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gracieheartspedro · 2 months ago

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how i imagine childhood best friend!eddie

my main masterlist - eddie munson masterlist

warnings: this is 18+, mdni, reader and eddie are 18+, tons of flirting, eddie is snarky, reader is also snarky, they grew up together but are no longer close, talks of sex with other people, mentions of std's, eddie wants reader and reader wants him, kissing. 2.1k words

After middle school, you did not relate to Eddie anymore

It may have to do with how his style changed, his music interests leaning more towards the darker side, he started to grow his hair out, his attitude towards authority shifting. You just felt that your friendship would dissipate.

But Eddie would still say hi to you in the hallway, trying to get your attention.

After junior year, you two were virtually strangers.

So when senior year came around and you and your new friends made big plans for an End of Year Bash, you reluctantly invited Eddie at lunch.

“Well look what the cat dragged in… How are you sweetheart? Still listening to that Prince cassette I got you for your 13th birthday?” You roll your eyes, extending an invitation out to him. “Me and my friends are throwing an end of year party. I was gonna invite you.” “Was?” You narrow your eyes at him, scanning him for any sign of a smirk. He was fucking with you and while you knew it, you wanted to see him break. “I think I’m gonna give your invite to Jeff or Gareth, because you’re annoying me.” “Oh come on, where’s the silly snarky girl I once knew? I miss her.” “She got tits and grew up. Are you gonna come or what?”

He gladly accepts the invitation, telling you that you better save him a dance.

You don’t even really think about Eddie again until you spot him in the middle of your friend’s living room, sticking out like a sore thumb. You swirl your jungle juice in your cup and down the rest before approaching him.

You were a bit tipsy, but not drunk. You lick your lips as you walk through the crowd, tapping Eddie on his shoulder.

“Thanks for coming.” You say, before he locks eyes with you. God, he did something different today, he looks… good. “I don’t know what to do with myself.” He yells over the bumping music. “Follow me, I’ll get you a drink.”

You get him a drink and have him come outside to smoke with you. You had picked up a bad habit, and luckily he had the same one. When you light up the cigarette, he matches your motions.

The moonlight adds a cast over his features that sends you spiraling into the thoughts of possibly finding him attractive. When you were kids, you always thought he was just baby cute. But now… he looks like a man.

His ripped jeans, his layed leather jacket and jean vest. He may have the rocker look, but his features are still soft. Especially his lips.

“You good?” He asks you, noticing your piercing gaze. You sit back in the lawn chair, pulling your cigarette out of your mouth. “Oh, sorry. Yeah, I’m good. Just a bit tipsy.” “You are still not good at lying. Never were.” You throw your head back, giggling, “Shut up, Munson. You don’t know me.” He throws his hands up in mock surrender, “You still talk with that high pitched voice, especially when you lie. Your eyebrows also do this thing-” “My eyebrows do not do a thing.” You say as your eyebrows do a thing. “They are doing it now.”

You roll your eyes, giggling to yourself. You how he’s right, but you can’t admit it to him, especially when he’s looking at you with such intention.

“You look good, dollface. Popularity didn’t change you too much.” You smirk up at him, not taking much offense to the statement. “Being a huge nerd changed you, though.” He chuckles, taking a drag of his cigarette. “Is it the long hair or?” You point to his free hand,“The tattoos. And all those rings.” “What you don’t like?” He flicks some hair off his forehead, which for some reason makes you stare more. You smirk, shaking your head and finally coming back to reality, “You’re a dork.” “You used to be, too.”

You chew on your cheek, flicking some ash. You shift your ass on the chair to face him fully. He’s looking at you with a questionable expression, like he’s trying to read your mind.

You hear someone starting to open the back door and you see a couple of your girlfriends drunkenly stumbling out. You call after them, making sure they are good. The one, Marissa, notes you and Eddie sitting together.

“Ooo, you got the hots for the Freak?”

You want to die in that moment. You had told them all plenty of times of your childhood with Eddie and how much he had changed since you knew him. You never said it as a particularly bad thing, but your friends thought he was too strange for comfort.

You glance over at Eddie, wondering if you should respond or just act like you did not hear them. But he’s watching you carefully, indicating that he needed you to answer her.

You clear your throat, “Eddie is just a friend, remember?” “I saw you through the door. You were staring at him like you wanted to suck his di-” You do not dare let her finish, screaming, “Marissa!”

She giggles as she walks towards the firepit with the other girls, leaving you and Eddie alone again. You want to just flip your chair off the edge of the deck, but you resist the urge.

Eddie stares into the side of your face, practically burning a hole into your cheek.

“You were staring at me like you wanted-” “I’ll kill you with my bare hands if you finish that sentence.”

Somehow, you end up spending the entire night talking with Eddie outside. You catch up about life, what new music you are into, and how you are excited to be working at a clothing store in downtown Hawkins.

The night ends with you walking Eddie to his van and wishing him a goodnight.

Eddie opens up his door, the edge resting on the hinge of his arm,“So I’ll see you around, I guess.” “Yeah, we should… hangout sometime.” “Yeah, we should. Are you busy this weekend?” You think for a beat, “I work til 8 tomorrow and Sunday. Maybe we could-” He doesn’t let you finish, shaking his curls and grinning, “I’ll come see ya tomorrow. Maybe we can grab a late night dinner at Hank’s. That’s nearby right?” “Right next door.” “Perfect, I’ll see you tomorrow, sweetheart.”

He gets to your work the next day at 7:30. It was odd seeing the guy who scares half of the females in your school in the middle of a women’s clothing store, but you knew he was harmless. You give him a smile, nodding your approval that he actually came through.

“Well, well, well… Welcome to Patricia’s Boutique, can I help you find something, sir?” “Yeah, I’m looking for this hot chick who works here.” “No hot chicks here. Just me.” “I guess you’ll do, then,” He teases, wiggling his eyebrows at you.

You could not help but blush at his stupidity. You advise him that you have to do some last minute cleaning and you’ll lock up so you can fill your stomach with a milkshake and burger next door.

He’s patient, leaning against some displays and chatting to you about how the work day was. You get a good look at him when he’s inspecting some earrings you have on display.

His lips. God, his lips.

Before he catches you staring, you act as you are mopping the same place you already did for the millionth time.

Once you clean up, you turn off the lights and lock the doors. You walk with Eddie right next door, occupying a booth right next to the vast windows of the diner. The older waitress jots down your orders and you both settle into easy conversation as the cook whips up your burger and Eddie’s cheesesteak.

“So I heard you were dating Kenny Lopez at the beginning of the school year. From the way he was just… not at your side at that party, I’m assuming you two aren’t a thing anymore?” You wiggle your nose, rolling your eyes at the thought of your ex. “He was too immature. He was also a bit too religious for my liking. Said that if we had sex or anything I would have to repent. Which is insane because I found out later that he was cheating on with other girls and having sex with them.” “Woah, woah, woah-” You cut him off, giggling a bit as you sip your soda,“Yeah, I know.” He abruptly speaks up, “Did you?” “Did I what?” “Have sex?”

You cock your head to the side, letting out a quiet scoff.

“No. We didn’t.” He lets out a random sigh of relief, “Good. I heard he gave Janet Huggins chlamydia.” “Jesus, Eds.” He throws his hands up in surrender, a cute smile plastered across his face,“What?! Just cause I’m a loser doesn’t mean I don’t hear the rumors about people.” You quirk your brow, playing with your straw. You were morbidly curious about your own status on the food chain, “Any about me?” “Some.” “Like what?” He stops, licking his lips painstakingly slow. He has to know what he’s doing to you, “You really want to know?” “Yes.”

Your food comes as soon as you approve to hear the dish on yourself. You grab a fry from your plate, obnoxiously smacking.

“Well?” He matches your annoying chewing, “Some are just… statements about you-” “Like?” “You have great tits.” “Eddie!” “Hey- we all have eyes here.” “Okay, ew,” You chew another fry, “What else, though?” “Last year I heard you smoked pot with Kendra Traverse under the bleachers.” You shake your head immediately, “Never happened.” “Damn, I was hoping that one was true.” “What else?” He takes a bite of his meal, trying not to enjoy the sight of you eagerly asking about what people say about you. “I heard your a great kisser. Amongst… other things.” “This is all locker room talk. I want something juicy.” “You’re really setting yourself up for a joke there-” “Shut up.”

He giggles. Like really giggles. It’s a sound you vividly remember listening to growing up. You can sometimes still hear it in your dreams.

“Other than what I’ve told you, I just heard whenever you were possibly dating someone.” “Ah,” You half smirk, wiping your mouth with a nearby napkin, “Well… those things never last that long.” “Why’s that?” “Because no guys around here are really worth a damn. I wasted a whole school year on a stupid guy when I could’ve just been having fun.” “No guys, huh?” You roll your eyes at his question, “Don’t say ‘well I’m worth a damn’. We already know that.” “So I am the exception?” “For now. Until you piss me off, somehow.” “So I have…” He looks at his watch jokingly, “T-minus 10 minutes to be an exception.”

God, he was so quick it gave you goosebumps.

You two sit in that booth for two hours, laughing and carrying on. Eventually you tell him you have to go home before your parents assume you got kidnapped. He laughs and jokes that they will be reassured to know you were with your childhood best friend and not some stranger.

"You should come by and see them. They would love to hear how you’re doing.” He scoffs, shaking his head, “Your parents only put up with me because I was always around.” “My mom found you cute,” You reply, walking side by side with him to your car, “She used to tell me I should date you.” He grows silent for a moment and clears his throat, “Wise woman.”

You turn to him, folding your arms over your chest. There was a twinkle in his eye that you had seen a couple times in the last two days. Something hopeful.

“Is that not what you’re doing right now? Taking me on a date?” You say, your heart practically beating out of your chest.

He cocks his head at you curiously before connecting the dots. Your smile practically takes up your entire face, watching the cogs turn in his brain. You stop in front of your car, waiting for a response.

"So…” He looks over at your car, raising his eyebrows, “Is this the point in the date where I get to kiss you?” You feel dizzy just thinking about it. “Is that how you end your dates?”

He shakes his head, taking two steps towards you. His arms wrap around your waist, making you drop your arms over his biceps.

“What dates? The only girl I’ve ever had eyes for was you.” You swallow, looking up at those big brown doe eyes, “Well, how would you like to end this date, with me?”

And he kisses you. He does it without a single ounce of hesitation. He’s soft but still eager, his perfectly plump lips slotting between yours. Your arms wrap around his neck and for once, in all the years you’ve tried forgetting about Eddie, you realize he’s all you’ll ever want and need.

np taglist: @fandom-princess-forevermore @robinbuckleywife @mediocredreams @amanitacowboy @awkward00noodle

divider by @/cafekitsune

#eddie munson hello pls be my boyfriend #eddie munson #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson smut #eddie munson angst #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson blurb #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x female reader #eddie munson fic #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson headcanons #eddie munson fanfic #stranger things smut

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dckweed · 3 months ago

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ROSIE!, alpha!simon riley x omega reader

in which captain price sends alpha simon on a much needed vacation to his secluded countryside cabin, but leaves out a most important detail- he has a live in omega caretaker to care for his little cabin when he’s away! and she’s the prettiest, sweetest little thing that simon ever did see..

warnings: alpha/omega universe, mentions/depictions of abuse, smut, pregnancy, kind of forced proximity?, ill add as i go...please note that i know NOTHING about COD but i am in love with the 141 guys and this has been rotting in my brain. absolute fucking filth. simon fucks us good and proper in the shower this time! PTSD flashbacks/hallucinations, panic attacks, mental health issues are heavy in this one pookies!

hello my silly little friends! when i tell you shit has been crazy, i mean shit as been CRAZY !! I MISSED Y'ALL THOUGH!! i struggled with this one because i wasnt sure if i wanted to add in another scene, or if i was ready to end it just like this.., obviously i decided to end it like this..next one will be alot of comfort and we finally meet johnny!

series masterlist here.

CHAPTER FIVE: retirement?

Simon stood by the bed, watching your sleeping form with a softness in his eyes that few had ever seen. The warm scent of freshly cooked food filled the air as he gently nudged your shoulder.

“C’mon, lovie, wake up,” he murmured, his voice low and tender. You stirred, your lashes fluttering as you blinked sleepily up at him. A slow, lazy smile spread across your lips as you inhaled the delicious aroma.

“Simon…” you sighed dreamily, stretching your limbs like a content cat.

“Made you some food,” he said, setting the plate on the bedside table. “Figured you’d be hungry after earlier.”

You sat up quickly, excitement lighting up your face as you reached for the plate. “You’re the best, Si’.” You took a bite, humming in satisfaction before beginning to chatter away as you eat, enjoying the food he put effort into making for you, even though it was clearly a bit burnt in places. “You know what I wanna make for dinner? Big, juicy burgers, the kind that drip when you bite into ‘em. And I want mac and cheese—real mac and cheese, not that boxed stuff. Oh! And mashed potatoes! The kind that’s so creamy you could eat it with a spoon like pudding. All from scratch.” You were absolutely ravenous, whether from the energy you’d exerted today or from the heat itself you’d never know.

Simon watched you, utterly enamored. His wolf preened at how easily you envisioned your future, how you just assumed you would be together for these little moments. He wanted to put a ring on your finger immediately. Right now. Drag you to the nearest town and make it official before you could even blink. The thought had been lingering in his mind since the moment he first laid eyes on you, but now? Now it felt like an inevitability.

He smirked as he leaned against the headboard, watching you practically glow with excitement. “So, let me get this straight—” he began, a teasing glint in his eyes. “I fuck you into oblivion, and your idea of a thank you is homemade food?”

You gasped, your cheeks flushing a deep red before you burst into giggles, covering your face with your hands. “Simon!” you whined, shaking your head, but he only chuckled, loving how adorable you were when you got flustered.

“You’re too damn cute,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to the top of your head before rubbing your back soothingly. “Could eat you up myself, babygirl.”

Still smiling, he stood up and stretched, rolling his shoulders. “Gonna start us a shower,” he told you, running a hand through his short, messy hair as he walked toward the bathroom. He paused in the doorway. “Oh, while you’re cooking, I’ll get that broken bed frame picked up. Move the bed from the guest room in here instead. It’s bigger anyway.”

You blinked at him, tilting your head in confusion. “Where will you sleep?” you asked innocently.

Simon turned back to you, a slow, knowing smirk curling his lips. “With you, obviously.”

The realization dawned on you, your lips parting slightly, eyes wide. He wasn’t planning on sleeping in a different room. Not anymore. He wanted to be here, beside you, permanently. And just like that, he knew—he wasn’t just thinking about staying the night. He was already contemplating retirement, or at the very least, switching to a desk job at the base. Something that would allow him to be here. With you.

His little Omega. His mate. His future.

Steam curled around the bathroom as Simon turned on the shower, adjusting the temperature until it was just right. He turned back to see you stepping in behind him, your skin already flushed from the heat of the room. His hands found your waist, guiding you under the warm spray as he reached for the soap.

“Let me take care of you,” he murmured, running his hands along your sides, smoothing suds over your skin. His touch was careful at first, reverent, but his fingers couldn’t help but linger over the spots that were still sensitive, still tender from before.

A soft gasp escaped your lips as he traced his hands lower, over your hips, down the curve of your thighs. He could smell it—your heat was calming, not gone entirely, but not as urgent as before. Still, you smelled so sweet, so utterly tempting.

“You’re irresistible, you know that?” he murmured, his lips grazing the shell of your ear as his hands roamed. His wolf rumbled with approval, his body reacting instinctively to yours.

You whimpered, leaning back into him, your body pliant under his touch. “Si’… you keep touching me like that…”

He smirked against your shoulder, his hands sliding up to cup your breasts, thumbs brushing over your peaked nipples. “Like what, lovie?” he teased, voice thick with amusement. “M’jus makin’ sure everything is clean for you..”

Your breath hitched, a needy whimper spilling from your lips. His body pressed against yours, firm and unyielding, the heat of him wrapping around you even more than the water cascading over both of you.

His mouth found your neck, trailing slow, open-mouthed kisses down to the mark he’d left earlier. “You’re mine,” He says, voice filled with a hunger you’d never heard in anyone’s voice before when they talked to you. “Wanna take you again babygirl, but I know your body needs a break..” A sigh escapes your mouth, and you find yourself pressing yourself back against him, his cock already rock hard and pressing firmly into your lower back, right above your ass, you think he whimpers when you arch your back, pressing your tits against his hands and pushing your ass up against his length simultaneously.

“you want me babygirl?” His voice is a whisper brushing against your skin, lips ghosting after it as his fingers worked, one leaving your breast and traveling along the plane of your soft belly, lovingly caressing as he ghosted to the top of your cunt, fingers just barely brushing you in your most sensitive of spots. “hm? know you’re tired sweet girl, sore, but I promise I’ll be quick..” You whine, leaning your head back against his shoulder as you feel his cockhead brush against your entrance. “you can take it right? such a good girl f’me huh, babygirl?”

You cry out as you feel the stretch of him sliding into you, the warmth of his hand pressing you against his chest, back arched as you stood on your tip toes, ass bouncing with every slap of his hips against yours. He hit you in a way that made you cry from this angle, the drag of his cock causing immediate overstimulation, you took it like a champ though, his good girl, you just wanted to be good for him.

“yeah, that’s it honey,” He coos, dropping his fingers to your clit, two of the massive things circling on long, languid strokes. A choked sob leaves your lips, your pussy quivering as yet another orgasm hits you, his filthy praises ringing in your ear as he pumps himself in and out of you a few more times, painting your insides in his cum once more..he was quick about it, just like he promised.

You were beginning to realize that Simon was good at doing that, even in your fucked out sex haze you could comprehend that he had thus far not broken a single promise to you, in general and as he fucked you (although, you vaguely remember something about him not fucking you until your heat was over..but that was neither here nor there right now). An honest man, he was.

That hadn’t always been a good thing in your life, honest men, and scared you more than anything else. The dream from the night before flashing through your mind as he pulled out of you, a whimper leaving your lips, from the loss or the thoughts you’re unsure.

He’s so sweet to you, a stark contrast to the brute way he can talk and behave and you thrive in it, a part of you self satisfied at that small fact. He hums a soothing melody as he washes you, rubbing a body wash along your extremities, gently rubbing over your sensitive mound when he gets to it, knelt before you as he placed a small gentle kiss to your hip, your body pliant to his touch.

You should be focused on him, you should be returning the favor, soaping his large, broad, war torn body, massaging his sore and achy muscles (you saw the way he cringed when he stood up from couch the other day, heel of his hand brushing gently against his lower back), peppering his skin with soft dainty kisses..it would be the least you could do, really. Instead, you stared through him, looking at him but seeing something else entirely.

He has to notice, you realize when you see him looking down at you as he rinses out the shampoo from your hair, the way his eyes don’t leave your face as he rinsed his own. You hardly register when he wraps a towel around you and leads you out of the shower, setting you down right in the middle of the double vanity as if you are nothing to lift, as if he could do a hundred reps and never get tired or lose stamina. You hear his voice but you don’t comprehend his words when he leaves you sat there, hardly recognize that he’s even left the room, your mind caught in a revolving door of memories, of things that feel like an auditory hallucination when you hear your papas voice telling you that you’d never be more than a worthless omega, a stain smeared on the existence of his blood line, a tragedy to end all tragedies. what was that saying he had told you that time when he rocked his fist into your eye socket? an eye for an eye? nothing more than a karma laden tragedy sent by the goddess to test his limits..

“…-osie?” You’re jolted from your thought, two firm hands gripping your shoulders as they shake you. “there she is..” He sighed in a way that made your heart race, as if he’d been worried. “You with me, swee’art?”

You nod, pressing your face into his chest as he rubs your back soothingly. “Thank you..” You whisper, eyes closing briefly as he gives you the smallest of squeezes, holding you to his chest for a moment. It’s sweet, and gentle, grounding you back down to earth, to the present, a reminder to breathe, to enjoy the time you have with this wonderful, beautiful man stood above you, wrapping his arms around you, welcoming you in with a kind of love and warmth that you’d rarely ever felt in your life.

When you separate, you headed down the stairs to the kitchen, to make that big feast you were talking about, he to your room to dismantle the bed that he broke fucking you earlier, it’s with his shirt on your shoulders, hanging down your body, somehow like a dress on you despite your pudgy, your pussy bare as you clamber down, a load of laundry in your arms, basket laden with the sheets from your mattress, the shirt of his that he had tucked under you while he was sleeping, now stained with cum and drool.

You set the basket down at the door to the basement, where the washer and dryer are, and maybe its your imagination, maybe it’s your over productive thoughts warped from your heat, emotion running high, but you swear the door is talking to you. You swear its got his voice, swear that the gold, hand etched door knob turns into his fist, shaking at you in violent rage for..for god only knows what, you’d seen that thing shaking at you for something as small as taking too loud of a breath before, so really who knew what you’d done to set him off now.

You leave it there, sitting in front of the door as you turn your back to it, letting out an uneasy breath as you grab your suddenly pain filled chest, heart racing. Your insides felt like they were being clinched, wrung out like wet laundry before being hung up to dry, felt tears well in your eyes as you heard his voice in your head, screaming, screaming, tearing you down with everything that he had, ripping your mind apart. It was as if the door had come alive and had grabbed you from behind, shown you exactly what happened down there, as if you didn’t relive the memories on a daily basis.

“STOP IT!” You shout, throwing the closest thing to you at the door, a casserole dish you realize, left over from the morning your heat started. It shatters into what looks like a hundred different pieces, some of them bouncing back and scraping against the bare skin on your legs, lingering stinging wounds akin to the kind that you were so used to. Akin to the hours spent picking them out of your knees when you were younger, before you were saved. “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

You don’t hear the thundering of the steps above you, don’t hear anything, don’t see anything but the man of your literal nightmares coming out of the basement door, large shards of glass sticking from his head as he grins at you, blood pouring into his mouth and staining his teeth red. You don’t want to see it anymore, you can’t bear the thought that even in your isolated little cabin, with your Alpha upstairs that the one who created you could torture you still. “STOP! STOP! STOP!” You don’t realize you’ve begun hitting yourself until it’s too late, don’t realize that the large form suddenly in front of you is Simon, not until after you’ve screamed bloody murder at him, until he’s got you tackled to the floor, damn near sitting on you as he pins your clenched fists to the floor, right above your head, you eyes still streaming with tears and your temples pounding from the pain you’d just inflicted upon yourself.

You’re a crying spluttering mess, too out of your mind to realize that the man above you is nearly in hysterics, face red and eyes wide with panic as he watches you break down, watches you look wide eyed and horrified at some invisible force. Oh, you had scared him. Had made his heart stop beating for merely a moment with that first scream, with the sound of the shattering glass.

It took everything in him to calm you down, to get your hands to unclench, to get you to stop trying to hurt yourself, him.

“Eyes on me lovie,” He breathed, keeping your gaze locked on him so he could calm you down, he stroked the skin of your arms, where his hands were still locking them above your head. He needed you to calm, needed you to snap out of..whatever this was. He needed you to know that you were safe, that nothing and nobody would ever hurt you when he was around..especially him, because you were looking at him like he was somebody else entirely, like you were terrified to be near him. You shake your head, choking on air as you start to sob. “S’okay baby, keep those eyes on me, yeah? Can you do tha’”

A nod, barely there. You couldn’t get your breath, couldn’t get your chest to stop feeling like it was being squeezed in a vice, like your heart was being sucked out of your body through your fucking throat. “I-h-u-rts-” You hiccup, finally stopping the wild bucking you were doing under him. “Mak-ke i-t s-toop” You were choking on words, on fear, on memories of a past life that shouldn’t haunt you anymore. “Pl-easee, c-ann’t br-e-ea-thee”

Simon, for what it was worth, was doing everything he could. Everything he could possibly think of to help you, and as you started hiccuping some more, struggling to breathe, he recognized it for what it was: a PTSD Flashback. His body felt like caving in on him when he realized that something so horrible had happened to you that would cause you to suffer in the same way he often did. He wanted to rip the world apart at it’s fucking seams for doing this to you, wanted to make it feel the pain that you probably felt, wanted to bury the fucking person who put this intense of a fear into your brain, your body. He would piss on the grave too, if you would let him.

“Rosie, baby, look at me..” He whispered, letting his voice soften. He switched his hands so that he was holding both of yours in one, still keeping them above your head, not quite trusting you to have free range, he didn’t care if you hit him, not one bit, he’d happily take the blows, but he was afraid you’d hit yourself some more, afraid that you’d knock yourself out somehow. “Shh, shh..just breathe babygirl, just breathe..know it hurts honey, but you gotta breathe if you want it to feel better..” What was it his therapist had told him? Focus? Focus and breathe…focus and breathe..your eyes were all over the place, pupils dilated from the adrenaline he assumed, looking everywhere but at him. He growled, trying to hold back his own tears as he gripped your face in his large hand, fingers squeezing your jaw as they held you still, making your lips pucker as he forced you to look at him, deep into his brown eyes. You were trembling under him, watching him with those big eyes.

“alri’ lovie, you’re gonna do as I say, okay?” You nod, muffled hiccups coming from your mouth still. “You can keep your eyes open, or you can close ‘em, whatever helps better, baby, but you gotta fuckin’ breathe for me, righ’?” Another nod, breaths coming short and quick, your face turning red from what he presumes is lack of appropriate blood flow, or maybe from the strain of the struggle. You don’t close your eyes. A sign of trust, he hopes. “Breathe with me, baby, okay?” He’s so damn scared, he’s hoping you’re not about to pass out. How would he explain this to John? He’d think he broke his pretty little live in omega.. “In through your nose, right?” You do as he says, doing it with him even. “Breathe in all that fear and anger from whatever the fuck just happened, and then breathe it all out, let it all out into the world, okay? It belongs to the universe now..” Your eyes don’t waver from him, and fuck it all if he doesn’t fall somehow more in love with you for it, he see’s you visibly start to calm down, sees your eyes go from as wide as saucers to a normal size as you work with him. “Good girl..” He whispers, watching you inhale every time he does, exhale when he does.

You go ten breaths before he feels your body start to relax, fifteen before he feels comfortable letting go of your face and hands, though he remains on top of you. He’s quite aside from the occasional whisper of praise, reminding you that you’re his good girl, that you’re doing so good for him right now.

After a few long minutes, you finally feel like your chest isn't about to explode, like your lungs aren't on fire. You don’t see him anymore, dont hear him. He’s gone. He’s been gone from your life for almost a decade by this point, hadn’t bothered you like this in a long, long time. ‘And he won’t ever bother you again, little one..’ Ah, there she was, that sweet, sweet wolf. She had kept you safe back then, as safe a she could anyway without being allowed to shift into her true form. She had been the only maternal figure you had too, had nursed your wounds for you from the inside out, voice cooing at you in your head. Maybe that was why you put up with her cunty side..she deserved to feel her feelings in any way she saw fit after the hell you both went through, you both did. It was her who had saved you too, who had grunted up the strength to take over your mind long enough to get John’s attention that day, had known somehow that he would help you.. ‘And look at what it brought us too, a quiet life..an alpha of our own..you and I, we’ll have a good life with him, the goddess sent him to us..penance for the life she gave you before..’ Maybe she was right. Maybe this was the Goddess’s way of an apology for the shit she had birthed you into. “I’m sorry.” You whispered, tears streaming from your eyes. Your head hurt, your heart hurt..You could barely look up at him, he didn’t deserve a mate that was this messed up. That hallucinated and lost her mind. That was your scar to bear, no one else’s. ‘Don’t you realize that he’s just as messed up as we are? That he’s got just as many scars as us? We were meant for each other, little one..in more ways than one..’

taglist: @wise-owl @bingoz @astrxsee @gazsluckyhat @howlerwolfmax @thisbitch-6 @littlelovebug98 @ungodlydilf @madsothree @rosallels @brilliantbecca94 @jaxz21 @mk-kbtbb @silas-aeiou @kelbowmacaroni @kittygonap @eremika104

#kara writes #alpha simon riley x omega reader #alpha simon riley smut #simon riley smut #simon riley x reader #simon riley cod #simon ghost riley smut #alpha simon ghost riley #cod #simon riley x reader fic #cod alpha x omega

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hamilton-here · 2 months ago

Text

𝒜𝒸𝒸𝒾𝒹𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒶𝓁𝓁𝓎 𝒴𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓈 - 𝒫𝓉.3

Authors Note: Hi all! Here is part 3 of Accidentally Yours. I am working on the next part as quick as I can. Enjoy! Lots of love xx

Summary: reader is approved by the group chat over a silly question. Later on, she overthinks and finally accepts the invite to Monaco. Though her anxiety gets to the best of her three nights prior.

Warnings: none

Taglist: @urmomsgirlfriend1 @mimisweetz @mits-vi @nebulastarr

MASTERLIST

Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4, Pt5, Pt6, Pt7, Pt8, Pt9

࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊

You didn’t reply to Hammertime that night.

You couldn’t.

Instead, you reread the messages more times than you’d admit. His words sat heavy in your chest, not in a bad way but in the kind of way that made you feel.

Something about the way he messaged you, like he was saying more than what was written. As if there were things hiding between the lines he wasn’t ready to say out loud.

Not yet.

The next morning, the group chat was back to its usual chaos. Someone had changed the group name to “GridGremlins 🛠️”, SmoothOperator was sending filtered selfies with too many sparkles, Baguetteboi was sharing his hatred of being called French and HoneyBadger had dropped a poll asking who would die first in a zombie apocalypse (Pastry was leading).

Still, your eyes drifted toward his name. Always his.

No private message. No follow up.

But then, like he knew you were looking -

Hammertime: Don’t worry, I survived another night with these lunatics. Barely.

Also newbie, zombie votes don’t count unless you tell us your apocalypse weapon of choice.

You smiled despite yourself. A soft flutter again. You replied in the group chat this time.

User (You): Cast iron skillet. Multipurpose. Classic. Heavy.

Pastry: Oh she’s good.

SmootherOperator: Marry me.

Baguetteboi: you won

Hulk: Please don’t encourage him.

You waited, just a little longer and then it came -

Hammertime: Good choice. I approve.

The day moved on. Classes, errands, life. But around lunch your phone buzzed again.

[Private Message – Hammertime 💬]

Hammertime: Was it too much? What I said last night.

Your breath got caught.

User (You): No. Just, honest. And maybe a bit scary.

Hammertime: Scary how?

User (You): Because I meant what I said too. And that kind of thing isn’t something I let myself believe in.

There was a pause.

Hammertime: I don’t usually either. But then you got added. And suddenly I’m thinking about it way more than I should.

You stared at the message.

Not flirtatious. Not bold. Just raw honesty typed out quietly like a secret.

You replied, this time without hesitation.

User (You): So what do we do with this?

Hammertime: Keep talking. For now, I like talking to you.

You smiled down at your phone, heart thumping.

Still no name. Still no face.

But somehow, this felt more real than most people you’d met in person.

࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊

The conversation didn’t stop.

Days passed like that - quick check ins, long stretches of silence filled with real life, then sudden bursts of messages that felt like stolen moments. It became a rhythm, one you hadn’t expected to crave.

Sometimes he messaged you first.

Sometimes you beat him to it.

Always, it felt like the highlight of your day.

Tonight was one of those slower evenings. Rain pattered softly against your window as you curled up with your phone, absently watching unread emails pile up. But one notification broke through the noise.

[Private Message – Hammertime 💬]

Hammertime: Ever feel like people know of you but don’t really know you?

You blinked. It was more serious than usual. No jokes. No chaos.

User (You): Yeah. All the time. Especially when I walk into a room and people already have an idea of who I’m supposed to be.

Three little dots appeared. Then disappeared.

Then came back.

Hammertime: Same. It’s exhausting. Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to start over somewhere. As just, me. Not the version people project.

User (You): You kind of did that with me. I don’t know who you are. Just who you’ve shown me.

And I like that version.

Quiet. Thoughtful. Funny.

Kind.

You sent it before you could overthink it. Then, heart hammering, you watched the typing bubbles appear.

Hammertime: That might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.

You hesitated. Then typed -

User (You): Want to tell me something real?

Just, one thing. About you.

The pause stretched longer this time.

Hammertime: I hate crowds. Everyone thinks I thrive in them.

But most days I’d give anything just to be somewhere quiet, no expectations, no cameras.

Just real.

You could feel your breath catch. Whoever he was, his words felt like they came with a weight he’d been carrying for a long time.

User (You): I’d sit next to you in that quiet.

Another pause. This one felt like a heartbeat.

Hammertime:That’s the second-nicest thing anyone’s said to me. You’re dangerous, you know that?

User (You): Only to people who like cast iron skillets.

Hammertime: That’s it. We’re definitely apocalypse partners now.

You laughed out loud.

࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊

That night your eyes were bloodshot starring at the Monaco invitation from a few days ago. You couldn’t decide if you should go or not.

You didn’t reply.

Not at first.

But you read his message again. Then again.

Your screen dimmed and lit up with the motion of your fingers tapping it back to life, like you couldn’t bear to let it go dark while his name sat there.

Hammertime: If you come to Monaco…Make sure it’s for you.

Your chest was tight, full of something you didn’t have the language for yet.

You typed a response.

User (You): Idon’t even know what I want yet.

You stared at it. Deleted it.

User (You): I’m not good at this.

Delete.

User (You): I saw the invite.

Too bland.

User (You): Why does it feel like something’s going to change if I go?

Your finger hovered.

Then you erased that too.

The typing bubble popped up on his end. Then vanished. Then reappeared.

You hadn’t even sent anything.

And still he was waiting.

You finally gave in, your fingers trembling as you typed something imperfect but real.

User (You): Are you always like this?

The bubble appeared again, almost instantly this time.

Hammertime: Like what?

User (You): Careful, kind, hard to stop thinking about.

Three dots.

Longer this time.

Then -

Hammertime: Only with people I don’t want to lose.

Your heart thudded.

You wanted to reply.

To say something sharp or smart or honest. But your hands had gone still.

You locked your phone, holding it to your chest.

Let yourself breathe.

You didn’t answer the invite.

Not yet.

But now -

You were starting to think about what dress you might pack.

Just in case.

࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊

You didn’t sleep much.

Not from stress, exactly.

It was more the feeling of standing at the edge of something high, toes curled against the drop. The quiet hum of maybe. Of almost.

Of what if.

Your finger hovered over the invite again sometime around 2 a.m.

Open.

It bloomed across the screen, white and gold and obnoxiously beautiful.

"MONACO."

Everyone knew what it meant in the group, expect you to be exact.

Glitz. Heat. A thousand eyes. And him.

You didn’t realise you’d clicked "Yes" until the screen updated.

Just like that.

Like it was nothing.

But it didn’t feel like nothing.

Because now it was real.

Your heart did this strange, stuttering thing. Not panic. Not quite.

But definitely not peace.

You switched back to the private chat. He hadn’t messaged again.

Good.

You weren’t sure you could take it.

Your fingers moved, traitorous and too honest.

User (You): I said yes.

Sent.

Three dots. Fast.

Hammertime: Yeah?

You could almost hear his voice in that one word. Low, warm, cautious hope wrapped inside it.

User (You): Don’t make it a thing.

Hammertime: Too late.

You closed your eyes.

Imagined the impossible. What it would feel like to see him and know, really know that it was him.

Not a username.

Not a maybe.

Not a what if.

But a person. Standing in front of you.

Breathing the same air.

Looking at you like he already knew every word you hadn’t said yet.

You typed again.

User (You): What happens now?

There was a pause.

Long enough to wonder if you’d said too much.

He then replied -

Hammertime: Now we wait. And see if you still feel everything when you’re standing right in front of me.

࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊ ⊹ ˑ ִ ֶ 𓂃࣪𓏲ᥫ᭡ ₊

It was stupid, how packing a suitcase could feel like preparing for emotional warfare.

You weren’t even leaving yet. The flight wasn’t for three more days, but your room already looked like a storm had passed through it. Clothes everywhere. Shoes you hadn’t worn in months lined up like soldiers. Three failed outfit attempts on the floor and counting.

You’d packed for trips before. Exams. Interviews. A funeral once. But never something like this.

Because how do you pack for someone who’s only ever known you in fragments?

How do you pick the version of yourself you want them to meet?

Your chest felt tight. Like something was pressing against it from the inside.

Later that night, lying in bed, your thoughts ran endless laps.

What if he wasn’t what you imagined?

What if you weren’t what he imagined?

What if all the texts and late night chats and electric not quite flirting didn’t survive the sunlight?

Or worse! What if it was real?

So real it unraveled everything else.

You rolled over and checked your phone again.

Still no new messages from him.

Just his name in your inbox.

Sitting there.

Quiet.

Waiting.

#lh44 x reader #lh44 #lewis hamilton x reader #lewis hamilton imagine #lewis hamilton #f1 x reader #f1 smau #f1 text au #f1 imagine #x reader #lewis hamilton x you #f1 drivers #formula 1 fanfic #f1 fanfic #f1 fic #lh44 imagine

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star-suh · 5 months ago

Text

Johnny, La Gente Está Muy Loca… WTF

Johnny Suh x Male Reader

cw: protected sex to bareback (remember do NAWT use oil based lube when you're using a condom), some impregnation kink disguised as silly jokes 😭

an: this is the best title i could ever think of ngl, like this is peak star-suh idk.

—

yn was in line waiting for the doors to open so he can finally witness a party with DJ JohnnyBe, he heard that all his parties are fun.

when they opened yn went straight to the bar to order something to drink, while he was waiting for the show to start he made some friends her and there.

“ladies and gentlemen please give it up for our guest DJ JohnnyBe” screams and claps of excitement flooded the room when the dj appeared. “hello everyone, i'm glad to be here and i hope i could make this night unforgettable for all of you” he winked, put on his dark glasses and blasted his first set of songs. the bass sounds make the floor vibrate. the music was intoxicating, DJ JohnnyBe indeed knows how to lit a party. during one of his last sets johnny removed his glasses, his gaze was adjusting to the bright colored flashing lights when he saw yn in the crowd. the guy was happy having the time of his life, something that made johnny smile and caught his attention too.

“excuse me, i’m going to the bathroom” yn whispered to one of his new friends and went there. “it was a magnificent night guys, thank you for coming here but i have to go now” everyone awwed, disappointed, wanting more of him, “but don't worry, tye part continues with the next dj”, everyone screamed in euphoria while johnny left and went to the bathroom.

yn was washing his face when someone entered the bathroom, “hey you're the happy boy that was on the crowd” johnny said with a happy tone. yn was stunned seeing him that close, his mouth was agap, thinking it was a dream caused by all the drinks he had tonight he said “fuck, you're so hot”. johnny was taken aback by this but then smirked, “well thanks” he replies.

yn realized it's not a dream, dj johnny fucking be was right there in front of him. his face became red like a tomato. “i-i'm sorry i think i-i d-drank a lot to-tonight haha” his flustered ass tried to brush it off. johnny places both hands on each side of tn cornering him against a counter. “you look so cute when you're flustered” both males made eye contact, one’s eyes showing how shy he was while the other's were fierce, as if a hunter had just hunted his prey.

“what's wrong party boy. what happened to that “fuck you're so hot” earlier comment, hmm?” at this point yn didn't know what to say he just closed his eyes but opened them again when he felt something poking at his bulge. it was johnny’s bulge. “see how horny i am, right now?, you should take responsibility for it” the low tone of his voice sending yn already to cloud 9, he moaned johnny’s name.

“hmm what was that?” johnny asked, his breath tickling yn’s neck. his lips ghosting his skin. he was desperate to feel johnny, he wanted him to touch him, obliterate him, rearrange his insides. “i’ve never felt this horny before for someone” yn confessed, feeling even more shy. johnny grabbed him by his chin so he can look directly at his eyes, “me neither” he said kissing the flustered boy…

johnny guided yn towards a bathroom stall while still kissing him, his tongue wxploring the other's mouth. “just put it in, i prep myself at home” yn said in between moans. “naughty” johnny heaved. he pulls out a condom from his pocket, unwrapped it and rolled it down his big thick shaft.

“wait” yn stopped johnny from putting in, “use this” he handed johnny a little bottle of lube that one of his new friends, conveniently, gave it to him as a ‘gift’ so he can have lots of fun tonight.

johnny applied and large amount of it on the latex and on yn's hole, he slapped it a few times on the entrance and slowly put it in, inch by inch. the sex was rough, with johnny using his hands to muffle yn's moans, something that was unnecessary due to the excessive loud music outside in the club. there were times were johnny instead made yn suck his fingers as if it was his dick. every time the dj thrusted deep a bulge formed on yn's tummy, “joh-johnny you're very deep”.

yn was pressed against the stall door with his eyes rolled back, johnny was stimulating his prostate continuosly and in return he was gripping hard on johnny's meat, “you're choking my little budy down there” he put his hand on the bottom's head pushing it even more harder against the door. a smile appeared on yn's face, he loved how rough johnny was treating him. “more. more. i need moree~”.

if someone were in the bathroom right now they would think that some rabid dog would be locked in the bathroom, with the loud strange sounds and the banging against the cold metal walls. but in reality johnny was there thrashing yn around the stall, there was not a pose left for them to try or a surface that they haven't touched with their sweaty bodies. missionary, against the wall, riding, with one leg up, johnny fucking him while still grabbing him. yn's hole was already obliterated but eager to receive more.

the smell of sweat, liquor and spit make them both feel dizzy, lost in the pleasure they both craved. hickeys littered all over their collarbones, necks and torso, hell even johnny made some on yn's thigh.

the euphoric feeling made them lost trace of time and their surroundings so much that yn didn't notice that johhny's dick felt warmer and warmer by time, he could feel every vein brushing against his walls. the same happened to johnny, he felt yn's insides warmer and how they hugged his little buddy even more than before. ‘woah, condoms nowadays make you feel like you're not wearing one’ they both said it in their minds. they didn't realize the condom broke and with every thrust it slowly went down johnny’s shaft sitting in the base of it.

johnny hugged yn tightly to impale his meat even more deep and harder, “fuck yeah please like that” yn whimpered, his body squirming in pleasure. “keep doing it like that. just a bit more. yes just right there” yn said to johnny who complied to the bottom’s demands. yn came, his torso being painted in white. his body spasm with every spurt of it. he was happy, he hasn't felt this way in years, this might be the best sex of his life.

“fuck i'm gonna cum” johnny grunted, he wanted to came on yn's face but he didn't wanted to stop feeling the warm insides of the guy so ge decided to just came inside the condom. little did he knew that he was, in fact, covering those insides with his white seed. “how does it feel to have a man's seed deep inside your hole?” johnny asked nibbling on yn's neck. “it feels sticky and so wet” yn slurred, coming back from his high.

the realization hit them both right there, “what do you mean sticky and wet?” johnny looked down seeing how the broken piece of latex was on the base of his shaft while the rest of it was inside of the other, bareback. “oh god i just bred you”, “oh my god you just breed me”, johnny and yn exclaimed in unison…

they both get out of the stall, yn walked awkwardly after all his hole suffered a lot tonight. staring at themselves in the mirror with a dumbfounded expression while fixing their looks and disheveled hair. “why are we acting as if you're gonna get pregnant” johnny joked, trying to lighten the awkward atmosphere.

“johnny, it … it was the first time someone came inside me” yn looked down feeling embarrassed but once again johnny grabbed his chin to make eye contact with him “then i guess i have to take responsibility for that baby on there” he caressed yn’s stomach. they looked at each other and then exploded in laugh, “dumbass” yn blurted out hitting johnny's shoulder lightly.

“you're way cool than it thought” yn confesses “and so wild in sex, my back side hurts a bit”.

“i also think you're cool” johnny replied politely too, “if you want, come to my hotel room. i know a home remedy to ease that pain” he gripped one of his ass cheeks, “the night is still young” he wiggled his eyebrows.

yn caught what he meant and said “oh yes of course, i would like to try it. besides i kinda want other of your babies inside me”. johnny kissed him in the lips and then in the forehead, “let's make a football team then”. they left the bathroom straight to the hotel room to chase that euphoric feeling again.

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sil-te-plait-tue-moi · 1 year ago

Text

The idler wheel is wiser than the driver of the screw.

PART 1 ★ PART 2

Quick summary: After one too many drinks, you find yourself unable to think of anything but a certain smart-mouth detective who is in desperate need of a release.

Word count: 11K (I'm sorry)

Warnings: This is basically just SMUTT with a lil feelings (if you squint) sprinkled in there; kind of angsty at points (mentions of canon-typical death and violence (hellooo they're homicide detectives); gets a bit existential at points, watch out; pretentious.

A/N: YAY! I had this obsession with True Detective S1 all throughout October (watched it at my nan's house lmao), so enjoy the lovechild of that. This is just for fun, so, please, nobody be angry at me if they don't agree with Rust's characterisation, or any of the weird philosophical chat, lalallalal, OKAY ENJOY!!

***

The night air is sluggish and humid with the remnants of a warm summer’s rain, pressing down thickly, close, clogging, simmering just below the surface.

A few times, I’ve interviewed people who live in these sorts of places: motel-types, the “in-between”, where folks stay when they’ve either got no money, no choice or nobody. Other residents include passers-by who’re looking to save money on accommodation, skipping on the fancier places. Not that Louisiana really has any “fancier places”. Places without the paint peeling off walls like dead skin, I guess. A bed and breakfast in the nicer suburbia, with a view overlooking a subpar daydream of a ghost town centre.

I’ve leaned up against the crooked, metal railing, felt the influence of my weight almost sending it and myself crashing down onto the faded parking lot beneath. I’ve leaned up there—after knocking—and waited, waited for a grey face to peer through a crack in the cracked door. I’ve smiled and remarked about how the beat-up, brass numbers up there are hanging by a thread. Sometimes, people are real stingy – they slink out and close the door behind them, or they remain in that little slit, just an eye visible, or they plain shut it in my face. Most let me in right away, maybe a little intimidated by the shiny badge clipped up in my jacket – I’ve sat across from ‘em, felt that mud in the room’s air seep into my pores, inviting me under its still swamp.

Seems like the sort of place for him.

Too many a fuckin’ time, Marty’s come grumbling and muttering into the office kitchen, rolling his eyes, scoffing, huffing, the whole lot. And when I ask him why the strop?—“Ancient fuckin’ philosopher fuckin’ Rust Cohle on it again. Birthday’s comin’ up: get me earplugs and a generous bit o’ duct tape for my dear partner over there, would you?”

Or somethin’ along those lines.

For all his apparent talk about us silly, little “biological puppets”, this seems like Rust’s sort of place. Temporary existence, temporary living. Purgatory?

Whatever.

If you ask me, Rust Cohle’s head is so far up his own ass that it’s no wonder his outlook on life is so dark.

If I was more sober, maybe I’d be thinking about it—about him—less—but this night out has had me so drunk I was maybe even hallucinating at some point. Rust?—sure, he’s been in the back of my mind for some part of the last few months – I have to see him most days I go to work, don’t I? – but, sometime in the space between my third and fourth shot of straight vodka, he was suddenly at the very front of it. I’d seen a guy who smoked like him: cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger, a simple, deep drag. I’d thought it was him, but then I realised his face was shrouded in the smoke that he’d exhaled, and I recalled that Rust never seems to do that. Never seems to exhale. All the tar and shit stays in.

With a twist of my keys, the engine rumbles off into more-or-less silence. Fuck, it’s a bad idea, yes, just being here. If he likes to keep his distance, well—he’s entitled to that choice.

I glance over my shoulder, out the window, out at the complex which is all yellow and shining, illuminated by buzzing halogen light bars and, of course, the occasional bug zapper. It’s clean enough. The lines of this parking space were white enough. Apartment 11A, said Marty. Second floor.

“Are you drunk?” he’d asked – Marty, not Rust.

I’d replied, “No,” pressing closer to the phone box in attempts to remove myself from the swarm and bustle of the ladies’ bathroom. And it was an honest reply. Sort of. Despite his scepticism, by that time, I’d long stopped drinking, and all that remained from it was a sort of numb tingle in my fingertips—as far as I was concerned.

I don’t think I’d be in this parking lot, stepping out of my car, if I wasn’t still a little bit gone.

Marty’s sigh had crackled through the receiver. “Don’t bring any o’ tha’ party-this-party-that attitude to ‘im, alright? He’ll hate it.” I’d told him okay, my stomach spiking up with excitement. “Fact is, I don’t think you should go at all. ‘f you do, should be a work matter. This a work matter, detective?”

I’d lied, said yes, perhaps with a slur to my voice.

He clicked his tongue. “Okay, buck, whatever you say.” Then, he’d hung up.

There was something disapproving in the manner of the conversation. I got the feeling that he was talking to me in the same voice he used to lecture his daughters. The only reason I’d called him was to get something from him, sure, so that I could basically get something from Rust, his partner. I could see how that sort of thing might’ve upset someone. Not that Marty Hart should have any right to judge, not when he’s coming into work in the same clothes as the day before, stinking of sweat and God knows what. The unsaid agreement of everyone in the office is to turn a blind eye. I’ve met his wife. Someone should cut off his damn dick.

Quiet, now. Hell, who am I to talk? Marty’s fun to chat with, makes a slow day at the office a little brighter. ‘Course, there’s rarely a slow day at the office.

And I’m at the top of the stairs, now. And I knock—one, two, three—on the pilling, forest-green door. Dulled down 11A. Blinds are determinedly shut, slats flat. For a second, I think maybe I’ll be waking him.

Then I remember Rust doesn’t sleep.

A grey face appears as the door swings just a little ways open, grave and sunken-tired. His expression isn’t so pissed-off as it is just his usual expression.

“Rusty,” I say to him with a small nod, words scraping out dryly.

He doesn’t respond right away – ‘stead, he leans his body out partway, eyes absent like he’s searching for some hooligan criminal in the night.

“Marty told you my address?” he asks lowly. It’s more a statement than anything, but I amuse him with a nod anyways. There’s a cigarette flaring up between his fingers. His hand twitches a little like he’s wanting to take a drag, but his eyes are fixed on my shoes, now, like he’s still coming to terms with the fact I’m a foreign body in his domain.

My toes curl up tight in my shoes – there’s that prick of anticipation again. Ice-cold, you could easily mistake it as dread.

Rust doesn’t exactly subject me to an imploring look—not really his style—but he bows his head down just slightly – that’s sign enough for me. He wants to know why I’m here, and he no doubt wants to know the quickest way to be rid of me.

I sigh. I ask him.

My body trembles, and he notices it, records it, stores it away for later reference, for some other time he’ll find that it and me will contribute to his purpose.

Rust has a face of stone. I get to know it well as I search for a sign there that might let me know what lies beneath. But, of course, a statue is solid through and through. Sharp angles and smooth planes carved hollow. If he’s cold to the touch, I’d like to reach out and be sure. Is he cold where a man ought to be warm? Christ, it makes my pulse jump just to think about it.

There is no greater purpose or cruel intention underlying my words, as far as I’m concerned. Rust, however, lingers there, with his arm up on the door, barricading the entrance, while he peels back and flits over every layer of possible meaning, his attention fixed absently on my left ear.

He then looks at me—briefly—in the eyes, with a sort of paralysing intensity. Even the tingling in my fingers ceases to be.

It takes a moment, pregnant with the chorus of cicadas, crickets and other night-creatures, before he steps back neatly to allow me in.

The door clicks softly behind me as I enter into a room that’s bare as bare can be.

Rust grunts, coming up around me and into the kitchen area. “Want anything?” he mumbles around his cigarette, other hand shoved in his pocket. He’s still half-dressed in his work clothes, his tie strewn on the counter, his blazer slumped over a rickety picnic chair perched up in front of a wall of crime scenes and dead bodies. My eyes linger there—how can they not?

“A beer,” I tell him, still looking at those photographs, then at the stacks upon stacks of books. Philosophy, ethics, religion. Names I’d expect only those with PhDs to know.

“Don’t think you’ve had ‘nuff to drink already?”

I shoot him a look. “I think I can handle it, Rust.” He straightens up, raises his brow. I snort, reasoning, “I’ll only have one.”

“One,” he agrees, opening up the fridge and having a rummage around.

White walls and all of them empty, like some sort of psych ward. Half-sure Rust actually did do some time in that type of care, though, so—shouldn’t make any quips about that. I don’t want him thinking I think he’s crazy – he gets enough of that, I’m sure.

Back at my place, though, I’ve got posters or drawings or paintings up around every corner. My niece’s drawing of a mermaid sits on my dresser, and photographs of my family are displayed in the hallway. One up by the TV, I painted myself when I was in high school. About two years after I graduated, they asked if I wanted my portfolio back, and I’d obviously said yes. And I love my stuff! Some ‘cause it’s pretty, others because of memories and whatnot. Guess some people don’t have that creative trait, or they lose it. Or maybe they detest the sentiments, those strings that have been, are and will be attached to things. When my cousin broke up with her boyfriend, she cut her hair and burned his clothes. “I just want to forget him,” she’d snarled. I’d sputtered a laugh into my tea.

Rust plants a Corona down on the counter, already cracked open.

There’s no mirror in here either – I can’t check whether I look as desperate as I feel. When I focus back on him, Rust is taking a swig from his own beer, turning to glance at the crucifix pinned above the messy mattress on the floor. Huh. Didn’t peg him as a Christian.

His honey-blond hair doesn’t look cold to the touch, that’s for sure ‘n’ certain. Wonder if he just wakes up like that or what. Once, Marty had been teasing him at work, even cracking a smile out of the old guy. “Ain’t them just the prettiest curls y’ever seen, buck?” he’d remarked, nudging into me, cooing at him. Silently, in my head, even then, I’d agreed: prettiest curls I’d ever seen. Rust hadn’t looked up to chart my reaction, but, if he had, he’d maybe have seen my fidgeting fingers or hitch of breath. Or maybe he felt it, heard it.

“Sorry to barge in on you like this,” I offer pathetically through a nervous smile.

He blinks, takes another swig, leaning over the counter that separates us. “No, y’aint.”

Jesus, I have to turn my head and shut my eyes for a second. I don’t particularly believe in God, but I ask Him to please give me the strength to resist my urges and act like a normal damn person for at least a few more minutes. And then I apologise for only praying out of convenience. In the face of temptation. This is why people shouldn’t drink – still, doesn’t stop me from downing a good part of my beer.

I turn to the wall and try to turn myself off a little bit. It’s not hard – Rust still has Dora Lange (rest her soul) pinned up on his wall, naked, blue, stiff. I don’t want to know why, so I don’t ask him.

His eyes are adamant on the side of my head. Funny how he never seems to look at me at the same time I’m looking at him. Pisses me off a lot of the time – not just him, but in general. A lot of people share this same fear of not being heard, not being listened to and not being cared about. Men in particular, I’ve noticed, have a tendency to raise their voice over others’, to yell or shout or hit things or push ‘n’ shove. Marty’s that way – a lot of men at the precinct are, too. Women who are raised to be the listeners sometimes act out in the same way, frustrated at all the things they have to care about that men don’t, burdened with manners and politeness. I used to hate having to listen, to wait for the man who interrupted me to finish speaking. Rust always lets people finish their point, for better and for worse. Pisses me off in a different type of way. I can feel his judgement seeping out of him, so potent that’s it’s tangible, lapping at my feet.

He doesn’t push and shove – he’s a listener, too. Of course, he has that male privilege where his silence has a gravity, a magnetic pull, where mine is simply as is. At least he pays attention. Sure, on the surface, it might look like he doesn’t care at all, hunched over a case file at his desk, back turned to me and the rest of the lot, but proximity has its power – assigned workspaces put with his personality, and he knows what’s like and unlike me better than my sister. He’s reading into my refusal to talk, to face him – unlike me.

“So, you’ve given this some thought, then,” Rust says matter-of-factly, and my tummy bubbles up.

I snicker nervously, heart racing. God, I’d expected surprise, disbelief, outright refusal, maybe even a little disgust, but, when I manage to turn around and look at his face again, it just seems to me like a calmness. Stoicism found in the affirmation, maybe, of his expectations. It’s like I’m walking right into one of those little theories of his: a proved hypothesis.

I take another sip from my beer, feeling too shy for my liking. “Well, yeah,” I drawl, slumping over the kitchen counter and propping my chin up to look right back at him in a surge of liquid confidence. “I always think ‘fore I do anything that’s anything, Rust.”

Almost immediately, he retreats, standing up straight and resting the small of his back against the lip of the sink behind him. He hums, glances away. “We both know that’s a lie,” he combats, hands tucked into his pockets, chin tilted up, eyes down. A mouthful of beer numbs the sting of rejection. “What you mean is you think you can justify all your decisions. You think you can justify why you knocked on my door and said what you said—” he elaborates quietly, eliciting a snort from me, “—but, at the end o’ the day, all your decisions boil down to what you feel is right, not what is right.”

“‘n' you think you ‘n’ you alone know what’s right?”

Slate-grey eyes flit up and down my face, like I’m a specimen on a slide.

“I think that the girl who’s stumbled up on a fella’s door asking him to fuck her is less inclined to know, without bias, what’s right, yes.”

I swallow thickly, sucking the remaining flavour of beer off of my tongue before going in for another swig.

Christ.

Not a single bat of his eyes. Not a quiver of his mouth, not a twitch to his nose, not a morsel of natural, human hesitation. Does he have to be so crass? I did the courtesy of making it palatable, at least to my own ears, with a euphemism. But when have I ever known Rust Cohle to water anything down? No drink I’ve ever consumed will match his body’s preference of alcohol content. He’s nursing his beer close to his chest, but who knows what poisons lay dormant in these cabinets?

“Rusty,” I say lowly, maybe asking for a break – I close my eyes for just a second, part because I couldn’t bear it if I caught some sort of disapproval on his face, and part because it’s just past two o’clock in the morning.

Late nights have consumed my life recently, what with that sicko rapist connected to a Christian fertility cult. Children of God – “go forth and multiply”. His confession had turned my blood cold. Johansson had offered to sit in the box instead, but I did it anyway. I went home and cried over it, then came into work the next day to talk to some press and then receive my new assignment.

He hums, taking a drag from his cigarette, swallowing the smoke down. Rust knows how it is. To be honest, I’m probably the one who doesn’t know the half of it. One night at the office, he’d casually confessed to his insomnia, like he was just commenting on the state of the weather ‘n’ nothin’ else. So, I guess I won’t pretend to get it.

I gnaw on the inside of my cheek. “Are you into that whole abstinence thing?”

The weak light above flickers gently as he pauses, turns the question over in his mind. Anyone else would’ve surely laughed.

“I believe that man is susceptible to desire, yes—but he can resist it and its consequences should his willpower be stronger than the false promises posed by that temptation.

I snort again, because, now, I really am tipsy, and I can’t hold in my attitude any longer. It’s not that I think he’s lost it or whatever. It’s just—he’s so—objectively—absurd. Well—“objectively”. He’s got points, but those points lose all meaning in the spiralling darkness of overthought and deep contemplation wherein he’ll explain that everything really means nothing—and he’ll be right about that, sure, but also unintentionally prove a point about himself. I’d ask him what it means when, in a world where everything means nothing, a child will give their friend a flower found on the way to school, but I feel like his answer would be too morbid for my liking. Does that make me an unreliable source? The fact that I want to live?

He's absurd. He’s also a little bit awry in the head. Don’t know what he’s lost or what he’s lookin’ for, but it’s not a good look on him. He’s honest, yes – that’s a good trait. But honesty without kindness is cruelty. And he is kind – underneath, he’s kind, and I know that because of how hard he works to weed out evil people in this world, most times at his own risk. That’s kindness, albeit unconventional, whether he realises it or not.

The kindness almost cancels out his arrogance.

“So, what?” I challenge under the guise of a teasing grin. “You can go mouthin’ off for hours on end about how up themselves religious people and all’at are, but you can’t draw the similarities between their philosophy and your philosophy? How does that work, Rust?”

While I was working that Children of God nightmare of a case, he just couldn’t seem to restrain himself – every bullshit word that left him revealed to me his hubris. Now, I’m not angry, and he’s not stupid – we’re not arguing. In fact, he seems intrigued, lean body shifted toward me. He sets his beer down on the counter, crosses his arms over his chest after securing his cigarette between his lips, and lowers his head as if to listen to me better.

I sigh, continue. “D’you know what I think? I think you oversimplify humanity. You’re a great detective—‘nd I guess you know it—and, within the confines of your job, it serves you well, makes you good in the box. But your assumptions are too general. People are who they are, sure, but they also decide to be those people. By their environment and those who surround ‘em, people make the decisions that define ‘em. A lot of the time, their circumstances ain’t fair. People born into badness are trapped by the badness—either physically, or up in their heads—and they have a tough time escapin’ it.”

Rust inhales the smoke again, the only evidence of it happening being the soft whisp that curls away from his nose. I wonder to myself how his lungs are still standing.

“‘s that how you explain that—homicide case you’re workin’ on?” Three-year-old boy died of neglect, his siblings found locked in cabinets, one in a dog cage, by their mother and stepfather. Rust’s eyes flash silver. “Killer had a tough time?”

Asshole.

I narrow my eyes dangerously. “Don’t be mean, Rusty,” I scold, and he blinks in concession. “I think evil exists. I think it’s complicated. I think you summarise things that ought not to be summarised.”

He’s silent for a heartbeat. Then, his hand comes up to pinch away his cigarette, and he waves it in a small flourish, explaining, “When I say “people”, I mean society. Human culture.”

“Last I checked, Rust, you don’t know everybody on the planet. You don’t know their “culture”, or experiences.” That seems to shut him up. My eyes wander to his broad shoulders, trail along the meat of his arms beneath the cheap, polyester shirt that hugs close to the muscle, and they linger there like the quiet that settles between us.

He nods slowly, once. “Our decisions define us?”

I bob my head, unabashedly staring at the elegant column of his throat, his neck, and the stretch of tan skin that is settled beneath the white undershirt revealed by the first one, two, three buttons which have recently been undone.

He’s quieter when he asks me, “Well, how does this decision define you, then?” There’s nothing malicious about the way he says it, or even lustful – just a calm curiosity.

“Ain’t it obvious?” I grin again, laugh a little, blush hotly. “I’m horny!” I hide my face in my shoulder, trying to compose the hiccups of laughter in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I snicker, wiping my palm over my brow, my eyes. “This probably isn’t very attractive to you.”

“You’re a very pretty girl,” he replies. He mutters my name solemnly, like we’re in a formal meeting or something.

I glance up, check whether he’ll offer me eye contact again, but he doesn’t – he’s staring at the wall, lost.

I scoff. “You’re a very pretty guy, Rust.”

God willing, none of the boys at the precinct will ever find out about this. If Marty lets it slip that I even asked for Rust’s address, then I’ll never hear the end of it. Worse, everyone’ll think I’m dead-gone over him. Guess I don’t really fit the standards expected of women around here: “wife”, or “whore”. Or “dead”. It’s hard enough to be taken seriously going about pretending I’m not interested in sex at all. Once sex comes into the equation, I’ll be reduced to that and nothing else.

Anxious, I start flicking up under my fingernails. Is Rust already starting to think those things, too? I’m a great detective, but that’s the only capacity in which he’s really known me.

I wring the neck of my bottle. “I should explain—”

He holds his hand up, stating, “I don’t need you to. Do you feel the need to?”

Curious, wary, I watch his face, a blank slate. Still waters run deep. My eyes drift down, to where his hands are together in front of him, one relaxed beside him the other curled around his wrist with two fingers resting on the pulse.

“No,” I reply.

“You thought it over,” he says, eyes tilting up at the ceiling, aloof, bored, maybe. His words are sort of monotone, like he’s reciting a passage from a book that he’s just recently read: “You chose me because you know me. You haven’t been sleeping well. You’re stressed, you’re scared, you’re frustrated.” He blinks. “You’re attracted to me due to some—unfortunate trigger beyond your control in the reptilian part of your brain.” Brief as the flicker of a candle in a still room, he looks over me, brow raised slightly as if daring me to tell him that he’s wrong. He pauses again, takes a short puff. “It makes you think I can take care o’ your needs.”

Look at the state of him: sallow and wilting on the inside. Reducing me down to a sentence or two, and being right about it.

“Well, can you?” I ask weakly, feeling small. He looks over me, blinks blankly. “How do you take care of your needs?” No reply. “You do have needs, don’t you?” I remark, tapping the rim of my bottle to my warm temple. “Programming ‘n’ whatnot.”

He tilts his head away in dismissal.

I smile, more to myself than to him. “Beat off in the shower, is it?”

For a second, Rust is still. My eyes grow heavy, admiring the strong profile of his nose. He then nods helplessly, like there’s no point in trying to lie.

I hum, a soft, self-satisfied smirk edging its way onto my face. “Must feel like a sin,” I snicker.

He squints slightly, like he disagrees with my logic, but does not interrupt to protest.

“I remember takin’ baths as a teenager and double-checkin’, triple-checkin’ I locked the door,” I confess. “Couldn’t take my time. ‘S that how it is for you, Rust?” I probe, tilting my head to the side, losing his eyes as quickly as I catch them. “You ever let yourself enjoy it? Let yourself want it—?”

“I don’t want it,” he snaps quietly.

“But your programmin’ says you do, right?” I point out, scrambling to hold onto the flaw in his argument. I search his face, my own bright, eager.

He quirks up a miraculous smile, and I myself burst into a wide grin. Still smiling—though, you’d have to admit, it’s such a strange sight, sort of gratifying, almost patronising—he shifts his weight between his feet, scratches at his nose with his pinkie, sniffs, takes a long drag of his dying cigarette. I know he must feel disjointed, though he doesn’t show it: he’s misstepped, and I’ve caught him. And how often does Rust Cohle misstep? I should’ve checked the news for a blue moon tonight.

Interested, now, is he? Breathing quietly, rolling his jaw – he’s entertaining the competition I have goin’ up in my head. From the looks of the gentle smirk on his face, he’s enjoying it, too.

“No,” he corrects with a dry husk to his voice. “No, I know what I want, and, when I think those things are necessary or useful, I know how to get them.”

In this type of context, I’d like to see him try. Though, he is an undeniably attractive man. Thick, solid all the way through, like a rich wood. But he’s got these brittle eyes: fraying.

He continues: “Most of the time, though, what we want is born out of dangerous feelings, like rage or lust. Ruminating on the consequences of those potential actions seems to me the more sensible thing to do than to just leave it and find out.” I sniff. “Desire is inescapable for most, including the sexual kind. I feel it—“ he eyes how I wriggle beneath my skin, “—you feel it. But it can be resisted. You’re lettin’ it dictate what you do ‘n’ say. If I do to you what you want me to, have you thought about how it might affect things down the line? Tomorrow, next week, next month—?”

“Yes,” I hiss, a little too emotionally, such that a gleam of satisfaction crosses his grey eyes at the strain and stretch of my voice. Christ. Desperate much?

I take several seconds to think before allowing myself to speak again, all while staring at him straight on and refusing to look away: I’d just die if I let him catch me out. “Well, how can you be sure of the fallout? How do you know the good won’t outweigh the bad? Not “you” specifically, but, also, yeah, “you” specifically. I can think about something morally ambiguous, and I can evaluate the potential consequences, and, just as you are satisfied to observe, I will decide to follow through with this somethin’ and deal with what I gotta deal.”

He sighs. “Because decisions define a person?”

I tuck my hair tight behind my ears. “Yes.”

And he hums – that beautiful noise resonates in my stomach before sinking down there, low, its weight a comfort. “I agree with you in that respect,” he admits.

A laugh erupts out of me like the sputter of an engine. Luckily, I’m easy to laughter – it’s like me, as is my genuine grin. “Rust Cohle’s agreein’ with me on somethin’?—Call the police!”

“We are the police,” he replies smartly, watching me snort and smile and grow flushed in the face. I feel very grateful to that beer – at least my giddiness can be blamed on the effects of alcohol and save me from embarrassment.

As I simmer down, he looks away, adds, “I agree to an extent. People all think that they’re one-of-a-kind. That they make these—amazing decisions. They speak and do and walk and play and work and fuck and eventually die – all of ‘em.”

“You’re part of the people,” I argue.

He hums, nodding in acceptance. “Yes.”

“If a person acts due to their instinct, whether it’s succumbing to it or fighting against it, then isn’t man simply his programming?” He lowers his head. “You can be aware of it, and you can be a part of it, too. Who are you to deny yourself the good parts?”

He fiddles with his cigarette, svelte fingers nimble and acute. I cross my legs, flex my hips; he notices.

“Because of the consequences,” he replies, a soft whisper.

I thought that everything meant fuck-all?

For someone who sees no meaning in life, he sure seems to spend a lot of time contemplating it. Here, I thought I’d have hot hands sliding all over me, gripping, spreading, pushing, but instead find myself defence in an unprecedented debate.

Rust is breathing slower, deeper, almost unable, now, to look me in the eyes, even look at me in general, whereas, before, it had been a choice, whether that choice be conscious or unconscious. His cigarette burns weakly in his fingers, forgotten. The muscle in his jaw flexes, his expression hollow.

My body buzzes with want, leaves me scrambling for breath like I’ve just run a race. I want. I want, I want, I want. The rough pads of his fingertips, the surest and most confident I’ll have ever known. Sharp tongue, quick and precise. Something about how he smells. All my compliments to pheromones – even in the heavy musk of the bar, I’d smelled him, ashy, warm, alive, and now it’s wreathing all around. Or maybe that’s just me – it’s like when you try to take someone’s pulse with your thumb, and all you’re feeling is your own heartbeat.

I want – my breath trembles with it.

“Rust,” I say softly. He shakes his head a little, looking away still, vulnerable like a wild animal. I sigh, gnawing at my lip. “I really want it. I—I’ve—it’s not just a rash decision,” I explain. “I’ve wanted it for a while, now.”

He shudders – I notice. “Since when?”

I huff out a sheepish laugh, fix my eyes on my restless hands. “You won’t remember it—”

“I will.”

His voice sounds clogged. It sobers me right up.

“A year back,” I tell him. “You were working at the office—late, in the dark. You called me, and I asked you why, and you said—it was because you were tired and thinkin’.” I glance up to check if he’s maybe looking, but he’s not – he’s turned his head even further away. The soft, gentle curls of his hair tempt me.

Blindly reaching for the bottle, securing it almost immediately, he finishes the rest of his beer, then sets it back down.

“I—” he begins, scratching his nose, “—I was—tired.” He pauses to re-thicken his voice. “And—thinking—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, but the both of us know what he said that night: Of you. Thinking of you—of me .

My stomach flips, leaving me almost nauseous, just like it did when I first heard those words. At first, I thought I’d misheard, that I was so tired my mind was playing tricks on me. Then, I thought he was being cruel, or maybe he was drunk. Those two instances weren’t—aren’t—unlike him, but he never, ever calls to be mean or to be stupid. He’d been quiet and warm through the phone after that, a presence so thick I could’ve sworn he had his arms around me right then. I hadn’t slept well for a time, then, of course, and that made it all the more vivid. His voice had made me shiver all the way through as he told me he had to get back to work.

When I saw him the next morning, I couldn’t look at him. It was the first time I couldn’t, not wouldn’t. It was also the first time I felt him paying attention to me.

I shift, ask the question I’d wondered since that call: “Why?”

A pause.

Then: “You brought me coffee that morning,” he explains softly, speaking to the wall opposite. “I was—looking at the mug on my desk – it was yours. Green one you like to use.” He sniffs. “And…” He teeters on the precipice of that word but does not finish the thought.

Hmm. That’s something to think about. Rust Cohle thinking about me and not picking apart why and why he shouldn’t be. It had been a mindless enough gesture – it’s not unheard of me to be makin’ coffee for other people in the office, not because I have to but because I like to. For the people I can stand, that is: Johansson always, and him for me; Cathleen; Marty, when I’m not pissed off at him; and Rust, from time to time. Everybody knows that green mug is mine, though – nobody touches it, not even the boss. Rust reads far too much into things. Most of the time, he’s dead-on. I should’ve known from the moment I placed that coffee on his desk, from the sharpening of his eyes (that did not spare me a glance) that lingered on my lingering hand on his table, that he knew. Figured out something I hadn’t even quite figured out myself. Not until later that night.

I wonder if he’s ever thought of me when fucking his own hand. I wonder if he thinks about me sometimes, when he can’t sleep, in between horror stories and brutal blows and uncovering the secret truths of the universe. I do, sometimes.

When I push myself back to my feet, stand up, Rust’s attention springs back, and he watches me, looks at me.

Quietly, I relish in the satisfaction of his stare, crossing on light feet to toss my empty beer bottle in the bin. He steps aside to let me open the cupboard under the sink, his hand curled in a loose fist by his side. I’m not trying to tease him – I grant him the space he so clearly needs, retreating about five paces back, leaning slightly myself against the counter.

I could say anything right now, no matter how insane, and he’d treat it with total and utter respect. I could reveal to him the reaction my body has to seeing his fingers fiddle like that with his cigarette, and he’d manage to identify the cogs and wheels in what, when you step back, actually turns out to be a hidden machine. Christ, I could probably remove all of my clothes, stand naked in front of him, and he’d look on as one would look on at a piece of evidence at work. Going over the details, once, twice, scribbling it all down in that big, leather ledger.

Here’s what I think: he needs it. For all his talk about how unoriginal, how predictable mammals are at the end of things, he probably knows that himself. The tension in his jaw, the perpetual tightness of breath. That clipped way of talking he has, wound so tight around himself, like a compressed spring fighting its natural urge to let go.

I could make him let go. Maybe. I wish he’d let me try. It’s nothing possessive, really: wanting to be the one to unravel his tightly coiled body. Just—the release of seeing him be. No thinking in particular – just being.

He is still, however, uncommonly mute, avoiding my eyes.

I sigh. I ask him tentatively, “You think I ought’a be ashamed o’ myself?” biting down on the fleshy inside of my cheek.

“No,” he contradicts.

“But—you think I should be findin’ my fun elsewhere, with—some other guy?”

He sort of pins his hands behind his back, pressing his weight against them there at the edge of the sink. He looks a lot taller from this angle. “I think there’s a lotta fellas stumblin’ over themselves to be with a girl like you.”

“Maybe,” I scoff, “but my reptilian brain don’t want none of ‘em.“ I blush warmly when I glance up and he’s there watching me, though there’s no bashfulness at all on his side of it.

I expect him to maybe dart his eyes away again, like he does, and then walk me to the door, maybe even to the car if I haven’t offended him too badly, and then call it a night. I could stuff it in; I can compartmentalise. Monday would carry on as it always does, except now without the wondering and the yearning and the delusion. Did he have to be so good-looking? His cheap, wrinkled shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows—like they are now—and those lean forearms braced up on the table, caging in the neatly set-out notes scrawled up in his ledger, like they have mind to escape. And he’s—beautiful. He’s tall. Out-of-place sort of tall, where he has this bend to his neck, sometimes, as to not draw attention to himself. Other times, though, he stands to full height, regal, elegant, authoritative, like when he comes out o’ the box.

He sees into people. He feels it all so deeply.

And he’s looking at me, seeing into me, deeply. His eyes are brittle like china pieced back together with store-bought glue. The low light casts long shadows down his neck and harsh face.

“Come here to me, Rust,” I say to him, beckoning him over with a tilt of my head. To my surprise, he does. He does immediately, peeling himself off the counter, eyes drifting somewhere just behind me as if disinterested.

He stubs his cigarette out on an old plate, abandons it there officially, before stepping slowly towards me, feet never dragging, dodging my searching eyes like the plague.

Hmm. Maybe I made a good argument “for” to his “against”. Or maybe he was never “against” to begin with. I’ll watch him carefully tomorrow and see if there was anything I missed.

I reach up and touch his face gently. I used to do this with my husband before he passed, and he’d close his eyes and whisper my name and lean into the touch, tender, loving – my fingers shake slightly with the memory. Rust Cohle does none of that, because he is nothing like my husband. He’s perfectly rigid against my fingertips; his stare flits briefly up right into my soul, his mouth pressed in a hard line. Everything about him is so sharp. The ridge of his cheekbones, the defiant slant of his nose. The lean muscle of his arms and shoulders, slightly sinewy just beneath the skin.

But when I brush my thumbs up along his eyebrows, easing the sharp line between them, he sighs and closes his eyes, neck bowing down, still as stiff as before, just—different. A small gap, an opening, to that locked room of his upstairs.

“Rust,” I whisper, nose brushing his. He hums again, lowly, eyes shut. “What do you think of us havin’ sex?”

“Sex,“ he replies softly, “is the illusion of connection constituted by the release of a mess of happy hormones, simply by touching all the right places—and nothin’ more.”

I hum and watch the look on his face grow brittle as our breaths mingle closely. God, he’s so near to me that my head swings in a bout of lightheadedness, heady, vision centring in on him and only him, such that I wouldn’t know if this place was burning down all around, even if the flames started eating us alive.

“I think you’re full o’ shit, Rusty. Know how I know that?”

He sighs shakily. “How?” It’s like the word is dragged right from the pit of his chest, barely a breath to show for the effort of it.

“I can feel you against my leg.”

He swallows thickly, but he does not blush, and he does not open his eyes. And, contrary to what he might seem, Rust is not cold like stone. When my fingers grow more confident, when they trace and drag lightly along the line of his cheeks, he is warm there. His pulse, when I find it, exists and is hot and slightly erratic, a fact that leaves my mouth dry and open. I can feel the inflexion of his throat as he swallows again, the shift of the skin and the rhythm of his heartbeat, the gentle influence of his breathing.

I wait for him to say something, but he doesn’t. So, I ask him, “Can I kiss you?” ever so gently.

Softer still, he replies, “Yes,” with that slight Southern whistle of his, barely moving.

Give me strength. Give me strength.

That look on his face is filling me with a delicious, vibrating power. As I stretch my neck up to brush a kiss against the corner of his mouth, my eyes are open and watching him, charting him: Rust breathes strongly out of his nose, eyes still determinedly shut, like he’s absent and meditating. He is not tough as stone – parts of him are soft. He barely returns the kiss, but, as far as my brain processes, his lips are soft. Hesitant, maybe.

Then, these soft lips part, and he is sucking in a hot, shuddering breath, capturing me in a deep kiss, as if to breathe all of me in, a strong hand threading through my hair. It hurts a little at first – a small noise escapes my throat at the slight shoots of pain tugging at the roots – but Rust doesn’t seem to notice. Not at first. No, he’s still breathing me in. His lips are dry, rough, a push and tug, a twist, and he’s kissing like a punch, knocking the breath right out of my lungs. Whatever oxygen I manage to hold onto is sucked out of me promptly.

I whine, my body going all slack and tired as he smooths the hair out of my face, palms dragging clean back across my cheeks. Those hands cradle the back of my head, making it impossible to keep my eyes open.

Content, I sigh, eyes succumbing to the sensation and falling shut. The last thing I see is his own eyes slipping open to look at my face.

Boy, he’s a good kisser. Must be that lizard brain he has such a distaste for.

My fingers blindly reach and fumble at his belt, hooking into the waist, pulling him flush against me. Rust must forget what he’s doing for a moment, and he pauses where he is, in limbo, eyes far away. When I begin to unthread his belt from its quietly clinking buckle, he goes stiff again, blinks rapidly before perceiving me.

Holy shit, he’s gorgeous.

His hands hover over my shoulders, not quite committed to the contact.

He’s seeing me—really seeing me—as I unzip his trousers and spit crudely into my palm and curl around the length of him, warm, tight. I begin to understand the gentle throb and strain he feels, a delightful thrill running rapid all through my insides. He feels deliciously alive.

But then he turns his head away, neck straining up, breath choked back in his throat. His hands come away, raised, it looks like, as if trying to seem non-confrontational, trying to come away unscathed from a bad situation.

My stomach burns with desire. “Let yourself like it, Rust,” I mumble against his cheek. “Are you here with me?”

I can feel him swallow.

“Yes,” he responds. I guide his face to me, stroking his cock confidently once, twice, as encouragement, maybe. Temptation. Whatever you want to call it. My mouth waters, my head goes airy, when I feel his sex twitch in my embrace.

“Kiss me again, then.”

And he does. Brows furrowed as if in pain, he does, with the tip of his nose dragging and pressing into my cheek. He kisses me sweetly once, then again, and then pants down hotly into my mouth, hovering there before sliding his tongue deep inside, close, smooth.

I let myself love it. I let myself let go with every kiss he blesses me with, growing looser and easier and lighter each second.

The weight of him in my hand inspires a beautiful urge to have him lay down and let me feel every part of his body. Even though his hips stutter, he doesn’t buck up into my fist, doesn’t whine, doesn’t moan, doesn’t curse. Not yet. He just breathes and breathes, and kisses me and kisses me, like it’s all he was set on Earth to do. All he’s allowing himself to do.

Desperate, perhaps, my thighs are pressed against his, feeling unnaturally weak and warm. The throb between my legs coincides with my heart rushing in my ears, a steady ache, impatient. Part of me wants to drag this out as long as possible, because what if this never happens again?—and another part wants to push him inside me already, have him fill me up, fuck me stupid.

This thought stuffs me up to the brim, like cotton punched down into a pillowcase. I whine shallowly and try to slot his thigh between my own.

A switch in his brain must flick on.

It’s like he’s inside my head, like he’s in on my desperation, like he can see and feel every sinful image and thought circulating my alighted brain. He knows it all so well, such that he uses his hips to press us firmly against the counter, spreads my legs with the nudge of his foot between mine, and immediately pushes the rough pads of his fingers right where I need it, through the fabric of my skirt, letting me grind myself against him, hips and all. He circles there generously. I can feel my need dripping from me. He can too, no doubt.

I sigh, he breathes. I gasp, he breathes. My eyes flutter open and shut, but he looks on, eyes half-lidded but stare immovable.

He then lifts his knee to place against my cunt.

“That feels good, don’t it?” he says gently, rocking me over his knee up and down, back and forth, fingers digging into the soft skin of my hips.

My legs widen. When I gasp out weakly, he raises his brow and scans my face, like he had predicted the shaky, wordless nod that I offer to him too late in return.

“Did you want it like this, girl?” His voice is low, intimate, a hit of something just shy of addictive. “Or did you want somethin’ else, too?”

He kisses the hollow of my neck.

His other hand grips at my ass, up my skirt, kneading the flesh there, manipulating it, and his fingers ghost my slit, spreading me around his knee. He fucks up into my hand. I slide my fingers through his hair, which is soft and warm like butter.

Fuck him. Fuck him and his stupid, pretty curls. I’ve proved my point: regardless of whatever act he may try to put on afterwards, we’ll both know that Rust isn’t as numb as he wants to be, that I made him feel good, that I made him want me, and that he’s hot-blooded and thrumming with life. I can feel how alive he is . I hope he thinks of this again some time, whether by himself or surrounded by people. I hope it drives him a bit mad, remembering this.

A hot, sharp breath fans out across my cheek, his mouth slotting back over mine, open, daring me.

I rut against his knee, my fingers teasing the wet head of his cock. I look down between us, at my hand on him, with half a mind to drop onto my knees and make him cum down my throat.

Rust lets out a grunt and swallows hard again.

Then, he gently grabs my wrist and pulls my hand out of his pants, leaving me dazed and confused. With nimble fingers, he unzips my skirt, pushing it over my hips and dragging his hands over my bare skin. He asks me, “You want the bed?”

I step out of the pool of fabric around my feet, slide my shoes off. “‘s not a bed.”

I slide my fingers beneath his sweaty, white undershirt, feeling the taut muscle there, feeling the steady breaths that contradict his racing pulse. He holds my eyes, dipping slightly when I dip, tilting when I tilt. “Seems like one to me.”

How unlike him.

A smile spreads over my face, and his pupils blow wide, dark, imploring. “You wait ‘n’ see what happens when the dust-mites turn up.”

His eyes on me alone are enough to leave me breathless, chest caving in on itself. Of course, when he kisses me softly, it only makes things worse – his long fingers curl around the base of my throat, watching me watching him, and his other hand slides up under the hem of my blouse, palm spread over my bellybutton.

I sigh, try not to squirm.

“You want the bed?” he repeats, heavy, rough. I bite back a needy whine that sits at the back of my mouth. His fingertips press down slightly into my pulse, tightening my breathing.

I nod. “Yeah.”

Think of all the times I’ve sulked over his lack of eye contact with me. Was I annoying? Uninteresting? That, obviously, was an immature way of looking at things, definitely not improved by my distinct femininity undergoing some kind of unspoken disapproval by most I met on the job. This is the most present he has ever been in a moment with me around.

As he pulls himself away, steps back, his eyes are darting over my face, less like he’s judging me and more like he’s trying to find and memorise every detail. I do that, sometimes: if I pay well enough attention, it feels like I’m re-living the moment when remembering.

His hands slot sensibly into his pockets as if his cock isn’t blushing and poking out of his fly right now, belt undone, hanging low about his narrow hips.

Legs don’t fail me now. I slink out of the glowing kitchen and carry on to where the mattress lies in a dim, blue corner, the strange crucifix watching over, a long shadow cast over the empty wall upon which it hangs. He follows shortly behind me, his warmth radiating out onto my back.

I pause and look out onto the darkness revealed behind the half-open slats of the floor-to-ceiling blinds that shield the room from the window to the outside world.

Rust’s presence is intoxicating behind me. He smells like cigarette smoke, still, enticing. I’m trying to quit, but he makes it damn hard. His nose is just shy of my hair, his body so close to enveloping me into him – the prospect of it makes me shiver in delight. I must hallucinate his fingertips along my spine.

I unbutton my blouse with slow fingers, then slide it off and undo my bra.

His breathing is level and grounding by my ear as he comes close, sliding his strong, wide hand up my stomach, along my ribs, and cups under my soft breast. He rubs over my nipple in gentle circles before squeezing over me warmly. He then comes around to pinch the creamy tissue gentle between his fingers and thumb, closing his hot mouth over, drawing along his feverish tongue. I sigh, stroke his hair, let him press soft pecks and kisses to the curve of the soft flesh and to my sternum.

My fingers, cupped around the nape of his neck, dip under the collar, cool. This touch, for some reason, causes him to make some sort of breathless, pathetic noise against me. His eyes are half-shut.

“Anything else philosophical y’wanna get out before we fuck?” I quip smartly (though, not feeling so smart altogether), hand placed innocently on his hip.

He lifts his head, removes his hands from my body – he looks so tragically beautiful in this light. “You want me inside you?” he asks genuinely, seemingly aloof to the fact I’m naked in front of him, open and wanton and pressing my thighs together, his eyes never drifting from mine.

“What do you want, Rust?” I whisper.

He seems to really think about it – he’s always thinking. Briefly, his eyes flit down to my mouth. Then, he looks away, scratches at his forehead.

After a moment longer, he swallows thickly and tips his head down over to the bed, tells me, “Lie down on the mattress,” in a gentle, decisive tone. He’s so soft-spoken – it makes my toes curl.

I do as told, transfixed by the dark shadow in his eyes, and sink down to sit and then recline back on his coarse mattress, coarse bedsheets, with my weight on my forearms and chin tilted up towards him. He watches me, tucking his thick cock back into his underwear.

Still fully dressed in his work attire, he takes a step forward, looming over me, powerful, assertive. Saliva pools in my mouth—again—as I play with the thought of him sitting heavy on my tongue with his stomach tight, shaking, hands in my hair, fucking down my throat. I would let him. Hell, I’d probably let him do anything he wanted to me at this point.

Does he know that? Maybe. I don’t know.

As he reaches his hand out too smooth the hair out of my face, I try to figure it out, but I can’t – he seems too wrapped up in his own desire to be thinking anything at the moment. I feel a flicker of satisfaction jump up in the pit of my stomach. Or maybe that’s something else.

“Lie back, girl,” he tells me.

My cunt flexes.

I thump onto my back, breathless. “Take off your shirt, Rust.”

Without replying, he sinks down to his knees in front of me, my thighs. Instinctively, I prop myself up and watch him unbutton that wrinkled shirt all the way down, shrug it over his broad shoulders. I could fuck myself silly just over the thought of those shoulders, I remark inwardly. He tugs the wifebeater over his head, lean muscles catching the low light, strong, study, solid, and tosses the thing to the side thoughtlessly. My hands reach out to touch him, to feel him and know him. When my fingers press into his skin, glide up his neck and down over his chest, he sighs deeply. He then carefully removes my hands, urging me to sprawl down under him.

“Said lie back, didn’t I?”

Rust doesn’t say another word before placing his large hands on my knees and easing them apart, lowering himself to press pecks and slow, open-mouthed kisses to my thighs, closer, closer, stroking my sensitive skin gently. I almost flinch at his every touch, like it burns. His face is awful serious, like he’s concentrating. I wriggle in anticipation, eager.

“Rust,” I whisper purposelessly. He looks up, hums, searches my face for anything the matter.

I watch on desperately, on the brink of feral distress. A sob clogs my throat as he kisses my fluttering stomach, ducking his head down and curling his forearms, his hands, around my thighs. The dark stamp of his bone-bird tattoo curls over his arm. I realise he is waiting for my attention to return to him, his eyes patient but glazed over with something cardinal. Hungry.

“Can—?”

“Yes.”

He hums. And then he breathes hotly over my underwear before pressing his nose right there into the damp fabric, inhaling my scent there. I whimper at the pressure he applies with the strong bridge of his nose, at the wetness of his open mouth against me. He breathes heavily into me, groaning slightly beneath it all – I can’t tell past the thrumming of my heart in my ears.

“Rust,” I whisper again, my shoulder straining with the task of keeping me up and looking down at the sight of his sweet head buried between my glistening thighs.

“Lie back.”

He kisses me through my underwear, dutifully kneading the flesh of my hips, my inner thighs.

I thump back against the mattress, helpless, keening into his touch as this grey man roughly tugs my underwear down, down, all the way down, until they’re clean off my body, long gone, and then returns his nose to the cleft of my pussy, unseaming me with his tongue, opening me up, breathing me in. It’s enough to draw a shallow, hoarse cry from me. He doesn’t say anything, and I can’t say anything, biting down on my white knuckles.

Rust licks warm over my clit, sucking gently on the bud of nerves (then not so gently), before sliding down, down through my very centre.

Whining breathily, the twist in my stomach tightens and spasms as he presses my hips and thighs right down against the mattress, slow, strong, giving me time to notice it, realise it, give into it, deny the natural instinct to curl my limbs tight all over his face, his neck, his mouth.

Holy fuck. Rust Cohle has his face buried between my legs right now. I have Rust Cohle’s tongue pushing deep into my cunt – he sighs softly, a sound with its own powerful gravity a black hole to envelop me in, and grinds his hips against the edge of the mattress for a split second, just once. My mind pulses with the thought of making him cum. I wonder if he feels the same hunger.

Then, he’s sinking his long, elegant fingers into me, one, then two, and just the knowledge that those fingers belong to him makes my thighs quiver and shake, makes me sigh again. Thick, confident, they curl inside, slow like an experiment, right up to the knuckle. When he taps up against me, when I squeal and crimp up into his hold, he returns himself to mouth dutifully over my clit. My hand threads itself into his hair, holding him steady – I offer a breathless moan when his grip across my hips loosen, an invitation to begin rolling myself up over his pretty face. He pulls his fingers out of me, wet and hot, and encourages my thighs upon his beautiful shoulders, clinging onto them urgently. He shudders a little, I think, when I lock them firmly around his head and grind myself shamelessly against his mouth, his nose. He moves his jaw, his face, in tandem.

I cum after a while like that, because how can I not? The searing buzz reaches a roiling static.

I go loose, moaning softly, melted down flat, and stroke fuzzy fingers through Rust’s pretty hair as he sucks my clit still, as he inhales again and sighs again, reduced to something primitive and needy.

Thick, my heartbeat throbs and echoes like a drum in my skull, threatening. I feel so full that I could mistake the beat of pleasure for nausea pressing in my throat. It was silly to think that this could all be satisfied just from one time. My eyes closed, Rust’s light touch over my abdomen, up to my throat, is acute and heightened, like a million tiny, individual sparks. His fingers fumble over my jaw, then press lightly over my pulse.

He retreats just as I’m playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck, coming to stand to full height above me, unthreading his belt from his trousers with quiet, precise hands. I press my shaking thighs together, watching him breathe strongly through his nose, trying to remain somewhat respectable in the presence of the darkening look in his eyes that is locked down on my body.

He pauses, wipes some shine from his nose. Before he can continue with whatever, I find myself sitting up on my knees, grabbing his hips hard enough to bruise all pretty and purple, shoving the trousers down to his knees, and palming him through his boxers.

We don’t have to say anything. He just watches me passively, pushing my hair back again, behind my ears, my shoulders, rolling my earlobe softly between his fingertips.

I remove his underwear, take him into my mouth, thick and long and wanting; he sighs, holds my head with two steady hands.

When was the last time someone helped him like this? I honestly couldn’t have told you, even given a loose theory, prior to this moment: Rust is simultaneously the hottest and most non-sexual being I’ve ever come across in my life. He just happens to be beautiful; he just happens to inspire these sort of feelings choking up inside me. No overarching intention that he’ll ever admit to, no vanity, no preening. So strict to himself, so tight, like a piston, something that fights and pushes and hurts.

So, as I hold him firmly and suck at the head of his blushing cock, kissing him, I watch his face, savour the tart taste of him, and press my thighs together: he’s becoming warmer, looser.

Still, as much as I want him, I know he’s wanted me. However vague he tells it, he’s wanted me. Good Lord, he looks even more stressed now, somehow, than when we had just been talkin’. Hands gently cradling my skull, he tilts his head away, watches the cross on the wall, as he succumbs to it, maybe, and begins to gently, languidly fuck my face. I tuck a hand between my thighs, and I love him, my other with the fingers digging into his hip, his ass. If I’m lucky, maybe it’ll leave some sort of mark, just to remind him I was here, so that, when he’s being all indifferent again, with his eyes lowered to the floor as he shares a report with me at my prim, little desk, we’ll both know that we were once in this room together, here like this.

Rust breathes and breathes, almost mechanically, and slides his cock further into my mouth. The weight of him in there drives me half-insane. If I could consume him, envelop him, and we could be one and the same, I’d readily allow it. When he sinks deeper still down my throat, I sigh around him, rub myself the way I like.

His eyes are determinedly shut, like some part of him refuses to be here.

Before I can make him cum, he shakes his head and tugs my hair back a little bit, mumbling for me to stop and sit away.

For all his mouthiness just a half hour ago, would you look at him now?—Rust Cohle, plundered by the human sensation of speechlessness. I’ve never seen him out of his element before. When he comes down and cages me with his body, hot skin flush against hot skin, I don’t mean that in a bad sense. Shit, he’s far from it. But there’s nothing to say. Nothing of note, nothing to pick apart, no deeper meaning, no theory. Just an itch that has to be scratched. He wants, he is, and it’s heaven to see.

In the dark, he sinks in to me as he is, eliciting from me a soft moan that curls over the shell of his ear. I have to bite down on his shoulder when comes the push, the stretch, the sink, the comfort of him inside. I curl my legs around his waist and grab at his ass, willing him deeper still. He shudders silently over me, thick ripples of pleasure rolling through his lean body.

I curse, but I’m sure it barely registers with him.

His head lifts and his eyes clamp shut as he braces an arm against the wall, lifting one of my legs up over his hip and fucking into me deeper, slipping out and in, and again, and again. I know what I’d see if I took a look down, saw his cock pumping into me, but I can hardly do anything but buck my hips up to meet his effort, my stomach stuttering with that building pressure, hands gripping desperately around his neck and shoulders.

Though, I’m not even sure it is effort that’s driving him.

I mumble into his shoulder, dumb, focussing on the feel and press of him in my belly. I doubt he’s really aware of anything more than the sensation of it, evident from the small grunt that passes his lips as he fucks deep in me. His stomach presses heavier down onto mine, crushing a delicious pressure there, teasing out a long, breathy whimper. He snakes an arm around my hips, pushes his free hand to the back of my knee, tilting my legs back a little more, and then pulls me wider. Tight, he moves me how he wants me, my flesh dipping and carving, fucking himself raw with me, with my hot cunt. His mouth moves over mine, not kissing me, not speaking, just there, present, hot, panting. He doesn’t open his eyes, so I close mine, and I breathe.

Rust stutters and cums and spills over into me with a grunt. He pants sharply, harshly, rhythmically into my mouth, tense again, and then he collapses over my body, and he lays there. I lay there too, burning on the far inside.

I think he only really remembers I’m there when I shift under him.

His eyelashes brush against my cheek. “Sorry,” he murmurs, but the sound of his voice scrapes directly against my brain with the shock of a flesh-wound.

I assume he’s referring to the thick cum that I can feel leaking out of me now. He shifts his hips, adjusting himself in the grip of my cunt. My fingers wrap around his arms, squeeze as I feel him easing out.

“It’s okay,” I reply.

He glances down between us and guides himself out with a lewd noise, swallowing hard. I shiver.

Quiet, sedated, he shrugs his trousers, his underwear, off of his ankles, slipping the bedsheet over both our naked selves. His hand spreads and flattens warm over my abdomen, feeling the gentle swell and sink of the breaths I take and release.

#true detective #rust cohle #marty hart #rust cohle x reader #rust cohle x reader smut #okay cool this is a bit niche hope you liked it #this show made me question my life's purpose #the first season at least #thanks matthew mcconaughey #anybody else here like Fiona apple or what #the idler wheel TD

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stayevildarling · 7 months ago

Text

Emily Prentiss x Reader- Hands off

A/N: I completely forgot to add my darling Emily in my latest poll so decided to write a little something for her🤍 Totally not inspired by an encounter I had the other day and wishing she was there😩

Prompt: A creepy dude scares you off despite being a strong independent profiler. Emily learns about it despite you not wanting her to know and goes full on protective milf.

tags/tw: mention of creepy men, mention of unwanted touching, mild mention of past assault, overprotective emily, angst, hurt/comfort

word count: 4.5k

taglist:

@lunaticwhittaker , @billiebeanhoward , @lanawinters-ily , @kenzbro , @minaslittleone , @httpfiftyshadesofgay @whitelotus00 , @ninaahelvar , @paulsonsratched , @vintagepaulson , @isle-of-earle , @grilledcheeseandguavajelly , @lucyintheskywithxanax , @fanfics4world , @mymiraclewitch , @hazard-to-myself , @awritersometimes , @wastdstime , @p1pecleanerwitheyes , @queen2234 , @ihartnat , @lifebyinez , @ahsatanizgay , @blu3dimples , @stepintomyworld

This week hadn‘t started off all too well, a cold still lingering in your tired bones, coming to the surface from time to time during quiet coughing fits that you tried to supress, knowing your boss would send you home. But with the holidays approaching, the cases piling up on your desk, you wanted to be there, needing to be there as you couldn‘t stand the silence of home, especially not this time of year. Mishaps happened one after the other, a case going wrong, some issues at the department which made work for your team more exhausting than usual, the bliss from the approaching holidays disappearing under the weight and darkness of it all.

The car situation had been messed up this week, one of your SUV‘s crashed while Derek and you chased an unsub, none available at the moment and no rentals either. And so in the end you had to go to the repair shop yourself to pick up the car. Well you didn‘t have to but Derek had already taken it there and someone needed to pick it up before work today and so you volunteered. You didn‘t want JJ doing it, knowing she was busy with her own life, as well as Hotch as they all had kids and shouldn‘t be getting up at this time in the morning. It left Rossi but with his status in the BAU it felt silly to ask him. Garcia was always at work at ungodly hours anyway and that really only left you and Emily. And you would do anything for the brunette, wanting to make her life as easy as possible.

The two of you had worked beside each other for years, going through several ups and downs together, heartbreaking cases, losing members of your own, losing Emily for a while before she came back from the dead and eventually returned from London. The two of you had grown close, the brunette appreciating another woman on the team, especially one quite alike her. You met up for drinks years ago, the other guys busy and you got to know each other better, learning about your differences as well as your similarities, interests and the way the two of you almost worked the same way. The two of you would always put the team first, loyal til the very end, knowing the importance of your work and rather spending the whole night by your desks rather than getting any sleep or taking care of each other.

And eventually you grew closer, weekly movie nights a thing, mostly at her place as you had fallen head over heels for her cat Sergio. You would take turns choosing and bringing snacks and the two of you adored it, spending some silly times together, away from the chaos of your jobs. The two of you knew each other inside out, quickly becoming insperable as life seemed a little more managable with the other. Whenever a case brought up the brunettes past, you would show up at her door, no matter what time, arriving with as much wine and ice cream as possible, enough tissues to dry her tears and your shoulder always a steady safe haven for her to lean on. In return Emily would look out for you, knowing you took this whole thing even more serious, often forgetting to look after yourself in the process and making sure you do so.

Somehow throughout the years, you realized your feelings for Emily were more than loyalty and friendship. She was your everything, your sun on rainy days, your safe haven in the middle of a storm and she was undeniably your home. You realized the way your heart fluttered whenever she was nearby wasn‘t what was supposed to happen. The way your eyes would often trail towards her body, standing by her desk with the others with her hands holding onto the desk, wasn‘t what you were meant to feel. But you kept it hidden, not wanting to ruin what you two had by possibly messing it up and admitting your feelings. But your love for her was obvious, shown in the quietest of ways, putting her first always, always looking out for her and having her back. Starting with silly things like picking up the car way too early in the morning in order to let her get some more sleep.

Your alarm startled you this morning, getting ready and dressed before getting yourself on the subway, the air more chilly than usual, seeping into your skin and not helping with the cough or sniffles that still lingered. You pull your jacket a little closer, adjusting your earphones and listening to some music, seeing the busy streets already, the christmas decorations and the busy city slowly fading as you make it to the suburbs. Somehow, the same brunette is on your mind again, thinking about movie night this weekend, looking forward as you finally got her to agree to watching some of your favorite horror movies, her usually opting for action or comedy. You adored the way she would laugh beside you, how you both snuggled with Sergio and ate each other‘s favorite snacks, how you would sometimes get drunk, how you had fallen asleep on the same sofa as her once. And how occasionally her hand would brush against your own or your shoulder, warming your heart.

But then again, you know you shouldn‘t be thinking about her this way, you should be respecting your friendship, your feelings risking the only meaninful relationship you ever had. But it was hard. It was hard when her smile brightened your days, when her mere presence at work made it safer for you. How you would willingly risk your life and take a bullet for her, knowing it would be worth it to let earth keep her for longer. She was your everything and every day it was getting harder and harder to ignore these feelings. But again you had gotten used to it, told yourself to appreciate what you have with her instead of longing for what you don‘t. Somehow this time of year made it harder though, seeing the happy couples hand in hand admiring the christmas decorations, seeing them going ice skating and posting cute photos in matching christmas jumpers.

You are pulled out of your thoughts when you make it to the station, getting off the subway and using your phone to find your destination before walking another five minutes. As you approach, you can already see the car, relieved to see it in one piece again, not necessarily caring about it but knowing you desperately needed this car in order to have enough and be able to work on the cases. It takes you a second to find the door, the area more looking like an abandoned warehouse but nevertheless filled with security cameras. As you open the door, there is a bell and you are greeted with two men, one considerably young, possibly a student, another one considerably older, grey hair. Both of them are dressed in work clothes and you watch as they chat amongs themselves, cigarettes hanging from their mouths.

The younger one‘s eyes drift onto you and you force a polite smile before speaking. „I‘m from the BAU and here to pick up a car“ you announce and the older man turns to you with a smile, approaching as he gets the key and looks at the file. „Y/N hi nice to meet you“ he greets and you cringe internally, wondering why exactly he would adress you like this, assuming someone had sent over your name for coming to pick it up but confused as to why he wasn‘t adressing you properly. „All fixed“ he smiles as he hands you the key and you take it before thanking them but you freeze as you feel his hand on your shoulder, his eyes all over you as his hand keeps reaching further and further down your back.

There is nothing more that you want than breaking his wrist, slapping him for the way he is touching you but something within you makes you freeze, despite knowing you could easily overpower him, not to mention you have a damn gun with you. Instead, you step away, heading for the door, wanting nothing more than to get out of there, still feeling his hands on you. You sigh in relief as you make it through the cold air and towards the car but then he steps out again, cigarette still in his mouth as he follows you. „Need any help?“ he offers with a smile that makes you want to vomit. „No I‘m good“ you finally manage to say as you get inside and begin reverseing. Still he doesn‘t let you be, waving and trying to help you but you ignore him, both feeling disgusted by his actions and also hating him for the obvious stereotype of being a woman and not able to drive this car on your own.

As soon as you leave the car park, you take a deep breath, feeling like you hadn‘t taken a single breath during that whole interaction. For some reason he triggered you, the smugness and privilege of his actions, so careless and disgusting at the same time. Angry tears linger in your eyes, wishing you had said or done something, knowing you could have and should have. But sticking up for yourself was hard, never having issues to do so for the people or victims from your cases you cared about. Your mind again travels to Emily, thinking of all the ways she would have handled him if he had touched her this way, also knowing she would have never let it get that far. In the end you settle for blasting music as loud as you can as you drive through the suburb and into the city, eventually reaching the precinct just in time for the others to get in soon.

After parking up, you pick up some coffee before making your way to your desk, drowning yourself in some paperwork on current cases. Your boss is already in his office and a little while later, the others filter in, greeting you as you politely force a smile, staying focused on your laptop and the files spread across your bullpen desk, trying to connect some pieces that hadn‘t sat right with you about the case and that you desperately wanted to figure out. Emily watches you from a few desks away, seeing how your posture was a little off today, how your gaze so fixed on the casefiles seemed a little off today and how overall you didn‘t seem your usual cheerful self. She thinks about making her way over but before she can do so, Hotch interrupts by ordering you all to the conference room.

„Good morning everyone“ he greets before he begins talking about the current cases again, underlining the urgency of results before meeting your eyes. „Did everything work out with the car this morning?“ he asks and again you freeze, all eyes suddenly on you before you feel Emily‘s hand on your knee, softly moving her thumb from one side to the other to get you to snap out of it. And you do, almost jolting a little before speaking „Yes sorry, fixed and parked downstairs“ you say. He looks over to Emily who‘s concern is evident in her eyes but they all leave it be, carrying on with the case and how to carry on from here. „Derek, Y/N.. I want you to go and talk to the victim’s family again, Emily and Garcia dig up anything you can, Rossi and I will go talk to the medical examiner“ he instructs and you nod as you reach for your jacket and follow Derek.

Before you can leave, Emily holds your arm and you turn around, seeing her concerned expression. „Hey.. you okay? you seem off today“ she asks, worry evident in her furrowed brows before you glance over at Morgan waiting for you. „I‘m fine Em, just tired“ you lie, knowing she could possibly see right through you but being a profiler yourself you had a few tricks up your sleeves either way. She nods, letting you go, knowing the urgency of the case before you get downstairs and into the car. He starts the car and as soon as the engine runs, some loud music startles you both as he glances at you. „Jesus, could have turned that down“ he jokes before you look away, feeling a little embarrassed as you had been so caught up in your feelings before. „What‘s going on with you?“ he asks a few minutes into the drive, the two of you having been working beside each other for years and equally trusting him with your life.

„Nothing.. tired, got up early you know“ you shrug, acting like it‘s no big deal but he didn‘t believe you, your posture and eyes betraying you as well as the obvious signs. You weren‘t one to complain about being tired, not when sitting at your desk until 4am at times and returning bright and early for 8am. Not when you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night or different time zones for cases, never you. And it doesn‘t take him long to make the connection, the way you froze earlier, the way the music blasted through the speakers. „If anything happened this morning, you know you can talk to me right?“ he asks, glancing at you as he stops at a red light. Your eyes meet his for a mere second, considering it but you shake your head before playing it off. „Promise I‘m good“ you lie, causing him to let it go, focusing on getting you to your destination.

But Derek Morgan wasn‘t one to back down and so when he gets a moment to himself, having seen you act weirder than usual, more jumpy, he calls the only person he knew could figure this out. „Hey babygirl, do me a favour?“ he asks before the voice of a certain hacker rings through the speaker. „Anything for you“ Garcia smiles as she gets ready to do some tapping on her keyboard. „Look up that mechanic place that fixed the car. See if you find anything unusual“ he orders and the blonde nods before beginning her magic. „Will do“ she mumbles before they end the call and he finds you again, as the team works the case. It doesn‘t take the blonde long to find the place, finding a few unimportant things about the owner, minor to what they usally dealt with but when she sees the footage of you, she pauses, never having connected the dots and this not being related to the case. She begins slowing down the tape, watching as her breath hitches and she sees what had happened this morning.

„Derek?“ her voice rings through the speaker about an hour later and he makes sure to step away for a moment. „Hit me babygirl“ he ushers before she fills him in. „Tell Prentiss and send me the adress“ he orders and she sighs before doing so. By the time you finish for the day, having connected some pieces and getting closer to finishing the case, you sink on your chair, finishing some reports as most of the team had headed home. You could still see Emily‘s coat by her chair, wondering where she was, unaware she had been with Garcia for a while. „Show me“ the brunette demands but the blonde holds back as they stand near her computers, having figured out about your connection a long time ago and knowing it would only upset her. „I need to see, Garcia show me“ she urges and with a sigh she does. And when Emily sees the smug smile, hearing the interaction and seeing the way he touched you, something snaps inside her.

Hands form to fists at her side, knuckles turning white as she sighs „I need the adress now“ she demands but Garcia steps forward. „Derek is taking care of it“ she tells her, calming her only a little before stepping in front of her with a gentle smile. „Go and talk to her“ the blonde offers with a sad smile and the brunette nods, taking a deep breath before leaving the office and returning. She finds you sitting by your desk, elbows on the table as you try keeping your head up, the day having drained you but not wanting to go home. She walks up behind you, wanting to put her hand on your shoulder the way she usually would but she stops herself, instead stepping in front of you before whispering a soft „Hi“ in order not to startle you. „Hi“ you smile back, trying to muster up a smile but your features betray you, fatigue and sleepiness obvious in your eyes.

„Come on, I‘m taking you home“ she offers as she walks over to her desk, grabbing her things. Your eyebrows furrow as you shake your head „I‘m good Em, just gonna finish these“ you protest but she isn‘t having it. „You have been up for way too long today, come on“ she orders and you sigh in defeat, grabbing your things before following her into the elevator. There is a comfortable silence between you two as you exit the BAU and make it to her car, the air chilly before she turns on the heater, some soft music playing in the background before she begins driving. The two of you sit in silence, as you enjoy the late night drive, seeing all the lights and leaning your head against the window. It takes everything within you not to fall asleep, but you snap out of it when you realize this wasn‘t the way home.

„Em, what are you doing?“ you ask, glancing over to her before she looks at you for a moment. „Taking you to my place“ she explains before your eyebrows furrow „Why?“ you ask confused, this never having happened before and movie night not due until tomorrow and the approaching weekend. And Emily doesn‘t know what to answer exactly, taking you home because she wants to talk to you, look after you and stay with you, wanting to have you close and not wanting you to know that she knew in the car yet, wanting to give you that bit of peace as she knew you loved late night drives more than anything. And so she stays silent but you don‘t question it further, too tired to think about it and trusting the woman with your entire life.

It takes another little while before you pull up to her apartment and follow her, greeted by Sergio who greets his mommy first before waddling over to you, the two of you best friends at this point. Almost like knowing your way around, you settle on the sofa, cross legged to make room for him as he jumps into your lap, the same way he always would. Emily disappears for a moment before she returns with two mugs of tea, opting for your favorite and placing it neatly in front of you. „Thanks Em“ you thank her with a smile before the tiredness slowly fades away and you become more aware of everything. „Why am I here?“ you ask as she settles beside you, her hands reaching for Sergio‘s fur as she begins giving him some pats. „Is there anything you want to talk about darling?“ she questions softly as she meets your eyes.

The name sends you into another dimension as her words don‘t even register properly before she carries on. „Because I know“ she whispers and then you freeze again, understanding just what she was talking about. „How?“ you ask a little confused, before realizing it must have been Morgan with the way he pushed, knowing Garcia probably figured it out. „It‘s no big deal, it was my fault“ you mumble as you set the cup of tea down but Emily stops you. „Hey, it‘s not your fault“ she says, her features tense upon hearing your words. „He was just being friendly and I overreacted, he didn‘t really do anything after all and I could have said no“ you excuse his behavior, ultimately blaming yourself and Emily can‘t believe those words are leaving your mouth. Not the usual strong badass woman she knew, who chased unsubs and didn‘t have any problems using her right hook or applying the perfect amount of sarcasm and sassiness every time.

„Y/N you didn‘t do anything wrong, he had no place to talk to you like that and that piece of shit definitely should not have touched you“ she sighs, the disapproval and anger laced in her voice and feature as her eyes almost plead with you. And then something overcomes you, flashbacks of a few years back hit you like waves, memories flooding your brain and knocking the breath from your lungs for a moment, tears pricking at your eyes as you avoid Emily‘s gaze. „Hey.. what‘s wrong?“ she asks, seeing your shivering state suddenly and when her hands reach your leg, trying to comfort you the way she usually would, you jump. And it didn‘t take her being a profiler or your best friend to understand what this meant. „When?“ is all she whispers before you glance at her and mumble „A few years ago“.

„Oh sweetie, who knows about this?“ she asks and when silence follows she understands that no one did, that you had never reported it, never talked to a single soul and when she realizes she is the first person you let this secret figure out, not denying it, she feels the weight of your trust, glancing at you before her eyes lock with your teary ones. „Can- may I hold you sweetie?“ she asks, ever so gently and you nod before you collapse forward and into her arms, letting the sobs wreck through your body and letting her swallow your darkness as she holds you close to her heart, rocking you back and forth gently, her chin resting on your head as her own tears threaten to spill down her cheeks, realizing how much you had suffered, how you never told a single soul, how you continued soldiering through work despite the triggers there and how you remained your best self today despite being reminded of what had happened in your past.

„If you want to talk about it im right here“ she whispers and then it bursts out of you, feeling her steady heartbeat as you lean into her further, telling her everything, what had happened, how you never saw it coming, how you froze just like this morning, how he sounded so much like him, how you feel embarrassed still, despite having worked through it on your own and trying counseling . And right there Emily realized the bond between you, the way you had just opened up to her, trusted her with your biggest secret and vulnerability and that she was the one soothing and holding you through it. How you were the one that soothed her whenever she was feeling off, reasons mostly never this important or dark. And like some miracle it took Emily all this time to realize her own feelings, as if this moment of vulnerability had woken her up from this slumber of obliviousness.

„I‘m so proud of you darling“ she whispers, cupping your cheeks as she wipes your tears and you smile sadly into her as your eyes lock. „Thank you Em“ you whisper and she nods before whispering „Not for this“. The two of you stay like this for a while and the brunette never leaves your side, holding you in her lap as the rain patters against her windows softly, the moonlight illuminating her apartment as she holds you close to her, wanting nothing more than to protect you from this cruel world. Her fingers trace gentle circles on your scalp, eventually soothing you to sleep. And eventually she takes you to bed, wrapping you up in a blanket before laying on the other end, her placing you on her chest again as you whined in your sleep for a moment, longing for her touch. And all night the brunette watched over you, shushing you through the slightest trembling or dreams. Her head circled around her own feelings, her heart both aching and beating for you having you so close and only realizing tonight that this is what she had longed for all along.

By the time you wake up, the sun filtering through the room, your eyes force open for a moment as you realize the unfamiliar surroundings. It takes mere seconds before you realize where you are, feeling Sergio snuggling up from behind you and remembering the night before. As you glance behind you, you realize the bed is empty and you balance on your feet, feeling more relaxed than you ever have after sleeping and your heart flutters as the memories of last night flood in, remembering how Emily had held you close. As you step into the kitchen, the front door opens and you find Emily, in a coat and beanie, seeing some melting snowflakes on her clothes as she greets you with a warm smile, setting two to go drinks and some breakfast on the counter. As she does you notice her bleeding knuckles and your eyes widen as you look into her eyes. „What happened?“ you ask, a little shocked, already walking to the sink and reaching for some paper towels.

„It‘s no big deal sweetie“ she smiles it off as you ever so gently, wipe the blood away. „Picked up your favorite“ she smiles as she points to the bags and cups and you smile gratefully, your heart fluttering at the gesture before you watch her take her jacket and beanie off, hair a little messy as she grabs breakfast and motions towards the sofa. You sit beside her as she hands you your favorite pastries and you look at her before taking a bite.

„Em what happened?“ you sigh, wanting to understand and then her eyes meet yours, something raw and vulnerable in them. „Let‘s just say this won‘t ever happen again“ she whispers and your eyes widen as you realize what she had done and where she had been. „No one is gonna lay a hand on you again, not while I‘m around“ she tells you as her eyes are still locked onto your own. And in the silence of her apartment, your hearts beat in synch, eyes communicating and saying all the unspoken words neither of you had been brave enough to say. And suddenly your world turned upside down, this having been the closeness you longed for all along, never suspecting these events to lead you both in the right direction but feeling utterly safe under her gaze, knowing she meant every word and knowing as long as she was around, this would never happen again, your love for each other equally strong, reflecting in each other‘s eyes, ready to accept them now in the closeness and safety of each other.

#emily prentiss #emily prentiss x reader #emily prentiss x you #emily prentiss x female reader #emily prentiss x y/n #paget brewster #paget brewster x reader #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #lgbtq

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lavenderchqn · 5 months ago

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✧・┆drunk on love — lyney

— it's the evening of lyney's birthday when you receive a call to retrieve your drunk partner from the lovely hands of his friend group's.

this piece is set after the story of red lines, although it works as a standalone read~

content warning: lyney is drunk. he's silly, but he's drunk.

Your eyes are barely open when your phone rings. You’ve been trying to finish correcting your master thesis for the entire evening, after sending your boyfriend out to spend his birthday with his friends. Taking a glance at the caller, as well as the time, you notice it’s Wriothesley.

You answer the phone, worry already seeping into your mind. “Hello?”. There are so many things that could’ve gone wrong… given Lyney’s ability to handle alcohol.

“Hi,” Wriothesley says breathlessly, sounding more than exhausted. “Sorry to be calling you so late.”

“It’s alright, what’s up?” You interrupt, drumming your other hand on your keyboard. “You sound miserable, man.”

“Tell me about it…” He says voice muffled as if he’s covered his mouth with his hand. “I hate being the designated driver on nights like these.”

“They made you the designated driver?!” Shock fills your voice. “You didn’t drink, did you?”

“I didn’t, don’t worry—“ Wriothesley laughs. “Quite amusing to see this lot completely drunk. I mean, Neuvillette has been crying about Furina breaking one of her nails for the entire time.”

“Ahh, gotcha.” You nod to yourself, hoping that the man will get back on track soon. “Do you need my help with something?” You ask. Wriothesley calling you is not something that happens regularly. At most, he'd only send you embarrassing pictures of your boyfriend.

“Lyney’s been calling out for you since he took a shot of whiskey. I don’t think I can take him, Furina and Neuvillette home without a drink myself in between…”

As if on cue, Lyney — the man in question — seems to notice he’s being talked about that. You can hear a sudden movement followed by a cheerful laugh.

“Hi, baby!~” Lyney’s voice seems more joyous than ever. Yeah, that man is as drunk as a kite. “I miss you so so so much!!”

“Having fun?” You ask, a small smile gracing your face. Given how stressful the winter season was for everyone involved, with the ever-nearing period of defending their scientific titles approaching, you felt nothing but happiness that Lyney went out to celebrate his birthday with his friends.

“Not the same without youu…” With how he's speaking, there must be a small pout on his face — his eyebrows knit. “No, no no… Wrio, let me talk man…” Ah. Wriothesley must be making a deal with your boyfriend to retrieve his phone.

“As I was saying,” The sole sober person speaks. “You’d do me a huge favour by coming to pick your prince.”

“I’ll go put on my shoes and be on the way.” You say. “Just send me the address. Oh, and don’t allow Lyney to drink more, alright?”

“Will do. Thanks, and sorry, again”

The message containing the group’s location comes the moment you end the call. Dressing yourself in anything comfortable, you’re ready to head out and take Lyney’s car. Ever since getting your driver’s license, he swore the only car you’d ever need is his.

Luckily the road is not too crowded, nor glistened from the rain despite all the inside jokes of Neuvillette’s tears causing it. You arrive without much issue, already spotting the group as you pull up to the parking lot.

Wriothesley is busy balancing an asleep Furina and Neuvillette who keeps on sobbing, head supported on his shoulder. Lyney’s standing on his two feet, zipping up his jacket. Lovely. Perhaps getting him back to the house will be easier than expected. He seems to spot you, approaching as you park the vehicle.

His eyes curve into straight lines as he breaks into a smile. Swaying from side to side, he throws himself into your embrace, burying his face into your shoulder. “Missed youuu”

“One child less to care for?” You ask Wriothesley while patting Lyney’s head.

“Unless you turn the car around…” He chuckles, readjusting Neuvillette’s position. “Thanks for the help, really.”

“Happy to help, Wrio.” With that, you split — each of you heading to their car. With the way you’re both basically dragging other people, it does take a while. “Message me when you’re home!” You shout as he’s settling his friends into the backseat.

“You too!”

“You’re going need to let go of me, Love.” You say, still patting Lyney’s head. It’s been almost five minutes of you standing out in the cold, your partner too clingy to allow you to drive the two of you back. “I promise you, once we’re home you’ll get all the cuddles.”

The blonde turns his head, looking directly at you. It’s unfair, you think, that even underneath this lighting, he still looks like a statue. His hair is unusually curly, and a pair of glasses is balancing on his nose. Not to mention the pure delight in his violet eyes, matching the warm, albeit drunk smile.

“Pinky?” He extends his finger, looking determined. Of course, he’d make you promise something as silly as this. You quickly interlock with one of your own, moving afterwards to open his door.

“Get in,” You smile, holding the door for him. “You’re the passenger prince today.”

All you can hear back is the tiny gibberish thoughts of a drunken man. You help him with the safety belt, and only when you confirm he’s actually buckled in, do you take your designated driver’s seat.

For the first time during your ride, it’s completely quiet. You’re unsure if Lyney’s fallen asleep, but checking the overhead mirror tells you his eyes are very much awake. His head sways slightly as if he was listening to music.

“What’s on the playlist?” You ask, leaning your head towards him, as to signal you’re talking to him.

“Marry you.”

You blink, momentarily distracted by his response. “Marry you? That’s what's in your head right now?" You tease, stealing a quick glance in his direction.

Lyney nods enthusiastically, though the movement is a bit too exaggerated in his tipsy state. “Yep! As Bruno says… It’s a beautiful night,” he slurs with a dreamy smile. “I wanna marry youuuuu.” His voice, although off-key, is filled with unmistakable affection, and it takes everything in you not to laugh.

“You’re so drunk, baby.” You say with a chuckle, shaking your head at him missing some of the words.

“But I’m honest!” He protests, his pout returning. “I think we should… should get married. Like, tomorrow. Or maybe today? We’re both free today!”

“Lyney,” You sigh, though you can’t hide the grin tugging at your lips. “You’re not even going to remember this conversation in the morning.”

“Will too!” He insists, crossing his arms in a huff, though his coordination betrays him and he almost smacks himself in the face. “I’ll remember everything. Like how much I love you, and how I wanna spend all my birthdays with you. And how…” His voice trails off, softer now. “How you’re the best thing in my whole world.”

Your heart squeezes at his words, even if they’re fuelled by alcohol. “Alright, my sweet drunk prince,” You say gently. “Let’s get you home first, and then we can talk about this… grand proposal of yours.”

“Promise?” He mumbles, already starting to doze off.

“I promise,” You reply softly, glancing at him through the mirror again. His eyelids are drooping, his lips curled into a content smile as sleep claims him.

date of posting — february 2nd 2025

#lavv.writes #genshin x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin fanfiction #genshin impact fanfics #genshin oneshots #genshin scenarios #genshin impact scenario #genshin impact fluff #lyney x reader #lyney x you #lyney x y/n

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baphmochii · 1 year ago

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Inmate Sal x f!reader ~ PenPal (HC's)

18+/CW: SFW with a dash of NSFW. PenPal turned Romantic. Reader is female and of age (adult).

°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°

This is something I thought of and I'm hoping it doesn't turn out awful. I know that no one's perfect when it comes to writing anything but.. *exhale* here we go.

°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°

✯ (How it Started): You're close friend had told you about inmate penpal's, they would read you their letters of what their penpal would write and it sparked an interest if you wanting to have a penpal.

✯ After getting set up and registering for a penpal, to your luck you manage to get Sal. It started off as (surprisingly) friendly back and forth conversation. It felt as if you were talking with an old friend you haven't seen in years, you would write Sal about your day, what you plans you had, college and other normie things. Sal would write to you about his day and what goes on in prison. (ex: riots, stabbings, etc.) The usual of what happens in a prison.

✯ You would eventually send Sal a photo of yourself after some time of talking and getting to know each other via letters, you slipped your photo in with the most recent letter you sent off to him. Once he got that letter and opened it, seeing your gorgeous face.. something changed in him.

✯ Sal was infatuated with you. Truth behold.. Sal was starting to gain feelings for you, strong romantic and sexual feelings. To admit, there were a few times Sal beat his cock silly to the photo of you, he felt shame afterwards, perverted too. He would imagine that it was you on your hands and knees, sucking his thick cock, taking it as deep as it would go down your tiny throat. The things he wanted to do to you... and you didn't even know it. Yet.

✯ Sal would manage to send a photo of himself to you (making a trade with another inmate), he would also slip his photo into his recent letter he sent off to you. Once you got it, you got to see him. Yes, you've seen mugshots of him before but that was along time ago and this was recent. He was.. handsome, he looked quite mysterious. His prosthetic made you feel.. tingly. You wanted to see more of him, especially his face. That would be asking for too much.

✯ The both you would still have conversations but there would also be.. "interesting" conversation. You would engage first with the explicit talk: "I have to be honest Sal.. I played with myself to your photo. I really want you inside of me, I really.. just want you to break me til' I'm unable to walk or form a sentence." You wrote in one letter. In return, Sal would praise you, call you his "good girl", his. Only his.

. . "You make me go feral inside of my cell. You're all I can think about, day and night, princess. I really want to feel your skin, you look so soft." . .

. . "In the showers when I'm alone. All I can think about is wanting to shower with you, our bare skin pressed together as we get each other clean." . .

. . "How are you doing today, princess? Did you remember to eat today? How were your finals today, too? I hope you did your best on it, you're my smart girl." . .

✯ I forgot to mention: Aside from the usual conversation and sexual talk/teasing of each other. Sal would regularly make sure you were eating, making your bed, brushing your teeth, just overall genuinely caring about you. Sal doesn't see you as his "little fuck toy" he sees you as his princess. His precious girl to care for you, he desperately wishes he wasn't behind bars so he can be with you. Sal has never felt this way in a long time with anyone, he's been through so much. Sal is quite surprised you feel the same way towards him.

✯ Being in love with an inmate and yes, a murderer despite him not having a choice. You loved the man, you shared personal things with him, shared many things with him actually. If only there was a way to get him out, to get him his freedom he deserved so badly.

✯ In your recent letters, you and Sal scheduled a meetup at Nockfell Prison. You two would finally see each other face-to-face for the first time. It made the both your hearts beat and flutter like there was no tomorrow, he had so much to tell you and you, the same. You'd finally be able to see his beautiful face (even if it's his prosthetic). It was a face you'd grow to love.

... Bonus!!🎉 (18+) 🥵

✯ Remember how you and Sal would send each other photos yourselves? Well, yes, the both of you would send naughty pictures to each other too.

✯ Sal loved when you would send photos of your naked body. He yearned to touch your curves, feel your breasts and squeeze them in his large hands. He wanted to feel every inch of you.

✯ I do think at one point Sal had manage to photograph his cock (a dick pic lol) and when you saw the image - THIS MAN IS HUNG. You always wondered how big or what it looked like but, the guy is big (8inches).

✯ Ah sending each other naughty pics was what got both of you through your days. Sal made a private folder (somehow) of all the naked/lewd pics of you, his girl. His little shrine~

°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°°.✯🖤✯.°

Phew! I hope I did good at writing this, this was all off the top of my head but I really wanted to write a penpal turned romantic type of thing, I guess? If you all want more or wanna ask questions (it can be SFW/NSFW questions)

Reblogs are greatly appreciated ❤️

Inbox is Open - 24/7 - SFW/NSFW Asks/Questions are Allowed ❤️

- Aki✯

#sally face #sal fisher #sally face killer #inmate sal fisher #sal fisher x reader #sally face x reader #sal fisher x y/n #sal fisher x you #sally face x y/n #sally face x you #sally face smut #sal fisher x reader smut #sally face x reader smut #prison sal x reader #sally face fandom #sally face simp #sal fisher simp

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goddessinnerglow · 7 months ago

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Become Your Best Version Before 2025 - Day 15

The Power of Self-Talk

Hi Goddesses! Let's talk about something we all do every single day, often without realizing it, talking to ourselves. You know that little voice in your head that's always commenting on everything? Yeah, that one. Let's make it work for us instead of against us!

Think about it: would you talk to your best friend the way you sometimes talk to yourself? If you just had a mini "oh…" moment, you're not alone. I used to be the queen of harsh self-talk until I realized I was basically being a mean girl to myself 24/7.

So today, we're going to transform that inner critic into your biggest cheerleader. Not in a fake, toxic positivity way, but in a real, authentic way that actually sticks.

Let's look at how we can flip the script:

The Inner Dialogue Check-In

First, let's catch those thoughts! For just one hour today, try to notice your self-talk. No judgment, just observation. You might be surprised at what you hear. Are you:

Beating yourself up over tiny mistakes?

Comparing yourself to others?

Dismissing your achievements?

Using words like "always" and "never" about yourself?

The good news? Once you notice these patterns, you can start changing them.

The Language Swap Game

Here's a powerful trick: imagine your thoughts are text messages you can edit before sending. Let's practice some rewrites:

Instead of "I'm so stupid for making this mistake" Try: "I'm learning from this experience"

Instead of "I'll never be good enough" Try: "I'm growing and improving every day"

Instead of "Everyone else has it figured out except me" Try: "Everyone's on their own journey, and I'm exactly where I need to be"

The Mirror Exercise

This one might feel weird at first, but it works! Every morning when you look in the mirror:

Give yourself one genuine compliment

Say one thing you're proud of

Set one kind intention for the day

Start small, even a simple "Hey, I like your energy today" counts!

Building Your Confidence Playlist

Create a collection of phrases that make you feel strong. Your personal highlight reel might include:

Times you overcame challenges

Compliments you've received that felt truly meaningful

Your proudest moments

Little wins that made you smile

Keep these handy for when your inner critic gets too loud.

The Permission Slips Exercise

Write yourself permission slips, just like in school, but these are for:

Making mistakes and learning from them

Taking up space

Saying no without guilt

Being a work in progress

Changing your mind

The Reframe Game

When you catch a negative thought, ask yourself:

Would I say this to my best friend?

Is this thought helping or hurting me?

What would someone who loves me say instead?

What's a more balanced way to look at this?

Your Daily Self-Talk Rituals

Pick one or two of these to try:

Morning power phrases (said out loud!)

Gratitude check-ins with yourself

Evening appreciation moments

Celebratory self-high-fives (yes, really!)

The goal isn't to never have negative thoughts. It's to catch them, question them, and choose whether to believe them.

Your Challenge for today

Notice your self-talk patterns for one hour (set a timer if it helps!)

Pick ONE negative phrase you use often and write down a kinder alternative

Try the mirror challenge (even if it feels silly at first)

Remember, changing your inner dialogue is like learning a new language, it takes practice, patience, and lots of gentle reminders. You've got this, and more importantly, you deserve this!

See you tomorrow for Day 16!

♡ ☆:.｡ Keep glowing, babes! ♡ ☆:.｡ With love, Goddess Inner Glow.

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jamiepaige · 8 months ago

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Constant Companions Closeup #1: DYAD

(also on spotify!)

Hello everyone!! It's been a couple weeks and change since Constant Companions, my newest album, was released unto the world, and I've been genuinely blown away by the response. Genuinely, thank you to everyone who's been streaming, commenting, making mashups, changing their pfps and usernames - it means the world to me!

I wanted to give some of that love back with something people have been asking me a lot about - and, admittedly, something I love doing. Song explanations! Deep dives! Dropping the lore! Welcome... to the Constant Companions Closeups...

For the next eleven days, I'll be going into each track one by one and babbling about the process, inspiration, details, feelings, and thoughts behind each one! We're getting sappy. We're bearing our hearts. We're telling unfunny jokes. And we're starting with track one - DYAD (featuring unit.0)!

---

Naturally, since this is the first track, it also serves as a great point to talk about my intention with this album as a whole!

I'll elaborate more on this with future tracks, but to me, there are really two main things that define the sonic progression of this album versus my previous work - guitars and vocal synths. Obviously, these things have been present in my work since I first started calling myself Jamie Paige, but Constant Companions is intended to be my overwrought, sappy confession of love to these two things that time and time again have made me simply want to make music. I love rock and I love Hatsune Miku dammit!!!

I had originally written this song in February of 2023 for a game-jam-esque online festival hosted by my friend Loni called HAPPY PARTY TRI, and at that time, I had found myself at a major crossroads. I had put out People Posture Play Pretend and :women_wrestling: the previous year, and while the response was nice, I was feeling listless and lost.

I love singing. I like my voice well enough. I certainly love writing music with lyrics!! But... there was something uniquely electrifying about using vocal synths. Amidst a lot of insecurity and emotional turmoil surrounding the process of making art and putting myself out into the world, it was one of the few things that just made everything feel right. Suddenly, I was making the same kind of music that had touched my heart so many times over.

Would it alienate people, though? Would I lose longtime listeners? Yes, that weighed on my mind more than I'd like to admit, but even more than that... I was worried I'd lose some part of myself, as silly as it sounds. Maybe what I thought was a bridge would become a barrier, and the messages I wanted to send across the gap would never find their way.

Ultimately, I felt that Dyad was the only kind of opener I could've possibly given this album, and a perfect fit for the album's motif. A dialogue between myself, stricken with loneliness and a lack of inertia running in circles, and that synthesized voice (ANRI Arcane my darling), grabbing the outstretched hand and asking a question I already know the answer to -

"Baby, do you know what you wanna hear?"

Yes, it's a love song, but it's not just for a person - it's a love song for the creative impulse, and for the places I wanted it to take me.

im resisting the urge to be jokingly dismissive of myself to diffuse tension but i still need to signal that the emotionally bare part of this is over so pretend im doing a funny little dance Anyways let's talk more technical stuff

---

Like many of my songs, Dyad came together from a patchwork of different snippets and ideas I had laying around. The back half of the chorus - "dream together, we can dream together" - originally came from this idea I had jotted down something like 9 months prior, but ended up being a perfect fit for Dyad in basically every way. The verse snippet that I'd written to go with it got reused for a later song on Constant Companions as well! (I say without naming it, as if it isn't literally lifted wholesale from this demo and thus incredibly obvious)

I wasn't originally planning on brazenly quoting the bridge of a Tally Hall song when I set out to write this song, but while toying around with a bridge idea involving a shortened version of the pre-chorus melody, I realized I had inadvertently copied it anyways. I was going to scrap it... but at the request of my dear friend and certified Tally Hall lover Marcy Nabors, I made it an explicit reference. Which I'm fine with, personally! The first CD I ever owned was a copy of Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum my sister bought me all the way back in 2006 - You can pry that sentimental attachment from my cold, dead hands, TikTok kiddies.

Lastly - not really behind the scenes so much as just a shoutout - thank you to unit.0 for the lovely lead guitar work on this song!! He's been a beloved collaborator of mine for many, many years now, and one of the people who ultimately convinced me this direction was the right one to go in, so it means a lot to share this song with him. Go listen to his music!!! Now!!!!!!

That's about it for this song! Not to sound like a fucking YouTuber, but genuinely, if there are any details you'd like to hear more about, let me know and I might made a bonus post at the end of all this. Otherwise, thank you for listening! Tomorrow: Not Quite There, featuring telebasher!

❤️💚

#jamie paige #music #constant companions #Bandcamp #behind da scenes

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fanficsat12am · 2 years ago

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when the brothers realize how much MC loves them I Leviathan, Satan, Asmodeus

📜 𝙼𝙰𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙻𝙸𝚂𝚃!! 📜

Lucifer & Mammon

Happy New Year everyone!! Hope ya guys had a great flippin holiday time :> As always, notes, comments, and reblogs are highly appreciated <33 Have fun reading!!

Leviathan

Putting himself down was second nature to him at this point—sometimes he didn’t even realize he was doing it. It especially got even worse after getting into a relationship with you. His mind refused to believe that anyone could ever love someone like him.

Levi dreaded the day you’d finally see what he sees and ultimately decide to leave, but he wouldn't hold it against you. Why would you settle for someone like him when there were countless others in the three realms who could give you so much more…

“Hey, you okay?” you asked worriedly, noticing his glazed look and how his eyes had dimmed. “O-of course I’m fine! Pft, why would I be lol,” he stumbles out, trying to keep up his facade—but of course, you saw through it.

As he tries to get back to his game he can feel your eyes piercing him.

“I’m going to ask you how you are one more time and I would like you to answer me honestly,” gently taking the controller in his hands from him and placing it aside. “Now tell me, what’s up?”

“I-I’m sorry,” he said, the words not too foreign to his tongue.

“If this is about last week I've already told yo-” “Ugh, that’s not what I meant…” he cuts you off, trying to find the right words.

“I-it’s just…you could have had ANYBODY else, but instead you’re stuck with me. I can’t 1v1 Beel's body, Diavolo’s money, Asmo’s looks- heck even stupid Mammon’s got charm! I'm just Levi, the plain old third-born…” he bites his lip, trying to keep his tears at bay. His efforts proved futile as he felt its warm trickle slowly dripping down his face, one after the other.

A part of him wanted to take back everything he just said—to restart and pick a different approach. But this wasn’t another one of his games. This was real life, and in here you've only got one shot. It was game over, he knew he had lost.

He shut his eyes tight, listening closely for the sound of you finally walking out those doors. He couldn't bear to watch you leave him.

You shake your head at the absurdity of his words, cupping his face into your hand. “I’m not stuck with you, silly. I choose to be here.”

Opening his eyes back again he's met with you smiling at him, the sight making his heart skip a beat.

“I’m here because I can’t get enough of you. I love how your cheeks would go red when I catch you staring at me,” you say, leaning closer and leaving a kiss on his cheek.

“How your brows would furrow and your eyes would squint whenever you’re focused on your game,” sending a kiss by the bridge of his nose.

You gently grab his wrist and fumble on the soft skin of his palms with the pads of your thumb. “How you’d start gesturing with your hands a lot when you talk about the latest anime you’re into,” you reminisce, another kiss now to the back of his hand.

“How right before you fall asleep, you hold me closer and whisper to the dead of the night how much you love me,” you say as you end it with a tender kiss to his lips.

“And each day I find myself falling for you even more. They could try to give me the whole world, but they’ll never be you. So please, stop thinking you need to earn my affection because you don't. Not now and not ever.”

You lift his face up to meet your gaze, looking at him as if you see right through him. “There is nothing I would change about you. You are perfect in my eyes.”

He felt like his heart was about to beat out of his chest. He was left speechless, his mind going haywire with everything you had just said.

Seeing how his brain had completely stopped working, he let his body do all the talking instead. He wordlessly wrapped you in a tight embrace, cherishing the warmth of your body against his.

The bitter taste of the sin he was meant to represent felt absent. Levi sensed no need to be envious of others when he had someone like you to call his.

Satan

Not once had he let himself think that he could indulge himself in something such as love—for wrath did not deserve the peace of love. While love held everything together in its warm embrace, wrath tirelessly tore with its cold unforgiving hands.

Despite their differences, there was no denying that both were blind. Just like a moth, you were entranced by the beautiful embers of his flame, blissfully indifferent to the heat.

He stared at his reflection with disdain. The obsidian black horns adorning his head felt heavier the longer he looked, not to mention the tail that whipped mindlessly on its own. He gritted his teeth in disgust, delivering a blow to the mirror that sent it hurdling to the ground. Through his ragged breaths and the rapid beating of his heart, he hears a voice not of his own.

"Satan?" you called, breaking him from his trance-like state. You softly closed his door behind you, hands outstretched and unsteady.

With each step you took, he took two back—his mind screaming at him to stay away from you but his heart yearning to leap into your hold.

"Hey, it's okay," you reassured, taking a step towards him.

"No it's not!" he screams, backing away from your approaching form.

Hearing the crunch of glass under the weight of his shoes, he takes notice of the mirror he broke just moments ago. Reflected on its cracked surface was a distorted image of him; a monster.

"Please, let me help," you pleaded, trying to close the gap between you. He hastily steps back, tripping on his own feet and leaving him a heap on the floor.

"Don't come any closer!" he screams, the room shaking with the sheer volume of his voice. You kneel to his level, quickly engulfing him in your arms.

‘Run. He doesn't deserve you. Just stay away.’ He repeated in his head like a silent prayer, hoping that by some miracle it would come true.

But as he felt you hold him tighter, he knew you would do nothing of the sort. As he trembled in your arms, he wills himself to ask the question that had been plaguing his mind since the day you'd started dating.

"Why?" he whispered softly, almost inaudible if not for the heavy silence of the night. "I could lose control. Why do you insist on staying? To even consider feeling anything for a monster such as myself is just…foolish."

You think about your answer carefully, knowing that what you say next will mend or break the man in your hold. "Loving someone takes courage. To trust someone with your heart and believe they would keep it safe. Keep you safe. Let the three realms call me foolish but there's no doubt in my mind that I love you, Satan. Not the Avatar of Wrath, you Satan,'' you answer truthfully, pouring every ounce of your heart into each word.

Gently taking hold of his chin, you tilt his head up to meet your eyes. "Tell me now Satan, will you hurt me?" you ask, the demon shaking his head immediately. He wouldn't dream of ever wishing to cause harm to you. He would die first before anybody, let alone himself, hurt you.

"Then it is not foolish of me to love you" you say, your words unfaltering.

Tears welled in his eyes, accepting defeat at the hands of your love and melting deeper into your embrace. As he lays on your chest, he turns to face where your heart would be and whispers an oath. "I love you, MC. I shall protect you with my life" he vows, sealing his promise with a kiss.

Asmodeus

As the Avatar of Lust and the Jewel of the Heavens, he was always the talk of the town. You, on the other hand, weren’t too familiar with the gossip world. Although you knew that was going to change once you officially became a couple.

You took no mind to it, brushing them off with a small wave knowing that the wrong move could only add more oil to their flame. But Asmo wasn’t like you. He could feel all the looks they gave him, the incessant whispers and murmurs whenever he’d turn his back.

He typically had no care for whatever lies people have heard about him. The same could not be said though when they had the audacity to include you into the mix. It was slowly chewing away at him and he couldn’t deny the pit of doubt slowly churning inside him.

“I saw MC out with one of the brothers last week. They’ve been getting closer recently. I wonder what happened between them"

"I saw them leaving school with Simeon yesterday, I’m surprised that’d cheat on Asmo with someone like him”

”They’ve got the most powerful people of the Devildom wrapped around their finger and they’re still with Asmo? Damn”

The final blow was realizing that everything was better without him in the picture. Your smile wasn't just bright, it was brighter, you weren't just happy, you were happier.

He slams his door shut, sliding down the wooden surface as he feels his legs give underneath him.

‘Can’t you see? They were never the problem. No matter what you do, you could never satisfy them. Once again you've proved to be useless.’

‘You think they’d just be swayed by your face? By the number of followers you have? Underneath it all you're nothing. It's just pathetic.’

He shook his head, gripping and pulling on his delicate sand blonde hair. No matter how hard he cupped his hands over his ears, their words never ceased. His eyes pricked with tears, months of silent torture finally finding his moment of weakness.

You on the other hand were beyond worried. You were no stranger to Asmo’s flamboyant walk outs but this was different. As you neared the door to his room, you could hear silent sobs and cries on the other side. Knocking softly, you worriedly call out to him.

“Asmo?” The sobbing stops, rendering the halls eerily silent. “Darling, what’s wrong? Can I come in?” Still no response.

Asmo freezes at the sound of your voice, the loud thumping of his heart drowning out the constant knocking on his door. An internal conflict rages within him. Not only is the person causing all this mess of emotions on the other side of the door, but the only one who can make it all go away as well.

“Please talk to me. I need to know that you’re alright.” Just as you’re deciding if you should get some help from the others, the door opens. From it, a hand grabs your wrist, swiftly pulling you inside and closing the door.

Looking around, the usually bright and pinkish room was cold and dark. You could barely see anything with the only light coming from his window.

The crisp silence of the night was cut by the uneven breathing of Asmo who was still by the door. You reach out to gently place a hand on his shoulder.

“Sweetie?” you call, fingertips only a few milliliters away, when his voice stops you in your tracks.

“Do you love me?” he whispers.

“Of course I do,” you answer immediately, not missing a beat.

You gently grab him by the shoulder and turn him to face you, your heart breaking at the sight of your lover being in so much turmoil.

“Oh, Asmo…” your hand tenderly holds his cheek, the other wiping away the tears that have yet to cease from falling.

“Each day, I hear another rumor about you finding somebody else…” he pauses, taking a deep shuddering breath. “If you’re going to do it, please just do it already and save me the mascara.”

He knows that watching you leave will hurt more than any hangover can ever do to him. It would be like he was falling from the pristine white gates of Celestia again, powerless as he saw all he held dear fade into a memory of what he had once had.

He could try to convince himself that the rumors were true. That you were only ever with him for his fame and looks and that he never cared about you. But of all the lies that have circulated, that would have been the biggest one.

“Honey, I’m not leaving you. Not now, not ever,” you say as you tuck a lock behind his ear. “If you think I’d ever love someone after you then I have failed in showing you how much you mean to me.”

Through blurred vision, Asmo tries to find an ounce of deceit within the windows to your soul; a malicious grin, a break in eye contact, a drop of sweat. Nothing.

He lets out a shuddering breath he didn’t know he was holding, pressing his soft hands upon your own and interlacing it with his. It was stupid of him to ever doubt your feelings for him. To hell with what they thought of the both of you. All he cared about now was now, being here in your hold, forever.

“You’re so cute sometimes, darling…" he whispers in amusement, a small smile finally making its way onto his lips.

“Please tell me I still look fabulous even after all that tears. Ugh, my eyes are gonna be so puffed up tomorrow!”

You chuckle at his comment, happy to see him start coming back to you. “Still ever so stunning, My Prince.”

“Let’s stay like this for just a bit more, hm? All this crying made me tired. Then after, we can run a nice warm bath for the two of us. Doesn't that sound wonderful?” He murmured, melting more into your touch.

“Whatever you’d like, darling,” you replied, pressing your forehead to his.

And there you stayed, forehead to forehead, hands intertwined, just you and him in the comfort of each other's touch.

AN: Thanks a bunch for reading!! Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments <33

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