#it's almost like writing these takes as much free time as there is available on a given day :P

[captain-huggy-bear]

In Your Element

Pairing: Quinn Hughes x Fem!Reader

Warnings: N/A

Summary: Quinn finally gets an opportunity to each lunch with you at your school, but he arrives a little early and sees a different side to you, when you're absolutely in your element.

Notes: This was a request which I very much enjoyed writing, so thank you:

'For Quinn x teacher reader you could do Quinn going to eat lunch with her at school and getting there early on accident and just admiring her teaching and her getting along with her students and then getting home and just telling her how much he admires her and loves her and wants to marry her'

Not me researching Canadian school grades and ages because it is not the same in the UK (Grade 11 is age 16-17, where as year 11 in the UK is age 15-16 and also the final year of secondary for us)

Totally happy to take requests/ideas/prompts at the moment in my ask box :)

Writing Masterlist

Most days Quinn doesn't get a chance to go and visit you at work and he'd never had the opportunity to sit and eat lunch with you during the school day. After all, you were busy and so was he. You had maybe 40 minutes in a day to sit down and eat, then if he subtracted the time in that 40 minutes you needed to tidy your room, put books out for your next class, write the title on the board, sort your powerpoint out and then pee, plus dealing with any dramas your students brought to your door? Well, you probably had 10 minutes to eat...and he, well, how often was he actually available at that specific time of day? It was like ships in the night sometimes, both having highly busy careers in different ways, but you made it work. Partly by taking any moments that you could find and utilising them, both of you had to learn to be a bit more spontaneous and flexible.

Something that was easier said sometimes than done, but your desire to see each other had a way of making bending easier than breaking. It helped that you'd moved in with him before the season started, so at least he saw you at night and in the early hours of the morning.

Today was different, an odd day where the stars had seemingly aligned. Quinn had a free 2 hours in his day just at the right time for lunch with you and you had a free period after lunch which meant you didn't have to spend all your lunch break sorting stuff out for your next lesson. So, you'd agreed to tell the office he'd be visiting and he agreed to bring your favourite sandwich from your favourite deli along with other goodies for you to snack on.

The problem was Quinn hadn't expected to be 20 minutes early, Vancouver traffic being almost non-existent (which was a rarity) and the deli having absolutely no one inside despite it being lunch time (he briefly considered that the zombie apocalypse might have happened at that point). Being 20 minutes early meant he didn't really have anything to do. At first he assumed he'd have to simply wait in the office, but Maria on reception just gave him his visitors badge and walked him to your classroom, ushering him away from the uncomfortable visitors seats.

Your door is shut to keep the noise of the corridor out of your classroom. From the small window in the door Quinn can see the way your 11th graders sit in various states of focus, you're leant against your desk at the front, hands moving as you talk to them. There's something about how relaxed you are at the front of the classroom, the way you seem to be in your element that hits him. He's never seen you teach a lesson before and it strikes him that it seems right, like it's where you're supposed to be.

Maria knocks on the door and he watches as you pause, telling your students something before setting a timer on the board. Watching for a second to make sure they were all on task before walking to the door and reaching for the handle, your face a picture of surprise at seeing him here early.

"Mr Hughes is here to see you, I thought he could sit in the back or help you with the last little bit of lesson."

"Thank you, Maria I'm sure we'll figure it out." You smile warmly at Maria and it strikes him that you probably know all about her, that you've probably spent time with her at the staff Christmas party and eaten lunch together. It hits him that there are people you see every day that he has no idea about because your worlds simply don't cross that often. You know his team mates but does he really know your colleagues? He suddenly feels very out of place.

"You are early." You give him a look that makes him smile sheepishly at you, raising the bag of sandwiches as if that would solve the problem. Still you let him into your classroom, your students narrowing their eyes at the new face before promptly widening at who just walked into their classroom. Still they don't say anything, like you've taught them better, heads down as they continue writing an answer to the question on the board. A timer ticking down the remaining couple of minutes left.

He drops the bag onto your desk before you point to a spare seat at the back, "You can watch if you want...sorry, it might be boring."

"I don't think anything you could do would be boring." He knows the way he's looking at you is probably a little much for a classroom, he can't help it though. You're so pretty in your teacher clothes, there's a different sort of confidence rolling off you, you own the room and it's attractive, the way you command the room even when you're not overtly doing anything.

A quiet little murmur runs through the class at his statement, a few raised eyebrows and David lets out a little 'ohhhh' that you hush with a sharp look. Even that is hot, the fact a single look from you has a teenage boy shutting up, Quinn's rarely seen you like this, in complete and total control, effortlessly. In your pairing you're usually the one who follows while he leads. He orders your drink at a coffee shop or initiates a kiss, this is a different you.

"Go to your seat, Mr Hughes." The raised eyebrow does it for him as well and he thinks if he had to actually respond he'd have stuttered, instead he choses to follow your directions, trying desperately not to look utterly devoted to you in front of a bunch of teenagers.

He forgot how uncomfortable classroom chairs were, still he uses it as a chance to watch from the back corner. You wander the room, green pen in hand for the remaining time on the timer, writing notes on students' work and giving direction here and there. A few times you give warnings to students who haven't worked hard enough, but there's a general sense that this group of students work for you because they respect you. Even the kids who clearly aren't the most academic seem to try for you.

The timer is blaring when it goes off, some sort of lute sound that you clearly picked because it was mildly medieval and fit the vibe of your history classroom. It's ridiculous but it also describes you perfectly, those elements of quirkiness and fun that fit in even into a classroom where students write paragraphs and complete work. Like you have a balance perfectly set.

"Right, times up, so put your pens down..." You march to the front in quick time, nabbing a flashlight that one of your students was playing with at the front before they could even protest, slipping it into your pocket. It's impressive, the way you seem to have eyes on every corner of the classroom, the way you notice things that Quinn definitely would not have.

The student in question puts his hand up in the air and you call on him as if it was expected, "Yes, Rory?"

"Can I have it back at the end?"

"Yes, Rory, you can have it back at the end." It's interesting, the way that that is enough. That Rory seems to respect that it shouldn't have been out, doesn't try to argue that you shouldn't have taken it, but trusts that he'll get it back enough not to press they issue. Quinn's pretty sure Miller has argued with him more over lesser things before.

"Who can explain to me then how war has had an impact on medical development? Bonus points, potentially getting the bonus point duck for the rest of lesson, if you can give me concrete examples from our unit." He's close to putting his hand up to ask about the bonus point duck when you reach into your desk drawer and pull out a rubber duck dressed as Henry VIII.

It's in that moment that Quinn realises he does not know as much about you as he thought. He knew you. He knew the woman he called his girlfriend who couldn't sleep with her feet outside of the bed covers and absolutely had to have the shower on the highest heat setting, but he didn't know teacher you. Never in his life had you mentioned a bonus point duck, never would he have predicted that that was something you even had in your classroom and it's utterly ridiculous and shouldn't motivate a bunch of teenagers at all and yet, suddenly there were 20 hands in the air, a few calling out as if that would make you pick them quicker.

He watches the way you smile, the scan of your eyes over each, the way you bypass those not meeting your expectations until they correct themselves and then you pick a student that Quinn would likely not have picked, a student he knows his history teacher in school would have avoided.

When he thinks of picking a student to answer there are two modes he thinks of from his own high school career:

The one without their hand up, who doesn't look like their listening, the one a teacher wants to catch out

The student who is clearly a nerd, clearly good at the subject and will clearly given an impressive answer, the easy kid to pick

You pick neither. Instead, you go straight to a girl with her hand up but with thick blonde hair extensions in and enough gum in her mouth that Quinn can hear it smack from here. The stereotypical popular girl who probably doesn't care much about school and would rather be at the mall.

"Angel?"

"Well, it's like when there's a war on like World War One then all the government care about is winning the war, right?"

You nod in encouragement and it hits him that you picked Angel for a reason. That you picked a student who likely doesn't like school, likely gets discouraged but who you know can answer and get a confidence boost. It's smart, he does something similar with rookies, where he gives them a chance to do something so he can boost their confidence, can build a relationship with them. Suddenly captaincy and teaching seem awfully similar, minus the gum and the smell of Lynx Africa.

"So like if they don't improve medicine then all their soldiers just die, right? Either outright or later because of like infection like why they funded Florey and Chain to mass produce penicillin in World War Two or like why people were so into the leg splint thing in 1916. So, the governments put more money into medicine because that means soldiers live longer and can get sent back to war and then they can win the war because they still have men alive, but like if they all die you're going to lose the war, duh."

"Beautiful answer and a few specific examples in there, you have earned the duck," You smile widely at her as you walk to plop the rubber duck on her desk and he can see it, the way she seems to puff up in pride, the way a student who maybe would have hated History is engaged because of you.

He's pretty sure he just fell a little bit more in love with you.

"Yo, Miss?"

You sigh a deep sigh as if this interruption is expected, stopping mid walk back to the front of your classroom and turning on your heel, "Yes, David?" Your voice is mildly amused, not impatient or frustrated like Quinn would expect.

"Why ducks?" There's a beat of silence and Quinn watches the way you just stare at David, eyebrows high on your forehead like your considering whether you'll actually treat the question seriously or not.

Then a big smile crosses your lips like you're laughing at yourself before you even say the punch line to a joke. A silly little smile that is so his girlfriend that suddenly both versions of yourself seem to merge together.

"Because ducks fly together."

"C'mon, Miss! Really? Did you seriously just quote the Mighty Ducks when a hockey legend is in the room?" It's your patience with David that smacks Quinn in the face. You could have given him a detention by now or told him off for disrupting your lesson, but you're not. Like you're confident you can bring it back to the lesson soon enough. It makes him wonder if you'd be that patient with your kids, if he's seeing a little glimpse into a possible future where you're this patient with the kids you have with him.

"Well, maybe we should ask the 'hockey legend' what he thinks of my jokes? Mr Hughes?" You ask him because you know he'll back you up, and it's that sense of being needed that makes him sit up a little straighter in the chair he's in and smile widely like he's scored a goal.

"Hilarious as always, although maybe you need a bonus point orca?"

"Oh, do I? The duck not good enough?" There's a little glint in your eye, the one you always get when you're teasing him, playful. It feels like the rest of the world disappears, falls away, like you're the only two people in the room.

"Seems a little too Anaheim like for my taste,"

"You would say that, no taste." As if you're a Anaheim fan when you are in fact a Canucks fan through and through, but you know the statement will get a little rise out of Quinn. You can see the way his brow twitches at the suggestion that you'd pick the Ducks over the Canucks, the sense of male pride being slighted.

"Miss, stop flirting with Quinn Hughes!" It's David, it's always David. David with a wide grin that shows off his braces, David who's waggling his eyebrows at you, typical teenage boy behaviour really but it stumps you. Quinn can see that it stumps you.

There's a beat of silence, like your brain is trying to process what's just happened, and for the first time you're off your game, flustered, a little taken aback like you didn't expect it to go this far. But, then, Quinn was never in your classroom while you taught, never there for you to banter with in front of students. Quinn had proven to be a distraction, a disruptive presence if you will.

Your choice of tactic is perhaps not the best nor the most smooth, but simply to turn back to your powerpoint plastered on the board and pretend that it simply hadn't happened. To move on.

"Anyway, back to medicine," Your voice is a little unsteady, a little less controlled and Quinn feels slightly bad that he put you off your game, but admires the way you push forward.

You turn the slide on your powerpoint, an old cartoon springing up on the board, "I'm going to give you a copy of this source from 1847 about anaesthetic and I want you to analyse it like we've been practicing. If you can do this properly in 8 minutes then I will let you ask Mr Hughes some questions..." You pause briefly, looking directly at David, "Appropriate questions."

There's a bubble of excitement that sees students volunteering to help you hand out glues and copies of the source before all heads hit the desks, hands moving ferociously across the paper while 8 minutes ticks down on the clock. Just like that you've got them back on track and it is utterly impressive, how you managed to completely save a lesson that he'd accidently ruined for you.

You both survive the few minutes of questions at the end, David only asking a few minorly inappropriate ones which Quinn fields with his usual tactic of say nothing and refuse to answer. By the end he's not entirely sure how you handle being questioned all day by hundreds of teenagers and Quinn's a lot more sympathetic to your reluctance to make decisions when you get home after a long day of teaching. He gets it now.

"Have a good lunch, everybody!" You wave the last of your students off at the door, shutting it the moment they're all out and letting out a massive sigh of relief, shoulders slumping.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, just tired." The unspoken is there. That your job is hardwork, that getting kids in the modern age to focus on anything for more than 60 seconds might look easier to the outsider but takes more brainpower and more routines and techniques than you can shake a stick at.

Quinn decides to leave it for the moment, you probably don't want to spend your entire lunch break talking about teaching and he's ultimately here to see his baby, not talk about education.

"Sit, I got your favourite," He's guiding you gently, hands on your shoulders to your comfy desk chair, the one he hasn't seen you sit down in at all. You let him force you to sit down, let him sort out your sandwich placing it in front of you with a napkin and your favourite packet of crisps with your favourite drink to boot. It's a little thing but the way he sets it out in front of you, the way he takes care of you helps ease a little bit of the strain of the day.

"Thank you for coming and having lunch with me," You reach for half of your sandwich, exactly as you like it down to the type of bread used, watching as Quinn pulls one of the desks closer to you so he's not so far away. His own sandwich being pulled from the brown paper bag.

"You don't have to thank me. I wanted to see my girl, who's looking extra pretty today by the way." You almost choke on the first bite of your sandwich, cheeks warming even as you cough and roll your eyes at him. Feeling decidedly unattractive after nearly choking on bread.

"You are such a suck up!"

"Oh, so I can't compliment my girlfriend now? That's sucking up? I'm just stating facts. The sky is blue, water is clear and my girlfriend is gorgeous."

"Quinn!" You laugh at him and it's the most beautiful thing he's seen all day. The way your face lights up, eyes crinkling as you twist your head away from him because of how ridiculous you think he's being. When you laugh he can't help it, it makes him grin, teeth on show, sandwich half forgotten in front of him.

"And she can't take a compliment to save her life."

The two of you fall into a comfortable sort of routine, taking bites of your lunches while interspersing eating with conversation about his upcoming roadie and what you're going to send to your mum for her birthday.

He doesn't say anything about your teaching, doesn't even bring up the bonus point duck because he doesn't want to take up your few precious non-teacher minutes with it...and also because he's pretty certain 40 minutes is not enough time for all the things he's thinking.

How does one condense down how much they admire their partner? How does he talk briefly about how utterly amazing you are at your job and how he can't wait to marry you, to have kids with you, to see you be just as patient, just as amazing with them? He can't, so he decides to leave it til later.

He doesn't just eat lunch with you before he leaves the school though, Quinn, ever determined to make your life easier helps you tidy up your classroom and fix a display board that you couldn't reach the top corner of. You can't help but admire him as he stretches up up to staple a bit of border roll back in place, the muscles of his back flexing underneath his t-shirt, the way his hair falls effortlessly across his forehead. It's weird seeing him in this environment, your environment but you can't help but think that he fits in it, like it suits him to be helping in a classroom. Maybe in a different life he'd have been a teacher or maybe you were just waxing poetic in your head.

You walk him out to his car once your done, even though you should be using this time to plan, you can't help but try to get as many moments with him as possible, any little bit of time precious.

"I'll see you at home later?" You ask just in case he'd planned something with the team, fingers twined with Quinn's as you stand by his car.

"Yeah, I should be home already when you get in, figured i'd cook dinner tonight." He wants to make it nice for you, special, because he knows you're going to shy away from his compliments, his admiration...but he feels like he has a lot to say. Good stuff, but a lot and he wants you in a good mood, more receptive.

"Mmm, anything good?"

"Your favourite." You think about the spicy noodle dish he's perfected cooking, the little spring onions on top, the warming broth and it makes you feel almost hungry despite having just eaten lunch.

"And what did I do to deserve this treatment?" You tug him closer by the hands, tilting your head back to look up at him with a sweet smile that makes his heart race just a little bit faster. You're so pretty without even trying.

"Just being yourself, baby." Quinn breaches the distance between the two of you, leaning down to close the remaining space, lips pressing to yours gently, once, twice, a third time because he can't help himself, "Have a good rest of your day and I'll see you later, sweetheart"

Quinn presses one more kiss to your lips, a longer one that lingers, a force behind it that almost takes you off guard, your hands reaching up to grip at the edges of his jacket.

It takes you a moment to catch your breath, just long enough for Quinn to notice and smirk about it, to find it cute that he can still make you react like that.

"Bye, I love you." You force yourself to pull away, watching as he steps into the car.

"I love you too." You watch Quinn's car roll out of the school car park, wave back at him when he turns to look at you from the driver's seat before he's completely gone, before heading back instead to finish off your day.

The rest of your day goes relatively smoothly bar the incident in which a student decided to swallow a battery he had in his backpack to see what would happen, resulting in him being taken to hospital and your last class of the day being unable to focus on anything but that. Still as days go it was relatively stress free and made ten times better when you walked into the apartment to the smell of Quinn's world famous spicy noodles and the way he'd set up the dining table with some candles just to make things sweeter. The lights in the apartment dim and romantic feeling.

He's stirring the dish when you get to the kitchen area, back to you, but head turned at the sound of your feet padding towards him. You don't hesitate to wrap your arms around his waist from behind, pressing your cheek into the centre of his back. Quinn leans back into you with a hum.

"You've really gone all out, huh?" You mumble it into his shirt, moving with him as he takes the pan off the heat and carries it towards the two bowls already laid out on the side. Shuffling alongside him determined to stay close to his warmth despite how inconvenient it was.

"Wanted to surprise you, now get off me and sit your cute ass down." You do as your told, jumping a little at the light swat Quinn gives to your arse as you move away from him. You turn to glare at him as if you're offended even though you both know you'd let him slap your arse whenever he wanted if he just asked.

Quinn serves you first, placing your bowl in front of you with a glass of your favourite thing to drink at dinner before grabbing his own noodles and sitting across from you.

At first it's quiet, the two of you more focused on eating than talking, but every now and then you look up to see Quinn staring at you as if he has something he wants to say. You choose not to rush him, both of you finishing your dinner before you insist that you put the dishes in the dishwasher since he cooked. Still he doesn't say anything and you don't push him.

It's not until he drags you to the couch, pulling you to curl up next to him while some movie plays in the background that he finally speaks his mind.

"You were amazing today..." You're tucked under Quinn's arm, his hand resting on your arm as you press your cheek into his shoulder, soft eyes looking up at him from under your lashes.

"Mm? What at work?"

"Yeah." You let him think for a minute, knowing he has more to say but clearly trying to figure out how he goes about saying it, his fingers tracing light circles on your arm. "I've never seen you like that...so in your element..."

There's a pause in which he shifts, pulling your legs over his lap, other hand gripping your calf. It's the most natural movement in the world, a touch neither of you even think twice about. "The kids love you. You got kids who probably hate school to willing write paragraphs for you and...you're so, so confident in that room, baby..."

"I'm just doing my job..." You hide your face in his shirt for moment, feeling that familiar bashfulness come to the surface. You've never been good at accepting compliments, even from Quinn, and now is no exception even as his words fill you with a giddy kind of happiness.

"I know but...the way you just knew you had it, even when someone was off topic, you knew you could get it back on track, that was so fucking attractive and even the silly things, like the duck!" Your head shoots up so fast at the mention of the duck that you almost knock his chin with the top of your head, the look you give him is nothing short of confused.

"The duck is attractive?"

"Not the duck exactly, but the fact that you wanted to make History fun but also still make sure they're actually learning...and, and it was so you, y'now? So silly but endearing and...I don't know..." Quinn looks away from you, red flush high on his cheeks as he starts to regret ever saying anything, feeling mildly embarrassed about how into you he is. Which he knows is ridiculous because he should be into his girlfriend.

"You don't know? Sounds like you do, you're just embarrassed about how much you love me." You tease him, hand cupping his cheek to get him to face you again, even when he's embarrassed he can't help but lean into your touch a little more, cheek pressed fully into your palm.

"I do love you...watching you teach was like seeing our future."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I thought..." There's that hesitancy again, flush bright on his skin, lip being bitten between his teeth. It's like he's worried he'll mess up if he speaks his mind, which is ridiculous because you love him so much you're not sure anything he could say would change that.

"You can't put me off, Quinn, if you're worried about saying the wrong thing...i'm too in deep to be put off, so, you thought?"

You wait, oh so patient, while he assesses you, judges whether you're telling the truth. Like he needs to double check that you're correct when you say you're in too deep.

"I was just thinking about how you're so patient with your students and how patient you'll be with our kids, y'know?"

"Our kids?" There's a giddy little sensation of butterflies flipping in your stomach, eyes widening in delight at the mention because how many relationships have you had where your exes refused to even consider children, where they didn't want that with you?

"Well, yeah, I'm going to marry you one day." It's so matter of fact as if he'd just said he was going shopping tomorrow or had a game on Saturday. A statement of objective truth as if there was no other option, no other outcome.

"Oh, you are?"

"If you let me. If you don't? I'm never going to marry anyone." You pull back from him, just enough to look at him, mouth slightly dropped open. He's dead serious, lips pursed, brows furrowed.

"Quinn."

"I mean it. I love you, you're so fucking amazing and I...seeing you in your element today made me realise how impossible it would be for me to fall in love with anyone else, to marry anyone else, to have a family with anyone else. I don't want anyone but you."

You let out a shaky breath, smile watery but pleased, full of love and affection.

"I...I guess it's a good thing then that I want to marry you one day. Can't have you dying alone, that would be sad." You're trying to lighten the mood, but the truth is you're so deeply touched, so in love with him that you hope he means it. If he breaks up with you, you're certain it'll break you for good because you were certain he was it for you too.

"Just to be clear this isn't a proposal, you're getting a proper proposal and it will be a surprise."

"You think you're sneaky enough to keep it secret?" Your arms wrap around his neck as the two of you shift, fingers playing with the dark curls at the nape of his neck.

"I think if I want something enough, i'll get it." Quinn's voice lowers in that way that has you raising your brows, cheeks warming as smirks down at you, green eyes peering at you from underneath unfairly long lashes.

"Oh?"

"Oh." You lean back against the couch, lowering yourself flat as Quinn crawls his way over you, arms bracketing your head on the couch beneath you. You reach a hand up to cup his jaw, scruff rough against your palm, the air around you feels charged.

He's the first to move, wasting little time before lowering his lips to yours. A soft press that deepens as your arms drag him closer, fingers curling in his hair tight. You're working on instinct when Quinn's tongue swipes across your bottom lip begging for entry, opening up for him as your legs wrap around his hips.

In that moment you are so very glad that you're never going to have to know what life is like without Quinn Hughes. That you'll always get to revel in the way he presses his whole weight onto you, the way his breath wavers when he pulls back just to catch his breath before diving back into you.

Maybe you're just lucky or maybe fate intervened, but you are so fucking glad you met Quinn Hughes and so fucking glad that he decided a random History teacher was more than enough for him for the rest of his life.

[allurilove]

Yandere Boyfriend x you

Rated 18 + -- mature long (?) content!

Includes: Headcanons of possessive, obsessive, and perverted behavior, stalking, rough sex, pretty gender neutral, jealousy, hair pulling, handjobs, going on vacation with you.

*Thanks for all the love on the first post, and here’s a continuation! Here is the third part! It’s a much longer version, and he’s now referred to as “your boyfriend!” This is gonna be a long one, and then I'll take a bit of a break to write yandere priest! This is purely fictional writing!*

Synopsis: Your wish became true, and now you have a boyfriend. He loves you immensely, and now that you two live together, he feels like his life is complete.

He never believed to see a more beautiful and attractive person than you. You have his heart and soul in your possession, all ready and willing for you to devour.

Take him, claim him, and he’ll be at your feet worshipping you forever.

He was stoked to be able to have access to your bedroom 24/7. It was like he struck gold as you shown him your newly decorated room. It felt surreal to be your roommate, and the fact that you two would be living under the same roof made it hard for him to control his urges. He knows he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. You were off to class, and his hand was on the doorknob. He slowly pulled the door back, and all of your clothes were revealed to him. He reached out and gently touched the fabric of your clothes, his hands feeling the smooth silk, or the fuzzy cotton shirt. He leaned in to sniff the closet, and your natural scent fills his nose. He sighed and he stepped in, he closed his eyes as your clothes enveloped him like a hug.

Your classmate slowly pulled down his pants, his face digging into your sweater as he kept inhaling the soft aroma from your fragrance. He had to keep himself busy somehow. He started to shuffle around the apartment, his pants pulled down to his feet and he looked like a penguin as he walked to the bathroom. He grabbed your towel you frequently used, and he sniffed that too. Your classmate began to rub himself, his fingers touching the outline of his manhood. It stood strong and proud, it was a bit heavy and sort of curved to the left. He used his free hand to start jerking himself off.

It was almost like a routine for him. He would wake up at the same time as you, watch you leave the house and wave goodbye, and then go back to your room to sleep. He soon began to grind onto your pillow. Or he would wrap himself in a little burrito with your covers.

You two had your great moments as "classmates", and had your little movie nights when you were done with class. You had a huge bucket of popcorn on your lap, and it was mixed with your favorite candy, with sweet and savory kernels as well. He would always grab for some when you did- just to brush his hand against yours.

While living with your classmate…he soon became your boyfriend. It sort of happened when you two got drunk and ended up making out in his bed. His lips were soft, his tongue swirled with yours, and he could taste the peach liquor.

Living with him was great: he frequently cleaned, always did the laundry, and he would steal a couple of your intimates. You almost caught him, and you could see the little fabric poking out of his pocket, but he had distracted you by pulling you to the bedroom.

You were getting a bit suspicious that he was at the apartment all the time, but he promised he just had online classes. He then started to be a Photoshop pro. He would create fake grades, and fake assignments he had to do, and he realized that it would be odd if he was available all the time. So, he actually had to sneak into campus and pretend he was a student there. His heart ached as he had to send "I'm actually busy and can't make it" text to you. Knowing damn well that he had nothing going on.

You two went on dates. He always took you out somewhere new, he never once wanted you to feel bored with him. He bought tickets to this stand up comedian you liked, and you both sat down onto your seats. It went well, literally too well. He grits his teeth as he hears another laugh from you. I mean c'mon, the comedian wasn’t that funny.

Now that he thinks about it… he doesn’t remember a time when he made you laugh like that. Even when he made notes of all the things you found hilarious. His eyes widened at the realization, and he started to doubt himself. Maybe he wasn’t even funny, no matter how hard he tried-- oh god!

You nudged him to see his reaction, his eyes were shining with love as he looked over to you, but he covered the lower half of his face. And he silently mouthed “Count your days” to the comedian.

He gripped onto his thighs, his eyes narrowing at the ground as he silently fumed. He didn’t want to seem overbearing, and you were having a good time, so he kept his thoughts to himself. You made fun of him that night. While you guys were walking back home, he frowned as you mocked his tense expression.

“Oh stop it.” He grumbled and he looked away. He looked so cute when he pouted, and he crossed his arms.

Though deep down, he liked that he made you smile. Even if you were laughing at him, it was still a win in his books. He sighed and decided to reel you in by wrapping his arm around your shoulder, and he brought you close.

You also got a lot of noise complaints. It was embarrassing to even bump into your neighbors when you left your apartment. They sent you nasty glares, eye rolls, and out right told you to keep it down. They thought you were a porn fein.

Your back arched as your boyfriend thrusted into you, and you held him tightly against you. Being with him was always passionate, he was ravenous and acted as if he had been starved of your warmth. He let out a loud groan. He also had the tendency to curse, the bed shook as he picked up the pace- the headboard repeatedly slammed into the wall. You also had to buy a new bed frame after he broke the other one.

He leaned down and he nibbled and nipped at your neck, he loved to leave hickeys and marks on you. His hands lifted your legs up and onto his shoulders, pressing your thighs to your chest. The bed creaks underneath your weight, and he reaches down to caress your flushed cheek.

When you saw him open his mouth to say something dirty, you quickly silenced it with your hand. He peered down curiously, his brow raised, and he tilted his head in confusion. You remind him to keep it down, and that the people next door will hear.

The next day: you hid yourself in a hoodie, running to the bus stop as you ignored your neighbors heckles.

After you were done with class, you two went to the gym to work out. You promised to help him build some muscles, and teach him how to run properly. He sometimes wished he didn’t have a dick. He listened to you explain some random machine, and he grabbed a towel to cover his crotch. You saw how he would nervously dart his eyes around, completely unable to look at you without drooling.

As a punishment, you got him to start running on the treadmill. He pants as you continued to speed up the machine, and sweat began to drip down his body.

"Are you trying to kill me?" Your boyfriend whined, and he had to keep pushing his body to the limits. "I thought you liked me..." He joked as he wiped the sweat off his neck.

When he missed you, he disguised himself when he would follow you around campus. He hid himself behind a bookshelf after he stalked you to the library. He lowered his shades to see what you were reading.

“Excuse me?” Another student tapped on his shoulder.

“Piss off.” Your boyfriend said curtly, and he slapped their hand off him. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”

The student looked at him and then followed his line of sight. They were going to ask him to move so they could grab their book, but when they saw his flushed cheeks, dilated pupils, and his odd heavy breathing… they realized he was stalking you and was probably a creep. The student gulped, slowly backing away as they flagged down security.

You had to save your boyfriend from the arms of a buff man. It was almost funny to see your boyfriend get manhandled by security, his feet dangling off the ground, and he continued to say that the guard was embarrassing him.

Your boyfriend still kept in touch with your siblings, he actually grew to liking them, and when winter break came around, he followed you back home. He stepped inside the familiar house, and he greeted your parents first. He handed presents around to your family, and he quickly put on a white beard and red hat for the kids.

He genuinely started tweaking when he was introduced to your life long childhood friend, and ex. He forced a smile and his grip was tight as he shook your ex lovers hand. Your boyfriend continues to give your ex a sideways glare whenever they were near him, or when they would touch you, he would accidentally push them into the christmas tree.

He holds your hand during dinner, and conveniently turns away when your ex asked him pass the rolls. When you reach over to grab the basket for yourself, your boyfriend handed them to you immediately. His expression souring as you gave one to your ex too.

“I think they meant to give it to me.” Your boyfriend grunts, and he picks the bread off your exes plate and shoves it into his mouth.

You kicked him out of bed that night. He had to sleep on the tiny ottoman, it was either that or sleeping on the floor. But he refused to lay down where he couldn’t see you. He sulked, and his body curled up into a fetal position as he saw you sleeping comfortably on the bed.

Your boyfriend slowly unraveled his body and he prowled towards you. His face rubbed up against your thighs, and he murmured “I’m sorry” into your skin. His lips trailing up to your inner thigh. When you pull away, he rolled his eyes, and he flipped you over onto your stomach.

“Do you like your ex more than me? Is that it?” His voice is calm but you can hear the underlying irritation in it. “Do you get all hot and bothered when you think about them?”

“Do you think about them when you’re with me?” He yanked on your hair, and you wince as you feel a burn at your scalp.

He rubbed his sore cheek after you hit him, and you made him sit in the corner to reflect on his behavior. He sighs and he leans his head back onto the wall, his eyes glancing at your sleeping form. You did tell him he couldn't sleep on the bed, but was he going to listen...? He got up from his spot, and he tiptoed towards you, and he laid down next to you. He was successful until your eyes shot open and glared at him, he quickly slinks away in fear.

Your family decided to take you guys to the slopes. You were still mad at your boyfriend, but you helped him put on his clothes. You roughly zipped up his jacket, wrapped the scarf around his neck, and shoved him into the van. He did not like sitting next to your ex. The car ride was tense for him, and your boyfriend was nice to your parents and thanked them for bringing him along. He rolled his eyes as he heard your ex do the same-- damn copycat.

He awkwardly sat there, you were on his left, and your ex on his right. Your boyfriend stared out the window, occasionally making conversation with you, and when you guys came to the gas station to fill up the car- he couldn't wait to jump out.

Your boyfriend stared at the road as your parents pumped the gas into the vehicle, he stretched his limbs and he couldn't help but wonder how long it would take him to walk back home.... surely it wouldn't be that far. He didn't want to leave you with your psychotic ex. I mean, he didn't know for sure they were a nut case, but he liked to believe they were. However, he also didnt want to be here so... he pulled out his phone and he looked it up, damn. 15 hours?

"Thinking about running away?"

Your boyfriends body stiffened as he heard your ex's voice. He sighed heavily, and he turned around to see the person in front of him. He looked at them up and down... realizing they were wearing the same colors. They looked like they were matching. Fuck.

"You would like that wouldn't you?" Your boyfriend shoved past them and he walked inside the store to find you.

You were standing at the chips aisle, a couple of things already in your hands. Your boyfriend grabbed a beef jerky and made his way to you, his body behind yours, and he pressed himself against you. He kissed your cheek, and his hands rubbed your sides.

"Are you still mad at me?" He moped.

"Are you being nice to my friend?" You said back.

He stayed silent for a bit, contemplating what to say. I mean he could lie, but he decides not to. "I think you're asking a bit too much from me."

The rest of the car ride was silent. When you guys made it to the mountain he was shaking the entire time. He was cold, did not know how to ski, and he was stuck on the easiest slopes with the kids and beginner skiers. He flailed down the hill, he tumbled and rolled, and he crashed into a tree.

You helped him get back to the cabin after he got a concussion.

His body wasn't hurting too badly, and he whined and sniffled- really trying to make it seem he was sick. He loved the attention you were giving him, the light touch of your lips on his forehead, and when he convinced you to touch him down there, he was really happy. His back arches as you continued to move your hand underneath his pants, your thumb brushing against his tip.

"Ah~" Your boyfriend moaned. "Keep going..." his hips jerked up to meet your movements, his cock starting to twitch in your hand. His arousal formed in his stomach, before his cum finally leaked out of his member.

You shimmied his pants a bit lower and you licked his manhood, your tongue tasting the slightly salty and white fluid dripping down his length. The rest of the trip went smoothly. He would often pull you to the side to kiss you, he cooked alongside you, learned how to ski with you, learned how to knit a beanie, and of course his favorite... being intimate with you.

Your ex's room was right next door, and your boyfriend made sure to make you scream out his name every night, and vice versa. He loved to make a show of how much you two loved each other, and his hands were on your hips to help you ride him.

"So goood..." He babbled, his brows furrowed in pleasure, and he latched his lips onto your neck. "Keep ridin' me, I wanna see you lose it on my cock."

Your boyfriend was entranced with how you took him in easily, his dick disappearing into you, and felt you tighten around him. A deep growl vibrating from his throat. He plays with your nipples, pinching and he sucked on them. He twirls his tongue around your hardened nipple. When you came, he lapped up your nectar, and he kissed you.

It was soon becoming the end of your college years, and he started to panic. Especially when he heard you talking about how you're gonna walk on stage, or what you were going to wear. He panicked because he's a damn liar. He wouldn't be able to sneak his way into graduation, and it was time to come clean. He hoped you wouldn't leave him, or think he's crazy for following you across the world to be with you.

Allure: Hopefully this keeps y'all fed until I come back! Here’s the c.ai link: https://share.character.ai/Wv9R/ondwnvhr

[zillychu]

I’ve gotten a WAVE of asks about this AU, so I decided to flesh it out some more and answer some of those questions!

I’ll probably polish this extended summary up at some point and submit it to AO3. But for now, here’s a rundown of my thoughts–please feel free to send more questions! I’ll update this post if I get any more. But if you’re someone who wanted to write fic for it, don’t worry, you don’t need to take my headcanons as gospel. It’s a pretty basic AU honestly lol

Summary:

The portal accident results in a violent explosion that wipes out the whole block, and condemns all of Amity Park. Danny haunts the city for 100 years, before Sam and Tucker find him. 

Setup:

In the 1920’s, 19-year-old Danny went into the incomplete portal on his own, hoping to help out his parents. Ripping the portal open through unnatural means created a huge burst of energy that resulted in a massive explosion. A good portion of the Amity Park population died, many were injured, and the ones on the fringes relocated–Amity was quickly deemed too dangerous due to the excess ectoplasm in the area that attracted ghosts. 

While the disaster was in Amity, the fallout was seen around the globe. Before, natural portals were rare, short-lived, and rarely allowed ghosts to fully slip into our realm (the most severe cases being on par with poltergeists that most people didn’t believe in). Now, natural portals pop open frequently around the world, large enough to allow the entirety of a ghost into the physical plane. They’re more common the closer you get to Amity, but they happen enough elsewhere that this change was something of a small apocalypse before people settled back down and found out how to combat at least some of their new, permanent neighbors. 

Danny is unaware that he’s only half-dead, believing he’s a full ghost. He ends up sticking around Amity, unintentionally making it his haunt. His grief and guilt over causing the death of his loved ones (and many others) makes him isolate and avoid human contact. Though he has, at times, scared nosy people away from the city in a mix of territorial instinct–and to get them to leave before a less friendly ghost finds them. 

Ghosts are much more of an uncontested danger in this AU. Lesser ghosts are practically mindless, and while stronger ghosts are capable of reason, their interests are limited. They’re highly territorial, possessive, and often destructive. Most worrisome is that they also like to snack on the life force of anything alive. No one is sure what dictates a ghost’s propensity to attack or hunt the living for their life force since ghosts don’t exactly experience hunger. At least, not the way we do. If a human is rescued before their life force is fully drained, they can make a full recovery–though humanity has still not yet found what this “life force" is. 

And since the Fentons’ research died along with them, there aren’t many tools available to the public to protect them from ghosts. Most homes have standard ghost shields and some weapons are available on the market, but certified ghost hunters are required to take care of anything more powerful than your average spook. 

Sam and Tucker met in high school, and are now rooming together for college very close to the Amity border. Rent is surprisingly cheap when you’re a stone’s throw away from a condemned area crawling with ghosts. Sam is the one who drags Tucker along with her fascination over finding out more about the city, and its largely mysterious demise. Sam is aware of the danger, but feels ghosts have a place in this world just like everything else, and does exercise caution–like one would while foraging in the woods with a known tiger population. 

What she and Tucker weren’t expecting was to run into a ghost that felt almost human. One that hasn't hurt them, not for lack of trying–while being powerful enough to walk past ghost shields without so much as a flinch. The long white hair is familiar in the whispers of the ectobiologist community, but there’s no way it could be the rumored ghost king Phantom, right?

About Danny:

He has very long hair, claws, and black sclera. His hazmat suit is more torn and ragged, with exposed hands and feet that fade into a burnt black.

His hair tends to float a lot on its own. It can start morphing into fire under duress. 

He does still technically have gloves and boots, they've just charred and melted into his skin towards the ends. He can't take them off in his ghost form. His hands and feet have a leathery texture that's tougher than the rest of his skin.

The white of his hazmat suit is both supposed to look like flames, and also a battered look representing his more violent, explosive death.

Overall, he appears rather listless and sad, with an unnerving air of danger around him–even for a ghost. 

Danny’s “ghost sense” comes out as white smoke.

He does breathe black smoke at times, usually when agitated. 

He's already fought and defeated Pariah Dark by the time Sam and Tucker find him, technically making him the Ghost King. This is heavily speculated by ghost experts, despite there being no real proof beyond a massive battle that scarred Illinois. He has not donned the Ring or the Crown, and captured sentient ghosts are hesitant to answer questions surrounding him. Danny basically has the throne but doesn’t do anything with it, and finds it meaningless enough to routinely forget he has the title. He only fought Pariah because he knew otherwise, humanity would have perished. A lot of ghosts are scared of him because he's so hard to figure out, and he's strong. 

Danny is usually very quiet and speaks softly, because his lungs were damaged in the blaze that half-killed him. He's technically healed since becoming a ghost, so it's more of a compulsion due to the traumatic memory. That, and he’s just… very forlorn and distant, shy around humans who don’t seem to understand how dangerous it is to keep hanging around him.

His memories pre-accident are extremely fuzzy. He knows the very basics of who he was, but specifics have been muffled due to trauma and isolation. He routinely forgets human habits, etiquette, etc. and tends to act more like a full ghost with some odd quirks. 

He does try to scare Sam and Tucker off numerous times. Unfortunately for him, they realized they shouldn't have been able to escape a ghost that strong–but they did, because he let them. 

Sam and Tucker think he's mute at first! He doesn't speak a word to them until several encounters later, when he fumbles his whole scary act and saves them from another ghost. 

He’s still half-ghost, though he doesn’t figure this out until Sam and Tucker come along trying to unravel the mysteries behind the Amity catastrophe. Physically and emotionally, he’s been stuck for 100 years–so his human form is still 19. It’s unclear at this point if he can age normally like a human as long as he stays in human form, or if he’s immortal. 

Danny's family did not turn into ghosts, though he sometimes worries he'll find them in the afterlife as shells of their former selves. He doesn't know if it's better or worse that he's not sure he'd recognize them. 

(Danny also still has some living family. Take a guess.)

Yes, he knows how to Wail. Understandably, he very rarely uses it. You do not want to witness this.

Danny :) is not immune :) from the allure of eating a human's life force :)))

[erodasfishtacos]

You Belong With Me | pilot!h |

Prompt: YN and Harry are enemies until they’re not. YN doesn’t need another relationship but neither does Harry. It doesn’t go smoothly.

Word Count: 19k+

Warnings: discussion of miscarriage

author's note:

I upload a piece of writing every 1-3 days.

I recently started a second tier called The OG Tier where 2-3 one shots (1-4kish) are posted a week.

There are currently 400 + pieces available to read

Tier I - $3 USD where you get access to main stories, everything except the mini one shots.

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you can check it out here!

there is more pilot!h on patreon

click here for a chance at a free month of my writing.

—-—

It isn’t love.

At least not a first.

YN cannot tell you the moment she fell in love with him.

However, she can tell you the moment that she knew.

-

YN had never had a casual hookup, she’d always been in committed relationships, and had pretty vanilla sex that almost always took place in a bedroom without much excitement.

For a long while, she never thought anything of it and deduced that maybe she just was not one of the people who had a wild adventurous sex life or was bold - it was just fine with her boyfriend in the past, it was never anything to write home about.

She definetly never thought that she would find out that she did in fact have a wild side at work of all places.

YN reveled in not rocking the boat, she’d never do anything unprofessional at work, and she was always one of the best employees - some whispered that she was a kissass or a try hard, YN just wanted to do a good job and hope that most people liked her.

YN had just gotten out of her longest relationship so far - she’d been with Noah since her first year of college and had broken it off after nearly six years of being together just about five months into her new job.

It wasn’t working out any longer, if they were honest, they hadn’t been working out for quite sometime.

YN doesn’t know exactly when she had fallen out of love with Noah but she had.

It was a rocky breakup.

They wanted different things.

YN wants a ring.

Noah didn’t want to get married.

Even though it wasn’t the worst breakup ever, YN really was struggling with all the stress it had put on her because her whole life had changed now that she was a flight attendant.

She had to let Noah keep their two dogs which really felt like she gave away custody because he could be home every night to take care of them while YN was never home for more than a few nights at a time.

Noah had owned the house they lived in which meant YN moved into an apartment that wasn’t that bad but it really wasn’t anything special, it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t home often enough and packed boxes lay untouched for a long time.

YN decided that being single was best right now, it would be near impossible to find a relationship that would work with her hectic hours and she wasn’t going on a dating app to have mediocre sex.

It only takes one person to flip her whole life around.

And that is a fucking understatement.

-

It officially marked her seventh month at the company and her second of being single - both were going somewhat well in her eyes.

Her parents wanted her to find someone, wasting no time in pestering her because they wanted her to have a wedding, to give them grandchildren.

Honestly, YN’s has not been looking.

At first, the breakup with Noah went fine, pleasant even but just a few weeks ago, it had turned completely sour after Noah had told her she wasn’t able to visit their two dogs anymore.

When YN was home, she’d swing by at least once a week to spend some time with her two fur babies whether in his backyard or taking them to the local park for a hike.

However, he’s found a new girlfriend and has stated that it’s no longer a good idea for her to come see the dogs but also said she’s not allowed to take them either which means she has completely lost them.

Noah: It’s nothing personal. I just don’t want my new girlfriend getting the wrong idea, you know? Sorta a buzzkill to have my ex and me sharing dogs like they’re kids or something. I hope you understand, maybe I can send pics

“YN, hello?” Her friend Elaina waves her hand in front of her cellphone screen to break her gaze from Noah’s text message.

“Sorry,” YN mumbles as she locks her phone and puts it on airplane mode.

They were waiting in the employee area for their flight to be ready, a little lounge that was a bit too humid and the coffee was always out.

“I was saying that today is Pilot Styles’ first day with Paradise Airlines after moving from Coastal,” Elaina explains to YN and the few other women that were huddled on the worn couches.

YN’s brow furrows at that, “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

She had heard rumors that a new pilot would be joining their team, be their captain as Paradise Airlines were unlike other companies - they tended to keep crews together on the same flights to build a good coworking relationship.

All the girls look at her like she had a second head, Justine speaking up first, “How do you not know who he is?”

YN doesn’t quite know how to answer that, shrugging her shoulders, “I don’t remember anyone ever saying anything about that captain to me. Why is it a big deal that he is changing to our airline?”

Perry jumps in, excited that she gets to spill some gossip, “Well, we’re surprised you don’t know him because of the amount of shit that the stewardess’ bitch about him. It’s a big deal that he’s coming to our airline because every attendant I know hates him.”

YN wasn’t expecting that for the reason that he was so well known.

“I mean most pilots are a bit grouchy,” YN responds as she sips her coffee that has enough espresso to get her through the next ten hours, “They all seem a little miserable if I’m honest.”

Elaina laughs at that, leaning forward, “He’s not just a bit grouchy. He’s a straight up asshole. He’s probably the most unfriendly, unwelcoming person that I’ve ever met and I’ve heard from others that it’s the same. He treats everybody like they’re less than and is demanding, like everybody needs to bow down for him.”

“You’ve worked with him before?” YN asks Elaina, it sounds like she was speaking from personal experience and there was still annoyance in her tone as she recounts how she knows the captain.

“Unfortunately, I worked at Coastal Airlines for a few years before I moved here. Styles is probably around forty years old so he’s been here quite a while now. I didn’t have many experiences with him but I swear he made at least one attendant cry each flight.”

“Did he make you cry?” YN responds because that seemed to be what Elaina was insinuating as her friend picked at the foam of her cheap coffee cup.

“Once,” Elaina nods with a pursed smile, “I accidentally turned off the seatbelt sign right before major turbulence which was totally on me but Harry lost his shit on me, he wrote me a formal warning, told me that if i can’t do something as simple as button control that I should be working somewhere ‘more my speed’, and when I started crying - he fucking laughed at me for and told me I was being childish.”

“Maybe he was just having a bad day?” YN tries to justify because why would someone be so cruel for no reason, it didn’t make sense unless he was perpetually miserable.

Justine finally jumps into the conversation, “He has a bad day everyday. He usually sits down at the hotel bars for an hour or so after check-in. I’ve watched stewardess’ try to hit on him, get him to take them back to his room because even though he’s a dickhead, he’s fucking hot. A lot of the time, he just turns them down but sometimes he’ll toy with them. He’ll flirt, buy them a drink, and then laugh at them because they thought they had a chance with him.”

It’s official, YN already hates this Captain Styles, he sounds like a chauvinist pig and she hopes that she can just manage to keep a safe distance from him.

YN misses the social cues of the situation, she misses the way the other girls tense up, she misses the warning glances that they’re trying to silently give her, she misses the way their eyes widen at the doorway.

YN’s back was turned toward the door so she couldn’t see who walked in, didn’t even hear anyone, and shakes her head with a soft chuckle, “I don’t care how good looking Captain Styles is, he can fuck off if he thinks he can be an asshole to me. I’m not in the mood.”

And she was expecting some type of response from her fellow coworkers but instead they are absolute dead silence, sitting stock still, and looking down at their laps.

“Is that right?” A deep voice asks from behind her, it nearly sent chills down her spine at the tone, cool and collected but the sharp, authoritative edge was not going unnoticed by her.

YN squeezes her eyes shut for a long moment, already having a sinking feeling that it was none other than the captain, her new boss, behind her and had just heard her brave declaration.

She stands up, straightening out the pleats of her freshly ironed dress, and turns towards him.

YN feels her breathing stutter when she finally comes face to face with the man who no one has had anything good to say about and she feels a weird flip in her stomach.

They said he was hot.

But that really didn’t do any justice to the man standing in front of her.

He was hot, sure but he was devastatingly, intimidatingly handsome.

She’d never been so intimidated by someone based on their appearance alone, he was so beautiful that it was startling as he stared her down with a bored expression.

He was tall, lean but not in a scrawny way, it was obvious that he had lithe muscle on his body that was hidden away under his uniform, and said uniform fit him like an absolute glove.

Captain Styles had cropped brown curls with individual gray hairs scattered within, mostly near his temples which was the one of the only signs of his age, his eyes were a piercing green surrounding by dark lashes, and his lips were puffy, pouty, and currently in a frown.

YN realizes that he’s expecting a response and in that moment, despite his good looks, she decides that she’s not going to let herself be treated like shit because she has had enough of that from other men in her life lately.

She knows it’s only appropriate to apologize but she’s not going to grovel for his forgiveness, he could hate her because she already disliked him, and so she swallows her pride for the moment.

“I apologize, Captain Styles,” YN says clearly, not letting once ounce of anxiety slip into her tone, “That was inappropriate and uncalled for. It won’t happen again. I look forward to working with you.”

He narrows his eyes at her, studying her face and not letting the scowl leave his, its like he’s trying to look at her soul with how intent his stare is, and then he’s replying, “Unfortunately, I cannot say the same. It doesn’t seem like such a pleasure to work with you. However, I am hopeful you’re not as unpersonable with customers as you are with your superiors.”

YN’s has to stop herself from letting her mouth drop open at the harshness of his words, a ball of red hot fury beginning to build in her as she drops the faux smile from her face.

“I don’t think you have much room to talk about being unpersonable, Captain Styles,” YN tells him, making sure the words sound soft and just casual conversation even though it’s anything but - she can feel the eyes of her coworkers bulging at the confrontation.

Harry smiles brightly, his bright white teeth flashing almost dangerously at her words, “Even though it’s adorable, the attitude won’t last long. Not if you want to keep your job.”

YN doesn’t let that worry her, she could always find a job with another airline, there’s always a need and for some reason, she decides that she wants to pick a fight with this man when she’s never done something like this before.

“I’m good at my job and I’m friendly,” YN shrugs like she’s unbothered, she catches Harry’s fist clench tightly at his side in annoyance but it’s the only sign of it in his body, “I think you may be able to take some lessons from me because the latter seems pretty difficult for you, Captain.”

Harry’s eyes are dark, laser focused on her and no one else in the room, and her words don’t change his facial expression, he simply states to the room at large, “Change of plans for the flight to Heathrow,” He takes a minute to look at her name badge, “I would like Perry and YN to switch positions on today’s flight. The plane is boarding in fifteen minutes, please be prepared to board and prepare for takeoff.”

With that, he’s turning on his heel and striding right back out the door.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Elaina hisses as she smacks YN’s arm, “What the hell were you thinking?”

YN doesn’t really know what got into her, that man just brought something out in her that made her want to fight, to be a little be feisty, and get under his skin when no one else could.

“I wasn’t really,” YN admits with a nervous laugh, flopping back down on the sofa, “He’s just so arrogant, cocky. Men like that get on my nerves and I’m not going to let him treat me however he wants.”

“I have to say I’m relieved I’m no longer on cockpit duty but I’m sorry for you, it’s going to be a long flight,” Perry sighs as she sits up to throw her empty drink away.

Fuck.

“Of course,” YN shakes her head in annoyance, “Of course, he’s going to make me wait on him hand and foot now.”

“Depends, sometimes he really keeps to himself. Especially on the long flights but when he’s on a rampage, he’ll make the whole flight awful. Thanks for that,” Justine snorts but doesn’t actually seem that mad, like she knows YN is going to get the brunt of it.

“Lucky me,” YN responds sarcastically, it was about time they headed out to board.

Paradise had the nicest planes in the game, newest and most expensive, an average seat on board cost no less than a thousand dollars, and everyone had pods instead of normal seating.

It was for long flights, international which YN didn’t mind - she liked getting out of the country, sometimes she got to experience the cities for a day or so, not always.

The cockpit attendant was exactly what it sounded like, they were responsible for communicating with the pilots and then passing that message onto either the passengers or other employees.

They would ask the stewardess to check on things, give them drinks or prepare their food, and give them any updates that may be necessary for them to know.

Most flight attendants want the cockpit because it tended to be the easiest spot, didn’t have to deal with the unruly passengers much, didn’t have to be at their beck and call, and most pilots were pretty low maintances and kept communication to a minimum.

However, everyone seemed to want to face the customers for a ten hour flight than even have to talk to their pilot which wasn’t what YN had considered - it just shows how awful he is and she just subjected herself to it.

-

Takeoff is smooth, after a few minutes, Captain Styles’ voice filters through the intercoms where he discusses the flight, the weather, the time, and cursing altitude before wishing them a good trip.

He doesn’t bother YN until three hours in, pressing the button that signals to her that she is needed in the pit which she punches in the code and sticks her head in where Harry and his co-pilot are.

“Yes, Captain Styles?” YN uses her most professional tone because she truly wasn’t trying to get fired.

“Club soda with lemon,” Is all he responds without looking back, no please or courtesy - it was demand because he could.

“Yes sir,” YN has to make sure it doesn’t come out as sharply as she wants it, he’s already creating an itch under her skin, and its making her want to tell him off again.

She takes her time preparing the drink, no rush to be back which she’s hoping annoys him, and when she steps back into the cockpit, attempting to hand him the beverage - he doesn’t reach for it.

“I’ve changed my mind. I’d actually prefer a raspberry la croiax,” He again doesn’t make any effort to look at her and she swears she can see the slightest smirk at the corner of his lips.

“I’ll take the club soda,” The other man shrugs, taking it off of her hands so that it doesn’t go to waste, oblivious to the obvious tension in the small space.

YN knows that he’s doing it just to fuck with her, its unprofessional and immature but that shouldn’t surprise her with how much people have been warning her about him, right?

She again drags her feet and inhales deeply before reentering, hands out with the drink, and this time Harry reaches for it - she tries not to startle when their fingers brush momentarily, one of his rings bumping her.

“Miss. YN, I know I switched you position last moment,” Harry hums like he’s thoughtful, it actually makes her more irritated than when he’s blunt and cold, it like he’s playing a game right now, “But I think cockpit attendant is most likely the easiest job on this plane. If you cannot even get beverages in a timely manner than maybe you need some additional training or an even easier job.”

YN is absolutely staring daggers into the back of his head, she knows that this is usually when the other women cry or back away with their tail between their legs but YN wasn’t going to do either of those things.

She was going to kill him with kindness.

“Abolstuely, Captain Styles. I apologize for any inconvenience, I know you have such a hard job and I’m making it difficult. I’ll try better in then future, thank you for your feedback,” The fake enthusiasm is dripping into her voice and it’s obvious how much acting is put in to her demeanor.

She preens a bit when she realizes that it catches him at least a little of guard, his smirk faltering for a moment before his eyes narrow again and his nostrils are flaring, “Get out my pit.”

And YN has to contain her giggle, overjoyed that she’d managed to irk him, and it seems to do the trick as he doesn’t request anymore beverages for the rest of the flight and doesn’t interact with her nearly at all.

-

YN can at least give it to Captain Styles that it was a smooth flight, as they were landing and finally able to exit the aircraft - all the girls looked at her with wide eyes, most likely expecting it to look like she had cried recently but she hadn’t.

It was a tradition to dine together when they landed in a new country since Paradise made them a team and always paired them together, they were also at the same hotel which worked out for them to hang out.

Elaina, YN, Perry, and Justine were all sat in the hotel restaurant gossiping about different attendants and recounting atrocious customers when out of the corner of her eye, she sees Harry walk into.

He had changed from his uniform into a pair of loose black slacks and fitted black t-shirt as he headed straight toward the bar, he didn’t glance around to see his surroundings and slid onto a stool.

“He has no right to be that attractive when he’s that much of an asshole,” Justine grumbles, crossing her arms dramatically, “Almost every pilot sleeps around. Why is he the only one who doesn’t?”

“You don’t think he’s ever slept with one?” YN asks curiously because she doesn’t put it above Harry to do one night stands and then act like the girl didn’t even exist the next day.

“I think he was married at some point,” Perry shrugs, “And from what I know he didn’t cheat on his wife like most pilot’s do. I don’t know what happened but Brandy said she heard Harry tell one of his copilots that he was single a year back or something. So they must have gotten a divorce.”

That surprised YN, she knew that many people who worked for airlines and travel constantly tended to do quite a bit of sleeping around because they weren’t home often with their significant others.

There was a lot of cheating in this line of work.

So once again, it did throw YN through a loop that he wasn’t known as one of the serial cheaters like most pilots are - that’s not saying he didn’t cheat on his wife, he could have done it much more secretly but it’s hard to keep it that much under wraps.

“I’d divorce him too. I can’t imagine he treated his wife too well,” Justine adds in with a sip of her margarita and a chuckle, “Despite how handsome and charming he can be, he seems like a bit of a loner.”

YN was not going to feel bad for him.

The rest of the dinner goes well, Harry doesn’t turn to look at them once but he has to know they’re there - Perry and Justine got a bit rowdy towards the end of the night and their giggles were echoing through the room.

When they file out, YN glances at Harry which she doesn’t know why, and is startled to see that he’s staring at her through the mirror opposite the bar, only for a moment before he purposefully looks away.

-

“Fucking shit,” YN curses loudly in the empty bathroom, she’d only been back from dinner for not more than fifteen minutes and was about to hop in the shower when dropped her hairdryer right on the top of her foot as she unpacked her toiltery bag.

It was already showing signs of discoloration and there was a nice sized abrasion across the top - it was absolutely throbbing and the shower was forgotten.

She had showered before the flight and wasn’t too dirty which meant she was just going to wait until the morning.

Instead she slips into her pajamas which consisted of a plain black tank top and a pair of cotton shorts that had sushi rolls all over them - a gift from Elaina after a girls night of bad sushi which resulted in food poisoning in Japan.

YN had a bad habit of walking around barefoot, it didn’t matter whether it was her house, the woods, the hotel hallways - she’d grown up in the country and it was just a habit to not wear shoes when she didn’t have too.

She grabs the ice bucket from the countertop to go fill it with ice, she could wrap some up in a towel and ice her foot - hopefully to prevent it from swelling too much.

They had a flight back to the states tomorrow and it was another ten hour trip, they were required to wear a specific kitten-heel shoe and she knew a swollen foot would feel awful in it.

It was nearly eleven at night, she didn’t think there would be many people patrolling the hallway, and wandered out of her room down the corridor - following the signs that guided her to the ic machine.

She passes the elevators and continues down the row of room when she hears it beep and the heavy doors open, she doesn’t bother looking back because she’s sure it’s just someone going to their room.

Of course that’s not the fucking case though.

“It’s pretty disgusting to be walking around barefoot in a hotel,” A voice from behind her states with clear disdain in his low tone, “Then you get into a clean bed with filthy feet?”

YN internally groans because of course it’s him.

“Mind your own business, Captain Styles. We’re off the clock,” YN retorts back with more bite than she’s had all day as she continues to walk albeit at a slower than usual pace.

“Why are you limping? You weren’t limping earlier at the resturaunt,” Harry asks pointedly, his voice hasn’t softened and it’s like he is literally demanding the answers out of her, not asking.

Huh.

He was paying attention to her earlier.

Interesting.

“I dropped my hairdryer on my foot. I’m going to get ice for it,” YN can’t help the low but audible gasp that leaves her mouth when she steps down and a sharp pain shoots up through her already tender foot but then she feels the ice bucket being ripped out of her hand, “Hey! What the hell-“

“Quiet the fuck down, will you?” Harry hissed as he steps in front of her, cutting off her path, there was still quite a long way to go until the ice dispenser and she’d like to get this over with so she can rest her foot, “Go back to your room. I’ll bring the ice to you. What room number are you?”

He doesn’t sound like he’s doing it because he feels bad for her, his tone is making it seem like she’s being annoying and an inconvenience and if he gets her the ice then she won’t be such a bother to him - his facial expression isn’t saying anything different than that either.

“I can get my own ice,” YN tries to reach for the handle but he jerks it away childishly.

“I didn’t ask you whether you could or not. With how long it took you to bring me a fucking drink by the time you hobble back to your hotel room, the sun will be rising. Don’t make me ask again, what room number are you?” Harry grits out because he’s definitely annoyed but YN doesn’t know whether he has another state of being besides that.

“Three twenty seven,” YN mumbles defeatedly, she wasn’t going to stand in the hallway and argue any longer about a stupid bucket of ice, it pains her but she manages to say, “Thank you.”

Harry stares at her for a moment longer, frown etched onto his face, and he looks like he’s about to say something nice but then his eyebrows furrow once again and says, “Be more careful. I don’t want to have to deal with a new stewardess because you can’t walk and put some fucking shoes on.”

Then he’s sauntering off without waiting for her response and she can’t help but just look at his broad back for a moment in disbelief at what an asshole he is but there is at least some type of kindness underneath….maybe she’s imagining things because she’s tired and in pain.

There’s a knock on her door a few minutes later, she thought he’d be back with the ice sooner and she started to believe that he was purposely taking long because of what she did with his drinks on the flight earlier.

So when she swings open the door, she already has a major attitude as she snatches the bucket of ice out of his hand and scowls at him, “I know I took a long time with your drinks earlier but I’m actually in pain, its really rude of you to -“

Harry extends his hand, showing that he has a bottle of aspirin in it, “I went down to the little shop in the lobby and got this for you, didn’t know if you traveled with it but should help the swelling and pain for tomorrow’s flight.”

And YN actually feels bad because that was nice of him to do and so she sheepishly takes it, “I’m sorry I know we got off on the wrong foot. I just thoug-“

“I’m not going to be your fucking friend, save the apology or whatever you’re about to say. I do not care,” Harry shakes his head as his hands go back to his sides, “I’m looking out for my crew, nothing more.”

YN thinks she’s starting to see past his tough guy exterior even if she’s only known him for a few hours at this point.

“You bring every stewardess aspirin?” YN shoots back with a raised eyebrow.

Harry grits his teeth, jaw clenching, “I haven’t met one as clumsy or unbearable as you before.”

“It’s an honor to be the most unbearable one you’ve met in all your years of being a pilot,” YN flutters her eyelashes at him but there’s so much tension between them that she can almost taste it, she’d never felt this with someone before, “I look forward to living up to my title.”

It surprises her when Harry steps forward, their chests nearly touching, and he is looking down at her, “I’m not someone you want to fuck with, do you understand me? Listen to your little friends when they tell you about me, it’s all true.”

“I’m not scared of you,” YN shakes her head defiantly, crossing arms and bumping his chest just barely in the process but he doesn’t move back yet.

“I never said anything about being scared of me,” Harry responds almost conversationally, if he leaned forward just a bit more their lips would be connecting and….

And what the fuck.

No, YN, No.

“I don’t understand why you’re such a miserable asshole,” YN responds tightly, trying to reign in her thoughts, “But you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to make me fucking bow to you.”

Harry doesn’t like that, not one bit because he nearly snarls, and bites out, “You’re not going to last long on my crew. I’ll make fucking sure of that. I won't fire you but by the time I’m done with you, you’ll be begging to quit.”

YN finally snaps at that, this arguement clearly going no where, and she would have thrown the aspirin back at him but she actually did need it so as she reaches for the door handle to close it, she makes sure to let him know, “Fuck you.”

Harry's face transforms into a sickeningly sweet smile, dimples popping in his cheeks as he steps out of the room and into the hallway, “It’s been a lovely first day working with you, Miss YN. If you want to be intimidating, you might want to try it when you’re not wearing pajama shorts with sushi rolls on them.”

And with that, he’s disappearing down the hall.

-

As expected, the next day YN’s foot was swollen which made getting her feet into the kitten heels exceptionally hard this morning, her foot was already pulsating in pain by the time they got to the airport.

When they’re in the staff room, checking any updates for the flight, there’s a collective sigh of relief when positions are posted before they all look over at YN, she doesn’t even have to look to know what they’re thinking.

“You really pissed him off,” Elaina states as she frowns at her friend, “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Styles put the same attendant on cockpit for two flights in a row.”

YN was relieved in all honesty because she was going to be able to sit more than the others and she’d rather not be on her feet for hours on end with her bruising in the just the very beginning of the healing phase.

“It’s because I’m not going to take his bullshit,” YN responds with another sip of her strong coffee, “I can see why he makes people cry, he’s a jerk but I'm not going to let him win with me. He gets on my last nerve so I’m going to make sure to get on his.”

“And if he fires you from his crew?” Perry asks and it’s clear that she’s trying to tell YN to cool it with the attitude because they really don’t want to see their friends lose her job.

YN almost spills about the conversation her and Harry had last night, how he doesn’t want anybody new on his flights which makes her somewhat confident that he won't get rid of her easily but she wasn't going to tell her friends about that interaction.

Instead she tries to come off as nonchalant as possible when she shrugs her shoulders, “So be it. I’m not going to kiss his ass for this job.”

Elaina and Justine are giving her the same disapproving looks like they don’t want to see the Rama unfold which will most likely end in YN getting the boot as it was much easier to replace a flight attendant than a pilot.

-

It must be tradition for Harry to come into the staff room before the flights to let them know that boarding is happening soon and if there’s anything that they need to be aware of.

When he walks in today, he notices how the others straighten up and sit more proper than they were before, giving the captain their full attention and YN can’t help but roll her eyes.

She knows it's outwardly rude but she doesn’t put her phone away when he begins to speak about the potential weather hazards and turbulence that may occur on the upcoming flight.

YN wants to smile because she can feel the daggers that Harry is boring into her as he speaks and she blatantly lets him know how uninterested she is in what he has to say.

After he is done speaking, he asks if there’s any questions or anything that the staff needs and they all respond pretty much in unison saying ‘ no Captain’ everyone except YN.

YN has never, not once been so insubordinate at work, she fucking thrived on being a model employee and for the life of her, she could not explain the brattiness that Harry brought out in her.

She was having fun making him angry and she’s never been that type of person, it was like she was also enjoying his attention even though it was negative but YN wouldn’t admit that.

It seems pretty easy to rile him up, get him on-edge, his bullshit tolerance was seemingly low which made it easy for YN to succeed.

“Miss YN, I’d like to see you privately. Now,” Harry orders with no budge, he hasn’t raised his voice but the words are distinct and pronounced.

“She’s just having a bad day,” Elaina, always the good friend, tries to justify because she’s definitely afraid that YN is about to get fired, “She doesn’t usu-“

“Did I ask you?” Harry snaps at the women, his eyes fiery now with confrontation, “Did I ask for your opinion? I think I can do my job just fine without your input, stewardess.”

He managed to make the job title seem less than or demeaning in the way it came out but Elaina’s eyes go wide in surprise and she instantly quiets back down.

“If you find it necessary to try to tell me how to manage my crew, you can start looking for another airline to work for,” Harry threatens but his gaze is already back on YN, her heart absolutely sinks when she hears Elaina start to sniffle to hold back tears.

That was the normal effect that he had on others, a few really harsh and threatening words would make them cry because they were scared of him and his wrath.

YN pats Elaina’s thigh, in a silent ‘thank you’ for trying to stick up for her but she pushes herself off the couch, quickly hiding the grimace when her foot reminds her it’s injured and grabs the handle of her heavy luggage.

“Fifteen minutes,” Harry tells the rest of them before he’s going back out the door but this time with YN in tow, again slower than usual as she’s trying to manage this bruised foot in heels.

Harry doesn’t take her far, just down the hall to an empty conference room and shuts the door - she wants to smile with how angry he seems to be but she also hates how handsome he was when he was like this.

His jaw was clenched but it showed off how defined and cut it was, his puffy lips were pouty and a bit swollen from biting them, and he made his shoulders as broad as possible like he was trying to puff up in defense.

“I think it’s a fucking record,” Harry almost growls as he crosses his arms, putting his hat on the table, “I don’t think I’ve ever despised a stewardess as quickly as you. How have you gotten anywhere in life with that spoiled attitude?”

“I could ask the same,” YN raises her eyebrow because he doesn’t have room to talk on attitude, “I’m not normally like this. You just bring out the absolute worst in me.”

“Good to know I have such an effect on you,” Harry smiles smugly, his teeth gleaming and those same dimples popping, “That I can get you so worked up.”

It definitely had a double meaning laced in those words.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” YN laughs like he’s told the funniest joke, “You’re not as great as you think you are. I’m not impressed.”

And bingo.

That must strike a nerve with him.

YN can already tell nobody ever tells him that.

His teasing smile drops into something stormier, “Cut the bullshit now. When I’m talking, you listen and pay attention, you’re not some silly little teenager who can’t take a moment away from her phone. I know what you’re doing. I’m not going to be disrespected so blatantly in front of my crew.”

YN’s insides sorta twist at that because when he lays it out like that, it was really fucking rude of her and just because they’re having issues doesn’t give her the right to be so outwardly disrespectful in front of the crew.

She actually means it when she says, “I’m sorry and it won’t happen again.”

Harry’s eyebrows raise like he’s surprised that she sincerely apologized but it relaxes him a bit after the apology, shoulders dropping just the slightest, and YN’s mind starts to drift on what his broad shoulders look like underneath the perfectly pressed uniform…

No.

Absolutely fucking not.

But god, even if YN couldn’t stand his personality, she really couldn’t deny how fucking attracted she was to him, it would be hard not to with how beautiful he is.

It helps to know that he doesn’t sleep with people he works with which means that she could fully keep this a fantasy.

“See you can be an obedient little puppy,” Harry lets the condescending tone lace through his words.

YN has to clench her fists by her side to avoid smacking the ever living shit out of him.

“Go fuck yourself,” YN hisses because he’s now managed to completely piss her off, “I take back my god damn apology. You absolute douchebag.”

Harry smiles again, eyes twinkling under the fluorescent lights because he got the reaction he wanted out of her, and watches in amusement when YN grabs her luggage handle and though she can’t storm out of the room as she’d like with her foot, she exits without another word.

When she’s a bit down the hall, she stops, leaning against the wall as removes her shoe, massaging at the tender skin that was already pulsing from being in the heel.

It felt good to have it off for a moment but of course, Harry decides to come the same way down the hall which makes YN cut her rest short and slip back on her heel without looking at him.

As she starts back down the hallway, almost like yesterday night, the handle of her suitcase is pried from her hand by none other than Harry as he strolls down the hall, “What the fuc-“

“Keep your voice down,” Harry chides sharply, taking the duffle off her shoulder and swinging it over hers, “We’ll never make it to board on time with you limping around like this. C’mon, I don’t like being late and you’re going to make me.”

YN’s argument dies on her tongue because it’s actually very nice of him to be lugging her suitcase and duffel which they don’t say anything else but when they get inside the plane - Harry tucks them away for her too.

She’s relieved none of her friends are on board yet because she knew they would have a ton of questions if they saw what just happened.

And YN would not have a fucking clue how to explain it.

-

The next three months go on basically the same since being on the same flight crew with Harry, they would constantly go at it before flights, Harry would drag her into a private room and they’d argue a bit before he’d take her luggage to the terminal for her.

They never interacted at the hotel restaurant or bar but they happened to bump into each other a lot as YN made it a habit to get ice at night around the same time and they both never mentioned how Harry was magically coming up to his room at that time and would walk to the ice machine and back to her room together.

As time went on, the night walks with Harry, there wasn’t always much conversation, occasionally bitching about an unruly passenger or an idiot staff member, quite a bit of jabbing and poking at each other but it didn’t seem so filled with hatred anymore.

It wasn’t a pleasant relationship at all, they were both pretty awful to each other and YN typically ended every conversation they had with a ‘fuck you’ or some variation of it but now there were some not so hostile moments mixed in between them.

They weren’t friends, not even cordial really but YN knew that she had a closer relationship to Harry than anyone else on the crew and she’d had kept that hidden from her friends.

She didn’t want them to get the wrong impression, she knew they would jump to the conclusion that they were hooking up or that she liked him in that way - it was better to keep it on the down low even if there really wasn’t much to report.

It had been a late flight in, everyone had eaten one of the lackluster meals on the plane, and headed up to their hotel room the moment they landed to go to sleep.

YN was on the same boat, not bothering to get the unnecessary ice tonight, and she’s just stepped into her room when her phone buzzes with a text message from her friend back home.

Micah: What a dick. I didn’t even know he was in a new relationship, let alone that serious. [image attachment]

YN opens the conversation to a screenshot from Noah’s instagram, she’d blocked him after he refused to let her see the dogs anymore, and it was a picture of his most recent post.

He was holding a girl she didn’t recognize, her legs wrapped around Noah’s hips and her left hand held up to their face where they’re kissing, and a prominent diamond sat on her finger.

The caption was something sickeningly sweet about her saying ‘yes’ and how excited he is for the rest of their lives together.

They hadn’t even been broken up for an entire year yet.

One of the main reasons that they broke up in the first place was because after six years, YN was ready to settle down and get married but he said that he just didn’t want that right now and he wasn’t sure if he ever really wanted to get married.

It turns out that he just really didn’t want to marry her.

God, she was over him but the rejection still fucking stung.

She deletes the photo from the conversation so she doesn’t have to look at it any longer and she can’t go back to hyperfixate on it later but she felt like a bus just hit her suddenly as she sat in her empty hotel room.

YN wipes her eyes roughly, refusing to let herself cry over it, and instead, she does something she typically never does while she’s traveling for work - she slips on her shoes and heads right down to the hotel bar to get drunk.

The flight the next day wasn’t until noon so she didn’t have to roll out of bed super early and she just wanted to feel numb right now which alcohol had a great way of doing.

It was a bit busy for a weeknight, quite a few businessmen scattered around the lounge, a few couples, and a few lone people like herself when she sits down on a bar stool and orders Long Island.

YN wasn’t a light weight per se but it really didn’t take her much to be feeling good and by her third one, she was feeling warm and fuzzy, not as awful as she felt an hour earlier.

She was drunk, not to the point of blacking out or being belligerent but enough that she was ready to curl into bed and have a night long sleep and pray not to have a nasty hangover.

YN’s just ordered her fourth, a bit surprised that the bartender allowed it but she wasn’t showing any sign of being smashed, and then someone slid up beside her, close to where their shoulders brushed.

It was stupid but momentarily she wished it was Harry, thought it would be him but she frowns when it's one of the businessmen from the lounge that is grinning at her.

“Can I buy you a drink?” He asks even though he can see that she has a completely full one right in front of her.

“I’m good, thank you,” YN tells him without much kindness in her tone to let him know that she’s not interested in whatever he wants from her but that doesn’t seem to deter her.

“C’mon, just one? It’d be a crime not to buy a drink for someone so gorgeous,” He lays it on hard, he wasn’t sitting and he was too much in her space for her liking.

“I said no,” YN replies firmly, it was obvious in her body language that he was making her uncomfortable but he really didn’t seem to care.

“Are you married? What’s the big fuckin’ deal? I don’t see a ring on your finger, just have a drink-“ The man pushes, angrier as he realizes that he’s being rejected, YN ignores the wedding band on his finger.

“Is there an issue here?” A startling loud voice states from behind them and YN slumps in relief when she realizes that it was Harry.

“Who the fuck are you?” The businessman retorts, puffing up his chest and posturing like he was ready for a fight.

“Her husband,” Harry lies easily, he’s not as worked up as the man he’s confronted but he doesn't need to be - his presence and the way he holds himself is ten times more intimidating than the other man.

The businessman looks between the two of them before rolling his eyes, snatching his freshly ordered beer off the counter and going back to the table with his friends.

“Thanks for that,” YN tells him as she goes to take a sip of her drink.

Harry doesn’t allow her, intercepting the glass and putting it back on the bar, “You’re drunk. I think you’ve had enough to drink. It’s time for you to get to bed.”

YN frowns at the full drink, she can’t help the spoiled whine in the back of her throat, “But I want it.”

Harry surprisingly lets out a soft laugh, his hand coming to her shoulder and his thumb rubs a circle for a moment before he’s pulling back - realizing what he did but doesn’t lose his smile, “I know you do, seem to be really enjoying them but I think it’s time for you to get back to your room.”

“Mm, a few more sips,” YN coos which isn’t her normal behavior but she was drunk, she couldn’t be blamed for being a bit flirty with the prettiest man she’d ever seen, “S’good and sugary, make me forget.”

Harry’s brow furrows, “That’s an awful reason to drink. What are you trying to forget?”

YN shakes her head as she begins to pull out her wallet, grabbing a few bills but she stops when Harry directly hands the bartender enough to cover it.

“You didn’t have to do that,” YN mumbles because she doesn’t know why he was being nice to her.

“I know I didn’t, come on,” Harry replies, he gently holds her shoulder as she clumsily gets off the bar still and when she stumbles, Harry wraps his arm around her waist but just barely touching her to guide her, “You’re a sloppy drunk, aren’t you?”

YN pouts at that as they leave the bar, “I don’t drink a lot. I don’t think I’ve gotten drunk in the last year or two.”

“Why now?” Harry asks as he presses the button up when YN starts to tilt - the hand on her back finally moves to her hip, gripping her with more pressure to keep her standing.

YN snorts unattractively, her eyes were getting bleary and heavy, she was getting tired which happened when she drank liquor.

“Like you care why I’m sad,” YN scoffs as they’re stepping into the lift, he leans forward to press the number to their floor.

Harry pauses for a moment, he doesn’t tell her he cares but instead repeats more firmly, “Tell me what’s going on. I’m sick of asking.”

“My ex just got engaged,” YN whispers and fuck, she feels tears begin to prick at her eyes as she say it out loud.

“He’s your ex for a reason, why are you upset?” Harry responds but he doesn’t seem judgemental but curious.

“I was with him for six years. We broke up two months into this job. He said he didn’t want to be tied down, he didn’t think he ever wanted to get married, and he didn’t want me waiting around for a ring and babies,” YN swallows as she wipes at her cheeks, mascara was definitely starting to rub, “Less than a year later, he’s already proposed to a girl he barely knows. I don’t know why I wasn’t good enough for him. I was a good partner.”

Harry’s silent as the elevator goes up, his hand doesn’t leave her hip even though she’s not swaying but she appreciates it's ground her and makes everything seem a little less worse.

“I’m sorry,” Harry finally says and he doesn’t sound like he’s being condescending - it actually sounds like he means it, “I cannot imagine what that feels like to go through. I can’t imagine why he would do that. You’re smart, intelligent-“

“Don’t act like you don’t hate me, Harry. Just to make me feel better,” YN butts in because she doesn’t need him to butter her up when she knows he doesn’t mean those things.

“I don’t hate you,” Harry’s voice is deep but quieter than it usually is, “You get on my nerves nearly every fuckin’ second of the day but that doesn’t mean that I don’t see how smart, quick-witted, beautiful you are.”

YN bites her lip because she didn’t realize that she needed to hear that, it’s been a long while since she’s got a compliment, and in about the year leading up to ending her relationship with Noah - he’d never say anything nice like this.

“Thank you, I-I haven’t heard anything nice like that in a while,” YN tells him as she continues to swipe away tears and look down at her feet because she can feel Harry’s eye watching her and she’s embarrassed she’s responding this way.

“You should be hearing those things everyday,” He sighs and squeezes the plush of her hip kindly, guiding her again when the elevator at or door opens, “I know it’s a bit ironic considering our style of communication but I do mean those things.”

YN tells him her room number and they begin walking down the left of the hallway, her mind is fuzzy but feels a little more clear after their conversation, “It’s fine, I’m just as bad and I started it for the most part. I don’t expect to hear those things from you.”

As they wind up at her door, Harry steps back and puts his hands into his pockets, “I should be nicer to you but I hate to admit I enjoy getting under your skin and making you angry. You’re quite pretty when you're pissed at me.”

And YN’s mind goes to insecurity right away because she knows that Harry doesn’t like her even though he said he doesn’t hate her, he has no reason to be this nice to her and even though they’ve had moments through the past months of niceness …

She doesn’t know what makes her blurt this out and she wishes she could swallow it as soon as it came out of her mouth.

“Are you trying to be all nice to sleep with me or something? Then you’ll be a dick again once you get what you want?” YN’s words are just a bit slurred but hold a somewhat curious, somewhat accusing tone as she watches him.

The small smile that had been on his face for their conversation drops and in its place was a frigid scowl and before he even spoke, she knew that she had offended him but the way his shoulders tense up and he takes another step back from her.

“You know what’s fucked up? I finally try to put myself out there just the littlest bit for you and all you can think is that I want to fuck you? You think that lowly of me?” Harry’s soft whispers were gone and back was the cold, emotionless bravado that echoed off the empty hallway walls, “That I was just trying to use you?”

“I-Harry, I didn-no, I didn’t,” YN begins to stumble because unlike their usual back and forth arguing that dissipates in meaningless banter, this wasn’t that - she had actually upset him and that was never her intention.

“Save it your bullshit apology,” Harry replies to cut her off, shaking his head like he’s disappointed in how idiotic he’s been, “I’m done trying if this is where it fucking gets me. I knew it wasn’t fucking worth it.”

And with that, he’s storming away from her without another word and he doesn’t look back as she stares after him dumbfounded at what the fuck just happened.

The flight the next day home, Harry puts her back on the back crew which was the further position away from the cockpit who dealt with the consumers in the back of the aircraft.

Her friends congratulate her on getting away from the pit because they didn’t know anything about how Harry and hers relationship has developed but all she could feel was anxiety about how much she’d fucked up.

He doesn’t come into the staff room before takeoff and is already in the pit when the stewardess’ board, YN doesn’t see him until the crew is heading off the plane.

Harry makes it clear he’s looking for no interaction as he hustles through the terminal with long strides.

-

They have a three day break and during that time, YN isn’t even thinking about Noah and his new engagement that originally had her so torn up in the first place.

All she could think about was Harry.

She had a wishful thinking that the time off would heal the wounds and they’d be back to normal but she knew that wasn’t the case when Harry put her again on the back crew.

She did not see him throughout the flight once again and stayed behind while the stewardess got off the aircraft when they landed which meant YN knew she wasn’t going to see him.

He makes a habit of this for the next three flights as well before YN can’t take it anymore, knowing that he’s actively avoiding her because she’d hurt his feelings.

He didn’t come to the hotel bar, he didn’t meet her in the hallway for their ice run, and it was more devastating than YN though which made her come to the frightening revelation that she might have a crush on the man she’d been mostly enemies with for over six months now.

She missed interacting with him, she missed fighting with him.

She missed the way his jaw clenched when she made him irritated, the way he looked like he wanted to reach out and manhandle her when she purposely ignored him when he called for her on flights and he had to come out of the pit, or the way he would squeeze her wrist lightly sometimes as a thank you when she would bring him a drink.

YN didn’t want to admit to herself that she felt something, maybe it wasn’t full blown feelings but just a smidge of fondness for the grumpy bastard.

And maybe part of it was that she felt special, Harry didn’t soften for anyone else but her and even though she didn’t tell her friends about it - she knew they were suspicious that YN was constantly on pit duty or that she hasn’t gotten fired after how sassy she can be to her captain.

After the fourth flight of no sign of communication, YN decides that she needs to take matters into her own hands because she didn’t know what she wanted with Harry but she didn’t expect it to suck this much when he didn’t engage with her.

They’re in Milan and when Harry doesn’t show up at the hotel bar, well YN wasn’t expecting him to at this point, and she needed to figure out what hotel room he was in.

She’d normally never be so deceptive but she was desperate, she walks straight up to the front desk and tells a bold-face lie to the young receptionist.

“My boss left his phone at the bar,” YN lies, flashing her own phone quickly, “I completely forgot what room he said he was in. Would you be able to tell me?”

The girl doesn’t think anything of it as she looks up the information, letting YN know what room and YN is thanking her before walking determinedly to the elevators.

It’s late by this point, nearing eleven and she was praying that he wasn’t asleep as she stepped up to his door, her heart was pounding out of her chest at the mere thought of being rejected.

It takes a good three minutes before she finally musters up the courage to knock on the door a few times - god, she didn’t even know what she wanted to say to him.

There’s a bit of rustling behind the door, YN wonders if he’s going to open it - there’s no peephole on these ones and her breathing freezes when he swings open the door.

He was in a pair of gray joggers that were low on his hips, the band of his underwear peeking over but the main thing was that he was shirtless and he had tattoos everywhere.

Her brain couldn’t tell if it wanted to focus on memorizing the black ink on his skin or the definition of his stomach, a trail of sparse hair leading from his belly button into his underwear.

Harry doesn’t give anything away from his face, blunt and cold, “Can I help you?”

“I want to say I’m sorry,” YN decides that is the best place to start, “You were kind to me that night and before that even, it wasn’t right over me to insinuate you were doing it for an inappropriate reason.”

“I don’t need a fucking apology, I don’t care,” Harry bites out and YN knows that his guard is a hundred percent up by the way his posture is uncomfortable and defensive.

“You do care,” YN replies surely, “If it hadn’t bothered you, you wouldn’t have been ignoring me for the three weeks. I hurt your feelings and I’m sorry because it wasn’t my intention.”

Harry doesn’t deny it again but he doesn’t admit to it either, instead he grits out, “It doesn’t matter either way.”

“It matters to me,” YN argues back, now getting defensive.

“It shouldn't,” Harry’s voice is back to being louder, firmer.

YN bit her lip for a moment, deciding on how vulnerable she felt like being with the man who showed absolutely none himself, “I’ve missed you these past weeks. I miss fighting with you on the flights, I miss our nightly ice machine walks, and you giving me a hard time in the staff room before takeoff.”

Harry’s lips twitch before he’s pulling them in a tight line, “I accept your apology.”

“Are you done ignoring me?” YN presses because this doesn’t feel resolved and she’s never had the urge to want to touch someone so much.

“For now,” Harry’s lips barely tilt into a smile.

It’s quiet between the two for a long pause, staring at each other, and YN doesn’t know what she wants but she feels like she’s just standing there like an idiot, “Well, goodnight. I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.”

Harry’s eyes dart back up to hers, she realizes that he’d been checking her out, and he doesn’t show any shame in being caught before nodding, “We are. Goodnight.”

YN turns towards her room, the door closing softly behind her but she pauses after a few steps because she’s never been adventurous, she’s never been bold, and she might be making a mistake but fuck, she has to just try.

She’s retracing her steps, knocking on the door harshly, and it was like Harry hadn’t gone back further into the room yet because he opens it up quickly.

They don’t say anything before YN steps forward, heart pounding in her ears, and leans up - pressing their lips together and letting her hand rest on his cheek.

It flips a switch in him because he’s pulling her into his room, shutting and locking the door before walking her right into the entryway wall - his lips were persistent and taking over as he coaxes her mouth open to lick into it.

He knocks her hand away from his face but only so he can take hers between his hands, cupping her jaw on each side tightly as he moves her head how he wants to deepen the kiss.

YN’s never been kissed like this in her life, she’d never been more aroused either.

Harry presses his hips forward until their pelvises are pressed together, he wants her to feel how hard he’s getting as pressed against her and bites at her bottom lip.

YN whines at that, her hands coming up to roam over his chest, it was so defined and muscular, not what she was used to - Harry was hard and firm where Noah had been soft and plusher.

When she thumb brushes over his nipple, his pec twitches and she has to do it a few more times until she gets her fill.

He wasn’t shy when he sucked on her tongue, licked at the roof of her mouth, and made her feel like he wanted to feel every single part of her as he moved down to the hem of her shirt.

He pulls back with his lips a delicious bubblegum pink, swollen and shiny from their spit, “What do you want? Do you want me to stop?”

That’s the last thing she wants.

YN shakes her head, “Don’t want to stop, please.”

Harry smiles at her, it’s a softer expression than she’s ever seen from him and he leans forward, nuzzling her cheek for a moment before dragging her in for another long kiss.

“Can I undress you then, pup?” Harry murmurs against her lips as he starts to bring up the bottom of her shift but slowly enough that if she told him no, he would stop.

“Please, just want you,” YN agrees breathlessly when she tries to move to the button of her jeans, Harry knocks her hand away with an annoyed grunt and glare.

“Let me do everything, I just want you to enjoy it. Don’t worry, you’ll get all of me. I’ll give you anything you fuckin’ want,” Harry tells her as he sheds her top, then bra.

He looks torn for a second like he can’t decide whether he wants to play with her chest or continue until she’s fully bare but he decides against the latter, cursing as he pulls down her pants, “Knew you’d have the cutest tits.”

“You’ve thought about this?” YN questions as he moves to discard her underwear.

“Of course I fucking have, it’s all I’ve thought about for the past month. No, I wasn’t doing any of those things to get in your pants but it didn’t mean I didn’t want to fuck you,” Harry’s voice is getting deeper and raspier as he’s gets more and more turned on, “On the bed.”

Noah’s the only guy that YN’s ever been with.

It was uncomfortable to have such a devastatingly attractive man standing in front of her when she didn’t feel anywhere as sexy as him.

The worry only stays for a moment because when she’s spread out in the middle of his bed, he’s tracing every inch of her skin, and moans loudly as he moves to squeeze himself once, “I think this is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. God, you’re like a little angel, aren’t you?”

“Come here,” YN whimpers, reaching out for him because she needs to touch him and he obliges eagerly, he’s tugging off his joggers but keeping his underwear on as he crawls over the bed and on top of her.

Harry finds her lips again, dropping his hips to grind against her center, and it feels so fucking good, just this contact through two layers of clothing and it all like a new experience to her - she never felt this with Noah.

Harry’s mouth moves but he’s not just kissing, he’s licking at her, sucking, and biting all over her jawline then neck until he gets to her chest where he lets a pleased hum when he cups them.

“Puppy, how are you this perfect, hm?” Harry coos as he leans down to graze his teeth against her hard nipple, “Pretty little thing coming to my room, begging for me to touch her, and then you show off this body? Maybe I should ignore you more often.”

YN turns her head and bites meanly at his hand which makes him chuckle and kiss the curve of her breast in apology before he’s wrapping his lips around one, fingers coming to pinch and roll the other one.

“Fuck,” YN gasps because he definetly knows how to use his mouth and her back arches involuntarily, pressing herself further into him, and trying to grind her hips up against where he’s hard, wishing he could slip between her folds like this.

Harry leaves them wet and hard as his lips continue down the center of sternum, down on her belly and she’d never thought it would feel good to have someone nip and suck at her plush but it did.

When he starts to move even further down, closer to her pubic bone, she freezes which Harry can tell right away by the hand on his shoulder tightens and her legs still from where they were restless.

“What’s wrong? Do you want to stop?” Harry asks with concern as he sits up more on his elbows to make eye contact with her - she didn’t know how he managed to look so cute and so obscene at the same time with worried eyes and puffy lips.

“You-I just,” YN stutters and she wants to smack herself for being an idiot because she should have known that it would lead like this but softly, she says, “You don’t have to…you know, do that.”

“Do what?” Harry replies with confusion, his fingers were still tracing mindless patterns on her tummy, thumb smoothing at the skin.

YN groans in embarrassment, she could feel her face getting hot, “You know…I’m just saying you don’t have to…,” Her eyes dart down to her lower half so that maybe he gets the hint.

“What? Eat your cunt?” Harry clarifies and of course he’d be this fucking crass in bed, she shouldn’t have expected anything less, “Do you not want me to? If you don’t want me to, I don't have to.”

“It’s not that,” YN wants to crawl into a hole and die.

“You’re acting like it would be a chore to me. I am one hundred percent sure that I’ll get just as much pleasure from tasting you on my tongue, getting my face in your perfect little cunt. Now what’s the issue?”

“You’re going to laugh,” YN mutters and she wishes she would have just kept her stupid mouth shut at this point.

“Tell me now,” He’s gone demanding again, his fingers pressing harder into her skin now.

“I’ve just never had it done to me before,” She admits finally, flopping back onto the bed and throwing an arm over her eyes to hide the absolute embarrassment of it all.

Harry crawls back up on top of her, forcefully moving her arm until they’re making eye contact, “I thought you were in a relationship for six years?”

“I was,” YN sighs as she curls her hand around his neck, “He said that men didn’t really do that often and he told me that he didn’t want to put his mouth on me and I never wanted to make him uncomfortable so we never did that.”

“Your ex is a selfish little prick,” Harry rasps against her lips, his hand moving down until he has his thumb pressed snug up against her clit which makes her twitch, “You get this excited from my thumb? You better not tell me he didn’t give you fingers either.”

“He didn’t want to do that either,” YN mewls when he starts a slow circular motion on her nerves.

“If it was possible, I’d have my mouth on your cunt and you riding my fingers every fucking day of the week,” Harry rumbles as he moves back down her body, “He’s a fucking dickhead who didn’t deserve you for a million different reasons. Do you want me to or no? I will understand either way.”

“Want it, Harry. I want it,” YN nearly slurs with how fucking turned on she is, her hips squirming again, and Harry gives her a dazzling fucking smile as he scotches down the bed.

He’s shouldering her thighs apart even further before he’s gripping the meat of one to keep her knee crooked and open as he groans like he’s getting pleasure from simply looking at her.

“God, I don’t think I’m going to survive this. I’ve never seen something this breathtaking before,” Harry says as he thumbs her folds apart, admiring her for another moment before he’s ducking down to bury his tongue tight up against her clit.

And holy shit.

She didn’t realize that this was what she had been missing.

Her legs try to close around his head but he keeps them spread and his other hand comes down the rest around her middle to keep her hips down.

He knows exactly what to do as he laps fat strokes of his tongue up from her core to her clit, over and over while YN is still relentlessly is trying to grind her hips up.

Harry pulls back which makes YN whine but he simply says, “Should have known what a brat you’d be in bed with how you are at work. Stay still now and let me do what I want to you. I promise it’ll feel good, baby.”

And his voice is so strict, demanding that she does finally relax into his hold which he rewards with fucking his tongue into her.

“M’close, Harry. Feels s’good,” YN moans as her stomach clenches.

“Come on, pup,” Harry coos against her, “Give me what I’ve earned, yeah?”

She’s almost disappointed she feels her orgasm coming because she doesn’t want to be over but Harry’s mouth is practiced and self-assured, he keeps the same pace throughout her orgasm which makes it longer by a few seconds.

YN melts into the mattress, body feeling loose and tingly as she comes down for her high, and her brows furrow when she sees Harry push down his briefs and begin to stroke himself with intent.

YN weakly kicks his thigh with a pout, “Don’t.”

Harry doesn’t stop but he slows down which gives YN a look at just how well endowed he is and to no surprise, mouth-wateringly beautiful.

“Don’t get myself off?”

“Fuck me,” YN breathes out, surprising herself with her boldness.

Harry’s hand stops, “Yeah? You’d let me get you on my cock, puppy? I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you.”

And….

YN wants to preen at the compliment, after feeling like she didn’t deserve anything to hear Harry say that made her stomach flutter even if it was just dirty talk.

“How do you want it?” Harry asks as he comes closer again, ducking down to kiss at her knees, thighs, and he peppers kisses over her mound which feels wildly more intimate than anything she’d ever done with Noah.

“However you want,” YN murmurs shyly because her only experience is Noah and they had a vanilla sex life to say the least, a whole lot of doggy and her riding him so he didn’t have to do any work.

Harry laughs at that, lips vibrating against her belly, “I’ll take you anyway you’ll let me. What do you like most? What makes you come hard?”

YN doesn’t have an answer to this because she’s never had an orgasm from penetrative sex before without her own fingers rushing to get her there so he doesn’t finish first and leave her hanging.

Harry is obviously experienced and so it doesn’t make her proud to have to feel inexperienced at this moment.

“Shut the fuck up,” Harry huffs out even though she didn’t say anything, he takes a moment to nip at her hip, “You’re telling me this fucker never got you off? Please tell me this is a joke.”

YN tries to cover her face again but he wraps his hands around her wrist and pulls them away, “This is so embarrassing.”

“It is,” Harry agrees easily, “For him. Can’t believe you were with him for six years and he couldn’t even make you come. You’re telling me she was neglected this whole time,” Harry frowns as his thumb comes back to her clit, “Should be a crime.”

“I mean I did get off but I had to….get myself there,” YN starts to wiggle again, wanting to chase the friction from his movement.

“I’d love to watch you do that sometime but tonight, you’re not going to have to lift a finger,” Harry tells her confidently before he’s positioning himself above her, lips brushing hers but not quite kiss as he lines himself up and she wraps her legs around his narrow waist, “I like this position. I want to see how gorgeous you are when you come.”

YN brings a hand up to his curls, knotting her fingers in the strands, and brings his lips fully against hers as he pushes in, it doesn’t hurt but it definitely takes a minute to adjust as Harry was much more blessed in the department than Noah was and she hadn’t had sex for over six months.

“Wait wait,” YN pants out, pulling back, “I -I’m on birth control but are you clean?”

Harry smirks at her like she’s asked something funny, “I’m clean. I got tested after my last partner.”

“Me too,” YN replies, relieved that they don’t have to stop.

Harry resumes kissing her but when he’s finally all the way in, his breathing stutters and he lets out a low whine that makes YN throb - like she felt so good to him that he couldn’t stand it.

“Harry, you feel so good,” YN mewls as he starts a slow but powerful rhythm, she was turned on to the point where she could hear it as he thrusted in and out.

“You’re the best thing I’ve ever felt, pup,” Harry praises and she doesn’t know whether it’s just the dirty talk, it most likely is but it still makes her feel empowered, sexy.

It becomes to much when he starts to pick up the pace to continue kissing, every other breathe out of YN’s mouth was a moan and he moves down to wrap his lips around her nipple and his hands came under her bum - positioning her more upwards so her backside was off the bed and he could slide in perfectly.

The change in position made him hit a spot she’d only heard about in her body, on every odd motion he would nudge it, and she was going to come again without any stimulation on her clit.

“Ha-Harry,” YN moans louder than she’s ever been and he pulls back from her breasts as he’s staring at her now, eyes studying her face.

“Oh baby, are you close f’me? Am I doing a good job?” Harry’s voice isn’t as steady as before either, there was a bead of sweat on his temple, and his chest was pink with arousal.

“Yeah, I’m close-“ YN doesn’t even get to finish her sentence before she’s squeezing around him, shaking as he keeps his pace to work her through it, and she’s a little dazed that she misses when Harry stills inside her - letting out his own filthy noises and praises as he comes down too.

YN didn’t know what to expect but it wasn’t for Harry to collapse his full weight on top of her and nuzzle his face into the crook of her neck for a moment, kissing her pulse point before rolling off.

She doesn’t want to assume that she can sleep here, she still needs to take off her makeup and she doesn’t have pajamas, and she feels anxiety creeping in which makes her get off the bed.

Harry lays on his back, one arm above his head, stomach flexing as he catches his breath, unashamed as he lays on full display because he has to know how beautiful he is.

“Where are you going?” Harry frowns as he watches her gather her scattered clothes.

“Um…back to my room? I have to take off my makeup, change,” And she didn’t want to mention showering because she wasn’t going to sleep after he'd come inside her.

“You don’t have to, I don’t want you to think that I’m kicking you out,” Harry sits up more, reaching for his briefs before his joggers and standing up to go over to his luggage to rummage for a shirt, “Let me walk you back at least.”

“Walk of shame,” YN half-jokes as she pulls her top over her head, bra crumpled in her hand because she didn’t feel like putting it back on.

“There’s was nothing shameful about how fucking well you took it,” Harry gives her a cheeky smile as he grabs his keycard, her room was only a few doors down.

When she unlocks her door, she turns around with her hand on the handle, and doesn’t know what to say but Harry’s leaning down to kiss her softly this time, “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Harry.”

And when YN steps inside her room, closing the door behind her, she knows she’s royally screwed because that was the best sex of her life and now she knows for sure she has a fat fucking crush on Harry.

-

The first month after their original hookup was filled with more sex, it wasn’t every night but at least every other time they had to stay in a hotel - Harry would find his way into YN’s room and they’d have amazing sex each time.

He had her constantly on pit crew and they still bickered back and forth but it wasn’t as heated and it turned more into teasing than actual fights anymore which YN surprisingly didn’t mind.

YN felt like she’d gotten to know just bare minimum about Harry while she’d be pouring her heart out when the right moment hit, and he didn’t stay the night but he’d hang around for a bit before leaving her room.

It was also the month that YN realized that she didn’t just like vanilla sex and Harry had made her realize that very quickly because before him, she’d never had sex anywhere but in bed and a few times in a shower.

It had been an evening flight out, their flight had got delayed due to a gnarly thunderstorm which meant they would be stranded at the airport for another three hours before their plane came in.

Harry never spent time in the employee lounge, pilots had their own area which was rumored to be substantially nicer than the one that YN was currently sitting in.

They still have two hours until takeoff when she receives a text from Harry.

Harry: Come to the pilot’s lounge. Third floor near gate b32.

YN’s heart rate spikes as she gathers her luggage, her friends looking at her curiously, “I think I’m going to walk around a bit, maybe find a new book to read.”

“Want us to come?” Elaina volunteers but doesn’t seem eager to move from where she’s splayed on a overstuffed chair while playing Candy Crush.

“I think I’ll be fine,” YN replies as she heads out the door, it was actually good luck that all three of her friends appeared to be in a lazy mood because usually at least one of them would want to tag along with her.

YN knows other staff are not prohibited in the pilots lounge and so she’s nervous as she finds the long hallway that leads to the tucked away space that he’s referring to.

He’s waiting outside the door with his normal unreadable expression, his uniform perfectly fitted and pressed - the thrill of her being able to take it off of him makes her start to get wet without him even doing anything.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” YN tells him even though it’s obvious.

That makes Harry crack a grin, a wolfish tilt to his lips, “I’ll sneak you in.”

Harry opens the door with a special keycard, guiding YN into the lounge, it’s empty in here but it’s a million times nicer than the one that she’s used to with luxurious comfy seats, a pristine kitchen, and big flat screen televisions.

Harry moves to hold her wrist, tugging her along until they’re in the back corner, and Harry’s pushes open another door - to a single stall bathroom that looked like it could be out of a movie with shining tile floors and floral wallpaper.

“Harry,” YN warns because she knows with this is going and she doesn’t want to get in trouble.

“It’s fine, pup. There’s no one in here,” Harry soothes as he locks the door, he is predatory as he stalks towards her, his eyes dark and his movements slow but precise.

“Someone could come in at anytime,” YN points out desperately, she wants to do this but she wants to be assured that there’s no way that they’re going to get caught, even though he can’t guarantee that.

“Better keep your pretty noises to yourself then,” Harry rasps, YN has noticed how much scratchier and deeper his voice gets when he’s turned on, it’s unfairly hot.

She doesn’t have time to reply because he’s picking her up from under her bum and seating her on the sink countertop, his mouth moving to hers, and bringing her into a kiss that’s already filled with desire.

YN is nervous, she’s knows it’s dumb, and she doesn’t want Harry to make fun of her because of it but she’s never had sex somewhere this….risky and this is all so new.

Harry can tell by the way she’s kissing, distracted and in her own mind which makes him pull back, his thumb coming to rub at her bottom lip, pulling it down a bit.

“Do you not want to?” Harry checks as he watches her face, “We don’t have to, baby. We can wait until we get to the hotel. It’s okay with me either way. I should have check-“

YN cuts his off with another kiss before she pulls back, fingers coming to graze along the collar of his uniform, dipping underneath and caressing the skin as much as she could.

“I want to. I’m just nervous, I’ve never had sex anywhere but in a house,” YN’s face is heating with embarassment, admitting how fucking vanilla she is to someone who obviously isn’t.

Harry’s smile is nearly fond, “Tell me if you want to stop at any point, okay? M’going to show you that you deserve to be fucked whenever and wherever you want. I don’t know how your ex never did it outside the house. I thinking about fucking you everywhere, the hotel pool, over the edge of the bar, on the balcony.”

YN’s thighs clench and she presses their lips together to shut him up because sometimes his dirty talk is so sincere and downright filthy that she’ll combust if she hears anymore of it.

They don’t get caught but fuck it gets YN addicted because it’s not the only time it happens.

-

The second month, things had evolved even more.

Harry started saying that he was much too tired to walk back to his hotel room that was right down the hall and YN never kicked him out, he started staying after every time they hooked up.

YN would ask about Harry’s life outside of work but he really never divulged much which made YN remember each time that this was simply casual for him - there was no interest in a relationship and he didn’t like her like that, didn’t want to get to know her or open up about himself.

It made things harder, when he would kiss her so sweetly and tell her every time that she’s the best he’s ever had, it was hard to comprehend that he didn't have feelings for her either.

Especially on nights where he didn’t even get off.

He was too exhausted from a long flight but YN wasn’t, how he’d eat her out or give her his fingers as he kissed her softly, goading her sweetly to come so they could go to sleep.

He’d do nice things outside of the bedroom too.

On days where they didn’t have to be at the airport until noon, Harry would order breakfast to her room, he had arranged a massage for her, and then once a spa day when they had a day off in Toronto.

They still hadn’t hung out without having sex until almost three months into their casual arrangement.

YN didn’t feel good when they landed in London.

When she’d gone to her hotel room, she’d thrown up everything she’d eaten that day, and it felt like she’d been hit by a truck as she showered before laying in bed.

She hadn’t gotten sick again but she could tell that something she’d eaten had upset her stomach.

Then around ten, there’s a knock at her door.

YN groans because her body protests when she pulls herself off the bed to open the door - just in a big shirt and underwear because she already knows who it is.

Harry steps into the room, going to cup her jaw, and lean in for a kiss when she pulls back much to his displeasure - a frown gracing his face as she denies him.

“I don’t feel good, I’m sorry. I don’t feel like having sex,” YN tells him, hoping he doesn't mind too much - she remembers how upset Noah would get if she turned him down, “Maybe tomorrow morning but I got sick-“

Harry’s frown deepens as he guides her towards the bed, “We’re not doing anything if you don’t feel good. Don’t worry about the next time we are going to. We’ll find time when you’re feeling better.”

“But…” YN hates that she feels like she has to ask, “Are you mad?”

Harry looks a bit devastated at that question, his voice soft as he pats her bum as she crawls back in bed, “Why on earth would I be mad, pup?”

It’s the first time he’s called her that outside of sex.

He’d call her other things like baby, darling but that nickname hadn’t been spoken before in this context.

“Because I don’t want to have sex tonight,” YN wants to look away but he holds her gaze so intently.

Something clicks and Harry realizes that this insecurity must come from her last relationship.

“I wouldn’t be mad even if you never wanted to have sex with me again,” Harry assures her and he sounds sincere as he sits next to her, “I fucking love doing that with you but if you didn’t want to tonight or whenever, I’d never be upset. I respect whatever you want to do.”

“Thank you,” YN smiles weakly, she wanted a cuddle and it didn’t feel like she could because they didn’t do just that.

Harry nods, squeezing her thigh before standing back up.

“Have a goodnight,” YN tells him as he turns his back to her.

He whips around with confusion written all over his face, “You want me to leave?”

YN is just as confused, “I thought that’s what you were doing.”

“I was just going to turn off the floor lamp,” Harry nods to the light still on in the far corner, “But I can go if you don’t want me here-“

“No!” YN says too quickly, “I want you to stay. I just, we haven’t done this without you know…having sex.”

Harry’s face relaxes as he realizes he’s not being kicked out but he does move to turn off the lamp before stripping down to his briefs, he doesn’t respond to her last sentence but instead says, “Put on a movie.”

She does and he brings her into his chest and now that becomes a thing.

-

By the middle of the third month, they spend every night together when they’re traveling, and even when they’re not having sex, they go to bed cuddled up at night.

Harry doesn’t even bother with false pretenses and stops putting his suitcase in his own hotel room.

YN still finds frustration in how closed off Harry is, he’s attentive and at least acts interested when YN talks about herself and her life but he rarely gives anything out.

She’d been dying to know about his ex-wife, if what his friends said was true and he was married but he doesn’t ever mention an ex-wife or anything much for that matter.

It starts to feel like YN wants this more than him which isn’t fair to him because he never said that he wanted a relationship with her and she knew she fucked up by falling for him.

One night though, something changes and it begins to give YN hope that this wasn’t all in her head that he might like her too.

They had gone out onto the balcony of the hotel, they were in Madrid, and it overlooked the city as they laid on the lounge chair, YN in between his legs, and the warm air had a light breeze.

“I’ve never been to the Maldives, never been lucky enough to get a flight there,” YN hums as she plays with the rings on his finger, his hand resting on her belly, “But I’d say that’s my dream vacation. Always have wanted to go. Have you flown there?”

“I haven’t had a flight there, working wise. I had my honeymoon there,” Harry replies and his voice is tighter, more vulnerable than it was just mere minutes ago.

“Oh,” YN doesn’t know what to say.

“It was beautiful. The water was amazing, it just looked like you were living in a magazine,” Harry continues but he sounds strained like it’s hard for him to even talk about it.

“That’s why I want to go,” YN keeps her voice upbeat, giving him the opportunity not to elaborate if he didn’t want to.

“I was married for five years,” Harry tells her with hesitation.

“When did you get divorced?” YN can’t help but ask, hoping it doesn’t make him close back up.

“We didn’t,” Harry says but there’s no sharp edge to his voice, “She passed away.”

YN’s heart absolutely sinks into her stomach.

“I am so sorry to hear that, Harry,” YN squeezed his hand, bringing it up so she could kiss his palm and he allowed it.

“We…we were separated at the time and had filed for divorce,” Harry continues with a shudder, “We hadn’t been getting along for the past two years of our marriage. We got married right out of college, we’d only known each other for six months before we eloped. We were stupid and young. Once the honeymoon phase was over, we realized we had nothing in common or even really liked each other. We tried to make it work but we couldn’t.”

“I…uh, I didn’t want to be with her anymore but I still loved her,” Harry’s voice is shaky, “Not so much as a lover but she was still my friend. I…It was hard. She was in a car accident coming home from work, she was working the night shift as a nurse at the hospital. Drunk driver.”

“That’s heartbreaking,” YN feels herself getting upset for Harry, tears falling down her cheeks at what he had to go through, she couldn’t even imagine.

“Don’t cry, S’okay. I’m okay now,” Harry soothes as he leans forward to thumb at her damp cheeks, “I’m okay. I got counseling, I’ve worked through my grief.”

“I should be comforting you, I’m sorry,” YN apologizes but she’s taken by surprise when he leans forward and kisses her firmly, it’s not sexually charged but there’s so much feeling as he holds her to him.

It feels like more than just friends with benefits.

It has to be.

-

Harry was on a rampage at work, YN had never seen him so infuriated in her life as they were up in the air, five hours into a eleven hour flight, and he was more pissed than even his worst fight with YN.

The ground crew hadn’t fully fueled the aircraft, they weren’t going to make it to their destination on what they had left to work with, it wasn’t something that often occurred but it has happened occasionally in the past.

However, it meant that Harry had to work with staff on the ground to figure out what airport he needed to land out to refuel while figuring out the logistics of changing the course and time of the flight.

He hadn’t lashed out at YN but he’d chewed out nearly everyone else on the crew at least once but poor Perry got shouted out at least three times and she had cried two of them.

At the end of the day, the eleven hour flight took nearly fourteen, and by the time YN and Harry were in their bed, it was late, and they were both tired as they turned on a movie.

YN isn’t sure about how the topic went to their previous relationships but she answered anything Harry had asked about Noah, YN felt like she could do the same now that he had opened up about his wife.

“What did your family think of you getting eloped six months after meeting each other?” YN was curious, figured it wasn’t a crazy question to ask at all but Harry visibly tenses.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Harry throws up his guard instantly and usually YN is understanding but quite frankly, it is starting to piss her off now.

“Of course you don’t,” YN scoffs with an annoyed edge.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Harry shoots back, sitting up straighter and looking over at her.

“That you will never open up to me! I share everything about me with you and you give me absolutely nothing. You shared about your wife that one night but beside that, you’ve never let me get to know you!” YN points out as she sits up too, anger rising in her chest.

An expression that YN doesn’t recognize flashes across his face for a moment before he’s covering it with a scowl, “I don’t have to share anything with you, YN. We’re not dating, we’re not in a relationship. It shouldn’t fucking matter if you know me.”

And ouch, that….that really fucking hurt.

YN could feel herself getting more upset than she’s been in a long time because this was her getting rejected officially.

Because if this is all he wants, YN doesn’t know if she can be okay with that anymore.

“Get the fuck out of my room,” YN finds herself huffing out, ripping the covers off of her legs and standing up - she feels a wave of naseous run over her as she bolts to the bathroom, slamming the door and doubling over the toilet.

Harry opens the door, moving to pull her hair away from her face, and rubs at her back as she heaves into the bowl, moaning at how gross she feels before flushing - he takes a step back from her.

“Thanks,” YN mutters as he gives her room to walk over to the sink to brush her teeth, “My stomach’s been sensitive to food lately while we’ve been on trips.”

“I know,” Harry replies simply because this isn’t the first time he’d held her hair as she got sick.

“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” YN tells him and at the same time, her heart is completely ripping into two.

This is the moment she realizes how irrevocably in love with Harry that she is and she’s fallen so hard that it feels impossible to dig herself out of the hole she’s dug.

If she couldn’t have all of him then she knew she was hurting herself in the long run because she’d never get what she wanted from him and sex just wasn’t enough for her even if it was for him.

“YN,” Harry’s voice is smaller than it’s ever sounded, shocked by what she’s saying and his eyes are wide, pleading, “Don’t. I’m sorry I snapped at you. I shouldn't have said those things. Today hasn’t been a good day, I didn’t -”

“Don’t apologize, Harry,” YN shakes her head, voice steady and firm,“It’s okay. I’m not mad at you. I just…this isn’t working for me. I can’t just be a hookup for you, I don’t want that. I want to know you, I want more than what you want. It’s just better if we stop while we’re ahead.”

“YN, please just-“ Harry sounds like he’s begging but YN’s made up her mind and nothing has ever hurt more than this.

“Harry,” Her voice is stern, “Please just leave.”

He bites his lip because he wants to argue more, he honestly looks like he’s near tears but YN doesn’t know if that’s just her imagination as he exits the bathroom to gather his clothes into his suitcase - digging around for the keycard to his own room he threw carelessly somewhere.

YN didn't sleep that night, eyes hurting from how much she’d cried, cheeks raw from where she had continuously wiped away the traitorous tears because this hurt worse than anything she’d ever gone through with Noah.

-

YN does exactly what Harry had done to her in the past.

She hides away before flights because her friends have told her that Harry has been coming in looking for her  and she switches positions with someone else so that she’s not in the pit.

She ignores Harry when he knocks at her hotel door one night, ignores his text messages asking for them just to talk, and lets the food he sends up from room services go cold.

It’s only been a week since the incident but YN hasn’t felt any better with her stomach issues as she settles back at home after another flight - she’s restocking her toiletry bag for the next day when she realizes that she didn’t need to refill her tampons.

YN’s heart sinks into her stomach when she realizes that she can’t remember the last time that she had a period but there is absolutely no fucking way that she’s pregnant because she was on brith control and took it regularly.

She was googling frantically the statistics of birth control not working and that the pill is ninety-one percent effective which means there’s only a nine percent chance it’s not.

But there’s a chance.

YN digs in her cabinets for an old test that she knew she’d shoved somewhere after she’d broken up with Noah and had sworn off sex, and she was shaking as she waited for the results.

Her phone chimes with a text from Harry.

Please, can we just talk?

Don’t shut me out. Please.

YN, can you just give me a chance to explain myself?

Please, YN. I can’t stand this. It’s killing me. Please.

And YN ignores them, hyperventilating as her alarm sounds, and she flips the plastic stick - a digital reading across the screen and in clear bold letters, it tells her what she didn’t want to fucking see.

Pregnant.

Holy fucking shit.

“No,” YN whimpers as she blinks at it, “No no no.”

She was responsible with her pill, how was she part of the small percentage?

It never happened with Noah, why now?

Why was it with the person who didn't want her like this?

YN feels lightheaded, stumbling to her bed, and burying herself in the covers because she doesn’t know what to think or do or feel because she’s pregnant with Harry’s baby and he doesn’t even want a relationship with her.

-

YN calls off work for the next two weeks because she doesn’t know what else to do, she had vacation time to use, and she couldn’t face Harry right now as she figured out what she was going to do or how she was going to tell him.

She’s still violently sick nearly everyday, feeling worse as the days go on, when her two weeks was up - she didn’t feel any better about going to work.

Harry hadn’t stopped texting her, trying to call her but she couldn’t even read them because it hurt too much.

YN is in love with him, she had a baby in her stomach that is half him, and he didn’t want any of that.

On the day that she returns to work, they’re going to London again.

She’d been having awful cramps all morning, getting sick twice in the airport bathroom, and felt like she was striking a fever as she boarded the plane.

Harry was out of the cockpit, standing right outside of it, and his eyes flash in concern when he sees YN, “Are you okay? I haven’t heard from you -“

“I’m fine,” YN brushes him off, lying through her teeth as she stows her bag away before retreating to the back of the aircraft despite his eyes on her the whole time.

-

YN lets her friends convince her into going to the hotel restaurant that night despite feeling like death, the cramps hadn’t stopped, her head was now pounding, and she still felt overheated.

Her food was untouched as her friends giggled and gossiped around her but suddenly she felt like she was going to pass out.

The stomach cramps turned into a sharper pain, something she’d never felt before.

It was indescribable and she knew that she needed to go to the hospital.

And all she can think about is the baby.

That this isnt’ good.

“Oh…Oh my god,” YN gasps as she pushes her chair back, “I- I need to go to the hospital.”

All three girls jerk their head with wide eyes, immediately confused and worried, Justine who was sitting next to her, “What’s wrong?”

“Cramps, I’m having cramps. They’re….fuck, they’re bad,” YN groans as she moves her hand to her stomach, feeling like she may just double over in pain.

“Do you think that it might just be your period?” Perry asks as she begins looking for a staff member.

YN shakes her head sharply, “No-no because I'm pregnant.”

All three girls gasp in surprise, moving into action as they flag over the waiter to call the paramedics - the pain in her stomach was starting to overwhelm her.

“Call Harry,” YN shoves her phone at Elaina, “Please.”

“He’ll understand, YN. Don’t worry about work right now,” She tries to assure her.

“Elaina, call him,” YN says firmly, giving her a look, and that when all three girls register what she is implying - they try to hide the absolute shock as Elaina presses his contact information.

YN zones in and out of consciousness for a while, barely remembers when Harry arrives but he’s brushing her hair out of her face, murmuring things to her, and patting a wet rag on her forehead that someone gave him.

He clambers into the ambulance with her and she starts to come back to reality for a little while the paramedic begins to ask her questions about her health history.

She doesn’t know how it didn’t get communicated from her friends about what was going on but the EMT asks, “Do you have any idea why you’re having this pain?”

Harry’s hand is gripping hers tightly, he’s confused and has no idea what is going on but he’s shaking as he watches her.

“I’m-I’m pregnant,” YN manages to spit out and squeezes her eyes shut because she doesn’t want to see Harry’s reaction to that news.

His hand leaves hers.

“Baby, oh my god,” Harry gasps in surprise but he’s getting up from the seat, leaning over, and pressing kisses to her sweaty forehead, “You’re pregnant...”

“Your baby,” YN nods as she tenses as a cramp fleets through her body, “I’m sorry, I didn’t- I took my pills I promise, I don’t know how-“

“Sssh,” Harry soothes instantly, lips peppering kisses all over her face now as he strokes her hair, “S’okay, you’re okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m here and I love you so much, pup.”

YN blinks up at him blearily, “You love me?”

Harry nods, there’s tears in the corner of his eyes, “I’ve been trying to tell you for the last weeks but you wouldn’t talk to me. Of course, I fucking love you.”

“I love you too,” YN tells him but has to grit her teeth when another pain shoots through her and everything goes dark for a while.

-

YN wakes up in a hospital bed, there blinds are drawn shut and it’s dark in the room, she can tell it’s still night as there is no sun seeping through the cracks of the sills.

She feels substantially better than when she was being transported here but her side is still aching and as she blinks her eyes open, she sees Harry sitting right next to her bed with his head slumped against the edge of the mattress.

He was asleep and looked to be in the most uncomfortable position, sitting up in a chair with his back hunched at an awful angle, his one hand resting on his thigh but the other was holding tightly onto hers.

She could fully admit that her heart soared with love as she watched the man beside her sleep - it may sound creepy but she loved watching him like this because all his frown wrinkles were smoothed, he was relaxed with his puffy lips parted, his eyelashes long against his cheekbones.

Her free hand comes to his hair, carding her fingers through the curls, and lightly scratching her nails against his scalp.

It takes a minute but he finally stirs, a sharp intake of breath as he sits up with wide eyes, there was so much anxiety in his expression that YN had never seen before this night.

“Pup,” Harry rasps, his voice thick from sleep but he brings her hand up to kiss the back of it, avoiding the IV, “How long have you been awake?”

“Just now,” YN tells him and she knows, she knows she needs to ask what happened but the sinking feeling in her stomach tells her that she no longer has a baby growing in her stomach.

“I love you,” Harry breathes out quickly like he’s worried she’ll kick him out of the room, “Pretty much from the beginning I think. I should have let you in, I wanted to. I just…if I have you that means I could lose you. I’ve been through that and I don’t think I could handle it if that happened to you. I hadn’t been with anyone since my wife passed. It’s been ten years and I’m scared.”

“I love you too,” YN whispers sincerely, leaning over slightly and Harry meets her the rest of the way to lay a gentle kiss on her lips, thumb coming to brush under her cheekbone, “The baby..”

Harry bites his lip, jaw clenching but not from anger this time but YN’s absolutely alarmed when he starts to cry, “Our baby is healthy and stable.”

“Wha-What?” YN stammers out in disbelief, she had fully prepared herself for the news that she had miscarried, “The stomach pain, I-You’re lying. Please, don’t- I can’t.”

“Baby, no,” Harry coos soothingly, standing up and leaning over her, pressing his forehead against hers, “It’s wasn’t anything to do with your pregnancy. Your appendix ruptured. The baby was never at risk, they’re okay.”

“I had appendicitis? No-not a miscarriage?” YN clarifies because she doesn’t feel like she’s awake right now, she had prepared herself for the worst news possible.

“Yes, they removed your appendix. They checked on the baby. Everything is fine with you and our baby,” Harry assures her as he peppers kisses all over her face like he did the night before, “I heard their little heart beat, YN. They’re already growing and so strong. Fuck, I’m so in love with them and I just found out.”

“I took my birth control everyday at the same time,” YN begins to explain as she watches Harry’s hand drift down to her stomach, there wasn’t any sign yet maybe a little pudge she hadn’t noticed but he still laid his hand there protectively, “I don’t know why it didn’t, I’m sorry-“

“Do not ever apologize to me about this,” Harry replies firmly, his voice serious and deep as he pulls back to look at her, “Of course, this isn’t what I was expecting but I want it. I want it so fucking badly. I never- I never thought I had kids after you know…what happened.”

“I don’t even know anything about you,” YN sniffles as she pulls him back down, digging her face into his shoulder for comfort as his hand comes to cup the back of her head.

“We have about six months for you to learn every single thing about me,” Harry murmurs with a wet chuckle, “I’m done having walls up. I was trying to tell you that for the last month. I am so fucking in love with you I can’t think straight. I want you to know all of me.”

“I want that too, I want you in every way,” YN presses her lips to his shoulder, tears making his shirt damp.

“You have another night in the hospital,” Harry tells her, “For observation. I think I’d like to start now.”

“Okay,” She nods quietly, moving over with a wince until Harry can squeeze into the small hospital bed with her.

“I grew up in this shitty little apartment above a Chinese restaurant…” Harry starts his story, YN had never heard him speak so much but for the rest of her hospital stay, aside from naps, Harry doesn’t stop sharing.

And he never stops again after that.

[chaiifluuf]

Heart to heart — d. osamu

synopsis. seeing your boyfriend’s ex makes you question if you really are enough for him

content. fem!reader, ada!reader, hurt/comfort, has a made-up character

notes. a request written here ! @hyunorue, @walnutnut since you wanted to be tagged, i adjusted a few things but hope you enjoy nonetheless <3

“‘samu, we just had a lunch break..” 

you mention softly as you let him lead you out of the agency office. of course dazai wants to ditch work with you once again despite all your efforts to make him do the opposite. often you don’t go along with his antics since you actually value the paperwork and don’t want to stress kunikida even further. unfortunately, today was one of those days where dazai wins.

“so? we were still working then and have every right to get a break now!” dazai tells you as if there is no problem with what he said. you raise an eyebrow and stare at him sceptically. “more like i was the one working, you just pouted and sat next to me because i wasn’t focusing on you.” you point out while both of you walk down the stairs.

“how cruel, bella! i did write on my report,” he says dramatically, holding his free hand to his chest when the other hand is still intertwined with yours. “i saw you add exactly five words.” you respond bluntly as you remember your gaze flickering to his laptop to see what he was doing from before. dazai gives you a fake offended look before opening the door for you to exit.

the cafe right below the agency was the go-to place to take a break or even have lunch. and today was no different. two of you sit down at one of the tables and order your usual. you still weren’t at ease though. “you know if kunikida happened to be at the office currently then we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” 

dazai hummed indifferently, taking your hand in his again as he rubbed gentle circles on the back of it. a warm smile tugged at his lips. “kunikida this and kunikida that but how about you relax? don’t worry, i’ll just—”

he abruptly stopped speaking when he looked behind you towards the entrance of the cafe, the sound of the doorbell ringing filling the space. you feel confused and decide to call his name, but to no avail. before you can even turn around a woman’s voice can be heard throughout the room.

“oh my god! is that you, dazai?” she gasps and you saw the way his body stiffened. almost right away you can tell something is wrong. the woman walks up to the table you were sitting at, an amused grin on her face. you can’t help but wonder who she is. dazai has never mentioned knowing other women besides you and some others at the agency. what is going on?

“why long time no see! you do remember me right?” she says to him with an upbeat tone, her gaze shifting to you afterwards. the moment she did you realised something. she looked pretty. stunning even, her golden wavy hair fitting so well with her hazel eyes. while her expression seemed friendly, as soon as she looked at you, you felt somewhat uncomfortable. you felt as if she judged your whole being right now.

“i do, yuna. what are you doing here?” dazai’s voice was much colder in comparison to talking to you earlier. okay so dazai does know her. then she has to be someone from his past. someone he has never told you about. perhaps a friend, a relative or a… oh.  

yuna merely hums in response. “this cafe is a public place, no? just wanted to get a coffee but ran into you instead. how have you been?” she asks dazai, mostly ignoring you and it makes you feel like you’re not supposed to be here. your suspicions about who she is make this even worse. 

dazai sighs rather heavily. “now is not the time. seriously.” it’s obvious that he is trying to get her to leave but yuna doesn’t seem to get the hint. “woah you’re so tense, i mean no harm…” she says with a softer tone despite the playful smile growing on her lips, calmly bringing her hand to dazai’s shoulder as if i wasn’t even there. it’s becoming harder to not get annoyed because who does she think she is? 

your lips form into a thin line as you watch her get dangerously comfortable around him. you were about to give yuna a piece of your mind but dazai already got ahead of you. without hesitation, he pries her hand off his shoulder and she’s surprised by his action. 

“yuna, this is your last warning. i need you to stop acting like we’re anything more than strangers and respectfully, get the fuck out of here.” he spoke with a stern tone and looked into her eyes the entire time. you’re definitely not used to seeing him get genuinely mad at someone. 

small shock crosses her face and she seems taken aback by his sudden words. a moment of tense silence passes before yuna scoffs. “fine, be like that then. have fun with your new little girlfriend,” she says mockingly, her friendly tone long gone and you were not ready for the look she gave you. it was full of loathing and bitterness, like you were far beneath her.

and now you want to sink six feet underground. you hate how much she managed to affect you and you pray that she can’t tell from your expression. you shouldn’t even care what she thinks of you but assuming that she had some type of relationship with dazai before, you can’t help but feel out of place.

yuna finally leaves the place and dazai’s eyes soften when he looks back at you. “i’m so sorry that you had to witness this,” he says with a sigh, “are you okay?” you can see it in his gaze that he is really apologetic and you don’t how to feel anymore. all of this could’ve been avoided if you just stayed at the agency.

“yeah, i’m fine. was that your ex?” you ask, ignoring the stirring emotions in your chest. dazai seems to think a little before answering. “not exactly. i haven’t talked to her in years now. i thought she moved away… but it doesn’t matter. let’s just focus on us, yeah?” 

you still had so many questions but you simply nod and take a sip of your drink. a worried glint remains in his eyes but you decide to ignore it and act like you’re okay with everything that happened. 

because you’re anything but okay.

yosano keeps giving you strange looks as you look through some files. you try to focus on work but the cafe incident won’t leave your mind no matter how hard you try. she can probably tell something is wrong. she’s a doctor after all. 

“y/n, did something happen?” yosano speaks up calmly while she sits on her office chair. you shift your gaze from the paper to her and blink in surprise. “ah, no. why are you asking?” you respond, trying to seem clueless.

“you’ve been staring at the same page for over five minutes now and i know for a fact you’re not that slow of a reader. your thoughts are elsewhere.” okay maybe it was more obvious than you anticipated. you know there’s no use to denying her at this point. with a defeated sigh, you sit down on a chair near her desk.

“it’s kind of stupid.” you’re still a little hesitant about this because while you and her got along well, you haven’t opened up about your problems to her before. her face softens slightly as she leans back on her chair. “surely it’s not if it has you acting this odd.”

a minute of silence passes before you start talking. “well me and osamu went on a break to the cafe and then this woman appeared out of nowhere, someone who he knew in the past and…” you pause, gathering your words, “after a tense conversation she finally leaves us alone. even if she did try to look friendly at first, i could tell she did not like me.”

“so it was jealousy or something?” yosano guessed, listening intently and you sigh again in return. “i don’t know. i asked osamu about her too and i didn’t really get any answers,” you say as you think about it. why did he barely tell you anything? is he hiding something? god you’re starting to overthink again.

yosano notices your troubled expression and decides to slowly move a little closer to you with her chair. “listen, let me ask you this—how did he react when she started talking to him?” she asks while looking into your eyes. 

“very irritated, in a way that I rarely see.” that’s true, there was a genuine glimpse of anger in his irises, it was surprising even to you. yosano nods and seems to think for a moment before speaking.

“do you trust him?”

you’re slightly caught off guard by the question. of course you trust him. through all the missions you have gone on with him, he always makes your safety the top priority and you know that you can trust him with your life. 

without thinking twice you nod in response and a small smile appears on her face. “then i’m sure you don’t need to get too concerned. plus from what i’ve seen, he loves and cares about you more than anything else.” she tells you with a warm tone.

her words manage to somewhat ease you because she must be right. you love him dearly and he feels the same. and that’s what is important. yeah, you can’t forget that. you give yosano a grateful look. “you’re right, thank you.”

the confidence you had a few hours ago is long gone. you don’t know how long you have been sitting on your bedroom floor alone, stuck in your thoughts. you left the agency a while ago, telling dazai you were going to a case related place so he wouldn’t get suspicious. in reality you couldn’t understand yourself. why are you so upset? even yosano assured you that there’s no need to worry.

everything was fine before going to the cafe and having that encounter with her but it shouldn't matter because it’s plain to see that dazai doesn’t care about her nor like her anymore. it’s not like he’s cheating on you which you know he would never do. but you do wonder how they met, you wonder if they were actually together and on top of all, you wonder what happened between them. 

because despite her cold behaviour, she was gorgeous to say the least. and maybe if you got along with her then she would have a nicer personality as well. honestly yuna seemed like everything you’re not. it makes you doubt yourself. just what does dazai see in you? you have heard his flowery and flattering comments more than you can count but what if he doesn’t mean them?

it’s such a silly thought but you can’t stop pondering over it. you’re so much in your head that you didn’t even notice to hear the soft creak of the door opening.

“love?”

your breath falters. you know that voice all too well. you can’t find it in yourself to answer, keeping your face buried in your arms as your knees are pressed to your chest. you hear him moving and you can tell he’s closer to you now.

“what’s wrong?” dazai asks gently and you can’t help but feel embarrassed since you are not sure how to answer. you wish you could act like you’re fine.

you stay quiet and after a moment he speaks up again. “yosano told me some stuff regarding you,” he says and now you really have no chance of hiding anything. it never crossed your mind that she might tell him. he knows why you are like this and you hate that.

“osamu, why are you with me?” your voice is more unstable than you would’ve liked. you raise your head and see that he’s sitting right beside you on the floor. his gaze goes softer and more concerned when you look at him. you then realise your cheeks are wet.

“why? because i love you of course,” he says so easily, a tender smile adorning his lips. you remain doubtful. “then will you tell me who she was? was yuna really not your ex?” you question him as you can feel your throat getting tighter, desperate for answers.

dazai’s smile fades and he lets out a quiet sigh. “me and her were friends with benefits at best. sometimes i could tell she wanted to be more than that but unbeknownst to her, i was aware of all the other boys she was hanging out with. we had an argument over it and i ended everything with her on the spot.”

you stare at him for a few seconds as you process his words. he is not lying, you can tell that much. you suck in a breath as your vision grows slightly blurry. “i just don’t get it. she was so pretty, osamu. out of all people you chose me when i’m barely anything in comparison to her. i—“ your voice cracks as you try to stop your tears. you have never seen yourself the way he does and at times it scares you because what if one day he will see you exactly like you see yourself?

you avoid his gaze and the fact he hasn’t said a single word makes you want to cry more. he brings his hand to your cheek and slowly guides you back to face him. what greeted you instead of pity was a warm smile and eyes full of fondness.

“my dear, are you hearing yourself right now? without any exaggeration, you’re the most breathtaking woman i have ever met inside and out. i would never love someone so much based off only their appearance. and do you know what makes you so precious?” 

you sniffle as your gaze is connected to his. you can’t help but lean into his touch while his hand cradles the side of your face. “what.?” you ask.

“you make me feel human. you make life worth living and i couldn’t be happier to spend the rest of my days with you.” his tone is filled with tenderness and sincerity. it almost makes you question whether you’re dreaming but his touch wouldn’t feel so real and soothing in any of them. 

and then you smile lightly. you really were overthinking it. as relief washes over you, your body moves on its own and your wrap around his waist, hugging him tightly. dazai returns the gesture and places a kiss on your head, softly rubbing your back. tears were still escaping your eyes but this time it wasn’t out of sadness. 

he suddenly seems to remember something and whispers into your ear. “oh and there are some flowers waiting on the table for you.”

my writing is so weird in this i’m sorry (ㅠ﹏ㅠ)

[islandofsages]

HEYY!! I love your writing from what i've read and i was wondering if i could ask for a gn reader (yuu) teaching the housewardens about like classic fandom lore- like imagine them turning into matpat to explain fnaf and undertale!! 😭😭 feel free to not do this and have a good day!! Thanks :D

characters: housewardens x gn!yuu

tags: platonic, fluff, crack kinda, imagines format

warnings: swearing

author's notes: SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG also all the fandoms mentioned here are all fandoms ive been in at some point :D fun times mhm

Riddle Rosehearts

He knows you’re very passionate about fandom culture but you never really had the chance to infodump about it to him

Until one day, you drop by Heartslabyul for a leisurely visit, when you see a not-so-clearly distressed Riddle sitting in the lounge

Not-so-clearly meaning he’s holding a teacup in his hand yet not drinking it, eyes closed as if he’s holding in all his emotions

You grow worried at this sight and slide next to him on the couch where he is seated, hoping you can help alleviate some of that stress

He sees you and he allows himself a sigh, then musters up a smile for you. He greets you and you cut straight to the point - can you help him with anything?

He releases a second sigh and shakes his head, telling you he only needs some sort of distraction. He just had a long day and needs to take his mind off things

You take a second to think of things that you can distract him with – that’s when a lightbulb goes off in your head. This is a prime opportunity for you

“Okay, I’m guessing you haven’t heard of Five Nights at Freddy’s since it’s a franchise from my world and all but the lore is crazy. So it starts like this…”

He wasn’t expecting to be paying much attention to the contents of what you’re saying but sooner or later, he ends up leaning towards you with his hand cupping his chin, mouth slightly agape at the story you’re telling

This inspires you to dump even more information about the media somehow at the rate that you’re going

By the end of it, he’s completely forgotten what he was so worried about. His head is full of creepy pizzerias for kids and haunted animatronics

He ends up having some trouble sleeping that night though. He’ll get you for that later.

Leona Kingscholar

He won’t lie, your interest in fandoms is too reminiscent of Idia for him – he doesn’t admit this to you obviously, since he hasn’t had the chance to

But on one particularly boring day, you decide to skip class with him and he lets you tag along for the hell of it

In the span of three seconds, he’s already off in dreamland. Sometimes you wish you had such a skill

Since you have nothing better to do and he’s way too deep in his sleep to even care anyway, you start rambling to yourself and a slumbering Leona

“Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about Undertale lately so I need to dump it all somewhere. So basically you play as this kid…”

Little do you know halfway through his nap, he wakes up from how much you’re talking. At first, he’s annoyed by your yapping but then he grows interest in what you’re saying

He’s almost tempted to try that game for himself and almost disappointed that it’s not available in Twisted Wonderland. Emphasis on almost.

When you’re done rambling, that’s when he stretches his arms over his head and yawn, commenting how noisy you were

You shrug it off. You're used to him complaining about you yapping instead of napping alongside him

…But then he asks you to tell him more about Undertale, if there's any more information you’re keeping from him out of the kindness of your heart

You smile smugly at this and his expression seems to say “don't make me regret asking” but oh, you definitely will make him regret even being friends with you in the first place

Needless to say, regrets were not the only thing he held at the end of that day.

Azul Ashengrotto

Similar to Leona, your fixation on fandom culture reminds him too much of Idia. not that that’s necessarily a bad thing - it’s more of an observation

And he gets more than an observation when you get the chance to show him what you’re made of: useless fandom culture and gaming knowledge

Speaking of Idia, he goes to you as a last resort to ask you to help him understand whatever the hell Idia’s talking about

You don’t know too much about Twisted Wonderland’s fandom culture just yet but when Azul explains the premise of a certain game and its fandom, it gives you an idea

“Sounds pretty similar to Yandere Simulator. Ooh, that one has a lot of history. Let me tell you about it…”

Unfortunately for him, he ended up unlocking your geekiness instead of having you address the things he was confused with

But at least your story makes it a bit easier to understand? He’s yet to decide that really but at least it sounds like you’re taking his lack of slang knowledge into consideration

Your infodump really gripped his attention though - it’s interesting to know another side of human culture, even if it’s not the humans of Twisted Wonderland

He would nod understandingly (or at least, politely) and thank you and your geekiness

He relays your story to Idia and finds it intriguing how similar fandom culture is in both Twisted Wonderland and your world

He would invite you to Board Game Club meetings so that you can rave and find out more about Twisted Wonderland’s fandom culture with Idia

He’d realize that was a big mistake and he may or may not have created the nerdiest pair in the world - but you guys are his nerdiest pair in the world.

Kalim Al-Asim

He’s very curious about fandom culture - he doesn’t know too much about it nor anyone who knows a lot about it so almost all the fandom information in his head are from you

He really wants to know more!!! So of course that warrants a hangout session fabricated as a study session to get Jamil’s stamp of approval

So there you are in his room, books laid out in front of the two of you but most importantly, a laptop

You two watch about a dozen videos on Twisted Wonderland’s fandom culture and as you absorb all the very-much-useful information, you sneak in tidbits from the culture of your world

“This one in particular is reminiscent of Danganronpa. Man, that one was a wild ride…”

It’s exciting to be able to talk about it with someone you trust wholeheartedly, especially Kalim, whom you know wouldn’t be so judging

He only nods in understanding at every point you made, his eyes sparkling with all the curiosity in his body

You were on your thirteenth video when you two are interrupted by a rap on the door and an unfortunately-familiar voice

So obviously you and your bestie hurriedly rush to close all the tabs on your laptop and open up something more academically-inclined

Which is obviously a…dictionary site

Jamil blinks twice at this, says nothing (but probably noting how it makes sense for you guys since you two are bumbling idiots) and walks away

If there’s any dictionary being read that day, it’d be a dictionary of fandom terminology, that’s for sure.

Vil Schoenheit

He doesn’t know too much about it - and doesn’t bother to learn much about it since he has better things to do - but since it’s you, he tries his best to be a good listener

The two of you sit down in the courtyard one day, the chirping of birds and rustling of leaves music to your ears; beauty truly is everywhere around you when you’re next to him

He’s talking about something. You’re not sure what because you’re entranced by the way his hair hangs above his eyes so elegantly. He notices this and calls you out for it

You shrug and excuse how you can’t help it - he’s like a dating simulator love interest in the real. He asks you what you mean by this. Now’s your chance to shine!

“Hmm, you know, something like Mystic Messenger? Hehe, let me tell you a bit about it…”

Unluckily for him, your “a bit” turns out to be a four-hour long ramble about the aforementioned dating simulator a little too reminiscent of Rook for his liking too

Despite his reservations, he really did enjoy hearing you talk so passionately about your interest; it’s a bonus that the topic itself is interesting

He tells you he wouldn’t mind trying out the game or at least finding out more about it though unfortunately it’s not available in Twisted Wonderland

You share his shame - until he says he’ll pitch the concept of the game to some authorities he know and perhaps make it a reality

Sorry, he’s going to what now?

You’re a little shaken. Sometimes you forget he’s a world-class model, despite his looks and mannerisms. You save your nerves for if a Twisted Wonderland version of Mystic Messenger actually ends up happening

He thanks you for enlightening him about fandom and video gaming culture. You use this as a cue to add another four hours of ranting about V’s route in the game.

Idia Shroud

You’re another victim for him to taint… or so he thought. You’re more of an ally than a victim at this point, considering how nerdy you are

He’d dump fandom lore on you and you’d reciprocate it right back. He’s genuinely so impressed with your knowledge, even if they differ by some degree due to being from different worlds

He gets more impressed when you pull up with knowledge about Twisted Wonderland’s fandom culture like damn, you really brushed up on your talking points already

Friendly rivalry aside, he really does enjoy talking about fandom culture with you and hearing about the things from your world - every story you tell adds a little color into his world

One day, the two of you are leaning on each other, on your phones because of course you are, even if you two are friends, talking still isn’t Idia’s strong suit

That’s when you blurt it out–

“Hey, wanna hear about this game called Persona? It’s a turn-based RPG and…”

Regardless of his response to your question, you ended up babbling away either way. It’s how conversations start between the two of you

You’re speaking so fast, he would have mistaken you for a rapper - or a doppelganger of himself even

Consider him entertained - he finds himself smiling by the end of your yapping and intrigued by your story

He then obviously starts to relate it to something from Twisted Wonderland, passing the listener baton to you

You don’t mind – you can stay there for hours and hours, just going back and forth with your fellow nerdy-ass friend.

Malleus Draconia

This man barely knows how to use a smartphone so you had to be a little patient with him when guiding him through the fandom culture trenches

He’s happy that you trust and cherish him enough to talk about your interests with no reservations or shame – and the feeling is mutual

On a certain weekend, the two of you are hanging out as usual. Chatting as friends would do

You don’t know why but the conversation reminded you of a certain fandom

“It’s kinda like Genshin’s community, I guess. They’re a riot, let me tell you that.”

Oh? What’s a Genshin and why is its community a riot?

You’re glad he asked – because you’ve prepared a 100-slide presentation on the history of the game and its fans

He asks you why and how did you find the time to make that. You tell him to shut up and that it doesn’t matter, he just needs to listen to you

You start and it feels like you’ll never stop – there’s just so much to say and Malleus has so much time in the world

Seeing his reactions to certain events makes you crack up and at times, you’d laugh at his shocked expressions (or sigh exhaustively, depending on the event you’re explaining)

When you finally stop, he gives you a one-man standing ovation. You blush a little at the attention and unexpected reaction but you appreciate his sentiment nonetheless. He tells you that your presentation has been very informative for him

You’re relieved to have been able to get that off your chest… and Malleus is more than ecstatic to relay the information to everyone he’s ever known. You obviously pretend that you had no involvement in his sudden investment of a game from another world.

[copperbadge]

Feeling a little overly perceived by Dr. Dodson right now, not gonna lie.

I'll throw a transcript under the cut, but both reading the transcript and listening to the video can be difficult as it's quite long, so here's some highlights. As always, these are the opinions of a specialist but only one specialist, so take with a grain of salt, and if you have research to add to this, please feel free to comment or reblog with it. I believe this presentation is from sometime in 2022.

ADHD appears to derive from issues in the corpus striatum in the brain. In most people, the corpus striatum filters out all but the most important input AND output; with ADHD, the things normally handled "outside of awareness" must be handled consciously.

People with ADHD don't see their emotions coming. Emotion is immediate, intense, and unfiltered, making therapies like CBT or ACT difficult, because you can learn the technique but you won't have time to employ it. Because people with ADHD have impulse control issues, expressing emotions "inappropriately" is common, leading people with ADHD to believe they can't trust themselves.

One function of ADHD-typical dysregulation is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which nobody understands even a little. People who have it can't even adequately describe it to people who want to study it. It is intense, painful, and apparently impossible to control. Prevention is based in maladaptive behaviors designed to avoid it entirely (perfectionism, people pleasing, generalized withdrawal). The only currently known treatment is alpha agonist medication.

Lastly, by the age of twelve, a child with ADHD has likely received twenty thousand more "negative or corrective" messages than their neurotypical peers. (This isn't relevant to the rest, I just found it sufficiently horrifying to warrant inclusion. Fortunately for me, if I got 20,000 negative or corrective messages, I wasn't paying attention for most of them.)

Anyway, here's the transcript of the first half. I did this by copying and cleaning up the auto-transcript on YouTube, but I stopped at Question Time, so this is only the first half (the presentation). Transcription of the second half is available at YouTube.

There is suddenly a very large interest in the whole subject of emotional dysregulation and ADHD. That has been driven oddly enough by the Food and Drug Administration, which has just opened up several pathways that drug companies can study emotional dysregulation and whether or not their medications can get an FDA indication for emotional dysregulation. So it's sort of follow the money. Up until then, there was not a great deal of interest for ADHD emotional dysregulation.

We have to understand that the ADHD diagnostic criteria were not made for people like you and me, either practitioners or people who have ADHD or their families. They were designed for and made by people who do research and pretty much that's it. People who do research have to have criteria that they can physically see and count. "Little Johnny was up and out of his chair three times in the last hour," and you can write a three on your clipboard. Things which are invisible, not always there, hard to count, or even hidden by the patient, don't lend themselves to research very easily and so tend to be ignored. And so consequently this is one of the main reasons why emotional dysregulation -- until there was some other motive provided -- was pretty much ignored and disregarded.

Consequently ADHD right now, if you look at the 18 diagnostic criteria, are almost entirely behavioral criteria. What is the person doing? Not how is the person thinking, what is the patient feeling, how are they controlling their emotions, how are they sleeping. Things that are all very, very important to the person who has ADHD but which is essentially ignored by the diagnostic criteria.

Why should you care? Who really cares about this? Well, the definition of what ADHD is and isn't defines who and what will be studied. It defines who will actually get into a study and what questions will be asked. It defines who will be diagnosed with ADHD and who will not. One of the most common problems I get is with a secondary referral to me -- somebody clearly has ADHD but they're not pinging off the walls, they can sit and do their work, especially when they get into a hyperfocus, and so they're told they couldn't possibly have ADHD. When really they just have the inattentive subtype and they're not being driven by their behavior, their overt behavior. Therefore it defines who will get treatment, who will get insurance coverage for that treatment, and who will get accommodations in school when they're young and at the workplace when they're older.

Consequently we should also care because the other major components of ADHD get ignored. These are the ones that if you really stand back and look at it cause the greatest amount of impairment, the greatest amount of embarrassment, the greatest amount of just…problems in general. We're talking about cognition and thinking, that people with ADHD fundamentally think in a different way than do neurotypical people. They are able to engage with the tasks of their lives in a totally different way. Their ability to control their emotions and their behavior, control their emotional responses, tremendously affects their self-esteem and their self-definition. Who am I? What am I worth? What am I valued? Why am I valued in a certain way? What do other people think of me?

It affects tremendously the nature and healthiness of relationships. How you respond emotionally to the people in your realm makes a great deal of difference about the healthiness and gratification you get from your relationships. Being highly dysregulated in terms of your energy and emotions also affects deeply how well you sleep, how easy it is to fall asleep and awake refreshed, and of course it affects emotional dysregulation.

And this is probably, when you look at it in the long term and especially with adults, probably the most impairing part of the ADHD syndrome. The vast majority of people with ADHD have found ways around their academic and work performance, but they haven't found their way around their emotional reactions to the people and events of their lives.

At all points in the life cycle -- child, adolescent, adult, and elderly -- people who have ADHD nervous systems lead intense, passionate lives. Their highs are higher, their lows are lower, all of their emotions are much more intense. And that really is what we're talking about: not really the quality of the emotions -- people who have ADHD have the same types of emotions for the same reasons that everybody else does. What we're talking here, in terms of dysregulation, is two things: one, the expression of emotions, being able to choose whether or not you let an emotion out. And then, when you do decide to express it, how intensely that emotion is experienced and expressed by you as a unique individual.

Consequently just about everybody with ADHD, but especially little children, are always at some sort of risk of being overwhelmed by their own emotions from within themselves. This is something that needs to be really emphasized: a lot of people with ADHD grow up not being able to trust themselves.

So why is this happening, especially to people with ADHD? I think that just about everybody now would agree that ADHD is primarily a problem of insufficient inhibition, being able to slow down and keep things from happening. If you look at the mass of the human brain, 85% of all the nerves in your brain and out in your nervous system are inhibitory in function. We happen to be aware of the other 15% because we can see what happens when those nerves are used: they create movement, they create emotions, they create our experience and memory. We have to remember they are a minority of the actual mass of the human brain.

Most of what happens inside the brain occurs outside of awareness. What happens is the brain starts something, it gets it moving, and then uses inhibition to guide that toward the destination it wants. It's like shooting off a rocket -- shooting it off is the easy part, guiding it to where you want it to go is the hard part.

When you look at where stimulant class medications work, they work solely in the deep areas of the brain down in the basal ganglia, and especially in an area called the corpus striatum, which is just Latin for a "striped body". That's how it looks when you look at it -- it's got many very fine stripes in it. This area, the corpus striatum, is almost entirely inhibitory in function. What it does is that it inhibits neurological input and output to just the one piece of information or one action that happens to be most important at that time. Everything else gets handled, but it gets handled out of awareness.

Probably the easiest place to see this in action is when we're driving a car. Driving a car is the most difficult thing that the average human being ever has to learn how to do. It's a very difficult process, if anybody has ever had an adolescent learning to drive. But once we learn how to drive a car we do it largely outside of our own conscious awareness. We can drive along, talk to the person on the seat next to us, think about what we're going to have for dinner, sing along to the radio, and not really pay attention, conscious attention, to what's going on around us. But if suddenly something is out in front of the car, even before our conscious brain can process what that thing is, our corpus striatum has already handled it. Slam on the brakes, swerve to miss it, start to question that person's parentage, in the twinkling of an eye. The corpus striatum has been scanning everything, handling everything.

So basically what ADHD is, is that relative lack of inhibition that should be there. Inattention, which is a cardinal feature of ADHD, is the relative lack of the inhibition of other inputs or distractions. When we look at physiologically what's happening, we don't actually pay attention to one thing. Neurologically, we suppress every other thing we might engage with except the one thing that we want. It is maximally inefficient in that way.

Impulsivity is a relative lack of inhibition, of the expression of actions and emotions before you can think about them and make decisions about that expression. Hyperactivity is the relative lack of inhibition of physical and mental activity. When the physical activity of the hyperactive little boy who's pinging off a wall goes away in adolescence, they're still very much mentally active in their own brains.

So what? The “so what” for most of us is that when this area of the brain is not working as it should, people cannot regulate the experience and expression of their emotions. Emotions are experienced as completely unmodified and unscreened. The word that most people use is that they are raw. They come out without any modification at all, they go in without any modification at all. People can see this in hyperacusis, where somebody chewing or the conversation across the restaurant comes in loud and clear because it can't be screened out.

All this is tremendously overwhelming. We get overwhelmed by entirely too much input, and the impulse to have entirely too much output. It's exhausting, and when it does get inappropriately expressed it's embarrassing, so consequently people with ADHD must always be vigilant of themselves.

Now, when we look at the traditional therapies that have been used, or tried to be used, with ADHD, they have had very very poor track records. They're largely ineffective in helping people control the expression of what they think and feel. The reason for this is that people with ADHD don't see their own emotions, their own actions, coming. They find out about their emotions and actions the same way everybody else does: it's already out there before they even know that it's coming. Consequently they don't have the time and the warning to use the techniques and new skills that they may have learned in behavior modification therapy, or in cognitive therapy. They learned them, learned them perfectly well, but the cat’s out of the bag before they can make use of them.

Right now, as we sit here today, medications are the only thing we have to offer that have a proven track record, because they're there all the time. We have two basic groups: we have the stimulant class medications which are amphetamine, methylphenidate, et cetera, which help directly with inhibition. They help slow things down, they help inhibit both input that would distract us and output. It gives you the same two seconds that everybody else has, to see an emotion or an action coming up, to play it out in your mind. “If this happens then this will happen, then that'll happen. Oh, I don't want that to happen, I'll redirect it.”

The alpha agonist, of which we have two -- guanfacine and clonidine -- inhibit the energy driving the speed and intensity of response. Interesting enough, when we look at just clean effectiveness, when we measure how effective is this treatment, the alpha agonists are significantly more effective than are the stimulants. Usually that's kind of a false choice, because most people end up taking both classes of medication.

A very special type, I think, of emotional dysregulation is -- again a terrible technical term -- what's called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. We actually don't know what it is. It's much too early to tell. But it does seem to be a thing with which many people with ADHD identify. There was a brief article from ADDitude that got posted on Reddit, on their subreddit on ADHD; that particular posting got twice as many responses, in less than a month, than any other posting that had ever been put on that subreddit. It really touched a lot of people in a strong way.

In my own checklist, when I'm asking about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, the question I have is: “For your entire life, in other words going all the way back into childhood, have you always been much more sensitive than other people you know to rejection, teasing, criticism, or your own perception that you’ve failed or fallen short?” This is directly from a psychiatric textbook, an old one, and it's the definition of a technical term, for psychiatrists called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

It's important to note, this is all a matter of degree. No one likes being rejected or criticized. Everybody hates it when we fail, we fall short, especially in front of other people. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is much more intense, and is much more than this universal discomfort.

When they were originally doing the research on this particular idea, 45 years ago, they wanted to get that intensity right up there in the name, and so they chose the word dysphoria -- which unfortunately happens to be Greek -- but it means “unbearable”. Because that was the description they were getting from people over and over and over again. Again, for reasons unknown, people with rejection sensitivity have trouble describing what the intense emotion is all about. They can describe its intensity -- “it's awful, it's terrible, it's catastrophic,” -- but not the quality of the mood. And so, over and over again, these research subjects would finally just tell the researcher, “Look, man, back off. I can't find words to tell you what this awful feeling feels like, but I want you to know I can hardly stand it.” And so that's where the word dysphoria came from. A researcher at Harvard who decided to put it into Greek, but that unbearable quality is very much a part of what's going on, a part of the experience of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

It's extremely common in people with ADHD; my guess is that about 95% of my patients report it as a significant impairment, and about a third of my patients say that it is by far the most impairing part of their ADHD. For the majority of people, and most occurrences, it is not that particularly disruptive, but when it hits, it turns your life upside down.

So how is rejection sensitivity experienced? There's no warning. It hits out of the blue; there's no way to protect yourself from it. It happens all at once, it goes from zero to a hundred percent instantaneously. It is commonly experienced as being physically painful, as if someone just punched you in the chest or punched you in the stomach -- there's an aching in the core of your being.

Once it gets started it seems to be largely uncontrollable until it's run its course, whatever it is. The quality of the mood is indescribable. Most people struggle to find any words at all to describe this feeling, even though it's massively intense. The duration can be a few minutes to several months. It's a very potent experience and can make it very difficult to risk ever being rejected or criticized again.

If this very intense emotional reaction is internalized, it looks for all the world like an instantaneous major depression, complete with suicidal thinking. And so a lot of times people do get a diagnosis of major depression, because the clinician they're working with fails to pick up the triggered, instantaneous nature of the onset of that depressive-looking syndrome. If it's externalized, it presents as a rage that is directed at the person or situation that wounded them so terribly. In fact, being “wounded” is is a very common description. This sort of sudden trigger change, with an intense emotional response, not uncommonly leads to a misdiagnosis of borderline character organization.

So if you can't see it coming, and you can't do anything once it's happened, how do people try and protect themselves from episodes of rejection sensitivity happening in the first place? Some people use perfectionism; they try to be above reproach. They feel driven to be the very best at everything they do. These are the penultimate overachievers. It works, but it's also an absolutely terrible, driven way in which to live.

By far the most common response is that people become people pleasers. They are constantly scanning everybody around them and trying to figure out what that person wants or would approve of, and that's what they give them, so much so that it is the to the exclusion of what they want for their own lives. These are people who take care of others, please others, to the exclusion of any sort of gratification in their own lives.

Another very common way that people try to deal with this is that they give up trying anything new, giving up anything in which they might fail or be embarrassed. I have hundreds of patients who have never been able to apply for a job or ask someone of the opposite sex out for a date. Just the imagination of being told no is so frightening, so devastating, that they just say, “No, I'm not going there. I'll sit this one out.”

One of the most effective ways of dealing with this are the alpha agonist medications, and when they work they can be almost completely effective. Alpha agonist again is a tongue twisting name, but it's not as tongue-twisting as the full name, which is alpha-2 selective adrenergic agonists. So you can see why we shorten it a bit. They were originally blood pressure medications that came on the market in the early 1980s. They worked very poorly -- when they did work, at most they lowered blood pressure about 10%, which was measurable but it still required other things that needed to be done in order to get most people's blood pressure down into a therapeutic range.

We have two of them, guanfacine which was marketed both as immediate release and extended release under the name of Intuniv, and clonidine, which was marketed under the trade name of Kapvay, both as an immediate release product and as a delayed release product. They have been used as a treatment of the hyperactive component of ADHD for more than 30 years, so these are not new medications for the field of ADHD. They're very much the treatment of choice for the “hyperactive, disruptive, and obnoxious little boy” that is what most people have in their minds when they consider the notion of “What does a person with ADHD look like?”

The exact mechanism of action of these medications both in ADHD and especially in rejection sensitivity is highly unclear. We really don't know -- we have a couple of ideas but they are very definitely theoretical. The only thing that we know for sure is that the stimulants don't work by stimulating anything, and that the alpha agonists don't work by being alpha agonists. How they do work is completely unknown.

We have two medications, they seem to work equally well, so there's nothing that would lead you to choose one over the other. The problem is that the robust response that we're looking for that really changes people's lives, is disappointingly low -- at about 30% to either molecule. Luckily that 30% is a different 30% of people, so that 30% of people get a good response to guanfacine but it's largely a different 30% that get a response to clonidine. So if the first medication tried does not work, it makes good clinical sense that that one should be stopped and the other one tried. There was an unfortunately worded sentence in an article I wrote for ADDitude several years ago that gave the impression that you could use the two medications together; they should not be used together. You try one, if that doesn't work you try the other.

The typical dose of either one is in the range of three milligrams of guanfacine per day or about three tenths of a milligram of clonidine per day. If you take all the people who get a good robust response to either one of these medications, about 80% are going to end up at these doses, so it's by far the most common dose.

There are of course side effects. Anything that's going to adjust the adrenaline system of the body is going to have the potential for sedation as a side effect, and this does occur for about 25% of people. It's usually mild and it does go away -- over a period of several months. So a person has to be fairly patient with that. It can cause dry mouth, and it's by a different mechanism then the stimulants can cause dry mouth, so the two of them together can really make your mouth cottony dry. And the third one is an accentuation of a universal experience we've all had, when we stand up quickly and suddenly and we get dizzy, get kind of a head rush, vision goes a bit gray. The technical term for it is orthostasis. And this can happen more frequently when you take the alpha agonist medications.

The benefits of the alpha agonist medications take a while to develop. When you change the dose it takes five days for the benefits to develop, so once again they're not like the stimulants where what you see is what you get at one hour. It takes a while for these medications to work and to see all that they can do.

Now just as a side note, Strattera has been looked at in two studies for emotional dysregulation and the results have been what they call mixed. If they did work it was only to a very minimal degree, almost undetectable, so Strattera does not seem to be a medication one could use and expect to have it help with emotional dysregulation.

So in summary, emotional dysregulation is a basic feature of ADHD, is almost universal in ADHD, and it should be considered as a core symptom of ADHD that ought to be evaluated in every initial evaluation. Rejection sensitivity…it's unclear yet -- this is an old concept that has only been brought up in the last couple of years. Its exact nature is still unclear. It does seem to be a specific form of emotional dysregulation, especially in regard that it does respond very well to medication. But again, how it fits into emotional dysregulation is completely unclear at this point. It does seem to be something that's really important, though. It is a thing that resonates with a large number of people with ADHD.

[aestherin]

seatmates | scaramouche x gn! reader

a random drabble i thought of at school bc of course my mind is floating :D

i was scrolling thru my drafts when i found this i totally did not forget about this i swear </3 also not proofread bc i don't have any braincells left :DD

wc: 589

You have always hated two-person desks.

Especially those that are too narrow you and your seatmate practically have to be squished against each other in order for both of you to fully utilize the desk.

"Fucking move," Scaramouche hissed.

"No, you," you pushed against his arm which had bumped into yours earlier.

He sent death glares your way, all of which you paid no attention to. After almost a year of sitting next to each other, it was second nature to build a system that's immune to the silent and furious side-eyes of an angry cat. How long has it been? Ah.

It all started when you made the grave mistake of being late for the first day of classes. No one else wanted to sit next to the menace that is currently sending daggers your way, and so you ended up sitting on the remaining available spot — the one beside Scaramouche.

The experience wasn't all that bad, though.

Sure, sitting beside him felt like being together with a grumpy old man, but even he had some soft moments. Like when he'd let you peek at his notes when you don't understand what the lecturer was babbling about (this comes with some mockery from him, but you shrug them all off).

Or like that one time you were shivering from the AC and he let you borrow his hoodie (this came with him uttering lighthearted remarks about how you should always be prepared because what if he wasn't there to lend his hoodie? Just what are you going to do without him?)

You returned it immediately after getting it washed but he told you to keep it. It's now your favorite hoodie.

Sitting next to Scaramouche was a give-and-take situation. He would begrudgingly lend you a hand, and you would do the same. He used to disturb you from whatever you were doing just to borrow your correction tape so many times that at one point, you just laid it out on your desk, free for him to use. Luckily, he got the message and just started using it whenever he needed to. Was it just your imagination or did he really start needing the correction tape less when you just laid the thing out on the desk?

He also once left his earphones at home and kept bugging you to let him listen to whatever was playing through yours because he swears even your trashy music taste is much more bearable than listening to whatever your classmates were chattering about.

That's what he said but he now listens religiously to the playlist you've been playing on repeat.

As an attempt to get back at you for what you did earlier, he bumped his arm against yours — which was writing notes, at the moment.

Across the organized scribbling of letters and words on a page of your notebook was now a long, thick line of black ballpoint pen ink. You gasped, mouth ajar at the painful sight of a mess.

"Dude! What the fuck?" You sharply turned your head towards him, only to find that he'd already looked away from you.

"Scara, you bit—"

He only sighed.

Your attention was swayed by him slowly and gently intertwining both of your hands above the desk.

"Don't worry about it. I'll rewrite your notes for you later."

He finally gazed back at you. Blood rushed up your face as he used his hand to guide yours to his lips, pressing a light kiss.

"At least after we eat out for dinner."

[prncssie]

to hobie’s surprise, you’re still working into the late hours of the night. no way he’s gonna let that happen multiple nights in a row.

caution! mdni 3k wrdz, pet names, oral f. receiving fingering, p in v, unprotected sex, black fem reader, overstimulation, use of cunny cunt n pussy, back scratching, squirting, creampies pls do not spam like my blog if you enjoyed it, feel free to tell me in the reblogs

when hobie swung into your open window, he wasn’t expecting to see you awake and actually doing stuff.

his head tilts at the sight of you typing away at your laptop, swivel chair turning in endless semicircles. you’re dressed for bed, wearing a silk nightgown and your slippers astray beneath you. even your hair is tucked away from the night under the safety of your bonnet. “why are you up, ducky?” he climbs his way through the window purposely left open for him.

it’s become a part of your routine. you both live your lives during the day and at night, hobie comes by to climb into bed beside you. you spend the morning together, just for him to leave and do the same the next day. as long as neither of you acknowledge it, he doesn’t count it as a consistent schedule and therefore doesn’t feel the need to stop.

you don’t lift your head to acknowledge him like you routinely do. instead, your manicured hands dart across the keyboard. “got home from work late, got an essay to write. it’s due tomorrow night.”

“what?” his shadow grows nearer with each step he takes towards you. hobie knows you’re too far gone when you don’t reprimand him from sitting on your desk. “it’s almost four in the morning, lovely. you can’t do it tomorrow?”

“no,” there’s a pause between your words and the silence is filled with your incessant typing, “i picked up a shift at work so i can’t.”

“you’re becoming a cog in the capitalism machine. that’s why you’re so stressed out. you should to take a break before they make you a mindless slave. that’s what they want, y’know. for more people to – ”

you tilt your back, a sigh leaving your lips. your eyes close with the attempt to find what dwindling patience you have. “hobie, i really cannot do it tonight. i have an essay to write and it’s due tomorrow. i just told you that.”

he stares at you, only for a moment. there’s a lot of things he isn’t enjoying about this. the fact that you’re still awake, the fact that you’re stressing over something put in place to make you feel bad about yourself, and the fact that you’re snapping at him. he’s sure it’s due to your lack of sleep but that doesn’t make him feel any better about it. “you’re in a shitty mood and it’s starting to bother me.”

“wow, really?” you can’t help your sarcastic tone. it slips out before you’re aware of it. “i didn’t even realize i wasn’t feeling super good!” your eyes are rolling as you place the laptop on what desk space is left from his limber body. you regret it the moment you say it but you’re so deeply set in your ways that the second thought doesn’t linger long.

he’s silent again, fingers tapping against the desktop. he stares at the floor, outlining the wood detailing with his eyes.

you both stay like this for a while, typing and staring at the floor. you can’t deny his company aiding your stress relief. it’s always nice to have hobie around, even if he isn’t doing anything.

ten minutes pass before hobie is glancing at the clock. “alright,” he finally says while rising to his feet. “time for bed, love.” he turns your chair himself, dragging you away from your nearly completed essay.

“what are you doing? i have work to do.” you struggle against him, tugging your arms but to no avail. he’s just so much more stronger than you, pulling you to your feet and into his arms. “hobie,” you whine as he gathers you up and into the air with his super human abilities.

“oh, i heard you,” hobie says, closing your screen and turning off your desk lamp. the room immediately gets dark. the lamp functioned as the sole light in these hours. having it off sent your space in a blanket of nothingness. “i just don’t care. you’re tired and your attitude is shit.”

you can never get over how easily he overpowers you, despite his tiny frame. while hobie is large in height, he’s the lankiest thing. his strength solely came from his radioactive spider.

you huff, throwing your weight around. all it does is get you tossed onto the bed. because your eyes have yet to adjust to the lighting, you’re unable to see a thing. you can’t help but shriek upon impact, bouncing on your mattress. “what the hell, ‘bie? my attitude is shit? your attitude is shit. mad at me because i’m not giving you attention because i have stuff to do. of course i’m tired. i’ve been up all night because i actually have responsibilities.”

“stop fightin’ with me.” hobie worms his way next to your body. his arm snakes around your waist, pulling you into his chest. “and while you’re at it, stop talkin’ and go to sleep.”

you’re still mumbling your distaste against his skin, arms pushing against him. you’re refusing to go down like this, to let him simply take you away from the essay you’ve been working so hard on. you’re so close to finishing, you can taste it. “isn’t this against what you stand for? thought it’s wrong to force someone to do something.”

he only holds you tighter, strapping your arms down in his grip. “you’re not takin’ care of yourself, princess. didn’t sleep last night, didn’t sleep the night before. think i’m gonna let you not sleep again? especially since you’re talkin’ to me like you’ve lost your mind.”

“i’m not! i didn’t say anything to you. if your feelings are hurt that’s your fault.” you resorting to using your feet, kicking at him until he’s forced to tangle his legs with yours.

“you’re always sayin’ the same thing when i call you out on somethin’. ‘i didn’t do it’. ‘it’s your fault’. ‘i’m not sorry’.” hobie’s voice raises a few octaves to mock yours. “it’s not rocket science. just admit it and let me help you.”

your cheeks puff in irritation. his route isn’t helping your mood and knowing unfinished work is just arms length away is making you antsy. “unless you’re gonna get up and do it for me, which you won’t, you can’t help me.”

with your next blink, you find yourself on your back. the bed dips and rises as hobie adjusts his position, arms locking around your legs and hands resting on your stomach. “what the actual fuck are you doing?” you sit up and as a result, slide out of his grasp just a bit.

hobie just yanks you back down and tightens his hold, leaving you no choice but to remain at his mercy. “helpin’ you. if you don’t wanna go to sleep, fine. i’ll just make sure you can’t do nothin’ else.”

he rolls the hem of your gown up, despite your protests above him. you wiggle about but it has no effect on his focus. he’s too busy staring at the pretty cotton panties you sport. “you need to relax, treacle. gonna spread yourself thin.”

you blow out a breath, somewhat mixed with frustration and defeat. you know he’s right but your mind is already racing with everything you have to complete this week, including going to work and making school deadlines. “that’s reality, ‘bie. that’s how it is. i’m not a crime fighting, rioting spider person with no cares for anything. i actually have to be a cog in the machine or whatever you said.”

his lips ghost and press against your skin, littering soft kisses along your inner thigh. “so? don’t gotta let them use you like this.”

“hobie.”

he hooks his finger around the bottom, pulling the white material to the side. “jus’ worried about you is all, dovey. shouldn’t even be awake, much less doing somethin’ right now.”

he tenderly kneads the stress away at your hip while his thumb coaxes you into submission, drawing slow circles on your clit. he leans his head against your skin, looking through his eyelashes to watch you.

you, who’s struggling to give off an unaffected impression, eyes closed and knees bending. “get off. you’re annoying me.” your slight grip on your sheets tell him otherwise.

“mhm,” hobie hums. his gaze is trained on you and you only while he warms your sex up to his touch. “you gonna go to sleep if i do?”

your silence is a loud enough response for him. he turns back to your now glistening cunt. his thumb glides over it with ease, collecting your slick and redistributing it along your folds.

he doesn’t understand you and your need to fight against him. hobie really is just trying to take care of you and you’re insisting on ignoring him and rotting your soul away. as if he is going to stand by and let that happen.

you keen at the feeling of his tongue running over your cunny, flat and thick. a soft pant falls out your lips, just barely open. your fingers curl into your palm. there’s a part of you that doesn’t want him to know, yet, how quickly he’s consuming your thoughts so you force you spine into the mattress and hold your arms against yourself.

you clench your teeth together and mute the moans that crawl their way up your throat as hobie drags his tongue around. his lips wrap around your bundle of nerves, suckling off the juices. his lips piercings aren’t helping, slotting against your skin and sending you into overdrive.

he glances at you for a second, only when you give in and entangle your hand in his hair. the tug that follows only pulls him closer. he has to pull your thighs apart when they threaten to close around his head. any other day, he’d stare at you with a warning slap to your pussy but tonight, he lets it slide in hopes you’ll tire yourself out.

hobie can tell your close when your writhe in his hold, both to get away from and get closer to his tongue. he’s easing you into it with a hand reaching up to clasp yours and another at the soft skin of your tummy, forcing your back out the arch. he massages your skin in encouragement at your orgasm that comes ripping through your body.

hobie, although unhappily, has to leave your pretty pussy behind. you’re pulling his hair so hard, he’s forced to resurface until he’s eye level. “feel better?” he positions himself next to you on his side. he’s sweet, draping his arm around your waist.

as he expected, you nod and curl into his chest. you can’t deny that much of the stress you felt before dissipated. hobie’s warmth is soothing, enticing you to revel in your sheets. you’re grateful when he pulls the duvet over your bodies.

his head is in the groove between your neck and shoulder, peppering kisses along your skin. “that’s good to hear, duck.” his fingers run up and down your back, just grazing and dipping farther and farther down. “still thinkin’ about all’at stuff?”

“yeah but i can just do it tomorrow. it’s not like i have a lot left because i already did most of – hobie!”

you shriek when his fingers suddenly become nestled inside you. you grip his shirt, hiding within his chest. you shudder at the feeling of them move, stroking against your cunt.

“you’re still thinkin’ about it.” he chastises with a click of his tongue. he holds you in place to control your twitching, continuing to peg his digits into you. “wrong answer.”

“i’m not,” you whine. you can both feel your gummy walls tighten and twitch, sucking him in despite you campaigning to get away from him.

“you’re not?” hobie cradles you against him, gentle in touch. “could have sworn you just said it, though.”

you whimper and mewl, torn between enjoyment and overstimulation. his fingers are larger than you can comprehend, digging dip within your core, and much longer than yours, pressing farther than you could ever do yourself.

you’re reduced to sobs, nearly shredding his shirt into two with how much you’re pulling it apart. the popping of the seams is drowned by your voice and the squelching of your slick against his hand.

his arm against your back leaves you little room to struggle with his fingers prodding from behind. at some point your leg slips around his waist.

“it’s okay, pretty. i got you, yeah?” hobie feels hot, physically hot. the duvet wasn’t helping, trapping your body heat that increased with each movement. he also can’t help his massive boner, having to fight the urge to rut against you.

hobie knows this is about you, or rather that he’s making it about you. about helping his baby get to sleep. this isn’t the first time he’s came back and seen you up at the late hours of the night. the first few times, he let it go but the longer this continues, the more messed up your sleep schedule is going to be. he has to interfere, especially when you’ve been waking up in a terrible mood each morning, a frown already settled on your lips before you’ve even gotten out of bed.

he’s so deep in his thoughts, hobie nearly misses how desperate you suddenly get. it’s only when you’re reaching behind to grasp his wrist that his brain fog is gone.

he didn’t realize, either, how much faster he’s moving, fingers bumping against your spot. “dove,” hobie says it softly, “i don’t want to use my webs on you. move em’ before i do.”

you’re reluctant but obliged, unwrapping your fingers from his wrist and hanging them over his shoulder. you find yourself plunging your nails into his skin. “hobie,” you cry out, hips grinding against him.

“i know, pretty. i know,” he whispers against your forehead. “let it out. i got you.” hobie consoles you as your body tenses in his hold.

you’re all wound up, taking a final gasp as it all rolls off your skin. he draws gushes of your cum out your leaking hole and swallows your sobs in his mouth, connected with a kiss. you’re grateful for his comfort, clinging onto him as if he is your saving grace

your chest rises and falls with each breath and you shove his hand away. “no more,” you roll away from him, simultaneously pulling off the covers for some much needed cool air.

it’s futile when hobie draws you back into him after tossing off his shirt, himself. “nah, i think you have another one left in you.” you can feel him shuffling behind you and assume he’s preparing to pull his dick out.

you tightly cross your legs together at his words, eyes darting around for a clock. “what? it’s so late, though. i have so much to do tomorrow, too. we should just sleep.”

your rational fall on deaf ears because he’s easily lifting your leg into the air and almost to your shoulders. “oh? you have a lot to do tomorrow?”

his tone has your stomach twisting. you wet your lips, feeling around for something to hold on to. “n – no. i don’t. i’m not doing anything tomorrow.”

the fat tip of his cock slaps against your folds, sticky from his own arousal. “too late, lovely. you already said it. gotta fuck it out of you.”

you’re still pleading your disagreement and how you’ll start sleeping at a proper time when hobie stuffs his cockhead inside your cunny.

he groans in your ear upon your welcoming wet grip. you always feel so good, at this point he’s addicted. if he ever died in your cunt, hobie would be the happiest man in the world.

thanks to the previous orgasms, there’s no pushback. only you griping about how you can’t take it and that he’s too big, which hobie knows is a lie. truthfully, you go through the same thing every time and he can never get enough of it.

“tired yet?” he grunts in tune with his rapid, steady paced thrusts. hobie doesn’t expect anything past your incoherent gargles.

you clutch the mattress under your pillow, prying at the fitted sheet. with every thrust, your body lurches forward. your head turns on your own accord, reaching out to cup his cheek.

you’re so cute, he thinks, with your eyes big and round and full of enchantment. you heave him towards you until your lips are moving together in perfect synchrony.

hobie wraps his tongue around yours, sitting up to deepen in. with his neck craned down and your dress pulled up, he gets a perfect view of his dick sliding in and out.

it glistens, even if the limited moonlight. the base is especially glazed over, foaming with a white sheen.

he feels like he’s becoming deranged when you toss your head back in ecstasy. you’re going to kill him, he’s sure.

and he’s even more sure when your tiny fist is rapping against the bed. “oh my days, oh my – fuck!” you outstretch your arm until you find his, grabbing in a firm hold.

hobie plants his head on top of yours and inhales the whiffs of hair products from your bonnet. he can smell the lingering hints of rosemary from your oil. “no more staying up late, you hear? pissin’ me off with this.”

and like the best girl you are, you nod brainlessly. your wordless promise is taken seriously, you’re sure. it’s cemented when hobie forces you to look at him.

his eye contact is just as intense as the grip on your cheeks. you can see just how vehement he is and it only makes you needier.

your face screws up as one final indication before your entire body trembles. you fall limp onto your side, cunt spasming around him. you’ve been fucked into oblivion, ready to settle in for the night. to your surprise, hobie has other plans.

his pulling out has you thinking he’s done, only to roll you into your back and position himself on top of you. he doesn’t wait for you realize what’s happening before he’s aligning his tip with your entrance again and gliding it in with ease.

you feel full to the brim, one hand on his chest and the other scraping your nails against the headboard. at some point, he supposes his own lust kicked in. after putting your needs first, he’s given free reign to chase his own orgasm.

that’s exactly what he’s doing now, pounding into you with such speed, your tits have been jostled out your top. the brown of your nipples has his infatuated brain screaming.

“hobie!” you all but yell. you’re inching slowly towards the top of the bed, unaware of your movements. hobie isn’t, though. he finds purchase at your hips to shift you back into place.

“hold – hold on. jus’ wait.” he moves both your legs over his left shoulder, driving deep.

you swear you can feel him in your throat, swear he’s realigning your insides like some sort of chiropractor. “gonna – ” your eyes roll to the back of your head. your nails dig into his back and drag across the skin as you try to ground yourself.

immediately, his attention fall to your cunt. hobie expects to see the usual sparkling ooze of cum but to his marvelment, watery squirts take it’s place.

you seize up so tight on him, he’s forced to release inside you without warning. he has to remember to hold himself up as to not crush you beneath him. all he can think about is how that was probably the best nut he’s ever had.

“you . . . you wanna finish your paper?” hobie says finally. he’s the first one to speak as you were both trying to catch your breath from your late night exercise.

you so quickly scowl at him, both at the implications and the thought of doing anything else tonight. “you must not value your life. you can’t.”

hobie smiles, lazily. he kneads at your muscles. “bear with me, treacle. ‘s gonna be uncomfortable.” he warns, anticipating the wince your expression turns into as he pulls out, genuinely this time.

you can feel the scratches developing from your previous actions, rubbing his shoulders, and a tinge of guilt tugs at your heart. “sorry. for these and all the worry i caused you . . . and also for what i said.” you wrap your arms around his neck and pull him close until you’re both laying down, cuddling up on each other. although you can’t quite remember what you said, you know you would have never uttered the words on a normal day.

he shrugs, fixing your slipping bonnet and unbunching your nightgown. “it’s in the past. i’m not thinkin’ about that, right now. i’m thinkin’ about how we need to get you ready for bed, again. can’t go to bed like this.”

he’s right but you’re still dramatic about in, unwilling to leave the comfort of your bed. “ten minutes.” you say, eyes fluttering closed. you revel in your sheets as long as you can before hobie chuckles, ripping them off.

“no, can’t do that. we’re doin’ it now. we both have to shower and shit and you probably can’t stand without me,” his voice is lighthearted, if not evident by the smirk playing in his lips.

he’s carrying you again, subjecting you to the princess treatment he feels you deserve. the most funny part about this, to him, is how dedicated you were before to staying up all night.

now, you’re all pliant and it’s purely due to him and his cock. even though hobie made you promise these endless nights won’t continue, he definitely doesn’t mind doing this again. especially after how easily you finally knock out, mouth wide open and snoring.

[d0llcuries]

ICE-CREAM FOR TWO

pairing(s): reiner braun x fem! reader

summary: you hated him for dragging you to marley, for every stolen chance at freedom. you expected the feeling to be mutual as you rented him for four long years but it wasn't. what better way to address this than ice-cream!

author's note: uh, i guess i write for aot now. blame my cousin and her insistence on getting me addicted to this stupid show for the possibility of inaccurate writing. i love reiner pls send requests for aot 🤲🏽

the market cradled you today in a way almost cruel, with its heat and grit pressing close, air thick with burnt coffee, iron on the breeze, syrupy traces of cotton candy and caramel inviting you into the hic et nunc, although you didn’t want to be. you hated this noise, this heat, the whole crowded mess of voices folding together like waves. you hated how it almost felt like home. you hated how you could almost trick yourself into calling it that if you tried hard enough. a mirror showing something soft, distant, something that could’ve been yours in some other life. no matter how warm the market held you, the truth settled somewhere beneath it all. this land is borrowed, marley is not home, and no amount of rose-tinted glass could change that.

under a washed-out sky, baskets burst with flowers like muted fireworks, children racing in loops, dogs tangled and nipping at their heels. you thought about reiner before you saw him. he was sitting across the square, shoulders hunched as if he were carrying every brick and stone of marley on his back, the same as he’d carried those in paradis. he looked like he was far away, somewhere only he knew how to reach. you still saw that ghost of the soldier you thought he was back then, before everything came apart.

you’d told yourself you wouldn’t go near him, wouldn’t let him know that, after all this time, you’d never quite stopped noticing him. you wonder why you think of him so much, why he takes up all this space in your mind even when he's not near. it was strange how close you were and weren’t, your lives spooled together and then split, moth-eaten like old twine.

but then gabi’s voice broke into your thoughts.

“hey, yn! can you buy us ice cream, please? come on, it’s not far! the ice-cream stand's like.. right around the corner, and i haven’t had any in soooooo long!” gabi stretched out the ‘so long’ ensuring that you felt every inch of the ache that came from a whole season without the taste of frozen sugar. she practically sang, her sticky hand finding yours and pulling before you’d had a chance to respond.

before you knew it, you were standing at the old ice-cream stand, faded to a dull blue, the wood bleached and splintering under too many hot days. the vendor, an older man with sunburned skin and tired eyes, barely lifted his gaze as he rattled off the list of flavors available.

while you hadn’t chosen this home, you chose these people, or maybe they chose you in some inexplciable way. the days of resentment, the times you’d longed to be anywhere but marley, softened over time. gabi, falco, and udo, each of them with their bright, trusting faces had managed to bring out a warmth in you that you’d forgotten was there. you hadn’t planned to love them, but they’d worked their way into the little cracks between loneliness and anger, without effort or warning. it felt like love. you loved them.

“please, please, please?” gabi’s voice tumbled out, each please more insistent than the last. you pressed your lips together, trying to chase away the smile that wanted to break free, but there was no stopping it. the vendor cleared his throat, glancing at the line of customers that was growing behind you, and that pressure paired with gabiʼs nagging commenced the immediate collapse of any resolve you’d held and any remaining choice you had.

“alright, alright,” you murmured. “three, please,” you said, “two caramel swirls… and a chocolate.”

you pull the coins from your purse, and slide them across the vendor’s counter, a quick glance past the crowd where you know reiner’s somewhere out there, not close but close enough. you dig back into your purse, pull out enough for an extra ice cream, and place it on the wood. “and one more, vanilla.”

the vendor didn't blink. he handed you the cones with a practiced indifference, the soft edges already drooping in the heat, melting faster than they should. gabi snatched hers right away, giving a quick “thanks!” but not really looking at you. she didn’t need to, her appreciation was in her wide-eyed grin and the way she immediately started devouring the cone as if she’d waited years for it. udo took his with a quiet “thank you,” glancing at the cone like it was the first good thing he’d seen all day. falco gave a small nod, not meeting your eyes, as if the simple gesture was too much kindness to take all at once.

you glance at the extra cone in your hand, and you think about the boy—no, man—you had brought it for.

your gaze flickered to the square, and there he was, his silhouette made of pale, ghostly gold and all the fragments that cling to it. the blond of his hair catches and curls like a match struck in silence as he rests on the bench with moss staining its feet in a green kiss. “stay close. don't wander off,” you murmur to gabi and the boys, a mother’s instinct in a stranger’s affection. the market seems to swell as faces blur into patches of color and shadow.

usually heʼd be the one buying them the sweets, trailing behind like he belonged to the children, not the other way around. he’d slip coins to the vendor, barely seen, to make sure the kids stayed kids, get them something sweet to carry home sticky on their fingers. his presence made the kids feel safe. that was his gift to them.

he didn’t see you, not at first, lost in whatever he’d wrapped around himself, his elbows resting on his knees and his eyes focused on something far off, his expression pulled into that mask of solemnity that’s so familiar it hurts. there’s a ghost of a frown in his brow from spending too much time thinking about things he didn’t want to think about. it was only when you were close enough that he looked up, startled, it was clear he wasn't expecting to see you. there was a tension in him, he sort of resembled an animal caught between choices, wanting to flee but rooted to the spot.

“i thought you’d want one,” you said, holding the cone out. it wasn’t often that you spoke to him this way, or at all. not about something as simple as ice-cream.

he stared at it first, then up at you. for a heartbeat you thought he might actually refuse it, let the ice-cream coat your hand with melted stickiness just to spite you for they way you resented him for the past four years.

“they give that to you for free?” he said, his eyes drifted somewhere just beyond the market stalls, like he was only half-invested in the jab.

something in his tone snagged, left a thin, invisible cut. he had every reason to say it, you supposed, but it still bruised in a way it shouldn’t. “no,” you shot back, trying not to let his offhand remark knock too hard against the satisfaction you’d felt just moments ago. “i bought it for you.”

with a breath soft as surrender, he looked up at you, and you could feel it, the way he saw you, had always seen you, from the days you were both cadets stumbling through ranks and routines. he’d always thought you were pretty, even when thought you didn't interact often.

the word devil was supposed to define you. reiner was trained to see you that way, to let a thick wall of prejudice stand between you both, forged over years of lessons and oaths. in marley, they pressed that word into people like you, used it to shape you into something repulsive. it was easy to believe it as a child, to see you through the war-stained images they painted, to think of you as something marley’s soldiers had been trained to conquer and devastate. but somehow, that wall never felt as solid with you. he tried to keep it up, you could tell from the way his gaze would shift from warm to cold so quickly, his jaw setting hard as if he was gripping some old lesson, forcing himself to remember why he wasn’t supposed to care. and you hated him for it as much as you didn’t. it was like he had stolen every sense of belonging from you, yet kept a fragile piece of it alive in himself, offering it back in little moments you refused to trust.

he’d always figured he’d have to wait, maybe forever for that forgiveness, if it came at all. for four years, he’d held onto the hope that one day you might look at him without that burning hatred in your eyes. over time, he’d let that hope slip through his fingers, learning to live in the shadow of what he thought he’d ruined.

but now, standing here, he felt something he hadn’t dared to let himself feel in a long time. the way you looked at him was different—not hardened or distant, but softened, like there was warmth in you meant just for him. it was subtle, but it caught him completely off guard, a look that lingered a little too long, the edges softening just enough for him to see something he’d once believed was lost.

he wanted to say something, anything, to reach out, but he found himself rooted, afraid to break whatever delicate understanding hung between you. he’s always been so careful with you, so mindful of your boundaries. your gaze didn’t waver, and he felt it like a quiet ache, as if, finally, there was a chance your view of him had changed.

he took the cone with hands that were larger than you remembered, rough and scarred and cracked in places. in his grasp, the small offering looked absurdly delicate.

“thanks.”

you settle on the edge of the bench beside him, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his skin, but not quite touching.

“you didn’t have to do this,” he said, his voice subdued, as if he was suppressing emotions that he couldn’t articulate.

“i wanted to,” you reply simply, the words soft but steady, a quiet confession hidden in plain sight. it’s not much, just a simple act of kindness, but it feels like more than that, like a tentative step toward something new, something neither of you quite knows how to name.

“i’m not good at this,” he admits after a long pause, the unexpected confession falling between you. he doesn’t look at you, eyes locked on the melting drip tracing a path down his knuckle.

you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. “good at what?”

he’s quiet for a moment, so quiet that the hum of the market seems louder, pressing in from all sides. when he finally speaks, his voice is low, almost hesitant. “being close. to anyone.”

you shift slightly, your knee brushing against his leg. it’s so slight it could be an accident, but it’s not. “well, you’re here now.”

he looks up at you then with an unconcealed reverence that makes your heart lurch in your chest, eyes softening around the edges, holding that mix of confusion and hope that makes him look almost boyish. “yeah, i am.”

the silence stretches, but this time it’s warm, inviting. you can see him wrestling with something, the way his jaw tightens, loosens, the way his thumb traces a line across the wood of the bench as if trying to ground himself.

“it’s strange,” he starts, eyes flickering to yours before darting away again, “this..” he nods to the space inbetween you, “feels like more than i deserve.”

your gaze lingers on him, and you swallow back the pool of savila resting on your tongue. “maybe we’re both not good at this,” you whisper, a shy honesty threading through your voice. “but i think we could be.”

he blinks. “you think so?”

“yeah,” you say, the word barely more than a breath but heavy with everything you mean. “i do.”

and for the first time in years, he lets himself believe it.

[lurkingshan]

The Miracle of Teddy Bear Saved the Gays

Last weekend, both @twig-tea and I had time off and were in the mood to binge something, so Twig suggested we finally watch The Miracle of Teddy Bear. Both of us had missed it while it was airing live (because it didn’t have international distribution) and had been given the impression by others that it had a sad ending that included some anti-queer messages. It was also very long, so we were not exactly rushing to get to it. But we are stubborn and like to judge things for ourselves, so we decided since we had the time and the show was now available, we should jump in. And imagine our surprise when we found out everything we had been told about it was wrong (we have our theories about why). This is one of the best queer dramas we have ever seen, with phenomenal acting, writing, and direction, and we have so much to say about it. The post that follows is co-written by the two of us. Strap in, folks, because it’s a long one.

If you haven’t seen this show yet and don’t want any spoilers, stop reading this right now and head over to YouTube, where international fans can now watch it for free with English subtitles. We’re going to go deep on the show below, and because this drama is designed to slowly reveal information in a very deliberate way, nearly everything counts as a spoiler. We’ll try not to give too much away in the early sections, but be warned!

The Story

The Miracle of Teddy Bear is the tale of a deeply traumatized gay man in desperate need of healing, and the teddy bear who comes to life to help him. In the process of taking care of his person, our bear uncovers deep family trauma and many secrets and lies, accidentally solves crimes, makes lots of friends, heals a family, and saves several lives. He is a very good bear, and through this adventure he contemplates his own existence, learns how to be human, and discovers what it means to truly love someone. 

This is primarily a family drama with important things to say about queer truth, and while it includes several bl storylines, it is not a romance. Intertwined with the family drama is a bl show within the show and a series of interrelated mysteries that slowly get unraveled as the story goes on. One of the things this show does best is parcel out information from various perspectives at the perfect time to keep the viewer one step behind—we found ourselves constantly almost guessing what the show was going to do next, but it always chose a direction a little to the left and surprised us in the best way. 

In the end, every question we asked was answered, and every time we thought a character’s motivation felt a little too shallow, we were given more. The experience of watching this show was deeply satisfying and really made us feel seen. This show gets us. 

The Characters

The Bear: Tofu

Tofu is the titular teddy bear who comes to life via drama magic and does his best to support his person. He starts the series incredibly innocent, and the show and his actor, Inn Sarin, do an incredible job of depicting the change in him as he lives life as a human, becoming more complex and less naive. Tofu is the heart of the show, and it is his love and kindness that enable the growth of the other characters in this story. 

The Core Family: Nut, Na, and Kuenchai

Nut is our protagonist, and his struggles with life as a gay man are the soul of this story. He lives with his mom, Na, and their dog, Kuenchai, and Tofu is his beloved teddy bear. Yes, Nut is a cranky ass grown man with a beloved teddy bear. It will make sense eventually, we promise. Nut is a bl novelist working through old trauma via adapting his work for the screen. Na is a woman who has been Going Through It, and while we start the story with only the vague sense that something is not quite right with her, we spend a lot of time on her history as well as her growth in the present until we get the full picture. The way Nut and Na’s stories are tied together gets to several of the core themes of this show (discussed more below). 

The Sides: Gen, Song, Prib, and the nosy neighbors

Our cast of friends and allies who support Nut and Tofu and have romantic trials and tribulations of their own. Without giving too much away, we’ll just say this: all of these characters have satisfying arcs, and some of them may have caused us to squeal in delight. 

Specters of the Past: Neung and Tarn

Telling you literally anything about them is a major spoiler so just know they are here and they are important and you will fully understand why and how by the end. Oh yeah, and Neung looks exactly like Tofu (or should we say Tofu looks like Neung?) for Reasons (which are explained! We love this show).

Villains: Saen, Sib, Jan, and Parit

Expect these four to show up often and cause a lot of trouble. Their motives and exact crimes are revealed over the course of the show.

Other Elders: Anik, Juea, Kanya and Sittha

They are mostly here to serve a few key plot functions and represent a spectrum of parental figures (related by blood and not) and acceptance of queerness.

And we cannot forget: The inanimate objects

In this show, inanimate objects can come to life under a certain set of magical conditions, and they are Tofu’s friends and helpers along the way. Some of their stories are shockingly touching! They also add some needed levity to the show, especially the grumpy ones. Special shoutout to the cactus and the spare blanket, our crime solving MVPs. We have to admit, the animation for these took a bit of getting used to, but within a couple of episodes we were cheering these creepy blinking eyes on. 

The Themes

And here is where we start to get into spoiler territory about specific character arcs. This show had so many clear and well-articulated themes, and they stayed consistent throughout the story.

Queer people can be happy

This is stated explicitly as well as demonstrated through multiple storylines: gay men can love each other, have good relationships and fulfilling sex lives, and get their happy endings. Those who argue that people should fight against their queerness because it will make their lives harder and keep them from happiness are not just wrong, they have it backwards. 

Queer people can only be happy by living their truth

This is perhaps the main thesis of this show, and it comes across in so many ways over the arc of the story. We see this theme exemplified in particular through Nut, Tarn, Song, and Gen, with each of them representing different versions of the queer experience that shape who they are and how they show up in the world. Even before the story tells you, it’s clear what kind of experiences each has had from his relationship to his own queerness and his general demeanor and outlook on life. Nut has survived an abusive homophobic father, and that shows up in his anger, his self-protective rejection of others, and his struggle with emotional regulation. Gen has been raised by loving and accepting parents who support his choices in all ways, and this shows in his good humor, balanced perspective, and confidence to be himself. When we say good media should show, don’t tell us its point, this is a fantastic example of what that means. 

Accept and love your queer children or pay the price

Relatedly, this story is very interested in the consequences for parents who fail their queer children, and explores a whole spectrum of acceptance from enthusiastic support to negligent ambivalence to misguided suppression to violent bigotry. We see so many different parents and parental figures react to learning about their gay sons and gain insight into them by how they respond—and only the ones who manage to get it together to love and support their kids get to keep their families. Critically, the adults who fail their queer children are convinced they’re acting in their best interests at the time, and we are along for the ride as the redeemable ones go through the stages of first admitting they were wrong but still thinking their intentions justify the pain they caused to fully acknowledging the damage they have done and making amends. 

Be patient with others, you never know what they’ve been through

That said, the show also invites us to stop and consider what might be behind aberrant behavior before judging it. Tofu is unfailingly patient with others, and even with the worst people in this story, he always seeks to understand why they are behaving a certain way before giving up on them. The show slowly and methodically reveals information that recontextualizes things we thought we understood and encourages us to keep digging for empathy and missing context. People in this story behave very badly and make a lot of mistakes, but a lot of it becomes more understandable once you have the full picture.

Unprocessed trauma will prevent you from healing and cause you to perpetuate harm on others

Speaking of bad behavior, so much of what’s wrong in this story is driven by unprocessed trauma of one sort or another. Nut’s anger is at its core a deep hurt from being betrayed by the person he trusted most to be on his side. Na’s refusal to live in reality causes her to continue to hurt herself and her son. Saen’s denial about his own actions leads to far-reaching consequences he could not imagine. And the healing process depicted in the show is not linear; people who have made mistakes in the series make them more than once and advance and regress as the situation around them changes. 

People are responsible for their own actions and inactions

And while the show is clear that trauma is the source of the bad behavior of these characters, it is also clear that this is not an excuse. Everyone in this story is held to account for the things they do, as well as the things they don’t, no matter how understandable their reasons are. The people who refuse to heal face serious consequences in addition to seeing the damage their unprocessed trauma causes others. 

Noble idiocy leads to everyone being unhappy

One of the biggest sources of said unprocessed trauma in this story is characters making self-sacrificial choices for the ostensible benefit of others and bringing misery to everyone in the process. We love a drama that recognizes noble idiocy for the selfish and destructive act it truly is and clearly says you have to communicate with your loved ones if you don’t want to make a mess of everyone’s lives.

You can’t appease an abuser

No amount of hiding who you are or making yourself small will convince an abuser to treat you better or guarantee your safety. This theme is most obvious in the main storyline between Nut, Sib, and Na, but Jan is another example of a manipulative and emotionally abusive character who other characters continually try to play nice with, to no avail. She takes every opportunity to be cruel, whether the person she’s talking to is kind or combative in return. The show reinforces that abusers will always find an excuse to justify their behavior; changing yourself for them is pointless. 

Love is wanting the best for someone, even if that means letting go 

This is really the show’s core point where romance is concerned: being with you may not actually be what is best for the person you love, and if your love is true you have to accept that. The people who could not see this—Saen and Jan—were the ones who continued to cause harm to their loved ones and themselves, while the characters who honestly worked towards the happiness of their beloveds even if that happiness was not with themselves—Tofu, Tarn, and eventually Prib—were rewarded by seeing that happiness play out and ended our story truly content. The MVP of this theme is Tofu, whose pure teddy bear love for his person became more complicated and selfish as he became more human. But in the end, he held to the truth at his core that Nut’s happiness was his happiness.

You can have more than one great love, and one doesn't tarnish the others

Which brings us to one of the most beautiful takeaways from this show, and something that dramas so rarely do well. Nut loves two different men, neither more than the other, and he never chooses between them. They both hold important meaning in his life and he honors that whether they are with him or not. When Nut is with Tofu, he remembers his past love with fondness but he is clear that these memories do not make his love for Tofu any less real. A lesser show would have had those moments where Nut was thinking about his past cause him to distance himself from Tofu. But in this show, Nut sharing his past and working through his lack of closure was when he and Tofu had some of their closest and happiest moments together. This show is extremely clear that we can have happiness with more than one person over the course of our lives, and it is not only okay but encouraged! 

The Resolution

From here, we will be talking about the ending, and so by necessity will no longer be avoiding major spoilers. If you’re intrigued by the above and want to avoid being spoiled fully, stop now! One of the things that is so brilliant about this show is the way information is slowly revealed, so if you think you would like this show we recommend experiencing it for yourself. If you’re still not convinced and need to know the ending before you decide, read on. 

In our view, this story ends exactly as the show signals it will from the very beginning—and the way it should—and the ending is unambiguously a happy one. Tofu realizes that he and Tarn’s life forces are tied together, that it was Tarn going into his coma that caused him to awaken, and that as long as he continues to live as a human, Tarn will not recover. We and the characters have come to love Tofu in his guise as a human, but the truth is he does not belong there—he is a teddy bear, and for him to stay by robbing an actual human being of their life would be wrong. The story took pains throughout to show us how tenuous and restricted Tofu’s existence is, because he is not a real person and thus can’t live a full life (for example, he can’t get a job or safely leave the house because he doesn’t have documentation or any life experience). We also see Tofu struggle so much with the added complexities of the human experience that he becomes ill with overwhelm multiple times. He repeats to us through the whole story that all he really wants is to be a comfort to Nut. While he finds value and joy in being human, it does not change who he is at his core. And so he allows himself to be poisoned by Jan, sacrificing his human existence to bring Tarn back and exposing Jan and Saen’s crimes in the process. 

With this decision, the other characters get the chance to mourn him and move on. Nut grieves, finally makes the connection between human and teddy bear Tofu, goes to therapy (!), makes peace with his mother, and writes his love story with Tofu as his next show. Tarn wakes up and begins his recovery, and he and Nut slowly reconnect and rekindle their relationship over time. Na finds joy in her lucid moments and enjoys time with her family, finally free of the hell Saen and Sib unleashed on her life. Gen and Song get their happy ending with acceptance from Song’s dad, and Prib’s fixation on gay men becomes clear when her new female love interest enters the scene (let’s go, lesbians!). We get confirmation that the nosy neighbors are, in fact, an elder gay couple. Even Kuenchai and some of the inanimate objects have character arcs! Kuenchai is instrumental in making sure Nut is reunited with bear Tofu, and we get to see a slipper gain some independence from her other half and a grumpy bolster cuddle in to comfort her people when they need it.

We end our story with several happy families who love their gay children and a call for marriage equality via Nut and Tarn deciding to marry whether it’s legal or not. Tofu is a bear again but his human life is very much not forgotten—Nut speaks to him every day, honors the love they shared, and talks about him openly with Tarn. And we even hear from Tofu again, see a final moment between him and Nut in a beautiful dream, and are reassured that Tofu is happy to still be with Nut in his original form and to see him living so well. It’s everything he wanted, and he made it happen. He truly is the very best bear.  

The Purpose

We wanted to take some space to get a little extra meta and talk about why this show matters so much in the broader queer media landscape. First, it was a landmark queer television event in Thailand—please read this post by @flowerbeasblog to get the background on its significance in the cultural landscape. This show was broadcast very intentionally to educate and send a message to a broader audience in Thailand than is typically reached via bl dramas. And that’s why understanding and taking its themes seriously is so very important.

This is a story that is deeply rooted in queer truth, written by a queer man who wants people like him to be seen and understood. The show puts forward an unapologetically pro-gay message on broadcast television (on a major national network! during primetime! that does not shy away from the sexual component of queer love!) and embeds important political commentary in a fantastic and engaging story in a format familiar and comfortable for the Thai audience. It’s not meant to be received as a romance, and its nuanced and mature take on love and relationships is certainly not designed for ship wars. The writer even turns directly to the camera and underlines this in the final episode: while he respects the importance of bl in the media landscape, he has a bigger agenda in mind for this show and important things to say.

And that’s why some of the discourse around this show is so frustrating. A small portion of international fans who watched this show live seemed to misunderstand it deeply and created such a false impression of it that it caused others to stay away. Contrary to some of the takes out there, this show does not have a sad ending, Tofu’s resolution is not remotely anti-queer, and there is no woman who ends up with Nut (we are so confused that this was anyone’s interpretation; Nut at every age and several times within the show explicitly shouts about how very extremely gay he is). To see this story as a tragedy because Tofu “dies”—which he doesn’t; his human body disappears but he returns to being a conscious and content teddy bear—is to misunderstand Tofu’s character journey, his narrative purpose, and his agency. We can only assume that shipping got in the way of comprehension here, and people who wanted to see human Tofu and Nut end up together focused on that to the exclusion of pretty much everything this show was saying and doing.

At the end of this story, Tofu is happy. To think that Nut was better off with Tofu than with Tarn is to not allow for the complexities of human experience; Nut did love Tofu, but he loved Tarn, too, and their relationship was a positive force in his life both before and after Tofu entered it. And Tarn was an actual gay human man in a coma who could not wake up while Tofu existed. Tofu was the creation of Tarn’s love for Nut; his existence was limited, and he found being a human extremely difficult. All Tofu wanted was to be Nut’s teddy bear and stay with Nut forever. He wanted Nut to be happy, because Tarn wanted Nut to be happy, and during his time as a human he worked to enable that happiness. He was instrumental in moving forward several stuck characters and uncovering many secrets, all of which were necessary for Nut to get to where he ends up at the end of the show. Being in a relationship with Nut was a bonus. He enjoyed the experience of being in love with Nut, but in the end he chose to sacrifice his human life so that Nut could have a permanent, lasting happiness with someone who was real. Tofu’s human death is not an example of the bury your gays trope; in fact, it is a total rebuke of it. Tofu, and this show, saved the gay men in this story and gave them full and happy lives. We cannot recommend watching and supporting this show enough.

[tmbgareok]

Evening Mr. Flansburgh!

I am an aspiring musician! I really want to create my own songs, but since I'm an absolute beginner starting from the ground up, I am soul-crushingly daunted by which skill I should focus on learning first, especially with the amount of resources available to me online (Singing? Lyric writing? Learning a particular instrument? Mixing? Music Theory? etc).

Do you remember what skill(s) you focused on doing first when you were just getting into music, or have any recommendations about the order to do then in?

Much appreciated!

JF: reflecting on it, my experience was extremely organic, slow-evolving and combined so many of my interests and obsessions I am not sure it is necessarily that universal. (For instance I was kinda obsessed with recorded sound before I started writing and recording songs on a tape recorder, which I did for a couple of YEARS before I ever played in front of another human being). So I came to writing songs with some extra skills that actually facilitated my earliest efforts.

An art history professor of mine said "Art is foisting your obsessions on the world" and I think he was right. Another art professor of mine said if you embark on a dozen creative projects, the odds of creating an inspired one greatly increases over simply working on one. I think this is very good advice, and is echoed by a lot of folks writing about the nature of creativity.

If you can't play chords, or move your hands around a keyboard or a fretboard fast enough to play a chord progression, saddle up to a screen with a movie and practice scales so your fingers get stronger. Do it everyday for some time. Then practice toggling back and forth between two chords as quickly as possible. Get a metronome. You know why!

Yes, a song is exactly the confected thing your mentioned in your request--it's a lyric, a melody, a progression, a beat, an evolving musical notion. But those parts are often created at separate times and simply smushed together. It doesn't have to be done in one go, and if the whole enterprise seems odd, or your skill set is underdeveloped in one way or another, assembling a song from the various moving elements might be an easier way to approach it.

(also a couple of days ago someone was asking about singing and I pointed at a few ideas there--essentially taking advantage of these free online vocal warm up videos)

I think you should gather a small clutch of tools--a tape recorder or a DAW that is simple enough to master quickly--there are multitrack recording apps that you can install on your phone that are intuitive. A couple of instruments-a guitar or keyboard, maybe an auto harp.

Find a place to work where you can make noise and not be heard.

I think you should start writing in a physical notebook where you can write down your ideas and revisit them. I wouldn't do it on a computer. It's slow writing, and the screen just creates distractions.

Write a bunch of lyrics without trying to write music: Make one about you but write it like it's about someone else, one about someone else's experience but sing it first person, write one about a group of people. Be positive. Be negative. Be regretful. Be optimistic. Express anger. Be as extreme as you can stand. Experiment in writing in every mode you can think of. Here somebody would write "express your own ideas", but ALL of your ideas will be your own! You are making choices based on musical notions that inspired you, but what comes out of you will almost certainly be different enough, and if it's too close to something else, shimmy it around so it isn't distracting! Write a few chord progressions. (A two chord progression that just sounds interesting going back and forth. A four chord progression. Make a beat, or find a beat online, and write a bass line or just a sequence of single notes on a keyboard or guitar to make a pleasant, evolving line. And see if you can write a "song" or two with a two or four chord verse, and a chorus that is a different chord progression.) Write it down and revisit it! Record it slow. You might want to speed it up later when it's "under your fingers."

Pretty soon you will have all the component of what you need to put lyrics to music. You can also try just singing lyrics over a beat, and then figure out the chords underneath AFTER you have a notion of a melody.

That's enough free advice. Go write some songs!

[veras1ne]

✮“Delicate.”

I had SO much fun writing this fic!! I’m so sorry it was delayed a little, there were some time constrictions and I’d much rather give you guys a late fic than a rushed and poorly written one. Anyways, Enjoy!! I can’t wait to see yall on the 31st 🦢 🫧

✰Pairing´ˎ˗📀: Anakin Skywalker x AFAB!Bimbo!Reader

✰ ‧₊˚ Summary 🦢: Anakin was out on a mission, leaving you home alone and an opportunity to hit the town. Nightclubs and dancing sounded perfect until he finds his way back home early.

✰ ;➛ WARNINGS🫧: THIS IS AN 18+ SMUT FANFIC. I am NOT responsible for the media you read and consume! Your warnings are the following: Smut, PIV, Fingering, Cum-Stuffing, Anakin being a master manipulator, Slutshaming, Degrading, Use of She/Her, Mentions of Breeding/Pregnancy, squirting, but no explicit mention of it! Try not to blink.

The sound of your dress zipping up and the spritzing of your favorite perfume filled your ears with excitement. Anakin was planned to be away on a trip for several nights, allowing you to sneak away with your closest friends for a night on the town, going to some of the sweetest clubs in your finest clothing. This would be the perfect chance for you to let loose without being kept on a tight leash by him. You could drink, dance, and enjoy yourself to your heart's content.

Tonight, you were finally free to do all that you wanted. You wanted to be selfish and get dirty and nasty with your friends. Of course you were allowed to go out, but statistics forbid you to be able to wear your tightest skirts and tops that were downright inappropriate for you to wear anywhere else. Personally, you had seen nothing wrong with your choice of clothing, especially when you got dressed just right, knowing that the explicit clothing wouldn’t matter in the first place as your lover would be right there in the event of anything happening.

The tightness made your waist look amazing, and the thin fabric hugged your curves perfectly. In Anakin’s mind, your clothes left little to the imagination—so little, in fact, that he believed he should be the only one to see you wearing the fabric you loved so much. He believed that he should be the only one to take advantage of you and ravage your mind, body, and soul.

He believed he should be the only one to see every nook and cranny of your body—the one that was specially made for his hands. To him, you were a toy, something he could take whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. No matter where he went, whether it was his bed or yours or the bar across town, you would always be available to him.

You were his property that he owned, and you loved it. He loved that he was the only thing you thought about, that every being in your soul belonged to him, and that your whole life was centered around being him. It pleased him endlessly when his presence seemed to be the only thing to bring happiness and contentment into your everyday existence.

You relished in the knowledge that he knew every inch of your body; everything you did was because of him. His touch was what caused you to cry out of pleasure. He held you, kissed you, touched you, pleasured you, and told you how much he loved you. His missions were an opportunity for you to get wild without his knowledge, to let out a primal energy that wasn't regularly seen in you while under his every beck and call.

You had loved to be under Ani’s watchful eyes, but to live somewhat of a secret second life was something that made you feel sexy and powerful. Sure, others saw you as naive and just a pretty face, but you simply loved it. You loved dressing pretty in pink and always sipping on smooth champagne. In Anakin’s words, you were “ditzy.” And he liked it. It felt good to have you wrapped tightly around his finger.

You were just too good for him. He loved having you completely at his mercy, giving him whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. You were a gift that no man or god could give him. The way you met was almost immediately revealing to your character: him being assigned to nearly babysit you while you traveled with your father throughout the galaxy, accompanying your father as the face of his campaign for his politics.

He became enamored by your innocent beauty and decided he wanted you to be his. You didn’t realize it, but he began to court you, solidifying his belief that you were rather bubble-headed, not that he minded in the slightest way.

He watched you giggle uncontrollably during a joke, hearing him chuckle when you cried out in disgust when you accidentally stepped in a liquid that had taken form on the floor. He had found you absolutely delicious, and his obsession had gotten the best of him. His lust had grown more intense, taking over any sense of logic and reasoning. He would come home after long missions and find you waiting for him, begging for him to touch you, kiss you, and fuck you. Your soft body begged to be touched, but Anakin couldn’t bring himself to give in.

As much as he desired you in the moment, his job had taken priority, and he had to be away from you until now. He hadn’t told you of his return, wishing to surprise you and see your pretty face filled with delight as his boots echoed down the hallway to your door, clacking upon arrival. Although it had only been a few days, to him, it felt like weeks away from your beautiful body, which fit right with his. He had missed you, and he wanted to prove you right.

As you smoothed out your top in the mirror, the jiggling of your front door’s knob caught your attention. Anakin’s voice calling out your name brought a smile to your face, making you rush out into the living room, heels clicking as you ran. The sight that greeted you, however, made your heart leap in your chest.

The man that stood before you was handsome in his Jedi robes. His eyes twinkled with mischief as he smiled down at you, a slight smirk on his lips. Anakin was clearly excited to see you, his arms open, expecting a hug. “Hi Baby! You’re home!” you almost screamed, joyously, running into his muscular arms.

You wrapped your own around his broad back and pulled him closer to you, pressing your nose into his neck and inhaling his smell of fresh soap and pine trees. “I didn’t know you were coming. I missed you so much, baby!” You exclaimed happily, kissing the side of his jawline before pulling away and admiring his strong build.

His face contorted in confusion as he looked at you, seeing you in your pink outfit fixed with your primmed and perfect hair and your finest heels. “What are you wearing, honey? I didn’t think you knew I was coming home.” You smiled at him blankly, not understanding his words. “I was about to go out with some girls from the club downtown; that’s okay, right?" He nodded slowly, trying to comprehend where you got the idea that you could go outside looking like that. “Of course that’s alright,” his voice trailed off as he entered your kitchen. “But I know you aren’t going out dressed like that." You tilted your head, confused. “Like that? What’s wrong with this?” “I should be the only one seeing you dressed like that. Your tits are halfway spilling out of your top; I wouldn’t even be surprised if other men tried to look at you the way only I do," he snapped at you, frustrated that you were trying to question his authority.

You rolled your eyes at his reaction, turning around and beginning to walk to your bedroom. “Oh really? Well, I guess maybe you should change the way you look at me if you hate it so much.” You scoffed as you walked past him, heading to your closet. “Besides, if you hate what I’m wearing so badly, why don’t you come and take it off?" You turned around with a devilish smirk on your face, wanting to see his reaction.

You never expected such a fierce and passionate response. A growl escaped his throat as he stomped towards you, slamming you up against the wall and pinning you there with ease. He pushed you against the wall roughly, ravanging your neck and placing wet, open kisses on your exposed skin. He nibbled on your collarbone, sucking lightly, causing you to moan and shiver. “I could rip your clothes right off," his low voice whispered into your ear, his lips close enough to yours for you to feel his hot breath. “Of course you’d love that, wouldn’t you?" He chuckled darkly as he released his grip on your shoulders and placed his forehead on yours.

The sight of Anakin’s eyes staring straight into yours made you forget all about the situation, instead focusing on the sensation of his hot breath fanning across your skin, his hand coming up to your face, and forcing eye contact between the two of you. “I've waited too long for you, Ani. My fingers couldn’t fuck me like you can. I need you so bad.” Your breathing was labored and unstable, with his hands harshly grabbing your wrists as he pinned you to your shared bed, which had grown so cold on his side.

He leaned down and kissed you passionately, his tongue brushing against your lip before slipping inside, exploring the depths of your mouth. His hands made short work of your miniskirt, and completely demolishing your beautiful designer top.

You were completely lost in him as he devoured you, his fingers tugging your hair slightly as he continued to press you against the bed, your hips bucking and rubbing against the fabric of his pants, the thin cotton of your pants creating friction on your clit that you so elegantly craved.

You moaned loudly into his mouth, his hands still holding your wrists above your head as his mouth roamed over your body, leaving a trail of hickeys all over your neck, chest, and stomach.

His right hand came down to your pussy, pushing your pants to the side as he reveled in your wet genitalia, your pre-cum acting as a lube for his thick and dry fingers, pushing their way into your hole, scissoring them against your walls, and loosening your tight muscles that pulsed against his flesh. You groaned louder than ever as his skilled fingers moved in and out of your slick and swollen entrance, his mouth moving to your breast, nibbling and licking.

A few minutes later, your eyes were closed, and tears streamed down your cheeks as pleasure rocked through you relentlessly.

A low grunt fell from your lips as Anakin removed his fingers from your pussy, placing a kiss on your clit as he replaced his fingers with his erect cock that prodded your tight hole. “I need you inside me, Ani. My pussy has been so empty; missed you so much.” Your encouragement was the final push for him, with his head pushing into your tiny slit.

He was careful at first, making sure to enter slowly and deeply, feeling how good it felt to finally be inside you, a scream ripping itself from your throat, your nails scratching at the sheets beneath your body as you writhed and trembled underneath him. “You’re so tight, my dove. I can’t get enough of you. So beautiful.” He spoke softly, his voice strained with effort, and his eyes focused solely on your swollen opening as he thrust in and out of your body, your back arching against the mattress as he took your sweet pussy apart, splitting you on his dick.

His cock rubbed against your sensitive walls, hitting every part of your insides as he fucked you hard and fast. “I should’ve known you were so desperate for me the moment I came through the door. I could practically smell your desperation like a dog; guess I’m fucking you like a bitch though, aren’t I?” You whined as you gripped tightly to the sheets beneath you. His movements became faster and harder, hitting your most sensitive spot, his hands leaving your body and taking refuge tangled in your hair, pulling it as you let out a pleasured screech.

Your entire body shook violently with each stroke of his cock, gripping the sheet beneath you. His voice deepened as he increased the tempo of his thrusts. “Such a slut, you know that? Your pussy is so deep, she’s swallowing me whole. I missed her so bad and the way she clenched around my fat cock," he roared out, his orgasm rising as you came undone, your juices spurting as you gushed around him, clawing at his back and seemingly drawing blood. "Anakin," you sobbed as he pumped his cock faster, his hips stuttering as he came hard, his seed flooding deep inside you.

With an animalistic growl, he collapsed on top of you. His heavy breathing and harsh heartbeat filled your ears, his large body covering your smaller frame. “Once a slut, always a slut, but at least you’re mine," he muttered hoarsely, nuzzling into the crook of your neck, breathing deeply in your scent, a smile stretching across his face as he placed a wet kiss on your jawline, thrusting into you one last time, pushing his cum deep inside of you.

“Maybe I should get you pregnant, breed you like a little bitch, and let everybody know that this pussy belongs to me."

[taurder]

Dom male reader x will graham with breeding and exhibitionism kink. 😻😻

Also can i be "🐗" anon??

top!dom!reader x bottom!will graham (hannibal nbc)

contains: breeding kink, exhibitionism kink, lots of swearing, anal (character receiving), implied fbi teacher reader and will.

note: my first request ever, thank you! and i hope i write something you'll enjoy. feel free to ask for more, cause now you're my first anon and I'm a fan of the emoji you picked.

he had been asked to help in another outgoing case, you could tell by the amout of his classes that you had to fill in for. another good indicator of this was his mood. he'll become snappier if approached, grumpy when a conversation with another colleague would become too casual for his liking. but mostly he'd get horny. down bad looking for you in between breaks and shoving you in any room available to climb you like a tree and get you inside him horny.

maybe it was his way of letting go of all this feelings and thoughts inside his head when he was at a murder scene. when your dick was deep inside of him you could tell his mind was empty, his presence entirely here, enjoying every physical pleasure that you could provide him with.

"could you maybe get in any time today?" always desperate, like he was in a rush. you ignored his mean tone, enjoying instead of the view that came from undoing every button of his shirt. his jeans were already out of the way on the floor, poor needy thing had pushed you into one small classroom designed for fewer agents, already biting and provoking, demanding for your touch as you closed the door.

the lock didn't worked on this one, and you voiced this concern knowing well how much he liked the idea of being caught. it was obvious from other encounters and his choice of places that a part of him was thrilled every time you mentioned the sound of someone coming near the door, of another class in the next auditorium and today was no different. even as you touched and gripped at his now exposed torso his eyes wandered to the door, pupils blown and you could picture the view you two made.

clothing in the floor, teacher and special agent will graham up in the desk with you between his legs. you jerked his cock a couple times, making him whimper and frown. "just fuck me already" another demand that you intended to ignore as well but then he reached with a hand to his ass, moaning with eyes closed as he pulled a small butt plug from his hole. the sound was wet and lewd and you unconsciously pressed your thumb there, confirming what the sound made you think. "i�� i already prepared everything. shit, i'm so wet you could probably shove it just like that. c'mon"

he had filled himself with as much lube as he could, putting the plug to keep himself from dripping in the corridors, at the places he probably visited to investigate the newest serial killer pattern. all while being stuffed and ready to be fucked. you guess even if he's a demanding piece of shit you have to give credit to his pretty face and initiative, and so you push your whole thumb without a warning first.

"FUCK. no, no, want you– mghh.. your cock" he really craved it, he was almost at the point you loved the most, when he starts sounding really needy. you fuck him with your finger a little more, adoring his squirming frame and already sweaty face. "your cock, your cock" he won't say please, he has already told you this before, so the whiney almost crying like tone you get from him is close enough and you pull your thumb out, watching him already hooking his feet at your back while you guide your dick right in.

And just like he said it's really not much resistance, but enough so to make him wail and moan, louder than he should given the place you're both in, but he's too far gone. as he adjusts to the fullness he goes down to properly lay in the desk, one hand taking his own member, the other grabbing an edge to keep his body from jumping away from you when you start thrusting. "fucking finally. yeah, yeah, like that, yesyes mgghh" a sudden rush of air from the top small windows is enough to make the door move slightly, sounding as if someone was gently pushing it.

will's body jerks at this, and you can clearly see how he squeezes his dick to keep himself from coming, but the movement makes his walls hug tigh your into your length, inviting you to improve your rhythm. you hold his hips, hearing the desk legs squeak against the floor from the movement that proceeds. you thrust into graham hard and fast, seeing his sweat accumulate in his forehead and even the skin in his torso glistening. his mouth is open, murmuring swears as his eyes cross out up his empty head.

this is why he needs you, to reach this state. and as your climax feels near you're reminded of the second thing he needs you for. you hit his prostate, and it's the signal he takes as to guess you're near. "inssss-ide" he whispers, slurring, as he always does at this point. he repeats the word, fearing you could ever forget what he needs to properly cum with you. even as his mind is gone his words come back suddenly, needy. "say it, 'mm-close, so close. keep it in, inside"

you're near too, and as you abuse his prostate with erratic thrusts the words he wants to hear pour out. "you want my cum inside, yes? want to get knocked out, don't you?" he keens, brows together and his right hand working again in his dick. "you think i'm reaching your womb now? i'll fill it up so much you'll be carrying more than one baby" more moans, his body tensing up and toes curling. "here it goes" is your only warning before you give a last deep shove, and even if you're enjoying to finally let go you can tell he's more thrilled.

his body seizes and he throws his head up as your hot seed fills up his insides. even if your thrusting has stopped he's tightening his ass, his dick left forgotten in his abdomen as white ropes paint his sweaty skin. "that's it, milk my cock. don't let any drop go to waste". he shudders, clearly not expecting to hear your voice again but he complies, riding his climax while getting filled. when it's too much for either of you, you pull out slowly, using your fingers to stop your seed from escaping his used hole. he hands you the butt plug and once again he's stuffed.

he doesn't say thank you, he has told you that in the past too, but he does bite into your shoulder when you help him sit down in the desk, his breathing still agitated. you don't see eye to eye as you both fix your clothing or clean the space, but there's a mutual understanding that this will keep happening, and you can't wait for the next session.

[erodasfishtacos]

Digging A Deeper Hole || MLB ||

Prompt: Harry is going through a rough adjustment to his new life. At twenty-one, he was the face of a massive franchise, a father, and a husband with millions watching his every mood. He starts to feel it. Word Count: 7.8k Warnings: Depression, Anxiety, Angst - please keep in mind H is young here so he’s a bit more immature than one shots where he’s older. He’s still figuring stuff out

AUTHORS NOTES:

There is 5 more part to this up on patreon (17k words, a 25.1k fic overall)

I upload a piece of writing every 1-3 days (usually two) consistently// currently updating abo!roommates

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========================= Harry had the weight on the world on his shoulders.

The past year had been the best but most stressful time that he has ever had in his life.

He hadn’t had a break, it was go, go, go.

At the age of twenty-one, it felt like he had responsibilities that most people never had this amount of.

He had expectations from every side, especially from work, though it sounded like a dream to be the new face of Major League Baseball, to be the highest paid rookie to start, or the fact that he was a projected to be one of the best players of all time.

It came at a cost.

A really fucking big cost.

It took Harry a while to realize that he was experiencing some depression, the pressure of his coaches, the team, the public, and on top of that, he was navigating being newly married with a baby.

++

”Styles, get off the phone!” His assistant coach shouted from the field, he should be jogging onto the mound because practice was nearly over, and everyone was ready to head back to the hotels.

“Hold the fuck on!” Harry shouts back without looking up, waiting for the FaceTime call to connect, he had thought he had more time before they started up again.

Harry’s heart leaps when it connects, his perfect baby in the camera view, blowing raspberries between chewing on teether that looked like car keys, “Say ‘hi’ to your daddy!”

Easton is too little to quite comprehend the phone but he blinks in confusion at the screen before blowing another wet raspberry towards his father.

”Hi East, look at how handsome you look,” Harry croons, trying to memorize every little feature because he’s only going to be this small for a little while, “Your daddy misses you so much.”

YN pulls the phone to her face for a moment, “I took him on a walk around Central Park earlier today and he saw a group of pigeons. He squealed so loudly that they all flew away in a flock and he started giggling. I wish I would have gotten it on video.”

”He really does love the pigeons-“ Harry begins but is cut off.

”Styles, final warning. Get off your phone or I’m locking it up! Now,” The other coach yells, starting to actually get pissed, and Harry has to resist the urge to flip them off.

”H,” YN says knowingly, it was pretty common that he was getting yelled at, “Go practice.”

“I want to be home with you,” Harry frowns, he truly means it.

”I know,” YN agrees with kind understanding on her face, “Go kick some ass for us.”

++

He didn’t get to spend the time he wanted at home with his family, the away games caused him to panic, and he was starting to have anxiety attacks as he steps onto the private jet.

Harry was blowing YN’s phone up at any free moment he got, asking to FaceTime to see her and Easton, and YN had noticed how much more he was asking for reassurance, it was frequent.

++

”He’s sleepy. He just fed for almost an hour,” YN murmurs, tired herself and her eyes were heavy, it was undeniable that she had a lot on her plate with taking care of Easton by herself.

YN did see Anne once or twice a week but she was adamant that she did not need help raising her own baby, that she was fully capable of taking care of Easton by herself when Harry wasn’t home.

Easton was ten-months at this point, splayed on his mother’s chest with a milk-drunk little smile as he laid his small fist on her neck, easily starting to drift to sleep.

Harry feels a pang of disgusting, gnarly guilt and disappointment that he’s not there to lay in bed with them, and he felt like a piece of shit for sitting in this swanky hotel room by himself.

”Harry?” YN asks after he doesn’t respond, he was just watching the screen as his wife ran her fingers through Easton’s soft baby curls, silky smooth.

Harry swallows harshly to avoid the tears prickling, “I love you so much. You know that?”

YN smiles at him, soft and warm, “We love you so much. We miss you and cannot wait for you to get home. We both want so many cuddles with you.”

Harry’s jaw clenches, scrunching his nose, and feel the pit in his stomach get deeper, darker, rawer, and it felt overwhelming as he sat alone with his family on the other side of the country.

It felt suffocating that he wanted to go home but he couldn’t because he had a contract, a job, he had to provide, and he worked his whole life to be where he’s at.

He’s in a position that billions would want to be in but all he can think about is being with his family, he would give up everything he’d ever accomplished to cuddle with them every night.

But he couldn’t, deep down, he knew that it was his emotions getting the best of him, and it’s disappointing that he’s not enjoying baseball like he thought he would right now.

“I…I’m sorry,” Harry sniffles, rubbing his eye roughly to catch the tears before they fall any further.

YN’s smile falls which makes him feel even worse, “Baby, what’s wrong? Why are you apologizing?”

”I’m not there to help you,” Harry presses his face into his forearm to try to stop the tears, “I’m just sittin’ here in a hotel room, I’m fuckin’ useless to you.”

”Hey,” YN says firmly, lips going into a straight line, “Harry, you are not useless. How could you think that? You’re providing for us. You make it possible for me to stay at home, in this beautiful home, with everything we’d ever need, and spend every moment with Easton. That’s because of you.”

It makes Harry feel a bit better, that perspective on the situation because he hadn’t looked at it like that, “I’ll always provide for you two.”

”You’re the best provider. We love you so much. We are so proud of you. Easton is going to be so so proud of his daddy and what a good man you are to us,” YN tells him confidently, thter’s no wavering in her voice as she watches Harry’s reaction.

Harry hangs his head, done trying to stop the tears, he didn’t feel good.

He had felt depression a few times in his life, the most when he was going through his struggles with his sexuality, and it was starting to feel like that again.

”Harry,” YN’s voice is soft, careful, “Are you okay, baby? What made you so upset?”

Harry wipes his face with the back of his hand, he didn’t want to worry YN.

She had so much on her plate right now that the last thing she needed to worry about was his mental health because he needed to pull it together and stop being so emotional.

”I just miss you,” Harry tells her, it wasn’t a lie but it really wasn’t the full truth, there was so much more to it than what he was letting on but he could handle it on his own.

Lord knows he had enough time while he was sitting in this hotel room alone or had a flight on the private jet.

++

Harry felt like a car ran him over, twice, and then backed up over him.

He did as good as everyone expected him to do during the games in San Diego, he won all three of the games with too many strikeouts to count, and two home runs to get them scores.

Harry was able to shut his mind off during the games, all he was thinking about was his job, and what he needed to do to make sure that they won the games - that was it.

Afterwards, the creeping feelings that had been haunting him especially hard this past month or so wouldn’t wait very long to pop up again after the games.

He started demanding a flight home the night of the last game, everyone else always waited until the next day because traveling right after playing was near torture with the exhaustion.

Harry felt like death as he landed in New York City, his bones were heavy as if they weighed a thousand pounds each, his arm was sore from how many pitches he had to throw, and he hadn’t been sleeping well when he was away from YN and the baby.

His heart was a bit lighter as he opened the front door to their home, the smell of his favorite brownies hitting his nose, and a peel of bubbly, angelic baby giggles echoed through the hallway.

Harry needed to see them, he dropped his bag and didn’t care that his cologne bottle most likely just shattered inside because of how careless he was being.

No, he was making his way toward the smell and sounds, and when he found what he waas looking for - his stomach untwisted just the slightest and everything didn’t seem so bleak for a moment.

YN turns around, having been alerted to his entrance by his bag dropping, Easton was on her hip and had a spatula in his hand, gnawing on it happily.

”Who is that, East?” YN bounces him up and down, “Is that your daddy?”

Harry wants to cry tears of relief when Easton drops the spatula, letting it clatter onto the tile, and starts to cry.

He was the cutest little thing.

Whenever Harry got home from work, Easton would start to cry because he wanted him, and was sad like he just realized that he had been missing him all day and he was finally home with him.

”Oh my goodness,” YN hums as Easton wiggles, starting to reach out for him with grabbing hands, dramatic tears running down his face as his pouty bottom lip wobbles.

”No tears, bub,” Harry coos as he steps forward, taking Easton out of her arms, and giving him the biggest hug he can manage as he presses kisses to the side of his face, his hair, his nose, “I missed you so much. I hate being away from you, East, miss you every moment.”

YN is watching with a content smile, patiently waiting her turn as he blinks over at her, his voice still soft and raspy, “Hi mama.”

”Hi H,” YN whispers back, stepping forward to cup his jaw and bring their lips together in a kiss, her thumb rubbing the stubble of his jawline and her other squeezing his hip, “I missed you.”

Harry hates that he feels the lump in his throat, “I fuckin’ missed you so much. I can’t explain how much I hate being away from you and him. I am so grateful that you’re so good to me and East. You know that?”

One of YN’s love languages was definitely words of affirmation so to hear such nice compliments really did mean a lot to her because she didn’t always feel the most secure either.

It was a lot to have her husband traveling all the time, where if he wanted, there would be unlimited opportunities for him to make bad choices because there was not a shortage of men and women who would bed him without a second thought.

YN had complete and utter trust in him.

It wasn’t ever a real concern but when Harry was as gorgeous as he was, it was hard not to feel a bit of insecurity when people often let it be known how much they found him attractive.

”Thank you, H,” YN brings him in for another kiss, “Dinner is almost ready. Brownies are also baking in the oven. Easton was my little helper but was trying to get his chunky fingers in the raw batter which he had an attitude about when I told him ‘no’.”

”You better listen to your mama,” Harry hums at his son, munching at his neck until Easton is giggling and pulling at his curls to keep him close, he loved his father so much, “Be nice to mama, Easton Robin.”

YN reaches forward, “Go get a shower. Settle in a little bit.”

Harry passes Easton back but frowns, “Darling, I can take him and manage. You have had him for the last week.”

YN waves him off, “I got him for a few minutes longer. Get showered, dressed, then we can eat dinner, and cuddle. Okay?”

”Sounds like a dream,” Harry replies because it really does, all that he wants is to be able to hold them in his arms, and start filling this hole that starts to eat away at him every time he has to leave.`

++

After Harry showers, he tugs on his briefs, and sits on the edge of the bed.

He doesn’t know how he fell asleep like that but it seemed to happen nearly as soon as he plopped down on the plush of their bed because he hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, after an exhausting game and seven hours of travel.

The next time he wakes up, it’s completely dark in the bedroom, and he blinks his eyes open to see the alarm clock reading that it was three in the morning.

YN was fast asleep on her side of the bed, baby monitor on the side table, and Easton was sleeping in his nursery on his back with a binky halfway out of his mouth.

Harry squeezes his eyes shut, putting his fists to them for a moment as he grits his teeth, “Fuck fuck fuck.”

He gets out of bed, not wanting to disturb YN, she looked so fucking pretty while she slept and Harry was in disbelief of what a fucking idiot he was.

YN not only watched Easton for the past week, she managed everything else for their household, made Harry dinner and dessert, all for him to fall asleep.

She needs a break from the baby, YN should have gotten one last night after all her hard work, and Harry just went and fell asleep like a bloody teenager with no responsibilities.

He grabs the baby monitor so that YN won’t be woken up, hoping that she will sleep in for as long as possible in the morning, and Harry can take on baby duties.

Harry’s plan was to clean the house, the least he could do as an apology but everything was near spotless thanks to his wife, and when he went into the kitchen to clean the dishes from dinner.

There were none, YN had put all the leftovers away, wrapped the brownies, and cleaned all the pots and pans - as well as all of Easton’s bottles.

”Fuck me,” Harry grunts as he resists the urge to hit something, instead slamming his fists on the countertop, and staring at nothing as he feels the deep hole become bigger, “Such a fuck-up.”

Harry doesn’t even know what he can do to repay her, to make it up to her, and the mixture of his anxiety and depression had to be the gnarliest combination because they were kicking his ass.

His anxiety starts taking over and an intrusive thought starts to pop into his brain and he can’t shake it.

What if she leaves you?

What if she doesn’t think you’re a good enough father?

She does all this for you and you treat her like shit the moment you come home?

You don’t deserve her.

Harry’s throat tightens up, it feels hard to breathe for a few minutes as he tries taking slow, deep inhales before repeating the process to help try to regulate his breathing.

He had to make this up to her.

++

Harry manages Easton by himself, that wasn’t an issue, and he was even able to run out to grab YN’s favorite donuts from a few blocks down before she was up.

Harry was currently in the living room, laying on the floor with Easton as he played with these soft, big blocks, and smiled at his father with only two little teeth showing on his bottom gums.

”Morning, well afternoon,” YN laughs as she looks at the clock on the wall, it was nearly twelve and she was able to catch up on all the sleep she desperately needs, “You didn’t need to let me sleep for that long, H. I appreciate it though, felt super nice to be able to get re-energized.”

”It’s the least I could do,” Harry replies, the enthusiasm that was usually in his voice was missing, and he struggled to meet her eye because he was embarassed.

YN knows something is off as she sits down next to them, scooping Easton up and tucking him under her big shirt where he can excitedly start to nurse - he very begrudgingly used a bottle but it was always a bit more difficult to get him to eat with one.

”Are you sure you’re okay?” YN frowns as she rubs his knee, “You seem down. Did something happen?”

”I’m a piece of shit,” Harry chuckles without humor, throwing his hands up, “Isn’t it obvious? I leave you at home with the baby and then the minute I get home, I fall asleep and don’t do shit to help you. On top of that, you made dinner and I didn’t even eat it.”

YN’s frown turns into more of a scowl, “Harry, what has you talking like this? Did someone say something to you? I don’t like when you talk like that. You were exhausted! You were just away for a week, training and playing, and have so much other than that going on. Do you really think that I’m mad about that?”

“I’m mad about how I acted because it effects you,” Harry grits back, his anxiety and depression had a tendency to make him cranky in a way that he normally wouldn’t be, “It’s no excuse. You get no excuses. I need to do better.”

”You need to stop talking like that,” YN retorts as she stares back at him with a twitch of her brow, “Everything is fine. We are fine. Nothing is wrong. This is how our life looks sometimes and that’s okay. You are doing this to take care of us.”

“It feels pretty fuckin’ selfish right now,” Harry shakes his head, standing up and trying to hide the wince from how achey his muscles were, he should do a cold plunge but he’s not going to take anymore time for himself - he dosn’t deserve it.

“How is it selfish?” YN is getting frustrated, her leg shaking slightly but then she stops when she realizes that it’s jostling Easton and he whines in displeasure.

”I get to get a full night’s sleep in a luxury hotel room, you’re here.”

YN scoffs, licking over her teeth, “Yeah, Harry. It’s a massive hardship, living in a three million dollar home in the middle of the Upper East Side. I think I’ll survive.”

“That’s not the fuckin’ point,” Harry cracks his neck, his anxiety made his heart rate feel like he was constantly running a marathon, it was hard for him to keep his composure.

”Don’t talk to me like that,” YN raises her voice, moving to get up with Easton still suckling away, “This isn’t how you show appreciation, Harry. I’m just trying to have a conversation and you have an attitude.”

Harry knows that he’s just going to continue to dig himself a deeper pit than he’s already in if he keeps talking.

Most of the time, he did not feel like like a twenty-one year old despite his boyish looks but right now, he felt like he was acting his age and it wasn’t a good thing.

”Why don’t you take Easton and see your mom today,” YN offers, her voice is still tight but trying to keep it cordial as she brings Easton out from under her shirt.

He was blinking languidly, his lips smacking in satisfaction as his belly was full, and YN hands him over to Harry to take, “Yeah, I’ll get him ready and go.”

It was a good opportunity to give YN a break but he was honestly a bit surprised that she took him up on it or that she didn’t want to come with because when Harry came home, they tried to stay together as much as possible.

He does know that he’s acting like a complete dickhead which makes sense why she wasn’t dying to spend time with him right night, still it was just odd because it’s unlike her.

”Sounds good,” YN pulls out her phone, looking down and fingers flitting across the screen which was also a bit odd, how she was a distracted by it because it was unlike her just like her letting him go alone.

God, Harry was making a fucking mess, wasn’t he? +++++++++++++++++

It stuck out like a sore thumb when Harry was off.

Normally, he was the most easy-going, bubbly, funny person who stole most of the attention when he wasn’t even trying.

It was how he captured everyone’s interest whether it was his big grin that had his dimples showing deep in the pockets of his cheeks, the way he threw his head back and let out these low raspy chuckles, or just how he nodded attentively when someone else was talking.

So when he wasn’t feeling like himself, all those things that lit up rooms disappeared, and it was hard for him to socialize.

Harry was still beating himself up the entire ride outside of the city to his mother’s house, Easton was napping in the back and this would be a nice sleep before the excitement of Nana’s house.

Harry was replaying everything with YN, from the way he was sharp with her to get short with her when she did absolutely nothing to deserve that from him because she was so fucking good to him - all the time.

YN never complained about anything.

She never complained about being at home with the baby alone.

YN never tied to guilt Harry because he was away during the season so much.

It makes it so much worse that he’s not able to hold his shit together even just for YN, he didn’t want her to worry about his mental health, that’s the last thing she needed on her plate.

He was going to figure this out himself.

It wasn’t that he didn’t feel like he couldn’t talk to her, it was more that he knew she cares so much that it might upset her or make her worry when he’s on the road, all he wants for her is to focus on Easton and herself.

Harry normally loves going up to his mom’s, a little lake house that he had bought her with one of his first paychecks, despite how much she huffed and puffed, he knew that it was a dream of hers to live on the water.

It was the least he could do after she did so much to make his dreams come true.

However, despite Harry getting a decent amount of sleep, he felt bone tired and just drained was the best way to explain it - he felt like all the energy that he normally feels has been sucked clean out of him.

He wanted to turn the car around, go home, crawl into bed with YN and Easton, and not have to interact with anyone else for at least a week but that wasn’t possible with his schedule.

Harry should be enjoying his time right now.

They have an off week which meant that he had nearly two and a half weeks at home because the following week were games at their home stadium so he could be home every night.

Harry just couldn’t wait for this season to be over.

And that thought alone alarmed him because he fucking loved baseball, he loved being the best of the best, he loved all the recognition he got but right now his desire was lower than it’s been in a really long time.

When he pulls down the long driveway, a house sat back off the residential road where she had neighbors but there was a good amount of distance between the them to give privacy and seclusion.

He sees that there are multiple cars in the driveway which makes Harry groan because he didn’t realize that his mom was going to call over friends and family since he was coming to visit.

Anne did that sometimes, when Harry called saying that he’d be up, she would call aunts, uncles, relatives, and close friends to come for a barbecue, and it was the last thing he wanted right now.

He was already a bit peeved that his mother didn’t ask him first because he would have very clearly told her that he wasn’t in the mood to entertain people, to answer questions, and talk about baseball for a good five hours.

When Harry opens the back door, Easton’s already awake and smiling at his father with a gummy smile, his two bottom baby teeth made him look so adorable but he knew that more were going to popping through soon.

”Hi, sweetheart,” Harry hums softly as he unbuckles his baby, bringing him up into his arms and into a hug, kissing his temple, “I love you so much, you know that? M’only away so that you have everythin’ you’d ever want. Miss you every second-“

A smack comes heartily on his back, right on his throwing shoulder where the soreness is radiating like a motherfucker, and he has to grit his teeth to not curse and startle Easton.

”Buddy, how much did this ride cost ya?” His Uncle Chuck, his mom’s brother asks obnoxiously, “Saw these things were going for a hundred and some change?”

Harry takes a deep breath, his patience was wearing thin, and he had barely made it out of the car, “I don’t remember how much it cost.”

“That’s what being rich gets you, huh? Twenty-one with a fat bank account and no responsibilities. I would have loved to have a life like yours,” Chuck chortles as he leans up against said expensive SUV, beer in his hand.

“I have plenty of fuckin’ responsibilities,” Harry bites back, scolding himself for cursing in from of Easton, even if he was too young to understand, he tried not to make it a habit.

“Sure you do, bud,” His uncle laughs, clearly not catching onto Harry’s mood, “Last thing I’d want is a baby with everything that you have going on. Growing up too fast.”

“Luckily, it’s not your life,” Harry brushes him off, picking up Easton’s diaper bag on his free shoulder and hikes him up, “We’ll be in soon. Give us a minute.”

His uncle shrugs before staggering off, a drunken sway in his step as he stumbles back towards the house.

Harry buries his nose in Easton’s downy, fresh smelling wispy curls to steady his breathing, he feels a bit emotional as he talks to his son.

“M’sorry, East. Daddy doesn’t feel good right now,” Harry swallows hard, squeezing his eyes shut, “I just have to pull it together. God, I love you. My baby.”

Harry gives himself another minute of grounding before taking a deep exhale and shutting the door, walking towards the house.

Everyone was on the back patio, sipping on drinks, and cheering when they saw him.

Dread settles heavy in Harry’s stomach as his family members as they start asking him about his games, wanting to recap every play he’s made, his sponsorships and his much he’s getting paid.

Harry’s trying to keep up the conversation but all he can think about is how much he didn’t want to be there, and he should have just taken Easton to the park or something more low-key.

When he bumps into his mom in the kitchen, Anne is prepping a salad and smiles back at her son - unaware of his mood.

“Isn’t this fun, hun?” Anne asks happily, sprinkling in some spices as she hums.

“Why couldn’t it have just been us? I have to be around people all the time and I thought it was just going to be you. Now I have to entertain all of them,” Harry’s tone definitely takes her aback as she puts down the tongs she was using.

“Usually you love when everyone’s here, I don’t understand,” Anne’s smile drops, wiping her hands on the dishrag.

“Does anybody ever consider that I don’t love talking about baseball every second of the day or how much money is in my bank account?” Harry’s tone is venomous and resentful, unfairly harsh on his mom when she hadn’t tried to upset him.

“Harr-“ Anne begins to apologize, albeit, a bit confused.

“Easton’s almost ready for a nap,” He cuts her off as he checks his watch, it didn’t really matter what time it was, he was done.

“My bedroom-“

“No, I’m going home,” Harry shakes his head, turning on his heel. He has the decency to look back and say, “Sorry, mom. I just can’t be here.”

Easton was currently being held by his Aunt Jane, he was starting to fuss because he had a bottle not too long ago and he was starting to get cranky.

“Alright, we’re going to head out. East needs his nap,” Harry announces, hiking on the diaper bag, and starting to walk over.

“Oh, we barely see him! Just a few more minutes with this little one. You can hold off his nap for a little!” His Aunt Jane jokingly holds him tighter for a minute and nothing right now is funny to Harry.

Harry doesn’t get loud but his voice gets steely as he reaches down and scoops Easton up from her lap, “Don’t tell me how to take care of my baby, understood?”

His poor aunt is taken aback, just like his mom, and nods.

Harry storms out without another glance back, ignoring the whispers about how odd he was acting and rude.

When he straps Easton in, the dark bubble in belly subsides for a moment- like sun breaking through storm clouds.

“Daaa,” Easton coos, happy but tired, tucking his binky back between his lips.

“Good job, baby,” Harry sniffles, blinking up towards the sky to keep the tears away, “Fuck, get it together.”

Harry had to pepper at least ten kisses on Easton’s warm, sleepy face before he’s able to close the door and get in the driver’s seat.

Harry presses on the console touch screen, calling YN, and he frowns when it goes straight to voicemail which was very unlike her.

He tries again.

Voicemail.

He pulls out his phone, trying to check her location, and it hasn’t updated in the past hour - it was just unusual for her phone to die, always on standby but he tries not to worry.

YN was probably still very pissed off at him, if he was to bet, she put her phone on ‘do not disturb’ so that she could take a well deserved nap and not be bothered.

Harry squeezes the steering wheel, reminding himself once again, “Pull yourself together.”

But in the back of his mind, an anxious thought pops in, well multiple.

What is YN is leaving you?

What if she’s sick of not having you around as much as other wives have their husbands?

First time you see her in a week and you treat her like shit. You really think she’ll stay?

Harry has never once thought like that, even when they’ve gotten in serious fights but god damn, he couldn’t stop his mind from going a million miles a minute, and it felt like shit.

Nothing was wrong.

Everything felt like it’s crumbling.

[writingquestionsanswered]

I used to love writing when I was in high school, but stopped after I graduated because of life. Now, after almost a decade, I want to get back into it but I don't know how. I have so many ideas but I tend to bounce around the same variations and don't know how to stick to one thing, or how to just get back into the rhythm of writing actively. Or even reading actively.

Any advice?

Getting Back to Reading and Writing

What you're experiencing is what I like to think of as "the creative zoomies."

After so long away from actively reading and writing, there's now this flood of ideas, plans, books you want to read, and stories you want to write. You can't settle and focus on a single thing because your brain wants to do ALL THE THINGS, so you keep bouncing back and forth between things hoping something will stick.

First things first... DEEP BREATH.

As I said in an earlier post, remember: there is no ticking clock. It may feel like there is, sometimes, but we're just little ants on a planet doing our things. There are no deadlines unless you sign up for any, and you don't have to worry about that right now.

So... start by taking an honest look at your schedule and your life, and see if you can figure out a realistic estimate of how much time you have in a given week. Where are there slots of time you can dedicate to writing? How about reading?

Next, it can be immensely helpful if you have a comfortable, relaxing space, free from distraction and interruption, where you can go to write. Some people like to go write at a coffee shop or library to get away from family shenanigans or bothersome housemates. If it's not a billion degrees where you are, you might also try your patio, yard, or a nearby park. Listening to soft music or "ambience rooms" (tons on YouTube) through headphones can also help you focus. There are also still some different apps and programs for distraction free writing. Just make sure to save often and keep a master document on your computer to prevent losing all your work in case the app or program gets glitchy. Also: put your phone on silent, turn off your internet if you must, and let people know not to bother you. This is your writing time... don't be afraid to guard it fiercely.

As for choosing ideas, I'm a big fan of the old-fashioned methods... random number pickers, drawing out of a hat, rolling dice... But you can also do a process of elimination based on what appeals to you the most. If you get it down to two, and then you're disappointed with the one you're left with, you know the one you just eliminated is the right idea to go with.

If you're not sure what to write, try doing some writing prompts. There are lots available online and there are some great books with writing prompts. Doing one a day can be a great way to get yourself back in the habit of writing again.

As for reading, start by reading during moments of spare time, such as if you're taking a bath, riding your stationary bike, sitting in a waiting room, or riding public transportation. You can even read during your morning coffee or your lunch break. Also, embrace the world of audio books. This is one of my favorite ways to read, because I can do it while I'm exercising, showering, cleaning, cooking, driving, doing projects... I get through so many more books by listening to audio books. More than anything, just remember that once again, there's no ticking clock. You don't have to finish a certain number of books before the end of the year. Read what you want, at the pace that works for you, and don't be afraid to DNF if a book isn't working for you.

I hope this helps!

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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