#maggie talks sports

[gallaghersgal]

i like hockey cause they js straight up fist fight on the ice. and then get put in time out. and that's normalized and sexy and everyone loves it!!!!

[navajja]

Nina and Maggie forced themselves into Crowley's life. After the last episode the guy banishes (he is getting drunk in an apartment that doesn't smells of feels like his anymore) so they ask Muriel and after a couple of days of looking they found an address. Nina takes a day free and Maggie just closes her shop for the day, they got and knock at Crowley's door.

Nina isn't one to judge about non healthy alcohol intake, but she doesn't like this, she also feels a tiny bit guilty because deep down she thinks it is her fault.

They tell Crowley that there is others human ways to deal with breakups besides crying and drinking, they can definitely do that too but maybe Crowley needs something else.

Crowley goes into a healing period, and it starts with some cleaning, he human way, because Crowley already miracled away everything that belonged to Shax or that she touched, the apartment looks a bit too empty now, but Crowley will always know she was there. So yes, they clean that apartment the human way, they scrub, they go shopping, the redecorate.

[dixons-sunshine]

Come Back To Bed | Daryl Dixon x Fem!Reader

(GIF by @daryl-dixon-daydreams)

A soft, quiet yawn escaped your mouth. You wiped the sleep from your eyes and placed your hands on the counter, your gaze landing on the coffee maker that you had started up a few seconds prior. Coffee—that was another luxury that came with your stay in Alexandria. You hadn’t realized the full extent of your love for coffee until the ability to make yourself a cup of coffee in the mornings was ripped away from you. Now that you had access to a coffee maker and coffee, you weren’t about to take the delicious liquid for granted ever again.

You were waiting for the coffee maker to finish up, contemplating what you were going to make for breakfast when you felt a pair of arms encircle your waist, a warm body pressing up against your back, a face nuzzling into the crook of your neck. You didn’t even have to look over your shoulder to know who it was. However, you still did, and you were pleased to find your partner pressed up against your back.

You smiled and placed your hands over his. “Good morning, handsome,” you greeted him, chuckling when he simply grunted in response. “You sleep okay?” You simply got another grunt as a response, eliciting another chuckle from you. “You want some coffee?”

“Nah,” he voiced, finally doing something other than making noncommittal grunts. “I don’ want coffee. I want ya to come back to bed. I ain’t ready to for the day yet.”

This was a pleasant surprise for you. You’ve known Daryl since the early days of the outbreak, dating back all the way to the quarry. He was always the first person up in the mornings and the last person to go to bed at night. He was always rearing to go, to make himself useful. You couldn’t think of a time he had ever wanted to sleep in. This was a side of the archer you had yet to see.

“I can’t,” you began in an apologetic tone. “I have to switch with Glenn for my watch shift soon.”

“He can wait,” Daryl grumbled into the skin of your neck, his arms tightening around you. “Can’t even count how many times he’s been late for somethin’ jus’ ‘cause he was busy with Maggie. He’ll jus’ have to understand.”

You giggled and shook your head, leaning forward to switch off the coffee maker. “I can’t do that, Dar. It’s not fair to him to have to stay longer than what was agreed. You can stay in bed longer if you want to, though.”

“Like hell it ain’t fair. Seems pretty fair to me. And I want ya to come back to bed too. Don’ sleep well without ya there.” Daryl lifted his head from the crook of your neck and spun you around in his embrace. From your new position, you could better appreciate the view of your partner. He was sporting an old, faded Metallica t-shirt with a pair of flannel pants. His hair was messy and you could clearly see the sleep still present in his eyes. He looked rather appetizing, in your opinion. “I don’ care whether or not Glenn throws a hissy fit if yer late or not. Yer comin’ back to bed. S’way too early to function right now.”

“It’s almost 8am.”

“Exactly.”

You shook your head and stepped out of Daryl’s embrace. “I’m sorry, Dar. I can’t.”

A few beats of silence passed. “Then ya leave me no choice,” Daryl finally spoke up again.

You barely had a chance to process his words. You were hoisted up off the ground, your body being laid over your partner’s shoulder. You yelped and laughed simultaneously. “Daryl! You can’t just—”

“‘Course I can. I jus’ did,” he cut you off, patting your rear end once as he descended up the stairs to get to your shared bedroom. “Yer comin’ back to bed. Thought I already mentioned that.”

You knew there was no point in arguing with him. When Daryl sets his mind to something, you knew there was no point in trying to talk him out of it. You’d just have to apologize to Glenn later, and as Daryl placed you down on the bed and clambered over to lay down next to you, holding you tightly from behind, you realized you definitely weren’t about to get out of bed again soon.

And the cup of coffee you were busy making yourself stood long forgotten on the kitchen counter.

[grimespial]

Too Sweet

Carl Grimes x Shane's Son Male reader

slightly aged up just for plot reasons

You did not have a good relationship with your dad.

He was practically two different people in public and private. In private you were mostly ignored, but if you weren't, then you were just a disappointment.

All because of Carl and Lori Grimes.

Nothing you could do would make him proud, he would throw you away in the blink of an eye if it meant taking Rick's place.

You and Carl used to get along, but you couldnt help but push him away, atleast it could be played off with you being older and teen moods.

Rick tried to include you, he was more of a dad to you than Shane, talking, playing, sports, just spending time but it just hurt.

So when the apocalypse starts, it's not a suprise you just happen to be left.

You somehow made your way to a farm, hoping it would be abandoned, but of course it wasn't and a woman on a horse came at you.

That's how you ended up joining the Greene family. It was hard. You actually got cared for, you practically were adopted

But then a boy was shot and Hershel had to help, and of course the people you honestly never wanted to see again had to show up.

Rick almost choked you with the hug he gave, Shane wasn't back yet, still out with Otis. The man who was teaching you to hunt with a gun because a knife won't always work.

Your dad came back, alone. You were already Maggie and Beth's brother, but Otis was like an older brother. And now he's gone.

When Carl woke up, Rick with all good intent, told him you were here. You would think it was magic how quickly he healed enough to go looking for you.

He was so insistent. Didn't matter how much you walked away, or replied rudely, he would just follow you everywhere.

For Carl, it was worth getting shot, because now you're back! He missed how you two hung out and when everything went down he didn't think he would ever see you again.

Everything was horrible with Shane, his whole group didn't even know you existed, even worse when they thought Shane was Carl's dad at the very beginning.

The Greene family were on edge around Shane, sometimes even getting hostile if he started crossing the line against their brother and son.

Rick had to step in and tell Shane to leave you alone until they found Sophia, because Hershel warned him they'd get kicked out if it continued.

Your relationship progressed without you or Carl noticing, but everyone else did.

Carl included you in everything, and included himself in anything you did.

It was hard to get over the jealousy, but with Shane gone and how Carl seemed so happy to spend time with you, like you were the greatest thing in the world, it was easier to heal.

Maggie was having the time of her life teasing you, hypocritical considering her and Glenn can't leave eachother alone.

What pushed you two to date was when Lori died. Daryl asked you to look after Carl, so you did. Spending time in his cell, getting him outside for some fresh air, just talking to him.

When he wanted some private time, you cared for Judith instead. Hershel joked that neither you or Beth should think about having a baby antime soon.

Maggie, humorous as always, told him there was no worry on your side unless Carl could get pregnant.

It was later when Carl came out of his cell, you were still looking after Judith while Beth made milk and Glenn helped Maggie make some food.

That night, you stayed up with Carl. He was struggling to sleep lately, so you stayed up until he fell asleep. This night he just started crying.

So you just hugged him. Nobody spoke. The only sound was Carl hiccuping and breathing while you wrapped your arm around his shoulder.

When Carl quieted down, he turned to see you, but you were already looking at him. And you were close.

It was easier to push away any feelings before, there was no time to think over feelings, more important things were happening.

But here you were face to face and before you knew it Carl kissed you.

Carl is practically your owner and you're the guard dog. Stubborn is your middle name, but one whisper of your name from Carl and you listen.

He never gets over the butterflies or blushing, you hold his hand and he's practically burning and trying to hold his smile back.

You constantly were protecting him. There was technically no need, he could take care of himself perfectly fine, but you insisted on it.

Sometimes it got annoying to him and he'd snap, Rick would end up explaining that you just care for him and dont want him to get hurt.

It's free entertainment for the adults watching you two go through a relationship.

You both sneak away from the group to make out, but when youre on the road its harder and Carl really doesn't want to make out in front of anyone, especially his dad.

You do end up breaking that rule one day, you were with Michonne after the prison fell, and when you found him you both just ran to eachother.

Cuddles are mandatory.

You have to be watched when eating, because you will just give Carl your food if it means he's healthier, Carl was not happy when he found this out.

Carl loves being pampered by you but he'll pretend he doesn't, but if you can't for whatever reason it doesn't feel right.

this is based off the Carl fic i have with the same premise, i might end up putting it on ao3...

[deansapplepie]

Do I look like I wanna laugh?

Summary: In years of marriage you had never worn a sexy lingerie to your husband. What happens when you do?

Pairing: Daryl Dixon x Reader

Warnings: detailed description of lingerie on your body (no body description), talks about sex, smut, Dom! Daryl or a terrible tentative of, dirty talk, knife play if you squint, fingering, mirror sex, swearing, pet names, use of the word slut very affectionately, p in v, unprotected sex (use protection kids), creampie. MINORS DO NOT INTERACT 18+.

A/N: FINALLY FINISHED IT AFTER ALMOST A MONTH WRITING! There’s a warning for knife play, but it actually isn’t, the knife is just used to cut something and it’s not reader.

You had gone on a run with Rosita and Maggie, try to find some supplies, hopefully some new clothes and that’s how you ended up with the girls looking for some lingerie. You had never had this kind of underwear, you normally wore the comfortable ones, the more practical… when you were younger you’d not have them because you were afraid if tour parents saw them they would think you were having sex. Your father would probably freak out and your mother would tease you for the rest of your life. When you left home… well then you preferred your comfort, and nothing is more comfortable than some sports bra and cotton panties.

You had a cute set on your hands, a baby blue all lacy and full of bows. It was cute and the color reminded you of his eyes. “I don’t know Rosi, I’m not used to wearing this. And it’s not practical when we are always running from walkers.” You said, Rosita and Maggie were trying to convince you to get some sets for you. They dragged you from the section you were before and were practically throwing the cute, revealing and sensual sets on you.

“You’re not supposed to use them to fight walkers. Although… I think Daryl would find it sexy if you did.” Maggie grinned, she knew how you could get all flushed and shy when the talk was about sex or any sensual thing.

“Maggie!” You reprehended your friend. “I don’t think he likes those kind of things, I mean… he never said anything or complained.”

“We know he prefer you wearing nothing. Girl, we know you’re enthusiasts, we have ears, you know?” You blushed instantly while Rosita spoke, yes, you knew they often could listen to your and The archer’s activities. Daryl made it very difficult to not be noisy. “But believe me, he’ll like it. He’s kind of a rustic man, but he’s a man after all. They like those things.”

“Ok, I’m going to take this one.” You surrendered, but Rosita wasn’t over.

“Oh not this one, it’s all sweet and cute. Daryl already know this side of you very well. Let’s get you something more sexy.” She said looking at the hangers.

“I’m no femme fatale Rosi, I’m just me… I think I’m sweet after all.”

“You can keep this one, and any other you want, but we’ll choose some for you. Daryl will be wrapped around your fingers.” Maggie said.

“We’re married in case you didn’t notice.” You observed and showed your hand as if they had never seen the ring on your finger.

They choose three for you a black one, a red one and a coral one, they said the colors would outstand more your features. You choose the baby blue one that reminded you of his eyes, a pink one as cute as the blue and a white one.

Later that day after killing 5 walkers and going back home you pondered if you’d wear one of them. What would he think? Would he like it? He liked your common underwear, would those “sexy” ones be appreciated by him?

You had chosen the black one, if anything could go wrong you obviously would go with the boldest one. The black lingerie was very different from all you had seen before. On the breasts it made a triangle around each breast and had only a strap from one side to the other covering your nipples, it had many straps embracing your body and forming geometric shapes with it. In the middle of each strap there was a little bow. The lower part was lacy and had one particularity, it was open in the middle, in the lowest part, letting your cunt uncovered.

You looked at yourself in the mirror, on one hand you thought it was beautiful how it fit in your body embracing all the perfections and all the flaws, but on the other hand you felt silly. You never wore something like this before and you never presented yourself like this to Daryl before. That was it, you were going to take it off and wear your usual underwear and your sleeping clothes. When you were about to take it out, the door to your shared room opened, you jumped startled and closed your robe faster than the Flash.

“What’s that love? Why are ya all jumpy?” Daryl, your husband, asked entering the room and walking in your direction. You didn’t turn to look at him, years of marriage and being caught in this situation still made you blush and be embarrassed.

“Nothing…” you tried. You knew he knew that when you said nothing, it indeed was something.

“It doesn’t seem like nothing to me. You’re all blushy and you were startled when I entered the room.” He wrapped his arms around you and looked at you through the mirror. “Were ya doing something wrong? Something ya shouldn’t be doing?”

“N-no…” you knew what he meant and no, you weren’t doing anything “wrong”.

“Hmm…” he inhaled your scent in your neck nuzzling his nose on it and on your ears. “Not touching yerself without me or without me saying so?”

“No!” You exclaimed, and you quickly thought saying it like this would make you more suspect. “It’s another thing.”

You closed your eyes out of embarrassment, now you couldn’t escape this situation.

“Then, what is it?” He asked again, kissing your neck, his stubble sending chills through your body.

“Do you promise you’ll not laugh about it even if it’s the most ridiculous thing?” You asked looking for his eyes in the mirror.

“I promise it, babe. I’ll not do that.” He rested his chin on your shoulder, observing you. “Now tell me…”

You took a breath and then opened your robe, you slowly opened it until you revealed the piece you were wearing under the robe. When you opened it, you quickly closed your eyes, you were afraid of what you would see in his eyes. There was a moment of silence, and you thought you had screwed everything, until you listened to his voice. “Open your eyes.” He commanded.

You slowly opened your eyes, afraid you’d see something you didn’t want on his face. But as soon as you opened them, you saw his blue eyes, black in lust and desire, the blue just a thin line on the borders. “Do I look like I wanna laugh?” He asked.

“No…” you replied weakly, gods the way his eyes were raking your reflection… that was making your legs weak.

“Hmm…” he took his arms that were wrapped around you and slipped his hands on your arms. “Where did you get it?”

“In the run. With the girls.” You replied. “They said you’d like it… but I wasn’t sure.”

“Why’s it babe?” He asked his hands running up your arms again just to end on your shoulders, his fingers grabbing your robe there.

“I never used any of it, and you never said anything.” It was difficult to keep your eyes open and looking at him through the mirror, when he looked you like that it always felt so overwhelming looking right into his eyes.

“I’d find ya sexy even if ya were wearing a sack of potatoes.” He said sliding the sleeves of the robe down your arms. “I’d rather have ya naked, but this… damn! It got me hard the moment I saw it.”

You shivered from excitement, expectation and a small breeze that you could feel now that you were completely exposed. He pulled your body against his and you could feel his hard on. “Fuck.” It let your lips spontaneously.

“Yeah… fuck…” he repeated and drank you in. “Do ya mind if I do some alterations on it?”

You shook your head, but you knew he wasn’t getting only that. “I need words babe…”

“I don’t mind, you can do anything you want.” You said almost breathless and he had done nothing he barely had touched you yet. That was what Daryl Dixon made you feel.

His hand went to his waistband and he took the knife he had there. He took it carefully to your front and then to the side of the set you were wearing. He cut one side of the strap that was covering your nipples, then he cut the other side and threw the strap to a corner of the room with the knife. Now you had your nipples completely exposed and he was practically eating you alive just with his eyes. “Now, it’s perfect.”

He embraced your body once again with his big strong arms while his mouth went straightly to your neck giving you the most sinful open mouthed kiss, immediately making you sigh. Then he stopped. “I think I shoulda go clean myself, I worked all day…”

“Don’t you dare.” He was playing games with you, you knew it. He had no intention of stopping. He just wanted to tease you, but he had already made you despaired for him. “You just fixed some cars… I-I need you!”

“Look at my sweet girl…” he embraced you tightly one of his hands cupping one of tour breasts and the other sneaking down your stomach. “… ain’t her a little slut?”

He massaged tour breast, teasing it, pinching your erected nipple. His other hand cupped your semi nude crotch. “Yours…” You breathless said.

“Mine?” He repeated on your ear, his fingers running through your impossibly wet folds. “So wet fer me… so ready fer my cock…”

“I’m…” He pressed your clit eliciting a moan from your lips. “Ugh… your slut.”

He inserted one finger on your pussy, you gasped a moan escaping your lips. He nibbled and sucked on your neck and shoulders. “Even being my little slut, yer still so sweet.” He pumped his finger on you ando looked mesmerized at your reflection on the mirror, how you face contorted in pleasure, your parted plump lips and how your lids covered your eyes so perfectly and sinfully. “Open yer eyes sweetheart, wanna you to see how beautiful yer when I fuck you so good.”

It took you a lot to open your eyes and look at your and his reflection on the mirror. “That’s it love…” his deep voice sent chills all over your body making you clench around his finger. He inserted one more pumping in and out of you, his thumb making circles on your clit. “Such a good little slut fer me…”

You bucked your hips on his hands waiting for your sweet release and aching to have his thick delicious cock inside of you. You clenched around him repeatedly, you had become a moaning mess and it was difficult to keep your eyes open, but he wanted that so you tried. For him. Everything for him. You focused on his pretty eyes, his clean eyes that were so dark right now, the intensity on them overwhelming but grounding you in the moment. “Cum fer me baby… let it go…”

You rose your arm to the back, your hand going to the back of his neck enlacing your fingers on his hair. As you’re sent to the edge you pull on his hair making him groan as you have your release on his fingers. “So, so, so sweet! So good fer me…” he said while he drove you through your high fingers still pumping on you.

“Daryl…” you weekly said, your head resting on his shoulder, trying to catch your breath.

He looked down at you, his lips brushing yours. “What’s it baby?” You didn’t answer you took his lips on yours, hungrily damn you hadn’t kissed yet since he arrived, you needed this, you loved so much his kisses and the taste of his mouth.

You both broke the kiss, breathless you looked him in his eyes. “Was that what you needed babe?”

“That too…” you answered, the tip of your fingers massaging his scalp. “But actually… I need you, inside of me.”

He tightened his embrace on you, ready to move to bed, but you stopped him with your words. “Here.”

He stopped on his tracks, looking you in the eyes. You had already made sex in many different places, but he knew you both preferred it in bed. Your words startled him and woke something in him. “Do ya think ya can stand for a little time?”

“Yeah, I’m holding on you babe…” you said tugging a little on his hair, he released you, but was ready to catch you if needed. He unbuckled his belt and opened his jeans, taking his cock out of his boxers and pumping it a little before getting a hold on you again. He needed you, and he was glad you suggested he took you right there at that moment.

He held you on his arms once again, his hands traveling on your body. One hand ended up on your neck, just getting a hold in there while the other went back to your breasts, caring them, stimulating them… giving them the attention that they deserved.

You rocked your but on his hard on. Both of you looked at your reflections, you never thought it would excite you this much. He teased your entrance with his dick making you whimper and squirm. “Oh, please… please…” you begged, the wait making you ache and burn for him.

Who was him to deny you something when you asked so sweetly? Without any warning he trusted deeply into you, you moaned almost screaming, your fingers tugging his hair a little harsher than usual. “Fuck. I. Love. Ya. So. Fucking. Much.” For each word a trust, deep, certain, at the right spot.

You wasn’t able to say anything, lost in bliss and desire the only thing that left your mouth were moans and whimpers. With your free hand you got a handful of his but pressing him deeply into you if that was even possible. You looked at both of you in the mirror, Daryl trusting his hips on you, your bodies trembling out of pleasure and glistening with sweat. You never saw anything hotter.

His hand stopped taking care of your tits going down your body just to tease your clit, stimulate it and build your pleasure. He’s main mission was to pleasure you and if he could he’d do it every single day and minute of his life.

A turmoil building on your lower stomach, his name leaving your lips. Your walls clenching around him, indicating you were close to your high, his cock twitching in a way telling you he was close too. He turned your head to the side taking your lips on his in a passionate kiss, and as he hit that spongy spot inside of you sending you to your edge, he found his shooting his seed in you as you squeezed around him. “I love you!” You said while descending from your high, finally being able to speak.

Wanna be added to my tag list? Let me know. (Please tell me if you want to be tagged on everything or just specific series)

Everything Taglist: @lilyevanstan1325 @hayley1998

Dividers and mdni banners by @cafekitsune

[81-piastri]

LOGAN SARGEANT AND OSCAR PIASTRI: a commentary on grieving friendships (and caring about it far more than the other)

War of the Foxes, Richard Siken // American F1 driver opens up on 'Loscar' bromance with Oscar Piastri, The Roar // UNKNOWN // UNKNOWN // "We Probably Talk Less": Logan Sargeant on Diminishing Bromance with Oscar Piastri, The Sports Rush // Post on r/BreakUps // UNKNOWN // s4pphoiduser // Untitled, Margaret Schnabel // inanotheruniverse // I Still Forget We're Not Even Friends, Trista Mateer // Logan Sargeant during an F1 'game' // Cought It Out, The Front Bottoms // Oscar Piastri during the same F1 'game' previously mentioned // What I Could Never Confess Without Some Bravado, Emily Palermo // The Crucible, Arthur Miller // I Loved My Friend, Langston Hughes // Bluets, Maggie Neslon // The Kinds Aren't Alright, Fall Out Boy // UNKNOWN

[angelwings-crossbowstrings]

I’ve Been the Archer, I’ve Been the Prey

Pairing: Daryl Dixon x Fem!Reader

Setting: Alexandria (after 6 year jump)

Warnings: Talk of pregnancy, angst (with a happy ending), brief mention of injuries

Summary: After everything, Daryl is still trying.

A/N: Part 2 of Help Me Hold Onto You. If you haven’t read that one, you may want to before this one. This isn’t great but I needed to put something out if for no other reason than to help me feel better. I hope y’all like it.

Moodboard by @dannyo000

The infirmary was quiet, and for that, you were thankful. Autumn had arrived, cooler temperatures and less fresh foods available left people’s immunities lacking. A couple of flu cases had been reported, but all in all, everyone seemed to be doing okay. Siddiq was setting up for your weekly visit. He had demanded those because of your declining health since you’d found out about the baby. You were never supposed to be able to have children. It took years for this to happen, even though you and Daryl had never taken precautions. 

You sighed. Daryl. The two of you hadn’t spoken since that day over a month ago. He had remained close but never asked about appointments or your health or the baby. Not a single word. A part of you had hoped he’d at least try now that he knew. Another part of you scolded that part with something about setting yourself up for disappointment. 

You knew the archer wasn’t in Alexandria today. He had left a few days ago for Hilltop after Maggie had sent word of a threat lingering nearby. Of course Daryl had left. Everything was more important than you, after all. You shook your head clear of those thoughts, looking down at your rounded middle. 

“At least I have you, little one.” You smiled, albeit sadly. 

“What’s that?” Siddiq peered out of the exam room, eyebrows raised. 

You shook your head. “Nothing. Ready?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, come on back.” 

You were levering yourself up from the chair, the physician’s brow drawing inward just as a sound came from behind you. Following his gaze to the door, your eyes widened. 

“Dixon?”

“Hey.” He greeted quietly. He looked like shit, covered in dirt and the dark remnants of walker innards. Cuts and bruises littered the skin you could see. How much of the bright red blood on his skin and clothes was actually his? The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in days and would keel over any minute. “S’it okay that m’here?”

You blinked at him a moment longer before nodding. “Yeah.” How did he even know? “Yeah, sure. I was just heading back.” 

He returned the nod, shifting from foot to foot uneasily. “I’ll, uh—I’ll just be here then. If’n ya need me.” Daryl had yet to meet your eyes. 

“Okay.” You turned toward the room and took a couple of steps, too lost in your thoughts to notice the almost comical discomfort Siddiq nakedly wore. Daryl’s here. He actually came. Stopping just short of the doorway, you twisted at the fabric of your sweater. “Hey, you could, y’know—come back here with me.” You turned back to the bowman, finding him staring back with an expression you couldn’t quite place. 

“Sure. Okay.”

You didn’t wait for him and squeezed past Siddiq to quickly climb onto the exam table. Daryl entered a moment later, your eyes narrowing at the limp he sported. He didn’t say anything else, didn’t even move toward where you were set up. It really seemed as if he was trying to be as imperceptible as possible. 

But he was here. 

“Alright, Y/N, let’s see what your little cauliflower is up to, shall we?” 

A glance at Daryl saw him looking lost and mouthing the word cauliflower. It was too adorable for you not to smile. “Siddiq likes to call the baby the fruits and veggies that represent how big it is.” You quipped, pulling up your shirt to just below your breasts. The archer seemed to have forgotten all about the mention of food, now staring at your rounded belly with wide eyes. You had forgotten that he’d never seen you like this beneath your clothes. 

The jelly on the end of the wand was cold and caused you to flinch, snapping both you and Daryl out of your respective thoughts. The room filled with the static noises of the machine until suddenly a quick, repetitive thudding sounded. You smiled and watched the screen, knowing from previous visits exactly what you were seeing and hearing. You let your gaze shift to the side, where the archer was leaning slightly with narrowed eyes on the monitor. “Come here.” You beckoned him with a finger. 

A moment of hesitation but then he limped toward you, halting next to your legs. You found yourself wishing he had taken the two extra steps to be beside you but quickly dismissed it. 

“S’that sound?” Daryl asked quietly. 

“That’s the baby’s heartbeat.” Siddiq smiled toward the screen, watching the little humanoid shape move. “See that? That’s a foot.” 

You couldn’t help but beam as you watched the show play out in front of you. Siddiq pointed at different things and told you both what they were. At one point, the baby yawned and you almost giggled, but your eyes tore away from the screen when you felt something brush your arm. Daryl had moved closer but he didn’t seem to realize. His piercing blue eyes were shining, unblinking, and locked on that screen. He didn’t speak, didn’t make a sound. Just stood there with this raw emotion on display for anyone to see. You couldn’t take your eyes off of him. 

Your hand moved of its own accord, fingertips ghosting over his knuckles. His reaction was instant, a single tear making its descent toward his jaw when he looked at you. “That’s your baby, Daryl.” He stared for a moment more and then back to the screen. You knew this softness wouldn’t last. The anger would return the moment you left this room, but for now—

Siddiq asked you again if you wanted to know the gender and you refused. He gave you the speech about needing iron and that you absolutely must find someone to send out for prenatal vitamins. Much to your chagrin, he prohibited you from any kind of work now. You waved him off and headed for the door, feeling Daryl on your heels. He was probably still staring at the picture he had been given. 

“Ya goin’ home?” He queried once the door closed and you stepped out into the cold air. You tossed him a look over your shoulder. 

“No.”

“Whatcha need? I can get it an’ ya can go rest.” Dog bounded over, stopping at your hip for ear scritches before continuing to his owner.

“I’ve got work to do. Some of the solar panels have to be moved.” His footsteps audibly picked up speed. Oh no. 

“Whoa, hey, wait a sec.” His grip on your arm was gentle, just enough pressure to get you to slow down and let him step into your path. “Doc said no work.”

“I heard him.” You made to sidestep around him, sighing loudly when he moved with you. 

“Ya need ta go home.” 

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be? Like in a shower? Or maybe go back and get that leg looked at?”

“Nah, only place m’goin’ is to your house so I know ya actually go inside.”

You closed your eyes and counted to ten in your head, pulling in a deep breath through your nose. “Dixon, get out of my way.” He only squared his shoulders and crossed his arms. “That shit doesn’t work with me anymore.” You stepped the other direction, only to be blocked again. “Move before I move you.”

“I’d like to see ya try.” He smirked. You found you had to bite back a smile.

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

“Nah.” 

“Why do you care?” You asked, mimicking his stance. It was low, you knew it. 

“What ‘bout all those things doc said about your health? And if’n that ain’t enough of a reason, that’s my baby inside ya.” You lifted your chin defiantly. Yeah, okay, you felt like shit. Nauseous and tired and weak almost constantly but you’d be damned if he was going to waltz in and start bossing you around after what he’d put you through. Daryl’s shoulders dropped, his hands falling to his sides. “Y/N, ya told me I could be part’a this as much as I wanted. Just—let me take care’a things.” 

You held your coldness a few moments longer, finally just too tired to continue. “Fine. I’m going home.” He gave you a small nod and moved aside, letting you pass. “And don’t follow me!” You yelled back before you rounded the corner and he was out of sight. 

Being home and not out in the community was not something to which you were accustomed. It filled you with a nervous energy that had you picking at your nails or bouncing your leg almost constantly. Regardless, your aching back and swollen ankles were quite content to be laid out on the couch. And it was a downpour outside, cold and windy. 

You tried to focus on the book you held in one hand, the fingers of the other twisting the silver arrow pendant that hung from the chain around your neck. You weren’t sure why you hadn’t taken it off. It reminded you of when Daryl was yours and you were his, when things felt right and safe. The familiar weight of it kept you grounded. Michonne had said you couldn’t part with it because your heart still belonged to him. The statement had made you so angry, but that made it no less true. 

But then you had seen him with her. This—Leah. Thinking back on it now, you could remember how she’d reached for his hand and he had moved it. How she’d stepped into his space and he’d turned his head, maintaining some distance. But she’d said something, close to his ear, and he had turned quickly. She’d caught him by the mouth in a feverish kiss and you had looked away, but he was already walking away from her when you looked back. You’d made a noise then, a broken sob, and he’d seen you. You could clearly remember that horrified, desperate look in his eyes. He’d called your name and begged you to stop, but the ache in your heart had propelled you forward. 

He may not have wanted that kiss, but why was he with her, alone in that cabin? He had wanted to explain after finally coming back, but you had shut him down. Why hadn’t you let him explain? 

A knock at your screen door made you jump, the book falling to the floor and your hand reaching for the knife on the table. Glancing out the window, you found the sun had disappeared, leaving nothing but darkness and shadows. How long had you been sitting there? 

After two tries, you finally made it to your feet and padded over to the front door. Maybe you should have brought the knife with you, but something told you that there was no threat on the other side. Hand hesitating over the knob, you finally grasped it and pulled the door open. 

Daryl was soaked to the bone, breathing hard and trembling in the cold wind. He still looked like shit. 

“Dixon? What’re you doing here? And why are you—panting?” You asked, mildly amused. 

“Bike stalled few miles out. Wanted to give ya this.” 

You hadn’t noticed the pack in his hand at first. “Oh.” You stated simply. “Okay, um, come in.” You unlocked the screen door and pushed it toward him, a blur of wet dog pushing past both of you before shaking off in front of the fire and making himself at home there. “Thanks, asshole.” You chuckled, shaking your head and waving the archer inside. 

You led him to your small dining table and reached for the bag, his cold fingers brushing yours as he passed it off. 

“Did you walk here in the rain?” You asked, giving him a once over while unzipping the bag. 

“Uh, sorta. Maybe more joggin’ than walkin’. S’fucking cold.”

Raising an eyebrow, you shook your head and opened the pack, your expression falling. Four bottles of prenatal vitamins, three bottles of iron supplements, a handful of peppermint candies, two small blankets, a stuffed elephant, and a tiny pale green onesie. Stunned into silence, you looked back at him. 

He was rubbing his upper arms, either to combat the chill or out of nerves; you weren’t sure which. “Doc said ya need those vit’mins an’ that your iron is real low so those other things will help. That candy’s good for when ya feelin’ sick, an’ I saw some stuff for babies so I grabbed what I could ‘fore I had to get outta there.” He didn’t even stop for a breath and kept his eyes on the bag. When you didn’t say anything, he cleared his throat. “Alright. If ya need anything,” he took a radio from his belt and placed it on the table, “m’on channel four. Don’t try to go get nothin’. Just call me, okay?”

You nodded and placed the bag on the table. Your heart was pounding, overflowing with gratitude and remorse and guilt and so many other emotions you couldn’t place right now. All you could focus on was him. Standing in front of you, drenched, tired, cold, limping, and still absolutely willing to do anything for you. “What if I’m craving pickles and peanut butter at 3am?” 

Still shivering, the look he tossed you was even more amusing. “Might be some in the pantry. I can check.”

“Mhmm. And what if my feet hurt and I want them rubbed?” You slowly started toward him, looking at the things on the table, running your fingers along the bag and then the radio. 

The confused frown only deepened. “Ain’t no masseuse, but I’d give it a whirl.”

“What if I just wanted you?” You stopped, a step or two away, and finally met his eyes. “What if I wanted to hear you tell me what really happened that day?” Your eyes began to sting, your vision blurring. 

“Y/N,” Daryl whispered. It almost sounded like a plea; like he felt as if you were toying with him, dangling this in front of him with the intent to pull it away when he reached for it. 

But you reached for him first. Your warm hand sat against his chilled cheek, his eyes closing as he leaned into your touch. 

“What if I wanted to tell you over and over how much I’ve missed you and how sorry I am for how I’ve treated you?” Your voice broke, the tears cascading down your cheeks. Daryl wasted no time in gathering against him, holding you as close as he could while you sobbed. He was wet and cold but that didn’t matter. “I’m so sorry, Daryl.”

“S’okay. M’here now.” 

You felt his lips press against the top of your head, his hand rubbing circles on your back. After you had shown him nothing but bitter disdain, he was comforting you. You allowed it until you could pull yourself together, placing your hands on his chest to move back but only the slightest bit. 

“Come with me. We’ve got to get you dry and warm.” You walked around him, closing and locking the door before offering your hand. He took it without hesitation. 

Hours later, you both were lying on your bed. Daryl was clad only in his damp boxer briefs and you were in your tshirt and sleep shorts, both under the blankets and facing one another. 

“I should’ve let you explain. We lost so much time, you missed out on so much.” You sniffled and wiped your eyes with the back of your hand.

“Don’t matter no more. M’here now. S’all gonna be okay.” He reached to tuck some hair behind your ear, letting his fingertips linger on your jaw. “I missed ya.” 

You felt new tears collecting on your lashes and tried your best to keep them from falling. “I missed you so much.” You moved first, closing the distance to press your lips to his. He reciprocated immediately. The kiss was desperate, meant to convey everything that hadn’t been said. You parted quickly, both of you too weary to seek anything more just yet. With your forehead against his, you smiled and pressed one more chaste kiss to his lips. “Daryl?”

He hummed in response, his eyes already closed, the circles his thumb was tracing over your hip stuttering and slowing as he began to relax and drift off. 

“Want to officially greet your baby?”

His eyes opened at that. “What?” 

You moved back just a little and took his hand in yours while you scooted up to lean against the headboard. Your free hand pulled up your shirt so you could press his palm against the curve of your belly. He didn’t have to wait long before a flurry of kicks rippled beneath his hand. His eyes lit up and he was propped on his elbow in an instant. 

“Holy shit.” He whispered. “That was them?”

“That was our little cauliflower.” You replied, smiling brightly. He moved closer, resting his head against your chest so your fingers could card through his hair. His hand was still glued to that spot. “Talk to them. They can hear you.” You encouraged, shimmying down a little so the pillows propped you up more than the headboard. If Daryl was bothered by your movements, he didn’t complain. He was already invested in a different conversation. 

“Hey, kid. M’your dad.”

[willowsnook]

Right Place, Right Time (LN pt. 2)

pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3, pt. 4

@seasonswinter @drdbnkl2008

It'd been a couple of months since the Dutch Grand Prix and your life went back to normal. Work, hanging out with friends, watching sports, walking your dog, the usual. The weather was starting to get nicer in Austin so you were in a good mental spot.

You and Lily had checked in every couple of weeks to chat and you had grown to really like her. About a month ago you had gotten a text from an unknown number.

L: Hey, this is Lando. Lily gave me your number I hope that's okay

Y/N: Lando who?

L: 🙄 very funny

Y/n: How do I even know this isn't spam???

L: [video attachement]

"Hey y/n, it's Lando Norris. You know the driver for McLaren that you met in August. Just wanted to say hi, okay bye."

Since then you had been casually texting, nothing crazy just pretty much sending memes back and forth. The Austin GP was coming up and your whole team was going much to Lando's delight.

The Monday of race week, you were in your office working when you looked down to see Lando calling.

Y/n: What's up?

LN: Nothing much just packing. I'm flying in on Wednesday.

Y/n: Coolio, I hate to do this but I have a meeting in 5 minutes. Can I call you later?

LN: No no it's okay. I was calling to see if maybe you could give me a little tour of Austin when I get in?

Y/N: Hmmm I am pretty packed this week hanging with Lily.

LN: Yeah but you can hang out with her when Osc and I are doing stuff.

Y/n: Fine, text me when you land and i'll figure something out.

LN: Cool, I'll see you then.

You said goodbye and hung up, leaning back in your chair. This whole situation was very strange to you considering you and Lando had spoken one time in person. But maybe he just needed a friend.

You were at happy hour later than day with two of your friends when the subject came up.

"So yeah, I'm picking him up from his hotel and going sight seeing and eating I guess," you said nonchalantly as you finished the story to your two best friends, Maggie and Jaelen.

"Oh yeah so casual," Jaelen said. "Just hanging out with a famous F1 driver. Nothing odd about that." You rolled her eyes and Maggie snickered.

"Did you like put a spell on him when you were there and now he's in love with you?" She asked and you flipped her off.

"I literally didn't do anything!" You exclaimed. "We just talked for a bit and I was being nice."

"You're just not like other girls," Jaelen mocked and you groaned. This whole thing was getting out of hand.

"I am excited for you guys to meet Lily though," you said. "She's cool."

"Sounds like it," Maggie said. "Girls night on Thursday right?" You nodded. You had planned a little girls night slumber party with them and Lily to just hang and watch movies and gossip. The usual activities.

------wednesday---------

The day had flown by at work and before you knew it you were heading out the door to pick up Lando. Your hair sat in waves down your back and you decided on a casual cute vibe wearing a cropped knit brown tank top paired with light baggy jeans. It wasn't that far of a drive to his hotel and you texted him when you got there.

Glued to your phone, you didn't see him walk up and jumped a little when the passenger door opened. He gave you a big smile as your eyes raked over him in a big gray t-shirt and black jeans.

"You are totally checking me out," he said and you huffed.

"I am not," you replied and he laughed.

"It's good to see you," he said sweetly and you smiled.

"You too, are you hungry?"

"Starving."

You pulled out and headed towards the restaurant, the two of you casually chatting about his travel and your work day. You found parking at the place and you both jumped out and headed in.

"Tex mex," Lando said looking at the menu with his face scrunched. "Isn't it just like Mexican food?"

"Yes and no," you said. "It's like American Mexican food so it uses more beef and yellow cheese vs. what you would get in an authentic mexican restaurant."

"What do they mean by a bowl of queso?" He asked and your eyes snapped up to him.

"It's just like a bowl of cheese that you eat with chips," you said slowly.

"And that's good?" he asked innocently.

"You are going to make me cry in public right now," you warned. When your waiter came over it was the first thing you ordered for the two of you.

"How long have you lived here?" Lando asked after you put in your orders.

"A couple of years actually," you said. "I grew up a couple of states north of here, went to college up there, and then moved down when I got the job at Monster."

"Do you have family here?"

"A couple of second cousins but my parents still live where I grew up," you replied. "You live in Monaco now right?" He smirked.

"Looking me up online now are you?" He teased and you blushed.

"I had to make sure you weren't crazy if I was going to show you around my city," you defended and he laughed.

"Yeah I'm in Monaco, I grew up in Glastonbury though," he said and you nodded.

"Is it hard being away from your family?" You asked and he shrugged.

"Yes and no. I miss them a lot but a lot of people involved in F1 live in Monaco so I'm not totally alone. It can be lonely though." You smiled sympathetically.

When your food arrived you waited patiently for Lando to try the infamous queso.

"Well?" You asked nervously. This was very important to you.

"It's pretty good," he said taking another bite.

"Just pretty good?" You questioned.

"It's like exotic," he said and you choked on the sip of water you had just taken a drink of.

"Exotic?? It's melted cheese buddy." Lando blushed and you laughed.

"Are you like a picky eater?" You asked and he nodded.

"Yeah I get a lot of shit for it," he admitted.

"I can't imagine why."

Conversation flowed over the next half hour while you ate, trading childhood stories and hobbies. Lando picked up the bill much to your protest and you headed out to your next stop.

"Mini golf? You really did stalk me online," Lando said as you pulled up to your favorite mini golf course that was peter pan themed.

"Yeah yeah, I wanted to make sure you had fun," you said.

"I would have fun with you even if we did nothing but stare at each other for two hours," he said cheekily.

"Yeah because I'm hot," you replied with a wink and he laughed.

Lando quickly realized that you were a pretty competitive mini golfer so there wasn't much conversation even though he tried. You complained about him distracting you multiple times which made him giggle.

In the end it did not pay off as he beat you by 5 strokes causing you to pout in the car.

"You realize I play golf like all the time," he said looking at you with amusement.

"Yeah whatever," you muttered and he laughed. As you pulled up to his hotel he turned to you.

"Come have a drink to end the night," he said pleading.

"I don't want to pay for parking," you countered and he waved his hand.

"I'll pay for valet come on," he said and got out of the car. You waited while he talked to the valet guy and then followed him in and towards the bar. You got a vodka soda and you found some comfy chairs to sit in. Right when Lando started to say something, someone sunk into the third chair by you guys.

"Mind if I join you guys?" You looked to see Max Verstappen with a drink in his hand casually sitting back.

"Not at all," you said.

"Max, this is Y/n, y/n this is Max," Lando introduced and Max nodded.

"Ahh the mysterious y/n," he said smirking and you turned to Lando who was looking anywhere else but you. The three of you chatted as you got to know Max a little more and the conversation naturally turned to the upcoming race.

"Are you ready for the race this week?" You asked and Max nodded.

"Yeah, don't have really any expectations so we will just see what happens," he said nonchalantly.

"Why not?" You asked.

"The car sucks so who cares," he said and you snorted.

"What?" He asked with an eyebrow raise.

"You've won the championship how many times now? And you expect me to believe that you really just don't care?" You asked incredulously. Lando leaned up about to say something but Max beat him to it.

"Tell me what you really think then," he challenged.

"I think it's so easy for you to fall into this nonchalant attitude because you're Max Verstappen," you said and he raised his eyebrows. "You've painted yourself as this self-assured confident guy so of course you wouldn't be worked up. But how did you get to where you are? By not caring? By not having passion? I don't believe it for one second."

He sat thoughtfully for a moment before speaking again.

"You know my dad used to always tell me that if I'm not winning, then what's the point," he said.

"I think the point is that you are doing what you love and trying to get better everytime because you love the sport," you said sadly. "Winning is just a bonus. And it's you in the car not him."

Max looked at you for a second before turning his attention to Lando.

"I can see why you like her," he said before turning again to you. He reached out and grabbed your hand, caressing his thumb over the back. "It was nice meeting you and thank you."

You bid him farewell before turning back to Lando who was lost in thought.

"I think I'm going to head home," you told him and he nodded. His hand rested on the bottom of your back as you walked back towards the entrance. Lando paid the valet guy and the two of you waited for your car.

"When can I see you again?" He asked.

"I'll probably be there Saturday for qualifying," you said and he frowned.

"That's a long time from now," he said and you smirked looking away.

"I'm hanging out with Lily buddy, she's my main priority not you," you teased and he huffed.

"I want to see you sooner," he complained.

"We'll see," you replied. Your car came back into your vision and you wrapped your arms around Lando's neck pulling him in for a hug. HIs arms wrapped around your waist and he kissed your cheek before letting go.

"I had fun tonight," he said.

"Me too," you replied. "See you Saturday."

"See you Friday," he said waving and you rolled your eyes but smiled as you got in your car.

[hard--headed--woman]

I briefly talked about it with someone here and it made me think so much that I had to make a post about it - why don't misandrist men get as much hate as misandrist women ?

They are men who think men are horrible and say it. Yet they do not receive the same amount of hate as a feminist saying "I hate men".

There's an example that I find interesting and that I thought I'd share : some decades ago, a very famous leftist french singer, Renaud, made a song that quickly became very popular and loved. It's called "Miss Maggie" and it basically says that men are trash and that women are superior. The thing is, absolutely everyone praises him for it and loves that song. I guess there are some conservatives and incels who hate it, but the vast majority of the country, men and women, loves it ; people say Renaud is amazing and a genius for writing it and that the song is wonderful. Here is a link if you want to listen to it :

(He also criticizes Margaret Tatcher in that song but I won't talk about it in this post because it's not the point).

Here are some lyrics (with the english translation) just so you understand what I'm talking about :

(Bourgeois women or whores

Who are often the very same

Normal women, stars or uglies

Females of all kinds, I love you

Even to the worst moron

I dedicate these few verses

Born of my disgust for men

And their warrior morality

Because no woman on the planet

Will ever be more stupid than her brother

Nor prouder nor more dishonest)

(Woman I love you because

When sport becomes war

There are no chicks, or very few

In the hordes of fans

Crazy fanatics

Drunk on hate and beer

Defying the morons in blue

Insulting the bastards in green)

(The atomic bomb

Didn't come from a female brain

And no woman has on her hands

The blood of Native Americans.

Palestinians and Armenians

Testify from their graves

That genocides are a male thing

Like SS, bullfighters

In this fucking humanity

Murderers are all brothers

Not a woman to compete)

(Woman I love you, above all, at last

For your weakness and for your eyes

When a man's only strength

Is his gun or his cock

And when the last hour comes

Hell will be full of morons

Playing soccer or war

Playing who pisses the farthest)

Everyone loves that song and Renaud didn't receive any hate for writing it. Now imagine if a woman had written it? Just imagine the amount of hate a female singer would receive if she wrote a song like this. That could ruin her carreer and I am not exaggerating.

Renaud is also known for saying other misandrist things. I remember watching an interview with him, in which he's said that "Women are always there to heal wounds, repair damage, get things done... Unfortunately, there are still too few of them in important positions where they can participate in decision-making", "The oldest form of discrimination is discrimination against women. They are the first group we decided to hate and oppress", "Politicians and religions don't want to let women be more than virgins or whores. They don't want to let them be human beings, women, fulfilled people, with a personality, who work...", "It's not long since women have had the right to vote in France. And what's more, when I see women voting for a man, it gives me the same feeling as if I saw a crocodile going to a leather shop of its own free will...".

And in the comments, absolutely everyone was praising him, calling him a king, an angel and what not. No one to call him names or to tell him horrible things. No one to act as if he's said the craziest thing ever, no one to act as if he committed a crime. Sure some people disagree and insult women, but there is not a lot of hatred against him. Again, a woman would have received a lot of hate if she had said things like that. Just read what men have to say about Delphine Seyrig criticizing the patriarchy and the "indifference of men".

The point of that post isn’t to say that Renaud is The Feminist Ally, that he's perfect and one of the good guys or whatever. I just want to point out that a man criticizing men, saying he hates them, calling out their behaviour (and even saying women are superior!) will never receive the same amount of hate as a woman barely saying "I hate men" or ever way "nicer" things. Sounds like everyone knows why we hate men and even agrees with us deep inside, and just hate when women speak up about it. Sounds like they don't have a problem with misandry but with women 🤷🏽‍♀️

[thevegandarkelf]

Taken Care Of

18+, MINORS DNI

Masterlist

AO3 link

This oneshot features my OC Lydia Vector (from my story 'Finding Myself, Finding You') & Daryl Dixon (TWD) after they've officially gotten together. I was going to wait until I had posted all the chapters of it to post this, but it's getting too difficult to restrain myself. It isn't necessary to read the story beforehand, but some things from it will be referenced in this piece. If you love smut with fluff, feelsy smut (as someone on AO3 called this), and Daryl being a massive softie for his partner, then this one's for you.

Lydia/Vec/Vector (she goes by all of those) (c) me, TheVeganDarkElf

As their relationship continues to strengthen, Lydia & Daryl begin exploring things in the bedroom. After many trials and tribulations, Lydia finally feels she's ready to take things all the way.

This is my first time ever writing smut, so please go easy on me. Constructive criticism is appreciated (emphasis on constructive), but please be gentle or I'll cry.

Pairing: Daryl Dixon x OC

Era: Alexandria, pre-Saviors

Word count: 7.3k

TW: referenced/mention of/allusion to sexual trauma, mention of panic attacks

CWs: swearing, smut (duh), oral sex (female receiving), p in v with protection (wrap it before you tap it my friends), gentle sex, Daryl losing his p in v virginity, dirty talk, praise kink, body worship (maybe? idk?), grinding, hand job (sort of), nipple stuff, a lil' bit of post-orgasm crying from our girl. Let me know if I forgot any!

“You’re practically drooling, Vec,” Rosita laughed, snapping her fingers in front of my face.

“Hmm?” I was only half-present in my response.

“Leave her,” Maggie giggled, “she’s off in her own little world.”

Winter had come to Alexandria, gracing our presence with its ice-cold temperatures and early sunsets. Snow hadn’t fallen yet this season, but it was certainly getting cold enough to do so. I had to break out some jeans and long sleeves, packing away my usual attire of shorts and sports bras for the next few months. Rosita, Maggie and I were sat on the front porch of Maggie & Glenn’s place. Rosita and Maggie had taken the opportunity to have some wine, saying they needed a way to warm themselves from the inside due to the cold. I skipped the alcohol, opting to warm myself with some tea instead. That and Daryl’s leather jacket. Even when he hadn’t been wearing it, his jacket still carried his warmth like it was storing it just for me.

When he was getting ready, I’d tried to convince him to put on his jacket, but he insisted I wear it, telling me he would be fine with a couple of flannels and his poncho. I believed him, as the layers combined with how warm he was all the time would surely keep him nice and toasty, but I also knew his weakness was seeing me in his clothes. That was further corroborated by how handsy he’d been that morning.

He was covering gate duty for the day, his crossbow locked and loaded in his arms, ready to take out anyone or anything that came too close. I was watching him, my mouth slightly agape, dissociating as the corners upturned into a small, delirious smile. There was nothing special or different about his appearance today, but he was looking particularly handsome.

I could’ve been ovulating, but I was down so bad for that man, I didn’t need to be ovulating to be drooling over him.

Rosita pretended to pick something up off the porch and held her hand out to me, palm up, the invisible object resting on it. “Here, I picked your jaw up off the floor for you. You’ll probably want it back. Y’know, so you can use it later.”

“Rosita, please. How many times do I have to tell you that your voice carries?” I snapped.

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” she teased, chuckling softly and taking a sip of her drink.

“You’re one to talk,” I sassed, “your mind practically lives in the gutter.”

“Let her ogle her man,” Maggie retorted. She swirled her wine glass in her hand, the red liquid spiraling up around the sides and nearly spilling over the edge, before taking a sip. “How are things with you two anyway?”

“Fantastic. It’s…it’s like a dream being with him,” I gushed. My eyes fell to my notebook, and the blood was rushing to my cheeks before I had even finished my sentence.

Daryl and I had been official for a few months now, probably four if I had to guess, though no one around here religiously kept track of dates. He treated me like a queen, doting on me despite any sort of little pushback I gave. I was Miss “I’m hyper-independent, let me do it myself,” and I’d met my Mr. “I know you can, but sit down and let me.” And I won’t lie, it had me weak. He was a goddamn angel. I got to wake up next to him each morning and fall asleep next to him each night. Daryl was perfect in every way. Being with him was perfect in every day.

“Still haven’t figured out how to stop blushing, I see,” she laughed. A small smile crossed my lips, and a breathy laugh escaped my nose.

“Daryl thinks it’s cute,” I replied, craning my head in her direction, “doesn’t exactly incentivize me to want to stop.”

There was a tension that hung in the air as Maggie began to ask me her next question. “So…have you...ummm—“

That tension was quickly cut by the sharp knife that was Rosita Espinosa. “How’s the sex?”

“Rosita!” Maggie & I gasped in unison. I gently whacked her arm with my notebook.

“I am not giving you any details about that,” I huffed. My cheeks were quickly turning red once again.

“I told you she wasn’t going to share anything,” Maggie whined, leaning back to talk to Rosita behind me.

I looked back and forth between them before burying myself back in my notebook. “I can’t believe you two.”

Even if I wanted to, truthfully, there wasn’t a whole lot to share.

Our sex life was a journey for the both of us. Daryl was a virgin before we began being intimate. I had given him a crash course in sex ed prior, as the little knowledge he did have about women came from his brother. And frankly, it was horribly inaccurate. Daryl said Merle was degrading when he talked about women, only discussing them in the context of sex and how it was for him. Couldn’t say I was surprised that he never bothered to try to teach Daryl how to please a woman. That didn’t matter to me though. Not having experience in pleasing women meant I got to teach him everything from pleasure points to dirty talk to my praise kink. And Christ, he was a quick learner.

It took some time for him to get confident in the dirty talk department, but he’d quickly mastered that skill once he saw how I responded to it. I had no issues going down on him. Getting comfortable with him going down on me took a bit more work, but he was nothing short of patient and understanding. Early on in that journey, there were times where I’d ask him to talk me through what he was doing, such as telling me where he was going to place his hand before doing so. That didn’t leave any room for surprises, and since I found his voice relaxing, there was a soothing aspect to it too. At first, I was worried he might find it silly, but he never did, Not once. More than anything, he was flattered that I found his voice comforting enough that I wanted to listen to it in our most intimate moments. We’d never gone all the way, but we’d come close a few times.

It had been a few weeks since we last tried, and I’d decided today was the day I was going to tell him I wanted to try again.

I’d been hyping myself up all day, even picking out a matching bra and panty set for later to boost my confidence. If you know, you know. I so badly wanted to experience him in that way. It was almost difficult to put into words how much my body craved him, ached to feel him in the most intimate way. But my brain always had to rear its ugly head and ruin it. It was simply doing its job—trying to protect me from the trauma that lied deep within the recesses of my mind. I couldn’t be too mad at that. My body tingled with nervous energy—excited nerves, anxious nerves, anticipatory nerves—and despite the butterflies in my stomach, I had a good feeling about this one.

“I’m sorry,” Rosita apologized, “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Or at least not been so crass about it.” I peered up at her over the brim of my glasses before adjusting them on my nose.

”I’m sorry too. We just want to know you’re…being taken care of,” Maggie assured.

I chuckled softly. Being taken care of…what a cute euphemism, I thought.

“You both know I can’t stay mad at you.” I looked up and watched Daryl as I continued. “It’s nothing personal, of course. It’s just…it would feel wrong to share details. I know he doesn’t talk about me like that. It wouldn’t feel right to do it to him.”

“We won’t bring it up again,” Maggie promised. She leaned back again, craning her neck to look around me. “Right, Rosita?”

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Right.”

“I won’t give you nitty gritty details, but I can assure you I’m being taken care of.” I smiled as Daryl turned in my direction, giving me a little nod. “That’s all you’re gonna get.”

I spent some more time with Rosita and Maggie before going home, gathering my notebook and tumbler and walking down the dirt path with an extra pep in my step. I wanted to get home before Daryl so I could get changed and spend some more time hyping myself up. Letting myself inside, I kicked my boots off and went upstairs, eager to change into the cute lingerie set I’d picked out. It was one I’d gotten months ago on a department store run, one that Daryl hadn’t seen yet. One that I’d been saving for a special occasion such as this.

I took the set out of my drawer and quickly undressed, tossing my clothes blindly behind me into some far corner of the bedroom. He could be home at any time, and I wanted to be ready, as well as be able to have some time to myself. I took one of Daryl’s black flannels and tossed it on, leaving it unbuttoned to show off my lingerie. I’d chosen a matching black set, the cups on the bra and the cheeky panties made entirely out of lace. My sternum tattoo peaked out from underneath, the blue flowers adding a pop of color to my dark attire. I adjusted my breasts in the cups, careful not to let my nails snag and tear the delicate fabric. I fidgeted with the straps to make it as comfortable as possible. I wore a 34B, so I met the criteria to join the itty bitty titty committee. My smaller chest had always been an insecurity of mine. I had a smaller frame, so my smaller breasts and butt looked proportionate on me. However, even I couldn’t escape the pre-apocalypse pressure of women’s beauty standards. Daryl didn’t care though. He didn’t care what size my itty bitty titties were or how big or small my butt was. He loved every square inch of me. Plus, he was just happy to be able to see me naked. I chuckled softly to myself as I recalled the first time Daryl saw my bare chest.

“Why ya got your eyes covered?” he’d asked as I approached him, topless and with my face buried in my hands.

“I don’t wanna see the look on your face when you don’t like what you see,” I said, my voice muffled by my hands and my cheeks quickly growing hot. I’d stopped in the hall and waited, anxious wiggling my toes as I heard him step closer. I could hear him laughing softly and feel him eyeing my bare breasts.

“Damn girl, ya got a nice rack,” he replied in an attempt to make me giggle. His hands fell to my hips and pulled my body against his before they wandered up to my hands, removing them from my eyes. I blinked them open, my baby blues meeting his for a brief moment before he kissed me, soft and tender, just like he always did. “Don’t got nothin’ to be shy ‘bout. You’re perfect.”

I fluffed my hair in the mirror, sweeping my bangs out of my eyes and running my fingers along my scalp. I smiled softly and did a few twirls, the hem of Daryl’s flannel flowing around my hips. The outfit was already boasting my confidence, and I knew Daryl was going to love it. He adored lace on me, and that combined with me wearing his shirt was going to drive him wild. I stepped around to the nightstand on my side of the bed and pulled the drawer open, checking to make sure there were still condoms inside, which there were. I rubbed my arms with my hands to try to keep warm. I could’ve put some pants on or threw a blanket around myself, but I wanted my lingerie to be on full display the second Daryl walked through the door. Plus, I’d be wrapped up in his warmth soon enough.

I was filled to the brim with nerves, both good and bad. Of course I was anxious. This would be a new step for us, a step we’d tried to make several times before. Unfortunately, my trauma always got in the way. But I was also excited. Excited to break boundaries, excited to slide into bed and be pleased by him in a new way. Excited to feel him in the way my body had been craving for months.

I heard the familiar creaking of the front door hinges, followed by the sound of Daryl’s bow clattering on the floor. I looked in the mirror and took one last deep breath before walking out. I rounded the corner from our bedroom and stepped out into the hall. The cold winter air that blew inside when he came in had quickly chilled the entire front of the house, the now icy wooden floor shocking my bare feet. I did my best to ignore the feeling.

“Hey handsome. Glad to see you home,” I called out as I made my way down the stairs. He kicked his boots off and turned around, the annoyed look on his face quickly turning into a flirty smirk as he laid his eyes on me. He folded his arms across his chest as he eyed me up and down.

“Lydia Rae, get your sweet ass over here,” he ordered. I skipped over to him, and he picked me up by the waist, spinning us around as he kissed me.

“I told you you’re not allowed to call me that,” I whined as he set me down. My arms remained draped around his neck, playing with the tag inside his shirt.

“Not unless ya’s in trouble.”

“Well what am I in trouble for?”

“For lookin’ so damn good.” His hands wandered down to my hips, his fingers fiddling with the sheer fabric of my panties. “This new?”

“Not new, no. I got this months ago. I’ve been saving it,” I explained. I dropped my eyes to the floor, wiggling my toes once again and scratching the side of my thumb with my index finger behind his head. I was already turning red. “Could we talk?”

“‘Course. What’s goin’ on?” he asked. My arms fell from around his neck to his chest, playing with the buttons on his shirt as I often did when I was nervous. “Ya doin’ okay?”

“I’m okay,” I assured. I bit at the inside of my bottom lip. I was brimming with excitement, but the anxiety had my vocal cords in a chokehold. “I, umm…” I sighed and buried my face in his chest. “Shit,” I said under my breath.

Daryl kissed the top of my head and buried his nose in my hair, snaking his arms further around my hips to pull me closer. “Ain’t a mind reader. Gotta tell me what’s goin’ on in that pretty little head o’ yours.”

“Fuck, this is harder than I thought.” I ran my hands through my hair, taking a deep breath as I did. I closed my eyes and let the words trickle off my tongue before my nerves could stop me. “I, umm…I think I wanna try again. No, sorry, not think. There’s no uncertainty. I wanna try again.”

There were a few beats of silence between that only lasted seconds, but in my mind, they lasted hours.

“Ya sure? Last time was…ya weren’t doin’ so good after that one,” he reminded.

He was right. Granted, every attempt had been similar to the last one, where I was left having a panic attack over who knows what trigger. But I’d done a lot of work on myself in the last couple of weeks, making sure there were no doubts in my mind about being ready.

“I’m sure.” I leaned my head up and kissed his cheek, which was quickly growing hot under my lips. “Very sure, baby. I’ve sat on it for weeks.” ‘Baby’ had become a pet name we only used to indicate to the other person we were in the mood & in the bedroom. 

He eyed me up and down again, his gaze lingering on the junction of my thighs. He’d seen me naked countless times now, but I still found my cheeks turning pink when he looked at me with lust in his eyes. As he closed the space between us again, he pulled my body firmly against his, encapsulating me in his warmth.

His tongue tickled my lips, silently seeking permission to enter. I parted my lips slightly, and our tongues tangled as his hands pulled at his shirt that hugged my body. I lowered my arms to allow it to fall to the floor, quickly bringing my hands back and tangling my fingers in his hair, tugging gently at his chocolate locks. My heart was pounding, the vibrations it sent through my chest radiating across my entire body. The butterflies in my stomach were working overtime. A soft moan escaped me, and he pulled away, gently nibbling my bottom lip as an amused chuckle trickled off his.

“We got condoms?”

“Already checked.”

“Then let’s get somewhere more comfortable.” He picked me up by the waist and held me close, coaxing me to wrap my legs around him. I draped my arms around his neck and continued to play with his hair, the faint scent of our coconut shampoo a sexy juxtaposition to his rugged appearance.

“Daryl Dixon, don’t you dare drop me,” I laughed as he took us upstairs.

“Ain’t ever dropped ya ‘fore, have I?”

We were hardly in the bedroom door before his lips crashed into mine again. Despite the cold, there was already a light sheen of sweat forming on his skin. Those familiar electric sparks tickled my skin, and I smiled into our kiss, remembering the first time I felt those sparks, back when we first met & I walked out of my bedroom door past him, our arms brushing ever so slightly as I did. If only me then could see us now.

He sat back on the bed, laying down and propping me on his pelvis to straddle him. I snickered as pressure built up underneath me. His erection was already begging to be freed from the confines of his pants.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing,” I giggled, trailing a finger down the buttons of his flannel, drawing little shapes and slowing down as I got lower, “you just get turned on really easily.”

“You’re one to talk,” he teased.

“I mean, look at yourself. Can you blame me?” I tried to lean down to kiss him, but he dug his work-worn fingers into the flesh of my hips to pull me back.

“Just wanna look at ya for a sec.” He held my hips in place with his firm grip, and the pink of my cheeks quickly turned to a rosy red as his cock continued to rise under me, coming in contact with my core. I bit my lip and averted my gaze. Even after all this time, it was nearly impossible to keep eye contact with Daryl when I was blushing. His eyes trailed up to my breasts, and I gathered my hair out of the way to allow him to get a better look. He was devouring every square inch of me with his eyes. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Ya change your mind, just say the word,” he reassured. He drew little circles on the front of my hip bones with his thumbs. The tone in his voice shifted to a more serious one as his gaze met mine. “I mean it. Ain’t gonna upset me at all. Don’t want ya pushin’ yourself just so’s I can get my rocks off.”

“I know. I won’t push myself, I promise.”

He pulled me down to his level, our tongues meeting once again. My panties were already soaked, wetness seeping through and coating his jeans as I grinded against him. Hitched, grunt-like moans escaped him, which only turned me on further. Daryl knew how much I loved when he was vocal in bed.

As I continued to straddle him, his hands found my bra clasp, unhooking it with one swift motion and allowing my breasts to fall free. I pulled away just long enough to slide the dainty fabric off and blindly throw it somewhere in the room. I began working at the buttons on his shirt, caressing his chest as I traveled south.

“Shit,” he moaned as I tossed my head back and shook my hair out. He gripped my hips again and rolled us over, pushing me onto my back and pressing his weight onto me. His mouth fell to the sweet spot on my neck, first leaving open-mouthed kisses, then licking and softly nibbling. A series of moans interlaced with soft giggles rolled off my tongue.

When we first began being intimate, him putting his weight on me used to be a big trigger of mine. Now, there was a safety in being underneath him, being protected by him when I was at my most vulnerable. I loved the feeling of his weight on me, and even in the most sensual contexts, it brought back those butterflies I used to get when we were getting to know each other.

His hands kneaded my breasts, his thumbs tweaking my nipples and eliciting little gasps from me. I squeezed my eyes shut, taking in every sensory experience, small waves of pleasure beginning to wash over me. I continued to blindly work at his shirt, which was almost completely unbuttoned now. I wondered if he could feel my heartbeat with how hard and fast it was pounding.

Daryl trailed kisses down my neck to my chest, tracing little shapes with his tongue down to my breast. My head fell back on the bed, eyes squeezed shut and gritting my teeth as he flicked and sucked and licked the supple tissue.

“Goddamnit,” I groaned. I frantically tugged at his shirt, and he pulled away just long enough to rip it off and throw it over his shoulder before focusing his mouth back where it belonged.

He planted sloppy kisses along my sternum tattoo, leaving a light sheen of saliva behind, as if he was marking his territory. As he came back to kiss me, he put his weight on me again,

grinding his clothed cock on my core to the rhythm of his tongue swirling in my mouth.

I had to restrain myself from digging my nails into his back, as I worried the sensation might be too smilier to what caused his scars. I gripped onto the bedsheets for dear life, balling it in my fists with such force, I was sure my nails would tear right through them. The friction of his jeans against my clit was euphoric.

“Oh…God…fuck, yes.”

He chuckled and dropped his head to my neck, his soft lips and gruff voice tickling my ear like a feather as he talked. “Ya like that?”

“God yes,” I replied through gritted teeth, “don’t stop.”

He was rock hard, his erection pleading to be freed from its prison with each pass over my most sensitive area. He was practically throbbing in his jeans as he continued to grind into me, and feeling him twitch, knowing I was the one making him feel this good, only brought me closer to release.

“Shit.” His strained groaning in my ear sent tingles through my core.

“Ok…ok, that’s enough.” I tapped on his shoulder, indicating for him to stop. He did so immediately, panting in an attempt to catch his breath. As much as I was enjoying the feeling, I didn’t want to come just yet.

Daryl brushed some strands of hair out of my eyes and kissed my cheek. “Ya doin’ alright?” Even when he was in the throes of pleasure, Daryl always checked in with me throughout our intimate escapades, making sure I was comfortable.

“I’m great.” I lightly panted and nodded. “But you know what would make me feel even better?”

“What’s that?”

“If you put that skilled tongue of yours to use elsewhere.” The sexiest smirk I’d ever seen crossed his lips as blood rushed to my cheeks. Even after many sessions of mattress action, I was still timid in asking for what I wanted.

“Think that can be arranged.”

He kissed down my body, incorporating more of his tongue the lower he got. Every muscle in my body was clenched, and I fought to keep myself still. Stopping just above my panties, he slid the delicate fabric down my hips and off my legs, letting them naturally fall off my ankles. Kneeling at the edge of the bed, he wrapped his arms around my legs and pulled me to him as he settled into his favorite spot.

He planted soft kisses along my slit, teasing and taunting me by licking and dipping the tip of his tongue in my entrance. My head was back on the bed, my eyes already beginning to roll back in my skull, but I could feel him staring up at me from between my legs, his eyes glossed over with lust and passion. The way Daryl looked at me, kissed me, touched me, was something akin to worship.

“You’re so beautiful. Love seein’ ya like this, gettin’ all worked up just for me.” His sultry Southern accent was dirty talk all on its own, and combined with words of praise made me tingle from head to toe. He left a few more long, teasing kisses before slipping his tongue between my folds of aching flesh.

He was slow at first, taunting me just the way I liked as he repeatedly flicked my clit. As he picked up speed, I reached for his head, tangling my fingers in his hair and rocking my pelvis in motion with his fluid tongue as he brought me closer and closer to the peak of pleasure. I became so lost in the throes of lust that I was struggling to gain control of myself, bucking and shaking and squeezing my thighs together. His moans and grunts sent vibrations across my core, the sounds that dripped off his lips evidence that he, too, was in ecstasy. This was just as much for him as it was for me. My fingers in his hair, being surrounded by my warmth, the intoxicating taste of me coating his tongue…this was his paradise.

“You’re shakin’, baby.” His hands gently pressed against my knees, coaxing them apart. “Gotta keep your legs open for me.”

Fuck, I’ve taught him well, I thought.

Shockwaves of pleasure radiated through every cell of my body. The only sounds echoing off the walls were my mix of luscious moans and delirious giggles. I used to be self-conscious about how loud I was the bedroom, but Daryl had assured me on numerous occasions of how hot he thought it was, how they were sounds often on repeat in his dreams.

“I’m close,” I said, words coming out broken though breathy moans, “so close, baby.”

Daryl took that as his cue to pick up speed, his magical tongue rapidly encircling my most sensitive area and devouring me like I was his last goddamn meal. Every centimeter of my skin was burning with pure ecstasy as the metaphorical cord in my center grew more taut with each pass of his tongue. I instinctively bucked into him, gently tugging on his hair and eliciting more deep grunts and groans from him, and my eyes rolled back into my head as the suction on my swollen clit pushed me over the edge.

“Ah…ah—fuck!” My cries were followed by my signature string of giggles, the telltale sign that I had climaxed. Daryl plunged his tongue in my entrance, yearning to feel my walls twitch around him as I rode out my high.

“That’s my good girl,” he hummed, leaving one last long, tender kiss between my legs.

As my body came down from the peak of pleasure, he crawled back onto me, leaving kisses along my jawline. I was all delirious smiles as the kisses trailed to the sensitive spot under my ear, all the while repeating how much he loved me. No man had ever cared about my pleasure in the way Daryl had. He always made sure to get me off first, and often, more than once.

“Ya still doin’ alright?” he asked, running a hand through my hair and lightly massaging my scalp with his fingers.

“Oh, I’m fantastic,” I replied, giggles still intertwined with my words. His signature little grin crossed his lips as he kissed me again, slipping his tongue in to allow me to taste myself on him.

“Ya wanna keep goin’?”

“Yeah.” I hoped my nod and tone of voice would mask the anxiety creeping up in my chest. Alas, it did not. This man was somehow attuned to my every thought, reading me like a damn book no matter how hard I tried to keep a poker face.

“What’s goin’ on?” The tone of voice softened, and I could tell he was starting to get worried. This was typically the point where I would start having a panic attack, and he was bracing himself to jump into action.

I bit the inside of my bottom lip and nodded again, dropping my gaze. “Mhm. Just a little nervous is all.”

“We can stop,” he reassured, “like I said, ain’t gonna upset me.”

“I wanna keep going. I’m alright, I promise. Just first-time butterflies is all. Those’ll be around until…y’know, it’s not the first time anymore.” I brushed strands of hair out of his eyes, tucking them behind his ear as I brought my gaze back to his. The safety that lied within those baby blue eyes soothed me instantly. “I’m sure you’ve got some of those too, right?”

His cheeks turned a faint shade of pink. “Maybe, yeah.” He dropped his gaze for a moment before bringing it back to mine, biting his lip. “Was worried ya might…I dunno. Just didn’t want ya worryin’ ‘bout me. Wanted ya to focus on yourself.”

“Aww, baby,” I cooed, taking his face in my hands and tenderly caressing his cheekbones with my thumbs, “it’s alright to be nervous. We’re doing something new for the first time. It’s gonna be a little nerve-wracking for both of us.” I kissed the tip of his nose and gave him a soft, reassuring smile. “Do you wanna keep going?”

He adjusted himself to straddle me, my wetness further soaking his jeans. He left a few more tender, open-mouthed kisses on the sweet spot on my neck before sitting up, tossing his head back and shaking out his chocolate locks.

“Sure do.”

I bit my bottom lip as I unbuckled his belt, sliding it off and tossing it down beside me, the buckle clattering on the floor. I rubbed him over his jeans, lingering and swirling my fingers over his swollen tip. I licked my lips in anticipation, my core tingling and aching to feel every inch of him. His breathing picked up, small grunts and groans trickling off his lips, one of the sweetest sounds I’d ever heard. I paused to unbutton and unzip his jeans, his erection breaking free the moment it had even a hint of wiggle room.

I pulled him from his boxers and stroked him. The bulging veins on his member pulsated under my grip, and he was so rigid, you would’ve thought he was made of stone. A small bit of precum started to leak out, which I eagerly swiped up with my finger, maintaining eye contact with him as I licked it off my hand before continuing. He tossed his head back again, his mouth falling open as I drew circles with my thumb over his sensitive red tip. 

“Christ, woman.” He removed my hand from himself, kissing the back of it and placing it on his chest. His heart was pounding, his ribcage the only barrier keeping it from bursting from his body. “Keep touchin’ me like that, ain’t gon’ last much longer.”

Daryl climbed off of me and dropped the rest of his clothes to the floor. I watched as he retrieved a condom from the nightstand drawer, carefully tearing it open so as to not rip the rubber. I pulled myself up and adjusted, propping my head onto the pillows at the head of the bed. I watched with hungry eyes as he slid the condom down his length. I was craving him, aching, needing to feel him fill me in the most intimate way possible. Though there was still a small presence of nerves, the butterflies in my stomach were beginning to settle. I was ready.

“Ya comfortable?” he asked as he propped his arms up on either side of me and settled between my legs.

“Very,” I responded, “are you?”

“Mhm.” He dropped his head back into the crook of my neck, lips grazing the helix of my ear as his gravely voice whispered erotic promises to me. “Wanna look at ya while it’s happenin’. See how good I’m makin’ ya feel.” I dropped my gaze and snickered as the blood rushed to my cheeks. Only Daryl was capable of making me giggle and blush like a schoolgirl.

His cock twitched on its own accord, grazing my clit as it did and sending little shockwaves through my center. “Ya sure you’re good?”

“I’m great, I promise,” I assured. I ran my hands through his hair and down his neck around to his chest, his muscles flexing as I caressed him.

“Just got one last question.”

The blush on my cheeks returned again. “What’s that?” I wondered. Like I didn’t know exactly what he was about to ask me.

“Can I fuck you?”

“Christ, yes.”

He took his time entering me, sliding in slowly to soak in every second of the feeling. My mouth fell open, and I looked down between us for a moment to watch him slip inside me. His cock slowly sinking further into my entrance was a beautiful sight.

The face he made when he first slid in…I’d give anything to see that face again, to capture a still of it and it imprint it into my memory forever.

“Shit, ya feel good,” he moaned, his head falling into the crook of my neck. 

“Kinda…tilt your pelvis…” I instructed, placing my hands on his hips to help guide his adjustment, “to get—oh, there you go.” His pubic bone put the ideal amount of pressure on my clit as he thrusted. “Nice and easy.”

“How’s that feel?”

“So good,” I replied, words spilling out me between moans as we kissed, “you feel so good.”

I was aching for him to return every time he pulled out. His tongue was magic, but his cock was otherworldly. He was the perfect size, comfortably filling every square inch of me and bottoming out with each thrust. It was like he was crafted just for me, and I was crafted just for him.

My eyes fluttered closed.

“Fuck, baby.” The words trickled off my lips like an erotic prayer.

“You’re so sexy.” He dropped his forehead to mine. “I love ya so much.”

I echoed his adoration, the words coming out between huffs and puffs. “I love you too…so much…you can…go faster…if you want…”

I opened my eyes in time to see him smirk, and I gasped at the pleasure that rolled through me as he picked up speed. “That what ya want?”

“Mhm.” After a few quick thrusts, he slowed his pace again, this time pumping in and out even slower than when he started.

“Ya know I need to hear ya say it,” he reminded. When it came to consent, a nod or an “mhm” or moan in response wasn’t good enough for Daryl. He needed verbal confirmation every single time, and to me, it was one of the hottest things about him.

“Yes,” I practically begged, “I…” I averted his gaze and bit my lip, my cheeks growing hot as I blushed the hardest I had so far. “I want it faster.”

The sinful sounds of skin-on-skin and salacious moans entangled as he repeatedly thrusted deep into my core. My breasts bobbed as we rocked back and forth, the squeaking of the bed becoming the harmony complimenting the melody of our bodies. Despite my eyes being closed, I could feel his on me, watching as my face warped and contorted with each wave of euphoria he sent between my legs. His moans were almost animalistic in nature, and his body was rigid, his face turning red as his breathing became more rapid. He was desperate for release, and it was evident that he had needed me just as much as I needed him. The enticing sounds slipping off his tongue were sounds I often played on repeat in my head when he was gone, my dreams recollections of our past intimate endeavors. I wrapped my legs around him, my heels digging into the small of his back, allowing for him to hit my G-spot at the perfect angle.

“Ugh, fuck, I���m gonna come.”

“Wanna feel it,” Daryl growled, hardly able to form a complete sentence as his tongue followed the curve of my helix, “wanna feel ya twitchin’ ‘round my cock.” I could tell he was close too, using every fiber of his being to hold himself back until I could get off first.

“Mmm…fuck…oh God.” Small initial shockwaves of pleasure began to roll through me, subtle and almost muted at first, letting me know what was waiting for me once I peaked.

“That’s it.” His voice was a sexy dichotomy of gravely and silky smooth as he nibbled at the sensitive spot below my ear. “Ya gonna be a good girl ’n scream my name?”

That alone almost sent me over the edge.

All I could do was nod in response, my eyes squeezed shut and moaning sweet nothings directly into his ear. My legs were beginning to shake, and I knew it was only going to be a few more strokes before ecstasy took over. I was moments from coming undone.

“Mmm…oh…oh, Daryl!”

I clung to him for dear life as I came, my body trembling and writhing underneath him. My fingers dug into his back muscles, my face pressed into the crook of his neck, practically gasping for air as orgasmic bliss nearly took my breath away. I bucked into him instinctively, demanding to feel continued pressure on my clit as I rode out the most intensive waves of pleasure yet. My walls clenching around him, along with my signature string of lewd giggles, were the catalyst to his release.

“Aah! Shit!” Strained moans and gasps came out through gritted teeth as his forehead fell to mine. I gasped at the feeling of him pulsating inside me as he emptied into the condom. He continued to frantically thrust, prolonging both my pleasure and his, before relaxing in my arms, the happy hormones coursing through him bringing a smile to his face. He trailed kisses along my jawline, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath.

Every muscle in my body felt like jelly. My limp legs slid off onto the bed, and my head fell to the pillow, eyes rolling back. I stared up at the ceiling, taking deep breaths and listening to my heart pounding in my chest. My ears felt full, like when the air pressure changes on a plane. Every cell in my body was singing his praises, and I was seeing stars.

He pulled out once he went limp inside me, rolling over to remove the condom, tying it off and letting it drop to the floor. He grabbed the covers and pulled them up over us, coming back and pulling me close to him. He’d rolled onto his side, propping himself on one arm and leaning over in my line of sight, running his other hand through my hair.

“Hi beautiful,” he practically cooed, kissing my cheek. A silly, delirious smile broke out on my lips.

“I think I just saw God,” I laughed, eliciting an amused chuckle from Daryl. As I panted, my gaze met his, and he kissed me again, tenderly, just like he always did. Even in the naughtiest contexts, this man never made me feel anything short of loved and adored.

“Ya know, I’ve tried my damndest to recreate that sexy little giggle in my head when I’s on the road, but ain’t nothin’ like hearin’ it from the source.” My cheeks began to turn rosy red at the thought of Daryl thinking about me to relieve himself when he was away for too long. “How ya feelin’?”

With those three little words, a myriad of post-coitus emotions coursed through me. Pride, joy, appreciation, and love, just to name a few, hit me like a train and sent me careening into a fit of tears. I was immediately overwhelmed, the feeling building in my chest overflowing as tears streamed down my face and soaked the sheets below me. Even though they were happy feelings, there were a lot of them, more than my body was able to handle in my current state.

“Hey, you’re ok.” He leaned over me, wiping tears off my cheeks and wrapping his other arm underneath me. “What’s wrong?”

The tone of his voice had dropped, and he looked sad, like he felt awful, like he thought he’d done something wrong. The worry radiating off of him was palpable, and I could tell that he thought I was spiraling into a panic attack. I gave him a big, stupid grin, kissing all over his face to reassure him that these were, in fact, happy tears.

“Nothing’s wrong, my love,” I promised, holding his face in my hands and stroking his cheeks with my thumbs, kissing the tip of his nose, “I’m just…overwhelmed, but with good feelings.” I blinked back more tears and took another deep breath. “I did it. I’m so proud of myself. And it was…you were…incredible. First time having sex that was so good, I cried after.”

“That good, huh?” he smirked. He adjusted his position over me, puffing his chest out a bit as he did. Clearly, I’d boosted his ego.

“Mhm. Really good,” I reiterated, biting the inside of my bottom lip as a faint blush of pink returned to my cheeks once again. “How are you feeling? How was your first…time getting your dick wet?”

“Amazin’. I mean, you were amazin’,” he replied, “happy ya said somethin’ when I got home. Ya’s lookin’ so good, I almost lost it.” His fingers trailed down my side, circling over the tattoo on the front of my right hip. “Gotta start dressin’ like that more often.”

I looked up at him, my baby blues locking with his as I gave him a soft smile. Every ounce of love I had for the beautiful man in front of me fought to break free from my chest as my heart swelled in my ribcage. “Thanks for taking care of me.”

He chuckled as he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and kissed me. “Takin’ care of…’t’s cute.”

Taglist: @raddydaddydude @lovenormandixon

[americaswritings]

When we fall | Part 2

Warnings (for all parts): Fluff, angst, description of injuries, probably unaccurate policing/medicine

Summary: You moved to Chicago to start a new life. Working as a doctor alongside your brother Connor you make new friends and although you swore to yourself not to let any man in your life at least for a while, your promises fail when you lock eyes with a handsome stranger in a bar.

Words: 4.5k

Pairing: Jay Halstead x Doctor!Rhodes!reader

A/N: Here's the second part :) I hope you enjoy!

Part 1

“Who got you smiling like that?”

You looked up from your phone, startled by the voice behind you. It was April, trying to glance over your shoulder to sneak a look at your phone screen. You immediately locked it, slipping it back into your pocket.

“No one”, you blurted out, biting your tongue. “I mean- just…someone.”

“No one or someone?” April wiggled her brows at you, her eyes shining with excitement. “I thought you said you didn’t want to date for a while.”

You let out a sigh. “I don’t”, you agreed, causing her to tilt her head at you in confusion. “But now there’s this guy-” You couldn’t even finish your sentence, interrupted by April’s squeal. “Oh god! Calm down!” You gazed around nervously, relieved to find neither Will nor your brother in sight.

“I don’t even really know him.” You feared if April got too excited over the news she had just gotten out of you, she would share them with Maggie. Probably the whole nursing staff too. And if there was one true thing to be said about hospitals, it was that nurses made the biggest gossips.

“But you like him.” It was a statement rather than a question, but still you thought over her words. April was right. You did like Jay. A lot.

He was funny, witty and sarcastic. Always quick with his remarks. Confident. But not in a macho kind of way, but more so that he knew who he was and what he wanted and that he didn’t fear speaking the truth.

And he was charming, if he wanted to be. A big flirt, but in a way that you could never be sure if he was just teasing you or if he meant what he said.

And he was brave. Courageous. He hadn’t given you many insight into that part of his life yet, but from the hints you had gotten you were fascinated by his drive as a detective.

Not to mention he was handsome. Unfairly so. Especially in that leather jacket you had seen him wear, although just a plain t-shirt was enough to show off his arms and- depending on the colour- bring out his eyes.

“Oh god what am I doing!” You let out a groan as the severity of your situation sank in. You were crushing on Jay Halstead, your colleague’s brother. A man you barely knew except a moment of eye-contact at a bar, a brief encounter at the hospital and a conversation outside said bar.

While the two of you had talked the whole way as he had driven you back to your apartment- your head spinning with the fact that he knew where you lived now- it had been mostly about unimportant things. What kind of sports team he liked, what the best food places in Chicago were, how cold it was supposed to turn at the end of the week.

But it had made you feel relaxed and even interested to get more hints into who this man beside you was. You had even been disappointed when you had recognized your apartment building, the exhaustion you had felt wearing off with him around.

Right before the two of you had parted ways Jay had stopped you, insisting on giving you his number. “In case you need another ride”, he had said with a wink.

That same night you had started texting, when you had thanked him for the ride home and you two had kept the conversation steady ever since. You even knew his break times by heart now, a smile stealing its way on your lips whenever you saw a new message from him.

Was it possible you were developing a crush for this man you barely knew?

“This won’t ever work out- I shouldn’t-” “Hey, take a breath.” April had stepped closer towards you, her brows drawn together in concern. “He makes you happy. It’s obvious. Don’t blow this off, because you’re scared what the future might bring.”

You swallowed, but you followed April’s words and took a deep inhale. “I just-”, you shook your head, the fear of the realization that had just dawned on you making your chest tight, “I can’t get hurt again. I just started a life here and I- I can’t.”

You blew out a breath, closing your eyes for a moment to collect yourself. “I’m not ready to get my heart broken again.”

April looked at you, empathy in her eyes. For a moment she didn’t say anything, the words hanging heavy in the air between you. Then she reached out, her hand covering yours. “No one ever is. But don’t jump to all the worst-case scenarios. What if it’s good? And it’s good now, isn’t it?”

You bit your lip, nodding hesitantly. There was no denying it; texting with Jay had become the highlight of your day.

“Then that’s all that matters now.” You nodded again, a shy smile forming on your lips. “Thank you, April.”

The dark-haired woman smiled at you in return, her eyes filled with a warmth you were sure made her patients feel reassured around her. “Always. But don’t think you can keep your secret long. I’m going to find out who that man is that makes you all lovey-dovey.”

-

“Hey!”

You almost jumped out of your skin, turning your head to see a silhouette pushing of the wall next to the hospital’s doors. You squinted your eyes, trying to determine who it was, waiting for you in the dark.

“Jesus”, you whispered, shaking your head as a relieved chuckle escaped you once the man stepped into the light. “You scared the shit out of me!”

Your heart was racing in your chest and you took a breath to calm it down, the shock slowly vanishing. Jay grinned, his dark clothes doing nothing to elevate him from the darkness.

“Sorry”, he said, stepping further into the light, “I didn’t realize you were zoned out like that.”

“Just thinking”, you muttered, straightening a little. “What are you doing here?”

“I was around here so I figured I would stop by after your shift.” You smiled, feeling warmth spread in your body that Jay had decided to come and see you.

“Are you off work too?”, you asked, your eyes drifting to the badge on his belt. You tried not to stare at the gun that was tugged beside it. Although it was covered by his shirt you could make out the outlines.

Your eyes flickered up again, feeling a little caught as you noticed Jay’s eyes on you. He looked so awake, so attentive, not how you felt after a long day in the ER.

“I’m not. Actually, Burgess is in the car waiting for me, so I should head back soon.” Your brows drew together, confused that Jay had still come to see you, even if he didn’t have much time. It was so unexpected and sweet that you felt a little overwhelmed trying to sort your thoughts.

“Kim’s waiting for you?” You were still having a hard time learning everyone’s names and faces, but you had seen her around the hospital. From what you could tell she seemed very nice. And stubborn, if necessary.

Jay followed your glance over his shoulder, where you could make out a parked black car in the distance. “Don’t worry about her.” He turned back to you. “She owes me a favour. She won’t tell.”

You didn’t know when you had decided to keep whatever was going on between Jay and you a secret, but you were glad he seemed to sense your hesitance of people knowing and respected it. Eventually you wouldn’t be able to keep it to yourselves anymore, you knew that, but for now you wanted this to be just between you and Jay.

Figure out whatever it was and what it could lead into before hearing everyone’s opinions. Especially Willy’s and Connor’s. The thought of one of them knowing was enough to send a shiver down your spine. “A favour?”

Jay shifted. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, I’ve got time, but I suppose you should get back. We don’t want to risk anything.” You almost sighed out loud, wishing for more time. But you knew Jay was as committed to his job as you were to yours and you didn’t want him to get in trouble.

“Right”, Jay muttered, but he didn’t move, his eyes on yours. You shifted, unsure what he was expecting you to do or say. “Well-”, you let out a nervous laugh, “why did you even come? I mean, if you don’t really have time.”

It wasn’t an accusation, only curiosity speaking. Jay’s lips curled up in an almost boyish way and he rubbed the base of his neck. “We haven’t talked about that date again”, he began and the words alone made your heart speed up. “I didn’t want to push you, so I thought I would ask you in person. And I just wanted to see you.”

Your heart swelled with fondness as you stared at Jay, his usual confident and casual demeanour replaced by what looked like uncertainty and maybe even nervousness as well.

“I came to Chicago to start over. And there are still some things I need to figure out.” You kept your voice calm and steady as you explained, hoping he couldn’t see how much strength it took you to open up. “It wouldn’t be fair to keep that from you.”

Jay waited, his face giving nothing away as he looked at you. Casting your gaze downwards you fiddled with your hands for a moment. “I don’t wanna screw this up.”

Slowly you lifted your head again, every fear you had thought of returning to you. What if you had scared him of? What if you were interpreting too much into this and Jay was only looking for some fun? What if you had already screwed this up?

His green eyes flickered between yours as you searched his face, trying to find hints to what he was feeling. Thinking.

“I don’t either”, he said seriously, clearing his throat. “Let’s just give it a try. Just one date, see how it goes from there.”

You looked at him, waiting for him to add something, but he didn’t, keeping the suggestion simple and undemanding.

“Okay.”

His jaw relaxed, his eyes lighting up. “Yeah?” You nodded, smiling yourself now. “Yeah. One date. Let’s do it.”

Jay broke into a grin, the sight enough to reassure you it had been the right choice. “I knew you would say yes”, he stated and you shook your head at him. “You’re persistent, Halstead.”

Tugging his hands into the pockets of his jacket Jay shrugged. “Comes with the job.”

Then he raised his phone. “I’m gonna text you.” You stared after him until the darkness had absorbed him, your heart pounding in your chest. But this time it wasn’t because you were scared or overwhelmed.

You would be going on a date with Jay Halstead.

This time, it was excitement.

-

Jay was taking you out Friday night.

You would be lying if you said you weren’t counting the days in your head, eager but also slightly nervous to meet him. Your encounters had been cut short until now, limited by either his or your work schedule.

Did he expect you to dress up or did he prefer a casual look? You wished you had someone you could ask about it, but you couldn’t tell anyone. Not yet.

In the end you decided it wouldn’t matter what choice you made. This wasn’t just about him, it was about you too and you wouldn’t make the mistake of changing who you were for someone ever again.

Still your thoughts were circling the upcoming date, so when Connor nudged you with his elbow to gain your attention, he wasn’t the first one to pull you out of your head that week.

“What are you thinking about?” You blinked yourself back to reality, closing the folder in front of you, which you had been bent over before your brother’s approach.

You didn’t see him much at the hospital, since he spend most of his time in the OR, but whenever your schedules aligned, he offered you a ride and you would spend the time in the car discussing your cases.

“Just how I barely see you these days.” Connor rose his brow. “What, you miss me?”, he asked amused and you shrugged, being serious. “What if I do?”

Living so far away from each other had meant you had barely seen Connor. Now that you had moved to Chicago the two of you had gotten to know each other much better and you had grown used to his presence, only recently moved out of his apartment and into your own.

Connor stared at you, obviously trying to determine whether you were making fun of him or being genuine. When you didn’t say anything, a sad smile appeared on his lips. “You’re right. I’m too busy these days. It’s just- everyone keeps asking me to do this and then that and-.”

“Hey,” you took a step forward, a smile on your lips as you nudged his shoulder. “I get it. You’re very popular here. No reason to get such a big head.” You were joking and Connor let out a breath, shaking his head in amusement. “You know that’s not what I was saying.”

“But it was what you were thinking”, you stated, enjoying it to mess with him. Connor’s face twisted unhappily and you almost giggled at the sight of it. A moment later his expression shifted, replaced by a mask of confidence. “Well, not everyone can be an amazing trauma and cardiothoracic surgeon.”

Now it was your turn to grimace and you scrunched up your nose. “Is that what you’re like when I’m not around? Because people kept telling me how strict and focused you always are that I almost ruined your rep.”

Connor smirked, before his expression turned serious again. “You are right though. You came to Chicago and I haven’t been around the past weeks. It’s not fair.”

You shook your head, your own amusement gone now too. “You don’t owe me anything. You already did so much for me and you know how grateful I am.”

“Dr. (Y/l/n)?” You looked up to where you saw Maggie calling your name. “Coming!” Turning back to Connor you sighed. “That’s my turn. How about you text me when you’re free and I cook for us? Because let’s be real your nutrition probably comes from the vending machine and the hospital’s menu these days and we both know neither is real food.”

Connor let out a laugh. “Doesn’t taste much different from what you cook”, he muttered, which earned him a jab to his shoulder from you. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that”, you whispered as you took off, pretending to be offended by his joke. “You’re going to have to make up for it with a lot of ice-cream.”

“And you talk to me about real food”, you heard his voice before you reached Maggie.

-

It was only Thursday afternoon when you saw Jay again, his casual stance something you immediately recognized as you rounded the corner. He wasn’t alone, a brown haired woman, which you figured could only be Kim Burgess next to him as well as an older man with hair almost cut down to the scalp.

He looked grim, his arms crossed over his chest as he talked to Ethan, who seemed just as tense and unamused.

It would be better not to interfere you thought as you watched them, but then you caught Ethan’s eyes for a moment and you knew it was only right to join him to try and solve the obvious tension.

Straightening yourself you marched up to them, forcing a neutral smile on your lips. “Hey, I’m doctor (y/l/n). Is there something I can help with?” You glanced between the older man and Ethan, waiting for one of them to acknowledge you.

From the side you could feel Jay’s eyes boring into you, but you tried to avoid his gaze, fearing you would give away how well you knew him, if you allowed yourself a look.

For a moment none of them said anything, until slowly the man’s eyes shifted towards you. It felt like you shrank under his gaze. It was cold and unapologetic, his icy blue eyes mustering you appraisingly. You didn’t know who this man was, but if you had to take a guess you would assume him to be Jay’s boss. The famous Voight.

Jay hadn’t talked much about him, always keeping his words vague, but it was clear the man in front of you wasn’t someone to mess with.

“We’re here to talk to one of your patients, Mr. Diaz. He’s a suspect and he might have valuable information for us.”

His voice was as cold as his gaze, sounding raspy as if he was hoarse from yelling too much. You didn’t want to imagine this man ever screaming at you.

Your gaze flickered to Ethan, silently asking him for his position on the matter. “And I already told you that’s not happening. The man’s straight out of surgery. We wake him now we risk a number of conditions such as brain damage and stroke. You’re going to need to wait.”

“I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to.” Voight- it definitely had to be him- took a step closer, his voice threatening. A shocked breath escaped you as you watched the tension thicken, Ethan’s eyes narrowing.

“I know exactly who I’m talking to. But this is my case, my patient and my responsibility. We’re at the hospital, not the police station so it’s my call.”

Finally your eyes travelled to Kim and Jay, their faces both masks of conflict. Having felt your gaze Jay’s eyes shifted to yours, his expression softening when he saw the hint of fear on yours.

“How about we all calm down for a moment”, he said sternly, stepping between Voight and Ethan. You held your breath, admiring him for his courage but at the same time fearing the consequences it might meant for him. You didn’t want to imagine what Voight’s anger might look like.

“We all want the same thing.” Turning to Ethan he asked, “How long is it going to be until you can wake him up?”

Ethan stayed silent for a moment before he broke his stare with Voight and looked at Jay. “3 to 4 hours, depending on his labs. It was an invasive surgery.” Jay nodded. “Then we wait 3. If he’s not awake then, you will wake him.”

You could see Ethan’s jaw twitch, but he nodded slowly, accepting the peace offering before walking off. You felt your whole body relax, meeting Kim’s eyes who sent you a soft smile.

“Burgess, get back to the station! Halstead, a word!” Voight’s voice was as sharp as a knife and your gaze flickered to Jay’s, your nerves back. To your surprise Jay didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. He was tense, you could see it in his shoulders, but there was not a hint of fear or regret in his eyes as he followed Voight to the side of the hall.

“Don’t worry. Voight will get over it.” You turned your head to find Kim looking at you with sympathy in her eyes. “He looked like he’s about to kill him”, you almost whispered, scared to attract the man’s attention.

Kim followed your line of sight. “We’ve all been at the receiving end of Voight’s temper at least once. It’s no fun, but when working with him it’s inevitable. Jay can handle it.”

You didn’t doubt that. But he shouldn’t have to. It wasn’t fair. Sure, he had undermined his bosses authority in a way, but he had only done it to defuse a conflict. Something that could have ended a lot worse for everyone involved.

“I should get back now before Voight sees me chatting. But it was nice to finally meet you” Kim offered you a smile and you forced one on your lips as well. “You too.”

When she was gone you turned back towards the corner Voight and Jay had rounded, waiting for a sign of them returning. Although it didn’t take long for them to re-appear it was more than enough for your worry to make you a nervous wreck.

Both of them looked equally stoic as they walked through the hall, the tension between them evident enough for everyone to keep their distance. You looked at them from your spot at the nurses desk, trying to catch Jay’s eyes to silently ask him if he was okay. But he didn’t look at you, his eyes trained straight ahead.

At first you thought he did it because of his boss right next to him, but when the two of them parted ways, Jay still didn’t acknowledge you at all. “Hey!” Your hand shot out as he marched past you, grabbing onto his arm.

Jay stopped, turning to you with the same cold look he had worn before. The one that told everyone to get out of his way and not mess with him right now. You could imagine he was pissed, getting told off by his boss for trying to do the right thing, but you would have thought his expression would soften when he looked at you.

It turned out you had been wrong. For a second your eyes flickered over his face as you tried to get a read on him, but he looked so different from the last time you had been together that it was impossible. “Are you in trouble?”

Jay shifted, shaking his head once in an abrupt motion. “Don’t worry about Voight. He’s almost always pissed at someone.”

“But today that someone is you. It’s not fair. You were just trying to de-escalate the situation.” Jay let out a sigh that sounded impatient and you took a step back, taken aback by his reaction. “Anyway, thank you for that. I don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t step up. Ethan can be so stubborn too.”

Jay raised his brow, but it wasn’t in an amused or teasing way. he almost looked…annoyed. “Don’t thank me yet. As long as we get the information we need.”

You swallowed, your eyes flickering to your surroundings. “Are you mad at me or something?”, you whispered, unease filling you.

You couldn’t imagine a reason why Jay would act that way towards you. Even if he did it to avoid raising suspicions, it was very much over the top. No, you decided, there had to be more. Because you couldn’t imagine him speaking to Maggie or April that way.

“Why would I be mad? You told me there are things you’re figuring out. I just didn’t think you meant it so literally.”

You drew in a surprised breath, confused by his words as much as his passive-aggressive tone. “What?”

Jay let out a huff. “You know it all makes sense now. How you were so hesitant about a date, that you’re trying to keep this a secret.” Jay shook his head, his frustration turning into annoyance.

“I’m not blaming you”, he clarified, “weighing your options before you make a decision. We never defined what this is between us, so it’s on me if I expected something you clearly aren’t interested in. But I would prefer not be one of your games.”

“Excuse me?” You stared at him with wide eyes, your mouth hanging open in shock as your chest tightened. Something had gone very wrong, only you couldn’t figure out when it had happened and why.

Jay leaned forward, your whole body going stiff as he spoke close to your ear. “I’m out.”

Involuntarily a shiver ran down your spine and you flinched a little, hurt by his words that you couldn’t make sense of. Opening your mouth to say something you weren’t quick enough as Jay took a step back again, looking you straight in the eye. “Have fun.”

Then he turned, leaving you standing there staring after him in shock. None of it made sense, but his attitude had hit you so unprepared you hadn’t been able to defend yourself nor ask the right questions to figure this out. And you doubted Jay would answer your texts.

To hold back the tears that threatened to make their way down your cheeks you forced your teeth into your bottom lip, willing yourself to pull it together.

Maybe it was better this way.

Because you hadn’t even gone on one date with Jay and he had already crushed your heart, leaving you empty and hollow as the hurt spread slowly in your body.

You didn’t want to imagine the pain, if you had fully opened yourself up to him and he had rejected you. The heartbreak seemed unbearable.

But then why did it hurt so much already?

-

Needless to say you had been in a bad mood since your encounter with Jay at the hospital. He hadn’t texted or called you after that and you hadn’t done so either, not ready to hear his distanced voice again, his usually sparkling green eyes now hard when he looked at you.

Maybe he had heard what had brought you to Chicago and decided he wasn’t interested in dealing with someone like you, but you couldn’t imagine who he should have known from. And it didn’t seem like Jay to judge you.

It all seemed so out of nowhere, like something had changed between you from one day to the next. Maybe the signs had always been there and you had been too naive and overlooked them.

A part of you wanted to ask Will about his brother, if anything had happened he knew about, but whenever you decided to do it, you changed your mind again. Because Will had never mentioned Jay to you after you had brought him up that one time so he probably didn’t know anything about you and him at all.

But you missed him.

Missed his witty messages, updates from his day and questions about yours. They had given you something to look forward to in your day. Something that brought you joy and made you feel special. Now that it was over you were still checking your phone, your heart longing for a text from him.

Anything that showed you he still cared.

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[fellow-travelers-fic-recs]

Fellow Travelers Fic Recs | April Recap

Some of the favorite fics read by FTFR and/or newly posted in April. This month we’ve got some stormy winter cuddles and lots of domestic bliss, old men in love, an awkward first date, plant POV, fics featuring Maggie and Estelle, Father Skippy, water sports and shower sex, office sex, fuck him on the floor sex, and threesome sex in this fandom’s first RPF fic!

Also, check out the latest fics in these collections:

🌼 Angstpril Prompt Challenge Masterpost

🌼 Promise You WILL Write Masterpost (Updated w/April fics) If you're feeling inspired, please visit the collection to leave a prompt for someone to write or take one for yourself... All are welcome!

Check out their page @promiseyouwillwrite for more info.

📣 April’s Features of the Month:

Fic of the Month: do these teeth still match the wound by @brokendrums | brokendrums

Author of the Month: @startagainbuttercup | startagainbuttercup

April Featured Collection: Old Men in Love Collection

April Featured WIPs

📚 More fic recs can be found at the fic register, here.

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✨ Show authors some love with your comments and kudos on the fics you enjoyed after reading! Likes are lovely, but please reblog this post to share this content with your mutuals! ✨

🌼 Within The Heart of Me by drabbleswabbles💠 [NR, 9K] Lucy goes to the hospital to talk to Tim. When she arrives, Hawk is already there.

Otherwise known as a prompt fill that wanders a bit off the mark, but is close enough in spirit to give credit where credit is due as far as inspiration goes.

🌼 Something Out Of Reach by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [T, 1K] Before the phone call, Hawk knows.

🌼 Shut Up and Drink Your Milk by @bre1995 | bre_thomas & @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [E, 4K] It all started with Hawk's "shut up and drink your milk" and then whispering how he wanted Tim to "fuck him". With those words alone, Tim doesn't hesitate.

This is an extension on the Episode 8, '57 sex scene.

🌼 Catching A Breath Of Moonlight by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [G, 1K] One lazy evening, Tim tries to find the perfect endearment for Hawk.

🌼 After Hours by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [E, 2K] “That’s it,” Hawk praised, petting through the soft strands of Tim's hair. “Good boy.”

Tim moaned softly around him, swallowing him deeper into the blissful pressure of his throat.

Or, the office sex fic that no one asked for.

🌼 Forgive Me Father For I Have Sinned by @bre1995 | bre_thomas [E, 2K] Based around the episode 6 cabin conversation and scene, but with a little twist.

🌼 A Disaster, Beyond Measure by drabbleswabbles💠 [NR, 30K] Hawkins Fuller is a campaign manager with a PR disaster on his hands. The solution involves pretending to date none other than Timothy Laughlin.

Featuring: unrealistic portrayals of the life and job of a campaign manager for the sake of the fake dating trope.

🌼 the life of the world to come by @thewindyoubargainedfor | thewindyoubargainedfor [NR, 5K] Maggie flew to San Francisco to take care of her brother. She didn’t expect it to involve so many visitors.

🌼 Chances Are by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [G, 3K] After a family Thanksgiving, Estelle and Hawk talk. Then she meets Tim.

🌼 Control and desperation by @mailboxbutterflies | mailboxbutterflies [E, 3K] Now Tim was really confused. "H… Hawk I really need to pee—" "I said no. You want to be a good boy for me, don't you, Skippy?"

Tim nodded slowly as he started to put the pieces together. "Then hold it," Hawk repeated coolly.

Tim saw a familiar fire behind Hawk's eyes. The kind that suggested he would be rewarded if he obeyed. "Okay, fine." And then, "Or at least I'll try."

Or, Hawk makes Tim wet himself and then rewards him with shower sex.

🌼 Only Himself To Blame by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [E, 1K] An evening out leads to some fun on the floor.

🌼 this time imperfect by @startagainbuttercup | startagainbuttercup [M, 16K] 1986. Marcus arrives at Hawk's house and gives him a box. Marcus doesn't know that paperweight in the box is a time traveling device. Will Hawk change anything, given the chance? We'll see.

🌼 you lookin’ like a present by Saturn💠 [E, 5K, RPF] “You fly all this way just to fuck me?”

“Not just to fuck you,” Simon teased and pressed a kiss to Matt’s forehead. “And actually,” he added, tone suddenly a touch more serious, “If you want, I won’t be the one fucking you tonight.”

Matt’s eyes widened, and he scanned Simon’s face for any indication that Simon was joking. Finding none, he raised his eyebrows and said, “I’m listening.”

Simon visits Toronto for Matt’s birthday.

🌼 🪴His great consuming lovage*🪴 by @carnivalrow | nightfall_in_winter [T, 3K] Tim's potted plant has a story to tell...

🌼 Hold You In My Arms Again by @timothydavidlaughlin | mauralabingi [NR, 977] Old(er) Men Tim and Hawk (who are in love) at the gay club.

🌼 the coming of night by @alorchik | alorchik [E, 3K] March 1957. Hawk, exhausted from grappling with his own thoughts and emotions, seeks solace in alcohol at the Cozy Corner. What other thoughts might cross the mind of a desperate man?

🌼 Might Drive Me Crazy by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [NR, 1K] Hawk helps Tim get ready for a party. More or less.

🌼 So On We Go by TigerLilyBlue💠[G, 589] Maggie leaves for vacation, but it isn't easy.

🌼 forbidden joy by @redmyeyes | redmyeyes [NR, 440] Fellow Travelers drabbles.

🌼 Lost In A World Of Our Own by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [G, 1K] A stormy winter's night is the perfect excuse to stay home and cuddle.

🌼 Guide your light in by @cinnamoncountess | CinnamonCountess [M, 21K] A new patient, Hawkins Fuller, has been admitted to the neurological diagnostic clinic at San Francisco General Hospital. The circumstances of his hospitalization are harrowing and raise many questions. The patient's tragic story and the man himself quickly arouse the curiosity of young nurse Timothy Laughlin.

🌼 Friday Night I'm in Love by @doodlingawaits | DoodlingAwaits [M, 7K] Lucy Smith was a very busy girl.

She was meeting Danny, the cute bartender at her favourite watering hole, the Bell and Bird, on Monday.

It was going to be another date night with Jake on Tuesday after work, but she was thinking of ending this one.

On Wednesday, she had a “tutoring” session with Yannis at the café near the library.

Thursday was free, but she was sure her friend Katherine would confirm soon that her brother, Tim, was up for a date with her.

But Friday, her favourite day of the week and reserved only for the really lucky ones, was going to be the one night she had been waiting for since she was fifteen.

After a misunderstanding, Lucy accidentally double-books her date nights with Tim and Hawk. She tries to find a way around it, but it seems fate has other plans in store for these three.

🌼 Worship at Your Altar by @bluebellsinburbank | ConsumingLove (Bluebellstar) [E, 2K] Hawk visits Father Tim Laughlin.

💠 Authors: If your tumblr (or other socials) isn't linked, and you'd like it to be, let me know and I'll be happy to add it. Or, if you are linked, and you'd rather not be, please contact me to remove it.

[mystic-writings]

remember the nights | chapter seven — bright lights, big city

WORD COUNT — 3,623

WARNINGS — none

NOTES — SHE'S HERE!! THE CHAPTER THAT STARTED IT ALL IN JULY 2021

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The further into October you got, the icier the chill in the air became. The month only had a few more days left in it, and you were already wearing your winter coat to school in the mornings. Every tree you saw was bare, and the colorful leaves they scattered all over the ground crunched beneath your feet with every step. 

It was Saturday today, and normally you were very grateful for Saturdays. Today, however, both Newt and Thomas had insisted that you get up early for a ‘surprise’. Last night when you had gone to Mickey’s and later the playground, no one had missed the glances passed between your brother and friend, but they refused to elaborate their mischievous, knowing looks they were giving one another.

When you’d asked Newt privately, he only told you to get up early the next morning for a special surprise. The answer had been unnerving, to say the least, so when you asked Thomas and he provided the same response, nearly verbatim, you were officially put on edge. 

You still did as told, though, the anticipation getting the better of you instead of the uneasiness. So, even though you usually reserved Saturday mornings for sleeping in, you got up just a little later than you do on school mornings, taking a shower, getting dressed and eating a quick breakfast. 

When you finished your coffee and muffin, your phone pinged with a text from Newt, telling you that he’d be arriving at the house soon, and asking if you were ready for the surprise. During this, Thomas had stumbled down the stairs in his pajamas, looking worse for wear as he grabbed an apple, still blinking the sleep from his eyes, and headed to the living room. 

You joined him on the couch, scrolling through Instagram while your curiosity and anxiety battled one another in your stomach as you waited for Newt. 

Maggie and your dad had come down while you waited, sharing cheeky smiles as they worked in tandem to make theirs and Chuck’s breakfast. It was nice so see your dad so happy. Of course, he was always happy when he was with you, but the smile he wore when he was with Maggie was different. More like he was in a state of pure adoration. 

When knuckles rapped against wood, you nearly shot up from your seat, slightly startling Thomas as he slowly ate his apple. Newt waited for you at the door, hands shoved into the pockets of his signature jacket, sporting a coy smile. 

“Morning,” he smiled, rocking on the balls of his feet. 

“Good morning,” you smiled back. “What’s this big surprise, then?”

Newt’s smile widened, bordering playful. “Can’t say. But I know you’re gonna love it. You might wanna grab a purse or something, though. We’re not sticking around for long.” 

“Oh?” You said. “I’ll be right back, then. You can wait on the couch with Thomas.” 

You stepped back, opening the door wider to allow Newt in. He greeted Maggie and your dad before heading into the living room to talk with Thomas while you went upstairs. You decided on a small handbag, throwing in your usual items — wallet, chapstick, and hair ties. You brought a charger, rolled up as small as it could get, and made sure your phone had enough room in the bag, as well. 

When you finally got back downstairs, Newt waited by the door while you said quick goodbyes to everyone — including Chuck, who woke up while you were upstairs and was shoving his face with scrambled eggs. 

You got into the car, Newt peeling off and heading past the town line, unsure of how long the drive would be, thinking up any kind of explanation of what today would be like based on the molecules of information you had. Once the drive was underway, Newt let you hook your phone up to the sound system to play music in order for you both to sing along to whatever songs you both knew. 

After about twenty minutes, though, you’d turned down the music in order to trade stories about Thomas. Newt laughed his way through his recounting of how Thomas had fractured his arm one winter on a patch of snow-covered ice while Minho had chased him around Gally’s front yard, and you excitedly recalled the time he spent three month’s worth of his allowance on a game at Coney Island in order to win a giant Pikachu plush — which had been sitting in the corner of his room for the past two years. 

“Have I ever told you guys about this one dude I went to school with?” You asked as Newt switched lanes on the highway. 

“I don’t think you’ve told us much about your old school, so no.”

You bit back a laugh. “This is gonna be amazing. Okay, so this guy, his name’s Mitch, he was like a grade above me in my old school, and I shit you not, literally every girl I talked to had a crush on him. If you didn’t have him in one of your classes you could swear he was one of the student teachers or something.” You rambled excitedly. “I talked to him a few times in my open photography class last year, he’s really cool, but that’s not the point. My whole point is that he looks exactly like Thomas if he could actually grow facial hair.” Newt barked out a laugh. “I’m not kidding; if the guy shaved closer to the skin and styled his hair differently, they’d look like twins or something, it’s insane.” 

“There’s no way that’s true,” Newt shook his head. 

“But it is,” you insisted. “If I hadn’t met Thomas so early into freshman year after Maggie and my dad started dating, I probably would’ve had a crush on Mitch, too.”

Newt scoffed out a laugh, bemused smile on his face as he shook his head. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I can show you, if you want. I have his Instagram.” You said, before remembering Newt was driving. “Actually, I’ll show you later. The shock of his similarity to Thomas might cause us to get into a multi-car pileup.” 

Soon after, the mindless chatter and story-swapping continued as normal, occasionally broken by a particularly good song coming up and you sang along to it. Car after car passed you by, and you were entirely wrapped up in conversation with Newt. So much so, that you failed to pay close attention to your surroundings outside of the vehicle. 

That is, at least, until the chatter died down and you realized that Newt was parking his car in front of a familiar set of open gates in a very familiar part of Central Park. “You took me home?”

“Not quite,” Newt said with a heartwarming smile, shutting off the engine and stepping out of the car. You followed, watching Newt as he led you through the gates as if it was him who had grown up in this park and not you. 

You passed through the gates, reminded of all the times you would walk this path with your best friends, coming straight from school or from your favorite froyo shop, wanting to spend as much time with one another as you could before everyone had to go home. 

“Newt, where are we going?”

“Just wait,” he told you. “You’ll see.”

As if his words were magic, you saw them. Sitting on a familiar bench, just a little ways away, were your best friends. Just laying eyes on them nearly stole the breath from your lungs, your face lighting up with joy. You wasted no time in calling out to them. “Mina! Fernanda!” 

The girls shot up from their seats, smiles overtaking their features like yours had. You ran to greet them, as they rushed up to you, pulling you into a tight, welcoming, and familiar group hug. Laughter spilled uncontrollably from all three of you, even when you pulled back to get a good look at them. 

“God, I’m so happy to see you guys.”

Amina laughed, squeezing your right arm. “So are we.”

“How is this even happening right now? I mean—”

“You can thank your Godsend of a boyfriend for this one,” Fernanda smirked. “He’s been talking to us, Thomas, and your dad for weeks just to get this put together. Wanted to make sure there was a time all three of us could spend an afternoon together.”

You barely had the time to process what Fernanda said before Amina was cutting in with her classically dramatic groan. “I wish Aleksander would do stuff like this for me.”

“You say that as if he didn’t literally take you to Coney Island for your anniversary two weeks ago and take you on like, every thrill ride in the park. That shit’s expensive, Mina,”

Your smile widened as the girls began their usual banter, realizing just how much you missed interactions like these, even if you had similar ones with your friends in Woodstock. It suddenly reminded you of Newt, of the fact that he was the reason you were even here. You quickly glanced over your shoulder to find him standing several feet away, watching you with a satisfied smile on his face, hands shoved into his front jean pockets. 

You left your friends to bicker and ran back to the blond, body colliding with his, arms wrapping around his neck, pulling him into a tight hug. He stumbled slightly upon impact before pulling his hands from his pockets and winding his arms around your torso.

“Thank you,” you whispered, face tucked into Newt’s neck for barely a moment before you pulled back, arms still around Newt’s neck, his hands still flat against your back. 

Newt’s eyes contentedly scanned your joyful face before he responded, “You told me you missed them a few weeks ago, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to take you to see them, even if it’s just for an afternoon.”

It was entirely true. At some point during your long, deep conversation underneath the willow tree, you’d talked about your friends and how much you missed them. Even so, you were surprised he remembered something from almost two months ago, let alone planned out a trip just to make you happy. 

A whistle broke through the air, causing you and Newt to jump and completely pull away from one another. Turning, you found Fernanda to be the culprit. “Hey, lovebirds! Let’s get a move on, I’m starving!”

Your cheeks burned as you and Newt rejoined Amina and Fernanda, beginning the all too familiar trek to your froyo shop to eat your all-time favorite dessert — aside from Mickey’s double chocolate milkshake, of course — before heading to the nearby mall. 

In your two months away from New York city, Anne’s Froyo Factory was one of the things you’d missed the most. If you could have things your way, you would marry the store in a heartbeat. 

You and your friends had spent the better part of an hour sitting at your usual table near the middle of the seating area, similar to the way your friends in Woodstock sat. You and Newt sat with your backs to the door, with Amina and Fernanda on the other side. Conversation between you flowed easily, as it was mostly questions from the girls about how things were going in Woodstock, and you asking for updates on things happening in your school. 

You ended up recounting the shopping cart race to them, and showing the mostly-healed injuries you’d sustained, much to Fernanda’s chagrin. They’d also been very happy to hear that the transition was mostly effortless, and that you had no issues making new friends and bonding with Thomas’ group of friends. According to them, that was the thing they’d worried about the most. 

After you were finished with froyo and the initial catch-up, Newt drove everyone over to the mall you used to frequent. He’d taken your advice and parked deep into the underground parking structure, as opposed to dealing with the hellscape that the above ground parking lot was on a Saturday afternoon. 

Despite how insanely packed the mall was, you knew you would have a good time with everyone. Any time a store caught someone’s interest, you’d all go in to explore it, more often than not coming out with a bag or two. You paid close attention to Newt, though, because he’d never been in this mall before, and you didn’t want to lose him to the crowd. 

Being in the mall for a prolonged amount of time only proved that having access to a bank account that housed a weekly allowance and a want for material items was truly your greatest downfall. By the time everyone was ready to eat again, you’d bought a few new clothing items for yourself, a Lord of The Rings figurine for Chuck, and a lightsaber keychain for Thomas. 

Some point between stores, on a leisurely path to the food court, Newt spotted a photo booth, tucked barely out of the way of the main flow of customers. Amina and Fernanda were inside some stationary store a little ways back, and Newt insisted that you and him go inside. You feigned reluctance to the idea, but followed the boy to it with a smile on your face. 

You stepped inside behind Newt, who was squished into the corner, slotting your bags between your feet as he shoved a $5 bill into the machine and you shut the curtain. It was only at that moment that you realized you’d never been in a photo booth before, and didn’t know what to do with yourself. 

Newt, however, seemed to know exactly what to do. Just as the countdown on the screen displayed a bright number five, you and Newt looked at each other, and he blurted out, “Gally’s a huge fan of Glee, but he refuses to tell anyone. I caught him watching it once, I don’t think he knows though.”

You erupted in laughter and Newt followed after, just in time to hear the shutter click. This was what made you get your footing, and in the pause between pictures, you came up with poses. Newt faced the camera and smiled wide, eyes closed as you ruffled his hair, eyes locked onto his features, a softer smile than his on your face. For the third photo, you both mustered up wide, bright smiles once again and pressed your cheeks together, one of your arms wrapped around Newt’s neck, his hands hanging off your shoulders. For the final photo, though, it seemed neither of you knew what to do. 

But you were proven wrong when it seemed that Newt had this one covered, too. 

You opened your mouth to speak as the countdown hit number two, but before you could say anything, Newt’s hand grazed your chin and pulled you close as he pressed a kiss to your cheek. The shutter flashed as he did, and within seconds, he’d pulled back and acted as though he’d done nothing. 

You stepped out of the booth, bags in hand, unable to control the burning on your cheeks. Two film strips deposited from the machine, one for each of you. Newt grabbed them and handed one to you, folding his in half and tucking it into his wallet. You decided your strip would be safest in your bag until you could tape it to the wall behind your desk at home. 

Just as you did so, Amina and Fernanda found the both of you, each carrying a small bag from the store they’d been in before. They both agreed that food was a must, and there was no need to go into any more stores until after you’d bought food. 

As you headed to the middle of the mall, you realized that you’d been in the mall for almost two hours, and had yet to see the other half of it. Still, food was now your priority, along with finding a suitable table for everyone to eat at. 

Newt had found one near the middle, and offered to save the spot so you and your friends could get food. Amina was the first one back, with a tray of Greek food, followed by Fernanda, who had chosen New York Fries. Newt ended up choosing the Chinese place near the edge of the food court, and you arrived back at the table last, carrying a delightful tray from Burger Palace, with a classic burger and chocolate milkshake — earning a laugh from Newt. 

Everyone else had already started eating, and you frowned when you took the first few bites and sips of your meal. 

“What’s with the face?” Fernanda asked. “You don’t like it? I thought you loved Burger Palace.”

You swallowed what you were chewing before you answered. “I do, but it’s nowhere close to Mickey’s, that’s for sure.” 

Newt laughed, chopsticks full of lo mein halfway to his mouth. “Nothing’ll ever beat Mickey’s. All of his recipes are homemade, not to mention top secret. He almost didn’t let Frypan know about them when he started working there.” 

The girls knew what you were talking about, as you had told them plenty about Mickey’s since you’d first eaten there, shared a quick look before returning to their food. The rest of the meal passed in a relative silence, up until you’d excused yourself to go use the bathroom. 

As soon as you were out of earshot, Fernanda leaned across the table to meet Newt’s eye. “So, how long have you two been dating?”

Newt choked on his drink, coughing and sputtering out, “What?”

“You guys can’t have been dating that long. I mean, she’s only been gone for like… two months.” Amina guessed.

“Oh,” Newt realized. “Yeah, um, we’re not— we’re not dating.” 

Fernanda’s eyes widened. “Really? We could’ve sworn—”

“No, no,” Newt blushed, a bashful smile appearing on his face. “We’re just good friends, that’s all.” 

“Well, I think you should ask her out.” 

“Mina!” Fernanda balked. 

The girl only shrugged, picking at her salad. “What? I’m just saying. They obviously like each other, and if they accidentally managed to convince us they’re dating? There’s obviously something there.” 

Fernanda only shrugged, considering her friend’s explanation. Newt observed the pair, hoping that the red that so obviously painted his cheeks would dissipate before you got back. The rest of the conversation was cut short when you returned to the table. 

Once everyone was finished and had thrown away their garbage, you all decided that exploring the other half of the mall wasn’t worth the aching feet and worn out muscles. After all, you’d been in the mall for two hours now, and it was nearing three o’clock. So, you decided to head back to the car, this time with a trunk full of bags from a multitude of stores, to go to a familiar cafe to grab drinks before saying your goodbyes. 

When you arrived at the park entrance where the day started, you felt the tears beginning to well up in your eyes. You and the girls stepped out of the car, Newt opting to keep it idling while you parted ways at the gate. 

“I hope I can see you guys again soon,” you said, fighting your tears. 

Amina laughed, wiping at the bottom of her eyes to keep the tears from falling. “Oh, please. You can’t get rid of us easily, Y/n. You know that.”

“Exactly, we’re like boomerangs,” Fernanda smiled sadly. “We always find a way back.” 

You decided that if you spoke again, you’d start crying, so you pulled the girls in for a group hug, savoring the moment as best as you could. When you pulled away, you hugged them both again, this time separately. 

“Take care of that boyfriend of yours,” Amina told you, face tucked into your shoulder, before pulling back. “He knows how to treat you right.” 

You rolled your bloodshot eyes, a playful smile threatening to show on your face as you tried to calm the burning on your cheeks. “He’s not my boyfriend, Mina.” 

“Could’ve fooled us,” Fernanda said. “No one who goes out of their way to plan a whole day with your best friends and drive you two hours here, and two hours back — in New York traffic, mind you — is just a friend.” 

You laughed and nodded, but said nothing. After another round of hugs and well wishes, you departed and headed back to the warm car, Newt driving off not long after you were settled. 

The drive home was vastly different than the drive into the city. It was calmer, and the silence was filled with the low volume of the radio as you and Newt finished off your cafe drinks. At some point, though, you felt that you needed to bring up your conversation with Amina and Fernanda. 

“They had that conversation with you, too?” Newt asked.

“‘Too’? What do you mean, ‘too’?” 

“When you went to use the bathroom during lunch,” Newt smiled, “they practically ambushed me. Apparently, we make a very convincing couple.” 

You couldn’t help but laugh along with Newt. 

The day ended at your doorstep. Newt poked his head in to say hello to everyone, and to assure your family that nothing had gone wrong with the ‘master plan’ that, apparently, everyone except you knew about. 

Once more, you thanked the British boy, reminding him that this was one of the best days you’d had since moving to Woodstock. After saying your goodbyes, you watched Newt’s car disappear down the street before heading back inside. Today was a really good day.

series masterlist: @heliads @ghostofscarley @badbatch-simp24 @virginia-peters @third-broparcelicito @lamolaine @yes-fangirl-things (open!)

[thewritingofspencerrose]

Little Lady Masterlist

age twenty-two

Announcements Over Dinner

maggie.hughes

liked by maggie.hughes, anaheimducks, jackhughes and 79,082 more

maggie.hughes taking after my momma, sharing my love through food <3

elblue6 i could not be more proud of the woman you have become <3

jackhughes are you proud of who we've become?

maggie.hughes love you mom <3

maggie.hughes and jack, she can't be proud of the woman you've become when you're not a woman

_quinnhughes he's not?!

jackhughes i hate you both

trevorzegras you should really just drop being a nurse and be a professional chef

maggie.hughes thanks trevy <3

trevorzegras also i'd like to say this is a lie, her main love language is physical affection

"Why are we all talking in my Instagram comments when all of my cooking is layed out in front of us?" I ask, looking over my family that sits around, phones in hand.

"I'm sorry sweetie, you're right," Mom agrees, Dad and the boys nodding along and tucking the phones away.

"The food looks great, Mags," Quinn is the one to compliment, everyone in motion now as their hands reach and grab for the celebration dinner Mom and I made this afternoon. "However, before we eat, I think our girl Margaret deserves some words."

"Quinn-"

"You're my baby sister, let me brag," Is how he interrupts me, standing from his seat next to me, "So, it's been twenty-two years of these two ruining my life," Cue his gesturing to Jack and myself, the two of us rolling our eyes. "And I wouldn't have ever had it any other way. While we all are able to see Jack's, and Luke's and my own accomplishments for that matter each week, Maggie's accomplishments haven't always been so loud."

"From being in honor societies from the first grade on, to her volunteer work and academic awards, while also supporting all of us, she's had more accomplishments than any of us. And tomorrow marks the biggest one yet."

"Mags," He continues, addressing me directly now as I try to furiously wipe the tears from under my eyes. "I could not be more proud of you for everything you've done to get here, and for the fact that tomorrow we'll be able to say that you're Margaret Hughes, RN. I love you kid. To Maggie!"

"To Maggie!" Everyone cheers, making me laugh through my cheek splitting smile, hugging him as tight as I possibly can as I stand beside him.

"Thank you Q."

"Anything for you Mags, you know that."

And while this would be the perfect opportunity to sit back down and just enjoy dinner, I look to Trev, his eyes already on mine as though he's read my mind.

"Actually, I'd like to make an announcement while we have everyones attentio-"

"You're not pregnant are you?" Luke is the one to question, eyes giant as Jack mutters angrily about the thought of Trevor and I having sex.

"No, no, I'm not anywhere near pregnant Lu," I assure, Mom releasing a sigh of relief. "But I've been offered a job with the Ducks as their team sports medical nurse."

Silence. That's all that's that can be heard.

"And I've decided to take it."

"You did WHAT?"

"Maggie, I can't allow this," Quinn follows Jacks yell, Lu sitting in shocked silence as Trev moves his hand onto my thigh, giving me a squeeze of support.

"Boys." Mom is the one to speak up, Dad's eyes simply staring between Trev and I. "She's made her decision."

"You knew," Dad speaks up, looking to his wife.

"She needed someones opinion. She's twenty-one and wanted to move across the country for a job. That's a big decision."

"One that should have been discussed with both her parents," Dad's quick to return, and while we've grown up in a peaceful household, we know all the signs of mom and dad fighting.

"I'm an adult."

"You're twenty-"

"I'm twenty-one, of legal age and legal drinking age. I've also been taking care of others since I was little. And I am old enough to move for an amazing opportunity, one that you should be thrilled for me to have been offered," I scold, Trev's hand moving to my own as I stare over the men of my family. "I will be moving to California a week from tomorrow. And you will all be happy for me or you will be quiet."

"Mag-"

"No, she's right," Lu speaks up. "She's moving for an amazing opportunity and we're all being a bunch of dickheads."

"Luke!" Mom can't help but chime in, "Watch your language, correct or not."

"We're happy for you, Mags, trust me," Quinn speaks up. "We're just surprised."

"I understand that but-"

"But that reaction was ridiculous, and if you weren't her family I'd have some choice words for all of you," Trevor speaks up, looking over the table. "She's doing amazing things in the world and you all need to be proud of her. Cause if anyone loves her as much as me it's all of you and that's not showing right now."

"To Maggie," Jack speaks up, smiling at me. "For not only becoming a kickass nurse, but also for this huge step on her life."

And I smile, because I knew it would be rocky, but I knew they'd support me regardless.

We're the Hughes.

"To Maggie!"

[enkelimagnus]

Don't Feed It (It Will Come Back)

Read on AO3

True Detective Season 1, Rust/Marty, Rated E

Summary: Follow-up to Something Stuck In Your Teeth

They've fucked. They've gone back to normal, or whatever poses as normal for these two. Except Rust's not one man you own and Marty's not gotten that memo. So when Rust sleeps with a friend of Maggie's, Marty gets possessive. And Rust doesn't like this at all.

Warnings: The usual warnings that come with Canon True Detective, Period-Typical Homophobia, Anal Sex, Slurs, Bad Crash Stuff, French-bashing (self-inflicted)

Full text below the cut

His thumb caresses the grip of his gun where it rests against his belt, runs his fingerprint all over the hard, cold polymer casing and he wonders when they’ll catch him out. 

Quesada knows he’s not listening to a word he’s saying but he’s not snapping at him to get his head out of his ass and pay attention. His tolerance for Rust’s never-ending anti-authority attitude lowers every day they get closer to the weekend and today’s friday.

He’s letting Marty be the spokesman for the both of them, lets him deal with the politics of men like Quesada who only care as long as their superiors do, as long as it will shorten their afternoons lazing around a golf green pretending to play that limpdick excuse for a sport.

Quesada must have been a good cop once upon a time, or at least that’s what Marty’s desperate to believe. Rust only knows he must not have been that good, else he’d know the sort of creature sitting across from him now, and he would know he belongs somewhere the sun don’t ever shine. The least he would do was get that state-issued gun away from him and force him to fend for himself in the firearm department. 

When they walk out of there, Rust is still a free man and Marty’s hand rests onto his shoulder, onto that very spot on his trapezius where, under the shirt, half covered by his undershirt is the crescent moon scar of Marty’s own teeth. He’s gotten the habit of it, of letting his hand fall onto that mark from time to time, a claim or a warning or a threat, or perhaps all three at once. He knows it’s there still, he saw it in the locker room, saw how it was scarring, a bit red still underneath the brown of the scab.

Others have seen it too, men he can’t help but see at work when they grab showers or take a leak by the lockers or grab something from the jacket of their civilian garb. A woman’s seen it too, a blonde little thing with a genuinely fantastic ass Maggie had introduced him to over sweet tea and some help with the plumbing of the house. One thing with being raised by a mad man in a cabin in the middle of Alaska, you learn how to take care of a home, and if Marty felt emasculated by it, Rust couldn’t care less. If he had decided to help out his woman, she wouldn’t be calling him up to help with her fucking pipes.

She calls him sometimes, in the evenings or on days he and Marty both have off and Rust can’t help but wonder if Marty knows that his wife is calling for no real reason but to talk, like he’s one of the girls from her book club. It’s nice though, he likes her like a little sister. She can see through enough of his shit to give a fuck but not enough to run away screaming, and Marty might be annoyed by it at the end of the day, but he’s the one who opened the door first, the one who let his wife feed Rust like a wild animal at their doorway, plying him with coffee and letting him think he could trust them. You don’t feed a stray unless you want it to come back. 

That day though, it had only been a trap to get him in his wifebeater and a flannel over at the house while Suzie was there as well for entirely unrelated reason. He’d taken her on a date the next day, mostly because Maggie had been staring at him with eyes promising divine retribution if he didn’t make a move. She had a nice smile but Rust wasn’t a fan of blondes, and the entire evening, he’d kept seeing Dora Lange superimposed over her like a 1910s film’s archaic special effects. They’d still fucked though, at his place on his mattress in the living room and she hadn’t said anything about that. She’d asked about the bite mark. He’d kissed her to shut her up and it had worked. He had been thinking of Marty anyway. 

The days after that perfect storm are empty of threats and insults; they’ve pierced the abscess and let the pus out and it’s going to need some time to build back up. They know it’ll build back up. The sort of festering wound they have doesn’t ever heal fully. 

Rust’s got a lot of those. Most days he feels like a torn open carcass laying in a patch of sunlight, just awaiting to be shredded further in the claws of some great carrion bird. Vultures are essential to the health of an ecosystem, he knows as much, but he can feel the talons digging into his flesh, three points of pain on his left side, right where the bullets found their way. 

The first one he’d seen, a great big thing, half majestic and half ungainly, was on a field trip his pop had not been able to pull him out of. The wildlife center had a wing – more like a spare room, but they’d been trying to get money out of the state to keep their operation flowing and “wing” had sounded like they deserved the aid more – for the sort of animals that were not supposed to be as far up north as the likes of Ennis. 

They’d only managed to get at the vulture because it had, in its despair to feed and keep itself warm from the otherworldly cold of north Alaska, attempted to steal away some of their critters out of their goddamn dens. 

The vulture had stared into his eyes then, and Crash had once told this story to Ginger, just filed off the specifics and replaced it with another man’s details, and added that the bird must have known what he’d become. Crash had felt like a big carrion bird, but that was before he’d met Louisiana CID Homicide detective Rustin Cohle. Nah, that fucker, the one whose skin he now wears, whose suits he puts on every morning, whose apartment he lives in, that fucker’s the vulture.

So they go back to work, he goes back to making his living off of dead bodies, and they don’t talk about what happened off Highway 10. They settle down into the routine of biting words and eye rolls, into the monotony of the cases that come across their desks. They fail to capture Rust’s attention for too long.

He knows that what happened with Dora Lange shouldn’t be replicated. He knows the obsession, the nights spent drinking coffee like water, staying awake through the sheer force of his will, staying on his feet going through files in the archives, he knows those are not healthy. He also knows that was the most alive he’d felt in a really, really long time.

Even before he opened that big red box, even before he got into that absolutely grandiose cocaine in the evidence locker, the thrill of the chase had lit him up from the inside and it had been what he’d been aching for since he’d joined Homicide. And he’s aching for it now, needs it like you need to scratch an itch, and that stolen stop in the heat of summer, damp and tense and electric in every way had scratched it and for a short, blessed moment, he’d been breathing free. 

He’s always been obsessive, always stared at every tree for a bit too long, always spent nights laying in the middle of the woods staring at the stars and trying to remember what he’d learned from the physics and astronomy intro books he’d absolutely not accidentally forgotten to give back to the school library before spring break. He looked at the space between the stars and wondered if a black hole would ever come to swallow him whole. He’d stared at the constellations and felt ancient and so very new at the same time, a sight held by so many eyes and understood fully by none at all. 

He remembers losing the night every year for two months, and how it felt like losing shelter, losing safety. How losing the day felt like he’d dug himself too deep into the earth to run from the world and he’d gotten stuck in a maze of caverns, every stalagmite the shadow of a person he knew, uncanny and unhinged. He remembers men like Riley Marshall whose words became more and more slurred with every minute of sunlight lost to the night, until he spent those two months barely understandable, only to spring back up with the sun, as if alcoholism was seasonal. 

Louisiana is incredibly steady in comparison, comfortably warm even in the dead of winter, with that golden sun bearing down onto the bayou and the insects buzzing around your ears, steadfast companions. 

So Rust finds other ways to feed the prowling beast in his mind. He reads and throws himself into work and spends his weekends sitting in his convent cell of a house with his head a smear of robitussin or a haze of quaaludes that still smell like the cheap perfume of the women he bought them from. There’s nothing like being high off your fucking rocker and hallucinating dead people staring at you with empty eye sockets and blood bubbling out of their mouths, staining the carpet from where they stand awkwardly in the corner, nothing like feeling the weight of a dead child in your arms and the stench of cocaine sweats on your skin, while you’re neck deep in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

Death is a given of life, but it’s been feeling like death is a moth to whatever bayou bonfire Rust seems to be made of. He’s always known the smell of it, the color of it, the weight of it pulling at his feet like gravity, keeping him on the ground, keeping him in the world. He cannot remember knowing anyone who didn’t have a personal, intimate relationship with death. Claire had been an anomaly for four years, until she hadn’t.

There are a few places where Crash and Rust intersected, places that made it easier to blend himself and disappear into another man’s skin. They recommend it when you go undercover, to find a cover that has a few things in common, so that lying will be easier. Death had been the main one. Rust had shot a deer down by the time he’d gone into middle school and Crash had grown up listening to the rattling of rifles in the dark in a damp corner of a Texas ghetto. 

Both of them had taken naturally to holding guns, both taken to killing like a duck to water, and the murkier the pond, the better. Dead moms and absentee dads and authority issues and the substantial skill of being able to recognize stronger than you, of being able to follow the rules of the strongest. More than all of that, all the seams shared between those two costumes, what had allowed him to disappear inside of the chitinous armor of that particular monster had been death. Without death, he wouldn’t have been quite as willing to shoot himself full of unspoken substances and spend four years in a haze of chemicals. It’s what made it so easy to throw away a sanity that hadn’t been precious to him in months.

He’s given up on recovering that. He’s given up on getting clean too. That ship sailed a really long time ago. He can do sober, though, most of the time, because the downers help and the work busies his mind enough that he’s not completely trying to drown himself in an ocean of liquor.

He locked the Jameson back into the red box with Crash’s jacket and his boots, and the personal dose of coke he’d grabbed out of that bag for himself, with the rifles and the fake IDs and the markers of Crash. He doubts he can ever go back now, cause Ginger was with him and now he’s locked up, but… it’s in there. It’s in a closet in his house, a skeleton of electricity and leather and whiskey. It stinks up that corner so he never goes there. He locked the door with a padlock so it would be hard to get into. His neighborhood is quiet, no record of home invasion, but there are closer demons than the nameless thieves in the night.

When he’s laying on his mattress with Suzie by his side, quiet now that they’ve fucked a second time, and he’s staring at the ceiling and the light fixture is bloodshot and blinking at him – The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain. – he can feel Crash in the closet, banging at the door to get out, he can smell the stench of him, of gunpowder and bad trips and murder. 

Marty wore that jacket with the full patch on the back and he must have known what it meant, he’d been in the force for too long not to know, even if bike clubs like the Iron Crusaders didn’t often make it up to him. Their murders were clear and motivated, rarely investigated the way they should, used as fodder to thicken the files that would take down men like Miles. 

He accepted it, though. He didn’t speak on it, didn’t judge it. Marty Hart, the great cowboy of Louisiana Homicide, let that wretched creature run free and didn’t come down on it afterwards. He let Rust put the box back in the closet and he still touched him like he wasn’t afraid of him, still fucked him like he wasn’t in danger. He liked being handled like he wasn’t a bomb waiting to go off. Or perhaps he liked that Marty didn’t care in that moment, that he might go off and kill the both of them at once, splattering red over the beige tiles in grotesque perversions of the shapes of their bodies. His mind supplied the image readily enough.

Marty lets go of him, lets that hand fall from the back of his neck as they reach their desks. Rust’s is clean and tidy, not a single sheet of paper out of place, not a hint of an open case, because there isn’t any. They’ve just finished one, the trail has ended with cuffs dug into a man’s skin and the wide, terrified eyes of cattle before execution. A commonplace crime, a commonplace horror, once again nothing sophisticated. Rust didn’t believe that homicide would be particularly rife with the sort of crimes you read in sensationally-titled books, but he’d thought there would be… more. He can get more intellectually stimulating shit from those dish rags they call gossip magazines, brightly colored like birds trying to attract mates, when he goes to buy his cigarettes at the shop next door to the station.

Marty threw him a comment about getting him one of those 3000-piece puzzles, threw it like a ball at football practice, and Rust let it fall down to the side and watched Marty’s eyes roll and his face show that look of ‘what else should I expect’ that he’s come to favor around Rust.

There’s a piece of wood and a knot of twine left over from those devil traps resting in the upper right corner of his desk, next to a neat stack of some procedure manuals he’s supposed to pass onto the next newbie to come in. There’s been one already, three weeks ago, but when Rust had made it in that morning, the kid’d been halfway down his first coffee, surrounded on all sides by Geraci’s little band of bootlickers and Rust hadn't even bothered with introductions.  

He can see him now, on his way out of the door with the brazen pep in his fucking step that comes with being fresh out the academy. He used to be that way too, before Paul and Ruddy had kicked some sense into him. 

Rust sits down and reaches for the pack of camels, and Marty reaches for his forgotten cup of coffee. It’s most likely cold by now but Marty has the uncanny ability to swallow down coffee no matter how long it has been sitting or how burnt it has become and Rust might just respect that quality in him more than any other. That’s a feat of herculanean strength if he’s ever seen one. 

They’ve got a rare empty workload, after months of back to back, open-simultaneously murders of jealous rage and covetous greed and insatiable lust, their own backwater Dante’s Inferno. 

The afternoon’s almost over. If they were any other men, they would walk out now, enjoy the early night with a beer and a conversation, but Rust doesn’t do beer and company, or early calls, and he’s managed to silently shame Marty into giving some of those habits up as well. They’re now staring at each other wondering who will make the first move and ask for additional work.

There’s politics to this sort of act. You can’t just shame your fellow officers by asking if they got anything they should be working on, no, you gotta beg for it, gotta add mumbles about not wanting to get home to the wife. That line only Marty can carry. He’s been back in Maggie’s good graces for two months now. 

Rust can beg. He can do it pretty too, can go with his hand outstretched like they’re giving him charity, like he’d owe them for it. Those are favors they’ll cash in when they need confessions and they see him idling in the station. They realized some time ago he’s good at those. He just enjoys the puzzles, and he enjoys watching human beings stripped down to their bare essential needs. He imagines he’d be entirely the same, pinned there and dissected, a rare butterfly in an entomologist's lab. 

Suffice to say, he’d rather Marty do it. At least he doesn’t have to flay himself open for it.

So they stare at each other and have this silent conversation, until they’ve reached an impasse and Rust just decides to wait it out. His eyes fall on the wood and the twine. They feel grotesque in this setting so devoid of anything natural, like broken off fingers of some greater entity, stolen in the night. 

They were called devil traps and Rust has been tangled up in them since he first saw them in that field on January 3rd. Did the one who made them know what it would mean to him? A child’s belief that evil could be warded off, left sarcastically to guard the corpse of a woman, of someone’s own child grown up to become disillusioned by the reality of life? 

Sophia wasn’t blonde, she had dark hair like her mother, a crow’s nest on the days they rushed out of the door late to drop her off at daycare. Still she’d haunted him that day, haunted the scenes of those crimes, all until Ledoux’s… bunker. He’d been too strung out for too long to remember her, until they’d had to move those bodies. It had been her hands pushing Marty out of the way to get the little girl. It had been her weight in Rust’s arms on the way out. 

Marty stands up with a long-suffering, exaggerated sigh, a smoke signal to all that he’s lost whatever silent battle he was fighting against his peculiar partner. That’s another way Marty can ask for work without shaming the others, by pretending Rust is pushing him to do unreasonable things. All Rust wants is for them to do their job, so he doesn’t have to go home early.

Rust stares at the back of Marty, the strong lines of shoulders and back, the way he stands with his feet apart, planted there like great oak trees to give himself balance. His hair is a little messy in the back, where he’s run his hand through it a number of times while they were talking to Quesada. He has one of his hands buried in one of his pockets, the other reaching forward, probably in the middle of asking for a file and it’s one hell of a picture, this all-American aged quarterback, begging for something under his breath. 

He’s never liked seeing that kicked-puppy look on Marty, the one he had when looking at Lisa at the Longhorn, when he wasn’t seething with rage. It feels obscene on a man like Marty, trying to make himself look innocent and victimized, trying to look small so someone will pity him. Rust finds it deeply unattractive, more so than the jealousy and the anger and the possessiveness, and all those biting, growling, snarling emotions that make a man into a beast, that make a man something to be scared of. 

Rust reaches up to grasp over the bitemark. He hides it with a roll of his right shoulder, like he’s working out a kink. 

They end up getting saddled with half the station’s paperwork, or something that feels like it at least, and Rust would care more that Marty is glaring daggers at him if he wasn’t cursing himself the whole time. He should have just accepted defeat and let Marty go home, while he went and hid in the archives somewhere in a cobwebbed corner until it felt safe to come out. It never felt safe to come out, but someone did eventually kick him out if he couldn’t justify his presence. 

“Maggie’s gonna kill me.”

“Just tell her you had to work late,” Rust mutters through his cigarette. Marty’s got one too, stolen from his pack as usual. It’s half burnt and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it sometimes, it just hangs from his fingers uselessly. He could use a pen just as well and not waste the smokes. 

“That ain’t gonna work. Used it too many times for her to believe me now.”

“Man who cried work,” Rust shrugs. He doesn’t pity him. 

He tunes back into the file in his hands, reading through the confession scrawled with a pencil that needs sharpening like a drunk needs whiskey, handwriting like chicken scratches on a yellow block of paper. 

“That does make me think…” Marty starts and trails off.

The confession, where he can read it, is from a man killing his wife, nothing new under the fucking sun and typing it up into a proper format is going to be hell. He guesses that’s what he deserves for asking for extra work. 

Marty still hasn’t spoken again so Rust sighs and looks up from the slice of human stupidity and cupidity smeared in goose poop colors in front of him.

The man looks at him in a way that makes Rust believe he’s had whatever he’s going to say on his mind for much longer than that ‘that makes me think’ lets on. He’s staring him down in a way, with those blue eyes like at the first sky of spring. 

Rust raises an eyebrow. They’re almost alone in the department now, everyone’s gone and left the kind of on time that feels early now that they’ve unloaded their paperwork on them. Whatever Marty wants to talk to him about now, pretending to be casual about it, as casual as a bullet to the gut can be, it’s something he doesn’t mind talking about here. But he does mind talking about it in the presence of the other detectives. 

“Maggie’s been asking me if you had a good time with Suzie.”

Rust frowns. He’s been expecting Marty to talk about something all day. It’s been hanging around, curdling the air, moving around them and tangled in their legs. But he was not expecting Suzie. 

“I…. Sure. She was a nice girl.” 

He doesn’t do this sort of conversation. Especially with Marty, who doesn’t usually mind boasting about his conquests around the others. Rust would think it’s because of what happened off Highway 10, if he had been more talkative before.  

“Hmm mmm.” Marty hums under his breath. “I told her we don’t talk like that, you and I. We don’t have that sort of a rapport.”

“Right.” Maggie would rather not know what kind of rapport Marty and him entertain. 

Rust turns away, towards the typewriter, and he starts to type out that shitstain of a confession. It would make him angry if he wasn’t so used to it now. Men hurt women everyday, those are not news stories. 

“So… Suzie?”

Rust looks back and Marty’s not moved, with that cigarette in his finger burning off almost unattended. That makes him roll his eyes more than the question, more than anything else. He should buy his own fucking smokes if he’s gonna waste them. 

“Friend of Maggie’s. She called me up to fix a pipe problem ten days ago.” He watches Marty tense across their desks. “Her pipes were fine, of course. 'Twas some great elaborate scheme to get me in my civvies at your place while her friend was there.”

Marty’s still eyeing him suspiciously, like he can’t quite believe he wasn’t trying to make a move on his wife. It’s fucking ridiculous, this peacocking of his, this fucking… pissing on the fence to mark it as his. Rust has no intentions whatsoever towards Maggie Hart. 

“So I show up. And Maggie’s busy but she says I should come in, and that the toolbox or whatever is in the kitchen. So I walk into the kitchen and sitting there with a glass of sweet tea half full, is this… Suzie.”

There’s nothing he dislikes more than this stupid sort of show and tell men do. But Marty’s got a look to him and he can’t tell exactly where it is going. He has no desire to get into a fight tonight. 

“Blonde,” he provides. “Nice girl.” He stops for a moment. “Good ass.”

He can see a look of recognition in Marty’s eyes at that. Fucker. Of course that’s what makes it click.

“Susan Cornell,” Marty explains. “From church.”

Rust chuckles and shakes his head. He thinks of the crucifix nailed into the wall above his bed, above where Suzie and him fucked, twice. When he was looking at blinking eyes in ceiling fixtures, she must have been looking at her lord and savior. 

“Well. We didn’t do that much talking, all things considered.”

“So. I guess you like yourself a blonde.”

It’s thrown at him for him to catch, and he can tell Marty’s mad underneath it all. He can’t really figure out why. Suzie was nice and they spent an enjoyable night and he drove her home in the morning because Claire force-fed him manners before their daughter was born. He can’t see where it could have gone wrong.

So he just shrugs and finishes his cigarette. “I actually don’t. Most of the time.”

Marty finally releases that cigarette from the throes of agony. He brings it to his lips and sucks in whatever pitiful amount remains, one deep drag that hollows his cheeks and makes him look angrier than before. Rust leans back against his chair and crosses his arms. Something’s coming, gathering over Marty like a cloud, wreathing his head in lightning and curses. It sparkles minty hot in between them and burns into Rust’s gums. 

“Well,” Marty finally starts after a moment. “Color me surprised. Thought you didn’t like women all that much.”

This one Rust expected. After Highway 10, after that half-earnest conversation where they’d danced around the topic like angels on the head of a pin, he’d gathered Marty thought the insults and slurs were at least backed by lived experience. That was a truly black and white view of human sexuality that Rust had always encountered particularly in those smoke-filled, misery-reeking liminal spaces they called police departments and community churches. 

He licks his lips. There’s a meal to be made of the discomfort Marty Hart will soon be squirming with. 

“You do realize I was married,” Rust starts, slow and lazy like he’s not even trying to explain himself. “For three years. With a daughter.” The simplicity of that equation is plain to see. Even Bobby’s math skills could withstand that examination. 

“Right. You wouldn’t be the first person to get married despite being unsuited to it.” 

This one blooms unexpectedly in Rust’s skull bringing back with it the taste of overfilled forgotten garbage bins and Claire’s voice, too calm and too emotionless telling him she was leaving. The aftertaste is corrosive, burns like acid into the soft, empty crevice underneath his tongue and Ginger’s voice is in his ear, his hand is in his hair, muttering that he’s not normal, he’s not made for normal life, for kids and wives and 9 to 5s, and Crash in him agrees wholeheartedly and shifts ever so closer, hunting for clammy skin under leather.

“I may not be very suited for it these days,” he admits. There’s no use in arguing with the truth of that. “But it isn’t for lack of liking women, Marty. Not that that’s any of your business.”

A phone rings, shrill and demanding attention and one of the secretaries rushes to get to it from the break room, a new one Rust hasn’t managed to catch the name of, something like Annamarie or Annie or Jackie, with ‘a’s and ‘ie’s like twinkling lights over a ferris wheel.

Marty waits until she’s gone to reply. He feels orange again, tense and rough like barbed wire, waiting for him to explode is like walking through the pretend minefields his father set up around the cabin in late spring.

“Well, I’d reckon it is.”

Rust laughs at that, one sharp bark of laughter like a creaking door. From the look on Marty’s face, disbelief and anger at once, he wasn’t expecting that.

“Why? Wanna be my boyfriend?”

The face Marty makes at that word tells him all he needs to know. There’s disgust there, shame and fear so bright, ice cold as the sea up there, sharp as the wind in the dead of winter. Marty makes him think too often of Alaska.

“Thought so.”

He doesn’t love the concept either: boyfriend feels like too sweet chocolate cakes and baby pink shirts and old ladies looking at them with a mix of fascination and pity, like leopard patterns and strawberry lube and calling each other pet names that made people want to commit hate crimes. 

That, the reminder of what people could think of him if they knew, how Geraci would have his balls cut and framed for all to see, that seems to quiet Marty down enough they can finish work.

By the time Rust makes it home that night, his saliva tastes like the yellow confession paper and he walks past Crash’s closet begging himself to give in and open the box and find the pocket sized Jameson intact in there. He doesn’t. 

There’s no bravery, no glory to the act of refusing himself alcohol. He just does, because he knows a single sip becomes a bottle in the blink of an eye, a taste becomes a torrent he cannot fight against. If he gives in, he might as well be on the Titanic in 1912, might as well sink and drown in ice cold memories of death blurred away by cheap whiskey. 

His house is damp with fall heat, with Louisiana mosquitoes and sweat and he finds himself falling into the beat up sofa chair he found himself a few days prior, tipped over on the side of the road by an empty house like a forgotten toy. It’s not too dirty, not clean either, but he couldn’t find bed bugs, just the beat-down of life. So he loaded it in the back of his pick up and brought it home.

Time passes like coffee in a slow drip. He kicks off his shoes and socks and takes off his shirt and tie, throws what’s in need of a wash in the lonesome basket in the laundry room and walks back, barefoot on the carpet into the main room. He was halfway through Camus’s The Stranger when he fell asleep last night and it sits face down, splayed open like a dead bird by the right side of the bed. He doesn’t mind the French when he can read them instead of having to hear them talk. 

He picks the book up carefully and throws a glance at the page he’d been on. Four bullets shot into a dead body. Barely enough emotion to fill one of the espresso cups of those French cafés where you drank at the bar in the morning, throwing back a shot of coffee and a cigarette in the same smooth motion. The portrait of a man so detached from the world that nothing, neither the death of his mother nor a murder committed by his own hand, seemed to shake him too hard. Rust hadn’t fallen asleep because of the book. It had been the pills. 

There is nothing to do here, no case to work, no mystery to uncover, nothing to sink his teeth into. He can’t go out fishing for it either, not if he doesn’t want to end up a fish hooked at the end of a line, mouth opening on nothing, drinking down alcohol instead of water but still trying to fucking breathe. There’s one thing left that’s not drinking. He’s gonna have to go on a run. 

If the inside of his house is a damp armpit in the fall heat, the back of it, the little garden patch with the shed that leads back onto a thin strip of water running down the back of the lot like a piss streak on the end of a sidewalk in the morning, is a Southerner’s deranged rendition of those Alaskan saunas. 

Rust starts jogging down there and feels immediately ridiculous, a puppet whose strings have been cut, left to flail around purposelessly. He knows that this is useful, that this keeps him fast and strong and allows him to handle himself better in the field, that it’s only because he kept up the fucking training that he made it out of that powderkeg with Ginger alive. The price of it is this, the sweat and the repeated motions that feel more awkward than anything else, that make him ache for a cigarette, that make him curse the day his father and mother fucked. 

The worst part is of course that he’s doing it to himself. 

It takes about fifteen minutes for his brain to start shutting up for the most part, no longer rattling on about punishments and self-flagellation but rather showing him perfect images of the terrible things that haunt his dreams, whenever he has them. Broken bodies on concrete and the crown of antlers he’s never, ever going to forget. Those devil traps that didn’t catch anything but Rust in their triangular cages. 

Those he thinks about most. He has half a mind to make one himself and tie it up somewhere, not too far from the crucifix, so that he has something else to meditate about. God and the Devil, allowing your crucifixion and allowing children to believe you can be stopped, two sides of the same fucked up coin the Christian church has tossed over and over, landing in every corner of the known world like a never-ending sickness. 

He can’t say that to Marty. He can’t say that to anyone. He does not actually want to die, though it would be one hell of a way to kill himself. If he can’t do it himself, might as well delegate. 

It takes him an additional forty-five minutes to realize the sun has set and he should go back. He’s coughing and sweaty and hungry like a wolf in winter when he comes back to the nunnery cell he calls home, but there’s a heaviness to his limbs that promises a semblance of rest for the night. It’s not going to come for free, no, there will be a price, some vision of some kind – nightmare-ish, dead kids or dead women or dead somethings, or worse, a good one, of happiness and smiles and the sand of the beach they used to go to by Corpus Christi those first two summers. It’ll come though. Perhaps even unmedicated. 

He opens the back door and walks in, guard all the way down, so of course he gets caught with his pants down like a fucking rookie. He didn’t lock the door when he left. He never does when he goes running, there is nothing worse in the world than the noise of jingling keys in his pocket, it’s loud and metallic and too round on the edges, and it’s not in the right rhythm, always a bit after his feet hit the ground. 

So when Rust comes home and sees Marty there, sitting in his chair with his tie askew and his eyes gleaming with something viscous, something ugly, he’s aware it is entirely his fault. If he was less of a priss about fucking keys, a wild animal wouldn’t have found its way in. 

“So what? You take her back to this dump? Fuck her on that stupid mattress you got like a fucking college student?”

Whiskey slurs his words and Rust rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he might actually strain something. It’s about Suzie, it’s about Rust fucking a woman and it’s about Marty being a big tough guy and getting jealous like a teenage girl with a crush on an upperclassman that maybe said hi to her twice. He’s met enough teenage girls to know they get as murderous as gangbangers on a good day.

“I thought we had thoroughly established I don’t kiss and tell, Marty.”

It’s half of a threat underneath his heavy breathing and the sweat rolling down his back like the first drops of a rainstorm, heavy and slow and predicting something else. 

“It ain’t the same and you know it.” 

It’s not. He’s right. Suzie’s a woman and Marty’s a man and in this world, in this job, in Louisiana, it’s very different. No matter the truth of it, that deep down it’s all skin and bones and blood and Suzie’s teeth wouldn’t have hurt him differently than Marty’s did, and his blood wouldn’t have tasted different in either of their mouths. One day, he’ll be done pretending otherwise. Life is easier to live for now if it’s not made into hell by the men that think they know better than him what right is. 

The truth is, he hates them as much as they hate him.

“What do you want, Marty?” 

He’s hoping that this can be done before the heaviness in his limbs disappears, before the exhaustion falls under the neverending assault of his fucked up brain’s neon lights of thoughts. 

Marty growls under his breath as he stands up, an ugly sort of sound, wet with the alcohol and whatever anger he came in carrying and that sustained him sitting there in this chair for god knows how long. It’s not going to be done soon. It’s never going to fucking end. 

“You planning on seeing her again?” 

He’s stuck on Suzie, a skipping record on a turntable, one spiraling thought, that ugly green-eyed monster with teeth shaped like the scar on Rust’s shoulder. He should have known better than to think Marty would be done after that little interrogation at the station. He never is. He’s a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth with jealousy. 

“What I’m planning to do or not, is none of your business.” He’ll repeat it over and over again, but he’s not going to be happy about it.

Rust reaches for the camels on the kitchen counter, slides one out of the packet one-handed and brings it to his lips. Marty is glaring with that rage-filled intensity that makes his jaw lock into a hard, rectangular shape. A shiver runs down Rust’s spine, sharp and sudden like a lick of a lover’s tongue. 

“You gonna make her fuck you at one point? Tell her you like it like a queer?” 

Rust lights his cigarette and he swears he sees the flash of the flame reflected in the glassiness of Marty’s eyes. Jesus fuck, he’s drunk. 

“Are you gonna fucking stop with the childish insults and tell me what you mean or will I have to beat it out of you? I can treat you like a suspect, Marty, but you ain’t gonna like it.” 

He didn’t mean to get angry but he can feel it rising, the annoyance coursing through his veins like wildfire. He’s good at keeping his cool, at keeping his control, years of living with the strangest present father in the coldest part of the world, years of being someone else’s bitch to survive to the next day, of swallowing down his own vomit when seeing a man’s face without skin, choking to death and thinking this should be him, this will be him. He’s so fucking good at keeping his emotions buried deep inside that half the time he forgets they’re there. Marty’s somehow, within days of meeting him, managed to find the trigger to release them and he won’t fucking stop playing with it. 

Marty snarls now, raising his arms like he’s gearing for a fight because for all that fucking bravado and that attitude and the growling and snarling and acting like a big predator, he won’t talk about his fucking feelings. 

“That’s what I fucking thought,” Rust huffs and pulls on his cigarette, hard and long. He feels the smoke fill the empty cavity inside of his body, fill the space there and the space not there, the void where his heart beats hard and strong. It’s gray and red like blood, harsh as chemicals and natural as a forest fire. Marty’s staring at his mouth like he can’t believe it and Rust just sucks longer, until he runs out of oxygen and has to fucking let go. 

The smoke released rises like it’s signaling his position to someone, like it’s trying to warn others he’s in here. There’s no one to call. All there is is Marty there, that Rust can see through the screen of smoke he’s just created, big and strong and angry and almost ridiculous with it. He doesn’t know what to fucking do with himself. 

“I ain’t planning to see her again. I’m not tryna find a girlfriend, Marty. I just humor your wife ‘cause she doesn’t treat me like a lunatic half the time.” 

“Don’t fucking bring her up,” Marty points at him with his big hands, shaking almost from the anger and the tension and Rust shifts. There’s something different here than the game they’ve been playing. 

“We fucked, twice, on this mattress, and then she slept over and I drove her home. I’m a good little choir boy, Marty, I got manners.” Tame. 

He’s giving into Marty’s questioning because he doesn’t know what it is about anymore. Earlier he thought this was the game. But Marty’s actually mad, actually red with it, with the anger and the jealousy and the shaking need to grab at him and take him and get revenge for him… straying? Oh absolutely the fuck not. 

“If anything, if we’re going purely by numbers, she’s got more of a claim on me than you do, and you don’t see her parading around here acting like a kid whose favorite toy got stolen, now, do you?” 

There’s a flash of something on Marty’s face, something that Rust can’t recognize. Marty looks, briefly, like he’s been punched in the guts, but without the rage that comes with it, just the soft-tissue hurt of bones and organs getting unnaturally close. It’s gone within a blink. 

Sweat is drying on him now, a sticky and humid shell around his skin that makes the slowly gathering night outside feel almost cool. It’s a trick, he knows it. You can never trust sweat, it means too many things at once, it’s a pretty lie the body tells so you don’t believe you’re dying. He licks his lips and his tongue tastes salt. Tears or sweat, it all tastes the same. Another lie.

“You son of a bitch,” Marty spits out. “You fucking emotionless robot fuck,” he hisses at him, pointing a finger like an Old Testament God. “Fuck a woman, doesn’t give a fuck. Fuck a man, doesn’t give a fuck. Fuck me, no wonder your wife left you if you’re that big of a fucking…. Black hole of decency.” 

Rust puts down his cigarette, shoves it down into the ashtray in one smooth, hard motion. It’s getting out of hand. Marty’s ranting, and the things he’s saying… Claire’s staring at him in the corner with blood on her hands calling him a psychopath. How can you not care? Did you even love her? 

“They should lock you up, you know? Holes in the brain, shouldn’t get to go around with a gun. Shouldn’t get to go around with shit. Can’t act like a normal person for a fucking second, man.” 

He means it too, at this moment, Rust can tell. He means it, and he’s fucking right on every fucking count. 

“Marty, you should go,” he says with every bit of restraint he can pull out of his own scarred bone bag he calls a body. He might puke. He might bash his head in. There’s red and metal behind his tongue, blooming with every beat of his heart. “Before you say something you might regret.” 

“Right, cause none of this fucking touches you. Psychopathic fa–”

Rust’s on him before he can finish the sentence, grabbing his tie and pulling hard. Psycho. 

Marty chokes out some aborted noise of surprise and pain and tries to fight back but he’s stupidly drunk and Rust’s sober and hot and filled with so much fucking blood right now. It’s inside of him, bubbling and boiling, getting darker by the second. Next time Marty bites him, it’ll come out black and thick as tar. Marty can’t bite shit right now. 

He’s got his face slammed against the counter and his arm twisted behind his back and Rust’s full weight, with the years of training and knowing and skill, bearing down on him, hurting him. 

“Let GO of me, Rust!” Marty sputters, but it sounds scared, squeaking in Rust’s mind like a rat caught in a trap and it’s one of the most jubilatory feelings he's felt in a while. He’s not a violent man by nature. He just has an appreciation for violence.

Claire’s voice rings in his head. Psycho. Basket case. Why can’t you cry? Why can’t you be as sad as me? She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get the empty hole where his heart used to be, and how that’s taking in all the water. He has a waterfall inside, nothing can escape. 

“Listen to me very carefully now, Marty,” Rust hisses down into his ear, slow and threatening and with every part of him bubbling up with unshakeable anger. How fucking dare he call him that? Walking into his fucking house drunk and out of his mind because Rust dared to fuck someone else? “You’re gonna need to stop this shit.”

Marty bucks against him like a bronco, tries to shove him off but this time Rust isn’t moving. His whole weight is bearing down on him, his arm twisting Marty’s behind him so he can hear the menacing creak of the shoulder like music to his ears, like nails on a chalkboard equally. He can see Marty’s red face pressed into the white of the counter, can feel his body under his, a mass of muscle and fat and nerves and animalistic fear. He has one leg between Marty’s. A plume of smoke still rises from the ashtray.

“Don’t fucking believe for a single second that this?” He grinds his hips into Marty’s ass, slow and dirty and hard and the noise that escapes his partner is a shameful mix of emotions that bloom maroon into his mind and taste like sour candies. “Means you get a say in what the fuck I do with my life. I will let you bitch about my behavior at work but anything regarding the personal sphere is none of your fucking business.”

He wishes he could bite him now, sink his teeth into his neck and tear at the flesh with his own mouth but it would leave a mark. They can’t afford marks that cannot be covered by fabric. 

“I know this is your usual little…. Pathetic trumped up drama you do with the girls you fuck,” he continues and he does let his teeth graze the lobe of Marty’s right ear where he’s speaking, a threat and a promise. “I’m not one of your girls, Marty. You don’t own me. What happened off of Highway 10? I let happen cause I wanted a good time, and don’t you ever fucking forget that I let you fuck me.”

It’s the ‘let’ that makes Marty freeze in his tracks. Rust can almost hear his mind going, the gears shifting as he tries to make sense of what has just been said. Was he still deluded in thinking he made Rust do something he wasn’t entirely interested in? Had he still been living in the fantasy that the little exercise in domination was one Rust wasn’t entirely consenting to, that his folding had been coerced? 

Rust immediately lets go of him, the ugliness of that feeling burning under his hands. The ugliness and the ridiculousness. He takes a step back and watches Marty squirm his way back to being upright, raise his arms to cover his face, something wild and unbalanced in his eyes. 

He can’t help but drag his hands down against his undershirt, feel the sweat getting caught there and the feeling of Marty’s skin, hot and damp and desperate, hopefully letting it smear on the fabric. 

Marty stares at him, in utter disbelief. Even in the depths of Crash, Rust didn’t touch him like that. Oh, he wanted to, he wanted to to the point of getting hard at the very thought, but he didn’t. He had better things to do, Ginger to deal with, the memories and the cocaine to eat through.

Laughter bubbles out of Rust’s chest, tar-like, weighed down by cigarettes and the absolute ridicule of this, of them, watching each other like they’re about to pounce, two large predators stuck in one small room, except Rust’s not playing submission anymore and neither of them really knows what to do with that. 

So he laughs, laughs without smiling, with the jerks of it shaking his body, shaking his shoulders and the reminder of what Marty did that time, the healed scar that will never fucking go away. His laughter echoes in this white, empty room, bounces against the wall and comes back like a punch into their ears and he can’t stop himself, even as he sees Marty brace himself to be enraged again. 

“What’s funny?” Marty spits out but a lot of the bite is gone. He can’t recognize where they stand either. He just stands there, rumpled and a bit less drunk now that adrenaline has burnt through his veins with every rabbit-scared beat of his big beefy Southern heart. He’s getting hard in his pants too and there’s acid red victory in the back of Rust’s molars and in the depths of his guts. 

“You think…” Rust chuckles and shakes his head like it’s the best job he’s heard all year. It might be. “I was gonna fold for you?” The idea is sending zaps of hysterical joy through his confused brain and he can swear the smoke of the ashtray is shaped like a great big bird in flight. A vulture maybe, or Jesus Christ, or Superman, or Dora Lange. A Rorschach test, homemade and addict-approved.

“You… you came here. And you thought… What?” He continues, and he can feel his mouth pulling into a smile, or what would have been a smile on anyone but him. On him, it’s a clown’s forced rictus, it’s the pull of lip over fang, it’s ugly and vicious and cold as the tools a dentist shoves into your mouth and to replace everything where it’s supposed to be. It tastes like metal and bleach. “I was gonna be a good bitch and not say shit when you treat me like you got ownership papers?”

Marty’s eyes are saucer-wide. He’s never seen him smile, he realizes. He’s never seen him do more than a vague smirk and an eyebrow raise and that’s for the better because smiling feels wrong. His cheeks hurt with the ache of unused muscle. There is no happiness there. 

“Bitch,” he calls out, and Marty gets angry again, because that’s not a word you use on a man like him, no. “I didn’t fold for the fucking bike guys I was sucking off with a gun to the head for years, you think Imma fold for your over-inflated rat ego?”

He hasn’t said it to anyone before: not the shrinks, not the doctors, not his handlers. It’s not in any file, redacted or not, it’s not in the notes the shrinks took in Northshore, or in rehab, it’s nowhere but in his mind. And in Marty’s now. 

Regret hits him like a tsunami and he buckles underneath the weight of it, he can see it in Marty’s eyes, the widening, the realization of what it all means, the painful context he’s just imposed onto their relationship and onto what happened off of Highway 10. He wants to recall it immediately, to take it back, but he can’t.

A fly has been trapped since he came in, flying around the room in a frenzy to get out. He wonders, briefly and senselessly, if it knows the swamp of tension it just flew into and is now regretting ever heading in behind him. 

There’s too much Crash in him. The vocabulary and the admission, that’s Crash’s addled brain and his need to prove his toughness, it’s the anger at being thought of as weak. Rust’s not much better than him in that department but Crash is a mess of vulnerability sometimes: he was designed that way. That soft underbelly gets a bike guy like Ginger all hot and bothered, they can smell the bitch they can make out of him and that means an in. And once you have an in, you toughen up, learn to hide the soft behind armor, and show you can play as tough as everyone else, but the guy that got you in, like Ginger for Crash, knows the soft is there. It’s power and hierarchies and jungle law. 

Marty has no way of knowing all this shit. All he sees is Rust laughing like a maniac and throwing him a truth shaped like one of the bones that he must have imagined this whole time and buried deep with the rest of the queer shit he feels and sees in his dreams. A predator realizing his prey is rabid. 

“Jesus Christ, Rust.” 

Rust flinches. It’s a whole body thing, a pulse of electricity shot through him. The crucifix on the wall stares at them with unseeing undead eyes. It’s the same sort of ‘jesus christ’ that Marty says in front of a gored up body, in front of a godless crime, where he feels compelled to bring in his higher power of choice as back up. That’s how he’s reacting to Rust telling him he gave head at gunpoint. 

It’s an entirely appropriate reaction. Rust wants to wash his mouth of the taste of his pity; burned building and overripe cranberries. 

He’s on Marty like wildfire, sudden and unforeseen and he can taste whiskey now, a cheap one too, and beer as well, and cigarettes, terrible ones, not Camels. Marty smokes Camels because he steals them from Rust. The new smell on his clothes and taste in his mouth is disgusting. It’s still better than cranberries. 

Marty takes forever to kiss back, as if he doesn’t know what to do now that he’s not the one on the offensive, as if he wasn’t expecting this at all. He probably wasn’t. Two minutes ago, his cheek was hard against the counter and he was trying to get away from the wave of violence coming his way. Three minutes ago, he was shouting slurs at him. 

He grabs onto Marty’s head with both hands, a tight grip to keep him there but Marty’s not fighting him right now. He’s still reeling from the shock of it. Which shock? He’s not gonna ask, it’s not worth the taste. So he bites him. Hard, hard enough to bleed and there’s a beauty there, in the taste of iron and death that fills his mouth, a mirror to the beige-tiled memories. 

“The fuck!” Marty tries to exclaim, to project the word like a weapon but he’s got Rust’s lips against his and the offense dies there, muffled. 

There’s scratchy hair grown in uneven spots around Marty’s mouth, thin lips stained with the whiskey, the blood pearling over the torn skin, Rust half loses his mind over the textures of it all, the zings of electricity the whiskers send up into his brain with every brush. He’s not a great kisser, he’s been told, he uses too much teeth and is either too intense or too soft with it. He kisses like speaking a foreign tongue, mouth clumsy with positions it is not used to taking. 

Marty doesn’t get to complain. Like Rust didn’t get to complain about sitting in strange positions for a day or two. You can’t complain about things that don't happen. 

When he pulls back, Marty is staring at him with the blood on his lips and the liquor in his eyes and he seems utterly gobsmacked by it all. This is the sort of moment in time where Rust could step back and choose something else. His mind is clear after all, the pills have been out of his system for hours, he’s sober and as clean as he’ll let himself be, he’s just fresh from a run, he’s as close to the picture of fucking health that he can get. He can choose not to thread the needle deeper in. 

They’re partners. They’re coworkers. They’re men who cannot afford to be found out. Marty’s drunk and hard and angry, Rust knows exactly what to do with it. All that misplaced, desperate masculinity has a home, and he can fix it, for just a moment, he can take it into himself and eat it up, and use it to fuel his own dumpster fire body. Whatever that ends up doing to Marty, sending him into the sort of tailspin a man like him doesn’t recover from, that’s fine. That will keep him from staring too hard at Rust’s mouth and imagining things.

Rust is an addict. He’s always been, in some way, with an addictive personality and chasms where reserves of feelings should have been built by his parents. He drank early, smoked earlier, got hooked on adrenaline bow hunting caribou, then stealing bikes, then stealing books. He’s an addict. And Marty’s bright like cocaine, green like absinthe, hard and needy and alive and kicking like a bull in his hands right now. He’s gotta feed the habit. 

His hands drop from face to belt, start undoing it in frantic motions, but they’re steady. These are Rust’s hands, not Crash’s. This is Marty, this isn’t Ginger. It’s barely night, he’s home. He knows who he is, what today is, he knows who the president is. Clinton, September 15th ‘95, Rustin Spencer Cohle. 

Marty’s fingers are on his arm, tracing the edges of the old black bird with some kind of junkie’s fascination. From where Rust is, he can taste the questions on the other man’s tongue. When did you get this? Why? What does it mean? The truth is ugly and Rust will have to do much more than fuck Marty to get him to forget those answers, so he doesn’t leave him time to ask. 

He shoves his hand down the front of Marty’s pants and grabs his cock. Marty’s breath stutters and he makes a noise that only makes Rust tighten his grip. He watches pleasure and pain and everclear need bloom over Marty’s features, his head tilting back until he’s stuck against a wall and breathing out with the feelings of it. He can see it like a cloud exhaled from that open mouth. It’s incredibly vulnerable. Is this what the women get to see? Anyone but Maggie? 

There’s nothing like watching a man get high from his touch, even as small as this. Soon, with more touching, with more skin touching and sweat dripping, he’ll see the heart of him, chest splayed open, ripe for the taking. He cannot wait. 

“What are we doing?” Marty asks, breathless, needy, confused to his very core. Rust pulls out his hand for a second, just to spit on it, and pushes it back into the open fault of his slacks.

“I’m jerking you off,” Rust replies without missing a beat, and he sees Marty’s mouth open, sees the questions pressing there, the feelings he has about it, and decides to shut it down. “Stop talking.”

And though it bothers him, though Rust can see the anger rising into him like a dark cloud of storm over the prairie, he does shut the fuck up. There’s a second where all there is is the uncomfortable noise of almost dry skin rubbing together and a slightly labored breath. They’re so close now, there’s nowhere to look but Marty’s face, or the wall. And he’d stare at Marty for hours if he could, probably, if only it meant Marty wasn’t looking back at him more and more disturbed. 

So the wall works. It’s white and from here he can see the texture of the paint. He can feel his eyes darting towards Marty, pulled by some sort of magnetic field to the wet saliva on his open lips, to the half glazed eyes. He watches, from the corner of his eye, the expanding and contracting of the barrel of his chest, ragged and almost forced in between the little groans of pleasure. This is a position Rust’s familiar with, a hand down someone’s pants and the wall as horizon, as anchor. His head isn’t swimming in substances, but he feels a little unsteady all the same, deep down. Like his core ain’t working right anymore, something’s got shaken loose and he’s teetering at the edge of passing out. 

He leans closer, lets his weight rest against Marty’s shoulder, let his face tuck into the crook of his neck and mouths there, teeth grazing sweaty red skin, hand moving in lazy, dry motions. He can’t help but take it slow now. 

If they were other men, Rust might be on his knees right now, with his mouth full of the hot, heavy cock that Marty’s thrusting into his hand. But that’s not a position he’s willing to take today. Not with Marty. Not when sober. There are limits to how much he’ll debase himself with a man who can’t look him in the eyes when he’s giving him a handjob but doesn’t mind breaking into his house to berate him for fucking a random woman. 

For a moment there, it’s almost nice. It’s a little slow, a little sweet, Rust’s mouth is sucking marks in Marty’s skin that might threaten the fragile state of his marriage, but Marty says nothing, just moans, just bucks into his hand with primal, needy focus. 

It’s not what he wants. He cannot, under any circumstance, do sweet. And neither can Marty. He might not know it but sweet would shatter the thin veneer of straight masculinity he still coats over every interaction they have, the one so many men before him have used before, Rust shamelessly standing in that particular line up. He’ll admit to himself it would be harder to deal with Marty if he was the one that made him queer. It’s mostly for his own personal convenience that he goes through the roster of insults and taunts his mind readily provides. 

He doesn’t have to settle on one of those venomous, taunting spikes, Marty’s hand is on his, uncomfortable, firm, moist, holding his hand that’s holding his dick, nails digging in, hard. He’s maybe just realized this too; that he needs the harshness as the shield for his comfort, and there’s a relief there, Rust finds, in not having the responsibility of Marty’s sense of self rest entirely on his shoulders. 

The angle is worse suddenly, pulling at Rust’s shoulder unnaturally, but it’s easier psychologically. The motions of his hand are harsh, stunted, mechanical now, no longer sweet and languorous, no longer about pleasure. It’s power, again. It’s impersonal, like they’re not the men they are anymore, but still holding too hard onto their roles to let themselves do the exact things they’d like to do. Archetypal. 

Is it part of that pantomime when Marty shoves him back and Rust lets him, back towards the mattress on the ground and its white sheets, clean and fresh because he didn’t want to sleep in fucked-in sheets? Is it part of the play, the sharp sliver of a whine, an injury all the same, when Rust’s hand slips from Marty’s pants as he lets himself settle horizontally? 

He can read the spine of a book on his left, at the corner of his vision, ‘Sex Crimes’ written in obscene bright letters on black background, chemical, loud. It’s a title that screams at you, that demands fascination and horror, that tastes like bile from vomiting on an empty stomach, that feels like that too, eyes bulging, chest heaving, desperate to expel something unnatural and threatening.

Rust looks up at Marty towering over him, at the open pans and the ruffled shirt and the alcohol glaze over it all. He runs his tongue over his teeth, seeks out the sweet sweet taste of the pleasure, of the blood, of the whiskey. Marty stands there long enough for Rust to think of ancient Greeks and circular, traditional violence again, of heroin in his veins and Jameson in his mouth, of relief, of caramel. 

Marty hesitates but he can’t stop watching him, eyes like highway beams over him, staring at the sprawl of his form, the bulge in his sweatpants, the parting of his lips. He can’t look away and that terrifies him, that disgusts him, and Rust is about to pounce and pull him down himself when he finally moves. 

Whatever choice he made there, behind blue eyes where alcohol decreases and fear rises to take its place, that’s gonna come back to bite Rust in the ass one of these days, but he can’t bring himself to fucking care. Adrenaline, need, hunger thin out his blood and his heart is pumping hard, fast, down into his dick. He hasn’t felt this good in a while. He hasn’t felt this hot in a while either.

In this moment, in this choice posited behind normalcy and sin, he’s a succubi for Marty Hart, and there is a delicious irony to it. Marty Hart and his girlfriends and pieces of ass, standing at the door to Hell staring at a fully clothed but hard as rock carcass of a man. 

Marty takes off his clothes like he’s being processed at Avoyelles. Rust kicks off his trainers and the sweat-soaked, uncomfortable warmth of his sweats and there is relief at being naked. 

The bed is too narrow for the both of them, two grown men and the width of Marty, a problem Rust didn’t have with Suzie. Marty runs a hand up Rust’s leg, there’s almost a naive confusion to the way he feels him up, catching nails in hair, lean muscle where fat usually is. Rust doesn’t think he’ll ever be soft, age will dry him up, hollow him out, before it ever happens for him.

Rust lets him do it, touch and prod and grab what he wants. He reaches for lube and condoms by the pile of books to his right (next to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood), pops open the cap and slicks his fingers and there’s a look and a sigh of relief from Marty. Rust huffs, rolls his eyes, gets to work.

He’s fast and he’s thorough and doesn’t care for comfort as much as he should. There's a wince of pain, a sharp tang of acidity behind his teeth and he’s not even trying to make it part of the event for him. It has never really been about that. Foreplay is a luxury for women like Susan Cornell from church. 

The speed is to accommodate his own racing need, the heartbeat in his veins, the heat in his belly, the aching hardness of his cock, but it’s also to keep Marty from running away before they can both get something out of this, to keep him from achieving clarity of thought and running away like he probably should.

Three fingers in, tight, barely wet enough, electricity zinging up his spine with every shift of his hips, a spasm there but he’s almost done. Marty’s staring at his fingers with barely contained fascination, like he’s never fucked someone up the ass before, like he’s never fucked Rust up the ass before. 

Done, finally. Marty reaches for him when he finally finds himself ready, reaching for his hip and starting to pull at him, to get him into whatever position he seems to want him in. There’s another hand reaching for a pillow so Rust guesses he’d rather he be on his front, eyes looking away. Easier, more anonymous, less of a torturous memory, less shameful to put in his spank bank for later. 

Rust’s hand wraps around Marty’s wrist and tightens, hard, over the tendons on the sides, forcing him to let go of his grip. Marty’s cursing and calling out Jesus, telling him to let go but he doesn’t, not until he’s shoved him on his back, sprawled there in all his fucking glory. 

“What are you-”

Words die in his mouth. Rust sinks down on his cock with a hiss. Too hasty with the prep, but it’s fine, there will be no damage from this, just the blankness washing over his mind in the path of the hurt. 

Marty’s eyes are wide. Blue, like a summer sky. Red with lust, intense with pleasure and hunger. Church windows. Bells ringing. Rust can feel him inside, hard and thick and perfect, just fucking perfect. He’s wrenched control away and the truth is Marty’s in heaven right now from it, he doesn’t know what to do with himself, hands fluttering uselessly to the side. He wants to touch him, Rust can tell that much. He doesn’t know how to. 

Power. 

Rust starts moving. It’s a slow, heavy drag at first, in those first seconds where he gains his footing. His thighs start aching within seconds. He’s not ridden anyone in years, and definitely not on this mattress, in this apartment. His body’s not used to this anymore but muscle memory is a long lived creature, and there is nothing it known how to do better than fucking. 

“Ain’t gonna do all the work, Marty,” he warns when his thighs start complaining and somehow; that does it.

Marty’s hands snap to his hips to hold, fingers wrapped around the hard ridge of bone under the skin, hard, tight. It’s like he’s remembered he knows how to fuck someone like this, that he’s done this before. It’s so much better then onwards. 

Rust grinds his teeth and doesn’t say a fucking word, just moves, and takes and fucks himself on Marty’s dick and lets the crashing waves of feeling: pleasure, pain, sweat rolling down his back, nails digging in his hips, ache in his thighs, take him away. It’s so fucking easy, it comes naturally, like breathing air, like dancing to music, like running away.

He keeps his moans to himself, keeps his words behind lock and key, stares at the fucking ceiling now. He can’t see it, not really, he’s just chasing it, the pleasure running down the notches his spine, the heat that burns through him, and it’s not as good as heroin, it can never be, but for half a second, he pretends he’s not falling back into a habit. 

Marty’s hand sneaks from hip to stomach, to the three points of scar tissue on his chest. There’s a fascination under the groans, under the words he says that Rust is absolutely not listening to. He’s chasing something he’s not finding, desperate for the high of it, wishing they were against a wall, wishing for blood, for hurt, for electricity and leather. He misses Crash for half a second, Crash and the recklessness with which he fucked. Mindless, animal, painful. 

And then, and then. Marty’s hand wraps around his dick, tight, sudden, and Rust wasn’t looking where that second hand went, he wasn’t paying attention and he groans, high and surprised and ripped out of his throat with tooth and nail. Marty’s bitten the bullet, must have decided that if he was fucking him, he might as well fucking touch him too, right? He’s staring at his dick in his hand like he’s never seen a penis before and it’s hilarious, and sad at the same time.

Retaliation for taking him off guard. Rust shifts his weight back, leans a bit differently and suddenly the angle is just right and he feels pleasure, white hot and blinding, rushing through his bones, through his veins. He stops there for a second, grinds, slow and hard and dirty, muscles tightening around Marty. 

“Rust, goddamn it,” Marty hisses, choking with pleasure, grip around his dick not letting up, which is starting to hurt, which is perfect. 

Fuel, fire. Marty says his name like a curse, like something dirty and wrong and wretched. Rust bites his own lip until he tastes blood, hot, red, violent and metallic. A crowbar in the legs, a bullet ripped through his chest, broken bones, cocaine, a kiss from an ugly, dirty mouth, yellowed teeth and animalistic greed. 

Marty comes first. He barely has time to warn, barely has time to say a thing, he’s wrecked when Rust looks down at him finally from the haze of blood and pleasure. There’s sweat shining on him, redness everywhere, strain in the muscles of his chest, of his groin. He’s desperate. He needs an orgasm like a junkie needs a fix. Rust recognizes it. And he’s always been generous when it came to bringing people down with him.

Fingers tighten around him, stopping to jerk him off, grabbing at his hip to keep him down, keep him from moving away from long enough to fill the condom. He can feel the force there, feel how Marty wouldn’t stand him to wrench himself away so he doesn’t move, gives him at least that. 

The noise Marty makes when Rust starts moving again, squeezing around him to finish getting himself off: wrecked, small, wounded. That’s what makes him come. He wants to laugh with it, but all he does, once the white, blinding light is gone, once the rubber band has snapped, once pleasure has washed through him, cleansing fire, salt in wounds, all he does is smile. 

They’re panting. Both of them. Loud, bovine breathing in the silence. Rust lets himself get off that ride, lets himself fall, boneless, exhausted, high for a moment. He stretches himself out on the part of the mattress Marty isn’t occupying, watching from the corner of his eyes the rising and falling of Marty’s chest. His eyes are wide open, staring at the wall, at the crucifix. At Jesus Christ, lord and savior, and witness, sole witness of the blood pearling on Rust’s lips, of the splash of white semen on Marty’s stomach.

The laugh is wrenched from Rust’s chest without him having time to stop it. It’s maniacal, rusted, with those edges of contempt and pity. Pity for whom? Marty, who keeps straying further and further away from propriety, from normalcy, from sanity? Himself, who just fucked his partner, the one and only person who can stand to be in the same room as him for longer than five minutes, to satisfy the burning itch of addiction? 

Rust finds cigarettes and a lighter to his right, takes out two. His lip hurts, sharp and bright and tangy when it stretches as he puts one in his mouth. He lights it first, takes one long inhale of it. He holds it out to Marty, with his blood on it, and that’s unhygienic at best, dangerous at worst, and disgusting no matter what, but Marty – father of two, cowboy of Louisiana State – Hart takes it and starts smoking.

He lights the second and keeps it. His body is loose, relaxed for the first time in forever, sated. Pain and pleasure as self actualisation. 

He glances over at Marty, at the frown on his brow: deep in thought, hardness in his eyes, cogs turning in the background, so hard Rust can basically hear them. It’s even hotter than the blind pleasure and death of shame he just witnessed. 

“He ain’t gonna come to life cause you keep staring at him, you know? Jesus is dead.” 

Marty’s eyes dart to him, sharp and furious for a second and familiar. Rust’s teeth ache with it, with the knowledge he has of this look. He’s missed knowing people, he has to admit. He’s missed reading the shifts in body posture, the licking of lips, the popping of veins on foreheads, the darkening or lightening of eyes. Knowing Marty like this, even outside of the biblical nature of what they’ve just done, it’s good. 

“Don’t. Don’t bring this up right now.” 

It’s a warning, there’s a bite under it, and that’s surprising. Rust knows Marty’s as loose and tired as he is, probably even more with the alcohol he had before, and the anger burning energy. He still wants to fight him though. Doesn’t go soft and gentle on him. Good. Easier this way. Much more comfortable.

Silence falls again, just the sounds of cigarette smoke, the weight of it like swamp water in the room. Sweat cools, his lip stops bleeding. He doesn’t know how long time passes. 

“You should go. Maggie’s gonna wonder where you are.”

Marty moves. He shifts over, on his knees, cigarette in his mouth, hand landing on Rust’s throat and gripping. It’s violent and it’s sudden and there’s ash falling down barely an inch from his fucking face and the anger…. Oh the anger. Marty is glaring down at him but he’s not pressing down, he’s not hurting him. It’s a threat. It’s incredible.

“I just fucked you and you’re gonna say her fucking name? You’re a disturbed motherfucker.” 

Rust blinks at him, lazy, slow, unimpressed. They’ve just fucked, and he’s just come but this… It’s a treat. Ice cream after dessert. Indulgent. Minty. 

“World doesn’t stop turning just cause you came, Marty. Your stolen pleasures never actually belonged to anyone but you, it’s your time you’re using. No one else’s. You still got a wife.”

And oh, he hates it right now, he hates that Rust isn’t afraid and flinching away. That he’s got his hand on his throat and the weight of a former quarterback and current cop thrown over him, ready to crush, and he’s not fighting back. He keeps hoping Rust will forget he’s been threatened by scarier men before. He keeps hoping he’ll be the tougher one this time. 

“Get off of me, Marty,” Rust continues, calm. That Crash tire fire from earlier is gone, quieted down by an orgasm and a release. He’s taken control back and so the leather and the baseball bat and the barbed wire has been put away for a second. Get off of me, Marty, or I will break your arm getting you off myself. 

Marty doesn’t lean back. He leans forward. He kisses him.

Rust has to admit, this one was unexpected. This one doesn’t make sense in the framework he’s been working with, where Marty hates himself and is too much of a coward to touch a man in any way that isn’t violent. This one takes half of his breath away, coupled with the hand on his throat that finally does press in just a bit, it steals one terrible sound of yearning and pleasure from Rust. 

And the second that sound resounds around them, he’s pushing back. Puts his cigarette into the ashtray he could reach with his eyes gouged out, and grabs Marty’s hair. Blonde, and soft and sweaty from sex. He pulls hard, ugly, and Marty hisses in pain and bites his lip before he’s wrenched away.

Blood, and pain again. Rust pulls him away from him, tearing him off, and only lets go when he’s back on his knees too, no longer slow and lazy and warm. 

“Bitch,” Marty spits out, but it’s foreign to his mouth and he doesn’t mean it, not really. 

Rust reaches for the still burning cigarette and shoves it back into his mouth and winces, properly winces. He didn’t fucking miss him with those teeth. It’s gonna be worse this time than the last, he’s gonna have to explain the split. 

“I’m not your bitch, Marty,” he replies. “Never gonna be. I ain’t scared of you.” 

He watches it ripple over Marty’s face, the knowledge, the realization, curtains of delusion and denial parting. They’re afraid of him, the women he calls bitch, the women he gets jealous over. He uses his badge and his dick like weapons. Unfortunately for him, Rust also has both of those. 

Marty stumbles to his feet and Rust watches him put on his clothes again, using Rust’s discarded shirt to clean himself off of the fluids splashed over his stomach. Hiding away all the evidence. It’s not the triumphant relaxation of last time. It’s ugly and mean between them now. Unpleasant, and a little worrying.

Camaraderie might be gone forever now. Marty broke the treaty first, he attacked first, came into Rust’s house guns blazing but he’s never going to see it that way. He never does. He’s always betrayed, forever Abel, never throwing the first stone. 

He runs from Rust’s house, from the evidence of it. Rust lays back on his bed, lazy and tired. Deep down, somewhere, he’s hoping the fragile partnership they have hasn’t broken irreparably. It would be a shame. 

The eye was in the tomb and watching him. 

---------

*"The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain" is the last line from La Conscience/The Counsciousness by Victor Hugo, one of my favorite poems of all time.

Throughtout the whole poem, Cain attempts to run away from the eye of God that won't stop staring at him after he's killed Abel. He runs to other countries, his children build cities where people cannot enter without forsaking God, but nothing works. So he asks them to build him an underground chamber, a sepulchre where he will be alone. They do. He goes sit down in that dark chamber, they close the door and he stays alone in the dark. And in the darkness of the walls. The eye was in the tomb and was watching Cain.

[bluekat12345]

Smiling Critters vs Nightmare Critters

While I don't personally play the game, I like the watch other people on YouTube playing, and I also like seeing fanwork relating to the Smiling Critters. And with the release of the Nightmare Critters, one of the first things I thought that these were supposed to be counterparts to the Smiling Critters. I wanted to share my thoughts on which Nightmare Critter counters which Smiling Critter.

DogDay vs Simon Smoke

I made this choice because DogDay is the leader of the Smiling Critters, and Simon 'knows' he's cool and popular and knows how to almost win popularity contests, so I imagine he would be the self-appointed leader of the Nightmare Critters. But while DogDay is friendly, warm, and encouraging to his friends, Simon is an absolute jerk who always brags about his popularity and accomplishments, making it clear he's better than others.

CatNap vs Baba Chops

This was the toughest, but ultimately, I thought these two would be counterparts to each other. Because with CatNap gives introvert vibes, being quiet, calm, but still tries to be there for his friends, Baba prefers to be alone, far away from others, locked away in her house, and has to practically be forced to join her friends. (Plus, CatNap helps his friends sleep, and a classic way to fall asleep is by counting sheep...)

Bubba Bubbaphant vs Touille

I thought this appropriate because Bubba is the brains of the Smiling Critters while Touille might be kinda stupid. Bubb is attentive and tries to get all the facts and most likely has a wide range of knowledge and interests while Touille only talks about trash yet isn't exactly informative or helpful despite talking a lot.

Bobby BearHug vs Rabie Baby

Ultimately, I think these two would counterparts since Bobby is a caring soul who is loving and compassionate to her friends while Rabie seems like she has no respect for her friends since she doesn't respect privacy, loves gossiping and spreading rumors and lies, and isn't afraid to share other people's secrets, while Bobby would never dream of hurting her friends like that.

Picky Piggy vs Maggie Mako

I felt this was an obvious one since they are big eaters within their respective groups, but while Picky encourages a balanced diet and eating healthy, Maggie eats anything except vegetables and basically laughs at the idea of eating healthy.

Kickin Chicken vs Icky Licky

While Kickin is considered the cool kid of the Smiling Critters, Icky Licky gives the impression of someone who tries to act cool but fails. Kickin also doesn't give up and even if he doesn't succeed, he'll be cool and try again, Icky is a poor sport who always has an excuse for why he didn't succeed, and would most likely lose his cool and give up in anger.

CraftyCorn vs Poe

They both seem to be the most creative of their groups, since Crafty likes to draw and paint and Poe likes listening to music, but Crafty is on the lighter side of art while Poe would be on the darker side. While Crafty is colorful, sees the beauty in things and likes to share her art, even if she's shy, and uses art to make herself and others happy Poe is dark, angry and gloomy, prefers to hangout in graveyards alone, and hates brightness and sunlight, and he seems to see the negative in things.

Hoppy Hopscotch vs Allister Gator

This is another one that I felt is obvious since Hoppy is energetic and Allister is lazy, so they are natural opposites. She puts all her effort into whatever and is a team player, Allister doesn't like to put the effort in anything, would rather wait for good things to happen to him while letting others do the work for him.

This is just a personal opinion so do not consider this as canon. As I'm sure you noticed, not all the critters are exact opposites of each other, but I made this list based on which the Nightmare Critters could possibly be rivals/archenemies with which Smiling Critter, if the two groups ever met, each would have their own rival. Feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions!