#i imagine this to be occurring during the first birthday art ever spends with you | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

angelisverba · 4 years ago

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thinkin’ bout you

in which harry owns a flower shop and has a major crush on a girl who comes in to buy flowers every once in a while (and he’s too shy to ask for her number)

word count: 17.3k

paring: florist!h and y/n

warnings: just some pinning and lustful yearning. m for mature...

author’s note: i’ve been working on this forever. not to pick fav’s but i think florist!h comes second to sl23... hes just so.......well, you’ll see!!

* * * * * *

When Harry was given the option to go on a playdate with his car-loving and dirty-nailed schoolmates or spending the weekend at his nan’s house, he would often pick the latter.

He preferred to spend his afternoons frolicking with her Siamese kitty in her wild-flower filled garden, sunbathing in the open grass, or napping on a quilted blanket under the large, round oak tree, with the kitty nestled into his tummy, keeping him warm. When he woke in the arms of his nan as she carried him inside the house for a glass of cool lemonade, he bore a band of pink sunburn over his button nose, and the blue and white striped Mickey shirt was sticking to the areas where his furry friend had provided an extra heat.

So, it was safe to say that from the start, Harry’s tastes weren’t what could be considered ‘average’ or ‘normal’ or ‘straight’ for a heterosexual male of his age in current society.

Not that he ever valued those opinions, but their impressions rang in the back of his loving head when the women who he brought to the comfort of his home made hurtful ‘joking’ comments on how ‘peculiar’ his choice of decor was or giving him prolonged strange looks before shaking their heads and yanking their clothes off so that they landed in a forgotten heap in some unimportant corner of his room.

Granted, he still got a good shag, but it wasn’t enough to fulfill his desires regarding any actions associated with relationships. He wanted someone warm and soft and kind. Someone who wouldn’t judge his home, his music choices, his clothing, or anything else about him. A girlfriend, not a fuck.

Long ago, he’d stopped caring about what others said about him. Adopting this mindset had given him some of the happiest and healthiest moments of his life (albeit occasionally, doubts merged with the ghastly shadows of his loneliness). Business at his flower shop increased as his charm increased with positivity, and a new life within him bloomed like a baby rose bud when he accepted that being single was okay. The ribbons of his bouquets bouncing with an added umf and the mist that landed on his skin when he changed the water in the flower buckets only enhanced the golden hue of his skin.

Harry even took to renovating his home a bit.

Coincidentally, his apartment was located on the floor above his flower stop, and contained a significant amount of singular flowers in vases or bouquets in empty corners to prove it. An array of pastel colors smeared on the once blank walls. Bambi pink in his bedroom, sage green in his kitchen, and a French blue in his living room. The couch was a suede papaya three-seater with black and white checkered pillows, and the coffee table was an emerald-tiled piece standing on top of a geometric lavender carpet, a soft contrast against the dark oak of his floorboards. Harry’s taste in pop-culture, art, and literature was displayed on the frames hanging off his walls. Pictures and posters of his favorite pieces like Matisse’s Blue Nudes and Goldfish and The Dance II. An enhanced, enlarged photo of maraschino cherries and a raven haired pin-up girl. Another glass table by the end of the couch held a silver candlestick and a small statue.

Sometimes, the miniature Greek statue he bought at a thrift store of a man with his nakedness pure and unobscured to the viewers' eyes made his dick bloat against the seams of his pants. If he stared at it for too long, his eyes drawn to the softened cock between thighs that looked so flesh-like even though it was carved out of some clay or ceramic material, his mind would travel to sensual, honey-red places that he hadn’t been in so long. Harry’s imagination explored- as cheesy as it sounds- the sexual aspects of the male genitalia, and therefore his own sexual expeditions and how much he missed giving or receiving a good fuck. More often than not, he ended up with himself in his fist, forehead sparkling with perspiration under the candle lights in his room as his thighs and abdomen clenched with every buck of his yearning hips.

The doorknob of his room was in the shape of an eye, the iris colored a brilliant blue. His king bed- no, frame, just a minimalist white base, pushed up against the wall with two tables on either side, both of them loaded articulately with vintage trinkets and ceramic ring trays shaped like seashells to hold his jewelry. His bedsheets were a stylish combination of pastel colors; lilac comforter, mint and sky pillows. Previously, they had been snow white sheets with strawberry print, but a woman he brought over said they looked like the sheets her five-year-old niece had.

He changed them the week after that.

On the windowsill, a pot in the shape of a white, blue-eyed kitty with vines of string of hearts kissing the floor. A mirror in the shape of a heart with a pink trim besides the lightswitch, above his brown dresser. In the corner, a bookshelf stuffed with books that spilled over the seams, and perpendicular to it, the home of his pet chameleon, Owen (he wanted a cat, but when he went to the pet store and saw the dehydrated creature, he couldn’t leave him there). A 16 x 16 x 30 inch tank filled with a branch that cut across halfway. It was full of all the things he might need, maybe even too much of it, but it didn’t matter because when Harry was home Owen spent most of his time hanging off the collars of his shirts or snuggled in the ruffles of his hooded sweatshirt on his shoulder. The small, color changing friend adored his owner, and only morphed into a mild red color when Harry didn’t feed him more mango.

The renovations occurred in his bathroom; a cherry-red covering the walls because it looked boring before (at least in his opinion). The gold piping of the sink accentuated nicely with the darker color, and the sun seemed brighter when it streamed in through the window above his ceramic claw-footed tub. Owen particularly liked the misty showerhead stall in the corner, and as long as he kept his eyes to himself, Harry didn’t mind it if his green friend wrapped around the showerhead and enjoyed the mimicked tropical atmosphere.

For awhile now, it had been just him and his chameleon (and maybe his mum’s cat if she was going out of town and needed a sitter) but he didn’t mind it.

He got to meet new people everyday within the parameters of H’s Garden, and they all tended to overshare when it came to buying a bouquet. ‘My wife just had our son, want to see a picture?’ or ‘my boyfriend and I have our anniversary on Saturday’ and even ‘my sister had plastic surgery so me and my dad need something that says ‘congrats you look like Kim Kardashain now’ how ‘bout it?’

Stories ranged from sweet, to grotesque, to sad, to funny, and sometimes even evil- Harry didn’t like customers that gave flowers as a ‘fuck you’. He thought it was a waste of beauty and sacrifice. Flowers were living things that had their lives cut short in order to provide momentary satisfaction and life long memories to the receiver, not bitter feelings of revenge. Although it was still business, it pained him that such a pretty arrangement be misused. It was one of the cons of his work. He created what he considered to be masterpieces, and had no control over where they would end up, whether it be as a centerpiece for a candlelit dinner, or in the trash after the apology for a strong argument hadn’t been enough.

However, Harry couldn’t deny that he didn’t love his job, because he did.

When he turned 16, he’d determined that he wanted a peaceful life with a job that wouldn’t bore him. He wanted to be as stress free as possible, with his spirituality as a prominent highlight in his lifestyle. When he turned 18, he had determined that he wanted to be a florist, and began to save up to open his own shop with the occasional help of his friends and sister. He refused to take anything from his mother because he wanted to be the one giving her gifts and money and everything good after all of her sacrifices in raising him. Call him a momma’s boy. Harry loved his mother.

Online seminars and college classes became his best friend, teaching him everything he needed to know about accounting, stocks, and how to keep his business going. He was a businessman first, florist second. During the slow seasons (the start of winter and an awkward half-week between summer and spring) he relied on his investments to triple-ensure that he had enough money to stay afloat.

On his 22nd birthday, as a gift to himself, he signed the lease to the building that housed all of the pretty plants in temporary buckets full of flower food and water, and hired a graphic designer to design the cursive, golden letters that spelled out the name of his shop above the front door.

Now, three years later, he lived as happy as can be.

And he wasn’t lonely anymore.

Well, if you wanted to be technical, his relationship status was still a checkmark over the box labeled ‘single’, but his heart couldn’t be fluttering any harder at the sight of one of his regular customers, and she was there, creeping around in his brain to keep him company.

She was the complete opposite of every girl he’d ever been with. She was sweet, kind, funny, and didn’t judge him for the way he dressed, or his profession. In fact, they bonded over things that previous women had… slyly berated him for. The color of his nails, the lace of his collar, the pattern of his flared pants, and even the sheep on his baby blue sweater vest.

She stole his heart the moment she walked through his door with a soft smile on her face, a sparkling gleam in her warm eyes, and placed it in her pocket the moment she said, “it smells lovely in here!”

Harry, awestruck and blushing because well, she was pretty and wore a shade of purple that somehow made her hair look so soft. Two strands of hair were pinned at the back of her head, essentially keeping the rest of it away from her face save for the few baby wisps that rested gently against her cheeks like a lover’s caress. The stuttering, stumbling cupid’s-bow-struck fool replied with, “thank you. It would be my pleasure to help you with anything you’d like,” and that had been his name, signed on the dotted line of a soul contract. Only she was not the devil. She was an angel.

But even then, it wouldn’t matter. If she was the devil, if she was an angel, something in between or something new entirely he wouldn’t care because he was half gone for her already.

“In that case,” she smiled, and Harry’s heart sang a melody it never had before. It was like the sun beamed from the spaces between her teeth and tickled the fuzzy spot beneath his earlobe. She had the most amazing voice, tranquil and clear and ethereal. “I just moved into a new apartment and wanted the place to feel like home. I thought maybe flowers would give it a little life.”

He vividly remembers that the color of her cheeks changed to that of what is called a ‘blush’, but he didn’t know if it was a trick under the light, or a product of his wistful imagination. Her fingers gently skimmed the petals of a rose from it’s bucket near her hip, and one of the straps of the tote bag on her shoulder disrespectfully dropped away from her shoulder. He wanted to simultaneously rush over and fix it for her, and yell at the inanimate object for not being grateful of the fact that it had the opportunity to cling to her shoulder.

But, before either of these inner-conflicts met a sound resolve, her delicate fingers righted what was once wrong, and Harry cleared his throat, embarrassed because he’d stared for a little too long. He wanted so badly to ask for her name and how she liked her eggs in the morning, but instead he said, “there’s nothing like a bit of something pretty to brighten your day. Did you have something specific in mind?”

He hoped that the meaning of his words wasn’t caught on her, or that would be totally embarrassing and ‘loser’-like.

When she walked out the door with a content smile on her lips, his own heart was beating faster than the flapping of a hummingbird’s tender wings. He was sure that he had never laid eyes on a pair of lips like hers, neither the feeling that blossomed in his chest at the thought that she might be smiling just for him to see and enjoy.

Of course, it was a silly crush. One that clawed and gripped onto his sweaty palms with no sign of letting go. Maybe, Harry thought, it was because he hadn’t wet his wick in so long, and the interaction he’d had with her had sparked irrational, poem-inspiring feelings within the love cavern of his ribs. Because how could he fall head over heels with someone he didn’t even know? Surely, the swarm of hormone-pumped butterflies in his stomach was the beginning of a dead-end infatuation.

Right?

Harry went that entire day, appalled at the apparent angel he had the fortune of being in the presence of in her short fall from the tender heavens. He wondered where she placed the flowers she bought (an arrangement he was particularly proud of, full of lilac, delicate stems of lavender, and puffs of baby’s breath wrapped with a white bow) and where that tiny extension of him was. At the entrance of her home, right below the place she rested her hand against as she tugged her shoes off? At the center of her table? Maybe besides her bed? Where she would see the purple petals and white of him as he wrapped it every time she woke up or went to bed? He hoped- as much as it was a romantic thought- that it wasn’t the last one. He’s been so awkward, so pink. A blush on his cheeks he hadn’t remembered being there since the time he yelped, startled, at the unexpected pain of a tattoo needle, the artist pointedly peeved. Acting like such a boy.

Right before crawling up the steps of his apartment, heart still bleeding with love-blood from the deadly tip of Cupid’s arrows, he made himself a mini version of the bouquet he’d made her, and placed it at the center of his tiled coffee table.

*********

A few days trickled by, and the memory of her face drifted in and out of his mind like a giant sway of fabric slowly billowing in the wind. He was just so… struck by a slab of awe, stunned by her kind of beauty. Natural, the kind that hooks you in it’s purity, like the golden beams streaming in through transparent curtains on a warm spring afternoon.

Her strawberry lips curved elegantly under her nose, and displayed a smile that leaked some sort of heady drug into the air because the air was sweet when he breathed it in. And when he handed the bundle of flowers over to her, the pads of her delicate fingers skimmed the rough ridges of his knuckles. He wondered immediately what kind of moisturizer she used, and if it smelled like honey or lavender or peaches. She smelled sweet. Sweeter than all of the flowers in his colorful soul shop put together. The colors that belong to her, on her person and worn by her, were more captivating than any of the tones that painted the petals on his plants.

Owen got a kick out of this whole ordeal, though. Harry’s passionate mood had him divulging in munching and nibbling on things that tasted the way he felt; ambrosial, fresh and pure. It resulted in the purchasing of endless amounts of fruit, with many bites given to the tiny chameleon. Mangoes, strawberries, oranges, grapes, pears (Asian pears, if the store carried them, they were Harry’s favorite), peaches and guavas. The sudden craving for fruit might be explained as just a casual craving, but deep deep down inside, Harry knew that it was because he wanted to replicate the feeling that coursed through his golden veins when she giggled at something she happened to find funny.

He wished that he had caught her name. The girl had paid in cash (and left a five dollar tip Harry fawned over), so he couldn’t have read it on her card, and he was halfway between charming and awkward that he didn’t even think of asking for it until the minute the door closed behind her, bells tinkling in announcement of her exit. He wished for a hundred different things, but he was not the type to live in regret. Not anymore. So after about a week of floundering in her memory, he meditated for an hour, tropical incense on one of his bedside tables, and cleared his mind as best he could.

The next morning, he did the same thing. Woke up with heavy limbs, plopped himself down on his blue mat and stretched in various positions, his white boxers hanging low on his hips. His lips and eyes were sticky with sleep, and the back of his nose ached with cold air that he must’ve breathed in throughout the night after forgetting to close the window (again) but the pleasurable twinge of stretching aches between his joints were the perfect way to start his day. They urged his mind to transform into the still surface of water, clear and collected from any unproductive-pinning thoughts towards a girl he would most likely never see again.

Even his clothes reflected his refreshed mindset.

Harry donned his favorite pair of flared trousers in an earthy brown color, nestled snugly on his slender hips and around his thighs. The tight fit accentuated the way his back tapered into his waist, glutes shapely and sculpted. A maroon sweater vest that had a teddy bear embroidered on the middle of his chest, the small latte-toned stuffed animal seemingly childish, but on him it only directed attention to the spotlight daze of the velvety heart sheltered underneath his breathless plate. Underneath, a mustard long-sleeve shirt with tiny cherries printed on them. Some straight, some tilted or lopsided. His shoulders and biceps were hidden in the floofy bunches of cloth, anonymity given to the true thickness of his ink slathered skin.

He looked like a corduroy dream. A thick milkshake of patterns and colors, but he managed to pull it off.

A tiny gold hoop on his right ear gleamed under the morning sun coming in through the windows and a pearl necklace rested against the downy skin of his throat. Slender fingered tipped with a coat of pure white, with his ring fingers accented in a shimmery pink. Chunky rings adorning the base of his digits; a silver rose, a band of dancing teddy bears (a running theme with him), two gold rings with his initials H and S on one hand, and a simple ruby stud from his graduating class.

He looked good, he knew that he looked good, and was ready to begin a bright, healthy, non-pretty-girl-thought-polluted day. Even the old woman had pinched his cheek whom he had been assisting- a regular-had said he looked like a proper ‘nice boy’ along with ‘when are you going to her a lovely girl to help you run this place, Harry?’. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he had momentarily sworn off women until his broken sentiments healed, and they had a long way to go.

In the middle of wrapping a smashing set of tulips and fern stems with a cherry red bow, the bells adorning the top of the door frame dinges, announcing the entrance of another pleasant customer and giving passage to a gust of chilly air. Harry looked up to greet the customer with his usual pleasantries of ‘welcome! I’ll be with you in a moment!’, but the words died on his throat in a desperate hussle, just as the little mermaid had given up her voice to meet her gallant prince.

It was his own personal little slice of heaven presented to him on the black and white checkered floors of his shop. Hair loose against her shoulders again, eyes cast downwards to inspect a bucket of fresh daisies that tickled the space above her bare knees. How she could wear a skirt in this biting weather, he didn’t know, and it partially prevented him from continuing his pursuit of admiring her because the first thought his caring mind jumped too was, ‘is she cold? And if so, does she need a sweater? Because I will gladly give her one.’ His second thought, however, was ‘how could someone be that beautiful?’. The third was something along the lines of ‘all my yoga has gone to shit, and I’m okay with that’.

He cleared his throat, tightened the bow around the stems of the flowers in his hands and said, “I’ll be with you in a moment, love!” His head bowed, looking at his work because he wasn’t sure he could afford the medicals for the paralysis that was sure to take over his meek self if they made eye contact so soon. Harry needed a moment of homeostasis, his soul adjusting to her dulcet presence.

The woman he was assisting, Edna, spoke, drawing him out of his daze, but he had been so deeply in thought that he had not heard what she said.

“What was that?” He asked her. He grabbed Kraft paper from the roll by the register to wrap up her arrangement.

“The girl. You like her?” She was smiling at him, wagging a finger the way his nan used to do when she caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. “Don’t lie to me, I recognize that look. I’ve given and received that look many times throughout my life.”

The woman was not wrong. With age, comes wisdom, Harry thought, smiling to himself at being caught. A dimple carves itself into his cheek, nestling onto the space above the corner of his mouth as if he had no choice in the matter. The apples of his cheeks were shadowed with a dusky pink, and the tip of his nose was twitching like a rabbit when it stood on its rear and sniffed the air, only he was coy after just being caught and wanted to avoid the question as much as possible.

“I’ve got no idea what y’talking about,” he chuckled, keeping his voice low so that the intriguing stranger in the store didn’t hear that their topic of discussion was her. He moved over to the register to ring her up, and even slid in a discount he applied to customers he liked.

“Next time I come in,” Edna said, passing Harry her debit card, “I hope to hear that you got her number, dear. Don’t let these opportunities pass you up. Life is short. And who knows? She could be the one.” Harry gave her the card back after charging her, and handed her the flowers, too. All the while Edna was grinning at him, shaking her head like she knew something he didn’t.

“Take care, Edna. And don’t forget to change the water every 2 days with the flower packets I placed at the stems,” he reminded her, sweetly wiggling his red-lacquered nails at her retreating woman as butterflies awakened in his stomach in a furious flood of nerves. The girl was looking around, her hands hovering over the up-turned faces of a bundle of lively sunflowers, browsing and quietly humming to herself as she waited.

There was no backing out of this, even if he wanted to. And he didn’t! He didn’t want to back out. The girl was a customer, and he would have to approach her no matter what. But she was so pretty it was also intimidating. He doesn’t remember ever being this nervous while approaching someone, especially one he harbored feelings for. His heart was pounding so loud, he was sure it was audible.

“Hello,” he wanted so badly to add ‘love’ at the end of his greeting. “Are y’finding everything a’right?” He asked her, his hands wringing themselves, palms moist with sweat from his unyielding need to impress her. The pink tip of his tongue poked out to swipe across his full bottom lip, and soon after that his teeth sunk down into it, nibbling with uncertainty. Harry made sure that he was standing straight, body aligned to face hers because in that psychology course he took once, he learned that it was a subconscious tactic to engage interest and pleasant replies to attempts at wooing another.

At the sound of his voice, the girl jumped, startled at the sudden vibrations of Harry’s husky voice. Her delicate feet, he noticed, skittered on the floor from her tiny jump, and her doe eyes widened, shouldered rising and falling at a quicker pace than before from the new rush of light fear. When she realizes that it’s just him her hand flattered over the base of her neck and her collarbone in attempts to soothe her racing heart.

“M’s sorry,” he whispers, his hand clamping over his mouth, and then lowering to his chin when he speaks again, “didn’t mean to scare y’love.” This time he can’t restrict himself. It comes so naturally, like the endearment was meant for her, and when a flush covers the bridge of her nose his first instinct is to coo at her for looking so cute. The second is a surge of guilt for having scared her to such an extent.

“It’s okay,” she says, a little out of breath. The blush on her face was partly because she was embarrassed at her own reaction, while the other was that she had let herself act so freely and uncoordinated in front of someone that looked like him. Handsome and sweet and eyes so green they refreshed you upon first glance. Like the cool burn of water going into a mouth that had just chewed a stick of minty gum. “I want to buy these flowers.”

God help him. Her voice alone was enough to make him melt. The lilts and melodies of her voice swarming all four of the ventricles in his heart with warmth, and every blood cell that passed contained a glowing heat, buzzing with her energy.

She points to the sunflowers, her gaze lingering on them with longing. A soft smile toying on her mouth, and Harry could see the tendons in her throat stretch as she inhaled to add another thought to her sentence, “Do you sell vases by any chance?” The girl looked at him shyly, her eyelashes almost twinkling as she blinked, and his heart soared, “I had a really nice one in the shape of a big Coca-Cola bottle, and I accidentally knocked it over, so now I have nothing to put them in.”

Harry is incredibly enamoured by subconscious gestures that take over her hands as she speaks, fiddling as if the vase she spoke about was in her hands, all in one piece before it was broken. He’s quiet throughout her tiny ramble, listening and taking note of her enticing antics. She’s looking down at the floor or the flowers or her hands, and when her eyes dance over to his steady gaze, “I’m rambling aren’t I?” she murmurs bashfully.

“No, no it’s a’right. I can look in the back for something if y’like?” He suggested, arrowing a thumb to the ‘back’ he mentioned. “Did y’want anything in particular?”

“Oh, I don’t wanna be a troubling customer!” She squeaked, concerned with becoming a nuisance she didn’t want to be.

“Y’not a bother, love. M’promise. I’ll go look f’you. What color did y’have in mind?” He asked her, tone calm and soothing to reiterate his sentiment. She was not a bother. The only thing about her that bothered him was the fact that he did not know her name, and even that was his own fault for not asking her.

His hands rest on his hips, tattooed cross momentarily hidden by the bunch of his sweater vest as he waits for her to respond, his eyes locked on her mouth, her own tongue subtly licks her lips, adding a sparkly sheen to it that only drove him crazy. Ever the jilted fool, his mind jumps to what it would feel like to kiss her, or what it would feel like if she kissed him in other places. What fruits she tasted like, and what kind of kisser she was. A timid one? With a patient mouth waiting to be broken open with the force of his own? Frugal? Opening her mouth and giving him everything she had to offer.

“Something pink, please. If you have it.” That smile again. One that told a million apologies it didn’t owe, with her eyes pinching at the corners with whatever nonsense culpability she felt. Her voice was sweet, Harry thought, like wind chimes on a summer morning.

Feeling guilty for allowing such dirty thoughts to gallop through his mind when she was so… so pure. Like an angel. Even her way of presenting herself was shy and sweet, yet he was thinking about kissing her. Was that perverted? She was a customer he had seen twice, and his mind was already running wild with luscious assumptions; a sunday topped with a red cherry of sensuality. How awfully dirty of him.

But! But those were not the only thoughts he had. He wanted to ask her what happened to cause her to drop her vase, and where she had bought it. If it was vintage, considering it was a Coca-cola bottle, and if she had any accidents while cleaning up the mess of broken glass. He wanted to hear her thoughts. No, better yet, he just wanted to hear her talk. He wanted to get to know her. To know if she was as nice as she looked.

“‘Course,” he mumbled, his eyes shamefully downcast to the floor. “Be righ’ back.”

Harry stalked off to ‘the back of the store’. Truth was, there was no back of the store containing vases. There was only a small closet with boxes of items he might need around the store, like flower food, rubber bands, and decorative paper for the bouquets. A crate of bottled water for when he got too lazy to climb up the back stairs and into his home.

His home.

Plucking the keys from his pocket, a ring that held a ceramic swan his closest friend Mitch had gifted him with a humble admission of ‘saw this at a thrift store and thought about you, H, I had to buy it’, and five keys: one to the front door of his shop, one to the cash box in the register, one to the mailbox, another to the front door of his apartment, and one to his car. The one to his front door was painted at the head with pastel pink nail polish, so it was easy for him to pick out when he was dead tired after a long day of being on his feet (spunky shoes that he liked to wear sometimes didn’t help ease the ache on his back, and neither did his posture).

The back door that led to the stairs had locks on both the inside and the outside. A deadbolt and chain on matching sides of the door to ensure comfortable sleep at night, and peaceful work time during the day. Not having to worry about curious children opening doors or nosy customers relieved him. It was a little amatuer, but the door made a loud noise when opened because it wasn’t quite level, and he had a tiny key so he could lock it from the outside, too.

A loud shucking noise resonated through the store as he pulled the door open, and then again when he closed it behind him. The delicacy of his dainty yet large hands were nearly comical around the tiny golden pin stud that hung from the chain, almost slipping from his hands with nerves as he slid it in place. Harry didn’t think that she was nosy or anything like that, bit if he was going up to give her a vase of his own personal collection, he didn’t want her to find out and feel even more intrusive that she already did.

He was a huge giver, and upon hearing her say that she broke her flower pot, his mind was already thinking about the perfect one to replace it. It just so happened to be sitting on his shelf with a bundle of dying lavender. Climbing up the stairs (the ache in his thighs was a mere twinge compared to what it was when he first moved here), Harry huffed and thought to himself all the ways he could ask for her name and number.

Listen, I really like y’and would like to have y’number?”

Do y’wanna have my number so we can go out sometime if y’feel like it?”

“Is it alright if I get y’number so we can go out sometime?”

“Hey, love. What’s y’name?”

Nothing’s making sense to him. The pick up lines he had stored in his head for the rare times he would flirt with a girl were slipping from him. None of them seemed worded right to use with her. Too abrupt or too brisk. Not sweet enough. He wanted to treat her gently and to be worthwhile of her time. Plus, it also had to be smooth enough that it made her forget she was paying him for flowers or it would be awkward. He was a twenty-six man for crying out loud, not a twenty-one year old smile at the bar looking for a good time. This wasn’t a ‘good time’. This was… a courting. An inquiry to a relationship. A rose rose in a candlelit room.

Harry opened his front door and moved in a quick jog to a table besides his hi-fi that held a translucent pale pink glass, fat at the base before twirling and widening a few inches at the lip. An image of a nude mermaid puffing out at the front like an engraving. Cuddling it into his breast, he grabbed the lavender, speed walked back to his kitchen where his toe banged against the metal of the trashcan as he pressed on the lever to open it. He hissed fuck under his breath and shucked the dead lavender into the bag before turning back to his door, closing it behind him, but not locking it because he didn’t want to keep her waiting. His feet moved quickly down the stairs, the one hand not holding onto the vase cupping a hand over the side of his hips that held his keys so they didn’t make much noise.

The button on the chain slipped from his fingers a few times from their repeated clamminess, and when he was ready to finally twist the knob, he paused to take a breath and collect himself. Harry ran a hand through his hair, fixed his collar, and dusted off his pants legs. He wanted to look perfect for her.

“Don’t be stupid,” he murmured to himself. He had a good feeling about this. About her. And if he messed this up because he looked bad or said something weird he would kick himself into a muddy ditch.

Taking a deep breath, he opened the door and calmly walked back, “I’ve got the last one,” he said, tapping the tip of the vase with his pointer finger. It was a lie, right through his teeth, but he was happy to tell it in return for the way she was looking at him in that moment. His eyes rounded out as he approached her, like the curves of hearts that made up the heart-eye emoji, or the puppy-dog face. Just another physical display of his growing affinity towards her.

“Oh my god!” She said, “It's so pretty!” The trapped crystals in her irises twinkled with bewilderment at the treasure Harry’s presented her with. She’s got a smile on her face, and he can’t help but think, ‘wow, she looks like a freshly bloomed white lily’.

There’s a vintage print hanging in his corridor, a ‘flower language chart’ with different types of flowers and a sentence beneath them describing the messages they send. For example, red carnations= my heart aches for you. The description beneath white lilies reads ‘my love is pure’.

She asked him if it wasn’t too pricey, and he made up some fake sale he had going on about a hybrid BOGO in which if she bought an arrangement she would get a vase included in her purchase (he added “I’ve got a shipment of new ones coming in an I need the space cleared out before they get here” just to make sure his fib is believable.) And he explains this so shyly. Harry can’t keep his eyes locked on hers because she’s staring at him with an intensity that lets him know she's really listening, and it makes him squirm. The tips of his fingers tap against the vase, and he’s tripping over his tongue, which is ridiculous because he already talks so slow.

“I guess I was right in waiting then,” she said casually, waiting for Harry to finish ringing her up.

His finger froze over the touch screen of the sleek, modern device (he wanted nothing but the best for his store) and listened to the exciting roar of blood through his eardrums at her words. I guess I was right in waiting then? What did that mean? That she was planning on coming back to see him and didn’t? Of course, it could also mean that she was going to buy something else somewhere else, but he couldn’t stop the vine of ripe hope that swelled around his chest. And she looked so apprehensive while saying it. As if she was walking on glass and was looking for cracks as she stepped. As if she was waiting on him to catch on to something.

Harry cleared his throat and looked at her through the corner of his eye, trying to be as discreet as possible as his fingers continued their deliberate work on the screen, “What d’you mean, love?”

“I was going to stop by sooner, but I just got in my head about it,” the girl shrugged, and adjusted the ends of her cardigan so they wrapped around her torso. She had a different bag this time, one of those reusable market bags that was made up of holes, and it was filled with two books and a can of green tea from the vegan store down the street. Harry thinks he can make out one of the titles on one of the spines, which looks suspiciously similar to something that he has on his own shelf.

“Why would y’get in y’own head about coming to m’flower shop, hmm? It’s hardly that intimidating,” he chuckles to play off the dashes of pink and red that are painting themselves across the bridge of his twitching nose, “I don’t bite, either.”

And he hopes that his wistfulness isn’t meddling with his vision because he swears that he can see a matching reaction on her own doll face. “I know! I know, it’s just that I can’t help it sometimes. Talking to other people makes me nervous.”

Harry could coo at her right now. He doesn’t, though. He nods and smiles at her before reading her total out to her, “That I get, too. But y’doing just fine with me, love.”

Waiting patiently as she digs through her bag for cash, he tries to not stare. However, it’s impossible. His eyes had a mind of their own dragging against the forces of his will to feast on her image again. Her hands and the tip of her nose. The base of her neck and gentle swell of her clavicles. The swoops of hair that hung in a curtain from her shoulder as her head tilted in search, and the how her teeth bit down into her lip in concentration. Harry counted the amount of times her eyelashes met her waterline in those few seconds of comfortable silence. Three.

“I thought I had cash on me today,” something in her bag clicks, and she pulls out the rectangular card Harry’s become familiar with, holding it out to him between two deft fingers, painted with red hearts on a white base. “I guess I used my last twenty at the organic food store down the street,” she said.

“It is pretty easy to get lost in there, isn’t it?” He took her card from her, and tried not to make it obvious that he was eager to read her name off of it as he inserted it into the machine. The embossed letters into the plastic read y/n y/l/n, and when he turns back to look at her, he can’t help the smile that spreads across his boyish features.

Y/n.

Y/n, y/n, y/n.

This is what it must feel to be let in on a secret that’s worth millions of dollars. It must, because Harry’s heart is soaring with a closure he didn’t know he needed. Y/n, y/n. Her name tickled him. Stroked him. Lathered him with the honey smoothness of the beeswax shampoo he bought at that fateful organic store. It was a fitting name. Sometimes, one could tell a person ‘you know, I actually thought you were a Amy or a Jessica’, because their looks and style just didn’t match the strength or modesty of their name. But not y/n. It fit her like a glove. There was no other way to make sense of the way Harry’s brain was thinking. The name was her.

“What?” Her lips quirk up into a smile and her eyebrows dip in confusion. Why was he looking at her like that? Did she have something on her face? Here she was, opening up to a cute stranger and she had something on her face? This, she thought to herself, is humiliating. Her finger dusted off non-existent crumbs from the corners of her mouth, “do I have something on my face?”

“No! No, no.” Harry’s careful beam simmered down from it’s previous brightness, and his hand nervously filed through the swoop of chocolate curls sitting on his head like a cinnamon roll. “I just think y’name is pretty thas’ all.”

He murmured the last part so that it was practically incoherent, and lowered his gaze as a searing heat stretching like saran wrap around his head and the divot on the nape of his neck. Oh, God. He was fucking blushing. Great Harry. A normally favorite among the ladies had been reduced to murmurs and thick, uncoordinated movements.

Like dropping her card when she piped up again.

Voice as small and quaint as his had been, "you think my name is pretty?” Her fingers are wrapped around the frail straps of her bag, tight enough that her knuckles were white and Harry was scared that she’d bury her fingernails into her palm.

“I think y’very pretty.” He whispered back. He can’t even bear to look at her in fear that he’s totally fucked himself over once and for all. His logic was this: what girl wants to be told by the guy they’re buying flowers that they’re pretty after he reads her name from her debit card? Especially one who (if outside female sources are to be believed) dresses “the way my mother did when she was a girl in the seventies”? Jesus, fuck. He must’ve looked ridiculous.

Harry opened his mouth to backtrack and apologize for being so unorthodox in his workspace, a breath sitting on his tongue with words ready to spew out, but the bell began to chime and it yanks his head from the register to the front and instead he said, “welcome! I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Flustered and full of regret, the flower connoisseur returned his wired gaze back to y/n, who… was smiling at him? The kind of smile that said ‘oh my god, I can’t believe you just said that. Now please say it again’? Was he… dreaming? Did he have to pinch himself in order to verify that he wasn-

“Thank you... what’s your name?” Y/n looked at the card from his hands and sunk her hand- carefully, as to not get her fingers stuck in any of the tiny holes- and there was another clicking noise before she took her hand back out. That angel-like smear of girlish happiness was still on her, decadently radiating positivity and secret affection. Goodness leaked from the seams of her bones; through the cracks of her breastplate, radiating from her chest to Harry’s. He could feel it now. He could feel that his previous assumptions about her nature were true. She was altruistic and tender, like the inside of a bird’s wing.

“Harry. M’name’s Harry.” This time, he didn’t hide his happiness. Even his eyes shone with a heightened, clear and sparkly shade of liquid evergreen. The joy that bounced inside of him like ricocheting metal balls in a pin game machine. His slender hand, fawn-skinned and graceful like the legs of a deer, stretched out between them. His mother had taught him that along with the first introduction of his name, a handshake must be present, always. Dipping his head slightly, and his words spongy with love-ditz, Harry rumbled, “Nice to meet you, y/n.”

She placed her hand in his, and was practically swallowed by only his palm. He curled his fingers around her, thumb and middle finger overlapping around the clammy center of hers. So she was nervous, just as he was. Y/n was trained on their embracing limbs, and he could feel a spot on his neck where the skin palpated from the rush of blood as she observed their entwined digits. Their hands moved up and down, up and down between them for longer than necessary until her chin twitched back up to meet his, and she blinked mawkishly, slowly, like the videos of rehabilitated barn owls Harry sees on his Instagram.

Then, suddenly, as if she remembered she was not the only one present, y/n jolts upright and shakes her head dazedly. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Harry. I like your nail color,” she added.

He’s cheesing. A shit-eating grin too big for his face and it carves dimples into the flesh of his cheeks. His name on her tongue had never sounded so appealing, like it was made for her and only her to say. Not even the turtle-doves that cooed outside his window in the mornings sounded as beautiful as she did saying his name. And she complimented her nails! She hadn’t scrutinized him like others had, instead, she displayed her admiration for them. No one- well, actually he can’t say that without offending Mitch- no female of his age had ever received him with such open-mindedness as hers. If he didn’t have any self-restraint, he would giggle. Instead, Harry pulled his hand back so that their perfect moment wasn’t sullied with bouts of bad timing, “thank y’love. I like yours, too. You’ll have t’come over sometime and paint mine, yeah?”

Y/n laughed, and he breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t been too bold, “I’d love too!” With glee frozen on her, she turned to look over her shoulder at the customer who was browsing the flowers Harry had in buckets, “I don’t want to hold you back from a customer for so long. I’ll stop by again soon, Harry. Thank you so much for your help.”

The moment her hands reached for the wrapped bundle of sunflowers and the mermaid vase, a metaphorical grey cloud of rain and thunder manifested in the space above his head, and blocked all of the sunshine from spanning across his toned, lithe body. Did she really have to go? He wanted to whine. Maybe even wrap himself around her ankles like a child that refused to leave the park. They were only just getting to a mutual spot of comfort! Forget the other customer, he wanted to shout. Harry would kick them out and flip the sign to ‘closed’ if it meant only a few more minutes in the presence of her candy-coated charisma.

But he knows that’s unrealistic, and settles with, “it was my pleasure, y/n,” a flirty wink (at least he hopes it is), “I’ll be waiting f’your next visit.” His taffy lips wrapping effortlessly around his smooth words, fueled by her welcoming receptiveness to his advances. It would be easy to be himself in the future, a little smoother and eloquent in his language and feeling. He was usually clear with what he wanted from anyone, and made it a pleasurable experience in all aspects for both parties involved (once it was three). Harry wanted to sweep her off her feet, and he wanted it to be an enjoyable experience for the both of them. Revel in that feeling of blooming emotions in a new relationship. A healthy one, in which he wasn’t receiving back-handed compliments all the time.

He wasn’t superficial enough to push anyone off the table based on looks alone, but it did help that y/n had the disposition of an angel. An ethereal voice, supple lips that looked so silky and soft they had to feel that way, too, and hands that felt so tender in his. Perfect for holding on a late night stroll, or over the center console of his car when -if they go out on dates.

What really hooked, reeled, and sinked him, though, was the fact that she was so nice to him. From the start, she’d been nothing but polite and sweet with him. Don’t even get him started on the way he swooned at the tone of her voice when he said that her name was pretty! So quiet and velvety, careful and calculated like she wanted him to know that it was okay. That she wasn’t thrown off by his comment. He nearly toppled over, clutching his heart with his legs jutting straight up into the air like a frightened goat.

It wasn’t until the bells stopped ringing the sad notice of her exit that Harry realized he passed up the perfect opportunity to ask for her number, and as he kicked himself over it, he walked with the perfect customer service face he could muster to help the other person in his store.

***

Harry was having a shitty morning.

Not the kind of morning where every aspect of his routine is a terrible mishap, but like the water being too cold and the stove not working or the bottle of oat milk in the fridge being empty so he couldn’t make coffee. No, everything was fine and rolling smoothly, as it should.

His water was the perfect temperature and ran down the toned bumps and divots of his muscles like the relaxing thrums of a lover’s caress in the midst of prowling heat. As soon as it hit his back, he released a sigh of contentment, his shoulders hunching and head rolling back and his hands roamed his shoulders and the back of his neck, rubbing away any aches that existed. The branch of eucalyptus that hung from the golden pipe of his showerhead fused a thick minty scent into the steam that fogged the glass wall, and the calming aroma helped the tendons loosen like the deflating limpness of untied shoelaces. He spent a few minutes just standing there, inhaling and exhaling deeply and feeling his lungs open and stretch beneath his rib cage.

It almost made him wish that he’d opted to use his tub for a hot bath instead.

He was able to cook an egg just fine on his stove, with dashes of Everything Bagel Seasoning with a side of avocado and a slice of toasted cranberry walnut bread, the same thing he had every morning. The carton of oat milk was brand new from his trip to the market the day before, and his coffee tasted the same as it always did. But… he was just... sad. An melancholy soreness that eroded against the insides of his body, consuming him slowly but surely and leaving him with a lost feeling of emptiness and unimportance.

He thinks he might know why he’s feeling this way.

While he’s stirring his scrambled eggs, he’s wondering how y/n likes hers. Over easy? Sunny-side up? Scrambled, like him? Did she even like eggs in the morning? What did she eat in the morning? He knows that some people ‘aren’t hungry’ in the mornings, though that’s only because they’ve gone hungry in the mornings before for an extended time period, and after so long of not feeding their growling stomachs, their brain discontinues the signals of hunger. Harry hopes that isn’t the case with y/n, and that she’s eating the proper three meals a day every day.

And while he dipped a mini vegan chocolate croissant that he got at Whole Foods, he also wonders what she likes to dip chocolate croissants into, or if she even likes chocolate croissants. If she was a person who likes sweet treats, like strawberry tarts with powdered sugar over them or something lighter, like fruit cut into small squares in a bowl. When Harry was younger and would visit his nan on the weekends, she would pick fresh strawberries from her garden and cut them up for him when he’d woken from his nap. Sometimes, she would even sprinkle half a tablespoon of sugar over them. He wonders if she’d ever eaten strawberries like that.

It’s been a week and a half, he still hasn’t seen her, and his heart is yearning.

Harry knows he’s not in the correct headspace to assist other people with a cheery disposition about an hour before opening time, and decides it’s best if he writes a note on the door about how the shop wouldn’t open that day because he didn’t want to taint the reputation of his business by snapping at a customer for the only bundle of sunflowers he had, or dissolve into a puddle of love-sick tears in the middle of ringing someone up. Though really the notice just says ‘H’s Garden will not be opening today. Sorry for the inconvenience!’ followed by a frowning face and a lopsided, filled-in heart.

Harry drags his feet back up the stairs, his lower lip jutting out in a discreet but depressing pout, and grabs Owen from his tank so that the chameleon could curl into the shoulder of Harry’s hoodie while he moped on the couch to sappy rom-coms that would only make him think about her more. At least there was someone there with him, even if his small green friend only used him for mangoes and papaya. They sit together for the entirety of Romeo + Juliet, and when it’s over, Harry’s sniffly and standing up to return Owen to his enclosure and to clean because the riotous emotions that whirl within him are too much to process while sitting down.

Cleaning wouldn’t help him solve his problems, but it would help him cram all of his worries into a tight corner at the back of his mind- sort of like when dirty laundry began to overflow in the hamper and it requires extra force to shove it all in, only to come all back out like a memory sponge. His tormented thoughts on y/n could be compared to a dramatic inner monologue, very similar to how Romeo feels about his Juliet. But, soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and y/n is the sun. Harry has the play on his book shelf (the one with the side-to-side modern English translation because he was never quite gifted in the English department) and as he reaches for a bandana to tie his hair back, he finds himself resonating with a particular line: parting is such a sweet sorrow.

There was no need to change any of his clothing, since he was already dressed in one of his more impromptu outfits; grey sweats and a white t-shirt that read ‘women are smarter’ in black across his chest. He tied the red bandana into a knot at the back of his head, and lifted it over his chin so that it settled on his forehead, sweeping his hair back with a final push back. It doesn’t get in his way when he crouches to clean his various tables, spraying cleaning products with his shirt pulled over his nose, another organic product that’s supposed to be less harmful and smells like cinnamon and sandalwood. His shoulder blades begin to ache because he’s being a little more aggressive than he has to be, but the green tiles were sparkling so he was content.

He washes the dishes, mops the kitchen floor, vacuums the carpets, cleans Owen’s habitat, and tidies the mail that piled up on the table when he finally calls it quits. Scouring his brain for something to do, to keep him busy- his brain busy, Harry settles on the floor with his back to the edge of his bed. He’s shirtless now, and is in need of another shower but he’d rather not because he knows he might end up crying over the possibility that he’s scared y/n off. There’s a book in his hands and a Frank Ocean record playing softly in the background that mentions something about ‘I've been thinkin' 'bout you, do you think about me still?’ and it’s not helping his case at all.

It’s no use.

There’s a plague of darkness buzzing like cicadas in his ears. He fears rejection and criticism. That maybe, she was only pretending in order to make the situation more pleasant so it ended sooner. Most of all, he feared that it would always be this way. That he would never find someone who embraces who he is as a person. Always met with mean side-eye glances or second looks of displeasure and confusion. It isn’t always that way, though, because then that would mean he gets absolutely no action, and that isn’t true.

Harry is very… well-educated in matters that concerned sexual intercourse, but it was always a one-night stand ordeal. It was never ‘I really like you we should go out sometime’. In fact, he noticed that only time his approaches were well received were those in which he was dressed in a calmer manner. Simple, solid colors with sneakers or a t-shirt. Girls would flirt back, make good conversation, allow him to buy them a few drinks, and when he’d take them to his apartment they’d ask why he lived on top of a flower-shop, and if it was his sister or female-friend’s palace that he was crashing. Sex would ensue, but his heart wouldn’t be as present and engaged as he wanted it to be.

Wrong. It was always so fucking wrong, and God, if he didn’t get out of this apartment he’s going to breakdown and cry and there’s no one to call to come over because Mitch is on a trip with his girlfriend, Sarah, and his other friend Jeff is on his honeymoon in Sweden. They were the only two on his mental speed dial list during the rare occasions he had a crisis, as they were the two that Harry had ever really opened up to. Mitch was a bit closer to his heart. They’ve known each other since their school days and practically grew up together (at one point they had small crushes on each other, which were confessed years down the line). Jeff was the owner of Winsome where… where y/n had mentioned spending her last twenty dollar bill. He didn’t have an issue opening up to them. He liked opening up to them, but he didn’t understand why they were the only two that ever truly opened their arms to him.

A walk, he decided, would help him… air out his brain. Calm down. Breathe a little deeper, a little easier.

He threw his white shirt back on, and a forest green sweatshirt that donned the emblem of the school he went to earn his business degree that fit him wide around the shoulders and felt like a marshmallow. Putting on a pair of beat up shoes, he shoved his keys into his pocket, hobbling and nearly losing his balance because he was moving way too fast. The door closed behind him with a slam, and even though he was still wearing the bandana around his head, wispy stray curls framing his face in a wild mane, his distress palpable through his appearance, but he doesn’t care. He just needs to get out and feel the cool air against his skin.

There’s a backdoor behind the stairs that will take him to a small alleyway that leads to a back parking lot where other shop owners that live at the top of their stores on the same side of his street parked their cars. He unlocks it from the inside, and throws his shoulder into it, desperate to her out. When it shuts behind him, he doesn’t turn back because it’s the kind to lock from the outside when closed. His fingers curl into the ends of his sleeve so that the tips of his fingers (nails now changed to a sparkling silver color) are the only parts of his hands visible.

Rounding the corner, he whistled the cheeriest tune he can muster. His lips are puckered and his cheekbones high with the extension of his mouth. He’s not very happy on the inside, though he remembers reading something somewhere that if you pretend to be something long enough, you’ll eventually become it. If he pretends to be happy, then he’ll actually be happy.

Right?

Harry rounds the corner of the parking lot and turns on to the main street. It’s only two in the afternoon, so there's people crawling in and out of shops anywhere. He even sees a man and a woman peeking into the window of his store, and he would feel bad if he wasn’t in a shitty mood already. He’s so out of it, that he nearly yells ‘get your hands off my windows!’. He doesn’t though, because for a moment the woman becomes y/n and the man becomes him, wrapping a ringed hand around her waist and whispering in her downy ear ‘they’re closed, darling, let’s go somewhere else’ and she straightens dejectedly, pouting playfully and standing up and her tippy toes so that she could press a quick kiss to his lips.

That image fades though, and the couple continues with their stroll, hand in hand, and his heart is wrenching, writhing and trying to yank itself free from it’s place in his chest because it hurts too much to stay.

Cars whizz past, and he skirts in and out of people on the sidewalk, keeping his pace fast and focused. There’s no intended destination, he’s just moving with the intent to forget the pretty girl who haunts him. Her voice is all he can hear. Her smile is all she can picture. And the rest of her is all he can imagine, which is exactly what hurts the most. Imagination only goes so far, fulfils so much with uncertainty of what the truth was and what wasn’t. Harry could imagine her with her feet up on the lip of a bubble filled tub, a glass of wine in her hands, but then…what kind of wine did she like? Or did she even like wine? And did she even have a bathtub to stretch out in after a long day?

He curses the crimes he may have committed in past lives to deserve this torture. This unbearable pain that felt like he was being dunked in a slow-acting acid. He can do nothing about it but keep walking with labored will power. He passed his shop, and a bakery and a small thrift store that sells used clothing for way too much money. At the propped open double-doors of Jeff’s Winsome, he decides to talk in and browse. There’s so many items that smell good and taste good, that it was fun to just walk in and look.

“Back again so soon, H?”

Spinning on his heel, Harry comes face to face with Niall, a brunette, fit, Irish bloke with a chummy smile and a killer sense of humor. The two have brokered a sort of friendship, considering the amount of time (and money) that Harry spends there. Niall has even started calling him ‘H’ in silent homage to his flower shop.

“Y’know I can’t stay away,” Harry attempted to joke, his lips pulling up in a weak smile, “plus, I think I needed s’more of the peppermint essential oils f’my diffuser.”

“‘Course ya do! You're worse than the bloody vegan mums that come in asking for gluten free baby powder!” Niall cups a hand over his mouth and loudly whispers to so that only Harry catches his verbiage. There was a woman in the back of the store, looking through soaps in the limited kid’s section, the same exact kind that Niall was speaking about. “Go on and look around then, I’ll be here when you’re finished.” He said.

Harry only nodded his acknowledgement, and moved in between wooden walnut shelves. The entire store had a caramel brown color scheme, with only the inventory adding color to it. Macramé potted succulents and plants added to the natural, outdoorsy feel. Winsome had an interesting mix of smells from all of the aromatherapy based products it housed, but it only added to the appeal.

Currently, he held a packet of four lip balms that advertised to be ‘100% all naturally derived ingredients with no artificial additives' infused with ‘healing power of crystals’, two of them ‘citrine cherry' flavored, and the remaining ‘garnet guava’. The brand name is something in Italian that he can’t read, packaging thick and a triangle made of arrows in the corner signaling it can be decomposed and/or recycled. He had the same exact ones at home, only they were all misplaced and-

“Harry?”

A small, timid voice called his name from behind him, and he froze. He knew that voice. It was the same one he had repeated over and over in his head for the past week, waiting for her promised arrival with a hopeful heart.

His eyes go wide with recognition, body still and stiff like a deer caught in headlights. His heart begins to rump at a furious speed, loud in his ears like a million stampeding hooves. The packaged products in his hands shake, and then she speaks again, “Harry, is that you?”

Is this really happening right now? He’s embarrassed at having been caught with lipstick in his hands of all things, but he can’t put them back now. It was too late for that. He lets them hang at his side, and turns around. He hopes there isn’t perspiration dripping from his temples because all of a sudden he wants to yank his sweater off.

Harry turned, slowly. He feared that if he moved too fast she would fly away like a startled dove.

“Y/n…” He’s breathless, but he manages a pitiful quirk of the corner of his mouth, which he licks over right after, “hi.”

She’s wearing a dress this time, frilly at the hem which fell just above her knees. It’s pink and covered and lined with blood red trim at her forearms. A string of pearls glistens at the base of her throat, and her lips are covered in a sheen of lipstick. Her hair, however, is a tousled mess, pieces of it framing her face and untucked from her bun as if she had been jostling around. Her cheeks are flushed with the cold, and clearly that thin beige cardigan hanging off her elbows is doing nothing to keep her warm.

Y/n smiles at him, with the same shakiness, “f-for a second I thought I was talking to the wrong p-person.”

It’s quiet again, and they’re both fidgeting. Y/n’s knees knock together as she shifts her weight from foot to food, and Harry idly rubs his finger under his nose and sniffs boogies that aren’t there. She’s staring at the ground and rocking back and forth on her heels and he can’t think of anything to say because he’s so paralyzed by the fact that she’s actually standing in front of him, and looks as gorgeous as ever. Had he somehow manifested her presence?

While she’s hiking up the ends of her sweater so that they’re situated properly on her shoulders, he says the first thing that comes to his mind. “Aren’t y’cold?”

Her head snaps up and she peeks at him from under her lashes while flattening a hand at her thigh, “a little bit.”

Harry watches her tuck her hair behind her ears and wonders if she came walking from her apartment again. In the cold. Dress as she was. Not that he had a problem with the way that she was dressed! He understood that sometimes when people grew bored they used the smallest occasions to dress up and have some fun and get out of their homes. He did it too, sometimes. To clear his head. Hell, isn’t that what he was doing now?

“D’you need a ride home?” He stumbled over his tongue to backtrack, not wanting her to think that he was a wierdo or anything like that, “t-that is if y’walking, I wouldn’t want you to get sick or anything like that. S’bit chilly out today.”

Y/n smiles shyly at him, a blush on the highest points of her cheeks, and rubs the side of her face against the fabric of her cardigan, “thank you, for the offer, but uhm… it’s my friend’s baby-shower-gender-reveal thing today and I came with my other friend to some last minute gifts and some flowers. I was going to buy some stuff from here because she’s crazy about the whole ‘no preservatives’ and all but, and I was also going to stop by your shop to buy some flowers, but I saw you were closed so I…I’m rambling again.” She sputtered out the last bit, and pressed the tips of her three middle fingers to her lips to stop the words from coming out.

Harry smirked at her antics, but it’s more of a repressed smile, and the rest of his humor gleamed in the sea-glass of his eyes like a message in a bottle.

“S’alright, love.” He’s still holding the lip balms in his hand, and he can feel the moisture that’s collecting on his palms dampening the Kraft like material as he gestured to her dress with the tip of his chin. “Y’wearing pink. I take it y’want the baby to be a girl?”

“Actually, I know it’s a girl. She told me,” y/n pips, shrugging smugly.

Harry laughs at her this time, “Did you finish with all your purchases here? I can make an exception and open up f’you.”

“Oh, Harry, I don’t wanna bother you! Because if this was your day off then-”

He lifts a hand to get her to stop, and uses the opportunity to twist around and put back what he had in his hands. The conversation is flowing so smoothly now, that all of his previous worries are gone. He can only focus on her and the way her eyelashes fluttered and the crystalline sparkly in her voice.

“Y/n, it’s fine. D’ya finish here? We can head over to the shop now if you’d like.” Harry points a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the door.

“Uh, no. I just got here so I still have to go grab some things,” she said, pushing her hair past her ears again. He thinks that she can probably tell the disheveled state her hair was in, because she begins to pop off a pin in her hair to readjust it. He doesn’t mind it, though. He thinks she looks cute. Angel-like.

He nods, rolling his hands into fists within his sleeves so that the cuffs hang over his knuckles, and tries not to trip over his legs as he backs away. “A’right. I’ll wait f’you in the front, then. Take y’time, love.”

“‘Kay,” she gleams at him, biting down on her bottom lip, and Harry turns away fully before he starts whining about how cute she is or before there’s a dent in the heather grey fabric of his sweatpants.

At the front, Niall has his chin at the palm of his hand, and as he gets closer, Harry lifts his head to see that the brunette is wiggling his eyebrows mischievously. There's a shit-eating grin on his face that clearly points to a mountain of teasing in the near distance.

“A little love-struck, mate?” He said, as soon as Harry was within hearing distance. At least he had the decency to keep his voice down, he thought.

Harry flips him off, “oh, bug off.”

Silver glitter sparkling on his nails, and his gaze strays to the floor, bashful of how clear his affection was. He turns to rest his bum against the counter and pulls out his phone to appear busy as he waits for y/n, mindlessly opening Instagram to have something to do (and to stop him from glancing at her ever two seconds).

“Yup. I knew it. Have y’asked her out yet?” Niall doesn’t stop to let Harry refute his question, “y’know she comes in sometimes, after stopping by your place? And she just will not stop talking about how nice yeh were to her.”

Harry’s head snaps up from his screen so fast, something at the back of his neck creaks with the force. Instagram is long forgotten.

“What? Are you fuckin’ with me right now?” He doesn’t mean for his words to come as aggressive as they do, but the thought of her speaking to someone else about him is… well, it’s thrilling.

Alarmed, Niall’s hands come up near his face in the motion of surrender, “no, man! Dead serious. Think she likes yeh, honestly.”

He can only say: “Fuck me.”

Niall is about to respond when a quiet voice breaks their stares, “I’m all finished.”

“Already, babe? I’ll rig ya up, then!”

He’s quick to slide the few products over the scanning square, and y/n and Harry stand beside each other silently, their height difference laughable. Niall’s gaze flickered between them with no commentary, and his lips pucker with a wiggling smile when he finally announces her total. A bit too much for a small changing blanket, oatmeal-based baby lotion, pacifiers with a lavender infused towel attached to ‘aid with goodnight night’s sleep’, and a bamboo hairbrush with a tuft of soft bristles.

Nonetheless, she provides the money with a pleasant smile. Harry can see a bit of tightness around her eyes that suggests discomfort, but he doesn’t say anything. Niall hands her a paper bag with her purchase, “there yeh go! Have a good day now, y/n! And be good, to Harry!”

Harry’s eyes widen at Niall’s last comment, and it takes every bit of self-restraint in him to not reach the other counter and whack him in the back of the head. Instead, he shakes and ducks his head in near shame.

Y/n, however, quips back with “I’ll be nice only if you’re nice,” and bumps her shoulder against his before walking towards the door, looking over her shoulder at Harry who’s smiling wide now, and trailing after her with no regard to Niall at all.

He shouts something after them about being rude lovebirds, but Harry doesn’t care. He’s floating after this heaven-sent like cartoon characters being led to a freshly baked pie with their nose on the scent. His rump high in the air like the Lorax disappearing into the light in the clouds, utterly ignorant to everything else.

When they’ve both stepped outside, they speak at the same time,

“Let me just-”

“Do y’wanna put-”

Harry and y/n giggle at each other,

“You go first.”

“Y’speak first.”

And then they laugh again. Harry pretends to zip his lips and throws away the key, and she says radiantly, “I’ll drop this off in my friend’s car really fast and we can walk to your flower shop.”

Watching her approach a car parked two spots away, a girl with blue, pink, and brown hair leans over to the passenger side, seat belt straining against her throat and when she sees Harry, she waves and it makes y/n push her back to her spot behind the driver’s side. Whoever this girl is, she and Niall have to meet, seeing as they can’t mind their own business. He chuckled and waved back, that girl laughing along with him and it made y/n cover her face with her cardigan covered hands.

“I’m sorry about Charlotte,” she said when she got back, “she doesn’t know how to mind her own.”

“A bit like Niall, it seems.” Harry said. He waits for her to catch up before beginning to walk down the street. Side to side, shoulder to shoulder. They’re so close, Harry can feel the warmth of her body heat through the fleece of his sweatshirt. It’s cold, and she’s still this warm?

“Maybe,” her eyebrows raise, and her head tilts towards him, “they should meet.”

“Tha’s exactly what I was thinkin’!” His voice rises with his excited agreement, and the tip of his nose wiggles as he scrunches his nose.

As they get closer, to H’s Garden, Harry reaches into his pocket for his keys, fingering through them so that they wouldn’t have to stand in the cold for so long. He didn’t want her to get sick.

“I’m sorry, Harry. I feel really bad about this,” she whispered beside him, looking up at him with doe eyes as she worried her lip between her teeth, the sheen of gloss adding an extra allure to her image at that moment. “It’s your day off, and I’m bugging you.”

They stood in front of the door now, underneath the green umbrella cover that extended from the top of the door and down the side of the window. Harry waited for her to step into the little alcove created by the indent of the door before stepping in after her and jiggling the key into the lock. He resisted the urge to pull his lips down into a cooing frown at the look on her face. She really was worried about disturbing him. If only she knew that he spent the entire day moping (and nearly crying) over her.

He sucked on his teeth, “oh, love, please worryin’ about it. Don’t wanna see that frown on y’pretty face anymore okay?” His confidence was slowly coming back, “s’not my day off, I just didn’t feel like speaking to customers today.”

Shrugging, he opened the door, and took a step back to allow her to step through first. Y/n ducked her head as she passed him with a murmured ‘oh, okay’, and he followed right after her, wanting to get away from the cold too because he knew that his nose was probably pink at that moment, but what he didn’t anticipate was for y/n to stop right after breaching the threshold, and bend over at the waist to pick something up from the floor, causing Harry to bump into her at such an awkwardly sexual angle with all of his momentum.

Considering he was half twisted away from her and in the middle of pulling out the key from it’s slot, the amount of force in Harry’s push from behind was enough to cause her to nearly fall forward, a surprised whimper slipping from her lips. Harry, determined not to see her fall, lets go of the key and reaches out just in time to grasp her hips on either side, pulling her back towards him mid-fall so that she doesn't collapse on her face.

However, in the midst of all of this Harry forgets himself and uses a bit too much force. Not to mention, the implications of their position makes him hyper aware of every single place their bodies touched, her small frame against his lithe, tattooed body.

This moment only lasts for a few seconds, but he can feel everything.

He can feel the easy give of the skin of her hips underneath each finger that touched her, the softness of the flesh on her thighs against his sturdy knees. The fabric of his sweatpants is suddenly non-existent, and it’s almost as if he felt every taught tendon of her legs, frozen with efforts of helping catch or brace herself. The heat of her groin is flush against his, and it makes him want to scream with a sudden sensitivity. Her ass is practically seated on him, full and malleable against the points of his laurel covered hip bones. Harry’s semi-hunched, as her weight also pushed him back, and the position is doing nothing to help his frenzied mind settle. He feels like shit because he’s being a horny, pubescent kid instead of asking her if she’s okay, but then y/n moves back into him to straighten fully and their centers grind. Her dress is semi-bunched at the halfway point of her bum, and he can feel heat emanating from her, radiating back on his bloating cock. He has to stifle a moan when she pushes herself up with the tips of her fingers.

Just as quickly as it started, it’s over. Y/n is dusting her bum off so that her dress falls and covers her modesty, and she’s beet red in the face, not looking at him. Which was fine by him, he was too ashamed to look into her eyes.

He clears his throat (something he’s doing a lot around her) and asks if she’s okay.

“Yes. Yes, I’m okay. This was on the floor,” she squeaked, holding up a neon yellow notice sheet in her hand. That damned thing was what caused all of this?

It’s a notice from the delivery men that said, ‘sorry! We missed you!’ with a time and date messily scrawled on the dotted lines. Harry had forgotten that he was getting a shipment of several plants that morning.

Cursing, he takes it from her, “t-thank you. Now how ‘bout those flowers?”

It’s awkward, obviously, but y/n is severely silent. Harry’s still stuffy in his pants, but he ignores it and doesn’t add any fuel to the fire because there’s more pressing matters at hand than a boner. Y/n is the most quiet she’s ever been around him, considering all of her word vomits and ramblings, and he’s suffering. Definitely beating himself up in his head for having ruined the moment. He held onto her for a second too long, frozen. She must feel so embarrassed, and he was self-endulging like a fucking asshole.

Harry asks her questions on what flowers she’d like, and she answers by pointing or bringing a stem to him, laying it on the counter without a word. A mixture of dahlias and baby’s breath with a handful of feverfew to make the pink in the dahlia’s stand out. He lays them out on his work table, cutting the ends at an angle where they need to be cutted and laying them out on a sheet of clear, dusty rose paper. Three packets of flower food are strewn at the corner, and y/n busies herself by fidgeting with them. He grows concerned when he makes a comment on the kinds of ribbons he had stored and she doesn’t say anything. Not even a nod or a hum.

Eventually, he decides he’s had enough of her neglect, and pauses his work to devote her some attention.

“Love, I’m sorry about what happened,” he said softly, trying to catch her eyes, “I know it probably made y’uncomfortable, and I didn’t do much to make the situation better, but I just didn’t wanna see y’fall.”

Y/n’s head is already dipped, so he can’t see her face, but when her shoulders begin to shake, he knows he’s utterly fucked. She starts to sniffle, and his eyes go wide. The paper crinkled as he set down the baby’s breath he’s holding in his hands. He hates seeing people cry, not because he didn’t know how to deal with it, but because he often ended up crying along with them. Also, he just didn’t want to see her cry. Harry wanted her to be happy, glowing, and smiling. Not dull with dollops of woeful distress in liquid form.

He rounds the corner and spares a look out to the street, wanting to make sure that there is no strange onlooker eavesdropping on their interaction. His hand reaches out to stroke her back or shoulder comfortingly, but he thinks better of it and drops his arm. She most likely would not like to be touched, considering what just happened between them. He drops his head, seeking face-to-face interaction, and speaks as gently as he can, “y/n, what’s wrong?”

She avoids his search, and turns the other way while sniffling, “you probably think I’m weird now or something after that.”

“No!” Harry exclaimed, jerking his head back as if he’d been struck, and her words practically had. He can’t believe that she would think that and even go as far as verbalizing her thoughts when he worshipped the ground she walked on and didn’t even know her that well, yet. “No, no. I don’t think that. Y’tripped, that’s all. Happens to everyone. If anythin’ I’m the weirdo for grabbin’ y’the way I did, and I’m really sorry about it.”

Y/n dig the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, “that was so embarrassing, I should’ve told you I was gonna stop or something. I always embarrass myself in front of cute boys and I never know what to do. I just-”

Harry interrupts before she can dig herself further another hole. He highlights a segment of her words, dropping everything else in hopes of changing the conversation and taking her discomfort away, and mostly because he was bursting with relief and happiness. She had said that she thought he was cute, just how he thought that she was adorable, and nice, and everything good. They were on the same level, their minds in sync. Did that mean…

His voice is airy and light because of what she had just admitted, “y’think I’m cute?”

She stills with awareness of what she’s just said, and a puppy-like noise seeps from the back of the throat before her hands sink further into her eyes, embarrassed. Harry tenderly wraps his fingers around her small wrists and pulls her hands away from her face, murmuring about ‘don’t rub y’eyes anymore, love, y’gonna hurt’ with nothing but kindness. A millisecond of distraction speeds through his mind at the softness on the inside of her wrists.

There’s a trickle of blubbering in her part, her bitten lips bumping against each other as she attempts to backtrack, “I mean- I- I-”

Harry decides that it’s now or never. It was a bit inconvenient, perhaps, but with her revelation his confidence soared and he was more prepared now to ask than he ever had been. So, he goes for it, “can I have y’number?”

A moment of semi-uncomfortable silence as the unknown tips the scale. Would she say yes? Would she say no? His head was spinning and he hoped his nose didn’t start bleeding or something because y/n nods slowly, smiling, and then, “okay.”

He’s elated. He was the polar opposite of what he had been that morning. If only Owen could see him then. He doesn’t waste any time reaching into his back pocket and handing her his unlocked phone. They don’t share any words, only coy glances and flirty quirks of the lips as the tips of her fingers move on his screen. Harry can’t believe that he’s finally getting her number, after nearly a month of pinning.

When she’s finished, she clicks it off and sets it next to him with an added pat to the back of his suspiciously clean white phone case while he’s tying the flowers together with a loose rubber band at the ends to attach the food packets. He’s fine with working in silence now that she's not crying anymore. He throws occasional glances in her direction, and catches her watching his hands while fiddling with her own. Her brows were furrowed and her mouth was twitching.

“Will you text me?” She asked him.

He’s careful not to bruise any of the petals as he sets them down again, pausing with his ministrations to pick up his phone. He wiggles his eyebrows at her and types a quick ‘Hi. It’s Harry :)’. He hits send, “until you’re sick of me.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.” She shakes her head, and Harry’s reminded Rachel McAdams in The Notebook while she’s in complete denial of her feelings for Noah. The comparison makes his heart flutter, considering the romance of the onscreen couple. “How much do I owe you?”

Harry waves her off, “it’s on the house.” She begins to argue, but Harry stops her before she starts rambling again, “y’better go or you’ll be late, love.” He holds out the arrangement to her, tufts of baby’s breath poking out from between the vibrant dahlias like fluffy clouds, the feverfew looking like miniature white daisies in the center.

She looks at it, and back at him before huffing, “fine, but you’ll have to let me return the favor.”

“Of course,” he smirks, “with dinner, maybe?”

They’re both gleaming at each other now, “okay.” Y/n takes a step back, her body half twisted as she walks away, but it remains like that for a moment as her eyes rake him up and down, a murmur following, “bye, Harry.”

His veins charge with electricity, and his dark taffy lips part at her actions. Had she just checked him out? He doesn’t recover quick enough to return her goodbye because the previous swirl of arousal in his navel was bristling back to life at the implications of that look. Calm, slow, steady, and her eyes remained doe-like and innocent.

She had to have known exactly what she was doing, whispering his name the way she had, looking over her shoulder and under her eyelashes the way she did. Deviously provoking his thoughts to begin a new with a reinspired fervor. The space in his underwear was growing tighter by the second, a blissful ache swelling.

Before any other customer stepped in after her, Harry locked the door, and jogged up the stairs to prepare himself a nice, hot bath, simultaneously cursing and thanking the stupid fucking delivery men.

********

Harry can’t stop thinking.

Obviously, this is a huge issue for him. He was constantly thinking, and well, who wasn’t? The process of thoughts wisping around in his brain was one that he often put an unnecessary amount of energy into because he had no one to filter these thoughts onto, releasing them through a conversation to prevent the exhaustion of his brain and heart. A prime example of these mishaps being the depressing slump that occupied his demeanor that very morning.

This?

This was different.

As soon as the apartment door was shut behind him, Harry pulled the suffocating sweatshirt off of his upper body, fingers hooking in at the collar and yanking it off with a swift tug. It landed somewhere on his kitchen floor, and he didn’t stop to take note of its final destination. Instead, his legs instinctively took him to his bathroom.

Chest heaving, Harry walked to the small window leaking sunlight and rolled the stick between his fingers to close the blinds. His thumb dipped into the waistband of his boxes and dragged them down lopsidedly, the tiger tattoo roaring as it became exposed. When the blinds are fully closed, the white extension clangs against the shutters from his aggressive release. His body was slowly being consumed by a raging fire stoked by the illicit images his brain conjured of the innocent, unsuspecting y/n.

His inner turmoil consisted of guilt for using her image that way and justification from the conspiring rake of her eyes along the upper half of him that was visible behind the counter. He was so fixated by her, that her look alone felt like a tempting caress along his skin. And it all happened in a matter of fucking seconds. That’s how gone he was. That’s how fucking gone he was. Harry guesses that the easy excitement also had to do with the fact that he hadn’t gotten laid in a while (he only ever gets lucky when he goes out to the bars with Mitch or Jeff, and they’d been gone for a significant amount of time) and the strong affinity he had for the girl who bought flowers from him.

Explanation or not, he had to do something about the problem in his pants. He was painfully hard, and when he shucked his pants off fully, his underwear dragged with the movement and pressed against the tip of his swollen prick. A darkened patch of moisture bloomed where the head was, and he saw stars at the short pressure. He wouldn’t take his pants off just then, though. He liked to stall his pleasure as much as he could so that when he finally did cum, his stomach muscles contracted and his toes remained curled for more than ten seconds.

He twisted the golden knobs of his tub so that the water would come rushing out at a borderline scalding temperature, and opened the small cabinet above the toilet for a bottle of almond and coconut shea butter bubbles. He uncapped it and bent over the edge of the tip, the cool, porcelain lip touching his crotch and provoking a choked whimper to leave him. Jerking his hips back, he poured the soapy liquid into the spot where the water cascaded, and retracted his hand when the beginning of froth formed along the surface.

The heady sweet smell permeated the air with the rising levels of bubbles, and Harry couldn’t wait any longer. Because he liked to torture himself, he closed his eyes and slowly dragged the hell of his hand over the outline of his cock, a groan ripping though the silence. It’s so painfully good, that he does it one more time, and he jolts forward. He removes his hand, slips his thumbs underneath the waistband of his boxers, and lugs the fabric down his hips at an excruciatingly slow pace. The head of his member smearing precum all along as he moves and when he gets caught in the ripples of his boxers the muscles in his thighs flex at the ripple of pleasure that zips into his nerves.

“Fuck,” he hissed under his breath. His mind was a spinning vintage reel of slideshow images of y/n. Y/n on bruised knees, her mouth wide open and her own drool on her tits, the tip of his cock flat on her tongue as she pleads with weepy eyes for him to cum down her throat. When he finally springs free of his underwear, a hefty slap rings out as his dick collides against his abdomen, right on the space underneath his belly button.

There’s a stripe of liquid on the trail left by the mushroom head of his prick, and Harry’s eyes roll to the back of his head, throat straining as he hovers over the bathtub. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s ever been this hard over a girl before, and it’s driving him crazy. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to last as long as he usually does. As he swings a leg over the edge of the tub, the hot water encasing his calf, he’s thinking about how soft she is. The inside of her wrist and the palm of her hand. If she’s that soft on an external part of her body that’s used everyday, he can only wither away at the idea of what the inside of her thighs feel like.

Bubbles are swarming up now, swathing his thighs and buttocks as he sinks into the sloshing water. When he’s completely seated and satisfied with the belly-button level of water, he clumsily throws a hand in the direction of the knobs to shut them off, and reclined his head against the curved end of the tub with his eyes shut.

He hikes up his knees so that they’re resting against the porcelain walls, and mindlessly ruts up into the water at the filthy images he’s picturing, white foam collecting in sparse clouds over the math on his chest. He doesn’t know what’s gotten into him. It’s as if his body is being transported back to the moment his hips clashed with y/n’s. At the recollection, his mouth drops and his eyebrows pinch in a silent moan. The feel of her flesh underneath his fingertips has him bobbing in the water, and the next ideation has him gripping the base of his cock.

Vividly, he pictured her on all fours, keening back onto him as her pussy enveloped him in warmth, a warmth that is almost replicated by the temperature of the water, dripping and making a mess of him but what’s turning him on most of all is the easy flushness of their bodies. He had felt the way her bum gave way under his hold, and he imagined the bounce of her flesh as he thrusted into her.

He moaned a broken call of her name with his eyes still shut, and heard the trickling of water as his fist rolled up his stiff prick, squeezing at the tip so that a few more droplets of precum dribbled out. With his thumb, he rubbed over the red mushroom head and lathered it in slow, leisurely circles, a throb pulsating with the beat of his heart as he returned to flicking his wrist over himself.

The way that he looked at him and the sound of his name on her lips seared into his memory. Airy and willowy, similar to it resonated in his brain with the fantasy of sinking into her for the first time, stretching her and having her preen and arch with desperate whimpers of his name for more. Harry considered himself to be ‘well-endowed’ and his size was a factor of what sent him careening over the edge as girls mewled over his size after he’d bottomed out. He wanted y/n to mewl under him, both of them falling apart at the seams at the mutual pleasures because if Harry’s this broken over just the thought of her, then he’s sure he’s going to lose himself beyond recognition after he’s buried himself into her velvety walls, slick with her arousal and so fucking warm.

Just as she had been earlier that day. There had been two layers between them- the fabric of Harry’s pants and her panties- yet, he was still able to feel an immense heat from the apex of her thighs against his cock. He needed more than this. He needed her, not just his hand driving him closer to the edge.

His jaw clenched as he bit back on a particularly loud moan, for no reason other than he enjoyed self-sabotage from time to time, and the speed of his jerking hand increased. His other hand gripped the side of the tub, and his legs flexed as he began to thrust up into his own fist, a trail of bubbles sticking to the tanned muscles. The cut rectangles of muscles of his abdomen glistened like freshly chopped cubes of apricot with the droplets of water that remained clinging to him. His breath came in labored, strained puffs as the palm of his hand twisted, tightening at the tip and loosening at the base.

For a moment, he paused and cupped his balls, massaging them as the fantasy in his head continued. His mouth wrapping around y/n’s nipples, her eyes glazed over from previous orgasm that he wanted so badly to give her. She’d whine something soft and quiet to match her personality, ‘please, Harry, please I want more. Need another Harry, please’, and he’d speed up the movement of his hips, driving deep into her and cooing into her ear about, ‘c’mon, darling. Give m’another then. Y’want it so bad, yeah? Give me a’fucking ‘nother’, and she’d release a peircing moan that explodes in his eardrums while arching into him. She’d squeeze impossible tight around him, gushing with her own cum.

The water in Harry’s tub sloshes around his ankles, and the muscles of his abdomen clench so that he’s closing in on himself, sputtering on an outrageously loud cry that he can’t contain and his hand increases the speed of his filthy ministrations because he’s right on the edge. He’s about to fucking cum and the back of his eyelids burns with the possible variances of y/n’s face in ecstasy provided by him with his nose deep in her cunt, lapping at the sweet honey that spills with every whimper of, ‘please let me cum, Harry. I’ll do anything, I’ll be good, please let me cum.

He tensed violently, his face contorted painfully as white ropes spurt from the tip of his cock over his fist and onto his chest, blending with the white almond foam. His feet are braced against the edge of the tub and his head falls back and his stomach tenses even further, the final leaks of his cum dribbling out.

With the fuzziness that comes after an orgasm, his body melts back into the water that’s still warm, and his jerks with a pant as he allows his softening prick to sink into the water. The head on his hair is matted in a chocolate smear across his forehead, and his lips are a raging heart of cherry blossoms, parted with arduous gasps of recovery breath. His hands fall into the water at his sides, and with the lapping movement of the liquid against his sensitive member, he ruts into nothing again.

Reclined with his eyes closed and heartbeat slowing, Harry murmurs a final, “fuck me,” at the extreme sensations that had raked through his body.

Somewhere in the muffled distance, his phone dings with the notification of a text message, and with a tired noise of resentment, he sits up and reaches for his sweatpants that lay in a messy puddle besides the tub. His fingers drip darkening spots onto the grey material as he rummages for his phone, and then he finally clicks it on...

It’s her name, lighting up his screen, and the text reads:

y/n <3 : so… dinner?

Harry doesn’t think he’s ever crushed on a girl this hard before because even though he’s just completely physically spent himself, there’s something stirring in the depths of his tummy just at seeing the heart she put next to her name.

He couldn’t be happier.

* * * * * *

and here he is!! what do you guys think?? pls pls pls leave your feedback in my askbox! i’d love to hear your thoughts! and if you really really loved it, don’t be afraid to press that reblog button <3333

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justkindaoverhereobsessing · 4 years ago

Text

you stumble, you soar (2/3)

What if Tony and Ziva had just a little more time in Paris during Jet Lag? Part one can be read here and the song from the last scene of this part can be found here.

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CW/TW: non-graphic mentions of torture

This chapter is a love letter to the capital of France and to the push-and-pull of conflicting fluff and angst that we all love so much about Tiva! Again, super happy birthday to @why-did-you-just-lie-to-mcgee and huge thanks to @indestinatus for plotting this with me!

_____________________

“Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.”

— Michael Simkin

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The bed they’re sharing is a large one, and though they went to sleep on opposite sides of it, the rising sun in the morning finds them curled together.

As always, Ziva wakes first; she realizes immediately that something feels… off. She takes quick stock of her body and realizes that her head is pillowed on Tony’s chest; his arms are slung snugly around her back, and their legs are tangled together. She can feel his heartbeat under her cheek, slow and strong, and she finds herself rather unwilling to leave this spot of unexpected comfort. There’s no reason it should be, but it feels… nice.

She realizes quite suddenly that this is the first time she’s been held by someone—truly held, at peace and content—since her time in Somalia.

The thought makes her feel a little sick, horrible memories cheapening the moment, and she pulls away hastily, trying to be gentle and avoid waking Tony. Luckily, he’s a fairly heavy sleeper, and she succeeds.

By the time Tony opens his eyes, Ziva is dressed and ready for the day, and he seems none the wiser about the way they spent the night. “Are you going to sleep all day, or would you like to see Paris?” Ziva teases.

“Leave me alone, woman, I was having a great dream. I was dreaming about this lady…” Ziva turns away so he won’t see her expression. She thinks it’s entirely possible that his dream stemmed from the scent of her hair or the feel of her skin as she slept against him.

“Hurry and get ready. We have things to do,” she says instead of acknowledging what he said.

_____________________

Ziva has a definite plan in mind for the bulk of the day, but Tony almost immediately steers her away from where she’s leading him. “What are you doing?” she demands, surprised enough that she follows him for a moment automatically before realizing what she’s doing and stopping.

“We’re in Paris, Ziva. We can’t just walk everywhere. That would be absurd!”

“We were going to ride on the Metro,” she corrects him, an eyebrow raised quizzically, “but why do I imagine you have a different idea?”

He certainly does.

Twenty minutes later, they’re climbing on the Vespa that Tony insisted on renting. “Are you certain that you know how to drive a scooter?” Ziva asks with a small amount of trepidation. She has little time to die in a Tony-induced accident today.

“Of course! It can’t be that hard!”

“That does not reassure me. You understand, yes, that the rules of the road are different here than in Washington?”

“I’m not stupid, Ziva.” Tony turns around to frown at her, but his eyes are alight with hidden laughter. “And honestly, are you really going to talk to me about road safety? How many times have I almost died with you behind the wheel?”

“I am an excellent driver!” Ziva insists indignantly, but she’s speaking to the back of his head because he’s already turned back around. “It is the other drivers who—AHHH!” She interrupts herself with a yell because Tony has—with zero warning—revved the engine and sent them speeding out onto the road.

“I thought you said you knew how to drive this thing!” Ziva yells over the sudden wind in her ears and Tony’s triumphant, wordless shout.

“I do!”

He definitely does not.

_____________________

Their first stop is one of Ziva’s favorite Parisian cafes, Café de Flore in the Latin Quarter. As they are seated and start to look over the menu, Ziva briefly explains the restaurant’s history. “This is a place that many tourists love, but that is for good reason. It is one of Paris’ oldest cafes, and it has been frequented by some of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Robert Desnos, Raymond Queneau… the list goes on.”

“And now we’re here.” Tony glances around; the morning light shining through the panes of glass bounces off the crisps white shirts of waiters as they bustle past. He’s never felt so French; the atmosphere of the cafe demands the feeling.

“Yes, we are.”

“What’s good here?” Tony wants to know, his eyes excitedly scanning the simple black-and-white text of the menu.

“You must try the hot chocolate, if nothing else. I know your sweet mouth will appreciate it.”

“Sweet tooth.”

“Yes, that.”

“Alright, I will.”

What follows is a delicious culinary adventure through several types of pastries, all split between them until they can’t eat another bite. They sit in sated silence for a few minutes after they finish their food and hot chocolate, bellies full and happy as they stare contentedly at crumbs dusting the green table top. “Damn. Parisians really know how to do pastries, don’t they?” Tony says eventually, a vaguely dreamy expression on his face.

“They certainly do,” Ziva agrees completely. “We have more things to see, however. Shall we?”

“We shall.” Tony rises to his feet with a light groan, patting his stomach to emphasize its fullness before offering Ziva his hand in a surprisingly chivalrous move.

Ziva accepts, her heart skipping one tiny beat. (She reminds herself once again that he is her work partner, not a romantic interest—they’ve nearly been down this road enough times that she knows better than to imagine otherwise.)

_____________________

After another mildly terrifying Vespa ride, Tony and Ziva burn off all the calories they just consumed by climbing to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. There, slightly out of breath, they get a birds’ eye view of the timeless city and all its charms.

Observing the yellow-white walls of buildings that have seen centuries of history, neatly arranged down streets and boulevards lined with the fresh green of trees blooming for spring, Tony thinks quite suddenly that there’s no one he would rather share this with. He glances at Ziva—she’s looking away from him, down at the traffic circle that’s too far below to hear its chaos. Her profile is as beautiful as the city he’s falling in love with, and it occurs to him that he came very close to losing her not even half a year ago.

He’s never been so glad for something not happening, and he’d go back to that desert and risk death or worse dozens of times more if it meant he could relive this moment with her again and again, here among the birds and the buttery sunlight and the city that stretches on forever.

He slides his hand into hers. Though she doesn’t look at him or acknowledge the move, she threads her fingers through his.

Eventually, Ziva lifts her other hand to point. “The Eiffel Tower is that way, as you can see. I thought we would go there next. It is about two kilometers away.”

“No.”

Now, she does look at him. “No? Tony, a trip to Paris is not complete without visiting its most famous landmark.”

“I know.” He doesn’t say more, though, and after a moment, Ziva dismisses whatever he isn’t saying with a shrug.

“Alright. To the Musée d’Orsay, then?”

“To the Musée d’Orsay.”

_____________________

They spend close to two hours meandering through the d’Orsay, both particularly enjoying the Monet collection. There’s something undeniably romantic about whispering to one another as they observe pastel water and floral scenes, feeling lost in the paintings and the history and the almost intangible sensation of being at home in this magnificent place.

The whole time, they’re hand in hand, and neither mentions it.

Then they have lunch at Le Galliera. Tony makes Ziva giggle almost helplessly as he tries his damnedest to order for them both in terrible French; the waiter is less than impressed, but Tony more or less gets his point across.

Considering this is still technically a work trip, they shouldn’t order a bottle of wine and then another one, but they do. A meal with wine is the greatest Parisian inevitability; it turns out to be one of the best meals either has had in ages.

Following lunch, they go to the last stop that Ziva has planned for the day, the Louvre.

Tony finds himself far more impressed with the delicate architecture of the Louvre than with its most famous inhabitant—the surprisingly small Mona Lisa—but he finds that he immensely enjoys other parts of the museum.

There are tourists everywhere, milling about the more well-known exhibits, and it’s a good thing that Ziva dedicated their whole afternoon to exploring… it’s an enormous building with too many exhibits to keep track of. At first, Ziva aims to show Tony the can’t-miss art pieces: the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, Liberty Leading the People… but then their tour becomes aimless.

Much like their visit to the Musee d’Orsay, they find themselves just walking, enjoying the art and one another’s company.

Then they stumble across the room that turns out to be Tony’s favorite of all: the Napoleon exhibit.

Here, there are no tourists. They’re alone with the art and the history, free to speak as loudly or quietly as they would like, or to not speak at all; the space feels almost like a church, old and sanctified and echoey and welcoming. Like a church, it brings on the urge for confession.

Tony coughs suddenly, twenty minutes into their Napoleon exploration, and the noise makes Ziva startle... something Tony has rarely if ever seen her do.

He hasn’t spent this much time with her since Somalia, though.

“Are you alright?” he asks, uncharacteristically gentle.

“Yes, of course I am.” Ziva turns to him in surprise. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re jumpy. I’ve never seen you like this.”

“You would be, too, if you spent every moment waiting for your nightmares to reappear,” she answers, her honesty surprising both of them.

“Are you talking about—”

“What do you think I am talking about, Tony?”

That stops him short. He’s often wondered what exactly happened to her in Africa, because she has never told him. He hates himself for wondering so much, though, for fearfully imagining, but he can’t suppress the gut feeling that she needs to get at least some of it out before she loses herself to the memories… as much as he doesn’t want to hear it.

“What happened over there, Ziva?”

“You do not want to know, and I do not want to say.”

“That’s not true,” he argues softly, following her as she stalks away from him, deeper into the museum. “I think you want to talk about it. I think you need to.”

“And when did you complete your psychology degree?” Ziva snaps, looking determinedly away from him; at least she has stopped walking.

“I don’t know psychology, you’re right, but I know you.”

“Do you?” Ziva demands, turning suddenly to face him with fire in her eyes. “Do you know me? Does anyone? Can you possibly know what is left of me, Tony? Because I do not even know myself anymore!”

That breaks Tony’s heart, and he swallows. “Yes. If there’s one goddamn thing I’m sure of, it’s that I know you, even if you aren’t so sure.”

“Think what you would like! You have never stopped forming your own opinions anyway, whether you had any information at all or not! Stop trying to get me to—”

“I’m just trying to look out for you! That’s all! I know you went through hell, alright? I know that! I’m not demanding all the details, and I’m not asking out of morbid curiosity or whatever! I’m trying to keep you from collapsing in on yourself, Ziva!”

“Stop. Pushing.” Her voice is at once quiet and deadly serious.

Not sure if it’s the right thing to do, Tony does stop.

_____________________

They reach an unspoken truce as they finish touring the museum, but neither is paying much attention to the exhibits anymore. Too worn out from both their active day and their suppressed emotions to search out a distant dinner spot, they decide to simply dine at one of the on-site restaurants, Le Café Marly.

They’re both subdued throughout the meal, and it seems to Tony that Ziva is constantly on the verge of saying something. Every time she looks like she’s about to speak, however, she bites her tongue and goes back to her plate.

Eventually, Tony cautiously decides to prompt her one more time—he doesn’t want his head bitten off, but he can’t let her stew like this without giving it another try. “Something on your mind?” he asks lightly.

“I…”

“Something about Somalia?” he hazards.

This time, rather than getting angry, Ziva just looks… tired. Sad. Maybe a little broken. “Yes.”

“Something you need to get off your chest?”

“I… I can’t, I...” The grief that wasn’t strong enough to break through her anger earlier comes suddenly now, and Ziva ducks her head, staring at the fingers of her twisting and worrying hands in her lap as tears start to gather in her eyes. “I am fine,” she insists, though Tony hasn’t said anything, “and you should not have asked me in public.”

“Oh, Ziva… I’m so sorry.” Tony sounds exhausted, too, and pained. He’s not apologizing for asking, Ziva’s sure. He’s hurting for her and what she went through, she knows, and though she loves him for it, it doesn’t make her own pain any easier.

She’s just going to have to feel this. She has been, little by little, but somehow it hurts more now, thinking of talking about it with someone who would go to the ends of the earth for her.

He lets her sit for a moment, tears falling silently to her lap from a curiously expressionless face, until he can’t take it anymore. Then he reaches over and takes her hand. “Do you want to talk about it? Because you don’t have to, but… no offense, Ziva, but I don’t think you would have entertained this conversation at all if you didn’t.”

“No,” she snaps, hating how congested her voice sounds, but then she relents. “I do not know. Maybe.”

“Then let’s maybe get out of here.” Without looking at him, Ziva can hear the small smile in his voice.

He may be an ass, and he may be obnoxious, but he may also be the best friend she’s ever had.

He signals for the waiter to bring their bill, and before long, they’re headed out into the cool spring air. Ziva heads for Tony’s stupid rented Vespa, assuming they’re heading back to their hotel, but he doesn’t follow her. She looks back questionably, glad her tears have dried up for now, but he’s standing back, shaking his head. “It’s our only real night in Paris,” he reminds her. “Let’s go see the sights.”

“What have we been doing all day, if not seeing the sights?” Ziva wants to know. “Tony, I am tired.”

Tony tilts his head to one side. “Come on, I know my badass ninja assassin partner has at least a little more in her, doesn’t she? Humor me, Ziva.”

He looks so earnest that she’s tricked into nodding yes, intrigued as always by the occasional vulnerable side of him that sometimes makes its way out. “Alright—for a little while,” she amends.

“That’s the spirit! Come on, David. Let’s go see the City of Lights by night.”

She can’t help but laugh when he drapes an arm ever-so-lightly around her shoulders. “You are in quite a mood tonight,” she observes, walking willingly toward wherever he’s headed.

“Yeah, well, somebody has to be, right?” he replies pragmatically, squeezing her shoulders.

For some inexplicable reason, the gesture warms her in a way her coat does not.

“Where are you dragging me?” She suspects she already knows, but him leading the way—and walking, no less, the Vespa still parked on a curb near the restaurant—is an unexpected change of pace.

“Really, Ziva, if you have to ask, you’re not half as smart as I give you credit for. Where does any first time tourist in Paris go? Where did we not go already?”

“The Eiffel Tower?” Ziva surmises.

“The one and only,” Tony agrees.

“It is not the only one,” Ziva counters, just to be argumentative. She loves verbally sparring with him, even if she won’t admit it, and the familiarity of the bickering is soothing.

“Where are there others?”

“Do not tell me you have never been to Las Vegas.”

“I have, but—oh. You mean the tiny one.”

Ziva laughs; it’s a little stilted, but it’s genuine. Tony now seems content to let her decide when or if she wants to talk about more serious things, and she appreciates it. “It is not quite as impressive, but the design is the same, I suppose.”

“Well, you may not be easy to please, but I thought it was cool. Anyway, this is why I didn’t want to see the Tower earlier. I hear it lights up at night and that’s got to be the best way to see it, right?”

“Right,” she agrees.

They fall into companionable silence, focusing on the long walk at hand. The sun has long since set, and the energy of the city has subtly changed in a way that few other cities ever do. They become anonymous, just another two Parisians strolling toward Saturday night plans, nameless and faceless among the city lights and the beautiful spring evening.

It’s comforting.

Before Ziva is even aware of what she’s doing, she starts to talk. To his credit, Tony doesn’t say a single word; he just holds onto her and lets her talk.

There’s little emotion in Ziva’s voice as she describes being tortured. It’s factual, like someone reading from a textbook; she has removed herself from her memories to the best of her ability. There’s more feeling, however, as she speaks of losing hope, hope she barely had in the first place. She tells him about wanting to give up, about not being allowed to, about wishing for death and receiving rescue instead.

She talks until the Tower is in sight, and when she’s done, she falls silent.

Tony’s only response is to drop the longest, most heartfelt kiss to the top of her head. Ziva’s glad; somehow, any response he could have uttered out loud would have felt… cheap.

Inexplicably, some of the horrible weight on her tired soul disappears.

_____________________

They stay silent when they reach the Tower; even Ziva, who has seen this sight many times, is struck dumb by the lights as they sparkle across the entire magnificent structure. She feels small, insignificant, like her problems are small and insignificant, too.

The thought brings tears back to her eyes, and she’s just about to voice the idea when Tony nudges her. “Listen,” he murmurs.

She stops and does so, focusing in on a sound that her analytical mind had already tuned out as unimportant. It’s the sound of a violin and a piano mixing sweetly together. Ten meters away, two street performers stand alone and ignored, softly playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor.

Now that she’s paying attention to it, Ziva’s a little mesmerized, and she’s startled slightly when Tony takes her hand again. “Let’s dance,” he says, the little smile on his face so hopeful that she can’t say no.

Tony uses her hand to draw her closer and rests his other hand on her waist, sighing slightly when her second hand lands on his shoulder. Neither says another word, but they start to rotate and move side to side to the haunting melody; their eyes are locked together, and Tony thinks it might be the most intimate moment he’s ever shared with anyone.

He doesn’t mind at all.

As the song progresses, their bodies get closer and closer together, and the brightness of the Tour’s display illuminates their faces like candlelight. Somehow, Ziva finds her eyes fluttering shut and her head leaning down to rest on Tony’s shoulder. Maybe it’s an illusion, and maybe the pain will come back tomorrow, but here, and now… she feels at once light of soul and cherished of heart.

The last note of the song dies slowly away into the night air, but Tony and Ziva don’t notice, continuing to sway.

#ncis fanfiction #ncis #tiva #tony dinozzo #ziva david #cynthia writes stuff too #here's part 2 tiz!#happy birthday!#here's some angst and some fluff #the smut will be in part 3 #also as requested please observe that there's a piano XD #anyway i tried my hardest to include all of your favorite places that you told me ages ago!#i love youuuuu happy happy happy birthday!#thanks again sof!

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theseadagiodays · 5 years ago

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May 4, 2020

This is Not a Performance

Irving H Bolano’s incredible repurposed newspaper fashion for the Met Gala Challenge on Twitter #HFMetGala2020

May the Fourth be With You as you reach the next chapter of this current sci-fi drama we seem to be living through. As the saying goes, reality can be stranger than fiction. But it just happens to be a many red-eyed virus rather than an evil, black-masked father that we’re fighting as we all walk around like Storm Troopers.

There are so many aspects of our lives, during Covid, which make it feel like we are actors in a make-believe story. First of all, we’ve all become movie stars, with our faces, homes, and even pets showcased on our own silver screens. As isolated as we are, our private lives now play out in the public sphere more than ever - no paparazzi required. For some, this invasion of privacy is unwelcomed. But for many people, it satisfies a secret longing to share themselves with a wider audience. After all, deep down, everyone wants to be seen and heard (I guess, me included, since I have this blog, after all). It’s why TikTok and YouTube and Facebook have become multi-billion dollar companies so quickly. And now, while this pandemic is a harsh daily reminder of the impermanence of all things, it makes sense that these digital missives are an attempt to seek immortality, in some strange way.

As someone whose work responds to human’s need to have a voice, I truly get why this is the case. And I love that this time has turned housewives into opera stars, and health care workers into hip hop dancers, and housepets into circus performers. But, at the same time, I have become very aware of the masks that we wear, even inside our homes, to portray a certain self to the world that may stray quite far from our authentic selves. The expression “dance like no one is watching” acknowledges the fact that we all tend to perform when we have an audience, and perhaps we’re only truly ourselves when we don’t. I understand that the way we “perform” ourselves online gives each of us a chance to reinvent the fictions we want our stories to have. So, while I surely take some guilty pleasure from intimate glimpses into strangers’ lives, I also do so with a certain skepticism about the veracity of what I’m seeing.

This became particularly true for me when I received a recent link from my friend and amazing singer/songwriter, Dominique Fricot. Capitalizing on this current trend of oversharing, he cleverly asked his fans to film their morning routines for the music video of his new song, Wake Up, by his duo, Flora Falls. Dom’s warm tenor voice blended with his partner’s breathy tones feel just like a lazy morning in bed. But I’ll leave it up to you to decide just how accurate these portrayals of people’s idyllic daytime rituals actually are.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EbsqXou5FeY

May 5, 2020

Homeschool Heroes

About twenty years ago, I was invited to adjudicate a youth music competition in the Yukon. Travelling to one of the northernmost inhabited spots on earth, I imagined that my greatest surprise might have been a polar bear or Northern Lights sighting. But it turned out to be something entirely different. Among the 25,000 residents of the thriving metropolis of Whitehorse exists a treasure trove of talent. I could not believe the incredibly honed skills and nuanced expression with which these 11-18 year-olds played. Wondering why, I developed a theory that I now call SLoW: Sheltered Living Wonder. When long, dark days, cold climates or pandemics force people indoors, they tend to spend inordinate amounts of time on creative endeavors and skill development. In other words, they slow down and take time for wonder.

This theory has surely applied during these past few months of sheltering in place. One of the most remarkable examples has been the inventiveness that many of my friends have brought to their first attempts with homeschooling. So, I wanted to give a few shout outs to some of these Homeschool Heroes and the highly imaginative projects they’ve done with their kids.

Stunning Easter Eggs made from natural materials and dye, by my friend Jane Cox and her kids (Botany lesson)

Candy Covid virus, made by Amelia, my friend Jen Sanke’s daughter, as she learned about the virus’ proteins (Biology lesson)

But perhaps the prize for most complex homeschool project has to go to my architect friend, Bryn Davidson, who upon returning from Australia, in late March, had to fully quarantine for 2-weeks. So, with his 5-year old son Bei as helper, this Physics lesson allowed him to enjoy home delivery beer while in isolation. Just brilliant!

https://youtu.be/FF9-2dWoUtc

May 6, 2020

Living in livestream

So today, 5 million British Columbian’s awaited our “sentence” with baited breath, as word spread that our provincial prime minister would deliver the Re-Open BC plan at 3 pm. I have to admit, it felt a bit like when you were “grounded” as an adolescent and then your parents returned certain privileges to you. Of course, I’m well aware that our province has already been far more licentious than many places around the globe. We’ve been fortunate to maintain reasonably low numbers of infection (just over 2,000), with counts as low as 8 new cases per day, at this point. So, while our provincial parks closed, our beaches never did. While we were encouraged, within a reasonable range of home, to be active outdoors, we were not restricted to walks only within the 100 metre radius of our house, as my Israeli friends were. And while we could still shop at gardening and furniture stores, to make sheltering at home more enjoyable, New Zealanders had nothing but grocery stores and pharmacies open, for two months.

I have sensed the gratitude my fellow Vancouverites have felt about these privileges. But that does not mean that we aren’t still anxious to return to other aspects of living which we’ve missed. When lockdown began, ominously on the Ides of March (the 15th), I’d harboured a secret hope that certain restrictions might be lifted on my birthday (exactly two months later). And it turns out that Phase Two of the BC ReOpen plan will commence on May 19th, just 4 days later than I’d hoped. What I most look forward to experiencing again are small gatherings with friends, (we’ll soon be allowed to socialize in public with up to 10 people); meals inside certain restaurants and pubs (those that are able to function within WorkPlace BC’s safety regulations); visits to registered massage therapists; and hugs with select people, (”using one’s own ‘risk assessment’.”)

But in the long-range plan, the harsh reality for artists has been laid out, as Phase Four (which includes resuming large-venue concerts, conventions, and international travel) can not occur until either a vaccine has been developed, an effective treatment plan is widely available, or herd immunity is achieved. And this is not estimated to occur until mid-2021 or later. So, the prospects are still bleak for symphony orchestras, opera and dance companies, artists who perform in crowded bars, or musicians who travel for arena shows and festivals. This likely means that in order to satisfy audiences’ need to access live performance, and for artists to continue to share their creativity, livestream formats will still have to persist for some time. Therefore, I thought I’d share a few regular weekly livestream arts events here, both from Vancouver, LA & NY.

Canadian National Live Art Champion, Dmitri Sirenko, who we featured at our non-profit’s annual benefit on February 20th, 2020

Every Monday Night at 7 pm PST (Vancouver) Poetry Slam: https://www.facebook.com/Vancouverpoetryslam/

Every Thursday at 5 pm PST (LA): LIVE Art Battles - Watch painters do their magic in just 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWJoWGVwzGtk99nTOCib9vg

Every Thursday at 8 pm EST (NY): Spotlight on Plays - famous actors perform readings of theatre pieces, online: https://www.broadwaysbestshows.com/post/the-best-of-series/

May 7, 2020

Collateral Blessings

So many thoughtful writers are adding to the discourse, as we all strive to make meaning from what can feel like a senseliess time. I have so appreciated the abundance with which people are sharing these missives, right now. Every day, bursts of inspiration or flickers of insight come my way, thru texts, emails and Facebook. Like adventurers, traveling together thru the dark of night, we shine light on guideposts, anywhere we can find them, as we collectively quench each other’s thirst for wisdom.

One of the most profound writings I‘ve recently discovered came from a stranger’s blog. In The Examined Family, Courtney Martin, without ever diminishing the gravity of the havoc that this virus has wreaked, writes about some of the assets that have also come out of this time. New friendships with neighbors. A long-neglected puzzle completed with her kids. The time to draw and truly notice an artichoke in her back garden. My good friend Juan calls these collateral blessings. This reference to the accidental gifts that this cruel virus has given us, is a beautiful twist on “collateral damage”, a term coined to explain accidental friendly-fire deaths during the Gulf War. Commenting on the anticipatory nostalgia that she projects she will feel about certain things, once this time has passed, Courtney writes:

“I instantly feel overwhelmed at the prospect of schedules and stuff. I don’t want to go back to our former accumulation or frenetic pace. I don’t want to stop texting (my neighbor) my little triumphs. I don’t want to forget about the artichokes in the garden. I don’t ever want to forget this happened--the grief and the beauty of it. I’m not even sure that will be possible, but if it were, I wouldn’t want it. I don’t want to vote like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to eat like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to consume like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to schedule like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to mother or daughter or befriend or neighbor like it didn’t happen. I don’t want to sit inside this little life, noticing and appreciating and breathing, like it didn’t happen. There is unnecessary suffering all around me, and inside of me, too, but there is also necessary meaning. May we hold on to that.”

You can read her full entry here: https://courtney.substack.com/p/unnecessary-suffering-and-necessary?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo3OTg0NDcyLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNzU1NDMsIl8iOiJCTnk2VyIsImlhdCI6MTU4NzA1MjgyMCwiZXhwIjoxNTg3MDU2NDIwLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjA5MjIiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.puI9NMne-783ypInpvTkJ96T237WcrTo2ItDhqlkMiY

May 8, 2020

Nostalgia

I’m rarely one prone to nostalgia. My childhood photo albums are in storage. I have no family heirlooms displayed in my home. My tendency is to revel in the present or dream about the future. But this pandemic has strangely turned me into a sentimental fool. Perhaps this return to simpler times, where we seldom shop, where we wander mostly by foot, or where we get to know our neighbors better, makes us long for the past in certain ways.

For me, I’ve honored this by resurrecting my daily teenage Twizzler habit - a candy I’ve rarely eaten since then, but that now feels so satisfying during my Netflix & Chill evenings (while watching films almost as old like Groundhog Day & Anchorman).

I’m also listening a lot to Old School Hip Hop, where the explative-free rhymes of the 90’s feel so strangely innocent. It’s refreshing to listen to these musicians spit verses that merely celebrate the joys of dance and rap, rather than ranting about gun violence and other societal ills. Run DMC It’s Tricky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-O5IHVhWj0) and Beastie Boys Body Movin’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvRBUw_Ls2o) happen to be personal favorites.

Last month, I was tickled by an old memory while planting a lilac bush in my backyard. I suddenly remembered a story about my college boyfriend, whom I hadn’t thought of in 30 years. Our relationship started a bit secretively, so as not to hurt his ex’s feelings. So, one May afternoon, we snuck away to a distant park that was hosting a Lilac Festival. Unfortunately, our ruse was quickly spoiled when a candid photo of our picnic under the purple blooms was plastered all over the front page of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle the next morning.

Another sweet memory returned in culinary form. Every Tuesday, for 7 years, my mother selflessly drove me an hour from home and back, for my flute lesson. And to break up the long drive, we regularly stopped at Bickford’s Pancake House for my favorite adolescent treat: breakfast for dinner. Their specialty was the Dutch Baby Apple. And I finally made my first homemade attempt at this deceptively easy delicacy, last Tuesday.

This has also been a time to return to bedtime stories (some I’ve read to friends’ kids, and others for adults to hear.) The Great Realisation by British performance artist, Tom Foolery, has been making the social media rounds. But in case you missed this touching tale that looks back on this time as if the tale is being told in a not-so-distant future, it’s a wistful story about some aspects of modern life that we may never long for in the future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw5KQMXDiM4

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shejustkeepswriting · 7 years ago

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“Right Here Waiting” Part I - Cole Sprouse x Reader Imagine

My very first Tumblr post and first Cole Sprouse imagine. :D

Hope you like it! Let me know what you think!

Enjoy!

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Song Inspiration

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You and Cole have been best friends since college. You met in NYU during freshman year.

Cole is your go-to when it comes to school projects, researches, and well, advice.

Your course is different from his, but you shared a subject or two, and some random after-school activities together. Like Cole, you were fascinated with history, video games, and photography.

He was the one who was there for you when you were struggling with your relationship with your parents, he even welcomed you to his apartment when you were looking for a new place. He doesn’t even want you to move and insist that you live with him instead so you can both go to and walk home from school, and he also want you to save so you can find a better apartment in the city. But you said no because at that time, he was living with his girlfriend and you don’t want to cause any problems with a relationship that you think would last forever.

Cole was the one who was there for you the day you lost your dog, Charlie. and to make up for it, even if he doesn’t have to, he gave you a puppy on your birthday, you named it after his character in that popular Disney film—

“Here, name him Cody, so you’ll always remember me.” He said while holding this cute little bundle of pure joy.

“How about Ben?” you both laugh.

You were there for him when he and his ex-girlfriend broke up. Cole calls you in the middle of the night, telling you stories, and you were always there for him, assuring him that the right one will come soon.

You’re wishing, hoping, and praying, that it would be you…

You fell in love with him the day you first saw him, the day he accidentally spilled his to-go coffee on your NYU shirt while you were in the train going to Brooklyn.

Since then, everyday with Cole is like sunshine. No matter how bad things have become, every time you text, call, or talk to him in person, it gets better in the end.

But you decided to keep your feelings to yourself. Afraid that Cole might stay away from you, worst, you are scared to the idea that he doesn’t feel the same way and that this feeling might destroy an amazing friendship. So you just cherish all the moments you spend with him. Late nights where he would come to your apartment and ask you to have coffee and just talk about art, poetry, and history. The quiet times you two spend in the library, even in silence, every thing seems perfect—as long as he is around.

On the day that he introduced his then girlfriend to you, it broke you to a million pieces but still supported him, because after all, he is, and will always be, your best friend.

And for long, you endured and accepted that he is with someone, happy, and contented. Seeing him with the girl he loves is bittersweet but you know that as his best friend, you are the first person to be happy for him.

Graduation came and you were very emotional. You knew that in a few days, you have to go back to Washington and leave New York, leave your friends, leave the city that became your home for the past 5 years, your apartment, and the coffee shop across the street where you spend a lot of time doing your homework.

Leave your heart, and the man who’s holding it.

Cole will remain in New York. He has plans to apply for graduate school and pursue Archeology full-time and his photography as well. You will be away from him. Miles and miles away. and that thought hurts you to bits. How can you leave the man you cared about? The man you love? The man who makes you happy? But change is inevitable. You have responsibilities and dreams to pursue.

Cole promised to always keep in touch.. “y/n, I will keep in touch, I promise. You might be in a different time zone but I’ll still bug you.” he said assuringly. “and besides, you can always fly back here.”

“...or you can fly to Washington!” you said

“If it means I get to see Cody, and your annoying face, sure!”

You both laugh. And in that little moment, the sadness eased a little.

Since every one will be busy preparing for the next chapter in their lives, your friends arranged an after party to celebrate this memorable day. You and Cole attended and minutes before you open the door, it occurred to you that you should finally let him know how you really feel. Besides, you’ll be miles away from him, so telling him now probably won’t hurt. At least, in your last days in the city, you finally did what you had to do.

Entering the building was like going through an obstacle course. You feel so uneasy and your heart is beating so fast. Cole noticed this.

“(y/n), everything alright?” he said, with a hint of worry in his eyes

“I’m fine.”

“no you’re not.”

“I am. it’s uh...”

“what?”

“my feet. Yes, my feet hurts, I haven’t removed these babies since the ceremony.” You said, pointing at your heels.

“Do you want me to carry you?” Cole said, with a little concern

“oh my.” you told yourself. “No, silly. Let’s just take the elevator” you said to him

You and Cole entered the elevator, it’s a little awkward to you because it was just the two of you. But Cole was very relaxed.

You stood there in silence. Until Cole pulled you back into reality

“That’s it” he said

“What?”

“You are not okay. C’mon what’s wrong? Tell me.”

“Cole. Nothing. I am fine. okay?”

“No, you’re not.”

“Why do you say so?”

“I know!”

“How?”

“Because ever since we entered this elevator you didn’t pressed any button, so we’re literally stopping in every freaking floor inside this building“

You stared at him

“Oh no, sorry, 15th” you said, pressing the button.

Cole crossed his arms and looked at you. You felt a little uneasy.

“C’mon, y/n, what’s wrong?” he’s getting serious now.

“This is it” you told yourself. “I should tell him now. Right here”

“Okay!” you said. “There is something I need to tell you”

“What is it?”

“Uhm, Cole, buddy, you’re my best friend. So I should tell you”

“Tell me what, y/n?”

You took a deep breath

“Oh no,” you were thinking. “This is it. I’m about to let it out”

“y/n?” Cole said

“Cole... I...”

“What?”

The elevator door opened and you can hear the music coming from the party.

You gulped.

“I... I like you.”

...to be continued.

#cole sprouse #cole sprouse x reader #jughead #jugheadjones #jughead x reader #imagine #riverdale #colesprouseimagine #colesprouse imagine #riverdaleimagine #cole #colexreader #cole x reader

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r10tp00f · 4 years ago

Text

Shame

You don’t need me to tell you how ashamed of myself I am. On the other hand, I’ve had occasion to wonder many times with many people in my life if the extent of my shame is something anyone besides Wendy, my therapist, has appreciated or understood. My shame about class and money is somewhere in, like, my top ten sources of shame? After fat shame and ugly shame and failure shame and crazy shame, so it’s fifth, maybe.

I think the first time I felt shame about money I was eight. Third grade. The trailer park we lived in, which was called McGarrity’s, for some reason never explained to me, was owned by a man named Frank Conger, who was the music teacher and chorus director at Soddy Elementary, where I went to school. The trailer itself we owned outright, because my mother and father, in what seems like some universe other than the one I inhabited with them, had bought it shortly after I was born, when they moved with infant-me from Graysville to Soddy. My father had always been a hardworking and very, even admirably high-functioning alcoholic, at least since my mother knew him; and my mother, once upon a time, wasn’t an alcoholic at all.

When I was born in 1982, my father worked at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Soddy-Daisy (doing what I’m not sure, some sort of labor in the course of which he was up on a telephone pole and was struck by lightning, sometime before I was old enough to understand or remember). My mother worked at DeLong, a sewing factory in Dayton. They both had new 1980 Ford Mustangs (my mother’s was maroon with maroon plastic and red carpet interiors and a sort of maroon striped upholstery, as I very hazily and imagistically recall). We lived, the three of us, in a double-wide trailer in Graysville, mere miles from my mother’s sisters, Aunt Linda and Aunt Suzy, who lived in Dayton, and even fewer mere miles from the tiny trailer my mother’s mother, Mamaw Betty, and her mother, Mamaw Pat, lived in a few streets over from us in Graysville, too. I think the settlement money my father got from Sequoyah as a result of the lightning strike accident was how they purchased the trailer and the Mustangs, but I wouldn’t swear to it. My earliest memories are not from Graysville, but after we had moved to Soddy. I remember playing in bed with my mother at night, under a blue comforter with sort-of needlepoint, six-pointed stars, my mother and father lying side by side, the streetlight coming in from the window, the room otherwise dark, and my mother balancing me on her knees and raised hands, our fingers laced together. I couldn’t have been older than two. I remember sitting in a round plastic laundry basket in the middle of the living room floor while my mother folded the clean clothes on the couch and we watched TV. Probably her stories, Loving or All My Children. Later, I remember my sister being an infant (which would make me three) sitting on our loveseat in the living room in the dark of pre-dawn morning, Cassie beside me, both of us bundled up for winter, while my mother went outside to warm up her Mustang to drive Cassie and me to our Aunt June’s house, where we stayed while Momma worked. I remember one such morning in particular because the Mustang’s engine caught fire while my mother was warming it up and she raced in to call the fire department. I’m not sure what became of the Mustang, other than it was gone after that.

And of course my parents divorced when I was four and Cassie one and the three of us stayed in the trailer we owned after Daddy moved back home to live with his mother, my Mamaw Ruby. And when I was eight, after we had been living with my mother’s boyfriend for two years already and my mother’s descent into alcoholism and addiction with him was total, we had no phone and regularly went months without electricity and hot water. He had already broken one of the kitchen windows trying to get in after my mother had locked him out after he hit her once (they taped the window up with packing tape and duct tape and and cardboard, after). The hot water tank had busted and soaked through the carpet and underflooring in their bedroom, leaving a hole straight through to the ground a few feet below the trailer floor that they tried to cover with the board on which my mother’s talented friend Brenda had drawn and painted for me a Rainbow Brite mural for my birthday; it had hung on the wall over the toybox in Cassie’s and my room before they used it to try and cover the hole in their bedroom floor because it was winter and the bitter cold winter air coming through the hole was making it impossible for our one kerosene space heater to warm the trailer, as much as it ever did or could). We couldn’t pay any bill with any regularity, by then. And though the trailer was ours, or my mother’s, I suppose, the plot in the trailer park it was parked on wasn’t ours (I think the plot rental was maybe $80 a month, if my memory serves), and we owed Mr. Conger money as a result. One day in third grade, as we were leaving music class, he called for me to stay behind while the rest of the class went back to our classroom, and he asked me “When is your mother going to pay me the money she owes me?” When I said I didn’t know, he told me “Tell her I want my money.”

I think that was the first time I was ashamed about money.

I had many such occasions to come. Early in my therapeutic relationship with Wendy, 2012 or 2013 or maybe a bit later, in 2015, when I was talking about the shame I had about money, she pointed out that I had never had any opportunity to learn how to handle money responsibly or well, that I never had that behavior modeled for me by any adult who then taught me how to do it on my own. Every year between 2010 and 2014 I earned more money in a year than my mother ever had. Between 2010 and 2016 I worked a minimum of two jobs at any given time (at one point in 2012, I think it was, I worked four, teaching simultaneously at UB and D’youville, writing copy for a TA colleague’s husband’s stem cell research site, and scoring AP English Language exams—I think I earned about $29,000 that year, total? The most I’ve ever earned by far, and more than my mother ever has or will.)

I spent money freely during that time. I’m not sure what else I could reasonably have been expected to do, given my shortcomings and weaknesses and background. I was earning money and didn’t think I’d ever be in a position where I couldn’t earn money again. Even if I never earn more than this, I thought, I’ll earn at least this, and that’s plenty. So I spent what I earned. Clothes, shoes, music, concerts, books—many, many books. And gifts. I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on gifts and clothes for my nephew Tyler and my niece Zoey and my best friend Kate’s girls Sofi and Minah, and trips to see them all twice a year, going first to Tennessee then to Houston once every summer and once every winter. A handful of trips from Buffalo to Toronto to see Tori or Nigella or go to academic conferences. A couple of times for a long weekend, just for fun. A two-day trip to Boston once, partially subsidized by the UB English department, the rest out of pocket, to present at NEMLA, the second largest and most prestigious conference in the humanities. There was the trip to London, aided partially by a student loan, to see Tori introduce the fabulously, heart-achingly beautiful musical she had written, The Light Princess. (I’m ashamed of damn near every dime I ever spent on anything in my life that wasn’t food or rent or utilities, but I’m not ashamed of the London trip to see Tori or any of my three trips to Toronto to see Tori, either; and if The Light Princess ever plays on Broadway, I won’t be ashamed to sell whatever I’ve got to pay Broadway-musical money to see it there, too; I wouldn’t be alive if not for Tori.) I spent money on a couple of trips to New York City to see Pat and Jana, too, once when I was there with them to see the McQueen show at the Met(ropolitan Museum of Art) and once to see Nico Muhly’s Two Boys at the Met(ropolitan Opera). We’d have gone to see Silence! the Musical (the musical parody of The Silence of the Lambs) off-Broadway, too, if Pat wasn’t such a fucking snob. (He apologized the next year, after he had read notices making clear the show was a tongue-in-cheek exercise of campy, bad-taste parody, as I had tried to explain to him, instead of the earnest musical of accidental bad taste he assumed I was recommending. He couldn’t imagine a musical of any kind being in good taste. Such a snob.

For someone who said he found me so fascinating and stimulating, he sure thought I was stupid. In part because he, having been raised in doorman-high rise Manhattan by his advertising executive father and downtown LA by his dilettante artist mother; having gone to Yale, his father’s alma mater, for undergrad; having taken the train from Penn Station to spend weekends at their summer house in Connecticut; thought I was some sort of amusing, borne-of-poverty hillbilly savant who, were I not born and raised so unfortunately poor and backwards, might have otherwise been an actual genius and not the forlornly downtrodden, unschooled, uncouth genius of otherwise unrealized potential he thought I was. It was not an accident that the painting he did, inspired, he said, by me and my work, was based on the linguistic connections between Dustin and dustbin—you know, what Brits call a garbage can. He used the word “receptacle,” as I recall, when he showed it to me in progress in his Brooklyn studio, and not just because I was an admitted and committed cumdump. I was so blinded at the time by his perverse fascination with me it didn’t even occur to me to say, “So what I represent to you and what, in this painting, my name represents of me to viewers, is semiotic varieties of garbage, Pat?” I’m not offended he was calling me garbage, I’m not even saying he’s wrong, but he might have considered the possibility I’d understand that’s what he was saying in the painting even as he avoided saying it to my face. But I digress.)

Or do I? Maybe not. Pat always vehemently insisted neither he nor his family were rich. His father regularly dined at the alumni-only Yale Club in Manhattan and they lived in a downtown New York Apartment with not only room for a grand piano but the actual grand piano itself (despite the fact no one in the family plays piano); its own private, lushly decorated elevator vestibule (for their actual apartment alone, not all the apartments in the building as a whole); a private, smaller-apartment-sized storage area on a lower floor; and an unobstructed view of the U.N. building mere blocks away. But Pat’s family weren’t wealthy. No. Maybe his grandfather had been wealthy, Pat allowed, but by the time he died and left Pat only a small trust fund—a pittance, really!—the rest of the McElnea’s weren’t wealthy. Maybe if I wasn’t so poor I could have seen that, I suppose. I could have had enough money to know what real money was and know Pat didn’t have real money, as he insisted.

I didn’t work all that hard to convince Pat of his privilege. I didn’t make a habit of parading the more ignominious and painful details of my itinerant, hotel room to hotel room, flophouse to flophouse, roaches-crawling-on-me-while-I-slept-on-the-Smith’s-floor-with-my-mother, ages eight-to-fourteen homeless childhood before Pat for his exotic delectation. I rolled my eyes a lot, and wondered what the hell I was doing sleeping in the guest room of a tastefully appointed Manhattan apartment while who knows what conversation was going on about me and my un-orthodonture-corrected teeth in the parlor as they entertained a few of his father and stepmother’s hoity-toity friends.

But I knew what Pat didn’t know about his family’s wealth and thus, what Pat wouldn’t ever and possibly couldn’t ever know or understand about me. And eventually I felt like too much a freakish token in his almost comically snooty artist’s salon to subject myself to it anymore, and had to lose his and Jana’s friendship the way I had (for different reasons) lost Sara’s and Trent’s and Stefan’s and Elizabeth’s and would come to lose Kate’s. Because, in their various ways, I understood them better than they understood me.

Not because I’m such sensitive, intelligent hot stuff. It’s not a question of skill or talent or greater intellectual capacity. I’m not smarter or kinder or more talented, none of those things are true; they all were and are more capable than I am in what feel like countless ways. It’s a question of learned consciousness.

I won’t go on about it, because I know my academic bullshit is tiresome to normal people, but the concept, from W.E.B. DuBois, is called double consciousness. He coined the phrase regarding race, but it applies to any social or cultural abjection. Whether black people like it or not, their place in the world means they have to know far more about white people than white people can or will ever know about them. It’s a white world, they only live in it. So black people are able to understand the existence of white people and are conscious of that, just as they are conscious of the fact the reverse is not true. Black people understand what it is to be black and to be white. Double consciousness. It’s true of queers and straights, women/femmes and men—and the impoverished and everyone else. It’s not the result of a character flaw or malice on the part of every white person (or straight person, or man, or securely middle class or wealthy person); it’s a lived reality enforced by social structures and the way they prop up self-protecting, replicating circuits of power.

If you’ve never been homeless, you don’t know what it’s like, and no one who has been homeless can adequately explain it to you. I understand what it would be like to be financially secure in the middle class because the world presents that reality to us more than any other, so everyone in our culture knows what that would be like. But no person who has never been so poor they were homeless knows what that’s like. It’s not a personal failing, only the way the world works.

When I was little, six or seven, Cassie three or four, before we had yet become homeless but when we were well on our way, we often had no food, despite the fact we were on food stamps. My mother and the man we lived with would take a portion of our food stamps and illegally sell them to mom-and-pop convenience store owners for cents on the dollar, in order to get cash to buy beer and drugs. So we never had enough food to make it through the month. I remember being off school during the summer, and Momma taking Cassie and me to the grocery store with her when we didn’t have any food or food stamps left. She would take us to the deli counter, and she’d get us styrofoam to-go containers, the sort with compartments, with mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, one bread roll, and a piece of fried chicken. She’d get the woman at the counter to put a PAID sticker on it, despite the fact she hadn’t paid (I don’t know how, my best guess is she offered to pay cash, at a later date, that the counter lady could pocket for herself), and we’d walk out of the store carrying them, because who is going to stop a six year old and a three year old and say “Hey, did you actually pay for that food?”

I don’t know how to tell you how that feels. Standing there ashamed, barefoot on the cold grocery store tile, knowing your mother is maybe begging, certainly stealing food because you don’t have any food left at home, and that if you tell anyone, they’ll take you away, and you don’t know if they’ll ever let you see your mother again. I had seen a made-for-TV movie with Sarah Jessica Parker playing a young, mentally ill, neglectful mother of four small children (as I recall). There was a scene where the oldest child, a girl my age at the time, fills an empty baby bottle with tap water and gives it to her little brother to stop him crying. She finds an open bag of potato chips and squeezes some water from the baby bottle onto a chip to soften it so he can eat it and won’t choke. She does it because there is no food and her mother is nowhere to be found. They are alone. Later in the movie, children’s services take them away from their mother and make plans to place the siblings in separate foster homes because no one will take them all together. They’re saved from being separated by a childless couple who own a farm, but they never get to go back to their mother. I remembered that movie. Watching it had made my stomach hurt in a way I hadn’t quite felt before, it made me cry, and I didn’t know why. But it taught me things. I knew if anyone found out about our lives Cassie and I would be taken away from Momma and we may never see her again, and I knew Daddy didn’t want us, and they might take Cassie away from me, too, and I couldn’t protect her anymore, and I’d be all alone, and that man would kill Momma without me there, and some man we didn’t know might touch Cassie if I wasn’t with her, and I couldn’t stop it.

I can describe it to you. I can’t tell you how it feels.

My mother used to call me lazy. I’m not sure why. Once we had a home again, except for the bout of severe depression my senior year when I didn’t clean my room once during a bleak stretch of months, no child had a cleaner room than I. From the time we became homeless when I was eight until we moved into a small house with Momma’s then-boyfriend David and got a washer and dryer when I was fifteen, the only reason we ever had clean clothes was because I urged her to take us to the laundromat so we could do laundry. From fourteen on, any time I was left alone in the house for any length of time, I cleaned it top to bottom (except my sister’s room). Goodness knows she never told me to practice my clarinet or learn my lines or do my homework or finish reading whatever I was reading. Or finish my college applications or practice for the Solo & Ensemble competition or prepare for the state tournament when I qualified in dramatic interpretation or revise my poem for the Young Southern Writers anthology. She never had to tell me those things, I did them on my own. So I don’t know where lazy came from with her. I mean, it worked, I’ve felt self-conscious about being lazy my entire post-teenage life. And everything I’ve ever done in the way of external recognition and achievement is because I’m desperately trying to make myself and my life valuable to others in ways I know it’s not, to prove a worth I wish I had but don’t and never did (and, at this advanced age, never will, which is a tough pill to swallow. If I could swallow it along with a cyanide capsule I guess I would.)

Some time ago—maybe months, but sometime in the last year—I was talking on the phone with a friend I’ve only ever known via the phone (what we were talking about I don’t recall), and the subject of my disability status, such as it is, came up, I think only by implication (I don’t think it was the topic at hand). He said to me, in reference to what I don’t remember, (I paraphrase as nearly as I recall) “not like you, you could go out and work if you had to.” A few times, when some habit of mine, predicated on my fear of going out in public and interacting with others, comes up, he’d sort of scoffed, laughed, said “Come on!” The last time, I think, was about taking out the garbage. I said I usually take it out at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, which is true, and he thought that was ridiculous, clearly. I’m not saying it isn’t. I know I’m ridiculous. The world’s least funny joke.

And I know other people would agree that, as he indirectly (probably so as not to hurt my big-dumb-baby feelings) suggested, I’m not that disabled, and others who know anything about my life now probably think so, too. Wendy doesn’t think so, I suppose, and my primary doctor Erin says she doesn’t. I assume when my previous doctor Lynn first told me she thought I should apply for disability and that she didn’t think I should be working that she didn’t think so. On some level people perceive my life, my inability to work and operate with some degree of productive normality in the world, to be, for all legitimate intents and purposes, malingering. I’m certainly not making my feelings up, or imagining them. My body does hurt the ways I’ve said it hurts, and I’m fucked in the head the ways I’ve admitted I’m fucked in the head, but the view that I’m making it all out to be worse than it really is and if I really want to I could get out and work and live like the counterfeit image of a somewhat normal person would be widely held if the details of my life were widely known. And I’m ashamed of that. I don’t know how to make it otherwise, but I understand they do, and that shames me.

Sometimes, when I’m trying to think how I could better communicate myself to others (Wendy told me not to say this, by the way, she said not to say what I’m about to say because making myself more vulnerable wouldn’t help, but she said so to try and protect me from the worst of my feelings, and I’m not good at helping in that goal, and I lost the thread of what she had gently encouraged me to say some time ago, anyway)—when I’m wondering what I could say or should say to make my life clearer to people, I think, should I tell them every time I cut myself? I don’t tell people every time I cut, because it’s humiliating, but should I? Should I tell them how I think about killing myself or otherwise dying every day of my life? How even if I sound like I feel okay, I don’t? How deep down I still think of dying as a relief? How, deep, deep down, I think that literally every man in the world (every doctor who’s a man, and every man nurse, and man Uber driver, and man grocery store employee, and man student, everyone who’s a man)—all men who have ever lived or will ever live would rape women and would hurt or kill me if they thought they could get away with it? All men, even Tyler, now that he’s a man and knows I’m a faggot? (I’m not saying my rational mind thinks it, or the part of it that’s rational, anyway. Just the part of me that knows we’re not entirely rational beings and people act in irrational ways based on irrational desires all the time.) Should I tell them how I hate myself for simultaneously feeling death would be a relief and men would kill me if they could, yet I live as locked away as possible so they can’t do what they want and what’s probably best for me?

But then I wonder what that would do. People might understand I’m even more fucked up than they knew, but the reasonable and responsible and practical part of them will still think, “You could go out and work if you had to.”

I know, what a freak.

I know it’s difficult for people to exercise any patience with me, given the fact I wasted fifteen years getting degrees any fucking idiot could have known weren’t practical or advisable in the long term, fifteen years being reckless and irresponsible and selfish and shortsighted and profligate and willfully stupid, fifteen years achieving only the most trifling and laughable outcomes to show for the pansy-ass, insubstantial work I did—My dissertation? Who gives a shit about my faggoty, labor-of-love dissertation?!—when people were doing actual work, working their asses off, making actual sacrifices, when here I sit on my obviously fucked but fundamentally malingering ass when I could go out and work if I really had to. I dunno, maybe I should have seen Lynn’s suggestion I apply for disability as a way to maybe get my messy life off her hands, at least for a while, and Wendy and Erin and Quinn and Ela’s kind reassurances as the best response they have to a fucking disaster like me on their caseload. However things end with me, I know it will be a relief to them to have me off their books, even if they’d never say so.

One Friday in July of 2016, I sat in Wendy’s office as I had nearly every Friday since the fall of 2010, and I broke down harder than I ever had before. For over an hour, I cried so hard I couldn’t speak. I’ve never cried so hard in my life. I had finished my Ph.D. I had no job to show for it. I had been homeless again from August of 2015 to March of 2016, and as of July I was renting a room in a rundown house with three straight men who stole food and money from me. I had no way to pay the next $500 I owed for each month renting that room. I was estranged from the best friends I ever had because I’m such a fuck-up and a freak. Sitting in that chair in Wendy’s office, I decided I needed to die. Or had to, anyway. No one and nowhere in the world would have me. I didn’t make sense anywhere in the world. I had nowhere to go. I had reached the limits of who I could be and what I could do.

After an hour and a half, I stopped crying, and as I got up from the chair and moved to leave, and Wendy said “Take care,” as she always does when I’m leaving. But that time I was leaving for good, even if she didn’t know it. I said “I’m sorry I never got better. It wasn’t your fault.”

At the top of the stairs, she called me back into her office. She asked me if I was planning to kill myself. She said it sounded to her like I was. I told her no, I wasn’t. The only lie I’ve ever told her. She told me if I were any other client, she would be admitting me for a psych. hold, she wouldn’t be letting me go away on my own, but she was only letting me go because she was afraid if she committed me I wouldn’t forgive her and it would irreparably harm our therapeutic relationship. I knew it was a terrible bind I placed her in. If I lived a thousand years I could never repay her.

The next Tuesday, I got a call from Angel Steele in the housing department at Evergreen. She said there was a place for me in the Lofts, which were opening in August. If I hadn’t received that call, I wouldn’t be here to write this. I wouldn’t be here at all.

When I received my disability designation in 2017, the letter said I was expected to improve. Wendy said she didn’t indicate that (can improve is a very different thing than will improve or even should improve), and I don’t think Lynn or anyone else who wrote in support of my disability application said so either. But the letter said so. It also said they would do a review of my claim after three years, in which time the improvement was expected to have taken place. I got the letter saying they were conducting my review in May 2019, but they’ve yet to send their inquiries to Wendy or Erin in order to conduct the review, and it’s been a year, so I don’t know what to expect or when. Wendy and Erin both said they intended to say I was still fully disabled, and Wendy said she intended to also make clear there was no evidence whatsoever that, regardless of what the initial disability letter said, it was ever the case that I was going to improve necessarily, or enough to alter my disability status, and she tried to reassure me: there’s no evidence whatsoever you have improved, even if they did expect you to. How pathetic a person I am, that what passes for encouragement and reassurance in the context of my life is don’t worry, no one who knows you thinks you’re any better.

But who knows what they’ll say. The chances they could revoke my status are high, I imagine. I’m 38. Or will be, on June 26th. I’m not supposed to be cripplingly debilitated by emotional instability and psychological disease, given what appear from the outside to be unfortunate but livable circumstances. Livable to someone fundamentally saner and a better person than I am, anyway. Someone should’ve told that disability judge I’d only disappoint him as I have everyone else.

If they take my disability status away, when they take it away, I’ve got nowhere to go. I don’t kid myself: as barely employable and barely functioning as I ever was, things have not gotten better or even maintained. They’re worse. I’m worse. I mean, in my mind. I recognize that others’ perceptions that I could go out and work if I had to is the assessment of a sane and hardworking person, but that’s not what I am. I’ll try whatever I can try, like I tried whatever I could before. I did what I could, my massive and devastating personal failings all too sadly withstanding. All those attempts ran out of steam on which my finally worthless efforts and the ultimately disgusting person I’ve become could float. Running on less than empty. That’s what happens given that the tank of the sorry person I am is a fucking collander in every conceivable way.

So I got a reprieve from what I understood to be true four years ago, July of 2016, sitting in Wendy’s office. It’s still true, even more true, and I know that reprieve is likely to be temporary, though my deficits are permanent, and will thus be terminal. A poz, homeless faggot becomes a corpse sooner rather than later, and this poz faggot would become a corpse rather sooner even than soon, all things considered. I know I will be homeless again, and I know then I will have to die.

That’s a lot to live with, as much as I can be said to be living.

Even someone as fucked as I am doesn’t look at my life through the telescope of money and the lens of necessary shelter and see, in the distance, home. I see, rather, the facts that indicate I probably won’t have a home for much longer. The facts that remind me I haven’t had a home for quite a lot of my life. And the conclusion that there are good reasons for that. Where, exactly, should a person like me expect to find shelter? My past and future homelessness, my current financial broke-ness, and my always already broken-ness militate against sheltering me. Nothing about me says to anyone, yes, you look a safe, sane, hardworking sort, come in and make yourself at home.

The first phrase of one of my very favorite books, in some ways most dear to me, Jim Grimsley’s Comfort & Joy is “To find a hiding place.” A few pages later, on the plane home—“home”—Dan thinks about Ford, “This is my hiding place.” But the thought seems wrong to him. Moments later, “Shelter, not hiding place. This wall of Ford was, would be shelter. That’s where the thought [had been] wrong.”

No wonder that book had my heart from the first word. Shelter in the love of a good man. Reading that book I thought, “Oh, this man understands some things about me.”

But.

Neither he nor anyone else is under any obligation to make any sense of my money shame, my fear of homelessness, my failures generally, or to understand me as a person at all.

Talk about a position that doesn’t pay.

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bleep-blop-lizard-hop · 7 years ago

Text

Jenny/Vastra Modern Coffee Shop AU

Jenny is a college graduate working in a London cafe in order to make enough money for rent until she can find a real job.

Vastra will be human in this universe.

Vastra had moved down to London from Scotland to train as a rookie cop just like her sisters did before her.

Vastra is a known regular at the coffee shop who would come in every morning before work, every afternoon for such with her co-workers, and every evening before heading home.

The first time that Jenny saw Vastra come in was during a drizzly autumn morning. Vastra wore a long gray trench coat over her police uniform, a woolen plaid scarf around her neck and black leather gloves to keep her hands warm. Short bobbed, slightly wavy brow hair framed a uniquely attractive face, complete with a well-sculpted jawline and stunningly bright blue eyes.(I tend to imagine human Vastra looking rather similar to Neve McIntosh, the lovely actress who played her in the show)

Vastra approached the counter where Jenny stood and ordered her usual black coffee with three shots of expresso and only a modest amount of sugar. Jenny was so mesmerized by Vastra’s beauty and charming Scottish accent that she misheard her name, accidentally spelling it wrong on the cup. Jenny became even more flustered when she realized her mistake and tried to apologize, despite Vastra insisting that it’s OK. Jenny still felt bad, so she gave her a free muffin on the house for extra good measure.

An electric spark occurred where their hands touched briefly on the coffee cup, but neither of them was willing to acknowledge it.

Meanwhile, Jenny’s co-worker, Bill, was watching the whole spectacle from the back storage room with great intrigue.

After that day, Vastra started going out of her way to come into the shop earlier each morning just to see Jenny. Though initially surprised by all the attention that she was receiving from Vastra, Jenny enjoyed her company nonetheless, perhaps a little too much than she would admit. They both liked talking to each other and spending time together, which served to increase their mutual attraction.

Jenny eventually grew bolder and would put in the extra effort to create artistic pictures in Vastra’s coffee using syrup and cream.

That often made Vastra the target of relentless teasing from her fellow officers, Martha, Clara, Donna, Amy, and River, who would eat lunch with her in the cafe. Jenny also has to deal with Bill’s cheeky comments about what an utterly lovestruck fool she is and that she should just bleeding ask her out already, for Sappho’s sake.

A month passed before it was Vastra who finally made the first move. Jenny came into the shop one morning to find a large bouquet of her favorite flowers waiting there on the counter, including violets, roses, and lilies. Inside the bouquet is a card signed by Vastra, asking her on a date and Jenny’s face instantly lit up as she read it. Bill tried to act coy when questioned about her, but Jenny knew that it was her who unlocked the door for Vastra to get in and leave those flowers.

Their first date consisted of going to see a play at the local theatre, then taking a stroll in the park where Vastra offered a shivering Jenny her coat, and they shared a kiss under the moonlight that was pure magic.

Afterward, they decided to stop by the cafe and get some coffee, but instead stumbled upon a robbery in progress. The lone masked suspect grabbed a terrified Bill and held her hostage at gunpoint when the two of them walked in, prompting Vastra to keep Jenny behind her as she handled the situation herself. Bill bit hard into the assailant’s hand and stomped on his foot, before she was able to slip out of his grasp, giving Vastra the perfect opportunity to tackle him, disarm him, and install handcuffs so that he doesn’t pose a threat ever again. Once the fear induced shock and adrenaline had worn off, Jenny came to the conclusion that this was easily the greatest date EVER.

Jenny and Vastra’s relationship continued to progress smoothly from there, leading Jenny to move into Vastra’s home within a few weeks.

Jenny soon grows fond of Vastra’s pet cat, Earl Grey, and would always bring home treats for him.

Jenny waiting for Vastra to come home from late night shifts at Scotland Yard so that they could drink tea and eat pastries together while snuggling on the couch, watching tv until they fall asleep in each other’s arms.

Vastra telling Jenny about her work during the day, especially if something majorly positive happened like finding a missing child, busting an illegal drug deal, or simply giving directions to some lost French tourists. Jenny was quite pleased indeed to learn that Vastra could speak both French and Japanese fluently.

Vastra was aware that Jenny didn’t want to work in a coffee shop forever, of course, and is super supportive of her aspirations to become a professional photographer for a major national magazine publisher someday.

Jenny and Vastra being huge Sci-Fi-fi geeks together.

Vastra escorting Jenny to work every morning where they would kiss before parting ways, and Jenny never hearing the end of it from Bill.

However, she did caught the two of them engaged in a heavily heated make out session in the back storage room on one particular occasion.

Jenny pecking Vastra’s cheek while serving her order, which invoked even more teasing from her friends as Vastra merely smiled like a lovestruck idiot.

Vastra playfully patting Jenny’s buttocks whenever she walks by, earning her a semi-stern glare from Jenny.

Vastra occasionally picking Jenny up in a police car to take her home, which never fails to excite Jenny.

Vastra bringing Jenny to the police target practice room and teaching Jenny how to shoot a gun.

Vastra teaching Jenny some martial arts and self-defense techniques in case she ever needs it.

River making a sexual innuendo to Jenny regarding Vastra’s handcuffs and the two of them laughing when Vastra blushes bright red.

Vastra showing Jenny her prized set of genuine Japanese katana swords and Jenny is absolutely fascinated by them.

During the weekends, Jenny and Vastra would hang out with friends at the pub before they all go dancing in a club. After having several drinks to loosen up, Jenny and Vastra would sing karaoke duets while visibly tipsy. In every single universe no matter what, Vastra has a habit of flirting with anyone she finds remotely attractive until Jenny pulls her in close and reminds her she belongs to with a furiously possessive kiss. They’re both the passionately jealous type, that’s a fact.

Jenny hanging up a rainbow LGBTQ+ FLAG on top of the cafe for Pride month and any bigot who is offended can just fuck off.

Jenny admiring and polishing Vastra’s police badge for her.

Firefighters were called to their house once because Vastra was trying to cook a meal for their anniversary, with disastrous results.

Vastra giving Jenny an expensive camera and rare memorabilia from her favorite Sci-Fi show on her birthday.

Vastra stealing a piece of pastry when she thinks Jenny isn't looking, which results in her being forcefully shooed out of the shop.

An overprotective Vastra making herself appear more tough and intimidating whenever she sees rude men bothering Jenny, whether it be at the cafe or in the streets.

Jenny and Vastra going on romantic open carriage rides throughout the city.

Jenny and Vastra dancing and playing in the rain together as if they’re five years old again.

Vastra boasting about her strong immune system and is grumpy when she does become sick, requiring her to stay home in bed for a few weeks. She soon realized that being sick wasn't so bad after all, since Jenny would feed her soup, and snuggle with her, and take good care of her. It was in those little moments that Vastra thought Jenny is way too good to her.

Vastra is obligated to keep her body as physically fit as possibly in her line of work. That proved to be somewhat of a problem for Jenny, who can barely function normally around Vastra when she’s exercising, due to her exposed lean muscles and perfectly chiseled abs.

Vastra bringing Jenny along to visit her family in Scotland for the holidays. Vastra’s family, consisting of her parents as well as six older sisters, might seem intimidatingly rough and rustic at first glance, but they’re actually the sweetest, most kindhearted people once you get to know them. They were very supportive of their relationship and really welcomed Jenny with open arms, much to Vastra’s delight. The only downside was that her family would not stop embarrassing her by showing Jenny her old baby pictures, telling stories about things she’d rather forget, constantly asking when they’re going to get married, and not to mention when Vastra’s father was marching around in a kilt while playing the bagpipes at fucking five in the morning. Jenny, on the other hand, had a lot of fun spending time with Vastra’s family and appreciated their strong sense of Scottish pride.

Before they left Scotland, Vastra consulted her parents in private about her decision to marry Jenny. Vastra’s parents were happy seeing how she have found the love of her life in Jenny, granting the couple their blessing and giving Vastra a precious family heirloom ring to take home.

Unfortunately, Vastra as a police officer believed that it was her duty to serve the city regardless of the risks to her own life, and her stubborn self-sacrificing streak was a main source of friction in their relationship. Jenny and Vastra have their disagreements like any other couple, but it was one bad argument in particular that caused Jenny to leave and seek temporary refuge at Bill’s place.

Vastra and her patrol partner, Jenny(the blonde one) are the first on scene respondents when a call is sent out about the robbery of a jewelry store. They were pursuing the suspects in a high speed chase when they were struck by some kind of explosive bomb, throwing them off course until they crashed and setting their vehicle ablaze.

An undetermined amount of time passed before Vastra woke up in a hospital room to be greeted by the heartwarming sight of her parents and sisters who all came down after hearing about the accident. They were extremely relieved to know that Vastra would be alright despite her injuries, but none more so than Jenny, whose tears were flowing freely down her face as in her hand she held the ring that Vastra was planning to propose with. Jenny immeditately threw herself into Vastra’s arms and proceeded to smother her face with kisses while repeatedly proclaiming, “Yes...Yes...Yes!”

Vastra’s partner also survived, in case you’re wondering.

Vastra eventually recovered, they got married, and lived happily ever after.

#västra and jenny #dw femslash #Jenny flint #madame vastra #OTP #paternoster gang #Modern Coffee Shop AU

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doumekichikara · 8 years ago

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bodyswap! 👯‍♂️👫👬👭

[put a fanfic trope in my inbox and i’ll describe the fic i’d write!]

i am in fact heavily into a bodyswap au for damen and laurent that i unfortunately am never going to write but i’ll describe it in detail for you now! for 2,500 words, in fact!

note that it’s inspired in part by kimi no na wa (your name) so if you don’t want spoilers for that movie then don’t read this,

laurent and damen realize they’re swapping bodies a couple of days into it, after initially thinking they must be having incredibly, inexplicably realistic dreams. what is happening is impossible and cannot be real. but then damen sees, in a handwriting that is not his own, too neat, almost as if the writer is not used to writing in akielon and had to compose the message quite slowly and carefully, a note left in his bed: is this real?

laurent, waking in damen’s body the following day, finds a message in veretian, written below his own and tucked away in the same place: it must be.

through notes, and then longer letters, they piece it together. they’re alternating days. the switch happens as they sleep. laurent tries staying awake to prevent it, but all it does is delay it by a day. (he files this away in case there’s a day he knows he wants to be in his own body for.) when damen wakes up in his own body for two consecutive days and finds out how, he tries it too and is also able to delay it, and it doesn’t happen when he takes a nap that afternoon either; they both have to be asleep. laurent counts back the days and realizes it must have started at the six-year anniversary of the battle at marlas, but that is not something he wants to discuss with damen without a sword in his hand and damen in front of him, and so he never mentions it.

the problem is: in damen’s body, living damen’s life, it is very hard to imagine fighting him to the death. the first weeks, it sickens him to feel all these worshipful eyes on damianos, to see people prostrate themselves for him, to be served by slaves and to have to refuse the services that are so commonplace as to be assumed if he doesn’t give some reason he wants his bed to himself that night. and it is confusing, at times distressingly so, to move through customs and behaviors he’s only ever read about, and to do so in a body that he can feel so much power in, one he handles with lumbering awkwardness, forgetting his height and the mass of his limbs. he comes back to his body and he feels very light, too quick, not nearly solid enough.

but damianos is—thoughtful. damianos glosses akielon words in veretian where he can and leaves little phrases he thinks might come in handy, far more conversational than anything laurent included in his own guide to passing as himself. he writes suggestions for areas laurent might like to work on the next time he spars with jord, accurate to laurent’s weaknesses without having ever seen him fight, only from being in his skin. he catches onto laurent’s unwillingness to make the same use of slaves as he does and does something, during one of their days in their correct bodies, that leads to laurent never again finding himself having to work a way out of a slave coming to his (damianos’s) bed.

he slowly transforms the messages from warnings and rules to anecdotes about what he did that day, things laurent doesn’t need to know, but that he seems to want to tell him anyway. and laurent starts to do the same, almost like a diary, or a friend.

meanwhile damen has become…very taken with laurent, or what he has gathered about what laurent must be like. his messages are utilitarian at first, and from the way he spends his days (or the way damen does while he’s him) he doesn’t seem to interact with anyone any more than he has to. he has minimal interaction with the court, which baffles damen because it is so far removed from everything he has learned from his father about being a future king, and laurent is supposed to rule in just two more years. it occurs to him that laurent may be keeping him away from the court in order to keep him from learning anything sensitive, since he’s an enemy and could use that information against him—that’s the way veretians think, isn’t it? (it would never work, since memories of laurent’s life are fuzzy each time he returns to his own; it’s the written record at each end that refreshes it each time, and that never makes it to the other side.) all he can say for sure about laurent, initially, is that he’s incredibly beautiful and probably incredibly intelligent, if the reading material in his bedroom and the way he writes are anything to go by.

and then he spars with jord, and he learns that laurent works much, much harder than he wants anyone to know, and that he has the absolute loyalty of his men, good men, and that it is deserved. laurent does not have the physical strength that damen does but he has honed his body well, and for a long time, and from how jord responds both during and afterwards damen can tell that laurent knows how to move in his body much better than damen can, and that damen can only begin to imagine what laurent could do with himself.

(he has a similar realization the first time he-as-laurent goes riding.)

and then laurent starts to write back for real, no longer the spare, efficient messages but actual responses to damen, and damen learns that he is funny in a way that can cut but also has a warmth to it. that he’s far more observant than damen, so much so that damen starts to realize just how much slips by him simply because it hadn’t occurred to him it could be important. that he is fair, and kind, and perhaps also very lonely. that he couldn’t have asked for a better person to be stuck in this surreal situation with.

some days he imagines going to vere to meet him, to share the same time and space instead of always being alone and always delayed a day. he wonders whether that’s what they’re supposed to do, if maybe that’s why this is all happening—they’re meant to find common ground, come up with a way to move past this uneasy truce between their countries and form a real alliance. he considers writing laurent a letter and sending it off to arles, and then feels silly because they already do that every day, and what is he expecting to happen? (and on some days, when he can’t stop himself, he wonders if there might be an end to the switching, if the way to stop is to meet, to kiss—)

laurent, meanwhile, has accepted border duty, even knowing his uncle means to engineer a way to kill him, because he too has started to wonder, and he thinks there may be a way to make a friend of akielos. the day he leaves for the border, he sends a letter to damen, a real one; leaving arles means leaving behind the place he’s been hiding their messages, and he’s not sure when he’ll next have a safe place to leave new ones.

the next day, laurent wakes up in his own body.

he thinks that damen must have had to stay up late, for some reason, or woke so early that there was no overlap, seeing as laurent went to sleep quite late. but there’s no switch the next day, either. or the next. he moves towards the border without a single day in ios. and without a reply to his letter.

when he reaches the border after two weeks, he writes to jokaste. they got along well when he was in damen’s body; damen always scolded him for it afterwards, but she was the only one he’d ever let himself act at all like himself with, when he was damen. he thinks that if he is going to chance a letter to anyone else in the akielon court, it has to be her.

and this is how he learns that damen has been dead for a year.

and this is where the reader would remember that laurent had thought it was six years since marlas, had turned twenty, while damen had thought it would be two years until a nineteen-year-old laurent could rule. that jokaste had tried to warn laurent-as-damen but had referenced things only damen himself would understand, and laurent hadn’t written any of it down, so he didn’t remember and damen never knew. that for a month damen had been coughing, had been tiring more easily, but had pushed it aside so well it didn’t seem important.

for this au, both theomedes and damen were poisoned as part of the regent’s plan with kastor, and damen accidentally died too soon, too soon for it to be believable, before theomedes and before enough word had gotten out about him being sick for it to seem like it had been of natural causes. the alternate plan became to keep it quiet that he’d already died and wait for long enough that it seemed plausible it was natural. the story was that he was ill, and even the story didn’t make it to laurent because it barely left ios; the health and vitality of their royals is a point of pride and to have the king and crown prince both ill wasn’t a vulnerability the kyroi wanted to share openly with neighboring countries. by the time it became more public knowledge laurent was swapping with damen and believed his firsthand knowledge over quiet rumors, and was also very distracted with the whole swapping situation in general.

so: laurent learns the truth from jokaste, who tells him the truth because by this point (pg in the canon timeline) the regent is starting to move forward with his plans and jokaste is sure something like what happened to damen is going to happen again, and she couldn’t save him but maybe she can help laurent. laurent, meanwhile, is very fixated on the fact that this all started on the anniversary of marlas, and while part of him thinks maybe this has all been some kind of delusion borne of his obsession with damianos and his approaching 21st birthday i.e. expiration date, he thinks it must have been real. that was not the damen he would have conjured from his own mind.

so he rides alone to marlas from the border, and he goes to the artesian ruins. and in his letters with damen they talked about artes, and how it was once a single kingdom, and all of the ways those connections are still present, underlying their foundations. and during the months they were alternating bodies, there was a time that laurent-as-damen went to marlas and left something of damen’s there—a sword? a shield?—on the site where auguste died. laurent returns there, now as himself, and he considers how backwards this all is: he came to remember auguste, wearing auguste’s killer’s body, and now here he is in his own body, desperately seeking his brother’s killer.

while he’s there, he falls on the uneven ground and hits his head. when he wakes, he’s in damen’s living, breathing body once again.

what follows is an Exciting Ride, in which laurent desperately tries to ensure damen lives, talking to jokaste about the poison plot, riding to delpha alone to see nikandros (who has def been present already in the story, warning damen-as-damen just like jokaste warned laurent-as-damen, and also the time laurent went to marlas was during a trip damen made to delpha) to set things in motion as far as having an anti-kastor faction amongst the kyroi. after he’s talked to nikandros he has a very strong instinct that he needs to go to the ruins, that he’ll be able to see damen there—

and he does, somehow. he goes to where his body had been when he left it (over a year from now?) and he calls for damen and hears damen call him back—damen in laurent’s own voice, saying his name, as he calls damen’s with damen's—and then somehow, incredibly, damen is there, or he is there, over a year from now but somehow in a shared time and place, and then he is himself, and looking up at damen, damen who is so very large and right there in front of him for the first time.

“you died,” laurent says, “how could you let that happen, you absolute moron—”

damen doesn’t hear any of this because laurent is so much more beautiful in front of him, in front of him and not in a mirror, laurent found a way to him, even though damen remembers when he collapsed—"can i?“ damen asks, reaching out.

he embraces him. laurent has not been touched, not like this, not in so long, but he embraces damen, there where damen killed auguste, and he feels a relief he hasn’t felt since that happened, and it doesn’t make any sense but he doesn’t want to let it go.

they are holding onto each other as laurent tells him everything he needs to know, tells him to remember all of it, his life literally depends on it, there will be more attempts, don’t you dare die, and damen tells him he won’t, he won’t, and laurent had better not either—

the moment ends. laurent stands alone, on the ruins.

he can’t remember why he came. he was looking for someone. for something? he looks around and feels an echo of relief and doesn’t know why.

(over a year ago, damen remembers what laurent told him, remembers what he needs to do. he doesn’t die, he won’t, he promised someone…

who?)

laurent can’t remember why he went to marlas, and he goes back to where he was stationed on the border in a sort of haze, feeling both emptied, as though something very important is missing, and more full and real than he has in a long time.

laurent can’t remember why he sent the letters to damianos or jokaste, but he did, and that’s what matters. that’s how the correspondence that changes everything begins. how he is able to bring together his uncle’s plots and the thwarted poison plot on the akielon royal family, the mastermind of which still hasn’t yet been identified. how he arranges to meet formally with the akielon crown prince and sees him in the flesh for the first time.

but—it doesn’t feel like the first time at all, and as laurent studies damianos’s face he thinks he sees something familiar in it, something he feels but can’t name. a sort of nostalgia, missing something he shouldn’t be able to miss. as they look at each other, the eye contact feels intimate, and strangely laurent doesn’t want to pull away from that.

��is this…?” damianos—damen asks.

“it must be,” laurent says.

#captive prince #the short version of what would be a roughly 80k fic...which is why i can't write it #artemisrisen #answered #marina writes

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felicezhukov · 7 years ago

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:: Dear Nicolas Jaar ::

Yesterday I wrote you a letter about rape, which can wait, because it’s not fully formulated yet and I have 23% left on my laptop battery and no charger and I need to get all this out today and in a public forum. I write you quite a few letters that never see the light of day, are tucked away in journals, they’re more to process what’s been happening, then the ones online serve as statements I guess, conversations with myself in public spaces. Because I come across as articulate, confident and possibly even at points a bit brutal in my delivery, but there is much I can’t say, the words won’t form on my tongue, but they will emerge from my fingers, I have always preferred text to phone call’s, I love writing emails, the written word is a friend of mine that allows me to draw out the details and the nuances of my thought, so today I must write an open letter to my housemates, a letter inside a letter, an ever expanding maze of dialogues, not that they may ever read it, but it’s out there, in a sphere they can access and therefore makes me feel somewhat better about the situation I’m currently in.

But first and foremost, my sister is in labour right now, speeding through jagged country lanes, probably spewing obscenities as she has the mouth of a sailor without being in rivers of pain anyway, I’m with her, in that car, I hope she can feel me there, squeezing her hand and singing strange lullabies to her stomach. We call the baby the wigglytuff, its its due date today and my sisters 29th birthday, obviously the tuff is eager to share, I guess that’s a good trait?

Here goes nothing, perhaps I’ll regret this I’m not sure; perhaps it’s all poppycock garbled in my head by overthinking:

DEAR HOUSEMATES (vun and tuu of you; swee: I don’t feel the need to reach out to as you seem to be living in your own world, unfettered or affected by me),

Yesterday my laptop charger broke, on closer examination it was rotting at the root of the wires, I found it whilst sitting at my desk, my wonderful desk, my sanctuary, the place I have attempted to make mine after the fallout of a brutal, powerful relationship that I’ve spent the last 10 years in. I was texting the moon when this happened, it was point of frustration, horror, in my day, because the main bulk of the work I’m making at the moment is editing and computer based self portraits and writing, all these things are reliant on this piece of metal and plastic perched on my lap right now, without it I can’t finish my films and what’s more, yesterday, I couldn’t let it absorb me, create a distraction from the aural environment of my room.

When I first came to look at the room I was struck by the light and the breeziness, the people I met were friendly, they shared wine with me and we talked about art, it felt like a place I could make my own for a short time, escape the violence of a previous life and begin to heal. At that point I was moving through a painstaking and hollowing breakdown, all bent around the dissolution of my relationship with the moon, I needed a refuge, a place I could close the door to.

For 10 years I couldn’t close my door to the moon, I know it’s something I chose and at points was wonderful, there were many jubilant moments wrapped in each other's minds and bodies, sharing ourselves completely. But the cycles of abuse also knew no limits and at times when things were particularly difficult the only place I could lock myself away was the bathroom, and even then I could hear him through the door, if he was on one of his spirals, launching angry tirades, because when he was like that virtually nothing could knock him off course, the only way I could break it was by getting in a more emotionally volatile state, which often involved heavy crying, screaming, lashing out physically. Just before I moved out one of the worst episodes occurred in recent history, because I’d had my phone stolen drunkenly, irresponsibly, I endured over 90 mins of vitriolic rage, cunt, bitch, stupid bitch, cunt, over and over and over, admonishing me, bashings things in blind anger, seemingly on the verge of causing me injury but never quite going that far, a staple in the ongoing abuse we’d been moving through.

This time I was to drained to counter anything and just let it wash over me, but it still was absorbed into my soul, and caused a rupture inside me, something deeply painful which hurts now even after time and distance it brings sour tears to my eyes to stroke the memory.

So you can’t imagine the release I felt moving into my new room, closing the door and gently pressing my ‘everything is going to be ok’ poster to the wall behind my headboard, I felt like I’d finally escaped, like the cycle would disintegrate and I could be with myself, get to know me, no longer have to avoid my bedroom with cider and outlandish performances, I could relax and let my bones breathe. This summer was to be the summer I found myself, and sure enough the muhrmaid samurai became my icon, self care, striving for something better in myself was the goal, through determined self examination, meditation, studying and exercise.

But of course things aren’t perfect, to endure is human, is the root of existence, we err and we endure. The wall’s are paper thin in my room, this has become apparent in the last few week’s, I might be able to close my door but smells and sound can travel through walls and increasingly I’ve felt like I’m in a box, in silence or peace you can expand, your mind can travel because you can imagine malleable space outside of where you stand. But if you are surrounded by noise, by elements you can’t control, then its like you are encompassed, trapped, and currently I have no where else to go.

I have no studio, no gym membership, no job (happily that changes next week),I have friends who I do visit pretty regularly but I don’t want to have to go to them because I don’t want to be stuck in my room, I want to be able to go to them for pleasure. I understand that not having a job these past weeks has been causing me more stress and also means I’ve been in the house more frequently, I have had no money and no real freedom which of course will have a knock on effect to my psychic wellbeing. I chose to have no studio, because I wanted to get through everything I have made this year before I start on new projects and felt that being locked away with all this material would force me to pour through it, organise it and understand what I have been doing a little more. Which in truth has happened.

But last night, in front of the candle I’ve been lighting when I sit for mealtimes, over one of the most delicious meals I’ve made for myself in a long time, surrounded by a kind of screeching from all the angles of the house, I held my head in my hands and sucked up tears that threatened to fall. The moon rang and heard the break in my voice, I couldn’t speak to him and I hung up. I tried to just brush it off, endure, we all live on top of each other in this city and I’m only subletting this room, the people I share with, especially you who I’m writing to, have real home’s here and I don’t want to interrupt your ways of life or ask you to censor yourselves.

I’m not 100% sure how it started, possibly because there was a period of 4 days where every morning I was woken by banging and speaking loudly outside my room, then I casually asked by text just to be notified of any decisions made regarding the house, not protesting anything, simply saying I needed a little notice as I was destitute and waking up to a note demanding money without any prior warning felt somehow unfair. Something changed after this message, as if I had stepped outside of my allowable boundaries, despite the fact that it was not rude or aggressively delivered. The next morning I was jolted awake by shouting outside my door, about not doing anything, part of me felt like it was directed at me, possibly that’s paranoia but whatever its intended purpose it certainly caused me shock.

Ever since this I’ve felt a slow decline in our relationship, partly to do with what happened above, partly because I stopped smoking and drinking, so for a few weeks was really tense and desperately avoided the common area’s, the kitchen, the designated smoking area, especially fell out of favour with me and it’s then that I started to really enjoy my solitude.

I’m sorry, I’m not like you, maybe I’m on the autism spectrum somewhere, I’m not sure, but I don’t feel the need to be part of a group and I want the place I live to be a place of reflection. I find interactions with people quite difficult a lot of the time and often feel like I’m not being true to myself in how I behave, so my ideal place is somewhere where I don’t have to worry about this, where I can have a causal relationship with anyone that I cohabit with and not feel like I’m somehow breaking the rules by not wanting more than a light hello when we come across each other. I just want privacy and peace, I want to be alone when I’m at home.

Following from the shouting outside my door it felt like the living room next to my room started to become used more commonly, which I don’t have a problem with as such except that the sofa is adjacent to the back of my bed and I spend a lot of time in bed writing at the moment, so the walls being as they are, its as if we’re sat in the same room with our backs to each other.

During a day that preceded; shouting excited chatter resounded, which is fine but was unusual in the timeline of my stay here, it migrated to the sofa and morphed into the melody of pop song, which in its heightened volume bashed me round the back of the head and knocked me from my train of thought. I hate to complain, will avoid it at all costs, I don’t want to inhibit other people especially regarding noise as I feel like it’s a freedom we don’t get to enjoy often. But it was evening, a week day, it just seemed without necessity and wasn’t creative, I stalked into the living room, bent in anger and spat out about how I’d like you to come hear it in my room and understand how thin the walls were, it was jumbled, I didn’t want to come across that pent up, but I was, I was shaking and my heart was palpitating, conflict is not native to me, I don’t know how to handle myself in that situation. You respectfully turned it down, I hoped it would be the end of it, but the very next day it graduated to a new level of absurdity.

My bedroom is my studio, it has to be, I am too poor to afford anywhere else to create. I make films and music, so I have to record somewhere. I’d been on a roll with my film and as I’d been struggling previously it was a relief to be in sync with editing again. This portion of the trilogy is a strange sort of karaoke I was acting out in my studio in outfits from the past; to songs which have resonated during my life and symbolically described the parts of my oeuvre I used as staging throughout the piece. So I was recording music. It wasn’t an invitation, I would much prefer to have done it somewhere privately, but with nowhere else to go, beggars can’t be choosers….

For some reason it whipped you up outside the room, I don’t know if that was already on the cards before I started to sing but it was suddenly like I had a chorus, an uninvited chorus which totally detracted from what I was trying to accomplish and also made me feel invaded somehow, like it robbed me of the authenticity of the action I was involved in. Somehow this pivoted into karaoke in real time, which you jollily invited me to participate in, totally disregarding the fact that I was engaged in something else and then taking offense to the fact that I didn’t want to be your backup singer or chorus girl.

I’m glad you let me know it was going to happen, but it was unbearable when it finally kicked off, stomping and screaming to lady gaga right next door to me, it felt like you were pointing the noise in my direction somehow, there are many ways to have fun and there was something somehow aggressive about this. I was bowed over at my desk whilst you screamed, with nowhere to go, I had been so happy making my film and suddenly was brutally exposed to the lack of power I held in my own home, how easily my holy sanctum could be penetrated. Not just this but something malicious lay over this moment, and this is what was deeply upsetting, that knowingly you were being cruel, it was not an act of joyous celebration which you painted it to be, but in fact like you were holding my head and rubbing it into the dirt, to remind me of my place, to satiate your own delicate ego’s.

Now you’re not evil people, and these shocks are fairly minor really, I know I’m not a saint and do not claim to be standing above you somehow, I’m just trying to write everything down here so that a mode of communication can be established. I’m writing it down to better understand it myself and because usually in cycles like this, they are unwittingly entered into and not directly intended to be spiteful. They stem from a breakdown in communication and I’m no better than you in this regard, the longer things drag on the angrier I become and now I can barely look at the pair of you. I don’t want to come into contact with you at all though you are regularly forcing me to be aware of your existence and somehow participate in your lives.

I know from experience, from a lot of previous happenings, that this is a pattern, this is how the whole things works. The more I draw away, insulate and attempt to be detached from people, the stronger the resistance and the more relentless their behaviour becomes. Last night was the most recent example; thankfully this isn’t daily, it seems to be happening at the beginnig of the week mostly and from next week I shan’t be exposed to it as I shan’t be here, so hopefully naturally it will lessen its grip on me.

But I was upset again last night, and have started to dread the evenings Monday through to Thursday and beyond, dread having you come home and the circus begin all over again. I know this is your home and if this noise had been so prevalent from the outset perhaps it wouldn’t have affected me so much, but it is different from the first 6 weeks I was living in this house, I know we go through phases but I can’t help seeing a correlation between when I first protested and when it started to get louder and more frequent.

Yesterday I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t be perturbed from using the kitchen, that it was my common space as well and even if it was awkward I was well within my rights to cook in there, I was hungry and I had just ventured to a distant supermarket so was keen to get my goods steamy and on a plate. I didn’t want to socialise, because I feel like when I speak to you it’s inauthentic, I am not coming from a place of genuine inquiry and I just want to potter about my space and get on with my life. I hoped we could share a room without this being an issue but of course that was denial on my part somehow.

As I stated I am probably spectrum, a part of this is that I don’t like to be touched, which irrelevant of the culture you come from should be a respected thing, you could've just asked me politely to move, especially if you’d gauged that I was in a bit of a state and didn’t really want to interact at all. But you touched me and it felt like an invasion, I’m sure it’s just because you’re a tactile person but I can’t help my reaction and don’t feel ashamed of it. You could’ve just asked me to move.

Then the shouting to another fettered guest, one of the parade that seem to be trounced about the house on a weekly basis. It was as if you were using this visitor as a pawn for your agenda of diminishing me somehow, shouting at the top of your voices like you were on a busy junction and ambulances were all around you. I know you have full right to express yourselves in your own house but a modicum of respect could of been used, you had seen me in a pent up state, clearly not in the best place, a feeling and kind reaction to this would of been to temper yourselves just slightly, to understand that I needed a little space. You could still of talked, just things like not bellowing and making a fuss could’ve been levelled, it would of been the kind thing to do.

I’m not 100% sure if you now feel like you’re in a tug of war with me regarding noise, I’m not asking you to not have friends over or to stop living your lives, I’m not asking you to relinquish any of the freedoms you hold dearly, I’m just asking if you’ll consider me sometimes and try to understand things from my perspective. I don’t want a deeper relation or to become friends because I want my home to be a place of respite from the outside world where I can be alone, I don’t wish you ill and I will make an effort from now on the affect small talk, to try and build a bridge, so at least it’s not quite so awkward or angry. I guess that’s my failing and something I need to work on, I need to put my face on, because ignoring people or not engaging with them is also its own act of cruelty and probably comes across as rude. Really I lived in a shared house, I am not alone and can not expect to be left alone entirely.

The truth is there is nowhere I can really expect everything from and as an adult I must realise this, that all places in my life at this point require me to compromise somehow. A muhrmaid samurai would compromise, a muhrmaid samurai would do this without jeopardising their beliefs.

Honestly I do like coming back to the common areas being occupied and lights being on, it feel’s more homely, I just also want to be comfortable in my space, able to go to the toilet, make myself a cup of tea, and not have to feel like by not being overt and excitable I am somhow being rude. I want my home to be my safe space, increasingly its getting further and further from this and its causing me to agonise over what I can do to remedy the situation, how I can counter it with meditation, repeating mantra’s to myself about the hero, channeling the muhrmaid samurai.

Possibly I’m just a difficult over emotional and intense artist, I’m expecting to much and this is madness. But if either of you have read this and somehow recognise what I’ve written down here, please just have a little more care when I’m at home, that’s all I ask. I don’t want this to escalate any more or to feel like I can’t come home, I’m not attacking you, I just want you to understand things from my perspective a little and I know fully well I wouldn’t be able to say this as clearly as I can write it, the words would come out backwards and upside down and you’d probably just take offense.

YOURS UNEXPECTEDLY // DIMINUTIVELY // RESIGNEDLY Felice

Phew, anyway I think I’ve written my piece, I guess those that read and have somehow experienced this before, I have friends who struggle with their housemates as well for instance, might sympathise a little. By putting it all out into the world I hope it will stop fueling the feedback loop in my head….

Now back to baby alert, we’re getting updates on the family whats app group, how meta we are as a unit, the millennial equivalent of the weasleys in a world where magic is interchanged for technology.

I hope you’ve managed to bridge any communication breakdowns in your life Nicolas and I wonder what domiciles you’ve moved through.

#Nicolas Jaar #nicolasjaar

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