise: “uh, sure?”

Bruce: “I watched you walk in over an hour ago and no one has accompanied you. Seeing as my date did the same, I’d like to fill the space.”

Clark, again, surprised he’s even being talked to by a billionaire outside of his job: “Y-yes? Yes! I mean, sure! By all means!”

It’s not like Batman’s going to come crashing in from the window. Well, he could, but Clark’s been listening to the city around them. No sign of Batman’s grapple.

So, Bruce and Clark meet. They fall into conversation easily, even make each other laugh. It’s so effortless and slightly suspicious, but they’re having a fun time and Bruce isn’t self-sabotaging enough to break away now. Not when he’s needed this for a while.

Then, at the end of the date, Clark listens for Batman’s heartbeat. He tries to hear where his friend might be, to understand why he didn’t show, but the heartbeat is standing right in front of him. There, in Bruce Wayne’s chest.

And/or, Clark removed his glasses to clean them and it clicks in Bruce’s mind. He reaches out to smooth all of Clark’s hair back and a single, rebellious curl pops out.

They’re both so furious, Clark has to fly them to the roof to properly shout about it.

[occamstfs]

Road Raging

Road rage induced Himbofication and Muscle Growth, hope y'all enjoy and Drive safe y'all! -Occam

Peter has been waiting at this light for just shy of ten minutes. He wouldn’t normally mind but as he watches car after car blast past him only to merge back in ahead of him. After the fifth car does so he starts talking to himself just to prevent losing his cool. “It’s like no one knows how to drive! They all just think their time is more important than anyone else’s I bet.” 

The light turns red once more and he rolls his eyes as he prepares to sit through another cycle. He turns up the podcast he had been listening to distract himself from the peaking irritation as cars begin to pass through the intersection. He checks his rearview and scoffs seeing the man behind him playing on his phone as they sit in traffic. “God damnit, can we keep our eyes on the road? No wonder this city’s going to shit with assholes like him driving.” He stares daggers into his mirror and as soon as he finishes the man behind him looks up and smirks almost as if he knows he’s being observed.

Peter in turn flinches and blushes, returning his eyes to the traffic ahead as any responsible driver should. He suddenly hears a car blasting through the traffic in the left lane , scowling as he is sure this jerk is going to try and skip the line. Sure enough he slows to an idle crawl as he nears Peter’s position in line. The guy throws on his blinker to hop into line. Rage begins to grow in Peter’s chest as the car approaches inching further ahead of the traffic by the second.

Peter averts his eyes from the road ahead to glare at the man who has wronged his fellow drivers, only to find himself intimidated by the specimen of man taking advantage of him. The car in front of him makes room for the approaching BMW and Peter, caught off guard, accidentally lets the titan of a man maneuver ahead of him in traffic. The man shoots Peter a smug smirk and a wink as he shifts his car into the gap in traffic, securely pushing himself ahead of him.

Meek man he may be, the rage in Peter’s small body overcomes him as this asshole edges in front. He’s not going to let every muscle-brained bro just ignore him. He was not going to let this alpha asshole push him around. He lays on his horn as hard as he can and shouts any obscenity that comes to mind at the man ahead of him. In response the man only keeps up his arrogant expression, as he clearly has come out on top. He laughs at Peter as he mimes a blown kiss back at his overcome foe.

Peter screams loud enough that his voice even begins to grow hoarse as he continues to squirm in rage at the alpha man now squarely in front of him. He takes a quick breath and tries to calm down, suddenly shocked at letting himself act in such a vulgar manner. “God what is taking this light so fucking long.” He says to himself, not hearing that his voice has lowered in pitch. Easy enough to blame that on all the shouting anyway.

Peter continues to sit in his car in wait, trying not to let his anger at the man in front of him boil over again. He realizes that he’s now sitting in silence. Wasn’t he listening to something? He strains his mind trying to remember what he was occupying himself with not but a minute ago. Some NPR podcast starts playing through the static on his radio which for some reason starts to ignite his rage once more. Surely he’s not listening to that nerd-ass shit right? He slams his stereo a few times expecting it to just give in and play something else, it swiftly returns to static before his phone connects and starts playing the Eminem album he apparently had queued.

Suddenly the asshole behind him starts honking and Peter realizes the light has turned green. It’s unlike him to be so oblivious, not that it matters though since the douche in front of him hasn’t started going either. God the fuckers on the road these days. He flips off the man behind him for honking before returning his ire to the fucker in front of him. He starts to tailgate the BMW in his way, only leading the driver to glare at him, his eyes half-closed, dripping with dominance, demanding Peter’s submission.

Peter’s eyes glaze over as he makes direct eye contact, not even noticing as the light turns red once more, not even caring as he is to remain stuck in yet another cycle of traffic. His rage subsides as he stares at the man ahead of him, does he know this jerk? His rage completely gives way to confusion as he sits and struggles to even remember that he just blew up at the man in front of him. His stereo soothes him with music he feels deep in his chest should not be as nearly as comforting or familiar as it is.

He feels his arms briefly strain his shirt. Peter feels the sleeves stretch and nearly tear before they quickly dissolve leaving them still-growing arms barren. He starts subconsciously rapping alongside Slim, feeling confidence grow in his chest as the droll life of quiet irritation that he knows begins to feel unfamiliar. His arms and chest begin to pump up as he bops in his seat to the music. He feels his pecs quickly strain his shirt before it expands to fit them, the neckline dropping to allow everyone a view of his hard-earned pecs.

Pete feels the AC graze his now exposed chest and is taken aback, he breaks his gaze with the bro ahead of him and is overcome with shock at his body. He jumps as he sees how powerful his arms have become, triggering his seatbelt to force him back into his seat, squeezing his now shockingly powerful chest. He whispers to himself as his voice deepens even more, “this can’t be right, I’m I’ve..” The music rises in volume trying to edge out any remaining thoughts of defiance. He feels the music reverberate through his chest, pumping it larger still, asserting that he is powerful. He once more makes eye contact with the man ahead of him and recognizes, oh, that’s his bro yeah! He then turns his mind back to his body as he finds yet another aspect of his transformation, his car is beginning to smell as if it were a locker room as he begins to just pour out sweat.

Pete turns the AC even higher which only spreads his musk even more through the cabin. It almost immediately fills the whole of the car, as if he’s been using it as storage for dirty gym clothes for weeks. He blushes to himself as he wonders if this actually is the case. He desperately wants to question if he could possibly go to the gym enough for that to be a problem before he stares at his growing arm and flexes it. Bro all this time has been paying off huh. Pete smiles to himself as he basks in his own power.

The light turns green once more but this time the cross traffic has totally blocked his lane's ability to go. Further ahead of Pete and his bro a crowd of cars honk as are once more impeded. Pete feels like he too should be bothered by this but can’t find it within himself to care all that much. He continues flexing in his seat as he feels his jaw squaring out and his bulge start to fill out his pants. He sniffs his pits as he tries to remember if he’s headed to the gym or on the way back from it, guffawing to himself as he realizes he forgot deodorant today. Not that he minds though, the gym smells rank anyway, might as well smell like him.

Excited at the idea of going to the gym once more Pete is suddenly preoccupied with the idea of getting there faster. His bro in front of him flexes back at him and smirks, almost in encouragement. Pete sees him mouth the words “race ya” and winks once more. Pete’s entire body tenses up and he discards his tank, tossing it in a pile of other sweat-stained shirts in his back seat. He’s gotta beat his bro to the gym.

He feels a cap shape itself around his head as his hair shrinks into a short crew cut. Pete is far too gone to notice though, bathing in his own scent and compulsively flexing as he tries to brainstorm a way ahead of his bro. Slow as his mind now goes he guffaws once more as he lands on the perfect idea. He’ll just skip the line huhuh. Pete swerves out of the line he has been impatiently waiting in all this time and shoots past his bro who raises his chin at the challenge.

Possessed with self-superiority, Pete scans the line ahead looking for some meek nerd or hungry twink to let him in. Not too far ahead he sees a tired man glare at him through sunglasses, not knowing it is a reflection of a face he once had. Pete sneers at him, his smile perfect and white as if carved from marble. He raises his arm behind his head, briefly struggling to stretch the muscle justly. The other driver recoils in disdain at the sheer audacity of Pete forcing his car in front of him. He continues to stare as Pete continues to demand entry ahead. The glaring man who has never even done so much as curse under his breath at other drivers begins to feel a rage grow in his chest, a rage that Pete is all-too-eager to encourage. Won’t last too long anyway, just a little stepping stone to having another bro.

[odiesdayoff]

JAIME REYES NSFW ALPHABET?? PLEASE ANYTJING NSFW JAIME 🧎🏽‍♀️

IM GONNA BE SO REAL I HAVEN'T EVEN WATCHED BB YET BUT I YEARN FOR HIM. SO BADLY. this may change when I see it like...tomorrow.

NSFW under the cut <3

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

He’s a cuddler. He’ll plant kisses all over you and hold you against him. He’ll keep telling you how much he loves you.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

He likes his arms. Specifically how strong he is and how it allows him to pick you up and spin you around all romantic-like.

He loves your eyes. The color, the way you look at him, the way you squint when you laugh or smile. He can stare into them for days. 

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

He’s a bit more traditional and likes to cum inside. He’ll always wear a condom, though. He likes the closeness. Also includes your mouth!

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He’s into cockwarming. Or falling asleep like that. He doesn’t know how to approach doing that. The thought of having to do some work and just you sitting with him inside? Makes him swoon. 

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

He went through law school. In GOTHAM. Briefly a city boy. He’s had a few dates before you and he knows how to make you lose your mind. It took a bit of a learning curve to adjust to you specifically, but he’s GOOD. 

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

When you’re, like, laying down together and spooning while fucking? Idk what that’s called. But that. He loves that. It’s just so intimate. He can hold you close.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

He loves to laugh. He enjoys spending time with you and doesn’t let it get too serious.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Trimmed. Dark and curly. That's all I'm at liberty to disclose.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

He’s so romantic. Definitely would be the type of person that lights candles and throws flower petals all over the bed. He’s such a sweetie. Will constantly tell you how attractive you are and how good you make him feel.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

He’ll never admit it, but he totally jerked off using a pair of your underwear that you had left at his place once. He’d rather not masturbate when he has you, but he has needs!

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Heavy on a praise kink. Whether it’s giving or receiving. He’s also into you being in charge!

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

He’s a little basic. In the bed. He thinks it's incredibly romantic. That, or in the kitchen and dining room.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

When he wakes up in the morning before you and you’re sleeping, he thinks you’re so hot he will actually melt. He would fight for his life not to wake you up and ask to fuck. You getting along with his family gets him going fr. Just seeing the people he cherishes the most getting along with you fills his heart.

Also…neck kissing!!! He looves it.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

He’ll absolutely NEVER do any of the step-family or things related to family, even as a pretend thing or scene. That’s just way too weird. He’s far too close to his family to think about any of them sexually in any way.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

He’s a sucker for making you come and oral is one of his favorite things to do. Bro will literally get under the table and give you head while you’re eating dinner if you even mention being a little horny or maybe someone that flirted with you. He’s gotta show you that nobody can make you feel as good as him. He’s a bit jealous.

He loves to receive, but is far too shy to ask for it. If you put it on the table, he’s giddy. He’ll somehow think that he’s degrading you by asking you to suck his dick.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

He takes it slow. Sometimes painfully slow, making you feel every vein in his dick each time he’s inside of you. If you asked him to be a little rougher with you, he ain’t gonna say no! When you’re on top or in charge, he lowkey loves when you kind of use him as a sex toy and go as fast as you need to reach your orgasm. He likes to prolong the moment as long as he can when you’re under him. 

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

He prefers not to have a quickie. He wants to spend time with you as much as he can and take his time making you feel good. He definitely would not say no if you asked him right before either of you left for work and after you woke up. He just prefers a night full of lovemaking.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

It would definitely take a lot of convincing to get him to do more outlandish kinks, but he likes to try some things at least once. He’s not a “it’s hotter if we might get caught” person. Very much a behind locked doors kind of guy when it comes to sex.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

He can go a few rounds. Again, the scarab would increase that stamina by a little bit. 

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Let’s be so real. Yeah. I don’t think he would have toys for his personal use, but getting things for your pleasure is his favorite thing to do. He loves watching you squirm as he presses a vibrator against you. He would literally ask you to watch a movie, then use the vibrator on you while you sit on his lap the entire time.

Also…that suit? It can literally be whatever he wants it to be…IF YA KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

He looves to tease you. At the grocery store, while you’re having dinner with your/his family, washing the dishes. He wants you to be completely dripping/rock hard by the time the two of you get to fuckin’.

On the other hand, he likes when you tease him. He’s a firm believer that whatever he does to you, you can do to him. A hand on your thigh under the table at the family dinner? He won’t be surprised when you “accidentally” drop your fork and lean over him to grab it from the floor. 

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Some guys are afraid to moan, Jaime’s in his partner's ear losing his mind. Initially, he’d be hesitant to be noisy and all, but once he gets comfortable (or you get a place alone) he’ll make sure that you know how good you’re making him feel. He’s a whimperer. Hardcore. You can play with his hair and his breathing gets shaky.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

I have a feeling that he would want to try to fuck while dressed as a priest. Maybe he watched Fleabag in college. Or had some religion in his childhood. Either that or have you dress in religious clothing and act that out. He’s not sure yet, but he wants to try it.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

He’s about average size, maybe six inches hard? Uncut. Slight curve upward.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

He would be a few times a week guy normally, but after the scarab fiasco, his drive increases. You could bend over picking something up and he needs to have you right now.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

I feel like he would absolutely pass out after a heated night. Like, I'm talking honk shoo mimimi with one leg off the bed and only half the blanket over his body.

[tmntxthings]

(First of saw your recent ask with the anon and I hope you’re feeling a bit better since answering that! Please don’t rush to answer this or your other requests and i hope you feel better soon!)

I AM CHEWING ON YOUR DONNIE X READER WORKS OML BRO WHAT ARE YOU FEEDING YOUR INNER WRITER YOUR WORK IS ✨DIVINE✨ 😔👌

I cant resist making a request but you know Donnie flies/hovers with his battle shell in some episodes right to get around?? So what if Donnie having an s/o who is fascinated by the idea of flying, so one day, after much pestering Donnie gives in and decides to fly them around New York for a bit. BUT only if he is there with them, cuz Donnie is not about to have a stress induced heart 

attack if they loose balance. 

Donnie himself doesn’t really understand the fascination with flying cuz….well nothing is especially different, it’s just the city but from high up. But then mid sentence he looks to his partner and stares in silent awe at the fascination twinkling in their eyes as they admire the view??

I’m sorry I’m such a goddam sucker for this sort of stuff

一∑ Nights Like These 。・゜・

author’s notes: you paint a pretty picture anon, I could see it all play out thru my head! hope you enjoy <3

warnings: fluff, unedited

—————————————————————————

“Y’know what would be cool?”

Donatello blinked, his stare deadpanned. He was over this. You had asked so many times already. And each time, he had given you his answer. A resounding no. So he continued to tap at his phone while you sidled up next to him on the couch.

“Donnieeeeeee!”

A drawn eyebrow twitched. He wasn’t going to deign that with a response. You were being trivial at this point.

“Please!”

He let out a long sigh. Clicking his phone shut as dark irises finally turned in your direction. By this point it was clear you were never going to let it go. The word no, didn’t exist in your vocabulary. At least not when it came to the possibility of flying.

With his attention now on you, a speech was suddenly underway.

“I’ll do everything you say! Take a whole Donnie-training-course on how to fly a jetpack!! Just let me try! Please! Pretty please!”

You sure did know how to beg. Maybe it was unfair of him. But he didn’t like the idea of you in the air at all. You weren’t exactly known for coordination. You sucked at driving video games. How would you be able to command a jetpack that could go from zero to a hundred in seconds flat?

It was dangerous.

You could get injured or worse! There were so many terrible scenarios that ran through Donnie’s mind, he almost went back on his phone. But your hands latched onto his arm, pulling his thoughts back to the here and now.

“Nothing bad will happen! You’ll be right there beside me!!”

It was weird how you knew exactly what to say. Exactly how to sway him. Maybe his face was an open book, or maybe you just knew how to read him too well. This time his sigh was one of defeat.

You cheered.

~

After many, many lessons Donnie finally felt it was safe enough for you to put the jetpack on.

By this point you knew what all of the buttons did. All sorts of emergency protocols. And you may even be considered a certified pilot depending on the country.

Rigorous couldn’t even begin to describe what regiment Donnie had put you through. But it all paid off in the end. Because now you were strapped in.

“Alright, looks like it fits. How does it feel? I designed this one according to your specs.”

Donnie was circling around you. A hand underneath his chin as he looked for a reason to call the whole thing off. But you were on the moon.

“It’s perfect! Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. Finally!! We get to fly together!!”

How could he shatter that bright smile of yours now? He’d put this off long enough. So he nodded, and led the charge out of the lair.

~

“Remember, if you feel out of control—“

You cut him off before he could finish.

“Don, I know! Stop and hover. Can I power on now?”

“No not yet we have to go through all of… Y/N!”

There was no patience left within you as Donnie kept talking so you just took off mid-sentence. He hollered after you. He took chase, his own jetpack roaring to life.

You were going way too fast. Donnie couldn’t tell if you were even under control! Just above the rooftops you flew by. Weaving past units and it became clear that you did know how to fly. His anxiety lessened but he still kept tailing you. Just in case.

At one point you slowed down enough for Donnie to be flying right by your side. Your smile dazzled him as you glanced over. Eyes twinkling in awe as you pointed out the bridge where Donnie and his brothers did the pizza box stacking competition.

“Race you there!”

You shouted and not a second later you were going max speed.

Now you may be a natural but Donnie had been flying far longer than you. The only advantage you did have was a slight head start. The wind picked up as the two of you flew higher. The finish line apparently being the highest point on the bridge.

Donnie won. He knew the best path to take after all from a projected route via his goggles. He watched as you made it to him. Slowing down and then circling him in the air while you laughed out in joy.

“This is amazing!!”

You exclaimed as you landed in front of him. It was high up, the wind whipping past the both of you. But the cold didn’t seem to affect your spirits at all. Your arms were raised in the air, back turned to him, whooping out for all of New York to hear. None of them would, not even the passengers in their zooming cars below. But Donnie could.

His heart did a strange thump beneath his plastron. He couldn’t take his eyes off of you. He felt a little breathless.

“Thank you! I- just, thank you for this! I never thought in my lifetime I’d be able to do something so… so..!”

The words were slipping from you as you had faced Donnie to express your gratitude. This was something that only happened in movies. That only happened in dreams! Your hands came up and moved in an expression that tried to convey how big this all felt to you. These emotions!

“We can do it again. However many times you like.”

Donnie replied after a moment.

You didn’t let the shock pass your features. You had wondered if he would let you fly again. So you had tried to get it all out of your system. Not knowing if the first would be your last. You smiled brightly for him.

“My worries seem to have been for nothing. You’re a natural at flying.”

A compliment. You could only smile brighter.

“Well, I don’t know about all that,”

And his mouth opened to argue. Not liking how you were putting yourself down. But before he could you continued.

“I had a great teacher!”

You mused at how his mouth snapped shut. His eyes darting away, a hand coming up to rub the back of his bandana.

“Really. He was the best! He’s too smart!”

He had to turn away as the compliments kept coming. Had the wind stopped? It was suddenly a bit warm up here. You had the nerve to giggle at his shyness before you powered up your jetpack again.

He turned immediately back to you, expecting you to take off again. But this time you hovered. Offering your hand to Donnie. He couldn’t help but take in the view. The night sky your backdrop, few stars even more satellites. But it was as if you were glowing before him.

His own hand reached out, fingers brushing against your palm, before taking a firm grip.

He held your hand.

[illubean]

Request 4 you :-D alright I was wondering if you could do a drabble with a reader with a men ability that makes her similar to a banshe pls😣 (chrollo, illumi, kurapikachu, layoreo, and 🌹feitan🌹)

HXH W/ a Banshee!Reader

Characters: Kurapika Kurta, Leorio Paladaknight, Illumi Zoldyck, Chrollo Lucilfer, Feitan Portor Type: Headcanons, Gn!Reader

alright i did some reading on banshees for this and obviously they have their scream right? but they also have clairaudience, precognition and supernatural detection! p cool if you ask me :D

Warnings: none??

Kurapika Kurta

every time you predict the death of a phantom troupe member he's like fuck yeah

if you work with him you mostly end up gathering info

like you can literally fly super fast, see vaguely into the future and have super cray hearing

i couldn't think of anything for this guy im so sorry...

Leorio Paladaknight

the first time he saw you hovering about he damn near shit his pants because he thought you were genuinely some type of ghost

knowing its just your nen doesn't make him any less scared since you can sense supernatural and paranormal activity...

sometimes you tell him you feel ghosts and whatnot around to fuck with him

he cries

he can't even rant about you to anyone because you WILL hear it

every time he mentions you he has to look around and make sure you're nowhere near him even if he knows you're cities away

sometimes you use your clairaudience to snitch on him LOLLL

he will mutter something under his breath and you'd be like "Leorio just said ____"

you probably told him Gon would die (he didn't actually but almost did) and he didn't believe you at first

bro was like do NOT joke about that and you're like I'm not joking and he's like FUCK

maybe you should stop playing pranks on him because now he finds everything you say hard to believe...

Illumi Zoldyck

you help him catch runners on missions LMAO

if he happens to keep you around you know all of the Zoldyck estate gossip because your clairaudience lets you hear everything that goes on in the mansion

every time you hear something new you and Illumi whisk away to some corner and chat quietly

no matter what you tell him he's surprisingly interested, he can and will gossip like a teenage girl

sometimes when he feels like a job is too much of a hassle he lets you handle it with your death scream thingy

he's not a lazy person but everyone has their moments

you are his personal little ghostlike assistant

Chrollo Lucilfer

yeah he's making you one of the supportive members of the troupe

he uses you to gather information with your heightened hearing and ability to predict the death of others

probably asks you if you can contact the dead

if you can then awesome, now you can answer a lot of his questions but if not then oh well

since you can fly pretty fast sometimes he has you snatch up people for questioning

he avoids using you for offensive purposes because your screams reach very far and could possibly accidentally kill him or the other troupe members

so when he does you're usually alone

you were able to sense that Uvo was going to die and also the exact moment he did

knowing his friend would die didn't make it any less painful for Chrollo tho :(

Feitan Portor

he thinks you're a valuable asset to the troupe

most of the time when it comes to catching people for torture and interrogation Chrollo sends you two

you guys are the perfect team for the job honestly, you can catch enemies quickly and also attack them from long distances while Feitan handles all the gross torture stuff

he probably carries ear plugs for this so yk..you don't accidentally kill him when you scream at the enemy

when you predicted Uvo would die after the first run in with the shadow beasts Feitan is like no way

then all of that shit happens yada yada yada then he goes to fight Kurapika and he actually dies

and Feitan was like fuck you were right

now he knows not to doubt your morbid intuition..

[seoktized]

step bro! gw WOAHHHH 🫢 who said dat.... ermmm step bro gw who snatches u away from ur parent's home at 3 am js to go to his place and do the most sibling thing ever (kissy each other like life depends on it 😽

— 🐥

tw: stepcest, aged-up!gunwook

mmm you in college while gunwook moved out of your parents’ home to a city an hour away so you don’t get to see him as much.. you two had a special relationship and all that went away when he moved...

one night, he felt a bit lonely so he calls you, telling you he misses his beloved stepsister.. tells you he’s coming to pick you up despite it being late in the night, but he doesn’t care.. he wants to see you.

after he picked you up from your parents’ house, the drive back was silent, gunwook trying his hardest not to pull the car over and make out with you right now.. you were the same, you’d missed your stepbrother and the encounters the two of you had back at home ;(

when you reach his home, he’s quick to help you out, his hand on the small of your back and he guides you into his home. “should we watch a movie?” he asks, setting your backpack down beside the couch. you nod, hoping over the couch and grabbing the remote to pick a movie.

gunwook came around and sat beside you, his arm stretched behind you on the chair. his eyes trailed down, noticing you were in a tank top that showed off your cleavage and shorts that rode up, leaving little to the imagination.

his hand dropped, now over your shoulder as he pulled you closer. “missed you so much, little sis.” he mumbled. you smiled in response, “missed you too, wookie.”

wookie. that name always had gunwook in a chokehold. you’d called out that name many times, his favorite being when he was between your legs, lapping at your folds as you loudly moaned his name.

he felt his cock harden at the nickname, a small groan leaving his lips. “fuck, you know what that name does to me.. c’mere.” he said before he pulled you into his lap, hands slipping under your shorts to grab your ass. “feel that? wookie’s missed you, angel. took everything in me to not pull the car over and kiss those pretty lips of yours.” he pulled your hips down, forcing you to grind on his clothed bulge.

“w-wookie-! please..” you begged, you mind was already full of gunwook, wanting nothing more but for him to kiss you, remind you of what you’ve been deprived of for so long. “please what? use your words.” he smirked, he knew what you wanted, he wanted to hear you say it though; let him hear how he’d molded you to be his perfect little slut.

“want you to kiss me, wookie..” you whined. he smiled and leaned in, pressing his lips to yours.

the kiss quickly got sloppy, your hips grinding against his clothed bulge as you moaned into his mouth. his hands squeezed at whatever he could; your hips, your ass, your tits, while yours played with the hair on the back of his neck.

when the two of you pulled away for air, gunwook noticed how fucked out you already looked; your lips swollen and wet as you panted, trying to catch your breath.

that was his last straw, he pushed you off his lap, letting you fall on the couch as he sat up on his knees. gunwook quickly pulling down his sweats and freeing his cock, “gonna show you how much i missed you. just lay back and let wookie take care of you, okay?”

[biggest-geo-oogami-enjoyer]

hiii :3!! Could you do a gn!reader x geo one bed left trope pls :3? (IM A SUCKER FOR TJAT DYNAMIC PLS ☹️)

A Lone Respite (Geo x MC/Reader - One Bed)

Hope you enjoy Annonie.

You're in an established relationship with Geode muahahaha

Anyway uhhhhh. Yuh.

- Signed by biggest-geo-oogami-enjoyer

Lone: having no companions; solitary or single.

Respite: a short period of rest or relief from something difficult or unpleasant.

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

You and Geo had decided...well, you decided — you just had to stubbornly convince him — to go travel places after school. Specifically Japan and possibly parts of Europe.

So when you both finally flew there (on Geo’s private jet of course), it mostly entailed him just taking you to all the fanciest places (because he’s 110% new-money-rich...or old money idk) and just showing you around. 

Most people actually don’t side eye you (because you know how some tourists like to assault the Geishas and all that? I don’t blame the Japanese personally), and some are just happy that A. (at least) one of you two speaks the language and knows the culture well; and B. that you (if not of Japanese descent, which I know is most of you readers), are trying to speak their language. 

I’m 99% sure Geo has Japanese citizenship, so if –when– you get married, you bet your ass you’re getting one as well (muahahaha)

You both are just going to places he knows are good, mostly in the more urban cities, like Tokyo,  until you both decide to visit the more coastal regions.

Geo does not live near the beach, so you’ll have to book out a hotel (this mf will book everything reluctantly lol; he’s not a fan of hotels at all, he probably thinks they’re filthy).

Anyway, after you both just wander around a beach (probs the Ishigaki one idfk), you return to the hotel you guys booked and…well…you get your keys, go to your room and...

One bed.

One single bed (heheheh imagine making your requester suffer couldn’t be me).

And Geo is malding. Very very stoically.

He’s death-staring the bed, a very cold, menacing glint in his ocean eyes.

You’re a bit concerned, because you know Geo isn’t gonna share a bed with you; and annoyed, because now Geo was probably gonna lose his McMarbles™.

So, you both take your stuff and leave to the reception (mostly him stalking out, vehement ornery in the rigidity of his posture).

You stayed behind to watch over your things, in case Geo deemed this place unworthy and dragged you both out.

And, well, that’s exactly what happened.

He came back and proceeded to bluntly state you’re leaving.

“We’re going, they refunded us.”

“Geo what-”

So you both go somewhere else, because, apparently, they didn’t have other rooms to spare with a double bed, then the staff started claiming he hadn’t even paid for it, so he got his money-decked ass (and yours) outta there ASAP.

Anyway, by the time you get to another hotel, Geo states, in Japanese, something that seemed formal, at least it sounded formal, you didn’t know lmfao.

Due to the fact it was getting later in the night, and Geo is a very big fan of beauty sleep, the first thing he does is check the bed.

A n o t h e r   v e r y   l o n e l y   b e d. (can we have 100 likes for the lonely bed thank you😔)

At least it was a queen sized bed this time.

It takes 27 minutes of pure debate, but you convince Geo to just sleep, because you’re both tired —and you told him people who get stressed get wrinkles and he doesn’t want those lol–.

So he pulls out one of those weird lights that reveal stains on bedsheets and whatnot (you know those janky ones that people use to check if their bed is actually clean or not?). And he’s *very* paranoid about cleanliness. He hates dirt.

Thank God the bed is actually clean, so Geo immediately unpacks the bare necessities and steals the bathroom (dw he already checked it as well it’s clean).

Yeah bro I’m sorry this man won’t let you wash up before him.

He might even be a germaphobe tbh.

Anyway, after his very long, very amazing skincare routine and shower, Geo emerges, his hair loosely falling down his lanky frame (omg omg omg bark bark woof?!?!?!?!!?!?!).

He tells you to hurry up and usurps a side of the bed (probably the one nearest to the restroom so he can freshen up bright and early).

So when you shower and get out of the restroom, he’s telling you to sleep. (also btw, he’s gonna crack all his joints before sleeping, he probably even meditates, so be quiet when you’re in the restroom).

You better make sure to not snore or kick in your sleep though, this man will throw you off the bed if he has to, sleep is superior to relationships for him (such a mood tbh).

But usually when it comes to one bed, he’s gonna take it from you. (He’d have to really like you to share a bed with you in the first place).

If you are the type to get nervous when sleeping in an unfamiliar place though? He’ll “reluctantly” offer his arms and you squish into him. (don’t push it guys I know it’s tempting ngh)

He’ll also be the type to go to a buffet (there is definitely gonna be one, he refuses to go to anyplace that doesn’t have one, especially in the more remote areas of any country).

So expect, when he wakes you up at like 7am, to be served food at a table. He won’t allow eating in bed, both from the fact it’s weird to him and also just…what if you drop some food or something??? He’d get embarrassed on your behalf…

But after that funny time is over, you both continue to traverse Japan, deciding to put that time behind you. Well, Geo does. You 110% are gonna try and sleep in his arms more often now. >:)

[nukudraws]

Not to be like that but Clopeh Sekka is kinda a mad lad (like both in the sense that he's a lunatic and otherwise)

Let's see:

can't record the legend without mages around? -> invents surveillance cameras (you can record the legend from all angles!!)

figures out first how to easily pass the failure test in the sealed god's temple, does he go to the other stage? Nope, turns back to complete the test the hard way anyway

-> still makes it out way ahead of the others xdd

Like, we know he's not right in the head but he does have some cool moments

He's the reason most of the battles they fought during the wars are immortalized

-> imagine he didn't record them, who would believe this one guy who used to be trash shouldered all that responsibility and did all those deeds? *cough* in the eyes of the citizens a 18-20 years old *cough*

He also switches between sane and Caleism pope mode quite often and pretty easily if needed, sometimes even combines the two

For example, when the foreign kingdoms were 'having a discussion' about the damages done to Puzzle city with no Roan Kingdom representative, Clopeh barges in and puts them all in their places 🙏🙏

Or when they had the battle between the Mogoru Empire and the Whipper Kingdom, bro came in looking like a priest and preached everything he needed to without being told what to do exactly

-> now that I think about it, that must have been quite refreshing, imagine shouting at people from the sky about your hyper fixation and getting a pat on the back for it (not really, no pat in the back for bro, but still)

So, he should be given a bit of credit, he's not just a Cale fanatic, tho the most offended I've seen him was when he wasn't associated with Cale and his group, resulting in him not getting locked up or worse... So maybe don't tell him that

[batneko]

okay, time to actually type up my thoughts on this AU! With some new art to make it worth it.

for context, here's part one and part two.

so the basics are, Bowser is continually trying to conquer the city and being fought off by the bros, who do have superpowers (I thought about drawing lightning around Luigi's fist but I don't know how to make that look good in lineart) and costumes and "hero names," but don't hide their faces so they don't exactly have secret identities. It's more like being an actor with a stage name. Since they're fairly average-looking dudes they don't get recognized all the time, especially when they're apart, but Mario definitely does more often than Luigi.

But even when they're not recognized by the starbucks barista, people expect a lot of them. Not just stopping Bowser, but stopping everyday problems, rescuing cats from trees or standing in for a broken TV antenna. Eventually the pressure gets to Mario and he decides to fake his death and make a run for it. He's not really thinking clearly at the time and he regrets it almost immediately, but he can't bring himself to go back and face everyone's disappointment. He needs to figure himself out first.

He does at least contact Luigi as soon as he's out of the city to reassure him he's not dead. He doesn't tell him where he's going though, and Luigi can't contact him back, he has to wait for Mario to call, so Luigi does genuinely miss him and can fake grief when he needs to without too much prompting.

Bowser, meanwhile, was genuinely not expecting to "kill" his greatest rival. He never really wanted Mario dead, he just wanted the city! But he's not going to let this opportunity pass him by- Or so he thinks, until he's beaten into a pulp by the other hero that he usually forgot about.

Okay, fine, Bowser can still work with this. Heal up, regroup, give it another try- Aaaand this time he's ganged up on by three heroes he's never even seen before. What the heck is happening?

Turns out that without Mario's charismatic leader act keeping everyone reassured (and complacent), a bunch of people are stepping into the gap. Luigi, Peach, Daisy, probably more than one Toad or Yoshi... Bowser can't plan for this! They all have different powers, different strategies, different types of banter. He's overwhelmed.

So Bowser gets the idea that he needs just one hero to fight. Maybe with a sidekick, but still. That way he can time his cool speeches and minimize the amount he gets punched in the face. He already killed one of them, maybe if he works his way through the others one at a time he'll finally win. Eventually. Someday.

He gets the super crown disguise watch (I still haven't decided if there's a real guy whose appearance and name he is copying) and finds his first hero. Mario's sidekick. Should be the easiest one to fight, right? Bowser just needs to convince him that it's better for everyone if the city only has one hero at a time. It's about continuity. It'll reassure them. Give them a symbol.

Unfortunately for Bowser (and fortunately for us) Luigi is way too nice a guy to chase off some random bear person just for recognizing him and having Opinions about all this hero stuff. Luigi talks to him, addresses his concerns, answers his questions, and the guy is actually surprisingly willing to listen. Most people who try to tell him how to do his job don't care about facts and logic!

Next thing Bowser knows, he's been invited for coffee next week. That's... fine, right? This is progress! It's not a date, it's just getting close to his target! And it's definitely not a problem that Luigi is really cute and sweet and patient and has big blue eyes and a nice smile and the warmth of his handshake lingered for the rest of the afternoon...

Everything is totally fine! 👍

[gugapuppy]

Abortion - Part 3 (A!Ghost x O!Soap)

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5

═══════════════════════════

A little confort today, but the next part one will hurt a little. Be advised.

CW: Implied abortion

═══════════════════════════

Soap was sitting in a coffee shop sipping an espresso, far from the base and the memories there. Looking out of the window, Soap could see various people passing by and going about their lives, street animals wanting food and affection, and happy children holding hands with their parents. It made Soap's breath shake.

He'd texted Gaz to meet him at the café, he trusted the beta to help him, knowing that Kyle wouldn't abandon him, or at least he hoped he wouldn't abandon him.

After a while of waiting and his espresso running out, Gaz finally arrived to greet him, the two exchanged a few words and random topics such as games he was playing, upcoming missions, series coming out, until finally a small silence hung over them both.

"So, what's been bothering you Tav? Ghost and you..." -Kyle began.

Looking out of the window, observing the scenery, Soap decided to be direct instead of winding things up. "I'm pregnant, Kyle."

Soap notices Gaz opening and closing his mouth out of the corner of his eye. "Oh...congra-"

"I want to abort."

This time, the silence is longer, and Soap comes round after a while to face Kyle, who is wide-eyed and has his hand over his mouth. 

"Oh..." -Gaz says, taking his hand away from his mouth and closing it on the table. "Does Ghost know about this?"

Soap swallows dryly, his eyes starting to water with each blink, but he keeps a straight face. "He knows."

Gaz looks between his hands quickly before getting up from the side of the table he was on and sitting down next to Soap, putting his arms around him as he shakes him slowly from side to side. "That's why you were acting strange..."

Soap nods and leans into Gaz's warm touch, purring his first way through weeks of tears and stress. "I don't want to do this alone, help me, please?"

"I'm not leaving you alone John, does anyone else know about this?"

"No, they can't know." -Soap tightens his grip on Gaz, holding on tight. "Price and Laswell will try to stop me or tell me to wait for Simon to come back... I can't wait for Kyle."

"Okay... let's go to my place, from there I'll call Price to give me and you a week off."

Soap looks at Gaz, a sad smile on his face. "Thanks bro."

The two then leave the café and take a taxi to Kyle's flat. As they go, night falls over them and the city, only streetlamps and buildings with LED signs illuminate the surroundings.

And as Kyle said, Kyle did. Calling Price, he asked for a week off and the captain quickly gave them both three weeks off, probably realising that Soap needed it after the weeks he noticed the sergeant had experienced.

Afterwards, they both ordered pizza for dinner, a purr echoing from Johnny at receiving one of his favourite foods. Gaz always knew how to please him. 

Over dinner, Gaz told him that his sister was a doctor and there had been cases where she'd had to help with abortion operations, so he offered to call her, something that Soap accepted with certainty.

Some time after dinner had finished and Gaz had called his sister, Gaz sat down on the sofa and told Soap that Kyle's sister had made an appointment at the clinic for the following day. 

On hearing this, Soap felt anxious and began to tremble. Gaz hugged him as he stroked the omega's back.

Soap lay on top of Gaz until his panic subsided and the few tears that fell dried up. "Can we watch something?"

"Of course, anything specific?" -Gaz asked as he searched for Netflix.

"The second season of a series I like just came out..." -Soap said as he found a comfortable position for his head on Gaz's chest.

As soon as Gaz put the series on, it wasn't long before they were both asleep before the second episode had even started. 

And for the first time in weeks, Soap felt that someone cared about him.

═══════════════════════════

Now, the angst begins, and idk how much will hurt...

[macabrecabra]

Did art fight and saw so many pokemon OCs...and realized for how much I LOVE pokemon, never had any of my own really...so I made some. Then I wrote a story. Then I built a whole worldsetting.

So enjoy the "End of the Line" pokemon setting that is now born... starting with my favorite trio of ghost pokemon! The Silph bros are known more publicly in connection to the powerful Silph Corporation, but also operate a powerful black market mafia under the table.

More under the tab if you are interested in my character ramblings!

GEN SILPH (Gengar) He is all about image. In the public eye, he is a well liked, always smiling, corporate prodigy and the face of Silph Co. Well respected and always known for handling PR and all the social trappings of an elite status well. Behind closed doors though, he is also running an extensive mafia operation with his fingers on the pulse of Saffron-Lavender City. He may seem nice and upbeat, but when he is ticked, he can show a very cold, very calculative, and very sadistic side as he is not above getting his hands dirty if people are messing up on the perfect persona he controls. Not a pokemon to cross as he will smile and shake your hand while having a gun behind his back. There are very few whom he trusts, as he is known to let his paranoia sometimes get the best of him when it feels like the control he's carefully built into an empire seems threatened even a little bit. Every move is calculated. Every chaos a delicate pull of the strings. Just remember to always trust in Silph Co for your every need!

Design Note: All the Silph bros wear suits because they are classy, but each has a design. For Gen, I was all corporate. Sleek cut, formfitting, Dark colors, and of course, classy tie. The kind of guy without a hair out of place. Also glasses felt fitting for someone that probably has to squint at computers...also makes him look more smart. GHAST SILPH (Ghastly)

The youngest brother of the Silph brothers, Ghast is a bit goofy and doesn't really tend to take things too seriously, but also never one to disappoint his older brothers whom he adores. He really wants to live up to expectations and has since stepped up to being the main leader of the mafia, second only to Gen, but really he just does what Gen says and doesn't ask questions. He really just wants to make his brothers proud, and feels the pressure to live up to Hauts' legacy.

Ghast can come off as dismissive towards others at times, but it comes from his desire to appear just as strong as his brothers when it comes to the dealings of the world. They are super besties with their personal gang of "bad brats" as he calls them, sometimes to the point of trying to step in and keep them out of trouble.

Should be note that Ghast is transgender. What their deadname is, no one knows. They don't much care for being misgendered as there has, and always has been, three Silph brothers, and don't you forget it!

Design Note: I felt that Ghast was the flashy type with bright eyesore suits and sort of a lounge lizard, impractical sort of suit, hence no pockets to be found. The single button suit felt more like going to a party than corporate, which fit Ghast more in my head. Also had to give Ghast unruly hair to mimic the gas around Ghastly.... Ghast's wears a hat to try and control it.

HAUTS SILPH (Haunter) (Alsos one of the main characters of the story!)

There was no doubt that Hauts was how made the Nightshade Mafia a force to be reckoned with. He was smart like his older brother, but also wasn't afraid to be reckless and unrelenting when it came to his goals. He was the muscle that could get any job done, one way or another. Known as a wildcard, laid-back, unpredictable, yet suave, Hauts was a criminal prince and was an important part of keeping the Nightshade Mafia running well....most of the time. His recklessness and disregard for Gen's orders often put him at odds with his brothers.

Hauts felt it more a difference of opinion, but nothing too crazy as at the end of the day, he cared very deeply about his brothers and everything he did would never put everything in danger. Gen didn't see it that way and shot his brother with intent to murder and remove something that was starting to make him paranoid about his control of things.

By all accounts, Hauts should be dead, face blasted open and body dumped in the woods, but he was found by a local pikachu from a nearby village and managed to find his health again. He's hung up his old life though, not interested in revenge, not interested in going back into that world. His guns are hung up to live a peaceful life as a bartender in Veridian Village, at least, until life comes knocking and he might have to pick up his old life again... Design notes: He is very much looking to copy the style of a 1920's ganster, hence the older style to his suit and wears an open jacket to match his more laid-back attitude. Also was one to always make sure you knew he was armed when in company. His hat was fun as it is clear it is blown off and there history and sentiment to it. He's had that torn up hat a long time and is intent on keeping it that way.

[medlarmeadows]

a firefly in your night sky

cc!Charlie Slimecicle x small streamer!reader

Synopsis: When you think no one notices you sinking in your darkness, Charlie does.

Warning(s): poor mental health, a little heavy but it’s mostly allegorised, tiny ounce of comfort.

Word count: 1.4k

A/N: Smol comfort fic. Hugs to everyone who’s going through a tough time <3

masterlist

There are always challenges that come with living overseas, in a foreign country, away from your childhood home and friends. Away from familiarity, away from comfort.

Of course, that isn’t to say that you couldn’t become familiar with or find comfort in your new environment. New sceneries become the norm, and strangers become friends. And when it comes to the job that you have, you will always be thankful for the strangers that had become your friends.

They were the reasons you moved in the first place.

Ranboo, whom you met at a convention and hit it off so well you became friends and started streaming together.

Moonzy, whom you met through Ranboo and quickly became one of your favourite people.

And so many more people who you met either through Ranboo or through various streaming events you had the opportunity to participate in.

Including Charlie, whose witty puns and genuine compassion pulled you in until you felt that you couldn’t get enough of his presence.

With how close you became to these group of people, it was no surprise that you eventually made the big decision to move continents to be nearer to them. It was the biggest move you had ever made in your life, and it filled you with excitement and nervousness.

But boy was it the best decision you had ever made.

Your friends were with you every step of the way, from Charlie picking you up from the airport, to Ranboo helping you set up some of your furniture, to Moonzy bringing you around Los Angeles and introducing you to the city.

It felt like a dream come true.

But as life would have it, highs were almost always accompanied with the lows.

Imposter syndrome hit you when you followed your friends to meet new ones in LA, new streamers who were far bigger in following than you were.

Homesickness hit you when Charlie travelled to a different country for a short family holiday, and you realised just how far away from your family you were.

Burn out hit you out of nowhere. Jadedness weighed on your shoulders. Suddenly, shadows were creeping at the corners of your mind.

And, maybe, you should have confided in your friends? You were friends, after all, right?

But anxiety warped your decision-making abilities, and you find yourself putting up a front. You were good at that anyways, you were a streamer after all.

And viewers never know what happens after the stream is over.

Your stream schedule became slightly less frequent, what with you not being in the best mental space to stream as often as you used to, but it was still frequent enough to not alert any of your fans that something might be wrong.

You still hung out with your friends, following them for outings streaming with them, because spending time with people should cheer you up, right?

You weren’t sure how good your acting skills were, but they were apparently really good because you managed to slide your jadedness under the radar of your friends’ concern.

Except for Charlie.

You didn’t notice it at first, being too focused on keeping a smile up and looking engaged in conversations. But every time people laughed and you only offered a snort, every time you were more reserved than the energy of the room, Charlie was looking at you.

And when you finally realised it, you couldn’t help but feel shame.

It was during a small get together that he approached you about it. Everybody else were occupied screaming at the Smash Bros match on the television, so you took the opportunity to sneak into the kitchen and get some snacks.

Or let yourself drop the pretence for a little bit, but you’re too proud to admit that to yourself.

You weren’t expecting Charlie to follow you into the kitchen and catch you staring into space, hands fiddling with a packet of chips.

“Look at you being the snack goblin while everyone’s distracted,” came Charlie’s teasing voice from the door of the kitchen.

Startled, you reply, “Huh?”

Charlie looks pointedly at the packet of chips in your hands. You follow his gaze to look at the packet, and feel your neck warm slightly when you realise that you had been so deep in your head that you forgot about the chips.

Attempting to salvage the situation, you reply, “I was about to open it.”

“Uhuh,” says Charlie, raising an eyebrow at you. “Like you weren’t just staring at Ranboo’s cursed Garfield portrait unmoving.”

You let out a snort at the mention of the painting that Ranboo had done during the last time you attempted a paint and sip (you couldn’t draw for nuts), but your fingers start tapping on the kitchen counter nervously, avoiding Charlie’s gaze.

You don’t catch the way his eyes soften with concern until he’s moved next to you, the movement causing you to look back at him.

The two of you stand in the kitchen in silence for a while, neither of you wanting to breach the question that was clearly swimming in Charlie’s eyes. Against your better judgement, you scan his features, letting yourself get trapped in how his face was slightly scrunched in concern, how his sincere gaze made you want to pour out your soul to him.

Charlie inhales deeply, as though gathering the courage for his next words, before saying, “I should’ve asked so much earlier than right now, but are you okay?”

You wish that you could come up with a clever quip in that moment, something to take his attention off the darkness behind your eyes, but all you brain could think about was how much you wanted to tell him.

And how much you wanted to crawl into a hole and never come back out just for thinking about that. Because the little parasite in your mind tells you that good friends don’t burden your friends with your problems.

As though he could somehow glean your thoughts from the way you averted your eyes, Charlie tells you softly, “You know I’m here for you, right? I care for you – you’re my friend. I want to be able to shoulder your burdens with you.”

You worry your bottom lip between your teeth, as though that action could keep the words from spilling from your mouth. It’s effective, but only because something in your gut keeps you from sharing your feelings with him.

Somehow, he senses that you aren’t ready yet, and instead offers you a hug.

“If you can’t, or don’t want to share, it’s okay. But can I at least give you a hug?” His eyes crinkle a little as the beginnings of a smile starts on his face. “Hugs are statistically proven to make people feel better.”

You let out a snort at that, one that actually causes a small smile to form on your face. You don’t trust your words in that moment, so you give Charlie a nod.

His arms come around you, enveloping your frame and pulling you into his chest. In that moment, it was just you and Charlie, who was like a little firefly in the midst of your darkness. You wrap your arms around his waist, resting your head on his chest.

You don’t know if it was because Charlie gives really good hugs, or you were just emotional in the moment, but you physically sag into the hug, melting as Charlie rubs small circles into your shoulders. Somehow, it energises and relaxes you at the same time.

You felt safe in Charlie’s arms, like just the act of him holding you was protecting you from the invisible monsters in your mind.

In the middle of Ranboo’s kitchen, with various muffled Smash Bros sounds coming from the living room, time stands still. And when you’re inevitably pulling apart, you find the darkness is far less dark, and your shoulders far less heavy.

You don’t tell him everything that night. Just enough to let him know that you were going through a rough patch. But you promised that you would tell him soon, because deep down you knew you wanted to.

Because Charlie noticed you while you were trying your best to hide away from everybody. He reached out to you when you were possibly pulling away from your friends.

He offered to be a firefly in your night sky.

[anon-402]

Roier's Interview (Eng Translation)

TN: The small font is for everytime they speak English.

Cucurucho: I have a few questions for you–

Roier: But I don't know English!

Missa: Alright. (To Roier) He says he has some questions for you. I can translate for you.

Roier: Oh, okay. He's going to be my translator. (With broken English) He- He- going to- to- 'traductation'.

Missa: Yeah, I will be the interpreter, okay? So ask anything to him and I will say it in Spanish.

Roier: Work harder, Alfonso!

*Missa hurting sounds*

Cucurucho: What is your biggest accomplishment on the island?

Roier: What did he say?

Missa: How big is your dick.

Roier: Fuck, well– soft, I think two. And hard, three. *Richas hits him* What is it? Why are you punching me?

Missa: He said he didn’t accomplish anything. He’s a loser in this game.

Roier: Hey, what does that mean, pendejo?! What did you say?

Missa: Eh– that you want to do bigger things but that you’re running into some–

Roier: And what does that have to do with the size of my penis?!

Missa: Ah. Right. Wait. (To Cucurucho) Can you repeat the question, please?

Cucurucho: What is your biggest accomplishment on the island?

Roier: My best companion?

Missa: Uh– yes.

Roier: My best companion… is… is, uh– me. My loneliness. *Cucurucho looks at Missa* Why is he looking at you like that?

Missa: Oh, sorry. (To Cucurucho) He just said that the best thing he’s done is himself.

Roier: I– what.

Missa: (laughs) He’s alone in this city.

Roier: Cucurucho, dude, you spoke Spanish before, what happened?

Missa: Wait, wait. *Hits Roier to shut him up* He just told me that the best thing he has accomplish is being alone but being like, uh, eh– is enough for him. You don’t need anyone.

Roier: Bro, I’m paying you money, why you don’t know how to speak English?

Missa: *Ignores him* He realized that he didn’t need anyone. The accomplishment that he have done is being happy with himself.

Roier: *High pitch voice* I don’t know what he said but he’s lying!

Missa: *Keeps struggling with English*

Roier: *Tries speaking English*Fernanfloo, I’m German. Hi I’m German. Vegetta777–

Cucurucho: Good.

Missa: (To Roier) He said dick. That’s how you say dick.

Cucurucho: What is your happiest memory on the island?

Missa: Says what’s your favorite memory card.

Roier: My favorite memory card? I had one for the PS2 to play the ‘Urugata’ *Crash Bandicoot sounds*– I liked that one a lot. I also had the Spyro one. *Looks at Missa* Said that. The Spyro and the ‘Urugata’.

Missa: The best memory of his is him being happy next to Bobby. But he’s dead.

Roier: WHAT?! Bobby?! What did you say?!

Missa: No, no, no. I said boobs. I said you liked boobs.

Roier: Oh, yes. *Looks at Cucurucho happily and nodding* Yes, yes.

Missa: So he treasures all those memories with himself, so he learned to be happy with himself, missing the old times but doesn’t want to be here again.

Cucurucho: Good.

Roier: What.

Missa: He said god. Like–

Roier: Ahhh, god, god. Like.

Missa: Game of Thrones.

Roier: Like how kids say ‘that’s so god’.

Missa: Yeah, that’s so god. Uh-huh.

Roier: Okay. So what?

Cucurucho: Have you ever felt like the protagonist of the story? If yes, when. If no, why?

Missa: He said if you ever felt like a dick– or– can you repeat?

*Cucurucho repeats himself*

Missa: Okay. He said if you ever felt like– *laughs*

Roier: The porn?

Missa: Yes. That if you ever had found– that if you have ever enter a bathroom while someone is shitting on the island.

Roier: Yes. Several times.

Missa: Several times. Okay, let me tell him. *Turns to Cucurucho* He’s been trying to be happy with himself so he’s being working on his own story. Uhm– at least he’s the protagonist of his own story, so–

Roier: Hey, I didn’t talk that long, bro!

Missa: He saw Cellbit in the bathroom.

*They get distracted by an admin flying around*

Cucurucho: If there’s something in your story that must stay, that is important, what is or what would it be?

*Missa asks to repeat the question*

Roier: What did he say, dude?

Missa: If you had a comic you liked so much that you wanted to keep.

Roier: Well, in Spain I saw a comic of Halo2 that I wanted to buy but at the end I didn’t, because I said, maybe I will buy it but never read it, y’know? Average dumbass moment where you buy something but never read it because you’re too lazy. So. I didn’t buy it, but I really did like it. That one of Halo2. In a store that Polispol took us to. That store was good.

Missa: That happens to me too. I will tell him. (To Cucurucho) Halo2.

Roier: Great.

Cucurucho: Good.

*Missa laughs*

Roier: Good. *Starts looking around* So what? Is this Coppel–

Missa: ‘Two’? ‘Two’ is two.

Roier: ‘Two’? You. No, ‘two’ is you, dude. ‘You’.

Missa: Halo2. Your halo.

Roier: You jerk off to– (TN: to jerk off, ‘jalar’, sounds like halo)

Missa: I wanna see your halo–

Roier: Cucurucho, what’s up?

Cucurucho: If you were to be recognized for something you did, what would it be? Would it be something good or bad?

Roier: Badboyhalo?

Missa: Yes. He said if you were recognized on the street, would like to be mistaken for Badboyhalo?

Roier: Fuck no. Said that to him.

Missa: He says that–

Roier: Say ‘Nelson’ (TN: a really slangy way to say ‘no’ in Mexico and the internet)

*Missa.exe not working*

Roier: Nelson. Nao. Nao.

Missa: *Asks if this counts for his answers as well*

Roier: Nao. Badboy? Nao.

Missa: (To Roier) Maybe this is serious and we’re fucking up his operation…

Roier: No, dude. *Looks at Cucurucho* Or is it true?

Missa: I don’t know, I don’t know.

Roier: He looks too happy, I don’t think he’s angry.

Cucurucho: Would you be more motivated into completing something with a premium to be received at the end?

Missa: Says if you’re willing to pay for Youtube Premium.

Roier: No– Well, yes. Quackity doesn’t want to but I do. I pay it. When I see videos *Gets distracted by the Cucurucho award and starts breaking it*

Missa: Roier, you motherfucker–

Roier: *Sits down again after stealing it* When I see videos and make reactions there’s no ads. Well– except one time. I was watching the ‘Amigos’ (TN: LuisitoComunica reference) going to Brazil, and I wasn’t on my Youtube account so there were some ads.

Missa: While you were watching–

Roier: Yes. But only one time and I do pay it.

Missa: (To Cucurucho) Yeah, he would like to be recognized as a person, important for the server. So yes. He would like to be rewarded by that.

Roier: Exactly. Yes.

*They get distracted by the bubbles and the lag*

Cucurucho: If there was a future out of the island, who would you take with you to continue your journey?

Roier: What?

Missa: A future item? *Cucurucho repeats the question* a feature? Ah, a future.

Roier: A token. [TN: Token, ‘ficha’, sounds like feature]

Missa: A future, ohhhhh. Okay. (To Roier) If you had a token– pogs [TN: Pog, ‘tazo’, is another word for Token]

Roier: Pogs to play?

Missa: If you had some pogs, would you like them to be of Pokemon or…?

Roier: Oh, you know which ones were really good? The WWE ones with Randy Orton were so fucking good, and they sounded like– *Pogs clashing sounds* And the ones with Mucha Lucha were good too. And the Pokemon ones.

Missa: You remember the Medabots ones? The metallic ones.

Roier: Yesyesyes. I only had like five because I didn’t have money. But yes.

Missa: One time as a kid, I was like six, and I had a collection and I was in a serious match and they fucked me up. They took all of them.

Roier: *Laughs* They took everything?

Missa: Bro, I was in a town, in a really far away town in Sinaloa. And– *Laughs* And I fucked up *Roier laughs* I lost everything. It was–

*Cucurucho laughs*

Roier: Hey, bro, he’s laughing at you. What the fuck? You’re gonna let him?

Missa: They already took the pogs.

Roier: Dude, why’re you laughing at the pogs? You don’t have anything. You don’t even have hair. Fucker.

*Everyone gets quiet*

Missa: Anyway, if the server had a feature, what would you like to have that could help you in your mission?

Roier: I need a good internet without lag.

Missa: *Laughs* You’re the only fucker who has internet problems.

Roier: That’s why I want them to give it to me. They have a ton of money, look where they are. They have a mansion ‘gameplay funny moments’.  

Missa: That’s true. (To Cucurucho) He says he’s okay with anything. He didn’t need anything, That’s okay. Thank you so much for being so kind and to help us all to be better in this server.

Roier: Yeah.

Cucurucho: Good.

*Awkward silent moment*

Cucurucho: *unintelligible* a huge nomination, what message would you give your supporters?

Missa: That’s a good one. (To Roier) If you had a big Venom– Something like that.

Roier: A Venom?  

Missa: Yes. How would you name it.

Roier: If I had a big Venom… The Chirawaso or– *Missa laughs* I don’t know. I never had one. I’ve never touched one.

Missa: But if you had one right here, what would you tell it?

Roier: How– How handsome. *Notices how his backpack disappeared* Hey, they took my backpack! They’re undressing me here! Fuck, they’re taking my things.

*Cucurucho laughs*

Roier: You little fucker. You were the one who took it. You don’t know we are both from Sinaloa, dude. [TN: Famous Mexican state for having really high crime rate] At any time we can disappear you, dude.

*Missa starts singing ‘Pena Tras Pena’ from El Recordo de Cruz* [TN: Famous Mexican band from Sinaloa]

Roier: *Starts throwing Mexican insults that are really hard for me to translate to English*

Cucurucho: Good.

Roier: *Gets distracted by the missing backpack again*

Cucurucho: What advice would you give others into continuing pursuing goals? What is the first and more important step?

Missa: Okay. If you were playing soccer and you scored a goal, with who would you celebrate with? Messi or Ronaldo?

Roier: With Messi.

Missa: *Laughs* This guy…

Roier: Why ‘This guy’?! You’re Team Cristiano Ronaldo??? You’re from the Goat– No, the Goat is Messi. Now is Messi, pendejo.

Missa: Of course.

Roier: Bro, I’m feeling so awkward. Why are they asking? *Gets up*

Missa: Sit the fuck down. That chair is a fucking Herman Miller–

Roier: This fucking chair– My coccyx is already hurting–

*Cucurucho gives Roier a book with an actual translation to his question*

Roier: Pendejo, you didn’t translate it correctly!

Missa: No, that’s an extra question!

Roier: Oh, okay. What advice would I give? To keep doing it.

*Missa gets all wet cat and starts apologizing for not doing rp and not answering seriously*

Roier: I would tell them to follow their dreams, and to keep searching their goals. In any time you’re going to make it. And if you don’t make it, that’s because you haven’t arrived to the end. I know you can do it. Fucker.