#like i know what the carpet in the autos feel like i spent hours sitting on it waiting in line

[novemberthee5th]

-

[suituuup]

pieces - chapter six

Five years ago, Chloe dropped off the face of the Earth. Beca didn’t expect to see her again dancing in a strip club, out of all places.

rated: E (drug use and emotional abuse in early chapters)

ao3 link

*

Chloe didn’t register any of it. Her ears were buzzing with adrenaline and her body felt like it wasn’t even her own anymore, but her legs worked on auto-pilot as she followed Beca to the car. 

As Jesse drove away from the club and Chloe somewhat calmed down, the situation slowly dawned onto her, sending her thoughts into a spiral. 

She had just fled from Marco. She probably didn’t have a job anymore. She was homeless. 

But before she could full-on panic, a gloved hand slid inside of hers, grounding her some. Her eyes flickered up and met Beca’s. “You’re okay. We’re heading to my apartment, you’ll stay in my guest bedroom.” 

All Chloe could muster was a weak nod. All of this felt surreal.

They arrived at Beca’s place less than ten minutes later, Jesse taking a left and driving into an underground parking lot. Once the car was parked, Chloe stepped out, standing back while Beca told Jesse to drive himself home and that she would come to pick up her car tomorrow. 

“I’m up on the twelfth floor,” Beca said as she hit the elevator button. 

“Is your hand okay?” Chloe asked, only remembering now that Beca punched Marco. 

Beca made a fist then splayed out her fingers, wincing a bit. “It’s not broken at least. I’ll be fine.” 

They stepped inside the elevator, Chloe’s eyes remaining fastened to the carpet as it rode up to the right floor. She followed Beca down the hall and stood back while she unlocked her door. Chloe stepped inside after her, her eyes scanning the huge open-plan space with floor to ceiling windows. 

She remained by the entrance while Beca went to get something from the kitchen, reappearing with something wrapped in a kitchen towel. “For your cheek.” 

Chloe nodded, taking it and pressing it to her cheekbone. 

“The bedroom is right there down the hall,” Beca directed, motioning for Chloe to follow her. She hooked a right and hit the lights, revealing a soberly decorated large room with a queen-sized bed. “I’ll go get you some clothes to sleep in.” 

Chloe nodded, stepping further inside the room and lowering herself on the edge of the mattress. She realized she was shaking slightly, but she couldn’t tell if it was from leftover adrenaline or her body starting to crave a hit. 

“Here,” Beca said as she rounded the corner, setting a pair of folded sweatpants, a simple t-shirt, and her Barden hoodie down on the comforter. “The bathroom is right across the hall, I put some clean towels on the counter if you want to take a shower, and a toothbrush. I have my own bathroom so feel free to use this one whenever you want. Help yourself to anything, the kitchen cupboards are stocked up with plenty of snacks and the fridge with sodas.” 

“Okay,” Chloe whispered, briefly meeting Beca’s eyes. “Thank you.” 

“You don’t need to thank me,” Beca assured her softly, casting her a small smile. “I’m heading to bed. I’ll see you in the morning?” 

Once again, Chloe nodded. She watched Beca step out of the room and stared blankly at the wall in front of her for a while until she started feeling the physical toll of the night’s events creep up on her. She stood up, stepping out of her stripper heels and unzipping her dress. A shower would wait until morning. After changing into the spare clothes Beca had lent her, Chloe swung by the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her heavy make-up off. 

She crawled into bed a few minutes later, willing her body and mind to relax enough that she would find some sleep. The next hour was spent tossing and turning, trying to silence her craving for cocaine and her visceral need to bolt. 

But she didn’t have anywhere safe to go, or any money to buy anything. 

Chloe slipped out of bed and crossed the hall to the bathroom, opening the faucet and cupping her hands under it to gather some water to splash her face with. 

“Snap out of it,” she muttered to herself as she stared at her own reflection in the mirror, gripping the edges of the counter with both hands. 

Dark circles were permanently etched under her eyes from sleep deprivation thanks to the cocaine allowing her to go days without resting. Her cheeks were hollowed out from her weight loss and her skin a ghostly pale. She looked nearly ten years older than her actual age. 

Familiar voices wormed their way into her mind, chanting, whispering, cackling devilishly. 

Worthless. Ugly. Dumb.

A sob echoed against the bathroom walls as Chloe let go of the counter to hold her head between her hands, fingers pulling on her hair. 

“Pull yourself together,” she mumbled next as her mind warred with those parasites having made a home in her subconscious. “They’re lying.” 

Chloe knew trying to sleep was a lost battle, so she padded to the living room. If she couldn’t have cocaine, alcohol was the next best thing. Something strong, preferably, something that could muffle all those insecurities.

It took her less than two minutes to find Beca’s liquor cabinet, and she fished out a bottle of whiskey, plucking a tumbler from the cupboard above the sink. She reached for the remote and turned on the TV at a low volume so she could focus on something else than her own thoughts, settling for CNN as she poured herself a third of the glass and knocked it back. 

Familiar, comforting warmth filled her belly and spread to her limbs and chest as Chloe poured herself another, nursing this one slowly as she curled up on Beca’s couch. It took four drinks for exhaustion to gain the upper hand on Chloe’s anxiety, and she fell asleep on the couch, the near-empty bottle sitting on the coffee table. 

She woke up sometime later to someone shaking her shoulder. The light was bright behind her closed lids, and Chloe scrunched up her nose, curling up tighter on herself. 

“Chloe, wake up.” 

That voice didn’t belong to Marco. The realization drew Chloe’s mind from its foggy state and she opened her eyes to find Beca sitting in front of her. Slightly disoriented, Chloe slowly sat up. She caught sight of the bottle and guilt coupled with shame surged her insides. “I’ll--I’ll replace that.” 

Beca frowned. “What? No, that’s-- you don’t need to do that.” 

Chloe’s shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t-- I was craving something, and…” she trailed off, inhaling sharply as she felt her chest constrict and tears burn her eyes. “I think-- I think I need help.” 

It was odd, that feeling of instant relief as soon as she uttered the words. As though a huge weight she didn’t know was there just lifted from her chest. 

“Okay.” Beca reached out to set her hand on Chloe’s knee. Her expression was soft, her eyes warm, and Chloe immediately felt comforted. “We’ll get you help. I was on the phone with a rehab upstate earlier, they have a spot on Monday.” 

Monday. As in three days from now. 

“I can’t-- I don’t have fifty grand, Beca, and there’s--there’s--” She cut herself off, shaking her head as emotions rose to her throat and made her voice waver. She needed to work. She needed to provide for her dad. “I have to work.” Upon catching Beca’s confused look, Chloe sucked in another deep breath. “My--my dad is sick. He has late-onset MS and they can’t afford treatment on their own.” 

Realization dawned on Beca’s features as she nodded slowly, empathy swirling in her gaze. “How much money is the treatment?” 

“I give them two thousand dollars a month to cover what’s left after insurance.” 

“Do you know their bank account information?” Beca asked as she grabbed her phone, swiping her thumb over the screen to unlock it. “I’ll set up an automatic transfer each first of the month.” 

Chloe’s mouth slowly opened in shock. “What?” She croaked out, her bottom lip trembling. “I can’t ask you to pay for it.” 

“You didn’t,” Beca said softly, glancing up. “I’m offering. And I’m covering the rehab cost as well.” 

Chloe blinked twice in slow succession. “I don’t-- I don’t--” she started to object, but reason quickly gained the upper hand. She couldn’t afford any of those things, and she couldn’t afford to stay like this, either. She was legitimately afraid she might die if she continued down that path. “I don’t know what to say except thank you, but that doesn’t seem like enough. I’ll pay you back though. Every cent of it.” 

“I don’t want you to worry about that,” Beca murmured, squeezing her knee gently as she gae Chloe a tight-lipped smile. “The best way you can thank me is by focusing on getting better.” 

A few tears rolled down Chloe’s cheeks, and she was at a loss for words for a little while as her heart swelled in her chest. 

She hadn’t felt that in a long time. 

“So um, next Monday?” She asked then, swiping her thumbs over her cheeks. 

“Yeah. It’s an hour drive away, I took my Monday morning off to drive you. The program is thirty days,” Beca explained. “The nurse I had on the phone told me that detoxing yourself on your own before that could be dangerous and advised against it. I wasn’t sure… what type of drug you’re taking, but she said it didn’t matter. You could go through a cold turkey kind of thing and while I’m not exactly comfortable with you continuing to use until then, it’s what’s best, according to her.” 

Chloe sniffled. “I don’t have any with me. Some of my stash is at the club and the rest is at Marco’s place.” 

“Right, um… do you know when he isn’t there? You probably need to get some stuff, right?” 

“He’s at the club most nights. Usually gets there from 9 pm, so we could go after?”

“I’ll text Luke and Jesse to come with us for reinforcements in case he’s there. I kneed the guy in the balls, he must be pretty pissed.” Beca cleared her throat, eyeing Chloe. “Will you be okay until tonight? You know, without taking anything?” 

Chloe nodded. “I’ll manage. I just need distractions or else I get really agitated.” 

“Okay. I can definitely help with that,” Beca said, taking her hand back. “I was gonna make breakfast, are you hungry?” 

“No, not really. I could drink a coffee, though? After I shower.” 

Beca smiled and pushed to her feet. “You got it. Take your time.” 

Trusting other people had been a recurring issue for Chloe in the past few years, but she willed herself not to start doubting Beca’s intentions. After her shower, Chloe headed back to the main room, her step faltering upon walking past an open door. She tentatively peered inside, quickly realizing this was Beca’s office. Her eyes popped wider at the sight of the five gramophones sitting on a shelf, among framed gold and platinum records. 

She stepped further inside to take a closer look, her heart making a painful lurch as her gaze fell on a picture of the Bellas after their first ICCA win. Chloe reached out to pluck the frame off the surface, a wave of nostalgia sweeping over her as she thought back to that day. 

“You okay?” 

Chloe jumped a little, glancing over her shoulder as she hastily but carefully placed the frame back where it had been. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry.” 

“It’s fine, Chlo,” Beca assured her softly. She nodded towards the leather couch in the corner. “Have a seat, I’ll bring you your coffee.” 

Chloe nodded and crossed the room, admiring the hundreds of records neatly tucked in a built-in library on the opposite wall. 

“You can pick something to listen to, if you want,” Beca told her when she returned with two cups, twin curls of steam rising from them. She set Chloe’s on the small table in front of the couch and curled up on one end while Chloe picked a record. She ended up going for Rumours, one of her all-time favorite albums, and took it out, setting it on the record player. 

The opening chords of Dreams filled the room as she lowered the stylus on the edge, and she padded to the couch, cradling her mug between her palms. 

“Fleetwood Mac. Always been one of your favorite,” Beca observed with a soft expression as she lifted her mug to take a sip. “How are you feeling?” 

“I’m okay.” Chloe knew the first telltale signs of craving would hit her sometime around midday, but she would hang in there. “You made it, huh? To the top?” 

Beca broke eye-contact, her cheeks reddening. “I was lucky to come across amazing people throughout my career.” 

Chloe knew Beca’s sheer amount of raw talent was the root of her success, but Beca still seemed to be her humble self. “Do you speak to Aubrey often?” 

“Once in a while. More so in the past two weeks as we tried to figure out a way to help you. Otherwise, we still have the group chat, and we’re planning a reunion this summer.” 

“Oh,” Chloe let out upon finding out the girls still hung out together. Her heart ached in her chest over everything she had missed, but she only had herself to blame for that one.

“And you’ll be there,” Beca added with a soft smile. “With us.” 

Chloe swallowed the lump forming in her throat; the road to recovery was bound to be a long and tumultuous journey, but maybe having a goal in sight was what she needed to stay on track during low moments. 

“The nurse said cellphones wouldn’t be allowed for the first two weeks, but I’ll give you Aubrey’s number for the next two, okay? She would love to hear from you.” 

Chloe nodded, her lips curling in a hint of a smile. “Yeah, okay.”

She spent the rest of the afternoon hauled up in Beca’s office (she weirdly felt at ease there), curled up on the couch and listening to soothing records as her body and mind battled against an array of negative feelings and sensations. 

Around 10 pm, she and Beca drove to Marco’s place accompanied by Luke and Jesse. Chloe kept a key under the mat for those nights she was so drunk or high she usually forgot them at the club and was grateful to find it there. 

“I’ll be quick,” she told Beca, heading into the bedroom to get a duffle bag from the bottom of the dresser and throwing a bunch of comfy clothes into it. 

She knew that even if Marco did come home nothing would happen with Luke and Jesse being there, but that didn’t stop sweat from trickling down her back as she grabbed her essentials as quickly as she could. 

“Okay. I’ve got everything,” she said as she met them by the door about five minutes later, slightly out of breath. Her anxiety was through the roof, not lessening even when they got back into the car, but she tried not to let it show. 

It was only when she was able to take a hit back at Beca’s apartment that Chloe was able to calm herself down. 

“Are you alright?” Beca asked a while later when Chloe eventually emerged. 

She sat on the living-room couch, her laptop balanced on her thighs. 

Chloe nodded, tugging on her sleeves as she shuffled to sit on the end of it. She didn’t take as much as she used to, not seeking that euphoric state she needed while she was at work. Just enough to deal with the darkness swirling inside her. “Thank you.” 

“Are you hungry? I was thinking of ordering pizza, with pineapple on one half for you weirdo.” 

Chloe snickered. “Yeah, I could eat a little.” 

Monday came before Chloe realized. She packed a bag and slid in beside Beca, staring out the window most of the drive as they headed upstate. Nerves sprouted in her belly as Beca parked in front of the fancy-looking facility, and Chloe puffed out a breath. 

Beca cast her a reassuring smile. “I’ll go check in with you.” 

Nodding, Chloe stepped out and grabbed her bag from the trunk, slinging it over her shoulder. They walked through the glass sliding doors and headed towards the desk, where a friendly-looking man greeted them. 

“Hi, my name is Chloe Beale, I’m here, um, to start rehab.” 

She felt Beca’s fingers gently wrap around hers as the man checked his computer, and let her tense shoulders sag. 

“Right this way, I’ll show you to your room, Ms. Beale. Your friend can come, too.” 

“Thank you.” 

She didn’t let go of Beca’s hand as they followed the employee up some stairs and down the hall. The room was bright and spacious, with a queen-sized bed and an amazing view of the forest behind the building. Chloe set her bag down on the mattress and looked around as the man went through basic rules, giving him her phone when requested. Chloe would be allowed to call someone during bad days with the phone downstairs, though.

He left shortly after, and Chloe inhaled sharply as she turned towards Beca. “I guess I’ll write you a letter?” She asked, her voice wavering slightly. 

“I’d love that,” Beca murmured. “You’re going to nail this, Chlo. I’m just a phone call away if you need to talk, alright?” 

Chloe nodded. “Yeah.” She stepped up to Beca and pulled her into a hug, closing her eyes as she relished in their closeness. “I’ll see you in a month.” 

Beca backed away, smiling. Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “I’m so proud of you for doing this,” she whispered, squeezing Chloe’s hand as she took a step back. “See you in a month.” 

Chloe fought to hold onto her emotions until the door shut behind Beca, breaking down as soon as silence surrounded her. 

For the first time in six years, she was on her own, and the month ahead might be her hardest challenge, yet.

[babbushka]

If it’s an option to have Flip give you his dick in a box, please sign me up! I’d love to request that for a holiday prompt, if you’re willing! Thank you! 🖤🖤🖤

(1.6k, NSFW (blow job/face-fucking, grinding/boot riding, fingering & comeshot), okay I have over a dozen requests for this now lmao. This is crack and it’s all @safarigirlsp & @lumberjack00fantasies fault !)

You come home from running a couple errands to find that Flip’s truck is already parked in the driveway. That was strange, you thought, because he wasn’t supposed to be home for a few more hours. For a minute, you wonder if everything’s okay, if something had happened at work for him to be home so early, but then you figure no, he would’ve called you if it were something serious. Shifting the big brown paper bag of groceries onto your hip as you close and lock the door, you hear a sort of rustling coming from the blackness of the living room.

“Flip?” You call, stepping out of your shoes and setting your bags down.

“In here ketsl.” Your husband’s smooth deep voice sounds from the living room where you heard the rustling, and you put your hands on your hips as you walk through the foyer.

“Honey why is it so dark in here?” You’re confused, but the moment that you step down into the sunken living room, the fireplace roars to life.

Your eyebrows shoot up, because illuminated by the fire, lying on his side on the plush shag carpet in all his glory is your husband. He’s dressed boots and all, got one of his hands propping his head up, but the other is holding a very…strategically placed present in front of his crotch.

“Hey, honey-bunny. I got something real important to give you.” Flip winks, “So, just sit down.. and listen.”

You take a seat on the couch, knowing that whatever he’s got planned, is certain to be the start of a wild evening.

Flip reaches over to the record player and drops the needle, and all of a sudden a groovy tune starts to play, something smooth and slow and sensual, and he clears his throat.

“Baby, you know we been together, such a long, long time…” Flip begins to sing, and your brows have a hard time coming back down to Earth, because your man hasn’t sung unprompted since the summer of ’67.

“Uh huh,” You try your very best not to laugh at whatever the fuck he’s doing.

“…And now I’m ready, to lay it on the li-ine.” Flip continues, in that deep deep voice of his that has you wondering if he’s pranking you. “You know it’s Christmas, and my heart is open wide, I’m gonna give you something, so you know what’s on my mind.”

“Did – when did you have time to rehearse this?” You look around, wondering if Jimmy is going to pop out from behind the couch with a video camera or something, but Flip gets up, holds the present as he saunters over to you while you continue, “We don’t celebrate Christmas.”

He takes a step to the beat, his hips swaying along.

“It’s a gift that’s real special, so take off the top.” He stops in front of you and his hips cant towards you as he encourages, “Take a look inside…”

You pull the ribbon off of it, and lift the lid and your hand flies up to your mouth because: “That’s your dick, in a box.”

Flip looks so pleased with himself, so pleased with this present of his, that he has to physically restrain himself from fist-bumping the air. You have no idea what’s gotten into him, he’s never done anything like this before – did he lose a bet?

Flip’s song isn’t over though, and now that you’ve seen his big gift, his hips buck along to the music as he continues to serenade you;

“Not gonna get you a diamond ring, that sort of gift don’t mean anything. I’m not not gonna get you a fancy car, girl, you gotta know you’re my shining star. Not gonna get you a house in the hills, a girl like you needs something real. I want to get you something from the heart, something special, girl.” Flip closes his eyes and lets himself feel the music, before pointing to his cock, “That’s right, it’s my dick in a box.”

He’s looking at you, eager for your reaction, and you realize he’s being earnest.

The music keeps playing as you reach inside the box, wrap your hand around his hard dick. How long has he been hard to keep it up? When did he come home and set all this up? You have a million questions, but all of them fly out the window when you shimmy the box off his cock, the proud curve of it nearly smacking you in the face.

Without saying anything, you lick a fat stripe up his shaft, and Flip pitches forward just a little, not expecting you to dive right in.

“Do you like it?” Flip asks, wagging it in your face, making it smack lightly at your cheek.

“You’re insane,” You firmly grasp his hard hard cock, making his whole evening when you laugh out, “But yes, I like it.”

You like it so much in fact, that you want it in your mouth immediately. Your tongue runs over the thick bulging veins as you slink off the couch and land on your knees on the carpet. The box with the huge hole on the side of it resting on the floor nearly takes you out of the sexy mood, but then Flip’s hand scratches against your scalp, and you look up at him with wide, innocent eyes.

You suck at the head of his cock, watching him bite at his lip, watching his chest start to heave from how hard he’s breathing. He must’ve been edging himself for ages, and you didn’t want him to have to wait anymore.

“Oh fuck.” Flip groans out as you begin unbuttoning your blouse. From his angle above you, he can see straight down your bra, your cleavage pushed together from your pretty bra.

You only smile a little, before letting your eyes close, head bobbing up and down over his cock. Your hand makes up for the few inches you can’t fit just yet, your spit lubing it up enough that the slip and slide is easy on his shaft.

“Mmm,,” Jerking him off and sucking his cock, you moan around him, and that makes Flip’s grip on your hair a little harder.

He shuffles closer to you, his jeans falling down his strong thighs just a little bit from no longer being held up by the box. There’s something so fucking hot about Flip with his jeans open, that dark happy trail scruffy over the tense muscle of his stomach. You take more of his cock down your throat, your other hand moving to rub against his thigh.

“I’m gonna fuck you hard tonight baby,” Flip promises, holding your head steady as he thrusts in and out of your throat, and you try your best not to choke on him, “Gonna make you fuckin’ scream with this cock.”

You only moan and nod, your pussy starting to clench and drip in your panties. If Flip is getting off, you don’t see any reason that you shouldn’t either, so you pull his leg forward and begin to grind your hips against the shiny toe of his new boots that you got him for Hanukkah this year.  

“Jesus ketsl.” Flip grunts as you moan from the friction on your pussy, your clit throbbing. His thrusts speed up, until he’s fucking your face on auto-pilot, hips seeking the tight clutch of your throat, “You’re gonna come like this? Just like this? My cock down your throat?”

“Mmmmhmmm,” You take whatever he gives you, focusing on your own pleasure, on the way he pushes his foot up onto his heel and gives you a better angle to undulate your hips down onto his boot.

Your hands have an iron grip on his jeans, your eyes watering from the sheer overwhelming feeling of his cock down your throat, your pussy desperate to be filled the same way. He had promised, but you want it now, want to be fucked hard now.

“I’m – fuck, I’m going to come.” Flip’s stomach flutters and tenses in front of your face, and you know he’s close. You prep yourself for the taste of his come, but he shakes his head, practically drools all over himself as he watches your breasts bounce, “Gonna come all over these perfect tits.”

Only a few moments later, he’s pulling out of you carefully, and you gasp down harsh breaths, your throat raspy.

“Shit,” Flip spills himself all over your cleavage, watches as it splatters and lands on your flesh, the hot white ropes sticky. He sighs and shudders out his pleasure, reveling in the debauchery of it all.

“Get me off? Please?” You’re close too, your panties smearing your slick all over his boots, desperate for him, for anything he’ll give you.

Flip pushed you gently onto your back and shoves his hand into your soaking wet panties, thrusts three of his fingers into your aching pulsing cunt, one thumb on your clit and fingers you hard and fast until your thighs are trembling, toes curling, back arching out your orgasm.

He collapses down next to do, the both of you spent…for now.

The fireside crackles steadily, the record player having finished its song long ago. That damn box is still lying on the floor, the half-hazardly cut hole in the side reminding you of all this all started in the first place.

You break out into bright laughter, and Flip joins in, the both of you covered in come and sweat and filled with absurd joy. He certainly was something, your husband, you grin into his armpit as he hugs you close.

And even though you don’t really celebrate this holiday, you can’t help but think that maybe it was okay, just this once.

[joshslater]

Werehick

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I don’t know when it actually started. I had been aware of time slipping for me occasionally. I might have thought it was Sunday and it turned out to be Monday, but I had shrugged them off as a result of stress. The alternative would have been some mental disorder, and you really don’t want to go there in your self diagnosing. It wasn’t until after the “break in” it started to become a regular occurrence. A serious one as well. Best I knew I woke up Saturday morning to a trashed apartment. Well, not totally trashed, but a few items broken, lots of things moved around, empty beer cans on the floor, some money missing.

I was shocked I managed to sleep through whatever had transpired in my apartment, and a little scared to what could have happened, what could have been done to me. Perhaps something had been done to me? Perhaps that was why I slept through it all. I couldn’t figure out any reason for it. Sneak into someones apartment, at great risk, tranquilize the sleeping resident, and then throw a party. Did they use sleep gas, like they do when they rob truckers sleeping at truck stops?

It was when I decided to call the cops I got the chills. The phone said it was Monday morning. The whole weekend gone! I decided the police had to wait, as I hurried to work. I got there enough on time to not be suspicious, but obviously I spent the entire day thinking of little else. As a creative writer at an ad agency my hours are flexible, and as long as I deliver in time and at quality no one cares, but it would still be weird to not show up at all. But I barely managed to do anything useful while there. I felt tired, mentally drain, and sore in my muscles, as if the adrenaline of the morning had a lingering effect. Above all, questions and thoughts kept popping up. Do I need to change locks? Are there now drugs stashed in my apartment? Did they do something else to me? Is that why I feel funny? Do I need to schedule a doctors appointment? What would I say that wouldn’t lock me up?

Cleaning up in the apartment took less time than I had feared, and once done I realized there was even less for the police to do. What was the crime? Where was the evidence? As the days passed, it was almost like it hadn’t happened. Oh, how wrong I was.

A couple of weeks later it happened again, only this time I woke up wearing someone else’s clothes. It smelled like sweat and auto repair shop even before I opened my eyes, and I practically jumped out of bed when I looked at myself. A worn under armour hoodie, filthy, threadbare jeans, and workers boots, splattered with caked mud. There was a light brown outline on the sheets where my body had rubbed dust into the fabric.

I could feel my heard pounding, as I ran through the rooms of my apartment to see if anyone was still there. Only later did I realize I didn’t have a plan for what to do if I had found someone. As before the place was a mess, but I sensed more things were missing.

I rushed into the bathroom and started to rip off the clothes. I smelled like someone else, I looked like someone else, and I hated it. I felt violated, somehow. This wasn’t just drawing a dick with a sharpie on someone drunk. I threw the hoodie on the floor. I tried to pull off the boots, heel against toe, but it didn’t work. I almost felt trapped that I couldn’t just throw off all the shit that was on me. I sat down on the toilet and frantically tried to untie the knots on the boots. It for sure took longer than if I had been calm. It didn’t help that I saw dirt under my finger nails. Once the first boot was off I reeled back from the smell of stale foot juice. Someone else’s warm boot smell, and on my foot, a thick, grey sock. I yanked it off, fast as I could, and did the same on the other foot.

Though the end was near, I just felt more and more trapped. The jeans had a belt with a belt buckle large as my hand. I undid it, and undid the buttons. The worst for last. Under the jeans I wore a jockstrap. Not any of the sexualized neon-pink ones from a pride parade. No, some disgusting, once white jockstrap with a few blue and red lines on the waist band. I got out of the jeans, and then as quickly as possible pulled off the jockstrap and thew it in the heap with the other shit.

My heart was still racing, the room smelled of feet and sweat and diesel, and my sight was transfixed on the pile of clothes on the floor. It took probably a minute to calm down. I looked in the mirror. There was a clear dirt line where the hoodie ended and my neck started. Determined I walk out of the bathroom to the kitchen to get a plastic bag. I needed to put all of the clothes away before I started to shower. I shuddered to imagine what damp air would to do them and the smell they would give off.

It started out brownish and took a while until the water running into the shower drain was clear. Only then did I start with soap. One full body pass with hard soap and one with some liquid soap. Then two thorough shampooings and finally one pass conditioner, something I rarely use. But I felt like I needed it this time.

I wasn’t at all surprised to find that it was again Monday, not Saturday, when I checked my smartphone. I made a deal with my project manager on Slack to work from home. I needed to vacuum and wet wipe the entire apartment to get the dirt out, figure out what was missing, and try to figure out what the hell was going on.

Assessing the damage I could immediately see that my hunch of things missing was true. A few art pieces were gone, and most of my formal clothes as well. It was just bizarre. The state of my apartment didn’t make sense either. It didn’t look like someone had thrown a party, but rather as if they had squatted there. Rifled through my stuff like a burglar, but also lounged around, dragging dirt all over my carpets and furniture. I was trying to think back to the last time it happened, what was different from then. This was like a serial killer story on CSI. They keep getting bolder and bolder after each kill, at least in the show. Did this guy, whoever he was, think his method was perfected enough that he could come and go as he wished. Even mock me by dressing me up. Who knows when he’ll...

I dropped everything and checked my phone calendar. This was the last weekend of the month, and last time it had happened was also the last weekend of the month. I flipped back through the month in the calendar, desperately trying to remember anything about the previous times I had lost track of time. For all the ones I could remember anything about, they had all been the last weekend of the month. So that was his pattern. How had I not seen that before? All I needed was some go pro or something. Motion activated, long battery time. I was doing some of my best work in a long time that afternoon. “Perhaps you should work from home more often” my project lead told me on slack.

It was such a roller coaster of a day, I reflected, as I took my second shower. Despite having thrown away the clothes, that smell of sweat lingered. Probably my imagination, but I had also spent several hours scrubbing floors, so my body was sore all over. I felt like I’ve had quite a workout, which probably was true. As I let the water wash over me I was thinking of all the different places to put cameras in the apartment. I wanted as few as possible, for cost reasons of course, but have as wide and good coverage as possible, yet be hard to find.

Something had not gone according to plan. I had purchased the cameras well in advance, tried them out, and checked the footage. All great. I had put limits on my credit cards. Made backups of my computer. Hid away some of the more valuable items. Everything was set when I went to bed. I was nervous, sure, but fully expected to wake up with the face of my tormentor recorded. At least I had expected to wake up at home.

This looked like a scrap yard, and my bed had been a bunch of cut up cardboard boxes. It took some minutes to get my bearings. My entire body felt stiff. I must have slept here, in the cold, on the hard surface all night, and I didn’t have much clothes on either. A tattered T-shirt, just as distressed jeans, and a pair of OK jogging shoes. I smelled like I hadn’t showered all week. Looking to my left I could see a camera on a rack of junk, looking back at me. It might even be one of the ones I bought and hid. So much for that attempt.

As I got up to get it, I something more than just soreness, and looked again at myself. Since when was I this ripped? My arms were way larger than when I went to sleep. My work is sitting with a lap top, writing almost the same thing over and over. I don’t have veins that pops. There is nothing that bulges when I bend my arms. Apparently I do now. Even without a mirror I could tell the rest of the body had changed just as much as well. What the hell is going on?

I stood up and walked a step to the camera. Everything felt wrong. My center of gravity was somehow off. My pose was different. My gait was different. It’s like my newly gotten muscles forced me to move differently, or they would rub against my body, stopping them. The small camera was recording, but I had no means to view it here, wherever I was. I stopped it, grabbed it and started to look for an exit.

After a few minutes of random turns in the heaps of trash I found a clearing and an open gate. An older man in a neat, but worn, blue coverall sat in a plastic chair, reading some papers and drinking coffee from a cup of out of place fancy china.

- Kyle! Here this early? I didn’t even know you were here.

Kyle? Who is this man mistaking me for? No time to figure that out. I have no idea where I am, what time it is, or how to get home, and I need to get there before anyone gets suspicious.

- The early bird. What time is it anyway? - It’s 5... 48.

I thanked him and exited. Once outside of the gates I started to recognize where I were. This was the industrial park south-west of the city. Lots of small and medium companies have lots there. The other kind of “lots”. God, and I’m a copywriter. It would be almost an hour walk to get home from here. I started to pat my pockets to see if I had any money or anything on me, and almost jumped and yelped.

I have a monster cock. It’s huge! You don’t just suddenly grow a large penis in your twenties. Certainly not while sleeping through a weekend. I just realized that perhaps I was wrong there too. It could be a year later for all I knew. I might not even have an apartment to come back to. I found my keys in my right front pocket and some wrinkled cash in my left.

I managed to find a bus stop at the outskirts of the park, with a bus passing every 30 minutes according to the posted schedule. I reckoned that even if I had just missed a bus, it would still be faster to wait for the next. Thankfully it was deserted. People would be travelling to their work at this hour, and most would come by car anyway. So I got to stand there and be self conscious all by myself. What a crude and obscene sight I must be, perhaps less so out here with literal blue collar workers, but at least pushing it. I couldn’t wait to incinerate these tattered clothes, and scrub myself an hour in the shower to get rid of this stench of man and machine parts. I just realized I would be on public transport in this state. Perhaps walking would be preferable after all.

At that moment the bus just rounded the bend in the distance. It would be weird to not take it now. The bus came to a stop just in front of me, and two hispanic looking men stepped off at the rear and I stepped on. I picked up my wad of cash and asked the driver how much for a single to town center.

- Travel card or travel app only.

I didn’t move, trying to come up with something to convince him to take me anyway. Pay him personally perhaps.

- Just take a seat.

The bus took a depressing sight seeing tour of our declining manufacturing industries before heading back into town. I can see from the time, date and temperature a gas station sign that it is just Monday two days later from when I went to sleep. Whatever had happened, happened during those 72 or so hours. My normally noisy mind was quiet. I couldn’t come up with any explanation for what was going on. Some 24 minutes later, according to the bus clock, I was reasonably close to home to walk.

Predictably my home was in a mess when I opened the door. On the floor were pieces of smashed surveillance cameras mixed with dried dirt, ripped papers, shredded clothes and other parts of my life smashed to bits. At least my laptop was unharmed, sitting on the living room table. I would have to deal with the rest of the apartment later, but my immediate concern was the camera I brought with me. I connected a USB cable between it and the laptop, and the vendor app started automatically.

The software showed the final frame of the video, with me pressing the off button at the junkyard. Fuck, I looked terrible, and almost unrecognizably different. I clicked at the start of the progress bar and the image switched to an interior view of my apartment, from what I thought had been a clever place in the bookcase to hide the camera. Into view walked me, in only underwear. Was I sleepwalking? What was this? The me in the video looked like how I remembered myself from this Friday, but he walked “looser”, for lack of a better term. He, I, looked furious.

- What the fuck is this shit? Yo spying on me now, fucking lib? Making your own fucking government spy program?

He was holding another camera in his hand, and threw it at the wall, showering the room with cheap, Chinese plastic shards.

- Just typical of you people, ain’t it? Can’t stay out of honest folks lives. I’ll fucking show you then. All this bullshit has to go. “Ooooo! Look at mee! I type on a compuuuter for living!”

He spat a large glob of spit somewhere on the floor off camera.

- I’ll butt into your life then. See how you like that? I’ll show you what a real fucking american looks like.

And he reached out to the camera and pressed the off button. It instantly cut to almost complete darkness. He could just barely make out the outline of a man moving, illuminated by the far distant sodium light. The camera then did cuts after cuts, as the motion detection turned on and off recording. As I fast forwarded It became apparent this was the camera setup recording me as I was sleeping on a stack of cardboard.

I didn’t even watch to the end, but just threw the laptop on the table and looked around in disbelief. “Schizophrenic” was all I could think. That was the only explanation that made sense. Somehow I was switching between me and this douchebag on a set schedule. Or was that imagined also? What about the body? Did I imagine that? Or did I imagine my old body and this was the real one? No, schizophrenic isn’t the word. What’s the real medical one... Multiple Personality Disorder! That’s the one! Fuck! I’ve been off my game all morning. Did my mind change too, and not just the body?

I picked through the devastation of my home. Almost all of my clothes were gone, replaced with distressed and dirty clothes that looked like it belonged to a teenager, mechanic and/or farmer. Most of it off brand, but some fox racing and carhartt stuff looked almost new. Where was all this shit coming from? This time I didn’t just dump everything in a trash bag, but tried to sort through the mess. If this really was a Dr. Jekyll and Kyle situation, perhaps it was best to keep as much of this shit as possible, or he would just drag in more. All of my broken stuff had to go though.

As I got rid of the last torn book pages and shredded tie, I realized that I didn’t actually miss all my stuff. I was more upset with how I lost it. I was just about to head out for lunch when I saw myself in the mirror. I’d spent all morning in that shitty T-shirt, jeans and shoes without thinking about changing. Suddenly I felt dirty again. Damn him!

This time the surprise was that there wasn’t any surprise. I stepped out of the shoes and found I had no socks on me, which felt icky to me. As I started to pull down my jeans I found I didn’t have any underwear either. I stopped at the knees and was transfixed with what I saw. My dick and balls where probably twice my old size. The legs looked stronger than before. I undressed the last part of the jeans just with my legs, and could clearly hear them rip further. Then I grabbed the T-shirt and pulled it off in one motion, and got a good whiff of really strong body odor. The upper body was something else. I had abs. I had pecs. Not huge ones, but well defined. My body had never looked this good before, and probably never would if it had been only up to me. I spent a really long time cleaning myself in the shower. How the fuck was this possible?

Andy was the first one to say something, perhaps even the first one to recognize me.

- Wow! What the hell happened here?! - Morning Andy. Just some workout that paid off. - Bulk payment? Well, you look great. I like the hipster look.

I had washed a pair of carhartt pants and a plaid shirt, brushed some boots clean, and managed to dress close to what one of our art directors looked like, but with muscles. As much as I hated all the crap in my apartment, it did fit my body, and it would take both time and money to replace it all, so I gathered I would use what I could. There was no hiding this body anyway.

It was a weird day in many ways. In one way it was like I was a new employee, with looks and outright stares from women, and a few guys, I didn’t know very well. Some people I had barely talked to before, mostly quite fit men, chatted with me to assess if I would fit in their social circle. And those I worked with the most couldn’t stop giving remarks about my body, some flattering, some jokes, many subtly envious, and several hurtful in the line of meathead and jockywriter.

I was obviously self conscious all the time. Even when I didn’t have eyes glued on me, or remarks woven into every dialogue, I could feel my body in a way I had never done before. I couldn’t sit the same as before. My legs were different. My junk was way different. My arms rubbed against my body in a new way. I felt restless as soon as I begun a task. And above all it felt like all my talent had left the building. I was not being very productive.

It pretty much dragged on like that. Perhaps less with the staring and the remarks, but certainly with my confidence and performance at an all time low. It was self reinforcing. The worse I performed the more certain I was that this was my new peak. As good as it gets. I didn’t bother to buy any new clothes. It felt pointless. At least I was always showing up with clean clothes. I kind of had to, because after a day they stunk.

After two weeks Jared, my boss, took me aside for a lunch meeting in his office. I knew things were going piss poor, and that I hadn’t been upfront with him about it. I made the decision to tell him everything I knew. The lost times, the “break ins”, the abduction to the junk yard, the sudden body changes, and my theory of multiple personality disorder, despite it not explaining everything.

He didn’t say a word while I spoke, and carefully consumed his Vietnamese BBQ baguette, making the appearance of almost not listening at all. Once my story was up to date with the last few days. He was just silently nodding and remained quiet for too many seconds.

- Can I meet him? - Who? - Kyle.

I was surprised. Somehow I hadn’t even thought of that as a possibility. I could never meet him, of course, but someone else could.

- When’s the next full moon? - The what? - The next time Kyle emerge? - Last weekend of the month. Week and a half from now. - We are way behind on cataloging. Boring and non-creative work, I know, but... you know... - Yeah, I know. - Well, you shouldn’t have any problems lifting the boxes at least.

It felt weird having my boss doing an all nighter binging Netflix content in my living room, while I was going to bed in the bedroom, but he was adamant he wanted to do this. So I fell asleep and strangely nothing appeared to be different when I woke up.

I quickly got dressed, blue jeans and fox racing shirt, and found Jared sleeping in my living room. It was 6:41 Monday morning according to my phone. Had he been here the whole weekend? I had a look around in the apartment. Some things had moved around, but it looked neat and clean enough.

- Hey... Hey Jared.. - Mmmmm - Hey, what happened?

Jared made a big yawn and sat up in the couch.

- Mmm. We certainly had too much to drink. - We? - You don’t feel it? I guess Kyle was right. - Right about what? - Well, it’s certainly more than just a mental thing, but we already knew that. I think I may have brokered a truce. - A truce? - Just trust me on this one. Don’t go to a doctor or anything. Keep his stuff in the apartment somewhere. - And me? What do I get.

Jared had a wry smile. Why was he so stingy with details?

- You get to be the message lead for our Chrysler commercial. - WHAT?! That’s huge. Wait... Why are you giving it to me? If someone asked a few days ago I would have said for sure I would be fired very soon. - I think you’ll do great. I’ll think you’ll manage to craft exactly the right message for heartland consumers. I have it from a good source that you’ll be just the right blend of creative writer and redneck for the job.

[mymymadeline]

• Someone New 

pairing: Hallmark Christmas Movie Au! Poe Dameron x Reader

word count: 2.7k words

summary: He’s instantly beautiful in an almost familiar way, like you could call his features home.

warnings: none! :)

notes: look... isn’t this what we all want? big shoutouts to my sun and stars Cat for making this fic baby with me, couldnt have done it without you love. Enjoy!

Adore You series: 01, 02, 03, 04, ... - AO3

“Well I don’t care how it gets done, it just needs to get done! As long as it’s legal, I'm fine with it, and if it’s illegal, well I'm sure we can find a way to work around that.” 

 If you hadn’t already kicked off your heels behind your desk twenty minutes ago, you’re sure your feet would be aching from the frantic pacing that’s now ruining your office carpet. The curtains are open to the bustling concrete metropolis outside, the massive height of the building giving you all the privacy you need. Uncertain sunshine slips from massive clouds and tentative rays rest on your carpet. 

“Enjoying your final day at work, I see.” Kylo smiles mockingly at you from the doorway of your office. Your frantic strides come to an irritated halt and you squeeze the phone next to your ear a little tighter.

“Just text me when it’s done. Don’t even call, I don’t care.” Hanging up before they can answer with a firm, unsatisfying press of your finger, you level your gaze with Kylo’s irritatingly smug face.

“What could you possibly want right now, Kylo?” You have to hold yourself back from rolling your eyes. Letting him onto your annoyance would only spur him on and you really don’t need that right now.

He crosses his arms and leans on the doorframe, carefully crafting the picture of power. “It just seems to me like leaving town is causing you so much stress. It might just be easier to stay.” He shrugs. 

“Ha. And you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” You raise your brow at him, putting as much taunting venom in your voice, hopefully without devolving into an actual argument. “Me giving up my first real vacation in years to stay and do more busywork, while you gallivant around with some… hmm more models, will it be this year?” 

Kylo scoffs, obviously enjoying this sparring much more than you. But a rare softness takes over his tone. “You know, you could always come with me.”

This catches you off guard. You haven’t seen this kind of tone from him in a long time. Not since before everything went down in burning wreckage between you two. 

You level your gaze with his meaningfully, keeping your voice smooth but unemotional. 

 “I think that would be a bad idea.”

Any sincerity in Kylo’s features goes as quickly as it came, he shrugs it off like it disturbed him to even know it still exists within him. His petulant yet teasing smugness takes over as natural as the clouds over the sun. 

“Yeah, well, don’t say I didn’t try. Anyway, hardly a vacation, spending a month in that pathetic, run-down rat-hole. I forgot, did they get wifi there yet?” 

Moving away from Kylo, you pace back over to your desk, turning your phone meditatively between your hands. “You act like you didn’t grow up there too.” 

Echo Basin was not a major town by any means. In fact, both you and Kylo spent all of graduate school telling people you were from Yavin just to spare the confused looks and odd questions. But while Kylo only ever pulled further away from your hometown and the people in it, you often pondered what life would have been like if you’d stayed. But it was never more than a thought, as the business at hand was always more pressing and besides, you were successful here. What more could you ask for?

 “We lived there for the first 18 years of our lives. We grew up at Imperial U.” Kylo snaps you out of your brief reverie and brings your attention back to his now clearly disinterested demeanor, as he scrolls through his phone. “Whatever, it’s your ‘vacation.’ As long as you don’t end up like that traitor.” He pauses, about to elaborate before he shakes his head and continues scrolling. “Still, we have a meeting with Hux approximately... four minutes ago. So, whenever you’re ready, princess.”  

You turn away from him, to the window and look out among the bustling streets and impassive skyscrapers of the city. The few rays of sunshine in your office have taken off, leaving the room colder than usual. Dark clouds look to be rolling in from the east. You faintly recall the weatherman standing next to a big snowflake on the TV this morning. You didn’t believe him before.  

“Sure. I’ll meet you there.” 

_____________

You give your best death glare to the array of lights flashing at you from the dashboard. They blink meaningfully, as if you have a clue what any of them mean, as snow continues to pelt the windows of the car. The hours long drive has exhausted your vision and the windshield is slowly becoming a wall of white. Maybe you should have invested in those 5 Hour Energies after all. Your assistant had offered to buy you an array of energy supplements or drinks for the trip, but in a foolish attempt to not show any weakness in front of employees and peers, you refused. Ah, hubris. 

Still, you drive on, heat blasting to offset the nearly year-round chill of your hometown and do your best to keep a positive attitude. But that attitude only proves more difficult to keep as the wheels of your precious TIE give an unpleasant bump and the sleet lined road is finally starting to make you chew your lip. 

“Come on. Only a few more miles to go.” You gently goad your car, pointedly ignoring the GPS and its remaining 80 miles. 

 The car answers only with another lurching screech. Then a sputter. Then a whine.

 The noises pause, as if waiting for a reply. 

“Don’t you dare,” you whisper. But your threat only comes out as a plea. 

Without your permission and seemingly out of spite, the car sputters and begins to slow, your frantic attempts on the gas giving no support. Continuing forward with only your momentum, you manage to gently steer your beloved, stupid car off towards the snowy treeline purely on instinct.

Out in the snow, on this one-lane highway, as the sun sets at 4:00 PM on a Friday, your car stops moving. 

 You sit in the stalled vehicle, as frozen as the miles of nothingness around you. You’re going to die here. Your shaking hands clutch the steering wheel in a white knuckle grip and you let out an angered scream worthy of an Academy Award. You just wish you were acting. 

 You manage to scream yourself out of breath, but the stupid thought won’t go away. You’re going to die here. What a stupid childish thought. You’ll be fine, just act like an adult. 

“Ok, ok. Calm down. You’re not far from town. Grow up and find out what’s wrong with your car like a reasonable car owner.” You reach for the door handle and are met with only another gust of wind, pushing all of the snow it can carry in your direction and your body shivers at the mere idea. 

“Ok, maybe just call someone.” 

Your phone is a lot of things. You’ve spent countless hours with it scrolling through stocks, shouting at people, being shouted at, scoffing at idiotic articles that don’t know the first thing about you. In fact, it's probably your only friend. And now, in the middle of nowhere, it feels like a lifeline.  

Your brain briefly recalls the fuzzy image of the old auto shop you would sometimes pass while getting groceries all those years ago, but whatever name was on the sign escapes you. So you’re left with dialing the first place that shows up on Google and crossing your fingers.  

Ring

Ring

“Pick up.”

Ring

“Please.”

Click.

“Rebel Auto, this is Rose. How can I help you?” 

A cheerful woman’s voice answers at the end of a laugh, as if joking around had kept her from picking up. You sigh in relief, but are quietly alarmed as the fact that you can see your breath already. The car is cooling quickly. 

Without a second thought, you put on the ‘phone call voice’ you’ve mastered for over a decade and get straight to the point. 

“Yes, Hi. My car has just broken down on the main highway, just after mile...” you turn around try to note the mile marker, but the fog on the inside and the snow on the outside are doing everything they can to make your job impossible. “77? I believe? Anyway, I need a tow into town and a repair as soon as possible. Thank you.”

“Oh.” The woman seems caught off guard at your brusk and smooth tone. There’s a sound of shuffling papers and she clears her throat. “Yes, ma’am. We’ll send someone out immediately. I-In the meantime can you identify your make and model?”

Immediately. Perfect, at least if you freeze, there will be someone close enough to find your body. With another breath of relief, you allow yourself to actually relax, even examine your nails. Damn, when did you get that chip on the thumb?

“Yes, it’s a 2021 TIE Striker. And if you’re going to ask me what the problem is, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars. It was driving and then it wasn’t.” 

“A… TIE Striker? Wow… Uhm-” Rose seems at a momentary loss for words, you’re not quite sure why. “Not often people drive TIEs and not know anything about cars.” She laughs. You don’t. 

“Well, Rose if that’s all I-” Something about the name coming out of your mouth gives you pause. Dots that you didn’t know were there start to connect. 

“Wait, Rose? Rose... Tico?” 

“Uhm…” her gulp is audible through the phone. “Yes?”

Now is when you laugh. You almost feel dumb enough to smack yourself on the forehead. Almost.

You clear your throat and put on your best impression of Ms. Holdo.

“Ms. Tico this is Honors English, not shop class. If you could please put away your… creation. ”

You wait with bated breath. You’re not even really sure if you remember how to make jokes anymore but you do remember this one from so long ago. Don’t make me look crazy.

You get the reaction you were looking for and then some. 

“ NO WAY ! ”

It’s your only warning before something your pretty sure is your name is squealed out on the other end of the line, so loudly in fact that you have to hold your phone a good distance away to avoid permanent ear damage. 

A grin, half pleased, half cringing, spreads across your face as the squealing continues.

“Yes, it’s me,” you laugh. 

“Oh my god. Are you back? Does this mean your back? I saw you on the cover of Wired! You looked hot !”

“Rose, one question at a time!” The bombardment usually irks you, interviewers or paparazzi stumbling over themselves just to get some dirt. But this kind feels oddly… nice? It feels genuine. Like she’s asking because she likes you. But… that can’t be the case, can it?

“Sorry, sorry!” You can practically hear her calming herself down. “Ugh, it’s just so cool to have you back in town. You are back in town right? That’s why you’re stuck on the highway?” 

“Yeah. It’s my parents' thirty-fifth anniversary and I haven’t been back in about fifteen years… I thought it might be time.” 

“Oh man, I can’t wait to see you! This is going to be so fun.” The heartfelt warmth of her tone makes the chilling air around you just that more bearable. But a sound cuts through from wherever she is and she turns back to friendly business. “Anyway, I’ll let you go, but I’ll see you at the shop soon! Poe left about five minutes ago, so he’s on his way. Bye!”

“Oh, alright. Uhm, bye.”

 You hear a few excited giggles before the beep cuts them off, leaving you in the silent car once again, with a strange hollowness sitting sickly in your chest. It wouldn’t have been so bad to just talk a little longer. But, that was odd, wasn’t it? Maybe it only felt odd because... you couldn’t remember the last time a friend had called. When was the last time you spoke to someone who seemed to actually care about you?  

Shaking your thoughts from the uneasy turn of conscious, you turned out to the sunset that has been steadily falling for the past half hour. Blinking tiredly, you hope that whoever is coming for you is quick. You attempt to recall the name she gave but it has already fallen to the back of your mind. Closing your eyes, you think it might not be a bad idea to get a tiny nap in meanwhile. Just a tiny one. Not a big -

______________

A rumbling that shakes the car jerks you out of your peaceful rest, and you shiver, the car much colder than you remember. Looking around, it’s quickly apparent your nap was much longer than the ‘tiny’ one you had so stupidly planned. It’s pitch black, the forest completely dark around you, and the only light comes from the bright headlights heading straight your way. Blinking groggily, you shield your eyes to the approaching vehicle, but the lights begin turning away, as the large truck appears to pull a U-turn, pulling in front of your car.  

Oh, thank god. Your savior has arrived.

A figure steps out of what you can now see is a tow truck. A flashlight leads their way in the treacherous snow as they approach, and you step out to greet them. The bitter chill hits you instantly causing a visceral shiver to overtake your body. 

“You alright there?” A warm, slightly scratched voice cuts across the wind, and your assuring smile only comes out as a grimace. 

“It’s just freezing is all.”

“We’ll see if we can get you warmed up then.”

You and the man meet halfway, only a few feet apart, and with your eyes steadily adjusting and the bright moonlight above, you can now make out his features.

Dashing is the only word that comes to mind as your brain short circuits. He is handsome. He’s instantly beautiful in an almost familiar way, like you could call his features home. Warm and gorgeous dark eyes blink back in their own caught-off-guard way, as you finally come back into the moment at hand and the man standing before you.

“Wow.” He speaks in something close to a whisper, and it’s almost lost to the wind. But he clears his throat before you can ask what has him so thrown.  

“You -uh- called the auto shop right?” He drags his eyes away from you and over to your sad, slumped over TIE behind you. You tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear and drop your gaze, nodding. 

“Yes. That was me. Sorry for all the trouble.” 

You suddenly feel very foolish and very embarrassed. You had expected some no one townie, not this heartthrob that could have easily replaced Errol Flynn in any of his biggest features. Having him drive all the way out in this weather just to take care of your stupid car feels very rude, and you suddenly wish you knew more about cars.

“Why don’t you get situated up front and I’ll get this set up back here?”

Sneaking a glance back up, you meet his eyes and quickly look away again, nodding once more. 

“Sure.”

You go to move past him, making a good few feet of footprints in the snow when a thought shoots through your brain at light speed and you’re jogging back to your car as fast as your designer boots will take you. You should have invested in a better pair of boots for the snow it seems because you don't make it very far before your front foot slips out from under you and your arms fly out looking for anything to grasp onto.

But Poe’s are quicker, instantly their firm grasp has a hold around you and your fall is cut short as you are held tightly against him.  

His breath comes out as a chuckle and he looks down at you, “What’s the hurry?”

You laugh slightly too, quickly righting yourself and trying to purge the memory of his arms around you and how nice it felt. 

“I forgot my bags is all.” 

Without a second glance, you march, much more carefully this time, towards the back of your car.

Poe runs a hand through his curly snow-flecked hair, smirking to himself.  

Ok, this could be interesting. 

-

notes: thanks for reading!

Chapter 2 should be up soon, though I can't guarantee a strict schedule. I have this whole fic plotted out though, so we ain't winging it! We'll finish this thing!

[lolita-tips]

Where have I been?

I originally wrote this up as a script intended for a youtube video explaining where I’ve been and why I haven’t been keeping up with things very well but I haven’t been able to bring myself to get in front of a camera. I thought I would at least make it into a post to sort of give you all an idea of what’s going on. I’ll put it all under a read-more though since it turned out pretty long.

Hi, I’m Averie. I’m 26 years old and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my life lately. I’ve been running Lolita Tips for eight years now but in the last year or so I’ve been a bit removed from it, definitely more than I’d like to be and I sort of feel guilty about it. I keep trying to tell myself that I shouldn’t feel bad, but it’s important to me and there are a lot of people I feel like I’m letting down by not posting more regularly. I guess I just want to talk a bit about where I’ve been and what I’ve been going through. 

Last year I officially moved out of my parents’ place and into my boyfriend’s house. Really it was his parents’ house and for the first few months we actually lived here with them which was a bit of a nightmare for a while, but as of April we’ve officially taken on the mortgage and they moved to Florida. When I moved in I started my first ever full-time job and it has really tested me. It’s nowhere near what I’d like to be doing with my life but as they say, it puts food on the table. I’m a claims adjuster for an auto insurance company which means my job consists of sitting in a cubical making phone calls all day and paying people to fix their cars after accidents. This job has really been putting me under a lot of stress. First of all, I’ve always had pretty bad anxiety when it comes to making phone calls, and after over a year at this job, that still hasn’t changed. Having to spend most of my day doing something that makes me so anxious leaves me really drained by the end of it. Add to it the facts that a lot of the people I have to talk to are in a bad mood, often times I’m calling to give them bad news (“You’re at fault for this accident”, “Your car is a total loss,” etc.), and I’m handling over 100 claims at any given time. So most of the time all I want to do when I get home is lay on the couch and do nothing. I wish I was in a position right now to quit this job but I’ve searched up and down for something else and there’s just nothing close to me that would make any sort of financial sense.

When I do have days where I feel like I can actually get something done, a lot of my time is spent working on the house. As I said before, we bought this house from my boyfriend’s parents and it was pretty dated. I’m someone who likes old things, I collect antiques and often dress in vintage styles, but dingy carpet from the 80s and floral wallpaper that’s probably even older aren’t exactly our taste. So we’ve been taking on a lot of home improvement projects and a lot of the time we sort of feel like we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, particularly when it comes to our budget and stamina. As artsy as I may be, I’ve learned that I hate painting walls so even though we started in December, our living room is only about a third of the way painted. I’m also learning that one of the biggest struggles of being a homeowner is just keeping up with the mess, especially with a dog and two cats, all of whom shed like crazy. And it would be easier if we could do all of this together, but my boyfriend and I have such different work schedules that it’s rare for us to have a same day off to work together. It also just seems like this house has one problem after another. A few months ago we had a leak and had to replace the roof. Now our basement is flooding and we have to tear out the walls of what is supposed to become our craft room. It’s hard to make the house beautiful when you keep having to spend all your resources making it functional.

Everything that has been going on in my life has left me feeling very overwhelmed. It may not seem like a lot from the outside, but when your head is constantly full of “Paint this, sweep this, scrub this, shit I forgot to send that check, how many boxes do I still have to unpack? Is this ours or his parents? Did I schedule an appraiser to look at that car? Holy shit the garden is overgrown where did all these weeds come from I swear we just pulled them out a week ago!” It’s daunting. And it has really had a negative impact on my mental health. I thought my life was going to be grand when I moved out of my parents’ house! I was going to be close to a big city, living with the person I love, and finally feeling like a real adult. But this really is more than I bargained for. It feels like all I really did was trade in the stress and anxiety of a long-distance relationship for the stress of a terrible job and a house that still doesn’t feel like my own. People keep telling me things like “That’s life!” and “Welcome to adulthood!” but I know adulthood isn’t all suffering! I know plenty of adults who have jobs they love and free time to  do stuff that makes them happy, but I feel like I’m stuck in an endless cycle of five-day work weeks, evenings where I’m too depressed and tired to leave the couch, and weekends where I try to cram in as many chores as possible. And thinking about it makes me more depressed! I studied theatre in college, I wanted to be a playwright, I STILL want to be a playwright. I also want to own an antique store, make and sell clothes, travel the country working renaissance faires, any number of things would make me happy; but it feels like any time I have some time to work toward one of my dreams there’s always something more important. 

A few months ago I went to a convention in Pittsburgh. It was the first time I’ve worn Lolita in a long time and it was exciting because there were going to be some big Lolita guests. I told myself I was going to face my fears. I was going to introduce myself to members of my new local Lolita community for the first time since moving here, but I came to the con by myself and the longer it went on, the more alone I felt. I thought it would be great going to all the panels I wanted to see and not basing my schedule on anyone else, but seeing everyone with their friends having a good time brought all these ugly thoughts into my head. I thought, “I’ll never be able to have close Lolita friends like that”, “I’ll never be able to make a living doing the things I love like these designers and Youtubers”, “What kind of Lolita blogger am I if I can’t even go up to other lolitas and introduce myself?” At one point after a panel I went to the bathroom and I heard a group of lolitas whos voices and names I recognized come in. All at once my brain was flooded with “Not good enough”s. I’m not pretty enough, my coord isn’t cute enough, I can’t possibly go out there and interact with these queens. So I locked myself in the stall and waited until everyone left while I cried quietly.

A few hours later there was another lolita panel that was a lot of fun and I had a good laugh and actually sort of felt like I was part of something for a moment. But after that was the J-fashion social. I spent all day trying to convince myself to be brave and not let my anxiety get the better of me, but that was a battle that I quickly lost. I went out onto one of the balconies of the convention center, pacing back and forth while I tried to gather my courage, but the “not good enough”s just came flooding back and I cried harder than I had cried in a long time. The meetup came and went in a panel room behind me as I stared into the night sky of the city that didn’t know I existed. No friends to comfort me, boyfriend at another convention working a booth, and family hours away. I felt completely and utterly alone. But that night I told myself that I was going to make a change. Something, anything, to make my life better.

I know that I can’t cure my depression, or my anxiety. I know that there’s something wrong with my brain and that I’m always going to have bad days and good days, but I also know that I at least owe it to myself to try and turn things around. I may be depressed, but I’d rather be depressed and do things that I love than allow things to continue on the way they have been. After all, I’m the most important person in my life. Nobody will ever be more fundamental to my own happiness than myself.  

I can’t exactly say that I have a plan, but I can say that I’ve been trying. I’ve actually spent a lot of time lately rediscovering things that once brought me joy that I fell out of for one reason or another. For example, I’ve recently started listening to My Chemical Romance again. I remember listening to them as a moody teen who just wanted to seem dark and edgy but going back and listening to the same songs as an adult hits me in a different way. They’re so full of emotion and passion and words that my mind likes to cling to like “I am not afraid to keep on living.” I also recently started watching the Vlog Brothers again. Their channel and pretty much everything they were part of were huge influences on me in high school and early in college so I was really happy to see that they’re still doing stuff. They always help me to remember that even though the world may be a big dumpster fire right now, there are still good people doing good things and there are still a lot of things worth living for. I’ve been working a lot on bettering my life in a lot of ways; I’ve been trying to embrace the Konmari method while working on our house and I’ve been watching a lot of youtube channels about being better with money and spending a lot of time watching ASMR to just try and relax. 

I still have a long way to go, and I know I’m still going to struggle, but I’m thankful to those of you who have stuck with me and will continue to be with me on this journey. Whenever I get on tumblr and see that I still get messages in my inbox it helps me to remember that I am not entirely alone. I know this was sort of a lot, I’m not someone who normally pours my heart out like this, to be honest talking about my mental health makes me worry that I’ll come off as whiney and it makes me pretty nervous, but I felt that I owed it to all of you to explain what’s been going on and I felt that I owed it to myself to get it all out there. Thanks to all of you who have stuck with me through it all. I hope to start making changes in my life get back to making this blog something worth sticking around for.

[smoothshift]

My experience shopping for a family car via /r/cars

My experience shopping for a family car

Hi all. Long time lurker. Just wanted to share my recent experiences - both to simply share, and also to get some outside perspective. For context, I am in Canada.

I have pregnant wife and a dog, and we have senior parents we drive around. We have a sedan and an aging hatchback, so the latter is out and a family car is in.

I've always had a soft spot for the Ford Flex, so I decided to start there. I have no anti-minivan sentiment, so there isn't typical crossover appeal in my makeup as a consumer. I honestly like the future-classic styling.

I first drove a N/A (no ecoboost). I found it a bit weak on the throttle, but reasonable. My wife and I through the overall comfort was okay for passengers, but even at being just under 6'0, I did not find I had enough legroom as the driver. I wasn't a fan of the cargo space, which was surprisingly limited with the seats down. I drove an ecoboost for comparison sake, as I've seen it stated many times on this subreddit that folks often regret passing on it. Perhaps I just expected more, but I didn't find it to be the "SHO wagon" I craved. It was okay, and I figured we'd pass on it and stick with the N/A version. However, the more I looked over the car, the more I found I didn't like it. The fit and finish felt weak, and the doors were massive. The vehicle as a whole feels dated, and you can tell Ford is just waiting for it to pass off into the sunset as they will kill it off soon. We decided to pass and moved on.

I decided to check out the VW Alltrack. I love wagons, but I didn't get far with this one. It's just shamefully under-powered and left me craving more. Also, the style of the seat just didn't jive with me, and I kept sitting on my god damned balls. We moved pretty quick from the Alltrack to our next option.

I've always loved Volvos, so we had a look at the brand new 2019 v60. God damn, is this car a stunner, and amazingly comfortable once you're inside, but it is also super low to the ground. Getting into the drivers seat requires a bit of a trust fall, and simulating dealing with a car seat killed it for us as I've got some back issues to contend with. We learned through this process that we were looking at the wrong cars, and should entertain something physically higher.

I decided to have a look at the Subaru Ascent. The current marketing is pushing this as a true 7 seater family car, but we quickly realized this was a farce. With the 3rd row up, the trunk space is minimal. I was actually shocked at how little remained. The legroom for both the second and third row was weak, and I could not sit up straight in the third row. Kids could work there, but no adults, and if you did have a family full of kids for a weekend trip, there is no where to pack anything. We didn't even drive it, because there was no point. I really wanted to see how that 4 banger would pull that truck around, but I didn't get the chance to as I didn't want to waste the salespersons time on a car I quickly realized was not good for us.

We never considered a van up until this point because it felt like killing a fly with a sledge hammer, but I'm a practical guy, and once we started thinking about it, I got excited about the utility.

Some online searching led me to knock out the Dodge Caravan and Toyota Sienna for safety reasons. The Dodge didn't surprise me, but Toyota dragging an 8 year minivan along does/did. I was not impressed to learn that after failing drivers side small overlap tests in 2015 (I think that's when it was), they reinforced the drivers side, but not the passengers side, which has led them again to have a poor safety rating. I get that these are rare accidents, and Toyota does put a lot of electrical system assists like auto braking and that jazz to mitigate it even on the base model now, but this killed it for me. Call me paranoid, but I'd never forgive myself if something happened to my wife and I knew this was a fault. I was really excited about the AWD option, but alas, no Toyota. I never even looked at the Dodge, but I did check out the Toyota for shits and giggles. I found that it had a nice, flat entry point for the sliding door and ample room with the seat slid up to access the 3rd row. But on the negative side, the interior is really dated, and in my taste, really ugly. Comfort was fine, though.

I was left with three options. The Kia Sedona, the Honda Odyssey, and the Chyrsler Pacifica.

I first checked out the Odyssey. With the sliding door open, the entry point is not flat and flushed, and raised a bit towards the back. I could see our senior parents tripping. I also didn't like how access to the third row was poor when the second row had all 3 seats equipped. You can tilt the second row, but it kicks the sliding rails up in the air, making for a bad tripping hazard. I felt frustrated by this design and decided to leave it, look at something else, and the come back.

It was time for the Sedona. Kia sales staff were living up to the terrible stereotype, and it took half an hour to just look at one. They took me to an SXL top trim model. I don't know much about Kia and don't have any reason to dislike them. I've heard a lot of good things, but I was not impressed with my first interactions when it came to quality of materials an feel. The door was light, the plastics glossy and tacky, and the console felt super dated. I really didn't like how it had the whole car-like center console thing going with the larger shiftier. For comparison, the Odyssey has buttons and the Pacifica has a puck. Those two get a lot of flak, but in my opinion, I much prefer those to a stick in an auto tranny. The Honda's buttons are super nice as you don't have to run through gears and you just pick what you need. It's different, but it works. Anyways, I digress. I was not digging the feel, but the Kia did have some neat stuff like front facing cameras. You do get a lot of bells and whistles, but I was focused on the core. We drove it and I found the new 8 speed transmission was really jumpy and hunting. Throttle response was really lame, with a lot of lag, and I wasn't feeling it from there out. I cut the drive short. I don't think I've ever been as eager to get out of a car as I was with the Sedona. If I were riding in the second row, I'd probably dig it as those are some nice seats, but as the driver, I was miserable. I left in a bit of shock and exclaimed to my wife that I didn't understand how this car won so many accolades. Clearly, it pleases someone, but not me. It's also priced very close to everything else, so I'm not feeling the value initiative.

Next up was the Pacifica. It's fun to shit on FCA, but I recently rented a Durango and enjoyed it (I was going to look at one but we decided to shop vans and that was before we got the Durango, so alas, it never got fully considered). The fit and finish was decent, but there is a juxtaposition between really nice touches, like a beautiful dash and really nice feelings leathers, to shitty plastic center consoles and unpleasant carpets. You get to known the carpets really well with the stow and go seats, which, from an engineering and practicality standpoint, are super cool. But they cost you in comfort. You sit with your hips low to the foor, and you knees up. My wife pointed out that none of our parents could sit like that for long. I imagine you lose some interior room to this system, as this was also the only van where I hit my back on the ceiling when crawling to the third row. None the less, we took it for a rip and the pentastar engine was really delightful. It has the notorious 9-speed ZF (which is also in the Odyssey with different software unless you go for the top touring/elite trim). I actually really liked the drive, but the drivers seat is very vertical, and I felt more and more fatigue as the drive went out. Power delivery was good, it shifted smooth, and I enjoyed it, but when we took a closer look at options when we got back to the dealership, we found you had to go to the higher trims to get items that were available in the middle of the pack of other vans (blind spot, adaptive cruise, etc). The Pacifica has a really great adaptive cruise that goes right down to stop and go traffic speeds, but I didn't want to spend upwards for 50 grand for that. My wife couldn't get comfortable in the seats and tried out a vehicle with fabric trim, and that was just bad. All in all, a very mixed bag with high highs and low lows. I was also disappointed to learn there is no spare offered (maybe on the base model, I'm not sure, but not on the touring L and up that we looked at. You lose it for an inflation kit or a vacuum.

We went back to the Honda and I tore out the middle seat in the showroom. But taking that out of the second row you can slide the seats in 4 directions, which makes it easier to just keep the damn car seat in and still throw old people or a dog in the back. The second row is also a lot comfier than the Pacifica due to the lack of stow and go. I wanted to drive the 10 speed, but their only demo was an ex-l, so I went for a spin. Out of all the vans, I felt most comfortable driving the Honda as it just 'clicked' with me. The infotainment system is also my favourite out of everything I tried, and the cameras/screen were really clear. I'd spent some time in a 2014 Crosstour before, and those blind spot cameras are so blurry you can't rely on them for a quick glance, but this system would be valuable for locating blindspot cyclists and the like. Accelerating was a bit chirpy, and I spun the wheels more often than I expected to, but this was much preferred over the sleepy Sedonda. We tried to work out a deal, but I was not satisfied with a 5% discount and decided to walk, thinking I may revisit this closer to when the baby is due, and see if I can score a CPO 2018.

It's worth noting the final 3 we considered have very similar stats and offerings. Similar power output and options. I find the Pacifica and Odyssey to be my preferred from the bunch, and would likely be looking at the Chrysler more if I though I'd use the stow and go seats on the regular (would be amazing for camping trips). But passenger comfort is a bigger concern. I also don't give a fuck about the entertainment systems, so we skipped that. With USB chargers and iPads, we could see no reason to shell out thousands more for propriety systems that offer less.

So, there you have it. I did leave out some details due to length, but just wanted to share in case someone else finds my thoughts useful, and I'm also curious to know what people think about what I think.

[roaldseth]

This started as a description exercise—“paint a set image with words”—but it ended up being a dialogue one as well, which then kind of lead to a slight timeline. Dialogue practice seemed like a good idea because most of the Lokapala aren’t named, so I could try and see if there were any distinct patterns among them (and try to set patterning without ever addressing anyone), but... that’s also a problem.

Best Taken in Twenty or Ninety Minute Durations, if Not For the Eight Hour Recommendation.

Digital Devil Saga 2 | Lokapala ( All ) | General | Ficlet | 743 FanFiction | Digital Devil Saga 2 belongs to ATLUS; this work is unaffiliated.

The longer the two stayed there in that way, the more Johnny had become prone to glance over the laptop screen and look their way.

“Do you think they forgot there was a meeting?”

        “It was their idea for all of us to get together.”

        “These chairs aren’t attached, you know. We could just move one around a bit… or pull one out from under them. That’d give them a good jolt.”

        “How old are you?!... Think how you’d feel. I bet it’d be really cranky.”

        “If you did that, Roland would let you live, probably… But, Adil would chew you up and spit you out, no doubt.”

        “Do you think so? I’ve heard Roland stays up for sixty hours straight sometimes, you know.”

        “Huh? Did you heard that from the kids?... Look, that sounds ridiculous.”

        “Try taking Adil’s hat. He probably can sense when it’s gone since he wears it so much.”

        “If everyone keeps this up, we won’t have to try to get their attention. The noise will be enough.”

        Johnny exhausted a hefty sigh, and spoke up for the first time: “Now, instead of hanging around here, we should take a queue from them and call it a day. We’ll all come back tomorrow and get everything done then. Sound good?”

        The rest of the Lokapala answered with brief affirmation, saying it was a fair suggestion, and went their different ways—except Johnny. Someone was going to have to fill the other two in, and since it was his idea, he figured he would wait around for however long that could be by doing what he would have done afterwards if everyone ended up sticking around. The armory inventory was saved on a document in the laptop that had long auto-set itself into sleep mode, which was conveniently placed on the table across from the head chair. Roland usually sat there, but it was vacant. Since Roland did not look as if he would be in imminent need of it, Johnny took the opportunity to enjoy the seat.

        If Adil had used his head, he would have taken that chair and dragged it over to the other two that were already situated next to each other to cluster up another set of three chairs, but with Adil’s current placement Johnny could practically imagine him having gargled out a groggy “move over” to Roland with a heavy head and heavier eyelids. But: Roland had long been unresponsive by the time Adil would have said anything, so the reality was that he never bothered to waste his breath and situated them both wherever needed.

        The set of chairs in the war room where deep enough that one had to sit away from the backboard to bend their knees around the edge, but Johnny would not have thought they were capable of fitting two bodies lying across; children maybe, but not two grown men. Adil had proved him wrong, although a few of his right-sided limbs were dangling off of the side of the furniture. His knuckles grazed atop of the carpeted rug, and his right leg hung down like a sling while his hip and foot remained on the cushion. His left arm arched over his head, catching his forehead; he would have been facedown in the cushion if it had not.

        Then, Roland: backside flush against the backboard of the makeshift couch, placed in a way where his limbs looked like they were positioned on purpose. His head was propped up on a flat throw pillow that he did not put there, and his limbs were bent outward, wedged between himself and Adil. Roland’s backhands and knees grazed against Adil’s sides, not because they were protruding far, but because Adil was the one taking more than his fair share of space, especially with his left leg jutting out.

        Both of them were still fully clothed down to their boots—spare Roland’s glasses that were resting on the tabletop next to a thin blanket that was refolded in a way where the ends and sides did not match up—and both of them bore weighted breaths and shut eyes. At least, the assumption was Adil’s eye were closes, for Johnny could not discern for certain without moving him.

        The longer the two stayed there in that way, the more Johnny had become prone to glance over the laptop screen and look their way. The more he did so, the more time he spent wanting and wishing and waiting to lie down alongside Kathy for the night—abet a little bit more comfortably and in their own bed.

As much as I want these two to SLEEP, whenever I try to write to make it happen... it’s never comfortable sounding. Then again: I’ve only ever did it one other time years ago, and it was a disaster of a fic... I try to forget it. One of these days I’m going to get around to putting them on an actual bed that sleeps two comfortably.

Wouldn’t be surprised if I did practice more with them sleeping though, because my gosh sleeping/napping together is one trope that always gets me, and there is no fucking way those two aren’t tired 110% of the time. Even the creator(s) themselves could not convince me otherwise.

[staircase-twit-blog]

Phantom Limb

I tell the girl with the long, red hair that I have to work before the sun rises because I don’t want to wake up with her in my bed.  Amber. I had been fighting the urge to call her Amanda all night; all of the “A” names had somehow melted together inside of my brain, leaving one or the other impossible to distinguish. There was an Amanda, once, too, I think; we had met drinking watery Crystal Light at a support group, right at the beginning of it all. Amanda, Amber. The names stopped mattering, after a while. I’d spent the evening sputtering out a litany of stuttered “Am”-s, pausing just enough to indicate that it was not a nickname. She pretended not to notice.  Eventually, I had simply avoided addressing her directly.

Amber. I remember it as soon as the door closes on her retreating back.  For a fleeting moment, I feel guilty; certainly she had come with the pretense of staying over, after the wine, the dinner, the half-contrived conversation. I might even feel a little bit sad. Different-sad, not the kind that sustains but the kind that still sits uncomfortably in the center of your chest. I could open the door, call her back in, tell her that I made a mistake, take your shoes back off, why don’t we watch television in the bedroom? It could be that easy. I could do it, right now.

The moment ends. I lock the door, and decide to shower.

When I pull back the rings of the curtain minutes later, she is there, half-visible through the tendrils of steam rising up and away from the wet floor tiles.  For a moment, I think Amber-Manda has returned; was it possible she left something behind? The back of her head brushes against the mirror, leaving strands of clarity in the gray condensation.  Her hair, indistinguishable in the thick, foggy air, is not red at all; it is blonde, unkempt, billowing with the steam.  The last time I saw it, really saw it, the silver-white of it had been red with blood. In the sticky heat of the bathroom I shiver, the follicles of my skin pointed up and away from the rest of my body, reaching out, reaching for her.

“Celine,” I say.

“Who was that?” She unfolds her long legs from beneath her, languidly stretching one perfect, tanned limb into the empty space between us. The skin of her biggest toe hovers inches from my waist, dangling, waiting to be touched.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, backing further away from her in the small space until the door knob collides with my back.

“It’s been a while,” she says, appraising me with ravenous, sad eyes.  She slides off of the counter, walking past me long enough to leave me breaking beneath her heady perfume of woman and freesia. She turns the corner into the apartment on confident feet, following her own map of muscle memory and so many years. There was a time where she could navigate the space in the pitch black, wandering drunk, half-asleep in complete darkness in the early hours from our bed to the kitchen and back again without so much as touching a light switch.  I foolishly would have thought that she’d lost that. “Aren’t you going to make me a drink?”

It stings. “Ha-ha.” I say over the torrential sound of my own failing heart. “Very funny.”

“What?” She asks, standing before the open liquor shelf, hungrily sizing up the jagged skyline of half-emptied bottles. “It’s not like it’s going to kill me.” It stings more.

My tongue rests too-swollen on the cusp of my lips. I taste on my teeth all of the things I want to say: I love you. I miss you. I hate you. I love you. I have never stopped loving you.

“Celine,” I say instead.

“Patrick,” she replies, imitating the deep timbre of my voice.

“I think you should go.”

Her face contorts momentarily with pain, the beautiful features crumbling into something awful before smoothly re-arranging.

“But I just got here,” she says now, pulling the skin of her bottom lip deliberately between her teeth. “You don’t want to see me, really?”

She did not just get here, this I know.  There is always the presence of her lingering between the walls, sulking in corners, stinking up the place with the intoxicating scent of her absence.  She’s only showed up in the flesh a handful of times since she left, all spaced out with months in between, but I don’t believe for a second that she’s ever truly been gone. Still, that she may have found it possible for me to not want to see her feels wholly unnatural, and the uncertain weight in my chest thickens. If she were to leave, then what? Would she really be gone? Forget her, I had heard so many times. Move on.

I sigh, look at the clock once, then to her, then back again. Even if I forced her out of the door and myself into a fitful sleep, she would still be there, too, a nightmarish figure torturing me from the shadows, forever evading my hands. It was choosing between the ghost of her and the haunting of her. at least with the former, there was something more than the biting, dissonant aftertaste of her lingering presence. I had grown too familiar with the latter.

“What are you drinking?” I ask finally.

“You don’t remember?” She asks, a small, victorious smile rising to her lips.

“You still a gin girl?” Of course she was. Silly question.

“’Course,” she grins, strolling to the table and taking a seat at the head, her favorite spot. “God, it’s only been what, a year? Two years, now? Don’t be silly. Nothing’s changed, baby.”

Beneath the dim ceiling lights she could pass for an angel. Arms dangling loosely around her legs, silk dress bunched at the hips, hair falling wildly past her shoulders, she could have never left at all.

There are vast, canyon-like holes on the floor where her piles of unwashed laundry used to lie. The CDs she hoarded like gold are gone from the shelves, replaced instead with old photos of her cheshire-cat smile, chemically-recreated imprints of her teeth halfheartedly attempting to exist in the same space the real thing once ruled. Her long, blonde hair has vanished from the carpets, the sheets, the drains.  Somewhere, there is an obituary on the pages reserved for our marriage announcement.  Nothing’s changed, baby. When in reality, it all has. Every last thing.

I pull out two glasses, grab the limes, the tonic, the ice, surprised even at myself for still having the necessary tools. I had grown partial to whiskey in her absence; I found it a much more efficient means to the same end. There must have been days where I threw the tonic in with my toothpaste and canned soup at the supermarket, auto-piloting my way through a life on the other side of her. A shiver runs through me.

At the helm of the table Celine twirls an empty wineglass in her fingers, appraising the pale halo of red pressed against the rim. I think about the lips who left marks there, and for not the first time feel a slither of resentment at the fact that they were not hers. She slides her finger along the shape of it, rubbing the pigment between her thin fingers. She had been a painter, before, and our apartment still bore the bruises of it: spills of blue on the white carpeting, mugs and glasses permanently hazy with the remnants of gray water, illustrations of bodies and fruits etched into TV guides and corner tables. There was no way of telling if this had changed about her; her clothes were clean, her skin free of skidded paint, and the shadows of long, late nights no longer bruised the undersides of her eyes. The thought that something so vital to her could have changed cuts into the core of me, and  I fight the urge to ask.

“Pretty,” she says now, peering at the pinkening tips of her fingers in the dim light.

“Thanks,” I say, before realizing the response is inappropriate.

Her mouth, stupidly beautiful, folds into a timid smile. She stifles her laughter at first, and, seeming to realize it is an indulgence she is still allowed to, throws her head back and cackles abruptly.  The sound fills the small space, bursting open in the corners of the room and dripping down the walls around us. I wonder, in this moment, if I am waking from a fever dream, if the sharp pangs of her phantom laughter might give way to the bleating pangs of an alarm clock, dragging me from whatever chamber in my mind is still dominated by her and back into reality.  

“So, who is she?” She asks again, allowing no time for pleasantries or the illusion that there might be something at all worth catching up on.

“Who?” I ask, because as far as I’m concerned, no one else has ever existed besides herself.

“Oh, shut up. Your woman. Your ginger. The owner of this lovely, charming, drug store shade of fuchsia. Tell me about her. What’s her name?”

My words feel impossible to collect.  Each time she appears it is just as difficult to absorb as the last. I spend every moment just following her exits forcing myself to forget her all over again, to avoid the irrational, impossible blooming hope for her return.  Every time must be the last. Otherwise, when it truly is, I think it might destroy me all over again.

She pours her drink directly into the wine glass, even though it is most certainly not designed for that type of drinking.  She presses a long kiss to the spot where Amber’s lipstick remains, sipping deeply from the rim. She watches me, smiling to herself, incessantly proud of her own jokes.

“C’mon. Please? You’re really not going to tell me?”

“Why does it matter?” I ask, sitting on the farthest end of the table, praying the agitated burn of my hands will quell. “She’s nobody, it’s not a big deal.”

Celine frowns, and rests her chin in the crook of her palms.  “She seems sweet.  A little young, though. What is she, still in college? You have to be so careful with those girls. One moment they’re quoting Proust, the next they’re vomiting half-naked into a solo cup.  I mean it, honey. You better watch yourself.”  She takes a steady sip, drains half the glass.

“Yes, please continue to lecture me on the dangers of binge drinking, Ce,” I say, pouring myself a full glass. “I really believe you could be an enlightening source of information.”

“Don’t be rude just because you weren’t expecting me,” she pouts.  “If you don’t want me to come around anymore, then I won’t.”

I want to beg her to stop. I want to tell her to go, please leave, I am burning without you but I am dying with you, go someplace else, away from here.  I think about the possibility of never finding her around some unexpected corner, sitting where she no longer belongs, smiling where she has no right to exist.

“No,” I say. “That’s not it. I just… I don’t think it’s funny, you showing up just to dick around with me. I never know how I’m supposed to handle it.”

The table is empty between us. When she lived here it was practically unusable, constantly buried beneath a mountain of accumulated nothings.  She had always littered it with paperback books, empty matchbooks, fast food receipts, business cards.  Empty liquor bottles.  When I look around the space we used to share I realized how effectively I have actually purged her from it, when compared to how we once used to live. To see her here you would have to close your eyes and picture another life, thinking hard, until your head might feel like it will burst.  The surface of the table reflects the spinning overhead fan, the sharp glare of the light. Without the evidence of her, the bread-crumbed proof of her ownership to these walls, the distance between where we sit feels insurmountable.

She stands and glides over to my end, sitting in the seat next to me, like maybe she’s read my thoughts. Has she? It’s impossible to know, now.  “If you let one of them stay the night some time, maybe I wouldn’t show up,” she says.

“What, did you come all the way out here just to lecture me?”

She purses her lips, then takes a guilty sip from her glass, looking away from me.

“Oh, Christ,” I say, and the glow of her presence dims.

“Come on, darling, you didn’t think I was here just for fun, did you?” She asks, extending her feet and resting them in my lap. “That’s not how this works.”

“I don’t know what I thought,” I murmur, rotating my glass in my hands to watch the ice cubes collide and spin with each other.

“Be serious,” she says after a moment, fidgeting nervously with her hands. “You’re a smart guy.  You have to know that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, be here unless it was something important, right?”

Right.

“Well, on with it,” I say, instinctively grabbing one of her feet in my hands and massaging the bottom of it.  As long as she was here, I might as well pretend it was forever ago, forever.

“I just wish that for once you could get another woman to stay in this apartment for longer than a painfully uncomfortable one and a half hour dinner,” she begins, pausing to refill her drink. “None of them even seem nearly as horrible as I might have imagined. There’s real promise here. Well, maybe not with the redhead. But that’s a preference thing.”  She smiles at me, brushing her hair behind her shoulder. “Still won’t bring back any blondes, though.”

“Are you stalking me?” I ask, even though I think I already know the answer.

She shrugs. “Not much to do anymore, now, is there?”

“That’s entirely inappropriate, Ce.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because,” I say, sliding her feet off of my lap, hating myself for it, “if you want me to move on, which is what it sounds like you’re insinuating, I am literally never going to do that if you keep appearing, literally, in our home, unannounced, acting like nothing happened.”  Acting like she is still here. Acting like she is still breathing.

She pauses, considering this for a moment. She sucks an ice cube into her mouth, rolling it around on her tongue and musically bumping it against her porcelain teeth.

“It sure is fun, though, isn’t it?” She asks, smiling, waiting.

Isn’t it? In reality, no, it isn’t. In the moment it feels like the sun might fall out of the sky, or that I might die, or that every awful thing that has happened was a series of long, agonizing nightmares. The wound of her festers, after so much time, always picked at, never fully healing. Her presence is a nail under the flesh, a disturbance in the scar tissue, only to be felt fully in a dark room as the skin struggles once more to seal itself.

“Not particularly,” I admit.

Both of us fall silent for a long time. We are aware of it, us talking ourselves in circles just to hear the other’s voice.  There are moments when she almost flickers away on the outskirts of my line of sight, disappearing for quick, panicky moments that force me to look back to make sure she has not yet left.  I want to reach out. I am afraid if I touch her she will vanish like smoke.

“I still miss you,” I tell her, because there’s nothing else to say.

She stares down at the table, swallowing over something in her throat. I keep my eyes fixed to the floor as she stands and floats from the room in my peripheral vision. A moment later, I hear her weight fall onto the bed.

I don’t think. I just follow.

I don’t bother turning the lights on when I come into the room. I collapse beside her, like she might be sleeping and I’m coming home from work too late and keeping my shoes on to pull her to me and kiss the parts of her hair that still smell like alcohol and cigarettes.  The city makes noise outside of our window. We stay silent.

“I miss you, too,” she says when the quiet has run out.

We lie together for a long time. We talk about the good. We skate over the bad. We avoid any admission that our time is temporary, recalling instead so many years together, so little time ago. Her hand falls into mine. Her hair falls into my face. The edges of the room ebb and flow with intoxicating excitement. When I want to cry, I laugh instead.

“Do you remember Halloween three years ago?” We ask. “Do you remember that waitress at the pancake house with the black eye? Do you remember getting our power bill shut off?” I’ve laughed since she’s been gone, I’m sure, but suddenly the sensation feels like something for the first time, like coming home.

“This is why I can’t keep people over,” I tell her in the darkness. “No one makes me laugh the way that you do.”

“Have you tried watching stand-up?” She asks, then snorts at herself. I bury my face in her neck. I am surprised to find it warm.

“There is no other you out there. You were the last one.”

She grips my hand tighter, her nails pressing into the skin. I feel the ghost of that sensation on my back, where she used to draw blood, her fingers breaking skin between hot gasps of breath. I shiver everywhere.

“You don’t need to find another me, baby,” she says finally. “You just have to find someone else.”

“I don’t want someone else,” I tell her, sadness rising inside of me in an insurmountable wave. “It will never be as good as it was.”

“Oh, stop it!” she says, pushing herself away from me. “Listen to what you’re saying. That’s bullshit.”  She sits up so quickly the edges of her dark form begin to bleed into the nether of the unlit room, and in the lingering afterglow of her warmth I feel the familiar panic of absence grow inside me.

“What?” I ask, fighting the urge to close the distance between us once more. I study the curve of her now erect back in the halo of the hallway lighting instead; I memorize the angular hook of her nose.

“You have over half of your life left, and you’re sitting here claiming that our relationship was the peak of it. It’s pathetic!” She runs a hand through her hair, the sharp features of her face converging on one another beneath her mounting anger. “Do you really want another us? Do you want to be drunk, fighting, all of the time? Resenting each other? Waiting until one of us is manic enough to say I love you again? ‘Remember the Christmas Party? Remember your mother?’ No. Remember kicking each other out? Remember losing all of our rent money on a bender? Remember lying there at night, in pain, wondering if this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, this feeling of giving so much of a shit about each other that we were willing to throw everything else away? Don’t pretend you never felt it, Patrick, because I know for a fact that you did.”

“I don’t care!” I insist, putting my hand on the leg she rests nearest to me and gripping hard, tethering myself to her so she can’t float away. “You know why we fought like that? Because we loved each other, and that was the most fucking important thing to either one of us at the end of the day.”

She shakes her head, staring down at the folds in the comforter we once used to cocoon ourselves within to shut out the world. “You’re remembering it wrong, you’re always remembering it wrong. We fought like that because you were always a vicious drunk, and so was I. You harp and harp on this idea that our relationship was perfect, but that’s just because it never had the chance to ruin itself.  I never had the chance to hurt you in the way that normal people hurt each other. You glorify it so much that I don’t even know if you recognize it anymore. It makes me sick. It makes me so, so sick.” When she breathes in, it rattles.

The fighting is comfortable. We slip back into it more naturally than anything else.

“Don’t you dare sit here and tell me that you didn’t hurt me, Ce, because that’s bullshit. Fucking look at me. Are you kidding?” The agony of her swells again, over and over, beating like a vein. “This is all so fucking easy for you to say. You didn’t have to deal with the after. You got to escape. You can sit here and talk about moving on all you want, and how easy it is to find someone else, when in reality, you’re a fucking martyr and I’m the basket case with the dead fiancé. You want to talk about hurting people?”

I grab her hand and throw it in front of her face, catching the glimmer of the small, diamond engagement ring still perched on her finger in the shards of light cutting beneath the bedroom door. “You left me. You perma-left me. You fucking died, Celine. I’m still here, picking up all of the wreckage, living in the aftermath, and you just get to come do your charity work here whenever you feel like it, when its convenient for you to absolve your conscience of some of the blame. I’m sick of you showing up here and criticizing me for moving on as best as I can.”

“You’re right!” She yells, her voice impossibly loud in the room, supernatural in magnitude. “You just said it yourself, what I did was awful. I carry that with me, all of the time.” Her voice breaks, every hint of humor, of lightness disappearing. “Why do you think I’m still here? Do you think I can make it anywhere else, knowing what I’m leaving behind?”

There’s a certain point where listening becomes too painful, where the brain begins to wander away from the threat. As she speaks I’m thinking of other times, things her voice used to say when she was not apologizing for stealing her own life away, when the sound of words dripping off of her tongue felt like music and not salt in a wound. I listen to the throb of my own heart, choking back sobs, looking for a noise loud enough to drown out my own human sound.

“God dammit, you’re a fucking plague,” I whisper.

She shoves her hands into her hair, dragging out the knots, chest rising and falling to work through the tears.  Through every emotion clouding my mind there persists a prick of hope that she might leave strands of blonde in the bedding, to be discovered like gold in some distant future.

“You deserve better than this, Patrick,” she says. “You deserve better than someone you love loving themselves more. I’m not a fucking martyr to anyone but you.”

I read between the lines, because she is still scared to say it out loud: You deserve better than someone who would drive drunk into a tree. You deserve better. You deserve better.  And I know she is right.

“I’m trying,” I say eventually. “You’ve seen it, then. You know I’ve tried moving on. But I can’t help it. It’s not my fault I haven’t found another person who makes me feel the way that I did when I was with you.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she says. “Stop. Stop trying to find the same thing. It’s… impossible. It’s just impossible. And you have to try harder. Just because something is different doesn’t mean it’s worse. This,” she waves her hand into the empty room, “sleeping alone in the same bed that we used to share together, not putting my pictures away, living in an absolute mausoleum of our relationship, this is not trying hard enough. This is refusal to let go.”

“I hate that you’re right,” I tell her. She usually is.

“I know.”

“So what,” I ask, when I feel brave enough to know the answer, still not ready to hear it. “You’re not coming back again, are you?”

“I don’t want to have to. I want to come back, but I want things to be different when I do, if I do, whenever that is.”

I think about the barren feeling in my chest. It would be foolish to pretend that it has nothing to do with her, that the only time the emptiness feels like a pain its when she is somehow involved.  And I know, too, that for as much of me that doesn’t want to let go there is so much more that wants to feel more than this.

“Just promise me you’ll try,” she whispers, the audible sound of the fight draining out of her.  “Don’t compare the next one against me. Let her stick around a while longer.”

“Okay.” I hope that I mean it.

In another life I reach through the darkness and draw her against the skin of my chest.

She lets me fall asleep before she disappears again. I wake into the middle of the night, alone in the darkness of our house. It’s only after she’s left again that I feel crippled by childlike fear, that the knowledge of her existence the way it is now takes on a malicious sensation.

Most nights when I fall asleep it is on the thought of her. Tonight I succumb to the anger, the way her leaving yet again punches a hole through the core of me, how I can feel the ragged bits throbbing in exposed air. I think of every awful thing she has done. I think of the times I left her for a night, maybe two, each time hoping to have the strength to make it the last. I remember in movie-like quality how much ugly there was contained in the space that we shared, how much of it I threw away on the other side of her, just to preserve her as something worth suffering over. I fall asleep again without her, and and think that this is how it is now, even when it’s hard, even when, like tonight, it’s not. I think about taking down the pictures. I think about selling the apartment. I think, guilty, about how brilliant a life without this pain might be. I think about moving away. I think of all of the places she can’t follow me to, all of the people she can’t be.

There is a certain power in letting go; I’ve seen it on other people, even in myself, on occasion. I have chosen to be weak for far too long. But if I could summon her back I would still say it all: I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate what you’ve done to me. I love you. I will never stop loving you.