#and then it got a bit out of hand and the story was storying soooo hard | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hyukascampfire · 1 month ago

Text

𝑯EART 𝑊ORM ⸺ hueningkai ℘˒´ˎ˗

⨾𓍢ִ໋ ˒˒ 𝚑𝔢art𝚠𝔬rm

[𝑛]. a relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.

⸺ listen to the playlist .ᐟ ‧˚

〝﹙ 📼 ﹚“I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?” ˛ ､､

wc ➛ 17.9k

𝔭airings childhood bsf!kai x reader (lowkey soulmates?) ⤷ ft. asshole!yeonjun x reader

𝒢 ‎; smut ˒ angst ˒ some fantasy

𝔴arnings angst, family issues, fingering, jealousy (i’m sorry i just love ts), yeonjun really is an asshole, orgasm denial, thigh fucking, unprotected sex (they're stupid!), strength kink a lil bit, breeding kink, possessiveness, creampie, choking... i think that's all, lmk if i missed any

✎୭ ashlynn's note omg. this was such a fun palate cleanser to write. this wasn't supposed to be as big as it is, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and i got super into the story. this kai is SOOOO!! yeah. i’m so nervous posting this because i’ve only ever posted TSFAWC, but…. here you areee (^^;; this is not proofread, so if you see a mistake... give me a sec. i'll get to it. hehe

Though you fan your hand furiously over your face, the little breezes washing over your clammy skin are not enough. The air is thick and heavy with summer’s heat. So thick that you almost feel it each time you swallow. It’s better than just letting yourself melt away, though. The cushion at your back doesn’t help much. It holds your warmth and returns it to you the longer you sit slumped back into it. You suffer it though—you’ve gone too sluggish to move.

You let a leg dangle over the arm of a chair, watching a hopeful moth dance in the light of the buzzing porch light overhead. It flutters frantically in it, making a grand fight to reach that false moonlight, only to drop away when it realizes that it’s being burnt. You watch it rinse and repeat, relentless and sure, for who knows how long. It’s no special moth—no luna moth or the ones with the pretty pink wings—but the light falls down on it and colors it a pleasant stardust silver.

You delight in letting your conscious brain turn off to watch it. It lets you forget the sweltering under your skin, and also that Kai had drug you out here. His dad gives him shit when he plays inside, but it’s way too hot to be out here. Isn’t it supposed to cool off after the sun goes down? It doesn’t feel like it. The deep acoustics are drowned out each time a car whirrs by. Playing outside should be the best option, but you and Kai live right on a busy road.

When the roar of some car going ten miles over the speed limit doesn’t obscure his playing, though, you admire the intricacy of it. His fingers work up and down the neck, jumping frets that you imagine would be impossible to anybody without those long fingers of his. You had always been a loud supporter of his playing, even way back when the most he could play were simple chords, but you became especially so when a few years back he put a guitar in your hands and tried teaching you. Even with his fingers guiding yours, it was quick to learn that the effortlessness with which Kai handles the instrument is hard earned.

He practices on the acoustic guitar, but that’s not his domain. With houses just a dash across the street from each other, Kai had grown up at your home more than he had at his own. So vividly, you remember the stars in his eyes when he’d listen to your dad’s music. Metallica, The Smashing Pumpkins, Linkin Park, any of it. He had fallen in love with it a long time ago. Your whole life you knew that it was only a matter of time before he was in his own band, chasing his dreams with a boundless mind and an indelible vision of himself on stage. How had that time come so soon, though? You don’t know if the notebooks full of inky lyrics that live wherever he deems inspiration might hit him make you proud or nervous. He’s making good on his dazzling aspirations, and you?

You speak finally into the air, cutting through heat waves and his music and the night. “Isn’t it weird that we’re not going back to school after this summer?”

He doesn’t have to even stop playing to answer you. Playing comes to him as a second nature. “Kinda,” he answers, brown eyes flitting up to you. “But it’s not like you won’t be back to it in September. College is the same shit.”

The leg you’d been dangling and bouncing pauses. That’s right; you’re supposed to be going to that college you’d chosen because it was only a three-hour drive away from here. You pluck at the seat’s threadbare fabric, and the moth, still there, becomes oh-so-interesting once again. When his playing stops, you drop your head back with a cushioned thud and a groan that you wrangle in your throat.

“Why are you acting like that?” he says, voice gone sharp like accusation. He doesn’t even know the truth, but he’s known you too long.

Can’t you just keep secrets for yourself, sometimes?

Kai, arms clad in a well-loved hoodie even in this dreadful weather, lays the guitar down. You maintain your silence. “Seriously, what?”

Some secrets have timers, though. This one could only last you until about September, or even August when he realizes that you’re not preparing to return to school. A controlled sigh from your chest isn’t enough to soothe the nerves that sparks. “Nothing.”

“Secrets, huh?” Kai says. When you do finally look to him, black spikes of hair frame his eyes and the accusation in them.

It’s a simple poke, but it gets under your skin as sharp as any thorn might. It’s not like you don’t keep secrets from him, and you’re sure he keeps some from you too. But those are the little kinds, the inconsequential ones—like I ate already when asked why you’re not eating or like Yeah, I’m fine when it’s been a bad day. You don’t hide this kind of stuff from each other. Usually, you’d run over to his place to tell him whatever’s bothering you. Why not, when he’s known even the worst details of your life for almost the entirety of it? You’ve been holding this one close to your chest since somewhere around the end of senior year, though. The longer you let it fester, the worse your nervousness snowballs. “C’mon, Kai. Let’s not do this. Can you keep playing?”

He doesn’t like that, of course. But you watch recognition dawn over his chocolate brown eyes, helpless to stop it. “You’re not going,” he says. It’s not a question nor a suspicion, it’s a bone-dry fact.

Well. There that goes. You want to tear every hair on your head right out. Why had you even thought you’d keep him in the dark about it? When he’s not out in some garage making music, you two are together. The conversation was going to stroll by at some point; this was only inevitable. His disappointment radiates off him in waves and blisters you. He hasn’t even said anything yet, but you know exactly what he thinks of it. It’s why you kept it from him in the first place.

Your silence is enough confirmation for him. “Why?” he says. “I thought you were excited to move out.”

Wincing, you nod slowly. You were. Even went through the whole application process, along with most other kids your age. Ultimately, you never went through with declaring a college. You don’t exactly know why, but somewhere weaseled down in the shadowy recesses of your soul, you know. Taking those steps, the massive and terrifying ones from adolescence into adulthood, meant agreeing that this form of your life was over. It meant that at some point, you’d be moving away from here to where living your days away in Kai’s room would not be a choice. Everybody has to do it eventually, you know that. Kai’s music gig could take off any day, too. He’s going to make it happen. And then what? All this stalling and wishing on just a bit more time would mean nothing, he’d be off and chasing that dream. As excited as you are for it to finally become reality for him, there’s a nasty bitterness that’s budded in your chest, infecting your person.

Can’t things just stay like this?

“I was,” you say. It comes out of your mouth heavy.

“Then why aren’t you going?” he says. Crickets, never seen but always heard, sing their song into the night’s darkness. “You didn’t get rejected. You’re too smart for that.”

An ache sits heavily somewhere near the center of your chest, maybe over your heart. All those good grades, nights spent bent over a desk and AP paperwork—you’re wasting it. You shake your head. “No... just...” It’s an effort to dress your thoughts in a way that might appease him. A quiet moment stretches with your thinking before you continue, “I don’t know what I want to do.”

He doesn’t like that, the yellow wash of the overhead light dancing over his taut lips and hard eyes. “Don’t know what you want to do?” he says, bringing his legs up onto the seat to crisscross them. He wears his favorite jeans. They’re heel-bitten and baggy enough over his legs that he can wear them around the house without any bother. “You’ve wanted to be an artist your whole life. You know exactly what you want to do.”

Your chest only seems to ache harder. When the both of you were only young and hopeful, you both had big dreams. Kai was going to be the face of a metal band, and you were going to be an artist. A painter, potter, sculptor, even doing animation for those big companies like Dreamworks and Disney. You wanted any of it, just as long as you were doing art. You’d even promised him that you’d do the cover art for his albums with interlocked pinkies and flushed, hopeful cheeks. That passion and love wasn’t gone from you, it blazed strong in your veins. This blaze wasn’t the kind that kept you warm and excited to push forward into life, though. It had morphed into something that scalded you when you got too close or started imagining yourself pursuing its call. It’s a taunting silvery glow, no longer a guiding north star. Taunting words of family members stamped down on that hope hard. When you were little, it was said lighthearted and in passing. The older you got, though, the more serious their faces became. They wouldn’t say it outright perhaps, but you hear what they think well enough. Art is a dead-end career.

Shifting in your seat, you tell him, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” Kai says. “There are good colleges for that.”

“I just... don’t know.”

Shaking his head, he tells you, “But you love it.”

You do. In its every form, you love creating. But loving it doesn’t mean that it’s right for you, or that you should trust your future in its hands. “I think I can do it in my own time,” you say, finally pushing yourself upright from the cushion. “Don’t wanna kill the passion by doing it for a living, you know?”

He thinks on that for a moment. “If you love it, you should do it,” he says.

An awful frustration bubbles in your chest. Kai has always had a clear life path, the steps ahead of him set in stone and waiting for him to follow in them. It’s hard for him to see why you might not want to do the same. There’s nothing that makes you as happy as the fact that he has it all figured out, that he knows just where he’s going and that he’s so incredible at it that he doesn’t have to worry about meeting the requirements, but your path seems obscured and untrodden. Punctuating a deep, resonant sigh, you say, “It’s not that easy, Kai.”

“If you’re not doing that, then what are you going to do? Are you just going to settle for a nine-to-five?” he says full of accusation, the tapping on his knees gone still.

A dry laugh, you say, “Maybe I’ll marry a super rich guy and just do my art for a living. No nine-to-five.”

His face flashes. He’d always been a bit reserved, especially around others, but he bared his emotions freely around you. You hold them dearly to your chest and made sure to do your best to make good on that trust. He says, “You’re more than some guy’s housewife.”

Cheeks radiating in the heat, you snort. “I know, dork. I’m a rockstar’s best friend. It’s my personal favorite achievement.”

His face sours when you reach out and pinch hard at his cheek, but he doesn’t pull away or brush you off. The skin there is warmed and clammy. Really, the two of you should go meet the cool AC inside before you suffer heat stroke. But this moment feels so nice—your shoulders feel tons lighter without something to hide. If you had it your way, things would stay like this forever. Just the two of you, sat here like you have so many times before, just taking for granted the time you’ve got together.

His mouth opens to banter, probably something about how he’s not a rockstar yet or to get you back for calling him a dork. Wingbeat and sterling dashes about your face send the image into a blur, though. You’re a quick mess of limbs and a whipping head, as if it’ll chase the thing away from you.

“Seriously?” Kai says. You’d climbed halfway over him, elbows digging into him and knee doing a number on his thigh. “It’s a moth. You’re not scared of moths.”

Lingering for a few moments later to ensure the flying thing was nowhere on you or around you, you hold back a laugh before you climb off him and fix your hair with undignified tucks behind your ears. “He was in my face,” you say around a laugh, because you know it was a bit too much. Nobody likes wings in their ears and spindly legs in their face, though, and you’re in no control of what you do when anything with six legs tries and get too friendly. Even moths.

“You just wanted me to protect you,” he says. A sarcastic, shit-eating smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh,” you scoff, batting your eyelashes and clasping your hands together all saccharine-sweet. “Yes, Romeo, won’t you kill that bug for me? This girl’s heart just can’t take it!”

Kai’s nose crinkles, and the playful light twists into a glare. “Nasty.”

“That’s how you sounded,” you say. “I only reacted accordingly.” Laughing, you kick your legs out over his lap and sprawl back out. He takes the guitar back into his hands.

As much as you want to escape the mugginess, you’ll survive it for just a little while longer—if only with the force of an indulgent heart. The eternal moments are those you allow to linger.

⚝⭒

Some things, you forget when you’re older. Maybe it’s time’s hand, eroding memories down and stuffing more in the longer you live to experience them. But also maybe because they’re the sort of things you can’t say in the adult world without a laugh in the face and a look from down their noses.

This memory is one of those forgotten things. It’s moth-bitten and dusty, something you one day folded up in a moving box and decided to never revisit.

You’d been down at the creek. Kai and you had spent so many summer days there. It wasn’t too far from home, just past the filbert trees and into the shallow neck of the backwoods, but there you were out of sight and free to get up to nothing good. It was a wonder your mom ever let you do it. Kai’s dad didn’t care too much where he went or what he did, but your mom dug her claws in deep. You like to think that she imagined you two would have each other, if anything ever happened.

Usually, you’d be there holding your jeans up from the stream and Kai would be letting his jeans go dark with it. The bite of water was nice as it washed over warm skin. Fun was a simple thing to find, then. You dug your fingers into the mudbanks and tossed stones way too big to be throwing at each other, just because you two remembered how much the adults hated it when you did. Then, you’d drag tired limbs home avoiding sweetgum tree spikes that had fallen to the ground and dug splinters out from your feet.

This day, you had been in the blackberry bushes. It was maybe late July or early August, and they’d gotten heavy on their branches. You’d waited until the smell of them, summer-warmed, was sweet and cloying in the air to pick them. With buckets in your hands, you plucked only the fattest berries from their bunches. Your fingers were stained a delightful purple and perhaps a bit thorn raw, but you didn’t mind much then. You plucked for hours, and it was dusk before you could catch it. Dinner was no doubt waiting for you back home.

“There’s a bunch over here,” Kai had said. He reached a long boyish arm, still awkward and lanky with puberty, up high for ripe bush. You finished off picking before climbing around thick branches sticking out to take a peek. A bunch, there was.

When you went to drop a handful of them into your bucket, Kai hissed. He’d been snagged by a vicious looking branch, those ones as thick as a finger with thorns to match and you’d warn each other tongue-in-cheek to watch out for that one. He’d worn those ridiculous shorts that day, the ones that looked half pants half shorts with how long and baggy they were, and the claws of the bush had jumped at the opportunity. At first the scrapes were white, but then red blood crawled out and down his leg.

“Kai,” you said, some parts chiding and some parts just wondering how he’d managed that. You surveyed his leg for a bit, and then determined that he should wash his leg off in the stream. He walked there strong, but of course you noticed the hobble beneath his acting. When you squatted down into the dry grass and cupped water to wash off his leg, you laughed.

“What?” he had said, holding the shorts up. You covered your laugh with a hand, but it erupted past your palm. You remember the glare on his face very well.

You still laughed. “You’re stupid,” you had told him.

“I didn’t see it,” he said. “I tripped over it because it was sticking out.”

That time when you brought your hands to catch some water, there was a twinkle in its surface. You didn’t notice it for a second. The creek moved fast and you could see a lot of things in its reflection. When it lingered, that’s when your brows furrowed. It seemed to twirl, dancing around like alive over the stones.

The sound of Kai’s voice remains with you. “Hey,” he had said, strong to call your attention but also wavered with uncertainty.

When you looked up, there was silver dust dancing around you.

It was fluffy and whorling, fine silver stardust. It’d moved weightless in the air, as though it barely existed. In the center of it were a few moths. They seemed to be made of sterling powder just as the dust was, and they glowed against dusk’s backdrop. If your memory serves you right, there had been a sweet hymn of coos from them. They beckoned you. Summer’s heat felt lighter, and so did your chest. You wondered where they had wanted you to go.

Almost afraid that if you spoke they might have fluttered away, you whispered soft and low to Kai. “What is that?” He was stood frozen there, pant leg still scrunched up in his fist. Stardust glowed soft in his brown eyes while he took it all in, you remember. It wasn’t a scared frozen. You weren’t scared, either—rather, it was as if that lightness had found its way into the core of your being and brushed over it with mending hands.

He whispered back, “I don’t know.” How could he have known? It was absurd.

Those whisps had beckoned you, flowing toward the deeper woods. The soft moths, their murmuring brushing up against your ears, seemed to wait for you to follow. You remember a pull, soft tendrils wrapping themselves around your heart and the yearning it planted there.

But there was also this reluctance, a bone-deep answering that had told you: No. You’re not ready.

“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him.

You didn’t even need to tell him twice. Berry buckets forgotten; the journey home was a stranger one. When your dad asked why you returned from berry picking emptier handed than you had left the house, Kai and you only shared a look. You pair kept that evening at the creek hidden so well that it became more forgotten than shared secret.

⚝⭒

Once, you had been the type of girl that loved being around family. Some of your favorite days of your life were spent in this living room, T.V. roaring over bouncing conversation. Some of those nights ended in rosy cheeks and laughs, and some ended with words thrown angry like fireworks. You never knew which you’d be getting, but you endured the fear of not knowing because it was a simple love—the basic kind built with biology into you the moment your infant skin touched your mother’s. You endured it because eventually, sleep washed away the bad taste left in your mouth and you forgave them quick, sometimes quicker than you ought to, and things would go on as if it hadn’t even happened. You endured it because you could handle its burden, if only to feel the warmth you feel when it’s a good day.

Kai was always there—his dad was hardly home, so he found family in yours. When you were younger, you’d been embarrassed he was there for caustic, spitted words and intimate fights. Now, you’re just grateful for his shoulder.

So, yes. Once, you had loved being around your family. But things feel tenser now, nights spent all together less frequent and when they do happen, they’re tainted by a strange air. You think that this strangeness is new, but an awful worry also makes you think that it’d always been there, that you only feel it now because you’ve grown into your adult mind. A hollow ache stakes its claim in your chest, declaring that it won’t leave until you find that youthful ignorance and joy once more. You think that it might stay there forever.

Bare feet bounding down the stairs, you make a rare appearance downstairs. The cupboard is only half open to make way for a snack raid before your mom’s voice cuts through the air. You know quickly just by the look on her face that you should’ve stayed upstairs.

“Hey,” she says, gathering laundry into a basket. “You’ve been applying to jobs?”

With an anxious belly, you tell her, “Yeah. A few. They’re not really, like, ideal, but I sent applications.” You don’t remember when it got hard to look into your mother’s eyes, but you can’t bring yourself to do so now.

“Not ideal?” she says. “It’s not like you can be picky. Mcdonalds or wherever, I don’t care, you’re going to need to get a job if you’re staying here.”

“I know. I applied,” you reiterate around a mumble. You close the cabinets, not so interested in a snack anymore. “I just... I don’t know, ma. I don’t want to do that for a living, going between those sorts of jobs.”

Face hard and abrasive against the truth you bare, she does that awful taunting smile that makes you feel small. Stupid. “You’re not going to college, so that’s what it’s gonna be. You can’t sit up there and draw for a living. You’ve gotta get into the real world, get some real experience.”

There’s a burst of hurt in your chest, dazzling and gnawing. She’s getting closer to saying how she really feels about your dreams out loud every day. Your face burns and so do your eyes, knot thick in your throat. “Yeah, okay. Got it,” you say, nodding. You’re at the front door before you even know it, slipping on shoes and fighting the greatest internal battle to will back tears. She’d use those against you, no doubt about it. “I’m going to Kai’s,” you throw over your shoulder.

Whatever she barks back at you, you’re glad you don’t hear. Bells on some old Christmas decoration hung on the door that had yet to be taken down, even into summer, jingle and wash it away for you.

Kai’s brows shoot up when he opens the door to your face crumpling. You’d done so well at damming it up, but the wall cracks and the water crashes through once you see him. If it were anybody else, you’d feel icky and attention seeking, but you’d held Kai to your chest through gut-wrenching sobs as much as he’s done it for you. Without question, he takes you into his arms, warm hand running up and down your back. The warm soothing is so familiar. You melt right into it.

He keeps you there for a long moment. Then, his chest rumbles as he tells you, “Come on.” The walk through the AC to his bedroom is nice. Having a house like Kai’s to come to where it can just be you is nice, too. You step around the mess of clothes and scattered belongings on his floor like you have a muscle-memory roadmap of his room. Boxsprings creak and hard mattress welcome you back home. His room is dark as always, a night-dweller you call him. The array of peeling band posters plastered over walls you two had painted blue some years ago, when it’d been his favorite color, don’t help to lighten it up. He keeps a low lamplight on.

“She never listens to me,” you say, crying gone to occasional sniffles from your chest. You rest your cheek on your bent knee.

“I know,” he says. “But at least she cares about you. Pays attention to you.” His voice is soft and deep and right next to you. Always right next to you, there for you even when you might not appreciate it as you should.

His dad cares too little what he does, and yours care too much. The grass is always greener on the other side, you know it. Still, you hold a fantasy where you’re able to do teenager stuff. Where you’d allow yourself to do bad things, because you weren’t so intent on painting yourself with their will. You two hold eyes for a long moment, your twinkling ones caught in that steady brown. “I just want to get away. Be my own person.” Your words are muffled in the softness of your skin.

“You had the chance to do it,” Kai says, hand playing with your fingers. “But you didn’t.”

Holding your legs closer, you lick your lips. What do you say to that? Would it ever be the time to tell him that you did it because you think that your soul is pathetically intertwined with his, and that it might snuff your lifeforce out to even try pursuing life without him? Without this? How do you tell him that you’re so frozen and unwilling to pursue any sort of future because it means accepting that this chapter is over? You clutch childhood to your chest like a wild animal guarding scarce food; you refuse. You refuse to acknowledge its end.

“Kai,” is all you say, trembled and thick. It’s not just your mother’s words that dig at you and tear to shreds the last bits of what dreaming you had left in you, but so many other reality checks too. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard those sorts of words, urging you forward. You can only dig your heel into the ground for so long before you’re swept away in time’s ruthless, endless moving.

He understands. Lifting your face with warm fingers against your cheeks, he says, “Hey. How about we go get ice cream, or something?”

Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?”

Smirk tugged over his mouth, he says, “Yes, Dairy Queen. A blizzard. C’mon, let’s go.” Sliding off the bed, he offers you an urging hand up.

But you falter. “I don’t know if we can. She’s mad at me. I don’t think she’ll let me go.”

“Let you go?” he says, eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t have to let you go. You’re an adult now, you go if you want to.” He offers his hand to you again.

It’s so him, freely going wherever he ordain it. The bullheadedness is very him, as well. Always the devil on your shoulder, he was the root of any rebellious thing you’ve ever done. He could never understand your apprehension, or why getting in trouble was such an awful thing to you. “I have to ask to get money.”

Brows pinching, he says, “You think I’m not gonna pay for you? You don’t need them to give you money, I’ll pay. I’ll take care of it.” He drags you up from the bed this time. “Live a little. Do you want to go?”

It was never the punishments or the getting in trouble that you were scared of, though. Disappointment was a scarier word than grounded. Sneaking out and those sorts of things, it’s not like you had angel wings at your back and never considered them. It’s that you are deeply, utterly terrified of changing how they look at you. You begin to tell him, “I do, but—”

He cuts you off, adamant. “Then do it. Let’s go. If you want to go, then go,” he says. “At some point, your life needs to become your own. It’s not sneaking out when you’re graduated and eighteen years old, it’s going wherever the hell you want. You’ve... You’re gonna end up stuck here, in this town, forever. You don’t deserve that.”

That sounds like both the best and the worst thing you’ve ever heard. You take his hand.

⚝⭒

Your frozen fingers nurse your ice cream. The cup itself is cold, but the Dairy Queen on your side of town is always thirty degrees below what it should be. It’d always been that way. Even way back when you two couldn’t drive, you’d get dropped off here to escape the melting weather and get a frozen treat with a handful of dollars. Each time, you’d start off sagging with the relief of summer’s weight off your shoulders and left the place shivering and sugar-mouthed.

It’s really only you two in here. You crinkle your nose when he takes a spoonful. “Out of all the flavors...”

Unbothered and no doubt expecting you to say it, he offers you a flat, “You get your flavor, I get mine.” He makes a point of taking an extra-long bite. His lips linger around the red plastic of the spoon and his brows rest high in silent challenge.

The corners of your lips twitch up. “Hmm. Well. I just have a hard time believing that Oreo... or, like, brownie fudge, is right there, and you actually want M&M. I don’t get how M&M your favorite.” A familiar banter falls over your tongues. Your heart buzzes and your cheeks radiate. This is the first you’ve done this all summer, and it’ll be weaning off into fall soon. Any other summer, you would’ve been here on all the hottest days. You hate that Kai’s been so busy with his music; you hate that you can hear the resounding ticks of the clock counting down your time. You also hate that the stubborn depths of you still believe that if you freeze yourself here in stasis that the world will relent and stop along with you.

You look over the sharp lines of Kai’s jawline as it feathers with his chewing, and the broadness of his shoulders where his jacket stretches around it, and the starkness of his collarbones against his chest and the bobbing of his adam’s apple when he swallows. No, time doesn’t stop. Some of him remains the same, though. In it, you see the boy that had love creeping up on you so long ago, with all its aching and all its hope. That freckle on the column of his neck, the bump in his nose leading down to the button tip that beckons your lips to steal a quick kiss.

And, those lips. They’re as soft as ever around the discontented grimace he pulls. “M&M isn’t my favorite.”

With a pursed mouth and patronizing brows arched over your eyes, you say, “Oh, huh. That’s funny, because if my memory serves me right, it’s the only flavor you’ve ordered for the past... six years.”

Kai husks a laugh at that. “That’s because they haven’t had my favorite for years,” he tells you, scooping up the final bit and then pushing it off to the side. “It was a blizzard of the month that they discontinued. The blackberry cheesecake one. I made peace with it, though. It lives on in my heart.” He grins, arms crossed over his chest and his back settled into the booth seat to let you finish your cup.

“Blackberry cheesecake,” you say, voice made taunting. Your nod is slow and taunting, too. “Well, forget M&Ms. Why would blackberry cheesecake be your favorite? Ever?”

His face falters, a moment where something flows over his eyes as if reliving a memory in a few short seconds. Then, he shrugs. “It just is.”

You roll your eyes. “Whatever,” you laugh. “Maybe my palate is unrefined.” Imagining the tarte fruit in purple swirls of ice cream, you’re taken back to a humid July day and the scent of churned mud.

The strange memory unfolds itself quick. As if it were waiting for you to find wherever it’d hidden itself away. With a sharp gasp, you say, “Oh my god, Kai. Do you remember that one day? That weird stuff we saw down at the creek?”

He nods. “Yeah. I was just thinking of that the other day, actually...”

Less interested in finishing your cup now, you let the spoon rest. “What?” you say, the word peaking in the middle. That day hadn’t crossed your mind once since it’d happened. “How weird is that?”

Scoffing a laugh, he says, “Weird, yeah. Just as strange as two kids high on fermented berries.”

That draws a breathy laugh from you. “Is that what you think it was?” you ask him with knitted brows. The berries had been fresh, and you two had popped plenty into your mouth. But no doubt, you’d have spat them right back out if they were that ripe. “I mean, we saw the same thing.”

“It happens to animals all the time. Squirrells, and stuff.” He lends you a gallic shrug. “We just freaked ourselves out. Like that one time you said you saw the shape of something in the dark and we freaked out. And it was clothes.”

Well, hallucinating, in tandem, a glowing mist because you two by chance ate fermented berries is a very long shot. However nonchalant he acts about it, he seems to have thought long and hard about it. Enough to reason it away with some far cry explanation. Would you have even been able to get drunk off a handful of fermented berries? And, god, you’re really sure that you’d have noticed. That taste isn’t really one you just don’t notice.

Whatever. Maybe you were just drunk idiots. That’s a lot easier to swallow, anyway.

“Okay, but you saw that. Did it not look sinister?” you say. With your spoon back in your hand, you punctuate the sentence pointing it at him. “You freaked out with me, too.”

An unsatisfied scowl on his lips, he steals a spoonful of your dessert. You don’t even swat him away—your phone buzzes in your pocket.

Catching sight of who’s calling, you share a long look with Kai. It’s funny, how fast those three white letters scramble you up. When you hesitate to answer, Kai tells you, “Answer.”

You hope she can’t tell you’re not at Kai’s by the refrigerators’ dull buzzing. It’s an effort to tussle that invasive worry back. You’re at Dairy Queen. Getting ice cream with the boy she’s known since childhood. She should clutch her hands and thank the sky that you’re here, not out in some nasty frat house like you could be. You thumb the green button.

Her voice comes through the speaker crackled and asking you to run over to do a quick dish load. For a heartbeat you consider telling her that you will and then start rushing home. Instead, you fork out the truth through resistant lips.

The hangup tone sits heavy on the air between you and Kai. Having listened to the whole thing on speaker, he says, “What was so hard about that? The world didn’t end, did it?”

The plush of your lip takes a hard gnawing. No, it hadn’t. “I know she’s not going to get mad at me for just going here,” you say as you rest your elbows onto the table. “It’s that they’re supporting me right now. I still live under their roof. The more I go around and insist I can do whatever I want, they’ll start reminding me of it.”

His face drawn, he lets his mouth twitch to one side. “Yeah,” he muses. “I never thought yours would be the type to kick you out.”

Kai’s dad had started threating him with getting kicked out years ago, when he first started telling him that he wanted to do music. How many times had he let reluctant tears flow into your shoulder over it? Because music wasn’t a real job? Back then, you’d whispered in his ears that he’d become everything he’d dreamed of and more as your fingers carded through shaggy locks of hair.

“I don’t know,” you say, humming it out noncommittally. “Is your dad still... y’know?”

Nodding slowly, his eyes tell. “Yeah. Always.”

“Because you’re taking the band seriously, now?” you ask.

“Probably. I don’t give a shit what he thinks about it. If I’m just his goddamn problem, I’ll give him what he wants soon enough.” His eyes blaze with promise of it.

It takes a bit out of you to not wince. Kai living anywhere but in the house across from yours is wrong. “I don’t think he necessarily wants that, Kai...” You take his hand in your icy ones, the urge to reach out to him thinly veiled under the guise of searching out warmth. He’d always run warmer than you—your personal heater. “It’s probably because he can see that you’re doing it for real. Not just saying it anymore.”

“Yeah, well,” he spits, “I can’t fucking wait to see what he’ll say to me when I make it. That piece of shit, though, he wouldn’t even care. It’s not like he ever gave a shit about me enough for it to matter.”

But, it matters to you, you want to tell him. You understand his need to throw it all in his face, though. “Is that one label going to sign you? The one you were talking about?”

His tongue darts out to wet dry lips. “They haven’t yet. I don’t know. But I don’t need that money to get out of here, I’ve been working on it.”

“They will,” you say. “But, where would you go? Not too far?” You try and keep it light and playful, even as your heart aches.

“Come with me,” he says. It’s painfully blunt, as if it were that simple. “Let’s go get and apartment; you and me.”

“Kai...” you say. “You don’t have to drag me along because you feel bad.”

The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.

“What?” His face tightens, as if somewhere under the surface your words had scraped somewhere tender. “You don’t have to stay here forever. Please. I want... I want you to come with me. You wouldn’t have to even tell them; just bring all your stuff and go together. We could do it together. Like we said we would.”

“We were like, five. Everybody tries to pretend running away at five,” you deadpan. It’s a washy attempt at lightening things back up.

Living with him, moving out together, should feel like everything you’ve ever wanted. And, maybe it is. But, he’s not asking you to live with him the way you want him to. Not in the way that your aching heart wishes he would.

Kai doesn’t share the laugh you give him. “Yeah, okay,” he says, leaning into the table.

Perhaps you should consider the potent disappointment he’s terribly masking with a face of indifference, though.

⚝⭒

Slowly, the knots in your belly have worked themselves out. When Kai had dropped you off, they’d been so awful that you felt borderline sick. You sat the whole ride there in his old beat-up truck picking at your nails and rambling to him. He listened to you the whole time. And then when it was time to walk in, it had least felt a little easier to do so with his eyes on you, watching to make sure you made it in safely.

You’d gotten a job. It’s not too bad, folding clothes out on display. It would be nice if they kept the lights a bit brighter, but you’ll get used it eventually, you hope.

Most of your coworkers are around your age, but the one showing you the ropes... your heart had fluttered.

“You’ll get it,” Yeonjun says. The smile you find on his lips once he straightens up from placing product on a display is smooth and smug. Sleek strands of black hair fall over his eyes. You fluster under his gaze.

With arms crossed over your chest you say, “Yeah, probably.” You reach into the cardboard box for stock to practice on.

“Where’d you work before this?” he asks, leaning back into a wall to watch you. Suddenly, you make sloppier work of your folding. “Your first retail job?”

Some obnoxious pop song falls down from the speakers over the store. Nobody’s in here yet, thankfully; you’ve got some time to try and get a handle on everything. “No, this is my first job. I was so nervous walking in.”

Interest catches in his eyes. It encourages that smooth smile on his lips further. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll show you the reins.”

Your mind stalls. The suggestive, sly flicker to it—are you looking too much into it? Maybe that’s just how guys like Yeonjun act. It’s hard to pretend that you don’t see how he’s looking at you, though. It has your belly twisted up in fluttery knots. It’s not like you hadn’t had your share of his type. But, for some reason you’d rather not address, he’s got your heart thumping in your chest.

He laughs at your fifth attempt to fold up the shirt. When he takes it from you to help, he smells of musk and vetiver. “You going to college near here?” he continues.

“Nah, just doing this, I guess,” you answer, watching him fold it up to try and soak it up.

“Really? Why not?” he hums, crossing his arms about his chest. “You seem like a smart girl.”

Buffering, your blood buzzes in your veins and your cheeks burn. “Dunno. Not really sure what to do. Are you in college?”

“Nah. I’m trying to figure things out, too.”

The both of you pop your heads up when the bell rings to announce the arrival of a customer.

“Yeah,” you say, eyeing him. He’s a few years older than you, no doubt, and yet his life hasn’t fallen apart because he’s not done anything grand yet.

Time’s hand around your neck loosens. Just a little bit.

⚝⭒

You sit crisscrossed on top of Kai’s bedsheets. He’d thrown the windows open because the AC died, but it’s no help. The hot air wafting about the room sits heavy on your skin. You’d dressed in as little material as possible to let it breathe, bare thighs clad in a pair of loose shorts and a thin tank top, but it’s still miserable.

Perhaps you two should be going over to yours, but you haven’t had time alone with him for a few weeks now. You hate this busier life, where you struggle to make room for this.

Your new job isn’t so awful, though. Especially with Yeonjun there. A bout of nerves flows up through your stomach. That reminds you.

Sitting up a bit straighter, you consider not doing it. In fact, you really shouldn’t. But your mouth moves before you can put a stopper on it.

“Hey, Kai,” you say. The thickness in your throat makes you believe that your heart’s jumped up into it, caught. God, what are you doing? The unsure waver in your words has you regretting.

His eyes flicker up to yours. He hums out a, “Huh?”

No, this is wrong. You mess with the thin cotton strap of your tank top where it’d slipped down. “Never mind,” you tell him, trying to shrug it off.

That piques his interest. “No, what?” His brow pinches.

You lick your lips and shake your head. “Nothing, never mind. Really.”

His eyes search you from where he sits up against the wall. “Tell me,” he demands.

Really, you shouldn’t have said it in the first place. It was a ridiculous idea. But now you know he’s not going to let it go. And, ridiculously, you say it. “I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?”

Insects buzz outside as he looks at you, frozen in spot. You reject the urge to dart away or throw up. You’re honestly just as shaken as him. But really, who else could you trust with something like that? You don’t want Yeonjun to be disappointed if he kisses you, or to seem inexperienced to him.

And, perhaps, the hopelessly in love part of you hopes to at least feel his lips on yours at least once. If you’re going to be alone forever in your longing, you just wish that you can have this.

“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.

Of course, he’s shocked. You shift. “Forget I said that,” you tell him, unable to meet his gaze.

String-roughened fingers wrap around your upper arm. “I didn’t say anything,” he says, voice strained and face less shock-fallen and more darkened. “But... I mean, you want me to teach you to kiss for some other guy.” He spits out the last bit as if bitter in his mouth.

“You don’t have to do it,” you say. “I just... thought that I might ask you to do it. I don’t know, I’m sorry I said it. I’ll just wing it or something.” His room’s grown ten degrees hotter, if that was possible. Especially where you feel his eyes on your face.

Almost imperceptibly, his hand tightens around you. He swallows hard. “You want to learn how to kiss?” he says. “Fine. I’ll teach you.”

In a heart-stopping moment, your eyes snap to his. Brown and familiar, they hold you with an intensity that turns your limbs into jelly. The air is stifling. “What... do I do?” you ask when the silence becomes too heavy.

A muscle feathers in his jaw, reflected in the low light of his room. It’s quick and so easy to miss, but it tells you everything you need to know about how this is making him feel. How much disbelief he’s in. “Come here,” he says, stilted around the absolute absurdity of it. He pats on his lap.

You make a hesitant crawl across the bed toward him. It seems as though your elbows might buckle beneath your weight, but you make it despite the odds. A fog settles over your brain when you rest your hands on his shoulders and bring your legs to straddle his lap.

But you shove it back; you want to live and breathe every last second of this. No matter how unbelievable or blistering it is.

Breaths fan out over your face. It’s seizing your mind like undiluted liquor. “Where do I put my hands?” you ask him. It’s breathless, the air stolen right from your lungs though your mouths haven’t even touched.

“There is fine,” he says. His words sound breathless, too. The weight of his touch on you as he runs his own up to support your back is unsure. “And then...” he says. It falls out on your mouth slowly, and then he’s taking your lips onto his.

The walls melt away, sound does too. All that is real is the taste of his lips and how they move against you. Your lips start tentative, but you try his mouth movements yourself. It feels like a timid dance—it feels like deep, deep down, finally everything is right. That mist, thick and blinding, falls back over you.

Something changes. Something in it, where you two meet, changes. He becomes hungry. Softly locked lips turn biting and nipping, shaky breaths exhaled slow through your nose. His hands on your back become surer, and one even ventures off to grab your chin. The other holds you to his chest, melded together despite the intense smoke and flame rolling off your bodies. You wonder if he can feel your heart beating a mess there.

Reluctance paints you both when you pull back. You’re panting deep drinks of air. It’s hard to think; your mind’s run off and sits just out of reach. Licking your messy lips, stained with illicitness, you can only manage to brush your fingers against it to form words. “How... was that?” you say, searching his eyes. You find his pupils blown so wide that they consume the warm brown. You’re ready to jump out of your skin with that look pointed at you.

Kai doesn’t answer, though. He slams your mouths back together as if starved by just the brief moment you’d parted for air. Nips on your bottom lip and emboldened hands—he moves like roaring water through a dam. A dam that he’d worked hard to fortify, and yet, at a crack it’s all falling down. Fingertips digging through the fabric of your shorts down to your soft hips, his chest rumbles. You feel it reflected in your core, electricity charging there and shooting up your spine and down your thighs.

You kiss him for all the times you wish you would’ve, but didn’t. The slight rolls of your hips down onto him come easy. You love how it has him making a sound into your mouth and taking the fat beneath his fingers harder into his hands. He helps you.

He drops his head into your neck. Your head swims for air and he has you shuddering with just the brushing of his nose against the column of your neck. The walls of his room spin around you. “Kai,” you whine, every bit of friction his jeans provide, even clothed as you are, just enough to rile you but not to give you what you need.

“God,” he growls, thumbs hooking under your waistband. “You always fucking run around dressed in nothing,” he says, letting his fingers linger like a suggestion of undressing you. “Did you do it on purpose? Expect to make me crazy, knowing I couldn’t touch you?”

And, in those words, it seems that he steals every last bit of breath from you. How often had you gone braless or worn something like this around him? Laid here, in his bed, like that?

Grown tired of your fruitless grinding, he brings a hand down to support your lower back and says, “Turn around.”

Though you explode with the prospect of what he might be intending to do or what’s next, if you’re really going to do this, you do so in a flash of eager limbs. His chest is solid against your back, you melt against the feeling of it. He’d become such a man lately, filled out, and you watched it happen. It was hard for your eyes not to catch on muscle-corded forearms while he picked at strings or to not appreciate the timbred rumble of his voice when you’d feel it come from his chest. How could it not do things to you? Now, he’s dragging your shorts down your legs and you’re in disbelief.

“Fuck,” he breaths out. His fingers find your panties soaked through. “So, you’re the type to get dripping wet.”

An embarrassed blush decorates your cheeks. Kai drags his index finger in circles around your clit through the fabric as if enamored with how much of a mess you’d made of it. Your hips twitch every time he rolls right over it. It’s strange how he’s got your body acting on its own volition with his touches. Even stranger that it’s your best friend doing it. “Sorry,” you tell him, wavering.

He continues those terribly slow circles. “Sorry?” he says, chin on your shoulder. He’s got you wrapped up in him, with nowhere to go but to melt back into him and let his fingers work. Free hand on one of your inner thighs digging divots into the plushness there to hold it still, he tells you, “It’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s hot as fuck. You’re so excited for me to touch you, huh?”

The words wreak havoc on you, feeding the flame that has your belly twisted up tight and the ignition point between your thighs pounding. To hear them coming from him, reserved Kai, has you digging your fingers into his forearm to prove that it’s real. You’d never have imagined him being so... filthy. You imagine him behind falsely nonchalant eyes, devouring you with a perverted mind all the times you’d spent innocently sitting together in this room.

Your cheeks squish beneath his fingers as he takes your face and turns it to him. He wants to make sure you’re look at him as he asks you, “Do you want me to finger you?”

Like a record, your brain skips. Between the blunt, lewd question and his hand on you, it’s in overload. How could he ask something like that so simply? Stunned as you are, of course you want him to. You want him to do anything to you. You nod.

Every last nerve and neuron in your system, just below the skin, cry out when his fingers slow down to nothing. “Hmm?” he says, ignoring the chasing of your hips and the opening of your thighs to invite him into paying your poor pussy the attention he’d ripped from it. He wants to hear you say it.

About ten minutes ago, you lost your mind. It does not return to you now. “I want you to,” you say, chest beating in tandem with your cunt.

“You want me to, right? Not some dumbass you met a week ago, huh?” he says. “Because you know that this is what it’s meant to be. Me, doing these things to you. Not some twenty-five-year-old piece of shit. He doesn’t deserve you, baby. Understand?”

His fingers slider under your panties. Dumb brained and cognition gone muddled, you nod. All you can really think about is the moment his fingers slide over you. Fire licks up your lower belly and your insides as he brushes calloused finger tips finally right against your clit.

Puffed breaths of a scoff raise goosebumps over your skin. “Teach you to kiss so that you can go over there and get his hands on you,” he says, middle two fingertips prodding at your entrance. “As if you were ever anybody’s but mine. You’d come crawling back to me, baby, because it was always meant to be us. He could never satisfy you.”

His words might alarm you or have you asking questions if he hadn’t pushed his fingers into you and begun curling them with strong, pointed presses, pulling soft mewls and hums from you until he finds a spot that twists up your insides. Even through the palm you press over your mouth, your moans come out more like wavering grunts and croaks. Your thighs quiver and twitch, threatening to snap closed against your own will with each. Only your feet stay planted to the mattress. Like a cone of soft serve under the sun’s blistering attention, you melt down him. Just his frame keeps you upright.

“Right there, huh?” he says. The smirk on his mouth filters his words into something taunting. “That’s where you like it.” It’s like he’s learning your body step by step, fulfilling all the questions he’d been forced to only guess at before this.

“Uh-huh.” It comes out whiny and cracks in the middle, but you can’t find even an ounce of you to care right now. If this moment had been a long spiral, a fall from grace, down into a dark pit of forgotten inhibitions, you’ve just hit the bottom. Cheeks blazing cherry blossom pink and with your fingers curling into his pant leg, you don’t doubt that you are a picturesque mess. The kind of mess that’s beautiful because it’s dirty. Your teeth are not gentle on your plush bottom lip. It stings, tugged back and bitten and still a bit swollen with kisses. Perhaps you taste the tang of metal on it, but you pay it no mind.

Kai redoubles his efforts. Now that he knows exactly how to play you, he’s fucking you on his fingers without mercy. The sounds coming from your cunt were wet, but now they’re different— nasty squelching. The only noises coupling with your pathetic keening. Forget anchoring yourself on his thigh, forget muffling your sounds. Instead, your hands fly to encircle his flexing forearm. Under your nails, angry red crescents dig into the muscle there. What had been a languid, building pleasure suddenly becomes everything. Your breaths run away from you, and you chase them frantically. Deep down in your core, the muscles spasm and rage against his fingers. “H—oh god,” you groan. Even the muscles in your thighs and tummy tighten up.

“So whiny...” Kai mumbles, voice taut with the effort of eroding you down into pure, blinding-white pleasure.

And then, in a swoop of mercy, your belly tightens. You hover here, on the precipice of something so consuming and voracious that your muscles and bones reject it, and yet your heart sings. Your eyes and cheeks and lungs and belly burn, the flame charring the edges of you in a beckon. You answer its call. Kai doesn’t mind the snapping of your legs shut around his arm, nor does your bucking or shaking deter him. He just holds you through it, arm like a metal bar around your waist. He’s everywhere, in this moment—the smell of him, leather and utterly familiar, his mouth dusting hot kisses over your skin, his fingers guiding you through orgasm. Where you’d gone silent in the initial crash of it, you devolve into mewls and grunts as you come down.

He holds you even as you slump against him boneless. Afterglow simmers in your veins and has your brain all lethargic and lazy. Neither of you speak for a while, your pulse thumping a rhythm. His breaths rise and fall against you; it grounds you in this moment where you feel all spacey and gone. You become aware again of how disgustingly sweltering it is in his room, your skin sheened.

That brainless bliss only lasts you for so long, though. When rational mind returns to you, no matter how you wish it wouldn’t, you’re hit in the chest with regret so hard it knocks the wind out of you.

How will anything ever be the same after what you’d just done? Stricken still by the thought, you barely register him pulling his fingers out of you. After all your worrying about making sure no wedge comes between you two, look what you’ve gone and done. No; nothing ever will be the same again.

⚝⭒

A couple of weeks ago, you ruined the one friendship you were supposed to have forever. It presses down heavy one you while you sit sprawled out on Yeonjun’s couch, his arm around your shoulder. His phone casts a glow over his features with all the lights out.

It doesn’t smell like home. He, pressed against your side, doesn’t smell like home.

Some stupid movie that he’d picked out, yet somehow you’ve ended up the only one still watching it, weaves a hum into the quiet of his apartment. Tangy hurt wells up in your throat. Even the moments when you and Kai would sit in mutual silence on your phones never felt like this. This is different.

You haven’t seen Kai since that night. He’s been busy getting ready to move out, and you’ve been here most days. How fast all of it had changed. You wish you’d feel whiplashed, left empty, by the drifting that you’d been so terrified of. But you don’t. It’s just been you, locked on land, watching him being taken away by the ocean’s tide with no way to change its course. You tried and screamed to call him back, but now your voice has gone hoarse.

And instead of watching him go, you choose to look elsewhere. It’s all you can do to protect yourself from the hurt.

“Hey,” Yeonjun says, finally addressing you rather than whoever’s he’s got in his phone. “Did you bring anything to change into?”

“I brought stuff to sleep in,” you say, eyeing him. You know that’s not why he’s asking. If it came down to it, you could just steal something from him and pull it on. He means going out clothes. Your jaw tightens. “But nothing nice. Why?”

He stretches his arms behind his head in a flaunt of long arms and tanned muscle. Hours spent at the gym lent him those; you appreciate the look of it with a watering mouth. Kai had earned his build by hours spent outside with your dad, because his own could care less, helping him fix up cars and vehicles of all ridiculous sorts. You remember when Kai had first gotten his truck—junk on wheels, honestly—he’d spent so much of summer out there getting it running. And, well... the sun-kissed bronze of his skin and frame that came with it, you had no qualms with.

But those memories only sit heavy in your chest as you’re sat here beside Yeonjun. You banish them elsewhere; you need to let him drift off. If you can’t have each other, and your feelings won’t permit just being friends, then you have to. You want him to do amazing things, and you fear that it’s your presence in his life that will interrupt that. As much as your feelings are real, they are selfish. You, your unsure direction and all your dead weight, should let him go. Because you love him.

“The guys want to come over,” he tells you, pushing off from the couch. “You should probably into change into something less showy.”

Less showy. Your mouth drops into a scoff of disbelief, looking down. A pair of shorts and a shirt, showy? You have to laugh, or else you’ll succumb to the strange embarrassment crawling at the back of your skull. What’s he trying to say? Is that what he thinks of you? “What’s that supposed to mean?” you say, face tilted up to him in a twist of distaste. “I’m wearing something comfy.”

He shrugs, hands shoved into the pockets of his black sweats. “Don’t want to give them the wrong idea about you, that’s all, baby. They’re guys; I just want to protect you.”

“No,” you say, the word falling out in a barked laugh. “Why would you even be bringing over dudes that you think will look at me like that? Why are you even friends with people that you think are gonna make moves on your girlfriend?” He holds a hand out to you, but your hands stay right where they are: crossed solidly over your chest.

Throwing that hand up in audacious exasperation, he gives you a look that makes you feel small and petulant—like you’re throwing an overblown fit. And, maybe you are. You should probably just do it; him seeing you as some overbearing or high maintenance girl has that embarrassment flaring like wildfire that’s found dry brush. “C’mon, baby,” he says, a lazy smile on his mouth that gets under your skin. “Let’s just have an easy night. Don’t make it a big deal.”

Let’s just have an easy night. As if you’re the one ruining the night. Something snarky tries to seize your tongue, but you hold it down. “I thought it would be just us. We wanted to watch the movie together, Yeonjun. Can’t you wait to hang out with your friends? Let’s enjoy our time together; you’ve got your shift tomorrow.”

“My fucking god,” he groans, running a hand through his hair furiously. “You’re needy, you know that? The neediest I’ve ever had to put up with. I don’t put up with needy, baby. Can’t you just chill out a little? My last didn’t mind when I’d have friends over.”

Your eyes burn. Your cheeks burn. He’d been with plenty of other girls before you; that, you’re well aware of. It’s been a corrosive source of self-doubt for you. You don’t want that title: the neediest he’s ever had. Don’t want him to think of you as some prude that won’t let him have fun. Just... hearing him bring up the other girls he’d been with before you stings and leaves welts no different from a slap in the face. Feelings of inadequacy shackle you and have you saying, “Fine. I’m gonna borrow some of your clothes.”

Heavy resentment blooms on your skin where he bends down and presses kisses to your cheek, and then mouth, and then down your neck. “Thank you, baby.”

And, where those ugly, wilted flowers of it bloom, you hear echoes of something. Something that tells you that Kai wouldn’t treat you like this. But you’ve made your bed, decided to do it yourself, and now you’ve got to lay on it.

⚝⭒

The frat parties are the worst kind of social outing that Yeonjun insists upon. The smaller kinds, more intimate gathering with just his closer friends, you tolerate much easier. You’re not fond of the circles he chooses. Breathing in thick, smoked-out air surrounded by alcohol-coated breaths is not your type of fun night. Somehow, you end up doing that more than date nights. But that’s better than being here. The base rumbles up through your feet and makes your stomach sick, and it reeks of grinding bodies and body odor, and condensation coats your fingers from the red solo cup as full as when you’d first gotten it.

But, still, you come along. Not every time, but when you don’t, you lay in his bed sickening yourself with images of what he might be doing here. How pathetic is it to attend parties with your boyfriend because you fear that otherwise, he might stick his tongue down the throats of other girls?

You’re looking for him right now, awkward and left alone. He’d promised to stick around; you had begged him to. That was pathetic, too. You know that you put up with too much. If he loved you, or honestly even liked you, you two would be in the thick of the throngs dancing or off somewhere talking with others. Together. The frantic skimming and weeding of your eyes through the blur of faces is not right. That’s not how he should make you feel. It’s not how Kai would make you feel.

Well, Kai would never have you here in the first place.

Venturing out from your little corner, you sift between the bodies of people have a hell of a lot better time than you. Drunken, some you bounce off of like bumper carts. You press your palm over the round face of your cup to spare the floor from spillage threatening to pour over the lip. It’s not like a splash from yours would matter much, though. The linoleum has already been made a fetor mess of dirt off shoes and the sticky sugar of liquor. Your shoes peel from it as you walk. God, what would your parents think of you being here?

You peek around corners and eye big groups. He’s not in the kitchen when you look there, either. Your stomach feels sick in a knowing way—a gut feeling that doesn’t justify anger or tears just yet, but you know. Right in the center of your chest, you know.

It’s in some room that you find him. Sat on the floor along with a few faces you don’t know, he pulls from his bottle. And on his shoulder, he lets a girl with shining curls and pink cheeks rest her head. At your busting in on the intimate gathering, Yeonjun’s eyes slide to you. Recognition flashes over them and wars with bleary drunkenness.

“Hey, baby,” he says. Their gazes all fall on you, but you can hardly see them through blurry eyes.

The girl lifts her head from his shoulder. She’d caught the memo.

“I think I’m gonna go.” You make it sound resigned, try to not let them see your shame, but your voice betrays you and crackles. Maybe it’s better to pretend it doesn’t feel like you’ve just been kicked in the stomach and left to reel against the force, but you can’t. You’re nowhere near shocked, nowhere near blindsided, but still you hurt.

He follows you down the hall. “What’s your problem?” he says, the few, plain words mending and waving into a slurring.

You’ve got one goal: get to the front door, away from the shitty music and him. His words, sharpened, fall off your skin despite his efforts. What good would fighting do you, anyway? It was always going to end up this way. This is just who he is, and he doesn’t give two shits enough about you to want to change that.

“Baby, seriously? That made you this mad? I didn’t even fucking do anything. Stop being insecure,” he says. At the gritting of your teeth, he sees an opportunity and pounces on it. “You don’t need to be jealous. I don’t do jealous shit. We can dance, or something. Shit, I don’t know what you want! Just stop throwing a fit.”

Didn’t do anything? You have to laugh. Maybe you didn’t walk in on him fucking someone else, but that’s not what this is about. Not even a little bit. You’ve checked out, and the fact that he thinks he can make you believe that it’s your fault this time only drives the killing stake in harder.

Maybe you’re bitter. It claws at your insides—turns your face hot and screams in your face that you’ve been used. But beside it sits a sadness. Not the slow kind, but the quick sadness of hurt. Why hadn’t you been good enough for him to love you? To like you? You’d left behind Kai and rested your new life on Yeonjun’s shoulders. You’d wanted so badly for his approval, or for him to want you. You did your best to try and make this work out because you needed it to. You needed so desperately proof that you could fall in love with somebody else. But your best was not what Yeonjun was interested in.

Pins and needles prick your skin as you step outside, like jumping into an ice bath. It shocks you out of dizziness. Words surge up and out in a flash flood like hard reality. You spin on him. “Jealous?” you say, choking out a scathing laugh. “The last thing I’d ever let myself suffer over you is jealousy. Get over yourself. I’m going, stay here if you want. I don’t care.”

“How are you gonna do that, huh?” he says. The flickering yellow of the porchlight paints his features. The shadow of something fluttering around it cuts dark spots in the light, and then a small little moth comes down and jumps around in his face. He waves it off. “Gonna have bitch boy come pick you up? You can’t leech off him forever; he’s gonna get sick of picking up another man’s girlfriend.” It seems like you walking in on that had sobered him up, but his breath still curls out onto your face with the reek of alcohol. “It’s not a big deal. You’re making this a bigger deal than it has to be. Do you not trust me?”

“You are such a piece of shit,” you grit out. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Ever. I don’t know how I let this go on for so long.” You don’t like him having Kai in his mouth, don’t like him trying to act like you’re conflating things, and especially don’t like that face he’s making. As if you’re acting crazy and overblown. “No, I don’t trust you. You didn’t fuck her, but come on, Yeonjun. Seriously? You think I’m stupid, and I’m sick of it. You thought this would be easy because I didn’t have the experience you have, but I’m sorry. I don’t like being walked over.”

“If you’re gonna be so goddamn jealous, then maybe we aren’t gonna work,” he says.

That moth, floating light in the air, is right back in his face. Yeonjun takes two hands and smashes it between a clap of his hands. He shakes its flattened, broken body off his hand. Looking down at it laying there on top of dirt-caked concrete, you get this... feeling. A tickling around your person.

“See if I care,” you snap, throat aching against the onslaught of emotion and held back tears.

⚝⭒

Rivulets of raindrops dilute the tears on your cheeks. Your hair plasters to your face and your clothes to your body.

For a week, you’d went about it all as if it hadn’t happened. And then you came here.

It’d not been this rainy when you first got down to the creek—just a gentle trickle, really. You hadn’t been crying then, either. But, watching the water work at babbling over stone, you let yourself feel it. Here, where you’d had so many good memories. You’ve gone and tainted it, now. But for whatever reason, you’d just wanted to be here. Arms curled around yourself and fingers digging into drenched sleeves, you don’t wipe away the tears or cover the sounds of your crying. You let the stream hear it; it’ll sweep it right up and down the way. Somewhere far off, where you don’t have to feel it anymore.

You realize that, usually, you’d be over at Kai’s right now. The fact that his room was not the first place you thought you could go to anymore is a punch to the gut. You drop your face into your hands and cry harder. Really, you’ve got to stop doing that to yourself. Thinking of sad things—putting your hurt under the microscope to see it closer. It’d be easier to just fold it up and tell yourself that it’ll pass, and that relationships end all the time.

It’s not him that you cry over. Well, maybe some of it is. Rather, it’s that you have absolutely no idea where you’re going. Where you are. Finally, you’d built yourself a raft to get off the shore and go out to sea, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it’s breaking apart right beneath you. And, stranded and alone in the water, you’ve got no way to get back to shore to build yourself another raft. You’re stranded, and the scariest bit is that you’re doing it all alone. You weren’t supposed to do this alone. You two made promises back then.

You suppose that a promise is one of those things you were supposed to leave faith in back on shore.

The raindrops are heavy over you. The fall of it roars against the ground, a torrent downpour. It’s not coupled with whipping wind or flashes of lightning—just straight, still falling. It’s a somber feeling no different from the gnawing in your chest.

Like chimes, there’s a distant, gentle sound. Maybe water falling over creek rock, but it’s more like suggestion. A sweet sound that you shouldn’t even be able to hear over the rest of it, it’s as if it’s right in your ear. A whisper.

You fix your blurry eyes with a wet sleeve. Rain falls right back into its place, but you see it: a silvery, whimsy haze. And the moths. They jump and call you, this time. Their glow bounces off the rainy mist against the grey of night’s arrival. Then, all you can hear is the whispering. Where you stand frozen, your feet beg to move. To follow them.

So you do.

Their entourage of moondust trails them where they go, wrapping you up and weaving between raindrop and space. You don’t worry where they’ll take you, or even try to wrap your head around this happening again. You just follow, mind glossed over and entranced with how beautiful it is. When you’d seen them before, it’d made you uneasy. Mostly because it looked so unearthly and unbelievable. But this time you just follow.

A far-off voice, one oh-so-familiar, peaks through the haze. It’s not enough to stop you, but then you hear it again, louder and closer.

You blink a few times. Once to break away the fog, and then twice to focus your eyes on Kai stood in front of you. His hair lays in wet spikes over his eyes and beads of rain trace the planes of his face. He’s as soaked as you.

“Kai?” you say. Looking around you, you’ve ended up somewhere in the field between your houses and the creek. But you’ve got no recollection of walking here. Whatever that mist is, sentient or not, had swept you here.

His voice is strained, but you appreciate hearing it. “Break up with him,” he tells you.

In his eyes, as you search them, there’s stardust glowing like reflection. Your face twists up. “What?” you say, breath a puff of smoke ahead of you. Summer had come and gotten away from you so fast, and now it’s gone all cold again.

“Break up with him,” he echos, face solemn. He looks ruffled.

“Why?” you ask, “And why are you out here?”

“Because I’m moving out today, and I think I deserve to at least see you before I go.” His eyes look over you. “And... your dad said you went down to the creek.”

He’s moving out today, and you had no idea. And really, it’s your fault. You’d driven that wedge between the two of you. “I did break up with him.”

Downpour fills his quiet for a few moments, his face swirling with emotion like the clouds above you. He nods. “Good.”

There are a few more long minutes between you; just you two searching each other's faces, antsy to say so much that it bunches up in your chests and stalls. It’s what a summer of longing does to you. Even with Yeonjun, even trying to slowly chip away the stitching that had connected the two of you at the hip, you were helpless to stop the gnawing of the love you bear for him. Even just seeing him now, you feel those threads mending back up. God, why does it have to be so hard?

He just looks at you. For a few beats, he just looks at you. There are so many questions in his eyes. They flit across and turn over, but all he settles on is, “Why?”

There’s so much you want to tell him. Words pile up to the top, some threatening to spill over. But you know that if you tell him some of it, just to make up for all the time you’d missed out on together, it’ll all come crashing out. And you don’t think you want him to know just how much you accepted, the way you let yourself get treated. So, you shake your head and say, “It doesn’t matter.”

Kai looks like he wants to push that issue, but whatever look he finds on your face deters him. “Come with me,” he pleads. “I want you to come with me.”

Your throat tightens. Curling your arms around yourself harder, the rain only coming down on you harder, you say, “Kai, I want to. I want to. I just... I don’t want to freeload off you, because you’re doing great things, and I’m just...” Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, but they’re already as soaked as the rest of you. “I’m just going nowhere. And I don’t want to be a burden, or ever be the reason that you can’t do what you dream of. If staying here means that you become everything that you’re destined to do, then I’m happy with that, Kai. I am.”

He shakes his head, stumbling toward you. “No, no you don’t get it,” he says, frantically taking your shoulders into big hands. Under his touch, every taut muscle goes slack. You melt. “You don’t get it. You are the music. Every single song is about you. Every single fucking song is about you. I want you to come with me, please. I love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you, and I thought you’d loved me too, and I don’t want to do this alone. I can’t do it alone.”

He loves you. Kai loves you. The enormity of it rumbles the ground where you stand on legs you fear might just give in. You flex your fingers to combat the tears pricking your eyes. It doesn’t work; they brim and well up, spilling down over your cheeks. “What?” you say, voice softly breaking. “Kai, I didn’t...”

“And just when I thought I finally had you, you left me,” he says, throwing a hand up beside him in a big gesture. “You left me! I woke up thinking you’d be there, and that maybe you loved me too, and you had left me. And then you threw me away for some piece of shit, and you stopped coming around.” His chest heaves for breaths.

Your face contorts. That night, the one where you two had slipped up, you’d fallen asleep curled up against his chest on undiluted contentment. When you woke up, you had panicked. You thought he’d wake up and pretend it hadn’t happened, or he’d be uncomfortable, or even be disgusted and regretting. You couldn’t handle that, so you slipped out before he woke up. It’d been an attempt to protect your tender heart, but looking at the twitching of his lip now, you begin to think it’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done. He thinks you used him and left him. Your stomach twists. Voice thick, you say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you, Kai. I thought you didn’t... I thought you didn’t see me that way. I was scared. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Brows knitted together, he says, “Thought I didn’t love you?” His hand cups your cheek, warm against the soft frozen skin he finds there. “I’ve... I’ve dreamed of you almost every night of my life. In my sleep, I see you, and you’re happy and glowing, and that damn... mist is all around you. I couldn’t get away from you even in my sleep.”

Darting between his eyes, soft and reflecting your face back to you, it’s hard to breathe. Kai’s dreamt of you; he’s as sickly in love with you as you are him. Thunder claps, and the ground shakes, and the heavens open up above you, the trumpets belt, and you two are in love. Somewhere deep in your center, you feel it—your soul nodding yes.

The mist. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I saw it. That stuff, those moths. The stuff we saw back then.”

“I did too,” he says, wet spikes of hair bouncing with a nod. “Not that long ago. It was the first time I saw it out of a dream since that day.”

Back then, you two had only budding, innocent love for each other. Things hadn’t become mangled and lost to confused hearts or expectations. When they’d appeared to you, you hadn’t needed it. This time, you’d followed it. And it had led you here—somehow had led you right to the very spot you needed to so that every last piece might fall into place. For this moment to happen. You know why it did.

“I’ll go with you, Kai. I’ll go wherever you go; I love you. I’ve loved you since forever,” you say, each and every word massive and lovely on your tongue. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier.”

So unlike the last times your mouth had met, he brings his mouth to yours with a dazzling clarity. No longer is it confused kisses; he locks his lips against yours with the urgency of so many years being unable to. Kai’s hands cradle your wet cheeks, hold you so tenderly into his kiss. His touch grounds you, makes the moment real. You melt into him—your fingers curled into his shirt as if holding him there so that he won’t disappear like something of an incorporeal dream. He sighs through his nose, kissing you harder. Even if it all were fake and this was nothing more than a feverish figment of your imagination, you think you could die happy just knowing this once.

But it is utterly real, and utterly yours. You kiss him harder, too.

When your lungs start to burn and plead for breath, you two pull away from each other. Your eyes flutter open to capture his. Warm and brown and the same ones you’ve stared into so many times before, but not like this, you sink into them. He runs his thumb over your cheek as he sinks into yours. His tongue darts out to lick lips painted with you. In the inches between you, space no longer feels heavy or charged with grievances. Every last unsaid thing had been answered.

“I have my stuff up in the truck,” he says, breaths soft. Brown eyes dart around your face. “I’ll help you add your stuff to it.”

You shudder out a breath. Add your stuff to it. A nervous energy settles down over you, but it doesn’t seem so bad if you’re doing it with him. Together.

“Okay,” you whisper, a balmy secret just like the ones you used to share in small, giggly voices so many years ago. “Okay.”

⚝⭒

Shivers seize you like jittering bones, all wrapped up in a blanket. The velour cushion seats beneath you have soaked up water and become damp, but Kai’s got the heater blasting. You wind around back roads, headlights illuminating the way ahead of you. Stray droplets whip in them, but nothing much. Isn’t it funny how the rain had just stopped like that? That’s just how the weather is, out here. You wonder how the weather might act wherever you’re headed.

Your teeth chatter as if your jaw had its own will. The two of you had the windows down thinking that the wind might dry you off, but all it’s done is lap at your bitten cheeks. You reach down for the handle to crank it up. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you—either you’ll eventually dry off, or you can pull off at a rest area to change in a bathroom. The wet clothes are really not helping.

With an arm up on the steering wheel, Kai turns his attention on you. You know that smile. “Cold?” he asks, eyes darting between your face and the road. With the hand he’s not got working the steering wheel, he runs fingers over your thigh. Soft, gentle massages, yes. The number it does on your core is absurd. Each mindless digging into your thighs and brush of his thumb, sparks sputter there. You’ve sat here, right in his passenger seat, so many times before. Day trips up to the lake, the one he’d joined your family camping at for so many summers, all the times he’d driven you to school in this truck, and even just a quick run down to a convenience store for a late-night snack. You’d deemed it your seat. But never once had you sat in it like this. Your heart does a flip. All those times you’d wish he’d reach over and do just this—a small gesture that would’ve been so big then. And it’s your reality, now.

“Freezing,” you say. A brush of his fingers nearer the apex of your thighs sends you pressing them together and shifting in your seat. “But not everybody runs as hot as you, though, so.”

His eyes catch the movement in just the split second he looked over to you. “Huh,” he says. He turns to look at you, his gaze flickering with something anew. Something that you’d only ever seen once before. “Is that it?”

It’s hard to swallow. His fingers brush higher, and higher, feather-dustings of calloused fingertips that sends tingles shooting up your spine at the slightest suggestion of where he’s headed. “Yes,” you say, feigning indignance to cover the shiver that threatens to overtake you. When his fingertips dance at the waistband of your bottoms, it does so anyway. “Kai,” you say, blood hot in your veins. “You’re...driving.”

His eyebrows pinch into a taunting furrow. “I am,” he says, nodding. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I’ve got us.”

And he does; fingers slipping under the band of both your bottoms and your panties, he doesn’t even tear his eyes off the road. He’d driven these roads so much, you think he might be able to do it asleep. Even drawing a mewl from you with a brush over your clit, he doesn’t look away more than a quick glimpse at your pinkened cheeks.

Two fingers dragging up your folds, right over the source of the mess. “You get excited so easily, huh?” he hums. “You like it when I play with you.”

When he presses those fingers at your entrance, you can’t help but be taken back to that night. It echoes and reverberates through you. Long fingers, strong and punctual brushes against the sweet spot—he was criminally good with his fingers. Playing guitar did more for him than just music. He seemed to know exactly how to utilize those roughened fingers and trained flicks. Your muscles flicker as he abandons your hole for more brushes at your bud.

Those teasing, sly touches turn to something more serious. His fingers roll over your clit, slow but enough to have you sighing and rolling your hips against the seat belt. But last time had gone just like this, him touching you and receiving nothing. He should feel good, too. “Shouldn’t you pull over?” you sigh, muscles taut. Your breaths come out shuddering and half-controlled, interrupted by the tightness that each delicious swirl provokes. The door takes the brunt of your grip, white-knuckling the interior.

He laughs, a husky sound that is tinder to fire. He knows what you mean. “Maybe,” he says. “But I think I’m enjoying this plenty. I think I want to see you cum on my fingers again.”

Fingers pinching and flicking faster, you grow breathy and whiny, hips rolling against the seatbelt and back into the seat. Your muscles, all the way down your thighs and deep in your belly, jump and twitch each time his fingers run over your clit in just the right spot—that tender spot that’s so good that it teeters on overwhelming. The kind that makes you hiss and then want more. “Shit, Kai,” you whine. “Right—there, keep going."

He doesn’t answer with any teasing words. No, he just doubles down right at that angle and pressure, leaned back into his seat and driving as if he wasn’t fingers-deep in your panties right now. His sculpted profile at total ease—it does something for you. A delicious tightness curls its fingers over your center, promising a sugary ecstasy that you can’t help but chase. Bucking into his hands as best you can, you go quiet. Right there—right there, you feel it. The cusp. Your fingers brush over it, clenching around nothing and squeezing your thighs tight around him. Every last drop of blood in your body reaches for it, singing and dancing through your veins and making you dizzy.

And then he stops. Your mouth drops open, whiplashed and helpless to its slipping away from you. You whittle your gaze into something sharp and turn to him. “What—why?” you complain. The tide slips further and further and further back, but you still taste sea salt on your tongue. Frustration sets in its place as you feel it go. Seriously, you’d been right there. “You’re so mean.”

He slows and then with the clicking of the turn signal, he’s off the road and pulling the truck into park on a little secluded side road. Where the headlights pierce the pitch black, nothing but gravel and field surrounds you. He doesn’t kill the engine, instead pulling his hand free from you.

Your heart, still stuttering with your lost orgasm, kicks back to life as he smears your slick over your mouth, dragging it over your lips and then taking his thumb to run it right over the plush of your mouth. “Am I?” he says, fingers taking your chin to meet your eyes with his. Endless hunger, pupils so blown that his eyes look black, pins you. “I don’t think you’ve seen mean yet, baby.”

Darting your tongue out to clean your lips, you look at him through your eyelashes. “Show it to me, then.”

Something dark passes over his face. It has your skeleton jumping out of your body. Then, he says, “Is that what you want? You want mean?”

Brain gone to mush that can only really think about him touching you, a slow nod is all you can manage.

The engine’s hum prevails for some long, thick seconds. And then, he tilts his head in a gesture. “Get in the back.”

Holy shit. You want to sit there frozen in an overwhelming sort of excitement, but his seatbelt clicks undone and you’re set into motion. In a flurry of giggles and clumsy limbs, you climb up over the center console and into the backseat. He slips out of the front seat, not bothering to even kill the engine.

The door beside you opens in a swirl of cold wind. In nothing more than a blink, a strong hand has both your wrists pinned to the cushions and your back flush against it. Nose-to-nose, his breath hot over your face. “I’ve got plenty of ideas as to how I can warm you up.”

You appreciate each other’s faces for a beat more, you looking up at him big-eyed and waiting. Kai breaks the moment to attack your neck in a procession of bites and kisses. Your mouth falls into a silent sound.

“You know,” he says, free hand working your pants off. His eyes are trained on you, though. “I thought about doing this to you all summer. Touching you again.” He moves on to your top, pushing the fabric up until your chest is freed, clad in soft cotton. He eats the sight up. You want to reach down and cup the back of his head or feel his hair between your fingers as he presses his mouth against the soft beginning of your cleavage, but he’s got your wrists firmly planted. So much so, that you wonder exactly how he’s got you so secure with just one hand. Kai is strong, but maybe you hadn’t seen just how strong. Your skin aches under the purple bites he decorates you in. The sight of him—face in your chest and marking you up so lazily—has your teeth abusing your bottom lip. Whatever sounds you might make otherwise would be embarrassing. Kai lifts his eyes to you. “And I think you thought of me, too. Didn’t you?”

“Oh, god, yes,” you say, writhing beneath him. He’s going so slow. You want him all over you. “So much.”

He likes that. He takes your pebbled nipple into his mouth through the fabric. Soft grazes of teeth and sucks, you’re burning all over. When he pulls back, he’s left you dark wet patches when the bra had only just dried against your body heat. “Good,” he rasps, taking his big hands demanding and hungry over your torso. They swallow your frame up, soothing skin but lighting it aflame all the same. “Good girl.”

You never thought just words could unravel you, but those did the job. Not a gasp, nor a sucking in of breath—no, you go silent and brainless, fumbling for rational thought.

The dropping of your jaw has Kai delighted. “You’re so pretty,” he says. In a swift and powerful hoist, he’s tugging you down the cushions toward him with greedy fingers. He’s got your thighs pressed up to your chest. You’re bent right in half.

Out of breath, you huff out, “You too.”

A quick laugh falls from his mouth, lips pulled into a smug tilt. He nips at your calf up by his face. “So sweet, it almost makes me feel bad for what I’m about to do to you.” Reaching down for your panties, he pulls back on the suffocating press for only enough time to drag them up your legs. Those get discarded somewhere on the floor. Who cares about that right now, though? All you can register is the metallic clinking of his belt being undone. It’s got your nervous system twisting up.

And, those words. Electricity shoots bolts of pure, sizzling revery into your core. What I’m about to do to you. You imagine a great deal of things that he might mean, but still, you think that none could hold a candle against the promise his voice held in saying it.

Kai presses his body to your thighs and hooks your calves over his shoulders, and it all becomes real. The press of his heavy cock to your folds, the digging of his fingers into your outer thighs, his pretty eyes sparkling with something feral. As real as it gets—more real than anything you’ve ever felt in the entirety of your life. Your hands find perch flattened to his broad chest.

The position leaving you two no option but to look right into each other, he holds your gaze and begins slow drags of his hot length up and down your slit. Tantalizing, awful, awful drags. When his tip nudges your eager clit, you jolt. And then he does it again. And again.

“Kai,” you mewl. A press against your hole has you hopeful, and he lingers there for a moment, but doesn’t give it to you. Can’t he just fuck you? You’ve never been more pitifully in need of something in your life.

“Shh.” His ruts get more daring, smearing your slick up onto your belly. “Take it.”

You wiggle your toes in the air and make passes at arching yourself into him in search of better friction. He’s got you pressed so suffocatingly into the seat that it does absolutely nothing for you. In fact, he holds your harder and changes tack so that your thighs press together. At the very apex of them, his weeping cock slips through the seam.

Pressing his cheek into your calf, he watches you. Every gasp and shaky inhale, he watches. It spurs his rutting on, sticky sounds and pants eating up the air. Your nails claw at his hands as, finally, a knot tightens in your core.

“Yes, please,” you breathe. He fucks your thighs harder. Faster. Every nudge at your clit and hole becomes euphoric. “Kai, baby—I’m gonna—”

Just as furiously easy as last time, he rips it all away from you. The rushing away of the buzzing and promise of shaking thighs—he takes it from you again. It brings prickling tears to your eyes. “Kai?” you hiss. “Again?”

His eyes aren’t playful. He pulls your calves back over his shoulders, handling your hips into a better position to press his cock right at your entrance as if you weigh nothing. Face utterly straight, he says, “I don’t think you deserve it, do you? Not after what you did with Yeonjun.”

A swallow goes down your throat hard. He presses himself just a bit harder into you. Not in yet, but right there.

When he does begin sliding in, the stretch of it... You cling to him and squirm between him and the warm cushions behind you. Each inch is a heady feeling, all the way up to the hilt of him. He shudders a controlled breath. “You’re so fucking tight, though,” he grits out. “Did he not fuck you right?”

Slaps of skin bounce off the car interior and between your bodies. He starts off at a brutal pace; you know it’s meant to make your brain go foggy. Squeezing your eyes closed, you manage, “I... didn’t fuck him.” It comes out strangled, voice bouncing as he fucks you into the car seat.

Thumb tugging your bottom lip down and then dipping into your mouth, he watches the show of your ecstasy down to every last detail. “Yeah?” he says, voice shaking and almost desperate. “Always thinking of me, huh? Such a good little princess. You know exactly where your heart belongs.”

You want to answer him, even just with a whine or moan. You try to. But with his thumb pressing down on your tongue, enough to pin it to the floor of your mouth, it’s not gonna happen. He tastes salty in your mouth.

His truck consists of his grunts and whines, and your taut groans for some moments that seem to stretch forever. The planes of his groin grind against your clit when he delivers occasional pointed rolls, but mostly it’s just an animalistic, feverish dancing of your two sweaty bodies, holds growing more frantic the closer you get.

Thumb wet with saliva; he frees your mouth. The hand trails slowly down your face and your chin, brushing feather touches, until he finds your neck.

Your eyes fly open, wide. He pressed his fingers into your neck—no real pressure yet, he looks at you through damp strands of dangling hair and says, “Want my fingers around your neck?” His thumb brushes over the buzzing pulse point there.

“Yes,” you grit out, body bouncing and back raw with friction against the coarse cushion’s surface. Your breath stutters, your mind stutters. Even your blinks stutter, eyelids too lazy to keep up. “Please.”

The pressure of his fingers there—it frightens you and has you tightening around him at the same time. But you would trust nobody more with your life than Kai.

He presses his cheek to your calf to indulge in the sight of you like this: underneath him, folded in two, nowhere to go but to take his pistoning hips, cheeks blazing, and his fingers pressed into your windpipe. If the way he becomes sloppier and more desperate in his tempo has anything to say for it, it does something for him.

“Gonna be my pretty little girlfriend, huh?” he says. His voice is tight—so is your belly. You’re both so close. Hopefully, this time he’ll let you cum. “Take you to every show; show you off to everybody. Fuck.”

Brain like static and swimming with a pinched flow of oxygen, you slur your words. “You’re—hah—gonna have other girls all over you.”

The taunting, split-second raise of his brows flips your belly. You tighten around him again. If he keeps hitting that spot, tip ramming into the soft spot deep inside you that he’d taken such delicate care of finding last time, you’re going to burst into sparkling flame and firework. He growls, “Well, I’ll just have to knock you up so that they know I’m yours, huh?”

Holy shit. You like the sound of that. Your nails dig into his wrist around your neck, but you cry out a pitchy, “Yes!”

“Oh, you like that?” Kai releases your throat to take both your hips. You gulp for air, finding nothing but the thick air of sex and humid breaths, at the opportunity. He’s ramming into you like he’s found a purpose. “Isn’t this the perfect position to do it? Get you pregnant?”

With every last bit of brain power you’ve got, teetering on the edge excruciatingly close to salvation, you groan a long, hoarse sound. “Fuck, yes! Please, Kai, inside—” A hot trail of tears roll down your temples.

It’s all he’s got to hear to still inside you. His growl rumbles deep in his chest, holding you in place and filling you with his hot cum deep in your cunt. That feeling, coupled with his short grinds against your clit as he fucks his seed deeper, takes your soul by sinful claws and crumbles it down into nothing. You burst into a shaking, whimpering peak, sucking your lips into your mouth to bare through the sheer twisting of your insides and the flame that consumes up your thighs and cunt.

He falls on you heavy, face in your neck. Warm kisses against your clammy skin meld with your slow floating down, the two of you a beautiful, nasty picture of fucked out. He stays right inside you—the absolute stillness of him, you think he has no plans of pulling out any time soon. His long fingers card through your sweaty locks of hair.

Finally, he presses himself off you. You get a glimpse of the window behind him—fogged up and filthy with your affairs. Anybody to see the truck from the outside would know exactly what went on inside, but right now, you don’t care. Not one bit. Your panted breaths drag in nothing but musk and thick, hot air. The drumbeat in your chest tells you that, despite how you feel ripped straight from your body, you are very much still alive. More alive than ever.

“Warm?” he says, pushing sticky hair off his forehead. He’s a mess, too. His hair is ruffled with your touch, his clothes rumpled the same, beads of sweat rolling down the planes of his cheeks and neck, and his eyes a lazy smolder. As much as he looks like sex personified, a soft smile twitches at his lips.

You snort. You can’t help but feel giddy, here with him. You’re with him. Nothing has ever felt more right. Unplugged when he pulls out of you, your mess trickles down onto the seat below you. “Yeah,” you say. “Very.”

Warm is not enough to begin to describe how you feel. In your ears, you hear whisperings. Soft and gentle. Perhaps it was divine intervention, or the fates lending you their word, or maybe just rational thought. It says:

Home. You are home.

✎୭ ashlynn's note how do we feel about this pair? i really didn't mean for this to get so long, but i ended up RLLY liking their chemistry. i had to do their story justice. also, i finished this with kai as a guitarist and then his drummer performance came out... hmm.

﹙🏷️ ﹚@lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

676 notes · View notes

inkdrinkerworld · 8 months ago

Note

Hiii i just saw your post prision Spencer post with sunshine reader and im soooo in love with it (and in love with him too tbh) could you please do a pt2? Have a nice day💕

spencer and sunshine!reader have set routines on office days and spencer likes flirting pt 1 of their story 🤭

“Spencer Reid, prepare to have your mind blown!” You announce as you walk into the bullpen, your Mary Janes clacking against the tiles. You’re in a skirt today, Spencer supposes it’s because it’s a designated office day- there’s only three a month, but every time there is one, you come in an outfit Spencer would never even dream of.

Today you’re channelling your inner Elle Woods. He knows about her from Resse Witherspoon, but also from your innate love of the film and the fact that you forced him to watch it on the jet once.

You’re wearing a pretty black skirt, a grey top and a baby pink blazer that matches the pink socks you’re wearing and your eyeshadow that he just about makes out behind your glasses.

“With what?” He’s on his way back from the kitchen, your prized orca mug in one hand and his mug in the other.

This is your new routine; you and Spencer have coffee in the morning while you both work through your crosswords and then get started on filing away reports for the many serial killers you’ve either interviewed with Tara or put away with the team. It’s fun, and it’s always something to look forward to, especially on designated office days.

These specific mornings, you have time for a game you’ve fondly named, ‘Making Spencer Try International Desserts.’

Spencer can smell your perfume, you smell like you always do- orange blossom, coffee and lavender. It’s intoxicating, the way the scent just floats into him with every move you make.

“The season calls for it, so I got pavlova. It’s a New Zealand dessert and I got it with raspberries, strawberries and a passion fruit syrup situation to go on top.”

Spencer knows the informational side to everything in the world but he’s never tried some of it out, as you’d learnt on a night out for drinks, so you’d started the game as a way to help him get real world knowledge of fun things- the operative word being up for debate but he hadn’t objected yet.

He clears his desk, making space for the two little boxes you have in your hand. “They’re a little sweet for breakfast, but you only live once.” You open up the boxes and Spencer is shocked to see the mini pavlovas and the fruit sitting beside it in a clear container.

“Do you like these?” He asks, handing over your coffee to you and pulling his box towards him.

“I do, but they’re more of a picnic food to share in my opinion. Like you need to be having a bar-b-que or a garden party to have the full effect of these.” Spencer isn’t surprised by your enthusiasm for the dessert- your little stories about every one you’ve shared with him is enthusiastic for how and when to eat them.

You sneak into the kitchen and return with two spoons. “Okay, try to get a bit of everything on your spoon.”

Spencer does as you say, a bit of the berries, the passion fruit and the shell of the pavlova on his spoon as he takes his first bite. You sit in anticipation, watching him chew and swallow like it’s the most fascinating thing a person could do.

You try not to focus on the way his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows or the way his tongue pokes out to lick away some of the meringue at the corner of his mouth. Spencer catches the way your eyes widen at the action and suppresses a smile.

“What do you think?” You busy yourself with setting up your own perfect bite, willing your body not to give away any of your fluster at being caught looking at him.

“It was really nice, I like the different textures.” Spencer compliments, watching you take your own bite and letting himself smile when some of the passion fruit syrup and meringue stain your bottom lip.

Without really thinking, his thumb comes to your face, wiping away the stain easily. Your breath hitches and Spencer feels it, his smile widening even more. There’s a moment where you both just stare at each other, your breathing filling the silence- you’re fighting the urge to lean in and kiss Spencer and he’s fighting the urge to lick his thumb.

“You only pretend to be this coy man, don’t you Doctor Reid?” you ask finally, leaning back in the chair you’re in and crossing your legs. Spencer’s sure his brain short circuits for a moment, your thighs have been a source of his torture for months now, especially when you wear skirts and dresses.

“You know you only call me ‘Doctor Reid’ when you’re flustered?” he tries changing the subject, leaning forward a bit to get a little closer to you.

“You have a knack for topic evasion, Spencer.” he laughs, a soft, sweet sound and he shakes his head.

“I have a knack for you,” you can feel your heart pounding in your ears, more so when Spencer’s fingers wrap around the arm of your chair and pull you closer to his desk. “Where’s your crossword?”

1K notes · View notes

watchmegetobsessed · 1 month ago

Text

UNMATCHED II.

A/N: soooo you guys were just as horny for a part 2 to this story as i was so here we are, giving in to the temptation. disclaimer, i know their behavior is giving red flag energy but lets just put that aside for the sake of the story now lol

WORD COUNT: 3.8k

WARNING: sexual content, age gap, student-professor relationship

SUMMARY: Harry has been trying his best to forget what happened with Y/N, he is set on never making the same mistake, but it seems like fate has different plans for him.

PART 1 | MASTERLIST | SUPPORT ME!

That skirt. That goddamned skirt. That’s gonna be the death of Harry.

And also the fact that she went back to that asshole.

Sitting in the busy school cafeteria Harry has zoned out of the conversation at the table a long time ago, precisely when he saw Y/N stroll in wearing that short skirt with that dickhead she should have ditched already or better, she shouldn’t have even dated him in the first place. But now they are moving in the line with their group of friends and he has his hand on her waist and it keeps inching lower, just a few more inches and his hand could be slipping under her skir–

“Harry? Hello?”

Stella catches his attention and he is forced to move his focus back to his colleagues at the table.

“Huh? Sorry, what did you say?” He clears his throat and keeps his eyes on his half-eaten sandwich in front of him.

“What’s up with you? You haven’t been your usual self lately.”

“Just… tired. I’m behind with my research and have a bunch of papers to grade before winter break.”

“The joys of being a teacher,” Stella chuckles. “Don’t worry, it’ll get better with time.”

“Really?”

“No,” she smirks at him. “But you’ll care less.”

She soon returns to the conversation at the table and Harry finds himself looking for Y/N again. There’s no trace of her in the line, but he is quick to spot her at a table across the dining hall, sitting beside Dickhead who has an arm around her neck, keeping her close as he wants everyone to know that they are together.

And it irks Harry way more than it probably should.

It’s been a little over a week since Stella’s Christmas party and also that very heated and very wrong kiss he shared with Y/N. That weekend was like hell, he kept beating himself over and over about it, cursing himself out for being so stupid and reckless. He still has no idea what came over him that let him make out with a student, but he knew one thing for sure: it couldn’t happen again.

So when Y/N walked into the classroom before his first lecture early on monday he didn’t even let her speak before he got to the point.

“It shouldn’t have happened. I’m so sorry for it, but I can’t undo it now. I suggest let’s pretend nothing happened, it’s for the absolute best. No one can know about it and it will never happen again.”

She seemed taken aback by his outburst, but after a bit of hesitation she nodded.

“Okay. Nothing happened. It must have been the wine.”

“Yes,” he agreed right away. “We both drank more than we should have and made a mistake.”

She flinched at his last word, but didn’t protest, only nodded, holding her textbooks tighter to her chest. She looked so sad, even disappointed that Harry almost wanted to take back what he just said, but he knew he couldn’t.

“Are you… okay?” he dared to ask, but when she looked at him again, her eyes told nothing.

“I’m fine. I’ll see you in class, professor.”

And she was out of the classroom before he could say another word. In class she sat in the back and not even once did she look at him. He knows, because he kept looking at her.

He’s been trying his best to get her out of his head, but with not much luck. Not when all he can think about is how soft her lips felt against his, how insanely good she tasted mixed with the coldness of the night, how amazingly she fit into his palm, the curve of her neck, back, waist and hips… and how badly he wants to experience it again even though it’s the worst possible idea.

Harry thinks he is going insane. Genuinely.

He’s been burying himself into work, but his focus has been all over the place, so it’s been more like a waste of time. He is one of the last ones in the building today as well. Most professors left a long time ago, but the lights in Harry’s tiny office are still on as he is hunched over a stack of papers. When he has to read over the same line for the twentieth time he drops his pen with a tired groan and leans back in his chair. He takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes roughly, until he is practically seeing stars.

“Fuck,” he huffs, staring at the papers that are still waiting to be graded. Checking the time on his phone he is surprised to see that it’s already past seven.

He stands from his chair and steps to the window. The campus looks quiet at this time, only a few students are walking towards the dorm that’s next to the literature department’s building. It’s a wednesday night, the semester ends next week so some lucky students who have no more exams left in the year have already left for the holidays. Harry will be going home right before Christmas, he plans to use those few days of the break to work on his research in peace.

From his window he sees part of the parking lot next to the dorm, it’s quite dark there, he almost doesn’t notice the figures sitting in the car closest to him, but a few heartbeats later realization hits him.

It’s Y/N and the dickhead.

They are pretty far, but Harry can tell that they are in a heated fight, judging from how Y/N is gesticulating. Obviously he can’t hear them, but if he had to guess he would say she is shouting, from what he can see.

For a moment he tells him to just ignore the scene, it’s none of anyone else’s business, let alone his. But when he sees the asshole slap his hands against the wheel several times, making Y/N jump, Harry is moving before he could second guess his actions.

He practically sprints down that stairs, already trying to figure out how he’ll interject without appearing like a creep, but he forgets all his plans when he is marching towards the parking lot and sees the scene unfold from up close.

At some point they must have gotten out of the car, because Harry catches the dickhead getting back into the driving seat, Y/N is crying and tries to stop him from shutting the door, but he swings it with such force that she stumbles forward, holding onto the handle. When Harry sees her almost fall to the asphalt he starts running, just as the car comes to life and he drives away so fast, he almost runs over Y/N’s feet.

“Fuck you, Charlie! Fuck you!” She screams after the car, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Harry rushes over to her, grabs her by her shoulders and turns her away from the direction of the car. “Hey, what happened?”

She is gasping for air from the crying as she wraps her arms around her, those beautiful eyes that are usually filled with curiosity are now full of confusion and hurt.

“Y/N, look at me,” he begs and she hiccups a few times before she finally looks him in the eyes.

“H-Harry?”

He ignores how good it feels to hear her call him by his first name again and tries to focus on the situation.

“Yeah. Let’s get inside, okay? It’s freezing cold.”

She nods and lets him steer her towards the building and up to his office. By the time she sits in the old armchair in the corner of his office she has stopped sobbing, but her expression looks just as miserable as before.

“I’ll make you a tea. Do you like tea?” he asks, stepping over to the tiny side table where he keeps his kettle and tiny tea collection with two mugs. She nods and he is quick to turn on the kettle. He grabs a chamomile filter and drops it into one of the mugs and while the water boils he hands her a box of tissues that she accepts with a quietly murmured thank you.

When the tea is done he hands her the mug and sits in his chair, unsure what to say. He definitely did not plan to have her in his office anytime soon and definitely not like this.

“Go on, lecture me about being with him,” she says at last, staring into the mug in her hands.

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“But you’d be right.” She looks up at him, eyes still red from the crying.

“Why did you go back to him?” he softly asks, not wanting to make her feel even worse.

“I don’t know,” she shrugs, looking away again. “He could be convincing, I guess.”

“Hope you won’t believe him after this.”

“No,” she chuckles bitterly before taking a sip from the tea, leaning back in the armchair. “Not even the sex will convince me to go back to him.”

Harry’s muscles jump at her words. Not because he is such a prude, but because instantly he is thinking about sex… and her… and his body reacts involuntarily. Clearing his throat he crosses his legs and looks anywhere but at her.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she chuckles softly, but she doesn’t seem sorry at all.

“No, I… um…” Harry has no idea what to say. This feels like such an impossible situation, he is definitely walking on eggshells here and the fact that he is semi-hard does not help his case.

While he is looking for the right words she places her mug to his desk and crosses her legs, a curious look playing in her eyes as she is looking at him. She appears calm and confident suddenly, like she wasn’t sobbing ten minutes ago.

“I lied,” she then speaks up.

“About what?”

“I know why I went back to him.”

“Oh. Okay, why did you?”

She holds his gaze for one… two… three seconds before her lips part, then she hesitates for one more moment before answering.

“Because I couldn’t go to you.”

A shiver runs down his spine at her words, his body is betraying him already, but he hangs onto the last bit of his rationality.

“Y/N, don’t.”

“Don’t what? Don’t tell the truth?”

“We agreed that we are not talking about it again.”

“I’m not talking about that night. I’m talking about how badly I’ve been wanting you, but knowing I can’t have you I went back to Charlie even though I knew I shouldn’t have.”

“Y/N…” His mouth is dry and he feels ridiculously hot even though the heating hasn’t been working too well lately in his office. He is clawing at the arms of his chair, trying to keep the remains of his cool, though it feels like he is hanging on a thread.

“I won’t do anything about it, don’t worry. And I won’t bring it up again.” She sounds different this time, the confidence has turned into what feels like disappointment and it lurches something in Harry’s gut.

Standing she smoothes her clothes before looking at Harry, a tiny sliver of expectancy glistening in her eyes.

“Thanks for the tea. I better get going.”

She is already moving towards the door when Harry jumps to his feet, entirely lost about what to think, do or say. He strides after her and just when she is about to reach for the knob, he grabs her other hand, stopping her mid action.

But he has no idea why he just did that. His rationality is screaming at him, but with each passing moment he spends holding her hand, the noise gets farther and farther away until it’s lost somewhere in the back of his mind.

Slowly, she turns her head, eyes taking in the sight of their touching hands before her gaze meets his. He instantly stumbles back, letting go of her like she was on fire, but she doesn’t seem surprised. Instead, she turns around and just stands there, with a calm, but determined look on her face.

“Careful professor,” she then speaks up. “I might take your actions as a hint.”

“A hint…” he breathes out, almost mesmerized with her, he is convinced she’s put a spell on him, because he can’t move or think straight, he just keeps staring at her.

“Yes, a hint,” she nods shortly. “That you want me just as much as I want you.”

He swallows down a moan that almost slips through his lips at her words. His whole body is burning for her, palms sweating and itching to touch her and he can almost taste her on his tongue again, desperate to pick up from where they left off not long ago.

The tiniest smirk tugs on the corners of her mouth when she sees just how much he is struggling and she takes it as her queue to push her luck just a bit further. She takes a step closer to him, but still leaves some space between them, wanting him to close those last inches.

“You know you can have me.” She cocks her head to the side, blinking up at him innocently. “Right here, on your desk or in that armchair. I want to be your good girl and take whatever you give me.”

“Stop it,” he manages to breathe out, but all his strength is gone, it sounds more like a plea rather than an order.

“What if I don’t?” she sassily questions. “Will you punish me?”

Harry whimpers. They both know he is close to breaking and she is not stepping down now and she’s determined to push him over the edge. Slowly she reaches up, drags a finger across her lips before moving then down, tugging at her shirt at her chest, revealing more of the exposed skin there, then she starts playing with the top button, all while keeping her eyes focused on him. He sucks on his breath, his gaze keeps switching between her eyes and what her fingers are doing.

Then it pops open, revealing the delicious swell of her breasts and a bit of the lacy bra as well and he knows he is gone.

“Close the curtain,” he simply orders and a sudden rush of excitement washes over her as she quickly moves across the room, drawing the curtains on the window and turning around she is expecting him to be in the same spot, but to her surprise he is right there and before she could say a word, his lips crash down on hers with such force she would have fallen back if he didn’t already have an arm around her waist.

His other hand is quick to find its way to her throat first, then to her jaw, angling her head perfectly so he can devour her.

He spins them around and she gasps when her ass meets the edge of his desk, still kissing her he pushes forward, blindly tossing everything on the desk aside to make room, something clatters as it falls to the ground but neither of them cares to even look. His hands are on the back of her legs and he helps her up until she is sitting on top of the desk.

She eagerly opens her thighs and circles her legs around his hips, pulling him closer and when she feels just how hard he already is, pushing against her clothed center, she can’t help but moan at the sensation.

“It’s a one time thing,” he pants when her fingers start to work on his shirt and his hands find the button of her jeans.

“Sure,” she breathes out smiling.

“Just to get it out of our system.”

“Of course,” she nods eagerly, and a moment later she is tugging his shirt off his shoulders.

Buttons come undone, clothes are thrown across the room and soon enough all of his focus is on her naked chest, his hands exploring the tender, heated skin before his head dips down and his mouth meets her hardened nipples.

“Oh fuck,” she moans, head falling back as she has an arm around his shoulders, the other one planted behind her on the desk. All while his hands are tugging down her jeans, finally giving him the chance to touch her inner thighs, exploring the warmth and softness he’s been fantasizing about for so long.

He gently bites on one of her nipples, making her back arch, burying his face between her breasts before he leans back to get rid of her jeans. She has a moment to admire his naked torso, all the tattoos he’s been hiding under his clothes, his pants are hanging around his knees and his erection is throbbing through the fabric of his underwear. She can’t help but smile at the sight, it’s surely one she’ll remember forever.

When her jeans are discarded on the floor he plants his hands on her thighs and pushes them wide open, revealing her drenched panties. He brings his thumb over the wet fabric, lazily drags it over her clit, making her tremble under his touch. Then keeping eye contact with her he pulls his chair under him, sits down and rolls closer so his face is perfectly lined up with her. With his eyes still locked on hers, he leans forward, moves her panties to the side and places a sloppy, open mouthed kiss to her throbbing clit, making her moan so loud, he digs his fingers into her thighs pulling back.

“You need to be quiet,” he warns her and she just eagerly nods, watching him take her underwear off completely and go back to where he was a moment ago.

Harry drinks up her taste, he licks, kisses and sucks on the right spots, making her see stars as her orgasm is building up. When she feels two of his fingers slip into her she grabs a handful of his hair, tugging on it.

But right when she is about to tip over the edge he pulls back, leaving her in a heaving mess. Reaching into one of his drawers he grabs a condom and standing up he watches her lying on his desk, chest rapidly rising and falling while he rolls the condom on.

To his surprise, she gets up and jumps off the desk, taking the initiative by pushing him down back into the chair and straddling his lap. His hands are quick to move to her ass as his cock wedges between her drenched folds. He hisses when she starts rolling her hips, making them both even more feral for what’s about to come.

She leans forward and kisses him, her hand reaching down between them until it finds his cock. She gives him a few lazy strokes to which he hums lowly into her mouth. Then she stops her kisses, lips still brushing against his, eyes meeting again as she lifts herself up just enough to angle him underneath her and then slowly she eases down, letting him enter her inch by inch until she is filled entirely. She gasps at the feeling of her walls stretching around him and they both stop for a few moments, just savoring how perfectly they fit together.

She plants both her hands to the base of his neck, kisses him again and starts moving her hips.

“Fuck, Y/N, you feel so good,” he groans, locking his arms around her, fingers digging into her naked back and side as she starts to slowly pick up her pace, bouncing on him.

When he starts thrusting upwards, meeting her movements, her head rolls back from how deep she feels him inside her, his tip reaching the perfect spot.

“Yes, right there!” she gasps as he buries his head in her neck, kissing and sucking on the soft skin while keeping his rhythm. “I’m so close,” she breathes out, her hands raking through his messy hair.

Wanting even more friction she adjusts herself and then starts moving faster and rougher, aching for the release. She looks down, her eyes meet his gaze and she just knows he is as close as she is.

“Harry,” she moans and hearing his name fall from her lips is what pushes him over the edge.

Grunting, his thrusts get rougher and fall out of their fast pace, he pushes into her over and over again as he fills the condom and watching him fall apart helps her let go as well. He feels her walls tighten around him while he is still riding out the afterwaves of his own orgasm, her mouth hangs open, nails digging into his shoulders so harshly they surely leave marks.

Then they both slowly come off their high and she leans forward, capturing his lips in a much softer kiss than the ones they’ve shared just minutes ago. He gladly returns, their lips melt together and his fingers gently roam her naked back while he is still inside her.

They’re quiet when she moves off him and grabs a few tissues to clean herself up while he discards the condom. The clothes are picked up from the floor one by one and a sense of unsureness settles between them as they both get dressed.

She was the only thing on his mind just five minutes ago, but now that the sex haze is gone, his thoughts start racing. What did he do? What will happen now? This shouldn’t have happened but still, he wants to do it again and again and again.

As if she knew he was panicking inside, she steps to him, takes his face in her hands and pulls him into a long, passionate kiss that instantly makes him forget about everything else.

“Don’t overthink it,” she whispers against his lips. “We’re adults.”

“I’m your teacher,” he hums.

“The semester is almost over. Grade my last paper and we’re done,” she simply says with very little care about his current status. But he is not that sold on it just yet, hesitation and worry is all over his face. “Did you not want it?”

“You know how much I wanted it,” he admits defeatedly.

“Great. I wanted it too. And I want it again. So I’ll come by tomorrow again. You’ll bend me over that desk after I had your cock in my mouth, then tell me what grade I’m getting for the semester and we do it again after that.”

He is already feeling himself getting hard again. Deep down he knows he should say no, but he has no will left to fight with himself anymore. So all he does is nod and then kiss her.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, professor.” She grabs her coat from the floor and then walks out of his office like nothing happened.

Harry falls into his chair and assesses the mess on and around his desk, staring at the spot where she was sitting not long ago. He knows he is making his biggest mistake ever, but sinning has never felt this good.

And right now he is willing to take this risk.

Thank you for reading, please like and reblog if you enjoyed and buy me a coffee if you want to support me!

#harry #styles #harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles oneshot #harry styles one shot #harry styles fluff #harry styles x you #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x reader #harry styles blurb #harry styles smut

750 notes · View notes

ambrosiagoldfish · 8 months ago

Note

Adam x third spouse part 3 I’m begging pookie ❤️

like a time skip to when Charlie appeared and proposed the idea

Benifit of the doubt Pt.4

Adam x 3rd Spouse! Reader

Warnings: General Adam TW’s, a little bit sad for a moment but it’s ok. Gn! Reader! honestly that’s about it I think?? Wow this is the first time it’s been this short in this series.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Request Box: Open

Word Count: 4617~

A/n: So… it’s been almost 2 months… whoops. In all seriousness though I’m sorry it’s been so long. I’ve just not been in the mood to write and a lot of stuff has been happening (which is finally over) and I’m glad I could finally post this. I was also, if I’m honest, nervous to post this, cause I’m not sure if everyone’s ready for the direction of the story. But I have made it clear that I wanted to do a time skip to the show at somepoint and decided to do it now! If you enjoy this, please let me know cause I’m really nervous about (Not my words of affirmation love language coming out-) ALSO to the requester, I know you said part 3, but I used it for part 4. I got your request as I was making part 3 soooo my bad. Hope you don’t mind tho <3 this will be the last part before the angsty finale (and maybe an epilogue)

Reblogs are always appreciated!

Anyways this was NOT beta read unfortunately, I tried to get as many errors out during the writing process so hopefully it’s fine. Also, there’s probably some words I might have wanted to italicize or make bold that aren’t, but I’m too tired to care honestly.

Tags: @tired-of-life-86 @nervoussystemss @qopia @lovelyemily @hcneyiced @v3r41ynn @ghostdoodlen @nxptvne-13 @ximenavc-che @edgyfluff @ericityyy @diffidentphantom @faimmm @slasher-whore69 @1-randomized @ozzersauce @fanlovedlt @alientee (if I forgot someone or you want to be added just tell me !!)

Days turned to weeks, to months, to years. Until eventually an eon had passed. An entirety filled to the brim with an indescribable happiness and love, threatening to spill over at any given moment. You loved Adam and Adam loved you.

To say it was all happiness would be a lie, there were some moments of sadness and pain, but all relationships were like that, even ones that lasted for eternity. You both always bounced back, apologize and moved on with a stronger bond than before. And you loved every second of it.

A lot has changed in these last few eons. Adam formed a band and is now the most popular guitarist in all of heaven. You both made new friends, some got into heaven while others were made there. Emily was one of these people to you, she looked up to you for being older than her. You’ve existed for almost all of human existence so, of course she’d look up to you.

Adam had also made new friends, his band members, some officials in heaven, but someone he’s grown close to recently was Lute. You're really happy about his friendship with Lute. She seems like a strong and loyal friend, someone that can keep him grounded while still encouraging him to be more himself. Overall, you really liked her.

How they became friends though is something… less tasteful for you. All the way back when Heaven and Hell had their first meeting on what to do with the surplus of sinners in hell causing an uprising. Neither side came to an agreement in the end, you do feel partially to blame for that, but you still stand by what you did.

You never returned to any of the follow up meetings

But Adam did, surprisingly to you. In the end, you were called to talk with Sera and Adam. You were told of the agreement between Heaven and Hell, about the yearly “cleanse” that Adam and his “Exorcists” would have to commit. At first you were shocked, sure, you didn’t have the best experience with sinners and especially with the rulers of hell, but was death really necessary? You didn’t know what to say, and Adam clearly saw this.

“Babe, you alright?” He puts his hand on your shoulder rubbing his thumb in circles. You place your hand on his.

“Yeah it’s just a lot to take in. Are we sure it has to be done… that way?”

Sera looked down in pain “they’re… uprising and are becoming to much of a threat to heaven.”

You sighed as Adam took you in his arms. Adam was fully aware that you don’t share the same sentiment towards sinners as he does. His hatred towards the unholy souls down in hell was brought about by events that you simply cannot understand. Which he is thankful for, he never would want you to experience what he did.

“If there isn’t anything else we can do then… I guess we have no choice. But I don’t want to… kill anyone, even if they are sinners.”

Adam holds you closer “You won’t have to,” you smile at him, the now familiar flickering of his LED mask meeting your gaze before softly frown “you ok?”

You nod, “yeah, just…I wish there was another way.”

That was it. Adam would take his exorcists down to hell to kill as many sinners as they could each year. Adam knew you didn’t want him to talk about it , he kept it as separate as he could from your life. You did have to attend meetings regarding it, as one of the very few people to know about it, that was your duty.

You were fine with having that part of the job. You weren't sure if you could kill someone, sinner or not. So, for the countless years to follow, you played your part with every new extermination, attending meetings to deal with the repercussions of each cleanse.

Adam would also have to attend the occasional meeting. Which is exactly what today was. Sera had called you both in to talk.

“Thank you both for coming. I have to inform you that you will be attending a meeting tomorrow.”

Adam groaned “What! Again? This is like the 4th fuckin’ one this week! Ugh fine! Where is it this time? halo city? Cherub towne” Adam’s voice mocked the locations you’ve both been sent to countless times with a high pitched voice. Even you have to admit that the meetings could drag a bit.

Sera's face turned into a slight grimace as she looks away from you both, she sighs and continues “The meeting will be in… hell.”

“What!” Both your voices raise in shock

“Sera, you know I don’t want to go down there again!”

“Why can’t you just send the other fucking dipshits who know about-“ Adam crossed his arms defiantly

“Stop,” Sera raises her hand toward you both “no one wants to go there, and I know you both especially don’t.” She pauses “But you both are the only available angels who know of the cleanse that aren't busy. Please… I understand your disdain but heaven’s business comes first.”

“Who are we even gonna be talking to -Wait a damn minute- Don’t fucking tell me we have to talk to him.”

“I'm sorry…” You all sat in silence for a moment before Sera begins to speak again, “But you both won’t have to worry about physically being there, we have prepared holograms for you, so neither of you would be in any danger.”

“I'll have an Angel escort you to the ‘meeting’ room tomorrow, please, get some rest. I’m sure you both have had a long day.”

With that, you and Adam went home, you were definitely not feeling well about the meeting, but the fact you wouldn’t actually be there calms your nerves a bit. You had to be a little honest with yourself, hell wasn’t really the issue for you, it was more so the people. Lucifer for one, that made you feel uneasy.

The next morning, you and Adam got ready, you had to motivate him a little. He was clearly not excited for this meeting like you. The entire way there he held you close, even though nothing could have hurt you it made him feel better knowing how close you were.

On the way there, you also got Adam some ribs, his favorite. You thought it would help his nerves a bit. Turns out, Lute was the one Sera assigned to escort you both there. That also made you both a little calmer knowing a mutual friend would be there.

The three of you waited in the ‘meeting’ room for a while, about an hour. At first you thought the meeting might had been canceled or moved and you just weren't told. But then, Lute walked up to you both.

“Sir! The Seraphim has told me to inform you that there’s been a change in plans!”

“What? The fucks that mean?” Adam said stuffing a rib into his LED mouth

“Lucifer won’t be attending the meeting, instead… his Daughter will be here in his stead.” Lute’s mask showed a continuous frown and stern expression as she spoke.

“Daughter?” Your voice shook a little. This was news to you, as long as you’ve existed you had never heard he had a daughter while in hell. You look over to Adam to see His LED eyes were wide in shock but his mask turned into a smile as he sighed.

“Phew boy, we sure dodged a big ass bullet, huh Sweetcheeks?” He laughed as his arm pulled you closer. The whole thing caused you to join in. Suddenly your nerves felt a lot better than before.

“When should she be arriving, Lute?”

“Within the hour.”

Adam scarfed down another plate of ribs as you all wait for the “princess of hell” to arrive. The entire time you just had to wonder what kind of person she’d be. The daughter of Lucifer and Lilith. The more you thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed.

But suddenly your thoughts were interrupted by the sliding doors opening to the meeting room and a girl steps in, asking if anyone is there.

“She can’t see us?”

“Yeah, Sera gave me a long ass lector on how this stuff works before we got here. Let’s see here…” Adam pushes a button causing a click to sound out as he says “Sup!”

The girl jumps back and falls to the floor, shocked by Adam’s sudden appearance in the room. She introduces herself as Charlie. Adam offers her to shake his hand, only for it to go through.

“Ha! I fuckin’ got you! Did you fucking see that? Good shit.”

You let out a slight laugh, as you sit and watch the meeting happen. Well, you say “meeting” but nothing about it seemed very professional. Adam for the last hour (you honestly wasn’t sure at this point) had been talking about the most random of things.

You or Lute occasionally shakening your head yes or no while listening to him, while Charlie seemed quite tired already. Not that you could blame her, people who weren’t used to Adam’s banter definitely weren’t cut out for it. But You love every word that comes out of his mouth.

Eventually Adam decides that it’s time to get into what you all came here for. Pulling out a bunch of papers, Charlie begins explaining her solution to hell’s overpopulation. You were only really half listening at first, at least before she mentioned that her solution could stop the extermination which peaked your interest.

She explains her “Hazbin Hotel” and its purpose to rehabilitate sinners, you wanted to hear more of it but Adam cut her off.

The meeting didn’t really go that well, At least for Charlie. But the whole thing left quite the impression on you. The idea of ending the extermination was stuck in your head for so long, and now you had someone who had an alternative.

“Adam, are you sure that it couldn’t have worked?”

Adam looks at you in surprise “What? Do you think that shitshow could have actually worked?” He laughed as he placed a hand on your back. “Don’t even pay it any mind, alright Babe?”

“I know, it’s just… you know I don't like the extermination. So another way to lessen the population of hell should at least be looked into.” Your voice was soft enough to barely hear.

Adam’s gaze softened but he didn’t say another word, only wrapping his wing around you pulling you closer. You lean towards him, snuggling into his soft robe. No matter how much you wanted to ignore it, you couldn’t. You needed to do something, anything.

So that night, after Adam fell asleep, you asked to talk with Sera. Leaving a note for Adam saying you went to buy something just in case he woke up.

“What is troubling you?” Sera’s voice was clear and concise.

You looked toward the ground, your nerves feeling tighter than ever, as you struggled with how to put your words together. “You're aware of all that happened in the meeting with Lucifer’s Daughter, right?”

Sera nods her head “of course, all meetings are documented about as they happen.” She tilts her head slightly “What about it?”

“Well!” You steel yourself before continuing “I would like permission to observe Charlie Morningstar’s ‘Hazbin Hotel’”

Sera’s eyes widen, breaking her calm demeanor before giving a firm “No”

“But-“

“It’s too dangerous for you to be there, Adam wouldn’t want that anyways”

“He would listen if it was an order from you!” Your eyes felt watery but you continued “Please Sera… I know you don’t want the extermination to continue. Just let me do this!”

Sera looked away from you, her feelings evident on her face, any mask now down. ‘Just a little more’ you thought

“Sera, I promise you, I’ll be careful! We don’t even have to fully support them yet, just let me observe them. It would be devastating if so many souls parish if we failed to seek all options!” You beg

Sera sighed, shakingly “…I’ll see what I can do.”

Your eyes gleamed up at the tall woman “Sera, thank you, thank you!” You wanted to hug her but out of courtesy, you advised against it.

Sera tells you that she can’t guarantee anything but she will try as she sends you home to rest.

A few days past after that and you haven’t heard anything from Sera. It was a little worrying and felt like a bad sign to you. That was, until you were informed by Sera that your request was accepted!

“But.” Sera stops you before you can celebrate “You're only there to keep track of the progress and to make sure nothing is happening under our noses” You nod your head in understanding

“Also…” she pauses “If anything involving this hotel happens, you will have to take full responsibility, understood?”

You nod again “yes I understand. Have you… told Adam yet?”

She shakes her head

“Ok… can you… not tell him it was my idea, please. I don’t think he’d agree if he knew.”

Sera sighs before nodding her head “Very well, I’ll tell him after you leave”

“Thank you.”

You return home, when you got back Adam was already gone, Sera must have already called him to the office. You dreaded when he got back. You didn’t want to see him upset, it hurt you to know how worried he was for you.

A few hours later, Adam comes through the door in a panic. He stomps up to you and pulls you into a warm and intense embrace.

“Don’t go down there. I need you here with me” his voice hitches as his wings wrap around you both, curling you both into a warm and feathery ball.

“Adam…” you paused, was this really the best thing to do? No, It had to be. If this goes well, not only will the extermination stop but Adam wouldn’t have to go down to hell ever again.

“Adam, you know I can’t go against Sera’s orders.” You kiss his cheek “and I won’t be gone forever, I’m only supposed to be there till the next cleanse. Not to mention, I’ll always come back to see you.”

Adam grumbled a little “I know, I just… don’t like you being in the same place that bastard is, and in his brat’s stupid hotel! ”

You laugh softly “Adam…” grabbing his hand, you put yours in it, showing off the gold ring on your finger “I’ll never forget my promise. You know that, right?”

Adam looks at the ring, the gold wrapped around your finger with a perfectly snug fit. Everytime he looked at it was just a reminder of your love for him. That promise was something he could never forget. He slowly raises your hand to his LED mask, kissing the back of it. “Of course not.”

“Good. I promise I’ll be fine, ok?”

He nods. Hand in hand, you slowly lead you both to the bed. The both of you lay next to each other, your bodies linked together like knots. You slwoly remove his helmet from his head, laying it on the nightstand.

Your hands move up his body before landing on his face, cupping his cheeks before pulling him to a kiss before snuggling into his chest.

Finally it was Time for you to leave. Sera allowed you to create portals back to heaven in case anything happened and you were in need of assistance. Adam walked you to the front gate.

“Ok, do you have everything? You didn’t forget that fucking angelic dagger I had Lute get for you right-“

You shush him “Adam, I told you I’ll be fine!”

He’s sighs “Damn it- I know that but just make sure to text me while your there ok-

You kiss him deeply “Adam. I know, you’ve told me a hundred times.” You smile as you cup his face “I love you”

He sighs “Love you too Sweetcheeks”

With one final kiss, you give Adam a tight hug before waving goodbye as you went through the flaming portal. As you went through, you take a second to look at your surroundings. In front of you was a tall building. You take a few steps back to see LED lights of a sign flashing the words ‘Hazbin Hotel’

You let out a sigh of relief. You had been a tad bit worried you’d spawn somewhere random and you’d have to find the building yourself. But it seems heaven at least spared you of that.

The red skies of hell were quite different from the pristine blue ones of heaven. Even though you just got here, you could already hear the sounds of screams and explosions in the distance. How welcoming.

You steel yourself and with three hard knocks to the door, you wait for someone to open it. Muffled Scurrying sounds of footsteps approach the door before it creaks open revealing the young blond woman in the doorframe, Charlie Morningstar.

“Hi! I’m-“

The door is slammed shut, Before opening again

“Be not afraid-“

It shuts again…

Well, this may be a bit harder than you initially anticipated. You go to knock again only for it to open once more. This time, the door doesn’t close again, instead the girl mutters a quick “Hi” before going quiet.

“Hello! I didn’t mean to scare you!” You give a small laugh before continuing “I believe we met a couple days ago?” You bring your hand towards her for a shake, to which she reciprocates.

“During the meeting with.. Adam? Right?” She grimaced when she mentioned Adam, which you decided to ignore, you simply smiled and nodded. ”but I don’t believe I caught your name?”

You tell her about yourself, about how your there to stay and monitor any progress the hotel may have. You made sure to pronounce ‘may.’ While you were hoping for this idea to show some kind of positive results, even you weren’t sure if it’d would work.

“Charlie? who’s at the door- WhatHolyShit-“ a woman with a red X over her eye suddenly shouts in surprise. You look over at her, She looked very familiar…

“Wait, you are-“

“Vaggie! Charlie’s sinner girlfriend! And you are?!” The woman known as Vaggie, highlighted the word sinner while performing a “be quiet” gesture with her hand. Your eyes widen a little at the ex-Angel in front of you but you simply smile a nod “I’m Y/n, I don’t believe we’ve met, yes?”

Look, lying is the last thing you’d want to do as a citizen of heaven but you figured that it would be fine if it was to protect someone. Vaggie nodded, her face scrunched up in a tense look.

“You feeling ok Vaggie? You’re looking a little… red?”

“I’m fine! *ahem*, Hun, how about you give them a tour of the hotel.”

Charlie gasped “Yes that's perfect, you may as well get acquainted with everyone if you’re going to be here more often!”

Charlie ran off, telling you “this way! This way!” Over and over. Before you went to follow her, you leaned toward Vaggie and said a quick “Relax, I won’t tell anyone.”

She lets out a sigh before muttering “Thank you”

You both follow Charlie as she shows you the various rooms in the hotel before leading you back to the hotel’s lobby and lounge area.

“Hey! Hello everyone!” Charlie’s voice picked up a little “I’d like to introduce you to our uh… new staff member?” You nod in agreement with the title. The room in front of you was shrouded in looks of both horror and amazement.

“What the hell’s an angel doin’ here?” A lanky spider demon spoke up first

“It’sss an ambush! seek Cover!!” The Snake demon shouted, seemingly grabbing an army helmet from thin air before taking a deep dive behind the couch.

“No Pentious-” She sighs “they’re here to monitor the hotel! Heaven sent them to scout any potential progress the hotel will have”

“It’s nice to meet you all” you look at the people in front of you, to say it was a colorful cast would be an understatement.

“These two are our current tenants of the hotel! Angel dust and Sir Pentious!”

The snake slithered slowly from behind the couch up to you, while the Spider demon remained rested on the couch

“Oh… *ahem* Excuse me dear! I am Sir. Pentious! Formally known as ‘the Architect of destruction’!” He laughs, a slight hiss sounding in his voice.

He offers a handshake which you accept. To which you immediately regret. ‘ Slimey’ you thought, before wiping your, now wet hand on your clothes.

The spider demon, who you now know as Angel Dust, just gives a wave with one of his 4 arms.

“And-“ Charlie extends the word as she quickly walk to a bar by the entrance “this is the recreational area, run by our Bartender, Husk!”

The winged bartender seemed entirely uninterested in your presence or even Charlie’s. The most you got was a small glance before he takes a swig of his alcohol and walks off.

“He’s not the most… social guy in hell” she awkwardly laughs before moving on to the next person. “And this is Nifty, our one and only maid at the hotel! Nifty say hi.”

The short woman scurried moved around you, her eye quickly looking at every every nook and cranny of you as she moved. She made numerous attempts to touch and grab various things on you, your clothes, wings, and eventually she tried to climb up you to get to your halo. That’s when you finally grabbed her in place “you're a… fast one, huh? Nice to meet you!”

“And last but not least! This is Alastor, the hotel’s executive producer and our first -and only- overlord sponsor!”

Immediately, you could tell there was something off about Alastor. The entire aura he gave off was as if he was restraining something completely and utterly ungodly. The static that surrounded him was just one of many whispers you could hear from his soul.

“Hello! It’s quite a pleasure to meet someone of your… holy status!” He offers a hand to which you, hesitantly, shake. “And what do we owe the pleasure for your service?”

“They’re going to be here to keep track of the progress of the hotel…” Charlie paused “you know I’m starting to sound like a broken record- here, it’s late, how about we all get some sleep and we can talk about it in the morning!”

“Fine by me, I am waaay too sober to be having social interaction this late” Angel picks himself up and stretches “I’m gonna hit the hay”

“Here I’ll show you to your room!” Charlie smiles “We -obviously- didn’t have time to make your own so I hope you don’t mind using one of the guest rooms” she laughs

She and Vaggie walks you to your new room before leaving you be, The room was nothing more than just your average hotel room. Of course it did have its differences, a multitude of… eyes seem to be on the wall, staring at you. Well, that’s not the least alarming.

You place your stuff down and begin unpacking, you mostly just brought the basics. Clothes, hygiene stuff, your phone, and, most importantly, a framed photo of Adam.

You sat the photo on your nightstand, angling it just right so that it would always be visible to you. As you do so, you think about the memory the photo brings, you took it on one of the first dates you went on with Adam. It was a relatively tame date, you and Adam, having a picnic by a lake at night. You brought candles so you both weren’t completely in the dark, and you just loved the way he looked, his golden eyes watching the water. The dim candle light illuminating his face with a warm golden shade. Adam hates photos of him with his mask off but… You just had to keep that moment in time forever.

*Ding* *Ding* *Ding*

Speak of the- well, you know the rest. The bright light from the phone comes with the notification sound displaying Adam in bold letters. You smile as you read his messages.

Dixkmaster69

Heyy Sweetcheeks, it’s been a bit since you left

You there??

Fucking answer

You let out a small laugh at Adam’s barrage of messages. He’s not used to you being away from him for more than a day, huh? Not that you could blame him, this is honestly nothing compared to how you feel each year he has to do the extermination.

Sweetcheeks

Hey love

Everything’s fine, I’m ok.

Aside from not having you with me :’(

Dixkmaster69

Fucking finally

You know you don’t have to do this

If I bitch enough to Sera I can get you back by tomorrow

Sweetcheeks

Please don’t, Sera already has enough on her plate.

I promise I’m going to be fine

I’ll be back before you know it.

Dixkmaster69

I know

This shit just worries me

Gonna miss hearing your sexy ass voice at night too ;)

You blush at the message before sighing. Whenever you or Adam approached a topic that made him uncomfortable, he would always try to change the subject to something that made him feel better. You knew why, Adam’s someone who rarely talked about his feelings, even after all these eons together that was something he hadn’t changed. You knew exactly what he needed, even if he didn’t explicitly tell you.

Sweetcheeks

I already miss yours too <3

Do you want to help me fall asleep with that heavenly voice of yours on the phone?

Dixkmaster69

Whatever you want Sweetcheeks <3

You smile when, almost immediately, Adam begins calling your phone. You click the lights off before You make your way in your new bed, not even bothering to change out of the clothes you’ve been wearing. You grab the cover and pull it over you and tapping the answer button.

“Sup”

You yawn “Hey handsome, I missed your voice”

You hear his voice hitch before he caused on “Of course you did, no one has a better voice than the dick master. But uh, yours is a close second”

You’re let out a tired giggle, “such a charmer, you. How’s your day been huh?”

“Oh! don’t even get me started on that- Lute took me to get some ribs to ‘calm my nerves’ or some shit and they had me, ME, wait in line for like 15 minutes! The fucking audacity!”

You smile to yourself as Adam tells you about his day, the sound of his voice was like a sweet lullaby to your ears and you couldn’t get enough of it. But eventually…

“And then when I got home, I couldn’t find my damn charger and it took me like 40 fuckin’ minutes to realize it was under our bed, do you have any idea of how it keeps getting there?” He waits for you to respond only to be met with silence. “Uh bitch, I’m talking to you.”

More silence… well no, actually if Adam focused on listening, he could hear the faint sound of your snoring from the phone. Adam sighs,”Long day, huh?”

Adam lays back in your shared bed, getting comfortable. He sets the phone beside him, plugging it in while keeping it on speaker. He yawns, “Goodnight Sweetheart, can’t wait to see you again”

Slowly, the soft sounds of both yours and Adam’s snores filled each others rooms, a distant, but intimate connection. Even in slumber, you couldn’t stop thinking of your handsome and caring soulmate.

1K notes · View notes

inside-lees-mind · 9 months ago

Note

hi could i rq. general konoha 11 + sand siblings nsfw hcs ! (aged up/boruto ver obv) <3

Also: nobody understands Uchihas better than I do and I don’t even like most of em. /j Why are they all practically evil in fics? I’m going crazy. Most of them are clearly softies when it comes to love. Am I right or am I right???

And sorry, you can tell who I have more ideas for and who I was drawing a blank on.

Oh and sorry yall for the gap in my writing. This one took a while. I’ve been working on it for a bit. And part of it got lost and deleted, so I rewrote it. A long with a couple other stories got deleted and I lost some motivation for a moment lol

Konoha 13 + Sand Siblings HCs

Naruto Uzumaki

He’s energetic, and that 100% applies to in bed too.

Likely inexperienced, but eager. And a little nervous.

Talked big game beforehand, but even if you didn’t know before, you definitely know it was all talk now.

That being said, he’s a quick learner, even if he complains about being confused at first.

I think he’d have like little to no knowledge though, being such a loner for a while, in all. Hope you have patience.

That being said, he is a bit of a pervert with what he does know.

Overall though, he’d set a fast pace, but the sex would still be intimate and soft.

Praise. Praise. Praise. Giving and receiving.

Sasuke Uchiha

No experience, but he knows the ins and outs.

He wasn’t too concerned with sex or anything of that matter before, but when he returned to Konoha, he realized he had feelings for you. So he starts to think about it.

He’s not a pervert like Kakashi or Naruto, and he’d never lose his cool over sexy jutsu, BUTTT he’s secretly horny as hell. Like low sex drive usually, but just being around you makes it sky rocket to abnormal levels.

He’s very private about sex though, so usually only happens in your bedroom or… cough cough in a quiet forest with nobody around cough cough (if you know, you know)

He’s got a breeding kink. Next question.

Uses a mix of degradation and praises.

Lots of demanding, but also lots of giving soooo…

I truly believe Sasuke would be a softer partner than people make him out to be. Like did yall watch Boruto or not?? He’s got awkward and sweet energy. He’s TRYING. He’s emotionally stunted yall.

More dominant and likes to be in control, but will fall apart in your arms anyways. Usually more of a soft dom than anything.

One of the most likely to be fairly kinky though. I think he’d slowly discover he’s into things as they occur or cross his mind.

Sakura Haruno

She knows a lot about the human body.

Might have experience, might not. I could see it either way.

I think your first time with her would happen after like a romantic dinner together. And it would be romantic and slow.

But… that depends on you, because she’ll mostly go with what you want. It makes her happy.

She’s okay with being degraded or praised, but she really only likes to praise you.

Low sex drive.

She likes any position she can see your face.

She’s a switch, depends on her partner’s preference.

Sai Yamanaka

(Obviously not married here but just to have a last name to add)

He read a book about what to do.

Probably does something incredibly stupid at first, but that being said, he’s not an idiot, so not too bad.

You’d probably have to correct him a little bit. Also, tell him to forget the book and just go with the feeling and follow your lead.

You’d be in the lead at first. Probably go down on him first thing.

He’s not small. (I mean did you hear the way he talked to Naruto? He’s probably got something to work with if he’s talking so confidently LMFAO)

So you’d probably have to use your hand for the base while your mouth sucks on about half or so of his cock.

His hand tangles in your hair/rests on top, not pulling, but resting there.

He throws his head back, letting out soft sighs and small moans that escape his lips. He’s not trying to be quiet, but he’s not loud either.

Although, he might have read girls don’t like when guys make noise. Who knows. Then you might have to tell him that’s not true.

At first, sex is just discovering things with him. You’re both exploring how everything feels.

But, after a few times, he starts taking the lead and initiating.

He has a low sex drive though, so he won’t initiate too often.

It’s also hard to get him to realize what you’re asking for if you drop hints. He saw your underwear when you bent over… okay. He might even comment on how you should be more careful since he knows you don’t like to expose yourself so much.

You just deadpan and tell him it was supposed to turn him on.

“Oh.” And now he’s unbuckling his pants and asking you to come sit on his lap. :)

Shikamaru Nara

Low sex drive, usually at least, because now he’s consumed by the desire to be rode by you. Like he dreams about it.

He calls you troublesome to himself when he wakes up hard in the morning occasionally.

He lowkey loves to just lay between your legs or have you sit on his face so he can eat you out (pussy or ass, don’t matter)

Lazy morning sex. He loves it.

He’s dominant, but he can be rather lazy most the time. That being said, he will fuck you how you want him to if you ask.

Degrading but he’s not super mean about it at all. More like soft grunts with degrading terms, but the rest of it comes out more like soft sighs and groans of pleasure and praise.

Choji Akimichi

The sweetest. He takes his time with you every time.

Body worship. More so giving than receiving, but he’ll be a blushing mess if you give back the same energy.

Praise. Lots of it.

He’d be the type to kiss down your body, from your lips to your neck to your chest all the way down til he gets between your legs.

He can’t bring himself to be rough or harsh with you in anyway. No degradation, rough sex, or anything.

Likes to be able to see your face during sex.

He’d like to try food play.

Ino Yamanaka

Pillow princess unless asked to do otherwise.

She loves to be praised and worshipped, but also likes things rougher.

She’s a bit of a brat about things. Constantly going against what you say for fun.

She does it on purpose so you’ll go rougher on her, she likes it.

She also likes when things are slow and romantic though.

And she’d love it if you planned like a candlelit dinner and put a trail of rose petals on like Valentine’s Day, or even just cuz.

Shino Aburame

He’s in charge. He’s on top. Whatever. He doesn’t like to not have control.

He also just wants to please you, and often he’s not too worried about himself.

Might get a little self conscious if you skip over touching him or giving him head more than once. Like if it’s been a few times now and you haven’t bothered… did he do something?

He doesn’t need it, but he just… you know how he is.

He doesn’t make much noise.

But I do believe that right before he cums, he whimpers. He can’t help it, and don’t bring it up afterwards. He’ll be so embarrassed and not want to do it for a while because he’s scared he’ll do it again.

If he gets like that, just tell him you loved it. Then go down on him and tell him you wanna make him do it again.

He’s good with his hands, I just know it.

He can go rough and be stern and demanding, but other than that, he’s rather vanilla.

He’s a big fan of missionary so he can see your face.

And he doesn’t want to do anything unless it’s in your own home or absolute private, like an inn.

Kiba Inuzuka

Hickeys.

He loves giving them.

You will have like 20. From your jaw to your thighs, he’s marked. Plenty of them are visible and hard to hide because they’re dark.

He doesn’t exactly take his time. No, those hickeys are from the entire act. He starts leaving them during foreplay, then when he’s pounding into you, he quiets himself down by latching onto your skin.

When he eats you out, he leaves bite marks and hickeys around your thighs.

He calls it “marking his territory” then has to explain himself because no he doesn’t mean you’re a territory, you’re not a place or an object… he just… you’re his partner!

He’s rough.

Likes doggystyle most, but then he gets upset that he can’t see your face and next time he sets up a mirror.

Quickies. He can’t wait. He’ll whine if you tell him NO he can’t fuck you under the blanket, because YES people will notice the movement.

You might want to settle and pull him into a bathroom and let him fuck you over the counter, but he won’t force or beg you to the point of you giving in or anything. He’ll wait if you really mean no.

He’s got a high sex drive

Very likely to be pretty kinky. He’d be willing to tie you up, spank you, degrade you, etc.

He won’t do pet play. Thinks that shit is weird. So don’t think that because he’s a dog user, he’s gonna act dog like or have you act dog like. In fact, he’s more likely to hate it as a dog user.

I think he’d find any roleplay to be useless though. You could convince him if you wanted, but he’ll complain.

Hinata Hyuga

Much more intimate and gentle sex is what she wants

She’s not a pillow princess. She literally fantasizes about pleasing her partner.

Like probably day dreams, gets lost in her own thoughts, then is a blushing mess when she realizes that somebody is talking to her and she’s imagining what your moans would sound like when she’s between your legs, ESPECIALLY if the person talking to her is you.

She likes to do it in private, but she can’t deny that she imagines doing it where you both currently are. Not that she would.

Secretly has a high sex drive

Long refractory period though. She needs breaks between rounds.

Neji Hyuga

Took him a while to get vulnerable enough to take off his clothes if he’s being honest

Also I think Hyuga’s are very reserved and conservative until marriage, but he has such a tough time following that.

He really wants to jump your bones. And it’s almost like the fact he can’t because of his clan’s reserved and traditional nature just makes it WAYYYY more tempting.

You’re literally irresistible to him

Secretly, he’s just a little bit of a pervert. (Like Rock Lee’s Ninja Pals says he is)

I think he would have wet dreams from sexual frustration. Like the longer he holds back from having you under him, the worse it gets. Like a disease with no treatment.

I think your first time with him would be sudden, and it would be his first time ever.

You’d look WAYYYYY to good, and this time he can’t bring himself to ignore the boner he gets. No he’s gotta see if you’ll indulge him.

He may stop and pull away, get his act together if you remind him of his clan’s pride, and how he was so bent on following it before.

Maybe the first time, but by the next time he tries to give in, there is no try. He is cancelling any plans y’all had and tearing the outfit that made your body look so irresistible off.

He doesn’t have a super high sex drive, but he has such a hard time resisting just laying you down when you look so damn good. You are the reason he’s horny.

He loves when you ride him, and he WILL whimper. He tries not to, but Neji can’t be silent with the way you are squeezing him. The way you do it is so perfect, every bounce is drawing a noise out of him until he’s literally just letting out a stream of loud whimpers as he cums.

I think his cum would actually taste good. Next question.

Rock Lee

Perverted…

He feels bad for it when he catches himself, but Oop it’s too late… he’s got a boner

Boners are obvious in that green spandex…

He wouldn’t agree with doing it in public or semi-public though, but if you noticed his behavior or boner and pulled him off into the bathroom, ignoring his “this is indecent!” Protests because when you look at him before diving in to give him head, his eyes are literally pleading and he shuts up, pushing his hips towards your face.

He can’t be quiet so you’ll have stuff something in his mouth or cover it with your hand.

He secretly wants your chest in his face. He’s a chest guy. Boobs, pecks, whatever. He loves everything chest.

But he also loves ass. Small or big. Wants to grab a handful anyways.

Total switch

Because listen, he loves to pin your hips down and force you to accept the pleasure you’re trying to deny yourself.

Loves to pound his hips against yours until you’re a mess, but he also loves to do as you say.

He loves to be broken down until he’s in pieces by your mouth, body, words, whatever.

He whimpers like constantly, especially when he’s submissive. He tries to shut up when he’s dirty talking as he’s in charge, but he lets GO otherwise.

Tenten

I’m sorry her portion of this will be… lacking. I don’t know enough to say much. I love her, but I’ve never really thought about this at all.

I think she’d be a switch, but prefers to be in charge.

I think she’s depend greatly on you though.

If you don’t want to bottom/sub, that’s good.

Or vise versa.

She likes to take her time when she’s in control.

She’s fairly willing to try new things if you want to.

She enjoys going down on you most of all.

Gaara of the Sand

He’s very private about everything. He believes that his private life and his kazekage life should stay relatively separate. However, it is known that you are his partner. That’s no secret.

He’s not super into PDA, so it’s no surprise that he refuses to do anything risky or public in anyway.

He will not do it in the kazekage’s office. He has too much respect for it, but he also doesn’t want to get caught anyways.

He’s very intimate during. Slow and sensual for sure.

I can see him being into bondage, but like you get tied up, not him. But… depends. And might take some encouragement.

Refuses to hurt or degrade you for any reason. He only does praise. He could not bring himself to call you names or anything. Or to draw blood from you or hit you, etc. he doesn’t see why those things should be brought into the bedroom for “fun.”

He doesn’t think they’re fun.

He knew like nothing about sex before you. I actually think he’d have no idea how to initiate at first so you definitely initiated it.

I think he’d be the type you have to teach what to do a bit, but he gets the hang of it quickly. Then next time, he’s got every spot memorized.

Awkward. Like the first couple times were awkward, but romantic and cute.

Kankuro of the Sand

One word: kinky.

He likes to degrade you with a shit eating grin on his face. His degradation feels like a compliment most of the time though. Like he calls you a slut and it feels like he’s calling you a prince/princess. It’s confusing.

He’s so good at dirty talk. He’ll have you writhing in your spot, desperate for him and he’s not even touched you yet.

He’s got incredible patience when it comes to you. He takes his time breaking you down into a mess for him.

His face paint would 10 billion percent be smeared across your thighs and chest. Your neck is purple from bites AND his face paint to the point you can’t tell which is which.

Only when you wash off the face paint do you realize he left way too many dark hickeys that’ll probably take at least a week to fade away.

Confront him about this and he’ll just laugh.

Don’t tempt him to leave more, because he will.

He forces you to maintain eye contact when he goes down on you. If you look away for more than like 3 seconds, he give you a little tap as a warning, but twice and he stops.

Orgasm denial for sure. He would be the type to make up an excuse as to why he pulled away. He tells you all sorts of excuses. “You weren’t moaning enough.” “You moved your hips too much. Stay still.” And of course, “you looked away.”

He can make you cum hard almost every single time. You see stars.

The most fun part for him isn’t dicking you down, it’s the breaking you apart and putting you back together again.

Temari of the Sand

Dominant. Dommy mommy for sure.

Even when she decides to “sub” or “bottom,” she’s not doing a good job at it. She’s still telling you what to do, where to move, etc.

She’ll pull your hair, slap you, etc. as long as you are okay with it and want her to.

Loves to boss you around, telling you what she wants. Demanding you to please her.

“Get on your knees”

Head pusher for sure, but you two have a like physical que to let each other know when it’s enough.

All that being said, sometimes she really really just wants sweet, slow sex. Intimate nights filled with nothing but love.

She likes to keep all of this private though. No public or risky stuff.

However, she does like to do it beyond just in bed.

Would be the type to start kissing all over your neck, unbuttoning your shirt while you’re trying to cook breakfast.

You might want to turn the stove off.

2K notes · View notes

rafebangme · 2 months ago

Text

pairing: rafe cameron x fem!pogue!reader

summary: ♪ am i making you feel sick ♫ - you and rafe get into a heated argument at a party because he starts brushing you off when you try to talk to him:( angst.

warnings: heavy drinking, strong language, strong themes, classism, drugs, yelling, insecurities, arguing, mention of cheating, toxic relationship.

a/n: omg hello my first story on my blog and its angst LOL. mb its like 2am and im listening to ethel cain soooo enjoy (?)

you were sitting quite comfortably on the end of the couch, watching your boyfriend laugh and talk loudly with his friends, scooping a little bit of coke out of a baggy sitting on the glass coffee table in front of you every so often. were you impartial to his coke addiction? no. but did you want to get in another shit fight about how worried you are and how much rafe doesn't care because he's 'fine' ? also hell no. so you sit there, looking pretty, minding your own business.

rafe shifts to the edge of the couch, leaning towards his dickhead friends as he tells them a story of how he ate shit on his motorbike the other day - funny - you instinctively reach your arm out and gently caress his bicep as he gets to the particularly 'funny' part of the story, where he explains how he was thrown a few feet but got out of the situation 'with only a few scratches.' in the split second that your hand makes contact with his arm, his eyes dart to your hand in his peripheral and he immediately yanks his arm away without missing a beat.

you pause, arm still lingering in the air from where it once was and a pang of hurt strikes in your chest. kelce and topper noticed as it happened and silently scoffed to themselves, but continue listening to your boyfriend talk. you squirm in your seat, now feeling more and more self-conscious about your position at this random kook party.

after a little while, you decide that he probably just wasn't thinking or got distracted trying to tell the story, that he didn't mean it. so once again, rafe was now leaning back into the couch man spreading (of course), you decide to casually rest your closest hand on the top of one of his thighs. the way that he usually did around guys wherever the two of you would go, all protective, though he hadn't done it once at this party all night.

your hand sits there for a few seconds this time but now you notice rafe's head turn towards you, and you look right into his eyes before he flashes you this halfway disgusted and irritated look, before he once again swats your hand off of him.

now you were upset. it was clearly on purpose. both times. so you tap your foot for a second, weighing your options. your situation was a bit shit, boyfriend is deciding to be an ass towards you in front of his judgey kook friends, and you have no way of getting home that wouldn't be like a three hour walk alone in the dark. you roll your eyes at him, though he isn't even looking at you, and get up quickly before walking off in another direction.

you don't even know where you're going, its dark, the figure eight mansion is packed full of random people and you have never been here before. somehow you find yourself in a second kitchen on another level of the house, its a lot more quiet and there are a small group of people playing pool so you decide to watch the game.

"hey, do you play?" a deep voice asks, you turn around, pretty startled having not been talked to by anyone all night.

"oh- hi, er- no i'm pretty bad at pool, i've only played it once when i was drunk" you reply awkwardly. you couldn't recognise the guy, but he was definitely a kook, must not be someone rafe knows because you thought you knew just about everyone on figure eight because of your king kook boyfriend.

the deep voice laughs a little before looking at the pool table, the current game is almost at an end, only two balls left to sink, "i could teach you? if you wanted to be on my team maybe?"

you nervously laugh and glance at the pool table before looking around instinctively for rafe, obviously you realise he's too busy being an asshole to care where you are right now, nor who you're talking to.

"honestly i think i'm a hopeless case, but thanks for the offer... er, you wouldn't happen to know anyone sober that would offer a ride home?" you hesitantly ask, realising you were way too tired to deal with anything or anyone for the rest of the night.

"uh, yeah i do actually, i haven't had a lick of anything the whole night" he admits, lips pursed together as if he's embarrassed by it.

your eyes widen a little, you weren't an idiot, you weren't the type to just get into anyone's car and drive off without telling someone where you're going... but you were desperate for a ride home and the guy in front of you had kind of a nerdy look to him. not really the kidnapping type, you concluded.

"oh, guess i'm pretty lucky i can't play pool then" you laughed a little.

he shrugged and glanced at the pool table before looking back at you, "guess so, so was that a yes to the ride home?"

you nodded politely and he said something about heading down to the front yard where he'd parked. you followed close behind him as the two of you made your way back through the mansion and the crowds of drunk kooks.

finally you were standing outside, watching as the pool table guy walked towards a range rover when suddenly you feel a harsh grip on your arm as you're forcefully turned around.

"rafe- ow what the fuck!" you exclaim, tearing your arm from his bruising grip. he threw back the rest of whatever he was drinking before scoffing at the sight in front of him, pool table guy now standing at his car with his arms folded as you stood between them.

"where the fuck do you think you're going with him? huh??" he shook his head, "think your trashy pogue ass can just cheat on me at a party that i invited you to??"

"cheat?? what rafe-" you began, but his yelling cut you off again.

he narrowed his eyes at you and back at pool table guy who was now walking closer to cut in himself, "fucking ridiculous, this is what i get for dating a fucking pogue. i can't believe you y/n."

you were fighting back tears at this point, but felt the burning hot rage rise inside you like a volcano, and you erupted.

"how fucking dare you accuse me of cheating rafe cameron! you know i would never fucking cheat on you! i left you at that table with your buddies to do coke all you pleased because you kept fucking swatting me away like i was some desperate stranger!"

his eyes widened at your outburst, you two had been in yelling matches before but the way you were giving him a tongue lashing now was something he'd never experienced before.

"this guy was nice enough to let me know i can actually get a fucking ride home because i was just stranded somewhere random in this fucking mansion! and you don't even care to fucking look for me until i catch your eye because you think im cheating rafe?? why do you care if im cheating anyway. im just a 'dirty fucking pogue.' am i making you feel sick rafe? can you just so not believe that you ever slept with a pogue!"

"y/n, i didn't mean all that- fuck! god, look what you've gone and made me say" he yelled, now directing his anger to the pool table guy.

he just shrugged, "dude you left her to wonder around, can't be surprised when another guy tries to get in her pants... pogue or not, she's hot"

you could see the gears turn in rafe's head before he finally attempts to lunge at the pool table guy, thank fully you put your entire body weight into pushing rafe back and even though you weren't really doing much, pool table guy was already driving out halfway out the mansion's gates.

rafe finally straightens up and then looks at you wordlessly, you take the opportunity to speak again, "don't ever fucking treat me like that again rafe. i'm too tired to have this conversation right now, we're going back to yours. i want to sleep."

still breathing heavily, he looks up past you before making eye contact with you again, "okay."

597 notes · View notes

going-to-ikea-for-the-fries · 10 months ago

Text

It's a Match! || 141 x reader

[ Chapter 1 ] || [ Chapter 3 ]

Pairing: Soap x Reader || 141 x gn!Reader Words: 1K~ cw: a bit of dirty talking/innuendos Summary: While overcoming recent heartbreak, you decide to join Tinder in search of a rebound. Your friends advise to just Swipe Right indiscriminately... What happens when 4 soldiers from the same squad match with you?

Chapter 2: Johnny

“Oh, hello…” You remarked to yourself as your eyes locked into a stunning pair of blue eyes on your screen, stopping your mindless right-swipping. “...Johnny.”

“You’re 29… A soldier… Scottish… Are you friends with Kyle?” You mused playfully. “Let me guess, you’re a gym bro, aren’t you?” You asked sarcastically as you tapped your finger on the right side, skipping through his pictures. The first one immediately after was him lifting while wearing a weightlifting belt. “Yup… Mandatory gym pic.”

Chuckling to yourself, you snap a screenshot of his profile to the girls as well, sending it quick.

leah: @/mia Whatever good energy you sent its working. second hot guy in the last 5 minutes! mia: i lit a CANDLE for this!!!!! leah: there weren’t any handsome guys like this when i was on tinder?! 😫 UNFAIR. 🙄 you: blow it out then cause this is the 3rd actually. leah: 3rd??? Where’s number 2??? you: didn’t think to snap a screenshot. hasn’t matched me back yet. mia: has he posted a shirtless pic? you: kyle did and this one idk but probably. need to check. leah: Don’t forget to send it over.🥴

Shaking your head and laughing in amusement, you went back to Tinder, checking on ‘Johnny’. The mandatory gym pic was there… a couple of them in fact! And then the mandatory shirtless selfie. Or rather… The mandatory shirtless SELFIES. Plural.

Three of them… The first one was him just straight up wearing just a towel… And the next was him in a kilt… And the next was him with a button-up very much so unbuttoned.

“Oh, my, Johnny-John-John… You sure know how to woo a bird…” You joked to yourself.

You dragged your finger down to check his bio and immediately frowned. “Of course…” You trailed off with a disappointed frown as you snuck another spring roll into your mouth.

He might be stupidly attractive, but his personality… Gosh, he doesn’t know how to sell himself. Boring, boring, boring. “I work out and like video games!” You quipped mockingly and scoffed a bit.

“Artist.” You remarked when you reached the last of his profile’s tags, spotting that word in the hobby section. “An artist? You?” You asked your phone screen as if Johnny would come alive in it and answer you.

You’d admit, him calling himself an artist was intriguing enough, but normally that wouldn’t be enough to make you Swipe Right on him… But you’re not under normal circumstances. You promised your friends you’d Swipe Right on everyone so…

Your phone almost dropped out of your hand as soon as the ‘It’s a Match’ screen showed. “Of course… He’s probably swiping right on everyone as well…” Rolling your eyes, you go to click off the screen but accidentally enter DMs.

Johnny: ye have any scottish in you? you: not that i know of. Johnny: would ye like to? 🫦 Johnny: wait. wdym not that ye know of??? Johnny: i was trying to be filthy and now got me curious bonnie

“Fuckin’ hell…” You said as you set down your phone and covered your face before breaking into a fit of giggles.

The fact you had accidentally ruined his pick-up line and succeeded in stumping him got you very, very amused. Okay, maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t as boring as you thought.

you: story for another time. you: i walked right into that one tho. good job. Johnny: no ye cant do that Johnny: gotta tell me all about it now you: i mean werent scottish people everywhere in the uk at one point? you: i might be 1/370232103484320th scottish. Johnny: would ye like some MORE scottish in ye then? 🫦 you: solid attempt again. you: if you keep trying you might just get there. Johnny: i intend to dont worry you: soooo… Johnny: so? you: were you wearing underwear under the kilt? Johnny: no Johnny: why want a peek? 😏 you: i’m good you: so ur an artist? Johnny: i am Johnny: ur fast at typing fuck you: what kind? you: keep up then! Johnny: drawing Johnny: im trying 🥴 you: can i see some? Johnny: hanging with my mates difficult to text fast 😤 Johnny: idk if ull be in the mood to see anything after im done with ye you: why? 🤨 Johnny: might be too tired and need to be cuddled to sleep 😏 you: oh fuck off. Johnny: u just cursed me out Johnny: i think m in love 😫 Johnny: gonna tell my mates i just met my spouse 🥴🥴 you: don’t give them any ideas. you: haven’t even agreed to meet up with you. you: haven’t been invited in the first place. Johnny: meet up with me 🙏 Johnny: meet up with me 🙏 Johnny: meet up with me 🙏 Johnny: meet up with me 🙏 Johnny: meet up with me 🙏

Your eyes widened at his enthusiasm and persistence. Okay, he was definitely not boring… It was actually kind of endearing and funny!

you: jc r u copypasting that? Johnny: yes Johnny: are ye going to or not you: can i get back to you on that? Johnny: ill wait for ye you: sure you do that johnny Johnny: ow the sarcasm burns

Concealing a chuckle, you clicked off the DMs page for the second time tonight… but, this time, you closed the app and focused on eating dinner.

Sure, this whole dating app thing was stupid, but at least you were enjoying yourself.

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

IF THE GIF DOESN'T WORK FOR YOU: CLICK HERE

taglist: @daisychainsinknots , @bunnysdaydreams , @iite-cool , @lahniu , @pagesfalling , @tapioca-milktea1978 , @live-love-be-unique , @thelaisydazy , @littleghosthoney , @bossva , @emotion-no-hot-yes-hotel-trivago , @chamomiletealeaf , @ghosts-hoe

#ikea writes 💚#it's a match! fic #cod modern warfare #cod fanfic #captain john price #john soap mactavish #kyle gaz garrick #simon ghost riley #text story #cod x reader #call of duty x reader #soap x reader #johnny soap mactavish #johnny soap mactavish x reader

1K notes · View notes

halemerry · 1 year ago

Text

On Crowley, memory, and identity.

So full disclosure first, I am not someone who is particularly interested in having Crowley's angel name on screen - personally I rather like the idea of never having an answer to this question - but I also do think it's interesting and fun to speculate and we got quite a few hints at this throughout this season soooo

Obviously part of this is that we meet him. The angel that would become Crowley is the first person on screen this season. We confirm a lot about him here. He confirm that he is powerful enough to start the engine of the universe. We confirm that he can control gravity and time and space and light. We confirm that he is the being that says let there be light before the beginning. We also confirm that he consulted with the concept designer of the universe and that he's very comfortable with the idea of questioning authority. We are also given Aziraphale's anxiety as a contrast to this and as proof that that is not a universal trait for early angels.

Now, we have always had evidence that Crowley is powerful. He's done some things that seem impossibly big. He stops time very casually and seemingly without effort - even at the end of season 1 it doesn't even seem to give us the same strain on him that holding the Bentley together does. This is a thing that we only ever see Crowley do and notably a thing that you would think other beings would mess with to their advantage if it was possible. Which means they either literally can't or that it never occurred to them that they could. Or as is becoming increasingly clear: perhaps it's a bit of both.

But that's not the only implication of power we get in season 1 either. We get Crowley seemingly in tune with the universe in a way many angels and demons aren't. Which, makes some sense if he helped make it. This manifests in all sorts of ways. He's constantly aware of Aziraphale's presence. He can smell when the world state changes like when Adam names Dog. He holds the Bentley together through utter destruction. He notices that there are different books in the bookshop - something I always assumed was meant to convey he was familiar with the shop's contents but after learning he didn't even know Jane Austen was a writer I wonder if it's actually more to do with him being in tune with reality. He also can apparently quite literally feel when there are eyes on them.

We're given even more of all these things this season in some really interesting ways. Crowley literally tests the air to check if a miracle has happened - another thing that we don't see anyone else do despite Heaven literally assigning someone to Aziraphale to check for a specific miracle. This particular beat is also something we are shown twice this season. Both here and in 1941, when Furfur uses the miracle blocker on Aziraphale. Here Crowley tests his miracles and despite getting nothing of the sort when Aziraphale tries a miracle literally the beat before this, we are given both a visual and an auditory effect. It ripples out with a watery sound effect from Crowley's finger. It's like he's prodding at reality.

There's also several instances involving the recognition or lack thereof of angels and demons. Crowley feels that the demon army is arriving before it does. Neither side seems to be able to track Gabriel - one of the most powerful beings in existence - at all once he leaves Heaven. We also see countless angels fail to notice Crowley himself both as Bildad the Shuhite performing literal miracles right in front of them. And this happens again as he prances about Heaven after Muriel. Aziraphale can't tell Shax is a demon despite Crowley recognizing she's manifested behind him nearly as soon as he answers the phone. Aziraphale can't even recognize that he himself is still an angel at the end of the Job story.

He also. Quite literally. Brings someone back from the dead???? Like waves a hand casually on the street and reconstitutes Mr. Brown like he'd never been dead at all. Mr. Brown returns with no memory of what happened to him holding a newspaper that seems to have literal bite chunks coming out of it. It's not framed as a huge miracle or anything strenuous either - just a casual snap.

And that's not even getting into the parallels with Gabriel. First of all. We get the color purple. It's purple when Aziraphale and angel that would become Crowley start the engine of the quadrants of the universe and it's purple when they miracle to hide Gabriel. This color is associated with power and, historically in the language of this show, with Gabriel himself. Them using it together twice speaks a lot to the power they have together.

But that's not the only symbolism historically tied to Gabriel that has found its way to Crowley this season either. Most flashy of all is the lightning. This is how we see Gabriel arrive on earth at the end of season one and it is something Crowley apparently just Does when he gets too mad to contain himself.

This alone wouldn't catch my attention except. Except the way Crowley reacts to Gabriel's memory problems is... interesting to say the least. He's angry and understandably so. Part of this is him being mad and protective of Aziraphale - he says as much himself to Jim directly. And yet, weirdly, it's the kind of mad that reminded me of something else.

This is the mad he tends to gets at his plants. Do it properly. Think hard. You can do better than that. Grow better. It's the kind of angry that's steeped in projection. It's he kind of angry that is undercut with the occasional weird undercurrent of understanding. And so much of his dialogue with Jim around this is framed like he does actually understand. Jim says it hurts and he says he knows. Jim starts talking about it feeling like being an empty house that still remembers where the furniture is and Crowley immediately latches onto this and understands ah it's looking at where the furniture isn't.

And there's a few other conversations that center around this issue that I find really interesting from a projection perspective. There's the conversation that happens when Crowley goes to have an alcohol fueled chat with Jim. He says "You're Jim now. Got everything just the way you wanted?" This doesn't make a whole lot of sense for him to be addressing Gabriel with. As far as he knows all Gabriel would want was the end of the world.

And then there's the particular way he asks Jim to eliminate himself in this scene. Climb out the window. In other words, have a fall. Something he pretty immediately retracts and clearly feels guilty about no matter how much he hates Gabriel.

And then there's the first conversation he gets to have after learning about Gabriel. Crowley opens this conversation, thinking out loud. He's staring out, not talking to Az yet and the very first thing out of his mouth is, of all things: "He's going to be okay." A weird start for a statement about Gabriel in itself but then Crowley goes and adds what at it's core is his own trauma narrative to the end with, "We can just take him somewhere and leave him there."

Now the real fun bit: Crowley also has memory issues that are out very prominently on display even as far back as season 1.

He has inconsistent memories of his Fall. The answers he gives us to why he Fell change slightly - even when he's alone with himself. He doesn't seem to understand why exactly he Fell even though he clearly has some vague idea of the pieces in play. I always thought to some degree that this was just a trauma response, but season 2 drew even more attention to this and now that we know that memory alteration is how Heaven handles powerful angels I can't help but to wonder if there's more in play here.

Crowley can't remember Furfur - who he apparently literally fought next to during the war in Heaven. Crowley can't remember building a nebula with Saraqael. Crowley doesn't remember why they decided gravity was a good idea.

But he does remember bits and pieces here and there. He remembers doing some of the starmaking. He remembers how to access clearance locked files. He's missing pieces and also seems to have an understanding that Gabriel's memories ARE in there. Almost like he's done this work on himself before.

This narrative itself is also far more concerned with the angel Crowley was this time around. It teases his rank a few different times. Most notably is him having access the files only available to Dominions and above.

Now angel hierarchy is a bit of a messy area depending on what sources you're using but given Good Omens tendencies in the past we can assume that this leaves us five ranks. Dominion, Throne, Cherub, Seraph, and Archangel.

I might break down why I think Dominion, Throne, and Cherub feel kind of odd to me later if there's interest - now available here - in that but given the current length of this meta I just want to focus on that last one for now.

Crowley was an Archangel is far from a new theory and I've honestly historically had some fairly mixed feelings about it. But the parallels between Jim and Crowley lend some interesting connective tissue to a lot of those theories. And. There's also some interesting camera work and script writing tied to Crowley and that term outside of the scenes about Gabriel's memories specifically.

Firstly, during Crowley's chat with Beelzebub he says it's a big universe with plenty of places for an archangel to hide. Like Alpha Centauri perhaps?

Then we get Aziraphale and Crowley both presenting Hell and Heaven respectively the idea that it could have been them that did the archangel class miracle. Aziraphale gets scoffed at and yet. Shax is the one who says the miracle was archangel level and Crowley's response is "how do you know I didn't do it?"

Then later as she's prowling about the shop we get this interesting shot of Crowley in the doorframe and Jim in the background. Crowley grins and offers to let Shax look in and see if she can see any archangels in there while he's framed dead center and Jim himself is blurry in the back of the frame.

And most fascinating in my opinion is this shot that happens when Crowley and Muriel are accessing the classified files. Nearly every shot in this sequence is group shots or shots of Gabriel. The camera is focused in the plot and the way the archangels function as a group and on Gabriel himself. But we get one single shot in this entire sequence of Crowley by himself and it is immediately following Gabriel saying "I am the only first order archangel in the room - or, well, the universe."

And then in the end. We get the Metatron who goes out of his way to avoid using Crowley's name. He calls him demon (and insists correctly that Crowley would recognize him even when Michael doesn't) or refers to him as Aziraphale's friend. He only ever uses that name when trying to use him as a bribe for Aziraphale. That combined with the dark look he gives Crowley implies a familiarity that only the Metatron has with him.

So who is he then? There's plenty of old meta out there about why certain archangels fit or don't and I won't reiterate them here. They're interesting and definitely worth poking around at and very fun to read! Personally I'm not as interested in naming the someone he used to be as I am in examining the places that ghost of this angel has started to poke through the narrative so I'll end this here. It's spiralled into something far longer than I ever meant it to be anyway.

#good omens #good omens spoilers #good omens season 2 #gos2 spoilers #good omens meta #Crowley #Gabriel

4K notes · View notes

letorip · 6 months ago

Text

kiss with a fist [ii]

"Blood sticks, sweat drips, break the lock if it don't fit, a kick in the teeth is good for some, a kiss with a fist is better than none"

===+++===

pairing: tara carpenter x reader

summary: you signed up to help tara with her stupid plan. not whatever the hell one would call this.

warnings: implied sex, use of alcohol, puking, arguing loudly and wrongly, curse words(?)

word count: 5.2k

A/N: sorry to make you wait so long, but here's the second part. there will probably be a third, so fear not, the story doesn't end here. i originally thought i would be able to just end it off right here, but it’s going kind of really well and i think a third or maybe even a fourth part is more reasonable

===+++===

For almost the entire walk to the frat house, Tara didn't actually say much. It surprised you too, the way she just glanced around the city that passed as you walked and fiddled with her nails. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, but you were so used to Tara having something to say that it made you speak instead.

"Wow, for once, you're speechless," you commented as you passed under a streetlight. Tara shot you a glare, shoving her hands into her jean pockets.

"Would it kill you to shut the hell up?"

“There we go, back to normal. Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird,” she scoffed. “Mind your own business.”

"I'm just saying."

"Well don't say. Don't say."

===+++===

The party fucking sucked. It was quintessential college, with frat boys who attempted to yell over the loud music that rattled your eardrums. Coolers upon coolers of shitty, cheap beer sat against the far wall, and a crowd had gathered around them to pick off all the free alcohol they could. Maybe a year ago this would’ve been fun. Now you found yourself disenchanted with the ordeal.

Tara was off god knows where, doing god knows what, which you figured was the point of the arrangement anyway. You weren’t too concerned with tracking her down, especially if situation also presented itself as a pleasant bonus— not having to put up with her.

Chad had wandered out of the room when he saw you and Tara arrive together hand in hand, going deeper into the party without a word. He was usually the one you hung around with at these kinds of things, but he had been a sad little dog with his tail between his legs since you and Tara announced you were meant to be a few days before the party. It seemed some of your friends were still adjusting.

The immediate reaction after Tara said “soooo, we’re together,” was to laugh, like you two were doing a bit. It got less funny when they saw you both blankly staring back at them and then Tara grabbed your hand and held it up with a forced smile.

The whole group was going through a somewhat awkward seven stages of grief thing. Chad was avoiding you completely, Quinn was a bit annoyed you were off the market now after an egregious few months of hitting on you, and Ethan was the only one to be a bit normal, even though it was clear he too had a crush on Tara and was disappointed with the matter.

When Mindy had gotten over her disbelief, she dove right into an endless game of questions, only occasionally staved off by Anika. "So who confessed first?" had been one of the first ones, accompanied by a glint in her eye. Tara jumped in before you could even open your mouth, eager to answer.

"(Y/n) showed up on my porch, all sweaty and disgusting looking, just smelling so unbelievably bad it was overpowering-”

“I had been working out,” you rolled your eyes. “That’s why I was sweaty."

“Mhm, whatever. Anyways, apparently they were just being such an asshole because they were in love with me," Tara said, with a wide, shit-eating grin. "Right?"

You had to hide your glare behind your solo cup. "Mhm. I was just overflowing with it. I have so many things to say about you."

“All nice things,” Tara corrected.

“Yeah. That’s what I said.”

“Was it?”

“Uh huh.”

Mindy’s questions followed you everywhere she did. Who kissed who first? Who’s more cuddly? Have you guys slept together yet? They volleyed back and forth and you and Tara fought for the first word each time to pin it to the other with gleeful sadism. Of course, it was then flipped around once the next question came and you would huff in annoyance at the other for being an asshole.

It wasn’t as bad of an arrangement as you had dreaded. You only had to be couple-y when other people were watching you two interact, or when Sam would glare in suspicion. Hold hands a few times, smile, share a glance. Other than that, things stayed mostly the same. The group probably appreciated you both not acting head over heels for the other and you liked it because it meant you didn't have to pretend to like her.

Tara had a brazen way about her that made you roll your eyes. She never took no for an answer, had a teasing remark for anything, and always felt the need to be doing something. Other people seemed to find themselves charmed by it. Others, but not you. Never you.

The walk there had been about all she could take of your personality, and the moment after you two were seen together, she ditched you at the door and wandered off to the dance floor. After that you had lost track of her, and ended up splitting your time between the kitchen, the bathroom, and the front room, away from the crowd. Mindy found you there, tugging Anika along with her.

"Cut the bullshit," She said with an eye roll, sitting right down on the couch in front of you. Anika plopped down next to her. "There's no way in hell you got together with Tara."

You grinned, sipping your beer and partially using it to block your expression. "No, we're together. I really like her."

Mindy scoffed. "You're a terrible liar." Your cheeks warmed and you tilted your head to the side.

"We have to separate you two like warring chihuahuas every time we hang out together," Anika said. She leaned forward and narrowed her eyes in a study of your face. "You're not confessing your undying love."

"I did."

"You didn't!" Mindy said, and she threw up her arms.

"I did."

"You didn't," Anika snorted.

"I...," you looked at them both, "...are you guys going to snitch?"

"Snitch to who?" asked Mindy. Now they were both leaned in, like eager children around a campfire. You swallowed.

"Sam." Mindy blinked. Then she sat back.

"What the hell did Tara get you involved in?" she asked. As much as Sam was part of your group, it was known not to fuck with her, and that's exactly what Tara was making you do.

You frowned. If anyone was going to ruin the plan, it probably wouldn't be Mindy or Anika. "You can't tell Chad, but we're not actually together."

Anika raised her eyebrows and shot Mindy a glance. "That didn't take a lot of brain power to figure out." You shrugged.

"Well, we fooled Sam. Tara needs a fake partner so she can go to parties and see people and stuff. And, well, you know how Sam is about that stuff."

Mindy crossed her arms. "And you said sure?"

You shrugged. "I mean, I didn't really see why not. Plus, she was being super annoying about it. Showed up at my house. She was begging, almost."

"So, you what, took pity?" Anika asked, giving you a look. You rolled your eyes.

"Trust me, it's not because it's fun. She's way too annoying and she'd probably say the same thing about me."

Mindy frowned, looking out the doorway and into the booming party. "Chad wouldn't like it."

You sent her a worried look. "Please please please, don't tell Chad. I know he's upset by the whole thing, but Sam would literally kill me if she knew I was helping Tara run around town."

"I don't know...," she said. "I know Tara wants freedom, but this is kind of bullshit, (Y/n)."

"It won't be for long. She just wants to meet someone. When she does, it's over. Life goes back to normal."

"Do you guys have a target in mind, or something?" Anika asked, a bit amused.

"Not even a little a bit. It’s like, her second party ever,” you shrugged. “I don’t know if she’s really dead set on a person yet.”

“Well… she better figure it out soon.”

“Mhm.” You looked out the same glass door and into the booming party outside. Through the jumping crowd, you could see in the distance Tara, who was dancing with her eyes shut and a smile spread wide across her cheeks. She looked happy like that.

You took a swig of your beer.

===+++===

The boom of a fist on your door shook the thin walls of your apartment, and you jolted awake to hear three more hit the wood.

“OPEN UP (Y/N), NOW!”

Immediately, a headache washed over you and you groaned. You tried to smush your head into the pillow to make it go away but there were the banging fists again, and you sat up, letting your legs dangle off the edge.

“OPEN THE FUCK UP,” came the voice again, and you blinked. Oh shit. You knew that voice. You clambered to your feet and stumbled out your bedroom and down the hall in a dusty pair of shorts and shirt. “I’M NOT KIDDING! OPEN THE—”

You pulled the door open like a deer in headlights, seeing Sam seethe on the other side with her fist raised. Nostrils flared, forehead creased, eyes narrowed. She looked about ready to rip your head off.

“You,” she said, spitting the word. You flinched. “Where the fuck is Tara?!”

Shit shit shit shit shit. Had she not gone home the night before?? Things felt a little bit fuzzy still. You remembered grabbing another beer from Ethan and flopping down in an armchair, then another and another, and then maybe wandering home while the sun started to rise. Had you seriously lost track of the attempted murder victim on her first night out???

You blinked, already aware that your cheeks were a dusty pink. "I, uh... she, um..."

Her hands went to her hips, glaring at you expectantly. "Well?! Where the hell is my sister?!" When you were still staring like an idiot, she threw up her arms. "I fucking knew I shouldn't have trusted you with her! This is what I get"

You stared, feeling a lie (though probably a clunky one) come to your brain. "I think her phone must've died, but she just left."

Sam's eyebrows rose, but you weren't sure if it was in disbelief or even more rage. "What do you mean?"

"We, um," your eyes went to the floor, feeling her glare laser itself into you as you spoke. "We got super drunk last night at the party, and I brought her back here and we both fell asleep," you looked back up to see her giving your pyjamas a once over, nose wrinkled. You flushed. "No! No— we didn't do that. We just fell asleep."

Sam looked at you for a moment, then crossed her arms. "I waited all night for her, you know," she said.

You nodded. "I know. I'm so sorry, it won't happen again."

"It won't." Sam repeated. "When I don't hear from her for a whole night, you know what I assume happened, right? You know how that feels?"

You swallowed. "I do."

She sighed. "I'm really trying here. I know she doesn't want me worrying about her, and I know she wants freedom. So I'm trying, (Y/n). Don't make me regret it."

"I won't, Sam." It felt like a giant wedge in your throat, and you tried to smile at her but she continued to frown, and she turned around and walked off. The moment she was gone, you spun around and slammed the door. You dashed through your apartment, grabbing your phone off your nightstand and quickly pulling up her contact.

Little Shit (do not pick up). You pressed the button and put it up to your ear, wandering over to the nearby curtain and lifting it to look out onto the city. "Come on, come on," you pleaded aloud. "Fucking pick up, asshole."

After the third ring and a good prayer to god even though you weren't especially religious, it stopped ringing and you could hear her grumbling.

"Tara??" you rushed. "Tara, where are you?"

"Mmm," she groaned, "the hell do you want so early?"

You scoffed. "Tara it's almost noon." There was a pause on the other end of the line.

"What?"

"Uh huh," you grunted. "Your sister just almost ripped my door off it's fucking hinges because she doesn't know where you are. And you know what, neither do I!" There was some shuffling from her end, and then what sounded like running footsteps.

"I went home with this girl last night, I just woke up," she rushed. "Sam is going to kill me!"

"She almost killed me!" You almost yelled into the phone. Now that the worry had subsided you were left with anger. "She almost killed me because you wandered off and didn't go home."

"It's not like I meant to fall asleep," she argued back, and you could hear some talking in the background in faint voices. "I must've slept through my alarm— wait, what did you tell Sam?"

"That your phone died, and you were on your way home."

"WHAT?! (Y/n), this girl's apartment is at least fifteen to twenty minutes away," Tara said into the phone.

"Well it's not like I knew that, now is it?" you shot back, scratching your arm, "considering I didn't know if you were even alive until you picked up."

"God, not you too. I'm fine, drama queen."

"Drama queen?"

"Yeah, drama queen," Tara repeated, and more noises flooded in. It sounded as if she was in the city now, walking, "you sound just like Sam. I picked you because I thought you knew I didn't need a babysitter."

"That's not being babysat, Tara. That's making sure you're not dead," you rolled your eyes.

"Well, I'm not."

"Good."

"Great."

"Fine!" you shot back.

"Awesome."

You sighed into the speaker. "Pick up some flowers or something on your way back. Claim that's why you're late."

"Good idea, actually," Tara hummed.

"I know." And you hung up.

===+++===

You found yourself at an identical party the very next Friday night too, and the Friday after that, and after that too. The walls were just as stained. It smelled just as full of mold. This one didn't have a front room for you to barricade in, so you sat at the bar top instead, in the kitchen with your chin rested on the cool granite.

It had taken a whole night to get rid of the hangover from a few weeks before, and in doing so you had remembered why it was exactly that you didn't find these things too fun, anyways. You hadn't gotten anywhere near as drunk since. Mindy and Anika had decided on date night instead, and Chad and Ethan were off to watch a movie that originally you would've been invited to, had it not been for Tara.

It was painful, that Chad was ducking you. The irony wasn't lost, that the more time you spent with your fake girlfriend at parties and outings like a couple, the closer you got to actually repairing your relationship with him. You still would've rather gone to the movie, though.

You could actually see Tara, from where you sat. Through the bar window in the kitchen, she was on the dance floor, moving along with the rhythm of hard EDM as best she could. It was a giant mob of people, all clumped up and hopping around in excitement, and you didn't especially want to be out there.

As you watched, a guy came up behind Tara, tapping her on the shoulder and smiling down at her. You thought nothing of it, until you got a longer look at the guy's face. In the revolving, multicoloured lights that hung over the crowd, you recognised him in an instant, standing straight up and weaving your way through the party.

"You having fun, Carpenter?" He asked, with a douche-y smirk on his face as he said it. You rolled your eyes, coming up behind Tara and standing right behind her.

"I—" but you interrupted her.

"She is, Frankie," you shot, staring at him and crossing your arms. Tara whipped around to you with a glare.

"(Y/n), go away," she whispered loudly. But you stood your ground.

"Tara, literally anyone but him. I mean, anyone—"

"That's not your decision."

"Sam tased him in the balls last time. I mean, come on, you have to know he's a douche."

Frankie scoffed. "I'm sorry, who are you?"

"(Y/n) is just a—"

"—We're dating," you interrupted again. "So fuck off."

"No, we aren't," Tara shook her head. "Not really."

"Yes, we are," you nodded at Frankie. "Please leave. She's not sleeping with you tonight." He frowned, but started to walk off.

"That's not your decision, asshole!" Tara scowled and she reached out an arm to stop him. "Frankie, stay. You know what, I wasn't going to, but I will now."

"Frankie, leave. I mean it, you creep." You turned to her and glared. "Tara, listen to me, you—"

"No! Frankie, stay. Maybe I need the company," she shot back, narrowing her eyes. Frankie looked between you both, as did a few other people in the room who were starting to notice.

"They literally call him Date-Rape-Frankie, Tara. There's no way in hell you're sleeping with Date-Rape-Frankie. Frankie, leave."

"Frankie, no, stay. Well, what if I want to?"

"Then you're being stupid."

"Bold choice of words coming from you! You're not my mother."

"I'm not trying to be your mom, Tara. I'm using basic common sense. That guy is a creep and a perv," you pointed to him.

"Hey!" Frankie interjected, raising a hand to your shoulder.

"Fuck off!" you and Tara said in unison, dismissing him to glare right at each other.

"Well maybe I deserve the freedom to sleep with weirdos and whoever I want! I mean, who are you, the fucking sex-Nazi?"

"I don't have a problem with literally anyone else, Tara, but he's a weirdo!"

"Well then let me make that call! I'm not five. You don't need to baby me, I know he's a weirdo!" People were definitely staring now. You were both shouting, but a lot of it was drowned out by the EDM. It didn't stop others watching you point in each others faces and scowl.

"It's not babying you, Tara! It's basic caring! You have no clue about this shit, this is like your fourth party ever!"

"I've managed this far, haven't I?!"

"What, you want a cookie?!"

"Yeah, maybe I fucking do! I'm an adult, asshole! Let me do adult shit!"

"Wow, it's so adult and mature of you, to sleep with creeps and get hungover every Friday. How adult."

"Well, maybe it's not, but who gives a shit! I'm having fun for once! I'm being free without a fucking serial killer on my ass! I know you can't relate, but Christ, take the stick out from your ass!"

"Real nice," you shook your head. "This is what I get for helping you. Of fucking course." Before she could reply, you turned around and headed out the sliding glass door, into the fenced-in backyard. There was a pool back there, and you collapsed into a wrought iron pool chair, right near the edge.

People watched you warily, as you sat out there, but within minutes, the party was resumed. Even from outside, you could hear the thumping bass shake the windows gently as the glass moved in the panes.

There was a faint scent of petrichor from the small patch of grass out there, and the sky rumbled in the distance. It was peaceful out there, with small hanging fairy lights and the pool in front of you. You propped your legs up on the glass table and tried not to scream.

This was exactly what you should've expected, from Tara. Of course she would be selfish. Of course she would be brash. A part of you wasn't surprised. Disappointed, sure. But not surprised. You just sat there and tried to cool your breathing, watching the city lights in front of you.

You must've sat like that for an hour or two, just watching the city. It didn't feel like long enough. You might've even felt at peace, until you felt a hand on your shoulder.

"Um...excuse me?" You craned your neck around, looking up in your chair to see a concerned guy looking down at you.

"Are you (Y/n)?" He asked, awkwardly scratching his neck. You nodded, confused.

"Uh, yeah? Do we know each other?"

"No! No, I was asked by Tara, I think was her name? She wanted me to get you. She's your girlfriend, right?"

The worry came back, and you stood up. "Why, what happened? Where is she?" Sam was really going to kill you.

"She's in the guest bathroom, I think she's sick."

===+++===

"Tara?"

"(Y/n)?" you heard a very uneasy voice on the other end.

"Can I come in?" you asked, and when there was no response, you let yourself inside. She was on the other end of the massive bathroom, leaned up against the bathtub with her head close to the toilet bowl.

Tara looked absolutely green, with her hair sweatily stuck to her forehead and eyes barely open. "Christ Tara, how much did you have to drink?" you asked in worry, coming to stand over her.

"Oh, just—" she gagged like she was about to puke and you bent down to grab her and tug her towards the toilet bowl. You spun back to the guy in the doorway, who stared at you both with wide eyes.

"Can you get me some crackers and Gatorade?" you asked him, sending a hopeful glance. He nodded and closed the door, and you turned back to Tara, who was bent over the toilet bowl.

You moved her gently and lifted the toilet seat up. "Are you okay?" you asked with a frown. You felt like an idiot the moment it left your mouth.

She raised her eyebrows. "Do I look okay?" Tara mumbled.

"Well, no."

"Thass' good," she slurred. "I had too many," she hiccupped. You nodded.

"I'd say so. How much did you have Tara?"

She giggled. "This many." She held up four fingers with a giant, toothy grin and slumped with her arms encircling the toilet bowl.

"Since when?" you blinked.

"Since you got allllllllll pissy!" You sighed, hands going to her hair and pulling it back. She wrinkled her nose at you. "Why are you touching my hairrrrr?!"

"So you don't vomit all on it, idiot," you replied, shaking your head. Tara huffed.

"I'mnuh gonnuh puke."

And then Tara puked. Everywhere.

===+++===

You both sat there, that way, for about ten minutes. Tara vomited three times, during that span, and when she was done, you handed her the crackers and Gatorade and told her to do her worst.

She downed them in another fifteen minutes, sitting in the bathtub and eating while you sat leaned up against the bathroom wall, across from her, just in silence. The sounds of the party seemed to have died a little bit as the night droned on, and by now people would be wandering home or to someone else’s place.

While you waited, you shot Sam a text, letting her know you’d bring Tara home and that she was okay. Sam didn’t reply but she saw the message, and you figured that was good enough. When you checked the weather app, Tara finally spoke, coming to her senses a bit with more food in her system.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, staring down at the package for the crackers in her hand. “Thanks.”

You shrugged, staring at the toilet in front of you. It probably reeked in there, but at this point you were nose blind. “For what?” You meant for that to be it, just a small little acknowledgment, but Tara shook her head.

“Thank you for that. For being here.”

She stared right at you when she said it, and you knew she meant it with conviction. You nodded. “I know we don’t always get along, but I had your back, back there.”

“You have my back?” she asked, smiling a little and grabbing her Gatorade from the edge of the tub.

“I agreed to help you, didn’t I?”

She paused for a moment, then nodded. “You did, yeah.” Tara looked over at you, then tilted her head to the side. “I still don’t get why, though.”

“You were honest, for once.” It came from a surprising place, and you said it before you entirely knew you were speaking. You didn’t completely know what it meant either, until after you said it, but the words passed between you almost like a new understanding.

A few moments of silence came and went, before she spoke again. “I walk silently places at night in case I hear I’m being followed. By Ghostface. Same thing as when I’m home alone. I don’t do it as much anymore, but I still do it sometimes. Don’t tell Sam, please please please. She’ll make me go to therapy.”

“Okay,” you said, nodding gently. You leaned your head back up against the wall, craning it up to look at the ceiling.

“Why are you being nice to me?” She asked. You laughed, tracing the popcorn pattern of the roof with your eyes.

“I’m not the devil, Tara.”

“…Neither am I.”

“I know,” you said, and you reached your arm out for a cracker. She gave you one and you crunched down on it, while an especially large bass hit came from the speakers outside. “God, this music fucking sucks,” you groaned.

Tara nodded. “It’s really hard to dance to.”

“Well,” you shrugged, “it didn’t seem like you were struggling earlier.”

Tara frowned, then tilted her head in curiosity. “What’s your favourite song?”

You raised your eyebrows in amusement. “Why?”

“Just wondering,” she said.

“Okay… you’re going to laugh, though.”

“Am I?” she grinned. You nodded.

“Do you know that one song, The Promise, by When In Rome? It’s from the 80s, it’s super cheesy?”

She stared off for a moment, in thought, then shook her head. “Don’t think so, how’s it go?”

You rolled your eyes, but began to quietly sing it in a tone that wavered in between spoken word and humming. It was terrible and you were tone deaf, but it was the song. “If you need a friend, don’t look to a straaanger. You know in the end,” your voice broke a little at the low note, and Tara giggled but you continued, “I’ll always be thereee.”

“Wow.”

“Mhm. And then it skips a little bit and the chorus goes, ‘I’m sorry but I’m just thinking of the right words to say, I know they don’t sound the way I planned them to beee.’”

She cut you off with her hand, laughing hysterically. You felt your cheeks flushed, and in any other time you would’ve been annoyed with her laughing at you. But this didn’t feel mean. You just smiled right back.

“That was good, actually,” she managed, between small laughs. “Why is it your favourite?”

“Um,” you shrugged, “my brother used to sing it to me, years ago when I was scared.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Tara said, leaning her head on the tile wall of the tub.

“I have six.”

She blinked, then sat up straight. “Since when?!”

“Always, Carpenter,” you shrugged. “Everyone knows.”

“Everyone who?”

“Chad, Mindy, Anika. Even Quinn.”

“I didn't know. How come you never talk about them?”

”I just don’t,” you frowned. Tonight was definitely not the night to get into that. Instead, you pivoted topics. “Why, what’s your favourite song? I showed you mine, now you’ve got to show me yours.”

“I’m ninety nine percent sure that’s not how that saying is used,” she laughed, “but fine. When I was crying as a baby, my mom sung me this song, called Baby, I Love You by The Ronettes.”

“Don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

Tara shook her head. “Probably not, but they’re the same group that does that one song Be My Baby?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Apparently my mom had Baby, I Love You playing in the hospital, when I was born and everything. It’s kind of comforting. When I miss her, I play it.”

“How often is that?”

She shrugged. “More than you’d think, considering she’s a giant asshole.”

"That's always how it is."

"Mhm... and just so you know, I know Frankie was a creep. I wasn't actually going to do anything with him. Just flirt. Have fun."

"I know. I wasn't trying to babysit you, I just wanted to warn you. That creep has so many stories."

"I know. I just don't like being told what to do, sometimes. It's a whole thing. I'm working on it, seriously."

You didn’t know what to say to that, so you didn’t say anything at all. You both sat in what you assumed was a prolonged silence, until you looked down finally to see Tara’s eyelids falling heavy.

You stood up with a sigh. “You should go home.” There was no reply, and you checked out the small window in the bathroom to still see it was pitch black out. It was definitely too late to send her home this sleepy, and after the incident a few weeks ago, there was no way Sam would let her stay at yours. “Tara,” you nudged her.

She groaned, rolling over in the tub and snuggling up. You rolled your eyes, then looked out the window one more time with an annoyed grumble.

===+++===

The longer you had to walk with her on your back, the more you regretted this. Her arms were wrapped around your neck, face pressed onto the back of your shoulder and knees held up by your hands. You couldn’t see her, but you knew her eyes were shut and she was super close to being actually asleep.

"We make a good team, you know," she mumbled into your shoulder. You knew she was being funny, but you were too tired to laugh as you trudged up the hill. Carrying a drunk girl home was not at all what you had anticipated of the night, and though it had been shitty at the beginning and shitty until almost the very end, you could definitely say it wasn't shitty right then.

When you arrived at her apartment complex, Tara was soundly asleep and Sam came out to meet you both, taking her sister from you and stumbling with her towards the door. In the distance, right over another hill, the sky was already beginning to lighten up a bit.

Right as both Carpenters reached the door, Tara stopped for a moment to turn back to you with a smile. "Thanks, babe," she said with a cheeky grin that was only half awake. You smiled back.

"You too, babe."

Sam rolled her eyes, pulling Tara through the door. It was a pleasant night, still with the same faint scent of rain oncoming. In your weird, newfound peace as you walked home yourself, you didn't see that Quinn was watching you from the upstairs window.

===+++===

so that was fun lmao. anyways there will be a part 3 but you and tara are kind of maybe friends now? now it's time for feelings 😈

#jenna ortega #jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega x you #jenna ortega imagine #tara carpenter x you #tara carpenter x reader #tara carpenter x y/n #tara carpenter

847 notes · View notes