#bono: edge's space

[boninhau2]

🎥 Popmart tour interview, 1997. (Metropolis/Arte, France)

[timmurleyart]

Space baby. 🚀👨‍🚀🪐🎶🥁🎸

[giuseppe-yuki]

Just imagine anyone on the grid having a lion or a tiger as an so and rocking up to the paddock (just like tiger king), with the animal on a bedazzled leash and everything

hmm interesting! i honestly tried to stick with smaller animals in my series, as to not spook the fans and reporters around the paddock, but i feel like a tiger shapeshifter!reader is a good concept as well!

i feel like the top contenders to have a tiger shapeshifter s/o would either be someone with a loud personality, like danny, or someone completely unexpected like andrea (kimi antonelli).

here's a little blurb/oneshot i thought up on a whim:

picture credits from pinterest :)

you are woken up from your nap by the shrillest scream you ever heard. you leap back, accidentally trampling a few decorative plants in the back of the mercedes motorhome. oops, you think. in front of you stands bono, lewis' engineer, who looks like he's seen a ghost. eyes wide behind his black framed glasses, he stands, frozen in fear. still blinking sleep from your eyes, you carefully pad in a direction away from the terrified engineer, who is now very noticeably trying to tiptoe away.

it was ironic, really, for the universe to grant you the ability to shapeshift into one of the world's deadliest predators, but make you have the shyest, most timid personality.

you were technically not supposed to be napping under the sun behind the merc hospitality- your boyfriend kimi had told you to wait inside the building while he had a quick meeting with toto. it wasn't your fault that the sun was shining so warmly and the lovely smell of freshly planted flowers were floating outside. you had decided to chill on the grass when you must have fallen asleep (and probably accidentally shifted too).

now, you watch in fear as bono beckons a group of people towards you. they all wear matching black uniforms with the word "security" pasted right in the back with neon yellow letters. god, this was going to be hard to explain when kimi came back.

they approach you, not knowing how to deal with the giant tiger currently huddling in the back of the mercedes motorhome. you couldn't blame them, you knew you looked pretty intimidating, and let's be honest, anyone would be scared if they saw a fierce predator in the wild, much less behind a formula 1 motorhome.

they slowly surround you, batons out, and a few of them talk through their radio walkie-talkies, requesting for "backup". it seems that some reporters and fans have gotten wind of the situation too, because you see some at the edge of the entrance, phones out and recording. you hear them mutter about the weirdness of the scene unfolding in front of them.

suddenly, you hear a familiar accented voice ring out behind the ring of security guards and crowd of people.

"baby, come here!" kimi says firmly. he clicks his tongue twice and beckons you toward him with his finger.

to everyone's surprise, you bound towards him through the now horde of people. they scatter to the side as you race towards your boyfriend. once you skid to a halt in front of him, he brushes his hand through your fur and places a soft kiss on your wet nose. it's a laughable sight, seeing your impressive-sized striped body cowering behind kimi's shorter figure.

bono steps out of the crowd of people, brow scrunched in fear and confusion. "what the-? kimi??? when did you own a tiger?"

your boyfriend laughs. "well, i don't really own her, you know. we just have, eh, what do you call it- a special bond between us." he gives a light hug, squeezing you against him. "i love her very much!"

if you were in your human form, you would definitely be blushing.

turning away from bono, kimi leads you back towards main paddock road, which wasn't hard to do considering the crowd leaving a wide berth of space around you both (probably from the fear of getting eaten by you, even though you would never think to ever do that to someone).

once he reaches the main part of the paddock, he pulls out a bejeweled collar and leash out of his pocket. you look at him questioningly, but don't resist as he threads it around your neck.

"just so no one thinks that you're a random runaway tiger," he explains, tightening it comfortably.

you both continue your walk through the paddocks, this time heading towards kimi's garage. several fans and enigneers scamper out of the way as the see you approach, not used to seeing an actual real life tiger, albeit in a shiny leash and collar.

as you lightly amble towards the entrance of the merc garage, leash trailing behind you from kimi's hand, you spot toto walk by with a big grey wolf on his heels.

he turns to kimi, looking him straight in the eyes, and smirks, eyes twinkling knowingly.

"you got yourself a tiger, huh?"

a/n: sorry i don't know why the picture format is acting up and won't let me make it into a singular row like it usually is 😭

[mynicosensesaretingling]

Mic Check: Feelings Engaged

A Bono x fem! (Y/N) reader story

Summary: When Bono’s radio mic goes haywire , (Y/N) offers her colleague a helping hand, leading to an unexpected moment of intimacy between the pair with the teasing comments from Lewis only adding fuel to the fire.

Warnings: None except it’s been written in my notes app

Notes: I wanted to write something for Bono for so long now , since he’s so incredibly dear to me. So now I just did- anyways I hope there aren’t any mistakes and that you enioy this little story x

—-

It’s a bustling Friday practice session at the track, and the air is filled with the familiar sounds of mechanics working, engines revving, and the steady hum of team radios crackling to life. Bono stands in the Mercedes garage, his eyes flicking over the various data streams on the monitors in front of him as Lewis sends feedback through the radio. There’s a calm professionalism to him, his headset settled snugly over his ears as he keeps his cool amidst the chaos of the session.

(Y/N), working a few stations over, is equally immersed in her role, running through telemetry data and keeping an eye on the numbers as they stream in. It’s her second full season working with the team, and although the work is often intense, the environment feels like home. Especially with Bono around. There’s something comforting about his expertise, his quiet focus—and maybe, though she’d never say it aloud, something undeniably attractive too.

Attentively watching the data presented to her , the buzzing noise of the track outside the garage slowly but surely becomes more of a background noise to (Y/N) —until she hears Bono curse softly under his breath. Looking over at the engineer, she finds him fiddling with the mic on his radio headset.

“I’m losing audio,” he mutters, mostly to himself, his fingers rapidly tapping at the small mic attached to his headset. The frustration is clear on his face. His eyebrows drawn together in a frown, as he tries to fix the issue without missing a beat in his ongoing strategy communications.

Without thinking much about it, (Y/N) walks over to the man, noticing his struggle. “Need a hand?”

Bono looks up, his brows slightly raising, surprised by her offer. “Yeah, I think the mic’s loose. Keeps cutting in and out,” he says, his voice lower than usual, the usual steady control in his tone replaced by just a hint of frustration. Stepping closer, (Y/N) notices the faint flush creeping up his neck as he tries to juggle the malfunction and his job.

“Let me take a look,” she says, voice gentle as she steps right in front of him. Bono’s eyes stay fixed on her for a moment before he gives a small nod, lowering his head slightly so she has easier access to the mic. It’s the simplest of gestures, but (Y/N)’s heart skips a beat—being this close to him, especially in the middle of the chaos of the garage, feels strangely intimate.

(Y/N)’s hands lift to adjust the mic, her fingers brushing his cheek ever so slightly, as she reattaches the microphone more securely. His skin is warm under her fingertips, and the moment she touches him, she notices the slightest inhale from Bono, though he stays incredibly still, as if he’s afraid to move.

The garage feels smaller now, the noise fading into the background as (Y/N) concentrates on the mic, trying to focus on the task but fully aware of how close she is to the race engineer. Every brush of her hand sends a spark of awareness through her body. Focusing on the task at hand she feels Bono’s eyes on her form, though he’s trying his best to keep it professional.

“Okay, try now,” (Y/N) murmurs, stepping back slightly to give him some space. Bono clears his throat, his hand reaching up to adjust the mic himself, fingers brushing where hers had just been. He’s back to business in an instant, but there’s an edge to his voice as he speaks into the mic.

“Lewis, do you copy? How’s the connection now?” Bono’s voice is steady, but the slightest tension remains in his shoulders as he waits for a response.

There’s a brief pause before Lewis’s voice crackles through the radio, loud and clear. “Yeah, I hear you loud and clear, Bono. Thought you’d left me hanging there for a minute,” Lewis teases, but before Bono can respond, Lewis’s voice returns, this time with a playful lilt. “Wait a minute… was that her fixing your mic? That surely sounded like her voice ,mate.”

Bono’s reaction is immediate—he lets out an exasperated sigh, his hand coming up to rub the back of his neck, but keeping her focus on him, (Y/N) can see the faintest hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

“Lewis, focus on your out-lap,” Bono says, his voice firm but with a warmth that betrays his usual stoicism. Slightly shaking his head, he’s trying to suppress his embarrassment, but the smile that’s breaking through is impossible to miss.

“Oh, I’m focused,” Lewis replies, his tone mischievous. “Just thought I’d ask. Should I leave you two to it, or are we going to talk about strategy?”

Glancing back at (Y/N), Bono catches her eye for a brief moment, both of them sharing an amused, slightly embarrassed look. There’s a tension between the pair, but the humor in Lewis’s words manages to cut through it, making the moment feel lighter.

Bono lets out a dry laugh, shaking his head as he taps on the mic. “Yeah, let’s focus on the strategy. We’ll debrief later, Lewis.”

The radio crackles again as Lewis’s laughter comes through. “Sure, sure. But, just saying—‘bout time you two got close. We’ve all seen it coming.”

Bono’s face flushes at that, and he quickly turns back to the monitors, his fingers tapping at the keyboard, pretending to be fully immersed in his work. (Y/N), on the other hand,feels a mixture of embarrassment and… something else, as she walks back to her station. The way Lewis spoke, as if everyone had noticed the way her and Bono seem to gravitate toward each other, leaves the woman flustered. Was it really that obvious?

“Well, uh,” Bono calls , clearing his throat again, “thanks for fixing that. Shouldn’t have trouble now.”

(Y/N) nods, her heart still pounding as she tries to shake off Lewis’s teasing. “No problem,” she says through a slightly awkward chuckle. There’s still something hanging in the air between them, something unspoken.

Bono glances over at her once more before looking away, his lips pressing together like he’s holding something back. For a second, it feels like he might say something, but before he can, the team radio crackles again.

“Bono,” Lewis calls, his voice still carrying that teasing edge, “when’s the next date? Need me to clear the schedule?”

(Y/N) can’t help but laugh softly, shaking her head as Bono rolls his eyes. “You’re impossible, Lewis,” he mutters, though his voice is lighter now, the moment of tension dissolving into something more comfortable. He presses the radio switch again, sighing dramatically. “Focus on the driving, will you?”

Lewis just laughs in response, clearly pleased with himself, and Bono, despite his best efforts to maintain his usual professionalism, can’t help but let out a soft chuckle as well.

As the practice session winds down, the garage starts to return to its usual rhythm, but the brief moment of closeness between herself and Bono lingers in the back of (Y/N)’s mind. Every now and then, she catches him glancing in her direction, and when her eyes meet his, there’s a flicker of something unspoken—a spark that neither of the two can ignore.

And though nothing more is said between the pair, there’s an undeniable shift. (Y/N) can still feel the weight of his gaze, the soft smile that tugged at his lips, and the teasing words of Lewis echoing in the back of her mind.

Maybe Lewis was right—maybe it was about time.

[ladybyakuya]

| SWOON + NATSUKI SEBA .

+cw.—f!reader, canon-typical elements and themes, borderline yan themes, explic!t smūt, s/d dynamics + s/m themes, voice k!nk, strength k!nk, edging, use of sex toy ( vibrator ), orgasm denial,dubcon, begging, sub!space + sub!drop, praising, dacryphillia, aftercare

+wc.—2.6k

+syn.—Natsuki wanted to do something for you but that did not include hurting you; then, why are you crying ?

+notes. —This has been in my drafts for a few months when i made my debut post to the fandom but it's finally out. ngl the borderline yan behavior was a little hard for me to write given his character profile but i couldn't get that particular scene from my head. you'll see which scene I'm talking about when you get there and if you ended up spotting it please yell in tags / comments.this is also cross posted to ao3 & biker!gaku is my next post tho. | redirect to blog navigation.

Your relationship with Natsuki is ambiguous at best. You are an assassin. He is a weapon engineer. That is how things started between you two. You still remember the first time he asked you to volunteer for a test run for a particular weapon he made all by himself. He was so nonchalant as well as so tactless that it made you dismiss it. But you caved in eventually because he constantly kept nagging. He had the privilege to do so since you practically lived under the same roof as him, and ran into each other so many times throughout the whole day, making it impossible for you to avoid him.

“This is not going to be a habit,” you mentioned when you first volunteered and he just nodded. You swear you saw him laugh when he turned while nodding or could it be your imagination? 

Somehow this thin layer between being a test subject for his newly invented devices and batchmate diluted to the point that now he is testing you, your patience, and your sanity without using any of his newfound devices. You can not pinpoint when it all started, the dilution of such a boundary. A boundary that you dared not to cross with him. A boundary that you drew with the sole purpose of ceasing all sorts of expansion of his relationship with you. It was for him: to keep him out, not for you, and it failed to keep you safe yet it managed to shock you  whereas the mere existence of such a boundary tempted Natsuki enough to explore it, blur it, erase it, little by little until there was no trace of it.

Now, you are sitting on his lap legs sprawled apart to be as close to him as you can afford. He has both of your arms held under a tight grip keeping them at the valley of your waist. 

“Comfortable?” he asks, his lips grazing underneath your ear over your cheek ever so slightly as he inclines to check his grip on you. You give him a hum as a response. With his free hand, he pushes a hard bulb inside your pussy. You know what it is, a pleasuring toy, a vibrator but with your knowledge you considered it quite small. 

Seba-san said he wanted to surprise you with something. You have been so good to him, so helpful with his work, and needless to say so patient with him that he wants to do something for you; something that will make you content and happy, maybe wanting more of his surprises and thereby be dedicated to continue working with him on a pro-bono basis. 

What could be more rewarding for you than making you cum? That too for the first time? He heard you once. Talking about it to Shin, saying how you always had to take care of yourself. How nobody bothered enough to make you cum! Always busy with just getting themselves off first. Natsuki practically felt his body shiver. You have never orgasmed before? That's hard to believe. How could such no one make you cum with a face like that? So pretty, so expressive. Moreover, he knows— he is aware of it that he can achieve this feat, oh dear the range of pleasure he could provide you— makes it hard for him to think it through.

Natsuki turns on the vibrator and the intensity has already swept away all your attention from the surroundings channeling it all onto him. “Is that the highest bar?” One of his eyebrows stretches upwards. So, you want more. . .? Is this too little for you, dear? Natsuki does not give you an answer but increases the intensity just one more bar making your lips curl inwards. You tip your head down, let your eyelids fall and your vision goes dark for a second. The sound of vibration reaches your ear. He increases one more bar and it just threatens you to hold on to something, anything. 

Looking up you let out a wry awkward chuckle followed by a heavy gasp you ask, “Are there more?” Natsuki’s eyebrows pinch a little and then go back to normal.

“Yes.” His voice is low, raspy, and impatient. You try to loosen his grip but he is strong. You feel his grip on your wrist tightens further. “Three more buttons.” By now your legs have encapsulated his torso yet the urge to move your hips against his lower half does not go away. You do not want this sensation to stop either, just a little toned down but saying that might not give you the result you want.

Natsuki is not doing any better though. The choice of your clothing is bothering him, hindering him from studying you properly. He should have thought of that, perhaps buying you an outfit that would not expose your excited state too ludicrously. Honestly, he is holding back the urge to put his mouth on one of your nipples and suckle on it over the cloth. He can see it properly, your buttoned nipples. Do they match the color of your lips? 

You have started to whimper, just a little though like a wounded cat but that is not the sound he wanted to hear. He increases the intensity by another progression and your forehead rests on his shoulder sniveling. You are in desperate need of distraction. You just can not let him see you like this, crumble like a house of cards. You refuse to give him a glimpse of such an intimate moment. Not to mention it will be your first time too.

“You are so impressive.” Natsuki opined, placing a chaste kiss on your cheek. “I would not have lasted this long.” He lies. He lies because he knows he will win if you two make a bet to see who lasts longer. Maybe Natsuki should save it for the next session. Turning your head, you glance at him, gasping with your mouth open as he intently watches your eyes glisten with water. “Just one more left. You can do this. I think—he pauses to glance at your lips for a second. “I believe you really can if you try,” he soaks his lips by running the tip of his tongue in a quick swipe.

It's obviously tempting. You lean for a kiss but he sways his upper body away. Ah! The hurt in your eyes. The shock. The frustration. The anger. This is what he wanted to witness: the downfall of your tranquil demeanor that you always carry with you in each step. He increases the intensity to the fullest making you close your eyes. The way you are whimpering and breathing could easily be mistaken as the sound of a dying creature. His is hard but that does not bother him as much if he can see the tears rolling down your cheeks as you arch your body. There are beads of perspiration over your forehead, and chest a little bit on your face and hands.

“Stop.” you welp. “Make it stop.” Natsuki keeps the remote aside on the table, running the tip of his index finger over his bottom lip rashly.

“Why do you want to stop? You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” He brushes his fingers against your cunt over the cloth making you jump releasing a hiss of pleasure. “Look. You are so wet.” Even after touching you through the cloth, his fingers are so sticky. He stretches his fingers revealing the strings of your arousal and glances at you. You can barely hold back your tears. You can not figure out if those are tears of pleasure or the embarrassment seeping into you as he licks his slick fingers staring right into your eyes.

“Then, at least leave my hands.” You say huffing it out with a pained sob then, start to cry making him go silent for a few seconds. He probably forgets to breathe until your whimpers start to get elongated, louder and finally turn into lewd cries of pleasure. This is a pleasure, yeah! It definitely is. He does not know what pleasure would look like on your face. So, he assumes it; even fantasizes about it a couple of times.

“No, that I can’t do.” He whispers but a mumble reaches to your ears. “But I can do this,” He states, taking his free hand behind you and interlacing his fingers with yours. It relaxes your strained muscles. He still kept his grip tightened while filling the gaps of your fingers with his not giving you even a bleak chance to free your hand. 

Now his face is closer to yours but you know better than to pursue the desire of putting your lips on his. He rests his chin just at the advent of your cleavage on your chest watching you as you start to twist and turn your body, buck your hips. Your feet stretch out as farther it can as the wave finally stops hitting the shore. The way you inhaled through your mouth and then exhaled it felt like you were about to puke. Natsuki was the first to question, “What just happened? I didn't…

“Why did you stop?” 

“I didn’t.”  Is he lying? Is this fun to him? Tormenting you to the point of ruin. Natsuki can see your lips droop like the wilting petals of a flower, eyebrows growing closer to each other. You roll your bottom lip inside your mouth unable to take it anymore, feeling a wave of sorrow building inside your ribs. But you do not feel Natsuki’s hand anymore. So, without wasting any further seconds to got out of his clutches and ran towards the bathroom. Natsuki follows without thinking anything only to be met with the chocolate of the wood. 

As soon as you bolt the door of the bathroom it all comes crashing down— flashes of his face when he was touching you, looking too fondly than he should, pushing your limits, and making you cum. You could not help but feel the guilt of it all since it was truly your fault all along. You could have said no and he would have listened. He is not that cruel. No. Never that cruel to you but you gave in because you were curious too. You were eager to know how it would feel to orgasm, to be touched so fondly and full of desire. And, you saw that desire in his eyes: that greedy lustful desire but you were wrong to think that you could contain it all in. Now it is oozing out of you, out of him. This realization that came so suddenly and so strongly which has been dormant for years, perhaps when you started frequenting his room often after being his mock-up weapon tester lets another wave of misery wash over you. Does he like you back the way you like him?

“I’m sorry.” You hear Natsuki’s voice. It is faded but you hear it, his breathing too. “I’m sorry.” Then again, “I’m sorry. . .I’m sorry. I— I will never do this again.”

“You don’t know that.”  You shout from the inside of the bathroom, your voice hitting the walls howls back at you, and then you gasp before finally breaking into a sob. It hurts. It pains. It aches. It agonizes you to think of anything or even touch yourself to release that piled up pressure in you. You feel as if there was no spark fiery enough to create wildfire in your body. All those hook-ups and bad dates that ended up with you being used as a thing to get off . . . they are all coming back to you now . . .maybe it's you. . .maybe it's you who can’t cum and that is why they did what they craved: took care of themselves with your help.

Natsuki can hear you; your faint sob coming through the locked thick wooden door as he stands leaning his head on it. He knows saying sorry no matter how many times would be useless now but he still wanted to say it because it was never his intention to hurt you like this. He just wanted to see your pleasure and push you to the high end of your limits, show you something so strong, so impactful that every time you would touch yourself you would think of him, so every time you ever think of going out with another guy you would think of him. As Natsuki’s head rests on the wooden door he draws lazy patterns on the doors while waiting for you to come out. 

It has been over half an hour. Natsuki does not mind standing even though you have not replied. But one thing has changed you have stopped crying. He can not hear your sobs anymore. He finally sits on the ground hearing something from the other side, his face still facing the door. He is waiting for you to come out, and see your face.

“Natsu, are you still there?” Your voice is murky. It wobbles as you speak more.

“Yes. yes. Of course. Am still here. Still here.” Natuski hears the lock of the door open with a click but you wait before pulling the door inside the bathroom to open it. You see Natsuki flopped on the floor, legs one of the other loosely placed with his headphones still as it was.

“Congrats. You broke the vibrator.” That was the first thing he could say when he saw you, your red swollen eyes. You are drenched from head to toe, water dripping on the floor as Natuski is forced to remember certain days when you would come home like this. Is this your coping mechanism?

“What?”

“Well. It was my fault too . . .” his eyes pull away from you as he confesses. He can’t think of anything other than being near you. He does not want you to watch you fall apart. If you do, he will be there to pick up the pieces and build Rome again. He knows it’ll be different Rome, he knows that but still worth a try. “Shall we go eat something? You must be hungry.” 

“Nah!” you walk past him, fully drenched looking for a towel. You appreciate his sentiment, you really do but right now you do not want those pair of eyes to look at you. Natsuki gets up and walks up to you holding you by your upper arm and jerking you towards himself. You do not protest much. You are tough. You can handle it when he is rough with you but lust and desire are oozing out of you. It’s hard to just watch and not do anything about it, about the spill. 

Natsuki cups one of your breasts and you cling to his touch like a branch of a tree reaching out for sunlight. He wets his bottom lip before pressing his thumb over your nipple. It does not take for him to wipe the boundary off that you had put up to keep him away. His lips on yours cascading like waterfall from a mountain,hand tending to your breast while your hands find a way to clamp around his shoulders pulling him into the kiss, dampening his clothes more and more till he squeezes your breasts a little too hard making you come back to reality, pushing him away to breath again. Your shoulders are against his chest now. His grip over your upper arm is still intact. He won’t let you go. He won’t let you go. He won’t.

“If you don’t take care of yourself then I'll be forced to do so.”  Your eyes are so sharp as you swat your head to look at him. 

“Yes.” You murmur and glance at his lips. “Yes. Yes. ‘course.” You lean towards him a little saying, “I’m hungry, very much hungry.” as your lips clash against his again.

[gayferrari]

Your fic recs are always always amazing. If it’s not too much bother do you have any favourite lesbian driver fics? Cute or rancid, sweet or sad, they’re always like gold dust but so hard to find.

I'm extremely flattered! I DO have recs and hope you enjoy. Leave a comment if you like them <3

Bono/Lewis. trust exercise by @thelittlebirdthatkeptsomanywarm — When Bono says, still, Lewis stills, her cunt clenching around nothing, aching, empty, waiting, still.

Charles/Max

sail on, silver girl by @foggieststars — She doesn’t have it in her to be angry with Max for taking that away, along with all the other firsts Charles had once hoped to claim for herself. Not when the firm press of Max’s thigh between her own is the only thing keeping Charles chained to the earth right now.

what i create is chaos by @on-sinkingships — Charles wants everything, yes. She wants the championship, and the race wins and Ferrari and a beautiful footballer boyfriend she can bring to the club and Max waiting at home to fuck her afterward.

Charles/Seb

drove me wild by @/thelittlebirdthatkeptsomanywarm — “You know, here’s a life lesson for you, since you seem to be so desperate for them: don’t apologise if you’re not actually sorry,” Seb tells her.

no stopping it by @tetrapod7 — Charles had never completely gotten over being the weird, almost star-struck girl in the Ferrari paddock. And Seb had always been Seb.

Daniel/Max. iron out the edges of the darkest sky by anon. — Danny is the closest that Maxi will ever get to racing. Maxi's been spending most of her life trying to forget that racing even fucking exists.

Lando/Oscar. the girls I mean by @chelemlem — WAG AU. "Is Mark coming?" she asks, while he's still distracted by her tits. Like Lando gives a single flying fuck about Mark Webber.

Lewis/Nico

buzzcut season by lostinsea. — Before they were any of this - before they were world champions and rivals and teammates, they were just girls together.

want you to be my girl by @sionisjaune. — Girls are squishable. Girls are malleable. You can fit two girls in a space only large enough to house one.

Nico/Charles

grow the apple, keep all the seeds by @liamlawsonlesbian — Nico Rosberg, second ever female WDC, visits Charles the day before her first grand prix weekend.

teach me, walk me, ride me by @/blorbocedes — Nico hadn't meant to take Charles under her wing.

Nico/Seb

square shaped smile, heart shaped mouth by @blorbocedes — high school AU. sometimes the best man for the job is a girl

your other one evaporate by sionisjaune — modern royalty AU. Sebastian spots the princess on the balcony, a glass of champagne dangling over the railing in her limp grip.

[hawkmoon269]

How beautiful Bono looks with that hair. The Edge playing "the shy one". Adam is lost in space. And Larry being Larry, without moving or smiling.

NBC Studios in Burbank, CA. November, 2001.

[angst-cravings]

let you break my heart again (2)

part 1 | part 1.5

summary: you take the leap.

pairing: matt murdock x reader

words: 2.2k

an: i rewrote this like three times and i’m still not happy with how it turned out, bi foggy, you make the first move, gender neutral reader

cw: mild angst, fluffy, some explicit language

You didn’t know this, but later that night, Karen and Foggy started scheming. Foggy wasn’t dumb, and he’s known how you both have felt for a long while. Maybe they’d try to get you two alone in the office tonight. Or they could stage a dinner where they’d have to cancel. Every plan had a flaw. If you two were alone in the office, you might just end up working alone. Or at the dinner, no one would say anything to each other. Karen decided that it’d be best if she sat down and talked to you seriously. Although you’ve always been good at reading people, Matt was far, far better. You just needed the confidence to confess. Foggy was far less engaged in the conversation that Karen was.

Truth be told, it did kind of hurt. Foggy wasn’t in love with you (he hasn’t been since college), and he always wanted you to be happy, but he always held a tiny bit of resentment towards Matt for being far more successful in relationships than he was. Or maybe he held a tiny bit of resentment because he wasn’t the one in the relationship with him. Either way, the planning to get you two together was bittersweet. He’d be happy for you two if it went well. Or at least he tried to convince himself that was true. 

“There is literally no way he doesn’t like you. He always responds differently from when me or Foggy talk to him.” Karen is perched on the edge of your desk, legs slightly swaying.

“Well he’s clearly not pining over me! And this is how he’s always treated me, it’s probably just because of Foggy. When he gets here he’s probably going to start talking with him about that woman he slept with last night.” 

You glance over your desk, case files strewn about haphazardly. Everything is putting you on edge, including the chaos on your desk that is reflecting your current mental state, “Just like every other night after we go to Josie’s. Half of me wants to stop going just so I don’t have to see it. It hurts, Karen. I just want to get over him.” Your face falls into your cold palms, and you feel like your button-up is suffocating you. 

“Maybe you should say something to him.” You hear her rise and you feel the gentle touch of her hand on your back.

“Maybe… I’m just so scared. I don’t want to fuck anything up.” You admitted, looking up at her kind face.

“I know. But sometimes we have to take risks. That’s why you guys started this firm. That’s why we do so much pro-bono work. And you both are mature enough to not let something like this affect your work.”



And that’s when Foggy enters. Karen stands up a little straighter and removes her hand from your back.

“Morning you two!” He’s cheery, as usual. That was half the reason you appreciate his friendship. It was ironic that his nickname was Foggy, because you always pictured him as the one who could clear the clouds away.

“Good morning Foggy. How was Josie’s last night?” You inquire with a faux nonchalance. You really just want to hear about Matt’s escapades and if he had really gone home with that woman, but you obviously weren’t going to let Foggy know.

“Oh you know, the usual. Karen left not too long after you, but I’m sure she’s told you that. Matt did seem a little off last night though.” He opens the door to his office, puts down his bag, and leans against the doorway of your office. “Oh?” You can’t tell what his comment made you feel. A cauldron of emotions swirl in your stomach. 

“Yeah, after you two left we kind of just sat there as he stared off into space. More so than usual.” Your mouth turned up slightly at his comment. You were a little confused though, there’s no reason that he would feel that way. Maybe something happened that day that you missed. Part of you started to regret going home early.

“So he… never went home with that woman? She was really gorgeous, that’s a shame.” “Yeah, I think he was too out of it to seal the deal. Something’s up with him, and I can’t quite place it. You’d think I knew my best friend a little better.” 

You gasp, faking offense. “I cannot believe you’d call him your best friend when I am right here Foggy.” The grin you were trying to hide to punctuate your teasing creeps up onto your face. Then the door opens. 



“I’m your best friend?” Speak of the devil and he shall arrive. He has on a crisp suit with a burgundy tie. It’s one of your favorite colors on him, it compliments his glasses. He has a large brown paper bag in his hands.

Foggy pauses for the briefest moment. “Yeah, you are. They left us last night at Josie’s all alone, so I think they deserve a demotion of the best friend title.”

“Yeah, well I had a headache, so you’re the bad friend for not being considerate of my feelings.” 

“Speaking of, why didn’t you say something before you left last night? I wanted to say goodnight.” Matt walked over and gently placed his hand on your shoulder. 

You could feel your heart start to pound, and you couldn’t discern whether it was over the touch or anxiety about the question that you didn’t want to admit the answer to. “Uh… well I didn’t really want to bother you. You seemed… preoccupied.” You force a smile.

“Well, you are more important than her. You should say something next time,” Your heart skips a beat, and his hand falls from your shoulder, “I, uh, I brought bagels for everyone.” As Matt shows everyone the bag, you see the logo of the bakery beneath your apartment.

“Thank you so much!” Foggy immediately goes to grab a bagel, and goes to his office, “No rest for the weary! I’m going to work on the Maddison case, you all should get to work soon too.” His office door shuts, and Karen nods.

“I should probably get to work too. I have a lot to do today.” You shoot her a glare, knowing that she’s just trying to get you two alone. She smirks, and you sigh as you watch her escape to her office.



“When did you go to the bakery?” You try to make your question nonchalant, but you can hear your voice betray your interest. “I guess after you left, since you weren’t there when I was there.”

“What, did you want me to be there?” You teased, but you could feel the rush of blood reach your cheeks. You silently prayed thanks that Matt could not see you.

“And what if I did?” Your breath catches in your throat. 

You quickly recompose yourself. “I mean that thought process is valid, I would want to see myself too.” You hope your smirk can cover the way you reacted to his statement.

“That’s where you have it wrong. I wouldn’t see you there,” A smug look forms on his face as you roll your eyes. 

“Whatever Matt.” 

“You love my jokes.”

You grab a bagel and usher him out of your room. “I actually have work to do, so I’ll talk to you later.”



Matt stiffens at the sound of a knock at his office door. He was so absorbed in the case he was reading that he tuned everything else out. He takes a second and recognizes Foggy at the door.

“Come in.” He raises his voice just a little so Foggy can hear him. 

“Hey, uh, Matt, can we talk?” Foggy shuts the door behind him and sits in front of Matt’s desk.

“Of course,” Matt shifts some of his papers, “What’s up?”

Foggy takes a deep sigh, and pauses before he forms his words, “You should tell them.”

Matt freezes. “W-what do you mean, Foggy?” He tries to laugh away the nervousness in his statement, and anyone else probably would have fallen for it.

“I said, you should tell them. It’s really obvious that you like them, and I can’t stand watching you two dance around each other’s feelings even though you share them.” Foggy seems sincere, but there’s some other emotion that leaves a subtle aftertaste in Matt’s mouth. 

“I know, they’re pretty damn good at hiding their emotions,” Foggy shifts in his seat to inch a little closer to Matt, “but I think it’s pretty obvious that they like you. Take it from their best friend.” “Hey, I thought you said that I was your best friend.”

“Well, you both are,” Foggy changes back to his more playful demeanor, “Anyways, here’s the plan. We’re going to order takeout for the office, and then Karen and I get pulled away by a phone call. Then you two will be all alone. You should say something or you’re probably going to regret it.” He stands up, and opens Matt’s door.

Matt can’t get a retort in before his door is open. “Alright, well, thanks for helping me out Foggy.” 



The smell of Chinese takeout hits your nose, and you immediately leave your office. “Thank God, I am so fucking starving.” “Yeah, well, don’t be too excited, because I actually got a call from a friend and they’re in the hospital right now,” Karen says, “So I’m going to go make sure they’re okay.” 

“Oh my God, is everything alright?” Your eyebrows furrow in concern. “Yeah, they said it’s just minor, but I just want to check on them. Here’s the takeout, have a nice dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Karen puts the takeout down onto the counter.

“Yeah, call me if you need anything Karen.” You change your phone from silent to vibrate as Karen scurries out of the office. Foggy and Matt step out of their offices as you start unpacking the food. Everyone has a usual order, and you set them out according to the order.

“Smells delicious. I heard Karen leaving?” Matt walks up, cane in hand, and grabs his order.

“Yeah, one of her friends is in the hospital. I hope they’re okay.” Your face is covered in worry, and you can only pick at your food. You hear the ring of a phone, and watch as Foggy picks it up.

“Hey man, what’s up? Oh fuck, I’m so sorry, I’ll swing over right away. I’m so sorry, I totally forgot. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” He quickly hangs up the phone, “Sorry, I promised Tom I was going to help him move. I’ll see you both tomorrow though!” Foggy grabs his food and rushes out the door.



“And then there were two.” The corner of Matt’s mouth was slightly lifted.

“Yeah…” Your heart starts racing, and you silently are thankful that you get some time alone with him. The air is silent and awkward for a few minutes. You swallow hard, and decide to take a leap. It was now or never.

“Hey, uh, have you ever had this before?” You gesture towards your food, knowing that Matt could probably pick up on the context.

“No, actually. It smells really good though.” He smiles, and takes a bite of his own food.

“Would you like to try?” You start panicking slightly, but you’ve already taken the first step. You won’t back down now.

“Sure.” He grins at you, and your heart leaps. His smile has always been one of your favorite things about him.

You grab a piece of your food with your chopsticks, and walk towards him. 

“Open your mouth.” You lower your voice. 

He looks like he’s about to protest, but opens his mouth, and you place it on his tongue. He closes his mouth around your chopsticks, and you gently draw them out from between his lips. The face he makes is beautiful, and he makes a soft Mmm sound as he savors the food.

“This is really good. I can see why you order it.” “Do you want another taste?” You hold your breath. 

“Sure, you can have-” You cut him off with a kiss. 

You can taste the tang of the sauce on his lips, and you know he can too. The kiss feels like a sigh of relief. You’ve wanted to do this for such a long time, and although your nerves are tainting it, at least you’ll have done it at least once. You were kind of proud of yourself, usually Matt was the one with the smooth pickup lines. Yours wasn’t the best, but it was still pretty cheesy. You hear Matt set down his takeout container to pull you closer to him, deepening the kiss. You gently push away, and you rest your hands on his broad chest.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.” He barely breathes out, his voice so quiet you can barely hear him.

“I could say the same thing to you.” You grin, and his face mirrors yours.

[bullet-prooflove]

The North Star - Part Ten: Safe Space - Terry Bruno x Reader

Welcome to mine and @the-hinky-panda The Bronx universe featuring our favs Terry Bruno & Mike Duarte.

This story takes place several years after 'Blood Out'. Terry still lives in the Bronx and works in Manhatten SVU.

Following on from @the-hinky-panda story 'The Dog' Mike has retired from the NYPD on medical grounds due to seizures causes by the attack. He has a therapy dog called Bono and lives with @the-hinky-panda character Meredith.

Tagging: @mysoulisasunflower @legit9thlunaticwarrior @bbyxoo @the-adzukibean @xoxabs88xox @crazy4chickennuggets @beardedbarba @wooshwastaken @justreblogginfics @im-just-a-mississippi-girl @storiesofsvu @anime-weeb-4-life

Part One: Moments

Meredith doesn’t realise they have an overnight guest until she trapses into the kitchen in her pyjamas to put on a pot of coffee and realises that only one of the dogs has appeared for breakfast. Shasta sits beside her food bowl, tongue lolling out her mouth, but Bono is nowhere to be seen.

Mike’s upstairs in the shower, so she knows he’s not with him. She calls him again, but there’s still no sign of him. It’s only when she pops her head through the living room door that she understands why Bono hasn’t trailed Shasta into the kitchen.

You’re curled upon the couch asleep, still clad in a dress from the party last night, the NYPD windbreaker drawn up over your shoulders. You’ve tossed the couch blanket over your legs and your shoes are neatly aligned on the floor. Bono’s lying on the floor at the base of the couch, he raises his head as Meredith enters.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re looking after our guest.”

Bono chuffs at her before clambering to his feet and thrusting his head underneath her palm.

“Yes, I’ll keep an eye on her.” She promised Bono who licked her hand before trotting off towards the kitchen.

You were out for the count; you didn’t even register Meredith’s presence as she sat on the edge of the couch and studied you intensely. You hadn’t done this in a long time, not since before Terry. It used to be the cases, when there was one that hit too close to home, or if it was particularly brutal. She’d come in and find you on the couch, with a glass of wine or a tub of mint choc chip ice cream. This was a safe space for you, it always had been, and Meredith hoped it always would be.

She hears Mike’s footsteps in the hall, gentle padding before he pokes his head through the open doorway and spotted the two of you on the couch. His dark brow furrows into a frown as he takes in the scene, you sleeping, the expression of concern on Meredith’s features.

“She ok?” he queries, his voice low as he leaned against the door frame.

Meredith shakes her head.

“I don’t know.” She whispers, tugging the blanket up higher so it covers more of your body. “She’s never this out of it. Something must have happened.”

Mike withdraws the phone from his back pocket.

“I’ll call Bruno, give him a heads up.” Mike says quietly before gesturing at your unconscious form. He takes in the detail, smeared make up, high heels, the dress from the party. “It doesn’t look like she made it home last night.”

“I’m going to wake her up, see if I can get her to go upstairs to the guest room.” Meredith tells him. “Maybe find out what this is about.”

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

Terry was in the final ten minutes of his shift when he received the call from Duarte. To say that he had been going out of his mind was an understatement. You weren’t picking up, the last message he’d received from you had been over twelve hours ago that read. “Gonna be outta touch for a couple of hours. Text you when I’m free x”

That had been before Russo had dropped by with the broken necklace. He had to admit he was worried; you didn’t usually drop off the grid for so long. He’d tried ringing your extension and gotten no answer, your cell went straight to voicemail, and you hadn’t looked at WhatsApp since he’d received that message.

“I think we have something that belongs to you. One Homicide Sergeant passed out on the couch, stealing my dog’s attention.”

That was how it was with Duarte, no pleasantries, just facts. Terry had never appreciated it more than in this moment.

“Thank fuck.” Terry muttered, tapping his fingertip against his temple to diffuse the agonising tension that had built up inside of his head since Russo had made his appearance. “I was about to start ringing around the hospitals and the morgue.”

“That bad huh?”

“Russo paid me a visit tonight.” Terry informed him, his thumb tracing over the engraving of the letters on the compass. “He said some things…”

Duarte cleared his throat.

“What things?”

“He had the compass.” Terry forced the words out, there was an ache in his chest as he stared down at the necklace. “It looks like the chain’s been ripped straight off her neck.”

“You’d better come over.” Duarte said, his voice lowering an octave. “There’s some things I need to tell you.”

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

Terry looks like hell.

Meredith’s never seen him like this before. He’s usually so easy going, so relaxed. It’s one of the reasons she thinks he’s a good fit for you. He never takes himself too seriously, your visits are filled with laughter and smiles. The two of you are so in love, she’d be ribbing you about it if she wasn’t so happy for you.

Right now, though, there’s a rigidity in his shoulders as he leans against the counter. His fingertips rub at the spot between his eyes as Meredith stares down at the broken compass and Mike slowly places his palms flat upon the table like he’s trying to prevent himself from destroying something.

“The three of you pulled a heist.” Terry repeats again before he turns his attention to the kitchen table.

“That has nothing to do with this.” Meredith said gesturing at the compass.

“She was still wearing it before I left.” Mike told them. “I remember it catching the light as I closed the curtain. There could only have been ten minutes between then and the raid.”

Terry rubbed his hand over the line of his jaw.

“A lot can happen in ten minutes.”

They were all thinking the same thing, but no one wanted to say it. Mike’s hands curled into fists, the scars on the back of his hands stretching taut across his flesh.

“I was right there.”

Bono whined, nudging Mike’s thigh with his nose and Mike sighed, his hand coming to rest on the dog’s head, scratching behind his ears.

“I know.” He told Bono. “I’m trying but it’s hard.”

Bono cocked his head to one side.

“If you’d met this asshole, your blood pressure would be going through the roof too.”

Bono huffed once.

Mike rolled his eyes before exhaling deeply and unclenching his fists.

“If it went that far, she would have told us right?” Mike asked Meredith as her fingers grasped the chain of the compass bringing it closer to her face so she could inspect the damaged links. “I mean she would have come to one of us.”

“It’s not that simple…” Terry said shaking his head. “Victims of assault, they have a hard time coming forward as it is, the fact she’s a female cop, in a position of power attacked by another cop…”

He trailed off considering the implications.

“I didn’t see anything that indicated that.” Meredith tried to reassure him. “When I sent her upstairs to bed, her dress wasn’t torn, there wasn’t any bruising that I could see but she still had on that windbreaker.”

“Look.” Terry said, pushing off the counter. “Until she tells us what happened we’re in the dark. There’s nothing we can do but wait until she’s ready.”

“You look like shit.” Mike informed the other man. “Why don’t you head upstairs, get some rest?”

Terry looked at him and Mike looked back, something passed between the two of them, an unspoken understanding. Terry tilted his head towards Meredith.

“Do you mind?”

“Be my guest.”  She gestured towards the stairs; the compass still clasped between her hands.

She waited until Terry closed the kitchen door behind him before turning her attention to Mike.

“She needs to feel safe right?” Mike said, leaning on his elbows, before jerking his head towards the closed door. “He makes her feel safe.”

“You’re a wily old dog.” Meredith smiled before raising to her feet and kissing Mike on the cheek. His arm wrapped around her waist, drawing her into his lap. She laughed, a beautiful breathless sound that made his heartbeat even faster in his chest.

“You wanna help me find a jeweller?” He asked her, his head dipping low so that their lips were barely centimetres apart. “Get the compass fixed?”

Her fingertips brushed over the nape of his neck; a soothing, comforting sensation that made him sigh contently as she whispered.

“You read my mind.”

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

You’re still asleep when Terry enters the guest bedroom, at least he thinks you are. You’re bundled up in the sheets, your back to the door so he can’t tell. He sits on the edge of the bed, his palms running over his weary features as his thoughts tumble over each other in his head. He’s exhausted, the panic from earlier has left him feeling redundant. He doesn’t know how to help you; he doesn’t know what you need.

He undoes the laces on his boots, toeing them off quietly before he lies beside you on the bed and stares at the ceiling. This thing with Russo is out of control, it just keeps spiralling. It makes him feel sick because he knows that it’s only going to get worse, that Russo is relentless in his pursuit of you.

He’s pulled from his thoughts by the sensation of you shifting beside him, inching closer to his form. He rolls onto his side and gathers you up in his arms, his chest coming to rest against your back as he breathes you in. The ghost of your perfume floods his nostrils as he cradles you close. He can feel the tension in your body, hears that choked sound emitting from your chest as your fingers entwine with his, holding him in place.

The first sob kills him, it vibrates through his entire body, stabbing him right through the heart. He clasps you tighter, whispering sweet nothings into your ear as tears roll down your cheeks.

You’re safe…

I’m here…

I won’t let anything happen to you…

In the shelter of his arms, you tell him exactly what Russo did and Terry knows without a doubt he’s going to kill him.

Love Terry Bruno? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[dollarbin]

Free Bin #1:

Prairewolf's Deep Time

There's only one kind of beverage I prefer over Simpler Times, Trader Joe's go-to 49-cents-a pop canned macrocraft brew that tastes like beer-flavored dish water. And that's the free stuff I find in your frig.

Invite me over to your place and begin the countdown: for the first minute I'll pet your dog, pay compliments to your cat and comment on your haircut. In minute two I'll make a bad joke, probably centering around your dog, your cat and/or your haircut. Minute three will find me checking out the board games on your shelf in hopes that we'll get down to some friendly competition before I run out of jokes.

But in minute four you'll find me head first in your frig, looking for free-at-least-to-me beverages to toss back. I've been forced into a gluten-free way of life this past seven months so these days I'm forever hoping for a little sparking water to add to your hopefully high end scotch; but if push comes to shove I'll drink your Modelo and tell myself it's surely corn-based. And if you're not an alcohol purchaser don't relax: your rice milk is gonna get drunk.

And so there's only two kinds of albums out there that can compete for me with a choice Dollar Bin find, and that the free stuff you find in a tattered box by the front door of the shop and the equally stuff you can get off the internet.

Let's begin our periodic appreciation of such sweetly cheap-ass goods by celebrating the news that my famous brother just announced his big deal band's second record. Check out the details here and here and listen to the album's first swinging single, which is available to stream for absolutely zero dollars.

As a big deal mooch with a family connection I already have a complimentary copy of the new album firmly in my (digital) hand, and while I can't compete with the literary and professional advance press Prairiewolf are getting, which includes the use of "woodshedding" as an incomprehensible adverbial phrase, I can say this: Prairiewolf's new record, Deep Time, is You're Gonna Get It! meets The Freewheeling Bob Dylan meets Transformer meets New Wave Hot Dogs meets Clouds meets Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. In other words, it's a classic sophomore album that you are gonna want to get your hands on asap.

Picture Bryter Layter with a drum machine and no vocals; picture The Joshua Tree if The Edge had launched Bono permanently into interstellar space. Picture Sense and Sensibility not as a novel, but as a record made by three middle aged white guys. Picture the New Testament, only newer. I could go on all day...

Because you don't have access to the free stuff in my famous brother's frig or his itunes you're gonna have to preorder the record and then deal with paying and waiting.

But fear not: Prairiewolf understands that miserly curmudgeons like me make up a firm section of their audience. So you can go listen to high-end recordings of their recent and less recent live shows for no price whatsoever, both of which preview tracks from the new record.

So, anyway, it really is a great haircut you've got going; and I was just kidding about your pets. Now, please excuse me; I wanna check and see what you've got in your frig. I'm thirsty.

[dk-thrive]

This doesn’t happen to order, but when it does, the technical, physical, and spiritual effort just falls away. It is effortless. I am weightless.

Give someone a mask, as Wilde put it, and they will tell you the truth. Taking the mask off is also revealing, as I found on tour in 2018, wiping my face of clown makeup live onstage and staring into the camera while talking to Ali at home in Ireland. In front of twenty thousand people I regularly discovered a moment of vulnerability verging on frailty. Emptying rather than filling the moment, awkwardness as dramatic gesture. If there is such a thing as honesty for the showman—and remember I’ve said there’s not—this is as close as we come. A moment on the way to surrender. It’s the song’s instruction that matters most, the lyric and melody. If you obey the song, you will get to that place that all of us singers live for. The experience of being sung. The experience of not carrying the song but being carried by it. This doesn’t happen to order, but when it does, the technical, physical, and spiritual effort just falls away. It is effortless. I am weightless. As unselfconscious as a child in a playground. It’s a make-believe which is truer than true and that everybody’s in on. It is a freedom which is contagious. Somewhere there is science in this magic. The high-tech bricks and mortar of a sporting arena built for the roar of rivalry is now a unified field theory of we are one and the same. The audience and Edge, Adam, Larry, and I have disappeared into each other. There is No Them, Only Us. This space-age concrete craft that someone landed on the outskirts of a metropolitan town is now lit up and taking off to some unknown address. People who didn’t know each other or didn’t like each other are singing the same song. An audience that arrived separately is leaving together, the community gathered for one purpose has found another.

— Bono, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono” (Knopf, November 1, 2022) 

[dankusner]

The Lawyer Who Landlords Don’t Want to See in Court

Attorney Mark Melton started helping people on Facebook during the pandemic.

Before he knew it, he’d assembled the country’s only group of lawyers focused full time on stopping illegal evictions—and saving taxpayers millions.

Mark Melton stands in the eye of a storm, a waiting area outside the 1-1 Justice of the Peace Court, in the South Dallas Government Center, an uninspiring building off Interstate 20.

Two other lawyers whip around the room, clutching clipboards and trying to reach about two dozen tenants in the next 20 or so minutes before court is called into session.

Two legal assistants sit at a card table, hurrying through paperwork with clients.

Melton, a partner at Holland & Knight who specializes in tax law, has the height and build of an edge rusher, one who prefers Maker’s Mark to protein shakes, with a charcoal beard and a fleeing hairline.

Today, he’s wearing a tailored navy blue suit with a baby blue tie, a lighter blue dress shirt, and black Oxfords.

If the outfit doesn’t make it clear enough, Melton, 46, is perched near a sign that reads, in English and Spanish, “FREE ATTORNEY FOR TENANTS.”

Sixty-one cases are on this Friday’s eviction docket.

Years of data show that without an attorney arguing their case, nearly all of them will lose their apartments in a matter of minutes.

The attorneys are here to stop that, if they can.

“This is a well-oiled machine now,” Melton says, still avoiding the fray. “I think I’ll fuck it up if I jump in.”

The machine is the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, a team of 10 lawyers and seven support staffers.

Housing experts have not been able to find another operation like it in the entire country.

Legal Aid works in the same space but is federally funded and far more limited in terms of whom it can serve.

Melton started this work with his wife, Lauren, in the first week of the pandemic.

It began as a Facebook post to explain how business owners could navigate lockdown.

Then it morphed into tenant advocacy and took over their lives.

Four years later, and three years after incorporating the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center, Melton spends his time fundraising, educating justices of the peace about housing law, advocating to elected officials, and recruiting more attorneys, doing the work that makes the machine more efficient.

Today that means convincing at least one client that she needs help.

About half of today’s defendants will not show up at all, which is typical.

Maybe they couldn’t find transportation.

Maybe they felt the decision had already been made.

In his 1-1 Court, Justice of the Peace Thomas Jones will issue immediate eviction judgments on every contested case where the tenant is absent.

With minutes to go, attorney Nichole Harden is trying to get a woman wearing pajama pants and Crocs to sign her retainer for the day, which will allow her to represent the woman pro bono.

NICHOLE ALEXANDRA HARDEN Eligible to Practice in Texas

Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center

Bar Card Number: 24122110

“I don’t know what’s going to happen if you go up there by yourself,” Harden says. “But I will represent you, and I believe I can get it dismissed.”

The landlord filed the eviction under the woman’s middle and last names, which violates state property code.

She eventually signs, and Harden wins a dismissal an hour later.

Melton realized early in the pandemic that, without legal representation, tenants who face eviction were essentially being asked to argue in a language foreign to them.

Their reflex too often is to narrate intimate tragedies rather than point out that their landlord didn’t give them enough notice or didn’t deliver the notice in a legal fashion or didn’t file notice with the court using a business name as it is registered with the Secretary of State.

Judges need a legal argument, not an emotional one.

When he began, Melton suspected landlords weren’t following the law and that nobody was in court to check them.

The first year proved him right.

With three attorneys, they litigated 853 cases and won 96 percent of them, which saved taxpayers millions of dollars in support services that would otherwise have gone to evictees.

“It’s easy to win when you’re right,” Melton says. “And landlords just don’t do it right. Ninety-six percent of the time.”

Mark Melton was once evicted himself.

In 1999, he was 21, a newly married father of a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old.

He was living with his then wife, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he grew up, one of nearly 4,000 people employed by Commercial Financial Services, the nation’s largest debt collector at the time.

Melton says he “separated people from their money.”

But CFS filed for bankruptcy, and its CEO, Bill Bartmann, faced 58 federal counts related to defrauding investors.

Though he was found not guilty, the company shuttered.

Melton, through no fault of his own, lost his income, then his rental home.

Desperate, he moved his family to Dallas in search of work.

He went to downtown office buildings, punching random floors in elevators, popping out to ask receptionists for job applications.

This was how Melton came to understand the vicissitudes of life.

He’d grown up in a household with a father who had interesting notions about his relationship with the federal government.

He was about 5 years old when he saw a story on the local news about his dad’s TV and VCR repair store being seized by the IRS for nonpayment of taxes.

“He thought that the constitutional amendment that allowed for income tax was bullshit, and he shouldn’t have to pay taxes,” Melton says.

Rush Limbaugh’s voice echoed through his childhood home.

His dad listened to Jerry Falwell sermons.

Before his eviction, Melton says, he was a “Trump Republican before it was cool.”

Lazy people relied on the safety net.

But now here he was, after the collapse of CFS, waiting in line at a county clinic to get free vaccinations for his kids.

“I’m everything that I never thought I would be,” he says. “Like, God, where are my bootstraps?”

He was humbled.

And radicalized.

He’d done everything he’d been told would secure him stability, and he was still struggling.

The only reason he found an apartment, he says, is that a landlord near Five Points—a crime hotspot near Park Lane, east of Central—told him they “needed more White people in this neighborhood.”

He could skip the $495 rent until he found a job.

His infant slept in a fold-out baby bed in a closet.

His daughter slept in the living room.

But they had a roof.

He enrolled in junior college in Tarrant County and paid the bills with cold-calling sales jobs and a night gig bouncing at a country bar.

Afterward, he earned a master’s in taxation at UT Arlington and began working at an accounting firm in Fort Worth after graduating.

The high school moot court champion liked arguing, so he decided to pursue law school, eventually taking night classes at SMU.

He graduated in 2008, less than a decade after he was nearly penniless in Five Points.

Then came a tax law job at Hunton Andrews Kurth and, in 2018, partnership at Holland & Knight.

It wasn’t lost on him that he wouldn’t have gotten there without catching some breaks.

And so, two decades later, when he took to Facebook to explain how business owners could operate on the right side of the law during a pandemic, he was struck by the comments to his posts.

Many people—regular folks—were running out of money to buy food and pay their rent.

Melton started translating the Texas property code for people who were about to lose their homes.

To help in the near term, the Meltons sent money over Zelle and Venmo to commenters who said they couldn’t pay their bills.

They helped people move in the middle of the night, becoming masked regulars at a hotel near their home, just east of Ferguson Road.

Melton joined eviction proceedings on Zoom, representing clients he’d never met.

He used Facebook to recruit hundreds of attorneys to help for free.

He organized furniture drives and GoFundMe accounts.

He advised the city on drafting an eviction moratorium.

Lauren started studying eviction laws.

The vaccines came and businesses reopened—but the eviction filings kept growing.

So the Meltons kept at it.

They became minor media darlings, sharing their story with the AP and CBS Evening News.

In 2021, with a $50,000 grant from the Meadows Foundation, Melton filed paperwork to start the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center as a nonprofit.

He and Lauren work for free.

Until recently, evictions in Dallas were something of a mystery.

Justice of the Peace courts, of which Dallas County has 10, are not courts of record, meaning there are no stenographers.

The elected judges hear small claims, with lawyers rarely present, so there’s little oversight.

The judges even control how they record outcomes.

The county provides them with software to track their cases, but the judges don’t have to use it.

Before the pandemic, no one really knew how many evictions were being filed in Dallas County.

This mystery attracted the attention of the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL), a local nonprofit that studies housing insecurity in North Texas.

Before the pandemic, CPAL partnered with Dallas County to track evictions for the first time by collecting each day’s docket.

In 2019, there were 43,306 evictions filed across the county’s 10 JP courts. The

CDC issued an eviction moratorium six months into the pandemic, cutting the figure in half, but by 2022 the number returned to its previous level, and this year it is on track to top 40,000 again.

Dallas has the fifth-highest filing rate per capita among large American cities, according to data collected by the Eviction Lab.

The median amount the tenant owed has tripled over this period, according to CPAL, from $950 in 2019 to $2,530 today.

If you find it hard to muster sympathy for someone who doesn’t pay his rent, consider the cost of an eviction to taxpayers.

When people lose their homes, they soak up social services.

A study by the Waco-based Perryman Group found annual savings of $40 million for the city and county when free legal services are provided to just 5,000 tenants facing eviction.

“The cost burden is largely assumed by departments within the city and county budgets due to uncompensated healthcare, criminal justice and shelter costs, along with downstream tax benefits,” the report found.

As CPAL and Melton’s Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center gathered data on the JP courts, it appeared that landlords have been forum-shopping, filing evictions in a court where they expect the scales of justice to tilt their way.

Judge Jones’ 1-1 Court in southern Dallas is by far the busiest of Dallas County’s 10 JP courts.

Last year, landlords filed 9,924 evictions in his court.

The next-highest-volume court is 5-1, which includes Northwest Dallas and Cockrell Hill, where landlords filed 5,007 evictions last year.

Right next door to Judge Jones’ 1-1, Judge Valencia Nash oversees 1-2.

Only 2,333 evictions were filed there.

This part of town is dense with apartments and includes some of the poorest ZIP codes in the county, but the different caseloads between the two next-door courts show that something else is in play.

Harden, the attorney, says that Judge Nash studies cases before they come to her, looking for errors that might lead to a dismissal.

Judge Jones considers only what is presented to him in court.

That was the next matter CPAL studied, not just how many evictions were filed but how those cases resolved.

The organization parked SMU law students in five JP courts from November 2022 through April 2023.

They found that judges sided with landlords in just 7 percent of cases when tenants had legal representation.

Those without an attorney lost nearly 70 percent of the time.

Melton sees this as evidence that landlords aren’t following the law.

When cases get dismissed because of an error, tenants get more time to settle their debt.

Melton worked with the United Way to secure rent relief, and his team works with tenants to find other ways to reduce their debt.

“I’m still not necessarily opposed to the idea of eviction,” Melton says. “I understand that there needs to be positive and negative incentives to do the right things, however you define that. But whatever those processes are, they should be fair and equitable.”

The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center wasn’t the first to provide free representation to eviction clients.

That work has long been the realm of Legal Aid, which, like Melton’s team, sets up a table and tries to find tenants who need representation.

But Legal Aid is funded by the Legal Services Corporation, a congressionally created nonprofit that sends money to attorneys all over the country to represent low-income Americans on matters as varied as divorce to wills and estates.

Because the money is federal, it often limits whom its attorneys can serve.

Three of Melton’s attorneys once worked for Legal Aid, which they speak highly of, but they all wanted to do more.

“Whenever Mark snatched me up, one of the key things I told him in building this, I said no government funds,” says Stuart Campbell, the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center’s managing attorney. “No funds that give us red tape.”

STUART P. CAMPBELL Eligible to Practice in Texas

Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center

Bar Card Number: 24096777

Melton’s goal is what he calls “saturation theory.”

Put attorneys in every JP court and scale the effort.

That rush to register clients in the 1-1 Court doesn’t happen if intake involves checking income or immigration status.

He sees it as a waste of time that could be spent getting tenants on retainer.

The philanthropy class is responding to the model.

The center’s revenue grew from $300,000 in 2021 to $1.6 million in 2023, according to its tax documents.

In addition to the Meadows Foundation and the United Way, the center secured gifts from Margot Perot, the Dallas Foundation, the Williams Family Foundation, and the Carl B. and Florence E. King Foundation.

In March, Melton actually turned down $240,000 from the city’s leftover federal COVID-19 relief dollars.

Accepting the money would have required them to represent tenants only in districts 7 and 14, which includes Pleasant Grove and much of downtown and East Dallas.

As Melton told the team his decision over a Zoom call, Campbell shook his head knowingly.

“It would change our intake process in a way that I’m not willing to change it,” he said.

He’s hopeful the city will spend the federal dollars on something else, which would then free up an equivalent amount from the general fund, cutting the red tape.

A little after 1 pm on that Friday in March, Harden and her colleagues exit the 1-1 courtroom.

She represented 20 people, all of whom got to stay in their homes.

A day earlier, she’d gone 16-0.

The staff takes a group photo to mark their achievement, as they do every day in every court.

But for all this effort, Melton’s team is representing only about 13 percent of tenants who face eviction.

For years, this resource wasn’t available to the county’s most vulnerable residents.

Reality always sets in after court: Melton says he needs to hire another 10 attorneys.

The Eviction Cure

Here was Mark Melton, one of Dallas’s most decorated lawyers, stepping out of his milky white Cadillac Escalade as two dozen code-compliance officers swarmed one of the most crime-plagued spots in the city. Melton, who’s in his mid-forties, didn’t look the part of someone who steers billions of dollars’ worth of private equity deals each year. A sweat-stained purple Patagonia cap shaded his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard; an untucked T-shirt dangled loosely over his jeans. Melton has the throaty rasp of a chain smoker, and as he surveyed the spectacle, he deadpanned, “This is pretty normal.”

The Rosemont at Meadow Lane apartments, just a few miles southeast of downtown, could easily pass for typical middle-class dwellings. Many of the roughly two hundred units are two-story townhomes, their facades accented with tasteful if weathered desert-hued stone. As the promotional materials would have it, the place exemplifies “luxury affordable living.”

In reality, city officials have identified the complex as an epicenter of violence, one of five spots where they’ve focused extra resources to disrupt deeply embedded criminal networks. Commotion, in other words, was nothing new. But on this searing afternoon last August, the offenses being documented by the officers laying siege to the complex weren’t carried out by residents or visitors. They were perpetrated by the apartments’ owners.

For weeks, as triple-digit temperatures transformed the city’s concrete expanses into a sprawling skillet, tenants had been pleading with management to repair or replace faulty air conditioners. According to several residents, these requests had been largely ignored. This was not only cruel and unlawful—a city ordinance requires that rental properties be outfitted to keep temperatures at a maximum of 85 degrees—it was also potentially deadly. At least 64 residents of Dallas County and neighboring Tarrant County died of heat-related causes in 2023, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Statewide, more than 330 were killed by the blistering heat, a record toll in a year marked by record-shattering temperatures.

At the Rosemont, many of the residents were young families. They’d made pallets and slept together in their downstairs living areas to avoid the dangerously sweltering upstairs bedrooms. One single mother with five kids said she’d been without AC for two months. “They didn’t give me a unit, didn’t give me nothing. They just treated me like I was an animal,” she fumed. At one point she was hospitalized, comatose from diabetic complications, and even still, “They didn’t do nothing for me,” she said.

Such stories no longer surprise Melton. In addition to his lucrative corporate work, he’s the founder and head of the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center (DEAC), a nonprofit that has attracted national attention since its inception in 2020. In short order he’s become the go-to figure when tenants across the city are facing crises and have nowhere else to turn. In Dallas, as in other parts of the state, such crises are never-ending. “This is not a Dallas problem,” said Eric Kwartler, the Houston-based managing attorney of the eviction unit at Lone Star Legal Aid, the country’s third-largest pro bono firm. “This is a Texas problem. This is an everywhere problem, but especially in Texas because of our lack of protections.”

More than 37,000 evictions were filed in Dallas County in 2023, disrupting roughly 8 percent of renter households. That tally doesn’t include untold numbers of unofficial evictions, in which landlords oust renters from their homes without going through the courts. Melton has seen cases in which property owners have smashed a tenant’s electrical box with a sledgehammer, removed a home’s front door with a circular saw, and placed a two-by-four full of nails across a renter’s driveway to pop the tires of the family car. He’s taken a middle-of-the-night call from a twenty-year-old single mother whose landlord had employed gang members to pound on her doors and windows, trying to intimidate her into moving out.

A few years ago, he got word that a complex in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Cedar Crest was trying to evict more than seventy residents. When he showed up at the Volara apartments, multiple residents told him about long-running problems with their gas—they were unable to use their stoves or take hot showers. Melton stormed into the management office and threatened litigation. Days later, he got a call from a whistleblower, a former manager at Volara who made a startling claim about what was allegedly going on: a new owner had ordered employees to do anything necessary to rid the complex of Black residents and replace them with “better tenants.” Melton recorded the call, and he said he later played it in a courtroom, successfully abating the rash of evictions that had been filed. (The city attorney’s office subsequently investigated Volara, which has made significant improvements.)

Melton is quick to note that plenty of landlords in Dallas scrupulously maintain their properties and are patient with tenants who are struggling financially. And certainly some tenants unfairly try to game the system. But, Melton says, “there are a lot of slumlords, and the only message that they are able to understand is a smack in a courtroom.” That single mother suffering without AC at the Rosemont, Melton said, “is a perfect example of the average tenant we deal with, just getting f—ed three ways from Sunday, and with no recourse. Nothing she can do about it. She’s almost breaking down in tears just recounting it.”

When the Rosemont residents’ requests for working AC went unheeded, they appealed to the city.

Kevin Oden, the head of Dallas’s Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions, a crime-prevention unit that operates independently of the police department, deployed a team to investigate. (The complex has “needed good, solid ownership for thirty years,” he said.) That’s when a scrum of code officers descended on the property, a clipboard-carrying battalion in khakis and navy polos. They split up and went door to door, discovering that roughly forty units didn’t have functioning ACs, many more than had been reported. (Tenants are often reluctant to report issues because they fear retaliation from their landlord.) The code officers ticketed the complex for every unit without cool air, and they planned to return in three days to see if the problem had been resolved. “I can’t compel them to do anything today,” a city official lamented.

The official told Melton that he’d called someone from Devco Residential Group, the out-of-state company that owns the apartment complex, and asked him to immediately install window units. The guy promised only to look into it. “If that’s his mindset,” the official said to Melton, “please do what you need to do to become his best friend.”

Melton smirked and said, “I will.” Presently he noticed the arrival of a news van from the local NBC affiliate, KXAS. “You want to do a TV interview?” Melton asked the official, who demurred. “I’ll do it,” Melton said. “I know how to apply pressure to these assholes.”

“And that’s why I appreciate you coming out,” the official said.

Melton strolled over and introduced himself to the KXAS reporter, who quickly mic’d him up. Melton then launched in as the camera rolled. “So far, the landlord has not committed to fixing all of this immediately,” he explained. “Unfortunately, this isn’t that rare of an instance. We see apartment complexes across the city, especially in poorer parts of town, that regularly don’t have AC.”

“And the landlords don’t care?” the reporter asked.

“It’s easy not to care when you’re not the person sitting in ninety-five-degree heat,” Melton shot back.

With that, he headed into the leasing office to confront the property manager. After swinging open the creaky, wood-paneled doors, he was met by the manager’s assistant, who said the manager couldn’t talk because she was in a meeting. (Management at the Rosemont did not agree to Texas Monthly’s interview requests, instead providing contact information for a public relations firm, which did not respond.) Melton handed the guy his card and suggested that the manager give him a call. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “I know the city has limited options, but we have a few more.” He went on to explain that it would be much cheaper—not to mention less painful—for the owner to address the problem now. “Otherwise, they’re going to have to do all that stuff anyway and then have to pay a bunch of lawyers and statutory civil fines.”

Then he was back outside. “That conversation is usually fairly effective in short order,” he said.

Air conditioners began arriving within days. The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center team at the Oak Cliff Government Center on May 24, 2024. The Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center team at the Oak Cliff Government Center on May 24, 2024.Photograph by Trevor Paulhus

When Melton launched DEAC, in 2020, he figured it would be a temporary pandemic project. Instead, it became a second full-time job, albeit one he performs for free. He routinely puts in hundred-hour weeks, and up to 40 percent of that time is devoted to DEAC. He now has a paid staff of fifteen, and his wife, Lauren, serves as a director. (Neither of them takes a salary.)

Melton is an unassuming spitfire, simultaneously brash and understated, with a wry sense of humor and a habit of gnawing on his right index knuckle when mulling a complex problem, as if literally chewing it over.

The list of folks he has riled is long and distinguished: the Dallas mayor, powerful lobbyists, state legislators, countless landlords, local judges, and at least one member of the Texas Supreme Court.

“The bottom line is he’ll fight anybody if he thinks they’re wrong,” said Dallas County commissioner Andy Sommerman.

“This is just a massive industry, and he has set it on its ear by fighting on behalf of people who didn’t have a voice before.”

Sommerman, a personal injury trial lawyer, was an early mentor: he coached Melton to a national championship in moot court competitions when Melton was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Arlington, and then again when Melton won nationals in mock trial contests as a law student at Southern Methodist University.

“He has a calm temperament. You cannot rattle him. I don’t care what you come at him with,” Sommerman said. “And he also has an excellent mind for the law.”

Last summer a tenant represented by Melton’s group lost her eviction hearing, and the judge gave her a week to move out or appeal.

When she got home, she discovered that the landlord had already stopped by—smashing the front door in, bashing the air conditioner, and cutting some electrical wiring. Melton went on TikTok, where he has more than 13,000 followers, to vent.

“Why do people have to be assholes?” he began.

“Instead of just following the rules and being a decent human being, he decided to go in there and mess up the apartment, so she didn’t have a safe or secure place to stay for the following few days while she figures out what she’s going to do next.”

He concluded with a not-so-veiled threat: “I don’t think he’s going to like what happens next.”

The next afternoon, at a run-down county courthouse in Mesquite, just east of Dallas, Melton wore a crisply pressed navy suit accessorized with silver bulldog cuff links.

He secured a private appointment with justice of the peace KaTina Whitfield to brief her on the situation and then waited in a dingy, fluorescent-lit hallway for a public hearing with the client, an auburn-haired woman named Nicole Hernandez.

At one point he asked Hernandez what would’ve happened had his group not intervened.

“Oh, gosh, I would’ve been screwed,” she said. “I don’t even know, honestly. I slept in my car the first night.”

Hernandez had lost her job at a home health-care agency and was training to become a dog groomer at PetSmart, but in the interim she had fallen behind on rent. She’d tried to google what her rights were but quickly gave up. “Texas laws are just so confusing.”

One of Melton’s colleagues, an irreverent former criminal defense attorney named Jena Davidson, had initially represented Hernandez in eviction court and then brought her a portable AC when she learned what had transpired.

Davidson started doing eviction cases pro bono for Melton’s group early last year.

“She kicked so much ass,” said Melton, that he recruited her to join full-time.

Like Melton, she takes joy from the occasional confrontation. (Her Facebook page, labeled “That Attorney Jena,” features zany photos of her celebrating legal victories and sticking her tongue out.)

“If you keep it fun and entertaining, people will tune in,” she explained with an impish grin. On the rear window of her gray Dodge pickup, using hot pink and blue window chalk, she had scrawled “Big DEAC Energy.”

Melton had already arranged a bed at a Dallas shelter for Hernandez should she need it, but he reassured her that she would get some recompense for her troubles.

“There’s nothing I love more than finding a landlord that’s a bully, because they think they can get away with it, and then just f—ing them up,” he said.

Once inside the courtroom, as he recounted the saga to Judge Whitfield, he struck a far more analytical tone.

“That is just unbelievable,” the judge responded. She drafted a writ demanding that the landlord, who wasn’t present for the hearing, immediately repair the damage. She would dispatch a constable to deliver the orders, and Whitfield explained that if the owner didn’t soon comply, she’d have him handcuffed and hauled in.

Afterward, Melton lingered briefly in the parking lot. He wasn’t in a celebratory mood.

“This happens every day,” he said of the mistreatment of tenants. “But nobody knows.”

He was bent on changing that.

Conventional wisdom holds that evictions are a consequence of poverty, an idea so glaringly self-evident it hardly seems worth noting.

Yet it’s an incomplete narrative because the converse is also true: evictions often create poverty.

Losing your home tends to set off a disastrous domino effect. Tenants sometimes lose everything: their belongings may get piled up outside while they’re at work, and by the time they arrive to collect the pieces of their lives, scavengers have picked through them.

Driver’s licenses and Social Security cards go missing. Most homeless shelters require identification, but applying for a new license can take weeks, which means that for a while, you may not have the option of bunking in a shelter.

Folks who were already living paycheck to paycheck are plunged into desperation.

Those fortunate enough to secure a new place typically relocate to substandard housing, which can lead to job loss (transportation can be tricky) and children having to change schools midsemester.

The Child Poverty Action Lab, a Dallas-based nonprofit research group, found that in Dallas, evictions cause roughly 60 percent of student mobility, which stunts academic performance.

“If a student moves at least once in the middle of the year between kindergarten and third grade, when they get to their third-grade standardized-reading assessment, they perform significantly worse than other students,” said Ashley Flores, CPAL’s senior director. The downstream effects of eviction are lasting, even generational.

Displacement is also an expensive proposition for taxpayers. The Perryman Group, an economic consulting firm that was commissioned by CPAL to study the issue, found that in 2023, Melton’s group saved the city and county roughly $40 million in health-care, criminal justice, and shelter costs, among other economic impacts that would have resulted from evictions it had forestalled.

DEAC’s budget was $1.3 million, which means it delivered a roughly thirty-to-one return on investment.

Governments don’t track data on evictions, so CPAL collaborated with Dallas County to fill that gap.

The research outfit has since published several striking reports. It found that from 2017 to 2022, fully 77 percent of defendants in eviction cases had no other eviction filings. In other words, most evictees weren’t chronically delinquent.

“What that tells me is that, most likely, there was some financial shock,” Flores said. Missing the rent stemmed from a single calamity or multiple, simultaneous setbacks—temporary job loss, an unexpected hospital bill, a broken-down vehicle—that briefly caused them to come up short. “For many people, it’s the one time they fall behind, something happens, and they find their footing again.”

One factor compounding this dilemma: rising housing costs. When Flores crunched the numbers, she discovered that Dallas rents have shot up by one third since January 2020.

Today families at or below the area’s median income spend at least half their paychecks on housing, which frequently means they can’t meet daily needs without government assistance and often have to choose between buying groceries or paying rent.

The paucity of inexpensive housing is an acute crisis across the state—Texas has one of the biggest shortages of affordable rental units in the country.

And mounting rents aren’t squeezing only the poor.

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies recently found that Texas is one of twelve states in which more than half of renters are “cost burdened,” meaning they spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

According to CPAL, the median income of a Dallas resident with a bachelor’s degree isn’t enough to afford the median rent in the city.

“I think that’s been particularly shocking for folks,” Flores said.

To allow renters to recover from the acute disruptions that can snowball into financial precarity, most states have enshrined “right to cure” laws, guaranteeing tenants a grace period during which they can pay their rent, plus any late fees.

“Texas is one of seven states in the country, by my count, that doesn’t have that,” said Ben Martin, the research director at Texas Housers, an Austin-based nonprofit.

“Texas is among the least renter-friendly states in the entire country. We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Melton sees the human cost of these policies every day.

During last year’s legislative session, he partnered with state senator Nathan Johnson, a Democrat from Dallas, to try to get traction on a right to cure bill.

Melton knew the prospects were remote at best, but he was playing a long game. In Austin, he took meetings wherever he could get them.

That included a private confab with Brandon Creighton, a Republican senator based in the Woodlands, north of Houston. Sitting in a conference room adjacent to Creighton’s office, Melton pitched him on the idea.

Creighton seemed to sympathize with the import of such a bill, Melton said.

Later, though, Creighton told him the idea was dead on arrival.

“The Apartment Association doesn’t want us to do it, so we’re not going to,” Melton said Creighton told him.

(Creighton didn’t respond to an interview request.)

According to Martin, “The Texas Apartment Association is incredibly powerful at the state legislative level.”

Last year, the association’s political action committee doled out $162,000, including $7,500 to Creighton; Governor Greg Abbott was the only elected official who received more.

Creighton is also the owner of Creighton Realty Partners, a residential and commercial real estate firm that does business with influential landlords in Montgomery County, where he’s based.

For these reasons, Melton wasn’t all that surprised when Creighton worked to further erode tenant rights.

He authored a bill that would have banned local governments from adopting any measure that “prohibits, restricts, or delays” the delivery of a notice to vacate, the first step in the eviction process.

It prevailed in the Senate but stalled in the House.

Creighton then spearheaded the Senate campaign to pass the so-called Death Star law, which, once signed by Abbott, barred cities and counties from passing ordinances that go beyond what’s broadly allowed under state law, even in areas such as agriculture and labor, long considered the province of local government.

“Cities in Texas were starting to make moves to adopt some of these national best practices around right to cure,” Martin said. “And then the state took a step backwards and preempted that.”

Meanwhile, a slew of other state laws that leave tenants vulnerable remain on the books. Melton, though, discovered through his work in Dallas that the problems run far deeper: the few protections tenants are afforded in Texas are routinely ignored.

“Most people jump to the conclusion that if you got evicted, it’s because you did something wrong,” he said.

“You didn’t pay your rent and therefore you deserved it. And that’s the beginning and the end of the analysis. But it’s not accurate in any way, shape, or form.”

The majority of evictions are unlawful, he found.

Eviction courts are the domain of county-level elected judges who aren’t required to hold even the most basic credentials.

Some are blatantly biased in favor of landlords.

Others are openly vindictive toward tenants.

Melton regarded the entire system as profoundly flawed, and he began devising a remedy.

It all started, strangely enough, when a Facebook post in early 2020 went old-school viral.

At the time, Melton had already cemented his reputation as a tax attorney, a partner at the international firm Holland & Knight.

He was then in his early forties, with a gently receding hairline, and his salt-and-pepper beard was much lighter on the salt.

Though he’s never run for public office, Melton is deeply immersed in local politics.

City council candidates seek his endorsement. County commissioners ring him for advice.

Mayor Eric Johnson takes his calls.

(At least, he used to. When Johnson switched parties from Democrat to Republican last year, Melton dressed him down on social media, calling him a charlatan.)

In Dallas, Melton tends to know what’s going on long before the news appears in the papers.

Social media is Melton’s bully pulpit, with his eight-thousand-plus Facebook followers tuning in for unfiltered takes on political goings-on.

So that’s where he turned in the spring of 2020, as the first wave of pandemic restrictions and disruptions arrived.

Melton had gotten a look at the county’s shelter-in-place orders and knew the panic they would incite, especially among those certain to lose their paychecks as businesses shuttered.

On March 22 he sat down at his desk in his home office, a cigarette smoldering in the amber ashtray beside his keyboard.

Melton lives in a modest tan brick house in a working-class neighborhood in far East Dallas, worlds away from the aristocratic enclaves where many of his peers reside.

(“I refuse to live in the Park Cities,” he said. “Ever. Period. It’s like this little bubble that’s not real, and I just don’t have any desire to be a part of that.”)

His house is perpetually under construction, in a series of renovation projects that have taken years because he does the work himself, in the little spare time he has.

That included building and installing floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in his office, lined with presidential autobiographies (George W. Bush, Clinton, Obama), several volumes on the American Revolution, a collection of Dallas histories, and—his most treasured possession—a signed copy of Mother Teresa’s The Joy in Loving.

That spring evening, he opened Facebook and started typing.

“In light of the number of jobs lost this past week, I’ve had several questions regarding evictions,” he wrote.

He explained that county courts had suspended eviction hearings for sixty days, so tenants were provided some emergency protections.

But he also noted that it wasn’t yet clear what would happen when the moratorium expired.

Melton then tapped out the seemingly innocuous sentence that would upend his life: “Feel free to reach out to me if you receive an eviction notice and you have questions.”

Over the next week, he hardly slept because of all the panicked calls he fielded.

The Facebook post was shared and reshared, but many also got wind of his offer through word of mouth.

Melton didn’t know the first thing about eviction law, so he learned on the fly.

“People were scared. People just lost their jobs. You still have to pay your rent, and landlords are already calling,” he said.

He became a one-man legal aid operation.

By week’s end he’d lost track of how many families he’d helped to navigate the grim prospect of losing their home in those terrifying and uncertain early days of the pandemic.

And though he was physically and emotionally depleted, he couldn’t bear to turn anyone away.

He knew precisely what they were going through.

Melton grew up in Tulsa in the eighties, one of six kids in a devout, blue-collar family that lionized Ronald Reagan and tuned in daily to the Rush Limbaugh Show.

They were long-standing members of Victory Christian Church, which held Sunday services inside the nearly 9,000-seat basketball arena at Oral Roberts University.

Melton attended the church’s small private school; his graduating class numbered around fifty students.

His parents divorced shortly after he was born, and his stepfather, Gaylon McDonald, was an avid outdoorsman who cultivated in Melton a hardscrabble independence.

McDonald, who ran an electronics repair shop, was “like a f—ing NASA engineer with no degree,” Melton said. McDonald taught him how to construct a rudimentary shelter from mud and sticks, craft basic tools from wood and stone, and start a fire without a match.

Once, when Melton wasn’t much older than thirteen, McDonald dropped him off on the side of a forest-lined highway and equipped him with a compass, a map, a knife, some fishing line, and three matches.

He told him to hike into the woods and meet him at a designated spot on the map two days hence.

Melton made it.

McDonald found other creative ways to test him.

He once took Melton out to the garage and told him to replace the water pump on the family’s car.

Melton wasn’t strong enough to loosen the pump’s bolts.

It took him the better part of a day, but he found a way.

“Whatever the project was, I always figured it out,” he said. “And I eventually learned after a few years of these projects to not get frustrated, to just keep going, because there’s going to be a breakthrough point.”

From a young age, Melton also nursed an entrepreneurial streak.

At twelve, he noticed the budding pyrotechnic fantasies common to his fellow preteens, so he began buying matches in bulk and unloading them at five times the cost to other kids at school.

At fifteen he got a job selling pagers and cellphones at a mall kiosk.

He was paid on commission but quickly grasped that the real money was being made by those farther up the chain.

One day he dressed up in his Sunday best and persuaded his mom to drive him to the local corporate offices of American Paging.

There, he talked his way into a reseller contract.

Every day after school, he’d sit with the phone book splayed in front of him and make cold calls. He charged $10 a month per line, an $8 profit. By the time he finished high school, in 1995, he was making around $2,000 a month.

Melton’s mom told him that college was for rich kids, and anyway, he didn’t need a degree; no one else in his family had one. He graduated from high school a semester early and applied for a job at Commercial Financial Services, which occupied 51 floors of the glass-walled CityPlex Towers, on the southern edge of Tulsa. The CEO, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Bill Bartmann, told Melton he’d never hired anyone without a bachelor’s degree, but he agreed to give Melton a shot. His starting salary was around $20,000.

The company’s business model was simple: it bought overdue credit card loans from big banks for nickels on the dollar, then collected those unpaid debts from consumers and kept the profits. CFS became one of the fastest-growing businesses in America, and Bartmann, a pale-skinned caricature with hair so white that he resembled a Q-tip, landed on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.

Melton thrived. A hard worker unfazed by rejection, he spent his days cold-calling debtors and persuading them to pay their bills. In 1997, a year after Melton was hired, Bartmann paraded him onstage during a company retreat in Las Vegas, praising his performance and challenging others to keep pace with the teenage up-and-comer.

That same year, Melton met his first wife, Candiance, at a party thrown by his roommate. They married a month later. She already had a two-year-old daughter, and they were soon expecting a son. Melton felt he was settling into a version of the American dream. His salary had doubled, he’d purchased a house, and he was managing a team of twenty.

Then it all imploded. Accusations of accounting fraud brought ruin to CFS, not to mention jail time for Bartmann’s partner. (Bartmann was acquitted of all charges and later refashioned himself as a motivational speaker.) Over a few months beginning in January 1999, all four thousand of the company’s employees were let go, in a collapse so large it was later compared to Enron. With so many scrambling to find decent work in a midsize city, Tulsa’s job market was long on applicants and short on openings.

Without a college degree, Melton turned up nothing but dead ends.

Six months passed, and an eviction notice from the bank arrived in the mail.

Desperate for cash, he put up for sale nearly everything the family owned.

For the next few days, he watched in despair as strangers rambled through his home, picking through items he was once able to provide for his family—living room furniture, his toddler’s three-wheeler.

He and Candiance then crammed their few remaining possessions into their Honda Civic, buckled the two kids into the back seat, and headed to Dallas.

Melton had visited the city only once before, and he didn’t have a job or so much as a plan.

“I thought with all these big buildings and highways, surely there’s more opportunity there than there is in Tulsa,” he said.

His wife’s mother lived in Euless, just west of Dallas, and they briefly crashed at her apartment.

“I was raised to be self-sufficient, a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of environment,” he said. “So the thought of having to live on my mother-in-law’s couch ate at me.”

He spent his days hitting every office building he could find, asking for work.

He stumbled into a few low-paying jobs and simultaneously searched for an apartment.

One afternoon he walked into a complex north of downtown and told the manager of his plight: he was looking for a small place while figuring out how to pay the bills.

The manager took a set of keys out of a drawer and slid them across the desk.

“Here’s the keys to a unit,” he said. “It’s kind of small. You can have it for $450 a month. We need more white people in this neighborhood. You can move in today. Let me know when you find work, and we’ll figure out the terms.”

Melton took him up on the deal, relieved to be catching a break, though the exchange stuck with him: “When people tell me white privilege doesn’t exist, I’m like, this was just the other day, man.”

His three-month-old son slept in the coat closet.

They carved out a spot for their daughter in the living room.

He and Candiance took the only bedroom.

They didn’t go out to eat.

They didn’t have cable TV.

“We didn’t do s—. I went to work and came home, and that was it.”

A few months passed, and he and Candiance and the kids returned to Oklahoma to get free medical care for his infant son at a Native American clinic.

On the way home, the boy started crying, hungry.

They were still two hours from Dallas, and they didn’t have any baby formula, so he pulled over at a small-town grocery store.

When he went to check out, his debit card was declined—his account was empty.

His son wailed for the rest of the drive.

“And that broke me in some way,” he said. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why is this happening? I’ve never been lazy. I work every day of my life as hard as anybody has ever worked. So how did I end up broke? I can’t even feed my kids or take them to a doctor.’ ”

Those painful memories often flood back when he meets with a client today.

“In the back of my mind I’m always thinking, it’s not always their fault,” he says. “It doesn’t mean they’re lazy or stupid. I tend to have compassion based on my own experience, because maybe they’re going through something similar, where they were pretty smart, and they were hard workers, and life just beat the s— out of them. Maybe they just need a helping hand.”

Realizing he needed a degree to have a shot at a stable career, Melton enrolled in Tarrant County Junior College and then transferred to UT-Arlington, working two jobs all the while.

As an accounting major, he landed a paid internship at a CPA’s office in the mornings.

He packed his coursework into the afternoons, and from there drove straight to a gig as a bouncer at Cowboys Dancehall.

He would stay and clean up after it closed, often working until 4 a.m., and scramble home to sleep for a few hours.

Then he’d wake up and start over.

Despite his chaotic schedule, Melton completed a bachelor’s and a master’s within three and a half years.

He applied to thirteen law schools but was accepted only into SMU’s evening program, which allowed him to work at a tax firm during the day.

After class each night, he’d cart his books to a local bar, settle into the same corner booth night after night, and study until closing time.

Following graduation, in 2008, he landed a job at the Dallas office of the international firm Hunton & Williams and started making his way up the ladder.

A decade passed, and Holland & Knight called, offering to make him a partner.

Today most of his clients are private equity funds.

The typical deal he works on ranges from $50 million to $150 million.

The largest he’s ever been involved in, the buyout of a Korean bank, was for more than $7 billion.

He’d always felt a compulsion to give back, which was only heightened as he achieved further material comforts.

“If hard work was really the be-all and end-all, then rice farmers in Southeast Asia would be the richest motherf—ers on the planet,” he said. “And the reason they’re not is because they’re not working within a system that allows them to convert that energy into upward mobility. So it’s important that we create that system. And I started thinking, What’s my role in creating the system? How do we make the system better and more inclusive?”

Melton at the Oak Cliff Government Center on May 24, 2024.

Inside an ornately appointed ballroom at the Dallas Arts District Mansion, a late-nineteenth-century neoclassical manor that’s now home to the Dallas Bar Association, Melton stood behind a lectern wearing a royal blue tie with his navy

suit. A group of two dozen looked on, seated around a handful of white-cloth-covered tables, dining on a buffet lunch.

Forks clinked against salad plates.

Ice jangled in glasses of sweet tea.

To Melton’s left, the title slide of his presentation was projected on a large screen. It read, in bold, blocky letters: “Injustice of the Peace.”

Melton has given this lecture in venues across the state and country, including to the American Bar Association and the justices of the Texas Supreme Court, but his efforts are still unknown to many in Dallas.

He was here to evangelize.

And he began with a disclaimer:

“There’s a whole lot of feelings out there about evictions on all sides of the political spectrum,” he said. “So I want to make clear that the problem we’re trying to solve at the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Center is not to stop all evictions; it’s to stop unlawful evictions.”

This is about the rule of law, he went on, and protecting constitutional rights such as due process.

He proceeded to recount the origins of DEAC, as a screenshot of his March 2020 Facebook post flashed onto the screen.

Within a week of that post going up, he said, the around-the-clock pace of the work was bordering on unsustainable.

That’s when his wife, Lauren—who was a manager at Chili’s when they met at a karaoke night around 2014, after his first marriage fell apart—looked at him and said, “You know, it’s okay to ask for help.”

Melton put out a call on social media, and about forty local attorneys responded.

Lauren handled logistics, creating a website and a Google voice line.

(“I would spend ten to twelve hours a day talking to people on the phone, through text messages, through emails,” she later said.)

The calls accelerated as word of the group spread, and by the end of that year, roughly 250 lawyers had donated their time, assisting some 6,500 families.

Going into 2021, DEAC was still purely volunteer run.

“But there’s this thing that happens when you spend all day, every day dealing with people having the worst day of their life,” Melton told the crowd. “Vicarious trauma.”

Burnout became a mounting problem.

Also, courts began to reopen after pandemic restrictions loosened, and it was untenable for attorneys with full-time jobs to litigate cases in person on short notice.

So Melton started raising money.

He solicited individual donations but also turned to philanthropic enterprises—his first big check, for $50,000, came from the city’s long-standing Meadows Foundation.

By July he’d brought on two lawyers full-time, including Stuart Campbell, a boyish 32-year-old who is now the group’s managing attorney.

The bulk of the organization’s work was still focused on counseling those who phoned in.

But they also litigated 853 eviction cases in court that year.

“We won 95.9 percent of those cases,” Melton told the crowd, eliciting gasps throughout the room.

“Jesus,” someone murmured.

Far from declaring victory, Melton saw the win rate as symptomatic of a much larger problem.

“It occurred to us—how the hell does that happen? I’m not Jack McCoy,” he said, referring to the formidable fictional prosecutor played by Sam Waterston on Law & Order, “though I like to pretend sometimes.”

Melton and his team realized that landlords, in most of these cases, simply weren’t following the rules.

“This wasn’t magic. This wasn’t courtroom theatrics. It was literally standing up there and saying, ‘Hey, the law requires you to give this notice in this way. Did you do that?’ And almost one hundred percent of the time, the answer is no.”

Looking to prove his point, he turned to the Dallas research outfit CPAL, which recruited SMU law students to sit in on eviction hearings across the county during the summer of 2022.

The data they recorded was stunning.

Melton clicked through a series of slides with an array of charts and graphs.

But the upshot was uncomplicated: when tenants didn’t have legal representation, he told the crowd, landlords won 79 percent of the time.

When tenants did have a lawyer, landlords won only 10 percent of the time. “That’s a very big delta,” Melton pointed out.

Eviction cases bear little resemblance to the kinds of trials the public is accustomed to seeing in movies and on TV.

For one, defendants aren’t guaranteed a lawyer.

Nationally only 4 percent of renters in eviction court have legal counsel, compared with 83 percent of landlords, according to the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.

What’s more, in Texas, eviction courts are overseen by justices of the peace, county-level elected positions with four-year terms that, in Dallas County, pay $151,252 annually.

To qualify for the post, you must have been a state resident for twelve months and a district resident for six months, and be at least eighteen years old.

You are not required to have a high school diploma, much less a law degree, though many do.

Most of the JPs win office in elections that voters barely pay attention to.

The rationale for such low standards goes like this: the cases heard by justices of the peace are elementary enough that common sense and some simple training should suffice.

“Texas wanted to have a forum where people could go and litigate matters without having to suffer the expense of having to hire a lawyer,” Melton explained.

“The rules of civil procedure are greatly reduced. It’s intended for a layperson to be able to show up and get justice. But if people are getting justice by winning ninety percent of the time with a lawyer and only twenty percent of the time without, then the whole premise is fundamentally broken.”

Because of the way the JP system was designed, there was until recently no data available to assess how it was working—no minutes kept, no tracking of case outcomes—or whether it was working at all.

In Dallas County, CPAL found, the average length of an eviction trial is three minutes and 59 seconds.

“We spend fewer than four minutes to develop the facts to decide whether we should kick a person and their kids—usually, more than sixty percent of the time, a single mother of color and her kids—out into the street,” Melton said. “Anybody want to make an argument that that’s constitutionally sufficient due process?”

To bolster CPAL’s court observation data, Melton enlisted volunteers to probe evictions that were appealed by tenants—cases in which the landlord won initially and the tenant contested the JP’s decision.

In appeals court, the rules of evidence apply, the judge holds a law degree, and records are kept.

In these courts, landlords lost 80 percent of the time.

If the tenant had a lawyer, landlords lost 89 percent of the time.

Accounting for both scenarios, Melton calculated that the JPs who initially ruled on these cases had gotten it wrong roughly 85 percent of the time.

He grew more animated as he spelled out these findings.

In eviction cases, “It turns out the rule of law is a myth. Is the Constitution also a myth? It applies to you if you can afford a lawyer or you get lucky enough to have one volunteer to represent you. But if you don’t have one of those two things, you might as well tear it up and use it for kindling at your next campfire, because no one is enforcing it.”

He then told a story: a few months earlier, a landlord was upset with him after losing an eviction case.

“Are you telling me that I’ve got to bring evidence to every single one of these things?” she screamed at the judge.

“This is a trial to decide whether we’re going to kick a person out of their home and into the street. Historically, no one has taken the time to ask, ‘Are you entitled to kick that person out?’ ” Melton said.

He didn’t blame landlords for not following the rules.

What incentive did they have if no one was enforcing them?

The only plausible way to create accountability, he decided, was to make sure someone was there to defend every case.

Melton coined a name for this strategy.

He called it saturation theory.

They were lined up some thirty deep, drawn by the promise offered on a glossy white poster propped on a three-legged easel: “FREE ATTORNEY FOR TENANTS.”

It was an unseasonably warm Friday morning in early February.

A steady stream of renters had filed down the hallway toward the justice of the peace court on the second floor of the newly built South Dallas Government Center, a modern, glass-walled structure on the southwest edge of the county.

Julio Acosta, a DEAC legal assistant with a background in community organizing, was making announcements in Spanish and English, shepherding new arrivals toward a pair of tables beside the poster.

A crew from DEAC was stationed there, including Stuart Campbell, the managing attorney.

Wearing a cobalt-blue suit, he was flipping through the day’s docket, researching the companies that own the apartment complexes that had filed for evictions, looking into possible defenses before he had even met the clients.

He could determine, for example, whether a company’s tax status was active with the secretary of state.

It often is not, in which case the corporation doesn’t have standing to file any sort of lawsuit in Texas, including for an eviction, so those cases should be automatically dismissed.

Sitting nearby was Marisela Gonzales, an eager 28-year-old fresh out of Texas A&M University’s law school, along with Bill Holston, a cheery Patch Adams type with a walrus mustache and tangerine bow tie, a “Housing Is a Human Right” button pinned to his corduroy jacket.

Holston signed on as DEAC’s chief operating officer last July after an eleven-year stint as executive director of the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas.

“I’ve been doing legal aid for thirty years,” he said. “And I’ve never seen anything like this.”

This was saturation theory at work: Melton’s attempt to represent every resident in the county facing eviction.

Rather than waiting for tenants to call DEAC, he was trying to build a staff large enough to defend every tenant who showed up in any of the county’s ten JP courts on any given day.

DEAC lawyers set up outside the courts to intercept tenants as they arrived, signed them up using a brisk intake process, and then went to work inside the court, arguing as many cases as possible, sometimes forty or fifty in a single court each day.

Campbell once got 55 eviction cases dismissed in one session.

Afterward, his clients gave him a standing ovation, an emotional experience he described as “surreal.”

Scant preparation is required for most cases.

Melton rarely attends JP courts himself now that he’s built a staff for that purpose, but during his early forays he persuaded a few judges to allow an experiment:

he posted up in front of the bar, and as the clerk called the next case on the docket, Melton would ask the tenant if they needed a free lawyer.

If they agreed, Melton would turn around and argue their case.

He had just learned their name.

Often that was enough.

He only had to compel the landlord to follow basic procedures.

“‘You’re required to give a notice to vacate. Did you give it? Show it to me. Who delivered it? Is that person here? Can you prove, like, the two or three things that you have to do to get an eviction under Texas law? This is a court. Show me some evidence.’ They almost never can.”

Representing tenants in eviction court isn’t a novel idea, of course.

Plenty of legal aid nonprofits have done the same.

Melton is frequently asked why he doesn’t work under the legal aid umbrella.

“The answer is—well, the real answer is I didn’t want to have to abide by anyone else’s rules,” he says. “I’m not a fan of bureaucracy or people telling me I can’t do something.”

DEAC accepts only private money, whereas legal aid groups are funded primarily by state and federal grants, which come with reams of red tape:

You can only help people who fall below certain income limits. You can’t help undocumented immigrants.

There are stacks of paperwork to sift through for every client, a fifteen-to-thirty-minute intake process.

But when tenants are standing in an eviction docket, Melton said, “You don’t have thirty seconds. It’s right now. It’s go or no go.”

Before signing on with DEAC, Campbell spent three years as a housing attorney with Legal Aid of Northwest Texas after graduating from law school at Texas A&M, and he admires many who work for the organization.

He and Melton have heard their frustrations.

Many of them wish they weren’t so constrained by bureaucracy.

At the South Dallas JP court one recent day, Campbell said, Legal Aid had two staffers working the same hallway.

“And they only picked up one client.”

Around 10 a.m. on this morning, 42 tenants settled into the ten wooden pews inside the courtroom.

Justice of the peace Thomas G. Jones presided, his spectacles perched near the tip of his nose as he peered out at the gallery.

Jones, a Democrat who was first elected in 1990 and is the longest-tenured JP in the county, opened with a joke:

“We have made it our mission and duty to alert the young men in the courtroom that the fourteenth of February is coming. Hopefully that means something to you. We’re giving you a hint, men.”

Then he started calling names on the docket.

Soon DEAC attorney Chris Dart was on his feet, explaining to Jones why his first client of the day should have her eviction tossed out.

“Castle Crown properties, [which owns] Waverly Apartments, is still forfeited on the secretary of state’s website.

They’ve been forfeited since December,” he said. “They do not have the right to sue in the state of Texas.”

Jones, though, declined to issue a judgment. “If you want to, we can reschedule this so you can check with the main office,” he said to the attorney representing the complex.

He abated the case for two weeks, giving the apartment owners more time.

Then, with the company’s lawyer still standing before him, Jones promptly issued three eviction judgments in favor of that same complex because the tenants had failed to show up for their hearing—even though he had just learned that the company didn’t have legal standing to file the evictions in the first place.

It happened quickly, in a matter of seconds, with few registering what was happening.

That morning, none of the more than twenty tenants represented by DEAC lost their cases, while Jones, who didn’t respond to an interview request, ruled against all of the dozen-plus who defended themselves.

As JPs go, Jones isn’t an outlier.

“The bias is just unbelievable,” Melton said. “Everyone wants to enforce the laws that benefit the landlord. But when it comes to enforcing the few laws that benefit tenants, everyone wants to forget those exist.”

Once, in another JP court, Melton remembered, he got a case dismissed.

As the next tenant approached the bar, Melton offered to represent him for free.

“No, I’ve got this,” the man said.

“I live in the same apartment complex as the tenant that was just up here,” he told the judge. “My facts are exactly the same. The landlord didn’t follow those same rules in my case.”

“You don’t even know what those rules are,” the judge responded, and then he quickly ruled in the landlord’s favor without asking the landlord a single question.

The tenant was left shaking his head, and Melton was helpless to intervene.

He could only watch, enraged.

“A lot of these justices of the peace are huge contributors to generational poverty,” he said. “Sometimes it is with incompetence, and sometimes it is intentional and with malice.”

Melton says he witnessed what he considered to be one memorable example of malice in the courtroom of Al Cercone, a since-retired Republican who was first elected as a JP in 1992.

A young woman facing eviction told Cercone she hadn’t received the proper notice in the mail.

“I don’t think you have any idea what the correct notices even are,” Cercone responded.

The woman became flustered, and Cercone quickly ruled in favor of the landlord.

Then, as she shuffled out of the room, Melton claimed, Cercone called after her, “Next time, don’t be so stupid in my courtroom.”

The woman, her back to Cercone, mumbled, “You’re stupid.”

“Did you just call me stupid?” Cercone asked.

He then held her in contempt and instructed the bailiff to arrest her.

As she was taken away, Melton trailed closely behind and approached the woman, whose face was tear drenched.

She was terrified about what would happen to her kids if she was detained and unable to pick them up from school, not to mention concerns about where they would all sleep after being ousted from their home in a few days.

Melton returned to the courtroom and approached the bench to ask Cercone whether he would consider letting her go.

“She’s already having a pretty bad day,” Melton told him.

Cercone agreed—but only if she returned and apologized to him in front of the room.

“I wanted to drag him right off of that bench,” Melton later reflected.

Instead, to ensure the woman got home to her kids that day, he arranged for the apology.

When reached by phone, Cercone, who doesn’t have a law degree, said he didn’t recall this specific incident.

He denied using the word “stupid”—“I wouldn’t have said that”—but the flavor of the anecdote rang true to him.

“It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know what I said. I don’t know what she said. But if she apologized for it and I let her go, that’s a good ending.”

(For the tenant, the good ending came later, when Melton appealed Cercone’s ruling and the landlord dropped the eviction.)

Cercone shared another story to demonstrate his philosophy on maintaining order in his court:

He once heard a civil case—it was unrelated to housing—involving a litigant who was “an attractive young female in a business suit. She was very sweet. Of course, I don’t let that influence my decision, but I can’t help but notice.”

After Cercone announced his decision, she screamed that she’d only lost because she was a woman, a premise he claimed was absurd.

“I’m a true Italian,” Cercone explained. “So if I have a slant, I’m sorry, it’s going to be toward females.”

The woman slammed the door to the gallery on her way out, and, Cercone recalled, he had her jailed.

(Later, Cercone said he’d misremembered this anecdote. He didn’t actually jail her, but now believes he should have.)

Cercone isn’t the only JP with whom Melton has developed a combative relationship.

In some cases, he said, he has presented statutes and Supreme Court opinions spelling out what judges are supposed to do in various scenarios.

“And they literally will say, ‘I don’t care what that says. I’m the judge here. It’s not a court of record. I’ll do what I want.’ ”

According to Melton, even more flagrant violations of tenants’ rights have occurred.

In the summer of 2022, while he was in Chicago to receive the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award, the organization’s highest honor for volunteer legal services, he got a call from a tenant who’d lost her case in the court of Margaret O’Brien, even though the woman had insisted that she’d never received a notice to vacate.

Melton flew home early to investigate and shortly thereafter got a call from a whistleblower claiming that O’Brien’s chief clerk, Lutishia Williams, had forged a notice to vacate after Melton had started asking questions.

Melton successfully appealed the woman’s eviction, and he asked the district attorney to investigate the forgery allegation.

In December, Williams was indicted by a grand jury on charges of falsifying official documents.

(Williams has denied any wrongdoing, and O’Brien wouldn’t comment on the case, which is still pending. In an email she wrote that her support for Williams is “unwavering” and that defendants always get due process in her court.)

These examples notwithstanding, Melton believes the majority of justices, including Judge Jones, operate in good faith.

“The problem is not that they’re actively being assholes. It’s just like in any other part of life: there are implicit biases. And I think even judges need to be reminded that they have them too.”

He and Campbell are trying to recruit a fresh slate of JP candidates for future elections.

“These judges impact more people every day than the police do, more than any other local official,” Campbell said. “Maybe the only other public employee that does is a teacher.”

DEAC now has a daily presence in the county’s two busiest JP courts, but the group is still playing Whac-A-Mole in the other eight.

Melton needs more attorneys to achieve true saturation.

Still, his efforts have impressed some notable figures. “Mark is doing heroic work,” said Deborah Hankinson, a former Republican justice on the Texas Supreme Court who now chairs the nonprofit Texas Access to Justice Foundation.

Melton’s model is easily the most promising she’s seen for providing legal services to the poor. “He’s got a long ways to go in order to have that one hundred percent saturation that he wants,” Hankinson said. But she believes he’ll get there.

For Melton, the obsessive pursuit of that goal has come at a considerable cost. The aftermath of the Meyers Street fire.Courtesy of Mark Melton

There was a fire tonight. And it burned something into my soul.”

It was July 19, 2022, and Melton was awoken at 1:01 a.m. by a text message from a former client who lived in a tumbledown apartment near Fair Park, in South Dallas.

Four of the complex’s sixteen units were aflame. Another building had lost power.

Residents didn’t know what to do. Melton and Lauren hopped in their Escalade and headed that way.

When they arrived, multiple fire engines were still on the scene. Melton found the department’s captain and asked if displaced residents would receive any assistance.

The captain said they’d called Red Cross, but it wasn’t clear if or when help would arrive.

As Melton and Lauren wandered the property, a small crowd congregated.

A pregnant woman mentioned she was hungry, so Lauren pulled up Uber Eats on her phone and ordered forty cheeseburgers and bottles of water from a McDonald’s down the road.

By the time the food arrived, the fire trucks had dispersed.

Around 2:30, Melton answered a call from an unknown number—the Red Cross, it turned out, phoning about the fire.

The woman on the other end told him he’d been listed by residents as an emergency contact.

She could help arrange for hotel rooms for those who were displaced, but she needed proof of residency.

Many of the victims had lost their IDs in the flames, Melton explained, and no one who lived there had an actual lease.

Contracts were informal—they’d always just paid rent using a money order at the beginning of each month.

In that case, the woman told him, there was nothing she could do.

Melton hung up and dialed all of his city contacts, none of whom picked up.

He was livid.

Finally, he gathered the residents together and apologized for not being able to do more, but he promised that he and Lauren would return.

It was shortly before 4 a.m. when they reluctantly drove home.

“It was so hard,” Lauren said. “You’re leaving these people who—you could just see the desperation in their eyes.”

When they arrived back at their house, Melton wrote an email to city officials, which he also posted on Facebook, excoriating them for not putting better emergency systems in place for poor residents.

Lauren put in a bulk order at Sam’s Club, and they returned to the apartment around noon with fifty sack lunches.

Residents were still sitting outside in the courtyard.

Lauren handed out food and took down contact information.

“These are people nobody listens to. Nobody gives them the time of day,” she said. “We talked about what their next steps were going to be.”

She spent much of the next three weeks returning to the site, maxing out multiple credit cards to help rehouse every displaced resident.

Melton and Lauren routinely take on projects that fall outside the scope of evictions, often at personal expense.

That twenty-year-old single mother whose landlord hired thugs to harass her family?

Melton drove down and pulled her and her kids out of the apartment in the middle of the night.

Lauren helped find another apartment for her, and they covered her rent for a year to help her get back on her feet. “They’ve just got big hearts,” said Ashley Brundage, a vice president at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, who during the pandemic often partnered with DEAC. “

They can’t just do the one thing they set out to do and then be done with it. That just wouldn’t sit right with their conscience.”

This commitment, though, has required an almost monastic devotion to the cause, forcing Melton to renounce many of the comforts he might otherwise be enjoying.

He regularly gets by on just three or four hours of sleep.

“He’s got a lot of horsepower,” said his friend and fellow attorney Ross Williams.

But still, there were times after Melton launched DEAC when he felt depleted.

“He was trying to build this airplane in midair, and he worked himself past the breaking point multiple times. He had two back surgeries during the pandemic because he would just sit there and work and not stop until he passed out.”

Even steeper was the emotional toll.

Almost daily, Melton would retreat to a dark room in his house to sit by himself and cry.

Few realized the effect the work was having on him.

Early in the pandemic, Williams recalled, a mutual friend died unexpectedly, and a group gathered at Melton’s house to grieve.

While they were all outside, it began raining.

Melton quietly walked over to the shallow, partially filled inflatable pool in his backyard.

Still wearing blue jeans, he laid down inside it, rested his head on the slightly deflated lip, and stared up at the sky, letting the drops pelt his face while he sobbed.

Melton said he never felt overwhelmed, exactly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever found myself in a situation where I’m frozen. It’s always, all right, this sucks and I hate it, but even if I’m emotionally messy, I’m still in the back of my mind saying, ‘What’s the next step?’ ”

He realized he needed help and began seeing a therapist, which gave him some relief.

At the end of last year, over the holidays, he took time off—five days without phone calls and emails, a luxury he hadn’t allowed himself in years.

He visited his parents.

He sat down to dinner with Lauren every night.

“I even got a dog, which is something I swore I would never do,” he said.

Now he looks forward to waking up in the morning and going on walks.

“It occurred to me that I was coming out of this deep, dark, emotional hole that I really didn’t even know I was in.”

There are still times, though, when he hears from folks going through eviction, then hangs up the phone and breaks down.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure what the specific triggers are. Almost every time I talk to a dad, you know, and whether it’s a single dad or a dad with a wife and kids, and I have this grown-ass man on the other end of the line crying because they don’t know what to do, and they feel like complete failures, and they can’t take care of their families. That one gets me every time.”

At this point, DEAC is representing more than four hundred tenants every month in court, roughly a quarter of those who show up.

And Melton is working with economists at the University of Notre Dame to devise and test various methods to get more people to attend their hearings, a perennial problem. If DEAC were to function at full capacity—i.e., representing everyone in the county facing eviction—Melton estimates the group’s annual budget would need to double to roughly $3 million.

He’s hoping to inspire others in cities across the country to mimic his saturation approach.

Kwartler, the legal aid attorney in Houston, is already trying to implement Melton’s model.

“There’s a path here to actually having the systemic change that we’re trying to create,” Melton says. “If you simplify it enough, it’s a workable plan.”

When he encounters resistance, he often recalls those boyhood moments in his garage, agonizing over the mechanical tasks assigned by his stepfather.

“At some point I’m going to get that bolt to come loose,” he said. “I just got to keep trying, and hopefully I don’t strip it before I do.”

MR. MARK AARON 'MARK' MELTON Eligible to Practice in Texas Holland & Knight LLP Bar Card Number: 24065734

MS. DENA DENOOYER STROH Bar Card Number: 24012522

MR. JOHN ERIC CEDILLO Bar Card Number: 00796330

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Northampton Electrical Contractors in the UK: Energizing the Heart of England

In the bustling town of Northampton, located in the heart of England, electrical contractors play a pivotal role in powering homes, businesses, and public spaces. As the demand for sophisticated electrical solutions continues to grow, Northampton's electrical contractors have positioned themselves as key players in the industry, showcasing a blend of traditional craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology. This article explores the landscape of electrical contractors in Northampton, examining their services, challenges, and contributions to the local community and beyond Northampton electrical contractors in the UK.

Comprehensive Services: Beyond Just Wiring

Electrical contractors in Northampton offer a wide array of services that go beyond simple wiring tasks. These professionals are involved in designing, installing, and maintaining electrical systems for a variety of sectors, including residential, commercial, industrial, and public infrastructure. From smart home installations to large-scale industrial automation, Northampton's electrical contractors have the expertise to tackle projects of any size and complexity. Their services include, but are not limited to, lighting design, electrical safety inspections, energy efficiency consulting, and emergency repairs.

Embracing Innovation: The Drive Towards Sustainable Solutions

In response to the global push for sustainability, electrical contractors in Northampton are at the forefront of integrating green technologies into their projects. This includes the installation of solar panels, energy storage systems, and electric vehicle charging stations. By embracing these innovations, they are not only contributing to reducing carbon footprints but also helping customers save on energy costs in the long run. Moreover, with the UK's ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the role of electrical contractors in facilitating the transition to renewable energy sources has never been more critical.

Overcoming Challenges: Navigating a Rapidly Evolving Landscape

Despite their crucial role, electrical contractors in Northampton face several challenges. The rapid pace of technological advancements requires constant upskilling and adaptation. Keeping abreast of the latest electrical standards and regulations is also essential to ensure the safety and compliance of their installations.

Furthermore, the competitive landscape demands high levels of service quality and customer satisfaction. Electrical contractors must balance the need for innovative solutions with the practical aspects of cost, time, and resource management.

Training the Next Generation: Ensuring a Bright Future

Recognizing the importance of nurturing talent, electrical contractors in Northampton are actively involved in training and apprenticeship programs. By partnering with local educational institutions and trade associations, they provide young aspiring electricians with hands-on experience and theoretical knowledge. This not only helps in addressing the skills shortage in the industry but also ensures that the next generation of electrical contractors is well-equipped to meet future challenges.

Community Engagement: Powering More Than Just Buildings

Electrical contractors in Northampton understand the significance of giving back to the community. Many participate in local initiatives, offering their services pro bono or at discounted rates for community centers, schools, and non-profit organizations. These efforts not only help in strengthening community bonds but also raise awareness about electrical safety and energy conservation.

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[lookfamilyexteriors]

Elevating Homes with Excellence The Look Family Exteriors LLC Advantage

In the realm of home improvement and exterior renovations, Look Family Exteriors LLC stands tall as a beacon of quality and craftsmanship. With a commitment to excellence and a legacy of transforming houses into homes, this family-owned business has become a trusted name in the industry.

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Founded on the principles of integrity, hard work, and a passion for creating beautiful living spaces, Look Family Exteriors LLC has its roots deeply embedded in a family legacy. What started as a modest venture has blossomed into a company renowned for its dedication to enhancing the aesthetic appeal and functionality of residential properties.

Comprehensive Exterior Solutions:

Look Family Exteriors LLC takes pride in offering a comprehensive range of exterior renovation services. Whether it's a roof replacement, siding installation, window upgrades, or the addition of a stunning outdoor deck, the company's skilled professionals ensure that every project is executed with precision and attention to detail.

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One of the cornerstones of Look Family Exteriors LLC's success lies in its unwavering commitment to using top-notch materials. By sourcing high-quality roofing materials, durable siding options, and energy-efficient windows, the company ensures longevity and resilience in every project. Paired with the expertise of their craftsmen, these materials come together to create exterior spaces that not only look stunning but also withstand the test of time and the elements.

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At the heart of Look Family Exteriors LLC's success is a customer-centric philosophy. The team understands that every homeowner has unique preferences and requirements. From the initial consultation to project completion, the company prioritizes clear communication, transparency, and collaboration. This approach not only ensures that the client's vision is brought to life but also fosters a strong sense of trust and satisfaction.

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In a rapidly evolving industry, Look Family Exteriors LLC stays ahead of the curve by embracing innovation and sustainable practices. From energy-efficient window solutions to eco-friendly roofing materials, the company strives to reduce its environmental footprint while providing clients with cutting-edge solutions that contribute to the long-term efficiency and sustainability of their homes.

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Beyond business, Look Family Exteriors LLC actively participates in community engagement initiatives. Whether it's sponsoring local events, contributing to charitable causes, or providing pro bono services for community projects, the company believes in giving back to the communities it serves. This commitment to social responsibility underscores Look Family Exteriors LLC's dedication to not just building homes but also enriching the communities they become a part of.

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Look Family Exteriors LLC has earned its reputation as a leader in the exterior renovation industry through a perfect blend of family values, quality materials, expert craftsmanship, customer-focused practices, and a commitment to innovation and sustainability. As homeowners embark on the journey of transforming their residences, Look Family Exteriors LLC stands ready to turn dreams into reality, one project at a time.

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[eagletek]

U2's new album set the stage for a Tiny Desk concert. These students joined in : NPR

Kirsten Holmes and Jevon Skipper shared the Tiny Desk space with the U2 stars. Brianna Scott/NPR hide caption toggle caption Brianna Scott/NPR Kirsten Holmes and Jevon Skipper shared the Tiny Desk space with the U2 stars. Brianna Scott/NPR Or perhaps Bono and The Edge performed with them. Who are they? A gaggle of D.C.’s most talented teens! The members of the Duke Ellington School of the…

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A brow raised suspiciously when he thought about the wife… sure it made sense; but more than that was the idea that the old lady was using her husband to carry out her dirty work and revenge even in death to get back at Madison for taking their last few months or years or however long away from her. It didn’t explain Cas alerting to other angels too though… “Right… yeah, I get that.” Dean mused softly when Madison refused leaving and claimed she’d feel less safe. He’d just wanted to see if whatever or whoever it was would follow her, but she was a stubborn one. They always were.

“Consider this like a pro-bono type case.” Dean reiterated; a breathy laugh escaped between the thin space between his lips when she described her needs… “You dont strike me as the type to be single, no offense.” Dean let the smirk hang on the edges of his features and took a seat next to her; clasping his hands in his lap. “Wish I could tell you in was in your head too; it would make all this a lot simpler… but I can stick it out here tonight with you, keep an eye on any things that go bump in the night.” He inhaled, watching the breeze from the window dance over her belongings.

“gotcha!” He watched the d.o.t.s dance off the form of someone else in the room right as the door slammed and he found himself staring into Madison’s eyes almost immediately. Dean didn’t waste anytime grabbing Madison under her arms; half carrying her out of the room and meeting Sam and Cas on the steps. “You were right-.” He half managed to get the words out before noise flooded the downstairs kitchen. “Hold ‘em off for us,” he ordered, rushing past Cas’s side.

“Dean!” Sam called after them, splashing a bit more of the liquified spell on the doorway overhang and stepping back when the lights crackled and buzzed with electricity. “Don’t open the door!” He shouted, watching Dean let go of the knob and back up, half dragging Madison back with him. “The spell will hold them for long enough to— Cas don’t!” he held his hand up and Castiel slid to a stop at the doorways threshold. “Stay there— stay..” he held both hands up. “This’ll hurt you too, I’m sorry i didn’t have any other way around this..” his expression was gentle and apologetic as Cas paced just feet from them.

“so what do they want with her?” Dean asked, looking to Sam and trying not to let his worry about Cas being susceptible to attack het to him. He used his arm like a guard to keep Madison up against a bookshelf behind himself. “Some sort of trade for her husband maybe?” The walls started to vibrate and the doors rattled violently until the house seemed to shake altogether. “Cas you gotta get out of here-.” He pulled his gun and gave a stern look when Cas started to move towards them. “Now!” Dean barked out and Cas clenched his jaw but didn’t argue, he turned down the other hallway and went for the only unwarded spot to finish Sam’s job while narrowly escaping.

Madison’s hips swayed a bit when she walked. It wasn’t intentional, atleast not now. “I like to bake pies, but I can make anything you want.” She said confidently & glanced over her shoulder when they reached the top step.

She patiently watched Dean wander around her bedroom & bathroom. Part of her praying he wouldn’t find anything & tell her it was all in her head. “No, he was a sweet man…. Used to go for walks w/ me. Sometimes we’d visit & just talk. He was a nice man…. His wife was a real bitch though. May she rest in peace… she died a few years ago.”

Looking up at Dean & scooted over a bit offering him space to sit on her queen size bed. Her eyes only gestured for him sit “no nothing like that… it hasn’t touched me. But I think it tries to sometime. I don’t know how to describe it.” Small fist formed & she used them to rub her tired eyes. “I don’t want to go somewhere… I called you guys here because I want to feel safe…. I won’t feel safe if I go to some random motel.”

“Will one of you stay w/ me tonight? In here?” Was that appropriate to ask? Did she look pathetic? A grown woman scared to sleep in her own bed alone. “I can pay extra… or whatever. I just… I don’t want to be alone tonight.” She let out a heavy sigh & held her head in her hands clearly frustrated & exhausted. “It’s times like this I wish I had a man to just wrap his arms around me & tell me everything will be okay. Maybe even tell me I’m crazy & this is all in my head.”

As she spoke the bathroom door slammed shut & Madison let out a little scream before practically jumping into deans arms. “Fucking hell!!” Her hands clutched onto his clothes.