#even though i would still like him to make more music | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hyukascampfire · 8 hours ago

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𝑯EART 𝑊ORM ⸺ hueningkai ℘˒´ˎ˗

⨾𓍢ִ໋ ˒˒ 𝚑𝔢art𝚠𝔬rm

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

⸺ listen to the playlist .ᐟ ‧˚

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

wc ➛ 17.9k

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

�� ‎; smut ˒ angst ˒ some fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t things just stay like this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just... don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him.

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home. You are home.

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

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

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koenigami · 2 days ago

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happy birthday, handsome. tags : fluff!! wc : 900 masterlist

There was a period in Wriothesley’s life where time did not seem to have a significant meaning. Being a convict meant experiencing more or less the same usual routine until he didn’t need to throw a quick glance towards a clock in order to know what time it was. His body adjusted automatically, his stomach always starting to growl around the same time every day, his twitching hands and fingertips signalling that it was time for his daily training, and his drooping eyes and yawns telling him that it was time to head back to his cell.

Life as the Duke, didn’t change Wriothesley’s perception of time for the better since he ceased to distinguish between day and night. The automatism and biological clock of his body disappeared, making him eat whenever he had time, sleep whenever he finished his duties, and head to the Pankration Ring whenever his thoughts and emotions seemed to get the best of him.

All of a sudden, Wriothesley’s eyes started to trail more frequently towards the old grandfather clock in his office. He looked forward to every Tuesday and Friday, when you were sent to the Fortress of Meropide on behalf of Neuvillette in order to take care of administrative matters. You always showed up around the same time, and on the days that you didn’t, he couldn’t help but impatiently pace around his office, or sit in the cantine with a bouncing leg while shooting a look over his shoulder every once in a while in fear that he would miss you.

Luckily, the awkward greetings and occasional small talks mixed with fluttering hearts and sweet smiles very soon turned into planned dinners and dates, until you became a huge part of his life as much as he became of yours.

It was late in the evening when Wriothesley threw himself in his chair with a deep exhale. With only a few tasks of which he had all already taken care of, it had been a quiet day so far, and usually those were his favourite kind of days. When he could aimlessly stroll through the fortress, work out whenever he felt like it, sit peacefully in his office and listen to music or read a book. But with you out of town, sent to Liyue for official affairs, it was simply a boring day.

The fact that it was his birthday didn’t necessarily make anything better, though he had to admit that he felt silly. There had been days when his birthday had as much significance to him as any other day, until your loving self stepped into his life, threw everything upside down and made every single day significant.

Leaning back into his seat, Wriothesley pondered about how he could possibly spend the remaining time of the night before going to sleep. He hadn’t been home in days, ever since you left, and he had no intention of doing so until your return, preferring the uncomfortable couch and throw-blanket over your shared bed. Home never felt the same without you.

“Shit, shit, shit. Wriothesley!” You weren’t supposed to return for another few days.

He’d recognise your voice everywhere at any time or place, but there was no denying that those quick stomps and breathless profanities that you spewed were yours as you climbed the staircase up to his office.

“I-I’m not late, am I? It’s still the 23rd, right?” His chuckle warmed your cheeks as your dishevelled self seemed to be quite amusing to him, hair a complete mess, and not too far away from an asthmatic attack while you braced your hands on your knees.

With a heart so unbelievably full and beating irregularly, Wriothesley’s eyes automatically flew to the clock across the room and his lips stretched into a soft smirk. Of course, you didn’t miss it.

“You have exactly one minute left, love.” His tall form stood up but before he could even take another step in your direction, you had already pounced on him. Arms tightly wrapped around his neck, chest against chest, hearts so close that their beats synched into one single melody-

“I’m home.” You breathed into his ear, and Wriothesley was about to utter the same phrase before he settled for a simple hum instead and squeezed your waist tighter, pulling you further against him. His body relaxed entirely in your presence, the trail of kisses you left along his neck and up to his chin softening his knees until he swore he could hardly stand.

“Happy birthday, handsome.”

You breathed each other in like air. And you smiled against his lips when you noticed that he tasted the same as ever, still smelled so good, and still kissed so good. Wriothesley deepened the kiss, leaving you no choice but to brace yourself on him, hands flat on his broad chest. It was impossible to tell which one of you was having the upper hand as your grip on his shirt was as desperate as Wriothesley’s low sighs and groans that filled the quiet room.

His thumb and index finger on your chin held you in place, and allowed you to pull back only when he himself was starting to get low on oxygen. Your skin was a little colder than his when he leaned his forehead against yours, heavy breaths mingling and your noses brushing one-two times, leaving love sick smiles on your faces.

Yeah, you were definitely home.

#wriothesley #wriothesley x reader #wriothesley x you #wriothesley genshin #wriothesley x y/n #genshin wriothesley #genshin x reader #wriothesley fluff #wriothesley drabble #|୧wrio.week୭|

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k0mmari · 12 hours ago

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Okay people, I need to talk about IDOL!Shen Yuan AU before I explode (aka slight Aggretsuko inspired office au…..)

I’ll try to make this short for once jdvfhbjdhbvdf, but basically SY has been (forcefully) made to work for his brother(SJ) in the family company, after SJ decided enough was enough, and SY was going to do something with his life besides rotting away in his bed whether he liked it or not. The thing is, he wasn’t (just) rotting in bed reading atrocious novels, but he also took some time to experiment with music as a hobby, and over time, he grew a small following.

Though, after he was dragged to work at SJ’s side, the ever boring of dealing with paperwork and staring at white walls was eating at him. It’s not like he struggled doing his job, in fact, he was quite good at it, but he wasted no effort to make it very clear that he did not like that he was there in the first place. So, in an act of rebellion and to just do SOMETHING other than feel every passing second of the day in a cubicle, he decided to work even harder in his music hobby. It eventually led to SJ finding out and sparing no words to say that SY needed to focus on his real job, which only made SY brat out even harder, even managing to find an alternative music club and booking a few performances.

It went great! More people showed up than he expected, and all went great, but since his health was still not the best, after that he basically spent a whole month crashed out, not being able to do any more performances and barely able to go to the office once a week.

Anyways, it all led to SY thinking he had proved SJ right that he couldn’t continue this life style, and even thinking about quitting it, but one day while he was scrolling on the comments on one of his MVs (aka a Fancy Lyric Video), one of the comments mentioned that SY was one of the most important influences for that person, and that it inspired them to start pursuing music. It was the first time he had received a comment of that nature, and it lit the fire of his motivation back up.

Some 2 years passed, SJ still kept SY at the office, but SY had reached a nice balance on his online music work and performances on that club, and as his popularity grew, his performances at that one club had almost turned into a whole event for his most dedicated fans. So, enter Luo Binghe:

He was that comment that SY had read, and he did want to try music after being a fan of SY’s for almost three years now, but due to his financial situation he desperately needed some other source of income first. Now, at his last year of college, he managed to get an internship onto the Shen family’s company, which was a huge step forward towards his dreams, unfortunately he just had to go under SJ, which as we all know, was never kind to Binghe, instead acting as if the boy should just give up the internship entirely. And Binghe did think about it, but it seemed as if the stars had aligned for Binghe at least once, and SJ, after getting a sudden influx of work, delegated Binghe to SY.

They got on quite well, and Binghe even grew to have a little crush on SY, but it was all going fine and great until one fateful day. The office was as boring as ever, and after SY let Binghe know they wouldn’t have to entertain any clients for the day, Binghe decided to work on his part while listening to some music of his favorite artist.

Binghe has an awful habit of listening to music worryingly loud, so when SY went to get him to explain his new task, he ended up listening to what Binghe was hearing: his own music, in fact, his newest song. He pondered telling Binghe about the coincidence, but decided that maybe would be overstepping some professional boundary, and instead told Binghe about his one music club SY had heard about…

Binghe, excited to get to know more places around the area (and maybe understanding what SY did in his free time), decided to go to the club the next week after work, and did not even think about checking who would be performing in the day he would visit. Imagine his surprise when he gets to the door of the music club and hears some awfully famíliar music, and after rushing to be as close to the stage as possible, besides being blinded by his favorite artist’s greatness, also noticed that, hey, the artist looked an awful lot like a certain coworker of his….

Anyways, shenanigans ensue, Binghe starts his own investigation on SY possibly being the artist, SY juggling his office life, music career, and SJ perhaps coming to accept his brother’s career, and even maybe revealing a bit about his own past with music performances.

That’s all I had for today, just wanted to release this into the world! If anyone wants to expand on this, or try their on take on it, feel more than free to! Here are some more doodles of the usual day at the office :)

#had to stop myself from yapping away #the aggretsuko inspiration comes more in the way I think sy could go all out on the metal screams lol #binghe is probably gonna become an idol later #svsss #shen yuan #shen jiu #shen qingqiu #luo binghe #bingyuan #drabble #long post #digital art #doodles

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3rdgymbros · 3 days ago

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━ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐝𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐞 !

— pairing; malleus draconia x ramshackle! reader.

— summary; you serenade malleus (terribly), but he loves it anyway.

— notes; thank you for all the support. please donate to my kofi if you like my work. and know that i am mentally smooching everyone who reblogs my stuff.

❋ After much deliberation (and some poorly thought-out advice from your friends), you decide to confess your feelings to Malleus in the most dramatic way possible: a midnight serenade.

❋ It doesn’t take much to get your friends to help; bribing them with snacks just about does the trick.

❋ The four of you scramble to find instruments for the performance.

❋ Deuce somehow procures an out-of-tune guitar from a random storage closet. Grim’s your backup vocalist (if his caterwauling can even be called singing). Ace . . . Well, Ace is there mostly to heckle but begrudgingly contributes by holding a flashlight for “dramatic lighting”.

❋ When the clock strikes twelve, the four of you creep over to Diasomnia, ducking behind bushes like a group of suspicious criminals.

❋ You don’t exactly have the voice of an angel, and that’s putting it mildly. But it’s also not as though your friends are blessed with musical talent either. Grim yowls enthusiastically in the background and Deuce strums something that vaguely resembles a chord. Ace is laughing so hard he can barely hold the flashlight steady.

❋ The noise is impossible to ignore. It echoes across the entire campus, waking everyone nearby.

❋ Malleus hears the commotion and comes out onto his balcony, curious and amused. He assumes that it’s a human courting ritual, and he’s immediately charmed. The passion in your voice and the sheer boldness of your gesture touches him deeply. He’s never experienced anything like this before — who would dare to wake the Prince of Briar Valley with such an act? Only you.

❋ His emerald eyes glow softly as he watches the spectacle, a gentle smile spreading across his face. He doesn’t seem to notice how awful the performance is — not when it’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever done for him.

❋ Meanwhile, Lilia’s laughing so hard that he’s doubled over and clutching his sides. He was woken up by the racket, peered out the window, and immediately started recording the whole performance with his phone.

❋ Silver and Sebek are not as enthused.

❋ Silver looks upon the chaotic scene for about all of five seconds before deciding that it’s not his problem, and shuffles back to his bed to get more shut-eye without a second thought.

❋ Sebek is appalled. He’d thought there was an attack at first, and had dashed out, clad in only his pajamas and brandishing his sword, only to be greeted by this spectacle. Once he’s certain that there’s no danger, just romantic intentions towards Malleus, he just about loses his mind. “YOUNG MASTER, HOW CAN YOU ENTERTAIN THIS NONSENSE?!” he yells, only for his protests to be completely ignored.

❋ When the song (mercifully) ends, you look up at Malleus, cheeks flushed with embarrassment and adrenaline. Malleus floats down gracefully to meet you, that gentle smile still affixed upon his face.

❋ “Child of Man, you have gone to great lengths to express your affections. I am honored.” Malleus gently takes hand, a gesture that makes your heart skip a beat. “And I accept your feelings.”

❋ Malleus whisks you away for a midnight stroll to continue the conversation. Ace, Deuce, and Grim, who were not invited, are left behind to clean up the mess, grumbling about how the serenade somehow worked despite being a disaster.

#malleus draconia x reader #malleus draconia imagines #malleus draconia headcanons #malleus draconia fluff #malleus draconia x you #malleus draconia reader insert #twisted wonderland x reader #twst x reader #twisted wonderland reader insert #twst imagines #twst headcanons #twisted wonderland headcanons #twisted wonderland imagines

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idkyetxoxo · 23 hours ago

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Daeron Targaryen - Halves of the Same Soul

Summary - Twin siblings share an unshakable bond that blurs the line between love and obsession. Courtly intrigue, forbidden desires, and dangerous secrets simmer beneath the surface—where loyalty and power collide, and no one is safe from the flames.

Pairing - Daeron Targaryen x Targaryen reader

Warnings - None

Word count - 2946

Masterlist for Daeron • House of the Dragon General Masterlist

Wherever Daeron went, I followed. As his twin sister, we were inseparable, two halves of the same whole.

He wasn't just my brother; he was my other half in every sense.

So when our mother decided he should go to Oldtown with our uncle, I couldn't bear the thought of being left behind.

I begged and pleaded until she relented, agreeing that I could accompany him.

Like many of our Targaryen ancestors, the idea of marrying within our family was not foreign to us. Daeron and I had made it abundantly clear that we were ready to wed, eager to spend our lives together in the way of our kin.

It felt natural, inevitable, as though our bond was written in the stars long before we were born.

Still, whispers spread throughout the realm of a possible match between me and Aemond, our older brother. Such talk was common in the courts, but my heart belonged to Daeron.

One brother held my affection, and it wasn't Aemond.

"Princess, may I have this dance?" Lord Tyrell's voice cut through my conversation with Daeron and Gwayne. I glanced at the extended hand, sighing inwardly as my gaze flickered to the two men beside me.

Gwayne smiled faintly, while Daeron's eyes remained fixed on me, unreadable.

"Of course, my lord," I replied with a polite smile, though exhaustion weighed on me. The night had been long, filled with dances and endless courtesies.

Tonight was our name day, and yet, I was more worn out than celebratory.

As Lord Tyrell led me to the dance floor, he offered a charming smile.

"Princess, you look absolutely exquisite this evening," he said smoothly, dipping me effortlessly in time with the music.

I returned his compliment with a gracious smile. "That is kind of you, my lord."

He twirled me around gracefully before continuing, "You are ten and six now if I am not mistaken?" His tone seemed casual, but I could sense there was more behind the question.

"I am, my lord," I answered, though I already felt a knot forming in my stomach. I wondered where this conversation was headed.

He smiled, a little too smugly for my liking. "Ah, the perfect age for a young lady to be wed. Some would say you're even a year or two past that ideal age," he said with a chuckle.

I forced a smile, though his words stung, the humour entirely lost on me.

"An... interesting observation, my lord," I replied, trying to maintain a composed tone.

He was undeterred. "I only mean to say, Princess, that it may be time to consider your future. A union could be quite beneficial."

As he spoke, his grip on my waist tightened ever so slightly, enough to make me uneasy. His suggestion was no longer a polite inquiry—it felt more like an imposition.

"I am quite content as I am," I said, attempting to subtly pull away. But his hands only grew firmer, drawing me closer.

A soft, involuntary whine escaped my lips as his fingers dug into my side.

"You are hurting me," I whispered, my voice barely audible above the music. He scoffed, rolling his eyes in dismissal, then leaned in closer to me, his breath hot against my ear.

"Remember this, Princess—you may wear a crown, but I am the son of the Lord of Highgarden and Warden of the South. It would be wise for you not to forget your place."

I kept my voice steady, ignoring his thinly veiled threat. "I would like you to let go of me," I said calmly, though I could feel my heart racing.

"I am offering you my hand in marriage," he continued, his tone impatient now. "And it is a favourable offer, one you would be wise to consider."

"It is a kind offer, my lord—" I began, but he cut me off, pulling me even closer, far too close for propriety. His face hovered inches from mine as he leaned in again, his voice a low whisper.

"Do not decline me, Princess. Together, we could achieve great things," he murmured, and before I could protest, he pressed a lingering kiss to the curve of my neck. I squirmed in discomfort, trying to free myself from his grasp.

"This is not proper," I insisted, attempting to pull back, but his hold remained unyielding.

"And yet here we are," he said, his voice full of arrogance as he tightened his grip.

As Lord Tyrell's fingers tightened around my waist, his smug expression only deepened.

I attempted to pull away again, but it was as if he was determined to exert his control over me, his grip growing more possessive with each passing moment.

"I am offering you something far better than waiting around for your family to choose for you," he said, his voice dripping with arrogance.

"Perhaps you think one of your brothers will come to your rescue? Daeron, perhaps?" He chuckled darkly, his breath hot against my ear.

"Oh, I know the whispers, Princess. It's no secret you and your twin are unnaturally close."

I stiffened, my heart pounding as his words twisted the bond between Daeron and me into something vile, something inappropriate.

"Do not speak of things you do not understand, my lord," I said coldly, trying to maintain my composure.

But Lord Tyrell only laughed, the sound low and mocking.

"Oh, but I do understand, Princess. Very well, in fact. The Targaryens have always had... peculiar traditions, haven't they? A little too fond of keeping things in the family, if you ask me. But I suppose it's convenient when you have two brothers to choose from."

His words stung, like barbs digging into my skin. I felt a flush of anger rise in me, but I kept my face impassive, refusing to give him the satisfaction of knowing how deeply his jabs had cut.

"You speak as if I have no will of my own, my lord," I replied, my voice steady despite the fury bubbling within me. "I make my own choices."

"Do you?" he sneered, pulling me even closer, his body pressing uncomfortably against mine.

"Because from where I stand, it seems as though you're simply waiting for your family to marry you off like a broodmare. Aemond, Daeron—it's all the same, isn't it? Marry one brother, marry the other. Does it really matter which? Maybe your mother will flip a coin for you."

His laugh was cruel and biting, the insinuation laced with contempt. I felt a surge of nausea at his words.

I had heard whispers before, rumours that clung to the shadow of our family's name like a curse, but to hear them spoken so brazenly to my face made my blood boil.

"That is enough," I said, my voice colder than ice. "I will not tolerate such disrespect, especially not from a lord of your standing."

But he only smirked, clearly enjoying the power he thought he wielded over me.

"Come now, Princess. You should consider yourself lucky. If your brothers won't wed you, I could make a far better match. Imagine it—the daughter of dragons married to the future Lord of Highgarden. We could unite the Reach and your precious Targaryen bloodline in ways your family could never imagine."

He leaned in close again, his lips brushing against my ear as he whispered, "You may think you can keep hiding behind Daeron, but sooner or later, your brothers won't be able to protect you. Not from men like me."

The threat in his voice was unmistakable now, and my heart raced with both anger and fear.

His fingers dug into my waist, his other hand creeping up to the small of my back, pulling me in so tightly I could barely breathe.

I wanted to scream, to shove him away, but in the middle of the crowded hall, surrounded by lords and ladies, I was trapped.

"I said let go of me," I hissed, no longer caring to mask the fury in my voice.

He smirked, clearly enjoying the effect he had on me. "You act as though you have a choice in the matter, Princess. But we both know you'll be married off to the highest bidder, whether it's your brother or not. And when that day comes, you'll wish you had taken a man like me instead."

His arrogance was suffocating, the air between us thick with tension.

I glanced over his shoulder, desperate to meet Daeron's gaze, and found his eyes locked onto us, his expression darkening with each passing second.

He had been watching the entire time, his posture rigid as Gwayne continued speaking, oblivious to the storm brewing beside him.

Tyrell's mocking voice broke through my thoughts again. "Or perhaps it's Aemond you're holding out for?" he sneered, the taunt sharp.

"I hear he's a real delight. Cold, brooding, but maybe that's your type. A marriage made for the histories, wouldn't you agree? I wonder, does he even look at you the way Daeron does?"

I couldn't contain my disgust any longer.

"You are vile," I spat, finally managing to pull back enough to create some distance between us. "You speak of things that are far beyond your comprehension."

Lord Tyrell's smirk didn't falter. If anything, it widened, as though my outrage only spurred him on.

"Oh, I comprehend perfectly, Princess. You Targaryens think you're above everyone else, that your blood makes you untouchable. But at the end of the day, you're just like any other woman—destined to be wed, controlled, and used for power. And believe me, I know how to use what's mine."

Lord Tyrell's smirk had turned predatory, his arrogance swelling with each moment I resisted him.

I could feel my pulse quicken, but before I could respond, I saw Daeron out of the corner of my eye, rising from his seat, his face dark with fury.

His normally calm and composed expression had twisted into something dangerous, his jaw set in a way that promised no leniency.

There was no question—he would tear the world apart for me, just as I would for him.

We had never needed words to understand that. I felt the strength of our bond in that moment, a force as powerful as any dragon's fire.

"Is there a problem here, Lord Tyrell?" Daeron's voice was deceptively calm, but the iciness beneath it was unmistakable.

He was at my side in an instant, standing between me and Tyrell, his presence immediately shifting the dynamic.

The crowd continued to swirl around us, oblivious to the tension mounting between the two men.

Tyrell straightened, his grip loosening slightly as Daeron's arrival forced him to back off—though not entirely.

He maintained a cocky smile as if Daeron's presence was nothing more than a slight inconvenience.

"Prince Daeron," Tyrell said with mock deference, inclining his head but failing to mask the condescension in his tone. "Just having a dance with your lovely sister. A bit protective, are we?"

He chuckled softly, though there was nothing friendly about the sound. "One might start to think you don't trust anyone else near her."

Daeron's eyes were dark, his stare unflinching. "My trust is earned, not given freely to men who have forgotten their manners."

His voice was low, the threat subtle but unmistakable. "I suggest you step back before you say something you'll regret."

Tyrell scoffed, clearly unbothered by the warning.

"Manners? I was only reminding the Princess of the realities of her position. Surely you understand, Prince Daeron, that marriage for someone like her—someone like you—is more about duty than sentiment. She will be wed to whomever best serves the realm. Or perhaps you believe your family's peculiar... preferences should continue unchecked?"

His eyes gleamed with cruel amusement, clearly relishing the opportunity to provoke.

Daeron's lips curled into a dangerous smile, one that sent a shiver through me, though I knew it was not meant for me.

"You are treading on dangerous ground, Tyrell," he said, stepping closer, his voice a low growl. "I would choose my next words carefully if I were you."

But Lord Tyrell was too arrogant to take heed. He glanced between Daeron and me, his smirk widening.

"Oh, I've heard the rumours. Everyone has. King Viserys's precious twins, inseparable since birth. The realm has noticed how you look at her, Daeron." He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice but ensuring his words cut deep.

"Tell me, do you plan to wed her yourself? Has she already been defiled? Or is Aemond your real competition?" His grin was sharp, mocking.

"Two brothers fighting over their sweet sister. It's quite the tale for the ages, isn't it?"

I felt Daeron stiffen beside me, the tension between them thickening like a brewing storm. His hand clenched at his side, his knuckles turning white.

For a moment, I feared he would strike Tyrell right there in front of everyone.

"You think you're clever, Tyrell," Daeron said, his voice dangerously low, his anger barely restrained. "But your ignorance will be your downfall. You overestimate your place in this world."

Tyrell's smile faltered for a moment, sensing the shift in Daeron's tone, but his arrogance wouldn't let him back down.

"I overestimate nothing, Prince. It's you and your family who believe yourselves untouchable as if the world should bend to your will simply because of the blood in your veins. But one day, even your dragons won't be enough to protect you."

Daeron's eyes burned with fury now, his posture rigid with barely contained rage.

He stepped forward, closing the distance between them until they were nearly chest to chest, his voice a deadly whisper. "You dare speak to a Targaryen in such a manner? You think your title and your father's lands will protect you from the consequences of your insolence?"

Tyrell, to his credit, didn't back down, though I could see the slightest flicker of uncertainty cross his face.

"I'm merely stating the obvious. We both know that she'll be wed to whomever your family chooses. If not Aemond, then perhaps me. The Reach would make a powerful ally, after all."

Daeron's smile faded completely, replaced by a look so cold it sent a chill through the air. "You will never lay a hand on her again. You speak as if you have a choice in this, but let me make something clear."

He leaned in, his voice barely above a whisper, though every word dripped with venom.

"If you ever touch my sister again, or dare to insult her in my presence, I will see you hanged. And when your neck snaps beneath the rope, I'll have your body dragged through the streets and fed to the dogs, for that is all you'll be worth."

Tyrell's face paled slightly, though he quickly masked it with a tight smile, trying to maintain his composure.

"A bold threat," he said, though his voice lacked its previous bravado. "But I doubt the court would allow such... savagery."

"You doubt too much, Lord Tyrell," Daeron said coldly, his eyes narrowing. "My family is not known for idle threats. You would do well to remember that."

His hand lingered on the hilt of his sword, a subtle reminder of how easily this conversation could take a deadlier turn.

Tyrell glanced at Daeron's hand, clearly weighing his next move.

Finally, he gave a forced laugh, stepping back slightly to regain his space. "No need for dramatics, Prince Daeron. I was merely making conversation. A misunderstanding, nothing more."

Daeron didn't move, his gaze still fixed on Tyrell as if daring him to say more.

"Then let me make myself perfectly clear—there will be no misunderstanding next time. You will not speak of my sister again, nor will you ever touch her. Do so, and I will end you. And no amount of titles or alliances will save you."

Tyrell swallowed, his confidence visibly shaken now. He straightened his tunic, his smile brittle.

"Of course. I wouldn't dream of offending." He turned to me with a stiff nod, his arrogance noticeably diminished. "Princess."

Without waiting for further acknowledgement, he took his leave, his steps quicker than before, as if eager to escape the tension that still hung in the air.

As soon as he was gone, I let out a breath I didn't realize I had been holding, my heart still racing from the confrontation.

Daeron remained tense beside me, his gaze lingering on Tyrell's retreating form as if waiting for him to turn back and make another foolish remark.

"Daeron," I whispered, touching his arm gently to pull him from his thoughts.

He turned to me, his expression softening slightly as he met my gaze. "Are you all right?" His voice was low, filled with concern.

I nodded, though my body still trembled slightly from the encounter. "Thank you," I said softly. "I didn't know what to do. He..."

Daeron's jaw tightened again, but he forced himself to stay calm for my sake. "He's a fool, and he'll regret this. I swear it."

He glanced toward the hall where Tyrell had disappeared, his expression dark once more. "If he ever touches you again, I will make good on my promise. The dogs will feast on his remains."

I believed him.

"You know," he said quietly, his tone softening further, "the realm may think they can decide our futures for us. But as long as we have each other, nothing else matters."

I smiled up at him, the warmth of his presence chasing away the cold that had gripped me earlier. "No one else," I whispered. "Just us."

And as he wrapped his arm protectively around me, I knew with certainty that, there was no force in the world strong enough to sever the bond between us.

We were more than siblings—more than Targaryens bound by blood.

We were halves of the same soul, unbreakable, and as long as we had each other, no one could tear us apart.

A/n - I know I have severely lacked in writing for Daeron recently but I've been so busy, hopefully this makes up for it <3

Daeron tag list - @alyssa-dayne

#house of the dragon #house targaryen #hotd #hotd x reader #house of the dragon x reader #hotd one shot #hotd season 2 #house of the dragon fanfiction #hotd fanfic #team green #daeron targaryen #daeron x reader #daeron the daring #hotd daeron #daeron targaryen x reader #hotd x y/n

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sevs-corner · 2 days ago

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Tf 141: Mafia AU! But they watch you flop and lose all inhibitions when you’ve had one little too many

(masterlist here!)

For lack of better terms, as Price would like to put it delicately, you’d- more often than not- lose all inhibitions and act “thirsty”

Yes, you heard that right

From all the way on the middle of the room, a mic in hand- ready to karaoke your heart out

“Since when did you learn young’in lingo captaiiiiiinnn!”

The bakery roars in laughter, poking fun at the barely-geezer man and for a moment, he thinks he should shave the beard to avoid being called old for the umpteenth time

The family often have get together once a month now (as proposed by you) and eat and drink their hearts out even through the the day after

So, you take this as a chance to let loose from all the stresses in life— eat and drink as much as your tummy can be filled!

But the best part of this was the karaoke portion you just had to include

This way, you learned their favorite songs and make a playlist customized for them whenever they eat the bakery (they love you and appreciate your effort for this by the way)

Though, in turn, you get to also hear them sing and vice versa

You love singing! (And the family knows all too well as you slide across the bakery floor with a mop in hand, moonwalking all the while as you cleaned)

So you decide to flex it as well with a very competitive karaoke sing-off

And you just knew the perfect song to win over Rudy (he always wins and sometimes Alejandro too)

You could only hope you were drunk enough to perform it and forget about how embarrassing you acted by tomorrow

“Anyways! Here’s the song i pickedd just for yaaallll!”

You were slurring all your words but they knew better (well some more than others like the Tf 141 guys as they go out drinking with you or at your place)

Even if you were as buzzed as you are right now, when it came to singing— you never flop

When that familiar violin sound came on— they (Tf 141) knew they were fucked

well,more like the others were in for an… ✨experience✨

And the fact that you were going to sing that song against Rudy’s “My Way”?

Oh they are just ready and waiting with popcorn on hand

Because you had sang this song before with Soap, and even taught him to act along the song like it was a musical, the guys already knew what to expect

But even they didn’t know they were in for a long haul with you bouncing around and saying the most wild stuff on mic in 4K

Were they your secret inhibitions?

No? Maybe?

As long as you don’t mention it being about Alejandro to Rudy you’ll be good

But alas, your lyrics seems to make Alejandro’z eyes wide and spit choked on

Especially when you get to the more frisky parts and go closer to him, to sing those lyrics and cradle his face as if you were muttering it for him

Yeah, you can’t blame him for how his pants we’re so uncomfortable that he had to keep shifting in his seat

Or the rest as well, with you twirling around and singing the most wildest and lewd lyrics— it was hard to not imagine it with you

Yet, the longer the song went on— the more drinks you got into you by snatching drinks from their hands or tables

That by the time the song right near bloody ended, you’re utterly spent in Price’s (still unimpressed with you from the jab from earlier) lap, head rolling over and giggles that never seemed to stop

After your final belt, he grabs the mic from your hands and replaces it with water

Patting your back all the while to encourage you but this just makes you sleepy

Landing on his chest and just…drooling all over him

He sighs, thinking at how he does so much things for you and you repay him by drooling on his favorite shirt

Though, he doesn’t mind having you in his arms

Your drunken mumbles of love admissions flowing through your lips— and it was only him who gets to hear how deeply you mean them

Drunken words are sober thoughts, right?

Alas, the night ends with you finally winning!

Though… you were properly lights out for the night and the guys promise they’ll treat you to something nice for winning karaoke night (especially Rudy- he has some… questions that need answering.)

And to also nurse your morning self, ‘cause you always had the wildest whiplash in the morning after a good night out of drinking

You were semi-sad you couldn’t see Rudy’s reaction when you won

But also, semi-embarrassed at how everyone kept making jokes about wanting to try that tango with you now

Finally did that one idea of mine about this song- it was sitting in my draft box for days LMAO

Taglist✨

@accidental-obsessionist @sunshineistoofuckingbright

#this is just silly #rudy is apalled but interested #alejandro NEEDS to know #price is just so done with you #crackfic #tf 141 mafia au #cod mw2 #cod x reader #tf 141 x reader #tf 141 x you #price x reader #alejandro x reader #rudy x reader #captain john price #alejandro vargas #cod rudy #cod rodolfo #no beta we die like soap

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unholywriters · 2 days ago

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Demon's Desire - Chapter Three: Lustful Wants

Summary: After getting your new wings from felix, who seemed to have left you quiet a lot of things in return. You stared to work on your list along with trying to get other things you'd normally get done but you also had another goal in mind, to find hyunjin and talk to him. Wanting to know how you got caught in that crash to begin with and see what his role was, also seeing how he is once the moon is out.

Word Count: 5.6k

Parts: Teaser, 01, 02

Tags: Demon AU, Demon royalty AU, demon chan, demon felix, demon lee know, demon seungmin, demon han, demon changbin, demon hyunjin, demon jeongin, unprotected sex, male reader, top stray kids with some switches, bottom reader, MDNI, talks or hell, torture, sexual things, possessiveness, obsessiveness, poly! stray kids, poly! chan, poly! felix, poly!hyunjin, Poly!changbin, poly!seungmin, Poly!i.n., Plly

Taglist: @felixneverbadd @gnusihcom @a-short-ass-disappointment

PS: please enjoy this teasing hyunjin who enjoys messing with you, but nonetheless, reminding you of what he could really do if he wanted to. But being more soft towards you durning the late hours of the night, I hope you're enjoying the series so far, Please feel free to ask for a spot in the taglist I promise I will add you into it so you can enjoy the many chapter to come, not sure how many but they will happen. Next in the list will either be Gluttony Changbin or a sloth Hannie just to throw in something a little extra please enjoy and tell me who do you think should be next.

With that being said I decidede to take another darker turn towards the end just a little surprise, sorry it took me a while but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless1

Filling my tub with warm water, bubbles and rose petals like I always do when taking a bath in the morning. Before I did any of that I made myself a drink, nothing too strong as of right now and set it next to the large sunken in tub with soft music playing the background to help me feel more relaxed then not. I grabbed a silk robe from my closet, usually the first one I see and hang it close to the tub with my towel for drying myself along with my bathroom vanity set up, with the wig from yesterday on the mannequin head for me to get ready for that process. I wanted to do that before I did anything else just to see if it was a lost cause or not and I just needed to take time with it and not rush into it. Taking off the rest of my clothes and setting them down to laundry hamper I kept in there near the tub but not close. My actual hair isn't that bad but if I can keep it up while I take a bath I do, and if not I just let it hang free while I do what I need to do and there's nothing wrong with that.

Slowly getting in I let out a relaxed sigh while slowly letting my back rest against the tub, closing my eyes while I let myself relax. This is all I truly wanted when coming home from work after so long. Just relax, eat somethingwhile watching a show and fall asleep hoping I'm not missing anything while getting ready to do more of a lot of things in the morning. All I wanted to do was this, grabbing my favorite bath sponge and soap I began scrubbing while being carerful of some spots, lookiong closely while I saw a small rose on my left side. It made me stop while I remember seeing the same one on felix, though it was intresting since mine was smaller then I think I could see what his was since it was still covered. It was going to be intresting to hide these during shows, makes me wonder what they would do if they saw those roses being covered just so I can keep my money up.

These men have everything in their hands, but I hate just taking it or being given that, I worked my way to get here. Even when I was constantly in pain and wanted to juist disappear and hope for the next life I would have loving people for my family who didn't want to make my life a living hell while I crawl my way to a palce they've been wanting to do for years yet lost. If I was going to get something, I was going to earn it no matter what any of them wanted to tell me or spoil me. I won't accept less or lowballs for it either. Getting out of the tub and letting out the water, I dried myself off with my towel and used my favorite lotion while making sure my face was cleaned since the makeup was ruined. Getting dressed in something casual for me to wear, it dind't matter to me, just as long as I felt comfortable in this moment right now I was ready to know this was going to be a while. Singing what I could just to get through this, having a steamer to get through this is my best friend for all of this. But the hair wasn't getting better, it wasn't the same anymore, I needed something new.

Maybe I can ask felix when I see him later if it's even possible but there's nothing else I could really do about it. Even after trying for hours to make sure I got everything since yet again I refused to just give up without making sure I could do something but not everything can be saved. There is no point on beating myself up over things I have no control over, that just makes everything harder to get through and I'm not here for it. I closed the wig in the bag it came with and looked at the other two felix had given me. One was the same as my last one, just a bit more sparkely then before. The other one was just as long and flowy, something I loved when getting wigs or even letitng my down my actual hair, but it was a dark blue, almost like a midnight blue to give out something…new. It was like something emerging from the dark and capturing you're attention just to pull you back in the darkness and giving you an embrace that there was no getting out of. Maybe I could use this one for now, since I needed something new after a while.

I help the bag and walked out of the bathroom over to my closet, the large walk in closet with a wide range of everything. Looking through I knew I needed something casual now, the things I was wearing had some sliver strands stuck on it and I just wanted to get into something else. Maybe just a hoodie with some sweats, I should also just let my natural hair breathe for a while. Letting it down while changing into a comfortable hoodie before walking to my room, walking to my work desk where I tend to keep my credit card, notepad to make sure I tracked everything and knew how much I spent on one store, if I go to any. Sometimes If I know I could afford to spend enough I should be good to go on a shopping spree, maybe that's what I need after a long day, well the start of a second one I could feel it coming and man was I not ready and just really wanted to get things done and come back home just to relax. Though my bedroom needed more decore, it was looking boring still I'm getting done with it by now.

I mainly enjoyed walking since I didn't want to drive, my roadrage was too real and I knew I would hit someone in a road rage or I'd get chased and walking just seems a little bit more…manageable after this. Grabbing my small bag I walked towards the door, making sure all of my cards were in there along with some cash just in case. Making sure I had my room key I left and locked the door, tapping the card against the keypad twice to make sure it's locked entirely before walking back to the elevator, one thing I forgot to mention that was in here was my earbuds so I can stay focused on shopping and not have to worry about random people calling my name when I don't feel like talking to them and just stay focused on the things I need to do so I can go home earlier and feel more relaxed and not feeling like I was already doing entirely too much for one day. Slipping them on as I pressed teh main floor button, I just played a random song on my playlist and elft it on shufle while waiting to go down the entire way. Walking out and handing over my key before walking out of hte large black steel metal doors to get to the main sidewalk, turning right and just walking down to the main store close to me, wanting to get my food shopping done first instead of just ordering fast food or eating out. I wanted to cook my own food for tonight and call it good.

It wasn't that far, was it always crowded though? Yes, was I used to it by now? Kinda but not entirely either. Grabbing a shopping cart I began walking around, staying on the left side since this closer and knowing me I was going too carry this all home and give it all to a staff member who has access to all the rooms, and would set everything inside my room without a hitch. Should I have bothered Felix back at home? Maybe but I don't know the exact room number he's in since the door closed right as he started to walk pratically since this place also makes sure everyone is safe, especially those who pay for the higher rooms since those cost more to take care of, though they do treat the lower rooms the same since I used to stay there before getting a bigger room like the one I have now. Sure it would take longer sometimes but since they've been able to expand on a lot more things, every floor now has their own keepers to make things a lot more easier. Something I thought was smart to do because it meant no one would try to steal from the higher rooms and get in trouble for it so fair is fair if you ask me.

But overall it was fine, and I was taking my time and felt more relaxed while trying to plan these out. Looking at everything, I felt better knowing I wasn't using that much but overall it was considered a lot. Overall, with everything I had in my cart, I spent just about 58,000 won ($54) in total with everything in bags before walking back to the hotel. My head held up high and kept walking to the front desk, which was a little bit late since of the drag because of the bags, but I was able to hand them over and watch the people walk to the elevator, where I was surprised to see hyunjin leaving in the same outfit he had when he dropped me off here. I titled my head as he flashed me a smile while walking over to me, his smile never wavering as he got closer. “Well look what we have here, what’s happening right here?” He stood close to me, looking down with his hands still in his pocket while I crossed my arms.

“Didn't feel like getting too dressed up on my day off, what are you doing here?” I asked him, watching him hum and walk around me for a while, almost like he was singing a song in his head anf feeling happy about it and just trying to feel himself. “I wanted to come see what Felix was doing since we have a lot to do tonight. I was about to leave and go to go shopping for some clothes, what were you about to do hm? Cook something and not give me a plate?” I felt my own eyes roll at that statement but I also had a smile on my face despite my efforts to try not to. “I usuaslly go window shopping unless I want something clothes wise, despite my outfit right now, why did you want to try and make up for confusing me when I left after we first met?” I poked a little bear, I could see it in his eyes that he was surpised just a little but and I wanted to keep smirking at the thought it but I didn't. I just kept looking at him while he got closer. I could tell he wanted to reach his arm out like he's been doing almost everytime we've met for now but he stopped himself and honestly I wanted to grab him and walk out since I could tell some people were trying to watch and be nosey about the bussiness that was happening right now but I kept my face as straight as I could.

But he surprised me because he got close enough and leaned down in my ear, his hands coming out of his pockets to hold my sides carefully. “You're smartt babyboy and I like it, let’s talk more about that away from nosey ears, doesn't that sound like a smart idea?” I could only feel myself nod while fighting the urge to roll my eyes. He pulled away just a bit and once again wrapped his left arm around my waist, walking out of the lobby to find him with a different car. “BMW? This looks more pricey then the ones I see on the special events we tend to have.” “Because it was custom made a while ago, thought I have her come out for a drive.” He opened the door and let me inside the backside, I didn't want to smile but I could feel myself smiling as I got in and looked at the black and wine red intieror. He knew what he liked and what looked good, I know some who just woudl've gone with the generic red but this was just the right kind of dark red that feel like a luxury to have. I can imagine the features he has for it as well but won't show it to me yet. “And don't worry about the drivers, I'mnot supposed to be telling you this so early but given how smart you are, I'm sure you can tell something about the drivers now can't you?” I looked over to him, watching him get in the car and closing the door while just leaning back in his seat, of course he didn't need a seatbelt. I guess overall I didn’t need one either but I was used to wearing one everytime I got in a cab just to go anywhere. After all It made sure I somewhat survivedand didn't just go flying out of the car like a fly.

“I thought they were just good at their job and acting like they didn't hear anything as much?” He shook his head, leaning it to the left while humming. “Their lifeless, we each have our own ones, a maxium of 15 just to throw peoeple off.” “Did you tell yours to get into a crash?” I raised a brow, almost ready to explode on him for getting me in this situation because I truly just wanted to go home and continue with my life and proabably laugh at my sister for making a scene if she ever did. “No, our leader had that planned out, we just needed to bring one to the car and hoep he or she would be able to make it past the drinking phase. Usually they all burn from the inside out. I wasn't supposed to be there, since I would stand out but Sometimes I don't listen to him, he gets annoyed about it but there's not a lot he can do other then keep me back in the main house for a while till he thinks I've learned my lesson for not listening to him when he says no.” My mind was trying to put the pieces together again, because clearly I'm not supposed to know who this leader is, but by the looks of it he seems more focused on his friends well-being but making sure the rules are being listned to and not ignored to a point of disrespect.

“The one in the middle? He looks terrifying almost when I met him.” Hyunjin has a habit of tilting his head slightly side to side I can see. Just from the way he's looking now, even when the driver is getting closer to the mall, I can see it from afar and by the looks of it, it's gonna be crowded all over again. Maybe I'll see some coworkers and we can either go on with the day or just talk. Sometimes we do butother times we see a lot of paying customers who used to get violent and try to keep ourselves hidden. Some are just weird but over all it's not my problem nor am I going to carry it like it is. “He can be like that in public or when we have someone we like. For your case, it's to show that we may tell you stories of him being funny and whatnot, but he also wants you to know he has a say in a lot of things that even I can't cross him in. And there will be nothing that any of us could do about it. But, if he likes you slightly, he might go easy on you.” The car parked in front of the main mall entrance, we could see some people peaking while they were walking, hyunjin got out and held his hand out. I tilted my head before looking down and seeing that my outfit was changed.

I wasn't wearing my laid back clothes, instead I was wearing something more fitting for the mall but it was still loose and laid back. I had a black undershirt on with a large white buttoned up see-tihrough shirtthe buttons were slightly undone, only 3 tops ones were and I now had black slack pants with a sliver chain on my left pocket with a large hoop on the front pocket. The sneakers were a nice pick, I was compleletely fine with this one as well but it confused me while I got out and held his hand. “How did you change my outfit? I was fully prepared to ignore people for judging my outfit.” His arm and hand went back to their favorite place while we walked to the entrance while we could slightly hear some whispers and still feel some of the stares coming from many angles.

“Because I'm the type of person that would say something to cause a scene and then ruin their life. Besides think of it as helping getting used to your new life. The main people you have to worry about in public, is our leader obviously, lee know and changbin. Those three take no disrespect when it comes to things like this. And that's not for debate.”

“I'm really worth allof that for 8 men who just met me and decided I was the one?”

I watched him nod his head while we walked and looked around some. There was one outfit I knew Iwanted even if it was for formal events and those are something I rarely attend to unless some of the fancy richer people I know decide to invite me. Even when I know they just need something for me, I charge for that kind of serives because I'm not just going to allow it to happen without someone regretting about it very much.I think hyunjin was just letting me be the guide while he walked along with me. “These are very high dresses, had a plan to attend something fancy outside of the bar now did you?” I could only shurg some while looking around. Slowly getting away from his wamring touch and looking at the racks before seeing a dark wine dress. “Depends onif any of you tend on inviting me to anything, Can't be surprised only to rely on someone to give me a backup. I like having my own options when we go out.” I would keep lookiong up to see his reaction to it since he seems like the type to enjoy spoiling someone he consideres to like, I have more questions for him, but with most of thios being in public it would draw attention and that would be the last thing I needed or wanted to deal with really.

“Besides look at this one, how could I say no to that?” I wanted to try and keep this conversation as normal as possible since I knew i'd be able to talk to him more later tonight. Even though it felt like it was so far from now, I knew that would be more of a better time since then we'd have no one else to worry about. I think he was able to catch onto my thinking or the fact that I really wanted to talk about something with him but it just wasn't coming out the way we wanted to. Since it would also make things a problem and it would be something none of us wanted to. But going back to the dress, it was more considered a mermaid style of a dress, a dark wine red color that would go well with any formal meetings or gatherings which I can only imagine that the men attened. There was a hand stitched design The top had that of a flower and stem design, left to your imagination of what kind of flower, I would say a rose since the color of the dress. The fabric felt like satin with a lace back style, something I knew I had the perfect boots for. Something I always enjoyed when getting dressed up was doing things like this, after all if I look good in a dress, why let my gender stop me from doing so? Even if my shoulders would show and I could probably tuck in the spaghetti straps on the dress to make it look like it was strapless, something I also liked when wearing something like it.

“Well now that you mentioned it, that girl you claimed to be related to when I picked you up.” Carefully putting the dress back on the rack, I looked over to him while he seemed to be looking at his own versions of a dress or even a suit to look for, since everything was close together and it all just overall seemed to look better. “There is an event I was invited to, along with felix and some of the others, you’d get to meet our leader for sure. I was going to go alone, but if you want to go with me then we can go together?” I titled my head to the side being curious of it since I wanted to see what else he had to offer. “Well what’s the attire? How classy or fancy do we have to dress up?” I could see the look in his eyes, he seemed to be happy and excited to be able to get something or the two of us and maybe even making something for the others to see and have something incorporated into the outfit of choice. “Let me surprise you, you can get anything else you wanted from here and I'll handle everything else.”

Hyubjin agreed to have us matching wth some outfits, I let him pickthe outfits from when we lwft and he would come and pikc me up at the time we needed to go, which would be around 7pm, since it was going to be a long drive to somewhere far away from the pearing eyes of those in the city. But that didn't mean there wouldn't be any security. There would be since everyone ahd to verify who they were and who they were going with. Hyunjin promised that he would talk to his leader and get things handled so I could attend with little to no worryandhe would pay for the ticket if he needed to. Which I was sure wa like pocket change for him since he could walk into a store and get things for free but he would still pay the workers mroe then they were getting in most cases since some people would be rude to them after he left. He dropped me off at home, saying he would send the outfit when he was able to get what he knew would be good while I did my makeup.

I didn't go too wild with my makeup, I wanted something simpy but it would still be straight to the point. I decided to stick with black and gold since it just felt right. I didn't want to do the same looks I do for shows, which is just any silver or platinum looks and I wanted to try something different so black and gold it is. The inners of my eyes were a bright gold that would sparkle in any form of light. The outer parts of my eyes faded to a black settled look. To me it was giving a smokey eyed look but I enjoyed it for myself. I added a winged eyeliner just to look more dramatic? In a way but I liked it, my hair was curled, even with it being small {Just in case the reader has short hair} The Sun was started to set when I heard my doorbell ring.

Walking over and opening the door, it was the gift sender from downstairs and held out teh box to me. Smiling to me as I thanked her and walked back inside, setting the box on table and slowly opening it. Gasping in shock as I slowly held it up, It was something I didn't expect from him, this must be a very important event for him to send me something like this. It was a straples dress with a large black flab around my chest area that had a long piece go down the back almost a veil but it was for the back, the front had black jewels with the left side showing the left side of my waist and thigh, but I would have something to cover things no one else was allowed to see. The jewels reminded me of soemthing reaching out like tree roots in the ground. I had just the best pair of heels for these along with a small bag. I got dressed and messed with my hair while making sure everything looked great. Putting on my black heels that had gold on the bottom with a small black bow on hte back and more black jewels on the front. Walking around ym closet I grabbed a small back pruse with a long black string. Inside I would have my favorite cologne, a matching black and gold fan with my favorite birthday cake chapstick with my clear yet sparkly lipgloss.

I almost felt mself wanting to grab my matching black goves just to have something but I felt like I was doing way too much with that so I decided against it, but I did add some black dangling earings with a simple gold necklace with two matching gold bracelets. Looking in the mirror, I looked something new but I was happy with it. I liked the way I looked, how every curse was hugged but it wasn’t too tight or lose. Looking at my phone, because yes he made sure I had his number so I could surprise him instead of him waiting for me downstairs with felix since the two of them were going to ride together. I got the text that he was here and after maksing sure everything was locked, my phone was in my pocket. Double checking that everything was right and off, I left my room and locked it. Walking down the to elevator and walking past everyone on the main lobby, handing the front desk and handing over my key, smiling as I walked to the double doors and soon to the gates. Thanking those who looked at me before someone offered to open the gate and there I saw the two men waiting by the luxury limo.

Hyunjin wore a long sleeved white shirt, the shirt having flower and star shaped cutouts from the fabric itself with one long black glove that had a silver braclet. The black tight leather jeans had a black and gold belt around his waist but had some silver chains hanging from some of the belt loops, with the jeans covering the high boots he was wearing, at least I was guessing he was wearing those. He looked at me with a proud smile but he was also had a shokced look on his face while I walked closer. Looking over to felix, who had more of shocked face but was still happy to see me. He seemed to take more a prince look by his outfit. It was pure white, practically the same color as snow, no wonder we had so many people staring. Yet there was still some gold accents to it, the collar covering his neck had a gold stitched in flower with a gold chain going to his right shoulder. On the right side on the white pocket was a gold, I wantt to call it a button but its not. He did have gold buttons on it though, shinning with the light while the left side was covered with a matching clock. If I didn't know any better I would've assumed he was a prince with how he was dressed for such an event. And I can see why the place were going is going to be concsidered private from the public eye and we have to go out of town for it.

“Now Hyunjin look at this, you pratically incorporated everyones outfits into one dress for this handsome man, we're going to be late for this.” Felix wanted to say more, but people were talking and some were starting to pull out there phones to take vides or pictures. So all got into the black limo and comfortably sat as the limo drove off. “Well, minus the mob that was growing, thank you Felix, I told you I was going to try and blow people away.” “You two looked like you came straight from a fairytale and decided to come look for a bride and decided on a male. You two can’t say much when it comes to me.” I joked, seeing hyunjin act dramatically shocked, and felix starting to laugh. “Guessing by the fancy attire we all are wearing, this has to be something very important or something just to be yourself away from the public eye and trying to make the place free from people?”

I was sitting between the pair and could see them looking at each other. I almost wanted to say I could see a faint hint of green and red between the two of them, but I wasn't going to question yet. “Well, I would've explained that when you went to sleep tonight but giving how I've been with you pratcailly all day, you won't see me tonight, since you have to meet someone new to keep you on your toes. Me and felix have been too friendly with you, something out leader isn't too fond of thnking that we're favoring you and not giving you a fairchance. That being said the place that we're going to tonight is more of a close friend of ours, well a close group. They can tell you more then we can if they choose to, but always keep this in mind. If you see their captain, and trust me they make it well known who that is, but be careful of them. The two leaders are more resevered then the others are.” I titled my head while felix explained all of this to me. It was more of an eye opener and a reminder, I'm not a human anymore and there will be poeple that I run into that could either make my experience duriong this and some that could make me regret ever being here. Something I never thought to consider.

I have been more friendly and close with these two simply because Felix lives closer to me, and hyunjin seems to be more social and local in the places I tend to visit. I have 5 more people to meet, with one of them seemingly being the one who can either make a choice go through or put a stop to it quicker then any of us could blink with a snap of his finger. “You won't like the later part of this event, something we al started to think about later beacuse at the end of it, you'll begin to see more demons and such and what some of us do, speak out about it if you choose to but rememebr this. Me and Felix can only do so much, if we get told no by those stronger then us and there's only one, there is nothing we can do to save you. And you won't like us for a while because of it.”

If I could leave the car I would, because Hyunjin made his eyes glow this mixture of pink and a dark purple while seeminly enjoying the fact that I was confused and slowly putting things together that I don't have much control over what happens. I was so caught up in being treated like nothing was different and not experiencing anything different from what I'm used to that the now reality that the places I could go won't have humans anymore and if I'm not careful something drastic could happen and there is very little some could do. I was staring at Hyunjin but felix seemed to keep his eyes more normal but I could swear I saw the undertone green at the bottom of his eyes. It was something some would have to pay very close attetnion to in order to notice it. But it overall seemed something for them to enjoy, makes sense as to why we're dressed up so fancy for it as well. And why we had to be so far away from people. “What happens at these events?” “Can't tell you that, it would ruin the fun of your reaction. Don't worry, you won't be phycailly hurt, but you will hate us for the next oh..couple days?”

We got to the place, stopping at the entrance where there were other luxury cars stopped in the large circle driveway that had those large water fountains in the middle. “Do try to remember, everything we've done was genuine, love.”

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mirandasidefics · 2 days ago

Text

But Home is Nowhere- Chapter 12 Pt2

Pairing(s): Lucien x Plus Size Reader, Azriel x Plus Size Reader, and Ruhn Dannan x Plus Size Reader.

Summary: Azriel and Reader finally start to bond bringing about some strange feelings that Azriel isn't sure how to process. It's made all the more complicated when Azriel confronts Ruhn about his actions.

Word Count: 5.8 K

Warnings: Mentions of nudity, sexually suggestive dialogue (no smut)

Author's Note: I'm still in a bit of a funk, and with the holidays coming up, things may be a bit slower. So I apologize for things slowing down. I can't thank you all enough for the support that this fic is getting along with some of my other little stories.

As always, a HUGE thank you to my beta reader @hardcoremarvelfan for all her help with this chapter. She really helped out with the struggles I was having for the Azriel and Ruhn scene and I don't think that I could have gotten past that block without her!

Series Masterlist Divider by @/tsunami-of-tears

Previous: Chapter 12 pt1 Next: Chapter 13

A half hour passed by quickly and Azriel was back at the front of the townhouse waiting for (Y/N) to emerge. He sent in a shadow to let her know of his arrival, even though she still appeared uncomfortable around them, she seemed to do better with a single shadow at a time. He couldn’t help but wonder if she had the same reactions to Ruhn’s shadows as she did with his.

When she finally joined him in front Azriel drank in the sight of her. He knew instantly that this wasn’t a dress Rhysand had originally picked out for her, but one that was very likely picked with either the assistance of Mor or Bryce. The simple silver off shoulder sweater dress was perfect for her frame.

“Wow.” He whispered to himself.

“I know right. I never thought that I would have the opportunity to actually wear this. Bryce picked it out. Apparently she wanted to take me to this place called Rita’s here. I told her I haven’t been out to a club in like a decade… literally.”

“Wait, how old are you?” Azriel asked, realizing that was something he had never learned about her.

“How old do I look?” She challenged. Azriel paused for a moment as she looked down from the stair stoop of the townhouse.

“I’m not answering that. Not if I want to continue living,” He smiled.

“Good boy,” She quipped.

A couple hours later, Azriel and (Y/N) returned to the townhouse after the concert. They decided to walk back from the concert hall and the entire time she spent gushing about the experience. He noted each of her hand movements as she talked, the way she walked slightly angled towards him. He was surprised that she hadn’t tripped on the cobble stone path in the high heels she wore. Azriel smiled the entire time she spent describing the music, her descriptions even provided him with insights into the pieces he had never considered before.

However, her chatty demeanor quickly dissolved the minute they approached the townhouse, which was still as dark as they had left it before leaving for the concert. Azriel watched as the sparkle that had been in her eyes throughout the performance slowly dissipated. It was starting to get late and it was clear that Ruhn had still not yet returned from whatever Rhys and Cassian were having him do.

“I’m sure he will be back soon,” He reassured her. However, she didn’t bother to acknowledge him. Instead she squared her shoulders, entering the townhouse as if nothing was wrong and resumed their conversation.

“So a requiem in my world also serves the purpose of remembering and honoring the dead,” She explained. “One of the largest religions has a very specific ritual surrounding it and many composers have set music to the prayers that make up the Mass. It’s honestly fascinating to see the same occurring here, but with a completely different religious base.” Azriel couldn’t help but smile as she continued to talk about what she found most enjoyable about the concert. “What were the parts of this one again? I’m so used to the Latin from my world,” She looked at him and Azriel’s mind froze for a half second before he remembered what she asked.

“So there are eight segments, the first seven are based on the elements of life that the Mother placed in her Cauldron to create Pyrthian, which are Darkness, Sun, Moon, Earth, Water, Sky, and Fate. The final segment is the standard prayer that the Fae recites to those that are dying and was added much later.” He explained as they entered the parlor.

“Yes I recognized the prayer. My mother taught me that one. It’s been passed down in my family for generations.” Her previous excitement was diminished, but she was making an effort to not let her disappointment in Ruhn’s continued absence show. “I also really enjoyed the segments for Moon and Earth. I am so impressed with this composer’s ability to encapsulate the imagery of each concept. It reminded me more of “The Planets” by Holst than a liturgical mass of traditional requiems in my world. It’s fascinating. And see this was one of my favorite things about music, the ability to allow us to gain insight into a wholly different culture through sound and the emotions it can help us experience. Oh! And…I’m rambling again…” She trailed off, but Azriel truly didn’t mind. There was a long pause before she spoke again.

“Thank you,” She whispered. “Wow…I didn’t think I’d ever thank you for anything if I’m being honest.” Azriel chuckled, slightly shaking his head.

“Just glad that I could help, even for a few moments.” He admitted as they sat down in the parlor. The conversation between them dwindled, the silence more comfortable than it had been in the past. But just as the silence grew, so did her anxiety.

“I should head up to bed soon.” Her voice was quiet and tried to mask the worry. He watched as she chewed on her lower lip, wondering if she was aware of how frequently she looked towards the clock on the wall. He noted that it was getting late, well past midnight. He also noted how Ruhn had still not arrived.

“Will you be needing more of the tonic soon?” He asked, trying to keep a conversation going, hoping that it could possibly lead to a new topic to help ease her mind. She merely continued to chew on her lower lip and began to pick at her nails.

“He’s never been home this late before,” Her whisper was her only response. “It’s been a week. I was hoping to talk to him tonight…I can’t…” Her eyes flicked to the clock again.

“I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” Azriel tried to reassure. “But what is it you can’t do?”

“I can’t take the tonic tonight. If I take it for more than...a week at a time…” She sighed. “That’s when I pretty much reach my limit before I start to build a tolerance for opiates. After that I notice that I have to start upping the dosage to have the same effect. And that…that just won’t be good for me in the long run.” Azriel nodded in understanding, his own mother experienced the same issue from time to time. He watched as she continued to chew on her lip and pick at her nails. He wanted to rest his hands upon her before she hurt herself again but stopped himself. He could tell she was lost in thought and his touching her suddenly had the potential to undo all the progress they made over the past year.

“Would you…would you like for me to stay here until he shows up?” Azriel asked tentatively. She nodded, her eyes still mostly glazed over from whatever scenario was playing out in her mind. “Go upstairs then and get some rest. I’ll let Cassian know that you won’t be at the training tomorrow.” She nodded again, making her way towards the staircase. Azriel watched closely, but remained a few steps behind her. As soon as she closed the bedroom door, he took a steadying breath and plopped himself on the staircase.

Azriel sat on the center of the staircase, head bowed down as his elbows rested on his knees. It had been a couple of hours since (Y/N) went to bed, though his shadows informed that it was not at all a restful sleep. His own hearing could attest to her experiencing at least one partial nightmare that she was able to wake herself from without screaming. After the first hour of waiting for the Midgardian male to return he had decided that he was going to have a small chat with Ruhn upon his return.

A few minutes later, Azriel heard the beating of Cassian’s wings in front of the townhouse. Given the hour it was slightly unusual for him to even be awake this late, much less out and about town. For a slight moment, Azriel even wondered if something may have happened to Ruhn. That thought was quickly dismissed as a second set of uneven steps were heard all the way from the gate.

As soon as the pair reached the front door Azriel was able to smell the stale and bitter stench of ale. Once the door opened the varying scents of different females were added to the mix. Azriel felt the shadow of rage begin to build within his gut. If the scents of the females truly indicated what he assumed, then he’d have every reason to physically beat some sense into Ruhn rather than just listen to whatever bullshit he may have spun as an explanation for his behavior.

As soon as Ruhn stumbled through the door, he made a beeline for the parlor, falling face first on the couch. Cassian stood in the entryway, his gaze moving towards Azriel. “Go easy on him brother,” Cassian’s voice almost sounded defeated. “He’s been a mess all week and I figured he could use a break. So, I took him to Rita’s. He was quite the novelty amongst the females, I almost wonder if I should have kept a better eye on him.” Azriel stood from his spot on the stairs, nodding his acknowledgment of Cassian’s words, but his eyes remained on the other clearly exceedingly drunk male.

Azriel descended the stairs turning to Cassian and sighed. “I got it from here.” Cassian nodded, leaving the townhouse and returning to his own home. With his arms crossed Azriel entered the parlor and stopped in the other male’s line of sight. Or at least it would have been his line of sight had Ruhn’s eyes had been open.

“What happened between you and (Y/N)?” Azriel questioned. Ruhn merely groaned in response, arm falling off the side of the couch. Azriel sighed again, closing his eyes to take a deep breath and keep the building rage at a simmer. “She said you made her feel ‘forgotten.’ You of all people.” This time Ruhn managed to release a sequence of incoherent noises, only a few words making any sense.

“Stupid… can’t… gonna…up…”

Not even a second later Ruhn bolted up from the couch and ran towards the kitchen, without a care that he bumped into Azriel as he dashed by. Azriel quietly thanked the Mother that the purple eyed male made it to the kitchen sink before puking inside. Ruhn remained draped over the sink, breathing heavily and occasionally spitting into the basin. Azriel walked over to the male, the awful stench of stale ale, whiskey, and whatever food Ruhn had managed to eat nearly overpowering Azriel’s nostrils. Turning on the tap, Azriel rinsed the vomit down the drain before grabbing and filling a glass of water for the other male. Clearing his throat, Azriel garnered Ruhn’s attention, slightly shaking the glass of water. Ruhn made to reach for the glass, but Azriel withheld it. He needed to hear exactly what the hell happened between them, though he wasn’t entirely sure why he found himself caring so much about a squabble between them.

“What. Did you say. To (Y/N)?” His speech was slow, voice filled with the dark undertone he reserved for his interrogations. He blinked away the surprise, having honestly not intended to use that tone when talking to Ruhn.

“I fucked up.” Ruhn muttered, his voice a bit clearer now that he emptied a good portion of the contents of his stomach.

“Yeah, I’m aware of that much. Question is: How?” Azriel insisted, hauling the younger male to sit at the small breakfast table on the far side of the kitchen. Ruhn stumbles over, the metal chair from the table squeaking against the tile floor as the male practically drops himself down.

Ruhn leans his head back against the wall, “I called her ‘Lidia.’”

“Lidia?” Azriel sat himself opposite the male across the small breakfast table. The water glass was still in the Illyrian’s hand, holding it just out of reach as incentive for answers.

“Lidia Cervos, also known as ‘the Hind’. She was a female shifter from Midgard.” Ruhn paused, letting out a heavy sigh. “I thought… I don’ fuckin’ know.” He paused again, a wry chuckle escaping him. “I…cared ‘bout her. She died before I could… figure my shit out.” Ruhn chuckles again, but the laughter quickly turns to tears. “Lidia died…just to save me.”

Azriel remained quiet, taking in the information. He could almost see where this was going, but needed the other male to confirm, he’d long learned to never assume anything during an interrogation. Ruhn released a pathetic whine, his head falling to the table, forehead banging hard against the glass surface. Luckily it didn’t break. The younger male’s arms came up to support his head as he continued to rest it on the table.

“Okay, so, you called her by another female’s name,” Azriel tried to brush off the icky feeling saying the words out loud gave him, “I’ve called Rhys Cassian and vice versa. So, it sounds like an honest and innocent mistake. Just a slip of the tongue. Unless-”

“I had her nipple in my mouth.” Ruhn’s voice was muffled by his arms, but the shame in his voice was as clear as the winter night skies of Illyria. Azriel felt the simmering rage turn into a boil and it took everything within him not to lash out.

After a few deep breaths, he was finally able to respond with a simple, “Oh.”

“Her sweet, perky nipple…” Ruhn trailed off, as if lost in the memory. “FUCK! I’m so stupid! How could I…I was thinking about (Y/N)! Her intoxicatin’ scent, the way it takes on a slight tinge of amber when she’s aroused. Fuckin’ Urd, I get so fuckin’ hard jus’ thinkin’ about it!”

“Alright, I don’t need to hear that.” Az shuddered. The last thing he wanted was to imagine the human woman in that state. Naked and moaning, another male’s mouth on her breast. He didn’t want to know, let alone allow himself to imagine what that change in her scent would taste like. The sweet and savory taste of the slickness between her…Azriel caught himself. The thoughts swirling around in his head took him by surprise. He couldn’t deny that the woman was attractive, but he couldn’t afford to have those thoughts. There were other…other things-people- he needed to focus on. Azriel shook his head, hoping the physical action would work to clear the questions forming in his mind about (Y/N). His focus returned to the blubbering male in front of him.

“Why’d I say Lidia? I wasn’ thinkin’ ‘bout her, at least not then,” Ruhn continued, his tears were silent and slow. “I wanted that moment with (Y/N) for years now. I can’t believe I fucked it up. When Lucien-”

“Lucien? What does…” Azriel’s attention perked up at the mention of the Autumn male. “Lucien is mated.”

Ruhn sits up, scoffing at the reminder of Luicen’s relationship status, “Yeah, well his ‘mate’ won’ give ‘m the time of day, let alone even acknowledge the bond.” Ruhn took hold of the glass of water, drinking half of it quickly before continuing. “I may be new ‘round here, and mating bonds seem to be a little different, but I’m not blind. Elain wants nothin’ to do with him.”

“I still don’t see what that has to do with (Y/N)?”

“I thought Lucien… he and (Y/N) would be something more than jus’ friends,” Ruhn explained. “But things changed after tha’ first trip to that other court. Lu kept his distance, and even if he didn’ ask me to help I would have. The past three years we’ve become so close.” He sighed, finishing the water in his glass. Azriel stood and refilled it for him before sitting back across from the male. “I didn’ wanna rush things between us either. She’s been through so much. Last thing on her mind was romance or sex. Then her birthday came; I wanted to make it special for her. I didn’ do it with the hope of anythin’, but…she kissed me an’ I thought, ‘Finally!’” He smiled softly to himself. “I could feel it, she wanted me as much as I wanted her.” Ruhn ran his hand through his mangled hair. “I jus’ had to fuck it up.” He reached for the refilled glass again, Azriel sliding it towards him.

“Did you apologize?” Azriel asked, knowing that even if Ruhn had, the likelihood of her being receptive to that apology in the moment was minimal.

“I tried,” Ruhn sighed, spinning the glass of water in his hands along the smooth glass surface of the table.

Azriel sighed again, his own hand running through his short hair, as he debated on saying anything. His own thoughts surrounding the woman were jumbled. It would be so easy to withhold what he knew about her feelings, her worry for the Midgardian prince. Ruhn deserved to wallow in self pity. Deserved to spend a few more nights away from her. However, Azriel eventually settled on his earlier admission to himself. (Y/N) deserved someone that made her feel safe, and Ruhn made her feel safe, even if they were in the middle of a fight. “She misses you.”

“I miss her,” Ruhn picked up the glass, drinking the contents in a singular gulp, throwing it back like a shot. He paused, setting the glass back down on the table, “Did she really say I made her feel ‘forgotten?’” Azriel could only nod, causing Ruhn to groan, his head returning to rest against his arms on the table.

“I can’t believe I did this. She’s all I think about and…” He trails off. “Her softness. Her body is so soft, yet also firm, strong. Even with all the trainin’ over the years she still has those plush feminine curves.” Ruhn closed his eyes and groaned. “And her skin tasted like… like… fuck, I don’t even know how to describe it. Imagine your-your favorite dessert, the one that’s not overwhelmingly sweet so you savor every bite. You then spend the rest of your life only wanting that flavor, craving it and daydreaming about the next time you’ll get a taste.”

The Shadowsinger shifted his wings, bringing them closer to his body. Even his shadows began to swirl and vibrate as the other male’s description of how the human woman’s nipple tasted made his cock twitch. With a deep breath Azriel willed himself to remain soft.

“Lidia…the shit with Lidia is just a jumble of thread. I wanna ignore it; a loose end with no closure.” Silver tears returned to line purple irises. “I had just found her and…there’s a lot of shit I gotta unpack ‘bout her. I sure as Hel didn’ think I’d find anyone else, but…(Y/N) just had to walk into that fuckin’ dining room. It’s like…the more time I spend with her, the more I get to know her, fuck… she is jus’ what I needed. Straight from my dreams. I felt this way with Lidia and… it’s so fuckin’ hard,” Despite the cracks in his voice, his words became clearer. “I feel guilty, like I shouldn’ wanna even be with anyone else. And ashamed, ashamed that I didn’ grieve the female that was likely-” The prince paused, trying to compose the tears that wouldn’t stop. Azriel hated to admit it, but the young shadow wielder was a damn mess without (Y/N). “I’m falling in love…I’m in love with (Y/N).”

Love. That simple word rattled something deep in Azriel, a wave of nausea swirled in his gut. He shouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t as if the Prince’s behaviors didn’t give away his feelings towards the woman. Nevertheless, the Shadowsinger didn’t expect to hear that exact word, that exact confession and the genuine emotion in Ruhn’s voice as he finally expressed the sentiment out loud. Azriel felt the blood rush to his head, his vision tunneling as the nausea built and acidic bile burned his throat. His mind echoed a singular truth: Ruhn is in love with (Y/N). The thought played over and over in his mind on a tortuous loop.

Another thought struck Azriel, why the hell did he even care? Why did he care if any male- Human, Fae, or otherwise-held any feelings or sexual fantasies for (Y/N)? He didn’t. He didn’t care. His body just responded as any sexually frustrated male would upon hearing Ruhn’s desire for her. Azriel reminded himself that he’d had similar thoughts about Elain many times over the past few years. Said fantasies regarding Elain made perfect sense for Azriel to have. Just like it made perfect sense for the male crying in front of him to be in love with the human woman that had slowly crept into all of their lives. But if he didn’t care, why did Ruhn’s spoken confession cause such a visceral reaction? Could it be guilt? Azriel recognized that most of his efforts to make (Y/N) feel comfortable in this world stemmed from the guilt from…that week of torture. That had to be what caused these feelings churning deep inside him. Guilt that he wasn’t the one to make her feel safe and secure after he had been the one to break her in the first place.

It wasn’t anything more than that. It wasn’t anything like what he felt for other females in his life. (Y/N) wasn’t all that unique; sure, she was kind, compassionate, and resilient as hell, but so were Elain and Gwyn, and many of the other Priestesses he’d come to know during the morning training sessions. This feeling in his stomach, and the thoughts now swirling around in his head were all just the result of a guilty conscience and nothing more. Settling on this rationale, the nausea in his stomach subsided, and the rushing of blood in his ears died away, allowing the Spy Master to refocus on the still struggling and drunk male in front of him.

“I really fucked up,” Ruhn held his face in his hands, elbows resting on the glass table. “I don’ think…I can’t…atone for something like this. Fuckin’ Hel…jus’ a piece a shit…makin’ her feel forgotten.” Azriel continued to listen quietly, biting his tongue to keep his agreement of the Midgaridan’s self assessment to himself.

The two fell into an uncomfortable silence. Ruhn’s head now leaning back against the wall of the breakfast nook. Azriel glances between the male and his empty water glass, a few minutes pass by before he stands. Picking up the glass from Ruhn’s limp grip, he refilled it a final time. However, instead of returning to his previous perch, he went over to the opposite side of the kitchen. Pulling out a loaf of bread, he ripped off a sizable chunk to then set down in front of the night haired male. Azriel had to pause for the briefest of moments, the tears in Ruhn’s purple eyes reminding the Shadowsinger of Rhysand after he returned from Amarantha’s grasp.

“Apologize.” Azriel tried to keep his voice soft yet stern. “Don’t just ‘try.’ Make her listen and apologize.”

“Make her listen, huh?” Ruhn chuckled darkly, picking at the chuck of bread. “You interrogated and tortured her for a week, and you now spend hours with her every day. Yet you still don’t know a fuckin’ thing ‘bout her.” Azriel stopped and turned from where he stood in the doorway leading towards the hall. He was about to counter the Prince’s words, but the utterly defeated look on the male’s face gave him pause.

“You’re right,” He loosened a heavy breath. “You know her better than I do. So figure something out. Maybe a grand gesture or something.”

Ruhn began to laugh, “I didn’t peg you as the romantic type Azzie.” Azriel tensed his shoulders at the nickname, mentally brushing it off due to the other male’s drunk status. He looked towards the clock on the wall, dawn was only a couple of hours away now.

“Look,” The spy master ran his fingers through his hair, “Just…just talk to her. If a grand gesture won’t work, then start with a small one. She made a comment about not really knowing you. That sounds like a good place to start.”

“The last female I opened up to was killed,” Ruhn lifted the water glass to his lips, his movements slow, as if the glass held the weight of his heavy words. The sips he took were slow and deliberate. His eyes glazed over as he stared ahead. Azriel sighed again. While he kept most of his thoughts to himself, he also understood the other male’s hesitancy. However, the idiot in front of him created this issue. It wasn’t up to Azriel to fix it nor tell him exactly how to do so. Yet, that is exactly what he found himself doing.

“If I was in your position, trying to regain the trust of someone I was in love with, I’d tell her everything and not hide a single part of who I am.” Azriel stepped closer to the male still sitting at the table. “She’d know of every crime, and every life I’ve taken or irrevocably altered. She’d know about my past and the story behind every single visible and invisible scar. She’d know the reasons behind every sacrifice I’ve made over the last few centuries. Especially regarding the safety of those I love and care for. She would become an integral part of my life, she’d know my loved ones and they would know her.” Azriel didn’t care that Ruhn began to shrink away in shame as he loomed over the younger male; the unintended intimidation of flared wings appeared to be just the thing the “Starborn” Prince needed to understand that any apology to a loved one could not be half assed. “I’d lay my soul bare before her… and if she understood, if she stuck around, and she could feel safe with me then I’d know with complete certainty she would be worth it.”

“And if she couldn’t?” Ruhn questioned. Azriel paused, he knew what answer he would receive from (Y/N) if he truly was in Ruhn’s position; and that would be a very different response than what she would grant the Midgardian Prince.

“Just talk to her Ruhn,” He muttered, wings returning to tuck in close before turning around to exit the kitchen. “She wants to listen.” Ruhn’s midnight hair shifts as he nods, a long contemplative sigh escaping his lungs.

“I’ll talk to her, tell her everything…” he mumbled, placing his head on his arms as they rested on the table top.

“And apologize.” Azriel reminded sternly.

“And apologize,” Ruhn nodded, his voice drifting off as he closed his eyes. Within seconds the younger male was asleep at the table. Azriel didn’t even bother to wake him, perfectly content to let the other male’s muscles cramp from the awkward sleeping position.

Azriel made it to the bottom landing of the staircase before a soft whimper caught his attention. Against his better judgment, he ascended the stairs giving into the pull he felt to check on (Y/N). The door was already slightly ajar, the light from the hall flooding into the darkness of the bedroom. The beam of light streaked across the wooden floorboards, up along the bed. Her lower limbs tangled up in the wine red colored sheets. He instantly knew that the level of dishevelment was the result of her tossing and turning during a nightmare.

His hazel eyes followed along her legs, red sheets fading into the black of her night dress. His gaze continued to travel up, snagging on an unexpected exposure of soft flesh. Azriel’s breath caught in his throat as his eyes drank in the sight of her uncovered breast. He tried to avert his eyes, but they continued to linger, a part of him wanting to know if Ruhn’s description was accurate. His questions were answered as she shifted, and a perky nipple made visible in the light from the hall.

One second Azriel stood frozen in his spot, the next, he was sprinting down the steps and out the front door of the townhouse. The cool air filling his lungs helped him regain his senses long enough to force the organ between his legs to return to a limp state. He glanced back at the townhouse, confusion marking his face. Perhaps he was spending too much time with the human…he shook his head, taking a few steps to exit the gate. It had also been quite some time since he enjoyed the company of a female, perhaps it was time to find that release. As soon as he cleared the gate of the townhouse, Azriel shot into the skies of Velaris, taking his time to process the conflicting and concerning thoughts in his head before returning to the House of Wind.

The sound of glass shattering startled Ruhn awake. Sitting bolt upright, he looked around the darkened room, moonlight filtering through the bay window of the breakfast nook in the kitchen. His heart pounded inside his chest, as he took in the sight of the broken water glass now on the floor. It took a few more moments for him to get his bearings and remember what transpired earlier in the evening. He could still smell the alcohol, and the various scents of what he could only assume were Fae females on his clothes. He needed to change. He needed to clean up this glass first. It took him ten minutes, but he finally located a broom and dustpan and swept up the shards, dumping them in what appeared to resemble a trash can. His vision was still slightly blurred as the headache of what was sure to become a monster of a hangover made an appearance.

Ruhn took a few more minutes for himself at the kitchen sink. Grabbing a new, clean glass, he filled it with water from the tap, taking small sips and deep breaths. Gathering the stamina and the courage to face going upstairs. Bits and pieces of his conversation with Azriel stuck out in his mind. He knew that he had to talk to (Y/N). To apologize again, especially now that the woman had some time to get her own thoughts in order. He also knew that Az and Cass were right. He and (Y/N) wouldn’t get anywhere if he didn’t also open up to her. He supposed that he could start small, let her know some of the positives of his life before telling her about all the fucked up shit.

He finished the glass of water, and slowly made his way upstairs. As he reached the top landing, he heard a faint whimper. He instantly recognized the sound and even in his hazy mind realized that (Y/N) had not taken her tonic tonight. He sighed, a part of his heart breaking that he had allowed himself to fuck around while she suffered. She had already been using the tonic for a full two weeks at this point. One week while with Lucien, and now this past week during their time apart. The Prince closed his eyes, standing outside the bedroom door debating if he should even enter. He heard her sharp movements and that was enough for him to move his feet forward.

Ruhn quietly entered the bedroom, careful as not to wake the woman sleeping in the bed. Their bed, he reminded himself. The one that he missed sharing. He missed her warmth and the softness of her body as he would curl around it. They had slept next to each other for the past few years and he was surprised by how much he missed her. The past week had been one of the worst he endured since he first arrived. Tossing and turning. Panicking when he couldn’t feel her lying next to him. He lost count of how many times he startled awake to find himself in a room separated from her. Cassian had seen the change in his attention, and after a week decided that it would be a good idea to let off some steam by taking him to a place called Rita’s.

He carefully made his way around to his side of the bed. Sat on the edge, he took off his shoes; his pants and shirt quickly followed suit. He didn’t care that (Y/N) would likely be pissed that he joined her in bed before she allowed it. He needed to feel her, to hold her. Especially if she had been too afraid to take the tonic tonight.

He knew that he needed to apologize, he only hoped that she was more willing to listen to him now. He had spent most of the evening trying to figure out exactly what to tell her. Where would he start? Cassian advised to start at the beginning, and Az…well all Ruhn could remember was Azriel telling him to just talk to her. However, which “beginning” would be the best to start off with? Should he tell her about his childhood, his mother, and his dickhead of a Father? Or should he start with telling her more about Midgard and what his life was like before his sister turned it all upside down. Honestly, with the way his head was starting to pound he may as well just flip a coin. Whatever he chose to tell her first didn’t matter. All that matters is that he would be telling her something.

Ruhn lifted the sheet, immediately noticing that her body was curled in on itself, back towards the center of the bed. She only did that when a nightmare was starting to take hold. He laid down next to her, and carefully wrapped his arm around her middle. Her body immediately began to relax. The knowledge made him smile, his own shoulders and upper back releasing their built up tension. He curled the rest of his taller frame around her, perfectly molding himself to her. She stirred, hips twitching as if she was going to turn over. Ruhn moved his hand seeking hers, interlacing their fingers once it was found.

She turned over to face him, and that’s when he heard her soft whimpers. Even though he enveloped her during the early stages of her nightmare, it seemed that whatever had played in her mind had already done its intended damage. He hated watching her cry, especially when he felt so powerless against the forces that brought her to tears each and every time.

He adjusted his limbs to accommodate their new position. One of her legs wiggling its way in between his. His arm wrapped around her back, snaking up her shoulder blades, allowing his fingers to find purchase in her hair. He gently tugged on the roots, reassuring her that he was there. She let out a shaky breath and the smallest whine before pressing her face into his chest.

“It’s okay baby,” He assured, another gentle tug, “I’m here. You’re safe.” She seemed to relax a bit more at his dulcet timber. “Go back to sleep. I’m right here.”

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