#but they spend their nights in Van’s apartment

[novelconcepts]

okay i don’t know how your mind works when you create a story like if you view the ending as the stopping point for the characters, but i just reread the other side of someday and am now curious about their future. do you think tai will still go on to marry simone and at night continue to venture into her dreams to be with van? how would van feel? this might be really weird and make no sense, i’m sorry.

This is a really fascinating concept, but in my mind, “happy ending” means they go on to figure things out together. And they don’t rope poor Simone into what would somehow be an even more hellish marriage than in canon. Imagine meeting a beautiful, brilliant woman and falling in love with her, and she doesn’t tell you she’s sharing her body with the woman she’s in love with. Simone deserves better. In this universe, she’s absolutely getting a wife who puts her first.

[dreamsteddie]

I love pre Season 3 Steddie AUs so much because there are so many opportunities for Eddie to be so incredibly jealous of his boyfriend's new best friend, Robin Buckley.

Eddie got so used to Steve spending basically every moment of free time he has with Eddie in some capacity, even if it's just them shooting the shit in the back of Eddies van getting high after a long day and he's come to covet his Steve Time like a precious treasure.

And then all of a sudden Steve has a friend his age??? A friend who doesn't have an 8PM curfew???? What the fuck??????

But Eddie doesn't want to be a toxic, controlling boyfriend who doesn't let his partner have a social life! He really doesn't! And he gets that Steve and Robin went through something together that they won't, can't, share with him and they need each other. But he got so used to having all of Steve's time that whenever he has to spend a Saturday night alone because Robin and Steve are having Boy Time watching a soccer game and talking about their crushes, instead of hitting up his own friends or working on a campaign or whatever he just pines and sighs by the window lamenting about whether or not his beloved will return from the war. Wayne hates it.

When Steve and Eddie see each other the next day having spent literally less than 24 hours apart, Eddie latches on like a limpet and demands to be consoled with a thousand kisses and a grilled cheese sandwich.

Eventually, once Steve and Robin are a little more settled after the events of Starcourt, the three of them start spending more time together as a trio which at least allows Eddie to hold his boyfriend during movie night. Eddie reluctantly admits that Robin is actually really cool and they become fast friends right up until Eddie realized Robin is stealing his boyfriend ON PURPOSE.

It's not all the time but what Eddie has come to learn about Robin Buckley is that she is a menace. She'll real you in with her sweet freckles and charming ramblings but she's always looking for a way to fuck with Eddie, especially if he's wronged her first. Eddie returns a tape without rewinding it? Steve won't be at band practice tomorrow, actually, because Robin needs someone to help with her art project due on Monday. Eddie got Cheeto dust on Robin's favorite sweater? Suddenly Robin and Steve have plans to get drunk and plan a way for Robin to ask Vickie out for Valentine's Day. No boyfriends allowed. Eddie stole Robin's favorite Steve Sweater before she could get to it on movie night? Steve rainchecks Eddie for their bi-weekly Let's Get High date because Robin is conveniently sick. Must be because she didn't have a jacket on movie night.

Once Eddie catches on it becomes a fierce game competition between the both of them. Steve acts like he's none the wiser, but he's secretly lapping up all the attention he's getting.

[hanasnx]

DATE NIGHT — bruce wayne, dick grayson, jason todd, tim drake, terry mcginnis, talon.

MINORS DNI 18+ ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ NOTES: for @xstarkillerx and his date night prompt ノ features indyfied (potentially ooc) tim drake. WARNINGS: drug mentions: weed, acid ノ suggestive content: dancing, grinding ノ ooc tim drake perhaps.

✩ BRUCE WAYNE

outfit(s) ¡! ❞

Black turtleneck; ghurka pants; versace black leather belt; calatrava watch; loafers or chairman dress lace-ups; ballston merino gray wool socks.

location(s) ¡! ❞

He's a versatile dater, he can make any scene his scene: club, bar, concert, dinner. He's already a VIP member there with a table he owns, not to mention a proud shareholder. He can get you backstage, he knows the performer personally because they're a close friend. He's got a lot of ins places, which makes dating easy and frequent.

✩ DICK GRAYSON

outfit(s) ¡! ❞

Expensive: black t-shirt; grand seiko watch; a single stainless steel huggie earring; figaro 5mm silver chain; hopsack wide leg pants; chelsea boots; cavalli black leather belt; worn quarter length white socks.

Casual: he keeps the jewelry and t-shirt; loose fitted jeans; leather lace up boots.

location(s) ¡! ❞

His expensive dates are nice restaurants. Casual are much more frequent and range from the rare fast food stop to the movies. He's not above dancing and grinding with you at the club. Gym dates are easy, but that requires a different wardrobe.

✩ JASON TODD

outfit(s) ¡! ❞

Cargo joggers; carhartt black webbing belt; beat-up black leather biker jacket; off white t-shirt or long sleeve; alphaforce duty boots; crew length black socks; silver cross chain and he doesn't really know why he wears it; frayed leather band bracelets on one wrist; silver band rings; ear cuffs; sometimes a ratty red ball cap to keep his hair out of his face.

location(s) ¡! ❞

Public dates are very rare. Movies, or spending time at the bookstore or library with a coffee and a seat, cafés, delis. Mostly at home having a movie night or a nap.

✩ TIM DRAKE

outfit(s) ¡! ❞

Old skool black vans or vans checkerboard slip ons; mismatched holed quarter length socks; dark wash wide leg jeans; graphic t-shirt of something he's never heard of; black grommet belt; skinny hair ties and falling apart string friendship bracelets and rubber wristbands on his wrists; leather string coin pendant necklace; cartilage and first and seconds ear piercings.

location(s) ¡! ❞

Videogames at home: couch co-ops like mortal combat, mario kart, overcooked, wii sports resort, or portal 2. Ordering in everything from pizza to sushi. Popping acid and/or smoking. Keeping up with a show together, movie nights. Hanging out on the roof to watch the stars.

✩ TERRY McGINNIS

outfit(s) ¡! ❞

Brown chelsea boots; black split neckline t-shirt; washed patch pockets on dark cuffed jeans; joe rocket classic leather motorcycle jacket; timberland belt.

location(s) ¡! ❞

Clubs are his best bet because of his unusual schedule, but a fancier dinner or two is on the table as a rare and occasional treat. Also running errands together.

✩ TALON

outfit(s) ¡! ❞

Suede brown blazer; hopsack wide leg pants; white or black turtleneck; chairman dress lace-ups; quarter length black socks; burgundy leather gloss belt; silver cross chain.

location(s) ¡! ❞

Will not go out in public. Any dinners will be at your place if any actually take place. He's prone to disappearing.

@HANASNX 2024 | do not copy, plagiarize, or steal.

[cherrychilli]

18+ Eddie Munson x f! reader, established relationship, PIV sex, unprotected sex, semi- public sex, mirror sex Summary: Feeling needy at a party Eddie's taken you to in order to deal to the attendees, you steal him away and give him a different kind of show by making out with a woman to excite him. The woman? yourself. WC:1.8K

A/N: Was I drunk when I came up with this? yup. Was I drunk when I sat down and wrote it? yupx2. Am I drunk right now? honey, what do you think? anyway, enjoy!

"Show me"

He stares you down in that way that makes the guest bathroom feel much smaller than it actually was, like there might not even be enough air for the both of you to occupy it at the same time with the way he keeps stealing your breath.

You could still hear the music echo as it continued to blare outside, the beer you'd downed to give yourself the courage to whisper into Eddie's ear in the first place now sloshing around inside your belly, adding to the intensity of having his eyes roving all over you.

It all began an hour into Todd Henley's party, fed up of all the drunken bodies swaying around as they bumped right into you without apology before they passed by on unsteady legs.

But what irked you the most was that half the crowd had been spending more time with your boyfriend than you were able to all night, all of them handing him crumpled dollars in exchange for little baggies and whatever else he could fit in his pockets to keep the partygoers' spirits high.

You couldn't take it for very much longer though. Unable to help yourself, you sprang into action just before Todd himself could attempt to approach Eddie, cutting in front of the birthday boy, entirely uncaring of the scowl that twisted Todd's lips because Eddie was all you could think about. And you let the latter know as much.

"I need you" you'd whined as you'd wrapped yourself around Eddie's arm when you pull him towards a lonelier corner of the room, all sweet and clingy and then a little more quietly; "watching you made me so wet".

As you'd expected, he's quick to grin at you when he takes your hand. Gently he led you through the crowd, even turning down a few potential customers like Todd who'd tried to approach Eddie with cash in hand, a quick but firm "not now" grunted at them over the music.

It made your hopes rise, growing giddy, thinking he'd take you back to his van to fool around, away from the rest of the party only to end up pouting when he'd pulls you into a vacant guest bathroom instead.

"Go on. Show me", he'd repeated again, still soft and patient with you, standing tall over you as you grow so pliant under his stare, giving in easily as you reach under your dress to pull your panties down to your mid thighs.

He observes closely as you part your legs as much as your underwear will allow, showing off the collection of slick sitting warm and wet on the thin red cotton.

Eddie whistles low as he sees it. "Looks serious", he mused, pressing his index finger into the middle of your panties. He pulls his damp finger back, rubbing it against his thumb and pulling them apart to watch a clear web of your essence develop between them.

Hoping you've pleased him enough you try again.

"Can we, Teddie? Please?", you make sure to dial up the sweetness, all saccharine and cute as your plead.

But the thing is Eddie sometimes liked to have fun with you at times likes these, anything to work up his girl in good jest as another toothy grin develop on his face. "Sorry. Still got some dealing to do, angel face", he explains, looking the opposite of apologetic about it until he sees your face crumble and fall.

"Hey hey, I'm only teasing", he's quick to drop the suave, unwavering persona he treats his customers with for his usual rough around the edges kind of natural warmth, kissing your wobbling bottom lip hard for good measure. "You know I'd never turn you down", he makes sure to add, taking your hand and pressing it over his clothed erection to show you that he's telling the truth, feeling relieved when your lips spread into a smile.

"Tell you what. Since we're already in here why don't we just make use of it?", he offers with a cheesy grin and raising his brows in a way that comes off more cartoonish than it does suggestive but it makes you happy nonetheless. He chuckles at the way your whole face lights up at the suggestion because honestly, you couldn't wait any longer, reaching behind Eddie to lock the door shut.

~

You warmed up to getting led in here by Eddie even more when you noticed how the room smelled pleasantly of white jasmine thanks to a little sachet of air freshener hung up on the door handle. The living room where most of the party had congregated including yourself for that one hour was all booze and smoke and sweaty bodies barely guised by cheep perfume and cologne, and for that reason you were glad to be away from it all and not sifting through the thick crowd of people to get to the van.

But mostly, you liked getting handsy in Todd's guest bathroom because unlike Eddie's van, this had a mirror.

When you bend over the sink, you do so quickly and willingly, making Eddie huff out a small laugh through his nose. Carefully he gathers as much of your hair as he can in one hand, pulling on it to encourage you to keep your eyes on each other's reflections in front of you.

It's a filthy sight when you're made to look at yourself. Your tits are spilling out over the top of your dress, made so by when Eddie carefully pulled at it enough to free them, pinching, pulling and nipping at them before he settled you in this new position facing away from him.

With your panties drawn down a few inches above your knees, you could feel Eddie pull your dress up over your ass, eagerly pressing his turgid cock between your thighs once he's pried it out his boxers, the fat tip and length of his cock gliding between your folds and against your puffy clit perfectly.

Watching closely in the mirror, you memorize the little knit between his brows as he does it, a thrill coursing through you as his cheeks then blend from a light pink to a deep mauve while he humps between your thighs.

"Y' ready for me?" he huffs, his lips parted as he looks to your reflection for an answer.

"I'm ready. Please, Teddie. Been waiting all night", you whine back to him over your shoulder, catching the way the corner of his mouth picks up into a smirk.

He's inside you not long after that, stretching you with his thickness which even after all this time, still makes you hiss through the initial sting. But you've never complained about it, always inclined to moan with a wave of pleasure especially now when his hips connect with your ass, bouncing against him while he has both of his hands set firmly just below your waist to keep you steady.

It's not gentle the way Eddie pummels into you but it is a steady and easy climb towards your release. It's because he knows exactly what it takes to make you cum, just minutes of him thrusting into that spot inside you that only he can reach until your belly's winding tight and your toes start to curl inside your shoes.

"Eds, I'm close", you squeak, more a warning than anything else when he pulls at your hair again. Your knees are quick to wobble when he makes you watch yourself getting ruined by him, noticing the runny mascara down your cheeks and your pretty lipstick smudged near the corner of your mouth, bare tits bouncing with every thrust.

"God, you look so good. Go on baby, give yourself a kiss", he tells you through ragged grunts, his free hand landing a few spanks on your ass for good measure.

You do as you're told, leaning closer to your reflection, your lower stomach pressing against the sink in a way that in this position, makes it feel so much more intense with his cock still inside you.

Lips just centimeters away from the glass, the idea of making out with yourself didn't strike you as all that arousing at first, only going along with it because it was something Eddie had wanted and that was reason enough for you to oblige.

You begin by pressing your lips against the cold mirror, chaste at first until you see the desperation swirling behind your hooded eyes. You looked so utterly fucked out, lips parted and your tongue lolling out with a thin rivulet of drool dripping down to your chin. You liked it more than you could understand, especially with Eddie right behind you and in view too.

Finding yourself getting worked up the longer you keep at it, the fire burning inside you only burns bigger and brighter as you see Eddie's reflection while he keeps pumping into you, his bangs stuck to his forehead with a light sweat, his lips pink and full from his teeth biting down on it and the look he gives you when you eyes connect through the mirror.

"Y'like it don't you, doll?", he asks the obvious question just to see you squirm under him, his lips pulled back into a pleased smile as you muster up the strength to nod.

Your breath fogs up the mirror as you continue to pant through Eddie's thrusts, giving him a show as traces of your red lipstick are left behind from your kisses, growing more aroused at the sight of yourself taking Eddie's cock like this.

It's sloppy and oh so perfectly dirty. Eddie watches in amazement as you tongue at your own reflection, your swollen lips leaving traces of spit all over the mirror, uncaring if Todd or his family find the muddled mess of lipstick on their mirror by tomorrow.

"That's it. You see how pretty you look like this? can't help it can you? Good girl. Use your tongue a bit more for me, yeah? fucking perfect..."

It's different being fucked like this, half of you unsure of which reflection you ought to keep your eyes fixed on as you near your climax, deciding to switch from one to the other the closer you get.

Sighing and whimpering underneath Eddie, you mean to warn him just before you tipped over the edge but with your mouth so busy as you press one last kiss against the glass, Eddie can tell that you're cumming when you squeeze your walls around his cock sporadically, crying his name out with your cheek pressed against the once clean glass.

The sight of you all spent and the feeling of you clamping down on him triggers his own orgasm, creamy white spurts filling you up between your legs while he bites down on your shoulder, grunting so deeply by your ear as he thrusts through the final wave that overcomes him.

"You did so well, baby", he groans into your clammy skin during your mutual comedown, teeth grazing the place where he'd bitten down on you as you look up to smile at him lazily through the mirror. He admires you fondly through the mirror, one hand rubbing your back.

"Also", he pats his jacket pocket while he's still inside you. "Remind me to give Todd one on the house", he finishes and the both of you share a laugh, looking over the mess on the counter top and mirror as a result of your time together.

Yeah. Todd's definitely entitled to a freebie. That's for sure.

[hiraethwrote]

As you're THE local florist, I'd like to request some Baker!Nanami x Florist!Reader headcanons that come to your mind 🙂‍↕️♥️

the local florist??? i am blushing. you're so sweet ilysm mwah. so i obvi took some real life inspiration from my life. and as happy as i am to not work as a florist anymore (bc it's too much work for shit pay), i look back at it with fondness, and i think i love flowers more than the average person lol

baker!nanami and florist!reader, who have a shelf in the bathroom dedicated solely to hand moisturiser due to constant cracked and calloused hands — neither occupation is as delicate and nice as it might seem to be on the outside.

for nanami, kneading dough and rolling out pastry takes a toll on his strong hands, the pillows of his fingertips becoming rough after being stuck with said tasks for hours. for you, your hands turn dry after constantly working with water. they’re basically submerged in water half the time, constantly wetting and drying them which eventually leaves small cuts in your skin.

baker!nanami who accompanies florist!reader to the airport when you have to pick up the cut flowers that’s being delivered. the large boxes of flowers are a lot heavier than they look. this is where nanami comes in, who spends a lot of time carrying flour bags, so lifting a few boxes of flowers into your van is no problem at all.

baker!nanami who comes to your flower store after closing, because you have to work late — again. he usually clocks out by the time you lock up, and he always texts to hear if you have to stay longer, and about half of the time the answer is yes.

whether it be a wedding, funeral or just a celebration of some sort, the demand for flowers is high, and never underestimate the time it takes to put together a dozen table decorations.

but nanami will, sooner rather than later, knock softly on the window. you scurry over to let him into your dimly lit store, his available arm snaking around your waist to pull you close, placing a soft kiss on your temple. in his other arm he has brought dinner — if you can consider leftovers from the bakery dinner. you don’t mind though, because his bread and buns are delicious ;)

baker!nanami and florist!reader who have to do laundry every single day. when he returns home after a day of baking, he is covered in flour, and dough is still sticking to his clothes, while your clothes are stained with dirt — ungodly amounts of dirt, and you don’t understand where it all comes from.

baker!nanami and florist!reader's apartment is the place to hang out because it’s so extremely cozy. due to both of you being particularly meticulous when it comes to details, every inch of your home is carefully thought out.

from furnishing to decorations, there’s just a harmony throughout your home that is very warm and inviting, so people tend to want to stay there as long as possible.

baker!nanami who sends customers to your store, especially couples who are in to order wedding cakes. he will casually hold a conversation and sneak in the question of “have you fixed flowers yet?”, and just send them in your direction.

baker!nanami who scolds you for being too careless. a florist uses a great variation of tools in their work. most commonly is obviously the floral knife, which you might pave around a little too much. you can’t really help it as you value efficiency when the store is packed with demanding customers who want their bouquets yesterday.

so when you come home, the first thing he’ll do is examine your hands before shooting you a disappointed glare — “what about your burns, mister?” you’ll quip in return, because his hands are just as scarred as yours. he’ll answer the same thing every time; “you’re more important.”

baker!nanami and florist!reader who have an hour every night before bed, dedicated to venting about customer experiences from throughout the day.

“must be so cozy working here,” you both hear on a regular basis, but if they only knew. nanami often has to take a deep breath when people walk into the bakery asking “excuse me, do you sell pastries?” like there isn’t a display cabinet a few feet in front of them filled to the rim with delicious treats.

and you’ll tell him about the gossip you get an insight to. how you had to write a card from some guy to his girlfriend, or presumably former girlfriend now, where it said ‘i’m sorry i messed up again baby. i never meant to slip into her dms. you’re the best thing to ever happen to me, love your sugar plum’

baker!nanami and florist!reader who live the domestic dream. you spend your days doing what you love, always bringing your passions with you home — a home filled with both flowers and bread.

©hiraethwrote 2024 . all rights reserved. reposting, translating and otherwise plagarisim is prohibited

[hairmetal666]

Eddie's supposed to be writing. The guys, they all agreed they'd each come to practice armed with two whole new songs they could pick from to add to their set list at the Hideout. And he's got his pen, and he's got his most recent trusty Composition Book, and all his lyrics are fucking bullshit about golden tanned skin and honeyed eyes and tracing constellations in freckles and moles, pathetic lines about being twisted in bed sheets, and the hopeless love he found himself in.

For the fifth time in an hour, he rips out the offending page, crunches it into a tight ball, and throws it across the room.

He can't write about Steve Harrington for the rest of his life; spend his nights aching for the boy who established himself as a fixture in Eddie's life and then just disappeared.

The worst of it--the very worst--is that Eddie knew better. Steve was never his, not in any real way, no matter how many times they fucked. He's Steve Harrington. Straightest guy in Hawkins. Popular. Rich. Whole fucking life laid out for him on a silver platter. And Eddie fell for him. It's the Munson curse, he supposes; always wanting what you can't have.

It started the way these things usually do, "got any weed?" and "come back to my place, Harrington" and "I got this stupid job at the mall, meet me there?" and lying "hey, guys, can't make band practice, gotta help Uncle Wayne" and "Munson, I really want--can I kiss you?"

In every other fantasy Eddie's ever had, it ends there. Steve gets his kiss and they never see each other again. But Steve Harrington--he's full of surprises. It catches Eddie off guard, makes him want, makes him trust. Because it's not just kisses. It's hands and mouths and "anything you want, Eddie. Let me make you feel good."

Maybe it wouldn't have hit so hard--maybe Eddie could've stopped from falling--if Steve hadn't been so good. Bitchy, sure, but genuine and kind. Had this whole gaggle of junior high kids he babysat, like what the fuck. Would hang out with Wayne and shoot the shit about whatever sports nonsense was on tv. Harrington never was as mean, as spoiled, as superficial as Eddie suspected.

Then Starcourt. That's when it all changes. Steve stops coming around then, in the aftermath. It hurts, but Eddie tells himself it's for the best. Now, he knows it would have been.

Two weeks with no contact, and Steve shows up at his door in the middle of the night. Eddie winces at the healing bruises and cuts on his face, can't imagine how much worse they were to start. He steps aside, lets Steve in, plans to say that he can't be whatever they are anymore.

Steve kisses him. It's a hot, needy thing, wild with teeth and tongue, nothing like before. Eddie is helpless to it, helpless to the way Steve grinds against him, already hard. He should slow it down, check-in that Steve is in the right headspace for this, but Steve is moaning low in his throat and Eddie can't think.

They're in Eddie's bed and Steve says, "fuck me, Eddie?" and Eddie says "are you sure" because he can't stop himself. Steve rolls his eyes (beautifuly bitchy), says, "I need to feel you inside me, baby."

How can Eddie say no?

Eddie's never done this before, but it doesn't matter. It's everything--Steve is everything--he could ask for.

The next morning, he expects Steve to be gone. Thinks they'll never see each other again. But he finds Steve in the kitchen, in his boxers and Eddie's Iron Maiden shirt, making eggs and talking to Wayne like it's the most normal thing in the world.

The next month and a half are the best of Eddie's life. He and Steve spend more time together than they do apart. Nights at Eddie's trailer, in Eddie's bed. Days lounging at the Harrington pool and driving around the nothing that surrounds Hawkins. Sometimes they'll stop in the middle of nowhere, climb on top of the van, and just--be. Steve takes his shirt off, and Eddie traces their names in the sun-soaked freckles, thinking maybe he really gets to have this, have Steve.

It ends as quickly as it started. One morning in September, Steve is cupping Eddie's neck, pulling him in for a goodbye kiss, saying, "sorry, baby, gotta get home for my parents. I'll see you later tonight, yeah?"

Except Eddie doesn't. Eddie doesn't see Steve that night, or the night after, or the night after that. He stops coming around and all Eddie is left with is a broken heart and these piss poor excuses for songs.

He rips out the latest page, waxing lyrical about the wonders of August, and time slipping away, and the boy he'll never forget. Crumples it into a ball and bats it into a pile of junk accumulated in the corner of his room.

Eddie needs a break.

He flies into the living room, snatches up his keys from the floor by the coffee table, and flees his house and all those memories of Steve. It's not like he has anywhere specific to go, so he drives around town, with his windows down and his music up.

His tires screech as he rounds the corner to the video store and arcade. He's not planning on stopping, but honestly, maybe a few rounds of Space Invaders is exactly what he needs.

The van hasn't even come to a stop in the parking spot when his eyes fall on Steve Harrington. He's standing in the middle of the parking lot surrounded by a gang of kids (including some of Eddie's new little sheepies) and Robin Buckley. Steve wears a sunny yellow sweatshirt, tight jeans, and his hair is perfectly coifed, falling in an elegant wave. His hands are on his hips, mouth and brows pinched stern. He's gorgeous, perfect.

It's an assault, an attack, Eddie's entire body shakes as the months they spent together crash over him. He has the van in reverse before he consciously thinks to do so, flooring it out of the space hard enough to burn rubber.

The noise, the speed, it draws the entire group's attention to him.

His eyes meet Steve's.

Time stops and so does he, idling in the middle of the parking lot. For a second, one moment in time, Steve's face falls. His mouth loses that grumpy pinch, his eyebrows drop, his beauty transformed by grief, by fucking longing.

Steve takes a step forward, and Eddie hits the gas, van screaming out of the parking lot. He watches the group shrink in his rearview mirror, sure that he imagined the sorrow in Steve's face, anyway.

They're nothing to each other.

Never were.

By popular request: Part Two

[stillmonsterz]

when you split the heart open

pairing: heeseung x reader, jake x reader (kind of)

genre: smut, angst (?)

summary: heeseung is dating the girl of his dreams. the only problem? he has to have sex with her.

warnings: unprotected sex, swearing, voyeurism, name-calling, manipulation, exhibitionism, dubcon, public sex, humiliation (?), heeseung is a cuck

word count: 5.1k

---

Heeseung had a girlfriend, and she was amazing. She was pretty, smart, funny, and her body was out of this world. She had a particular vibrancy and joie de vivre that made spending time with her invigorating. She was the opposite of a dead fish in the bedroom- she was vocal, enthusiastic, and loved to please him.

He disliked having sex with her.

Sometimes he almost pitied her; she would seduce him in any way she could, winding her hips seductively, crawling towards him on the bed wearing nothing but thigh-high socks, rubbing his crotch under the table when they ate out, anything to catch his attention. Of course, he didn’t pass up a good fuck – he wasn’t insane ��� but it did nothing for him but provide a quick release.

It wasn’t like he didn’t love her, he did. He was convinced that someday, he could even marry her. It’s just that he found that he loved her best when she was farther away from him, someone he could admire rather than keep. Heeseung found her beautiful at 11 pm, when she would dance alone in her bedroom wearing a baggy T-shirt. Or when she would shove her face into her pillow and thrust the end of a hairbrush into her pussy. It was an amazing night when he had caught that- he had been parked outside of her apartment complex, so he got a side-view, and the camera he had set up in her closet gave him a perfect shot of her smooth legs and raised ass. The day after that, when they had had sex in his van, the memory of her chasing her orgasm got him to finish.

Heeseung was a voyeur, and he was starting to think that it was becoming a problem. And it wasn’t even a problem he could complain about; in a moment of weakness, he had told his best friend Jay that he didn’t like how frequently his girlfriend wanted sex, and Jay had heavily implied that Heeseung was gay.

He was getting really sick and tired of having to fuck his girlfriend all the time. Heeseung had suggested mutual masturbation, which backfired. It ended up being too intimate for him and it just got her hot. She had pounced on him and ridden him as if her life depended on it.

At times, he missed how things were before they started dating. He had met her at her job, and had never revisited. Instead, he had waited for her shift to finish, followed her home, and tugged himself dry while he watched her undress in her room. The curtains were too sheer, and sometimes she wouldn’t even draw them. It made him think she wanted him to see her, and the thought of that always made him harder.

She had approached him at the local grocery store, as he was buying ramen noodles. She had said that she had wanted to see him again, Heeseung had made up some excuse, and through a series of events that Heeseung hadn’t lived through so much as passively observed, they had ended up dating.

It had been eight months of dating, cuddling, and sex, and he felt exhausted. He wanted things to go back to normal, but he also loved spending time with her. So he started making up excuses to not sleep with her. Headaches, shifts at work, weird erections from his medication.

One day, a few days after their eight month anniversary where Heeseung had reluctantly eaten her out, she confronted him. They were sitting on his couch, playing Mario Kart, when she turned to him.

“Do you still like me?” she asked, voice shaky.

Heeseung shut the TV off immediately. “Huh? Of course I like you- baby, I love you.” He rested his hands on hers as they clutched the controller.

“Then why don’t you like sleeping with me?”

“No, no, I…” Heeseung hesitated. This was the perfect time to come clean. They could work things out, maybe. It would be good to get it off his chest. “Okay. Okay, I’ve been having a…problem. It has nothing to do with you, I promise.”

Her eyes were wide and glassy. She was wearing his large hoodie and a pair of dolphin shorts. She looked perfect. “A problem?”

“Yes, a problem. I…I…look. I like you. I love you. You’re my girl.” Heeseung reached out and stroked her cheek gently. “The problem is that you’re just…like an angel to me. It feels wrong when I…when I fuck you.”

“What?” It came out as a squeak, and she recoiled from his touch. “Feels wrong?”

“No, no, not that you’re wrong, it’s me, it’s that…” Heeseung sighed. “I like to look at you I like seeing you move, it’s like art come to life. It feels like when I touch you, I’m sullying something beautiful, something that needs to be kept clean.” Heeseung thought that if he made it sound more romantic and less like a paraphilia, she would be more inclined to hear him out. And to his glee, she slowly leaned into his touch again, her cheek rubbing against his hand.

“You find me beautiful?”

“You are the most gorgeous woman I have ever met,” he said, staring her in her luminous eyes. “Too gorgeous for me.”

“You aren’t,” she said imploringly, holding his wrist with her two hands. “Heeseung, I love you. And I really like having sex with you. Why did you sleep with me all those times if you didn’t enjoy it?”

“I did enjoy it, I did. I just…I wanted to make you happy, baby.” Heeseung kissed her forehead. “Your happiness matters the most to me. I’d do anything for you.”

“And I’d do anything for you,” she said, leaning in to kiss him on the lips. He kissed her vack, cupping her face in his hands.

“Anything for me?”

“Anything, Heeseung.”

“I have an idea.”

He clambered into his room and pulled out his hairbrush. “Just…just use this to get off, okay?” He handed it to her, and she accepted it slowly, turning it over like it was a foreign object.

His girlfriend looked up at him. “Right now?”

Heeseung shook his head. “Not yet. Hold on.” He ran to his room again and found an old handheld camcorder.

She squinted at it. “You’re going to film me?”

“No, it’s dead,” he lied. “See?” He showed her the black screen. “I’m just going to use this to mimic the feeling of….uh, awayness. Like an extra screen between you and I.”

She fiddled with the hairbrush, feeling its smooth wooden end with her thumb. “Well…I mean, I’m not really in the mood right now….”

“You’re always in the mood,” he replied, frustration slowly building in him. “I swear you’re like a dog in heat sometimes.”

His girlfriend’s eyes widened again. “What?”

“You’re always asking to get fucked. You’re like a nymphomaniac, I swear. I bet you go home and hump your pillows right after I turn you out because you just can’t get enough.” Heeseung had seen exactly that from one of his midnight excursions to her place.

“I’m not a nympho-,”

“Oh, yes you are. Whores like to get fucked less than you do. I can only imagine how much you got around before I cuffed you.” He saw her shove one hand down her dolphin shorts. He raised the camera with a smile.

“I’m a whore?” Her face was flushed, and her eyes were squeezed shut.

“You’re a whore who gets off to being called a whore. Good fucking thing you’re with me, or else you would have been taken advantage of already, especially with that slutty body of yours.”

To his growing delight, she had tugged her shorts off and slipped her dainty little panties off. The end of his hairbrush slipped deftly in and out of her glistening folds.

Heeseung stopped talking, as so not too ruin the footage with his voice. He just watched her circle her clit with her manicured fingers, watched her pussy swallow the hairbrush.

“Heeseung,” she moaned, and he scowled, cutting the video short.

“Don’t say my name,” he said. “And keep your eyes shut.” When her eyes fluttered shut, he turned the camera on. He stroked himself in time with the insertion of the hairbrush. Seeing her splayed out on his couch, her head tossed back, his hoodie riding up to expose her soft tummy…it was amazing. And the fact that she didn’t know he was filming her made it all the better. It was forbidden, it was wrong, it was perfect. When she came, she nearly said his name again, but she cut herself off instead. He didn’t let himself cum, but he moaned and pretended like he did too.

Heeseung kissed his girlfriend, licked the sweat off of her face. “Perfect,” he murmured. “So perfect for me.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

The second she left his house, he sniffed the couch, the exact place where she had sat as they had played video games. Her scent was so strong; he buried his face into the faux leather and inhaled deeply. Heeseung closed his eyes, imagined her masturbating herself all alone in room, and finished all over the couch.

He was going to have so much fun.

The platonic aspects of their relationship stayed the same. They would have simple at-home dates, occasionally going out to restaurants or the movies or anywhere she liked. Heeseung didn’t really care what they did as a couple. He just liked to be around her.

They still had sex, but it had gone from several times a week to once every two weeks. It was still a dreaded task for Heeseung, but it balanced out now that they had incorporated his voyeuristic tendencies into their relationship.

On movie dates, he made sure to get tickets in a theatre with a sparse audience. Then, he would leave his seat, sitting a few rows back, and watch his girlfriend play with herself, fondling her tits and slipping a hand into her jeans. If they went to the beach, Heeseung would take her to a secluded spot, tell her to lie down on a towel, and to strip. She would sunbathe completely nude,  rubbing lotion all over herself.

When she would go out with her friends, Heeseung would periodically text her, asking her to unbutton a few of her buttons, or to send him a picture of her panties. He asked her to fuck herself in public bathrooms and to send videos for proof. He would lazily stroke his cock to the grainy footage of her sliding her fingers in and out of her tight pussy. When she told him that men were hitting on her, he would text, “Good job.” Then he would tell her to unbutton another few buttons, or to part her legs as she rode the subway. What he would really like would be for her to walk around dressed in a tiny little crop top that showed the underside of her breasts and shorts that displayed her bare ass, but Heeseung knew he was already asking for a lot.

A few times, he had strapped her to his bed with rope, so that her arms and legs were bound. He had affixed a phone-controlled vibrator between her thighs, and he watched her writhe on his bed with glee. Heeseung watched her have orgasm after orgasm, and if she begged him to stop he would get angry. He would complain that she had ruined it. He would pry her mouth open with his fingers, and she would suck him off to completion. Then he would start the process over again, until her face was flushed, her legs would shake, and he could even glimpse her pussy clenching around nothing. It was fun for him, but eventually he grew tired of watching it. He had tried making it more interesting by binding her fingers in front of her hole so she could tremblingly fuck herself, but the rush of that wore off too. Heeseung needed something more, something that could sate his urges.

So he had asked for something else.

---

“You want me to do what?” They were at a café, and she put down the croissant she had been nibbling.

Heeseung raised his hands. “You don’t have to do it. It was just a suggestion.”

“Heeseung, I know you’re struggling, but…nude karaoke?”

He sighed and looked away from her. “I know, I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s getting hard, you know. I love you, and I feel like I’m not good enough for you. It’s really messing with me, up here…” Heeseung tapped the side of his head. “I feel like a freak.”

Her face softened, and she reached out to hold his hand. “You’re not a freak, my love. You’re just…”

“A perv who wants his girlfriend to get nude in front of strangers.” Heeseung laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, I’m really normal.”

“You’re not a perv, either.” She swallowed. “I mean…this could actually be good for me. It could help me explore my sexuality more.” She squeezed his hand and mustered up a smile. “I think we should try it?”

Heeseung didn’t allow himself to smile. “Yeah? I mean, are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said firmly. “I want to do this.”

He leaned across the table and kissed her all over her face. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re the nicest girl ever.”

That night was nude karaoke night at a local var. When they arrived, there were only a five dozen or so attendees, mainly men. They were sitting around a makeshift stage in wooden chairs that had been dragged from the surrounding tables. A woman was there, warbling a song as she swayed her hips. The men seemed bored, and Heeseung started to feel prideful. His girl, who was wearing a loose white dress and had folded her arms tightly around her chest, was so much prettier than that other woman. These men were going to shit themselves when she started to sing.

The woman finished her song, and the applause was scattered. Then his girlfriend slowly walked onto the stage, her heels clacking against the floor. Her hands were scrunched into fists. As she adjusted the mic, one man yelled, “Take your tits out, now!”

Another said, “Don’t look so shy, sweetheart.”

Heeseung was elated.

She introduced the song she was going to sing – Fade Into You by Mazzy Star. Heeseung had heard her sing that one; her voice had always sounded so melancholic, fragile, and sweet. He smiled at her encouragingly.

The intro to the song played, and she pulled her dress off, revealing her stunning body. The men whooped and cheered, hurling vulgarities at her. She tried to sing, clutching the microphone tightly, but the jeering was loud. As Heeseung scanned the small space, he saw that the men around him were either stroking their bulges covertly or outright jerking themselves off.

His girlfriend kept singing with her eyes closed. Heeseung wanted her to open them, so she could see the effect he was having on all of those men. They were all drooling after her, calling her a slut, saying that she must be tight, that they would fuck up whoever got to tap that pussy. Heeseung jerked himself off right there, joining in the orgiastic atmosphere of the cramped little bar. He watched her sing, his heart full.

When she finished, the patrons begged her to keep singing. They tossed money at her, wadded bills. She glanced at Heeseung, who nodded, and so she continued to sing, this time quietly crooning In The Mood For Love.

A man told her to play with her tits while she sang, and she did, running her thumb along her nipples. It was more than Heeseung could handle, and he came halfway through the song.

After her second performance, she hurried off of the stage, collecting some of the money before pulling her dress on. She ran out, which was smart, because the men were starting to clamor for her to do worse acts. Heeseung followed after her, and before he opened his car, he kissed her in the parking lot.

“That was amazing,” he whispered, kissing her again. “So amazing. Your voice is beautiful.”

She scoffed. “My voice?”

Heeseung shrugged playfully. “And, you know, your body. You looked sexy up there. Everyone thought so.”

His girlfriend rested her hands against his chest. “Did you think so?”

“Of course I did,” he said in a placating tone, stroking her hair. “Of course, baby.”

“You’re the only person I care about,” she said quietly.

“Me too.”

She hesitated. “Did you…like what I did? How did that make you feel, me going up there, naked, and…”

Heeseung tilted her chin up with his finger. “I loved it. I fucking loved it. I came in mere minutes. You’re amazing, baby.”

She reached out to hug him, and he wrapped his arms around her. Heeseung held her like she would slip away from him.

--

After that, she became different. Without even asking, she had started to wear tighter, shorter clothes. She used to go out in dresses, worn jeans, or she’d just wear his hoodies. Now, she wore bodycon dresses, miniskirts that practically gave you peeks of her ass, and she had cut her shirts up so that they displayed her midriff. It was amazing.

He liked to parade her around the mall now. The sight of men and women alike ogling his girlfriend made his cock so hard, he would walk with a limp. When he couldn’t handle it anymore, he would take her into the family bathroom, or slip into a change room and fuck her in there. Public sex was marginally better than regular sex with her, because he liked to imagine that men were fantasizing about her. He would close his eyes and imagine her naked, standing like a mannequin in a store, and all of the men who had lasciviously eyed her in the mall being forced to see her but unable to touch. It was a glorious time.

The novelty wore off after a few months, and he lost interest in having sex with her again. She could tell, and he knew that she was getting nervous. She performed at nude karaoke again, but even that did nothing for him.

He knew what he wanted from her.

On their first anniversary as a couple, Heeseung had taken her to brunch at a restaurant she had been eyeing. She wore this little black crop top with a tiny skirt, and her makeup was perfect.

Towards the end of their meal, Heeseung dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Baby,” he began, staring her in the eyes, “you are my better half. I can’t believe I’ve been able to spend a full year with you. You’re so kind, so sweet, so understanding, and so gorgeous.” He reached out and kissed her hand, and she giggled. “You’re the light of my life. You’re my reason to go on, and you deserve the moon. Unfortunately, all I can offer you is this.” Heeseung pulled a small black box out of his jacket pocket.

With a smile so bright Heeseung swore it could cause flowers to bloom, she opened the box. She gasped when she saw the charm bracelet he had bought her. “Oh, Heeseung,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand. “This is so expensive.”

“You deserve it,” he said softly, taking the bracelet and slipping it onto her wrist. “You deserve the world, baby.”

“I have it right here,” she replied.

They shared a kiss, then Heeseung leaned into her ear. “I was thinking…we could make this anniversary even more special.”

Her lips curled into a mischievous little smile. “How?”

“You said you’d do anything for me, right?”

She pulled away from him slightly, her lips setting into a thin line.

“Right?” he asked firmly, taking hold of her hand.

“Of course,” she said frantically, “anything for you, my love.”

---

The motel that Heeseung had driven them to was shoddy and sleazy. There were people outside smoking on lawn chairs, and dilapidated cars filled the parking lot. The neon sign affixed to the window flashed its name: Ethan’s Motel. Heeseung ushered his girlfriend inside, and he took note of the people populating the motel. Tweakers, men in sweaty wife-beaters.

He wondered which one would give his girlfriend the best fuck.

In the end, he told her to find someone while he set up the rooms. She asked how, and he told her to just be upfront with them. Heeseung had bought two rooms, which stunk of dust and reeked of bodily fluids. He hid a small camera in a flower pot- his girlfriend didn’t know about that – and shoved a nail through the wall to make a small hole, just to cover his ass.

Then he went to the other room to set up his laptop, which showed the feed from the camera. He set that on the small desk directly in front of his bed.

Within ten minutes, his girlfriend was leading a man into the motel room. He looked around their age and had a shaggy mop of hair. He was shorter than Heeseung, so Heeseung figured that his dick was probably smaller, too. But his girlfriend wouldn’t mind that, he was sure- who knows how much random dick she’d bounced on before they dated? Anyways, her hookup looked nice enough, but then again, he was hanging around a place like this.

“What did you say your name was?” she asked, still holding his hand. She sat down on the bed, and the guy followed.

“Jake,” he said. “And yours?”

She told him her name, and he nodded.

“Well, you’re…you’re hot as hell,” Jake said, laughing awkwardly. He scratched the back of his neck. Heeseung was getting really pissed off, but he told himself to be patient.

“You’re not too bad yourself,” she said lowly, tracing a finger down Jake’s chest. Heeseung shivered. “I think you know how to please a woman, right?”

Jake smirked and slowly pushed Heeseung’s girlfriend down until he was hovering above her. “Come find out.”

Heeseung watched Jake make out with his girlfriend. He watched his girlfriend lie, refusing to even touch Jake. It made him frown. She was supposed to be enjoying this. He wanted to see her in the throes of ecstasy, wanted to see her in all of her hedonistic glory.

Finally, she kissed Jake back, and he started taking his clothes off. He seemed as frantic as Heeseung was. She undressed, casting her clothes aside, and Jake was on top of her again.

Jake shifted around so that her ass was above his face as she lied on top of him. He started to lick her pussy, firmly gripping her ass with both of her hands. She started to suck him off, only licking the tip at first before throating Jake’s cock.

Heeseung whimpered, unzipping his jeans and only allowing himself minimal pressure as he palmed himself over his boxers. If he didn’t pace himself, he was going to cum before the fun truly began.

Jake continued to eat Heeseung’s girlfriend out, and Heeseung could hear his moans through the door. His girlfriend was being incredibly quiet, however, which was annoying. She pulled herself off of Jake and sat at the head of the bed. She spread her legs and looked up at Jake with empty eyes. Jake crawled towards her, and from that angle Heeseung could only see his hips moving rapidly and his girlfriend’s legs quivering. Her hands feebly wrapped around Jake and hugged him tightly as she pounded her.

Then Jake laid flat on his back and she got on top of him. The way she arched her back, practically dancing on Jake’s dick, made Heeseung moan. She gripped Jake’s shoulders and took him to the hilt, her eyes closed. Jake was holding her hips and whispering, “Fuck, fuck that’s nice, fuck.” It was annoying that this shmuck didn’t have anything better to say, but Heeseung didn’t really care. He was forcing himself to stroke himself at a snail’s pace, when all he wanted to do was rub his dick raw.

His girlfriend got off of Jake’s cock and went on all fours, so that she was facing the TV of the motel room. In other words, she was facing Heeseung’s camera. It felt like magic, like she knew or something. He couldn’t take it anymore, and Heeseung spit in his hand and started stroking himself directly. Jake kneeled behind Heeseung’s girlfriend and started ramming into her, one hand slapping her ass and the other pulling her hair back.

Heeseung took in the details of her body; the shuddering of her torso, the trembling of her arms as she steadied herself on the bed, the way that her ass pressed against Jake’s groin as he pounded into her, the way her breasts freely shook, the conflicted expression on her perfect little face, the sheen of sweat covering her from her head to her toes. Heeseung had always known that she was beautiful, but now he swore that she was an angel.

Jake panted, “I’m close, fuck, fuck!” so Heeseung rubbed his cock even faster, his other hand squeezing his balls. It was an Olympic feat to suppress his growing orgasm, but he didn’t want to mess this up. Not when his girlfriend was whimpering so prettily, when she was so consumed by her own pleasure, guilt, and embarrassment that she had probably forgotten all about the camera filming it all. Heeseung thought he might die.

With a guttural moan, Jake came in her, weakly thrusting a few more times to drain the last of his cum. Then he let her drop onto the bed, and she collapsed like a rag doll. Heeseung came as well, biting his lip harshly so he wouldn’t moan. He milked his cock with a white-hot fervor, riding out his high for as long as he could. When the aftershock hit him, all he could do was take quick gasps of air. Heeseung licked his lips and tasted blood.

Jake stroked his girlfriend’s hair, kissed her forehead, then whispered something in her ear. The sight of her limp and pliant, barely lifting her head to talk to Jake, was so arousing that Heeseung wished he had it in him to jack off again. This footage would last him for months.

As Heeseung closes his eyes to relive the memory, Jake put his clothes on. He dug around in his jacket, pulled out a few bills, and left them on her back. He left, closing the door with a soft click. Heeseung’s girlfriend remained where she was, as stiff as a corpse. Heeseung didn’t leave his motel room right away, the images in his head too vivid, too lush.

Heeseung walked inside of the motel room, and the smell of sex was intoxicating. “Baby, that was amazing- you, you were amazing.” His grin is stretched maniacally wide, and his steps towards the hidden camera were buoyant. “I came so hard, baby. It was perfect, just perfect.” He removed the camera from the potted plant and tucked it carefully into its bag.

She hadn’t said a word, just resting on her stomach. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was shaky. Poor thing, Heeseung thought, she hadn’t had a fucking like that since we got together. Poor little angel. He walked over to her and lay next to her on the bed. He kissed her over and over, holding her slick cheeks in her hands. “You’re so perfect,” Heeseung whispered. “Thank you so much, thank you, thank you. You’re amazing, thank you, thank you.”

She opened her eyes, and her apprehensive gaze made Heeseung’s cock stir. “I feel dirty,” she said, voice choked with emotion.

“No, baby,” he said, kissing her nose again. He gently crawls on top of her, circling his arms around her waist. “You’re not dirty. You’re good, so good. You’re the best. There’s nothing wrong with…with exploring. Didn’t it feel good? Didn’t you enjoy it?” His girlfriend hesitated, so he firmly said, “You enjoyed it. Right? I could tell you did.”

She nodded, bucking her head against his chin affectionately. “I did.”

“You did,” Heeseung breathed out. “I knew you would, my sweet girl.” His hand trailed down to his pants zipper, and he pulled his cock out. He gave it a few strokes, but the sight of another man’s cum coating her thighs was all the motivation he needed. “You’re the best,” he cooed, slipping inside of his girlfriend. It was so easy because she had been fucked open by Jake, and she took him so well. The only sound she made when he entered her was a soft little sigh.

Heeseung closed his eyes and thought of her face again, the contortion of her features into that portrait of debauchery. His arms remained tight around her in a stiff embrace, his cheek resting on her head. He thought about how amazing it would be to see another man fuck her again. Maybe two, three, a train of strangers having their turns with his girlfriend, his beautiful, kind girlfriend. Heeseung couldn’t have pulled out of her if he had tried as the fantasies overtake him. He finished inside of her, hot jizz clamoring out of him in spurts, and wiped his tip on one of the bills Jake left on her back. The room felt like it was spinning, and every nerve ending in his body felt alight with fire. “Thank you,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to her neck, “I love you so much.”

Heeseung pushes the money off of her back and carries his girlfriend into the small bathroom. He placed her inside of the cracked bathtub and filled it with warm water. He left her there to get her toiletry bag, and when he came back she was staring at the ceiling. As he scrubbed her body, he pressed kisses to her skin. He washed her like a piece of alabaster pottery, washing her thoroughly. When he dried her off, he noticed that she hadn’t said a single word. “Baby?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Baby?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Heeseung.”

He carried her to bed and dressed her in her grey robe. He stripped to his boxers and kissed her cheeks before he pulled the covers over them both. He pulled her head onto his chest and stroked her soft, downy hair.

He had never felt so in love.

[peachhcs]

a trip to van

hughes!sister x will smith au (samy + will)

samy spends a weekend in van with her two favorite people

4.5k words

hiii here's this that i've been working on for a few days. i thought this idea was super cutie and wanted to write more quinn and samy dynamic. also lowkey predicting that sjs vs. van game in a week so lol this won't be accurate but anyways let me know if u guys like these longer fics or not bc i think they're fun to write sometimes!! (also i imagine samy taking these pics of quinn and will)

au masterlist

"i actually can't believe you convinced me to let you stay for a whole weekend," the oldest hughes brother teased samy as they climbed into the car once her stuff was in the back.

"oh shut up. you've been begging to spend more time with me. plus, i haven't been to van in years," the younger sibling countered as they shared a laugh.

"yeah, you're right. you're right. it's good to see you, squirt," quinn squeezed her arm across the armrest as they pulled out of the pickup line.

it was thursday night and samy was in vancouver for the weekend to watch her brother and will play one another on saturday. she was ecstatic to say the least to be spending some time with quinn and getting to see will. it wasn't often that the oldest and youngest sibling spent 1 on 1 time together—in the summer if they were lucky, but even then, quinn had things keeping him busy and so did samy.

"mom told me you need to take me to a hundred different places while i'm here. she sent me a whole list," the brunette chuckled.

"oh really? like where?"

"apparently this bakery that sells really good bagels. there's an italian restaurant in downtown mom really liked that she wants me to try. i dunno, i'll send you the list," samy clicked around to add quinn to the note.

"alright, i'll have to check it out. is she expecting me to pay for all your meals this weekend?" the older boy hummed, amusement on his features.

"i mean i won't complain if you do. i am a broke college student," the younger brunette grinned.

"good thing i make millions," samy hit her brother's arm for that comment making quinn laugh out loud.

"you better stay humble for someone making 8.6 million a year," the girl mumbled, still unbelievable that her brothers were that rich for doing something they genuinely loved doing. she knew she'd never make anywhere close to that even if she did put in the same amount of work.

either way, she secretly enjoyed bugging and asking her brothers for things knowing how much money they had and that they could definitely swing helping her out with groceries here and there.

"plus, you got your boyfriend making a good couple hundred thousand. you're in good hands," quinn added and samy just flushed, rolling her eyes slightly.

"don't worry, i know. i've been told many times that i should just drop out of college and move to san jose because will can support us," he poked at her every time about it and sometimes samy also still couldn't believe her childhood best friend now boyfriend was rich enough to support her and she didn't have to do a thing. "don't worry, i got you, squirt. welcome to luxury for the weekend," quinn grinned as he leaned back in his seat and really embraced his millionaire status inside his expensive car and fancy sunglasses atop his nose.

—

later that night, samy sat in quinn's apartment on facetime with their parents plus jack and luke so they could see she made it in safely.

"i'm so happy you had a safe flight! how is it so far?" ellen wondered with a bright smile while quinn slipped into frame.

"it's been really good. quinn's been a really great host," she pinched her brother's cheeks making him push her hands away.

"damn, i'm so jealous i'm not in vancouver right now. it could've been a reunion!" jack exclaimed.

"hey you get to see will in like a week when he plays you guys in jersey," samy smiled a bit, sad that she couldn't fly out for that reunion.

"yeah, i guess. how's quinn's? has he made you his weird protein shake yet?" the middle hughes wondered while luke snickered.

"dude, it's not that bad, i swear. it gets me up in the morning," quinn rolled his eyes.

"oh it's bad, don't try gaslighting yourself. if he does make it, don't drink it. it had me on the toilet for an hour," jack mumbled while samy laughed and ellen and jim just shook their heads.

"well, i'm glad you've been having a good time so far. it's rare that i see my kids getting along on their own," ellen chimed in.

"hey! we get along! what are you taking about?" luke defended himself.

"mhm, yeah, sure you do," jim chuckled.

"we do! i swear. at least jack and i kind of get along better," the second to youngest sibling patted jack's arm and the two boys gave their most convincing smile.

"key word: kind of," samy chirped.

"oh shut up," luke rolled his eyes at his sister.

"there it is," quinn mumbled, concealing his laughter so their parents or luke wouldn't see.

"well, anyway, it's good to see my kids sort of together. you two have fun in van this weekend! i want lots of pictures and tell will we said hi!" ellen cheered, breaking up the bickering before it got worse. her kids smiled, all nodding.

"will do. love you guys," samy waved before disconnecting from the call.

quinn jumped up from the couch to continue making dinner. the siblings sat in comfortable silence for a moment until the older boy decided to keep talking, "so how have you and will been doing? okay?"

"yeah, we're good. we talk like every night. it's good," the brunette nodded.

"good, i'm glad. i'm happy you guys worked things out," quinn nodded in approval.

"yeah, me too. we're still..readjusting, but it's been easy i think now that will's had time to settle into california and the team."

"that's good. i mean it'll take time, but i'm glad to hear it's been easy," samy appreciated her brother's words knowing some may think she took him back way too soon and way too easily.

"thanks. what about you? have you found anyone or been seeing anyone?" she loved poking into her brothers' lives. it wasn't easy with quinn considering how closed off he was and how easy it was for him to hide things because he lived in a different country.

"funny, but no. i haven't really been seeing anyone," the older boy hummed.

"lameee, we need to get you someone. i mean don't you have like girls lined at your feet?" samy giggled, thinking about all the edits she saw about her brothers on tiktok.

"very funny. i'm just trying to work on myself. is that a crime?"

"of course not, but i feel like mom's looking for another daughter," the younger brunette teased a bit.

"she'll find one in jack's girlfriend. i have a feeling he's getting married first out of all of us," it wasn't too out of character for jack since he was the middle child and all.

"you think so?"

"i mean i don't know, but yeah. he likes jumping into those things," quinn chuckled.

"yeah, i could see it. i think it will be jack, you, me, then luke. or luke and i are switched and i'm last."

"you last? that's surprising."

"well will and i aren't getting married anytime soon. we wanna live a bit and establish ourselves before anything serious," samy nodded. she wasn't too big on getting engaged so soon anyways. it was probably the only thing she wanted to take her time with other than having kids. that was a way later thing.

"alright, fair. i guess i could say the same. i'm not looking for anything," quinn shrugged. he wasn't huge on any of those life milestones knowing he'd find his person when he was ready.

"do you think you're gonna stay in van forever?" samy changed the subject, leaning her arm across the back of the couch and resting her head down.

"i mean probably. i've got a good few years left in me. plus, i like it here. it reminds me of being a kid and growing up in toronto," the older brunette smiled.

"i kind of miss living in toronto. i basically grew up there, you know?" a good 12 years of samy's life was spent in toronto and they were probably some of the best years.

"yeah, i know. they were good years for sure. you could always go back, you know. move back up there," it was definitely something quinn thought a lot about whenever he did decide to retire from the ice. even though he loved michigan, those times in toronto would always call back to him.

it called back to all of the hughes siblings.

"yeah, maybe when i'm like forty and will's retired," the girl grinned and quinn nodded in agreement.

the rest of the night, the two watched some hockey highlights and then a movie before calling it a night. samy excitedly awaited will's arrival tomorrow afternoon where he was able to pull a few strings and fly out early to spend a bit more time with her and quinn.

—

the two siblings rode back to the airport to gather will while samy continuously checked his flight to see if he had landed yet.

"the plane's not getting any closer every minute you look at it," the older boy laughed, watching the way his sister constantly looked at the website.

"i know, i'm just excited," the genuine happiness was a good look on samy that quinn enjoyed seeing. he hated seeing her so sad this past summer, so he was glad her spirits were back up and she was her usual, bubbly self.

"does this mean i'm gonna be third wheel for the rest of the weekend?"

"no, i promise. we'll just be all gross and kiss when you aren't looking," the girl laughed to herself while quinn rolled his eyes.

"great, great. thanks for having some decency," the boy mumbled but he was secretly smiling.

they pulled back into the airport pickup line where quinn started getting serious deja vu from yesterday. the two of them sat in comfortable silence on their phones and listening to the soft hum of the radio in the background. a few minutes passed when samy began hitting her brother's arm repeatedly, her face glowing.

"his plane landed! he should be coming out," she squealed, jumping out of the car. quinn followed after, the two of them leaning against the side waiting for the blonde.

the younger brunette was bouncing on her heels, scanning every face that came through the doors knowing will was bound to walk through them any second.

finally, will came through, his big hockey bag slung over his shoulder, backpack strapped to his back and sharks hat to cover his messy hair. samy jumped up, running to greet her boyfriend in the middle where quinn couldn't help the smile on his lips.

will dropped his bag so he could lift samy into his arms, the couple spinning around in their bone crushing hug. "missed you," the brunette hummed, pulling back a bit once her feet were back on the ground.

"i missed you, too. its so good to see you," will's hold on her waist drew her in closer, admiring all of her features up close after only seeing them through a screen for months.

"i'm so excited you're here. this is gonna be so fun," samy grinned and pulled her boyfriend down for a kiss, not caring that they were in public or who was watching.

they melted into one another, lips and bodies molding together. quinn, who was watching the entire exchange, pretended to act disgusted which pulled the two apart.

"sorry to break up this reunion, but maybe save that for back at the apartment?" he raised his eyebrow. samy rolled his eyes while will flushed, letting the girl go.

"good to see ya, smitty. it's been awhile," quinn opened his arms for a quick hug.

"it's good to see you, too, quinn. thanks for letting me stay for the weekend," the blonde smiled.

"my apartment is your apartment. although the ice will be a different story tomorrow," the older boy teased a bit, laughing when he saw will pale a bit.

"just kidding. it's gonna be a good game tomorrow. i'm excited to play you and see what you got," quinn smacked will's shoulder and a bit of a nervous chuckle left the blonde's lips.

"alright, don't scare him. let's get back," samy broke them up, tugging them back to the car so they could stop taking up a spot.

—

once quinn and samy helped will get settled in, the oldest hughes brother let the couple have some time to themselves. they sat out on the balcony curdled up together enjoying the nice weather and city below. it was nice de-stressor for will before the game, too.

"so how do you like it so far? be honest," samy wondered, referring to will's time in the nhl so far.

"i really like it. it's like a dream come true," will said honestly which made the girl smile.

"i'm really glad. you look like you've been thriving."

"i do miss boston and the guys and my family and michigan and you though. it's not the same not having all of you an arm's length away," the blonde frowned briefly, thinking of the boys and his parents on the other side of the country from him.

"i get it. we miss you, too, but i'm glad you've been loving it so far. you've got a pretty big name to yourself now," samy giggled while will rolled his eyes a bit.

"just so you know, i'm only thinking of you when i do those press interviews," his words made the youngest hughes blush, burying her face into his shoulder.

"i actually can't believe all of you are in the nhl now. it still feels like yesterday listening to you guys talk about that dream in our living room, or pretending you were playing a real game back on our rink in toronto," all of those memories were still so fresh in their minds, it was hard to believe it was nearly 10 years ago.

"wow, i remember those days. i was always so excited to fly to canada to visit you guys because i knew i'd get to play hockey," will chuckled.

"back when you were more interested in seeing my brothers than me," samy teased.

"only because we were like nine and thought we were gross and had cooties," the blonde countered and the two shared a laugh.

"i was telling quinn yesterday that i miss being out there. i spent my whole childhood there."

"yeah, toronto holds a lot of good memories for us. i miss it too. maybe we can go back one day?" will raised his eyebrows while a little grin appeared on his girlfriend's lips.

"i had the same thought. i said maybe when you're retired and we're like forty or something," they both laughed again.

"forty? i don't know if i'll be playing for that long. i'll probably be done at around 30 or so."

"so thirty. we'll set our plan now," samy determined and will squeezed his arm tighter around her torso, kissing the top of her head.

"sounds like a great plan."

—

the next morning the apartment was buzzing with excitement mixed with nerves and adrenaline. quinn had to be at the rink in the late afternoon and will needed to meet up with his team, so the three spent the morning getting themselves ready. samy was a bit torn trying to figure out what to wear, wanting to support both will and quinn.

"what do you think?" she stepped out of the bathroom to show off her outfit—a jean mini skirt paired with one of will's sharks shirts that had his name on the back and one of quinn's many canucks hats.

will fell silent as he took in her appearance when she did a full spin. the gears in his head started turning and a feeling he hadn't felt in a while bubbled in his chest.

the whole idea of playing in the nhl was something will dreamed of forever. dating his best friend was another unimaginable dream and now the two were colliding and knowing samy would be in the arena wearing his number and his name so everyone would know she was his...the blonde's brain nearly stopped working.

"will?" samy snapped will from his daze.

"huh? sorry. you look..wow.." he mumbled, losing his train of thought as he snaked his hands around her waist, drinking in her outfit even more.

"what's that mean?" the girl chuckled, noticing her boyfriend's lustful expression.

"i just..i'm so lucky. you look good wearing my name," will dipped his head down to place a kiss to samy's lips.

he pulled her flush against his chest, hands wandering with a mind of their own. samy fiddled with will's loosely buttoned undershirt and other hand dancing into his curls. the hockey player's hands drifted further down her hips until he grabbed ahold of her ass and squeezed. she giggled at the action.

they pulled back for a second, panting into one another's mouths. will wanted more. he craved more and so did samy, so they reattached their lips. a soft moan escaped will when samy pulled particularly hard on his hair. her lips felt so good against his own.

"god, you're so gorgeous," will pulled back, lips tinted from samy's pink lip gloss.

"right back at ya, hot stuff," the brunette winked and will couldn't stop himself. he dove back in for more, the desire burning from his head to the tips of his toes.

he backed her against the wall of the bedroom where his lips started dipping further down onto her neck. samy moaned when will found her sweet spot almost immediately, tugging harder at the base of his curls.

"will...people are gonna see," she said but she didn't make any move to pull him away.

"good, let them see," he said, the possession clear in his voice and fuck, if samy didn't find that super attractive.

"we should stop. you have to go soon," she tried knowing he was due to see his team in thirty minutes.

"how soon?" the blonde mumbled, still attacking samy's neck.

"like thirty minutes."

"i can do it in ten," his words sent a rush of heat down the girl's spine, but she knew they couldn't. not now anyways.

"will, not now. later, i promise," she finally found the courage to pull him away from her. he looked back up, breath heavy and lips swollen in pink. he was such a sight to see that had samy wishing they didn't have to go.

"i'm keeping you to that promise then," will smirked.

a quick knock on the door caught their attention, the two of them tensing slightly. "yeah?"

"leaving in fifteen!" quinn called.

"be out soon!" samy yelled back, returning her gaze to her boyfriend's burning stare, placing one last kiss to his lips.

"you're gonna do amazing out there. don't be nervous. you know how quinn plays."

"i know, i know. just scared he'll rip me to shreds," the blonde mumbled with a low chuckle, samy going to help him get himself together as she buttoned up his shirt. 

"even if he does, know he's trying to push you and help you get better," samy knew quinn wasn't going easy on will tonight, but she also knew he was gonna use all the tactics he knew that would push the blonde out of his comfort zone a little to get him to play harder. 

it was how luke played on will too whenever they went head to head back in michigan. 

the two finished getting ready, slipping out of the bedroom as quinn was making sure he had everything and everything was turned off before they left. 

"nice touch," the older boy noticed his sister's hat, smiling a bit as he flicked it up. 

"don't worry, i didn't forget about you," she cheesed as the three of them headed down to the garage. 

quinn dropped will off around the back of the rink where the sharks were gathering in the locker room. the siblings wished the blonde luck before they drove back around to the front and the cameras and media were waiting for them. 

"good luck, quinn. i'll see you later," samy smiled as she climbed out of the car. 

"thanks, squirt. text me if you need anything before we get on," the two departed as samy headed to the doors and quinn headed towards the cameras to capture the player's game day outfits and walk up. 

—

rogers arena was electric leading up to the game. samy had her spot just behind the canucks bench behind the glass where quinn wanted her incase she needed his attention or something—always looking out for his baby sister even during the game. the two waved to one another before samy searched for will doing his warmups. the black and dark teal was a nice addition to the away game jeresey's and she spotted her boyfriend a little bit further down. 

the fans were excited for this matchup, canucks fans loud and eager to get the game underway against the two newest rookies on the sharks. macklin skated by, quickly waving to the brunette. she grinned, waving back and giving two thumbs up indicating good luck. 

the game revved up quickly as quinn took to the ice against will in the first period. samy saw how much the sharks were improving with each game, but she knew the canucks still had the upper hand with their older players and more experience. she was on the edge of her seat watching her boyfriend and bother race towards the puck sliding across the ice. 

quinn was up in will's business, pushing and shoving the younger boy for the puck, so will pushed back harder. the two were basically dancing with one another, the older hughes brother making will work for it. 

some of the other canucks players bumped against the blonde and then in the next second, he was on the ground from a hit. the whistle blew, but will bounced back up, a little flustered but okay. it was a clean hit, so no penalties. samy sighed and then made eye contact with her brother as he skated towards the bench. cool off a bit her look said while quinn just shrugged, but he understood. 

at the end of the first, canucks were up 2-0. samy texted her parents updates even though they were also probably watching. she sent quick messages to gabe and ryan as well as hannah. 

gabe

ur brother's got killer aim

samy

tell me about it

he's making will work for it

ryan

figures

during every intermission, the cameras always panned to the players' family members if they were in the stands. when the jumbotron showed samy she quickly waved and pointed to her canucks hat. the fans cheered, always excited to see quinn's siblings or parents in attendance. 

the second and third periods played out almost the same as the first. the guys were fast on the ice for the puck and scoring goals. canucks led now by 5-3 and samy knew this would be another loss on the sharks side. she knew it'd discourage the boys, but there was definitely improvement from last game. will got his stick on the puck a few times, passing to his line, but still not enough to over power the older guys on the canucks team. 

when the game ended the fans cheered loudly for quinn's team. samy cheered for her brother too while also giving will and macklin a smile for trying their best. she knew press would take some time, so the girl mingled with fans as they left the rink and back into the lobby. 

she enjoyed getting to talk to girls who looked up to her and parents who congratulated her on having a good soccer season so far, asking questions about conference games and the national title coming up soon. 

will came out before quinn now showered and back in his suit. samy made her way over to him, giving him a loving hug and kiss on the cheek, "sorry you lost, but you played well." 

"thanks, it's okay. i knew we would against quinn. he definitely pushed me though," the blonde chuckled. 

"see, i told you. not too bad," samy grinned, squeezing his arm as the couple waited for quinn. 

he came out a few minutes later, waving to the two. "press wants some pics of all of us around back. is that okay?" the older boy wondered while samy and will nodded. 

they followed the older boy around the back where the media snapped a few pictures of the siblings and will together to share online later. once those were done, the three climbed back into the car to head back to the apartment, feeling exhausted from the long night. 

quinn's ringtone started playing through the car as ellen's name lit up the screen. the older brunette answered, "hi mom." 

"hey quinny, great game! you guys back at the apartment in once piece?" the older woman said. 

"we're on our way back right now. samy and will are here." 

"hi mom," the younger girl called. 

"hi ellen," will said too. 

"hi guys. sorry you guys lost, willie. you played really well, though. it can be tough with these big, old nhl players," ellen chuckled. 

"mom, are you calling me old?" quinn cut in as samy giggled too. 

"yeah, i am. just wanted to check in with you guys and make sure everyone had fun. any plans for tonight?" 

the three exchanged a glance, the silence taken as probably nothing since the late game tired all of them out. "probably a movie or something. kind of beat," quinn answered. 

"i bet. well, have fun guys! i'll talk to you soon. love you." 

"love you too, mom," samy and quinn said in unison, giggles escaping both of their lips. 

once they got back into the apartment, samy collapsed onto the couch, glad to be back in a warm temperatures and not on a frozen metal bench. will copied her movements, falling down beside her while quinn chuckled at their behavior. 

"you guys can pick out whatever movie. want anything to eat?" the older boy wondered as he started shedding himself of his tie. 

"whatever you wanna make, we'll eat," samy said. 

"got it," quinn disappeared into his room. 

"so one day this really could be our life," will hummed, breaking the small silence that had filled between the couple. 

"it really could," the brunette agreed as her eyes flicked around her brother's apartment. 

"only...2 more years?" the blonde raised his eyebrow. 

"possibly depending on what career path i choose," samy reached up to mess with some of the misplaced curls hanging off will's forehead. 

"sounds like a dream," the boy smiled warmly, moving so their heads were touching. 

"yeah, for real." 

will went in to press a sweet kiss to samy's lips, all the love in his chest feeling full and abundant. they pulled apart knowing quinn would come back out any second. 

"also i think ryan and gabe wanted to facetime to say hey and talk about the game," samy giggled while the blonde playfully rolled his eyes. 

"of course they did. don't forget about that promise you made to me earlier," the boy grinned as samy stood up to change into something more comfortable. 

"oh, don't worry. i didn't forget," she winked, heading into the guest room leaving will to quickly follow after her. 

[cherriesformatt]

9 months || matt sturniolo part 3

matt x fem!reader

summary: just how you and matt figured out life during your pregnancy

warings: pregnancy, suggestive, being sick

word count: 2,2k

a/n: guys thanks so much for all the notes 🥹 means a world to me and 100 followers wtf 🍒ily im not that proud of this one. Let me know if I should still keep going with the next part. Didn’t proofread yet!

The doctor said I couldn’t fly till my second trimester. I was really sick and pregnancy wasn’t easy on me. So we decided that we will wait to tell our families because we really wanted to tell them in person. Chris and Nick were great with keeping the secret. No one besides 4 of us knew. Even Laura and my boss didn’t know. I worked from home so I was able to do my job even when I wasn’t in my best form.

I had basically 3 babysitters now. Matt, Chris and Nick treated me like glass and to be honest sometimes I liked it (mostly when I was rotting on the couch and needed a snack) but most of the time I just yelled at them that I really could do everything without them staring at my soul.

When I was so sick all the time Matt decided that I should just stay with them for now. But the next thing I see is him moving my entire apartment here. I was pretty minimalistic so I didn’t have too much stuff. I just didn’t extend my rental and decided that would be for the best now.

My doctor said I was clear to fly when I was 16 weeks pregnant. So we organized trip to Boston. Sooner than later because I was starting to show and also because I already felt better. I gave up and started taking meds to stop being so nauseous. Every time I would try to gave them up everything would just make me sick.

Justin picked four of us from the airport and I took a passenger seat in the van. The flight was pretty good. I was just tired. The car had an air freshener and it’s smell just make my stomach flip.

“Oh no” I said and released I did not take my meds in the plane because I was sleeping. And also I couldn’t find them in my bag.

“Justin pull over …please” I kept my hand on my mouth.

He looked at me and when he saw me he momentarily did pull over to the side and I just jumped out of the car and threw up. I felt my hair being hold and a gentle hand rubbed my back.

“It’s okay baby… just let it all out” Matt said with his voice being worried.

When I was done I rinsed my mouth with water that Matt gave me and looked at him.

“This air freshener gotta go” I said quietly but he did take it out before I got back in.

“What are you pregnant or something, kid?” Justin looked at me jokingly but I only smiled at him awkwardly.

That’s how he found out.

MaryLou, Jimmy and boys grandma found out because Chris couldn’t keep his shit together.

“No she doesn’t drink” Chris said after their dad offered me my favorite wine. I was the only one who would usually share a glass or two with them and Justin. I was also over 21.

“How come? That’s your favorite” Jimmy said but I just looked at Matt.

“O fuck I’m so sorry” Chris said realizing but it just made it worst. We had to tell them now and then.

“So we came here… not only because we missed you but also to share some news with you all” Matt said really calmly.

“We’re having a baby” He aded looking at his parents and I just gripped his hand really hard.

“Oh my…” MaryLou said and she stood up and came to us and just gave us both a hug.

“You won’t believe this… but what I told Jimmy when you went to drop your bags upstairs. I said something is different… and you honey.. you’re glowing” She looked at me and honestly I couldn’t see that but I heard that a lot lately.

“What can I say…. I didn’t expect that so soon but congratulations kids” Jimmy came up to us as well and gave Matt a reassuring shoulder squeeze and I got a big smile.

“Oh Matty… I always knew you’re going to be the first one to give me great grandchildren” Their grandma smiled at us and Matt just went to her and gave her a big hug.

Rest of the night we spend watching their old videos and baby photos and I just cried so many times. Because I realized I couldn’t wait to have the baby here with us.

They took the news so well and I was really stressed about it because at first I was always worried about being older than Matt and now I’m also older and pregnant.

But they just always made me feel like home here and the rest of the trip just went so well. Talking to someone with so much experience gave me just more power to get through it all.

Then we did my family after coming back from Boston. I didn’t want to put myself out for such a long flight. Since my family was back in Europe. So we did what I dreamed about since I saw that commercial back when I was in middle school.

“Everyone…I want you to meet someone” I said while we were on a family group chat FaceTime.

I stood up and Matt readjusted the screen so it was on my belly. Which I swear was just bigger everyday. I felt like weight was lifted off my body, because not telling my mom and siblings about that was hard. Everyone freak out and I needed to answered 100 questions but luckily my mom didn’t make us say we will get married before the baby comes.

Half way through we were just getting really excited and everyone knew. Everyone except the whole Internet. But honestly that wasn’t to hard to keep from. We always did keep our relationships private and I wasn’t that much on social media so it was alright.

Also that was the time when I just couldn’t resist Matt. I honestly felt like jumping his bones 24h and I’m not even kidding. That was his favorite part of me being pregnant.

We also did decide that we rent a house that went in the market in the same neighborhood that the triples lived now. And we got the house so we started to renovate it like we wanted it. Boys were happy that it’s literally next doors but also it’s our own space that we would need to learn to have.

Nick was filming and photographing all weeks of my pregnancy. At first I didn’t like it because I was camera shy. I usually worked behind it. And now when I’m looking at Polaroids he made me take every week. They made me so happy.

“I love the name Noah” Matt said while his head was on my boobs and his hand on my belly.

I smiled. We didn’t want to know the gender till birth so while we talked to the baby we just called it “peanut”.

“I actually love it too… and we could do N O A H for a boy and N O A” I said and he looked at me so happy that I liked his idea.

Me and Madi would go shopping sometimes and all we did was just buying baby stuff. Most of the stuff I got were the ones I’ve learned from birth classes. I was obsessed with reading all the books about newborns and every now and then I’ll see Matt reading them too when he was not working.

One afternoon Chris came back from his meeting and he was so excited. He handed me w bag and I opened it.

“Chris are you kidding me? I’m going to cry” I put two mini sets of fresh love on the table. One was blue and one was pink.

“That’s the cutest thing that I have ever seen” I hugged him tightly.

“That’s from your favorite uncle kid your first outfit” He said looking at my belly and I froze because I felt a movement inside. First time ever so hard.

“Oh fuck… that was so weird” I said.

“What happened?” Chris stepped away from me.

“The baby is moving and I can feel it so well! Oh my gosh it did it again!!”

“Can I feel it?” Chris asked clearly exited.

“Yes..give me your hand” I said and I put his hand where I last felt it. And when the baby did it again I looked at him.

“Did you feel it?” I asked and he just looked at me with his eyes wide open .

“I did… a little.. that’s so weird… bro you’re a hero” he said.

“What’s that screaming all about?” My boyfriend joined us in the kitchen.

“I just made your baby kick!” Chris said.

“Oh my goodness are you just gonna claim it on yourself?” I laughed.

“What?” Matt came up to me and put his hands on my belly.

I readjusted them and looked at his eyes.

“Now…she did it again” I said and his eyes widened.

“That’s… wow” he said.

“I know” I whispered.

“You also just called Peanut a “she”” Matt smiled.

He knew I was having dreams about us having a daughter. That was another thing since I was pregnant. I had so many vivid dreams.

“Oh that was an accident…” I said.

After my 32nd week we had everything ready in our house and we started to sleep there and hang out. I worked there too. I had my little office. But I started to be really tired so I took my time off. Matt was really happy about it. Because we had more time to spend together, just two of us before there was a three people in the pack.

He was just perfect. He would rubbed my feet when they were swollen and give me a massage every night. He talked to my belly so much and just loved us both to the moon and back. All this time it was really hard for us but he made it so easy in the same time.

When I was freaking out the day my waters broke. He just packed a car and kept his cool. He was beside me every second. His brothers and our moms outside the delivery room.

“That’s a nice one if I’m going to have my baby to this song I might actually name it skies” I said in between taking my deep breaths. I let everyone be part of my delivery day playlist. Lil Skies was currently playing for the 7th time.

“Oh please baby” Matt laughed and rubbed my back as I rolled myself on the ball trying to get through my constructions.

When it came to actual pushing I thought I’m gonna kill everyone in the room. I decided that I wanted to give birth in water. So when I was ready we moved to the pool that nurses got ready.

Matt was siting behind me telling me sweet nothings while I was screaming and holding his hands so hard that I’m pretty sure blood couldn’t get to them.

While I heard crying in the room that wasn’t mine. Everything just went away. All the pain. They put the baby on my chest and I hold it.

“It’s a girl…” One of the nurses said and I kissed her temple. She was so little.

“We have a daughter…” Matt whispered as he hold as both. Both of us crying at this point and just couldn’t believe it.

“She is perfect” I whispered and touched her little nose.

“You both are, you’re a hero” Matt kissed my head.

When they took her for check up. Nurses helped me to get myself together while Matt went to take a shower. Took him 5 minutes because he was scared to miss the moment they will bring her back. I actually couldn’t keep my eyes open after they gave me pain meds I just passed out.

When I woke up there were flowers, balloons and gift bags everywhere. And I saw Matt at the corner of the room with little Noa on his bare chest.

“Matty…” I whispered.

He looked at me and stood up holding her. He was so natural about it.

“Look mama is up” He gently placed her in my open arms and I looked at her. I could just stare at her forever.

“Is everything okay? What’s all of this?” I asked quietly.

“Both of you are great, you slept some time, you deserved it, I send everyone home after they saw Noa for a little bit. That’s all form the favorite uncles apparently” He said with a big smile.

“They’re crazy…come here on the bed” I said and moved a little. He did as I said and I rested my head on his shoulder.

“Thank you…she’s so perfect” Matt said and kissed my cheek.

“Well we did it together I just had more work” I laughed.

He did too and Noa opened her eyes and looked at us. But didn’t cry. She really was perfect. Well she was a Sturniolo after all.

That’s all I needed. My little family.

[stariekis]

birthday boy.

pairing : non idol!jungwon + fem!reader . genre : fluff + suggestive . cw : kissing . wc : 2.9 k not proofread

— synopsis : celebrating his birthday with the people he loves the most ! with a tiny twist ...

— note : HAPPY WONI DAY!!! my brightest star ⭐🤲🏻 i love him so much pls he is everything to me ˙◠˙ hope he has an amazing day today and hope you guys like this one shot <3

He was having the most awful day ever. Even though it was his birthday he had to spend the whole day at the company alone and, on top of that, you and his members haven't talked to him for the whole day.

He wasn't really upset about his group mates but he felt pretty sad when he realized that you didn't texted him.

He didn't want nothing more than to come back home and spend some time for himself, being able to enjoy his 20 birthday and rest after such a tiring and kind of sad day was all he needed.

He finished all his duties at the company and finally it was time to go back home. Tiredness taking over his body as soon as he step on the van, almost falling asleep as soon as he sat on his seat.

Once he finally reached the entrance of his (and your) apartment he let out the biggest sigh, he needs to take a shower and lay on his bed as soon as possible.

But as he inserted his key to open the door he heard someone whispering inside os his apartment. He was confused, all the members where at their respective houses and you probably were sleeping. Or that's what he thought.

Finally opening the door completely he was shock when he made eye contact with the seven of you, his bearest best friends and his pretty girlfriend standing in front of him with balloons and a cake on your hands.

— 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BOY' shouted jake as jungwon dropped his belongings on the entrance and take off his shoes. Heeseung took the cake out of your hands as he watches Jungwon running towards you with his arms open.

You giggled as he hugged you, hiding his face on your neck leaving small soft kisses there.

— 'The surprise was also our idea you know?' said Sunghoon with a smirk on his face. All of you burst out laughing, Jungwon removed himself from your embrace pecking your lips before turning to his friends, giving them a big hug.

All of you moved to your living room to get the party started. After blowing the candles you gave him your present, he loves matching things with you so you gave him a pair of rings; one was a sun and the other one was a moon. He looked at you with the biggest smile on his face and, taking your hand, he place the sun one on your finger kissing your hand right after.

The hours kept passing and, after opening all the presents and having dinner together you guys decided to call it a night and the boys went back home.

As soon as you close the door you felt a pair of arms sneaking around you waist, hugging you from behind. — 'Thank you so much for this baby, i was having the worst day ever but its was completely worth it' Jungwon whispered in your ear.

You turned around now facing him, placing you hands around his neck you gave him a kiss. — 'Sorry for ignoring you Wonie, i was really busy preparing all of this that i didn't have time to text you' you said. He place one of his hand on your neck, pulling your face closer to his.

— 'You still have time to repay me for that ' the tone of his voice dropped a few times and now there was a smirk adorning his pretty lips.

You smiled, knowing perfectly what he meant with that. As much as you loved the boys you couldn't wait for them to be gone so you would be able to spend some time with your boyfriend. — 'Now that you mentioned it i actually have another present for you' you kissed him, this time the kiss was much intense that the other ones you shared, hearing him breathing through his nose and melting in your arms as soon as your lips touched his.

Your hands that once were around his neck were now grabbing the strings of his grey hoodie. You separate yourself from him and, pulling him by his collar, you started walking towards your shared bedroom.

Let's say he had the best birthday of his life.

[unabashegirl]

Different 3 | College HS

Harry's quiet, routine-driven life changes one weekend when he meets Y/N through a mutual friend at her party. She comes from a superficial, materialistic world with absent parents who believe money solves everything. Despite their differences, something clicks that night, and Y/N can't stop thinking about him.

Author’s note: hello everyone, I am so happy you are all enjoying the last few written pieces that I’ve published.

check out my patreon (starting at $2) and get full access to all 25 chapters, various one shots and much more :)

masterlist

What are you doing right now?

He played with the corners of his phone’s cover as he looked down at the message that he had just received from her. They had been talking since the day after her soccer match. Harry unconsciously bit his bottom lip, thinking of a response that wouldn’t sound too nerdy or boring. He had been studying for a test. He was about to sit down and play some video games with his roommate. There was no chance he would admit that he was studying on a Friday evening.

Nothing much🫠

He wrote and deleted the words a few times; hating the way he sound and how uncertain he felt when he was around her. He finally stopped making any sort of assumption and pressed send. He placed his phone beside him before turning on the console. Right before he could grab the control, his phone beeped. Harry closed his eyes for a second and decided to leave it for a few minutes, so he would come across as desperate. That was until he realized he couldn’t concentrate on the game and gave in.

I am hungry

Do you want to come with me to pick up some food?

He smiled like a fool. He hadn’t seen her since that Monday. He wanted to ask her to spend some time together, but he had been too scared of being rejected. He wanted to be with her, but he thought he needed to be realistic. She was way out of his league. Y/N was too special to be with someone so ordinary as him. Although the thought of Y/N becoming his girlfriend made his skin get goosebumps and his heart rate rise.

Right now?

Yes. I’ll pick you up

Ok

Harry quickly freshened up and threw on a long sleeve shirt, some sweatpants, vans, and a beanie since it was starting to get colder. It was a Friday, and he still couldn’t understand how Y/N was free and more importantly willing to hang out with him.

On my way 🚗

“Where are you going?” Ganesh, Harry’s roommate asked, watching him freak out. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes. I’m just going out with a friend” He responded, just as he found the keys to the room.

I am here!😊

“Who is she?” He had never seen Harry so agitated and so different. He was always so collected and calm, nothing ever bothered him.

“No one you know” He lied and shut the room door.

“Hi!” Y/N smiled, turning down the radio as he got into the car. She wore sweatpants and a green t-shirt.

“Sorry for the wait. I couldn’t find my keys” He apologized just as she started the drive.

“What do you want to have?” She asked as she drove down the busy streets. “I could honestly eat anything. I am starving”.

“Anything would be lovely” Y/N nodded as she thought of where they could go and genuinely enjoy it. Somewhere, where they could sit and enjoy and nice conversation and a meal.

“I haven’t eaten anything today” The fridge at the apartment was packed with all sorts of food. Unfortunately, Y/N didn’t like to cook, not because of the act itself, but because of all the cleaning that had to take place afterward. She had made herself some coffee and a sandwich in the morning, but she hadn’t had dinner or lunch.

“When was the last time you ate? Harry asked trying to make conversation.

“This morning after class” She shrugged, “I don’t enjoy cooking. Do you?”

“I do” he admitted with a bit of embarrassment. “I find it quite enjoyable”

“Maybe I should invite you over, so you can cook for me” Y/N joked, but not really. She found it very romantic when a man cooked for a woman.

“How is your knee?”

“It’s just bruised and still sore, but no biggie”  Y/N decided to get some food at a nearby Panera. She was really craving some soup and a sandwich. Plus she found the place very cozy and nice. “Is here alright?” She asked as she parallel parked.

“Perfect” He couldn’t care less where they ate. He just wanted to spend some time with her.

“Would you like to eat here? Or we could pick up and go to mine? It’s just a few blocks away” Y/N offered in case he didn’t want to dine in.

“H- Here is fine” He instantly felt nervous about being at her apartment. Therefore, he preferred to stay at Panera. Somewhere where he knew that he would be able to form complete sentences.

They both got out of the car and Harry stood beside her. He got a whiff of her scent. She smelt like flowers specifically like lavender. He felt like a creep, but the scent was intoxicating. Y/N threw on a white hoodie and then locked the car.

They each ordered a cup of soup with half of a sandwich. Y/N ordered lemonade whilst Harry ordered iced tea. Y/N then took it upon herself to find them a comfortable booth where they could sit and converse. She chose one that was by the window and on a corner. It was nice a private.

“How was the rest of your week? Y/N asked as they finally sat down with their food.

“A bit hectic. I’ve got this test on Monday that has been keeping me up” He shared, dipping his spoon into his chicken tortilla soup.

“I know the feeling,” She said, “You’ve never told me the story behind your accent” Harry smiled and wiped the corners of his mouth.

“My mother and father moved here months after giving birth to me. My father is American, and my mother is very English and so am I. Although I’ve been more exposed to America’s culture, the accent is thanks to my mother. My parents moved back to England when I started college. It was that or getting the divorce” It was all very foreign to Harry. He rarely shared so much of his private life with anyone. He would even go to the extremes of leaving the room when his mother would call just so he could have privacy from Ganesh. Although, it all felt very different with her. He felt like he could tell her his darkest secrets and Y/N wouldn’t judge.

“But they are still together” She loved his accent. It singled him out of the bunch.  She found it very attractive how he could drag the last syllables of the words and how raspy his voice sounded.

“Yes.”.

“Oh! That’s nice”.

“What are you talking about? Your parents are still together too!” He pointed out, opening the bag of chips that came with the meal.

“Sure, but my parents are never home” Y/N shrugged, “Are you close to your mom?”

“Very much”

“I’m not. They spend a lot of time away, but I sort of get it. My father says it’s the sacrifice we pay to keep the type of lifestyle that we desire” Harry could tell that she didn’t believe her father’s words. He couldn’t blame her — neither did he.  He could tell that she had a very lonely life as opposed to what everyone thought.

“Would you like my pickle?” He asked as he pushed it away from the rest of his food. Y/N instantly burst into a giggle. It took Harry a few seconds to understand why she was laughing, but he caught on and joined in the laughter. “What is it with you Americans and your obsession with adding pickles to everything!”

“They are tasty!” Y/N stabbed his pickle with her fork and took it away from him.

“You eat weird things like,” he thought for a second, “Rice Krispies!” He exclaimed. “Whose idea was that?!”

“Take that back!” Y/N didn’t want to admit it, but her pantry consisted of them. Whenever she was in a hurry, she would throw two or three in her purse and call it day. Her obsession came from her mother not allowing her to have them when growing up. “They are so tasty!”.

“Absolutely not. Horrid”.

“Well, unfortunately, this has come to an end” Harry laughed at her exaggeration and finished eating his panini. “So, did you miss me?”

“Horribly” Thankfully he had swallowed all the food in his mouth when she had asked it. His cheeks had turned a tone or two darker and for a second he had thought he was going to be sick. Although, he was quite surprised and proud of himself for his honest answer and without any stuttering.

Y/N felt like her heart was about to burst out of her chest and that butterflies in her tummy. It had been a long time since she had ever felt this way toward anyone. She moves closer to him, to the point where their shoulders are touching. Y/N turned to look at him and was met with his big eyes that she had grown to adore.

“Do you like me?” She asked as she leaned close to him.

“I- I do” his stutter was back, but he didn’t care. He could smell her intoxicating scent again, and it was enough to drive him crazy. Her hand reaches up and to the back of his neck, where she tangled her fingers.

Their noses touched, and their foreheads met.

“Good because I like you too” Y/N whispered then pressed their lips against one other.

Harry closed his eyes as soon as their lips touched for the first time. She kept a hand on his chest for leverage whilst the other remained tangled in his hair. Her lips were just as plump and soft as he had imagined. His entire body froze for the seconds they share the kiss. He opened his eyes as he felt her pull apart, but before he could open them fully, she kissed him again. This time it was more long and affectionate. It was as if there was no concept of time. As if they were the only ones in this world sharing a kiss. They both felt invisible and nothing else mattered.

chapter 4

[schnuckiputz]

it takes a while, but one day, after the kids have graduated, eddie and steve pack their most precious things into eddie's van, and they leave. for months, they just drive from city to city, from state to state, go wherever it takes their fancy. until they find a little town surrounded by age-old trees and mountains, with unpredictable weather and more rain and fog than sunshine. but the pacific ocean isn't far, and if they leave early in the day, they can spend a few hours in san francisco's queer neighborhoods.

the town has a little old diner that's a bit run down but has good bones. so, steve and eddie combine their powers: steve knows how to take care of customers, has one of his nonnas old books with delicious cake recipes, and knows how to use it. eddie is a god in the kitchen and knows how to make money stretch. they are both charming, so pretty soon they have a few regulars and a steady stream of patrons.

included, are a group of high schoolers. and neither eddie nor steve know what happened to these kids, but they recognize the looks in their eyes. and they just can't help themselves, both like taking care of people a little bit too much, so they basically adopt this group of little ducklings, offer their time and ears in the hope of making the lives of these kids a little easier.

but the longer they stay, the more the town starts to feel a little...strange. there is something unsettling about the way the woods creak at night, how the shadows stretch at night. sometimes, after locking up the diner, steve lingers by the stairs that go up to their apartment and stares into the woods, and he knows something is looking back.

it comes to head a few months later. the ducklings stayed late at the diner, late enough that it's just them, when the thing that kept its eyes on steve steps out of the forest. for a second, everyone just stills before the kids spring into action. trying to barricade the diner doors.

steve and edddie share a resigned look, a touch, then separate. eddie goes for the high proof alcohol they keep in the kitchen, making molotov cocktails. steve gets the bat from under the counter. it's not the original, but mark ii is sturdier, a little bit deadlier. he tests his swing once, twice, then steps into the way of the first thing the crashes through a window and bats it right back out.

afterward, the diner is a burnt out shell, but everyone is alive. the kids are a little worse for wear, but steve knows this was probably not their first or second rodeo. steve and eddie keep the kids in sight but step around the van a little for some light thank-fuck-we-survived pda.

that's when a bunch of government cars arrive and out steps none other than owens. owens prioritizes the kids at first before movement catches his eyes. he stops, stares and then makes the kids loose their minds when he greets steve and eddie by name.

steve just pinches his nose and sighs. they should have known.

[faefictions]

Go to Bed Angry

Eddie Munson x Reader

Word count: 2.5k

Request: Eddie teasing and flustering his girl best friend who has a not so hidden crush on him and he has a not so hidden crush on her but they're both blind to it With a happy fluffy ending please 🥺

(Gif by @thorinsbeard​)

It had been a Tuesday afternoon. You only remember that detail because any other day of the week, Eddie wouldn’t have been free to give you a ride home after school. It wasn’t anything new, you were in the passenger seat of his van, the music blasting through the speakers at a deafening volume. He had just made a joke that to this day you can’t remember, but that wasn’t what did it. You turned to the window, rolling your eyes in annoyance at his teasing, everything was business as usual. That was until you glanced at his reflection, staring at the back of your head. It was a simple, innocent look, but something about it lit a fire in you that you couldn’t stamp out. 

That was the moment you realized you were in love with your best friend. 

You spent every day after that either in active denial, or trying your best to suppress the emotions you knew were brewing. It shouldn’t have been that hard. Eddie was just as much of a little shit as ever. His constant comments about how bad your breath smelled, or how terrible your music taste was, or slight digs at your personality in general should have been enough to completely kill the crush that you had. But the small moments where he would check to make sure you were ok in stressful situations, or when he would insist on buying you flowers when he knew you were having a particularly bad day. This moments would bring you right back to that day in his van, and the butterflies would come creeping back up on you. 

It only got worse after graduation. On graduation day, Eddie had picked you up and spun you around out of excitement. Neither of you had really thought that he would be graduating with you that year, but after all the late nights you forced him to study, he had finally crawled his way past the finish line. For a second, after he had set you down, you thought that he was going to lean in and kiss you. He just stood there for a moment, staring into your eyes without saying a word, but the Hellfire boys ruined the moment when they practically tackled him from behind. You avoided him for the rest of the night after that. 

Once you both got full time jobs, it got harder to spend time with each other. You began to worry that the two of you would drift apart, but Eddie would have never left that happen. The second he realized that you were worried about it, he chose to come over to your trailer every day after work. 

It didn’t matter if he worked a 10 hour shift, or if he got off a 3 am, you could always expect him to let himself in and plop himself down on your couch with a loud sigh. It became a new normal to wait for Eddie to “come home”, but you hated that you thought of it that way. It was staring to feel a little too domestic. But that didn’t stop you from making him something to eat after every shift, or listening to his incredibly boring work stories for hours, or walking him 100 feet back to his trailer so he could get some much needed sleep.

On one night in September, you came home from your shift at 4 pm, as always. Your hair was slipping out of it’s pony tail, and your makeup was smudged. It had been a particularly long day. The amount of customers who had left with nothing but complaints had been higher than normal, and it had worn you out by lunch. You counted down every minute of the tail end of your shift, but not even clocking out was enough to get rid of the storm cloud over your head. 

You had no idea how long you had until Eddie would inevitably let himself into your trailer, but you figured you had at least a few hours to shower and get yourself in a better mood before you had to socialize again. However, you were proven wrong when you opened your trailer door and found Eddie’s work boots kicked off to the side, and heard him rustling around in the kitchen. 

“Is it too early for dinner? I mean, you always make it when I get off, but that can be like six o clock or midnight so I don’t really know what a normal dinner time is to you.”

“What are you doing here?”

He turned around to face you, now standing behind him in the small kitchen area, his shirt covered in a mysterious food stain that you couldn’t find the origin of since it appeared he was only making macaroni. 

“You feeling ok?” he asked as he feigned concern and placed his wrist on your forehead to feel for an imaginary temperature. “How could you forget about your favorite person in the whole world? I’m Eddie, remember? I practically live here,” He giggled to himself before you slapped his hand away from your head. 

“You’ve just never gotten off this early. I figured I had time to at least take a shower before you got here,”

“Bad day?”

You sighed and turned to finally take your jacket and shoes off. Your sigh was answer enough for him. 

“You can still go take a shower. It’s not like I don’t know my way around.”

“It’s fine, you made food, let’s just eat.”

“No,” he chided as he blocked your access to the cupboard you were reaching for, “Go get out of your work clothes and get in the shower, before I help you out of them.”

“Eddie!” you yelped and slapped him on the arm, praying that the blush you felt on your cheeks wasn’t as obvious as it felt. 

“I’m serious. Shower. Now,” he laughed and began to shoo and chase you down the hall into the bathroom. 

“I don’t have any clothes to change into,” you pouted before he could close the bathroom door in your face. 

“Get the water warm, I’ll go get your pajamas.”

You said a quick thank you as he disappeared, and you did just as he said. You turned the water up as hot as it would go, knowing that you needed to melt the day away. Eddie quickly returned with a change of clothes before running back to the kitchen in hopes that he hadn’t found a way to somehow burn a box of Kraft. 

After your shower, you emerged from the bathroom fully clothed, but hair still dripping wet. You hadn’t had the energy to dry it, and the grumbling coming from your stomach was getting to be too much. Luckily, by the time you made it to the living room, Eddie was waiting on the couch with a still warm bowl of macaroni waiting for you. 

“There she is,” Eddie smiled, mouth half full of noodles. He pushed the blanket that had been resting next to him onto the ground and patted the cushion excitedly. 

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” you sighed and bent over to pick the blanket back up. You could feel Eddies eyes focusing on you as you folded it and rested it over the back of the couch. 

“What’s with you today, sweetheart? Something happen at work?,” he asked, much more gentle now, as he handed you your dinner. 

“Just a long day Eds,” you fought off another sigh. 

“Seriously,” he stopped you from taking your first bite, “Is there someone I need to beat the shit out of? You know I’d do that for you, right?” 

“Can I just eat this lovely meal you’ve prepared for the two of us?” You faked a smile and hoped your blush wasn’t too dark. 

Lately, anything Eddie said made you feel a certain way. It was like he was going out of his way to get a reaction out of you, almost like he was doing it on purpose. 

“Fine,” he smirked, “I’ll get my answers out of you later, Doll.”

You tried not to choke in response to that name. That was a new one, and your brain reacted a little too fondly to it. You quickly reached for the remote and turned to the first station that seemed entertaining enough to shut Eddie up. 

You reveled in the silence for the short while it lasted. You loved spending time with Eddie, always had, but it had grown harder to be around him with him acting like this. The last thing you wanted was for him to figure out how you felt about him and ruin the friendship. As time went on, it was growing harder and harder to control your own reactions to him though. 

Just as your heart finally began to beat normally again, right after you had finished your dinner and set the bowl on the coffee table in front of you, you hit your limit. Eddie reached out and guided your chin towards him. He made eye contact for a moment, with an expression that felt too serious for the situation, and for a second you thought he might kiss you. Instead, he brought his thumb to the corner of your mouth and swiped away what you could only assume was a glob of artificial cheese. 

“Got it,” he smiled. 

“I’m feeling pretty tired, I think maybe you should head home,” you nearly snapped at him. It came out more polite than you expected, but much less than you meant for it to sound. 

“But it’s only like 5:30,” he pouted. It was obvious that something was off. He usually wouldn’t get off work until much later than this, and would still end up staying longer than he had today. 

“Like I said, long day. You should get going.” 

“Come on, y/n, did I do something?” he tried to reason with you as you began to usher him off of the couch and towards the exit. 

“Eddie, I just wanna be alone right now, ok? Don’t make a big deal out of it.” 

“No,” he dug his heels in just as you had nearly gotten him to the door, and turned to face you, “Something’s up and I’m not leaving until we resolve it. You know what they say, never go to bed angry.” 

“Eddie, that’s for married couples.”

“And we’re practically that.”

“Excuse me? No, Eddie, we aren’t practically anything!”

“Woah, ok, I was just joking around sweetheart.”

Had you been thinking straight, you would have noticed that Eddie almost seemed offended at your reaction to his joke. But you were far from level headed, and all you knew was that he had no right to tease you like that if he didn’t mean a word of it. 

You groaned and rushed around him, opening the door to make the invitation to leave feel more like a demand. But if there was one thing you knew about Eddie Munson, it was that he was the most stubborn piece of shit, beating out even you. 

“You know for a fact that I’m going nowhere until you tell me what I did. I know this isn’t just a shitty day. It may have started out that way, but you’d never kick me out over just that.” 

“Well maybe today was just extra shitty, Eddie. And maybe the cure to a shitty day is to not have you around to make me even more miserable.”

You hadn’t meant it, it had just slipped out, and the second you saw Eddie’s face drop, you had regretted it. But it was too late to take it back, and you still desperately wanted him out, so you just stood in silence, trying not to let any hot tears free from your eyes. You cursed yourself for your tendency to cry at any situation that made you raise your voice. 

“Y/n, seriously, what did I do?” he asked, voice laced with deep concern, and took a nervous step towards you. 

“Nothing, I just want you to leave, please.”

Your tears had begun to fall, and Eddie would have been able to sense your overwhelm from a mile away. He was unsure what to do though, since in any other situation, he would offer his presence to console you. He tried to comb through the night in his brain, trying to pick out anything he had done to upset you. Once he remembered the last thing he had done before you asked him to leave, he had an inkling of what may be happening. 

He gently reached out and grabbed your hand to pull you even closer to him, and he proved himself correct when he saw the way you nearly winced at his touch. He knew you well, he had once declared himself an expert on everything y/n. But, he had missed the most important thing there was to know about you. 

You loved him in the exact same way he had loved you from the start.  

“Can I kiss you?” he blurted, but his voice was barely above a whisper. 

“What?” you exclaimed, the surprise putting a pause to your tears. 

“That’s what you wanted, right?” 

“Eddie,” you warned, and pulled away from him, gently this time. There was no more malice towards him, just defeat. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything you wouldn’t want,” you finished as you turned to walk back to the couch. Before you could get far, he grabbed your arm once again and spun you around to look at him. 

“Then let me kiss you because I want to,” as he spoke, his demeanor changed from confidence to match your insecurity, “Please.” 

You both stood, staring at each other as you tried to take in what he had said. The butterflies in your stomach were trying to convince you that he meant it, that he really had wanted to kiss you, but your brain was trying to let you down gently. He had had a million chances to kiss you, to make a move, to do anything. But he had always chosen to tease, to make you think that what had blossomed between you was nothing but one sided. You were ready to turn him down, to try to preserve your friendship and your heart, until his hand reached out and cupped your cheek. 

He slowly took a step towards you, never breaking his line of sight on your eyes. He moved as if you would turn and run at any sudden movement, and his heavy breathing gave his nerves even more away. 

He wouldn’t be nervous if he were lying. That was the final thought you had before you launched yourself into his lips. There was no way he was going to get the glory of kissing you first. Not after all the teasing he had put you through. 

Tags: 

@eddielives1986​ @eddieswifu​ @chickpeadumpsterfire​ @fluffybunnyu​ @embrace-themagic​ @fanficparker​  @heartbeats-wildly​ @saturn-aka-six​ @calum-hoodwinked-me​ @peterplanet​ @mischiefmanaged49​ @nicotine-sunshine820​ @itsjusttor​ @emistrash​ @thenoddingbunny-blog​ @sovereignparker​ @raajali3​

[tencrushesperday]

Sparks Fly

matt rempe x reader

warnings: angst, 1k

i was doing friendship bracelets for the eras tour with my friend bc she’s going and we were listening to speak now and i knew i had to write something for matt, and i had also seen this pic of matt with wet hair and i knew i had to fit the lyrics of the song

You had to tell Matt about the job offer you had gotten. It was the only one you got since you finished your degree. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t your dream job. But it would pay the taxes and it was in your field of choice so it would have to do.

You had also convinced yourself that with his growing popularity, soon he wouldn’t care for you. You would never think him capable of cheating. But who said he would never get bored of you. You were repeating to yourself that you were doing the both of you a favour.

He walked out of the locker room, hair still wet from the shower, cheeks flushed. He was such a sight to behold. The thought that he was your boyfriend still seemed bizarre sometimes.

He grinned when his eyes laid on you. “Hey beautiful” He bent down to kiss your cheek and you closed your eyes to encapsulate as much of this feeling as you could.

You turned in his hold to wrap your arms around his waist to hug him. A real hug. You squeezed as hard as you could and basked in the warmth of his touch. Maybe you could go back to his apartment tonight? Just spend one more night in his arms to remember every curve and hollow of his body.

But you pulled away and looked up at him “I have something to tell you Matt.”, and grabbed his hand to drag him further into a corner.

He looked at you expectantly and you had to force the words out of your mouth “I got a job offer.”.

A smile grew on his face, “That’s amazing !! Congratulations! Isn’t that good news? Why do you look so sad?” Your heart broke at his excitement.

“It’s in London”

“London, Ontario, right?” A bittersweet chuckle escaped your lips at his almost cute denial.

“London as in the capital of the United Kingdom.” his excited expression was replaced by one of confusion.

Your head dropped at your next words, “I’m sorry I didn’t have the courage to tell you before. I leave next week for the interview while you’ll be away on the road. I’m so sorry for telling you about it so late.”, they were full of shame.

He was speechless so you continued, left hand on his chest as if to make sure his heart was still beating, still warm underneath your touch, “I’ll probably take it. I don’t really have a choice. I’ll go by your apartment after you leave to get my stuff and leave my spare key. I’m so sorry for doing it this way. Good bye.”

Your hand dropped as you turned around and left the building. Realization slowly downed on Matthew. You haven’t said the words. But you just broke up with him.

———————

The interview had gone well and you were back in New York a week later to clean out your apartment.

The rain was pouring outside but you had to get your belongings into the moving van. Your lease was ending in two days so you had to move it to your parents’ place until you would find a place in London.

The movers had just loaded your couch into the truck when you heard someone call your name. You could recognise that voice amongst a thousand others.

When you turned around you found Matthew standing a few feet away, all wet from the rain, hair draped messily over his eyes. “Don’t leave.” he said through ragged breaths “Don’t go to London. Drop everything now.”

He was taking tentative steps forward as if not to scare you away. “I don’t want you to leave. It may sound selfish but I need you here. This week away from you has been one of the worst weeks in my life.”

He was right. This last week had been so dull. Everything felt wrong. It had rained all week. There was a storm that had delayed your flight to London by 4 hours. The thought of getting off the plane had crossed your mind more than once.

He was now standing in front of you on the side walk. His height towering over you and you just wanted to crash your body into his, to cower from the whole world and hide into him. “It feels like I don’t have anything to go back home to. My bed hasn’t felt like my own since I know you won’t be sleeping there every other night.” You were holding his gaze like you were holding your ground. With all your crumbling will.

“New York is chanting your name right now. You have so much success. You will find someone else to warm your bed and forget me in an instant.” The rain was kind for blending in your tears with its drops on your cheeks. It failed to hide the crack in your voice.

He laughed at your words, looking away from you for a second “Don’t give me that bullshit. Are you even listening to me? Do you think I want anyone else just to warm my bed? I couldn’t look at another girl if I wanted to. It’s you that I want.” And you believed him. Every word. A smile cracked its way on your face, through the pain and the tears. You were like a house of cards around him because you always knew there was no use putting up walls with him.

“I love you.” he had never said those words before. It took you a moment to register them. Eyes wide, mouth falling agape. To hell with reason.

You grabbed his shirt and tugged him down towards you. Your lips crashed on his before you could find words to answer his confession. Every emotion you felt this past week was poured into that kiss. Sadness, desperation, longing, passion, love. Love.

All the arguments you had previously prepared, all the reasons you convinced yourself were good enough fled your mind at the moment. And there was only him.

His hands were on your face, then on your neck, your shoulder, your back, your hips. He had you pressed against him, his shirt wrapped tightly in your fist. You were holding each other as if the other was about to disappear, as if you needed each other to survive.

Both of you were panting when you pulled apart. Through an exhale, you whispered “I love you too.”

He let his forehead fall against yours, “Then stay. We’ll figure it out.”

They say sparks fly when you’re with the right person. There was a firework show around you.

[mmmichyyy]

40? for the prompt

#40. "am i your husband or your taxi service?"

the first time it happens, mickey doesn't think much of it.

can you pick me up after my shift? too tired to take the L

when mickey is near the station, he parks the van a block away. force of habit from when he and his brothers used to sneak up and collect from people who owed terry money. plus, he doesn't particularly want ian's coworkers to see their stolen ambulance, even though it's completely unrecognizable after debbie helped them revamp the entire thing and paint over it with the logo sandy designed.

here

i don't see you

i'm parked a block away

pick me up at the station

your legs don't work?

i'm tired :(

i drove the van

it's fine no one will be able to tell lol

mickey rolls his eyes and drops his phone in the cupholder. as he pulls up across the street from the station, he sees ian standing on the curb, chatting with someone wearing a matching EMT uniform, a shorter man with tan skin and curly hair.

mickey honks once, a bit impatient since he's hungry as fuck and there's a large pizza he ordered earlier waiting for them at their apartment. ian lifts his head and smiles. as he waves goodbye to his coworker and jogs over to the van, mickey doesn't miss the way the dude is gaping at mickey with wide eyes and a dropped jaw.

the hell is this guy's problem?

"everything okay?" mickey asks, once ian buckles his seatbelt and reclines his seat.

"just tired." ian yawns. "had a long shift today."

"well," mickey puts the van in drive, reaching over the center console to ruffle ian's hair, promptly forgetting ian's weird coworker, "i already ordered a pizza so we can eat then turn in early."

ian smiles sleepily and interlaces his fingers with mickey's. "you're the best husband ever."

mickey shakes his head, biting back a smile. "sappy fucker."

*

after almost two weeks of ian asking to be picked up, mickey suspects something is up. not that he minds or anything, since he makes his own schedule nowadays. after the security business started turning a profit and ian went back to being an emt, he hired a couple of guys to drive the routes so he could work from home and catch up on admin work, freeing up a lot of time in his day to day.

but ian never used to mind the commute. he's the kind of long-legged freak who liked to take the scenic route and go on long runs in the morning, just for fun. absolutely deranged behaviour, in mickey's opinion. but lately, ian has been flashing his kicked-puppy eyes and asking to be chauffeured like a pampered prince and, well. mickey could never resist spending more time with his husband, so he hasn't said anything. not yet, anyway. god he's so whipped.

the excuses ian came up with, however, were more unbelievable as it went on, ranging from the train broke down (mickey knew for a fact it didn't), to spraining his elbow (though he had no problem throwing mickey on the bed later that night with his supposedly injured arm), to how it was going to rain later (it was sunny all day without a cloud in sight).

when mickey tried to call him out on his bullshit, ian either got down on his knees or flipped mickey over and fucked him senseless into the bed, promptly making mickey forget what the hell he was trying to say.

it's gotten to the point where ian stopped making excuses and simply asked mickey to come get him. which truthfully, mickey doesn't mind at all. but he just finds it odd how his beefy athletic husband had gotten so lazy.

"what's with you?" mickey finally asks one day, as ian climbs into the passenger seat.

ian blinks innocently. "what do you mean, dear husband of mine?"

mickey rolls his eyes. "am i your husband or your fuckin' taxi driver? 'cause i've been picking your ass up every day for the past two weeks when you have two perfectly functioning legs."

ian huffs, crossing his arms. "maybe i just want to spend more time with you."

"we live together," mickey points out flatly, "how much more time do you need?"

"i–"

a tap on the glass interrupts them, and mickey turns to see a woman with brown hair tied back in a ponytail, enthusiastically gesturing at him to roll down the window.

"the fuck?" mickey turns to ian, whose face has turned slightly pink. "did you forget something at the station?"

"ah, no." ian scratches his head sheepishly. "sue is just being... sue."

sue waves her hand again and mickey reluctantly lowers the window.

"mickey, this is sue, my supervisor, and sue, this is–"

"the elusive husband." sue grins. "i've heard a lot about you, mickey."

mickey raises his brow. "have you now."

"oh sure," she says, ignoring ian's frantic head shaking, "ian won't shut up about you, yapping on and on about mickey this and mickey that. we're all jealous at the station actually, everyone just complains about their partners while ian keeps gushing about how perfect and amazing his husband is. his words."

"huh." that explains a lot, actually, why there was always someone different waiting with ian every time he came to pick him up, and why they all stared at him like a circus freak. "well, i bet ian didn't tell you the time we stole an ambu–"

"okay," ian cuts in loudly, reaching over to turn the key in the ignition, "we're leaving. i'll see you tomorrow, sue."

"come to the company picnic next month," sue calls out. "it's a potluck and everyone is bringing their family. it'll be fun!"

"uh sure," mickey says, even though a social gathering with ian's nosy coworkers sounds like the least fun thing he's ever heard of. he looks over at ian, slumped in his seat, avoiding mickey's eyes. "I'll check my schedule."

once mickey drives around the corner, he playfully flicks his finger at ian's temple and ian rolls his eyes, shaking his head.

"you yap about me to your coworkers," mickey teases. "you're so fuckin' whipped."

"whatever," ian grumbles. "stupid sue calling me out."

"is that why you keep asking me to pick you up?" mickey asks, amused. "to parade me around like a little show dog?"

"well, eduardo blabbed to everyone he saw you, then everyone kept asking about you and wanted to see you in person, so..."

"hm." mickey reaches over and brushes his thumb over ian's palm. "what do you say about me?"

ian links their fingers together and sighs. "that you're attentive. funny. caring. protective. loyal. the ideal man."

mickey laughs. "you're really overselling me here, gallagher. did you forget i'm an ex-convict, pimp and drug dealer?"

ian waves him off and continues. "kind. loving. perfect in every single way, except when you leave your socks on the floor. oh and that you're hot as hell with an ass that won't quit."

"you talked about my ass?"

"okay, i didn't say the last part," ian amends, "your ass belongs to just me. but i meant everything else i said."

"you really are a sappy fucker."

"you love it."

"i'd love it even more if i didn't have to be your chauffeur every day, at least they get paid to drive back and forth."

"you come with me to the picnic, i'll pay you with favours in bed. i'll even throw in a big tip."

"a big tip, huh..."

[lovebugism]

oh my god,,,, gurl!!!! THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT fic is sooo good 😫 my heart literally breaks every time I read this story. Thank you for blessing us with this masterpiece <3

THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT | square one

summary: eddie makes a confession that's been weighing heavy on his heart. you realize that your future with him is haunted by ghosts from your past. pairing: virgin!eddie munson / f!reader word count: 16.3k warnings: hopper, steve, and robin being the reader defense squad, hints at reader's previously poor mental health, mentions of abusive and toxic relationships, a banshees of inisherin quote, b*lly h*rgrove because he needs a warning. (pretend any typos don't exist pls and thank u!) a/n: guess who's back, back again? ✨✨ i'd apologize for disappearing for a month, but then there'd be apologies in all my notes, so just know that i'm sorry every time i disappear unexpectedly, okay? 🥲 thanks for being so patient! please enjoy this long-awaited installment of tcar ily <3

( PREVIOUSLY ) | ( SERIES MASTERLIST ) | ( NEXT )

Eddie’s got a 1986 Van Halen tape in his boombox and a baby pink heart stitched into the fabric of his shirt. He’s the least metal he’s ever been, but he couldn’t be happier.

You keep your promise to him to patch up his torn Hellfire tee. If anything, you use the absentminded assurance as your excuse to see him again. The night you shared before, all but baring your scarred souls underneath glittering stars and streams of pale moonlight, hadn’t satiated your hunger for him. Eddie left you craving in a way you weren’t used to before — a yearning to be close to him that went beyond the boundaries of physical intimacy.

It was a simple sort of longing. It was a homesickness. A sense of nostalgia for a love you’d never felt before.

You wish you could wear Eddie’s adoration for you like a blanket, wrap yourself in the hand-stitched quilt of many colors and bundle it tighter around your shoulders when the cold comes. You want his softness to hold you in a way you’ve never been able to hold yourself.

You feel swaddled in it, succumbed and cloaked and at peace in all his tenderness. You’ve never been so at ease, so blissfully comforted by the presence of another human being. And Eddie feels all of that, every ounce of warmth you feel, because it pours out of you like rays of sunshine and bathes him in shades of gold.

He didn’t think you could get any softer than you had been that night at Skull Rock, until you were nestled in his unmade bed the next morning. You curled your legs underneath you as you weaved the needle and thread through the tear in his t-shirt, eyes squinted and tongue poking out the side of your mouth in an astute concentration. 

All of the sudden, you were marshmallow fluff and honey on toast — made of all things sickly sweet that made his stomach feel suddenly full. 

You finish mending the rip in record time and beam when he wears the heart-shaped stitching with pride. The rest of the day thereafter was spent in the tiny confines of his one hundred square-inch bedroom. From there, the both of you came to the silent understanding that you didn't want to spend another day apart.

The weekend had given you a limited sort of freedom, allowed you to pretend that you lived in a world with no responsibilities or anything other than Eddie Eddie Eddie, but adulthood made you no such promises. He had a side job to do to keep himself afloat, and you had a cat that thought it was the end of the world anytime you were gone for longer than a night. Both of those things together meant that the eve of parting was ultimately inevitable.

Every second you spent away from Eddie felt like you were grieving.

You mourned for him in the darkness of your apartment and tried to pretend you weren’t half a person in the cat food aisle at Melvald’s.

You tried to lessen the unbearable distance with phone calls, though it didn’t come nearly as close as feeling his fingers thrumming imaginary beats on your thigh or his heartbeat thudding against your ear. 

But his voice filled the emptiness of your one-bedroom apartment and the Eddie Munson shaped hole he’d left just behind your ribcage, and that was good enough for you.

When you weren’t with him, you were roaming around your apartment like some kind of ghost, with the phone tucked between your ear and shoulder and the rotary clutched in your free hand. 

You cook yourself dinner with him ranting about his day in your ear. You hold the receiver closer to Bowie and force him to hear her purr when she’s being exceptionally cute. He falls asleep some hours later to the sound of your soft snores, and you wake up the next morning to the sounds of his.

It was pathetic, truly.

You’d be gagging at how sweet it was if it wasn’t happening to you.

But it was.

Every ounce of this sticky sweet goodness was yours, and it tasted just like honey on your tongue. 

It was the honeymoon stage times a thousand, all rose-colored and reflecting light — your own personal utopia. It brought with it a heavenly sort of refuge, a bubble of peace you never wanted to pierce.

Eddie basks in the serenity of it all when he finally has you with him again. You’re in his lap, on his lips, and all over him, but it still isn’t quite close enough. He doesn’t think he’ll be satisfied until you’ve successfully melted with him and your limbs have entwined with his like tree roots, destined to remain that way for the next couple of centuries or so.

And it’s weird because he could hardly handle living in such a tiny trailer with Wayne, let alone stomach more than a couple hours with the guys from Hellfire all in one place. But you? You entered his life all at once and now he can’t remember what it was like without you.

He doesn’t particularly want to, if he’s being real honest.

It’s why he’s always less enthused about letting you leave when you’ve both got responsibilities dragging you apart. He begs you to stay with him a few hours more, pleads for you to stick around while he makes a quick deal or an emergency pick-up when Dustin Henderson calls and says he needs a ride. 

And you promise you’ll wait on him there, because he makes it virtually impossible to say no to his rosy pouted lips and chocolate syrup puppy dog eyes.

That’s when you run into Wayne for the first time, when Eddie’s out and you’re making breakfast for when he comes back.

French toast and scrambled eggs sizzle on the stove and warm the kitchen with all its cinnamon confections. It makes the man’s face screw up in confusion when he steps inside the trailer because he’s never known Eddie to cook a day in his life. And then his eyes find you — a young, pretty girl all alone in his kitchen with his nephew’s van gone from the drive.

“…Who the hell are you?” he wonders gruffly and pops a cigarette between his lips, totally unbothered.

He’s got no reason to be intimidated by the stranger in his trailer. He’s more confused than anything else, and he’s got this contorted look on his face like he’s blaming the exhaustion from the graveyard shift for his vision of you.

“Oh— my god,” you mumble through the mouthful of whipped cream you’d squeezed into your mouth moments prior. You fight to swallow it all down. “Uh. Hi. I’m, um… I’m Eddie’s... girlfriend?”

It sounds like you’re lying. 

In some ways, it feels like you are. 

You’ve been spending more time in his trailer than in your own home, but it’s not like either of you has motioned to make anything official just yet.

He eyes you with a tired and heavy gaze, eyes as dark and as infinite as Eddie’s. The man gives you a once-over and then chuckles lowly to himself as he tosses his corduroy jacket onto the back of the recliner and his tin lunchbox to the coffee table.

You shift awkwardly on the other side of the room. “…What is it?”

“When Eddie said he was talkin’ to a pretty girl on the phone every night, I thought he was lyin’,” he admits through hearty chuckles. 

It makes you laugh too. 

There’s little talking after the fact, besides you offering him some of the breakfast on the stove and him joking that you should come around more often.

You recount the story to Eddie when he returns, utterly mortified about the whole thing. You’re even more embarrassed when the boy finds amusement in your horror and starts to chuckle to himself — not exactly at you, but not with you either.

He laughs louder when you swat at him for it. You clamber on top of him, mattress squeaking mattress under your weight, as you demand him to stop through giggles of your own.

Somewhere down the line, both of you stop caring. 

Neither of you is quite sure where the conversation stopped and ended, only that when you started kissing, you couldn’t stop. 

They weren’t innocent little pecks, but they weren’t sloppy and full of tongue either. You press your lips together with the intent of being as close as you can to the other, like you haven’t spent every second you could together.

Neither of you will be satisfied until you’ve swallowed each other whole.

And you, you’ve got this ache for him. A swirling of want that’s constantly rippling in your belly for this boy. He’s just not usually under you when it’s happening — and now that he is, the crackling embers have burst into white and blue flames behind your sternum.

Your lips click each time you part, a lewd noise you never want to stop hearing. The sound of it gives you goosebumps, like a good song you’ve just heard on the radio. You wonder if Eddie can feel them as his hands start to creep up beneath your shirt and find purchase along your waist. 

You open his mouth with your own and sneak your tongue inside just as you roll your hips over his lap.

It’s the most forthcoming either of you had been in your three-day stint of nonstop talking. Even when you were over at the trailer, totally alone and pressed underneath him, it was otherwise completely innocent. You just make out like a couple of teenagers until one of you wants to make a food run or offers to roll a joint. 

And you like that. You like that he doesn’t expect anything from you, but it does get a little agonizing when you’ve tried every attempt to give yourself to him and he just won’t take it.

Like usual, Eddie tenses when he feels you grinding on top of him — partly because he feels a tingle at the base of his spine when he gets instantly half-hard, but mostly because he knows there’s nothing he can do about it.

He keeps preaching to himself it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time, it’s not the right time — but he’s got no idea when it’ll ever be the right time, if it’ll ever be the right time, or if he’ll know it when it comes.

Because he’s had you to himself for days now — no Wayne, no responsibilities, no pressure — with his tongue rutting against yours and your hands fidgeting with the metal buttons of his jeans, and it still doesn’t feel good enough. Eddie doesn’t feel good enough.

He’s not sure if he ever will.

And it’s not you. God, it’s the farthest thing from you. As far as Eddie’s concerned, he’s never had more fun with anyone else. He’s never laughed harder with anyone else. He’s never felt as comfortable with anyone as he’s starting to feel around you. So he’s not entirely sure why he finds the rest of it so hard. 

Eddie wants you so bad that the ache of all his yearning is palpable. It’s like the weight of it is what’s keeping him from you — unstoppable force, immovable object, blah, blah, blah. 

Either way, it leaves him entirely unable to take things further with you, however much he wants to. There’s something in his way and it’s him. 

Your heartache is his own when he has to pull away from you.

“You okay?” you ask him with wide eyes and swollen lips, always so concerned for him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” he’s quick to assure you. He’s still breathless when he fidgets beneath you, trying to prop himself up on his headboard without rubbing his half-hard cock against your thigh.

When he succeeds, he musters a smile that shakes at the edges. “It’s just… you know, not everything… It doesn’t have to be about sex, you know?”

He makes himself as soft as possible for you when he says this. He gets rid of all the usual teasing lilts that tend to lurk on his tongue as the words spill from his mouth. The last thing he wants to do is hurt your feelings or, in some roundabout way, make you think you’re the problem. 

He just wants you to know that that isn’t why he’s been wanting to spend so much time with you. There was never an ulterior motive with him other than all the adoration he holds in his hands and his mouth for you.

The strike of hurt that flashes across your face is obvious to only Eddie, who’s spent enough time mapping out your features to know what twitches are ones of discontent. The slight frown that dips between your brows when they scrunch together for half a second comes like a stroke of lightning. It’s a brief flash of purple in the sky that leaves so quickly that it makes you wonder if it was ever there at all.

You fidget on his lap, not resting as comfortably upon him as you had been just moments before. “Oh…” you murmur through soft, jutted-out lips. “Sorry. I, I didn’t—”

“No, it’s not— that’s not what I—” he tries to assure over your insecure stammers, but succeeds only in tripping over himself in return. He cuts himself off with a breathy laugh, shaking his head while his fingers fidget on your hips. “That’s just not what this is about for me, you know? I just… I wanna spend time with you.”

It’s easily the softest thing he’s ever said to you — to anybody, for the matter — and the marshmallow sweetness of it all wraps around you like wisps of pink cotton candy.

Your apprehensiveness twists into something lighter, a pair of twinkling eyes and a bashful smile.

“Oh,” you hum again, obviously more pleased than before. “That’s nice…”

“No one’s ever said that to you before, have they?” Eddie asks you.

He tries to muster a crooked smirk as the words leave his mouth, but he’s got a feeling he already knows the answer. Hearing you affirm his suspicions will do nothing more than make him angry at all the assholes that had you before him, at everyone who taught you that you were good for sex and hardly a thing else. 

It makes him wish that he’d gotten to know you sooner. Maybe then you’d understand that he’d be happy just holding you like this and never doing anything more.

You don’t answer him verbally, just shake your head with your lips pursed softly to the side. You look more innocent than anything he’s ever seen before, even with your lipstick smeared on your chin. 

He’s still not quite sure how someone could be so reckless with such a fragile thing — to watch you break and not spend the rest of time grieving to know that you’ll never be quite the same again. 

There’s a primal instinct that swims in him then, an urge to keep you in his arms and locked in the confines of his trailer forever and ever. He wants to keep the wolves of Hawkins, Indiana from ever getting a whiff of you again. It’d be more than they deserved, anyway.

“God, you have got to get better boyfriends, sweetheart,” Eddie tells you with a playful lilt in his voice despite the anger simmering in his belly.

“Isn’t that what you are?” you giggle.

His world stops.

“Huh?”

You tense at his tenseness. Only when he’s gaping at you does the weight of your words dawn on you. “…Huh?”

The awkward moment goes as quickly as it arrives, chased out by the fit of laughter the two of you are quickly thrown into. Your entwining chuckles rise like smoke in his tiny bedroom and then settle back over you like a fuzzy blanket.

“Are you asking me to be your boyfriend, babe?” Eddie teases.

“Of course not,” you scoff. “Babe.”

“Oh, right, of course not. That would be way too crazy considering we’ve spent, like, every day together and have made each other come… what is it now? Twice?”

“Three times for me,” you correct with you a smile. “You need to catch up, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“Another time?” he offers with a scrunched nose.

“Whenever you want.”

Eddie is grateful for your lack of urgency, even more so for the kiss you press to the tip of his nose. 

You peck him on the lips after — once, twice, and then a thiiird, drawn out time — before moving on to his chin and jaw and neck. Whatever part of him you can reach (which is just about everywhere, considering the vantage point you’ve got sitting on his lap), you sprinkle a kiss to it.

It’s an innocent sort of affection, the kind that makes him wonder how it ever came to be in the first place. What evolutionary measures led to this, to you pressing your lips to his skin to show how much you care about him? Eddie doesn’t really want to know the answer, he’s just grateful that it happened in the first place.

You’re so good at it, loving on him. You’re always so kind and so gentle in your way and it makes him feel guilty. There’s a lingering feeling of undeservedness that settles something heavy at the base of his stomach. How could he ever expect you to be so open with him when he hasn’t done the same for you?

A heavy sigh rattles in his deflating chest. 

“I gotta tell you something, sweetheart,” he cautions when your lips smack against the thrumming pulse below the left side of his jaw. “Something you’re not gonna like…”

A billion things run through your head all at once. When you part from him, he can see the rollercoaster of emotions each one of them puts you through.

Your first instinct is that he’s got some kind of partner he’s kept hidden from you until now. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve gone steady with a guy who’s then told you about some other girlfriend he had — or, god forbid, a wife. 

But then you realize that you surely would’ve had some sort of inkling if that were the case. There’s no way Eddie would’ve been able to spend every second of his day with you — and then another several hours on the phone when you had to leave — without someone else coming along to burst your bubble. 

And so far, there haven’t been any angry wives, just the occasionally confused Uncle Wayne.

Then you start thinking he’s about to tell you he wants an open relationship. The you’re great, but I’m just not ready to settle down yet spiel that you’ve heard a thousand times before. Usually when people say that, they mean that they just don’t want to settle down with you.

You’ll become some douchebag’s fuck toy for a month or more until the girl next door comes around. He gets her knocked up in record time, his family forces him to marry her, and they begin their cushy lives together in the center of some cul-de-sac — really settle down, as it were.

You’re not sure if you could take that from Eddie. You could grin and bear if it you had to, take whatever attention he’s willing to give you because who cares if he’s giving it to someone else on the side? You’re just not sure how long you’d last like that.

And then you start to worry that he’s just going to break up with you entirely — it’s not you, it’s blah, I’ll always care about blah, please don’t tell anyone about how we blah-ed. That whole talk. 

All the rest of your worries stop mattering so much because you’ve only just called him your boyfriend. And here he goes, about to end it all before it can really even start. That’d be just your luck, you figure.

“Did I do something wrong?” you caution after a few moments of heavy silence.

Eddie’s bleeding heart wrenches at your words, at how sad they sound spilling from your mouth, and how you immediately think that it’s got something to do with you. 

He shakes his head feverishly in response. “No. No, it’s not you. You’re… you’re perfect.”

“Okay…” you concede quietly, voice trembling with a lingering disbelief.

“I just… I haven’t been totally honest with you, you know?” the boy admits before his glimmering chocolate eyes fly open and he corrects himself quickly. “And I haven’t lied to you or anything. Not— Not exactly. I just… I wanna be honest with you… As your boyfriend and all.”

You can tell by the sudden weight in his voice that he’s serious. But the fine coat of glowing rose that splotches Eddie’s cheeks after calling himself your boyfriend for the first time makes you melt. 

You smile to yourself and start to trace the heart you’d stitched into his t-shirt with your finger.

“Yeah. I mean, we are about to spend our two minutes anniversary together and everything.”

“Exactly,” the boy huffs out a laugh. It lacks its usual jest, though, because of the ice-cold anxiety that drenches him from head to toe and makes his hands and feet go numb.

His fingers tremble where the rest on your waist, trying and failing to find a comfortable position there because, right about now, Eddie feels the most awkward he’s ever felt.

“I just want you to know that I… I’ve never done this before,” he confesses quietly and with his eyes squeezed shut. He prays that he doesn’t have to be any less vague than that.

Your face twists in confusion — your brows furrow and your nose twitches and your head tilts to the side like a puppy. And then you’re laughing, a soft little thing of a giggle that normally makes his heart sing, though now he can only feel it breaking.

“What…?” he tries to scoff out his own chuckle. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’ve already told me that, dummy. That you’ve never felt this way before…” you answer, reciting his own words back to him. You haven’t yet forgotten how he’d looked at you as you said them, pale skin made silk under the moonlight while he sparkled beneath the beams of it and his love for you. 

“No, it’s… it’s more than that,” he corrects. “I’ve never even had a girlfriend before you. Or anything really.”

You still don’t seem to understand. You just look on at him with uncertainty. 

A quiet “okay?” tumbles from your mouth entwined with a nervous giggle, because you don’t understand what’s got him so somber. He’s never dated anyone, you’ve fucked half of Hawkins — these are just facts that went unsaid before now. 

And maybe it’s because you’ve never been with a virgin before, but the thought that Eddie might be one hasn’t seemed to cross your mind at all. 

It’s that exact thought that scares him. 

Because if it hasn’t already, maybe it’s because you’re avoiding it altogether. And why would he ever be the exception?

He opts to bite the bullet and hopes that his heart doesn’t get broken after.

“I’m a virgin. Okay? I’m a complete, total, proper adult virgin,” he blurts with a brazenness he’d previously lacked when it came to all this. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before now, but I didn’t, because I liked you and I was scared. So if you wanna yell at me or if you wanna break up with me before our five-minute anniversary, I totally get it, but I should probably let you know that it’ll rip my little virgin heart to shreds, so…”

Eddie ends his nervous ramble with a trembling, lopsided smile that does little to ease the leaden tension he’s just manufactured in the four walls of his bedroom.

He can’t seem to gauge your reaction after the fact, which is strange because he always knows what you’re thinking. 

He knows when you’re laughing with him and not at him. You scrunch your nose and giggle when he tells you a funny joke, then tilt your head back and cackle when he trips over the punchline. 

He knows the exact moment when something’s started to bother you — when you get real quiet in your bubble of reserved stillness and your eyes start to glaze over. To anyone else, it might just look like a person who’s keeping to themselves. Eddie’s starting to learn that usually means trouble when it comes to you.

He knows the difference between your gentle sort of sadness and when you’re damn near inconsolable. When you cried at the end of Stand By Me, you smiled at him with a glassy tear-filled gaze, then rolled your eyes when he tried to comfort you. The tears only spilled over when you laughed because Eddie pretended you’d hurt him when you’d shoved him away. 

But when you’re really upset about something, you don’t show him at all — you fight to keep it all to yourself until you’ve squished the problem into a tiny enough ball that you can forget about all of it.

This is something different.

There’s too much crossing your mind all at once for him to get a good read of you.

You just gape at him, like you’re trying to figure out if he’s joking or not, and then fighting to understand what it means when you realize he’s being serious. 

And just when you’ve started to wrap your head around it all, when your brain remembers how to make words again and you realize you haven’t said anything in several agonizing seconds, a foreign voice sounds from down the hallway.

Not foreign in that it was unfamiliar exactly, just foreign in that you and Eddie had spent so much time alone that you were starting to forget that there was an entire world outside of yourselves. A great big world, filled with a great many people, some of whom were your friends who tended to get pretty worried about you.

“Edward Wayne— why the hell is the Chief in my driveway?” his uncle curses from the living room, sounding like he’s speaking through a cigarette in his mouth.

Eddie himself is immediately freaking the fuck out because he figures he must’ve gotten tipped off again. He tries to calculate the quickest way to get you off of him and to all of his cubby holes full of miscellaneous drugs so he can flush them down the toilet before Jim Hopper busts the door down.

And even though you’re not the drug dealer who’s had cops on their ass since they were fifteen in this equation, you look a whole lot more terrified than Eddie does.

Your eyes go wide and the whites of them swim with terror as you launch yourself off of his lap. You don’t spare another glance back at him, not even when you nearly trip over yourself when you shove your sneakers on your feet and shuffle out of the room. He’s forced to follow behind you like a confused puppy as you bound through the trailer at lightning speed. 

The haste of your movements startles even Wayne, who halts mid-puff of his cig when you’re in and out of the living room before he can blink. The opening squeak of the screen door and metal slamming against metal is the only thing that punctuates your exit.

“Would it kill you to answer your damn phone every once in a while?” the powerful timbre of Jim Hopper’s angry voice, of which only the man himself could pull off, is muffled until Eddie cautiously slinks onto the porch behind you. 

He finds the chief standing beside the Cruiser he’s parked sideways. The door of it is still flung open. A distant beeping sounds from the ignition. 

He’s still got on the pressed khakis of his uniform — complete with the golden badge pinned to his chest, darkened sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, and flat-brimmed hat on his head. Even with the majority of his face covered, it does little to hide the anger that radiates off of him like a hot stove eye.

You remain on the porch, shifting your weight on your feet at the top of the steps. “Okay, Hopper, just listen to me for a second—”

“Three days!” he shouts over you, not deterred by your composed nature. “I have been calling you… for three days! Seventy-two hours. No answer!”

Eddie decides to speak up from behind you despite his better judgment. “Yeah, uh, that was kinda my fault,” he confesses with an awkward laugh. “Wouldn’t let her hang up the phone—”

“I’ll deal with you in a second,” Jim interjects firmly and without thinking. He goes back to berating you with an admirable finesse. “Buckley wanted my head on a pike when I wouldn’t file a missing person’s report in the first twenty-four hours, but seventy-two? She was gonna kill me!”

Rather than argue with him, like every fiber of your being so desperately wants to, you make the difficult choice to concede with a heavy sigh. Because you don’t doubt that Robin was on his ass the second she realized you weren’t answering your phone or at your apartment when she and Steve dropped by.

She did tend to be on the overprotective side, after all, which obviously paired well with her melodramatic disposition.

“I’m sorry, okay? I’ve just been… busy.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard the one before,” the man answers bitterly.

“It’s different, Hopper!”

“I’ve heard the one before, too!”

Eddie can only assume that the both of you are communicating telepathically, what with the way your synchronized glares seem to say a thousand words (probably every curse imaginable, if he had to guess) without your mouths ever moving once. 

He stands on the outskirts of it all, feeling a bit stuck in the thorniness of such a tense silence, like any slight movement might cut him.

Jim moves slowly, akin to a creeping snake, as his hands raise to remove the glasses from his face. Their lack reveals the ice-cold glare that was previously hiding beneath them.

“Get in the car—” 

“—No,” you reject just as the direction leaves his mouth because you knew it was coming.

Jim inhales sharply and smacks his lips against his teeth, like a father whose child is most ardently testing his patience. He plants his work boot in the gravel and his hand on his hips. His steel gaze goes far off for a moment before flitting back to you again.

“…Get in the car or I put you in handcuffs.”

Your breath hitches at the threat. You squint over at him. “You wouldn’t.”

Jim smiles at you, but it’s more threatening than anything else. “We both know that I would.”

Eddie’s eyes flit between the both of you. He can tell that Hopper’s serious and that you’re trying to decide whether or not to call his bluff, with your arms crossed defensively over your chest and lips pursed in a tight line.

You ultimately decide not to. Because Hopper has, in fact, done that before. And even though the circumstances are very, very different, you wouldn’t put it past him to do it again. So you all but stomp your foot like a protesting child and spin on your heel to storm back inside the trailer.

Eddie’s nervous gaze flits between your disappearing form and the storm cloud of a police chief standing in his driveway. When their eyes lock, he realizes he should probably say something. He cocks his thumb over his shoulder and stammers, “I should— I should probably…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. He catches the front door before it shuts and slithers through the crack of it to follow in behind you.

“Wait, was he— was he being serious about that?” Eddie wonders once you’re back in his bedroom.

It feels a lot less cozy than it did minutes before, less like the bubble of refuge that you thought nobody could pierce and more like a lonely space that feels entirely too empty. You pluck your things scattered around his room, and it starts to feel less and less like home with parts of you gone from it.

“I don’t know,” you answer within a sigh as you collect your cardigan from the back of his desk chair and shrug the thing back over your shoulders again.

“But it’s happened before?”

“Yeah. Once. When I was…” you confess quietly, then trail off. You get your bag from his nightstand and haphazardly shove your scrunchie, sunglasses, and chapstick into the bottom of it. “…When I was in a bad way— it doesn’t matter now.”

Eddie so desperately wants to pry.

He’d wanted to make a joke before, about the handcuffs — something less than tasteful about them and you and Hopper and some good ol’ freaky deaky that you'd scold him for after. But he decides not to now because you sound so strangely solemn about the whole thing, as though it was a story you buried deep with the intent of never bringing it up again.

“You don’t have to go with him if you don’t want to, you know that, right?”

“Of course, I do,” you scoff at his worries, not nearly as threatened by Jim as the rest of Hawkins. You move to stand in front of him in the center of his room and meet his furrowed brows with a soft grin. “He’s not gonna do anything, he’s just pissed. He’ll berate me on the drive back to my apartment and then it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

That seems to please Eddie well enough, though he’s still a bit disheartened at your leaving.

“I guess we couldn’t keep spending time together like this, huh?” he teases lightly, like the realization of it doesn’t make his chest ache. “Sorta forgot about the rest of the world… whatever that is.”

“It was fun while it lasted,” you tell him with a shrug and a whimsical sigh.

“Wait for me, will ya?” he jokes, if only to make you laugh and to feel like he’s stuck in some sickly sweet ending of a romcom for a couple moments more. 

You roll your eyes at his dramatics but let him wrap you in his arms anyway. His hands find purchase on your elbows, thumbs rubbing soothingly along the outsides of them. “How about a kiss, then?” he offers when the urge to feel you because too great to bear. “For our ten-minute anniversary and all?”

“You never have to ask me, Eds,” you assure with a laugh. You rise to the tips of your toes and he meets you halfway. 

Home is in your mouth. It’s warm and cozy and safe there. It’s easily the most familiar place he’s ever known, with your bottom lip nestled between his own. He feels homesick when you part from him. 

“You’re not mad at me?” he wonders quietly, feeling a bit like a cowering child from where he stands in front ahead of you — eased only when you shake your head almost immediately in response.

“No. I couldn’t be even if I wanted to, I think.”

“Okay. That’s… That’s good.”

“We can talk about it later, if you want. After I get lurch off my ass.”

He tries not to smile too wide, but it’s hard not to beam every time he looks at you. “Yeah. Sure. I’ll… I’ll see you around, I guess?” he stumbles over himself, having forgotten how to say goodbye to you. 

It’s equally as hard for you too, it seems, because you nod at him and turn to leave and then realize once you’re halfway down the hallway that you might not survive if you don’t kiss him again. 

So you turn and rush back, catching Eddie with his back turned and spinning him around so you can peck him again. You feel his cheeks heat beneath your palm and his sigh against your cupid’s bow and his lips melt against your own.

You etch each tingling sensation into the edges of your mind in the hope that you won’t drive yourself completely insane when you inevitably start to miss him like crazy. 

You focus on that and on him when you find Hopper and his stupid proud dad smirk. It’s the only reason you don’t punch him in the jaw and tuck and roll out of the Cruiser when the silence becomes so slowly insufferable.

You’re starting to think Jim left the radio off on purpose. You’ve never known the guy not to drive around without the strumming of an old-school folk song to accompany him. You figure it must be some sort of intimidation tactic, to make you so uncomfortable that you break. You’re a lot closer to that than either of you realize.

You spare a glance over at the man next to you. He hasn’t looked at you once since you get in the car. He’s got one hand at three o’clock on the steering wheel and the other with its elbow propped up on the door as he scratches at the stubble on his jaw. 

He’s too at ease not to be bothered. This is obviously some kind of front he’s putting on to conceal his inner irritation.

You give on the lecture you’d been trying to prepare yourself for and exhale sharply through your nose. Your fingers fidget on your thighs as you kick your restless feet up on the console. 

“Get your feet off the dash,” Jim scolds without missing a beat. 

You huff and obey. “Okay, this is crazy— can’t you just yell at me already?”

He barely wastes a second.

“I cannot believe you right now!” he seethes through gritted teeth, stewing in a dad-like sort of anger.

“It was three days, Hopper!”

“You know what happened the last time no one heard from you for three days?” he shouts back. 

You tip your head back against the seat and groan. You should’ve known he was going to play that card. 

He waves an accusatory finger between the both of you. “You and me— we had a deal, remember? You let me check in on you. You agreed to that. You visit your little high school friends, and I see you at work, so I can make sure you’re not off somewhere killing yourself.”

Hopper becomes a casualty to the tense silence he created then, when you don’t retort with some comeback of your own and force him to feel every ounce of pressure from the leaden quiet. 

He sighs a great big, too loud sigh and shifts in his seat. His softening gaze flits between you and the road. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean it like that, okay? I just meant it, you know, figuratively. I wasn’t… trying to be mean.”

“When have you ever cared about being mean?” you monotone.

“I don’t,” he assures. “I’m just not trying to hurt your feelings, alright? Jeez…”

You try not to take too much pride in the man’s half-apology, though you’d be lying if you said it wasn’t a little bit rewarding.

Jim Hopper’s practically an iceberg. He only melts for his kid, Joyce Boyers, and you, apparently. 

It’s why he’s always so damn protective over you. He’s developed this sort of deep-rooted urge to keep you safe after watching you make every wrong decision a human being could possibly make. And when you mess up, because you do mess up, he feels like it’s partially his fault — that, if he’d done more, he could’ve kept you safer. 

It makes you feel like a burden most of the time, but you know it’s above yourself and mostly out of your control.

You’d known of each other for a while before you really met, because a troublemaker and police chief in such a small town are bound to. But somewhere down the line, he found you in a valley of mourning for someone that was still alive and you found him in a black hole of grief for someone who wasn’t. The empty and infinite voids within you both were stitched slowly together all over again. 

Jim Hopper was the dad you never had. You were the daughter he couldn’t.

And you thought something might change after he adopted El. You figured he might forget about you because it wasn’t like it was his job to watch after you or anything. Playing pretend always felt nice, but you knew it wasn’t real. 

It was to Jim, though, who’d developed a similar adoration for you as the one he had for Sara. He hasn’t been able to forget about you in the same way he hasn’t been able to forget about her. 

Every night, after he’s scrubbed the day off his body and washed it all down with a lukewarm beer, he lays on his pull-out bed in the small living room of his cabin and goes through a checklist in his head. 

He makes sure that he’s checked on El and reminds himself to wake up early to make her breakfast the next morning before he brings Joyce coffee at Melvald’s — Joyce. She always comes next on his list, always right after El, and then you. 

He forces himself to calm down when his blood pressure inevitably spikes at the thought of not having heard from you all day. He reminds himself that he saw you at work on his lunch break and that he’ll see you again tomorrow.

Jim hums to himself as he settles more comfortably into his springy cot, deciding that he’ll try a new wine he can’t pronounce when he sees you at Enzo’s the next day and that he’ll drink it while he rambles about Joyce or El’s new boyfriend.

He drifts to sleep with thoughts of Sara.

You’re as ingrained into his mind as every other person he’s grown to love.

He stopped worrying about never getting you out a long time ago. Like a tomato sauce stain on a dress shirt, he knows he’ll never get you out of his head. He knows even more so that he doesn’t want to — no matter how much you annoy him or how angry you make him when you don’t answer his calls.

“Sorry…” you murmur and swallow down whatever mundane argument you could’ve spewed then, at the result of his sudden warmth. You turn to gaze out the window and trace the edges of the puffy white clouds with your eyes. “I wasn’t thinking about that — the… deal, or whatever… Honestly, I was a little too busy being happier than I think I’ve ever been in my life, so…”

You don’t see the dramatic eye roll he gives you in response, but you can’t miss the hearty groan that spills from his mouth. 

“What?” you laugh in response. “Have you never been a kid in love before?”

It’s almost jarring how he goes from huffy to concerned in a fraction of a second. His head snaps over to you, jaw clenched and eyes suddenly stern and swimming with a lingering fear. 

“Love?” he repeats like he must’ve heard you wrong. “Love— That’s— That’s what this is?”

You shrug. “I don’t know… Maybe…”

His eyes flutter shut for a moment. “Please don’t tell me you’ve said that to each other yet. This guy was just a crush four days ago.”

“No, Hopper. We haven’t. I mean, he literally just told me he was a virgin, so I don’t think we’re even close to—”

“A virgin?” Jim echoes, voice high-pitched and giddy. He beams at you from beneath his bushy mustache and slaps you a little too hard on your arm when he laughs. “Shit, teacup. Are you runnin’ out of options over there or somethin’?”

You twist your body to hit him back harder with your right hand. “It’s not funny, Hopper,” you scold. “He’s nice.”

“You said that about Hargrove once—”

“This is different,” you monotone before the words have the chance to leave his mouth.

“Yeah? How do you know?”

The question stumps you for a moment because you don’t know — you can’t.

You’d never admit it out loud, but Hopper was right; you’re still not quite sure how you ever could’ve thought that Billy Hargrove was a good guy, but you did. You felt a similar feeling of elation with him as you do now with Eddie, an otherworldly sort of happiness that makes you feel like you’re the only person it’s ever happened to.

And here you are now, sometime later and reveling in the aftermath, still gluing pieces of your shattered heart together.

You treat love like a drug. You use and use and use until it stops being a fun thing and becomes a crutch you can’t live without. That’s always when it starts to hurt you, but you’re in too deep to stop craving it.

And you know it’s bound to happen all over again, but you have to believe Eddie’s different or else you might as well fall into the deep pit of despair you’ve been trying this whole time to crawl out of. 

He makes you happy, really really happy, and you’d rather gamble that he hurts you than give it all without even trying.

“I… don’t,” you conclude after a few moments.

Jim seems surprised by your admission, shooting you an incredulous look with his untamed brows raised to his hairline.

You meet his look with a wavering grin. “But he makes me really happy, Hop. Like… It feels like it should be illegal or something. He makes me feel so good my heart hurts. There’s like this—”

“Ugh,” the man grumbles in disgust, sullen all over again.

“I didn’t mean it like that, you weirdo,” you chide.

A grin twitches beneath his mustache in response. “I know you didn’t… ‘Cause Munson’s a virgin.”

“Oh my god!” you groan. “I didn’t even mean to tell you that, okay? Leave him alone— and a swear to god, Hopper, if you make fun of him—”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with it, alright? I mean, he’s got the expert around to show him the ropes— ow!” You cut off his stupid joke and accompanying sardonic grin with a fist to his shoulder.

Steve and Robin tend to be quite the formidable duo.

They’ve barely got a brain cell to rub together between them, but there’s still something strangely intimidating about them when they’re both angry. It feels a bit like they’re your I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed parents, and you’re the scolded child taking your lashings in the form of a lecture.

It’s what you feel like now, sitting across from them in your designated booth at Benny’s Burgers — the one by the window in the corner. It’s far enough away from the bustle of the entrance but close enough still to gossip about the assholes you used to know from high school when they walk through the door. 

“You scare the shit out of us when you go AWOL like that, you know?” Steve confesses, still soft even though you know there’s a more upset part of himself he keeps hidden for now.

His chocolate gaze flits between you and the pile of fries in the middle of the table that the three of you share. He finds the one covered in the most salt and pops it into his mouth.

“AWOL?” you echo with a distant laugh when you realize how much he sounds like Hopper. “It was three days.”

“Yeah, and you fell off the face of the earth,” Robin retorts, half-muffled through the hearty gulp of strawberry milkshake starting to melt in her mouth.

“You guys are acting like I went halfway across the country,” you scoff. “I was with Eddie. At his trailer.”

“Exactly!”

Steve’s face contorts mid-bite. “Wait, you were with him? The freak?”

It makes you roll your eyes. He’d been too busy hopelessly flirting with the waitress at the counter to hear the entire recounting of your absence to Robin, though it was more of you gushing about it than anything else.

“Yep,” you answer.

“You skipped out on movie night to be with… Eddie Munson?” he reiterates for himself, as though there was any correlation between watching the same three movies while gorging on greasy junk food with your best friends and falling more in love with a guy you were already head over heels for as he tried to explain away the unopened box of condoms collecting dust underneath his bed.

Both are equally fun in their own ways, but totally totally different.

“How did you survive without me, Steven?” you joke back in response.

“He didn’t,” Robin quips.

“So… what? You guys just went on some kinda bender? I don’t get it. Did you just fuck the entire time or something?”

“Well, contrary to popular belief, I can actually spend time with someone and not fuck them—”

“Okay, that’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“And to answer your question — no, we didn’t fuck,” you confess, then elaborate more slowly, a tad bit awkwardly. “Because he told me today that… he is a… virgin.”

Your words seem to settle over each of them differently. Robin stills with her lips wrapped around the candy-cane striped straw then furrows her brows, as though their meaning hits her a few seconds after the fact.

Steve, meanwhile, goes entirely agape in an amazed sort of shock. His eyes go wide, his brows fly up and hide beneath the bangs that hang down over his forehead, and his jaw falls open. And then he starts to smile, a subtle hint of a grin on the corners of his pink lips, like he finds it funny.

“I knew it,” he murmurs to himself.

“…Why are you smiling like that?”

His smirk widens. “That freak said he screwed Vicki Carmichael senior year. I knew he was lying.”

“And why do you look so proud of yourself, exactly?” Robin asks him.

“Because now I feel less bad about never fucking her,” the boy explains like it’s obvious. He set his elbows on the table and gestures wildly with his hands. “I always thought the freak one-upped me because she, like, never gave me the time of day after Hargrove came along, you know? But… It’s good to know that I’m still king.”

His delighted grin is met with confused looks from both you and Robin, who look upon him with twisted eyebrows and squinted eyes. 

“Are you not aware of how strange everything that comes out of your mouth is?” you ask him, only partly joking.

“At least that settles why he wouldn’t let you give him a blow job,” the brunette girl concludes with a shrug as she slouches against the booth. “Poor guy was probably shitting bricks about it.”

You realize then that it does make sense, why he’d always been so adamant about your pleasure and never his own. Why he always touched you like you were some fragile thing he might break, and like everything was new to him. Because it was new to him. All of it.

And even though it baffles you to no end how he went his entire life without someone wanting to jump his bones (because truth be told, you’re doing a terrible job at hiding your want to do just that), the fact still remains — Eddie Munson is a virgin. 

He’s a virgin with an acute infatuation for the local slut, both of you freaks in your own right. 

It just adds more intricacy to a puzzle that already feels so complicated.

“I’ve never been with a virgin before,” you admit quietly, mostly to yourself, as you train your gaze on the straw wrapper you curl around your finger. “It’s different… Scary.”

“Why?” Robin wonders aloud.

“I don’t know. I just— I don’t know what to do now.”

“Just do what you always do,” Steve tells you like it’s that simple. He folds his arms on the table and leans in closer to you. “Experience is good. Okay? Experience is key.”

“No, it’s not that. I think I’m just… I’m scared I’m gonna treat him the way, you know, that I was treated. And I don’t wanna… I don’t wanna do that to him.”

You’re not sure when the shift started, when you stopped being a person to people. You only know that you were something less than that. Somewhere between junior and senior year, you become a plaything that anyone could do anything they wanted to with, and you were too starved for physical affection to tell them otherwise. 

You liked the attention. You liked feeling loved, even if it was only for a minute and a half, and all you had to show for it was a pool of cooling come on your belly.

Eddie’s the fragile thing now that you were then. 

He was a delicate little thing that can break so easily, something you could split in half if you wanted to. 

You don’t. 

You want so desperately to be kind, but you’re scared you won’t know how to, because no one’s ever been kind to you.

Steve reaches across the table for you, taking a wild stab at an attempt for affection after several months of being scared to touch you — he did enough of that, he thought, and he’d hurt you. But he can see the lingering ache hiding in your glazed-over eyes and feels an overwhelming urge to quell your worry. 

Five warm fingers wrap around your wrist, not too tight or too strong, just enough to stop you from cutting circulation off to the tip of your pointer finger and to remind you that he’s still there.

“Trust me,” he tells you with a sudden soft swimming in his caramel-colored eyes and a smile playing on his lips. “You couldn’t do that to anybody. Not even if you wanted to.”  

Your heart nearly stops at his words, at the sheer kindness of them, and at the way he holds you in the soft way you’re used to only Eddie holding you. Your eyes go wide when they flit up to him and then start to sting with the weight of unshed tears. 

You’re quick to blink them away though, while you playfully shrug him off and joke — “stop being so nice before I get the wrong idea, Harrington” — because it’s easier than accepting his tenderness.

Robin takes one look at his fond gaze, all gooey and dripping with honey, and then at your rolling eyes and accompanying shy grin, and groans at the softness of it all. She slides out from the confines of the booth and grumbles something about getting a refill on her milkshake.

“Some fries too, while you’re up?” Steve offers with a hopeful grin.

He’s met with the girl’s signature scowl.

“Please,” you finish for him.

Robin grins. “Anything for you,” she croons, if only to make the boy pout, before skipping off to the counter.

She leans her elbows upon the red wooden laminate top and smiles that same sickly sweet smile for Benny by the grill — no doubt trying to get her refills for free. 

Even though the bearded man seems unimpressed with her presence, you know that he’ll give them to her free of charge. He’s always had a soft spot for her, one of the only people in town who could rival his wit.

The door dings open, a familiar and high-pitched chime that often becomes more frequent as the evening progresses. This time it lets in a foreign, bitter breeze when the door swings open and closed again.

You can feel the chill from a distance — it resembles the crispness of autumn despite being comfortably settled in the middle of March. It nearly takes your breath away, prickles your skin and makes you grimace back a shiver. 

When your eyes leave Steve, a difficult feat considering he’s doing an alarmingly good impression of a walrus by sticking fries in his upper lip, you find that it wasn’t abnormally cold air at all. It was a Peter Parker spider sense form of anxiety that had felt like a bucket of ice water had been poured over you.

Billy Hargrove used to turn heads when he walked into a room. 

Now he just sucks all the air out of it.

And it’s not like you haven’t seen him since the break up; for a while, the asshole was painted on the backs of your eyelids — he all but haunted your consciousness. You’ll see him around town on occasion, in his sunglasses and jean jacket and too-tight denim pants, while he struts around Main Street with his new girlfriend (otherwise known as, his flavors of the month).

You think this is the first time you’ve been in the same room as him since your split, though. It feels like it must be with the way your throat starts to tighten and you forget how to breathe. 

All at once, you’re scrambling for an exit. It’s like Billy’s a fire and his smoke is rapidly filling your lungs. Your legs start to tremble when your adrenaline spike. Your brain tells you to get out as quickly as you can before he burns you.

Steve notices the look of fear flood your features like a dark storm cloud. You were laughing just seconds before the door opened, equal parts with him and at him, but now you just looked terrified — like a child who’s just spotted a boogeyman in her closet.

He turns in the booth to find what haunted thing has just caught your eye and finds that it’s worse than any monster you could conjure up. It’s Billy fucking Hargrove, with his pretty hair and his pretty smile and his pretty girl under his arm.

His presence filled targeted, almost. Like he chose to come to this diner, on this day and at this time just to fuck with the group of you.

“Don’t even look at him,” Steve advises when he turns back to you. “Look at me, okay? He’s not even worth it. That asshole doesn’t deserve to ruin our day.”

And you try to listen to him. You try really, really hard to let him change that subject to the cold fries or Robin taking too long or a combination of the two, but you can’t focus on him. You’re already so overwhelmed at the sight of Billy that you can’t focus on anything else but him. 

You settle on the fact that you might just have to drag Steve and Robin out by their wrists because you can’t sit in this booth any longer, and you definitely aren’t hungry anymore.

And that’s when he spots you.

Your eyes lock and you freeze, immediately averting your gaze but catching the sudden sparkle in his own as he grins a sly, sadistic grin.

“No way,” you hear him say with a laugh under his breath. The sound of his voice makes you tense. You hadn’t realized how at peace you’d been all this time without having to hear it. Now it feels like so many little needles piercing your skin.

“Fancy seeing you guys here,” he greets after he’s made a b-line for your booth and dragged Vicki Carmichael along with him. He smiles with all of his pearly whites while he smacks pungent wintergreen gum between them. 

When he slides into the booth beside you, he does so without invitation, and forces Vicki to slink in next to Steve.

And like it wasn’t already awkward enough, you know Vicki — like, know her, know her. There was a drunken makeout at a Halloween party in ’82. Then a one night stand with her brother before he left for college in ’83. And then her Tom Selleck clone of a father at a sleepover for her eighteenth birthday in ’85. 

You’re not exactly proud of it, but you’ve gotten a rather hefty taste of her family tree, and the fact that both of you know it makes it that much more uncomfortable.

“We’re kinda busy here, Hargrove,” Steve tells him when he notices how comfortable he’s making himself in your booth.

“Ooh… Is this a little date?” Billy teases with a grin.

Steve’s face falls. “…No.”

“Oh, right,” he nods, though the sardonic lilt in his voice tells you that he already knew the answer. He crosses his arms on the tabletop and turns to look at you with eyes bluer than any ocean. They flicker up and down your form. Suddenly, you feel self-conscious in your baggy jean and tank top duo.

“You’ve been seeing that guy, haven’t you? What’s his name again? The, uh— the freak?”

“His name is Eddie,” Steve answers for you, defending him because you can’t find the words to.

“That’s it,” Billy snaps his fingers, then points. He nudges you with his shoulder. The familiar feel of his jean jacket against your skin makes you wince. “God, you must be runnin’ out of steam over there, huh? I mean… the freak? Seriously? You couldn’t do any better than that?”

The jokes were tolerable coming from Jim and Steve and Robin — they weren’t funny by any means, but you could stomach them because you knew they were jokes. But this? This was just to hurt you. And it works too easily because Billy knows exactly how to break you. He knows all the wires to cut and buttons to push because the puzzle of shattering your psyche is one he memorized long ago.

“He’s actually a really nice guy,” you manage through a tight throat, still staring at your fidgeting hands.

“Well, that’s good,” he hums like you need his approval. “It’s about time, right?”

You huff and choose to entertain him despite your better judgment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He only shrugs. “I don’t know... Just, you know, that found a guy willing to settle for you. That’s all.”

“Settle?” you repeat, trying to laugh despite how tiny your voice sounds.

“You know what I mean, c’mon,” the blonde boy chuckles. “Sluts are fun and all, but they’re not the kinda girls you wanna settle down with. Steve knows what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Steve monotones quickly and without thinking, gaze hardened and jaw clenched. “And you need to leave.”

“I”m hungry, Billy,” Vicki whines, feeling every ounce of the tension surrounding her — like syrup or quicksand. She slides her permed bangs from her eyes and tucks a rogue strawberry strand behind her ear in a nervous tick. “Can’t we just get something to eat?”

“Alright, alright. I know when I’m not wanted,” Billy chuckles.

You grumble bitterly under your breath. “Apparently not…”

“I’ll see you around, Harrington,” Billy singsongs with a grin that wreaks of insincerity while his girlfriend slides out from the booth. He turns to look at you and squints. “Don’t be a stranger, alright? Matter of fact, point Munson my way, and I’ll give him a few pointers.”

You’re uncowed by his offer and angered by his mention of Eddie. Your eyes are stern and unwavering as you meet his gaze for the first time since he sat down beside you. 

“I think you could learn a thing or two from him, actually,” you retort, words sounding sweeter than the venom lingering behind them.

Billy’s grin only widens, impressed by your arguing. “Ooh… I forgot about the mouth you had on you, sweetheart.”

The use of the nickname makes you cringe. It doesn’t sound nearly as fulfilling as it does when it comes from Eddie. Now, it just sounds artificial — degrading.

He leans in close to you like he’s about to tell you a secret and splays his arm along the back of the booth behind you. The nicotine on his breath makes you grimace; it’s intoxicating when it comes from Eddie, disgusting from the boy sitting next to you. 

His eyes are bluer so up close, darker than you remember them being, and you notice he’s trimmed his usual stubble to a patchy mustache. He looks like the grown-up version of the boy you used to know, visually more mature but still the same in his way.

“When he gets bored of you — because, let’s be serious, he will get bored of you — you know where to find me,” Billy murmurs to you, a cynical smirk on the edges of his lips. “I’ll make sure you stay nice and broken in for the next dozen guys that want a taste—”

Steve can’t hear a word from where he sits across the booth, but he’s fuming with fists clenched under the table anyway. He hates how close Billy is to you, more so how uncomfortable you look with the proximity and how his words make you flinch. 

“Alright, you need to leave,” he blurts. “Now.”

Before the blonde could respond with a quip of his own, Robin all but teleports to the head of the table. She’s standing in front of the four of you suddenly, carrying a basket of fries and a strawberry milkshake and wearing a frown on her face.

“You’re in my seat, dickwad,” she monotones, even though she hadn’t been sitting next to you before. She’s not the least bit threatened by the Californian douchebag.

Billy smiles up at her anyway. “I was wondering where the third musketeer was! Still a carpet muncher, Buckley?”

“Happily.”

“What do ya say me and you head up to Lover’s Lake later?” the boy offers despite his date shifting awkwardly a few feet away. It’s a joke, for reasons that are more than obvious, and that’s what makes it so unbearably unfunny. 

He slinks out from the booth. The lack of his warmth is strangely comforting and you’re able to breathe for the first time in five minutes. He stretches his back out when he stands to his full height in front of Robin, then shrugs with his hands splayed on his hips.

“Maybe you just need some good dick. I mean… we’re gonna die anyway, right?”

“I’d rather,” she quips with a rouge-tinted smile.

The way it makes him laugh is startling. He finds a strange humor in being rejected — in most things, really. You still haven’t forgotten the cackles that left his bloodied mouth when Steve delivered blow after blow to the boy’s face in the middle of his living room, like it was all a fun game to him.

That was, of course, before Billy got the upper hand and nearly killed Steve that night. He laughed about it that too, until Max knocked him out with a baseball bat.

He’s got the same grin on his face now as he did then when he turns to look at you. A pink and pretty smirk, just wide enough to reveal the dimple in his left cheek. It’s nothing short of taunting, like he’s mocking you without having to say anything at all.

“Don’t be a stranger, alright?” Billy repeats. He keeps smacking his gum between his teeth and winks at you before spinning on the heel of his boot. He guides Vicki with him to the counter with a hand on the back pocket of her jeans.

Even when Robin slides in next to you and effectively pierces the bubble of tension that had already started to shrink with Billy’s leaving, you still find it hard to breathe. You have to keep reminding yourself, forcing oxygen in and out with wobbling breaths through your nose, or else you just stop altogether.

The other two move on rather quickly, having no trouble finding their voices again after he’s gone. Their words are muffled, though, like they’re underwater.

“I forgot what an asshole he was,” Robin grumbles.

“Well, I didn’t,” Steve retorts, eyes scanning the basket of fries for the most strategic pick of the bunch. “I can still barely breathe through my nose.”

“That’s because you didn’t go to a doctor, dingus.”

“Because I didn’t need a doctor, Robin.”

“Yeah, because being concussed three times in two years is so healthy—”

Your eyes act like magnets as they stay locked on Billy’s form. He leans in closer to Vicki to tell her something, then pats her once on the ass before walking towards the exit again. The door dings when he swings it open. Through the window, you catch him pulling out a red and white pack of cigarettes — the same brand of Marlboro Reds he’s been smoking since he was in middle school.

“You okay?” you hear Steve say, but it sounds too far away for you to realize he’s talking to you.

Robin nudges you with her shoulder to jog you from your stupor. You blink hard once and then turn to her with wide eyes. “What?”

“You doing alright over there?” the girl wonders.

“Yeah,” your answer is too quick and too high-pitched to be true. “Fine.”

“Like, fine as in you’re actually fine, or fine as in, if I leave you alone for too long, I’m gonna find you living under a bridge like a troll?”

You roll your eyes at her. “Fine as in, if someone bums me a cigarette, I’ll be good as new.”

Steve huffs when you hold out the palm of your hand toward him. He’s the only one of you who smokes recreationally enough to carry a lighter and pack of cigs with him. You swear he only keeps it with him because the weight of them makes him feel cool. You’re grateful for them now, though, and for the escape they unexpectedly provide you.

His fingers are warm when they brush your hand. The metal zippo he drops in the center of it is far colder and carries a comforting sort of weight to it. He thumbs a cigarette from the pack for you, and you take it with a sardonic smile and a sickly sweet “thank you, Stevie.” 

Robin gets out of the booth to let you slide out of it.

The door chimes again, this time over your head when you open it. 

Fresh, spring air nearly knocks you on your ass when it hits you for the first time. You realize then, that you’d forgotten to tell yourself to breathe and now your vision’s all swimmy. The cool breeze tries its hardest to quell your swelling anger, but you’re still at a simmering boil. Fists clenched over the lighter and cig duo in your palm and your sneakers slapping angrily against the cracked pavement.

That’s what signals your arrival, the raging stomps that echo in the alleyway Billy takes his smoke break in. 

The boy takes a puff of his cigarette and smirks on the exhale at the sight of you. All he needs is one glance to see how angry he’s made you. It’s an innocent, childlike sort of rage that’s got you all scrunched face and red — a heartbroken girl on a war path.

“I knew you couldn’t resist me, sweetheart,” he taunts with his signature sarcastic smile. He holds his arms at his sides, like he’s waiting for some kind of embrace from you. “You used to be like that all the time — all over me, you know? Clingy.”

“You know what you used to be?” you ask him once you’ve planted yourself a few feet away from him, fists shaking at your sides in a nearly overwhelming mixture of rage and apprehension.

“What’s that?”

“Nice! You used to be nice! Or do you not remember that?” you wonder rhetorically. Your anger fades slowly, an ebbing tide, as a reminiscent sadness eclipses your fury — a flood of blue in all your red. 

The sharp frown between your brows crumbles and so does your clenched jaw as your harsh features crumple like a balled-up piece of paper. You look upon the man that broke your heart with all the shattered pieces of it.

“You used to let me sleep over at your place when I was too scared to sleep alone at mine, and you’d bring me food when I told you I hadn’t eaten all day, and you’d take me on drives when you knew I hadn’t left my apartment in days,” you ramble in a single breath, gesticulating wildly with your hands — waving them at him and at you and the still air between. They fall hopelessly to your sides. 

“You used to be so sweet, Billy…” you conclude with a wavering breath. Your chest trembles on the inhale as you straighten out your shoulders and lift your chin, trying your best not to look as defeated as you feel. “And you know what you are now?”

Billy grins that stupid grin at you, the one that almost looks kind. Almost. It’s still soft in all its insincerity, like a parent entertaining their kid that’s gone on some meaningless tangent.

“No, sweetheart,” he answers after a beat. “What am I?”

“Not nice.”

He scoffs out a laugh.

“You used to tell me, all the time, how scared you were about ending up like you’re dad—” he tenses at the mention of the man, of his own monster in his own closet. “—He’d beat you black and blue every night, and I’d bandage all your cuts and put makeup on you when you begged, so you could go out and pretend like everything was normal. And you know what? You’re just like him!”

Billy doesn’t cower when you walk closer to him. He’s got no reason to be afraid of you, but your words hit him in a place far deeper than a thousand bloodied fists.

“What he did to you, is exactly what you do to me… Or do you know see that?” you don’t wait for a sarcastic reply, mostly because you wouldn’t see the indicators of it through the tears that blur your vision. “You’re not punching me, but it feels like you are. You break me over and over and over and I have to pretend like everything’s just normal and that we—”

“Real mature of you. To bring out the dad-card,” he interjects, if only to stop your ramblings so that he might not have to hear the truth that comes with them.

“You used to he nice,” you repeat, you agonize, you deflate. “Or… Or did you never use to be?”

The shell of your mind answers for you, paints itself with all the memories you’ve been trying like hell to forget for the past six months. It’s easier to pretend the bad things aren’t real than unravel all the reasons why they were bad to begin with, you find.

The negative memories come together like renaissance paintings — dark and gloomy and blotted with too realistic tears and spatters of blood. The oil stains the backs of your eyelids, destined to remain there forever like paintings in museum that’ll stand the test of time if you nurse them well enough.

You hadn’t yet been able to forget the screams and the cracks of fists colliding with bone. They tend to keep you up at night, even when you squeeze your eyes shut and beg for your memory to be wiped away completely. 

Billy crouches over Steve’s chest and pummels wholehearted punches to the boy’s face, never tiring in their force, even well after the boy goes limp underneath him. You beg for him to stop while trying like hell to shield Max from the sight of it all. 

For a while, you’d blamed yourself for it — for Max being there in the first place and for Steve’s cuts and bruises. 

You’d taken the girl and sought refuge in the Harrington home after witnessing a rather heated fight between Billy and his father. There was a sudden urge within you to take her far away from it before it ended how it always did — in weeping cuts and salty tears and insincere apologies when the cops were called.

But you made it worse anyway. 

For Max, for Steve. 

And you apologized profusely for it after, cried to the boy in his bathroom while you nursed his cuts like you were the one who put them there. 

When he told you it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t believe him. Not until now. Not until you realized that Billy had always been angry — always raging with an ocean of fear and grief and violence.

When he fought with his sister, you thought it was normal, that that’s just what siblings did. But the way she cried to you after couldn’t have been normal. Neither could the unearthly fury that washed over Billy like a riptide when he found out you and Max had sought safety in Steve The Hair Harrington — angered that it was Steve and that he couldn’t be that for the both of you.

And then there was the fights. The yelling and screaming and crying fights that felt like the end of the world every single time. The kind of fights you shouldn’t be having when you’re eighteen. You thought that maybe there was some normalcy in the cheating and the secrecy and Billy’s accompanying assholery because that was all you’d ever known.

Or maybe because you had to tell yourself that was normal in relationships because you didn’t want your’s to end. Billy was the first guy to give a damn about you in ways that went beyond just sex. How were you supposed to just give that up?

But then there’s Eddie — Eddie The Freak Munson, who was really just sunshine wrapped up in leather jackets and wild hair and chunky rings and metal music. He makes you happy. The sort of happy that makes you suspicious because something bad has to counteract all the goodness he makes you feel. 

Maybe that’s what this was. 

Seeing Billy after having wrapped yourself in a blanket of Eddie’s warmth made you see somehow more clearly. He loves on you so much that it’s made a mockery of everything else. 

Whatever you had with Billy wasn’t normal, it was a goddamn shit show. He loved you when it was convenient and then had you believing it was the real thing, that you wouldn’t find it anywhere else, when you tried to leave him. 

It was a lie, all of it.

The realization makes you falter.

“Oh, god…” you sigh, voice fragile like cracking glass. “Maybe you never used to be…”

For the first time ever, you see Billy’s grin shake. The edges of it flitter, like he’s fighting to keep the corners quirked up. And his eyes have gone a lighter shade of blue, the way they always did when he blinked back angry tears as he talked about his father.

It isn’t rage glassing his eyes now. It’s something sadder, but still as real — something you never got from him in the two years you were together.

He tries, still, to cover it all up. He smacks his lips against his teeth, sympathetically. “Sorry it took you this long to figure that out.”

The laugh you exhale then is heavy with sadness. Your smile is far away and so is your gaze as you stumble back from him. You turn your head to the edge of the alley where mom’s with strollers and people in fancy suits bustle on the sidewalk and keep your eyes on the strangers that whiz by you’ll probably never see again. 

“This is… This is pointless,” you murmur. His lean form is blurry through the burning tears you blink away. “Every time I see you, it’s just more bullshit so let’s just— let’s just leave each other alone, okay?”

Billy takes a puff from his cigarette. When he sighs, white smoke billows from his plump, pink lips. “That’s a shame… I was just thinking that you were the most interesting you’d ever been.”

The ebbing tide that had just left you rushes back in a bubbling scarlet wave. His words don’t make you sad anymore, they just make you angry all over again because you know you don’t deserve them. And you’re not entirely sure why he’s chosen you to antagonize out of all the other girls who’d made the mistake of falling for him, but you’re too far past the point of not caring to ask.

“Bother me again and I tell Chief Hopper,” you threaten even though you don’t feel very threatening just now. “I know you’re not scared of me, but you’d be stupid to be scared of him.”

“Why’s that?” he wonders before sticking the half-gone stick between his lips again.

“Because he runs Hawkins. And he fucking hates you—” for what you did to me, you almost say. You swallow the words down like bile before they have the chance to spew out. “And… And be nice to Vicki. Okay? She’s too good for you. Don’t do to her what you did to me.”

Your plea for another is the last thing you say to Billy before you turn away from him. You wouldn’t be upset if it was the last thing you ever said to him. You’re grateful for the resounding silence that follows. It’s nothing but the sound of your receding footsteps and the soles of his shoes scrapping the concrete as he snuffs out his cigarette. 

There is no snarky remark or insincere plea — just two people who used to love each other that have no idea to exist together anymore. 

When you step outside the brick confines of the alleyway, you feel as though a fraying string that had always connected the both of you had been finally cut.

It allows you to take a deep breath in for the first time in months. A lungful of fresh air that cleanses you, body and mind.

And when you catch Steve and Robin idling at the corner and doing a terrible job of pretending like they hadn’t just been eavesdropping, you don’t get upset or angry with them — you don’t feel much of anything, really.

You just hand the boy his lighter and unused cigarette and let them comfort you on the drive back to your apartment.

A misery sandwich. That’s what Robin calls the three of you and the heaping pile you lay in. 

Your queen-sized bed is in no way meant to accomodate three moderately sized adults, but you make it work anyway, like you always do.

Steve lays on his back, legs crossed and hands tucked under his head. Robin is on her stomach on the other end of the mattress, arms wrapped around the pillow she smushes the side of her face into. You lay between the both of them — on the both of them. Sprawled out sideways, you’ve got your head on propped up on Steve’s ribcage and your legs thrown over Robin’s thighs. 

The awkward position is the most comfortable you’ve ever been.

“I can’t believe that asshole had the nerve to show up to the diner on our day,” the boy rants. “And then sit in our booth, I mean— who does he think he is?”

Robin’s response is mostly muffled by the pillow. “I thought he left, like, forever ago.” 

“Maybe he just couldn’t stay away. It’s Hawkins, shit attracts shit, right?” Steve answers with a shrug that jostles your head slightly. It doesn’t little to knock you from your stupor, though, where you’ve been stuck for the better part of the day. You pick at the skin around your nails with little regard for how red and raging it's gone.

He notices this and thumps you on your temple — hard enough for you to feel it, gentle enough that it doesn’t hurt you. 

You turn your chin to your shoulder to look over at him. He tilts his own head to stare down at you, honey-tinted gaze somehow stern and soft at the same time. “If he bothers you again, I’ll kill him.”

You’re instantly warmed by his protective disposition. You know that he cares about you, even though you like to joke that he doesn’t. Steve hurt you once, made a promise to himself to make it up to you, and then just never left you alone. 

You’re grateful for it. 

You’re not sure who’d be the butt of every joke if he wasn’t around.

“Good to know,” you answer, nodding against his side and trying to hide the smile he gives you. You fail. “You think if he breaks your nose again, it’ll pop back into place?”

His face falls. “You’re real sweet, you know that?”

You open your mouth to respond, something along the lines of “I’m always sweet. You of all people should know that, Stevie,” before a knock sounds at the front door. It comes in the several rhythmic raps that Eddie is known to give when he’s got a tune stuck in his head. 

Apparently now, it’s the chorus to “Why Can’t This Be Love?” The Van Halen song he said he couldn’t stand before you.

Robin huffs at the sound of the muffled taps. She frowns like a child. “Who the hell…?”

“It’s just Eddie,” you affirm through a half-hearted grunt as you rise from your comfy position.

That brightens the two of them up almost immediately. Her and Steve share a look you can’t place as they grin at one another. Then they turn back to you with identical mischievous twinkles in their eyes. “Your boyfriend is here,” the former of the two singsongs.

You roll your eyes, but make no move to correct her. 

When you stand from the bed and make the short journey towards the door, you hear the patter of their feet following close behind you. 

“Gonna go all the way tonight?” Steve teases and jabs you on the shoulder. “Do you want us to leave?”

“No, nothing is happening. And yes, I think you should leave,” you monotone playfully.

Robin rushes past you suddenly and grabs the brass door handle before you’re able. She swings it open without thinking twice about it. Her sudden appearance, coupled with the fact that it isn’t you, startles the man on the other side of the door.

Eddie’s umber eyes go wide, brows raising and disappearing beneath his fluffy bangs, as his head jerks back.

“Eddie Munson,” the girl full-names the stranger she’s never spoken a word to before now. She leans against the doorway and effectively blocks the boy’s view of you. Steve, who squeezes himself in beside her, doesn’t make it any easier. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“You too, Buckley…” he wavers, trying to peer past them for any sight of you.

“Perfect timing, Eds,” you call out from behind them. “They were just about to leave.”

He’s relieved at the sound of your voice — even more so at your appearance when the two in front of you step off to the side to toe on their sneakers. 

You don’t look much different than when he saw you last. You’ve put on some makeup that’s started to smudge after the long day and changed your baggy sweatshirt for a more fitted tank top and boxers, but other than that you’re still the same. Still familiar and comforting in your way, a home away from home.

His smile is a tired one and it wobbles at the edges. “Oh, shit, am I— am I interrupting something?”

“No,” you’re quick to reassure him. “You’re saving me, actually.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Steve scoffs. “You love us.” 

The boy pulls you into a hug before he leaves, and it’s not the rarest thing in the world, but embraces like this do tend to be few and far between. He whispers  “use protection” in your ear and then a sharp “ow!” when you jab him in the ribs.

He and Robin smile kindly at Eddie when they walk by him and out the door, but waste barely a second before turning back around and grinning wildly at you. Steve flashes you a thumbs up while she mouths a cartoonish ‘good luck’ — like it’s the first time you and Eddie had ever been alone together. Like they were just on your ass about having been with him this whole time.

You usher Eddie and shut the door behind them. A quiet sort of peace settles on the apartment like a weighted blanket. The boy revels in every bit of its warmth.

Exhaustion drips from him like syrup. He’s sticky with it. His eyes have lost their usual twinkle, weighed down now with the burden of his fatigue. His face has lost most of its color, leaving a pale sheath of monotoned skin, and his hair is wilder than normal, with an unintentional sort of ruggedness to his curls.

It’s what being without you has done to him.

“You okay?” you ask him softly. It almost makes him want to cry.

“Yeah,” he answers anyway and idles in the spot where your kitchen meets your living room. “Just had a pretty shitty day. Wanted to spend time with you.”

“Me too… About the wanting to spend time with you part— and the shitty day part, too, I guess.”

Eddie smiles at your rambling, but purses it to the side to conceal it from you. “And since it is just about our…” he trails off and bends his elbow to check the watch on his wrist. “…Twelve hour anniversary, I picked us up some takeout.”

He sets the plastic bag on the counter. The red logo of Oriental Jade on the side of it makes your stomach roll with a distant hunger. You hadn’t realized how starved you were feeling after you abandoned your early dinner at Benny’s. It makes you more grateful for Eddie, who always seems to be on the same wavelength as you without even trying.

“Keep this up and we’ll be married before we hit hour twenty-four,” you joke as you rifle through the cartons — chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, dumplings, the works.

Eddie settles in next to you, propping his elbows on the countertop. “Well, I’m pretty sure the courthouse opens at nine, so… What were you thinking for the honeymoon? Hawaii? Bora Bora?”

“How about a cabin in the woods where no one can find us?”

“Hmm… Spooky. Sexy. I’m into it.”

You settle in the living room and eat on the couch while She Ra re-runs play on the television. You try to teach Eddie how to use chopsticks, though he can only work them with his non-dominant hand and all the wrong finger placements. You think it’s cute to watch him fumble with them, and you giggle about it until you’re scolding him for trying to feed Bowie some noodles. He laughs as you swat at him.

When all the containers are fully scrapped clean and tossed in the recycling bin, you migrate to the bedroom — which is perhaps too raunchy a phrase to use when the two of you only bury yourselves under the covers to talk shit.

Eddie drags out the chunky box fan you use when the air conditioner goes out in the summer — because it always goes out in the summer — and props it on the chest at the foot of your bed so the covers will billow around the both of you. “And it’s perfect because we can stay in the fort forever and not get hot,” he tells you, all giddy about it like he's a kid again.

“What if I get cold?” you retort.

Without missing a beat, he answers, “Well, lucky enough for you, I know several ways I can warm you up, sweetheart.”

He ditches his leather jacket and strips down to his boxers and settles in beside you underneath the blankets. The two of you lay shoulder to shoulder while you trace absentminded patterns on the palm of his hand and tell him about your day.

You make sure to leave out all the re-traumatizing-Billy-Hargrove bits, though. You focus mainly on the tense drive with Hopper and the small fight you’d had with Steve on the drive to the diner later that afternoon about the lyrics to Love My Way (both of you had been wrong).

Eddie tries his hardest to focus on your story and your fleeting touches, but he’s too far in his own head. You tell him all these things but he can’t stop thinking about himself — about whether or not you might’ve brought him up somewhere in between. 

He wouldn’t have blamed you, if you had. Steve and Robin are your closest friends and, for whatever reason, so is Chief Hopper, you’re bound to bring him up eventually. He was just hoping it would’ve been in a better capacity. Maybe about how kind he was or what a god he was in bed — not how he could only be one of those things because he’d never been anything in bed.

“It doesn’t make things weird between us, does it?” he wonders out of the blue.

You halt mid-sentence and turn to him with furrowed brows. “What?”

Eddie realizes then, that the first half of the conversation with you had only happened in his head. He prays that it’s too dark beneath the covers for you to see how red his cheeks get. “Just… What we talked about this morning. About me… you know…” He finds it hard to say the words. Or any of them at all.

“Why would it make things weird?”

“I don’t know. Because I wasn’t… totally honest with you, I guess? I feel a little bad about it, you know?”

“It’s okay,” you assure and turn on your side to be closer to him. Eddie stays on his back, more than happy to let you cuddle further into him. “I guess I do wish you’d said something before, though.”

His chest tightens. “I’m sorry. I just… I didn’t know how to—”

“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad!” you interject quickly when you catch the spiral of regret he was about to twist himself into. You curl tighter into his side, tossing a leg over his thigh and wrapping your hand around his bicep in an effort to melt with him. When he turns to face you, your noses nearly brush.

 “That’s not how I meant it. I just meant that, if I’d known before, I wouldn’t have… I would’ve taken things slower. I wouldn’t have been so, you know, so all over you.”

He hates how apologetic you sound. Like there was ever an ounce of him that would want to take back what happened that night at his trailer or a part of him that might hate how much you love on him.

“I liked it. I do like it.”

“Maybe we can just start over,” you offer. “Pretend like none of that ever happened.”

Eddie knows there’s no way in hell he’ll be able to forget about a single damn thing — not his cum stained jeans and how you looked so pretty washing them for him, not the feel of your tits in his mouth or you wrapped around his fingers, not how you made him blow his load all over his fist just by talking to him. 

He goes along with it anyway, though, just for you.

“Okay...” he nods slowly, then squints over at you. “You’re still my girlfriend, though, right?”

“Of course I am,” you giggle.

He grins proudly to himself. “Well then… Hope it’s not too early to have our first kiss then?”

It makes you roll your eyes because it’s such an Eddie Munson way of asking to kiss you. You told him earlier the day that he never had to ask you — in fact, you’d prefer it if he’d just kiss you out of the blue and take your breath away without you ever knowing it was coming. But there was something foreign and sweet in his little reassurances.

“Kiss me silly, Eddie Spaghetti,” you beam. He twists on his side to press tiny pecks to your smile.

It’s rather strange, you find, to kiss someone this way without the intention of it ever becoming something more. You kiss him just to kiss him — just to map the outline of his cupid’s bow and memorize the pattern of his tongue. Just to feel him, as much of him as your mouth will allow you to.

With one arm curled under his head and the other cradling your jaw, when his watch alarms — high-pitched beepbeepbeeps in quick succession — it’s sudden and close to your ear. 

Your lips click in protest when they part. His are pink and swollen and glossy with your spit. He smiles with them. “Happy twelve hour anniversary, sweetheart.”

“How long are you gonna make that stupid joke?” you laugh like your heart isn’t swelling so much you’re scared it might burst entirely.

“Uh, I was thinking… forever. Yeah. That sounds about right,” he concludes after a moment of feigned thought. He turns his watch off again and you swear you see him set for another twelve hours from now.

“Forever?” you echo.

“Uh-huh. Forever—” he presses his lips to yours once. “—And ever—” Twice. “—And ever.”

Eddie kisses you until you’re flat on your back and surrendering to each of his tiny little pecks. You twist your hands in his hair and let him love on you a little while more. You giggle when his mouth trails from your lips to your chin to your jaw to your neck. Please don’t get bored of me, you beg silently within your laughter.

I don’t think I could even if I wanted to, he answers with each kiss his sprinkles to your starved skin. How could I, when you’re the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me?