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babbushka · 4 months ago

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Death At The Dive Bar

Flip Zimmerman X F!Reader

Inspired by this request, some weird twilight-zone occult occurrences happen to happen to our favorite detective. 3.4k, NSFW

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It’s always the same -- a scream, a crash, broken glass bloodied on the floor. A gunshot maybe, or maybe not. In the dead of night, acts of violence hiding beneath a cloak of darkness.

It’s always the same -- a 911 call, frantic panicked voices demanding someone come down from the station, someone please help, before it’s too late, even though the very act of them picking up the phone means it’s already done.

It’s always the same -- until it isn't. And on a dark and stormy summer night in the thick of the Rocky Mountains, a tiny dive bar calls the nearest police dispatcher, and calmly requests to speak to one Detective Flip Zimmerman of Colorado Springs.

Flip had been in the area when he got the call over the radio, wandering around, scoping out the woods. He knew at once where it was, had heard stories of the place of course, way back in the day when he still wore the weight of the war like a thick leather jacket around his shoulders. When he pulls up in his Chevy it looks exactly the same as it always had been described: run down, small, with a buzzing neon sign proudly proclaiming The Mile High Tavern as the best place to grab a Coors within 50 miles. Nevermind that it was the only place.

He sits in his truck and glares at the bar. Popular with passers-through along winding scenic roads and most frequented by motorcyclists seeking shelter from the rain, he wonders (not for the first time this week) what the hell he’s getting himself into. The note from the dispatcher had been vague -- a lady was askin’ for him specifically, and he was supposed to find out why. Things like this didn’t bode well for him, usually.

Especially not lately, not with the way his last relationship flopped. He had tried to explain to the nice woman that his job took up a lot of his time -- had hoped that her big city job had given her a different perspective, but she didn’t seem to think his work hours applied to her. That had been three months ago that she left him, and he was still sore from it.

No, a woman asking for him directly was the last thing Flip wanted to get himself tangled up in, regardless of the reason.

Despite the rain, there isn’t the usual line of motorcycles out front. In fact, there was only one car to be seen, an oldie -- something chrome plated and pink, but he can’t really tell in the rainy darkness. The Mile High Tavern appeared for all intents and purposes to be empty, and so Flip takes one last drag of his cigarette, makes sure his gun is loaded and in its holster, and with a sigh of resignation steps into the downpour.

“Let me get you something nice and warm,” A friendly voice calls over to him from the counter when Flip steps over the threshold, your back turned to him. All at once, Flip’s heart begins to pound. Something about this place felt odd to him, an uneasy feeling that shifted his stomach around. He took another step closer and you continued, “I’m afraid the only hot thing we’ve got tonight is coffee.”

“Coffee’d be just fine, thank you.” Flip nods with gratitude, before sitting at the bar. Looking around, he notes how quaint the little place is. It’s neat and clean and warm, and he confirms that you are the only person in here. He wonders if you’ve been alone long, and frowns. “I’m sorry - I’m Detective Zimmerman, someone here rang for me?”

“I’d be that someone, yes.” You slide him a cup of black coffee down the counter that you lean against with a smile. It is dazzling, bright in the dark light of the dive bar. “Thank you for coming out here, I appreciate how quick you were.”

Well shit, Flip grimaces into his mug, now he feels like an asshole for sitting in the truck debating when, or if, he should brave the rain to head inside.

You smile at him like you knew he was out there biding his time, a teasing smile that lets him know you’re not mad, even though you could be. It wasn’t professional for a law officer to keep someone waiting like that.

“What seems to be the trouble?” He doesn’t bring up the fact that they’re alone.

It was dangerous these days, with all the murders in the woods lately. Women being slaughtered left and right by what Flip is certain is a serial killer, but no one will take him seriously enough about it to do anything. Not without more evidence.

“Do you..” You pause, as if you’re trying to find the words. No, that’s not it, as if you’re having a hard time spitting them out, like something is preventing you. “May I sit next to you?”

You look at him with expectation and hope, and he stares into your eyes, searching for what the hell brought him all the way out here on his night shift. The clock strikes three in the morning.

He doesn’t notice himself nodding with allowance, until you’re walking around the counter and getting close to him. Even though it’s warm in the bar, your hands are cold.

“Thank you,” You breathe, getting close to him. Not so close that you’re touching, but close enough that he could brush against your shoulder with his own. “I don’t usually work alone, but tonight the other server is sick, and with the storm we aren’t expecting too many people, so here I am. There was something out there.”

You stare directly into his eyes, and he’s almost taken aback by the seriousness and bluntness of your voice. Your voice is hypnotic almost, the edges of your words fuzzy and sharp at the same time, an impossible combination that has his palms sweating. He wonders for a brief moment if you slipped something into his coffee, but the thought leaves him as soon as it arrives.

“What sort of something?” He finds himself asking quietly, not wanting whatever it is to overhear. He thinks back to the past few weeks, the broken in-houses, the tape on the floor, the screams of agony. Flip sets his jaw and leans in close, looks deep into your wide open eyes, pupils huge in the dark.

“A figure, on the other side of the window. I saw it in the lightning, I saw its eyes. I think it’s a man. I’m scared.” You whisper, lowering your voice to match his pitch.

“I can escort you home -- ” He goes to get up, a rush of protective energy flowing through him, scraping the bar stool against the wooden floor, the sound so so so loud in the quiet of the bar, but your hand is gripping his arm the second he gets up.

“No!” Your voice is too sharp again, dark around the edges, and Flip looks down and sees panic in your eyes. He softens immediately, and even though he’s not supposed to, even though it’s unprofessional, even though you’re a stranger, he pulls you into a hug for some comfort. You throw your arms around him in return, and he’s not certain who is comforting whom. “No -- I -- I don’t want it to know where I live, if it follows us. I was hoping you could keep me company.”

Your face is pressed into his chest, and for the first time in a long time, he feels complete, he feels like he’s never ever going to let go. He feels like you were made to fit into his arms, against his chest. He grows hot, his throat clearing as he immediately steps back to give you some space.

You’re a stranger.

He doesn’t even know your name.

The rain pounds outside and lightning flashes, and Flip snaps back to reality.

“I don’t think I can stay all night, I would have brought backup.” He grumbles, rubbing the back of his neck, offering, “I can do a search of the premises, if that would make you feel better.”

“You shouldn’t go outside.” You shake your head, and Flip lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, glad that you have relieved him from what would have been one bitch of a job. Especially when you look up at him through your lashes and bite your lip and say, “I would prefer it if you stayed in here. With me.”

“Alright.” He smiles, throwing all caution to the wind because what the hell else is he going to do on a Monday night? “If you’d feel safer with me staying here with you, I’ll stay. But in the morning, I’ll escort you either home or to another safe location, or hell even to the station and you can give a statement, and we’ll have someone out here searching the woods.”

“That sounds like a plan, thank you.” Your hand rests on the bar counter close to his, so close, he nudges his pinky against yours. There’s no rings on your finger, he notices.

“In the meantime, what should we do?” He licks his lips, knowing that it’s wrong, it’s an abuse of power -- but who has power over whom? He’s getting lost in your eyes, in the pretty smile you give him as you reach over the bar counter and grab a small rectangular pack of --

“I have a deck of cards.” You brandish them at him, looking over your shoulder with a grin. The way you’re bent over the bartop has Flip’s mind doing awful things, things like picturing you without any of those clothes on. “You any good at poker?”

Flip was not good at poker.

He’s lost the past two games and you’re already shuffling for a third. The energy in the bar has relaxed significantly, and Flip is starting to forget why he’s there.

“Let’s up the ante.” You say, in an attempt to discourage or motivate him, he isn’t sure, as you shuffle and shuffle and shuffle the cards. “Each hand someone loses, they take something off.”

“I don’t see how this ends any other way than me naked.” Flip grunts, not entirely displeased by the prospect.

“You could win, and then I’d be the naked one.” You point out, and he laughs, a snort through his nose that exhales blue wispy smoke from his cigarette.

On the first hand, Flip loses -- but that’s all it takes. He unbuttons his shirt and you’re hot on him, pinching his cigarette out and flicking it into the ashtray for him, your lips searing onto his. No one can ever find out about this, can ever know he’s about to fuck this stranger on the job, fuck you silly over the bar counter while on a call, and you don’t seem like the type to tell. Not with the way you’re pulling your blouse up over your head.

He hadn’t really paid any attention to what you’re wearing until it’s off, in a heap on the floor around him. The undergarments you wear are old fashioned, a bullet bra and girdle that hold up a pair of stockings. The clothes on the floor are old fashioned too, almost like the same exact uniform that a waitress might have worn at the Tavern twenty years ago.

But they look new, and maybe the tavern never updated their uniforms,Flip doesn’t care, not with the way your hands are on his belt, pulling his hard dick out of his pants and spitting down onto it, spreading the spit around, his tip leaking and joining the mix.

With ragged breath, he pushes you down face first onto the bartop again, pops the straps of your bra, your garter, pushes down your stockings. They rip under his rough treatment, and he feels bad for a moment, just a moment, until his cock is rubbing at the soft wet folds of you and you let out a moan that fills the tavern with warmth.

“I don’t have a -- ” He starts, pulling away, trying to remember that he’s almost forty for fuck’s sake, he needs to be responsible, he needs to --

“It’s alright.” You reach behind him and grab at his hand, leading him to drape his body over yours, giving him permission to fuck you anyway.

With a sharp breath he pushes in all the way, bottoms out so that his cock is completely enveloped inside of you, his hips pressed against the smooth skin of your ass, and he almost can’t move he’s so blinded by the feeling. You’re so tight, and so wet, the bar smells like musk and sweat and rain, the sweet salty combination making his mind go dizzy.

He’s never talked much during sex, and this is no different, but in the back of his mind he wishes he had something good enough to say to you, something impressive. Instead, he thrusts in a steady harsh rhythm that has your knees buckling, your hands gripping the far edge of the bar counter, your cheek pressed against the polished wood, mouth dropped open and eyes shut tight in pleasure.

Flip’s hands on your waist are tight enough that he could dig them into you if he wasn’t careful, he could leave marks. He almost wants to, wants you to remember him when this is over and he’ll have to go back to the station, have to write a report about all of this. Not this, not you, not the way your sweet cunt clenches around him as you take his force, take his length, hot and pulsing inside of you.

He needs to see you, all of a sudden, he needs to. Grabbing your arms, he pulls out only long enough for you to whine in protest for a few short seconds, and then he’s taking you to a booth, taking you somewhere padded that he can lie you down and brace himself on top of you.

You lick your lips as your head rolls back, legs spreading for him to nestle between them as he bends over you, those same legs hooking around his waist. You’re completely naked, your perky breasts begging to be sucked on, and so he does. He wonders if the rasp of his clothes on your skin feels nice, if you like it. If you like him.

It’s too hot in here, Flip thinks, his eyes shut as he pants against your body. Too hot and bright, bright behind his eyelids as he groans and moans. He’s sweating, and it’s loud, the sound of rain too loud, its wooshing a roar that deafens his ears. He almost can’t think about anything else, can’t think about the way you feel under him, why is it so bright why is it so hot --

It hits you first, and you’re squirming, panting and moaning as you come. Flip can feel it squelching between your thighs, his cock pulling out shiny and glistening with your orgasm. It makes him go over the edge, his come filling you up, the hot white spread of it. He tries not to worry about fucking you raw, but it’s been a long time since he hasn’t used a rubber.

You give him a big grin, stretching out beneath him, your legs falling to the sides where they can. It’s still raining.

Wordlessly, he gathers you up from underneath him and settles you down on the floor, kissing all over your face, your neck, your breasts. Your stomach chuckles underneath him as you hold him close, breathing in the smell of him. He doesn’t want you to ever let go.

“Then don’t.” You sigh into his hair there on the floor, and Flip closes his eyes, tired from the events of the day.

He doesn’t realize that you’ve responded to his thoughts, until he’s in a deep sleep.

In the morning, he’s alone.

In the morning, the dive bar isn’t just old, it’s run down. The windows are smashed like kids had been playing pranks here, tossing bottles and rocks through the glass. The shelves are all empty, no liquor, nothing.

Flip feels like he is frozen as he looks around him. Where were you? Where were the cards that had scattered all over the floor? He is fully dressed, asleep in a booth that is covered in dust and cobwebs -- it wasn’t that dirty yesterday, was it?

He’s sick, his stomach lurching as he sits up. He doesn’t even know your name to shout it out into the bar. In the light of morning, the rain has stopped, and Flip gathers himself up on uncertain legs. He looks around, trying to find any trace of you, but there isn’t one. There’s only one set of boot prints in the dust on the floor, his own.

Confusion continues to wash over him, which slowly morphs into panic. These windows weren’t broken last night, the floor wasn’t dusty, where the fuck were you? He stumbles to his truck, his mind working double time trying to piece together what happened. Surely he hadn’t dreamt this, what was he doing last night? He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t stoned he --

“Come in, Flip, come in!” A panicked voice crackles from his car, and making sure his gun is still in the holster, Flip runs right to his truck, hopping in and turning the engine over.

“Ron?” Flip grasps the radio tightly in his hand, tuning the frequency to hear better. “Ron is that you? What’s going in?”

“Flip! Where are you?” Ron asks, direct to the point.

“I’m up by the fork in the mountain pass, just off the scenic highway.”

“What?! Are you safe?”

“Of course I’m safe, why wouldn’t I be? Ron what the fuck is happening?” Flip’s eyes are hard on the tavern, and even from the outside, something is wrong. This place was not open last night, it couldn’t have been. The walls are blackened with soot, the doors are boarded shut. How did he get in -- how did he get out?

“There was flash flooding, down the scenic road. It brought rocks down with it from all the rain. Search and rescue found a couple cars down the cliffside.” Ron rushes to explain, and Flip feels like he’s going to be sick.

“They’re dead?” He pinches the bridge of his nose -- people were getting caught up in a flash flood while he was getting laid last night.

“Yeah. You need to get back here, where did you say you were at again?” Ron asks, and Flip can hear that he’s pulling out a pen and paper from his desk.

“Mile High Tavern. I spent the night here” Flip responds, and then there’s silence. “Ron? Did you hear me? I said I’m at -- ”

“I heard you, but that’s not possible.” Ron’s voice is shaken, “That bar burned down back in ‘57.”

All at once, everything stops.

He blinks, and he’s in the roar of the inferno as he comes into your body.

He blinks again, and the bar is gone entirely.

Nothing remaining but a patch of scorched earth in its place.

No neon sign.

No motorcycles

No single car out front.

Ron is saying something on the radio, but Flip can’t hear. He is reversing out of there so quickly that he almost misses the flash of something behind him -- almost. Flip looks back in his rearview mirror at the bar and sees something, a shape, a young woman in old fashioned clothing far away, through the trees.

A hand waves, and Flip knows that whatever you were, you saved him, protected him from the flash flood that killed. You saved him, and he fucked you, and he’s sick to his stomach about that, not sure what was real and what isn’t, not sure of anything anymore except that he wants to find you and do it all over again.

But he blinks, and you’re gone.

#flip zimmerman #adam driver #adcu #adam driver fanfic #flip zimmerman fanfic #flip zimmerman x reader #summerween 2024 event

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safarigirlsp · 4 months ago

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The Lovely Things I'll Show You

Flip Zimmerman x Siren

Word Count: 16.6k

Warnings: NSFW. Smut. Horror. Angst, maybe? Lots of Violence. Violence Against Women. Violence Against Men. Rage. Revenge. Drowning. This isn't dark by my personal standards, but it's fairly dark by fic standards, so be warned.

This is from Flip's POV, so there's no X Reader language. However, I left the Siren pretty vague and I think she can be read as a reader insert. At least by readers with enough imagination to assume they have a tail etc xD. Also, I don't consider this as 'Dark' Flip, but some people probably will, so consider that an additional warning.

Inspired by Lighthouse by Halsey Based on a request I butchered from @cas-backwards-tie

AO3 Link

Eastport, Maine, perched on the Northeastern most tip of the state like a mole on the end of a witch’s nose, was about as far away from the rest of the country as a man could get. Alaska might be further, but the strange daylight and dark hours that changed with the seasons wouldn’t do a damn bit of good for the mental state of a man already on the brink. On the brink of what exactly, Flip couldn’t really say and he wouldn’t hazard a guess. Things like that should be left to professionals high above his pay grade. Professionals Flip wouldn’t denigrate himself to consult.

Talkin’ about a man’s problems is for pussies and whiners, Flip would say. To his own reflection in his bathroom mirror, leaning over the sink, wiping the sweat from his brow after waking from another recurring nightmare. A shrink is a poor substitute for a cold beer and beatin’ the hell out of a punching bag.

That was back in Colorado Springs, back during the aftermath of the Pigman killings. Sure, Flip had solved the case, shot dead the bastard dubbed Pigman for his penchant for frying strips of his victims up like bacon. Flip resented it in ways deeper than he could ever express to a shrink, how that sorry bastard had ruined the taste of bacon for him. One of his favorite guilty pleasures was his heart attack special – a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and waffles, all slathered in genuine Vermont maple syrup. Flip hoped that pleasure would return to him. After he was able to purge his memory of the smell of human ‘bacon,’ harvested from plump victims, sizzling in a cast iron frying pan, human fat popping up from the pan and burning his hand as he crept past with his gun held at the ready. Firing a bullet into the Pigman’s head was a relief, something he deserved for ruining the taste of bacon for Flip, in addition to his other gruesome atrocities.

Focusing on bacon as the greatest tragedy helped Flip mitigate in his mind what had happened to his partner. Flip had taken that memory, crumpled it into the smallest ball of pain he could, and shoved it down inside his mind, into the darkest, deepest recess. He understood now the meaning of that shrink term ‘unpacking.’ Well, he had no fuckin’ intention of ever unpacking that memory again, or those emotions. There was nothing equal to finding a partner dead and half butchered like a prize hog. Nothing in a shrink’s handbook to undo the damage caused by the smell of bacon frying in a cast iron pan. Thick cut bacon, freshly cut from his partner’s flanks.

These days, that memory was left buried in Flip’s subconscious, coming to him in sweaty, pulse-thundering dreams. Flip was a mentally tough man, highly disciplined. He could keep that terrible beast caged. But everything about the Colorado Springs police station reminded him of his partner, a constant kick in the guts that made it impossible to truly repress. Even his favorite restaurants and bars, his own house for fucks’ sake. All of it was now full to bursting with painful associations. This pain came out as anger, which was really the best and healthiest reaction in Flip’s arsenal. It beat taking up drugs, drinking even more, or putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Before he lost it on some poor bastard who cut him off in traffic or an asshole who pinched a waitress’s ass in front of him, Flip decided a change of scenery was just what the doctor ordered. He wanted to get as far from anything familiar to him as possible. When he came into work one morning and saw a newspaper clipping advertising a small town in Maine was looking for a new sheriff, Flip didn’t think twice about where it may have come from. He didn’t give a damn.

After a long weekend trip to Eastport, Maine that served as reconnaissance, Flip found a nice cabin that suited him, far away from people, and even a friendly little mousy-haired schoolteacher who suited him too. Well enough for some entertainment, anyway. She had great tits and a face that gave Flip the impression she was the kind of girl who’d let a man do damn near whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, because she wasn’t overly burdened with beauty or brains and had the good sense to compensate in more tangible ways. He took her out for coffee and a stroll around the small, quaint town, having her show him what passed for the sights. Afterwards, she was very friendly and rewarded him handsomely and enthusiastically for her mocha latte in the backseat of her car.

Come Monday, Flip accepted the sheriff gig for a surprisingly good salary and made a deal on the cabin for a steal. Both for the same reason – the market was thin pickin’s for successful men with Flip’s level of skill, who were willing to move to a town of fifteen hundred people with a higher population of sasquatch than eligible singles. Eastport was a nice little town, what there was of it. Picturesque in that quaint, rural way that looked great on a postcard but didn’t hold one’s interest for long.

Three months in, and Flip loved it. The work was easy. He hadn’t had to use his brain on a crime since he left Colorado Springs, and the most stress he had was searching for a dumb kid who had gotten lost in the woods and escorting the little shit back to his mom. He’d only had to fire his piece once to scare off a bear that was rummaging through the sheriff department trash. Most of the ‘crime’ he’d been prepped for consisted of vandalism, DWI’s, animal attacks, domestic violence, and bar fights. Flip had already dealt with a few bar fights, about one a weekend. He loved that part of the job. It gave him an excuse to take out some aggression on some wannabe tough guys who could handle it, and who wouldn’t be the wiser when they sobered up as to whether their fat lip or black eye came from the sheriff or the other guy. And the floozy schoolteacher named Cristy gave great head and made few demands, aside from dragging him to church a few times to keep airs that she wasn’t a loose woman. That was a royal pain in the ass, but he could endure it.

He loved the pace and the seclusion. He was damned sick of cities bustling like ants, air that smelled like grime. Colorado Springs had that big city grime along with big city crime, and the punks and gangbangers that came with it. It was nice to have the freedom of driving less than thirty minutes from town and being out in the middle of nowhere. Forest or coast, he could take his pick. He could go whale watching or moose hunting; hiking or fishing; watch the golden sunrise at a local coffee shop and watch it set fiery orange over the ocean while having a juicy ribeye, a fat lobster tail, and a cold beer. Eastport even had a barber shop with the red and white striped pole out front, where a man could get a haircut and a shave with a straight razor and not listen to women chatter about the latest Cosmopolitan article on how to please a man or what celebrity got which body parts inflated.

Six months in, and Flip was beginning to hate it. The easy work had grown dull. There wasn’t a goddamn thing that got his heart rate up anymore – fucking aside, anyway – and he hadn’t had a good adrenaline rush since he’d been woken up in the middle of the night by a bobcat in heat screeching on his back porch, sounding like some banshee straight outta hell. Even that little excitement had been weeks ago. The schoolteacher had grown as dull and uninteresting as a blowup doll, with a comparable IQ and conversational skills. It gave him more reason to keep her mouth occupied with other activities or her face shoved into the mattress, but that brand of enjoyment was only good for so long. Then she wanted to talk, always about the most mundane gossip and dumbest shit imaginable. Flip asked her once if she wanted to read a book with him – some adventure thing he’d picked at random in a used bookstore, packed with plenty of action for him and shirtless strapping men he thought she’d enjoy too. She looked at him with a bovine sort of vacancy in her mossy eyes – an association that had become hard for him to ignore – and asked, “Read? You mean like a magazine or a newspaper?”

The seclusion was turning to cabin fever, the endless wilderness closing in on him like a noose. The bad accents of the locals were as grating as a migraine, and the smell of fish and ocean pervaded every fuckin’ piece of his clothing, strong enough that it vied with cigarette smoke for his signature scent. Going to the five restaurants and three bars in town, having the same thing on the menu over and over had gotten old as hell. There wasn’t even a movie theater within an hour’s drive, only an old drive-in that was only open during the four months a year a man wouldn’t get frostbite on his dick trying to enjoy a movie from the bed of his truck with his girl in the old-fashioned way. The seclusion and boredom had been good for one thing. Flip had lifted weights and run himself into the best shape of his life. His arms bulged, his chest strained his shirt buttons, and both his cardio and timing on a speed bag were better than they had been during his tour in the Marines.

The teacher must have gotten bored with Flip too, because he stopped by her house a little early one Friday night to surprise her with a bottle of cheap wine and a chick flick, only to find her banging some pencil-dick science teacher he recognized as a specimen she had made assurances was just a friend. A married man too, aptly named Less, the piece of dogshit. Flip wanted to knock the bastard into next week, but he was truly concerned he might get a murder charge if the limp-wristed yuppie couldn’t take one of his punches. Actually, fuck the man. Flip wanted to knock that cheating slut around. He’d never hit a woman before, but if anyone deserved it, it was a fucking cheat. Dull and plain as she was, and despite ample opportunity, Flip had never cheated on the little skank.

The icing on the cake was when the murders started. Flip had come to this backwoods hellhole to get away from murders. It seems crime missed him and had followed him across the map. The first body washed up on the shore in a bucolic cove. It was a place Flip had found early on and driven to several times to have a beer and watch the sunset. Tall rocky cliffs populated with pine trees surrounded the ocean, and the waves crashed against the rocks with a thunderous susurrus. Those dense pine softened the light at dawn and dusk, bending into luscious pinks and oranges, and the water gleamed a vibrant sapphire. It was a scene straight off a postcard.

The bloated corpse lying on the beach slightly hampered that postcard beauty. Standing over the corpse in the sand, Flip guessed by the clammy pallor of the gelatinous skin and the damp putrid smell the man had been dead a week or so. Flip’s deputy, an older man with greying hair straight out of Mayberry, gave Flip his opinion that the man had fallen from the cliffs and drowned, or had been boating and drowned, or some other kind of accident that led to drowning. An accident that didn’t necessitate police involvement or investigation. The deputy had been there forever, and had turned down the sheriff’s position twice to avoid the added responsibility. The pattern was easy to see. As were the strange marks on the dead man’s neck and shoulders. The marks were faint, a little difficult to make out for an untrained eye, especially on the bloated, damp, decaying skin. They looked like something between hickies and strangulation bruises.

With a shrug, the deputy mentioned to Flip that accidents like this happened a couple times a year. Flip took the initiative to research exactly what that meant and how many similar accidents like this had occurred.

“Fuck me,” Flip muttered profoundly.

Based on his first cursory examination of the half-assed reports the Eastport Sheriff’s Department generated and the even worse records it maintained, he counted around fifty accidental deaths in that cove going back until World War II. He suspected there were many accidents the police didn’t deem worth documenting in their records.

“Accidents my dyin’ ass.” Flip swiped a hand over his face.

So much for a quiet change of pace.

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The bodies had all been found washed up on the rocky beach of the cloistered cove. There wasn’t much of a beach, just the rocky bottom of cliffs that the waves crashed against. Flip thought it might be public land or even park land because it was pretty enough that some rich recluse should have bought it up years ago if the government hadn’t claimed it. He was surprised to find the entire cove and a couple hundred surrounding acres had been in one family for well over a century. The entire property was dubbed ‘Thundercliffs,” a term he guessed was coined from the sound the waves made crashing against the cliffs. The old house wasn’t abandoned in the technical sense, not in the way the townsfolk believed. A quick search at the County Clerk revealed it was owned by a trust along with the sizable acreage it sat on and a host of other assets. The sole beneficiaries of the trust were a pair of siblings by the names of Hortence Desdemona and Beauregard Mountbatten III.

“This is gonna go well,” Flip grumbled as he wrote the names and address into the small notebook he kept in his pocket.

The address listed in Port Clyde was easy to find, and even offered a nice drive down the coast. It led him to a quaint cottage in town overlooking a harbor abuzz with working fisherman hauling in nets of fish and cages of lobster. He pulled his truck in behind the only car in the driveway, one of those old station wagons with the wood side panels. Several potted plants taller than Flip lounged on the porch and in the windows there were crystals and weird looking wicker crafts shaped like moons and stars. An old German shepherd was curled up by the door, his muzzle more white than black. He lifted his head to appraise Flip, but decided he wasn’t worth getting up over, and settled for watching him warily. The scent of incense or maybe fancy candles seeped onto the porch from inside. As he rapped his knuckles on the door Flip hoped that froufrou smell wouldn’t stick to his clothes and stink up the inside of his truck on his drive home.

A dumpy eccentric woman answered. She inhaled sharply at the sight of the handsome stranger, instantly flustered, and set about smoothing her rumpled outfit and bushy curly hair. She was dressed somewhere between a seventies hippie and a new age wannabe witch. Flip didn’t really understand the difference, but there were lots of colors and flappy material to her getup, stacked jingling bracelets, and multiple rings on every finger.

“Hi, ummm, can I help you?” the woman stammered. It had probably been a while since she’d talked to a man.

“Is Hortence or Beauregard available?” Flip asked in an authoritative tone.

“Why on earth would you want to see them?” She bristled and folded her arms over her chest.

Clearly, he had taken the wrong approach. The woman was of indeterminate age. She could have been a good-looking sixty or a rode-hard forty. He figured either way, she probably wasn’t dried up enough to be immune to masculine attention. Leaning against the doorframe and towering over her, he turned on the charm.

“Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to come off rude.” He flashed his handsomest smile and ran his hand through his thick cowlick. “I’ve been put in the position of looking into some abandoned property that may be part of a trust of which they’re the sole beneficiaries. I just want to make sure all the property they’re rightfully entitled to gets to them.”

“Property where?” the woman stiffened even more, a rare response to Flip’s moves.

“I can only discuss that with the beneficiaries, I’m afraid.” He looked over the woman’s head, starting to suspect something was off. The cluttered inside of the house looked more like a fortune teller’s parlor than the residence of wealthy siblings. “Are you a relative?”

“I’m May,” she snorted in what passed for a laugh. “You could say I’m their stepmother.” She flapped her arms in a kind of shrug. “If you want to meet Hortence and Beauregard, follow me.” She turned and snorted again. “You can ask them anything you want.”

Flip passed overstuffed bookcases and curio cabinets filled with a myriad of trinkets into a sunny kitchen. The windowsill was littered with more witchy hippie looking things and a large plant with striped leaves dominated the center of a small dining table.

“Can I get you something to drink?” May asked as she started tapping a can on the counter.

“Coffee, if you have it. Thank you.” Flip watched her odd tapping with the can. “About the folks I’m here to see…”

“They’ll be along shortly.” She smiled and poured a mug of coffee from an existing brew in her coffee pot. “Give them a minute, they don’t move as fast as they used to.”

Flip still didn’t know what kind of eccentric he was dealing with here, but he decided to be careful not to leave any stray hairs around just in case. The last thing he needed was some broad crafting a voodoo doll of him or some shit and summoning him to her bedroom in the witching hour. He wondered if witches only used hair for those things, or if any kind of DNA would work. That unsettling thought made him eye the coffee mug suspiciously. An old police trick was to offer a suspect water, then keep the glass for DNA testing after the suspect leaves. DNA was discarded material then, free game to search without consent. He decided he didn’t need coffee that badly after all and set the mug on the counter in the same motion that he leaned his hip against it.

A fat black cat waddled into the kitchen, greeting him with a trilled meow, looking up at him expectantly with rich green eyes. The cat jumped up onto one of the chairs at the dining table, then up onto the tabletop, where it sat politely. Another deeper meow heralded the arrival of a second cat, bigger and even fatter, with a bright orange striped coat, a white patch on its chest, a white tipped tail, and bright amber eyes that matched Flip’s.

May smiled at them and said to Flip, “Let me introduce you to Hortence,” she pointed at the black cat, then moved her finger toward the orange tabby. “And Beauregard.” She emptied the can of cat food onto a saucer and used a fork to separate the contents. “Ask away.”

Flip rubbed the scruff on his jaw, watching as the woman placed the saucer on the table. Hortence began eating while Beauregard hefted his bulk up onto the chair then the table beside her.

“Cat got your tongue?” May asked with a snort.

“They’re the beneficiaries of the Thundercliffs Trust?” Flip stroked the black cat.

“They sure are! Brother and sister. Twenty-two years young,” May beamed as if she were indeed talking about her children. “Their real mom died ten years ago, but they get their longevity from her. She lived until she was in shooting distance of one-hundred. She was an old maid like me, no human children. So, she left everything in a trust to her cats. I get a monthly wage as their caretaker, not that I wouldn’t do it for free. I used to help their mom with chores and errands. Part maid, part cook, part caretaker. She was more like my crazy aunt than anything though.”

“I see.” Flip smiled to buy time while his mind ran through any questions that might be useful. “The trust also owns an old house up in Eastport. Does that mean the cats own it?”

“I suppose it does,” May shrugged. “I left my law degree in my other pants, but I’m told we could all live in that big old mansion on the cliffs, the cats, and my dog, and I. But I don’t think I could spend a night in there and catch a wink of sleep. I used to clean it once a month, and I hated every second I spent inside it. Something’s just wrong in there. I couldn’t even get Elwood to go inside with me when he was young and reckless – you met him on the porch.”

“Why is that, do you think?” Flip asked. “I’d like to hear your thoughts on that house if you have time.”

“I have plenty of time, but those aren’t thoughts I like to spend my time on.” She smiled but her tone was firm. “I might look like a silly old woman to you, but I’m not that silly. Or naive. I know there’s nothing I could tell you about that house that you’d believe anyway. And I know it’s not smart to go telling a sheriff lots of outlandish things and making him think you’re crazy.”

“Sheriff?” Flip grinned a little bashfully. He didn’t know his jig was up when he knocked on the door.

“I could tell you I’m a psychic and see if I could get fifty bucks out of you for a tarot reading.” May winked. “Or maybe news just travels fast in small towns. Especially between women. And extra especially about the new hunk of meat with a silver star up north.”

He laughed because it beat acknowledging his status as a slab of meat. “I’d like to take a look inside that house on the cliff. Would you be willing to show me around? The sheriff’s department would compensate you at the same hourly rate you get from the trust.”

“No way in hell, sheriff,” she smiled sweetly. “Not for the money or that handsome smile. I haven’t been up there in years and I don’t intend to go back. Not ever. If Hortence and Beauregard could sign legal documents, I’d advise them to demolish that house and every other structure on the property, bulldoze it clean, and turn it into a landfill.”

“Hell of a thing to do to a place with such a great view,” Flip said.

“I see. You’ve already been out there poking around.” It wasn’t a question and she seemed sad about it. “It’s always the handsomest men around who are drawn to that place.”

“Well, it’s also my job.” Flip didn’t tell her that he had gone to those cliffs many times on his own before anything suspicious had happened or any bodies had washed up on shore. That he thought the cliffs with the tall pine trees overlooking the boisterous cove was the best place in town to have a beer and watch the sunset. He damn sure wouldn’t say he felt drawn there. But even if he did, it was just the view. A man had every right to appreciate a nice view.

May opened a kitchen drawer and rummaged around, finally retrieving a keyring with a single key on it. She tossed the key to Flip and smiled as he snatched it out of the air with ease.

“Here’s the key to that house. Take it. The honor system is still pretty big here in our small towns.” She smiled. “Besides, if you use it to do something stupid to that house or anything inside it, you’ll have bigger problems than me.” She snorted again. “Actually, I doubt I’ll have to deal with you anymore at all after that!”

“What worries you so much about that house?” Flip asked, shoving the key into the front pocket of his jeans.

“Nothing about that house doesn’t worry me.” May shook her head. “You might want to ask me about the property too, not just the house itself.”

“Alright.” Flip nodded. “Consider me asking.”

“Lots of deaths on that land over the years.” She shuddered slightly. “I imagine that’s why you’re here. One of the first deaths the paper covered was in the forties. A strapping man who’d just come back from the war drowned in that cove. Everyone thought it was so strange because he was in great shape, fresh out of the military. They suspected it must have been a suicide. He was the second man to drown in the cove that year. But if you ask me, or most locals, the very first death was actually just labeled a disappearance. The military man’s wife.” She waved at the cats. “Their mom’s great aunt. I guess that’d make her their great great aunt.” Another snort. “Rumor has it she ran off with some man or other she met while her husband was off at war, and her husband committed suicide when he got home and found out.” She paused and looked at Flip. “But there are always rumors about beautiful women, aren’t there? If a woman’s pretty enough, men will call her a slut regardless of how many of them she sleeps with. Or doesn’t. Come to think of it, the more men a woman rejects, the more likely they are to label her a slut because it makes them feel superior. I’ve seen it a dozen times and I’m sure you have too. A small man’s way to destroy a woman who’s out of his league.”

“And that woman lived in the house?” Flip clarified. “The pretty woman?”

“She wasn’t just pretty. Rumor has it she was drop dead gorgeous. Bewitchingly, enchantingly, dangerously beautiful. But yes, Hortence and Beauregard’s great great aunt.” She patted each cat in turn, eliciting happy purrs. They had plopped down on the dining table, listening to the conversation. “All this was told to me by their mother. I wasn’t there, of course. I wasn’t around at all for a few more decades.”

“I appreciate it.” Flip gave her a genuine smile. “The key and the information. Don’t worry, I won’t hold you to anything you got secondhand.”

“There’s one fact that isn’t secondhand and you should give it some real weight, sheriff,” May said in the most serious tone she’d adopted so far. She was still stroking the orange cat. “Their mother owned that house for decades when she inherited it from her mother. It’s closer to a mansion than a house, and has that great view you mentioned. Still, she never lived one day in that house and she never sold it either. She didn’t want any living thing to live inside it. She rarely spoke of her great aunt, and when she did it was only to praise her beauty. I asked her more about her once and this is what she told me: ‘I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead, especially when the dead might still be listening. But I will say that since she was a young girl, my great aunt was blessed with beauty and cursed with rage.’”

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Flip stopped at a local bakery before leaving Port Clyde, letting all the new information settle in his mind. He had two slices of spectacular homemade blueberry pie, allowing himself to wander through this new world of information. It was a strange world for him, one with witches and ghosts and curses and haunted beaches. He didn’t believe any of that shit any more than he believed in Santa Claus, but it was an entertaining world to visit. Plus, it had a dangerously beautiful woman in it.

The drive back would take him around four hours. He’d be pulling into town just in time to catch the sunset. Picking up a cheeseburger and fries to go and a six pack on the drive sounded good. What sounded even better was eating his burger while watching the summer sun set over that gorgeous cove from high up on the rocky cliffs.

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Flip’s favorite spot was on the highest cliff at the head of the cove. There, a flat rock served as an ideal bench near the edge, offering the best view of the cove from beneath the shade of a tall pine. He sat and just admired the view, the greasy-bottomed bag containing his cheeseburger and fries sitting on the rock beside him. He felt like a gargoyle perched on the top of the tallest building in a city, overlooking his domain below.

The sky was molten gold and fiery orange as the sun dipped below the horizon. The surface of the ocean glittered golden too, like it was a sea of coins instead of water. The light in the pines took on a soft dreamlike haze and a light fog was building along the beach. Lower in elevation and about two-hundred yards away was the lonely old house, its four tall stories keeping watch over the cove. Flip looked at it now from his vantage, conscious of what his senses might tell him. He felt nothing ominous at all. If anything, he felt content, a sense of belonging. A feeling that he could be happy here for a very long time, that he could even stay here forever. With a jolt, he realized he had been leaning nearer to the edge while lost in thought.

Movement on the beach far below caught his eye. Staring intently, he quite literally couldn’t believe his eyes. A woman lay on the beach, stark naked, and writhing in pain. She was also thrashing what appeared to be a shimmering golden tail. He didn’t believe in ghosts or Santa Claus, and he wasn’t about to start believing in fuckin’ mermaids either. But that’s damn sure what she looked like. Flip rubbed his eyes and forced them to focus more clearly. No, that long golden tail was still there, glistening wet and whipping violently on the beach. He could even faintly hear the wet slaps of it on the sand, paired with an ethereal voice calling for help.

Flip launched off the rock and ran back through the trees toward the house. A trail took off from the house, navigating the treacherous cliffs down to the beach. It would be suicide to attempt a descent anywhere else. At the base of the cliff, he charged into a full sprint, pumping his arms and kicking up sand as he ran down the beach toward the woman. Her cries for help were louder now, so loud they seemed to echo inside his head. There was a lewdness to it, too. If Flip hadn’t seen her writhing in pain, he would have taken the sound for loud moans of ecstasy.

He vaulted over a boulder at the head of the cove and found her, only feet ahead of him. The woman was every bit as naked as he had thought, but it wasn’t a tail he had seen thrashing. From the waist down, she was tangled up in a tawny fishing net. Somehow, the sunset must have made it look golden. In his mind’s eye, he could picture a perfect tail, complete with fins and individual scales of gleaming gold, thrashing and slapping the sand. He didn’t know how the hell he had seen that from the tangled mess of rope binding the woman’s legs, but he didn’t need to think about that now.

Falling to his knees beside the woman, he spoke soothingly like he would to a frightened animal. “I’m here to help you. I’m not going to hurt you. Let me help you.” It required a herculean effort to keep his eyes from wandering over her magnificent heaving breasts. He cupped her cheek to stop her from thrashing in the net. The ropes were digging into her, leaving angry red burns across her skin. Her eyes were wild with fear like a fox caught in a snare, but also bright and fierce. He grabbed her shoulder and shook her gently, keeping his voice soothing, “Look at me. I’m going to help you. Be still.”

The woman’s eyes rolled to meet his, and it felt like they bore straight into his soul. His throat went dry and his hands felt weak. The sun had set now, leaving a lingering purple twilight. Her eyes were luminous in the lavender light, somehow catching the ambient glow and reflecting it back even stronger. A mane of glossy hair was spread across the sand beneath her, and the fading light danced on her skin like diamonds on silk. Her eyes were no longer frightened, but still wild. They drew him in. Without realizing it, Flip’s hand had slipped from her shoulder to skim down her side, coming to rest on her hip on the only free patch of skin between ropes.

Flip flinched at the realization, fumbling a broken, “I’m sorry.”

The woman said nothing, continuing to stare up at him. Her lips curled in a slight smile that may have been satisfaction. Or it may have been relief at finding a savior.

Flip felt a foreign compulsion. Something dark and sick. Something he would have beaten another man up for. He felt the almost irresistible urge to unzip his jeans and cage the woman beneath him. To use the ropes to his advantage, plunge into her and ravage her like an unhinged beast. It was a base impulse, something at home in a feral animal instead of a man. Flip had felt lust, and he had a bad habit of thinking with his cock, but he had never felt the drive to take what wasn’t offered willingly. He had never felt desire so aggressive and consuming.

“How long were you out here on the beach?” he asked to ground himself. He shook his head, berating himself internally, asking himself, What the fuck is wrong with you? He had seen plenty of naked women, beautiful women. Had plenty of them beneath him writhing in much more lascivious ways than this one. He wasn’t a blushin’ virgin and he goddamn sure wasn’t a fuckin’ pervert.

“I’ve always been here,” she said with a laugh on her voice, as harmonious as a sonata.

Looking away from her, he took a breath to purge the perversion from his mind and unbuttoned his shirt. He roughly shrugged out of it and draped it over the woman’s torso, covering the most enticing bits of her. He wanted to rip the ropes off her, but he forced himself to move slowly and untangle her with care.

“Are you hurt?” he asked when she was free of the net, forcing himself to look into her eyes and nowhere else.

“No,” she said in a serene voice with a sound as pleasant as windchimes. “What are you going to do to me?”

That odd, innocuously asked question flooded his mind with another violent rush of terrible, driving, impulses, alarmingly perverse. His jeans felt tight, and he felt disgusted with himself. He decided it was even worse looking into her eyes than it had been looking at her perfect naked figure. He fought the urge to tell her what he wanted to do – ravage her, and even more than that he wanted to take her home and keep her chained to his bed. All to himself. Forever. In a great effort to remain civilized, he gritted hoarsely, “I’m gonna get you off this beach and somewhere safe.”

Flip wrapped her in his shirt, lifted her into his arms, and pushed up to his feet. He cradled her gently in his arms as he carried her back down the beach. It was now nearly dark, but her eyes were still almost unnaturally bright as they watched him serenely. She should have smelled like the ocean, even salty or fishy, but she smelled sweeter than anything he had ever scented. He couldn’t place her scent, but it was like an amalgamation of everything that had ever enticed him, from the hottest woman to the sweetest honey to the most fragrant perfume. All those scents mingled harmoniously where they lived in her skin. She laid her head on his chest and made a sound in her throat like a purr. It shook Flip straight through to his bones.

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Flip carried her up the steep trail back up to the top of the cliffs. He carried her to his truck, parked near the trailhead. He wanted to take her to the hospital, have a doctor sign off that she was alright. But the strange woman protested, insisting it was too far and she was too cold. Flip hadn’t noticed her shivering before, but now she trembled in his arms, her body fluttering against his chest.

Instead, she asked him to take her into the old, abandoned house, assuring they could warm themselves inside. Though she had only asked and in the most melodious of tones, Flip found it was a command he couldn’t refuse. Still carrying her in his arms like a doting husband with an eager bride, he strode to the front door of the abandoned house. The door was a shade of purple-brown, like a fresh bruise, with a standoffish doorknocker in the shape of a lion’s head with a heavy ring clenched between its teeth. Glaring at the beast, Flip kicked the door in.

Still holding the woman to his chest, Flip paused at the threshold, looking from one dark corner of the foyer to the other, prepared for anything, like an old west gunfighter entering a saloon. He felt immediately ridiculous. Those ghost stories and tall tales must have gotten to him more than he’d wanted to admit. There was nothing amiss inside, save for some dust and cobwebs. Moonlight filtered through the windows, making the dust he had disturbed look like mist wafting lightly on the air.

“Upstairs,” the woman said. “There’s less dust upstairs.

Flip didn’t care whether she was right and he didn’t ponder her statement. He attacked the stairs, taking them two at a time. The house was Victorian-styled, filled with tall ceilings, ornate details, and airy windows. A pair of double doors stood open at the end of the hallway on the third floor, beckoning him inside. Flip carried his prize through them and into a master suite, noticing at once it was surprisingly clean. Bay windows were ajar, open just enough to allow a crisp breeze tinged with pine and salt blow in from the cove. The light wind must have kept the dust and cobwebs at bay because the room looked and smelled pristine.

Flip tried not to focus on the large bed, almost as plush and inviting as the woman in his arms. He aimed for the bathroom, intending to fight her chill with warm water. She tugged on his collar, pulling her face near his ear and whispered, “You just pulled me out of the water. Don’t put me back in it yet.” Her breath was hot on his neck. “Take me to bed.”

“That’s not what you need,” Flip rasped, trying to deny the way his blood boiled and remain a gentleman while his cock throbbed.

“Isn’t it just like a man to tell me what I need?” she laughed, both husky and harmonious.

“You need warmed up, and a doctor, and probably a hot meal,” Flip told her as he walked to the bed. In one swift motion, he sat her down and peeled his own soaked shirt off her, trying not to look at the perfection that revealed. He pulled the quilt around her in a cocoon, both to warm her and keep her hidden from his view. He turned her brusquely around and laid down beside her, wrapping her cocooned figure inside his arms, hoping the thick quilt barrier between them would keep his arousal his own dirty little secret.

“Can you not think of a more effective approach to warm me up?” the woman lilted.

Inhaling her scent with his nose near the back of her neck, Flip thought he had never been so intoxicated by any substance. He cleared his throat. “I’m not very imaginative. Sorry to disappoint.”

“I have some ideas,” she teased. “Do you care to hear them?”

“Not unless you buy me dinner first, darlin,’” Flip gruffed. “I’m not that easy.”

“You can take whatever you want, you know,” she said in a sultry invitation.

“I don’t want to take anything from you,” his voice rumbled.

“That’s a lie and we both know it. I can feel how much you’re lying.” She wiggled her perfect ass against the ridge in his jeans. He only tightened his hold to still her, making no moves to relieve his own suffering. She stilled, and when she spoke again there was a sprinkling of admiration in her voice, “What a strange man you are.”

“Darlin,’ you have no idea,” Flip laughed, adjusting his large arms around her body. “You should see me cut loose on the weekends. I really live on the edge. I have pizza with pineapple and stay up past midnight to watch Twilight Zone reruns and everything.”

Flip held her tight and forced his eyes shut, trying to ignore the way the moonlight danced on her pristine skin and glossed her hair; the feel of her curves through the quilt, as apparent to him as a pea beneath a princess’s mattress; the way her scent curled into his nose, as decadent as rose petals and as potent as whiskey. He could feel her weaving spells around him, through him, inside him, a kind of intoxication that settled in his blood. Flip knew once he was good and drunk on her, he’d never want to sober.

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Flip dozed during the night, falling into a fitful nightmarish kind of sleep. His mind reeled with images of men screaming as they drowned, a beautiful beach corrupted by waterlogged corpses, and an unnaturally gorgeous woman swimming in the cove, watching the mayhem and smiling at it all.

The feeling of his back being forced down into the mattress made his eyes fly open. The sight of the mystery woman straddling his lap, her mane backlit by moonlight, the same moonlight that gleamed in her eyes, made his pulse thunder. Inhaling sharply, he gripped her naked thighs, his fingertips digging bruises into her skin.

Flip wouldn’t take her, but he was damn fine with being taken by her.

Pleasure rumbled through his throat as she raked her nails down his chest, tracing angry red streaks down his body. She had discarded the quilt, brandishing her exquisite and fully naked body like a weapon, her tits languidly jostling to the circular motion of her hips as she worked him into a frenzy through his jeans. She whipped his belt loose and yanked the button open on his jeans. He tried to sit up, to capture her pouting lips, but she pushed him back with a throaty laugh.

It was the first time in his life Flip had been manhandled by a fuckin’ woman. She was stronger than she looked. He looked up at her in a kind of daze, unable to look anywhere else, or to look away from those oddly luminous eyes. He had an unsettling feeling of being a prey animal, caught in the claws of some carnivorous predator. But with a cock as hard as his was now, he didn’t give a damn about that or any other misgiving.

Purring or maybe snarling, she arched her back and shook out her long glossy hair, crooning his name when she sank down onto him. Flip didn’t remember telling her his name, but that hardly mattered now. All around him, the room blurred like a steaming mirage until everything was a shapeless haze except for the glorious woman riding him. His skin simmered and his throat burned with every breath as if he were sitting inside an oven, but he had never felt more alive. Every sensation was heightened, and his pleasure was more intense than anything he had ever known.

Flip was a big, big man, and he was big where it counted. He was used to women being impressed by his body and his size, intimidated even. He wasn’t used to being stared down with unshakeable confidence as a woman took her pleasure from him. It was strange finding he wanted to give her not only pleasure, but everything else he had. He wanted to give it to her as good as he was getting it, bucking his hips beneath her while her hot pussy strangled his cock. Kissing and licking, grabbing and caressing, thrusting and bucking, he used every part of his body to earn her shudders and hear her moan his name.

Feeling her body tense around him like a silky vice, Flip fisted his hand in her hair and yanked her down to capture her lips. Growling into her mouth, he followed her over the edge, drinking her breath as she trembled in his arms while he filled her. He thrummed with something far deeper and stronger than lust, and he kissed her with a passion he had never given any other woman.

Holding her against him, Flip rolled with her, bringing her beneath him and propping himself up on his palms to admire this view of her under him. She locked her arms around his neck, urging him into her again, assuring him they were far from stopping for the evening. Again and again, they enjoyed each other until his back was stiff and his jaw ached, and until he even wondered if he would have some chaffing in some rather embarrassing areas by morning. When he finally fell asleep with her in his arms in the last hour before dawn, he dreamed of her still.

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Flip woke with the sunrise, a habit ingrained by his days in the military. Turning over in bed, he reached for the intoxicating woman. How he had released his hold on her in his sleep baffled him, but he resolved to keep her in his arms for the rest of the day to compensate. His hand met only cool sheets and a vacant mattress. As if she had been nothing but a drunken reverie or a fever dream, she was gone from the bed. She had left no note or token, only her luxurious scent lingering in the sheets.

With the sunrise, a realization dawned to Flip. His missing mystery woman was unlike anything he had ever touched or tasted. She was his wildest dream and wickedest fantasy. It was unnerving, frightening even, to realize he was so far gone after one impulsive evening. Flip had tried the most addictive substances in the world at one time or another – it came with the territory for an undercover cop, having to blend in with the worst kinds of men – but he had never sampled anything so addictive, so utterly arresting from the very first taste. The marks she clawed into his back and shoulders would last for days, but the mark she carved into his heart was one he knew would never heal. Flip was tempted to call it love at first sight, but this felt more like enslavement. Love, in his experience, had its limits. His feelings for this woman had no such limitations. Neither did the lengths he would go to have her.

Outside the window, it was a beautiful summer morning with bright sunshine and blue skies. Inside the lonely bedroom, Flip had awakened in his own private hell. A gloom so heavy as the one that settled over him upon seeing her gone should not have been possible after the night he had and the hormones that still flooded his body. There shouldn’t have been a single damn thing that could knock him off cloud nine, but all the happiness and pleasure he had felt throughout the night blackened into loss and sadness as despairing as a moonless winter night. Collapsing back into the mattress, he knew that he would give anything, absolutely anything, to hold her in his arms again.

That’s what love will do to you, he thought wryly.

The woman was the cause of his suffering, and only she could be his relief. He didn’t know where she’d come from or how he hadn’t encountered her before in the claustrophobically small town. As he thought it, despairing at his lack of leads to find her again, he heard her voice quite clearly. She sang a hauntingly beautiful melody in a language he didn’t understand. He didn’t know her words or even if her voice came in through the window or echoed out from the depths of his soul. But he knew her message with stark clarity.

When the moon shines on the ocean, you’ll find me. On that beach, inside this house, I’m yours. Surrender to me, and I’ll show you lovely things.

*******************************************************************************************

Flip did as she asked. Or maybe as she commanded. If he could tell the difference, he didn’t care. Night after night, he returned to the mansion on the cliffs. Sometimes, the front door would be ajar, leading him inside and into her waiting embrace. Sometimes, he would find her on the beach, out for a walk in the moonlight, reveling in the way it shimmered on her skin. He would swim with her in the ocean, stroll with her in the sand, hold her in the sheets, and fuck her with an insatiable hunger every way she wanted.

She never came to him when the sun shone or when the moon was black, nor would she leave the acreage. She was always gone from his bed and his arms before dawn, no matter how tightly he held her. The rational part of Flip’s mind told him it was some weird game she was playing. Maybe she was married to some big asshole with a temper. The instinctual part of his mind, the dormant part where dreams and intuition reign, told him something that he couldn’t believe even though it felt true down to his bones. Flip knew he had found the creature who haunted that beautiful cove. Hell, he had probably found the woman responsible for so many deaths over the years that he hadn’t even cataloged them all.

As summer bled into fall and the colors turned vibrant, more accidental deaths occurred in the cove, more torn and bloated corpses washed onto the rocky beach. Flip now agreed with his unconcerned deputy, that these deaths were unfortunate accidents. Just as he knew damned well they were murders, Flip knew he had fallen under the spell of the murderess, that he could never again be free of whatever kind of enslavement this was. But he knew also that as much as she had enchanted him, he had captured her heart just as surely. It was like taming a man-eating tiger to eat from his hand and purr from his touch.

If something had cursed this magnificent woman to wander the cove on moonlit nights, that meant there should also be a way to cure her. That’s what Flip did, he solved problems. He was pretty damn good at operating within rules he thought were arbitrary and chickenshit – that’s how he categorized whatever rules held her prisoner. If he could find loopholes inside the penal code to get what he wanted, he could figure out how to save her.

If Flip couldn’t save the woman he loved, what kind of a man was he?

*******************************************************************************************

The nurses at the Eastport Hospital had all grown tiresome to Dr. Jason Monroe. Plowing through them all had taken most of the year, and it had been a nice ego boost – just what the doctor ordered, as he liked to say – but now the flock of nurses had become just as dull as the withered shrew of a wife he begrudgingly went home to most nights. In addition to the way her once mediocre looks had been eroded by age and the toll taken by their offspring, in recent years she had even neglected to remind Dr. Monroe how impressive he was, how lucky she was to have whatever morsel of attention he gave her. This was an unacceptable slight to a doctor whose ego had outstripped his credentials since his first residency rotation. Eastport was a good fit for him. People there were provincial enough to be highly impressed with Dr. Monroe whereas his arrogance had worn thin to his peers back in Boston.

The drive home from the hospital was long enough for Dr. Monroe to resent what he’d find when he got there – the yellowing smile of his middle-aged wife greeting him along with the smell of whatever trendy meal she had attempted – but not long enough for him to think of any suitable excuses to stay out for the evening. The missus believed him a few nights a month when he told her he had to work late but he couldn’t overuse it, and he was already over what he considered his safe allowance for the month. He decided to take the long way home, take a scenic cruise along the coastline.

The full moon glittered on the ocean like diamonds on satin. Without a large city within miles there was nearly no light pollution, and the moon and diamante stars illuminated the forests and beaches like a dreamscape cast in silver. The moon was so bright, he saw a white spume burst from the ocean and telltale black fins peeking above the waves as a small pod of whales swam near the deserted coast. There was no one else on the lonely two-lane road, so Monroe watched them instead of the road, smiling when a calf breached and turned its belly up toward the moon.

When he returned his eyes to the road, an unfamiliar cove came into view ahead. Frowning, he thought he must have taken a wrong bend in the winding road. The road narrowed and there was no shoulder, making it cumbersome to turn around. He quickly oriented himself when he heard the crash of thunder on the cloudless night. Monroe knew all the stories about the beautiful cove surrounded by thundering cliffs and the haunted house perched high above. He had always wanted to see it, but his doe-eyed and doe-hearted wife had always nagged him out of it.

“What about the rumors, Jason?” she would whine. “It’s supposed to be haunted and it gives me the creeps.”

What a fortunate wrong turn, Monroe smirked to himself. Now, he could take a walk along that beautiful, ‘haunted’ beach and see what all the fuss was about. He could even keep a clear conscience and save his evasion for when he really needed it.

The road had taken him to the beach before it doubled back and wound up the nearest hill toward the old, abandoned house on the cliffs. He thought about driving up there to get the bird’s eye view, but movement in the water caught his eye. Squinting, he thought he saw something glimmering in the water near the shore. It looked like a woman swimming, but that couldn’t be right. The leaves were starting to turn crisp and vibrant as autumn approached, and the nighttime air had a cool bite.

Stepping out of his car, Monroe strolled along the beach toward the head of the cove. The cliffs formed a perfect horseshoe around the ocean and towered above him. The beach was littered with fallen boulders and large monoliths that protruded from the sea like the teeth of a great petrified monster. The beach’s dangerous edges added to its beauty, like a woman in a tight red dress and stilettos.

Monroe saw the movement again, something glistening in the water. Closer now, just beyond the nearest protruding fang of rock. He couldn’t explain why his heart kicked up as he trotted around it to get a better look, but his intuition was rewarded. He’d been right at first. It was a woman. A fucking babe, too, so hot she could have walked right off a porn set. Her tits already had his dick twitching. She was treading water a few yards away, close enough for him to see the way her eyes reflected the moonlight. Below the swell of her tits, her body was hidden beneath the gentle waves, but Monroe had seen enough.

“Hey, baby!” he called to her, trying to sound suave. “Are you out here all by yourself? It’s dangerous for a woman. Especially a woman that looks like you.”

Monroe didn’t like operating from the disadvantage of his prey not knowing his professional status. But it did give him the opportunity to enlighten a new woman, watch the admiration bloom in her eyes when he regaled her with stories of all the lives he’d saved. But for the first time in years, he didn’t even feel the desire to regale her. Monroe just wanted to fuck her. He felt like an alcoholic at a bar, his mouth watering and hands shaking. He walked closer, waves lapping over his six-hundred-dollar brogues.

“It is dangerous,” the woman agreed in a voice as harmonious as a symphony. “You should stay away.”

Her angelic lift didn’t fool Monroe. He caught the sultry devil in her tone, too. It was the tone of a woman who wanted it, wanted him. He kicked off his waterlogged shoes and told her as much, “You look like a woman who wants some company.”

“How does your wife look when she wants company?” The woman asked and kicked away, further out into the ocean. “You should go home to her.”

Monroe saw a flash of gold in the water beneath her, something he swore looked like scales. He wondered if she was blonde down south and the thought caused another jump in his pants. He didn’t bother taking them off when he waded deeper. Fuck, the water was cold. It was a testament to how hot the mystery woman was that his hard-on could endure the frigid water as he swam out toward her.

Just as he closed in, the woman glided away. She looked back at him over her shoulder in what may have been fright or evasion, but Monroe knew better. She was playing coy, giving him a chase. Women did that to him from time to time, played those little games. It never meant they didn’t want him to catch them. He thought about what he’d do to this one when he caught her. He wanted to sink his teeth right into her. One thing he was certain of, he hadn’t ruined his shoes and his clothes to play coy. Play time was over once he caught her.

Which, judging by the way his outstretched hand was nearly clawing through her luxurious mane, was right about now.

Monroe caught her hair as she swam away from him, still playing coy, and used a little too much force when he yanked her back to him. Her beautiful features were twisted and her mouth was open when he yanked her head around. Monroe had expected that – a look of pain or surprise. But the woman was smiling. And she wasn’t a woman anymore. The creature was smiling at him. Its features were still beautiful, but its eyes were vicious with narrow, slitted pupils, and its smile was too wide with too many teeth. Dear god, the teeth! Rows of sharp, brutal, shark-like teeth.

The creature laughed, drinking his fear like wine. It laughed as it tore into him with its brimming smile and those terrible teeth, latching onto his neck with vice-tight strength. The pain and surprise belonged to him alone. And what exquisite pain it was, like nothing he had ever experienced. He felt his flesh being serrated by ragged teeth, and even heard the tearing of his tissue like a seam ripping as the creature tore a chunk out of his neck. He felt his blood oozing down over his collarbone, hot on his chilled skin.

Monroe didn’t think it should take so long to die or that a person could endure so much pain before the release of death. He flailed feebly, or possibly it was his muscles twitching spasmodically as the last currents of life tried to save him. He looked up at the full glowing moon and sputtered a prayer, blood frothing from his mouth as he pleaded to God for help. Or at least to let him die quickly.

“God’s not here tonight, doctor,” the creature told him, her voice still as wickedly harmonious as a devil’s serenade. A golden fin breached the water before the creature dove under with him, fanning a magnificent golden tail to drive them deep into the crushing black depths. Somehow, he could still hear her voice or perhaps the words were driven straight into his soul.

“There’s only me.” Her voice seemed to fill the water like light. Terrible, golden, hellish light. “And the lovely things I’ll show you.”

*******************************************************************************************

It took a week for Dr. Monroe’s corpse to wash back up onto the beach. Clammy skin had begun sloughing off in patches which, combined with the bloat of decay and waterlogged oozing, gave the body a poached egg sort of look. Flip always had thick skin when it came to murders and crime scenes, it had thickened even more in the last few months. The smell was particularly loathsome with bodies dredged up after marinating in water for days. Soggy, rancid meat was just a little more putrid than dry rot. It should probably worry him that the humid stench coating the back of his throat no longer bothered him, but now he was more concerned with not getting his boots wet from the waves lapping at a vacant eye socket, the surrounding tissue hanging loose like a worn-out buttonhole. In addition to the missing eye, there were other places the fish had eaten. They went for the soft tissue first – eyes, lips, genitals.

I hope you did something in life that warranted your dick bein’ chewed off in death, you poor clammy bastard, Flip thought as he studied the corpse. Fuck, I hope he was dead when that happened. He smirked at his own dark humor.

That humor faded quickly when he had to break the news to the doctor’s hysterical widow; console her while she sobbed, listen while she bemoaned the fate of their litter. He really needed to hire some deputy to do this part of the job, some kind of emotional support golden retriever in human form. Especially with the impressive accidental death toll Eastport boasted.

*******************************************************************************************

“I found your latest handiwork on the beach this morning,” Flip said to his golden girl between kisses as his mouth trailed from her throat down toward her navel. Moonlight gilded her skin as she moved beneath him in the bedroom he now considered theirs, hidden away in the seaside mansion. “You gotta quit doin’ that, darlin.’”

She bucked her hips against his face in invitation. “You don’t need to worry. I know what’s really bothering you. None of them touch me. No one has touched me since you. Only you.”

“It ain’t a walk in the park breakin’ the news to all these wailing widows, you know.” Flip nipped her skin, delighting in the way she shuddered in response.

“Tell the wife about the nurses the good doctor was fucking,” she said with no remorse. “That should put a bandaid on her grief.”

“Is that an educated guess?” Flip asked redundantly. He had learned earlier that day the doctor had been making the rounds in the hospital in multiple ways.

“When a man drowns in my cove, there’s a good reason,” she said with a hint of venom.

“A man-hater, huh?” he grinned against her skin, teasing her with the scratch of his beard. “Should I be concerned?”

“You? Never, handsome.” She laughed headily. “A hard man like you is good to find.”

“Is that what’s behind all the killing?” Flip asked more seriously, looking up at her and meeting her eyes. “Some asshole hurt you and have a score to settle?”

“I had a score to settle, alright. I was filled with rage, for years and years. But now, it’s nothing so simple as rage. Not anymore. It’s all part of a bargain I made long ago.” She tangled her fingers into the thick forest of his hair. “You might say, I have quotas to meet.”

“Tell me what happened.” Flip raised himself up, cupping her cheek in his hand and looking steadily into her eyes.

“You talk too much, handsome,” she said and used her surprising strength to roll him onto his back and hoist herself to straddle him. Better than that, she straddled his face. “I can think of a better use for that mouth.”

Some time later, she lay draped across his chest as the sweat cooled on their bodies. Flip marveled at her indefatigability. He felt like he had run a marathon, and she could go all night. They still had a few hours before dawn and Flip didn’t want to waste them sleeping.

“You know if you need a hero, I’m happy to step up,” Flip told her, rubbing his hand along her back.

“A hero can’t save me,” she scoffed with surprising rancor. “A hero would never do what’s necessary to save me. Only a villain would have half a chance. A man who chooses to be my hero alone and a villain to others.”

“Hero or villain, I’ll be whatever the hell you want me to be,” Flip assured her, his voice soft this time as he cradled her head on his chest. “Tell me what happened to you, darlin.’”

“What happened doesn’t matter,” she replied with a hint of melancholy. “Why things are the way they are rarely matters.”

“Anything that affects you matters to me.” His voice rumbled through his chest.

With her head resting on one side of his chest and her sharp fingernails tracing patterns on the other, she began her story. Her sonorous voice played harmony to the spell woven by her words. Flip had never been the best listener, not to the frivolous pillow talk most women tried to engage him in. Yet he found he hung on every word she spoke as if it were the thrilling cliffhanger at the end of a riveting novel chapter.

“It’s been more than eighty years since I’ve let a man have me for more than one night.” She kissed his chest. “But I suppose you figured that out.”

“Not really,” Flip huffed, jostling her on his chest. “I don’t have a damn thing figured out, other than I have you now, but I’m not supposed to be able to keep you. I know I want to keep you.” His brow was set and voice heavy with conviction. “I’ll find a way to keep you.”

“I want you to keep me, too,” she purred. “And you’re the first man I’ve ever said that too.” Her voice grew darker. “But there’s a price you must pay to keep me. You’re also the first man I’ve ever wanted to know exactly what that price is. If the price is too steep for you, I won’t force you to make the purchase.”

“No price is too high, darlin.’” He grinned. “Can I whip out a checkbook?”

She smiled up at him with great sadness and returned her head to his chest to begin her tale.

“I married too young to the first man who had ever made me laugh. I was just coming into my beauty and had never kissed a boy before. My husband promised he would take me far away when he returned from the war. I was young and foolish, and I believed him. While he was at war, men in town hounded me. They were merciless. Truly merciless, like hounds baying after a fox. I wouldn’t have looked twice at any of them even if I was single. I was more vigilant over my reputation than I needed to be, more vigilant than any other woman I knew. I couldn’t have done more to avoid and deter them, unless I started undermining my appearance. I wouldn’t give any man the power of making me lessen myself to make them more comfortable. I wasn’t too much. Those men were inadequate.”

Flip stroked his large hand along her back soothingly and kissed along her hairline, letting her take whatever time she needed.

“It didn’t take long – weeks it seemed – until one of those men, a fat, verminous, troll who could never touch a woman like me, started telling everyone who would listen that he had slept with me. That I had begged for it and moaned like a whore. I don’t know how many people in town believed it at first. I thought surely no one could. But the women who heard the rumor were jealous of me and fostered it – ‘I’ve always known she was a whore. Just look at her!’ And the men who heard it wanted it to be true so they might have a chance with me – ‘Yeah, you know she wants it.’ That foul rumor spread through town like wildfire, until I couldn’t walk down the street without getting poisonous looks and lewd propositions.”

“Let’s take a stroll down mainstreet tomorrow,” Atas suggested with gravel in his voice. “I’ll rearrange some faces and punch the teeth down the throat of any asshole who so much as looks at you sideways.”

“I’d give anything to have you show me off on your arm,” she said in a faraway tone. Her voice hardened when she continued. “All the perverse talk emboldened the perverts, I suppose. It didn’t take long until the looks and comments weren’t enough. Then the pinching started, then the grabbing. I could handle myself. I could even fend them off one at a time. I was never a meek woman and I was raised on a farm. Then they started following me in packs like hyenas.”

Flip’s hand stilled on her hip, his grip tightening.

“I went to the sheriff,” she scoffed. “He asked me what I expected, looking the way I look, dressing the way I dress. He told me I was asking for it, and I shouldn’t be surprised when men wanted it. He also asked what it was worth to me for him to do something about it.”

“Is that sonofabitch still alive?” Flip growled.

“None of them are.” She smiled at the thought. Then her lips thinned and her face hardened. “One night one of those men – I can’t remember his name, but I remember his face and his rancid breath – came to my house, the house on the cliffs. He broke in and knocked me out. I woke up when he was dragging me along the beach by my hair. When I fought back, he beat me more, beat me until he could take what he wanted from me. He was stupid though. He turned his back to me to stuff his little dick back into his pants. I bashed the asshole in the head with the nearest rock I could grab. I bashed him again and again and again until his face was hamburger, then I threw the rock into the ocean and dragged his body out. I waded until I was swimming and then I kept swimming. I was a good swimmer, and it felt good to wash the filth off me. I left his body in the middle of the cove to sink and swam back. When his corpse washed up days later, it looked like an accident.”

“That asshole deserved it,” Flip said genuinely. “He deserved a helluva lot worse.”

“My husband came home from the war a few weeks later,” she continued. “I tried to tell him these things. I needed to tell someone other than my damn pets. But he had heard the rumors in town too, and he had already been poisoned by them. He thought it was all my fault. That I must have been putting something out there to elicit the response I received. He thought I took lovers and flirted. That I acted like a whore in his absence because I couldn’t keep my legs closed until he got home.”

“I see why you wanted to get outta Dodge,” Flip grated, his body rigid beneath hers. He dreaded what he thought was coming, but still had to hear it from her lips.

“He said if he couldn’t have me, no one would. He killed me, beat me mostly to death,” she revealed. “When I was barely conscious, he dragged me to the cliff. I screamed and screamed, but no one heard me. He tied an anchor around me and shoved me off into the deepest part of the cove. You’d think it’s quick to drown, but it takes a long time when it’s happening to you. It felt like I sank for hours in my last few minutes. I screamed, watching my cries for help rise in bubbles toward the surface.”

Flip felt her body grow stiff against him as she continued. “I begged and pleaded. When I thought I would do anything anything to live a little longer, something answered. Something that lurked in the bottom of that cove. Something monstrous. I heard its voice inside my head and it offered me a trade. A trade I was all too happy to accept. Instead of a handshake, I felt thick slimy tentacles wrap around me. I thought they were dragging me deeper, but they dragged me somewhere else. I kicked so violently I broke free and I shot to the surface, kicking and kicking. A part of me realized that I should have drowned, that I couldn’t be alive after so long under water. Then I realized that my feet weren’t there anymore. The creature had stolen them, replaced my legs with a tail. I had become one of whatever that creature was. Something cursed. Something soulless.”

“Jesus,” Flip said dumbly, at a loss. What does a man say to that?

“Jesus wasn’t there that night. He didn’t answer my prayers,” she said vehemently. “I made a deal with the devil that night, or a kind of devil, and I became his pet and his ward. Since that night, I have taken my revenge and sated his hunger at the same time, luring men to their deaths with my beauty and my siren’s song. They find me on the beach, and come to save me, then they try to take me,” she laughed cruelly. “Then they beg God to let them drown. So, I show them all my teeth and then I laugh out loud. I never wanted saving, I just wanted to be found. That will teach them. All of them. They’re never to be seen again, and I’m still wandering my beach, swimming in my cove.”

Flip thought she was finished, so he asked with conviction, “So what’s the price I have to pay?”

“I’m glad I met the devil,” she said and propped herself up on his chest so she was looking down at him. “He showed me I was weak. He removed the weakness from me and replaced it with a part of him. In exchange he took a part of me too. The part of me he barters in.” She smiled grimly. “The price, as you see, is a piece of your soul.”

Flip chewed his cheek, considering this for only a moment. “I can go without a piece of my soul, darlin,’ as long as the rest of it belongs to you. And all of you belongs to me.”

*******************************************************************************************

When Flip awoke the next morning, she was gone. He knew she would be; he had grimly resigned himself to that reality months ago. It could have all been a dream, a fantasy or a nightmare. Maybe he could walk away from her and after a few painful years, convince his mind of that. Inconveniently, she was real. The realest and most alive Flip had ever felt and would ever feel was when he was with his siren.

Thunder roared outside and a gusty wind blew the bay window open with a rusty groan of hinges. Flip groaned himself as he rolled out of bed, grabbed his pack of cigarettes, pulled one out with his teeth, lit the tip and dropped his lighter back on the nightstand. Smoke trailed from his nose as he walked to the windows. He was still naked, boasting scratches from her nails across his chest, his hair wild from her fingers. Leaning against the window frame, he blew a stream of smoke outside.

Clouds as dark as gunsmoke hung low overhead and the thunder booming in the sky was louder than the crash of waves against the cliffs below. Waves ripped across the surface of the usually calm cove, cresting white like lipizzans in capriole. Watching the water boil from the storm, feeling the chilly air on his skin, and taking a drag from his cigarette, Flip wondered how in the hell he could pay the price for his siren’s absolution. If it was as simple as handing over a pound of his flesh, he would go down to the kitchen and cut a chunk out his side before breakfast. Ideas turned over in his mind, he rejected each one as fast as it bloomed. He focused so intently on that question, he didn’t realize he was chewing his lip around his cigarette until he tasted blood mingled with tobacco.

A strange movement in the water in the center of the cove caught his eye. The shape of the cresting waves in the center had changed, becoming sinuous. The water looked like insects crawled over its surface. Flip frowned, stepping outside onto the balcony, clamping the cigarette between his teeth. The wind buffeted him, raising goosebumps on his shoulders. Or maybe it was the sight of a long oily black tentacle reaching up from the water, twisting in the air, then vanishing again.

Flip spit his cigarette over the balcony rail, as he planted his hands on it and leaned forward. He strained his eyes, focusing on the sinuous writhing in the center of the cove. Horror prickled his skin like icepicks when he realized the strange movement of the waves were a multitude of black tentacles, wringing and twisting inside and on top of the stormy waves. The very center was calm, about the size of a dinner table. It gleamed like oil. Something inside the round center made a jerky movement. Flip realized it was an eye. A giant black eye. And that eye had just focused its abyssal pupil on him. The tentacles whipped wildly around it now, breaching the water in agitation or excitement.

Whatever this creature was, it was not his siren nor anything possessing of her beauty. He recalled her story and the tentacles that had caught her legs and dragged her under. This was the hellish beast that had lived in the cove long before the siren ever took her first swim. This was the eldritch monster that collected the souls his siren harvested. Flip stared at it, and the monstrous eye stared right back.

An idea flashed into his mind. Whether it was his own, a spark of brilliance born of the terrified adrenaline that coursed through his veins, or whether the tentacled monster had impregnated his thoughts, he didn’t know or even care.

Flip knew what he had to do to save his siren, to have her all to himself. He was too late to avenge her, but he could try his best to save her.

*******************************************************************************************

After meeting the shining black eye of that monstrosity in the cove, Flip was rattled. He didn’t like the idea that had been put into his head, but he wasn’t forcing it out either. He was allowing it to percolate, considering his options. His phone dinged from an incoming text as he was pulling on his jeans. It was unusual for him to be bothered by calls or texts out on that acreage; it allowed him to feel like there was only him and his siren alone in the world. Service was spotty and unpredictable at best out on the cliffs. His phone varied between one bar and no service depending on the device’s mood. He fished it out of his jeans pocket and glared at the new text, wrinkling his nose more from the text than he did from the smell of moist corpses.

“I miss you,” said the whoring schoolteacher, Cristy.

“I bet you fuckin’ do,” he gritted to himself and shoved his phone back in his pocket.

The thought that had taken root in his mind that morning blossomed into something thorny and brutal. Maybe even a little evil, the kind of thought that was rare for Flip. And it was brilliant.

Instead of the petty barb he had been poised to text, he typed a new message. “Then let’s do something about it. Pick you up at 7?”

“See you then,” her reply came almost instantly, followed by a string of emojis.

Another check in his siren’s box. She didn’t text him stupid shit with stupid fuckin’ emojis.

“Better get movin,’” he grumbled to himself as he shoved the phone back in his pocket and pulled his shirt on. He had a lot to do between now and seven.

*******************************************************************************************

Before picking up Cristy, Flip ran a few other errands. He went into his favorite coffee shop, as he often did in the mornings after leaving his empty bed. This time, he flirted with the barista he knew was married. Loud enough for his voice to carry to the surveillance camera behind the counter, he told the married woman he was thinking of watching the sunset from the local lighthouse and asked if she wanted to join him. She declined as he knew she would. Later in the day, he purchased a ticket for a show at the drive-in theater and made sure a few people spotted the sheriff there, talked to a few others. Once the movie was rolling, he doubted those same people would notice him leaving early, and there was no surveillance in the dated drive-in to be concerned about. He still had time to drive to the lighthouse, at the far end of town from the siren’s cove, and toss out an empty Coke can with his DNA on the rim. With the recent storm and the humidity, it would be impossible to place his tire tracks to a timeframe narrower than twelve hours, which was just what he wanted. His last errand of the day was surprisingly easy, and he even arrived early to pick up the teacher. He ensured there were no witnesses or cameras in the area. And he kept the radio loud in his truck while he drove her out for their date, loud enough to cover any noises coming from the truck bed.

The hardest part of it all was faking a smile at Cristy’s bland wit and keeping his mouth shut on the topic of her liaisons with the science teacher, Less. Even though he had no interest in her and now had the woman of his dreams in bed most nights, being cheated on still irked him. He wondered if that lingering anger would be resolved tonight too.

Flip just hoped her lackluster spirit and dented soul were fungible with those of his magnificent siren. He would never make that trade, but he hoped that was just his mortal sensibility.

Ignoring Cristy’s protests that the cove was haunted, Flip drove them there anyway. He remembered the road with beach access thanks to the late Dr. Monroe. It was convenient that any tracks on the beach were washed away by the tide within minutes. Few people ever came to this place, thanks to the ghost stories and tall tales surrounding the cove and the old house. From the beach, enclosed on three sides by high cliffs and tall, toothy rocks, a man could feel like he was alone in the world. Flip parked between two spires of rock rising out of the surf, near a small dinghy and oars he had dragged there that morning, still patiently awaiting him. They arrived when the sun was setting, the prettiest hour of the day to spend in the haunted cove.

“Get your whorin’ ass in the boat,” Flip ordered the woman in a frightening tone, shedding his pretenses of civility.

“What did you say to me?” Cristy tried to sound offended, but fear shook her voice.

“I’m askin’ nicely.” Flip smiled cruelly. “But I’m not above askin’ another way. I suggest you don’t make me ask twice.”

She was stumbling over her words, backpedaling some kind of excuse or apology. Atla didn’t care and he wasn’t listening. He got out of the truck, made sure to pocket his keys, and walked behind it to open the tailgate. He wasn’t concerned about Cristy getting away. She couldn’t get up the cliffs here, so all she could do was try to run away down the beach and Flip could catch her in seconds. Or she could try swimming away across the cove, which would be just fine by him.

Grabbing the bundle Flip had covered with a tarp in the bed of his truck, he yanked it out, letting it fall to the sand in a heap. He had thought the man, Less, might have given him more trouble, but he lived up to his name. Flip had dealt with stray dogs who put up more of a fight. Less was crying behind his broken glasses, sucking against the duct tape over his mouth as he sobbed. He wasn’t even fighting against the zip ties on his wrists and ankles.

Flip walked to the passenger door and yanked it open, unable to keep himself from grinning at the sight of Cristy’s dull, horrified eyes. Flip leaned on the door and told her, “I doubt you believe me, but I have no intention of hurting either of you. I just want us all to have a little chat.” He jerked his head toward the dinghy. “So, you can either walk your ass over to that boat and sit down in it on your own, or I can drag you to it and throw you in. Your choice.”

Trembling with fear and crying, Cristy complied. As she walked toward the boat, she looked around, calculating her odds of escape and realizing it was hopeless. Flip bent and grabbed hold of the man’s collar, dragging him through the sand and hoisting him into the boat like a duffle bag, landing with a heavy thud.

“I’m sorry,” Cristy sputtered. “I didn’t mean to cheat on you. It was all a mistake.”

“Yeah, it’s a dangerous world out there for a woman,” Flip menaced, letting her know the world she was in now was very dangerous indeed. “A girl never knows when she might trip and fall onto a dick. I don’t know how you navigate it. Me? I’m just thankful I haven’t tripped and fallen on top of any strange women yet.” He bared his teeth in a cold grin. “Get in the boat.”

“You said you weren’t going to hurt me,” she sobbed, climbing into the dinghy.

“I’m not,” he said gruffly. “You have my word.” He jerked his thumb at the quivering man curled in the bottom of the boat. “Believe me, if I was gonna rough you up, it would have been when I caught you with that fuckin’ joke.”

Flip shoved the boat with both teachers inside out into the water and jumped in as a wave caught it. He took the oars and began rowing them out into the cove. The sun had dipped behind the pines on the cliffs above and the light was rapidly fading. By the time they reached the middle of the cove, the shore was hazy and indistinct, shrouded with purples and blues and a light mist.

Flip retrieved a knife from his jeans pocket, smirking at the way Less cowered from it. Catching Less by the ankle, Flip cut the zip ties binding his legs. He jerked his hands back when he realized the pathetic excuse for a male had pissed his pants. He cut through the ties on Less’s wrists and then stood, trying to keep his balance in the small boat. Less staggered up on shaky legs, his puny fists balled at his sides. Flip grinned at the feeble sight, but it gave him an opening he had wanted for some time.

Still grinning, Flip slammed a vicious right punch straight into Less’s nose, feeling the rewarding crunch of cartilage as the skinny dweeb reeled backward. Before Less tipped over backward, Flip grabbed the front of his shirt and the waistband of his pants, and unceremoniously chucked him over the side. Less shrieked like a woman when he hit the water and sputtered in hysterics next to the boat.

Looking at Cristy, Flip gave her his best Dirty Harry glare. “Do you need help gettin’ out of the boat too, or can you manage on your own?”

“What are you going to do? You can’t leave us out here!” she screamed, but she timidly stepped out of the boat into the ocean to tread water beside Less.

“Like I said, I just want to have a conversation,” Flip said dangerously. “And what I want to hear is the two of you begging. I want you to beg for your lives. Beg not to drown. I want to hear what kind of bargain you’re both willing to make not to drown here tonight.”

“I’ll do anything,” the woman cried. “Oh, God help us! What do you want?”

“Keep it up.” Flip grinned at her.

Grabbing a fistful of the man’s thinning hair, Flip shoved his head under again. The man flailed and sputtered, giving Flip about as much trouble as a wet rat. The woman sobbed, treading water in place. It was pathetic how weak the couple was. Not an ounce of fight or flight in them, just sobbing and pleading. They didn’t even try to capsize his dinghy, which wouldn’t have been difficult.

Keeping hold of his hair, Flip let the man splash back to the surface, wheezing for breath.

“Beg, you sorry sonofabitch,” Flip growled in his grittiest tone. “Beg to be saved. Promise you’ll do anything.”

Less instantly amped his sobbing to the level of horror-movie-cheerleader, begging and pleading and promising with everything he had. Cristy followed his lead, stupidly thinking that being pitiable enough would save her. They carried on for minutes, wailing and splashing, pleading and promising.

“Please,” Less pleaded, snot clogging his nose and tears streaming from his eyes. “Please, I’ll do anything. I’ll give you anything you want.”

“Don’t let me drown!” Cristy shrieked. “I’ll give you anything you want if you save me.”

The ocean began swirling around the couple. They were too preoccupied by Flip to notice. The eddy was gentle at first, quickly gaining speed. Cristy noticed when it started to tug her under, like filth getting sucked down a drain.

“We begged you,” she sobbed. “We promised to do anything you wanted to spare us.”

“You weren’t beggin’ me for a fuckin’ thing.” Flip laughed cruelly. “And it wasn’t me you made those promises to.”

Punctuating his laughter, a forest of tentacles erupted from the whirlpool, oily black and as thick as Flip’s waist. The tentacles whipped around like cats o’nine tails. The woman screamed and the man cried pitifully. Flip grabbed the sides of the little boat to keep from being thrown out as it bucked on the turbulent water, hoping to hell it wouldn’t capsize.

The tentacles latched around the pathetic couple flailing in the water, catching Cristy around her legs and waist and Less around the neck in a slimy noose. His mouth opened in a scream that couldn’t escape his strangled throat and his eyes bulged from their sockets, as the woman splashed feebly. Their screams and sputters and splashing sounded deafening to Flip in the otherwise silent cove. Just as fast as they had appeared, the tentacles were sucked back beneath the water, leaving Cristy’s terrified face and Less’s lobster-red strangling head bobbing for another heartbeat before they too were sucked down into the water.

The whirlpool grew smaller, swallowing the couple down into the cursed depths of the cove. Flip’s dinghy settled with a splash, its violent bucking slowly calming until it was rocking gently. The whirlpool had vanished along with all trace of the teachers, and the waves had returned to normal. The starry night was incongruously peaceful, the ocean beautiful and the sky pristine. With a heavy sigh, Flip dropped his hands from the sides of the boat and let his breath return to normal, waiting for the guilt that never came.

Two worthless souls in exchange for one exquisite soul was a fine trade by him. Maybe he’d thrown in a little piece of his own soul as a tip, but he was fine with that too.

A hoarse cry coming from the shore snapped him back to attention. There was enough light from the moon and stars for Flip to see movement on the beach, but he couldn’t make out what it was. There wasn’t any way either of the two teachers could have gotten there that fast, and slimmer odds still they’d survived.

Grabbing the oars, Flip heaved against them, sending the dinghy lurching back to shore. His heart jumped when he recognized the familiar, superb figure of his siren. When he neared the shore, he jumped out of the boat, splashing water up to his thighs, and dragged the rowboat ashore. She was on her hands and knees in the sand, doubled over coughing up water. Flip ran to her, falling to his knees beside her, his hand going instinctively to rub her back.

“Are you alright?” he asked, still rubbing her back as she coughed. He had never seen her cough like this before, as if she had just narrowly avoided drowning. She was naked, as he had found her many times, but this time her skin was cool to his touch and goosebumps rose in a rash over her shoulders. Flip yanked his shirt open, shrugged out of it and wrapped it around her, pulling her onto her knees and into his arms.

She shuddered against him, her entire body heaving. Worried, Flip squeezed her tighter. Then he realized she was laughing, silently laughing so heartily her whole body shook. Pulling back enough to look at her, Flip cupped her face, studying her smiling features.

“I think you did it, handsome,” she crooned, her smile widening further, tears brimming in her eyes. The ethereal lilt was gone from her voice, though it still spoke to his heart. The oddly luminous glow was gone from her eyes, though they were still bright and beautiful and looked right into his soul. Her mane of hair was still luxurious but lacked some of the gloss it usually held, and her skin was soft as velvet but was missing the ethereal golden flush that had always seemed to shimmer just below the surface.

“You’re free?” Flip asked, his voice hoarse in his tightening throat, a toothy smile blooming on his lips.

“I think so,” she laughed, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so roughly she bruised his lower lip. “Take me to bed. If I’m allowed to stay until dawn, I’m yours.”

*******************************************************************************************

For the first time, Flip was able to watch the sunrise holding the woman he loved. He stayed awake all night waiting for it, just to make sure she wouldn’t somehow evaporate in his arms. He wanted to touch her, assure himself she was real, while he watched the morning sun gild her skin and dance in her hair. This morning, he would be able to take the woman he loved with him into the little coffee shop, show her off in town. Thinking of spending his life enjoying such simple pleasures with her made him feverish with love.

A thought played over and over in Flip’s head, making him grin like an idiot. She was still his as the sun rose. She would be his forever.

The sunrise was golden, lighting the reds and oranges in the autumn foliage aflame. The cove was calm, the water a peaceful sapphire. If Flip strained his ears, he thought he might have heard a faint cry, carried up from the water on a light breeze. With some imagination, it might be the screams of the souls trapped beneath the water. The new recruits Flip had engineered as a trade for the release of his siren. But a rational man would chock it up to the wind rustling the pines. The sound was barely audible when the waves thundered against the cliffs. And the waves would always be there. The waves would always come crashing down.

Flip would label the drowning of the two schoolteachers an accident. One might call it following traditional Eastport Sheriff Department protocol. Even if some ambitious cop wanted to investigate, there was no evidence to support anything else. Two lovebirds went skinny dipping in the cove and drowned. Damned shame.

Flip’s siren heard the faint sounds carried across the water, turning in his arms to look out of the windows. She smiled, a wistful sort of look in her bright eyes. Flip kissed her shoulders and neck, feeling her body respond to his touch. When she rolled onto her back and pulled him over her, he saw the familiar wildness in her eyes. Her wildness wasn’t a gift from the being in the lake. It was born into her and it remained a part of her. As Flip kissed her smiling lips, he wondered if her desire to kill, her rage, were gone too. Or if that had been a part of her long before she was taken by whatever dwells in the cove. She still seemed like a wild thing to him, like a fox or a tiger. Then he wondered if he could possibly domesticate a wild tiger. Or if he could only keep her sated. He didn’t know, but he intended to do his part on that front right now.

*******************************************************************************************

Tagging some sexy sirens!

#my stuff!#my writing #best #fic #summer #halloween #pirate #flip #flip zimmerman x reader #flip zimmerman x you

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mrs-gucci · 1 year ago

Text

The Prank

{ flip zimmerman x female reader }

anon

Flip being an idiot and scaring you to get in the spooky mood! Or vice versa! Please and thank you

I kind of took this in a little bit of a different direction, it's not super duper spooky per se, but I love the idea I came up with and I hope you love it too!

warnings. FLUFF, very light sexual stuff, scaring/pranking, flip getting all grumpy, lingerie wearing, a kiss n' make up situation.

word count: 1.2k

★ written for sextember 2023 ★

Flip, being a seasoned police detective, is a very hard man to scare. You're always trying to jumpscare him, but it never works, and it frustrates the hell out of you because he's constantly jumpscaring you. You just wanna get him really good one time, really scare him, and you've finally come up with the perfect plan to do it.

When you told Ron your idea, he was immediately eager to help you out, agreeing to do whatever needed to scare the living daylights out of Flip.

So when Flip calls and tells you he's on his way home, you quickly get your lingerie on and do your hair and makeup all nice. You really need to have Flip completely focused on you and get his guard down so Ron can do his thing.

You're buzzing with excitement as you head downstairs in your pretty set, one of his favorites, and make a quick call to Ron to confirm the plan. Then, you settle on the couch and put yourself on display as best you can while you wait for Flip to come home.

"Princess? I'm home!" he calls through the house as he normally does, pulling off his boots and putting out his cigarette in the ashtray by the door. "Baby, where--"

He turns the corner and finds you on the couch, all laid out in one of his favorite lingerie sets. He hums, pausing and leaning against the archway of the living room.

"What's all this for?"

"What, can't a lady dress up for her handsome, hardworking man every once and a while? Keep things spicy?"

Flip chuckles and walks over to you. "Hey, I never said I was complaining. Just didn't know if we were supposed to be celebrating anything, maybe one of those bullshit holidays we always use as an excuse to have sex, like fuckin' national laugh day or whatever."

"Oh my god," you chuckle. "We should really stop doing that, we really don't need any more excuses to have sex."

"Mm, you have a point," Flip hums, smiling as he pulls you to your feet and kisses you deeply. "But you have to admit, we've had some, mm, pretty great holiday celebrations."

You smile against his lips, nodding. "Yeah, we have."

Meanwhile, outside, Ron pulls into the driveway with his headlights off and takes it slow, not wanting to alert his partner to his arrival. He grabs his cuffs and sneaks around to one of the living room windows, staying low as he taps the metal cuff against the window.

Flip's head turns immediately in the direction of the sound, eyebrows furrowed.

"Did you hear that?"

You look up at him, pretending to be confused.

"Hear what, baby?"

"There was a tapping noise."

"I didn't hear it," you say, turning his head back to you and kissing him again. "It was probably just the icebox again, you know how it makes those weird sounds sometimes."

Flip's instincts were telling him there's something going on, but he chooses to ignore them in favor of kissing you some more. He hums, hands on your hips, squeezing them firmly.

"You look so beautiful, princess," he says against your lips, pushing you gently back down onto the couch. "I--"

Ron scratches along the window with his nails and Flip's head whips over again, walking towards the window.

"What the fuck is going on?" he says, looking through the window. "I swear to god someone's outside tapping the window. You're not hearing it?"

"No, baby, I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't hear anything."

He huffs, then walks back over to you and lays down on top of you, kissing you again as he presses himself against you.

Ron grins and moves to the other window, then knocks quickly, squatting down in the darkness to hide in case Flip looks out the window.

"Alright now, this is getting fucking ridiculous. Either I'm crazy or you're going deaf, because that was very noticeable."

Flip huffs, making a move to get off you and walk over to the window. You hold his shirt and keep him on you, kissing his neck.

"Baby, don't get up again. It's okay, it's probably one of the neighborhood cats. I need you, Flip, please stay here..."

His jaw clenches, but he starts kissing you again. You left the back screen open for Ron so he can enter quietly, and you subtly keep a lookout for him as Flip starts to nibble at your neck.

Ron comes around the corner and you hum, smiling softly and winking at him. He grins, standing in silence for a moment before making his presence known by using his deep, serious shouting voice.

"ZIMMERMAN!"

Flip startles and tries to turn around but falls off the couch with a soft grunt. You burst into laughter and Ron joins in as Flip processes what just happened.

"What the fuck?!"

"Oh my god, that was amazing," you breathe, laughing hysterically. "We got you so good."

You give Ron a high five as Flip stands back up with a huff, crossing his arms.

"You guys fucking suck," he says bitterly. "Why would you do that?"

"Revenge, of course. You're always scaring me but I can never scare you. So I wanted to get you back for all those times."

“Well this was so much worse than anything I’ve ever done to you,” he says. “We were about to…that was just mean.”

You can tell that he’s actually getting upset over this, and you quickly wrap up the conversation with Ron. He can sense it too and heads out after a few more minutes, leaving you and Flip alone.

He walks over and grabs a beer from the fridge, opens it up, then takes a long sip. You sigh, getting up from the couch and walking to him, wrapping your arms around him from behind as he lights a cigarette.

“Baby, it was a little prank. Just for a little fun.”

“It wasn’t fun for me. I actually thought something was going on outside and I was getting worried. And the fact that you got all dressed up just to scare me…it was just shitty.”

You step around and give him a kiss on the cheek, then another, and another.

“Flip, baby, I’m sorry,” you say, pouting. “Please forgive me.”

He huffs. “I’m not happy with you right now.”

Your lips continue to press kisses all over his face, jaw and neck.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” you say with each peck. “I’m really sorry, baby.”

As much as he’s upset, your kisses and apologies are definitely chipping away at his hardened defenses.

His hand slips onto the small of your back but he still doesn’t look at you, hoping you’ll keep going but understand that he’s really not that upset without him having to say it.

You definitely understand it, and you smile slightly, but continue to kiss him until you finally press a kiss to his lips.

“Please forgive me?”

He looks at you, then, and smiles ever so slightly as he holds you close.

“You’re not gonna quit, are you?”

You shake your head with a smile, kissing him some more. "Nope, not until you forgive me."

"Alright, alright," Flip sighs, running his hand down to give your ass a firm squeeze. He smiles, then kisses you. "You're lucky I love you so damn much."

****

sextember taglist: @rynwritesstuff @safarigirlsp @babbushka @mrs-zimmerman

if you'd like to be tagged in future sextember works, please let me know via comment on this post or the original sextember post!

#mrs gucci's sextember #adcu #adam driver #adam driver character #adcu fanfiction #adam driver fanfiction #adcu fanfic #adcu community #adcu fic #adam driver fluff #adcu fluff #flip zimmerman #flip zimmerman fluff #flip zimmerman x reader #flip zimmerman x you

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just-some-random-blogger · 2 years ago

Text

Love Interest

[Character Development Part II]

Joel Miller x Reader + (a not secret pairing)

Summary: Don't you just love it when the universe just hits you with an uno reverse and now you're the one getting flowers?

Word Count: 1k+

Warnings: fem!reader, flip zimmerman x reader but idk him and just used his character and made it my own HAHAHHA, pov shift in the end, devil's advocate!ellie, pining, jealousy, angst, typos, etc.

A/N: this is a very niche pairing but im just so psychotic for adam driver that i had to add him. i took the liberty of tagging everyone i could that screamed at me in p1 so enjoy! Tagging: @sloanexx @pinksirensong @aralezinspace @ellooo0ooo @strwwbbrri @zaweashtonslover @aurors-things @b00kw0rmsworld @anxietatema @laysmt @hiddenbabynyc @o-sacra-virgo-laudes-tibi

"Hi." I grunt as I load the basket onto the shelf. I huff and turn around, eyes widening at the fact I have to lift my gaze to find the face of who just spoke. The large man in plaid lets out a breath hot enough it condenses with the chill of the morning air. I offer him a soft smile, "hi." He huffs. His lips curve into a soft grin. I cannot help the way my brows furrow nor the chuckle that leaves me because of his reaction, "can I help you?" He clears his throat. He shifts in his spot then rubs his lips with two fingers, "actually, I'm here to help you." He looks down at the produce in the baskets, sprawled across the floor. He picks two up like it was nothing, "where'd ya want these?" I watch him as he kicks my makeshift step ladder aside (two boxes) and brings the baskets to the high part of the shelf I just couldn't quite reach. He turns to me, "here?" I nod.

"Mornin'," a deep voice huffs.

I turn over my shoulder. I can't help but snigger at the man's just-woke-up face. I shake my head, "clearly not a good mornin', thus the omission."

"Mmm," he grunts, reluctantly reaching his hands out to me, "need some help?"

I burst into giggles as I climb down the ladder with shears in my hand. He steps forward, ghosting his hands over my waist as I go down. I sequentially jump in front of him with a huff.

He fidgets, eyes widening in concern, fully waking up as I do so, "chrissakes."

I snort as I look up at him, "well, do you even know how to prune apple trees?" I show him the shears, "had to learn from the Millers how to do that."

His attention averts from the shears to my face. He mumbles, 200% awake now, "Millers."

I roll my eyes, "Tommy and Maria."

He lets out a breath and nods, taking the shears in my hand, looking to the tree and the ladder, "well, now I'll learn from the Zimmermans."

I huff and roll my eyes, "Flip-"

I still, feeling my lips part.

He looks back at me and clarifies, "you and me, baby."

"I know, I know," he cuts me off, raising a hand, "s'a joke," he climbs up the ladder. He mutters lowly, "half meant, but a joke nonetheless."

I watch as his dark hair brushes against his jaw. I watch as he reaches out for the branches with his thick arms. I watch at how the sunshine reflects on his brown eyes, making them a golden hue. I watch and feel my stomach roll. He brushes his longish hair back. I place my hand on my hip, "do you know how to prune?"

Flip looks down at me, lips curving into a lopsided smile. He pops the p, "nope."

I roll my eyes again, "get down."

"Yes, ma'am," he steps down the two steps my simply taking one big one in front of me. Flip stands in front of me, propping the shears at the top of the ladder.

He looks down at me and stupidly salutes. The constellations of freckles and moles on his face silently urge fingers to retrace them. An early morning breeze blows between us and the smell of grass, flowers, and apples, I find, are slowly beginning to smell like him.

He brings a knuckle to the corner of his eyes and rubs the sand off. His admission of looking for me after taking a morning piss replays in my head after he does this. My belly get even more restless.

"I've been meaning to tell you something," I start, making the man before me still and rigid.

He freezes. I watch him simultaneously gulp and clench his jaw as he drops his hand to the side.

I can't help it. It was a common theme when I was around him-- 'can't help myself'. I can't help but hold back a smile, "I think it's silly you never changed your name."

Flip Zimmerman's face contorts. he takes a moment then his lips fight back a smile.

"I mean," I cross my arms and give an exaggerated look, "we live in a world past birth certificates and IDs..."

I look at how the leaves and branches of the apple trees sway as sunshine kisses their cells. Then, I turn back to Flip, taking in the way the sunshine was kissing him. My eyes dart to his lips. He mirrors my stance, arms crossing, lip corners curving. He furrows his brows and licks the inside of his bottom lip.

I purse my lips tightly at his amused annoyance. I pretend I meant not to continue my train of thought because I caught on he was offended.

"No, go on," Flip nods his head, "please. I'm dying to know how this insult is going to play out."

I laugh, feeling my cheeks hurt as I do. Flip feels his insides churn.

"Well," I try to calm myself, "I was thinking there's no reason for you to go on using the word your parents thought to call you while making pancakes."

Flip is annihilated.

He wheezes so hard, he topples over and sinks down to my height. He reaches out to my arms, squeezing them with his inhumanly large ones, and empties all the amused howls from his diaphragm.

My stomach turns into a washing machine. Its whirring is powered by the sound of his laugh and the feel of his touch.

Flip eventually relents and reclaims his herculean stature. He straightens up, rolls his shoulders back, sighs, and wipes a tear. He chuckles some more as look back at me, "hng- what- hng hng, I'll have you know I enjoy being the only Flip in the known galaxy."

I make a face, "I'm sorry you got Stockholm Syndromed that bad."

He lets out a high pitched giggle. He snorts, "I'll also have you know I plan on naming my child Pivot. I'll say it's French; Pí • vou."

It was my turn to get obliterated. I throw my head back in laughter and slap my hand on my mouth.

Flip starts up like a motorcycle, pleased with my reaction to his joke.

By the time I catch my breath after laughing, I wipe a tear and shake my head, "I feel bad to whomever decides to have a kid with you."

Flip gives a lopsided smirk, "don't worry. I'll be good to you, baby momma."

I instinctively let out a loud sound. Flip watches me as I react, or try my best not to react to his words. I shake my head and move to the ladder, folding it after grabbing the shears.

Flip wordlessly intercepts and takes the ladder from me, ignoring me as I tell him to let me do it. He motions his head, "we doing the next tree or we done for the day?"

"I'm going to do the next tree. You're going to go do your chores."

"You're my chore."

I release a breath and make a face, "uhmmm, that's not as romantic as you think it was."

"So you think I'm romantic?"

"That's literally not what I said."

Later that day, when Flip was finally doing his chores, he was approached by his informant.

He was in the middle of inspecting fuse boxes all over the compound when Ellie sneaks up on him and tries to scare him. Flip, barely flinches as he turns to the girl. He looks at her with slightly wide eyes then relaxes, "hey kid."

Ellie shoves him, "WHY DON'T YOU GET SCARED?!"

Flip barely topples back at her push and looks back to the fuse box, "no idea."

She sighs and comes up to his side, inspecting whatever it was he was doing, then pipes up, "so, how'd apple picking go?"

"It was apple pruning today," he mutters, "and, well, she bullied me over my name."

"Ha," she snorts, "deserve."

Flip ignores this and turns to her after closing the box, "it's clear to me she's obviously still not over your old man."

She flattens her lips into a line.

"So, any ideas?"

Ellie sighs, "look," she raises her hands, "you gotta step up your game! Joel used to do her chores with her too, so that doesn't make you special."

"I thought you said he only did it if she asked."

"Potato, Potahto."

"No, that makes a big dif-"

"YOU GOTTA STEP UP YOUR GAME!" Ellie repeatedly slaps the back of her hand into her palm. Flip stills. She continues, "you should get her something! Something like, I dunno, flowers! Though, I think she would appreciate it more if it was an apple, but you can't really give the apple lady an apple, can you?"

Flip hums, "what about apple pie?"

She gasps and points a finger, "apple pie and flowers."

Flip lets out a chuckle at her excitement, "seems like a plan, except," he shakes hid head, "I can't bake for shit."

"I think this is the part where people say it's the thought that counts," Ellie motions her hands around, "besides, I'm sure as long as you don't poison her, it'll be fine."

Flip tilts his head and looks at the girl as she looks up and thinks, "you know what, I think I remember seeing a recipe book somewhere, let me look for it and," she raises a finger, "I'll even help you."

"Alright," he agrees but then shifts in his spot and crosses his arms, "real talk. Why are you helping me?"

She looks up at the man and makes a face, "bruh," she shakes her head, "I told you! She deserves a hot girl summer."

"It's not s-"

"IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE HOT GIRL SUMMER FOR HER!"

"... how do you even know what that is?"

"ALL I KNOW," Ellie raises a finger "is I was supposed to be making a cake with her, and then I wasn't. And that very same day I find out Joel is hanging out with some other chick. And you," she points, "are going to be evening out the playing field."

Flip watches the teen grow red with anger.

"You also better not mess this up or you'll be my next target," Ellie pulls out her switchblade.

Flip raises his hands and steps back, "fucksake, Ellie, put that away."

Ellie does but points a finger again, "remember. I'm not on your side or his side, I'm on hers." She walks away. Five steps in, she stops and looks over her shoulder, "but also, she smiles a lot more when she's around you, so do what you will with that information."

Flip chuckles as he watches Ellie walk away. He waves his hand around and thinks, "like a rabid bunny."

Ellie goes to Tommy and Maria's place, looking for the recipe book she remembers reading when she was bored. When she comes in, Joel's there and immediately scolds her, telling her to leave her shoes by the door because her boots are grimy and the baby crawls everywhere now.

Ellie rolls her eyes and removes her shoes. She walks up to Joel, who was sat on the living room carpet next to his niece. She chuckles at he sight of the baby ripping at Joel's hair. He raises a thumb in approval, "good job, baby."

Joel turns over his shoulder, inspecting Ellie's sock clad feet and looks back at the baby he was reading to. Before continuing with the flash cards Maria made for her daughter, Joel says, "there's some roast chicken in the counter. They said you can finish it if you want."

Ellie turns to the counter but then walks off to the bookshelf, just past Joel, "not hungry."

Joel makes a sound of disbelief, "right."

She begins to rummage through the books just as Joel reads out some words to the baby girl in his arms. The baby girl can't even walk yet, so Ellie makes a face at the sight of them, wondering if this was even effective. She thinks maybe Joel was just bored out of his mind.

Ellie can't help but chuckle when the child takes the card from Joel's hand and accidentally pokes his eye with it. She whispers under her breath, "deserve."

Joel pulls his head back and grabs the card from the baby. He grunts, "you're worse than Sarah."

Ellie snorts as she continues looking for the recipe book.

The baby makes a much of sounds and Joel grumbles, "yeah, yeah, it's not your fault you have underdeveloped motorskills."

Ellie giggles as she finally spots the book, "are you arguing with a baby?"

Joel looks up to Ellie, "I'm having a civil conversation."

Ellie rolls her eyes as she laughs, "how's that going for you, grampa?"

Joel grumbles, just as the baby yawns, "uncle."

Ellie snorts at the fact she was corrected. She flips through the pages of the cook book, "whatever you say, uncle grandpa."

Joel stands from the floor, cradling the baby in his arms, "alright. Nap time it is then." He lets out old man sounds as he gets on his feet and is about to bring the baby to her crib, but stops when Ellie exclaims in excitement. He catches the cover of the book in her hands then asks, "you baking with her again?"

Ellie looks up from the page, watching Joel stroke the child's tiny back. She thinks for a moment then grins, "nah. Flip wants to make her an apple pie."

Joel makes a face, "flip what?"

Elle's eye narrows. Is he for real? "Flip!" She closes the book and raises an arm, "the sasquatch?! With the," she flexes her arms, "big man boobs and the," she flips her ponytail back, "luscious dark locks."

When she turns back to Joel, she catches how his face darkens in real time.

Ah, Flip.

She wanted so badly to scoff and egg him on, but then she thought that she would be giving herself away too much if she did. Instead, she clarifies with a no-duh tone, "Flip Zimmerman."

Joel clears his throat, "yea. I got it."

Ellie huffs through her nostrils and purses her lips. She dashes over to Joel, gently squeezing the baby's dangling leg, before running off and calling, "see ya on the flip side, Joel."

Joel lets out an annoyed chuckle, turning around, just to see Ellie shove her shoes on and run out of the door. He scoffs and looks at the baby, "who the fuck names their kid Flip?"

She doesn't give a crap what her uncle is saying and nuzzles against his neck.

Joel sighs, "ok, nap time for us then."

Joel looks up from the sheep pen when he hears a fit of giggles. He looks up and sees you and Abella carrying a large basket of vegetables, both of you had a hand on the handle.

He straightens up and wipes his hands on the back of his pants while the two of you huff and urge the other to walk faster because you feel the basket slipping. He is about to jump over the fence and jog up to you to help but then the sound of a loud scream from behind surprises him.

"CHEATERS!"

Joel looks out to whom shouted just as you do.

Flip fucking Zimmerman's arms strain through his muddy flannel.

The two women turn to each other and finally drop the basket once they're in front the storage house. They let out giddy, heavy breathes and high-five each other in accomplishment.

Joel feels like his insides warm at the sight. He feels like he's being torn from the inside. He thinks about the friendship between the two of you. He watches as you two lean on each other and laugh before pulling away. He watches as Abella beams, finding himself reminded by the fact it was so easy to be around her, so easy to love her. She was the type of person that lit up the room. It was undoubtedly the reason why you both were so taken with each other.

He watches as you look out to the approaching man.

You were, too, incredibly easy to be around. No fuss, no muss, just... just you.

He steps back and decides to busy himself with the sheep when Flip finally reaches the two of you.

"First of all," Flip huffs as he stops, "I take the fact y'all cheated cause you were too scared to be beaten by me as a compliment."

You roll your eyes and stick out your tongue. Abella giggles, covering her face.

"Second of all," Flip puts down the two large baskets of vegetables he hand in either hand, "y'all did me dirty by tripping me into the mud. Literally."

You and Abella speak at the same time, "we didn't trip you!"

Joel's ears perk. He sneaks a look. Well, you shudda.

Flip hums as he narrows his eyes, "right."

"It's literally not our fault--" you start. Your words go dry when Flip begins to undo the buttons of his shirt. Abella's jaw goes lax while you clench yours after Flip pries the caked-in-brown material off his torso.

Joel's eye twitches at the sight of the man undressing. He looks around and scoffs. He's two seconds away from storming over and telling him off. Doesn't Somersault know there are kids around?

Abella looks away and whistles. You rather unabashedly look down at his abdomen.

Flip furrows his brows, not doing much to conceal his shit eating grin, "what was that, baby momma?"

You lift your gaze to glare at him, "I told you to stop calling me that."

"Okay, wifey," he smiles.

Abella presses her lips together tightly.

"Unlike you I actually have a proper name, which you can call me by."

Abella holds back a giggle.

"Well why should I when it's so much more fun to call you mine," Flip leans forward, each tooth in his stupid head on full display. You cannot help the fact your body begins to prick with heat.

Joel stills when he sees this. His insides fume when he catches how close Rotate gets to your face. This man has no sense of decorum whatsoever.

Flip only turns away when there is a loud crash from a distance. Joel knocked over some metal buckets by accident and is now roughly setting them back up. When Flip turns back to you, Abella looks back and finally spots Joel. She smiles when she does. You, however, could only awkwardly shift in place, not knowing what to do or where to look.

Abella looks back at you and laughs at your stance. She looks at Flip and shakes her head, "I can't lie, that was pretty good."

Joel's brows furrow at her words. What's with the enabling?

Flip wipes his side with his shirt then throws it over his shoulder. You glare at Abella and she holds back a laugh. Flip looks to her and points, "you like that, do ya? Well you'll love this."

Flip pulls out a piece of paper from the back of his pocket and hands it to you. Abella watches in excitement as you apprehensively take the paper from him.

Will you make flowers and make apple pie with me?

▢ Y E S ▢ no

Abella watches as your begin to shift restlessly in your spot. She barely catches a glance of your paper before you say, "so," you look to Flip, "you never graduated high school, is that it?"

Joel hears this and scoffs out a chuckle. He shovels some dirt and thinks, probably didn't get passed elementary.

"There is a charm in the childish," Flip smiles, "also, no pressure, but I never got yeses way back when."

You bite your lower lip to conceal your smile. You fail, "damn. It would be wrong of me to break that tradition now.

Flip's breath hitches, muttering softly under his breath, "no, it really wouldn't."

Abella immediately knows what the note is after hearing that. She coos and clutches her chest, "a yes/no note?"

Joel scoffs and mutters as he shoves his shovel into the ground, "a fucking yes/no note?"

Flip wipes his lips with his fingers, "I didn't want to give you flowers and pie if you didn't want them."

Joel stops his shovelling.

"And I also thought it would be much more enjoyable to do these things if you were there," Flip adds, suddenly crossing his arms, making his chest muscles get smushed up, and clears his throat, "it's not at all because I wanted to know what flowers you liked nor because I don't want to accidentally poison you with my baking at all."

When you rub your face after hearing this, Abella takes a hint and looks away. She pretends she just spotted Joel, "oh my goodness, look, it's Joel!"

Joel nearly has a heart attack when he hears his name get called. He stiffens as he watches Abella jog over to him. Whatever semblance of calmness he feels from her smile is shattered when he catches you turning to him. His eyes lock with yours and his mouth goes dry. He clenches his jaw and offers a small smile, raising a hand.

The way your lips curve into the faintest of grins grates at his heart, especially when it breaks into a thin line and an eyeroll, one that you did in endearment. He watches you turn to Flip as he whispers something to you. You promptly attack him and pinch his arm violently for it, groaning but giggling at the same time.

Joel watches Invert recoil at the violence he so clearly merited for whatever the fuck he whispered. He only looks away when a hand is waved in front of his face.

"Earth to Joel," Abella pipes, finally earning his attention.

Joel looks at her and her pretty doe eyes, melting at the sight, "hi, honey."

Abella chuckles under her breath, "that's not the appropriate response to what I said at all, but I'll take it."

Joel sighs and shakes his head, turning back to his sheep, "I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't hear a word you said, sugar."

Abella's face flushes at the pet names. She levels her breathing as Joel turns back to her while he readies to shovel up some dirt again. Abella tilts her head, "I said they look cute, don't they?"

Joel's shovel skids on the ground as he scoops up some manure.

As if on cue, you laugh so hard it's impossible not to look to your direction. And Joel does it so instinctively. It's possible for Abella though. Her chest tightens as he watches Joel look your direction. She decides to look too in the end and finds herself smiling at how you and Flip were now chasing each other around as he threatens to get the mud his shirt on you. She cannot help the giggle that leaves her at the sight of Flip waving his shirt around as you evade him, careful not to hit the baskets on the ground.

Abella's expression falls when he hears Joel grumble to himself. She would not hear it well enough to distinguish the fact that Joel said, "fucking flipper."

Joel makes the mistake of looking the next instance you squeal. It was his mistake that he looked and found you wrapped in the arms of the beefy lunatic.

Abella catches how quickly he looks away after. She says, "you like her, don't you?"

Joel turns to Abella, leaning on the shovel, "what?"

She shrugs and shakes her head, "well if you don't think that," she points to side, "looks cute, then obviously you like her."

Joel watches as Abella leans on the pen and flares at the skewed reasoning. He tilts his head as his one eye twitches, "I don't have to think they look cute at all. It's none of my business what she does with him anyway. They can roll in mud for all I care."

"But you-" Abella quip but then chokes on her words.

Joel is increasingly annoyed, "but what?"

"But you like her," she blurts softly.

Joel clenches his jaw. He regurgitates a dark chuckle. His ears twitch at the sound of your laughter but he no longer makes the mistake of looking.

Abella knows what went on between the two of you, and she knows that was why Joel insisted on taking things slow. And by slow, they haven't even kissed yet. So what happens next takes her off guard.

Joel yanks his shovel out of the ground and walks over to her. He bends down to meet her lowered face and offers a smile. Once their eyes meet, he kisses her softly.

Abella's spirit leaves her when Joel's lips press against hers and his mustache tickles her skin. When they pull away, he rubs his nose against her as her breath hitches, "not like how I like you."

When Joel smiles at her, Abella feels like she could fly. She reaches out and caresses his cheeks lightly. When Joel closes his eyes, Abella's touch is not what he feels. She leans over the pen to give him a deep kiss and once they pull away, they're both breathless. Joel's eyes open and he feels a dread wash up in the face of Abella's beauty. But then she rubs her thumbs on his cheek and now he's actually smiling at her.

Abella watches Joel as he goes back to his work, a grin playing on his lips as he tried not to smile too big.

She was too taken by the kiss, too taken by him to realize the full meaning of his words, not how I like you. He didn't like Abella the way he liked you.

Joel's expression fades as his eyes roll to your direction against himself. It seems the baskets were stored away now, since they were no longer in sight and the two of you were walking off. Spin was still shirtless as ever. Joel watches his back muscle flex as he moved.

You snort as you shove Flip away. Flip lets himself topple to the side and walks back closer as he looks down on you and smiles. He pushes your hair away from your face as a breeze blows.

Joel wonders for a moment if you and him had ever been like this, laughing at the littlest things, annoying everyone, obviously smitten. And then he wonders about what he, himself, meant... not like how I like you.

Joel looks back at Abella, who very much melts at his gaze.

How did he like you?

#joel miller fanfic #joel miller fluff #joel miller x reader #joel miller angst #flip zimmerman x reader #flip zimmerman #joel miller #flip zimmerman fanfic #joel miller fic #the last of us #the last of us fanfic #the last of us fic #the last of us fluff #joel miller smut #the last of us x reader

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waywardrose · 1 year ago

Text

MASTERLIST

Under the cut are x-reader fics for:

Flip Zimmerman (BlacKkKlansman)

Pale (Burn This)

Ronnie Peterson (The Dead Don’t Die)

Adam Sackler (HBO’s Girls)

Jacques le Gris (The Last Duel)

Clyde Logan (Logan Lucky)

Charlie Barber (Marriage Story)

Abraham H. Parnassus (Saturday Night Live)

Kylo Ren (Star Wars)

Armitage Hux (Star Wars)

Eddie Munson (Stranger Things)

Phillip Altman (This Is Where I Leave You)

+ Miscellaneous fics (and more! 👀)

updated: September 25, 2024

Follow me on:

AO3

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Discord: waywardrose

BLACKKKLANSMAN

reader x flip zimmerman

🌹 A Reintroduction

rating: teen+, 1.5k, gender-neutral!reader, flip is dishonest, but also thirsty, drug-dealing mention

Flip. Your Flip is with the cops. He has a gun and a badge and everything.

That didn’t make any sense.

🌹 Flashfic: Flip could get it ✊

🌹 Flashfic: How do you think Flip would react to his wife’s changing body during pregnancy?

🌹 Flashfic: How grateful are they in general? Are they aware of what their s/o is doing for them?

🌹 Flashfic: How do they picture their future with their s/o?

🌹 The Handler

rating: explicit, 4.4k, sexism, violence, abusive language, blood (bc of the violence), drug mention, guns mention, child sex-trafficking mention, rape threat, jealousy, fighting

You propped your cowboy boot on the table edge and took a long drink of beer. No one sitting at the table with you paid your rudeness any mind. In fact, Johnny Claiborne promptly placed his callused hand on your bare knee.

🌹 It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now

rating: teen, 2.1k, past physical-abuse mention, brief injury description, off-screen murder, period-typical sexism

The first time Flip saw you, you were bruised and cuffed. The scuttlebutt around the precinct was you had run over and murdered your abusive ex-boyfriend.

🌹 Queen of the Roller Derby

rating: mature, 2.3k, vague injury description, anachronistic sports teams and organizations

He couldn’t believe… Well, a lot of things. First, that he’d been invited. Second, that he was looking forward to the bout. Third, that he was anxious for your well-being.

🌹 NSFW Alphabet Series

ABC | DE | FGH | IJK | LMN | OP | QRS | TU | V | WXYZ

Bonus: My five favorite things about Flip Zimmerman

rating: explicit, 32k, stand-alone vignettes, oral sex, fluff, angst with happy ending, masturbation, daddy kink, public and semi-public sex, kind-of somnophilia, drug use, under-negotiated bondage and spanking, soft domming, ass play

Your legs went limp on Flip’s shoulders, and you felt him eased them down to the bed. He ran his big hands up your sides and then under your back as he bent forward.

🌹 Still the Same

rating: explicit, 13k, fem!reader, high-school!flip+reader, vaguely 1969 (with inaccuracies), fingering, handjobs, pining, military draft/service (with inaccuracies), colorado setting, period-typical drug use, magical first time, angst with happy ending

He cracked the window, letting in the crisp spring air. It was too dark to see where specifically he was looking, but he had turned to face you. One hand remained on the steering wheel, the other over the back of the seat.

He offered, “Wanna get in the back?”

“Sure,” you said, dropping your purse on the floor, and opened your door.

🌹 Three-day Weekend

rating: explicit, 3.2k, daddy kink, daddy dom, reader is not a little, off-screen negotiation, edging, oral sex, mild spanking

You woke to a hot hand sliding across your bare middle and lips kissing your shoulder. There was the tickle of whiskers, and you turned your head towards disruption. With a sigh, you opened your eyes to watch Flip kiss your shoulder again. He looked up at you as his hand traveled under the sheet bunched below your waist.

“Mornin’, baby,” he said. His voice was sleep-rough yet tender.

🌹 Triple-Feature

rating: mature, 2.8k, old-fashioned living arrangements, making out

The Aircadia Drive-In was running a classic-horror triple-feature this Saturday night. You read in the paper they were playing The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dracula. That evening, you rang Flip and asked him out on a date. You even offered to pay.

🌹 You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

rating: mature, 2.8k, detective reader, estranged married couple, smoking, period-typical sexism, dirty talk

…you balanced your mother’s big Tupperware container filled with homemade Samoas cookies. They were Flip’s favorite, and he detested sharing them. But he would have to—because you were famous around the station for your cookies.

You hoped he only got one. It would serve him right.

🌹 You Can Leave Your Skates On

rating: explicit, 2k, almost uniform kink, roller derby mention, clothed female naked male

The sink counter was strewn with make-up and hair tools and the pair of scissors from the kitchen. Before he could ask what the hell all this was for, you kissed his cheek and closed the bathroom door behind him.

Spiritual sequel to Queen of the Roller Derby

🌹 You Light Up My Life

rating: teen, 1.4k, sneakiness, secrets, fluffy married life

The first time you knew something was up was when Flip started his car and hurried to change the radio station.

🌹 You’re the Inspiration

rating: teen, 854, past alcohol abuse, fluffy afternoon

Flip sat in his switched off car and stared at the dark house. He wanted to break something.

BURN THIS

reader x pale

🌹 In the Night We Trust | playlist on spotify

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

rating: explicit, 57k, pretty woman au, prostitute reader, 1980s/90s, drug use mention, alcohol consumption, inherent power imbalance, soft dom, choking (not breathplay), safe sex, oral sex, semi-public sex, public dirty talk, rough sex, mild spanking, fighting, abusive language, attempted sexual assault, aftercare

“So tell me, Pale, are you in town on business or pleasure?”

“Business…” He looks at your lips. “Until now.”

THE DEAD DON’T DIE

reader x ronald peterson

🌹 A Grave New World

rating: teen+, 804, canon-typical violence, missing parents

You’d only gone on one date—a really nice date, too—with Ronnie Peterson and then the zombie apocalypse happened. Like, what the actual fuck?

GIRLS (HBO)

reader x adam sackler

🌹 Flashfic: …imagine him trying to cuddle and smooch his gf in public and she’s like “😬😬 what are you doing…? Mmm, I guess it’s not so bad”

🌹 Flashfic: please. please tell me about licking sackler’s sack. its all i can think about. my mind has been infected by thoughts of adam sacklers balls in my mouth

🌹 Improving His Taste

rating: teen+, 2.2k, post s05e10, arguments with SO, making out

You were so sick of Adam Sackler and his tempestuous girlfriends.

🌹 Let Me Explain

rating: teen+, 1.2k, light angst, happy ending

“Whoa, let me explain!” Adam implored while teetering in patent leather stilettos, a chef’s knife with slices of carrot sticking to it in his hand. He grabbed the kitchen counter with his left to steady himself.

🌹 There Is A Light (That Never Goes Out)

rating: explicit, 4.3k, canon-typical buffoonery, jealousy, brief non-con element, femdom-ish reader, oral sex

“Take off your clothes,” he murmured after kissing you. “And crawl to my bed.”

THE LAST DUEL

reader x jacques le gris

🌹 Fair Is Foul

rating: teen, 1.8k, historical inaccuracies, timeline inaccuracies, anachronisms, medieval flirting, sad/open ending, minor spoilers(?), rape mention

The other ladies at court told you not to demean yourself by keeping company with a squire. You pointed out that said squire had Count Pierre’s favor. Said squire might even be favored above any knight.

🌹 To Honor and Innocence

rating: mature, 5.3k, fem!reader, young!jacques, historical/jousting inaccuracies, ✨the middle ages were magic✨, catholic imagery, reader has a spring/summer birthday, just roll with me, making out, thigh riding, euphemisms galore

You needed to look away, but you couldn’t. He was striking with the sudden high color in his cheeks and glittering eyes. His smile softened around the edges, and your heart soared at the sight.

Look away, you’d told yourself. Look away before you lose yourself.

LOGAN LUCKY

reader x clyde logan

🌹 A Newer World

rating: teen, 1.3k, PTSD symptom mention

Jimmy leaned across the patio table, bottle of Coors in hand. “So, when you gonna make an honest woman outta her?”

🌹 Lucky Me Lucky You | duck tape jukebox on spotify | ambient mix by Sushii

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

Bonus: NSFW Alphabet [2.1k]

rating: explicit, 33k, counter-espionage, angst with happy ending, alcohol consumption

You’d had big plans for your future. He’d had big plans, too. During senior year, you’d overheard him talking before class about joining the Army. You had thought about him in that service uniform and how handsome he would look.

Thirteen years later, Clyde was tending bar, sans uniform and missing part of his left arm. At the same time, you were working at the data-entry/call-center down the road from the house you inherited from your late grandmother.

So much for big plans.

🌹 When I Saw You

rating: mature/explicit, 3k, hairdresser!reader, touch-starved!clyde, post movie, erotic fantasies

In his fantasies, he always has both hands.

Which he knows is ironic.

MARRIAGE STORY

reader x charlie barber

🌹 Finding Treasure in the Dark

1 | 2

rating: explicit, 18k, submissive!female-reader, dom!charlie, under-negotiated bdsm, impact play, nipple play, oral sex, anal sex, piv sex, restraints, rope bondage, edging, semi-public fingering, sex toys, handjobs, public teasing

“Yes!“ she hissed in delight. "I told Professor Barber straight out I didn’t do that crap. Or let him boss me around. That’s why I dropped him, you know. If he wants some Stepford to indulge his impulses, he should go to Fetster or whatever.”

Your eyes went wide, and you shifted in your seat, faux-yawning and stretching your arms to cover the movement. You knew Charlie Barber.

🌹 Sweet Angel

rating: explicit, 3k, fluff, dog adoption, insecure!Charlie, piv sex

Since moving to a house with a fenced yard, Henry has been focused on getting a dog. First, it was getting a puppy for Christmas. When that hadn’t panned out, a dog for his birthday. Nicole wouldn’t install a real fence at her place, but tried to distract him with a new iPad.

That worked for a month.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE

reader x abraham h. parnassus

🌹 Flashfic: …what would young!Abe do for his wife on [Valentine’s Day]??

🌹 Flashfic: Abe Parnassus vibes jacquesdemys.tumblr com/post/125815250515

🌹 His Girl On A Friday

rating: teen+, 1.2k, corporate espionage, seduction

You’ve been sent by your father, Henry Pickens, to spy on his rival: Abraham H. Parnassus.

🌹 Indulgences

rating: mature, 1.5k, fem!reader, vaguely 1950s, old-fashioned euphemisms, dub-con-ish at first, public fingering, mild edging

It’s official: Don Carlos is boring. Yes, it’s a fundraiser. And of course, you agreed to purchase tickets. Anything to support The Met. But this opera, while beautiful, is dull.

🌹 My Baby Just Cares for Me Series

rating: explicit, sheltered-artist reader, vaguely 1950s, no vintage racism, written with old-fashioned sensibilities and euphemisms, oral sex, alcohol consumption, semi-public sex, sex toys, vaginal fingering, first time

— Expanding One’s Horizons [5k]

“We all need to expand our horizons,” you said as you went to the dining room to turn off the lights.

“Indeed we do, my love.”

— Tension Tamer [3k]

The mattress trembled under you. The softly lit face of your alarm clock said it was after three. You knew it must be work that had awoken him. The company was in the middle of a merger and tensions were high.

— A Treasure More Than Gold [2.2k]

You met your husband’s eyes across the dance floor of Hotel Astor’s ballroom. He’d let his five o'clock shadow develop into a short Vandyke beard in preparation for Babe Paley’s Halloween gala.

— Minx [2.7k]

Abe groaned into the coverlet as you pressed your thumbs on either side of his spine. His muscles were slowly losing their tightness. You didn’t think his desk chair at work was supporting him properly. Most likely, he never sat in it except to sign documents.

— It’s Magic [4.4k]

Don’t go to art school, they said.

— Two To Tango [7k]

You sat at the bistro table tucked in the corner of the pasticceria. Abe sat across from you, tiny plates of bite-sized cake on the table between you.

STAR WARS

general

🌹 The Skywalker Ascension

rating: teen, 4.5k, tros revision, mc death, angst, lightsaber battles, retcon timeline

“All the Sith live in me,” he vows. “You will be empress, and we will be one.”

While disgust churns her gut, she will not hate, she will not give in.

To him or to anyone.

🌹 Unsanctioned

rating: general, 371, universe jumping, pre-tfa, my poor attempt at humor

You’re taking the walk of shame to the kitchen, arms full of dirty dishes.

kylo ren x armitage hux

🌹 Bombing Out

rating: mature, 1.4k, canon compliant, cannoli kylux, gambling, strip sabacc, alcohol consumption, afterlife, mutual pining, arguing

He didn’t know why he was playing sabacc. He didn’t like card games. There was hardly any strategy. No planning. Everything was left to chance. It was messy. And the gambling. He didn’t mind risk, of course, but one had to match their opponents’ bets. Which meant the opponent had too much control.

It was idiotic.

About as idiotic as his opponent, Ben Solo—

Who had literally lost his shirt last round.

🌹 Iron Moon Series on AO3 | photoset | spotify playlist by ayudameme

rating: explicit, 36k, canon universe, xeno-vampires, canon-typical violence, the first order wins, soft kylux, but with blood, knife play, blood drinking

He wanted to taste it, lick it all up. He wanted to run his tongue along the cauterized edges of the cut on Ren’s face. He wanted to follow it down under Ren’s ruined clothing.

reader x armitage hux

🌹 Flashfic: Armitage Hux is low key hot

🌹 Flashfic: I want Hux to throat fuck me

🌹 Succor

rating: mature, 2.4k, shy princess reader, fo-leader hux, the first order won, arranged marriage, dirty talk

You felt your dinner guests’ eyes on you, their judgements. You ignored them while hiding behind the courtly rituals you’d been taught since childhood.

reader x kylo ren | ben solo

🌹 All the Time in the Galaxy

rating: teen, 1.9k, kor reader, mutual pining, first kiss

“Lady Ren, pardon the interruption—” You didn’t know what he was interrupting. You were both standing in silence. “—The techs have noticed something strange here on Starkiller.”

🌹 Call It In the Ring Series

rating: teen-mature, college au, art-majors kylo and reader, first date, sibling fights, nude photography, assisted masturbation, phone sex, fingering

— Hotshot House Show [2.5k]

You checked the address one more time on your phone. It was right, but definitely not what you expected when Kylo offered to make you dinner.

— Worked Shoot [5k]

Photography midterms were due in two weeks, and you only had one of the four photos you needed. You silently berated yourself because you’d known this was coming. It was on the damn syllabus.

But who actually read the syllabus?

— Clean Finish [2k]

You couldn’t believe you were about to do this, you thought as you stood naked in front of the clean bathroom mirror. You didn’t know if Kylo would like it. What if he didn’t?

— Vignette [938]

Ben was all “Morning, beautiful” with a grin Flynn Rider would be proud of. He sat close to you on the sectional sofa—even though there were plenty available places to sit.

— Bonus: I want nothing more than to strip off his clothes piece by piece, kissing any and all skin bared to me.

— Dirty Pre-show [1.3k]

You’d washed at the sink in the studio, but ugh, your jeans are splattered with slip. You’re pretty sure you have some on your face, in your hair. Hell, even one of your ears feels crusty.

How the ever living fuck does it get everywhere?

🌹 Dum Dums

rating: teen, 2.3k, gender-neutral reader, suburban high-school au, fluff, mutual pining, mild angst with happy ending

“Your boyfriend’s looking this way again,” Poe sing-songed before taking a big bite of his apple.

You rolled your eyes, knowing exactly who he was talking about. “He’s not my boyfriend,” you reply as you set your bottle of water on the lunch tray.

🌹 Flashfic: Please the (fem-dom!reader) story from gc…. I NEED IT

🌹 Flashfic: FAM IM ON MY KNEES BEGGING YOU… PLEASE PLEASE WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT GIVING SMOOCHES TO FOREVER SAD BOY KYLO

🌹 Flashfic: How does Kylo spoil his lady?

🌹 Flashfic: So, what do you guys think is Kylo’s favorite way to kiss?

🌹 Hello

rating: mature(ish), 1k, modern au, dream-sharing, pining, possessiveness, nightmare elements, magic/force shenanigans

A phone rang. Burr-ring. Distant at first. Burr-ring. Clanging. Jarring. Burr-ring. It was too dark to find it. You groped around in the cool, damp blackness to find nothing. Burr-ring. You cursed just before your hand slapped against something cold and metal.

🌹 Me and The Devil Series

rating: mature-explicit, modern vampire au, dub con, death mention, blood drinking, menstruation, oral sex, biting, predator/prey

— Flashfic: …I want vampire!kylo to do *very* unspeakable things to me :)

— Flashfic: Very bored tonight and [thinking] about vamp!kylo, if you have any, what’re your favorite five about him?

— You’re My Sweetness [2.1k]

“You’re sad,” he murmured, a note of confusion in his words.

“Funerals tend to do that.”

“Let me make it better.”

— Red Wings [1.4k]

So, you laid there and bled onto an overnight pad that had to be the length of a regulation cricket bat.

— Flashfic: Do you have any thoughts on vampire Kylo sensually playing with you with his teeth?

— To Bring You My Love [9.4k]

“Biker gang? Pfft!” said your boss Vic in reply to a bar patron

The agitated patron continued, describing a group of bikers led by a dark-haired man with a scar bisecting his face.

You suppressed a shudder as you mixed a simple cocktail.

🌹 Not Like the Rest

rating: teen, 948, alcohol consumption, politics

So, Ben’s kept moving for years. He hustles. He’s on committees. He researches everyone around him. He schmoozes.

And he’s schmoozing during a dinner to honor a retiring staffer when he sees you.

🌹 On the Pulse of Mourning

rating: teen, 6.5k, ptsd, angst, disregarding an elder’s wisdom, force choking, force weirdness

He sat on the lowered ramp of his TIE and waited for the Resistance scouts to find him. He didn’t think it would take them long. He’d landed only two klicks from the base.

🌹 The Sofa King

rating: mature, 550, hs au, making out, frottage

Anonymous asked: Ben Solo is such a precious little baby I don't see him making the first move. He would be way too nervous. Like during a movie night you could literally be in his lap, rubbing his chest, purring into his ear and he would just keep his eyes locked on the screen, jaw locked, shifting uncomfortably, and he making silly comments about the movie.

reader x kylo ren x armitage hux

🌹 Precious Pet Series on AO3 | photoset | playlist on spotify

Bonus: NSFW Alphabet for Kylo and Hux [1.6k]

rating: explicit, 335k, canon universe, force-sensitive reader, departing from tfa, stockholm syndrome, force bond, everyone has issues

A hush suddenly fell over the village and you strained to hear anything. Was it over? Had the Order gotten what it wanted? You had a gnawing feeling it was only beginning.

The whoosh of energy—you couldn’t identify the noise, but you knew it wasn’t good—pierced the air. There was a collective horrified gasp and more scrabbling and then more blaster fire. Something had happened, something terrible. Someone’s death had triggered it all. Suddenly, there were screams and controlled violent blasters, and you covered your mouth to muffle your sob. The village was dead. Everyone you knew was dead. Lor San Tekka was gone. You felt it like a punch to the chest.

STAR WARS/DREDD

armitage hux x clan techie

🌹 Little Blue

rating: mature, 1.3k, incest, abuse mention, jealousy, crushes

“I see you’ve been slumming it with the radar techs again,” Armie said from his perch on Techie’s bed.

Techie gnawed on his lip, stepping through the doorway of his berth, and let the door slide shut behind him. He knew it would be stupid to deny it. He was wearing the tech jumpsuit after all.

STRANGER THINGS

reader x eddie munson

🌹 Sidetracked

rating: teen, 900, mechanic!eddie, gender-neutral!reader, domestic fluff, slice of life

Maybe something last-minute happened. Like an emergency tow. Or a quick flat-tire fix. Or a gaggle of geese had waddled into one of the bays — again.

🌹 Through A Glass Darkly | playlist on spotify | masterlist

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28

rating: explicit, 163k, canon universe, fem/witchy/goth!reader, magic, slow burn, friends to lovers, series-typical horror, period-typical sexism and homophobia, historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, drug dealing and use, smoking, alcohol use, masturbation, mutual masturbation, fantasizing, one-bed trope, making out, fingering, dirty talk, chasing, oral sex, handjobs, condoms, piv sex, mild spanking, reader’s father is a dirtbag, magical violation, mental torture, body horror, aftercare, nightmares, strict parenting, panic attack, past child abuse and abandonment, semi-public sex, breaking up, angst with happy ending, running away, guns, fighting, everyone survives, suicidal ideation

Eddie would have to wait until his lunch break to see this new, hot, weird chick. He wondered which flavor of weird she was. Art weird? Theater weird? Band weird?

Weird weird?

He shrugged. He liked weird.

In other words, you’re the new girl in town, and Eddie is intrigued.

THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

reader x phillip altman

🌹 Risking Thorns

rating: explicit, 12k, post-movie, ice skating, nice suburban upbringing, slut shaming, almost enemies-to-lovers, prickly reader, phillip gets a short leash, bastardization of a jewish holiday, fingering, semi-public sex, phone sex, spanking threat

Once she pulled out of the parking lot, you asked, “So, where are we going?”

“Altman’s? I thought you got your skates sharpened there, too?”

Mental alarms went off as you shook your head. You knew the Altmans…

THE WITCHER

yennefer x geralt

🌹 Nailed Into Place

rating: explicit, 14k, modern new orleans au, inspired by s01e03 “betrayer moon”, mishmash of nola folklore, i’ve altered the striga curse (pray i don’t alter it further), references to s01e05 “bottled appetites”, timeline what timeline, alcohol consumption, incest mention, pedophilia mention, injuries, blood, ableist language, a sprinkling of geralt/jaskier

Geralt Rivia is the only witcher in New Orleans. He’s typically hard to find until Jaskier decides to announce on Instagram where he’ll be performing via selfies with Geralt in the background. Baron Ostrit, an associate of mob-connected Foltest Temeria, shows up to hire Geralt to rescue his daughter from slavers. Another princess to save. Geralt finds himself in a tangle lies, from the Marigny to the Garden District—and consulting with a mage he hasn’t seen in years…

MISCELLANEOUS

🌹 Character Soundtrack

Songs and playlists for characters I (and others) associate with them. Feel free to message me with ideas!

🌹 BlacKkKlansman Supercut

Flip Zimmerman scenes only.

🌹 Logan Lucky Supercut

Clyde Logan scenes only.

🌹 Burn This - Audio

Bootleg audio recording of the play.

#waywardrose writes

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