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horansqueen · 5 years ago

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AM Conversations : chapter 39

A Niall Horan fanfiction ; rated MA

CHAPTER 1 || CHAPTER 2 || CHAPTER 3 || CHAPTER 4 || CHAPTER 5 || CHAPTER 6 || CHAPTER 7 || CHAPTER 8 || CHAPTER 9 || CHAPTER 10 || CHAPTER 11 || CHAPTER 12 || CHAPTER 13 || CHAPTER 14 || CHAPTER 15 || CHAPTER 16 || CHAPTER 17 || CHAPTER 18 || CHAPTER 19 || CHAPTER 20 || CHAPTER 21 || CHAPTER 22 || CHAPTER 23 || CHAPTER 24 || CHAPTER 25 || CHAPTER 26 || CHAPTER 27 || CHAPTER 28 || CHAPTER 29 || CHAPTER 30 || CHAPTER 31 || CHAPTER 32 || CHAPTER 33 || CHAPTER 34 || CHAPTER 35 || CHAPTER 36 || CHAPTER 37 || CHAPTER 38

NOTES:

-one chapter is her pov, the next is his. -4.6k -im sorry, i never proofread, i hate it. -there WILL be smut. but not only smut. -this is a romance, comedy, smut story. -for the summary, check my MASTERLIST.

- if you want to be notified when this is updated, please message me or leave a comment!

- you can send me questions and theories and comments. tbh they all make me SO SO SO SOOOO HAPPY! and make me want to write more! you can also tell me if there are things you WANT to happen. you never know, i may add it :P

- note for this chapter: an other tiny smut scene. and a long discussion. they will do more things when he comes back from his trip i promise! but there will still be a few more smut scenes in the future chapters. so yea i promise more action and less discussions in the next few chapters lol and since it took me so long to post this ill try to post an other chapter before friday :)

here are the ‘requests’ i added in this chapter!

Chapter 39 : Her chapter

OLIVIA

I stayed motionless, watching him fill his bag with barely anything, leaning against the door frame. I looked at him as he checked his list, crossing out everything as he added it to his stuff. He was concentrated and I didn't want to bother him, but my whole body was throbbing with stress, fear and sadness. I couldn't tell him that though, because I didn't want him to feel guilty about leaving. He deserved that break and he needed that trip. I would never be the one to stop him from doing anything. I said I was fine with it, and I still meant it, which didn't mean I was not sad to see him leave.

"I'm gonna miss you." I admitted in a low tone, leaning my head against the door frame too and making him turn around.

He took a few steps closer but I didn't move, I just watched him, trying to engrave this image in my head as if I was never going to see him again, as if he was leaving forever. I could swear I read sadness on his face until he sent me a small smile.

"I'm gonna miss you too." he admitted in a soft voice. "But it's only six weeks, right? That's what you said."

I smiled more, trying to reassure him, and licked my lips, pushing myself away from the door and tilting my chin up to look in his eyes. I knew six weeks would go by fast and that it was my own insecurity that made me doubt, but I couldn't stop thinking that so many things could happen in six weeks.

"I know, but i'll miss you anyway."

He bent down to press his lips against mine as his hands reached for my arms. He ran his fingers gently on the, making goosebumps appear on my skin, and I smiled against his mouth. I didn't want to worry about anything. I just wanted to trust him. I wanted to trust that his feelings wouldn't change and that he'd be faithful to me. I had to trust him.

"Oh, by the way, look what I found last time I went home."

I took a few steps back and searched through my backpack, handing him a book with a bigger smile. He took it, staring at it with a frown, and finally sat in bed and opened it. I sat next to him as his eyes roamed on the pictures inside. I followed his hand as he brought it on a picture, his fingertips brushing on my baby face and his own, printed on the glossy paper.

"You really were the cutest kid in the world." I just let out with a chuckle.

He glanced at me but quickly looked back at the pictures, tapping on my face with his finger.

"Me? Look at you, darling!"

I was about 10 on the picture and he was a few years younger but to me, it was already obvious how close we were, even back then. He flipped a few pages and I chuckled when I saw both of us dressed up for Halloween, and then sitting next to a Christmas tree.

"Oh my god, first day of first year!" he exclaimed.

His eyebrows raised and his lips curled and it took me everything to stop looking at him to look away. I felt my heart skip a beat when I noticed how I was looking at him on the picture. He was maybe twelve, and I was about fourteen, but I remember being incredibly happy and excited when he finally joined me in school. Back then, I was extremely bad at hiding my feelings and it was a miracle he never noticed it.

"Even back then I was so in love with you."

He kept silent for a while as we both stared at the picture and I finally turned the page to point at an other picture.

"Last day of third year for you." I pointed out to his smiling face.

He had his arm around me and I squinted my eyes because of the sun but my head was leaned against his shoulder and I remembered everything : how the sunrays felt on my skin and how warm his arm felt on my nape. The memory was so vivid that I could swear I was back in that moment.

"You never noticed the way I looked at you."

His fingers grabbed mine and I held my breath until he turned his head my way and shrugged a shoulder.

"Liv, you always looked at me like that. For me, it was just... how things were. It was just you being you. I knew you loved me as a friend, and I never thought..."

He sighed and looked down at our hands as he rubbed his thumb on the back of my hand. He brought his other hand to mine, leaving the photo album on his thighs, and I swallowed hard. I was just being emotional because he was leaving but I couldn't help it.

"If I have to, I will apologize every single day for the rest of my life." he added, making me chuckle and shake my head.

"No, it's alright." I just replied. "I'm not sure twelve-year-old you would have been able to handle hanging out with a girl who was in love with you anyway."

This time, it made him laugh.

"True."

He finally let go of my hand and took his phone on the bedside table, holding it up to take a selfie. I rolled my eyes but moved closer as he wrapped his arm around my shoulder just like in the old picture. He quickly snapped it and I watched him as he made it his phone background.

"On this picture, I know exactly how you feel." he finally says in a very low tone, raising his eyebrows. "And I feel exactly the same."

I brought my hand to his face as my heart twisted in my chest and I closed my eyes only when I felt his lips against mine. I was going to miss that so fucking much. He pulled away and kept looking through the pictures until he stopped suddenly. I noticed a picture from my 18th birthday where I was holding Rian's hand and I expected a cheeky comment from Niall but instead, he kept silent for a while and it made me frown.

"What's wrong?"

"This picture brings back memories, that's all."

I felt my heart jump in my chest when I noticed he was with Holly and I tried to push the dash of jealousy that suddenly invaded me.

"This one? Out of all of them?"

"Every single time Rian kissed you annoyed me. Watching you holding his hand bothered me so much I..."

He looked up in my eyes and my lips parted at his confession. I would have never thought he would admit something like that. I never thought Niall had been jealous because of me and I would have laughed if someone had told me that but he looked sincere and I knew he wouldn't say that just to make me happy.

"I just never really understood why." he added. "I thought it was just because I knew you'd be busy with him and that you'd neglect me."

"Maybe that was why. Maybe it had nothing to do with romantic love."

His eyes roamed on my face and he licked his lips before sighing.

"Maybe."

I grabbed the album from his hands and found a picture of us right before he left for the X-Factor. I took it off the album and handed it to him with a smile. I didn't want to keep whining on the fact that I loved him since forever and that his feelings for me were way more recent. It shouldn't matter and I didn't want to let it ruin the love we had for each other now.

"Do you think you've got some place left for this picture of us in your bag?"

He chuckled, the left corner of his lips curling up, and took the picture in his hand to look at it better.

"Don't forget where you belong." I let out, half-joking, and tilting my head slightly.

He stared at me again and his free hand slipped in my hair, on the back of my head before he pulled me closer to him slowly. He kissed me deeply and my eyes fluttered close. He tasted amazing and it took everything in me not to whimper in his mouth.

"I belong with you Olivia." he breathed, allowing his lips to leave mine for half a second. "And I'll never forget it."

I felt my whole body vibrate somehow due to the words he whispered and I gripped the sheets of the bed, focusing on the way his lips pressed and moved against mine. I knew I didn't have to say that i belonged to him, too. I knew he knew it, and I knew it was obvious. I don't know how long we kissed but when he pulled away, I groaned low and my eyes fluttered open. I felt his hand slip away from my neck and tilted my head to look at him, my heart feeling suddenly lighter even if I knew he was leaving.

"Can I ask you something?" I let out, pressing my lips together.

"Anything."

I moved a bit on the bed to face him, one of my legs bent and the other still hanging off the bed. I loved the way he was looking at me, like stuck in some sort of bliss that I completely understood. In fact, I probably looked even worse.

"Did you ever... masturbate thinking about me? Besides that time after tour."

His eyebrows raised up and his upper body moved back in surprise very slightly, making me blush a bit. I didn't know why I felt the need to ask but I knew it was something I wanted to know. Niall cleared his throat and looked down before looking back in my eyes.

"I spent a lot of time thinking after you admitted your feelings to me and a bunch of things came back to my mind. I remember liking you, I remember lusting you sometimes, but I never really wanted to admit it to myself. It was little things like cuddling together in bed, or on the couch.. or when your hand would brush my thighs... But I was young and I just thought it was hormones, I don't know." he explained as I held my breath. "I remember getting hard sometimes, like when you'd fall asleep on my lap or when you pressed your ass against me while asleep... there's only one time I really touched myself thinking about you, besides that time after tour. It was a few years ago and we were friendly fighting the way we always do but I decided to let you win just to see what you'd do, and you ended up straddling me.. It's just the way you moved over me, fuck."

I laughed a bit, staring at him as he closed his eyes tight. I remembered that day, surprisingly, but straddling Niall was also something I couldn't forget.

"I couldn't stop thinking about it and when you left I just..." he shrugged, raising his eyebrows again. "I just jerked off."

We remained silent for a while as he was looking at me with an amused smile.

"You got hard that time we danced in your living room."

This time, he's the one who laughed before nodding.

"Fuck yea I did." he admitted without shame. "I knew you had noticed, but thanks for not mentioning it back then."

I moved closer to him and brushed my lips against his with a small smile.

"You're welcome." I whispered, turning his smile into a fond one. "So it seems like we have similar tastes in bed."

His eyes roamed on my face and he sent me a cheeky smile. running one of his hands on my arm and leaving a burning trace on my skin. I knew it was because our relationship was still recent, but I always wanting him to touch me and fuck me to the point where I could barely control myself.

"Seems like we do." he agreed in a whisper. "I'd love to hear it though, you said you'd tell me."

I pressed my lips together and moved back a bit to look at him better.

"Like I said, I like to please." I let out, gripping the sheets of the bed harder. "I love when you bite me. I love when you're rough, when you spank me, when you slap me. I love when you choke me, too." I could feel my heart beat hard against my rib cage but I didn't know if it was because of what I was admitting or because of the way he was looking at me. "I love name calling, too."

"Give me examples."

I held my breath for a few seconds and swallowed hard.

"I like 'slut' and 'whore' as much as I like 'princess' and 'little one'."

He nodded slowly and I felt his hand slide on one of my thighs but I kept staring in his eyes. Every single touch always made my whole body throb and I ended up hoping this feeling would never leave.

"I'll remember that."

His other hand reached for my face but he pushed a lock of my hair behind my shoulder very slowly as I licked my lips.

"I love being rough with you. And I love that you're a pleaser." he continued, his eyes dropping to my lips. "But I love watching you shake and moan... I love making you cum. Giving me control also means letting me please you. You think you can do that?"

Slowly, I nodded as he looked back up in my eyes, and I felt my heart jump in my chest at the way he was looking at me. His fingers brushed on my shoulder and down my chest, between my breasts.

"Let's try it now, then." he whispered, moving his chin quickly in my direction.

I held my breath but sat better in bed, leaning against the pillows. I expected him to crawl on top of me and kiss me but he just reached for the button of my jeans and undid them before pulling them down as I moved my butt up to help him. I felt nervous but tried to remember that he saw me naked plenty of times and he was not going to decide to drop me because of what I looked like naked now. He moved my shirt slightly up and ran two of his fingers between my legs, over my panties.

"How about we make you wet these panties first?"

Once again, my heart jumped in my chest and I watched him bend down and open one of his drawers to get something but it's only when I noticed the vibrator in his hand that my lips parted. It wasn't one of mine and I realized that he had bought it just for me. He didn't ay anything and I didn't dare ask all the questions burning my lips. Instead, I held my breath until he pressed it between my legs, sliding it slowly. I felt my lips part as he pushed it harder and let out a very low whimper when it brushed on my clit. After only a few seconds, he turned it on and my eyes fluttered close as I let out a curse word.

"Really? That easy?" he chuckled and I felt his free hand brush gently on my thighs. It stopped at my knee and he pulled on it a bit to spread my legs slightly more. "So glad you put black panties on. I can already tell how horny you're getting."

I felt my hips jerk a bit when he turned the speed on and once again, my hands gripped the sheets on each side of me. I was too focused on the pleasure I was getting that it's only when he whispered that he realized he had moved closer.

"Keep your eyes open."

His voice was harsh even if he was talking low and it took me everything to open my eyes again. His lips curled into a smirk and once again, I held my breath as I tried not to squirm too much. He pressed the vibrator more on my clit and I whimpered again, making him smirk even more,

"Fuck, you look good, I'm getting so hard looking at you."

He moved away slightly and looked between my legs before moving his gaze back up. I knew I was getting close to an orgasm and I moaned a bit louder, feeling incredibly aroused by t eh fact that I didn't have any control on my own pleasure.

"You're soaking your panties." he added. "Love watching my little princess turn into a good little slut."

My heart skipped many beats and I almost came right after he talked, his words making my whole body throb in rhythm with my inner thighs.

"Oh god, Niall..." the words escaped my lips in a mix of a whimper and a whisper and he moved closer, dipping his head near my neck and biting my skin gently. "I'm gonna cum..."

"Not now." he quickly replied, making my heart jump. "Not until I tell you to."

"I don't know how long I can last." I admitted, gripping the sheets harder.

"Then beg me."

He moved his face back up and our eyes met. I let mine roam on his face and started biting my bottom lip hard as I tried not to grind on the vibrator he was holding tightly against me.

"Please, Niall, let me cum." I let out in a pleading tone. "Please I really need it."

I quickly brought my hand to his wrist but he started moving it and feeling it rub against my clit along with the vibrations made me moan louder than I intended. I couldn't stop myself and starting grinding on it as he brought his head closer to mine and pressed his lips against mine, kissing me deeply. He swallowed my moans and I felt my nails dig in the skin of his wrist as I tried to hold my orgasm. Slowly, he pulled away and I felt myself get dizzy from the effort I was making.

"You can cum petal, cum for me."

I felt a sensation of relief wash over me just as an orgasm hit me and I started shaking, closing my eyes despite myself. A bunch of curse words came out of my lips along with his name and when I came down from my high, I felt my panties slip down my legs. He moved over me and his mouth pressed against mine as he kissed me eagerly and roughly.

"I thought I could resist but I can't, I need to feel myself inside you."

His words made me chuckle a bit but I stopped immediately when he pushed himself inside me. I could feel myself throb hard around him because of my orgasm and he groaned against my lips, nibbling gently on my bottom one.

"I'm sorry, it won't take long."

I enjoyed the way his body weighted on mine as he pushed himself in and out of me quickly and brought my arms around his neck.

"You feel so good." I confessed low, tilting my chin up and closing my eyes. "Don't stop."

His lips brushed against my chin and he groaned again.

"You're so fucking wet, princess. you're gonna make me cum."

A shiver crossed my body at the thought and I slipped one of my hands in his hair. I moved my knees up to feel im deeper inside me and moved my hips this way, making him moan.

"Please do it." I begged again, letting out a low whimper as his movements became unsteady. "Please."

He buried his face in my neck again, gripping the sheets on each side of my head and pulling himself closer to me as he came. I felt him shake lightly over me and ran my hands down his back until his ass. It's only when he started panting that I realized I could have reached an other orgasm.

I thought he'd move away from me the way he always does but he remained on top of me as my fingertips brushed on his back, under his shirt. We kept silent for a while and I felt his lips leave small kisses from time to time on the skin of my neck.

It was one of those moments where you realize how lucky you are and how your life turned out exactly the way you wanted. I felt a wave of love and happiness flood my inside and held him tighter against me.

"I would like to make love sometimes, too."

His lips stopped moving against me and slowly, he moved up to look in my eyes. The way he looked at me made my heart melt in my chest and all I could hear was the sound of my heart beating against my rib cage.

"I'll make love to you any time you want me to."

I felt something stir in my stomach and brought my hands to cup his face. My lips parted and I wanted to tell him how much I loved him but the words got stuck in my throat. I knew that if I talked, my voice would crack and I would probably cry a bit. His lips curled in a fond smile and he licked them before bending closer and kissing my lips.

"I love you too, and i'll miss you too."

I sent him a smile and he quickly pecked my lips before getting under the blankets. I sat up in bed to go turn the lights off and noticed the photo album laying on the floor. It probably fell when we were having sex and I just stared at one of the pictures on the page. Niall had his arm around my neck, holding me close, and kissing my cheek with a beer in one of his hands. I had grabbed the fingers of his other hand and my eyes were closed but I was probably a bit too tipsy to actually remember that picture being taken. I left it there and got up to turn the lights off and finally lied back down in bed, under the covers. I thought Niall was already asleep but when he talked, I instinctively moved closer.

"I bought the vibrator for you." he let out as I cuddled him, my head on his shoulder and my arm around his waist. "So you can use it when i'm gone."

"I'll use it, I promise." I whispered. "I'll think about you while using it."

He chuckled and turned his face my way to kiss the top of my head, making me smile more. I felt his hand on my back and his thumb started caressing my skin gently. I couldn't stop thinking that the next day, i'd have to sleep alone in bed and it made me want to cry.

"Can I stay here while you're gone?"

I felt like it wouldn't be as hard to be without him if I was in his stuff, spending time at his place, sleeping in his bed... It would feel like he was still sort of with me. I couldn't imagine going back to my empty and cold apartment and wait for six weeks until he'd come back.

His hand stopped moving on me and maybe I imagined it, but I felt him tense next to me. It made me frown and I moved my head up to look at him.

"You don't want me to stay here?"

I didn't know why but it hurt me and I I held my breath, noticing he was avoiding my eyes.

"No, it's not that, it's just.." he shook his head and I moved my upper body up a bit, holding myself with my hand on the mattress and looking down at him. He finally looked in my eyes and his traits softened slightly. "You can stay just.. don't make a mess, okay?"

My eyes roamed on his face and although I shouldn't I felt a bit annoyed by his words. I didn't want to fight with him, especially knowing he was leaving the next morning, and I decided to just nod slightly and lay my head back on his shoulder. It took a few minutes and he finally sighed, turning his face my way again and pressing his lips on the top of my head.

"I'm sorry." he let out sincerely. "I want you to stay here. Maybe you could even stay here... all the time?"

Once again I held my breath, feeling my whole body throb as the room went completely silent. I just stared at his chest for a few seconds, thinking about everything it implied.

"You don't really want to live with me." I pointed out, letting one of my hands brush around his belly button. "Trust me."

"I do." he chuckled, pulling me closer to him, his warm hand burning the skin of my back. "I wanted to ask you even before we started dating."

I raised my eyebrows in surprise and finally looked up at him again. He was sending me an amused smile and this time, I couldn't help but smile back.

"Really?"

"Really." he repeated. "Didn't you ever think about us living together?"

I felt my cheeks burn, glad that we were in the dark, and raised a shoulder.

"I did, but I was scared we'd never sleep in the same bed if I had my own room here."

This time, he's the one who looked surprised and clearly, it was not something that had crossed his mind. His expression made me chuckle and he nodded slowly.

"Fair point. But not relevant anymore."

I nodded and sent him a loving smile, tilting my head. I really wanted to move in with him but I was also scared it would result into useless fights and I wanted to avoid that more than anything. We were together, we were happy, and I didn't want to ruin it. Still, the thought of sharing a place with him was extremely tempting. I knew I was at his place most of the time but having an apartment where I kept all my stuff and where I could always go whenever I needed to be alone was reassuring, for both of us. He wanted to make the big jump though and he asked me. That, in itself, proved how dedicated he was to this relationship and I owed him to be just as devoted as he was. I loved him and It was scary to think of all the things I was ready to do for him but I was confused and it made a pain appear suddenly in my stomach. I just wanted to make the right decision... the one that would insure us a future. I wanted this to last, I needed this to last. I didn't know what i'd do if it didn't.

I brought my hand to his face and brushed my thumb gently on his cheek. I felt so in love that I had to swallow a lump of affection stuck in my throat before bending down and kissing his lips.

"I'll think about it."

#niall horan #niall horan smut #niall horan fluff #niall horan story #niall horan writing #niall horan fanfic #niall horan fan fic #niall horan fanfiction #niall horan fan fiction #my fanfics #amc #idk how to apologize for this tbh #i feel like its going so slowly #but its really needed guys #i promise problems and tears and stuff

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shijiujun · 5 years ago

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Hello!😙 I have another tangfei headcanon if you like. After they became "almost friends" in the series, one day Tang yi sees Shaofei crying. What does he do? only if you like, because a fandom is nice when everyone enjoys sharing things without obligations😊

heya!!! okay i knowwww i took super long to answer you ask and that’s because i kind of wanted to write a fic on this but i figured i’d answer it first and write the fic later hahahaha! firstly, thank you headcanon anon (i assume you’re the same one who’s been giving me headcanon asks) you have my eternal gratitude for putting ideas in my head!!

so - they become ‘almost friends’ after tang yi gets shot at and i think this might also be set before shao fei gets shot, but after he’s moved into tang yi’s house, after the massage and after shao fei realises that he likes tang yi!! (and in the novel, canonically shao fei cries after he realises that he likes tang yi and thinks tang yi doesn’t like him back this is chapter 5 i think)

i can’t imagine shao fei really crying for small things, he’s always the pillar of support ya know? so it has to be something really major for him to be crying, so… okay, this is gonna be long but:

1. Shao Fei’s pretty reliable in the police station and people get along with him pretty well, but it’s known that he’s a persistent person when it comes to Li Zhen and Tang Guo Dong’s murder case, and because of that some asshole police officers in the precinct like to poke fun at him for it from time to time, like asking him if he’s finally given up yet, if he’s finally admitted that LZ is a corrupt cop, that he should just cut his losses while he still can instead of embarrassing himself and his team by hounding Tang Yi etc. and it gets worse when they find out that Shao Fei actually moved himself into Tang Yi’s house

2. Shao Fei isn’t the kind to retaliate in a fight because, he’s a cop, and even if he could totally take the fuckers down in a fight he can’t because they’re his colleagues and all he can do is just glare and ignore, and they don’t do it very often anyway because they know Shao Fei can beat them into a pulp, but they also know that Shao Fei has no way to retaliate which is why they continue to insult him

3. We know that he has a photo of LZ and him on his desk, and he hides his music box probably at Shao Fei’s table as well

4. One day, he returns back to the office (he’s staying with Tang Yi still and being his bodyguard and shit) to grab some case files, and because he’s there, he gets roped into half a meeting with interpol and Captain Shi because they’re there coincidentally and see him, and they all know he’s assigned himself to Tang Yi, so out of curiosity they ask him how’s it going etc.

5. Interpol chief throws in some barbs about how he’s wasting his time and also chiding Captain Shi for spoiling Shao Fei and letting him do whatever he wants - and SF is already in a shitty mood when this happens

6. He goes to the washroom later and he hears the usual two asshole officers making fun of him again while he’s standing right there, and SF can’t really do anything but grit his teeth and move on

5. He returns to his desk and that’s when he sees it - the photo of him and LZ, the photo frame shattered into pieces on the floor by his desk, and the photo torn, with shoe print marks over it and it’s ruined from dried coffee stains (everyone else in team three is still in a meeting so they don’t see this happening)

6.and his heart just BREAKS after the day he’s had, after being reminded that after 4 years he still can’t solve LZ’s case, and TY doesn’t like him, and is everything he’s doing for naught? SF’s pretty damn stubborn but I’m sure there were little moments where he just thinks.. what is he doing wrong and how long can he last doing this? But then he always bounces back because even if no one believes in LZ he will

7. but anyway, he picks up the tattered pieces of the photo and cleans up the mess - he has an idea who did this but when he sees the two officers standing at the corner and sneering at him, he almost goes over and starts a fight because how dare they touch his precious things when his phone rings - it’s Jack, keeping him updated on his and Tang Yi’s next location so SF can catch up, so he abandons his plans for a fight first

8. he’s totally out of it the rest of the day, so much so that Tang Yi notices, and Jack does too, and while the both of them exchange looks in the rearview mirror they don’t say anything

9. Tang Yi finds SF’s silence disconcerting, and at night after a quiet dinner and after SF retires back into his guest room, Tang Yi is about to sleep, when he decides that he should walk past SF’s room, and the door is ajar - that’s when he hears the sniffles

10. startled, TY opens the door and SF jumps to see who the hell is here and TY stills as he sees SF’s red-rimmed eyes and the dried tear tracks down his cheeks - SF hurriedly wipes them away with his sleeve and indignant, asks what TY is doing here and seriously can’t he knock?!!

11. TY’s first reaction is to say “it’s my house”, and then SF’s face crumples because he can’t deal with TY right now, and TY then asks what happened? of course SF isn’t going to tell him what happened and he shoos the man out of the room and locks it after him - still, TY goes downstairs, and brews a cup of tea, and then goes back upstairs - this time, he knocks, and SF looks really annoyed when he opens the door at TY’s insistent knocking, and when he sees that TY brought him a mug of tea, his demeanour softens somewhat

12. TY leaves SF alone for the rest of the night, and in the morning, when SF is doing the dishes from breakfast downstairs, TY sees that SF’s room door is open and somehow walks inside - and that’s when he sees the ruined photo on SF’s desk

13. At this point I think TY likes SF quite a lot already even if he doesn’t wanna admit it, and he cares for SF quite a bit, so he gets Jack to find out what the hell happened - and Jack being Jack, and also because Jack knows ZZ, he collects the info he needs, pieces it together, and then reports what happened to TY

14. I HAVEN’T REALLY THOUGHT OF HOW TY WOULD HELP SF out in ‘punishing’ the two asshole officers because he can’t get ppl to beat them up right, cuz he’s reformed and all that, but i know he’s going to do something, just haven’t figured it out

15. and then because TY would have hired a PI or something to dig out everything on SF and LZ the moment LZ and TGD died together and SF started hounding him, TY has a copy of that photo of SF and LZ together

16. and somehow, when SF returns to Tang Yi’s home a few days later with TY, he goes back to his room and sees a brand new photo and photo frame on his desk

17. SF puts two and two together and he’s grateful, and when they have dinner later in the evening, SF and TY keep exchanging small little smiles and looks (smth like the scene in the car where TY opened the bottle of water for him) and TY being extra nicer and more gentle to him than usual

So yeah I’m gonna write a fic on this, and the cute parts will be more obvious - It’s mostly plot at this point heh but I thought if I left it to when I actually write the fic your ask would never be answered!!!

#asks #history3: trapped #headcanon anon!

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lovemesomesurveys · 4 years ago

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Around the House (#4) Bathroom(s)

1. How many bathrooms are in your house? How many are full and how many are half? 2 full.

2. Do you have more than one window in your bathroom? No windows in either one.

3. What is/are the wall color(s) of this/these rooms? White.

4. Does/Do the/these room(s) have hardwood flooring or carpeting? An area rug, perhaps? Linoleum? Tile.

5. What type(s) of lighting fixtures are in this/these rooms? (wall lamps, table lamps, freestanding lamps, or ceiling lamp/fan) Ceiling lamp in both.

6. Do you have cabinets above or below the sink? Below. The front bathroom has a linen closet that we also store things like extra shampoo and whatnot and there’s a few drawers as well.

7. Do you have a cabinet above the toilet? No.

8. Do any of your bathrooms have more than one sink? Nope.

9. Do you have a bidet in any of your bathrooms? No.

10. Is your linen closet inside your bathroom, or is it in the hallway? It’s in the front bathroom.

11. Do you have any cleaning supplies in your bathroom, or is there a separate utility closet for these items? Yeah, in the cabinets under the sink.

12. Do you have anything on the walls of your bathroom? Yeah, a clock and some decorative things.

13. Do you have a full-length mirror on your bathroom door? No, there’s a big mirror on the wall.

14. Do you have any decorations/items on the back of your toilet? What are they? Room sprays.

15. What is on your bathroom countertop? Stuff like hair brushes, hairsprays, perfumes/colognes, a toothbrush holder, toothpaste, mouthwash, hand soap, a container with Q-tips.

16. Do you do your makeup in the bathroom or in your bedroom? How about getting dressed? I haven’t done my makeup at all in like 3 years, but prior to that I had been doing it in my room for awhile, that’s where I kept all my makeup. I used to do it in the bathroom and kept my stuff in there, but eh I preferred doing it in my room. I always get dressed in my room.

17. What color is your trash can? White.

18. What is one unique thing you have in your bathroom that hasn’t been mentioned yet? I can’t really think of anything at the top of my head. Pretty typical stuff, I think.

Bedroom(s)

1. How many bedrooms are there in your house? Are they all currently being used as bedrooms, though? 2 actual bedrooms, but we turned the dining room area into a bedroom as well.

2. What is/are the wall color(s) of this/these rooms? White.

3. Does/Do the/these room(s) have hardwood flooring or carpeting? An area rug, perhaps? Linoleum? Carpet (except for the dining room-turned-room area, which has tile)

4. What type(s) of lighting fixtures are in this/these rooms? (wall lamps, table lamps, freestanding lamps, or ceiling lamp/fan) Ceiling lamps/fan and a floor lamp in both bedrooms.

5. What size bed do you have? What size parents do your parents have? (if you still reside with them) Siblings’ beds? My bed is a full, my brother’s is a full, and my parents’ have a king.

6. Do you have any prints or wall decorations up? I’m just going to do my room-- my room has a few canvas prints, a framed art photo, a clock, a couple calendars, a bulletin board, a marker board, a couple wall decals, and a huge Swedish flag.

7. Do you have a string of lights somewhere in your room? Around my headboard.

8. Do you have a desk in your room? What’s on it? Nope. My bed also serves as my desk, ha. I spend most of my time in bed, so I keep my laptop and some other stuff on it so that they’re close by and easily accessible.

9. Do you/did you ever have to share a bedroom with someone else? No.

10. Do you have a nightstand? What’s on it/in it? Yes, I have 2. One has a makeup organizer thing with makeup I don’t even wear anymore, along with a few body sprays, lotions, and 2 jewelry bowl/tray things. The other has my medicine, pill crushed, a bottle of Coke to take my medicine with (I have to crush my medicine cause I can’t take pills and soda is somewhat tolerable to take them with), a few bottles of water, nail clippers, and hand sanitizer. Those are things that are always there, but currently there’s also my ramen bowl and a Starbucks energy drink that I’ll take out when I get up later.

11. Do you have a vanity or a mirror in your bedroom? I have a full length mirror on my door.

12. Do you have a clock in your bedroom, even if you just use your phone as an alarm? I have a wall clock.

13. Do you have a calendar in your bedroom? Yes, I have 2.

14. Is your bedroom neat or messy? How often do you clean it? It’s clean for the most part. I need to put a few things away.

15. Do you make your bed on a daily basis? It stays made. I sleep on top of the made bed and just use a throw blanket that I keep to the side when I’m not using it.

16. How many windows are in your bedroom(s)? What sorts of coverings do they have? One window with curtains.

17. Do you have a bookshelf in your room? Approximately how many books do you own? Yes. There’s like 30 books on there. I’ve been using the Kindle app to read for the past few years, so my collection is bigger on there. I have access to a shitload of books on there.

18. How many dressers do you have in your room? One.

19. Is your closet “regular” sized, or is it a walk-in? It’s regular sized. It’s not one with a regular door, it had 2 sliding doors originally, but I took them off and put up curtains instead.

20. What kinds of things do you do in your bedroom? I spend a lot of my time in here, so I do just about everything--go on my laptop, read, color, watch TV, listen to music, mess around on my phone to check my social medias and watch YouTube, play my Nintendo Switch, eat, sleep, chill...

21. Do you have any photographs/pictures anywhere in your bedroom? I have a couple on my bulletin board.

22. What’s under your bed right now? Nothing.

23. Is your hamper overflowing? Do you need to do laundry? Nope, just took it out last night.

24. Do you have anything in your bedroom that you wouldn’t want your parents finding? (even as an adult, if they came over) Nah.

25. What does your comforter look like? How many pillows/blankets do you sleep with? I don’t have a comforter right now, just a top sheet at the moment. The sheets I have on right now have giraffes all over them. I have like 7 pillows, but I only sleep with 2. I have a throw blanket if needed, but I haven’t needed it since summer started.

26. Do you have a trash can in this room? Yes.

27. What is one unique thing in your bedroom that hasn’t been mentioned yet? My large collection of giraffe stuffed animals and knickknacks. There’s also a 4 ft giraffe that has a Santa hat on it that I put on 2 years ago when I put up my other Christmas decorations in my room that I have yet to put away lol.

[a-zebra-is-a-striped-horse]

#personal #text #survey #surveys #house tour

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juliebalfourhnd2cphoto · 5 years ago

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Personal Project

The Lewis Dresser (working title)

The purpose of this project is to produce 10, A3 Fine Art images on a common theme, “The Lewis Dresser”. (15 types of photography genres to pursue as a professional photographer, 2020)

Creative idea: last year during my NQ I took images for my painting with light project of an old typewriter and an uncooked Plaice on a platter. The latter turned out fairly well, but more importantly it sparked within me an enthusiasm and desire to progress in this medium.

The platter was part of a collection that we had “rescued” from my late father-in-Law’s Croft on the Isle of Lewis before its sale, they have no real value apart from sentimental.

The croft is located near the cliff edge, overlooking the sea and is a beautiful windswept location just a few minutes’ walk from the lighthouse at the end of the Island.

As I have wanted to develop the idea further (I jot down potential ideas for projects in a wee notebook that I carry around with me) I have been considering ways I could do this.

Using the large collection of crockery we brought from the island I propose a series of still-life using a painting with light technique. I want to give it a flavour of the isles and as Lewis is known predominantly for its, fishing, weaving and crofting (The Isle Of Lewis, 2020).

My Initial thought was of limiting it to seafood which I would source through a fishmongers who sell seafood caught from the Loch Fyne area , but in the current climate with shops closing every day, I may have to widen my food sources but keep within the theme of ingredients for traditional Scottish fare. (Redirecting..., 2020)

Technique: during this project I want to develop and improve my painting with light technique.

As I said previously It is a medium that I have been interested in since it was first introduced to me in my NQ class and it has always been my intention to develop it, but the briefs this year have been fast and furious and opportunities to explore our own projects have been few .

I have been looking forward to this brief and the chance it offers to pursue my own interests.

Research: As part of this project I will expand my knowledge of photographers and artist who have inspired and influenced my work. (How to Plan a Photo Project * Anthony Epes, 2020)

Harold Ross

(PhotoBiography: Harold Ross | International Photography Magazine, 2020)

(MacDonald, 2020)

When painting with light my first thought is Harold Ross, I really admire his work. The way he uses light to accentuate the details of his subject creates stunning, surreal photos. Ross uses a variety sizes and softness of light tools to sculpt the images and builds up his photographic images incrementally building layer upon layer in Photoshop. He describes the process as more intuitive than technical and there is a great deal of artistry evident in his work.

This method requires the subject to be shot in a darkened room, the camera should be on timer and tripod mounted (as you are layering the camera needs to remain in a fixed position and at a fixed focal length.) I find it best to focus your subject in auto and once it is fixed, change to manual. If you try to shoot in auto the lens will move in and out of to focus when you paint the light onto your object.

The room needs to be darkened for this to be effective and I intend to shoot in late afternoon or early evening to avoid the “borrowed light” that comes in through the opening near the ceiling of my studio (if I am unable to access my studio I will set aside an area in the flat to work in).

Ross advises that he shoots tethered and this is something I have never done but I would like to add this to my skills set and will research the method further. I have begun accessing online tutorials and been having discussions about this with other Olympus users on the Facebook group I am part of. (Step by Step Tutorial for How to Shoot Tethered, 2020)

Laura Letinsky

(Laura Letinsky → THE DOG AND THE WOLF, 2020)

Letinsky is another photographer that I have come to admire since I began studying photography, I love the way she uses light, and the narrative quality of her work. Her compositions, which at first glance seem haphazard shots of the remnants of hurried meals, abandoned dishes, vestiges of parties, are in fact very carefully arranged.

She uses light to pick out every crease, crumb and fragment within the frame, telling us not only what we see in front of us, but what happened before and what will come after. My earlier shots were very tightly focussed on the subject but perhaps there is scope to pull back and tell a bigger picture.

Mat Collinshaw

(Last Meals on Death Row, Texas - Photo Essays, 2020)

Collinshaw is categorised along with Letinsky, and many notable others, such as Paulette Tavormina and Margriet Smulders, as a photographer who can be defined, at least in his still life, as “Vanitas”. (Still Life Photographers Who Give a Fresh Meaning to Vanitas, 2020). That is that the work either through lighting, content or context leans towards works of the old masters of the Dutch and Flemish painters of the 17th century. Messages such as the transience of life and the beauty of nature were intrinsic in these paintings and strong symbolism was seen in the inclusion of skulls, dead animals or dramatic chiaroscuro lighting.

These traits can be seen in the contemporary work of both Collinshaw, and Letinsky, she with her depictions of dead creatures and decaying food and flowers, he with his slightly voyeuristic look into the thoughts of the condemned man and his deeply dark lit photographs.

There is something slightly morbid about working with a dead creature, particularly in the dark, exploring piece by piece, that I find chilling and it is important to ensure that the beauty of the subject exceeds this, a difficult balance I have found in the past.

Alicide d’Orbigny

(Dance of the Aymara People | Old Book Illustrations, 2020)

D’ Orbigny was neither a photographer nor an artist, he was a French Micro Palaeontologist in the early 19th century. (Alcide Dessalines d' Orbigny | French paleontologist, 2020)

His anatomical illustrations, particularly those of sea creatures are stunning. He not only created biologically accurate depictions but used colours which captured the vibrance and other worldliness that many of these creatures possessed and that caused so many myths to grow up around them.

I came upon one of his images as an illustration in a cookbook that I was gifted and was so struck by the beauty of it that I researched him and found a wealth of beautiful illustrations (sadly my knowledge of palaeontology has made no progress). I cite D’Orbigny as an inspiration for this project as I think painting with light reveals much hidden beauty in subjects such as sea-life and yet retains a realism.

My “ambitious outcome” for this project is that I produce something that is well crafted, beautiful and could be considered fine art. I hope that the images will be finely detailed and that the process through which they are shot adds a dimension to them which cannot be captured in a single shot alone. This is hugely ambitious for one photograph but to produce 10 such images seems unimaginable. It is a very time-consuming process and time is limited but it will be a photography adventure and without doubt a learning experience.

Exhibition

The question “how would I like it to be viewed” is a complex one as ,first and foremost ,this is a personal journey and in a way a homage to the father-in-law I never met but have heard so much of, to his homeland and the place that is held dear in the heart of my husband and his family.

It is also a way of placing a new value on these old and fragile objects imbuing them with fresh life; sentimental and personal.

Alongside this is a need to show progression in my photography skills and my creative ability, both to friends and peers, and finally if the work holds any merit as fine art then I would like to organise a small exhibition.

The campus where my studio is based has an exhibition area which would be ideal for this type of informal exhibition preferably in conjunction with some of my fellow classmates. I have contacted the building’s owner* to check on the viability, the space is freely available to tenants for non-commercial ventures and has dates open for this year. At this stage I haven’t spoken to any of my classmates about it, but I am confident that there would be enough interest to set up a class launch.

*see attached email.

I have given some thought on how I think I would display my work; prints sized A3 and mounted will be printed on Hahnemuble German etching, Hahnemuble photo rag ,or Hahnemuble smooth as I want the images to have a fine art textural quality to them and reduce any shine. I like the textures of each of these products but will obviously make a final decision once the images are edited and optimised.

Technically a good knowledge of the camera, use of lens, depth of field and focal point and lighting techniques is essential, as is an understanding of the aesthetics of the technique, my skills in this area are adequate but I hope by the end of this project they will be considerably improved.

The main pieces of gear I will be using for this will be:

My Olympus EM1X DSLR mirrorless camera

An Olympus micro 4/3 lens 12- 40 mm Lens

A tripod

Light tools modelled on those demonstrated on Harold Ross’ websites

Black card flags

A reflector

A MacBook air with photoshop software.

Approximate settings: (based on previous shoots)

2.0 secs @ F8.00, ISO 100, focal length 18 mm

This type of shoot is really a solitary activity and, because of current restrictions due to the Corona virus precautions, is one of the main reasons I have chosen this rather than my other plan, I will be able to do it without assistance.

Materials needed;

Workroom which can be darkened.

Small backdrop and base

Seafood – I have already purchased and frozen a selection of this which can be thawed as required.

A selection of Lewis crockery

Consumable items as required, see costs:

Costs –

Backdrops/base materials - 4 backdrops from Black velvet - £36.00

Food products - Fish, meats vegetables Approx. £30.00

Printing costs - 10 prints @ £8.00 £80.00

Travel N/a working from home

Misc Buffer for incidentals £20.00

Total £166.00

1815 Words.

RISK ASSESSMENT

Project: The Lewis Dresser

Location Name: Home address

Tel:XXXXXXXXXXX

Tick any identified hazard.

o Access (blocked or restricted) o Dangerous surfaces (slippery, wet)

o Vehicle parking at location X Trip Hazards Found

o Dangerous Services (elec/y, water). o Derelict Buildings (unsafe floors)

X Working in confined spaces oHazardous Substances (chemicals)

o Flammable Materials o Water (proximity to water)

o Rubbish/Vermin o Machinery (working, turning parts)

o Working at Height o Working on/near roads

o Driving in traffic o Noise (high sound levels)

o Weapons o Stunts

o Extreme Heat/Cold o Physical Exertion

o Using animals o Hostile Environment (violence)

o Special Needs (inexperienced, child, elderly) o Public/ Crowds

o Other Hazards.

Please specify

HAZARD SEVERITY - H / M / L Confined space - Low, Trip hazards - Low

People at Risk - Who photographer, how many? -1

Likelihood. H / M / L

Risk Control Adequate - Yes / No

Are the precautions proportionate to the overall risk?

Please expand this document as required to properly assess your risk

Details of Activity

Photography, low light photography using darkened room, tripod ,handheld lights.

Set up will be confined to blocked of area of 1 room, wire to be secured using heavy duty tracking.

Confined space in darkened room.

Trip Hazards

Ensure floor is clear of obstacles before switching off lights.

Use of headlamp for safe visibility.

Make sure no items are near edges or trailing. Secure cables with heavy duty cable.

Source of safety advice at location

Name : Julie Balfour

Signed:

Julie Balfour

Date:

25.03.2020

College Contact

Name:

Faculty Admin Assistance

Tel:

0141 375 5226

Signed:

(Donna Wilkins)

Date:

Session 2019/ 20

Risk Assessment undertaken by:

This must be signed before the Shoot can go ahead.

I have read the above risk assessment and am satisfied that:

· Constitutes a proper and adequate risk assessment in respect of the programme activity.

· The precautions identified above are sufficient to control the risks.

· Adequate arrangements are in place to communicate risk assessment findings and to co-ordinate the safety arrangements of all those affected.

Plan your first 8steps – whilst this is likely to change, it can provide a loose framework Remember to account for additional opportunities

As I have a small studio space it is my intention to work from there, if however the studio has to close for any reason I will relocate to a space in my flat.

I have ordered some online backdrops which may compliment my compositions

I will be visiting the local fishmongers and buying in the foods I plan to shoot, these can be frozen until needed.

I will set up my backdrops and experiment with lighting etc until I am happy with the set up.

From my research it seems that it would be beneficial if I could shoot tethered so I will be researching how to do this while I await feedback on my proposal.

I have a number of Light tools already but I will research this further and add to these.

I will continue to work on my photoshopping skills so that I can get the best possible results from layered images.

As I want the final images to be in the Fine Art genre I will be printing on a Hahnemuble paper, type to be decided.

References

Anthony Epes. 2020. How To Plan A Photo Project * Anthony Epes. [online] Available at: <https://www.citiesatdawn.com/how-to-plan-a-photo-project/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Digital Photography School. 2020. Step By Step Tutorial For How To Shoot Tethered. [online] Available at: <https://digital-photography-school.com/tutorial-shoot-tethered/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Encyclopedia Britannica. 2020. Alcide Dessalines D' Orbigny | French Paleontologist. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alcide-Dessalines-d-Orbigny> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Facebook.com. 2020. Redirecting.... [online] Available at: <https://www.facebook.com/pg/kennycaedonia/about/?ref=page_internal> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Internationalphotomag.com. 2020. Photobiography: Harold Ross | International Photography Magazine. [online] Available at: <http://internationalphotomag.com/harold-ross-photo-biography/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Isleoflewischessset.co.uk. 2020. The Isle Of Lewis. [online] Available at: <https://www.isleoflewischessset.co.uk/isle-lewis.html> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Lauraletinsky.com. 2020. Laura Letinsky → THE DOG AND THE WOLF. [online] Available at: <https://lauraletinsky.com/photographs/the-dog-and-the-wolf/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

MacDonald, F., 2020. Sculpting A Photograph With Light. [online] Lens Blog. Available at: <https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/with-light-sculpting-a-photograph/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Old Book Illustrations. 2020. Dance Of The Aymara People | Old Book Illustrations. [online] Available at: <https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/writers/orbigny-alcide/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Pixpa. 2020. 15 Types Of Photography Genres To Pursue As A Professional Photographer. [online] Available at: <https://www.pixpa.com/blog/types-of-photography> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

TIME.com. 2020. Last Meals On Death Row, Texas - Photo Essays. [online] Available at: <http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2095889_2316169,00.html> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

Widewalls. 2020. Still Life Photographers Who Give A Fresh Meaning To Vanitas. [online] Available at: <https://www.widewalls.ch/still-life-photographers/> [Accessed 25 March 2020].

#PersonalProject #Gradedunitproposal #gradedunit #HND1

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upennmanuscripts · 5 years ago

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Question of the Week: “What will you do when he comes at you with the sickle?”

Fifty-two discoveries from the BiblioPhilly project, No. 31/52

Denis Faucher, manuscript additions to Hendrik Herp, Speculum perfectionis (Mirror of Perfection), Venice: Sabio, 1524; University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Codex 1620, fols. 1v, miniature of a Nun on a Cross, and 3r, miniature of the Mememto mori, both by Denis Faucher, after 1524

As we approach the end of October, we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog posts to bring you a seasonally appropriate reminder of the grisly fate that awaits us all. This week, we delve into an item from the University of Pennsylvania’s holdings (not formally within the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project but closely associated with it, and now accessible through the main BiblioPhilly interface), a sammelband or hybrid volume that consists of a printed book sandwiched between two manuscript gatherings. Despite the extraordinary morbid imagery present in these hand-written and illuminated sections, the book in question has been little studied to-date, despite the fact that we can name its author (who was also its scribe and artist) with great precision.

The printed core of the book is an edition of the fifteenth-century Franciscan mystic Hendrik Herp’s Mirror of Perfection issued in Venice in 1524. The two eight-folio manuscript quires that bookend it contain texts authored by Denis Faucher (1487–1562), a mystical poet and Benedictine monk with close links to the South of France. Faucher’s authorship was deduced by Norman P. Zacour and Rudolf Hirsch in their catalogue of the manuscripts of the University of Pennsylvania, published in 1965.1 They were able to locate the hymn to Saint Catherine, which begins “Festa lux mundo rutilans coruscat…” in the standard index of hymns, Ulysse Chevalier’s Repertorium hymnologicum.2 At numerous points in the manuscript portions, the rubrics tell us that the poems were written by a certain “Dionysius,” all but confirming Faucher’s identity.

Surviving information on Faucher’s biography is quite rich, and corroborates the notion that he actually transcribed and decorated his own devotional manuals.3 He was born in Arles and began his religious vocation in 1508 at the Benedictine monastery in Polinore, near Mantua, but was based for the majority of his career at the Abbey of Lérins off the coast of Provence, where he was elected prior in 1548. This storied island monastery was the subject of several early monographs, which discuss Faucher at length, and mention his activities as a spiritual advisor and provider of edifying religious texts to various mentors.4 Most fascinatingly, these sources also mention Faucher’s work as a scribe and johnny-come-lately illuminator.

The Abbey of Lérins, France (photo: Alberto Fernandez Fernandez, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0)

The poems by Faucher present in the sammelband are mostly addressed to a scholasticate, a nun in the training period following the novitiate, and concern the attainment of spiritual perfection in the world. While hybrid books of print and manuscript could be useful for obtaining a customized set of literary texts, or for pairing mass-produced images with favorite prayers, they could also allow for spiritual advisors to add tailored content suited to pupils, in a manner reminiscent of the earliest thirteenth-century Books of Hours. Faucher’s interest in embellishing pre-existing books is conformed by an intriguing manuscript, signed by him, that surfaced on the market in 2018. Formerly in the collection of Arthur and Charlotte Vershbow (see Riverrun Books & Manuscripts, Hastings-on-Hudson, catalogue 2, 2018, item 1), and now in a European private collection, it consists of an apparently unfinished fifteenth-century Book of Hours that has had its miniatures and border decorations entirely painted by Faucher in a colorful style that can be described as a mid-sixteenth-century re-imagining of a century-old illuminated book. Faucher’s intervention is attested by an autograph inscription, dated 9 April 1554, in which he offers the book to his brother Jean on condition that it remain in the family in perpetuity (“Semper apud Faucherios maneant.”). Remarkably, this Book of Hours is mentioned in Barrali’s early-seventeenth-century biography of Faucher. Barrali even transcribed a portion of the inscription, and stated that the book was not only illuminated, but also written, by Faucher (“Haec sunt horaria preces manu propria ipsius Dionisii scriptae & miris figuris penicillo subtiliter adornatae….”).5

As seen at the top of the post, Faucher’s poems in the Penn sammelband are accompanied by two striking images. The style is extremely close to the miniatures in the aforementioned Book of Hours, confirming that Faucher’s hand was responsible not just for the images but also for the texts as well. The first image shows a nun in a black habit being crucified, with a snake biting a heart, representing sin, entwined around her left arm (fol. 1v). The lit oil lamp the nun holds in her right hand represents faith and refers to the parable of the Wise Virgins (who tended their lamps). This remarkable iconography merits further study, as apart from its brief mention (and illustration–thanks to digitaztion) in a recent article on the figure of the crucified abbess in the New World, it is totally absent from art-historical literature.6

Ms. Codex 1620, fol. 1v, detail of miniature of a Nun on a Cross by Denis Faucher, after 1524

Arrayed around the nun are illusionistic scrolls with quotations from scripture: Matthew 25:41: “Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire;” Matthew 5:16: “So let your light shine before men;” Psalm 118:120: “Pierce thou my flesh with thy fear;” Psalm 118:37: “Turn away my eyes that they may not behold vanity;” Psalm 140:3: “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth: and a door round about my lips;” 1 Corinthians 15:56: “Now the sting of death is sin;” Luke 12:35: “Let your loins be girt;” Psalm 118:116: “Uphold me according to thy word, and I shall live: and let me not be confounded in my expectation”; Jeremiah 2:2: “I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals;” Psalm 118:101: “I have restrained my feet from every evil way: that I may keep thy words/order;” and Galatians 2:19: “I am nailed with Christ to the Cross” (with a feminine ending in Latin).

The four-line poem below can be roughly translated as: “The heavenly bridegroom, so that he could appear beautiful / Made this likeness of a chaste girl for your eyes. / Do not be pleased by her face, or lose your shame in front of what is shown here, / only pray now for those who are dead.”

Ms. Codex 1620, fol. 1v, detail of poem

The second image (fol. 3r) consists of a somewhat more conventional memento mori, at least pictorially. A medallion hangs from a stalk of lilies, its frame decorated with bones and pansies (pensées in French). At its center, a skull in a circular mirror is intended to invoke a sense of self-consciousness in the viewer’s mind. The scroll above the image bears a further moralizing extract from the Bible: “In all thy works, remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Ecclesiasticus 7:40). Similar scriptural quotations are found surrounding a painted skull in a manuscript addition to a printed Book of Hours of 1491 now in Cambridge University Library (Inc.5.D.1.19 [2530], fol. 4r).

Ms. Codex 1620, fol. 3r, detail of miniature of the Mememto mori by Denis Faucher, after 1524

The two vertical scrolls, however, bear a unique message, likely authored by Faucher himself: “If you tremble in fear looking at this image of death, what will you do when he comes at you with the sickle?” (“Si fremis inspiciens mortis turbata figuram, quid facies cum te falx truculenta trahet?”). Interestingly, the verb faucher in French means to mow, reap, or knock down, and it comes from the Latin root falx (sickle, scythe) used in the verse. One wonders whether the author was indulging in a macabre pun. The large scroll directly beneath the image contains a quatrain that, in Barrali’s early-seventeenth-century history of Lérins,7 was ascribed to Faucher and said to be dedicated to “Anna de Boufremont,” possibly Anne de Bauffremont-Sennecey Abbess of Tarascon, suggesting that this otherwise obscure figure may have been the recipient of the present hybrid book, early in her career.

The final scroll is an adaptation of Saint Bonaventure’s exhortation: “When death comes, no one accepts it willingly, except for he who prepared for it, while living, with good works” (“Mortem venientem nemo libenter accipit, nisi qui se ad ipsam, dum viveret, bonis operibus praeparavit”).

Ms. Codex 1620, fol. 3r, detail of scroll

All good things to keep in mind in the run up to All Saints’ Day. Happy Halloween!

from WordPress http://bibliophilly.pacscl.org/question-of-the-week-what-will-you-do-when-he-comes-at-you-with-the-sickle/

#Fifty-two discoveries #University of Pennsylvania

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hymn2000 · 5 years ago

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Chiquitita - MCU AU fanfic - C19

Story summary: Something strange is happening. Someone from space has made their way to Earth, armed with a strange weapon. Targeting teenagers, their ray gun, when fired, turns the victim into a toddler. The Avengers set out to stop this, and find a way to reverse the effects. However, they don’t all come out of the battle unscathed.

Previous chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Part of my Frostiron and Spiderson series.

Warnings/themes: de-aging, family stuff, corporal punishment (early chapters only), mental health stuff, hurt/comfort, hospital/medical stuff

Content warning: this chapter follows strong themes by way of discussion about death and bereavement, including mentions of child and infant death. If you want to skip this chapter and want a summary of important points in it, please comment and I'll be happy to give you an overview

Chapter 19 - Memories, Good Days, Bad Days

Bruce stepped up and offered to look after Peter on Thursday so Loki and Tony could go out. It was the seventh of the month, and Bruce knew there was always an unavoidable commitment on that day.

Tony grabbed Loki’s hand just inside the cemetery gates.

“I’m not ready”

Loki looked at him. “Ok. Do you want to have a little walk round first?”

Tony nodded, keeping tight hold of Loki. “Can you take the flowers?”

“Of course”

Loki took the bouquet from him, balancing it against his free arm. Loki squeezed Tony’s hand reassuringly, starting down the adjacent path. They walked for some time, before turning down one row of graves. There were lots of black marble kerb headstones filled with coloured glass pebbles and personalised memorials. Many of them had cards and flowers and plaques and statues and candles. Some had bottles of beer balanced on their edges, obviously something the deceased had been a fan of. Many of them showed the persons interests in life;- television programmes, songs, hobbies, and the like. Many of the mens ones had football team logos and colours on them. Almost all of them had photos of the person included. They were big, shrine-like monuments, and they were beautiful.

Tony held Loki’s hand tight as they walked down the rows. They later stopped in front of one of the graves. Blue pebbles. Little statues of Disney characters. A framed poem about daughters.

“She was only eight”

“Does it make you wonder what happened?”

Tony nodded. “These people are all so young. I think a lot of them, those teenagers, it could have been traffic accidents or something... Illnesses, maybe. This little girl... Maybe she was sick”

“We’ll never know, unless it explicitly states. But it’s not our place to know” Loki looked at the picture of the little girl printed onto the headstone. “Aside from that stillborn, I think this is the youngest out of these ones”

“One of them was six” Tony said. He swallowed hard. “These are nice, aren’t they? They’re so personal. You can tell how much all these people were loved”

“Is it bad, do you think, that I like looking at them?”

“No” Tony shook his head. “I do too, in a way. It’s peaceful, and it’s interesting. Just... it’s horrible, isn’t it? Loss”

Loki’s mouth twitched. He started to walk again, so Tony did too. They were slow, taking their time, reading everything, looking at everything. Tony stopped again, in front of a grave for a young baby.

“Three months old” he said. “There’s a baby and child cemetery here, isn’t there? Why are some of them over here?”

“I suppose it’s up to the family where they want them buried” Loki said. “Maybe it’s easier for them, having them separate from everyone else’s lost little ones”

Tony looked up, and Loki did too. In the near distance, they could see the start of that section of the cemetery. They could see the first few headstones, one of them clearly shaped like a teddy bear, and age balloons visible flying above.

“Do you want to go over?”

“Oh Tony, I can’t” Loki said. “Even just looking from over here breaks my heart. I hate that that bit even has to exist”

Tony leant his head against Loki’s shoulder. “I’ve imagined this twice”

“Imagined what?”

“Coming here for... someone else”

Loki stayed quiet.

“The night of the accident, it went through my head. Until we saw him. And again that night he had that building site accident, and he had a reaction to those antibiotics, and his heart stopped”

“Don’t” Loki said. “Seriously, don’t. Even if it’s just a concept come to light from fear, I can’t bear to hear it. It makes it feel like a very real possibility and I just can’t torture myself like that. Not over our son”

“I’m sorry. It’s just... My mind is absolutely racing right now. I don’t even really know why”

Loki sighed and squeezed his hand. “It’s just like that sometimes. We’ve had a tough few weeks too”

“Loki... You’ve seen babies die before. How do you cope with it? Do you remember them all, or does it all kinda merge together?”

“Jo Jo and I have a book” Loki said. “It’s a blue marbled notebook with a stork carved into the cover. He writes in blue, and I write in green. We’ve got the names of every baby we’ve lost in there. We write their name, or their family name if they didn’t have one, and we write the dates and the times. We write about what happened and how we felt about it. We get it out of our systems as quickly as possible. It’s easier to get out the emotional side of it before we have to do the official reports... I haven’t lost anywhere near as many as I’ve seen delivered. The NICU nurses aren’t so lucky”

“When we have our baby, do you think you’ll quit?”

Loki paused for a moment, looking down at the teddies and toys on the babies grave.

“...No, I don’t think so. If I could go back to work there after my long hospital stay, and after losing May, and after all the times Peter’s ended up in A&E, I don’t think having our baby is going to make me give it up” he said. “I think I’ll carry on regardless”

Tony swallowed. “I like Oliver”

“Hm?”

“For a boy” Tony said. “Oliver for a boy. Oliver Stark”

“What about a girl?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought of anything for a girl yet”

“What about May?”

Tony went quiet for a moment. “I don’t think Peter would like it. Not as a first name. Maybe as a middle name. Something May Stark”

“Princess”

“What?”

“Princess” Loki repeated. “I had a dream... We thought we’d decided on a shortlist of names, but then the baby was born and she was just too perfect for any of them. We were cradling her in our arms and we were talking to her, calling her our little princess, and we looked at each other, and we just knew...”

“Princess...” Tony said. “Princess May Stark. Or Oliver Stark. Oliver Loki Stark?”

“I think we may need to brainstorm that one a little further” Loki said softly, but he was touched.

“I think it’d be nice to name him after you. I think we should name the baby after someone, anyway”

“And here I was, thinking we had said that we were going to wait until conception before thinking up baby names”

“We also originally said we’d wait until the new year before asking Peter if we could adopt him, and we barely lasted a fortnight before we cracked on that one”

Loki smiled at him. “Ah, you’re right there. So. Princess May Stark, or Oliver Stark. Loki, Tony, Peter, and Princess”

“Or Loki, Tony, Peter, and Oliver” Tony raised Loki’s hand to his mouth and kissed it. He took a deep breath. “I think I’m ready now”

Loki nodded “I think I am too”

They looked down at the grave. The headstone was still pretty as ever; black marble with gold lettering, chosen by Peter. But after seeing all of the kerbed memorials, it looked almost plain. The grave was still covered in flowers and candles and trinkets - Loki and Tony knew they weren’t the only people who still visited regularly - but underneath all of that, it was just a mound of grass. Loki took the flowers in his arms from the cellophane and set them in the grave flower vases. He stood up again, taking Tony’s hand once more.

It felt strange, being there on the seventh without Peter. All three of them visited often, sometimes alone, sometimes together, whenever they felt they should or whenever they felt they needed or wanted to. Peter always brought flowers. Tony often wrote a letter and, when visiting alone, would sit and read it out loud. Loki often went empty-handed, but he’d sit on the path at the foot of the grave, talking, and imagining that maybe she was somewhere out there, watching and talking back to him. Sometimes he felt like he could hear her voice and sense her presence. He just wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not.

But the seventh, that was the day the three of them always went together. They all dressed smartly, they bought an expensive bouquet from the florist Peter favoured, and they went down to visit May’s resting place together. Peter had struggled considerably at the start. He’d start to get funny around the fourth or fifth of the month, and he’d often have some sort of fit or tantrum on the sixth before going all funny and shaky and whiny on the morning of the seventh.

For a long time he’d hated it. He still went, and he wouldn’t miss it for anything. But every time the seventh popped up on the calendar, he felt sick. Even now, when things were less of a hardship and more of a routine, his mind was thrown back to that fateful day where he’d woken up at the Stark’s, checked his phone and seen it was the seventh of January. He hated thinking of that day, which had started so nice and normal and ended with his entire world crashing down around him. He hated the feeling that he could have done more. He hated remembering being told. He hated hating; remembering how much he hated the look of his room when he got to the Stark’s that night, how he hated the feeling of having lost everything, how he hated feeling so unbearably sick, how he found himself hating himself, hating the world, hating it all.

A lot of the time he could avoid delving back into the day completely, but not always. But he was lucky, because his parents went through the same loss, and they knew how hard it was for him. They never made him feel bad for struggling.

“She deserves better than this” Tony said after a long silence.

“She never should have died”

“I don’t just mean that” Tony said. “We can’t do anything about that. I mean... I want to update this”

“Update it?”

“The grave. All those ones we just looked at are so beautiful and special and lovely. We never really looked into it properly. We should give her one of those. Give her something more than a headstone and grass. We should look into it properly, get it done. Give her a memorial just as special and lovely as she was”

Loki looked at Tony, at the tears in his eyes and the quivering of his lip. Tony kept his eyes on the grave a few moments more, and the turned and threw his arms round Loki, and he started to sob. He didn’t say anything;- he didn’t need to. Loki held Tony tight and closed his eyes, and it was only a matter of seconds before he broke down too. All of it still felt so raw sometimes. Whenever they visited, they wondered what she’d think. What would she think now, when Peter had been turned into a toddler? What would she think if she could see them? Would she be able to tell that they’d been doing their absolute best by him, ever since that night May had been marked DOA? They liked to think she knew. She always left Peter with them if she was going away or something was happening which meant she couldn’t look after him. She even gave them a type of custody agreement, for goodness sake; every Wednesday and every second weekend. They were all happy with that. They knew where they stood. So of course she knew they’d take the best possible care of him, no matter what. She trusted them. She’d be proud of how far Peter had come. She’d be relieved that he was being looked after by people who loved him more than anything else in the world.

But sometimes, at times like this, none of that reassuring knowledge mattered. Sometimes, all they wanted was to be able to pick up the phone and talk to her. They didn’t always miss her quite so painfully, but the loss was still felt at the back of their minds. On days like today, they just wanted to hug her again. They wanted to hold her and laugh with her and argue over what they were going to do together that day. They’d been such brilliantly close friends (and a little more besides), and that was a hard thing to say goodbye to.

“Why does it hurt more when we’re going through stuff?”

“Because she was always at the other end of the phone to help us through it before” Loki said. “Because she was part of our family”

“I felt so bad for throwing up when I identified the body. All the staff were so nice, saying it wasn’t uncommon, moving me away and getting me a drink and talking to me like they completely understood...” Tony let go of Loki, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “Peter wanted to see her. Do you remember him shouting and begging and pleading with us, saying he needed to see her? He was absolutely beside himself. He near enough screamed the house down when we said no”

“It would have absolutely killed him” Loki said. “Tony, I don’t know, what you saw that night at the hospital, but considering I know her injuries were incompatible with life, I don’t want to know. But I saw her at the funeral home, after she’d been cleaned and made up and looked after and- and prepared, and I absolutely could not deal with seeing her lying there, looking like herself but knowing she wasn’t really there, and you know that. If I was affected by it the way I was, imagine what it would have done to that little boy”

“I had to say no” Tony said. “I’d seen her at the hospital. I didn’t know they could do so much to make her look... Well. Like she was just sleeping. But even if I had known, I still wouldn’t’ve let him go”

“He said to me once that he was glad we hadn’t let him” Loki said. “Quite a while after everything, he said he didn’t think he would have been able to deal with it. He’s not sore about us saying no. He thanks us, in a way”

“He... He absolutely fell apart that year and we just watched. We watched him break, and we did so much wrong. We shouted at him. We sent him to school way too early and we know how that ended. We didn’t address the PTSD until he was at St Hendrick’s. We should’ve forced him into counselling straight away”

“We were grieving, Tony. We were trying to deal with our own grief while also suddenly having him full time, and while trying to juggle the rest of our lives too. We didn’t know how best to deal with his trauma, and losing May was definitely at the forefront of our minds. Neither of us were in a position to turn around and decide that what was wrong with Peter was more than grief, and we certainly wouldn’t have known what to do about it then either”

“He stopped speaking. I got cross at him for that for such a long time. I made him cry at work events because of the way I spoke to him and refused to understand the condition when he couldn’t talk to people. I shouldn’t’ve taken him to work events anyway; he was far too fragile”

“Maybe” Loki said. “We’re both at fault, but we did the best we could under the circumstances. I made mistakes too. The way I treated him when I found out he’d been skiving from that first school, that wasn’t great, especially when we found out why he’d done it. The way I treated him that day he ran away to the airport and tried to go to England was even worse. I talked to him about it months later and he said he’d never been so scared of me before or since. He said it was like I’d turned into a completely different person, someone he didn’t know. He said he thought I was going to injure him... And then there’s my sabbatical. I went for the right reasons, but I should have told you first, and I shouldn’t have walked out and left him alone in the house the way I did”

“Those few months while you were away were some of the hardest in my life. I did things I regretted in that time too” Tony swallowed hard. “That year was horrendous for all of us. We all did stupid, reckless things, and we all hurt each other and made some pretty catastrophic errors. But we got through it, didn’t we? We made amends. We forgave each other and we got help and we’ve worked through it. But, you know, despite all of that, we always had something going for us, didn’t we?”

“And what was that?”

“We always loved each other. We didn’t always like each other, but we always loved each other”

Loki put an arm round Tony’s shoulders. They looked at May’s grave, and drops of water started falling from the sky. At first it was just spitting, but it soon came down heavily. They listened to the sound of the rain against the pavement and the leaves of the trees. They listened to the thunder that began to rumble above them. They swallowed, and rested their heads together.

“We have a son, who can and will crawl into our beds when he’s scared during the night. He’ll climb onto our laps for a cuddle when he’s sad. He’ll come crying to us when something bad happens, and he’ll tell us all about it. Our son trusts us, and he loves us, and he knows that we love him too” Loki said. “He knows we’re not perfect, but I think, like us, he knows that all of our triumphs have far outweighed our mistakes. I know we’ve been through a lot together, but when you take those away, we’re happy. All of us. We’re a happy family. Despite everything”

“...A couple of months ago he came into the study. You know he’s not a fan of the study”

“He says the dark wood makes him feel unnerved”

“Right. Well, he came into the study, and he was all teary-eyed. And I was like, what’s the matter, darling? And he came and crawled onto my lap and cuddled into me and said, he said he wasn’t crying because he was sad. He said he was crying because he was happy. And I asked him why, and he said; ‘because you’re my dad’”

Loki took a deep, shaky breath. “He’s not what we’re going home to”

“I know” Tony closed his eyes for a moment. “We’ve got a toddler to go home to. He won’t be a toddler forever though. Your brother’s gonna make sure that reversal gun gets sorted”

“He’s a sweet little toddler. He’s so cute and lovely and funny and happy. I really do love him, Tony”

“I do too. He’s brilliant, but... We adopted a teenager”

“It’s going to be hard letting little Peter go”

“We’ll get normal Peter back. The Peter he’s supposed to be: big Peter, teenage Peter” Tony said. “We’ll get him back... We’ll still remember little Peter, though. We’ve got the memories, and the pictures”

“And all of his things”

Tony put an arm round Loki’s waist. “May would laugh at us. Especially me. She’d say surely the great Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark could deal with watching Spongebob and making up juice bottles for a few weeks”

“The school rang me on Monday” Loki said.

“Yeah?”

“They know what’s going on, obviously. They said they’re happy to offer Peter a place in the nursery at their sister school while he’s a toddler”

“Oh” Tony said. “What did you say?”

“I said thank you, but we’re not interested”

Tony held him tighter. “Good”

#my writing #fanfiction #mcu fanfiction #marvel fanfiction #frostiron #irondad and spiderson

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echodrops · 6 years ago

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The Promises I Made (2018)

For the past twelve years, I’ve spent every New Year’s Eve compiling a list of fifty promises I intend to keep or fulfill over the next twelve months. The results have been truly amazing, and I have kept some promises I never thought I could. Although this year was really, really bad, oh lord... This year, for New Year’s, there will be a new set of promises for to me keep, but here are the old ones, for review!

The Promises I Made (2018 edition)

1) I will be less anxious at work and not let passing comments from students or passive rudeness get under my skin as much. Status: Somewhat kept; I feel like I wasn’t as upset by students being rude this year as last year, but then again that might just be because I had better students. XD

2) I will be more proactive about my responsibilities for the college newspaper committee so we can make a great product. Status: Uhh… Can I count this as kept if the newspaper committee was put on hold due to decisions from the higher administration, so I didn’t have to be proactive about these responsibilities?

3) I will actually visit Mexico, not just accidentally take a wrong turn and end up there... Status: Broken. You know how some people like live next door to a restaurant for years but somehow never get around to trying it? Yeah that’s me, with the entire country of Mexico. Like, I literally live less than a mile from the border… I really should just go get lunch one day or something…

4) I will actually decorate my office with all the stuff I have had sitting around at my house for months. Status: Actually kept. I don’t feel like the decorating is really done in the office, but the decorations are no longer cluttering up my actual home instead of the office!

5) I will be better about focusing so that I can grade quickly and feel less overwhelmed throughout the course of the semester. Status: You know, it’s hard to say whether or not I did grade more quickly because spring semester I took on a really annoying class schedule and it screwed me over hard. I feel like I was a little faster this year, but I felt more overwhelmed than ever.

6) I will get the scratch on my Camaro buffed a bit to clear up the parts that can be cleared. Status: I just… didn’t do this. Broken.

7) I will repair the mortar on the fence outside the Utah house and seal the bricks on the window sills. Status: Somewhat kept/broken. I fixed the mortar on the fence outside but did not seal the windowsill bricks.

8) I will finish at least 26 books over the course of this year. Status: Look man. If my promise had been “Finish 26 fanfics longer than 100,000 words,” I would have blown this promise out of the water. But as it stands, I think I only made it to 10-ish printed books. I’m naughty. 9) I will retrim the grape vine at the Utah house and also spray/get someone to spray to kill the wasps. Status: Broken. I don’t know why I thought it would be smart to make a promise about trimming the grape vine, since that’s something you do in fall… when I’m not even in Utah… Hrmmmm… 10) I will get the mail man to stop delivering the wrong mail to my box because I’m getting ten times more mail for other people than for myself. Status: I had so many opportunities to do this, and I just didn’t. RIP.

11) I will have the fire escape window installed on the Utah house to make it legal to rent. Status: Broken. That’s a lotta money fam.

12) I will update Home and a Half at least four times (and no more double posts, just be chill Yehn, be chill for once…) Status: WOW. I was so, so optimistic, wasn’t I? 13) I will actually build all the furniture I bought for the Texas house and never assembled. Status: Mostly kept? I think there’s like one more thing I haven’t assembled (the spare futon), but up to this point I haven’t needed it, so...

14) I will actually watch Stranger Things since everyone keeps nagging me about it. Status: Broken. I just didn’t do this at all.

15) I will go to a dentist and get this annoying wisdom tooth removed and also see what can be done for my front tooth that got pushed out of alignment by said wisdom tooth. This really needs to happen ‘cause the partially erupted tooth is killing me. D; Status: Wisdom tooth is still hurting me… I am the worst at taking care of myself… 2019… the year of self-care?

16) I will take a road trip with my friend Karen like we’ve been talking about for a while. Status: Actually did this! Finally something completely kept. It was a great trip too.

17) I will continue to serve as the video game club’s faculty sponsor. Status: I was too busy… T_T Broken.

18) I will lower my credit card debt by at least $2000. Moving is so expensive. T_T Status: I ended up having major set-backs this year in the form of having to pay out of pocket for a new windshield in my car and also my Playstation flat out dying on me, so this goal did not get satisfied. But now that my car is completely paid off (hell yeah!), I’ll finally be able to start making big payments on this sucker.

19) I will have ALL my lesson plans planned out in advance for Fall 2018 so that I can just chill next fall. Status: YO THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED. There were still some instances of needing to fix things, but overall I did actually have all the lessons done in advance, and that was probably the only reason I survived fall at all lol.

20) I will finish painting the living room in the Utah house, finally. Status: I… forgot I even made this promise. Yikes.

21) I will be better about walking my dog because I have been slacking lately. Status: I wanted to be better, but every fucking time I go to walk my dog, the neighbor’s Chihuahua runs through their fence and tries to attack my dog, so literally every walk becomes a nightmare and there were a lot of days when I just didn’t want to deal with that stress… :/

22) I will finish a game other than FFXIV this year. Man, so many games have been piling up… Status: I couldn’t even find time to play FFXIV this year, let alone another game… 23) I will write a new, original short story. Status: I… did not write like at all this year. 2018 was just really hard for me. T_T

24) I will get my black glasses fixed this year, finally. Status: Uh… Kept… I think? At least I think this promise was referring to the damage to the frames of my black glasses, which I did get fixed. But now the lens has a scratch… V_V

25) I will attend more professional development/on-campus events and trainings to bolster my evaluation. Status: Eh, kept? I’m signed up for a conference and did some extra training thing that I can throw on the sheet, so I’m calling it good.

26) I will ink and color at least the one drawing of Yehn’zi that I finished sketching a while ago and did absolutely nothing with. Status: A whole lot of nope on this one.

27) I will really finish moving in to my Texas house, no more “I’ll fish out the clothes from the Space Bag when I need them but never actually hang them up.” Status: I’m counting this as kept, since the only thing that didn’t happen is that I never took the plastic wrap off the top of my nightstand, but like… hey that’s a really convenient way to avoid water spots so…

28) I will volunteer at a non-profit organization to fulfill my “service to the community” work requirement. I mean, I will volunteer from the goodness of my heart… yeah… Status: Shitttt this didn’t happen and it really needed to… Oh dear…

29) I will level ALL my classes to 70 in Stormblood. Status: This also did not happen. No time to play.

30) I will reach 1000 followers on tumblr. You should follow me. I’m only marginally a waste of time and space. Status: Kept and exceeded! I’m at like… 1540-ish right now I believe.

31) I will find a salon so I can get my hair dyed consistently instead of looking like a shabby blob half way through each semester. Status: Well, the good news is that my hair color fades so nicely that one of my students actually asked if the strawberry blonde was my natural color. But uh… no… it’s not… so…

32) I will find some way to pay back my coworker for all the incredibly nice things she has done for me already. Status: I mean, I took her out to lunch a lot but I don’t know if I really managed to feel “equal” on the debts I owe her for helping me out.

33) I will see an Anhinga (it’s a kind of bird!) in Texas. Status: Kept! The very first time I went looking for it, I found it, so score.

34) I will win Camp NaNoWriMo this year (because November might never be a possibility for me again, given how much grading I seem to end up doing during that month). T_T Status: Broken. Again, I wrote almost nothing this year. Too much stress. T_T

35) I will scout for new neighborhoods to move to with better internet access and closer to my work. Status: Kept. It’s still a bit too early for me to be looking for specific places, but I have a better sense of where I’ll be aiming for when I do go to buy something.

36) I will try to get better at Spanish, possibly by using my DuoLingo app more. Status: …Broken.

37) I will buy sod for the front part of the Utah house so that my house actually looks decent from the curb. Status: I COULD HAVE… But I didn’t.

38) I will be more proactive about commenting, reccing, and reblogging content I appreciate online because I find so many wonderful things but I rarely say as much about them as I should. Status: I think I was worse about this than last year. I miss the days when I didn’t feel like every five minutes taken to myself was stealing from my work responsibilities…

39) I will actually use my Instagram account to upload my photography somewhere public. Status: I forgot I made this promise too. Oops…

40) I will go dolphin-watching in the Gulf. Status: Somewhat kept? I mean… I stood on the pier… And saw dolphins in the Gulf. That counts, right???

41) I will clear all the photos and videos off my phone and camera SD cards because they are overflowing. Status: Kept but now they’re just sitting on the hard drive unsorted and in a confusing jumble of unnamed folders...

42) I will update my calendar with important dates—holidays, birthdays, etc.—and be productive about sending cards and well-wishes. Status: Broken, just totally broken.

43) I will complete my series of posts about Yato/Hiyori. Really. Status: >___> One day…

44) I will not work later than 10pm on any given work night. I can’t keep running myself ragged. I need to brake sometimes. Status: HA. I was really hopeful. More broken promises…

45) I will explore some new places/cities in Texas that I have not been before. Status: I… did not do this. I had a chance to do this and I didn’t. D;

46) I will get a gardener for the Texas house because the lawn is basically unmanageable by myself. Status: Kept. Because… the lawn really was unmanageable by myself so…

47) I will clean out the fridge more often. No expired milk or ancient leftovers this year please… Status: >_____> Ooopppssss.

48) I will get some sort of watering system set up so that the lawn at the Texas house isn’t a total disaster anymore. Status: Somewhat kept. I did buy hoses and sprinklers to water the lawn but mostly it’s just been raining a lot and that made the grass greener on its own.

49) I will help make one of the super complicated cookies from the new cookie cookbook I bought for Karen. Status: Actually kept! We learned much about the workings of cookie guns.

50) I will keep these promises. Status: Ouch, this one hurts a little.

Totals Kept promises: 12 Broken promises: 29 Somewhat kept/broken promises: 9

Y I K E S ™. I thought last year was crazy and was so hopeful for this year… I had NO IDEA how hard this last year was going to be. So many broken promises; I feel so guiltyyyyy. DDDD; Although I’m still at the same job and not planning on dramatically swapping entire career fields again, things are still in the process of settling and there’s still SO much more I feel like I need to work on. 2018 was the year of being constantly overwhelmed. Unfortunately, 2019 doesn’t seem like it’s going to be much calmer because I’m still working on designing classes and getting my lessons ironed out, but I at least no longer feel like I’m at rock bottom… So, I’m cautiously, very cautiously, feeling the tiniest bit optimistic?

Let’s do this, 2019! The new set of promises will be up by tomorrow.

#50 promises #new year's resolutions #2018 feels like a thousand pound weight on my shoulders #time to shake it off #new year #IRL stuff #welcome 2019!!

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chpinthestacks · 6 years ago

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In the Stacks with Lara Mimosa Montes: Darrel Ellis

This past March, I visited OSMOS at 50 East 1st Street in Manhattan’s East Village to see some works by the Bronx-born painter and photographer Darrel Ellis. As far as I know, the last time any of Ellis’s works have been shown in New York was over fourteen years ago, in 2005, so it’s something of a big deal to see his work in the real world once again.

When I first began looking a bit more thoughtfully into Ellis’s biography upon recalling that he had been included in the exhibition Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960’s, a basic internet search yielded very few results, especially in comparison to Ellis’s peer group, which includes artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Apart from a short entry about Ellis on Visual AIDS and an exhibition catalog from 1996 published by Art in General to celebrate the posthumous, traveling exhibition which featured seventy of the artist’s works from his estate, there remains very little in print on the subject of Darrel Ellis. Given the works of his that I was able to view online and the little bits that I had been able to glean from his bio, this just didn’t sit right with me. This is an artist whose work needs to be known.

Self-portrait based on Peter Hujar photograph, c. 1990, painting on canvas, 22” × 24”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

Darrel Ellis was born December 5th, 1958. He died April 3rd, 1992, a couple of months before David Wojnarowicz, whose full-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, I saw last fall. Having encountered Wojnarowicz’s presence as a teenager through the fairly obscene underground films of Richard Kern [ie. “Stray Dogs” (1985) and “You Killed Me First” (1985)], it was definitely a trip seeing his work at the Whitney—it was packed to the point that I kind of didn’t want to be there. People love David now, I thought, a little moody.

As I moved through the museum’s galleries, I had to wonder what an artist like Wojnarowicz would think of all this posthumous looking and snapping. I had to ask myself: Why does the art world want to stage its appreciation for an artist like David Wojnarowicz now? Because the fucked up political future he had been observing finally came to pass? And if we are looking at David and the ambitious body of work he assembled during his lifetime and encountering it as emblematic of a certain downtown New York countercultural moment, or an idealized version of some queer, punk sensibility we associate with the ’80s and ’90s, then what else—and who else—in our historicization of that particular time drops out as a result?

I am not exempt from the “we” I speak of here; next to my bed currently sits a newly purchased copy of Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, published by Semiotext(e) just last year. My attention is turned towards David, too, and I suspect, unlike many of the tourists at the Whitney that day who might have been seeing his work for the first time, I had the luxury of living in New York City and participating in the art world in ways that allowed me to encounter his work IRL many times over the years and in several different contexts with varying degrees of politicization. I’ve even been lucky enough during my brief time working at a private arts college to teach and share his work with others. If I have a lot to say about David Wojnarowicz, it’s because I have had years of looking and thinking about his work alongside the many documented accounts of his critics, friends, admirers, and biographers, some of whom were fortunate enough to know him, and live to tell of their experiences (among my favorites of these accounts are those by artist Zoe Leonard, with thanks to Sarah Schulman).

The same, however, cannot be said of Darrel Ellis, so it is still something of an experiment: learning to look at and speak about his work, the impression it leaves on me. As of now, I cannot speculate as to how his art and reputation will fare in the wake of this strangely belated and renewed interest in the art historical ongoings and culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. [1]

Poster for Day Without Art, designed by Danny Tisdale Studio, 1994, offset lithograph on paper; 35” × 25 ⅝”. Courtesy of Visual AIDS. Background image features Darrel Ellis’s Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989.

When he died in the spring of 1992 of AIDS, Darrel Ellis was the same age as his father, Thomas Ellis: 33 years old. In 1958, Thomas, a postal clerk and aspiring photographer who briefly ran a portrait studio in Harlem with his wife, was killed by the police following an argument with two plainclothes detectives who had blocked his parked car. The injuries sustained from the altercation proved fatal. At the time of Thomas’s death, his wife was pregnant with Darrel. [2] Justice was never served.

These events and the life that preceded them, as documented by the senior Ellis in the many family photographs taken before Darrel was born in parts of the Bronx and Harlem during the 1950s, eventually made their way into Darrel’s work. In 1981, when Ellis was living in the Lower East Side with his then-lover and “unofficially” participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, the artist, writer, and independent curator Allen Frame recalls that Ellis had recently acquired some of his father’s black and white photographs from the 1950s which he was reinterpreting with ink on paper at the time. [3]

In 1983, BOMB magazine published some works from this period. [4]

Left: Darrel Ellis, My Mother and My Sister from My Father’s Photograph, 1982. Right: Thomas Ellis, Picnic NYC, 1953.

The diptych featuring Thomas Ellis’s photograph alongside his son’s interpretation published thirty years later is uncanny. In Darrel’s version, there are outlines, blurs, shadows, and contours. Certain details, like the density of the grass or the striped pattern on the young girl’s shorts fall away in favor of other, more plain facts, like “here’s a family.” The position of the subjects in relation to one another would suggest even without our knowing that these folks are kin. Their togetherness in time is an indisputable fact. Prior to Darrel’s being-in-the-world, Thomas’s photograph establishes the family as existing within a shared visual field: they had a life and their being together—whether it was in a park or at home—appears as a notably carefree aspect of that life.

Ellis continued experimenting with his father’s photographs: the layers of technique and reinterpretation that would distinguish his images from the ones taken by his father would become more pronounced. Allen Frame observes, “Between 1984 and 1986, [Ellis] made a series of photographs of his mother, brother, and sisters, from which he produced a new body of work evolving from screenprint to experimental photograph to painting. The screenprints, made while he was living at his mother’s apartment after breaking up with his boyfriend and coming out to his family, were compiled into a book at the Lower East Side Printshop, with the help of Susan Spencer Crowe.” [5] The book, published by Appearances Press in 1986, reveals various domestic scenes and interior living spaces depicting relatives sitting in the kitchen, around the family table, doing each other’s hair, laying in bed. They are sparse in terms of detail, and resemble studies of the generic and the sublime as they depict the taken for granted scenes from a life. Again, what stands out are not the faces of the individuals pictured, but their relation to one another as suggested by their body language, particularly the casual nature of their closeness. [6]

At some point, while looking at the drawings alongside the later photographs, I remember saying to my new friend, Kyle, who had accompanied me to see the show at OSMOS, “I don’t see how the artist who made these drawings also made these photographs. Or rather, I can’t see that the photographs were made by someone who primarily identified as a painter. . .” Kyle responded, “I can see it. . . Maybe it has to do more with understanding Darrel’s relationship as a painter to the photograph as a surface.”

Kyle was onto something. In an interview, Ellis said of his process, “The idea of putting a photo on any surface other than photo paper gives you a lot of freedom. The process became [one] about animating the photo, about revivification.” [7] Perhaps what was painterly about Ellis’s photographs, particularly those that reinterpreted his father’s negatives, was that he treated the original images as content rather than object. In other words, by projecting the negatives on a wall and then experimenting with both his position as the photographer in relation to the projected image and the dimensionality of the surface onto which the image was projected by creating sculptural forms onto which the projections would appear, Ellis transformed his father’s negatives into surface. The resulting images that we are left with therefore are not really appropriations; they’re the being-with of a trace of a lost object—the trace being the negative, and the lost object, the father. As Ellis reflected of his father’s images, “When I look at those photographs sometimes, all I see is holes.” [8] I will never fail to be moved by those words.

Left: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, silver gelatin RC Print, 15 ¾” × 19 ¼”. Right: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, crayon and ink on paper, 10” × 12”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

When Ellis was discovered in a coma by his friends Susan Spencer Crowe and Bruce Dow in the spring of 1992 at his apartment off Franklin Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, “his last self-portrait was sitting on his easel beside his bed, eerily depicting him as he was found: eyes closed, lying on his bed in deep repose.” [9] After spending some time with Ellis’s work at OSMOS, I felt better able to appreciate how complicated the idea of the self-portrait must have been for Ellis if he was so compelled to return to it as a generative mode of inquiry. By adopting different mediums such as drawing, painting, and photography, while sometimes blending all three in the process to create an individual work, I imagine he must have felt provoked, if not also a bit estranged, by all the selves he had discovered through his practice.

Among Ellis’s self-portraits, perhaps the most recognized one is Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe which was featured in the now infamous Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing exhibition at Artists Space in 1989, curated by Nan Goldin. For the show, Ellis contributed two self-portraits, both of which were based on photographs taken of him by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. The caption in the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe reads: “I struggle to resist the frozen images of myself taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.” I’ve never seen either of the photographs Mapplethorpe or Hujar took of Ellis, but I remain haunted by the decision Ellis made to take back his own image. [10] I suspect that if during this time period, Ellis became that much more aware of his mortality following the discovery of his HIV status, then “the struggle to resist the frozen images” through the creation of the self-portrait forms part of the process by which the artist is able to reassert his right to his body as well as his right to explore acts of self-representation. I imagine then for Ellis: the self-portrait is not a luxury, but a vital necessity.

[1] Thank you to Tiona Nekkia McClodden who, through her continued work, conversations, and writing on Essex Hemphill, Julius Eastman, and Brad Johnson, helped me think the most deeply about some of the contradictions inherent in this renewed interest in queer art from the 1980s and ’90s, and so much more.

[2] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White,” Darrel Ellis (New York: Art in General, 1996), p.13.

[3] Ibid., 14.

[4] Darrel Ellis and Thomas Ellis, "Darrel Ellis, Thomas Ellis" in BOMB, no. 5 (1983): 44. Also see “Two Drawings by Darrel Ellis” in BOMB, No. 8, (1983/1984): 37.

[5] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p. 17.

[6] Thank you to Ricardo Montez who, upon learning about my interest in Darrel, gifted me his copy of the aforementioned book.

[7] David Hirsh, “Darrel Ellis: On the Border of Family and Tribe,” in Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993), p.125.

[8] Ibid., 124.

[9] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p.21.

[10] See Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe” (1986) for a more in-depth discussion of the artist’s use of black male bodies.

#lara mimosa montes #chpinthestacks #in the stacks #artist residency #darrel ellis #OSMOS

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bts-fic-universe · 6 years ago

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25 Days of Bangtan

Day 3 Taekook - Pictures with Santa

Prompt: Character A works as a Santa’s helper. Character B has a small sibling/child.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10 | Day 11 | Day 12 | Day 13 | Day 14 | Day 15 | Day 16 | Day 17 | Day 18 | Day 19 | Day 20 | Day 21 | Day 22 | Day 23 | Day 24 | Day 25 |

“Daddy, do I have to go up there by myself?” The little girl tugged on Jeongguk’s hand from below.

“Of course, sweetheart. I have to stand behind the camera to make sure they take a good picture.”

He definitely wasn’t going to pay for a shit picture like her mom did last year. He could have taken the picture a million times better, but Sooyeon had to be with her mother during the previous holiday. This year, Jeongguk had planned to do her picture with Santa himself, seeing as he was a professional photographer, but Yoongi had informed him that he would be lacking something vital from said picture, Santa. Yoongi quickly followed up by politely (not really) refusing to volunteer for the role, which is why Jeongguk found himself and Sooyeon in a bustling, crowded mall two weeks before Christmas.

There were only a few people left in line to take their turn in front of them. Sooyeon was getting antsy. The three year old was very well behaved for her age, especially for her father, but he knew having to wait for so long was beginning to take a toll on the child. He lifted her into his arms and her head immediately tucked into the crevasse of his neck. His heart nearly melted at the action, just as it did whenever she did the small of things.

Jeongguk was too busy checking out the photograph equipment to realize the young girl in his arms had completely frozen as they waited their turn as next in line.

“Alright you can bring her up here,” A velvet like voice drew Jeongguk’s attention away from the tripod to his right.

In front of him a gorgeous man approached the two of them. He shot Jeongguk a dashing smile before reaching out for Sooyeon. The little girl’s hands tightened further into her daddy’s coat. This brought Jeongguk out of whatever trance this guy in front of them had put him in. A light blush set high on his cheeks as he realized he had been blatantly staring at the man in front of him.

“Why don’t you come with me, honey?” His daughter only clung to him even more, drawing his attention away from the man finally.

“Sooyeon, what’s wrong? I thought you were excited to get your picture with Santa.” Jeongguk only then realizing how withdrawn he body language had become.

“I want daddy to take my picture.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jeongguk noticed the beautiful guy in the elf hat pull a look of confusion onto his face.

“I’m a photographer,” the guys eyes lit up slightly with realization, “She’s never usually like this though. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

A boxy smile tugged at the corners of the guys cheeks as he looked back at Sooyeon, but not before sending Jeongguk on understanding look,

“Hey Sooyeon, my name is Taehyung, but you can call me Tae-Tae oppa! How about this, you come with me so we can go tell Santa what it is that you are wanting for Christmas, and we’ll let your daddy, here, take your picture. How does that sound?”

The three year old in his arms immediately lightened up at that. This caused the smile to grow on Taehyung’s face in front of him. Wow, he barely knew his name, but Jeongguk was already feeling whipped fo the guy.

Sooyeon’s eyes shot up to Jeongguk. He too gave her a smile before sending Taehyung another look to ask him if it was really okay, and all he got back was an even bigger smile.

“Happens all the time. Now if you’ll come with me kiddo, we can go tell Santa what you want.”

Sooyeon was reaching out for Taehyung before Jeongguk was even able to put her down. He transferred his daughter to the male and watched the two of them make their way toward the man in the red suit. Jeongguk couldn’t help but think about how well the two of them were already getting along. Sooyeon doesn’t just let anyone pick her up like that.

Maybe his daughter was falling under the man’s spell as well. Jeongguk snapped out of whatever kind of fantasy he was having about the three of them making a cute family when he saw Taehyung walking back toward the camera to his right.

“So you’re a professional photographer, huh?” A cheeky grin raised the corners of the brunette man’s lips.

“Went to college for it and luckily was good enough to find a job that actually paid me a living wage to do it.”

“Wow, now I’m nervous. In the presences of such a great photographer. My pictures probably look amatur compared to yours.”

Jeongguk just chuckled as he looked through the viewfinder of Taehyung's camera to line up the scene in front of him.

“I’m sure you’re not too bad. You got this job, did you?” Jeongguk kept the light hearted conversation going as best he could.

“Well actually I’m a model,” the shutter of the camera went off too soon as Jeongguk’s fingers stumbled over the buttons.

It wasn’t hard to believe this beautiful man behind his was a model. Even with the weird green tights and elf hat, he was still radiating. Jeongguk bit his lip imagining what beautiful images he could capture of the other in the quiet atmosphere of his studio at home.

He quickly shook his head ridding it of all thoughts of the other in such an intimate setting.

He focused back on the task at hand, not commenting on the fact that the guy behind him was a model. He was able to get a pretty decent shot with the camera he was provided. His daughter skipped up to him all smiles as Taehyung fiddled around to print the photo so they could leave.

He shot the little girl a smile as he handed her the framed photo of herself and Santa that her daddy had taken for her. Jeongguk dug around in his wallet for the cash to pay for the picture and something else.

He turned to taehyung, once again taking in the others beauty, “Here you go this should cover it. Keep the changed though.”

Taehyung’s face faltered a bit as he noticed the tip Jeongguk had left him. HE shot the other a blinding smile again.

“Thanks again for letting me use your camera, “ he handed Taehyung the other item he had dug out of his wallet, “Oh and if you ever want to update your portfolio, give me a call.”

Jeongguk only smirked and took his daughter's hand before pulling her away and out of the mall, leaving a stunned Taehyung behind him holding one of Jeongguk’s business cards.

This is taking much longer than I expected it to 😅

admin nicole 💕

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beatricethecat2 · 6 years ago

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if/then (2.0) - 18

This isn't 100% ready and I know it but I've got a lot of work coming up so I'm releasing it into the wild anyway. Slightly more upbeat than the last chapter, but there's still much to resolve. Which will happen in a timely fashion, meaning not a million chapters to go. Typos abound, I will fix later.

Previously: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17

////////////////////////////////

“Hey Claud, I’m coming up. Text me or something if you’re there, ok?” Myka pushes through the front doors and stands inside, waiting for a reply. She smiles at the front desk guy, then looks down at her phone. Nothing yet, just like every other message she’s left this week.

“Hey Doug, you seen Claudia today?”

“Uh-uh,” the front desk guy says. "First shift back from vacation. Want me to ask Tony?” He picks up his walkie-talkie.

“That’s ok, I’ll just go up,” Myka says, scuttling past him as the elevator doors open. Two people step out as she walks in. She taps the button for Claudia’s floor and checks her phone again. No new message, but she really needs her stuff.

Claudia should be home as it’s late for a school night...but wait, it’s not, it’s Friday already. Maybe they're eating out or at a movie, or watching a movie at home. Or maybe Claudia's so miffed she won’t pick up the phone.

Claudia's police station antics are still a conundrum, they could have been for show or totally sincere. She has no clue what Helena told her as after the group interview, she didn’t see either of them again. If she could have talked to them before she left, she'd feel more confident moving forward.

Claudia’s buzzer rings and rings, so she waits for a beat then knocks twice. She tries her key card and the indicator glows green, thankfully, as she was worried Claudia already changed the code. Dewy whooshes out the instant the door opens. She drops her bag and rushes after him.

“You don’t want to go down there,” she says, scooping him up near the stairs, holding on tightly as he squirms. She wedges her foot in the door and pushes it open then crouches down to pick up her bag. Dewy wriggles free, but she blocks his second escape, swinging her bag to shoo him in.

“Claudia? Christina?” she calls and waits for a reply then pokes her head into bedrooms and the terrace.

“Where’s your moms?” she says to Dewy as he rubs up against her leg. He's purring so loudly she can hear him clearly. She glances his bowl, it’s empty. He must be hungry.

“Let's get you some dinner, mister,” she says and walks into the kitchen. Its surfaces are oddly clean, but the cat food cabinet is its usual mess. She sets a bag on the counter then grabs Dewy’s bowl to give it a good cleaning. The sink is devoid of dishes, which highly unusual as they often linger for days. She checks the fridge, it's also sparse, but maybe Claudia hasn’t gone shopping. That's not as unusual as an empty sink.

Myka snaps back to her task as Dewy mews plaintively. He hops up on the counter as she opens the bag of food. “Dewy, chill!” Myka says and swipes him to the floor. He’s way more anxious than usual.

She strokes his head as he eats and rubs behind his ears, his purrs vibrating so vigorously they travel up her fingers. Such good cat, she thinks, so good-natured, and mostly well behaved. We’re lucky to have him, even if he is a little dumb.

She looks across the living room at her corner, then traipses across and into the space. There's far too much stuff to take in one go, so she starts plucking out what she needs for now.

A picture of Helena hangs on the wall but a corner has popped free and it flaps to and fro. She peels it off and drags a finger over Helena’s likeness, then sits on the bed, drinking in Helena’s warm smile.

“Would it be bad for you if I see them? I want to know if they’re ok, but I don’t want mess this up for any of us.” Second guessing her movements is already difficult. Subterfuge isn’t her strong point.

Dewy bounds into the room and jumps on the bed. He sits on his hindquarters and chirp-mews at her insistently.

“What do you want?” Myka asks as he smushes his head against her side, then drags his body back and forth. She rubs his head again and sighs, then swings her legs onto the bed. It's ok to say for a few minutes longer than needed, so she lies down.

“You’re lucky, Dewy. You can't fall in love. At least not the way humans do.” She holds the photo up in front of her, what a lovely day that was, laughing and lounging at the beach. Her heart swells, she really does love Helena more than she ever imagined possible.

Dewy headbutts her cheek then abruptly flops on his side. She lays the photo on her chest and turns her head to look at him.

“She did this all for me, you know, but you don’t know that means. I should be thankful, but…" She reaches over and scratches Dewy’s belly. "I can’t stop thinking about Bonnie.”

Dewy claws her wrist, lightly, as a warning. Myka yanks her hand away.

“Yeah, exactly. I don't know if I can trust her. But she’s helping me, I guess. She’s supposedly an ally.” She looks at the photo again. It was taken during their trip to Shelter Island, when they were pretending everything would be ok. If Helena knew then that Mrs. Frederic planned to frame her, was she already in cahoots with Bonnie? Was Bonnie’s price a roll in the hay or is that the jealous girlfriend she’s been groomed into talking?

Dewy stands up and turns in a circle, then lowers himself down, smooshing his back into Myka’s middle. She scratches under his chin and turns on her side, pulling her knees up and hunching over to spoon him.

“She wouldn’t do that to us, would she?” Dewy’s purrs soar as she rubs behind his ears. What lengths would Helena have gone to spare her? She skims her hand over Helena’s pillow, smoothing a non-existent head print and closes her eyes, summoning Helena's form.

Helena often laid awake for hours as the clock ticked toward her departure. On those days, Myka would nudge her on her side and spoon her from behind. She'd bury her nose into the bend of her neck, letting her warm breath graze over Helena's skin. When Helena'd let out a whimper, she’d press her lips into her shoulder until Helena would roll over and kiss her back. And then quickly, but quietly, their bodies would meet, instinctively quelling each others lingering anxieties.

In comparison to now, those times seem simple; if only being deported was the worst of their fears. It’s not fair their last night in Poland was fraught resentment and that she’d wasted precious time being angry. Or that she has no idea where or how Helena is or how she’s ever going to gain her freedom.

Dewy rises and blinks as she shifts to lie flat. He then settles comfortably into her armpit. She circles an arm around him as he lets out a huge yawn. She yawns reflexively, then scratches his head.

“I wish I could stay and nap with you,” she says as Dewy lays his head on his paws. “But I don’t want to scare your moms when they get home. And…I probably shouldn’t be here.” Myka turns to leave but Dewy lays a paw on her arm. She slips it free. “Sorry, little dude. Say hi to them for me?”

She plucks Helena’s photo off of the bed. "I hope you're ok,” she says to Helena's likeness, then tucks it into her bag.

----------------

As Myka waits for her Uber, her phone rings.

“Steve, hey.” She’d called earlier to ask if he’d seen Claudia.

"You’re back!”

“I’m back.”

“Claudia’s back, too?”

“She should be.”

“Great! So we don’t have to feed Dewy anymore.”

“You’re still feeding him?” A car pulls up to the curb. There's an Uber logo its window so she waves and points toward the trunk. "Hang on a sec,” Myka says as she throws in her overfilled tote and garment bag into the car. She slams it shut then climbs into the back seat.

“Ok, back,” she says, but gets no reply. “Steve?” She pulls the door closed and checks her screen; no service. She waves the phone to the left and the right but gets no bars.

“No use,” the driver says while driving away. “Dead zone."

“There're no dead zones in New York,” Myka snips, scrolling through her settings and tapping buttons. She glances at the driver, her voice is familiar, but all she can see is fair hair bunched up underneath a blue baseball cap. “Hey, your not...” She consults her app but the phone won't connect. “I thought my driver was a dude.”

“Change of plan,” the woman says, continuing to drive. At a red light, she turns to face Myka. “You and I need to talk.”

There’s a thunk as Myka’s phone drops to the floor. “B-B-Bonnie?” The quintessentially American accent threw her off.

“Morgana Kurlansky, Interpol,” Morgana says, extending a hand over the seat. “Though I heard you already knew that."

"I, um, yeah?" Myka takes her hand and shakes it, limply. Morgana’s tone is deeper than her European one, but just as brusque.

"This has gotten way out of hand. We're doing our best to fix it." Morgana turns back to the street and drives away.

“Is Helena in jail?” is the first thing Myka thinks to ask.

“House arrest, held for further questioning. Bargaining for leniency as we speak.”

“That’s a relief. Have you seen her?"

“No, Bonnie Belski can’t. The cops don’t know who I really am. But she’s not alone, her daughter and her friend are there with her.”

“Christina and Claudia?”

“They’re under our protection. Potential collateral damage. MacPherson’s a threat, but Mrs. Frederic's our main concern. We’re worried she'll use Christina to force Helena’s hand.”

“No,” Myka says, shaking her head. “No. She wouldn’t do that, would she?”

“There’s no limit to what she might do.” Morgana glances at Myka in the rearview mirror. The sincerity in her eyes is frightening.

“How can I help?”

“Stick to the story. Keep acting scorned. Play dumb. You did a great job in the police station.”

“So did you,” Myka says, her mood suddenly souring. “You and Helena, did you really…you know. You said you had proof.”

“What do you think?” Morgana snaps.

“I don’t know.” Myka narrows her eyes.

“Everything Helena’s done has been to keep you in the clear. Do you think she'd go that far?”

“No.” Myka looks down at her hands.

“She loves you. Remember that. But it's better for you if you don't know.”

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Go with your gut."

More cryptic bullshit. Great.

They drive in silence for a few moments, then Morgana speaks up. “We have eyes on you, but stay on your toes. Has anyone at work asked about your trip?”

“Just about my show and Thanksgiving.”

“Even Vanessa?”

“I’ve barely seen her.”

“Hm. Steering clear until there's a verdict. None of this is public yet.”

“I know, I’ve looked.” Myka waits for Morgana to continue, but she doesn't. “How long will this last?"

“No one knows. But there's a contingency plan if things go further south.”

“What about Christina’s school? And Kenpo? And drum lessons?”

“We’re taking care of it.”

“Steve and Liam? Claudia’s neighbors?”

“Claudia will be in touch."

“And if Steve asks me what happened? What do I say?"

“For authenticity, you should—”

“Yeah, I get it.” Myka waves a hand dismissively. She sees it now, why Morgana won't tell her the truth. She looks out the window, but doesn’t focus on anything. Acting the part of a scorned lover doesn’t appeal to her at all.

The car pulls over to the curb.

“Do you really work or Interpol?” Myka asks.

Morgana nods.

“And the other stuff? Was Claudia right?”

Morgana looks over her shoulder but her eyes offer no answer.

“Fine.” Myka unlatches the door. She's not sure she can handle the truth right now anyway.

“Remember what I’ve said. And be mindful about what you say,” Morgana warns. “This is a critical stage; we all have to play our parts. Everyone’s looking for faults, especially Mrs. Frederic. Be extra careful if she contacts you."

The remark hits Myka hard; she trusted Mrs. Frederic unconditionally. It’s still foreign that Mrs. Frederic wants to hurt her and the ones she loves. “They’re all ok, right?” She looks back at Morgana.

“As far as I know, they’re fine,” Morgana says, her tone softening. “I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer, but I’ll be in touch whenever I can.”

Myka nods and opens the door, then walks toward her building.

“Hey, your stuff,” Morgana calls.

“Right, stuff,” Myka repeats. The trunk pops open but suddenly her stuff is no longer important.

---------------

As December crawls to a close, Myka’s worry morphs into a dull, constant pang. She obsessively checks for news but finds none. She avoids talking to friends, especially Abigail, as she's the hardest person to lie to. There's no way she can navigate this for months on end.

For the holidays, she visits her family as she's done every year. There’s little mention of Helena, except from her sister, who begs for details about her relationship. She concocts a story about visas and compromise, unable to tell the lie in full. Tracy seems to buy it, enough for her to drop it, at least until after the celebrations are over.

On Christmas afternoon, she hides upstairs, looking through boxes her mom said to "take back with her." Nothing strikes her as worth keeping, though lukewarm memories of school hijinks momentarily displace thoughts of Helena’s whereabouts.

When her phone buzzes, she startles. The number's oddly long but her gut tells her to answer.

“Hello?”

“Happy Christmas! Did you know they say that here instead of Merry Christmas?"

“Christina?”

"In Welsh it’s Nadolaig Llawen. Mom’s been teaching me.”

“Nadolay…what?” Christina’s last word sounded like a phlemy version of “lawn".

“But everyone on TV says Happy Christmas. And the Queen gave a speech to address 'her royal subjects!’ Mom said I’m one of them, but Aunt Claudia's not because she’s American.”

“There was a war. A revolutionary one. So yeah.” Myka's voice cracks as a swell of relief overtakes her. Plus Christina mimicking the Queen was the cutest thing ever.

“We opened Christmas crackers and mine had a hat, a bracelet and a joke. Who delivers presents to baby sharks at Christmas?”

“I don’t know.”

"Santa Jaws!” Christina cracks up laughing. “Oh, oh, and we made fruitcake. Mom said the store-bought ones were gross but the one we made was kinda gross, too.”

“I’ve never had fruitcake.”

"Don't."

A mumbly voice sounds in the background. Christina says “ok.”

“Mom wants to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to her too.”

“I wish you were here.”

“So do I.”

“Merrrrry Christmaaaaas!” Christina says, her words fading away as the phone is passed on.

“Hello, Myka,” Helena says and those two words, in that rich, velvety voice, make Myka's insides melt. She swallows back a sob before answering.

“D-Does this mean that you’re...”

“I’m afraid not. There’s been little movement since we last spoke. All that fanfare for such little gain.”

"How are you calling?

“Many strings were pulled. And a tantrum may have occurred in front of several key officers. Not by Christina.”

“Oh my.” Myka pictures a distraught Helena pleading with suits while Claudia's concocting a covert communication scheme in the background.

“I assume you're at your parents?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. You shouldn’t be alone.”

“Where are you?”

“How are you coping?” Helena says.

Deflecting already. “I’m…” Should she tell her this lie’s been eating away at her soul, that waking up every day without them is torture? “I’m ok, I guess. But it sucks, not knowing where you are or how you are.”

“I’m sorry.”

“This is my fault, not yours. You did this for me.” The weight of that's still sinking in. "It’s hard to be here without you."

“But you must."

“I’m trying.” Myka tears up, speaking the truth after bottling it is overwhelming. “I, um…I got that residency, in LA. I’m going in February. Unless you think I shouldn't.”

Helena sniffs in before continuing, she must be affected, too. “Go on. Focus on your work. Put this behind you if you can.”

“What if you come back while I’m gone?”

“That’s highly unlikely.”

“But it’s already been a month. How long will this take?”

“As long as it needs to, so we all may be safe.”

“I know. It’s just...” Myka pushes a box of out of the way and flops back on the bed. “I’m being encouraged, 'for appearances,' to move to LA.”

“By whom?”

“By Morgana.”

“You’ve spoken?”

“Briefly. Twice.”

“I asked her to watch over you.”

“So you think I should?”

“If she thinks it’s best, perhaps consider it. I know it’s a lot to ask.”

"Charlotte and Bennett are moving to London, so I have to move anyway. And Vanessa introduced me to a museum there looking for a new registrar.”

“Ah. If she hands you off, you’re no longer her problem. I imagine she’s keeping her distance, riddled with guilt.”

“Maybe, yeah, I don’t know. It’s been weird at work in general.” Everyone keeps giving her sad, concerned looks, and she’s worried they know more than they're saying. "A fresh start might be good. I’ve never been to LA. I might hate it.”

“It’s awfully showy.”

“When this is over you’ll come back New York, right? I want to be here when you do.”

“Claudia will be back eminently, but Christina and I…”

“Christina and you what?"

“Christina and I will be moving on after the holidays.”

“Moving where?”

“Somewhere safe."

“You'll call me when you get there.”

“There'll be strict rules, once we’re settled.”

“Once you're settled? Settled where? Like witness protection?”

Helena’s silence is answer enough.

“For how long?” Myka yelps. “God, I sound like a broken record."

“We'll miss you terribly if that helps.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Someday you’ll stop saying that. You’ll be able to stop saying that.”

“One can only hope."

“Does Christina know what's going on?”

“She understands as much as an eight-year-old can.”

“She’s almost nine. Nine! I’ll miss her birthday. I don’t want to miss her birthday.”

“You’ll be there in spirit.”

There's mumbling in the background.

“Please, not yet,” Helena says.

More mumbling.

“They’re saying I must go. The line’s unstable.” As if on cue, the line crackles.

“Helena?”

“I’m here.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Happy Christma—“

“Helena. Helena!” There’s a click then dead air. “I love you,” she whispers as if the phrase will reach Helena anyway.

"Who you talking to, sis?” Tracy says from the door.

Myka jerks upright. “I, um...Abigail. Her family’s driving her nuts.”

“Join the club,” Tracy says and rolls her eyes. She walks into the room and sits on the bed. “Mom’s going to have a coronary if you don’t come down soon.”

“Was she calling me?”

“Duh. Like a zillion times.”

Myka hangs her head but doesn’t move. Tracy circles and arm around her.

“It’s a big one, huh? Got your heart broken didn’t you?”

Myka shakes her head.

“You’ll get over it. You always do.” Tracy pulls Myka close.

“Thanks, Trace.” Myka leans into her sister. Her words are comforting, though she doesn’t know the truth.

“Soooo...Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Ted went to Graceland this year. Keep them talking; that might get us through dinner in one piece.”

-TBC-

#BERING AND WELLS #w13 #fan fiction #if/then #Myka Bering #Helena HG Wells #I'm trying to piece together a trail of clues I left along the way #ones I didn't know I needed but they are mighty handy now #not in this chapter necessarily #but coming up #I may even finish this story before winter is over #(what's that - you say winter hasn't started yet?#-exactly....)

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dignitywhatdignity · 3 years ago

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NaClYoHo Day 21

So I didn't think I'd be able to count today (much less be able to update), because 5yo is doing remote learning for election day (GO VOTE if you can and haven't yet).

But I was surprisingly productive. And 5yo is taking a break because MIL keeps going, "Aren't you done yet?!?!" so I'm like, just go play with Grandma, we'll finish later. As if she wasn't warned.

I think I mentioned before that some strong winds knocked over the sunflowers. Well, I tried propping them back up, but it didn't take, and then I'm pretty sure FIL, in the course of fixing our basement walls, stepped on them. And I'm also pretty sure squirrels got into what's left. But I salvaged and hung what I could, even though I think it's a bit too soon. Pictures to follow.

So I did all that today because I have, in fact, met my MIL, and she can't stand when I leave undone a task she thinks makes us (and by extension her, somehow) look bad, so if I didn't do it, she would... and she definitely would not have saved the seeds. While I was at it, I started pruning the Shasta daisies. I'll have to do another round of that next week, but it looks better already.

There's no bulbs in the fridge. I didn't think so, but I had to check.

Since the asbestos guys aren't coming until the 20th, I don't expect to get too much of the basement done for NaClYoHo, but eyes on the prize, right?

Now that Halloween is over, it's time to start thinking about Thanksgiving. Yikes.

I did, in fact, finish the 2019 book last year. So we're only 1 year behind. I think that will be my main focus the week I'm temping.

I really need to work on the medical stuff. Ugh.

Current Date: 11/2/2021 Current Score: 20/91 = 22%

Make this list.

Garden 2. Buy some spring bulbs 3. Plant the bulbs 4. Check fridge for bulbs. 5. Prune the sunflowers 6. prune the Shasta daisies ✅ 4. Cut down the sunflowers 5. Dig up the sunflower stalks 6. Harvest the seeds. 10. Repot houseplants

Basement 8. Set up direct deposit for the insurance 9. Upload pictures to FEMA portal 10. get an asbestos appraisal 11. Figure out insurance-vs-fema money situation. 14. Get asbestos removed 15. Get floor refinished 16. Get the walls fixed ✅ 17. Get the walls painted 18. Buy a new rug 19. Put all the furniture back 20. Buy a new couch 21. Buy a new TV 22. Replace the other stuff we claimed 23. Submit receipts for depreciation. 25. Buy new desk chairs.

Halloween 12. Have 5yo hang his window clings 13. Dig non-Christmas holiday box out of the garage and pull out Halloween decorations 14. Buy pumpkins 29. Buy 5yo’s costume

Thanksgiving 30. Put Halloween decorations in non-Christmas box and pull Thanksgiving decorations out 31. Figure out where we're going when and what we need to bring.

Masks 16. Line the white knit mask. 17. Finish knitting the blue knit mask. 18. Line the blue knit mask. 35. Start another knit mask.

Photos 20. Download the official school picture 21. order this year’s pictures 22. parcel out pics for relatives 23. Buy frame for school pics 40. frame the wallet-sized

41. Deal with papers ✅

Medical 26. find glasses prescription 27. order glasses from zenni 28. make GP appointment 29. Attend GP appointment 30. Ask GP about therapy 31. Ask GP about ADHD 32. Make OB/GYN appointment 33. Attend OB/GYN appointment 34. Get flu shot 35. Get the kids their flu shots.✔ 36. make dentist appointments 53. attend dentist appointments

Christmas 38. Make a list of needed gifts ✅ 39. Inventory purchased gifts 40. Shop 41. Pick out kids’ holiday outfits 42. Take holiday photos 43. design and order cards 44. Compile, mail merge, print addresses 61. Order stamps

photo books 46. Did I ever finish the 2019 book? 47. Compile 2020 pictures – my phone 48. Compile 2020 pictures – husband’s phone 49. Compile 2020 pictures - 5yo’s camera 50. Compile 2020 pictures –BIL 51. Compile 2020 pictures – facebook 52. Compile 2020 pictures – my parents 53. Compile 2020 pictures – desktop 54. Compile 2020 pictures – laptop 55. design 2020 photo book 56. Order 2020 photo book 73. repeat process for 2021 book

74. work through mending pile

Finish thank you notes 59. the last of last Christmas (yes I know) –J&S gave castle blocks, pirate stickers, bath book and toys, pelican sorter –J&D gave crayons, sketch pad, tiles, bead maze 60. 1yo’s baptism 61. 5yo’s birthday 78. 1yo’s birthday

79. Organize the coupon drawer ✅

Fridge 64. Contact paper 65. Magnets 82. Organize

83. Bag up clothes for Goodwill

Decorate 5yo’s room 68. frame lighthouse pics 69. Hang all art and pics 86. Hang growth chart

Decorate 1yo’s room> 87. hang art

88. Clean and organize nightstand

Windows 73. Measure all windows ✅ 74. get new blinds for bedrooms 91. get curtains for bathroom, 1yo’s room, kitchen?

#naclyoho

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bestupdatesdaily-blog · 6 years ago

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Republic Day Parade Delhi 2019

26 January is celebrated as a Republic Day of India Since from 1950, after the two and half year of Independence. It is the time to show our love toward our nation. Happy republic day to all my friends and people in association. In fact, the bonds of the birth of our country's centuries were actually broken on August 15, 1947 and India was liberated from the British rule, but even after independence, we were not completely independent because we had no constitution.

Republic Day Parade Delhi 2019

The Union Home Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh, inspecting the Rapid Action Force' (RAF) 26th Anniversary Parade in Lucknow on Sunday, October 07, 2018. Director General, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Shri Rajeev Rai Bhatnagar is also seen. The buzz in the corridors of power is that the President of Argentina Mauricio Macri could be the chief guest at the Republic Day 2019. This would be the second time that a leader of Argentina will be the chief guest.

NEW DELHI: The United States has indicated to India that President Donald Trump may not be able to attend Republic Day as the chief guest owing to intense domestic political commitments. Indian Constitution is only calligraphed and not printed and only 1000 copies are written till date.

Since 1950, India has been hosting head of state or government of another country as the state guest of honor for republic day celebration at the capital of India, New Delhi. They stress it was a generic invitation for the US president to visit India. The invitation by the Narendra Modi government comes amid difference with the US over trade tariffs and the latter's sanctions on Iran.

National awards for bravery were started in 1957 by the Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW) Every year the ICCW confers these awards to children between 6 to 18 years of age. January 26 is our Republic Day. We celebrate this day every day. In 1950, this Indian became a sovereign democratic republic and it had its own constitution.

According to India Today TV, administration officials have told the Indian government that the President has other engagements, including the annual ‘State of the Union' address. The festivities of Indian Republic Day are concluded by the Beating Retreat ceremony which takes place on 29th January. This ceremony is chaired by the President Of India and is performed by the three wings of defence - Army, Navy and Air Force.

The Constitution of India is the longest written Constitution all over the world (which cannot be read in a single day); it has incorporated 448 Articles in 22 Parts, 12 Schedules and 97 Amendments”. This comes after preparations suffered an embarrassing setback last month, as US President Donald Trump turned down Prime Minister Narendra Modi's invitation citing scheduling constraints.

Happy republic day! Wishing you India, you have a great future and enjoy your everlasting independence. Be an Indian people and show yourself to the world that says we proud to be an Indian by making you DP with 26 January Photo Frames 2019 Application. Thanks to all of you for being here and i hope you like this 26 Jan Images. I Wish you all a very Happy 70th Republic Day 2019.

Here you can get republic day 26 January wallpaper which you can set on of PC Desktop, Mobile can easily download HD wallpaper for India Republic download now and share Wishes Photos Pics Messages On WhatsApp. Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Saturday promptly responded to her Pakistani counterpart's invitation to the groundbreaking ceremony of the Kartarpur corridor, saying she cannot attend the event due to "prior commitments".

#republic day #republic india

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soft-sarcasm · 7 years ago

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jung taekwoon: mint.

Pairing: jung taekwoon x reader.

Summary: Taekwoon decides to be a tease at the wrong time and a war ensues.

Genre: smut, fluff, some dry humping, oral, taekwoon being a little shit and getting what he deserves.

Word count: 7+k.

a/n: so, this happened. I’ve been planning this for a little while and I don’t know if I really succeeded in conveying my idea in a cohesive way but oh well. I hope you enjoy.

Finally, the menthol burn was relieved from your mouth as you spat out the green liquid that had turned acidic during it’s time swishing about, your tongue feeling oddly like it had been both scalded and bleached all at once. You blanched, expelling the final remains as you once again found yourself questioning the sanity of your decision to purchase this particular bottle of mouthwash even when it had been advertised with an awfully foreboding slogan, one that should have been enough of a warning for your mornings to come. It still remained on the bottle that haunted your bathroom cabinet, printed in boisterous bold on a danger red label that read with little to no discretion ‘DEATH BY MINT: NO GERM OR TASTEBUD LEFT ALIVE.’ The product stayed true to its marketing and you couldn’t deny its affectability, as molten mint historically beat caustic coffee when it came to one's breath, a truth that made enduring the torture more endurable.

Face pinched in lingering distaste, you retreated back to the still of your bedroom, each step bearing a conscious caution in hopes of staying as quiet as possible so to not disturb the ominous lump that protruded from the white duvet of your bed. 05:30 am was early for just about anyone but especially for someone who had only returned from a tediously tiring training session at roughly 2:40 am. Or at least you think that was the time your phone had showed last night when you checked it with sleep blurred eyes after being awoken by your boyfriend’s arrival home in the wee hours of the morning.

It was now your turn to skulk around, making the effort to remain as close to soundless as you could while you gathered your things to leave.

While Taekwoon’s schedule almost always ran late, you were always starting early. 04:50 coffees and 06:15 buses that sleepily shuttled you in the direction of your University’s Anthropology department that you would haunt for the rest of the day. In contrast, Taekwoon was known to leave slightly later, only to arrive home in the late 20:00s or early 00:00s.

It wasn’t as if your daily roles were set in stone, never to alternate or act in reverse, it was not a rare occurrence for Taekwoon’s day to start hours before yours could even think of beginning and in turn, for yours to end hours after his came to a close. But more often than not it was you pressing the early morning kiss of farewell to his forehead while he returned the gesture later in the final moments of the day. Your relationship was routinely a cycle of hellos and goodbyes with rarely any sort of filler in between, a side-effect of both participants leading extremely work heavy lives.

You had learned to not really mind it. Though undoubtedly there were times when it was frustrating, it was just something you had come to cope with. You had come to terms with that even during the times where you were in the same city, sleeping in the same bed, cyber connections were used to replace the absence of physical ones. You weren’t all that deterred, you could have as extensive of a conversation with Taekwoon over chat as you could in real life, sometimes it could be even livelier with the addition of memes and emojis. The lack of frequent in-person moments were manageable by when they did in fact occur and the unfathomably strong bound you and Taekwoon had formed during your two years of dating.

In the middle of twisting your scarf around your neck in hopes to battle the cold wind that the weather report promised was waiting for you outside of your apartment, there was a stir and a soft voice barely heard over the silence of the room. “You leaving?”

You straightened from your hunched position that you had originally assumed to put on your shoes and had ended up holding for the convenience of lethargy. There was an audible pop that you knew was from your knee invoking a wince, another reminder that you did not have enough stretching in your daily routine. Cautiously, you made your way over to his side of the bed, only to be met with the endearing sight of ruffled hair, and barely open eyes framed by white covers that he had evidently pulled up past his nose. When it came to morning Taekwoon, there were few things that could crush your resolve quite as quickly.

“Afraid so,” You muttered, voice still muted so to not go above a certain volume that would wake him further. “You need to sleep; your alarm is only in a few hours.”

There was a groan followed by the rustle of Taekwoon further snuggling himself into the covers, “I don’t want you to leave so early.”

You made an empathic sound because you really didn’t want to leave him, you’d much rather join him back in the warm blankets and never leave. But there was a group presentation that wouldn’t start itself and you were the only one that seemed to be determined to get anything done out of the four other people who were meant to be doing it with you.

“I don’t want to either. But,” You began with a hopeful tone, “I’ll hopefully be able to finish early today and then we should have the entire evening!”

You couldn’t be offended when you received no enthusiasm to equal your own from Taekwoon because it seemed that he was already halfway gone, head barely managing a nod against the pillow and you couldn’t stop the overly fond smile that touched the lips you used to plant a light peck to his temple. The touch was feathery and did little more than make him stir ever so slightly before you were floating out of the room and out the door, the hope that perhaps maybe you would be done early and would be able to spend a rare night home with your cuddly boyfriend making the 06:15 bus that much more bearable.

Hopefully.

11 hours. 11 fucking hours, that’s how long it had been since you left Taekwoon cuddled up in your bed and only after 11 hours were you now finally arriving home.

The overbearingly fresh taste of menthol in your mouth had long been replaced by one of stale, machine coffee and frustration. Each minute spent away from your ever cosy apartment had felt like an hour within itself, the presentation preparation taking far longer than you had previously anticipated. At the start of the day, you really thought it would only take 4 maybe 6 hours max to finish all of your individual and your group work, especially with how early you had gotten there, ready to start so you could get the break you had earned after the last 2 weeks of 12+ hour days.

But as it had been made painfully evident; that had not been the case.

Instead, it had taken you and your group all day to come up with some sort of presentation that was due in a matter of days, the preparation made all the more difficult by the fact that only 2 out of the other 4 members of your group had even bothered to do their work.

11 hours later and you were ready to implode.

You were tired, hungry and in need of a shower to wash away the fatigue of the day, but most importantly, you were horny a fuck and that was all due to your ever loving boyfriend and the unintentionally arousing photo he had sent you earlier on in the day while you were halfway through cleaning up a mess that wasn't even your to begin with. Without any caution of what may be inside, you had opened the photo attachment, assuming that it was just another one of the many selfies your boyfriend routinely sent you throughout the day.

This had resulted in you being completely unprepared for what waited for you. As an idol, part of Taekwoon's job was to be attractive and you were painfully aware of just how beautiful he was after two years of dating. But even after spending that much time together, you were yet to become immune to when he fully displayed his looks and shit, did that photo put him on display.

Gone was the mess of sleep puffed cheeks and mussed hair that he had been sporting when you had left him that morning, that adorable mirage had been replaced by one that would surely lead to your eventual death. Already sharply edged eyes had been further daggered by strong eyeliner, his hair had been perfectly styled up and away from his face and his pink lips were pulled into a small sultry pout. And while the photo was primarily of his face, there was also his collar bones sticking from underneath his white shirt and the glimpse of the ever impossibly tight leather trousers that he frequented for stage performances. All in all; he was devastating and it had taken you far too much effort and control on your part to simply lock your phone and move on. The caption hadn't helped either. Tagged along with the overly enticing photo was simple enough sentiment but paired along with such an image was captivating to the point that you couldn't get the typed out words from your head.

'i'll be waiting for you when you come home.'

Simple, plain, nothing that should have made you clench on air and have your head swim but fuck, you had never been able to get enough of Taekwoon and from your reaction, you had your doubts that you ever would. But finally, you would get able to satisfy your desire if Taekwoon's text sent at a much more reasonable time then it was time was any indication, he was home and ready for your arrival.

When you had left earlier that morning, the plan for the evening had been one full of tender lounging and the consuming of whatever delicious food was at your disposable. Now, there was something very different that you wanted to eat.

The door all but shuddered with the amount of strength you used to force it open after punching on the security code into the keypad, hands unable to help your efforts as they were currently filled with the assigned reading that you should really be getting finished tonight. But instead you were too focused on your boyfriend and there was no way you were going to be able to concentrate on anything else. You made hasty work of discarding your outer layers of clothing and shoes, hoping that your message that you had sent a little over thirty minutes ago when you had been leaving had been a fair enough warning for him to be aware of what you were coming home for.

11 hours, a group dominated by lazy wastrels and one photo had worn your patience down to a thin wisp, so depleted that it was all but nonexistent at this point. You didn’t care if you were being abrupt or borderline out of character. You were energised with a new sense of purpose and drive, set on the idea of all but mounting your boyfriend; you could only hope that he was prepared.

Though by the sight of him casually draped over your armchair, phone in hand as he aimlessly scrolled and still dressed in those infuriating leather pants, it seems that you hadn't been clear enough in the thread of texts that in your opinion had bled with desperation and frustration. He simply lifted his head at your arrival, completely dismissing your simmering stare as he met your gaze with one of indifference, an ever subtle smile on his lips.

"Hey babe, how was your day?" He asked ever so casually, locking his phone and stretching his hands casually above his head.

You couldn't help but follow the movement, feeling even less in control at the small glimmer of revealed skin you received as his shirt was slightly tugged up his stomach. If you only knew Taekwoon briefly, you wouldn't see him as being the teasing type due to his rather permanent unresponsive exterior and softly spoken words. But fuck, after two years of being in a relationship with the lanky minx, you knew better. The boy was a fucking tease when he wanted to be and you could only pray for his own safety that he didn't have any plot already in motion because you were not in the mood.

"Shit.” You summarised, the word all but snarled, “And your photo didn't make it easier you little fuck." You were then slamming down the rest of your things before pulling off your jumper as you made your way over to where he was on the couch. The only movement on his part in comparison was made to pull himself up against the arm of the sofa so that he was in sitting position, unfazed by your overly direct assault.

He hummed in response, tugging on your wrist when you were close enough so that you were clambering onto his lap, torso barely covered by the thin shirt that removing your jumper had left you in. He took a movement to pad his fingers up your bicep, each touch feather like. "That bad huh? Sorry babes."

You huffed, tired of this little charade when you knew that your intentions were clear and he was simply toying with you. So with little more pretence, you slammed yourself into him, hands wrapping into those deliciously soft, black tendrils as you fused your lips together, the contact resulting in the instant gratification of your need both being slightly sedated but also amplified. He was clever enough to return your enthusiasm, though he was definitely letting you do all the work as you nipped and sucked, his long digits curling at the nape of your neck, gently rubbing the skin.

"Someone a bit needy today?" Taekwoon chuckled during one of the few instances you released his mouth to take a breath, you were easily irritated by his voice but were reassured by the near pant in his tone that he was quickly becoming just as riled up.

There was none of the softness that had been the genre of your morning interaction, your overly tedious day had long ago rid you of those feather-light notions. You were ready to get this show on the road so that the ache you had felt nearly all day could be sedated and you could finally relax. Taekwoon just needed to get with the programme.

“I’m not in the mood Taekwoon,” You cut the words against his lips, refusing to detach yourself as you ground yourself against himself in emphasis to your statement.

The little shit had the audacity to smirk, even when you could feel him become increasingly hard through the tight confines of his leather trousers, “I think you’re most definitely in the mood.”

You couldn’t help but hit his chest in retaliation for both his joke and the frustration it was currently causing you, especially as he now had changed his tactic to craning his neck just far enough back that you couldn’t fully reach his mouth. Growing more and more irritated, you decided to take matters into your own, capable hands, allowing your fingers to trace down the counters of his chest from your place now leaning back, legs still on either side of his waist. You kept your gaze locked with his, an unspoken challenge when you were grabbing onto him through his trousers and his resilience visibly withered.

A look of coy satisfaction now played on your face as you stared him down, all but begging for a word of snarky defiance as your expert fingers fiddled with the thick zipper, his body stiffening underneath you. “And what about you, babes?”

It was this cockiness that would be your mistake, becoming overconfident due to his reaction and the control being in the top position gave you. You were too consumed in your small victory to the point that you actually let out a shriek of surprise when Taekwoon abruptly changed your positions so that you were evidently pressed between the firm couch and his somehow firmer body.

“I’m always in the mood for you, darling.” He purred against your slightly gaped mouth, giving your bottom lip a teasing bite before he settled on making a clean descent down your body, mouthing at every part of exposed skin as he went.

You arched into his touch, back bending to his will when his hand found the band of your legs as he continued his assault on your collar bones and neck. He made miraculously quick work of removing them with only one hand, your underwear ending up dragged alongside them as you assisted in the process with a buck of your hips and a corresponding wiggle to make the process more seamless. He seemed pleased with your eagerness, not that it should have been at all surprising at this point, but wisely chose to not comment on it, instead continuing his working down of your form, his large hands pushing up the fabric of your undershirt so that he could gain better access to your abdomine.

You were keenly aware that the hand that had once been gripping your hip had now disappeared in between your legs, this change being made evident by the fingers that were now creeping up your thigh, closer and closer to where they were needed most. Finally, they arrived and the sound that escaped you was somewhere bordering on a sigh of both pleasure and relief.

Despite the touches being infuriating light, the smallest ounces of pressure that were applied to your clit with every tantalising swirl of Taekwoon’s thumb was enough to have your hips canting in appreciation and search for more. “You’re so wet,” His tone would have led some to believe that he was surprised when in fact you knew he was taunting you and you fucking hated it that your body was reacting in such a way that it made teasing you so easy for him.

“Jus-” You had to pause as one of his fingers slipped lower, resting at your entrance and you gripped the couch arm behind you for support to refocus yourself, “-t get on with it.”

He hummed in slight recognition of your order, too busy watching that movement of his fingers on your slick core to give you his full attention. “Get on with what? I’m going to need you be you’re more specific.”

“Fucking piece of shit,” You snapped, though the anger came out more breath then fire as he decided when you opened your mouth to speak was the perfect time to apply a slightly larger amount of pressure onto your increasingly sensitive clit. “If you don’t do something more substantial then fiddling about down there I will actually murder you.”

“My word, someone sure is impatient,” He tutted and for a second you thought he was going to continue teasing, your mouth parting, ready to slice him into ribbons. But then an ethereally long finger was inside of you and you actually forgot how to speak.

Clarity remained out of your reach because the fog of incoherence was thickened when a silky smooth tongue was coming into contact with your clit and you were near blacking out. After all this time, hours of frustration, finally.

You couldn’t stop your hips from moving forward, didn’t even try to halt the hand that worked on its own agenda to tangle itself in Taekwoon’s hair and push down in hopes of somehow getting him closer than he already was.

After two years of being intimate, Taekwoon had perfected the art of unravelling you. He knew that you could take two fingers as easily as you could take one, knew that sucking and nipping at your clit actually sometimes was enough to make you near lose your mind. He knew that when your vocabulary solely contained his name and a few, panted curse words that you were close.

He knew that when you started moving frantically, hips grinding down onto his lips and your entrance clenching every moment that you were ready to cum, that you were going to come in a few moments. He knew that you were on the spiral, that you were a second away from fully being gone and finally claiming the satisfaction you had been aching for.

He knew all of this and more, and yet just as you were gasping out, preparing yourself to plummet down and dive into the realm of stars and release; he fucking stopped.

One moment, you were repeating how you were about to cum and then abruptly, any and all pleasure was wrenched from your grasp. Leaving you high, dry and fucking pissed.

Your back contracted, resulting in you all but sitting up and you were met with Taekwoon’s overly satisfied face, his cockiness and indifference evident by the way he licked the remaining wetness from his lips and simply purred, “Sweet.”

Irritation was replaced by absolute rage and you actually seethed your next words, each one containing the force to flatten walls. “What. The. Actual. Fuck.”

“Awe,” Taekwoon continued to patronise, “Is someone upset that they didn’t get to cum?”

You didn’t know if Taekwoon had momentarily lost his mind because he seemed to not understand the deathly lethal glare in your eyes as you stared him down. Though it did seem you pulling yourself into a sitting position and further away from him seemed to knock some sort of clarity into him.

How fucking dare he.

Taekwoon was a tease, you knew that well enough. But it was rare that he ever went far enough to the point that he actually denied you your release, he usually favoured bringing you over the brink over and over and over again. It had never been particularly easy to get yourself to that point with past partners; it had taken some work even with Taekwoon in the beginning when you were both still discovering each other. But he usually knew that if there was one thing you did not stand for, it was orgasm denial. Especially if you had been suffering from pent-up frustration all day which made this blow all that more damming.

“You’ve fucking done it now,” You stated, voice a chaotic cocktail of chilling calm and fiery rage. You were ready for this torture, this game that Taekwoon had unintentionally started, even if he continued to seem none the wiser to it, blinking in slight confusion.

His brow furrowed in question, “Done what?”

A look of destructive delight took control of your features and you leaned forward so that your next words were spoken directly into Taekwoon’s ear, your closeness allowing you to feel the way his body stiffened, “Started a war.”

Perhaps a war wasn’t the correct term for what progressed for the next few days; war would suggest that both sides had an equal chance at winning. Instead, it was more of a siege on Taekwoon’s self-restraint and you revelled in every moment of the unbridled control.

It wasn’t as if you spent the entirety of the following days teasing the shit out of him in every way you knew would make him eventually crumble, you simply chose your moments, each one leaving enough of a lasting impression to carry over until the next. While Taekwoon hadn’t fully grasped the ramifications of his actions until the following day, he had definitely been suspicious when you had suddenly pulled back, declared war and then refused any and all of his advances without any further explanation.

The first day you had played dumb, playing off any suspicion as effortless as breathing, going about your routine as if nothing had happened.

The second day was the one that set the tone for all those to follow. You simply ignored all of his lingering gazes and leading questions during dinner, shrugging off his grab at your waist that you knew was a wordless proposal for some late night activities, disregarding the prospect with a casual step away from his grasp. You had left the kitchen while he finished tidying up under the pretence of taking a shower, leaving him alone with the suds feeling more confused than ever with your rare shift in character. If there was something you were almost always down for; it was sex, especially with how exceptionally needy you had been only a little over a day prior. And now you were too tired? But while he was meditating on your behaviour over the soapy water and half-clean plates there was a sound that pierced through the veil of pattering water from the shower; a moan. Then there was another and another, only for the apartment to be suddenly filled with the sound of your pleasure.

All Taekwoon could do was wait for you to finish, poised at the end of your shared bed, still smelling of dish soap and confusion. Though instead of answering his questioning gaze when you entered back into the room, wearing a lofty smile and overtly sedatedexpression, you went about wordlesslydressing yourself for bed, Taekwoon unaware that the prolongued amount of time you took to shimmy into your night clothes was all a conscious decision. He had been completely defenceless to your planned assault later that night when you had both settled down on your respective sides of the bed, your routine peck to his lips contorting into something far more foreboding.

Your lips had found the shell of his ear, tracing the lobe as you curled up behind him so that there wasn't a whisp of seperation, tongue peeking out to swipe at the skin as a hand slinked down to find his crotch where you applied a deliciously detrimental amount of pressure that had him all but gasping at the abrupt contact. Teeth had sunk into his soft flesh, the grip on him intensifying so that his focus was disrupted between your hand and your voice, “Touch this without permission and you won’t be touching any of me for weeks.”

And then you were gone, back faced to him, eyes closed in bliss as you faked sleep, smile so soft and peaceful that it was almost difficult to see the malice that lurked beneath.

By day four, Taekwoon was on the verge of conceding and caving and while he wasn't entirely certain as to what he was being punished for; he was more than ready for the torture to be over.

The night before he had come home horny from the risqué photo of you in your favourite lacy black and white bralette and matching panties that you had sent to him a few hours before his practice session was finished, the dance rehearsal made all the more difficult by his raging boner that he knew without your mercy wouldn’t be receiving any sort of relief. His worries were further confirmed when he reached your room, enticed by the muffled sounds of some sort of activity. He had opened the door to reveal you spread across the bed, clad only in the ensemble you had sent him a sample of and skin covered in sweat as you reclaimed the hand that had been stuffed in your underwear only moments before. There had been no oxygen in his lungs as he watched with unabated interest as you pulled your slick covered fingers into your mouth, retaining eye contact with him throughout as you gave the digits two deep sucks before removing them.

“What a shame- I just finished.”

He couldn’t even last a week, five days was all he could manage before he was at his breaking point. Even though he was almost certain he hadn’t been putting up any sort of fight the entire week, instead allowing you to do completely as you pleased with the weight of your threat hanging over him like the knife of a guillotine. All he had done was not attempt to touch you, or himself for that matter, but apparently that wasn’t all you wanted. You wanted him crippled and tripping over himself, begging for a forgiveness and relief only you could grant. Sure he could have perhaps gotten off at work, but it wasn’t just the paranoia that you would somehow find out that had stopped him from him even attempting such a thing, there was also a piece of him that was thriving off of this dangerous denial.

Every bat of your eyelashes, every coy and brief brush of your body had been a weapon to get him to where he was now, continuously pacing the length bedroom while waiting for your arrival from your friends dinner, ready to omit and atone for every one of his crimes.

You were struggling with the handle of your bag that refused to detangle from your coat when you entered the room, slightly surprised to see Taekwoon standing before you, expression a beautiful concoction of frazzled and desperate. Your demeanour instantly shifted, air similar to that of the one Taekwoon had foolishly worn all those nights ago.

How the tables do turn.

“Taekwoon,” You drawled, setting down your bag as you nonchalantly breezed past him in favour of the wardrobe so you could finish undressing yourself. “I didn’t expect you home so early.”

“Finished practice early,” Was his response, voice thick in a way that you knew even with your back turned to him meant his pupils were blown and his jeans were tight.

The twist of your lips was instinctive, having to consciously remove it in effort to remain coy as you shouldered off your coat, revealing your leather skirt and tight blouse ensemble to be devoured by Taekwoon’s hungry eyes that you could feel were trained to each of your deliberate moves. “That’s nice,” You spoke into the otherwise silent room, “You’ve seemed a bit tense lately.”

His answer was quiet, so much so that you almost missed it under the gritted teeth and implications. “I wonder why.”

You hummed in a way you both were aware was posed sympathy, slipping your shirt over your shirt so that your upper half barely concealed the scraps of wispy material and lace that made up your bralette while your lower half remained concealed under the like faux leather. You turned, unsurprised to find his gaze down, it taking him a moment longer to meet your eyes.

“You alright over there?” You asked, a laugh threatening to escape at the way his eyes narrowed at your taunt that you played off with a life-threatening amount of ignorance as you stepped closer, placing a purposeful pointer finger on his collarbone, “You seem a bit- out of it.”

He remained silent, just watching as you picked and prodded at him, your expression never wavering from its mirage of civility and curiosity even though you knew the cause for his current state; you were the cause. You watched him struggle with the words, his inherent stubbornness causing his words to come out near choked, “Please.”

You batted your eyelashes, delight curling within you at the mere utterance of one word, you stepped closer, leaning in as if you hadn’t heard him, “I’m sorry; what was that?”

You admired the tensing of lithe muscle under the thin material of Taekwoon’s white shirt as his fists clenched at his side to both ground himself and to restrain from touching you, enamoured with how close you were, how good you smelt and how you were literally in arms length and he was powerless. It had been days since a touch from you had been anything more than fleeting and he hadn’t even attempted to initiate anything ever since you had set the rules that had never been truly set but he had somehow known to follow. The ball had been entirely in your court as he had made a futile play of resistance if you could even call what he had been doing resistance; you hadn’t even given him enough power to even resist. He had just been forced to endure and it seemed that that endurance had finally come to an end.

“Please,” He repeated, his broad chest that you had begun to slowly trace with your nail, “Let me just, fuck, let me just touch you.”

You let out a noncommittal noise as you scrapped your nails against the fabric of his shirt, focusing more on your fingers then his eyes that followed each of your movements especially as your hand begun to wander lower, toying between the hem of the article clothing and the waist of his jeans. “And just why, should I let you do that? Especially when you were so rude to me before.”

“I’m sorry,” He gritted out, coherency depleting due to how close you were to where he needed you most. “-just let me touch you.”

“So you understand,” You continued to drag on, tongue peeking out to swipe at your lips. All of sudden you were harshly cupping him in your hand making him bolt as if struck by lightning while meeting your gaze, your hand began to make assertive circles over the front of his trousers. “And why exactly, are you sorry?”

“Because I was an idiot,” He answered immediately, his choice of words being confirmed to be correct as you hummed in agreement. “Because I stupidly thought that I could be a total dick and get away with it.”

You nodded your head, entranced by the way Taekwoon’s hips all but buckled forward when you added slightly more pressure, though it still wasn’t enough, especially because Taekwoon knew there was no way you were going to let him cum. “So, what-” You pressed your thumb to what you knew was the head of his dick causing Taekwoon to nearly slump forward, “-have we learned?”

“That I should know -fuck-” He broke off into a whine when you gave him another tentative squeeze, “-when I’m being a tease and when I’m being an idiot. And I’m also, sorry, I’m so so so sorry.”

“Good,” You purred against the skin of his neck, pressing your tongue down to the juncture, relishing in the total relinquishing of control Taekwoon was currently exhibiting as he restrained himself from grinding into your hands and grabbing at you like you knew he wanted to. Taekwoon was everything but passive and it was rare that there was a time you ever felt completely in control. But right now, you were bathing in it. “Now Taekwoon; fuck me.”

“Yes.” Came his winded reply before your mouth was being consumed by a fire that made you almost step back in surprise, teeth and tongue instantly being added to the mix.

Your tongue swept against him, eleciting a beautiful whine from Taekwoon as he worked on herding you in the way of the bed, working on the zipper of his jeans while he hurriedly rid himself of the fabric. He was making all the moves, doing all the work, but you still remained in control, the fact evident in the way you pulled back, the cry of loss from Taekwoon causing a grin to spread its way on his face.

You slowly removed your skirt and underwear as Taekwoon finished removing the remaining articles of his clothing. It was as if the site of your entirely naked form set him off into some sort of dive into madness and utter desperation because you were suddenly being flipped over so that you were bent over the bed, the gasp that escaped your lips at the abruptness increasing in volume when two fingers were sliding into you.

You had to stifle a moan, gripping the sheets in search of some sort of support. You needed to ground yourself, just because Taekwoon had you bent over on his fingers didn’t make this any less your game. “If you’re not going to fuck me properly; I’ll do it myself and make you watch.”

That alone was enough to send Taekwoon in frenzy, the head of his dick finding your entrance before he was thrusting in and you were fighting the urge to let your eyes roll back into your head in ecstasy.

“Fuck,” He cried out from behind you, his voice close with how was he hunched due to the overwhelming sensation of finally being inside of you. “Fuck you’re incredible.”

“I know,” You panted, hands scrambling for purchase. “And I expect –shit- for you to get me exactly to where I was the other night and this time- actually finish the job.”

You could only assume that he understood because your answer was a powerful thrust that had you moving forward and had your back arching. There were few things you liked better than being fucked by Taekwoon and you would be lying if you hadn’t missed the feel of his dick during the last five days.

“I’m not gonna last,” He gasped, his hips never stopping for a second while you met him in the middle with your own.

“I dare you to cum,” You snarled, the air stolen from your lungs as he hit a specific spot. “You’re going to have to try harder.”

This seemed to spur him into action because suddenly there was a loss of his cock inside of you and instead you were being flipped over, the absolute devastation of his expression enough to have you keening as he loomed over you. There was also a certain renewed determination in his gaze as he pinned you down, throwing your legs over his shoulders as he supported his weight on his arms that he placed on either side of your head.

“You’re the fucking devil,” He stated, his words punctuated by thrusting himself entirely into you causing your nails to instinctively search for purchase on his shoulders where they bit down into his skin. He rolled his hips again and you couldn’t stop the way your body arched in turn, “You’re also a fucking tease, punishing me for not letting you cum when you wanted it, making me suffer over nothing.”

“You’re- fuck-,” Your thought was broken by the cry from your lips as he hit your spot directly, too far gone to really be that fussed with the seemingly switch in control, you were finally getting what you wanted and fuck if it hadn’t been fun getting here. “-the one who started all this, you’re the real tease here.”

His grin touched your lips as he pressed them down to yours, let out a moan of his own as you clenched down on him. “Maybe, but fuck you really did a number on me.”

“Seem pretty okay to me,” You snarked, making defiant eye contact despite the fact that you were so close to cumming you could actually taste it. “What you did was also an asshole move and you know it.”

“And I think you did a pretty thorough job of making me pay for it.”

“I could have done more.”

Then there was a pinch to your clit and you were ready to cave. There was some satisfaction that even though there had seemingly been a shift that happened often happened between you and Taekwoon when it came to who was in control, you couldn’t help but notice the look of concentration on Taekwoon’s face that revealed that he was struggling not to cum.

You clenched down just to see his reaction which was a glare sent in your direction, you would have revelled further in satisfaction if it weren’t for the overwhelming pleasure that hit you when a thumb was pressed down to your clit. Sensing your climax, Taekwoon’s thrusts became more frantic, coherent sentences being replaced by broken sentiments of pleasure and desperation for release. It took only a few more moments before you were greeted with a blinding orgsam and you were sure you were crying out Taekwoon’s name.

“Fuck,” He moaned, his thrusts carrying you through your high, his own being advanced by the way your walls pulsated around him. He allowed you to be fully taken over by your orgasm for as long as he could before he could no longer bear it. “Please- fuck- please- can I cum?”

You hummed, “Yes.”

His shoulders visibly slumped in relief before he was rolling his hips into yours with a renewed vigour and moments later, he was groaning out your name as he fully spiralled.

Your mouths met in a messy but coaxing kiss, love pouring through each slide of tongue and lips. His body blanketed yours as he relaxed, all strength drained from his arms resulting in him no longer being able to support his own weight.

There was a few moments of content, silent connection as you simply enjoyed the feel of each other, making up for the lack of intimacy that had been provoked by the last couple of days.

“I can’t believe this all started because I didn’t make you cum one time,” Taekwoon tsked, his skin all but glowing under the clear, heated water of the bath you had both recently moved into.

His comment was returned by a splash and an insulted scoff, “That one time just happened to be after I had the most tiring day and had been sexually frustrated because of your fucking leather-clad ass.”

He let out a laugh while swatting away the continuous flashes of water, undeterred by your weak assault. “You could have just said that instead of going on this mission to make me beg to just touch you.”

“But it was so much fun,” You pouted, poking at his bicep. “And don’t even try to lie and say you didn’t enjoy it, I felt your dick, I know everything.”

“Are you somehow implying that my feelings are entirely controlled by my dick?”

“Would somehow I be wrong?”

#vixx #leo #vixx scenarios #kpop scenarios #kpop #leo scenarios #taekwoon scenarios #vixx smut #kpop smut #leo smut #taekwoon smut #writing

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pattie-remembers · 7 years ago

Text

Famous muse Pattie Boyd says she neglected herself in her rock star marriages

10 April 2018 — 10:21am

If you remember the '60s, you weren't there: so it is said of that explosive decade of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll when girls sashayed down the Kings Road in tiny skirts and Biba boots, boys wore ruffled shirts over tight velvet trousers and London was the epicentre of cool.

Oblivion came with the territory: Eric Clapton was supposed to have slept with more than 1000 women but as he told me in an interview for Fairfax Media, "I wouldn't know, I was in a blackout for quite a few of them".

George Harrison and wife Pattie Boyd.

Photo: Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo

Pattie Boyd was both muse and wife to Clapton, to George Harrison before him and no stranger to drug and booze-fuelled partying. But there was little danger of failing memory for her. She kept a record of the wild years – portraits and reportage style snaps taken with a Polaroid and, later, on a Hasselblad.

As fans and paparazzi clamoured at the door, Boyd had the inside track, hanging out with The Beatles and friends, at home with George, on tour with Eric. "I took endless photos," she says. "It was something to do, otherwise you could feel a bit spare."

Pattie Boyd and her then husband George Harrison in England in 1968.

Photo: Pattie Boyd

We are talking in her Kensington flat ahead of an exhibition of her photographs and a series of speaking engagements in Australia in May. I'd spent several minutes on the rather grand doorstep, repeatedly ringing the bell and wondering if I'd got the wrong address. Perhaps she'd been having a nap; she is 74 after all and it is that snoozy, post-lunch time of day when I often feel like one myself. She does seem quite dreamy, half-heartedly remonstrating with a friendly Irish terrier called Freddie who inspects me thoroughly before jumping onto a large pouffe, not quite as pristine white as the matching sofas. "He's allowed on that one," she says.

Boyd is wearing skinny jeans on her long, slim legs and a deep blue mohair jumper; a fall of blonde hair frames what is still recognisably the face that launched, not a thousand ships, but three of the greatest love songs of the 20th century.

George Harrison wrote Something in the first flush of his youthful marriage to Boyd; the soaring guitar chords of Layla expressed Clapton's yearning obsession with his friend's wife. Then, when he had won her, he wrote Wonderful Tonight – and who hasn't danced dreamily to that, wrapped in a lover's arms?

There is a photograph of a 19-year-old Boyd in the flat: blonde fringe, huge blue mascara'd eyes and a tiny Union Jack stuck on the end of her nose. It is from a weighty coffee table book, Birds of Britain, containing portraits of London's posh totty – society girls who roamed the bars and vintage clothes stalls of Chelsea. Boyd's face is on the cover.

George Harrison, 1968

Photo: Pattie Boyd

She was a model then, on the run from her dysfunctional family, broke and living on Birds Eye chicken pies in a shared flat. "You had to go round the photographers persuading them to use you for shoots," she says. "Norman Parkinson said, 'Come back when you've learned to do your hair.' It was all DIY hair and make up back then."

Did photographers hit on her? "Well some might try it on but you didn't submit and say, 'Oh must I?' You'd get out of there and warn the others." So it wasn't a #MeToo scene? "No! I don't know why these women don't just say, 'F--k off, I'm not having a meeting with you in your dressing gown with nothing on underneath.'" Is she a feminist? "Well not in the old 'hate men' way, but I don't like women being treated badly. I think the young generation – what are they called, snowflakes? – don't take responsibility for themselves."

George Harrison and Eric Clapton in England in 1976.

Photo: Pattie Boyd

She met George Harrison on the set of A Hard Day's Night – she played a schoolgirl – and they married when she was 21. They moved into Friar Park, a gothic pile in Hampshire where the Beatles came to record, friends drove from London to stay and she threw herself into decorating, cooking and entertaining. She was, she says, blissfully in love but often lonely: wives and girlfriends were not allowed on tour and Harrison was frequently absent. After the Beatles had discovered the Maharishi Yogi and they all went to India to learn meditation, Harrison returned gripped by eastern mysticism. "He chanted a lot," she recalls, "it's difficult to talk to someone who's chanting."

He had also discovered that he was attractive to women: "He was famous, good-looking, had tonnes of money and flash cars – what a combo. Girls were offering themselves everywhere and he loved it. To come home to old wifey must have been a bit dull."

I took endless photos. It was something to do, otherwise you could feel a bit spare.

Does she think all men would be like that if they could? "Yes I do," she says firmly. What constrains them? She shrugs: "Society, women, family?"

Eric Clapton had been a frequent visitor to Friar Park, laying siege to Boyd and, famously, playing a guitar "duel" with Harrison in the kitchen: she was the putative prize. "It was John Hurt [the actor] who described it as a duel," she says, "and he was so on the button. I sensed it but I hadn't formulated it."

She was attracted to Clapton, by then a rock deity – the legend "Clapton is God" was spray-painted on city walls – but determined to stay in her marriage. Her parents had split up when she was 10, her stepfather was a cruel and unusual man who tyrannised the family and left her mother for another woman: "As a child I always thought I would do anything to avoid divorce."

By the time she left Harrison – "He didn't want us to be together, it was a life of rejection" – Clapton had made good on his threat to take heroin if he couldn't have her. It would be four years before they got together.

Propped on an easel beside the window of Boyd's flat is a rather beautiful black and white photograph of John Lennon. Did she take it? "No, I bought it." Wasn't he the most interesting of the four? "He was, yes, he was. He was quite volatile, you never knew what he would say next. He was a pretty sexy guy actually." Did they have a fling? "No!" she exclaims. I explain I'd seen it suggested somewhere in a newspaper article. "How cheeky," she says comfortably. Later, reading her autobiography published in 2007, I find another reference to the rumoured liaison. True or not, I don't think she minds the idea.

Boyd and Clapton married in 1979: "I was madly passionate about him," she says. "We lived at Hurtwood Edge [Clapton's home for the past 50 years], I was in my 30s and ready to have babies; I used to wander round the house thinking, this will be the baby's room, the nanny can sleep here." But it was not to be: despite visits to a series of doctors and several rounds of IVF, the longed-for baby never arrived.

Clapton, meanwhile, had replaced heroin with alcohol and was drinking heroically. Boyd joined him on tour where he and the band would have girls to their rooms after the show. Cruellest of all, two of his extra-marital relationships produced babies: a daughter Ruth and two years later a son, Conor, who would die, aged four, in a fall from the window of his mother's New York apartment. Boyd and Clapton divorced in 1988.

Asked once who was the great love of her life, Boyd nominated Harrison: "I think he always loved me … Eric loves himself. She admits now: "In both my marriages I had neglected myself, and got lost in a big cloud of fame, I got lost in their lives."

When the music stopped Boyd found herself with a legacy – cardboard boxes full of photographs which she exhibits and sells as prints from her online gallery. They are the archive of an era: here is an angelic George lying in bed in an Indian ashram, Eric in a woodshed leaning on an axe and looking Lawrentian in corduroy trousers, Paul and Linda McCartney at Boyd's wedding to Eric, Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull at the Brixton Academy. They are candid and intimate: did anyone ever object? "No, not at all," she says, surprised, "I would never show a photo where someone's not looking good."

The collection has been a useful earner for the girl who left school with three O levels and had no need to work while married to rich men. She has continued to take photographs – portraits of actors for their books and pictures from her travels. Does the contemporary work sell? "No one's really interested," she says without rancour.

Freddie needs a walk so we put on coats and set off for Holland Park where the trees are still leafless but there are daffodils and a hint of spring. Boyd has been with her partner, property developer Rod Weston, for 20 years – "we are old friends" – and they wed in 2015. They share the Kensington flat and a cottage in Sussex bought for her by Clapton. Why did they decide to marry? "We have lots of nieces and nephews between us," she says, "we wanted to put everything in order so there wouldn't be any tears." We walk on a few paces: "It's funny," she says, "Rod has been much nicer since we married and I am happier and less selfish. I didn't anticipate that."

She remained friends with Harrison until his death from cancer in 2001 and has stayed in touch with Clapton, many years sober and married with three more children. Last year she accompanied him to the launch of a documentary about him, A Life in 12 Bars, in which she features, naturally. "He rang me and said, 'It's a bit raw Pattie, I hope you'll be OK.' I said, 'I'll be fine Eric. I'm a grown-up now."

George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me: An Evening with Pattie Boyd will be held at Sydney's Four Seasons Hotel on May 15. Boyd's work will be shown at the Blender Gallery in Paddington from May 5 to June 2 as part of the Head On Photo Festival.

Morning & Afternoon Newsletter

Delivered Mon–Fri.

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/famous-muse-pattie-boyd-says-she-neglected-herself-in-her-rock-star-marriage-20180409-h0yi6e.html

#pattie boyd #pattie remembers

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enaasteria · 7 years ago

Text

Apartment 5108 // 16

Apartment 5108 — ft. Oh Sehun // Contemporary Romance // Adult Fiction // Sexual & Explicit Language — in later chapters

A/N: It’s long (19,000ish words) and I’m sorry. This chapter is more of closing loose ends but nevertheless---please read with low expectations.

Chapters // 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8 // 9 // 10 // 11 // 12 // 13 // 14 // 15

I remember staring back at Sehun that night.

I remember his imploring request to believe in him one last time. I remember his each and every sentiment sinking deep into the well of my heart and I remember how all of my words were lost beyond grasp while I listened to his final plea.

‘Believe in me.

Believe in me one last time, Ahri.’

It wasn’t hearing the four letters to my name muting my lips or hushing my thoughts. It was his determination in expressing how he was trying to do better---to be better than the man he once was.

Sehun finally showed me progress. He displayed his will to become someone far different than the man I lived with months ago and he was a person untethered to his past just as I have moved forward from mine.

It’s all I ever wanted from him.

It’s all I ever wanted to see from him.

For countless moments, I tied myself to the quiet night. I was unable to summon any sensible reply in head or heart. I remained without speech and could only watch as Sehun mirrored my voiceless actions. My stillness became his own while he patiently waited for my response.

And all I could give him, all I could answer with was a nod void of any sound or noise. Every small movement I made was filled with a myriad of emotions traversing through my skin and bones. They were heavy feelings I inwardly felt but couldn’t translate nor properly convey into letters or sentences. It was a mixture of uncertainty, worry, but also wonder and curiosity in how he’s going to show me precisely what I always longed for in this lifetime---

Love.

“Again,” my best friend demands. She’s full of breathless anticipation as the unfaltering amazement spills from her voice. “Tell it again from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

“Soi---

“Please?”

“This is the sixteenth time I’ve told this story.”

“And it gets better with each time, Ahri. You know I love a good romance.”

A weighty sigh rolls off my tongue as I dig my face into a pillow, suffocating my groans from reaching the surface. As much as I enjoy love stories, reciting my own intimate tribulations repeatedly from weeks ago doesn’t stop the embarrassment from making a home on my rosy cheeks.

But I’m awestruck with her reaction to Sehun as of late. For a while, she refused to pronounce his name, finding the sound of it leaving a bitter taste at the back of her throat. It’s a black and white disparity now as she revels in my narrative, flopping her slim extremities across the expanse of my bed. The thought summons a light over my face because she, along with my other two friends, see his improvement.

“And I must remind you, Sehun and I are not characters in one of your romance novels.”

“True. You’re not filthy enough. Him? Maybe. You? Possibly with some practice.” She rises from lying position and pulls me up with her.

I give her an intrigued expression of what she reads in the privacy of her home but make a note to ask about it later, not now because it’s definitely not the right time to hear about fantasies. Instead, my soft laughter fills the bedroom. “Please go get ready. You can give me lessons from your suggestive, fictional dalliances on the way to the party. We have a busy night ahead.”

“We most certainly do.” Her brows wiggle up and down before she jumps out of bed like a child racing towards their favorite treat.

I internally cringe, hoping she doesn’t trip over the mass of decorations I’m temporarily housing for Seunghyun and Lia’s wedding. Calligraphy signage, linen table cloths and napkins, picture frames, and even their wedding favors---a copious amount of reserve Merlots bottled in the year they met are scattered throughout my apartment. Everything was shipped to me because their living spaces no longer have the capacity to accommodate even an additional speck of dust. But she manages to avoid disaster and disappears into my closet.

There’s an extra bounce in her steps as she remembers why she’s spending this weekend before their wedding at my apartment in the first place.

Myungsoo invited Chanyeol, Soi, and I to KALON’s magazine release party located at an industrial warehouse a few minutes from where I live. He submitted our photoshoot to the lifestyle publication and found out they’re including the feature in their Autumn/Winter print edition. None of us have seen any of the photos and I assume it’s why Soi is particularly excited to dress up so she can witness her vision in matte paper form.

Although, I’m not sure what she expects to find inside my closet because my less than abundant amount of party clothes equate to slim selections.

“Ahri.”

“Hrm?” I walk to her as she calls out my name but all sense dissolves once my sights settle upon the ghastly mess she created. It takes me back to our room at Seunghyun and Lia’s getaway and I find being neat truly isn’t one of Soi’s many prized qualities.

Everything is out of order and I’m baffled she managed all of this within two minutes of being alone in the confined space. My folded clothes ranging from sweaters to pants are thrown askew. Wooden hangers dangle haphazardly off the rack and even my shoes are misplaced from one end of the closet to the other.

“What are you going to wear?” Soi asks, incognizant to how she’s a human tornado.

Holding in a low chuckle, I attempt to search for the outfit I set aside and find it pinned underneath the laundry basket. Myungsoo mentioned it wasn’t a formal event so I chose something simple. A white rayon short sleeve blouse with black jeans. I give them to Soi before sitting down on the hardwood floors and watch her gaze study the two pieces. “Should I wear something else?” I offer in between her many beats of contemplation. “A dress perhaps?”

She shakes her head with a pleasant merriment stretching from ear to ear. “No, these are perfect and very much you.”

“Figured you would say that but if you must, there’s a shopping bag in the back right corner. I bought them to try on at home but haven’t had the chance yet. Maybe you’ll find something in there to wear.”

“Moon Ahri buying dresses at a store? Who would’ve known this would be the you of today.”

Her sarcasm doesn’t go unnoticed. She tosses my chosen outfit over to me while I scoot towards the door and lean against the frame. “Really?”

“Yes, really. You avoided the mall like it was a contagion.”

“It still is.”

She scoffs before a succinct gasp breaks the soundtrack of her rummaging through the pile of clothes. “This. What about this one?”

My body sways over to see what she picked but rather than finding something new, she somehow managed to choose my mom’s blue dress. The same dress I wore to Sehun’s parent’s Christmas Eve dinner and the very one he wanted me to shove into a shredder.

A bewildered grin emerges as I refuse. “No, definitely not that one.”

“What---Why not?”

“Because it’s my mom’s dress and I said right corner. Not the left, Soi. You were looking through the donation bag.”

Her jaw unhinges, latching in place as if she can’t discern if this is a dream or occurring in real life. “This is your mom’s dress? That dress? The dress she wore while she gave you your one and only gift?” Soi trudges over to where I’m sitting and collapses to her knees in front of me. With the cobalt fabric draped over one arm, she takes in my face and stares directly into my eyes, searching for some kind of answer I doubt she’ll uncover just by ogling at me in this peculiar manner. “And you’re throwing this dress away?”

“Not just the dress,” I mumble in between short breaths because she’s squishing my lips along with my ability to speak properly. “The earrings are somewhere in there too.”

“But you’re throwing them away.”

“I’m donating them. Didn’t have the heart to completely trash them since some good can still come out of it.”

Soi releases her grasp on my cheeks and waits for me to elaborate. She’s wondering why I decided to give them away as opposed to ripping and burning their essence. It’s easier for her to understand if I inflicted the same calamitous treatment on the two items as my parents subjected upon me.

But what I strive for isn’t to act like my parents. It’s to become a person they wholly believed I could never grasp within this world.

“I thought my mother loved me. It was a hope. It was a minute dream I conjured up because I forced myself to believe she cared enough to give me one of her possessions. It was my innocent method in coping and I didn’t want to consider the real reason. I ignored it because it felt better to hope than to ensue life into the fact that---

“That she didn’t.”

I nod as Soi finishes my sentence.

My mom was never seen wearing anything twice. It was unfathomable for her to wear any attire or jewelry more than once so she constantly threw away her belongings. The blue dress and earrings were no exception---as I wasn’t either.

“She believed once an item was no longer new, they lost their value. They were unworthy of her and she implied I was just that to her---that I deserved nothing more than the items she rejects. I was, down to the very core, fitting of only the trash she gave me. I held no merit and couldn’t mentally process her cruel beliefs back then. It was too much to deal with on my own.”

“But it’s different now. You’re different now.”

My gaze lingers on the blue dress. I take it from Soi and hold onto the garment for one last time before placing it flat on the floor. I brush over the textile, feeling the fabric glide against my skin and find there’s no lingering desire of what my mother felt towards me.

“I don’t want her to have a hold on me anymore. I don’t want to continue hoping when the blatant answer was always there. She didn’t love me or care for me but it doesn’t mean I should allow it to imprison me in futile wants and wishes for the rest of my life.”

“That’s why you’re giving them away. You’re freeing yourself from them.”

“Once and for all. The reason why I’m not throwing them away is because my mom would’ve tossed them into the bin without a second glance. I’m not like her. I'm the contrast of who she was and these items can still do good. They can be given to someone who wants or needs them.”

“So someone else can enjoy the dress for what it is---just a dress.”

Finally folding up the garment, I hand it back to Soi and recite her exact thoughts. “Right. It’s just a dress.”

I fail to control the delight spreading inside my chest. It expands through every vein and vessel, trickling all the way up to the winged corners of my eyes and it’s because of the peaceful contentment. The long overdue chapter with my parents is officially closed and I’m finally at a stage in my life where I’m perfectly happy. It’s not forced. It’s not an emotion I’m making myself show the world but it’s originating from within and my smile swells from satisfaction.

“And you’re right in every sense. It goes to prove how you’re a much better person than your mom could ever aspire to be, Ahri. She couldn’t and will never measure up to you.”

“I’d like to think the same too.”

“Really. You are.”

The lightheartedness is short lived as I catch onto Soi’s voice waning to a whisper. She copies my sitting position and her head leans on my shoulder. We descend into a strange silence; it’s a kind I’m not accustomed to especially in her presence.

I’m used to her vibrant personality. She has the skill to view the positive in all she does but there are moments when she’s quiet with her deep breaths outweighing her speech and her timbre unveiling a tinge of sadness. It’s then when I realize even she bears her own qualms without knowing how to explain them. “Soi? What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“Honestly, it’s silly. It really is. I don’t even know why I’m letting it get to me---again.”

With the latter word, I know she’s referring to Yixing. “You helped me through so much. I’d like to think you can confide in me as well.”

She lifts her head with her chest rising and falling to a steady tempo. Her vision roams around my closet as if the action will somehow release her encaged emotions. “You’ve grown, Ahri. You’re incredible and it’s like you said, everyone has the ability to change if they worked hard enough. You did with your parents, your relationships, and with how you live your life. Seeing and listening to what you’ve been through, I can’t help but wonder why couldn’t Yixing?”

The pain stitches itself onto her skin like an invisible tattoo. It’s a scar she tries to cover behind a brave smile but she’s hurting. The anguish is still there and I entwine my fingers within hers to ease the aches.

“We were great together but with every relationship, we’re supposed to grow with each other. Learn off of each other. Build a life with one another but Yixing didn’t want anything to change. It felt stagnant with him. He didn’t want our lives to converge more than it already did because something more meant time and attention away from his dance. There was no middle ground. He couldn’t cooperate and refused to budge on any issue. I was willing to compromise because I understood how important his work meant to him.”

“But in the end, he still couldn’t.”

Her hold on me tightens as she stops the difficult feelings from spilling out into the open. “No, he couldn’t. It was a situation he didn’t want to deal with and dismissed the matter in favor of his own stern beliefs. The way he behaved made me think I was inadequate like I wasn’t important enough for him to try.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re not enough. Don’t permit his lack of ability to see how great you are determine your self-worth.”

“I know. It used to eat me up inside. It used to gnaw at my flesh and bones when I was consumed by the negativity. It’s much less now. I don’t let it get to me as often but a part of me is still regretful over it.”

“Like when your thoughts wander and you think about the what ifs and could’ve beens.”

I know how she feels. I’ve been in her position. I’ve thought about the same dangerous questions and endured the grief she sustained on a daily basis. But she can overcome them. She can push through this obstacle and strive towards something far greater than what Yixing could ever offer.

With a deep breath and a strong exhale, her mood gradually cheers up. She voices a comment seemingly coming from out of nowhere while her sharp diction and honed speech spreads throughout the room. “Exactly, but what prevails is my anger and annoyance over the whole matter.”

It takes me a second to acclimate when her tone suddenly increases in melodic key. My vision on her widens because as fast as her somber demeanor appeared, it just as quickly vanishes. Her mannerisms are defined as dynamic and lively. She was never the type to dwell in pessimistic tides for long.

Her nose scrunches into a tight ball while her gaze fires imaginary daggers straight into my rib cage. I wonder why she’s abruptly giving me this seething expression as if I did a serious wrong to her and wish this isn’t one of the rare occasions where she unleashes her wrath on my poor old soul.

I’m scared to ask but proceed with caution. “You’re annoyed?”

“Absolutely annoyed.”

“At---me?”

“Partly you, but mostly annoyed over your Oh Sehun because even he changed. I thought he would be the very last person on the planet to mature and grow in character, but he did. He made the effort for you. And again, it makes me want to scream up to the high heavens, why couldn’t Yixing? Where’s the justice in all of this?”

She airs out an infuriating sigh and returns to her normal self as she stands and makes small, whiny stomps over to the shopping bag. Wrath averted but amusing, nevertheless, as I watch her petite frame walk away with such vexation.

“You sound bitter.”

“Can you blame me?”

I give her a whimsical grin and shake my head. “No, but may I correct you on two minor details?”

“Go for it.”

“One. He’s not mine.”

“He is.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He is, Ahri. If what he said on the bridge was any indicator---he is, without a sense of doubt, completely and entirely yours.”

“Soi---”

“We can agree to disagree. What’s the second?”

I concede but her sentiments rattle my heart, shaking the tiny strings and lines scattering throughout my body because having someone all to myself is an otherworldly sort of notion. I don’t mull on the matter for more than a minute before moving onto the next number. “Two. I’m not sure you can say he’s fully changed per se.”

“What do you mean?”

My shoulders shrug as my fingers play with the hem of the white shirt sitting on my lap. “Sehun hasn’t said or done anything more beyond the norm since our talk that night.”

“He hasn’t?”

My head turns left and right and she makes a huh noise. It’s not a question or confusion. It’s her method in running through all the possible scenarios and reasonings. I can’t read her expression but she’s perturbed by the issue.

I am worried about the sincerity of Sehun’s words. I wonder if he meant every single promise but I don’t want it to consume my spirit and life. It’s not something I’m waiting for minute by minute or second by second. I choose to carry on without overthinking which is different from how I was prone to doing so in the past.

“You don’t seem very bothered by it, Ahri.”

“I may not seem like it, but I am.”

“You are?”

“I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me at all because it does. I’m just not letting my curiosity eat me alive.”

“So you’re not too concerned with his promise---with what he said? To believe in him, to believe in him one last time.”

I bury my face into the palms of my hands because she’s mocking me. She’s making fun of my odd circumstances with her singsong voice trilling through the enclosed space. I’m tempted to lock her in my closet for all of time but instead let out a dubious laugh. “Disregarding the last portion of your dialogue, I don’t know what Sehun’s planning to show me or if he’s planning anything at all. But if he does, then he will. He’ll show me what I want to see but if he doesn’t, then I guess we both move on.”

Her hand sweeps over her lips while her top frame bobs up and down. It appears she’s going along with what I’m telling her but when she does this, I know she has something else to say; it’s something she’s keenly aware of and I’m not.

My fingers move to the crook of my neck, kneading the skin as I recount my statement and debate the validity of my actions. “Is---is that not right? Is that not what I’m supposed to do or how I’m supposed to feel?”

“There’s no right or wrong feeling and it’s okay to behave as you have.”

“But?”

“But there’s another option besides waiting in limbo or moving on.” She hums a melodious tune with a smile stretching from ear to ear. “You could ask or talk to him about it.”

I shut my eyes to a pinch because it wasn’t what I thought she would say. Her more than straightforward approach astonishes me and I joke with her. “Is that what the characters in your books would do if they were in my situation?”

“If I remember correctly, you and Sehun aren’t like the characters in my novels full of secret rendezvous and moonlight trysts. So, no, they wouldn’t do that in your situation. The fictional characters I read about will dance in between miscommunication and unsaid words. They will wait until the very last moment to reveal what they’re feeling when most could be solved if they addressed it right away. But again, that’s why they’re books. They’re entertainment. You and Sehun. You’re not them so if you’re feeling uncertain about how he’s been acting lately, even if it’s just a tiny bit---talk to him. Ask him directly and you’ll find out why.” She emphasizes the final word and my figure cranes at her heightened elocution.

“Why do I have the feeling you already know the reason behind his behavior?”

“Because I do.”

“Care to tell me?”

“No, not really. It’s not my place to reveal such significant matters of the heart,” she sneers and grabs a bunch of clothes, making her way to the bathroom.

I throw a stray sock at her bottom before she disappears behind the safety of closed doors. “Killjoy.”

“I heard that.”

Feathery chuckles swim along the expanse of my chest but all the while, I keep her advice.

I place it securely inside my mind and consider it for the next time I meet the fateful man.

After an hour of Soi trying on dress after dress and wrangling over which one accentuates her petite figure better, we make it to KALON’s magazine release party. With the sky darkening to night and the sun setting beyond the horizon, I feel the late autumn air bring in a chilled wind. The clouds overhead blanket across the rising moon and we meet Chanyeol at the entrance which is already bustling with an eclectic number of people.

Even in casual all black attire, Chanyeol exudes a dapper appearance. Unfortunate for most, the dashing impression only lasts up until he decides to open that witty mouth of his. His love for spewing nonsense doesn’t relent as he greets us. “Well, if it isn’t Soi and my former wife with the sadistic talent of breaking men's hearts.”

“How could I break something which was already broken to begin with?” I retort without hesitation because he’s not the only person who loves to dabble in meaningless banter and harmless quips.

Chanyeol’s eyes grow wide, pluming to round orbs of horror. His hand draws over his chest with nails digging into his shirt as if I punctured him with a sword imbued with poisoned love. “The pain. Must you hurt me so?”

“Always.” I give him a cynical smirk before checking my phone to see where we’re meeting Myungsoo and ignore Chanyeol’s fake cries into Soi’s shoulder. Though, she does very little to appease his sorrows. “Myungsoo’s still driving. Traffic in the city but he should be here in about 5 minutes.”

“That means 5 minutes to get myself a drink,” Soi pipes and saunters off into the building while Chanyeol and I wait outside in the brisk weather. I mentally chastise myself for not wearing a jacket as my arms wrap around one another, rubbing my exposed skin to create a sliver of warmth.

The tall male next to me notices with his sulking tendencies subsiding. Per his usual habits, there’s an enjoyment prancing along the highs and lows of his voice in lieu of his former brooding mood. He takes a step towards me, inching closer and closer while angling his grand frame down to my size. “You know, hugs are a great solution to when you’re feeling cold.”

“I, regretfully, must pass.” I push out my bottom fold into a pout, sending it off into his direction and see what other creative comebacks he’s prepared for our trivial competition of words.

“How about my oversized tee?”

“Are you wearing anything else under that oversized tee?”

Chanyeol ponders on the question before gracing me with his addictive, mischievous grin. It’s contagious and enough for me to believe even I can smile forever if I’m around his buoyant personality. He peers into his shirt, examining his form and I slightly wonder what he’s hiding under there (but not for long because a half naked Chanyeol should never be one of my concerns in life). “Nope. Nothing.”

“Then, I must say no.”

“A hoodie. I have one in the car.”

“Pass again, which reminds me. There’s a collection of your leftover hoodies at my apartment and they’re all waiting to go home to their proper owner.”

“Who says they’re not already with their proper owner?” he retaliates as if what I said was exactly what his ears wanted to hear. “Plus, your apartment is like my second home. I think I’ll leave them there for now.”

“How is my apartment your second home? It’s more or less you ran out of closet space. Please pick them up, Chanyeol. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with 15 of your black hoodies.”

“Wear them. They look better on you anyway.”

It’s an enticing notion. As much as I love comfortable clothes and huge sweaters to curl into at night, I, nonetheless, abstain from his offer because my apartment is turning into everyone’s excess storage room. “Wouldn’t you rather have someone else wearing your clothes?”

Chanyeol raises his brows and shakes his silvery locks at me. Metallic strands of hair drape over his eyes and I note how there’s no sadness lurking in them. If anything, he appears enthralled over some unknown fact beyond my understanding. “Maybe someone else later on but right now, the thought of you wearing them is my greatest joy.”

“Why is that?”

I catch a glimmer of evil perch at the corner of his mouth. He speaks clearer than before, enunciating every letter and syllable with precise diction. “Because it’ll bring me wondrous pleasure when I think about you wearing my clothes in front of the person you love, Ms. Just Moon Ahri.”

He ends his peculiar statement with a flirty wink and waltzes around me. I hear him greet Myungsoo from behind but I’m left pinned in a daze. Whereas my feet refrain from moving, my lips open and close like clockwork. They mutter to themselves, repeating his sentiments as if pronouncing it again will provide insight on how his clever brain ticks. My body finally wills itself to turn around for clarification but the question is heard by more people than I originally intended. “Why are you talking about the person I love?”

It’s in that moment when I realize the demonic boy trapped me in his horrific game of fun. Chanyeol lured me into a destructive path and easily won this round, perhaps even this entire war. I grit his name in between my teeth because I’m struck mute when I see the number of individuals Myungsoo brought with him to this event.

Lia and Seunghyun are included in the mix but the one person my eyes naturally trail towards is the last person I thought would ever show up tonight.

Sehun.

The elated boy stands with his height shadowing over me as I snap my jaw to a shut, contemplating a vow of silence for all of eternity. He doesn’t pass on the opportunity and hammers the last nail into my coffin, sealing in my death with ease. “And who is this person you love?”

My heart sinks into my gut and I feel my soul leave the atmosphere. I cry for it to take me along because I don’t know how to rid myself of this dire situation. My cheeks heat up and I’m certain they’re changing in hue as the distinct feeling of dread trickles down every part of my limbs with no remedy for a cure.

Sehun’s on the opposite spectrum. There’s a light glowing in him, a hope or desire in needing to hear the answer to his question. Soi’s lingering advice shoots through my head like a fire cannon and I mentally quiet the chaos to keep it from seeping onto my face (knowing far well it’s a fruitless cause).

As much as I want to shout out a name, none is spoken because it doesn’t feel right. It’s not the right place; it’s not the right time. I swallow the lump hinging inside my throat and barely manage to talk like a normal functioning adult, albeit rather slowly at a chopped pace. "I---I-I--lo--”

Sehun hangs onto every word and it’s similar to the night when we sat on the bridge overlooking the stream. He’s waiting for my response. He’s eager to hear a specific name marry into the air between us but somehow in some bizarre universe, there’s a deity looking out for me. There is a supreme being living on this earth and she’s come to save me in the form of Soi.

“Ahri.”

My attention snaps to my best friend reappearing. She’s sipping on her drink, unaware of what she’s stumbling into and I take advantage of it. “The person I love is Soi,” I declare. It’s not a lie. It probably not what Sehun wanted to hear but it did comprise of a truth; it’s just not the truth he was hoping for.

Soi is oblivious in how she’s become my new god as she peers at us through long lashes. She blinks from me to Sehun and there’s a brief shock as her attention ambles onto the latter male, puzzling over why he’s here of all places. I link my arm within hers, greet the rest of the group in one swooping breath, and walk in the way she came.

With one glance back at Sehun, I see him grinning to himself. It’s a soft, velvety laugh bouncing through his shoulders and travels all the way down to his knees.

And I can’t help but do the same.

My actions reflect his captivating movements. I don’t have an understanding on why I’m amused over the encounter but hide my embarrassing smile from emerging. Once we reach a comfortable distance away from the others, Soi tugs on my shirt with a free hand and an intrigue peeps through her bright visage. “Did I miss something?”

"No, nothing important---only my ultimate demise.”

“Oh, so the usual then?”

“Yes. Just the usual.” My head shakes and feel I should simply accept my entire life as one, terribly drawn out joke. I decide not to relive my shortcomings with Sehun in intimate detail and instead focus on the surroundings (because concentrating on the scenery around us won’t phase me into a blushing red pumpkin for the rest of the night).

KALON magazine emphasizes beauty from within. They favor inner attractiveness, praising the humble and modest rather than when it’s typically seen in outward appearances. It’s evident in the building they chose to host their party. The exterior portrays a cold, almost frigid construction and most wouldn’t take a second glimpse at it in passing. Its muted gray tones convey little to no spirit but once inside, the bones of the warehouse shine and provide a warmth filled with familiarity.

The high ceilings are lined with exposed metal beams. They’re painted charcoal in color and contrast against the crisp, white walls and golden light. The open plan layout is accentuated with wooden columns. They’re rich in hue with the grains depicting the structure’s old age but what piques my fascination is the furthest right corner. Black stairs lead up to the mezzanine level framed by hazed glass and black steel railings. The balcony design provides a view over the vast space and I note the easel placed in the center. It’s supporting an artwork but the piece is covered by a dark linen cloth.

“It’s the magazine cover,” Myungsoo says and follows my line of sight. “They’re revealing it tonight.”

“Are you one of the contenders?”

“Yeah, along with about 20 other photographers who are also featured in the magazine.” Myungsoo gestures to the displays around us.

Each photo is printed on heavy stock paper the size of posters and hang from thin wires attached to the ceiling. Some are single photographs while others are pages of the magazine spreads with descriptions and stories shown at a larger scale for guests to read. They’re an inside look into the publication and we walk around, perusing the various images around the gallery.

Myungsoo wasn’t lying when he said the competition for the cover art was intense. Every picture we pass by represent what KALON truly is about---a beauty instilled deep within the spirit. And somehow, I suddenly feel apologetic towards the photographer next to me.

“I’m so sorry if you don’t win, Myungsoo.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“Because your chances would’ve drastically increased if you had professional models for your shoot.”

Myungsoo chuckles and waves a hand to stop the nonsense. “Here. Let me show you something.” He leads us over to a shoot illustrating a female artist in her studio. She sits on the ground with charcoal drawings surrounding her feet. A man, assuming he’s her boyfriend or husband, is off to the side. His back is against the wall with a coffee and newspaper in his hands while he watches her render large sketches of the human form.

To the untrained eye, it’s a charming image just like every other image in the exhibition. It’s unique enough to be in the magazine because it shows a simple lifestyle built on a passion for the arts but also for each other. It’s how I perceive the image but Myungsoo expands on how it’s good---just not great.

“It’s an excellent image from a textbook stand point. The colors are balanced, the shot is perfectly framed, exposure, light, everything is good. It’s everything you learn in a classroom translated onto a film picture. It’s technically sound and it’s why it was accepted into the magazine.”

“But something is missing,” I follow up and he agrees.

“Yes, and can you tell me what that is?”

I study the picture, going over every detail until I notice a discrepancy in their expressions. It’s in the way they hold the items and in the manner they position themselves in the room. “Love.”

“Exactly. The photographer and stylist hired models for their shoot. You can tell by how she has the piece of charcoal in between her fingers. Artists have a natural way of drawing. It’s innate. There’s an inherent movement to their actions and it’s not easily imitated by amateurs. There’s a strain in her hands and arms and the same can be said for the guy. You can feign intimacy with longing looks and smiles but nothing beats the real deal.”

“But what Chanyeol and I did wasn’t a real love though.”

“Who’s to say it wasn’t? Love doesn’t always equate to romance. It can be a familial love, a love of the arts, or a passion for what you do in life whether it’s living or breathing. But it can also be found in a love between two friends who happen to share a platonic affinity towards each other.”

And I begin to comprehend Myungsoo’s interpretation. “It’s an understanding of one another and as the topic of our photos illustrate, it’s a comfort.”

His countenance brightens with his crescent eye smile, “You got it. Their shoot was curated. The props, the event space, and down to their very expressions were organized together. They posed in these positions because they were told to and not because they felt it. Although it all appears nice on the surface, it doesn’t leave a lasting impression. So to answer your trepidations, no, having professional models wouldn’t have increased my chances but working with you and Chanyeol definitely did. I might have to hire you two again for a future editorial.”

“Please, no. Once was more than enough.”

Myungsoo and I break out into a fit of chuckles. He runs a free hand through his hair before digging the other into his pant pocket. “I guess you’re right. If I put you and Chanyeol together in another intimate setting, the poor guy dawdling behind us with Seunghyun and Lia might actually do the impossible and self-implode.” Myungsoo clicks his head to the right and I see Sehun.

He strolls around the gallery while maintaining a distance from us. It’s a contrast from earlier when he was knitted into my space, stealing the air from my lungs and wrecking havoc on my tragic soul.

What I’m met with now is how he tends to act around me ever since our conversation all those weeks ago. We’re cordial to one another. We talk. We share the same area but there’s an implicit barrier between us. It’s a wall comprising of unanswered questions, intrigue, and tension. The last portion isn’t like the strain in the photos Myungsoo showed me. It’s not a tension felt in muscles or ligaments. It’s the kind where my heartstrings are attracted to Sehun’s. They’re unwillingly hypnotized by him and I’m either supposed to relinquish control and freely go towards him or stay absolutely stationary against the tide and currents.

They are my inward struggles but I leave the matter alone at present because the male notices me looking at him. The edge of his mouth curls into a smile and he conceals it with the back of his hand. I immediately sever my observation on him as I’m caught staring and ignore how the blushing on my cheeks is returning full force.

Myungsoo takes no heed over my veiled frets and goes on to explain why Seunghyun and Lia are here. He had a final venue walkthrough with the couple before the magazine party because their wedding next weekend will take place in a historic library located in the city’s center.

With an Old World ambiance, he tells me the ceremony room is decorated with ornate trimmings including heavy stone walls and a ceiling illustrating countless murals of rippling clouds and azure skies. But even with large arched windows stretching from top to floor breaking up the line of cold walls, the main issue Myungsoo had was the lack of natural lighting to balance out the wood accented expanse. He states the meeting took much longer than anticipated, carrying on well past the set one-hour appointment and it was why he was running late.

He adds how Sehun was asked to join at the last minute because Seunghyun and Lia wanted him to familiarize himself with the building layout. He’s one of the groomsmen but has the extra task of guiding guests to their proper seat and the go-to person for questions on the special day.

Towards the end of the walkthrough, Myungsoo mentioned the magazine party. They asked what it was for and he explained how we’re featured in KALON.

“Seunghyun and Lia wanted to know if they could come since they want to do a photoshoot the morning after their wedding. I figured this would be a great place for them to grab some ideas on where to have it and what to do.”

“They’re definitely inspired,” I say and see Lia pointing at one photo after another as she pulls insight from every single piece of artwork.

“I think so too.”

“Do they have a favorite yet?”

“They like certain elements from each but nothing quite hitting the mark. I think it’ll change once they see your photos with Chanyeol.”

“Why us?”

“Not sure. A feeling, I suppose?” He wiggles his brows and shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

Like many artists, Myungsoo has pride over his work. It derives from his personality and how he dedicates so much of his time towards his chosen passion. He realizes there’s always room for improvement---to be someone who can always better their skills and talents. But for the photos he took of me and Chanyeol, I somehow sense he finds his greatest achievement strictly within those prints.

He explains there’s something else about them; something vastly richer which will transpire through every individual here tonight. Each image portrays an ease felt in the heart but they also depict how everything in the end will be all right. It’s a comfort in realizing no matter the battles or scars laced in and onto our bodies, we will all be okay.

My hand naturally moves up to my own set of imperfections and feel there’s a familiarity in what he says. They are the words I relied on heavily throughout my life and hearing them dictated out loud by Myungsoo reinforces all of my beliefs---that what we endure will eventually lead to an ending fitting of all the hardships.

“Was this the reason why you didn’t show us the photos until now?” I ask.

“Partly, but also because of my greed in wanting to see all of you react towards them first hand. Although, I didn’t plan on having Sehun here so not sure how that one’s going to work out.”

“Are you worried about his reaction?”

“A little, but I’m wondering what he’ll do once he sees them.”

“Hopefully not self-implode,” I profess into his frame and he chuckles over my use of his exact words from earlier in the conversation.

“He very well might, Ahri.”

I shy away a pleasant merriment and view Sehun from the corner of my eye. My vision rests on him and I inhale a breath of air while correlating what Myungsoo told me.

Everything will be all right.

No matter the outcome, everything will happen the way it’s supposed to and we’ll all be okay.

With a pat on the shoulder, Myungsoo leaves me with Soi as he goes off to mingle with his colleagues and industry vendor friends. I see her reading over one of the full large scale spreads featuring KALON’s editor in chief, Ji Changwook. It consists of snippets from a day in his life, behind the scenes shots of his morning to night routine, and how he runs the magazine label.

While she’s fully immersed in the writing, I scan around the warehouse and catch Chanyeol hiding behind some of the hanging posters. He appears afraid of the repercussions about to unfold due to his former games and I find it’s time for his ultimate ruination.

His dark pools of umber turn doe-like as if he’s pinned on a road and sees I’m about to shoot an arrow straight into him. He swivels around on his heel for an escape but his lanky and clumsy movements slow him down. They work in my favor because he lacks control over his gargantuan body and elongated limbs. My fingers latch onto the sleeve of his oversized tee and haul him back with a stern grasp. “Park Chanyeol.”

“Ms. Just Moon Ahri.” He displays the most innocent smile; it permeates with cherubic appeal as if he prays it’ll convince me in sparing his mortal life.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Bathroom?”

“Bathroom’s the other way. Were you running from me?”

He’s appalled by my accusation. “No, of course not. I would never do such a thing.”

“And you think I can trust the words of a man who threw me into a wolf's den earlier this evening.”

“Well, I wouldn’t really call Sehun a wolf---”

“So you admit your wrongdoings?”

“Again, wouldn’t call it wrong.”

“Chanyeol.”

“All right, okay. I’m sorry. I really am. What can I do? How do you want me to repay you? For what it’s worth, you were cute with all the stuttering and stumbling.”

I could strangle him. I really could. My hands would just have to wrap around his neck and squeeze hard until his hyoid bone fractures and his pretty little face turns blue. But I bite down on my murderous intent, grumbling over how it’s not worth going to prison on a homicide charge.

Instead, I settle the score with a small jab into his stomach and come to the horrifying conclusion about how all my friends are terrible people. They are the worst and take the ultimate pleasure in seeing me squirm inside my skin. “You’re doing a terrible job at apologizing.”

“How’s it terrible? I’m giving you a compliment.” He proceeds to extend out his arm for me to take and attempts another tactic to appease my glowering displeasure. “But if flattery isn’t what you want, may I ask what is? Perhaps I can be your genie for the night and grant you what you’re wishing for. Would that be a better form of an apology?”

He’s resorting to transforming into a genie because acting as an angel didn’t work to his benefit. I cast away my disbelief, hoping he doesn’t expect I’ll iterate his name and he’ll offer himself up like some sacrificial tribute. I grab onto him, albeit with much reservation, and follow as we make our way through the final portion of the gallery.

“I had genies fail me before, Chanyeol. What makes you far superior amongst the rest?”

“They didn’t have my wit or charisma.”

“That they did not, but I believe we’re at an impasse because there isn’t anything I want.”

Chanyeol chuckles as if I muttered a ridiculous notion and affirms everyone on the planet wants something regardless if it’s a small wish or object. He states his otherworldly talents allow him to see what others can’t and he knows all of my aspirations even if I don’t articulate the words. Worst of it is he offers to grant me three wishes without having me speak a syllable. I can’t fend off the curiosity as I tuck free falling locks of hair behind my ear.

Similar to Soi and Myungsoo, Chanyeol radiates positive energy. He thrives off the fire of carefree moments and lighthearted experiences, basking in all optimism. It’s a trait I’m learning to partake in more and more with each passing day as I join in his jests because any resistance is a hollow effort.

Before he begins, I give him a warning shot. “But if you speak one letter to your name as something I want, I will shake you silly until you’re in the right frame of mind again, Chanyeol.”

“Do you think this lowly of me?”

“I don’t, but you are one of my closest friends which means I know you rather well. So---was I wrong?”

“You’re not completely mistaken. Perhaps one day you’ll change your mind, but until then.” Chanyeol exhibits his candied grin again it’s the very smile indicating how our lives could be so different if we were made for each other. Only, we’re a shade of mismatched pieces. He doesn’t speak the sentiments wafting through our thoughts and maintains the air of our childish games. “The #1 thing you want is: to completely wipe away the existence of the dating app.”

I exhale a guffawed laugh into him and breathe out my amusement. In this case, he isn’t one bit close to wrong. For the past few months, Soi has dragged me into the hellish depths of the online dating world and I’m tormented by the notifications ordering me to swipe left or right. The blinking red light, the list of potential suitors, the deafening chimes. They all contribute to my suffering of the acutest kind. “I can’t deny this is something I desperately want.”

“Told you. Magic genie.”

“But how do you suppose you’re going to release me from this dating app prison? Soi dictated my friendship with her will be revoked if I dare uninstall it.”

“Oh my dear girl, it may come sooner than you realize.” Chanyeol winks and his benevolence is soaring through the roof as we walk side by side. He flicks his attention to where Soi is and we see her enthralled in a conversation with Changwook, KALON’s editor-in-chief. He was the man she was reading about earlier with great interest.

With hands behind his back and tousled jet black hair, Changwook beams at Soi and exudes boyish charisma as if it’s his god-given right. It’s not arrogant; it’s a bashfulness and I observe it in the way he fiddles with his fingers when he speaks to her. I’m not an expert on body language or anything but believe the poor boy is nervous (in the good way, of course). There’s a slight, growing infatuation he has for my friend and the same can be said for Soi as I haven’t seen her jubilant appearance light up a room like this in a while.

“She won’t have a need for the dating app much longer which will unbind you from your contract as a result.”

“Nicely done, Genie.”

“Like I said, your previous genie lacked my ingenuity. Wish #1---granted. Wish #2 is Ehle.”

“Ehle?” My footing stops and I direct my worries up to the tall man next to me. “Please tell me you’re not planning on stealing Ehle from Myungsoo. I rather not stand trial and testify against your criminal deeds.”

“As much as I would love to give you Ehle, I don’t want to die a horrible death by his owner’s hand when he finds out I was the mastermind behind the canine heist. What I can do is provide you with an alternative.” Chanyeol pulls out his phone, taps the screen a few times before ushering me to look at my own device.

Swiping down, there’s a mile long list of notifications from him. Every message received is a picture of Ehle’s fluffy white face and his heart tugging grin. I melt from each photo and keep it to myself how I’m already planning on printing them out so I can frame them all over my apartment. “When did you take these?”

“The day I adhered to your suggestion and borrowed Ehle so he can help me win Naia’s favor, which utterly failed by the way.”

I nearly gasp in horror, unable to fathom any person in the world not falling under Ehle’s hypnotic spell. “You must be joking.”

“Not in the slightest. Turns out she’s petrified of dogs. She hid behind anyone and anything she could get her hands on and screamed to get Ehle away from her as if he would devour her toes. You and I both know how Ehle behaves. The only thing he has a taste for is designer shoes and window curtains. It was ridiculous, Ahri. She wouldn’t give him a proper chance.”

“Similar to how she didn’t give you one either.”

“No, she didn’t. It was at that precise moment when I realized I couldn’t do it; I didn’t want to chase after her anymore.”

“And you decided to move on.”

“I did, hence the pictures. I celebrated my freedom from the horrid cycle by taking ample amount of photos with Ehle. I think you’ll appreciate the bedroom ones,” he teases and swipes my phone to the right, showing him and Ehle in matching bathrobes. Despite the latter promiscuous pictures, I give his arm a supportive squeeze; it’s the same kind he’s shown me in the past. Chanyeol appears ever so satisfied with himself and his visage is brighter than the fluorescent lights hanging above us.

What strikes me the most is the pride in his performance. It’s a blend of optimism and positivity because he’s pleased with actions, gratified he surpassed the struggles of knowing when to keep fighting and realizing when it was time to walk away from her.

“I’m glad you did.”

“Me too. It was worth it in the end.” His smiles don’t relent and if it goes on any longer, I’m certain the dimple in his left cheek will permanently carve itself into his flesh. But there’s a hidden meaning behind all of it. There’s an unknown detail spanning along the gentle features of his inviting face and it reminds me of when a person reflects fondly on a happy memory.

“Chanyeol---”

“Hrm?”

“Is there someone else you want to tell me about?”

His eyes lock onto me as his index etches itself along the edge of my chin and his response doesn’t shock me. “Yes, there is and I do want to tell you about it, but now isn’t the time, Ms. Just Moon Ahri. For at current, I will sadly have to spend the rest of my evening relinquishing my first love.”

I can’t help but find he’s spurting absurdities again but he guides my attention to the middle of the gallery. Chanyeol angles us to the last photo suspending in the center of the exhibition and I immediately sense all my breaths leave the sanctum of my heart. What he reveals is not any ordinary picture. It’s not of any random model or person.

It’s us.

It’s me and him and we’re teleported back to the cottage house with warm summer rays and a blissful scenery rivaling even the best fairy tale endings. The picture lives up to my memories as I recollect every intimate action performed. Chanyeol’s fingers against the lining of my face. His gentle hand to my thigh and the otherworldly smiles depicted on our faces as our foreheads connect to the faintest of touches. I remember every feeling felt, every thought transpiring through my mind as my eyes roam through the four corners of the image.

But Chanyeol adds to the surreal fantasy; he speaks to my hidden desire and unearths it to run wild and free.

“This photograph---this is what you want.”

My gaze links to his as he stares down at me and it’s because he knows me as much as I understand him. He’s answering what I can barely conceive or acknowledge on any given day. He’s telling me what I want, what I dream of, and what my wishes and hopes are in this lifetime in the form of one single picture.

His soft embrace on my forearm remains steady as his thumb grazes over my skin, subduing any nerves from fragmenting into shambles.

I remain stationary and permanently in place as Chanyeol’s voice echoes throughout all the corridors of my mind. I memorize the exact love felt in this image---the intimate expressions, the affectionate touches, and the distinct warmth filling my spirit as it all makes their way to my beating heart. I sense it drumming to the tempo of another and Chanyeol is quick to point out this single fact.

“This is what you want. You want the contentment, the ease, the unconditional love and how it’s simple and effortlessly clear. It’s what you imagine your life to be; it’s the future you’re searching for. Only, the male lead is someone else. He’s someone different; he’s someone other than me, isn’t he?”

My lips separate but the words fail in reply. Silence is my companion but what astonishes me is my ability to continue smiling because I remember what Myungsoo said. Whatever burden we bear, it’ll be okay and we’ll each find a resolution deserving of the struggles dealt to us. It’s an equilibrium. It’s a balance between the two halves.

“You know everything, don’t you?” I ask with my voice at a whisper.

“As much as your one and only genie should.”

“But as my friend, tell me. Do you think he could give me that? Could he give me the very thing in which I seek---in which you just described?”

Chanyeol arches to my height and he twists his head slightly as if to capture the attention of another. He’s making sure this person is listening to every word spoken. “If I was him, I would. I would do that and so much more for you, Ahri. But I’m not the one you want. You and I would make each other happy but we both know there’s another kind of happiness. A kind of love our souls yearn for because that person is the one we’re meant to be with. They are the ones we feel most at home with.”

"And you found that person, haven’t you?”

He straightens his posture and neither agrees nor disagrees to my suspicions. “Too early to tell, but again, not the right time to be discussing my active love life, Ahri. You have your own to worry about.” Chanyeol brushes a few strands of stray bangs away from my face before we return to the photo.

As the minutes go by, I can’t help but observe everyone’s reaction to it. Surrounding individuals turn quiet. Their voices dim as they inch closer and closer to study the photograph. Like Chanyeol and me, they survey every detail. They notice the loving ambience down to the imperfections situated on my skin. I hear their exhales end with a tender smile and realize how Myungsoo was correct when he said our picture would elicit an emotion transcending the norm.

The photo reveals a simple hope for the future and once more, I feel my soul strings seeking out a certain person.

Sehun is focused on the photo. His eyes are firm on the large print but his gaze doesn’t drift around the image. What moves are his fingers as his thumb sweep across his lips and chin. He releases a heady breath but whereas others sighed in relief, his encompassed a determination filled with resolve and grit.

His actions leave me in a plight of mystery but my thinking is interrupted by Changwook’s vocals channeling through the warehouse speakers. The editor stands on the second floor balcony as all guests rotate their attention onto him.

Changwook dives into the final portion of the event and begins thanking every vendor for submitting their work for a chance to grace the cover design. Within the number of attendees, I can easily point out all of the photographers because each are waiting in anticipation. Their bundled up nerves fill the air and even Myungsoo, to my far left, has his arms swung behind his back with fingers crossed for good luck.

“At KALON, we have a passion for the spirit. It’s an inner love for who we are, what we do, and who we choose to share our lives with. It’s a simple statement but extremely difficult to achieve in today’s world which is why this magazine came to fruition. We’re purveyors of simplicity and natural comfort whether if it’s within ourselves and or with another.” Changwook pauses and the audience mimics his prolonged silence. With a free hand, he grasps onto the black cloth and steadily drags it off.

Without looking at the revealed cover art photo, I can tell who won just by the sentiments expressed by the editor. Ease and comfort. Myungsoo shuts his eyes closed with his palm to his forehead. It takes him a moment to suppress the shock before bowing to his fellow photographers showing him their genuine applause.

As the celebration comes to an end, we all purchase our own print edition to keep before leaving the building. Soi and I have two whereas Myungsoo and Chanyeol grab ten each. I understand why the former is buying more than usual but have no idea why Chanyeol requires the same amount. He refutes my bafflement with how he must preserve his first marriage for as long as possible by laminating as many pages as he can. I conclude his acts are nonsensical but endearing in the least despite his aberrant behavior.

We all walk to the entrance and Soi drapes her arm within mine. She skips to a jovial rhythm and speaks my name. It oozes with caramel sweetness as she elongates the last letter, stretching it upon minutes. “Ahri---”

“Yes, Soi?” I mewl with a giggle and can’t help but ponder over what she wants. She issues my name in this manner when she needs something or feels guilty over a trite matter.

“Don’t hate me.”

“I don’t think I could ever hate you.”

“You might.”

“Again, I haven’t ever gotten close, but it would greatly help if you tell me why you think I would.”

After a few seconds of chewing on her inner cheek, I feel the excitement pour out of her like a waterfall cascading over a river’s edge. “Changwook asked our group out for drinks,” she confesses.

I raise my brows at her, “And?”

“And I know you don’t like bars. You will most likely say no to going but would you hate it if I said yes?”

“Why would I hate it?”

“Because I’m spending the weekend with you but---”

“Soi, I’m perfectly all right with driving home and having a quiet night indoors. Enjoy yourself. He seems genuinely nice.”

I see her clench the magazines closer to her body, withholding her glee from spinning out of control. If it was possible, I’m almost certain her exuberant jumps would land her straight on the moon. “I could ask Chanyeol to keep you company,” she suggests and I refuse without blinking.

“No, it’s okay. If he comes over, it means my collection of Chanyeol hoodies will increase from 15 to 16. I mustn’t allow that to happen.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Do you remember the pass code to my apartment?”

“You mean Yoo Yeonseok’s birthday?” she catches me stashing away a blushing smirk. “I still can’t believe you changed it from Won Bin’s. That’s simultaneously the most amazing and quite shocking thing you’ve done as of late.”

“A woman must move on once she’s been rejected in the clearest way possible,” I digress and continue, “And you have your phone just in case there’s any trouble?”

“Yes. I’ll even be home before curfew.”

"Good. I’ll be watching the clock.”

She sticks her tongue out at me as if I’m acting like her guardian and making sure she arrives home safe and sound. But she ends on the note of appearing relieved and more or less eager to spend time getting to know Changwook. It seems her days of reminiscing Yixing are coming to a finite end.

We reconvene with the rest of the group by the entrance before saying all of our final congratulations to Myungsoo as well as goodbyes for the night. Lia, Seunghyun, and Sehun already left earlier to pick up their wedding attire from the alterations shop before they close for the night and Myungsoo and Chanyeol decide to join Soi for drinks with Changwook. They ask if I want to go once more but the idea of an evening alone is much too tempting as I enter my empty apartment.

The silent solitude is a welcoming sight as I journey up the stairs to my bedroom with peace of mind roaming along beside me. A solo evening indoors provides a chance to tidy up after the mess Soi displaced in my room as I fold and organize the haphazardly tossed clothes. My phone rings while I place the last hanger on the rack and I look at the ID, finding it’s the said person herself.

“Soi.”

“Don’t hate me.”

I chuckle into the receiver and it’s baffling how this girl thinks I could hate her---twice. “Is this déjà vu or have we not gone through this already?”

“No, it’s serious this time so please remember I’m your best friend and I know you don’t like surprises but I literally have no choice in the matter. I would save you if I could but I can’t and he’s already on his way to your apartment but all in all, this might be your opportunity to ask him.”

I ignore Chanyeol’s wails in the background. He’s spewing something about being my genie and this is him granting my third wish but I’m confused as it is so hearing him doesn’t aid in my problems. “Wait---who is on their way here?”

“Sehun.”

I nearly choke on my saliva and an eruption of coughs bellow out of my esophagus. “What?”

“Sehun is on his way to your apartment.”

“Why?” The ability to remember how to inhale and exhale shoots out the nearest window when the doorbell goes off. An instant cold sweat roams through my bloodstream and the sound of the alarm is loud enough for Soi to hear as she curses under her breath.

“Shit. I’m sorry, Ahri. Remember, I love you. We all do. Don’t hate us or plot our demise.”

Against my every refute and call for her name, she hangs up with a click and I’m left inwardly struggling on why this is happening because it’s apparently against the will of the gods to have a quiet night alone.

The doorbell chimes for the second time and I rush to the entryway, checking the peep hole. Standing there in all his proper glory is Oh Sehun himself with not a hair out of place. I wince at this grim predicament but tow in a gulp before unlocking the dead bolt. With one hand on the door and the other affixed to my left earlobe, I barely manage a greeting. “Hi.”

“Hi, Ahri.” He responds in kind with a heated smile warm enough to melt even the coldest glaciers. I push away how the sound of my name entwines and tangles my flustered heart strings because there are more prevalent concerns stationed before us. The leading questions being---why is he here and how did he know where I live?

As if he can decipher my inner most thoughts, “Lia and Seunghyun emergency. Lia wants to have the wedding favor wine bottles etched with their names and date in calligraphy but the letterist needs them dropped off tonight so she can complete them by next weekend.”

“Oh---I could’ve drove them down.”

“They thought you would offer but they already feel bad about using your apartment as a surplus warehouse. Lia didn’t want you driving so far late at night. She suggested if I would go in their stead since they had another appointment and I said I could only if you were okay with it.”

I watch as his neck slants slightly, examining my current bewilderment and it’s because my brain is having to overclock itself trying to compute the situation.

He appears confused as if he was given wrong information. “Lia gave me your address---did she not call you? They both told me you were okay with it.”

“No, well, I assume she called Soi. I haven’t had a chance to process it all since Soi told me you were coming literally two seconds ago.” I brush my bangs away from my face and open the door wider for him to enter. But he doesn’t move from his stance and it’s as if his feet are bonded to the tiles. It hits me that he’s acting in this way because he wants to make certain I’m okay with him being here in my space. “It’s fine, Sehun. You’re not the person I want to murder tonight,” I joke.

The two on my hit list are Soi and Chanyeol. My best friend would never act under this pretense without the influence of another---that being is the devilish genie by the name of Park Chanyeol. He’ll be the first to go but I stash away my villainous side because unfortunately, I might be the one losing my soul tonight before the rest.

Sehun’s alleviated for the time being as he nods and takes the initial step into my apartment. I lead him out of the foyer and into the open living area shared with the kitchen. He circles around in place, visually sifting through the loft I now call home. In a way, our roles switched as I remember walking into Apartment 5108 for the first time nearly one year ago.

With two floors and two bedrooms, my new residence has more amenities than I require. I kept most of the furniture from when it was a model home and added only a few of my personal touches---landscape photographs and black and white portraits of my friends accenting the walls and tables. I never had many possessions to begin with but my collection is slowly growing due to new interests and hobbies.

Sehun’s hand drags along the exposed brick outlining the back wall. He feels every groove and indent as his feet advances across the aged hardwood floor. I can only imagine what his thoughts are but break him out of his musings to avoid any awkward small talk if possible.

“The wine boxes are in the guest room. It was the only place cool and dry enough to house them for the time being. Unfortunately, it’s on the second floor.” I explain while navigating.

The windowed wall in the living room leading out to the terrace provides too much light and warmth whereas the guest room is AC controlled and barely used unless Myungsoo or Chanyeol stays over for a night.

Sehun follows me up the stairs from behind as we pass my bedroom in the hallway. It still shows remnants of Soi’s destruction and I can hear him chuckle through his nose before clearing his throat. The nostalgic sound of it causes a fondness to spread inside my abdomen and it expands throughout my extremities. I’m not anal retentive when it comes to cleanliness but I do lean towards being neat more so than the average individual. Even when I lived with Sehun, the apartment always remained spotless and void of dust and dirt. I assume Sehun realizes this as he witnesses the unruly clutter.

“Soi’s doing?” he asks.

“How’d you know?”

“Seunghyun told me horror stories from when they were kids. He wants to submit her to Hoarders.”

“She’s not that bad, is she?” I turn around before reaching the guest bedroom and effortlessly laugh with him. And I miss this already. The ease of conversation. The laughter. The simple method in which we could say anything and everything to each other.

Sehun bounces his head up and down as strands of hair play over his happy eyes. “Why do you suppose she had to do renovations to her apartment?”

“That makes so much more sense now.” I quip and open the guest bedroom door.

We spend the next half hour loading his car parked outside with the wine cases. He offered to do the job all himself since he felt terrible for showing up out of the blue but I wasn’t having any of it. Didn’t seem right to sit back and watch him move all the boxes alone. Soi would beg to differ but since she’s decidedly not here, her opinion is invalid.

With the last box safely tucked in the back seat, Sehun shuts the door before a pitter patter of rain hits our shoulders. He and I both hold out our palms simultaneously while looking up but are met with an onslaught of downpour. It soaks through our clothes and onto our skin. Words barely leave my lips before I steer him to shelter under the apartment entrance overhang. Thunder and lightning rip across the atmosphere while the rain continues to plummet without a chance of stopping.

“The weather did not call for rain tonight,” I mutter and wipe away the moisture from my forehead and bare arms. Only, there’s no response as I look to the drenched male beside me. His stern gaze darts from my figure and then away to the parking lot before he slides off his suit jacket and holds it out to me.

I’m confused by his gesture but finally notice how my thin white blouse clings to me like a second skin. Everything is seen from my nude bra to the small birthmark below my breast and my left arm instantly covers my chest in haste.

I don’t even know why I did it since it’s not like Sehun hasn’t seen everything before but I’m grateful of his consideration as he walks over. He refrains from looking straight at me and places the jacket over my shoulders, holding out both lapels as I insert my arms into the sleeves. My fingers get lost in the arm holes but upon closer inspection, I finally discern this particular jacket. His suit. His entire outfit. I didn’t pay attention to it when we were at the magazine party due to my embarrassment but find he’s wearing the very garments I chose for him at SPAO.

The perfect tailoring shapes to his figure even if he’s soaked from top to bottom. The subtle vertical pin stripes elongate his already tall frame and in lieu of the lavender dress shirt, he opted for a crisp white finished by the diamond plaid tie. I don’t know what to make of his clothing choices because it could just be a coincidence. It could be just something that happened with no reason or rhyme but nevertheless, I force down the urge to stare and overthink it into the pit of my stomach.

“Think it’ll end soon?” he questions while angling his sights up to the still pouring skies.

I keep it under wraps with how the way our lives tend to pan out, it will sadly not go in our favor. “No, I don’t think so.” My answer is interrupted by vibrations and beeps coming from his jacket’s breast pocket. I quickly pull out Sehun’s phone and pass it to him.

He scans the ID and treads off to the corner as he talks with a person on the other line. He’s still within earshot so I can’t disregard his words even if I tried. I do my best not to listen but his tone suddenly changes in frequency and is at a decibel hard to ignore. My ears take in Sehun’s half of the conversation while his frustrations crowd into the outdoor area.

“You have got to be kidding me, Seunghyun.”

“She’s changing her mind---now?”

“Yes, Ahri and I loaded all the---”

“Yes, it’s storming.”

“Like hell I am, Seunghyun.”

“No, I’m not going to let you talk to her.”

“Why not? Because you’re all being certified rotten idiots and this isn’t how I wanted things to go.”

“No, shut up, Seunghyun. If you weren’t my best friend, I would’ve killed you by now.”

The overdrawn sleeve clasps over my mouth while I hold in a snort and find I’m not the only person wanting to commit homicide tonight. I curl into Sehun’s suit jacket and trek over to where he’s standing. His broad shoulders and long back face me and with folded arms, I ask, “Everything okay?”

From this close distance, I can already hear Seunghyun on the other line demanding Sehun lend over the phone. The gentleman in front of me sighs and I give him a reassured look. Dejection permeates through his eyes but he performs as ordered.

Holding the device up to my ear, “ Hello?”

“Hi, Ahri. Sorry and don’t hate us.”

Everyone seems to believe I hate people easily, in which, I don’t. Disliking a person is completely plausible and within my character spectrum but I could never hate my friends. Despite their questionable antics, they mean it all under good intentions. It’s just their execution is a bit skewed.

I release a gentle laugh, “For?”

“Lia changed her mind. She doesn’t want the calligraphy.”

“Of course she doesn’t.”

“Also the storm. We’re worried about Sehun. It’s a bit late and he doesn’t drive well in the dark. It’s a long commute and the rain. Slippery road conditions. Visibility is reduced. Hazardous trek.” Seunghyun drawls on and on and continues to stress the weather and drizzling torrent. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.

“Message heard loud and clear, Seunghyun.”

“Really?” He almost sounds too astounded by how quickly I folded.

“Yes, really. Have a good night.” I tap the red end button on the screen and catch a glimpse of his wallpaper. Us. Another jingle of my heart is felt tapping against my ribs but I placate its commotion as I pass the phone back to Sehun. However, I can’t taper off the small giggles bubbling in the craters of my belly as I raise my brows at him. “You realize we have dreadful people as friends and this was all a ruse, right?”

“I’m beginning to reach that conclusion, yes.” He fiddles with his device and stares out into the lot of cars as another strike of lightning bolts across the weathered skies. It makes him jump in his skin as a child would tremble from the crackling noise.

So, I make it easy for him.

A part of me believes I shouldn’t and I should merely send Sehun on his way to drive back home but it is dangerous. It is a risky journey back and if something were to happen to him, I don’t think I would ever be able to forgive myself for telling him to leave.

I turn in my footing and take swift strides towards the front door. “C’mon. No use staying outside.”

“Ahri---”

Another rupture of lightning shakes him down to his bones and I stifle an amusement over his fear of rainstorms. “Look, even Mother Nature doesn’t want you to leave.”

“Is that a challenge?” he retorts with another pang of nostalgia.

“No, but it’s an offer. You can drive home freezing wet with the chance of catching a bitter cold or you can come inside. You can shower, dry off, and plan on how we can kill our friends without getting caught.” The argument appears to ease his rigid hesitancy and in a way, he looks grateful---almost relieved I’m allowing him to stay with me.

As we re-enter my apartment, I motion for Sehun to follow me up the stairs like from earlier. “I have some of Chanyeol’s clothes you can borrow.”

The sudden comment makes Sehun clear his throat as if there’s an itch, scratching and irritating him under his layers. The sensation bothers him as his left reaches around his neck, rubbing his skin to alleviate the sullen exasperation. “Ch---Chanyeol?”

“Yeah. He has a knack for leaving his hoodies all over the place and forgets to take them home.”

“Does he---” A throbbing vein strains against Sehun’s male flesh before he forces out his question with significant difficulty. It’s like the imagery is leaving an acrid taste at the back of his tongue as his mind darts off into forbidden lands, creating visual nightmares and bad dreams. “Does he stay overnight often?”

“What constitutes as often?” I choke down my glee from Sehun’s flustered inquiry and try not to smile too hard because the man in front of me has changed in character but there are traits of his which will always remain. His boyish envy is one of them.

I retreat into my closet and rummage through the contents to find him suitable clothes. I grab one of my oversized zipped sweatshirts and loose lounge pants. They’re large on me and I have a habit of purchasing pajamas from the men’s department rather than the women’s for they don’t cling to me like glue.

When I return to Sehun, he’s still suffering from my previous jests as his body leans on the metal railing. Beads of water drip from his ebony locks. They create woven straits along the contours of his prim face as I guide him to the guest bedroom. Opening the closet, he finds it lined with Chanyeol’s multitude of hoodies, t-shirts, and sleeping pants.

“He does leave a lot of clothes here,” Sehun croaks to his appalling distress. He loosens one of the buttons on his dress shirt as if the realization is restricting his oxygen flow more so than the shirt itself.

But I know how he feels about Chanyeol and the idea of wearing that male’s clothes will probably destroy Sehun’s livelihood faster than him being lit on fire. It’s all the more why I’m giving him an alternate option. “The ones in the closet are Chanyeol’s and these are mine if you want to try them on. I doubt they’ll fit you properly so you might be more comfortable wearing Chanyeol’s. Guest shower is through the door on the left and toiletries are in the bottom drawer.”

Sehun holds onto my clothes but before he vanishes into the bathroom, he flips around to me. His mouth balls into a circle as it swishes to and fro like a pendulum. It’s like he wants to ask or say something but can’t decide on which to convey. It’s a few passing moments before he accedes to a short thank you and we both disperse into our respective rooms to heat up with a warm shower.

All the while, I ignore the nagging thought of how Sehun is staying overnight in my apartment. He’s in my space. He’s in my home.

I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it as I finishing washing up and descend down to the bottom floor. I switch on the television as it aids in drowning out my emotions. I make a cup of tea while waiting for Soi and dearly wish for both her sake and mine that she keeps her promise and doesn’t leave me stranded with the man upstairs for the night. But my hopes in her returning dwindles as my eyes survey the clock.

The ticking sound hypnotizes my inner struggles while I steep my tea bag in a drone like fashion. I remain staring at the second hand while it goes around minute by minute and it’s only then when Sehun snaps me out of my despondent reverie.

“Ahri---are you okay?”

My hand stops bobbing the tea bag in my ceramic mug and I look over to Sehun standing at the other edge of the kitchen counter. What makes my movements halt isn’t him enunciating my name; it’s rather the clothes adorning his towering form. A pained grin emerges as I peer at the boy in front of me. He’s dressed not in Chanyeol’s clothes, but pitifully within mine.

I don’t know what I was expecting considering Sehun has a certain distaste for my other lofty friend. It’s apparent as I observe him in my sweatshirt. It’s zipped halfway, showing more skin than I care to be beckoned with (and I’m inwardly screaming for I’m sure I gave him a t-shirt to wear underneath) and sweatpants sticking to parts of him tighter than honey. I fight the heavy urge to sigh longingly because it’s not the right moment to reminisce previous late nights with him.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I divert my attention away and concentrate on my cooling drink. “Tea?”

“Only if it’s caffeinated,” he answers and I send him a hurried glance of why as he explains. “Don’t feel like sleeping just yet.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Secret.” Sehun attempts to wink at me but cutely fails as it looks like he’s simply blinking both eyes. A cherry tint surfaces on both of his cheeks and the temptation to sigh again is back.

As I finish steeping both teas, he carries the two mugs while we walk over to the living room and sit on the L-shaped sofa. He chooses to maintain a distance between our bodies and takes the longer leg of the sofa while I sit on the shorter end. He does it to separate us, to keep us a breadth apart and I swallow the affair (because perhaps having him closer might not be the wisest decision).

We settle into our seats as I surround myself with small plush pillows. There’s a relief as I remember how he said he didn’t feel like sleeping and not that he couldn’t or can’t. We don’t live together anymore but ever since Camberley, I was worried about his sleeping schedule---how he always had trouble falling asleep until I moved in but it seems the problematic habit is finally broken.

I put a cushion over my lap and inquire on his previous answer. “Why is it a secret?”

Sehun’s broad frame ticks left to right, stirring over my question with his eyes leading straight onto the television screen. His smooth features suddenly light up as if he came across a brilliant idea. His spine straightens and he wrinkles his nose to my direction. “I’ll tell you the reason why if you find a white item in the TV show.”

“Like our color game?”

“Yeah, just like our color game. It’ll also help keep you awake while you wait for Soi to return.” Sehun’s smile deepens as he hears me say our game and I force myself to peer into my less than luster tea rather than him. The manner in which his mouth curls into a grin was always an addiction. It’s easy to get lost in his expressions and I fear it’s a practice I haven’t lost even after all this time.

“To be quite honest with you, I don’t have much faith in her coming home tonight.” I turn to the right and see the relentless downpour still soaking the landscape. Weather is probably one factor as to why she might not return but the other is her giving me this opportunity to talk with Sehun. I’m still wary over her advice and temporarily set it aside to the far off corners of my mind for now.

“Then how about we play until we’re both tired and want to fall asleep?”

I contemplate the offer but nod in agreement. Although, the action is cut short as I forgot how fast he typically is and has already found a white item. In my dire defense, the show playing on the screen is a Yoo Yeonseok medical drama rerun and there are about a million white things in every scene.

Sehun is clearly proud of himself early on and I make a mental reminder for myself to never play games with my friends ever again. I’m neither good at them nor is winning ever a possibility.

“White lab coat.”

“Would you like a secret or a task?”

“Task.”

I was half expecting secret because the last time we played this game, Sehun always chose secret. He wanted my words, my speech, my thoughts to hold onto but it’s changed this time. I place my mug on the coffee table before preparing myself for his task, inwardly pleading it’s not embarrassing or too strenuous to perform.

He senses my apprehension and presents me with a comforting reply, a hybrid game of sorts as he clarifies. “It’s nothing physical but if you don’t mind, can the task be answering a question I have for you?”

“Like the personal question of the day?”

“Yes, but without the veto power. It’ll be easy. I promise it won’t hurt.”

He and I must have varying opinions on what pain constitutes but I curl in my legs and perch my chin on bent knees. I hope what he asks of me won’t be terrible or unsettling as I await his first question.

“Can you tell me about your new job?”

“My teaching job?”

He nods, clearly interested in my line of work. I’m not quite certain what he wants to know specifically or what kind of information he wants to hear but tell him the whole of it without hesitation. “Good. It’s different from what I used to doing at St. Albans. Some days I’m scared to admit I might enjoy it more than I should.”

“You don’t mind the permanency?”

My eyes flick towards him because he remembers my conversation at the Christmas Eve dinner with his family. He remembered how I said I was afraid of settling down with a full-time teaching job because I wanted the ability to up and leave at a moment’s notice. It makes me wonder if he’s asking these atypical questions for another reason---perhaps to gauge if I’m content with settling down within other aspects of my life. “No, it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would and in a way, I kind of like getting to know the students in my class for a full term.”

“It lets you build a solid foundation with them.”

“Exactly.”

Sehun shifts on the sofa and orients himself more towards my way. His small movements captivate my every and all attention as we talk about my students. The topic reminds me of another detail. I battle if I should speak about it or not but decide it doesn’t hurt to bring it up. My fingers drum along my calves as I tell him a secretive fact I’m sure he’ll find amusing.

“My students actually ask about you.”

“Me?” His perfect brows rise in surprise and he wonders why my students would inquire about him out of all people.

“Yeah. Ada and Joon---well, mainly just Ada.”

“I thought they both went to St. Albans.”

“They did, but Ada persuaded her mom. She said if her parents wanted to provide her with the best possible education, they should let her transfer to Windemere and place her in my class. Somehow Joon got dragged in and with numerous teacher recommendations and both their parents making generous donations to the school, they were introduced into my class against my utmost dismay.”

The day when they appeared at the classroom door is still a vibrant memory. They hugged my legs and fought hard not to spill any tears from their doe-like eyes and I believe their determination in achieving the impossible is something incredibly unrivaled. It’s either that or they have parents who can’t help but cater to all their wants and needs. I smile into myself and think no other students will ever compare to those two.

Sehun catches on and shares in the benevolence displayed on both our faces. “You’ve taken a liking to them.”

“I have grown attached to them. I try not to pick favorites but it’s hard not to when they act like this. They insist on staying late with me after school and like it when I read to them before their parents pick them up. They even share a notebook together now. Ada writes quotes and quirky little facts she finds interesting.”

“And Joon?”

“He writes her little love stories.” I don’t tell Sehun some of the stories are based on us because it would mean revealing a hint of blush on my cheeks. I’m reminded of how each of Joon’s short stories all have happy endings and I’m envious of the innocence they still both preserve. “On occasion, they inquire on your whereabouts. They ask about what you’re doing and how come you don’t stop by and disrupt my class anymore.”

Sehun adjusts in his seat. He circles the ceramic mug within the palm of his hand before a grin piques at the edge of his pink-hued lips. It twists in a boy crush inducing kind of manner and he adds, “Should I then?”

“Should you what?”

“Should I come disrupt your class more often?”

Sehun’s gaze is rooted on me; his irises pierces gaping holes into my skull as if he wants to make an opening to read my inner thoughts. It feels like he’s measuring whether he can take one step deeper into my new life or not and I slowly begin to see the reason behind his distant actions and the caution he has when interacting with me.

But I’m unaware of how to bring it up and instead send him a look I give my students when they misbehave. “Only if it’s an emergency, Sehun.”

He stares back down at his tea and I ignore how whenever I speak his name, his happiness increases ten fold. I wonder if it’s derived from his name not causing me grief anymore but rather something similar to delight and contentment or hope and assurance. Although, I fear his emotions are a distraction as he points out another white item from the show.

“White ultrasound machine.”

“Should I even try anymore in this game?”

“How about I let you win the next round?”

I decline his offer and don’t want anyone to pity me even if I’m more than inept at these games. It’s also a way for me to extend this game because if I win a round, I’m afraid I’ll eventually have to ask him the very question I’m avoiding at the moment. It’ll be the one Soi voiced and I’m not entirely ready to hear his answer just yet. “Don’t worry about it. Secret or task?”

“Task.”

“Question or action?”

“Question.” Sehun pauses for a minute and places his warm mug onto the table as a preventative action before vocalizing his second ask. “I happened to hear you’re on a dating app?”

I nearly choke on my drink as I cover my mouth and swallow what I can. My hand balls into a fist as my eyes plume to astonished orbs because it’s frightening how his questions start off seemingly safe and instantly transition into disaster. I mentally groan and inwardly weep to the gods because this app will forever haunt my night and day. “H---How do you know about that?”

“Today in passing. Chanyeol has a voice which tends to echo.”

I regain whatever composure I can muster and Sehun doesn’t appear worried by it. He’s the reverse and is enjoying my ruffled behavior mingled with absolute mortification. His pure mannerisms aid me in no shape or form as I say, “It’s nothing serious.”

“It’s not?”

“No, no. Definitely not.” I shake my head more than I should because I don’t think I once considered it a viable form for dating. Not yet at least. It’s only because I never felt ready in that measure. I was and am still perfectly content with the people surrounding me and I don’t want to burst whatever comfortable bubble I'm in with the inclusion of another. “I joined solely because of Soi. She wanted someone to do this with after her separation with Yixing and I volunteered. Although, she basically did the majority of the work. Signed me up, filled out the description, and uploaded the pictures.”

“Did you end up getting matched with anyone?”

“Yes, but no one of consequence.”

“Not even Chanyeol?” Sehun inquires and I hear the end of Chanyeol’s name wing to a lilt. He’s doing the same thing he does when he’s forced to speak Myungsoo’s name and I note the annoyed tendency he still retains. His free hand moves up to the back of his ear as he scratches the annoyance away.

“No, I don’t think he’s on the platform. He only knows about it because Soi told him and since he’s decidedly one of my most wicked acquaintances, he likes to constantly pester and tease me about it.”

“I think it means you’re both comfortable with one another.”

“I am---as I am with Myungsoo and Soi as well.” I make it clear I view my two male friends as only friends. But what I see on the man in front of me is not a jealousy out of love. He seems envious of the friendship as if he desires for a type of companionship like the one I have with my three close friends---ones where he can converse with effortlessly without apprehension. “They’re easy to be around, easy to talk to even if it’s something as embarrassing as a dating app.”

“You have good friends, Ahri. I’m glad you have them.”

And I know he now has people he can rely on as well. He mentioned he had no one at first but finally depended on his parents, especially his mom, to help him through his troubles. It shows in his features---the tiredness and exhaustion a mere memory and in place of it is the face of the man seamlessly belonging in otherworldly stars.

Sehun mirrors my gaze and ambles it over towards the television screen thus concluding the short inquiry on the dreaded dating app. He implies he’s letting me have the next round and I follow suit with an item in white. “White sweater.” Like the previous turns, I choose a task.

“Question or action?”

“Question.” I contemplate on what to ask and watch as Sehun rolls up the sleeves of the sweatshirt he’s wearing. I try not to think about how he fits into my apartment so easily as if he belongs and stop the notion from growing and thriving as I concentrate on our game. “Why did you choose my clothes to wear? I know you don’t have a particular liking towards Chanyeol but he’s more of your size. You would be more comfortable in his rather than mine.”

He winces as his wide shoulders scrunch and tighten into his firm body. “You’ll laugh at my reasoning.”

“I promise I won’t.”

Sehun releases the tension and falls back onto the sofa. Grabbing a small cushion from the tail end of the couch, he covers his chest as if to conceal his swelling shyness. His reserved speech is slow and I hear a hesitancy in voicing the truth. It’s only until he says it that I understand his reluctance. “Because this is the closest I can physically get to you right now. It’s the closest thing to being with you, to breathing you in, and feeling you next to me. It’s why I chose these clothes.”

My confusion returns and I’m left stranded in the middle of uncertainty. As of recent, Sehun has this tendency of pulling me towards him with simple gestures and tempting words but within a second, he can change to a stranger and takes five steps back from an unspoken wall of fear and wary. I let out a silent sigh and turn away from his steady attention, oblivious on how to properly reply.

I remain mum.

I stay connected to my silence and feign concentration on the game, knowing full well both our hearts are speaking something vastly different. It’s as if this game is cover up to what we need to face but both are unwilling to let it surface.

The night goes on with more rounds and iterations than I can count. Sehun and I take turns asking each other carefree questions. They range from a myriad of themes and topics including: his parents, his living situation, the photos hanging on my walls, the Yoo Yeonseok drama on repeat, and even Sehun revealing a secret on how he doesn’t know how to wink.

He tried earlier tonight while we were making tea and adorably failed, telling me he only attempted because he saw Chanyeol performing the motion with ease during the KALON party. I revived my skills in googling and wiki-ing to search for instructions on how to wink but to no avail. The talent eludes him.

As the evening progresses into the late hours of the AM, my eyes turn heavy and a yawn escapes my lips. I’m sprawled on the short leg of the couch and lie on my side. My limbs are outstretched while my arms hug a pillow close to my chest. "This might be my last round.” But my words come out as a jumbled mess because as the hours dwindle, apparently so does my pronunciation and speech. “White sheet of paper.”

“Secret or task?”

My ailment doesn’t seem to affect Sehun as he’s much more awake than I am. His genteel eyes flow over me, amused over my fatigued state. The tea seems more potent on him than it is on me. “Task.”

“Question or action?”

“Question.” Exhaustion is winning as another weary yawn slips in between my teeth. It’s my final question for the night but I’m still stubborn over my unwillingness to adhere to Soi’s advice. Half of me wonders if Sehun and I are characters from her novels as I choose not to ask the very question lingering on my mind. I choose something else, something much lighter because of my greed in wanting to end the evening on a good note. It’s my desire in wanting to keep this blithe atmosphere even if it’s for a few more seconds. “Earlier you said you didn’t want to go to sleep just yet. Was there a reason why?”

“Yes, there’s a specific reason why.” His sheepish smile calms me as I curl in my legs, waiting for his answer. But he sees my drowsiness and makes one last deal. "Close your eyes first and then I’ll answer.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re on the verge of falling asleep---so close your eyes and I promise I will answer your question.”

I want to fight him on it but I’m already battling heavy eyelids disobeying my orders to stay awake. I hopelessly surrender to the fatigue but as promised, I drift off to Sehun’s silvery tone swimming like flows of rivulets inside my head.

"I don't want to fall asleep because it will mean tonight will end. It will become a new day and when morning comes, I know I'll have to leave. I'll have to leave your side. I’ll have to leave you and this night will end. So---I'm prolonging it. I'm making tonight last so I can be with you for as long as you will allow."

The following morning, I wake from the sun’s early rays beaming down on my skin. With eyes fluttering open, I blink once, twice, three times before adjusting to nature’s warm light. My immediate action is looking to my left as I slip the quilted covers off my body. I assume Sehun took them from my bedroom and placed them on me before he went to sleep as my sight settles onto his slumbering facade at the other end of the couch. His steady breaths are a slow ballad to my less than norm daybreak, but not one that I mind so much as I slide off the sofa.

A smile manifests from my lips as I’m reminded of Sehun’s final sentiments from yesterday night. I don’t fight how the feeling of waking up next to him still brings me a joy no other person can ever match or replicate.

But my happiness is assuaged as I finish washing up in my bathroom and head back downstairs into the kitchen. Sehun’s no longer on the couch and I believe he must’ve woken up shortly after I did.

I lean onto the kitchen island as my fingers wrap around a cup of coffee. My wishes linger on this sole warm mug, hoping the ebony liquid will imbue me with some sort of bravery to finally ask him the question I avoided conveying all of our prior evening. It’s the very one Soi told me to relay so I can figure out the ambiguous state of what Sehun and I are. With each passing sip, I find no solution on how to even begin asking him and it doesn’t help as his voice calls out my name, putting an end to my inward thoughts.

“Ahri?”

Sehun’s grin graces my vision and all of which was once blurry starts to come into focus. His bed hair is tousled into an array of directions but still charming as I take in his winsome face. His eyes form crescent moons with the irises pooling in umber. His Grecian nose is straight from bridge to tip. And his lips flush with rose as his tongue slightly wets the upper fold.

I swallow the rock in my throat as I see him do the same. His Adam’s apple hitches for a second before I apologize for the commotion and clamor slipping him away from his deep dreams.

“Sorry---did I wake you earlier?” I ask.

“No, no. I was half awake already when you got up.”

He shakes his head with a sheepish grin and I can’t but wonder if his heart is thumping to an erratic beat like mine. It’s humming and pounding against my chest, making a noise deafening to my ears and I force myself to speak so it can flood out my inner banter. “Coffee?”

“Yeah, please.”

With a nod, I grab him a clean cup before pouring the dark drink into the empty vessel. His voice is quiet as he thanks me. Taking a step away, he leans his back on the the Carrara countertop. We remain stitched to our silence and perhaps he’s in need of liquid courage to progress through the rest of this morning as much as I do.

But I soon realize—it’s now or never.

My arms lower the drink from my lips. I set it to the side before my fingers fiddle with one another, abating the nerves from creeping through my pores. I look to all the items in the kitchen. Everything from the stove, to the refrigerator, even the pantry. I set my sights on everything but Sehun because I fear staring at him will steal away my words. I find it’s my turn to speak concisely, but the only method I can muster up is finishing our game from yesterday night.

“White mug,” I say, albeit with considerable difficulty.

Sehun’s brow raises and a tiny simpering smile twists at the corner of his lips. He’s motionless for a few moments but the seconds feel like hours before he responds. “Secret or task?”

“Task.”

“Question or action?”

“Question,” I articulate and feel my heart moving up my throat centimeter by centimeter.

I don’t want to feel the prickling nerves but they are, nevertheless, there. My hands and fingers tremble as they find a fixed point on the counter to help keep myself steady and still. My inhales and exhales become short before the final breath breathes out my hidden concerns.

“That night—did you mean it? Did you really mean it when you told me to believe in you?”

Sehun doesn’t skip a beat and answers without hesitation. There’s no wait. There’s no insecurity or doubt. “I meant every word.”

“Oh.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“No, it’s j—just. It’s just I’m wondering why—“

I battle with how to properly pronounce my worries but Sehun saves me. He helps me by voicing the very sentiments chained inside my chest and conveys his honest truth in the clearest way possible. He makes certain his eyes are on me before the quiet is cut with his voice filling the air between us. “Why haven’t I shown you how my affections for you will last longer than the duration of our lives.”

My gaze finally meets his and my beating heart, which was once at my throat, plummets into my stomach as it swims in an ocean of unreadable emotions. His specific speech hits the mark straight center. My head dips up and down before he tells me not to move and to stay firmly planted in my position.

His long legs take him upstairs and he disappears into his room before coming back with his wallet in tow. It’s the one I gave him last Christmas as he pulls out a thin strip of paper from one of the pockets. For the time being, I ignore the picture of us clearly marked inside the window panel and train my attention on Sehun.

He clasps both hands together with the thin paper in the palm of his left. He holds it down at his lap but doesn’t show me what’s written. “I remember that night as much as you do. I remember every detailed description from the moon shining over us through the thick trees, to the tranquil stream flowing over stray rocks and stones, to even our actions and the wordless dialogue exchanged from your lips to mine.”

Sehun remembers it all and in a way, he’s telling me to think back to that night, to replay the events between us. He wants me to acutely remember what he saw through his perspective.

My left hand naturally travels up to my earlobe as I knead the skin and cartilage. Every time I blink, I see more of that night flashing back like a disconnected movie reel and slowly it all comes together into one piece. I remember the vulnerability he displayed between the last two sentences. I recollect how he waited for my response that night with bated breath and the part rattling my poor spirit is how I answered his final words.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t vocalize any literal response. My voice was left unheard and I didn’t utter anything to guarantee my acceptance of him or his promise. “I only nodded.”

“You did.”

It was a nod where I couldn’t will myself to even look at him. I nodded because I didn’t know what to say. I nodded because I was left with a feeling I couldn’t fully grasp and it was because of my wordless actions that we’re standing here now.

Yet, he doesn’t tell me I was wrong. He does the opposite and explains his comprehension of why I performed in that manner---how he knows my habits and common practices down to the very minute facet.

“You nodded because you weren’t ready. There’s nothing wrong with your reaction to my words that night and I understand why you did it. You’re perfectly happy right now, Ahri. You’re happy with your life, with the people around you, with yourself. It’s the best you’ve ever felt and deep down you know what I am to you—you realize I’m a risk to the happiness you fought so hard to achieve.

And it’s why I don’t want to mess this up or move too fast. I don’t want you to regret giving me this one and final chance. I want to do this right because that’s who you’ve always been to me. You were always the right person.”

I watch as Sehun wrings the small piece of paper in his left hand. His fingers brush against the texture, feeling the crinkled edges before he holds it out to me. I gently grasp onto the end as I see his handwriting stretch across the strip.

I have a sheet of paper similar to the one he gave me. It was when we stayed at the glass house and slept on the same bed together for the first time. The following morning, Sehun left behind a tiny piece of paper next to me in which he asked what I felt sleeping next to him. I answered, ‘warm’. What I didn’t realize was he wrote his feelings out as well. He wrote out his emotions on another piece of paper and kept it with him all this time.

‘Sleeping next to you feels right.’

“My heart knew it before my head could catch up. I should’ve realized it then how right you always felt which is why I don’t want to move too fast. I don’t want to move at pace uncomfortable for you. I want to move as slow as you want me to. It’s why I haven’t progressed any further than how I’ve been acting lately because I’m waiting until you are okay with me—

Whether it takes months or years, I’ll wait until you tell me you’re ready. I’ll wait until you tell me it’s okay so I can show you the extent of how much I love and will love you for the rest of my life.”

My fingers clench onto the sheet of paper as I realize the lengths he’s going through solely for me. He’s placing me above everyone else and making certain I’m comfortable. He’s making sure in all ways possible that I see he’s doing his best to show me he’s continually learning to be better than his previous self. And it’s this single fact trembling my heartstrings as I lower my walls.

My sight connects with his. It creates an invisible line permeating with an understanding of what he did as I whisper a single thought through my lips. “Okay.”

My sound causes him to stir. His spine straightens and he matches my voice as if making sure he heard correctly the first time. “Okay?”

I hum an mhmm and add to his wishes. “Show me, Sehun. Show me a love and an eternity I can truly believe in for the rest of my life.”

Our actions mirror one another as we exchange silent glances. He draws in a hushed breath and returns with a hopeful grin reaching all the way up to his eyes as it consumes my every spirit. He takes one step forward; it’s slow, paced. His body envelops me in a familiar intimacy and it’s an act I dearly missed. His arm wafts around my waist, holding me effortlessly as if it’s where I always belonged and it finally feels right. It’s the right moment. It’s with the right person.

His left hand glides up to my bangs, sweeping away my dark locks. A warmth emanates from his lips brushing onto my forehead as he does the single action signifying something especially meaningful for us. His gentle kiss flutters about onto my skin and creates small smiles illuminating both of our faces.

With three words, Sehun proves the one thing I always searched for in this lifetime. He shows me that from the moment I wake, the one person who’ll always be there to greet me, to be next to me, to love me in the purest way possible---will be him.

“Good morning, Ahri.”

#sehun scenario #exo scenario #sehun scenarios #exo scenarios #kpop scenario #kpop scenarios #sehun #oh sehun #exo fanfic #exo fanfics #exok #exo #exo k #enaasteria #but hopefully you all see the signficance of the end #bc there were hints #but if u don't #i must've failed then lol

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