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itsmyblogandillreblogifiwantto · 4 years ago

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Doctor’s Orders.

A/N: Hi everyone, this fic is a crossover between Criminal Minds and CSI New York, so I hope you enjoy. Just before you do, I’d just like to do a little shout-out to @g0ldengubler who proof read some of this fic for me. I won’t be publishing a lot now, as I have a lot of University work and exam to prepare for, but I’ll still be online! My requests for Matthew Gray Gubler and Spencer Reid are still open, as is my taglist!

Triggers: Shootings at Churches/religious places, swearing, sex/smut (implied)

“Right my darlings, today I am taking you to New York.” Garcia said “Ooh, all expenses paid?” Emily asked all excited. “Case.” Hotch said as everyone groaned, in desperate need for a holiday. “There has been a series of shootings at Churches, and every time a family sadly dies.” J.J says, “They get shot and well, you get the idea. Detective Mac Taylor called us for help.” “I thought the NYPD would be able to solve this, they’re all really smart.” Spencer said “They are, but they need our help in bringing the unsub, or unsubs down. They don’t know who they are looking for.” Penelope said, “Now go crime fighters, the plane leaves in an hour.” “Bye baby girl.” Morgan said kissing Penelope’s cheek. “Come back safe my darlings.” Penelope said waving goodbye to them as they got in the lift “God I love that woman.” Morgan smiled “Speaking of women, Reid, you single?” Rossi asked Spencer looked up from his book and his cheeks flushed. “Yes. I don’t see how that is relevant.” “Maybe we can get you a pretty lady on the next team night out, or maybe even whilst we are in New York. I mean, we need to get you a girl.” J.J smiled “Yeah, we need another girl we can take on girls night.” Emily said “Maybe we can see if we can get the vacancy filled for a new agent on the team whilst in New York.” Hotch said, agreeing with J.J and Emily, but tried to think of a professional response. “I didn’t realise we had the budget for a new agent, I would have got a new type of coffee if I knew.” Rossi said “Not everything is about coffee Rossi.” Morgan said “It is when you are Italian.” Rossi said and got out of the lift. Spencer rolled his eyes at his co-workers and picked up another book. He did agree he needed to get out there but wanted to when he was ready. On the plane “My darlings, there’s been another church shooting. Mac Taylor will meet you with Detective and all-round forensics & Detective and Doctor Y/N Y/S/N will be there too, oh, and her PhDs are in Mathematics and Chemistry, same as genius baby.” Penelope said on the phone providing more details. “Thank you Garcia.” Hotch said and hung up. “Did someone enjoy researching the detective?” Morgan texts Garcia “That’s classified chocolate thunder and you know it. ;)” Penelope replied “Reid, Rossi go with Agent/Doctor Y/N Y/S/N and see what they have so far. J.J, Emily and Morgan with me and Mac Taylor when we get off the plane.” Hotch said. “Aaron Hotchner, Dr Y/N Y/S/N, we spoke on the phone. This is Detective Mac Taylor.” You say and do handshakes with everyone except the cute curly haired one. “It’s actually safer to kiss or hug.” Spencer said to you after introducing himself to you. “Nice to meet another Doctor.” He smiled You smile back, “You too Dr Reid.” “You can call me Spence if you like.” Spencer smiled as J.J and Emily give each-other ‘the look’ and text Penelope. “And you can call me Y/N or Y/N/N. I only let special people call me my nickname though.” You wink and Spencer’s cheeks flush. “Special people kid. She likes you.” Rossi winked Spencer rolled his eyes and went with you, Hotch and Mac to the office to discuss the case so far. “Would you like some coffee? The flight must’ve been a long one.” You say putting the machine on. “Only 1 hour, 12 minutes.” Spencer smiled “He means yes, we’d love some coffee.” Rossi said as Spencer gave him a ‘What?’ facial expression “Here you go.” You smile. “Sugar and milk are on the table behind you. I got some donuts earlier, there were more but I had a sugar craving.” “Thank you Y/N, this is perfect. We don’t normally get food.” Spencer said picking up a donut “Rossi, could you join Hotch and I to go through some forensics?” Mac asked “Sure.” Rossi said and left the two Doctors to it. “They seem to be getting on. Y/N/N is my best detective.” Mac smiled at Rossi, “But she doesn’t have much of a life outside of the job. She’s only 28 and started here at 16 as an intern.” “I could say the same about Spencer, and he’s 30 but he started at the FBI when he was 22.” Rossi said as he looked at some evidence under the microscope. “So, what are your PhDs in Y/N/N?” Spencer smiled at you even though he knew the answer. “Maths and Chemistry, but I want to go for one in History next. What about you Spence?” You ask as the team walk back in. “Oh me too! Well, not the History bit.” Spencer said and sipped his coffee. “Look guys, Dr Y/S/N brought us donuts.” He said “Ooh good, I’m starving.” J.J smiled grabbing one. You, Mac and the FBI went through the case, and the team went through their profile. “You keep staring at him.” Mac whispered to you “Who?” You whisper back “Dr Reid.” Mac whispered as your cheeks flush, maybe you have got a crush on him. “Is it that obvious?” You whisper Mac nods and you go back to listening. “So, you think it’s a foster kid then?” You chat to Emily and J.J who have taken a shine to you. “Yeah, we have seen it before.” Emily said “I’m sorry.” You say “Don’t be Y/N. We’ve all seen terrible things.” J.J said “I’ll drink to that.” You say “Once the case is over, we should all go for a drink.” Rossi said “That’d be good.” Hotch said You and Spencer nod and continue reading some old case files that Penelope sent. “This is interesting. Drew Smith was in and out of care all his life, and all of his foster families said he was sweet at first but then turned into the devil. Could he fit the profile Spence?” You ask, handing him the file. Spencer reads it in all of 30 seconds. “Yeah. Definitely. Hotch?” He asks. “Y/N has a theory.” “Put me on the spot why don’t you?” You giggle at Spencer, “Mac?” You ask and the two teams listen to you. “Look at Spencer giving Y/N the googly eyes.” Morgan smirked to Rossi. “She’s smart and beautiful, he had better ask her out. Or Hotch better ask her to join us.” J.J said looking at Hotch in the eye “Plus she has a gun and a badge already. She wouldn’t need training.” Emily said agreeing with her co-workers. “She’s Mac’s best detective, he won’t give her up easy.” Rossi said You finish delivering your theory. “I’ll have a word with Mac once the case is over.” Hotch says after hearing the teams discussion. “Y/N, could you go with Spencer and Flack to see if you can bring in Smith? Make sure to take your gun though.” Mac asked, “If that’s okay with you Hotch.” “Yes, that is fine.” Hotch said as the girls and Morgan smirked at each-other. You nod biting your lip and go to your desk to get your weapon Spencer follows you, noticing a photo of you and the NYPD team at Halloween dressed up, but you look very young. “When was this?” Spencer asked you. “Oh, the year the NYPD offered me a paid job. I started here as an intern at 16 and worked my way up. I got a paid detective internship at 18 that means I’ve been here 12 years this year. That’s a fucking long time.” You chuckle putting your hoodie on. Spencer nods. “Definitely. I’ve been at the FBI for 8.” “You ready Y/N? Dr Reid, right? I’m Flack.” Flack asks putting his hand out to Spencer. “He doesn’t do handshakes.” You smile, remembering his germaphobia. “It’s safer to kiss or hug.” Spencer said “But we’ve kissed before Y/N.” Flack smiled at you Spencer immediately feels jealous, and he doesn’t understand why… Maybe he does fancy you. “Yes, on the cheek as my best friend.” You smile as Flack wiggles his eyebrows at you. “Let’s roll.” “Is it me or did Spencer look jealous then?” Morgan smirked “Yes. Definitely.” Hotch said Mac laughed. “Flack has a girlfriend. I can tell Y/N likes Spencer. She’s like a daughter to me, but I am terrified of her sometimes.” Rossi laughed, “We are terrified of Spencer sometimes.” In the car “Turn left you fucker.” Flack laughed as you took the wrong turn. “I turned left.” You smirk “You turned right.” Spencer said laughing at your banter with Flack. “You may be a Doctor Y/N, but you are shit at listening for directions.” Flack said “You may need my Maths skills one day you bell-end and if you hadn’t noticed, the sign said no left turn.” You smirk and arrive at Smith’s apartment. “Maybe listen to your doctor.” Spencer smirked “Ah she knows I’m messing with her.” Flack smiled as he got out of the car. “She’s like my little sister.” “And you’re my dickhead of a big brother.” You say and park up. “I miss when you were 16 and didn’t answer back.” Flack laughed as some shots were fired, you all quickly put vests on as Flack kicks down the door. “I see you have your own Derek Morgan.” Spencer thought to himself “Freeze! NYPD and FBI! Lower your weapons.” You announce, as Smith tries to run but you trip him up. “Got you, you son of a bitch. Oh, and you have a little weed farm here too, we better add that to the murder charge.” “Murder?” Smith says as Flack puts him in cuffs. “We got Smith and we need a crime scene team here ASAP.” You say calling it in. “Don’t play dumb with us asshole.” Flack said putting him in the car. Back at the office, Mac and Hotch are talking to Drew, whilst the rest of your team and the FBI compare notes before they interview him.

“Do they always say no comment?” Emily asked you. “Yeah, or a string of swear words.” You shrug Spencer came in holding two cups of coffee. “Thanks pretty boy.” Morgan smiled reaching for the cup “Oh it’s not for you it’s for Y/N/N.” Spencer smiled handing you a cup “Ooh thanks Spence.” You smile taking the cup. Morgan looked at Spencer, “You always buy me coffee.” He said pretending to be a little hurt. “Well, in the 8 years I’ve been at the FBI, you have only brought me coffee 8 times, and I have brought you coffee 16 times. Y/N/N however brought me coffee and donuts upon our first meeting therefore she has the advantage over you.” Spencer said and sipped his coffee. “Is that the way to your heart Spence? Buy you donuts?” You ask Spencer nodded smiling as the team give each-other ‘the look’. “Here’s that file you asked for.” You say to Hotch after it finally prints, it’s about 30 pages in total. “Reid... Can you?” Hotch asked Spencer sighed and took the file. “I’ll give you the DL.” He said “DL?” Hotch asked “Downlow, summary.” You say assuming that is what Spencer meant “I was trying to be cool.” Spencer mumbled “You are plenty cool kid.” Rossi laughed “If you want answers out of him, question his foster families and experiences there.” Spencer said, “It could trigger him, but it could also get a confession. Also, he was closest to his foster Mum 5. Debbie, who passed away recently.” He handed back the file. “Thanks Dr Reid.” Mac said as Hotch nods. “Dr Y/S/N, could I have a word with you later?” Hotch asks “Yeah, sure.” You smile, wondering what it is about. “Have I done something wrong?” You ask “No, far from it.” Hotch said returning the smile “Hotch just smiled, he must really like Dr Y/S/N.” Morgan said on the phone to Penelope “Chocolate thunder, I want all the details. Keep me posted. Ciao.” Penelope giggled having done her research on you. “Bye baby girl.” Morgan says and hangs up “Y/N could you maybe give Drew a shot? He doesn’t seem to pay attention to us.” Hotch asked as he came back with Mac. “Yeah sure.” You say getting up “Hotch, this guy is huge, he could crush her with one push.” Morgan said “She can handle it.” Mac said, “You ok Y/N?” You stretch your muscles. “Yeah I’m great, just doing some stretching because it helps keep my brain limber.” You say and stretch your legs. Everyone looks at you confused, except Spencer who looks at you in awe. “Nice socks.” Spencer smiled, noticing they are mismatched. “Thanks.” You smile at your polka dot one and stripes one. “What socks are you wearing?” You ask tying your shoelace of your trainers. “One of dinosaurs and one of pumpkins. The classics.” Spencer smiled as Mac handed you Drew’s file. “Do you want company in the room?” “Nah, I’m good but you can watch from behind the glass in case I need back up.” You wink as Spencer’s cheeks flush. “Are you coming?” You ask walking to the room. Spencer gets out of his chair and follows you, as you walk you share Maths theories with Spencer. “Did anyone get a word of that?” Emily asked “The last thing I understood was their socks discussion.” J.J said shrugging “I don’t even understand half of the words she uses, sometimes, between us I have to research what she means after hours.” Mac laughed as a forensics analyst handed him something. “Y/N/N!” He called just before you walked in the room “Yeah?” You smile “Fingerprints match his. We have him.” He says and you nod as Mac goes back and tells the rest of the teams. “We got the bastard.” Morgan said “Drew, I’m Doctor Y/S/N, I just have a few more questions.” You say sitting down as Spencer watches you from behind the glass, the guy is huge. “Shoot lady.” Drew smirked “Tell me about your childhood, and Debbie.” You say “There’s nothing to tell, I’m sure that file tells you everything you need to know.” Drew said, loosing the smirk instantly. “And what about Debbie?” You ask “She was my foster Mom, the only one who liked me. But she got sick.” Drew said “That must’ve been tough.” You say, “The doctor mis-diagnosed her, didn’t he? Made you feel rage.” “Yeah but I didn’t kill anyone over it.” Drew admitted “So, why are your fingerprints on the weapon found at the last scene?” You ask “Well, that escalated fast.” Spencer says as Morgan, Hotch and Mac come into the room. “They’re not mine.” Drew said to you “Oh, who do they belong to? The guy we have downstairs for drunk driving, or the guy in the room down the hall who shot an officer with an unlicensed weapon?” You ask innocently “Is she always like this? Sarcastic?” Hotch asked “She plays dumb, because she has a baby-face they assume she’s young and not really a detective, but she can usually get them talking once she’s snapped. Just wait.” Mac smirked “Yeah, it’s one of them lady. I’m clean.” Drew says “Clean as the blood on your right breast pocket?” You ask “It’s.. It’s not like that lady.” Drew stutters covering the blood. “I wonder if it matched the blood found out the crime scene… Could get a decent sample too.” You say putting your feet up on the desk, “But if you are so innocent, that could be wine.” “Shut up lady! Calm down!” Drew ends up shouting “This is calm, and it’s doctor. Sit down.” You say calmly, “Now let me test that wine for blood.” You say, “Take off the shirt.” You say giving him a bright pink one to wear. Everyone laughs from behind the glass, “Oh she’s good.” Hotch smirked You put gloves on and do a test on the shirt. “Didn’t realise you could get human blood wine, where did you buy it?” You ask once the test comes back positive for human blood. “Is there anything she doesn’t know?” Spencer asked Mac noticing you know your way around forensics “How to get a boyfriend.” Mac said “Okay okay, I did it! I did all of them. Lock me up.” Drew said “Aww, because you asked so nicely. Get up.” You say as Drew gets up but headbutts you and kicks your knees in the process as you crash to the floor. “You’ll regret that.” You say with a busted lip and put him in cuffs as everyone runs in. “You ok?” Spencer asked you “Oh yeah, that’s nothing.” You shrug, handing him over to Mac then go to the bathroom to clean up limping a little. “That’s nothing?” Spencer asked in a slightly high-pitched voice. “Once a suspect pushed her so hard, she broke her back, had therapy and she still showed up to work in a wheelchair.” Flack said “When was this?” Hotch asked “She was 21. She’s from a rough neighbourhood so she does herself proud every-day.” Mac said “Can we have a word in your office?” Hotch asked Mack who nodded, thinking he knows where this is going. “I’m going to check on Y/N/N.” Spencer said as he eventually found the bathroom. “Hey Y/N/N, you okay?” He asks softly as you come out “Yeah. Coming!” You say walking out all patched up. “You good?” You ask “I should be asking you; you had your head butted into. You should get it checked out.” Spencer said worried “First respondent said I’m good, and for someone I met today, you seem very worried about me, it’s almost adorable.” You admit biting your lip then wince forgetting you’d hurt yourself. “Fuck.” You grumble at your stupidity as Spencer laughs “Almost adorable?” Spencer asked with a raised eyebrow “What’s going on?” Morgan asked a little too loud as Rossi, J.J and Emily were watching “Ssssh.” Emily said putting a finger to Morgan’s lips “Okay, a lot adorable.” You say blushing In Mac’s office “No, absolutely not. She’s my best detective.” Mac shouted to Hotch as he kept shaking his head, “I’m not letting her go.” “You told Rossi she needed to get out there, I think this would be great for her.” Hotch shouted back “I meant settle down, get a boyfriend, have kids. Not leave New York.” Mac said “The change would suit her.” Hotch said, “And at the end of the day it’s her decision.” J.J knocks on the door, “Hotch, we’re all going to Shaw’s for a beer. You both coming?” She smiles “We’ll be there soon.” Mac said as J.J nods, closing the door on her way out. “Regardless of what you say, I’m making my offer.” Hotch said At the bar “Any idea what they were on about in there? Shouting match or what?” You say to Spencer. “No idea.” Spencer lied, “What do you want to drink?” “Just a pint of the house beer.” You say handing over the money. “What are you doing?” Spencer asked “Er, paying for my own drink because screw the gentlemen pays.” You say “Y/N/N, you got kicked and pushed to the floor today. I can buy you a beer for that.” Spencer said, “Two pints of the house beer please.” He told the barman who nods “I’ll buy some snacks then. Whatcha want Doctor?” You ask eyeing up the fries on the menu. “Whatever you’re having Doctor.” Spencer smiled as Hotch and Mac come in, Mac still looking cross and Hotch looking smug. “Mac, what’s up?” You ask him “Nothing.” Mack lied “Don’t bullshit me. We’re off the clock.” You say to him as Mac walks off and goes outside for some air, “Just some crisps and nuts please.” You tell the barman and pay then find a seat with Spencer “Dr Y/N, can we talk?” Hotch asked just as you sat down “Yeah sure.” You say and walk off with him, leaving your drink on the table “Oooh, it’s happening.” Emily said pouring herself a glass of wine from the bottle “What’s happening?” Spencer asked sipping his drink “We’re getting a new agent.” J.J smiled Spencer smiles to himself and sips his drink. “So, Y/N. I was talking to Mac, and as much as he really doesn’t want to let you go... I’d like to make you an offer anyway.” Hotch began “Offer?” You ask “We have a position for an agent at the FBI, with us. You are overqualified, but I think you’d like it. You understand the work, and even used our terminology on your case. We don’t see that every-day.” Hotch said, “Plus you wouldn’t be in New York every-day. We travel a lot, but we are a family.” You look at Mac, and your team there, then to the FBI. You have debated about leaving for a year, not because of the people but wanting a change, and this could be the one you need. You then look at Spencer, who looks a little sad. “What if she doesn’t take it?” Spencer asked “I think she will.” Morgan said sipping his drink Suddenly, you and Hotch walk back. “Well?” Emily asked “Looks like I need a new badge.” You say with a smile Everyone cheers. “I’m sorry to see you go Y/N/N but please visit.” Mac said “Course.” You smile. “Hey, can we have a word?” Spencer asked you You nod, confused. “Everyone wants words with me tonight.” You laugh as Spencer and you go outside “Do you think?” Rossi asked “Oh yeah. Pretty boy about to ask baby girl genius out.” Morgan said “Everything okay Spence?” You ask once you get outside. “Yeah, I mean… No… I mean, want to go out with me on a date?” Spencer blurted out then gasped. “Fuck. I didn’t mean to say that, but I did. But if you don’t want to that’s fine.” He says going through all the emotions of a menopausal woman at once. “Every time a pretty face comes pops up your brain turns into a god damn potato. Prentiss is right, my IQ lowers from 187 to 60.” You quickly grab his arm gently. “Hey... Let me answer before you get yourself in a tizz.” Spencer calms down at your touch, which he finds strange, not really liking being touched but when you do it, it makes him feel, safe almost. “Okay... okay...” Spencer says looking at you “Yes.” You smile and kiss his cheek. “Want to sneak off and grab some pizza? I have a lot of packing to do. Hotch wants me to start in two weeks.” Spencer nods smiling as you do just that. “Where are the pretty people at?” Morgan asked noticing you’ve been a while. “I don’t think they’re coming back.” Rossi winked. “Ooooh.” Emily and J.J smirked “So, what pizza can I get you Spence?” You smile. “I’m going for four cheese.” “That’s fine with me.” Spencer smiled at you, “Does this count as a date?” “If you want it to.” You say and place your order “I do.” Spencer smiled “Me too.” You say and pay for the pizza “I should pay half.” Spencer said feeling bad “You’re good, you can always buy ice cream if you want.” You assure him Spencer nods, as you walk around New York eating pizza. “It’s okay if you don’t want to, but would you like to come to my flat and have a nightcap?” You suggest as you finish your ice cream “I’d like that.” Spencer smiled, “But I’d like to do one thing first.” He said having a desire to kiss you there and then. “And that is?” You ask Spencer puts his hands on your cheeks and kisses you deeply. “Oh.” You giggle, pulling away after a few moments Spencer giggles too, “Told you it’s safer to kiss.” You walk to your flat, and let Spencer in. It’s fairly small with a double bed, en-suite, a kitchen and a small library. “I don’t normally have people back to my place on the first date. But I think there’s something special about you Dr Reid.” You say locking the door once Spencer walks in and takes his shoes off. “There’s something special about you too Dr Y/S/N.” Spencer says, “Can I take a seat?” He asks gesturing to your two-seater sofa “Of course. You okay with whiskey or scotch on the rocks?” You ask getting two glasses down “Scotch please.” Spencer said looking at your bum when your back was turned You bring the glasses over and sit next to him, “Can I tell and ask you something Spence?” “Of course Y/N/N.” Spencer says, “Thanks.” He says taking the glass “It’s more of an observation, but I’ve noticed you don’t like physical touch, but when I’ve done it, you go from tense, to relaxed in seconds. Why?” You ask sipping your scotch “I feel safe around you, and I don’t feel like that around many people.” Spencer admitted “Do you want to kiss again?” You blurt out and finish your drink quickly in-case Spencer says no “I do.” Spencer smiled and finished his drink and pulled you in for a kiss

After a few more drinks, you end up having sex with Spencer.

Spencer pulled out of you gently and wrapped the condom up and put it in the bin. “That was amazing.” He says as you cuddle into his arms glad Morgan slipped him that condom earlier. Even though you were on the pill, Spencer wanted to be extra safe. You nod agreeing, “Aren’t your team wondering where you are?” as you trace little patterns on his chest with your finger. Spencer checks his phone, as a text comes through from Hotch ‘Plane leaves at 2PM tomorrow, as Mac and I have some paperwork to sort out for Y/N’s transfer. Meet us at the Police Station at 12PM.’ He then shows the text to you. You nod, “Least we don’t have to be in early.” As Mac texts you that you need to be in at 12 to sign the papers and get a new badge. Spencer smirks, as Morgan texts him, ‘You got laid didn’t you pretty boy?’ and replies, ‘Yep.’ And turns his attention back to you. “You comfy?” He asks wrapping the duvet over your shoulder You nod, “Stay the night if you want.” “Doctor’s orders?” Spencer asked “Doctor’s orders.” You yawn and fall asleep as does Spencer. Taglist: @pumpkin-goob , @jpegjade , @andiebeaword , @hopebaker , @hotchsbabygirl , @hercleverboy , @cupcake525 , @gubetube , @aperrywilliams , @cosmic-psychickitty , @marleyhotchner , @gubler-me-up , @trina2323 , @goldentournesol , @jenna-jd , @reidgraygubler , @g0ldengubler , @gcblers , @peachpitfics

#Criminal Minds #criminal minds fic #csi new york #aaron hotchner #donald flack #mac taylor #david rossi #spencer reid #jj #emily prentiss #derek morgan #penelope garcia #spencer reid fluff #spencer x reader #my fics

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pearsabeth · 4 years ago

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The Folks - A Percabeth fic

"Annabeth, don't try to act like this is my fault"

Percy's amused tone earned him a glare from his girlfriend. They were waiting in the warm car, anticipating the cold air they would be met with outside and the reaction of the Chase family if they were to notice the red bruise adorning the side of Percy's neck.

"Of course it is, I could've planned all this if you hadn't been so..." Annabeth's eyes flickered as she recalled the making of the hickey that has decided to plague her life.

It was the mischief in his eyes taunting her to remove that trouble maker smirk playing on his swollen lips. Before she knew it her teeth were on his neck and all sense had disappeared. She hadn't thought about the scheduled dinner at her parents. She wasn't thinking at all.

"You know you can't just wait in the car and glare at the house until it disappears" Percy's voice comes from the driver's seat.

"I can try," she sighed.

Knowing perfectly well she had to go in soon and face Bobby and Matthew and their fascinating incapability of minding their business , Helen who's judgemental stare could burn a hole through the dark grey woollen scarf wrapped around Percy's neck and tucked under his thick winter coat and her Dad who would interrogate them until the truth came out.

"You'll be fine Wisegirl, nothing's gonna happen and if anything does we'll just play it cool. We're grown." Percy suggested, hands landing on her thigh to try and comfort her.

She faced him with an anxiety-stricken expression he hadn't been expecting. His eyebrows raised in realisation. There was always more to it when it came to Annabeth.

"They already hate me enough. I bet Helen's in there preparing a list of ways to criticize my life. As if bringing home a boy isn't enough, it just had to be a bruised necked pretty boy who doesn't study law at Harvard."

"I guess we don't care about my self-esteem today, huh," Percy feigned offence.

"C'mon Annabeth, we're gonna be late. You've got this. Besides, I'll be on my best behaviour," He couldn't help the lopsided grin that emerged on his face as he said it.

When it didn't look like she was getting up anytime soon, Percy got out of the car and practically dragged her out and onto the sheet of snow that had begun to cover the driveway. When they got to the porch, Annabeth fixed his thick scarf once more to cover the hickey and rang the doorbell hesitantly.

Percy attempted to offer his support by holding her hand and giving it a squeeze only for Annabeth to snap her hand out as she heard footsteps walking towards the door.

"You're crazy," Percy murmurs as he opted for the small of her back.

The door opened to reveal Annabeth's stepmother, wearing a clean apron over her clothes. Before the couple could exchange greetings with the woman, the sound of slapping feet against the wooden floors was followed by the eager faces of Annabeth's twin brothers, Bobby and Matthew.

"Annabeth, did you get the stuff?" Bobby said his eyebrows disappearing under the brown coils against his forehead.

Matthew, presumably the mature one of the two rolled his brown eyes, showing the little resemblance he and his brother shared with Annabeth. For the most part, the twins resembled their Filipina mother more so than their father and it showed in their soft eyes and thick dark hair. But they couldn't escape the splatter of freckles on their nose that seemed to be Chase family staple.

"You bet I got the stuff, help Helen set up and then we can do business," Annabeth said as she made her way towards the living room, Percy following her lead awkwardly.

Matthew looked at his brother smugly, " I told you it was too good to be true."

Before sulking off to the kitchen, the boys set aside their negotiation and finally got a glimpse of the infamous Percy Jackson. Annabeth had been talking their ears off about him ever since the summer the two met. They knew vaguely about the two being an item from Matthews tendency to pick up his parents' grown-up conversations because he was just quiet enough to go unnoticed as opposed to Bobby who always made his presence known even if he didn't mean to. It was almost never good stuff.

Percy almost took a step back despite himself against the scrutinising gaze of the twins. Seriously, where could he learn to do that? Maybe Annabeth's Dad held lessons.

"Percy Jackson?" Bobby questioned.

Percy had always been great with kids. Annabeth had joked about it saying that it was only because he was basically a child himself. But something about making a first impression on his girlfriend's brother's who looked like they had their fair share in troublesome behaviour made it a lot harder. Percy could blow up a few school busses by accident here and there but the twins looked as if they would not only commit vandalism to school property but also devise an intricate plan before doing so. He had to make the right impression, he could feel the pressure from Helen's silent gaze and Fredericks presence from somewhere in the large suburban home.

"Yeah, that's me, it's nice to finally meet you two." Percy scratched the back of his neck subconsciously and turned to Helen.

very cool of him

"It's nice to meet you too, Mrs Chase." He hesitated before her name not wanting to call her Helen and rendering himself as even more disrespectful than the image of him that she probably had in her mind.

"Yes, I've heard a lot about you. Frederick will be down shortly," She gave Annabeth a side-eye before telling Bobby to go upstairs and call his father from the office.

The silence that followed was enough to send Percy's inattentive mind to the surroundings of the house. It was a pretty big house, nothing too fancy though. The walls were decorated with various family photos and plaques of both Helen and Frederick's degrees and academic achievements.

He noticed quickly that Annabeth memorabilia was lacking save for a picture of her beside the wall nearest to the staircase with a smile, her two front teeth missing and posing proudly in front of a lego block set. Percy couldn't help but take his phone out of his pocket and snap a photo of it.

He didn't call for the loud shutter that erupted the silence and he definitely wasn't expecting to see Frederick Chase's aloof yet somehow still disapproving face on his phone screen.

Annabeth stifled her chuckle with a cough and went forward to greet her dad.

"Hey, Dad."

She wasn't sure whether to hug him but it didn't seem like he was opening his arms in an inviting embrace so Annabeth settled for an awkward handshake.

"Annabeth, I hope the traffic wasn't too bad."

Annabeth shot Percy a look that seemed to say,

‘look at this oaf.’

Percy was new to paternal interactions as well, having only met his dad in this last quarter of his life. But Frederick Chase's actions confused him too. His daughter had fallen into Tartarus and saved the world, putting her life at risk for the second time in the span of a year and the first thing he does is make conversation on vehicular congestion?

Percy calmed his fury at the man as he approached. They had met once before but the middle of a battle determining the fate of the world wasn't exactly the ideal setting to exchange pleasantries. In the back of his mind, Percy hoped he wouldn't attempt to give him "the talk" because quite frankly he didn't have any right to tell Percy to take care of his daughter when he'd been failing to do so himself.

"Percy, It's good to see you again. I hear you two have been on quite the journey these past months." Frederick led them to the dining room, taking a seat at the head of the table

This time, it was Percy's turn to throw a meaningful glance Annabeth's way.

Does this man know nothing?

Annabeth returned it with a squeeze of his leg as if she were saying, hang in there.

Helen arrived with steaming plates and bowls of food and the twins weren't far behind her trying to speedily set the table.

Percy thanked Helen for the food and right before he was about to dig into the steaming plate, Annabeth's fears were confirmed.

"It's a little warm in here don't you think? Annabeth must've forgotten to show you but you can hang your coat and scarf behind the door." Frederick suggested.

Percy looked at Annabeth for help, only to see the blood already rushing to her cheeks, fear evident in her eyes.

" Uh- I can't," Percy said shortly.

"You can't?" Frederick's eyebrows raised in question.

"He has this condition, it's uh, what was it called again Percy?" Annabeth aided which must've been suspicious because it wasn't like Annabeth to forget things.

"Um-eczema, it's pretty bad."

"Yeah, wouldn't want flakes of skin falling into your soup or anything," Annabeth added helpfully with a small smile on her face at the twins' disgust.

"Well, sorry I asked then," Frederick said suspiciously but didn't comment on it anymore.

Helen was busy serving Bobby and Matthew, seemingly unaware of the conversation. Percy tapped his foot against Annabeth's shin under the table to get her attention. They were good now. Annabeth shook her head at Percy's gullibility, not buying for a minute that her parents had bought it. But they didn't push, so as far as Annabeth was concerned she was blushing because her boyfriend had a terrible case of eczema and not because she had sucked his neck.

The dinner was unbearable. The food itself was great but even good food couldn't scratch the itch Percy felt to do or say something. Compared to mealtimes at Camp Half-Blood, which were always loud and eventful or dinnertime with Sally who always had something to say whether it be an idea that popped up while writing her manuscript or the oddly dressed poodle she saw on the subway- this dinner was a bore.

It wasn't long before they had retired to the living room again to make more small talk that conveniently avoided the topic of the two falling into the pits of hell. Annabeth had finally given the twins an anticipated copy of a comic series they followed and they'd resided upstairs to read it, leaving the couple alone with Annabeth's parents. They endured until it seemed appropriate to leave.

They were so close. Oh so close to getting up and getting as far away from the dull monotonous voice of the news reporter on TV to the warmth of the car when the tense air was broken by a musical note on the tv claiming to be an emergency weather report.

A blizzard.

It had to be Zeus. It was barely snowing when they had arrived. Percy and Annabeth were stuck and at this moment he had empathised with the dread that encompassed Annabeth every time she had to go home for the summer. How could a house so big feel so claustrophobic and lonely at the same time? The twins were lucky they had each other. He couldn't imagine how Annabeth managed.

"I guess it's a sleepover," Matthew's voice came from the kitchen as he licked the mocha from above his upper lip before running back up the stairs to his brother.

***

Before Percy knew it, he was in the Chase family guest room. Annabeth had nothing to worry about since she had clothes to wear to bed. She had changed into loose purple sweat pants with a long sleeve shirt and had come out of her room to help pick up the assortment of toys that were scattered on the floor. If Percy had an extra room in his house as a child he would probably make it an unofficial playroom as well.

This was probably just as inconvenient for the Chases as it was for them. Percy remembered how his mom fluttered around the house cleaning every surface before the arrival of guests and he finally understood why she always insisted he clean his room even if no-one was entering. Just in case Zeus decided to create a blizzard and snow-in the poor unsuspecting guests.

Percy's thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock on the door to the guest room. He opened the door for Helen, who had arrived with a bundle of Frederick's clothes. She placed them in his hands and left abruptly before he could thank her as if she had forgotten something. Annabeth laughed softly at the thought of Percy wearing her dad's plaid pyjama's.

"You think this is funny Wisegirl?" Percy said with a smile spreading on his face as he took off his coat and shirt and buttoned up the plaid print flannel.

"It's quite comical," she said, shamelessly looking at Percy's exposed chest as he fixed the last few buttons.

Annabeth averted her gaze quickly to the action figure on the floor when Helen resurfaced with a small bag of toiletries for Percy.

"Your condition isn't so bad," Helen said to Percy. She glanced at Annabeth, a hint of a sly smile on her usually stoic face.

Annabeth looked between the two of them. Helens eyes and Percy's exposed neck, scarf abandoned. She couldn’t somehow manipulate the mist and make herself disappear. So she opted for the second-best thing.

"Goodnight, I'm gonna go to my room now." she rushed out the words and almost crashed into Helen on her way out.

It was Percy's turn to be flustered as he nervously scratched his neck, then quickly switched to his head not wanting to bring any more attention to the very blatant hickey.

"Towels are in that closet," Helen said finally and closed the door behind her.

Percy puts on the rest of the clothes with two thoughts in mind:

1) Annabeth's cute when she blushes.

2) I hate it here.

#percabeth #hoo #percabeth hickey drabble #percabeth fanfiction #percabeth fluff #annabeth chase #percy jackson #whatisatimeline #on second thought this is not a drabble #percabeth fic #percabeth fanfic

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dammitadolfnomorecake · 4 years ago

Text

Once Bitten, Twice Stupid prt 17 - prt1

Keeping up with the tradition, they all wound up back at Lance’s house. Keith and Pidge were bonding with Blue, his cat a ho when it came to pats... on her terms of course. Keith seemed mystified over what to do when a cat sat in your lap. Blue was a traitor, bunting up into Keith’s chin because she was a traitorous whore with no taste. In the kitchen with Hunk, Lance nursed a mug of warm wine mixed with blood, as Hunk baked. He couldn’t stop himself. He needed to unwind and Lance was happy to provide his kitchen for that

“Did you really break your phone, man?”

Lance looked over the rim of his mug

“Yep. Dropped it on my bedroom floor. It shattered on the spot”

“You said we’d talk... I’m feeling kind of left out man”

“I didn’t mean to make you feel left out”

“Ever since Keith came along, you’ve been acting weird. I know sometimes Pidge can be full on, but I thought we were tight”

“We are tight”

“Then what haven’t you been telling me? I’ve told you things I wouldn’t think of telling Pidge”

Lance felt as if Keith had gotten his wish and staked him through the heart

“It’s not like that...”

“Then what is it like?”

The vampire didn’t have a whole lot of options. He could confess he was a vampire and give Hunk a heart attack. He could keep lying, which was clearly hurting Hunk. He could claim Keith was threatening him, but then Pidge and Hunk would want to take things into their own hands... Fuck... He didn’t want to hurt Hunk. Lying really did hurt. His friends were so special to him that he hated having to distance himself... semi lies were as bad as the real thing

“Okay... okay... the truth is I’m not really over being sick. I’m still feeling sick most of the time and I’m not used to having company all the time. I didn’t want to tell you because you worry about me so damn much. I’ll recover, good as new, but I’m supposed to have spent this last week resting up as much as possible. I can’t help myself, I love hanging out with you and Pidge, so when you invite me I can’t say no. I pushed myself a little too hard to fast, but I promise I’m working on getting better”

Hunk’s eyes immediately welled with tears

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because all I need is to catch on some sleep. You and Pidge are my best friends. I want to make as many memories with you as I can. I also had a call that wasn’t great, so that’s been on my mind too”

“A call?”

“A work call. The woman was strung out of her mind, I had to call in a welfare check on her. It’s been exhausting, but nothing a few good nights sleep won’t cure”

“Man... I wish you’d told me. We could have gone back home...”

“It’s okay”

“It’s not okay. If you’re sick, you need to be resting. I’ll tell Pidge while you get ready for bed”

“Dude, I’m okay”

“Please, stop being stubborn! Pidge and I both know you’ve never been really well. You’re always so pale. But you never tell us anything. We’re your friends, we want you to rely on us”

He’d been told that by Hunk before, playing it off as a low immune had bought him about a years worth of silence on the matter

“I do. I love you guys like family. That’s why... that’s why it’s so hard. We’ll watch what Pidge filmed, then head to bed”

“Absolutely not. I’ll have dad come pick us up. Keith can crash at mine for the night”

“You don’t need to do that”

“I don’t need to, but I want to. Let me help”

Passing Keith off was a terrible idea. Keith didn’t mix well with others. If he snapped anything was likely to come out... but what Lance wouldn’t give for a night without having to worry about waking Keith

“His brother Shiro should be swinging around tomorrow to pick him up. It’ll be fine, it’s only one more night. Plus, if we don’t watch the film now we won’t be able to watch it all together as a group”

Sure, most of Keith’s face was hidden behind the mask but Lance could tell all his expressions from the way his muscles moved. His brain told him that at any rate. His imagination must have been filling in the blanks automatically based on what he knew of Keith’s personality

“You need rest”

“I’ll be resting on my chair. Nothing strenuous happening, other than being in trouble with Pidge for talking. We’ll watch the video, pick out what to keep and what to edit, then I’ll go straight up to bed”

Hunk sighed, picking up the closest tea towel off the kitchen bench as he did

“You better. I’ll still have dad pick us up. And you need to answer your phone”

“I only have my work phone and the home phone”

“Exactly. Two other ways of calling”

“I can’t promise I’ll hear them, but if I see you’ve called, I’ll call back. Deal?”

Holding his hand out, Hunk took it, his handshake firm

“Deal. Don’t go around worrying me like that, man. I’m still recovering from tonight. Did you see that grey stuff?”

“It was the light off the camera. From having the viewfinder open and in night mode. That’s my bet. That combined with dust. Anyway, anything haunting that place would have made themselves scarce thanks to Pidge. I wouldn’t want to be a ghost and on the wrong side of her”

“I thought she was literally going to blow steam from her ears. She was so cranky”

“Especially when Keith tripped. I thought she was going to go turn him into a ghost on the spot”

Lance snorted as he smiled. Keith would be the dopiest ghost. He’d probably actually turn into one, but go around thinking he was human

“So did I. Our little gremlin is viscous. How long do the cookies need?”

“10 minutes. Go on ahead, I’ll be in soon”

“Alright, buddy. Don’t forget to use the dishwasher instead of doing the dishes by hand. Tonight was hard on you too. You deserve to kick back and relax”

“Yep, will do”

Pidge had Lance’s laptop on her lap when Lance headed into the living room

“Pidge! You’re not supposed to be on there!”

Pidge jumped at being sprung in the act

“I was ordering you a new phone. What kind of idiot doesn’t use a lifeproof case?”

“Me when they’re not very lifeproof. You know there’s sensitive files on there”

“Relax. All I did was open the browser. I don’t want to know about your cases”

“That’s beside the point. How you feel if you were one of them. And, it’s not like I can’t buy a new phone from the post office”

“You can, but I’m picking out a good one”

“Nope. No. I just need a cheap one where I can message you guys, take photos of Blue, and watch cat videos”

“Pffft. No. Trust me, you need to embrace the future, no more living in the past. Now, what colour do you want?”

“I don’t care about colour”

“You’re hopeless! Here’s one for $1500”

“Absolutely no way. I can’t justify spending that much on a phone. No. I’m fine with a $120 cheapie”

“You’re not fine and those things are an insult to technology. Help me out Keith”

Keith’s expression said he was in for trouble. Keith would do anything to mess with his life further, including taking revenge by making Lance pay out an unreasonable amount of money. Give it enough time and everything flashy would become standard for much cheaper

“I don’t know if he’s allowed something, or if he’d just wind up breaking it”

“Damn! Nice one. Okay, I’m ordering your phone now...”

“Pidge!”

“... and it’s done. You can thank me later with a shitload of photos of Blue. She’s such a diva. You should make her her own socials”

Lance didn’t love socials. He didn’t love the fakeness. He wished people could see and love the things in them that they might hate because society had made them feel like shit. He only had socials because of Pidge and his Mami. Most of what he posted was of Blue and her perfect little toe beans... with the occasional, less than lady like, tongue blep as she glared at him. He wasn’t putting pressure on Blue to be perfect for an audience

“Seriously?”

“Yep. A new case is coming too. This one should be Lance proof. Do we need to think about putting child safety devices in place?”

“I don’t know, Pidgeon. Do I need to think about digging a shallow grave when I see the price?”

“Maybe... is it for me, or for you?”

“I don’t know yet”

“Then I don’t know either. Hurry up and sit down already, you can have your precious laptop back. I don’t see why you need the desktop set up and a laptop. Both are practically antiques”

“You did both builds last year”

Pidge moaned

“Exactly, antiques. A painful reminder of my youth”

“Keith, do me a favour and punch Pidge in the arm for me. She’s being an idiot”

Keith ignored him, scratching the base of Blue’s back where it met her tail, Blue purring. Everybody in the room sucked. If it worked and did what it was meant to, Lance was fine with it not being the latest and greatest

“Ha! He knows better than to hit me”

“Yeah, because he’s as scared of you as the rest of us”

Pitch ditched a cushion in his direction, that missed him completely

“Rude”

“Merp”

Keith simply snorted at the both of them, Blue was taking up too much of the hunter’s attention. Still, he was going to be the bigger man, no wet food for Blue until she came back and loved him again.

The next week of Lance’s life passed slowly. Very fucking slowly in parts. His thirst wasn’t getting better, Keith wanted to fight every day, he didn’t have the energy to keep up with his work, feeling like he was letting all his clients down. Something in his gut was trying to tell him something, and Lance wasn’t sure what it was. He hadn’t heard from Shiro. Keith’s answer to that problem was that Shiro would come back when it was safe. But “safe for who?” was a totally different question. Lance had found that gradually he was getting used to Keith’s presence. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like this kind of uneasy peace. Keith grudgingly ate Lance’s cooking. The idiot had burned toast... in the toaster. It didn’t take a degree to be able to put two pieces in and pull down the lever, but somehow he’d done it. He’d set off the fire alarms, waking Lance, who immediately went into panic mode. Smacking his arm on the wall, he’d burst the blood blister building beneath his skin, smearing blood on the wall, as he swore. Rushing into the kitchen, the toaster was on fire, Lance ripping the cord out the all and dumping the lot in the sink.

Swapping the washing from the machine to the dryer, Lance closed his eyes and counted to 10 before opening them again. He could hear Keith shuffling around in the kitchen. He could hear his phone vibrating on the bench. The way his coffee machine slowly came to life told him he had all of 5 minutes before Keith would be all up in his face demanding that they fight. He could be in the middle of vacuuming and Keith would still pop up and demand to fight. He seemed to be working out a style for himself and organising his thoughts as he did. He still hadn’t decided on Keith, but he had to give him some credit. He kept trying and he kept getting back up... He was still to get an actual blow in that Lance hadn’t allowed. Maybe he was sick from Keith continually beating him up? And maybe he was kind of enjoying things more than he let himself believe. Or maybe his defences were lower than normal thanks to still being sick.

“Lance! Message!”

So Keith was his answering service now? Where was that in the terms and agreements of having his house hijacked?

“I know! I heard! Some dick didn’t bring all his washing out!”

“That’d be you!”

Like fuck it was. His lapses didn’t count when it was his house and he was going through stuff. Watching Keith try to wash and live in two sets of clothes was painful, so now he had three sets, plus underwear and socks of his own. He had a whole damn drawer in the spare bedroom, the Hunter basically moved in

“Fuck off!”

So much for his calming breath.

Heading into the kitchen, Keith had coffee made for the both of them. Yeah, Lance would have preferred tea but Keith seemed adamant on conquering the coffee machine

“Who was the call from?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t check it”

Lance raised an eyebrow

“I thought that was your thing, snooping on people’s calls?”

“Very funny old man. You look worse than you did yesterday”

“Isn’t that good for you?”

“No. I can’t learn anything if you’re half dead”

“If only I’d known that all along. I would have been off the hook long ago”

“Ha ha fucking ha”

“Shut up drink and your coffee”

Snatching his phone up, Lance’s chest went tight, his stomach dropped and his knees nearly went with it

“What’s wrong?”

Opening the message recorded, Lance held it to his ear as his hands shook

“Hi, Lance, it’s Sally here. Your grandmother’s taken a bit of a fall. She was awake when we found her, but we’ve transferred her to Platt General hospital. I’m sorry to drop this on you. If you want to give them a call, they might have more information for you...”

Lance’s phone slipped from his hand, Keith catching it before he could break another one

“Lance?”

“I’ve got to go”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t concern you... fuck...”

He was getting teary. His Mami wasn’t as strong as she’d once been

“Hey...”

Brushing Keith off, Lance started scrambling to get ready, his head already dreaming up worst case scenarios. Had his Mami fallen or had it been something more? Had something happened? Was she not telling him something?

Racing out the front door, he made straight for his car. The key didn’t seem to want to go into the ignition, Lance screaming at it in frustration

“Move over, I’ll drive”

Lance nearly told Keith to fuck himself. He didn’t know why he’d followed him out. Sliding across the bench seat, Keith climbed into the drivers seat

“What’s happened?”

“It’s... I need to get to Platt general”

“You’ll have to give me directions. What’s going on? Who’s in hospital?”

“My Mami...”

Whatever smart reply Keith had for that died on the man’s tongue. Giving a nod, Keith got the key into the ignition, the old bronco starting with a rumble.

The drive to Platt was horrible. It passed in a blur as Lance prayed to whoever was out there that it wouldn’t be something major. Barking directions at Keith, Keith copped all his bad mood and worry, the hunter barely parked before Lance was rushing to get out the car. He hadn’t even bothered to clip in his damn seatbelt for the drive

“Lance, take a breath”

“Fuck you”

“Your teeth are fucking showing”

Oh... he was making a vampire face... fuck... he felt like he was about to throw up across his feet. He needed to see his Mami, and Keith’s presence was the only thing keeping him from completely losing himself. The hunter deserved a break

“Do you know what ward she’s on?”

“No. They didn’t say...”

“Okay, we’ll find out together”

Lance should have known Keith knew all about his family. Keeping his hand on Lance’s good arm, to keep him from running off, Keith talked to the woman at the front information desk, finding his Mami’s room with more patience than Lance had. He’d been here before with his Mami, so he should have remembered the way up to the floor, Keith nearly getting them lost because Lance couldn’t stop the flood of tears rolling down his face over the fact his Mami wasn’t dead. Finding the right ward, the nurse at the desk looked up at them like she was perplexed by their presence, telling them that only family was allowed to see his Mami. With choked words Lance explained that he was her grandson and emergency contact, which was apparently Luis on the hospital side of things. It wasn’t supposed to be him. Lance lived the closest, and he was the one who always made time for his Mami. When the woman looked to Keith, Lance explained that he was Mami’s other grandson, Keith not at all comfortable with the sudden promotion to family. Signing in, the nurse led them to his Mami’s room. She’d fractured her hip in the fall, and done a bang up job on her face, Lance nearly face planting as his emotions grew further out of control.

Propped up on pillows, Lance let out a fresh sob at his Mami’s face. Keith telling the nurse he’d call if they needed anything. His Mami looked so frail, far too frail, her complexion washed out, but when she saw him, she was raising her arms towards him

“Oh, Mijo...”

Walking over to his Mami, Lance wrapped his arms around her the best he could

“I’m okay. It’s just the silly head of mine. I got a little muffled”

“I was so scared”

“I know, you’ve always had a sweet heart. But you know it takes more than a fall to stop me”

Lance snorted a laugh, well aware he was snotting on his Mami’s shoulder

“I was still scared. Sally called to let me know”

“She’s got a big mouth, that one. They say I’m off to surgery soon, time for the good drugs”

“Mami!”

His mother chuckled, her strength wasn’t what it was, so Lance reluctantly drew out of her embrace to sit beside her

“Now, enough of that face. It’s a fractured hip, I’ve still got plenty of life in this old bird”

“You’re not old”

“Says you”

“Touché... fuck... I felt like...”

He felt as scared as when his Papi passed

“You didn’t lose me just yet. My face is sorer than the leg. I’m a tough old duck”

“That doesn’t make me feel better”

“That’s because you worry too much. Now, who is your handsome friend here?”

Right. Fuck... He didn’t know if his teeth were still showing... but this was his Mami and he’d never been that great at keeping secrets from her

“This is Keith... he knows...”

“Nice to meet you “Keith He Knows”... I’m hoping you did the driving and not Lance”

“Uh, yes, Ma’am”

His Mami laughed, her slight wince in the corner of her eyes didn’t go unnoticed by Lance. She had to be in a lot of pain, despite what she was saying and how she was acting

“Gracious. Where did he find you. Miriam is fine, dear. Now, I know my son is a worrywart, so could be a dear and find him a cup of tea for his nerves?”

“I think I can...”

“Thank you. It’s nice to see Lance is making friends. He’s so insistent that he’s fine alone. I hope you’re a good friend to him”

Keith took the the opening to flee, Lance didn’t blame him. They weren’t friends... he didn’t know what they were

“Mijo, I’m okay. Where did you meet Keith “who knows”?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does when my baby boy is making friends... or is there something you’re not telling you Mami”

Lance groaned

“You sound like Pidge”

“Ah, she’s a smart girl. Sooo... you and Keith?”

“Aren’t like that... He’s a human for one thing”

“And?”

“And a single drop of my blood could change all that, plus, I’m pretty sure he actually hates me”

“Ooooh, my little Mijo is growing up!”

His Mami must have been high

“Mami, he’s a hunter”

“I can see how that could make things difficult... Is he here to kill you?”

How could his Mami sound so blasé about his death?

“He wanted to. But things happened. Now he’s annoying houseguest”

“I hope you’ve been treating him right”

“Mami!”

“Good chinaware and fresh sheets...”

Lance groaned

“Mami, it’s not like that. How can you be so calm?”

“Because I can tell he’s not going to kill you”

“How?”

“Just call it a Mami feeling”

“I think Mami’s feeling high”

“A bit. A bit annoyed this happened before bingo. That Andy Jefferies always wins the good stuff. His walker might have to go for a walk”

“Mami!”

“I’m just saying... oh, never mind. Luis should be here soon”

Fucking Luis...

“Don’t make a face like that, Mijo. He is your brother”

“I know and someone changed me from their emergency contact here”

“Well Luis and Lisa are thinking of making the move here...”

“I’m already here”

“I know you are, dear. But you can’t chase after your Mami forever”

“I’m pretty sure I can. I mean, vampire and that”

Lance injected scoff into his tone. He didn’t want to seem as jealous as he was. He’d always thought he’d had a special bond with his Mami, and the rest of his family all had families of their own... except for Rachel. She’d had a troubled life, thanks to him

“You know what I mean”

“I do, but you don’t get to think that you’re rid of me anytime soon”

“I wouldn’t dream of such freedom”

His Mami was viscous

“Now, give me hug. This old body doesn’t always like cooperating”

#once bitten twice stupid #17prt1

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writing-for-the-weekend · 5 years ago

Text

Adventures With Aaron

Hey guys! This is the start of the revamp that I’ve been talking about. Hope you enjoy! For those of you that have any suggestions or things you would like me to change/add, just let me know via message. Thanks for reading!

He approaches the garage door and types in the four-digit code. 9055. The door slowly rises.

"I have no idea why she isn't answering her phone. It's only 8:00," Austin says over his shoulder.

"Are you sure she'll be okay with this?" Aaron asks.

"Yeah, I don't know man. She's pretty chill, but this might be going too far," Giancarlo replies.

Austin glances at the parked car in the garage and shrugs his shoulders. (Y/N) is one of the most down to earth people that he knows, but something like this could make the calmest person freak out.

"I don't know what else to do. We drove 45 minutes to come see her, and now I'm nervous something happened," Austin grimaces.

Aaron looks up at the beautiful house, "I can't believe she lives here alone."

The house is definitely big for one occupant. (Y/N) is a very successful editor for one of the most popular magazines in New York. Her personality does not match the lifestyle that she lives, but entertaining is one of her favorite things. It helps that her closest childhood friend is Austin Romine of the New York Yankees. He has introduced her to a bunch of new people, and he and his friends frequently need a place to crash that isn't a cold hotel. She likes to open her home to them whenever they are willing to make the trip to Westchester County.

"Well, let's go scare the shit out of (Y/N)," Giancarlo chuckles.

********

You wake up to the sound of the garage door shutting and the handle of the side door turning. It takes you a minute to realize what you're hearing, but once it registers, you throw the blanket off your body and stand up from the couch. Your heart is racing as you try to remember if you're expecting anyone tonight. What time is it? Where is your phone? You run your hands over your pants trying to find your phone when the door creaks open slowly.

"Y/N?"

"Rise and shine sleepy head!"

You let out a sigh as you recognize the voices.

"Holy shit. You guys scared me," you say with a huge exhale.

You hear a bag drop and Giancarlo comes around the corner. He gives you a huge smile and trots over to give you a bear hug.

"Sorry (Y/N), it was Austin's decision to break in your house. Aaron and I thought it was a terrible idea."

"Wow, thanks for throwing me under the bus, man," Austin says as he elbows Giancarlo.

Austin grunts as you wrap your arms around his neck, "Next time pick up your phone when I call and text you a million times!"

"I fell asleep on the couch again for the third time this week. Work has been absolutely crazy. I hadn't heard from you guys in a bit, so I wasn't expecting company. Sorry for the mess."

Aaron comes around the corner carrying all three of their bags. He stands there awkwardly and just smiles as you stare at him with your mouth hanging open.

"Guys, help him!" you squeal.

Austin and Giancarlo grab their bags from Aaron and smack him on the back.

"Sorry man. This is (Y/N) by the way. (Y/N) this is Aaron. Not like you need much of an introduction," Austin smiles.

You can feel your face flush, but it's not the time to be embarrassed. First impressions are everything you think to yourself. You run your fingers through your hair, pat some of the wrinkles out of your shirt, and stick your hand out. "It's nice to finally meet you!" you exclaim.

Aaron gives you a huge smile and says, "I've heard so much about you! No way are we starting this out with a handshake."

He bends down and goes in for a hug.

Your breath catches in your throat, but you allow yourself to relax and return the hug. His massive hands envelop your back and you are completely swooning over the man you've been so obviously crushing on for months. He is bent down low enough for you to reach your arms around his shoulders. Your right hand brushes against the nape of his neck, and you feel how soft his hair is. You realize how intimate this hug just became, and you quickly pull back. You stare up at him and notice the grin that he has on his face. You glance over his shoulder and notice the suggestive look on Austin’s face. You can feel the rush of heat to your face as you mindlessly play with the hem of your shirt.

"Well, (Y/N), it's really nice to finally meet you. All the guys speak so highly of you. And your house is - it's absolutely stunning," Aaron says sheepishly.

You quickly glance around your living room which is a complete mess.

"Thank you! I wish I knew you were coming - I would have straightened up a bit,” you say running a hand through your hair. “If you want, I can give you a tour of the place.”

Austin picks up his bag and slings it over his shoulder. “How about you give him a quick tour, and I’ll order some pizza for us?”

“I am so down with that. I am completely starving,” G says as he rounds the corner and heads towards the hallway.

“Ready for the tour?” you say with a shy smile.

*****

You motion for Aaron to follow you down the hallway. He stops frequently to stare at the art on the wall and just absorb your home.

"Sorry if I'm being nosey. You just have a lot of really interesting stuff here," Aaron says.

"It's all good. I like to collect a bunch of different things so sometimes it feels a bit messy."

You bring Aaron into your lavish kitchen and dining room and show him where he is always free to help himself. You go through the dining room and into the gaming room. Aaron's eyes widen as he takes everything in. A huge TV is on the one wall and the room is filled with a giant U-shaped couch and multiple bean bag chairs. He walks over to the corner of the room which just so happens to be your favorite place. The corner is lined floor to ceiling with books and there is a huge bean bag chair that can easily sit three adults. There are fairy lights lining the bookcases, and it is the perfect place to take a trendy Instagram picture.

"This is amazing," he murmurs as he looks through all of your books.

"This room is usually a big hit. The guys like to come in here and play video games or watch movies, and I usually curl up in this corner with a good book. It allows me to spend time with my friends while still doing what I love the most."

"Well isn't that adorable," he says with a smirk.

You smile and look down at your feet looking more bashful than you intended.

"I meant that as a good thing. I think it's awesome that you have a hobby you enjoy so much."

"Yeah of course," you reply. "Well let's finish up the tour. We’ll probably come back here once dinner is over.”

Aaron crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head no. He looks like he is about to throw a temper tantrum, and you can’t help but laugh. You hold your hand out to him and nod encouragingly towards the hallway. “The bedrooms are even more fun,” you say winking.

You notice a touch of color creeps up Aaron’s face, and this makes you laugh even harder. His massive hand reaches out and takes yours.

You take Aaron down the main hall on the first floor. You show him the three guest rooms and the accompanying bathroom.

"This is insane," he says in awe. "I'm not doubting your success or anything, but it's amazing that you are able to live here by yourself. What made you want to live in such a big house all alone?"

You give him a smile, "Well I'm rarely alone. I have a bunch of friends who regularly need a place to crash. Most of my guy friends play baseball or hockey and stay with me instead of the hotel option when they are in New York. It reminds them more of home and it's less lonely."

"Yeah, I can't believe I am just coming here now. The guys have been trying to get me to come here instead of staying at the hotel, but I didn’t want to impose. Of course, the hotels are nice, but it just gets kind of lonely after a while."

"Exactly!" you say. "It's nice to share this with my friends, and I always enjoy the company too. And never feel like you are imposing here, there is always plenty of room, and even if all the rooms are taken, we always figure it out. The guys have totally taken over these rooms, so they are all occupied,” you say motioning down the hallway. Romine uses the first one, Giancarlo prefers the second one, and Yelich sometimes stays in the third room whenever he is in New York. He has so much shit in there though, so we just keep that door closed," you chuckle.

You head up the stairs for the rest of the tour. You make a left at the landing and walk into your immaculate bedroom. The color scheme matches your personality perfectly. All white and gray with pops of peach in the bedding and curtains. This room is especially photo ready at all times just because it makes you happy to have full control over one room in the house where the guys don’t invade. “So this is the master bedroom,” you say, “my office is down there to the left, and then there is the attached en suite.”

Aaron sits down on the corner of your bed. "Hm, I like this room. I think this is the room I want for myself," he says as he leans back on his elbows.

"Ohhhh sorry,” you say sarcastically, “but this one is already taken."

"I mean, you could always be nice and share," Aaron smiles.

You can tell your cheeks are turning red, but you do your best to ignore that. "Wow. We've known each other for what 30 minutes? You are quite the flirt."

"I literally won 'Most Flirty' in high school," Aaron replies with the cutest smirk.

You walk over to the bed and hit Aaron with a throw pillow. "Let's go lover boy. Time for you to see your room."

*****

Aaron follows you out of the bedroom. He trails far enough behind you that you think he might be enjoying the view, or maybe you just hope that he is.

"There are two guest rooms up here, but this one tends to be in use by one of my hockey friends,” you say gesturing towards the room to the right. “This room right next to mine is usually open, so that's probably the best bet for you tonight."

"Perfect. (Y/N), I just want to thank you again for letting me stay here. It really means a lot," Aaron says.

"Yeah, of course! You're always welcome here. Let me know if you need anything, okay?"

Aaron smiles and nods. He grabs his bag and drops it on the bed. You stand just outside the door frame, and he slowly approaches you. He raises his arms up and places his hands on the inside of the door frame. You make eye contact with him, and both of you are smirking like teenagers.

Just then you hear Austin yell up the stairs, "Hey you two! Pizza is here!"

You smile up at Aaron, "Looks like our company is being requested then.”

Dinner was perfect. Pizza with some of your favorite guys is always a great way to spend the evening. You didn't realize just how hungry you were, but you hadn't eaten since lunch time and it was obvious. Two beers and four slices of pizza later and even your comfy yoga pants felt tight.

"I need to lie down," you mutter.

You make your way into the game room and weigh your options. You decide to flop down on one of the large bean bag chairs and just let it completely consume you. You close your eyes for what feels like a few seconds and open them to see Aaron standing above you.

"Want some company?" he says with a shy smile.

You move over more than you need to, but it gives Aaron enough room to sit down without automatically being on top of you. You wouldn't mind that, but you want to make sure Aaron is on the same page as you before you assume anything. Just as Aaron sits down, Austin comes into the game room.

"Hey, (Y/N) is it okay if some of my friends come by and spend the night? It's my photographer buddy and his two assistants. They have a huge project they are working on in the city, but I haven't seen him in a long time," Austin asks as he leans on the door frame.

"Mike? Yeah, that's cool with me," you reply.

"Awesome, thanks. Don't get too comfortable you two. Wade just got here and we are going to come in and play games."

Aaron nudges you with his elbow and gives you a sweet smile when you look over at him. You knock your foot into his knee and jokingly say, "Hey, watch it."

The guys come in the room to play video games and have a couple drinks. They have an off day tomorrow, so they are letting loose a little more than normal. Austin's friends show up and join in on the fun. They try to include you and Aaron, but you both are content just watching them from the bean bag. You are lying down next to each other with your arms and legs lightly touching, but it's natural and you aren't even thinking about it. You are so relaxed.

******

Aaron is freaking out. His teammates have been telling him about (Y/N) for months, but he absolutely hates being set up on dates. He saw pictures of (Y/N) and appreciated her looks, but he knew she was some fancy magazine editor in New York - there is no way they would get along. Pictures simply did not do her justice. She is gorgeous, has a great sense of humor, and is so down to earth. Aaron liked that she blushed when they met and he loved that the hug hello lasted a little longer than it should have.

Aaron feels a hand on his shoulder slowly shake him awake and a whisper, "Hey, Aaron."

Aaron wakes up to the rowdiness of his friends and the most beautiful girl standing in front of him.

"Mike wants to take your picture."

"What?" Aaron replies as he sits up.

"Yeah, your bone structure is to die for. Is it cool if I snap some pictures of you before I leave tomorrow?" Mike asks. "Actually, if I could convince the two of you to do a mini photoshoot together, I would be the happiest man on earth. The softness of her features next to your angles, perfect."

"Who, me?" (Y/N) asks.

“Yes, of course, you. You two are going to look so good together,” Mike says.

"I'm down," Aaron says trying to keep his cool.

*****

"So what exactly are we going to be doing?" you calmly ask. "I feel like the lighting isn’t really ideal this late.”

"Relax and let me worry about these things. We have some lighting in the truck, so we can definitely make this work. I just want to do a couple of shots with you two together. I'll direct you, don't worry. Right now, I need you to go put on some foundation, mascara and get some color to your lips. Deal?"

"Fair enough,” you say with a smirk as you turn to head to your bedroom.

Your number one goal for the night is to remain as calm as possible. It is very clear that you have had a crush on Aaron from afar for a very long time, and now that you’ve met him, your crush has just continued to develop. Aaron seems like such a cool and down to earth guy, and you are definitely not trying to ruin anything by fangirling over him.

You put your makeup on and keep it as simple as you possibly can. Your hair was slightly messed up from lying down earlier, so you run a brush through it and flat iron the wonky parts. Mike didn't tell you what to wear, so you decide to head down and see what he has in mind.

You make your way down the stairs and around the corner to find Aaron standing shirtless in your living room. Your breath hitches in your throat and you come to an abrupt stop.

"Hey," Aaron says with that charming smile of his.

"Hi," you say.

"Perfect, (Y/N)! you look absolutely perfect. The idea that I am dreaming about is Aaron over here in jeans with no shirt, and you in your underwear. How does that sound?"

"Under- underwear?" you stammer.

"Yeah, I'm thinking a cute lacy bra with some matching booty shorts. I know you have something like that so don't even look surprised," Mike responds.

"I thought you wanted to take pictures of our face?"

"Well yes, but I need to set the mood and this lawn chair outside is the perfect location for this photoshoot, and ugh. Please (Y/N)? This will be perfect."

"Okay, okay," you respond. "Aaron, you're cool with this?"

"As long as you are," he says with a huge grin on his face.

You go upstairs and find the perfect black lacy bra and the black lace underwear to match. The panties make your butt look amazing and plump. You adjust your bra to make sure you look as perky as possible. "Well here goes nothing."

You pull on the yoga pants that you were just wearing and grab the closest hoodie to cover up. You walk down the stairs and run into Austin as soon as you come around the corner.

"(Y/N), what the hell are you about to do?" he says as he grabs your hand.

"I have no idea, but I do know I am seconds away from having a heart attack."

"Can I watch?" he says with a smirk.

"I would rather my best friend not watch make a fool of myself half naked," you reply.

"Fine. You'll do great. Good luck," he assures you squeezing your hand. “Oh, just a heads up. Giancarlo was looking for you earlier. Something about you owing him cuddles?” Austin says rolling his eyes.

“Fuck,” you reply. The last time the guys were over you had gotten a little too comfortable with Giancarlo. Things didn’t get very far, but you pretty much sat in his lap the whole night as you consumed way too many drinks. He ended up coming to bed with you after a passionate make out session, but you were sober enough to put a stop to anything going further. You still spent the night with him, and since that night he has been sending you suggestive texts. You really liked G, but you were definitely not interested in continuing where that night left off. You were hoping that he got the hint, but clearly, if he was getting Austin involved, you weren’t so lucky.

“I can tell him you seem pretty busy with Aaron,” Austin says laughing.

“I’m not trying to start shit between teammates right now, but you already know how I feel about the situation. I’m just trying to have a good time,” you say shrugging your shoulders. Austin gives you a friendly pat on the upper arm and sends you on your way.

You take a deep breath and try to calm your nerves before walking into the living room. You run your fingers through your hair one more time for good measure and step around the corner.

Aaron stands next to Mike deep in conversation nodding his head to whatever he is saying. One of Mike's assistants is outside setting up some artificial lights on your patio.

"There she is!" Mike exclaims. "Do you mind getting undressed while I go talk to Caleb out on the patio?"

You nod your head and glance over at Aaron. His body is amazing and he knows it, but he is humble enough to not show off. He gives you a small smile and turns around to give you privacy to change. The view from the back is just as fantastic as the view from the front, but you stop yourself from staring too long.

You strip out of your yoga pants and pull the hoodie over your head trying not to mess up your hair or makeup. Once your clothes are off, there isn't much left to do. You fold the pants and the sweatshirt and clear your throat. Aaron turns around and his eyes widen.

"Well this is awkward," you say.

"You look absolutely stunning," he replies shaking his head back and forth. "Seriously. I - I - I'm speechless."

"You're speechless? Have you seen yourself? I'm trying to stop myself from going into shock right now," you say laughing.

Aaron glances down shyly, “Well this is one way to get to know each other quickly."

"Girl! You look amazing. You look even better than what I imagined," Mike squeals. "How about you two join the rest of us outside. (Y/N), it's a little chilly, but I'm sure you'll be warmed up in a minute."

You go out the sliding door with Aaron behind you. Your nerves are through the roof, but somehow you are keeping it together. Mike leans down and pats the lounge patio chair that Caleb pulled away from the pool. The chair is completely drowning in artificial light. You glance up towards the sky and see that the moon is peeking out from behind some clouds. There are a couple of moths migrating towards the light, and Mike notices you freezing up a bit.

“(Y/N), Aaron let’s make this short and sweet. If either of you doesn’t feel comfortable doing something, please just let me know. This should be pretty painless. Aaron, I want you to come over here and sit down. We want the band of your briefs to be showing slightly above your jeans because that just screams sex," Mike states enthusiastically.

Aaron adjusts his briefs and pulls his jeans down a bit to get the exact look you know Mike is looking for. He looks so damn good. You bite your lip and look at the ground to control yourself.

"(Y/N) I need you to come over here and straddle Aaron's lap. We are going to be taking pictures of you two face to face, so this is the easiest way of going about that with the height difference."

You slowly walk over to Aaron and swing one leg over the chair. The lounge chair is close to the ground, and you don't really want to fully sit in his lap. You squat down and hover over his lap a little bit while you keep your hands on the top of the chair to steady yourself.

"You might as well get comfortable, I have a feeling this will be a while. Unless this is your workout for the day," Aaron looks up at you with a smile.

You give in because there is no way you have the core strength to hold that position for very long. You don't want to sit directly in Aaron's lap, so you scoot up a bit and sit on his lower abdomen.

"Am I hurting you?" you ask.

"Not even a little bit."

A flash goes off as you are looking down at Aaron. You look up to see Mike staring at you sheepishly.

"I'm sorry. You guys just look so great together. Let's start so that we can all actually get to sleep tonight at a normal hour. I don't really want to direct you guys too much. I'm looking for sweet, but sexy," Mike says.

Aaron looks up at you completely lost. You can see that he is just as nervous as you are, so you decide to pull yourself together and take the lead on this one. You lean in and take Aaron's face in your hand and tilt your head as if you are going to kiss him. You slightly part your lips and pull on Aaron's bottom lip with your thumb to encourage him to do the same.

"Ugh, absolutely perfect," Mike says as you hear the shutter on the camera go off multiple times.

You look down at Aaron and bite your lip for Mike to take the next picture, but you notice that Aaron has locked eyes with you. He reaches up to cradle your face with his massive hand and tugs on your bottom lip for the next picture.

"Hello, sexy!" Mike calls out.

You try not to pay any attention to it, but you can feel Aaron grow hard underneath you. You shift slightly to try and relieve some pressure for him, but you must have rubbed him just right as he lets out a quiet gasp. You can't help but smile knowing that you've turned him on this much. Aaron rests his forehead against yours and you can hear how much Mike loves that. It's sweet, but you can tell that Aaron is dying for more and this is definitely not the time to go for it. You lean back a bit to get into a new position and you can feel Aaron pushing through the seams of his jeans. He rests his hands on your ass, and he gives you a slight squeeze. He locks eyes with you again and you can tell he has about had it with this photoshoot. He grabs your face and brings your lips to his aggressively.

"Yes!" Mike screams.

Aaron's tongue slips inside your mouth and starts to explore. You can hear the shutter on the camera going crazy and you can see the flash even though your eyes are closed. Aaron runs his fingers through your hair as one hand holds your face in place as if he is begging you not to go anywhere. The kiss finally comes to an end and you lean back with a sigh.

"That was amazing you two!" Mike shouts. Can you guys swap positions? I want Aaron on top now."

You look at Aaron and smirk. You know he's hard. He knows that you know he’s hard, and now Mike is about to know he’s hard.

"Can we take a 10 minute break?" you suggest as you push yourself out of his lap.

Mike nods and turns his back to the two of you to talk with Caleb about the next group of photos.

"Thanks," Aaron says as his face turns red. "I'll be right back."

Aaron trots towards the sliding door doing the best he can to conceal his bulge. You lie down on the lounge chair and close your eyes. Mike was right, it is pretty cold out, so you pull your legs up to your chest and rest your head on your knees. You listen to Mike and Caleb as they sort through the pictures they took. You keep hearing words like passion, sex, dirty, and naughty but you slowly start to tune them out. You suddenly feel a hand on your back and you quickly open your eyes.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you," Aaron says with a smirk. "Thanks for covering for me back there. Sorry if I got a little carried away."

"What? No, it was great - I mean you were great. Everything was great," you stumble out.

"You guys ready to finish this up?" Mike asks.

Aaron waits for you to lie back down on the chair before he lowers himself above your body. He uses his knees to hold himself up on either side of you so that he doesn't have to put any weight on your body. He crawls forward and braces his hands on either side of your body. You scoot your body down so that you are flat on your back and lean up to kiss him. He stays put and you know it's going to be a great picture with you longing after his kiss. You grab Aaron's face and give him a hard, long kiss. He grinds his hips down into yours not even thinking about who is watching. You can feel how hard he is and it drives you wild. Your kiss intensifies and you lift your hips up to feel more of him. The camera is still going off like crazy, but you barely pay it any mind. Aaron lowers his hand to your waist and grips it tight pushing you down into the chair. You let out a soft moan as he pushes his tongue farther into your mouth. You grab at his face desperately wanting all of him and more. Aaron pulls back from you despite your protest and he stares deeply into your eyes.

"I think we are good here," Mike says with a grin on his face. "You guys should probably go take a cold shower or something."

You start to sit up as Austin is stepping out of the sliding glass door.

"Woah. Sorry to interrupt the porno, but we don't have enough beds for all of the guests tonight," he says looking directly at you.

"It's all good. I'll bunk with (Y/N)," Aaron replies.

"Oh yeah?" Austin questions with a smirk.

"If that's okay with you, of course," Aaron says looking over at you.

"Yeah, sure," you stammer.

"Cool. I'll go move my stuff out of the guest room," he says before he walks off.

You immediately look at Austin with your eyes wide. You have no idea what just happened or how it happened or what to even think about. Austin grabs you by the shoulders and gives you a little shake.

"What the hell are you about to do?" he says jokingly shaking you back and forth.

"I don't know! I don't know what I just agreed to. What should I do?"

"Well it's a little late now!" he laughs. "You guys just met, I can't believe you are going to sleep with him!"

"Well it's not like I have to have sex with him tonight," you say hesitantly.

Austin raises his eyebrows and shakes his head back and forth.

"Earth to (Y/N)," he says waving his hands in front of your face. "What part of him staying in your room are you not picking up?"

You are by no means a prude especially considering what just occurred between Aaron and yourself, but you actually want to get to know him. Sex is great and all and it can lead to amazing relationships, but you are worried he might get the wrong idea. You open your arms to give Austin a hug and he can't help but smile at how pathetic you look. He squeezes you tight and kisses you on the forehead.

"Aaron's a good guy. You don't have to worry about anything. Do whatever you are comfortable with."

You give him a smile and walk inside together.

****************

Aaron walked into the guest room to gather his belongings. He lets out a huge sigh and rolls his neck from side to side. He could definitely use some practice when it comes to smooth talking someone he is so obviously interested in. The look on her face indicated that he may have taken it too far. He normally wasn't this forward, but he was really interested in her and wanted to make it known. He winced as he picked up his bag from the floor and started to roll his shoulder to relieve some pressure. He had silently been dealing with a minor shoulder injury for the past few weeks and it was bothering him after the photoshoot. He got so into the moment that he didn't even notice the pain.

****************

All you wanted to do was shower and go to bed. The make out session with Aaron got your adrenaline pumping and now you were crashing fast. As nervous as you were about Aaron staying with you tonight, it was all you could think about. You take the stairs two at a time as you make your way to your bedroom. You slow down before you open the door and try to look as casual as possible. You walk in the room to find Aaron sitting on the recliner that you have in the corner by the window.

"Hey," he says sweetly.

"What a nice surprise," you say.

Aaron smiles at the ground and bites his lip. His bag is sitting by his feet and he looks as if he is trying to take up as little room as possible. He stands up and walks over to you with his head down still and you can't seem to figure out what's going on.

"Everything okay?" you ask.

"I just - I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I don't want you to feel pressured to do anything or think I am just interested in - only that. You seem amazing, and all the guys have such wonderful things to say about you. I just want to hang out with you tonight with no expectations or pressure."

Aaron's brows are furrowed and he looks like he is seconds away from getting on his knees to beg for forgiveness. You move closer to him and reach for his right hand.

"I definitely appreciate you saying that, but I know that you’re a good guy and you weren’t trying to rush me. Also, I’m pretty sure the guys would kill you if anything were to happen,” you say laughing. “I think a nice relaxing night with you sounds like a great idea. Besides, it’s already a little after 10, and ya girl needs her rest.”

Aaron grins and looks down at you. He brushes a piece of hair behind your ear and moves his hand away quickly as if embarrassed.

"Do you mind if I shower?" you ask.

"Of course not. Do you want to just hang out up here and watch some mindless TV?" Aaron asks.

You nod your head and make your way to your dresser drawer to pull out some clean clothes. Even though Aaron took some of the pressure off you still wanted to make a good impression. You want to look cute and sexy but not look like you are trying too hard. You pick out a pair of cute undies with a matching bralette, a simple black tank top, and a pair of sleep shorts. You shake your head and try to remind yourself to stop overthinking everything. You turn around and find Aaron changing by the bed. He pulled off the jeans that he was wearing for the photo shoot and was folding them neatly. His ass looks perfect in his briefs and you can't help but stop and stare. He grabs a pair of basketball shorts out of his bag and slips them on. He takes off the shirt he put back on earlier and his back muscles stretch and flex as he moves. His arms are to die for, and you are probably going to die because Aaron turns around to find you staring at him with your mouth wide open.

"Enjoying the view?" he questions.

"I'm so sorry," you say embarrassed. "I, uh, I - let me just go take a shower."

Aaron can’t help but laugh, and you quickly turn around to head towards the bathroom. You set up all your clean clothes on the counter top and look at yourself in the mirror. Your hair is a mess, and you have circles under your eyes. The little bit of makeup you put on earlier was probably rubbed off during the photo shoot. You are hoping that the shower freshens up your face a little bit, but you know that it's not likely. If Aaron is attracted to you like this, then you are in good shape. You strip out of your clothes and hop in the shower to clean up quickly.

*****

Aaron sits down on the bed once he puts a fresh shirt on. He is on his phone just relaxing waiting for (Y/N) when someone starts knocking on the bedroom door. He gets up to answer the door to find Austin and Giancarlo standing there looking awfully suspicious.

"Where is (Y/N)?" Giancarlo questions coldly.

"She's in the shower. What are you guys doing up here?" Aaron asks.

"We wanted to make sure everything was going smoothly," Austin replies with a smirk.

Aaron turns around to check to make sure (Y/N) hadn't emerged from the shower and he pushes the guys out into the hallway. He shuts the door behind him.

"Quit being dicks. What do you want?" Aaron says a little more seriously than he intended.

"Woah, chill man. No need to get upset. We just wanted to check on (Y/N). She seemed a little nervous before, so I wanted to make sure she was okay," Austin replies.

"You guys should know me enough to know I'm not going to take advantage of her or do anything she isn't okay with."

Giancarlo steps forward looking annoyed. “Dude, you knew that I was interested in her. What’s the deal with you offering to share a room with her?”

“You drunkenly made out with her once after knowing her for how long?” Aaron questions.

G shakes his head back and forth, “That’s not even fair. You know I’ve been trying to hook up with her.”

“Yeah well I’m not just trying to hook up with her, and last I checked, you guys weren’t exclusive. Also, she seemed pretty into me when we were making out earlier,”

Giancarlo lunges forward, but Austin grabs his arm before he can do anything. “That’s fucked up and you know it,” he says through gritted teeth.

Aaron raises his hands in the air in a surrendering motion. “Why don’t we just ask (Y/N) who she wants in her bed tonight.”

“Okay, enough of that. The last thing either of you should be doing is fighting over a girl.” Austin grabs Giancarlo’s arm a little more forcefully and pulls him towards the stairs. “Both of you are acting like complete children right now,” he says.

Aaron rolls his eyes and closes the door. He turns to head back towards the bed just as he hears the shower turn off.

*****

You turn the shower off and open the shower curtain. You take one towel to dry off your face and arms and then you wrap it around your hair. You grab another towel to dry off the rest of your body. Once you are dried off, you put your clothes on and start to towel dry your hair. You run a comb through your hair quickly and give yourself one more glance in the mirror. It’s the best you’re going to do right before bed.

You emerge from the bathroom to find Aaron in bed searching through Netflix. He looks over at you and gives you a brief look up and down. He smiles slightly and pats the bed next to him. You toss your dirty clothes into the hamper and hop into bed next to him. The bed is big enough, but you are close enough that your arms and legs are lightly touching.

“How tired are you?” he questions as he looks down at you.

“Honestly, I’m exhausted. I think I worked myself up during that photoshoot and now I’m ready for bed.”

"Yeah, me too," he laughs. “Want to just put on an old scary movie and see how we feel after that if we’re still awake?

“That sounds perfect,” you reply.

You select the movie and settle into bed. Aaron props up some pillow behind him and opens his arm up to invite you to snuggle. You wrap one arm around his waist and rest your head on his chest.

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lonelypond · 5 years ago

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Moonlight Becomes You: Apocalypse Midnight Dance Party, Ch. 4: Dropping In For Brunch

Love Live, NozoEli, NicoMaki, KanaMari, 3.2K, 4/?

Summary: Maki's in town, Eli's still out of it, Mari's not everybody's favorite person, and You and Kanan make time for a chat. Plus, Nico and Nozomi both have a severe case of Ayase on the mind.

Dropping In For Brunch

Maki Nishikino marched up to the desk. She knew her direct off the Paris runway Loewe fringed t-shirt, jeans and bucket hat screamed first class, private penthouse suite, don’t even blink when this woman is speaking to you to anyone who made a study of style and today, today, she was going to use that. The staffer at the desk looked up, adjusted her posture, lowered her eyes briefly and then Maki spoke, hand solidly connecting with the wood of the counter, “Where is Nico Yazawa? She’s expecting me.”

There was a giggle behind her, “Oh, Maki, don’t scare my employees Unless you’re actually going to accept one of my job offers.”

Maki turned, a perfunctory nod to the desk clerk. Mari Ohara stood there, slouching, amused, in a three piece white suit, long jacket, with bright black and yellow smudges scattered. Maki recognized Akiko Aoki. Not her style at all. Too flashy.

Mari winked, “Can I interest you in a suite? Or running a nightclub.”

Getting drawn into a conversation with Mari was stepping into a mire. Simple demands were best. “You can take me to Nico.”

Mari raised an eyebrow, “Oh, you’re very focused.”

Maki shrugged.

Mari sighed, clicking her tongue,“Ki Ki…one after another and we all have to cope. Your friend doesn’t understand trust.”

“I’m sure Nico is doing what she thinks is best.”

Mari turned and tossed her hand up in a gesture that brought Maki back to the Italian clubs she’d toured last year. So many cultural cues mishmashed so ruthlessly in one blonde bulldozer. Maki was too jetlagged to snap any patter or be polite so she just pulled her sling bag strap tighter and followed Mari.

###

Nozomi missed home, the way the room smelled, how the fabric of the drapes fluttered gently, but mostly she missed the comforting security as the atmosphere opened up and enveloped her. But here she was, again, somewhere else, with her oldest Tarot deck, at a new coffee shop with a different view, one of people rushing to jobs, and auditions, and brunch meetings. Was Eli one of them? Or had Eli stopped by for a taste of her past and be disappointed not to find Nozomi around...no texts since midweek, since that exchange that ended so flatly. Was Eli all right?

Nozomi sighed. Hanamaru would laugh at her and probably point out with a smirk that no matter where Nozomi took her cards, she also took her heart. Closing her eyes to let her mind open into a memory, Nozomi pictured Eli, sitting across from her, bright eyes morning dark with worry, lips a nervous line. Breathing in three times, Nozomi dealt out three cards. That was the simplest spread and one that seemed to suit Eli. Page of Pentacles...very solid, charismatic, not that Nozomi needed a reminder of Eli’s charms, what it meant would depend on what next...but its position in the past indicated that Eli might be living with the consequences of her own choices. Next card, reverse Page of Swords...Nozomi tensed...danger, confusion, difficulty communicating, powers out of your control threatening. Nozomi hurriedly flipped the third card, another pentacle, another reversal...another concerning clue...whatever was cutting into Eli, she would need patience to resolve it and to let go of the thought that there might be an ideal solution. Would Eli listen to advice? Last time....when Nozomi had offered some, Eli had abruptly ended their text chat. But Nozomi couldn’t stop remembering the last time she’d seen Eli, the eager gleam in those bright eyes when she’d announced it was ‘time for a fresh start’, the firmness of her handshake. Surely someone as careful, as grounded as Eli seemed would be relieved to be advised patience? Nozomi picked up her phone, leaving the cards out on the table, pentacles and flipped sharps staring at her as she thought back to the Five Of Pentacles she’d drawn for Eli the last time. Reach out a hand. She swept to Eli’s contact info. Maybe just a hello? To remind Eli she wasn’t alone.

###

After Eli had been distracted by the huge raw steak Mari had acquired, Nico had let Kanan talk her into sitting down for a bagel and fresh fruit and a HUGE sweet caramelly bucket sized latte shipped in from somewhere. Nico didn’t ask how or why, she just chugged the caffeine and sugar boost as she shifted in a chair, still trying to stretch out the kinks in her legs from sleeping curled up in front of the door to Eli’s room. Kanan had attempted some conversation but Nico just let the chat die, as she wondered what to do with Eli if she didn’t change back...that was too complicated, so Nico shook herself and decided fresh mango slices would be a nice bagel follow up.

“Nico?” Maki’s voice, very nervous, very tight, and as Nico glanced up from the fruit bowl, Maki started to step into the breakfast nook, then Mari, blonde and brusque and way too touchy, like all those women in the photos, took Maki’s arm and swept her into a seat. The fringe on Maki’s branded, Luxury™️ t-shirt swayed and Nico caught a glimpse of abs as toned as the arms Maki’s usual muscle tees had given her ample opportunity to view. Hadn’t Maki just flown over night? How did she look so fresh, with a hat that would look stupid on anyone else tilted at a cute and perfect angle, frowning, but her amethyst eyes still luminous...and here Nico was, hadn’t even brushed her hair, same clothes she wore last night, which Maki was taking too close a look at.

Maki shrugged off Mari, scowling over her shoulder, “Don’t touch me.”

Nico nodded in agreement, not that she needed an excuse to frown at Ms. Mari Ohara, but she added touchy around hot redheads to her growing list.

Nico finished biting into the mango slice, “You look good. How do you do that after flying all night? Nico wants to know your secrets.”

Maki’s eyes met Nico’s and then she ducked her head, flushing, “Are you all right? You look terrible.”

Confirmation Nico didn’t need, but Nico had other charms. “Nico was a hero and a human obstacle in front of Eli’s door last night.”

Mari stomped, tossing her hair back. “Hero? Che palle! She insisted on having le mani in pasta when we could have had everything under control. For one so tiny…”

“Basta, Mari.” Kanan stood, wrapping Mari up in a hug from behind that pulled her away from the table, “Let’s check on our other guest.”

Nico started a bit guiltily at that from her latte sipping, staring at Maki daydream, but Maki smiled and Nico couldn’t hear anything from the room Eli was in so maybe, just maybe, this was an actual minute she and Maki could have crisis free.

###

Nico’s voice? Eli was curled up into a tight ball on something softer than her futon mattress. Shaking, she opened an eye. Completely strange room, large brush paintings of sea scenes on the wall, a huge window leading out to a balcony with a view of the ocean. Still in Santa Monica? Eli sat up, every muscle sore, her head pounding. Naked. She grabbed a sheet and wrapped it around herself. What had happened? It was well into the day. The sun was too bright for early morning. Surely she’d heard Nico. Why was Nico here? Frowning, squinching her eyes to force memories through the painful wall of her headache, Eli searched for her last awareness. She’d been standing in front of the window in the rehearsal space, watching the sun dip closer to the rolling waves. She was itchy again, prickles pushing against her skin, distracted, two straight days of rehearsal had worn her through to weary and although Kanan still had a few things to work her through, Eli had enjoyed the challenge. It had been a rare moment of solitude, sipping tea, eating a Pryaniki from the stash she’d brought to treat herself. She’d loved the honey swirled through it...the honey had a different, sweeter tang mixed in with the Russian spices...Eli remembered thinking of her grandmother’s kitchen, then there were footsteps coming down the hall, and with a fast turn…snarling, a raw throat, the pressure headache where her brain tried to come out her forehead...Eli shook herself as a mood closed in, dangerous, blinking her eyes as she forced herself to stay in the brightness.

Eli tried out a sound, “Hello?” and her voice was a bare shadow of full volume, a scratchy mumble. A puff of s breeze was blowing curtains around and everything seemed very quiet, the roll of the ocean dominating the soundscape. What day was it? Eli didn’t see a clock or her phone.

She was going to have to get up to learn anything. Shakily, swinging her legs to the hardwood floor, sheet gathered around herself, she shuffled past to the door, cracking it open. Definitely Nico’s voice. And Maki?

Eli managed to make it through the office section and then Nico spotted her, jumping up to run and grab her in a hug that nearly knocked Eli back to horizontal, “You’re all right!”

Eli shook her head, trying not to tear up at Nico’s affection and familiar confidence. It was hard not to think Nico was here, everything would be all right, but as she glanced up to see Maki watching both of them out of the corner of her eye, one hand turning a coffee cup, the other arm crossed over her chest. Eli took an unconscious sniff of the room’s atmosphere and immediately realized Maki’s aloofness was some concern but mostly...resentment, probably at Eli interrupting their conversation. Eli couldn’t blame her, but she felt her own frustrations rise. Nico was there for her. Maki hadn’t woken up in someone else’s...Eli glanced around, taking in the art, the Turkish rugs, the fresh flowers perfuming the natural salt of the sea air, the elegance, the lived in comfort of casual affluence...someone else’s home.

“I’m a little shaky.” Eli raised her arms, bringing Nico’s attention to the blue and tan quilt patched blanket she swaddled in, “And underdressed.”

“You need to wash your face.” Maki stated sharply, swiping at the corner of her own mouth with a clenched hand.

“Oh yeah,” Nico somehow managed to make this sound like Eli had just woken up from a post pancake brunch nap, “Kanan’s wife got you a huge steak.”

Eli reddened, not wanting the quick skim of her memory to happen. Could she recall anything from last night, pull any images before waking up into daylight? Were the barriers natural or learned? Her grandmother had continually encouraged her to lock out any thoughts or urges that might originate in the non human part of her and Eli had become an expert at denying them any power over her waking awareness. She wavered, but Nico was still there.

“I’m so tired, Nico.” Yep. Crying. Eli saw Nico glance to Maki, and the redhead’s glower softened infinitesimally.

Nico was a cheerful blur of coping. “Well, Nico will tuck you back into bed, find your phone and shoes…”

Maki cleared her throat, “Maybe if Eli’s going to sleep…” she hesitated as Nico’s eyes narrowed suspiciously and the rest of her words came out in a rush, “we could get coffee or smoothies and sit in a cabana while Eli rests.” Maki frowned, then nodded, her eyes bright, “I want to talk to you, Nico,” the voice softened, and Eli tried not to start filing all the voice, body, and scent cues she was still sensitive to, “and out there, we won’t disturb Eli.”

Nico glanced back to Eli, who was rubbing her eyes, sickened by the discoloration under her fingernails. First, Eli told herself, she was scrubbing herself all over, BEFORE she looked into a mirror.

“Cover the bathroom mirror, Nico. Please. I want to wash up.” Eli slumped.

Maki stood, her voice kind, “I’ll do that while Nico finds your phone and stuff.” Resolute purple eyes met Eli’s, “We’ll be right outside. Don’t worry.”

Eli stopped a snarl. How did her life get so out of control that strangers who wanted to captivate her best friend were now patronizing her. Maki smiled encouragingly and Eli’s fists clenched, dirty nails digging into her palms, a growl rising and then Nico’s voice was a slap.

“Eli.”

Eli glanced down. Nico shook her head, a quick motion, lips pressed together in a frown. Eli closed her eyes and opened her palms.

“You’re okay,” Nico stated. “Just relax for now. You need rest.”

Eli knew that was the truth.

###

You was pacing the lobby, totally not dressed for the Ohara aesthetic in a polo and well worn nylon running shorts. She’d expected Kanan to be at their usual balcony table, but no, and after a half an hour and no response to any of her texts. You had been forced to ask the assistance of the hotel staff. And now she was waiting.

“You!” Kanan was rushing toward her, in leggings and a cropped sweatshirt, “I’m so sorry. There was an emergency last night and…”

All You’s danger tells went off and she stepped to Kanan’s side, her voice hushed, confidential, “Are you and Mari all right? What happened?”

“Let’s go outside.” Kanan led You through the lobby, to step out in view of the beach. It was either a slow day at the hotel or Mari had somehow made all the guests be occupied elsewhere. Mari had some kind of inherited hotelier hospitality magic that You thought made her more of a magical creature than many of those attending CRAAVI meetings, but it was a magic You avoided messing with. Give her the depths and shape changers and tentacled dangers, not hangry guests and thirsty vacationers.

Beach in front, pool behind, random wanderers on the wooden boardwalk, no one around the pool, easy to spot if anyone was approaching, Kanan stopped and fixed her ponytail, “I really need a run.”

“Not a swim?”

Kanan grimaced and gestured with her cast, “I’m tired of extra layers.”

You nodded sympathetically, “yeah, I bet you miss…”

Kanan cut You off, “I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night. There was an emergency. Eli, the dancer I’m working with…” Kanan hesitated, “became ill and then her roommate…” Kanan chuckled, gaze distant as she remembered Nico right in Mari’s face, not impressed, not backing down a centimeter.

“Sounds exciting.”

“Too exciting.” Kanan sighed and decided to drop dramatically into a chaise, “Plus, that DJ Mari’s been after forever showed up this morning. And wasn’t completely focused on Mari.” Kanan rolled her eyes, her non injured arm across her forehead, “and you know how my wife HATES not being the center of attention for all the pretty people in the room.”

“I do.” You dropped into the next chair.

“So why’d you call?”

“Check the LACryps hashtag sometime.”

You had spit sourness as she spoke. Surprised, Kanan pivoted on her hip to stare.

You kept staring at the sky, eyes nearly a matching blue, her facial expression and tone back to a carefully cultivated neutral, “Someone’s stirring up rumors, I had to warn Bo to stay off shore, but most of her group are with the whales this season. Yoshiko hasn’t heard anything yet, but she rarely dives into the internet.”

“No, that’s what she has you for. Inside information. Advance warning.” Kanan frowned, picturing Yoshiko frazzled, static electricity tightening her hair into curls, juggling her phone, brow furrowed as she kept her glamor carefully dulled, trying to organize the physical index cards she writes CRAAVI agendas on. So they can be more easily burnt when she was done with them. Yoshiko held too many secrets to live an online life. Kanan let her voice drop most of an octave, “Your godless technology burns at the touch of one who has swept the glory of Heaven’s dome with her wings.” Kanan stretched out arms, enjoying You’s amusement at the mockery, but then practical Kanan was back, “Has Hanamaru even learned to use that mini iPad you got her last year?”

You winced, “I might have seen it, next to her F L I P phone last time I stopped by. I think Yoshiko was using it as a coaster.”

Kanan blew out a long breath, “Let’s hope the fate of the world doesn’t rely too much on them.”

“Yeah.”

The waves and swooping gulls let both women exhale their worries as they sat in friendly silence.

###

The cabana was nice, Maki had to admit, with a breeze, a blueberry mango smoothie at hand, and Nico leaning in with the curtains drawn and no one watching and…

“Maki?” Nico, sounding worried.

Maki forced herself out of a fantasy, smiling, “I missed you.”

“You seemed busy.” Nico’s scrunched up grumpy face was as cute as the rest of her expressions, Maki decided, eager to catalog them all.

Maki leaned back, running both hands through her hair, hat tossed aside, remembering the relief she felt when Aya confirmed all her gigs were cancelled through the end of the month, “I was glad to be heading home…” She couldn’t say “to you” yet, they’d barely had any conversations that didn’t involve the words Eli, or cryptids, or werewolves…

“Nico could have handled Eli.” Nico sounded annoyed.

Maki sighed. There was that word. But then she glanced over and Nico was leaning even more forward, her eyes watching Maki’s fingers as they snagged on a tangle of curls. “I don’t mind.” Maki slid a finger through the condensation on her glass, “It seems like a lot though. You’re a good friend.”

Nico huffed and repeated, “Nico can handle it.”

Maki needed to make a quick detour away from the wall of exasperation she was about to SMACK into so she sat up and leaned forward, nearer to Nico, but not yet as near as she'd been dreaming about, “Want to take a walk? And get lunch?” A chuckle as Nico almost smiled so Maki dared to say what she’d been rehearsing on the drive from LAX, “I’ve been wanting to take you out since I met you.”

So much earnestness in the eyes that suddenly wouldn’t look away from hers. Nico felt her frustration and worry over Eli fade as new feelings took over, curiosity, longing, heat..the air seemed to close in, a tingle, electricity raising the hairs on Nico’s arms, wind picking up to tumble Maki’s curls with a restlessness that Nico wanted to tame, but before Nico could close the gap, a huge gust of wind slapped the curtains against her back, forcing her forward into a startled Maki as a scream arced over the roof of their cabana.

Something large splashed into the pool.

A/N: Right ho...and we merrily roll along. I am working my way back to 'Can't Get Started', but we have reached the fiddly bits of this one, where attention to detail must be paid.

Don't forget to tip your hat and say 'howdy' ; )

#NozoEli #NicoMaki #KanaMari #YohaMaru #Ayase Eli #Tojo Nozomi #nishikino maki #yazawa nico #Watanabe You #Matsuura Kanan #Ohara Mari #beach #werewolf #LA #cryptids #Moonlight Becomes You #etcétera #enjoy #Apocalypse Midnight Dance Party

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mellicose · 6 years ago

Text

That Woman Over There - Chapter 23

A You Me and Him Fix-it Fic

Rating: Teen, for some mature themes

Word count: 3832

Warnings: none

Summary: ~ Set after the birth of Monty, Olivia’s baby ~ A dear friend of Olivia comes to visit for a week, and she disturbs the fragile peace between her, Alex, and John.

Alex slammed into the gallery, cursing. She forgot to bring a damn umbrella, of all things. She shook herself off and threw down her bag. Rainwater dripped off it, to the parquet floor. The place was eerily dark. She wondered whether it was on purpose. She sniffed at the air. It smelled a bit like John’s house.

Her chest burned. “Fuck,” she said out loud. She wondered whether he hated her, and whether she’d ever smell his house again. She looked around and noticed pieces of art in pools of light. She walked to the closest one.

A painting. Fleshtones. Abstract, but the image began to take form in her brain almost immediately. Bodies. There was something about the sumptuous curves of the negative spaces … but she felt like she was missing something. The paint had a matte quality, a texture that fascinated her.

“It looks like living, breathing flesh, no?”

“Goddamnit!” she said, jumping aside. A lithe man in a striped t-shirt and a pair of jeans stood behind her.

He stood beside her and smiled a cheshire cat grin that was oddly nostalgic. He hugged his slim arms.

“Flesh, no?” he repeated.

“Yes, but there’s something off. I can’t tell where one body ends and the other begins,” she said. Her heart was only slowing now. He drifted the scent of cedar to her. Cedar and … violet? Her eyes drifted to him again. He wore a neat goatee and mustache, and his eyes were the color of his hair - golden brown.

He nodded, and stretched. His shirt rode nearly to the bottom of his ribcage. His smooth belly flexed. His jeans rode low on his hips, and she saw so much happy trail it made her blush.

“You can look away at any time,” he said, giving her a half grin. She didn’t know she was staring. “Not that I mind. You’re cute.”

Her cheeks were hot. Whether it was embarrassment or something else, she didn’t care to figure out.

“You are Alex?” he said, turning to her.

“How’d they get the paint to look like that?” she said, looking back at the painting.

“I don’t know how she does it. That’s why it’s here,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “Yeah. I’m Alex.” She held out her hand. Again, he smiled as they shook hands.

“How professional,” he said. “You’ve got a firm handshake.”

She shrugged. “Want to see my work?”

“Of course. No more flirting. Straight to business.”

“I’m not flirting,” she said, walking to her bag and digging in it for her laptop. “I’m-” she stopped. She was going to say she was gay. But it wasn’t true. At least, not all the way true. But she could still say it. She gave him a sidelong glance. She decided against it.

“You’re what?” he said. “Taken? If so, I’m sorry.”

She frowned. “No. Not taken.” She coughed.

He nodded. “Come, let’s go upstairs. There’s more light in my flat.” He walked to the far corner. He opened a door to an elevator.

“It’s one of those fancy personal ones,” she said as she entered behind him.

“Yeah. I don’t want a nosy visitor finding their way to my personal space,” he said. He punched in a code. It moved up smoothly. She caught another whiff of cedar.

“Again, you’re sniffing,” he said, smiling.

“Oh. Yeah. You smell a lot like a friend of mine,” she said, smiling bashfully.

“You close?” he said, opening the door. Beyond, was open space with islands of tasteful furniture.

“He’s my best mate,” she said. She hoped it was still true.

“He has good taste, then.”

“It’s not a perfume. It’s, uh, he works with wood, so the smell sticks to him.”

“Carpenter?” he said as he guided her to what looked like an office.

“Artist,” she said confidently. “He makes beautiful things. Precious things. You know, keepsakes.”

“Ouiai,” Alphonse said, and offered her a seat in front of his computer.

“The screen big enough for ye?” she said, and chuckled. It was at least 45 inches.

“I use this to view art,” he said.

“Sure, mate. Art.” she said, and handed him her USB with a sardonic grin she couldn’t wipe off.

His lips trembled with mirth. “You’re not terribly formal, are you?” he said.

“Should I be? This isn’t like, a proper interview, is it?” she said, and slung a leg over the arm of the office chair. “This chair’s rad, by the way. It’s ergonomic, right?”

“Maybe not how you’re using it,” he said. The screen came on and she lost her balance and fell back.

“Holy fuck! I can see colors I didn’t even know existed,” she said, crawling back up to the desk and standing up. “Sorry about the language.”

“Speak however you like. This isn’t the Vatican,” he said.

She looked over his shoulder.”There’s the folder with my work.”

She swore when he clicked on the first photo. “That’s bloody gorgeous,” she said. “Okay, you’re absolutely right. This screen is a requirement. All I’ve got is my mam’s grotty little 200 quid laptop. I can see every single brush stroke with this thing.” She leaned forward. “It’s brilliant.”

“Now you see the method to my madness,” he said.

“Yah, I do. It’s definitely not just for porn,” she said. She nodded.

He burst out laughing. “You have absolutely no filter, do you?” he said.

“Why? Should I? I have a feeling the posh art buyers might cringe at me, eh?” she said.

“Maybe you’re not the affected art school type, but it honestly doesn’t matter. Most of them don’t even know what they’re looking at anyway. They just buy to say they did. It’s very rare to find collectors with an actual eye for talent. That’s where I come in.”

“You’re an art dealer,” she said, emphasizing the last word. “You make the good shit available to ‘em.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“You scare your fancy customers down there?”

“You were in my space,” he said.

“You could’ve made noise walking up, like normal people.”

He crossed his legs, and she noticed that he was barefoot. “Again, my space.”

She smiled. “Sorry. But I almost wee’d myself.” She squirmed.

“You need the loo?” he said.

“I think so,” she said. He pointed to a frosted glass cube in a corner of the apartment. She sighed. “Seriously?”

He winked. He watched her walk away. She was a bit rough around the edges, but her honesty was refreshing. Perhaps he had been around posh art students for too long. Even her shape was more inviting – curvy in places where so many others had on-trend angles.

“This is ridiculous,” she yelled as she closed the glass door behind her. “There’s no privacy whatsoever.”

“I live alone,” he said. He felt strange yelling in his own apartment.

“And when you have … guests?” she said.

“I don’t really hold parties in this space – any guests here are usually beyond that kind of embarrassment.”

“Oh. Yeah,” she said, and flushed. She looked around. There was a large shower in front of her, also glass. It was fancy in a way that made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t imagine washing her body in a place like that. And it was a place, not just a shower. The chrome fixtures gleamed, and the bottles on the shelf were not in English. She wondered whether they smelled like wood. She washed her hands, saw no towel, and dried them on her shorts. She felt weird letting the water dry on the sink. It would get spots.

“Hey, do you wipe down the sink?” she said as she walked back up.

“Shhhhhhh,” he said. He leaned forward, looking intently at one of her blue period pieces. At least, that’s what she called it. It was not naturalistic, but also not as abstract as some of the pieces she saw downstairs. “Viens-ici,” he said, and beckoned to her. “Tell me about this.”

She took a deep breath. “It’s the last piece I painted before I stopped for a while. I just sort of … sat in front of a canvas and let the brush do the talking.”

“Yes, it speaks volumes,” he said. He hugged himself again. “What’s most striking is that although the composition hints at desolation, you did not use the stereotypical washed out palette. It’s searingly bright.”

“I couldn’t stand using muted colors.” She echoed his action, hugging herself. “She deserves better than shades of gray.” She shivered.

“She?” he said.

“Jo,” she said softly.

“An ex?” he said.

“My daughter, who died last year right before being born.”

He gasped.”Ah, petite. J'en suis désolé,” he said. He patted her hand, and for some reason, she burst into tears again. He stood and hugged her. She wrapped her arms around his narrow frame and wept into his chest.

“I’m a mess. I’ve had the worst day ever. I think I just lost everything.”

“How do you mean?” he said.

It surprised her that he even cared. She didn’t know where to start. He was a stranger, so lying wasn’t worth the effort.

“My fiancee just broke up with me. She was right to do it. And I just fucked up my relationship with my best mate. At least, if he’s got any sense.”

“Eh,” he said. He didn’t expect the full truth. She was extraordinary.

“When you say “just”, do you mean in the last month or something?” he said. He rubbed her back. Her hair smelled like cigarette smoke and satsuma.

“I mean, today. Earlier.”

He pulled her away to look at her. “Putain. And you’re here?”

“I’ve got nothing left … what’s your name again?” She wiped her face with her arm.

“Alphonse. You can call me Alfie if you like.”

“Alfie. Sounds posh,” she said. “You don’t like Alphonse?”

“I’m named after my dad. He’s as asshole,” he said.

“‘Least you know ‘im,” she said, and sniffed.” I’ll call you Alfie, then. Don’t wanna be bringing back any bad memories. I don’t usually get like this.” She finished wiping her eyes, but her lips still quivered.

“You want a beer?” he said.

“God yes,” she said. He ran to the kitchen space and opened a giant fridge built into a brick wall “Jesus, man, got enough space in there?” she said. There was actual food in it. Like John, he liked to cook.

“You peckish? I’ve got some leftover cold sesame noodles,” he said, putting two bottles of beer on the counter. She shrugged, but approached the counter, curious. He pulled out a plastic tub and opened it.

“It’s not takeaway,” she said. The noodles were glossy with oil, and dotted with toasted sesame seed and green onion. “Smells amazing.”

“I made them for dinner. As ever, I made too much. I suppose some habits die hard,” he said, and handed her a fork.

“Cooking a lot?” she said around a mouthful of noodles.

“Adjusting to cooking for one again,” he said, and sat on a stool opposite her. “Tell me more about that piece. I noticed that it’s unfinished. Or am I wrong?”

She took a sip of her beer. “That’s perceptive,” she said. “This is delicious, by the way. Better than from a restaurant.”

“Merci,” he said. “I have a mild obsession with asian cuisine.”

“Was your ex girlfriend from there?” she said, taking another generous mouthful.

“Perceptive,” he said. She winked. “No, she isn’t. She’s Portuguese. But she’s a chef who specializes in pan-asian cuisine. She got me hooked.”

“She’s a chef? If I dated a chef I’d gain two stone in a year,” she said. “I’d wear it as a point of pride.”

He laughed. “I wish, but I can’t. Genetics won’t really let me gain much of anything. Some might consider it a blessing. I guess it is.” He shrugged.

“Uhuh,” she said. “I was like that until I hit 25. After that, things started happening in this area,” she said, gesturing to her middle.

“I’m quite a few years over that, and nothing’s happened yet,” he said.

“How old are you?”

“39,” he said.

“Really? You look amazin’, bruv,” she said. She blushed at the ease with which she gave him the compliment, but she didn’t regret it. He beamed.

“I avoid sunlight whenever possible,” he said.

“Okay, Nosferatu,” she said. She looked at the sweating bottle of beer in front of her. She liked him. He seemed like a good bloke, and he hadn’t acted funny when she burst into tears. She didn’t know what she expected when she came, but definitely not him. She looked at him. His eyes were gold, with flecks of green near the iris. It was one of her favorite color combinations.

“You’re staring again,” he said. She was so zoned in she didn’t see his smile.

“Your eyes. The green is nice,” she said, then stuffed her hands in her pockets.

“Thanks. My maman has Persian blood. I get my eyes from her,” he said. “And in more ways than one. She’s the artist. My father thinks art is a hobby.”

She snorted. “My mam’s the same. She thinks I should go to school to become a nurse’s assistant. But I can’t stand the sight of blood. I’m working on being a teacher, maybe.”

“Maybe?” he said, opening another beer for her. She took it gratefully.

“Liv, my fi-my ex-fiancee, suggested it. She had a baby too, Monty. He’s the sweetest little guy you’ll ever meet. He’s gonna be one year old in a month and a half.” She took a deep swig of beer. Her eyes started to swim again. He walked beside her.

“He’s going to be one. And you said you lost Jo last year…” he said.

“It’s a hella long story, mate,” she said. “And you’re a stranger.”

“I’ve got an empty dance card and a case of beer,” he said, walking to a nearby sofa. “Let’s get acquainted.”

She stared out one of his large windows. The night was setting in, and it was pouring rain.

“I think we should wrap up the art stuff. It’s pissing outside and I’ve got to take a train back to Bristol...” her voice failed. She didn’t know where she was gonna go once she got there. She would have to speak to Olivia, then her mam. She dreaded the latter far more than the former.

“I can give you a ride to the station, if you like,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “You that bored that you wanna listen to my long list of fuck ups?” she said. She sat on the other side of the sofa. She wished she could kick off her boots.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he said.

“You just wait till I get into it, boyo,” she said.

“So that means you’ll stay for a bit,” he said. “I will open my ears and refrain from any possible censure until you’re done.”

“Century what?” she said, making a face.

“Censure. It means a strong or vehement expression of disapproval.”

“Huh. Whatever.” She looked down at her lap. She looked so lost. It made him want to stroke her rain-frizzy blond hair. She broke up with her fiancee just today, yet here she was, braving wind and rain to show him her worth. It was beyond his capacity to understand. He had not gotten out of bed for three weeks after Lorena left him, and it had been over two months until he was able to face the world. It was still difficult to adjust. She had been his life for six years.

“Where are you?” he said.

“I couldn’t finish it,” she said, tracing the shapes printed on her tights. She took a deep breath. He waited patiently. “At the time. It was, like…”

He moved a little closer, but made sure to give her plenty of space.

“It was like admitting she was finished. That her story was over,” she said. “I couldn’t bear it.” She hiccuped, but kept her composure. “I don’t even know why that’s in there. It’s a mess.”

“You keep saying that,” he said.

“Because it’s true. My life’s a mess. My work. My brain. They’re all one great big horrible mess.”

“You also said it’s unfinished,” he said softly.

“The painting? Yeah.”

“You don’t get me,” he said. He used his hands to speak, and it was beautiful to see. “I mean, it’s unfinished. Your life. Your brain. You. You’re young, no?”

“Old enough to know better about things, though,” she said, crossing her arms.

“You haven’t told me your unforgivable trespasses, but obviously not,” he said.

Her mouth dropped open.

He smiled. “I know you can’t see it from the inside looking out, but I have faith in you. You’ll right the wrongs of which you speak.”

“You don’t know me, bruv,” she said, taking a sip of beer. “I’m, like, the queen of fuckups.”

“That’s why it’s faith. If 2.2 billion Christians can believe in an invisible God, I can believe you’re not an incorrigible fuck up.”

She scratched her head. This bloke was something else. She rolled her eyes and gave him a half-grin.

“Alright. But you haven’t heard what I did yet,” she said.

“Will it explain the mystery of you and your ex being with child at the same time at some point? I am very rudely curious about that. Did you do it on purpose?”

“No,” she said loudly. “I didn’t.”

“Okay,” he said, and stretched his legs out. “We’re getting to the meat of the story.”

“I’ll bore you with my stupidity, but what does this have to do with my art?”

“We’ll figure it out along the way,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“Whatever. So my girlfriend got pregnant without telling me. I was really angry, and I got blind drunk and got off with our next door neighbor, John…”

“Wait. You’re gay?” he said.

She bit her lip. This was the first time she was going to say it out loud to someone she didn’t really know. But considering the stuff she was sharing, it couldn’t be that bad.

“I’m bi. I go both ways,” she said. She paused, as if waiting for peals of thunder and lightning, but the rain continued, silent and dark. “I didn’t know it at the time. But that comes later.”

“I see,” he said. “Take your time. I’m here all night.”

“Yeah. So, all it took was one night, and I was well preggers.”

“By the neighbor? Fuck,” he said. “And he was okay with it?”

“John? We became best mates during the pregnancy. He was in love with me or whatever, but we dealt with it. Now he’s in love with Connie.”

“What?” he said up. “So your ex girlfriend got pregnant without telling you. Then, you got off with your neighbor John, got pregnant after one night, and you’re still living by each other?”

“Yep,” she said.

“And now Encarnacion is with John, the father of Jo, and in love? Wasn’t she with Ella?

“Her and Ella went kaput last year. Big drama – at least, the bits I heard. Super messy.”

“I believe you now,” he said, eyes wide. He had to call Encarnacion. Her and Ella had once felt as immutable as a mountain. But Vesuvius most probably felt the same to the Pompeiians. “You remained friends?”

“Of course. Even after Jo. Like I said, he’s my absolute best mate. Or, possibly, was.”

“If you could endure that triangle, what happened to break it?”

She looked out the window again. She wondered what he was doing. Connie, most probably. He deserved happiness. She couldn’t get the indignant look on his face when she confessed. She never wanted to see that look on his face again.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Oui.”

“What?” she said, snapping out of her train of thought.

“You developed feelings for him. That’s why you broke up with your fiancee.”

She kicked off her books and started pacing the open space in front of the window.

“I’ll have you know she broke up with me,” she said. “He’s the father of my girl,” she said. “Jo was ours.”

“You said he was in love with you. What happened to change that?”

She snorted. “I’m a fool. A damn fool.” His brows rose. “He moved on. I suppose to keep his sanity, but he did. Fully.”

“With Encarnacion,” he said.

“Who is Olivia’s best friend,” she said.

He brightened up. “How is Olivia? She was a hell of a drinking buddy, back in the day.”

“Drinking buddy, huh? Of course,” she said, but she didn’t ask. It was just another story Liv hadn’t bother to tell her. “She’s fine, I hope.”

“You’ve given me only the blurb, but it already sounds like a hell of a story,” he said.

She sat on the windowsill, which was lined with silk pillows. “I think I’ll need something stronger than lager to really get into it,” she said. She held out the half-empty beer bottle.

“I’ve got vodka in a freezer,” he said, taking it.

“That’s good. Pour a drop of juice in. I’m still nursing a hangover.”

“As one does,” he said with a smile, and handed her a glass. He sat against the wall, at her feet. “So, start at the beginning.”

“At the actual beginning, or when everything got fucked?”

“At the very beginning,” he said, nursing his beer. He was a believer that you could tell a lot by a person by the kind of conversation they had. There are people who could talk your ear off for hours, but in the end, you didn’t know them any better. And there were people like Alex – open to a beautiful fault. He already knew he would be crazy about her. Whether it was romantically or not, he couldn’t ascertain now. But he’d know soon enough.

“I met Olivia online, on a dating site. I’d joined as a gag, but in less that 24 hours, I had over 30 messages…”

They talked until dawn, and in the interim, he figured it out.

Next Chapter

#That Woman Over There #you me and him #fan fiction #alex deserves the world #we're almost at the end #It's gonna be so hard to let these characters go

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news-ase · 4 years ago

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peachyyluxx · 7 years ago

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Sweet Lies (BTS Mafia!AU)

One Two Three Four

"Pleasure doing business with you all. I hope to see you visit Seoul another time." Chae-Min says, giving her clients an elegant smile. She waved them off, watching the elevator door close on them, her smile immediately fading.

"I see you didn't like them that much." Eun-Hee said, pouring some coffee for Chae-Min.

"How much stock do they buy from us, Eun-Hee?" She asks suddenly, sipping on her coffee as she types on her computer.

"Uhm... only .5%, so not a lot. Why the sudden interest?”

"Well, inform them that if they don't pay a higher price, we won't hesitate to exterminate our contract of protection. They were being quite rude to us, don’t you think?" Chae-min finished, Eun-Hee nodding.

"Yes, Miss. I'll inform them in the lobby." With that, Eun-Hee left, leaving Chae-Min alone.

"I see you won't be taking your father's approach of things."

"And I see that you're 4 hours late to work. You're lucky I told Eun-Hee to not put that on your permanent record or else you'd most likely have no job right now." Jae just laughed at her statement, sitting in the chair in front of her.

"You wouldn't do that to me. You love me, Minnie."

"Not anymore I don't." Chae-min muttered, Jae getting up and sitting on her desk, watching her work, a mysterious glint in his eyes.

"So you did,huh?" He muttered, a small smirk appearing on his face.

"It was a long time ago, I was a stupid kid." She said lifting up her head to look into Jae's eyes. He leaned down, his face just an inch away from hers. He watched her cheeks slightly flush red, but her stone cold face refusing to show any emotion of want.

"You mean we were stupid kids. It wasn't just you that had a crush on their best friend, you know? It doesn't take one person to participate in s-"

"Am I interrupting something?" The two looked away quickly, returning to their earlier positions.

"No you weren't Eun-Hee. What is it?" Chae-Min asked, feeling her face still feel hot.

"Your mother is here."

"So, what is it you needed?" Chae-Min asked, watching her mother happily chow down on some food.

"Is it a hassle to have lunch with your mother once and a while?" Her mother scolded, Chae-Min chuckling.

"No, I just thought you needed something... How are holding up?"

"I'll live. Just visit me more often and i'll be fine.'

"Yes mother."

"Hey don't have attitude with me." Chae-Min just laughed, eating her noodles. It was silent for a few minutes, but not a bad silence, only comfortable silence, before her mother started up another conversation.

"So, have you and Jae tied the knot yet? He can really take the company off your shoulders." Her mother hummed, causing Chae-Min to choke.

"I don't want to marry Jae,mother." She muttered, sipping on her drink. Her mother rolled her eyes, obviously not believing her.

"Excuse me? I was the one who caught you two going at it when you were teens, you're lucky you aren't pregnant." She scolded, Chae-Min rolling her eyes this time.

"Mother!" She hushed her, a small blush appearing on her face. Her mother laughed her boisterous laugh.

"Oh you know i'm trying to make you flustered. It's a thing I do." She smiled at her daughter, watching her smile slowly fade away. She deeply loved Chae-Min's smile. It reminded her of the first time they ever met: When she went to adopt her at the orphanage. Chae-Min used to be such a lively child..but when her brother had passed, it was like she did a complete turn and never looked back at her old self.

"Mother?" Chae-Min whispered, watching as her mother began to tear up, her beautiful eyes suddenly overflowing with salty tears.

"Oh, it's nothing. Just living in the moment." She laughed, wiping them away quickly. Chae-Min just gave her a small smile, taking a napkin and lightly dabbing them away. Her mother just smiled weakly, putting her hand on her daughter's while staring into her eyes. "Chae-Min...Please...just, hand over the business to Jae. You have no idea what kind of work your father used to get into-"

"His business transactions?" Chae-Min interrupted, but her mother shook her head. She saw her mother dart her eyes from left to right,hints of paranoia appearing.

"He didn't just protect people..but at any cost..If he had to go out and hurt someone, he did.As long as they paid him and the others, he would do anything. for them." She said, barely above a whisper. Her pink, plump lips trembled at each word, not wanting to go into further depth about this with her own daughter. She's seen things, terrible things. She's seen her husband butcher a person for answers to a recent crime that had targeted a nearby company, only simply asking one single question,

'Was it you?'

The very thought of her husband saying that question sent chills down her spine. He was a family man, yes, but behind closed doors, he was truly a psychopath in a business suit.

"What's this plan, Namjoon?" Hoseok asked, slightly swiveling in his chair.

"Well, since everyone's here, I'll go over it." Namjoon turns on his laptop, using it to show photos and such. "This is Jae, short for Jeon Jaehyung."

"Wow, nice tattoos." Yoongi mutters, a little disappointed this man has better and more intricate tattoos than he does. Namjoon rolls his eyes at Yoongi's comment, flipping to the next picture. It was of Chae-Min.

"This is Chae-Min, as we all know, the Heiress to the Seoul Enterprise. Now, these two, Jae and Chae-Min, have an arranged marriage in their future. It was supposed to happen later this year, so Jae can take over the enterprise, but since we killed off Kyung Dong-Soo too soon, she took over instead."

"So basically it was our fault that we killed him too soon? We could've waited and killed this Jae dude instead, then our problem would be solved." Hoseok shrugs, slightly sinking in his chair.

"We could actually play this mistake to our side...if we play the right cards." Namjoon hums, seeing everyone display confused looks on their faces.

"It'll just be more of a hassle to kill them both, you know? More planning and more money." Taehyung mutters, crossing his arms. His eyes then darted to Namjoon, who held a slightly crazed look in his eyes, as if he already knows what's going to happen and how they're going to play this to their side.

Namjoon then closes his laptop, stopping the display of Chae-Min's picture. "You guys really don't see how this can play to our side?" The room was silent. "Fuck I work with a bunch of dumbasses." He mutters, rubbing his temples. "Okay, let me break it down to stupid-speech then. Chae-Min as supposed to wed Jae. But she isn't because her father is dead. She runs the enterprise now and-"

"-and if we can get a person to infiltrate the enterprise and somehow woo Chae-Min..The enterprise could be ours." Jin finishes Namjoon's statement, causing Namjoon to break into a smirk.

"Someone get's it!" He yells, giving Jin a nod. "That's exactly what we're going to do. We need to get someone, who isn't well known, inside Seoul Enterprise, and make Chae-Min fall for him, before killing her off and taking the Enterprise for us."

"But who would that be, Hyung?"

"Oh trust me, I got the perfect person in mind, don't worry."

Chae-Min sat down in her office chair, slightly rubbing her temples to try to get rid of her headache. It had been a week since her mother's slip, and now she felt a little paranoid of taking her father's place. If there was a small, small chance that it could be true, she could be in deep shit. The people in her past life would soon find out of her power, and chase after her once more, demanding repayment for what she did to them all those years ago.

"Chae-Min?" Eun-Hee called, causing Chae-Min to quickly be pulled from her thoughts. Her gaze peered past Eun-Hee, watching cautiously as a new male she had never witnessed before, strolled into her office behind Eun-Hee, looking around in slight awe. He looked around her age, maybe even a little younger, his eyes seemingly filled with life and curiosity.

"I wanted to introduce you to your new assistant. I'll be downstairs if you need anything, Miss." With that, Eun-Hee left the curious boy and Chae-Min alone. Chae-Min continued to watch him, her steps and movements filled to the brim with caution.

"You know," She started, causing the poor boy to jump up, not realizing she was even behind him, "Curiosity killed the cat. Don't touch anything." She warned. This only caused the boy to chuckle, his laughter lower than anything she's heard of.

"I believe that Curiosity is just the lust of the mind..Something it wants to know more about, something that..intrigues it to the very point that they might even die finding out what they want to know. Some take that risk, but others don't. Will you take that risk, Chae-Min?" He hummed, adding a light wink to the end. Chae-Min just stared at the male, baffled by his explanation of the simple word 'curiosity'.

"Kyung Chae-Min, your boss. No more smartass remarks with me, okay?" Chae-Min holds out her hand, feeling the male's hand wrap around hers, giving a slow but firm handshake. His eyes pierced hers as a small but unnoticeable smirk appears on his face. A mysterious glint passed his eyes, but Chae-Min didn't have time to register when he slowly pulled her delicate hand to his lips. His plump lips pressed against her skin, warm compared to her cold hand. He still kept eye-contact with her, watching Chae-Min visibly shiver at the sudden contact.

"Park Jimin. Pleased to be of service, Miss Chae-Min."

-Chapter 4, END-

*pictures and gifs used are not mine, credit to the owners*

#bts #bts reaction #sweet lies #bts mafia au #fanfiction

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kootenaygoon · 6 years ago

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So,

The Nelson Daily had scooped us.

It was a Thursday morning at the Star and we were right in the thick of production day when I saw a new story pop up in my social media feed: a local pot dispensary had been evicted from two different locations, and now the owners were noisily complaining about it. The main photo featured proprietor Kyle Lindroos and some other guy I didn’t recognize, striking defiant poses as they held up their eviction notice to the camera. I’d been sitting on my hands for months when it came to pot reporting, and now somebody had beaten me to it.

“You see this, about this pot dispensary getting evicted?” I asked Greg.

“Apparently the cops can’t actually arrest them or fine them or anything, so they just lean on the landlords until they kick them out.”

Greg smirked. “That’s one way to do it.”

Though Nelson was considered the weed capital of B.C., the topic wasn’t raised much around the Star office. My habitual pot smoking was a secret, though it wasn’t exactly well kept. I’m sure Tamara and Calvin had each smelled it on me at least once, but neither had said anything. Greg had grown up in the Slocan Valley, where weed was ubiquitous, but he was a teetotaler himself. He explained to me one afternoon that his mind was so precious to him that he hated the idea of anything compromising it, be that alcohol or drugs. That didn’t make him pro-pot or anti-pot, it just meant there was a realm of experience he was choosing not to have.

I wondered if those experiences were really worth it, if I really believed in the way I was living my life. I told myself cannabis stoked my creative fires and helped me navigate my depression, but I was starting to experience some pretty nasty side effects too. I wished I had more control.

When it came to actually reporting on the issue, I was well poised. I’d developed a relationship with Phil McMillan, who loved to stand outside his club and tell long-winded jokes that ended with him doubling over with laughter. He was an excellent source of gossip, and had stories reaching back decades. The dude was mountainous, with cigarette-stained teeth, a grey-streaked beard and a pony tail. I described him as a benevolent yogi that didn’t actually do yoga. I’d approached him a few times to see if he was interested in doing a Star story in the lead up to legalization, and every time he told me the same thing: he had a comfy arrangement with the cops as long as he flew under the radar, and that’s what he intended to do. It had been working for him since 1999, and he wasn’t going to change things up now.

Then Kyle Lindroos blew up the radar. The guy was so far out of his depth it was hard to decide whether it was comic or tragic, especially because he was obviously throwing himself into the endeavour with such earnest abandon. He had begun using cannabis after injuring himself on the job, and was now passionate about sharing it with the world. And he wasn’t just offering plain old weed; he also had edibles, tinctures and a variety of other extracts. According to him, this was all motivated by a passion for health care. To prove this he showed me his tattoo of the Egyptian alchemist god Thoth, which also featured flakes of weed being transformed into liquid gold.

He called out Nelson’s secretive culture.

“We all pretend it doesn’t exist, which creates a terrible dynamic. Everybody isn’t being up front like in the rest of the world, where they’ve realized pot is no big deal. Here in the Kootenays we’re still holding onto prohibition, which is weird,” he said.

“I’ve been traveling around Canada trying to educate people about extracts, edibles. I’ve been providing services for the past three years.”

As we were copy-editing the following issue a few days later, with the cannabis story running on the front cover, I watched as Ed read it over at his desk. He sighed multiple times, scratching out typos and circling errors. He reached the part about Kyle’s tattoo, and read it out loud to Tamara. He chuckled to himself. Once he was finished he came over to go over his notes.

“This kid sounds like quite the character,” he said. “So you actually went in this place when it was open?”

“Oh, it was ridiculous. He’s just some pot dealer who had two grand for rent. Total gong show.”

“There’s going to be more places like this coming. This could end up being one of those stories that keeps on giving.”

“Seems to me like everyone’s aiming to elevate their game now. There’s a new dispensary coming to Front Street that’s supposed to be super corporate-looking, like being in a McDonald’s or something.”

Ed pursed his lips. “I wonder what the accepted protocol is about doctor’s notes, and getting access. Is it exclusively medicinal at these establishments?”

I shrugged. “Medicinal or recreational, I don’t actually think it makes much difference. I mean technically these places are supposed to require some sort of paperwork, but in reality I think it’s pretty laissez-faire.”

“As this develops, it would be nice to understand the nuances around that. I think that’s the big question most people have, is are they just handing this stuff out to anyone who walks in off the street? What rules are they following?”

“Well, they don’t sell to anyone underage obviously. But even that, I dunno. Like Kyle was pretty much just selling to whoever. He wasn’t even pretending to have a verification process or anything.”

Ed nodded. “That’s potentially why he was targeted, then.”

“Oh, totally. I mean Phil’s been running his shit without any sort of conflict or interference for years now, and it’s because he knows how to keep his nose clean and toe the line with the cops. Everyone else just needs to figure out how to fall in line.”

At that time individual U.S. states were beginning to legalize cannabis, starting with Washington and Colorado, and there was a sense in the community that we were being left behind. If Canadians could cross over the border to a more developed market, then Nelson would be losing its pot tourism to the south just as Deb Kozak had predicted during the municipal election. That being said, she wasn’t being especially vocal on the industry’s behalf, choosing instead to distance herself from the topic completely. (”I’m not the pot mayor,” she said.) That seemed like a strategic move to me, like she was playing politics, and it felt like a betrayal to the voters who had hoped she was going to be their champion. I decided I wasn’t going to let these authority figures hide behind secrecy and silence anymore -- this shit was happening, right in front of our faces, and it seemed silly not to acknowledge it. Not only that, Herb Couch had correctly pointed out that the local police policy on cannabis had potentially far-reaching implications for a huge number of citizens, including our youth. This wasn’t just an issue relevant to growers and dealers, but also consumers. If the city was going to embrace a certain approach, I wanted to make sure it was being scrutinized thoroughly.

When I reached out to the NPD for comment, Holland deferred to his deputy chief Paul Burkart. He was a towering bald soccer coach with a quick smile and a firm handshake, a local boy with daughters at the high school. I could tell he was trying to be as open-minded and progressive as he could be, but it was clear that he was frustrated by the new influx of dispensaries and unclear about how exactly to deal with them. It certainly wasn’t a police responsibility to regulate a new market, but they also didn’t want people slinging pot willy nilly. This latest tactic of using landlords to evict dispensaries would only work for so long, and he said at times it felt like they were that little Dutch boy from the parable, the one blocking a flood with his finger in the dike. Not only that, who wanted to waste time on policing pot when they were already being stretched to capacity dealing with both the mental health and opioid crises?

“My editor Greg says these places are popping up like Starbucks,” I said. “And sooner or later it’s pretty obvious we’re going to have to come up with a better long-term plan.”

Burkart sighed. “Somebody, it won’t be us, will have to come up with regulations. They’ll have to explore the fees, the rules. That’s exactly what Vancouver is looking to do now.”

“How quickly do you think that will happen?”

“Things don’t move very fast with the government, so it might be a while before we see any real movement. In the mean-time they’ve kind of left us holding the bag.”

When the interview was over, I asked Burkart a few additional questions. I wanted to make sure I had a proper lay of the land. I told him I knew about three dispensaries: the compassion club run by Phil, this evicted one run by Kyle, and Niles’ operation. Was that all of them? Did he know how many more were coming, and where they would open? He told me they were hoping to keep them off Baker Street, but he wasn’t sure they’d be able to successfully do that. He hadn’t heard of any others, but it was clear that there were many in the works.

“We’re just going to have to see how this plays out,” he said.

The Kootenay Goon

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erickmalpicaflores · 6 years ago

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Erik Malpica Flores Erik Malpica Flores recommends: How (Not) To Support Your Family

Photo by: USA Network

If SUITS has had one consistent theme throughout its eight seasons, it’s been that of Insert Firm Name Here as a family unit. In “Stalking Horse,” one of the so-called family’s longtime members (in)conveniently forgot what it meant to have faith in the guy who has always come through for her, regardless of how many times it meant risking his own neck. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the newest addition to the family was willing to go the extra mile to make sure one of her own would never have to live in fear again.

How not to be an “empowered woman.” At this point, there’s probably not much that can be said to make sense of Donna Paulsen’s arc in SUITS’ eighth season. In fact, ever since viewers asked for more background for the character, the writing has become inconsistent to the point of madness, turning Donna into a parody of all the things that made folks fall in love with her in the first place. Donna used to be wise; now, she offers up relationship advice while being completely incapable of anything resembling intelligence in her own. She used to care about her family; now, she puts men she’s been on a few dates with ahead of the very same people who would rather die than see her in danger.

And, once upon a time, she was a woman of her word. But now, it seems, she’s perfectly fine with making promises she doesn’t intend to keep.

When Harvey Specter’s client, Simon Lowe, expressed interest in having Donna’s instant “great love,” Thomas Kessler, as an anchor for his 20 new malls, Harvey immediately saw the conflict of interest. Through Alex Williams, the firm had already negotiated a solid deal for Kessler; and representing both sides of this kind of litigation was a terrible idea.

Further complicating the issue was, of course, Donna’s morning announcement that she was seeing Thomas. But clearly, that stunted conversation was just about letting a name partner at Insert Firm Name Here know that the COO was involved with a client and not, you know, Donna playing some sort of game with the feelings that she and Harvey totally don’t have for each other.

Since Lowe was offering better terms, though, Harvey was able to get Alex and Thomas on board; so, seemed like everything was going to work out, conflict of interest or not. Two lawyers, two clients, a handshake, done deal. Right? Wrong.

It turned out that Simon was just using Thomas as a stalking horse to woo Restoration, and that whole rookie mistake of “oh, we don’t need contracts. Let’s just shake hands” (or whatever the line was) came back to bite everyone — especially Harvey. His skeevy client threatened him with retaliation if he shared the privileged information of his screwjob with anyone. Which, of course, Harvey did: first with Alex and, later, with Donna.

…can we not with the “I want to take my boyfriend of five minutes out to celebrate his new deal, so I’m demanding you give me privileged information,” though? No? Ok. Thought I’d ask.

Once she learned what she had demanded to know, Donna berated Harvey for putting her in a “shitty position,” to which he had an actually accurate assessment of the situation as a comeback: “No, Donna. Simon put us all in a shitty position. I’m busting my ass to get us out of this. I just need you to trust me.” Donna said she’d trust Harvey, but as soon as she’d had a few sips of wine and listened to Thomas boast about business on a date — so much for the whole separating work and pleasure idea, yet again — she ran out of that trust.

One secret phone call, a promise to have faith, and cuddle time with Mr. Right Now later, and Donna forgot about said promise. She told Thomas everything, and the diarrhea hit the fan. Big time. Forget the fact that Harvey had sabotaged Simon’s deal with Restoration, and he had Alex work on a better deal for Thomas from his original landlord. Thomas felt the need to throw his weight around via a press release, and Simon found out.

Lowe confronted Harvey and Alex, fired Mr. Best Closer In The City, and — here’s the fun part! — enlisted Daniel Hardman to sue the firm on his behalf. But everything’s fine here because Donna’s now looking out for herself and, like, totally has it all now. If “it all” means breaking the trust (and the heart) of someone who has repeatedly put everything on the line for her, that is.

But I’ll let Harvey close us out here on this one because, quite frankly, the writers had him say everything remotely important on the matter: “Then, don’t feel bad about it Donna. Get out of my office.” Wait. That’s not it. “Because you didn’t give me a chance to fix it when you said you would. You lost faith in me! For all of the time that we have been together, that has never happened.”

And there you have it. But sure, Donna, it was just that Harvey was jealous because you chose Thomas over him — unlike, you know, how he chose you keeping the job you “love” over his own relationship.

And now, the hero of SUITS season 8, Samantha Wheeler. While Harvey was busy being victimized by someone who used to care about him, Sam proved herself a worthy new member of the “What’s This Firm’s Name This Week?” family by helping Louis move past his mugging.

Louis and Sheila were shopping for expensive baby stuff for their rich friends to buy them as gifts, when Louis received a mood-killing phone call. There was finally a lead on the guy who had stolen his wallet back in the (now-forgotten, as far as most of the plot goes) first half of SUITS season 8. All Louis had to do was identify the mugger in a lineup — or so he thought. After making a positive identification, Louis learned that he would be called upon to testify against the suspect in court.

Not really sure why this was surprising to a lawyer but ok.

Because he’d had such a difficult time looking at his attacker through two-way glass, Louis couldn’t deal with even the thought of having to face the guy in a courtroom. Off he went to get Sam to validate his feelings on the matter…only to be told that avoiding court was completely out of the question. She did, however, promise Louis that she’d be with him “every step of the way,” if only he’d trust her.

Unlike certain other folks, everyone was honest here. Sam did stay by Louis’ side, right up until the very end, and Louis trusted her to do so. Because family sticks together. (Usually.)

The road to Louis’ freedom from fear wasn’t exactly smooth. The first bump in the road came when, during trial preparation, Louis couldn’t share his feelings. In an emotionally-charged scene, he finally broke down when pushed; and Louis’ mock testimony transferred seamlessly to the real, in-court version. But the case was thrown out, regardless of how gut-wrenching Louis’ courtroom confession was, because the defense was able to prove that the incriminating evidence was obtained via an illegal search.

Although it should have been, all hope was not lost. Because Samantha Wheeler doesn’t give up on the people she cares about, she came to Louis with an offer of a way to make sure that the trial wasn’t the end of this story. Initially, Louis just wanted to drop everything because he was so afraid that the mugger would want revenge; but after a particularly vivid nightmare, he decided he wanted in on Samantha’s plan to plant new evidence, after all.

Robert showed up at just the right time to talk Sam out of getting herself into trouble, though, so she found another way: slightly-less-illegal blackmail. Once again, Louis was hesitant — this plan meant potentially forcing a child out of her home — but when Sam reminded Louis that his own family’s safety was on the line, he was back in. Off SUITS’ newest Batman and Robin (Sam is clearly Batman here) went to save the day. Louis stood up to his attacker, and Sam pinned the guy down long enough to force him to turn himself in.

Robert knew something less-than-legitimate went down and, yet again, he confronted Samantha about her willingness to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. For her part, Sam was just happy that Louis was now safe and couldn’t figure out why Robert saw that as a bad thing. Robert’s answer? He was afraid it would become a bad thing for Sam.

To be continued, I suppose. Something tells me that, regardless of his reservations with regards to how she handled her business, Robert will be there to back Sam up if and when she needs his help, though. Because, you know, family.

Thoughts and prayers.

Can’t believe someone finally wrote a scene with Donna’s mom for…this.

Farewell, Craig from Degrassi. Please let us know what it feels like to be a ghost when you get a chance.

I know SUITS is all about baiting viewers with too-real dreams that never come true, but I was honestly afraid for Louis’ life during his nightmare. Oops.

“You got me over here at eight, and I don’t even like to be up at eight, so…” Harvey is me, and I am Harvey.

No, really. I, too, would die for Donna, even though I don’t know who the hell she is right now and have been victimized by her idiotic behavior. I am absolutely Harvey.

“This thing isn’t over. I just need you to have faith.” Harvey, honey, I have so much faith in you. Your creator and your whatever-she-is, on the other hand…

“That’s one of the things that I admire about you: You’re a man of your world.” Are we even sure about that?

“You don’t know because you’ve never had to let someone see what he did to you — how he made you helpless and scared, like a child.” If anyone wants to know why women rarely come forward about sexual assault, here’s reason #298739, straight from a man’s mouth and about a completely different type of crime.

Is Thomas Kessler the dumbest guy ever or what? Donna was drinking wine, perfectly fine, and then suddenly needed a ginger ale. And he questioned nothing. Strong relationship!

Harvey instantly fell in love with Donna’s coffee recipe; Thomas took a while to warm up to it. That is all.

“Then, you don’t know anything. Because the only reason I was breaking my back to save this deal is because I know how much he means to you. If it was anyone else, I never would’ve told you or Alex in the first place.” I just want to hold him. The great irony here is that, while Scottie told Donna that she hoped Harvey would one day see “what everyone else sees,” it’s Donna who’s blind right now.

“Trust me. No one understands sacrificing for their family more than me. I’m proud of you.” Coming from Louis Litt, I actually believe this line. If certain other characters had delivered it, though…

“If you don’t put him away, he will haunt you for the rest of your life. You are doing this so you won’t ever have to be afraid again, so do not be afraid of your emotions now.” Heigl’s delivery here was about as perfect as you could get. If anyone, or anything, is the saving grace of SUITS’ eighth season, it’s her.

The SUITS season finale airs on Wednesday, February 27, at 10/9c on USA.

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jeroldlockettus · 7 years ago

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Is America Ready for a “No-Lose Lottery”? (Update)

Could a lottery be the answer to America’s poor savings rate?(Photo: Jason Kessenich)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “ Is America Ready for a “No-Lose Lottery”? (UPDATE)” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Most people don’t enjoy the simple, boring act of putting money in a savings account. But we do love to play the lottery. So what if you combine the two, creating a new kind of savings account with a lottery payout?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

One of our favorite things to do on this show is present a new idea, or maybe a new way to think about an old problem. Way back in 2010, the first year we made Freakonomics Radio, we did such an episode. Unbeknownst to us, one of the people who heard it was so inspired by the idea that he would spend much of the next seven years turning it into something real.

Michael GAUDINI: Knowing that this had been a podcast that turned into an idea that ended up becoming a constitutional amendment and that I had a piece of that thing that had happened. It was just super exciting.

That’s Michael Gaudini.

GAUDINI: Yeah , and I am a policy adviser with the city of Austin.

In 2010, he was a 21-year-old college senior in Pennsylvania, interning in a state legislative office.

GAUDINI: And I was really kind of trying to get involved more in public policy at the time and I listened to the Freakonomics podcast on prize-linked savings I thought it was a really cool idea that was pretty common sense.

What, you may be wondering, is “prize-linked savings”?

GAUDINI: So a prize-linked savings account is basically just a savings account in which you’re incentivized to put more money into your savings account.

The incentive comes in the form of cash payouts. Kind of like a lottery but unlike a lottery in that even if you don’t win, you still have your principal.

GAUDINI: We kind of wanted to harness the same type of feeling that you get when you play the lottery. And I thought that it just made sense and had the potential to have like a broad spectrum of support across, like, no matter what part of the aisle you sat on.

Gaudini happened to sit on the Democratic side of the aisle – first in Pennsylvania, where he pitched the idea; and then when he moved to Texas to work in the state legislature there. He was patient, and stuck with it through the very slow political process. Finally, this November, it was on the ballot in Texas.

GAUDINI: Proposition number seven was an authorizing amendment that would allow banks and credit unions in the state of Texas to offer prize-linked savings accounts as a savings option for folks that have accounts there. And it passed by a pretty solid margin. I think it was something around 60 percent in favor. And so here we are today.

So here we are today. We thought, therefore, it might be nice to replay for you the original episode that inspired 21-year-old Michael Gaudini. Who knows, maybe you’ll be inspired to do something with it …

There’s something Peter Tufano wants to know about you: If you had to, could you come up with $2,000 within 30 days? That’s the question he asked a whole bunch of people in 13 countries, including the U.S.

Peter TUFANO: Why $2,000? ‘Cause an auto transmission is about $1,500. Most estimates of what everyday emergencies are about are in that order of magnitude, if you were to have a sick or ailing relative on the other side of the country and you had to buy a full price plane tickets, it could easily be that amount.

And then, why this language “come up with” as opposed to “save”? Because we wanted to see if people had access to resources between savings and credit, and friends and family. About half of Americans are not able to come up with $2,000 in 30 days, which means that they stand only one emergency or crisis away from really quite dire circumstances. This isn’t picked up in the national economic statistics; this is picked up at a much more local level, at a much more intimate level of what happens inside families. It’s this lack of savings, as it were, that motivates me.

Tufano is all about the motivation. He’s a professor at the Saïd School of Business at Oxford and one of his specialties is consumer finance. He wants to know how many checks you write, and for what; how much you borrow, and why. And he wants to know how much you spend on beer, on toys — or on lottery tickets.

ANNOUNCER: It’s the South African sensation you’ve been hearing about. That’s right, prize-linked savings is here. Forget that free toaster. Open a savings account now for as little as $25 and you could walk away with $100,000. It’s the no-lose lottery. Make a deposit in your super-savings account and you’ll automatically be eligible for free cash and fabulous prizes.

WOMAN: I just won $5,000!

MAN: And I just won an MP3 player!

ANNOUNCER: Mobile electronic devices, gift cards and cash prizes are waiting for you. That’s right. It all happens when you open your own new super-savings account for as little as $25 today. Save now and win bigger. Call now and cash in. For a limited time only. Void where prohibited.

* * *

Americans are generally terrible at saving money. Think about what Peter Tufano just said — half our country doesn’t have enough money in the bank to survive one breakdown. And it’s not just poor people. In Tufano’s survey, only 25 percent of the people who earn between $100,000 and $150,000 a year could come up with that $2,000 in 30 days. We are, however, excellent at spending money. Houses, cars, clothes, books, electronics — and lottery tickets. Households that play the lottery spend on average about $1,000 a year on tickets — that’s more than a typical household spends in grocery stores on dairy products and beer combined. This year, Americans will buy about $60 billion worth of lottery tickets. The other day, I went to a store in Penn Station in New York called Carlton Cards. It’s pretty big. In the back are rack upon rack of greeting cards and some candy bins. But there weren’t any customers back there. All the customers were jammed up front, at the lottery counters. According to the New York State Lottery, Carlton Cards sells more lottery tickets than any other store in New York. Kirit Prajapadi is one of the managers. I asked how much lottery revenue his store does in a year.

Kirit PRAJAPADI: It’s about $8 to $9 million a year.

DUBNER: Holy crap! $8 to $9 million a year in lottery sales in one store in Penn Station.

PRAJAPADI: Yes.

DUBNER: OK, you see people buying tickets all day. You see winners a lot. Tell me how excited they are when they win.

PRAJAPADI: When they win, they forget about all those losses. And they get excited, like they win something. Whatever they lose, they just care about their win.

DUBNER: They give you a hug? Give you a kiss?

PRAJAPADI: Not really. Just handshake probably sometimes.

DUBNER: You probably don’t want the hug or the kiss.

PRAJAPADI: No, not really.

Melissa KEARNEY: When I was in graduate school there was a local little store by my graduate student-housing unit, and I would stop there on the way home and pick up milk and orange juice, and notice lots of people buying lottery tickets.

This is Melissa Kearny. She teaches economics at the University of Maryland.

KEARNEY: So I just sort of started chatting with the vendor, and he said “Oh I have people coming in and spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on lottery tickets a month, a year.” And so being a graduate student, I just downloaded some data and started playing around, and was struck. In particular, people do spend a lot of money buying lottery tickets. So it was just sort of a passing curiosity really. I started wondering about what were they not buying in order to buy lottery tickets.

DUBNER: So let’s walk through some of the numbers in lottery gambling. In the U.S., how many people play the lottery?

KEARNEY: Half of U.S. adults surveyed said they played the lottery in the past year.

DUBNER: And would that make it the most popular form of gambling in the U.S.?

KEARNEY: Yes, by far. So two out of three American adults report gambling, and 50 percent say they’ve played lottery, and the next closest is casino, which is about one in five adults.

Why do so many people play the lottery? Because it’s fun! For a dollar or two, you buy the chance to dream. Big. This remarkable bargain illustrates a phenomenon — a probabilistic oddity — that economists call “skewness.”

KEARNEY: That’s the idea that there’s some big prize way out there that corresponds to very small odds, but there’s some potential of capturing that. And that’s what your typical money market account can’t give you. So you could have $1,500 in your money market account, and every month you might earn a dollar on it. But there’s no chance in any month that you’ll earn $100,000 or even $10,000.

DUBNER: Now, I know as an economist you’re not trained to answer this question, but as a human being, tell me, why is skewness so important to us?

KEARNEY: That’s the chance of changing your life, right? That’s the return, that’s the big-win outcome that might allow you to buy a beach house, or to send your kids to college. If it’s less far out in the distribution that might be what you need to make a down payment on a house, or buy a car, or throw your daughter the wedding you want to throw her.

For a lot of people, skewness has an irresistible appeal. And so, a handful of researchers like Melissa Kearney are trying to harness its power — the unlikely chance of changing your life with a big prize — to solve America’s low savings rate. The idea is a new financial product that combines the thrill of the lottery with the goal of, say, accumulating more than $2,000 in a savings account. So that a broken transmission doesn’t become a full-blown crisis. Here’s Kearney’s pitch.

KEARNEY: So we know Americans like gambling. They always have, the majority of them do it, and they’re going to keep doing it. And so what we do is take seriously the idea that people want some small chance of winning a large sum of money. That market, that asset is missing from the American landscape.

Low-wealth individuals — the only asset available to them that gives them some chance of accumulating a large amount of money, is the state lottery. And in fact, a recent national survey of a thousand adults, one in five American adults said their greatest chance of accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars is through the lottery. That number jumps to 40 percent for folks making less than $25,000 a year. So a lot of

Americans think the lottery is their only chance at winning big sums of money — why don’t we take that appetite for gambling, for a product like this and attach it to a savings vehicle that offers some positive return? It’s a win-win situation.

That win-win situation, and the chance to make it happen in the U.S., has generated a lot of enthusiasm among economists like Kearney and Peter Tufano. He’s the man who’s been researching what are called “prize-linked savings,” or PLS, all over the world.

TUFANO: I started in the UK because they have a product called “premium bonds” which has been around for about 50 years, a little bit more. And where the government offers a savings product to investors which, at first glance, would almost look perverse: give us your money, and we promise you no interest.

But that’s not quite how the program works because it’s give us your money, you can take your money out at any time, and each month we’re going to basically take the interest pool and we’re going to lottery it off so that one lucky person will become a millionaire and literally every month someone in Britain gets a knock on their door from Mr. Millionaire who tells them they’ve won the million pound prize.

There are over 100,000 other people in the UK who have found out they’ve won smaller prizes. This was an intriguing concept and so the research that I’ve done tried to understand: Was this more like gambling or savings? Bottom line: it’s both. Then this travel took me to South Africa where I met Robert Keip, and he was creating a product call MAMA, the Million a Month Account, and I think in a word or in a phrase he described the entire economics and in some sense the value proposition for savers quite simply: Everything to gain, nothing to lose. It’s a savings account where you can take your money out when you’d like. You always have access to your principal and it will never go down in value, you may come out with a little bit of interest, a little bit of payment, but you might come out with a remarkably large payment. But you can only go up and you can never go down. And then, in respect to the extensive work on behavioral economics and behavioral finance, the logic of this product is quite obvious. People have what we call loss aversion, they much prefer to protect against losses than to worry about gains, they tend to misestimate small probabilities, but when you put it all together, in very plain English, people would rather have a small chance at a life-changing payout, than an almost certainty of a pittance. So I can be guaranteed in this interest-rate environment to put my money away and maybe be able to buy a coffee with the amount of interest that comes off my $100 account. Whereas, I’m willing to say I’ll give up that interest but there’s some possibility, remote as it might be, that I might be able to have a life-changing payout — an amount that would allow me to buy a car, or a house, or even more. So this preference for highly skewed payoffs or, you know, the kind of payoffs that would normally be present in gambling or lottery products, when combined with savings, turned out to be tremendously effective around the world. But it was completely absent for legal reasons in the United States.

So, what are those “legal reasons?” As Tufano discovered, state law typically prohibits something like a Prize-Linked Savings account because it’s a lottery and, according to state laws, the only legal lottery is a lottery that is run by the state itself. Nice monopoly if you can get it, right? You can hardly blame them for keeping lotteries to themselves. They generate billions in revenues. And so, while most states might like to help their citizens save more money, they may not be willing to pit their own lotteries against ones that might be run by, say, a bank. But as Tufano discovered, in the state of Michigan there was a loophole. In 2009, he got a group of credit unions to pilot the idea. Here’s Dave Adams, CEO of the Michigan Credit Union League.

ADAMS: You know banking can actually be pretty boring. It’s not like we go to social events and talk about how much we’re saving and talk about a great new feature on our checking account. Banking services are pretty mundane. So what people want and need is a fun way to save, and in Michigan we’ve come up with what with what we think will accomplish that.

It’s a program called Save to Win. And what it is, is using a lottery concept, so if someone saves, so that for every $25 that someone puts into these one-year certificates of deposit, they are going to get a chance at cash prizes. And the cash prizes are given out every month by participating credit unions ranging from $50 to $500. And there’s a grand prize at the end of the year, an opportunity to win a $100,000 grand prize. So Save to Win gives people what they need, which is they need to save more, while giving them what they want, which is a fun way to do it: a game of chance that makes it interesting to save.

DUBNER: Something that you will want to talk about at a party, say “Hey, I won a hundred grand!” So you’re making savings sexy by introducing a lottery element.

ADAMS: I think so, I don’t know so far as to say that it’s sexy, but it’s certainly far better than talking about the point-five percent that I’m getting on my savings account at the bank. So now you’re getting a competitive interest rate. You’re doing what you know you need to do, which is be more responsible in the way that you save and plan for the future. But you’re getting a chance at these cash prizes including a chance at a $100,000 cash prize. And the odds of winning are much better than what you would see if you were buying lotto tickets.

Year-to-date we have 15,000 accounts with 18 million in deposits. We’re on track to double the numbers we had in 2009.

Even with the sputtering 2009 economy and low interest rates, a handful of credit unions in Michigan opened 15,000 new savings accounts. We spoke with the first big winner of the Save to Win program, 87-year old Billie June Smith.

DUBNER: So you put $75 of your own money into a credit union savings account. And as a result, you were entered into a lottery for which you won $100,000.

Billie June SMITH: Right.

DUBNER: Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. What do you think?

SMITH: Well, it is! It has helped me a lot.

DUBNER: Tell me what you’ve done with the money, Billie.

SMITH: Well, I’ve had to replace the furnace just about a month ago. And I’ve put in water softener. And I have put money aside for the taxes. And I have another savings that I don’t touch for just so long. And I can add to it then.

When Save to Win surveyed some of its customers, they learned that more than 60 percent of them had either played the lottery or gambled in the previous six months. Fifty-five percent, meanwhile, had had no savings plan. Save to Win was beating its goals, and reaching the customers it was supposed to reach. It makes you wonder what would happen if a program like this took over an entire country.

Robert KEIP: Well, my name is Robert Keip. I worked at First National Bank for 11 years, where I headed up the Investment Product House, which was a business unit that really focused on retail deposits, both consumer and corporate deposits. And our focus was trying to look at ways of growing the funding base of the bank.

First National Bank, or FNB, is in South Africa. In 2005, it started what would turn out to be a phenomenally successful prize-linked savings program. It was born out of South Africa’s financial problems, as the country struggled to put the apartheid era behind it. Millions and millions of black South Africans did not use banks, for anything. Robert Keip wanted to find a way to get some of them in the door.

KEIP: Now in South Africa, because so much of the population is unbanked, so much of the savings are literally sitting under mattresses. Now, this has got a double effect: the one that really does really do badly is that it removes that funding from the mainstream banking environment so it can’t be harnessed to lend out and fund economic growth because retail funding tends to come from consumers and then get lent out to businesses who can then create jobs. That was the one problem.

The second problem was really that these people with the money without bank accounts were really excluded from the banking system and by being excluded by the banking system you miss out on so many benefits that really help with people’s individual development. For example, developing credit records, being less exposed to having your money being stolen or lost on the way home.

So there were really two problems there. One was trying to create access to the funding base and two was creating access for people who never had access to the banking system.

But Keip’s bank had a problem. Interest rates at the time weren’t keeping up with inflation, so putting your money in a plain old savings account might actually erode its value. Keip’s job was to make it worthwhile for customers to deposit new money. So instead of simply offering an account with a scrawny interest rate, he’d offer an account with practically no interest at all — but: it came with the chance for a really big payday.

KEIP: So what we did, we literally pooled all of these little point-two-five percents of interest. And then what we did is we paid out that interest in lump sums to a few people. So we paid out 150 people a month in lump sum prizes. So the first prize would be a million rand, which is an enormous amount of money in South Africa. And then there were three prizes of $100,000 rand. And then we went down to 20,000 rand, and a few prizes of a $1,000 rand. So really what we did is collected the little bits of interest that would be paid on all these little accounts and then paid it out randomly to a few select lucky winners.

DUBNER: So let’s say I live in South Africa. I take the money I’m earning and put it under my mattress or maybe buy some high-risk equities. You’re offering me the security of a bank account and the excitement of a chance to win a million rand. And what did you call this idea?

KEIP: We called it the “Million a Month Account.”

DUBNER: “MAMA.”

KEIP: And MAMA became the trivial name for it.

DUBNER: And you’re the man who gave birth to MAMA.

KEIP: Yes.

DUBNER: And how successful was MAMA?

KEIP: Hugely. Probably too successful for its own good.

MAMA attracted more than a million new customers to Keip’s bank. Other banks in South Africa took note — and they complained to regulators. And then came the South African National Lottery.

KEIP: Well, we engaged with them before we launched. We wrote to them and asked them opinion on the product. They wrote us a letter back saying that they didn’t think it was a lottery; they thought it fell into a promotional competition part of the legislation — and that we just comply with the requirements of promotional competition. And we launched and nothing was heard from them for six or so months, then they contacted us to say actually they don’t like what we’re doing — that it’s a lottery now.

DUBNER: So when you were starting out and there was very little money in your coffers, they thought that it wasn’t a lottery. But then after it got going for a while, and you had, how much? A couple hundred million dollars?

KEIP: About $200 million. By the time we closed down. But more importantly it was over a million customers that we had brought in.

DUBNER: And the National Lotteries Board changed its mind then. It thought: “Oh, that thing that we said a little while ago was not a lottery, now looks a lot like a lottery.”

KEIP: Yes.

DUBNER: What did they do then?

KEIP: We first engaged with them and tried to discuss it but it was very clear that they were in no position and not wanting to even try to discuss what the issues were. And so they took us to court to have us closed down.

Hugh Melamdowitz is the man who took MAMA to court. He’s the lawyer who represented the South African National Lottery. Melamdowitz argued that First National Bank’s MAMA program infringed upon the state lottery’s right to be the only game in town. The case went all the way up to South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeals, and Melamdowitz won every time.

DUBNER: Hugh, you must be very good.

Hugh MELAMDOWITZ: I can’t answer that.

DUBNER: Now, when MAMA was created, about 70 percent of low-income South Africans were said to be “unbanked.” The government was eager to cut this number. MAMA made it easy to get people in the bank. All they had to do was deposit a minimum of 100 rand, or about $15, into a 32-day “call” account — what we’d call a certificate of deposit. So, what’s wrong with that?

MELAMDOWITZ: Well I suppose it is an inducement to bank, but for the period in which your money is deposited in the bank you do not receive any interest. South Africa has a relatively high interest rate. Part of the motivation around the account was touted as being a no-cost account, which was correct, but also there was no interest earned. In South Africa on a 32-day call account your interest rate is fairly substantial. So for the days when your money wasn’t earning any interest whilst it was sitting in the bank accounts and the bank was earning substantial sums. I think the idea was that it was driven towards the unbanked hence the minimum amount of 100 rand. But realistically, substantial amounts were being deposited into accounts with the chance of affecting the million rand return.

Now, how successful was the savings plan run by FNB in actually drawing in money from either the previously unbanked or citizens at large. How much did they take in, in what period of time?

MELAMDOWITZ: Well there was substantial money taken in, not necessarily from the unbanked. My understanding is that substantial funds came from their regular customers. And really the customers who had sufficient means that they had essentially free money sitting around that they could afford to put aside for the 32 days without effecting any return, or any real return.

So my understanding is that the funds were deposited not predominantly by the unbanked, but really predominantly by the banked, and I would imagine predominantly by the more wealthy customers. The return that the bank made was fairly substantial.

Melamdowitz’s argument seems a bit at odds with itself. He says the bank took advantage of people by failing to give them a high interest rate — but also that most people who bought into MAMA weren’t the unbanked, that they were wealthier customers who had, as he puts it, “free money sitting around.” Well, if they want to play the bank’s lottery instead of the national lottery, why shouldn’t they be free to choose? But Melamdowitz was doing his job: protecting the interests of his client, the National Lottery. And it worked.

MAMA was shut down. Robert Keip, the man who created MAMA at First National Bank, stands by its success. He says the excitement of the lottery payout got people in the door so fast that the cost of acquiring a new bank customer fell from $300 to $5. But that was MAMA’s goal in the first place — to expand banking. Keip says 20 percent of MAMA accounts were opened by people who were previously unbanked. Sure, it wasn’t the majority, but MAMA reached that level in just the first three years. And it took in $200 million in deposits. After MAMA was shut down by the national lottery, Robert Keip was invited to Washington, D.C., to talk to federal banking officials about the program’s success.

Coming up next: when you play a state lottery, the state likes to keep quite a bit.

KEARNEY: Oh yeah, it’s a lot of money they take off.

And: has the U.S. Treasury Department thought about breaking up the state-lottery monopoly?

BARR: One of things that I’ve learned in my role at Treasury is that picking fights that one doesn’t have to pick isn’t the wisest course of action .

* * *

Today we are revisiting an episode from the deep archives of Freakonomics Radio, from 2010. Because one listener who heard it way back then, Michael Gaudini, took the idea and spent seven years working to make it a reality. He finally got his way, this past election day, when Texans passed a state constitutional amendment allowing credit unions and other financial institutions to offer prize-linked savings accounts. Why did such a relatively simple idea require something as drastic as a constitutional amendment?

GAUDINI: So in the state of Texas, the state basically had a monopoly on lotteries. And because this was considered a lottery, it could not go forward without an amendment to the state constitution.

It’s hard for anyone but the government to run a lottery when the government thinks the only lottery should be run by the government itself. And that has been the biggest obstacle to bringing PLS plans to the United States. The biggest lottery in this country is run by New York State, which today generates more than $9 billion in annual sales. But in order to get there, New York – like most states that have a lottery — had to rewrite its existing laws that prohibited any kind of gambling. Here’s former New York State lottery director Gordon Medenica.

MEDENICA: New York first began in 1967, and it was the second state after New Hampshire to come in.

DUBNER: What was the original impetus? Was it a budget shortfall essentially? Did the state feel we need money; we can void this ban on gambling in the state and come up with a way to do it?

MEDENCIA: I think was both a desire to raise money, and also I think it was a recognition that playing was going on anyway. And it was an attempt to tax and regulate an activity that they knew was very common among citizens. And whether you go back to the numbers games that existed in urban areas, and quite frankly still exist, or those kinds of activities, and even sports betting today, which of course technically is illegal but we all know is a huge business, I think it was a recognition on the part of lawmakers that much like prohibition, better to tax and regulate than to ostensibly call something illegal and pretend it doesn’t go on.

State governments do more than tax and regulate their lotteries. They take a generous cut themselves. In gambling circles, the commission taken by whoever operates the game is known as the “rake.” With state lotteries, the rake can be as high as 60 percent. That means that as little as 40 percent of the money taken in from ticket sales ends up in the pool that pays the winners. The rest of the money usually goes to education (it’s an extra tax for schools, but paid for only by people who play the lottery ) and it goes to cover overhead, marketing, and sales commissions. Compare the lottery’s rake to the slot machines in a casino: they pay out more than 90 percent.

KEARNEY: Oh yeah, it’s a lot of money they take off.

That, again, is the economist Melissa Kearny.

KEARNEY: States ostensibly run the lottery, at least initially it was “let’s provide an alternative, legal lottery product or numbers product to the illegal groups, it will be transparent, it won’t be corrupt.” But then they declare themselves monopolies and they take a big cut, which we can think is a really high price. Consumers are paying a very high price to buy this type of product. They can’t get it from anywhere else legally. And then the lottery commissions have the mandate to increase revenues. So they innovate, they advertise, they market. They behave like monopolists.

What do we know about people who play the lottery? What’s, for instance, the socioeconomic breakdown?

KEARNEY: Ok, so this surprises a lot of people, but people throughout the socio-economic distribution play the state lotteries. So it’s roughly 50 to 60 percent of men, roughly 50 to 60 percent of women, roughly 50 to 60 percent of people across the education spectrum so high school dropouts, high school degrees, college graduates.

When you look at the absolute dollars reported spending, it’s not that different across the income distribution, so it’s sort of lower income households spend about as much in dollar terms as higher income households. The flip side of that, of course, is that it winds up being a larger share of lower-income households’ total spending.

So states have a monopoly on lotteries. And the people who can least afford to play — the people in the study Tufano conducted who can’t raise the $2,000 when their furnace dies — They buy just as many tickets as people who make a lot more money. The lottery’s rake is so big that you can reasonably expect to make only 50 cents for every dollar that you pay in. And that’s why Peter Tufano and his colleagues are backing prize-linked savings in the U.S. And yet, for now it’s illegal.

Peter TUFANO: I think the reason that this product exists elsewhere and not here is because of the, I don’t want to say accidents of history, but the path that history has taken in America over a long period of time. I’m not a banking expert, nor am I a lawyer, but it’s been explained to me that the prohibitions on banks engaging in lottery activities goes back to the 1930s when for whatever reason the activities that some banks pursued made regulators very nervous about them having anything to do with the lottery which is why you can’t walk into a bank and buy a lottery ticket. And so, that may have been a really smart legislation back then and it might still be smart legislation now but it seem to have in this instance thrown out not only lotteries but also savings programs that have chance elements to it. So that’s half the equation. The other half of the equation is that as a public finance matter Americans states and localities have relied on lotteries as a way to close public finance deficits. There are other ways to close those deficits but unfortunately they’re going to be quite large looking to the future. But when public entities were given the right to use this vehicle to raise funds, other parties were prohibited from using the same vehicle and therefore there are prohibitions against private parties running lotteries in virtually every state.

So the combination of laws to try to protect the safety and soundness of banks and the laws to permit states and local governments to have a kind of preferential access to this form of funding has led to this situation where this product, which I think no one ever meant to outlaw, has become outlawed.

It makes sense that a state-run lottery might see a prize-linked savings plan as a natural rival. But the New York State Lottery, for a little while at least, actually considered teaming up with Peter Tufano on a PLS plan. Gordon Medenica again.

MEDENICA: We called it a no-lose lottery ticket. And basically what the concept is, is you buy a ticket, it would be an expensive ticket, let’s say a $100, but you can never lose the base of it. Then we pool those funds, invest them just like mutual fund or anything else like that, and then the investment gains become the prize pools.

Every month or so, instead of earning almost zero percent on savings accounts, there’s a lottery and different account holders win prizes just like you would with a lottery game. So, we went through a lot of this research and we went to the FDIC. And this was an FDIC committee on trying to encourage a higher savings rate among low income people, and also to embrace what they referred to as the unbanked, and to get low income people to use banking facilities and financial services better.

Medenica says he couldn’t make the math work out for the New York State Lottery. But for the Florida Lottery, it’s not about the math; it’s about the law. I asked Leo DiBenigno, the former Florida Lottery Secretary, what he thought about a prize-linked savings plan.

Leo DIBENIGNO: From a purely lottery perspective, I think the Florida Lottery is the only entity in Florida that can operate a lottery game. So if what you described is legally a lottery game, then I’ve got to say that it probably sounds illegal under current Florida law.

States protect their lotteries because the lotteries bring in lots of money for the states. Some money goes to education, and other worthy-seeming causes. But even DiBenigno admits that’s not what motivates people to play.

DIBENIGNO: I think people — Floridians in general — are players. They like the idea that the money they spend on the lottery, that a proportion of it and, in this case, a significant portion does go to fund education. But I’m the first to say that they don’t play the lottery by-and-large to help fund education in Florida. People play the lottery to win. They like the prizes, they like the excitement, they like the fun, the possibility of winning — you know, sometimes $10, $20, $50 and sometimes many multi, multi millions of dollars. I think the funding for education is ancillary. It’s an extra bonus that the public views the lottery as a different and unique and fun way to be able to fund at least some of things that our education system needs.

The lottery has famously been called “a tax on the stupid” — you get terrible odds, and the state rakes off a huge amount, converting your hard-earned cash into an additional schools tax. Now, you can understand why a state lottery commissioner like Leo DiBenigno of Florida likes things the way they are. But what about the other government officials who work on things like consumer protection? What about someone like the former Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the Treasury Department? His name is Michael Barr. I asked Barr if he ever played the lottery.

Michael BARR: I haven’t really played the lottery. I think probably if I went back over my 45 years I may have bought a scratch ticket or two in my 20s.

DUBNER:Now why do you not play the lottery?

BARR: It’s a fool’s errand. As you undoubtedly know there are a handful of people who will make some money out of the lottery but most people most of the time will lose money. It’s not a great way of spending one’s scarce resources.

DUBNER: I don’t know if you’re aware of the pilot program that’s been happening up in Michigan with credit unions where a prized-linked savings program is actually under way — are you familiar with that at all? Called the Save to Win program?

BARR: I have not actually studied that.

DUBNER: So the folks who are trying to make this happen come up against a very simple reality, which is that it’s typically illegal. That a private institution like a bank or a credit union is not allowed to run a lottery according to state law. State law typically forbids gambling in order to allow a state to run a lottery itself, there’s a loophole that must be written, and those loopholes have been written — most of states do have their own lotteries. But for someone else to come in and do it, it would be illegal.

If you looked at the landscape and thought, in my role in the Treasury here I would like to encourage people to save more, I’d like to make it worthwhile for them to save more, and I’d like to remove barriers that prevent from participating in projects that let them save more, would you would you be in favor of sponsoring or trying to get rolling some legislation that would allow for a widespread deployment of prized-linked savings? Do you think that’s something that Treasury should get its momentum behind?

BARR: One of things that I’ve learned in my role at Treasury is that picking fights that one doesn’t have to pick isn’t the wisest course of action unless it’s something that’s absolutely essential to take on. I wouldn’t have put that in the category of high priorities to wage into a discussion of state gaming law.

DUBNER: But if your job is to help American families save more and be better financial stewards generally, and we know that tens of billions of dollars are being spent on lottery tickets every year, which you called a fool’s game, and one alternative is to offer bank savings accounts whereby a customer can put in $100, enter a lottery, maybe win, but probably not, but maybe, and keep the $100, why isn’t that something that’s worth considering even in a politically fractious environment when the potential benefit — getting people to save more — seems to be much larger than the potential downside of angering some state lottery commissioners, let’s say.

BARR: I think there are lots of different ways of encouraging greater savings among all American families and I think we should continue to innovate and try new approaches. I think that the question that you posed is potentially one aspect of one way to do that. I don’t think we yet know enough from the research to say that it’s the kind of thing that we think needs to happen on a wide scale in order to be effective and I think we have a number of potential strategies to help meet the needs of American families to save that we haven’t really fully explored and that maybe raise a somewhat lower set of issues and barriers.

All right, so the prize-linked savings idea may not be universally beloved. But up in Michigan, they like it fine. And in fact, since 2009 when Michigan became the first state to allow PLS accounts, more than 20 states have followed suit — with Texas, as we’ve been hearing today, being just the latest. Now, maybe you think this is a terrible idea. Maybe you think people ought to save money on their own. But you know what? We don’t. People respond to incentives and for a lot of us the incentive to save — for retirement, for emergencies, for whatever — is weak.

Why? Well, because the payoff is abstract, and it’s too far in the future. It’s the opposite of “skewness.” This dilemma doesn’t just apply to saving money. Think of a school kid, a third- or fourth-grader. You want me to do what? To bust my butt in school for 10 more years — and then go to college — just to get some job that I probably won’t like?

Or think about crime and punishment. If you look at the data, it turns out that the death penalty does not work as a crime deterrent. Why? Because as it’s currently practiced, with the punishment waiting so far out in the future — through a maze of delays and appeals — the incentive simply isn’t strong enough to stop me from pulling the trigger right now.

Sometimes you need stronger incentives. Or maybe some good smoke and mirrors. That’s kind of what a prize-linked savings plan could offer. In a country where it’s easy to borrow your way to bankruptcy, where you can buy lottery tickets anytime you buy a loaf of bread, PLS is like a big neon billboard that turns a boring old savings account into an exaggeration of itself. Stick some money in here, it says, and you just might hit a big payday. And even if you don’t — well, your money still belongs to you. I’ll buy that for a dollar. Wouldn’t you?

FREAKONOMICS RADIO is produced by W-N-Y-C Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Bourree Lam, whose lucky lottery number is 8. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check out our archive, at Freakonomics.com, where you can stream or download every episode we’ve ever made you can also read the transcripts, and find links to the underlying research. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Michael Gaudini, policy adviser with the city of Austin

Peter Tufano, professor of finance at the University of Oxford

Dave Adams, Chief Executive Officer of the Michigan Credit Union League

Melissa Kearny, professor of economics at the University of Maryland

Billie June Smith, the first big winner of the Save to Win program

Robert Keip, former head of investment and premier banking at First National Bank in South Africa

Hugh Melamdowitz, Attorney of the High Court of South Africa

Gordon Medenica, Director of the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency

Leo DiBenigno, former Florida Lottery Secretary

Michael Barr, former Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the Treasury Department

RESOURCES

“Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications Brookings”, Annamaria Lusardi, Daniel Schneider, Peter Tufano (Papers on Economic Activity, 2011)

“Making Savers Winners: An Overview of Prize-Linked Savings Products”, Melissa Schettini Kearney, Peter Tufano, Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst (NBER Working Paper, 2010)

“State Lotteries and Consumer Behavior”, Melissa Schettini Kearney (Working Paper, 2002)

State Lotteries at the Turn of the Century: Report to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, Charles T. Clotfelter, Philip J. Cook, Julie A. Edell and Marian Moore (1999)

Texas Proposition 7, Financial Institutions to Offer Prizes to Promote Savings Amendment (2017)

EXTRA

John List Explains Why Lotteries Are in Fact a Good Fund-Raising Mechanism

Lottery Breakage

Would a Big Bucket of Cash Really Change Your Life?

The post Is America Ready for a “No-Lose Lottery”? (Update) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/say-no-no-lose-lottery-rebroadcast/

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cfijerusalem · 7 years ago

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HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION REWARDS TERRORIST LAWYER

Muhammad Alyan (second from L) and his prize for his award-winning argument (photo via jewishpress.com, “New Low: French Consulate in Jerusalem Awards ‘Human Rights’ Prize to Terrorist’s Proud Father” by Hana Levi Julian).

You know how the Bible warns against calling evil good, and good evil (Isaiah 5:20)? Well, one European group just blatantly defied that admonition.

On Sunday, the Geneva-based International Institute for Human Rights and Peace and the Caen Memorial for Peace presented a “human rights” award to Palestinian Arab lawyer Mohammed Alyan.

Alyan was honored for his legal representation three years ago of the wife of one of the terrorists involved in the synagogue massacre in Jerusalem. In that attack, terrorist Ghassan Abu Jamal and his accomplice shot, stabbed and beheaded four Jewish rabbis at worship before also gunning down one of the responding police officers.

When questioned by police, Jamal’s wife, Nadia, expressed support for the massacre and revealed that she had prior knowledge of her husband’s bloody plans. She was subsequently stripped of Israeli residency and lost the health care that Israeli taxpayers had previously covered for her and her family. Nadia insisted her human rights had been violated, and Alyan jumped to her defense. That in itself makes Alyan more villain than hero. But that’s not where the story ends.

Alyan is also the father of Bahaa Alyan, one of two terrorists responsible for the October 2015 attack on a Jerusalem commuter bus, during which three Israelis were mercilessly murdered.

Beyond the fact that Alyan raised a son capable of committing such atrocities, a year later, in 2016, he was arrested for publicly praising his son’s heinous actions during lectures at local elementary schools.

Alyan is actively trying to encourage future generations of Palestinian Arabs to follow in his son’s footsteps by murdering Israeli Jews. And the Europeans reward him as a “champion of peace and human rights.”

ARAB WOMAN TELLS TRUTH ABOUT ISRAEL

A Times of Israel journalist writes: “I first met Boshra Khalaila in the Spring of 2010, at the Ministry of Public Diplomacy’s offices in Jerusalem. She was 24 at the time. Like me, she’d been alarmed by the public relations debacle that followed the Gaza flotilla incident and had somehow found her way to the Ministry’s hastily set-up situation room, to volunteer her time and do damage control, in Arabic.

“I next saw her last January at the first preparatory meeting for the Faces of Israel program, which I have previously written about. She had again volunteered to defend her country and taken time off work to drive from Jerusalem, where she lives, to Tel Aviv for the preparatory sessions, a ritual she would have to repeat often. I was sent to California as part of that program. Boshra’s destination was South Africa – during Israel Apartheid Week.

“In South Africa, she traveled to both Johannesburg and Cape Town, lecturing at four large university events that included a serious round of follow-up work – public discussions, five radio interviews, and a host of newspaper interviews.

“Boshra, a secular, independent and patriotic Israeli Arab woman, defies stereotypes. She grew up in a liberal home in the Arab village of Deir Hana, in the Galilee. Her first contact with Jewish Israelis came at the age of 18, when she enrolled in Haifa University. There, she had to speak Hebrew for the first time. And it is there that she started to develop her political conscience and her attachment to the State of Israel.

“‘I am married and doing a master’s degree [in Tel Aviv]. I am a liberal, free woman, with all the rights that I could enjoy. I compare myself to other women my age in Jordan, the territories, Egypt, any Arab country. They don’t have the rights that I have: freedom of expression, the right to vote. They are forced into marriage at a young age, and religious head covering, despite their own convictions. With me it’s the opposite; I have everything.’”

On one occasion, we sat down for an interview in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel. My first question to Boshra was why she feels the need to speak up for Israel so publicly – something that most Jews don’t even feel compelled to do. She answered me in perfect Hebrew: ‘To sacrifice myself for the country that I live in and that gives me rights, that’s a natural price.’

Boshra (R) with “Faces of Israel” participants in S. Africa (via timesofisrael.com; “Telling Israel like it is — in Arabic” by Philippe Assouline).

“Boshra was part of a team of five people, including another Israeli Arab and a Druze, who were sent to South Africa with Faces of Israel during Israel Apartheid Week. Like us, Boshra and her team had to deal with widespread ignorance about Israel, compounded by a campaign of demonization waged by pro-Palestinian students. Unlike us, she could counter the anti-Israel Middle Eastern students as an Arab herself, in Arabic.

“[The pro-Palestinian students in Johannesburg] had built fake barriers and put up all kinds of slogans demonizing Israel and accusing it of Apartheid, of being a child murderer and the like. There were awful pictures, pictures with dead children, [it was] really terrible.”

“Boshra and her team were generally not welcome. They didn’t even know that there was such a thing as Israeli Arabs. They accused us of being Jews. Some people were hostile, they told us ‘get out,’ ‘we don’t want to hear from you.’ [Some] were even more unwilling to talk to me because I am Arab and was seen as a traitor, but this was only a small part of their group. Others, thankfully, came to listen; they were open-minded about it.”

“Boshra and her team delivered a number of lectures, told their personal stories, dialogued with students and gave interviews. “You want to defend yourself from people that tell the world that [Jews and Arabs] travel on different buses and study at different schools and that there is segregation,” she said. “That just isn’t true: I study in the same educational institutions, ride the same buses, shop in the same supermarkets. Everything that they say is absolutely false. And I do feel that I belong to my country.”

Hoping to give South Africans a glimpse of her everyday life as an Arab citizen of Israel, Boshra instead found herself publicly debating politics with a Palestinian PhD student from Gaza, in Arabic.

“This is what I told him in front of everyone; I spoke in Arabic, and I was translated: ‘I don’t enjoy it when soldiers attack and mothers and babies end up getting killed or injured. It’s hard. But the same is true for Netivot and Sderot, when Kassam rockets hit and, God forbid, someone is killed, it is very hard. On both sides there are mothers and it is hard. I want the Palestinian people to have a country. It’s a natural right.

That said, there are all kinds of conflicts within the Palestinian authority, mainly with Hamas, that prevent progress toward a peaceful settlement for the state of Israel and that is unfortunate.” She added, “If there is any Apartheid – in the sense of flagrant injustice – in the world, it is what is happening in Syria. Thousands of people murdered…the number of dead doesn’t even come close here.”

Thinking back to my experience in California, I assumed that her message would fall on deaf ears. But she surprised me:

“Most of the talks ended with a handshake and a hug. To me this says it all. I have to say that it was important that I wasn’t there representing the government of Israel. It was surprising for them to see that I was a simple person, defending my country for the rights that I have and not speaking on behalf of the government. It came across as very genuine. For them, this was huge – to be able to listen to someone who is not from the government, including for the pro-Palestinian students. When you tell them you are a student and not a government spokesman, they no longer see you as an enemy.”

Boshra’s appearances on campus made waves, and, among her many radio appearances, she was interviewed by an Islamic, Arabic-language radio station in Johannesburg. The interviewer, a religious Saudi man, asked her questions which revealed a disheartening level of ignorance about Israel, the most over-scrutinized and documented country in the world – an ignorance that is unfortunately all too common.

“He asked why Israel doesn’t let Muslims pray or go to Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem; why only Jews are allowed to pray [in the State of Israel]. I told them that in my own small village in the Galilee there are not only one but two mosques and two imams who both get a monthly salary from the state. The interviewer was in shock. I added that I could go pray at Al Aqsa mosque at will, freely. Sure, sometimes there are security concerns and they limit entrance temporarily, but that’s it.”

Thousands of Palestinians pray outside Al-Aqsa Mosque, atop the Temple Mount (by Sliman Khader/FLASH90).

The host was receptive to Boshra’s story and as the conversation turned to the rights of Arabs in Israel, her assertiveness grew. “I said to him: ‘In Saudi Arabia, can a woman drive a car?’ He said no. I said: ‘I can.’ And he was silent. I asked: ‘Can a woman in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia meet a man and get to know him before getting married or is she just forced into marriage at a young age?’ He said no, she can’t. I said: ‘I can.’ And I would answer his questions with my own questions…and each time he would be stunned silent.”

Boshra went on to correct other popular misconceptions that the host had, including ideas about the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. She informed him about the supplies that Israel provides to the strip on a monthly basis, and she reminded him that Egypt also enforces the embargo. She asked him why it was Israel and not Egypt, an Arab county, which provided for the territory’s necessities? “He was speechless. He was often speechless during our interview.”

“The host’s silence, and the reception she got from many if not all of the Arab students that she met, stood in stark contrast to my experience at Berkeley. Boshra’s interviewer, a religious Saudi, was more receptive to new facts than the “liberal” Ivy league students that I faced. “He saw me; I spoke Arabic, I was liberal and secular. This made him quite open-minded, actually.” [The Times of Israel article, by Philippe Assouline.]

“LORD, who...may live on your holy mountain? The one whose walk is blameless...who speaks the truth from their heart; whose tongue utters no slander...and casts no slur on others...who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind...Whoever does these things will never be shaken” (Psalm 15:1-5).

In Messiah, Lonnie C. Mings

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flauntpage · 8 years ago

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Blue Jays Mailbag: Bullpen Depth, Gibbons' Slow-Starting Teams, and Trade Chips

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

Andrew Stoeten answers your questions in our Blue Jays Mailbag, which runs weekly at VICE Sports. You can send him questions at [email protected] , and follow him on Twitter.

The Blue Jays season just keeps on going. Five more months of this! Oh joy!

But on the field they've actually started treading water enough that fans can seriously contemplate a red-hot run putting their Blue Jays back in contention at some point—meaning the club's recent roster fluctuations aren't mere rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic quite yet. Even if they sometimes have felt that way.

So let's do it to it and take some questions about the bullpen! *COUGH*

And if you have a Blue Jays question you'd like me to tackle for next week, be sure to send it to [email protected]. As always, I have not read any of Griff's answers...

Hi Andrew, With the Jays injuries to their pitchers and him doing great in Buffalo and a solid ST until the horrific injury from the line drive, why hasn't TJ House gotten a shot in the show yet? Rian

Uh... I hope you're not asking this about T.J. House as though you think seeing him take the ball for the Blue Jays would be a good thing. It wouldn't. But I get why there might be a little confusion over this, because you're not wrong that House has looked good so far. He's struck out more batters in his brief spell in Buffalo so far than he has at any level for several years (25.2%, compared to 14.6% in 2016 in 72.2 Triple-A innings in the Cleveland organization), and producing a groundball rate over 50%, which has added up to a tidy 1.24 ERA on the season.

The thing is, it's not necessarily just performance that has to be considered. Especially when we're talking about Triple-A performance, which can be misleading at the best of times. (Remember when Randy Wolf sparkled for 23 starts for the Bisons in 2015, bristled about not getting a call-up, and eventually was sent to the Tigers, for whom he made seven starts, posting a 6.23 ERA, and then called it a career?) Still, maybe House had as good a case to get the call as Mat Latos or Casey Lawrence did, but the Jays said at the time that pair was first called up that they were looking for right-handers to face the right-handed-heavy Angels lineup. And House, of course, is a lefty.

There may have also been some kind of handshake deal with Latos, promising him the first available spot start in exchange for not opting out of his contract when he didn't make the club out of spring training. We have no idea if this was the case, but it's at least plausible, and a thing that teams sometimes do.

Has it really come to wanting T.J. House called up? Yes, yes, it has. Photo by Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports

The other thing is that Lawrence has minor league options remaining, while House doesn't. If the idea was to bring someone up for only a start or two, perhaps the club felt it made more sense to use the guy they wouldn't have to sneak through waivers just to keep in the organization. (Though they've since designated Lawrence for assignment in order to bring up catcher Mike Ohlman in the wake of Russell Martin's recent shoulder injury).

Because House is the kind of guy the Jays might actually like to keep. The front office knows him well from the Cleveland days, and he started 18 games for them in 2014. That stint makes up the bulk of his big league résumé, and it's not a terrible one: 89 strikeouts in 117.2 innings, a 59.7% groundball rate, and 2.6 walks per nine innings—numbers spoiled somewhat by a higher-than-average home run rate.

Serviceable is the word. And while that's maybe exactly the kind of guy you'd expect the club to turn to, I don't think it's unreasonable that they chose to not imperil their already thin depth and go with Lawrence and Latos for a couple early starts, especially given the handedness issue relating to facing the Angels.

Hey, and good news, T.J. House fans, with the way Blue Jays pitchers have been dropping like flies, he may still get his chance! Though for now all eyes are on Joe Biagini, who had an excellent first start for the club on Sunday, and someone BP Toronto noted over the winter, maybe should have been a starter all along.

Speaking of...

---

Bullpen plans for Gibby w/o his only reliable reliever now (Biagini). In case it wasn't painfully obvious.

@TheRealTayls17

Call me crazy, but I'm actually pretty comfortable with Danny Barnes, Ryan Tepera, Joe Smith, and Dominic Leone bridging the gap between whoever the hell the Jays are starting and closer Roberto Osuna. (For anyone wondering where Jason Grilli's name is here, have you not been watching?)

Barnes has produced very good strikeout totals in the minors, and has limited walks and—despite having fly ball tendencies—home runs. His fastball isn't huge in terms of velocity (he sits in the low 90s), but it generates swing and miss, especially paired with a nice changeup. The ZiPS projection system has Barnes as being worth nearly 1 WAR for the rest of the season, which is based in part on his excellent minor league numbers, but a growing (if still minuscule) sample of big league success, too. So far this year he's allowed just three hits and two walks in nine innings of work. Keep riding him, I say!

Tepera has been up and down between Buffalo and Toronto a bunch over the last few years, so fans know him fairly well. He lives on his heat (94-95), throwing a four-seamer, cutter, and sinker, with little offspeed or breaking stuff mixed in. He hasn't been a dominant reliever, and has tended a little too much toward issuing walks—including 9 in 17.2 innings this season—but I don't think it kills you to give him some higher-leverage opportunities than he's seen.

Leone's results haven't been great so far with the Jays, but the peripherals look pretty good. He's another somewhat hard thrower (93-94), has a good cutter and a slider he could maybe use more of (Brooks Baseball notes that his fourseamer "is basically never swung at and missed compared to other pitchers' fourseamers, results in more flyballs compared to other pitchers' fourseamers, has essentially average velo and has some added backspin"). The 4.73 ERA doesn't look great, but 16 strikeouts in 13.1 innings is something to work with, and the 5 walks (one intentional) work, too. Again, not a dominant guy, but a guy who'll do fine enough most times to get some looks in higher-leverage situations.

Smith, the sidearmer, has been quite good so far, gives clubs a different look, has over 650 games of big league experience, and a spell closing for the Angels in 2014. He's going to look like trash if his pitches frisbee into the middle of the plate, but when he's on it's a thing of beauty.

There's also Grilli, once he finds himself (which we all, y'know, hope he will), the newly-acquired Neil Ramirez (who looks somewhat like a poor man's Grilli—the good version, that is), and whoever else might come up from Buffalo.

So the bullpen might be OK, minus Grilli? Photo by Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports

So... yes. The bullpen is in flux. This, I think, was always to be expected, even if the sudden loss of Biagini to the rotation, and the less-than-sudden shittiness of Grilli, has thrown a wrench into whatever vague plans were there. John Gibbons is probably going to get heat for it whenever he makes the "wrong call" and a game ends up going sideways. And with guys who look more like middle relievers than late-inning ones being asked to pick up a lot of slack, it's definitely going to happen. But the thing is, even the best of relievers blow games, and these guys here now have a chance to really grab an opportunity and turn themselves into the next Biagini. It could work!

At the very least, it'll be OK. And if the offence ever starts not being completely useless, we might not even notice so much, anyway.

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Hello, I recently read a stat that since 2013 (the year Gibbons was rehired) the Blue Jays have the MLB's worst record in April. While I detest the 'fire Gibbons' refrain whenever the team plays poorly, I can't help but feel that it is a legitimate criticism of Gibbons and the coaching staff for not doing the right things during spring training to adequately prepare the team to start the season well.

How much responsibility should the coaching staff shoulder for slow starts? Or is it primarily a matter of the type of roster assembled?

Would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Josh

Holy shit. Speaking of John Gibbons taking heat!

But, to be fair, this is actually quite a reasonable way to frame a question that's hard to ask without sounding like you're unduly shitting on the manager. Which is mostly because asking it at all means unduly shitting on the manager.

What are these magical "right things during spring training to adequately prepare the team to start the season well"? And if John Gibbons doesn't know them, why isn't he being steered toward them by Ross Atkins, or Mark Shapiro, or DeMarlo Hale, or Luis Rivera, or Tim Leiper, or Alex Anthopoulos, or Tony LaCava, or Jose Bautista, or Mark Buehrle, or J.P. Ricciardi, or anyone he worked with as the bench coach for the Royals, or the Jays' new high performance department, or the '86 Mets team he played for, or any of the countless other people with vast experience in the game that he's been surrounded by over the years?

Y'know????

I'm not saying that we should just wave this stuff away and pretend it doesn't exist—you're not wrong that slow starts have been a hallmark of some of Gibbons' teams—but this idea that, in the absence of anything else to point to, the manager must be to blame simply doesn't make any sense. I'd be happy to hear some reasoning for it beyond "well he was there and he was the manager, so it's ultimately on him." But what might such reasoning even look like? Is he doing anything differently than any other manager in any other organization? If yes, sure, we should look at it. But if he was, and it seemed possible that it was impacting the team's starts so significantly, my suspicion is that one of the huge number of knowledgeable and successful people who've been in his sphere along the way would have noticed—and if they did notice and try to correct him and he wasn't receptive, then that should have been noticed.

Until you show me something concrete that he does that might explain this, the best explanation is, unfortunately, "shit happens." I know it's not very satisfying to not be able to have someone to point a finger at, but shit happens.

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How much money for real grass and drainage? Would trading JD, JB, Stroman, Sanchez and Morales for cash cover that amount? @StephenDame

I know you're being facetious, but I've seen a few people try to make this kind of a direct connection between a player's salary and the coming renovations at the Rogers Centre, and I really don't think we need to be so scared of that.

I can't claim to know exactly how it's all going to work, but the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into extending the Rogers Centre's life won't be taken directly from the Blue Jays' payroll. Some of it might be! Don't get me wrong, I don't have a whole lot of trust in the company that may have intentionally devalued their own team for years just so they could get a sweetheart deal on the building—which they bought for just $25 million in 2004. But there have been some rather major projects over the last couple of years—a massive upgrade to the roof and the installation of the dirt infield being key among them—and the payroll has been healthier than ever.

Unfortunately, the future upgrades I'm talking about very likely don't include retrofitting the building to have a full grass field—the cost of which seems like it will ultimately prove prohibitive. Hey, but at least we got to swallow that sweet false hope for a few years, eh? Thanks, Beeston!

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IF the jays do end up as sellers come trade deadline who do you think is most likely to be moved and what kind of haul could they get for them? Rian

I think you could probably figure this out on your own, to be perfectly honest, Rian. If they're out of it, they'll certainly move guys who will be free agents once the season ends, which means Bautista, Estrada, and Liriano.

Grilli and Barney will be free agents, too, but whatever the Jays might be able to get for those two as rental players isn't going to be much of a haul. They might nab some interesting depth pieces—the Blue Jays gave up shortstop Dawel Lugo for Cliff Pennington in an August 2015 deal, and Lugo has had a couple very good seasons with the bat since, and ended up the Diamondbacks' tenth best prospect this winter, per Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs—but nothing that's going to turn the franchise around any time soon.

Unfortunately, there's probably not going to be any kind of massive haul for the big three, either. More than the other two, Bautista's value will depend on his performance heading into the end of July. If he gets right and teams aren't scared off by his reputation, I still don't see him netting much more than Carlos Beltran did for the Yankees last year. That package, if you don't recall, was pretty underwhelming: a couple of arms that look like they're probably relievers, and Dillon Tate, who was the fourth overall pick in 2015, but whose stock dropped massively post-draft. Keith Law had him as the Yankees' 14th best prospect this winter at ESPN.com, calling him a future reliever as well, so...

The market could play out differently for the Jays and Bautista this summer, if that's what it comes to, but I think two months of Beltran is a pretty good baseline, and it's not going to get anybody terribly excited.

As for Estrada, the dream is something like the Jays gave up for two months of David Price in 2015. But, as much as Blue Jays fans may love their AceStrada, I don't think he has nearly the same cachet. He almost certainly isn't going to get back what the Reds did when they moved Johnny Cueto to the Royals, either, but maybe the Jays could get something of a similar shape. That package was centred around Brandon Finnegan—a still-improving young arm who was able to start 30 times for Cincinnati in 2016—and also featured a couple other pitchers (John Lamb, Cody Reed) that were ready to step into the big leagues and be bad, one as a back-end starter and the other as a reliever.

Estrada has been rock solid and has the best strikeout rate of his career. Photo by Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

Liriano will be worth even less, one would imagine. And with the pitching market expected to be rather robust in terms of supply, it's not impossible that both will be worth quite a bit less.

Isn't this fun?

Hey, but there's always the chance that the Jays can package a couple of these guys and get something better than what they might bring back as individuals. At last year's deadline the A's sent rental players Josh Reddick and Rich Hill to the Dodgers for a trio of interesting arms: Jharel Cotton, who has struggled out of the gate in Oakland's rotation, but made five very good starts at the end of last season; Grant Holmes, a big, hard-throwing prototypical A's starter whom Law suggests they may have bought low on; and upper-90s throwing relief prospect Frankie Montas.

Useful pieces, in other words. Pieces that, at least in these cases, were at least able to step in and contribute the next year—which could be especially useful for the Jays. Good players, but guys with flaws—with limited ceilings or still steep learning curves—and not quite the kinds of mega-prospects we've seen moved in the last year for studs with years of control remaining, like Chris Sale, Adam Eaton, Andrew Miller, Aroldis Chapman, or even Drew Pomeranz.

Of course, the Jays have a guy who could net prospects from out of that higher tier, but they'd essentially be saying goodbye to both 2017 and 2018 if they were to move Josh Donaldson, and it's still a little too hard to envision them having the stomach for that.

Blue Jays Mailbag: Bullpen Depth, Gibbons' Slow-Starting Teams, and Trade Chips published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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