#i gotta reblog the goat

[304files]

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

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

“It flutters frantically in it, making a grand fight to reach that false moonlight, only to drop away when it realizes that it’s being burnt. You watch it rinse and repeat, relentless and sure, for who knows how long. It’s no special moth—no luna moth or the ones with the pretty pink wings—but the light falls down on it and colors it a pleasant stardust silver.”

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

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

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

“‘You don’t get it. You are the music. Every single song is about you. Every single fucking song is about you. I want you to come with me, please. I love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you, and I thought you’d loved me too, and I don’t want to do this alone. I can’t do it alone.’”

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

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

𝑯EART 𝑊ORM ⸺ hueningkai ℘˒´ˎ˗

  ⨾𓍢ִ໋ ˒˒ 𝚑𝔢art𝚠𝔬rm

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

⸺ listen to the playlist .ᐟ ‧˚

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

wc ➛ 17.9k

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

𝒢 ‎; smut ˒ angst ˒ some fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t things just stay like this? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just... don’t know.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him. 

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.  

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚝⭒ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

You make a hesitant crawl across the bed toward him. It seems as though your elbows might buckle beneath your weight, but you make it despite the odds. A fog settles over your brain when you rest your hands on his shoulders and bring your legs to straddle his lap. 

But you shove it back; you want to live and breathe every last second of this. No matter how unbelievable or blistering it is.  

Breaths fan out over your face. It’s seizing your mind like undiluted liquor. “Where do I put my hands?” you ask him. It’s breathless, the air stolen right from your lungs though your mouths haven’t even touched.  

“There is fine,” he says. His words sound breathless, too. The weight of his touch on you as he runs his own up to support your back is unsure. “And then...” he says. It falls out on your mouth slowly, and then he’s taking your lips onto his. 

The walls melt away, sound does too. All that is real is the taste of his lips and how they move against you. Your lips start tentative, but you try his mouth movements yourself. It feels like a timid dance—it feels like deep, deep down, finally everything is right. That mist, thick and blinding, falls back over you. 

Something changes. Something in it, where you two meet, changes. He becomes hungry. Softly locked lips turn biting and nipping, shaky breaths exhaled slow through your nose. His hands on your back become surer, and one even ventures off to grab your chin. The other holds you to his chest, melded together despite the intense smoke and flame rolling off your bodies. You wonder if he can feel your heart beating a mess there. 

Reluctance paints you both when you pull back. You’re panting deep drinks of air. It’s hard to think; your mind’s run off and sits just out of reach. Licking your messy lips, stained with illicitness, you can only manage to brush your fingers against it to form words. “How... was that?” you say, searching his eyes. You find his pupils blown so wide that they consume the warm brown. You’re ready to jump out of your skin with that look pointed at you.  

Kai doesn’t answer, though. He slams your mouths back together as if starved by just the brief moment you’d parted for air. Nips on your bottom lip and emboldened hands—he moves like roaring water through a dam. A dam that he’d worked hard to fortify, and yet, at a crack it’s all falling down. Fingertips digging through the fabric of your shorts down to your soft hips, his chest rumbles. You feel it reflected in your core, electricity charging there and shooting up your spine and down your thighs. 

You kiss him for all the times you wish you would’ve, but didn’t. The slight rolls of your hips down onto him come easy. You love how it has him making a sound into your mouth and taking the fat beneath his fingers harder into his hands. He helps you. 

He drops his head into your neck. Your head swims for air and he has you shuddering with just the brushing of his nose against the column of your neck. The walls of his room spin around you. “Kai,” you whine, every bit of friction his jeans provide, even clothed as you are, just enough to rile you but not to give you what you need. 

“God,” he growls, thumbs hooking under your waistband. “You always fucking run around dressed in nothing,” he says, letting his fingers linger like a suggestion of undressing you. “Did you do it on purpose? Expect to make me crazy, knowing I couldn’t touch you?” 

And, in those words, it seems that he steals every last bit of breath from you. How often had you gone braless or worn something like this around him? Laid here, in his bed, like that? 

Grown tired of your fruitless grinding, he brings a hand down to support your lower back and says, “Turn around.” 

Though you explode with the prospect of what he might be intending to do or what’s next, if you’re really going to do this, you do so in a flash of eager limbs. His chest is solid against your back, you melt against the feeling of it. He’d become such a man lately, filled out, and you watched it happen. It was hard for your eyes not to catch on muscle-corded forearms while he picked at strings or to not appreciate the timbred rumble of his voice when you’d feel it come from his chest. How could it not do things to you? Now, he’s dragging your shorts down your legs and you’re in disbelief.  

“Fuck,” he breaths out. His fingers find your panties soaked through. “So, you’re the type to get dripping wet.” 

An embarrassed blush decorates your cheeks. Kai drags his index finger in circles around your clit through the fabric as if enamored with how much of a mess you’d made of it. Your hips twitch every time he rolls right over it. It’s strange how he’s got your body acting on its own volition with his touches. Even stranger that it’s your best friend doing it. “Sorry,” you tell him, wavering.  

He continues those terribly slow circles. “Sorry?” he says, chin on your shoulder. He’s got you wrapped up in him, with nowhere to go but to melt back into him and let his fingers work. Free hand on one of your inner thighs digging divots into the plushness there to hold it still, he tells you, “It’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s hot as fuck. You’re so excited for me to touch you, huh?” 

The words wreak havoc on you, feeding the flame that has your belly twisted up tight and the ignition point between your thighs pounding. To hear them coming from him, reserved Kai, has you digging your fingers into his forearm to prove that it’s real. You’d never have imagined him being so... filthy. You imagine him behind falsely nonchalant eyes, devouring you with a perverted mind all the times you’d spent innocently sitting together in this room.  

Your cheeks squish beneath his fingers as he takes your face and turns it to him. He wants to make sure you’re look at him as he asks you, “Do you want me to finger you?” 

Like a record, your brain skips. Between the blunt, lewd question and his hand on you, it’s in overload. How could ask something like that so simply? Stunned as you are, of course you want him to. You want him to do anything to you. You nod.  

Every last nerve and neuron in your system, just below the skin, cry out when his fingers slow down to nothing. “Hmm?” he says, ignoring the chasing of your hips and the opening of your thighs to invite him into paying your poor pussy the attention he’d ripped from it. He wants to hear you say it.  

About ten minutes ago, you lost your mind. It does not return to you now. “I want you to,” you say, chest beating in tandem with your cunt. 

“You want me to, right? Not some dumbass you met a week ago, huh?” he says. “Because you know that this is what it’s meant to be. Me, doing these things to you. Not some twenty-five-year-old piece of shit. He doesn’t deserve you, baby. Understand?” 

His fingers slider under your panties. Dumb brained and cognition gone muddled, you nod. All you can really think about is the moment his fingers slide over you. Fire licks up your lower belly and your insides as he brushes calloused finger tips finally right against your clit. 

Puffed breaths of a scoff raise goosebumps over your skin. “Teach you to kiss so that you can go over there and get his hands on you,” he says, middle two fingertips prodding at your entrance. “As if you were ever anybody’s but mine. You’d come crawling back to me, baby, because it was always meant to be us. He could never satisfy you.” 

His words might alarm you or have you asking questions if he hadn’t pushed his fingers into you and begun curling them with strong, pointed presses, pulling soft mewls and hums from you until he finds a spot that twists up your insides. Even through the palm you press over your mouth, your moans come out more like wavering grunts and croaks. Your thighs quiver and twitch, threatening to snap closed against your own will with each. Only your feet stay planted to the mattress. Like a cone of soft serve under the sun’s blistering attention, you melt down him. Just his frame keeps you upright. 

“Right there, huh?” he says. The smirk on his mouth filters his words into something taunting. “That’s where you like it.” It’s like he’s learning your body step by step, fulfilling all the questions he’d been forced to only guess at before this.  

“Uh-huh.” It comes out whiny and cracks in the middle, but you can’t find even an ounce of you to care right now. If this moment had been a long spiral, a fall from grace, down into a dark pit of forgotten inhibitions, you’ve just hit the bottom. Cheeks blazing cherry blossom pink and with your fingers curling into his pant leg, you don’t doubt that you are a picturesque mess. The kind of mess that’s beautiful because it’s dirty. Your teeth are not gentle on your plush bottom lip. It stings, tugged back and bitten and still a bit swollen with kisses. Perhaps you taste the tang of metal on it, but you pay it no mind. 

Kai redoubles his efforts. Now that he knows exactly how to play you, he’s fucking you on his fingers without mercy. The sounds coming from your cunt were wet, but now they’re different— nasty squelching. The only noises coupling with your pathetic keening. Forget anchoring yourself on his thigh, forget muffling your sounds. Instead, your hands fly to encircle his flexing forearm. Under your nails, angry red crescents dig into the muscle there. What had been a languid, building pleasure suddenly becomes everything. Your breaths run away from you, and you chase them frantically. Deep down in your core, the muscles spasm and rage against his fingers. “H—oh god,” you groan. Even the muscles in your thighs and tummy tighten up. 

“So whiny...” Kai mumbles, voice taut with the effort of eroding you down into pure, blinding-white pleasure. 

And then, in a swoop of mercy, your belly tightens. You hover here, on the precipice of something so consuming and voracious that your muscles and bones reject it, and yet your heart sings. Your eyes and cheeks and lungs and belly burn, the flame charring the edges of you in a beckon. You answer its call. Kai doesn’t mind the snapping of your legs shut around his arm, nor does your bucking or shaking deter him. He just holds you through it, arm like a metal bar around your waist. He’s everywhere, in this moment—the smell of him, leather and utterly familiar, his mouth dusting hot kisses over your skin, his fingers guiding you through orgasm. Where you’d gone silent in the initial crash of it, you devolve into mewls and grunts as you come down.  

He holds you even as you slump against him boneless. Afterglow simmers in your veins and has your brain all lethargic and lazy. Neither of you speak for a while, your pulse thumping a rhythm. His breaths rise and fall against you; it grounds you in this moment where you feel all spacey and gone. You become aware again of how disgustingly sweltering it is in his room, your skin sheened. 

That brainless bliss only lasts you for so long, though. When rational mind returns to you, no matter how you wish it wouldn’t, you’re hit in the chest with regret so hard it knocks the wind out of you. 

How will anything ever be the same after what you’d just done? Stricken still by the thought, you barely register him pulling his fingers out of you. After all your worrying about making sure no wedge comes between you two, look what you’ve gone and done. No; nothing ever will be the same again.  

⚝⭒ 

A couple of weeks ago, you ruined the one friendship you were supposed to have forever. It presses down heavy one you while you sit sprawled out on Yeonjun’s couch, his arm around your shoulder. His phone casts a glow over his features with all the lights out. 

It doesn’t smell like home. He, pressed against your side, doesn’t smell like home.  

Some stupid movie that he’d picked out, yet somehow you’ve ended up the only one still watching it, weaves a hum into the quiet of his apartment. Tangy hurt wells up in your throat. Even the moments when you and Kai would sit in mutual silence on your phones never felt like this. This is different.  

You haven’t seen Kai since that night. He’s been busy getting ready to move out, and you’ve been here most days. How fast all of it had changed. You wish you’d feel whiplashed, left empty, by the drifting that you’d been so terrified of. But you don’t. It’s just been you, locked on land, watching him being taken away by the ocean’s tide with no way to change its course. You tried and screamed to call him back, but now your voice has gone hoarse.  

And instead of watching him go, you choose to look elsewhere. It’s all you can do to protect yourself from the hurt. 

“Hey,” Yeonjun says, finally addressing you rather than whoever’s he’s got in his phone. “Did you bring anything to change into?”  

“I brought stuff to sleep in,” you say, eyeing him. You know that’s not why he’s asking. If it came down to it, you could just steal something from him and pull it on. He means going out clothes. Your jaw tightens. “But nothing nice. Why?” 

He stretches his arms behind his head in a flaunt of long arms and tanned muscle. Hours spent at the gym lent him those; you appreciate the look of it with a watering mouth. Kai had earned his build by hours spent outside with your dad, because his own could care less, helping him fix up cars and vehicles of all ridiculous sorts. You remember when Kai had first gotten his truck—junk on wheels, honestly—he’d spent so much of summer out there getting it running. And, well... the sun-kissed bronze of his skin and frame that came with it, you had no qualms with. 

But those memories only sit heavy in your chest as you’re sat here beside Yeonjun. You banish them elsewhere; you need to let him drift off. If you can’t have each other, and your feelings won’t permit just being friends, then you have to. You want him to do amazing things, and you fear that it’s your presence in his life that will interrupt that. As much as your feelings are real, they are selfish. You, your unsure direction and all your dead weight, should let him go. Because you love him. 

“The guys want to come over,” he tells you, pushing off from the couch. “You should probably into change into something less showy.” 

Less showy. Your mouth drops into a scoff of disbelief, looking down. A pair of shorts and a shirt, showy? You have to laugh, or else you’ll succumb to the strange embarrassment crawling at the back of your skull. What’s he trying to say? Is that what he thinks of you? “What’s that supposed to mean?” you say, face tilted up to him in a twist of distaste. “I’m wearing something comfy.” 

He shrugs, hands shoved into the pockets of his black sweats. “Don’t want to give them the wrong idea about you, that’s all, baby. They’re guys; I just want to protect you.” 

“No,” you say, the word falling out in a barked laugh. “Why would you even be bringing over dudes that you think will look at me like that? Why are you even friends with people that you think are gonna make moves on your girlfriend?” He holds a hand out to you, but your hands stay right where they are: crossed solidly over your chest. 

Throwing that hand up in audacious exasperation, he gives you a look that makes you feel small and petulant—like you’re throwing an overblown fit. And, maybe you are. You should probably just do it; him seeing you as some overbearing or high maintenance girl has that embarrassment flaring like wildfire that’s found dry brush. “C’mon, baby,” he says, a lazy smile on his mouth that gets under your skin. “Let’s just have an easy night. Don’t make it a big deal.” 

Let’s just have an easy night. As if you’re the one ruining the night. Something snarky tries to seize your tongue, but you hold it down. “I thought it would be just us. We wanted to watch the movie together, Yeonjun. Can’t you wait to hang out with your friends? Let’s enjoy our time together; you’ve got your shift tomorrow.” 

“My fucking god,” he groans, running a hand through his hair furiously. “You’re needy, you know that? The neediest I’ve ever had to put up with. I don’t put up with needy, baby. Can’t you just chill out a little? My last didn’t mind when I’d have friends over.” 

Your eyes burn. Your cheeks burn. He’d been with plenty of other girls before you; that, you’re well aware of. It’s been a corrosive source of self-doubt for you. You don’t want that title: the neediest he’s ever had. Don’t want him to think of you as some prude that won’t let him have fun. Just... hearing him bring up the other girls he’d been with before you stings and leaves welts no different from a slap in the face. Feelings of inadequacy shackle you and have you saying, “Fine. I’m gonna borrow some of your clothes.” 

Heavy resentment blooms on your skin where he bends down and presses kisses to your cheek, and then mouth, and then down your neck. “Thank you, baby.” 

And, where those ugly, wilted flowers of it bloom, you hear echoes of something. Something that tells you that Kai wouldn’t treat you like this. But you’ve made your bed, decided to do it yourself, and now you’ve got to lay on it. 

⚝⭒ 

The frat parties are the worst kind of social outing that Yeonjun insists upon. The smaller kinds, more intimate gathering with just his closer friends, you tolerate much easier. You’re not fond of the circles he chooses. Breathing in thick, smoked-out air surrounded by alcohol-coated breaths is not your type of fun night. Somehow, you end up doing that more than date nights. But that’s better than being here. The base rumbles up through your feet and makes your stomach sick, and it reeks of grinding bodies and body odor, and condensation coats your fingers from the red solo cup as full as when you’d first gotten it. 

But, still, you come along. Not every time, but when you don’t, you lay in his bed sickening yourself with images of what he might be doing here. How pathetic is it to attend parties with your boyfriend because you fear that otherwise, he might stick his tongue down the throats of other girls? 

You’re looking for him right now, awkward and left alone. He’d promised to stick around; you had begged him to. That was pathetic, too. You know that you put up with too much. If he loved you, or honestly even liked you, you two would be in the thick of the throngs dancing or off somewhere talking with others. Together. The frantic skimming and weeding of your eyes through the blur of faces is not right. That’s not how he should make you feel. It’s not how Kai would make you feel. 

Well, Kai would never have you here in the first place. 

Venturing out from your little corner, you sift between the bodies of people have a hell of a lot better time than you. Drunken, some you bounce off of like bumper carts. You press your palm over the round face of your cup to spare the floor from spillage threatening to pour over the lip. It’s not like a splash from yours would matter much, though. The linoleum has already been made a fetor mess of dirt off shoes and the sticky sugar of liquor. Your shoes peel from it as you walk. God, what would your parents think of you being here? 

You peek around corners and eye big groups. He’s not in the kitchen when you look there, either. Your stomach feels sick in a knowing way—a gut feeling that doesn’t justify anger or tears just yet, but you know. Right in the center of your chest, you know. 

It’s in some room that you find him. Sat on the floor along with a few faces you don’t know, he pulls from his bottle. And on his shoulder, he lets a girl with shining curls and pink cheeks rest her head. At your busting in on the intimate gathering, Yeonjun’s eyes slide to you. Recognition flashes over them and wars with bleary drunkenness. 

“Hey, baby,” he says. Their gazes all fall on you, but you can hardly see them through blurry eyes. 

The girl lifts her head from his shoulder. She’d caught the memo. 

“I think I’m gonna go.” You make it sound resigned, try to not let them see your shame, but your voice betrays you and crackles. Maybe it’s better to pretend it doesn’t feel like you’ve just been kicked in the stomach and left to reel against the force, but you can’t. You’re nowhere near shocked, nowhere near blindsided, but still you hurt. 

He follows you down the hall. “What’s your problem?” he says, the few, plain words mending and waving into a slurring. 

You’ve got one goal: get to the front door, away from the shitty music and him. His words, sharpened, fall off your skin despite his efforts. What good would fighting do you, anyway? It was always going to end up this way. This is just who he is, and he doesn’t give two shits enough about you to want to change that. 

“Baby, seriously? That made you this mad? I didn’t even fucking do anything. Stop being insecure,” he says. At the gritting of your teeth, he sees an opportunity and pounces on it. “You don’t need to be jealous. I don’t do jealous shit. We can dance, or something. Shit, I don’t know what you want! Just stop throwing a fit.” 

Didn’t do anything? You have to laugh. Maybe you didn’t walk in on him fucking someone else, but that’s not what this is about. Not even a little bit. You’ve checked out, and the fact that he thinks he can make you believe that it’s your fault this time only drives the killing stake in harder. 

Maybe you’re bitter. It claws at your insides—turns your face hot and screams in your face that you’ve been used. But beside it sits a sadness. Not the slow kind, but the quick sadness of hurt. Why hadn’t you been good enough for him to love you? To like you? You’d left behind Kai and rested your new life on Yeonjun’s shoulders. You’d wanted so badly for his approval, or for him to want you. You did your best to try and make this work out because you needed it to. You needed so desperately proof that you could fall in love with somebody else. But your best was not what Yeonjun was interested in.  

Pins and needles prick your skin as you step outside, like jumping into an ice bath. It shocks you out of dizziness. Words surge up and out in a flash flood like hard reality. You spin on him. “Jealous?” you say, choking out a scathing laugh. “The last thing I’d ever let myself suffer over you is jealousy. Get over yourself. I’m going, stay here if you want. I don’t care.” 

“How are you gonna do that, huh?” he says. The flickering yellow of the porchlight paints his features. The shadow of something fluttering around it cuts dark spots in the light, and then a small little moth comes down and jumps around in his face. He waves it off. “Gonna have bitch boy come pick you up? You can’t leech off him forever; he’s gonna get sick of picking up another man’s girlfriend.” It seems like you walking in on that had sobered him up, but his breath still curls out onto your face with the reek of alcohol. “It’s not a big deal. You’re making this a bigger deal than it has to be. Do you not trust me?”  

“You are such a piece of shit,” you grit out. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Ever. I don’t know how I let this go on for so long.” You don’t like him having Kai in his mouth, don’t like him trying to act like you’re conflating things, and especially don’t like that face he’s making. As if you’re acting crazy and overblown. “No, I don’t trust you. You didn’t fuck her, but come on, Yeonjun. Seriously? You think I’m stupid, and I’m sick of it. You thought this would be easy because I didn’t have the experience you have, but I’m sorry. I don’t like being walked over.” 

“If you’re gonna be so goddamn jealous, then maybe we aren’t gonna work,” he says. 

That moth, floating light in the air, is right back in his face. Yeonjun takes two hands and smashes it between a clap of his hands. He shakes its flattened, broken body off his hand. Looking down at it laying there on top of dirt-caked concrete, you get this... feeling. A tickling around your person.  

“See if I care,” you snap, throat aching against the onslaught of emotion and held back tears.  

⚝⭒ 

Rivulets of raindrops dilute the tears on your cheeks. Your hair plasters to your face and your clothes to your body.  

For a week, you’d went about it all as if it hadn’t happened. And then you came here.  

It’d not been this rainy when you first got down to the creek—just a gentle trickle, really. You hadn’t been crying then, either. But, watching the water work at babbling over stone, you let yourself feel it. Here, where you’d had so many good memories. You’ve gone and tainted it, now. But for whatever reason, you’d just wanted to be here. Arms curled around yourself and fingers digging into drenched sleeves, you don’t wipe away the tears or cover the sounds of your crying. You let the stream hear it; it’ll sweep it right up and down the way. Somewhere far off, where you don’t have to feel it anymore. 

You realize that, usually, you’d be over at Kai’s right now. The fact that his room was not the first place you thought you could go to anymore is a punch to the gut. You drop your face into your hands and cry harder. Really, you’ve got to stop doing that to yourself. Thinking of sad things—putting your hurt under the microscope to see it closer. It’d be easier to just fold it up and tell yourself that it’ll pass, and that relationships end all the time. 

It’s not him that you cry over. Well, maybe some of it is. Rather, it’s that you have absolutely no idea where you’re going. Where you are. Finally, you’d built yourself a raft to get off the shore and go out to sea, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it’s breaking apart right beneath you. And, stranded and alone in the water, you’ve got no way to get back to shore to build yourself another raft. You’re stranded, and the scariest bit is that you’re doing it all alone. You weren’t supposed to do this alone. You two made promises back then. 

You suppose that a promise is one of those things you were supposed to leave faith in back on shore. 

The raindrops are heavy over you. The fall of it roars against the ground, a torrent downpour. It’s not coupled with whipping wind or flashes of lightning—just straight, still falling. It’s a somber feeling no different from the gnawing in your chest. 

Like chimes, there’s a distant, gentle sound. Maybe water falling over creek rock, but it’s more like suggestion. A sweet sound that you shouldn’t even be able to hear over the rest of it, it’s as if it’s right in your ear. A whisper.  

You fix your blurry eyes with a wet sleeve. Rain falls right back into its place, but you see it: a silvery, whimsy haze. And the moths. They jump and call you, this time. Their glow bounces off the rainy mist against the grey of night’s arrival. Then, all you can hear is the whispering. Where you stand frozen, your feet beg to move. To follow them. 

So you do. 

Their entourage of moondust trails them where they go, wrapping you up and weaving between raindrop and space. You don’t worry where they’ll take you, or even try to wrap your head around this happening again. You just follow, mind glossed over and entranced with how beautiful it is. When you’d seen them before, it’d made you uneasy. Mostly because it looked so unearthly and unbelievable. But this time you just follow. 

A far-off voice, one oh-so-familiar, peaks through the haze. It’s not enough to stop you, but then you hear it again, louder and closer. 

You blink a few times. Once to break away the fog, and then twice to focus your eyes on Kai stood in front of you. His hair lays in wet spikes over his eyes and beads of rain trace the planes of his face. He’s as soaked as you. 

“Kai?” you say. Looking around you, you’ve ended up somewhere in the field between your houses and the creek. But you’ve got no recollection of walking here. Whatever that mist is, sentient or not, had swept you here.  

His voice is strained, but you appreciate hearing it. “Break up with him,” he tells you. 

In his eyes, as you search them, there’s stardust glowing like reflection. Your face twists up. “What?” you say, breath a puff of smoke ahead of you. Summer had come and gotten away from you so fast, and now it’s gone all cold again. 

“Break up with him,” he echos, face solemn. He looks ruffled. 

“Why?” you ask, “And why are you out here?” 

“Because I’m moving out today, and I think I deserve to at least see you before I go.” His eyes look over you. “And... your dad said you went down to the creek.” 

He’s moving out today, and you had no idea. And really, it’s your fault. You’d driven that wedge between the two of you. “I did break up with him.” 

Downpour fills his quiet for a few moments, his face swirling with emotion like the clouds above you. He nods. “Good.” 

There are a few more long minutes between you; just you two searching each other's faces, antsy to say so much that it bunches up in your chests and stalls. It’s what a summer of longing does to you. Even with Yeonjun, even trying to slowly chip away the stitching that had connected the two of you at the hip, you were helpless to stop the gnawing of the love you bear for him. Even just seeing him now, you feel those threads mending back up. God, why does it have to be so hard? 

He just looks at you. For a few beats, he just looks at you. There are so many questions in his eyes. They flit across and turn over, but all he settles on is, “Why?” 

There’s so much you want to tell him. Words pile up to the top, some threatening to spill over. But you know that if you tell him some of it, just to make up for all the time you’d missed out on together, it’ll all come crashing out. And you don’t think you want him to know just how much you accepted, the way you let yourself get treated. So, you shake your head and say, “It doesn’t matter.” 

Kai looks like he wants to push that issue, but whatever look he finds on your face deters him. “Come with me,” he pleads. “I want you to come with me.” 

Your throat tightens. Curling your arms around yourself harder, the rain only coming down on you harder, you say, “Kai, I want to. I want to. I just... I don’t want to freeload off you, because you’re doing great things, and I’m just...” Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, but they’re already as soaked as the rest of you. “I’m just going nowhere. And I don’t want to be a burden, or ever be the reason that you can’t do what you dream of. If staying here means that you become everything that you’re destined to do, then I’m happy with that, Kai. I am.” 

He shakes his head, stumbling toward you. “No, no you don’t get it,” he says, frantically taking your shoulders into big hands. Under his touch, every taut muscle goes slack. You melt. “You don’t get it. You are the music. Every single song is about you. Every single fucking song is about you. I want you to come with me, please. I love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you, and I thought you’d loved me too, and I don’t want to do this alone. I can’t do it alone.” 

He loves you. Kai loves you. The enormity of it rumbles the ground where you stand on legs you fear might just give in. You flex your fingers to combat the tears pricking your eyes. It doesn’t work; they brim and well up, spilling down over your cheeks. “What?” you say, voice softly breaking. “Kai, I didn’t...” 

“And just when I thought I finally had you, you left me,” he says, throwing a hand up beside him in a big gesture. “You left me! I woke up thinking you’d be there, and that maybe you loved me too, and you had left me. And then you threw me away for some piece of shit, and you stopped coming around.” His chest heaves for breaths. 

Your face contorts. That night, the one where you two had slipped up, you’d fallen asleep curled up against his chest on undiluted contentment. When you woke up, you had panicked. You thought he’d wake up and pretend it hadn’t happened, or he’d be uncomfortable, or even be disgusted and regretting. You couldn’t handle that, so you slipped out before he woke up. It’d been an attempt to protect your tender heart, but looking at the twitching of his lip now, you begin to think it’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done. He thinks you used him and left him. Your stomach twists. Voice thick, you say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you, Kai. I thought you didn’t... I thought you didn’t see me that way. I was scared. I’m sorry I hurt you.” 

Brows knitted together, he says, “Thought I didn’t love you?” His hand cups your cheek, warm against the soft frozen skin he finds there. “I’ve... I’ve dreamed of you almost every night of my life. In my sleep, I see you, and you’re happy and glowing, and that damn... mist is all around you. I couldn’t get away from you even in my sleep.” 

Darting between his eyes, soft and reflecting your face back to you, it’s hard to breathe. Kai’s dreamt of you; he’s as sickly in love with you as you are him. Thunder claps, and the ground shakes, and the heavens open up above you, the trumpets belt, and you two are in love. Somewhere deep in your center, you feel it—your soul nodding yes. 

The mist. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I saw it. That stuff, those moths. The stuff we saw back then.” 

“I did too,” he says, wet spikes of hair bouncing with a nod. “Not that long ago. It was the first time I saw it out of a dream since that day.” 

Back then, you two had only budding, innocent love for each other. Things hadn’t become mangled and lost to confused hearts or expectations. When they’d appeared to you, you hadn’t needed it. This time, you’d followed it. And it had led you here—somehow had led you right to the very spot you needed to so that every last piece might fall into place. For this moment to happen. You know why it did. 

“I’ll go with you, Kai. I’ll go wherever you go; I love you. I’ve loved you since forever,” you say, each and every word massive and lovely on your tongue. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier.” 

So unlike the last times your mouth had met, he brings his mouth to yours with a dazzling clarity. No longer is it confused kisses; he locks his lips against yours with the urgency of so many years being unable to. Kai’s hands cradle your wet cheeks, hold you so tenderly into his kiss. His touch grounds you, makes the moment real. You melt into him—your fingers curled into his shirt as if holding him there so that he won’t disappear like something of an incorporeal dream. He sighs through his nose, kissing you harder. Even if it all were fake and this was nothing more than a feverish figment of your imagination, you think you could die happy just knowing this once. 

But it is utterly real, and utterly yours. You kiss him harder, too. 

When your lungs start to burn and plead for breath, you two pull away from each other. Your eyes flutter open to capture his. Warm and brown and the same ones you’ve stared into so many times before, but not like this, you sink into them. He runs his thumb over your cheek as he sinks into yours. His tongue darts out to lick lips painted with you. In the inches between you, space no longer feels heavy or charged with grievances. Every last unsaid thing had been answered. 

“I have my stuff up in the truck,” he says, breaths soft. Brown eyes dart around your face. “I’ll help you add your stuff to it.” 

You shudder out a breath. Add your stuff to it. A nervous energy settles down over you, but it doesn’t seem so bad if you’re doing it with him. Together.  

“Okay,” you whisper, a balmy secret just like the ones you used to share in small, giggly voices so many years ago. “Okay.” 

⚝⭒ 

Shivers seize you like jittering bones, all wrapped up in a blanket. The velour cushion seats beneath you have soaked up water and become damp, but Kai’s got the heater blasting. You wind around back roads, headlights illuminating the way ahead of you. Stray droplets whip in them, but nothing much. Isn’t it funny how the rain had just stopped like that? That’s just how the weather is, out here. You wonder how the weather might act wherever you’re headed. 

Your teeth chatter as if your jaw had its own will. The two of you had the windows down thinking that the wind might dry you off, but all it’s done is lap at your bitten cheeks. You reach down for the handle to crank it up. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you—either you’ll eventually dry off, or you can pull off at a rest area to change in a bathroom. The wet clothes are really not helping. 

With an arm up on the steering wheel, Kai turns his attention on you. You know that smile. “Cold?” he asks, eyes darting between your face and the road. With the hand he’s not got working the steering wheel, he runs fingers over your thigh. Soft, gentle massages, yes. The number it does on your core is absurd. Each mindless digging into your thighs and brush of his thumb, sparks sputter there. You’ve sat here, right in his passenger seat, so many times before. Day trips up to the lake, the one he’d joined your family camping at for so many summers, all the times he’d driven you to school in this truck, and even just a quick run down to a convenience store for a late-night snack. You’d deemed it your seat. But never once had you sat in it like this. Your heart does a flip. All those times you’d wish he’d reach over and do just this—a small gesture that would’ve been so big then. And it’s your reality, now.  

“Freezing,” you say. A brush of his fingers nearer the apex of your thighs sends you pressing them together and shifting in your seat. “But not everybody runs as hot as you, though, so.” 

His eyes catch the movement in just the split second he looked over to you. “Huh,” he says. He turns to look at you, his gaze flickering with something anew. Something that you’d only ever seen once before. “Is that it?” 

It’s hard to swallow. His fingers brush higher, and higher, feather-dustings of calloused fingertips that sends tingles shooting up your spine at the slightest suggestion of where he’s headed. “Yes,” you say, feigning indignance to cover the shiver that threatens to overtake you. When his fingertips dance at the waistband of your bottoms, it does so anyway. “Kai,” you say, blood hot in your veins. “You’re...driving.” 

His eyebrows pinch into a taunting furrow. “I am,” he says, nodding. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I’ve got us.” 

And he does; fingers slipping under the band of both your bottoms and your panties, he doesn’t even tear his eyes off the road. He’d driven these roads so much, you think he might be able to do it asleep. Even drawing a mewl from you with a brush over your clit, he doesn’t look away more than a quick glimpse at your pinkened cheeks. 

Two fingers dragging up your folds, right over the source of the mess. “You get excited so easily, huh?” he hums. “You like it when I play with you.” 

When he presses those fingers at your entrance, you can’t help but be taken back to that night. It echoes and reverberates through you. Long fingers, strong and punctual brushes against the sweet spot—he was criminally good with his fingers. Playing guitar did more for him than just music. He seemed to know exactly how to utilize those roughened fingers and trained flicks. Your muscles flicker as he abandons your hole for more brushes at your bud.  

Those teasing, sly touches turn to something more serious. His fingers roll over your clit, slow but enough to have you sighing and rolling your hips against the seat belt. But last time had gone just like this, him touching you and receiving nothing. He should feel good, too. “Shouldn’t you pull over?” you sigh, muscles taut. Your breaths come out shuddering and half-controlled, interrupted by the tightness that each delicious swirl provokes. The door takes the brunt of your grip, white-knuckling the interior. 

He laughs, a husky sound that is tinder to fire. He knows what you mean. “Maybe,” he says. “But I think I’m enjoying this plenty. I think I want to see you cum on my fingers again.” 

Fingers pinching and flicking faster, you grow breathy and whiny, hips rolling against the seatbelt and back into the seat. Your muscles, all the way down your thighs and deep in your belly, jump and twitch each time his fingers run over your clit in just the right spot—that tender spot that’s so good that it teeters on overwhelming. The kind that makes you hiss and then want more. “Shit, Kai,” you whine. “Right—there, keep going."  

He doesn’t answer with any teasing words. No, he just doubles down right at that angle and pressure, leaned back into his seat and driving as if he wasn’t fingers-deep in your panties right now. His sculpted profile at total ease—it does something for you. A delicious tightness curls its fingers over your center, promising a sugary ecstasy that you can’t help but chase. Bucking into his hands as best you can, you go quiet. Right there—right there, you feel it. The cusp. Your fingers brush over it, clenching around nothing and squeezing your thighs tight around him. Every last drop of blood in your body reaches for it, singing and dancing through your veins and making you dizzy. 

And then he stops. Your mouth drops open, whiplashed and helpless to its slipping away from you. You whittle your gaze into something sharp and turn to him. “What—why?” you complain. The tide slips further and further and further back, but you still taste sea salt on your tongue. Frustration sets in its place as you feel it go. Seriously, you’d been right there. “You’re so mean.” 

He slows and then with the clicking of the turn signal, he’s off the road and pulling the truck into park on a little secluded side road. Where the headlights pierce the pitch black, nothing but gravel and field surrounds you. He doesn’t kill the engine, instead pulling his hand free from you. 

Your heart, still stuttering with your lost orgasm, kicks back to life as he smears your slick over your mouth, dragging it over your lips and then taking his thumb to run it right over the plush of your mouth. “Am I?” he says, fingers taking your chin to meet your eyes with his. Endless hunger, pupils so blown that his eyes look black, pins you. “I don’t think you’ve seen mean yet, baby.” 

Darting your tongue out to clean your lips, you look at him through your eyelashes. “Show it to me, then.” 

Something dark passes over his face. It has your skeleton jumping out of your body. Then, he says, “Is that what you want? You want mean?” 

Brain gone to mush that can only really think about him touching you, a slow nod is all you can manage. 

The engine’s hum prevails for some long, thick seconds. And then, he tilts his head in a gesture. “Get in the back.” 

Holy shit. You want to sit there frozen in an overwhelming sort of excitement, but his seatbelt clicks undone and you’re set into motion. In a flurry of giggles and clumsy limbs, you climb up over the center console and into the backseat. He slips out of the front seat, not bothering to even kill the engine. 

The door beside you opens in a swirl of cold wind. In nothing more than a blink, a strong hand has both your wrists pinned to the cushions and your back flush against it. Nose-to-nose, his breath hot over your face. “I’ve got plenty of ideas as to how I can warm you up.” 

You appreciate each other’s faces for a beat more, you looking up at him big-eyed and waiting. Kai breaks the moment to attack your neck in a procession of bites and kisses. Your mouth falls into a silent sound. 

“You know,” he says, free hand working your pants off. His eyes are trained on you, though. “I thought about doing this to you all summer. Touching you again.” He moves on to your top, pushing the fabric up until your chest is freed, clad in soft cotton. He eats the sight up. You want to reach down and cup the back of his head or feel his hair between your fingers as he presses his mouth against the soft beginning of your cleavage, but he’s got your wrists firmly planted. So much so, that you wonder exactly how he’s got you so secure with just one hand. Kai is strong, but maybe you hadn’t seen just how strong. Your skin aches under the purple bites he decorates you in. The sight of him—face in your chest and marking you up so lazily—has your teeth abusing your bottom lip. Whatever sounds you might make otherwise would be embarrassing. Kai lifts his eyes to you. “And I think you thought of me, too. Didn’t you?” 

“Oh, god, yes,” you say, writhing beneath him. He’s going so slow. You want him all over you. “So much.” 

He likes that. He takes your pebbled nipple into his mouth through the fabric. Soft grazes of teeth and sucks, you’re burning all over. When he pulls back, he’s left you dark wet patches when the bra had only just dried against your body heat. “Good,” he rasps, taking his big hands demanding and hungry over your torso. They swallow your frame up, soothing skin but lighting it aflame all the same. “Good girl.” 

You never thought just words could unravel you, but those did the job. Not a gasp, nor a sucking in of breath—no, you go silent and brainless, fumbling for rational thought. 

The dropping of your jaw has Kai delighted. “You’re so pretty,” he says. In a swift and powerful hoist, he’s tugging you down the cushions toward him with greedy fingers. He’s got your thighs pressed up to your chest. You’re bent right in half. 

Out of breath, you huff out, “You too.” 

A quick laugh falls from his mouth, lips pulled into a smug tilt. He nips at your calf up by his face. “So sweet, it almost makes me feel bad for what I’m about to do to you.” Reaching down for your panties, he pulls back on the suffocating press for only enough time to drag them up your legs. Those get discarded somewhere on the floor. Who cares about that right now, though? All you can register is the metallic clinking of his belt being undone. It’s got your nervous system twisting up. 

And, those words. Electricity shoots bolts of pure, sizzling revery into your core. What I’m about to do to you. You imagine a great deal of things that he might mean, but still, you think that none could hold a candle against the promise his voice held in saying it. 

Kai presses his body to your thighs and hooks your calves over his shoulders, and it all becomes real. The press of his heavy cock to your folds, the digging of his fingers into your outer thighs, his pretty eyes sparkling with something feral. As real as it gets—more real than anything you’ve ever felt in the entirety of your life. Your hands find perch flattened to his broad chest. 

The position leaving you two no option but to look right into each other, he holds your gaze and begins slow drags of his hot length up and down your slit. Tantalizing, awful, awful drags. When his tip nudges your eager clit, you jolt. And then he does it again. And again. 

“Kai,” you mewl. A press against your hole has you hopeful, and he lingers there for a moment, but doesn’t give it to you. Can’t he just fuck you? You’ve never been more pitifully in need of something in your life. 

“Shh.” His ruts get more daring, smearing your slick up onto your belly. “Take it.” 

You wiggle your toes in the air and make passes at arching yourself into him in search of better friction. He’s got you pressed so suffocatingly into the seat that it does absolutely nothing for you. In fact, he holds your harder and changes tack so that your thighs press together. At the very apex of them, his weeping cock slips through the seam. 

Pressing his cheek into your calf, he watches you. Every gasp and shaky inhale, he watches. It spurs his rutting on, sticky sounds and pants eating up the air. Your nails claw at his hands as, finally, a knot tightens in your core. 

“Yes, please,” you breathe. He fucks your thighs harder. Faster. Every nudge at your clit and hole becomes euphoric. ���Kai, baby—I’m gonna—” 

Just as furiously easy as last time, he rips it all away from you. The rushing away of the buzzing and promise of shaking thighs—he takes it from you again. It brings prickling tears to your eyes. “Kai?” you hiss. “Again?” 

His eyes aren’t playful. He pulls your calves back over his shoulders, handling your hips into a better position to press his cock right at your entrance as if you weigh nothing. Face utterly straight, he says, “I don’t think you deserve it, do you? Not after what you did with Yeonjun.” 

A swallow goes down your throat hard. He presses himself just a bit harder into you. Not in yet, but right there. 

When he does begin sliding in, the stretch of it... You cling to him and squirm between him and the warm cushions behind you. Each inch is a heady feeling, all the way up to the hilt of him. He shudders a controlled breath. “You’re so fucking tight, though,” he grits out. “Did he not fuck you right?” 

Slaps of skin bounce off the car interior and between your bodies. He starts off at a brutal pace; you know it’s meant to make your brain go foggy. Squeezing your eyes closed, you manage, “I... didn’t fuck him.” It comes out strangled, voice bouncing as he fucks you into the car seat. 

Thumb tugging your bottom lip down and then dipping into your mouth, he watches the show of your ecstasy down to every last detail. “Yeah?” he says, voice shaking and almost desperate. “Always thinking of me, huh? Such a good little princess. You know exactly where your heart belongs.”  

You want to answer him, even just with a whine or moan. You try to. But with his thumb pressing down on your tongue, enough to pin it to the floor of your mouth, it’s not gonna happen. He tastes salty in your mouth. 

His truck consists of his grunts and whines, and your taut groans for some moments that seem to stretch forever. The planes of his groin grind against your clit when he delivers occasional pointed rolls, but mostly it’s just an animalistic, feverish dancing of your two sweaty bodies, holds growing more frantic the closer you get.  

Thumb wet with saliva; he frees your mouth. The hand trails slowly down your face and your chin, brushing feather touches, until he finds your neck. 

Your eyes fly open, wide. He pressed his fingers into your neck—no real pressure yet, he looks at you through damp strands of dangling hair and says, “Want my fingers around your neck?” His thumb brushes over the buzzing pulse point there. 

“Yes,” you grit out, body bouncing and back raw with friction against the coarse cushion’s surface. Your breath stutters, your mind stutters. Even your blinks stutter, eyelids too lazy to keep up. “Please.” 

The pressure of his fingers there—it frightens you and has you tightening around him at the same time. But you would trust nobody more with your life than Kai. 

He presses his cheek to your calf to indulge in the sight of you like this: underneath him, folded in two, nowhere to go but to take his pistoning hips, cheeks blazing, and his fingers pressed into your windpipe. If the way he becomes sloppier and more desperate in his tempo has anything to say for it, it does something for him. 

“Gonna be my pretty little girlfriend, huh?” he says. His voice is tight—so is your belly. You’re both so close. Hopefully, this time he’ll let you cum. “Take you to every show; show you off to everybody. Fuck.” 

Brain like static and swimming with a pinched flow of oxygen, you slur your words. “You’re—hah—gonna have other girls all over you.” 

The taunting, split-second raise of his brows flips your belly. You tighten him again. If he keeps hitting that spot, tip ramming into the soft spot deep inside you that he’d taken such delicate care of finding last time, you’re going to burst into sparkling flame and firework. He growls, “Well, I’ll just have to knock you up so that they know I’m yours, huh?” 

Holy shit. You like the sound of that. Your nails dig into his wrist around your neck, but you cry out a pitchy, “Yes!” 

“Oh, you like that?” Kai releases your throat to take both your hips. You gulp for air, finding nothing but the thick air of sex and humid breaths, at the opportunity. He’s ramming into you like he’s found a purpose. “Isn’t this the perfect position to do it? Get you pregnant?” 

With every last bit of brain power you’ve got, teetering on the edge excruciatingly close to salvation, you groan a long, hoarse sound. “Fuck, yes! Please, Kai, inside—” A hot trail of tears roll down your temples. 

It’s all he’s got to hear to still inside you. His growl rumbles deep in his chest, holding you in place and filling you with his hot cum deep in your cunt. That feeling, coupled with his short grinds against your clit as he fucks his seed deeper, takes your soul by sinful claws and crumbles it down into nothing. You burst into a shaking, whimpering peak, sucking your lips into your mouth to bare through the sheer twisting of your insides and the flame that consumes up your thighs and cunt. 

He falls on you heavy, face in your neck. Warm kisses against your clammy skin meld with your slow floating down, the two of you a beautiful, nasty picture of fucked out. He stays right inside you—the absolute stillness of him, you think he has no plans of pulling out any time soon. His long fingers card through your sweaty locks of hair. 

Finally, he presses himself off you. You get a glimpse of the window behind him—fogged up and filthy with your affairs. Anybody to see the truck from the outside would know exactly what went on inside, but right now, you don’t care. Not one bit. Your panted breaths drag in nothing but musk and thick, hot air. The drumbeat in your chest tells you that, despite how you feel ripped straight from your body, you are very much still alive. More alive than ever. 

“Warm?” he says, pushing sticky hair off his forehead. He’s a mess, too. His hair is ruffled with your touch, his clothes rumpled the same, beads of sweat rolling down the planes of his cheeks and neck, and his eyes a lazy smolder. As much as he looks like sex personified, a soft smile twitches at his lips. 

You snort. You can’t help but feel giddy, here with him. You’re with him. Nothing has ever felt more right. Unplugged when he pulls out of you, your mess trickles down onto the seat below you. “Yeah,” you say. “Very.” 

Warm is not enough to begin to describe how you feel. In your ears, you hear whisperings. Soft and gentle. Perhaps it was divine intervention, or the fates lending you their word, or maybe just rational thought. It says: 

Home. You are home. 

✎୭ ashlynn's note how do we feel about this pair? i really didn't mean for this to get so long, but i ended up RLLY liking their chemistry. i had to do their story justice. also, i finished this with kai as a guitarist and then his drummer performance came out... hmm.

﹙🏷️ ﹚@lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

[jen-with-a-pen]

(In Your) Arms Tonight - 2/2

summary: Wade tests out his previous hypothesis with great success. Might experiment more later.

pairing: Logan Howlett x Wade Wilson / Worst Wolverine x Deadpool

word count: 3.6k

warnings: MDNI 18+, Wade's POV-ish, blowjob, itty bitty blood mention, slight angst, nightmares/PTSD, pining, cursing, claws, crude humor and language, fluff, touching, *cue start of something new from high school musical*, Wade's a little shit, cum drinking bc i guess that's what happened, deepthroating, lowkey face fucking, bad flirting but it's kinda reciprocated, wade is the throat goat next question, wade kissed his roommate and they both liked it

a/n: here she is :') thanks yall for the patience and all of the magnificent love and comments for part one ❤❤❤ means the world to me, especially since it's my first time stepping out of stucky territory as a whole. also got a little away with the tags 😅 hope yall enjoy this !

Not beta'd. Half-written on my phone, edited and revised in ellipsus + gdocs. Please let me know if there are any spelling or grammar mistakes!

If I've missed any tags, PLEASE let me know!

gif by @tomshiddles | dividers by @saradika-graphics | warning banner by me ❤️

My AO3 | My Masterlist

Read this fic HERE on AO3

❤️ Reblogs and comments are appreciated, as always ❤️

PART ONE | PART TWO

Wade forgot to turn the AC back on. 

It's his turn to sleep in bed tonight and he's got the worst case of swamp ass you can get this far from a fucking swamp. He's already thrown the covers, sheets, pillows, and his boxers off; he swears if he gets up there will be a sweaty version of a goddamn chalk outline on his mattress. 

He stretches. Notices he can feel both hands now, fully grown and everything, fingernails and all. Smirks to himself as he flexes his new fingers before reaching over to the nightstand– it's actually a really sturdy cardboard box, but it works just as good– for his phone. The screen responds with a bright 3:02AM overlayed on a photo of him and Vanessa. 

There's a pang in his heart for a moment. The same type of twist and pull he felt when Logan got up to leave after their big adventure (AKA saving their universe.)

“See you around?”

Wade tried to swallow the hard lump of desperate hope that had been bubbling inside of him the entire time they ate their shawarma. Hopes it wasn't obvious in his voice. Not a total cry for help, but definitely more of a solemn whimper and puppy dog eyes.

No matter how many times he was used to it– the people he loved leaving or dying or what have you– it still stung like a bitch. 

“Probably not.”

And Logan didn't mean for it to come out so harshly, but that's what happened when– and if– he got too close. To anyone. To everyone. 

With that, Logan rose from the bench, gathering his cowl and TVA jacket up from the place on the bench separating him and Wade and started walking. Dogpool whined and scratched at Wade's arms to chase after him. 

Wade had to do something. Anything. He couldn't let this one– this Logan. His Logan– walk off into the sunset.

No.

Not without him. 

“Logan!” 

And then he turned around. 

And now they're here. 

He feels a similar yank and tear elsewhere in his body– lower belly, groin area– whenever thoughts wander back to that glorious time in the Honda Odyssey; Adamantium stabbing in and out of his chest cavity, puncturing his lungs and literally taking his breath away. The tight feeling of multiple seat belts holding him down to the second row passenger seat and the sickeningly happy grin adorning Logan's face when he tied the last knot. Wade remembers smiling just as bright under his mask.

That one definitely got filed into ye ole spank bank for safe keeping.

Sighing, Wade remembers he's sweating like a hog and drops his legs over the edge, planting two clammy feet onto the creaky floorboards. He throws on his previously discarded pair of boxers just in case Logan has a case of insomnia. Gotta take a man out to dinner before you show him your dick, like a gentleman. 

Wade peaks his head out into the living room, TV glow assaulting his pupils like a flash bang. The door creaks open wider and Wade steps further out. He doesn't want to wake either furball– you'd be surprised how grumpy Dogpool gets when she doesn't get her beauty sleep– as he tiptoes out in front of the couch. 

His breath catches in his chest. 

Logan lies propped up on the couch, head resting on the arm with a throw pillow behind for support, arms crossed over a bare, hairy chest rising and falling slowly. A sheen of sweat coats his skin that reflects the changing colors of the TV. Half a snuffed cigar smolders on the coffee table ashtray. The semi-permanent crease between his brows is softer, perfect pink lips parted as he snores quietly.

And to top it all off, he's in his fucking boxers; his jeans are discarded on the opposite end of the couch, kicked off in his sleep to beat the heat.

Wade can't breathe. He can't help but stare, committing the heavenly scene to memory. A knowing smile slowly spreads across his chapped lips.

He's happy. Happy at how peaceful his roommate looks. Happy that Logan is finally feeling safe enough to sleep here. Genuinely. Wade knows first hand what it can be like to be constantly on the run, chasing peace and release, rest and safety. 

Tip toes make way to the thermostat, Wade presses the 'on' button to the AC when there's stirring behind him. Head turning slowly, he catches the tail end of Logan mumbling something in his sleep. 

“...Wade, please.” 

Wade freezes like a carjacker caught in an impound lot. Surely he didn't hear Logan, his roommate Logan– The X-Man, The Wolverine– fucking whining Wade's name in his sleep. 

What were the symptoms of heat stroke, again? 

Wade shuffles back over to the couch. Feels like a creep watching his fucking roommate sleep, waiting another moment to see if he needs to take a power drill and give himself a DIY lobotomy or not. 

“Mm… No, Wade…No, please, don't–” Logan murmurs softly. Struggling, brow furrowing, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Ngh… Don't hurt ‘im… please.” 

Logan begins to shake. His head whips from side to side against the pillow, hands dig into the couch cushions, grunting, fists clenching as his claws itch to defend from the phantom threat. Muscles tensing and chest heaving, his breathing grows harder, faster, more frantic. 

He's having a nightmare.

Wade recognizes the signs immediately. He knows where Logan's at: some distant memory with talons and sharp teeth assaulting his brain without him knowing. Hell on earth on the worst nights, a light ego beating and insomnia on the better ones.

Wade knows– his stopped two months ago. When Logan came home.

Without another thought– one in which he probably should’ve given– Wade climbs onto the couch to straddle Logan’s hips in the most non-horny way he can make it. Hands press into the center of Logan's chest. He gently calls his name, preparing for the sharp stab of Adamantium through an appendage and/or organ. Nothing he isn't used to at this point, but he secretly prays it isn't something totally major.

“Logan. Peanut, hey,” Wade whispers. He presses further into Logan, heat radiating off rough, hairy skin into Wade's tingling fingers. “Logan, it's me, Wade. You're having a nightmare, you’re scaring the kids–” 

SHNK. Intestines. Ten or fifteen points, depending on if it's big or small.  Wade's thankful it wasn't a kidney or his stomach– those are a bitch and a half to grow back.

“Okay– that was maybe warranted,” Wade grunts. Both sets of claws penetrate straight through his lower abdomen as Logan jolts awake, sitting up as much as he can while pinned under Wade. A gnarled scream catches in his throat. White-hot knuckles graze the skin of Wade's stomach, who is really, really trying his hardest not to get a boner right now. 

“Th’fuck's goin’ on?” Logan slurs, face inches from Wade's bare chest. He blinks. Once. Twice. His brow returns to its permanent crease as he adjusts to the scene before him: bright TV glow contrasts with dark shadows Wade casts over him.

Wade is on top of him and his claws are inside of Wade.

Face scrunching– not inherently in disgust, Wade hopes– claws retract with a muted grunt. Wade can breathe again while his body begins repairing itself. His hands are stuck to Logan's heaving chest, fingers fanning out over each delicious pec. Thick arms rest on either side of him, elbows bent and resting on Wade's thighs.

Wade swallows, praying the man currently underneath him either A. doesn't know where his hands are at the moment or B. this is going exactly the way he wet-dreamt it a few weeks ago. Completely unprompted too, by the way– he's no stranger to the sick side effects of PTSD, he wouldn't knowingly exploit that in order to get into his roommate's pants. He's got more class than that.

Well, most of the time, that is. Again, completely unintentional. Coincidence, if you will.

Maybe he does need that DIY lobotomy.

"Where th'hell am I?" Logan asks, voice less threatening and more alert. His eyes flick from the TV and travel up Wade to meet sympathetic chocolate eyes already on him. Wade peels each finger off Logan's chest and sits back on his knees. Gaze softening, hands fall into his lap inches above the chiseled V pointing to down under Logan's boxers. He doesn't dare move a fucking muscle.

His pinky finger twitches.

"You're okay. You're here, in my world, Peanut. Twenty-first century. New York. We use fifty-cals now, not muskets. You were having a nightmare–"

Wade's throat hitches. He's not gonna cry, no– he's not that much of a fucking empath, for chrissake– but what he wants to say versus what he probably should say get lodged together on the way down to his mouth from his brain.

"I– I did the pressure thing Dogpool does with me, sometimes. Except I thought you'd wanna wake up to this pretty face 'nd not one with drool."

Logan looks skeptical, searches Wade to see if he's actually telling the truth for once, features relaxing once he mulls it over in his head. Wade's gnawing at the inside of his cheek when Logan's thumbs subconsciously start rubbing slow circles over the toughened skin of his upper thigh. Upper-outer, to be exact, but right now Wade doesn't really want to dwell on the minute details.

"So," Logan starts, "you woke me up… 'cause I was havin' a nightmare…?"

"Well, not exactly because you were having a nightmare, no." Wade runs a hand over the top of the couch, distracting himself. "Al really likes this couch. Antique, actually. Vintage find. Be a shame if some man with claws–"

Logan's palms press into Wade's thighs. A warning.

"Mouth."

Wade sighs. Hands fall into his lap once more and he is absolutely not fighting to gawk at Logan's V that lights up like a road work sign pointing to a detour. The semi-hard abs just above definitely do not make him want to run his fucking tongue across them like a cheese grater.

He looks back to Logan, clears his throat. "Look I– I've been there. Am there, honestly. Didn't want you t'be alone whenever you woke up, but I also know how hard it is to wake up. So," he shrugs, voice lowering, "thought I'd help. Help you come down from it, I mean."

Logan stares back in response, eyes trained on Wade like a hunting dog and a downed fox. Wade swears the corner of his lip twitches along with the meaty hands on his legs.

He's gotta get the fuck out of here.

"So!" Wade starts, "Seems everything's in working order. The doctor will be in soon–" Wade starts to scramble off before realizing Logan's holding him down. Sharp claw stubs poke into scarred skin and a deep growl rumbles out of Logan's chest. Not necessarily threatening, no, more of a 'you're not goin' anywhere.' Wade gulps, hands raise up jokingly, forcing his racing mind to think of a naked, cross-country skiing Al to stave off the blood violently rushing to his stubborn cock.

Logan sits up, closing the space between him and Wade. Hazel eyes study wide brown ones. Logan takes a breath, shaky but sure.

"Don't want y't'go. Not– not yet."

It's hesitant. Unsure but curious, quiet enough Wade thinks he's hallucinating again. Wade mulls it over, leans forward with hands back on Logan's chest, skin and muscles taught underneath with tactile tension.

Wade sucks in a breath, moves his hands higher to Logan's collarbone and it's grossly apparent how tense Logan is. Hostile to any sudden movement, untrusting of touch to the point his fists shake against Wade's legs. A slow, tender hand inches up Logan's throat and onto his cheek. Wade feels through the rough facial hair and unkempt stubble, a thumb finds the shaved spot at the point of Logan's chin and strokes gently. Fists start to unclench, but there's a hesitancy still lingering in the air, under Logan's skin. Wade thinks it smells like fear. Inches away, face to face, breaths fan eachother's faces.

There's a shift in the air and Wade leans forward.

Logan doesn't stop Wade from connecting them together, lips touching lips in the softest manner possible. Almost feels like there's nothing there, Wade's too gentle. Nobody moves, breathes, at first; they're each trying to make sense of what the fuck exactly is happening. Logan isn't saying no, isn't sawing through Wade's skull and Wade isn't pushing himself on Logan.

Okay, maybe leaning in to kiss his roommate might be pushing himself on Logan to the logical bystander, but in the moment it just felt right.

To Wade's surprise, Logan's the first to move.

His lips start molding into Wade's. There's pressure, a little pushing, chapped skin and the remnants of tobacco on his breath when his lips part and his tongue pokes ever-so-slightly through. Wade pushes back, hoping his breath isn't as abhorrently delicious as leftover cigar. He tilts his head, nose poking into Logan's cheek as his does Wade's, and lets his tongue explore a little more. Logan allows him in, meeting him at the tip and hungrily welcoming him. Breaths turn heavy, panting, while hands begin to roam, more comfortable now that they've crossed the line into 'spit swapping' territory.

Wade drinks him in. Greedily swallows the choked-back groans Logan keeps holding in his throat that come out as muted mewls. Fingernails wantonly dig into one another and leave temporary marks that disappear under rapid replacement cells.

It feels like forever when Wade finally comes up for air, unable to focus with the growing hardness digging into his thigh.

"I–fuckin' shit– I think I have an idea." Wade pants like a dog in heat– and fuck, he might as well be at this point. Logan pulls back with lidded eyes and kiss-swollen lips.

"'s that?" He's hesitant. Hands tense slightly over Wade's back, his whole body stiffens.

"Do you– do you trust me?"

Wade holds his breath.

Logan only nods. Adam's apple bobbing, lips part in anticipation and curiosity.

Wade strokes Logan's cheek in reassurance, shoots him a wink before shimmying down his body to the other end of the couch, keeping Logan's legs in between his thighs. Fingers hook around Logan's boxers, in turn causing Logan to jolt up immediately. A set of claws unsheathe an inch away from Wade's throat.

"Th'fuck are you doin'?"

Wade only smiles, taking a hand away and kissing the tip of the middle claw, gently pushing it back into Logan's fist and coaxing him to lay back down. What he's about to do would be easier with an in-tact esophagus.

"Relax, Peanut," Wade coos, "'m not gonna hurtcha."

Logan stares at Wade. Eyes pinch, still suspicious.

"…Promise?"

A sharp pang ripples through Wade's heart.

"Promise."

Logan hesitates, relaxes, gives another go-ahead. Wade's fingers curl once again around the waistband of his boxers and slowly, but surely, pull them down and off him. He can't help the immediate salivatory reflex upon seeing Logan in all his glory; the deep V lights up like a fucking Vegas sign pointing straight to the jackpot.

Logan's big– like, big big. Biggest Wade's ever seen (and Wade's seen a LOT.) An automatic response, Wade's asshole clenches, mistakenly preparing to take Logan. Wade forces himself to relax– that's not happening tonight. He promised Logan he'd go slow, no surprises, no whipped cream or leather cuffs.

Not yet, at least.

His own cock weeps happy tears through his briefs. He cannot believe how perfect– how beautiful– how fucking huge Logan is.

"What're you gonna do?" Logan whispers, hesitant eyes hooking on Wade and every little movement he makes.

"If it's alright with you, 1972 Burt Reynolds, 'm gonna suck every ounce of tension out of your perfect, hairy body and make you feel the best you've felt in a looong time."

Logan scoffs a laugh, brow furrowing as he shakes his head slightly. "Don't know who–"

Wade shushes him. "Don't worry, baby girl. I'll be your Sally Field."

Wade smirks at Logan's confusion and mentally makes a note to his future-self to show Logan the glory that is Smokey and the Bandit.

A gentle hand steadies the base of Logan's cock while another slowly wraps around his stiffness, standing at attention and beginning to cry, begging for Wade's touch. Heavy breathing and bitten-back grunts fill Wade's ears. It's a heavenly symphony he's lucky enough to have a front and center seat for. Free ticket, too.

"Ngh– Red, whatever you're gonna do– ah–!"

Wade presses his lips to the base, bush of hair tickling his nose and lips while he kisses his way up to the head, tongue poking out to lap up the precum. Before siccing his lips around Logan, Wade looks up once more, mostly searching for permission to help him feel pleasure for once instead of pain.

Logan reads Wade's mind and sends a small nod in response.

With a shit-eating smirk, Wade welcomes Logan into his mouth, flattening his tongue and curving his lips over his teeth so as not to scratch the sensitive, velvety skin. Drool spills out the corners of Wade's mouth and swallows a gag when Logan jams into the back of his throat, digging into his uvula. Squeezing the base and cupping the balls, Wade begins to bob his head to the rhythm of Logan's mess of 'fuck's, 'shit's, and–

"Mmm–Oh–oh, my god," Logan moans. A calloused hand runs over Wade's bald head, scars and grafts rippling under his touch while another hand grips tightly onto the side of the couch. Wade slurps up every drop of precum, relishing in the sweet musk of Logan's scent, head bobbing and tongue swirling in tandem. Logan's hips buck up into Wade, fucking his throat without meaning to. No amount of lozenges or peppermint tea will be able to cure the sore throat Wade knows he'll have come morning.

"F–fuck, Wade, baby– shit– that feels so–!"

Another lengthy dive down onto Logan hits the very back of Wade's throat, pulling a long, strenuous 'fuck' from the deepest part of Logan. He bucks harder into Wade who stalls, choking on Logan's cock while his own strains against his briefs. Another swipe of tongue, another gag and seeping drool, and Logan is officially done for.

"F–fuck! Motherfucker! Oh my, god, Wade–!"

Curses and chants and shaky breaths fill the living room as Logan spills into Wade with an 'O' on his lips and a hand on the back of Wade's head. There's a sharp shngk and a sting at the tip of Wade's ear as red warmth drips down onto Logan's thigh; his claws unsheathe into the couch this time, not Wade, who slurps and sucks every last drop of mutant cum from Logan's softening cock like it's the Fountain of fucking Eden.

He comes up for air, finally, lungs gasping against a swollen, fucked throat. He sits back panting on his thighs and Logan's legs underneath, a mix of cum and drool and the slightest bit of blood running down his cheeks and neck. Wiping away the mess with the back of a hand, blurry vision focuses back into reality and onto his roommate.

His roommate. Logan. Wolverine. Who's dick he just sucked the ever-living hell out of.

Well this is awkward.

Wade swallows, offers a crooked half-smile to the man who he just sucked, fucked, and milked dry.

"How 'bout them Yankees?"

Logan barks a laugh. A real, genuine laugh, one with teeth and spread lips and legitimate amusement. Wade preens.

"That was–" Logan wipes beads of sweat off his brow, "Fuck it. That was fuckin' amazing, Wade." He stuffs a hand behind his head, blinks a couple of times to recalibrate. "Didn't know that mouth did anything else 'sides talk."

Wade shrugs cutesily. "It impresses me sometimes, too. Helps when I have a willing participant. Just hope you signed the paperwork."

Logan shakes his head. Arms reach up to grab onto Wade, pulling an ear to Logan's lips.

"Now how 'bout we take care of you next, baby? Hm?"

\|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/ \|/

Morning sun and a weight on his chests wakes Logan from probably the most peaceful sleep he's had in… well, ever, honestly.

There's a wetness and mix of smells wafting into his nostrils that make him stir next; combination of what feels like a tongue on his cheek making way towards his lips, dog breath, and the sweet smell of something cooking in the kitchen. Eyes fly open when a whine vibrates on his chest, finding himself greeted by Dogpool wagging her rat-tail with eyes bugging out of her little head.

"Gah– get off me, mutt," Logan scolds, sitting up and gently shoving Dogpool onto the couch cushion next to him. He runs a hand over his face and into his hair, the crick in his neck a little less noticeable this morning.

"Gooooood morning, sunshine!"

Logan looks up with tired eyes still adjusting to the morning light to find Wade in his robe covered in flour with a mixing bowl cradled in his arm as he stirs. Last night comes screeching back to Logan as soon as he locks eyes with his roommate, mouth going dry and dick twitching in his boxers.

Wade only smiles, not at all hiding his obvious glance at Logan's crotch. "You want chocolate chips or blueberries in yours?"

Logan shakes his head. "In my what?"

"Pancakes, Peanut. In your pancakes."

"Oh. Yeah." Logan blinks, then scoffs a laugh to himself. "Yeah, Mouth. I'd, ah– blueberries. I'd like blueberries."

[whatdoeseverybodywant]

You're the Only Girl for Me - Chapter 29

I do NOT give permission for my work to be translated or reposted on here or any other site, even if you give me credit. DO NOT REPOST MY FICS

❤ Reblogs, comments, likes, and feedback ALWAYS appreciated ❤ 

All OC Characters belong to me

Series Masterlist

Main Masterlist

Character List

TBH! At this point, this is a joint collab with @paigereeder 😭. GOAT!

Thursday, September 2nd 2021 

Airielle’s peaceful slumber was interrupted by her phone ringing. Groaning, she snatched her phone off the floor next to her and squinted at the screen to see who was calling her. “Oh my god.” She muttered before accepting the call. 

“Hello?” 

“Why in the fuck didn’t you tell me Christopher popped the fuck back up. I knew I should’ve killed that motherfucker when I had the chance.” Her older brother Isaiah seethed over the phone and Airielle sighed closing her eyes as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Airielle!” He shouted into the phone when she didn’t respond. 

“Because I had it under control.” Airielle looked behind her as Josh started to shift in his sleep, sighing she threw the covers off of her and walked into the living room to finish her conversation. 

“Uh-huh, sure you do. He broke into your spot -” 

“And I moved, problem solved.” She shrugged, eyes glancing around the living room just taking in how much he had actually gotten rid of. “Shouldn’t you be working?” 

Isaiah snorted. “I took the day off.” 

“Hmm,” Airielle hummed. “And that’s why you’ll never be Dad’s favorite” 

“Eat my - “ Airielle hung up before her brother could finish his statement. Rolling her eyes she threw her phone on the island. She looked up when she heard Josh shuffling into the living room. 

“Everything Aight?” Josh mumbled as he walked closer to Airielle and kissed her cheek. 

“Yeah, my brother being a pain in my ass.” She replied, rolling her eyes when he chuckled. “What you got going on today?” 

“Nothing. I gotta do some laundry and gotta pack. Got Smackdown and the House show this weekend.” 

“You wanna go get some breakfast first?” She asked, tapping the screen on her phone to see what time it was. “I’m kinda craving waffles.” 

“You already know the answer to that.” Airielle rolled her eyes with a smile as she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest. 

“Can you believe it’s about to be a year since we met?”  It's crazy to think about all the ups and downs they went through in a year! If she could go back and change anything it would definitely be breaking up with him after he asked her to move in with him. That would have saved them months of heartbreak. 

“You wanna hear somethin’ wild?” He waited until she lifted her head from his chest to continue. “That wasn’t the first time we actually met.” 

Airielle furrowed her eyebrows together and tilted her head a little. 

“Huh?” 

“We actually met back in 2019. Me and twin had a meeting with Hunter, down at the PC and I saw you there. I mean I was looking, respectfully, but I was still looking.” He laughed when Airielle rolled her eyes again.  “Hunter told us he was taking us off TV after Jon’s latest arrest but he still had - 

“Y’all cut a promo for us.” She whispered as the memory of their first meeting came rushing back. “I remember y’all looking so pissed but still came and cut like one the best promos I ever heard.” 

“Mmhmm.” Josh hummed while nodding his head. “I remember trying to come talk to you, but you weren’t even trying to give ya boy the time of day. I mean I understand why now but shit, back then I thought you were like this stuck up bi-” He stopped himself when she narrowed her eyes at him. He cleared his throat. “You know what I mean.” 

“I mean I was a bitch to you when I came to the main roster.”  Josh nodded his head in agreement and Airielle sucked her teeth, pulling away from him. 

“What? you said it, not me.”  Just as she went to smartass him, his stomach released the loudest grumble she had ever heard. They both stared at each other before bursting into a fit of laughter. “You the one who brought up waffles, I mean you already know how I get down.” Airielle sucked her teeth and pushed him away from her before walking back towards his room so she could grab her clothes to shower. 

“I feel like they just need to go ahead and sponsor your greedy ass Uce.” She chuckled, her back to him as she shuffled through her bag looking for something to wear to breakfast. She stood up straight and gasped as she turned and bumped into Josh. 

“Whatchu’ just call me?”  Airielle bit her lip to stop herself from smiling at the look he was giving her. “Airielle, stop playing with me.” 

“You wanna go get waffles or not?”  Josh tilted his head as he stared at her. He was really contemplating on not going to the Waffle House with her because who the fuck did she think he was. Uce, had she lost her damn mind? He wasn’t her damn Uce. He went to tell her that they weren't going to breakfast but his stomach growled again making her smile. “That’s what I thought.” 

AirielleJones

liked by trinity_fatu, c_smith and 200,000 others

AirielleJones: Me and UCE out to eat! ❤️🤭

view all comments:

uceyjucey: you still playing huh?

↪ AirielleJones: @ uceyjucey; love you too UCE 😘

trinity_fatu: HAHA!!

“You gon glare at me throughout breakfast or what?”  Airielle asked him as the waitress walked away to put in their orders. “Why can’t I call you Uce?” She pouted. 

“Cause I don’t fuck my family Airielle.” 

“Boy –” 

“Oh my god. Look at you! You’ve gotten so big.” A new voice interrupted their conversation. Both Airielle and Josh both turned towards the new voice. Josh narrowed his eyes as he looked at the woman. She was older than both of them, with dark brown skin; for some reason, her facial features reminded him of Airielle. Josh turned to look at Airielle to ask if she knew who the hell this lady was but he stopped short once he saw the look on Airie’s face. He had only seen that look one time before. 

A couple weeks before she broke up with him she had this same look when he had tried to initiate sex but she wasn’t in the mood for it. That’s the same day he found out Christopher used to force her to have sex with him. He remembers her telling him that her old therapist called it dissociating. Josh immediately stood up and stepped in front of this lady, blocking Airielle, who was still sitting in the booth, from her view. 

“You good?” Josh asked the woman, straightening his shoulders so he was standing at full height. 

“Are you her bodyguard or something?” Another voice piped up from behind the older women and Josh definitely knew that they had to be related to Airielle in some sort of fashion because this girl and Airielle could pass off as twins. 

“Yup. Now answer my question, Y’all good?”  

“You must be Joshua.” The older woman said. Holding her hand out to him. “I’m Abigail and this is my daughter Janelle.” 

“Cool, y’all can leave now.” He said eyeing her hand with disgust. Whoever this woman was made Airielle uncomfortable and he wanted her away from them ASAP. Abigail’s hand hung in the air awkwardly for a moment before she withdrew it and cleared her throat, forcing a smile on her face. 

“Airielle please tell this man that I am your mother and I just want to talk to you.” Josh’s eyebrows shot up at the news. “Please solèy –” 

“Don’t call me that,” Airielle spoke up. “You have no right to call me that.” Airielle stood up from the booth and grabbed Josh’s hand. “I want to leave.” Josh nodded his head immediately. Breakfast forgotten, he ushered Airielle back to his car. 

“You okay?” Josh asked as he pulled out of The Waffle House parking lot. 

“No,” Airielle said. “Pull over.” As soon as the car came to a stop, Airielle threw open the passenger door and threw up nothing but stomach acid. “Fuck!” she cried out. 

Josh handed her a bottle of water and she thanked him, swishing it around in her mouth before spitting it out.  “That was–” 

“If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t gotta talk about it.” 

“I know.” Airielle smiled and grabbed his hand, stroking the back of it with her thumb. “But I wanna be more open and honest with you.” Josh bit his lip and nodded. “That was my birth mom and her daughter I guess.” 

“Y’all not close. I take it.” 

“Nah,” Airielle shook her head. “She left when – well right after she gave birth to me. She never wanted me, never wanted a daughter, but I see a lot has changed in the past thirty years. I remember growing up, she would always send my brother’s gifts and cards on their birthdays but never mine. I didn’t really care because I didn’t remember her anyway. But um- one day I was just curious as to why she seemed to ignore my existence so I got her address off of one of the packages she sent my brothers and wrote her a letter.” 

Airielle quickly wiped away her tears. She hated crying over this woman. Josh squeezed Airielle’s hand gently. “She wrote me back. Which kinda shocked me but I was happy that she did. I was thinking she was just gonna tell me that she was just feelin' guilty about leaving me but, she said the complete opposite. She wrote me 4 pages, front and back, telling about how many times she unsuccessfully tried to abort me. How she tried to give me up for adoption without my father knowing. How she had a plan to tell my dad that I had died during childbirth.” 

Josh’s jaw was damn near on the floor as he listened to Airielle. No wonder she’s so emotionally challenged  He thought. 

“She blamed me for the fact that she couldn’t see her boys grow up, she blamed me because my dad chose to raise me instead of be with her. The final thing she wrote to me was, I wish you would have died. Do not contact me again. So I didn’t, I ripped the letter up and burned it. Never told my dad or my brothers about it and obviously neither did she.” 

“What the fuck.” Josh whispered, his hand tightened into a fist on his thigh. Abigail or whatever her name is better than her lucky stars that Josh didn’t put his hands on women. 

“Yeah I mean, I just wanted my mom, but she didn’t want me..” Airielle shrugged as she tried to stop the tears but it was too much. She had pushed Abigail and her hurtful words into the back of her mind in the folder with Chris and her unborn baby. Seeing her today just opened up a wound that Airielle thought had semi-healed. 

Josh pushed his seat back and pulled her over the center console so she could sit in his lap. He held her tightly as she cried into his shoulder. Josh gently stroked her back, his voice low and soothing. “It’s alright. I’m right here, okay? We gon’ get through this.”

As her crying eased, Josh kept her close, feeling her heart slow against his. He didn’t let go, knowing she needed this more than anything. He wasn’t just comforting her; he was vowing to stand up for her in every way he could.

Whew.. Miss Abigail is a trip!

What do y'all think about this chapter??

❤ Reblogs, comments, likes, and feedback ALWAYS appreciated ❤ 

Abigail Noelle Roy

Janelle Noelle Roy

🏷️: @christinabae @southerngirl41 @reci1996 @jeyusos-girl @empressdede

@harmshake @paigereeder @li-da-savage @nbanenefrmdao @alyyaanna

@theninthwonder @raya-hunter01 @abadbitchblogs @jaethaone @black-yn

@mzv11 @shantinextdoor @sheydnni @zillasvilla @thatone-girly

@xmonetsworld @bebesobrielo @kill-the-artiste @yana3sworld @bookuce

@sageispunk @amandairene88 @rianasixx @vebner37 @mindairy

@trashbin-nie @saintaquarius @adoreesun @shayaaaaaaa @sayyestoheav3nn

@xbriexx @edtomh @princess-saki1 @kat3457 @queeny23

@privateeyed95 @rebelrel0987

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

hi, i really love your art!! (it's so cute and is singlehandedly feeding my RE obsession fr, thank you so much ^_^) do u have any playlists or songs that remind u of the games/characters?

OH YEAH BABEY I WAS WAITING FOR THIS!

ethan:

when i was done dying - dan deacon

evil - interpol

SAD- lemon demon

hermit the frog- marina and the diamonds

watching him fade away - mac demarco

the outsider- marina and the diamonds

chateu (feel alright) - djo

passing out pieces- mac demarco

dead or alive- oingo boingo *

poor grammar- roar *

chris:

gotta be a reason - alec benjamin

heaven knows im miserable now- the smiths

lonely zone- vansire

karl:

power freaks- jean dawson

community gardens- the scary jokes

kiss me son of god - they might be giants

eveline:

maybe- flower face

the tv made him do it- moon walker *

mia:

rules- the hoosiers

our word -36 questions

youth- daughter *

miss dimitrescu:

when a woman is around- unloved

mithan:

the truth -36 questions

MIA- chakra efendi

birds dont sing - TV girl

yr the best - carpet garden

care- TEMPOREX

no children - the mountain goats

lost kitten- metric *

rosemary: *

wild sage (cover) - claypup (the mountain goats)

wintersberg: *

evil side- the dirty nil

me and mr wolf- the real tuesday weld

( if i update i will reblog :3)

(* means recently added)

updated:

1/28/23: added a song to ethan, mia, eveline, mithan added rosemary and wintersberg section

(btw these arent songs that i think they would listen to, these r songs i could explain why every single line of lyrics relates to the charcter and how i can imagin a entire animation to it)

[st4rm4ns-f0rt]

Mario fans are eating good

June 2023 Nintendo Direct - Mario Franchise Announcements

[captain-sharkie]

Alright everyone, it's time, hope you guys enjoy a little introduction to this AU! if theres any questions the ask box is open!

Reblogs are appreciated <3

Story under the cut!

Chapter One

Warnings, Blood mentions,

Word count : 1321

A whirring noise hummed through the trees at the lamb rushed past, running through Silk Cradle from a large spider, clutching their arm as they heaved, their legs aching as they ran

Normally the lamb could easily vanquish such a foe, but now? Absolutely not

the spider sprayed acid around the ground in front of the smaller lamb, stopping them in their tracks as the creature cornered them, others following suit

The lamb took a deep breath, closing their eyes as leaves rustled, the wind howling through the area as footsteps approached,

louder, and louder they got before screams rang out amongst the arachnids,

the lamb slowly opened their eyes, wincing before letting out a sigh,

“You always show up at the perfect time…” The lamb sighed, a chuckle rumbling ahead of them, as an ax wielding goat stood before them, wearing a light blue poncho in contrast to the lamb’s red one,

“At least yaint dead Lambert.” The voice spoke, a slight accent to it with a smile.

“What can I say? Wouldn't be the first time.” Lambert hummed, wiping the dirt and blood off,

The two were silent for a few moments before giggles rang out of their mouths,

“What’re you even doing out here?” The goat hummed, the ax slowly fading back into a small crown on top of their head,

“Gathering silk, we’re all out back at the cult.” Lambert spoke bluntly, summoning a large back, “I was just on my way back home actually… before all that.” Lambert huffed,

“Mind if I come along?” The goat asked, the small teal eye of the crown atop his head stared down at the lamb

“Uh… sure!” Lambert shrugged, holding out their right hand,

The two of them closed their eyes as Lambert chanted softly, the dead, gray grass around the duo lit a flame in a white light, consuming the two of them before it burned away, leaving a black ring in the ground beneath where they once stood.

Now stone laid beneath them, a pentagram drawn in dried blood beneath their feet as lush green grass ran through the area

The goat took in the sights, as Lambert took a breath, “Feels good to be home.” dragging the goat forward as worships greeted their leader,

“Oh by the way… goat?” Lambert hummed, The goat just tilted his head, “What's up?”

“Actually… What do I call you? you never told me your name exactly.”

“You never asked.” The goat sighed

“Oh, well…”

“She normally calls me Kidd, if that helps at all.”

“Who?” Lambert raised a brow,

Kidd just groaned, pointing at the crown upon his head as Lambert just scratched their head, mumbling an apology,

“Uh… Leader?” a small dog follower walked up to the two,

“Yeah? What's wrong Thorm?” Lambert asked, concerned.

“Leshy threw poop at Hans while you were gone.”

“Again? Seriously?!” Lambert groaned, Kidd just put a hand over his mouth, holding back a laugh as best as he could.

“Go ahead and wait for me in the temple. I gotta go put Leshy in jail… again.” Lambert groaned, running off

“Oooh-kay.” Kidd hummed, walking towards the temple, watching the grass beneath his feet move as he walked, the sun beamed down, bright and shining amongst the land.

The door to the temple swung open before Kidd could grab the door’s handle, two small kids running out cackling like witches, one chasing another with a wooden stick, dressed as the Lamb.

“Well that sure says something about this place.” Kidd chuckled, walking into the temple and sitting down on the ledge by the podium.

“Hmph… you would think his chosen vessel would be… better at this whole cult thing.” spoke as the crown flew off of Kidd’s head, judging the temple they stood him,

“Madame, give them a break.” Kidd sighed, watching the crown closely inspect the place, “Lambert is new at this whole cult thing.”

The crown huffed, “Suppose so.” floating back, resting in Kidd’s hands,

“Still, glad to know I’m better than him at raising a leader.” The crown chuckled,

“Madame, what happened to being nice? I thought you were kind to mortals and gods alike?” Kidd teased, chuckling as the crown scoffed,

“Child, if you ever catch me being kind to anyone from The Land of The Old Faith, Behead me.” The crown’s eye closed, the ethereal voice from it huffing,

“Who are you talking to?” a scratchy, deep voice spoke from a dark corner, The crown was quick to shut up as Kidd let out a soft bleat,

A figure in white and red robes stood, face veiled with a dark silky fabric,

“No one of importance to you, Death.” Kidd huffed, placing the crown on their head once more,

“Oh, but I believe it is.” Narinder spoke, crouching down as he stood next to Kidd, “Who is brave enough to bad mouth me, as well as Lambert?”

“Curiosity killed the cat y’know.” Kidd spoke, grinning as they looked at Narinder.

Kidd rolled his eyes as the door to the temple swung open, Lambert groaned, walking in, itching their head,

“Oh, Good to finally see you two getting along!” Lambert smiled, as Narinder stood,

“Guess you could say such, Lamb.” Narinder walked off, leaving the temple.

The Lamb sat in the middle of the floor, tossing the bag of silk on the floor, as well as four needles,

“Why are there so many?” Kidd pointed at the knitting needles on the floor,

“Thought you’d wanna help!” Lambert smiled as Kidd shuffled onto the floor, sitting across from Lambert, picking up two needles.

The two of them sat on the creaky wooden floor, turning silk to fabric, and fabric to carefully woven shirts and robes.

“Sooo…. Kidd, why did you wanna come back here with me?” Lambert hummed, raising a curious brow,

“Well…” Kidd sighed, setting the needles down, taking off his crown and gently placing a few shirts on top of it.

“I… I need to speak with you, Narinder and the Bishops.” Kidd sighed,

“Oh! I could go get them-” Lamb quickly got up as their hand was grabbed by Kidd,

“Later, now is not the best of times.” Kidd spoke, motioning to the crown next to them shaking around under the shirt.

“Oh?” Lambert furrowed their brows sitting back down, “I will be here all night.” Kidd huffed

“I do not want any prying eyes watching.” Kidd huffed, removing the shirt from on top of the crown as it flew back on his head.

“Oh! wait let me go check something.” Lambert hummed, standing up as they ran outside before Goat could ask what.

As the door closed an ethereal voice cracked from the crown once more,

“What was that?” spoke the crown,

“What?” Kidd asked, sewing a shirt together.

“What you did!” The voice cried, “Communication was put on pause and I wish to know why Kidd!”

“Oh bah! I only set the crown down briefly!” Kidd groaned, “Must of been interference again, I am rather far from home, aren't I?”

“...You are correct about that…” The voice mumbled, the crown’s teal eye squinting at the goat, circling around their head, yet Kidd held a carefree expression.

“...The eye of this crown makes you look so much larger than you are.”

“What-?”

“You are so small you could fit in my palms! yet you look grown in the eye of this crown.”

“Madame. I’m not a baby.”

“Yet you still are my little Kidd, are you not?”

Just then, the door to the temple swung open, Lamb stood in the light once more,

“Five!” They chuckled,

“What?”

“Five hours until my disciples and I have dinner, you wanna join us?” Lambert spoke,

The crown’s pupil went up and down in a nodding motion,

“Yeah, sure thing Lambert.” Kidd huffed,

“Good! I’ll make extra food then, for now…” Lambert spoke, sitting back down,

“Let’s finish these clothes.” Lambert smiled.

[berrypass-de-murdler]

93. Death in the Magick Shoppe

So many notifications that are just people accidentally reblogging my reblog of someone else's post and it's just </3 T-T

i know it's an accident but it hurtsssssssss

DON'T READ THE EPISODES UNTIL YOU'VE FINISHED THE FIRST BOOK!!

Of course. A little Irratino-branded shop. It’s about the size of… a bedroom, and Azure, Dusty, Champagne, and Uncle Midnight are all crammed inside. There’s a bunch of cult stuff everywhere for sale… was this a trick?? And the clerk’s dead, because, of course he is.

LOGICO: Fuck you, Irratino.

Time for some Logi Lookin’.

LOGICO: Don’t say that. Anyway, why are YOU all here? Did he send you here too?? AZURE: I’m not here for the reason you think I am. I am getting things for my sister. LOGICO: You have a sist- AZURE: YES.

Dusty peers out from a room in the back people didn’t know was there.

DUSTY: I’M NOT DOIN’ ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS!

Logico dives in. The room is… a photo booth with pretty much nothing in it. Dusty is just pacing around.

LOGICO: Okay… what about you? CHAMPAGNE: I dunno man.  LOGICO: You’re holding a crystal ball. CHAMPAGNE: Yeh, but, I just like the look of it. LOGICO: Right. Aaand… Uncle Midnight.

The boy is in a cheap tuxedo and fedora, and has a cane. 

U.MIDNIGHT: Uncle Midnight? Who’s this, ‘Uncle Midnight’? LOGICO: Oh god no. U.MIDNIGHT: You’re looking at… THE MASKED DANCER! 

He does a bad tap routine. 

AZURE: You’re not wearing a mask. LOGICO: And I’m sure that name is copyrighted. U.MIDNIGHT: People tell me that I gotta be more ‘serious’. And man, look how serious I am! [falls] Ahaaah. 

Logi calls.

LOGICO: Why did you send me here.

He hasn’t even answered yet.

IRRATINO: I’m sorry. I was on the opposite side of the mansion when I heard the phone. But more importantly, you’re about to understand everything.

The only thing Logico understands is whodunit.

AZURE: My daughter always tells me… LOGICO: You have a daughter too? AZURE: SHUT UP! She told me that magick is the key I’ve been missing. And if I give up my silly superstition, I’ll be able to sell my screenplay. But the first time I try to? I’m called a MURDERER! LOGICO: You have a screenplay? AZURE: UGH!!! [storms off]

Champagne is gone too, and so is the crystal ball. Guess he REALLY liked the look of it… meanwhile Uncle Midnight is on the porch, lit by a single lamp against the night sky.

U.MIDNIGHT: I’m gonna make my own career, just you wait. Yeaaah. Gettin’ down with my tap-dancing, out in the big leagues? Everyone’s gonna love me. LOGICO: Why are you telling me this?

Benjamin grunts and shuts up, leaning on his cane. There’s a lot of silence.

LOGICO: YOU’RE WRONG, IRRATINO! I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!!! U.MIDNIGHT: Jesus Christ, lil’ man! [stumbles away]

Logico brings out his phone and stares at it.

LOGICO: But I will.

The end! 

playing in roblox avatar creatore with a pal and this

logico is l i t e r a l l y a penguin

The power of Goat Lord compels you!

See you next time murdlers!

[starsnores]

Gotta say the Gamzee as Dionysus sketch is 😮‍💨👌

Im pretty sure theres an old painting that you did with gamzee as Dionysus thats also absolutely beautiful. Gotta say theres just something about Gamzee that makes him perfect as Dionysus. When I do Godstuck AUs I always tend to lean that way with him. It’s just so very *chefs kiss*

Id absolutely LOVE to hear your thoughts and ideas around this 👀

thank you! i think i reblogged that painting recently i think, the one that's just bacchus by caravaggio but i made it gamzee lmao. idk if i have anything to add really other then affirm that yeah dionysus is Very fitting for gamzee, especially the orphic dionysian stuff? a god ripped apart and reborn narrative. the intoxication and divine madness and blood worship, his festivals being a driving force behind the development of ancient greek theatre, that comedy and tragedy thing that's also apart of gamzee. And separate from that i think it's neat how a lot of his incidental symbolism is at least tangentially related to gamzee? bulls, the hide of a big cat, goats and snakes. Penis. i just feel like gamzee embodies a lot of the aspects of dionysus to an absurd degree.

[oneforthemunny]

munny's one-derful year

to celebrate my one year on tumblr (january eighth, to be exact), i have decided to open up a little writing prompt. some of my favorite lores, asks, and others for anyone to participate in <3 thank you all so much for your love and following me around onto three blogs lol!!! i love you all so much!! 

rules: must tag #munnysonederful and @oneforthemunny to each entry so i can read and reblog ofc. unlimited entries, and i will be reblogging and making a masterlist on my own page so everyone can read/find the works :)  can be blurbs, full works, headcanons, honestly anything you want! 

prompts: 

rockstar!eddie and nepo baby!reader’s favorite hate fucking moment. where does it happen? why does it happen? are they just playing, or did one prompt the other? What happens ;)? get as smutty and gross as you want to babes, no one here will complain lol. 

based off the lore that older!eddie gets slutty on teqila lol. gimme tequila eddie. make it slutty. the og prompt was at the beach for a wedding of a cousin, if you’d like to follow that, but if not- where does it happen? how do you think it would go? don’t spare a single detail please!!!!

modern!eddie and his lil mean girl’s first date, like official date. i get a lot of questions on this and i honestly want to know what you guys think! what’s it like? where do they go? any awkward moments? what’s the convo like? does he try to over impress or play it like he’s too cool? have fun with it! 

ofc i would never deny anyone here a chance to write about our beloved mafia!eddie and the dogs lol. vecna, diablo, lucifer, and zeus (and beelzebub if you want to add him). i love anything with the dogs, specifically with them being spoiled, so spoil me for a moment and write about them! eddie’s bitching because they’re “guard dogs!!! they’re trained to kill!!!” and you’ve got them totally spoiled, so tell me about it. how would you spoil them? 

janitor!eddie deserves the world, so give it to him. give me something with spoiling him. why are you doing it (birthday, valentine’s day, hard week)? how are you doing it? is it planned or a surprise or impromptu? and of course, how does he react? could be angsty, fluffy, smutty if you’re feeling it. just show him some love. 

cowboy!eddie and sweet girl’s animals. i gotta know about them. there’s three parts of lore here: the cow, the chickens, and the goats. take your pick or choose all of them. make it your own, or me, personally, i want to know how they came to be? how did that conversation of convincing eddie to get them go? expectations vs reality? have fun with it, be silly with it. 

the horny hours convo we had (in april??? maybe lol) with dom!eddie was quite possibly the most successful and most interacted horny hours we’ve ever had. so with that being said, i’m opening up the prompts to be rewritten in your version. so there was three big ones: “don’t make me pull this car over” aka car troubles, “go pick a switch” aka switching it up, and the bath brush aka dripping down. rewrite it, make it your own, make new drama, if you’re not a brat make it non-bratty lol, make it slutty is all i ask. 

bouncer!eddie being a switch really shook everyone up and i loved it, so i want whatever version of him you want to write. him being subby, him being dominant, him just being him and being a little flirty and silly and slutty and the love of my life. expand on the walk in blurb if you need inspo, or what happened after a night where you or him got jealous from someone flirting at the hideout. 

funson’s freebies: 

in honor of my og blog (funsonmunson, gone but not forgotten) these are freebie plots for any of my au’s <3

give me an angsty breakup fic. why did they break up? who broke up with who? make me cry, ruin my day- or take mercy on us and give us a happy ending, up to you. 

self care nights. what do they do? is it a night in? a night out? is eddie taking care of you, or you taking care of him, or a little bit of both? what’s going on, just let me feel all gooey and lovey inside!!! 

i always get birthday requests, and technically it’s my tumblr birthday, so what do the eddies do for your birthday? where do they take you? what’s the cake situation? surprise party, planned party, no party? night in or out? presents? birthday sex? truly whatever you picture!

another highly requested, is a wedding. i love weddings and my guilty pleasure is wedding fics idk why, so give me that. you can follow the lore if they have it, or do whatever you want! proposal, ceremony, honeymoon- honestly whichever you want! where does it happen? what’s the details? who’s there? if you put vows i’m gonna sob so just fyi on that. 

finally, i have to give it up for the domestic babes. give me something soul crushingly domestic. dog!dad eddie, dad!eddie, pregnancy one, newborn, child- i don’t care. i want to feel motherly in this bitch after i read it. 

[im-a-marvel-ous-hoe]

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas | Bucky Barnes (12th Day of 🎄)

(Credits to the owner of this pic!)

We have officially reached the end of my 12 days of Christmas! I hope y’all enjoyed these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them! This one is kinda short, but still sweet all the same! Thank you sm for showing this series some love! Until next time!

Christmas Masterlist <- check out my other holiday fics!

~~~~

“Do you think Santa will come tonight?” Grace asked both Bucky and I as we settled her into bed, bringing the blanket up to her chest. We’ve been trying to get her to bed for the last hour, but she’s been too excited to sleep. “Of course he will, but he won’t come if you’re awake.”

“That’s what Uncle Steve told me.” She smiled. “Well your Uncle Steve is right.” Bucky chuckled, grabbing her little goat stuffie and tucking it in next to her. “Do you think he got my letter?”

I pushed her hair back away from her forehead and nodded. “I’m sure he did, baby.”

“Do you think I can try and stay up to see him?” Bucky and I chuckled, shaking our heads. “Sweetheart, I just told you that he won’t come if you’re awake.”

“But I could hide and he won’t know! I’m really good at hide and seek!”

“Grace, he’ll know. You wanna know how?” She excitedly nodded her head as Bucky continued. “He… he has a magical crystal ball and when he looks at it, he can always tell if you’re naughty or nice. Same way he can tell if you’re sleeping or not. If he sees that you’re awake, he won’t come.”

“Really?” He nodded as she pondered this new information. “So you gotta go to sleep, little missy, if you want him to bring you presents.” She paused for a moment before nodding and getting herself comfortable. “There ya go.” Bucky smiled while leaning on and kissing her forehead. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

“Goodnight, daddy.”

I kissed the top of her head and playfully pinched her nose. “We’ll see you in the morning, munchkin. We love you.”

“I love you too.” She yawned as Bucky and I started making our way to her bedroom door. We both looked back at our daughter and saw that she had turned on her side. I turned off the light and walked out, Bucky closing the door behind us.

We walked back towards the living room and sat down on the couch. We sat in silence for a moment, just looking at the scene in front of us. The tree beautifully decorated, the soft Christmas lights softly blinking and the cookies and milk seated on top of our coffee table.

Bucky sat up straight and scooted closer to the table, reaching for a cookie. He grabbed one and looked back at me, a sheepish smile on his features as he held it up to his mouth.

“What? Santa has to eat the cookies.” I smiled and reached forward, grabbing one and lifting it up to my mouth. “Well, I can’t just leave it all to you.”

We both took a bite of our cookies and softly laughed to ourselves. “When should we put the presents under the tree?”

“We’ll put them there in a bit. I’m in my happy place right now, so…”

I laughed and shook my head. He reached for the glass of milk and brought it up to his lips, taking a few gulps. “I can’t wait for Grace to see what Santa brought her.” I chuckled as Bucky nodded his head. “Oh yeah, Santa went all out this year.”

“Did he now?”

“Mhmm..”

“… Did Tony pitch in?”

“Yeah, Tony might’ve helped Santa this year with certain things..” He scratched the back of his head as I let out a laugh. I slumped back on the couch, bringing my knees up to my chest as he looked at me. His mouth stuffed with cookies and beard sprinkled with the crumbs.

Everything just seemed absolutely perfect. Our daughter was sound asleep in her bedroom and here we are, eating Santa’s cookies and getting ready to put presents under the tree for our little girl. I don’t know how to explain it.

It just feels like we made it.

“What?”

I shook my head, smiling. “Nothin’. I’m just really happy.”

~~~~

I hope y’all liked it! Please let me know your thoughts! Likes, comments and reblogs are very much appreciated!

[cleolinda]

Weekend links

My posts

Thought I had a substantial queue, and then it turned out to mostly be Manul Monday posts scheduled for the next three months. Posting might lag a little while I tag some things. Mostly I’ve just been trying to rest up through Liminal Spacemas, although I did post Dear Diary: Holiday Edition over on Patreon.

Reblogs of interest

“This is a bucket. Anything you don’t want to take with you into 2024, feel free to drop it in the bucket. I will be burning the contents (with Hellfire) at exactly 11:59pm on New Year’s Eve.” No idea what time zone OP is in, so get your 2023 discards in early. 

12/31/23, ah ah ahhhhh

OFFICIAL GÄVLE GOAT FATE

This is, in fact, fine.

“A grad student at NYU, Alía Warsco, has created a free and open-source library of Quechua and Andean-related materials (and other global indigenous resources), called Runakunaq Bibliotecanku (The People’s Library)"

“But from 2022 to 2023, Google has gone to hell. It is almost unusable compared to what it was a year ago.”

Elon wants $1 from new Twitter users. Here, I think, is why he's content (for now) with a nominal fee, and why he'll eventually ask it of every single user.

Medjed the Smiter, Breaker of Fourth Walls

You can guess how the sentence “I honked at the car in front of me” is going to end, but you’ll be wrong

Story time: the selkie sisters

"'average cat owner spends 3 years in prison' factoid actualy just statistical error. average owner spends 0 years in prison. Miette’s mother,"

"Moby Dick’s full name was Morbius Dickenson and he was the best damn whale I ever knew"

Krux the adopted lamp

Space vampires of the 1990s

The year is 2094. The month is Compuary

We must not download goblin men

Video

My favorite video about an obsessed cat

The Sparrow Tarot: The King of Wands

Unrestrained winter fun

The sacred texts

AMERMRICA DOSNOT KNOW THE JOJ OF TETRIES CHOCLAY ORNAGE

Personal tag of the week

Gotta go with #cats again

[poo-poo-kun]

Hello!!! I wanted to tell you that your pictures you put when you reblogged my fic made me burst out laughing 😭

i gotta support my brothers on here who write "x male reader." You guys are the GOAT ✊️

[voidtrace]

I've seen 2 reblogs in a row tagged with a specific OC of yours and I'm so interested. please tell me more about this Ilya fellow. their vibes are fantastic.

My most beloved OC Ilyana Moreau.

Shithead extraordinaire.

They are the OC I tend to put in a lot of different Situations. The character I end up making in video games. So there are lots of different "AU"s with him.

Here he is in FFXIV

He is a nonbinary shapeshifting goat demon! Can appear to be masc or femme, depends on the mood. Which is fun for me because all these different designs in different games and media are all technically canon. :3

My favourite way to draw him right now is as a "tiefling"

He's a horrible guy. Cocky, mischievous, loves the taste of blood. Had a bit of a murderous phase where he liked to rip in tear into flesh. Demons gotta eat. He's calmed down a great deal.

They used to be an angel. But then got their wings ripped off and casted out of heaven where demons took him in and showed him true love and familial bonds. In most AU's that a thing I tend to keep part of him. Like in BG3, he's a devil where their wings were ripped off and all his power stripped from them so now they're a "regular" tiefling. Or in FFXIV they are a survivor of the 13th. A voidsent.

Also very succubus coded in a way that he used his demon powers to influence people and lure them away to feed upon them. (Blood. They like blood. And flesh and bone)

Got charisma up the wazoo but he's also kind stupid and silly sometimes. They are a bard after all.

[whimsy-of-the-stars]

whimsy-of-the-stars: a writeblr (re) intro

hi there! this post is here because I can't edit the old one on desktop bc I reblogged it! :( Anyway i’m whimsy-of-the-stars! the only name i really go by is my actual one, but i’m hesitant to share it online. some info about me:

relatively new to tumblr

currently in high school

i aspire to be an author, as well as a poet and musician

I enjoy cartoons, comics, fiction podcasts and novels

Currently, I'm foraying into the world of itch.io, so you might see me working on Twine games or ttrpgs too!

Learning languages is fun! my main focus right now is Spanish!

I’m in the LGBTQIAP+ community

I like to read (YA): fantasy, sci-fi, fluffy romance, some mysteries

I like to write (YA): fantasy, sci-fi, fluffy romance, superhero

oh and I kinda have an original poetry tag within my posts! It’s “whimsy of the poetry” lol. there you’ll find my 1 (one) poem posted so far!

I’m really bad at coming up with names so most of my projects are untitled. now onto mini WIP intros!!!

unnamed apocalypse story

status: roughly halfway thru the first draft

genre: uhh queer apocalyptic mg/ya

this one is new-ish! ok, not really. It's from April 2023 Camp Nano, and I never finished it. I'm hoping to resume writing soon, probably for July Camp Nano. I'll make a WIP intro soon!! | SWEAR! (casually has never made one before)

Anyway, it centers around a bunch of teens who get lost in the huge forest right before the plant-centered apocalypse hits. They have to survive in unfamiliar woods as this freakishly fast-growing plant continues to creep closer and closer, releasing dangerous pollen; not to mention they've gotta get along with each other. featured in this wip are: silly diary entries, hand-drawn maps, new friends, and questionable poetry!

The Quest for Calamint (a Twine game)

status: jam version (aka simpler, more bare-bones version) available now here! better, cooler version coming in or after July, probably, along with full intro post!

genre: Wholesome fantasy interactive fiction :)

Go on a quest to get your best friend, a little goat named Calamint, back from the faeries who stole him and the rest of the dairy animals on your family's farm. Navigate the forest, talk to the right faeries, and solve the ex-queen's puzzle to get him back!

Side Projects

currently, I'm slowly working on a few small tabletop roleplaying games!! There's one about wizard girls, one about a seaside vacation where you become a delivery kid, and one about summoning a ghost with your friends! however I’m also thinking about a bunch of other things as well for the One Page RPG Jam of 2023 hosted on itch!

[quillheel]

spell out your url using song titles. then, tag as many people as there are letters in your url! ( repost don't reblog. )

:O !!! i've never done one of these before, neat!!! usually this is for a specific muse i THINK but bc i'm a multi i just wound up picking songs based on if i personally had a meaningful connection to them + they gelled with the vibe Quillheel tends to have with musing n themes!

Q ━━ Queen of Peace - Florence + the Machine ( Oh, the queen of peace / Always does her best to please / Is it any use? / Somebody's gotta lose )

U ━━ UNWELCOME GUESTS - The Narcissist Cookbook ( Like a hundred thousand unwelcome guests / Crammed into the narrow corridors / Of our dark hotel by the sea ; ... As I said, I don't believe in ghosts / But that doesn't matter really / I don't think you did either / I think I'm about to find out / What it actually feels like to be / Haunted )

I ━━ It Means Everything - OMORI

L ━━ Life - Mother Mother ( Oh, maybe I'm right (Feels wrong) / Where I'm supposed to be right (Damn right) / Where I'm supposed to be, this is my life (La-la-la-la-la-life) / This is my life (Stop) / Yeah, maybe I'm right )

L ━━ Love Love Love - the Mountain Goats ( Snakes in the grass beneath our feet, rain in the clouds above / Some moments last forever, but some flare out with love, love, love )

H ━━ Hymn of the Medical Oddity - The Weakerthans ( The sun will start late and clock out early / And I'll drive around and wait for it / Follow familiar roads / Emptied of every memory / Under a sheet of silence and unmarked snow )

E ━━ Eat Your Young - Hozier ( I'm starving, darling / Let me put my lips to something / Let me wrap my teeth around the world / Start carving, darling / I wanna smell the dinner cooking / I wanna feel the edges start to burn )

E ━━ Everything Stays - Adventure Time ( Everything stays right where you left it / Everything stays / But it still changes / Ever so slightly, daily and nightly / In little ways, when everything stays )

L ━━ Lullaby - American Murder Song ( Hush falls the evening / And tickles the bell / Love, close your eyes / There are stories to tell )

tagged by: @rceway !!! thank you sm!!!!!!!!!!!! tagging: @ofeggies @lcngdays @theaterrush @rdkii @flockrest @jfouler @z0mburger @nectaric @mightiestbanana aaand one extra @campblcd for when u return from The Tumblr Grave n prob make a multi bc musics fun as hell <3

[nerdieforpedro]

12/17/2023 Weekend Update

We’re halfway through December already! The year will be over soon, so weird but it does happen every year. Anyhow, let’s get started.

Nerdie, you’ve got some new graphics. It looks…the pickle is starting at me.

Is it? Eh, it probably feels like it. I’ve been playing around on Canva after looking through other people’s accounts and masterlists. I’ve made some progress. The lists I’ve updated so far:

Dieter Bravo Masterlist (Betty liked this one so I’m leaving it as is.)

Frankie Morales Masterlist. (I found a side profile pic that screamed Frankie to me, I made it the largest picture.)

Joel Miller Masterlist (He screams to me that he drinks whiskey so it’s on his page also I edited the middle picture because you gotta understand how broad he is)

Dave York Masterlist (The Dave I wrote is a sadistic man who might be softening a little. I might have gotten a soft pic or two in there.)

What else have you been up to this week Nerdie?

Session Three of the Sard’ika Sessions went up. We’re half way through Space Buddies. I want to thank everyone who’s been reading and following along. Your comments and reblogs are always very sweet and have some great takes.

We did a Fic Authors Self rec this week in the tag games and we all gave five of our own fics we would recommend to readers. If you’re a writer and would like to do some signal boosting, you can try it out as well.

I was in the mood for some Dieter Bravo this week. I read quite a few fics with him in it and I somehow forgot that I had written a second chapter of my Dieter Bravo series that I started a couple months back. 😅 Yup, too many WIPs and not enough focus will do that.

The series is revolves around Dieter and our OFC Maya who is traveling to her younger brother’s destination wedding. She meets Dieter and chaos ensues. I made Dieter a goat papa and Dee may have an issue with the man who plays Poe Dameron. I won’t say his name because Dieter doesn’t react well to it at all.

Both chapters are on the Dieter Bravo Masterlist. I am working on chapter three. No clouds were harmed in the creation of the chapter.

How do you forget you started a series Nerdie?

Well, I kept reading others people’s fics, starting WIPs based off of different ideas and it fell off. I have three other series that are “paused” too. I haven’t had any ideas for them.

Plus I have two different challenges to work on and that are due soon.

What are those?

One is that pickle staring at you: The Pickled Peña challenge. Open to all writers who wanna try it. Have some fun trying to figure out a Peña pickle. Instructions are in the hyperlink above.

The other challenge is, well, involves Pedro characters, we were assigned one to get pegged. It’s the Peg That Middle Aged Man or PTMAM 2024. Go big, go forth and peg on! I think, but I have an outline. So, yeah… 😭 Totally on goal there.

We should know by know not to ask, it never goes where we think it’s gonna go. What else?

We spoke in our group about astrological signs. We had a very good discourse led by @goodwithcheese who told us what our sweaty palms looked like and gave us more insight. Pretty fun actually, I pondered I pondered hard.

I started another WIP (because it feels like I start a new one every 3 days) about Joel and Layla from my Sugar series. Them at Christmas, Joel spending more time with her family, what happened when he met them the first time, where they are now. The nylons will make a return, because I’m not sure I can see Joel without them now when I write him. It started out being @morallyinept ‘s fault but it’s all mine now. I won’t shift blame on that one.

Is there anything else Nerdie?

Just one more thing, I made volume 4 of my fanfic author recommendations so please check out their work and make sure to reblog. 😊

Stay warm, hydrated and safe,

Love Nerdie ❤️