#it did not even occur to me it could be her until oj pointed it out. it just felt like mion was acting super ooc.

[evendrierguys]

me and oj watched the 2008 live action higurashi movie last night and 24 hours later i am still not over how absurd it was. like first and foremost it follows the plot of onikakushi pretty closely all the major beats are there but it tries so hard to shove in as many things as possible from other arcs it's just. simultaneously so much and so little as an adaptation

[lfd072936]

Harlequin - Chapter 1

So here is the first chapter of the fanfic I posted about previously. It features a original female character I intend to be “Harley Quinn” later on, although this story is completely different from the traditional comic book one. This chapter barely has Arthur in it, but he will be featured a lot later (obviously).

Word count: 1788

Summary: a young woman named Lola Page starts working at a new wing in Arkham Asylum.

Warnings: none, except that this chapter has criminally little Arthur in it, but I had write a little bit of backstory/building.

@tiredwritersworld asked to be tagged (<3)

Chapter 2 link

Chapter 3 link

1.       Fresh Meat

She had been working at Arkham for little over a year now. She liked it although with most things she could make peace and be content no matter what cards she was handed. Of course this wasn’t what she wanted to do originally, she wanted to be a dancer, which she practically was up until a misfortunate misunderstanding (as her mother called it) put her in prison.

- What do you want to do after you get out? – her probation officer asked one week before her release.

- What do you mean? I’m a dancer, I dance… that’s what I’m gonna do.

- Lola, you know you cannot go back to your old company after what happened.

- So? This is a big city, there’s plenty of fish in the sea.

- Look… word’s got around. No sane person would hire you as a dancer. You have to come up with something more… realistic.

- So then what do you suggest? I am not trained in anything other than dancing, I have no skills. Should I sweep the filthy streets of Gotham so that you can check it off of a to-do-list, while telling me how much cleaning up other people’s shit is helping me to get back on my feet?

- Come on, there surely must be something that you would like to do.

The probation officer was too persistent to shrug off so after a few suggestions she agreed to try this job. The hospital was on such a staff shortage that it only took a 10-day training for an ex-convict who was sentenced for assault to start working there. Of course she was not allowed to do anything medical or touch any drugs, but she did help out with anything else she could from feeding to making the beds and mostly interacting with patients. She was placed in the eastern wing due to her past where the lighter patients resided, those who generally did not pose a threat to anyone other than themselves. Lola proved herself to be an excellent employee over the months, despite her criminal record no incidents occurred and she was adored by the patients she took care of and the feeling was seemingly mutual. She surprisingly had immense patience and gentleness towards them.

That day however she was called into her supervisor’s office out of the blue. She knocked on her door at around noon and stepped in confidently.

- Hey, Josie!

- Hey, Angel! Have a seat… - she sat down opposite of her supervisor, a sweet old lady with immaculate style. Lola always adored the intricate braids she could put into her greying hair. – How are things going?

- Amazing as always… you know me – she said with a wide smile.

- Yeah, yeah I do. So – she usually cut straight to the point – you’ve been with us for over a year now… - Lola heard the hesitation in her voice. Something was wrong.

- Are you letting me go, Josie? – her voice wasn’t worrying more confused.

- No, God no… listen the thing is… there was a situation over at west and I need to switch you up with someone.

- Sure, no problem.

- Yeah? – Josie raised an eyebrow.

- Absolutely. It’s even closer to my stop.

- But you know that the west is one of the more, well… problematic wings. And you will get an all new supervisor, new colleagues…

- That’s alright. I think I can handle it.

- Okay – she said with a slight surprised tone. – Thank you for being so understanding.

- No… - Lola leaned forward a bit – Thank you for giving me a chance for change.

The next week she started her shift at the notorious western wing. She was greeted by one of the nurses who was assigned to show her around, although it did not seem like she volunteered for it. Oh, how wildly different this part of the hospital was. Almost all rooms were for one person, the doors were made from metal and heavy latches protected the outside from anyone that was on the inside. Guards were patrolling the floors and almost all patients outside of their cell were at least handcuffed if not forced into a straightjacket.

The nurse led Lola up on one of the lesser used back stairs.

- This is the staff area – she continued her never-ending tale of dos and don’ts. – A little bit onward there is a kitchen and a room with some beds, although I heard that you’re not allowed to take any night shifts – Lola frowned. No she wasn’t, but why did everyone have to be aware of that? Why was her past such common knowledge even on a wing she never even entered before? – But sometime we do like to take naps. A little further back are the women’s restrooms and next to them the showers. Why they put them so far from the beds still baffles me… but make sure to always lock the shower with your keys especially if you’re inside, because we have some incidents from time to time.

- Wait… what kind of incidents?

- Those patients who manage to wander off are especially drawn to this place to give a little surprise visit.

- Oh… we never had anything like that. On my previous wing incident meant someone spilt their OJ – the nurse gave a mocking laugh.

- Welcome to the wild west, Page – Lola did not laugh though, if anything she wondered how can some patients just walk into a staff shower with all these safety precautions.

Their tour continued pretty smoothly, they walked and she talked on end. She finally halted in front of the entrance of the communal room.

- Now about some of our patients. The worst are Flynt, 7-foot guy, pure muscle. He is restrained at all times, but he sure likes to bite and if he spontaneously faints close to you, don’t try to catch him. Then there’s Marigold… she hates everyone younger than her, so more and more people every year, I would just avoid her all together. And last but not least, there’s Fleck. He is currently stable on his meds, but he has some authority over the other patients. If I were you I would put my sunshine and rainbows approach that might have worked back at your old wing aside and be little more tough or else this place will crush you, but… I would try to stay on Fleck’s good side.

- But why do the other patients respect him so much?

- How old even are you? – the nurse laughed again. She was rude, but Lola decided to just swallow it for now. – He is Arthur Fleck… the guy who killed Murray Franklin a while back. Ring a bell?

Lola’s face lit up. She never would have admitted it to anyone, but she adored that clown. She thought he was an icon, the face of the protests she desperately wanted to attend, but her mother forced her to stay in their spotless suburban house, that the garbage strike could not reach. Oh, and that television broadcast that she had the privilege to see live… brilliant. She did not condone murder, but he executed it so theatrical and with much flare. Honestly she wouldn’t mind someone killing her either, if it happened in such a stylish way.

- Wait up… you mean to tell me that you have the Joker in this wing? – she couldn’t hide her excitement.

- Yes, but why are you so happy about it?

- You never met a celebrity, huh? – Lola laughed. Now it was her turn to make the nurse uncomfortable and looked down upon.

- Stop laughing! – she hissed. – He’s not a celebrity, and trust me… you will be disappointed when you see him. Now get in, and do your job!

She forced a serious look on her face as they walked in. The room was more bleak and depressing than the one at her old wing, this one clearly had more insanity in the air. She could feel almost every patient looking at her, those at least who were aware of their surroundings, and it made her uneasy. She completed the tasks upon tasks given to her wondering which one could the Joker be, but she just couldn’t tell. Finally, she approached one of her colleague who’s face seemed familiar.

- Hey, which one is Fleck?

- Don’t look right away, but it’s the one who didn’t stop staring at you ever since you arrived – she said with a grimace on her face. – I mean the one by the window. – she had to correct herself, because most patients were still staring at Lola.

- I surely am interesting.

- Well, you know how it is… you’re fresh meat. – she returned the smile, because the worker had no wrong intentions, but being called fresh meat was not something Lola thrived on.

As promised she did not look at the window’s direction, but rather went back to doing her job, feeding patients, getting them blankets etc., but after a while she couldn’t help herself. Masking it as a simple glance to the clock on the wall above the man, she could finally look at him. The man was alone with nothing but a notebook in front of him, but at the moment he wasn’t focused on that. He was smoking and looking at her. He blew out some smoke as their eyes locked and took another drag. The nurse did not exaggerate; he really was a lot different than she expected. He was thin and frail, his face wrinkly, but that look… oh that was something to die for. He was practically piercing her with his gaze and she could feel blood rush into her cheeks. She quickly looked down unable to do anything else, but from the corner of her eyes she could see him smile with satisfaction. Bastard. It was so amusingly annoying she had to smile, but made sure to turn away, so he didn’t see it.

She went on with her tasks, being sent here and there around the floor. So far she wasn’t too impressed by this wing, how somber and grey everything was, despite the walls being painted to a pretty yellow color somehow the air was grey. But there was one positive thing: Arthur. She was desperate to talk to him, even though he surely was nothing like she expected, but it only made her more curious. How much did he change, how much did the meds tone him down, was that whole persona just for television? It was impossible to tell as of yet.

[wonduhhwoman]

quality time - kacchako secret santa

@mmmakus

read on ao3

Katsuki dropped his final box of things on the kitchen counter of his first apartment with a grunt. He glanced around at the bare apartment walls, then to the shitty pre-furnished living room that was also suspiciously vacant and harrumphed in agitation.

“Where is that shitty—”

As if on queue there was a loud crash outside of the front door followed by a jarringly familiar groan that would have made Katsuki groan himself had he not gotten on better terms with shitty Deku while in high school.

There was a boisterous laugh, a trademark of Uraraka Ochako.

“Sorry, Deku!” She sang. There was a faint jingle that must have been her searching for the apartment key, accompanied by her giggling to herself and saying, “Oops, wrong one!” Katsuki watched, unimpressed, as the doorknob jiggled as a result of her jamming the right key (hopefully) inside while trying to turn it at the same time. A moment later, Ochako was bursting through the door as if she had been using all of her weight and force to open it followed calmly by Deku. There was a beat up, old toaster in his arms and he was rubbing into the back of his curls like it had just fallen on his head—which might have been the case, considering her quirk.

“Hey, roomie!” She giggled, waving at Katsuki and rolling a sizeable suitcase into the entryway.

“Tch,” Katsuki offered as an acknowledgment of her greeting.

“Kacchan!” Deku chirped, clapping him on the back before placing the toaster on the counter. He then threw himself down on the couch like he owned the damned place—which he absolutely did not.

“Oi,” Katsuki growled, going up to Deku and digging his knuckles into his skull. Deku yelped, batting pathetically at the blonde’s hands in between laughs. “Get your lazy ass up and go get the rest of your girlfriend’s shit.”

Deku stiffened, glancing over at Ochako.

Katsuki raised an eyebrow, glancing over to regard his new roommate. She rubbed the back of her head, avoiding eye contact and pissing Katsuki off for not just getting to the point.

“What?” He barked.

“Kacchan—”

“This is the rest of my shit, Bakugou,” She grumbled, red faced and—oh. She was embarrassed.

Well.

Well, now he felt like a dick.

He’d initially been pissed off that she hadn’t been around because he wanted to see what they both had—appliances, tapestries, dishes, whatever—so that they could determine what they needed or what they did not need. But now he just felt terrible for being mad over that.

He eyed the toaster on the counter, feeling like his entire foot was in his mouth and that it was physically impossible for him to remove it.

An apology was bubbling up from somewhere inside of him, foreign and heavy and getting stuck in his throat. Logically he knew that it needed to be spoken, to show to her that he wasn’t trying to be a jerk—but Katsuki can’t remember the last time he verbally apologized to anyone.

So instead he grunted, meandering over to the kitchen and opening up the box that he had put up on the counter. If he didn’t pull out the high-end toaster his parents had gifted to him to replace hers, then she didn’t need to know.

The next day he went to the store to buy her dishes and a rice cooker—he told her that they were gifts from his parents for accepting to be his roommate.

A few days later and they’d thankfully gotten over their awkward start as roommates. And by them, Katsuki means just him. As in, he was the only one even worried about it in the first place. She had brushed it off almost immediately, a trait of hers that he’d always respected.

“Uraraka,” He barked, pounding on her door, “Get your ass up or we’re going to be late!”

“Ugh!” Came the muffled reply from inside her room, “I’m up!”

He rolled his eyes, trudging back to the kitchen to finish up the pancakes he’d been whipping up. He flipped the last of them onto the big ass pile he already had stacked up just as the door opened to her bedroom and Ochako stumbled into the bathroom sleepily.

“Tch,” He glowered at the clock, wondering if he should leave for the bus without her if she took too long. Not even five minutes later, just as he was putting the juice on the table, she emerged from the bathroom stretching and yawning. Katsuki averted his eyes when her shirt rode up.

“Oi,” He growled as she started inhaling the pancakes, “You’re gonna fuckin’ suffocate yourself!”

“Theef are delififuf!” She said through a full mouth of food. She swallowed just to beam up at him, “Are you going to make breakfast everyday, Bakugou? ‘Cause I could get used to this!” She poured herself a glass of OJ, using it to wash down her pancakes.

“I’m not your fucking slave,” He growled, sitting down across from her to dig into his own plate, “Make your own damned breakfast.”

“We could take turns!” She chirped.

“Whatever,” He agreed.

They ate and cleaned up and left quickly afterwards, taking the same bus until Ochako’s stop separated them. Ochako talked his ear off the whole time and it was irritating as fuck, but he only jammed his earphones in his ears until after she left.

She attempted to make breakfast the next day and nearly burned down the apartment in the process. She was banned from the kitchen unless it was to make toast or rice, and Bakugou prudently came up with a breakfast schedule so he could know what to make every morning.

Their first Saturday evening as roommates finds Katsuki trying to catch some shuteye after a long week of patrolling and paperwork. Just as he was about to snooze off, there was a soft knock at his door followed by an even softer, “Bakugou?”

He almost didn’t answer, but when she called for him again he could immediately tell that something was off. He grumbled his way over to his bedroom door, opened, and fixed Uraraka with a glare that would make anyone who wasn’t her piss their pants.

“What?” He barked, albeit with minimal heat. The look in her eyes was so sad and pathetic—it was hard to stay annoyed at being woken up when he was even more annoyed with her gloomy demeanor.

“Were you sleeping?” Ochako inquired, red faced. Bakugou realized belatedly that he had answered the door wearing nothing but his boxers. “I—uh, nevermind. You can—go back to sleep.”

“What’re you doin here?” He raised an eyebrow, just now noticing that she was dressed up for something nice. She was even wearing high heals, which was a rare occasion for the brunette who preferred much more practical shoes. “Thought you had a date with Deku.”

“Something came up,” She murmured, avoiding his eyes, “Villain attack, and—well…you know how he is.” Her eyes flicked up to his, “Sorry for bothering you, though. Go back to sleep.” She waved before turning away to head towards the living room.

“What did you want?” He growled, stopping her before she got too far.

She sighed, “It’s stupid.”

“Spit it out.”

Another sigh, “I was just wondering if you would like to watch a movie with me? You know. Have one on one roommate time? I could make some popcorn, and we could finish off the Oreos in the pantry…”

“Fine,” He said, “Let me change into pajamas.”

Ochako’s lips twitched in amusement, and Bakugou knew he was probably about to regret being kind. Like he always fucking does.

“You want to make this a pajama party?” She teased, “That’s adorable.”

“I take it back,” He snapped, “I’m going back to bed.”

He moved to shut his door, but her foot snuck in before he could.

“Nuh uh!” She protested, pushing on the door with alarming strength, “You already agreed! We’re having a pajama party.” She hummed to herself like she just had a brilliant idea, “If I let you pick the movie, will you paint my nails?”

Bakugou narrowed his eyes and stared at her for a moment. When she didn’t crack under his glare, he knew he was fighting a losing battle.

“Fine,” He barked again, “We’re watching Interstellar.”

Ochako grinned, “I love that one!” She removed her foot from his doorway and her grin was seriously starting to put strain on his eyes, “I’ll…meet you in the living room then?”

He grunted in affirmation, closing the door so that he could get dressed.

When he padded into the room wearing his black skull shirt and plaid pajama bottoms, he found her at the microwave waiting for the popcorn to finish. She was wearing an All Might t-shirt and sweatpants and she had pulled her hair back into a bun.

Katsuki went to the TV stand and rummaged through the drawers for Interstellar and popped it in just as she was bringing over the bowl of popcorn. They sat at opposite sides of the couch.

They hardly said a word during the actual movie, not that Katsuki cared. He preferred not talking sometimes. Glancing over at Ochako, he figured she was just as comfortable in the quiet. The only talking that occurred was when she asked him what color would look best on her nails and he picked out a deep red that went best with her skin tone.

Two hours into the movie, because he forgot how long the damned thing was, he peeked over at her to see that she was drooling all over her arm. There was popcorn in her hair and her blanket had fallen off of her. Katsuki grabbed the remote, turned off the Blu-ray player, took the popcorn bowl from her lap and pulled the blanket back over her shoulders. He turned the lights off in the living room and moseyed back to his own room to turn in for the night.

He had his first nightmare in this apartment four months into living there. They happened less and less as more time passed, but they always came back eventually. He woke up to darkness breathing heavily, and immediately flicked on his bedside lamp. Sitting up in bed, he threw off his covers and trudged out of his room and into the kitchen.

As he was reaching into the cupboard for a glass, a chipper voice called out, “Hey, Bakugou!” He nearly exploded the cup in his hands, and he chalks up his self-control at all the extensive quirk training he did at U.A.

“Fuck!” He yelled, rounding on Uraraka with murder in his eyes, “What the fuck, Uraraka?! Don’t startle me like that!”

The smile on her face fell as she took in his ragged appearance.

“You okay?” She asked, setting aside her laptop—it was two in the fucking morning, no wonder she always got out of bed at the literal last second—and meeting him in the kitchen. Her footfalls were loud as fuck. Go figure she’d only be able to surprise him when she’d been sitting in the same spot for literal hours.

“M’just getting a glass of water,” He grumbled, not wanting to talk about this right now. Or ever.

“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” Ochako pressed on, reaching out hesitantly to touch him. She stopped an inch away from his bicep as soon as she noticed him stiffen and dropped her hand back to her side. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“Shut the fuck up, round face,” He snapped, drawing himself out of her reach and angrily shoving the glass under the tap. It was a low blow pulling out the old nickname—one he hadn’t even bothered with all that long since she was able to gain his respect so quickly. Probably faster than anyone else in their stupid class. “I’m fine,” He tried again when he saw the gleam of incredulity in her eye, removing the glass from the water once it was full.

“It’s okay if you get nightmares, Bakugou,” Her assurance was laced with aggravation, which was probably the most effective kind of assurance that could be used on him, and her brows were pulled down in a glare. “If they make you feel weak, then you should know that I get them sometimes too. Now, look me in the eyes and tell me I’m weak.” She raised an expectant eyebrow.

Bakugou stared her down for a long while, the words getting caught in his throat because he knew that they would be a lie. Fuck her for having that sly card to play.

“You’re not weak,” He said honestly.

Her eyes softened a bit, and she was finally able to lay that comforting hand on his arm without him flinching. “And neither are you,” She said, squeezing his shoulder once before letting her hand drop back to her side.

He nodded, tears stinging at his eyes for whatever stupid reason.

“Still don’t wanna talk about it,” He said, bringing the glass of water to his lips and taking a sip in a vain attempt to disguise the emotion in his voice. He thanked every deity he knew of that she didn’t comment on it.

“Wanna blow something up?” She asked instead.

He snorted, nearly choking on the water. She patted his back while he coughed into his elbow.

“That a no?” She said before he could even recover, “Hmm. What about an emotional support animal? Koda always used to let his bunny spend the night in the girls’ rooms whenever we couldn’t sleep or had a nightmare. Actually really helped.”

Bakugou blinked at her as the last of his coughs died off.

“A cat maybe?” Ochako persisted with shrewd eyes, “You seem like a cat person. Plus cats are easier to take care of with a busy schedule.”

He continued to stare at her like she’d grown another head. Was she really suggesting that they get a cat together?

Ochako sighed, “You’re not giving me a lot to work with, Bakugou.”

“Where the hell would we keep a litter box?” He barked eventually, “We would need to get a shit ton of supplies for a furry little fucker.”

Ochako shrugged, “We’ll figure it out.”

“Fine,” He said, his voice hoarse but thankfully devoid of emotion, “But I’m not leaving you to pick out the damned cat by yourself. Knowing you, you’d pick out an ugly fucker just because you think its funny. I’ll be there to supervise.”

Her smile melted into something warm.

“I would do that, huh? You’ve been paying attention.”

Bakugou was thankful for the dark lighting and that she couldn’t see the way his face heated up.

“Shut up,” He growled, “We’re going tomorrow after work.”

“Deal,” She beamed.

“Get some fucking sleep, Uraraka,” He barked, setting his glass to the left of the sink. He crossed his arms while she gathered her things together, waiting for her to retire to her room before he trudged back to his own.

His mind was a lot calmer now as he got comfortable in his bed. He punched his pillow a few times before digging his head into it, staring into the darkness and perhaps imagining a pair of brown eyes staring back.

There was a knock on the wall behind his head.

“Good night, Bakugou,” Ochako’s muffled voice called out.

“Tch,” He responded, reaching up before he could stop himself to knock back.

He fell asleep in minutes.

A month later Bakugou was walking up the stairs to their apartment just as Deku was running down, nearly bulldozing him and the fucking eggs he’d picked up. Katsuki bristled as soon as the nerd’s massive shoulder bumped into his, nearly knocking him off balance.

“Watch it, nerd!” He barked over his shoulder as Izuku continued to descend outdoor staircase.

“Sorry, Kacchan!” He called back, waving in apology before continuing to book it out of the apartment complex.

Bakugou walked into the apartment grumbling about damned nerds and fragile eggs. Lord of Death and Havoc—Havoc for short and, God, he and Uraraka should never be allowed to name another living creature ever again—bounded towards him as he shut the door behind him. He snuffed, putting the bags of groceries on the counter before stooping down to offer the black cat his hand. Havoc’s big green eyes regarded him like he was a fucking idiot before turning her back on him.

Bakugou fucking loved that cat.

“Uraraka?” He called out, figuring she was here if Deku had been leaving, “What was Deku in a hurry for?”

Ochako didn’t respond, and normally Bakugou wouldn’t give a shit but somehow he knew that something was up. Like an idiot he forgot the groceries and walked over to her bedroom door. He knocked softly, remembering too late that he should probably ask if she was okay in there but not really sure how to do that without sounding like an idiot.

“You…uh,” He started, scratching the back of his head, “doing…good?” As he listened more intently, he could hear her sniffling. When she didn’t respond immediately, he figured that she probably just wanted to be left alone. “Alright,” He said, stepping away from her door awkwardly, “Just let me know if I need to beat Deku’s ass.”

The doorknob jiggled just as he halfway to the kitchen, and then Ochako was padding into the kitchen behind him with red eyes.

“He’s so—so obtuse, Bakugou!” She proclaimed, wiping tears away from her eyes angrily. She sat at the bar, watching him put away groceries as she started in on a tirade, “I tell him that I want to spend more time with him—and he just fucking nods as he goes off to respond to another villain incident that’s not even in his fucking precinct! I’m always second to hero work with him—which I always knew was the case. I thought I was ready for that because I just liked him so much, but I’m not! It sucks! And it sucks that nothing’s changing, because I just wanted this entire shitty situation to just change but it’s not and I can’t take much more of it! I don’t know what to do!”

Halfway through her rant Bakugou had leaned up against the fridge with wide eyes, dreading when she’d finally finish and he’d have to say something. And now that she finished, it’s just as he expected: he didn’t know what the fuck to say to comfort her. He was the last person that should be comforting someone in this kind of distress. It had taken three entire years at U.A. just for him to get decent at comforting people in need of help because of villain attacks or natural disasters or whatever the fuck else.

“Uh,” He started eloquently, shifting his weight nervously, “Have you…talked to Deku about these feelings?” If there was one thing that he knew about Deku, it was that the nerd was pretty obtuse about anything that didn’t revolve around hero work. Not that Katsuki was much better, but it was something that the blonde had actively tried to improve upon.

Ochako shook her head, a fresh wave of tears erupting from her eyes. Katsuki winced.

“No,” She cried, “I know exactly where that conversation is going to lead!”

Katsuki huffed—this was probably the one thing about Ochako that drove him crazy. She didn’t know how to chase her own happiness.

“To where?” He growled, stepping forward to lean over the counter to glare at her, “To you dumping that nerd so that you can have a more healthy relationship with him that doesn’t revolve around you constantly comparing his dedication to you to his commitment to his fucking job? To the both of you getting your heads out of your own asses so that your thoughts can air out enough for you to actually think of what’s best for the both of you? God, he ran out of here not knowing that there was even a goddamn problem because you won’t say anything.” He ran his hand through his hair in frustration, “Both of you are obtuse, Uraraka. Goddamn.”

His eyes flicked to hers, and he sighed when he saw that he had made her cry even more.

“Aw, shit,” He whispered, berating himself and pinching the bridge of his nose, “Uraraka—”

She shook her head. “Don’t let that be the first thing you ever verbally apologize for,” She said shakily, wiping tears from her eyes, “That’s…actually what I needed to hear. Thanks, Bakugou,” Havoc jumped up in her lap, and she began petting the cat mindlessly, “for never coddling me.”

He nodded, unsure. She said it was all fine and dandy, but she was still bawling her eyes out like he just killed her mother. His hand hovered over her shoulder for a moment until he thought better of it and brought it back to his side. He tapped the wood of the counter.

“Want me to grab some ice cream?” He inquired, watching her fingers thread through Havoc’s fur.

She nodded, biting her lip like that would stop the sobs from coming out.

“Alright,” He said, already retrieving his keys from the kitchen counter, “We’ll have a stupid pajama party, okay? I’ll be back soon.”

She nodded again.

When he returned, they popped in a movie and shared the tub of chocolate ice cream—although Ochako definitely devoured most of it. When she finished it off, she shoved her feet under his thighs to warm them up. And for whatever reason, he allowed it.

She and Deku broke up the next day, and she was a wreck for an entire week. But damned if he wasn’t proud of her for putting on a brave face and getting her ass to work and taking down just as much if not more villains than she usually did.

“Hey,” Ochako said on the bus not even six weeks after her break up with Deku. They hadn’t been able to snag a seat this morning, and they were crowded together amid the other passengers. “Can we train together sometime?”

Katsuki perked up, leveling her with a look of curiosity. He grinned down at her, pulling down on the handhold just to feel the muscles of his arm work. “You wanna rematch, pink cheeks?” He inquired, showing all of his teeth, “I’d love to know what tricks you have up your sleeve these days.”

“Hah!” She exclaimed, delighted, “I’m sure you would.”

“We could also train to use our quirks together,” He thought out loud, wondering when shitty Deku had rubbed off on him, “Bet we’d kick ass in a team-up.” He declared it easily, because it was the truth. Ochako said nothing and when he looked down to see what her deal was, she was gaping up at him with wonder in his eyes.

“What?” He barked, staring over her head so that he wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes.

Before she could answer the bus hit a pothole and she stumbled into him, her hand landing on his chest to steady herself. They were closer to each other than they had ever been before in the time they’ve known each other, and the warm line of contact of their bodies felt like a brand. All at once, his mind couldn’t focus on anything else. His cheeks burned, and he craned his neck so as to keep his face as far away from hers as possible.

“Ha,” She exhaled, her warm breath hitting the skin of his neck and he wondered if she could feel the pounding of his heart, “Sorry, Bakugou!” She rocked her weight back onto the balls of her feet to create space between them again, and Bakugou mourned the loss of her warm hand on his chest. “But yeah,” She picked up their previous conversation, “We could totally practice using our quirks together. I’d really like that, actually.”

He grunted, suddenly feeling like he forgot how to use words.

She kept up a one-sided conversation until she reached her stop and they parted ways. He stared after her like an idiot. When she was off and the bus started rolling away, he groaned into his hands. This new revelation was just what he fucking needed, huh?

“Fuck.”

“Okay, let me get this straight,” Kirishima said, holding onto the punching bag as Bakugou pounded it relentlessly, “You and Deku are on good terms and you actually want to maintain that, but you’re hot for his ex-girlfriend who also happens to be your roommate."

“Where are you confused, Shitty Hair?” He grunted, pausing for a moment before punching into the bag again.

“At the part where you actually have romantic feelings for someone,” The redhead answered with a stupid grin on his face, “I mean, I always figured the concept of romance and wooing someone would eventually make itself known to you by slapping you in the face someday—but I figured that wouldn’t happen for another couple of years.”

“And why the hell not, huh?” He asked, stopping again to raise an eyebrow at his friend. He stood up straight from his stance, and walked over to the gym bench nearby to cool off. Kirishima followed him, eagerly trying to put together this new puzzle.

“You’re just super focused on becoming a better hero and—huh.”

Katsuki rolled his eyes, glowering at Kirishima to let him know he was ready for whatever bullshit revelation he just had.

“You know, I guess it makes sense,” He said resolutely, “She makes you better, dude. I noticed that even back in high school. S’probably why you like her so much.”

“Aw, fuck,” Bakugou sighed, “You’re making sense.”

“Alarming, isn’t it?”

Bakugou grinned, “Heh, yeah. You’re supposed to have hair for brains. When did you grow a cerebral cortex?”

Kirishima pouted, “I’m pretty sure you’re insulting me and complimenting at the same time, and I don’t know how to take it.”

Katsuki rolled his eyes, standing up and clapping Kirishima on the shoulder.

“Come on, Eijirou,” He said, pausing to take a swig from his water bottle, “Let’s go run.”

“Wait, wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wait,” Kirishima protested, grabbing Katsuki’s arm and stopping him from walking towards the track, “We need to talk about this more—what are you going to do about it?”

“Fucking—nothing, probably.”

“What!? Why not?”

“She and Deku just broke up, Ei,” Katsuki reasoned, “I could care less about what the shitty nerd would think about me making a move on his ex—I’m more concerned about how she’s fucking feeling. And, sure, it’s been like a month since their breakup, but she’s still pretty beat up over it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Eijirou allowed, “But what if she likes you too?”

“Haaah?”

“What? You’ve never considered that being a possibility?”

“What the hell would she like me for?” Bakugou snapped.

“Um,” Kirishima started like he was about to throw down some serious ammunition, “Maybe because you make her better too?” He grinned, like he was holding the last nail for Bakugou’s coffin, “Saw you two on the news the other day—you guys make a helluva team.”

Katsuki couldn't quite disguise the pride he felt at that statement. He swung at fist at the redhead's knowing smirk, but Kirishima dodged it easily.

“We fight well together. So what?”

Kirishima shook his head, “It’s not just fighting—you push each other to do your very best. Neither one of you underestimates the other and it gets your gears going. You help each other keep a good mindset. I’ve noticed it in both of you ever since you two became roomies!”

“Whatever.”

“I’m serious!”

“I know you are. Still doesn’t mean she likes me. Now shut the fuck up and get your ass on the track.” He literally jogged away from the conversation, leaving Kirishima pouting after him.

Bakugou may have gotten clipped on his side during a villain fight a month later—and he may have ignored it with all the adrenaline running through his system. Furthermore, he may not have mentioned it to fucking anyone because he gods honest forgot. So Ochako really shouldn’t be getting mad at him for being so careless.

“I’ll patch myself up,” He persisted, batting her insistent hands away from his side, “S’not even that deep of a cut. No bid deal. Got worse in high school.”

She held a bubble in one side of her mouth, eyebrows scrunching together in aggravation. Bakugou could only just make it out in the darkness of their apartment, and he had to bite his tongue to keep his thoughts on how good she looked to himself. “We had Recovery Girl to take care of us in high school. Now we have all sorts of access to different responders with healing quirks—and you should have called them hours ago.”

“Fuck, okay,” He agreed, “And I’ll make sure to go to ‘em next time. But I’m already home and I wanna fuckin’ sleep so I’m going to handle this by myself tonight.”

Ochako huffed, pushing his shoulders until he backed into the couch. “Take off your shirt while I go get the first aid kit,” She commanded, pushing him down onto the cushions and leaving before he could protest. He groaned but did as she said, wincing as the muscles sitting underneath the wound flexed and the pain receptors in his brain went fucking wild.

He hastily held his shirt to his wound, not wanting to get blood on the couch.

“Move,” Ochako demanded, returning to his side with the first aid kit in hand. Thinking she wanted him to take the antiseptic and gauze from her hands so that he could wrap himself up, he reached out only for his hand to be knocked away. He blinked, realizing too late that she had every intention of cleaning up his wound herself. “You’re going to visit a responder tomorrow morning before going out for patrol, got it?”

He hissed as she pressed a cotton ball with antiseptic to his wound.

“Holy fuck,” He growled, “Give me a goddamned warning next time, Uraraka!”

She pressed the cotton ball more firmly against his skin, “Got it?”

“Got it!” He snarled, snapping at her hands with his teeth—which she avoided easily, “I’m sorry, alright? Fuck.”

She froze, removing the cotton ball from his skin and blinking at him stupidly.

“Did you just apologize?” She asked, voice softer than before. She reached for the gauze and taped it over his wound, taking care to be gentle with him—like no one ever bothered to be around his explosive ass. He was struck suddenly with a sense of déjà vu, except that their roles were reversed. Years ago he had shown her how he fought a worthy opponent, and now she was showing him how she cared for a friend in need.

“So what if I did?” He snarked, face red as she brushed her fingers over the dressed wound.

“Well apology accepted. If—” The glare returned to her face, “—you promise not to do it again.”

He rolled his eyes, “I promise.”

She beamed, just as Havoc strolled up to them to check things out.

“Hey, fucker,” He greeted the cat as she rubbed up on Ochako’s legs, “You worried about Ochako more than the actual injured person? Figures.”

“Don’t be petty,” Ochako said, smacking the back of his head lightly, “This is why she likes me more. Cats can understand the tone of your voice, you know. Can’t you, Lord of Death and Havoc? Aw you’re a good girl, aren’t you?” Ochako proceeded to lose herself in her fuckin’ baby talk.

“Yeah,” Bakugou deadpanned, “I ain’t talkin’ to the cat like that.”

“Katsuki’s just grumpy, Havoc,” Ochako informed the cat, picking her up and staring into her eyes, “Just ignore him.” His name on her lips wasn’t just a weapon, but an entire arsenal she could exploit if she wanted to. He supposed he shouldn’t be mad, however, considering he started it.

“Whatever,” He said as he got to his feet, wincing, “I’m going to bed.”

Ochako laughed, hugging Havoc to her chest before letting the squirming cat free, “Goodnight, Katsuki.”

He stopped at his doorway, his heart pounding.

“Night…Ochako.”

From there on out, Ochako decided that she was suddenly allowed to touch Katsuki as much as she wanted to. Which was probably his own fault, seeing as he didn’t do a damned thing to stop her. So now he had to live being on the verge of cardiac arrest constantly. On movie nights, she’d lean on his arm and reach around his stomach for the popcorn. At breakfast, she would brush her leg against his. She’d squeeze his bicep playfully after lifting weights together at the gym. She would ruffle his hair in goodbye whenever her stop came on the bus. Everyday she would come up with a new way to torture him with her touch.

Alright, but this one took the cake. And she hadn’t even actually touched him.

He had made an offhand comment about how Havoc was supposed to be helping him sleep, but the damned cat only ever seemed to snuggle up in her bed at night. They had both made the habit of keeping their bedroom doors open at night, just in case the cat wanted to go back and forth. But Havoc only ever bothered with Katsuki’s room when Ochako was gone on extended missions.

He nearly had an aneurism at her response.

“If you really want to snuggle with Havoc that bad at night, then maybe you should just sleep in my bed with me.”

She giggled at the look on his face, and he wondered if the offer was a serious one.

They had nearly been roommates for a year when Ochako came home from an extended mission limping and covered in bandages. She greeted Katsuki with less gusto than usual as she trudged to her room, and when he went to check on her a little later she had already passed out on her bed. She was fully clothed and hadn’t even had time to pull the blankets over herself.

Katsuki crept over to her quietly, carefully removing her shoes and readjusting her gently into a more comfortable position. He pulled the covers over her shoulders and swept his fingers through her hair before he could think better of it. The prodigious urge to lean over her to press his lips to her forehead was staggering—but he wouldn’t even know how to go about that, couldn’t remember ever wanting to shower someone with that kind of affection.

So he pulled away, flicked the lights off and retreated to his own room.

That night he woke up to heavy footfalls in his room, blinking blurry eyes up at a bedraggled Ochako. Havoc was at her feet, curiosity in her eyes as she watched the brunette creep closer to Bakugou’s bed.

“Katsuki?” She asked softly, clearing the distance from the door to the foot of his bed with a few more limps.

“Whazzit?” He slurred, leaning up on his elbow to get a better look at her. He then glanced over at the clock only to see that he still had another three hours before his alarm was supposed to go off.

“Can I sleep here?”

Her voice was so soft and he was so tired that he just nodded and scooted over. She climbed under the covers and cuddled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the world, the warmth of her body quickly luring him back to sleep.

He was out as soon as his head hit the pillow.

When he opened his eyes the next day, he was greeted with a pair of green eyes staring at him with disdain. Havoc was perched on his chest, her tail flicking back and forth lazily. His brows furrowed in confusion, unused to seeing the cat in his room when Ochako wasn’t—

His eyes widened as his brain caught up to his surroundings and he immediately flicked his eyes over to the girl sharing his bed with him.

She was hugging his arm close to her body and she was using his shoulder as a pillow. Her chocolate locks billowed across his collarbone where they fluttered with each of her warm exhalations. Even though he was stiff as hell from sleep, he didn’t move a muscle—too afraid that he might break the spell.

He didn’t have to wait long before his alarm went off, however.

Ochako groaned, smacking his face as if she was in search for the alarm herself. He yelped, surprised by the petite hand slapping him—he grabbed her wrist, halting her smacking motions and reaching for his alarm himself. Havoc bounded off of him in the process, leaving the two of them alone.

“Stop hitting me, Ochako,” He growled, disabling the alarm before sinking back into the pillows.

As if his voice triggered a new alarm in her head, her eyes opened wide and she sat up quickly in his bed. “B-Bakugou!?” She eeped, pulling the covers over her chest as if to protect her modesty even though she was wearing her sweats and baggy t-shirt from last night. He could see in her eyes that she was putting together the pieces of what lead to her waking up in his bed. As realization dawned on her, her muscles relaxed and the blankets she was holding up dropped into her lap.

“So…” He started awkwardly, “You doing okay?”

Her face darkened.

“Uh, I, um,” She said fluently, “Yeah. Hah, why do you ask?”

“You don’t usually demand entry into my bed at night,” He deadpanned.

“No, no,” She insisted nervously, “I’m fine!”

He raised an eyebrow, patiently waiting for her to elaborate.

“I just,” She continued, twiddling her thumbs and avoiding his eyes, “I didn’t have a nightmare or anything—I honestly thought I was dreaming last night? But I guess I really did come in here to sleep, huh?” She hid her face in her hands and shook her head as if to shake off the mortification. “This is so embarrassing. I totally invaded you space!” She berated herself, peeking out at him through the cracks in her fingers.

Bakugou rolled his eyes, yanking her back down into the mattress with him just to shut her up.

“Does it look like I give a fuck?” He inquired, throwing an arm over his eyes.

“Hmm,” She hummed, wiggling into his side experimentally, “I guess not.”

His face burned and he didn’t argue with her. Ochako was a smart girl, and she probably understood him better than anyone besides Kirishima. She had all the fuckin’ clues and he was pretty sure that she was about to slide the last one into place. His intuition was reinforced when he felt her settle against him again, so he threw all caution to the wind and wrapped an arm around her waist so that he could tug her even closer.

She meeped.

Bakugou lifted his arm from his eyes just a smidge so that he could peek out at her—if he was reading everything wrong and she actually didn’t want this with him, then he’d back off in an instant.

“You okay?” He asked again—although for a different reason entirely—rubbing his thumb back and forth over her clothed stomach.

Ochako nodded, settling her own hand on his chest shyly and watching it rise and fall with every breath he took. “Thanks for being the best roommate ever,” She whispered, her lips skimming against his skyrocketed pulse. She pulled his arm from his eyes so that she could interlock their fingers and lay them back down on his collarbone. Then she giggled.

“What’s so funny?” He growled, squeezing her hand.

“I just really like you, Katsuki,” She answered honestly, nuzzling into his neck, “And you're always make time for me, and I really appreciate it.”

His heart pounded against his chest like a snare drum.

“Yeah, well,” He grumbled. He knew what he was about to say was going to completely ruin the mood, but he literally couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out. “I liked you first.”

“Does everything have to be a competition with you?” She deadpanned, rolling her eyes.

“Yep,” He replied, popping the ‘p’, “But you like me for it anyways.”

She rolled her eyes but didn’t argue—a small detail that made his heart soar.

“So, we’re sleeping in today?” She asked instead, sliding her other arm up so that her hand could snake into his hair. He pressed into the contact like a cat, letting her know the affection was more than welcomed.

“Uh huh.”

“You’re gonna skip breakfast? You?”

“We’ll get to it later, pink cheeks,” He grumbled, stuffing her face more thoroughly into his neck in hopes of stopping her flurry of questions, “But we’re fucking cuddling right now, so shut the fuck up.”

She giggled again but complied, throwing a leg over his so that their bodies could become even more entangled.

They stayed like that for an hour longer than he had intended, but there wasn’t anything going on today that couldn’t be pushed back and she felt way too warm and perfect cuddled against him. He couldn’t find it within himself to pull away, nor did he want to.

It wasn’t until both of their stomachs cried for sustenance that he steered her to the kitchen, unwilling to keep his hands off of her. They made the food together, Bakugou standing behind her as he guided her hands with his and murmured directions into her ear.

There was a lot for them to talk about, but right now he could settle for pressing his lips into her hair like he’d been dying to for months.

[collateralfiction]

23

Adrian

My eyes immediately shrunk due to the amount of brightness pouring inside of the room. If it wasn’t the sunshine irritating me, it was my phone that seemed to be ringing for the past hour nonstop. Reaching for my jeans off the floor, I slipped my iPhone out of my jeans and looked at the brightly lit screen. It was simply just my alarm going off so I dismissed it and placed my phone away from me, so I could resume sleeping. The thought of sleep seemed perfect but once I looked at the clock and noticed it was nearing fairly close to eleven in the morning, I knew I had to get up and do something. I couldn’t sit around like this knowing there was shit to do. Swinging my legs off the messy bed, I stood and stretched, cracking a few bones in the process. I turned to look over my shoulder and smirked upon seeing Bailey’s half naked body. We probably didn’t get in till three this morning and I know for a fact Bailey and I didn’t fall asleep until after five. She had to have this birthday dick before she tapped out.

She was a wild ass sleeper, that’s for sure. Cuddling was the only remedy to control her movements. She was turned over on her stomach with her ass sticking out and her hair sprawled out across the white and black pillows. Shaking my head, I trekked towards the bathroom and handled my business at the toilet. I washed my hands thoroughly before brushing my teeth and washing my face as well. Reemerging from the bathroom, Bailey was still knocked out. I give her another thirty minutes to rest. I had plans today for everyone and I didn’t spend about 25 grand just for it to go to waste. I looked through one of my duffel bags, pulling out a black tee, slipping it over my head before leaving the room altogether.

We had a hired chef for the week’s stay and every morning by ten thirty, an arrangement of food would be placed outside, waiting for us to devour. This morning was no different as plates of fruits, waffles, pancakes, sausages and bacon strips were set out for us with a jug of Apple and Orange juice. It was no surprise that Justine was one of the few that was up early; she was always like that. “Morning,” I mumbled, taking a seat on the opposite chair as her. She briefly looked at me and continued to pick at what was left on her plate which wasn’t much. “I said morning,” I stated again, grabbing a plate and beginning to fill it with what I wanted.

“And I heard you,” she gritted.

“Fuck is your problem?” I stated, dropping the plate back on the table, creating a loud thud.

“Nothing,” she stated sternly. “I’m just tired,”

“So why you not in bed sleep?” I muttered, crossing my arms over my chest.

“I’m not sleepy,” My face twisted into a scowl at her two contradicting statements. None of that shit was making sense and I wasn’t about to run around in circles to understand it if she was going to act like this with me right now. It was either you tell me what’s wrong now or walk around pissed ‘cause your ass wants to be stubborn as fuck.

“Alright, so don’t complain then,” I grumbled, going to fix my plate one last time. It looked like she had something on her mind but how would I know if she didn’t speak up? I wasn’t going to force her to speak up on something she didn’t want to talk about to begin with. However, it didn’t stop me from picking up on her strange ass behavior. Justine is very transparent so it’s easy to tell when something isn’t sitting right with her but it’s difficult to figure out exactly what’s wrong with her. It takes way more than a few simple questions. Sucking her teeth, she grabbed her plate and empty glass and stormed towards the kitchen. “If that was your way of getting away from me, you failed,” I chuckled. “You might as well come back and eat at the table,”

“No thank you,”

“Alright,” I nodded. “Be like that,” Which probably won’t be long. For the first ten minutes of me eating my plate of food was enclosed with silence. But just like I predicted, Justine was right back in front of me, starting up a conversation as if she wasn’t acting suspicious a minute ago.

“How was Bailey’s birthday last night?”

I smirked, licking my lips. “It was cool. She had fun,”

“Yeah, I could tell. You guys came in pretty late and then had the nerve to go to sleep late,” she said, giving me that knowing look. “Nasty,”

“I know,” I chuckled. “I would do it again if I ain’t have eavesdroppers,”

“Ugh, can you not?” she asked, rolling her eyes.

“I guess. So, what’s up with you? Why you acting sus?” I said bluntly. There wasn’t any way I was going to let her leave out of my eyesight without her telling me something.

“Am I really?” she questioned.

“Yeah, nigga,” I muttered, grabbing my glass of OJ. She rolled her eyes yet again before leaning back in the chair and crossing her arms over her chest. Regardless if she wasn’t acting strange or whatnot, I would still have a few questions in store for her to begin with. I took a few sips before hearing the sound of feet in the near distance. Turning my head around a bit, I saw Austin approach the table while rubbing his eyes. That officially ended the conversation before it even started but that didn’t mean I was going to let it drop either. While everyone thinks they’re on vacation, I’m certainly not. I still got shit to do and it’s going to get handled. I don’t give a fuck if I have to rain on everyone’s parade. “Ay, what’s up, lil nigga?” I greeted, extending my hand out for a dap.

“Seriously, Adrian? Watch your language around him,” Justine said, pointing her fork at me.

“Chill,” I said. “He ain’t picking up on it like that. Chillax,”

“Morning, ma,” Austin greeted, heading around the table to give Justine a hug. Without the help of a nigga around to help groom Austin to be a great man one day, Justine has been doing pretty well so far and I will never discredit her for that. Although half the thing she does I don’t particularly agree with, how she raises Austin is one thing I can certainly say she does well on 100%. They hugged and did all that motherly and son shit before Austin sat down and decided to grab the stack of Bacon to munch on.

“He still taking his medicine?” I questioned.

“It’s no longer required so naw,”

“That’s dope,” I smiled.

“Yeah, it is. He hated the medicine with a passion. I don’t blame him,”

“Me either,”

“I’ll be back,” Justine said, grabbing her plate and treading into the kitchen. I acknowledged her with a simple head nod before she left off, leaving Austin and I at the table still.

“You good?”

“Yeah,” Austin yawned shortly after.

“You sure?” I asked sternly.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Where’s Bailey?” he asked.

“She’s still asleep. After breakfast I want you to pack some of your clothes for an overnight stay,”

“Why?”

“You ask too many questions,” I chuckled. “We yachting out in this bitch,”

“That big boat we saw?”

“Yeah, the one you can live in. That’s my birthday gift to Bailey,” An expensive ass gift too.

“That’s not fair. She’s going to like your gift more than mine,” he frowned.

“Tough luck, kid,” I laughed.

“Here, Austin,” Justine placed down his plate and left the dining area all over again. It was a good feeling knowing that Austin was where he belongs, but it still tore me up knowing that at one point no one knew where he was at. No matter how much I try to justify certain shit, it always fell back on me and what I should have been doing versus what I was doing. Regardless, I know for a fact that something fishy had to occur and the two main targets are Lonnie and Ryan. I’m close but not nearly as close as I want to be. That shit is all about to change though. My primary agenda would be talking to Bailey, of course, and possibly having a conversation with Justine if she allows it. If Bailey is going to go back to her life, I need to be frank with her and let her know that Ryan got another bitch pregnant. I don’t know how well that’s going to go over with her, but it needs to be done. After that, I’m going to need to call G back in New York, so I know what to expect. Besides all of that shit, I just need someone I can lay all this info on because it’s eating me up that I only know.

“You know what I noticed, Uncle A?” Austin said, bringing me out of my thoughts. I gave him my full attention, so he knew that I was listening. “Your father isn’t around, and neither is mine,” Austin’s statement caught me off guard and for a second I was unsure of what he meant by that and where’d it come from. I paused as I stared at him with my eyebrows meshed together. It was almost as if what he said was nothing big of a deal. I don’t talk to Austin about his father and he doesn’t talk to me about his nonexistent father either. Where this is coming from all of a sudden, at this moment right now? It’s only leading me to Justine. I just stared at him for the longest, not completely believing that he had said that and how he easily returned to snacking on his plate of food while I had to digest something, I would have never thought I hear from him until he was well in his late teens.

“Yeah, something like that,” I said, clearing my throat. “Why you say that though?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Just something I noticed,”

“You feel good about that?” I was at a loss of words to say the least, but I was also intrigued in what possibly was on his mind at the same time. Austin is a smart seven-year old child and I’m pretty sure he’s aware of everything that goes on around him, even half the shit I do. It’s not rocket science for him to realize his father isn’t around, but I wasn’t expecting to hear him talk about it either. I don’t know but him saying that just made things more complicated, at least in my head.

“I don’t care,” he said nonchalantly. My eyes widened at his bold statement. This didn’t seem like the same caring Austin I know him to be. Although I can’t lie and say that I’m not happy knowing that he doesn’t give a fuck about his father but it’s not the right thing for me to verbally say to him. The least I want him to do is have his own feelings towards whoever without me swaying his own ideas. Either way, it got me fucked up now.

Rubbing my temple, I said, “Don’t say that,” I sighed, saying words I never thought I would. “Look at me, Austin. I’m deadass. Don’t say that. You don’t know what you’re saying right now. Shit, why are you saying that?”

“I don’t know. It’s true. I haven’t seen my dad in a long time. He doesn’t care, I don’t care. That’s good, right?” I was in pure shock. I don’t even know how to end this conversation. “I have my mother, you, Caiden, Justin, Brian, August, G, my grandmother and even Bailey,” he went on to list.

“Did you talk to your mother about this?” I found myself asking.

“Kind of,” I nodded slowly, locking my hands together.

“We gon’ finish this conversation later, alright? Just know that we all got you even if your pops isn’t around, you hear me?”

“Yeah, I do,” he smiled.

“Alright, hurry up and eat,” I said, standing tall and grabbing my plate. “And eat them carrots your mom put on your plate!” I yelled. His laughter soon followed after that. I placed my plate in the sink and ran some water over it before leaving the kitchen. I had half the mind to go and see what was up with Justine and where Austin had got this random epiphany of basically saying fuck his father, he ain’t shit mentality. A part of me couldn’t fathom Justine putting that type of idea in her son’s head so where else he might have gotten that from… I’m not too sure. Maybe it was me. The other half of me didn’t feel like saying anything to her, not at the moment anyhow. Austin really fucked with my head too early in the morning.

Shaking my head, I headed back into my bedroom and softly closed the door behind me. Bailey was no longer lying in bed and from hearing running bath water, I automatically assumed that where she was at. Slipping inside the bathroom door, I found myself staring at her voluptuous body behind the clear shower glass. Her body was turned away from me, standing in the direction of the steaming water. She was leaning against the wall and from her posture, I could sense how she was still sleepy and probably still a bit tipsy. She still looked fine as fuck though. Stripping out of my clothes, I pushed the sliding glass open a bit and walked up behind her, gently wrapping my arms around her slim waist.

“Ugh, why do you do that, Adrian?” she groaned, relaxing in my arms. I turned her around to face me and she easily wrapped her arms around me, laying her head against my chest.

“’Cause I can,” I chuckled.

“Same reason as why you’re hard, huh?” she said, kissing along my neck.

“Yeah, you gon’ take care of it?” I said huskily. Dropping her arms from around my neck, she pressed her lips against mine, enveloping me into a deep kiss. Her small, warm hands trickled down my abdomen until she wrapped her fingers around my semi-hard dick, slowly moving her fingertips along the length of it. “Shit,” I hissed, staring down at her with hazy eyes. She knew exactly what she was doing. Her grip on me tightened as she increased her pace. I bit my bottom lip, not wanting to give her the satisfaction that her simple hand job was doing wonders to me. But being that Bailey likes to outcompete a nigga, she was going to test me until I gave in.

With a mischievous grin, she got on her knees and directed my throbbing dick into her mouth. My hands immediately went to the back of her head, my fingers becoming entangled in her hair. All through the different girls I’ve ran through, minus the exception of one, Bailey is the only one who I go out of my way when it comes to sexual shit. I rarely go down on a bitch if it ain’t my bitch, I usually don’t give a fuck if they cum or not because it’s about mine. But with Bailey, everything I do comes natural for her. I don’t think twice if I’m giving her head or whatever. Everyone else, my mind is already made up by the time I have them on their knees, ready to suck me off.

“Just like that,” I grunted in a labored breath. Her lips wrapped around my tip, licking the pre-cum off before enveloping the whole thing in her mouth; essentially deep throating me. Shit had me in bliss. She wasn’t sloppy and she wasn’t gagging either; Bailey’s a perfect ten. Her hand rubbed at my balls bringing me closer towards my peak. I got a handful of her hair, pushing her mouth further on my swollen dick. My head leaned back against the granite wall with my mouth slightly agape while she continued to bob her head at an even pace, much quicker than before. She had me in the palm of her hand and before I knew it, I was bussing all down her throat. She fucking swallowed. “Damn,” I grunted, watching as she stood under the water. “So fucking sexy,”

She smiled, pulling me closer to her. “Your turn,”

__

“Welcome to Carpe Diem, one of Turks and Caicos most elite yachts!” The head manager in charge spoke as we all crowded around the deck, staring up at the rather large and tall boat. “Everything you want will be provided, any service, we most certainly have. Your stay for the next 48 hours should live up to the hype you most certainly have heard. There are waterskis, kayaks, four massage room, yoga and dance room, gym, two saunas and an indoor pool. All your needs will be met regardless of any issue you think you might have. Please enjoy your stay at Carpe Diem,” Definitely didn’t have to tell me twice. Being that everyone knew about these plans in advance, Bailey was the only one with a shocked facial expression as she turned around and looked at me.

“What?” I chuckled.

“You did not mention the surprise being this,” she said, standing in place which caused everyone to walk around us.

“I didn’t have to. Happy belated,” I laughed. “It’s all for you and if I were you, I would hurry my ass on the boat before Justine picks the best room,”

“Aw, is your heart melting? Do you feel like you’re about to die?” she teased.

“Hell yeah, nigga,” I chuckled. Laughing along with me, she kissed the side of my mouth and headed towards the opening of the boat. I followed suit, giving a firm handshake to the man who was speaking moments prior. When Austin and I was looking for presents for Bailey’s birthday, I didn’t feel like buying her any materialistic shit, so I opted for a yacht in which everyone could benefit, and I could also one up my lil homie, Austin. Looking around at the yacht, I nodded my head in approval at the décor. For 25 grand, this yacht has no choice but to be less than perfect. Approaching Caiden, I tapped his shoulder in which caught his attention.

“Wassup?”

“When everyone is ready to doze off, we all need to talk for a second, a’ight?” I muttered.

“Yeah, no doubt. Can’t be all fun and no work,” he chuckled, rubbing his chin. “For now, I’m finna unpack and check out the rest of this shit. You must be sprung if you’re spending all this dough on her,”

“Sprung? You must be out your mind,” I said, shoving him playfully. “Fuck up,” I sat down at the barand grabbed one of the glasses of alcohol. I placed it under my nose to see what it was and took a sip once I noticed it was just Vodka. Everyone around me seemed to be basking in the moment of being on this yacht but I couldn’t enjoy it just yet. I haven’t been anyhow for the last couple of months so that wasn’t anything new. I quickly finished off my drink and ran my hand down my face. In the pocket of my shorts was a white envelope that I was going to give to Bailey tonight or whenever the mood strikes. Three simple words on a bland piece of card seemed to be weighing heavy on my mind and I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was the smartest, but I could no longer put off doing certain shit for the sake of Bailey’s feelings; she’s going to have to find out one day or another, why not now?

Then I had to deal with Justine and her son’s declaration this morning. Too much fucking shit. “Why you drinking so early? It’s only three,” Bailey purred, wrapping her arms around me from behind.

“You think I care what time it is?”

“I know you don’t. What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting down in the seat beside me.

“I’ll tell you later tonight. You like the yacht?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“It’s so beautiful! Come so I can show you our room,” she said excitedly, grabbing my hand.

“Hol’ up,” I grabbed another glass of Vodka and handed her one before taking one for myself. Following her lead as she dragged me around the boat, my vision stayed on her ass the entire time as she decided that she wanted to wear shorts. She looked good, no doubt, but that shit was distracting as hell.

“Look!” she squealed. “It’s gorgeous and so spacious,”

“You do know we’ll probably be everywhere but here, right?” I smirked.

“What do you mean?” she asked, turning around to face me.

“The boat is too big to make it to this room. You’ll end up somewhere else before you get here. Promise you that,”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” she said, playfully rolling her eyes. Her eyes fell on the white envelope that was in my hand. “What’s that?”

“An envelope,”

“For real, Adrian,”

“Look at this later. Not right now, okay?”

“Why? Is there something I should be afraid of in here?” she chuckled, grasping the thin envelope in her hand. She stared at it as if the words that were in the inside of the card would magically appear outside. But as far as there being something that just might make her afraid, I doubt it. But, it will catch her off guard. However she reacts is up to her but anything else, that’s up in the air. I’m counting on August to man up and tell her what the situation with Riley was too, but I have a feeling that’s going to backfire. Not on August, on me.

“Naw, just read it later,” I stated.

“Okay,” she nodded.

Licking my lips, I stared down at her and she looked back up at me with a faint grin. It was crazy to me how someone you barely knew could come into your life and have such a strange impact on your life. I’m not saying that Bailey has changed me or some shit because that has to come from me and willingly, but she has changed shit along the way. Things were supposed to be strictly business between us and it could have been that way because I do have self-control, but I don’t know what happened this time around. It’s not a good feeling because it makes me feel like I’m off my game and no one should be able to throw me off my game like that. I had something on my mind that I wanted to speak about at the moment, but it wasn’t the right time. She looked like she was really enjoying herself and I didn’t want to be the one to end that for her. “Boat will depart in exactly an hour,” said a crew member from the loud speaker.

“Ooh, I’m so excited!” she squealed, brushing past me to join everyone else.

Bailey

It was absolutely beautiful sailing the ocean that boarded the small island. I was accustomed to traveling quite frequently since it would be my father’s go to resort when all options seemed to lack in certain departments. It was something about being far away from your troubles that brought peace to me, oddly enough. The ocean was such a beautiful hue of blue and the slight breeze around my body was just right. It was close to seven in the evening and we had been sailing for some time now along Grand Turk. I sat with a glass of White Wine in my possession near the rear end of the boat. Everyone was pretty much spaced out along the boat and really had their own quarter of space to be in. Well, except the guys. They were all huddled in one of the many tableson the bottom yacht last time I saw them and it seemed like they were discussing something urgent because no one seemed to return the small smile I had given them in passing. Well!

Grabbing the blanket that was near, I wrapped it around my body and curled up into a fetal position. My head rested against the closest pillow and I sighed deeply, having thoughts of my family back home surface in my head. At least once a day I would have thoughts and most of the time, I wouldn’t have anyone to talk about it to because I automatically assumed they wouldn’t understand as much as I would have liked them to. Why? How can you exactly sympathize with someone who has been kidnapped by your doing? The only person that probably doesn’t know the circumstance is Austin and there’s no way I can vent to a seven-year old about a predicament this large. It’ll go right over his head.

I miss the normalcy that my life gave me, despite what I’m surrounded around by force. If I wanted to, I could easily evade it and do something to distract myself. While being in the presence of Adrian, you really can’t and it’s not even like it’s by chose, it just happens. I miss my mother, that’s without a doubt. Even with me being closer to my father than my mother, I still miss her and her easy-going vibe. I miss Rayne too but a part of me feels like she’s doing something wrong. Out of the two of us, she’s probably the one that needs to be watched out the most. I miss Chance. He was my other half. We fit like a puzzle and had the same mindset, so it was easy for us to click. I don’t know what he could possibly be doing at this point, but I hope it’s something productive since the last time I seen him.

And then there’s Ryan. Do I miss him? Sadly, yes. I feel stupid for missing him but for him, it’s a different type of ‘I miss you’ than what everyone else gets. Ryan was better off being a friend than anything more, quite honestly. Relationships just might not be his forte and that’s alright; I just wish I knew that beforehand. Huffing, I placed my drink back on the table and begin to stand and head back in. I liked to be by my lonesome, but some company right about now wouldn’t be that bad. Shuffling inside, I headed up the stairs and towards the kitchen to set my glass away.

We had crew members on the ship and they were spread around the entire yacht, catering to our needs. Having a personal crew on board definitely came with its perks. Grabbing the platter of strawberry off the counter, I looked in the stocked fridge and pulled out the whipped cream and began my ascent along the yacht. I had no particular destination in mind, but I figure I walk around until I bump into someone. Hearing commotion from the next roomover, I stuck my head inside the room and notice Justine and Austin. It seemed like such a cute mother-son moment that I didn’t want to interrupt but it was too late because Austin had already spotted me and asked that I come in.

“Oh, okay,” I laughed. “It’s so difficult finding everyone,” I pouted, sitting beside Justine

“I know,” she agreed. “I have to look at the camera to find out where everyone is,”

“There’s cameras?!” I gasped. It brought me back to the time when I found out that Adrian had a camera chilling in my room. Actually, he admitted that he had a camera located in my room so nonchalantly one day. I didn’t believe him at first until he showed me his desktop computer and the monitor of my room being displayed. I didn’t even know how to react when I found out quite honestly. If I recalled correctly, I laughed and called him a pervert which in return, he acknowledged that he was a perv with a chuckle.

“Yep! All over. But most of the cameras are in the main room. The monitor is right over there,” she pointed. I squeezed some of the whip cream down on my strawberries before I picked one out and bit into it. They’re so fucking good.

“Do you feel any better from yesterday?” I asked, referring to her behavior. She sighed, running her hands through Austin’s soft hair. He was too invested in watching Toy Story 3 to notice anything subtle.

“Not really,” she frowned.

“What’s wrong then?” I said, hoping that this time she would actually say something this time around.

“Not around, Aussie,” she mouthed. My shoulders slumped forward, and I relaxed back into the soft couch. We sat in silence for a total of thirty minutes and every now and then I could see the disgruntled facial expression she would make but, yet she didn’t want to talk about it at all with me. I did understand how she might not want to talk about everything that bothers her right then and there, but I didn’t understand why she rather hold it in when I was more than willing to listen to her rant. I don’t know. Maybe I was digging into this too much, but it did hurt my feelings knowing that she couldn’t confide in me – the only girl here.

“What y’all doing in here?! Meditating or some shit? Why so quiet?” Adrian asked, barging into the room.

“Shh, Austin is sleep,” Justine shushed him.

“Yeah, that’s what he wants y’all to think,” he mumbled, walking towards the couch. I reached over the table, getting ready to grab the last strawberry, knowing that he eying it just a few seconds ago. Just when I thought I had it, he grabbed it from my grasp and bit in to it. My face immediately turned into a scowl as he grinned while finishing off the juicy fruit. “Com’ere,” he called, licking his lips slowly, purposely.

“Can I get a please?” I huffed, standing up anyhow.

“Not when you obey me like that,” he chuckled.

“Don’t make me snuff you, nigga,” I grumbled, walking beside him. He threw his arm around me and led us back outside to where I was trying to get away from. But the warmth from his body was more than enough. I figure he was leading us away from everyone to finally have this conversation that’s been bothering him ever since we got on this yacht. He was a lot tenser and I’m one for picking up on body language and I definitely noticed it by the way he was walking around here. He led me somewhere completely different from where I was once aware of to another private sectionof the yacht. “This boat is entirely too big,” I mumbled.

“I like it like that. I get claustrophobic,” he admitted.

“And you expect me to believe that?” I giggled, sitting down on his lap.

“Bitch, better believe it!” he exclaimed.

“Alright, cut that shit out. I won’t hesitate to punch you in your face and dick,” I said to which he chuckled at. But I was dead serious. Rolling my eyes, I watched him lean over and grab a tray that I had just now noticed was here this whole time. What might be on the tray you ask? Weed. However, I wasn’t going to throw a tantrum about it. I can’t control everybody’s behavior and besides, he looked like he really needed it. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Talk to me,”

“Everything,” he mumbled, lightening the joint before putting it to his mouth.

“I’m all ears,” I expressed.

“Shit, where do I begin, girl?” he shook his head lightly and took a pull from the potent blunt. “I’ll start with this morning. This morning I’m having breakfast with Justine, right? We’re eating and I peep shit. Something not right with her so I basically call her out on it. I’m usually a good judge of character and I’m trying to get information out of her and see what’s up. You know, be that loving brother. But she acting sus and if she continues to act like that, I‘m going to call her out on it and put her on blast. I don’t like that fake shit and it’s irritating me that she been trying to hide shit,”

“So, you’ve noticed it too?” I murmured.

“What you mean?”

“She was acting strange since last night,” I frowned. “Do you think something is going on with her?” I whispered, assuming the worst automatically. I’m not pessimistic but it’s the reality of the situation and what comes with this lifestyle. He stared at me for the longest, probably mulling over what I just said and the possibilities. “Trouble?”

“Naw,” he stated. “She would tell me if something is wrong. I expect her to do that much,” he gritted.

“I don’t know, Adrian. What if she’s afraid, maybe?”

“I’m giving her till tomorrow morning to open her mouth and say some shit. I shouldn’t have to guess around her and she also shouldn’t be afraid to open her mouth if it involves some serious shit. If I find out any other way, I’m going to be pissed,”

“Okay and that’s understandable. Just give her some time, don’t jump to conclusions,” I tried to soothe, the smell of marijuana circulating around us. With how much pre-rolled blunts he has set out, I’d assume that he had plans of smoking all night. I rubbed his shoulders gently because I could clearly see his frustration. “For someone who always seems to be in my business and got a fucking say in what I do, why she not trying to talk now?”

“Patience, Adrian,” I told him, rubbing his shoulders a little rougher. “What else is on your mind?”

“Austin, man,” He blew out the smoke from the side of his mouth. “Although I don’t want to believe it, I think he misses his pops,” My hand movement immediately stopped, and my heart felt like it was plummeting inside my chest. Even with me acknowledging the fact that Lonnie isn’t shit, I couldn’t help but feel for Austin, especially since I’m in a similar situation as him. My father isn’t around, his isn’t; I miss my father and I’m sure he misses his, although he might not talk about it as much as you would expect. It’s just something so unfortunate and for the fact that I had some type of hand in a situation such as this does rub me the wrong way. What if Austin was to ever find out? “He was talking about how me and him have similarities with how our pops ain’t in our lives. Man, that shit fucked me up. He seemed so cool and calm about it too like it was no big deal for a seven-year old to say that,”

That seemed to get under his skin more than anything. He was literally turning red right before me. I was speechless. I never once heard Austin talk about his father but that didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t think about him at all. I remember once upon a time when I wondered where Austin’s father was at and to find out that I would basically have to play him a few days later, unbeknownst to me until Lonnie basically told on himself. We sat in silence as Adrian continued to puff away at his dwindling blunt. It was kind of hard watching him go through so many emotions and not have a single answer to any of his questions. I know Adrian is passionate; he didn’t have to tell me that to understand. However, it was just something I wasn’t accustomed to seeing him be so blatant about it. It was a little saddening to watch.

“Well for one, he didn’t mean it,” I stated as confidently as possible. “He’s young and impressionable so that’s probably why he said what he did. He doesn’t know better,”

“That’s not how it seemed,” he said. “Like, I feel like this was all under the influence of Justine and her trying to prove some type of point,”

“She wants Lonnie in Austin’s life, that’s understandable,” I sighed. “I don’t think she would sway Austin to think his father was a deadbeat,”

“Not when a kid walks away with the mindset that they all of all sudden don’t care no more,” he muttered.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Adrian. Maybe it’s one of those phases he’s going through,” Leaning his head against the support from the chair, he finished off the blunt with ease and sighed contently. “I wouldn’t hold it against him either,”

“I know,” he grumbled. “I feel bad for lil man, you know, cause that’s my nephew and all but I despise the fuck out of his sperm donor,”

“Why?” As far as I knew, I wasn’t 100% sure on what animosity Adrian had towards Lonnie besides the obvious and a few theories I’ve conjured up on my own. The main one solely being based upon how carless Lonnie was to allow Austin to go to the store by himself and end up in the worse case scenario.

“I never liked Lonnie to begin with, no one did. But my sister was stubborn as hell and went against everyone wishes. I was frank with her about how I see this shit ending for her and she never believe me. Now look at her and what he’s done. Something is hella sketchy about him and I haven’t found the energy to find out until Austin went missing. I don’t trust him, and I know he’s behind some serious shit. I have this gut feeling and it’s proven me right countless times,” he gritted. By the time he had finished explaining this to me, he already had a blunt to his lips, looking for his red lighter. I held it in my hands and did the honors of lightening it myself.

“Well, what’s going to happen now with Lonnie? Are you going to tell Justine? You don’t want to put her in a compromising position,”

“Lonnie is easy to deal with. Don’t worry ‘bout him. As far as Justine, I’ma tell her in due time but her ass gotta start talking first because she playing like I’m stupid,” he grumbled, his voice so husky like. I bit the inside of my lip and nodded. I felt like as soon as they confronted each other with their issues and problems, it just might be something more dramatic than what everyone anticipated. It’s no secret that they bicker and go back and forth over the smallest things but when will that come to its peak? When will the ticking time bomb erupt and leave the two of them hating each other forever? Anything could happen. and I’ve seen it even happen in my own family with my father and aunt numerous of times before they reconciled.

“I would tell her now,” I advised. “You’ll sleep easier,”

“You see this shit right here?” he said, referring to the blunt. “This is what makes me sleep… you should try it,” he smirked.

“No thank you,” I chuckled.

“Why not?” he pressed, licking his lips.

“I don’t have a reason to smoke,”

“You don’t need one,” he said quickly.

“Not now, Adrian,” I laughed at his failed attempts at trying to get me to smoke. It’s not that I’m against it, I just don’t do it.

“In the case, I need to bring something to your attention, baby girl,” His voice was stern, so I automatically knew it was something serious. I just didn’t know how serious it was and whether or not it would affect me or something. With everything Adrian has been saying in the past hour or so, nothing has been relatively positive. I just don’t know what more to expect and if I should become worrisome. It wasn’t helping that Adrian decided to take long dramatic pauses, only intensifying my worries. “I told you from the start that Ryan wasn’t shit and you would realize it too. You know that but before you’re able to go back to him,” he said, using quotations. “…. I need you to know that your man stepped out on y’alls relationship and got some side bitch pregnant,”

I don’t think I heard him correctly so instead of spazzing, I simply laughed. In my head, there was no way possible Ryan or anyone for that matter could possibly do that. I understand completely that Ryan and I might not have had that picture-perfect relationship but it was better than most by a long shot. My mind could not and would not wrap its head around something like…. the unbelievable. It seemed like some sort of twisted joke and punishment I seemed to have deserved for a reason unbeknownst to me. However, the longer I stared at Adrian’s stoic, emotionless face, I realized he wasn’t laughing or cracking a smile… not that I expected him to anyhow. Sliding off his lap and into the open space besides him, I stared blankly at the moving water with a blank mind. He wasn’t lying. He was telling nothing but the truth. “What the fuck?” I found myself whispering.

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, B. I just figure you should know before anything happens,”

I closed my eyes tightly, feeling the pressure of tears attempting to slide out of my tear ducts. If Ryan just so happened to be cheating on me, I think I would have been smart enough to find that out before hearing it from someone else. When could he have possibly had enough time to go out and do his dirt when we were always together even when we were having our differences? It just didn’t make sense and the longer I thought about it, the more I felt myself mentally caving. I would have never thought that Ryan would go as far as cheating on me when I have been nothing but faithful to him. Then to find out from Adrian of all people? This was definitely a stab to my back. Maybe I should have listened to my mother when she told me she didn’t believe Ryan was a good choice for me. Maybe I should have took Chance’s opinions into consideration. Maybe I should have listened to Rayne when the chance presented itself for her to give me her thoughts on Ryan. But I didn’t. I listened to my father and look where that has led me.

“Here,” Adrian muttered, extending his hand out. I looked down at the blunt and chuckled bitterly. My life has been turned upside down quickly in just a mere three months and I don’t know if this is something I should be grateful for because it’s eye opening or feel ashamed because I wasn’t aware before. Shit, I feel like both. So, for about twenty minutes, we both sat in silence as I finished off the perfectly rolled blunt by myself. Any other time, I wouldn’t have taken it but this was a different predicament; a predicament I wasn’t sure I could handle by myself.

“Are you sure?” I whispered, bringing my legs up to my chest.

“Positive unless Ryan ain’t the father,”

“So regardless, he was cheating?” I murmured, feeling defeated. That blunt didn’t do shit to numb me.

“I guess,” he said. I shook my head sadly, tears I’ve been trying to hide for the past half hour pour out of my eyes. There were a million and one things I could have been doing, saying or expressing but I was still in that initial shock and no matter how many times I mulled over it, I still couldn’t believe it nor would I ever think Ryan would stoop that low. Not only did he get someone else pregnant, but he betrayed me in the worst way and didn’t even have the courage to even tell me about it nor take responsibilities for his foul ass actions.

“Don’t cry over a nigga like him, a’ight? I tell my sister the same shit. Instead, you fuck their head up,” Adrian stated, bringing me closer to him.

“Why would he do something like that?” I whimpered.

“I’ma be honest with you like I am my sister; he wasn’t yours to begin with,” That only caused a permanent scowl to etch across my face as I allowed his words to sink in.

“I’m so fucking exhausted with all of this,” I expressed, tears still managing to blur my vision, even with Adrian doing his best to comfort me. I was so hurt by Ryan’s action and the fact that I couldn’t confront him at the moment because of obvious reasons only turned my sadness, regret and disappointment into anger. Why would he ever think it is acceptable to do something like that? Why be with me in the first place if that’s what you were going to end up doing to me? I didn’t deserve it, no one deserves that type of treatment and it was just grinding my gears. Not to mention, he ended up getting the chick fucking pregnant. I don’t know what I was mad at more. The fact that he cheated or that he didn’t use protection and someone that isn’t me is pregnant.

“As bad as it might sound, maybe this happened for a reason. You’re so much better than what Ryan can do and give for you. Don’t walk around with a pout and shit, a’ight? You should be happy God ain’t let you walk around with that nigga for eighteen plus years,” he murmured, rubbing my side soothingly.

“It still hurts,” I frowned. I seriously don’t even know how worse my predicament could get.

“Look, pain don’t last forever and that some real shit. Yeah, he cheated but you shouldn’t be the one feeling down about this shit. That’s all on him, baby girl. You hear me? He fucked up and now he has to deal with the consequences. You ain’t do shit wrong,” I looked up at him and smiled faintly. It was nice knowing that he felt that way but I still felt some type of way, as I should and I don’t know how long this feeling will last. I literally gave my all into that relationship and to see it end up with results like thatis heartbreaking. I said a long time ago that I was done with Ryan and indirectly, we are no longer a couple but that doesn’t take away the fact that he fucked me over like that. Had things been different, I doubt he would have ever pulled such a thing but sadly, they aren’t and now I’m stuck feeling like I was the one who purposely stepped out and got pregnant by some random nigga.

“I hear you,” I sighed, biting my bottom lip. “Look at me. I’m so fucking antsy and shaky now,” I said, raising my hand a bit so he could see. “You sure I gotta go back to him?”

“Naw, I can kill him on sight if you prefer,” he said nonchalantly with a mischievous grin on his face. Chuckling lowly, I shook my head.

“I’ll decline on that,”

“Alright, the offer is still out there though,” A moment of silence had passed before he spoke up again, intentionally bringing me out of my thoughts concerning Ryan and another thing he done to disappoint someone. “Get up,”

“Adrian, please, no. I just want to sit here and sulk,”

“Bailey,” he said sternly.

“Adrian,” I said in the same tone, crossing my arms over my chest. He knew that if he left me out here alone, I’d just end up crying and feeling bad for myself all over again. Despite his wonderful efforts of trying to distract me from the bigger picture, I had to face the music; no matter how off key it was too. Sucking his teeth, he leaned down and scooped me up in his arms, picking me up bridal style. I didn’t even put up a protest to his action and allowed him to do as he pleases. We ended up in the master kitchen and luckily for us, everyone was pretty much asleep or getting ready to sleep. It was nearing eleven and if Austin was sleep already, that meant everyone else would be too.

“This was supposed to be Austin’s but he can’t hang so I figure you would want it,” Adrian said after he placed me down on the granite counter. Walking to the freezer, he pulled out a container and grabbed a fork, finally placing the dish besides me. “Comfort food is the best, ain’t it?” he smirked, revealing the ice cream sundae. My mouth was literally watering for it.

“Thank you, Adrian,” I smiled, wrapping my legs around his body. His hands found their way around my waist, bringing me closer to him.

“Don’t mention it,” he said. I leaned in first and kissed his lips lightly. He softly sucked on my bottom lip before slipping his tongue inside of my mouth as our tongues wrestled against one another. The kiss began to turn aggressive quickly and without much thought, I found myself moaning into the kiss and pulling him closer. I needed comfort and Adrian was doing an excellent job at doing that, surprisingly. Then again, it’s not so surprising. He has a heart and it shows whenever a situation like this pops up.

“Can you stay up with me tonight? I don’t think I’ll be falling asleep anytime soon,” I confessed after pulling away.

“Why? So, you can talk my head off and smoke up half of my supply?”

“Please?” I pouted.

“After I eat this dessert,” he agreed, causing a faint smile to appear on my face. So, for the next half hour we both sat, talked and laughed while we could about almost anything. It was a good feeling knowing that he was doing his best to bring up my mood. If it was up to me, I would be in the room, feeling down as ever. It’ll probably happen anyhow, just not right now. I’m still in shock and it won’t hit me until I’m probably in New York and I’ve come in contact with him.

“I swear I just gained like three pounds,” I mumbled, softly running my fingers through his soft hair.

“Hope that shit goes straight to your ass,” he grunted, palming my ass.

“Shut up,” I giggled. We were snuggled up in one of the areasthat contained a TV since our room actually didn’t. His lanky self was laid out across the couch with him resting his head on my stomach and his arms around my waist. It was just so natural how conversation between the two of us easily flowed from one topic to the next. It was still difficult to not think about Ryan and what was just revealed to me, but I was trying to do well with keeping up appearances. I didn’t want to show how broken I truly was by the news. But the free-spirited talking didn’t last long because before I knew it, Ryan was now the topic of discussion.

“I need to know right now if you’re comfortable enough to go back home and be in Ryan’s presence,”

“I’m not,” I stated truthfully, and this has been expressed numerous times.

“So, what will make you comfortable? Regardless, you gotta go back,”

“And then what happens to you?”

He cut his eyes at me before resting his head back on my stomach. “That’s beside the point. Let me know now if you’re going to go back to him,”

“Not in that sense,” I muttered. “But there has to be some adjustments ‘cause I will not feel comfortable in his space,”

“We can do that,” he nodded, siting up and reaching for his phone; well, it was more a fake phone that he used when he didn’t want anyone knowing his number. “Call him… now,”

What?!

[milenasanchezmk]

The Carnivore Diet: Pros, Cons, and Suggestions

All-meat diets are growing in popularity. There are the cryptocurrency carnivores. There’s the daughter of the ascendant Jordan B. Peterson, Mikhaila Peterson, who’s using a carnivorous diet to stave off a severe autoimmune disease that almost killed her as a child. The most prominent carnivore these days, Dr. Shawn Baker (who appears to eat only grilled ribeyes (at home) and burger patties (on the go), recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and Robb Wolf’s podcast, and is always breaking world records on the rower. Tons of other folks are eating steak and little else—and loving it. There are Facebook groups and subreddits and Twitter subcultures devoted to carnivorous dieting.

What do I think?

I’m no carnivore. I love my Big Ass Salads, my avocados, my steamed broccoli dipped in butter. My blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. My spoonful of coconut butter.

Yet, I get the appeal.

We’ve been eating meat for three million years. Its caloric-and-nutrient density allowed us to dispense with the large guts needed to digest fibrous plant matter and build massive, energy-hogging brains. There isn’t a traditional culture on Earth that wholly abstains or abstained from animal products. Nearly every human being who ever lived ate meat whenever he or she could get it.

Thus, meat appears to be the “baseline food” for humans. If you look past the cultural conditioning that tries to convince us that meat will give us heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, meat looks pretty damn good as a place to start.

The question is if it’s where we should stay exclusively…. 

All this said, I’m skeptical about the “steak and water” or “ground beef and water” diets of modern carnivory. Let me explain….

A Few Key Arguments For It (and My Feedback) “In its natural state, meat is relatively safe as far as toxins go.”

Animals can run and bite and claw and fly to get away from predators; most don’t need to employ any chemical warfare that causes problems when you eat the meat. Sure, allergies and intolerances can arise, like if you get bitten by the Lone Star tick and pick up a red meat allergy, but those are quite rare.

“Whereas plants’ phytonutrients are pesticides.”

This is technically true. They are toxins the plant produces to dissuade consumption by predators—toxins that the plants manufacture to maim, poison, kill, or even just make life uncomfortable for the animals who eat it.

But just as we can do with many other “harmful” inputs, we tend to treat plant phytonutrients as hormetic stressors that make us stronger, healthier, and more robust. 

There’s an upper limit, of course. And many of the phytonutrients have been primarily applied either to populations eating normal omnivorous, often downright unhealthy diets or to unhealthy subjects trying to improve a disease marker. As I’ve said before, there aren’t any real studies in healthy human carnivores, so we don’t know one way or the other whether the promising results of the extant studies apply to people eating only animal products. 

“Meat nutrients are highly bioavailable.”

The protein has all the amino acids we need to live and thrive. We readily absorb and utilize the vitamins and minerals in meat; they already come in “animal form,” requiring little to no conversion before we can start incorporating them into our physiology. Plant nutrients usually undergo a conversion process before humans can utilize them, and not every human has the same conversion capacity.

Some of those essential and/or helpful nutrients only occur in meat, like creatine, carnosine, vitamin B12. There’s literally no realistic way to obtain them without relying on supplementation, which didn’t exist until the last hundred years.

“Nutrient requirement studies don’t apply to us.”

I could see that. They haven’t tested the requirements for selenium, magnesium, and iodine on a zero-carb carnivorous diet. Do they go down? Can you therefore get by and thrive on lower intakes—the low levels found in muscle meat?

It’s a tough call.

It hasn’t been empirically tested. That’s true. It largely hasn’t undergone a series of RCTs. You can’t pull up a Cochrane meta-analysis of carnivore studies. All we really have are anecdotes.

I’m not disregarding the power or relevance of anecdotes and testimonials. Those are real. They’re not all suffering from a mass delusion. They’re not all lying. Peer-reviewed? No. Admissible in a scientific paper? Not unless you call it a case study. When you’re there in the room with someone pouring their heart out because something you wrote helped them drop 50 pounds and reclaim their lives, you don’t go “Yeah, but where are the clinical trials?” At some point, the weight of anecdotes adds up to something substantial, something suggestive. And hey, if it’s working for you, there’s no arguing that. 

But I can’t point to anything solid and totally objective in the research. Not yet anyway.

Still, any time you embark on a historically unprecedented way of eating, whether it’s pure muscle meat carnivore or vegan, you should be a little more careful about what you think you know. 

What Do We Know About Carnivory in Human History?

We don’t know if there have been any purely carnivorous human cultures. We haven’t found any yet, and you can’t prove a negative, so I won’t say “there were none.”

In all the best candidates so far, though, plants sneak into the diets. The Inuit actually utilized a wide variety of plant foods including berries, sea vegetables, lichens, and rhizomes. They made tea from pine needles, which are high in vitamin C and polyphenols.  The Sami of Finland, who primarily live off a low-carb, high-fat diet of meat, fish, and reindeer milk (I have to imagine that’s coming to Whole Foods soon), also gather wild plant foods, particularly berries and mushrooms (Finland’s forests produce 500 million kg of berries and over 2 billion kg of mushrooms each year!), sometimes even feeding their reindeer hallucinogenic mushrooms to produce psychoactive urine. The Maasai are known for their meat, milk, and blood diets, but they often traded for plant foods like bananas, yams, and taro, too, and they cooked their meat with anti-parasitic spices, drank bitter (read: tannin- and polyphenol-rich) herb tea on a regular basis, and used dozens of plants as medicines (PDF). Even Neanderthals used plants as food and medicine, we’re learning.

Even if we discover evidence of carnivory in human prehistory or in some extant group, the emerging science of genetic ancestral differences suggests that the habitual diets of our recent ancestors shapes the optimal diet for us today. If your close ancestors weren’t carnivores, you might not have the adaptations necessary to thrive on an all-meat diet.

Still, what about Vilhjamjur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer who came away very impressed with the native Inuit diet and underwent a series of studies on the effect of an all-meat diet in man? He and a colleague did great for over a year eating only meat. But Stefansson wasn’t eating ground beef. In his own words, he ate “steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short-ribs, chicken, fish, liver, and bacon.” Definitely carnivorous. Definitely not just steak or ground beef, as many modern carnivores seem to be eating. All those “weird” cuts gave him critical micronutrients otherwise difficult to get from just steak.

How To Best Optimize a Carnivore Diet

While you won’t find me switching to the carnivore side, if I were to do a carnivorous diet, here’s how I’d try to optimize it (and why).

Take Magnesium

A recent paper showed that the majority of people following a “paleolithic ketogenic diet” with at least 70% of calories from animal foods and including offal had adequate serum magnesium levels. That’s a great start. But earlier studies show that serum magnesium may not be the definitive marker. A person can have normal serum levels but inadequate tissue levels—and in the tissues is where magnesium does its work. A person can have normal serum levels but still be deficient.

Eat Eggs

They’re not quite animals, but they contain everything you need to build a bird from scratch. That’s cool·—bite-sized whole animal.

Eat Liver

Liver is unabashedly animal flesh. It absolutely qualifies for a carnivorous diet. Loaded with choline, folate, vitamin A, copper, and iron, it’s nature’s most bioavailable multivitamin. There’s no reason not to include it. If you get your hands on some fish livers, you’ll get a ton of vitamin D along for the ride.

There’s frozen liver tabs, where people dice up liver into little chunks and swallow them hole.

There’s liver smoothies, where absolute savages blend raw liver and drink it. I know a guy who fixed severe iron deficiency by drinking raw chicken liver orange juice smoothies, with the vitamin C in OJ meant to enhance iron absorption.

Liver is also great sauteed with fish sauce, citrus, salt, pepper, and sesame oil. Do it quick, don’t overcook.

Eat Seafood

A few oysters, some mussels, a filet of wild sockeye salmon… You’ll get vitamin D, long-chained omega-3s (which tend to rare even in pastured ruminant flesh), selenium, iodine, copper, iron, manganese. Not every meal has to—or should— be a New York strip. 

Implement Intermittent Fasts On a Regular Basis

A constant influx of muscle meat will keep mTOR topped up. That’s great for muscle growth and general robustness. Just do something to stop the protein intake for a day or two to  lest you start fueling unwanted growths.

Treat Spices and Other Low/Non-Calorie Plant Foods As Medicinal Supplements That Don’t “Count”

All the nearly-carnivorous cultures we have good data on did similar things, using bitter herbs and barks and the like as supplements to their diets. You’re not getting calories from this stuff. You’re getting non-caloric compounds that provide health benefits.

Get the Best Quality Meat You Can Find and Afford

While I’m sure a diet of snare-caught hare, Alaskan elk, and choice sockeye salmon you wrest from the grasp of picky grizzlies poised over rivers preparing for a long winter would be ideal, it’s not necessary. Yes, grass-fed and -finished/pastured as well as organic are ideal, but do the best you can with what you have.

Use Bone Broth

It’s a great way to get collagen and the glycine it contains to balance out all the methionine you’re eating, especially if you’re doing the muscle meat-only thing and avoiding most gelatinous cuts of meat.  Make it yourself or buy. Collagen supplementation, of course, works here, too.

The carnivore diet isn’t for me. I like plants way too much. But I’m cautiously optimistic that it could work for more people than you’d expect, provided they heed as many of my suggestions as possible.

That’s it for me, folks. What about you? Have any experience eating a carnivorous diet? Interested in trying? Let me know what you know!

[fishermariawo]

The Carnivore Diet: Pros, Cons, and Suggestions

All-meat diets are growing in popularity. There are the cryptocurrency carnivores. There’s the daughter of the ascendant Jordan B. Peterson, Mikhaila Peterson, who’s using a carnivorous diet to stave off a severe autoimmune disease that almost killed her as a child. The most prominent carnivore these days, Dr. Shawn Baker (who appears to eat only grilled ribeyes (at home) and burger patties (on the go), recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and Robb Wolf’s podcast, and is always breaking world records on the rower. Tons of other folks are eating steak and little else—and loving it. There are Facebook groups and subreddits and Twitter subcultures devoted to carnivorous dieting.

What do I think?

I’m no carnivore. I love my Big Ass Salads, my avocados, my steamed broccoli dipped in butter. My blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. My spoonful of coconut butter.

Yet, I get the appeal.

We’ve been eating meat for three million years. Its caloric-and-nutrient density allowed us to dispense with the large guts needed to digest fibrous plant matter and build massive, energy-hogging brains. There isn’t a traditional culture on Earth that wholly abstains or abstained from animal products. Nearly every human being who ever lived ate meat whenever he or she could get it.

Thus, meat appears to be the “baseline food” for humans. If you look past the cultural conditioning that tries to convince us that meat will give us heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, meat looks pretty damn good as a place to start.

The question is if it’s where we should stay exclusively…. 

All this said, I’m skeptical about the “steak and water” or “ground beef and water” diets of modern carnivory. Let me explain….

A Few Key Arguments For It (and My Feedback) “In its natural state, meat is relatively safe as far as toxins go.”

Animals can run and bite and claw and fly to get away from predators; most don’t need to employ any chemical warfare that causes problems when you eat the meat. Sure, allergies and intolerances can arise, like if you get bitten by the Lone Star tick and pick up a red meat allergy, but those are quite rare.

“Whereas plants’ phytonutrients are pesticides.”

This is technically true. They are toxins the plant produces to dissuade consumption by predators—toxins that the plants manufacture to maim, poison, kill, or even just make life uncomfortable for the animals who eat it.

But just as we can do with many other “harmful” inputs, we tend to treat plant phytonutrients as hormetic stressors that make us stronger, healthier, and more robust. 

There’s an upper limit, of course. And many of the phytonutrients have been primarily applied either to populations eating normal omnivorous, often downright unhealthy diets or to unhealthy subjects trying to improve a disease marker. As I’ve said before, there aren’t any real studies in healthy human carnivores, so we don’t know one way or the other whether the promising results of the extant studies apply to people eating only animal products. 

“Meat nutrients are highly bioavailable.”

The protein has all the amino acids we need to live and thrive. We readily absorb and utilize the vitamins and minerals in meat; they already come in “animal form,” requiring little to no conversion before we can start incorporating them into our physiology. Plant nutrients usually undergo a conversion process before humans can utilize them, and not every human has the same conversion capacity.

Some of those essential and/or helpful nutrients only occur in meat, like creatine, carnosine, vitamin B12. There’s literally no realistic way to obtain them without relying on supplementation, which didn’t exist until the last hundred years.

“Nutrient requirement studies don’t apply to us.”

I could see that. They haven’t tested the requirements for selenium, magnesium, and iodine on a zero-carb carnivorous diet. Do they go down? Can you therefore get by and thrive on lower intakes—the low levels found in muscle meat?

It’s a tough call.

It hasn’t been empirically tested. That’s true. It largely hasn’t undergone a series of RCTs. You can’t pull up a Cochrane meta-analysis of carnivore studies. All we really have are anecdotes.

I’m not disregarding the power or relevance of anecdotes and testimonials. Those are real. They’re not all suffering from a mass delusion. They’re not all lying. Peer-reviewed? No. Admissible in a scientific paper? Not unless you call it a case study. When you’re there in the room with someone pouring their heart out because something you wrote helped them drop 50 pounds and reclaim their lives, you don’t go “Yeah, but where are the clinical trials?” At some point, the weight of anecdotes adds up to something substantial, something suggestive. And hey, if it’s working for you, there’s no arguing that. 

But I can’t point to anything solid and totally objective in the research. Not yet anyway.

Still, any time you embark on a historically unprecedented way of eating, whether it’s pure muscle meat carnivore or vegan, you should be a little more careful about what you think you know. 

What Do We Know About Carnivory in Human History?

We don’t know if there have been any purely carnivorous human cultures. We haven’t found any yet, and you can’t prove a negative, so I won’t say “there were none.”

In all the best candidates so far, though, plants sneak into the diets. The Inuit actually utilized a wide variety of plant foods including berries, sea vegetables, lichens, and rhizomes. They made tea from pine needles, which are high in vitamin C and polyphenols.  The Sami of Finland, who primarily live off a low-carb, high-fat diet of meat, fish, and reindeer milk (I have to imagine that’s coming to Whole Foods soon), also gather wild plant foods, particularly berries and mushrooms (Finland’s forests produce 500 million kg of berries and over 2 billion kg of mushrooms each year!), sometimes even feeding their reindeer hallucinogenic mushrooms to produce psychoactive urine. The Maasai are known for their meat, milk, and blood diets, but they often traded for plant foods like bananas, yams, and taro, too, and they cooked their meat with anti-parasitic spices, drank bitter (read: tannin- and polyphenol-rich) herb tea on a regular basis, and used dozens of plants as medicines (PDF). Even Neanderthals used plants as food and medicine, we’re learning.

Even if we discover evidence of carnivory in human prehistory or in some extant group, the emerging science of genetic ancestral differences suggests that the habitual diets of our recent ancestors shapes the optimal diet for us today. If your close ancestors weren’t carnivores, you might not have the adaptations necessary to thrive on an all-meat diet.

Still, what about Vilhjamjur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer who came away very impressed with the native Inuit diet and underwent a series of studies on the effect of an all-meat diet in man? He and a colleague did great for over a year eating only meat. But Stefansson wasn’t eating ground beef. In his own words, he ate “steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short-ribs, chicken, fish, liver, and bacon.” Definitely carnivorous. Definitely not just steak or ground beef, as many modern carnivores seem to be eating. All those “weird” cuts gave him critical micronutrients otherwise difficult to get from just steak.

How To Best Optimize a Carnivore Diet

While you won’t find me switching to the carnivore side, if I were to do a carnivorous diet, here’s how I’d try to optimize it (and why).

Take Magnesium

A recent paper showed that the majority of people following a “paleolithic ketogenic diet” with at least 70% of calories from animal foods and including offal had adequate serum magnesium levels. That’s a great start. But earlier studies show that serum magnesium may not be the definitive marker. A person can have normal serum levels but inadequate tissue levels—and in the tissues is where magnesium does its work. A person can have normal serum levels but still be deficient.

Eat Eggs

They’re not quite animals, but they contain everything you need to build a bird from scratch. That’s cool·—bite-sized whole animal.

Eat Liver

Liver is unabashedly animal flesh. It absolutely qualifies for a carnivorous diet. Loaded with choline, folate, vitamin A, copper, and iron, it’s nature’s most bioavailable multivitamin. There’s no reason not to include it. If you get your hands on some fish livers, you’ll get a ton of vitamin D along for the ride.

There’s frozen liver tabs, where people dice up liver into little chunks and swallow them hole.

There’s liver smoothies, where absolute savages blend raw liver and drink it. I know a guy who fixed severe iron deficiency by drinking raw chicken liver orange juice smoothies, with the vitamin C in OJ meant to enhance iron absorption.

Liver is also great sauteed with fish sauce, citrus, salt, pepper, and sesame oil. Do it quick, don’t overcook.

Eat Seafood

A few oysters, some mussels, a filet of wild sockeye salmon… You’ll get vitamin D, long-chained omega-3s (which tend to rare even in pastured ruminant flesh), selenium, iodine, copper, iron, manganese. Not every meal has to—or should— be a New York strip. 

Implement Intermittent Fasts On a Regular Basis

A constant influx of muscle meat will keep mTOR topped up. That’s great for muscle growth and general robustness. Just do something to stop the protein intake for a day or two to  lest you start fueling unwanted growths.

Treat Spices and Other Low/Non-Calorie Plant Foods As Medicinal Supplements That Don’t “Count”

All the nearly-carnivorous cultures we have good data on did similar things, using bitter herbs and barks and the like as supplements to their diets. You’re not getting calories from this stuff. You’re getting non-caloric compounds that provide health benefits.

Get the Best Quality Meat You Can Find and Afford

While I’m sure a diet of snare-caught hare, Alaskan elk, and choice sockeye salmon you wrest from the grasp of picky grizzlies poised over rivers preparing for a long winter would be ideal, it’s not necessary. Yes, grass-fed and -finished/pastured as well as organic are ideal, but do the best you can with what you have.

Use Bone Broth

It’s a great way to get collagen and the glycine it contains to balance out all the methionine you’re eating, especially if you’re doing the muscle meat-only thing and avoiding most gelatinous cuts of meat.  Make it yourself or buy. Collagen supplementation, of course, works here, too.

The carnivore diet isn’t for me. I like plants way too much. But I’m cautiously optimistic that it could work for more people than you’d expect, provided they heed as many of my suggestions as possible.

That’s it for me, folks. What about you? Have any experience eating a carnivorous diet? Interested in trying? Let me know what you know!