#golf shirts three sixty six

[lenbryant]

(LONG POST) Being a piece from the New Yorker, this essay takes several paragraphs before it finally gets around to the main point. #refrigeratormagnet

David Zaslav, Hollywood Antihero

The C.E.O. of a conglomerate that includes Warner Bros. studios, CNN, and HBO takes on an entertainment business in turmoil.

By Clare Malone, August 23, 2023

In 1941, a couple from New York bought an undeveloped parcel of land in Beverly Hills for fourteen thousand dollars from the writer Dorothy Parker, the most fearsome wit at the Algonquin Round Table. James Pendleton, an interior designer and art dealer of Regency and Baroque pieces, and his wife, Mary Frances, who went by Dodo, craved a particular vision of California living. They imagined a landscape of eucalyptus trees and rose gardens, with a pool house suitable for high-life entertaining—a Xanadu escape from their place in Manhattan. The Pendletons enlisted the architect John Elgin Woolf, who designed homes for Cary Grant, Lillian Gish, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn, to create a one-level house—Dodo had a bad hip—in a coolly sumptuous style that would come to be known as Hollywood Regency.

In 1967, Pendleton sold the house to Robert Evans, who, as the head of Paramount Pictures, went on to oversee a string of era-defining films: “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” “Chinatown.” Evans led a life worthy of a film auteur’s attention—glamorous, accomplished, and more than a little sleazy. When he bought the house, which he called Woodland, he had been married twice; he would marry five more times. He became almost as well known as a host as he had been as a producer, throwing bacchanalian parties and entertaining such stars as Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski. In the nineteen-eighties, an addiction to cocaine and an association with a tawdry murder case helped bring his career, and the parties, to an end.

Evans died in 2019, at the age of eighty-nine. Three months later, a media executive named David Zaslav bought Woodland for sixteen million dollars. Though Zaslav was one of a select group of people who could afford this Hollywood palace, he was not part of the town’s aristocracy. Zaslav was then the C.E.O. of Discovery, Inc., the cable corporation whose channels included HGTV, TLC, Animal Planet, Food Network, and the Oprah Winfrey Network. At the time, his greatest claim to fame was the size of his paycheck. In 2014, he was the country’s most highly paid executive, with compensation of a hundred and fifty-six million dollars, mostly in stocks and options. Zaslav, whose teeth gleam a startling white and whose wardrobe skews toward Wall Street leisurewear—logoed golf shirts and zip vests—had a reputation as a shrewd dealmaker, adept at brokering acquisitions. Discovery was something of an entertainment-industry backwater, known for a portfolio of low-cost, lowbrow, highly profitable programs, of the kind you don’t tell co-workers you watch: “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Wives with Knives,” “Naked and Afraid.” Zaslav, a lifelong New Yorker, had never been involved in managing a Hollywood studio, but he seemed to like the idea of the town. “David has always been on the outside looking in on the content world,” a former Discovery executive told me. “He’s always wanted to be a player in Hollywood.”

In May, 2021, a year and a half after Zaslav purchased Woodland, he was announced as the C.E.O. of a new media company, Warner Bros. Discovery—a vast conglomerate that melded Discovery’s holdings with those of WarnerMedia, which encompassed HBO, Warner Bros.’s film and television studios, CNN, and a suite of cable channels including TNT, TBS, and Turner Classic Movies. Zaslav, the sixty-one-year-old head of a middle-market cable company, had suddenly achieved a cultural reach beyond what the likes of Robert Evans could ever have imagined. “Whoa—the minnow swallows the whale,” the former Discovery executive recalled thinking.

Under Zaslav, W.B.D. adopted a new slogan, “the stuff that dreams are made of”—an evocation of Hollywood glory borrowed from “The Maltese Falcon,” a hit for Warner Bros. in 1941. But Zaslav joined the movie business at a bracingly inglorious moment. The advent of streaming video has demolished old business models. The unions that represent the industry’s actors and writers are carrying out a bitter and prolonged strike. And the company that Zaslav has ended up leading is an ungainly entity, stuck with colossal debts.

Zaslav has said that he is focussed on the long term—a sensible position, since he’s made a pretty rough first impression. As soon as he took over W.B.D., he began slashing costs and laying off hundreds of workers. Last August, he scrapped a Scooby-Doo movie and a ninety-million-dollar Batgirl project, both nearly complete, and wrote them off for tax purposes. (W.B.D. justified the decision as “a strategic shift.”) On the picket line, actors and writers point not just at his compensation package—valued at two hundred and forty-six million dollars in 2021, the year he brokered the W.B.D. deal and extended his contract—but also at his seeming interest in playing mogul while the entertainment business implodes.

For many, Zaslav is something of an antihero, at the center of the town’s story for all the wrong reasons. Those in what one insider half-jokingly calls “the Hollywood deep state” seem unsure that he is up to the task of building a new entertainment-industry power under difficult circumstances. Even Zaslav’s supporters describe him as an outsider feeling his way along. “Notwithstanding David’s long and distinguished media career, he is a relative newcomer to the motion-picture environment,” said Alan Horn, a former president and C.O.O. of Warner Bros. and chairman of Walt Disney Studios, who has been hired as an adviser to Zaslav. “That generated a lot of scrutiny, and it can take a while to be accepted.”

The deal that created W.B.D. was, like many mergers, a marriage of convenience. A.T. & T. had bought Time Warner in 2018, as part of an attempt to expand into the entertainment industry. This was a radical departure from A.T. & T.’s traditional business, but the company was eager enough to open new markets that it was willing to pursue an eighty-five-billion-dollar acquisition and to fight off an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice. Three years later, it was equally eager to get out.

John Malone, Zaslav’s longtime patron, is widely considered a principal architect of the deal. A former cable magnate who was a powerful owner of Discovery, Malone is eighty-two years old, worth around nine billion dollars, and seen as one of the most formidable minds in business. The W.B.D. transaction, a Reverse Morris Trust, is a hallmark of his dealmaking: a complex maneuver in which a company spins off a subsidiary to its shareholders, then immediately sells it to another company, which forms a new entity in which the shareholders have majority control. A.T. & T. shareholders retained seventy-one per cent of the stock in W.B.D.; this exchange, executed by high-priced bankers and lawyers, prevented them from incurring capital-gains tax. Malone owns less than one per cent of the stock, but sits on the board and remains enormously influential. (Advance, the parent company of Condé Nast and The New Yorker, is one of the largest shareholders in W.B.D., with around eight per cent of the stock.)

Discovery didn’t really have the money to make the acquisition outright. A former media executive characterized it as a leveraged debt buyout, which is “unusual in the media business, because the media business is so volatile.” But the deal left the new company with substantial handicaps: Discovery, which was already carrying fifteen billion dollars of debt, went further in debt as it made a huge payment to A.T. & T. Thus, W.B.D. was born more than fifty-six billion dollars in the red. In order to keep his company intact, Zaslav would have to use its cash flow to pay down that debt. The former media executive told me, “The key is, in the next two to three years, can David pay off enough debt that he emerges with a viable business?”

The media industry is a seascape of big fish prowling for slightly smaller fish to eat. W.B.D.’s creation was Discovery’s bid to “scale up,” combining assets to compete with such streaming entities as Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video, which have spent a decade enticing customers to cancel their cable subscriptions. The truism is that only the largest firms will survive in the post-cable world of streaming, which demands endless content. Traditional media companies have launched their own streaming services, but it’s been difficult for them to make scores of new movies and series while their once-reliable cash flows dwindle. Expensive cable subscriptions are quickly becoming obsolete. Advertising, too, has been lost to Big Tech, as Facebook and Google Ads have come to dominate the market.

Zaslav likes to tout W.B.D.’s vast library: “Harry Potter,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Superman,” “Batman,” “Friends,” “Game of Thrones.” (He tends not to dwell on “Dr. Pimple Popper,” a reality series about a celebrity dermatologist.) His company, he boasts, is purely focussed on content, not distracted by selling phones or cloud storage or bulk toilet paper. But anyone who runs an enterprise like CNN or HBO knows that the days of easy money from cable fees have ended. CNN made a billion dollars in profit in 2016, and is expecting to make more than eight hundred million dollars this year—a good business, but a shrinking one. The future of entertainment might have been aptly described by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in 2016. “When we win a Golden Globe,” he said, “it helps us sell more shoes.”

Someone who has worked with Zaslav for years described his career as a series of cannily seized opportunities. Born in Brooklyn, he spent most of his childhood in suburban Rockland County, where his father was an attorney and his mother taught at a Jewish day school. Zaslav was a talented tennis player; Althea Gibson, the first Black athlete to win a Grand Slam, was his private coach. After graduating from Binghamton University and Boston University School of Law, he went to work for the New York firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby & MacRae, where he endeared himself to partners by joining them for matches. “I wasn’t a good lawyer,” he later told Time. “But I was a good tennis player.” (Zaslav declined to speak on the record for this story.)

In 1986, the firm hired Richard Berman, a former general counsel of Warner Cable, who brought along MTV and Discovery as clients. Zaslav was quickly drawn to the work. “It wasn’t the law that I was passionate about,” he later said. “It was the cable business and the idea of building a business.” A few years later, Zaslav recalled in an interview in 2017, he happened upon a story in the trade publication Multichannel News, which said that Bob Wright, the C.E.O. of NBC, wanted to get into cable. Zaslav wrote Wright a letter saying that he wanted to be part of the project. Soon after, he was hired as a junior lawyer for what would become CNBC.

Zaslav has told the story of the letter many times, though recently it got a bit of a punch-up. In the version he delivered in a speech this spring, the article appeared not in Multichannel News but in the Hollywood Reporter, and the letter went not to Wright but to Jack Welch—the C.E.O. of NBC’s parent company and perhaps the greatest corporate celebrity of his time.

When Zaslav started at CNBC, “there were a few layers between him and Jack Welch,” a person who worked there at the time told me. The startup network operated out of Fort Lee, New Jersey, far from NBC’s Art Deco headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Eventually, Zaslav began overseeing the negotiations with regional cable companies over how much each would pay to carry CNBC. “David was a transactional guy,” the former NBC co-worker told me. “He went from deal to deal.” But Zaslav was ambitious. His deals often seemed timed to close on the night before a big meeting, and he would show up bedraggled but radiating victory.

“David always attached himself to a higher-up boss,” a colleague from his NBC years told me. A former NBC insider said, “He was very good at managing up. He knows how to get somebody to buy into him.” Many cable-company executives of the era didn’t see themselves as media moguls; they were engineers and scrappy businessmen who had built the infrastructure to bring cable TV into millions of households. Among the most powerful of them was Malone, who ran Tele-Communications Inc., based in Colorado, which at the time was the country’s largest cable company. Malone—a soft-spoken, snowy-haired man with a permanently amused smile—is the controlling shareholder of Formula 1’s parent company and one of the largest private landowners in the United States. “I have earned so much money that money doesn’t interest me,” he told Der Spiegel, in 2001. “Now it is only the love of the game that drives me.”

In a 2017 interview, Zaslav told a story of staying at the office late one night to wait for a call from Malone. When Bob Wright arrived the next morning and found him still there, Zaslav explained why he hadn’t left his post: “You said I should wait for John Malone to call, so I did.” Wright, he said, “got Jack [Welch] on the phone and goes, ‘This guy stayed all night. Can you believe this guy?’ Years later, Bob said to me, ‘That was it. We said, you’re our guy.’ ”

Zaslav considers Welch and Malone his fundamental influences. Welch was known for ferocious cost-cutting and constant attention to the bottom line—which often came with mass layoffs. Malone has a near-fetish for tax avoidance and is a master of strategizing complex transactions. “Jack was analytics and costs and ‘figure out how to manage people out and get the best people in,’ ” Zaslav said on a podcast last year. Malone “is really about long-term strategic thinking and driving toward free cash flow,” he went on. “Somehow, I think the conflation of those two is my brain.”

Welch encouraged a hard-driving corporate culture, which Zaslav strove to embody. Compact and thrumming with energy, Zaslav has a distinct New York accent, and speaks in long narratives that always resolve in a salesman-like pitch. His two primary interests, people who know him well say, are business and his family. Zaslav met his wife, Pam, in high school, and they worked together as lifeguards at a summer camp. They now have three adult children, one of whom is a producer at CNN. Zaslav’s Instagram is filled with pictures of him golfing with his sons and eating at an Italian joint with his mother, who is ninety and lives in New Jersey. “What we love most about David is how he loves his wife Pam and their beautiful family,” Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper,” wrote not long ago.

Zaslav’s gift for cultivating allies helped him advance, but it also forced him to take sides in a messy corporate conflict. In 1993, Roger Ailes, a Republican political consultant with roots in television production, came to CNBC to help boost ratings. He promoted Zaslav, who was then thirty-three, to head the affiliates division, negotiating deals with various cable companies. But Ailes was in a bitter power struggle with Tom Rogers, the head of the cable division, and he saw Zaslav as loyal to Rogers. According to Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” he enlisted comrades to keep an eye on Zaslav and exhorted them, “Let’s kill the S.O.B.” In a meeting, Ailes allegedly called Zaslav “a little fucking Jew prick.”

The conflict took a toll on Zaslav. Sherman writes that an executive saw him “almost visibly shaking in an empty office.” In a memo from the time, Zaslav described a pervasive sense of fear: “I view Ailes as a very, very dangerous man. I take his threats to do physical harm to me very, very seriously. . . . I feel endangered both at work and at home.” Ailes was investigated and ultimately left CNBC, in 1996.

Zaslav and Rogers had outlasted their rival, but the episode had unexpected consequences. Ailes’s separation agreement stipulated that he could not work for such competitors as CNN and Bloomberg, but it said nothing about Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corporation. Just weeks after leaving CNBC, Ailes held a press conference with Murdoch to announce that he would be the new leader of Fox News.

By 2004, Zaslav was the head of cable distribution and syndication for NBC Universal, a role that was distant from any programming decisions. He had attached himself to yet another boss, an executive named Randy Falco, who ran the business side of the division and was a candidate to take over the company. But Jeff Zucker, the former executive producer of the “Today” show, prevailed, and, according to the former NBC colleague, it was clear to Zaslav that he would never make C.E.O. of NBC. Though he and Zucker maintained a decades-long friendship, people who know them say that it was always tinged with competitive tension. “David kind of always coveted what Jeff was doing,” a person with knowledge of their relationship said. “He became C.E.O. of the company, and he was in charge of all the content and all the movies.”

Zaslav seemed determined to find his way into a similar position. In 2005, he joined the board of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, whose members included John Hendricks, the founder and chairman of Discovery, and Robert Miron, the chairman and C.E.O. of Advance/Newhouse Communications, which, like Malone, was an owner of Discovery. “Suddenly he got in the room with the guys who built the industry from the ground up,” one person who knew Zaslav at NBC said. “They were long-term thinkers and planners, and serious businesspeople.” Zaslav was eager to develop relationships with them. “He wasn’t particularly strong in terms of assessing and analyzing financial information,” a former cable executive said, of Zaslav. But he was “extremely good at creating bonds with key deal decision-makers.”

One well-informed industry source told me that Malone came to appreciate Zaslav’s energy and skill as an operator—someone who could execute complicated strategies on the ground. The media executive Barry Diller, who has known Malone for decades, told me, “John Malone has had a great facility for finding people that he thought were competent and giving them an enormous opportunity that would not have been available, almost at first blush.” In the summer of 2006, Zaslav began talks to take over Discovery. He was officially installed early the next year, with approval from Hendricks and Malone.

As C.E.O., Zaslav had a difficult remit: take the channel public, shake up its culture, and grow internationally. “At NBC, he was on an easy street with good compensation, not having to work very hard—he could delegate—and, all of a sudden, he had to work his ass off to turn around a group of channels that were underperforming,” the former cable executive said.

Zaslav laid off many of the company’s executives and a quarter of its staff. “There were some real turkey businesses there,” Malone said at the time. “David had to take them out behind the barn and shoot them.” Zaslav needed underlings who would help change the company. “People were coming in at nine, nine-thirty, heading out at six,” he told Time. He wanted those people gone. While some of his top executives are women, Zaslav is “swayed easily by a certain kind of person who talks a certain kind of way, and they all tend to be white men,” one former Discovery employee told me. “Very confident, big swagger. Having a bad reputation can actually be a good thing in his eyes, because it means you’re tough.” Being too nice could earn you a reproach.

Discovery had become known for earnest, carefully made educational and nature programming: Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” documentary, the “Globe Trekker” travel series. Zaslav was more interested in taking advantage of the ongoing boom in reality TV. In 2007, “Jon & Kate Plus 8” premièred on TLC, opening a fruitful niche for Discovery, which then launched “17 Kids and Counting.” Zaslav showed demotic taste, and an instinct for gimmicks and provocations; in 2010, he green-lighted Sarah Palin’s reality show. “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” about a child-beauty-pageant contestant from Georgia, was followed by “Wives with Knives,” “Sex Sent Me to the E.R.,” “Naked and Afraid,” and “My Big Fat Fabulous Life.” In what seemed like a bid for more respectable life-style content, Zaslav courted Oprah Winfrey, and together they launched OWN in 2011. Television was then in what became known as its second golden age: “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men.” Zaslav made a point of not competing in that realm. “It’s like a kids’ soccer game—everyone saw something that worked and started chasing the ball,” he told Time. “It’s way too expensive.” Much of his programming was economical, lucrative, and relatively uncomplicated to produce. “Discovery’s model was completely different than the Hollywood content model,” the former Discovery executive told me. “It was very low-cost content that was made completely on a nonunion basis, owned one hundred per cent by Discovery.”

Malone based Zaslav’s pay mainly on the company’s performance, supplying much of it in the form of equity and stock options that vested over time. Discovery went public in 2008, and S.E.C. filings show that the following year Zaslav’s compensation was $11.7 million. A year later, it had jumped to $42.6 million. In 2014, Zaslav’s pay package was valued at $156.1 million, even as the stock fell by a quarter. “David is clearly a genius,” the former colleague from NBC said. “He’s taken probably about a billion dollars of stockholder money off the table since he started working for Malone personally.” (It’s closer to seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Still, a lot.)

Media-C.E.O. salaries have continued to grow, as the transformation of the industry requires more mergers and acquisitions, and riskier bets on unpredictable markets. But Zaslav was an outlier; even though Discovery’s stock value increased substantially in his time there, he was still the head of a mid-tier media company who in some years made more than Disney’s Bob Iger. In 2022, a firm advising institutional investors recommended that the company’s shareholders decline to reëlect three board members because of their “poor stewardship” around compensation.

For years, Zaslav lived in a tony village in Westchester County. Then, in 2010, he bought Conan O’Brien’s duplex apartment in the Majestic, an Art Deco co-op on Central Park West, for twenty-five million dollars. One person who has known Zaslav for years described the purchase as an act of self-assertion: “There’s a new player in town.” Still, a former Discovery insider who visited the Manhattan apartment said that the décor was almost shockingly modest. There were posters on the walls, and TVs playing programs from Discovery and CNBC—effectively an extension of his office.

Two years later, Zaslav spent another twenty-five million dollars on an oceanfront mansion in East Hampton, where he began hosting a “Shark Week”-themed Labor Day party. His guest lists started to appear on Page Six: Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Donna Karan, Martha Stewart, Jamie Dimon, Ryan Seacrest, Colin Powell. Even Roger Ailes was spotted at a Winter Wonderland party in 2014. These days, Zaslav goes to Taylor Swift shows with Kevin Costner and John McEnroe, and sits courtside at Lakers games with Michael B. Jordan and Bill Maher. Joy Behar, a co-host of “The View,” recently accompanied him to a Bruce Springsteen concert. “He’s very social,” she said. “He’s very alpha—he has a big personality.”

Zaslav enjoys this kind of socializing but sees it as an extension of his work, the media executive Kenneth Lerer, who is a close friend of his, said. Lerer thinks that, without a high-profile job, Zaslav’s natural milieu would be a back-yard barbecue. Zaslav is often seen out in New York—at Barney Greengrass for breakfast, at Le Bilboquet or Porter House for lunch, and at the Polo Bar for drinks. But he tends not to linger. “He would have one course, a glass of wine, no dessert—because, by nine o’clock, David’s out,” the former Discovery insider said.

Zaslav rises at 4:45 A.M. to read the news, and then, when he’s in New York, walks a few miles through the city while making calls. One person sent me a photograph taken of Zaslav hustling up Madison Avenue, in jeans, a sports coat over a zip vest, and dark glasses, talking animatedly on his phone. Zaslav can call underlings as early as 6 A.M., New York time; the conversations often last no more than a minute or two, and sometimes end so abruptly that he doesn’t bother saying goodbye. “Everyone wakes up and they got e-mails from me,” Zaslav once told CNBC. “Part of my job is to push everybody forward.” He can be similarly bluff in meetings. One associate told me that he tends to deliver long monologues and ask questions without seeming intent on hearing the answer. Another associate read the phenomenon differently: “He can be multitasking and you think he’s not paying attention, but he is.”

Some colleagues called Zaslav a short-term thinker, who moves restlessly from idea to idea. His proponents see it differently. “Of all the C.E.O.s I’ve worked with over forty years, he’s probably the most hands-on,” Lerer said. “He gets an idea and he just forces it until there’s a decision.” In that process, others note, he doesn’t always keep his temper in check. “He could be very warm and very nurturing, and then turn on a dime,” the Discovery insider said. “I saw him lash out when people bullshitted, pretending to know what they didn’t know.” An incident in 2008 became a subject of company gossip. When Leonardo DiCaprio, who was an executive producer on a Discovery series, didn’t show up to a première, Zaslav and one of the other producers had what an attendee called a “spirited conversation”—a screaming match. One of Zaslav’s sayings, according to a former employee, was “It’s not show friends. It’s show business.”

During Zaslav’s tenure at Discovery, the industry was undergoing a radical transformation. In 2013, Netflix had launched its first major original streaming series, “House of Cards,” and since then it had poured billions into original movies and TV series. Netflix didn’t much concern itself with profits; its strategy was to dominate the streaming sector first, in the hope that it would eventually generate huge gains. This made some media observers nervous. “One day soon, the finance gods, they’re gonna wake up and say to everybody, ‘Where’s the money?’ ” one former executive told me. Another industry insider said that “an irrational stock market” gave Netflix the incentive to overspend. “And that tipped the scales in the market and caused peak TV and then too much TV,” they said. But Wall Street valued Netflix more as a tech firm than as a media company, and its stock price continued to rise.

Though traditional media companies knew that they needed to adapt for an all-streaming future, their investors weren’t ready to take too many resources away from cable, which was still a reliable, if dwindling, source of cash. “We couldn’t turn ourselves into Netflix because the lion’s share of our network and even studio revenues came from the cable bundle,” the former Time Warner C.E.O. Jeff Bewkes told James Andrew Miller for his 2021 book, “Tinderbox.” Like many others in the industry, John Malone thought that the only way to compete with Netflix was to join forces against it. “You have to aggregate either through coöperation or consolidation,” he said. In 2018, Discovery made its first major effort at that sort of expansion, purchasing Scripps, which owned HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel.

A.T. & T. saw the acquisition of Time Warner as a way to expand into a new but complementary field; the idea was that customers could stream A.T. & T.-owned content over A.T. & T. networks on an A.T. & T. platform. That deal is now viewed as a disastrous culture clash, between the Dallas-based telecom giant and the “creatives” who made up the teams at HBO, CNN, and elsewhere. The Times reported that in one early meeting, John Stankey, the C.E.O. of WarnerMedia, outlined for his new executives the protocols for communicating with him: no calls on Saturday, no PowerPoints, and as few meetings as possible. (A spokesperson for A.T. & T. disputed this characterization.)

In February, 2021, as A.T. & T. grappled with the media industry’s rapid changes, Zaslav sent a message to Stankey. “I have an idea,” he wrote, adding a couple of golfer emojis and a smiley face with sunglasses.

The two men talked for a couple of hours, and later met at a Greenwich Village town house to discuss a potential transaction. Finally, they brought in advisers and bankers to settle the details of what Zaslav’s team took to calling Project Home Run. The deal officially closed on April 8, 2022. Two weeks later, in what is now referred to as the Great Netflix Correction, the company reported a drop in subscribers for the first time since 2011; it lost roughly fifty billion dollars in value virtually overnight, and Wall Street abruptly abandoned its enthusiasm for companies that spend huge sums on content. Malone and Zaslav had closed their deal just in time.

As the merger took shape, Zaslav went on a Hollywood listening tour. Bryan Lourd and Ari Emanuel, the co-chair of the talent agency C.A.A. and the C.E.O. of the sports-and-entertainment firm Endeavor, respectively, hosted dinners with writers, actors, and executives. The deep state—the managers and agents who make the industry function—remained relatively receptive to him, hoping that he could undo the damage of A.T. & T.’s ownership. Zaslav was solicitous of the old guard. “We talked a lot about the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, about how the business started to really change geometrically,” Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A., told me. “He wanted a foundation, he wanted roots.” Ovitz offered Zaslav some advice: move to L.A. “When people try to run these creative businesses from the East Coast, it was very difficult to do,” he said. “You don’t get the intrinsic feeling.” Zaslav moved to L.A.

He settled into a new office, in a leafy corner of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank—a recessed space where he works at Jack Warner’s old desk. A curving conservatory window opens on trees and a manicured garden. By the window is a sitting area where Zaslav receives guests. There, directly behind his chair, is a picture of him with Malone.

In Hollywood, Zaslav quickly adopted local habits. His Woodland house was under renovation, so he took an apartment at the Beverly Hills Hotel and spent a lot of time at its Polo Lounge. But he did not necessarily acquire the “intrinsic feeling” that Ovitz hoped he would. A well-informed source told me that Zaslav’s team fumbled through easy interactions; at one meeting, they asked painfully basic questions about residuals—long-term payments for reruns, DVD sales, and other repeat airings. Before the merger had even closed, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy piece on Zaslav, and Variety declared him “Hollywood’s New Tycoon.” The presumption that an out-of-towner was going to swoop in and fix everything rankled. There were snobbish dissections of his wardrobe and enthusiastic manner—though people were happy to attend parties in his honor and to take his money.

At the time, Jeff Zucker, Zaslav’s former boss at NBC, was running CNN. Zucker was popular with on-air talent, and the network had secured high ratings with aggressive coverage of Donald Trump’s Administration. Much of Hollywood was similarly resistant to his Presidency. But Malone, a libertarian who had contributed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration, chafed at CNN’s critical tone. During an interview in November, 2021, Malone said, “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists—which would be unique and refreshing.” Zaslav, too, began to talk about the need for CNN to tack to the center. Two months before the deal was finalized, Zucker was forced to resign, for having an undisclosed relationship with another executive.

Zaslav did not interview any internal candidates for the new C.E.O. Instead, he quickly appointed Chris Licht, a longtime producer who had launched “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and run Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. In June, a long profile in The Atlantic portrayed Licht as a feckless and distant leader, whose ham-fisted decision-making led to such embarrassments as a televised town hall with Trump, in which the host struggled to manage the former President’s ad-hominem attacks as a sympathetic crowd cheered him on. Zaslav was portrayed as an intrusive micromanager, trying to move the network toward an ill-defined political center. According to The Atlantic, CNN employees thought that “Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.” Zaslav fired Licht days after the article’s publication. He is still searching for a replacement.

A CNN insider described the network’s prospects as the merger went through: the cable business was dying, but CNN had a devoted enough following that, with time and investment, it might be able to reinvent itself. Staffers saw CNN+ as their best hope; even though its programming was somewhat limited, it might help accustom viewers to streaming news from CNN. But Zaslav killed CNN+ after just a month. Now the future of CNN itself is uncertain. Though W.B.D. vehemently denies that it is for sale, many in the newsroom speculate that it would be a prime asset to sell if Zaslav’s debt-payment plan doesn’t go as quickly as Wall Street demands. Guessing at potential CNN buyers has become a media parlor game. Comcast, the corporate parent of NBC News, is seen as a likely potential partner for W.B.D., but CNN might not survive such a deal intact. If W.B.D. and Comcast merged, they might want to offload one of their news networks. “David Zaslav will be remembered as the guy who squandered the opportunity to take the world’s best-known news brand and transition it into a digital future,” the CNN insider said. “Instead, he took the massive yearly profits that CNN has, and used it to pay down debt for this bizarre, complex, convoluted, debt-driven merger.”

But CNN is only a small part of W.B.D.’s business, and of Zaslav’s mandate. “Whenever I talk to David, the first word out of my mouth is, ‘Manage your cash,’ ” Malone said on CNBC last November. Cash generation, he added, “will ultimately be the metric that David’s success or failure will be judged on.” In fact, bonuses for W.B.D.’s top executives this year are officially tied to the company’s cash flow, along with debt reduction. “If you’re an investor, you love David Zaslav,” the former Discovery insider said. “He is a great businessman. If you put a number out, he’s going to make that number.” But, the insider added, “he’s a tractor who will run you down to get to that.”

This spring, Zaslav gave a commencement address at Boston University, where he attended law school. Wearing a red academic robe and sunglasses, he spoke dutifully of the five things he’d learned along the way. “Some people will be looking for a fight,” he warned graduates. “But don’t be the one they find it with.” Outside, the Writers Guild had assembled a picket line. A small plane circled overhead, trailing a banner that read “David Zaslav—Pay Your Writers.”

On Twitter, a writer named Annie Stamell poked at the new C.E.O.: “All we want is 2 Zaslav salaries for 11,500 WGA members, is that really so much to ask?” Two days later, Zaslav and the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter hosted a party together at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, near Cannes, to celebrate a century of Warner films. The two were photographed in near-identical blue button-down shirts and cream-colored jackets, amid bottles of Dom Pérignon. Zaslav told a reporter for New York magazine that the party was for “our best friends, and our real friends, you know, no assholes.”

Zaslav was not alone in failing to project empathy. This July, as executives gathered for the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Bob Iger spoke in an interview about Disney’s initiative to control costs by “spending less on what we make, and making less.” This was a terrifying prospect for the creative class, but Iger dismissed the striking writers and actors: “There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic, and they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing that is quite frankly very disruptive and dangerous.” Disney had recently renewed Iger’s contract through 2026, at a rate of thirty-one million dollars per year. Fran Drescher, the sharp-tongued president of SAG-AFTRA, likened him and his fellow-C.E.O.s to “land barons of a medieval time.”

For writers and actors, streaming has meant a steep drop in residual payments, which once sustained them during career dry spells or made them rich if they created a hit. SAG-AFTRA has said that it wants its members to receive two per cent of the revenue that shows generate from streaming platforms, and wage increases to keep pace with inflation. The studios had put forth a proposal they claimed would offer the union a billion dollars in increased wages and residuals. But, as the Hollywood labor writer Jonathan Handel noted, that works out “to just $30 million per year per company”—roughly a single year’s pay for Iger or Zaslav.

Twenty months after Zaslav was declared “Hollywood’s New Tycoon,” it feels as if the town has turned against him. “He’s feeling the backlash,” as the former media executive put it. He has no choice about servicing his company’s debt. But, the executive went on, “human nature would say the other objective is to prove that you are the mogul. Five years from now, you want to be remembered as someone who helped rebuild the movie business.”

Warner Bros. studios are struggling, despite the billion-dollar success of “Barbie.” Zaslav likes to declare that the company has thirty-five to forty per cent of the world’s most valuable intellectual property—it just needs to take advantage of it. For more than a decade, Marvel’s superhero franchises have dominated the industry, while Warner’s equivalent, DC Studios, has struggled to keep up. Zaslav and his team hope to recruit the director Christopher Nolan, who made a string of successful movies before leaving Warner during A.T. & T.’s ownership. But some in the industry fear that Zaslav’s involvement in the movie business is distracting. Kenneth Lerer conceded that the hands-on instinct he sees as one of Zaslav’s strengths “does have some negatives with the Hollywood establishment, because you go to him, complain to him—he always jumps in. If David would jump in less, I think that’d be helpful to him.” A recent Variety feature on Warner Bros.’s new co-chairs, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, noted that Zaslav showed up at the interview and snapped a “photo of his film chiefs being interviewed, like a doting dad at an amusement park.”

The studio and the strikes are only one problem Zaslav and other executives must solve. Media C.E.O.s know that the loss of cable earnings can’t be replaced by the streaming model that Netflix and Amazon helped establish. Seventy per cent of W.B.D.’s revenue is tied up in its cable channels, while its television and movie studios account for roughly thirty per cent. Even as Zaslav works to establish himself in Hollywood, the vast majority of his cable assets are based in New York and Atlanta. He needs to squeeze them for cash while managing their demise. (A spokesperson for W.B.D. said that Zaslav wanted to devote time to his Hollywood businesses during the first year but now lives between New York and L.A.)

One of his biggest looming deals has to do with renewing TNT’s right to carry N.B.A. games. Live sports are a primary reason that consumers keep their expensive cable subscriptions, and so networks risk losing customers if they lose the contract. “It’s like heroin,” Malone once said. “You’ve gotta keep buying and buying it.” Disney and W.B.D. currently own the N.B.A. rights, but it’s likely that a streamer that wants in on the sports market will join the bidding, driving up the price. “David’s not going to want to say he lost the N.B.A.,” one close observer of the deal said. “He’s paying $1.2 billion per year right now. He will pay more than $1.2 billion to keep the N.B.A., with possibly fewer games.”

Zaslav and his team have blamed some of their difficulties on the condition of WarnerMedia. At an investor conference, Zaslav complained that some of the company’s assets had turned out to be “unexpectedly worse than we thought” before the deal closed. The former Discovery employee told me, “We knew the debt would be bad. When the number came out, we were stunned and scared.” W.B.D. went so far as to investigate whether A.T. & T. inflated the projections that underpinned WarnerMedia's value. Last summer, A.T. & T. paid W.B.D. $1.2 billion. (The spokesperson for the company said that this payment reflects a standard post-close adjustment.)

Whatever the cause, W.B.D.’s first year was rocky. Zaslav’s plan to cut costs began almost immediately and brought a stream of bitter reactions. Among other things, the company started removing little-watched shows from HBO Max, including the cult hit “Westworld.” “We don’t think anybody is subscribing because of this,” Zaslav said, of the removed programming, in November, 2022. “We can sell it nonexclusively to somebody else.” Writers, showrunners, and actors complained of a disorganized process of informing them about the future of their shows. “People who you would normally talk to have been fired, moved, or quit, so no one has any idea how to get the information they need right now,” the showrunner and animator Owen Dennis wrote on Substack. “Never cheer for a corporate merger, they help about 100 people and hurt thousands.”

Though jobs were slashed across the company, one of the biggest controversies came from Zaslav’s decision to cut the budget at Turner Classic Movies, laying off several senior executives in the process. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bryan Lourd and Steven Spielberg warned ahead of time that the cuts would attract outrage; the film industry cherishes its own history, and particularly the history of its greatest hits. Zaslav apparently complained that outsiders were telling him how to run his business.

After the cuts were announced, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson joined a Zoom meeting with Zaslav to plead the network’s case. Zaslav offered a concession, moving the oversight of TCM from the cable division to Warner Bros., run by the Hollywood veterans De Luca and Abdy. One TCM executive got his job back, too. The directors, seemingly pacified, released a statement: “We have each spent time talking to David, separately and together, and it’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him.”

Some saw the incident as a demonstration of Zaslav’s impetuous decision-making. Others argued that, even though Zaslav craved acceptance in Hollywood, he knew that his mandate was to save money. On the ledger, W.B.D. seems to be making progress. This year, it launched a new streaming service, Max, which mixes premium HBO content with some of Discovery’s more down-market shows. Max allows subscribers to pay less in exchange for agreeing to view ads—a model that Netflix adopted last year—and increased streaming ad revenue by a quarter in its first few months, even as subscribership dipped. W.B.D.’s latest quarterly report says that it lost three million dollars on streaming, compared with a loss of five hundred and fifty-eight million dollars in the same period last year. Though Hollywood is in crisis, W.B.D. has found a benefit to the strikes: you spend less money when you aren’t making anything. Gunnar Wiedenfels, the C.F.O., announced in August, “Should the strikes run through the end of the year, I would expect several hundred million dollars of upside to our free cash flow.” Since W.B.D. was formed, Zaslav has paid down nearly nine billion dollars in debt. Some $47.8 billion remains.

Those sympathetic to Zaslav’s project of “rationalizing” the economics of streaming think that the anger at him is unfair. “We are all little boats navigating uncharted waters,” Alan Horn, the former Warner Bros. C.O.O., said. “The issues we’re having right now in the middle of a strike are exacerbated by the fact that no one quite knows exactly how to get to a ‘new normal.’ ” By this argument, Zaslav is being blamed for an agonizing but inevitable period of adjustment. “He said, ‘Look, this company needs restructuring so that it may be as healthy as possible in the long term. That requires some short-term actions that are painful,’ ” Horn said.

Barry Diller, who spent “a great deal of the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties” at Robert Evans’s Woodland estate as the C.E.O. of Paramount Pictures, has known Zaslav since his NBC years. He’s optimistic about Zaslav’s project, if not entirely clear on what the future holds. “W.B.D. will make it through. I do believe that,” Diller said. “What comes out on the other end is, frankly, up to the gods.”

The actors and writers on the picket line are less sanguine. Even as they protest, they need Zaslav and his peers to help Hollywood make sense again: to calibrate a streaming system so they can make both art and money, if in a more modest way than they used to. But Zaslav has enough to do solving the problems of his own company.

Collage illustration of David Zaslav

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photograph by Steve Mack / Everett / Alamy

[generalalmondbagelflower]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: THREE SIXTY SIX Men Golf Shirt.

[jimmydemaret]

Fila Big and Tall Shirts for Men Cotton Polo Shirt Performance Short Sleeve Golf Polo

Fila Big and Tall Shirts for Men Cotton Polo Shirt Performance Short Sleeve Golf Polo

Top Shoppers Choice 6x Golf Shirts. Fila Big and Tall Shirts for Men Cotton Polo Shirt Performance Short Sleeve Golf Polo.

6x Golf Shirts – Now Discount Price [price_with_discount]

Off Season 6x Golf Shirts, Fila Big and Tall Shirts for Men Cotton Polo Shirt Performance Short Sleeve Golf Polo.

USD$20.99

  [ad_1]

Fila Big and Tall Shirts for Men Cotton Polo Shirt Performance Short Sleeve Golf Polo

[chickensarentcheap]

Best Part of Me -Chapter 35

Warnings: none

Tagging: @innerpaperexpertcloud​, @alievans007​, @c-a-v-a-l-r-y​, @ocfairygodmother​

“Did you consider it? Even for a split second?”

He can’t get those words out of his head; playing on a continuous loop. Eating away at him and burrowing into every inch of his already fractured and troubled mind. It’s the insinuation behind them that hurts more than anything; the fact she’d even think that he’d be capable of something like that, as if it somehow made a difference that they’d only known one another for five days.  She wasn’t a stranger; they’d been sharing a bed, exploring each other's bodies and both enjoying and pleasing one another as much as possible. They’d been each other’s confessionals as well; sharing those deep, dark and -and sometimes shameful- secrets that they’d kept buried for years and never told a single living soul. It was the first time he’d felt THAT comfortable with someone; able to easily and effortlessly let his guard down and show her the different sides to him. Not just the hardened mercenary covered in scars and tattoos; the one with a drinking problem and an addiction to pain meds, weighed down by a lifetime of baggage.  He’d found himself smiling and laughing again; genuine, not the forced smiles and laugh that he’d perfect over the past thirty-five years of his life.

By the middle of the third day he’d realize that maybe it was more than just two lonely and broken people drawn to each other through similar painful circumstances and a job they used as an escape from their shitty realities. He liked having her around. Not just in those early morning hours when he’d wake up to that soft, warm body next to him in bed. But when he’d look at her from across the room as she sat at the table by the window; both feet up on her seat and knees tucked tightly to her chest, headphones on and eyes narrowed in concentration as she worked on her laptop. Or when he’d come back to the room after grabbing food at the market and she’d greet him with that brilliant, beautiful smile that made her eyes sparkle. He just liked her being there; hearing her voice and seeing her face and breathing in the soft, sweet scent that lingered in her hair. Most importantly, he didn’t feel judged; she didn’t look at him with disgust or pity. She understood his job and the brutality and violence that came with it; she knew what he was capable of and the lives he’s taken over the years.   None of that had bothered her. She ‘got it’. In a way no one else ever had.  

It had been his side to see if there was more to it...more to THEM. Suddenly feeling as if there was actually something to forward to after Dhaka; something...someone...who could keep him going even during the most difficult and darkest of days. Sure, the sex was good. It was incredible, in fact. But to find someone that understood your life and didn’t hold it against you or judge you for your past mistakes and horrible decisions? That was even better. They’d take some of the money from the Dhaka job and travel; wherever they felt like going or wherever they just ended up. And she’d spent time in Australia; willing to travel to The Kimberley and stay in that rundown little shack. And he’d head to Colorado; looking forward to seeing the mountains and just spending time with her.  Seeing just...if anything...actually existed between them.  

Only things hadn’t gone according to plan. Everything went to shit, and their entire existences changed. The path becoming much more difficult to tread than either of them could have possibly imagined.

She’d always trusted him. Right from the start. Without question or reservation.  And she’d always told him that he made her feel safe. Protected. During both those early days and the seven years that followed. She’d confused that she’d never felt that way before; not even with the other men that had been in her life. Always relying on herself; her own wits and her own skills and her fierce independence.   She hadn’t realized how much she’d actually wanted that; the feeling of security and, being able to trust someone to that extent, going to bed at night not only knowing that someone would do anything to protect her, but that they were more than capable of doing it. That steadfast faith and confidence in him sometimes the only things that kept him going; knowing that she trusted him and loved him THAT much. Even on the days when he hated himself and wondered if she -and even his kids when they came along- would be much better off without him and his bullshit dragging them down.   She would tell him how ridiculous it was to think that way. That she couldn’t imagine her life without him. That she didn’t just want him there, she NEEDED him there. No matter how hard he made things on her, no matter how difficult he could be to love.  It was the one constant that kept him alive sometimes; knowing that -beyond a shadow of a doubt- she truly felt that way.  

So to hear her ask that -if he’d ever considered giving her up to Asif- had torn him apart inside. He can’t remember anything hurting that much; cutting straight to his core. No physical pain -not even the wounds he’d sustained in Dhaka- inflicting that much damage and agony. It killed him inside; wondering if he’d ever given her a reason to think he’d do something like that. That she doubted he would have done anything -even back then- to keep her safe. Alive. There’d never been a moment where it had seemed like a good idea, her life in exchange for his freedom. For money. And it makes him physical ill knowing she’d ever looked at him that way. That maybe she STILL does.

He forces himself to get his shit together; head down and sunglasses over his as he takes the path to the back of the kids’ school. Leaves and twigs and gravel snapping and popping beneath the soles of his flip flops. It’s not often that they pick the kids up; normally the last Friday of the month was the usual. A routine that they’d gotten into; grabbing the three oldest and driving into one of the other towns on the coast and spending time on their beaches and then going out to dinner. Returning after long after sunset and having to carry exhausted yet happy children into the house and upstairs to bed. Even in the later stages of the pregnancy with Addie they’d tried to hold onto that habit; family time away from the house and the chaos that sometimes ran amok within those four walls. Little moments and memories that their kids would hopefully hold onto it and look back on forty years down the road.  

Going home had been the smartest thing he’d ever done. Not just for himself, but for them. Things calmer and less stressful. The arguing less frequent and much less intense. Before if had been constant; lingering frustration and hostility that lingered under the surface and would build up to the point of exploding. Since leaving Colorado things have improved. Tremendously.  

Until she’d asked if he’d ever give her up a drug lord, that is.

****

The other parents are too chatty. Too nosy. The moms don’t hide the fact they’re checking him out; huddling together in little groups, nudging each other with their elbows, the sly little smiles that tug at the corners of their mouths, the whispers that follow. It’s flattering yet annoying as hell at the same time. The dads are another story; they stare and talk but try and hide it. The women will actually approach. The men will stay their distance. They don’t see the muscles and the tattoos and the scars the same way the ladies too; they see them as intimidating. Threatening, even.  A guy with six inches and sixty pounds -if not more- on them, wandering into their ‘territory’ and taking all the attention away. He’s pretty sure his ‘resting asshole face’ -as Esme calls it- doesn’t help; he doesn’t want to be bothered and he doesn’t try to hide the fact. Maybe the guys see it as arrogance; him appearing overly confident and all the women taking notice.  Suddenly they’re interested in the dad in the jeans and the ratty t-shirt and not on the ones with starchy golf shirts and the ironed pleats in their khakis. He sticks out like a sore thumb and likes it that way. He’s somewhat of a mystery to them; showing up out of the blue six months old with those haunted eyes and the stern face and all the battle wounds that bear evidence of a story to tell. One they’ll never be privy to but will always speculate about.

He plays it for all it’s worth. In his own subtle way. The longer he gives off the intimidating vibe, the longer people stay away from him. He’s not there to make friends. He has enough of those. He prefers his privacy; not allowing anyone outside of his immediate family -and a trusted few- past the walls he’s built up. It’s all way too fucking complicated; his past, what he did for a living, what he’s getting back into. And letting people in means letting them know ALL of that. And that’s something he wants to avoid. At all costs.

“Your Tyler’s dad.”

At first it doesn’t even register that someone is actually speaking to him. Lost in his own little world as she leans against the brick wall the door the kids will come out; one hand shoved in his pocket, the older holding his phone. Attention focused solely on the text messages that his wife has sent since he left the house. Apologetic. Remorseful. The regret obvious in every word she’s typed. He’s not angry; not at her. It’s hurt. Genuine hurt that sits in the pit of his stomach and makes his chest ache. Maybe Gaspar HAD been right; maybe she is his ultimate weakness.  And he sends his own text back. Telling her that he loves her and they’ll talk later. TALK. Not fight. Then turns his attention to the man now standing beside him. A few inches shorter; slim, with tousled and unruly salt and pepper hair and dark skin. Aboriginal; he can see the dark and intricate tribal tattoos that travel up both arms and stop at the sides of his neck.

Tyler grins. “Before I lay claim to him, it depends what he’s done.”

“He’s friends with my boy. Ezekiel. He’s one of the few kids that are. He’s got some issues. My boy. He’s not like everyone else. And the people around here...between you and me...they don’t like anyone that looks different. Or acts different. They’re…”

“Judgmental pricks?” Tyler finishes for him.  

The other man laughs. “I’m glad one of us has the stones to say it out loud. “

“My wife always tells me I’m imagining it. That it’s all in my head.”

“Mine says the same. Now I can go home and tell her that I’m not making it up and someone else feels the same way. Your boy, he’s a good kid. He’s got a huge heart inside of him.  I’ve heard the stories. The way other parents talk. Saying he’s a troublemaker and has behavior issues and all that shit.  He’s just a kid, you know? He’s got a lot of feelings and emotions going in there. He always sticks up for my boy. Always. Never backs down no matter how big the other kids are or how many of them come at him.”

“He’s fearless. And stubborn as hell.”

“Well, I for one appreciate it. Kids like mine...like my Zeke...they have a hard enough life without assholes making it worse. So when kids like yours come around, parents like me take notice. And we wish there were more like him and parents who would raise them like you and your wife are. World would be a better place for Zeke if kids were brought up like that. I just wanted to say thanks. For raising such a good kid.”

Tyler doesn’t know what to say. He’s never been good at accepting compliments; ‘thank you’ always seems so self-serving and fake.  And it’s better to say nothing than come across as either socially awkward or a complete prick.  So he gives an appreciative smile instead; and the other dad returns the gesture with a smile of his own and a friendly pat on the shoulder before wandering off the stand on his own. He sees the way the other parents look at the man; the color of his skin and the wild hair and the tribal tattoos. Australia has a long and sordid history of treating their aboriginals like shit, and even in this day and age the ignorance and racism continue. And he shoves his phone into his pocket and heads over, sidling up beside the other dad, crossing his arms over his chest.

“What grade is your kid in?” he asks. It sounds lame, but you have to start somewhere.

“He’s in special education. He has cerebral palsy. From a stroke at birth. He can speak, but he’s in a chair permanently. Has seizures and some other problems.”

“That’s gotta be rough.”  He doesn’t want to say ‘sorry’; that will come across as pity.  Give the impression that he thinks something is wrong and shameful with having a kid with issues. It is what it is. And every child, with disabilities or not, deserves respect. Not pity. At least in his eyes.

“Thanks for not saying ‘I’m sorry’. I hate when people say that. What’s there to be sorry for? He’s a beautiful kid. He’s happy. He loves and is loved. I wish we could all see the world through his eyes. He doesn’t judge or hate.  He just loves. You have other kids, yeah?”

“Four other ones. Two boys, two girls. Millie’s the oldest. She’s going to be six in a week and a bit. Addie’s the baby; not even a month yet. The one before her, Declan, the doctors thought maybe there was something going on with him. They saw some things when my wife was pregnant with him; at the twenty-week ultrasound. Chromosome issues.”

“Downs?”

Tyler nods. “They wanted us to let them do more testing. To find out for sure. So we could ‘discuss the options’. They actually said that. There were no other options. Not to us. We didn’t need to know. We were going to have him regardless. Didn’t matter one way or the other. It was our kid.”

“And everything came out okay?”

“Well, he’s a ginger and can be a little asshole sometimes, but yeah…” he grins. “...it turned out to be nothing. Like I said, we wouldn’t have cared. It’s our kid, right? Obviously they’re meant to be here. Regardless if there’s something going on or not.”

“Shame some people don’t think like we do. They see kids like them as a burden. Say they’re never going to be ‘contributing members of society’.”

“Yeah, well people like that can go fuck themselves.”

The other man laughs, then holds out a hand. “I’m Anatjari. Everyone just calls me Andy.”

“Tyler,” he shakes the hand that’s offered. “Anatjari. That’s from Pintupi, right?”

“Not many people know that.”

“A mate of mine, his mum comes from the tribe. He speaks a little bit of it. Enough to get by, I guess. Your wife aboriginal too?”

“As white as the driven snot.” Andy laughs. “She was an exchange teacher. From New York City. We met and she never went back. Your wife from here?”

“Colorado.”

“From the mountains and the snow to this? That’s culture shock. How’d a guy from here meet a girl from there?”

“Work. We got contracted out to the same job.”

“Zeke says your boy told him that you used to fight bad people.”

Tyler gives a small laugh. “I guess that’s kind of true. The field I was in, sometimes I HAD to do that. I’d get sent places to sort out other peoples’ messes. Private security, I guess you could call it.  

“Well you’re definitely made for that kind of shit. Doesn’t it bother you? That?” Andy nods in the direction of the group of moms huddled together, staring and whispering.

“A little. They’re harmless though. My wife would kill them if they ever tried anything. She’s small but she’s tough. Definitely puts the fear of God into me sometimes. As much as it embarrasses me to admit that.”

“Your secret is safe with me. It’s the same at my house. You know…” he scuffs the toe of his runner against the concrete. “...you didn’t have to do this. Come over and talk to me. I’m used to being the black sheep.”

“I know. And I didn’t do it because I felt I needed to.  I wanted to. I don’t make friends easily either. The wife says I give off bad vibe. That I scare people.  Something about the look on my face and my size. Makes me intimidating, apparently.

“I don’t know,” Andy shrugs. “You seem pretty harmless to me.”

Tyler chuckles. “I think that’s the first time anyone’s ever called me that.”

He’s been called many things over the years. Brutal. Violent.  Aggressive. Even merciless and savage.

But never THAT.

****

“Daddy!” Millie is the first to greet him, sandals already in her hands as she races toward him in her bare feet; ponytail swinging wildly from side to side. And he scoops her up as she throws herself at his legs, pressing a kiss to her cheek and then settling them on his hip. “I missed you!”

“I was only gone one day.”

“Doesn’t matter. I still missed you. Look…” she gives a wide smile and points to the gap in her bottom teeth. “It finally fell out! At lunch. I went to eat my apple and it just popped out!”

“Didn’t swallow it, did you? Don’t want a whole bunch of teeth growing in your tummy.”

“That’s not what would happen!” she says, and then giggles when he tickles her stomach. “I put it in my pocket. So I can put it under my pillow tonight.  I was worried you wouldn’t be there. That maybe you had to stay away longer.”

“I said I’d be here and I’m here. Have a good day? Punch anyone in the face?”

“Nope.  No one tried to dull my sparkle today.  It was an awesome day,” she enthuses, as he sets her on the ground. “Hi Zeke’s daddy,” she chirps to the man standing beside him.  

“You already know each other?” Tyler asks.

“Everyone knows Zeke’s daddy. He’s awesome. He comes sometimes and teaches us art and tells us really cool stories about his people. And Zeke is awesome too. He’s so cute and so sweet and gives the best hugs.”

Andy gives a sheepish smile. “I think he might have a bit of a crush on her.”

“He’s so cute!” Millie gushes. “He’s coming to my birthday party. He loves to swim, right Zeke’s daddy?”

“He does,” Andy confirms. “And he’s very excited. He’s never been invited to a birthday party before.”

“Other kids are such dicks,” she declares. “Mommy and daddy said that we’re all the same and we should love each other no matter what we look like or what we can or can’t do. That’s the stuff that makes us different and unique and not boring. No one wants to be boring.”

“You are definitely NOT boring,” Tyler tells her, as he fixes her hair clips and tightens her ponytail.  “No one can ever say that about you, that’s for sure.”

“That’s Zeke right there!” She excitedly announces, and points to where her brothers are coming across the school yard; one on either side of their friend as he’s being pushed in his wheelchair by a one on one aide.  

At first it makes Tyler feel sad; a hint of pity that nearly brings tears to his eyes and a lump to his throat. Pissed off at a fucked up world that would do something like that to an innocent kid. But he notices the brilliant smile and the look of pure adoration and love in his eyes as he looks at one boy, and then the other.  The way the twins hold his hands and laugh and talk to him as if he’s just like any other kid on the playground.  

“Daddy!” Tanner breaks away first, tossing himself into his father’s waiting arms. “You’re here! I know you’d be here. I missed you!”

“I missed you too, mate.” He lays a hand on the side of Tanner’s head and presses a kiss to his temple. “I said I’d be here. I wasn’t going to let you guys down. I’ll never do that. Not anymore.”

“Hi daddy!” TJ greets. “This is Zeke. He’s my best friend. Other than Tanner. Zeke, this is my dad. Remember how I told you that used to beat up bad guys? He’s crazy big and crazy strong but I promise he’s not mean. Not unless you’re a bad guy. And you are definitely not a bad guy.”

Tyler gives an uncomfortable laugh. “Okay, no one needs to hear that. About me beating up bad guys. You ready to go? We gotta go and get something for mommy. A surprise.”

Millie frowns. “Did you do something wrong?”

“I can’t buy your mom something just because? Maybe I just love and want to buy her things. Ever thought of that?”

His daughter scoffs. “That’s not how you work.”

“Well maybe I’m changing how I work. Don’t be such a smart ass.”

“You helped make me. I’m half you. Where do you think I get it from? Blame yourself.”

Tyler smirks, then turns to Andy. “Almost six going on sixteen. I’m dreading actual teenage years with this one. You guys wanna come with? We’re just going into town. Grab some ice cream. You’re more than welcome to tag along.”

“Yes! Please?! Millie grabs a hold of the other man’s arm. “Please Zeke’s daddy? It’ll be fun. And Zeke will love hanging out with us outside of school.”

“I warn you,” Tyler says, as he slings their three backpacks over his shoulders. “They’re a little feral. I blame my wife. Just don’t tell her I said that. She has a different take on who made them that way.”

“Ice cream sounds good,” he enthuses. “Be nice to have another dad to talk to. One that isn’t...I don't know…”

“A total prick?”

“That’s pretty much what I had in mind.”

“Wait until you get to know me, mate. I’m not as harmless as I seem.”

****

“Daddy made a friend!”  Millie announces two hours later, as she bursts onto the back patio, already clad in one of her many bathing suits and a Strawberry Shortcake towel hanging off her head.   And she stands beside the chair her mother sides on as she nurses the baby, pressing a kiss to Esme’s lips in greeting.

“A friend, huh?” She gives Tyler a wink as he lingers in the doorway, waiting for the twins to rush past him before stepping outside. And they each give her a kiss before rushing off with their sister; racing towards where Ovi sits with Declan in the surf.  “An imaginary one or…?”

He smirks. “Now I know where your daughter gets being a smart ass from.”

“It’s definitely not from me,” she says, and he stands behind her chair, giving the nape of her neck a gentle squeeze before dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “So real? Fake? Who’s this friend?”

“A real one. And he’s not a friend. Just some guy that started talking to me while I was waiting for the kids.”

“You know it’s okay to have friends, right? Not everyone is out to get you, Tyler. Don’t you think it would be nice to have someone to talk to you?”

“I have you talk to you.”

“Who do you talk to when you’re pissed off and you need to vent about me?”

“Myself mainly,” he says, grimacing as he lowers himself into the chair across from her.

“Because THAT’S totally healthy.”

“You don’t piss me off enough to make me bitch to other people about you.”

She arches a brow. “Not even today?”

“We’re not going to talk about this right now, are we? I really do not want to talk about this.”

“When is there a better time?”

“I dunno. When the kids go to bed.  When we actually can pay attention to what the other one is saying. And I don’t want to fight. I’m just putting that out there now. We’re supposed to be working on getting past shit like that; fighting all the time. And I thought we were doing pretty good.”

“We have been.  Things have a lot better since we moved here. In New Zealand, for that matter. We’re more relaxed and less stressed and we don’t have people sticking their noses in our business all the time. One fight is not the end of the world. We used to fight about everything. Even stupid, small shit.”

“Yeah…” he stretches his right leg out, attempting to ignore the pain in the knees as he places his foot in her lap. “...I don’t miss those days.”

“I don’t know. The making up was always fun,” she teases, and he grins.   “I think Declan’s here because of a fight, actually. Millie might be too, but we can’t say for sure which of the five days it happened on.   If it was the first day…”

“That wasn’t a fight.”

“Bullshit it wasn’t.”

“That was you not listening to a goddamn word I say and doing what you want.”

“Okay for the record, I didn’t listen because I thought your rules your stupid and no man was going to tell me what to do no matter how hot he was. Second, that was a fight. You were doing all the yelling, but that was definitely a fight.”

“You and I remember that day very differently.”

“I think you have selective memory. Because you were pissed, and you were losing your shit. Which makes it a fight.”

“Isn’t a fight two sided?”  

“You grabbed me by the throat.”

“You liked it.”

She smirks. “Okay, I’ll give you that. But that was definitely a fight and it’s very likely that that’s when Millie was conceived. And if it was, then your swimmers are very lucky and very determined. That’s all I’m going to say.”

“I am telling you. Super sperm. I know you don’t believe me, but I think that’s proof right there. First day, first time. Boom. Got shit done.”

“You are so romantic,” she chides.

“There was nothing romantic about those five days.”

“No,” she laughs. “There wasn’t. But it was hot though. Crazy hot.”

He nods in agreement, then leans his head back against his chair; eyes closed, hands clasped and resting on his stomach.

“I didn’t mean it,” she says, as moves Addie up onto her chest, one hand on the back of her head, the other rubbing her back. “I especially I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I wasn’t trying to make it sound like you would do something like that. I...”

“Stop, okay? Not right now. Later.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just...”  

“Baby...” he cracks his eyes open and gives her a tight-lipped smile. “...not now, okay? Please.”

“Okay,” she agrees with a sigh, and then looks out towards the water; watching as the three oldest kids take turns on who gets to be the one Ovi hurls into the water.  “Chloe left,” she announces.

“What? When?”

“This morning. I guess they got into a big fight last night. About the job. She’s mad that he cut ties with Nik. I guess she was getting really tight with her.”

“Oh, for fuck sakes. That’s what pissed her off? How old is she again?”

“I told her that Nik is not the person you want to get close to. That she’ll fuck you over the first chance she gets. She spent seven years trying to do it to me. Ovi tried explaining how things are better this way; you running the business and him working for you. I don’t think she realizes just what that world is like. She’s got some romanticized view of it. Like it’s some exciting, amazing life where the good guys always win and survive. I told her that I’ve seen a lot of good people die. G, Saju. Just for starters.”

Tyler nods in agreement.

“And you. Well, almost you.”

“I wasn’t a good person. Not then. I don’t even know if I am now.”

She frowns. “Don’t do that, okay? You’re not the horrible person you think you are. You made some shitty decision and you had to do some bad things. To BAD people. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t deserve to be.”

“I’m here because YOU thought I deserved to be”

“I didn’t think it. I knew it.  You didn’t die that day because you weren’t meant to die.  If you were supposed to be dead, you would be. And you can’t convince me otherwise.”

“Well for what it’s worth, I’m glad you did what you had to do to save me. Even though I know it fucked you up.”

“Seeing you like that is what fucked me up. Not doing what I did. And can we not talk about this?” Tears well in her eyes. “I hate talking about this. About Dhaka. Because it brings it all back and I just can’t deal with that. I thought by now I’d be over it and I could talk about it and think about it. But I can’t. I just can’t.”

Pushing his chair away from the table, he stands; limping as he walks around to where she sits, slightly wincing as he crouches down alongside of her. “Look at me...” he gently orders, one hand on her knees, the other reaching up and settling on the back of her neck. “...look at me.”

She obliges.

“I am right here.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because sometimes I’m not so sure. It’s like we’re right back there. Going through everything all over again. Like we never left.”

“I’m just having a hard time,” she admits. “Things are happening so fast and with the business. I didn’t expect things to happen THIS quickly. I thought we had some time to breathe before you actually got back into it. At least a couples. A month, even. It’s been two days.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m not even starting anything until after Millie’s birthday. We talked about this. You were okay with it.”

“I AM okay with it. I’m the one who told you to go back. I just didn’t think it would happen so fast. I mean Addie’s not even a month old. She’s still tiny. She’s still new. And now I’ve got crates and bags of weapons and ammo and all kinds of other shit in my garage. And there’s people calling all the time wanting you help them right away.”

“Baby...calm down...I’m not going anywhere for at least a couple of weeks. I told you that.”

“I’m just worried. And I’m scared. I’ve got a new baby and four other kids, and I don’t want to do this alone. I CAN’T do this alone.”

“Esme, everything’s going to be okay. This isn't like all the other times when I went back. Everything’s different now. You don’t need to worry so much. It’s all different. I’m different.”

“I just want you to be careful. I just want you to be safe and come home and...”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he stresses.  “Not for a while. Maybe not ever.” He pushes his fingers through her hair and places his lips against her forehead. “It’s going be okay. There’s nothing for you to worry about, I promise. Alright? Just calm down. Just calm down and trust me.”

“I do. You know I do. It’s other people I don’t trust.”

“I’ve got a lot of good people coming on board. Believe me when I say you can trust them. And you know, something really good happened today. At the school.”

“With your new friend?”

“If that’s what you want to call him.  He was talking to me about our kid. TJ. How he always sticks up for his boy. His little guy’s in a wheelchair and has some issues and...”

“You met Andy. Zeke’s dad.”

“How do you know...”

“Him and his wife used to volunteer at the school on the days I did. That guy is crazy talented. You should see his art. He’s known all over the world, apparently. All aboriginal stuff. Did you meet Zeke too?”

Tyler nods.

“He’s the cutest little guy. And he gives the best hugs.”

“Your daughter said the same thing. Kid must be a player. What’s up with him hugging all the women in my life?”

“It makes me realize how lucky we are,” she says. “We have five beautiful, amazing, healthy kids. And I know it wouldn’t have a difference if there’d been something wrong with Declan. It didn’t matter to you. And I wouldn’t have wanted to go through that with anyone else. But we’re lucky. So lucky.”

“Yeah, we are. And we must be something right if TJ is like that. It means we haven’t fucked them up as bad I thought. At least not yet.”

“You do a pretty good job. I’ll give you that.”

“We do a good job,” he corrects. “I didn’t make those kids alone. And last time I checked, I didn’t give birth to them, so...”

“Makes the thought of a sixth one not seem so daunting after all.”

He grins. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that so soon.”

“I’m just putting it out there. We’ll see how we feel six months from now.”

“I was going to give it a year, but okay...”

She leans forward and presses a kiss to his lips. “I love you and I’m sorry for what I said. I know you said not to talk about it right now, but I can’t help it. I never meant it that way and I don’t even know why I asked you that in the first place.  I just...”

“It’s okay,” he assures her, kissing her temple before drawing her head down to his shoulder.  

“It’s not okay. That was shitty thing to ask you. I don’t know why I did. Because I don’t think that way about you. I never have. I was just shocked, I guess. I wasn’t expecting you tell me that. I mean, I’m glad you did because you shouldn’t have held onto that for so long and...”

“Baby...” he rubs her back comfortingly. “...you’re rambling. Take it easy.”

“I’m just so sorry. I never meant to hurt you like that.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure I’m the crappiest wife on the planet.”

“You’re far from it. Trust me.”

She pulls away to look at him, smiling through the tears. “You’re so biased.”

“Maybe a bit. But that doesn’t make it less true. And I didn’t tell you because I wanted to protect you. I didn’t think you need to know about it. What good is going to do? Now that you heard all that. Now that you know what Asif wanted and what he was going to do. Nothing good is going to come of it.”

“I just deal with it, I guess. Same way I’ve been dealing Dhaka shit for seven years.”

“Not very well?”

She frowns.

“I’m just saying.”

“Tell me this is going to go away. That one day I’m going to think about it and talk about it without feeling like I’m going crazy. That one day I’m going to wake up and it won’t bother me anymore.”

“You will. One day.”

“I hope so. Because I don’t know how much more of it I can take.  How much longer I  can go with it bothering me like this.”

“It’s going to be alright,” Tyler promises, then presses a kiss to her forehead and once more draws her head down against him. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

It sounds good. Even to his own ears. But he can’t stop that feeling of dread that forms in the pit of his stomach. There are so many unknowns; answers he needs but can’t seem to find. No matter how hard he tries.

[bloodyknuckles]

darling, let’s get old.

hey, losers! welcome to my crib! 

anyway, i wrote an entire fic in three days and here it is. it’s a proposal fic cause i love myself uwu

enjoy!

read on ao3 here

[continue under the cut]

Your first date is a bit of a mess. It’s at a little diner in the rundown part of town where the two of you get burgers and fries that are too greasy, but are so good. It’s a place you suggested, a place you’d always came when you were a kid, and the bright neon sign that reads The Primordial Diner sets up the whole sixties aesthetic. You’d known Terezi since seventh grade, and you hadn’t really talked to her until ninth grade. You’d always thought she was cute, and you’d finally gotten the balls to ask her out a week before. You’d scheduled Saturday at six p.m. and you’d lived up to that promise. You may have shown up ten minutes early, but Terezi doesn’t need to know that. And no, for the record, you are not nervous. You are definitely not nervous.

When Terezi finally makes her way into the diner, she’s in a bomber jacket and skinny jeans. You can’t see her shoes, but they’re probably her atrociously bright red Vans. When you straighten up and wave at her, she squints and waves back, heading your way. She easily flops into the booth seat in front of you, lacing her fingers together and laying her chin on them. Her short hair is curly, in a cute messy way. You want to play with it. Her worn shirt is tucked into her jeans. You can spot a few small holes in it, and there are bound to be some in the back, maybe larger than the small ones in the front. She’s wearing her bright red glasses, and it seems Terezi tried to style her outfit around the glasses. You’re wearing your old ‘lucky’ jacket, along with some pretty worn jeans. You don’t really remember what shoes you put on, but you’re pretty sure you’re wearing your boots. They’re soft, old, and worn, but you can’t really bear to go anywhere without them.

“Hey,” Terezi says. You smile and wave at her.

“Hey,” you say. It’s a little awkward. The two of you have been friends for three years at most now, and you didn’t ever really think you’d get this far with her.

“How long have you been here?” she asks, a smile gracing her face. Your cheeks flush.

“I got nervous, so about ten minutes or so,” you say. She lets out a tiny laugh.

“I know. I thought I was going to be late, so I got here early too and I’ve been sitting in my car since five-thirty. I saw you walk in,” she says. You snort.

“Thank god, I’m so glad I wasn’t that weird person and just got in here early for nothing,” you say. Terezi laughs again, lifting her hand to her nose as if trying to hide her mouth. Her shoulders shake as her head faces downwards.

When the waitress asks for your drinks, you’ve warmed up to each other, warmed up to the idea that this is actually a date. The conversation is flowing smoothly and the two of you are being so loud you think you might get thrown out of the diner.

“Oh my god, you’ve never been to a fucking Target?” you say, a note of disbelief in your voice. Terezi nods.

“Yeah! I’ve never been to a Target before!” she says, cackling. She’s scrunched up completely, a leg in her seat and an arm over her stomach. Her glasses are slipping over her nose and she looks absolutely stunning like that.

You establish in that moment that you like making Terezi Pyrope laugh.

The second date is less awkward. You pick her up at her house, where she says bye to her mom and shoves herself outside the door as fast as she can. You’d tried to clean your car before she came over, and you’d thought you’d done a pretty good job. As soon as Terezi enters the car though, you feel self-conscious and begin to fiddle with the Mountain Dew bottle in your cup holder. Your hair is properly curled and brushed, not the messy shit you usually leave it in. She seems to take notice.

“I like your hair,” she says.

“Thanks,” you say. The ride to the arcade is quiet besides the low hum of the radio. It’s some pop station you don’t like, but you’re too nervous that Terezi will make fun of your music taste if you connect your Spotify. You’re tapping your fingers on the console and very gently, almost hesitant, as if she’s scared, Terezi lays her hand on top of yours. You glance over at her, not turning your head, and lace your fingers together.

When you arrive at the arcade, it’s a little less packed than you expected. You head to the Pac-Man game, which you’re not that good at and you’re praying that Terezi isn’t either, and slot some quarters in. You make it pretty far, about thirty-two levels before you ever die, and Terezi is rolling on the balls of her heels in excitement. She’s hung her glasses on her shirt, and her eyes are so brilliantly bright blue-green that they’re breathtaking.

“You chose a game I’m good at! Hell yes! Eat ass, Serket!” she says. You let out a cackle. Terezi makes it ninety-three levels before losing even a single life, 102 before losing her second life, and 201 before losing her final life. You gawk at her as she smiles triumphantly. Her tiny frame is relaxed and proud, and you can tell it in the way she stands. Usually, she’s turned in more, shoulders sunk in, posture slouched; now her chest is puffed out and her she’s standing taller. Her shoulders are broad and out, and there’s a wide smile on her face. The award-winning smile on her face is better than anything you could win in this entire arcade, as cheesy as that is to say.

You roam the arcade for about two more hours before you head to a pizza parlor not too far from the arcade. When you enter the parlor, the cold hits Terezi harder than it does you. She’s not wearing a jacket, you slip off the bright yellow hoodie you’re wearing and hand it to her.

“No, I can’t,” she says, pushing it back to you.

“No, seriously, dude, I’m not cold. Take it,” you say. Unsurely, she takes it. When she slides it on, the sleeves hang down low and the sweatshirt swallows her down to her mid-thigh. You grin and pull her into your side, where she softly laughs and buries her face into your side. This is something you could really get used to.

On the third date, when you’re sure that you’re absolutely smitten with Terezi, you decide that you’ll kiss her. It’s extremely hot today for some reason, so both you and Terezi are in shorts and t-shirts. Well, she’s in a t-shirt and you’re in a tank top, and she’s wearing her checkered Vans. You’ve completed your look by adding a hat that doesn’t exactly match the outfit, but you don’t your face to burn. Terezi’s wearing lip gloss, you notice, and you’re wearing the full set of piercings you have in your ear.

“When’d you get your nose pierced?” Terezi asks. Your hand immediately goes to your nose as if you’re shocked she asked the question, but you aren’t. You thought you had told her that you had gotten your nose pierced? You hadn’t exactly been completely sober last night, though, so it’s very plausible that you didn’t tell her.

“Oh, uh, last night,” you say.

“I like it,” Terezi says with a smile on her face. She gets into the passenger's side of the car and you grin like an idiot. It’s a stupid third date, you’re taking her mini-golfing, but you know it’s going to be fun. The mini-golf place is a little in town, and Terezi lives out in the middle of fuck all nowhere, so you connect your Spotify to the radio. Quickly, you select a song.

“Hey, this song reminds me of you,” you say as the song begins to play. It’s “Sedona” by Houndmouth, and you don’t know if Terezi will like it, you still haven’t placed a finger on her music taste, but you’re hoping she does. She taps her fingers against her thigh and reaches for your hand halfway through the song. You interlock your fingers and let the song continue.

When you park, both you and Terezi are balls of excitement. Both of you suck at mini-golf, you do know that. There’s a weird spark of excitement in your chest when you’re waiting in line and Terezi is holding your sweaty palm, and you’re trying not to bounce in place. Terezi is tapping her fingers against your knuckles, and for some reason that makes your heart melt.

When you’re finally able to begin, you let Terezi go first, ever the lady you are.

“You just don’t want to be a sore loser,” she says.

“You, my love, are very correct,” you say, leaning on your club. She lets out a small laugh and you smile.

The rest of the holes are absolutely a disaster. You’re both cackling and tired by the end, and Terezi’s ball has ended up in the water more than once. Your ball ended up in the water once, as has half of your leg, but that’s beside the point. The entire time is a disaster, but it’s the best date you’ve had with her. Yeah, you’re gonna kiss her today.

When you get in the car, you and Terezi have your hands latched over the console and the radio on a very soft hum. It’s a classical music playlist John had made in tenth grade, and you only listen to it when you want to go to sleep. You’re hoping it might lull Terezi to sleep, and it does. When you glance over at her, she’s passed out cold. She looks soft in her sleep, peaceful almost. You think everyone looks soft and peaceful in their sleep, and you’re hoping you do. You’re so high strung during the day, so out there and ready to do anything, that you’d like to look like that when you’re asleep.

When you pull into her driveway, you lean over to gently shake her awake. She stirs, lifting her head from the window and blinking. She looks dazed and confused, and that makes you giggle softly.

“Hey, sunshine. How’d you sleep?” you ask. Terezi looks over at you and your dumb lopsided smile. She grins.

“I’m passing out as soon as I touch my bed,” she says. She reaches for the handle of the car door before you stop her.

“Let me walk you up, I’ll get the door,” you say. She nods and relaxes in her seat for a moment when you get out. After you’ve opened the door, you grab her hand and help her out, beginning the short trek to her door. When you get to her porch, both of you stand there dumbly in front of each other.

“Today was really fun,” she says, smiling. Terezi looks tired and dopey, and that makes your knees feel like jelly and your heart palpitate.

“Yeah, it was,” you say, smiling. Her eyes flicker to her door and then back to your face, right down to your lips.

“Can I, uh, can I kiss you?” you ask, your hand playing with a piece of your hair.

“Absolutely,” Terezi says. So you kiss her, soft and warm, and everything you prayed for. It’s the ideal first kiss, the one you’ve seen in movies; where they kiss on the porch in the soft yellow glow of the porch light. When you pull away, your foreheads are pressed together and your eyes are still closed. You don’t remember when your hand went to her cheek, but it’s there now, and god do you love this.

When you knock on Terezi’s door you’ve got a bloody nose and mouth, and a few more cuts and bruises littered on your arms and face. You don’t remember what sparked the fight with Tinsley, but whatever had, it had gotten particularly violent. You’d roughed Tinsley up more than she had you, maybe that was because you had more experience. Maybe it was because you had much, much more pent-up anger. Your hands are shaking when you knock on the door, you aren’t nervous, but maybe you are. You don’t want Terezi to see you like this but you also don’t want to go back home right now. When you knock, it takes a few moments for someone to answer. Terezi opens the door, she dressed in a pressed white, nice tank top, black pants, and stiletto heels. She doesn’t have her glasses on either, and her hair is nicely curled, and her lips are glossed. She looks like she’s going somewhere important and that makes you want to run.

“Hey, Vriska, hey. What happened?” she asks, walking out the door and holding your face.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, if you have somewhere important to go, I can leave. I didn’t mean to intrude, god, Terezi, I’m so sorry,” you say, stepping away from her hands. Your hand goes to the back of your head. Terezi shakes her head.

“No, no, no, you’re fine, baby. Come on, I’ll get you fixed up, okay?” she says. You nod and try not to cry, heaving a deep breath. She grabs your hand and leads you inside, her heels clacking on the deep colored wood. You wipe at your nose, smearing blood on the back of your hand and your face. The TV is on in the living room, it’s not too loud, maybe at the right volume, but you aren’t really in the headspace to know if it’s good or not. Terezi leads you to a bathroom, lets you sit on the toilet and grabs something from under the sink. It’s a first aid kit.

“This is going to hurt,” she says softly, sitting on her knees in front of you. She’s going to clean your cuts before she bothers washing the blood off, which you don’t understand, but you go with it. She’s poured hydrogen peroxide on a small cloth pad and begins to wipe away at your cuts. You hiss when she gets to your knuckles, the sting of it in your open wounds hurts. When she’s finished, she stands and kisses your head.

“Be more careful,” she whispers into your hair. You close your eyes and nod, letting out a soft shaky sigh.

“I will,” you say. You don’t know if you’re lying or not.

Terezi chooses your fourth date. When she shows up to come get you this time, she’s dressed in bright clothes and has even brighter makeup on. You’re only in jeans and a t-shirt, so when you see her get up you’re very confused.

“Okay, so I assumed you would look like this. I brought some clothes that might fit you and I have my makeup with me, we’re getting you dolled up,” she says. You snort and close the car door as she gets out and goes to the backseat. Your house is much more of a mess than you’d like to admit, and letting Terezi see that makes you a little nervous, but you proceed through it nevertheless. Terezi marvels at your room, which is even messier than your house. You’d tried to clean it up, but there are piles of clothes still on your floor and you’re pretty sure that if you’re not watching where you’re stepping, you’ll step on a d4. Terezi tosses her bag on your bed and flops right beside it.

“Okay, so I brought a lot of things. I want you to go through them, choose your outfit, and then I’ll get you ready,” she says.

“Okay?” you say, but it comes out more as a question. When you decide on something, it’s a rather loud tank top and high waisted shorts. The shirts a bright blue with a few splatters of what you suppose is supposed to be an orange design.

“I’m gonna change,” you say. Terezi nods and heads outside your door. Your changed in just a few seconds, you’ve always been good at getting in and out of your clothes quickly, and you get Terezi back inside. Terezi looks you up and down, seemingly satisfied with your choice.

“Ah, now I get to fuck with your face,” she smiles. She goes heavy on your makeup, mostly on the eyeshadow. The colors are orange and blue, yellow in the corners of your eyes, they’re from her own eyeshadow palette. You’d never own one with colors like that, you only own ones with natural glows. She bops you on the top of the head when she’s finished.

“Alrighty, I’m finished. What d’ya think?” she asks. You open your eyes and look in the mirror. It’s nothing you’d ever usually wear, but admittedly, it looks all right on you.

“I’d probably only ever wear this again once, but it looks good,” you say. She does an okay with her fingers, and you get up. “Now, where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” she says.

She brings you to a roller rink. The colors, much like your outfits and makeup, are bright and colorful. It’s muggy inside and smells like body odor, and you’re sure if you move even an inch that you’ll begin to sweat worse than you already have. Terezi, for some ungodly reason, has her own roller skates. They’re bright red and glossy, and there’s only a little wear to them. You have to get some from the behind the counter, it costs you ten bucks, and while you’re lacing them up, you’re pretty sure that you’re going to slip and fall as soon as you stand up. Terezi is standing and scrolling through her phone, not even wobbly on her feet. Her pink converse are in her hands, and she’s holding them by her laces. When you stand, you nearly slip and grab the chair for support. Terezi slips her phone in her pocket and helps you up.

“Just so you know, I’ll probably be dead by the end of tonight,” you say. Terezi lets out a cackle, tossing her head back. Both of you sit your shoes and phones on a table and skate your way over to the actual rink. You almost fall at least twice to the rink, so you aren’t exactly excited about the prospect of entering it. Terezi, on the other hand, easily glides onto the floor. You gawk at her as you hold onto the wall. Terezi sends you a wink and a smile and skates away, it’s not hard for your eyes to follow her. Her bright pink vest is a show of where she is, and when you finally take a wobbly step onto the floor, she’s standing beside you. She has a hand on your shoulder, and she looks like she can burst she’s so happy.

“If you can’t tell, I love roller skating,” she says.

“I think it kind of clicked as soon as I saw that you brought your own skates, babe,” you say. Terezi lets out a shy laugh. After some time skating against the wall, and Terezi slowly skating beside you, you think you’re ready to let go of the wall. Very slowly, you take your hand off the wall.

“You sure you’re ready?” she asks. You nod.

“Yeah. Besides, you’ll be there to catch me if I fall. If you aren’t there, you know, the floor’s always there,” you say, shrugging. Terezi lets out a loud laugh, and you go a little unsteady, grabbing her arm harshly. She grabs your shoulder and helps steady you even though you make her a little unsteady. She lets out a soft giggle when you huff out a sigh.

“Quit laughing at me,” you say, fake frustration ringing in your tone. You swat at her arm and slip a little, your knee buckling under you. You fall on your ass and let out a loud yelp. Terezi tries to hold back a laugh, but it doesn’t work very well. You get back up, slip a little, and grab the wall in fear you’ll fall again.

“Okay, so maybe I’m not ready to go off the wall yet,” you say, only a little ashamed. Terezi smiles and leans against the wall.

“You wanna take a break?” she asks.

“Does it mean I get to kiss you?” you ask. Her smile morphs into a smirk.

“Absolutely,” Terezi says. You grin and click your tongue, stepping off the floor. You collapse immediately into one of the chairs that are there. Terezi rolls her eyes and licks her lip, a smile gracing her face.

“Ugh, fine,” you say, your head rolling back before you get back up. “I’m taking these skates off as soon as I can though.”

“Aw, that sucks,” Terezi says. She does seem disappointed, like genuinely. You could probably last a little longer if your feet weren’t beginning to hurt and you were sure you didn’t completely ruin the palm of your hand from how many times it’s hit the floor.

“I’ll watch you from afar, dear,” you say, trying to be as endearing as possible. Terezi snorts and her face looks a little happier than it did before. You just want Terezi to know that you’ll always support her, you’ll cheer her on no matter what. You’d support her in a heartbeat.

You’d asked Terezi to prom and she’d said yes. Of course, you’d immediately gotten nervous. You weren’t much of a dress wearer, never have been and never will be, so you opted to wear a suit. When you go to pick Terezi up, she’s wearing a nice teal colored dress, and she’s in flats while you’re in heels for once. Now, you’re already taller than Terezi as it is, she’s pretty short, but you might just be saying that because you’re tall. Wearing heels only makes you much taller than her, to the point where you have to bend down to kiss her.

“All right, this, this right here is gonna be a problem,” she says, pointing to both of you. You quirk an eyebrow up as she turns away and heads upstairs. When pops back down, she’s wearing black heels.

“Now I’m on your level,” she says. You let out a loud laugh, a genuine full laugh, and that makes Terezi smile. Whom you think is Terezi’s mom walks into the room, she’s clad in a nice shirt and leggings with socks to cover her feet. She looks at you and gives a soft smile.

“You must be Vriska,” she says. Her voice is soft, a bit lower than Terezi’s and she places her hand out for you to shake it. Nervously, you grab it and shake, and you think that maybe you held on a little too firmly, but you don’t try to dwell on it. You step back to Terezi and wrap your arm around her. “I’m Terezi’s mother, Nadia.”

“Nice to meet you, ma’am, I’m Vriska Serket,” you say. You think you see Nadia’s face fall into a grimace, but she quickly covers it up with a tight smile. That makes you nervous, so you begin to tap your fingers gently on Terezi’s shoulders. Terezi lifts her hand and places it on top of yours. You look down at her and she gives you a soft, reassuring smile. She mouths ‘It’s all right’ to you, and somehow, you believe it. You take in a deep breath and exhale.

“Let me get a few pictures of you two,” she says. Terezi flushes.

“Mom, you don’t need to,” she says.

“Oh, honey, but I do,” her mom says. Terezi rolls her eyes, but is still smiling.

When you arrive at the school, there are some people still arriving. The tiny girl that’s obsessed with cats (Nepeta you think her name is?) is walking into the school with big, beefy, sweaty Equius. They seemed to be getting along quite well lately, but they were the least likely people you expected to become a couple. Maybe you’re just drawing conclusions. You’re getting sidetracked, so you walk in with Terezi. The music is loud, and it immediately overwhelms you just a little bit. Terezi turns to look at you when you squeeze her hand, you give her a tight smile.

“You okay?” she asks. You nod.

“Yeah, I think I’m fine,” you say, more like shout. Terezi nods and squeezes your hand back.

Tonight’s gonna be a helluva night.

By the end of the year, you and Terezi are thick as thieves. You aren’t going to the same colleges or even moving into the same state, but you’ve decided that you’ll try long distance. Hopefully, you won’t fuck too much stuff up on your own, but you can’t make any promises to yourself or her. The summer before both of you leave is filled with dumb skateboarding tricks and roller skating rink activities. Terezi has taken you roller skating so many times that you’ve gotten quite good at it and own a pair of skates yourself.

The last night the two of you are together, you’re in your room listening to your record player play a dumb slow song. You’re laying on your floor while Terezi is on your bed. Her head pops over the side of your bed.

“Dance with me,” she says. You lift an eyebrow and quirk your mouth into a confused smile.

“Okay?” you say. You begin to sit up and Terezi swings her legs off your bed. You pull her up, and she sets you into some waltz. You aren’t listening to waltz music, so you don’t understand why Terezi chose this dance, but you shrug it off follow her steps. Your mother hadn’t taught you how to classical dance, so you’re a little clumsy and you definitely step on her toes a few times, but by the end of it, the two of you are gently swaying, your bodies pressed together. Her face is pressed into your shoulder.

“I’m gonna miss you,” she says. Gently, you start to play with her hair, tucking your head in it.

“I’m gonna miss you too,” you say. You let out a shaky breath and you feel your eyes start to water. You aren’t going to cry, that’s the one thing you promised yourself you weren’t going to do. Terezi starts to shake in your arms, and you hear her heaving short and deep sobs, and you finally feel yourself begin to break. You continue to sway with her, you silently cry, your hands shaking while Terezi’s entire body shakes in your arms.

“I love you,” she says. That makes you want to freeze, but right now you can’t. You sniff.

“I love you, too,” you say.

You’re eighteen years old when you head off to Pensacola, Florida. You’re going for maritime studies, you’re interest in the ocean and shipwrecks getting the better of you. There are barely any tears when you wish your mother and your sister goodbye, there are only tears when you wish Terezi goodbye.

“I’m gonna call you as soon as I get off the plane, all right? I’m gonna miss you so much, god you have no clue,” you say, hugging her. Terezi squeezes you.

“You bet your ass I can imagine. I love you,” she says.

“I love you too,” you say. When you unwrap yourself from her hug, you kiss her. It’s the last time you’ll get to kiss her in god knows how long, and that’s when you feel yourself start to cry.

“Don’t you dare start crying, you’ll make me start crying then!” Terezi laughs tearfully. You smile and kiss her on the top of the head and wipe her tears. You look her directly in the eyes, a sad smile on your face.

“I love you,” you say. It’s like bidding goodbye to someone you’ll never get to see again, and it seems that in that moment that’s how it’s going to be. You love her so fucking much that it makes you sick to your stomach to leave. She’s going to study law in Boston for God’s sake, got accepted into a fantastic school too. You want to melt in her arms right here in the airport. You give a shaky sigh and one last sad smile before you walk off to your flight. You don’t look back, can’t look back, because you don’t know what you’ll do if you look back.

You’re half-asleep when you land in Florida. The man sitting beside you shakes you awake, and you startle immediately, alarmed that you’re mother or your sister is the one waking you. You bolt up and hit your head on the seat in front of you.

“Goddammit,” you whisper, rubbing your head. The man beside you snorts and you flip him off, jerking your backpack up from the floor and wait until you can unbuckle and get out. You’ve been to Florida about twice in your entire life. You didn’t have too many family trips, mostly because your mother had been trying to save for your college, but most of the money you made yourself went into that damn bank account.

God fucking dammit, you’re shaking again.

When the plane lands, you grab your backpack and as quickly as you can get off the plane. Getting your baggage takes a while, and you almost miss it because you’re too busy messing with your phone. You already hate this.

To: gallowscalibrator@gmail.com Subject: i hate florida!

Okay, so maybe I’m being a little melodramatic, but y’know that’s my thing. Florida only KIND OF sucks, but that’s only because you aren’t here. My roommate is kind of annoying too, and she already seems to have this huge vendetta against me even though I’ve only met her. Her name’s Aradia, and I think she’d be alright if she’d let me speak to her. I think by the end of this we might get along? I don’t really know, and I guess that’s what we’ll find out. If not, I’m gonna see if I can move roommates. Who I think was her boyfriend was here helping her move in, he’s a scrawny little dude. Really tall, though.

Anyway, I don’t miss home all that much. Won’t go into much detail as to why, it’s more of a conversation for real life, but yeah. Really, the only reason I miss home is because of you, but even you aren’t there anymore. God, I’m getting sappy. Okay, I’m ending this email now. I love you, see you soon.

To: arachnidsgrip@gmail.com Subject: Re: i hate florida!

I thought you’d like Florida a lot better than you do. Sorry about your roommate, though. Mine’s pretty cool. Her name’s Kanaya, and she has this big mom energy. I’m pretty excited to start classes, but eh. Kanaya doesn’t talk a lot, she’s got like… the brooding mom persona. She listens to me ramble though, so I think that’s really all that matters. She dresses very nicely too, apparently she’s her to be a designer.

Home seems like it would be nice, but maybe that’s because I haven’t gone out too much. I miss my sister and my mom, mostly my sister. I miss you too, and I can’t wait to see you again. Love you too, see you soon.

To: gallowscalibrator@gmail.com Subject: (no subject)

We haven’t talked in a while. Miss and love you lots, call you soon.

To: arachnidsgrip@gmail.com Subject: Re: (no subject)

Class has been a lot. Love and miss you too, can’t wait.

“Hey.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Could be better, a little stressed.”

“Classes?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, Vriska?”

“Yeah?”

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Not fine.”

“How are you coping?”

“No comment.”

“Vriska.”

“Terezi.”

“Talk to me.”

“Parties. Alcohol.”

“Vriska, you know you can always talk to me, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I love you, don’t forget that, okay?”

“I love you too.”

“All right, I have to go to sleep. I’ll call you sometime soon though. Bye.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Hey, it’s Vriska. Can’t pick the phone up right now, or I’m ignoring you. Call you back when I get the chance!”

“Hey, Vriska, I hope you’re doing all right. Call me when you can.”

“Hey, babe. Are you crying? What’s wrong?”

“There’s so much going on right now, Terezi. I just… I can’t right now? Like I miss you, and exams fucking suck, and there’s just so much pressure to do well on them, I don’t know what to do. Just… Can you just stay on the phone with me? You don’t need to talk or anything, I just… I just want to know that you’re there.”

“Of course! I love you so much, and don’t forget I’m coming over there for winter break, okay?”

“I love you too.”

When you go to the airport to get Terezi, she hasn’t landed from her flight yet. Maybe you’re a little too excited, and maybe you woke up at five am and didn’t quit pacing your room until you woke Aradia up and she threatened to kill you if you didn’t stop. You just moved to sit on your bed and scroll through your phone. You didn’t plan on getting dolled up, Terezi has seen you at your worst so there really isn’t a point to. You walk up to the first Starbucks you see and order a peppermint mocha. You don’t need the caffeine, but you get it anyways as if it’s something that’ll calm your nerves.

Terezi said she’d call you when her flight landed, but holy shit does the service here suck. Nevertheless, the call comes through.

“I’m at the baggage claim, please come get me,” she says. You snort.

”I’m on my way,” you say.

The baggage claim is crowded, and you don’t know if you’ll be able to spot her, but you see the bright red jacket you gave her last Christmas and you know. Her bags are in her arms and she’s got a backpack slung over her back, and she’s typing away at her phone so she doesn’t see you coming. Gently, you lower her phone, and she looks up, about to argue with before she notices who you are.

“Oh my god, Vriska!” she shouts.

“Shh, not so loud,” you laugh. She laughs, and you notice there are tears in her eyes. “God, just fucking hug me already.”

“On it,” she says, wrapping her arms around you. You dig your face into her hair, and she digs her face into your neck. She’s hugging you so tight and you think you might start crying. You didn’t realize how much you missed her until now. When Terezi pulls back, she’s wiping at her eyes under her glasses.

“I swear, if you start crying, I’ll start crying, and right now we don’t need that,” you say, a smile on your face.

Your fifth date, you take Terezi to the beach. It’s windy and a little chilly, but all you’re wearing is a hoodie and capri leggings. Terezi is wearing a mustard yellow hoodie and shorts, both of you had left your shoes in your car. You have your arm wrapped around her, and she’s leaning into your side. You’re walking along the coast, and everytime the ocean hits your feet you shiver from how cold it is. There isn’t much talking on this date, only comfortable silence.

“How often do you do this?” she asks. You shrug.

“Not much. Did when I first got here, do it sometimes to clear my mind. Tried to keep this up as my coping mechanism, didn’t work that well,” you say, taking in a deep breath and run a hand through your hair. Terezi sighs.

“Have you been working on that?” she asks. You give her the so-so sign with your hands and click your tongue.

“Been trying,” you say. You feel Terezi nod against your side.

“That’s good,” she says. She sounds like she’s proud that you’ve been trying, and really, you have. That’s something you should be proud of too, but all your life it’s been drilled into your head that you don’t need to ask to get help. You can always get over things yourself, you don’t need help, you just need yourself. It was just… something your mother and your sister had taught you.

You’d never tell Terezi that, though.

“Yeah,” you say, blowing a strand of hair out of your face. The water washes against your feet.

“I just got here, and I already don’t want to go,” Terezi says. You snort.

“I never want you to leave,” you say. Terezi’s shoulders shake under your arm from laughter, and that makes you smile.

Your sixth date is at a small run-down diner, one the both of you had never heard of. The food is good, and you’re most definitely surprised you’ve never heard of the diner before. It wouldn’t surprise you if none of the people in your own school hadn’t even heard of the diner. Your tossing fries at each other and laughing at your dumb jokes. You’re the only two in the diner beside the workers, so you’re being much louder than you should be, but it’s fun.

“Okay, so, Dave, you remember Dave, right? Okay, Dave decided to just… walk into his party, and note, these boys hate Dave, and there’s Dave! In all his glory! His boyfriend is at his side, and it looks like Stephen is about to deck Dave in the face, but he doesn’t. You know he can’t do that in front of everybody, because most of these people love Dave, so Dave, knowing this, walks up to Stephen and he,” Terezi chokes on her laughter for a second, “he punches Stephen on the shoulder jokingly and goes, “Hey, buddy, how ya been?” and Stephen looks like he’s about to drop dead. Little does Dave know that Finn is coming up behind him, and he pours this entire cooler of ice and drinks on him. Karkat, Dave’s boyfriend, looks like he’s about to murder somebody, while Dave looks cheeky as hell. Dave turns around and he says, “Nice waste.””

You don’t understand why she thinks this is so funny, but as you take a sip of your drink you smile. Curled up in her chair, snort-laughing about some dumb story about one of her best friends, in this weird sixties style restaurant the two of you found while driving around, you realize how madly in love with Terezi Pyrope you are. It doesn’t matter where you are, she’s always there for you and she’s always been there for you. You wonder what it would be like to marry her.

When you’re twenty-three, you and Terezi officially move to Florida and rent a house together. Getting all the things you need for your apartment is a bit of a disaster, both of you get too distracted to actually get stuff done. You end up buying everything you need, and you make your way to a McDonald’s. You and Terezi have the car radio up a little too loud and the sunroof open, screaming the lyrics to this dumb song and it’s so fucking fun. You pull up into the drive through and get burgers and fries, and a large drink, and Terezi gets a frappe. You’re ready to get home and put all your shit up, and lay down to binge watch TV shows.

When you do get to the house and get everything set up, both of you hit the couch. You’re both tired, Terezi has decided to keep her glasses off, blinding her, and she’s sprawled out on your lap. You’re tucked into a corner of the couch, playing with her hair. It’s curled from sweat, and greasy from Terezi running her hands through it and not washing it. She has your free hand tangled in her own, not really making it a free hand anymore, and you’re pretty sure she’s asleep. You remove your hand from her hair to turn down the TV and put something on that you can fall asleep to, and Terezi’s face shifts to a disgruntled look and she pushes her head into your thigh. You do your work quickly, and gently tangle your hand back in her hair. She stops applying pressure and relaxes. You smile, carding your fingers along her scalp, hoping it’ll put her back to sleep. It does, and you feel yourself begin to drift off too.

In those hazy moments, you think Terezi Pyrope looks ethereal. Your hand is still tangled in her hair, and you can see the way her cheeks puff out. Her hand is loosely tangled in yours, and her fingernails are long and you can feel the tips of them through the fabric of your leggings. You can see the tips of her thick, black eyelashes just a little over her cheeks. Terezi Pyrope is beautiful, she’s so beautiful and you can’t believe that this is the girl you’ve been in love with since high school. You can’t believe that this is the girl who’s stuck around with you, high school and on. You’ve fallen in love with a woman you can’t get rid of, and you’re satisfied with that.

When you are twenty-five years old, you decide you’re going to marry Terezi Pyrope. You don’t really know what sparks the idea, but in all honesty, you think it’s been nestled in the back of your brain for quite some time now. Karkat and Dave, two of Terezi’s best friends she’d met in college, are flying down to spend some time with Terezi since they haven’t seen her in awhile, and it’ll be your first time meeting both of them. You’ve heard too many stories about them that it feels like you know and that they’re your best friends, but you’ve really only heard about their good sides. You’re hoping they’ve only heard about your good sides.

You go and scope out rings when Terezi isn’t home, some online (which is much easier to lie about than real life) and some at some Kay’s Jewelers. You haven’t found anything yet, you don’t even have an idea of what you want to get her, so you’re hoping that Dave or Karkat can help you with that. At this point in time, you’re nervous that you won’t get Terezi a good iring, and your biggest fear is that she’ll say no. You think you’d have a panic attack if she said no, or I don’t know, or let me think about it.

Goddammit, Vriska, you’re shaking.

You only have a slight idea of where you’re going to propose. You think Disney World would be good, it may be cheesy, but it is the world's most magical place on earth. Pensacola is a six-hour drive from Orlando, but it’d be worth it. You’d never even been to Disney, for god’s sake, you don’t know what you’re doing. Terezi is the first relationship that’s ever lasted this long, that’s ever actually fucking meant something to you, you can’t fuck that up. You can never fuck this up because you won’t be able to get something like this ever again. This is going to be fine, you tell yourself. Fine.

When Karkat and Dave arrive, it’s hectic. They text you before they arrive, but neither you or Terezi have really cleaned the house, so both of you race around the house trying to shove whatever you can where ever you can. The dishes aren’t done, but you can get to work doing those while Terezi gets Dave and Karkat inside the house.

“No, babe, I’ll do the dishes, make a first impression. Shoo,” Terezi says, promptly shooing you away and making her way into the kitchen. You huff.

“No, I’ll do the dishes,” you definitely don’t want to do the dishes just because you’re nervous. Definitely not the reason you want to do the dishes. Terezi crosses her arms and gives you a pointed look. The hands that were once on your hips fall to your side, and you roll your eyes but smile.

“Fine,” you say. Terezi smiles. You don’t have to wait long for the knocks on your door or Terezi yelling from the kitchen that they’re here, and you nervously make your way to the door. When you open it, you greet the boys with a cheerful smile.

“Hey! Come on in,” you say, opening the door wider. The boys make their way in, marvelling at the house. It’s been spruced up since you started renting it, so you can understand why they’re a little shocked. Terezi pops her head out of the doorway from the kitchen.

“Hey! Vriska will lead you up to the guest bedroom, and you guys can get yourself situated. I’ll be up there in a few,” she smiles and slides back into the kitchen. Before you lead them upstairs, you introduce yourself.

“I’m Vriska, as you know, nice to meet you all for the first time,” you say, putting your hand out for them to shake. The shorter one goes first.

“Karkat Vantas,” he says. His voice is scratchy and low, sounds like he hasn’t used it in a while, but it’s also weirdly loud. The taller one is next, he’s got a pair of sunglasses on and his hair is died this dirty blonde color with his brunette roots growing in.

“Dave Strider,” Dave says.

“All right, let me show you to your rooms,” you say, leading them down the hall. The guest bedroom hasn’t been touched since you and Terezi moved in. You’d done it up, and then you moved on. You knew it wouldn’t be used very often, and you were right. You and Terezi had washed the blankets and sheets a week earlier, and then you left the room as it was again.

“Here’s your room, the bathroom is down there,” you say, pointing down the hall, “and enjoy your stay. Feel free to just… you know, ask us anything.”

“Thanks,” Karkat says. You nod and make your way back to the kitchen. You know that Karkat and Terezi are closer than Dave and Terezi, so when Terezi is out of the house, you’re gonna have to ask Karkat about what you should get. God, getting engaged is a fucking process. You sneak up behind Terezi in the kitchen, snaking your arms around her waist and kissing her temple. Terezi lets out a soft giggle and looks up at you.

“Hey,” you say.

“Hey,” she replies. You go to kiss her on the lips and she turns around completely, putting her hands on your cheeks. When she pulls away, there’s a gentle smile on her face. The moment is ruined when someone clears their throat. Terezi puts her head on your shoulder, standing on her tiptoes to fully see the person.

“Hey, Karkat!” she says, cheeriness ringing through her voice. You let out a huff and pick Terezi up, making her let out a shocked squeal.

“Hey, Terezi. How’ve you been?” Karkat asks.

“Great! How about you?” Terezi asks.

“Just fine,” you can’t see the way Karkat’s smiling, but you know he is.

It’s Tuesday before you can ever get Terezi and Dave out of the house and corner Karkat.

“Okay, so I need your help,” you say, sitting with him at the kitchen table. He raises an eyebrow and leans on the table.

“What could you possibly need my help with?” he asks. It’s a valid question, you’ve proven you don’t need much help around the house, even if it’s made you look slightly like an asshole. You sigh and run a hand through your hair.

“I’m gonna propose,” you say. Karkat goes rigid, completely still for half a second. He looks at you, completely shocked, and he leans back in his chair.

“I… wow, okay. Not what I expected,” he says.

“Really? I’ve been trying to get those two out of the house since you got here so we could have this conversation. Haven’t exactly been that subtle about it either,” you say. Karkat snorts.

“Yeah, that’s true. Now, why exactly do you need my help?” he asks.

“I don’t know what type of ring to get her, or her size for that matter,” you say.

“She’s a size seven in ring size. She’s always talked about how she wants to get her birthstone as her engagement ring, says diamonds are bullshit,” Karkat says.

“Thanks,” you say, smiling. He nods and stands. “Now, uh, can you help me come pick one? You know her best, I think you know what she’ll like best.”

“Like… Right now?” he asks. You shrug.

“Might as well take the time we’ve got, I don’t know when they’ll be back. Even when she’s grocery shopping alone, Terezi spends like two hours in there,” you say.

“She’ll spend like four since Dave is with her,” Karkat says. You nod.

“Let’s get goin’ then,” you say, a devious grin crossing your face. Karka nods, rolling his eyes and clicking his tongue, but smiling nonetheless.

When you get to the Kay Jewelers you are more than overwhelmed. Karkat helps you calm down for a second once you begin shaking, even though you tell him you’re fine and you don’t need his help. Karkat crosses his arms.

“The whole entire reason I’m here is because you need my help,” he says.

“I. You know what? Sh,” you say. Karkat snorts and walks past you, jerking his head forward.

“Come on,” he says. You follow him, heart racing, and as a pool of nerves.

“Are you sure this is a good one? Are you sure she’ll like it?”

“Yes, Vriska, calm down.”

“Karkat, I can’t calm down!”

“Okay, listen: my best friend loves you. If you fuck this up, at all, and I know you haven’t yet, but if you do, I will fuck you up. The only reason I’m putting up with you is because Terezi loves you, she adores you, Vriska, I hope you know that. I don’t think you’re going to fuck up your engagement, and I’m proud of you for that. Don’t make me regret saying that.”

“I’m moved, truly.”

“Good.”

“Okay, so when do you plan on doing this?” Karkat asks from the passenger's seat.

“I was thinking Thursday? I still have to book some shit up, and Pensacola is six hours from Orlando, but still,” you say, hand on the console. Karkat looks at you and you glance at him.

“‘Book some shit up’? What the hell does that mean?” he asks. “Where exactly are you proposing?”

“Disney,” you say.

“Happiest place on earth,” Karkat counters. You nod.

“That’ll be nice,” he says.

“I’m trying to do it before you two leave. You’re her best friend, I think you deserve to see if she says yes or no, you know?” you say.

“Vriska, she’s going to say yes, okay? Don’t doubt yourself. Don’t back out. I can hide the ring in my room for you. It’s going to be alright,” Karkat says. You let out a sigh.

“Let’s hope,” you say.

The days leading up to the proposal are anxiety ridden. Karkat and Dave both know about your plan, and you drop an impromptu Disney trip on Terezi on Wednesday afternoon. Finally, when the time comes around to drive to Orlando, you’re half-asleep and thriving on badly made coffee. When you get the chance, you’ll stop at Starbucks and get yourself something to drink.

Terezi is half-asleep in the passenger’s seat, her hand curled around yours and her knees tucked in the seat, head rolled off the side. Dave and Karkat are also asleep in the back seat, laid up on each other. You didn’t have to leave this early, but you thought it’d be better to get there early than to get there late. Besides, you can always do random shit in Orlando since you have time.

Whenever you do arrive, the four of you fuck around for a few hours. Eventually, Dave and Karkat run off somewhere. They’re going to record the proposal, you’d asked them to, and you hope they’re there at the time you told them to be. Terezi looks fantastic with her windswept hair and the off the shoulder red sweater she’s wearing that’s tucked into some high waisted shorts. She’s wearing a pair of checkered Vans you couldn’t fit anymore and had given to her not that long ago. You’re wearing a loose fitting black button up and some shorts so torn you’re surprised there’s any fabric left along with a jacket. You’re wearing plain black Converse you’d found in the back of your closet.

“Let’s go to Disney Springs,” you say.

“Alrighty,” Terezi says, leaning into your side and following you. You’re getting antsy now, heading to the spot where you’re going to propose. You slip your jacket back on and fiddle with the ring box in your right pocket. When you finally get there, you spot Dave and Karkat fucking around, but trying not to get noticed. You lead Terezi over to a vaguely open spot close to where Karkat and Dave are, and the plan is in motion. You’re going to ask her to marry you.

When Terezi is turned for a moment, distracted by the lights and the night sky, you take the box out of your pocket and get down on one knee. When Terezi turns, she knows exactly what’s happening. Her hand flies to her face, and her eyes are already filling with tears.

“Hey, so, um, I don’t have this big speech planned out, but Terezi Pyrope, you have been the love of my life for god knows how long. I don’t know how long I’ve been planning this like just… in my head, I know I’ve been doing it for a really long time. You’ve always been there for me, always looked out for me even when I’ve done some fucked up shit, and you’re just there to listen. You’re beautiful, Terezi, my love, and I’m sure I know what I’m doing right now. So, will you marry me?” you ask.

“Yes, absolutely, yes I will!” she says, wiping at her eyes and laughing. You get up and slide the ring on her finger, a large smile on your face and tears in your own eyes and you hug her. You squeeze around her waist hard and laugh.

“God, I love you so much,” you whisper into her ear.

“I love you too,” she says.

[sportswearworldwide]

Three Sixty Six Quick Dry Golf Shirts for Men - Moisture Wicking Short-Sleeve Casual Polo Shirt

Three Sixty Six Quick Dry Golf Shirts for Men – Moisture Wicking Short-Sleeve Casual Polo Shirt

[tomatodeals]

Three Sixty Six Collarless Golf Shirts for Males - Fast Dry Quick Sleeve T-Shirt with 4-Method

Three Sixty Six Collarless Golf Shirts for Males – Fast Dry Quick Sleeve T-Shirt with 4-Method

Worth: (as of – Particulars) Product Description Collarless ✓ ✓ ✓ Fast Dry ✓ ✓ ✓ 4-Method Stretch ✓ ✓ ✓ Bundle Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.9 x 10.7 x 1 inches; 8 Ounces Division ‏ : ‎ Mens Date First Accessible ‏ : ‎ July 8, 2021 Producer ‏ : ‎ Ink Slate, Inc. ASIN ‏ : ‎ B098X8RTL9 Button closureMoisture Wicking Dry Match Materials – Designed with fast dry material, these mens golf t-shirts wick sweat…

[wesanjeev]

Where to get designer golf shirts for women

If you’re an associate extended-time player, or maybe new to this sport, due to its nice ability to be fun, you’re about to wish for the right clothes to maneuver in freely. Golf ought to be one all told the foremost fashionable sports out there. women UN agency play unit able to sing their own praises for their trendy aspect as there is the associated ever-expanding alternative of golf outfits for girls with a range of styles to wear from tee to inexperienced. but still, if you decide on pants, a skirt, or shorts, you’re about to desire a women’s golf shirt to team it with to look the part!  Polos unit the classics of ladies’ golf crack, due to innumerable clubs having the principles that ‘shirts have to be compelled to have a collar’, thus it's unceasingly necessary to check the code wherever you will play.  There are loads of ladies golf shirts to decide from, with most brands touting sleeveless styles that leave your arms liberal to swing; but there is to boot an honest alternative of classic vogue polos; long sleeves, and modern dynamic prints. 

Shopping for women's golf shirts has to be compelled to be fun, not a job. In recent years, golf apparel choice for men associated with women has come back an extended approach to include extra fashionable things that seamlessly integrate performance-ready technology. No longer do you have to be compelled to create an alternative from fashion and performance. The foremost effective golf shirts will wick away condition, stretch altogether the right places, feel ultra-lightweight, and still maintain that refined on-course look you'd like. If space unit} shopping for that smart outfit to create your debut into golf or square measure a recent player in wish of a variety of wardrobe upgrades, here unit some favorites from the female golfers in our geographical point.

1. Slazenger school Sleeveless Golf Polo:  

Women's golf shirts this Slazenger school golf high is formed of moisture-wicking material, thus it will keep you cool although you head over par. It is a collar vogue with a hidden quarter cipher. This vogue comes through a sort of color, but users warn that it’s barely tight to tug over your head. Dri-fit golf shirts are also a good choice for women to buy. 

2. PUMA Mock Neck Women’s Sleeveless Golf Tops:  

Women's golf shirts when the sun is shining this painter’s mock neck vogue golf polo is bright and gay for the course. The shoulders have a flexible work, and conjointly the breathable, cozy poly-stretch material is soft and moisture-wicking. The handy cipher that helps you to air is available in mid-afternoon play!

3. Adidas Jacquard Sleeveless Women’s Golf Shirts:

Women's golf shirts this Adidas golf high includes a classy vogue with a curving hem that is sleek and fashionable. it is a mock neck, [*fr1] height collar, and [*fr1] cipher, for comfort and adjustability. This best golf shirt is to boot environmentally acutely aware, as it’s fabricated from recycled polyester. Plus, it's UPF 50+ technology.

4. Nike end Sleeveless Women’s Golf Polo Shirt:

 Women's golf shirts this whole make the classic polo high, and unit customary for his or her fashionable golf attire. This immortal end shirt can be a fight the classic vogue, with a refined white description at the collar and a fragile trademark ‘swoosh’ at the hip. Nike women’s golf shirts have Dri-FIT moisture-wicking technology, to remain you dry and comfortable, and also the sleeveless vogue will offer free movement for even the trickiest bunker shot.

5. CQC Polo Women’s Sleeveless Golf Shirts:

Women's golf shirts look sensible throughout this cute attempting CQC golf high. The sleeveless classic golf shirts kind and fitted vogue provide a clean and tailored finish. it is a buttoned piece of fabric and fold-down collar that's adjustable for comfort. Plus, the fabric has UPF 50+ technology to protect you from the summer sun. Buy such unique golf shirts. 

6. Three Sixty Six quick Dry Polo Shirt:

Women's golf shirts for a relaxed and easy vogue, these women’s sleeveless wild golf shirts by three Sixty Six unit band (so no distractions) and includes a sleek silhouette. but it’s to boot equipped with all the choices you’ll wish for a competitive game: four-way stretch, UPF fifty sun protection, odor-fighting technology, and moisture-wicking properties.

[ruman123blog]

Three Sixty Six Collarless Golf Shirts for Men - Quick Dry Short Sleeve T-Shirt with 4-Way Stretch Fabric & UPF 30

Three Sixty Six Collarless Golf Shirts for Men – Quick Dry Short Sleeve T-Shirt with 4-Way Stretch Fabric & UPF 30

Price: (as of – Details) Product Description Collarless ✓ ✓ ✓ Quick Dry ✓ ✓ ✓ 4-Way Stretch ✓ ✓ ✓ Button closureMoisture Wicking Dry Fit Material – Designed with quick dry fabric, these mens golf t-shirts wick sweat away from your skin and evaporate it, keeping you cool, dry, and comfortable on and off the course.Lightweight, Breathable, and 4-Way Stretch – Made of polyester and elastane…

[generalalmondbagelflower]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Three Sixty Six Performances Wear Golf Shorts.

[jimmydemaret]

Men's Heavyweight Cotton T Shirt – Basic 6.2 Ounce Short Sleeve V Neck Plain Tee Top Tshirts Regular Big and Tall Size

Men’s Heavyweight Cotton T Shirt – Basic 6.2 Ounce Short Sleeve V Neck Plain Tee Top Tshirts Regular Big and Tall Size

Selection for 7xl Golf Shirts. Men’s Heavyweight Cotton T Shirt – Basic 6.2 Ounce Short Sleeve V Neck Plain Tee Top Tshirts Regular Big and Tall Size.

7xl Golf Shirts – Now Sale Price [price_with_discount]

Free Shipping 7xl Golf Shirts, Men’s Heavyweight Cotton T Shirt – Basic 6.2 Ounce Short Sleeve V Neck Plain Tee Top Tshirts Regular Big and Tall Size.

USD$7.48

  [ad_1]

Men’s Heavyweight Cotton…

[biggtowninworld]

Three Sixty Six Womens Sleeveless Collarless Golf Polo Shirt with Zipper - Quick Dry Tank Tops for Women

Three Sixty Six Womens Sleeveless Collarless Golf Polo Shirt with Zipper – Quick Dry Tank Tops for Women

Price: (as of – Details) Product Description Zipper closureMoisture Wicking Dry Fit Material – These collarless ladies polo shirts utilize dry fit material made up of 100% polyester fabric. Keeps you cool and dry during those hot summer months. Perfect for golf, tennis, or any other outdoor activity.Lightweight, Breathable, and Comfortable – These sleeveless golf shirts are super light weight,…

[puttndrive]

This is worth checking out. golf puttndrive https://puttndrive.com/313740/reviews-golf-skechers-men-s-go-golf-elite-nike-men-s-new-tech-essentials-three-sixty-six-golf-shirts-golf-knickers-black-mens-par

[sportswearworldwide]

Three Sixty Six Golf Shirts for Men - Men’s Quick Dry Collared Polo Shirt - 4-Way Stretch & UPF 50

Three Sixty Six Golf Shirts for Men – Men’s Quick Dry Collared Polo Shirt – 4-Way Stretch & UPF 50

[tomatodeals]

Three Sixty Six Collarless Golf Shirts for Males - Fast Dry Quick Sleeve T-Shirt with 4-Method

Three Sixty Six Collarless Golf Shirts for Males – Fast Dry Quick Sleeve T-Shirt with 4-Method

Value: (as of – Particulars) Product Description Collarless ✓ ✓ ✓ Fast Dry ✓ ✓ ✓ 4-Method Stretch ✓ ✓ ✓ Bundle Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.9 x 10.7 x 1 inches; 8 Ounces Division ‏ : ‎ Mens Date First Accessible ‏ : ‎ July 8, 2021 Producer ‏ : ‎ Ink Slate, Inc. ASIN ‏ : ‎ B098X8RTL9 Button closureMoisture Wicking Dry Match Materials – Designed with fast dry material, these mens golf t-shirts wick sweat…

[solotravelbaa]

Shop Colorful Toms Kids’ Sneakers And Athletics In Trendy Patterns - Shoes & Footwear

The feeling appears to reverberate, even when you are boutiques ping for the gifts for girlfriend for any occasion, or to celebrate the 1st year of your relationship. And that needs to be finished even under the scorching sun. Chances are you'll needs footwear, polos, pants or a solar visor. In sports stores, not solely will you see golf shirts, golf trousers and golf sneakers, additionally, you will discover golf tools, similar to golf clubs and golf baggage. Include in your search the model of sports activities wear. These retailers can either be an exclusive retailer of a particular brand or a common retailer selling all manufacturers of sports outerwear and tools. It's troublesome for avid shoppers to keep their mouse pointers off the 'purchase now' button when nice deals on unique range can be found from house. As you can see, subscription boxes for males are an effective way to analyze new product strains with out investing a fortune.

I don’t know if it is a indisputable fact however it's actually a well-liked declare that males do not like to shop. The better of the most effective doll shop links one can find on this little part. All throughout the game, you will have interaction in quite a lot of strolling. Hence, if you desire Nike, then you may type in the search field, the keywords “Nike golf polo.” After you hit the enter key, relaxation assured that if the location has this product, it is going to present up in a brand new web page. For instance, you possibly can kind golf polo, if that is the one that you just need. Do you need the appropriate golf apparel? Satchels and handheld baggage are compact and fashionable; when they're matched with the proper pair of clothes, they provide you with a splendid and astounding appear to be no other to enhance your fashion assertion instantly. The luggage coming from Naturalizer are unique and styled in a traditional manner to provide them a sober, refined, decent and trendy look all the identical time.

The preferred wine store of Pharrell, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sting, Iggy Pop and lots of extra of Hollywood's elite, is among the only a few shops in NYC to have the unique first bottling. Squier Company. In the 1950s the corporate first contacted Fender, That is when Squier started making electric guitar strings for Fender's first products. The primary six models with the Squier inscription on the headstock have been replicas of Fender's most well-known guitars, the '57 and '62 Strats, '57 and '62 Precision Basses, 'fifty two Telecasters and a sixty two Jazz Base. Using the slogan "There's Magic in the Breed," this series was inexpensive high quality entry-level instruments together with included Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision bass models, and three Bullet fashions. This series finally will develop into the new Vintage Modified family, which popped with coloration introducing the Butterscotch Blonde Telecaster, Two-colour Sunburst Stratocaster, Metallic Red and Metallic Blue. You'll get your order at your footstep within a brief time frame. 2- Part of what you spend comes again to you every time.

Brand awareness is part of product evolution in any tradition, music is no different. The affiliation with music artists is clearly an necessary a part of Fender Squier guitars. These guitars were supposed for players from any sort of culture, from rock and blues to alternative to jazz and steel . Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2002 by launching its new Series 24 devices, referring to their 24 ¾” scale length, this collection provided some extra instrument fashion options together with single-cutaway newbie guitars, semi-hollow-physique blues guitars and arch top jazz boxes. In the early to mid 2000s Squier decided to persist with the Fender design introducing the restricted version Affinity collection guitars. Fender's Custom shop grasp builders came up with the design for these two Master Series models for Squier. The large pay-day got here in 2004 with two updated affordable priced guitars, Jagmeister ll and the Squier '51. Fender took their advanced know-how and applied it to build these non-pickguard fashions and models with an updated tremolo system to this sequence of guitars.