#and now I really want to wear it with the grad gown. Like no one has seen this dress and I forgot what I looked like in it

[star-of-wishes]

Kinda super long post. TLDR at the end

Idk if I've mentioned this before but if I have, idc, you're listening to it again. Almost exactly 12 months ago I was in probably the worst place mentally and physically, even more than my teens. I won't get into details because that will make this post require a community label and my intention is just to get this stuff of my chest. Even so, now I feel happier, I'm surrounded by people who don't hate me and even though it makes me nervous I can't wait to go to graduation (which is in 11 days btw!) and show people how much better I am now. Not in an arrogant way but in a "getting away from you people turned my whole life around" way. I know the whole point of glow ups isn't for others but for self improvement, but I've always wanted that "be careful who you call ugly in middle school college" glow up.

Just. I imagine myself actually putting in 10% more effort into my appearance, so I look neither like a sleep-deprived zombie nor a cried-myself-to-sleep last-night-zombie. Maybe those who weren't as terrible would talk to me a little. Maybe get a few compliments? They ask about how I'm doing, I ask about their life, I compliment them because a lot of them actually have better fashion sense, and we have nice genuine conversation? ....Does that feel self-obsessed and vain? The other day Dad and I were going somewhere but we were stuck in traffic which gave us plenty of time to have a few "reflecting on life discussions" as he calls it. And he told me that it was nice to not see me in as pathetic of a situation as I was a year ago (that sounds rude without context but he was honestly sweet about it lmao). I had seriously considered dropping out of the bachelor's degree program but if that had happened I would have gone back to that place in Jan 2024 and it would have made an "irreparable dent in my career". And he's right. In addition to all this my shit health affected Mom as well and it was honestly heartbreaking because the last thing I wanted was to drag her also into my crises. Let's just say it wasn't "My year" as people generally hope for on New Year's Eve. TLDR; if you're not in a good place please hang on a little longer I know it feels impossible but it's not and I believe in you. I don't claim to be wise or something because i'm 21 i don't know a lot of stuff still but just my little piece of advice that's all

[bananayuyu]

Lust & Love & Loss

Pairing: Yunho x f reader

Genre: angst, smut, a sprinkling of fluff

Word count: 10.5k

Summary: Graduation was meant to be celebrated, you knew that. But all you wanted was distraction, now that you knew how bad of a granddaughter you'd been.

Warnings: smut, MDNI, semi-public sex, safe sex (we love condoms), degradation and praise, throat fucking, spanking, dom/sub dynamics, (it's kinda nasty but he obviously loves her)

A/n: Just lost a grandparent and this is how I'm coping 😭 idk what that says about me. I hope y'all enjoy <3

"How does it feel to be a college graduate?"

You slowly turn your head over your right shoulder, eyes locking with your favorite grad student. No longer a grad student, now that he'd graduated too. His cap is still on, gown blowing gently in the wind. It barely reaches past his knees, his jeans and scuffed converse sticking out underneath.

"You couldn't even be bothered to wear some nice shoes for graduation?" you ask, eyes narrowing.

"It's not fair that my feet are on display when everyone else's aren't. I can't believe they don't have a longer size than this one," he responds, staring back at you, his eyes so obviously trailing to your lips. You know that look, at least you're pretty sure you do, and you have a feeling you know exactly why he's here talking to you.

"Well I still wore nice shoes," you say, pulling up your gown to reveal your platform black leather boots.

"Aren't you special," he jokes.

"Now I've got a college degree like everyone else," you chuckle, rolling your eyes and looking around at the sea of robes around you, the meandering families and friends taking photos with and hugging their loved ones.

"Are your friends here?" he asks, looking around too, suddenly looking a little nervous.

"No, they already left. Jenna has work today and Mags is helping out with set up and take down so she had to run. Well, I told her to run. It's volunteer, so, you know, she could have stayed longer," you look back to him, eyes flitting up and down awkwardly. You don't know why you still get this way with him, after two years of knowing each other. "I didn't feel like standing around and making a moment of it. Just any other day," you laugh, looking back up.

The intensity, the darkness, it roils beneath your surface, and you really fucking hope it doesn't show all over your face. You were in no mood to celebrate, not after the past few weeks you'd had. Yunho didn't dare ask again why your family wasn't here, because the last time he'd asked you'd shut him down so harshly that he knew to never broach the subject again. At least, not on a crowded football field filled with many students who may or may not know you. Maybe another time, in a more private location, he could get the answer from you, but he knew his wish was unlikely to come true.

"I know you don't like celebrating things, but me and Mingi and San are having people over to our place tonight. It'll just be close friends, everyone you already know. If you'd like to come, have some fun, you know, loosen up a bit," he smirks at you, holding his hands behind his back and tilting his head to the side.

"You can just say you want to fuck me, you know," you shoot back, crossing your arms over your chest. "Yun-ho," you drawl, laughing at your own stupid play on words.

"I like hanging out with you too, you know," he mocks you.

"Is that so?" you ask, raising your eyebrows.

"We might not have many more opportunities to, before I'm off to Maine," he says, and you can't explain why it shoots through you so painfully. So deeply. It's like there's a deep scar it's reopening, or something inside that's never fully healed. You don't like it.

You really don't like it.

"What time?" you ask, blinking back the thin layer of tears that so quickly formed, eyeing him more harshly than you realize.

"We're ordering food from that Chinese place San likes, probably like seven or so, but you can come whenever. What should we order for you?" he asks.

"Oh, y'all don't have to get me food, it's okay," you shake your head, remembering your leftover lentil soup in the fridge. You should really eat that up today, before it goes bad.

You don't want to lose it.

Why do I care?

"Chicken or tofu with your fried rice?" he asks.

"Tofu," you answer, eyes falling to the ground a moment. That feeling, I really fucking hate it, you think. You want it to stop, you're desperate. You'd been numb all morning, able to go through the motions of getting dressed and walking to the stadium without a single feeling.

Why am I feeling it now?

"Wait, no seriously, you don't have to get me anything, I have some soup I should eat. It'll go bad if I don't," you look back at him, at his brows that are pulled together in a look of concern.

"Mm," he hums, nodding at you, that look still plastered on his face. "Be there by seven. Earlier if you want, like I said," he finishes.

You just stare at him, your body now turned in his direction, your arms hanging loosely at your side. He closes the distance between you with a step, wrapping his arms around in a friendly hug, putting your face into his shoulder and caressing the back of your head.

"Congratulations," he says, squeezing you for a moment, your arms not moving an inch. But your body starts to shake a bit, the feelings starting to snake their way through your nervous system and make you jittery.

"Thank you," you whisper, and he pulls away, snaking his way back through the crowd, finding Mingi and San and walking off with them.

++++++++++++++++++++

"Marcos, give me that!" you hear Letitia scream, her little boy no doubt running through the house with a knife or scissors in hand. You stumble to the back of the house you live in, sneaking through the back door that opens to your tiny hallway. Your bedroom and bathroom sit across from each other, the doors dirty and dented at the bottom from the capricious toddler, who had more of a penchant for destruction than any other kid you'd known. Letitia was kind though, so kind, and you were thankful to have had a place so close to campus for your years here. Six years, six long years of working and studying, grinding every last bit of productivity out of yourself that you possibly could. You snuck into your room quietly, hoping to avoid any questions about graduation, or the classic, 'How are you doing? You've been so busy lately.'

Letitia was kind, but she was your landlord, and you toed the line between kindness and professionalism with her. Now especially, with everything going on with the family, your granddad, all of the unknown possibilities...

You didn't want her knowing anything. If what your Dad said will happen does actually happen, what he seems to be wishing will happen, you'll be moving out of here sometime this summer. And though you've grown attached to this place, it isn't really your choice. Or it doesn't feel like it is, even if it should be.

It was something you felt deep within you, a feeling that came and went, and only ever gave you a few seconds of its time. You weren't sure you'd ever be able to fully name it, fully understand it. Why it kept evading your conscious you weren't sure, but the fact that it was real, that it was definitely something of importance, couldn't be denied.

You pulled off your heavy boots, slumping them into your tiny closet, stripping off the fitted outfit you'd worn to graduation. You weren't sure why you felt obligated to dress up, when seemingly no one else did. You threw your clothes in the hamper, soaked with sweat from the hot summer day, and grabbed your favorite loose t-shirt and some baggy sweats.

If you were making it over to the party, there was no way you were dressing up today. Not that you ever did to go hang out with Yunho and his friends.

"I'm heading to my friend's place on Cornell, I'm walking," you told Letitia as you entered the living room, your phone, wallet and keys all held in one hand. It seemed like a bit of a slap in the face, the fact that your university decided on naming all of the surrounding streets after colleges far more prestigious than yours.

"Sounds good, please be safe," she smiles at you, Marcos struggling out of her grip to come and hug your leg.

"If I don't have a ride back, I'll just stay over there," you assure her, trying to smile back.

"I can always give you a ride, if you don't want to stay," she says, tilting her head at her son and his adorable face. He loves when you wear baggy pants so that he can hang off of them.

"It's fine, I've stayed over there before. No worries," you say, peeling the toddler off of you, wrestling with him for a moment to get him back in his mother's lap.

"Okay, have a fun time sweetheart," Letitia says, smiling again, looking like she might not know what else to say. You're unsure if she knows already, logically, that you're probably moving out now that you've graduated. Though it isn't a given, you reason, it's always possible you'd find work in this small town or decide to go to grad school now. But keeping her in the dark about everything is what you've decided to do, and really nothing could persuade you to change that decision.

Even if she'd picked you up that first night you'd went out, and saved you from potentially the worst case scenario.

"Thanks, have a good night," you answer, walking out the back door again, making your way through the alley way the leads right down to the street where Yunho lives.

++++++++++++++++++++

"You made it." Yunho's face is bright, lips stretching into his beautiful smile, as he opens the door and ushers you in.

"Mmhm," you respond, nodding, stepping cautiously into the apartment. You're out of breath from the three flights of stairs, your face slightly flushed, you're sure of it. The wind picked up on your walk over, your hair blown about and now a bit tangly. You run your fingers through it, snagging on one of the tangles.

Wincing, in a way he's seen a lot.

"You're early," he jokes, looking over to the living room, not a soul in sight.

"You said-" you stutter, cutting yourself off.

"I know, I'm kidding," he responds. "Do you want to put those in my room?"

You just nod, following him in silence, your chest feeling tight. You don't know why you suddenly feel so exposed, suddenly feel like maybe you shouldn't have come, or at least not so early. You just didn't feel like sitting in your bedroom any longer.

He opens his door, and you come in and plop down on his bean bag, setting your stuff down next to you. At least on this bean bag chair you can curl into yourself, holding your legs close and leaning your head to the side, sighing deeply. Yunho grabs his glasses from his side table, picking up the little remote that sits there, setting the LEDs in his room to a comforting mix of pink and purple. He pops out to the living room to do the same, and you overhear San letting him know the food's on its way, arriving in fifteen minutes. Just then a knock sounds on the front door, and San goes to open it to his best friend Wooyoung, and Yeosang and Jongho are tagging along too, quickly making for the refrigerator to find the cold beer.

"Yo, is y/n coming?" you hear Jongho ask, and your ears perk up.

"Already here, she's in my room," Yunho responds.

"Oh, damn," Jongho replies, and you don't know if it's his face or some other hidden meaning, but you hear the boys chuckle in unison.

"How much should I Venmo you San?" Yunho asks.

"Don't worry about it man, it's a graduation gift," he laughs, slapping him gently on the back. "Oh there he is," San says, and you hear the low rumble of Mingi's voice greeting everyone.

"What, were you taking a shit or something?" Yeosang asks, making the group burst into laughter. You curl in on yourself more, cringing.

Men.

Poop was only fun to talk about when it was you and your friends joking around. You didn't give a shit if that was a double standard.

"Hey, everyone's starting to arrive," Yunho says as he enters his room again, not bothering to close the door. The sounds of male conversation tumble in from the kitchen, and the more you hear the less you're wanting to join, really. Not that it was all disgusting, not that any of them were. It was just that they were people, and a lot of them, and you didn't have it in you to talk tonight. "You're so quiet. Graduation got you all depressed?" Yunho asks, eyeing you from his desk, where he's hurriedly trying to organize the absolute mess in front of him.

"No, it's not that. Just don't really feel like talking I guess," you say, staring back. "Why are you organizing that now?"

"Cause you're here," he says, chuckling in almost an embarrassed way.

"I'm not your girlfriend," you retort, shaking your head.

"I know that," he says, but the look he shoots you says so many other things, his eyes hiding so much as he stares at you sideways. "I don't want you to think I'm a slob."

You just shrug your shoulders, looking away, sinking further into the plushness.

"Are you ever going to tell me why you're upset?" he says, finishing what little organizing he could muster, sitting down on the floor right in front of you, a hand coming to reach out and rest on your thigh.

"Upset?" you ask, not moving away from his touch, but not moving into it either.

"With me," he says.

"I'm not upset with you," you say, shaking your head.

"So if it's not about graduation, or about me, then what is it about?" he asks.

"You know what it's about," you sigh, breaking your eye contact.

"Barely," he replies.

"It's better that way, trust me," you sigh, looking back towards him, tears brimming in your eyes. You're generally good at holding it in, at crying by yourself in your room when you know no one's watching, when you can think whatever thoughts you have and not worry how they'll hurt anyone else. But his touch, it's too comforting, and it's been too long since you've felt the warmth, his warmth that sinks through you and makes you forget about everything else.

You lean forward, pushing off of the chair to crawl into his lap, wrapping yourself around him.

"Please tell me," he says softly in your ear. But all you do is shake your head, shoving your face into his chest, trying to forget everything.

++++++++++++++++++++

"Y/n, aren't Yunho's glasses sexy?" Wooyoung asks you, right as you put a huge bite of rice in your mouth, forcing you to nod awkwardly as you try to chew quickly. "I think he should wear them more, stop wearing contacts every day."

You continue nodding, awkwardly swallowing your food, reaching for the glass of water you'd placed on the coffee table. You're sat with Wooyoung, San, Mingi and Yunho in their tiny living room area, the rest of the guests still mingling in the kitchen, a few more arriving after the food had arrived. There is one girl, Seonghwa, who you're pretty sure is Hongjoong's girlfriend, but you don't know for sure. You don't know Hongjoong well enough to really ask that, either, but you made sure to give the girl a genuine smile when she walked in. Another female presence in the space did put you at ease, at least a little.

"They're too much of a hassle, they get dirty so easily," Yunho says, saving you from having to answer the question.

"You'd get so much female attention if you did though, I'm sure," Wooyoung says, shooting a playful glance your way. "Don't you think?"

"Woo, stop messing with her," Yunho says, feeling your body tense up beside him.

"I'm not messing with her, I'm genuinely curious if she finds those glasses sex-"

"Woo, stop." This time Yunho is firm, firmer than you've known him to be with his friends, and the looks around you indicate that it isn't a common occurrence at all. The five of you fall into a tense silence, only the sounds of chewing and swallowing filling the space.

"You sure you don't want a beer?" Mingi asks you, hoping to change the subject and break the tension.

"No, I'm good," you say, voice small, shaking your head.

"Yunho? Want another?" Mingi asks, standing up with his empty can in hand, heading back towards the kitchen.

"Nah, I think I'll just have one tonight," he replies, throwing back the last of his can.

"Really?" his friends all ask in unison.

It wasn't like one beer would make him feel anything. And it wasn't like they were drinking delicious beer. Never had Yunho drank just one, if he chose to drink. They all knew something was up, but what it was, they had no idea.

++++++++++++++++++++

"Hey, I'm Seonghwa, I wasn't sure if you remember me," Seonghwa says, sneaking up beside you while you clean off your plate and fork, placing them in the dish drainer to the side of the sink.

"You let me smoke your weed, how could I forget?" you respond, smiling over at her and gently taking her dirty plate from her hands. "I'm y/n, if you forgot my name," you say, getting to work on scrubbing her dishes clean.

"You graduated today, right?" she asks, black bangs brushing over her eyes, her thin hips leaning against the counter.

"Yeah," you sigh, giving her a weak smile.

"Not much fun, is it?" she asks you.

"Not really," you say, finally placing her dishes in the rack next to yours.

"Last year it was so boring, our commencement speaker talked so slow that I nearly fell asleep. And I sweated like crazy, I hated it," she chuckles.

"Yeah ours was... hmm. I don't want to insult that random woman who I know nothing about, but let's just say, not very inspiring. And same, I sweated so badly, I didn't realize how damn hot those robes would be," you reply.

"It's so annoying. Like please just give us our diplomas and let us go," she jokes, making you laugh.

"For real, I'm twenty-four years old, and none of my family is even coming, we don't need to be announcing everyone's names like this. It's so goofy," you say.

"I guess some people's family's come, but I wouldn't know what that's like," she smiles, tilting her head in understanding.

"Yeah, what is that like? Having a picture-perfect family? I know it's rare, but there are some out there."

"Makes for some very unfunny kids, I'll tell you that," she laughs.

"Still, I envy them," you chuckle.

"Oh, of course. I doubt that feeling will ever go away," she smiles.

Right then you wish you could teleport out of here, with her, and just float on a cloud and watch the sunset.

"Do you wanna smoke?" she asks, and pulls a tiny tube from her small black purse, popping open the top and pulling out a perfectly-rolled blunt, it's edge crisp and white.

"Is that from Astronaut Status?" you ask and she nods, chuckling at your reaction. "You're gonna share your expensive weed with me?"

"I'd rather share it with you than any of those bozos," she says, tilting her head in the direction of the living room. You burst out laughing for a moment, grabbing onto the counter.

"Well thank you, it would be an honor," you say, jokingly curtsying to her, making her laugh too.

"Do they have a balcony?" she asks, looking around to the window in the living room, right to the left of their TV.

“They’ve each got a small one off their bedrooms.  Let’s use Yunho’s,” you say, knowing the tree bordering the park behind covers most of the view, making it almost feel like a private place.

“They’ve each got balconies?” she asks as you both make your way to the hallway, raising her eyebrows at you.

“I know, it’s kinda fancy.  They’ve all got really good scholarships, so, yeah,” you say, making your way through Yunho’s still open door.  You quickly grab your phone off of his beanbag, Seonghwa waiting for you to show the way.  You gently unlock the door to his balcony and push it open, the hinges creaking slightly.

“Oh, this is nice,” She says as soon as she steps outside behind you, taking in the tree in all of it’s glory, it’s summer blossoms starting to edge towards blooming.

“You should see it in late summer, the flowers are this deep orange color, so pretty,” you say, closing the door gently behind you two.

“Wait, so how long have you and Yunho been together?" she asks, searching her bag for her lighter.

“Oh, we’re not dating,” you say, sighing.  “We’re both too busy for that,” you chuckle.

“Is that so?” she asks you, finally lighting the blunt, taking the first inhale and handing it over to you.

“Genuinely, I’m so busy most of the time I don’t even have a sex drive anymore.  If teen me could see me now, she’d be shocked,” you say, making Seonghwa laugh, as you take a hit yourself.  You cough, your lungs squeezing in on themselves for a moment.  “Fuck, I haven’t done this in a while,” you laugh, handing it back to Seonghwa.

“I get what you mean, I think that really does happen.  People get so busy they don’t even think about relationships or sex.  But people date in all kinds of situations, it sounds like you just don’t want to date him?”  Her knowing eyes are fixed on you, and in the fading sunlight her features are striking.

“I don’t know, I guess I don’t,” you say, turning away.  “I mean, we’ve only hooked up like six times in the last year, or maybe seven, I can’t remember.  I haven’t hooked up with anyone else, I genuinely haven’t had the time or desire.  I guess it’s nice to know, with him it’ll be good.  It’ll be safe.  I don’t have to worry about some stranger hurting me, or doing something awkward, or something that I hate.  It’s never a wasted night with him, at least.”

“How wholesome,” she laughs.

“Shit’s been weird lately, I don’t know if I really have the emotional capacity for a relationship,” you say, looking back to her as she hands you the blunt again.

“You never know.  That may very well be true, but sometimes things work when you least expect them to.  Romantic relationships are… strange…” she trails off, as you blow out the smoke, this time your lungs accepting their fate.  You nod at her, handing it back, taking a deep breath.  “What’s been going on?” she asks.

“My grandpa is dying,” you say, not sure why now this feels so easy, with this nearly complete stranger.  “He has dementia.”

“That’s an awful one,” she says, sighing as she exhales smoke.

“Yeah,” you say, turning to look up into the night sky.

“How far along is he?” she asks, holding the blunt out to you, and you shake your head.

“Well, we had to put him in a memory care facility about two and a half months ago, because it was to the point that he couldn’t do nearly anything for himself.  He couldn’t dress himself anymore, he would forget to eat, he stopped bathing, all that stuff.  I guess he lost control of his bowels too, so that was the last straw for my dad.  It was really hard on my grandma to try to take care of him, and at that point it was just too much.  But he’s progressed really fast now that he’s in the home, he doesn’t remember any of us anymore.  He’s in a wheelchair.  Before he went there he could still walk, still remember all of our names.  It’s all happening really fast.”

“Do you visit him a lot?” she asks, and you shake your head, tears starting to form again.  But you fight them down.  “Shit, is he somewhere far away?”

“Yeah, my family’s from the city but like, the center of the city, so maybe a thirty minute drive from here, but the place they found is in the west suburbs, so the drive is nearly an hour.  And I have to borrow someone’s car, either my landlord’s or one of my friends.  It’s hard,” you say, still not looking at her.

“Were you close?”

“Yes and no, I mean I grew up living in the same city as my grandparents, they’d always come to my sports games or whatever.  But my family isn’t very close, period, none of us are.  I am an only child, so when I did stay at their house while my parents were out of town I’d get a lot of one on one time with him, but I don’t know, there’s nothing that memorable.  He could be grumpy, and kind of mean sometimes.  But nothing crazy.  Just a normal old man, in many ways,” you sigh.

“It’s still hard though, I’m sure.  With family, it’s always hard,” she says, taking a final puff, putting out the blunt on the stone wall bordering the balcony.

“My dad’s pissed that I haven’t visited in so long,” you say, looking back at her, finding comfort in her striking face.  “I haven’t been able to since the second week he was there, this semester’s just been too busy.  I went yesterday, crashed at my parents, then drove back this morning.  He didn’t remember me at all.  It was so fucking weird.”

“It’s so scary that so many of us live so long, that we forget everyone for years before we pass,” she replies, the look in her eyes making it clear she knows that from experience, not just from empathy.

“I know,” you say, shaking your head.  “I promised my dad I’d visit all summer, two times a week.  And I’ll probably be moving back with my parents so that it’s easier, we’ll see.  I haven’t decided yet.  Living with them… I don’t know if I can do it again,” you sigh, and Seonghwa nods in understanding.

“You have to do what’s right for you,” she says.

“Is it weird that I don’t even find it that sad? I’m more worried about how it’ll affect my Dad who's freaking out, about how it’ll affect my grandma, and my mom is just like completely emotionally checked out, she’s doing so much extra shit at her job right now.  They’re all a mess, it seems like they’re all devastated.”

“You don’t feel any of that devastation?”

“Uh, I don’t think so?” you respond.

“You haven’t thought about it?” she asks, looking at you. 

“Death is a part of life, I’ve known that for forever.  It just happens, we can’t prevent it.  Despite this crazy civilization we’ve built, where so much of what we do has nothing to do with nature, we are animals.  We die, there’s no stopping that.  And my grandpa is eighty, that’s pretty old,” you say, sighing.

“It still can pull at you though, even if you don’t fear death like most people.  And it’s okay that you haven’t visited him, you’ve had important things you’ve been working on.  We can’t always put our life on hold because a family member is sick.”

“Tell that to my Dad,” you chuckle, pulling your arms in to hold yourself.

“Honestly, fuck your Dad, if he’s making you feel bad about that,” Seonghwa replies, her eyes sparkling in reflection of a distant passing car’s headlights.

“You’re cool, I like you,” you laugh, smiling in her direction.

“Says you,” she replies, smiling too.

“Me?”

“Yes, you have such cool style, always so calm and collected,” she says, eyeing you.

“Glad to know that’s how I come off to other people,” you laugh, looking at her with disbelief.  “It’s absolute chaos in here,” you say, pointing to your head.

“I get that, people tell me the same thing a lot and I’m like, nothing about me seems calm to me, but okay,” she laughs, raising her hands in a shrugging gesture.  “I hope you don’t dislike this, but I totally though you were gay when I first met you.  Cause you dress so masculinely,” she says.

“Oh yeah, I get that all the time, especially here at college.  I mean, I guess I’m like pan or something, definitely not 100% straight, but I do still like getting dicked down, I guess.  Though I suppose anyone could do that for me, if they had a strap.”  You both laugh, a warmth sitting in the air between you.

Suddenly Seonghwa’s phone starts sounding, a gentle song of wind chimes playing.

“Ah, shit, it’s time for us to go.  I gotta take Hongjoong to the airport super early tomorrow, so I’m gonna try to get us some actual sleep tonight.  It was so good talking to you though, I’m so glad we got the chance to smoke, and everything,” she smiles at you, looking like she wants to take a step forward.

“Can I give you a hug?” you ask, and she steps forward, answering your question with her arms around your shoulders.  “Sorry for the trauma dump,” you say as she pulls away.

“No need to apologize.  I loved it.  I like dating boys, but there’s nothing else that compares to the way girls can just be open with me.  And I love it, truly,” she says, phone in hand.

“Thank you, for the conversation and the weed,” you say, making her laugh once more, as she opens Yunho’s door and dips back inside.

“Of course, have a good night!” she’s says.

“You too,” you reply, and you gently shut the door behind her, breathing deep and letting the fuzziness of your slight high hit you, staring softy into the darkness of the park below.

++++++++++++++++++++

Yun Ho: Did you go home? Y/n: I’m on your balcony

It only took about fifteen seconds, and the door from Yunho’s room was swinging open, the hinges squeaking more sharply this time with how forcefully he opened it.

“I thought you’d left,” he said, invading your space in an instant, wrapping his arms around you again.  “Did you smoke?”

You nod your head against him, tucking your arms in between both of your stomachs, letting him cradle you.

“So no beer, but you wanted to smoke?” he asks.  It almost sounds accusatory.

“Seonghwa has nice weed,” you say, rolling your eyes, a bit pissed but not even sure why, and certainly not mad that he’s holding you like this.

“I didn’t think you liked it,” he says.

“What, can I not smoke?” you ask.

“No, you can do whatever you want,” he says, pulling back and looking at your eyes.  “Do you feel high?”

“Barely, I look like two hits,” you say, staring back at him.  “You’re being so weird,” you say, looking at him with confusion, and contempt.

“I’m just checking on you, baby,” he says, inspecting your whole body as if those two hits could have somehow caused you to grow an extra limb.

“Baby?” you ask, raising your eyebrows at him.

“You are my baby,” he says, and you roll your eyes and stick your tongue out, pointing your finger down your throat.  “We both know things would be different between us if you hadn’t been so busy this year,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest.

“If we hadn’t been so busy,” you retort, crossing your arms too.  “You were working on a master’s thesis until about two weeks ago, do you remember that?” you ask, tone patronizing, but he knows you're joking.

“Oh, I was?” Yunho jokes back, squinting his eyes and playing dumb in that way that always gets you.

“Shut up,” you laugh, smacking his upper arm with your hand, and his arms relax too as he grabs your wrist, fighting back.

“Come here,” he says, pulling you into him, one hand reaching around to the small of your back, the other landing gently on the side of your neck, pulling your face up to him.  He places a gentle kiss on your lips, his first taste of you in over a month, his body reacting instantly.  Yours is too, a hunger lit inside of you every time he touches you like this, kisses you like this, reminding you that you do like this, need this.  You hold on to his upper arms, letting him pull back to lick along your bottom lip like he loves to do, then dive back into you harder, putting both hands behind your back to hold you close.

Finally he pulls back, a hand coming up to brush a strand of hair out of your face.

“You doing okay?” he asks, his enlarged pupils making his eyes look so very alert.

“Mm,” you mumble back, shaking your head, in an attempt to tell him you won’t answer his question.  But to him it just looks like you're saying no, and his eyebrows pull up in concern again.

“So something’s going on, but you won't tell me?” he asks.

“You’re a boy,” you answer, shaking your head.

“I’m 26?” he says, tilting his head at you.

“I trust no boy with my emotions,” you say, knowing it’s a revealing thing to say, and honestly not sure how he’ll respond.

“I’m not that other boy, or man, or whoever you’re talking about,” he says, and you just stare at him, eyes a bit wide.  At least Yunho wasn’t dumb, at least he understood that your distrust of men came from the countless, genuinely countless times the men in your life had broken your trust and hurt you.

He thought that probably explained a lot, about you.

It explained a lot about him, too.

“What can I do, to get you to tell me?” he asks, rocking you back and forth, trying to do anything he can to make you feel calm and ready to share.  But you just shake your head again, eyes on his, lips sealed tightly together.  “You can tell me anything, I promise,” he says, turning his head to the side, trying to coax it out of you.

You can tell.

But that isn’t what you want right now.  Not when he can give you something so much better.

“Just fuck me already, please,” you sigh, looking at him with a pathetic needy look, and he sighs too, mad that you’ve won, pissed that you always get what you want from him.  He can’t be too mad though, when just the smallest taste of you is all he needs to be happy for the next month.

His mouth is open at is meets yours, no tongues at play yet, but your lips are wrapped deeply around each other in a hungry kiss, your breathing unsteady as soon as he’s made contact.  His hands snake under your shirt, feeling over every bit of skin he can find, finally adding his tongue to the mix and swiping it deeply through your mouth, your own tongue feeling electric at the contact.  The feeling snakes right down to your core, right to your clit, and you can’t help but tremble against him, feeling so unfairly empty, needing his tongue down there, fingers down there, anything.  He pushes a knee between your legs as your back comes to rest against the stone wall surrounding the balcony, your own hands greedily reaching underneath his shirt, then snaking down into his pants, fighting with the layers of fabric, and then fighting with his own hand that is preventing yours from reaching for his cock.  You shouldn’t be surprised he doesn’t want that yet, you’ve done this with him before, but you can’t help the visceral anger and want that his rejection has caused you.  You whine into his mouth, your eyebrows scrunching in frustration and hurt, as he pins your arm behind your back with his, swiping his tongue even deeper against yours.

You pull back, breaths ragged as he now attacks your neck, sparks of pleasure shooting up into your head and making you feel dizzy.

“Stop teasing, Yunho please,” you beg, knowing he likes drawing this out, because you get so damn sensitive and needy and it makes him feel fucking amazing.  He chuckles against your skin, running his tongue up the side of your neck, landing by your ear lobe and sucking on it, making you nearly scream in pleasure.

Your ears are too much, he knows that.  He’s trying to get you riled up, and of course it’s fucking worked.

“Yunho, stop, I c-can’t take it,” you nearly cry, pushing against his shoulder to try to move him off of you.

“Tell me what you want,” he says in your ear, kissing your neck a bit more gently, giving you the chance to actually answer him.  You whine though, hating when he makes you say these things, say the words he so loves to hear.

You hate how much you love to say it.

“Tell me, baby, you can do it,” he encourages, hands still roaming you.

“I- I want you to fuck me,” you start, breath stuttering as you finish your sentence.  “I need you t-to fuck me,” you manage, making him smile against you again, finally pulling back and just looking at you, the hints of the smile still there.  “I want your cock inside me,” you say with your eyes on the ground, never able to say it while looking at him, not sure if you could bear just how much you like the humiliation.

It wasn’t until him that you found out how much you liked it.

“Good girl. Stay right here, don’t move,” he says, and you oblige, watching him with wide eyes as he ducks into his room, returning in mere moments and almost slamming the door behind him.  In his hand is a condom, which he rips open with ease, looking up to see your surprised face.

“Turn around,” he says, and you do, standing now facing the tree, the park below.  “Put your arms on the wall baby, there,” he says as he moves you, placing your forearms on the wide ledge of the wall.  He pulls down his own sweats enough to free his cock, quickly rolling the condom down, then steps forward to grab at your sweats and panties, pulling them both down in one swift motion.  With his hand he tests the waters for a moment, sticking a finger in you with no warning, making you cry out in pleasure, feeling just how unbelievably wet you are already.

He knows you don’t need any more preparation, so he lines himself up with your entrance, pushing in slowly, simultaneously moving his hand that was just inside you in front of your mouth.  You obediently open up, letting him stick his fingers down your throat, tasting your own sweet muskiness that makes your whole body reel with pride.

Sometimes you wish you could clone yourself, just so you could get an unbridled taste of your own cunt.

“You’re so damn needy,” he says in your ear, leaning over to whisper to you, starting with slow thrusts of his hips, your legs already shaking as you choke on the fingers in your mouth.  “Can’t wait two fucking seconds to get fucked, you have to have it right away,” he says, picking up the pace every so slightly, the sound of skin slapping starting to fill the air.  “All you want is to be choking on my fingers while your pussy is filled with my cock, huh?”  You attempt to nod, even with his fingers in your mouth, and you end up gagging on them harder, your pussy clenching from just how good it feels.

Maybe you were his baby.  But he knew exactly what you wanted when his cock was buried this deep inside you.

"Why have you been avoiding me then, hmm?" he asks you, picking up his pace, placing his free hand around your neck to hold you there. He can feel your throat repeatedly gagging now, from the outside and the inside, spit starting to escape your lips and drip down onto the branch of trees just below you. "You haven't been that busy, baby, I know that."

His cock is repeatedly hitting that perfect spongy place inside you, over and over with such force, your legs are trembling uncontrollably now. Yunho watches as your thigh muscles involuntarily twitch, making your ass jiggle as his cock disappears inside your cunt. It's a miracle he isn't coming on the spot, feeling your tears drip down onto his forearm, knowing you're so fucking close yourself.

He knows once you start to cry you can only take a few more seconds of gagging, so he slowly pulls his fingers from your mouth, your body heaving with it's sudden ability to breathe normally.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," you mumble, trying to wipe the spit and tears from your face as he fucks you even harder, his hands on your hips now to give him the leverage he needs.

"I know baby, I know," he chides, his cock reaching impossibly far inside you, your body finally letting go and coming, pussy twitching hard.

"Fuck, fuck," you whisper as your vision goes white, not remembering for a second where you are, not even feeling the cold stone underneath your forearms.

"Good girl," he says behind you, fucking you until he feels your pussy start to release. He pulls out slowly, reaching over to open the door, then grabbing you and slinging you over his shoulder, your bare cunt up to the sky for the world to see.

Once he's thrown you on his bed he's clawing at your clothes, taking them off with a hurriedness that makes you giggle, and he shakes his head at you, holding a finger up to his lips to shush you. You can't help it though, your mind slipping into your favorite headspace, where you can't really control anything that you say or think, and you just feel free.

"Hand and knees," he says as he strips of his own shirt, pulling down his sweat pants and boxers and throwing them on the floor. You obediently do as he says, still giggling, throwing your head back over your shoulder to get a good look at him.

"You think this is gonna be easy?" He stares back, eyebrows raised, as he moved behind you on his bed, landing a smack on your right ass cheek with his right hand. It's powerful, harsh, and makes you moan involuntarily, the pain rippling up into your core. He lands another, with even more force, and you know for a fact you'll be bruised up tomorrow.

You can't wait to stare at the blue and purple marks in the morning, and spend the whole day replaying this over and over and over.

"Not so funny anymore, is it?" he says, ripping another pathetic moan out of you with his left hand, grabbing harshly at your flesh after he's spanked you yet again. "You think it's funny, ignoring me? Pretending like I don't exist? I know you think about me every time you touch yourself, baby," he says, another smack echoing off his bedroom walls. "You just like being punished too much, though, don't you? Fucking slut," he spits, and now finally he's being a little too mean, in that way that makes your calm head so fuzzy, his spanks and his words nearly making you cum already. "You like to pretend like you're not a little whore, don't you? Like this isn't what you wish was happening every fucking day," he drawls, his voice getting lower and gravelly, and the next smack he lands is so hard you're crying out, the pain running through you, your body feeling empty except for the feeling. It runs straight through you, and suddenly you feel Yunho's thumb on your clit, and all the feeling rushes to your core in an instant, making you start to cum. Yunho can see your cunt clenching around nothing, the sight intoxicating, and he can't stop himself.

"Fuck, baby," he whispers as he sheaths himself, and suddenly you're so full of him again, your orgasm ripping through you fast, his cock feeling somehow even bigger now. He thrusts into you hard, throwing his head back with an almost pained expression, and god it is it a fucking miracle that somehow he hasn't come again. When he looks back down again he sees your pained expression, pathetic whimpers coming from you as you grab onto his comforter for dear life. A few tears have slipped out of your eyes, and it drives him fucking crazy, unleashing something within him that he didn't know was there until he met you.

"I can't, I-I can't, ahh, yuyu, too much," you cry below him, barely even recognizing the words yourself.

"Oh, now it's too much? Did you not fucking ask for this?!" he snarls, taking his hand off your clit to land another harsh smack on your ass, reaching down to grab both of your arms and push your face further into his mattress. He wraps one hand around both of your wrists, holding your arms behind you, now not giving you any option but to just take whatever he's giving you. It feels good to him, the completely vulnerable state you're in, the ways he's in total control, but somehow it still doesn't feel like enough. He slows his movements for a second, picking your ass up even higher to move your knees close to your shoulders, nearly crumpling you into a ball with your ass stuck high into the air. Then he moves himself sideways, anchoring one knee between your calves, and moves his other leg gently over, putting his foot right down on the side of your head that's facing his ceiling.

He'd only done this one other time, and it was blowing your mind just as much again, because how the fuck this even worked logistically was beyond you. He starts thrusting again, the angle so much deeper now, and you nearly shriek with how intensely his cock just hit your cervix, making your whole body start to shake as another orgasm started to rip through you.

"Feels good, doesn't it? Being fucked like a whore," he spits, still holding tight onto your arms, his cock nearly able to fully bottom out inside you at this angle. Tears and snot continue to flow down your face, getting caught in your hair that's no doubt a tangled mess, and you finally feel something massive building inside you, as his cock repeatedly hits your cervix and makes it feel like you're coming with every stroke.

"Fuck, fuuuck," you groan into the blanket, and Yunho can feel your cunt start to tremble, your moans and whimpers getting louder and more erratic.

"You love my cock, don't you baby?" he drawls, chuckling to himself, his leg muscles working overtime to make this position work. He lands another smack on your ass as he thrusts even harder, putting a force behind them that makes your body start to come undone.

"Fuck, Yunho, fuck, fuck, fuck, ahh," you scream, the feeling washing over you, your whole body shaking in pleasure. No matter how well you knew your body, you'd never be able to make yourself cum as hard as he does.

"Yes, baby, good girl," he says as he feels you clenching down on him, his own legs starting to tremble from his position.

"It feels so good," you cry, nearly writhing underneath him.

"Yeah?" he mocks you, chuckling again when you whine in response, as he fucks you through the aftershocks, gently slowing his movement until there no longer was any.

When he steps back and pulls out of you, you collapse immediately, your chest heaving up and down and your whole body still tingling.

"You good?" he asks, his own breath coming out fast, with how hard he'd just exerted himself.

"Mmhm," you giggle, feeling him move your messy hair out of your face, wiping the tears from your cheeks.

"Good tears?" he asks you, and you nod and mumble again, grabbing onto him and giggling hard as more gently fall from your eyes. The harshness of your orgasms with him have always made you cry, at least a little, and he's never made you feel embarrassed about that for a second.

Probably because it turns him on so much, but he still hasn't fully admitted that to you.

"You gonna be good for me?" he asks you, and your eyes snap to his as you nod your head. "Good girl, come here," he murmurs, tapping the edge of his bed, pulling you around to position you so the top of your head is at the side edge, your head hanging off slightly as you look up at him backwards. He makes quick work of ripping off his condom, tossing it in the tiny trash can by his desk, and now you can see just how red and flushed he is, beads of precum dripping down the slit on his head.

He looks down at you, the length of his cock dwarfing your upside-down face, and he taps the side of your cheek with it, not wanting to wait another moment. You open your mouth for him again, as he starts to slide in slowly, thrusting gently a few times before moving his way finally into your throat. His hands are on either side of your head, supporting your position, and the look he's giving you is one of pure pride, pure adoration.

"Fuck, baby, this feels so good," he groans as his cock finally hits the back of your throat, and you gag around him, tears continuing to fall from your eyes down the sides of your face. "My pretty girl," he coos, thrusting gently, paying attention to how long it's been since you last took a real breath. The thrusts a few more times, his face and chest turning a slightly shade of pink as he gets closer and closer to reaching his own high.

"Breathe, baby," he says when he pulls out, letting you catch your breath for a moment, wiping the spit away from the sides of your mouth. "Ready?" he asks when you open up again, and you nod. He thrusts in again to the same spot, but this time goes harder, knowing it'll only take a few more thrusts before he's ready to unload.

"My pretty girl is so smart, she just graduated," he says, a deep grunt leaving his throat as he thrusts even deeper. "I'm so proud of you, fuck you're doing so good for me," he groans, and suddenly he's pulling out of your mouth again, stroking himself as his cum paints your face and your chest, your lungs heaving to catch their breath.

"Fuck," Yunho grunts as the last of his orgasm washes over him, as he looks down to see the absolute mess he's made of you, your eyelashes fluttering up at him in a way that almost doesn't look real. "You like that?" he asks, and you wiggle around in happiness, making him laugh. "You like when my cum is all over your face? Naughty," he shakes his head, but his smile is wide as can be, and he reaches over to grab his phone. You know exactly what's happening, he doesn't have to say it. You're excited to look back and see what the picture looks like, excited to see when he'll make you look at it.

"Let me go get a towel, baby," he says, stroking a hand through your hair and leaning down to leave a small peck on your lips, tasting himself there. You shake your head, holding onto him from below. "What?" he asks, and you pull him down again, your tongue in his mouth making him moan. "You still not satisfied?" he pulls back, his breathing ragged again, and you giggle and shake your head, still grabbing hard onto him. It only takes a few more seconds of making out, but miraculously he's hard again, and he can't stop himself from ravaging you again, especially when you give him those big eyes again.

This time it's sweeter, it's unplanned, his mouth is right there on yours and his arms are wrapped around you, but you don't cum any less hard. It's almost too intimate for you, but it feels way too good for you to tell him you've had enough. It's always felt good to just let him have you however he wants to, but it's never been quite like this.

"Fuck, come here," Yunho sighs, wiping the last remnants of himself off you with a damp wash cloth, his sweats hanging off his hips. He climbs into bed and wraps you up, pulling you both underneath his comforter, kissing your cheeks and nose and forehead and holding you to him, not letting you go even as you both fall into a gentle sleep, tangled together.

++++++++++++++++++++

Your eyes blink open in the early morning, Yunho’s room still nearly pitch black, your body warm and sticky against his, his breaths still coming out of him soft and shallow.

You’d slept over in his bed once before, and that time you had an early appointment, your alarm set.  He’d had a meeting with his thesis advisor, so you both scrambled to get dressed and ready, and headed out before any kind of romantic morning could be enjoyed.  But today was different.  Sunday morning, and neither of you had anything you needed to rush to.  You adjusted yourself in his arms, causing him to wake for a moment too, but then both of you fell back into a deep slumber, the early hours of the morning passing you by.

When you woke again you felt colder, the air of the room brushing over your exposed chest.  You reached an arm to feel around you, finding the bed empty, Yunho’s side still warm from his body.  You rolled into it, sighing into his pillow, the faint smell of him still there in the fabric of his pillow case.

It was like any other morning, except for the fact that you woke up in Yunho’s bed.  You felt groggy, no doubt having slept past your normal waking hour because of your late night.  You felt slightly sore, but nothing a little stretching couldn’t take care of.  You blinked open your eyes, letting them adjust to the late morning light, the same way you always do.

It was like any other morning, until it wasn’t.

| 10:47am ||Sunday, May 14th|

Mother: Darling, I have some sad news.  Granddad passed away late last night.  Call me when you get the chance.

You were sat up in Yunho’s bed, about to stand up and pull on your shirt, just checking your phone out of habit.

It was the last thing you expected to read.

‘Fuck’ you whispered under your breath, out loud to yourself.  How were you supposed to be reacting?  You’d known for several years now that he had this disease, this disease that would surely kill him within the decade, and no doubt you saw yesterday that it had progressed far.  But still.

Yesterday.

You were there, yesterday.

You’d seen him on his last day, seen him still able to drink water and eat food on his own, still able to carry on some conversation with you.  It didn’t make almost any sense, but still.

How the fuck was he dead?

You slapped your phone face down on Yunho’s side table, sitting down more carefully than you’d ever sat, criss crossing your legs on Yunho’s comforter.  Then you jumped up and made his bed, picking up your strewn about clothes from the floor and putting them on, then hastily grabbed your phone and placed it on the bean bag with your keys and wallet that hadn’t moved an inch from where they’d been placed yesterday.

You walked away slowly, backwards, watching your phone intently.  Like it was a bomb, about to explode.  Like it was a dragon egg, about to hatch.

Like it held every little thing that might tear you apart, or the one thing that might save you.

You sat down on Yunho’s bed, again crossing your legs under you.  And then the tears came, sneaking up out of nowhere, a feeling closer to anger than sadness rippling through you.  

And right then, with a cup of coffee in hand, Yunho opened his door quietly, peering in and seeing the outline of you in his peripheral vision.

“I was just going through my tea bags, I’ve got some Jasmine or some peppermint, and also this weird chai mixture that Mingi got a couple weeks ago-“

“Oh, baby,” he says softly, finally getting a good look at you, setting the coffee down, sitting down next to you in his bed and wrapping his arms around you, pulling you into him.  You’re so rigid, you’re barely melting into him at all, so he puts one arm under your legs and fully lifts you into his lap, wrapping you into as tight of a ball as he can manage.  He sits himself against the wall, crossing his legs like yours were a second ago, holding you against him in the fetal position and you gently keep crying, tears streaming steadily.

He holds you tight, placing gentle kisses on your forehead, breathing deeply with you.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” he ventures, voice gentle as can be.

You let out a small sound, almost a groan but lacking in any strength, as you try to open your mouth and actually form words.  Your breath stutters, as you try to control it, try to get one good breath into the depths of your lungs.

“Grandpa died,” you squeak, breaths shuddering after, as the reality gently starts to seep into your chest.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry baby,” Yunho responds, his heart sinking, his own emotions welling up inside him.  He knows you’ve held him at an arms length for so long, and he’s never truly understood why, just accepting that your excuse of being busy really was the truth.  He’s not sure you’ll let him be here for you now, but he wants to, and he doesn’t know how to say that, especially not when you’re crying in his arms, which has never happened before.

"I wish I wasn't leaving in a week," he sighs, and you turn your head up to him, looking confused.

"Why?" you ask. He'd been so excited for this summer research opportunity, so ecstatic when he'd been accepted. You were genuinely confused to hear those words leave his lips.

"Cause I wish I could be here for you," he sighs, placing a gentle kiss on your cheek.

"But you've been looking forward to it, aren't you excited?" you ask, wiping the tears away with the backs of your hands.

"Baby," he says, cocking his head to the side, looking at you dead on.

"Yunho," you sigh. You weren't sure what he was trying to say, but all you could think about was your grandma, your dad, even your mom.

"Don't you wish I could be here to, you know, be here for you?" His face full of emotion, full of something intense, and it makes feelings roil deep in your gut.

"You have a life to live," you say, shaking your head. "I'll be fine," you sigh, shoving your face into his shoulder again, hoping that it's true.

"I care about you, a lot, you know?" he asks, sighing himself.

"I know, but-" you cut yourself off with a sharp sigh, because you have absolutely no idea how to finish your sentence.

"I care about you. I'm your friend, I wish I was more, you know that, but-"

"Stop." The word squeaks out of you, as you bury yourself into him even more.

"I'm sorry," he sighs, hugging you close, scolding himself for even going there.

"I can't do this right now, I just- I-" you stumble over your words, tears coming again, and this time all you can think about is your granddad, his face yesterday, that slight smile that he made at you as you said goodbye, squeezing his hand.

"I need to call my mom," you sniffle, collecting yourself with a deep sigh. You pull yourself off of him, crawling off his bed, going over to the bean bag to grab your phone. You check your messages again, checking that your mom really sent that message, that you didn't dream it. It felt awful to read it again, everything wavering between feeling real and feeling completely absurd.

"I'm sorry," you say, seeing Yunho's face, his eyes full of worry. "I'm so sorry," you squeak, standing in place, your eyes closing as another wave of tears stream down your cheeks. Yunho jumps up from his bed to come hold you, pulling your head into his chest.

"Why are you sorry?" he asks, his voice soft as ever. His body feels warm against you, his head gently laying on yours.

"I don't know," you whisper, but you do know, you absolutely do, you just can't fathom getting into that conversation now with everything that's happening. "I need to go, I'm sure my mom will want me to come home today," you sigh, looking up at him, stepping back. You find your sweats, pulling them on slowly, not even bothering with putting on your panties that you can't find. Yunho's holding out your shirt to you, and you grab it and put it on too, the room filled with a silence that isn't completely comfortable.

You grab your things, staring at him, not sure what to say.

"You can call me, or text me, anytime. If you want to talk. Even while I'm in Maine. Whenever." His face is serious, his posture straight but still he almost looks deflated.

"Thank you," you say.

"Even if it's 3am, you can call me," he says.

You just nod in response, cause you know what'll happen if you say another word. You're already worried about all the tears you've shed this morning, how everything has changed between you, how vulnerable you've been in front of him. You give him one final hug, walking to his front door yourself, not looking back for a second as you walk away.

Yunho stares at the back of you, as you disappear down the stairs.

The tears come as soon as you're out of view, the feeling of his arms around you still lingering.

And he can hear your sniffles, even if he can't see you.

He's not sure if he's done anything right.

[noel-diary]

12/2/2024- Almost done

Today officially marked one week until this semester is over and I leave Geneva and go back to the US. In a sense I've been ready to go home for a while now, I miss my comforts and have really been needing them with all the stress. But I'm also sad to be leaving. So much has happened this semester and now it's about to be over. I have made some amazing friends but most people I have met here I will likely never see again, my new favorite restaurants (mostly Ginger Donuts lol) I wont have for YEARS if ever again. I would really like to live in Europe and specifically Switzerland one day, especially if I'm going to be working in global health but if this semester taught me anything is that life is unpredictable and you truly never know what is going to happen. So yea I'm ready to be home but mostly for this semester to end. A 9-5 is rough and not getting paid for it is even rougher, I'm broke and exhausted.

I am excited for next semester, my last semester of undergrad. All my classes sound interesting and I get to take two with a friend I made here in Geneva and three of us are going to do pilates together! I'm a little nervous for housing but I've only heard good things about seniors coming back to campus in the spring so I think I'll get a good placement. I'm excited for all the senior stuff and of course graduation (lemme know if you know a good place for grad dress shopping!). I do wish we didn't have to wear red graduation gowns it really limits the color options.

This weekend I got to travel to a Christmas market a couple hours away from Geneva and it was so cute (enjoy the not so christmasy but beautiful picture)! but omg there were SO many people, it was insane. I wish it was a little less hectic and I had time to really look around at the different stands to see what I could get. We also went to the pharmaceuticals museum, ik nerdy. It was really interesting and there was a lot about alchemy. It reminded me a lot of my witch craft teacher (that's a long story but would love to share another time). I should visit him next semester and show him, I think he would love it!

I sent in my application to my first graduate school yesterday. It was scary and very expensive but I am glad I've done it, it kind of makes the other applications less scary now but now it's the fear of not knowing and just waiting which is the worst part. I really like this program and it's the closest to home but I don't know how close to home I want to be. I went 17 hours away for undegrad and I love the freedom and the life I made in the city, I don't know if I'm ready to leave that yet. But that is a problem for future me to figure out.

[young-dumb-and-vaccinated]

Omg can I please get a hannibal x a shy girl reader ? Like he’s really possessive of her and she doesn’t know how to handle it but she likes him so they date??

Sorry this took so long, anon. I’ve been bouncing ideas around and this one in particular, I believe, fits your request. Y/n feels out of place among Hannibal’s fancy friends and it becomes even more obvious when he abandons her at a party. 

Trigger warnings: social anxiety, sexual harassment, overstimulation

You and Hannibal had an agreement about large gatherings. He could only bring you to a party if you had a week's notice and at least three uninterrupted hours of gaming time prior to the event.

For this event, you needed a solid six.

One of the major Maryland universities was awarding a lucrative research grant to a student of clinical psychology, and every influential name in the industry was expected to be there. As a recent college grad with a bachelor's in business you didn't know what to do with, you couldn't imagine a less welcoming environment if you tried. You couldn't fit into their world and more importantly, you didn't want to. But the thought of being noticeably different in any situation was twice as terrifying. So you spent the whole week repeating your mantra; blend in, be quiet and make it through the night.

But Hannibal had different plans for you.

Halfway through the week, just when you'd pushed the party out of your mind, Hannibal presented you with a gift.

"What's the occasion?" You asked. You hoped that if you pretended not to know, it would just magically go away.

"I brought you something to wear on Friday." Hannibal answered, hanging the garment bag up on the bureau. "You know I'll take any excuse to dress you up."

He unzipped the bag and placed a black silk dress into your arms. "Try it on so I have time to get it altered if it needs it."

The material was cool to the touch and outlined your figure so perfectly, you felt even a little naked. Hannibal, of course, loved this. You were his own personal Venus de Milo. His goddess and his muse. 

“Yes, that will do nicely.” He observed, looking at you hungrily. 

“Seems a little short for a such a sophisticated event, doesn’t it?” You raised an eyebrow. The answer was yes and he knew it. He was very deliberate in everything he did. “I don’t want to come off the wrong way.” 

“And what way would that be, darling?” He asked, not taking his eyes off your figure. 

“I mean--” You searched for the right words. “It’s a gathering of the Mid-Atlantic’s most esteemed academics, I feel like, in a dress like this, I might be seen as, well, a...” 

“A prostitute?” Hannibal finished, choosing a much nicer word than you would have.

You looked down. “Yeah. It just doesn’t seem all that appropriate.” 

Hannibal approached you and lifted your chin slightly to look into his eyes. “Many Christian denominations believe that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, yet she was Christ’s right-hand woman. She was first to see him crucified and first to witness his resurrection.” 

“Dr. Lecter,” You smirked. “I never would have taken you for a religious man.” 

“Goodness, no.” He shook his head. “But any reputable academic is expected to be familiar with biblical literature and its many contradictions and impossibilities.” 

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You are my divine feminine, Miss [L/N].” Hannibal said in a low whisper. “And I want everyone to see it. If they see a common whore, it would only be a reflection of their own jealousy.” 

Hannibal's rationalization almost made you forget about your fear of being noticed. Almost. It all came rushing back when you arrived at the event. Not one person your age was in attendance. The women wore long, flowing evening gowns that reached the floor. The length of your skirt alone guaranteed that all eyes were on you. In a simple black silk dress, you looked the very model of high society. Silk was a sign of luxury, and Hannibal wanted everyone to know that you were a woman of means. His woman, to be precise. That was why he brought you to these functions in the first place. To put you in a dress short enough for any wandering eyes so see the smattering of love bites running up your inner thighs. He wanted everyone in his field to know that you were completely and entirely his.

You realized too late that this was all his little exercise in showing you off.

Everyone seemed to know him. He only knew a handful of people by name, and you didn't know anyone.

"And who is this delightful young woman?" A woman with a light southern twang in her voice asked, looking at you as if you were a caged animal on display.

"I wasn't aware you had a daughter, Dr. Lecter." The young man beside her laughed. "Or is she your side piece?"

Your eyes scanned the room for the nearest exit. It would be unbecoming to make a scene, so you plotted a way to slip out quietly.

“Darling, meet Dr. Charlotte Ramset and her TA, David.” Hannibal introduced, notably ignoring the young man. “Dr. Ramset, this is my intended, [F/N] [L/N].”

"I didn't realize she was also a ventriloquist!" The lady, presumably Dr. Ramset, joked. You'd heard that one a million times. She looked at you. "Tell me about yourself, sweetie. What are you studying?"

The lady was old enough to be your grandmother and reeked of too much perfume.

"I graduated last year." You said, quietly. "With a BA in business."

"See, there's a good woman." David added. "Only speaks when spoken to. They don't make ’em like you anymore, baby."

Hannibal tightened his grip on your hand. "On the contrary, David. See, Miss [L/N] is quite a bit like myself. She only dignifies those she deems worthy with a response. There's nothing wrong with being selective."

The lady laughed at David's expense and smiled at you. "Good for you."

You smiled back just a little, not ready to bring your guard down yet. "I've had to deal with more than enough. It's best not to engage."

"Oh, I know, I know." The lady said, shaking her head. "That's how it is for us educated gals. Always having to put up with pigs. See, I went to college in the sixties, so I can tell you some real stories."

This was a new experience. Talking to Hannibal's friends and having them listen to you was something you never considered possible. Now, you were one of the educated gals. You were just about to strike up a conversation with this woman, when the man next to her decided someone desperately needed to play devil’s advocate.

“I find that sexist, actually.” He cut in. “Not all men are pigs.” 

The silence following his comment was deafening and you wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Whatever progress Hannibal and Dr. Ramset made breaking down your defenses was completely reversed and you were ready to retreat.

Dr. Ramset took a long sip of wine and adjusted her shawl. “David, none of us said anything about men, you drew that conclusion yourself.”

“I mean, look at you.” David gestured to your dress. You knew exactly where this was going and you wished you could just disappear. “You’re basically asking for it.” 

Dr. Ramset glared at him. “David, that’s enough.” 

“I’m just stating facts.” David crossed his arms. “If you dress like a slut, what do you expect?”

Dr. Ramset and Hannibal seemed to have an entire conversation through prolonged eye contact before one of them broke the silence. 

"Charlotte, I hate to have to excuse myself so soon, but the president of the university is expecting me." Hannibal said, dropping your hand. Your heart hit the floor when you realized that he would be throwing you to the wolves.

"Of course, Dr. Lecter." She nodded. "Duty calls."

"I trust you'll keep an eye on my beloved [F/N] in my absence?" His voice hardened. The severity in his tone frightened you.

Dr. Ramset didn't seem disturbed or even surprised in the slightest by his gently threatening demand. "Of course."

"Thank you. And [F/N]?" He said, pressing his lips to the back of your hand. "I won't be going far. Please, try to have fun."

You tried not to look affronted, but you were going to have a long talk with Hannibal when you got home. 

"I'm just saying what everyone is thinking." David continued, his inability to take a hint positively astounding. "Why don't you respect yourself enough to cover up, [F/N]? You have a boyfriend!"

Your eyes scrolled across the room looking for any sign of Hannibal, but he was gone. Dr. Ramset finished her wine and stared at her TA with the resigned disgust of a death row jailer.

"Any other thoughts?" She said, snatching a fresh glass of wine. You looked at her with a clear expression of discomfort.

"Come on, do you see any other woman in the room dressed so provocatively?" David's voice broke mid-sentence. "No. Because they're educated enough to know that real men don't care about their bodies."

The hotel clerk approached the group. "Mr. Hosmer, there's a call for you."

David narrowed his eyes. "Uh, what?"

"Someone is on the phone asking for you." The clerk repeated. "Says it's an emergency."

David shrugged. "Fine."

Just when you thought you would be rid of him, at least for a moment, he planted his hands on your hips in attempt to "get by" you. His touch was like that of an insect crawling across your skin; unexpected, filthy and leaving you squeamish.

"I'm so sorry about that." Dr. Ramset's words echoed in your ears, but you didn't really hear them. You were too focused on grounding yourself to process what she was saying. 

“Dr. Ramset?” You said, quietly. “Which one is the president of the university?” 

She glanced at a tall woman in a dark blue suit, surrounded by equally important looking businesspeople. You followed her eyes. “That’s Dr. Mary Hosmer.”

Your ounce of righteous fury was squelched in two seconds when the reality of having to talk to someone, especially someone of stature, set in. You looked sheepishly back at Dr. Ramset. 

“Could you please ask her where Hannibal went?” You whispered. “I’d really like him to take me home now.” 

Her face turned sympathetic. “Of course, [F/N]. Stay right there.” 

You nodded. “Thank you.” 

Dr. Ramset crossed the floor and politely greeted the president. You took a few slow, calculated steps closer, just to get in earshot.

“Pardon me, but, have you seen Dr. Hannibal Lecter?” Dr. Ramset said, casually. 

“I wasn’t aware Hannibal had even arrived yet.” The president answered. “I haven’t seen him.” 

Your eyes widened. You fought the urge to freeze, but you had to move back before Dr. Ramset knew you’d been eavesdropping. You heard everything you needed and rushed back to where she’d left you.

“Dr. Hosmer said he stepped out.” She told you upon her return. “He should be back soon.” 

You tried not to show that you knew she was lying. “...oh.” 

“Would you like me to stay with you until he comes back?” 

You knew you were completely on your own. You didn’t know what was going on, but you had an inkling that it had to do with the president and David sharing a last name. All you knew for certain was that you couldn’t trust anybody. 

“Don’t bother.” You shook your head. You took off for the door, but Dr. Ramset grabbed your wrist. 

“I’m sorry, [F/N].” Her voice dropped to a low whisper. She didn’t look mad, but afraid. “But Dr. Lecter told me to stay with you. Please. Don’t make this harder for me.”

You recalled how seriously threatening Hannibal’s request was. She wasn’t answering to the president of the university. She was answering to Hannibal. You didn’t know whether to be scared or relieved. 

“Right.” You conceded, stepping back in. “I’m sorry.” 

The actual award ceremony was much longer than it needed to be, and it dragged on even longer knowing there was no reason for you to be there. Other than that, you awkwardly followed Dr. Ramset around the party like a lost puppy the whole time. You were back to your original plan: blend in, be quiet and make it through the night. 

Just when you thought the party would never end, someone tapped you on the arm. You turned around, hoping with every fiber of your being that it was Hannibal, but it wasn’t. A tall woman in a dark blue suit stared back at you. 

“I’m sorry to bother you, miss.” She said, apologetically. “But have you seen my son? I saw him talking to you and Dr. Charlotte earlier, perhaps he told you where he was going?” 

You’d pushed that man completely out of your mind. You shook your head. “He left to take a phone call and I haven’t seen him since.” 

A hand found your shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Hosmer, but I believe I saw the boy on his phone out in the lobby.” 

“Dr. Lecter!” The president’s eyes widened. “How nice of you to finally join us.” 

“...Yes, I believe he left right after making unwarranted comments towards my intended here.” Hannibal ran his hand down your arm lovingly. 

“Well, boys will be boys.” The president chuckled. “Maybe you should teach your girlfriend not to wear such revealing clothes.” 

Hannibal smiled and pulled you in protectively. “Whatever the case, I hope you find him very soon.” 

Her phone chimed in her back pocket. “Oh, that’s him right now.” 

“Wonderful.” Hannibal said. “[F/N] and I will be taking our leave.” 

He hurried you towards the door, his hand tight around yours. A blood-curdling scream came from behind you. You looked back for just a moment and found the president hollering in pain and falling to her knees. 

“Let’s go, darling.” Hannibal tugged at your arm. “They don’t deserve your presence.” 

“Hannibal, I swear.” You said, once you were in the safety of the car. “If you killed every man who looked at me like a piece of meat, sooner or later, there won’t be any men left.” 

Hannibal smirked and reached for his seatbelt. “Wonderful.” 

[jimlingss]

Sugar and Coffee [12]

Chapter 11 - Chapter 12 - Chapter 13

➜ Words: 2.1k

➜ Genres: 99.5% Fluff, 0.5% Angst, Pâtisserie school!AU

➜ Summary: It isn't hard to be a pâtisserie chef, but it's not a piece of cake either. It seems like for you in particular, life keeps throwing in one wrench after another. It always finds ways to make your sweets bitter. The cherry on top is Jeon Jungkook — a rival with a sensitive sweet tooth who always finds ways to complain about you.

cr.

“Never stop believing, never stop dreaming, and never stop doing your best!”   There’s deafening applause, standing ovations, and you get onto your own feet, clapping your hands together. The graduates are wearing bright smiles and they throw their hats into the air simultaneously. You watch them soar, knowing one day soon that’ll be you too.   Proud parents are gathered together, taking pictures while teachers are shaking the graduates’ hands, wishing them luck for their future endeavours. In the meanwhile, you hold the bouquet of flowers to your chest, paper crinkling underneath your grip and your eyes sweep the crowd.   “Do you see him?” you ask Jungkook.   He hums, hand placed on his brows to shield the blazing sunlight away. “No….oh, there he is!”   The two of you are dressed up for the ceremony. You’re in a modest dress that church goers would approve of while Jungkook is in a suit and tie like he’s going to prom. You appreciate him being here. He didn’t need to come, but he didn’t hesitate when you asked him to.    Jungkook just gives you the moral support you need.   “Y/N? Jungkook!” Seokjin is in his navy graduation gown, rich in colour. He wears a matching coloured hat with a yellow tassel and you muse the whole grad get-up looks good on him.   “Hey. Congratulations, man.” Jungkook smiles as a form of salutation.   “C-Congratulations on graduating.” You smile as well and extend your arm.   “These are for me?” He indicates the flowers, the corners of his mouth lifted. When you nod, Jin laughs and takes them. “I love them, thank you!”   “It’s nothing. I always promised I would see you walk the stage, so I’m just following through.”   “A woman of her word.” Seokjin grins, making you release half of a scoff and half of a laugh.   “Of course I am.”   You glance at Jungkook and he takes the cue. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom.” The boy hitches his thumb over his shoulder, slowly walking backwards. “I haven’t gone for about an hour now and my bladder is just killing me.” He stiffly laughs, almost bumping into some old lady. “Alright then. See you later.”   You sigh at his awkwardness and turn back to Jin. “Sorry about him.”   “No, it’s alright.” Seokjin smiles softly. “So you’re finished with all your finals?”   “Yeah, they’re all done. I don’t get much of a break though. My internship starts in two weeks.”   “Oh yeah!” He recalls, eyes lighting up. “Good luck. It should be really exciting. I still remember mine.”   “Thanks. I’m actually looking forward to it.”   “Good. You’ll make great memories, trust me.”   The pair of you stare at each other and you exhale lightly. “So this is it, huh, Kim Seokjin? All done with your schooling, you lucky bastard.”   The older man grins. “It’ll be you soon.”   “I know and I might beat you as a pastry chef one day, so you better watch out.”   Laughter bubbles out of his chest and it’s melodic to the ears. “I will.”   It’s a bittersweet moment, a nostalgic one. You remember going to his high school graduation, him at yours. Now he’s moving onto a new stage of his life again and in a way, you are too.    It occurs to you how grown up you’ve both become, how you’re not so young and naive anymore. “Can you congratulate Moonbyul, Sandeul, Ken and Hani for me?”   “I will. I’ll tell them you came by. They’ll appreciate it.”   You nod, but before you bid a final farewell, Seokjin raises his arm and gently ruffles your hair. The tension dissipates with his sincere smile. “I’m glad you came, Y/N.”   “Me too,” you say with an equally earnest smile.   “How’d it go?” Jungkook asks once you’ve regrouped with him again. You found the mop of black hair in the midst of parents and graduates, somehow munching on a hot dog he bought, and getting ketchup on his black blazer.   You hum, cheeks swelled with the biggest grin. “Good.”   You’re glad you came, that you followed through with a promise made a long time ago, one you could’ve pretended to forget. But you don’t regret showing up.    You and Seokin are almost strangers now, but you’ve realized somewhere down the line that it doesn’t make your time spent together any less fond. You loved him once and loved him wholeheartedly. He allowed you to do that. Allowed you to have those feelings and experiences.   You wonder if this is what closure is. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders, that your mind has been put to ease. Like you’ve finally closed a chapter of your life.

It’s the end of the year. All of you are halfway done with your diploma, if you’re not counting the internship and only the lectures and workshops. But it’s unfathomable how fast time moves when you don’t take notice or count the seconds ticking as you sit idly by.    Your first year is over — and you can still remember coming to this institution months ago wide-eyed and nervous. It wasn’t that long ago, but you can also see the light at the end of the tunnel, the end coming near. A lot has happened and a lot still needs to occur.   “Your internships are starting on the fourth?! Lucky, you guys get like a whole week break,” Taehyung grumbles, pouting. “I haven’t even finished packing and I’m leaving tomorrow.”   “You’re going to a catering company, right?”   “Yeah.” Taehyung perks up with a smile. “I might be starting sooner, but on the bright side, at least I’m not making wedding cakes.”   “Why does everyone hate wedding cakes so much?” You take offence, defending your internship that you’re actually excited for.   “Maybe because it’s probably one of the hardest things you could make. Wedding cakes are humongous. It’s laborious and takes days to make. There’s a reason why they’re so expensive.” Yoongi leans back as he’s proving his point. “Plus have you ever worked with bridezillas before who want everything perfect? There are Karens galore. I’m not eager to work at a restaurant, but it’s still easier than a wedding cake company.”   “I’m sure it won’t be that bad.” You have yet to learn how to actually make a wedding cake, but how hard can it be? At the end of the day, it’s just a bigger cake for a fancier occasion. You look over to Jungkook. “Right?”   But he doesn’t look you in the eye.   He mutters incoherently and when you roughly nudge him, he sighs. “I can’t say I’m….excited.”   “Didn’t you want to go somewhere that works with chocolate?” Hoseok asks, his own internship at the Marriott hotel. It’s a sweet gig and apparently close to where Aeri will also be working for her own cooking fellowship.   “Yeah.” Jungkook sighs again, running a hand through his black locks, picking up the habit of Jimin. Said man is already gone, left yesterday for a pastry shop in the city next door — a cute place he told you about called Bread & Butter. “But apparently the man who runs the place with his wife is a chocolatier.”   “It’s not about the place, it’s about the mentor,” you chime and he remains unimpressed.   “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”   You quirk your head to the side, lashes batting. “What? Not excited to spend a whole summer with me?”   Jungkook glances at you and then diverts his eyes quickly. He gives you no answer.   You click your tongue in annoyance. At least Taehyung can appreciate it, openly wishing he was working with someone that he knew.   Jungkook is probably the biggest reason why you aren’t afraid or anxious. You know you have each other’s backs, that you’ll learn together, and there’s no way he can be better at cakes than you are.   The man might be good at his chocolate but his cakes are dry.   //   “Try not to rip each other’s heads off,” Hoseok says moments before getting on the bus, duffle bag in hand. He’s the last one to go.   “Nah.” Jungkook throws his arm over your shoulder and pulls you towards his chest. “I still need someone to take the blame when things go wrong.”   “Excuse me?!” You turn to him and he laughs boyishly, making you pout.   Hoseok grins, bidding his last farewells before he gets on the bus and waves goodbye as the vehicle takes off down the road.   It’s sad to see all your friends going to different places, to forge their own separate ways. But you know goodbyes are inevitable and that it won’t be long till their return. You’re just glad that right now Jungkook is with you.   Campus empties out in the days that follow. Only you and Jungkook are staying in your dorm rooms over the summer. Hoseok is getting accommodation at the hotel he’s working for, Jimin is staying at a boarding house during the duration of his internship, and the rest going home where it’ll be more convenient for them.   It’s eerie to see the paths so empty, the dining center closed down, and the corridors void of people and noisy conversation. It’s apocalyptic. A ghost town.   There’s no one around but the pair of you.   “Are you ready?” you ask, breaking the silence. You spin around on your heel with a smile to face him, attempting to bring up the somber mood.   You don’t realize the small action has such a big impact.   Jungkook’s heart stutters. Your hair is flying in the breeze, the side strands brushed away behind your ear. Your eyes are glimmering as the sun sets, casting a golden hue on you that makes you glow. And you look at him so happily.    Jungkook has to resist the urge to pull you in. To kiss you.    He doesn’t know how he’s going to spend an entire summer with you and just you.   But he’s ready. “I am.”   “I’m gonna crush you, Jeon.” You laugh, not helping with his situation. Jungkook wonders what it takes to capture this moment and make it tangible. “Make the best wedding cakes anyone has ever seen.”   “You better walk the talk then.”   “Course, I will.”   Jungkook’s initial impression of you was never wrong. You’re stubborn, childish, a brat. You’re also annoying and irritating beyond belief. It’s amazing how sometimes you can just grind Jungkook’s gears without even knowing. But you’re also sensitive, sentimental, softer than he expected — and it’s what led him to have a closer view of you.    From the time you bursted into tears in the kitchen to when he called out your name to join him for lunch. Bringing you over to his friends' place and his family for the holidays. Teaching you how to temper chocolate and making truffles on Valentines for your ex. Going out on the town to be his wingwoman and having you as his partner in a competition and winning.   Those tiny moments lead him closer and closer.    Little by little.    One by one.   Without him realizing….   In these months that you’ve spent together, Jungkook has become unequivocally captivated by you.   “Y/N.”   “What?”   “I like you.”   Jungkook admits it out loud. Unabashedly. He tried to get over it, ignore it, clear his mind. He did all of it while trying to keep you by his side as his best friend, but it didn’t work. He can’t.   His feelings for you overwhelms him.   It’s a container overflowed with spillage all over the sides — he can’t repress it and doesn’t want to. He faces it head on, even if it’s reckless.   But you merely snort after a beat. “Thanks, grinch. I like me too. You’re not too, too bad, I guess.”   There’s no way you’re this obtuse. You’re not dense. Jungkook knows you well enough and he suspects you’re feigning ignorance, maybe because you’re traumatized and not willing to risk friendship again. But he presses on, not allowing you to ignore his heart on his sleeve.   “I mean it.”   “I mean it too.”   Jungkook assertively grabs your arm, stopping you in your tracks, He looks you dead in the eye, going for a bold strategy with no room for escape or for you to disregard what he’s spilling out to you. He corrects himself—   “I’m in love with you.”

[derireo]

lost and found ↦ itaru and izumi

Fate is a funny thing don’t you think? It hits you when you least expect it, and it always gives you the chance to accept it or run away from it.

「 2.8k words 」

cw: part two to sad little pair. separation and reconciliation.

Itaru and Izumi had pretended that nothing had happened after that day. Not a single peep of what had transpired that afternoon made it past their lips, and they decided that it was better that way.

Izumi forcefully shoved away the memory of Itaru's hug that brought her comfort while Itaru locked away the memory of her tired body leaning against him for support.

She chose not to remember the apologetic face he wore when he left her house that day and he refused to remember the way she had hid her face from him when he left.

Except that, Itaru actually couldn't forget the image of her still kneeling on the ground even as he stood up from the floor. The way she held a hand to her face to save what little pride she had left and still said 'goodbye' when he stepped out of her house.

Itaru couldn't forget anything, but it looked like she could.

"Are you excited for graduation?" She whispered softly, months later, as they laid on the floor in her lounge room.

That afternoon was far behind them, and Izumi was looking forward to what the future had in store for her. She continued to pretend that Itaru wasn't planning on disappearing off the face of the earth as they neared the last day of high school, to the point that she believed he was gonna stick around just a little longer.

Itaru mulled over his answer to Izumi's question as he stared at the ceiling, his hands folded atop his stomach while Izumi had her arms folded beneath her head.

"I'm in between." He said, turning his head to look at Izumi who was smiling. 

"What about you?"

"I'm excited." She responded, but didn't return Itaru's gaze. "We're finally free."

Her expression was soft and held a tinge of warmth and happiness. Truly, she seemed to be excited, but for some reason Itaru felt his heart clench with sadness.

He looked back up at the ceiling, having nothing else to say, and pretended he wasn't disappointed when Izumi still didn't spare him a glance.

It wasn't until their last day had come up when Itaru felt his heart clench again. Their ceremony had finished a little while ago and his family were keeping him busy with all of the photos they were taking.

He had wanted to find Izumi after everyone descended the stairs to leave the auditorium, but lost sight of her. She should have passed him since her last name was further below on the list, but he missed her and the opportunity to celebrate with his family.

Izumi's mom hadn't come to the ceremony, claiming she needed to go to work, and she wasn't sure if the letter she had sent to her father reached him. She didn't even know if it was the correct address.

If he could offer her one more thing before they departed, Itaru wanted to show her what it would have been like to have a sort-of happy family.

His heart felt heavy and he couldn't smile for the camera anymore. His parents deemed that it was a sign that they should go home.

They drove away from the venue in silence, Itaru staring out the window while his sister scrolled through all the photos they took, his parents speaking to each other as they drove their way home.

His family understood why he was like this, having met Izumi plenty of times to find themselves fond of her too. He'd talk about Izumi at the dinner table if he had an interesting enough story, replacing Tonooka with the sound of her name falling from his lips instead of his.

They understood that Itaru had grown to like Izumi more as a friend as the days passed, but they didn't want to involve themselves when it came to her family problems.

They cared for her, of course, but they didn't want her mother to lash at them if they ever did something 'wrong' in the eyes of Mrs. Tachibana.

Itaru dropped his cap on the seat between him and his sister and dragged his hand through his hair to distract himself from the empty feeling in his chest.

"Oh. Do you think that's Izumi walking down the street?" Itaru's sister commented as she ducked her head to see through the windshield.

The question made Itaru's heart stutter and he begged for his father to stop the car so that he could greet her, but his dad refused.

"I can't." He said, apologetic. "There's a bunch of cars behind us."

And at that point, Itaru was already rolling down his window, heart racing in his chest as the wind blew at his trimmed fringe and his blocky glasses.

His heart was in his throat now as he recognized Izumi's back, still clad in their graduation gown with her cap in her hand.

She wore jeans and her sneakers to the ceremony, unable to find clothes that were cheap enough for a high school student.

It was an odd sight to behold as she was the only one in casual clothes, and there were whispers among his grad class as well as in the audience when she received her diploma with a charming smile.

Izumi told him, a few days before today, that her mother's dresses didn't fit her body when he had asked what she was going to wear.

It was a good call on her part, at least. She didn't have to walk home in heels.

But that's not what mattered. She was walking slowly, but the car was going too fast and all Itaru could do was shove his upper body out the window while calling out Izumi's name, his arm desperately reaching out to her before they passed.

His breath left his lungs then, and it felt like the world was moving in slow motion when he saw her lift her gaze from the sidewalk to see who was calling. And she smiled, her eyes meeting Itaru's for the briefest of moments as she waved him goodbye.

Her expression told him that she was accepting their end, and Itaru was barely able to utter his farewells as the car drove further and further away.

It had been, what, six years since they last saw each other?

Not that Itaru cared anymore. Izumi was but a good memory from high school, and there was nothing else he could do to find her anymore.

He had studied his ass off in university, locking himself in his own room to finish his homework and then work on studying for the next quiz, test, exam. He didn't have time to go look for someone who probably had no interest in him anymore.

So he gave himself time to play his video games of course, rather than conduct a search. His family wasn't really happy about that part, but as long as he finished university with a degree and managed to get a high-paying job, they would let Itaru continue with his obsessive hobby.

Eventually his hard work paid off, and Itaru finally had enough money to move out of his parent's house and find a new home.

Well. He didn't find a new place yet.

Hence the reason why he was currently at Veludo Station, staring at the bulletin board that had different offers for housing.

He had come here after a long day at work, his tired eyes searching for an appealing enough apartment or roommate. His briefcase felt heavy in his hand and he could feel his shoulders slouching as he continued to stare, unsatisfied with each offer that he read.

He almost didn't bother to take a step to the side when someone else came up to the bulletin board, his body exhausted with how hard he had worked today.

His side step was heavy as he had at least some respective for the people around him, but didn't bother to respond when the person quietly thanked him.

It was a woman who showed their gratitude, soft-spoken and timid. She was a bit shorter than him, her head at the same height as his jaw probably.

Itaru wasn't even going to bother looking her way until he saw how she took a photo of each flyer on the board, the sound of her camera clicking awfully loud as it rang in Itaru's eyes.

He clenched his jaw once, twice.

Then she took another photo while Itaru was struggling to read a sentence and he had to take a deep breath to calm his boiling blood.

He turned his head in the direction of the woman who seemed to be completely unaware of how annoying she was being, and as he opened his mouth to plead with her and ask her to kindly put her phone away, the words died in his throat.

"U-Uh..." His breath came out in a pathetic wheeze, seeing who it was right beside him.

That all too familiar, side-swept hair was one hint. The pigeon-toed feet was another. Those round, black rimmed glasses and that thoughtful frown she wore was just a few more.

It felt like it was graduation day all over again; when the world came to a slow and all of the breath in his lungs had escaped him.

Itaru found that he couldn't speak.

The woman felt a pair of eyes on her and had to turn to see who it was, phone dangling from her hand in a haphazard way that would have anyone sweating. Her brown, sparkling eyes caught onto Itaru and she pursed her lips to one side, wondering why he was staring.

"May I help you?" She asked curiously.

The smile she gave him was kind, and she pocketed her phone to give Itaru all of her attention.

It wasn't until he ran a hand through his hair when she realised who was standing in front of her. Her smile dropped to show her confusion and disbelief, and she visibly flinched when Itaru reached out to greet her with a handshake.

"Um. Hi." She said with cinched eyebrows, smiling awkwardly as she took hold of Itaru's hand to take it.

Her palm was warm in his grip as they gave each other a firm shake, and they took a step to the side of the bulletin board so that they avoided blocking it from the others who had wanted to check out the listings.

"Izumi." He sighed, relieved.

Relieved to see that she was okay.

"Yeah..." She nodded, smiling crookedly as she released Itaru's hand when he didn't let go. Izumi tried to be discreet when she wiped her hand on her pants to dry it (Itaru was sweating), but of course, the man saw it, and she flushed while trying to defend the man from himself.

"I-It's okay...don't be embarrassed." Izumi panicked, seeing how Itaru quickly wiped his own hand on his pant with a panicked laugh.

"You—uh, you look different." She gestured wildly, waving her hand at Itaru who only smiled and rubbed the back of his neck. He shrugged his shoulders in a sheepish way and sucked in a breath to calm his nerves, still in disbelief that he'd run into Izumi here of all places.

"Thanks... I think." He laughed. 

"It's a good thing, I promise." She chuckled and pushed her glasses back up her nose with a bashful smile.

Izumi noticed that he had grown taller over the years, and that he even dyed his hair a convincingly natural blond. He ditched his glasses for contacts too, but all the while kept that lazy air around him.

She was glad to know he took care of himself while they were apart.

...She realised that she hadn't changed so much over the years.

Maybe it was a good time to run.

Izumi threw her thumb behind her shoulder and smiled.

"I've got to g—"

"I've missed you."

Itaru breathed before Izumi could finish her excuse to leave.

"You were gone before I knew it." He said softly, taking Izumi's wrist in his hand to pull her forward until they were in each other's space.

"Why didn't you give me the chance to say goodbye?"

He was close. Too close. People were probably staring at them when he bent down to her level, and she flushed a faint pink when he stared at her with a sharp gaze as he whispered.

She couldn't bring herself to lie after all the years that had passed them by and she pressed her lips into a thin line at that fact. Her wrist was trapped in his grip, so she had no chance of escaping him unless she wanted to use physical force.

Izumi was helpless in the presence of Itaru and she no longer tried to pull herself away from him.

"I didn't want to hear you say it. If I did, I don't think I would have been able to keep it together." She laughed quietly, smiling in a way that made Itaru's heart twist.

Izumi tucked a piece of hair behind her ear while avoiding his gaze and sucked her lip into her mouth, staring hard at the tie that wrapped around his neck to focus her attention elsewhere.

"You had your issues and I had mine. If anything, I think parting ways was the best choice for us to make." She murmured, flitting her gaze up to Itaru who was staring back at her.

"But...didn't it hurt? " He asked, eyes sad. Izumi looked as if she no longer felt the pain of the past, and it made Itaru envious. It looked like she had gotten over it far more quicker than he had, and Itaru wished he could do the same.

Seeing her again brought back everything he thought he had buried.

Izumi floundered at the question, visibly taken aback by the prying question and laughed; more incredulous this time around.

"Yeah? I—what? Is that even a question?" She smiled, gently tearing her wrist away from Itaru's grip.

"I was a mess for years. I mean—I still am, but, that's not the point." She waved her hands oddly to distract herself from the embarrassment that was heating her face, and she took a small step away from the man in front of her.

"Itaru. You meant a lot to me. I was so torn. I didn't know how else to cope when I didn't have you around anymore. It was like I—I was suffocating. Suffocating in the loneliness and drowning in the darkness.

But I had to learn how to overcome it all by myself. I had no one else to rely on, and so I had to become the person I didn't have. Of course, it hurt, Itaru. But if I don't learn how to heal on my own, what good can I do for anybody else?"

Izumi was breathless after her tangent, her face warm with all of the stress and sadness she had expressed to Itaru as she rambled about what she did when he was gone.

"It hurt so much when, in my moments of weakness, I'd still call you even after you changed numbers. When I couldn't visit your house because you were no longer there. When I'd still see Tonooka hanging around, telling me that you weren't going to return."

Izumi placed a hand on her forehead to cool herself down before her voice could break, and she closed her eyes as she drank in a deep breath.

"It hurt, Itaru. But I knew you didn't want to stay any longer, and I told myself that it was okay."

With her voice dwindling down to a whisper, Itaru sucked in a sharp breath and reached out to cradle Izumi into his chest before he could see her tears begin to fall.

"I am so sorry." He whispered, his trembling lips tickling the outside of her ear as Izumi sobbed into his shoulder, the moisture from her eyes staining his suit jacket.

The scent that stuck to her was still the same; freshly cooked rice with a hint of that cherry blossom perfume her boss back in high school used to gift her every Christmas.

It made Itaru cry out with relief as he held her tighter to his chest, finally convinced that all of this was real as she punched at his chest and his stomach to punish him for all of the pain he has caused her.

"I missed you so much." Itaru whispered softly as he smoothed his fingers through her hair like he used to back in the day, grunting out of slight annoyance when Izumi gave him a harder punch to the stomach.

"You're such an asshole." She cried into his shoulder, slapping at his sides. "I hate you. So much."

Itaru almost wanted to cry himself. Not because of the overwhelming emotions he felt, but because of how intent Izumi seemed to be on physically hurting him.

"My best friend~ don't be like that—ugh. Please." He coughed over her shoulder when she threw her knee up into his stomach, tears still running down her face as he held onto her for dear life.

He guessed that even something that was once lost, will always have the chance to be found again.

[nineteenseventeenbarnes]

Cinderella

Pairing: CollegeAU! Bucky x reader Genre: fluff Word Count: 3084 Warnings: n/a

I stood in the middle of the school gym, sweat dripping down the back of my neck, I was dead tired. I can’t wait to get home and jump under the sheets of my big comfortable bed.

I snapped out of my trance as I heard the beat of the music blasting through the stereo and moved to the side, waiting for my cue before I hopped in and began dancing to the music alongside my cheer mates.

“Good job, girls!” Our head instructor yells, clapping her hands. “Take a break! Be back in 5. We’ll go through the routine a couple more times and we’re done for the day!”

The other girls cheer, some of them dropping themselves on the floor, others making their way out the gym to grab food or a breather. I need one too.

I walk over to the bleachers and grab my water bottle, chugging the entire content of the bottle down, savoring the feeling of the water passing through of dry and itchy throat.

“Hey! Save some for me!” Nat yells and grabs the bottle from my hand, drinking whatever was left in the bottle. I let out a big sigh and sit on the bleachers, massaging my aching legs.

“I just want this to end,” Nat groans, plopping beside me.

“You’re telling me,” I mumble in response.

“Wanna go grab a bite after practice?” she asks me, watching me remove my shoes and massaging the sole of my aching feet.

“Nah, I’m gonna head right home and sleep,” I reply. Nat rolls her eyes and grabs one of my shoes, examining it.

“Hey, give that back,” I demanded, scared of what she’d do.

Sometimes, Nat could be unpredictable. There was a time in high school where she pulled the fire alarm because she thought the whole week had been too ‘uneventful’ - her words. Needless to say, it was definitely eventful for her after the incident, I heard the principal’s office served instant coffee.  

Nat looked at me, wiggled her eyebrows, and then threw my navy blue Nike Air shoe across the gym, landing right below the ring of one of the basketball courts.

I give her a look. She just stood up with an innocent look on her face and skipped away, knowing I was going to be annoyed. I rolled my eyes and made my way across the gym to grab my shoe.

Right before I could pick my shoe up, someone beats me to it and holds it out for me.

“Thank you!” I tell the stranger before I glance up and get a better look at him. He was around 6 to 6'2, wearing the university’s basketball jersey and had a towel hanging around his neck. He had dark brown locks that he pulled into a bun, a little stubble growing, and the most captivating set of ocean blue eyes ever.

“No problem, Cinderella.” He grins and walks away.

Hi, my name is Y/N L/N, a senior college student at Oregon State University. I’m a member of the university cheer group together with my best friend Nat, and we’re proud of that. We worked really hard to get where we are.

The next day, I get to the campus and see a bunch of colorful posters and streamers being hung up. I almost forgot graduation was around the corner, meaning the graduation ball was coming up.

On the way to my last class for the morning, I receive a text from Nat, who had decided to ditch classes today.

FROM: Nat Y/N/N, meet you in the mall at 5. See you! Xx

Oh right, I was going graduation ball shoe shopping with her this afternoon - I nearly forgot. I tucked my phone in my pocket and proceeded to class.

I impatiently tapped my foot on the tiled floors of the mall and checked my phone for the 100th time. It was nearly six, and Nat was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t reach her through her phone, nor could I find her in her favorite café down the street.

A couple of minutes later, I receive a text and nearly screamed out loud.

FROM: Nat Y/N, I LOVE YOU. SO MUCH. Can’t make it. :( Bruce’s taking me out to meet his parents. I’LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU, I SWEAR. xx

“Fucking hell,” I mumbled, closing the message. “Guess I’ll have to go pick something out myself.”

I begin to walk around the mall, looking through shop windows to see if any heels attracted me, and as I got on the escalator to get to the second floor, someone grabbed my wrist, startling me and making me lose footing.

I fell backward and crashed into someone’s chest as the escalator continued moving upwards.

“Whoa, easy there, Cinderella,” A familiar voice spoke, a hint of playfulness in his voice. I spun around and saw the boy who gave me back my shoe during practice the other day.

“It’s you,” I whisper, standing back up, still a bit shocked from the fall. He grins and gently pushes me, signaling me to get off the escalator as we got to the top.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask him, trying to make small talk. It’s not that I wasn’t comfortable with him or anything; it’s just that we barely knew each other and he was talking to me as if we were buddies.

“Well, I was going to buy a tie for the ball next week, but then I saw you,” he tells me. I nod and turn to walk away, letting him go do his business until he grabs my wrist again.

“Yes?” I politely ask him.

“What are you doing here, Cinderella?” he asks me with a toothy grin.

“Shoe shopping for the graduation ball.”

“That’s pretty ironic,” his smile turning into a smirk.

“How so?” I ask him, trying to humor him and his small talk.

“You’re Cinderella,” he starts. “Buying shoes. For the grad ball.” He explains. I raise an eyebrow, obviously confused with where this ctonversation was going.

“Well, Cinderella, why not let Prince Charming come along?” he suggests, wiggling his eyebrows.

A small smile forms on my face, amused by what this boy was saying. Hell, I didn’t even know his name.

“Well, Prince Charming,” I play along. “Before I let you take me shoe shopping, may I know your name?”

“My name is James Barnes, but they all call me Bucky.”

“Well, hello, Bucky, the name’s Y/N L/N.”

“Well, Y/N, shall we start looking for your glass slippers?”

About an hour and a half later, Bucky plops himself on the sofa of the last shoe store in the mall.

“I swear, if there isn’t a pair you like in this goddamn shop, I might as well just get you to sneakers,” He grumbles, tired from following me around the 26 shoe stores in this mall. I chuckle and start looking through the shelves. "Dummy, you didn’t have to tag along,“ I told him the 10th time today.

"Dummy, I told you wanted to,” he responded, mocking me.

After walking pass every shelf in the store, with nothing catching my eye, I turned around and got ready to go, until I saw those pair of shoes in the corner of one of the shelves. It was a pair of gold stilettos, probably 5 or 6 inches.

“Hey, Cinderella, are you done? 'Cuz I’ m-” Bucky whines, walking over, but stops midway. “Those look hot.”

I roll my eyes at his comment and check the bottom for the size. It’s a size 38, perfect. As I bend down to try the pair of heels on, Bucky stops me.

“What?” I ask him.

“May I have the honors?” he asks in a fake British accent.

“Sure. I AM Cinderella after all,” I joke and give him the pair. He bends down and grabs the left heel and my left foot, gently slipping the heels on, followed by the right one.

“It’s perfect.” I squeal, walking around in them.

Bucky grins widely, probably relieved that I finally found a pair of heels.

It was the night of the ball and I was sitting at our table, going through some of the pictures I’ve taken with Nat earlier tonight. I was in this gorgeous gold gown and my matching heels from the other day.

Surprisingly, I hadn’t seen Bucky around all week. I never got to thank him for tagging along with me the other day. After paying for the shoes, we had a quick dinner and McDonald’s and parted ways.

“Boo,” a voice whispered into my ears, making me jump in my seat.

“Good Lord,” I breathe out, turning around to see Bucky with an amused look on his face. Speaking of the devil.

“Scared you, Cinderella?” he asked with a raised eyebrow, chuckling. I roll my eyes but smile a little.

He sits on the empty chair next to me. It was supposedly Nat’s seat, but she’s off somewhere playing or mingling.

“Hey, Bucky?”

“Yeah?” he replied, looking at me.

“Why do you keep calling me Cinderella? You know my real name,” I ask him, wanting to know what he’d say. He merely shrugs and smiles.

“Boys,” I mumble, earning a soft chuckle from the boy.

“And why are you here, Bucky?” I ask him, trying not to sound rude.

“I was bored. Plus, I missed you,” he answered, giving me an adorable crooked smile. I return his smile and get back to looking through my pictures, Bucky still beside me.

“Hey, Y/N,” he calls out.

“Yeah?” I tore my eyes away from my phone and to the boy beside me.

“I-”

“Y/N!” Nat calls out, walking back to our table from somewhere. She gives Bucky a questioning look, wondering why he was here.

“Umm… See you around,” Bucky mumbles as he stands up and quickly leaves the table.

“What was that about?” Nat asked.

“Don’t know…"

It was almost midnight when the ball ended. The students were leaving the area, but Nat and I stayed, waiting for our other friends.

When we were finally ready to go, Wanda, one of our other friends, suggested we should hit the club down the road.

"We’re going drinking?” I asked, not exactly surprised, but just making sure.

“Yeah!” Wanda responds, hopping up and down in excitement. Clubbing was her forte. So we left the area and walked towards Club Hydra. 80% of the seniors should be there right now, partying.

“WOOOO! YEAH, BABY!” Tony, a guy from one of our classes, screams in our ears as we walked in the club, music blasting through the speakers. Many people sat by the bar, others in the booths while others danced on the dance floor.

“Let’s go dance!” Nat shouts over the music, pulling me along. I laugh and follow her to the dance floor, jumping around, doing really stupid moves like the sprinkler and bunny hops.

Half an hour later, I got tired and told Nat I was going to grab a drink and sit down. She shooed me away and continued dancing with our other friends.

I made my way towards the bar and ordered a margarita, making myself comfortable on one of the bar stools.

“Hey, Cinderelly,” a familiar voice called out, I turned around to see Bucky standing there, his signature crooked smile etched on his face. His bow tie and the first two buttons of his dress shirt were undone.

“Hey, Prince Charming,” I played along, laughing as Bucky struggled to get on the high bar stool despite his height.

“Here’s your drink,” the bartender says, pushing the blue drink towards me. I thank him and take a sip, feeling the alcohol burning down my throat.

“My, oh my,” Bucky talks in his not so convincing British accent, his words slurring a bit. “Her majesty drinking alcohol?”

“Bucky, are you drunk?” I asked, amused at how similar his attitude when he’s drunk and when he’s sober are so similar.

“Of course I’m not, Y/N!” he replies, taking a sip from the glass he was holding. Probably whiskey.

“Oh yeah?” I chuckle. “How many fingers am I holding?” I ask him, holding all five of my fingers up.

“I’m tipsy, not blind,” he reminds me, patting my head.

“You just admitted you’re drunk,” I tell him, shaking my head.

“No, no, no,” he shakes his head. “I’m tipsy. There’s a fine difference between the two, Cinderella.”

“Sure, sure,” I answer, not wanting to start an argument with a drunk – I mean – tipsy person.

“There really is a difference, though!” he begins, his words becoming more and more slurred as he takes another sip of his whiskey. “If I were tipsy, I would tell you you looked beautiful tonight, if I were drunk, I’d tell the same thing and tell you how much I regret not asking to for a dance.”

“E-Excuse me?” I shrieked, choking on my margarita, surprised at the sudden confession. I feel my face heating up, will he notice?

“Aww, look, she’s blushing!” he chuckles slowly, his head was probably spinning. Yeah, he did.

“I said you looked beautiful tonight,” he repeats, smiling.

“Umm,” I mumble, not sure how to react. “Thank you…?"

Wow, smooth, Y/N. Someone just drunkenly told me I was beautiful and my response sounded half-assed.

"BUCK. PAL, THERE YOU ARE!” someone shouts over the music, approaching us.

“STEVE!” Bucky shouts back, reminding me of a puppy whose owner just got home after a long day. He stands up from his seat, almost tumbling in the process.

“Whoa,” Steve, as Bucky called him, quickly catches his friend. “Slow down, pal.”

“Hey, Steve,” Bucky quickly speaks. “I was just telling Y/N how beautiful she was tonight.”

I mentally slapped myself as I felt my face growing even hotter. Steve shook his head and chuckled.

"I’m sorry about all of this, Y/N,” Steve apologizes, throwing an arm over Bucky’s shoulder, holding him up. “I’m Steve Rogers.”

“No harm done. I’m Y/N L/N,” I smile as Bucky’s piercing eyes continue to stare at me.

“We should get going, Buck,” Steve mumbles, trying to pull Bucky away.

“Whaaaat? But I was talking to Y/N,” he whines, his words continued to slur. Steve chuckled and kept dragging Bucky away as he protested.

“We’ll see you around, Y/N. It was nice to finally meet you,” Steve grins.

“Bye, Bucky, bye, Steve,” I waved as they left. I continued thinking about Bucky’s words. Was he being serious? I tried not to think about it, but his words continued to echo in my head.

Here I am, six months later, still kind of fresh from college, but definitely enjoying my 8-8 job - sarcasm intended.

After the party, in the two months before graduation came around, I never saw Bucky around campus or around town anymore. Yeah, sure, I searched him up on social media, never having the guts to add or follow him, and I saw Steve around campus, we occasionally said hi, but never had we ever brought Bucky up. I didn’t bother asking anyone either. It felt like that night, the night at the club, it was supposed to be something between us.

For two months, I wondered and wondered about where he had gone. It’s not my fault, after his remarks at the club, I wouldn’t be a girl if I didn’t want to confront him and ask for answers. Did he mean it? What he said? That was the question running through my mind, a question I believed never would be answered.

But of course, like every question we have, we find the answers eventually. I found the answer to my question on graduation day as all the students were called one by one.

It was a windy, but sunny afternoon. Everyone was gathered in the university auditorium and our school director began the ceremony. He was reciting his long boring speech about how a chapter in our life was ending and we were starting a new one. Not interested, I decided to glance around the auditorium, trying to get time to pass.

On the other side of where I sat, I saw Steve, who met my eyes. He smiled and waved, mouthing congratulations. I smiled back and congratulated him back. I glanced around his area, wondering if Bucky was around.

I’m not one to deny that I’ve taken a liking to him. A normal person wouldn’t just come up and call you Cinderella and almost treat you like one.

But then again, Bucky wasn’t a normal person.

An hour later, after all the speeches and presentations, they finally started calling our names one by one for our diplomas.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” the school president called out. I looked around, hoping that maybe that certain a particular 6 foot, brunette’s head would stand up, but to my dismay, no one stood up.

“Ah, yes,” the president spoke up, clearing his throat after. “Barnes moved to another state a few months ago.”

Well, you can imagine my reaction by now. Wide eyes, mouth agape. But, at least my question was answered.

I sat at a café across the university. The area just brought back so many memories and even after graduation, I didn’t want to move away, not especially since Nat was staying.

I was going through the notes I had written during my meeting with my client earlier and occasionally sipped on my peppermint latte, scanning through my notes.

A couple of minutes later, I receive a text, my phone lighting up, the picture of Nat and me at the ball was set as my wallpaper. I unlocked my phone and saw that I had received a text from Nat asking me where I was.

The picture brought my mind back to the graduation ball, back to Bucky. To the first time I met him, thanks to Nat, to the time at the mall, the stupid jokes he made, his whining - I shook my head, quickly replying to Nat’s text.

No, I shook my head. He was just a little crush, his crooked smile and steel blue eyes didn’t affect me. Brain, just shut up.

I went back to reviewing, blocking out the chatters in the café, when suddenly, the seat across me was pulled back.

I looked up and my eyes widened. I couldn’t get anything out of my mouth.

“Mind if I sit here, Cinderella?”

[aqvarius]

I been wondering how many untranslated sub stories hlitf left? And which one, that u want to be translate asap

at first i was just going to answer this as “a lot”, but i was curious and really decided to count the actual number. and the answer is A LOT. 129 untranslated substories to be exact!! (128 when ayumu’s episode 0 comes out). i also didn’t count “discontinued stories” or reward stories (the ones you can only get if you met campaign requirements) or repackaged stories (there’s a substory which is just the text version of goto/kaga/shinonome’s voiced stories, and another 5 which are just goto/kaga/shinonome’s voiced stories split by chapter rather than character. i also didn’t check koi cafe. 

there are so many that i want to be translated!! but let me list a few of the ones i want the most:

all of the 勘違い ♡ BABY stories, also bc the SP (bodyguards) appear in these stories~

in kaga’s one, you go on a diet cause he squished your stomach and said it was soft while he was sleeping lol and also bc ayumu is compiling photos for something like a yearbook (graduation album) and saw you about to eat a doughnut and told you that the camera adds 10lbs. because you go on a soy-heavy diet, your period isn’t arriving and you go see an obgyn as recommended by riko. in the hospital, you bump into katsuragi!! anyway you left your phone in the obgyn department and get called to retrieve it on the loudspeaker so katsuragi and shinonome hear it and assume you’re pregnant. you tell shinonome to keep it a secret and then he blackmails you into helping him with the grad album and kaga gets annoyed since you’re listening to someone other than your master. when he finds out that you went to the hospital to see an obgyn he’s just... SO SOFT AND CARING???????? he makes you lie down and sleep and he makes you so much food and is relieved that your complexion is back to normal and when you tell him the reason you started dieting he APOLOGISES ALSKDJFLAS. one of the options to respond to his apology is asking him if he has a fever lol. another option is telling him to stop (apologising) and be mean like he usually is and then he’s like are you a masochist lmao. 

anyway he tells you that if you really are pregnant, don’t hide it next time since “it’s OUR problem” and not just yours. he also says that not speaking up might harm you and that he doesn’t intend for your relationship to be loose/casual (meaning he’s serious about being with you). HELP I LOVE KAGA.

afterwards, katsuragi is in the instructor’s room to do something and then he thinks you’re pregnant so he gives you a congratulatory bouquet from your team and ayumu literally loses it. 

I LOVE THIS STORY SO MUCH i can’t WAIT until it’s translated!! you all know i love soft/caring kaga the most and getting that + pregnancy misunderstanding + katsuragi + ayumu being a brat all in one story? *chefs kiss* incredible. i read this story on sato’s room, my favourite jp blog for hlitf content.

in goto’s one, where you go to a drinking party with naruko but it turns out to be a group date (goukon). sora and kurosawa make an appearance (naturally!!)

kaiji makes an appearance in ishigami’s route in which you go to his place to retrieve some documents for him and find lipstick and a lingering scent at his place after he cancels a date because he’s busy with work...

shinonome’s one is the one i’ve briefly mentioned before where his mc ends up with a porn dvd by accident. ayumu also gets jealous of mizuki in it (since his mc in particular just loves mizuki and is starstruck every time she sees him lol, the same thing happens in one of his vip room chapters too )

soma’s route is the one i also posted about recently where you have a matchmaking meeting with subaru. i’ve mentioned this like 5 times before but i literally am dying to see subaru/soma dynamics since subaru is usually so alpha male but soma was his mentor and senpai and trained him in criminal affairs and he really respects him, so i’m desperate to see them interact particularly in a competitive(?) setting. 

there’s another substory i want which is just for kaga and soma called ふれない夜を過ごすとき (when you spend a night without touching). the common factor in both stories is that mc turns down kaga and soma’s advances in bed (because of different story-related reasons) and it results in a ‘cold’ night where they just go to sleep. it’s so appropriate for these two considering they’re the most sexual/physical in the whole title. 

in this substory, voltage alternates between your pov and his pov for each chapter which i think is so interesting. i also love seeing both instructors being so ANXIOUS? about being turned down, since it never happens. and they’re so accepting of your rejection but so worried and hurt asdlkfs i love it. seeing soma being rattled for once is an incredible feeling lmao. and also seeing the third chapter from his perspective is so cool because you really get to see him put his detective skills to use when it comes to gathering information.

a fun detail in kaga’s route is that at the beginning you watch a film together called “ 私の名は” (obviously meant to be playing on “your name” kimi no na wa) haha. by the way, this is also the substory where we meet akane (who you may have seen in kaga vip room stories and ss3). i’m not going to spoil who akane actually is but let’s just say it was totally unexpected... 

aside from these two i want:

入捜査は蜜の味 which is a substory about going on undercover mission with your man. by the way, in this substory, kosugi from my sweet bodyguard is already a famous actress whose shows sell out in under a minute. 

離れるの禁止！－手錠で１日独り占め♡ー a substory just for kaga, goto and shinonome where you end up handcuffed to your instructor for a day

私を見つけて☆王子様 an AU substory with kaga, shinonome and namba routes since they won places in the 2015 election. the concept is like a cinderella x tanabata situation and it’s honestly HYSTERICAL. 

in the kaga ver, shinonome and soma are your evil stepbrother and stepfather respectively and you can only see kaga once a year. you met him in town last year and you spent a day (and night ;)) together and now you want to go to the ball this year. goto and kurosawa are your wizards (fairy godmothers) and their sprites wear giant witch hats with their regular suits. it’s literally so funny. ishigami is kaga’s butler and honestly, he is such a claude lmao. kurosawa reappears disguised as a prince and tries to get you to dance with him and prince hyogo literally tosses him out of the way and calls him nouveau riche ;alskfdjls. anyway he does the whole “i don’t care about your status” thing and wants to be with you. turns out it was a dream the whole time and you tell kaga about it and he’s like i don’t want that fucking megane to be my butler lmaooo (amongst other cute things that he says)

in the namba ver., kaga and shinonome are your stepbrothers A and B. they’re bullying you as usual and then prince namba shows up. i love how kaga is prince hyogo but namba is just prince namba. he whisks you away to a bar somewhere after joking that you don’t have sex appeal because you’re <30 year old and then butler ishigami comes to get him lol. prince namba tells you to grow a little next time you meet and then ishigami is like stop it with the harrassment, you are already being complained about by princesses from neighbouring countries lmaoooo. anyway you get grounded by stepbrothers kaga and shinonome and your evil stepfather soma and made to stay indoors and do chores for the rest of your life while they go to the tanabata ball. wizard goto appears and he’s SHY LOL and he uses his magic to dress you up and whisk you to the ball, where you see prince namba again. you’re about to kiss and then the bell rings and you flee before the date changes (since wizard goto’s magic only works on july 7 lol). literally an entire year passes and you wish to see prince namba at the ball again and wizard goto shows up to grant your wish. however, your evil stepfamily burst in and tie you and wizard goto up because they knew you used magic to go to the ball last year hahahahahhaa. you somehow escape and ride goto’s horse to the ball and namba sees you cause your horse is like screaming/making some really weird noise. he brings you inside and has a whole bunch of gowns and accessories laid out and is like “this old man doesn’t know what kids like so just pick whatever”. you get all dolled up and he tells you he’s impressed by how mature you look and that he was waiting for you and long story short he takes you on a garden stroll and gets on his knees and asks you to be with him forever. naturally, it’s a dream and you wake up in the reference room where you chat a bit with namba and then you end up going for ramen but this is before namba ms2 probably so you aren’t together yet and you lament that he just sees you as a trainee. 

i can’t find a copy of shinonome’s ver online and i spent all my money on intl voltage so sadly i can’t summarise it but i bet it’s equally ridiculous and funny. 

カクテルグラスに愛をのせて a really cute set of substories featuring ishigami, namba and soma which are all about “cocktail language” (as in cocktails having different meanings). i want soma’s one to be translated so badly so i can see dumbass mc being fooled over and over and over again by everyone’s lies and then soma ultimately being SO cute~ 

彼が野生動物だった件 this one is basically about you and your man not being able to touch each other because you need to hide your relationship from tsugaru’s surveillance - but when it’s over, you get devoured by your frustrated boyfriend... 

カレが妬くと大変なことになりまs aka all of those rival jealousy stories. naturally i’m most desperate for soma v shinonome. also, the first of these stories to come out (a while before any of the other ones) was kaga vs tsugaru, so i thought haha they replaced the “す” with “s” for sadist. they kept the titling like this for every single rival pair (namba v kurosawa, ishigami v goto, soma v shinonome) and i was like oh that does undermine it... but then i realised that as tsugaru once said, their entire department is full of sadists and public safety division should be renamed to SM division so~

aside from all of those, i want all the anniversary stories as well with their accompanying CGs and/or manga!! 

ahh... there’s also the 2/365 birthday story (which is where ishigami gifts you the matching watch btw) which is literally just everyone spoiling you and it’s so cute. anyway if i don’t stop this now i will keep going on and on and on but basically every single hlitf substory is AMAZING? i hope they release the untranslated summer ones soon too as summer is coming up!

ETA: I FORGOT TO MENTION I ALSO WANT THIS WHOLE SET: 逆転バレンタイン- 恋人は専属補佐官 which is a valentine special where basically the roles are reversed and you are the instructor and he is your exclusive aide~ 

and i want the entire kare kiss set as well because you know how much i love a jealousy plot ;) 

EDIT 2: I ALSO FORGOT TO MENTION 加賀兵吾の再調教 if only just for this one image 

and this formalwear sprite

and also just the drama of you being locked in a cage barely conscious for days while kaga has to pretend to sell you to a perverted millionaire 

by the way, the heart necklace you’re wearing in the cg is something that kaga gave in one of his main routes iirc and he literally tramples on it in this special... the DRAMA

[aewriting]

Part 2 - You Can't Jump the Track

I had some time and decided to continue the story about UNM grad student Michael encountering Alex at the cabin while hunting down spaceship fragments. 

Here is Part 1.

Warning for brief mentions of abuse, the shed, war, and injury.

***

 Michael’s sipping his coffee (bitter, black), concentrating on it, trying hard not to stare at Alex, or the frankly insane décor in the cabin – all dead animals and plaids.  It smells of smoke and stuffiness, and for about the eightieth time in the last half hour he’s wondering what the hell happened these past ten years.

Because when he does steal glances at Alex, it’s all wrong. Like, if it wasn’t for Alex’s initial reaction to him out in the woods, he’d think for sure this was just a lookalike, a cousin, a brother – he knows Alex had older brothers.  But surely this isn't the real Alex, not his Alex – shit, not the Alex he remembers, that is.  The one who was pretty much the embodiment of two big middle fingers raised right at the Roswell establishment, while at the same time showing more care and concern for Michael than any other person had on the face of this Earth.

He’d thought about Alex, over the years.  Of course he had. Less and less, honestly, the older he got and the more entrenched he’d become in grad school, in his life at UNM.  Little things would remind him of Alex, though – an emo undergrad playing guitar in the quad, the sound of Brendon Urie’s voice on the radio, mentions of the military.  And sex. Sometimes. When he had sex with men, he’d sometimes think about Alex.  About how things had been with them.  About what could have been.

He’d tried to look up Alex a few times, with little success.  Alex Manes wasn’t an uncommon name.  He supposes that he could have tried harder, but maybe a part of him didn’t want to… if he’s honest with himself, he didn’t want to read that Alex was dead in some desert, fighting someone else’s war.  Good days, he wondered if he’d gotten out – served a safe four-year commitment then hightailed it somewhere better. Of his choosing.  Nashville? California?

Fucking anywhere but here. This… this never crossed his mind.

Alex is sitting on a recliner, on old, tattered-looking thing, sipping at his coffee slowly.  He’s been quiet since realizing who Michael was – seems apologetic for threatening to shoot him, even if those words aren’t actually said. When Michael finally does look up, he’s met by dark eyes, staring at him.

Caught, Alex clears his throat.  “So.  Grad student, UNM?”

“Yup,” Michael nods quickly.

“Did your undergrad there, too, right?”

Michael’s a little surprised that Alex remembers.  “Yeah, that’s right.”

Alex bobs his head consideringly.  “So, out there, you weren’t lying? About being out here for school? You really didn’t know,” he pauses, swallows. “Didn’t know this was my place?"

“No, definitely not,” Michael says, and he’s surprised to see the quick flare of disappointment cross Alex’s features before it quickly fades to something more closed-off.

“Hmm,” Alex murmurs thoughtfully.  “What are you studying? Geology or something?”

“Astrophysics, actually.”

Alex’s raises his eyebrows halfway up his fucking forehead, and Michael almost laughs, because it’s the most familiar he’s looked to him this whole afternoon.  “Wow,” Alex finally says.  “Well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.  You always were a genius.  Too good for this shit town.”

“So were you,” Michael says reflexively, then winces. Because Alex is still in this shit town, looking considerably worse for wear.

Alex blows out a breath. “Won’t argue with you there.” He eyes Michael.  “Can’t say there haven’t been times I wished I’d taken you up on your offer.”

Michael’s eyes widen and he can’t, can’t totally believe he’s hearing this, that Alex brought that up. He swallows thickly and isn’t sure what to say. That was the last time he’d ever seen Alex, before this morning.  Alex, with half his face covered in pancake makeup that was doing a half-ass job at concealing the bruises. Michael knew, if he could see under his cap, his gown, his clothes underneath that there would be more bruises.  It’s the first he’d been allowed out since the shed – even Jesse realized it would look fucking suspicious if his son didn’t attend his own graduation.  Michael had cornered him in the auditorium before they all marched out.

“I’ve got a full ride.  Come with me.”

“What? Guerin, stop, if someone tells him we were talking – “

“Oh fuck him!” Michael’d half-yelled, through gritted teeth. Liz Ortecho had turned toward them, looked concerned, he remembered. 

Alex had dropped his head. Lifted his cap, revealing an uneven buzz-cut, nearly shaved.  It was then Michael noticed that the piercings were gone, too.

“It’s too late.  It’s done.”

Michael remembers how the rising panic had felt, the way he’d felt too-warm in his skin.  “What, what’s done?” Alex had been silent. “Alex?” he’d pleaded.

“I’m 18.  Just turned.  And I… I enlisted.  Air Force.  I ship out in two days.”

And with that, Alex had replaced his cap on his head, pushed past Michael to find his place in the alphabetical order lineup.  And Michael… Michael never crossed the stage.  Was too busy retching in the bathroom.

He’d tried to connect again, before Alex left, but it was no use. Went so far as to park his truck in Alex’s neighborhood and watch his window in the middle of the night, but didn’t approach. Hated the idea of making things even worse for Alex.

Looking at him now, he thinks he should have blown out every window in the whole Manes residence, marched Alex out, burned down the house.  And certainly the shed.

He refocuses on Alex, who’s got a thousand-yard stare going at the moment, just sipping his coffee.

“You… you went Air Force, right?”

Alex scoffs a little.  “I went, alright. Did three tours.  Got this nice souvenir,” he gestures to what remains of his right leg, “on my last deployment.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael says. “When was that?”

“Almost two years now.”

Michael glances around the cabin.  Everything in it looks old. “And how long you been here?”

“Little over a year.  You remember Jim Valenti?  The Sheriff?”

“Sure. Kyle’s dad.”

Alex makes a face.  “Yeah.  Left it to me in his will.  Along with the décor.”

Michael nods, makes a show of looking around.  “Yeah, I was gonna say, didn’t really seem like your style.”

Alex cocks his head a bit.

“Not, not that I really know what your style is.  It’s been, god, it’s been a long time.”

“Ten years this month,” Alex says, matter-of-factly, eyes skimming over Michael with… interest? Not, not anything overt, but it’s there.  Michael’s not sure how he feels about that, exactly. Alex blows out a breath, sets down his coffee mug. “So if you’re studying astrophysics, then let me guess, those rare, specific elements?  Not of this earth, yeah?”

Michael smiles a little.  Still sharp.  “You guessed it.”

“So, like, you looking for fragments of a meteorite or something?”

Or something.  “Yup,” Michael says.

“And that device shows if you’re getting close?”

“Sure does.”

Alex leans forward a little in his chair.  Peers at it. “Is it on now?”

“Now? No, I turned it on out there. Before you made me drop it on the ground.”

Alex actually has the good grace to look a little embarrassed.  “Yeah, about that… I’m sorry.  I, I don’t really get out much, and the cabin’s pretty far from anything else, so when I saw that someone had broken the perimeter, I… I just didn’t want to take any chances.”

Michael’s staring at him.  “Broken the perimeter?”

Alex closes his eyes for a second, nods. “Yeah, I, uh, I have cameras, alarms… I, uh, I did some shit in the military. And, um, my dad’s a real ass.  As you know.”

Michael inhales sharply, flexes his left hand.  “Sure do.”

“Honestly, he’s 95% of the reason I have the security measures I do. The way he’s tried to mess with my life, you’d think I was developing nuclear weapons, not fucking other dudes.”

Michael’s eyes widen at Alex’s casual statement. “It, it just you here right now?”

Alex laughs outright at that.  “Look around, what do you think?” His laughter fades away quickly after that, leaving only a tense silence.  Alex has dropped his head and is just staring at his lap, one hand absentmindedly stroking the end of his ponytail. “This meteorite,” Alex says slowly.  “If there were fragments on my property, it wouldn’t… wouldn’t be like a big thing, would it?"

Michael stares at him, confused. 

“Lots of people, I mean. Press.” Alex looks uncomfortable.  “Since I… ah, since I got out, I haven’t really been the best around people, you know?”

Michael’s quick to reassure him. “No, no, if there even is anything here,” and there certainly is, ”it would probably be just me.” It would definitely be just him, since UNM has no idea he’s been using University funding to pursue this particular side project.

Alex’s eyes narrow a bit at that.  “Huh.  Well.  Okay.  You I can deal with,” he says with a little smile, and Michael’s not sure if that’s a threat or… something else.  “Can you show me how it works?”

He, he can’t really say no, at this point. And after dropping it, and kicking it, he should probably make sure it still works.  “Sure,” he says, picking it up off the coffee table.

“You come up with this yourself?”

“I did, actually,” Michael says, hint of pride in his voice. He fiddles with the device, turns it on, and –

“Shit!” Michael yells, reflexively kicking out both legs at the piercing sound the device is emitting.

“Fuck!” Alex exclaims, putting his hands over his ears.  “What the fuck?”

The device is, is fucking wailing.  Michael’s never, never heard it this loud, has never seen a signal this strong. It’s, it’s like they’re sitting right fucking on top of it. Michael scrambles to turn it off. “Fuck, Alex, I’m so sorry. It, it’s usually not that loud.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It, it gets louder the stronger the signal is.  Lemme turn off the noise.  I can still see the – “

“Michael.”

Michael freezes, clicks off the device entirely.  “Yeah?"

“Michael, did… did you kick the coffee table?”

“Shit, I think I did when the tracking device went off.  Sorry about that. I’ll move it back into – “

“No. Look.”

Michael looks. Swallows hard.  “Um, did you know that was there?” If he’s looking at what he thinks he’s looking at, there’s a trap door in the floor, perfectly covered by the normal placement of the coffee table.

“No,” Alex says shortly, eyes drawn to the floor.  “Haven’t, haven’t really been in the mood to decorate since I moved in.” He looks at Michael.  “Can you move this even more?” he asks, gesturing to the coffee table.

“Of course.” It’s a heavy table, probably on purpose, Michael thinks, and he uses a little hint of power to help slide the table out of the way, exposing a hatch.  He whistles, low.  “Your call, Alex.”

Alex grabs his crutches and scoots to the edge of the recliner.  Raises himself out of the chair and shoves his phone in his cargo pants.  Palms his gun. Once he’s next to Michael, he gives a quick nod.  “Open it.”

Michael lifts the hatch, exposing a ladder.  “May I?” he asks, holding up his phone. Alex gives a nod of assent, and Michael illuminates the shaft below them.  There’s a ladder and what looks like an open area. “Bunker,” Michael murmurs.

“What the fuck was Jim up to?” Alex wonders. He glances at Michael.  “Look, I wanna know what’s down there, but I totally understand if you don’t want to – “

“No, I do.”

“Good. Let me put my leg on.  I’m coming too.”

Michael frowns.  “You sure, man?” Alex fixes him with a dark look, and he shuts up. He watches as Alex disappears down a hall, coming back with a utilitarian-looking prosthetic limb.  Michael tries to strike the right balance between nonchalant and creepy as he watches Alex deftly attach the prosthetic.  He doesn’t bother with a shoe.   

“Students first,” Alex finally says with a little smirk, and Michael rolls his eyes, begins to descend the ladder.  He finds a light switch just as Alex drops to the ground next to him. “Well, shit,” Alex says, taking it in.

It looks like, like an office space.  There’s a very out of date computer and large metal cabinets. 

“I can’t believe this has been here the whole time.  Shit,” Alex says. He runs his hand along the keyboard, feels the computer.  He must press something, because it starts whirring to life. Michael turns to him, and Alex shrugs.  “I, uh, was a codebreaker. In the Air Force.”

Michael raises an eyebrow approvingly.  “I can see it.”

Alex holds his gaze, and there’s a spark of… something, quickly gone when Alex points to the device in Michael’s hand.  “Turn it on. Whatever you’re looking for, maybe it’s down here.  Like, maybe Jim was into rock collecting.”

Michael swallows hard.  “I dunno, don’t want to blow out our eardrums again.”

Alex frowns.  “Thought you said you could turn the sound off.”

Michael forces a quick chuckle. “Yeah, oops, let me do that real quick.” He’s hyperaware of Alex’s attention on him, on the device.  He turns it on, and it’s immediately clear to him that whatever it’s detecting, it’s big, and it’s somewhere in this room with them.

He can’t shake Alex, either.  “Those numbers,” he says, pointing.  “I’m guessing the higher they are, the closer the sample, right?” Without waiting for an answer, he takes the device from Michael.

“Hey – “

Alex is holding the device out in different directions, moving wherever the signal is strongest. Michael watches helplessly as he opens a metal cabinet. And drops the device.

Because there, in front of them, encased in glass, is the largest spaceship fragment Michael’s ever seen.

Alex grips his gun tighter, turns toward Michael. 

“That is not a fucking meteorite.”

[stevemoffett]

A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

*

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I��d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

“So what does that mean, then?”

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

*

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

*

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off—both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

*

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

[spiderman-homecomeme]

Something Borrowed

Part 3 of “And a Silver SIxpence in Her Shoe.”

AN: And here we are at the third part! Hope you guys like this one! It was just so lovely to write and I (surprise, surprise) teared up a little bit. I also went to a wedding last week, so that really inspired all this sappy emotional stuff! 

pls enjoy <3

-

“I’m not gonna say it again, Peter. I’m done trying to explain this to you—”

“—MJ, please, just hear me out—”

“—Absolutely not. End of discussion.”

“Last time I checked this was our wedding—”

“—And now I have to say it again—”

“—Not your wedding—”

“—We’re not doing our first dance to The Time of My Life.”

Peter’s head jerks back, face scrunching in confusion as he stares at her. “And why the hell not?”

There’s the faintest upward twitch of his lips at the exasperated groan that comes from his fiancée as she buries her head in her hands; he knows full well that he’s being a complete—to put it nicely —shithead.

And she knows it, too, as she tries her best not to bash her head against the dining room table. “Oh my God—”

“MJ, I can literally do the lift.” He pushes her buttons even more, seemingly just too damn proud of himself. “Just imagine it. I’m Johnny. You’re Baby. It would be… so dope.”

She looks up at him, blinking slowly, thoroughly unimpressed.

“Okay, okay, okay. Fine,” he chuckles, and she thinks for a moment that they can move on from this like normal adults, that he’ll finally let the joke go. That maybe, just maybe, he’ll give her a moment of peace and they can enjoy the rest of the nice dinner that Aunt May had so graciously prepared for them.

She really should have known better.

“If you think you can do it, you can be Johnny.”

Her eyes narrow.

A beat.

Another slow blink.

His mouths twists, lips pressed tightly together, eyes gleaming with mischief as he holds back the laugh threatening to burst out of him.

“Are you done?” MJ asks, tone even.

The corners of Peter’s eyes crinkle as he grins a toothy, perfectly innocent grin back at her.

“Never.”

And as annoyed as she currently is at her darling, dearest, sweet and wonderful fiancé, she can’t hold back the scoff-snort that escapes her as she shakes her head at him.

God, what a dumbass.

She loved him so much.

“You’re a patient, patient woman, MJ,” May huffs as she steps back into the dining room, having returned with three wine glasses and a bottle of pinot grigio.

Peter sits up in his chair, opening his mouth to retort before MJ cuts him off.

“I try.” She gives a half-hearted shrug, passing Peter a playful wink before handing the bottle opener to May. “It’s a good thing he’s pretty.”

May laughs hard at that particular statement.

The sudden, distant sirens can be heard from inside the apartment, the room falling silent as the sound passes by. Peter’s phone chimes, the police radio crackling through; something about another break-in, a serial art thief striking again in one of the richer neighborhoods.

Peter freezes, eyes wide in question as he glances between the two women and the window, throwing a cautious thumb over his shoulder. “I—Uh—”

“Go,” May says, excusing him with a gentle sigh.

It’s funny, because MJ can’t tell whether or not Peter’s more eager to leave because he gets to go fight crime, or because he’s been freed, been given an out, from the relentless teasing that both she and May could have put him through.

Less than a minute later, he’s back, suit on sans mask, rushing as he wraps May up in a quick hug before planting a fleeting kiss on Michelle’s lips.

And then, before any of them can wave him off, he’s leaping out the window.

Leaving them all alone to clean up dinner.

A moment passes. May shakes her head, laughing quietly as she pours them both a glass of the white wine. “He’ll owe us.”

And to that, MJ chuckles with her, tipping the glass. “He already does.”

May clinks their glasses together, lips twisting into a knowing smirk as she takes a sip.

Although the call had come out of nowhere, neither of them minded, or were really all that surprised. It was just something that happened, almost part of the daily routine. Plus, it was nice to have the quality time together. In the years that MJ’s been with Peter, May’s become not only another maternal figure in her life, but someone she could turn to. Someone she could trust. Anything Michelle needed to talk about—even, no especially when it concerned Peter—May was there.

And she would listen. Not just as Peter’s aunt, but as MJ’s friend.

There’s all these horror stories everyone tells her about the nightmare of in-laws, how hated they are, how it’s almost better to just ignore them and pretend that they don’t exist, and even in some cases, how they can straight up ruin a perfectly good marriage.

But, even though she’s not the traditional mother-in-law, May couldn’t possibly be any farther from that entirely too common misconception.

They talk for awhile, neither of them sure of how much time has passed since Peter flew out the seventh story window, about anything and everything, from the quality of the wine (it’s a little too dry, May points out, but she likes it anyway), to the way her and Peter’s landlord still hasn’t responded to her last text regarding the ever so slightly leaky sink.

And, probably what May’s most excited about, the wedding.

It’s still in the early phases at this point, the venue having only been chosen in the past week. And she had the dress (kind of; she didn’t physically have it, but she picked it out!)

But that was about it. Though, there wasn’t much going into the actual ceremony; it was going to be a small wedding, only family and very close friends being in attendance, both MJ and Peter not wanting all of the fuss and expense.

(They still have to pay off those pesky grad school loans, and they weren’t even done yet.)

The reception, however, was going to be bigger.

Something Peter was more than a little excited about.

“You know, Ben and I had a home wedding.” May swirls the wine in her glass, a fond smile pulling at her lips.

Humming, Michelle grins faintly. “Really?”

May nods. “In my grandmother’s house. Ben and I—we wanted something more intimate, and cheap,” she laughs quietly. “And grandma Eddie… she had this big, fancy living room. But it wasn’t too gaudy or anything like that. Oh—and the fireplace was this gorgeous, mahogany—I think? I wasn’t sure then either.” She laughs again, her eyes sparkling with joy at the memories. “It was just so beautiful…”

“It sounds beautiful,” Michelle readily agrees.

Somehow, the excitement in May’s eyes grows. They light up even more. “Oh, I have to show you now. Hold on!”

It doesn’t take long; she rushes out of the room, returning with a simple, yet pretty photo album, her smile having never left.

The album is still in near perfect condition, pristine, not a trace of dust or a photo out of place.

Something tugs at Michelle’s heart as she opens to the first page. The first picture shows the bride and groom in a close embrace, a beaming smile on May’s face as she stares up at Ben, wearing the same expression, the love and warmth between them almost glowing.

Ben looks so handsome, May looking beautiful as ever.

MJ immediately smiles, seeing the elegant white gown, the off-the shoulder lace and the delicate fall of the satin fabric. “Wow. Your dress…”

“Pretty right?” May grins. “Not bad for the nineties, huh?”

The page turns, again and again, showing another series of photos, all of them showing Ben and May deliriously happy and in love; pictures of friends and family, of Peter’s parents, Richard and Mary, a close up shot of the rings on Ben’s and May’s hands. There’s a few candid shots where they aren’t smiling, but still holding each other in tender embraces.

And MJ can’t help but notice the way May’s voice tightens as they look at all the photos, all of the memories; the way she clears her throat, the way she blinks back the prickling feeling behind her eyes.

There’s pictures of the first dance, and the second; one showing May laughing against her husband’s shoulder, a smug grin that Michelle’s definitely seen somewhere before on his face.

“We were dancing to My Girl ,” May explains, huffing out a laugh as she tries to subtly wipe at her eyes. “And he’d always look right at me when he sang, ‘when it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May.’ Always so proud of himself for that, too.” She chuckles, shaking her head fondly. “He did it every time.”

MJ lets out a quiet, all-too-knowing laugh.

The corners of May’s lips twitch again, her chin quivering slightly as she looks down at the photos.

Though, she quickly collects herself, her body relaxing as she lets out a deep, shaky sigh. “So how’s the dress coming?” She asks, shifting the attention to Michelle, her eyes still glistening as she puts on a watery, yet still genuine smile.

MJ shrugs, lips quirking into a faint, brief half-smile. “It’s good, I think. My first fitting is in… a week and a half I think? On the third.”

“Are you excited?” May asks, her eyes twinkling, the same look in her eyes the day she, MJ’s mom, and Betty watched her literally say yes to the dress.

Michelle gives a small, yet enthusiastic nod, though she still tries to play it down. “Yeah,” she responds. It had been a tiring day, trying on gown after gown; she hadn’t even really known where to start. Any dresses she wore were usually hand-me-downs, and they weren’t anything she’d ever put much thought into.

How many she actually tried on, she wasn’t sure, but it was probably in the hundreds.

(Maybe she’s being a bit dramatic, but still. It was a lot.)

Her mom had cried when they found the one . May and Betty, too.

And there was the possibility that MJ also got the tiniest bit emotional seeing herself in the mirror.

An actual bride.

Adding the veil only doubled the feelings though, at least in the three women with her. MJ honestly wasn’t feeling any of the ones the consultant gave her to try on. Sure, it made her look more bridal, more like she was at the wedding right then and there.

But, again, none of them really… added anything for her.

MJ gives a half-shrug. “Still not sure what I’m gonna do about that veil though. I didn’t really like any in the store, I dunno.” She pauses, thinking for a moment. “I figured I could use the one my mom wore, but she and my dad had a small wedding, like really small—they pretty much eloped—so she didn’t have one…”

Suddenly, May gets an idea, her face lighting up. “Borrow mine!” She suggests as if it had been obvious the entire time.

“Huh?”

“You can use mine! It’s so pretty and it would go so well with that dress—Oh let me go get it!”

May doesn’t even wait for her to respond before rushing to her bedroom, once again.

She brings a pretty, pristine box out. “Here she is.”

It’s a beautiful veil, very classic. The fabric isn’t itchy like some, it’s soft and sheer, and it almost floats as May lifts it from the box.

And it also looks very expensive.

MJ’s not sure what to say, too overcome with some unnamed emotion weighing on her chest when May hands her the veil. It’s impossibly beautiful, Michelle thinks as she gingerly touches the sheer fabric.

It’s absolutely perfect.

“May, I don’t know—”

“—You still need that something borrowed right?” May asks, smiling warmly as she sits back down in front of her.

It’s suddenly very hard to speak. Michelle clears her throat, nodding, letting out an amused huff. “I do still need that.”

“Well, there you go.”

May was more than willing to loan it. She and Ben, in their too short of time together, had had such a wonderful, happy marriage, both of them so ridiculously in love with each other. It had been some of the best years of her life, being with Ben. There wasn’t a day that went by where she didn’t miss him, where she didn’t love him, where she didn’t look back on those blissful days together, a day where she didn’t smile remembering something funny he’d said, or how he’d told her he loved her.

And now, all she wanted nothing more than to share a part of that happiness with Peter and MJ.

MJ looks down briefly at the veil in her hands before looking back up, unable to stop herself from smiling. “Thanks.”

May pulls her into a warm, motherly hug. “Anytime, sweetie.”

After helping May with the rest of the dishes, and after a few more teary hugs, Michelle goes home, the cozy, happy feeling never having left as she reads in bed, the new box sitting quietly on top of the dresser in the corner of the room.

Peter stumbles in through the bedroom window nearly two hours later, around twelve-thirty in the morning, lazily crawling out of his suit as she falls next to her on the mattress, face down into one of the pillows.

“Hey, Tiger,” she smirks, running a loving hand through the hair on the back of his head.

He mumbles an exhausted greeting, voice muffled by the pillow.  

“Rough night?”

He pushes up slightly to look up at her. “A long night.” He sighs, finally turning over onto his back. “Sorry I left.”

“S’okay.” MJ’s hand still continues to card through his dark, slightly sweaty curls. “May and I had a good talk while you were gone.”

“Uh oh,” Peter laughs. “What’d you guys talk about?”

“How I should just get out now while I can.” She doesn’t miss a beat, her expression and tone in her true, Michelle Jones deadpan.

His body shakes with another laugh. “That’s fair.”

Looking down at him, the way he’s smiling up at her, his expression so full of love and teasing warmth… it all reminds her of May and Ben, and just how incandescently happy they’d both looked as they danced, laughed, and joked together on their wedding day.

She puts her book down, sinking into the mattress next to her sleepy fiancé. The surprised smile on his face is almost audible as she pulls herself to him, nestling as close as she humanly can.

He chuckles, capturing her lips into a tender kiss. “I can’t wait to marry you.”

And she grins, snuggling closer, a contented sigh leaving her body as she shuts her eyes.

It had been so easy to see how in love with each other Ben and May were, so easy to see how they cared for each other, all from just a few photos.

How they were both so ready to spend the rest of their lives together; two best friends, utterly devoted.

And it had been easy because it’s a feeling—that same feeling—that Michelle knows too well when she looks at Peter.

“Me neither.”

[nineteenseventeenbarnes00]

CINDERELLA

Pairing: CollegeAU! Bucky x reader Genre: fluff Word Count: 3084 Warnings: n/a

I stood in the middle of the school gym, sweat dripping down the back of my neck, I was dead tired. I can't wait to get home and jump under the sheets of my big comfortable bed. 

I snapped out of my trance as I heard the beat of the music blasting through the stereo and moved to the side, waiting for my cue before I hopped in and began dancing to the music alongside my cheer mates.

"Good job, girls!" Our head instructor yells, clapping her hands. "Take a break! Be back in 5. We'll go through the routine a couple more times and we're done for the day!"

The other girls cheer, some of them dropping themselves on the floor, others making their way out the gym to grab food or a breather. I need one too.

I walk over to the bleachers and grab my water bottle, chugging the entire content of the bottle down, savoring the feeling of the water passing through of dry and itchy throat.

"Hey! Save some for me!" Nat yells and grabs the bottle from my hand, drinking whatever was left in the bottle. I let out a big sigh and sit on the bleachers, massaging my aching legs.

"I just want this to end," Nat groans, plopping beside me.

"You're telling me," I mumble in response.

"Wanna go grab a bite after practice?" she asks me, watching me remove my shoes and massaging the sole of my aching feet.

"Nah, I'm gonna head right home and sleep," I reply. Nat rolls her eyes and grabs one of my shoes, examining it.

"Hey, give that back," I demanded, scared of what she'd do. 

Sometimes, Nat could be unpredictable. There was a time in high school where she pulled the fire alarm because she thought the whole week had been too 'uneventful' - her words. Needless to say, it was definitely eventful for her after the incident, I heard the principal's office served instant coffee.  

Nat looked at me, wiggled her eyebrows, and then threw my navy blue Nike Air shoe across the gym, landing right below the ring of one of the basketball courts.

I give her a look. She just stood up with an innocent look on her face and skipped away, knowing I was going to be annoyed. I rolled my eyes and made my way across the gym to grab my shoe. 

Right before I could pick my shoe up, someone beats me to it and holds it out for me.

"Thank you!" I tell the stranger before I glance up and get a better look at him. He was around 6 to 6'2, wearing the university's basketball jersey and had a towel hanging around his neck. He had dark brown locks that he pulled into a bun, a little stubble growing, and the most captivating set of ocean blue eyes ever.

"No problem, Cinderella." He grins and walks away.

Hi, my name is Y/N L/N, a senior college student at Oregon State University. I'm a member of the university cheer group together with my best friend Nat, and we're proud of that. We worked really hard to get where we are. 

The next day, I get to the campus and see a bunch of colorful posters and streamers being hung up. I almost forgot graduation was around the corner, meaning the graduation ball was coming up.

On the way to my last class for the morning, I receive a text from Nat, who had decided to ditch classes today.

FROM: Nat

Y/N/N, meet you in the mall at 5. See you! Xx

Oh right, I was going graduation ball shoe shopping with her this afternoon - I nearly forgot. I tucked my phone in my pocket and proceeded to class.

I impatiently tapped my foot on the tiled floors of the mall and checked my phone for the 100th time. It was nearly six, and Nat was nowhere to be found. I couldn't reach her through her phone, nor could I find her in her favorite café down the street.

A couple of minutes later, I receive a text and nearly screamed out loud.

FROM: Nat

Y/N, I LOVE YOU. SO MUCH. Can't make it. :( Bruce's taking me out to meet his parents. I'LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU, I SWEAR. xx

"Fucking hell," I mumbled, closing the message. "Guess I'll have to go pick something out myself."

I begin to walk around the mall, looking through shop windows to see if any heels attracted me, and as I got on the escalator to get to the second floor, someone grabbed my wrist, startling me and making me lose footing.

I fell backward and crashed into someone's chest as the escalator continued moving upwards.

"Whoa, easy there, Cinderella," A familiar voice spoke, a hint of playfulness in his voice. I spun around and saw the boy who gave me back my shoe during practice the other day.

"It's you," I whisper, standing back up, still a bit shocked from the fall. He grins and gently pushes me, signaling me to get off the escalator as we got to the top.

"Yes, it's me."

"What are you doing here?" I ask him, trying to make small talk. It's not that I wasn't comfortable with him or anything; it's just that we barely knew each other and he was talking to me as if we were buddies. 

"Well, I was going to buy a tie for the ball next week, but then I saw you," he tells me. I nod and turn to walk away, letting him go do his business until he grabs my wrist again.

"Yes?" I politely ask him.

"What are you doing here, Cinderella?" he asks me with a toothy grin.

"Shoe shopping for the graduation ball."

"That's pretty ironic," his smile turning into a smirk.

"How so?" I ask him, trying to humor him and his small talk.

"You're Cinderella," he starts. "Buying shoes. For the grad ball." He explains. I raise an eyebrow, obviously confused with where this ctonversation was going.

"Well, Cinderella, why not let Prince Charming come along?" he suggests, wiggling his eyebrows. 

A small smile forms on my face, amused by what this boy was saying. Hell, I didn't even know his name.

"Well, Prince Charming," I play along. "Before I let you take me shoe shopping, may I know your name?"

"My name is James Barnes, but they all call me Bucky."

"Well, hello, Bucky, the name's Y/N L/N."

"Well, Y/N, shall we start looking for your glass slippers?"

About an hour and a half later, Bucky plops himself on the sofa of the last shoe store in the mall.

"I swear, if there isn't a pair you like in this goddamn shop, I might as well just get you to sneakers," He grumbles, tired from following me around the 26 shoe stores in this mall. I chuckle and start looking through the shelves. "Dummy, you didn't have to tag along," I told him the 10th time today.

"Dummy, I told you wanted to," he responded, mocking me.

After walking pass every shelf in the store, with nothing catching my eye, I turned around and got ready to go, until I saw those pair of shoes in the corner of one of the shelves. It was a gold and black pair of stilettos, probably 5 or 6 inches.

"Hey, Cinderella, are you done? 'Cuz I' m-" Bucky whines, walking over, but stops midway. "Those look hot."

I roll my eyes at his comment and check the bottom for the size. It's a size 38, perfect. As I bend down to try the pair of heels on, Bucky stops me.

"What?" I ask him.

"May I have the honors?" he asks in a fake British accent.

"Sure. I AM Cinderella after all," I joke and give him the pair. He bends down and grabs the left heel and my left foot, gently slipping the heels on, followed by the right one.

"It's perfect." I squeal, walking around in them.

Bucky grins widely, probably relieved that I finally found a pair of heels.

It was the night of the ball and I was sitting at our table, going through some of the pictures I've taken with Nat earlier tonight. I was in this gorgeous black and gold gown and my matching heels from the other day. 

Surprisingly, I hadn't seen Bucky around all week. I never got to thank him for tagging along with me the other day. After paying for the shoes, we had a quick dinner and McDonald's and parted ways.

"Boo," a voice whispered into my ears, making me jump in my seat.

"Good Lord," I breathe out, turning around to see Bucky with an amused look on his face. Speaking of the devil.

"Scared you, Cinderella?" he asked with a raised eyebrow, chuckling. I roll my eyes but smile a little.

He sits on the empty chair next to me. It was supposedly Nat's seat, but she's off somewhere playing or mingling.

"Hey, Bucky?"

"Yeah?" he replied, looking at me.

"Why do you keep calling me Cinderella? You know my real name," I ask him, wanting to know what he'd say. He merely shrugs and smiles.

"Boys," I mumble, earning a soft chuckle from the boy.

"And why are you here, Bucky?" I ask him, trying not to sound rude.

"I was bored. Plus, I missed you," he answered, giving me an adorable crooked smile. I return his smile and get back to looking through my pictures, Bucky still beside me.

"Hey, Y/N," he calls out.

"Yeah?" I tore my eyes away from my phone and to the boy beside me.

"I-"

"Y/N!" Nat calls out, walking back to our table from somewhere. She gives Bucky a questioning look, wondering why he was here.

"Umm… See you around," Bucky mumbles as he stands up and quickly leaves the table.

"What was that about?" Nat asked.

"Don't know…" 

It was almost midnight when the ball ended. The students were leaving the area, but Nat and I stayed, waiting for our other friends. 

When we were finally ready to go, Wanda, one of our other friends, suggested we should hit the club down the road.

"We're going drinking?" I asked, not exactly surprised, but just making sure.

"Yeah!" Wanda responds, hopping up and down in excitement. Clubbing was her forte. So we left the area and walked towards Club Hydra. 80% of the seniors should be there right now, partying.

"WOOOO! YEAH, BABY!" Tony, a guy from one of our classes, screams in our ears as we walked in the club, music blasting through the speakers. Many people sat by the bar, others in the booths while others danced on the dance floor. 

"Let's go dance!" Nat shouts over the music, pulling me along. I laugh and follow her to the dance floor, jumping around, doing really stupid moves like the sprinkler and bunny hops.

Half an hour later, I got tired and told Nat I was going to grab a drink and sit down. She shooed me away and continued dancing with our other friends. 

I made my way towards the bar and ordered a margarita, making myself comfortable on one of the bar stools.

"Hey, Cinderelly," a familiar voice called out, I turned around to see Bucky standing there, his signature crooked smile etched on his face. His bow tie and the first two buttons of his dress shirt were undone.

"Hey, Prince Charming," I played along, laughing as Bucky struggled to get on the high bar stool despite his height.

"Here's your drink," the bartender says, pushing the blue drink towards me. I thank him and take a sip, feeling the alcohol burning down my throat.

"My, oh my," Bucky talks in his not so convincing British accent, his words slurring a bit. "Her majesty drinking alcohol?"

"Bucky, are you drunk?" I asked, amused at how similar his attitude when he's drunk and when he's sober are so similar.

"Of course I'm not, Y/N!" he replies, taking a sip from the glass he was holding. Probably whiskey. 

"Oh yeah?" I chuckle. "How many fingers am I holding?" I ask him, holding all five of my fingers up.

"I'm tipsy, not blind," he reminds me, patting my head.

"You just admitted you're drunk," I tell him, shaking my head.

"No, no, no," he shakes his head. "I'm tipsy. There's a fine difference between the two, Cinderella."

"Sure, sure," I answer, not wanting to start an argument with a drunk – I mean – tipsy person.

"There really is a difference, though!" he begins, his words becoming more and more slurred as he takes another sip of his whiskey. "If I were tipsy, I would tell you you looked beautiful tonight, if I were drunk, I'd tell the same thing and tell you how much I regret not asking to for a dance."

"E-Excuse me?" I shrieked, choking on my margarita, surprised at the sudden confession. I feel my face heating up, will he notice?

"Aww, look, she's blushing!" he chuckles slowly, his head was probably spinning. Yeah, he did.

"I said you looked beautiful tonight," he repeats, smiling.

"Umm," I mumble, not sure how to react. "Thank you...?" 

Wow, smooth, Y/N. Someone just drunkenly told me I was beautiful and my response sounded half-assed.

"BUCK. PAL, THERE YOU ARE!" someone shouts over the music, approaching us.

"STEVE!" Bucky shouts back, reminding me of a puppy whose owner just got home after a long day. He stands up from his seat, almost tumbling in the process.

"Whoa," Steve, as Bucky called him, quickly catches his friend. "Slow down, pal."

"Hey, Steve," Bucky quickly speaks. "I was just telling Y/N how beautiful she was tonight.” 

I mentally slapped myself as I felt my face growing even hotter. Steve shook his head and chuckled. 

"I'm sorry about all of this, Y/N," Steve apologizes, throwing an arm over Bucky's shoulder, holding him up. "I'm Steve Rogers."

"No harm done. I'm Y/N L/N," I smile as Bucky's piercing eyes continue to stare at me.

"We should get going, Buck," Steve mumbles, trying to pull Bucky away.

"Whaaaat? But I was talking to Y/N," he whines, his words continued to slur. Steve chuckled and kept dragging Bucky away as he protested.

"We'll see you around, Y/N. It was nice to finally meet you," Steve grins.

"Bye, Bucky, bye, Steve," I waved as they left. I continued thinking about Bucky's words. Was he being serious? I tried not to think about it, but his words continued to echo in my head.

Here I am, six months later, still kind of fresh from college, but definitely enjoying my 8-8 job - sarcasm intended. 

After the party, in the two months before graduation came around, I never saw Bucky around campus or around town anymore. Yeah, sure, I searched him up on social media, never having the guts to add or follow him, and I saw Steve around campus, we occasionally said hi, but never had we ever brought Bucky up. I didn't bother asking anyone either. It felt like that night, the night at the club, it was supposed to be something between us.

For two months, I wondered and wondered about where he had gone. It's not my fault, after his remarks at the club, I wouldn't be a girl if I didn't want to confront him and ask for answers. Did he mean it? What he said? That was the question running through my mind, a question I believed never would be answered.

But of course, like every question we have, we find the answers eventually. I found the answer to my question on graduation day as all the students were called one by one.

It was a windy, but sunny afternoon. Everyone was gathered in the university auditorium and our school director began the ceremony. He was reciting his long boring speech about how a chapter in our life was ending and we were starting a new one. Not interested, I decided to glance around the auditorium, trying to get time to pass.

On the other side of where I sat, I saw Steve, who met my eyes. He smiled and waved, mouthing congratulations. I smiled back and congratulated him back. I glanced around his area, wondering if Bucky was around. 

I'm not one to deny that I've taken a liking to him. A normal person wouldn't just come up and call you Cinderella and almost treat you like one.

But then again, Bucky wasn't a normal person.

An hour later, after all the speeches and presentations, they finally started calling our names one by one for our diplomas.

"James Buchanan Barnes," the school president called out. I looked around, hoping that maybe that certain a particular 6 foot, brunette's head would stand up, but to my dismay, no one stood up.

"Ah, yes," the president spoke up, clearing his throat after. "Barnes moved to another state a few months ago."

Well, you can imagine my reaction by now. Wide eyes, mouth agape. But, at least my question was answered.

I sat at a café across the university. The area just brought back so many memories and even after graduation, I didn't want to move away, not especially since Nat was staying.

I was going through the notes I had written during my meeting with my client earlier and occasionally sipped on my peppermint latte, scanning through my notes.

A couple of minutes later, I receive a text, my phone lighting up, the picture of Nat and me at the ball was set as my wallpaper. I unlocked my phone and saw that I had received a text from Nat asking me where I was. 

The picture brought my mind back to the graduation ball, back to Bucky. To the first time I met him, thanks to Nat, to the time at the mall, the stupid jokes he made, his whining - I shook my head, quickly replying to Nat's text.

No, I shook my head. He was just a little crush, his crooked smile and steel blue eyes didn't affect me. Brain, just shut up.

I went back to reviewing, blocking out the chatters in the café, when suddenly, the seat across me was pulled back. 

I looked up and my eyes widened. I couldn't get anything out of my mouth.

"Mind if I sit here, Cinderella?"

THE END.

_______________________

A/N forgive me

[daughterofelros]

You guys, I have this friend that I’m so proud of.

We went to elementary school together, we stayed friends all through the “girls shouldn’t be friends with boys” peer pressure. I remember amazing days with this group of guy friends and I clambering over rock walls in rain-drenched spring forests and taking over the elementary school playground to have elaborate sci-fi/fantasy flavored adventures, weaving in and out of the kids who wanted to to traditional things on the slide, like I don’t know...slide? Instead of battle dragons and rescue the part of our group trapped in the highest tower.

We’ve kept in touch throughout the years, chat whenever we run into each other when visiting our home town. He was in NYC for awhile, now he’s out in LA, and he’s having such an amazing glow up. He’s working in a lot of web-based shows, some podcasts, great stuff. He donates his time off to volunteer with kids, and he’s an amazing teller of stories. It’s been a little surreal honestly.

Sometimes I’ll walk into the Center (I run a college and career center in two really amazing urban high schools) and I’ll see my kids watching his videos. My partners will bring me links to great things he’s doing like they’re magpies with shiny metal going “this is your friend, right? This is so cool!”

I tend to send him messages whenever cool stuff like that happens, because I feel like on every platform, negativity floats to the top and I don’t think he’s on most platforms in a way that the crap can bombard him. I assume it exists, I steer clear of mentions of it myself, because it doesn’t do good things to my brain to see my friends attacked by trolls who hate anything that leans toward social justice.

He’s the sweetest— he recorded a video for me that I can play for my kids if they’re trying to cut class and hang out in my center. I use it long before security does a sweep and the kids who are resistant to following school policies would get in trouble. I sit down with them, and remind them that if I have to tell them a third time to go to class, I get to play the video. They say fine, end up laughing at the video, and heading back to class, feeling seen because a semi-famous comedy person talked to them in a video where he addresses me by name, and that’s way better than a security guard challenging them.

And I’m just so, so happy that, since I’ve gotten back on tumblr, I keep seeing posts where people talk about how much it means to them to see positive representation of the LGBTQIA+ community in the content he creates, how wonderful his comedy is. I’m so glad that the work he does with his life is having positive impacts for people, and you better believe I send him updates on every set of positive comments, because in 2020 I am fiercely committed to sharing things that I like, not just things that activate negative thoughts and prompt us to share those pieces of content disproportionately.

(I do not share the RPF Fic that I have stumbled across. Right now, he’s still a degree of separation removed from any RPF fandom I’ve read or written in, so we’re good there. My brain knows not to poke it. And honestly, I’m well-trained to not get weirded out my RPF of people I know in passing, so this is just one extra level of closeness.

Because seriously. I grew up in a weird, tiny town where I’d bump into famous actors on the street, and they’d tease me about my life choices. I held an Oscar when I was seven, because my father, who owned the town deli and knew everyone’s coffee and breakfast sandwich order, asked the winner of said Oscar if he could borrow it so my Mom could give a presentation to her grad school class about the modeling software they had used to predict the Oscar winners that year. Guys would talk about being in production meetings for The Godfather and people thinking the idea was crap. A famous actor’s tax return was misdelivered to my grandmother, so she drove it over to him the next day and he thanked her with tickets to his broadway show.

Famous sommeliers and four-star restauranteurs and producers live in town and like to give asshole tourists shitty country directions that take them on a nine mile loop past the tree with the owl on the Saunders farm if the tourists are being shitty to locals (all to get to a destination 1/4 mile away around the next curve in the road). Brad Pitt yelled at my parents for selling the story that he was in town for a few days, and my father calmly pointed out that the nice guy Brad had been chatting with over breakfast the day before was in fact the editor of the paper from the city across the river. Brad had disclosed his location himself.

One of the actors who came in to help stage student-written productions for the drama club in high school is an Oscar-winner now. It was weird to see her in a red carpet gown because I’ve never seen her wear anything other than baggy black sweatpants.

My Mom ran into Daniel Craig in the supermarket a few months back. She gave him advice on canned soup. She had no idea that the pleasant lady with him was Rachel Weisz. She likes movies Rachel Weisz is in, and it still didn’t register to her. She did make note the one time Katherine Hepburn came into the deli though.

My grandpa smoked weed with Willie Nelson when he came through town and stopped at one of the only other restaurants there- only celebrity he ever bothered getting out of bed for. I have a ceramic rabbit collection that belonged to my Uncle Gene and Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob wrote the book that the Chucky movies are based on. I have a collection of small rabbit figurines from the household of the man who created Chucky.

Another famous actor made me a coat rack when I was born, because he was in a wood-working phase. It’s mint green, there are cows on it, and the pegs kept falling out.

Another guys from the group of friends would routinely come home to find Steve Buscemi in his living room. His Mom was Steve’s preferred seamstress when he needed something altered.

It’s a weird life. And still, I’m the most proud of my friend. )

[mrbingley]

i had my top surgery consult today! i will talk about the details and experience below for those who are curious and/or want to know the process!

after scheduling the consult over the phone, i had been emailed some forms to fill out about my health. to schedule a consult, you have to pay $65. if you end up getting top surgery with them, they put that consult money towards the cost of the surgery. the consult was with dr. med.al.ie in cleveland, ohio. ive decided to go to him for top surgery b/c he has amazing results and is only a forty minute drive from where i live. they asked for me to show up ten minutes before the scheduled time which i did. i should note, i did this consult in person because, as i mentioned, i live nearby. for people who dont live nearby, the consult can be done via emails (i think thats how it’s done, not sure since i did it in person). when i got to the office, the wait was super short, like five minutes. a nurse took me to a room and asked me my height, weight, and if i smoked. she then told me id have to undress my top half so the doctor could look at my chest and that i could either put a gown on or just stay in the clothes i was already in. the gown was a comfortable looking robe. but i stayed in my clothes. she left and several minutes later the doctor came in and introduced himself.

the doctor asked me a couple of medical questions and then asked for me to undress so he could take a picture of my chest and assess it. it never really felt awkward or uncomfortable. he was very respectful and turned around to give me some privacy. he took the pic fast and then examined my chest in person. that whole process took less than five minutes. i dont even remember him touching my chest b/c he did it so quickly and clinically. when i say touch, he barely even touched it. like, it was just a second. he told me my chest had too much volume and stretch marks to be a candidate for peri areolar and that i would get to do double incision. i was happy with that b/c i want double incision. then he told me i could get dressed again and turned around while i did. after that, he went over the details of surgery and what the first week post op will be like. i had done a lot lot lot of research prior to this consult so nothing he said was new information to me but it was informative nonetheless. he did tell me about how around one in a hundred ppl who get top surgery get a hematoma. i knew some people got hematomas post-op, but i had never heard the statistic, so that was illuminating. he went on to say that those who did get a hematoma never had to get a blood transfusion. it was never life threatening. they just numb your chest and suck it out. or if it’s minor, they leave the drains in longer than seven days. that was relieving to here. as a side note, i had read from others who have gone to med.al.ie that he has poor bedside manner, but the entire interaction i had with him, he was very respectful and kind and dare i say charming. also, he was wearing striped socks and a striped blazer and it was a good, cute look.

after that, he told me i would get to meet valerie (his main coordinator who i had been emailing and talked to on the phone) and she would go over the cost. the total cost estimate is $7,177.00. med.al.ie does not take insurance so if i get this covered with my insurance it will be out of network. my out of network for this kind of operation is 50% coverage. however, with my insurance, this out of network operation requires that i pay the total cost up front and then theyll reimburse me and cover 50% after. that is! a lot of money! but somehow, some way, im going to make this work.

med.al.ie requires you to have taken six month of therapy with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria before you can schedule your top surgery. i am currently just over three months into my therapy. so i have less than three months left and then i can schedule my surgery. i was told surgery typically is scheduled around six weeks off from when you reach out to schedule it. in theory, i could get this surgery as early as march. however, my twin will be taking care of me post-op and shes in grad school right now and she wants me to wait until may so she will be able to be at the house and not have classes keeping her away.

overall, the consult was a very good experience. me getting top surgery feels so much more real now and that’s incredibly exciting.

if you have any questions or whatever, feel free to ask!!!

[wishbone-md]

Grad season

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of flights, residency paperwork, awkward posed photos, and raising a glass with my classmates to us finally being MDs. Graduations always make me feel some type of way to where I was dreading it. I’ve worked for so long for this degree. Some of y’all have been Day 1s, since I graduated college. It feels anticlimactic. Same with Match Day. Which I didn’t really expect to feel. I did have periods of pure excitement, especially at our class Match Day party, that I got my first choice for residency, and taking pictures with my classmates in those black and green gowns + a doctoral hood. These 2 days are the most hyped up days in medical school. You spend hours and hours studying for 4 years in hopes of getting to this point. 

Milestones like this make me reflect on what I gave in exchange and what mistakes I made over the years. I look at all the doors that closed along the way and wonder if I picked the right one now. What I could or should have done before. I even thought back to the MCAT and how I wish I studied harder because I might be somewhere else right now going to a different place. Or how I wasn’t AOA or that I was 1 point away from honoring many clerkships. Or how I didn’t get some interviews I thought I’d get for sure.  I don’t know how to let go and I know I should let go. Yet I ruminated on this while sitting in my robe and wearing my hat. 

After we got our diplomas, my friend asked if they made a mistake in giving him the degree. “Joke’s on them, suckas.” 

I don’t want to look backwards because I can’t change anything. I don’t want to look forward because the challenges of intern year seem unsurmountable. Especially because I haven’t written a note since December. I thought that medical school was going to be the hardest thing but it’s not. While I had my own challenges with it like my bad breakup and a rocky start due to being out of school for 2 gap years, I truly enjoyed it. What’s yet to come seems like it’s 100x worse and it’s about to come in 3 weeks. I’ve been filling out paperwork and doing training modules online for my program. Weirdly enough, I’ve always enjoyed doing orientation type stuff so at least I’ve been productive in that aspect. Probably because it’s easier than actually taking care of patients and keeping them alive. 

It’s an end of a very, very long chapter and the start of a new one. A new one that I hope is so good that I won’t even think about all the times I’ve been disappointed in the past. 

[purplebenjy]

2005-Part 1

“I’m not going to know how to talk to them.”

He’s pacing in front of the couch, Darling following his every turn. Benjy’s been muttering to himself on and off in Gujarti for the past ten minutes or so, meaning Cass could still continue to read whatever incredibly thick and dense book he was reading. It was supposedly fiction, and not assigned reading and therefore ‘for fun’ and Benjy didn’t understand how he was able to fit that in on top of grad school work, nor what the hell the story was supposed to be about even though Cass had patiently explained it at least three times.

Saying something in English, however, gains his boyfriend’s attention. Benjy hears the book thud close but he doesn’t stop moving.

“I’m not gonna go.”

“You are gonna go. You’ve been talking about this and been so excited for the past two weeks.”

Benjy stops to face Cass, taking a moment to let himself admire the view. His hair was short enough that it was curling around his forehead and over the tops of his ears-he needed a hair cut, but he was letting it go back to his natural color, which Benjy loved almost as much as he loved Cass. His newly acquired wire glasses were perched on the end of his nose and they magnified his eyes-Benjy could see the little crease when he smiled. He was wearing a white and blue striped shirt that Benjy had bought him cause he thought it made him look like a pirate with black jeans. He’d painted his nails yellow the night before, but, as usual, all Benjy can do is stare at his lip piercing.

“Benj.”

He looks into his boyfriend’s eyes and sighs.

“Don’t give me that sexy professor look, you know it works on me.”

Cass raises his eyebrows at him.

“The disappointed ‘I can’t believe you’re joking about that’ look works on me too, Cassie.”

“You’re deflecting.”

Benjy whines closes the short distance to the couch, replacing the book with himself on Cass’s lap.

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe.”

He presses his face into the front of Cass’s shoulder and sighs.

“What if they don’t like me?”

“Wanna try that again and look at me? Perhaps looking at me and not muffled?”

“No.”

“Benj.”

“Don’t Benj me.” He says, sitting up and tracing the shell of his ear.

“It worked.”

“Didn’t.”

Cass catches his hand and pulls Benjy into a kiss. He feels himself relax against Cass’s touch, letting out a sigh.

“What if they don’t like me?”

Cass smiles at him softly.

“I don’t think that’s humanly possible.”

“I’m being serious.”

Cass shifts on the beanbag, causing them both to sink in more.

“I am too. Speaking as a former teen admitted against his will in a psych ward, I would’ve liked you.”

Benjy smiles. He’d been feeling stuck the past couple of months since graduation-the agents who had shown interest in his work at his showcase hadn’t had time to meet with him yet-though he had a few voicemails insisting they’d make some time for him in the next couple of months. He’d vented about it at group, talked about how he was trying not to be so hard on himself and not let this be any sort of ‘proof’ to what Forest had said about Benjy not being able to find success on his own. Bernie, their facilitator, had pulled him aside after to tell him about the art therapy volunteer program at the same hospital that ran their program. After a background check that was shockingly clean, he was all set up to teach patients painting skills, giving them something to do while in recovery, a positive outlet. His first session was today, and he’d specifically requested teenagers, for a lot of reasons but the main one was currently wrapping his arms around Benjy’s waist.

“What if I don’t know what to say?”

“Hasn’t happened yet.”

Benjy laughs softly and brings their lips together for another kiss. He doesn’t have to leave for another hour and he’s had his stuff packed since he’d woken up that morning. He presses himself against Cass’s chest and closes his eyes, only opening them when he hears the sound of a page turning.

“Are you reading right now? While I’m moping?”

“You’re not moping out loud.”

“Hmm.”

He tries and fails to glare at Cass’s smile.

“Can I uh, ask you one more question and then I’ll leave you alone?”

Cass pushes his glasses up on his nose and Benjy reaches up for another kiss before he responds.

“That’s not true, but sure.”

He looks away from his boyfriend, his attention drawn to the faint scars he can see at the top of Cass’s forearms.

“It’s pretty stupid-”

“I guarantee it’s not.”

“Is it scary? To be there?”

Cass nods slowly, his eyes looking up and away like he always did when he was thinking.

“Like to visit? Or to be there?”

“Both, I guess.” Benjy says, shifting so he can properly trace the lines on Cass’s arms. “I feel like a coward for even asking.”

“Benj.”

He doesn’t have to say anything else, he rarely does.

“Okay, not a coward just...I don’t know. I wanna be prepared, I guess.”

Cass nods again.

“Yes, it’s scary. Not like those movies I make you watch it’s more...jarring I think would be the better word. Cause there’s sick people all around you and they’ll all kind of look like it. With the scrubs or gowns or sweats they’ve got on. And it was scary to be there, obviously but…” He taps lightly three times on the back of Benjy’s hand.

“It’s also a place that makes people better. And it’s obviously a good one if they’re doing something like this-once I realized that, at least kind of, it made it a little less scary. Some of the kids you’re gonna be with might be there, some of them might be scared--and some of them probably aren’t gonna care. That’s where I was for a lot of it, Benj. Just kind of...there, I guess, until they got me talking to Kevin and stuff…”

Cass trails off and Benjy bends forward to kiss some of the scars on his left arm.

“I’m glad you’re here, baby.”

Cass smiles at him, lifting his head slightly and cupping his face with his right hand.

“Me too. “

~

The staff had been almost too friendly and enthusiastic, chattering away about how they’ve been trying to find someone who fit to do this for a long time. Benjy made small talk easily, but couldn’t really focus, a little too worried about how it was going to go.

“And I’ll be in there, just in case anyone needs assistance-and truthfully because I’d like to pick up a thing or two, too.” Benjy smiles at that, reading the name ‘Dorcas’ on the nurse’s ID tag. She leaves him to set up, telling him he’s going to have three patients plus herself. He puts a few pieces of the weird paperboard canvas they’d told him to buy (no staples) and a bunch of non toxic paints at each of the little tables they’d set out. He smiles to himself at the rickety old easel someone (probably Dorcas) had put out for him, and decides to use it instead of his travel one. He puts his bags in the corner of the room closest to him and waits, rocking back and forth on his heels. He’d turned in his cellphone at the front desk, and he was too jittery to try to text right now anyway. He grabs one of the soft lead pencils he’d set out and starts sketching, instantly relaxing and almost calm by the time Dorcas and her patients came in. The first was a teenage girl with long, dirty, blonde hair, so thin Benjy could see her ribs through her grey sweatshirt. She shot him a shakey smile and sat down at the first table, right beside Dorcas who reached over and gave her a hand a squeeze as soon as she sat down herself. The second was a boy who was only a little taller than Benjy with very dark circles under his eyes and a weird sort of shuffle walk, he didn’t look up when he entered the room and sat at the middle table. The third was a girl who looked absolutely and totally average-a big shock of curly brown hair that went down to her shoulders-frizzy but well cared for. She had poked thumb holes through her sweatshirt sleeves and had them pulled up to her knuckles-she already looked bored and raised her eyebrows skeptically at Benjy’s set up before sliding into a seat at the back table. Four pairs of eyes were on him now, and Benjy takes a breath before grinning at them.

“Hi, uh, you probably already know why you’re here, but-I’m Benjy. I...Bernie, who i think some of you know, he’s helped me to get better, he’s helped me a lot, but um, nothing’s really helped me feel better like painting has.”

“Not even meds?”

The girl in the back has a glint in her eyes that makes Dorcas frown and turn around, but Benjy laughs.

“Fair enough. Almost nothing has made me better than painting. That work for you?”

She shrugs. Benjy continues.

“Art uh, it’s actually helped a lot of people for a long time. Which sounds like I’m making it up, but I promise I’m not. I’m not really good at talking in front of people really but…”

He shuffles some stuff around on his easel and turns it to them, showing them a print of Starry Night.

“Vincent Van Gogh was an impressionist painter--that was a period of art in the 1870s and 1880s-a fucking long time ago-I probably shouldn’t swear, huh?”

Dorcas kind of shrugs and Benjy laughs.

“Well anyway, Vincent struggled for a really long time but there’s evidence through letters and stuff that he wrote when he was around that painting made him feel better. He’s considered one of the best artists ever, and he did a lot of his work when he was in hospitals to get better. I don’t know if any of you guys care about that, but I thought it was pretty neat. So-uh, one of the styles in Vincent’s time period was to like, make a bigger picture out of little shapes. Like dots or squares. That’s what I thought we could try to today but uh, for me, the best part of painting is you can do whatever you want. So let’s just go-”

He catches himself before he says ‘go nuts’. Nice one, Benjy.

“Let’s just go-”

“Van Gogh?” The girl in the back pipes up. Benjy laughs.

“Sure. Paint whatever you want. Just kind of...let it out, you know? You can paint what you’re feeling, you can paint something you want, something you think is cool, something you hate...it’s literally always up to you, you know? You’re in control of what you make. I always liked that.”

He pulls his own table over to everyone else’s and starts setting up.

“I think we’ll just kind of sit here and make shit-if that’s okay with you guys?”

Dorcas, the boy and the blonde girl both nod and Benjy smiles. The girl in back already has a paint brush out and is getting to work.

“I’m gonna do that impressionist thing I was talking about, if anyone wants to do it with me.If you have any questions just ask.”

“I have one.”

Curly girl dips her brush into the black and makes eye contact with him.

“Shoot.”

“What fucked you up?”

“Deena!” Dorcas turns around in her chair, obviously pissed, but Benjy laughs, dipping his brush into the blue and speaking as he starts to do a background wash.

“No, no, it’s okay. Really. I was in a very emotionally and physically abusive relationship when I was nineteen. I was able to get out-which I’m very grateful for-but the person I was involved with was in a position of authority over me and it was incredibly damaging and stressful.”

Benjy starts mixing a purple and glances up at Deena. She addresses her canvas as she speaks.

“So you got beaten up by a girl?”

“Sorry about her.” The blonde girl speaks in an impossibly soft yet somehow fierce voice. “She’s attention starved.”

“You’re not supposed to bring up shit we talk about in group, Katie.”

“You’re also not supposed to make someone else share their story if they don’t want to.” Katie retorts, a flash of fire appearing in her expression. She holds up her canvas to show Benjy, she’s made a tiny sun out of yellow dots.

“Is that okay?”

He smiles.

“That’s great, Katie. But you don’t have to show me, I’m not grading you or anything-if you like it then it’s perfect.”

She nods, her lips tight as she scruntizes her work and then dips her brush back into the yellow.

“And to answer your question, Deena. No, I wasn’t beaten up by a girl-though that does happen, anyone can be abusive. But my abuser was in fact another man.”

“It was?”

The boy looks up for the first time really, his whole demeanor changing and making Benjy’s heart break in half at the wonder in his voice. Benjy nods.

“Yeah. He wasn’t great, but my new boyfriend is.”

“And your parents are cool with it?”

Benjy bites on the inside of his cheek and takes a breath, looking down at the paint so he doesn’t have the wrong reaction.

“Mine are but...Cass’s weren’t as cool. My mom’s the coolest person in the world, actually, so pretty hard to beat. But, you know, Cass and I kind of made our own family. It was hard for him for a little bit but he’s uh-I mean not to toot my own horn, but I’m pretty amazing and I think I make him happy.”

He glances over at Dorcas, who seems only to be concerned with the boy, not reacting at all to Benjy outing himself. He should’ve figured as much given that he knew Bernie from a support group for LGBTQA victims of partner violence, but still. It was nice to know he could be as much as himself as he wanted to.

“That’s good.” The boy says quietly, picking up his paintbrush for the first time. They play with the paint for another fifteen minutes or so, just making small talk which mostly consisted of Deena asking a variety of personal and art related questions.

“Okay I’m gonna come around and see if I can give you any tips. I’m hardly an expert-”

“Whoa.” The boy, who Benjy knew was named RJ, was staring at the painting on Benjy’s table. It was a portrait loosely based on Cass, per usual, but he was all different shades of purple triangles. “You didn’t tell us you were good.”

Benjy laughs.

“Good is relative.”

“I’m not impressed.”

“Thanks, Deena.”

He encourages Katie to be a little looser with her strokes, guiding her hand into a more flowing motion as she paints a sea scape. Dorcas had a canvas completely covered in red spots that she told Benjy was either a fire or a tomato fight. He showed her how to try to make shading. RJ had just painted a bunch of triangles fitting together, all impossibly small and not colored in. Benj had given him a half assed explanation of color theory and moved back to Deena. He had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. Her entire canvas was covered in penises with angel wings on them. When she glances up, a big grin on her face, Benjy tries to keep his face neutral.

“You said to paint what we wanted.”

“Interesting interpretation. Are you going for a realistic rendering or do you want it to be more cartoonish?”

He sees surprise cross her face. Benjy guessed she was waiting for him to lose his patience, to tell her she was being innapropriate, get mad at her for not taking it seriously. He smiles pleasantly at her-waiting for her response.

“Um...what do you think?”

Benjy shrugs. “Doesn’t matter what I think. It’s not my painting. I can show you how to do both.”

Deena blinks down at them.

“I say cartoony cause it’s a little-”

“Ridiculous?” Benjy says, his smile growing. Deena laughs for the first time, and Benjy almost thinks he hears embarrassment in her voice.

“Yeah.”

“I like it, it’s hilarious. And even if it’s ridiculous, if it makes you feel good to paint it, who gives a shit, right? If you make the lines a little bolder on one end and then have it taper off towards the other, you can kind of give them a little like, comic book-y effect, do you wanna try?”

He watches her try and nods.

“Good, now do that however many times you’ve uh, made one of those.”

“There’s sixty-nine of them.”

“Ah, yes, of course.”

Deena laughs again. Benjy glances up at Dorcas and finds actual surprise on her face which leads him to believe that this isn’t a side to Deena seen all of the time.

“Don’t get paint on your sleeves, or I mean do. Everything I own is covered in paint.”

“I don’t think I technically own this.”

Deena rolls up her sleeves and Benjy is glad she’s focused on her painting so she can’t see the change in his face he knows is there. The bandages up her arms are white save for almost perfect lines of rust red at three places on her wrists.

“You’re doing great, D.” Benjy says, keeping his voice even as he swallows against the emotion in his throat. Deena whips her head up at him.

“Did you just call me D?”

“Oh-yeah, sorry. I won’t if you don’t want me to. My family has a thing with nicknames-”

She smiles at him, a real smile. A sad smile. A scared smile.

“No, it’s ok. My family does too. That’s what my parents call me. I like it.”

“It suits you.” Benjy says, watching her work.

“Cause I’m a dick?”

Benjy laughs.

“Not what I was going for, but sure. Sure.”

Their hour passes quickly, and when they’re done, Dorcas promises to be right back after she takes Katie to her room. Rj nods at him, holding his painting close to his chest. Deena pulls her sweatshirt sleeves down and marches to the front of the room, presenting Benjy with the flying dicks.

“Here. Something to remember me by.”

Benjy laughs.

“Well first of all, you’re fairly unforgettable. Second of all, I’m coming back next week.”

Deena’s face lights up.

“Really?”

“Yeah I mean if y’all want me back-”

“We do.” Deena actually blushes, realizing how quickly she’d spoken. She pushes the painting at him again.

“I still want you to have it.”

“I can’t take it until you sign it, dude. A true artist always signs it.”

“Oh good call, it’s gonna be worth millions some day.”

Deena takes the pencil Benjy’s holding and scribbles something in the corner before pressing the painting and pencil back into his hands.

“See you next week.”

She smiles at him again before stomping out of the room, picking at the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Benjy looks down at the hastily scribbled “D” with a little heart next to it and smiles.

“I’m really glad you were here, Deena.”

He’s not sure if she hears him at first, until she turns around and flips him the bird. Benjy watches her dissapear down the hall and then waits for Dorcas, looking down at the flying dicks and very glad he was there too.