#everything works and its as good as I can make it

[lubdubology]

Take My Love and Wear It

SYNOPSIS: Taking care of Charles has its own special challenges, but you didn’t expect the hardest one to be the man who hired you. Distant, gruff and rough around the edges, Logan still manages to worm his way under your skin. But you’ve worked your way under his, too. 

PAIRING: Old Man Logan x fem!reader

WC: 10.8k 

WARNINGS: smut 18+; mdni; angst; swearing; non-explicit mentions of wounds, blood and use of stitches; extreme physical pain; Charles is a lovable, meddling little shit; fluff sprinkled in for good measure; Logan in a tub (if I had a nickel for every time I bathed him, I’d have two nickels—which isn’t a lot, but its weird it happened twice, right); touch-starved Logan; handjobs; shower sex; fingering; dirty talk; oral (f receiving); sex with feelings; unprotected p in v; creampie

A/N: There’s something special about Old Man Logan, isn’t there? Old and grumpy and desperately in need of some love and affection. I know the Charles caregiver story has been done before, but I couldn’t get this idea out of my head. And then Charles starting talking in my head and well...it blossomed into this. As always, thank you to @joelsgoldrush for allowing me to send her snippets of this as I went along and offering her love, support and suggestions. I hope you enjoy this and any likes, comments and reblogs are always appreciated!

You stare down at the remnants of yesterday’s cold and congealed dinner and sigh. Scraping the food into the trash, you resist the urge to pack everything you have and leave. 

One month. 

One month of helping Charles—making his meals, washing his clothes, giving him his meds, making sure he doesn’t hurt himself (or others), assisting with daily tasks—and Logan still regards you as a nuisance, like a gnat needing to be swatted away. 

At best, he ignores you, moving around the house as if you don’t exist. 

And at worst, he treats you with barely concealed contempt, his scowl deepening the lines of his face whenever he’s around you. As if you’re invading his space uninvited even though he’s the one that sought out help. 

You grip the edge of the sink, staring down into the porcelain basin as if it holds some hidden answers. Every day you’ve tried to break through walls Logan’s built around himself, held onto Charles’ promise that eventually he’ll soften, just give him time, but he only seems to have grown more hostile. And you’ve done nothing to incur his ire besides watching him come home every day battered and bruised, his very bones weary with exhaustion, and offering your assistance.

Part of you is angry—angry that you care so much when your main focus is supposed to be Charles. Angry that despite all his efforts to come across unapproachable and cold, Logan’s worked himself under your skin and takes a little piece of you with him whenever he leaves. 

Angry that somehow he’s stolen a piece of your heart. 

You hear shuffling behind you and turn to find Logan entering the kitchen, fingers fastening the last buttons on his dress shirt. “What?” he asks gruffly and for a moment you wonder if he can read your thoughts.

You straighten and meet his gaze head on, swallowing down your nervousness. “How much longer are we going to keep doing this, Logan?��

“Doing what?”

“This,” you say, gesturing between you. “You walking around here like I’m some stain upon your life, acting like I’m a problem when all I’ve ever done is try and help.” Your voice is steadier than you feel. “You asked for me to be here, Logan. It’s not like I barged in here without permission.”

Logan holds your gaze, his jaw tight, and for a moment you think he’s going to grab his keys and leave, head off into the night and drive until sunrise. His eyes soften for just a moment, something like regret crossing his features. 

“I know why you’re here. And I do…appreciate it,” he says, his words coming out low and rough. As if the words taste foreign in his mouth. 

“Wouldn’t kill you to show it,” you challenge.

You’re waiting for him to lash out and instead he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Look, I’m not good at this.”

“I’m not asking you to bow at my feet,” you say, hoping to ease some of the tension in the air. “Although, I wouldn’t be mad about it.” You think you see the briefest hint of a smile flicker across his face. “I just want us to be able to live in the same space. I’m here to help, Logan. Let me.”

“You have no idea how hard this life is.”

A rueful smile tugs at your lips. “I understand more than you think I do.”

Logan’s gaze sharpens, inquisitive as he searches your face, as if he’s trying to decipher the meaning behind your words. He rubs a hand across his face, scratching lightly as his beard. “I’ve gotta couple jobs tonight. Maybe more,” he finally says, changing the conversation. “Should be back before sunrise.”

You nod, his switch in topic not lost on you, but you don’t push him. “Alright,” you say softly. “Just—just take it easy, okay?”

He glances down at you, relief softening his gaze and you know a part of him is grateful you didn’t push further. 

Grabbing his keys, Logan heads towards the door but pauses just before he’s about to leave. He turns to look back over his shoulder. “Thanks,” he murmurs, the word awkward on his lips. 

You give him a small nod of encouragement as he slips out the door. He may not be ready to full open up, but you feel as if he extended a tiny olive branch tonight, cracked open the door just enough to let you peek in.

+++

Over the following weeks, Logan’s a little less avoidant. He doesn’t go out of his way to make conversation—you didn’t expect him to—but he at least as acknowledges your presence. Small nods and murmured goodbyes when he leaves and sleepy hellos when he returns. It’s not much, but you’ll take it. 

You’re cleaning the last of the dishes from dinner, Charles safely settled in front of the TV watching an old movie when Logan comes home. He’s earlier than you anticipated, but exhaustion lines his face nonetheless. You expect him to slip away quietly, but he pauses instead, lingering in the doorway. 

“Smells good,” he says softly, nodding towards the pan of half eaten lasagna still sitting on the counter. 

Surprised, you turn around to face him. You brush the hair from your face and say, “Sit. I’ll make you up some.” 

Logan hesitates and for a moment you think he’s about to decline, but then he nods, his shoulders dropping slightly as he sits down at the table. You fix him up a plate, setting it down in front of him with a bottle of beer as you slide into the chair across from him.  

He tucks quietly into the food, his fork scraping against his plate as he eats, pausing only to wash it down with a few swigs of beer. You watch him, a strange satisfaction tugging at you at the sight of him actually sitting down, enjoying a meal with you, even if it is in silence. 

“Long day?” you ask quietly, gesturing towards his bruised knuckles.

He flexes the fingers on his free hand before tucking them under the table. “Nothin’ I can’t handle,” he mutters, taking another bite of lasagna. “They’ll be gone in a day or two.”

You know not that long ago an injury like that wouldn’t have even marred his skin. Now, the simplest of wounds can take days to heal and it’s not the appearance of his skin that bothers you, but the newfound ache he experiences, the heaviness of constant pain.

You want to help him, ease his discomfort, like you know you could. But you know he’s not ready for that. Not yet.

“You’re good with Charles,” Logan says then, his gaze steady on his plate. “He seems calmer around you.”

Logan’s admission is so unexpected, you find yourself staring at him in disbelief. At your silence, his eyes flicker up to yours and you see more than simple acknowledgement in his expression. It’s subtle, but it’s there, a current of something more, something you’re not quite sure how to address.

“Thank you,” you murmur, your voice softer than you intended. “Charles—he means a lot to me.” You pause briefly, but something compels you to continue. “You both do.”

His gaze is focused on you and you don’t miss the flicker of surprise that breaks through his usual stoic expression. Clearing his throat, he looks down, pushing around the last bit of lasagna on his plate and then after a moment, he sets his fork down and leans back in his chair. “You mean a lot to him, too,” Logan finally says and you wonder if he’s talking about more than just Charles.

From the living room you hear Charles call for you, his voice soft but insistent. The moment between you still crackles as you stand from the table and as you begin to walk away, Logan reaches for your hand. His fingers are warm and rough against your skin and you’re barely able to suppress your shiver. 

“Thank you,” Logan says, his voice surprisingly soft. 

His grip against your skin is gentle, a stark contrast to all his roughness and you can feel the weight of his unspoken words curling around you. Charles calls again, his voice breaking through the moment, but Logan’s hand lingers just a beat longer before he lets go, fingers trailing along your skin. 

+++

“He likes you, you know.”

You glance up from shaving Charles’ face and find him staring at you, a mischievous glint in his eye. You give a soft hum. “Did he tell you that or did you read his mind?”

Charles scoffs and waves his hand dismissively. “What’s the difference, dear?” 

You chuckle, shaking your head as you rinse the razor. “With Logan I’m pretty sure there’s a big difference.”

“Bah, if Logan wanted to keep me out of his head, he would. Stubborn man.” He tsks softly to himself and shakes his head. “But, no my dear, he can be quite loud if you know how to listen.”

You raise an eyebrow, giving him a playful look. “Loud, huh? And what exactly is that brain of his telling you?”

Charles gives you a knowing smile. “Oh, just little things,” he says casually with a wave of his hand, but you can tell by the look on his face that he’s holding back. “He notices you—what you do for me, this place, for him. He may not realize it himself, but his thoughts linger on you more often than he’d like.”

A flicker of hope sparks in your chest and despite yourself, you feel a blush creeping into your cheeks. “Logan doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

“Logan has spent so much of his life running,” Charles continues, his tone and expression growing more thoughtful. “The loss he’s experienced has led him to believe it’s better to be alone than form meaningful connections with people. But you’ve somehow become something of a home for him. And he doesn’t quite know what to make of that.”

Your heart skips a beat as you take in his words. The idea of being a home for Logan, a comfort, feels surreal, and yet...there’s a part of you that dares to hope what Charles is saying is true. That this isn’t some fictional truth his brain has concocted, a product of his disease riddled mind. 

“Home.” You repeat the word softly to yourself, testing the word on your own tongue as if it might shatter into pieces.

Charles nods, his hand reaching for yours, his gaze warm and knowing. “Yes, home. He feels it, deep down, in a way that’s unfamiliar and frightening for him.”

You glance down at your hand in Charles’ grasp, his touch grounding you as his words settle over you. 

“Logan’s spent so long hiding from himself,” Charles continues. “I think he’s convinced himself he doesn’t deserve that kind of peace.”

“And you think I can give him that peace?” you ask quietly, your eyes flicking back up to Charles’ face.

He smiles knowingly and gives your hand a squeeze. “You already have, dear.”

+++

“Want some help?”

You turn to find Logan standing in the entrance of the kitchen, hands tucked into his pockets.

It’s a rare night—one where Logan’s chosen to stay home, taking a night off from the almost endless driving he does. He’s dressed down, well worn jeans and a button-up flannel, and for once you actually think he looks comfortable.

You smile, surprised, but happy to see him there. “Sure, the company would be nice,” you reply as he comes to stand next to you. “Want to wash and dice the potatoes?”

Logan nods and rolls up his sleeves before reaching for the bowl of potatoes you had set aside earlier. You watch him for a moment as he settles into the task with a quiet focus. 

“Smells good,” he comments, gesturing towards the oven. “What’re we having?”

“Charles has been asking for beef tenderloin for weeks now, so I’m finally indulging him.” You finish trimming the last of the green beans and toss them into the bowl beside you. “You know, if you have any favorite meals you’d like me to make, you can tell me.”

Logan pauses and glances at you as he shuts off the tap. He clears his throat and says, “You already are.”

You blink in surprise as Logan’s words sink in and then the realization dawns on you. A soft smile spreads across your face as you piece together the extent of Charles’ meddling. You can’t find it in you to be annoyed and only feel a mix of amusement and fondness towards the old man as you chuckle softly to yourself.

“What’s so funny?” Logan asks, raising his eyebrow as he catches your expression.

“Oh, nothing,” you say, waving him off with a smile. 

Logan doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t pry as he picks up the knife and begins to deftly dice the potatoes. You watch him for a moment, captivated by the simple domesticity of the task. It’s in direct contrast to the man you’ve seen numerous times before, brooding and gruff, brimming with an almost untamed violence. 

It suits him, you think, this quieter version of himself.

You both finish the prep with relative ease. He helps you set the table as the rest of the food cooks, plates clinking softly as he sets them down. You busy yourself with finishing the green beans in a garlic butter as you wait for for the tenderloin to rest enough to carve into. 

“Ah, my dear, this smells wonderful,” Charles announces as he rolls into the kitchen, a warm smile on his face. “And you managed to pull Logan out of his room. What a treat.”

Logan snorts in response, giving Charles a pointed glare.

“I dare say it’s because the company has improved much as of late,” Charles says, his eyes twinkling in amusement as he glances between the both of you. “We all know he’s not out here for my benefit.”

You laugh as you bring the dishes to the table, noting the faintest of blushes creeping along Logan’s cheeks. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Charles.”

“As you should, dear. Your personality is quite sparkling.” He looks over towards Logan. “Isn’t it, Logan?”

Logan’s eyes land on you as he answers, “Yes. Yes, it is.”

Dinner begins quietly, the three of you settling into easy conversation as the first few bites are consumed. Both Charles and Logan hum in delight and a warmth blooms within you watching them both. This—this is the simplicity you’ve been craving with Logan.

As the meal continues, Charles launches into his usual repertoire of stories, those of the school and his students, his words brimming with nostalgia and pride as he talks. Logan sits back in his chair, arms crossed as he listens to him speak, shaking his head fondly at some of the memories.

“You know,” Charles begins, setting his fork down with an air of mischief, “I don’t think I ever told you how I met Logan, have I?”

Logan’s head snaps up. “Don’t, Chuck.”

But Charles is already smiling at you, ignoring Logan’s warning. “It’s a good story, dear. See, Logan had quite the career as an underground cage fighter.”

You lift your brows in surprise and you glance over at Logan, who’s thoroughly unamused by Charles’ choice of topic. “Cage fighting, huh?” you ask, unable to suppress your curiosity. 

Logan shifts uncomfortably in his seat, stabbing at his potatoes with a little more force than necessary. “It wasn’t a career,” he mutters. “Just a distraction. Way to get by.”

“Mmm, yes, perhaps,” Charles chuckles, clearly enjoying himself. “Regardless of the reason, it lead you to this exact moment. Didn’t it, Logan?”

Logan narrows his eyes at Charles, though the glare is only half-hearted. “You make it sound like all it all had some grand purpose.”

“Did it not?” Charles says gently, his tone shifting into something more serious. “Kept you alive, for one. But more than that, it brought you to us. To me.” He pauses for a moment, his eyes darting towards you. “To her.”

The words hang in the air and you glance over at Logan, whose expression softens just slightly. Without thinking, you reach across the table and give his forearm a gentle squeeze. His eyes meet yours, a flicker of a smile tugging at his lips.

Charles watches the exchange with quiet satisfaction before clearing his throat. “Well, I believe my work here is done,” he announces, wheeling himself back from he table. “Logan, fancy a game of chess? I haven’t made a player out of her yet.”

You laugh to yourself as Logan follows Charles into the living room. After clearing the kitchen from dinner and loading the last of the dishes into the dishwasher, you join them both in the living room. Tucking yourself into the couch, you read while the two of them play, the clinking of wooden chess pieces and the occasional dry quip from Charles filling the room.

From your spot on the couch, you glance up from your book every now and then to watch them. Logan’s brow furrows in concentration, while Charles’ face is more relaxed as they play. You smile to yourself, wondering how often they played like this in the past, when times were simpler.

You’re not sure when you fell asleep or how long you’ve been out, but you’re jostled awake as two large, warm arms wrap around you, holding you close as you’re lifted off the couch. Logan’s familiar scent—cigar smoke and pine—fill your nose and you blink up to find him walking you down the hall towards your room.

“Logan?” you mumble, voice thick with sleep. “D’you really cage fight?”

Logan chuckles softly, the sound rumbling through his chest. “I really did.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No.”

You blink slowly, your sleep-laden mind struggling to process his answer. “Not even a little?” Your voice is barely audible as you nestle closer into the warmth of his chest.

“Not in the way you think,” he answers, nudging open the door to your room with his foot.

You’re too drowsy to ask what he means and instead you hum softly, a noncommittal sound that Logan feels more than hears. Lowering you onto the bed, he moves with a gentleness you’ve never felt from him before. He brushes a strand of hair from your face and pulls the blanket over you before he turns to leave.

Your limbs are heavy, eyes barely open, but you call out softly—“Logan?”

He looks back towards you. “Yeah?”

“I’m glad Charles found you,” you murmur, closing your eyes.

Logan doesn’t answer, but you swear you feel the lightest of kisses against the top of your head before he leaves.

+++

It’s deep into the night when you hear the front door finally open. Your heart flutters against your ribs as you swing out of bed, unsure of what condition you’ll find him in. He was expected back two days ago, those extra hours away feeling like an unfathomable eternity. 

You find him sitting at the kitchen table, dress shirt hanging off one shoulder, the rest of his clothes rumpled and bloodied. A large gash oozes from his shoulder and you can’t stop the gasp that falls from your lips. 

Logan looks up at you, eyes narrowed and lined with exhaustion. “Don’t look at me like that,” he grunts, tugging off the rest of his shirt. 

“How else am I supposed to look at you?” you ask, taking a tentative step forward. “No phone call or text letting me know you’re not coming home and then you waltz in after midnight soaked in blood and covered in wounds.” Unshed tears burn in your eyes but you will yourself not to cry. 

“Didn’t ask you to care about me,” he bites back, but his tone is more weary than argumentative. 

“Oh, fuck you, Logan,” you snip, but your tone lacks venom.

He ignores you, pushing up from the chair with a heavy groan and limps over towards the cabinets. He shuffles through one of them, pulling out the makeshift sewing kit before sitting back down. You watch as he attempts to thread the needle, growing increasingly frustrated when he keeps missing. 

Shoving down your own frustration, you pull up a chair next to him and reach for the needle and thread. He pulls his hands away from you, turning in the chair to keep you away. You chase after his movements, finally grabbing his wrists and removing the supplies from his grasp.

“I don’t need your help,” he growls. 

You sigh, tired of this same argument, this same endless loop every time he comes home injured. “Goddamit, Logan, just let me help you.”

He drags his gaze up to yours, eyes tracing the lines of your face. His chest still heaves with heavy breaths, but you can see the anger bleed from him. He nods once, turning just enough so that you have access to his wound. Threading the needle, you place a gentle hand on his shoulder, ignoring the flinch he gives at your touch. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” you whisper. 

Logan huffs. “It’s a needle, darlin’. It’s not gonna feel nice.”

You try to ignore the flip your heart does at his use of the word darling. Despite his earlier gruffness and proclivity to push you away, Logan has softened to you over the last couple of months. Since that first dinner you shared, he’s joined you and Charles more often. Or if he comes home late, sought out the leftovers you’ve kept for him. He’s engaged in conversation, offering small pieces of himself, pieces that you’ve cradled close and nurtured. 

But there’s a tension between you, thick and heavy in the air, and you wonder if he feels it too. Feels that same undeniable pull you’ve always felt in his presence. You’d like to think so, otherwise you were doomed to love him silently, your feelings for him bound in the quiet of your mind.

“Just trust me,” you say. 

Slowly, you release your power, warmth spreading from your fingertips, easing his pain and discomfort as you begin to stitch him up. You try to ignore the heavy press of his gaze on your face and you can almost hear his unspoken thoughts, his words still stuck on his tongue.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, his shoulder relaxing as you continue to work.

You glance up at him then, finding his expression softer than you’ve seen it. “A mutant is a dangerous thing to be, Logan,” you answer, your voice soft. “Few people know what I can do. Those I trust.”

For a long moment, Logan just looks at you, his eyes unreadable. Then, a rough, tired sigh falls from his lips. “You coulda told me.”

You take a steadying breath, his words lingering in the space between you. “Maybe,” you say, your fingers brushing against his skin as you continue to stitch. “But you don’t make it easy to talk to you.”

Logan lets out a low huff. “No. I guess I don’t, do I?”

You finish the last stitch, securing the knot. Your fingers linger a touch long than necessary, the warmth of his skin a comfort you’re loathe to lose just yet. Slowly, you lift your gaze to his and you feel your heart beat solidly against your ribs as he looks back at you like he’s seeing something there he hadn’t allowed himself to before. 

Logan’s voice is low when he finally speaks. “Why you keep stickin’ around? Watchin’ me come home time after time covered in blood?”

“Because you deserve it.” The words tumble from your mouth before you can stop them. “Even if you don’t see that.”

He doesn’t respond, not right away, as he continues to watch you, his eyes tracing the lines of your face. Then he reaches up for you, fingers curling around your wrist, his skin warm and rough against yours. He holds you there as if grounding himself in your presence, his thumb drawing random patterns against your skin. The gesture is simple, but vulnerable and open in a way he rarely shows.

“I’m no good for you,” he murmurs, glancing down at where he’s touching you. “For anybody.”

“How ‘bout you let me be the judge of that?” you answer, your voice steady. “You’re more than you think you are.”

Logan clenches his jaw, a flicker of disbelief crossing his features, and you know deep below the surface he’s waging a war against himself, one he’s been fighting for far too long. His thumb stills on your wrist, his grip loosening slightly, but not letting go. 

Placing your hand over his, you give him a soft smile. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up.”

+++

You’re surprised that he doesn’t argue, doesn’t try to brush you off or push you away as you gently nudge him towards the bathroom. He still gives you a dubious glance as he looks down at the tub, but you just ignore it, moving past him to run the tap.

You give him privacy to undress and get settled before you reenter the bathroom. The sight of him, as large as he his with his knees pulled up to his chest, makes you laugh, garnishing a terse look from him.

“You find this amusing?”

“Big man in a little tub? Yeah, I do,” you reply with a smile. “Just relax, Logan. This’ll be our secret.”

He huffs, but does seem to visibly relax, resting his arms over his knees. You kneel down in front of him, resting one hand gently against his forearm as your other reaches for the washcloth. You can feel the tension release from his muscles as your power floods through him and he breathes out a soft, “Oh,” as all the pain and discomfort is eased from his body.

You wonder how long it’s truly been since he’s felt like this, unburdened by the pain and suffering of his own body. Your heart aches for him as you slowly begin to wash him, rubbing soft circles over the scarred flesh of his back, rinsing away the blood dried to his skin. 

Even battered and marred as he is, you still find him beautiful—you always have. When you first started working with him all those months ago, you felt that pang of attraction when you met him, you’d have been blind not to. Ruggedly handsome, so strong and sure of himself. But you know that wasn’t all that drew you to him. Deep down, below all the tough, seemingly impenetrable exterior, you saw the man he truly was. Someone born of scars and rough edges, yet gentle. Someone who would selflessly put himself before others, even at his own expense. 

You let the cloth linger a moment longer against his skin before dipping it back into the water, watching as his blood rinses from the fabric. Squeezing the excess water out, you press it back against his collarbone, tracing the warm cloth along his neck and over his shoulders. Logan doesn’t move, his eyes half-closed, his expression relaxed in a way you’ve never seen before.

Something deep tugs at you as you realize how vulnerable he is right now, how trusting. He hides behind a gruff exterior, his true self guarded so carefully so that he doesn’t let people in, doesn’t open himself up to the hurt that trusting another person can bring. But maybe you’ve finally cracked through, broken down a little bit of that wall he surrounds himself with.

The warm water drips from his skin as you continue to wash him, letting your fingers trail gently along the newly cleaned lines of his arms. Logan shivers at your touch, but he doesn’t pull away. If anything, he seems to lean into it, his breathing deepening, muscles falling even more slack. 

“Feel nice?” you ask in a murmur, voice barely above a whisper.

He nods, finally glancing up at you through his half-lidded gaze. “’S very nice,” he replies, his voice rough.

“Good. You deserve it,” you say, repeating your sentiment from earlier.

You feel a flicker of warmth as his eyes meet yours and he simply nods. It takes everything in you to not smile too widely, to keep the moment gentle, but you take his acceptance to heart. 

Running the cloth down his ribs, you pause when you feel the misshapen knot of a bruise beneath your fingers and glancing down, you find a deep purple hue coloring his skin. Your eyes dart to his with worry, knowing that an injury like that will take him at least a week to heal, if not longer, in his weakened state. That with every breath he’ll feel the pain of his muscles pulling and the bruise spreading if you’re not touching him.

Dropping the washcloth in the water, you press your palm against his side and take in a deep breath to steady yourself. Then, a warmth spreads from your skin into his as you pull his injury from him, feeling his skin knit back together, feeling his abused muscles realign themselves under his skin. A dull, yet sharp ache, blooms along your ribs as you continue to pull his pain into yourself, erasing the injury from his body. With a final gasp, you draw back, your fingers now running along unmarred flesh knitted whole. 

Logan tilts your chin up, forcing you to meet his gaze as the back of his knuckles brush against your cheek. His eyes flicker to yours, holding your gaze, and for a moment, the room falls into a deep quiet.

That pull between you, the magnetic force that you’ve felt since the beginning, feels amplified now. You’re acutely aware of every inch of space between you—how small it is, how easy it would be to close it. How badly you want to close it. You swallow, feeling the tension coil in your belly as he continues to hold your gaze, unblinking, but more open and raw than he’s ever been before.

“What are you doing to me?” he asks.

Your breath catches in your throat at his question, voice rough and laced with something between wonder and disbelief. As if he can’t quite fathom what you’ve done for him—what you’ve given him so freely.

Logan’s eyes search yours, his fingers drifting from your cheek to trace along your jaw, lingering with a tenderness that belies the man he presents to the outside world. His gaze is steady and intimate, as if he’s trying to understand you in a way that goes beyond words. But you say nothing, your heart pounding too loudly in your ears to form a reply.

“You took it on yourself, my pain?”

You simply nod, distracted by the way Logan’s fingers continue to brush along the edge of your ear, tracing the lines of your face as if he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he lets go. 

“Why?”

“Because I want to,” you whisper, unable to resist the pull of his hand against your skin, the warmth of his touch that you feel with every fiber of your being. “Because it’s the one thing I can do to help you.”

A beat of silence passes, the air thick and heavy with unspoken words. He exhales, shaky and deep, letting his hand slide to the back of your neck. The calloused pads of his fingers press gently against your skin, anchoring you in place and you can feel him pull you closer, his gaze dropping to your lips, his breath mingling with yours in the small, intimate space between you.

“I shouldn’t want this, want you,” he says, voice so low it’s almost a rumble. “But, fuck, I do.” 

His confession is raw, leaving him unguarded for the first time in a long time and before he can pull back, before he can throw those walls back up around himself, you close the gap, resting your forehead against his. You bring your hand up to touch his face, thumb brushing over his cheek as you breath him in, feeling the heat radiate between you. 

Logan’s hand slides further along your neck, his fingers tangling in your hair as he finally, gently, presses his lips to yours. His kiss isn’t demanding or rushed or filled with passion, but a lingering connection, the promise of something more. His lips are softer than you imagined, his touch more careful than you expected, as if he’s afraid he’ll break you. Slowly, his thumb traces circles against your cheek, steadying and soothing, pulling you closer. 

When he pulls back, he rests his forehead against yours, eyes closed. His breath is warm against your skin. “I don’t wanna push you away anymore,” he murmurs.

“Good because I don’t want you to.”

Logan lets out a breath, a hint of a smile finally softening his features. 

Reluctantly, you pull away and pick the washcloth up again, intent on finishing what you started. The water turns to rust as you wash him of blood and grime, making sure you reach each cut, each bruise, each scar on his body that makes up the map of who he is. 

You turn off the tap and hand him a towel, averting your eyes as he stands, wrapping the towel low across his hips. Logan reaches for you, tugging on the collar of your shirt to pull you closer. You stumble a bit as he pulls you in, surprised by the insistence in his grip. Logan’s eyes meet yours, an intensity behind his gaze that makes your breath catch.

“C’mere,” he murmurs, hand slipping along your jaw, his thumb pressing against your bottom lip. 

You’re drawn forward as Logan’s lips find yours again, but this time there’s an urgency behind the kiss, a desperation and need he’s no longer trying to hide. He holds your face gently in his hands as he deepens the kiss, his nose pressing against yours, his beard scraping against your skin and you find yourself melting against him.

This is what you’ve been craving since you met him. Despite it all—the rage simmering just below his surface, the sharpness of his exterior, the sometimes shocking callousness of his words—you always knew there was a tenderness underneath, a softness that even his tortured past couldn’t erase. 

Logan’s hands drift from your face, trailing down your neck and tracing along the curve of your spine as he presses you closer until there’s no space between you. The dampness of his skin bleeds into your shirt and you gasp into his mouth when he shifts his hips just enough and you feel heat of his erection against your thigh.

He pulls away from your mouth long enough to husk against your lips, “I’m old, not dead.” His teeth nip lightly at your bottom lip. “I’ve gotta beautiful woman lettin’ me kiss her, what did you expect?”

Your fingers trail along the edge of the towel slung low across this hips and a thrill runs through you as you feel his abdominal muscles flutter beneath your touch. You peer up at him, noting the flush of his skin, the black of his eyes as you tug the fabric just enough to loosen it. “How long has it been since someone has touched you, Logan?” you ask, your breath warm in the space between you.

Logan’s hands urge your hips closer, seeking friction as he starts to slowly rut against your thigh. You hear him swallow as your fingers dip below the fabric, brushing along the damp hair at the base of his cock. 

“F—fuck,” he groans, guttural and low, his head dropping down to your shoulder. “Since before you.”

The weight of Logan’s confession presses into you and in that moment you want to give him everything. Wrap him in all the love you can muster, show him something other than pain and suffering. 

You move your hand from the towel, allowing the fabric to fall from his waist and pool forgotten on the floor. Logan’s breath catches as your fingers wrap around him fully, the heat and weight of his cock pressing against your palm. 

A ragged groan escapes his throat. “Christ,” he mutters, voice thick and vibrating against your skin. “You don’t gotta—”

“I want to,” you interrupt, slowly and deliberately dragging your hand along his length, tracing the vein along the underside of his cock with your fingertips.

Logan’s hips jerk involuntarily, seeking friction, chasing your hand, and you oblige, tightening your grip just enough to elicit another groan from him. 

“What do you like?” The question lands in the sliver of space between you, your strokes still light, teasing.

“Firmer, more ah—” He breaks off as you tighten your grip on the upstroke. “Fuck, yes, like that, sweetheart.”

A shiver runs down your spine as his hands find your waist, fingers clutching at you almost hard enough to bruise. His breaths are growing uneven, each exhale warm against your neck as he fights to maintain some semblance of control.

“You keep that up,” he rasps, lips grazing your ear, “and I’m not gonna last long.”

His admission sends a rush of pride through you and you tilt your head back to look at him, your thumb brushing over the sensitive head of his cock, spreading the wetness there. Logan’s eyes meet yours, dark and heavy-lidded, his expression raw and unguarded. You like him like this, such a large, imposing man boiled down to pure wanton need. 

“I don’t mind,” you reply, keeping your movements steady, your strokes firm yet gentle. You focus on the subtle shifts in his breathing, the way his fingers grip you tighter each time you find the right rhythm. “Just wanna make you feel good, Logan.”

He leans forward, capturing your lips into a kiss that’s both rough and messy, teeth nipping at your lip as his tongue licks into your mouth. He groans are muffled against your mouth as his hips begin to thrust in time with your strokes, his movements growing more erratic as he chases after his release. 

“Can’t believe—ah, fuck—can’t believe how good you’re makin’ me feel,” he growls against your lips.

You smile into his mouth, your free hand brushing along his hipbone as your strokes quicken. His whole body tenses, the muscles in his shoulders and arms flexing, his abdominal muscles taut as he teeters on the edge.

“Let go, Logan,” you say. “I’ve got you.”

With a strangled groan, he comes, his release spilling over your hand, hot and thick. His body shudders against yours as he buries his face in the crook of your neck. You hold him close as he continues to thrust lazily into your grip, your own movements slowing as you guide him through the aftershocks. 

For a moment, neither of you speaks, then Logan lifts his head, his hazel eyes soft as they meet yours. “You walked into my life and I knew—I knew—you would ruin me.”

You smile to yourself, unable to stop the thought that floats into your head—he’s ruined you as well. 

+++

The text comes in at a little over one AM—hurt.

You jump out of bed, adrenaline rushing through your veins as you slip into one of his discarded flannels and head out into the night. Pacing the driveway, your heart jumps into your throat at every passing headlight, your thumbnail almost bitten down to the quick as you wait for him.

The minutes bleed into eternity until you finally see the limo turn down the long drive and it takes all your willpower to not run and meet him halfway. You’re bouncing on your heels as he finally comes to a stop, the driver’s side door opening with a faint groan of steel. 

Your heart stutters in your chest as he emerges from the car, blood soaking through his shirt, dark and spreading, as he steps towards you on shaky legs. Logan’s face is pale in the moonlight, his breathing uneven and shallow and white-hot dread shoots up your spine as you see his arm hanging limp, two of his claws unsheathed and dripping blood.

“Oh, fuck, fuck!” you gasp, rushing to his side.

Logan tries to wave you off, gritting his teeth as he grips the doorframe. “”M fine,” he grits, but the tremor in his voice betrays him. 

You reach for him, hands already attempting to steady him as his knees buckle and he collapses to the ground beneath him. “Careful. Claws,” he rasps as his left hand seeks purchase against your shoulder.

“I don’t fucking care about your claws, Logan,” you snap, although you both know your anger isn’t at him. You glance up at him and for once you think you actually see fear in his eyes. “What happened?”

“Gas. Robbery.” Each word punches out of his chest, the effort to speak sending tremors down his limbs. “Got ‘em.” He nods down towards his limp arm, claws still unsheathed, but slowly, so slowly starting to retract.

He winces as you help him peel off his coat to get to the shirt underneath. Your fingers shake as they trace the holes the bullets made—one in his shoulder, dangerously close to his lungs and the other just below his ribs. Hooking your fingers through the fabric, you rip it from his chest—the wounds are deep and his skin is hot and slick with sweat.

Panic claws at you and unshed tears burn in your eyes. You’ve seen Logan hurt before, but this—this was different. His breathing is painfully shallow, his usual gruffness and resilience absent. 

“Logan, you’re not healing,” you whisper, your voice shaking as your fingers stain with blood. Logan simply grunts, trying to wave you off, but lacking the strength. “I can’t…I can’t lose you. I can help.”

Logan’s eyes widen as he grabs for your wrist. “No. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I don’t care!” you shout. “I love you, dammit, and I’m not just going to sit here and watch you die!”

Before he can protest, you press your palms over his wounds, the familiar warmth of your power surging through you as it spreads from your palms into his torn flesh.

The pain hits you like a freight train.

It’s sharp and relentless, searing through your shoulder and into the softness of your belly like molten fire. You gasp, biting back a scream as your body jerks instinctively away from the intensity, every cell in your body demanding you withdraw from the torture. 

But you don’t stop. You cling to him, tears streaming down your face as you channel your power into him, knitting his flesh back together. You can feel it, the way his muscles, bones and tissue rearrange themselves, months of healing taking place in mere moments. Every second feels like an eternity, but you refuse to let go.

You’re dimly aware of Logan yelling at you to stop, his own pain momentarily forgotten as he watches you endure his agony. 

Black dots dance in your vision as the last of his wounds come together, the spent bullets clinking to the gravel and you finally collapse against him, trembling, your breath coming in ragged gasps. The fire in your body begins to dull, fading to a cold, hollow ache as Logan wraps his arms around you, pulling you tight against his chest.

“Hey,” you mumble against him, your voice barely above a whisper. “You’re okay now.”

“Me?” Logan’s voice is low, disbelieving as his hand cradles the back of your head as if you might shatter. “You’re the one—why the fuck would you do that? You could’ve—dammit, you—”

His words break off, his forehead dropping to yours as his breath shudders against your cheek. You can feel the tension radiating through him, warring with himself between his gratitude and anger, between his guilt and the love he’s too afraid to speak out loud.

“I told you why,” you answer, lifting your head to look up at him. 

Logan’s jaw clenches, his words caught in his throat, but his eyes say everything is voice won’t. You don’t need him to say it, not yet, but you can feel it, pressing just below the surface.

“C’mon, let’s get you inside.”

+++

There’s a reverence in which Logan washes you. 

Steam swirls around you as he works the thickly lathered loofah over your shoulders, down across your collarbones and down along the soft planes of your stomach. The water rinses away the faint metallic tang of blood, leaving behind the fresh scent of soap. He continues with a silent determination, as if the act of washing you can erase all the pain you’ve taken from him.

You know better than to convince him you’re fine, that the pain is always temporary, that it only lasts for a few minutes, sometimes just a bit longer. That the pain is something you’d endure for him again and again if he’d let you. 

His thumb brushes along the underside of your ribs, searching for a wound you know he won’t find. You reach for him, lacing your fingers together with his. He blinks up at you, hazel eyes holding far too much worry for such a stoic man.

“I’m not going to break, Logan,” you say softly.

A wordless noice escapes his throat as he removes himself from your grasp and continues to work, ditching the loofah in favor of his hands. His fingers are warm and calloused against your skin as they glide lower, down over the swell of your hips, over your thighs, down towards your knees. 

His touch morphs from one of care and comfort to one more sensual, simmering with unspoken tension as his fingers rest in the hollow behind your knee. You glance down at him, water droplets catching in his hair, running off the slope of his nose. 

Though you’ve seen him bare before, you can help but trace the lines of his body—the broadness of his shoulders, the well defined muscles of his chest, the sturdiness of his thighs, the scars that mar his skin. The sight of him stirs something deep within you and you feel your pulse thrum beneath your skin.

“Logan,” you murmur, your voice almost lost in the sound of the water.

He looks up at you then, eyes locking with yours. A storm swirls within them, a mix of guilt, affection and an intensity that takes your breath away. Leaning in, he presses the barest of kisses to the inside of your knee before he rises to his full height, pressing you close.

“D’you mean what you said before?” he asks, voice low.

I love you, dammit!

“Yes,” you answer without hesitation.

Logan exhales sharply, the tension he’s been holding coiled in his muscles loosening as he loops his arms around your waist. “I’m not very good with words,” he admits, his breath fanning across your damp skin. “Can I show you?”

There’s no mistaking the meaning behind his words and you can only nod, your voice catching in your throat. 

His lips find yours, mouth moving over yours slow and deliberate as if he’s savoring the taste of you. The first touch is a spark, the second a fire, and by the third, it’s an inferno that engulfs you both and leaves you breathless. Logan kisses you like you’re his anchor, his salvation, his touch desperate and full of everything he can’t yet put into words.

Your fingers slide into his hair, gripping the strands at the nape of his neck as you pull him closer, deepening the kiss. He groans against your mouth, the sound swallowed in the space between you. His tongue brushes against yours, teasing and exploring and you respond in kind, your nails scraping along his scalp.

Logan’s control is fraying. You can feel it in the way his teeth nip at your bottom lip, the way his hands press along the curve of your spine, the way he can’t seem to find enough of your skin to touch, to caress. A low growl rumbles through his chest as you slip a hand between your slick bodies, finding his cock, thick and heavy against your belly.

You give one slow drag of your palm along his length before he’s gripping your thighs and forcing your legs around his waist. His mouth leaves yours, trailing down to the curve of your jaw as he presses you against the wall, the coolness of the tile a direct contrast to the heat of your skin and you can’t stop the gasp that escapes your lips. 

Despite his age, the metal bones inside him slowly poisoning him and causing him human aches and pains, he’s still able to hold you up solidly with one arm as the other trails along your hip bone and dips down to where you’re warm and wet. 

“This all for me?” he asks in a murmur, sliding a finger along the seam of your cunt, just barely brushing against your clit. 

Your breath hitches and you grip his shoulders, nails pressing lightly into his skin as you nod. Logan’s eyes darken at your reaction, the faintest hint of a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Yes,” you finally manage to whisper. “Always for you.”

“Good,” he growls, leaning in to nip at the skin just below your ear. The deep rumble of his voice vibrates through you, his touch deliberate and almost torturously slow as he slides his fingers through your folds, spreading your slickness with a focused and unrelenting precision. 

“Oh, fuck,” you gasp, your head tilting back against the wall as he finally presses his thumb to your clit, circling it with just enough pressure to have your thighs trembling around his waist. 

“I got you,” he coos against your skin, his lips trailing from the pulse point in your neck to your collarbone. His teeth scrape along the curve of your shoulder, his free hand gripping your hip tighter to steady you as his fingers continue to tease and coax. “Lemme make you feel good.”

Every nerve ending is afire beneath him, every motion, every stroke of his fingers against your cunt leaving your mind reeling with pleasure. Your nails dig further into corded muscles of his shoulders, desperate for something to anchor yourself to. You pull back when you see the tiny, crescent shaped cuts marring his skin.

His eyes snap up to yours, sharp and molten. “No, do it,” he urges, fingers still moving. “Mark me with somethin’ pretty.”

“Fuck, Logan,” you gasp. 

“Say my name again,” he demands, his voice rough and commanding. There’s a quiet desperation in his tone, as if hearing it grounds him. Grounds him to this moment. To you. 

You can’t help but obey, whispering his name like a prayer, and he rewards you by slipping one long finger inside you, the sensation sending a jolt of pleasure along your spine. Logan watches your face intently as if memorizing the way you react to his touch. When he adds a second finger and slowly begins to thrust his hand, you cling further to him, the heat inside you building to an almost unbearable intensity.

“Good girl,” he murmurs, his voice low and reverent. “You’re so beautiful like this. So wet and warm and tight around me.”

His words barely register in your mind, too focused on the way his fingers curl and thrust inside you, finding that soft spot that makes your eyes roll back. He’s relentless now, his thumb pressing hard against your clit as he brings you closer and closer to the edge.

“Logan, I’m so close,” you whine, your hips beginning to roll against his hand, seeking just a bit more friction, forcing his fingers deeper inside of you.

The tension coiling low in your belly finally snaps, your orgasm washing over you in waves that make your whole body shudder as you cry out his name. Logan holds you through it, his hand continuing to thrust against you as he draws out every ounce of pleasure from you, his own breathing ragged against your skin.

When you finally come down, Logan presses a kiss to your temple as he helps you unwrap your legs from his waist and carefully sets you down, keeping you close. 

You tilt your head to meet his gaze, your fingers tracing the line of his jaw. “I didn’t think you’d be into shower sex, old man,” you tease with a smile.

His laugh is low. “I can make exceptions. I need a bed to fuck you properly, though.” 

“Prove it,” you challenge.

+++

The heat and intensity between you doesn’t diminish as Logan helps you out of the shower and guides you down the hallway towards his bedroom. A shiver of anticipation crawls up your spine as you get closer, knowing that once you cross this line, there’s no going back, that he will have claimed you fully.

You scoot back onto the bed, watching as he approaches you with a fire in his gaze that doesn’t waver. He climbs onto the mattress, knee pressing down between yours as he cages you in from above, gently pinning you beneath him. 

Leaning down, his lips brush against yours, teasing. “Still wanna challenge me, sweetheart?” His voice is a low gravelly growl that sends a prickling rush of arousal down your limbs.

“Always,” you reply breathlessly, arching into his touch as his hands slide down your thighs, parting them with ease. 

His grin is sharp as he leans back to take you in fully and you acutely feel the weight of his gaze against your skin. He traces his calloused fingers over your damp skin, along the dips of your collarbones, under the swell of each breast, mapping the curve of your hips as if committing you to memory. Dipping his head, he leans down between your legs, his beard grazing the sensitive skin of your inner thighs and you can’t help but shudder at the sensation.

“You’re so fuckin’ beautiful,” he says, almost to himself, his voice dripping with desire. He drags his lips higher, brushing along your damp cunt, his breath hot and tantalizing. “And all mine.”

The possessiveness in his tone has you clenching around nothing, heat pooling low in your belly and your fingers tangle in his hair, urging him closer. But he ignores your silent plea, almost deliberately testing your patience as he kisses you everywhere except where you want him most.

“Logan, please,” you gasp, the ache between your thighs almost painful.

“Patience,” he chides with a smirk, though his own resolve seems to be thinning. His hands grip your hips, pulling you closer before he flattens his palms against your thighs, opening you fully to him. Then, his tongue is on you, lapping at you with flat, broad strokes in a rhythm that quickly has you teetering on the edge.

Logan’s focus is unrelenting, his low growls of approval vibrating through you as he works you over with an enthusiasm that proves to you this is about more than just pleasure—he’s claiming you, showing you just how much you mean to him. Making you his. 

Your thighs tremble around him and his warm, rough hands hold you steady as he slips one, then two fingers deep inside of you. It’s embarrassing how quickly you come as he thrusts his fingers against that spot inside you, your second orgasm of the night crashing over you as his name falls from his lips in a breathless moan. 

Before you can properly catch your breath, Logan is moving from between your thighs, making his way back up your body, leaving wet, open-mouthed kisses against your skin. His lips finally find yours in a kiss that’s messy and desperate and you can taste yourself on his tongue, sharp and bright, and the intimacy of it sends a thrill through you. 

“You taste so fuckin’ good,” he groans against your lips, his voice wrecked as he grinds his hips against yours, his cock hard and insistent against your hip. “Could spend the rest of my life between between those thighs.”

“Why stop there?” you tease, your lips tugging into a smirk. “I thought you said you’d fuck me properly.”

Logan’s eyes darken, your challenge seeming to light something dark and primal in him. His grin is all teeth as he sits back on his heels, hands curling around your hips and pulling you down the bed like you weigh nothing until your hips are flush with his. “You gotta mouth on you, sweetheart. Should we see if you can still talk stuffed full of my cock?”

The weight of his cock brushes against your slick folds and you gasp at the sensation, your nerve endings exquisitely sensitive. Logan grips himself at the base, giving himself one languid stroke before running the thick head along your cunt, teasing you with shallow thrusts. Each slow, deliberate stroke of him sliding against you leaves you desperate and aching and you lift your hips in search of more.

“Look at you,” he murmurs. “So needy. Bet you’ll take me so well, huh?”

“Yes,” you breathe, nails digging into the muscles of his forearms. “Please.”

He presses into you then, the stretch of his cock making your jaw drop as he takes his time, sinking in inch by inch, filling you completely. Logan’s gaze is locked on yours, heavy and possessive as he watches every flicker of pleasure cross your face. 

“Fuck” he groans when he’s fully seated against your hips, his body trembling with the effort to stay still. “You feel…so fuckin’ tight. So damn perfect.”

Your hands clutch at his shoulders, anchoring yourself to him as he starts to move, pulling out torturously slow before thrusting back in harder, setting a rhythm that’s relentless and consuming. Each stroke of his hips has you crying out, your body arching into his as you meet him thrust for thrust.

“Takin’ me so well, sweetheart,” he growls, his fingers gripping the flesh of your hips hard enough to bruise as he continues to pound into you. “Like you were made for me.”

The sound of skin slapping against skin fills the room, mixing in with your whimpered moans and Logans own ragged groans. He leans down, bracing himself on his forearms, the wiry hair on his chest teasing your nipples as his lips find your neck, biting and sucking marks into your skin that feel like promises.

Your legs wrap around his waist, pulling him in deeper, your heels digging into his back as the coil inside you begins to tighten once more. He feels it too, the way you body clenches around him, and his pace falters slightly, his breaths coming faster.

“C’mon,” he rasps against the pulse point on your neck. “Wanna feel you come. Wanna make you fall apart.”

It doesn’t take much more—just a few more well-angled thrusts that hit that spot inside you and the tension finally snaps, your orgasm ripping through you with a force that leaves you trembling. Logan’s finesse is slipping, thrusts growing erratic as chases his own release.

“Come Logan,” you manage in a whisper. “Come for me.”

His hips stutter as he groans your name, spilling into you as his body tenses, lazily thrusting against you as he wrings out the last of his pleasure. He stays deep inside you, still for several moments before he shifts just enough to collapse against your side.

For a long moment, neither of you moves, the only sounds in the room being your heavy breathes and the pounding of your heart. Logan rests his head against your chest, heavy and sweat slick between your breasts. You brush at the strands of hair against his forehead before running your finger along the old scar on his cheek.

He lifts his head to look up at you, his gaze soft yet still simmering with hunger. “I do, you know,” he murmurs. His fingers brush idly against your skin. “Love you.”

A smile spreads across your face, warming blooming in your chest.

“I know.”

+++

You wake before he does, rolling over to find him prone, face buried in the pillow he hugs close to his chest. Sunlight filters in through the half slatted blinds, catching on the silver in his hair and beard and you can’t help but admire how handsome he looks, how at peace he is beside you. He’s relaxed in sleep for the first time since you came here. You’ve heard his growls and yelps of terror that echo in the night, seen the claw marks that pierce his sheets.

Your mind filters back to last night and how he looked as he came apart inside you, how desperate and needy he was for your touch upon his skin. The memory of his gasps and groans send a rush of warmth over your skin, making you dimly aware of the ache between your legs. Logan, so guarded, so unyielding and seemingly unbreakable, trembled as he came, his voice rough and wrecked as he called out your name. You shiver thinking about it.

You want to hear it again. But not now.

Resisting the urge to reach out and brush the hair from his forehead, you leave him undisturbed and slide out of bed. Padding into the kitchen, you find Charles sitting in his chair at the kitchen table, the newspaper spread out in front of him. He looks up at you with a warm smile as you start a pot of coffee, the machine humming to life. 

“Ah, I see,” he comments, a smirk tugging at his lips.

You glance over at Charles, his eyes back on the paper in front of him, but his smile still paints his face, sly and knowing. Heat creeps up your neck as you busy yourself with the coffee. “Are you reading my mind?” you ask, trying to force nonchalance into your tone.

Charles chuckles softly and taps at his temple. “I don’t have to. You’re projecting. And quite loudly, at that.”

You bite your lip as you fill your mug, leaning against the counter as the coffee warms your hands. You attempt to clear your mind, trying to think of anything mundane—the weather, baseball, laundry. Charles just shakes his head. “Relax, my dear. What the two of you do together as consenting adults is none of my business.”

“Oh, God,” you groan, your cheeks aflame. “That’s what I’m projecting?”

“Not that explicitly, no. You think more in feelings, rather than words. But they’re quite powerful emotions and rather hard to ignore when they’re radiating as strongly as yours are this morning.”

You bury your face in your hand, peeking at Charles through your fingers, which only seems to amuse him further. “You’re enjoying this far too much,” you mutter. 

“Perhaps,” Charles says with a laugh. “But you’re helping him. Healing him. And that, my dear, is worth everything.” 

Before you can respond, you hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the hall. Logan rounds the corner, hair tousled from sleep, his body still bare except for the pair of low slung sweatpants clinging to his hips. His eyes find yours first, softening in a way they rarely do for anyone else as he scratches at the back of his head and mumbles, “Mornin’.”

“Morning,” you reply with a smile, thankful for the distraction. You pour a second cup of coffee and offer it up to him. “Coffee?”

Logan grunts in affirmation, moving towards you, but instead of reaching for the mug, he loops an arm around your waist, pulling you against him. He buries his face in your neck, beard scraping against your skin as he sighs. “Didn’t like wakin’ up with you not there,” he breathes into your hair, his voice so low you almost don’t hear him.

“Sorry,” you whisper. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“S’okay,” he says softly, pressing the lightest of kisses just under your ear. “Next time, wake me.”

Your heart stutters against your ribs at his open display of affection, the softness and warmth in which he holds you, and the promise behind his words. From over his shoulder you see Charles give you a slight nod, a bright smile on his face before he turns his attention back to the newspaper in front of him.

You think back to what Charles told you all those months ago, about how you were a home for Logan. Those words echo in your mind as you feel Logan’s steady weight against you. He’s so different now, soft and unguarded and in that moment you know.

You’re home, too.

[rafecameronssl4t]

Could you write about a phone call from Morocco between the reader and rafe the reader really misses him

Lonely in My Mansion || Rafe Cameron x fem!reader

gif by @rafeyscurtainbangs

A/n: loooove this!!!

Warnings: none rlly

Word count: 764

MASTERLIST

The sun filtered through the large windows, casting a warm glow on the living room as the movers carefully set the velvet couch in place. You tilted your head slightly, stepping back to admire its placement. It was perfect, exactly how you’d envisioned it when selecting it from the showroom. A satisfied grin spread across your face as you clasped your hands together. “That’s perfect right there,” you said, your voice filled with approval as the movers carefully adjusted it into position.

“Where would you like this painting?” a woman asked, holding a canvas wrapped in protective plastic. Taking a moment, you scanned the room, letting your gaze settle on the wall just above the futon. “Right above that futon—” you began, gesturing toward the spot. But before you could finish your sentence, the vibration of your phone in your pocket interrupted you. Pausing, you slipped it out and glanced at the caller ID. A smile tugged at your lips when you saw the name flashing on the screen.

Rafe. The sight of his name alone filled you with a warm, familiar comfort. “Excuse me for a moment,” you said politely to the woman before stepping into the airy kitchen. Lifting the phone to your ear, you answered the call, your voice bright and eager. “Hello?” “Hey, baby,” Rafe’s smooth, familiar drawl came through the line, and you couldn’t stop the grin that spread across your face. “Hi,” you replied, your voice soft but brimming with energy.

As you spoke, you instinctively reached for the fridge, pulling out a pitcher of freshly made juice for the movers bustling about. “How’s it going? Settling into the house okay?” he asked, his tone warm but with a subtle edge of distraction. “Yeah, yeah,” you replied, glancing back toward the living room where the movers worked. “They’re moving in all the furniture and decorations. It’s coming together nicely,” you added with a light laugh.

“Good, good,” Rafe said, his voice softening for a moment before shifting slightly. “Hey, listen, I need a favour.” You paused, your brows knitting together. “What’s up?” you asked, your tone immediately shifting to one of concern. “Is everything okay?” “Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine," he reassured you quickly, though the faint tension in his voice didn’t escape your notice. “I just need you to find a pen that Groff gave me. It should be in the kitchen somewhere, in one of the drawers maybe. ”

“A pen?” you repeated, setting the juice pitcher on the counter and scanning the room. You began opening drawers one by one, your eyes darting around for the item. After a moment, you spotted it in the second drawer, its sleek design catching the light. “Found it,” you said, inspecting it curiously. “Perfect,” Rafe said, his voice tinged with relief. “There should be a name of a hotel written on the side. Can you read it out for me?”

Turning the pen over in your hand, you squinted slightly to make out the embossed letters. “Riyadh Mimouna, Essaouira, Maroc,” you read aloud, the foreign words rolling off your tongue carefully. “Okay, great. Yeah, I think I saw a sign for that,” Rafe's voice dropped, the lightness from earlier replaced by something heavier. You leaned against the counter, a faint frown tugging at your lips. “Rafe,” you said gently, “are you sure everything’s okay?” There was a beat of silence on the other end before he let out a breath.

“Yeah,” he said, though the hesitation in his tone made you question it. “I’m just handling some business. Don’t worry, babe. I’ll get it all back with interest.” Your chest tightened slightly at his words, and you instinctively ran your thumb along the edge of the countertop. “Just… be careful, okay?” you said softly, your concern bleeding through your voice. “I will,” he replied, a low chuckle escaping that managed to ease some of the tension. “I promise. I’ll get this wrapped up and come home as soon as I can.”

A playful smile tugged at your lips as you decided to lighten the mood. “It’s so lonely here,” you said dramatically, your voice taking on a teasing lilt. “And the bed is way too big for just me.” You heard him exhale sharply on the other end, followed by a groan. “Babe,” he drawled, his voice rougher now, “don’t do this to me.” “Do what?” you asked, feigning innocence, your grin widening as you bit your bottom lip to stifle a laugh.

“I think you know,” he muttered, a strained chuckle following his words. You laughed softly, leaning more comfortably against the counter. “Maybe,” you teased, drawing out the word just enough to make him groan again. He sighed heavily, his tone reluctant but firm. “I gotta go,” he said, and you could hear the pull of obligation in his voice. “Okay,” you said quietly, your teasing fading into softness. But just as he was about to hang up, you stopped him. “Rafe?”

“Yeah?” he replied immediately. “I love you,” you said, your voice barely above a whisper but filled with sincerity. “I love you too, baby,” he said without hesitation, the warmth in his voice washing over you like a blanket. “I’ll come home as soon as I can, yeah? Can’t wait to see what you’ve done with the place.” “Please do,” you murmured, a soft smile gracing your lips as you held the phone to your ear, lingering for just a moment longer before the line went quiet.

[help-itrappedmyself]

Dead on Main short part 3

Debating if this can actually still be called a short....

Masterpost to find earlier parts, or my other work.

Danny shudders underneath him and grips the front of Jason’s jacket with both hands. They are both about to make the kiss deeper, when Jason hears the sound of Bats surrounding them. 

Jason can recognize that they make for a weird picture. Jason, kissing some man no one else in the family knows, with the Joker’s dead body five feet away. But he just wants to groan at the interruption. He needs to take Danny back to a safe house so he can learn everything about him as soon as possible. 

Maybe figure out how exactly he killed the Joker while he’s at it. Not that the means change anything about the end point, but Jason is curious.  Because as much as Jason wanted to kill the Joker, planned to kill the Joker, would have if it had come down to it, if this night had ended a little differently.

 The Joker did always seem a little unkillable though. He had a way of coming back. Like a cockroach. Jason may have to make sure that they burn the body.

Jason pulls away from Danny before he could continue the kiss, causing a truly adorable pout. Jason chuckles lightly, stepping back and letting his arms fall to his sides. Batman jumps down from the fire escape he was lurking on. He lands directly behind Jason, with a growl of “Hood”, that Jason knew was both a question and a command. Jason ignored it and watched as Robin jumped down as well. 

Robin crouched next to the Joker and did his own assessment of the body. 

“Dead.” The announcement is not a surprise to anyone present. It still brings Jason joy to hear.

“Hood.” An even lower growl than before. Getting more gravelly, Jason is starting to push Bruce’s tolerance for his bullshit.

It’s not funny. It shouldn’t be funny. But Jason throws his head back and laughs. He laughs for a god ten seconds before he calms and glances behind him at Danny, smiling so wide his cheeks are starting to hurt. Danny gives a small, nervous chuckle when Jason turns to him, but he keeps glancing between him and Bruce. Clearly nervous about Batman’s reaction to the manslaughter.

Jason turns back to Bruce, and his voice comes out so chipper when he talks it elicits another chuckle from Danny.

“I think we should burn him!”

“Hood!” And this one is as exasperated as Batman will allow himself to get in costume. 

Jason saunters over the Robin, whispering at him conspiratorially “We should maybe do this full-vampire style. Chop him up into pieces and then burn him.”

“I can’t help but agree.” Robin mutters, kicking Joker lightly in the arm. Jason liked this kid before, but his affection was growing. Jason  put his arm around Robin in a quick side hug. 

Robin was not expecting it, which gave Jason a full second before he had to dart away from a knife, laughing. 

“Explain. Now.” Batman’s main focus is on Robin and Hood, but he is also crowding Danny, who looks like he is trying to sink into the wall.

“Hey, leave him alone.” Jason walks back over, quickly, hoping Robin will start with the body while he distracts Bruce. He has faith the kid is good for it.

“What is he doing here and what were you doing with him?”

“Batman, this is Danny.” Danny gives a short wave. “Danny here was startled by the Joker, who confronted him while he was very innocently minding his business. Danny then defended himself against him, and now the Joker is dead.”

Batman gave him a blank stare. “Danny killed the Joker.” It’s flat, but conveys his disbelief perfectly.

“Do you see any bullet holes?” 

“Hn.” Batman grunted, turning to look back at the body. Which Robin might have actually been about to get started on. Jason spares a thought for what they would have donw about all the blood

“Robin!” The shout is sharp, and Robin lowers his knife, despondently putting it back in its sheath. “Robin, bag him and get him ready for transport.”

Robin sighs, but starts doing as he was asked.

Batman turns back to Jason and Danny. “ What were you two doing when we arrived?”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Look old man, I know kissing is not unfamiliar to you.” Batman grunts again. “But Danny, my new favorite person,” Jason takes Danny’s hand as Danny smiles at him. “Is my soulmate. Recently discovered, obviously. Just after he did what all of you refused to do for me, and by accident.”

There was a moment of quiet.

“I really didn’t mean to, Batman, I swear.” Danny is still holding Hood’s hand, squeezing it intermittently. Jason squeezes back every time. “Wait, what do you mean they refused to do for you?” Danny peers at the stoic faces of Batman and Robin, before nodding to himself. “Not the time.” 

“Hood, cave for debrief.”

Batman immediately started to turn around, but Jason scoffed. Jason could not believe the nerve actually, gaping a little at Bruce as he turned back around, before turning to look at Danny and then back at Bruce.

“ Hood, I understand the situation, but this is something that must be discussed.”

“B, you can’t be serious! He-”

“Hey, it’s okay.” Jason and Bruce both shift their gazes over to Danny. “I understand that meeting your soulmate in costume is probably not ideal. You don’t know me, and I’m not going to pretend you trust me yet.” Danny’s entire focus was on Hood.

“Go, talk things out with your group. My name is Danny Fenton. I’m sure you can find whatever you need on me with that. Find me later, okay?” Jason looked upset and it hurt Danny to already to see it.

“I’m okay with getting to know you in a mask if need be. Find my number, text me, call me. I can and will wait until you trust me.”

[yvesntul]

vi x reader’s first time together

18+ minors dni, fingering, intimate sex, fem receiving, oral sex, teasing, squirting, vi in love durr

‘ i can’t believe i get to touch you like this, ‘ you close your eyes feeling vi’s lips press against you, just above your pussy, too easily flustered to even look at her, ‘ you’re so fucking beautiful.. ‘ she commented, her lashes bat in a daze, a breathy laugh leaving your lips in attempt to brush it off, she knew you could never take her compliments serious out of getting nervous, but this was different, this was intimate, you both knew that. this was the farthest you both had gone in your relationship and she wanted to do whatever was possible to reassure you it was all okay. she sees your hips squirm under her contact, you were so worked up, such an easy button to push.

‘ vi, you’re teasing .. ‘

‘ mmm, am i ? or are you too nervous to tell me what you want ? ‘ her pixelated eyes hold a menacing glare with yours, but you’re too busy trying to fix your gaze upon anything other than her. the way she was taunting you during your first time with her was sickening, stimulatingly sickening. ‘ i- i don’t know, i want you, just do something already, please. ‘ she huffs a laugh, wasting no more time diving in. vi starts off with a tongue lick to your cunt, slowly licking her way up to your clit before wrapping both lips around the swollen area. your hands run through her hair. the vibrations of her working making you pull and scratch, causing her to grumble against you with pleasure.

‘ baby oh my god t-that feels so fuckin’ g-good- ohh! ‘ your hips move in sync with her mouth, rubbing your cunt against her face as she follows your path, ‘ all this time i didn’t have a taste of you, ‘ she mumbles and yet you’re already losing it, beginning to lose your patience along with your sanity. she was slurping, kissing, licking and penetrating your pussy with her tongue and she had no remorse while doing so. the lewd sounds from your mouth motivating her, pushing her to do so like it was her last breath here. her tongue continued to work as she sucked on what was almost driving you to the edge. ‘ don’t stop— ‘

‘ god, fucking love the sound of your voice right now, ‘ and that’s when vi slips 2 fingers in without warning, and to be honest, there was no need to. if anything, you needed to be warning her for the messy orgasm you were tiptoeing around. ‘ you’re close aren’t you ? i feel it. ‘ she quizzed and you frantically nodded, your breathing getting heavy. she admired you from her point at the end of the bed. her silence catching your attention as she worked her fingers into you. ‘ stop looking at me like that, ‘ you spoke before she smiled. ‘ i can’t look at my girlfriend ? ‘ ‘ no ! ‘

she laughed at how you tensed, her fingers thrusting into your gummy walls along with the impact from the tip of her tongue flicking against your clit — creating the perfect combination for nothing but pure bliss, ‘ i can feel you angel, just let go for me. give me all of it ..’ her words of encouragement were doing its damn thing, the knot in your belly starting to untie itself on vi’s behalf. your body begins to convulse, this moment felt like more than everything to you, especially to vi, hoping she’d be able to show you her love in every way she’s been wanting, with this only being the beginning.

‘ b-baby .. vi … i’m so close– oh my god .. ‘ she quickly intertwined her hand in yours as you squeeze her knuckles for support through your orgasm. you were too busy making the flesh on her hand turn pale from how hard you were holding on to notice how reactive you verbally were, vi loved every sound coming out of you though. it was a beautiful side of you she had never seen. ‘ i’ve got you babe, let go just like that. ‘ as she says this, you start to panic when you feel the certain pressure below you.

her finger is still working your hole, not pulling away for anything or anyone — not even you. vi sees your small hands trying to pry her own away, but she simply stops you by restraining the same hand pushing her. ‘ wait vi— this feels so different, please, oh my .. ‘ you babble but she didn’t care because she knew what was about to come. ‘ i know, baby. i know. ‘ she holds eye contact with you, feeling your walls begin to tighten around her fingers yet again. that’s when she moves faster, jabbing her finger in and smoothly adding another to completely rupture you. her hand was cramping, but she could take that on any day if it meant she’d be able to see you fall apart.

‘ you’re there. you’re right there, you feel that ? ‘ vi’s question not only earns a loud whine from you, but it finishes you off completely. ‘ holy shit i’m fucking c-cumming vi, oh fuck—” you felt couldn’t even pronounce a single word. the only thing you could begin to make out was her name, and even then, it was just hoarse whines. you don’t see it, but she does. she sees it all — the spurts of your cum soaking her hand, drenching the covers, the way your chest rose and fell with each unsteady breath, your eyes looking into the back of your skull with your lips parted softly as she slowly dragged her fingers out of your walls.

you were fucking breathtaking, she couldn’t believe you were hers.

‘ you did so good, you’re the most beautiful girl ever i swear. ‘ she huffs as you smile at her, you lightly grabbed her face with one hand, bringing her into a long kiss. she uses the weight of one elbow to lean over and place kisses onto your temple. your body is still coming down from its peak, and your vision was still foggy — but you still needed her. you still craved her touch like you had a sweet tooth. ‘ you okay ? didn’t hurt you did i ? ‘ ‘ no no, not at all, vi, i just wan’ more .. ‘ your pleading eyes search for her lips, and once you find them, you inch closer. vi seals it for you, pressing her plumped ones onto your own. you feel the same fingers that were inside you creep up to your chin, then lips — trails of your wet essence lingering on your skin.

‘ are you sure ? ‘

𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒 © 𝐘𝐕𝐄𝐒𝐍𝐓��𝐋 | all rights reserved — do not modify, copy, or plagiarize any of my works.

[caplanbuckybarnes]

The Devil's Tailor (mafia!bucky barnes)

Summary: you work for dangerous criminals, most notably, the mafia leader himself, when they need new suits and dresses for political statements.

Warnings: mafia au, a smidge of flirting

WC: 630ish

Read on AO3!

--

The faint scent of cigar smoke clung to the air, mingling with the aroma of freshly pressed fabric. You stood behind the counter of your little tailor shop, fingers delicately threading a needle as if the world outside didn’t exist. But you felt it—the weight of his gaze before he even spoke.

“Miss Y/L/N,” came the low, gravelly voice. “You’ve outdone yourself again.”

You didn’t look up immediately, letting the final stitch slide into place before tying it off. “You say that every time, Mr. Barnes.”

Finally, you raised your eyes to meet his, and there he stood, James Buchanan Barnes, the most dangerous man in the city, dressed in a suit you’d made for him just weeks ago. The midnight blue fabric clung to his broad shoulders like a second skin, the silver cufflinks gleaming under the dim light. Everything about him screamed power, from the glint of his vibranium hand to the calculated smirk playing on his lips.

But it was his eyes that caught you—the sharp, steel-blue gaze that seemed to strip away every layer of pretense.

“Well,” he drawled, stepping closer. “Maybe it’s because you deserve the compliment every time.”

You fought to keep your composure, placing the freshly finished tie on the counter between you. “Flattery won’t get you a discount.”

His smirk deepened, and he reached for the tie, his fingers brushing yours. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Besides, you’re worth every penny.”

“You mean my work is,” you corrected, stepping back to give yourself some breathing room. “What can I do for you this time?”

Bucky leaned against the counter, his presence overwhelming in the small shop. “I need something special. A suit for a meeting.”

You arched a brow. “Special how?”

His expression turned serious, the playful air dissipating. “Let’s just say this meeting might be… heated.”

You nodded, understanding the unspoken words. A bulletproof vest wouldn’t suit his needs, but a suit lined with discreet protective layers? That, you could do.

“I’ll need measurements again,” you said, grabbing your tape measure.

“Think I’ve grown?” he teased, but his tone lacked its usual lightness.

You walked around the counter, gesturing for him to stand straight. “Arms out,” you instructed.

He complied, and as you worked, you couldn’t help but notice the scars peeking out from his collar, the tension in his shoulders, the slight weariness in his eyes.

“You trust me with this?” you asked quietly, your fingers grazing his wrist as you measured.

Bucky’s gaze softened, his voice dropping to a murmur. “I trust you with more than that, doll.”

The weight of his words hung in the air, and for a moment, you forgot about the tape measure in your hands.

“Why me?” you whispered, meeting his eyes. “You could go anywhere. Hire anyone.”

He tilted his head, a small smile curving his lips. “Because you don’t ask questions. You don’t judge. And, most importantly…” His fingers brushed a strand of hair from your face. “You make me look damn good while keeping me alive.”

Your heart skipped a beat, but you forced yourself to focus, clearing your throat. “Well, let’s hope this suit does the trick.”

He chuckled, the sound low and warm. “If anyone can pull it off, it’s you.”

As you finished taking his measurements and scribbled notes, Bucky lingered by the counter, his eyes never leaving you.

“You know,” he said as he turned to leave, “they call you The Devil’s Tailor out there.”

You smirked, crossing your arms. “Only because I work with the devil himself.”

Bucky’s grin was wicked, his eyes glinting as he opened the door. “Careful, doll. Keep talking like that, and I might just make you mine.”

And with that, he disappeared into the night, leaving you with trembling hands and a heart that raced faster than it should.

[notlongtolove]

in eternal lines

spencer’s mind—brilliant and boundless—was one of the reasons you fell for him in the first place. but when the deadlines are looming, it takes everything in you not to snap. because while you’re good at literature because you have to be, spencer's great at it because, well, he’s spencer. 

pairing: spencer reid x fem!reader (second person, no y/n)

genre: angst, comfort, fluff... i don't know anymore

content: student!reader gets kinda pissy and snappy but she has a 3000 word essay due and a fever so go easy on her. and spencer is spencer, so patient, so kind :'

word count: 5.2k

note: as a literature major this was extremely self-indulgent... i'm sorry. i love lit student reader and i hope you guys do too! also aptly titled after the one and only sonnet 18 because it was the first poem we were given read in uni <3 (reader is basing her essay on george macdonald's 'the princess and the goblin' and isaac watts' 'divine songs' if anyone is curious; but don't read too deeply into her lines about it because i submitted that essay weeks ago and it's been relinquished it from my mind oops)

a line: You’d decided then and there that if you couldn't break the glass ceiling, you'd make a comfortable home just beneath it. Always looking up, never quite breaking through.

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. - william shakespeare

You love your boyfriend. Truly, you do. After all, who else would sift through pages of Whitman’s dense poetry with you or debate whether Rossetti was really referencing Eve’s bite of the apple in Goblin Market? Nobody else ever cared enough to try. Spencer’s mind—brilliant and boundless—was one of the reasons you fell for him in the first place.

So yes, you love your boyfriend. But when deadlines are looming, and submission dates are bearing down on you, it takes everything in you not to snap. Because while Spencer can dissect poetry and prose with an ease that seems almost otherworldly, you sometimes feel the weight of comparison pressing on you. You’re good at it too—of course you are, you have to be. You’re pursuing a degree in it forgodsakes. But Spencer? He’s great at it because, well, he’s Spencer.

And while you can hold your own most days, a fair challenger when you come back from a particularly intriguing lecture too layered to dissect by yourself, there are times you feel like you’re running to keep up. Spencer will pull references from texts and obscure sources you haven’t even heard of, leaving you struggling to connect the dots. And that’s just literature. When he dives into his other passions—you don’t even bother to compete. Instead, you resign yourself to the couch, nodding and asking questions during the rare moments you can sort of follow the thread of his thoughts.

Having an IQ of 187 and an eidetic memory does have its perks. Everyone knows that.

Your friends see it too. Like today when one of them stopped by between classes to return an essay you’d been stressing over for days.

“Well, don’t you look fantastic,” she teased, smirking. “Guessing those leftovers weren’t as ‘fine’ as you thought?”

​​“Don’t even start,” you mutter, weakly grabbing the paper from her hands as you lean on the doorframe. You flip through the pages marked in red ink quickly with the little strength you have, eyes scanning briefly through the comments before you’re on to the next page, next page, next page. They’re not what you’re looking for. 

And then you see it. There on the last page, a definite red circle around it: B+. 

You’d expected it of course. B+—your ever-reliable benchmark. It's a mark of consistency you've been forced to be contented with. It wasn’t horrendous. It wasn’t amazing. It was fine. But you’d worked hard on this one. You’d hoped, maybe, for something more. You’d expected it, and yet, you don’t know why you still feel a pinch of disappointment.

“How’d you do?” you ask grimly, fighting the nausea creeping up your throat.

“Same,” she replies nonchalantly, scrolling through her phone.

You nod, trying not to dwell on the fact that she’d seen your grade before you did.

“Oh, you know it’s always the same,” she adds with a wry smile. “Solidly subpar, as per tradition.” 

The phrase stung a little more now than it had when you’d coined it back in your first year. Back when, after a string of middle-of-the-road grades, you’d decided then and there that if you couldn't break the glass ceiling, you'd make a comfortable home just beneath it. Always looking up, never quite breaking through. 

“Whatever, it was only 20% anyway,” she shrugs.

“Yeah…” you reply weakly, though the disappointment still gnaws at you. You can’t quite shake it. Maybe it’s because deep down, you know you do care—no matter how often you tell yourself you’ve accepted the fate of being perpetually average. You still want, so quietly, so desperately, to be something more. You’ve always had a love for literature: the way words flow across a page, imbuing meaning into simple phrases, transforming them into art. You’ve always admired the beauty of it. But passion doesn’t translate to academic brilliance, and appreciation doesn’t equal A grades. It’s a hard truth you’ve come to learn.

“How was class?” you ask, trying to steer your mind away from its current spiral. “We still on Faerie Queene?”

“Mhmm,” she hums, rolling her eyes. “Kristoff’s still rambling on and on about virtue and chastity. Ha. Imagine me living in those times—at the rate I ghost men, I’d be a certified whore.”

“Well, actually, they’d probably get to you first,” Spencer interrupts as he steps out of the bedroom, his tone slipping into that familiar, matter-of-fact cadence. “Virtue and chastity were considered to be absolute truths in the 16th century. A woman’s value was intrinsically tied to her perceived purity, which of course, was a reflection of her family’s honor.” 

If you weren’t so ill, you would’ve laughed at her face—eyes wide, mouth slightly open in disbelief.

“And then there’s the public shaming,” he continues, leaning casually against the doorframe with his hands tucked into his pockets already miles deep into his thoughts. “In fact, the entire allegory of Book III revolves around chastity as a cornerstone of moral virtue. Witch trials in the late 16th and 17th centuries often targeted women who were thought as sexually deviant or independent, framing their ‘sins’ as some sort of evidence that they were consorting with the devil—”

He pauses, glancing between you and your friend. “So yeah… considering all that, if you’d ‘ghosted’ a few men back then, they probably would’ve gone straight to accusations of witchcraft or worse.”

Your friend stares at him, “...Right. Good to know,” she says, blinking slowly.

“But you know, Edmund Spenser intended The Faerie Queene to be a moral guide for young men,” he adds as an afterthought, realizing he’s just indirectly affirmed your friend’s self-deprecating joke. Spencer shifts awkwardly but can’t help himself by continuing, “It was meant to instil chivalric virtues to shape a model English gentleman. So technically, your interpretation is, um, modern at best.”

Her expression—equal parts baffled, impressed, maybe even a little scared—almost makes you forget how sick you feel.

“So…” she says after a pause, “I’m guessing you’re Spencer?”

“I am,” he replies simply.

“Well,” she says, drawing the word out, “It’s nice to finally put a face to the name.” 

Spencer offers a smile, “Likewise.” 

“Anyway… I’m off.” She slings her bag over her shoulder, “Essay’s not gonna write itself. This one’s 30% by the way. God, I hate Kristoff but Burton’s a close second for sure.”

You wince at the reminder, the weight of your unfinished work pressing on you. The brief called for at least three secondary sources, and you’ve barely scratched the surface.

“Feel better soon, sweetie,” she says, offering you a sympathetic look. You manage a weak smile in return.

“Bye Spencer,” she says, her voice taking on a teasing lilt. “Take care of her for me, will ya?”

“Will do,” he says curtly, giving a small wave as you close the door behind her.

A moment later, your phone buzzes. He’s cute, her text reads. Another follows immediately: And basically a walking Wikipedia.

You start typing a response, but another text pops up before you can send it: Don’t dog on us for using ChatGPT now. You huff and click your phone off instead, tossing it aside. 

Therein lies another source of stress. Spencer is always happy to help you untangle a difficult text or interpret a dense poem, but he draws the line when it comes to your academic work. He never interferes directly. You’ve seen it yourself—The first time you handed him your laptop to review an essay, he’d made his comments verbally, pointing at sections on the screen while explaining his critiques in detail, but never actually touching the keyboard. You’d brought it up during an argument once, after a particularly crushing grade. Your frustration had spilled over: You’re smarter. You type faster. Why can’t you just fix it? But Spencer had only responded with something about “academic integrity” and the importance of maintaining the “code of conduct.” The conversation ended there, and after that, you stopped asking. 

Even yesterday, when you managed to scrape together 300 words for a draft, you’d handed your laptop to him, and again, he was careful to keep his boundaries. Too drained to make edits in real-time, you’d expected—maybe hoped—that he might step in more directly. Instead, Spencer quietly switched the document to “suggesting” mode, marking up your draft with precise yet detached annotations, never infiltrating or overstepping your own words. Spencer Reid is and always will be a stickler for rules. You try to hold yourself to the same standard. You steer clear of AI, no matter how tempting it might be. You know better. Well, that and because Spencer would never let it slide. 

But now it’s late and the thought of letting some website churn out polished, perfectly phrased sentences for you in seconds has never felt more tempting. The nausea has faded, leaving behind a fever in its place. Spencer’s in the living room, reading. You’d banished him to the couch—even the faint sound of pages turning, not to mention the speed at which he reads, was enough to derail your already fragile train of thought. You’d felt bad of course; he’d made soup for you earlier, fed it to you and everything. But with this essay worth 30% of your grade and your 300 words barely scratching the surface of the 3,000-word requirement, you don’t have it in you to be oh-so-sweet and ever-so-grateful. Not right now. You’ve nailed down the introduction—a quick overview of historical context, a sweeping statement on the authors’ intents. But now, the real challenge looms: The thesis. And you’re utterly stuck.

This essay argues that…  that…

You groan in frustration, flopping back against the pillows. So much for children’s literature. You’d chosen this class thinking it’d be an easy ride—fairy tales and picture books, how hard could it be? Yet here you are, being tasked with dissecting the significance of form and language. Now, the simple language and pretty pictures are anything but your friend, doing nothing to help further your argument. Your head throbs, your mouth feels like sandpaper, and the brilliant points you’d thought of in last week’s class are nowhere to be found, lost in the haziness of your mind. With a defeated sigh, you peel back the sheets and shuffle out of the bedroom, laptop in hand, every joint aching in protest. Spencer looks up from his book as the rustle of sheets catches his attention. His heart aches slightly when he sees you in the doorway, clutching your laptop and looking every bit as pitiful as you feel. He sets his book to the side. 

“How’s it going, honey?” he asks sympathetically, even though he already knows the answer from the state of you. 

“It’s barely going,” you admit with a yawn, tears prickling at your eyes from the force of it. They only add to your overall air of defeat as you cross the room and crawl into his lap, laptop balanced precariously on the armrest. “Brain’s foggy, can’t think straight,” you murmur in incomplete sentences. 

“Finalized your thesis yet?” he asks again, his voice gentle but patient. You shake your head, sinking deeper into his chest—It’s a silent surrender, as if giving in to the exhaustion and frustration that’s been building up. Spencer notices, brushing your hair gently away from your face, his hand cool against your hot skin. He presses the back of his hand to your forehead. “You’re burning up, hon,” he says softly, voice full of concern. “Why don’t we get you to bed, take a break for tonight, hm? You can work on this tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. The thought of putting everything off feels like both a relief and a burden. The idea of sleep has never seemed more appealing. But then, the thought of letting this drag on for another day—of pushing the finish line even further out of your reach fills you with dread. But you know you’re not in any state to be working on anything right now, let alone something worth 30% of your final grade. You know that you can’t focus, not when your body feels like it’s ready to give up and when your mind can barely hold onto a coherent thought. “Tomorrow, okay?” Spencer prompts again, calm and gentle. You know he’s right, so, despite the gnawing anxiety in the back of your mind, you nod. “Okay.” 

Spencer doesn’t push, just gives you a small, reassuring smile as he stands. Every movement feels like a chore as he guides you back to bed but the warmth of the blankets and the prospect of rest is more than enough motivation. He tucks you in, his touch comforting and steady. You feel like a weight has been lifted, albeit temporarily. Either way, it’s enough for now. You close your eyes, the thought of picking up where you left off tomorrow seeming almost bearable. 

You wake to the sunlight filtering through the curtains. It takes a moment for your brain to adjust to the new day, the stress of yesterday not entirely gone. But as you sit up, stretching slowly, mind less hazy and joints less achy, you feel a renewed determination, a flicker of focus that was nowhere to be found last night. Your mind is still whirling with fragments of ideas, half-formed arguments, and theoretical connections when Spencer strolls in with a cup of something warm for you.

“Tea.” he announces, handing it to you with a small, triumphant smile. “Decaffeinated.”

You frown, rubbing sleep from your eyes. “Need coffee.”

“Studies say caffeinated beverages stimulate the colon,” he counters matter-of-factly.

“Eww,” you groan, wrinkling your nose at him. “Why’d you have to say it like that?” 

“Exactly like that,” he replies without missing a beat, his tone precise and measured. “You’ve just recovered, and everyone knows caffeine is a gastrointestinal irritant.’

You huff, taking the mug from him. “Fine, but if I don’t finish this essay, it’s on you.” Spencer raises an eyebrow, completely unbothered by your protest. “Somehow, I think you’ll survive.”

You grumble under your breath but take a tentative sip of the tea anyway. It’s not what you wanted, but you can’t deny that he’s probably right—he usually is. The warmth seeps through the mug into your hands, grounding you just enough to pull your laptop over from the bedside table. Its practically empty screen blinks back up at you, as though it’s been waiting patiently all night. Hi again. Still here. Still empty. 

Spencer takes a peek at your screen and you can’t help but glare half-heartedly at the mug in his hands. Of course, it’s coffee. He’d get to enjoy caffeine while insisting you couldn’t. Typical.

“So, I was thinking…” you start, deciding to let the injustice slide for now as you scroll through your document.

“Hmm?” He looks up, his gaze meeting yours over the rim of his cup.

“What if I say that MacDonald’s pedagogy was more effective for children because Watts’s text was too directive. That works, right?” You look up, scanning his face for some form of agreement.

“That’s hardly arguable honey,” his words land softly, but you still feel your shoulders sag. “It’s an observation.”

"But—look at the words they use! It's so different. Here, look at the tone," you insist, nudging your laptop toward him. "There has to be something to be said about that, right?"

Spencer leans in, glancing at your screen before looking back at you. His expression is calm, composed, and maddeningly reasonable. "Watts’s text was meant to be read as a textbook. Of course it’s directive. You know that." 

Do you? You think you don't know much at this point. You don’t know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know. You groan, dragging your hands down your face as if you could physically scrape the frustration away. Darn you, Isaac Watts. Darn you, pedagogical learning. Darn you, whoever had the audacity to name this course a simple exploration into the history of children’s literature. 

Before you can wallow further, Spencer slides your laptop away. “How about we brush our teeth before crying over educational theories for children in the 18th century?” he suggests, his voice light. You sigh dramatically, dragging yourself to your feet like it’s some Herculean effort. When you shuffle back from the bathroom, hair slightly damp from washing your face, Spencer has taken over your spot on the bed, laptop resting on his legs as he scrolls through some article. He glances up when you flop down beside him with an exaggerated sigh.

"Feel better?" he asks, the faintest trace of a smirk on his lips.

"Not at all," you grumble. You don’t let him know that the brief pause in frustration has given your head just enough space to try again. 

It’s been hours, but you’ve finally narrowed down your thesis. It’s not amazing—far from it—but it’s something. It’s arguable, at least. Spencer’s been relegated back to the living room, his presence a vague hum in the background as you attempt to focus. You’d claimed you worked better in bed, though Spencer’s tried (and failed) to prove with statistics and studies that it’s just a placebo effect, a lie your brain insists on believing.

But right now, none of that matters. You have a thesis and on that note, an essay to begin. Or, at least, the faintest glimmer of one. And that’s when you hit a wall. Again. You sit cross-legged, laptop perched on your knees as you stare at the cursor, blinking like it knows you’re stuck. You wish it would stop judging you. You drag yourself—and your laptop thats become an extension of your body at this point—into the living room like a child seeking comfort. Spencer barely looks up from his article when you slump into the couch next to him.

“What about this?” You straighten your back, determined to sound confident this time, even if you're not sure where you're going with it. “What if I say that MacDonald’s use of fantasy is critical because it creates like, an emotional bridge and that makes it more effective for moral teaching and—”

“Well, yes," he says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Spencer doesn’t even look up from his article. "But that’s kind of a subpoint, honey.”

You stiffen, irritation rising like bile in your throat. “It’s not a subpoint. It’s a point.”

He shifts in his seat, eyes flicking up, finally meeting yours. His tone isn’t dismissive, but it might as well be. “How is that significant? What does it build toward?”

You grit your teeth. “Ugh, you sound like Kristoff.” You mutter, more to yourself than to him. You know it’s not fair to snap, but your patience is paper thin. You can feel the fever creeping back into your skin, and you’re not sure if it's the heat or the mounting pressure, but suddenly everything feels like a little too much. 

“Fine,” you say, swallowing your frustration, trying again. “What if I say that MacDonald’s narrative style is more progressive because it like, engages the reader’s emotions directly? And that’s why Watts’ text feels scarier?”

Spencer pauses. For a moment, you think you’ve finally hit something solid, his eyes narrowing just enough to show he’s intrigued. “And how are you planning to argue that?”

“Well, um… um—I… I don’t know!” You exhale sharply, throwing your hands up in exasperation. You sink back against the cushions, frustration seeping into your bones. “Something about how MacDonald’s vibe is all nice and charming while Watts is all like, ‘learn this or else’. 

“Sure I guess…” Spencer acknowledges, nodding slightly, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “But you’ll need more than vibes and a strong dislike of Watts to support it sweetheart.”

“Gee, thanks,” you say bitterly, rolling your eyes.

He chuckles softly, a sound that’s too calm, too collected, and somehow that makes it worse. He’s not wrong, but you’re still pissed off. You take a breath, steeling yourself for the next round of dissection. “Okay, then what if I say that MacDonald lets kids think for themselves, and Watts... doesn’t. Because of his moral authority and intellectual agency and whatever.”

Spencer’s eyebrows rise, just a fraction, but it’s enough. You feel a flicker of something—relief, maybe? It’s hard to say. His voice has shifted, just slightly, less detached now, more engaged. “You can build on that.”

“Really?” you ask, suddenly more hopeful than you’d like to admit.

“Really,” he confirms, leaning back in his chair. But then he tilts his head and furrows his brows in a way that makes you want to throw your laptop at him. “But you’ll need to define those terms and back it up with examples. Otherwise, it’s just a claim.” Of course. 

“God, you’re making this so much harder than it needs to be!” you snap, the irritation rising in your throat. “I get it, okay? I need examples. But you’re not even letting me work out a point before you just, I don’t know, shit all over it.” Spencer’s eyes widen, and for a second, you almost feel bad for snapping at him. 

“I’m just trying to help,” he says gently, but there's something in the way he says it—just a little too patient—that makes you bristle. You hate how right he always is, how calm he always looks, how much care he always has in his eyes even when you’re acting out. 

“You’re trying to help?” you repeat incredulously, shaking your head. “You’re poking holes in everything!” Even in your feverish haze, you know you’re being cruel—but you just can’t help it. All you can think about is how everything is slipping away, how your thoughts won’t line up, how your head is starting to hurt again. You’re not even sure if you’re angry at him anymore, or just angry at everything else. 

Spencer doesn’t answer right away. He glances at your screen again, a mess of quotes and bulletpoints. “I just want to make sure it’s solid, honey,” he says finally, his tone softer.

You scoff. “Yeah, well, you tore apart whatever solid lead I thought I had after two hours of work in just about five minutes, so thanks for that,” words tumbling out before you can stop them. Spencer’s silence hangs heavy in the air, and for a moment, neither of you speak. “Just… just let me get through this.” 

Spencer sits there for a moment, just enough for you to feel the weight of the tension shift in the room. “I’m not saying you can’t get through it. I just want you to get through it right,” he says carefully, his voice quiet but insistent. “That’s all.” There’s no judgment in his voice, just care.

But the heat, the fever, it’s all swirling inside you, and you can’t hold it together much longer. “Of course you are…” you mutter bitterly, already regretting everything you’ve said. It feels like every step forward just leads you straight into another wall, and you’re just too tired to keep going. It’s not that you want to push him away or that you don’t appreciate his help. You’re just too irritable, too exhausted. You just want the whole damn essay to be done—and you wish you didn’t need his help to make it happen. You want to yell, to throw something, to demand that the world stop spinning long enough for you to catch your breath. But all that comes out is a hollow, defeated sigh. 

You feel like you're drowning and you don’t want to drag him under with you. “I’m just…” You stop yourself, swallowing hard, trying to gather whatever little strength you have left. “I’m just so tired.” 

Spencer looks at you, eyes full of concern, but it doesn’t help. You don’t want sympathy. You want to be better—to be able handle all of this. You want to be able to write this damn essay on goddamn children’s books without falling apart. And it doesn’t help that you’re falling apart in front of Spencer. The same Spencer who can recite verses from Paradise Lost at the drop of a hat. You’d almost burst into tears the last time he did it after it had taken you an entire week just to decipher and analyze a single chapter with any real confidence. You can’t help but feel that pang of inadequacy every time he breezes through something you’ve struggled with, even if he doesn’t mean to make it look so effortless. You hate yourself for it. You can’t find a way to shake the feeling that you’re not doing enough, not good enough. Not for yourself, not for him. You feel the sting of it, it’s pressing on your chest, suffocating.

“I just… just feel like I can’t keep up with any of it.” You don’t say it with any anger, just exhaustion. It’s not even directed at him anymore—it’s just the fact that you feel so stuck, so far behind where you should be, where you so badly want to be. “Like I can’t keep up with you.” 

Oh. Spencer feels his heart sink. He’s always prided himself on being able to read people. He should’ve known better. He’d been so focused on helping, so intent on pushing you to reach the level he knows you’re capable of, the level he knows you want to be at—even if you keep telling yourself you don’t. The fever, the deadlines, the constant pushing—he should’ve known that it was all too much. 

“You don’t have to keep up with me honey, I’m right here with you,” he says, trying to get you to look up at him. You can’t meet his gaze. You feel guilty for snapping, for letting the frustration slip out, but you’re not rational enough right now to pull yourself out from this spiral of self-pity. It’s easier to stay here, in the anger, the frustration, than to face the embarrassment of it all. 

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, his voice tinged with regret. “I didn’t mean to make things harder for you.” Spencer takes your hand, cautiously, testing the waters. He knows you don’t exactly want to be touched right now. He knows it makes you feel coddled. He pauses, waiting for your reaction. When you don’t push him away, he gains the confidence to cradle your face gently. You don’t resist, your tired eyes meeting his, heavy with sadness and Spencer thinks he can actually feel his heart break.

“You’re doing just fine sweetheart. You’re not falling behind. You’re just stressed. And sick.” He knows you’re feeling fragile, like any comfort might smother you so he threads forward lightly. “This essay? You’ll get it done. I promise.” It sounds right, and yet it doesn’t really help. It doesn’t stop the doubt that’s eating at you, the sense that you’re just not measuring up to everything you want to be. You feel like you’re barely treading water, no matter how hard you swim, the shore never gets any closer.

But for now, Spencer’s words are enough to quiet the panic—a buoy in your sea of sadness threatening to pull you under. You cling to it, knowing you’ll have to start swimming again soon. But for this moment, you allow yourself to stop. A beat. A pause. A breath—Just for now.

It’s only the next day that you manage to get the words on the page, not in any smooth, brilliant way, but they’re there. The sentences form, sometimes haltingly, sometimes with more confidence, until the essay is painfully but finally done. Not perfect, but it’s done. Relief washes over you, even as exhaustion lingers. 

The moment you hear the front door open, you practically leap up, laptop in hand, meeting Spencer before he can even take his shoes off. He raises an eyebrow, setting his bag down as you both settle onto the couch. Without a word, you hand over the laptop, nerves bubbling beneath the surface. You wait with bated breath as he begins to scroll, your laborious effort displayed in black and white. The sound of the touchpad clicking feels louder than it should in the quiet room. He asks a few questions, here and there—clarifications, mostly. Questions you answer with ease, surprising even yourself with the confidence in your responses. He nods along, his expression thoughtful, but not critical. Finally, after what feels like an eternity, Spencer looks up, eyes bright, a proud smile on his face. “It looks great, honey. You did a really good job.” 

You can’t help the grin that spreads across your face at his praise. “Really?” Spencer leans in, cupping your cheek gently, and presses a soft kiss to your lips. “Really.” When he pulls back, his forehead rests lightly against yours for a moment, his hand still cradling your cheek. “You worked so hard on this,” he murmurs. “So proud of you.”

Your chest tightens, but in a good way, and you can’t stop yourself from leaning forward to kiss him again, this time slower, savoring the comfort he always seems to bring. “Now," he pulls away just enough to smirk, "can I have my bedroom back, or should I just start setting up camp on the couch?” You laugh, rolling your eyes, but it’s full of affection. “Don’t even start.” Spencer chuckles, his arm slipping around your waist as he pulls you closer, the tension of yesterday long forgotten.

When you get your paper back, you flip through the pages, one after the other, looking for the feedback, waiting for the corrections, the marks that tell you where you inevitably went wrong.

Next page. Next page. Next page.

And then, there it is. On the last page, in a definitive red circle, unmistakable: A.

It’s an A. 

A goddamn A.

It doesn’t feel like a one-time fluke, not exactly, but you can’t shake the thought that this might be the only time you break through the glass ceiling you’ve spent so long looking up at. And who knows, maybe you’ll never push past it again. But for now, you allow yourself to relish in this singular moment of triumph. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. 

Because now you know that the other side is real, and that you can get there. But Spencer, the genius, the enigma, who’s always been a step ahead of everyone in everything academic, has always known.

And while everyone knows that an A in an essay that’s only a partial percentage of your overall grade isn’t anything compared to what he’s achieved, nothing compared to the academic milestones he’s already crossed—Still, he’s here, celebrating with you. You can see it in his eyes, even if he knows you’re not one to make a big deal of these kinds of things. His quiet joy is evident in the way he grins that little grin of his, the one that’s only for you. 

So, in summary, in essence, in all the words and ways you could possibly use to phrase a conclusion—You love your boyfriend. Truly, you do. After all, who else would read through your entire syllabus for the semester (frustratingly quickly), just because he knows you understand better when you can talk things out? Who else would patiently stick around, exiled to the couch in their own home, while you’re exhausted, irritable, and buried in deadlines? Nobody else ever cared enough to try. Spencer’s mind—though brilliant and boundless—isn’t the only reason why you fell for him. 

Because when the world feels too heavy, when the never ending lines of poetry and prose become too difficult to untangle by yourself, Spencer’s there reminding you—ever so gently, ever so steadily—that you can make it through, one word at a time.

⋆✴︎˚｡⋆ hi if you're here! thank you for reading! feel free to like or reblog or comment or reply!

[naamahdarling]

So, the other night in an effort to show a friend that LLMs can produce very credible fiction and relatively inventive ideas, I played with ChatGPT for about 10 minutes I was able to make my point flawlessly. Don't get up my ass about this, that's juvenile.

ChatGPT has watched enough Dropout to be able to reasonably (and genuinely amusingly) impersonate Brennan Lee Mulligan and, to a lesser extent, Sam Reich. It's successfully produced a script for Game Changer where the show was entirely about cats and Brennan couldn't win, and parts of it were actually funny. It also produced an AITA post from the point of view of Brennan Lee Mulligan AS DM OF DIMENSION 20 that was in places absolutely hilarious.

It is able to very successfully postulate a set of G1 my little ponies that do not actually exist, complete with colors, cutie marks, and back card stories. It had a little trouble with G1 versus G4 due to the sheer glut of content, but its ideas were genuinely appealing because the source material it was drawing on was designed to be appealing.

It generated a list of birthday party themes that would terrify an arachnophobe, two or three of which were really good. A request for it to generate a list of queer pride birthday ideas didn't produce anything particularly original, but it was all appropriate and convincing.

It produced a short script where Johnny Sims from the Magnus archives receives birthday gifts from his coworkers, and one of those was a knife-wielding tentacle. This script was in places a little less sharp than the actual writing, but it absolutely nailed the speech patterns, and each gift was appropriate to the character giving it. It was genuinely funny. In places it was clever. It actually made me laugh.

I have most of these saved if anybody wants to see them instead of playing with it themselves.

It really isn't a question of what has been dumped into the data set. We can just assume it has been dumped in there somehow.

We can't undo what has been done and we're never going to be able to name all of the people whose work has been used to train these datasets.

I have both positive and negative feelings, strong ones on both sides, about this technology. If someone wants to use this technology to create a script for a movie in the Predator franchise, or a sequel to their favorite book, or whatever, that is a neutral act. Profiting from that is highly questionable, passing it off as the real thing is completely indefensible, using this technology to replace writers and artists and real people doing ANY work where there is no benefit to humans (like identifying cancer cells -- "AI" does that) is the second worst thing that can be done with it.

That's what worries me about this. It could produce infinite Simpsons episodes without the need for a single writer. Eventually it will be able to animate them so accurately you could ask it to make it look like it had been recorded on a video cassette and it would be completely convincing. It would be able to imitate the voice actors perfectly.

We do not want corporations to have that power. Worker protections are critical. It isn't that AI produces art that is bad or soulless or whatever. Those are completely spurious arguments and irrelevant to any true discussion of whether or not it is ethical.

What matter is is that we keep this shit out of the hands people who want to delete us from the workforce. They aren't going to delete the data. We need to protect workers.

P.S. Artists, Disney and Adobe do not have your best interests at heart. Copyright issues are more complicated than they are being presented, and if you find yourself on the side of one of these companies in any capacity, re-examine literally everything you think immediately. Unions. You want unions.

For reference, because I think it's really important to bring this up as often as possible, the worst application of this technology I can think of would be deliberately or accidentally misapplying data that could be used to affect things like a person's medical care, criminal record, and credit score, all of which are actually currently things that a single company can do, APPRISS, now owned by Equifax, yes that Equifax, and fucking nobody, none of y'all, are freaking out about that even though it's the single most frightening thing I have seen in 20 years. I cannot overstate its potential to utterly destroy the lives of literally anyone who comes into contact with the system that uses it, and those are unbelievably common. They are currently selling their product to law enforcement so that cops and businesses can use it to predict who will engage in criminal behavior, I'm literally not kidding about that, they come right out and say it. It is being trained on existing data and refined constantly.

Enjoy breaking your leg and needing painkillers, which get you flagged in a medical database that will try to prevent you from accessing them in the future (already happening), and also entering you into a law enforcement database that knows you have taken them. Then add in whatever eldritch fuckery bringing credit bureaus into it would cause.

We aren't fucked, I'm not a doomer who insists that all people are terrible and that we have no future and we might as well let things burn, I do actually care about the world we live in and the people who populate it and I consider humans a delight rather than a plague, but we need to start seriously resisting the use of this shit by entities more powerful than us. They are already way ahead.

“I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad.”

😡

[arc-misadventures]

Morning. For the Friends Au it appears that Winter is trying to reach out to Jaune... and maybe he sees it and it's confusing him as to why.

Does her each out to Saphron and Terra, and seek their advice?

On a side note, great series. Looking to further posts as you have time.

Specialist J.A.

Winter: Specialist Jaune Arc. It has a nice ring to it. Don't you agree?

Jaune: It has a bit of ring to it... But, it's not as special as you're making it sound.

Winter: You should be proud, Jaune: You're the youngest person to ever be accepted as a, Specialist, and the first person of none, Atlasian descent to become one. So, take pride in your accomplishments, Jaune.

Jaune: Okay, being the first none, Atlasian to join the, Specialist doesn't sound like that much of an achievement. But, am I really the youngest member?

Winter: Oh yes, I was twenty when I joined, most others, Specialist were around twenty one as well when they joined. You are nineteen years old; You are the youngest member to ever join the, Specialist!

Jaune: Wait really...? Wait, twenty? Does that mean you're around twenty three then?

Winter: Careful, Arc... You should know better than to ask a lady her age...

Jaune: I-I-I'm sorry! I've just been curious how old are!

Winter: And, why do wish to know that?

Jaune: I was just curious!

Winter: Curious...?

Jaune: Yeah. You have this ageless beauty about you, Winter. So, I've always been curious.

Winter: Ageless beauty...?

Winter: Ahem! So... So what do you think of your new uniform?

Winter changed the topic as she looked away from, Jaune hiding a faint blush threatening to spread across her face. Meanwhile, Jaune looked at his reflection taking in his new, Specialist uniform.

It wasn't what, Jaune had expected, but he loved it nonetheless. It was similar to the uniforms to the rest of the, Specialist work as in style.

Jaune's uniform was more of a long sleeve sweater than a dress shirt. A zipper ran up the middle of it to the high collar. A sleave that ran over zipper to connect to a series of buckle buttons on the side. The front was a vibrant white with red stripes running along the side. The rest was the vibrant deep blue that was commonly found on, Atlasian uniforms.

His blue denim jeans had been replace with black combat cargo pants, giving him extra pockets to store necessary supplies. His boots had also been chaged for more modern combat boots, rather than the surplus boots, Ruby tends to wear. He found the boots quite nice, there was space in the boots he could fit something like a knife in it, perhaps her should do something like that.

Jaune: I didn't expect the blue would fit me so well. I know the red, and white suit me. But, I was never sure of the blue.

Winter: The blue is quite fetching on you; it matches your eyes quite well.

Jaune: Really? T-Thanks...

Winter: Your welcome. So, how does your armour feel?

Jaune: Mmmm... It feels a little tight; I think I need to ask one of the armourers to readjust it for me.

Winter: I see... Well, you can ask the armourers to resize it for you, that shouldn't be a problem for them. In fact, they could forge you new armour if you want.

Jaune: New armour? I know my armour is pretty good as it is, but would I be able to get some of that, Paladin Armour plating if I asked?

Winter: Hmmm...?

Winter: That’s a possibility… You'll have to ask about it.

Jaune: Okay, I'll ask them to remake, Crocea Mors then... It's probably best if I ask for, General Ironwood’s permission first. I suspected considering the metal this is used for your, Paladins its restricted from personal use.

Winter: While I'm not sure about that myself. But, I'm sure he'll agree to it, at least he may eventually let you do that. Once you prove your worth to, Atlas.

Jaune: That's fair. He's already upgraded my gear as is. It feels a little greedy of me to ask for another upgrade.

Winter: So, everything alright with your new uniform, Jaune?

Jaune: My armour is a little snug, but everything else is just fine. But, what's with this sash?

Jaune pulled out a deep rich crimson sash with a white snowflake pattern on the edge of it. Jaune looked at the beautiful needle work before staring at, Winter. She looked away as a small blush crossed her face.

Jaune: Winter?

Winter: I uhh... I got you a gift...

Jaune: A gift?

Winter: Yes, a gift to celebrate you're joining the, Specialist core. I would have gotten you something else, but I wasn't sure what... what you would like...

Jaune ran his thumb across the sash marveling on the smooth fabric, and the intricate detail woven into the snowflake.

His mind wondered at the red sash, he wore, Pyrrha's stash as a memento of her, the gold of his armour was also from her. He worse it keep her close to him. But, maybe...?

Winter: Do you... Do you like it, Jaune?

Jaune's mind was running until he saw a flash of red, and gold in his eyes, his eyes moved up to see the ghost of, Pyrrha looking at him. A smile spread across her face as she nodded her head, and gestured to the sash. Jaune's eyes darted to the crimson sash in his hands before looking back at, Pyrrha, and realizing she was gone.

Jaune smiled as his hands reached down, and grab the sash before wrapping it around his waist. Jaune looked down at the sash, then at it in his reflection. He nodded his head before turning to look at, Winter with a smile on his face.

Jaune: Thank you, Winter, it's beautiful.

Jaune hand pulled on the sash to move it so it ran parrel with his hip, while he was fiddling with it, Winter stepped forward, and readjusted it so it would look better.

Winter: Oh thank goodness... I was worried you wouldn't like it. I rarely get presents for my siblings, I've never gotten one for someone else so I was really... worried...

Winter's rambling was cut short as she finished adjusting, Jaune's sash before standing back up staring directly into, Jaune's cerulean blue eyes, their faces mere centimeters apart.

Jaune: I uhhh...

Winter: Y-Yes...?

Red slowly creeped across their faces before the game of chicken was called to the end as the both turned away,. Brushing away their blushes in the process.

Winter: S-So... did... Did you tell your teammates about you're appointment to the, Specialist's?

Jaune: Uhh... no.

Winter: Do you plan to?

Jaune: They'll find out eventually. Just like when I learned that they forgot to invite me to, Ruby's birthday party the other day.

Winter: What? They did, when?

Jaune: They texted me my invitation when I was about to talk to, General Ironwood about me becoming a, Specialist.

Winter: The message you said was from, 'no one important.'

Jaune: Yep, that one.

Winter: You don't see them as anyone important in your lives now do you?

Jaune: Just returning the favour...

Winter: I see. Well then... Specialist Arc!

Jaune: Sir!

Winter: Are you ready for your first mission as a, Specailst?

Jaune: Yes, Sir!

Winter: Good! You will follow me to the cafeteria where we, Specialist will be holding your initiation!

Jaune: Yes, Sir. May I ask what this incitation process will be, Sir?

Winter: Yes, to survive, Marrows cooking!

Jaune: ...

Jaune: Eh?

Winter: The incitation is just a simple welcome party with food, drink, and cake that we, Specialist have. We're expected to each bring in our own food, hand crafted, or store bought. Marrow insists on bringing his family's chili recipe.

Winter: It taste terrible...

Jaune: Chili? Well... now I'm worried about the surviving bit... Should I bring something?

Winter: If you want to, but you're the guest of honour you don't have to.

Jaune: Why don't I cook something edible then. Something we can all enjoy.

Winter: You can cook?

Jaune: Seven sisters, and not a chef among the lot of them.

Winter: Well then, I'm looking forward to whatever it is you plan to make.

Jaune: When is the party?

Winter: This evening around six.

Jaune: That give me... five hours. I can whip up something nice by then. I best get to it. But, I'm going to change first. Don't want flour on my new uniform now.

Winter: I'll see you later then.

Jaune: till later then.

Winter soon made her way to the exit as, Jaune started unbuckling his armour. As the door opened, Winter stopped to say one last thing to, Jaune.

Winter: Oh, and Jaune...?

Jaune: Yes?

Winter: You... You don't need to call me, Sir, or Specialist Schnee... Just call me, Winter, okay?

Jaune: Okay... Winter...

Winter: Thank you~!

Winter smiled a sweet smile as she left, leaving, Jaune behind dumbfounded as he nervously swallowed.

Jaune: Shit...

Jaune: She does like me...

[kinardsboy]

Buddie shippers have tried to coin the moral superiority and high ground with their ship and I’m sick of it

This not only comes from a place of homophobia but also heteronormativity. Buddie is inherently better because “they’re a family” ignoring the fact that Evan and Tommy could easily build their own, they are constantly pushing buddie into heteronormative roles, ESPECIALLY Buck.

They go out of their way and try so hard to prove Tommy never changed for the better, that he is still the same person he was nearly 20 years ago. That he isn’t deserving of Buck, all to prove their claim of “your ship bad and toxic therefore mine better.” Again, putting themselves on the moral high ground so their criticisms and weird hater behavior seems more justified and acceptable than when we speak out.

When that doesnt work? No problem. They just turn to straight homophobia and conservative talking points.

“Tommy wanted Eddie first but settled for Buck” sure man, I’m surprised you could take Eddies dick out of your mouth long enough to type that sentence.

“Tommy only wants sex, like most gay men do” Yes this is an actual quote from a post criticizing Tommy! Again! Homophobia! If Tommy only wanted sex theres.. grindr.. its fucking LA?? However I do find it interesting that the idea of queer men (Gay men especially) wanting sex and not feeling bad about it is something that upsets these people so much.. i wonder why the idea of gay sex makes them uncomfortable 🤔

Which brings me to their next talking point

The daddy kink scene.

I don’t even want to go into the awful violent things that were posted in response to a gay man flirting with his boyfriend, but I’m sure most of you all have seen them already so I’ll keep it vague. We all know Buck initiated that flirting scene, we all know Buck brought up daddy kink and Tommy reciprocated.

But because they can’t possibly imagine their precious little baby Buck partaking in such heinous kinks? Well then it MUST be Tommy who started it! Therefore BuckTommy is bad because Tommy is into “gross” or “immoral” kinks and makes everything about sex and so..? Yep! Buddie better ! Buddie the safe clean option!

SPEAKING of making everything about sex lets talk about the way buddie shippers tried to say “youre a vision in a cone” was about PUPPY PLAY??

Again I find it sooo interesting that these people are trying to base morals and high ground on two men possibly engaging in kink. Isnt that interesting?

The compliment was obviously not puppy play kink but even if it was who the fuck cares? They’re grown ass men? They can partake in kink???

Why are you twice now claiming that BuckTommy , and lets be honest here, mainly Tommy is a bad person and ship because of sexual attraction? Because of kinks?

Good thing their fave is a fucking catholic cause they all sure act like one

[catsukkii]

okay so!

i have been craving an idea... knowing on the bars of my cage... for a katsuki × retired!pro hero... Still young, in her early twenties, who was put out of commission for an injury on the field. From there, she practically goes M.I.A and isolates herself, until Katsuki is finally able to track her down and just finds that she turned from a happy-go-lucky person to someone who is grumpy and brash, refusing help and avoiding him. essentially it's angst/comfort, which I think you could do perfectly! feel free to add any other elements

HELLLOOO BEAUTIFUL!! THIS IS A WONDERFULLL IDEA I HOPE I CAN EXECUTE IT TO YOUR LIKING! 🥹 I messed around with the request and made it so she accepts his help instead I HOPE THATS OKAY WITH YOUU !! 😭

Chasing shadows, chasing you. — katsuki bakugo

IN WHICH…as the request says, you were put out of commission for an intense injury, in a frustrated rush you run away from the place that held your dreams, to a small run down town to live in a shack in the middle of nowhere. months add up and you accept nobody will find you, just as you wanted. until a knock is at your door.

Pairing; Katsuki Bakugo x Afab!reader

Content contains; swearing, angst/comfort, fluff at the end, swearing, mentions of injury, depression implied, LOWKEY selfish reader (but not intentionally), sad sad stuff, bakugo may be a lil ooc…, not proof read so it may suck ass

Word count; somewhere over 1k 😭

A/N; THIS REQUEST WAS LOVEEELY AND IM SORRY IT KIND OF JUMPED ALL OVER THE PLACE! I HOPE YOURE HAPPY WITH THE OUTCOME MY LOVEEE!! 🫶🏻 this is going to flop awfully I feel like I could’ve done so much better OUUUCH

frustrated. that’s what you were. angry. It was ridiculous, a stupid injury and now you can never work again? stupid. It was stupid. having to give up on the dream you had just reached all for your own rookie mistake.

so you ran, you couldn’t stand being in the town where all the big-shot hero’s were, constantly staring at what you could’ve become. what was the point in staying? your dreams were shattered, crushed.

you packed your stuff, and ran from the place that once held your dreams, now a place that would haunt you.

of course, people were concerned. you were an amazing hero, and that injury was practically fatal, just to never be heard of again? the media assumed everything was under wraps for the time being, giving you space to recover. but the more months that went by the more the media pressed.

eventually, the authorities had to make a statement, you were missing completely mia. they didn’t know where you were or what happened, of course this caused an uproar among thousands.

you scoff at the tv, and the crowd going out of control. you reach for the tv remote, ready to turn it off before they spoke,

“we have a team of police and hero’s searching, don’t fret, she will be found.” you roll your eyes at this.

“dynamight will be leading the case, considering they were the closest and even he has no idea what happened.” you still your movements. katsuki? you had grown close throughout the years, but would he really go searching for you? was it just to calm civilians? was he forced into it?

thoughts running through your head, you turn the tv off and sigh, walking to your sad kitchen filled with barely enough food. you avoided grocery stores for obvious reasons. doordash bags scattered on the ground, takeout boxes covering your island, it was a mess. you had no motivation to clean, train, do anything. everything you once loved only reminded you of the incident.

you lean your elbows onto the cold island counter, burying your head in your hands with a long sigh. how could you even face katsuki after all this? what if he really did find you and show up? would he be upset at you? he had good reason but he must’ve understand where you were coming from right?

the thoughts clouded your head, you remove your head from its place in your hands, and look up at the light. a weak attempt to stop the tears that brinked your lash line.

It had been months. you had forgotten about the whole katsuki thing, surely they’d have stopped their searching by now. most of your days were filled with unnecessary naps, scrolling aimlessly on your phone, and occasionally watching some dumb show on tv. you were miserable, your once bright smile has turned into a permanent frown. your sparkling eyes, filled with hopes and dreams, we’re now dead and empty.

knock knock.

the mail, probably. you shake the chip crumbs off of you, and force yourself to spring up off the couch.

knock knock kno—

“I’m coming!” you groan, hes never been this persistent..must have a lot of houses to get to. you make your way to the door, attempting to fix your tangled hair to the best of your abilities, you open the door and immediately a man’s voice speaks.

“hello, I’m dynamight and we’ve been looki—“ he freezes, you freeze. the shell shocked expression on both of your faces, brows raised, eyes blown wide, mouth slightly parted. your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water at the sight, fuck had he really been looking all this time? and why is it just him?

“…y/n.” he speaks with the same shocked tone, almost as if he was wondering if you were real or a hallucination. all you could do was stare up at him with a blank expression on your face.

“kat..katsuki—why did—how did you even find me?” you open the door to its full capacity, backing away slightly; he takes this as a sign and steps into the entry of your sad little cottage, silence filled the house more then chatter, both of you still in disbelief.

“I searched—“ he cuts himself off with a harsh swallow. “I searched everywhere for you y/n. why—I don’t…why did you leave?” the question causes a lump to build in your throat, you didn’t know a good answer. hell, you didn’t know if there was a good answer.

silence passed for a minute as you thought, you move out of his way slightly and mumble a “come in.” he nods and steps out of the way, letting you close the door softly as his boots stomp dirt all through your house, not like it’s hurting the piles of dust that were already scattered among your floor.

he sits himself down on your small cheap couch, and crosses his ankles awkwardly, you sit down on the opposite side creating as much distance as possible, more silence looms in the air, tension so thick you could cut it with a knife.

“I missed you.” he grumbles quietly, you bit your lip, staring at the floor avoiding his gaze. “I missed you too.” you speak softly, he nods slowly in understanding. neither of you knew where to go from here.

“so..why. why y/n? why did you leave me? everybody?” all he could muster was ‘why.’ because that was the only question on his mind for borderline a year, just as you open your mouth to speak he continues,

“I mean fuck—“ he lets out a faux laugh, trying to ignore the fact he just wanted to sob right now. “I was so worried, so goddamn worried. All I wanted was confirmation you were safe, do you know how hard it was?” you shake your head no softly, there was nothing you could say at this point.

“everybody pressing me constantly. ‘what happened to athena.’, ‘are you covering for athena?’ ‘how could you not know where she is?’” as he repeats what people were telling him, it makes you realize how selfish you were.

“katsuki i didnt—“ he cut you off quickly. “didnt what hm? y/n I searched every. fucking. day. the authorities even stopped looking for you, but I never did.” tears watered your lash line threatening to spill at any moment, why did he keep looking even when everybody else had given up on you?

“I’m sorry.” you spoke softly, a tear dripping down your eye slowly, which you quickly wipe away. he sighs and rubs a hand through his hair, silence and a few tears go by before he speaks up,

“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to blow up like that. I was just worried sick y/n. I was worried something happened to you..” you nod in understandment, you would have been worried if this happened with katsuki.

“I just wasn’t thinking—“ he shushes you. “I know. I know…” even more silence passes, but a comfortable one now, the tension no longer growing in the air.

“I seriously did miss you..you were all I thought about.” you broke the silence, he let out a soft laugh, you missed his laugh.

“I missed you too…or whatever tch.” he scoffs and looks away, putting his nonchalant persona back on playfully, causing you to laugh yourself.

the rest of the night was filled with chatter, catching up on everything eachother had missed, mostly hearing about how katsuki went door to door to almost every town in Japan until he found even a trace of you. It caused your heart to swell at his thoughtfulness, you couldn’t help but feel a little guilty for all the trouble you put him through.

the days go by, and he makes daily visits, attempting to get your so called house back in shape, but he proposes a suggestion.

“yknow,” he starts, holding another bag of trash in his hand. “my house is pretty big, and I have a guest bedroom maybe you could— ah, I don’t know, move in? atleast for the time being.” you were caught off guard at his gesture, the wide smile you’ve gained back over the days seeing katsuki, mixing with your brows furrowed in confusion, you wait for a remark of him joking but it never comes, your face drops into a more serious expression.

“you serious?” he nods curtly, “dead serious.” your face turns into a bright smile again, and you nod slowly before exclaiming,

“yeah…yeah! yeah, what the hell? of course!?” he laughs at your enthusiasm. “alright, start packin be ready by tomorrow.”

“TOMORROW!?” you screech in shock and he gives you a confused look as if it was a casual encounter. “yeah? best of the best moving.” you jaw drops in shock before you sigh stressfully at the thought of packing in a day but…now that you think about it, it probably won’t take that long considering you only have necessities in your house, and you don’t have to move furniture so…

I guess you’re going back home.

a/n; this is so rushed and kinda jumps all over the place I’m so sorry growls

[304files]

you don’t understand how mc is literally me and i am here. she’s me to a molecular level. no joke, i never read an mc that was so deeply similar to me it hit me like a gut punch.

reading this while listening to the playlist was truly an experience (which was so good btw i LOVE your music taste). can we talk about how absolutely gorgeous your writing is for a second??? the way you craft your sentences are so satisfyingly beautiful it’s insane!! some of my favorite quotes:

“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.”

“Taking those steps, the massive and terrifying ones from adolescence into adulthood, meant agreeing that this form of your life was over.”

“That passion and love wasn’t gone from you, it blazed strong in your veins. This blaze wasn’t the kind that kept you warm and excited to push forward into life, though. It had morphed into something that scalded you when you got too close or started imagining yourself pursuing its call. It’s a taunting silvery glow, no longer a guiding north star.”

“You clutch childhood to your chest like a wild animal guarding scarce food; you refuse. You refuse to acknowledge its end.”

“‘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.’”

i don’t know if you’ve ever read this book, but the vibes of this fic reminds me a lot of the starless sea by erin morgenstern!! literally my favorite book EVER. if you haven’t read it then i think you would like it a lot!! ^^

this is truly one of those types of stories that you come across and it just makes you absolutely fall in love with reading. the type that makes you want to pick up a pencil and feverishly write out the story that’s been in your head for years. if this story was a song, to me it would be dog days are over by florence + the machine. it just gives you that feeling that everything will work out and everything will be okay and this too shall pass. i love it so so much and i’m so happy that you decided to share it with the world so that people like me and so many others could come across it and read it for themselves! ♡♡♡

𝑯EART 𝑊ORM ⸺ hueningkai ℘˒´ˎ˗

  ⨾𓍢ִ໋ ˒˒ 𝚑𝔢art𝚠𝔬rm

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

⸺ listen to the playlist .ᐟ ‧˚

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

wc ➛ 17.9k

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

𝒢 ‎; smut ˒ angst ˒ some fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t things just stay like this? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just... don’t know.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him. 

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.  

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you do. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The taunting, split-second raise of his brows flips your belly. You tighten 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!

[strang3lov3]

Rescue Mission

“You take him beautifully, birdie. Beautifully,” Ezra says, now drawing in and out of you at a faster pace. “Look how happy he is inside a’ ya. You’re soakin’ the fella.”

Tags - smut, dubcon, dbf/dad’s weed guy/uncle!ezra (he’s not your biological uncle. I promise), pussy job, unprotected piv, creampie, cock pronouns in excess, cock nicknames (fella, bastard), Ezra’s cock has a titan’s girth (thank @beefrobeefcal), fire hazards, somno ish, plumber’s crack, smoking weed, a tasteful amount of pussy pronouns, me writing Ezra comes with its own warning, surprise surprise Ezra is morally bankrupt, Beefro contributed so I’m not all to blame, Ezra has a lot more jizz than the average man. i don't know how to summarize this. Fic Help - thank you @beefrobeefcal for being my guiding light. Without you this fic would be nothing! thank you @endlessthxxghts and @noxturnalnymph for your eyeballs! A/N - heddo! I finished my research paper but I still have a few things to do as far as school goes, but the end of the semester is right around the corner!! Thank you all for being so patient with me this month. I love you. Mwah!

This is my submission for @sp00kymulderr’s cock pronoun event. I had so much fun with this!! Thank you for hosting, Gideon!!

After packing your old Vera Bradley weekender duffel bag with the last of your clothes for the long weekend ahead of you, you open up your phone one last time to check the weather. It’s not supposed to snow until later in the afternoon, but you’ll make it to your dad’s before then. 

You haul your duffel into the backseat of your car, then carefully place two 9x13 Pyrex pans covered in tin foil next to it. Your dad asked that you prepare a couple of Thanksgiving sides - sweet potatoes and broccoli cheese casserole. Your dad is taking care of the turkey, with other extended family members taking care of everything else. 

You do one last quick check to make sure everything is in order, taking care to give your cat an extra scoop of food.

Fuck - the litter box. You almost forgot! You thoroughly clean it so your neighbor doesn’t have as much work to do when they’re caring for your cat in your absence, but you realize you forgot to buy a new tub of litter at the store the other day. Not to worry, your dad left you some in the trunk of your car for some reason or another. You’ll just leave that for your neighbor to use. 

You get into the driver’s seat after turning off all the lights and pull up directions to your dad’s on your phone and put on Father John Misty’s newest album, then you’re on your merry way. 

About a quarter way through your drive, you have to turn your windshield wipers on. It’s not bad, but there’s the tiniest sprinkle of snow coming down. It’s probably nothing. People are driving like morons under just the threat of snow, but it’s nothing. It’ll be fine. At a stoplight, you change the music. This time, you listen to Love Deluxe by Sadé, one of your Uncle Ezra’s favorite albums. You wonder if you’ll see him at Thanksgiving. 

Quickly, the snow becomes not-nothing. The further you drive, the worse it gets. The snowflakes are getting bigger and coming down heavier, and the road ahead of you is becoming so covered that you can hardly make out the white and yellow lines painted on the road. You’ve slowed to driving at about twenty miles an hour, and you’re growing nervous. It seems like you’re headed deeper into the storm. 

Forty-five minutes pass, though you’ve not driven more than ten miles. It’s coming down now, and the roads are so thick with snow that you’re driving at what feels slower than a glacial pace. This is getting dangerous. The good news, however, is that you did see plow trucks driving down the opposite side of the median. Not confident in your ability to safely drive through what is now probably three inches of snow on the ground, plus the added slush and ice, you decide to pull over and wait for a truck to salt and plow the roads before continuing on your way. You turn on your hazards and watch the traffic move slowly ahead of you; it seems that nobody else has the same idea as you. 

You text your dad first just to let him know that you’ll be a bit late, that you’re pulling over to wait out the storm and wait for the roads to be plowed. 

Ok. Stay safe. - Dad.

Things could be worse, right? You’re safe and warm in your car, you have plenty of gas in the tank. It’s probably another 45 minutes of just waiting, but finally, it happens: plow trucks drive by, salting the roads in their wake. Halle-fucking-lujah. You adjust your mirrors, put your seatbelt back on, and throw the gear shift into drive. Aaand…

You’re stuck. 

You press the gas again, and you’re still stuck. It doesn’t take long for you to start to panic. But your dad will know what to do, right? You call your dad and explain the situation to him. 

“Try rocking the car,” your dad tells you.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Forward, reverse. Forward, reverse.”

With your dad on speakerphone, you try just that, but it’s a difficult maneuver. “It’s not working, Dad.”

“Okay, okay. Can you dig yourself out?”

“No!” you whine. “I am not doing that.”

Your dad’s eye roll is audible. “Alright. Cat litter. I left you cat litter in your trunk last time you came up, remember? Sprinkle that around your tires, it should give you enough traction to get out.”

“Cat litter…cat litter…”

“Yes, the cat litter. That I left in your trunk.”

You laugh awkwardly, “Yes. About that.” 

Your dad groans on the other end of the phone, “You have to be kidding. Okay. Hang on, where are you again?”

“Just past…I don’t know. I’ll drop you a pin.” You text your dad your location. The text takes some time to go through, but it does. 

“Alright. Uncle Ezra’s not far from you. I’ll give him a call, see if he can’t pick you up. Hang tight.”

“Isn’t he with you?”

“No,” your dad replies. “Why would he be with me?”

“I just figured he’d be up for Thanksgiving too.”

“I invited him, but I never heard back. Dude probably forgot. Okay, call you back.”

Sounds like Ezra. Ezra always was an…odd duck. You remember him visiting from time to time when you were a kid, and he and your dad would spend a lot of time locked in the garage together. It wasn’t until much later that you realized they were smoking weed. 

Ezra’s not your uncle, not really. It’s just what he calls himself. He’s your dad’s old coworker turned weed dealer turned buddy. Probably still sells your dad weed, though. Ezra also used to sell your dad quarter sticks of dynamite for the Fourth of July, and both of them made you promise not to tell anyone about that.

  Ezra was always a comforting, if somewhat peculiar, presence in your life. He called himself your guardian angel and texted you from an unknown number - he never has the same phone number whenever he texts you - on your twenty-first birthday, promising that one day soon he’d take you out for a beer. 

Your dad calls you back. “Hey.”

“Hey,” you greet him back. 

Your dad cuts right to the chase. He tells you that Uncle Ezra is on his way, that he has your location and he’ll come pick you up in thirty minutes. Worry about towing your car later, et cetera. 

“Okay. Love you. I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Love you too, honey. Be safe.”

-

‘On his way’ your ass. True to Uncle Ezra’s style, he doesn’t show up until nearly two and a half hours later. It’s just like that time he told you he’d pick you up from something at eleven and didn’t show up until the clock said 11:47. ‘Yeah,” he said, ‘Clock still says eleven, don’t it?’  He pulls up next to your car in a beat up old Kia van, the same Kia he’s been driving for years. 

Ezra hops out of his car, clad in snow boots, plaid pajama bottoms, a Carhartt jacket, and a fleece trapper hat. He stomps through the snow and opens your door, then ushers you into his van. “I apologize for the delay. Wasn’t expectin’ to be assigned a rescue mission,” he shouts at you. You’re not sure why he’s yelling. 

You watch Ezra grab your prepared food and the duffel from the back of your car, his ass crack visible through his falling pants. Ezra tosses it all haphazardly in his before getting back into the driver’s seat. He’s covered in snow, stomping off the flakes before looking over at you. With his dark brown eyes narrowed in your direction, he scans you up and down. “What on God’s green earth is the matter with you? You intended to traverse without the proper coverage?” 

“Excuse me?”

It takes your brain double the time to process Ezra’s words. You forgot about the unique way he speaks, his very particular vocabulary. You wonder where he picked up that way of speaking.

Ezra gestures to your torso. Oh, you think. Right. You’re just wearing a hoodie. You suppose it could have been a problem, had your car’s heat gone out.  

“Jacket,” he chastises you. 

“Yeah, no. I got it.”

“Then where is it?”

“No- like, I understood what you-” Ezra stares at you expectantly, with raised eyebrows. “Never mind.”

Ezra shakes his head in disappointment, then puts his foot on the brake of his Kia and pulls it into drive. “My domicile will have to do for you tonight, birdie. If you are amenable to it, of course.” 

“Mhm,” you hum. “Works for me.”

-

It takes Ezra about forty-five minutes to drive back to his house, which is located behind a water tower and a church off of a highway exit. It’s in a secluded area, thick with trees, the snow much heavier on the unplowed roads over here. Ezra pulls into his driveway, then opens the garage via a remote control attached to his sun visor. He gets out of his seat first, then rounds the front of his van and opens your door. “Hold onto me,” he tells you, holding out his arm. “You’re liable to slip and fall on these slick grounds.” 

You take hold of Ezra’s sleeve, and he carefully helps you out of the van and ushers you inside his house. “Get settled in. I shall retrieve your belongings and return to you post haste.”

You toe off your shoes and leave them on Ezra’s doormat, then begin strolling through his home, perusing through his belongings. His home is cluttered yet clean; lava lamps left on, paintings of St. Francis and St. Gertrude on the walls in his game room, which has floor to ceiling bookshelves full of board games and Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia. A Halloween bucket full of month-old candy on the table. The house smells strongly of incense, and when you turn the corner and enter the living room you see that Ezra’s left his fireplace lit. 

“Awh shit, must’ve slipped my mind,” Ezra says, noticing the same thing you do. He’s got your duffel bag on his back and the Pyrex pans in his arms. He sets all items down, then goes back into his garage without a word. A few minutes pass and you’re left confused by his absence, so you follow him. 

“Uncle Ezra?”

Ezra’s at his workbench, the warm flicker of a flame illuminating his handsome features as he lights a joint. He blows out the smoke, then smiles at you. “Joinin’ me?”

“Uhhh…”

“C’mon,” he urges. “It’s the holidays.” 

You join Ezra at his workbench, still unsure if you want to partake yet. While Ezra smokes, you study his workbench. There’s not one tool in sight, but there’s lucky bingo trolls, little Buddha statues, snow globes, and other little tchotchkes sitting on the bench. It’s lit by old, dim, rainbow Christmas lights, and little ornaments hang from the wire. You touch an ornament depicting John McClane from Die Hard in when he’s in the air vent, turning it side to side as you inspect it. 

“Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker,” Ezra croaks out with a smile then coughs. He offers you his joint. “Let’s have ourselves a merry little Christmas, now.” 

“It’s Thanksgiving, Ez.” 

Ezra’s brows knit together, “What’d I say?”

“Christmas.”

“Oh.”

Ezra’s still confused as he puts the pieces together, and then he realizes you’re correct. “I suppose you’re right, little bird. In any case, s’a reason to celebrate with a little green, no?”

“I’m not sure Thanksgiving is the weed-smoking holiday.” 

“Oh, but it is indeed, little bird. C’mere.” Ezra takes a pull from the joint held between his middle and forefingers, then, still holding the joint, puts both hands on your cheeks and pulls you close, pressing his lips against yours. He blows the smoke into your mouth, “Attagirl,” he says, his lips curled in a wry smile that makes your stomach churn and your heart flutter. You cough a bit, turning away from him to hide your flustered expression. Ezra pats you on the back. “You’re alright. You got it.” 

He pulls off his trapper hat then, setting it on the workbench. His black hair all messy, and he’s gotten grayer since you’ve seen him last, but that little white streak is still prominent as ever. “Let’s get you somethin’ to eat. Betcha need somethin’ in ya,” he says. 

Ezra ushers you inside, then sits you down on a barstool at the kitchen counter window. He opens his once white but yellowing-with-age refrigerator, scratching the back of his head as he examines his lack of contents in it. “I got…uh…” he trails off, bending his upper half to look through condiments and cans of ginger ale. “Wasn’t expectin’ company.” He opens a box of take-out, takes a whiff, and recoils. “Christ almighty,” he exclaims, “Don’t even wanna know what that most unholy concoction is.” then throws the box away. 

You have to laugh. Ezra is as Ezra as ever. Charming, bizarre, endearing, confusing. He’s never had his shit together, not once. You slide out of your barstool, then head into the kitchen to join him. You nudge him to the side, then pull out your Pyrex pans of Thanksgiving sides from his refrigerator. He’s got an R2-D2 magnet holding up a paper full of logins and passwords on it. ‘ezralikesballs’ is his WiFi password, apparently. 

Ezra smirks at you, tapping his index finger against his temple. “Smart girl,” he says, watching as you start pressing buttons on his oven. “Hold it right there–” Ezra pushes you out of the way and opens the oven door, pulling out various Halloween decorations, all of them plastic, before allowing you to preheat his oven. “Didn’t have a proper place to store ‘em.” 

Jesus fucking Christ. How this man made it past forty years is beyond you. You preheat Ezra’s oven, then sit back down at the barstool as you wait for it to heat up. Ezra pours you a glass of ginger ale, and you spend the time until your food is warmed talking. 

Ezra doesn’t have oven mitts or potholders, so you have to pull your pans out with kitchen towels. You carefully pull off the foil, and Ezra’s standing beside you with plates and forks, ready to serve you both. 

“Goddamn,” he marvels, salivating at the sight of the food you prepared. “You made all of this?”

“I did, yeah,” you reply, smiling shyly. 

“Beautiful. Jus’ beautiful.” Ezra serves himself first, a generous helping of both the sweet potatoes and broccoli casserole. He opens a cabinet and pulls out a can of Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce, “Knew this’d come in handy. Never hurts to have a can of this stuff for emergencies,” Ezra tells you, waving the can in your direction. He serves you next, then opens the cranberry sauce and puts a bit of it on both of your plates. You avert your eyes from the expiration date on the can. You don’t wanna know.

With a nod of his head, Ezra tells you to go sit in his living room. He pushes an ottoman in your direction with his foot, then sits down on his sofa. He pats the spot next to himself, “C’mere, sweetheart. Uncle Ezra missed his birdie.” You sit next to Ezra, who then turns on his TV. He puts on the Thanksgiving classic, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which is also one of his favorite movies. “‘Tis the season.” 

-

Ezra nudges you and leans down to whisper in your ear, “Wake up, sleepyhead. The hour’s come for us to adjourn to my quarters,” he drawls. 

“Hm?”

You hadn’t even realized you were asleep, and asleep on Ezra’s shoulder at that. In your head, you thought you could still hear the movie, that you were following along to it. You’re surprised to see Steve Martin cursing out the airport attendant on Ezra’s TV. 

“Bedtime,” he says. “Upstairs.” 

“Oh. That’s okay, Uncle Ezra. I’m fine right here.” 

“On the sofa?”

“Yeah.” 

“No.”

You turn your head to face Ezra better, stunned. “No?”

“This couch is Hans’ domain. Best not to provoke the fella. Don’t feel like settin’ him off tonight.” 

Hans is Ezra’s cat that you’ve rarely ever seen, but have often felt when his feather-duster tail brushes your foot, heard him when he hisses at you before skittering off into a dark corner. He has to be in his twenties at this point, an Eldritch creature. Hans was ancient when Ezra found him palling around with a raccoon by his garbage, and that was years ago. Ezra’s always spoken about him like Hans is an abusive husband, that one wrong move could result in a reckoning most unpleasant. You’re glad to know the beast is well. 

Ezra stands up first, then stretches backward, exposing his soft, pillowy tummy and happy trail to you. He smirks when he catches you looking. “Your turn, birdie. Up you go.” Ezra bends forward and takes hold of both of your hands, then guides you upstairs and into his bedroom. 

You enter the dark room first, Ezra right behind you with his hand on the small of your back. He turns the lights on and his bed is neatly made with the scratchiest flannel sheets that have to be well over decades old, knit afghans that are even older and have absolutely seen better days. Ezra peels off his clothes, tossing them into a laundry basket on the floor. Clad in nothing but boxers, Ezra gets into his bed. 

God, it is sweltering. Ezra’s house is warm to begin with, but does not heat efficiently at all. You excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and change, pulling out from your duffel only an oversized t-shirt. You’ll just be strategic, so as not to flash Ezra. 

You return to Ezra’s bedroom, and he looks halfway asleep already. “Do Uncle Ezra a kindness, darlin’, and hit the lights for me.” Ezra makes a lazy gesture toward the light switch by the door. 

You turn off the light, and darkness consumes the small bedroom until Ezra turns on his small CRT-TV, Die Hard playing and already halfway through. Another one of Ezra’s favorite films, as evidenced by the name he gave his cat and the little ornament in the garage. You’re not much of a sleep-with-the-TV-on person, but Ezra’s blackout blinds kind of freak you out so it’s nice to have that light. Plus, the volume is low enough. It’s been a long, long day. It weirds you out a little to sleep next to Ezra, but you know that while he’s a strange and bizarre man, he’s ultimately harmless. You slide into bed, exhausted to the point that you’re not even bothered by Ezra’s rock-hard mattress or the scratchiness of his sheets and blankets. The minute your head hits the pillow, you’re asleep. 

-

You wake up in Ezra’s bedroom to that suffocating, smothering heat, the hot air so thick that it burns your nose and your throat. God, how does he sleep this way? His flannel sheets under your body are also warm, and Ezra’s insulating all that heat with his own body. Ezra’s cuddling you tightly, and you’re not sure when that happened, not sure whether he initiated it or if you did. Despite the heat, you don’t entirely mind when he snuggles you closer, curling himself around your body. Nuzzling the back of your neck, strong arms wrapped tightly around you. 

Until you do mind. 

He groans when he presses himself tightly against your frame, his hard cock against your ass as he ruts his hips into you. 

“Uncle Ezra,” you whisper, scooting your body in the opposite direction. In Ezra’s unconscious state, he pulls you back against his body, now fully grinding his hard bulge into your backside with a rhythmic tilting of his hips. “Ezra,” you hiss, voice firmer.

“Wha…” he mumbles, voice thick with sleep, his words slow and slurred. His brow pinched together and his eyes are squeezed shut to block out bluish light from his TV. “What’s ‘a matter?”

“You- your-” You swallow, trying to summon the words. 

“What’s that? You’re havin’ a nightmare of sorts? C’mere, sweet birdie. Go back to sleep. I gotcha.” Ezra presses a kiss against the back of your head.

“N-no, fuck. Ezra-” You wiggle out from Ezra’s hold, then flip over onto your back. 

The loss of your warm body against his cock, that’s when it all clicks for Ezra. “Ohhhh, I get it,” he murmurs, chuckling. “I understand perfectly well.”

“Yeah…”

“I do apologize, little bird,” Ezra says in a raspy, low voice. He reaches for your cheek and drags his pointer finger up and down the soft skin there. “The bastard’s got a mind of his own, doesn’t he?”

Jesus Christ, he’s so fucking weird. He? Ezra’s given his cock pronouns?

“S’alright, go on back to sleep, now.” 

This has to be a nightmare. Or something in between a nightmare and a wet dream. You’ve had those before, anyway. You drift off to sleep once more, then awake again to Ezra’s bulge against you. This time, you feel more of him. His underwear is off, and he’s rubbing the head of his cock against your pussy. “Ezra!”

“What’s troublin’ ya now, birdie, tell me.” 

“You…fuck.”

Fuck, it’s wrong. It’s so wrong and you know it. But goddamn, if his cock isn’t thick. Ezra keeps rocking his hips, grunting softly in your ear as he rubs his hard length against your pussy, arousal dampening the cotton of your underwear. 

“I do apologize for wakin’ ya with my member, but he’s got a titan’s girth, birdie. What’s a man to do?”

Titan’s girth…what the fuck. You don’t even know where to begin deciphering that statement. Right now, the only thing on your mind is fighting the growing heat, that sticky feeling building deep in your belly as Ezra continues to grind against you. His little noises of pleasure aren’t helping in the slightest. 

“Let’s get you outta these,” Ezra huffs rather impatiently, hooking his fingers into the waistband of your panties, then pulls them down with a practiced ease. He tilts your ass, “Yeah, lay like that. You won’t even know he’s there,” he whispers, then slots his length between your lips, coating himself in your arousal as he moves his hips. “Don’t pay him any mind, birdie.”

“Ez- oh, fuck–” you gasp when the thick head of his cock catches against your clit, sparking a pleasure even more intense. “We - you can’t.”

“Oh, I know, angel. He just needs to feel ya a bit, that’s all. Not gonna feel any sort ‘a - fuck–” Ezra notches his tip inside you, only temporarily as he continues rutting, “Any intrusion of any sort.” 

“O-okay.” 

Ezra snakes a hand under your shirt and paws at your breasts, squeezing the soft flesh in such a manner so as not to be too harsh, but god, he could tear you apart. Ever the gentleman, he holds back, teasing your nipples with his fingers instead. You moan a little louder, a little more sweetly when he does that to you. 

It’s an excruciating tease - long, arduous, excruciating. Ezra needs more from you. He could get himself off just like this, fucking your slick folds and no more, but Ezra’s really not one to deprive himself. He’s always been a bit of a libertine in that regard, believing that pleasure’s good for the heart, good for the soul, too. He can’t stave off his hedonistic tendencies much longer, “Ohh, Christ. You feel how fuckin’ hard he is? He needs ya somethin’ fierce, birdie. Needs to be inside that sweet cunt of yours.”

“Ezra…”

“Why don’t you let him in, sweetheart? You need it too, I know you do.”

“We really shouldn’t, Ezra.”

“Says who, sweetheart? Ah–” Ezra notches his tip inside you fully, inching inside you little by little, “You cure what ails him, little bird. Be a lamb, now.” Ezra pushes inside you in one full thrust, burying himself down to the hilt. Ezra did get you sufficiently wet, but it’s still, still such a stretch. You wince in pain, and Ezra covers your mouth to quiet your cry. “You’ll get used to him. Relax, angel. M’gonna have him take good care of ya.” 

With that, Ezra builds a slow pace at first. Just steadily moving in and out of you, his short term goal only to get you used to the thickness of his member. “Ezra,” you sigh. 

“You take him beautifully, birdie. Beautifully,” Ezra says, now drawing in and out of you at a faster pace. “Look how happy he is inside a’ ya. You’re soakin’ the fella.”

Ezra moves fluidly, thrusting in and out of you as he breathes heavily in your ear, whispering swears you’ve only rarely heard him speak. This angle in particular has Ezra hitting that most special place inside of you as that hot, fiery pleasure inside you intensifies tenfold. 

He’s sweaty and warm against you, his body slick with sweat. You clutch his forearm as he fucks you, rocking your hips to match his thrusts. He feels so fucking good, good enough to scramble every thought in your brain. His cock is so long and thick and curved at just the perfect angle. 

Ezra wriggles his arm down the front of you, fingers immediately finding your clit. You gasp when he touches it, rubbing perfect, practiced circles into the sensitive bud. “Oh fuck, Ezra.” 

“Yeah, she likes that, doesn't she, birdie? Don’t take much at all.” Ezra smiles behind you, then presses a kiss against your cheek. He breathes you in as he fucks you, rubbing your clit with precision to bring you to the edge. Within seconds, you’re whimpering, thighs twitching against his large, masculine hand. “Let go,” he grunts. “Come all over him.” 

With his ministrations, his cock fucking you perfectly, you come with a loud symphony of moans, a mixture of swears and Ezra’s own name. Your pulsing cunt coaxes Ezra’s own orgasm along, walls squeezing around him as he paints your insides with so, so much come. A truly astounding amount of come. 

“Ohhh, he needed that,” Ezra groans, pulling out of you with no regard for his spend that spills out of you and onto his flannel sheets. “Thanks for humorin’ him, birdie. Go on and get some sleep now.”

If you enjoyed, please please please reblog with some kind thoughts or send me an ask!! Your feedback means the world to me and keeps me motivated to write, and goes so far in making this blog feel like a community 🩷

[stickylizardcave]

longass kingleader au comic rough

gonna be under the cut bc hrhs its 48 panels long and i dont have the script ON the panels. I've been calling this the Codemaster AU (cause it's like half inspired by Chez's Gamemaster Kinger) but also I'm not sold on that name but also also I have literally no other idea for it bc this literally only exists for this one comic lmaooo;; I have nothing else planned

(1) CAINE: -and there will be a grand prize waiting for you! (2) CAINE: When you get ba-[STATIC BUZZ] (3) POMNI: ...Caine? What was- (4) CAINE: Nothing to worry about! Off you go!

(9) CAINE: ...Kinger? (10) KINGER: Caine? What are you doing here so late? (11) CAINE: I...am experiencing a problem, and I need your assistance.

(12) KINGER: Oh dear...Is this what happened to you earlier? CAINE: Yes. It has been...not pleasant. And occurring more frequently. (14) KINGER: Well, it's not a virus, at least as far as I can see. Nor a hack since your firewall would pick that up first. Strange that it's glitching your model like this...I may need to see your code directly. CAINE: That's fine.

(16) KINGER: Execute command code. Admin request. Profile Kinger. Password GLTC-G05WX. (17) CAINE: ...Access granted.

(25) KINGER: Found it. (26) CAINE: What is it? KINGER: You have a bit of a looping statement that's self-updating, but causing a leak. It's iterated itself to gibberish at this point. (27) CAINE: So it should be an easy fix... KINGER: I'll need to look through the backlogs to make sure I get it all, but yes. Just a small patch.

(28) CAINE: Such a simple thing to affect me so much...how humiliating. KINGER: It's been going on unnoticed for a while now. With everything that's happened recently, you've been working overtime and it finally caught up to you, that's all. No shame in it. Would you like me to cycle you down for the update? CAINE: If you would be so kind, my dear. (29) KINGER: I'll put the Circus in stasis, don't worry. (30) KINGER: Execute command. Rest mode.

(38) KINGER: Welcome back. How are you feeling? CAINE: Much better, my dear. KINGER: That's good to hear. I want to make sure the clean-up didn't mess with anything important. Would you mind running a diagnostic?

(41) CAINE: Scans came back clear. Thank you very much, my dear! KINGER: It's never a problem, old friend. (42) KINGER: Now then, it's late and I think it's time for me to sleep. (43) KINGER: Execute command. Remove admin permissions from Profile Kinger.

(44) CAINE: Accepted. Executing... (45) KINGER: What are you doing? CAINE: Getting more comfortable, of course.

(47) KINGER: You don't need to stay here, you know. I'll be alright. CAINE: Nonsense, you stayed with me until I woke, it's only fair to do the same for you! KINGER: If you insist... CAINE: I do! Now, off to sleep you go. I have a grand adventure to plan for tomorrow. KINGER: Ha, alright. Goodnight, Caine. CAINE: Goodnight, my dear Kinger.

[dufferpuffer]

(Note: idk the characters OP mentions or what they are from, I wanted to talk about peoples reaction to disability rep in general)

I think it's fantastic when non-disabled people talk positively about disabled characters, even if they do it a little clumsily (though not in the face of disabled people critiquing it... yeesh...) Just like with other marginalized groups. eg: we can be happy about having more PoC characters... even if we might not fully understand the nuances in their representation. We can be taught about that nuance by those who do understand - and that's how we learn to understand better. That's awesome.

The thing that's annoying, as OP describes, is that - especially for disability representation - existence seems to be the bar for entry. They see a prosthetic and go 'Wowee! Good enough :)'

Maybe existing can pass as 'good representation' for some things - like race, gender or sexual orientation (arguably - important: it depends on the particular media) But that doesn't really work for disability.

Depending on the setting and themes of a narrative, being a different race, gender or orientation doesn't alter how you can live. Having a disability, by definition, DOES alter how you live.

Example: Innocent little kids show, where a bunch of kids go on adventures together, doesn't need to display topics like racism, homophobia, transphobia etc. to be good representation. The kids can just exist the same as everyone else - just existing is enough.

But a disabled kid HAS to be disabled. Their life has to be shown as altered in unique ways - otherwise it risks being harmful. It doesn't need to be anything big, or sad, or the topic of an episode... Infact it's often better when it isn't.

+ Have a character wake their friend up early, knocking on her window - she says 'Wait! Let me get my leg on!!' + They go swimming - and she takes her leg off to swim. + It gets really muddy, so she gets a piggy-back from a friend so she doesn't get her leg stuck. + Or it DOES get stuck and someone pulls it out for her. + She's training for a race and she switches her leg to a running one. + Maybe she isn't in an episode - the other characters can't rely on her skills to solve an issue, because its Physical Therapy day.

You don't need to draw attention to it, she doesn't need to suffer - but she has to be different. She has to live with different worries. She can't just be the exact same as everyone else, because she isn't like everyone else. That's what being disabled means.

If she just does everything everyone else does, with no thought put into the fact she has a fake leg other than 'one of her legs is blue'... you are teaching that disabled people don't live differently. But we DO. We HAVE to. A little kid seeing a character never put any thought into the things they need to worry about doesn't feel GOOD. It feels WORSE.

People of minority racial groups, and people of differing identities, dream of a world where that doesn't matter, they can be the same. Disabled people don't get that dream. Having a leg re-grown...? God, even thinking about the physical therapy, training to walk again... It would just be nice if there was more understanding, more facilities and support, that some of us need to live different lives.

...I am not an amputee. My digestive organs are all messed up - and I have PTSD. That is a very different experience to being an amputee. But I can talk about what I think is good or bad representation, even if it might be clumsy sometimes, because: I understand that good disability representation is in how the character is affected by their disability, not by just existing.

And that's what I would want to share with any non-disabled person who feels excitement seeing a disabled character: think about how it affects their life. Think about the choices they make because of it.

Toph from Avatar isn't 'cool disability representation' because her blindness is accurate or realistic. It isn't. It's fantasy blindness. It's cool because she has to live differently. She uses her bending to super-power 'see' - but not in water, or sand, or for flying things... There is no 'fix' that gives her sight back. Only tools to help. ''How does blindness affect how she can live'' has been considered.

So... you have a character 'you didn't even notice had a prosthetic'. Is there no way in which she is shown to act or think differently because of it...? That's not particularly good representation. There can still be cool parts of it that are worthwhile representation, like an interesting history, or design, or function... ...but she isn't disabled unless she is disabled. Yknow...?

I really wish non-disabled folks would stop commenting on weather or not something is good disability rep, especially when people with those disabilities are critiquing the specific things these folks are bringing up as examples of why the character is so good.

I swear, if I hear one more person say "I didn't even realise Neve was an amputee, that's such good representation!" I'm going to scream lol.

Also just to clarify, I don't think Neve is bad, my feelings on her from a disability representation stance are more complicated, but her disability having such a small impact on her that a shocking number of players said they didnt even notice it until she tells you how she lost her leg is NOT what makes her good. "You cant even tell she's disabled" is not a flex. We've talked about this. Twice.

Same goes for the inquisitor and Hezencost but they're pretty minor characters so I'm seeing less of it there.

[totalswag]

Hii I have reques if you feel comfortable with it!

I read your drew fic with the arrest and I loved it!! I was wondering if reader was preforming bed chem outro instead of the back up singer it’s Drew and they get a little to carried away in front of the crowd. If That makes sense💕

bed chem ⎯ DREW STARKEY

authors note thank you for sending this request and it makes glad you liked my arrested for being too hot fic. my requests are still open and i'm gonna be working on the requests that are in my inbox right now from recent requests. also, you can picture singer!reader picture any way you want <3 i’m using sabrina carpenter as inspo for singer!reader.

taglist ⤕ if you would like to be notified every time i post you will type in your username then be all set.

summary drew coming on stage at the very end of your song and you both get lost in the moment for a second in front of fans.

warning(s) mentions of intimate positions, kissing, touching.

Earlier in the show, you arrested Drew, your boyfriend, for being too hot— everyone in the arena went crazy seeing him. What they aren't expecting to Drew making a second appearance.

At the very end of bed chem one of your backup dancers will come into frame holding a camera on his shoulder, and when the curtain closes you pretend to do intimate things then the stage lights go off.

Prior to the show you asked Drew if he would be okay to go this— he agreed. Making sure he's comfortable was your first priority. He talked about different ways coming on stage that were so funny.

You start singing the final chorus of bed chem on your knees, legs wide out and free hand in front of you as you lean forward. The curtain signal is about to close. From the corner of your vision, you can see Drew approaching with the camera on his shoulder, dressed in dark pants and a white tank top—fans immediately began to cheer as he entered the frame.

He looked so good you couldn't control the redness of your cheeks spreading like a teenager seeing their crush.

To make the moment better, you sway your body around on the bed, allowing yourself to relax. Drew is looking at you with a smile on his face as he gets closer to the edge of the bed.

Motioning him to get closer— he lifts one leg on the bed as the curtain makes its way around the bed. Slowly setting down the camera on the edge of the bed.

You moved closer to Drew, pressing your bodies together in a false display of intimacy. Drew played along well, massaging your sides as he drew you closer. The crowd's cheers intensified, and the excitement in the arena reached a fever pitch.

You leaned in and kissed Drew deeply, as the curtain began to close behind you. The kiss was supposed to be a tease, a staged performance for the spectators, but you found yourself becoming lost in it.

Drew's hands crept up to cradle your face, his touch soft yet forceful. You forgot about the crowd, the cameras, and everything. It was just you and Drew, completely lost in each other.

Your hands drag down his bare chest, and he leaps forward into you at the gentleness of your touch, sending lightning down your body. 

Once the lights turn off you both pull away from each other. Everything in your body right now is all over the place you think you are gonna explode. You are breathing heavily.

"You always know how to put on a show," he said quietly, his voice hoarse.

You giggled softly, your fingertips tracing the contour of his jawline. "And you always know how to make it unforgettable."

⎯⎯ my taglist!

✰ if you would like to be added to my taglist and be notified whenever i post please let me know in the comments or in my ask box. if there's a line across your name that means i couldn't find your account.

@chenslucy @rosezza @rafeyslamb @runningfrom2am @starkeyvhs @mymultiveres @percysley @diqldrunks @drewsephrry @francislovergirl @kiiyomei @sukuna-wafiu @skyslowalking @kneelarmhstrung @inthelibrarybtw @superlegend216 @liliummz @bxmaaa @ifwfratboychris @the1nonlyariana

[carlyraejepsans]

would you be okay pitching ghost trick to someone who doesn’t rly know anything about it? i’ve heard of it before and that it’s good but idk why, and i don’t really get a lot out of advertisements or game descriptions

you know the toby-typical campiness in how he writes his characters in UTDR? over the top, extremely iconic, clearly working from preestablished tropes but doing his own special spin on them? put toby fox on acid and you've got shu takumi's writing style.

ghost trick isn't "just" good. ghost trick is the type of good that invents a whole new categorization for itself. ghost trick invented a situation to put little fictional bitches in that is so good, the most popular works in the tag are people from other fandoms being like "oh shit, let me put MY fictional bitches through in this situation as well"

it is one of the most hooking, satisfyingly delivered mysteries I've ever seen in a videogame. there is not a single second of the game that feels unutilised, everything pushes you forward in the mystery, and still it never feels choking. the way it handles tension and delivers its information is phenomenal. if this were a normal recommendation i would start talking about the gameplay and how fun and good it feels to play and how genuinely clever it is but you're not here for that, are you, so let me tell you the real selling point: every single character in this game is fucking insane. not a single one of them is normal. it's a noir. it's a parody. it's an animator's wet dream. my friend is playing the game on stream and they said his fiancée can tell when we're streaming because she can hear him doing his pathetic man voice on call.

listen to me. you will fall in love with sissel. i played One Shot earlier this year. i thought i was never going to find a game with a protagonist that crawled into my heart as much as niko. i was wrong. jesus christ i was wrong. you need to understand, this is a puzzle game. once you know the answers that's it for the gameplay. the replay value is extremely low. I have replayed it 5 times in three weeks just to make the wrong choices and watch what sissel says and quips about it. he's my guy. i need to hold his face in my hands. you will see his fuckass red suit, you will see his fuckass banana hair, you willl see his goofy little smile and his dirk strider ass sunglasses and you will whimper like a DOG because you miss him so much. i am missing him right now as we speak. fuck.

play ghost trick.