#i’d make you chicken noodle soup

[inkdrinkerworld]

i love your writing so much, thank you for everything <3 (especially for post!prison spencer and sunshine!reader!!!) i was thinking about spencer and r are hanging out. still, no one from the team knows yet. she saved his contact as “cutie pie” or some other pet name (and maybe even he doesn't know it yet), and he calls, but someone from the team picks up her cell phone before she does and answers like “uuuuh who are you, 'cutie pie?'” and the spencer was "what???? who's cutie pie???"

Spencer’s at home sick. He’d come over before his fever set in and he’d been delirious by the time he crawled into your bed. 

You wanted to stay home too, to take care of him and make him chicken noodle soup that would’ve been too spicy or make him take his medicine- he can be a bit of a baby about the liquid stuff. 

Instead, you had to come to work. 

You left medicine on your bedside, a large glass of water and a couple sleeves of saltines for Spencer. 

At work you’d been texting back and forth when he woke up, giggling and smiling much to Luke and Matt’s confusion. 

“Who’s got you smiling like that?” Luke asks and you lock your phone, holding it against your chest. 

“Just someone I’m talking to.” 

It’s the wrong thing to say because just as the words leave you Penelope is in the bullpen and you look up at her like you’ve been caught red handed. 

It’s not that you and Spencer are trying to keep your relationship a secret. It’s that you’ve only just started dating- maybe a month. You know Penelope will feel betrayed for a few minutes before asking for updates. 

“Who is this someone?” She asks and you shrug, not wanting to say too much. 

Your phone pings again and Matt raises his eyebrow- he’s come to be like a protective brother to you. 

“Is it serious?” He asks, watching you bite your lip to hide your smile. 

“Yeah, I’d say so.” 

Penelope squeals, your phone rings. You freeze for a moment when your phone announces, “Baby.” 

She lunges before you do, snatching your phone from your hands and then answering. 

“Who are you, ‘baby’?” Penelope says and you bite your lip, hoping Spencer is at least a bit coherent. 

“Put it on speaker, Garcia.” Luke says and you shriek, apologies already circling your head for Spencer. 

Penelope does as asked, and repeats her question. “Well mystery Baby, who are you?”

Spencer’s voice is hoarse and confused as he repeats, “Who’s baby? Penelope is that you? Where’s Y/n?” 

The entire bullpen goes quiet, a crippling sort of silence that is longing to be shattered. It goes unshattered and stretches till the tension makes the room taut. 

“I’m here, I’ll call you back Spence.” You say quickly, body hot as you rush to hang up. 

“So, the boy genius huh?” Penelope says, a chuckle breaking through your group. 

“I knew it!” Matt said, opening his hand as Luke fishes out his wallet. 

“What did you know, Simmons?” You ask, watching Luke place what looks to be a couple hundred dollars in Matt’s hand. 

“That you and the good doctor were seeing each other.” He says like it’s no big deal. “I knew it from the second day when you guys started doing your crosswords together.” 

You blow a raspberry, not even you knew you were going to end up with Spencer. 

“Rossi’s going to love this gos!” Penelope says, rushing out with a wave of her arm. 

“We are happy for you, you’re cute together.” Luke compliments, laughing when you hide behind your hands. 

When the drama dies down you text Spencer, I think everyone is now aware that we’re together. Oops 

Spencer texts back, more coherent than you’d thought he’d be given the temperature of his fever: That’s not so bad. At least now I can kiss you between the crosswords. 

You roll your eyes, You already do that, genius. 

Spencer’s response has you a mess of emotions. So, baby huh? I didn’t think you’d be fond of that one. 

Go take your medicine and get some rest, Spencer.

[rustedhearts]

keepsakes (boxer!steve harrington x fem librarian!reader)

summary: the heat goes out during an autumnal cold front in your new hawkins home, so you make the most of a cozy day at home.

uses she/her pronouns and female anatomy.

✶ the king of the ring (1995) ✶ the library ✶ ‘tis autumn

✶ roller girl’s pie stand!

tags: pure marshmallow fluff, allusion to smut at the end. akin to old boxer steve from ‘22

hawkins, indiana. october, 1995.

“They said they can’t get out until Tuesday,” Steve huffs, slamming the phone back into the receiver on the kitchen wall.

You groan into the steam furling from the ceramic pot on the stove. “Ugh, come onnnn.”

Steve shuffles into the room with a sigh, thermal-sleeved arms winding their way around your shoulders. They fold together over your chest, guiding you back against him. You let him tuck his mouth into your neck, lips warm, nose cold. You jolt a little when it brushes your skin, giggling when he huffs a harsh breath.

“Mm, I know, angel. But ‘m here to warm ya up,” he mumbles against your throat.

Each of you had enough layers on to keep decently toasty. What you could rummage out of boxes still taped up now sat in a messy pile on your bed upstairs. You hadn’t expected such a cold autumn and thought you had at least a few weeks before you had to break out the winter gear. But now a long sleeve turtleneck sits under a clove-scented 49ers sweatshirt, big and bulky and soft inside like you liked it. Your sweatpants are matching in black color, and you have your hair tied up just like Steve liked it.

He has a white t-shirt under a navy blue thermal that makes his hair seem more chestnut than usual. His sweatpants are grey, the Jimmy’s Gym logo on the top right thigh cracked and faded from wear. You have a pair of his white socks on, and you think it’s adorable that the pair of you have matching feet right now.

Steve presses a noisy kiss to the column of your throat. His hair tickles your chin and makes you laugh again.

“Whatcha got planned today, hmm?”

You stir the wooden spoon through your soup again. “Guess.”

Steve hums thoughtfully, lifting from your neck to squint at the tile. “Hmm, if I had t’ guess, I’d say…reading in that ‘lil window upstairs, pretending you aren’t freezin’ your ass off.”

You scoff, cheeks warming. “N-no…”

“No?” Steve tips his head and kisses your cheek this time. “Saw the book already out. Waitin’ for you. Can’t you hear it calling, baby? All those words you have to read.”

You giggle, squirming in his arms. “Stop, don’t make fun of me.”

You click the gas off and Steve coos, clutching you a little tighter. His cheek is lukewarm when it presses to your temple.

“Aww, my ‘lil nerd. ‘s okay, angel, you know your librarian glasses are so fuckin’ sexy.”

You clutch the handle of the ceramic pot and veer toward the counter, where two mismatched bowls are waiting. Steve gets the hint, matching your steps until you’re moving together. You tip the pot and pour equal amounts of the chicken soup into each bowl, splattering noodle and broth drippings as you go. The window above the sink beside you is beginning to fog with the warmth of the stove. Beyond it, your neighbor’s tree is a vibrant yellow. Shedding pointed leaves across the yard, stuck in the jagged edges of the wooden fence. They gather on Steve’s BMW window, suctioned to the glass with this morning’s rain. The sky’s still a muddled grey, and you have all the lamps and candles lit in the house.

Steve somehow always gets horny in candlelight.

“My librarian glasses? Grab some spoons, please, baby?”

Steve takes one arm from your chest to lean to the left and open the utensil drawer. He gathers two spoons in his hand and nudges it shut, immediately returning to ensure both arms are back in place.

“Yeah. ‘s a good thing, baby, I promise.”

You take the spoons dangling near your collarbone and plop one into each bowl.

“Stevie, can you take ‘em? They’re hot.”

Steve takes a bowl in each hand around your sides and reluctantly pulls away from you. The pair of you whirl around and head for the dining room, a bowl clunking onto a plaid placemat at each assigned seating. Yet as you pull your chair out and go to sit, a pout appears on Steve’s face. He hasn’t even touched his chair.

“What?” you giggle.

“I just…you’re so far away.”

“I’m literally right here.”

“Too far,” he huffs. He swings around and directs his gaze toward the living room. “Let’s go sit on the floor.”

A soft smile touches your face, that glowing warmth gathering in your cheeks again. Oh, something about the cold made Steve so sweet.

“You wanna have a carpet picnic?” You beam.

Steve tips his head back and rolls his eyes. “You and that damn movie—yes, angel, we can have a carpet picnic.”

“Yay, okay! Take the bowls, please.”

He hides his grin against the back of your head when you flounce your way into the living room, forgetting all about the goosebumps and shivers you endured when you woke up to a frozen house this morning. You peel the throw blankets off the back of the couch and lay them on the carpet, smoothing out any wrinkles you know Steve will replace in just a few moments.

The bowls are placed on the coffee table, a folded napkin under each. Steve waits patiently at the corner of the blanket, knowing you’ll let him know when he can join.

The lamplight above you catches and glows on your left hand. On the diamond glimmering on your second smallest finger, haloed with beams of orange. When you lift your hands and pass the flames of the fireplace, amber rays pierce through the crystalline gem.

Steve watches all the while. Watches you move your hands, knowing soon your diamond will rest above a wedding band. In a mere month, just a few short weeks—you’ll be his wife.

The thought alone has Steve sinking to his knees. You whip around to scold him for interrupting your process, but squeak in surprise when he catches your face and kisses you. He smells like cold air and leaves and vaguely of the Marlboro smoked a few hours ago. He smells like Steve.

When he pulls away, you sit back on the blanket and grin. “What on earth was that for?”

Steve assumes the spot across from you, kicking his legs out beside you. He reaches for the soup bowls and carefully places yours near your tucked-in knees.

“What was what for?”

You scrape your teeth over your bottom lip and laugh. “Never mind.”

You turn your attention to the chicken noodle soup and Steve turns back to you. Watches through his lashes as you lift your hands and wipe away wisps of hair on your forehead. Black sleeves curled over your knuckles to keep warm, your fingers appear beneath them in delicate form. He wishes to do nothing but kiss them and stare more at that ring.

“Is it not good?”

Steve blinks, lifting his spoon. Your lips are shiny with broth and oil, eyes rounded in his direction. They catch the fire like your ring and they make Steve swallow hard.

“N-no, baby, ‘s good.” He quickly shovels a spoonful of the soup in his mouth to prove it.

You do a little squirm and smile that makes Steve chuckle. He hunches over his lap to slurp the broth and you wrinkle up your nose.

“Ew, Steven.”

His spoon clinks against the bowl when he drops it.

“Heyyy,” he warns playfully. “Don’t start. There was no attitude at their carpet picnic.”

You giggle. “No, but there was a blowjob if I remember correctly.”

Steve lowers his bowl completely, eyes suddenly alert. “Well, that’s welcome any time.”

Broth bubbles with laughter in your bowl. Steve watches you take small, quiet spoonfuls. When he decides you were only joking and there won’t be an immediate gratification for his Pretty Woman joke, Steve goes back to his soup, too.

Soon the soup is gone and the bowls sit empty on the table. You stretch onto your stomach and place your head on Steve’s lap, allowing his fingers to work over your hair. He pulls it free from its confines and smooths it down. Massages your scalp until your eyes flutter. The flames of the fire rest in dancing orange shimmers on your face.

The rain begins again. It comes with a great howling wind, rushing through the trees and shaking colors loose. The house darkens to near nighttime degree. A grey darkness that turns all the candle flames and lamplight in the room warm.

“Will you read to me, Stevie?” you inquire softly.

Steve’s fingers lag in your hair. He shifts, resting back on his palm.

“Uh…I mean—you sure? Y’ know ‘m not very good at it.”

You let your eyes close and smile to yourself. “I’m sure. I love the sound of your voice.”

Steve smooths his palm over the crown of your head, cupping it. With your eyes closed, he’s free to grin down at you and know it’s just for him. Do you have any idea what you do to him?

“Gonna let me up then?”

You hum. “In a minute.”

“Okay,” he murmurs in agreement.

He holds you there a moment longer, watching the fire warm your face; your socked feet cricketing together at the edge of the blanket contentedly.

“Okay,” you say, pushing yourself up. “Now you can go.”

Steve rolls his eyes as he stands. “Spoiled. What am I getting?”

“You pick. I’m gonna bake some cookies.”

Steve watches you bounce back toward the kitchen with both soup bowls. “Well Jesus, have a little faith in me. I know my way around your shelves.”

“Mmhmm,” you hum, setting the bowls in the sink. “You want chocolate or snickerdoo—“

Your words die on your tongue, slipping between Steve’s lips. He pinches your jaw in one hand and holds you still, mouth forced to pucker for his gift. He hums when he nips at your bottom lip, licking at his own when he releases you.

“Somethin’ t’ think about while ‘m gone,” he says, a heavy hand popping across the fat of your asscheek before he turns around.

Steve heads toward the stairs, ascending them while doing his best to crane over the railing and watch your flushed reaction until he no longer can. He immediately walks to your library–much smaller than the one back in California, but somehow it captured the girl he met in this very town better than anything in the sunshine state ever could—and directs his attention to your stuffed shelves.

He has absolutely no idea what he’s looking for, and stands for a while just staring aimlessly at the spines with his hands on his hips. He hears you clink and clang around in the kitchen. The beep of the oven. The slam of the oven door. It’s much colder in the library, and Steve swears there’s a draft in your window seat.

He turns to inspect it, pressing one hand firmly on the cold, foggy glass. As he leans over the plaid fabric of your window seat, his thigh nudges the corner of a leather-bound journal. He recognizes it immediately as the same journal always kept on the bedside table and in the bottom of your purse. It's always next to you so long as you can help it.

When he spins it with his finger, the Polaroid used to keep your last page inches its way to the edge. Steve slowly and carefully pulls it from the pages.

He sinks into the window seat when he's met with his own face.

Six years old now, the photograph is still as perfectly intact as the day it was taken. The flash collects in a younger Steve's eyes, making them appear darker than they really are. The film softens the emerald and violet bruise kissing his left cheek that Steve vividly remembers taking weeks to disappear completely.

He knows immediately where he's standing, where the photograph was taken by the color of the wall alone. The soft ballerina pink, the edges of rosebuds from now-outdated wallpaper. The arched mirror of your vanity rests just behind his shoulders, stretched and puffed broadly with the flex of his arms. Though the muscles are concealed beneath a heavy black sweatshirt, embroidered with his recent champion title.

And in the glossy white border just below his stomach where the photograph completes, remains your handwriting.

My boyfriend husband ♡

"Steeeve? Did you find one?"

Steve quickly clambers to his feet, shoving the Polaroid back into its place in the journal. He grabs the book you had sitting on your rumpled blanket on the cushion.

"Yeah, coming!"

His footsteps clunk down the stairs, and he's met with the scent of warm cinnamon when he finds you in the kitchen, wiping down the counter.

You spin with the rag in hand and a small grin. “Hey, did you find one?”

Steve sets the book on the counter gently. Your eyes turn to inspect the cover, surprised to see one of your “stuffiest” options waiting. Steve hates Dracula, and he hates attempting to read anything written before 1950.

Before you can question his choice, Steve takes a slow step toward you.

“How long do the cookies have?” he asks.

You glance at the timer. “Um…ten minutes, why?”

His hands smooth over your waist, thumbs pressing into your stomach. He grips you firmly, stepping until he can fit his head in your neck again. His response comes in the form of his mouth on your throat—latching on with his hot, wet suction. You gasp, hands flying to touch him: one gripping the front of his shirt and the other tangling in his hair.

He hums, releasing your skin to kiss it gently. He moves down, dragging his nose over your skin. His suction returns to the junction between your neck and shoulder, where the tendons are soft and waiting to be bitten. You jolt with a quiet squeak, grip tightening on his collar.

“St-Steve—“

“Shhh.” He moves one hand from your waist to your chin and tips it away to make room for his head on the other side of your throat. “‘s nine minutes now, angel. Come lay down f’ me so we can make the most of it.”

He takes your hand and leads you to the living room again, and you follow silently. Nearly hypnotized by his softness, tongue swollen dumbly in your mouth.

He takes both your hands to lower you down to the station of your carpet picnic. You thump to your knees, and he follows suit only to lay you on your back with his hand supporting the back of your head. When you’re flat, you blink up at him with bated breaths.

Steve smiles, fingers curling into the elastic band of your sweatpants. The house seems hotter than ever, a flaming warmth coating your body as his touch drags down your thighs with your clothing.

“Don’t worry. Your husband’s gonna take care o’ you, angel.”

[nanawritesit]

Jungkook Imagine: Taking Care of Him When He Gets Sick From Playing with Bam in the Rain

a/n: i think i might have accidentally deleted the actual request for this when i was cleaning out my ask box, but i know for a FACT it was requested 😤 it’s been on on my to do list for a while now, and i miss him sm rn, so here it is :)

TW: sick!jungkook, it’s just a cold but he’s kinda whiny, living together, mentions of food

—————

“Jeon Jungkook, you get back here right now!” you screeched from the back porch steps. It was pouring down rain and chilly, but you were safely tucked under an awning with one of your boyfriend’s sweatshirts on.

“Don’t worry, honey!” he yelled back, chasing his pet doberman all around the backyard. “Bam loves the rain!”

“It’s not Bam I’m worried about!” you retorted. “You’re not wearing a coat or hat, and you’re gonna get sick!”

“I’m not going to get sick!” he argued, putting his hands on his hips sassily. “Don’t worry about me! Just go back inside, I’ll be there in a bit. I just want to make sure Bam gets some exercise in.”

You rolled your eyes and turned back around to walk into your shared apartment. Songie and Paengie, your other two greyhounds, cocked their heads at you as you entered the living room.

“Kids, your daddy is an idiot.” you sighed, petting their heads.

—————

“Ugghhhh….” you heard your boyfriend moan from his bedroom.

You laughed to yourself as you finished preparing his soup. Oh how you loved being right.

Picking up the bowl and a big glass of water, you made your way down the hall to where he laid in his bed, bundled up in a million blankets.

“There’s my beautiful nurse…” he beamed with a crooked smile when he looked up and saw you. All three dogs perked up from their places on the bed, looking at you with wide eyes.

You gave him a warm smile and sat down on the bed next to him. “I made you some chicken noodle soup. And here’s some water, you’ll need to stay hydrated.”

“You’re the best, baby.” he pouted affectionately, sitting up to take the bowl from you. He winced as he did so. “Ah, it hurts to move…”

“Your muscles are just weaker because your body’s trying to fight off the infection.” you explained with a small smile.

“Is that why I’ve been so tired?” he asked, eyes sparkling innocently. You would think he’d never been sick before.

You nodded in confirmation. “You’ll need to get lots of rest to get better.”

He blew on a spoonful of the soup, then ate it slowly. His eyes squinted shut at the warmth and comfort of the meal. “This is so good. Literally the best thing you’ve ever cooked for me.”

You scoffed dramatically. “Ouch, thanks darling.” you grumbled sarcastically.

“No, I didn’t mean it like that!” he pleaded, reaching for your hand. “I just meant that it’s really touching that you’d take the time to make me soup while I’m sick!”

“I know, baby.” you shushed him, brushing some of his hair back. “I was just teasing.”

He breathed a sigh of relief, going back to his soup. “That isn’t a very nice thing to do to a sick person.”

“Well, if you had listened to your partner, you wouldn’t be sick right now.” you quipped back, a satisfied smirk on your face.

“Yeah, you’re right…” he sighed in defeat. “I definitely learned my lesson.”

You grinned triumphantly. “Good boy. Have you been feeling any better?”

“Not really. My throat still hurts and my nose is runny.” he complained. “But having you take care of me makes me feel a bit better.”

You smiled, squeezing his hand. “It’s no trouble. I’m not heartless after all. Hearing you admit I was right is reward enough.”

He chuckled at your cheekiness. “If I wasn’t so sick right now, I’d kiss you.”

“Awh…” you pouted, rubbing his thigh comfortingly. “When you’re better you can give me the biggest kiss in the world.”

“That’s all the motivation I need.” he grinned hopefully.

“Alright then, finish your soup and water and go straight back to bed.” you instructed, ruffling his hair a bit before you stood up to leave. “Let me know if you need anything.”

“Yes, nurse.” he replied, giving you a theatrical salute.

You chuckled, then leaned forward to give him a quick kiss on the forehead.

“I love you, Y/N.” he whimpered as you opened the door.

You turned around momentarily to smile at him. “I love you too, baby. I hope you feel better soon.”

[dadsbongos]

i loved that denji one ty 😝🤘u said u've been wanting to write for him? ur in luck cuz i can only think about him 😎😎

how about (fem) reader is sick or something and denji's there to take care of her but like he sucks at it and he doesnt know the fever temps (cuz that'd be pretty funny)

or switched and reader takes care of sick denji :)

ok i know... i know you said him being bad at it is funny... but i think aki having forced him to become a good nurse is sillier

645 words -- not proofread :/

~~~

“I knew you were hot,” Denji wiggles the thermometer in front of your sweaty face, grinning despite the miserable downturn of your lips.

“Denji.”

“Sorry,” he huffs, studying the dial again and sucking air through his jagged teeth, “This is shit, though. You’re boiling.”

You nod sluggishly, “I know, Denji.”

“That’s seriously bad.”

“I know, Denji.”

He frowns, bending down to wring a towel through cool water before laying it over your forehead. Smoothing down the cloth just because he feels useless otherwise. Denji gnaws his bottom lip as he thinks, sitting on the edge of your bed to hold your clammy hand.

“Do you want soup?” he murmurs unsurely, watching you wince and swallow hard before nodding slowly. With a new and apparent objective in mind, Denji beams down at you before rushing off, “Okay!”

Soon after, he returns with an off-white bowl shaking in his hands before sitting beside you again on the bed. You blink up at him with crinkly, boogery eyes and croak out desperately, “...chicken noodle?”

“Chicken noodle,” Denji nods surely, spooning soup up and into your mouth, “I tried not to make the broth too hate.”

“Thanks, Denji.”

“‘Cuz if I burned your tongue I think I’d skin my hand.”

You chuckle weakly, sputtering phlegm and wheezing as you do before soothing a hand over your chest, “Thanks, Denji.”

“Yeah, ‘course,” he happily feeds you more soup, feeling his whole body go lighter and lighter the longer you go eating his food without throwing it up. He knows it’s a little strange, but he remembers eating all of Aki’s cooking because he wanted Aki to know he appreciated it -- and he prays now that you might have the same motivation.

“Tea,” you’re mostly mouthing the word, desperate to avoid harsh scratching against the sore spot in the back of your throat. 

“Tea!” he hugs the emptied bowl to his chest (still getting the drippy remnants of chicken noodle soup on his shirt), prepared to rush out of your shared bedroom before pausing, “With honey, right?”

You nod sluggishly, yawning into the open air.

Denji’s eyes light up excitedly, “Lots of honey, right?”

Again, you nod. More so to entertain Denji than anything.

When he returns, it's with a steaming mug and a spoon in his mouth. You point at the spoon with a shaky finger and he speaks clumsily around it, “Honey!” he plucks out the spoon and lays it in his lap when he sits to avoid setting it on your nice dresser. Then he hands the warm mug to you, “And honey here, for my honey.”

You grimace playfully, rasping a “corny”, before blowing into the tea and sipping. 

“‘s true,” he wants to lay down with you, but you’d whack him upright -- too stacked with preemptive guilt of spreading germs onto Denji to let him cuddle you. 

“My neck feels slimy…”

“Shit,” he feels over the folded cloth on your head, “It’s warm!” he dips his fingertips into the large bowl of water he kept to re-moisten the cloth, “Warm!”

Denji runs off to the bathroom and soaks the cloth in cold water to slick over your feverish forehead before refilling the water bowl. Your heavy eyes follow him through the doorways, he stumbles and his hands are unsteady but he’s helpful. You’re sure Aki whipped him into shape on one of his rare sick days. Then, the thought of Power strikes and you’re almost giggling aloud -- what a nightmare that Fiend would be if she got ill.

“Back!” Denji cheers, settling the bowl down and stirring a single finger through the iced water, “Nice and cold for ya. If you overheated that’d be bad.”

“I know, Denji.”

“‘Cuz I don’t want you sick anymore,” he pouts.

Soothed by good humor, you smile genuinely and wave off his worry, “I know, Denji.”

[lotties-ashwagandha]

how the yellowjackets would react to you being sick (headcanons)

i wrote these forever ago when i had the flu and they got lost in my drafts enjoyyyy gender neutral reader i think but taissa does reference her partner as her wife. also if the pics on this don’t format right (theyre supposed to be 3 in a row and then the header) pls tell me sometimes it fucks up :(

SHAUNA

sees you sneeze once and runs to the store for cold medicine with the fervor of middle aged preppers fist fighting for toilet paper in 2020

she would do or get absolutely anything you wanted, would go and buy takeout food from your favorite restaurants or make sure you’re comfortable wherever you’re situated

will make sure you’re taking whatever medicine you need, whether it’s just over the counter cough medicine or it’s something prescribed by a doctor. you can’t put up a fight with her about it bc you’ll never win. she gets so intense about it but it’s ultimately for your good and you know that

also just likes to hold you. she cancels whatever plans she has and you lay and watch movies together — she might not like everything you pick to watch but she’ll put up with anything to make you feel a bit better. as for the close proximity of holding you, she doesn’t care if she gets sick because she knows you’ll take care of her once you’re better in the same way she cared for you. plus i’d imagine her immune system is of fucking steel after having a baby in the wilderness???? no germs are getting on this woman ok and ykw that probs goes for all of them they probably have some fucked up forest girl immunity or smthn idk im not a doctor don’t come at me

LOTTIE

she’ll never admit it ever but at first she gets kind of excited because she’s been waiting for someone to fall ill so she can try out a new herbal remedy

but then she sees how upset you are and how much discomfort you’re in and feels guilty

anyway rich girl lottie is averse to germs and when you first get sick she handles you a bit like you’re a giant jellyfish someone’s trying to throw at her , she wants to help you but girl has a whole wellness center to run she is not getting sick

until she caves and you’re cuddled in bed together watching movies because she can’t keep away from you

she lets you watch whatever you want while you’re sick , but she does get a bit bored sometimes when you’re asleep so she flips the channel to nature documentaries. she’ll flip it back to whatever you were watching immediately after you wake up tho, and yes of course she was watching your horror movies instead of bird watching shows go back to sleep

she also cooks for you while you’re sick — probably not very well, but she won’t allow anyone else cooking for you because she wants to make sure you’re eating quality food that will help you get better and not just anything you could pick up

she gets very protective over you and over your health in general and won’t allow anyone to come bother you, if you work outside the wellness center she makes sure your bosses aren’t being bitches about you being sick and she ensures everything’s in order to her standards

TAISSA

panics because she has absolutely no idea what to do when you get sick, probably googles “what to do when your wife is sick” and follows the wikihow

she’ll take a few days off work for once to look after you, it doesn’t seem like a big deal but it is to you because she hardly ever takes time off from the campaign

she’s very stereotypical in the way she takes care of you — she’ll make you chicken noodle soup, get you blankets, everything she knows is the “standard” of taking care of someone with a cold but she works so hard to make sure everything’s perfect for you

she knows you’re miserable so she’ll try to make you laugh when you’re sick. telling you stupid jokes, funny stories from work, anything she can think of. your body is down but she won’t let your mental health go down with it especially if you already struggle with mental health

might offer you some dirt and a spot in her tree if you’re lucky

VAN

knows you’re sick before you do it’s some psychic ass shit she just KNOWS

you sneeze once and she’s like “oh I bought you some cold medicine earlier” like ??? girl ok whatever

she usually loves to make you watch her old dvds and tapes but when you’re feeling bad she puts on a marathon of your favorite movies

she buys you a lot of sweets. she’d be one of those “chocolate fixes everything” girls and whenever she would go out to buy you something she would come back with some sort of treat for you

she lets your rant about being sick if you’re one of those people who get grumpy when you get sick, she wants you to trust her and feel safe enough to express your distress

NATALIE

i think we all know natalie isn’t the best person in health and wellness situations but she does make it fun to be sick at least !

raids the vending machine for you

will probably google how to take care of you like taissa , but thinks the instructions are too long and gives up

will probably call misty and make her bring over whatever medicine you’d need because she knows she’ll fuck it up picking it out herself

she’s silent on the bed for an hour and then announces “i made you a spotify playlist” out of the blue. it has like 5 songs on it but they’re all very very very meticulously selected and she’s so proud of it, she knows it cant help you get better physically but hopes it will make you happy

warns you not to get her sick as if it’s something you can control. looks at you so sternly and goes “don’t. don’t get me sick.” it makes you roll your eyes

MISTY

she’s been waiting for this day her whole life tbh not in a creepy way but in a loving “i want to take care of you” way

will do absolutely everything to make sure you’re comfortable when you’re sick, she would kill for you (she would anyway but especially when you’re not feeling well)

knows a bunch of get better health hacks from all the reddit forums she’s stalked over the years and only half of them work but it shows that she cares

tries to search amazon to see if there’s a little covid mask she can get caligula “just in case”

she makes you watch true crime documentaries with her and narrates every episode and then gives you all her hot takes afterwards. you can’t escape and she takes advantage of it

[breakfast-piastris]

chicken noodle soup? | oscar piastri

summary: reader wakes up sick and wants chicken noodle soup, so oscar comes to the rescue.

warnings: none. my brother is sick, and i have an obsession with chicken noodle soup = fic about chicken noodle soup.

you wake up and roll over to cuddle with oscar and find an empty bed, which is odd as you two normally cuddle in the morning. why aren’t you cuddling this morning? oh. it’s not morning. the clock reads 15:49 and you realize you slept all day, you also realize you can’t breathe out of one nostril… and that you’re really hot, and you have a headache, and your throat hurts, and- my god how sick am i?

you pull yourself out of bed and shuffle to the living room to see oscar on the couch “hey, are you alright? you slept all day” he says when he sees you walk in “no, i think i’m sick” you say, wincing when you realize that made your sore throat worse “oh i’m sorry sweetheart, do you need medicine?” he says, feeling bad that you got sick “uh no, but i’d like some soup” you say, already craving the salty broth. “yeah, i can make you some” he says, getting off the couch to go to the kitchen “thanks baby” you say as you, yourself, curl up on the couch

after 30-odd minutes oscar comes back with two bowls of chicken noodle soup, one for you and one for him, he sits next to you on the couch after giving you one. you have a spoon-full and it instantly makes your throat feel better, not to mention the delicious taste. you both sit watching whatever was on and finish your bowls. you were sleepy, somehow, after eating so you took a nap while oscar continued with his day. when you woke up the headache, sore throat, and congestion were gone. leaving you with a slight, but manageable, headache as you got up to get another bowl of the left-over chicken noodle soup.

ahh first fic!! hope u like :)

[cheollipop]

chicken noodle soup

navi | taglist | pt.2

pairing: choi san x gn!reader

w.c.: 2.0k

tags: sick fic, fluff, so much fluff, I warned you

After a whole day without a peep from your boyfriend – someone who couldn't go an hour without talking to you – you make your way to his apartment. Panicked, you walk in, only to find him battling with a cold, hair greasy and dishevelled. Tucking him into bed, you make him soup and nurse him back to health with as many kisses and cuddles needed to see those dimples breaching the soft skin of his cheeks.

A/N: when I finished writing this, I definitely did not scream into a pillow while kicking my feet. and I absolutely was NOT smiling and giggling the whole time I was proofreading it either.

Your keys rattled and chimed in the empty hallway as you unlocked the door with the spare key your boyfriend had given you. You weren’t sure what to expect exactly – was he kidnapped, did someone break in and hurt him? He was a strong man, fully capable of protecting himself, but what if he had been ambushed? You battled these thoughts and begged them out of your mind as you stepped into your boyfriend’s apartment. No blood on the floor. You almost sigh in relief. But also no San in sight.

He often reminded you of a puppy on crack, unable to contain all the energy and excitement rushing through his system. He couldn’t go an hour without texting you – asking about what you were doing, sending you random selfies with his face smushed against the camera, spamming you with pictures of a cat he saw on the street, using anything and everything as an excuse to talk to you. So him going missing for a whole day? It’s definitely a reason to panic.

A door opened to your right – the bathroom. It’s too late to hide. The intruder will take you just like he took San.

A mop of greasy hair peeked out of the doorway; eyes wide as they took in your presence. You finally let out that sigh. San. You moved forward to wrap your arms around him, but he stepped back.

“I’d keep your distance babe, I’m pretty gross.” His voice was hoarse, eyebrows furrowing as he swallowed around his dry throat. You took in his appearance, hair sticking up, left, right, anywhere but down, his eyes bloodshot and teary, nose sniffling. You’d think he was crying if it weren’t for the painful bob of his adam’s apple as he tried to swallow around his inflamed throat.

“Are you sick? San, why didn’t you call me?” You covered his forehead with your palm, heat searing through your skin upon contact.

He sniffed. “It’s just a cold. I didn’t want you to worry.” You almost leaned in and kissed the pout off his lips, but you managed to stop yourself.

“Oh, Sannie.” You noticed the sway of his limbs as he used up the last of his energy to remain upright, taking one of his hands and moving towards his bedroom. “Let’s get you into bed.”

--

You moved the ladle around in the pot, watching the different veggies swim in the simmering broth, overlapping with the noodles and chicken. Your mind was elsewhere, stuck worrying about the man you tucked into bed two hours ago; still sleeping soundly, even with a stuffy nose. You felt silly fretting over a simple cold, but seeing San drained of all the energy he loved sharing with everyone around him was not something you were used to. You heard him cough a few times as you poured the soup into his favourite bowl – Shiba Inu’s decorating the glossy exterior. Placing it on a tray, you peeked your head through his bedroom door, checking on the slumbering man inside.

“Hello,” his gravelly voice greets you.

“Good morning, princess,” you smile, placing the tray on his nightstand, switching on the lamp. The light was bright enough for you not to trip over his mess and die, but dim enough not to hurt his sensitive eyes.

You helped him sit up against his headboard, his head tilted sideways to watch as you pull his gaming chair away from his desk, using it to sit by his bed.

“Have you always been this pretty, or is it the cold doing something to my vision?”

Your cheeks flushed, and your hands fumbled to grab the spoon set next to the bowl, the tray resting evenly over your thighs. The liquid rippled at your movement and San’s lips quirked upwards, dimples dipping into the skin of his cheeks. You scooped some soup into the spoon, blowing softly at the steaming liquid before bringing it to San’s mouth, hand cupped under his chin. He let out a prolonged moan as he swallowed, closing his eyes and shaking his head slowly in delight – an exaggeration. He stopped as his headache panged harder against his temple, pressing his fingers against it, eyes scrunched shut.

“Idiot,” you said. A cute idiot, your brain added.

His hand clutched his chest, eyes opening to peer at you. “Is this how you treat a sick man, (Y/n)? I’m hurt.”

“You have a cold. You’re not dying.” You poked his cheek, where his dimple would usually be.

You resisted the urge to kiss his pouty lips yet again, your fingers twitching around the spoon you were holding idly. This task was becoming more and more difficult by the second. You settled on pinching his cheek, fingers slipping to stroke against his jawline. You shared the comfortable silence, gazing into his droopy eyes, tracing lines down his jaw, and circles on the high of his cheek.

Then he sneezed. Everywhere. And again, the second one ripping through his chest in a way that must have hurt.

He babbled apologies as you grabbed the tissue box by his bedside. “Baby, blow your nose.” You stifled a laugh as you watch him do as you said, wiping your own hands with wet wipes you pulled out of his nightstand drawer. You pull another wipe out, reaching over to San’s sulky face, running it over his skin. The wrinkles between his eyebrows smoothed, savouring the cool touch of the wipe across his heated skin. You couldn’t help yourself, leaning in and planting a soft peck against his forehead, and his cheek, then his other one.

“Babe, stop,” he complained, half-heartedly trying to push you away, yet the smile splitting his face betrayed him.

“Stop what?” you pressed your lips to the corner of his, straying down to his chin, his jaw, then back up to his nose, eyelids. Then you started over, back at his forehead.

How could he pretend not to enjoy the softness of your lips against his skin? All he wanted was to pin you down and smother you with his love, and yet he couldn’t get you sick. Even though you got all whiny and needy, clinging onto him and nuzzling into his chest, claiming he was warmer than all your blankets combined. He did contemplate it, for a few seconds maybe, but ultimately decided against it. And yet, he would never deny the love you gave him.

“You know, I heard mouth-to-mouth helps get rid of colds reaaal quick.” The corners of his mouth tilted upwards, staring up at you through hooded eyes, drunk on kisses.

“Oh, really?” You couldn’t help but smile, endeared by this sudden change in attitude. He leaned closer to your face, lips puckering.

You shoved a spoonful of soup in his mouth, laughing as his eyes went wide, trying his best to swallow the liquid without choking.

“Ya! What was that for?”

“Keep your cold to yourself, Choi San,” you narrowed your eyes at him, eventually giving in and letting the smile you’d been hiding back stretch your mouth. You swear he will be the reason you’d get premature wrinkles in your smile line.

You fed him the rest of the warm liquid in silence. San’s head rested against the wooden headboard, eyes trained on you, not even looking at the spoon as you pushed it towards him. He trusted you wouldn’t let it spill on him. Besides, your face was too distracting – the way the tip of your tongue breached the corner of your lips in concentration, how your eyebrows furrowed and you’d mutter his name o’ so softly whenever San would get too absorbed in watching you to open his mouth, when your eyes lit up after he swallowed the last of the soup you had made for him. Everything about you was distracting, from the way your fingers softly worked to clean his mouth with a napkin, to the smile stretching your face, the corners of your eyes crinkling.

“You’re so beautiful,” he blurted out.

You were taken aback, eyebrows raising in surprise at the sudden statement. Blood rushed to your cheeks, and the butterflies battled within your stomach.

“Is this the cold speaking?”

“No. It’s me,” his face remained neutral, eyes focused on you. “You’re the most beautiful person I have ever had the honour of laying my eyes on, inside and out. You always will be; I don’t think a person more beautiful than you will ever exist.”

Your lips parted, then closed, then opened again. You didn’t know what to say. What could you say? That whenever you were with him, he flooded your senses with joy, happiness, comfort? That his face alone could light up your whole world, and you felt like you could weather any storm so long as he remained by your side? And when he spoke so softly to you, throwing the sweetest phrases at you like it were nothing, you felt like you were being ripped apart from the inside by the voilent fluttering of butterflies in your stomach?

Love is you, was all you could think in that moment.

Before you could think of a response, a shiver ran through his body, his limbs shaking with the force of it. You stood up, tray in your hands. “I’ll grab some more blankets for you.” He took a hold of your wrist before you could move to the door.

“Don’t go. I’m okay.”

You hesitate.

“Just cuddle with me.”

You finally realized the power Choi San held over you as you carded your fingers through his matted locks. His face nuzzled against your collarbone, arms wrapped tightly around your waist. Limbs tangled up under the thick comforter, you eased yourself down onto the pillow under your head, fingers scratching against San’s scalp. He hummed, soft puffs of air warming your skin. You felt him plant soft kisses along your neck, smiling against the column of your throat.

“Are you feeling better, Sannie?”

“Mm, my head still feels funny.”

You smiled, placing a kiss against the crown of his head, resting your lips there for a couple seconds before pulling back.

“Much better,” he purred, planting a peck of his own onto the nearest patch of skin to his lips.

You giggled, fingers continuing their ministrations against his scalp. The both of you laid there, bodies a tangled mess, breathing the same air, empty bowl of soup forgotten on the nightstand.

Soon, San’s grip around your waist would ease, his breathing growing even, body slumping against yours. You would lay there, marveling in the soft snores vibrating through the quiet room. He would deny this with his very being the next morning, but you’ll play along, keeping the voice notes you secretly recorded to yourself – perhaps sharing them with Wooyoung later on. Because just as adorable San was when he was sulky, you couldn’t help but try to keep him smiling. You would do anything to keep those dimples on show, every second of every day, for as long as he would allow you to remain by his side.

Soon, you’d sense your own drowsiness tugging at your eyelids until they fell shut. Your fingers would gradually cease their movements, stilling against his head, trapped between the soft strands. You’d nestle your face against San’s, unbothered by the germs that would soon sneak their way into your system. He’d take care of you if you ended up catching his cold, you were sure of it. Because just as much of an idiot San was, he never failed to make you feel safe, cared for, loved.

You surrendered yourself to the grip of sleep, San’s warm skin sending bolts of heat coursing through your body. Slipping into a comfortable slumber, your dreams – as usual – revolved around the man you were so helplessly infatuated with.

pt.2

apply for my tag list here (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡

[20doozers]

★Sickly sweet★

TW: fluff, 2006-2007 Tom, sick Tom, caretaker m!reader, cutesy shit, etc

A/N: IM SORRY THE FIC IS A FEW HOURS LATE

Tom grunted as his alarm went off again, rolling over and falling right back to sleep. Well he was almost asleep before he felt a gentle hand on his back and a dip in the edge of the bed with the weight of someone sitting down.

“Tom.. c’mon we have an event today, David wants us at the venue by 2.” The gentle voice of m/n hit Tom’s ears, only making him groan as he curled further into the pillow he’d been cuddling. He knew they had an event today, there’d be lots of press and for a newly famed band they were supposed to have good press. But here he was, feeling like shit with a runny nose and sweaty forehead, signs of a cold on an important event day.

“Tom..?” M/n slowly rubbed Tom’s back, sighing when he heard a little sniffle come from Tom’s face burrowed in his pillow.

“Tom c’mon, what’s wrong?” He said softly, frowning when Tom lifted his flushed face to reveal his runny nose and tired looking eyes.

“Oh maus… poor you..” m/n cooed, reaching out to cradle Tom’s sweet face in his hands. He leaned down to kiss the boy’s head, the soft kiss lingering on the slightly younger boy’s dreads.

“…m-m/n..” Tom whimpered, only to be shushed by a gentle hand combing through his dreads.

“Shh.. just sleep, I’ll tell the guys that you’re sick.”

“B-but what about the interviews..?”

“We’ll figure it out. I’ll bring you some soup and tea in a bit, okay?” M/n ended with no discussion, kissing Tom’s head one last time before letting the sickly boy go back to sleep as he left to go tell the others that Tom was sick.

“What?! He’s sick? Seriously?” Bill huffed, crossing his arms in a dramatic pout. Gustav slipped an arm around his waist, earning strange glances from both m/n and Georg but both ignored it as the two had been getting awfully cozy around the house these past few weeks.

“Yep. He’s sick, has a fever and everything, poor guy was exhausted when I went to go get him.”

“Then what about the interviews and carpet?” Georg questioned, looking up from where he sat at the table eating cereal.

“I don’t know, I guess we’ll just tell them he’s sick? We can’t let Tom go out there while miserable.” The room was silent for a moment before everyone realized they needed to get ready to actually go to the event.

“I’m staying here with Tom, there’s no way I’m leaving him alone while sick.” M/n shrugged as he grabbed a mug, beginning to make some tea for Tom as the other boys got ready and left for the event.

M/n sighed as he walked through the empty house, carrying a bowl of soup and a mug of tea on a little tray to save him a trip downstairs. Nudging Tom’s door open with his foot and gazing down at the sleeping boy as he sat the soup and tea on his bedside table.

“Tom sweetheart.. I brought you some soup.. and some tea as well..” m/n whispered, gently rubbing Tom’s back as he sat down on the edge of the bed, slowly coaxing the boy out of his fitful sleep. Tom’s stomach growled at the smell of soup, chicken noodle soup to be exact. The scent just barely getting through his stuffy nose but enough to make him hungry for it.

“…Suppe..?”

“Yeah.. that’s right.. soup..” m/n encouraged gently, leaning down to kiss Tom’s head as he helped the boy sit up against the headboard of the bed. Tom sat up, yawning sleepily and rubbing his eyes as he sniffled. M/n gently rubbed Tom’s back as he handed him the soup, watching the boy stare at it while his brain slowly processed the fact that there was now a bowl of soup infront of him.

“Just don’t spill it, alright? I mean, it’s not like I’d be upset if you did, I just don’t wanna have to change the sheets.” M/n said with a small chuckle, gently kissing Tom’s head once more as he slowly began feeding Tom soup.

The rest of the day was slow, the other boys eventually came back home and all went to bed since it had been a long day. M/n checked on Tom every one in a while, usually met with a sleeping Tom or occasionally waking him up to bring his medication for his stuffy nose and sore throat.

M/n hummed as he carried the small bag of medication and such he’d gotten at the store, some coughdrops, medicine, overall things for Tom’s comfort. He pushed the door open, seeing a groggy looking Tom sat in bed rubbing his eyes.

“Good morning Prinzessin.” M/n teased, knowing full well it was the afternoon as he approached Tom’s bed and sat on the edge, setting the bag of items on the bedside table.

“I got you some stuff Tom. Coughdrops, medicine, just some stuff you might need.”

“…was..?” Tom asked in a raspy tone, looking at m/n with exhaustion clouded eyes.

“Nothing, just take it easy maus..” m/n gently kissed Tom’s head, the younger boy groggily whining and wrapping his arms around m/n in a weak plead for him to stay.

“Alright, alright, I’ll stay sweetheart.” M/n slid under the blankets with Tom, propped up on the pillows before patting his chest for Tom to lay down and cuddle with him.

“Nap time, hm?” M/n chuckled as Tom laid on him, tucking his head beneath m/n’s chin and yawning, his arms snaking around m/n’s waist to make sure he didn’t leave. M/n wrapped his arms around Tom, gently combing his fingers through Tom’s dreads. His poor baby, all sick and tired; poor Tom just needed some cuddles, kisses, and soup.. and medicine of course.

“Zeit für ein Nickerchen… schlaf gut mein Schatz..” M/n whispered, kissing Tom’s head one last time before closing his eyes and drifting to sleep with Tom. He didn’t care if he got sick, he got to take care of Tom and that’s what mattered.

YIPPEEE! Another Tom fic to add to my masterlist! Also happy fall! Halloween season is upon us and in October you guys might get a special Halloween fic! Love you guys!!!

Tags: @itsmealaiahh @itsmealaiah @itsangelll @billskeis @divinelolita @d0wn-in-the-morgue

[bwabys-scenarios]

Sick Kurapika please🥹

WARNING: smut under the cut, creampies, hickies

It was just a cough, nothing really to be worried about. At least, that’s what Kurapika kept telling himself as he continued work.

‘Can’t get worried over a little cough. I’ll take some vitamins when I get back to the hotel…’

But the next morning, his cough turned into an awful cold. He had a runny nose, a fever, and a barking cough. Kurapika cancelled any plans he had for the next few days and called Leorio.

And Leorio called her.

The blonde laid in bed, absolutely miserable. He didn’t have the strength to get up to eat, going to buy himself some medicine was out of the question.

‘It should get better with time, I’ll just sleep it off…’

That’s what he thought before his hotel door opened. Kurapika sat up, wondering who the hell had a key to his room.

“(Name)?”

There she was, standing in the doorway, carrying a few grocery bags in her arms. “Hey, Pika. Leorio told me you were sick, so I came as quick as I could.”

He could feel his heart thump against his chest. He’d specifically asked Leorio NOT to tell her, knowing that she would come and possibly get sick too.

“I brought medicine, snacks, ingredients for chicken noodle soup, some high electrolyte drinks-“

“You should go, (Name).”

She tilted her head, setting down the grocery bags in the small kitchenette. “Why? I just got here.”

He played with his blanket, looking down. His cheeks were a faint pink, and he wasn’t sure if it was from the fever or because the woman he had a huge crush on was here to take care of him. “I… I don’t want you to get sick.”

She hummed, before walking over and standing next to him. He gave her a inquisitive glance when she leaned closer, then quickly pecked his lips.

“(N-Name)!?”

His face went red, the girl giggling. “Well, now it’s almost impossible for me to NOT get sick. Can I stay?”

Her face had heated up as well, and when she was looking at him with those pretty (e/c) eyes it was hard to deny her. “I guess it’s alright. But…”

She blinked. “But what?”

“But I’ll need another kiss.”

She grinned bashfully, giving him another kiss, this one reciprocated by the blonde. “How about another?”

“Please.”

After a few heated kisses, (Name) walked away to get started on the soup and prepare his medicine. Kurapika is as on cloud nine, fingertips pressed against his lips to try and keep the feeling of her lips on his.

———————

“Pika.”

He turned his head, cheeks pink.

“Pika, look at me. It’s just some cough medicine, you c-“

He shook his head rapidly. (Name) sighed. “It has a spider on its logo. I c-“

When he opened his mouth, she shoved the spoon full of medicine in we fast as she could, the blonde coughing as he choked it down.

“Ack, you didn’t have to do that! Yuck…”

He swatted her hand away, eyes narrowing as she sat next to him. “Yes I did. Your fever went up again, and if you didn’t take something I’d have to take you to the hospital.”

Kurapika twiddled his thumbs, looking down with a pout. If he wasn’t being so frustrating, (Name) would find him cute.

In the past hour, the blonde had gone from sweet and grateful, to a brat. She knew he was in pain, and the fever was making him a little delirious, so she didn’t fault him for it.

“Hate spiders…” he mumbled, crossing his arms.

“I know, Pika.”

“They’re gross.”

“Yes, you’ve said that many times. You can lay back down now.”

She kissed his forehead before tucking him in and heading back to the kitchen to check on the soup she was cooking.

He watched her go, eyes hazy and mind fuzzy from his fever. “Got a really cute butt, (Name)… wanna squeeze it.”

She stopped at this, turning her head to look at the blonde. His gaze was different, eyes half lidded as they stared at her ass. “P-Pika!?”

He blinked sleepily. “Hmm..? Your breasts too, look so soft…”

He yawned before turning over and drifting off to sleep.

Poor (Name) was stuck standing in the kitchen, her face hot as she wrapped her arms around herself. Now she was feeling hot and bothered.

‘He wants to… touch me?’

——————

Kurapika felt something cool drape over his forehand, the blondes eyes fluttering open to see (Name) hovering over him.

“(Name)?”

She smiled at him, seemingly moving something around on his forehead before pulling away. “Sorry for waking you, Pika. You were getting warm again, so I got a wet rag to help cool you off.”

He nodded slowly, smiling weakly. “Thank you, (Name). I’m already feeling some relief from the heat.”

He brought her hand to his lips, kissing her knuckles. “My angel, you’re too kind to me. Even when I’m being… unreasonable.”

His lips pursed slightly, before he began to kiss each of her fingertips. “Won’t you… help relieve me of my more intimate heat, love?”

He looked up at her through his eyelashes, smirking when he saw her flustered face. “W-what do you mean by that, Pika?”

He smiled against her palm. “You know what I mean, (Name). I know you’re not stupid, you can’t be oblivious to my advances.”

She did know what he was talking about. Besides him blatantly stating he wanted to touch her earlier, he’d been very… touchy the last few months. His touch lingered, eyes following her figure when she visited.

And she didn’t dislike it, no in fact (Name) quite liked his attention being on her.

“…”

She shyly glanced at him, slowly climbing into the bed to lie next to him. “Is that really what you want, Pika?”

His hands went to her waist immediately, pulling her flush against his body. “Yes, more than anything.”

She poked her lip out, thinking it over. She could feel his hard on poking her tummy, his lips moving to press kisses to her neck.

(Name) moved to sit in his lap, resting her butt against his bulge. “Pika, sweetheart, I doubt sex will help you feel any better. In fact since you’re sick, that kind of thing might strain-“

She felt him pin her down, gasping when the back of her head hit the plush pillow. He was already ripping off the sweatpants she’d been wearing, his cold hand cupping her clothed cunt. “Can handle that, not that sick.”

He hovered over her, face still red from his fever. Despite him being weaker than usual, (Name) was still unable to break away from his iron grip. And why would she want to, when her panties were growing wet from her own desire?

“Hmm…”

He let go of her pussy, pushing her panties to the side slightly to get a better look. “Wet already, and I haven’t even done anything.”

She pouted. “And you’re hard from just looking at me. Guess we were both wanting this…”

He hummed, slipping her panties off. “Need you, (Name).”

He was quick to pull his pajama pants down and press against her pussy, glancing up to stare at her through his eyelashes.

She wiggled a bit, trying to pull him closer. “Pikaa, put it in already.”

He laughed, leaning forward to give her a sloppy kiss. “Impatient, but that’s okay… I’m impatient too.”

He pushed, holding onto her hips as he bottomed out inside her.

For someone so sick, he was able to go for nearly three hours, pushing her legs against her chest as he sank into her cunt. After several creampies and too many kisses to count, (Name) was getting tired.

“Sleepy…” (Name) muttered into his neck. Kurapika pulled her in closer, peppering kisses all over her face and neck.

“Sorry, angel. Just a little longer, okay?”

She pouted, but allowed him to continue pounding into her puffy cunt. He kissed her nose, gently cupping her cheek. “You can take one more load, hmm?”

She whined. “But I’m so full…”

He cooed, reaching down to rub her clit again.

“Shh… just be a good girl, and take all the cum I can give you.”

——————

“Seriously!? You’re both sick now??”

Leorio tapped his foot against the ground angrily as he looked over the two. They were cuddled up together, looking miserable yet content at the same time.

“Sorry Leorio… couldn’t help myself.” (Name) said before descending into a coughing fit. The blonde patted her back, frowning.

“It’s my fault, I’m the one that got her sick with my selfish actions…”

Though, Kurapika didn’t regret the night they spent together…

The dark haired man pinched the bridge of his nose, wearing a mask over his face. “Should have known sending (Name) was a bad idea. Can’t keep your hands to yourself, can you blondie?”

They both blushed, (Name) not even attempting to hide the love bites decorating her neck.

He sighed, rolling up his sleeves. “Alright, I’m here now. (Name), did you make that soup?”

She nodded slowly, a pout on her lips. “Yes… sorry Leorio.”

He patted her head, the woman being pulled into Kurapika’s arms.

“Ungrateful brat.” Leorio said, flipping of the blonde.

The two spent the next two days being tended to by Leorio, clinging to each other. They were nearly inseparable.

Once they were better, Kurapika kissed the top of her head. “Does this mean we’re…”

She nodded. “Yes, Pika. We’re together now.”

He smiled against her hair. “Forever?”

A giggle left her lips, making the blondes heart race.

“Forever.”

[wonwayne]

cold season ☁️ lee heeseung

pairing : bff!heeseung x gn!reader genre : fluff, comfort warnings : mentions of food word count : 0.6k

a/n : flirty heeseung with zero survival instinct comes to cuddle while you’re sick.

“you look so hot right now.”

you winced your eyes open to look incredulously up at your doe-eyed best friend. it’s too damn bright in this room, you thought, as your head continued pounding. there were more things about the condition of your room you were unhappy with at the moment: the suffocating humidity from you staying cooped up here with the doors closed for nearly three days straight; the mess of your bedside table, littered with tissues and soaked tea bags; and your own nightmarish appearance, violated by swollen eyes and hair matted by sweat. you felt somewhat sheepish, letting yourself be perceived by heeseung in this state, but you were also too relieved to see him to shoo him away — or register the undertone of his comment.

“yeah, that’s a 101 degree fever for you.” your voice was so nasal, you wondered if the words were actively coming out your nose.

heeseung pouted, taking your clammy hand in his cool ones. “have you eaten? want me to order soup?”

you shook your head weakly. “no need.”

“to eat? humanity has proved otherwise.”

you rolled your eyes, trying to slip your hand out of his grip, but he held on tight.

“chicken noodle would be a bit basic, wouldn’t it? maybe something spicier? gamjatang?” with his free hand, he was opening the delivery app on his phone. “when i had that nasty cold like a month ago, this place absolutely saved me—”

“i really appreciate the thought, hee, but i swear i’ve got no appetite.” you squeezed his hand this time, hoping that, like a chinese finger trap, he’d let you go because of it.

when he showed no signs of doing so, you added, “do you really want that nasty cold back? i’ve been quarantining for a reason, idiot.”

heeseung only chuckled at the nickname. “perfect, just ordered. should be coming in the next 20 minutes or so.”

“heeseung.” you used all the energy left in you not to sound pathetically silly.

“yes, darling?”

you frowned at his response. “you’re seriously calling me darling right now? when i look like this?”

“’course i am,” and he took your hand up to his lips for the softest, sweetest peck, “as i said, you look so incredibly hot.”

suddenly, you felt the urge to punch him for being so unserious. (and for making you blush from more than your heightened body temperature.) but instead, against your will, you found yourself tugging him by the hand with such raw, instant force that he lost his balance, falling over you onto the bed and narrowly missing the headboard.

on second thought, you hadn’t seized him with that much force — definitely not enough to trip him over. but before you could open your mouth to apologize, at least out of courtesy, heeseung was adjusting himself to lie parallel to you, hand still intertwined in yours.

“ah,” he sighed, turning onto his side and shifting closer to you so that his face was almost entirely buried in your neck, “your bed is insanely comfortable.”

you sniffled in faux disgust, sliding to the edge of the mattress as if you actually had a chance of escaping his embrace. much to your surprise, he pulled you right back into him by your waist.

“your white blood cells are so pissed at you right now,” you huffed, trying not to betray how flustered you were by his touch.

“okay, nerd,” he shot back, snuggling ever closer into your backside. “you know, i’m starting to regret ordering that gamjatang.”

“and why is that?”

“because now that i’m here, i’d never want to leave your side.”

[fanfics4all]

Winter Flu

Request: Yes / No  Fluffcember Day 2!

Don’t be shy, request things! <3 Have a nice day/night

Carl Grimes x Fem!Reader 

Word count: 681

Warnings: Being sick I guess?

Y/N: Your Name 

Prompt(s): Winter Flu

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(Not my photo, credit to whoever made it!)

The winter flu hit me hard and fast. I had woken up with a scratchy throat and a headache, but by noon, it felt like my body was waging war. My head throbbed, my joints ached, and every swallow was a burning reminder that something was wrong. 

When Carl returned from a supply run and found me on the couch, wrapped in every blanket I could possibly find, my cheek flushed from the fever, he could tell something was wrong. 

“Hey, Y/N,” He said softly, crouching down beside me. 

“How are you feeling?” I opened one eye, looking at him with a mixture of exhaustion and relief. 

“Like I was run over by a horse.” I mumbled. He gave me a sympathetic smile and ran a gentle hand over my tangled hair. 

“I’ll see if anyone found any soup.” He said, brushing a strand of hair from my face. 

“And maybe some tea. I’ll also see if Denise has anything for you.” I barely managed to nod before drifting back into a light sleep. 

*Carl’s POV* 

I left to see if Carol had any soup in the pantry and luckily she did. She even gave me some tea and then I was off to Denise. I explained the symptoms to her and she handed me a little pill bottle. I returned home to see Y/N still lightly sleeping on the couch. I headed into the kitchen and moved around quietly, pulling out a pot and placing it on the stove. I grabbed the naked soup can Carol had given me and poured it into the pot. Chicken noodle soup, a classic. I turned the burner on and let the soup start to heat. I then pulled out a kettle and filled it with water, before placing it on the second burner and letting it heat up. I went upstairs and grabbed some extra pillows for her. I headed back down and adjusted her head gently so she’d be more comfortable. She stirred but didn’t wake up, just sighed softly and burrowed deeper into the pillows. 

When the soup and tea were ready, I poured a steaming bowl, made her tea, and carried it over to the couch, setting it on the coffee table before gently waking her. 

“Y/n, hey.” I whispered, nudging her arm. 

“Soup’s ready.” Her eyes fluttered open and offered me a small, grateful smile. I helped her sit up, wrapping a blanket tightly around her shoulders and handed her the bowl. She cradled it in her hands, breathing in the steam with a sigh of relief. 

“Thank you.” She murmured her voice barely a whisper. She took a small spoonful and closed her eyes as the warmth soothed her sore throat. 

I sat next to her, watching to make sure she could eat on her own. When she managed to finish half the bowl, I set it aside and handed her the mug of tea. 

“Think you can handle some medicine now?” I asked, brushing a cool hand over her forehead. She was still warm, but not as flushed as before. She nodded, and I handed her two pills that Denise had given me. I watched her swallow each one with a grimace. 

For the rest of the evening, I stayed by her side. I read her comics quietly while she dozed, adjusting her blanket whenever she shivered, refilling her glass, and refreshing her wet towel whenever her fever flared up. I even put on her favorite record, letting the familiar, soothing sounds play softly in the background as she rested. 

By the time night fell, Y/N’s fever had finally broken, and she looked up at him, eyes drooping but grateful. She managed a soft smile. 

“I’d still be on the couch, a wreck, without you.” She whispered. I chuckled, pressing a gentle kiss to her forehead. 

“Well, I’ll be here tomorrow too. Someone has to take care of you.” Y/N closed her eyes, reassured that she’d be okay. And as she drifted off again, her hand resting in mine, she smiled softly.

Tag list: @les-bio-lie @tashy-bear @ashwarren32 @hollie-blogs-blog1 @lover-of-books-and-tea @nerdygaloresposts @teenwolfbitches28 @kmc1989 @drw0301bieber @lady-of-lies @ravenmoore14 @ravenempress101 @cillianchamp @rowanthomasknapp @rachelxwayne @ready-4-fanfiction @madammarvellous-blog1 @dracoswhvre​

[writingsfromhome]

If you Love Something II

A/N: okayy I’m finally going to stop overthinking and just post this one. Please note the tw in part 1. Thank you all SO much for the comments and love on the original…hope this one meets ur expectations. It’s definitely more focused on the lost daughter relationship rather than you and Harry so p dense but...here it is 🫣

——————————————

Age 36:

“Dinner’s almost ready,” Harry informs me over the phone. “I went with chicken noodle soup.”

“Mmm,” I close my eyes. “I could use something hot and hearty right now. I’m freezing my ass off.”

“I didn’t need to make dinner for that.”

“So come here, warm me up,” I crane my neck to the left again. “Stupid delays.”

“I can come get you."

I’d mapped it out before calling Harry, it would take him too long to get here. “That’s alright. Doesn’t make a difference.”

The screen on the platform showed 6 minutes…for the past 15 minutes.

“I’ve either been living in the longest minute of my fucking life,” I mutter. “Or this line is taking the piss out of all of us.”

Two dozen of us had gotten off the last train when it announced it was out of service. Now the number on the platform had tripled waiting for the next one.

“Patience,” Harry says. “Is a virtue.”

“Easy for you to say in the warm flat with the chicken noodle soup.”

“It’ll be yours soon.”

Soon. I sigh and try to release the anxious energy with it. “Thank you for taking care of dinner.”

“Of course.” He replies. Like it was that simple. But being with Harry was like that nowadays.

Despite all the catching up we had to do with the 17 years we had lived separate lives, emotionally it’s like we picked up where we last left off.

I’d be lying if I said it was smooth sailing the whole year we’d been together. There had been a hard few first months where both of us felt unnerved by the peacefulness of the relationship. We weren’t used to such an easy quiet.

I’d tried to self-sabotage first by going awol and working longer hours than I needed to. I think I was scared Harry would wake up one day and realize too much time had passed and he didn’t like who I’d become so I minimized our time together. Until Harry called me out for it.

But then he went off the rails, and for a few weeks I’d been an even bigger ball of anxiety. Ultimately I had to give him the hard truth even though the last thing I ever wanted was to convince someone to stay with an ultimatum. But I’d told him, he had to at least attempt sobriety if he wanted us to work.

There were a few sleepless nights, I didn’t know if we were going to make it. But one morning he asked me to go to an aa meeting with him.

Going together, being in the same boat as a group of people gathered in the back room of a dusty church finally gelled us together. For good. He’d been sober since.

We moved in together 7 months ago. Even though it doubled my commute time—tripled with delays, I had never been more sure that I was exactly where I needed to be.

We held space for each other. Even the heavier bits; we knew what they were. What it was like to hold them on our own. We always joked about how our loads had halved despite taking on half of the other’s. Because just like our venn diagram of love, our venn diagram of hurting was the same.

“Oh god, I better not be hallucinating.” I nearly jump up and down when the twin headlights of the next train peek in the distance. The platform board still says 6 minutes.

“You’re cutting up what?”

“Nothing! Train’s here!”

“I’ll pick you up from the station.” Harry says before I hang up.

I spend the remaining 15 minute ride going over the lecture I’d given tonight.

3 years ago when I applied to be a lecturer I didn’t actually think I’d get it. But in the 10 years of my career I had collected, I had done exceptionally well. It was ironic with all the bullshit life threw at me, I had somehow channeled it into a determined work ethic. After failing many math tests in high school I had found a love for it in uni—it made me work hard, get out of my head with its constant thoughts. Harry now took to calling me a masochist for teaching something mathematical.

In reality it wasn’t that mathematical. I taught Management Econ which was a snorefest on paper but I tried to be engaging and include a whole host of ways to teach—I knew not everyone excelled with a textbook.

It had made the course popular, it went from being offered once a semester to 3 times this year because the waitlist spoke for itself. It was one of my proudest accomplishment—getting students motivated and interested. And because it was mostly first and second year students, they were still eager and not jaded by the uni system.

That was how I spent my evenings on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Otherwise I worked for the city the same hours Harry worked his creative exec job at a major firm in the city. Sometimes we met up for lunch. It was the little things like that, making time to see each other in the middle of the day even though we woke up and fell asleep to each other, that made this relationship feel so secure.

It felt like coming home each time I caught sight of his face, and knew his smile was just for me.

My thoughts drift to our daughter. She would have celebrated her 18th birthday a few weeks ago. I always lit a birthday candle for her, this year Harry and I bought a cake and a symbolic drink for her. Our baby was old enough to drink.

“Do you think she takes after her parents?” Harry had asked.

“I think she grew up alright.” I always imagined her to have. “I hope she has no reason to drink herself silly.”

“Being 18 is reason enough.”

We talk about her often. She slips into conversation as easily as inhaling. It keeps her with us.

When I spot Harry’s car at the station I nearly weep.

“Your cheeks are so cold,” Harry says after a peck hello. He holds them both in his heated hands and plants exaggerated kisses on each cheek.

“Please sir,” I kiss his mouth and continue in what Harry called my Oliver Twist accent. “Take me to the chicken noodle soup. I hunger.”

Harry responds in the same accent (although it wasn’t as good as mine) and pretty soon I’m forgetting the 20 minute delay, the lecture with 100 technical difficulties, and anything in between.

After dinner and completing my 20 step night time routine I crawl into bed beside a cozy-looking Harry.

“Whatcha reading?” I peek at his book. I can’t believe he was the reading-before-bed type. In a way it was so different from the 17 year old guy I knew. It was also a reminder that even though we knew each other through and through, there were still so many habits and stories and quirks to discover.

“It’s a boring as hell sci-fi novel, don’t ask.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

“I accidentally joined a book club at work!?”

He tells me the story of how he told some people he enjoyed reading, and then being unable to say no when they bought this month’s book for him and presented it to him a week later.

“I bet you that’s their ponze scheme. It’s like an MLM, the latest recruit has to guilt the next joinee. You’ll be doing it soon.”

Harry laughs and holds his book out to me. “That actually brings me to my next question with this very generous gift, do you like reading?”

“Nope.” I push the book away. “I also don’t like book clubs.”

He tosses the book down lightly. “Damnit!”

We laugh. I cuddle into his side and lay my head on his chest as he finishes his chapter. His heart beat is steady, like the life he’s helped me create as we committed to each other. I listen to it as it lulls me to a calmer place.

“So how was work? How’s your students this semester?”

“Work’s good. Same old right now. Teaching was interesting. It’s the second week of classes so still seeing a lot of people come and go. You start to see the regulars by week 3.”

“Full class?”

“Almost,” I tell him. “A few empty seats. There was one girl who was obviously watching tv the whole time, another guy that fell asleep halfway, and this other kid kept looking at the door like he was physically trying to decide whether he would stay. Weird lot.”

“They won’t be there next week.”

“Nope.”

“You think she’s starting uni? I wonder what she’s decided to study.”

“Mmm, I always think it’s something creative like you.”

Harry squeezes his arm around me. “I think she’s a masochist like you.”

We talk more about her, about the upcoming weekend, and as sleep visits we drift away still intertwined like most nights.

***

“Does anyone know why?” I ask the lecture hall. Just like I predicted, most of the people I knew wouldn’t make it were gone. Now there were just under 60 students in total. What had surprised me was the guy who looked nervous the second week stayed. He’d been joined by two friends who only showed up in week 4. He was probably the designated note taker.

A girl to the left puts her hand up and I point to her. “The growing gap between upper and middle classes?”

“Yes.” I give her a reassuring smile. Until I started teaching, I forgot that most answers they gave were questions. “Anyone else?”

The girl beside nervous guy puts her hand up. “The ageing population, it skews the demographic from what was initially projected?”

“Exactly,” I try not to show favourites but that was beautifully said. Maybe she didn’t need to come to all the classes.

“That would also affect the workforce,” a guy sitting in the front pipes in. I smile, pleased that a discussion was forming.

A few others join in and I nod at each point. I loved this job.

After class is over I always got a few stragglers asking questions. The nervous guy comes up to me.

“Um professor,” he hitches his backpack and glances back at his friends. “For the assignment due next week, can groups of 3 be okay?”

I glance at his friends, it was supposed to be in pairs but what the hell. “Sure. But I’ll need extra stuffing in the assignment to make up for it.”

I say it with a joking tone but he’s so wound up that he takes me seriously.

“Of course. We’ll increase the citations and make sure to include more research-“

“Philippe,” one of the girls is suddenly a few feet away.

“Thank you.” He says, finally meeting my eye. I smile and he relaxes. I turn to his friends, to acknowledge them but they stare at me like I’d grown a second head. One of the other students asks her questions and I turn my attention away—weird.

***

“Mid-terms?” Harry asks. I’m reading a textbook while I stand over the simmering pot. We had accidentally ordered 4 times the tomatoes on our online order last week and with three still left I’d decided to batch make spaghetti sauce. It had been a long time since I made it from scratch.

“Kind of.” I push the book aside. “Someone in the department wants to update the textbooks and they left notes in the old one for what needs updating. They asked me to take a look.”

“That’s cool,” Harry walks over to me. He smelled like cologne and outside, the way he usually did right after he came home on chillier days. “That he wants your opinion?”

“She actually,” I poke him. “And it is! I can’t believe I get paid to lecture about one of my passions.”

“Economics,” Harry makes a face like he smelled something bad.

“Makes the world go round,” I smile sweetly.

“Remember when you liked things that were cool like Harry Potter and Coldplay-“

“I still like them! If I recall you’re the one who motivated me to do well in maths.”

“I did?” Harry looks off into the distance but his slow smirk is evident that he was remembering. He tilts my chin up and brushes my lips. “You’re right. So how about now? Would that still work?”

“Do you want me to stroke your ego right now?”

“Amongst other things,” he muses, his hands drop down to my hips and then lower, giving my bum a squeeze.

“Cut it out,” I scold him but it’s cancelled by the smile on my face. I shake my head and go back to the simmering pot.

“Is that tomato soup?” Harry’s suddenly distracted by the pot. We’d been having a lot of it this week because…well tomatoes.

“Nope, I’m making spaghetti sauce. From scratch.”

“Hey, didn’t you make that one time? When we were kids.”

“Hm,” I think back. It felt like so long ago but something niggles at me. “I think? I used to help my mum—it’s her recipe. Maybe you had dinner on a night we made it?”

“Yes. Dinner at your place, around Easter.”

I remember that Easter clearly but not for dinner. It was a night Harry and I had talked our lives all out.

“Aw. We were so young then.” I wrap my arms around Harry.

“I’m still young,” Harry says. “I’m in my prime.”

I pat his cheek. “Of course you are love.”

***

“Taylor I can’t really do this right now!” I tell my sister as she whines to me. No matter how old we got we were always somehow 17 and 12.

“C’mon just call mom! Tell her you met him and he’s really awesome.”

“I’m not lying to mom so you can invite your newest loser boyfriend to dinner. Anyway I can’t talk. I have to get to class!”

“I know.” She says weirdly. And I understand why when I walk into class and see her sitting in the front row. Ugh she knew I would try to blow her off!

My sister had somehow taken up the bad habit ever since her mid-20s of having a string of shitty boyfriends. We all blamed it on her longterm bloke breaking it off around her 26th. I don’t think she ever fully let herself heal from that.

After two separate guys were invited to two separate family dinners and both ended in mum or dad exploding over something, they were banned. This new guy, as she insists, was different. Mature. He deserved an invite.

She holds up 9 fingers and mouths, 9 months! That’s a long time!

I shake my head and start setting up my laptop.

“Hiya,” one of the students, Kim, walks up to me as I do so. “Sorry I was just wondering when we’re getting our assignments back? Will it be before midterms?”

Midterms were in 2 weeks for this class. The assignments were in my bag, marked and ready. I tell her and watch the relief spread through her.

I spend the next hour teaching, and before we break at the hour I announce I’d return assignments. As I call them out student walks down to me and pick them up, leaving with a smile or a frown.

“Philippe?” He had stuck to his word and his group had gone above and beyond. It was a beautiful paper, albeit overly-sourced. But I appreciated it.

“He’s not in,” one of his friends comes down to get it. She looks at me in that same way again, with just as much fear as curiosity. It’s odd.

“C’mon then,” I shake the paper I was holding out. “I don’t bite.”

“Oh sorry,” she grabs it from me in a rush I nearly get a papercut. She doesn’t even look at the grade, turning quickly away before halting, pivoting halfway, changing her mind, and running back up the steps to her seat. That group of kids were weird. Maybe they were on drugs.

I catch eyes with Taylor and she raises her brow. I shrug and continue handing out the papers.

I don’t expect the girl to come up to me after class. Her friend stays hovering behind, close to my sister who I know must be desperate to have sat here the whole lecture.

“Um ‘scuse me. Professor?”

“Yes?” She was the last person in the small line that had formed after class.

“I had a question about the assignment? You um, you said we missed the equations for our answers but they’re um-“ her hands are shaking as she flips the pages to the last page. “They’re on the bottom here.”

“Oh,” I did remember they were missing it but my pen marks were all over the back of it. “I must have missed that, bloody hell sorry about that!”

“Yeah um, do we get the extra points?”

“Of course but I-“ I glance back at Taylor. She’s talking to the friend. I had to get her out of here before she said something ridiculous. “I have office hours after my Monday class. I’ll have it remarked by then and you can pick it up?”

“Um, okay?”

I quickly shut my things down and grab my sister, getting her out as quick as possible.

“I’m a professional,” she reminds me. “Jeez. Anyway Y/n listen it’s the longest I’ve been in a relationship since, well y’know. 9 months! It’s different with this guy. He works like you! A cushy office job. He’s serious. Please!?”

I hadn’t seen Taylor since last month’s dinner when she had tried to convince me to get on board with this guy. She’d been pleading for a month. “Fine.”

“Oh I love you!” She squeezes my arm. “Text me when mom gives the okay.”

I sigh. I’d really got myself in the middle again.

I retell this to Harry when I get home.

“She’s persistent. But 9 months is a new record.”

“I know!” Harry knew all about her string of boys, I’d caught him up months ago. “Anyway I can’t believe she sat through the whole lecture.”

“Maybe this is the guy. The One.”

“You don’t believe in that do you?”

“Yeah?” He squints at me. “Of course I do?”

“So I’m The One?”

“Baby do I even need to say yes? I knew it as soon as I saw you when we were 14. You confirmed it when you kissed me on the roof that day.”

“I can’t believe I did that. I had my first drink that day by the way so I might’ve been drunk.”

“You were not drunk when you kissed me,” Harry points his fork at me.

“Look at you getting all worked up,” I tease.

“I’ll get you all worked up,” he mutters into his plate. I grin as I stretch my leg out under the table and run it up his leg. He grips my ankle when it gets too high and the look he gives me across the table sends my heart racing.

“Oops,” I drop my foot and go back to eating.

We put on a movie after, something we can zone out to. It doesn’t take Harry long to get bored and nuzzle into me, and it doesn’t take much longer after that before the movie is just for show and we’re tangled in our sheets.

There were 17 years of experience Harry showed up with now, and it was another one of those things that made catching up on lost time all the better.

***

In the first half hour of my office hours, the girl walks in. I should remember her name but I just associated her group with Philippe. I was surprised he wasn’t here actually. He seemed to be their spokesperson.

“Hi come in!” I wave her into the tiny cubicle-like room I borrowed for a few hours every Monday. “I’ve got your assignment here all done.”

“Thank you,” she hovers over my desk and I hand it over. Her fingers fidget with the strings of her hoodie and I seriously consider the drug angle. Or maybe her and her friends had serious anxiety issues. I didn’t miss that part about being a teen.

“You wanna flip through one more time? I try not to make mistakes twice but…”

She sits down tentatively and buries her head in the paper as she flips through.

“It’s alright,” she says. Her expression is so serious it nearly makes me laugh. She had pretty hair—blunt cut bangs that I remember rocking in my early 20s, but on her they hide the expression in her eyebrows. Maybe that’s why she always looked so sullen. Her lips are painted a pretty mauve colour and it complimented her green eyes.

“I really um…your class is really interesting.”

Kids saying that was like injecting pure joy right into my veins.

“I’m so glad you’re enjoying it,” I smile at her. But it still doesn’t crack a smile on her end. “It’s dense material but that’s nice to hear.”

“Yeah, I didn’t know if I was gonna keep the class.” It’s subtle but she inches back in the seat. The more she talks the more she relaxes back. “But I heard it was worth taking. And people were right.”

“Are you in your first or second year?” I ask.

“First,” she tucks her hair behind her ear. It’s covered in piercings.

“How are you liking uni so far?”

She meets my eyes for a second before they shift away. “Yeah it’s nice? I’ve never lived away from home but I have some friends here that I’ve known since before so it helps. It’s really different, less structure but I like the freedom.”

Wow, she really spoke a lot more when she was comfortable. But I find it endearing.

“That’s really nice. It’s good to have a support system, especially with such big change.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. Her eyes dart around the desk as she goes silent. I wait for her to get up and go but a minute passes and the room starts to feel even smaller.

I could ask her if she needed anything else, or maybe continue the conversation? Did she want me to ask about her? No, that would be weird.

“So um, was that your sister in class last week?”

Okay, didn’t see that coming.

“It was! My baby sister, although she’s not really a baby. Did she tell your friend that?”

She nods again. “She was talking to her.”

“You have any siblings?”

“An older sister yeah.”

“So you get it,” I say. “You love them, they get under your skin, you’d do anything for them, and the cycle continues.”

For the first time she smiles and my breath catches. For a moment…no. No, I was imagining things.

“Yeah. My sister and I were close growing up, but she’s the one person that really knows how to get under my skin. I swear she does it on purpose sometimes.”

“Probably,” I want to say something funny again. I just want to see her smile.

Back off, my inner voice says. Don’t do this again.

Some years back, when I was still in the throes of alcohol, I had followed a girl at the mall for nearly an hour. She had looked so much like my sister but with brown curly hair. I could have sworn it was her—my daughter. But after an hour of drunk stalking she had met up with her mum, a direct clone of her.

I couldn’t be obsessive again. Nobody knew about that phase. Not even Harry.

“D’you have any kids?” She asks. I don’t expect the question and it throws me off what with the thoughts looping in my head. She watches me, waiting for an answer.

“Um,” I usually answered no. To anyone who had asked in the last 18 years. But for some reason I nod today. “Yeah. One.”

I imagine it, I must have. Her face draws in for a second before she looks down. “Does she ever come to your lectures?”

“Oh no,” I feel the prick of tears and try to blink them away without being too obvious. “I’m not sure she’d find them interesting.”

“Oh.” She finally stands. “Maybe when she’s older…but I’ll see you on Thursday I guess?”

“Yeah,” I watch her go and realize she’d forgotten something. “Don’t forget your paper hon!”

She stiffens by the door before coming to get it.

“Sorry, it probably makes me a bad prof but there were two female names on the paper. Which one’s yours?”

“Bridget,” her voice cracks.

“Bridget,” I try to match the name to her face. It fit. “That’s lovely.”

She scurries out and I hear someone say “well!?” Outside followed by a “shh!”

I shake my head and try to focus back on my work, my heart racing an unusual amount.

***

It takes a couple days but I confess to Harry. He’d decided to meet up with me after class on Wednesday to eat out. We didn’t go far from the uni, a pub a few roads down. I actually spotted a couple former students there and they’d waved at me warmly.

“You’re not crazy,” Harry holds my hand on the table. “A few years ago I realized the volunteer interns we took on from the nearby school? They were the same age as her, teens? And I used to check up on them all the time, make sure they were feeling comfortable, until one of the guys on the team told me to quit being so weird and find someone my own age. I don’t know if it came across that way but…I got lost in that.”

“Oh Harry,” I squeeze his hand. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“Me too,” I pop another chip into my mouth. “But really I’d kind of pushed those memories out of my head until the other day. I can’t explain it, when she smiled it just felt like I knew her.”

“Yeah. Maybe she just looks like Taylor?”

We finish dinner while Harry tells me about a story about some friends of his I knew. We reminisce about our old friends as we wrap up and head out into the brisk November air.

We’re near the station when I gasp and clutch Harry’s arm. Standing outside one of the nearby pubs, smoking with her friends, was Bridget.

“Harry! That’s her!”

“What? Who?” He’s so oblivious as he whips his head around.

“Hushhh!” I nod towards the northwest side. His eyes scan the group. “Red beanie. We have to walk past just look at her okay? Tell me if you see it.”

Harry laughs to himself, “This feels like we’re in high school walking past a crush.”

“Is that how you walked past me?” I tease.

“I did.” He looks at me in that way that still gives me butterflies. It never got old.

“Stop making me want to jump your bones out here. I have a reputation to uphold!”

“Hey I’ll still have a job to support us,” he whispers as we near closer to the group. “Feel free to do whatever you feel.”

“You’re a bad influence.” I whisper back. By now we’re a few feet away and I sense Harry slow down beside me.

Bridget’s nodding to whatever her friend is saying. Philippe is waving his drink around as he responds. We almost pass by unnoticed when someone completely different calls my name.

“Hey professor! Can we buy you a drink?”

I turn and spot a group of students I taught last semester. They were all friends, always battling out their wits during group discussions. It made my class lively, even distracting at times. But I tried going with the flow of whatever group of students I got.

“Hey kids!” I say. Then I have no choice but to acknowledge Bridget and her friends. “And more kids! Is this the new spot to be at?”

I sounded so lame but shite! We weren’t supposed to get caught.

“It’s always been popular,” one of my old students says. “Can we pick your brain? Buy you a drink? We can buy one for your friend too.”

“I uh,” I glance at Harry but he’s frozen solid. I look to what he’s looking at and it’s Bridget. They’re locked in some silent conversation and her friends eye each other. “Harry?”

“Huh?” He focuses on me, flushed and just as confused as I had looked on Monday.

“We’ve gotta get him home,” I pat Harry’s arm. “Our alcohol metabolizes differently at our age.”

“You’re not that old,” Bridget says. She seems to be surprised she said it at all and her eyes widen. “I just mean you look younger than my parents.”

“We’ll take that as a compliment.” I smile up at Harry who still looks a little lost.

“Miss aren’t you going to introduce your male friend?” One of my old student goads.

“Don’t assume,” the other chides.

“Aren’t you a nosy lot after a few drinks.” I missed dishing it back in class with them.

“Oops!” They laugh.

“Anyway. This is Harry.”

“You can call me Mr. Professor,” Harry jokes and it’s a crowd pleaser. God they were drunk. Harry leans into me, “I can see why you like teaching. They’re an ego-booster.”

“Not in a 6pm lecture on a Thursday night.” I whisper back. He hides his laugh.

“Are you guys heading home?” Now it’s Philippe. I’m surprised he was getting involved in the conversation. He was usually the quiet nervous type.

“We are. Need a good night’s rest so I’m not falling asleep in your lecture tomorrow.”

“We wouldn’t mind,” Philippe goes for joker but his face flushes. It’s cute.

“Philippe you take way too many notes during class for me to believe that.”

His two friends, Bridget and the other girl, look at each other wide-eyed before losing it. And I watch Bridget’s face transform again and I get the same feeling. I look up at Harry and he’s transfixed.

I tug his sleeve and he looks at me, swallowing like he was parched.

“Weird right?”

“Yeah,” he whispers but his mouth turns down ever so slightly.

The girls are too busy cajoling Philippe to say goodbye to so we make our exit quietly. We don’t talk much on the train ride home but Harry simple holds his hand out on my thigh, palm up, and I lock my fingers into his. Even when we didn’t have words, we never stopped staying in touch.

***

It’s exam and holiday season before I know it.

I was actually looking forward to Christmas this year. It was the first that Harry was going to join with my family. Taylor’s bloke was also showing. He had been a hit with my parents and even I could admit he was the better of all the guys she’s every brought over.

It’s the last 30 minutes of the last exam I was facilitating this year. I announce the time left to the group. There were only about 15 kids left.

Bridget is one of them. I watch her tuck her hair behind her ear and bite her lip. She’d been pretty quiet the remainder of the semester, and I tried not to let my eyes wander to her too much.

After that night, bumping into her with Harry, we hadn’t spoken much about it. The hope that was initially so buoyant turned crushing as we faced the reality that the odds were slim to none. That our wishes were just pennies tossed in a fountain, sinking to the bottom of the pool.

Dreary winter days pass by and Harry and I try to keep the seasonal depression away with regular outdoor dates, cozy nights in bed, and seeing friends as often as we could.

On Christmas we go to my parents’. It’s a loud affair as my grandparents and a few cousins join us. After dinner I go up to my childhood bedroom, it’s now a guest room but some of my things still lay around. I open the window, it was cold so I drag a blanket out and sit outside. The street is quiet, I see families in a few open windows and I watch the festivities through them. I feel a mix of nostalgia and an ache that goes even beyond that, like I was missing something.

“Y/n?” Of course Harry would find me even though I’d left the door closed and the window tilted.

“Here,” I say.

“Ah,” he struggles to hoist himself out. “Some things never change.”

“You need help?” I watch him climb on all fours.

“I’m steady,” he grins as he crawls to me. I open the blanket and he gets in.

We sit in silence for a bit.

“It was getting really loud downstairs wasn’t it?” I ask.

“I think your grandma’s in love with Taylor’s guy.” Harry says so bluntly that I burst out laughing. He joins in.

“I feel like old people get to flirt with whoever they want because it’s always harmless.”

“Maybe that’s the case with older women,” Harry grimaces. “Can’t say the same thing about old men now can we?”

“Jesus!” I laugh and then laugh even harder when Harry says: “it is his day.”

By the time I wipe my tears Harry’s gazing down at me.

“Sorry,” I lean my head against his shoulder. “You have to stop being so funny.”

“Nah,” he kisses my head. “Have I never told you how much I like your laugh?”

He had. On a night many years ago on a roof like this.

I go to remind him but he’s pulling away. I watch as he shifts to face my slowly. He pulls something out from behind him and my brain only connects the dots as he starts talking.

“Y/N, this is something I wish I could have done 18 years ago but only feels incredibly right to do now. Especially out here.”

“Harry,” I gasp. When did he get the ring? When had he planned this?

“We somehow found our way back to each other again y/n, and you know I love you more than ever before.” He clears his throat as it clouds with emotion. “Some 18 years ago I told you I knew you, because the first time I ever laid eyes on you my heart knew. You were something special. And I never ever want to spend another moment apart again. So Y/N Y/L/N, will you do me the honour and finally be mine? Will you marry me?”

“Yes!” If I wasn’t sitting on a roof I would launch myself at Harry. I settle for pulling his face down to mine and kissing it. “I’ve always been yours Harry. But yes, of course yes!”

He slides the ring on and it fits perfectly.

It was perfect.

When we go back down my mum knows right away, and if it was loud before it’s absolute chaos as everyone descends on me and demands to know how he proposed and how the ring looks.

“On the roof? When there’s a perfectly pretty tree here?” My grandma asks. Harry and I exchange a look then, trying not to laugh all over again.

We ring in the New Year with friends, as fiancés. I can hardly believe it. Apparently most of our friends knew Harry was going to propose and they all toast to us and our happiness.

Somewhere in mid-January, I drop by my parents’ house to drop off some groceries. That’s when my dad hands me a letter that had been mailed home.

“It came for you, I dunno who thinks you still live here but it looks handwritten.”

I take it from my dad as I say one last goodbye. I barely make it to the tube with wobbly legs. Because somewhere inside I know.

It’s a long and agonizing 2 hours that I wait for Harry to come home. He finds me sitting in the dark; the sun had set while I waited, and I’d been too busy staring at the feminine scrawl on the front of the letter to turn on the lights.

“Hello-y/n, what are you doing in the dark?”

Harry drops his things where they are when I look at him. “Y/n are you alright? Say something.”

I open my mouth but nothing comes out. I just push the letter forward.

He walks towards it. It’s like he hits a brick wall when he puts the pieces together, he halts a foot away.

“What is that?”

“Is was…” I try to swallow so my voice doesn’t sound so hoarse. “My dad gave it to me. It was sent to the house.”

“Is it…”

“I was waiting for you.”

Suddenly he’s in motion. He puffs his cheeks out and lets out a noisy sigh. Then he paces the floor one, two, three, four times before standing in front of the couch.

“We should read it.” I say.

“Yeah,” he deflates into the couch. I want to join him but it feels like my arse has been glued to the chair.

I inch it towards me and Harry nods. He wanted me to read it.

My mouth is parched. I can barely make out any sounds as I open it up. It’s three pages folded in two, the paper itself isn’t anything very special, it’s typed up so it’s literally just ink on paper. And yet it’s worth a whole goldmine.

“Y/n and Harry,” I read before my voice breaks and I bury my face in my hands. Our baby girl had written to us. She had reached out.

“C’mon love,” Harry’s suddenly beside me and his hand squeezes my neck. The touch gives me enough strength to stand with him. He sets me down where he just sat and leaves again, returning with water and the letter.

“Can you read it?” I ask.

He settles in beside me, we touch along every edge of us. The letter sits in between us like our love, our hurting—it’s where it belongs. He begins to read in his soothing voice.

“Y/n and Harry,

I hope it’s okay I’m calling you that. I don’t know if it’s proper but ever since I found out about you two last year that’s what I’ve been calling you.”

Harry lets out a shaky breath and I intertwine my arm through his. He kisses my temple and continues.

“When I turned 15, I asked my mum about you. I started to wonder where I came from. I knew I was adopted for as long as I could remember but it didn’t mean much to me for a long time—I had a mother, a father, and a sister. I had a family so why did I need to know where I came from?

But over the last few years it’s been like an itch I couldn’t get to. See when I was 15, what set it off is that my sister decided to look into her birth parents. They were separated, her father lived in Tokyo and her mother lived in Wales. It took her a year to convince our parents to go to Wales. I went with and I found myself in the home of a woman who looked just like the girl I grew up with. The whole time it ate away at me. I wanted this ending too.

I asked my mum and dad when I turned 15 but they were weird and evasive. I turned my skills to the internet but I didn’t really know where to start.

I felt the missing part more and more as I turned 16. I used to fall asleep thinking about you two, if you were alive, what you looked like, where you were, what you did.

I love my parents. They’re wonderful and amazing, they are supportive and never made us feel like we were anything but theirs. But I wanted to know my background.

On my 17th birthday my parents gave me a letter like the one I write today.” Harry stops reading and takes in a deep shuddering breath. “She got the letter.”

His shoulder shake and he pinches the bridge of his nose. I clench my teeth so I wouldn’t cry too. I wanted to finish this letter. I wrap my arms around him and hold him.

This was unbelievable, what we’d dreamed of. Her words, in our hands.

“Here.” I take the letter from him and continue. “Let me read it.”

Harry stays hunched over, so with my hand on his back I continue, “in it you told me how much you loved me. How much you loved each other, your families, where I came from. And Why you had to give me up. For a better life. I saw the picture of you, and I felt broken and complete at the same time. I realized I was the same age as you in the photo, I had to meet you but I was terrified. And I didn’t know how.

I spent a year agonizing and looking through every google page I could find about you. I learned a lot! But I needed to meet you.

I don’t know how to do this. I’ve made decisions that may not have been the best but I’ve left my number and a picture of me when I was 5 in the envelope.

I hope you call.”

With shaking hands I turn to the third page that has one of those polaroids taped to it and a phone number in the same handwriting as the envelope.

“She’s beautiful,” Harry says while tears continue streaming down his face. I can’t even hide mine anymore.

She was beautiful indeed. She had his eyes, and her curly locks in a deep brown frame her chubby face. She had my nose, she looked a little like my sister as a baby. A scatter of freckles over her cheeks confirm it. She was ours. Our baby had reached out. We knew what she looked like.

“We need to call her,” I say. “We need to meet.”

“Yeah,” Harry wipes his face. “We…we need to do this carefully. It’s delicate right?”

I wanted to call her right now but what would I do but cry into the phone? No, I had to wrap my head around this. Harry was right. “Right.”

“She’s out there,” Harry turns to me. “She wants to know us. Y/n she wants to meet us! She saw the picture I-“

“I can’t believe it,” I whisper. “Our daughter wants to—did she leave her name?”

We open the letter and flip over every piece of it but her name is nowhere.

“Maybe she didn’t want us looking her up?” Harry offers.

“Maybe she has an awful digital footprint.”

Something about it makes us laugh and we can’t stop. But pretty soon it shifts back into tears and we’re left holding each other on the couch, tender and content and anxious.

Our daughter had made contact. Would she like us? Would she be mad at us? What did this mean for us?

The thoughts continue to spiral the rest of the evening. We don’t make much of an effort, we reread the letter and try to get dinner in us. We face each other as we try to fall asleep, whispering questions into the darkness. The darkness doesn’t answer, it grows heavier as does the night, and we fall asleep for the first time in our lives knowing the weight of a decision so long ago was a tiny bit lighter.

***

It’s a few days later. All I’d been thinking about was the letter, when I woke up, at work, during my commute, during breaks, when I went to bed.

It sits on our dining table, we glance at it as we pass by. It becomes part of the decor, three pieces of paper and an envelope. It’s so much weightier than that.

I come home from my lecture on Wednesday, a slight buzz of anxiety humming in the background. It wasn’t unusual for Harry and I to get busy at work and not talk the whole day but today Harry had been radio silent. He hadn’t answered my texts or phone calls in a very un-Harry way.

I walk in to Harry sitting on the couch in the dark, staring at the coffee table. On it sits the letter.

“Hey,” I don’t even take off my jacket. I slide next to him. “Is everything alright?”

“Hey,” he whispers. He stays frozen sitting forward, elbows on his knees, head cradled in his hand.

I wait for him to speak, to say something about what was going on. I rub my hand over his back and he glances up. I tip forward until our foreheads touch. “What’s going on in that brain of yours? Let me help you.”

“It’s a lot,” he whispers. It tears me in two.

“Hey,” I remind him. “Just one day at a time. Let’s just talk about today.”

“I want to call her so bad,” he leans away and buries his head in his hands. I wanted to call her too, I’d been waiting for Harry to give the cue since I knew I could be rash and impulsive about something like this. But something was going on with him.

“We will.”

“We gave her up. What if she hates us?”

“She wouldn’t have written us that beautiful letter, or sent a photo, or left her number if she did.”

Harry sniffles and then asks what he really wanted to, “what if she hates me.”

“Harry look at me,” He unfolds slowly and I make sure he’s looking at me. “You’re her father, you’ve carried her with you for the last 18 years. You love her. She wants to know you. Why would she hate you?”

“I’ve fucked up so much!”

“You’re not your mistakes.” I remind him. I get teary eyed as I feel the echoes of his insecurities. I’ve thought about it too: what if I didn’t meet her expectations? “She’s not going to see you and see every good and bad decisions you’ve ever made. She’s just going to see her father—her biological father, and see where she got her eyes from and her hair from and every other quirk she has.”

“You’re not worried?” He asks, looking at me with grief.

“Of course I am,” I confess, tears leaking out of my eyes damnit. “I’m so fucking worried. But my curiosity overtakes that, my love for her is what I’m focusing on.”

“I love her,” he says.

“That’s all that matters.” I cup his face and press a reassuring kiss to his lips. “That’s all she’ll care about.”

Harry untangles himself from me and my heart sinks. He paces the length of our living room a few times, running his hand through his hair.

“We really should talk about the letter,” he says.

“Yeah. I know. I want to call. Badly.”

He pauses. It’s like all the anxious energy drains out of him at once. He sits back down beside me.

“What do we do?” I ask

“How about Saturday? She’s probably going to be home then right? No school—if she’s in school.”

Two days. Two more days of agonizing over the letter.

At this point the letter is memorized, seared into my brain like I had an exam on it. I want to know the person behind it.

When we wake on Saturday it’s a cloudy day. I don’t take it as a bad omen.

We sit with our phones out after breakfast, just staring at everything before us.

“You should do the talking,” I tell Harry. “I’m too nervous.”

“I think you should.” Harry says. “She sent the letter to you.”

“Only because that’s the address my mum gave…gave her mum.”

It hits me again in another wave I try not to drown in. She was eighteen, she’d lived a whole life with a whole family. There was everything of her we’d missed out on.

“Please Harry?” I was already overwhelmed with the realization. I just couldn’t.

He watches me, must hear the desperation in my voice, and slowly pulls his phone forward.

It rings, and rings a few more times. When it goes to voicemail he turns it off.

“I didn’t think that was an option,” Harry says and we laugh. It feels good.

“It’s only 10 maybe she’s asleep. Try one more time?”

He pulls my phone and tries again but it still goes to voicemail.

We sit there, unsure of what to do. We agree to try again later, in the afternoon.

But around half past 12, while Harry’s working in our spare room and I’m scrolling through my phone, it rings. I don’t think much of it and pick it up automatically.

“Hello?” It’s silent on the other end. “Hello?”

I wait, but as I do it dawns on me. Who called me?

I check my phone screen and swipe through as I say hello again. I match the number. It was her.

I run to Harry but the phone is still silent. I wave the paper with the number saying hello again.

“Is this…well you never gave us your name. But we got your letter. We’re so gl-“

The line goes dead and so does my heart.

“You called her again?” Harry whispers, his brows furrowing as he stares at the phone.

“She called.” I think about calling her back but that was pushy. She was backing out of this.

All of a sudden I feel myself giving out. I catch myself against the wall and slide down.

“She’s backing out. It must be…too much for her.”

Harry stares at a spot on the ground, a million thoughts flickering through. Finally it settles on acceptance. He sighs.

“We can’t force her to talk to us,” he says softly what I already know. But his words are like a saw to my resolve and I just start crying. He gathers me in his arms but the grief feels endless. It felt like she was slipping away again; I’d lost so much and I lost her again. She had been so close. How could she do this? Why did she reach out if she wasn’t ready?

Questions without answers. More of them piled on top of the lifetime of questions I’d built for her.

I know Harry feels the weight of them too. We carry them together. That’s the only reason I hadn’t broken yet.

But I come close to it that day. We don’t hear back from her. And we don’t try to call her back. It didn’t feel right.

It killed me she was so close. And something changes inside.

For weeks I feel like I’m on autopilot. It’s like my first semester of uni all over again.

Harry tries his best to keep me together but he struggles too. It makes me feel worse I was taking the bigger hit, not being there for him as much as I wanted. But life feels like a a million blankets covering me.

I try to keep my usual momentum for my classes, but I’m always exhausted after. It pulls me deeper into my sadness, something I loved made me so tried.

It’s a Thursday at the end of the semester and I’m marking exams during my study hours when there’s a light knock on the door.

I’m surprised to see an old student.

“Bridget,” I wave her in. “Come in, what can I do you for?”

“Hi professor-“

“Call me y/n, I’m not teaching you anymore am I?”

“No,” she says with a stiff smile. The last time I saw her was in February, I’d spotted her with Philippe and a few other friends at a local coffee shop. She had been explaining something to one of her friends from a textbook.

Now her hair was short and more pronounced with waves. I wonder if she styled it, her longer hair had been pin straight.

“I had a question?”

You already asked it, I want to joke. But she was usually wound up so I knew it wouldn’t land well.

“What’s that?”

“Um, well.” She perches on the chair and I wait patiently for her to continue. “Are you taking any applications for TA next year?”

I wasn’t expecting that. She always found a way to take me by surprise. I stare at her for a few seconds, trying to remember what year she was in.

“Aren’t you in first year? If I do TAs they’re usually 3rd or above.”

“I know,” she tucks her hair behind her ear. “But seeing that one of my majors is in econ and my gpa is really high, and I did well in your class, I wondered if you would consider me?”

I hadn’t done TAs since my first year of teaching. I found I liked the work because it got me more familiar with the class.

“What’s your other major?” She had said one of them was econ.

“Sociology, I’m pre-law.”

Ambitious. “Why TA for my class?”

She balks as she meets my gaze. There’s something that flits through her face that I can’t quite read before she drops eye contact.

“Um, I really enjoyed it. I did really well. I think you’re super smart and would learn a lot by TA-ing for you.”

“I don’t give special lessons to my TA,” I let her know. “You’d typically attend some of the classes, mark assignments, and maybe teach exam tutorials, and have office hours of your own for students.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Why should I pick you?”

She pushes her shoulders back, “I’m responsible, dependable, I submit all my assignments on time and have experience teaching.”

“Teaching?”

“I used to tutor when I was in high school. I didn’t really get an allowance so I found a way to support my hobbies.”

“What are your hobbies?”

She blushes a little, was she still nervous? “I love reading, books are expensive.”

I nod. For Harry’s birthday I’d told him he could get any books from Waterstones and it had been over £100 for 3 only.

“I also enjoy cooking. And um, it’s been a while but my friends and I sometimes go to like. Do you know comic con?”

“Yes,” I’d seen things online.

“Yeah we liked to dress up for that sort of thing. We used to make our own outfits and usually the cost varies depending on what you’re making and how realistic you want it and…” she trails off as I smile. She was really enthusiastic about it. I couldn’t help it.

“Tell you what. Leave your number with me and I’ll think about it. I haven’t had a TA for the last few semesters but I am going to take this into consideration.”

“Really?!”

I laugh. “Yes. Really.”

“Um…” she starts to fidget again. “Can I leave my email? I’m getting a new phone soon so I-“

“Sure. Anywhere I can reach you.”

I expect her to get out a pen but she says it verbally and I type it out.

“Um, are you alright?” She asks out of the blue after I type in the last letter.

“Alright?” I raise my brow.

“I mean, you seem…I just heard, um.” She tries to backtrack but I ask her again and she spills. “Some people just said your last few classes seem scattered. Not that people don’t like you. I just…that’s what they were saying. And I don’t know if having a TA would help? And I just wanted to ask if you’re okay sorry I shouldn’t…it’s none of my business.”

God, this girl was so awkward. But she was sweet for caring, I think. “You’re not applying for the role because you feel bad that I seem…scattered right?”

She blushes. “Sorry. I think I said too much.”

I want to laugh but it strikes me that my students had noticed. I’d let it affect their learning. It didn’t feel very good.

“Life’s hitting me hard recently,” I tell her simply. “But I’m alright. Thank you for reaching out Bridget.”

As I finish up the semester I think about her. It wouldn’t hurt to have her TA for one of my lectures, see how she does. I didn’t care for TAs as a lecturer but something about her is compelling and I find myself emailing her in the middle of the night in June. She responds back a few minutes later,

Thank you!!! You’re the best. I’ll do whatever you need just tell me I can do anythingggh

Sent from iphone.

I laugh to myself as I put my phone away and go back to bed. My guesses were she was drunk at a party.

Harry’s asleep beside me and I reach out to touch his back but think better of it. He’d been busy at work with a project nearing its deadline and I didn’t want to accidentally wake him.

I turn around and try to drift off, thinking about my daughter, about how Harry and I hadn’t really talked much in the last two weeks, about my teaching, and my new TA.

Age 38:

It’s a depressing summer. The air of dashed hopes still hangs around Harry and I. It’s less thunder clouds and more of a fog.

One weekend morning, it’s one of those mornings that start off heavy. I can’t get out of bed, but I hear Harry pattering about doing his weekend morning thing. I hear the dishwasher turn on, and soon after he walks in with our laundry folded in a basket. I feel awful as I normally do, but not awful enough to get up and do anything about it. I think I’d have to feel less awful, to do that.

I don’t expect him to get in beside me once he’s finished putting everything away. He smells like laundry and shampoo, I must smell like rot and decay.

“Y/n,” he says gingerly. I just look at him in response. I felt too heavy to even reply. He sits up and calls my name again.

“Mm,” I say.

He sighs. Despite months of this Harry’s been nothing but understanding but this morning seems different.

Suddenly I’m being pulled up by my shoulders and I find myself sitting up in bed.

“Y/N,” Harry says again. I fold my arms as the duvet slips down and the cool air raises goosebumps. “I love you, which is why it’s so hard seeing you like this. You have to get on, my love. We have to move forward. It’s been months.”

All I could remember after our daughter hung the phone up on us was when I almost got to hold her. Right after she was born, I almost got to hold her but they took her away. And that piece of me that followed after her was nearly returned. It was that almost that was a death blow.

“It’s hard,” I feel myself tear up. It was hard not to these days.

“I know baby,” Harry scoops me into him. “I know. It’s hard for me too but we have to get better. We have to live our lives. She’ll come back to us, I just know it. She’s scared, we’re hopeful. Fear’s gonna keep her away. Hope keeps us patient.”

I cry into his shirt and he rocks me.

“I’m sorry,” I say into his shirt.

“It’s alright,” he grips the back of my neck.

So for Harry, for us, I try to get back to myself. I start to pick up my outdoor hobbies, I try to keep conversations going with Harry, I reintroduce my multi-step night routine. I look forward and re-light the candle of hope, even though I ache to blow it out before it can burn down to its wick.

My wounds inside stay tender.

We had booked our wedding for November and as the days approach we find ourselves with one thing on our mind.

Harry and I finally talk about it.

“I always thought she’d be there at the wedding once she reached out.”

We’re sat in an outdoor space near King’s Cross, coffees in hand as we people watch. We’d just come back from a cake tasting and neither of us felt like going home with such a glorious August day. Kids splash in the water sprinklers and couples sit around arm in arm. I touch shoulders with Harry unconsciously.

“Me too. I think that’s what’s kept me from mentally committing to the fact that the date is coming closer.”

“It can’t be forever,” Harry says. “She reached out. She just needs time. She’ll call again one day and we’ll meet her.”

“I know.” I lean my head on his shoulder. This was a realization I’d also been slowly digesting. I’d waited 18 years, what was a few more months, another year? Her baby picture lived on our fridge, at least we were one step closer.

And the love, I had to remind myself in these moments. Hold onto the love.

***

“I can’t stay for this class,” Bridget tells me. It’s the second week of classes and there were still 10 minutes until it officially started.

“Is everything alright?”

“Not really,” that’s when I notice her nose is red and her eyes are too. “My um, my parents had to put my dog down. She…she wasn’t feeling well yesterday and the-they found cancer? And she was in a lot of pain but she never showed it? And-“

I put my hand on Briget’s shoulder and lead her to the exit. There was no reason for the whole class to see this.

“Sorry. I’m-“

“Don’t apologize.” I rub her shoulder. “I understand. Take the time you need I have this covered.”

True to her word, Bridget had been a loyal TA over the summer. I considered it a trial run not expecting much but she had shown up, aced marking, and I’d gotten good feedback from the students at the end of the semester.

I’d also taken to her. She’d join me during my 2 hours every Monday and when no students would come she would loosen up. She’d told me all about the dog she grew up with, she showed me costumes her friends and her made, I’d asked her about the books she was reading and the classes she was taking. It was like having a younger sister again, except I was mature enough to appreciate her.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Bridget says and this statements seems to be the breaking point. She curls in on herself, shoulders shaking. I don’t even think, I just pull her into me like I would for Harry, for Taylor, for any of my friends.

“You have a lifetime of memories with her,” I hold her. At first she stiffens up and I almost let her go but she only breaks down further and wraps her arms around me. Tighter than I expected.

“I wish I said goodbye,” she says into my shoulder.

“I know hon,” I squeeze her against me, something maternal washing over me. “I know.”

After a minute or so she regains her composure, wiping her face with her sleeve. When she looks at me she looks so much younger, her face grief-stricken and regretful.

“I’m sorry-“

“Don’t be.”

She seems to want to say something more but whatever it is, she swallows it and takes a step away.

I don’t see her for two weeks and I miss her.

When she walks into the lecture the first week of October I try not to rush her but I’m overjoyed seeing her face. It had become so familiar to me.

She smiles shyly when she walks up to me and I pull her into a hug. This time she doesn’t stiffen.

“How are you?” I whisper. Students were still trickling in so I use the time to catch up.

“Okay. Better than that day I cried all over you sorry again. I went home last week, thanks for letting me take it off.”

“Of course. You forget I’ve been doing this without a TA before you. I can hold down the fort.”

She cracks a smile, her dimple making a rare appearance.

“By the way, week 10’s lecture is supposed to be cancelled.” I tell her later during office hours. “But I wondered if you wanted to hold a tutorial that week for some of the material?”

“Really?” A light comes on in her eye. It’s fiery and bright with excitement.

“Yeah! You know the material! I’ll leave you with slides and you can go about teaching them.”

“I’d love to!” She grips her laptop close to her. “Wait why is it cancelled?”

“I’m getting married that week!”

The light dims. Or maybe I imagine it.

“Oh! I thought you were married already?”

“No,” I’d referred to Harry as my partner any time he was brought up. “We’re getting married in November. You’ve met him actually, kind of, that night we ran into you and some students at the pub. Last year?”

“Oh yeah I remember,” she says but her eyes are somewhere else. “So you’re getting married?”

“Yes Bridget,” I laugh. “Married. Tying the knot. You alright?”

“Yeah,” she blinks and she’s back. “You never mentioned the wedding. Do you have a dress?”

“Yeah! Just finalized the tailoring last week. Most things are ready, we’re just finalizing the rings!”

“Cool!” She fidgets with the hem of her shirt. “Is it in London?”

“Yeah, it’s not too big but we didn’t want people travelling too far. This is where Harry and I were born and raised so this is where we want to marry too.”

“Wow,” she seems lost in thought and she stays pretty quiet the rest of the time. I didn’t realize my news was that surprising.

Maybe I still didn’t have Bridget completely figured out.

***

“Harry I can’t pick them up! I need to get home and then head back out to class!”

“Y/n it’s on your way home!”

“Not really! It’s a 30 minute detour. Why can’t you do it?”

“Because you can still get to him right before he closes. I won’t be done here until after he closes. I’m sorry love!”

“Agh and why can’t he do tomorrow?”

“He’s off until Saturday! We need it today.”

It’s the Wednesday before we marry and our rings are still at the jeweller’s. He’d finished them last weekend but we’d been so busy with other things we hadn’t had time to pick it up. And now it was either today and be late for class, or the day of the wedding.

I had gotten delayed at work and missed Harry’s texts explaining the situation. I’d only responded while on the tube, but going out of my way for 30 minutes meant I’d be 30 minutes late to get back to class. And since I’d left marked assignments at home that the kids needed for next week’s tutorial, I had no choice but to head back.

The idea hits me at once.

I hang up on Harry and ring Bridget. She picks up right away.

“Bridget, I’m on a crazy tight schedule. I’m going to be late to class by half hour at least.”

“Oh no. Is everything alright?”

“Yeah it’s just wedding thing but can you do something crazy? And feel free to say no okay?”

“Okay?”

I explain to her that if she rode to my flat, Harry would be there by then and she could pick up marked assignment. She can delay class by taking them up.

She’s silent but eventually I get a yes. “Okay. Can you text me your address?”

“Yes! Yes. Thank you Bridget. I owe you your trip fare and lunch or something. I’ll text you now, leave as soon as you can!”

I call Harry again and confirm he’d be home by the time she arrived. Everything works out.

I get the rings, and have to head home so Harry can try his on. The jeweller was expecting both of us, and let me know he couldn’t do adjustments if I didn’t text him by today. Just my luck!

When I get to the flat I tell Harry not to read his inscription but to try it on and thankfully it fits.

“Hey,” Harry calls out as I try to rush back out the door.

“What?” I was out of breath and frantic.

“Slow down,” he pulls me into a lingering kiss and despite being breathless before, I get some air into my lungs when we part.

“Sorry, so hectic.”

“I know I’m sorry,” he strokes my cheek. “I would have gone if I could make it. Also don’t be mad.”

“Be mad?” I let go of the door handle. “What did you do?”

“Your TA stopped by, Bridget. I forgot she was coming so I didn’t have your papers ready. I invited her in and she was in the living room looking at our pictures and she stopped in front of the baby picture. Of our daughter.”

“Okay,” did Harry tell her our history? I get antsy. “And?”

“Well she asked if that was our daughter. And I didn’t know what to say, if you’ve said anything to her? I panicked?” Harry runs his hand through his hair. “I just changed the subject.”

“Okay, that’s not bad. What’s the bad part I don’t get it?”

“Well. I changed the subject and told her she should come to the wedding.”

My jaw drops. “Harry.”

“I know! I know I’m sorry! I know she technically works for you, she was a student, all that! You’re so fond of her though maybe it’s not a bad thing?”

“Harry that’s…she was my student! I’m a prof at that school I…is that even allowed?”

“Yes? I panicked and googled it.”

I groan, “I swear you’re getting worse the closer we get to the wedding.”

The other week he had tried to buy out a whole bakery in case there wasn’t enough cake for our guests.

“You can tell her we have a full guest list? I don’t know what came over me! She just looked at me with those puppy eyes and she asked about the picture and I tried to talk about something else but the only thing on my mind-“

I kiss him. Just to shut him up. I was getting really late.

“This is like that book club you were tricked into joining all over again-“

“Hey I really like that book club now! It might be a good thing!”

“We’ll talk later.” I shake my head at him. “It’s fine, it’s not a big deal. It’s weird but what’s one more guest?”

“I also said plus one.”

I let out a long exhale and then kiss Harry again. I didn’t want him spiralling while I was gone.

“Baby don’t worry, it’s okay. I’m fine with it. We’ll talk when I get home?”

I mull over it on the ride to uni. But I can’t find a way to uninvite her without it being awful. I text our wedding planner if we could squeeze in two more seats and she gives me the thumbs up.

I did have a soft spot for Bridget, and technically I’ve known her for over a year now.

During office hours, we get a few people in for the first half hour. Then we’re back to just the two of us.

“Thanks for taking over today,” I tell her. “I really appreciate it.”

“That’s alright. Happy to help out.”

An awkward silence slithers in.

“So my partner invited you to our wedding.”

“Yeah! I didn’t know if that was serious am I…?”

She looked so hopeful I couldn’t shoot her down. “Yes! I have a couple people from the faculty coming. And some colleagues from my day job. You’ll probably have to sit with them but?”

“That’s fine!” She’s chirpy Bridget again. “I’d love to. That would mean a lot.”

I watch her as the smile stays on and she gets out her phone, typing away. Maybe her friends, her plus one.

I realize I’m not entirely against it. It had happened, and I was okay.

***

I stare at myself in the mirror, smoothing down my dress in a nervous habit. I never thought I’d get married twice, I always thought after Tatum I was done with marriage, but Harry would always be the exception.

I feel a flutter of nerves thinking about him. Walking down the aisle to him. We started talking on a rooftop one day, we had just been two kids.

“You better not cry,” Taylor threatens as she walks into the room. She had gone to fetch lash glue after my teary eyes loosened an edge.

“I’m not,” I say weakly.

She stands beside me in the mirror, “They’re all waiting downstairs.”

Just 30 minutes ago this room had been a chaotic mess. From my mum, to my friends, to the wedding planner. I’m kind of glad my lash came loose, I’m able to ground myself in these few minutes of silence.

Taylor talks about our family downstairs as she fixes my face. I get up with her help and she beams, but her eyes look misty.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Nothing!”

“Why do you look sad what happened?”

“Oh my god calm down, I just can’t believe you and Harry are getting your happy ending! I’m just…emotional.”

“Aww,” I cup her face even though I want to squeeze my baby sister against me. But my white dress, although not entirely traditional, would be ruined for the ceremony.

A ping on her phone—mum. We rush out. It feels like getting caught when we were younger and quickly getting away from the scene of the crime. I grip my sister’s hand until I stand in front of the doors leading down the aisle.

I don’t remember walking, it felt more like floating. Even if there was a chimpanzee and a talking dog in the pews I wouldn’t have noticed. My eyes are locked on Harry’s teary ones, they anchor me as I glide towards the man I’ve never stopped loving. Who always saw all of me.

When he reaches for my hand I grasp it and I know I made the right decisions. Even the painful ones. After all, I wanted to be nowhere but here.

“Y/N,” Harry reads his vows to me and I try not to cry as he sweeps me away with his delicate words about our love story.

“To be so deeply known by another, without even saying a word, shouldn’t make sense and yet with us we have a language that goes beyond words. A brush of your hand or a look in my direction, it can be enough to unload whatever burden I’d just been carrying. I promise to do the same for you, and to never end this dialogue between us. To love you and to cherish you forever.”

Harry couldn’t keep the tears in and they slide down his cheeks as he reads his words out to me. I reach out instinctively and brush his tear away and he laughs because I was doing it again.

“You’re can’t make me cry in my makeup,” I tell him and our guests laugh.

I had sat and thought so hard about my own vows. In the end after 50 versions, I’d settled on short and sweet.

“Harry, when we first spoke on the rooftop of that party in high school,” I say at my turn. “You told me everything you wanted. One of them was to make the world a better place. And I don’t know if you still want those things as much now as you did then, but one thing is true. You’re made my world a better place. I can’t imagine doing life without you. I love you with all of my heart, there’s no equation that could calculate how much.”

Harry grins at me and my breath catches. My man, he was my Harry.

We finish our vows with a kiss and a lot of noise from the crowd. When we turn to everyone I’m struck by how lucky we were.

The absence of our daughter was tough but when it came to love we had an abundance of it. I see it in every smiling and shiny face in the crowd. It’s like photographing a sunny day with one of those old school films, the sun is covered by a dark spot but the rays still wash everything in gold.

Harry squeezes my hand and I look up to him. He’s already looking at me.

He holds his hand up and lets out a whoop before he pulls my face towards him again for an even longer and borderline inappropriate kiss. I feel myself start to blush in front of the crowd.

We start down the aisle and this time I beam at every guest I catch eyes with.

My mum and Harry’s wave with tear-streaked faces. My friends from high school shout out, always the biggest supporters of our relationship. I catch eyes with Bridget, forgetting for a second she was here. Philippe is beside her, but what’s surprising is her blotchy face. I didn’t take her for someone who got emotional at weddings. I throw her a wave and she smiles through the tears.

Whoever ordered weddings to have a small break between the ceremony and the reception deserved a billion dollars. Harry and I spend the quiet moment doing our outfit change but afterwards we hold each other and let the moment sink in. The day sink in.

“We’re married,” Harry whispers when I tell him we should get going so we weren’t late.

“We took the long way to get here didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” he tucks me under his chin again and even though we would be late we just sway together for a little while. Our own private first dance, before the one for our family and friends.

“We did it all quite backwards actually.” I look up to him.

“Yeah, but we were never ordinary.”

“No, and I don’t think anything we’ve ever done is either.”

“Including our kid. I really wish she were here.”

“We’ll tell her all about it one day,” I promise him. His face eases into a loving smile, the fact that we’d made it to a place again where I can comfort him about this said a lot. Said we’d make it through everything, despite.

“I don’t want to do life with anyone else y/n, I have everything I need right here.”

“Remember that day at Whole Foods?” I remind him. “The first time we bumped into each other.”

“It’s a core memory,” Harry remembers. “I feel like the sun never set on that day. Getting to see you after all those years…it’s cheesy but it felt like coming home.”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Me too. I recognized you by the back of your head did I ever tell you that?”

“Stared at it enough in maths, of course you did.”

“That’s probably why I did so poorly that year remember,” I laugh. “Just staring at the back of your head.”

“That’s why I never sat anywhere but in front of you.” He swipes lightly down my nose and I smile. “Now I get to see every angle of you whenever I want.”

“Oi,” I slap his chest. “Save it for tonight.”

He brushes my cheek. Under his gaze I’m stripped naked. There was nothing to hide with him, ever.

“I understand how long it took you to get ready,” he says in his deep silky voice. My stomach flips. “So I can’t do anything right now. But y/n, our wedding night will turn into a wedding dawn, and then to day again. I promise you.”

I tip-toe, even in my heels, and brush my lips along his cheek. In his ear I whisper, “I don’t expect anything less.”

I step away, feeling unravelled by the look of desire in his eyes. I’m sure I had the same look of want. But before we can give in to what we wanted to do, I open the door to our suite and embrace the gust of cool air.

“You should get some air too,” I say and he laughs, following me behind.

***

“Bitch!” Taylor comes up to me on the dance floor later that night. We had dinner, Harry and I had our first dance, there’d been toasts and tears in between. I was finally letting loose as the wedding party crowds the dance floor. We had been taking pictures all night, after this next glass of champagne I was going to call it quits on photos lest anyone captures anything that’s not an elegant bride.

“What?” I turn away from Harry to face Taylor. She’d been running around all day making sure my wedding day was perfect and seeing her just warms me with love. I squeeze her against me despite her protests. “I love you Taylor. Thank you for everything!”

“Ugh c’mon,” she wriggles out. She’d never been very affectionate.

“Where’s your bloke?” I look out for him.

“He taking a call. Anyway don’t change the fucking subject!”

“What subject!?” I ask as someone dances past me, fluttering their fingers in my direction. I blow them a kiss.

“C’mere,” she’s annoyed I’m distracted. She drags me off to the side and I hold a finger up to Harry as he watches us. “When the fuck were you going to tell us about her? And you invite her to your wedding and everything and nobody knows anything!?”

“What?” I was drunker than I thought or Taylor was making no sense. “Wha?”

“The girl you just took a photo with? Don’t act stupid Y/N jeez I can’t believe it. You hid it from me when it happened but why are you still hiding…”

My sister grows more upset as she talks, I realize it was serious. Taylor rarely allowed herself to get this worked up in public.

I put my hand on her shoulder but she shakes it off. I think hard about who she was talking about. Who had I just taken photos with?

Some of Harry’s friends took a picture lifting us up, then there was a photo with my cousin but that can’t be who Taylor was talking about. There was Andie, a few other friends and their partners, then Bridget and Bridget and Philippe.

Bridget.

“Wait what are…who do you think that is? Taylor I work-“

“Your daughter! Why are you still acting fucking clueless!”

“What’s happening?” Harry walks in mid-way into the conversation.

“God you too!” Taylor turns to him and hits the back of her hand on his chest. He rubs the spot and stares at her like she’d gone crazy.

“Me too what?”

“Harry?” His mum walks up to us, her brows pulled together the same way Harry’s does when he’s confused.

“Yeah?”

“Who’s that girl? With the brown hair? Purple dress?”

She’s eyeing Bridget who’s laughing with Philippe.

“Bridget?” Harry glances at me and Taylor grows more pink.

“Bridget? That’s her name?” Taylor blinks away tears. “Really y/n? I get when it happened I was a child, you and mom kept it from me. But she’s, you invite her to you-“

“Invite who?!” I shout. What the hell did Taylor think.

“Y/n,” Harry puts his hand on my lower back in warning.

“Your daughter?” Taylor says with teary eyes and a look of betrayal on her face. “That’s your daughter isn’t it? She looks just like…”

“Jesus I thought the same thing,” Anne looks at all of us. “Harry?”

“That’s not-“ he stops talking and we all look over at her. I had to say, right now she really could be. With her hair curled and wearing what she’s wearing. She could be family.

“She’s my TA. I’ve known her for a couple years guys I’ve bloody taught her. That’s not our daughter. She wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight? Harry invited her last minute.”

They all turn to look at me. Taylor looks miffed, she bites her lip as she looks at her one last time.

“That’s weird. Nevermind.”

She leaves like she didn’t just make a big scene. Anne covers her hand with her mouth and shakes her head. “I’m sorry loves, I didn’t mean to upset anyone-“

“You didn’t do anything,” I reassure her. Taylor did. And she couldn’t even say sorry.

“Don’t worry mum,” Harry pays her arm. She fades into the crowd and Harry stands in front of me so all I see is him. “She’ll get air, she’ll be fine.”

“But how could she just cause such a big scene like I’d hide something like that from her? On my wedding day! And then leave without even apologizing ugh! She is still such a brat sometimes!”

“I know, she’ll apologize later just let her be.” He knew Taylor enough. He knew her at 13 and he knew her now. That’s exactly what she would do. “We’re getting you a shot.”

“That’s the last thing I need! I’m already kinda tipsy Har.”

“This won’t tip you over c’mon. Shake it off.”

He leads me to the bar and we take a shot. I nearly spill half of it, it was awful whatever it was. I lose Harry as we get back to the dancing and end up behind Bridget instead. Philippe noticed me first and slows his dancing, which signals Bridget to turn around.

“Y/n!” Her smile is so bright it hurts to look at. It dims as I just stare at her.

It would be crazy. It was a big fat coincidence. She had a mum, a dad, a sister, she told me all about them. Her childhood dog and the time she twisted her ankle playing football in year 4. She wasn’t who we wanted her to be.

“Are you alright?” I read her lips. There’s only ringing in my ears. “Hey! Y/n!”

Philippe is suddenly on my other side and I’m being led to a chair. He disappears and Bridget pulls a chair beside me.

“What’s,” my voice sticks and I clear my throat. “What’s going on between you two? He’s your date?”

“Philippe?” Bridget’s brows draw together and I can’t stop looking at where they meet. I knew her. I didn’t know her. I was too afraid to ask. “No just friends.”

“That’s not the way he’s looking at you.”

“What?” She tucks her hair back. “No we’ve been friends since high school. It’s not like that?”

“What would you do if he got a girlfriend?” It was a random conversation to have, here and right now but it helps me from tumbling anywhere else. Especially into a pool of what-ifs.

“I’d,” she shrugs but a flicker passes through her face, for a second her jaw clenches. “Be happy for him.”

“Liar!”

“I’m not! Why are you asking?”

“You two like each other. I see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking. Why did you invite him tonight?”

She shrugs, picking at something on her arm. “I dunno. He’s good at being a plus one. He always supports me? He’s always been there for me.”

“Sorry,” he shows up with a glass of water. “I swear the guy behind the bar was ignoring me.”

“Thank you Philippe,” by now I didn’t really need the water but I hold the icy glass in my hands. “Let’s see the pictures you took. I want them in my inbox or something soon. We don’t get our official photos for months.”

“Oh yeah here,” Phillipe hands over his phone after opening the photo. There are a couple of all of us, and then a few with just Bridget standing between Harry and I smiling.

I look between all three of us and feel something in my gut. But it’s too scary and big to unpack right now. I shove it away. I couldn’t do this. Not today, not tonight.

“You look beautiful Bridget,” I touch a lock of her hair. “Did I already say that?”

“Yeah,” she smiles awkwardly. “You said that before the photo.”

“You do. And so do you Philippe. Thank you for attending my wedding.”

“Thanks for inviting us,” Bridget looks at me wide-eyed, like she’s about to say something but when Philippe’s hand lands on her shoulder she looks down.

“What?” I ask anyway. Her eyes dart like prey to me, to Philippe, and down to her hands. I grab her hand and force her to look at me, like I could read something in her eyes. Like I would know. “Bridget.”

She looks up and her eyes well with tears as we look into each other’s eyes. My throat feels tight like I was having an allergic reaction, it travels down to my chest, I inadvertently feel myself squeezing her hand.

“I’m so-“

“Bridget,” Philippe’s voice cuts through whatever Bridget was going to apologize for. I look up at him and he’s burning a hole staring at her that hard. Over his head I see Harry.

“Oh look I see my husband,” Harry’s spots me too, relief in his features. His eyes stay on my face as he walks towards me and his eyes keep my steady. I want to tell him something, but everything that just happened was so non-verbal and unreal that I think I made it all up. I must be because this was insane and there was no explanation other than I was drunk, and sadder than I realized. “Gotta go kids. Have fun. I think I need another shot.”

I remember the rest of the night in snapshots. I forget myself later, giving myself up to Harry after that. We actually make it to dawn in a mixture of love and declarations, filthy words and I love yous, laughter and deeper conversations. It’s everything we were. It’s just like he promised.

***

Life moves on and I don’t bring anything up to Harry. I couldn’t, either I’m wrong and get his hopes up, or he thinks I’d gone insane in my sadness.

I feel like Bridget avoids me the week after, I return to class and she sits there, even takes questions after class, but she makes an excuse of studying during office hours and I barely get a few words with her. The week after she has an exam and she skips out after class.

I’m antsy. I want to know more about her; from her. I’m tempted to find a way to access her profile, get more info via the school. But I wait.

Harry notices, as we prep for our honeymoon booked over the holidays, he continues to ask if I was alright. And I try to convince us both I was.

About 3 weeks after the wedding, it’s a Saturday afternoon. Harry’s making lunch and I’m sitting in a pile of our books trying to decide what can be donated.

“Can you get that?” Harry asks.

“Hm?”

“The door?” He says just as there’s another knock. I’d been so entranced in the book I’d randomly started reading a passage of I hadn’t even heard.

I scramble to get it before the next knock and nearly stumble back when I find Bridget at the door.

“Hiya,” she says with an awkward wave.

“Hi…Bridget. What…come in what’s going on?”

“Sorry? Now that I’m here I should have called first.” She comes in and I go further in, waiting for her to follow. She hesitates before peeling her wet boots off.

“Harry? We have a guest,” I announce as I take her further into the home. I guess she’d already been here once before. “Bridget what can we do you for? Did you need something?”

“Bridget!” Harry pops out of the kitchen into the adjoined living room when we get closer. “Nice to see you again! I’m nearly done lunch, did you want to stay?”

What was it with Harry randomly inviting Bridget to things that were not pre-discussed.

“Um, I no. I probably shouldn’t. I just, came by to talk?”

“Sure,” I lead her to our dining table. “Is it about school? Did something happen?”

I sit across from her and Harry mumbles something, turning the dials down on the stovetop before sitting beside me.

Bridget’s eyes dart everywhere, from me to Harry, to the pictures on the wall, the kitchen, the books all over the floor.

“I was just doing a clearout,” I say to fill the silence. “Hey you like books right? Look through that pile there later if you want any of ‘em.”

“Actually,” she tucks her hair behind her ear. I feel Harry tense beside me. “I have a book for you.”

She leans down to where her tote rests and pulls something out. She lays it on her lap first, where we can’t see it. When she looks up to us she has tears in her eyes and her chin quivers.

“Please,” she whispers before pausing. My stomach drops as I take her in. Her face is blotchy and her hair hangs around her face, hiding half of it. She’s definitely cried before coming here, and I almost feel like deja vu as she places the book on the table. “Please don’t hate me.”

She slides it across to us. It’s just a simple leather hardcover, about 30cm by 30cm. The thing in my gut, the suspicion or the intuition, it turns into a cackling ball of energy and moves up to my sternum. I put my hand over it, and then move it to Harry’s leg. He’s frozen like a statue, staring at the book.

“Please open it?” Bridget says with tears streaking her face.

When Harry doesn’t make a move I pull it the rest of the way towards us. I open the first page to a few baby pictures.

I’d never held her in my hands, never even saw her. I’d pushed her out into this world, into another’s arms. But somehow I know who this is.

“Bridget,” I don’t even look at her. I start to frantically flip through the pages. The baby grows, 2 months, 6 months, 1 years old. Another girl joins in some photos, she always has an arm around the other child. I flip and flip and flip and even though I’m expecting it the photo stops my breathing.

I stare at the clone, or the original, of the photo on my fridge.

I’m frozen until another photo is slid towards us. It comes into view: two teenagers on Halloween night. The guy is dressed like the girl, the girl is dressed like the guy.

I throw my chair back and in the time it takes to walk to Bridget she stands too.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobs but I just do what I wanted to do the second she was born.

I hug her. I hold her to my chest the way I never got to over 19 years ago. She belonged here. She never got to be here.

She was finally home. My daughter.

“Bridget,” I cry into her hair. Harry’s hair. She had Harry’s hair, his eyes. She got my nose and everything else. I was holding my daughter. She was in my arms, finally.

She really did look like Taylor as a baby.

“I’m sorry,” she cries again. “I was so scared and I screwed up and-“

“No.” I say fiercely. I push her out of the hug so I can grab her face. I wipe her tears and I nearly cry again. How many tears had I missed? Over skinned knees, playground taunts, first crushes and friendship breakups. How many tears had I missed? “Don’t say that. You’re here. You’re—Harry!”

I turn to him, why wasn’t he here?

He’s sat exactly where he was before. Frozen, staring at a spot between the picture of us and Bridget.

I let go of Bridget and move back to him.

“Baby,” I touch his arm and he springs up. Tears coat his lashes.

“‘Scuse me,” he brushes past me and heads out into the hall. Away from us. I want to go after him but I don’t want to leave Bridget—our daughter, alone.

“I’m sorry I knew I would ruin things I-“

“Please,” I want to go after him so bad but I go to Bridget and pull her into a gentler hug. When we part I keep hold of her shoulders. I never wanted to let her go. “He’s just processing it. He’s fine. He’s not mad at you I promise. Promise.”

She bites her lip, it reminds me of Taylor. She was a bit of everyone I knew and loved. She was the love that Harry and I always had. She was ours.

“I just got so scared when I tried to reach…I didn’t mean to deceive you. I didn’t. I felt terrible every day.”

“It’s okay,” I tuck her hair behind her ear. “There’s nothing to be sorry about-“

“But I saw you,” she cuts me off. “After I finally called you back and then just like, ghosted you. And every time I saw you at school it was like…I knew I was to blame. And it made me want to tell you even more but I got more scared any time I came close to it. I almost said it at your wedding—it would have been so stupid. Philippe stopped me.”

“I understand,” I did. I also didn’t care about any of it. She was here. That’s all I cared about. I wanted to know everything about her, I needed Harry here though. “Look Harry…your…Harry. I’m just going to check on him. You stay here and just…”

I trail off and leave. I had to be sure he was okay.

He’s not in the bedroom, or the office. I try the door to the toilet and it opens, he’s sitting on the edge of the tub with his head in his hands.

“She leave?” He asks in a hoarse voice.

“Oh baby,” I crouch in front of him. “No. She’s still here but I just wanted to check on you.”

“I’m pathetic,” he buries his hands in his hair. “I’ve been waiting my whole adult life for this and all I do is freeze. Her first impression is of her dad just freezing and then running away.”

I try not to laugh at his dramatic retelling. “Har you know that’s not true. She’s known you before this. It was a shock-“

“You were fine.”

“You know I…always suspected. Especially after the wedding.”

He looks up at that, finally. “You never said.”

“Harry, I felt crazy. Saying it out loud would have forced me to check myself into the psych ward. We all react differently, it doesn’t matter though. Our baby girl is here. The day we talked about!”

He takes a deep breath, and then another one. I guide him to stand and he looks so limp and sad that I squeeze him in a hug. “She doesn’t care how you reacted. She just wants to know you.”

Harry sighs again, he splashes his face with water and we walk out. I was nervous for him.

We walk back into the living room and my heart sinks when Bridget isn’t there. But her things are?

A few steps further and she’s at the stovetop, stirring a pot.

“Oh sorry,” she steps back and nearly throws the spatula into the pot. “It was boiling a lot and-“

“Bridget,” Harry ignores most of what she’s saying and she freezes at the sound of her name. He’s a foot away from her now. I watch him raise a hand to her face and then drop it. His face is a cross between heartbreak and awe as they drink each other in. I wait in anticipation.

“Hi,” she finally says shyly. But it breaks the ice. Harry pulls her into a hug and she returns it tenfold from the looks of it. I can’t tell who’s crying, but I give them their moment as I turn the dials off on the stovetop.

It was just a regular Saturday, except it wasn’t. Our worlds exploded with our past and was putting itself back together again, all the old broken pieces were being mended back together with love. My chest drowns in it, I can barely breathe. In Harry’s arms, there’s no denying she’s ours.

***

“Thank you,” Bridget says as we tuck into dinner. Harry’s lunch prep had gone cold as we’d all sat down and talked about how Bridget found us (looking me up, finding out I was teaching a course she was interested in, forcing her friend Philippe to take it to see if I was who she thought I was), and going through her album. I found out more about her sister Louisa and her parents. It was weird seeing pictures of them, in my mind they were the people that took my baby as their own and for Bridget they were mum and dad.

We finally decide to do something about food when our stomachs rumble. Harry goes back to cooking, showing Bridget what he’s doing until she leaves to take a call. I recognize Philippe on the caller ID.

I take Bridget’s place but I’m more of an extra weight tied to Harry’s back as I hug hun from behind. We don’t even have words on what this all means to us. For now, just touching each other keeps us grounded, it keeps is in what was happening together.

Bridget comes back from the call when we’re nearly done.

“I just want to say I am sorry—and I know you said not to be,” Bridget says quickly before I can get a word in. “But I never meant to deceive the both of you. My plan was to take your class, leave the letter and then talk. I Googled you so much it felt like I knew you. Yet when we spoke in your office that day, you felt familiar but In a different way than the person I studied. I just liked you so much, and I wanted you to like me. I was scared maybe you wouldn’t. So I just screwed the plan and messed up everything.”

“Hey,” Harry hands her a tissue and she takes it. Under the table he squeezes my hand. “It’s in the past.”

“I know. Still made me feel awful. And I couldn’t tell you but I also couldn’t stay away. I applied for TA and, it felt like having a friend and a sister and a mentor all in one. And I…I screwed up. I took it too far. And then you invited me to your wedding—I got to attend my parents’ wedding! It was so absurd. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Sounded like me. But I don’t say anything. We listen to her attentively.

“I only told my sister. I wanted to tell you two before I told my parents.”

I think about my parents. Harry’s. I didn’t want to overwhelm her but I couldn’t wait to introduce her to everyone that already loved her.

“I just hope…no, I know I hurt you two a lot. I didn’t mean to. I am really sorry about it all.”

“Bridget,” Harry’s hand comes down on hers. “What’s done is over. There are so many things we wish we did differently but ultimately it’s all done. All that matters is you’re here, now. You’re our daughter we never got to meet and you’re finally here.”

Harry’s voice cracks on the last word and he sits back and laughs away the tears. “Sorry. I’m a mess today aren’t I? Your first impression of me is a crying mess.”

“That’s not my first impression,” Bridget laughs but her eyes also fill with tears. “That night at the pub. When I saw you two together I nearly bloody fainted! When I looked you up y/n, there’d been an old wedding registry with another bloke. But then seeing you two together?! I just couldn’t believe it—I thought I dreamed it. And then I nearly cried because my bio parents were somehow together?? And the way you just stared into my soul it felt like you knew who I was.”

I laugh, remembering but also knowing exactly what look Bridget was talking about. “He does have a piercing look doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. It could gut someone!”

“That makes it sound awful!” Harry laughs. “Don’t say that.”

“It nearly gutted me! I really thought oh shite—“ Bridget freezes and looks between us like we were gonna scold her for swearing and I nearly leap across the table to hug her again then. “I uhm, I thought you knew who I was.”

“We thought it then,” I let my eyes roam over her. I realize I’d always been a mother, despite not having my daughter. Holding her earlier had awoken an instinct in me and now every time I look at her I feel a rush of love and something fierce. I wonder if Harry felt it too. “But we thought we were mental!”

Her phone chimes as we laugh. She flips it around and then tucks it into her purse.

“You need to take that?” Harry asks.

“No it’s just Philippe. He was at the wedding? I was just talking to him, I hadn’t texted him in a while he wanted to know how it went.”

“Philippe,” I say with a knowing smile. Bridget blushes and Harry asks what he’s missing out on so I fill him in.

“He sounds like a good lad,” Harry comments.

“A good lad?” I repeat. “Are you hearing him?”

Bridget laughs behind her hand and I can’t stop staring at her. I have to force myself to go back to eating.

“He is. I might have told him about how I felt?”

“Wow,” I put my fork down. “You’re confessing an awful lot lately.”

She blushes even deeper. And suddenly I’m grateful of the weird and layered way she’d come into our lives. Despite hiding the truth, it had allowed us to get to know each other as people first. Without any baggage or give me any inclination to fit who I thought she should be onto who was in front of me.

I got to know her for the young woman she was first, so did Harry in a way. And I would be forever grateful for that despite all the pain in between.

“Sorry,” I get up. The affection was overflowing from my cup. “I’m going to give you another hug because I just can’t believe all this.”

“Ohh,” Bridget stands to meet me and we wrap our arms around each other. Here was a girl I already knew, here was my daughter waiting to be known.

“God, she really is our daughter.” Harry quips from his side of the table. He explains when Bridget looks over at him, “y/n is known to be a big touchy person, I’m kinda like that too.”

“Oh my god,” she smiles at us. “I’m like that too! My sister hates hugs. My dad’s 2 pats on the back man, 3 if he’s feeling a lot. I always wondered if…”

She trails off. It seems to hit all of us all over again every so often. For me it’s when she talks about her mum and dad and it’s not Harry and I. The reminder that she went 19 years becoming her own person that we now were catching up on.

For her, it seems it was realizing all the parts of us that were in her.

“You got Harry’s hair, and eyes.” I comment.

“I did! I realized that as soon as I saw a photo online. But I do look a bit like you.”

“You do! I should show you some younger pictures of us and our families. You’ll see more similarities.”

“Wow. So you have a younger sister. How about you Harry?”

“Older sister. Seems we all have sisters.”

Bridget and I make eye contact, remembering a conversation we had what feels like ages ago about having sisters.

We continue our dinner, swapping stories and filling her in on anything she wants to know. She leaves after, claiming to have to get back home, she had an exam on Monday to study for.

When she leaves Harry and I can’t stop talking about her. Or gushing would be more accurate.

“Did you see the way she laughs?” I’d tell him. “Pure you!”

“The way she tucks her hair back,” he would retaliate. “Just like you. You did that especially back in secondary.”

We talk until we’re exhausted, crawling into bed just staring in wonder. There were still so many details to figure out, so many things to cover, it could drown a person thinking of it all.

But like an anchor in the sea, Harry and I fall asleep with hand clasped together. We keep each other buoyed amidst it all.

It was going to take time for this all to sink in but all I’ve ever had was time, and questions. I think I was finally getting time and answers.

Age 39:

Harry’s pov: Having our daughter in our lives is simple and complicated at the same time. At first there were a lot of things to untangle but as time went on, the knots loosened until our lives became their own knots, tangled into each other.

Meeting her parents, the people I met once many years ago, was likely the strangest part. They already felt so familiar as soon as they greeted us in a warm embrace, as if we were there own children. I guess the last time they saw us we were.

“Oh look at you,” Bridget’s mum had squeezed us tight. Her dad had pat us three times and we took it to mean as much as a hug.

In my mind they were always the age they had been then. They were probably around the age we are now. Seeing them sport greys and fine lines, it was like stepping into a time portal.

Lou, Bridget’s sister, eyes us for the first little while before warming up and sharing all kinds of stories—especially the embarrassing kind with us.

When Bridget meets Y/n’s family, I can tell they’re loud and overwhelming at first but we’re all surprised when Taylor embraces Bridget and takes to her immediately.

She brings out old pictures they had of Y/N and I, but every time she says, “your mum and dad…” when she talks about us through the pictures, I notice y/n protesting less and less.

It makes me feel funny, I keep thinking I was going to wake up and find out it had all been a dream.

“This feels very full circle to me,” y/n’s mum says. She’s watching Taylor talk about her baby bump—she was 3 months along. “I saw Bridget as a wee baby when they handed her over to her parents. I remember running late to hospital and making it to the room just in time to see it. I blinked and now she’s in my living room!”

“Sometimes I feel the same way,” I confess.

My family is slightly quietier but they all fuss over our daughter. They ask a million questions and when it’s all over we take Bridget for ice cream. It’s a pseudo-recreation of a life we never had.

Bridget eases into it too. At first she had bouts of disappearing on us. No more than a couple days. But we give her space, understanding it was overwhelming.

Every time I see her, I see her mum—y/n. I was never there when y/n gave birth. We had to drive up from London when we got the news and by the time I got there the dust had settled.

I never even had the potential of seeing her. I’d always been more sympathetic of y/n; her loss had been physical, mine was slightly more abstract.

Even though I’d spent every year since regretting that I wasn’t there to at least glimpse her, I’m glad now I hadn’t been there to see her. If I had to live the last 18 years with this feeling in my chest I don’t think I could have lasted that long. I don’t know how y/n did it. It’s a concoction of deep unconditional love, and tenderness, and recognition, wrapped in a shell of protectiveness. It took me a while to sort through it all but I had a conversation with my parents one night at dinner Y/n and I had visited. And they’d laughed because they had told me that was simply what being a parent was.

“Maybe she regrets it,” I had said the second time she ghosted us. Really it had just been over a day where she hadn’t gotten back to us. But I couldn’t help the overthinking, being tuned into any potential of loss with our daughter.

Somehow, y/n was the cool headed between us two in these moments. Maybe it was being a mum, maybe it was knowing Bridget beforehand, but she was very in sync with her.

“She needs space. The last thing we want her to be is overwhelmed too. Now don’t overwhelm yourself love, at least she’s in our lives.” She’d say.

It takes us the start of the summer and all those meets later for Bridget to finally feel at ease.

We invite her on a road trip, we were renting a place in the Cotswold for a few days and told her to bring Philippe. When she doesn’t even hesitate to say yes Y/n tells me we’d done it: she was finally more comfortable than overwhelmed.

“Y/N made me a better man,” I say after a couple drinks. We’re all sat around a fire outside the house. Despite it being a warm day of hiking the night had cooled significantly and we’d decided that boozy hot cocoas was the way to go. “I’ve lost my ways a lot of times as an adult. But she’s always been my north star. Even when we got back together she led me to being sober and getting my shite together.”

“Oh…” Philippe looks down at his drink. “Are you…”

“No,” I laugh, Philippe was the most-conscientious teen I’d ever met. “I got sober to get my life in order. But…it’s in order now. I haven’t done anything crazy for over a year now.”

A little before our wedding I decided I wanted to end my sobriety. It had been a thought for months, and I had waited before giving in. But I really felt more in control of my life. I faced my life decisions head on, I confronted my past with y/n’s help, and I didn’t think I’d lose control again. It had been a shaky first week but I was right. It was a proud moment for me.

“You two really have something special,” Bridget comments.

“They do,” Philippe adds. “I can’t believe you got your happy ending after so many years!”

“Yeah,” y/n says as I lay my hand on her thigh, palm up. “Y’know what they say about loving someone and letting them go.”

“I guess you did that with me,” Bridget says so quietly we almost don’t hear her. But out here in the countryside we do.

“We didn’t want to,” I remind her.

“No I know.” She smiles, it’s a bit sad. Philippe tugs her closer. I could see how much he cared for her in that small gesture. “I’m not saying it like that. I hear your story and I just imagine how different my life would have been if I was raised by my, by you two. I wouldn’t have this life. And I really like this life.”

She looks at Philippe and I feel y/n squeeze my hand. She often said they reminded her of us when we were younger; the kind of love you’d do anything for.

“But you two loved me enough to let me go. To let each other go. It’s fucking sad but it’s beautiful. Life’s weird.”

“Here here,” Y/N raises her nearly empty cup of hot cocoa. “Life’s weird, sad, beautiful, but lately my life’s been full of so much love. I wish I could sell all the excess, I think I could solve a lot of world problems with it.”

“Wow,” I lean over and kiss the top of her head. “That’s one hell of a speech.”

“I have a speech,” Philippe stands, a little tipsy, and clears his throat. Bridget rolls her eyes but they shine for him. “Bridget you’re the love of my life. Since we were 13. But Harry and Y/N, I think I love you too. Ever since we were 15, I’ve watched Bridge struggle for answers about her past. And you two have given her all the answers, welcomed her—and me actually, into your lovely life. I’ve watched her become old Bridge but even more confident. I’m falling harder for her these days. And I can’t thank you guys enough.”

“Aw Philippe come here,” y/n lets of my hand to walk around and give him a hug. How quickly strangers became family.

Bridget grumbles about being left out and joins the hug. Soon I join in too. I want to create a mold of this moment, I think as I squeeze them against me, I’d make it out of plaster and let it dry. Any time we wanted, we could always find our way back to this moment here.

Age 40:

Y/N and I watch our daughter cross the stage. Beside us are our parents and in front of us sits Bridget’s parents and her sister. She has a whole army cheering for her. This was the first milestone event we could all really show up for, and show up we did.

“I can’t believe this,” I was so proud of her. I know the kudos went to her parents, and herself, but I beam with pride. Honestly Bridget could spin in a circle in front of me and I would be a proud dad.

“We need to get photos,” mum leans over and says so seriously, as if we hadn’t planned on getting a million already.

We have a framed picture in our hall, Y/N and I on our wedding day, our daughter in between us. Her graduation photo is definitely making it. She makes fun of this wall, calls it the Styles hall of fame, and I never mention it but she always lingers a few second longer in front of the photo of the three of us.

I do too.

“It makes me so sad you won’t be so close to me anymore,” my mum tells Bridget later. We’re all piled in our flat, drinks and celebratory cake in everyone’s hands.

It reminds me of mine and y/n’s 40th birthday, we had gathered our family and friends here and it was some of their first times meeting our daughter. Today is more intimate, and focused on Bridget.

“I know it makes me sad too, but I’ll be here often, visiting Philippe.”

“Only visiting Philippe?” I raise a brow.

“Is there someone else I’m supposed to be visiting?” She mirrors my raised brow.

As Bridget’s gotten more comfortable, me and her could banter for hours if you let us, it’s one of those things that brought us closer together—having the same sense of humour. It’s allowed us to have just as deep heart-to-hearts, a handy joke always close to the surface.

Y/N always says seeing me like that, thoughtful and silly, reminds her of the boy she fell for. I can’t deny that I’ve been feeling closer to my 20 year old self than my 40 year old self lately.

“She’s too cheeky,” Bridget’s mum says. “But I have to say I’ll be glad to have her back.”

Lou, Bridget’s sister, was moving to Wales. Apparently she wanted to know more about her background, and take a trip with her bio mum to visit her bio dad.

I think Bridget was moving back to Coventry to keep her parents’ loneliness away; she said she would commute to Birmingham for school. Even though she got accepted into law schools in London, going to a uni close to her parents just showed me how close she was to her parents. It was a bittersweet feeling.

“I’ll have somebody to watch cricket with again,” her dad says.

“Ohh,” Bridget throws her sister a side-eye. “I love cricket…”

We all laugh at her complete lack of concealing her true feelings.

Later that night, it’s just Bridget’s parents and us. The kids are on the balcony talking.

“I know we’ve said it before,” I say after a long silence. We’d just been watching the kids talk and laugh outside. “But I want to say thank you again.”

Bridget’s dad shakes his head. “It was the greatest pleasure of our lives getting to raise those two girls.”

He looks over at his wife and they smile at one another. Seeing them interact, I’m grateful that somehow fate had led us to them. While Y/N and I were figuring life out, while I fucked up a lot of things, she was raised on a steady and stable foundation.

“She’s incredible,” I murmur. “She’s gonna be a lawyer. She’s going to change the world.”

“She sure will,” her mum says. “We should be thanking you two. For giving us Bridget. I know it wasn’t easy, you told me you thought about her nearly every day. But we can’t imagine our lives without her.”

We sit in a comfortable silence, looking out at the kids until they notice and start to ask questions through the glass.

“She’s happier,” her mum says smiling at Bridget and Lou exaggerating their words through the glass. “She stopped being like this before she left for uni. We thought we lost her but…I think everything worked out for the best.”

Y/N glances at me. Her eyes crinkle when she finds me looking at her first, her eyes steady me as she says what I was thinking, “I think so too.”

Age 45

Your pov: “When did she say she would be here?”

“6?” Harry says for the tenth time.

“It’s 6:20 do you think something happened? She hasn’t texted has she?”

“My love,” Harry puts down the cutlery he was arranging on the table and holds my face in his hands. “They’re driving from Coventry, they probably hit some traffic.”

“Maybe I should call her?”

Harry sighs and squishes my face.

“Don’t! You’ll make more wrinkles.” I warn.

“I love your wrinkles,” Harry kisses my forehead right where the pesky wrinkles had been growing deeper over the last few years despite the additions to my night routine.

Harry always said our wrinkles were just the stories of our lives showing through. I told him to get himself undereye cream.

“You don’t think I’m aging handsomely?” He strokes the moustache he started growing last year. At this age, even I couldn’t deny it made him even more attractive.

“Well it’s no good if you’re ageing handsomely and I age like a troll.”

“I will love you if you age into a troll.”

“But will you love me if I turn into a worm?”

“Do you even have to ask? I’d buy you the best soil and keep you in a beautiful pot.”

“You wouldn’t take me fishing?” I ask. He sighs. Last year while we were taking a trip up north for Lou’s wedding, we’d gotten into a fight and when I asked him the question while he was still stewing he said he’d take me fishing. It had, ironically, broken the iciness of his anger and we’d laughed about it so hard he’d nearly had to pull over.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he wraps me into his chest nearly suffocating me.

I’d spent half my life with a lot of difficulties, but life now felt easy compared to it. I had the privilege of getting older with the man I adored, got to watch my daughter flourish as an adult and a lawyer, watch her get married to the love of her life, and all the while live comfortably in the heart of this city I called home.

When Bruno starts barking though, I gasp and push myself off of Harry, “that’s them!”

Bruno continues to bark as I rush to the door. We’d got him a couple years ago as a pup and I can’t believe it had taken us that long to get a dog. He filled our lives with laughter and long walks. We loved him.

“Down.” I say to him. I open the door and hold my hands out while Bruno runs in circles beside me.

“Ahhh sorry we’re late!” Bridget steps into my hug and I tug Philippe’s hood so he can join. Bruno goes for Philippe when they walk in, he’d gotten obsessed with him after Philippe took care of him while Harry and I took an anniversary trip last year.

“Where are my hellos!?” Bridget says to Bruno and he barks, standing on his back legs to paw at her leg.

I hadn’t seen the two of them since March, that was 6 months ago. It had been their wedding, and they’d gone on a month long honeymoon after that, after which Harry and I had taken time off to road trip around Europe with Bruno, and then time had just zipped by.

After a hearty dinner, Harry and I carry out the birthday cake we’d been hiding.

“You didn’t have to do this!” Bridget fans her face but we treat it like we do any special occasion, plus making up for all the ones we’d missed. We get photos and exchange presents, she cries reading the cards and the whole time she says she had a present for us.

It’s a small bag, Harry and I guess that it was something for Bruno but when we take out a box it doesn’t sound like much when we shake it.

“Is this a prank gift? There’s nothing in it?” Harry asks.

“Open it!” He was making me antsy.

“You open it,” he hands me the box. Bridget and Philippe stare intently at my hands.

I undo the bow and slowly open the box. There’s a small square of tissue paper, and then a piece of paper. I remove both but something catches my eye.

I flip the paper over and stop breathing.

“Is that-“ Harry stops talking too. We stare at the piece of paper in our hands. It looks so much like one I had held 28 years ago. But it’s not.

“Bridge,” I look up at the couple. The parents-to-be.

“We’re having a baby,” Bridget says. Philippe and her are gripping hands and I throw everything off of me to launch myself at her.

“A baby!” I hear Harry say and joining us. “You’re having a baby! Y/n!”

“I never thought we’d be grandparents,” I look up at Harry.

“Those wrinkles were coming in for a reason,” he teases.

We never did have any other kids. Quite frankly, neither of us wanted any. When we first got together we were just starting to get comfortable with the reminder that we had a daughter out there and we could talk about her freely with each other. It felt like having a third person in our little family.

After Harry proposed, while we planned our wedding, we talked about it but we never thought it felt right. We both had first marriages where a lack of conceiving had just put a strain on the relationship we didn’t think we needed. We’d also felt like it was betraying something, before we met our first child.

When Bridget did reach out, it became about catching up on lost time. And then with her in our lives we knew what we suspected all along. We had each other, and that was enough. Bridge was our bonus. And getting to be aunt and uncle to our nieces and nephews it was enough. It was a full enough life.

We never even dreamed in our 20s we’d get to be parents and now we would get to be grandparents! I never realized until this moment that I wanted this. Really wanted it.

“Do you know the gender?” Harry asks.

“No,” Philippe answers. “We were thinking of doing one of those reveal parties? But not for a couple months.”

“Wow,” my hands drift down to Bridget’s belly and I remember I had something. I leap away from the group and find the box in my closet, it’s painted pink with random collages from old magazines. It hosts old diaries, photos, a hospital bracelet, and an ultrasound.

“This was you once,” I show her the picture when I get back. “I carried you like that once upon a time.”

She takes it with teary eyes, holding it close to her face to make out the shape of her. She hands it to Philippe and grabs my hands.

“I’ve thought about it before, but when I got pregnant I couldn’t wait to tell you-“

“She kept telling me I had to make a trip out to London just so she could give you the news.” Philippe interrupts, eyes scanning the ultrasound still.

“No really,” Bridget laughs. “I did. It’s like I got this new perspective.”

She puts my hands on her belly and covers mine with hers. I feel everything at once then, all the heartbreak I ever went through to get here.

“I can’t imagine giving this baby up. And it’s barely 3 months. What you were willing to do to give me a better life-“

She breaks off and Philippe squeezes her shoulder. I watch my daughter try to gain control of her emotions. I remember when I was pregnant with her, anything would set me off.

“It must not have been easy. After carrying me like this for 9 whole months. Thank you-“ she looks up to where Harry’s standing. I barely register his hand on my shoulder. “Thank you as my mum and dad, for making the hardest decision I can imagine ever making, so I could have something you knew you couldn’t provide.”

I reel my tears in, save them for later that night in bed while Harry holds me tight against him.

Right now I kiss my daughter and tell her what a good mother she will make. I tell her and Philippe how proud I was of them, how excited, how wonderful this was.

Age 46

The day we meet our granddaughter is seared into my brain. We get the call at 8:35pm, Harry and I were staying in a B&B in Coventry despite Bridget’s mum insisting we stay with her. We’d been here all weekend, booked it all week, not wanting to miss Bridget’s delivery date.

“Y/N she’s here,” her mum whispers into the phone. Her voice is filled with joy and giddiness. “She’s here.”

“We’re coming,” I say. Harry’s already at the door and we rush out into the night to see our granddaughter.

She has the perfect little face, and when she finally wakes up I gasp when I see Harry’s eyes looking back at me. I turn to him, to see if he noticed, but he’s teary-eyed and gazing at the baby in awe. I soak it in for a second, imagining this exact look if we’d kept our baby so many years ago.

Bridget’s parents had given us the room, to give us a moment alone, and I can’t be more grateful. Bridget encourages us to hold her and as her soft body is pressed into my body I let out a sob and hand her over to Harry. I excuse myself and step outside the room.

Lou’s kids sit on the floor outside, playing with whatever toys are spilling out of a miniature backpack. I focus on the flashy colours, trying to calm down, counting the number of toys falling out.

My life was a 180 from 10 years ago. This moment would go down in our history books as one of the best days of our lives.

But I can’t deny the bittersweet. The experience threatens to push me into the bitter past of not even getting to hold Baby Bridget. But with it comes an undeniable sweetness of getting to experience this now.

I take a deep breath and walk back in. Harry and Bridget stop mid-sentence and turn to me. Bridget’s face is streaked with tears, Harry’s looks concerned but I smile. He sits with the pink bundle to his chest and I ache.

“Don’t look so obvious you were talking about me,” I try a joke.

“Are you alright?” Bridget asks.

“May I hold her?” I ask in return.

I sit on the edge of the bed and she’s placed in my arms; she’s perfect. Just as perfect as Bridget must have been.

“She’s got Philippe’s hair,” I gently stroke the wispy blonde strands.

“She’s got my eyes, her grandpa’s eyes.”

I look at Harry. And he catches the stricken look on my face when Bridget tips forward and whispers to her baby.

“Look baby, this is your mumma’s mum, and your mumma’s dad. You’ve got his beautiful eyes. Say hi to grandma!”

My throat tightens. “Bridge.”

She leans away, her eyes dart between us. “I know I call you Y/N and Harry. It made it easier at first but…you are my mum and dad. Even though I have another pair. You are my mum and dad. And I want her to know you like that.”

“Oh love,” Harry leans down and kisses the top of our daughter’s head. She keeps her green eyes trained on me, grasping my hand that’s wrapped under her baby’s.

I mouth a thank you, my voice couldn’t pass through the block in my throat. She squeezes my hand and it sets the baby off. Remembering when my nephews were this young, I just hand her back to Bridget knowing she only wanted her mum.

Harry and I stay in the waiting room. We couldn’t go home, even though we had spent our allotted time we had inside the room, we stay there.

We watch Lou’s kids as Bridget’s family gathers in her room. We stay as they fall asleep, draped over us. I remember when Taylor’s kids were this small, they would fall asleep anywhere.

We talk in whispers, I don’t remember what about exactly. Mostly how excited we were. How there was so much to look forward to. How different our lives looked a decade ago.

“One day we’ll tell our grandkids,” I remember Harry saying. “We’ll tell them all about us, how we met, how our love burned so bright it shone in the sky. We lost each other but our love was always there to guide us back home.”

“We’ll see them grow up, all the memories we missed.”

“We’ll change diapers.”

“We’ll change diapers,” I giggle, half-delirious by the lack of sleep. It was probably 2am and I was tired.

When I gaze up at Harry I remember him holding our granddaughter. I replace her with Bridget. For a minute I allow myself to imagine how that would have been.

“I think you would have made an amazing mum if we did things differently,” Harry whispers into my hair.

“You too.” I whisper back.

“An amazing mum? You think?” The edge of his lips tug upwards.

“Harry,” I warn. We had kids sleeping on us we were trying not to wake.

“I love you.” He says in response. “To the stars and back.”

On our drive home I can’t stop looking at him. I always wondered how it would be like to grow old with someone; when I was younger and watch my own parents celebrate anniversaries. And then when I was older and my first marriage was so rocky.

But thinking about it now is like a simple mathematical equation. You take two lives, two individuals, and you bracket them in love. You add an exponent—the decision to continue choosing each other. And you get a lifelong commitment. No matter the situation, no matter the challenges or the changes, you choose to choose each other.

His side profile lights up by an oncoming car. For a second he’s the same boy I feel in love with, a few more gray hairs, a few more wrinkles, and a moustache. But he’d always be the boy I followed out to the roof, who held my hand in our high school hallway, the one who turned an I into a we when I got pregnant, I see the man I had coffee with after a run-in at the Whole Foods, I see the broken heart from a harsh life sitting on the steps of a church, I see a bookworm, I see a father, a husband, and now a grandfather. I see the one person who knows me like the back of his hand. The one I am home with always.

“What is it?” Harry asks as we pull into our b&b. “Have you been asleep this whole ride or have you been staring at me?”

“Staring at you?” I ask. “You think I was staring at you the whole ride?”

“Well you were really silent. And facing me

“I was thinking.”

“About me?”

“Why are you so desparate!? Do I not show you enough love regularly?”

“I could always use more,” Harry looks half asleep as we reach our door.

“The people are right: you give someone a hand and watch as they take the whole arm,” I tease.

“When you gave me your hand, I made you a wife.” Harry retorts.

“Ooh,” I poke him. “I have to say that’s a good comeback for being half-asleep.”

Harry grins back. “You keep me sharp.”

“And you keep me happy. Now open the door so I can stop freezing out here!”

We walk into the warmth of our b&b.

For so much of our lives, our past decisions haunted us. We let so much go. Now life was repaying us, returning it all back, with interest.

***

In a small b&b in the middle of a town called Coventry, two lovers crawl into bed. They’d just become grandparents and they carry an exhausted buzz about them as they try to fall asleep. They’re both thinking of the other, of their daughter, of the tiny bundle they held in their arms today.

Some 20 minutes away their daughter lays in a hospital bed, an exhausted buzz putting her to sleep. She dreams of her mother who gave her up, how she had found her parents in the end, and dreams about the kind of mother she’ll be.

A few doors down lay her newborn daughter, she doesn’t dream of much, not yet, but she’s in for a lifetime of love.

Most of life is what we made it. Y/N and Harry loved deeply enough to make it.

———————————————

TAGLIST: @quinnwritezz @unknownnbihh @dilfhrrys @umadirectioner @hermionelove @anonymous-91 @meganxfddf

[dyinglikenarcissus]

Staying Home

Steve’s best girl has been sick before but not like this. He’s determined to be the best stay at home doctor boyfriend he can be.

Thank you so much @longingstormysoul for the inspiration. It’s not exactly what you requested but I had the flu and I kind of weaved this story into that.

Warnings: None really. Just fluff and stuff but this blog it still 18+. No funny business

Plagiarism isn’t cute. Don’t do it.

Like, comments, and reblogs are all appreciated 😊

Master List

You wake up feeling a slight chill run through your body. You snuggle closer to you personal heater and pull the sheets up to your nose. You swallow and know that the flu season has finally gotten to you. You try to take a breath and find your nose hopelessly stuffed. You attempt it again and are thrown into a coughing fit.

“You okay, princess?” You hear Steve’s sleepy voice mutter from behind you, rubbing a hand down your side.

You sit up and take a sip of your water bottle you kept by the bed. You attempt to sooth your burning throat but it doesn’t help as it brings on another coughing fit.

“Hey. What’s wrong?” Steve asks again sitting up to rub your back.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” you wheeze, trying not to talk too loudly.

“Oh, princess. Come here,” Steve coos and presses the back of his hand to your forehead. “You’re warmer than normal,” he muses.

“But I feel so cold,” you whisper, pulling the blankets to your chest.

“Yup. Definitely a fever. Do you have any cold medicine?” You nod and attempt to get out of bed. “I’ll get it,” Steve assures you and presses you back down.

“It’s in that cabinet,” you sniffle and cough before continuing, “in the corner by the sink.

The upper one.”

“Got it. You sit tight and bundle up,” orders.

You’ve never been one to follow orders.

You slide out of bed to use the restroom and brush your teeth.

Steve steps into the bathroom and appears in the mirrors reflection after you spit out your toothpaste.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay in bed?” There’s a playful smirk on his face as he watches you through the mirror.

“I’m not the soldier in this relationship,” you whisper. You think the vibrations from your toothbrush loosened the congestion in your nose but your throat was still on fire.

“When you finish up, I made you some hot tea then I’ll take your breakfast order.”

“You’re gonna cook?” You chuckle and rub some face wash against your skin. Your boyfriend is good at almost everything. Cooking is not one of those things.

He grins at your words. “Panera’s a block away. Whatever soup you want. Sandwich. They have flat breads now. Apple for breakfast, chips for lunch, baguette for dinner.” You can’t help but giggle at his notion but you’ve gone days only eating at Panera before. Sadly.

A day of Panera sounded amazing.

“And I made you a virtual doctors appointment. They’ll call in an hour. Just wanna make sure I don’t have to go on a murderous rampage to find a cure for the love of my life.” You giggle and it turns into another coughing fit.

“You’d go on a murderous rampage for me?” You smile once you regain your voice.

“Well…Bucky and Loki would. I’d go along to keep them in line.”

You smile at his words. “Thor can’t even keep Loki in line. What makes your think you can?”

“Hey! Who kicked Hitler’s ass across the continental US?” You shake your head and try not to laugh to hold back the coughs. “You done making yourself look beautiful? Get back in bed, princess.”

“Beautiful?” You huff, looking yourself over. You felt anything but beautiful but you’d take it.

You slink back into the bed with Steve on your heels. He tucks you in before sitting on the edge of the bed to take you meal order. It may be breakfast time but some chicken noodle soup sounded amazing. Stevie did say to order for the day…

You giggle at the array of items in your cart by the time you pass Steve’s phone back to him.

“Soup, salad, a whole baguette, a kitchen sink cookie? What is that?”

“It’s got everything but the kitchen sink,” you smile. They normally sell out at lunch so you’re staking your claim early. “What are you getting?”

“Breakfast sandwich, turkey sandwich, ham sandwich,” Steve recounts. “And I’m getting one of these cookies, too.” You smile and Steve presses a kiss to your forehead. “Take some meds, princess. And get some sleep. I’ll be back before you know it.” You nod and obey his direction as he walks out of the bedroom and the apartment. You sip you tea and scroll through your phone for a minute before the NyQuil kicks in and knocks you out.

You wake up to Steve hot body wrapped around you as he dozes, spooning you comfortably on the couch. At least it would’ve been comfortable. You would’ve normally loved it.

You felt completely stifled.

“Stevie, too hot,” you whine and attempt to press away from him.

He groans and stretches before muttering a soft “What’s wrong?”

“You’re too hot,” you whimper trying to struggle out of the throw blanket.

“Calm down. I’ll help you.” He untangles you and tosses the blanket to the chairs. “Better?”

You hum positively.

He sighs and you hear music playing from the TV. “We fell asleep?” You ask as you crack your eyes open to see the credits playing from the movie you were watching.

“You’ve seen Avatar enough times to know all the lines. We didn’t miss much.” You hear the smile in Steve’s voice as he rubs your stomach softly.

You giggle and sing along to I See You with your croaky sick voice. Steve laughs and rolls on to his back. Well, as much as he can on the crowded couch.

“How you feeling, princess?”

You yawn and nod. “A little better. I’m enjoying just being home with you. Sucks I have to be sick.”

“I’m enjoying the vacation,” Steve yawns. “What are we watching next?” He goes back to the Disney+ menu to scroll through your recommendations.

“The Orville! Or Miraculous Ladybug! Are there new Miraculous episodes?”

Steve chuckles. “Let’s check. Shit, looks like they uploaded the rest of season 5.”

“Run it, Cap!” You grin.

“Popcorn?”

You nod and get up to go to the kitchen.

“Take some cough medicine while you’re up,” Steve instructs.

You sigh and but follow his orders. You were getting better under Dr. Rogers supervision so you couldn’t knock him. You just had a bad cough and a migraine that wouldn’t go away no matter what medication you took. But all your other symptoms cleared up in a couple of days.

He had to be doing something right.

You toss a bag of popcorn in the microwave and look through the pile of pills for your cough meds.

You grab two bottles of water and deposit them on the coffee table when there’s a knock at the door.

“Who’s that?” Steve mutters narrowing his eyes.

“Maybe Amazon?” You shrug. You start to walk over to get it but Steve easily over takes you.

Doesn’t stop you from peaking around him to see who it is.

It’s just Bucky.

“What are you doing here?” Steve greets.

Of course he’d be the only one brave enough to come visit when you’re this sick. Super soldier immune systems are no joke.

“Just came to check on you two,” Bucky grins as Steve lets him in.

“Hey, Buck,” you smile. He pulls you into a hug and presses a kiss to your forehead. It was his standard greeting for you. It always felt so warm and comfortable.

“Sorry for the mess,” you whisper.

“You’re sick, doll. Don’t apologize,” he sighs and follows Steve to the living room.

“How’s it going? Getting any better?”

“From when I first got sick, way better,” you smile.

“She still has a bad cough and gets random fevers,” Steve sighs, pulling you into his lap after you bring back a bowl of popcorn. “But one day at a time.” You nod and snuggle into his embrace.

“You two will never stop being disgusting,” Bucky sighs watching you as he falls into the arm chair. “As much as I love you, I didn’t come by just to check on you, doll face. Stevie. Wanna go to Istanbul?”

“No,” Steve states firmly.

“Nat’s in Brazil and Sam’s in California. I don’t have back up.”

“You can’t throw a stick without hitting a super powered being. Go find one of them.”

“Steve, are you seriously saying no?”

“Yes.” Steve states resolutely. “My best girl is sick. I’m not leaving her like this.”

“Stevie, I’m feeling much better. You don’t have to stay behind because of me-“

“No, princess. Buck. I’m retired. Which means I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I love you, you know I do, but I don’t want to go. I want to stay right here and take care of my princess. Any other time, I’d suit up but right now, she needs me.”

Bucky looks between you and Steve. “Okay,” Bucky says simply.

“Okay?” Steve asks, leaning back on the couch and pulling you along like a security blanket. Bucky would say whatever he wants to Steve but he watches his language around you.

“Yeah, I get it. I’ll ask Okoye or track down that Moon Knight fellow. He hangs out in the Middle East sometimes.”

“You have so many options,” Steve smiles. “I have to draw a line somewhere.”

“Or we’ll just keep dragging you out and it’ll be like you never stopped,” Bucky sighs, leaning back in the recliner.

“When are you leaving?”

“Couple of days.”

“Then you can watch a couple of episodes with us. Want some popcorn?” Steve pushes the bowl closer to his best friend.

Bucky stayed for a few hours, took a nap, ate dinner, then said goodnight.

You turned on Steve the second the door closed. “You don’t have to stay behind because of me.”

“I’m not doing it because of you. I’m doing it because I love you and I don’t want to leave you alone while you’re sick. I’m going to marry you one day and that’s part of the vows, isn’t it?” He smirks and you’re sure your fever came back because you suddenly feels faint.

The two of you didn’t talk about marriage often but when you did, you alway felt flushed and flustered.

“Come on, my little princess. Let’s get to bed early. You’ve had an eventful day.” He scoops you up by the backs of your thighs and carries you to the bathroom to wash up for bed. You both brush your teeth and shower together, just like you’ve done all week.

And you end it all curled up in Steve’s strong arms. You’re quickly getting used to this.

“I like having you home,” you sigh as he holds you against him.

“I like being home. I could really get used to this.”

“This is what retirement actually looks like, baby,” you smile.

“I think I might actually do it one day.” You hear the smile in Steve’s voice making you giggle.

“I know better. The second I start feeling better, you’ll be back out there on them streets.”

“You aren’t feeling better, are you?” Steve questions and presses you down on your back to get a better look at you. You let out a fake cough. “That’s what thought.” He presses a soft kiss to your lips and you can’t help your smile.

“One more?”

“Spoiled little princess.” But he happily obliges.

“I’m your spoiled little princess,” you remind him.

“I guess I have to keep taking care of you.”

You nod in agreement. “And keep giving me cuddles and kisses?”

“And keep giving you all the cuddles and kisses you could ever need.” He presses another kiss to your lips and pulls you back into his embrace.

You lie in his arms for a moment. “Stevie, I really am feeling much better,” you insist.

He hums softly but ignores you otherwise.

“It’s true. I barely have a cough anymore…”

“I don’t care what you have to say, I’m not leaving.” You giggle softly and snuggle into his arms.

For the first time in your almost two year relationship, he said no to saving the world. For you. You can’t keep the smile off of your face as you fall asleep in the only place you want to be: in Steve’s arms.

Master List

[homeofthelonelywriter]

Let's call it Fate | Part 15

(A/N) Who wants my uterus? I'm done with that thing. Also, yes this is a reference to what happens to Terzo. :)

Pairing: Cardinal Copia x Reader (no Y/N)

Warning: google translate translations, abusive parents (especially mother), arranged marriage, age gap, bullying, talk of grandparents and death of a grandparent, mistreatment of Ghouls, threats, angst, fluff, kissis, bit more spice

Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15

The moment was quickly interrupted by Papa Secondo softly clearing his throat. Both you and Copia quickly turned to look at him, a blush covering your cheeks.

“As much as I hate to interrupt this moment-” his tone suggested that he very much enjoyed it. “-I assume that means that you two are going to take care of Primo tonight, si? Great! I’ll be in my chambers if you need something. His medicine is on the table.” He started to walk to the door, before turning around again and calling out to Copia. “È quella giusta, vero? Sei fortunato che sia completamente innamorata di te, altrimenti la prenderei per me.” 

Copia chuckled before pulling you closer to himself, a dangerous spark in his eyes, as you got the feeling that whatever the older Emeritus brother had said, was about you. “Provaci, caro fratello, e ti taglio la testa.” Secondo laughed, making you glance at Primo, who thankfully didn’t stir in his sleep. “You know I like the challenge, little brother. Anyway, good night.” And with those words, Papa Secondo left the room.

You turned to look at Copia, an eyebrow raised. “Do I want to know?” Copia snacked both arms around your waist and pulled you close until your noses were almost touching, your chest pressed to his. “He said that if you weren’t so in love with me, he’d take you for himself.” The thought that any of the other brothers, hell, anyone else, would desire you like that had never crossed your mind. And you didn’t know if you were supposed to be flattered or scared.

“What did you say?” His lips found their way to the column of your throat, where they ghosted over your skin, a smile pulling on them. “I said that if he tried, I’d cut his head off.” A quiet moan escaped your lips at his words, and as if to emphasize what he’d just said, he bit down on your skin, hard enough to leave a mark but not enough to break the skin. You never knew this possessive side of Copia, but you had to admit that you liked it.

Before either of you could take it further, Swiss and Dew returned. A very quiet Dew and a very smug Swiss when they noticed the position you were in. You would've hit him if the taller one hadn’t been carrying a very comfortable-looking couch. Softly. Instead, you glared at him, watching as he placed the furniture down, the blanket, book, and cloth all on top of it. Dew was trailing behind him, wheeling in a small cart with everything else on it.

Once the Ghouls had placed everything where you wanted it, you pulled away from Copia and hugged both of them, thanking them quietly. “We also told the kitchen to prepare some chicken noodle soup. He gathered the vegetables from the greenhouse. I hope you don’t mind.” You were surprised when Dew spoke up. “No, of course not. Thank you so much. Both of you.” Dew nodded and turned, heading for the door, but Swiss stayed for a second longer.

“You gonna be okay?” You nodded, forcing a smile onto your face. “Copia is going to stay with me; I’ll be fine.” Swiss nodded, hesitating, before handing you a slip of paper. “My number if you ever need something.” You couldn’t help but throw your arms around his neck, thanking him again. He returned the hug, before pulling away gently and leaving. You stayed there, rooted to the spot, until Copia pulled you out of your thoughts. “Come, let’s get comfortable, si?”

The night was spent mostly awake, with a few short naps sprinkled in between. When you weren’t next to Primo, either standing or sitting on the side of his bed, you were lying on Copia, your head on his chest as his hands softly caressed your back. You tried reading but found that you couldn’t concentrate on it, so instead, Copia took to read it aloud. You were still struggling to pay attention, but his voice was enough to keep you calm.

By the time the sun was rising, you could barely keep your eyes open, but at the same time, you couldn’t help but startle awake every time you started to fall asleep. Thankfully, the replacement came in the form of Papa Secondo and Terzo. When they ushered you out, Copia didn’t even try to get you to walk, instead, he picked you up and carried you back to his apartment, where he fell onto the bed with you. You had never fallen asleep quicker.

When you woke up, everything felt wrong. It was too hot, and there was a slight pounding in your head. The light streaming in from the windows was too bright, and you weren’t sure what time zone you were in. Beside you, you heard a deep and sleepy groan. Copia had one warm thrown over his face, effectively shielding his eyes.

“Amore…I think I’m too old to stay up all night.” You chuckled and pulled yourself closer to him, resting your head on his chest as you gazed up at him. “I know…but thank you for doing it. I’m glad I wasn’t alone.” Lightly lifting his arm, he blinked down at you, a soft smile on his lips. “Anything for you, cuore mio.”

After resting for a few more minutes, both of you got out of bed. Slowly, hand in hand, you shuffled to the kitchen, where Copia brewed coffee for the both of you. While waiting, you checked the time and realized it was already past lunch. You missed the lessons that morning. A silent curse escaped you, catching Copia’s attention. “What is it, amore?” Instead of answering, you just held up your phone and let him read the time. But instead of panicking, Copia just shrugged and returned to the coffee machine.

“I assumed we’d be sleeping in, so I asked Secondo to excuse us for today.” You frowned. “When? I don’t recall you doing that?” Copia chuckled as he picked up two filled mugs and led you to the couch, where he sat down the mugs before pulling you down with him. “As we left. You were half asleep by then, so I’m not surprised you didn’t notice.” While talking, he pulled you closer until you leaned your back against his chest, sitting between his legs.

You spent the rest of the day lounging around in Copia’s apartment, only quickly letting Lila know that you were okay and you would see her soon. After Copia and you ate dinner, you decided to go and check on Primo, where you found Terzo, sleeping soundly on the couch while a very irritated Papa Secondo sat next to Primo’s bed and played some kind of card game with his older brother. The older man looked better already, and you couldn’t help but smile at him as he noticed your presence.

“Ah, tesoro, fratellino. We were wondering when you’d come back.” Primo waved you over, and you followed the invitation, standing next to his bed with Copia behind you, his hand on your waist. As soon as Papa Secondo noticed you two, he let out a relieved sigh and got to his feet, leaving his cards on Primo’s bed. “Thank Satanas. I’ll get this bastardo back to his quarters; you take over from here.” Without another word, Papa Secondo slapped Terzo over the head, waking him up, before dragging him out of the room. You couldn’t help but laugh as you watched, Primo also letting out a chuckle while Copia just shook his head.

“Those two told me what you did last night, and I want to thank you.” Primo looked at the pair of you, a grateful smile on his face. You waved it off, smiling right back. “Please, it’s the least we could do. How are you feeling?” Primo padded the mattress next to him, and you sat down, waiting for him to answer. “Much better, dear. Thank you. I’ll take the weekend to rest, but I should be fine starting next week. Although I can’t miss this week’s black mass. We are celebrating Secondo after all.”

You looked back at Copia, who nodded. “Si, it’s his birthday.” Immediately, your mind went into overdrive, trying to think of a good present for the former Papa, but you came up empty. “Don’t worry, amore. He hates his birthday, hates that we have to celebrate it. He wouldn’t care for a present anyway.” You nodded, although you couldn’t help but feel sad for him. No one should hate their birthday. At least now you had a mission: make Secondo enjoy his birthday!

Translations: È quella giusta, vero? Sei fortunato che sia completamente innamorata di te, altrimenti la prenderei per me...She's the one, isn't she? You're lucky she is utterly in love with you, or I'd take her for myself. Provaci, caro fratello, e ti taglio la testa...Try it, dear brother, and I'll cut your head off. amore...love si...yes fratellino...little brother tesoro...dear cuore mio...my heart Satanas...Satan bastardo...bastard

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Tags: @antoniamarie1989

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[callsign-joyride]

For some reason the link to request won’t work on my phone :( . Can I please request a Fall Fluff for Jake for prompt 15 where the reader is the one who is sick ?

Chicken Noodle Soup | Jake "Hangman" Seresin

Summary: Jake worries that you're having second thoughts about the relationship, only to find that the reason you haven't been responding is because you've been sick all day.

Content warnings: Fanboy being a menace, mentions of an illness/virus (NOT COVID-19), fluff

Prompt: 15. Sender lies next to the receiver (who is recovering from injuries or illness) and spoons them while staying awake to make sure their health doesn’t deteriorate overnight.

This was written for my Fluffy Fall Fantasy event. Feel free to send in requests!

Jake was stressed. You hadn’t been dating for very long, and you weren’t technically official, but it was Hard Deck night and you hadn’t responded to his text messages since last night. He was tempted to call you to check in and see if everything was okay, but he didn’t want to seem clingy and obsessive while it was totally possible that you forgot to plug your phone in the night before, or that you left it at home while you were getting ready for work.

“Honestly, man, I was thinking she’d ghost you a lot sooner than this,” Fanboy said as they were getting their things to leave. Jake didn’t even have the energy to react.

“You’re good at relationships, Rooster. Would it be weird if I drove by her house on my way home?”

“I don’t know, man. None of us have ever met her but maybe she’d be okay with it based on what you’ve said about her in passing.”

“Or maybe she doesn’t exist and he wanted to hide the fact that he’s not getting laid.”

“Dude, too far,” Payback said to Fanboy. Jake just shrugged it off and grabbed his bag before heading out to his truck and finding your address in his phone. You lived pretty close to base so it wasn’t a very bad drive at all. Right as he turned down your street, his phone started ringing and your name was on the screen.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to ignore you but I think I’ve got the flu or a common cold or something.”

“Do you want me to bring you medicine? I’m like five minutes from a CVS.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s Hard Deck night. You should be out with your friends. I can go another time. I think I’ll make some soup and go back to sleep.”

“Hard Deck night is a weekly thing and Coyote’s deployed so I kind of don’t want to go anyways. I’d have more fun staying in with you. Plus I’ve got a family recipe of chicken noodle soup and it’ll probably be the best chicken noodle soup you’ll ever have.”

After a moment, you sniffled and said that he could come over and that you’d leave your door unlocked. He walked into your house about an hour after he got off the phone with you with reusable bags on his arms. You were laying on the couch under a blanket while an 80’s movie played on the TV. 

“I brought medicine,” he said as he unloaded everything in the kitchen. You peered over the couch and smiled before taking a sip of your Gatorade that was on the coffee table. He came over to sit next to you after getting everything put away. It was almost unbelievable how sick you were, considering that you felt completely fine the day before. Your fever broke earlier in the day but you had been sleeping for most of it, living off of Gatorade and nearly stale crackers that you found in the back of your pantry. You changed the channel to something that you knew he’d like before nuzzling into the pillow that you brought from your bedroom.

“Poor thing. I’m gonna get your soup started. It should take about half an hour, okay? Let me know if you need anything.”

You nodded your head and scrolled through social media before going back to sleep for a little bit. The smell of the soup was what woke you up a little bit later, as Jake walked over and placed your bowl on the table in front of you. He made enough to last you a whole week, and he even offered to send you the recipe if you liked it. He was right, it was the best chicken noodle soup you’d ever had. Ten o’clock rolled around and even though it was considered early for you, you grabbed your pillow and blanket and started heading up the stairs. You were surprised when Jake followed you, considering that you had spent the few hours since you ate barely talking to each other. 

“I need to shower,” you said as you got your pajamas out.

“Okay. I’ll wait here.”

He had sent a few texts to the Dagger Squad group chat while you were in the shower, saying that he’d see everyone in the morning but that he had to take care of you. You took a big sip of water before crawling under the covers, Jake following suit.

“What are you doing?” You asked as he wrapped an arm around your middle.

“Staying with you, if that’s okay.”

“What if I get you sick?”

“I’ll take time off. Mav loves me so it’ll be fine. I don’t want anything to happen to you through the night.”

“Oh. Okay. Then yeah, you can stay. But don’t come crying to me if you get the man flu.”

“Trust me, I won’t. My dad taught me and my brothers better than to be dramatic so that a woman will take care of us.”

“That’s good,” you said with a chuckle.

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Summary:

Thanks to an especially virulent strain of the winter flu, his headstrong boyfriend’s voice crackles and rasps; punctuated by the occasional rattling cough that shakes him to the bones. His skin is pasty. His lips are chapped. Every flash of animation, it seems, comes at a cost of energy he just doesn’t have, and eyeing the general detritus of Kleenex boxes and lozenge wrappers that litter the wooden coffee table, Oliver’s hard-pressed to remember if he’s actually seen him eat.

Elio’s been slouched on their tan three-seater since the first light of dawn: swaddled in an oversized sweatshirt and some plaid pyjama pants as he rifles through various files of staff paper and his ubiquitous notebook. I’d much rather fail at originality than succeed in imitation, he’d declared last Wednesday, lamenting each scathing critique from his pompous review panel, yet much as Oliver appreciates his righteous indignation, his protective instincts can’t help but bristle at the fact he sounds utterly miserable, to boot.

Thanks to an especially virulent strain of the winter flu, his headstrong boyfriend’s voice crackles and rasps; punctuated by the occasional rattling cough that shakes him to the bones. His skin is pasty. His lips are chapped. Every flash of animation, it seems, comes at a cost of energy he just doesn’t have, and eyeing the general detritus of Kleenex boxes and lozenge wrappers that litter the wooden coffee table, Oliver’s hard-pressed to remember if he’s actually seen him eat. 

There’s been plenty of herbal tea to soothe his scratchy throat. Nasal spray. VapoRub. A regular dose of Tylenol from the Walgreens two blocks over. But nothing that falls under the category of food. An untouched plate of toast on the nearby bookcase bears out his suspicions, so Oliver raids the kitchen cupboards for a can of chicken soup, then heats the contents on their gas-powered stove; wincing in sympathy when Elio convulses with a gut-punch sneeze, swearing and hacking in alternate breaths.

Several minutes of snotty sniffing later, Oliver turns off the burner then pours the simple meal into an old Columbia Lions mug: the one Elio’d claimed for his own upon his initial move to the States. The other man’s squinting at a dog-eared composition sheet when he eventually returns to the couch, and Oliver figures his blocked sinus is the culprit as he pinches the bridge of his cherry-red nose; probably trying to banish the cobwebs.

“Scoot up, Patient Zero,” he says, sitting down carefully beside him, and when Elio blinks sluggishly his mercurial eyes are nothing but dull slits of colour beneath his heavy lashes; the light of their freestanding lamp shade apparently too much to bear. “Tell me again how you never get sick?” 

Elio summons a gimlet glare. “I'm not sick; I’m dying,” he groans - the edge of a wheeze rattling the vowels - but he accepts the mug all the same, and Oliver hums indulgently as he sweeps an unholy assortment of balled-up tissues into a neat little pile. 

“Your stubbornness is commendable,” he says, pleased to see Elio make short shrift of the steaming liquid, if not the noodles themselves. “But do yourself a favour and get some rest, yeah?"

“Un mal nécessaire.” A yawn: barely stifled. “I have to finish these -” 

“Not today you don't.” Oliver rescues the mug from his slightly-drooping hand. “Even us creatures of habit deserve a night off.” 

Elio smirks; slow and playful. “Is that so?” he says, nodding at the Sophomore Ontology coursework partially obscuring the living room rug.

Which, yes. Fair enough. But -

“I’m still new to the syllabus,” Oliver replies, nudging him gently with his knee. “Professor Johnson’s lesson plans were shoddy at best. You, however, have a fever of thirty-eight.” As the flush on his sunken cheeks can attest. “So don’t pretend you’re not ready to pass out from exhaustion.”

A grunt is the only acknowledgement he receives, and Oliver’s all set to try a different tack when Elio slumps sideways like a stringless marionette. It’s completely proprietary - the way he claims his unsuspecting lap as an ad hoc pillow - but Oliver’s quick to adopt his role as a piece of human furniture, uncaring of the knobbly shoulder blade digging exorbitantly into his thigh.

Little victories, he decides, and reining in a grin, smooths the messy curls from his maestro’s clammy forehead. 

“Do you need anything else?” he asks instead, the slim column of Elio’s neck spasming amidst his muttered grumblings. “A blanket? Some water? There’s a fresh bottle of vitamins in the bathroom cabinet…”

“Just your support in these harrowing times,” Elio murmurs, the arm around his middle snugging tighter, so Oliver follows his own advice as he drags a knitted Afghan over the curve of Elio's body - fishes a dog-eared copy of The King Must Die from between the sunken cushions - then crosses his legs at the ankles as he settles in for the duration.