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stxrvel · 6 months ago

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coincidence! (2)

series summary. the holy grail of the seven men who ruled the country's entertainment used to be your friends at school. now, ten years later and between successes and failures, what reason would they have to want to come back into your life? pairing. eventually ot7 x f!reader. content. first of all, english is not my first language so sorry for any mistakes! curse words, we're still on the safe zone, angst if you squint, just silly writing! a/n. hi guys! finally second chapter is out! im blown away with your response!! thank u so much from the bottom of my heart! i loooooved reading your comments <33 pls remember updates are weekly or biweekly! and if you want to be tagged pls say so in the comments! see you next week ;)

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“This is unbelievable! We're going to be rich!!!”

“What makes you think my sister is going to give you any of that money?”

“I created that Instagram account that was tagged in Kim Taehyung's damn story, I deserve a raise!”

“What makes you drones think my daughter is going to give you any of that money?”

“None of you are going to get anything out of that act of feigned innocence. Honey, are you all right?”

It seemed like a light had gone on in the room, four pairs of eyes landing on your still pale, surprised face. The night had been heavy after Yuna's call and you'd had so little sleep that you didn't know how you were functioning at the moment. Maybe that was the thing: you weren't functioning at all.

When you woke up, you thought it had all been a bad dream and that definitely the first exposure you'd had to the guys in years hadn't been because Taehyung came across your books at a convention you decided not to go to and uploaded them to his Instagram account with over eighty million followers. It was impossible, wasn't it? Too crazy.

Maybe not as crazy as waking up to your parents banging on your bedroom door saying that over a hundred thousand orders had been placed overnight and they didn't have enough book production for that much demand.

Be that as it may, Yuna and your mother took care of the communications on the account. You went from having twenty followers (including your family and friends —your father had created an account exclusively for that and only followed you—), to almost sixty thousand in at least twelve hours. The posts you had worked so hard to create and put together were finally getting the attention they deserved, but it had all happened so fast and suddenly that it was too strong to process calmly.

Weighing which was stronger, whether Taehyung's acknowledgment of your existence after so many years of zero contact or that your book sales shot up so immeasurably that they couldn't even keep up with demand, even if a month went by, didn't make things any easier.

“She's obviously still in shock,” Yuna replied to your mother at your lack of response from the living room, right across the dining room where you had been sitting since you had come down from your room. Your breakfast was still untouched on the table, but that seemed to be the least important thing in the room with all the more important news.

“Have the printers answered yet?” your brother's voice through the speaker of your father's phone rang as you blinked, reality settling too slowly on your shoulders. You didn't even want to think about what it meant that Taehyung had done that. Maybe it was simply an altruistic act, wasn't it? Maybe he felt guilt and wanted to ameliorate it somehow. What better way than to do an act of charity?

“I'm on it,” your father was sitting across from you in the dining room, his laptop on the glass of the table as he moved his hands over the keyboard and stared through his glasses at the full tip of his nose. From the way his eyes narrowed, your mother snorted.

“Why don't you get those glasses adjusted if you know you don't see well up close, let alone on electronic devices?” the woman reached over, dragging your father's glasses until they were almost glued to his eyebrows. Your father barely gave her a goofy grin as your mother started shaking her hands. “You better move. I'll do it. You write too slow; you're getting on our son's nerves.”

“Nah, I'm fine. I don't know if y/n is tho.”

Silence returned and you growled internally. Well, that was enough conjecture and assumptions without any information to substantiate them, it was time to get down to business.

“Do you think we should take over this business now?” Yuna completely ignored your stretch and you sent her a confused look.

Your brother exclaimed from the phone in agreement. “I call dibs on the treasury!”

“There's no way you can keep the accounts right! You're studying law.”

“Seojun is good at numbers, Yuna.”

“Ha, with all due respect Mrs. I/n, he must only be good at counting sheep.”

“Hey,” you tried to get attention, getting up from the chair.

“y/n, don't talk, you're still in shock. Can you believe he once called me from the supermarket to ask if he got his change right? He didn't even move from the checkout counter. There were people booing him.”

“Ow, my poor baby.”

“I told you not to say that to anyone!”

“I can't keep quiet if they're speaking lies about you!”

“This wasn't lies! This is about my pride!”

“Nonsense. I'll handle the treasury. I double majored in finance and international relations for a reason.”

“You can't run anything without starting bossing everyone around!”

“It's not my fault you're a good-for-nothing!”

God. It was going to be a long day.

Sorting out the whole printing issue and the number of orders was difficult, but with a couple of stories, interactions with new followers and express delivery of the few copies you'd already had at home for months, the waters calmed down a bit. Now, in the stifling silence of your room, you wanted to run.

“Are you going to stare at the ceiling all night?”

“Maybe.”

Yuna watched you from the bed while all you could do was stare as notifications continued to pop up on your Instagram account and your mail because the requests simply wouldn't stop, even though you had made a thousand clarifications to all the new followers. You were trying to focus on the bright side of things, regardless of whatever reasons there may have been for everything to have happened that way, but with your friend's incessant gaze lying on your bed it made it a little difficult. You knew she wanted to pierce your skull from curiosity, but you wouldn't know how you would answer her questions.

“Is there anything you'd like to share with the class?”

The tension had become a little more latent during the last few minutes, when Yuna saw a specific notification on the account. Kim Taehyung and Park Jimin had followed you. To describe your look of shock might be an understatement, and all you did for the next half hour was run across the room and throughout the house vociferating that you were living a nightmare.

Yuna has known all along that you had never been a fan of the siamese or their clan of friends, but she never knew why exactly. You had to tell her that you weren't interested in fashion, that you didn't like the kind of music Jungkook made, that hip-hop was never your thing, that you weren't interested in dilfs and you weren't interested in dance either. You had to tell her that all the things you once did with them didn't matter to you because it was painful, even if it was hard to accept.

You couldn't remember the times you would go shopping at the small mall in town to buy the trending clothes to put together different outfits with Taehyung and Jimin, then go try them all on at your house and invite the others and even your parents to do an impromptu runway show. You couldn't remember how the genre of music that Jungkook and you listened to all the time on his iPod and your MP3 player was the same one that his entire music career focuses on. You couldn't remember the nights when Yoongi would share his writings with you and you would help him compose a song or two on the piano when he felt brave enough. Or the times when you would accompany Hoseok to his workouts and then watch him create dance routines to his favorite songs while Jungkook sang in the background. You also didn't want to remember the times when Namjoon and Seokjin would sponsor their trips and give everyone gifts without expecting anything in return.

You couldn't remember those things. It was too much to bear for such a weak heart.

“What do you want to know?” you sighed, your body sliding on the chair as the notifications grew.

“How did all this happen?”

“Why do you think I have an answer for that?”

Yuna clicked her tongue, sitting on the bed with the cell phone still in her hands, still staring at the notification that snapped her out of her sanity.

“It's just… this is all unbelievable, magnificent and unreal. But how come you're not so excited about what happened?” Yuna slid across the sheets, to be right in front of you, but you refused to look away from the computer. Every time you thought you had overcome and grown around everything that happened so many years ago, something would pop up to remind you that you still had a long way to go. Maybe the nostalgia was strong, but so was the anger. “Regardless of how things turned out, because I know you're not as big a fan as me, this opens a million doors for you and I don't know why you're not celebrating it like we are.”

“It's…complicated.”

“I don't think so. Tell me.”

Yuna was unstoppable when she wanted to get answers out, but besides the obvious, of course there was something else that bothered you and kept you from enjoying this boom so much.

“It's just that all of this doesn't feel like it was a product of my effort,” you began, letting your gaze wander over the desk. The copies of your books you kept for yourself, the first ones you'd ever printed several years ago, lay there, as tattered as your failed accomplishment. “It doesn't feel like an achievement that my work had exploded thanks to a celebrity whose fans would buy even the toilet paper he uses. A lot of those people won't even read the book. They will just buy it and take a picture of it to say that they have the same book that the great Kim Taehyung read. Many of those books will never have a life, they will just be dust collectors and be reminders that all this did not happen because of my effort.”

“What the fuck are you blabbering about? Of course it's the fruit of your effort! Of course you deserve it!” Yuna got up from the bed and moved the chair around the back to leave you in front of her disgruntled and almost offended face. You could see the words drawn in her face. “You worked so many years to pull this off and after so many bumps you finally can! You deserve to have what you wanted so badly. This recognition will last just the same because many other people will read them and love them and they may not be many, but you will form a solid foundation as time goes on with people who will be truly unconditional and supportive and that will grow over time. Don't look at this so negatively, maybe you skipped a couple of steps, but you had every right to. It was what you deserved after all the effort and dedication you put into this project for so many years.”

Yuna didn't hesitate for a second. Her very serious expression sent a shiver down your spine and you could tell from her furrowed brow that she really was angry at your perception. Perhaps she was right, but without knowing the full background of this specific situation, you were only left to shake your head in assent and send her a grateful smile.

“I guess you're right,” you lifted a shoulder, turning your gaze back to your mail notifications.

“Of course I am!” the smile returned to her face and it didn't take long for her to look back down at her phone with sparkling eyes. “Now that we got the emotional charge out of the way, would you mind telling me how you know Taehyung?”

Your breathing stopped for a second and you cursed yourself because it sounded too loud as you almost choked on your own saliva.

“Oh?”

Play fucking dumb.

“What, did you think I wasn't going to notice? He wrote it crystal clear.”

Yuna wasn't even looking at you, too focused on running her finger over the row of notifications. Her nonchalant demeanor only caused you to panic more. It was as if she had caught you red-handed.

One of the best writers I've ever met in my life, damn you Kim Taehyung.

“Ah… I didn't… I didn't really know him so let's just say…”

“He couldn't have said that for nothing, don't you think? No celebrity would do that unless it was a person they hold in deep regard.”

Yuna had just caught you totally off guard. Maybe you should've focused a lot more on what Taehyung had written before you blocked his user from your personal account and threw the phone in the bottom of your drawer the night before and tried hard not to think about the rest for the rest of the night and all that day.

“It's just that… uhm… we studied at the same school. But for a short time actually. I don't even remember it well actually, ha, ha.”

Your laugh came out too constrained under your friend's narrow-eyed stare. You knew you'd have a hard time convincing her because you were a lousy liar.

“You know, it always struck me as odd that you weren't a fan. Taehyung and Jimin are like the two extremes of your ideal type.”

“Whaaaat?”

“And Jungkook's music is literally the kind of music you listen to, you just don't listen to his. All the other artists in the same genre you do listen to.”

“That has nothing to do with…”

“And even your parents don't claim to know Kim Seokjin when your mother was literally a nurse. She probably worked with him.”

“What does that have to do…?”

“And your brother is a hip-hop fan. How come he doesn't listen to Agust D? He's the best rapper of the last few decades and he's been trending for a long time.”

“…”

At what fucking moment?

“And all of them, plus Hobi and Namjoon, they all went to the same school. They're all friends. And you say you went to school with Taehyung?”

“Ahm… well, yes, but it's not like I would have met the others.”

Yuna looked at you, really looked you straight in the eyes as if that way she could tell what it was you were hiding or as if that solved all her guesses. It was impossible for her not to figure it out if she had already tied up all the damn loose ends.

Since the boys had left one by one, clearly your family was the first to realize how much their departures had affected you. In the beginning there was communication and all, but when Jungkook was the last to leave you lost any kind of link with them completely. You never knew exactly what happened because no matter how hard you tried to contact them you couldn't, not even your parents could talk to the boys' parents. Perhaps they had simply grown up, matured, completely forgetting about their ordinary life in that town.

They seemed to have disappeared from the planet.

Until your family moved to the capital. Jungkook was just starting out as an idol, but he had an amazing debut. He had captivated the entire audience and was too successful almost from the second one. It was a torment to watch them grow professionally little by little because, although you were happy for their achievements and all, you couldn't forget that they had basically abandoned you. And your parents and Seojun had noticed. They had noticed how much seeing them all over the place was bumming you out, so unreachable when at one point they were all in your living room eating your mother's delicious kimchi and listening to your father's anecdotes. Everyone was affected by their departures, but clearly no one as much as you.

That's why, of course, your parents and brother had made a silent vow to keep all media about the boys away from you, because they didn't even talk about it by accident in the house, at least not when you were present.

“It must be a huge coincidence…” Yuna continued and only at that moment did you realize how much you got into your head. Your vision slightly blurred. “I shouldn't accuse you of anything for things like that, should I? What nonsense.”

You were probably as white as a sheet of paper.

“Yeah, it would be too weird… ha, ha.”

God, you had to stop letting out those giggles when you were nervous.

“Anyway, should we order fried chicken for dinner?”

“I think I heard mom say she was going to make japchae.”

“Ohhhhhh, Mrs. l/n's japchae is delicious!”

You let out a laugh watching your friend spring up from the bed and head for the door. She stopped halfway out and pointed her index finger at you.

“Don't tell my mom I said that.”

You made a gesture to zipper your mouth shut and Yuna finally left.

The previous conversation had been so tense that you already felt tired and ready to sleep at seven o'clock at night. Really the whole day had been so heavy for everyone that you didn't know how the lights in the house were still on. For now, you couldn't do anything else, even if orders continued to come in, now everything depended on the printer and how fast the books would come out, so you would have to wait.

Maybe you should rest. You had asked your boss for the day off, but tomorrow you would have to continue working hard. Regardless of the incredible growth you'd had, you couldn't let your work go to waste.

Tomorrow would be a new day. A quieter one, preferably.

a/n: i'll try to have ready part 3 for next week! see you on june 13 at 11:59 pm - GMT5 time!

tag: @rinkud @futuristicenemychaos @pastelpeachess @parapiop7 @kokoandkookie @midiplier @thunderg @lizzymizzy-blogg @ladymorrie @butnotmontana @lovelgirl22 @jjeonjjk7 @aurorathi @ot7stansthings @kunacat @borahaetelevision @mylovingstars @ghostlyworld @talyaaas-blog @slowlyshycomputer @jjk174 @maynina @saintomie @damn-u-min-yoongi @juju-227592

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zvezdacito · 4 months ago

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Tbh I think a lot of people downplay the stakes Malleus is in that makes him overblot as just surface level loneliness by itself and that's why they think his overblot is unwarranted/annoying compared to the other six. It makes sense he jumps to such drastic measures to avoid facing whatever comes next because whatever it is will last not just a few years but literally a millennium + either way because of multiple systemic reasons he knows he's not just gonna be able to connect with a bunch of new people/explore a bunch of new experiences to make up for it.

Compared to other overblotters, it seems no matter what course of action Malleus will end up in a bad ending since he's a species seemingly among the few left of his kind while also being biologically predisposed to outliving everyone. It's as if he can never have a happy ending as long as he's himself, or that as a king (and symbolic "lord of all villains") his happiness will only come at the cost of others'.

I feel like a lot of people also give him the entire blame of his failures to connect properly with his peers. When even before they knew about his impulsivity or lack of cognitive empathy people were already jumping to conclusions about him. (Said mindsets came about from internalizing the depersonalization he was raised with, he's the sole heir of a country battered by colonization who place very high expectations on him to be a symbol of hope for them again after all)

Assuming the worse because of his powers, the reputation that came from it, and because of (the once again systemic issue) humans and people outside the Briar Valley barely knowing anything about/only having stereotypical rumors to go off the nocturnal fae who closed themselves off to try and stop humans from invading them more💀

So yeah givevn all of this Malleus was a ticking time bomb and even then he was about to just stand down and put his own feelings aside until he became accidentally convinced there was a way that didn't have to exclude him. It's an unfortunate clash of circumstances between different people and that's what TWST is all about. So yeah idk just kinda baffling some people are unironically out there saying things like "Malleus should've just held himself together for one night that's so selfish" when it's kinda made extremely clear by the story there's way more leading to the characters' making choices than that

From an outside point of view as the audience of course there are obvious steps Malleus could take to make the most out of what he has and to not inadvertently be a prick to others, but it pretty obvious why in his shoes it's not really feasible rn lol. Other than these things I could think of at the top of my head, a lot of the things people single him out as especially selfish or unreasonable for are things the other overblotters and characters in general also do lol.

> Like the class dynamics at play? NRC is literally rich boy central many characters express some kind of class privelege

> Not receiving consequences for his actions? This is a staple twst writing flaw for all its stories in general, most overblotters have gotten a slap on the wrist/their actions relatively covered up by the end. And Fellow legit just walks away from an undisclosed time of human trafficking like it was no big deal😭

Ironically Malleus will probably be the first overblotter to not have his actions hidden to only a select circle of people and receive severe repercussions for it because someone like him "should've been above that".

But yeah sometimes I feel like the extent of how some factors in Malleus's background, upbringing and environment determine his way of thinking and why he thinks he needs to do certain things is underestimated by the fandom and only the surface level of what he's doing is focused on which results in some people talking about his character and his flaws in a very dismissive way idk

#bumping into the most mid malleus opinions posts of all time has been stressing me out #im 3 seconds away from passing out rn so this is written kinda sloppily #malleus draconia #word barf #twisted wonderland

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jentrovert · 4 months ago

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Love to Hate You ♡

(Charlie Dalton x Fem Reader)

Enemies to Lovers Oneshot!

Warnings: Swearing, 1950’s stereotypes (purity, clothing style, cigarettes), mentions of neglect, immature high school drama, talk of paddling at school, dumb pranks, kissing, romance, teen partying, suggestive flirting, mention of a diet, moral grayness, parental issues, arguing, drinking, jealously, reader possesses slight anger issues, Neil lives and all is well.

Synopsis: The highly regarded Welton Academy has two buildings, one strictly for girl students, and the other for young boys. By a turn of events, they all end up having to share study hall together in the afternoons. (Y/n), your typical rich, hyper-feminine prima donna, thinks she’s in charge of Welton Academy. With her squeaky clean reputation and unwavering confidence, surely no one will ever see her sweat. However, being the drama queen that she is, she takes her first encounter with Charlie Dalton as a personal attack. Teenage chaos ensues. ~

｡ﾟ•┈୨♡୧┈•ﾟ｡ *

Authors Note: Hello! I just got into DPS, and I don’t write very much, so be gentle. This was originally supposed to be a dumb little blurb I wrote without intent to post. Short and silly. Obviously it’s based on the movie, but I also made it my own. Reader is referred to as a female, woman, and girl. She/Her pronouns used. It’s mentioned once that the reader has hair, but other than that, if something doesn’t feel neutral as far as the reader’s appearance, please let me know. Feel free to request! :)

Dramatic Princess Society

꘎♡━━━━━♡꘎

To say you were a diva was a staggering understatement. Everyone who graced your presence could see that you were in control of any room you happened to wander into. You weren’t a princess; you were the princess. A fond nickname you’d developed as well. You were never afraid to say whatever was on your mind, and you figured that really wasn’t such a bad thing. You just knew what you wanted, and that was all.

It didn’t help that your wealthy parents constantly fed into your ego, insistently showering you with lavish clothes and gifts to distract you from the fact that they only saw their child a few times a year. The only time your mother really gave you any guidance or contacted you at all was to ask about your diet or your clothing size, which was honestly fine by you. You had a social hierarchy to rule over, and that kept you plenty busy. Yeah, you were vain, and maybe even a bit too proud, but if anyone had the right to be, it was certainly you.

Your parents had pushed you into doing all sorts of extracurricular activities throughout your childhood and adolescence. They put a lot of weight on status and education, so failure just wasn’t an option in their eyes. You were meant to sit above everyone else at all times with a crown fixed on your head. Maybe if you could accomplish that, then you’d have to be good enough in their eyes.

What most people didn’t usually see, however, was the bleeding heart beneath all of that pompous prestige. Just below the surface, there was a young girl who wanted the same thing every other teenager so desperately did: to be accepted. But no one was going to knock down that wall you’d built.

On par for the course, you attended Welton Academy, one of the most distinguished prep schools in the country, made strictly for young women like yourself. The catch was that just across the lake from your school, there was another high school identical to your own, except it was made for young men instead.

The girl’s building was a fairly recent addition to the school grounds themselves. The schools weren’t necessarily close in proximity, but they were close enough that you could always see the opposing building. On the rare occasion of a mixed assembly, the Welton staff were always swift to pull you in opposite directions when the event had ended. There would be absolutely no one partaking in any premarital activities on their watch. The adults around you were very strict in that regard.

“What do you think the boys are doing over there right now?” Your roomate Maddie wondered aloud, her elbows propped up on the seal of your dorm window as she ogled dreamily across the lake.

You gave a teasing scoff as you turned away from your chemistry work to face her. “Probably using binoculars to stare at our building.”

“You think?” She chirped in almost a hopeful tone, glancing over her shoulder at you.

Your eyes nearly rolled out of your head. “That would not be a good thing, Madison. They’re a bunch of little perverts, and everyone knows it.”

“Maybe I should wear prettier night gowns,” She mused, ignoring your input completely.

You groaned. “Gross. Please just close the shutters.”

“At least you said ‘please’ for once,” Madison grumbled, doing just as you’d told her before deciding to turn in for the night.

You sighed, playing with a strand of your hair. “Madison. They’re just boys; I promise you, they don’t have anything special.”

Once you heard Maddie’s mischievous giggle, you already knew where she was about to go with that statement.

“Oh, I’d beg to differ on that one.”

You waved a dismissive hand in her direction.

“Well, maybe if you weren’t so uptight, then boys wouldn’t be so scared of you all the time,” She laughed.

You looked over at her again, brows raised. “Ha! That’s the way I like it,” You hummed, shrugging your shoulders as you inspected the polish on your nails. “But who could really blame them? I’m pretty intimidating, if I do say so myself.

Now it was Maddie’s turn to roll her eyes. “Whatever you say, princess,” She said, bowing theatrically before flopping back on her pillow. “Can you cut the lights off already? You’ve been looking at that forever.”

“Oh, I have to say ‘please’, but you don’t?” You huffed, but obliged anyway.

Cutting off your lamp, you followed Maddie’s lead and crawled beneath your own blankets, curling into a cozy little ball. Your eyes lingered on the ceiling for a while before you finally drifted off. You couldn’t stop yourself from wondering if there really was anything interesting about the boys over there. You doubted it, but you wouldn’t know unless you saw for yourself. Perhaps they could make things a little less boring in your current life. As much as you appreciated all the praise from your female peers, it was getting a little tired.

The next afternoon, it was nearing the end of the school day when you were sitting in Mrs. Newman’s class, daydreaming about your next salon appointment before dismissal. That’s when the older woman made an extremely important announcement to the class. Apparently, the boy’s library was under some new renovations, and as such, all of the boys who still wanted to attend study hall were instructed to use the girl’s library in your building until construction was over.

Your eyes widened when you heard the news, and you’d never admit it, but your heart also sped up a little at the thought. A few coy giggles echoed through the room as Mrs. Newman spoke.

“Now, ladies,” Your senile instructor boomed, scanning the room with a very firm look on her face. “I expect nothing but professional behavior from you all, and anything to the contrary will not be taken lightly. Do you all understand?”

“Yes, Mrs. Newman,” The class cooed in unison, not sounding nearly convincing enough.

You never thought you’d live to see the day Welton Academy would actually allow males and females to mingle. Hell had finally frozen over, you thought.

Newman kept a narrow eye on all of you as she dismissed class, but none of you seemed to pay her any mind. You were all too busy laughing and gossiping about what it would be like to merge study hall with boys. You must’ve heard your name being called a hundred times as you made your way to your locker.

“(Y/n)! (Y/n)! Did you hear?! We get to be with the boys every single day for the next few weeks!” A freshman girl named Rachel beamed as she approached.

The mundane expression never left your face. “Duh, of course I did. That’s all anyone’s talked about for the last five minutes.”

She deflated a bit. “Oh. Right. Um, I like your makeup today, by the way… Always, really.”

“Of course, Rach. You know me,” You remarked, stopping to fiddle with the combination on your locker. You could see her grin from your peripheral as she started to turn away.

“Alright, well, I’ll see you later, (Y/n)!”

You wiggled your fingers in her direction as you sorted through the books you wanted for study hall. You liked Rachel; she had great fashion sense, but she was a little too boy-obsessed for you, even worse than Maddie. You refused to give young men so much of your attention. They should be excited to see you, not the other way around. You’d never judge her or anyone else for it, but there was no way you were going to be dubbed a ‘tramp’ and end up being an outcast from your social groups. At least that’s what your parents told you would happen. So a boy would need to have something truly magical in order to make you break a sweat over them.

As you gripped your stack of books and began making your way to the now highly sought-after library, a small group of girls began trailing close behind you, a couple of them throwing affirmations your way about your hair or outfit. A few of them you knew, a few you didn’t, but at least you never had to worry about sitting alone.

“(Y/n), I love your pink socks.”

“Thanks. You know I just can’t be bothered with their horrid dress code. The patterns on the skirts are bad enough.”

“(Y/n), where did you get your bag?”

“Don’t remember. I just grabbed one this morning.”

“(Y/n), are you going to talk to any boys?”

“They can come up and talk to me if they want.”

“If they dare,” Maddie laughed, amplifying the string of constant giggles behind you.

You had your hand on the library door, ready to push it open, when a high-pitched voice startled you by crying, “Wait!”

You pulled away, immediately recognizing a sophomore named Jenny as she rushed over, peaking her head through the window of the large double doors.

“Ohmygosh,” She whispered. “They’re really in there.”

The group laughed, but you simply nudged her aside. “Please, Jen. Of course they are.”

“Oh! Let me pick where to sit!” Maddie begged with her sad brown eyes.

You thought about it briefly and ultimately caved in to her request. She cheered as she took a turn looking through the window, scanning each male specimen with great precision. A few women were in the library already, but not too many just yet. You tapped your foot impatiently, staring at the side of Maddie’s head while you waited on her decision.

“Pick cute ones to sit by!” A little red-headed girl commented, and the rest of them whispered amongst themselves in agreement.

You huffed, stamping your foot a bit as you began to push by your classmates. “For God’s sake, women, can we pull ourselves together a bit? Maddie Garcia, you’ve got two seconds before I pick for you.”

“Okay! Okay!” She squealed. “Um… That one! That table right there.” You stepped beside her, observing the large table that she’d pointed out. It was only half full, with one side harboring a fairly normal-looking group of young men, and the other side vacant.

“Fine. Perfect.”

Giving the entrance a quick shove, the group began filing in to the library one by one. Maddie and Rachel stayed by your side in order to get a closer look at the scope of people, and the rest of them hung behind you shyly. If the boys weren’t looking your way already, they certainly were after you haphazardly dropped your pile of books on the table. The rest of the girls sheepishly sorted out which chairs to take, making sure to leave a space between them and any boys. Almost instantly, you began burying yourself in your chemistry book, ignoring the girl’s whispering and the boy’s eyes that were burning holes in your head. You couldn’t believe all that fuss was just for them to not even talk to a single male in the room. You simply had no time for the nonsense.

After a while, everyone seemed to settle in and get back to their books and homework like normal, but every minute or so, Maddie would tap on you and ask, “What about that one? Is he cute?”, only for you to look over and shrug. More and more students came through during the hour. The library had stayed surprisingly quiet, so you figured the boys must be on their best behavior in the new environment. They were very careful not to say anything too loudly about any of you, though you knew what they were probably talking about when they lowered their voices. It was fine by you as long as they weren’t being overly distracting.

Your friends, on the other hand, weren’t doing anything with their time except yammering on; their books were open to a random page in the hopes that none of the teachers would actually notice. That day probably set a record for how many students attended study hall in Welton history, and the ironic part was hardly anyone was studying.

“Hey, (Y/n)?” A girl named Tayla asked, catching your attention.

You looked up at her in acknowledgment, so she continued. “How do you always keep from getting in trouble during Mr. Baker’s class?”

You thought about it for a second and laughed. “Well, you see, if you misbehave in a male teacher’s class, but you simultaneously wear a skirt that’s two sizes too small, then they won’t paddle you. None of them would dare make you bend over in a skirt that short.”

And you were right; teachers wouldn’t paddle you if your clothing seemed too short, so you always made sure wear clothing from previous school years if you were planning on causing problems. It may have been a shoddy thing for you to do, but so was hitting your students with an object, you thought. At least this way you could laugh about it.

A few of them giggled, one calling you a ‘genius’ in a playful manner. However, you could see from across the table that a few of the boys had suddenly turned rather crimson, and you knew it was likely from your conversation. You couldn’t fault them, because you weren’t exactly being quiet. Though you wouldn’t concern yourself with it either. If they were embarrassed, that was their problem.

A toothy smile graced your lips as you returned to your book, feeling oddly triumphant in your “advice”. But alas, you couldn’t revel in it; you had chemistry work that desperately needed your attention as well. Your parents would have your head if your grades proved any less than perfect.

You’d sat at the head of the table, trying your best to focus for at least a few minutes once everyone had gone quiet. However, rather than focusing on chemistry formulas, you’d slowly started to take notice of a young brunette who sat opposite you. He wasn’t doing anything particularly special, just chewing gum and trying to kick one of his friends under the table, not paying much mind to the new female table-mates. One of his classmates had called him “Charlie”, which was a name you actually recognized. You’d definitely heard a few of the girls talk about him before, and his not-so-appropriate stories.

You took a moment to observe the details of his face and the way he interacted with his friends, your work now long forgotten. He seemed so confident and loud, clearly a class clown as well. His boyish features were pretty charming, if you had to admit it. Soft and mischievous at the same time. The uniform looked handsome on him too. His looks and mannerisms definitely made you want to get to know him a bit better.

Suddenly, the same male you were admiring cleared his throat in a loud, dramatic sort of fashion, catching everyone at the table’s attention. He made quite a show of folding his hands out in front of him on the table, leaning toward you with direct eye contact, so you knew that whatever he was about to say, he was talking to you.

You cocked a brow at the boy, clueless as to what he could possibly be drawing so much attention for.

“Ma’am, since I don’t see any paint or an easel in front of you, I’m going to have to ask that you refrain from staring, please. Not that I don’t enjoy it, but it is very distracting at the moment,” He explained in mock concern, smiling in almost a taunting sort of fashion.

Your eyes blew wide, your jaw all but dropping to the floor as everyone who was listening turned to see your reaction. A few other tables had heard the disturbance as well. Your back suddenly straightened, and you opened and closed your mouth a few times in an attempt to defend yourself, but nothing came out. Normally, you’d fire off something snarky in return, maybe even insulting, but instead, your mind was rendered completely blank. It was strange, really. Sex and everything related to it were extremely taboo, especially with the way you’d been raised. It was one thing when you were talking to your female peers, but having a male address you in that sort of manner was kind of petrifying.

Your cheeks burned with humiliation from all the giggles that met your ears. His gaze never left yours as a huge smirk began to paint his features, causing you to avert your eyes. You couldn’t remember when you became so shy.

“I, uh...” Your eyes darted around to various on-looking students. “Whatever,” you muttered, propping your book up in a way that would block most people from seeing your face.

A symphony of “Ooo’s” echoed from all around you, the group of boys laughing as they playfully punched their friend on the shoulder. Only one boy in a vest who sat closest seemed to give Charlie a displeased look. Some of your own friends began poking you and laughing themselves. Your skin was on fire. You hardly even interacted with men in your day to day life, much less experienced this. You were mortified. You could only take it for a few more moments before you stood straight up from your chair, slamming your chemistry book. Charlie and a couple of your friends were the only ones who noticed the tantrum you were throwing, and Maddie stood to follow you as you made your way out of the library.

You practically stomped out of the room, never once looking behind you. “Who the hell even is that? Who does he think he is talking to me that way? This is why they shouldn’t be over here,” You ranted, directing it toward Maddie, even though she hadn’t caught up to you yet.

Before the door could shut behind both of you, someone had flung it open once more. You turned to see if the rest of the girls were following you, only to be met with his face again. You groaned and began walking faster to your locker.

“Hey!” The boy laughed, hurrying to catch you. “Hey, hold on-”

You didn’t answer, the click of your heels being the only noise you made. Maddie didn’t say anything either, but she watched the two of you with suspicious eyes.

“Wait a second,” He urged, attempting to grab your sleeve before you swatted him away.

“Who do you think you are, exactly?” You snapped, suddenly spinning on your heel to face him. He nearly tripped over his feet to stop himself from running into you.

“Uh, I think I’m Charlie,” he stated, taking a couple steps backward.

Your eyes narrowed. “And what do you want? Why are you trying to humiliate me?”

Charlie stared at you for a second, then let out a small chuckle as he began rolling his sleeves up to his elbows. “Ah, I see. You’re one of those types.”

“Excuse me?” You seethed, digging your nails into your textbooks. “One of what type? Nobody is like me, not even close, so get that straight.”

The male put his hands up in defense. “Now, I didn’t mean it like that, babe.”

Throwing him a fake laugh, you rolled your eyes and continued the journey to your dorm. “Babe? I’m not your babe; my name is (Y/n). Now go torture some other girl.”

Charlie stuffed his hands in his pockets as he watched you walk away, glancing over at Maddie, who had yet to follow you again. "Well, now I have to torture her,” he said.

“Good luck with that. She’s, like, the queen of Welton,” Maddie laughed. “Although, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody work her up that much before.”

Charlie hummed, fixed on the spot you once stood. “Well, then the king himself will just have to take that as a challenge.”

The next few days went by with you avoiding study hall like the plague, no matter how much any of the other girls begged you to go. You were sick, you were hungry, you were tired—anything it took to avoid him until you were certain the whispers had died down. You hated his cocky demeanor. You were the only one who should be cocky at Welton. Of course, the rumor of your “crush” had made its rounds by now, much to your dismay. Maddie told you she’d heard some of the boys talking about it as well. The majority of girls just couldn’t shut up about how cute you’d be together with one the “poetry nerds”.

You must’ve been asked a dozen times if you and Charlie were dating, and for once you wished people would stop paying so much attention to you. That was the point where you’d had enough. There was no way you were going to let people think you had a thing for that clown, absolutely no way. You knew he just liked to flirt with every girl anyway, so his advances meant nothing to you. He had embarrassed you on purpose, and you were going to make damn sure you returned the favor someday. These were your school grounds, not his, and not anybody else’s either. Mr. Nolan, the old bat, could take that fact and shove it for all you cared.

The day you finally went back to study hall was on a Friday. There was a chemistry test on Monday morning, and no matter how much you detested it, you really could’ve used one of the boys’ help to study. This chapter of Chemistry was your weak point, and you’d heard a lot of good things about a boy called “Meeks” and his godlike abilities in that realm. You’d seen him sitting around Charlie on that fateful day, which troubled you at first, but once you thought about it for a while, an idea started forming in your brain. That’s where your friend Rachel came in.

Rachel had an affinity for lizards, frogs, and any other small creature that crawled along the ground, which was just perfect for you. You just hoped Charlie loved lizards as much as she did. By the time Friday afternoon had rolled around, you all but dragged Rachel out and down to the library. You could tell she was very unsure, but went along with you anyway.

You stopped and turned to her right outside the doors. “Did you catch one?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, crouching down to fish through her bag.

After a moment, she stood, holding out her hand to reveal a small lizard gently clenched in her grasp. You grinned a wide, maniacal grin, carefully taking the creature from her hands. He was small enough that he would hopefully go undetected for a while, which is exactly what you wanted.

“Thanks, Rach. Alright, c’mon, let’s go,” You instructed, holding the creature in one hand behind your back.

“Ok—ay,” Rachel replied, trialing behind you with your chemistry books in hand.

You strutted right through the room and towards Steven Meeks’ table, ignoring any whispers you heard along the way. Sure enough, Charlie was sitting right beside the Meeks boy, laughing at something his friend had said.

Perfect.

As you approached, most of the table’s attention had turned your way. Charlie immediately plastered that smug look across his face at the sight of you. You scowled at first, but quickly switched your expression to something nice and welcoming as you looked toward Steven, leaning down to his level once you were beside him.

“Hello, gentlemen. Do you mind if I steal your friend Steven for a moment? Rachel and I are seriously clueless when it comes to chemistry, and we need some help for our test Monday,” You explained in a sugary sweet tone, intentionally placing your hand on Meeks’ shoulder. You knew they would fold like wet paper at your request.

The group exchanged several glances with one another, during which, you took the opportunity to place your lizard friend into Charlie’s uniform coat, carefully planting him where he’d likely go down rather than out the top.

“Uh, yeah, alright, sure,” Meeks agreed, gathering up his things and rising from his chair. Rachel chuckled awkwardly, giving a timid “Thank you” to the boy for his help. You couldn’t distinguish whether she was nervous about what you’d done or if Rachel actually had a thing for Meeks. Either way, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting to witness the events that unfolded when Charlie realized something besides him was moving in his clothes.

You and Rachel led Meeks to a vacant table off to the left and began setting up things to study. You could tell the boy was a bit nervous around you, but he but shook it off pretty quickly. You, however, were still too distracted with watching Charlie. Once Meeks noticed this, he chuckled, gaining your attention.

“What is it?” You questioned.

“It’s just that… I noticed you staring over there.”

You shot him a chilling glare.

“I was not staring at him!” You blurted a little too loudly. A few students glanced your way before going back to their work, making you take a breath and sit back in your chair. “I apologize. Continue, please.”

Rachel held in a laugh, but said nothing.

A few minutes had gone by before you finally caught a sign of Charlie feeling around in the sleeve of his clothes. You leaned forward in anticipation, waiting eagerly for some sort of panic to ensue. However, rather than panicking, Charlie stood up, removing his jackst and flipping it to search the inside. After some investigation, he found whatever he was looking for.

“Oh, man!” You heard Charlie exclaim as he pulled something from the article of clothing. “Guys, check this out.”

He seemed excited about it, much to your utter frustration. The group all gathered around to view the animal Charlie now held in his hand, all taking turns viewing the small reptile. You were fuming, now sunken down in your chair with your arms folded.

“Yeah, I wonder where he came from, too,” Charlie articulated louder than before, peering over his shoulder at you with a knowing look.

That cocky smile of his made you stand up so hard that your chair fell backwards. You snatched your book off the desk and started to walk out, not bothering to say anything other than, “I’m going to study in my room.”

“Okay,” Rachel squeaked as she and Meeks’ eyes followed you out the door.

Charlie couldn’t stop the laughter that nearly doubled him over as he witnessed you pretty much barrel through the door on your way out. You ignored him, walking briskly to your locker to grab another book, accidentally bumping into a few people on your way. Once you stopped in front of your locker door, a puzzled look replaced your once furious one. The combination lock on your locker had completely disappeared, initially making you think someone had stolen something out of it.

In a panic, you threw open the door to see what might be missing, but rather than finding an empty space, you found the exact opposite. The second you tore it open, an absolute mountain of paper came toppling out like a waterfall, making you shriek as they pooled all around your feet. You stood staring at the ground for a moment, desperately trying to process what just occurred. That’s when you heard footsteps approaching to your right. You didn’t even have to look to know who it was.

Charlie was stifling laughter as he closed in on you. Then he dug around in his front pocket for a moment before pulling out your missing lock and holding it towards you. “Figure you’d want this back,” he offered between chuckles.

“You put these here?” It came out as a statement rather than a question.

“Yeah, kinda like you put a lizard in my shirt. Funny coincidence. Mine was funnier, but I guess we’re even now, eh?”

You studied the inside of your locker for a second more before slamming it shut as hard as you could and pivoting on your heel to face him. His expression faltered a bit when he saw the rage evident in your features.

“Babe, hold on, it was just a jo-”

“How did you get my lock off of there?!” You roared, kicking papers away as you shoved your manicured finger right in his face.

Charlie smirked. “The same way I knew it was you who got that lizard in my blazer, I’m just smart, is all.” He didn’t seem too fazed, which angered you even further. “That was pretty corny, by the way. You should know that we men aren’t afraid of our own shadows like you ladies are.”

You thought your head was about to spin around.

“Afraid of our own shadows?! Are you aware that it was a girl who got the lizard in the first place, you hoity, lame, stupid, conceited-”

“Children!” An adult’s voice boomed from down the hall, making you both whip your heads in that direction.

“Shit,” You and Charlie whispered in unison.

“What on earth is going on here?! What’s all of this mess for?!” Mrs. Newman screeched as she advanced toward you, her brow carved into a deep, wrinkled frown.

You quickly began straightening your outfit, scanning your brain for an excuse to the papers.

“Well, Ma’am, I, uh- Um, Mr. Dalton here had accidentally bumped into me, and I dropped a bunch of papers on the ground,” You rushed out, flashing her an innocent smile as you flattened your skirt.

She gave you a skeptical look up and down, then turned her attention to Charlie. “Is that so? Then what’s with all the noise?”

Charlie coughed into the crook of his elbow before he spoke, giving himself a moment to think.

“Were we being loud? I’m so sorry, Mrs. Newman; we’ll keep our voices down. Won’t happen again, I promise.”

After contemplating it for a minute, she finally let the two of you off the hook, scolding you not to let it happen again and instructing Charlie to help you clean up. Once she was out of sight, the boy grinned at you, kneeling down to help you sort through the sheets of paper littering the floor. “You lied for me, babe?”

You could hear the satisfaction in his voice. “Don’t flatter yourself. I knew if I told on you, then you’d probably narc me out too.”

He paused for a second, then laughed under his breath. “You hardly look at me when we talk like this. Do I make you that nervous, babe?”

As soon as the words left his mouth, you reached over and kicked the foot he was balancing his weight on, effectively toppling him over. Charlie was quick to catch himself, though, cackling like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen happen.

You stood to your full height, intending to leave him on the ground to fend for himself. “I told you to stop calling me that!”

“Hold on!” He cried rather dramatically, grabbing you by the hand while on his knees in front of you. “I’m sorry. How could I have ever upset the most amazing girl at Welton? A beautiful flame that I’ve tried to snuff out. Could you ever forgive me?”

It was almost weirdly poetic, but still very sarcastic.

Your expression couldn’t have been less amused than it was in that moment, but it quickly twisted into one of shock and horror as the boy leaned forward and planted a curt kiss on your knuckles, still staring up at you with a look that feigned remorse. Those auburn eyes froze you in place for just a moment before you finally snapped out of it, tearing your hand away. The recoil of your action caused you to stumble back a step, which Charlie was thoroughly entertained by, of course.

You shook your head. “Ugh! Can you just stop messing with me, Dalton?! There’s a hundred other girls here; try one of them.”

As much as you hated it, Charlie was right about one thing: You did have a difficult time meeting his gaze. Something about those eyes just made it frustratingly difficult for you to string the right words together. So instead, you scooped up your books and trudged back to your dorm, leaving him surrounded by mounds of paper that still needed to be dealt with.

It seemed that the more irate you became, the more Charlie couldn’t help but laugh. Whatever the reason was, you were not amused in the slightest. You were really about to snap, and dumb little pranks weren’t going to alleviate your feelings. As the day crawled to an end, you took a shower, ate a snack, and eventually decided on going to Maddie’s house for the weekend. You figured it would do you some good to hang out and relax rather than staying at school, and it wasn’t as though your parents cared anyway.

Madison lived close by, and her parents would always come pick her up if she wanted. They were happy to have you since they got along well with your family, so it worked out perfect anytime you needed to get away. By the time you got there and caught up with her family for a bit, it had grown dark outside. She was quiet for a while as she put her things away and meandered around aimlessly, obviously stalling for something she wanted to say.

“So,” she finally said, drawing out the “o” at the end. Your eyes flickered up from your book to see Maddie fighting a smile, her hip cocked with one hand placed on top of it. “I heard about your locker.”

Your jaw clenched. “Maddie, let me stop you right there. I do not want to talk about it. I do not want to think about it. And it was hardly a joke at all; it was just stupid. I had no idea he’d actually pull something so dumb.”

She let out a breathy laugh and picked up a book of her own, beginning to immerse herself in its contents after plopping onto her bed. “Right, so stupid. It's almost as stupid as putting a lizard in someone’s clothes.”

Your nails nearly tore the page you were pretending to read. “I asked you to drop it. I do not want to talk about that man child anymore this weekend.”

“Actually, you didn’t ask,” She hummed. “And it’s funny, since he’s all you’ve wanted to talk about for the past week.”

“Is not!” You wailed, dropping your book on the desk to look at her.

Maddie blinked at you owlishly, though she was plenty used to your antics by now. “(Y/n), I know how much you adore drama, but don’t you think you’re being a touch dramatic here? He probably just likes you.”

“Well, he has a horrible way of showing it.”

“He’s a teenage boy, (Y/n).”

“I don’t care. You all are gonna make me take up smoking.”

She pursed her lips, observing you for a moment. “Are you sure you don’t think he’s kind of cute..?”

You heard the skepticism in her voice. “... Absolutely not.”

She didn’t acknowledge the fact that you hesitated for a split second, she just smiled and went back to reading. “Whatever you say, princess. I’d say you match each other’s egotism.” She paused for a second. “I was going to tell you something else, but now I forgot what it was.”

“Mm. That’s a shame; I would’ve really been interested to hear more of what you had to say,” You drawled, sarcasm dripping from your words.

She grinned. “Shut up, you-… Hold on, do you hear that?”

You glanced around. “What? It’s quiet.”

Maddie lived in a pretty wealthy neighborhood so everyone, including her parents, had turned in by half an hour ago. It stayed generally pretty mundane.

“Listen,” She said, walking to her window and moving the curtains. Both of you stilled as you strained to hear something, and sure enough, the sound of distant music met your ear.

“Is someone throwing a party?” You asked.

“Must be that girl across the street. I bet her parents are out for the weekend.”

“Hm. And where does she go again?”

Maddie shrugged. “One of the public high schools nearby, I suppose.”

“Whatever,” You sighed, standing up. “I guess I’m going to head over to the guest room and get some sleep.”

Maddie nodded. “Alright. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be next door.”

“Thanks, Mads.”

Surprisingly, it didn’t take much for you to doze off once you’d gotten comfortable. Perhaps you were exhausting yourself worrying about nonsense. The unfortunate part was that you didn’t stay asleep for very long. About three hours went by before Maddie was shaking you awake again.

“Ugh,” You groaned in annoyance, shifting as your stirred awake. “Wha—at, Maddie? My beauty sleep-”

“Don’t you hear that? I haven’t been able to sleep forever!” She interjected.

Your eyes fluttered open as you listened. That’s when you finally processed how excessively loud the party music was playing from outside. Maddie was hardly visible in the darkness, but you could still make out the aggravated expression etched on her features.

Now you were pissed.

The absolute last thing you wanted to deal with was being woken up out of your sleep by some inconsiderate bunch of teenagers with nothing productive to do in their spare time.

“I’m surprised no one in the neighborhood has called the police on those kids or something,” She grumbled, folding her arms over her chest. “I guess none of them are as close to her house as we are.”

You kicked your legs over the side of the bed, weaving past the young girl and practically growling as you went digging around for some shoes.

“What are you doing?” Maddie quizzed, watching as you tugged some slippers onto your feet and started towards the door.

“I’m going to make sure they quiet down. Come on.”

She was quick to follow after that, not uttering a word as you padded down the stairs and out the front door. You were careful not to alert her parents of your exit, even though you knew they slept through everything anyway. Maddie almost had to jog to keep up with your pace.

As you made your way across the street, it became even more glaringly obvious where all the noise was coming from. The neighbor’s backyard was practically lit up like a rock concert. You didn’t even bother with the front door at that point and instead looped your way around the back of the house, straight for the source. You could hear Maddie faltering behind you.

“(Y/n), wait, if there are boys here, we can’t be in nightgowns! What are you even going to say? What if-!”

“Listen, I know you’re a ridiculously light sleeper, and this noise is just stupid, so I’m fixing it right now. Either follow me or don’t,” You snapped, not bothering to look in her direction.

She didn’t reply, but never stopped following you. You were on a war path, but the instant you rounded the corner, you came to a screeching halt, causing Maddie to smack into your backside.

“Ouch!” She yelped, stepping backward. “Why did you…” Maddie trailed off as she caught sight of what you were staring at—the very thing that had caused you to stop in your tracks.

“No. Way.”

Just as you suspected, there was a crowd of high school kids everywhere, some drinking, some smoking, and others dangling their feet in the large pool. You didn’t recognize any of them—none of them except two teenage boys standing by a large table of refreshments. One of them you knew as Knox Overstreet, and the other was Charlie Dalton himself, right there in the flesh, sipping on a cup of God-knows-what with his arm slung around a young brunette girl’s shoulders. They were preoccupied laughing at something Charlie had said, completely oblivious to your presence.

God, he looked just as arrogant as ever with that horrible smug look slapped across his face. To you, it looked like he thought he was getting somewhere with that girl.

You were initially shocked to see them both, but quickly shaped up when you remembered why you were standing there in the first place.

“That’s Mary, the girl that lives here. Is she with Charlie?” Maddie asked.

“Over my dead fucking body,” You mumbled, marching right towards where they stood. It only took a second for them to notice you approaching. The girl, Mary, seemed only bewildered by your clothing choice, while the two boys looked like they had suddenly seen a ghost.

You got about six feet away before stopping and jamming a finger in their direction. “I apologize, but this music is-!”

“What?” Mary yelled over the music. You could tell by her body language that she really wasn’t all that interested in what you had to say regardless. Like you were the one being a nuisance, not the other way around.

You gritted your teeth, glaring down at one of the radios that blasted on the table beside you. You all but ripped the knob off that damn machine trying to turn it off. At that point, nearly everyone had turned to look at the commotion you’d caused, but you truly couldn’t have cared less. The perplexed expression had melted off Charlie’s face, now seeming more impressed than anything. But what he was impressed by, you weren’t quite sure.

“I said,” You snarled, practically boring holes into the girl’s head. “I’m sorry, but music is over the top. I’m at my friend’s house across the street, and it’s clear as day through the walls. It’s late. We and everybody else in the neighborhood are really trying to sleep, and you’re being a bit inconsiderate with this. There is zero reason for it to be that loud all night.”

Your head snapped to Charlie when you heard his laugh, and it was all you could do not to tackle him, then it went back to the girl.

“Or maybe,” Mary said slowly, “You should try putting some clothes on before you decide to come stomp on everyone’s fun. I mean, seriously, are you a prostitute or something?” Her words were slurring together. Then she took a final swig from a glass bottle she held before tossing it in your direction.

You stepped back quickly, listening to her giggle as the bottle rolled along the grass and bounced off your foot. Charlie chose to step away from her at that point. Taunting “Ooo’s” came from the crowd of people, who were now fully engrossed as they moved closer to watch the show. You stood there stunned for a moment, in disbelief that someone had actually thrown a glass object at you. Sure, you could be catty sometimes, but you’d never done anything like that to a stranger.

“(Y/n)..?” Came Maddie’s meek voice. You could hear her take a few steps in your direction.

You ignored her and instead looked up at Mary again with a calm smile.

“Hey, alright, look, you can’t-” Charlie began to tell her, but you stopped him politely.

Her smugness seemed to diminish at your mellow reaction, which was quite the opposite of what everyone thought. She had clearly anticipated on you being angry.

But you were angry. You were literally shaking with anger. However, you opted not to express it right away. You weren’t going to give her the pleasure of seeing you scream or cry over her actions.

Still sporting your gentle expression, you sauntered around to the back of the refreshment table and stood there for a moment, all while maintaining eye contact with the young girl.

Mary furrowed her brows, almost ready to laugh at whatever you were doing, but just as she did, you reached out in a quick motion, and flipped the table completely over onto its side, emphasized by a deep ‘thud’ as it hit the ground.

Food went cascading in various directions, the radio rolled several times, and the punch bowl’s contents shot out so far that it covered almost all three of their shoes, causing Mary to shriek and jump backwards. You could tell she had some nice shoes on, too. Well, they were nice.

“Oops,” You sang, “My mistake.”

You could tell she was furious, but thankfully for her, she didn’t move to approach you.

“What in the hell is wrong with you?!” She screeched, face now glowing with anger.

“What’s wrong with me? It’s you, bitch. You’re what’s wrong.”

Noises of surprise and astonishment came from the other teenagers, some egging you on and others commenting on how unladylike you were. You didn’t care; you were ready to shove her in the pool if she tried something else. However, Maddie was there to snatch your hand and start tugging you in the opposite direction.

“(Y/n), let’s go,” She demanded.

You pulled your arm back, knocking her aside as you left all the laughter and commotion behind you. She was about to take out, but Charlie stopped her.

“Hey, head on home, I’ll handle it.”

Maddie sneered at him. “Are you kidding me? You? You think you’re going to help?”

“I’ve got it, I promise. She’ll be back at yours afterward,” He assured.

She sighed, and begrudgingly allowed him to go after you. It didn’t take him long to catch up, but he was confused to find you walking down the road rather than back toward Maddie’s house. You knew from the weight of the footsteps that it wasn’t Maddie behind you, but that didn’t concern you in the slightest. You were too busy fighting tears that threatened to swell in your eyes, the adrenaline making your emotions run rampant. You just wanted to walk and cool your head a little bit, and you were deaf to anything else going on around you.

“(Y/n)! Shit, I didn’t know you had that kind of fire, babe!” Charlie hollered, but when you didn’t stop or even slow down after a few more steps, he took the liberty of grabbing you by the shoulders and spinning you around to face him.

“(Y/N)! Where are you-“

“What?!” You yelled, not bothering to fight him as he held you. He let go when he saw the way you were looking at him, then opened his mouth to say something, but you immediately cut him off.

“What do you want with me? What did I even do to you?”

“What? I’m pretty sure you started this whole thing, not me. Besides, where are you even going?” Charlie laughed.

You glared. “Does it really matter? And what the hell is so funny? What are you so amused with all the goddamn time?!”

“You,” He stated dryly, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“Me?” You quizzed. “I’m is amusing? Is that why you embarrassed me in front of my friends the first day we met?”

He pulled back. “I wasn’t trying to embarrass you, I was trying to get your attention.”

“Well, congratulations, you’ve got it!” You ridiculed. “What are you even doing here? Did you sneak out with Knox to go to that stupid party? And who was that girl hanging all over you like that? She’s awful.”

A broad, playful smirk stretched across the boy’s cheeks. “Why do you care who she was?”

You straightened, placing a hand on your chest. “I don’t. I just don’t see why you have to throw yourself on every girl like that; it’s gross.”

He stepped forward with that ever-teasing look on his face. “Oh, but it was okay when you were rubbing Meeks’ shoulder at school?”

“I wasn’t ‘rubbing’ his shoulder!”

“Yeah, and I don’t actually ‘throw myself’ at women, either,” He shrugged. “I only talk a big game. I make jokes, it’s what I do.”

You tried to fight it, but it was useless. He just looked so attractive under the warm street lights, the wind making his hair all ruffled and messy. Your resentment diminished at the sight, and instead was replaced with a pang of jealousy. The reality was that you wanted Charlie’s arm around you instead. You needed it to be you, and not Mary or anybody else. The facade had finally lost its luster. Realization was now staring in the face: you had feelings for Charlie Dalton.

“Yeah, right, Dalton. That’s what I’d say too,” You uttered, demeanor now flat.

“It’s part of my charm,” He affirmed.

“Of course…”

Charlie was so easy to admire that it made you loath him for it. A thick silence hung between you both for a second.

“I wasn’t trying to make you that angry, for the record. I was just teasing. You’re absolutely gorgeous, and everyone at school wants your attention, so I was trying to make sure I kept it to myself for more than two seconds,” He mused, scuffing his shoe on the pavement. “Although you are pretty hot when you’re mad, so I’ll admit it was a little fun.”

Chills ran down your arms, eyes drifting to the ground bashfully. “You’re crazy, Charles Dalton.”

“Hm. Then I guess we have a lot in common,” He retorted.

“Really? You can’t be serious for two seconds?”

“You can’t loosen up for two seconds!”

You wheeled around, ready to walk away from the conversation and let your crush die with it, but Charlie grabbed you again. This time he wrapped one arm around your waist and pulled you dangerously close, using his other hand to firmly grasp your chin so you’d have to look at him.

You were about to reprimand him, tell him to unhand you and to go back to that other girl, but before you knew what was happening, he’d already leaned in and smushed his lips right up against yours.

A bolt of electricity ran through your body upon contact, and the words that died on your lips came out as a small moan of surprise. He was kissing you. You couldn’t believe it, Charlie was actually kissing you. A real kiss. The sharp scent of cologne and cigarettes invaded your nose, overwhelming your senses. It took a moment for your brain to process the situation, but when it did, you relaxed against him, instinctively letting your eyes close and snaking your arms around his neck. You felt him smile against you as you pulled him flush to your body. It was sweet, meaningful. Your heart thumped wildly in your chest, making you slightly lightheaded.

Oh, you were so screwed.

You had no foggy idea what came over you, but you didn’t have to think twice about it. You began running your fingers through his chocolate locs of hair, nails grazing his scalp ever so slightly in a way that had him sighing against you. He ran his hand to the back of your neck began moving his lips feverishly with your own. You could taste whatever fruity substance he’d been sipping on earlier, but it was heaven. The way he kissed you caused your tongues to brush together a few times, and your stomach flipped each time it happened.

All the built-up tension you’d acquired over the past week was completely released in those few moments as his hands moved up and down your torso. You were fully content to stay like that for the rest of the night, but of course, it was over all too soon.

“Hey, Dalton! Why can't we leave you alone for five minutes, man?” Knox’s voice made you jump away from Charlie, ears warm from being caught.

You weren’t exactly being discreet about it by making out in the middle of the street, but you were still surprised and suddenly much more aware of the fact that you were in nothing but a nightgown.

“Hey, Carpe Diem, man!” Charlie called back to him from down the street, sporting a grin that was probably less than trustworthy.

He continued when all he got was silence in return, “Hold on a second; I’ll be right there, I swear!”

Knox rolled his eyes, turning back toward the house. “Make it quick; we’ve gotta get back before someone misses us!”

Charlie gave his friend a thumbs up, then turned back just as you shivered from a gust of cool night air. Without missing a beat, he peeled off his jacket and placed it over your shoulders, shooting you a goofy smile.

You pulled it around you while shaking your head, then leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, and watched as youthful excitement erupted on his face.

“So you were staring at me that day.”

“Mmm, let’s not push it, Dalton. You’ve been having way too much fun this week,” You warned, stifling a smile.

“Neil owes me a dollar.”

Eyeing the wet grass for a moment, you thought carefully about what you wanted to say next, but it proved difficult to come back down from the high that kiss had put you on.

“You know… I really am sorry about everything that happened,” You said ashamedly.

Charlie’s silence urged you to continue.

“You… I like you, truthfully. And I’ve never really been interested in a boy like this before. When you called me out that day in the library, it sort of hurt my pride a little bit for everyone to see how flustered I got.” Your breathing trembled. "And… I don't know, I guess I just panicked when I realized I couldn’t be cool in front of you."

It felt foreign to open up like that. Showing soft emotions was just not your forte. You were always taught to suck it up and keep going; you were to cry about things in private and smile like a lady in public. But fortunately, Charlie didn’t care about that, and he listened to you ramble with perfect patience. You couldn’t tell if you wanted to cry or throw up at that point, but you were glad you got it out.

“That’s what all this was about?”

You nodded.

“(Y/n)… You need to stop worrying so much about what everyone else thinks. I was sure you just hated me by this point.”

“Charlie, I can’t help it. I’ve worked hard all my life trying to impress everyone,” You defended, feeling a twinge of sadness as you thought back to your parents.

“Well, whether you believe me or not, I would never want you to feel like you had to earn my acceptance. Never.” He gave you a sympathetic look. “And please trust me when I tell you it’s not worth trying to be whatever your family expects you to be. You’re better than whatever they have in their head for you.”

You nodded, and he smiled. A genuine smile, not that patronizing smirk.

“I could’ve approached you so much better than I did, and it was immature to keep antagonizing you like that. I’m sorry, (Y/n).”

You shook your head. “No, I should’ve controlled my temper. You and that poor lizard didn’t deserve it either. And now I need to go apologize to Maddie for the feud her family is going to have with the neighbors for the rest of their life.”

He grimaced. “Eh, they sort of had it coming, if you ask me. I should’ve known you could handle yourself just fine.”

“Don’t encourage me,” You hummed in amusement, watching the trees sway in the breeze.

“Man. Nobody gets the last word with you, do they?” He said through chuckles. “Honestly… What you did was pretty funny. And you were right; the music was obnoxious. It was giving me a headache. Also, let it be known that none of this was my idea, by the way; Knox dragged me here.”

You smiled back at him half-heartedly. “Yeah, I’m never going to hear the end of it… Not that I necessarily deserve mercy.”

“Well, regardless of how it started out, I hope it can continue.” Charlie took your hand, kissing your knuckles just as he’d done before, mumbling against your skin, “If I had known all it took to get on your good side was to stick my tongue in your mouth, I would’ve done it a while ago.”

You took your hand away and whacked his shoulder gently. “Shut it.”

You didn’t have to look at him to know he was grinning from ear to ear.

“I’ll see you Monday! And I’ll have to properly introduce you to my friends,” He joked, walking backward toward the direction Knox had disappeared in. “They all think you’re pretty, but they’re also scared of you, so you have to sit by me.”

“Wait! Do you want your coat back?”

“Nah, I’ll get it Monday, and I’ll get you your lock back, too,” He laughed. “And next time we’ll have to do this at my place, babe!”

You rolled your eyes. “Only if you wear the nightgown next time, Charles.”

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hexarix · 5 months ago

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Curious about the daughters' past lives. Were they from the village? their class, family, personality, name, things they lost. Did they follow Miranda because they were sick like Alcina? Did they know each other before they were given Cadou?

In the original concept, the daughters weren't three, but a hundred witches in the castle. I think this concept evolved into Moroaică. So, my other question is, is Moroaică considered a failure in becoming a daughter? When Alcina treated her three daughters, she was already thinking of them as daughters. In other words, they were intended to be Alcina's daughters from the beginning, not as a failed experiment to find a vessel for Eva. If so, the daughters might have worked as maids just like Moroaică.

However the daughter's (possibly Daniela) clothes are not suitable for an ordinary maid to wear. Daniela has deleted line that says "Mother loves me the most." So there's still a possibility that she was one of Alcina's favorite maids. I wonder how she already has the tattoo before the surgery. Is it possible that it was engraved on all the workers to mean that they belong to the house Dimitrescu? If not, it was probably engraved before the operation for the purpose of having her as a daughter. In my opinion It seems more fitting to see them as noble or rich women from outside the village. Because the daughters have lost all their memories of the past, and there's no way Alcina has told them about their past life.

Seeing Miranda's hair changed from black to blonde, Cadou certainly has an effect on melanin. This is why the portrait and the current hair color are different. In other words, portraits are their past life and mean that they knew each other(or real sister) even before mutated.

Personally, I hope they came to the village from different countries, different environments, and for different reasons. Maybe they wanted to live, maybe they wanted to have a better life. No matter what they will eventually become Dimitrescu.

#resident evil village #re8 #alcina dimitrescu #bela dimitrescu #cassandra dimitrescu #daniela dimitrescu #house dimitrescu

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gamingavickreyauction · 2 months ago

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I wonder if the slowdown of growth in rich countries is largely just poor countries catching up.

Everyone wants to industrialise, but at the end of the day someone has to do the agriculture, so as the global population becomes more educated, and infrastructure improves so that everyone has access to industrial jobs, the wages in agriculture have to increase to keep up. But this applies for moving from manufacturing into white collar jobs too. The amount of surplus captured by the earlier parts of the value chain should increase as countries develop, meaning higher wages for poor countries and lower wages than the counterfactual in rich countries. And this seems to be happening with agricultural wages at least.

This is an uncharacteristically optimistic view for me because it means the slowdown is a) a good thing, and doesn't represent a failure of productivity and b) it's temporary, as when poorer countries are more caught up, the value capture of different sectors will shift less.

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reasonsforhope · 5 months ago

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"International climate negotiations have long been haunted by a broken promise.

In the wake of collapsed negotiations at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, wealthy nations, led by the United States, pledged to provide developing countries with $100 billion in climate-related aid annually by 2020.

The money was meant in part to ease tensions between the rich countries that had contributed the most to climate change historically and the poorer nations that disproportionately suffer the effects of a warming planet.

But rich countries fell short of the target in both 2020 and 2021, deepening mistrust and stymying progress during the annual United Nations climate conferences, which are known by the abbreviation COP.

A new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, confirms what the international organization began to suspect just before last year’s COP28: that wealthy nations finally surpassed the $100 billion goal in 2022.

And while they were two years late delivering on their promise, rich countries partially compensated for their earlier shortfalls, contributing nearly $116 billion in climate aid to developing countries in 2022, according to the latest data available.

That additional funding helps fill the roughly $27 billion gap resulting from rich countries’ failure to meet the $100 billion threshold in each of the two years prior.

“If you underachieved in the first two years, overachieving in the rest of the period is a good way to make up for that, to make amends,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S.-based environmental nonprofit.

Even $100 billion, however, is far lower than the developing world’s estimated need. United Nations-backed research projects that developing countries (excluding China) will need an eye-popping $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 to transition away from fossil fuels and adapt to climate change.

Serious questions also remain about the quality and accounting of the existing funding. According to the OECD report, more than two-thirds of the public finance in 2022 was provided in the form of loans rather than no-strings-attached grants.

That means developing countries are required to pay the money back, often with interest at market rates...

Such findings are likely to inform talks next week [the last week of June, 2024], as climate negotiators meet in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the end of the year. Negotiators need to agree on a new collective goal for climate aid to developing countries this year.

So far, different countries have submitted a range of proposals, with some nations floating $1 trillion annually as an appropriate number. Wealthy countries also want to expand their ranks so that some relatively rich countries that are technically classified as “developing,” like the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, can contribute funds toward the goal. Historically, only countries that the United Nations designated as “developed” in the 1990s have been on the hook...

If countries continue to provide a similar level of funding for the next few years, they could make up for the shortfall. “Making up for 2020 and 2021, meeting the goal in those two years, could help rebuild a bit of trust,” Thwaites added...

The report indicated specific progress on funding for adaptation measures like sea walls and disaster-resilient infrastructure, an oft-overlooked area of climate finance. In 2021, countries pledged to double adaptation finance from the $19 billion provided in 2019 to $38 billion by 2025. According to the OECD report, adaptation funding had already risen to $32.4 billion one year after the pledge."

-via GoodGoodGood, June 20, 2024

#climate adaptation #climate crisis #climate change #global warming #developing nations #developed nations #international aid #good news #hope

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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The health industry’s invisible hand is a fist

On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

The US has the rich world's most expensive health care system, and that system delivers the worst health outcomes of any country in the rich world. Also, the US is unique in relying on market forces as the primary regulator of its health care system. All of these facts are related!

Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything. Our decisions to accept or refuse prices are the data that feeds this distributed computer, and the signals these decisions send about our desires triggers investment decisions by sellers, which guides the whole system to "equilibrium" in which we are all better off.

There's some truth to this: when demand for something exceeds the supply, prices tend to go up. These higher prices tempt new sellers into the market, until demand is met and prices fall and production is stabilized at the level that meets demand.

But this elegant, self-regulating system rarely survives contact with reality. It's the kind of simplified model that works when we're hypothesizing about perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface, but ceases to be useful when it encounters a messy world of imperfect rationality, imperfect information, monopolization, regulatory capture, and other unavoidable properties of reality.

For members of the "efficient market" cult, reality's stubborn refusal to behave the way it does in their thought experiments is a personal affront. Panged by cognitive dissonance, the cult members insist that any market failures in the real world are illusions caused by not doing capitalism hard enough. When deregulation and markets fail, the answer is always more deregulation and more markets.

That's the story of the American health industry in a nutshell. Rather than accepting that people won't shop for the best emergency room while unconscious in an ambulance, or that the "clearing price" of "not dying of cancer" is "infinity," the cult insists that America's worst-in-class, most expensive health system just needs more capitalism to turn it into a world leader.

In the 1980s, Reagan's court sorcerers decreed that they could fix health care with something called "Prospective Payment Systems," which would pay hospitals a lump sum for treating conditions, rather than reimbursing them for each procedure, using competition and profit motives to drive "efficiency." The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient and someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this kind of abuse was predictable from the outset, especially since Health and Human Services is starved of budget for auditors and can only hand out "slaps on the wrist" when they catch a hospital ripping off the system:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-13-fantasyland-general/

Upcoding isn't limited to Medicare fraud, either. Hospitals and insurers are locked in a death-battle over payments, and hospitals' favorite scam is sending everyone to the ER, even when they don't have emergencies (some hospitals literally lock all the doors except for the ER entrance). That way, a normal, uncomplicated childbirth can be transformed into a "Level 5" emergency treatment (the highest severity of emergency) and generate a surprise bill of over $2,700:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

The US health industry is bad enough to generate a constant degree of political will for change, but the industry (and its captured politicians and regulators) is also canny enough to dream up an endless procession of useless gimmicks designed to temporarily bleed off the pressure for change. In 2018, HHS passed a rule requiring hospitals to publish their prices.

Hospitals responded to this with a shrewd gambit: they simply ignored the rule. So in 2021, HHS made another rule, creating penalties for ignoring the first rule:

https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-price-transparency/hospitals

The theory here was that publishing prices would create "market discipline." Again, this isn't wholly nonsensical. To the extent that patients have nonurgent conditions and the free time to shop around, being able to access prices will help them. Indeed, if the prices are in a standards-defined, machine-readable form, patients and their advocates could automatically import them, create price-comparison sites, leaderboards, etc. None of this addresses the core problem that health-care is a) a human right and b) not a discretionary expense, but it could help at the margins.

But there's another wrinkle here. The same people who claim that prices can solve all of our problems also insist that monopolies are impossible. They've presided over a decades-long assault on antitrust law that has seen hospitals, pharma companies, insurers, and a menagerie of obscure middlemen merge into gigantic companies that are too big to fail and too big to jail. When a single hospital system is responsible for the majority of care in a city or even a county, how much punishment can regulators realistically subject it to?

Not much, as it turns out. Kuttner describes how Mass Gen Brigham cornered the market on health-care in Boston, allowing it to flout the rules on pricing. In addition to standard tricks – like charging self-pay patients vastly more than insured payments (because individuals don't have the bargaining power of insurers), Mass Gen Brigham's price data is a sick joke.

See for yourself! The portal will send you giant, unstructured, ZIPped text files filled with cryptic garbage like:

https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/patient-care/patient-visitor-information/billing/cms-required-hospital-charge-data

These files have tens of thousands of rows. As a patient, you are meant to parse through these in order to decide whether you're getting ripped off on that HIP STEM 16X203MM SIZE 4 FEMORAL PRESS FIT NEUTRAL REVISION TITANIUM you're in the market for (as it happens, I have two of these in my body).

Kuttner describes the surreal lengths he had to go through to prevent his mother from getting ripped off by Mass Gen through an upcoding hustle. By coding her as "admitted for observation," Mass Gen was able to turn her into an outpatient, with a 20% co-pay (this is down to a GW Bush policy that punishes hospitals that charge Medicare for inpatient care when they could be treated as outpatients – hospitals reflexively game the system to make every patient an outpatient, even if they have overnight hospital stays).

Kuttner's an expert on this: he was national policy correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine and covers the health beat for the Prospect. Even so, it took him ten hours of phone calls to two doctors' offices and Blue Cross to resolve the discrepancy. The average person is not qualified to do this – indeed, the average person won't even know they've been upcoded.

Needless to say that people in other countries – countries where health care is cheaper and the outcomes are better – are baffled by this. Canadians, Britons, Australians, Germans, Finns, etc do not have to price-shop for their care. They don't have to hawkishly monitor their admission paperwork for sneaky upcodes. They don't have to spend ten hours on the phone arguing about esoteric billing practices.

In a rational world, we'd compare the American system to the rest of the world and say, "Well, they've figured it out, we should do what they're doing." But in good old U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!, the answer to this is more prices, more commercialization, more market forces. Just rub some capitalism on it!

That's where companies like Multiplan come in: this is a middleman that serves other middlemen. Multiplan negotiates prices on behalf of insurers, and splits the difference between the list price and the negotiated price with them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/health-insurance-medical-bills.html

But – as the Arm and a Leg podcast points out – this provides the perverse incentive for Multiplan to drive list prices up. If the list price quintuples, and then Multiplan drives it back down to, say, double the old price, they collect more money. Meanwhile, your insurer sticks you with the bill, over and above your deductible and co-pay:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/multiplan/

The Multiplan layer doesn't just allow insurers to rip you off (though boy does it allow insurers to rip you off), it also makes it literally impossible to know what the price is going to be before you get your procedure. As with any proposition bet, the added complexity is there to make it impossible for you to calculate the odds and figure out if you're getting robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/04/house-always-wins/#are-you-on-drugs

Multiplan is the purest expression of market dynamics brainworms I've yet encountered: solving the inefficiencies created by the complexity of a system with too many middlemen by adding another middle-man who is even more complex.

No matter what the problem is with America's health industry, the answer is always the same: more markets! Are older voters getting pissed off at politicians for slashing Medicare? No problem: just create Medicare Advantage, where old people can surrender their right to government care and place themselves in the loving hands of a giant corporation that makes more money by denying them care.

The US health industry is a perfect parable about the dangers of trusting shareholder accountable markets to do the work of democratically accountable governments. Shareholders love monopolies, so they drove monopolization throughout the health supply chain. As David Dayen writes in his 2020 book Monopolized the pharma industry monopolized first, and put the screws to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospitals formed regional monopolies to counter the seller power of consolidated Big Pharma. That's Mass Gen's story: tapping the capital markets to buy other hospitals in the region until it became too big to fail and too big to jail (and too big to care). Consolidated hospitals, in turn, put the screws to insurers, so they also consolidated, fighting Big Hospital's pricing power.

Monopoly at any point in a supply chain leads to monopoly throughout the supply chain. But patients can't consolidate (that's what governments are for – representing the diffuse interests of people). Neither can health workers (that's what unions are for). So the system screwed everyone: patients paid more for worse care. Health workers put in longer hours under worse conditions and got paid less.

Kuttner describes how his eye doctor races from patient to patient "as if he was on roller skates." When Kuttner wrote him a letter questioning the quality of care, the eye doctor answered that he understood that he was giving his patients short shrift, but explained that he had to, because his pay was half what he needed, relegating him to a small apartment and an old car. The hospital – which skims the payments he gets for care – sets his caseload, and he can't turn down patients.

The answers to this are obvious: get markets out of health care. Unionize health workers. Give regulators the budgets and power to hold health corporations to account.

But for market cultists, all of that can't work. Instead, we have to create more esoteric middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" and Multiplan. We need more prices to shovel into the market computer's data-hopper. If we just capitalism hard enough, surely the system will finally work…someday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

#billing codes #health #corruption #ripoffs #arm and a leg podcast #robert kuttner #prices #austrian economics #Prospective Payment Systems #the invisible hand #shop around #a market for lemons #monopoly #monopolization #upcoding

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collapsedsquid · 2 months ago

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97% of firms in India, 96% of firms in Indonesia, and 91% of firms in Mexico have fewer than 10 employees. Of these, most are just a single owner-operator, or perhaps a household enterprise. 55% of employment in developing countries is self-employment, rising to a staggering 77% in sub-Saharan Africa. These individuals operate firms, producing goods or providing services. Indeed they operate most firms. If we want to enable firms to grow, how should we think about these self-employed people? One possibility is that self-employed people are “micro-entrepreneurs.” They would like to grow their enterprises, but don’t have the resources to do so. This is the premise of microfinance, the most popular development intervention of the 2000s. Microfinance is the practice of giving households small loans that they can use to set up or grow a home business. If self-employed people are really microentrepreneurs, then the key to firm growth is giving them more access to capital. However, many different lines of evidence suggest that this view of self-employed people is inaccurate, and that it is more accurate to think of them as workers looking for wage employment than as entrepreneurs. In developing countries, self-employed people transition to wage employment at similar rates as unemployed people — and earn similar wages when they do. This isn’t what we would expect to see if self-employed people intended to grow their businesses as “microentrepreneurs.” In that case, they would be reluctant to quit their enterprise and take a wage job. This is exactly the behavior we see in rich countries, where self-employed people transition to wage employment much less frequently than unemployed people, and do it for higher wages. Microfinance studies also reveal that microloans have very little average impact on household or business outcomes. Most businesses run by an individual or a household are just not designed to scale. All of these facts point to self-employed people behaving more like unemployed workers than like entrepreneurs — which is to say, looking for jobs rather than aiming to create them. If self-employed people act more like unemployed workers than business owners, that implies that we should not design policy to bolster the growth of microenterprises. These microenterprises are desperate measures in the absence of wage employment, and will melt away if and when formal-sector firm growth creates more jobs. Formal-sector firm growth is key to making developing countries grow. Another urgent implication of this fact is that there is an unemployment crisis in developing countries that isn’t captured by official statistics. The typical approach to measuring unemployment is to ask whether people want to work but are unable to find any opportunities to do so — including self-employment. By this measure, the official unemployment rate in developing countries is 5% and 6% — around the same as in developed countries. However, if self-employed people are unemployed “in disguise,” this number could be much higher. One study estimated that at least 24% of self-employment during India’s agricultural lean season occurs solely because workers cannot find jobs. If we (loosely!) extrapolate this to a sub-Saharan African country with 77% of workers being self-employed, then the true unemployment rate jumps from 6% to 25%! Even if only 50% of workers are self-employed, then the true unemployment rate is still 18%. That level of unemployment is a catastrophic failure, and a crisis that cuts against both poverty alleviation for individuals and aggregate growth.

#biases confirmed back to work

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rjzimmerman · 7 months ago

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Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ecological civilization” and “new, quality productive forces,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that.

This raises an important question for the United States and all of humanity: Is Mr. Xi right? Is a state-directed system like China’s better positioned to solve a generational crisis like climate change, or is a decentralized market approach — i.e., the American way — the answer?

How this plays out could have serious implications for American power and influence.

Look at what happened in the early 20th century, when fascism posed a global threat. America entered the fight late, but with its industrial power — the arsenal of democracy — it emerged on top. Whoever unlocks the door inherits the kingdom, and the United States set about building a new architecture of trade and international relations. The era of American dominance began.

Climate change is, similarly, a global problem, one that threatens our species and the world’s biodiversity. Where do Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia and other large developing nations that are already grappling with the effects of climate change find their solutions? It will be in technologies that offer an affordable path to decarbonization, and so far, it’s China that is providing most of the solar panels, electric cars and more. China’s exports, increasingly led by green technology, are booming, and much of the growth involves exports to developing countries.

From the American neoliberal economic viewpoint, a state-led push like this might seem illegitimate or even unfair. The state, with its subsidies and political directives, is making decisions that are better left to the markets, the thinking goes.

But China’s leaders have their own calculations, which prioritize stability decades from now over shareholder returns today. Chinese history is littered with dynasties that fell because of famines, floods or failures to adapt to new realities. The Chinese Communist Party’s centrally planned system values constant struggle for its own sake, and today’s struggle is against climate change. China received a frightening reminder of this in 2022, when vast areas of the country baked for weeks under a record heat wave that dried up rivers, withered crops and was blamed for several heatstroke deaths.

#China #climate change #renewable energy

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mariacallous · 1 month ago

Note

Hi mariacallous! Some of my friends have started spouting the 'abortion is a class issue because rich women always have access to abortion' BS, and I was wondering if you had any resources/articles etc that might be helpful in convincing them. Sorry to barge into your inbox!

The notion that rich women will be fine, regardless of what the law says, is probably comforting to some. But it is simply not true.

Yes, abortion bans will disproportionately affect poor women and women of color in a country that already has appallingly high maternal mortality rates, no federal paid family leave and little support for parents who struggle to provide for their children financially. As Rebecca Traister pointed out in New York magazine, this is nothing new: The Hyde Amendment and state restrictions have already made abortion effectively inaccessible to many women without means or mobility.

But we should not lose sight of the reality that the Supreme Court decision has created a crisis for all American women. Even the richest Americans — the one-percenters and the upper middle class — will not escape the effects.

Attenuating the rights of half of the population will have systemic effects akin to climate change. Just as no amount of investment in Mars-bound space colonization, air-conditioned bunkers and private firefighting services will save the rich from terrible outcomes if the planet becomes uninhabitable, the rich cannot avoid the effects of the overturning of Roe. Residents of blue states won’t be exempt. And men who think the ban won’t affect them are mistaken; it will affect women they know and love, and it will change the political economy in which they live and operate.

The persistent myth that the wealthy will be unaffected is predicated on the vague notion that they’ll be able to find and purchase abortion pills by mail, travel to places where abortion is legal or get abortions from local providers willing to break the law.

And sure, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a red state one-percenter has his daughter or wife airlifted to another state for an abortion — or, potentially, for in vitro fertilization, if it becomes illegal to terminate embryos. We are accustomed to different rules and privileges for the wealthy, and witness these injustices daily. People with more money and privilege conferred by race and class — people who have access to better lawyers — experience our justice system differently. They also get better health care and pay less in taxes as a share of income. We hold the rich to a lower, not higher, standard and tacitly accept that they will get away with cheating various systems.

But the wealthiest are in for some unpleasant surprises when it comes to abortion. The scenarios in which a woman needs an abortion include medical emergencies in which any delay in treatment can have severe, even fatal, consequences — and in those circumstances abortion pills obtained by mail won’t help.

One in 50 pregnancies in the United States is ectopic, for example, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. The embryo must be removed, and delaying that treatment can result in sepsis, internal bleeding and death. Placental abruptions must be addressed immediately to avoid extensive bleeding, renal failure and even, in some instances, death.

Any woman who finds herself in either of these scenarios is not going to be able to pack her bags and go for a long drive. Even for someone with the means, an airlift to a medical facility in another state may not be quick enough to save her. She will need to be treated locally and immediately. Some of the bans going into effect around the country include medical exceptions for these situations, but if there’s any ambiguity about what the law allows, the time it takes a medical professional to consult a lawyer may be the difference between life and death.

Some states are expected to try to ban interstate travel for abortions. Bans in Texas and Oklahoma leave room for that possibility. Planned Parenthood’s Montana branch has reportedly decided that it will no longer provide medication abortions for patients from certain states where bans are in effect or in the works, citing the “rapidly changing” legal landscape. It’s also clear that many Republicans view the Roe reversal as an inroad to a total federal ban. If they gain electoral victories in 2024, this is a very likely outcome, and in that case there will be no blue state abortion clinics to travel to. Even now, the lines and waiting times at abortion clinics in safe haven states are likely to get very long.

Many people also assume the wealthy can always find a local doctor willing to perform an abortion, even in a state where it has become illegal. This seems unlikely. While some providers did flout the law and provide women with abortions before Roe in 1973, the ubiquity of digital surveillance and other mechanisms for violating the privacy of women seeking abortions have made it far more difficult for them to do so privately and safely. Trigger laws are already forcing medical professionals to consult lawyers before they provide care, and laws that criminalize abortion leave health care workers with little incentive to violate them. When faced with the prospect of prosecution or losing a medical license, how many doctors will take this risk, even when money is offered? Meanwhile, anti-choice conservatives are already working to make it harder to obtain abortion pills.

Some believe abortion bans won’t affect them because they’ll never find themselves in need of an abortion. Conservatives might imagine the typical woman who needs one fits an archetype: poor, single, liberal, promiscuous, anti-family and irresponsible. But most women who get abortions are already mothers (60 percent). Nearly half of abortion seekers live below the poverty line, but a significant portion are not poor. (Women with higher incomes have more access to contraception, but that dynamic might change if the Supreme Court follows through on Justice Clarence Thomas’s suggestion to revisit earlier rulings, including the right to contraception.) Conservative families also include teenagers and young women whose privacy, autonomy and ability to seek medical care, regardless of whether their parents approve, will be severely compromised by abortion bans.

The reality is that women from every demographic need abortions. Well-off conservative women are not immune to contraception failures, gynecological emergencies, miscarriages, incest or rape. Many women find that despite their beliefs, carrying a pregnancy to term is just not something they can go through with, for a range of reasons. Pregnancy itself can be life-threatening for women with certain existing medical conditions, and even for women who don’t have those risks, it is life-altering. The kind of person who might need or want an abortion is, put simply, any person capable of getting pregnant.

Women will die because of this — disproportionately poor and middle-class women but not just poor and middle-class women. Rich women could just as easily suffer and die, too, even those who think that they would never need an abortion or that they would never be denied essential medical care in the United States of America in 2022.

There will be other effects: Roe is a privacy law, and there are implications for the ruling outside of the issue of abortion. Forced birth will take women out of the work force in an already tight labor market. Women could be treated like criminals for having miscarriages, which are incredibly common. And women who are pregnant when their partners don’t want them to be will be more at risk for domestic violence and homicide. Individual wealth won’t prevent these outcomes, either.

It is, of course, true that the wealthy are the least vulnerable in the new post-Roe world, and this is not a requiem for them on a tiny violin. But it is important for all parties to understand that all people are going to participate in this nightmare, whether they realize it now or not. The wealthy unfortunately have an outsize influence on politics, so how much the bans harm them, inconvenience them or enrage them will most likely affect the will of politicians to vote for and maintain abortion bans.

The overturning of Roe will affect all of us. And if you are lucky enough to be wealthy, your money probably won’t shield you.

The Persistent Myth That Restricting Abortion Rights Won’t Affect the Rich

the problem is that it's a class issue, but not only in the way they think, and the point is that all women are impacted by it, but obviously some way more than others

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robertreich · 5 months ago

Video

youtube

Boeing Is Everything Wrong With American Capitalism

Excuse my language, but why is Boeing such a shitty corporation?

Their planes are literally falling apart in the sky.

At least six Boeing planes have had parts fall off this year — including an exit door in mid-flight. A whistle-blower has accused Boeing of a “criminal cover-up” of its safety failures.

But beyond this one company, Boeing’s descent is a case study in how American capitalism has become so rotten. Let me explain.

I’m old enough to remember when people used to say “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.”

But in 1997, everything changed when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas and became the only major maker of commercial aircraft in America. With no domestic rivals, it no longer needed to stay on the cutting edge of innovation.

Executives at Boeing who once specialized in engineering were replaced with Wall Street types who looked down on the engineers. One money-hungry CEO described those who cared too much about the integrity of Boeing’s planes, and not enough about its stock price, as “phenomenally talented assholes.”

To keep Wall Street happy, Boeing began spending billions on stock buybacks that pumped up the value of shares — money that could have been spent on safety and innovation.

It doled out hundreds of millions on campaign contributions and lobbying to lower safety standards, rake in massive government contracts, and boost its bottom line.

To cut costs, Boeing outsourced roughly 70% of its design, engineering, and manufacturing rather than rely on its experienced union workforce.

To further undercut its union, Boeing opened an assembly plant in South Carolina, a notorious anti-union state. Executives reportedly told managers not to move any unionized employees there.

This quest for profit resulted in massive quality control problems that were reported by engineers and machinists, but allegedly ignored by management. All of this inevitably led to the deadly safety issues Boeing faces today.

And because of Boeing’s monopoly-like power, it has been largely immune from any repercussions for its poor performance.

Boeing made it seem like it was punishing executives who led it astray by firing them, but still rewarded them with “golden parachutes” on the way out.

Folks, Boeing’s troubles should serve as a cautionary tale. It’s reflective of broader trends in our economy over the past forty years. Monopolization. Wealth siphoned off to rich shareholders at the expense of everyone else. Cutting corners on safety to save a dime. Bashing unions. All while spending big money lobbying the government.

Boeing may have become a shitty company, but that doesn’t mean we have to put up with it.

The government has the power to increase antitrust enforcement to bust up big companies — something that we are already starting to see in other industries.

It should also attach strings to government contracts and subsidies to ensure that private corporations are working in the best interest of the country, and not just their bottom lines.

It should ban stock buybacks, which were illegal before the Reagan administration, so profits are put back into improving the company, including the safety of products, rather than solely padding investors’ wallets.

Union power should be rebuilt, so that workers can once again act as a countervailing force to Wall Street.

And we should continue the fight to get Big Money out of politics.

It’s not too late to reverse course and chart a new flight path.

#youtube #Boeing #travel #video #videos #politics #Wall Street #Greed

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madaqueue · 8 months ago

Text

Dripping in Gold | Chapter 1

synopsis: finding a job was never easy, and why even bother trying after you meet satoru gojo, a man with mysterious and exorbitant wealth, who wants nothing more than to spoil you with it? the only caveat to your little arrangement is that it can never, ever, become personal.

pairing: satoru gojo x f!reader

themes/content: non-curse modern au, sugar daddy gojo. language, angst, light smut. alcohol mention, masturbation (f). 18+, MDNI

word count: 2.6k

a/n: IT'S HERE AHHHH hope y'all like this one :)

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God, I need to get a job.

The afternoon sun filters in through the blinds as you scroll through your phone, trying to distract yourself from the reality of your future. You graduated college months ago and still have no idea what you want to do or how to do it. Application after application, shitty interview after shitty interview, and you’re still no further into the career that’s supposed to be the rest of your life.

Sighing, you prop yourself up on your elbows in bed to take in the space around you - clothes were strewn across the floor of your studio apartment, dirty dishes piled in the sink, empty takeout containers from restaurants you certainly couldn’t afford to be eating at. It was all just too much.

Eh, I’ll get around to it, you think, laying back into the pillows and returning to your phone. You navigate to check your bank account, just to see the damage that months of unemployment have done.

“Balance: $68.06”

Shit. That’s not even enough to make rent this month, and even if you did have a job lined up you’ve already asked your landlord for one extension on your payments and he did not seem very open to the prospect of doing it again.

Trying to shut out the thought of possibly losing your apartment, you move over to Instagram to quiet the dread building inside of you. Scrolling through posts of your friends on yachts, traveling the country, eating expensive dinners with expensive-looking people, you only feel like more of a failure.

How are they able to do it? I mean, sure, they at least have jobs, but none of them pay well enough to do this, right?

You hover over one of your friend’s pictures, trying to recognize the incredibly well-dressed, albeit much older, man she’s seated across from. As you zoom in, it suddenly clicks - her new jewelry, the expensive bottle of champagne, fresh nails, styled hair - and you remember your conversation with her the last time you saw each other.

You were both out at a bar and she kept buying rounds of shots for you and all your friends.

“Dude, not to be a total dick, but how are you able to afford all this?” you shout over the music blasting through the speakers.

“Oh m’god, you aren’t gonna believe it” she slurs slightly, “there’s this app where rich guys pay you to just go on dates with ‘em, I jus’ gotta keep lookin’ pretty and they pay me so much.”

“Don’t you have to, like, fuck them though?” you ask, curiously raising an eyebrow.

“Only if y’wanna! You’re not really supposed to, but they pay you a lot more!” she grins.

At the time you pushed the conversation to the back of your mind and promptly forgot about it after a few more drinks, but now the realization crashes over you.

No, there’s no way. You try to shake the idea out of your mind - were you seriously considering getting a sugar daddy before getting a job?

She did make it sound pretty easy though…and I mean, it’s just dates, right?

You hesitantly pull out your laptop to search for the website she had mentioned. There’s no harm in just checking it out, you try to rationalize. Before you know it, you’ve set up a profile and have picked out a few pictures of yourself that make you look particularly hot - you out at a bar, you on the beach, you with your friends.

After you finalize your profile, the screen suddenly fills with pictures of, frankly, less-than-attractive older men. You roll your eyes and scoff at your own stupidity for even considering this idea, starting to shut your laptop before something catches your eye in the corner of the screen.

Bright white hair and piercing blue eyes look back at you through the computer. Holy shit, he’s hot, you think as you move your mouse to click on his profile.

Bio: “My name’s Gojo, but you can call me yours 🥰 23, casual only”

Okay, so he’s hot, rich, and practically the same age as you? You feel like you’ve struck gold. Besides, he only wants something casual, which is all you’re interested in anyways since you still need to focus on finding a job eventually, but this could at least help you financially bridge the gap between then and now.

Swiping up, you decide to just send him a message and hope for the best; after all, the worst he can say is no.

You: Gojo, I need you to be fr with me - does that pickup line in your bio ever actually work?

Sighing, you move to close your computer as you wait for him to respond, but a message pops up almost instantly.

Gojo: Why don’t you find out tonight over dinner - 7:30 work for you?

A smile starts to form on your lips - this was almost too easy. The two of you briefly confirm the details of your first date before you finally shut your laptop and start getting ready.

–

Standing outside of the restaurant, you’re suddenly hit with a wave of nervousness as the reality of what you’re about to do sets in.

There’s no way this is a good idea - maybe I should just go home. No, no, I’ve made it this far, and I really do need the money.

You inhale a shaky breath as you try to steady yourself before reaching for the door and walking inside. The restaurant is beautiful, the scent of fresh bread and herbs hitting your nose as soon as your feet step onto the dark wood of the floor. The deep red walls make the space feel cozy, intimately lit with candles and a chandelier hanging overhead. You glance down at the burgundy dress and black heels you decided on since they were the nicest clothes you owned, yet you still feel slightly underdressed.

Glancing around the restaurant, the white-haired man is nowhere to be found. “Hi, um, I’m here to meet someone,” you hesitantly explain to the person at the host stand.

“Ah yes, you must be with Mr. Gojo. Right this way,” he gestures for you to follow him. He leads you through the restaurant to the far back corner, unveiling a small room that was initially hidden behind a curtain.

As you adjust to the dim lighting, you glance around the new space in front of you: a single table with roses placed in the middle, and on one side sits perhaps the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen. He smiles at you as those bright blue eyes meet yours before they slowly move down and up your body, taking you all in.

“Well, aren’t you a treat,” he grins before getting up to pull out the empty chair for you.

When he stands up you allow your gaze to cover him as your eyes shift up to his white locks then down across his black suit, adorned with a dark red tie that somehow perfectly matches your dress.

“You aren’t half-bad yourself,” you respond as you move across the small space to sit down.

“Careful now, don’t flatter me too much or it’ll go to my head,” he smirks as he returns to his seat across from you. He places his elbow on the table and rests his chin in his palm, staring at you.

Trying to break the silence, you murmur, “This place is nice.”

“Mhm,” he hums, eyes never leaving your face.

“So, um, what do you do?” you continue, desperately trying to loosen the pressure you feel from his gaze.

“Do you care?” he taunts, tilting his head to the side with that same smirk on his face.

“W-well, I-” you stammer.

“It’s okay sweetheart, I’m not offended. You’re here because I’m paying you, and I’m here because I wanted to sit across from a beautiful woman. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that,” he smiles.

The combination of the pet name and him calling you beautiful suddenly makes your cheeks flush and you look down at the table, trying to hide your reddening face.

Suddenly you feel a hand on your chin as Gojo gently tilts your head back up. “Eyes up here, princess,” he purrs. “After all, what’s the point of this little date if I can’t even look at you?”

Something about his touch, his voice, his words has your heart fluttering in your chest. You’ve never been nervous like this over a guy before, and you’ve barely just met him.

You swallow, trying to keep your eyes on his but it almost feels like he’s seeing into you, somehow able to view the depths of your soul. You feel naked in front of him, like he’s looking at your very essence.

After what feels like an eternity, he finally breaks the eye contact with a chuckle. “Sorry, I know I can come off a little intense sometimes. You’re just so gorgeous it feels like I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t try to take it all in.”

A sigh escapes your lips as you finally tear your gaze away from him, softly laughing at the compliment.

The rest of the date goes smoothly - he orders the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu and tells you to get whatever you want, since it’s obviously his treat. The conversation flows easily between the two of you, and you find yourself genuinely enjoying your time with him. When it comes time to leave, he thanks you for spending the night with him and gives you his phone number in case you ever want to go out again. As you part ways to walk towards your car, you get a notification from your bank.

Holy. Shit.

Your eyes widen at the screen. Gojo sent you $2,000.

You almost feel dizzy, not having had this much money at once in nearly months. Now you can pay rent and buy groceries and do all the other stuff you were too broke to do. Sitting in your car, you let out a squeal of excitement.

Unfortunately, your joy gets cut short as you go to turn your car on, the key turning repeatedly in the ignition as it stalls out.

Of course, you think, the one time I don’t put gas in this goddamn thing. To your credit, you really couldn’t afford it, and it had lasted longer on empty before. You had also neglected the oil change, and the tire rotation, and the other maintenance the mechanic kept emailing you was overdue, but how were you supposed to pay for all that anyways? Not knowing what to do, you pull out your phone to call someone to help you. As you unlock it, you’re met with Gojo’s contact information he just put in.

I mean, he would definitely help me. And I know he can afford gas. Sighing, you call him.

He answers almost immediately. “Miss me already?”

You want to roll your eyes at his cockiness, but you really do need his help. “My piece of shit car won’t turn on, and I figured you’re probably still close to the restaurant, could you help?”

“Anything for you, sweetheart. I’ll be there in a minute.” Even after just one date, it’s like you can practically hear his smile through the phone.

As promised, he arrives a few minutes later. He drives up in a sleek, black Porsche that has windows so tinted you wouldn’t be able to see inside if he hadn’t rolled his window down. Of course he drives a nice car, you think to yourself.

“Your savior has arrived,” he smirks, leaning his head out the window at you where you stand against your car. Opening the passenger side door reveals the interior of the vehicle, which is just as nice as the outside, with black leather seats and an all-black console. “You know, this is usually the part where you say thank you.” He turns to face you as the scent of his cologne hits you, something woody and crisp.

“Thanks,” you mutter as you settle into the comfortable seat. “You can just take me home.”

“On it,” he responds with a salute.

The drive is quiet as you spiral into your thoughts. How am I supposed to get a job now if I can’t even drive to an interview? How am I even supposed to get groceries? Can I just leave my car at the restaurant? Where else would I even take it? How am I supposed to afford this? Fuck.

Gojo clears his throat next to you, pulling you out of your mind. “You alright over there, sweetheart?”

“Y-yeah, sorry,” you stutter, “just stressed.”

He glances over at you out of the corner of his eyes. “Well, what if I could help you be a little less stressed?”

“Oh yeah, and how would you do that exactly?” Looking down, you suddenly notice his hand on your thigh, his thumb moving in slow circles along your skin. The gentle sensation makes you feel flustered as heat begins to pool between your legs.

Am I seriously about to fuck this guy I just met?

Before you can say anything else, Gojo continues. “How about you use my car while I get yours sorted out for you, hm?” A look of surprise flashes across your face at his kindness and lack of sexual proposition. “What, not the offer you were expecting?” he smirks.

“Gojo, I-” you start.

“Look, princess, I want to do this. Let me help you, please?” he pleads.

“Fine,” you relent, “but I owe you one, seriously.”

“Don’t worry about it. But, if you really insist, I’m sure we can figure out a way for you to repay me at some point.” You tilt your head to look at him as his eyes meet yours, a glint of mischief in his blue irises.

After a few more minutes of him flirting with you, his hand never leaving your thigh, Gojo finally pulls up to your apartment building. Stepping out of the car, he hands you the keys and reminds you not to worry, that he’ll take care of everything. You thank him again as you walk inside - he insists you don’t wait outside while he waits for his ride home - and he sends you off with a wave.

Walking into your apartment, your thoughts swirl in your mind as you replay the events that just transpired. How did you manage to find this rich, handsome, courteous man? More importantly, what’s the catch? If he’s truly as good as he seems, why was he on that website in the first place?

Sighing, you flop onto your bed and peel off your dress, tossing it into the accumulating pile of clothes on the floor. Your skin feels warm where he touched you, a part of you wishing he had inched higher. Before you realize you’re doing it, your hands traverse down your body between your legs, gently pulling your panties to the side.

As you rub over your clit, you picture how his soft fingertips would feel against you, how good those long fingers would feel inside you, beckoning you towards your release. Your other hand traces up your chest, gently cupping your breast as you toy with your firm nipple. His name escapes your mouth as you feel yourself getting closer, eyes shut as you picture him. “Gojo,” you can’t stop yourself from moaning into the empty room as your orgasm hits you, legs shaking, the thought of him the only thing on your mind.

Your breathing slows as you come down from your high, heart still pounding in your chest.

Well, that settles it, you think as you sit up. I guess I am going to fuck him.

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