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pinkanonwrites · 2 years ago

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@tadpoledancer made a throwaway post about someone writing Vash getting fingered until he cries, and somehow I’ve transformed that little thought bunny into 3,500 words of gratuitous Vash The Stampede smut. Also please keep in mind that there’s only three episodes of Trigun Stampede out so far, so even though this is Stampede!Vash it’s more of a hodge-podge between his ‘98 and ‘23 personalities as I know them to be.

Tadpole, and others, I hope you enjoy!

Read on AO3 here!

Stampede!Vash, G!N Reader but sharing a room with Meryl is mentioned, fingering, sub!Vash, dacryphilia, gratuitous use of the word “fuck” (if y’all notice anything else i should add to this top bit here lmk)

"Shh! Shh!"

"I'm not saying anything! You're the one giggling!"

"You're giggling too! Don't try and pin it all on me!" You hissed back, though it held no bite past your eager smile. The sun had set a few hours prior, desert air cooling just enough to no longer sting as you snuck down the motel hallway to Vash's room. Your socked feet slid silently along the old wooden floor as you crept past your companions' rooms to your target, the door cracked just enough to see Vash peering out waiting for you with a red flushed cheek and an eager eye shining behind his tinted lenses.

As you slipped through the gap and let the door slide quietly shut behind you, you found yourself bracketed in by Vash's arms. He stooped a bit to reach you more easily, cheeks rosy and eyes love-drunk as he hovered near you, bubbling with eager, nervous energy. Not that you didn't feel the exact same.

"Hi." He murmured.

"Hi." You responded. He squirmed a bit under your gaze, shifting from foot to foot. You leaned in to press a fluttering kiss to his cheek. Just a brush against his sun-kissed skin was enough to make him shiver, both flesh and metal hands resting on the sides of your shoulders, rubbing slowly up and down. He was beaming when you pulled away, red enough that you were surprised his glasses weren't fogging up.

This had been pretty routine for the two of you since joining up with Meryl, Roberto, and Wolfwood. Though you did your best to keep things low-key around the others, Nicholas had been the most vocal about pointing out Vash's favoritism for you. His teasing only served to make things more obvious to the others, and, well… You and Vash didn't want to give them any more ammunition to fluster the two of you than they already had.

Doubling up into hotel rooms was the best way to save some cash on the road, usually with you and Meryl in one, Roberto and Nick in another, and Vash in the third. But you always found yourself slipping out the door once Meryl dozed off, scampering and giggling down the hall to warm Vash's bed instead. And really, if you weren't keeping an eye out on your Humanoid Typhoon, who knows what could happen to him?

"Just one?" Vash nuzzled your cheek with his nose, letting out a delighted little hum when you gave another kiss on the cheek, then a third before meeting his lips.

"You look like you could fry an egg on your face right now. I don't need you overheating or anything."

He chuckled and leaned in for another kiss, lips brushing against yours as he spoke. "What can I say? Maybe you're worth frying for."

His lips were warm, ever so slightly chapped, and it wasn't long before they were parting to meet your sly tongue with his own. You tangled your fingers in his shower-damp hair as he pressed you up against the door, molding his body perfectly to yours. His hands slid down the length of your arms, down to cup each of your hips and hold you right up against him, leaving nowhere for you to go between his broad body and the door.

"Did you-mmh…" He struggled to keep his train of thought on track in between wet, lazy kisses. "Did you still wanna…?"

"Would I be here if I didn't?" You responded, pulling away both to let Vash continue to ramble and to pepper teasing kisses down the slope of his neck.

"I dunno, I just, hah… Wanted you to know you could change your mind if you want. I wouldn't-ohh…w-wouldn't mind."

You knew Vash could feel you smiling against his neck right before you trailed your teeth down the tight, corded muscle. "You ask me if I wanna finger-fuck you and you honestly think I'm gonna say no?"

He let out a quiet little eep! at your choice of words, tipping his head up and away so you couldn't see his wobbly, flustered expression. "I mean, you don't gotta say it just like that!" Lucky for you, trying to hide his face like that only served to give you more room to kiss and nibble on his sun-warmed skin. "Just letting you know you have the option, is all."

"Vash." You cooed against his neck, and you could swear you felt his length stiffen against you through his old, worn-out pajama pants when you did. "I just wanna make you feel good, that's all. If you're not sure we don't have to do anything, but I promise I'd tell you if I wasn't comfortable."

"Yeah?" He hummed. Finally he tipped his head back down to meet your gaze, and you could see it in his eyes. As far as he was willing to go to make sure you felt okay and comfortable, Vash really wanted this. He wanted it bad.

"Yes. Let me fuck you, baby boy. I'll make you feel so good."

He whimpered, and you knew you'd gotten him hooked. It was a clumsy backwards stumble to reach the bed, neither of you willing to part from the other for more than a breath. When the backs of Vash's knees hit the mattress edge he tumbled back, taking you with him in a clumsy heap and a painfully loud squeaking of old bedsprings that you probably should have been a bit more worried about than you actually were in the moment. You tugged at the bottom of his nightshirt as you straddled his hips, shoving it upwards to reveal more of his broad, scarred chest.

"Take it off." You mumbled, dipping your head to kiss around the edge of one of the deep pink wounds before he could reply. As he struggled to get the fabric around and over the shoulder joint of his prosthetic you lathed your tongue over the hypersensitive skin, smiling to yourself when you felt him shiver down to the tips of his toes.

"Th-That's cheating, you know? Getting me while I'm distracted?" He huffed. You just blew softly over the place you'd just licked and made him shiver a second time. "Maybe you're the real dangerous one around here, Mayfly."

Down the broad slope of his chest you continued to kiss, over faded slash marks and old bullet holes, lavishing each inch of him with the love and attention you knew he deserved, no matter how often he tried to rebuff it. You felt one of his hands cup the back of your head, fingers warm and rough in your hair so you immediately knew which one. At the waistband of his pants you peered up again through your eyelashes, over his heaving chest to his face where he had his lower lip worried between his teeth.

"Having fun?" You cooed. He bit out a short laugh and cracked a wobbly grin in response.

"Could be having more." He responded.

"Are you gonna keep being cheeky or are you gonna help me get your pants off first?"

"Little bit of both. Gotta keep things entertaining, after all.~" You both laughed as he lifted up his hips, letting you wrestle his sleep pants and underwear off in one fell swoop to be tossed somewhere on the floor to find later. This was an unfamiliar position for the two of you to be in, Vash naked with you still basically fully-clothed. He was always a giver, never wanting to take the pleasure you offered without offering it tenfold in return. But tonight you were the one in control, not Vash. So you cozied yourself right up between his legs and ran the pad of your thumb up his length, slow and steady, from the base all the way to the tip. His hips jumped in response, a short, stuttered thrust chasing the fleeting touch of your fingers even as you trailed them away and Vash let out a punched-out whine.

"You've still got lube, right?" You asked. It took a second for Vash to process, eyes lidded and expression trained on your hands, but once it sunk in he snapped back up to attention.

"Yeah! Little pocket of my bag, lemme just…" He rolled over onto his stomach to reach over the edge of the bed for his bag. As he strained outwards for the handle, unwilling to actually stand up and walk over to it, he presented you with an accidental view of his pert, toned backside. You slid both hands up the backs of his thighs to his ass and squeezed, digging your fingers into his firm cheeks. The scandalized little yelp you got in response made it absolutely worth it.

"Taking advantage of me when my guard is down, even! Who's the real dangerous outlaw around here?"

"Big talk from the guy who's about to get railed." You purred, stretching over Vash's body to pluck the mostly-full bottle of lube from his grasp. You spread him open with one thumb, the other popping the cap on the bottle with an audible click that sent a shiver down Vash's spine. "This is gonna be cold, m'kay?"

"'m ready. Hit me with your best shot!" His voice was partially muffled by the pillow, but there was a waver of unabashed desire behind the playful taunt. You tipped the bottle over and squeezed, letting a generous amount of lube dribble down Vash's ass and pool at his hole.

"Cold!" He yelped. You simply shushed him, rubbing your thumb back and forth over his slick, pink entrance.

"Shhh, don't worry baby. It's gonna feel real good, I promise."

You spent far too long simply teasing at the edges of pleasure, thumbs spreading Vash open and drawing slick trails of lube as you slowly worked him up. You massaged your fingertip over his entrance, rocking slowly back and forth and letting his body open up to you. Every time you got a stifled little sound of pleasure out of Vash you made sure to reward it with a praise of your own; knowing him he'd probably think his little sounds were annoying but you just couldn't get enough of them.

"You can-" He gasped, back arching and pressing towards you with the next swipe of your thumb over his twitching hole. "-Can try putting one in now. Please?"

"Of course, baby. Stay just like that for me, okay?"

You were almost surprised how quickly Vash's body yielded to you, your index finger sinking up to the second knuckle in his wet, pliant heat. You pulled back slow before pressing forward again, a gentle rhythmic rock that already had Vash keening. His cock was pushed down between his legs and pressed against the mattress, and on the next slow thrust you rubbed your wet thumb across the underside of his head. The response was instant, a muffled wail, a gush of pre-cum drizzling across the bedsheets, it damn near gave you a headrush yourself with how much it aroused you.

"Vash." You groaned, thrusting your finger forward and watching his entire body jolt again. "Fuck, you look so good. You should see yourself right now, baby. So fuckin' eager for me. You think you can do two?"

He nodded frantically, voice muffled by the pillow and garbled with pleasure but you were still able to make out something that sounded mostly like "Yes!" So you carefully pulled out, pressing your index and middle finger in this time, slow and steady. It was tighter this time, obviously, but Vash's walls gave away as you gently worked him open, his pink hole stretching around your fingers as you scissored them. You tried to crook your fingers down, towards his stomach. There was supposed to be a spot there, small, kind of spongy, if you could just get your fingers to curl the right way then…

"AAAH!?~"

Vash seemed as surprised by the noise he made as you were to hear it, clapping both hands over his mouth and wincing as his metal fingers clanged sharply against his teeth. The two of you fell perfectly still as your ears strained to hear if any of your room neighbors had awoken. From the opposite wall you could just barely make out Roberto's thunderous snoring, blissfully asleep and oblivious to you and Vash's night time activities.

"Holy shit, Vash."

"Sorry!" He hissed, the back of his neck and ears burning bright red. "I didn't know it was gonna feel like that!"

"No, no, it's okay! It was just… Fuck, that was really hot. You still good?"

He nodded, face still hidden mostly by the pillow. You crooked your fingers again to hit that same soft spot, and though the sound was much more muffled this time the effect it had on him was still obvious. He shuddered, a deep, desperate groan muffled into his pillow case as you thrust forward again, and again, grazing that soft spot half the time but hitting it dead on every other. Now that you'd found that spot, you didn't want to give it up so easily, especially with the noises it kept drilling out of Vash. The wet shlick of your fingers pounding his asshole joined the sound of each of your huffed breaths and his pleasured whimpers.

"You're so good for me, baby." You murmured, feeling woozy and delirious with power over how easily you were able to make the world's greatest gunman fall to his knees before you. Pleasure coiled low in your gut, hot and wanting, but you were more than willing to wait for it just for the chance to watch Vash fall apart. "So pretty, taking my fingers so well. I'd do this for you every night if you wanted it Vash, you sound so fucking wrecked."

You couldn't really hear him all that much anymore, but you could see the way his shoulders were shivering with each ragged breath and pulse of white-hot pleasure. You crooked both fingers hard, finding his prostate and pressing down, not letting up. His entire body quivered like he'd grabbed a live wire, and somewhere through the din of your own desire and his muffled noises you heard something concerning. A single soft, wet sniffle.

Immediately you pulled back, easing up on the pressure and watching his entire shivering body drop back into the mattress like he'd gone limp. His glasses had been pushed up into his bangs, his face fully hidden by the pillow. But without the continuous slick sound of your fingers you were able to hear another near-silent sniff.

"Vash, baby?" You carefully pulled your fingers out, resting your clean hand on the small of his back. "Are you okay?"

He nodded frantically in response, but otherwise stayed perfectly silent.

"Can you roll over for me?"

He jolted, falling perfectly still. You rubbed a slow, careful circle into his lower back with your palm.

"Please? I wanna see your face, Vash. For me?"

After a long, silent moment, Vash finally shifted, pulling his face away from where he'd hidden in the pillow and turning around to face you. He looked thoroughly fucked, face red with an indent of a fabric crease in his cheek where he'd pressed the pillow too close for too long. But he was also sniffling, snotty and wet as fresh, hot tears rolled over his cheeks. It made your heart clench, twisting painfully behind your ribcage as you reached up to cradle his face.

"Oh, baby. Baby. Hold on." You shifted up his body, straddling his waist so you could cradle his head to your chest. He let out an embarrassed little hum, but made no move to push you away. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"...It's embarrassing." He mumbled. "Didn't want you to see me all wrecked like this, it's seriously uncool."

"But I didn't hurt you?"

"Whuh-? No!" He jerked back, finally meeting your gaze with wide, red-rimmed eyes. He grabbed your wrists with each hand and held you close to him. "No, never you, Mayfly."

"So you're crying cause it feels good?"

He shifted anxiously at the question, gaze flitting around the dark room. "I, uh, I mean- Yeah? I kinda thought that was obvious, and you keep saying all that stuff that's like- like wow. Wow."

You didn't hurt him, not in the slightest. You'd brought him so much pleasure with your touch and your words that you were able to bring him to tears? That… That was…

"Vash, that's so fucking sexy."

"Bwuh?"

You shoved against his chest, pushing him back into the mattress as you shifted back down his hips. The low, pooling desire that had been purring in the pit of your belly erupted into a bonfire of pleasure as you situated yourself again, crooking two fingers into Vash's open hole while your other hand fisted his cock. He keened, hips jumping up into your grasp as his hands flew to cover his mouth.

"I wanna hear you. I wanna see you." You groaned, straddling one of Vash's legs so you could roll your hips down against his knee. It sent little white sparks of pleasure dancing up your spine and behind your eyelids, but they were nothing compared to the picture painted before you. "Lemme make you cry, baby boy. Let me see it."

"Oh, oh, oh fuck." He gasped, ragged and wet. Another wave of big, shimmery tears rolled over his cheeks, and he accidentally knocked his glasses all the way up and over the top of his head while trying to scrub them away. They clattered somewhere down in between the bedframe and the wall and you knew you'd have to get down on your hands and knees and feel around for them for him later but right now you just didn't care.

Now you had Vash, Vash the Stampede, the Humanoid Typhoon, whimpering and begging at your mercy.

Both his face and his cock were shimmery-wet and flushed red, punctured gasps and dribbles of pre-cum escaping with each harsh thrust of your fingers. You could feel his thigh strain and twitch desperately beneath your crotch, each jolt and shiver making your own pleasure burn all the hotter. Finally you could hear him, each ragged gasp, each wet sniffle and whine, each punched out, desperate wheeze of your name interspersed with little 'fuck!'s and 'please!'s and 'I love you!'s.

"Fff-uhhh, fuck please. Oh, oh, please if you don't let me cum I'm gonna break, please Mayfly!"

"Yes, yes Vash. Do it. Cum for me. That's my good boy!"

Twice, thrice more you thrust your fingers up hard against his prostate before his back arched off the bed and a shivering desperate groan escaped his lips as Vash unloaded himself all across his scar-marked chest. You slowed your hand but kept your fingers pressing, massaging, pulse after pulse of thick cum splattering up and across his chest as you wrung him dry. His hole twitched pathetically around your fingers as you worked, and you heard the sharp, metal creak of his lost-technology hand permanently denting a grip mark into the metal bed frame as he sobbed.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

Finally, when you'd wrung him dry and he had absolutely nothing left to give, you released his cock from your grip and let it fall to his tummy with a wet smack. Carefully you removed your fingers, trailing a final thumb over his red, stretched hole before turning your attention back to Vash's face. It was impossible to tell where tears ended and sweat began, his eyelashes clumped and shimmering and his bangs plastered to his damp forehead. He moaned softly as you scooted towards him, giving him another soft, fluttering kiss on the lips.

"You're gonna… You're gonna get a lot more than you bargained for if you kiss me now, Mayfly." He teased. "But that's your problem, snot mine."

"You're so gross." You hummed, all the love and affection you could fit into three words swimming in your tone. You snuggled yourself up next to him, cradling your head in his arms. "I'll get a washcloth in a minute, okay? Get you all cleaned up."

"Mmh, okay." He let his head thunk into the valley of your chest, eyes fluttering shut. "Gimme… gimme fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Then it's your turn."

"You are way too fucked out to do anything for me, Vash. Just rest, I'll be fine, I know you'll make it up to me."

He whined, kicking one foot like a petulant child. "Aww, c'mon! It doesn't have to be much. What about my fingers?"

You could feel him smile slyly against your chest as he continued.

"...My mouth?"

A pulse of heat made itself known once more between your legs, and you hummed softly.

"Let's see if you can stay awake that long, wonderboy."

"What happened to 'baby boy'?"

"I'll call you baby boy when you're being good. Do you wanna be good for me?"

Despite how wrung out he was you could feel Vash shiver against you and oh, oh, the two of you would certainly be exploring that dynamic more in the future, so long as you had anything to say about it.

"Mhmm…" He hummed, barely awake.

"Alright. Then let's get you cleaned up, baby boy."

#trigun #trigun stampede #vash #vash the stampede #vash the stampede x reader #vash x reader #trigun imagines #trigun x reader

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toooceanblue · 3 years ago

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#i want berries i have brie thats gonna go bad and i want it w berries but i cant go to the store bc my household is infected with covid 😭#i have also missed xmas shopping i needed to get done AND i am missing my best friends birthday 😭#like bro ik there are far worse things but like 🥺 this sucks #what sucks worse is im gonna have to isolate SO MUCH LONGER bc my parents have it so im having prolonged exposure #its not like i can just take a covid test 5-7 days after my exposure and see im negative and be in the clear #bc im CONTINUOUSLY BEING EXPOSED #garbage sucks i hate it boo :(#perhaps some berries would make it better BUT NOT EVEN THAT. I DONT EVEN GET A TREAT.#and work is soooo short staffed bc everyone there got sick I am NOT looking forward to how to address my next shift #got myself replaced these past few days for obvious reasons but i dont think i will be able to do that this week #UGh anyway.#just venting.#hey maybe ive rambled so much this wont show up on ios lol.

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halfway-happyyy · 3 years ago

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invisible string (rooster bradshaw)

AN: the one where rooster’s about to leave on a mission he doesn’t know if he’ll be back from, and he wants you in every way imaginable. as always, soft feelings ensue! under a cut because there is some 18+ sexual content!

pairing: rooster bradshaw x female reader

side note: rooster has been really fun to write for recently so thank you for all the love and feedback on my other two works 💙

“There’s an invisible string between the two of us,” Bradley Bradshaw confesses over a pint on the eve of mission day.

Struggling against the background hum of the Hard Deck you quirk an eyebrow in question. “I beg your pardon?”

He leans in closer to you; his coarse moustache hairs tickle the delicate shell of your ear, and make you shiver involuntarily. Taking your smaller hand in his, he traces a circle around your ring finger. “There is a string around this finger that connects to mine. You can’t see it, but wherever I go, you go with me.”

He has completely dumbfounded you, and so for lack of anything better to say, and also because you’re in serious danger of telling him just how much you love him you ask, “What color is this mysterious string?”

“Red,” He simply states- as if it were the obvious answer- and swills back the last of his beer.

His umber gaze smolders under the low light of the bar while he watches you; the beer he has just finished is a catalyst for the blush that colors the apples of his cheeks, and which threatens to spread even lower. A sudden, subtle shift in the atmosphere occurs; like moments before the sky rips opens and bleeds rainfall in torrential sheets.

“Rooster?”

He tilts his head to the side, a smirk pulls the corner of his lips skyward- and yeah, he knows.

“Yeah, babe?”

“Take me home.”

It comes out as more of a desperate plead than you were anticipating, and hot flames of embarrassment lick at your cheeks.

He senses the not-so-subtle urgency in your tone, and because he’s always had a rather difficult time saying no to you, he grins from ear to ear and says, “Sure thing, kid.”

The drive home is silent save for the static of the FM radio in the background, and when he rolls up in front of your house eleven minutes later, a breath of pent-up air rushes from your mouth in a soft sigh. Rooster exits the car and makes his way around to your side to open the door. Taking your hand, he leads you up to the front door where he struggles for a moment with the keys, and finally- you’re in the comfort of your front foyer. Kicking off his boots, he leads you by the hand to the bedroom down the hall. Once there, he doesn’t wait a moment before pushing you up against the wall and kissing you like it's his last time.

Because maybe it is.

When he pulls away from you, he’s breathless, his chest heaving from the sudden lack of oxygen. “You really are something else, you know that?”

Tugging impatiently at the hem of his cotton t shirt, you gaze up at him from under long lashes, a sly smile dances on your features. “Oh, shut up and take me to bed, Rooster.”

If he senses the desperation behind that sentence, he makes no mention of it. Instead, he gazes at you for a second before pressing his lips to yours again. It’s a languid kiss that carries with it an underlying frenzy; he wants this as bad as you do and when he pulls away, you are left breathless and utterly yearning for him. His taste on your tongue is so familiar- so intrinsically Rooster- that it causes tears to prick behind your eyes and when he pulls away to study you, his lips glisten with shared saliva. When you ask him what he's thinking of, he offers a half shrug. “This moment- with you, right now, makes everything worth it.”

The late nights. The suicide missions. The missed birthday parties and holidays. Time with you.

You kiss him now because you can’t bear the weight of those words yet- maybe not ever, and your need for him is entirely primal now. He wordlessly rids you of your sundress, pleased to see that your proper undergarments were somehow completely forgotten.

“That’s my girl,” He grins into the muddled air before you, pressing a chaste kiss to your temple. His warm, sure hands roam your body freely; they find purchase in your hair, moving to your neck, then further down to caress your breasts and- goddamit, if this is the last time, you resolve to commit every second of it to memory. No one has ever made you feel the way Rooster does, and you doubt anyone ever will again.

Bending his head down to suck a nipple into his mouth, he tugs and rubs at your free one with calloused fingertips. You arch into his touch, feeling the weight and friction of his clothed erection as he grinds up against you. Rooster sinks to his knees then, leaving scorching trails of open-mouthed kisses down the expanse of soft flesh between your chest and ribs, while you writhe in anticipation beneath him.

“Rooster…” A low moan claws its way from the hollow of your throat as you watch him hook your leg over his toned shoulder.

When he gazes up at you, his burnt-honey orbs twinkle mischievously in the waning evening light. His kisses are sloppy as they blaze over the velvet-softness of your inner thigh while you squirm with need beneath him. Paying particular and close attention to the ways in which you come apart for him are one of his many strong suits. You reckon he could draw a road map of your body from memory alone; where to kiss to make the prettiest sounds sing from you and where to touch to have you coming apart beneath him. He parts you with ease and without warning presses the tip of his nose to your clit, inhaling your scent. Shaking his head against you, the vibrations spark shockwaves of pleasure that stoke the fire roaring in your belly. He pulls away to lick a long, firm stripe up your slit with the flat of his tongue, greedily lapping at the moisture collected there. Your fingers find purchase in his hair as you give yourself over to the pleasure he's so graciously gifting you.

“Fuck, Rooster…”

Rooster's acknowledgement of your need for him arrives in the form of a muffled groan. He continues lapping at your folds with a pressure and speed that lights a match to the unravelling coil wound deep in your belly. Filthy noises and a seemingly endless array of choice curse words flow freely from you as he helps you near the edge. He pulls away from your all-encompassing heat to push two thick fingers into your soaked core and it's all you can do to keep from falling apart right then and there.

“Always so good for me…” Rooster marvels at you, his naturally husky voice ruined by sheer want. He knows you’re close; can feel it in how tightly wound you are, how hard you’re quivering against him. His head rests close enough to you that you can feel the warmth of his breath where it really matters and suddenly- thanks to the curl of his long, skilled fingers, you tumble head-first over the edge into an abyss of pure pleasure. Stars bloom in vivid fireworks behind the lids of your closed eyes while Rooster holds onto you like his life depends on it; like he's afraid if he lets go, he'll lose you forever.

“That's it sweet girl, give it all to me." He coos encouragingly while you tremble against him.

Rising from his position, the site of his chin glistening with your arousal is obscene and only helps to stoke the fire still burning in the pit of your belly for him.

“I don't know that I've ever wanted you more, sweetheart.” His tone is desperate, almost frustrated, and your gaze travels to the erection straining the crotch of his blue jeans.

“I am yours, Rooster.” You whisper.

And it’s true.

In every way imaginable, you are his.

He strips for you now; knows it’s one of your favourite things to watch, and how quickly it gets you ready for him again. Lifting the cotton t shirt up and over his body, he tosses it onto the pile of other discarded clothing. The sound of metal from his belt buckle as it hits the hardwood floor pierces the too-warm stillness as he shimmies the black briefs from his legs. His hard cock slaps up against his abdomen- a pearlescent string of pre-come hangs from the tip of his swollen head, and your breath hitches at the mere thought of lapping up the salty-sweet fluid there.

“You want a taste of it as badly as I want to be inside of you,” Rooster muses, his orbs blown almost fully black with desire.

You’re about to argue with him- even though he’s not wrong- until he gestures to the bed with a subtle nod of his head, and the words fizzle and fade in your throat.

Bodies slick with sheens of perspiration, you continue to shiver violently beneath him as he inches up the bed to drop his head into the crook of space between your neck and shoulder blade. His kisses lack the fiery intensity from before but are instead tender and lingering, and the notion of it makes you dizzy with hunger for him. He pulls away to straddle your thighs, taking his cock into his fist and stroking it, languidly. You watch him with a hooded gaze, the very image of him exactly like this, will be etched into your memory for all of eternity. A bead of sweat rolls down the side of his face, his normally pale cheeks burn pink with mounting pleasure, and you watch in awe as his head tips back, a pair of pink, full lips part in toe-curling bliss.

And fuck, he’s never looked more beautiful.

He’s working himself up well; another bead of pre-cum glistens tantalizingly at the head of his cock and you swallow hard, the urge to taste it still just as overpowering as before.

“Fuck,” He whines, halting his movements entirely. “Want to be inside of you so bad…” He lowers himself back to you, lining the head of his cock at the center of your wet, hot core. He teases you at first; rubs himself against your slick wetness, and just when you’re about to protest, he sinks himself into you.

“Oh,” You gasp; breathless from the sheer size of him.

Being filled by Rooster is one of those things you know you’ll never forget. It’s impossibly warm and so tight it’s almost painful- but it's also easily the most satisfied you’ve ever been. He goes slowly at first- he's careful to make sure you can feel every inch of him as he stretches you fully. His head drops to your collarbone, and a long sigh emanates his parted lips. “Fuck, you feel so goddamn good.”

His hips slam home again, causing you to spasm around him at the dizzying sensation of it all. His lips have found that achingly delicate part of your neck again, where they lick and suck and nibble and leave miniscule bruises in their wake.

Mementos.

He ruts into you shamelessly now; the aching push and pull of his cock inside of you has you both breathing heavily, ready, and awaiting the nearing end. Resting on the support of his elbows, his large, warm hands move to cradle your head, and he kisses your temple tenderly. He's close now; steadied movements fall in and out of rhythm, his cock throbbing and pulsing inside of you with each powerful thrust. You arch into him, bettering the angle at which he’s driving into you, and purposely rake your fingernails across the firm flesh of his back. He groans loudly at this particular sensation- his relationship with pain has always been complicated. Tilting his head back, his eyes close and his mouth falls slack with mounting pleasure.

“Tell me sweetheart,” He hisses so low you almost miss it over the sound of him fucking you into literal oblivion.

Dragging a sharp fingernail down the front of his toned chest, you gaze up at him. “Come for me, Rooster.”

His brows furrow, and his beautiful mouth twists up into a tight O. Tossing his head back in ecstasy, he stills his hips against yours and fills you to the brim with his hot release. You'll never be over the feeling of being truly full with him. Utterly spent and still riding the high of post-orgasm haze, his forehead drops to the crook of your neck where he allows himself a moment of respite before slipping from the heat of your core and rolling onto the space of bed beside you. It’s mostly silent in the room while you try to regulate your breathing; the only other noise is the slight pitter-patter of drizzle on glass window panes, and the odd F/A-18 overhead. Rooster turns on his side and gestures for you to turn over too so that he can curl up around you and you oblige him, happily.

After a couple minutes of comfortable silence, you excuse yourself to use the washroom. “When I get back, I want to hear more about this invisible string.”

And Rooster only chuckles lightly before complying. “I’ll be right here, kid.”

He’s lightyears away from you when you return, a pair of large hands steeple together atop of his chest, like he’s deep in thought about something. He’s not gone yet but the mission’s on his mind. How could it not be?

“You alright?” You ask, tentatively.

Rooster meets your gaze and hesitates before shrugging. “For the first time in a really long time, it feels like I have something to lose.”

Crawling back into bed, you take his hand into yours and press your lips to his temple. “You’re going to be back.”

But maybe he won’t.

He leans toward you and kisses your forehead gently. “Lay down, kid. Let me rub your back.”

You do as your told.

“So the string theory goes like this,” He whispers. “Two people connected by the red string are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances.” He pauses to kiss your bare shoulder. "Wherever I go, you go with me."

“That’s how you feel about me?” You swallow hard, emotion thick in the hollow of your throat.

Rooster nods against you. “It’s how I’ve felt about you since the first day, sweetheart.”

When you know, you know.

You waken a couple of hours later to the realization that Rooster is already gone- his side of the bed vacant and cool to the touch. Your throat constricts at the possibility of never setting sights on him again, when something on your hand catches your eye.

He had managed to tie a crimson string to your left ring finger while you slept. A note on his pillow reads,

To my invisible string-

Whatever happens today, I’ve loved you in this life, and I’ll love you in the next.

Hope to see you soon,

Bradley

#bradley bradshaw #bradley bradshaw x reader #rooster bradshaw #rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster x reader #top gun: maverick #rooster bradshaw imagines #bradley bradshaw imagines #writing #smut #invisible string #all the feels

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buckyarchives · 2 years ago

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Metal Arms and Short Skirts | Bucky Barnes [2.]

summary: waltzing in as the new head of the Avenger's medical division, impressing everyone, and... scaring Bucky with your incredibly short skirts. while bucky's having a hard time looking at his arm as anything other than a deadly weapon, you're more than happy to help him.

words: 4.3K

warnings; creepy men (+bucky fending them off) slight body dysphoria on buckys end

author note : HI I KNOW THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE UP LIKE & DAYS AGO... aib came out and ive been hyperfixaed on that and my brother got frostbite so wump wump was at the hospital on chrimis. i have mixed feelings on this chapter, but i hope you enjoy. and im still taking request.

READ ON AO3 | masterlist

Bucky wasn't going to pretend to be completely oblivious and say he wasn't finding every and any excuse to visit you. Whether it be a tear in his muscle or the sound of the metal whizzing sounding off, something bucky would have ignored with absolutely no thought. Bucky maintained a comfortable distance between you two, physically and emotionally, staying at arm's length. But something about today seemed to be different.

Bucky shifted nervously in his seat, he watched your stride around your lab. You finally got your own area after 2 weeks of staying at the compound. It almost put Tony's lab to shame, it was huge and decked out with technology far too advanced for bucky to even understand.

Today, You wore a black bustier that seemed to shape your form, thick and sturdy paneling sewn into the shirt, if that is what you can even call it. The neck hung low, low enough to leave very little to the imagination. Bucky practically had to tear his eyes away from your neckline when he first walked into the lab.

Bucky's excuse today was a deep cut on the side of Bucky's flesh bicep. Coming back from a quick and easy mission, but Clint needed to watch his arrows since one slit past bucky’s arm on the way to the actual enemy behind him. Bucky had a sneaky guess it was on purpose.

You gathered the plaster and made your way back to bucky, footsteps echoing as you walked. A sigh escaped your lips, but bucky only caught a small smile. “You know, bucky. You can't come in here every time you have a small cut.”

“Isn't that what you're being paid for?” bucky snarked back, watching your hands as they gently grabbed at his lower arm. Your touch was always so delicate, like you were going to break him rather than heal.

“Ha, ha.” you mocked. “I could have been making some ground-breaking discovery or invention before you walked in.”

Bucky's eyebrow quirked up eagerly. “Were you?”

A closed-mouthed hum escaped your lips. Your all too perfect pedicured hand wrapped the white bandage around bucky's arm, he was just watching your face as you worked. Couldn’t– wouldn't tear his eyes away.

“Not really, just researching some stuff about scarring and skin stuff,” you spoke, dumbing it down for bucky.

During bucky's visit, he’d always ask about everything, trying to catch up with the technology of the 21st century, or maybe just to hear your voice. He didn't understand half the things you spoke about, though he never mentioned it, but you figured it out soon enough and started to simplify it the best you could.

“Scarring?”

“Helen has some idea about how to better rid of scars.” your hand smoothed against his bicep as you finished, and your touch sent a good burn through him. Giving him a warm smile like you always did when you finished.

Bucky's eyes glanced down to his left shoulder for a moment, the ugly scarring that single-handedly destroyed most of his bodily confidence. The permanent mark of what Hydra did to him as they chopped it off and made him part machine. Bucky scoffed to cover up the obvious self-depreciation in his voice, “need a test subject?”

You flinched at his words, surprised, being taken aback by his response. Only then when you looked him up and down, settling on his clothes shoulder, your face fell and a sympathetic look flashed. It was covered by his tanktop but you knew what was under there, you'd seen the photos, you'd seen him.

You sat back down on your little rolly stool. “I'm surprised you’d suggest that, based on your history, I'd expect you to not be so keen on being poked and prodded.”

Memories flashed Hydra's methods at tearing his humanity, mind, and body apart, all those experiments. But they quickly subdued, how could bucky think of something so cruel when you stat right in front of him, which in bucky's opinion, is perfection.

“I think I'd be okay with it if it was you.” bucky said quietly, honestly– a confession even.

A fond smile rose to your face, one you quickly bit back. Narrow eyes met him when you tilted your head slightly, shying away. “Good to know you trust me.”

“Always.”

“But–” you sighed, “I'm going to have to decline, Bucky. For now, you'll have to live with what your shoulder looks like. Sorry.”

Bucky dramatically groaned, trying to mask the obvious pain and disappointment he actually felt. “You're killing me, doll.”

Your ears warmed at the nickname. Averting your eyes for a moment from shyness. You knew bucky despised the scarring that painted his left shoulder, the one that connected the man to metal. You could only lend him some comfort in the situation, no amount of medical technology right now could completely ease his worries.

“Bucky?”

His head perked up, a hum escaped his lips as he put all his attention on you.

“You wanna see something really cool?” you smirked.

Bucky noticed the slight smirk tugging at your lips, he could only react by biting back a smile of his own. “Sure, doll.”

You leaned down to the hem of your right pant leg, slowly hiking up the baggy jeans that hung low on your waist. Slowly revealing a large and messy scar on your kneecap, nothing as bad as bucky's many scars that littered his body. But something definitely bad happened for you to have that, even fully healed now.

“When I was a kid, I used to skate a lot.” you started, bucky's eyes bouched back up to your face. “I got on a gravel road and fell down and my knee landed right on a huge sharp rock and just logged itself right into my knee.”

You laughed looking back on the memory. “Hurt like hell for 14-year-old me and I had to get so many stitched, it was the worst.” a cheeky smile grew as you spoke through a laugh. “Especially for my dream of becoming a knee model.”

Bucky laughed with you as you dropped your pant leg, sitting back up to look at bucky. Bucky didn't say anything and hung his head low when a silence grew in the lab, only the sound of lab tech whizzing in the background. Bucky mostly just wanted to bask at this moment with you, letting himself enjoy the light-hearted nature of your conversations. The way you and he feel warm inside, lighter than ever.

You smacked your lips as you rose from your seat. Bucky's eyes begrudgingly followed you, “you have to learn to love every part of yourself, despite the bad memories. Because it makes you…”

Stopping in your place, turning to him as your eyes traveled up and down his body, the gesture weirdly didn’t make bucky cringe and crawl into himself the way most gazes did.

“... you.” you smiled again and bucky felt dizzy. “And I think you're pretty cool.”

You turned away to continue whatever you were doing. Bucky muttered your statement under his breath, loud enough for him to hear it again but quiet enough so you wouldn't.

Bucky rose from his place on the workbench, after many visits he practically claimed this spot. As it sat right in the middle of your lab. Despite everything inside of him wanting to stay near you and soak up your presence. He headed for the door.

“Thanks, doc,” Bucky called out.

“Anytime, bucky. I'll be here when you come in with another excuse to see me,” you spoke coyly. Bucky's eyes widened and warmth crept up to his face.

He sputters for words to save his pride, stumbling over his poor excuse of an explanation. “Maybe I just wanna see your cool outfits.” bucky's face scrunched up, cringing at his own pathetic words. He wondered what the 40s version of himself would say now, probably something sly and confident that’d knock you off your feet.

“Whatever you say, Mr. Barnes.”

“Bucky.” he corrected, again. But maybe it was just an excuse to linger longer at your door.

You smiled at him and repeated, “bucky.”

“You're going on a date with her.”

Bucky's eyes widened, his head snapping towards Natasha. “I’m what?”

A frustrated groan leaves Natasha's lips as she shifts in her uncomfy office seat. Half of the Avengers team sat in an office going over a mission coming up, but - like most things - it turned into them talking about anything but that, and successfully annoying the hell out of Steve.

“I set you up on a date with her.” Natasha spoke, referring to you. “I cannot keep watching you get beat up during missions just so you can see her, so you're going on a date.”

Bucky was dumbfounded, to say the least, lost for words as he stared at the woman in front of him. “Why would I go on a date with her?”

Over the past week or two, Bucky began to deny his fondness towards you when you interrupted a meeting to talk to Tony, or popped into the common rooms to talk about new tech, or how you practically strutted through the compound like you own the place.

or when you slowly build up bucky’s confidence without either or you realizing it.

Always in short skirts, or colorful and dramatic tops, and in heels or boots that echo loudly throughout the halls. Bucky denies the way his eyes drag along your figure, always lingering on your face longer than he needs to, the way if you look close enough, Bucky's eyes light up a little when you enter the room. Bucky denies it, but he can't fake it.

And Natasha clocked that quickly.

“the way you look at her tells me you want to,” Natasha spoke coyly. She always read bucky better than anyone else in the room— similar background and all. a defeated groan comes from bucky in return, followed by a slightly pouted lip. Natasha gives him a friendly slap on the shoulder

A scoff was heard from the other side of the table. “Is the cyborg cable of feelings?” Tony snarked, his head down looking at a sheet of paper. Chewing slightly at a pen.

“Ha. ha. Very funny.” Bucky mocked. “How do you even know she wants to go on a date with me? I can’t imagine she agreed to this?”

self-consciousness slowly crept up bucky's spine, he can’t face rejection if he denies, denies, and denies.

Natasha went to speak but Tony Stark does what he does best and interrupts her. With a hefty laugh coming up from his chest, he dropped the pen and papers down on the table. Leaning forward to face bucky. “Are you kidding me? You’re like a wet dream to her, always injured and part robot. Hits all of her boxes''

“I'm surprised she hasn’t mounted yo-”

“Okay Tony, I think that's enough talking.” Steve interrupted before he could finish his sentence. Tony’s comment earned a choked laugh from both Natasha and Sam.

“Anyways.” Natasha continued. “I know because she already agreed to it. Everything is already set up.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, hoping his hair covers his growing red ears. Steve spoke up, “Just give it a chance buck. You might enjoy it.” oh steve, hopeful as ever.

“I’m sure you'll enjoy it, it’s very much your style,” Natasha spoke, her infamous smirk growing on her face.

“That scares me.”

*****

Turns out Natasha was right, it is very much Bucky's style. Natasha had planned (with the help of Steve, because of-fucking-course) a date at a fancy, old-style diner, and every Saturday night they clear the floor and play some old music for some swing dancing. Just bucky’s style, he knows this was Steve’s idea. more than sure after years of watching plenty of girls swoon over Bucky with just one twirl and one short dance, Steve would think this is right up his alley. And it was.

Now Bucky stands outside a busy and bustling diner, upbeat 40s music echoing to the streets. Flowers in hand and a nice black collared shirt under a vintage jacket (it was from the museum and Steve name-dropped at least 12 times to get it back), waiting patiently for you to arrive. Bucky fiddled with his hands a little, his eyes kept darting to his watch— is he too early? When are you arriving? Bucky’s now convinced you wouldn’t show up. Because who would honestly want to go on a date with h–

“James!” a cheery voice broke through his very self-deprecating thoughts. Bucky turned around and swore his heart stopped beating, just for it to speed up even faster when his sights landed on you.

You wore the same boots that caught Wanda's eyes in the common room that quiet day. His eyes followed up your legs, past your thighs as he saw the dress you wore. It was stripped and sparkly, bucky would see the shine from down the street. It felt like you wore the entire rainbow and more as every stripe was painted differently. It was sleeveless and high-necked. And of course, very short.

An excited smile greeted him as you waved your hand. Your pace sped up as Bucky met you, he wondered how you didn't trip in those high heels constantly.

“Hi,” Bucky said, wanting to hit himself for how awkward he sounded.

“Sorry for being late, I didn't mean to make you wait.” you stood before him, and he noticed your makeup. You painted your lips with a darker shade than usual and you had little shiny gems glued around your eyes.

“Don’t worry about it, I just got here too,” Bucky spoke softly, bringing the flowers up to you. “For you.”

Your eyes instantly lit up at the sight, taking the bouquet from him “thank you! you didn't need to get these for me, James.”

Bucky's heart fluttered slightly at the name, it was rare for people to use his first name nowadays. You brought the flowers to your nose, smelling them with a blissful look on your face. Laughing to yourself.

“What's so funny?” the super-soldier asked.

“Oh no, it’s nothing.” you looked back down at the flower. “I don’t think anyone has ever gotten me flowers before.”

Bucky’s eyebrows furrowed, “really?”

“Mhmm.” you rocked back and forth on your heels, “thank you for being the first.”

You smiled warmly up at Bucky as you did so often, but the aura of everything made it so much more this time.

“Let's head in?” Bucky cocked his head towards the diner.

Nodding, “yes, please.” you threaded along, catching Bucky off guard when you swiftly grabbed ahold of his hand. Your fingers wrapped around his flesh hand, the warmth made Bucky feel funny in his stomach. Yeah, Bucky might have a crush on you.

You lead him into the diner, confident in your walk like usual. Your eyes spotted an empty seat and the both of you settled yourselves in a booth. You make quick eye contact and Bucky's mouth gaped like he's going to say something but is stopped when the waiter comes up. The waiter looks like she blends in with the scenery, with pinned-up hair and a bright red lip. She asks for your order and you both get water, and a milkshake.

“I can imagine why Natasha picked this place out of everything,” you say, eyes off into the distance, Bucky follows your gaze and sees the dance floor of people together with large smiles. “Though, I don't know how to dance.”

Bucky's lip quirks up slightly, “I can teach you.”

“Perfect, let’s go then.” your smile widely, and your already getting up, standing next to bucky's seat and holding a hand out. Bucky’s surprised by your sudden willingness but despite the nervousness in his stomach - he takes your hand.

Bucky may have been nervous standing outside the diner. May have been nervous as he greeted and met you outside. May have been nervous as you led him inside and watched you from across the table. But once he stepped out onto the swing floor, the soft sound of 40s music playing in the background. The sweet-talking James Buchanan – that seemed to flirt with every girl that met him – came back from the dead, and he had his arm around your waist in no time.

You noticed the sudden confidence and glint in his eyes suddenly, reaching up to grab his neck. Bucky held you at your waist, then he noticed the gold chain hung around your hips. His fingers grazed over them for a moment before they rested at the smallest part of your waist.

Your wide eyes met his and bucky swore for a moment, he couldn't breathe. “How was the mission?”

A groan escaped Bucky's mouth, playfully he rolled his eyes. Trying to sound annoyed, but his smile said otherwise. “Oh god, I don't wanna talk about work.”

Bucky’s hands stayed planted on your waist. You smiled as you continued to sway together along to the soft jazz in the background. You tugged nervously at your lip, “you know, I was getting worried when I heard you guys weren’t getting back on time.”

“You worry about me?” Bucky was stunned, an unfamiliar warmth shot through him as you averted your gaze. He took one hand to pull at your chin, so you were looking at him. Your mouth gaped open for a moment and your brain studdered before you just shrugged in response, a slight nod.

The familiar sound of the music speeding up, the upbeat sound of Harry James filled Bucky’s ears and for a moment Bucky was in the 40s again with a girl in his arms ready to be shipped out to war. A sentimental smile grew on his face.

“You ready to learn how to dance.” Bucky beamed down at you and before you could even respond, Bucky pushed your body away from him abruptly. Just to grab your hand before you could fall, twirling you around and back close to his chest.

It all happened so fast and you yelped once your back hit his chest. His arm wrapped across your body and held your hand. You breathed and smiled widely. “I might step on your toes.

“I can handle it, doll.”

******

A few songs later and a couple of toes crushed, followed by a slew of apologies from you. You and Bucky ended up breathing heavily and slightly sweaty from dancing. Bucky swung you around like you weighed nothing - which to him - you probably did. Lots of music ranging from the 40s to 60s played throughout the diner, to which Bucky snarks at the fact he didn’t recognize the songs, always followed by light laughter.

The dancing came to a slow, but you two remained on the floor still. It was getting late and you hadn’t even eaten yet and most couples and groups of friends had gone back to their seats. You swayed comfortably in Bucky's arms still, your head laid on his chest listening to the soft beat of his heartbeat.

Bucky Barnes is a more than qualified trained assassin with heightened senses. He's very aware of his surroundings at all times, so when he notices the man peering at your thighs and ass, his eyes narrow toward the man. A glimpse of the winter soldier showed, but the creep didn't seem to pay any attention to Bucky's gaze.

Every so politely, Bucky attempted to tug at your dress without it seeming like he was trying to grope you. Also, swiftly and smoothly twirling you around so the man's gaze would be fixed on bucky's broad shoulders. Effectively protecting you from perverted stares as his body towards over you.

You noticed the way Bucky's body stiffened when he spun you, looking up at him once again. “You okay?”

Bucky nodded and gave you a reassuring squeeze around your waist. “Let’s head back? I'm hungry.”

You agreed quickly and grabbed Bucky's hand, pulling him off the dance floor and guiding him back to the table where your two drinks sat warm now. You slid into the booth with a large exhale, sitting across from Bucky. The waiter decked out in 40s apparel and took your orders, your food coming in no time. It was a poor excuse for dinner per se, only ordering fries and cheese curds to simply snack on.

“You make a good dance partner.” Bucky mutters, mouth muffled with fries.

“Chew.”

Buckys recoils in embarrassment and covers his mouth, face tinted red from dancing. He swallows and lowers his hand. “sorry.”

“Thank you.” you sigh, pushing your food away from you. “You did most of the work, but I'd like to keep practicing.”

Bucky stopped, and looked at you as you stared intently into him. Bucky flustered mix.

“Are you gonna keep blushing or accept my offer on a second date.” you shoot back and Bucky feels the air leave his lungs. His ears are definitely burning red.

“I'm not bushing? What are you talking about? This is me worn out from all the dancing.`` Bucky plays dumb, throwing a fry into the basket between the two of you. Slowly pulling out his billfold from his jeans.

Your eyes roll dramatically, as a scoff escapes your lips. “Yeah, okay. Super soldier.”

Bucky narrows his eye’s toward you, a grin plastered on his face. “I'd love to go on a second date.”

You bite back a grin. “Ready?” you asked, bucky puts down the money to pay and nodded. Bucky gives you a boyish smile that you'd only recognized from old war photos. It warms you to the core, leaving you flustered. He grabs at your hand as you let him drag you out of the diner, a secure arm around your waist.

The light breeze of new york hit both of you, your hands instantly going up to your arms to warm yourself. Bucky notices all too quickly and instantly wraps his jacket around you.

“Oh, thank you. Are you cold?” you ask, seemingly genuinely worried.

“Doll.” he stares down at you, and bucky speaks like the answer is obvious, which– it kinda is. “I hiked through Siberia in less.”

“Whatever.” you scoff and roll your eyes, tugging the jacket closer around your body. the corners of your mouth slowly creeping up.

The faint scent of bucky comes off of it, sandalwood and pine mostly. You're used to the smell when he's not coming into your lab sweaty or bloody from missions and workouts. A comfortable silence falls between the two of you, filtered out by the busy city around you.

“So… I’ll see you tomorrow?” you speak awkwardly, unsure of where to go from here.

“Yep, tomorrow.” Bucky strings on the word, are also awkward.

You could cut the tension with a knife.

“Or…” your voice raises a few octaves as you turn on your heels to face him, barely a foot between the two of you.

Bucky's eyebrow quirks up, “Or?”

“Or you could come back to my very, very nice and cozy apartment that isn't full of agents and superhumans.”

You flashed your best and greatest grin toward Bucky, and the way you were looking at him made Bucky want to crumble beneath his knees. You shouldn't have this effect on him, his heart tugged towards you in a weird, mysterious way that Bucky wasn't familiar with yet. He wasn't going to lie and say it didn’t stress him out a tiny bit.

Bucky let out a heavy, pained exhale and stepped a little closer to you. “Not tonight, doll. sorry.”

“It's okay.” your face dropped slightly, but then you looked up at him and a flash of something came across your feature and soon a smirk was replaced. “Then let me have this.”

“What–?”

Bucky was cut off by your warm hands cupping his face and lips as he received the most gentle kiss he's ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Initial shock ran through his body at the suddenness, and just as he accepted the feeling and went to melt into the kiss— you pulled away. Bucky felt so cold without you against him, he hated feeling cold.

“Wait, no.” he eagerly grabbed your face to pull you back in. Bucky didn't care if he sounded needy, because he did need this. noticing a glimpse of your more than satisfied grin before he shut his eyes and let himself feel your touch.

It was like you were meant for bucky, the perfect puzzle piece as your lips molded against each other. Slow and passionate, his hand ghosted above your waist before he pulled you full against his body. If it wasn't for your wedged heels, Bucky wasn't sure if you'd even reach his lips with the way you stood on your toes.

Pulling away, Bucky felt dizzy, like he was drunk off of you. He swears he saw stars in your eyes, the street lights reflecting off your irises. Soft laughter came from you, you bowed your head as bucky stared at you. Practically mesmerized.

To you, Bucky looked like he was in some sort of shock. Which wouldn’t be too far from the truth, which scared you slightly.

“Everything okay? Did I do something wrong?” you asked innocently, a pang of worry laced your tone.

Bucky frantically shook his head, “no, no– god no. just not used to that.”

“That?”

“I mean.” Bucky thought for a moment, collecting his mind. “Being kissed. I've always been the one to initiate.”

You smiled sweetly, seeing hints of a flustered, young boyish version of Bucky. One that he, and everyone else swore was long gone. You had always thought otherwise, and tonight proves you right.

“I hope it wasn’t too jarring for you.” you nervously chuckled.

“It was perfect.”

tag list;@matchat3a @sebsgirl71479 @heavenswrld @ivywasmaroon

#bucky x reader #bucky fic #bucky barnes x reader #james bucky barnes #bucky imagine #bucky barnes #bucky fluff #the winter soldier #sebastian stan #seb stan

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luminnara · 3 years ago

Text

Billy Hargove x reader fluff

Can I request a Billy x Reader where the kids have no idea she’s Billy’s girlfriend and the boys have little crushes on her. They’re always visiting where she works (whether that’s at the pool/arcade/Starcourt is totally up to you). One day they swing by to see her, and notice that Billy is there, openly flirting with the reader and she’s dishing it right back. The boys don’t pick up on the obvious signs, annoyed at Billy for hitting on their crush, but Max and El quickly realize there’s something between the two older individuals. Just a lot fluff and playful banter and maybe a few sweet moments between Billy and his girl? Thank you! Sorry if it’s a lot lmao

Billy requests are open!

Warnings: very vague mentions of abuse/violence, implied sexual references bc billy is a flirt, innocent teenage pining lol

“That’ll be fifty tickets,” you said boredly, leaning your elbow on the glass countertop while you propped your cheek up on your hand.

The kid shoved a sweaty wad of tickets towards you and you sighed before handing him the prize he had picked out. He grabbed it and ran off without a second glance, and you were totally fine with that.

Working at Palace Arcade wasn’t really a gig you enjoyed all that much. It was alright—you had an unending supply of cheap snacks, you were surrounding by games all day, and if you really wanted to you could skim some tickets and use to them get your own prizes—but it was so. So. Boring.

Okay. It wasn’t necessarily that it was a boring job. On busy nights, there was plenty to do…but a lot of the kids were obnoxious, you didn’t get along all that well with your coworker, Keith, and you had so many things you would rather be doing.

Things like Billy Hargrove.

You’d been going steady for a while, though up until now, you’d kept it pretty private. It had all started when Billy climbed through your window one night after a particularly bad fight with his dad, and after you let him stay til morning, things snowballed. Now, you always found yourself missing him, especially since he had gotten a summer job as a lifeguard, and you were stuck dealing with gross kids at the arcade.

There was one group of you kids you really didn’t mind, though. Those nerdy ones, who always saved up as much cash as they could to come beat each other’s high scores and ingest way too much sugar. Will, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, El, and Max, Billy’s sister. Step sister.

He was always very clear about that.

Max was nice. You didn’t spend much time with her and really only saw her when she came into the arcade, but she seemed alright. You had known the boys pretty much your entire life—Hawkins was a small town, after all—and El was cool, too. They were a goofy bunch, and they always made you laugh, something that was very welcome during shitty shifts.

They loved making you laugh. To them, you were maybe the coolest girl in Hawkins. You’d babysat them all in the past, when they were younger and needed it, and now, they always looked forward to coming in while you were working to see you. Because they all had little crushes on you, and it always made Max and El roll their eyes.

You never really noticed, though. They were just goofy junior high kids who didn’t go out of their way to be overly obnoxious at the arcade, and you appreciated that. And besides, you were usually daydreaming about Billy while you worked, imagining him strutting around at the pool like an absolute asshole, all the moms checking him out. You wondered if he ever hit on them. He always told you that you were the only girl he ever wanted to be with, but you knew Billy, and you knew that he could be a total flirt.

As long as he kept climbing through your window at night, though, you wouldn’t complain.

The sound of footsteps and keys jingling pulled you away from your thoughts. Rather than look up at your new customer, though, you just sighed, staring down at your chipped nail polish.

“Can I help you?” You asked in a monotone voice that put Keith’s to shame.

“Damn, I thought working at an arcade would be a little more exciting than this, sweetheart.”

Your head snapped up and you grinned when you saw that Billy was leaning against the counter, smirking at you. It was too hot out for him to be wearing a jacket, and he stood before you in a black muscle tank that showed off his toned arms, an outfit choice you were sure he had made very purposely.

“What are you doing here?” You asked, pushing yourself up to lean across the counter and kiss his cheek. “I thought you had work all day.”

“Got off early.” He shrugged, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear. “Wanted to come see my girl.”

You heart swelled a little whenever he said that. Because you loved Billy Hargrove, and you loved being his girl.

“Got bored of Mrs. Wheeler, huh?” You joked.

He fixed you with a glare but it only lasted a few seconds before he was sneering at you in a way you had learned was playful. “Jealous?”

You scoffed. “As if. I get all the attention I need right here.”

Billy suddenly bristled, straightening up as he looked around. “Who do I gotta beat the shit out of?”

You snorted a laugh. “I was joking, Billy. Nothing exciting happens here. It’s totally boring and I always spend all day thinking about you.”

He visibly deflated and you had to keep yourself from laughing harder. “Oh. Good.”

“It’s good that I’m bored?” You raised a brow.

“No!” He said quickly, immediately scrambling over himself to take back what he had just said.

“It’s good that I daydream about you?” You grinned as he floundered.

He smirked at that, finding his normal cockiness again. “Course, baby. What else are you s’posed to do without me all day?”

You laughed at that, and it was like music to Billy’s ears.

“You got a break room around here?” He asked, craning his neck.

“…why?”

He looked back at you with those smoldering eyes of his and you felt your knees growing weak. “So I can make all those daydreams a reality, princess.”

Your face burned in a fierce blush, the kind that only Billy could bring on.

“Not gonna climb through my window tonight, Prince Charming?” You manage to flirt back. “Got somewhere to be? On a tight schedule?”

He offered you a genuine smile, the sort nobody else ever got to see. “Definitely not, baby. You know I just can’t get enough of you.”

And you laughed again, and he looked down at you warmly, because he was head over heels for his girl and nothing was ever gonna change that.

Someone else heard your laugh, too, and it brought smiles to their faces.

“See? I told you she’d be here!” Dustin said, elbowing Lucas.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“For not believing me!”

Max and El shared a look and both rolled their eyes. The boys’ little collective crush on you was more annoying than anything else, but it meant that the whole party spent most of their free time at the arcade now, which wasn’t the worst. It wasn’t like they usually had much money to spend at a place like Starcourt Mall, and none of them wanted to stick around the pool when Billy was working. At least the arcade had games they could enjoy while the guys paid you way too much attention, and Max’s shitty stepbrother only ever showed up when he was being forced to give her a ride home.

“Guys!” Mike said, giving Dustin and Lucas a look. “Focus! We need a game plan--”

Max rolled her eyes and grabbed El’s arm. “C’mon. I want a new high score on Dig Dug. Gotta leave Dustin in the dust.”

“I heard that!” Dustin yelled as the girls marched away.

“Okay,” Lucas said, pulling a small roll of tickets out of his pocket. “How many do we have? We can just go up and get prizes, and then talk to her.”

The others glanced at each other. They almost never played the carnival-style games that actually spat out tickets, spending most of their time focusing on the cabinets that they actually cared about.

“Guys, seriously?” Lucas groaned. “Am I the only one who got tickets?”

“We can still take those to the counter!” Will said. “We can just...get...candy, or something.”

Lucas gave him a skeptical look, but before he could say anything, Mike cut in.

“Yeah, and then we can...we can ask about games,” he nodded enthusiastically. “Or...something.”

“Or something?” Lucas asked.

“Well do you have any ideas?”

“Let’s just...be cool,” Will suggested.

“Yeah,” Dustin agreed, leading the way. “Just be cool, guys. Watch the master at work.”

“The master?” Mike scoffed as he followed.

“Uh, duh,” Dustin said over his shoulder as the four of them walked between the rows of arcade games towards the kiosk at the back of the room. “The ladies can’t get enough of me!”

Mike and Lucas rolled their eyes and Will just laughed. This was the latest in a long line of attempts to talk to you, and they were all determined not to chicken out this time. You were always nice to them, and they thought you were just about the coolest girl around--besides Max and El, of course. On the ride over to the arcade, they had all been talking about how to talk to you, and they all had a good a feeling about today.

As the other three were still arguing, however, Will’s face fell. The kiosk was in view, and you were there...but so was someone else.

“Guys,” he hissed, grabbing someone’s arm.

“What?” Mike snapped, coming to a sudden stop while the other two continued on.

“Look,” Will whispered, nodding towards the counter.

Mike looked...and then his face paled. There he was, the biggest asshole in town--no, in the entire state--leaning on the counter, smoking a cigarette, and talking to the girl they liked.

“Oh,” Mike managed to say. “Oh no.”

Because there was Billy Hargrove, the guy who loved trying to run them over with his obnoxious, loud car. There was Max’s shitty, violent older brother, who only liked fighting and drinking and being a dick. There he was, trying to smooth talk you, acting like he had the right to stand there and enjoy your company. They watched as you smiled at Billy before stepping away, rolling your eyes at whatever your boss had just yelled towards you.

Great. Now you were gone, and Hargrove was still there. And Dustin and Lucas were about to walk right into him.

“Dustin!” Will hissed, trying to stop his friend before he got too close.

But Dustin and Lucas were still arguing, looking at each other rather than where they were going.

“--I’m going to strike up a conversation, and then you--”

“No way!” Dustin interrupted. “I’m talking first!”

“Why?”

“Because I know how to talk to girls, and--”

“Dustin!” Mike practically shouted at him.

“What, Mike?” Dustin asked, looking back at him in annoyance. “Can’t you see we’re--”

He cut himself off by running into something. Unfortunately for him, that something was already turning around to snarl at who the fuck had the balls to interrupt his conversation.

And Dustin stared up in horror as none other than Billy Hargrove glared daggers down at him, a cigarette clenched in his teeth, his blue eyes icy and angry.

“Uh--”

“Uh?” Billy mocked, sneering down at him. “Get lost, twerp.”

“You get lost!” Dustin snapped back reflexively.

Billy’s eyes were blazing with rage. “What was that?”

Lucas was quickly backing up towards Will and Mike, trying to make himself seem as uninvolved as possible.

Dustin gulped.

“I-it’s a public arcade,” he said quickly, standing his ground.

“Is it?” Billy growled.

“Leave him alone, Billy!” Max yelled, suddenly appearing.

“Great,” Billy said sarcastically. “Get your little friends outta here before they get hurt, Maxine.”

“Don’t call me that,” she growled.

Billy’s nostrils flared angrily as he moved to flick his cigarette away. Max knew what that meant--they all did--and they had about ten seconds before he got pissed off enough to go after them.

Before anyone could run, though, a new voice interrupted everything.

“Oh, hey guys. It’s nice to see you.” You said, walking back behind the counter with a box of new inventory in your arms.

The kids all perked up at your arrival, and Billy relaxed. Visibly.

Max was baffled. Billy never calmed down that quickly, no matter who was around.

“What’s up?” you asked, seemingly oblivious to the angry tension.

In truth, you knew what was going on. Or, at least, you could guess—you knew Billy better than anybody, and you knew how he could get. You had seen his bouts of anger plenty of times, but it was never directed at you. Because your Billy was sweet, and just like he did now, he always calmed down for you.

“We just…uh…” Dustin stammered.

“Oh, do you guys have tickets?” You asked, noticing what Lucas held. “Want someone candy? You can have extra. Don’t tell Keith.”

That seemed to smooth things over, and the kids were willing to inch closer and snatch handfuls of candy out of the box you had brought out. Then, they all retreated, mumbling thank yous and running to regroup around Ms. Pac-Man.

“What the hell is he doing here?” Dustin hissed, ripping open a packet of Smarties.

“It looks like he’s…hitting on her,” Mike wrinkled his nose.

They all peered around the games to watch as Billy returned to his former position, leaning casually against the counter as you sorted inventory.

“Ugh, can’t he just leave her alone?” Lucas grumbled through a mouthful of chocolate.

“She clearly isn’t into him,” Dustin said confidently.

“She isn’t, right?” Will asked, glancing at the others. “I mean, nobody likes him. Right?”

“Right,” Mike agreed. “And definitely not her.”

“Yeah, so we have to get him to back off!” Dustin said.

“And how are we gonna do that?” Lucas asked, glaring at him.

“We’ll just…tell him to go away.” Mike said. “Right? That’ll work.”

“Yeah, there’s four of us, and one of him,” Dustin agreed.

“Good luck with that,” Max mumbled, leaning against a cabinet.

They all turned to fix her with a look before their attention was back on you. They couldn’t hear what Billy was saying, but they were sure it was totally lame…and they were so convinced that you didn’t want the attention that they mistook your genuine smiles and laughter for something more awkward and polite, as if you were simply putting up with him because you couldn’t escape.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

“God, you’re sexy,” Billy said as he watched you count out packets of cheap candy.

You glanced up at him, unable to hide your smile. “I’m in my work uniform, Billy. It’s not very sexy. I don’t even have any makeup on.”

“I like you without it.”

“I thought you said you loved my lipstick?”

“Yeah, I love smudging it all over,” he smirked. “Love making your mascara run, too…”

“Billy!“ you whispered, laughing. “I’m at work!”

“I still wanna find that break room…”

“Billy!”

“What? Can’t a guy sneak his girlfriend off for a quickie once in a while?” He gave you a wolfish grin, watching you like a big, scary predator might watch a cute little bunny rabbit.

But two could play at that game.

“What if I prefer something a little longer?” You asked, a suggestive tone in your voice. “Maybe…tonight?”

“Now you’re speakin’ my language, doll.” He puffed on his cigarette, giving you a lazy smile. “It’s a date.”

You smiled and bit your lip, tossing a piece of candy at him and laughing when it hit his chest. He chuckled, reaching out to smooth his thumb over your cheek. He was looking down at you with such a warm expression that you felt yourself melting, his bright eyes suddenly seeming so peaceful. When you leaned into his touch, you closed your eyes for a moment, just enjoying the feeling of his skin against yours.

Your audience, meanwhile, was growing angry.

“What is he doing?!” Dustin practically yelled. “He can’t touch her!”

The others all nodded, agreeing, their voices rising as they worked up the courage to intervene.

Max, however, was quiet as she shared a look with El.

“Guys,” Max said, trying to get their attention. “Guys!”

“What?” They all asked in unison, staring at her.

“Leave them alone,” she said.

“Are you crazy?” Mike asked. “He’s bothering her!”

“I don’t think he is…” El said.

“What? What are you talking about?” Lucas asked.

“I think she’s into him,” Max said, trying not to retch as she thought about anyone liking her brother.

“What?”

“They’re into each other,” El agreed nodding. “I can tell.”

“How can you tell?” Dustin asked angrily.

“I watch TV.”

He grumbled something and rolled his eyes, sitting on a stool in defeat. “Great. Just great.”

“I think they look happy,” El commented, watching as you laughed at something Billy said again.

“Happy? How can anyone be happy with him?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know, but El is right,” Max said. “He never acts like that around anyone else.”

When they all looked back at the two of you, they could see you smiling a real, genuine smile…and Billy was returning it, suddenly looking a lot less like a sleazebag than he usually did.

“I’ll get outta here,” Billy said, giving you a quick kiss. “Want a ride home later?”

“Nah, I drove,” you shrugged.

“Then I’ll see you after you get back?”

“I sure hope so, Romeo,” you gave him a coy smile and another kiss.

Billy gave you a long, lingering look, and it took everything in him to force himself to turn and leave.

You got a pretty nice view of his butt in those tight jeans, though.

As he passed the kids, he paused to snap at them.

“The hell are you lookin’ at?” He growled, fixing them all with the glare they were so used to from him.

“Nothing!” They all stammered as they shook their heads and turned to the various games around them.

He just snorted angrily and kept walking. They watched him go before their heads swiveled to see you standing in your usual spot, a wistful look on your face as Billy Hargrove walked out to his Camaro.

“Dang,” Mike sighed. “They really are a thing, aren’t they?”

“Oh well,” Lucas grumbled.

“At least now I can focus on my high scores again,” Dustin mumbled, hopping off the stool and heading towards an arcade cabinet.

They dispersed, heading to their favorite games. El and Max just looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Boys,” Max scoffed.

“Boys.” El agreed.

#billy hargrove x y/n #billy hargrove #billy hargove x reader #stranger things

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loveshotzz · 2 years ago

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Hello, hello, so, I love Eddie (don't we all?) But I know you take requests for Steve too...I just rewatched season 3 and I'm just craving some nerdy/naive Steve? I feel like we've all made him out to be this suave and dirty man, but I need Steve falling in Nancy's window, Steve playing a fake trumpet, Steve yelling too loudly, "Ahoy ladies! I didn't see you there!"

So maybe something where Steve is just absolutely clumsy and dorky, knocking things over and flustered by readers charm and confidence? Needs to be told what to do and will gladly do it, but he's going to make you laugh while it's happening.

If you're not into writing it or have NYE and other WIP that are filling your time, thats a-okay, I just love your style of writing and thought I'd throw it out there!

Sending love, good writing vibes, & all the Eddie/Steve thoughts your way! 💕

I’d write anything for you! But we’ve talked and there’s just something about a Scoops Ahoy Steve that’s irresistible. I hope you enjoy this <3

Steve Harrington x Reader

Warnings: Fluff, suggestive Innuendo’s and a very flustered Steve under the cut. Pretty SFW but still my blog is 18plus.

You’ve had crush on Steve Harrington for as long as you could remember. It started all the way back in middle school when he shared half his PB&J with you having accidentally forgot your lunch at home.

Even through out high school the feelings you harbored never changed, but with your lack of interest in the hierarchy of the popular crowd you decided admiring from a far was for the best.

Steve wasn’t the person he presented himself to be around them, even you knew that. Waiting patiently for him to get the bump on his head he needed, there was a part of you that was grateful when Nancy Wheeler showed up. After watching him chase her around for the better half of year the opportunity to take your shot finally presented itself after you both had graduated.

It was the Scoops Ahoy uniform that really did it for you, it humbled him in a way he needed. Working at the mall yourself, you’d spend every lunch break watching what used to be the King of Hawkins become a bumbling mess around women. There was something charming about the way he never gave up, day in and day out you watched him desperately try to find someone to help him get over Nancy.

Finally one night after your shift you walked passed the food court, glancing his direction you noticed he was behind the counter alone. Legs dangling with a look of pure boredom on his handsome features.

Feet faltering you stop before you can get any further. Taking your bottom lip between your teeth your eyes dart between the boy on the counter and the double glass doors of the entrance. The mall was practically empty at this point in the evening, with only an hour till close the families of the small town of Hawkins were already tucked into their homes.

Turning on your heal you descend towards the ice cream shop determined to be the one that finally makes him forget about Wheeler.

It takes Steve a minute to notice you walking towards him, but when he does his eyes widen and he’s snatching off his sailor cap as quick as he can. Jumping off the counter a nervous hand runs through his infamous locks, trying desperately to tame them before you get to him.

“Ahoy!” Steve coughs in his hand nervously when he sees just how beautiful you are up close. It wasn’t like he didn’t know who you were, he just couldn’t remember the last time he was this close to you. “I mean, um, yeah hi, I don’t know why I just yelled that at you. The mall is empty, you can clearly hear me. You’re standing right in front of me.”

The fact that you had Steve a rambling mess without even speaking a word yet only adds to your confidence.

“Ahoy Sailor.” Planting both hands on the counter you lean in with a sweet smile enjoying the pink that suddenly flushes his cheeks.

Licking his lips, his eyes go big at your obvious advance. Puffing his chest out a little he tries his best to put on a confident front, but the way your eyes were roaming his body was making his brain short circuit.

“What brings you to uhh my vessel of flavor?” With a hand on his hip he pinches the bridge of his nose, even he knows how stupid that was. But it was too late, it already left his mouth.

Stifling your giggle, you act unfazed by the bad pick up line. You’ll let him have this one.

“Hmm, I don’t know. What do you suggest Captain Harrington?” Dropping your voice lower when you say his name you turn towards the ice cream flavors. Running a finger along the glass as you move, never breaking eye contact with the glazed over hazel ones in front of you.

Clearing his throat again the blush from his cheeks spreads down to his neck, running another hand through his hair he meets you on the other side of the glass.

“Depends on what you’re in the mood for gorgeous.” Flashing you the kinda smile that makes your knees weak, it was your turn to blush.

“Definitely something creamy.” Biting your bottom lip you look up at him through your lashes. “And salty.”

Steve’s jaw drops at your lack of subtly, but your confidence has him so flustered he doesn’t know what else to do but keep playing along. Feeling his blue shorts tighten he pushes himself closer to the counter desperate to hide how badly you were already effecting him.

“Something creamy and salty? That’s my-“ Clearing his throat again, all of the tension starts to make him feel like it’s closing. “That’s my kinda gal.” Laughing nervously Steve focuses in on the Ice cream flavors in front him, refusing to meet your hungry stare as he does his best to try and calm himself down.

“Butterscotch, I like butterscotch.” Tapping your nails on the glass lightly you want his attention again.

“We happen to have the best butterscotch in Hawkins.” Steve finally musters enough strength to meet your gaze again and god, he wished he hadn’t. The way your eyes are trained on him makes the bulge in his shorts grow even more.

“Can I have a sample Stevie?” You can’t help but notice the way the nickname makes him bite his lip.

“You can taste every flavor on my ship if that’s what your heart desires.” His words are smooth when they come out, but when he reaches over to grab a spoon his elbow hits the ice cream scoop next to him sending it crashing to the ground.

The sound of the metal hitting the tile echos loudly through out the mall. Scrambling to pick it up, the pink tint in his cheeks turns a deep red when he sets it back down on the counter.

“I just hate when that happens.” Throwing a wink his way you can’t help how much you’re enjoying this.

“Hah, yeah, those metal ice cream scoops. Menaces I tell you.” A small smile tugs at the corner of his lips, reaching back over he finally gets a hold of the tester spoon he had set out for.

With a trembling hand Steve scoops the caramel colored ice cream, sucking in a sharp breath as your finger tips brush against his when you take it from him.

Making a show of eating it like a popsicle, your tongue darts out first collecting the sweet treat before your lips wrap tightly around the end. Humming lowly you close your eyes enjoying the way the sugar coats your mouth.

“Jesus Christ.” Steve breathes louder then he intended. “You’re doing this on purpose aren’t you? Like I can’t be imagining this right?”

Opening your eyes, you see his torn expression. Lips spreading into a smile around the spoon you let it fall from your lips with a small pop.

“Doing what on purpose? Hitting on you? I thought that was obvious Harrington.”

#request #Steve Harrington #steve harringon smut #steve harrington imagines #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington fan fiction #steve harrington fanfic #steve harrington x you #steve stranger things #stranger things #joe keery

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seasonsbloom · 2 years ago

Text

baby, let's play house. rooster (part 1)

part 2

pairing ; bradley bradshaw x female!reader

synopsis ; marriage of convenience. you got yourself in trouble. bradley has a bit of a savior complex. together, you come up with what could potentially be the worst idea in the longstanding and illustrious history of bad ideas.

wc ; 12.5k

warnings ; 18+ only, minors do NOT interact; angst; explicit language; explicit sexual content in later parts; pregnancy; mentions of infidelity; mentions of vomit; mentions of Tom Cruise; unhealthy family dynamics; one mention of suic*de but it's not a plot point; age gap

note: uhm... i blacked out. idk either. part 2 should be out eventually, which of course means that i haven't even started writing it yet. there will probably be several mistakes in here regarding the navy, etc. so i'm sorry about that i'm just dumb :-(

sol. sunderlust. crab. bestie... i love you forever, what would i ever do without you?

When you’re fourteen, sitting on a floral couch in one of the nondescript, army-commissioned houses you’ve been moving to every few months since you were old enough to remember, your mother turns on Cocktail with Tom Cruise, and you decide that, once you’re grown up, you’re going to be a bartender. You’re going to do just what Tom does - get a job in some dive, work your way up, learn the bottle slinging and the shot pouring and the flirting, and then you’re going to franchise the whole thing and take it national. It’s going to be just like TGI Fridays, except your drinks will actually be good instead of whatever watered-down punch they serve.

Of course, you’re fourteen, and you don’t even know what alcohol tastes like yet. Years later, you’re going to take a shot of Tequila at a bar, you’re going to splutter and cough and think you might choke, and it’ll leave you wondering if maybe you’ve made a mistake. But for now, you’ve got a dream, and you’ve got a plan, and not a smidge of doubt that you’ll make it all come true.

You’re going to do just as Tom Cruise does - minus the best friend’s suicide from the movie and the real-life Scientology thing and all that. But you’re going to be successful. You know it.

So this, then. This is not part of your plan at all.

Behind you, there’s a bang, and then the back door is ripped open. The buttery light of the bar spills in a rectangle across the beaten path, but it doesn’t reach your little corner. You hear the muffled thud of footsteps, a curse, followed by a shout of your name.

“Yeah?” you call back, hope you don’t sound like you’re balancing on the edge of a mental breakdown. Hope you don’t sound like you feel.

“Your shift’s about to start. I really need you in there cutting up some limes, please,” Jerry, your co-worker, says. Thank God he doesn’t walk over to investigate just what you’re doing huddled in the sand behind the bar.

“Okay,” you answer, voice a little wobbly, “I’ll be in in a sec.”

You wait until you hear the door shut behind Jerry, then you unfold yourself, get your shaky legs underneath your weight. You feel like somebody hit you over the head with one of those huge hammers they use to knock down walls. The nausea is back, too, something queasy and watery that shifts through your stomach.

Inside the bar, everything is like it always is. The chatter of the customers, the drawl of the music, the smell of beer, and the Ocean Breeze scented cleaner you use to wipe the floors. Far below it, the scent of the real ocean breeze drifting in through the opened windows. It seems wrong for the Hard Deck to be unchanged, unaltered, untouched when your own life has gone so completely off the rails.

You sneak in a quick, discreet bathroom break to swipe at the mascara smudged beneath your eyes, to dab at it with some damp toilet paper, to hope nobody will notice the obvious signs of tears still clinging to you. To stare at your reflection in the mirror for a moment, try not to think about that stupid test you buried at the bottom of the trashcan. You can taste your heartbeat in your mouth.

You don’t look any different - same nose, same hair, same eyes - but something has irrevocably shifted inside of you.

Behind the counter, you cut up the limes you promised Jerry. The scent clings to your fingers, the juice settles in the calluses. The steady sound as the knife meets the cutting board and the familiar motion of your hands help to ground you a little.

“Could we get a refill?”

You lift your head and then immediately lower it again, shoulders going up, turning to the side in an attempt to hide your face. If there are two people you don’t want to see tonight, then…

“Oh my god.” Natasha’s face pushes into your line of vision, her eyebrows crinkled, her mouth pursed. “Have you been crying?”

Waving her words of concern away with one hand, you grab for their empty glasses with the other.

“Allergies,” you lie. “I’ve got two on tap here, which one did you guys have? The German or the…”

“You don’t have allergies,” Bradley points out. You’d made it a point not to look at him, but now your gaze snaps in his direction. He stands with his eyes narrowed, with his hands on the polished wood of the bar top. Concern flutters across his face.

There’s something about Bradley Bradshaw. You like to think of it as a gravitational pull. Something with force, something that makes people look at him. Something that grounds them, too, though, gives them a tether.

Ever since he first walked into this bar a little over a year ago, it’s like he’s become a fixture in your life, even if you only see him once or twice a week, even if it’s just a quick exchange of words over a countertop. Bradley Bradshaw makes for a good North Star.

He shrugs, and there’s something almost sheepish to it. “It was part of your list of reasons why you’re better than Hangman last month.”

You pause, still holding the glasses, and stare at him. He looks right back.

“That’s beside the point,” Natasha pipes up. She’s balancing both her elbows on the bartop, pulling herself closer. “Why were you crying?”

That sort of shifts reality back into focus. What are you supposed to say? I let a guy who isn’t even really my boyfriend but also not really not my boyfriend knock me up, and now I have no idea what the fuck to do? To two people who are little more than glorified acquaintances?

You shrug and decide they look like they’d enjoy the new craft beer Penny got on tap. It has notes of vanilla and apple, and you’re not much of a beer person, but even you like it. Or at least you used to.

“It’s nothing,” you say, drawing the first glass. It ends up perfect - amber liquid topped with just the right amount of foam, the little bobbles popping as you push it across the counter toward Natasha. Your life might be a mess, but at least you still know how to draw a damn good glass of beer from the tap. “Don’t worry about it.”

Natasha’s eyes narrow, but then she lets it go. “You know I’ll beat a guy up for you, right?”

You don’t doubt it. If there’s anybody in this bar you wouldn’t want to cross, it’s Natasha, and not just because of whatever training the Navy put her through. You’re convinced she came into the world knowing how to take a guy out.

“Yeah,” you agree and are surprised to find you mean it. Realistically, you’re not particularly close to any of the pilots. You chit-chat sometimes, have had a few drunken conversations after everybody else has filtered out of the Hard Deck while wiping down tables or collecting shot glasses, but that’s not really enough to support a true friendship. Still. If you asked, you have no doubt Natasha would go to bat for you. “It’s okay, though. I’m fine. I’ll put this on your tab, yeah?”

She looks like she wants to say something else, but then decides to let it go. Sighs, “Okay.”

As Natasha pushes off the bar to rejoin her group of friends toward the back of the bar, Bradley takes a step closer instead. You make it a point not to look at him, but the yellow and white of his Hawaiian shirt flashes in your periphery despite your best efforts.

He places a large hand on the countertop, palm down, and you should be looking busy, but all you can do is stare as his fingers starfish across the wood.

“You can talk to me, yeah?” he asks, and his voice is soft enough that it almost disappears in the din of this Saturday night. “Whatever it is.”

You do look up then. Bradley has brown eyes, round and big and deep. There’s something about them that makes you want to trust him, trust his words, trust the sincerity. It almost makes you start crying again.

“Okay,” you whisper. “Thank you.”

Then somebody’s shouting an order at you, and you’re pushing a coaster under a sweating Cuba Libre, you’re pouring a Tequila shot, you’re looking for the maraschino cherries, you’re passing out salt shakers, and you don’t notice as he disappears and you don’t think about anything for a short, blissful, beautiful time.

Two months ago, you met Luke halfway through the door of a bar you’d seen on Instagram, something with low lights and neon signs and booths cushioned in lush, ruby velvet. They had this signature cocktail there, something with rum and gold foil and a lot of smoke that drifted up in sweet-smelling plumes.

Luke was charming and laughed a lot, and when he put his hand on your waist, when he looked at you, your heart skipped a beat or two. And still, the first thing you told Penny about at work the next day was the cocktail and not the guy.

You’re almost entirely sure you’re not in love with him, but you’re excited about the idea that maybe someday you could be. Luke is a nice guy. He works in finance somewhere in San Diego, takes you to expensive seafront restaurants, and once or twice, he even bought you expensive lingerie. Luke likes the same movies as you do, likes putting on Jazz music when you go down on him in his car, and that always manages to make you feel strangely sophisticated even with a dick in your mouth. He’s older, and he has a real, grown-up job, completely unlike you with your singles soaked in beer.

He’s a stead-fast, reliable guy. If you have to be in this situation with anyone, you figure it’s better to be in it with him than some twenty-something surfer dude who couldn’t even find the word responsible in a dictionary.

The anxiety has been gnawing at you since last night, has been chipping away your composure and your calm. Has reduced you into a jittery, terrified, chafing shell of your former self. All day you were fumbling - burning your hand on the heated water kettle in the morning, almost running a red light, cutting your finger deep enough it didn’t stop bleeding for a whole five minutes.

Earlier today, you took a last, desperate stand. Propelled by the sort of hope that exists against all better judgment, you went on a CVS run and returned with three more pregnancy tests. You left them back at your tiny apartment, right on the counter where you put them out in the first place, those three tiny, horrible, life-altering plus signs laughing right in your face.

And that was it then. Your fate decided. Your luck run out.

Since you were fourteen, sitting on that floral couch, the course of your life had seemed so clear to you. You’d been so sure of where you wanted to go, so sure of how to get there. And yeah, okay, maybe you used to think you’d get there sooner, but that’s never deterred you before. Slow and steady wins the race, that’s what you used to think.

Now, ten years later, everything is muddled. You can’t see an inch ahead in the fog of all this.

To add insult to injury, those tests were fucking expensive. The next time you check your bank account, you might start crying.

So you spent a good fifteen minutes curled up on your bathroom tiles, staring at your shower curtain, blinking away tears you never shed. You spent a good fifteen minutes trying to figure it out, trying to untangle it, trying to make sense of how you could fuck up so completely.

And then you finally picked yourself up, massaged the grid pattern of the tiles off your cheek, and shot Luke a text asking if he was free tonight.

He drops by at the end of your shift.

“Hi, babe.” Luke grins as he slides into one of the bar stools. “You good?”

You nod, then pause. “Not really?”

You’re wiping down the bartop, dumping an ashtray you collected from the smoking zone outside into the trash. The Hard Deck is empty now, even the last stragglers filed out. Bob selected a song on the jukebox before he left, something slow and decidedly country. Your hands shake when you go to wet the rag again.

Luke frowns and leans across the bar to look at you closely. “What happened?”

“I have to tell you something,” you say and run the tap. The water hits the chrome of the sink with a splatter.

Luke raises an eyebrow, grins. “Illicit confession?”

Under any other circumstances, you would have laughed. But your stomach is coiled up in knots so tight you wonder if they’ll ever untangle again. Like the earphones you fish from the bottom of a purse.

You just so manage a half-hearted chuckle, a sad, pathetic little sound that has Luke’s eyebrow climbing even higher.

He pushes a brown paper bag across the counter. “I brought your favorite take-out… Would that cheer you up?”

Almost immediately, your stomach growls in answer. You’ve been so hungry the past few days that you can’t even manage to be embarrassed. “Mexican?” you ask, something like excitement in your voice for the first time in over 24 hours.

“Ah...” Luke bites his lower lip. “No, uhm… I got something from that one place we went to. The fusion kitchen?”

“Oh…” The excitement dampens immediately, and you force a smile. “Yeah, cool. Thanks.”

“Sorry… you did say you liked it when we went.”

He’s right. You did say that.

Luke likes experimental food, things like that cocktail with the gold foil. Things that look much better than they end up tasting. He takes pictures of them and posts them on his Instagram, and he always makes sure not to get your hand in, your purse, your foot. He doesn’t even follow you back, and you want to not care about trivial things like social media so very badly that you never ask him about it.

He looks genuinely apologetic, though, so you resolve to forgive him. You smile and say, “I did! This is great. Thanks, Luke.”

His satisfied smile puts you at ease.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

It’s a bit like a bucket of ice water. The ease slips away as quickly as it came. You start wiping almost furiously at a stain on the bartop, then give up. Stare at your fingers gone wrinkly with the sudsy water.

You open your mouth, and then you say, “I’m pregnant.”

It’s not what you meant to say. You meant to ease into this, make it sound… less final, somehow. As if that’s at all possible. As if that isn’t exactly what it is. Final.

You’re never going back from this, you realize suddenly. No matter what happens from here on out, there’s never going to be another moment where this hasn’t happened. Where you weren’t pregnant, where you didn’t mess it all up. The plan, the dream, the life.

Tears aren’t enough anymore. You’re going to run headfirst into the ocean and scream until the saltwater fills your lungs.

Luke laughs. You stare at him.

It takes a moment, but slowly he realizes that you’re not joking. That this is serious. The smile slides sideways off his face.

“Oh,” he says, and you can’t look at him anymore. So you let your eyes wander, down towards the lapels of his white dress shirt. He’s still wearing his suit and tie, and the realization that he’s come straight from the office touches you more than it should. At the same time, guilt settles in your stomach. You’re doing this to him, you’re altering his life, you…

The rational part of yourself scoffs, takes over the reins. It takes two to tango, you remind yourself. This is as much his fault as it is yours.

But that doesn’t get rid of the bitter taste in your mouth.

“Why…” Luke pauses. “Why are you telling me this?”

When you look up at his face again, his expression is carefully blank.

“Uh…”

“Shouldn’t you be telling the father?”

You blink. The cogs of your mind turn slowly like somebody slapped gum between them. “I am,” you say, wondering what the hell he’s on about.

“I’m not the father,” Luke says, very matter-of-factly. “You don’t need to lie about it.”

“I’m not lying.” You’re too stunned to even be insulted by the insinuation.

“It’s alright.” He shrugs his shoulders, his expensive suit in the tacky, glossy fabric catching the light. “It’s not like we’re exclusive. I don’t mind if you slept with somebody else.”

“Not exclusive,” you repeat lamely. Maybe that part shouldn’t catch you as off guard as it does. You’ve never discussed it with him in as many words, never sat down to have the whole boyfriend/girlfriend talk, but you’ve been seeing each other semi-regularly for two months now, and you’d just sort of assumed…

“Sure.” Luke nods. “Don’t blame this one on me, then.”

Oh. Your heart clenches, and suddenly it feels like you can’t breathe.

“I didn’t sleep with anybody else,” you say, but your voice sounds far away.

Luke shrugs. “Well, it can’t be mine.”

You don’t even know what to say to this. You’re in desperate, burning need of a shot, and the realization that you can’t have one zaps through you like a pain.

“We always used a condom,” Luke is saying, and his words drift to you through a fog, through a mist, through a thicket of fear and anxiety and ice-cold panic. “I made damn sure of that.”

“It’s not….” You clear your throat. “They’re only like… 98 percent safe. Condoms, I mean.”

“What, so you’re saying we’re those two percent?”

He looks like he’s about to start laughing again, and suddenly you barely recognize him. You’ve always known that Luke wasn’t the love of your life, but that was fine. Love hadn’t been part of the plan anyway, that was for later, much later, after you’d gone international and gotten rich off Mojitos and Pina Coladas and the occasional Old Fashioned. But Luke had been… well, he’d been nice. Always. He’d been someone to laugh with, had been long walks on the beach, and quick tumbles in his backseat. He’d been fun and nice and…

And you’d been stupid enough to hope. Hope for more, hope for better, hope for something.

“I can’t have a baby with you,” he says. His voice rings with finality.

What are you supposed to say to that? With those three positive pregnancy tests back home on your bathroom counter. With the knowledge that you haven’t slept with anyone else.

“Well,” you whisper, and the words come out softer than you want them to, “you are.”

Luke is very quiet for a moment. He’s looking right at you, the blue eyes you used to think were open, inviting, now slitted and probing. Like a snake.

“Jesus,” he says finally, draws back to run his fingers through his hair, a gesture of exasperation. His voice has lost some of its calm. “What do you want from me?”

You wonder if you look as dazed as you feel. “I don’t… I don’t want anything from you.”

That’s not true. You’d like him to hug you. You’d like him to tell you it’s going to be okay, even if that might be a lie. You’d like him to be nice to you.

Instead, Luke, who looks increasingly distressed, jerks his head and says, “If it’s a family you’re after… I can’t give you that.”

Everything has happened so quickly - the toppling of your plans, the chaos of your life. You haven’t really had time to think about how you want him to react. Not like this, though.

“Why not?” you ask and regret the question the moment it’s out of your mouth. You sound like a child - lost, confused.

Luke sighs. He rakes a palm over his face and shakes his head. When he finally looks at you again, there’s something almost guilty on his face. You can’t tear your eyes away, can’t help but feel your stomach plummeting down down down toward the ground. It’s like standing on the ledge of a skyscraper, feeling what the fall might be like even with both feet firmly planted.

“I can’t give you that,” he says, “because I already have a family.”

Beneath you, the ground seems to quiver.

“What?”

Luke pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, then reaches into his pocket and produces a shiny, golden wedding band. When he slips it back onto its original place on his finger, you watch the patch of pale skin, several shades lighter than the rest, disappear.

Your breath gets stuck somewhere in your chest.

“You’re… married?”

“Going on five years,” he says, and you think he sounds sad, but maybe that’s just your hope getting the better of you again.

You don’t know what to say. For a moment, you just stand there with the rag still in your hand, listening to the sad, sad voice of some wanna-be cowboy drawling from the speakers. Hear the phantom thud of the cues hitting pool balls. Turn your head to where the pilots were having fun earlier, back when things weren’t all jumbled up.

The whole world moves far, far away from you. Like something you watch on TV screens, something intangible, something fake. It’s not something that happens to people like you. It’s not something that happens to real people.

“It’s… you didn’t tell me that,” you say, and it’s like your voice echoes through a long, long tunnel, bounces off the walls like a tennis ball. “I didn’t know.”

And then you think back on it. Think of whispered phone calls in the dead of night, think of erratic work schedules, think of his insistence to come here instead of going to San Diego. Think of how little you know of his life, how firmly he kept you locked out of it.

Suddenly you’re not so sure if you didn’t know or if you just didn’t want to know. If you closed your eyes to what was right in front of you.

Guilt and anger and confusion flash through you in rapid succession. You feel sick to your stomach.

“I’ll give you money,” Luke says. It’s a peculiar thing - you see his mouth move before the words ever reach your ears, like a movie that’s gone out of sync with the audio.

“Money,” you repeat, very slowly. Or maybe not slowly at all. You just feel like you got stuck in molasses, like the whole world has been dipped in something sticky.

“Well. You’re getting rid of it.”

It’s not a question. He says it like it’s a fact, like it’s something that’s already been decided. Like it’s something you don’t get a say in.

You stiffen, fingers sinking into the wet rag. Soapy water drips over the lacquered wood of the bartop.

“No,” you say. “No, I’m not.”

About five minutes ago, you hadn’t even made your mind up about it yet. Hadn’t decided whether to keep it or not. Had still been weighing the pros and cons in your mind, turning them over like a Rosetta Stone that might help you decipher the encrypted, tangled mess of your thoughts.

And now that he’s said it, now that the option is right there in the open, suddenly you know that’s not the way you want it to happen.

“What,” Luke says, “you wanna have it?”

“Yes,” you answer, and you know it’s the truth.

Maybe it’s stupid. You’re twenty-four. You’re broke. You pick up shifts at a bar to pour tequila shots for other people. You live off the guys you flirt with long enough they decide you’re worth a tip. All those plans of grandeur, of franchises and cocktails and Park Avenue apartments, are dead-ends. You’ve been walking a cul-de-sac your whole life.

And still… something about it feels right to you.

You’ve been thinking about the whole thing in theory - the theoretical truth of that test, the theoretical reaction of Luke, the theoretical existence of that baby, the theoretical impact on your life. But it’s not a theory. It’s real.

There’s a baby growing in you.

It’s the most terrifying thought of your life. You’ve never experienced something so wonderful. Even as the fear eats away at you, even as your stomach churns and your head spins, some part of you feels illuminated with light.

Luke laughs. “Babe… no offense, but that’s a horrible idea.”

You clench your teeth and grit out, “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

He shrugs. “Well, you’re gonna get it. You really think you could raise a kid?”

“I don’t know,” you say, truthfully, and wonder where all this calm is coming from. “But I want to try.”

Luke stares at you as if you’re growing a spare set of ears right in front of him. Then he laughs again, shakes his head. You can’t see what’s so funny about any of this.

“Babe,” he says, “this isn’t some new Cocktail recipe. This is an actual child you’re talking about.”

If you weren’t so goddamn tired, it would make you angry. Set fire to you like a fuse. But you’re drained, empty, hollow. You want to go home, want to curl up in bed, want to cry. You want to go back two weeks in time, back when you were still just a failing waitress with a big dream. Back before the responsibility of it all hunched you over.

“I’m doing it,” you say, and hope he understands the decision is final. Hope your voice is firm.

Luke exhales. A muscle in his jaw twitches as he grinds his teeth, as he turns half away from you.

Finally, after an eternity, he says, “I can’t be involved in this.”

For your part, you understand that decision is final too.

You nod, grab onto the bartop to keep yourself from toppling over. The ground beneath you is a gaping, beckoning abyss. It’s going to swallow you whole.

“Fine,” you whisper. “I’ll do it alone then.”

For a moment, Luke looks almost surprised. As if he was sure you’d fold eventually, see reason. Listen to him.

You wonder if that’s how it’s been before - him pushing and you giving in. Rearranging your life to fit his schedule, his plans, his wants. Shrinking yourself to make room for him. And you didn’t even notice.

You straighten your spine.

“For what it’s worth,” Luke says as he slides off his chair, “I’m sorry.”

And then he does what men do best: He leaves. Walks away from you and the baby growing inside of you. Walks away from the mess he made, the dream he shattered, without a care or a thought. Without looking back.

You watch his retreating form, watch the set of his shoulders, the spring in his step, watch as he bounds down the steps onto the gravel of the parking lot, watch as the shadows eventually blot out the sight of him.

Good riddance, you want to say, but you can’t even form words.

With your heart torn to shreds, with your fear clawing a bloody path up your throat, you sink down onto the floor, press a hand to your mouth, and you sob.

Twenty minutes later, Bradley Bradshaw finds you in the exact same position.

You know it’s been twenty minutes because you’re staring at the digital clock of the dishwasher, counting down the wash cycle. The neon red of the numbers blurs through the veil of your tears.

It’s like somebody’s cut your chest open. Scooped you clean like taking a spoon to a tub of ice cream. Behind your ribcage, you feel hollow in a way that aches down to your bones. That spiderwebs through your veins.

Bradley pauses in the doorway, silhouetted by the outdoor lighting you still haven’t turned off. Like this, with your vision blurred, he looks like a drawing of the Virgin Mary on one of those cheap, tacky candles. Descending on a flurry of clouds and light and doves. Only this Virgin Mary wears Hawaiian shirts, apparently. It almost makes you laugh.

He casts his eyes over the room, a slight furrow dipping between his brows. It takes you a moment to understand he hasn’t seen you yet, not with how you’re crouching by the crates of Corona.

Part of you wants to hide, wants to crawl under the jutting canopy of the bar. Wants to pretend you’re not here, fold yourself into a tiny pocket square of a person until he leaves again.

“Hello?” Bradley asks, genuine confusion laced with the word, and you know you can’t do that.

“Hi,” you call back, and your voice sounds tiny. Miserable. You push up on your knees to preserve a bit of your dignity. The room goes spinning in a whirlwind, and you catch yourself with both hands on the wood, lifting up to peek at him over the edge of the bar. “I’m down here.”

For a moment, Bradley just stares at you. He takes in the scene, the smeared mascara, the swollen eyes, the fresh tears leaving tracks down your cheeks like you’re drawing rivers on a map.

Then he snaps into action. He’s crossing the room before you can even really come to terms with the fact that he’s here in the first place, pushing through the hip-high swinging door that separates the oval space hugged by the bar from the rest of the room and falling to his knees by your side.

“What happened?” Bradley asks, something hard to his voice. But when he goes to touch the side of your face, carefully as if you’re injured, as if you’re made of porcelain that’ll break at the slightest jostle, his brown eyes show nothing but genuine concern.

It makes you cry harder.

“Nothing,” you say, which is a ridiculous lie, all things considered. You’re crouching on the floor of your workplace, over an hour after your shift has ended, crying your eyes out. Clearly, there’s something wrong. “I’m fine.”

Bradley sits cross-legged on the hardwood floors, his knee close enough to graze against yours. He looks decidedly out of his depth, almost uncomfortable. Helpless. His mustache quivers as he opens his mouth, then closes it again.

But he doesn’t push. Doesn’t try to get you to explain it, doesn’t ask again. He just sits there with you, elbows on his thighs, and lets you cry.

It’s nice not to be alone. To have somebody with you, even if he doesn’t know you. Even if he has no idea what it is that has you on the brink of a complete crisis.

You do your best not to think about it. Not about the baby, not about the guy who just dumped you. Not about gold foil and Instagram posts and wedding bands. Not about how he’s made you a homewrecker, and you didn’t even know.

Maybe this is karma. The universe punishing you for your sins. Something like that.

Maybe it’s just really, really bad luck.

“What are you doing here?” you ask when you’ve finally calmed yourself enough the sobbing has subsided to sniffles.

Bradley jerks his head noncommittally. “I forgot my wallet.”

“Oh.” You try to get up, but your legs won’t cooperate. “I’ll help you look.”

He shakes his head, pulls you back onto the floor by the elbow. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll look for it later. What happened?”

There’s something about his tone that tells you this time he won’t let you get away with a half-assed lie. Which doesn’t stop you from trying.

“Just… rough day.”

Bradley looks at you, then pulls his knees up, lets his arms dangle between them. “You don’t have to tell me,” he says, and his voice is very gentle. “But if you want to… I can listen.”

This is the thing about Bradley Bradshaw. He has the kind of face that makes you want to tell him things. Makes you want to spill your secrets to him, pour them into his space. He’s steady, reliable, calm. It would be so easy to trust him.

That’s dangerous.

But you’re so tired, and you’re so broken, and you’re so terribly, horribly lonely. With Luke gone, with your parents out of the picture, with nobody to help and no one to hold you, the loneliness is like an ache, like a stain, like something that festers and spreads and unfurls inside of you.

You just want to pretend you don’t have to do it alone. Just for a moment.

So you say, “I think I did something stupid.”

Bradley’s eyes are very brown. A soft shade of brown, like milk chocolate. When you look at him, you feel warm all over.

“Alright,” he says, and there isn’t an ounce of judgment in it. It’s just a gentle, careful nudge for you to continue.

“I…” You exhale shakily, look down to the floor, twist the bracelet around your wrist. It’s so much harder to form the words the second time around. “I’m pregnant.”

Saying it to Bradley, who is practically a stranger, saying it to someone outside of whatever little bubble, whatever vacuum two people playing at love built around themselves, makes it real in a way it wasn’t before.

You’re pregnant. In a few months, your belly is going to grow to the size of a watermelon. You’re going to get ultrasounds and wear maternity clothes and buy a crib. You’re going to hold a baby in your arms, a baby that will become a toddler, will become a child, will become a teenager, will become an adult. They’re never going to leave again.

I’m pregnant.

One moment - and in it the rest of your life.

It’s a skyscraper, it’s a monument, it’s a mountain. It dwarves you. How can you ever be enough for the path that lies ahead?

The panic jumps you. It rattles you. Suddenly you’re panting, you’re shaking, you can’t think, your head spinning circles around the enormity of it all.

“Oh,” Bradley says. He sounds like he expected you to say just about anything except that. “Congratulations.”

You stare at him, and he backtracks.

“Unless you don’t want me to congratulate you? Sorry, I shouldn’t just….”

“No,” you stop him, your voice a tiny, trembling thing. “It’s okay. Thank you.”

You wonder what it might be like if you were older, if you were married, if you weren’t such a fuck-up. Would people beam at you, hug you, shake your hand? Would they share the joy they must assume you feel?

Neither one of you says anything for a while. Through the opened windows, the sound of the ocean drifts in, of the waves crashing against the shore. The chrome of the fridge you’re leaning against is cold even through the layers of your shirt. You count the wooden tiles on the floor.

After half an eternity, Bradley says, “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

It’s like a knife to the heart, it slices right through you, stabs you between the ribs. And you’re not even angry, don’t even feel betrayed… it just hurts. The kind of pain that stays with you. The kind of pain that leaves phantom traces even after the wounds have healed.

“I don’t,” you say finally.

Beside you, Bradley shifts his weight. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m really putting my foot in it today, aren’t I?”

It’s almost enough to make you laugh. “It’s okay,” you say, even though it isn’t. This whole thing isn’t okay. “I’ll be fine.”

Without hesitating, Bradley says, “I know you will be.”

There’s such conviction in his voice that it baffles you. You stare at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“He’s… have you told him, though? Or are you guys not in contact?”

Still trying to recover, you shrug. “Yeah,” you whisper, drawing your shoulders almost all the way up to your ears, “I told him.”

You can tell he wants to ask more, but he gives you a second before his next question. “And you… you guys are gonna try co-parenting? Or is he… are you going to get married?”

That makes you frown. You say, “What is this, the 1950s?”

“I just think….” Bradley clears his throat. “I just think if you get a girl pregnant, you should step up. Take responsibility.”

Of course he’d think that. You’re not even surprised.

There’s always been something traditional about Bradley Bradshaw, like he’s one of those men written by women people rave about all over TikTok. If he takes a girl out on a date, he probably holds open car doors and pulls out chairs for her, hands her his jacket if she gets cold.

Distantly, you wonder what that would be like.

“I don’t want somebody to marry me out of responsibility,” you say. “I can take care of myself.”

Bradley scrambles. “I know that!” he says quickly, and out of the corner of your eye, you see him shift his weight forward, elbows resting on his thighs. “Of course, I know that. I just thought… I just thought you shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

It’s such a simple thing to say, but it almost bowls you over. You turn your head to the side, press your face into your shirt sleeve and dig your fingernails deep into the skin of your shins.

Bradley watches you, eyes intent, and then he probes carefully, “Are you… are you going to keep it?”

You sink your teeth into your lower lip, blink against the sudden dampness. Keep your face turned away from him. The shame of it all, of the situation you’re in, of him seeing you like this, overwhelms you. Your vision blurs.

“I think…” You swallow around the lump in your throat. “I always used to think if I ever got in this situation, I’d just get an abortion but now… I don’t… I just don’t think it’s the right thing for me.”

Slowly, he nods. “You want to have the baby,” he says, and it’s not really a question, but you answer anyway.

“Yes. I mean… I don’t know, it’s just… I want this. I don’t know why or how, but I… it feels like I have to do this.”

“Yeah,” Bradley says, completely sincere. “Your body, your choice.”

Now you do snort. “What, are we at a rally?”

“I follow a few Instagram accounts,” he admits. His voice has gone almost sheepish. “Abortion rights should be everybody’s concern. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

It’s endearing in a strange way because there’s nothing performative about it. It’s just bumbling and awkward and peculiarly genuine.

“You sound like you spend too much time on Twitter,” you say softly, and it makes him laugh. Bradley’s got a nice laugh, one that starts in his belly and seems to end at the back of his throat, punches out into the air from back there.

After things have gone quiet again, the anxiety sets back in. Or maybe it’s been there all along, chomping at the bit, and you just didn’t notice.

“You must think I’m crazy,” you say finally, a self-deprecating chuckle loosening from your throat.

But when you glance up at him from beneath lowered lashes, stomach tight with anticipation, Bradley doesn’t look judgmental at all. Instead, his face is wide open, his eyes clear, the corners of his lips still curled upward with the remnants of his smile.

Luke laughed at you, but Bradley is looking at you with something like admiration, and it takes your breath away.

“No,” he says. “I think you’re really, really brave.”

And then you’re crying again.

You’re surprised there are any tears left in you after your earlier session, but they burst forth now, in a sudden eruption of all the fear and all the pain. And Bradley is so nice. So goddamn kind even though he doesn’t know you, not really, even though this isn’t even his problem. Sits there on the floor of the Hard Deck with you at half past one am on a Sunday night, and doesn’t complain, doesn’t sigh. He just listens.

You don’t feel brave. You feel terrified, you feel overwhelmed, you feel… you feel… you feel like the whole world has toppled over. You feel like Atlas crashing down, buried beneath the weight of his burden. You feel tiny. Inadequate. You feel scared, scared, scared.

“I don’t know what to do,” you confess, choke it out between sobs. Wonder why you’re telling him this. When you don’t know him.

Funny how it is so much easier at times to be honest with strangers than it is to be honest with the people we love the most.

“I’m so… I’m so scared, Bradley.”

He moves as if to touch you, then seems to think better of it and slumps back into himself. The expression on his face is unreadable, his eyebrows furrowed, his jaw clenched.

“He’s not gonna… the father isn’t going to help you out?”

It makes you realize you never really answered his earlier question. And you don’t know why, can’t explain it rationally, but for some reason, this, too, makes embarrassment well up at the back of your throat.

What is Bradley going to think? The poor, little, stupid girl who got herself knocked up by a guy who won’t even stay? Is that what everybody’s going to think now? Is that all you’ll be?

It’s a life sentence, this whole thing.

You shrug, pause. Shake your head. “No,” you say finally. “He’s not going to be involved.”

You know it’s true. Luke won’t come back, not now, not in ten years, not in twenty. There was something final about that exchange, something permanent. Something that can’t be undone.

Suddenly, you think of that tiny, unborn child inside of you. Abandoned before it ever came into the world.

It’s just you and me now, baby, you think to yourself, and it goes through you like a current, sweeps you under like a wave. We’re all alone. All we have is each other.

“What about your parents? Your dad’s in the Navy, too, right?”

If you could, you’d run away. Fold yourself to invisibility. Slip into the pockets between moments and become something other, something that exists out of sight.

You think of your parents. Floral couches and polished hardwood floors. Tom Cruise on the television as your mother scrubbed every part of the house like she was getting rid of an illness, wiping away a disease, perpetually finding another stain or another cobweb or another wrinkle to smooth over. Think of your father, rigid and strict and absent. Always on some mission, always thinking of a greater good that definitely didn’t involve you, always looking through you even as he looked at you. You don’t know if you have a single memory of him smiling.

You haven’t spoken to them once since you gave up a perfectly fine full-ride scholarship to college.

“My parents,” you say, and as the words spill from you, you realize they’re the truth, “would probably kill me if they found out I got pregnant out of wedlock. Maybe if I were married, they’d give me back my trust fund or something, but… No, I don’t think they’d help me out.”

A muscle in Bradley’s jaw jumps, then he’s looking away. Turning to the side so you’re knee to knee again. You stare at his profile, at the curl of his ears, the cut of his jaw. The jagged edges of his scars blur through the fog of your tears.

“So, how are you… do you have a plan?”

You had one. You had Mojitos and Daiquiris and Cosmopolitans. You had a slew of business classes at a community college. You had a dream and a set of tools to achieve it, and when you close your eyes, you can almost see it right there in front of you.

But now it’s been swept up in a hurricane. Swallowed by a tsunami.

“No,” you admit, and your voice trembles. “I have no idea what to do.”

Bradley’s jaw moves as he chews on his lower lip. He swallows, and his throat unudlates with it, and then he’s shifting, shuffling forward a bit.

“I…” He clears his throat. If you didn’t know any better, you’d say he looks nervous. “I may have an idea.”

“An idea?” you repeat slowly.

You think he’s going to tell you about some friend who’s looking to hire someone, looking to rent out a very cheap apartment, works at a doctor’s office and is going to treat you for free. Something like that, maybe.

Instead, Bradley takes a deep breath and says, “Marry me.”

It takes a while for the words to register. At first, you think you’ve misheard, then you wonder if maybe the romantic parts of your mind cooked that up. If he even said it at all.

But Bradley is looking at you expectantly, the only indicator of nerves the slightest glimmer in his brown eyes.

And you can’t help yourself. You laugh, even through your tears. It’s a sound that rips from you unconsciously, unstoppably, because surely he’s joking. It’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard.

“Good one,” you say, and wonder just how big of a mess you look like. You wipe at your cheeks, your nose with your sleeves and sniffle once, twice.

Bradley’s lips twitch into the pathetic half of a smile, then he’s serious again, avoiding your eyes.

And that, finally, is when you realize that he isn’t joking at all.

“I…” You pause, mind whirring, head spinning. “What?”

“It’s just….” Bradley shrugs, then explains, “It’s only a suggestion. But you said your family might consider supporting you again if you were married. It might be an option.”

You don’t know what to say. You feel like you’re in a low-budget Hallmark movie.

Bradley pushes on, “It wouldn’t be permanent. We could get a divorce quickie in a year or two, just stay together long enough for you to get settled with the baby and everything. Plus, you’d get free healthcare.” He glances at you, and the blank expression on your face must light a panic in him. Now his words come faster. “I wouldn’t expect anything from you, of course I wouldn’t. It would just be… keeping up appearances. Just for a while….”

Finally, he trails off. The silence stretches between you like a palpable thing, thick and dense like summer heat.

When you were twelve, sitting in the back of the car as your parents argued up front, the woods of Washington flying past in rapid ribbons of black and blue and green, the moon a disk of silver in the sky, a deer ran out into the road. You remember the screeching of the tires as your dad did what you’re not supposed to and brought the car to a sudden, abrupt stillstand. You remember the wide eyes of the animal, the muscles locked in its state of catatonic horror. You remember the flanks rising and falling quickly beneath the matted fur.

For a second, you feel like that deer. Frozen. Caught completely off guard. Vulnerable.

Then you think you might be a little overdramatic.

You say, “What the fuck, Bradley?”

Part of you expects him to backtrack immediately, laugh, and tell you that he was joking after all. But Bradley stands his ground, even as he still won’t look right at you.

“I probably wouldn’t even be home much anyway. I leave for work all the time,” he says, brows drawn into a straight line above his eyes as he stares intently at his thumb rubbing circles into the skin of his arm. “But I could babysit, and then you could go back to work. I really wouldn’t mind. I’m good with kids, you know?”

You’re not entertaining the whole thing, not really, but you can’t help yourself. Your curiosity takes the upper hand.

“Why would you… why would you ever offer this? You barely know me.”

Bradley seems to think about it for a long moment, his face unreadbale. Then finally, he says, “There’d be something in it for me, too, you know? I’ve been meaning to get assigned to North Island permanently, do a relocation. But those spots tend to go to the guys with family, so…” He shrugs, but the gesture seems forced. “I could help you out, you could help me out. Win-win.”

“That’s all?” you ask, and you don’t know why there’s something like disappointment in your voice.

Bradley looks like he wants to say something else, and for a moment his face is vulnerable. But then it shutters again, and he nods. “That’s all.”

For a second, just a second, you let yourself imagine it: Imagine saying yes to this mad, insane, incredible proposal. Imagine marrying Bradley, someone soft and warm and responsible, someone completely opposite to Luke. Imagine him in a tux and you in a white dress, imagine his mustache tickling against your cheek as he leans in to kiss you. You imagine one of the quaint little houses you grew up in, but one that would belong to you, at least for a while. You imagine a toddler running through it, imagine Bradley bending down to scoop them into his arms. You imagine a life without this aching, shifting loneliness. You imagine a life with Bradley.

When you finally shake your head, when you let go of that ghost, it feels like it takes a piece of you with it.

“No,” you say softly, and it breaks you open in ways you can’t describe. “I can’t let you do that, Bradley.”

It’s just too insane. Too far out there. It wouldn’t be fair to him, when you’d be getting so much more out of that arrangement.

And besides. I don’t want someone to marry me out of responsibility. That’s what you told Bradley earlier, and you meant it.

When you do marry, when you walk down that aisle, you want it to be for love. And people can call you delusional, naive, whatever. You don’t care. You just know you want the big thing, the real thing, True Love, capital t, capital l. You want the hurricane of romance, the monsoon of love. You want to fly into it.

Bradley’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Okay. But if you… change your mind, yeah? I’ll be here.”

And he means it. Bradley carries his heart on his sleeve, you’ve learned this much. He tries to hide it, but he’s no good at it. Eventually, his emotions always get the better of him, burst forth like fountains. It’s part of his charm.

“What,” you say, “right here on the Hard Deck’s floors?”

It’s a sad attempt at a joke, but Bradley is nice enough to laugh anyway. “Sure thing. You guys have the cleanest floors in all of North Island, did you know that?”

You hum. “Sure. I’m the one who cleans them.”

Finally, you get up off the floor, unfold yourself from the bundle of misery you’ve crumbled into. Your legs ache, your back hurts, your chest still feels hollow. All the crying has left a dull pain pulsating behind your left brow.

The two of you look for Bradley’s wallet together, finally find it over by the pool table. You pretend like you’re not still reeling from his proposal, like it’s not suddenly become impossible to do so much as look at him without your heart flopping around like a fish finding its sad end on dry land.

“Can I give you a ride home?” Bradley asks as he watches you lock up. The Hard Deck has an old lock that gets jammed whenever the slightest bit of dampness creeps into the air. You have to hang onto the doorknob with all your weight while simultaneously turning the key to get it to lock.

“I drove here,” you say, casting your eyes about for the tiny tin can you call your car. You can’t even remember where you parked earlier.

“You okay to drive?” Bradley asks.

You glance at him. With the lights off, the parking lot is almost covered in a thick blanket of darkness. The headlights of a few passing cars winding their path along the coastal highway illuminate patches of gravel now and then. Moonlight spills silver and dim across his shoulders, like fingers caressing him. He looks concerned, examining the state of you.

The truth is that you’re tired. Bone tired. Dead tired. So tired you could probably go to sleep where you stand if you put your mind to it. But you don’t want to bother Bradley anymore, have already stolen enough of his time.

So you’re about to decline, but it seems you hesitated too long.

“I’ll take you home,” Bradley says decidedly, “and you can come get your car tomorrow, okay? I don’t think you should be driving like this.”

“You don’t have to do that, you….”

“I know,” he interrupts you, a smile spreading on his face. “But I’ll feel better knowing you got home safe.”

That makes your insides clench in a way they shouldn’t. Your chest feels tight, and you look away just in case you start crying again.

Is it too soon in your pregnancy to start blaming raging hormones?

Wordlessly, you let Bradley lead you across the parking lot toward his monstrosity of a car. His hand hovers at the small of your back, incredibly close yet never touching. He’s big behind you, bulking, and you try not to think about it. When he opens the door for you and waits until you’re buckled in to close it, you feel like your head’s going to explode.

The ride home is quiet, as is the town around you on this Sunday night. An old Killers song plays on the radio, and you think of deer stepping out into streets, then press your eyes closed and will the thought away.

In Bradley’s car, with the windows rolled down, with the Californian night breeze whipping your hair into your eyes and clearing the fog from your head, for a short, blissful while, nothing seems real. It’s one of those liminal moments, a not-time, when reality feels like a dream and even the sharpest knives don’t cut deep enough to hurt.

It ends quicker than expected because time always goes the fastest when you want it to go slow. Then you’re thanking him, saying goodbye, both of you pretending he didn’t just propose some strange, fake marriage to you behind a bar counter not even thirty minutes ago.

Bradley waits until you’re inside the building before he starts the engine again. You hear the roar of it as you climb the stairs up to the second floor.

In your bedroom, you don’t even bother getting undressed. You just slip under the covers, pull them up over your head, bury in the sticky, stale air beneath them, close your eyes, and fall asleep within seconds.

The first time you told your parents about your bartending dreams, your father yelled at you for forty-five minutes. He hurled words at you that hurt, that left scars, that made you wonder and kept you second-guessing yourself for years, that stayed with you. Your mother didn’t say anything.

Somehow, that was worse.

You call her on the landline at five pm on a Tuesday, just before your dad gets back home, and she answers after the third ring. You’re so sure she’s going to acknowledge the four-year gap in contact, the crumbling of the relationship, the fall-out of screaming and crying, and your dad kicking you out of the house.

What you get, instead, is a ten-minute spiel about who brought what to last week’s church potluck and which laundry detergent your father’s contact allergies don’t act up with.

You’re sitting cross-legged on your bed, your digital alarm clock counting down the time in radioactive green. Outside, you hear the sounds of jets roaring through the sky. In your tiny kitchen unit, the faucet is leaking.

Finally, five minutes into a lecture on the advantages of pre-chopped garlic, you interrupt, “Mom?”

You wonder if she hears the shift in your voice, the slight tremble of it. Something makes her go very quiet on the other end of the line, no sound but her breath.

Drip-drip-drip goes your faucet.

When she doesn’t acknowledge you, you push on, your heart beating a staccato rhythm against your ribcage, “I might… I think I might need some help.”

She doesn’t answer for so long you think you might have lost connection. Then you hear shuffling, imagine her walking through her empty house the way she sometimes does - like a phantom, like a specter.

“With what?” she asks after an eternity.

It’s all you can do to keep yourself from hyperventilating. Years of pain and fear clog up your chest, settle like goosebumps on your skin. You close your eyes and let your head drop back against your pillow.

“I’m pregnant,” you say.

And then you can feel it through the phone, like something physical. What you’ve always known deep down. The disapproval and the disappointment, and the complete lack of understanding.

You’ve never been who your parents wanted you to be, and they’ve always punished you for it like it was a crime.

When your mother says your name, it’s so plain. That she can’t understand what you’re doing, with your cocktails and your late nights. That she doesn’t see why you’d ever choose something like that over a real education and a real job. That she cannot fathom how it could come to this now - you, broke, young, alone, pregnant.

It’s like being five again, trying to get somebody to look at the picture you drew. It’s like being ten again and being overlooked. It’s like being fifteen again, still vying for the attention you’ll never really get.

Your mother is a stubborn woman, set in her ways. She knows what she wants from people, more specifically, what she wants for them. And you’re no exception. Nobody’s ever asked her a question whose answer she couldn’t find in the bible.

More than wanting you to go to college, wanting you to work in an office, your mother has always wanted you to get married. To fit yourself into the picture-perfect stencil of white picket fence and smiling husband she cut herself. For you to let some guy put a ring on you, put a kid in you, buy you a house and a porch swing and a family van.

It’s pathetic, but it doesn’t matter how much time passes. How much older you get. At the end of the day, you still want her approval, just once, even if you have to lie to get it.

So, like a child, like you’re five again, like you’re ten again, like you’re fifteen again, you say, “I’m getting married.”

“Oh?” your mother asks, and there’s so much hope in the one word it hits you like a ton of bricks.

“Yeah,” you confirm, and then the lies just burst out of you, and you hate yourself, hate yourself so much it’s like bile on your tongue, “yeah, we’ve been engaged for a while, and now with the baby and all… It’s been long overdue.”

Your mother almost sounds excited. Sure, she’d probably prefer for you to have been married before getting knocked up, but all of this must still seem better than the last plan you presented to her four years ago. “What’s his name? What’s he do?”

You squeeze your eyes closed. If your mother knew you at all, if you hadn’t spent the past few years not speaking, you’d like to think she would have heard the shame in your voice when you say, “Bradley. He’s a Naval aviator.”

It might be the worst thing you’ve done in your life: Dragging poor, kind Bradley Bradshaw into the mess you’ve made of your life. Nevermind that he offered. It doesn’t matter.

Your mother starts babbling, the way she only does when she’s actually pleased about something. She’s talking about how happy your dad will be that you’re getting married to a fellow army guy, but you barely hear it. Now that you’ve gotten the approval, it doesn’t feel at all like you thought it would.

It just hurts.

For a while, you just let her keep talking as you blink away the tears, as you stare at your bedroom wall, as your mind spins and spins and spins in circles. Then you promise to send her an invite, say your goodbyes, and hang up.

It’s like you’re numb all over. You stay on your bed for another five minutes, and then another, and you feel just as empty as you did after your last conversation with Luke.

What has your life become? How could it crumble as quickly as it did, going from okay to horrible in less than a week?

Even when you weren’t speaking to your parents, you never felt this distant from them, this far removed. A chasm you’ll never be able to breach. An ocean you’re never going to bridge. The only way you’ve ever gotten your mother to be happy with a decision you’ve made is when you lied to her.

The loneliness is everywhere, then. In your chest, in your bed, in your veins. Crawling like a shadow that swallows you whole.

And then the panic sets in, ice cold in your veins, and with it comes the guilt. Your stomach rolls with it.

What have I done? you wonder. What have I done to myself, to Bradley? How will I ever get out of this?

You scramble. Blindly reach for a dress to slip into, for a pair of flip-flops, for your car keys. It’s a miracle you don’t crash on your way to the Hard Deck. Your heart works itself up into a frenzy, and the guilt gnaws at you, slashes at you, paws at you. All these emotions are tearing you apart.

In the back, Bradley and Bob are playing Pacman on one of the retro machines. They’re pretty loud, too, and from what you gather in your mad dash through your workplace, Bradley seems to be disproportionally competitive about the whole thing.

Figures. Nobody gets into Top Gun without a cutthroat streak and a mean penchant for ambition.

“Bradley,” you say, and when he looks up, his eyes sparkling, the smile slides right off his face. “Can I talk to you?”

He seems stunned for a second, then nods and deposits his beer on a nearby table. “Sure thing.”

You lead him out the back. Out of the corner of your eyes, you spot the exact corner you huddled in a few days back, agonizing over the positive pregnancy test, the decline of your life, the decay of your dreams. Don’t look, you tell yourself, and then do it anyway.

The sun hasn’t set yet, but twilight is descending on the world rapidly. Everything is washed into soft pastels, the sand and the last surfers shaking salt water from their hair. Bradley’s shirt and the honey gold of his skin.

You can’t look at him. It’s a shame that grows in the pit of your stomach, that settles there, heavy like a stone. How can you do this to him?

You’ve never felt worse about yourself, and still… The fear is too big.

Since you decided to give up on the scholarship, since you walked out of your parents house four years ago, you’ve been on your own. You’ve been footing your own bills and renting your own apartment and paying for insurance on your car. You were alone the time you got a cold so bad you couldn’t get out of bed for two days. You were alone when your tire popped on the highway and you almost hit another car. You were alone when you got rejection after rejection from the big San Diego bars, the ones that end up featured on TV and in magazines.

And that was fine. You’re strong, you know you are. Any issue that came your way, you managed to figure out eventually. You’ve been doing fine without any help.

But this, here, now. This… You just can’t do it on your own. Not when it’s about a baby. Your baby.

So you take a deep breath and ask, “Is the offer still on the table?”

Bradley exhales. You watch as he takes a step closer to you, as his shoes move in the field of your vision, grains of sand crunching beneath the soles. When he speaks, a cadence of insecurity has snuck into his voice, “The marriage?”

You nod because you can’t say it. Your mouth just won’t form the words.

“If…” Bradley clears his throat. “If you want it… yeah.”

When you look up at him, there’s something strange on his face. Something that looks less like surprise and more like awe.

His eyes are so brown, and your heart beats so fast, and you’re dizzy like you just got off a rollercoaster.

“I…” You pause to collect your thoughts, and then you rush it all out at once, scared that if you don’t say it now, you never will. “If I were to say yes, like, hypothetically… I’d need to know that you’re not just doing it for me. That there’s something in it for you, too, so….”

He’s nodding before you’ve finished. “I told you. I wanna stay here. I’m sick of getting sent around the country all the time, so… It’s good. It’s an opportunity.”

An opportunity. That sounds like business, sounds like a transaction, sounds rational and level-headed and reasonable, and you latch onto the idea. Maybe if you try to take the emotion out of the equation, it’ll be easier.

Bradley seems relaxed about the whole thing, much more relaxed than he should be given the absurdity of the situation, but you feel like you need to make things clear anyway, if only to put yourself at ease. That’s what people do before singing contracts, right? Put all the cards out on the table?

So you go on, “And I wouldn’t, like… Like you’d still get to do anything you want. I wouldn’t expect you to help with the baby or anything. And you could keep dating, of course, you could, I won’t mind. I promise. It’d just be for show, right?”

Bradley hesitates, and for a second, you think he’s going to say something. But then he just shrugs, nods, says, “That’s fine. Yeah. Whatever you want.”

For a moment, you both just look at each other.

“This is insane,” you say because it is, and you don’t know what else to say.

And Bradley just chuckles and agrees smoothly, “Yeah, it’s nuts, isn’t it?”

As you look at him, here in this pastel lighting, here on the verge of something monumental, there’s something so reassuring about him. Something so steady and reliable and constant. Something that makes you think, with him, maybe it could be okay, no matter how insane the whole idea is. An opportunity. An investment that just might pay off.

North star, you remind yourself. Bradley Bradshaw is the North Star.

At the very least, you won’t be alone.

“So is that….” Bradley shifts, scratches the back of his neck. “You saying yes, then?”

There’s a lump in your throat like you’ve swallowed a pebble. It almost chokes you.

“Yeah,” you agree finally, and can’t believe you’re saying this, doing this, can’t believe you’re this mad and this selfish and this desperate. “I guess I am.”

It’s awkward after that. You both just stand there, you with your arms around your own ribcage, Bradley with his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. Space and silence stretches far and gaping and glaring between you.

Then he says, “Can I hug you?”

That’s sort of the last thing you expected him to say.

You blink at him. “Uhm… sure?”

When Bradley pulls you into his arms, when he holds you against his chest loosely, carefully, giving you room to pull away at any moment, the whole thing almost bowls you over. It’s the first time anybody’s hugged you since you found out you’re pregnant, since your entire world came crashing down, and you can’t help yourself. It’s a visceral reaction. You cling to him, wrap your arms around his neck, press your face into his shoulder and your chest against his and squeeze your eyes shut, and stay there for longer than you planned to, longer than you should. Let him hold you tight enough that for a moment, for a while, it almost feels like you’re whole again. Like you’re not alone.

For the first time in a week, for the first time since that positive test, things feel real. You feel real. Only with his hands on you. The thoughts that have been echoing through your head constantly, loud enough to drown out everything else, quiet.

You could get addicted to it, could get greedy and selfish and never-satisfied. Could eat it raw.

Bradley smells like sunscreen and sandalwood. You try to commit that scent to memory, try to ingrain it into your brain and your body. Something to remember the next time the loneliness sets in.

Finally, he pulls away, and his smile is gentle. You feel every inch of separation like an ache in your bones, like an echo, like a reverberation.

You can’t cry again. You’ve been doing it so much recently that you just won’t allow it again. If you’re going to do this, if you’re going to be a mother and a wife, in whatever capacity, you’ll have to be strong. No matter how hard that will be.

“I don’t even have a ring for you,” Bradley says, a frown etching itself into his forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh.” You’re shaking your head quickly, vehemently. “No, Bradley, that’s fine, you don’t need to….”

“I think you should have something, though. I want to give you something,” he interrupts you. “I just don’t know….”

And then he seems to think of something. The epiphany is practically written all over his face, and for a moment, he looks so much younger. Rosy cheeks and all.

Bradley reaches into his wifebeater and pulls his dog tags from beneath the fabric. Before you know what’s happening, he’s tugging the thin silver chain down over your head, moving your hair out of the way carefully. It settles against the skin of your neck, warmed by his body heat.

You stare down at the metal dangling over your dress, the letters of his name etched into it. Bradley Bradshaw.

Your heart seizes.

When you were younger, much younger, you used to dream of this. You used to imagine what being proposed to would feel like, what it would be like. A fancy restaurant, an expensive glass of champagne, and a diamond ring at the bottom of the flute. Something flashy, something extravagant, something beautiful. The man in your fantasy was faceless at first, and then he looked like Robert Pattinson, and then he looked like your first crush, and then he went back to being faceless again.

He never had a mustache. He was never a stranger. Your dreams were never this: Rushed and fake and no ring at all. You, pregnant with somebody else’s baby, and Bradley, marrying you to get assigned to a base of his choosing. None of it real. No True Love, no capital t, no capital l. Not even lowercase. Nothing but madness and guilt and business between you.

And still you want it, want it so bad it swells inside you, pushes against your ribcage with enough pressure to crack bones - you want to be wanted.

You wonder what Bradley dreamed of. Not you, probably. So much younger than him, so naive, so gullible, falling for married men and getting yourself into situations you can’t climb out of yourself. Making him do this when he deserves better, more, deserves something true and real.

It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to cry. It makes you want to ask Bradley to hug you again, so you can forget, just for another second, just for another moment.

Instead, you say, voice barely a whisper, “Thank you.”

Bradley shakes his head. “You don’t have to thank me,” he says, and he sounds so genuine you have to avert your eyes. “We’re friends, right?”

Friends. This man you barely know. This man who is doing something unfathomable for you.

“Yeah,” you agree softly. “Friends.”

And then later, in the bar, as Bradley’s friends discuss some new Star Wars show you haven’t seen, as they order round after round of beer you can’t drink, as the sky goes from pastels to blues to blacks, you’ll pretend you don’t see Natasha staring at the dog tags around your neck, pretend you don’t wish you could hold Bradley’s hand, pretend you don’t feel like you’re falling apart, like you’re capsizing where you sit, like you're kicking water miles and miles and miles below the surface.

Beneath the table, you put a hand on your stomach, fingers spreading out, close your eyes, and let the current drag you under.

part 2

#rooster #bradley bradshaw #rooster x reader #rooster imagine #bradley bradshaw x reader #top gun imagine #mine #f:blph

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claraswritings · 2 years ago

Text

Stay For Now, I Love You Forever

Pairing: Steven Grant x Reader (a tiny bit of Marc Spector x Reader- pining)

Summary: Steven meets a girl. Steven falls for her. Marc falls too.

Warning: Some angst. Set mostly pre-series. (Also for the sake of the fic, Marc is already divorced). First time writing Steven/Marc/Moon Knight system. This is not spell checked as I’m posting at nearly 2AM lol.

A/N: Meant to finish this sooner but I got Covid :( Tagged @marvelenthusiast10 )

***

“Okay Steven…what’s your symptoms.”

The man before you shifted in the chair, drumming his fingers on his jeans, eyes flickering over the walls. It looked like he was battling the urge to run away. It was obvious that he felt awkward, and you couldn’t blame him. It was pretty bizarre having to explain your sleep symptoms to a total stranger.

“Right…” Steve started then trailed off “Sorry Uhh…” he hesitated once more as he looked away from you and rested his gaze on the view from the window. where he could see I t had started to snow heavily.

“Huh…it’s snowing.” He commented “Didnt know it was going to snow? Did you?…Do you think the buses will be running?”

Sensing his rambling was a outburst of nerves, something to distract himself, you attempted to placate him “I didn’t…but I like the snow… I’m sure the buses will be fine but I’ll check the TfL website for you before you go. Do you need a drink?”

Steven brought his dark eyed gaze back to you. “Right sorry, sorry…” he muttered, scratching his jaw… “I’ll get to the point and stop rambling…”

“It’s okay…take your time…” you reassured him. “I have lots of time”

He hesitated, once more before he took a breath for composure

“Okay, so sometimes, yeah, I wake up… and…I‘ve lost… hours or even sometimes days at a time…like couple of weeks ago… I went to bed on Friday…” he gestured, with one hand, the sleeve of his over sized jacket sliding up as he did “but I woke up on Sunday…but I’m still tired…Fell asleep on the bus…” he trailed off for only long enough to rake a hand through his wavy dark hair “Feel like I’ve been hit by one too.”

He gave you a muted smile, as he pulled the long sleeves of his blue jacket back down.

Your lips lifted at corner as a response to his joke, and you nodded slowly, writing down what he was saying.

“That’s not normal is it? Losing days…” He frowned a little, his gaze on you, as you could feel him almost crying out for help “I feel like I’m losing my bloody mind.” He mumbled, his voice quiet.

“No Steven, you’re not, a lack of sleep can do all sorts of things to our bodies, that’s why I’m here. Sleep is a very difficult thing to get right… but we can help you…once we work out what might be causing whatever is happening…do you have any other symptoms? Do you ever sleep walk?”

“See… I thought maybe I did, cause I’d wake up and be like coming back through the door…” Steven leant forward, uncrossing his arms to draw a circle in the air “But like the sand circle would still be yknow in a circle, right? So I can’t be?” He spoke as if he was offering a suggesting, shoulders moving up and down in a shrug that did not look as nonchalant as he had clearly hoped

Now he’d lost you.

“Sand circle?”

“Oh god I’m gonna sound like a right weirdo…” he flopped back in the seat. “I put the sand circle around my bed…, yeah, cause if I was sleep walking I’d shuffle and ruin it.” Steven explained with a wave of his hand. “Wouldn’t I?”

You had to admit it, it was clever, if a little unconventional. “Yeah, that’s actually quite a good idea… never heard that one but I like it.” You nodded encouragingly. As the years you’d spent helping set up various sleep studies, you’d heard all the classics-no caffeine, no cheese, lavender oil, hot baths, white noise, black out curtains… but you’d never heard of using a sand circle to test if you were sleeping walking.

“That and the restraint on the bed.” Steven tacked on then instantly realised what he clicked your eyebrows shooting upwards “Not like that...I’m not like…” He muttered, a red creeping up over his face, as his hand crept up to itch the back of his neck. “Don’t really get the chance for anything like that with the…funny sleeping stuff and that…” he trailed off.

stoptalking stoptalking stoptalking stoptalking. He told himself internally and shook his head, trying not to visibly shudder at his own awkward comment. How he’d just told you, the prettiest woman he’d seen in…god knows how long, that he had a restraint on his bed. God Steven, way to show off your glaring red flag.

“You…you have a restraint?” you paused, trying not to smile at the flustered man before you, as he now was staring directly at the spot where your desk met carpet. “To prevent the sleepwalking of course.”

The comment about not having the chance stuck out to you. Must mean he’s single.

“Yeah, uh..I have tape too for the… for the door. So I can’t get out and bother anyone…Tried to keep myself up aswell, listened to a podcast and did the stuff it said… puzzles, reading books, all that…didn’t work though…”

His eyes shot back to you as hand ran through his thick wavy hair again Everything about him was a bundle of nerves from the fidgeting to the eyes looking from you to the window and back to the tangents, now on top of that, he was worried his sleep issue would bother anyone. You couldn’t help but feel for him.

“And how long have you been using these… techniques for?”

“Oh god…” he blew out a long exhale “I don’t actually know…to be quite honest…ages now…Doctor”

“It’s okay Steven, anything that can help you is worth trying…and I’m not a doctor… I’m a sleep…tech…” you held your hands up. “I just check you in and help with results.”

“Oh..sorry…” he faltered, a little embarrassed , trying to find the words “…Ms. Sleep… Tech…Technician?… Technologist?”

He cringed inwardly at his own sentence only seconds after the words had left his mouth and for the… he’d lost count… time since he’d entered the room.

“Just….[Name]”

Once again, you weren’t pulling back, recoiling or phased by his awkwardness. You were, much to his surprise, smiling at him. Not the weird passive smile Donna gave him when asking, or rather telling him, to stay late. Not the fake nicety smile exhausted tourists usually gave him, you were actually smiling at him like you thought he was funny. The smile you were giving him was so genuine and warm, he felt himself relax under your eyes.

“You must always be well rested. Must be nice.” Steven attempted to extend the conversation, hoping his attempt wasn’t too ungraceful.

“Ah. You’d be surprised,” There was a smile toying at the corner of your mouth “I’m better at giving advice than I am at following it.”

“Suppose It’s like chefs innit…they come home and probably just Deliveroo themselves a Nando’s or KFC or something?”

You laughed “Yeah, exactly what I mean…Now look…I know this is going to sound cliche but…problems with sleep, it’s more common than you think.” Pausing, you put your notebook down, and leant in, elbows planted on the desk. “But basically in your deepest stage of sleep… your brain switches off the muscles… so you won’t be acting out your dreams or anything crazy. If you are in that stage, you won’t go anywhere, Steven.”

You turned one of your folders over and pushed a case plan towards him, and pointing out the diagrams with the end of your pen.

“We’ll chart your brainwaves whilst you’re asleep… then we can use them to work out what’s going on.”

“And that’ll help me?” He sounded hopeful as his gaze ran over the notes, following your make shift pointer.

“Yeah I hope so, i mean it might not stop the processes but it’ll help us understand what’s going on.”

“You must think I’m a right weirdo…but it’s nice…to talk to someone that isn’t my fish…or the living statue bloke,” Steven turned back to you, giving you a thankful look. “Or my boss.” He pulled a face.

“I don’t think you’re weird, Steven… I want to help you. I’ll listen for as long as you need me to”

You hadn’t automatically assumed he was some weirdo which was a relief. He felt comfortable with you like you actually wanted to help him rather than judging him.

There was a moments silence, then your eyes flicked down to the notebook that lay between you and back to Steven.

“Do you drink tea…or coffee?”

“Oh… um, just tea with soy milk and one sugar. Sometimes a hot chocolate? Although that’s not caffeine is it? I wouldn’t mind one of those flavoured ones, Think they do them that cafe around the corner if you’d like?” He grinned somewhat awkwardly “they do refills…which you know in London, gotta get your moneys worth… it’s expensive.”

You felt a heat creep up your face “Erm…it’s for the questionnaire? I need to know how much caffeine you’re drinking?”

“Oh..oh god I’m sorry, I’ve just put my foot in it havent I?… I thought you were…and now I’m rambling, I do that…”

“But…yes Steven. I’d love to have any hot drink with you…”

“Wait. Really?” Steven faltered, surprised.

“Of course. I finish at half five. I’ll meet you there.”

And when you’d walked into the cafe, saw him already waiting there, drink gently steaming on the table and book in hand, reading glasses on, you’d slid in beside him and had never looked back.

When Steven offered to meet you at your flat to go for dinner two days later, you agreed. It was suggestion, that had it come from any of the fuck boys in your Tinder matches would have had you hitting the un match button…but with Steven…you knew he was being sweet.

You knew he wasn’t just asking to try get into your place and into your underwear, although you wouldn’t have minded. He was asking because he didn’t want you to walk to the Tube station alone in the dark.

Steven had wrapped up in a winter coat, and worn a dark blue scarf and matching gloves. He brought chocolate and a dozen pink roses, which as he’d handed over, he’d told you that he noticed your notebook had been pink and thought it was a safe bet for the colour. Before you could say thank you he’d already apologised for the chocolates incase you hated them or incase he’d got the colour wrong.

You’d kissed him on the cheek, told them they were perfect and that you’d share the chocolates with him, before linking your gloved hands together and starting your walk to your favourite Asian restaurant in Camden, where he’d had a tofu version of a curry and you’d had chicken teriyaki skewers. It was closing time before you’d left arm in arm, giggling as you walked together.

As you made your way back to the Tube station, Steven had excitedly wanted to try a bubble waffle, so you’d opted for a shared vegan friendly version and ate it with two forks. You’d hugged him outside the station then met him outside his work two days later…and before long you’d fallen into an easy pattern of dating.

The first time he hadn’t called when he said he would, was one month into dating and he was eight hours late. Steven had saw the voicemails left from you and panicked, fully expecting the “you’re an arsehole, never talk to me again” but no, you’d called him to check he was okay, came by his place and even posted a card through his letterbox telling him you were thinking of him and you hoped he was okay.

You were worried.

Steven kept that card in the top drawer of his beside table alongside a napkin from your first date, one of the gratuity sweets from your second, the first note you’d ever wrote to him, a puzzle you’d bought to do together and a model pyramid you’d saw online and thought of him. You’d said you just saw it on Amazon, but it wasn’t one you could just buy. Steven knew from the model that you’d have had to buy it from a specific retailer. You’d never tell him you googled it specifically but he loved that you did.

He knew he loved you then and there

“Hey babe.” You stuck your head around the entrance to the gift shop and grinned at him.

Steven, at the sight of you, dropped the plush back into a box and ran to you, squeezing you tight.

“Hiya love, I’m just finishing up here. Won’t be five minutes and I’ll be over to you” he kept his hands on your waist as you wrapped yours around his neck and kissed him before reaching up and straightening the collar of his patterned shirt

“Okay, babe. I’ll just wander around. We can go to that new bakery if you like. I’ve checked the menu, they do have vegan options.”

His lips curled into a smile and he squeezed your hand by way of thanking you before you headed off to wait for him.

“That sounds brilliant. Really good!”

“Stevie!” A call rang out from across the room and Steven rolled his eyes

“Oh fuck Donna.”

“Stevie! I told you the answers no. So just stop talking to guests…alright? Leave it to the real tour guides…”She turned to you, not giving him the chance to reply “Is he bothering you?”

“Actually…” you wrapped your arm around Steven. “He’s not. I’m…”

“Oh…Stevie’s girlfriend.” Donna pointed at you “Gunna be honest, thought he’d made you up. Kept saying you were dead pretty and let him talk. Didn’t actually think you were real.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Thought he was bothering the guests again!”

“Well Steven is a wealth of information, and I want my info from the best source” you gave her as friendly of a smile as you could muster.

“Best source is a tour guide” she smiled “but I’m glad he has someone to listen to his weird rambling.”

“I’d rather hear about it from someone with a passion for it”

“I’m sure our guides are plenty passionate.” She turned on her heel to face Steven. “Clock off please. I’m not paying you to chat to your girlfriend.”

“Sure, Donna. Pleasure as always.” He gave a curt wave, however she had already stalked off before she could return the acknowledgment. “Back in a sec, love.” He leant in and pecked your lips before disappearing off to clock out.

When he returned a few minutes later you linked you arm through his, and noticing he looked slightly dejected, attempted to offer him some comfort.

“She doesn’t know what she’s missing out on. I’ve done a few of these tours and I’ve learnt more from listening to you at home than I have from any of them”

“Really?” He perked up “Cause we have this new exhibit, it’s basically like the super group of Egyptian gods and it’s really interesting…the posters only show seven but there’s nine and…” Steven was suddenly conscious he was babbling but when he looked at you, he was still holding your attention.

“Tell me about it?” You asked him.

“About the super group?” Steven was quick to check, excited at the chance to discuss his passion before stopping. “I don’t want to bore you, love”

“You won’t.” You gave his arm a reassuring squeeze through

Steven could never bore you, everything about him was captivating. He was so excited and so passionate about Egyptian mythology that you couldn’t help but be drawn in by his wide eyed enthusiasm. You liked it when he went off on a tangent. It was cute.

“I love you, you know. And not just because you let me go on about Egyptology or that, I just really do love you, and I never thought I’d get that.”

“I love you too Steven.” You kissed him. “Now tell me about these super gods, I wanna know about the missing ones…”

***a few weeks later***

Marc froze. You were half asleep-half awake, the lights from the window, casting bright lights through the window of Stevens flat. You looked angelic, the slopes of your face, the curves of your body as you pulled the duvet tighter.

He’d watched from the background as you and Steven had fallen for each other over the past few months and Marc had, having seen how you were to Steven, had fallen for you too.

He’d realised it when he saw how gentle you were with Steven, after he’d woken one night when you’d been staying the night. He’d stumbled back to bed, a struggle to keep control of the body and barely collapsed into a half slumber before Steven had woke with a jolt around fifteen minutes later, pulling hard at the restraint and checking around him.

**flashback**

“Hey hey, it’s me babe, you’re okay…” you, on instinct, sat up next to Steven. He was checking the restraint, pulling at it hard to make sure it was in place. “…Steven, babe. You’re here, I’m with you, it’s okay.”

You reached for him slowly not making contact until Steven turned to meet your eyes. He was breathing heavy, chest heaving and shoulders tight, brow furrowed as you wrapped one arm around him and held his hand with the other.

“Steven. You haven’t had anything like this in a while.”

It was the first time you’d been there when it had happened. Usually, if Steven had a rough night, he’d call you and you’d talk and you’d stay with him listening.

“Im here babe.” You whispered

“Youre here.” His voice sounded so small and lost and such a far cry from how you’d ever heard him. A part of your heart broke seeing your usual bubbly, chatty Steven such a wreck. “I thought you’d left.”

“No. No.” You pulled him into you, lying back with his head on your shoulder as you carefully carded your hand through his curls. “I’m not leaving.…” You reached for his hand and pressed a kiss to the back of his knuckles. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Please stay for now”

“Of course, for as long as you need me.”

Marc had felt so guilty that night that he’d resolved that he wouldn’t go far when you were staying the night. Steven deserved some happiness, a sense of peace, some chance to be normal so tonight he’d kept it short, a quick hour before returning back to you.

Marc wondered if he’d met you first…rather than Steven, would you have fallen in love with him? Would you be stroking circles on his back and whispering sweet nothings to him when he woke in the dead of the night, freaked out and panicking.

He doubted it. Everything you loved was so rooted in Steven. Sweet, endearingly quirky, good-natured, warm hearted, clever Steven, who was nothing like Marc.

You were always staring at Steven, looking in his big wide eyes, playing with the fluffy curls that Marc usually slicked back, sliding your hands under Steven’s oversized clothes that Marc hated, asking him questions about the book Steven was reading that Marc didn’t know anything about, offering suggestions for whatever puzzle Steven was looking at that Marc didn’t care for, you cooked Steven vegan versions of your own lunches where Marc would have preferred the meat, you left cute notes for Steven to find. You called him Babe all the time.

Steven deserved the world but, god how Marc was jealous. He wanted you to look at him the way you looked at Steven. He could feel it heavy on his shoulders as he breathed and like an open wound in his chest.

“Steven?” He froze in the spot where he was, you turned over in the bed, voice half asleep. “Come back to bed. It’s cold.” You muttered

“Shhh, back to sleep.” He had hoped you wouldn’t notice the change from London to American as he whispered approaching the bed.

“Babe you’re talking different.” you muttered.

The second of silence that passed felt like an age to Marc, the only sound was his hammering heart rate, before you filled the room with a sleepy laugh “You’re so funny…I love you Steven.”

And like that you were back to sleep, leaving Marc alone with his own racing heart.

**a few weeks later**

Steven had been gone for five days. You’d spent most of your mornings leaving early for work to drop in on him and see if he’d shown up, your lunch breaks scouring the local news to see if an anonymous man had shown up in any hospitals, you’d called almost every hospital and police station within a ten mile radius. The police had told you they’d “note his name and description” and let you know. By Wednesday you’d even went to his work twice only for Donna to tell you Steven doesn’t work here.

You’d began to wonder you should be going back to the police to tell them the missing person you’d reported still had not shown up when you heard a knocking at your door

“Gimme a minute,” You called out as pulled yourself off the sofa and headed to the door. Hauling it open you half expected to see your neighbour or the postman. What you were not expecting to see was your boyfriend, in a baggy navy jumper, hair sticking up at all angles and looking like he’d come off a 72 hour all nighter.

He wouldn’t have of course, Steven barely drank so you couldn’t process exactly how or what the fuck had happened until he spoke.

“Hi.” He managed to get out “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”

“Steven…You‘ve been gone for days…where the fuck where you?” Your mouth formed the words, quieter, more concerned than angry.

Instead of saying a word, you felt him slump into your arms, exhausted.

“Fucking hell Steven, what happened?” You repeated yourself with a mutter as you looped an arm around his waist and the other you used to support him and helped him to the couch, where he flopped down. Your heart ached just looking at him.

“Don’t go.” He murmured, “Stay here.”

“I’m just getting you a blanket and a cuppa, babe… okay?” You brushed some of his curls back as he nodded. “I’ll be back in two minutes… I promise.”

You kissed his head and exactly two minutes later, you returned a steaming mug of tea and your favourite sage green blanket. You’d bought it in the Dunlem sale and it never left your bed until it made its way to Stevens. You’d wrapped him in it once when he’d fallen asleep at his desk and he’d looked so adorable you’d insisted he kept it.

“Are you okay? Should I be calling an ambulance or the police or something?”

His hands knotted around the edges as you draped it over him and sat the mug in front of him. You sat in silence beside him until he’d had a few large gulps. Steven shook his head

“I’m okay…no ambulance. no police needed. It’s alright..”

“Steven. You have to tell me where you were.” You tried “Please. I thought you were missing or dead, I kept expecting to see your picture on the news as a fucking body found.”

“You wouldn’t believe me…” he let out a tiny impression of a laugh “I mean not just you… no one would and I don’t blame them.”

“I will…I promise.”

“It sounds made up”

“Babe, not that long ago Spider-Man had a fight on Tower Bridge, and before that half the world disappeared and came back and before that Thor had a fight with that…alien thing in Greenwich and before that if you’d asked me, I’d say that shit only happens in New York but I’m three out of three of mad things that have happened to me so nothing you say is going to freak me out… but saying nothing is…” You pressed your head to his. “Please…please tell me where you were.”

Steven sighed, you looked so desperate to help, so worried and he could hear Marc, telling him to be honest with you, not being honest with Layla had cost him his relationship, and although they were still friends, he didn’t want the same to happen to you.

“Yeah okay…” he started “but you got to let me tell you the whole thing, alright? No matter how mental it sounds.”

You smiled. “Of course.”

And for the whole time, you kept your attention on him, nodding, asking questions and squeezing his hand”

“Suppose that’s it all.” He said with a finish “I’ll understand if you don’t want to go out with me anymore…”

“Steven.” You pulled him into a hug, hands reaching up to rub his back. “I believe you and I love you and of course I still want to go out with you.”

“But all I do is cause problems for everyone…I don’t want to mess up your-.”

“You could never be a problem. Not for me.”

“I will eventually.”

“Steven, there is no problem you could cause that would be too big. You were never a problem to me.” Your head shook vehemently “and you never will be. Not now, not ever. You and me always.”

“I love you…” he muttered leaning in and pressing his head to yours so softly “forever”

“…I love you so much.”

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me…us.” He paused, as you tilted your head with a smile “Marc won’t come forward now but he cares for you. A lot.”

“Steven, you will always be enough for me…but one day I’d like to meet him…Marc…if that’s okay with both of you…when he’s ready.”

Steven nodded. “I think he’d like that too.”

The relief lifted a weigh off his shoulders and he felt himself settle back into the sofa. You joined him, and slipped your arms around him, pulling the blanket around you both.

“I’ve missed you.” You muttered quietly.

“I missed you too.”

Steven kissed you softly and started to apologise before you planted another kiss on his lips, softly and gently.

“Shhh, you have nothing to apologise for. I’m just glad I have my boyfriend back.” You gave him an easy smile and he leant in.

.“I’m glad I’m back too…love. To the rest of our lives Eh?” He leant in to you as you repeated his sentiment.

“To the rest of our lives”

#steven grant x reader #steven grant imagine #marc spector x reader #moon knight x reader #steven grant #steven grant x y/n #steven grant x you #moon knight imagine

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mtkay13 · 2 years ago

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Finished! Hope you enjoyed this short, very rushed comic. It is actually a scene that is very dear to my heart, and I discovered in horror, 5 days ago, that the way it was interpreted by the actors in the audio drama was very different from how I pictured it in my head. Therefore, I couldn't resist, and had to do this before next week (because of other incoming events). It seems like among readers, the interpretation of that scene is rather unanimous : WKX, for all his ridiculous and over the top fake flirting, does feel a need to express at least some form of honesty; maybe because of the grief, maybe because he knows that his decision to stay with ZZS despite him being condemned will bring suffering. His best friend is going to die, but being with him is still worth it. I think... especially after the open conversation they have before the scene I decided to adapt, that it makes sense for WKX to want to express his deeper feelings -which he may not fully accept yet, given his "It's a good thing I'm not in love with you yet" quote from two chapters before. Sometimes, some words have to come out, and they're just a bit too much to fully take responsibility of. And thus, he backtracks, because now is not the time, because perhaps when seeing ZZS' expression, he feels like he'd rather not make this an honest statement yet. In the AD, the whole speech is played as a joke, including the final "confession". I guess it works, but for the emotional flow and rythm of the scene, I am more interested in a visible shift in WKX's delivery. On top of that, I find ZZS being left speechless afterwards to make more sense. He's used to WKX making outrageous declarations, why would this one be different? It also gives more intensity and contrast to the "Gotcha" moment at the end, which is a bit less convincing when it's already an obvious joke. It makes it a bit sadder, too, in my opinion. Maybe it's a bit tropey, maybe we've seen it before (=the honest confession that is then retracted), but I do think that it works well in this context. Additionally, I like how it reinforces the "Are you sincere?" scene, at the end, since ZZS would still be marked by how he did buy WKX's confession until WKX himself made fun of him for falling for it. That's it! Thank you for reading and then reading some more. Additional thanks to WenBuXing and Xuxunette for their translations, and to the DZZS creative chat for cheering on me. Big, big shoutout to Bichen, who I hope will like this version of that scene.

#tian ya ke #wenzhou #zhou zishu #wen kexing #tyk #zzs #wkx #comic #adaptation #meta

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vamqyr3 · 2 years ago

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Hey can I request any jealous ghost or yandere ghost headcanons with smut. Please?

↳ SIMON “GHOST” RILEY // COMING DOWN. ❀

CW// OBSESSION, STALKING, VIOLENCE, ORAL, ECT.

NOTES// obsessive!anything has to be my fav to write. Anyways.

He’s got a staring problem, it’s chronic. He knows all too well, he’s too tentative, far too particular. Ghost knows better than to stare, he knows your feet shift before you turn to look around your shoulder. He knows your attention is pointed where your torso is, you have a blind spot to your left and the right eye is worse than the other. He knows better than to look while you look back. It’s rude. It’s obvious.

He’s often thought of your face upon meeting him. Most think him monstrous, horrible, evil. He’d hoped you’d be scared too, see what evils had been protecting you thus far. Know the power and capacity of that man, the weight of his shadow on your brow bone, his bulking figure on the eye. To know someone’s getting the job done.

It wouldn't be too hard to notice him in every corner of a room. You’d just purposely moved from the bar to the rooftop, he’s still sat in a chair farthest left of you. You’d twitch under the attention, stress under his eyes and grow anxious. But he’d love it, knowing your finally aware of him.

Already in a relationship? No issue. He’d hate to have to kill, he’d hate to see you cry, get all messy just cause of him. Me might not, he might enjoy cheering you up, understanding what no one else cloud. Maybe he’d get angry, chastise you for ever having used your mouth to talk to anyone else. He just might choke you on him, use it, finally, for some good. Train you good and well to only use two words, ‘Please’ and ‘Yes’

It would come easily, first. Texts from unsaved numbers on your lovers phone, disappearances on the hour. Then, to arguments, to fighting and rumors. A photo of your ex and another.

Your marital relationship with Si was art. He aged like fine wine, soon becoming nothing more than a doting husband. He’d drool at the sight of you, never let you do any bit of work. The house is in his name, only one car for him to drive, a house in the woods, food provided by him. He’d let you do damn near anything to him.

He has a few scattered trust issues. Spiraling into control and commitment. He’d always kiss your hands and eyes, kneel and beg mercy during any argument. But he’s began monitoring your nutritional intake, jutting motion detectors in the four corners of the room. But you get it, occupational hazard.

More often than not he’s gone into lengths upon lengths of detail whilst rutting into you. Describing his strength, power, might over the ones around you. How easily the hands ringing your hips have broken a man. How beautiful you look, how he’d wanted to ruin your pretty little eyes every moment they weren’t on him. What horrible things he had thought in a hooded black jacket staring you down at the bar.

Corruption, Ghost would enjoy ruining you. Using you an earshot away from your peers. Affirming your safety, how he would never let any other see you how he did. How he had needed you so badly, he couldn’t even wait a moments rest, and while there is still breath in his breast, he would kill any other man before they saw you bare before him.

#ghost cod #cod #cod modern warfare #cod ghost #simon ghost riley #simon riley #simon ghost riley x reader #simon ghost riley smut #simon riley x you #ghost mw2 #ghost headcanons #simon riley smut #cod mw2 #cod mw22

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stefanmikaleson1864 · 2 years ago

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Toy Story

Requested by @dkdueo

Evan Buckley x girl reader

The readers a firefighter at station 118 an best friends with everyone especially really close with Eddie and Christopher an Buck goes to leave to meet up with Taylor on a date an before he leaves he overhears Eddie “oh come on you just need to tell Buck how you feel,you would be better together then him and Taylor I didn’t tell him but there’s just something about that relationship that’s just off,also I have a extra shirt downtown would you mind spending the night with Christopher?“

The reader just responding “oh just shut up,he’s in love with her and they are happy what kinda person would that make me ruining that,an you know I would always watch Christopher that was stupid I love him maybe even just as much as you to the point you ain’t getting him back” joking around picking up Chris smiling running to the car while Christopher is laughing

A/N: If you like my work please comment like and reblog it means a lot to see interactions on my work !

Y/N”S POV

Being a firefighter had a lot of perks. Not only did you get to save lives but you also got to gain a family along the way. You originally weren’t from LA so you always felt a little alone. But then all that changed when you joined the 118.

Everyone welcomed you with open arms. You were the last one to join the group so you were a little intimated.

But they made you feel like you belonged from the moment you walked through the doors.

You became really close with Eddie and his son Chris. You spent all your time off with them and would always take Chris out to do fun things. You guys really bonded and you felt like you meant something to someone.

Buck was always there too and it was hard not to get feelings for the blonde. He was a second dad to Chris.

You would sometimes catch yourself daydreaming about having your own family with him.

The two of you also had a lot in common. You loved the same music, the same tv shows. He always made you laugh even when he wasn’t meaning to.

You could relate also to the family situation that he had. Being away from home and having a complicated relationship with your parents.

It’s also the reason why you left home to. To be able to start a new life for yourself.

You thought about asking him out so many times but it just never seemed like the right moment. Either the bells went off or Chris would come in. You took this as a sign that it just wasn’t supposed to happen between the two of you.

If you needed another sign that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be when he started dating Taylor

. You never really liked her and not just because Buck was head over heels in love with her. She always gave you the worst vibes. She always seemed like she had some kind of hidden agenda.

Eddie agreed with you but you thought he was just agreeing with you because he was your friend.

He kept trying to convince you that the two of you belonged together but you didn’t believe it.

You guys were wrapping up your shift. It was long and all you wanted to do was go home and kick back and eat pizza. Chris had coming up running to you breaking you out of your thoughts.

“Y/N hey I missed you” Chris said grabbing you in a big hug.

“Hey bud I missed you to what are you doing here” You asked

“Carla dropped me off she had somewhere to go so she dropped me off to have dad take me home are you coming over tonight” Chris asked.

“Yeah Y/N come on over Chris really misses you ” Eddie said

“I don’t guys i’m tired maybe i should just go home besides I took all my clothes home to wash already so I don’t even have anything” You said smiling up at them.

“Listen we all know why your being a little sad it’s pretty obvious” Eddie said looking over at Buck and Taylor who were laughing with each other.

“It’s not about them besides I’m happy for them. They both seem really happy together” You said glancing over at them.

““oh come on you just need to tell Buck how you feel,you would be better together then him and Taylor I didn’t tell him but there’s just something about that relationship that’s just off,also I have a extra shirt downtown would you mind spending the night with Christopher?“ Eddie said.

He slapped me in the arm hard and I looked up and pouted at him

““oh just shut up,he’s in love with her and they are happy what kinda person would that make me ruining that,an you know I would always watch Christopher that was stupid I love him maybe even just as much as you to the point you ain’t getting him back” Y/N said

The two of you ran off to your car after leaving Eddie behind in the dust. Maybe you did need this. Eddie was right that you were just upset over Buck. But you weren’t going to admit that to him.

Buck’s POV

Taylor texted me she was coming over to the firehouse. I mean was I happy to see her of course but also I didn’t want her coming around here.

I mean I just didn’t want Y/N to see her. Not that Y/N was mean or anything I know I’m rambling but the whole thing is really complicated.

I was maybe In love with Y/N which I know is wrong to say because I’m in a relationship and were just friends.

But i never thought she would see me the same way. I always also though she had something going on with Eddie.

The two of them always seemed close. She was going over his house all the time. I mean I couldn’t compete with all that.

When I meant Taylor it was just fun and casual. Then things started to become more serious between the two of us. I really did like her but it just wasn’t the same kind of love I had for Y/N.

I could always tell that no one else in the firehouse really liked her. I mean part of it hurt because it was the person I was dating but then on the other hand. I knew why they had those kinds of feelings for her.

Taylor did always take advantage of situations sometimes when she saw a good story. It was a constant reason why we were always fighting.

Eddie and Y/n were sitting by the fire truck laughing and talking to each other and I wanted to go and join but I didn’t think it was a good idea. I just decided to wait off to the sides. I didn’t want to interrupt whatever was going over there anyways.

I pulled out my phone and started going through social media hoping to just kill some time.

“Hey you what are you doing” Taylor asked coming up and tapping me on my elbow.

“Nothing just waiting on you are you ready to go” I asked putting my phone in my pocket.

We started walking towards my car and I passed Eddie and Y/N Talking to each other.

“oh come on you just need to tell Buck how you feel,you would be better together then him and Taylor I didn’t tell him but there’s just something about that relationship that’s just off,also I have a extra shirt downtown would you mind spending the night with Christopher?“ Eddie said

“oh just shut up,he’s in love with her and they are happy what kinda person would that make me ruining that,an you know I would always watch Christopher that was stupid I love him maybe even just as much as you to the point you ain’t getting him back” Y/N said.

When i heard her say that it felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest it was beating so fast.

I cracked a smile also thinking that Y/N was also in love with me. That her and Eddie weren’t together like I thought.

I wanted to go and confront her before she took off but that didn’t seem like the best move.

Also I didn’t want to say anything just incase she changed her mind. But I also felt like I needed to go and say something.

It just felt like my head was spinning and I didn’t know what to say or think. That I didn’t want to screw up and besides it seemed like an invasion of their privacy listening in on their conversation.

I snapped out of my thoughts before I ended up thinking to hard about this and bursting a blood vessel or something.

Me and Taylor got into my truck and then i took off into the direction of my apartment.

“Your being quiet” Taylor said.

“Yeah sorry just a long day at work” I said

“I get that I’m here if you wanna talk about it” Taylor said

“Thanks” I said letting the conversation fall.

LA Traffic was awful so we reached my apartment about 45 minutes later. We both got out and made our way upstairs.

When we got in I just dropped my stuff down and went and flopped on the couch.

Taylor came and sat next to me and looked up and smiled.

“So what’s the plans for tonight because I don’t feel like just sitting in the apartment I wanna go and do something” She said.

“I know I get that and honestly I’m really tired and would rather just do some take out and watch some movies” I told her.

“That’s what we did the last time we hung out” Taylor said pouting.

“I know and I’m sorry but work was a lot and I’m just tired” I said sitting up to look at her.

“Look is there something else going on” Taylor said

“No what makes you thinks that It’s just we had a lot of calls and I’m not in the mood to go out and get drunk or party” I said being honest with her.

“Fine but I’m going out I’ll text you okay” Taylor said

“Yeah okay” I said not in the mood to fight.

This whole thing even before the conversation I heard earlier this whole relationship just felt like it was running on it’s last leg.

I got a buzz on my phone and groaned but then picked it up to see who it was.

It was from Y/N and I smiled and picked it up my mood shifting to see it was her.

It was a pic and I opened it up to see her and chris smiling into the camera. She sent another text saying.

“Eddie’s out on a date and Chris wants to see his uncle buck want to come over for Pizza and Movies” She asked

I quickly texted her back

“Hell Yeah I’m on my way” I sent her back.

“We can’t wait to see you !” Y/N said back

I grabbed my stuff and ran out there. Eddie’s house wasn’t that far. I was smiling ear to ear heading over to them.

When I got there I ran out the Jeep and went up to his front door knocking on it. Chris was the one who answered it. He looked up and smiled at me.

“Uncle Buck is here” He shouted.

Y/N walked to the door in Eddie’s T-Shirt and sweatpants. She smiled real big when she saw me.

“Thanks for coming you got here quick” She said

“Yeah I was in the area and came right over” I said

“Come on Pizza is on the way were picking out a movie” Chris said.

“Awesome because I am starving” I said.

We walked in and made our way to the couch. I kicked off my shoe and took of my jacket and headed over to the couch.

“So what’s on the list” I asked

“Were stuck between Toy story and a marvel movie” Y/N said.

“Well me personally Toy story is a classic we can’t beat that” I said

Chris laughed and i looked at him confused

“That’s what Y/N said” Chris said.

“Because it is a classic a true timeless original” Y/N said.

“And 2 out 3 wins so I’ll just go ahead and put it on” Y/n said.

She took the remote and put it on. Chris groaned a little but we both just laughed him off. A little bit into the movie the pizza came.

“Pizza’s here Yay” Chris yelled

“I got it” Y/N said getting up

“I’m glad you came and it was Y/N”s idea to invite you over she was thinking about you” Chris said laughing

“Well I’m glad because I didn’t want to be alone tonight” I said smiling.

I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks from the mention that Y/N wanted to see me.

A few minutes later she came back and put down pizza’s and sodas and a bunch of other stuff to.

“Were having a feast tonight” Y/N said

“ I can see that look at all this” I said

“It’s friday night we need to party” She said.

I laughed and we all dug into the food. It was really good. She had gotten pizza ,wings ,fries and mozzarella sticks. We all ate good until we thought we were going to burst. We finished the movie too.

Chris fell asleep not to long after eating so it was just me and Y/N finishing the movie. It was really nice just to sit back and enjoy each other presence.

When the movie ended she looked over at me and smiled.

“Hey will you help me take him to his bed” She said

“Of course” I said getting up and picking up Chris and carrying him to his room. Y/N followed behind me and I laid Chris down on his bed and tucked him in.

“Good night buddy” I said to him

“Good night love see you in the morning sweet dreams” She said to him.

We turned out the lights and quietly headed out.

We made our way back into the living room and I helped her clean up the dinner mess.

“Thanks for coming by It really means a lot I hope I didn’t mess anything up for you” Y/N said

“Oh absolutely not I wasn’t doing anything I’m glad you invited me over” I said

I decided to speak up and shoot my shot. It seemed like a good time now and I didn’t want to not say anything and just loose the chance.

“ I heard your uh conversation earlier with Eddie” I said

“Oh I’m sorry I didn’t want to mess anything up with you guys im sorry” Y/N said her face turning bright red.

“No it’s okay I’m not bringing this up because I’m mad in anyway i’m saying it because I want you to know I love you I have for a while now and I didn’t think i stood a chance” I said playing with my hands nervously.

Y?N walked over and grabbed my hands and looked up at me and smiled

“You always stood a chance with me. I love you to I have been in love with you for a while but you were with Taylor and I didn’t think i had a chance you know” She said.

“Maybe we both should have just talked to each other” I said laughing

“When did you grow up” Y/N said smiling.

“Well as a I get older I do get a little wiser” I said

“Oh yeah well in your case that might not be true at all” She said poking me

“Ouch that kinda hurt my feelings” I said pouting

“Oh just shut up and kiss me already” Y/N said.

“Yes Mam’am” I said

I leaned down and kissed her and she kissed me back.It was short and sweet. But it really meant a lot.

We broke the kiss and we just looked into each others eyes and smiled before pulling away.

“What about taylor” Y/N asked

“That relationship is over I’ll talk to her in the morning I promise” I said

“Good because I wanna start this off right the last thing we need is that bad karma out there in the world” She said

“ I agree” I told her leaning down and kissing her again.

Suddenly the door opened up and I heard someone loudly clearing their throat.

“I’m gone out one night and I come home to this in my own home” Eddie said a little loud

“First off all stop being dramatic it could be a lot worse second off shh man Chris is sleeping” Y/N said

“Yeah yeah what ever I’m going to bed good night little love birds” Eddie said stumbling into his room.

“That man is clearly drunk but also i’m glad he had fun” she said laughing

“He’s gonna regret that in the morning” I said laughing.

“You want to watch Toy Story 2 and eat more cold pizza” Y/N said.

“I would love that let me go grab the spare blankets and pillows” I said

“I am going to get us some drinks” Y/n said

I went off and grabbed some stuff from the closet and Eddie was passed out on the bed in his clothes. I just laughed and took a pic of him.

I went back to the living room and Y/n was setting up the movie for us. I sat down and passed out the blanket and pillows.

We got comfortable and we started on the second movie. She leaned her head on me. I smiled down at her.

I was so glad I came over and glad I opened up. We ended up both falling asleep after that movie. I was glad I decided to come over here tonight and be with my family.

#evan buckley #evan buckley fic #evan buckley imagine #evan buck buckley #evan buck x reader #911 x reader #911 imagine #911 one shot #911 fic #911 on fox #911 fanfic #Eddie Diaz #taylor kelly #evan buckley one shot #buck x reader #buck imagine #buck one shot

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sambvcks · 3 years ago

Text

of first, second, third, fourth meetings, e.m. x reader

pairing: eddie munson x fem! reader

summary: The first time we met we hated each other. You didn’t hate me, I hated you. And the second time we met, you didn’t remember me. I did too, I remembered you. The third time we met, we became friends. We were friends for a long time. And then we weren’t. And then we fell in love. – When Harry Met Sally.

warnings: cursing (like a lot), holding not-so lifelong grudges, mention of stage fright, head-cannoning that eddie was kinda a jerk before he was given a proper thump in the head, so divergent from the actual events of season 4 it’s scary, celebration of Christmas (exchanging of gifts).

word count: 5.1k (HUH???)

author’s note: AKA Eddie Munson + RomCom tropes = Perfection. Eddie deserves to be happy. Season 4? Never heard of her. (no fix it fics in this house, we actively pretend it didnt happen)

[ read on ao3 | masterlist | inbox ]

first meeting.

Looking back, it’s so silly to remember the things that seemed so important to the freshman version of yourself. One week, it was some science project that escaped your mind the second it was turned it. The next, it would be the new shoes your mom bought you – off brand and noticeably so. The other girls had real Converse, why did you have to settle for the Payless knockoffs? One particular week, it was talent show try outs.

You had been rehearsing your song day and night, much to your mom’s chagrin. Her overnight shifts only afforded a preciously small window for sleep, something you tried your very best to not disturb (you still did). You had even laid out your best outfit – a hand me down blouse and tweed skirt that you had tailored to fit a little shorter than your mom approved of.

The line of acts auditioning was slowly dwindling, leaving you and a gaggle of boys that looked like they had walked straight off of a Metallica poster to exist solely as every parent’s worst nightmare. They were each absentmindedly fiddling with their instruments, fine tuning and flipping drumsticks as they awaited their turn, contrasting heavily with your noticeably panicked state.

“Do you mind? I think you’re gonna leave a dent in the floor with all your pacing.” Grumbled their leader.

Eddie Munson.

Easily recognizable with his growing hair and the spattering of patches of bands you had never heard of across his jean vest. He was loud. Loud enough that even newly christened Hawkins High School freshmen like you knew his reputation and, more importantly, knew to avoid him if you had a good head on your shoulders. Which you liked to think you did.

Still, who were you to judge, with your barely elevated trailer park aesthetic, homemade lunches, and hair you cut yourself? Benefit of the doubt, you decided. Maybe Eddie Munson wasn’t the devil-worshipping cultist he had garnered the reputation of. Maybe he was just misunderstood, an outcast but a good guy.

“Sorry.” You mumbled, steadying yourself against a wall and hoping beyond hope that he would leave it at that. You could still feel his eyes, though, skirt across your fidgeting form.

“Nervous?”

As if it wasn’t obvious. Your nails had been chewed to the nub and the skirt you had altered was starting to fray at the edge from your constant fiddling with it.

“No need to be, the people running this thing have no idea what real music sounds like. We’ve tried every year, still no takers.” He gestured back to his group of misfits, who only seemed half interested in the conversation. “But you seem top 40. Let me guess…Madonna? Will they let you sing ‘Like a Virgin’ at a school talent show? We’re playing ‘Rainbow in the Dark’. Ever heard of it?”

This drew the attention of the other boys, who cackled like he had told some life-changing joke.

“I-I-” You tried, but Eddie was quicker.

“Jesus, if you’re this nervous before the audition, imagine you up there! Stage lights on you, no one there to save you. You’d just-” His hands wrapped around his own neck, tongue sticking out and eyes rolling back as he pretended to struggle for breath.

Oh, no. Eddie Munson wasn’t a misunderstood good guy. He was an asshole.

Before you could come up with some half-assed retort, the gym door was swinging open. The person ahead of you, Tammy Thompson, was walking out with her head held high. No doubt the teachers they had roped into running the talent show this year had given some sort of standing ovation and maybe even got down on their knees in praise. If they were feeling particularly frisky. Your name was called and you were ushered in so quickly your head spun.

“Good luck.” A teasing voice followed behind you.

You totally choked. Haunted by Eddie fucking Munson and the echoes of his band’s laughter, you were barely able to get two lines out without the air hitching in your lungs. The tears came next as you high tailed out of there without an explanation.

Munson and his friends were still loitering around, awaiting their turn. You wondered, briefly, if they were forced to the end of the auditions in hopes that they would just give up and spare everyone the trouble. You marched past them, eyes stinging and lip quivering as you spat out a single “fuck you” in their general direction.

When the list of acts was pinned to the bulletin board the next morning, you weren’t too surprised to not see your name amongst the ranks.

You did feel a little more than satisfied when Corroded Coffin wasn’t, either.

Within a week, the whole ordeal was forgotten with the announcement of a five page English paper on foreshadowing in Romeo and Juliet. Eddie Munson and his band of freaks were out of your mind, too. High school was funny like that.

second meeting.

Taking up an after-school job on top of your weekend babysitting/tutoring duties was a no brainer. The bills on your kitchen table continued to pile up and your mom’s hours kept getting cut shorter and shorter. She hadn’t explicitly asked you, but as soon as you turned sixteen you applied at the music store on Main Street without debate.

The owner, a lonely old man named Bill, had made plenty of conversation with you whenever you went in to rifle through the discount record section in the past. You had a pension for finding the diamond in the rough, the no name artists that were subjected to the back of the crates, something Bill respected about you. Even with zero experience, he happily hired you on the spot.

So, after band practice you would work a quick five-hour shift and zoom home to pour over homework until you made a half-assed midnight dinner before your mom had to leave for her night shift.

It wasn’t all bad. The bags accumulating under your eyes were minimized when Bill sold you his old, beat-up Volkswagen for a week’s pay. Way under value – even for the gas guzzling, unreliable hunk of junk, but Bill was something like the grandfather you never had. At least, you were the granddaughter he never had.

You were independent, no matter now little sleep you really got. And you got to chat all day about your one true love – music. You weren��t all top 40. You assisted old ladies in picking out records for their grandkids, helped couples looking for a copy of their favorite song, introduced new artists to unlikely fans.

Then, on an ordinary Tuesday, in he came.

Eddie Munson.

His car was almost as loud and worthy of the junkyard as yours was, so it was difficult to miss his impending arrival.

You hadn’t really thought about him since Freshman year, two years prior, willing yourself to forget one of your most embarrassing memories. It seemed it was just as easy for Eddie to forget, as he paraded in with an easy smile and a casual greeting. He perused the shelves for a few minutes, oblivious to the bubbling rage in your gut, which manifested as the harshest glare you could manage.

“Hey, uh-” He glanced down at your name badge, “Sorry to bother. You guys got the new Metallica yet? This is, like, the fourth place I’ve been to.”

His smile was almost charming. He was certainly easier to look at now, even with his still unruly hair and fading jean vest. So similar to that day three years ago that you almost felt fourteen again, shrinking under his unwavering stare. It was something you refused to admit even to yourself, how he never shrunk under pressure. He took the absolute vitriol spewed at him daily and dished it back just as easily. He had grown into his gangly limbs, jaw more defined and the hint of a tattoo peeking from under the collar of his shirt. If you hadn’t sworn to hate his living guts until the day one of you was put six feet under, you might even call him attractive.

But you weren’t fourteen anymore, and you certainly weren’t letting him get the last laugh this time.

“Sure, follow me.”

“Sweet. While I have you, any recommendations?”

“Broadening your horizons, Munson?”

He seems startled that you know him, as if he wasn’t solely responsible for a week’s worth of tear-stained fits of rest. If anything, he looked a little nervous that you did know him. Like you would turn on your heel and kick the troublemaker out. No Metallica, no service.

“Uh, sort of.” His head tilted as he followed closely behind your determined steps, craning for another glance at your face. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“I go to Hawkins. How’s your second senior year treating you, by the way?”

Okay, maybe that was a low blow. But he started it, right? Either way, he seemed unphased by the question.

“Ah. It’s, uh, riveting. Really getting the most out of Mr. William’s Chem class the second time around. Might take it again just for the fun of it.”

You almost laugh, but you won’t give him the satisfaction.

“Here.” You pull the new Metallica from its display, the only copy available. “And my recommendation.” You hand over Rio’s Holy Diver, an album you were sure he had listened to backwards if the hand-stitched t-shirt adorning the back of his vest was any indicator. “It’s all great, but my personal favorite is ‘Rainbow in the Dark’. Ever heard of it?”

You watched, satisfied, as the wires in his brain began to piece this interaction together, firing faster than maybe they ever had before. His jaw fell, eyebrows shooting up beyond his shaggy bangs.

“I do know you! You’re-”

“The girl whose dreams of musical stardom you dashed in a single day. Finally, he remembers!”

“Jesus, it’s been, what? Two years?”

“Try three.” You snatched the cassette back, placing it delicately back on the shelf.

“Wow. You’ve, uh, changed a bit.”

Your nails, once a pristine Ballerina Slipper Pink were now a chipped charcoal black. The blouse and tailored skirt he had seen you in before was now replaced by a slightly too big ‘Bill’s Music’ t-shirt and jagged black jeans. You had found a bit of grunge and, if Eddie was pressed on the matter, he would admit that it looks good on you.

“Yeah, well. Someone stole away my dreams of fame, so I’ve fallen into a life of crime and rock and roll.” You maneuvered back to the register, hoping to end this interaction as quickly as it had started. If you were quick enough, Eddie Munson would be gone in a cloud of exhaust smoke from his shitty van in the next five minutes.

“I need to tell you, I still feel like an asshole about that.”

Oh. Oh shit. In all your fantasies about finally getting back at Eddie Munson – slashing his tires, stealing that stupid tin lunchbox he always carried around with him, maybe framing him for some crime – never did it include him actually feeling guilty. You had built him up in your mind as some soul-less villain, preying on the misfortunate.

“I talk a big game, but I still think about you running out crying. There’s no excuse, I’m just a natural dick, I guess.” He seemed almost shy, now. Haunted, even. Fingers fiddling with the edge of his coveted cassette. “I’m sorry.”

What were you to do? You could really stretch it out, let him feel that sinking gut feeling of guilt that would maybe match that fear you had felt on that stage three years ago. You could demand a public apology; he had no trouble making a fool out of himself if his lunchtime outburst were any indicator. But your mom had always taught you to be the bigger person.

“No big deal.” Sometimes you hated your mom and how her voice always rings in your head. “Already forgotten.”

His cassette was purchased, but not without him apologizing around another fifty times. He did disappear in a cloud of exhaust, his van puttering down the street and the faint tones of Metallica blasting through his window. His scent lingered, though, cheap cologne and cigarettes. You hated to think that you didn’t really mind it.

third meeting.

It was a little embarrassing, honestly. Cozying up to a group of freshman boys you had saved the world with was not on your senior year bucket list. Yet, you found yourself huddled around a corner table in the cafeteria, trying to map out the ins and outs of high school life to them.

Really, Robin was to blame. Robin - your talkative junior year Italian 3 desk mate - and your inexplicable hobby of linguistics which afforded you a basic understanding of the Russian alphabet were the two main culprits to this turn in your social life. Which then had you bunkered down in the Scoops Ahoy backroom attempting to translate a shady recording with Robin, Dustin, and Steve Harrington of all people.

And, sure, maybe the curly haired little weirdo had endeared you somehow. And you somehow found yourself promising Steve to watch over the kid after summer. Driving him around was the worst part – the gas alone was cleaning out a healthy chunk of your weekly paycheck. But his taste in music? You’d smother him before you allowed another Broadway soundtrack to crackle through your car speakers.

You remember the looks you got when you maneuvered the cafeteria as Dustin, Mike, and Lucas waved you over, the open mouth stares as the kids poured out of your Volkswagen on the first day back from Summer break. But fighting a Russian army and some multi-legged creature from another world created an unexplainable bond between the most unlikely of people and, honestly, would you even speak to any of these people after walking the stage at graduation anyway?

In return for your vast high school knowledge – which teachers to avoid, which bathrooms went unmonitored, which days they really needed to pack a lunch - the kids gave you a crash course on all things D&D, filling lunch periods with shitty cafeteria food and outlandish ideas for your blossoming character. They crafted an intricate narrative worthy of their high esteem for their sudden older-sister figure, picturing an elf, ethereal and full of curiosity and kindness.

You just wanted to smash things, but the boys promised the game went well beyond simple violence.

Then, a voice from a table over.

Eddie Munson.

He’d clocked the boys on the first day of school, looking lost and out of place in the hoard of cliques occupying each table. Then, you ushered them over like Galadriel to the lost, broken Fellowship and offered little pieces of yourself, of kindness and zero judgement. He was impressed, allowing you to seep into the recesses of his mind ever since he saw you rip off the sign some junior varsity football player stuck to Dustin’s back that said, ‘KICK THE FREAK!’. He watched, amazed, as you balled up the paper and chucked it in the general direction of laughter, hitting some linebacker square in the face.

Gone was the tear-stained girl running from the gym.

Recently, Eddie had found solace under gym bleachers during lunch, discussing upcoming band rehearsals and Hellfire Club meetings. But a weekend hangover actually had him craving the sorry excuse for cardboard that the school district called pizza, so they’d made the trek into the jungle of a cafeteria.

And there you were. Prettier than he remembered, but he was a stupid boy these past few years and anything beyond bootleg copies of Dio records and plans for upcoming campaigns did not have space in his mind. He’d scooped Henderson out of the bunch, much to your displeasure, and ushered your group over to his table with the promise of adventure beyond their wildest dreams.

The boys were easy. They were eager for any type of structure, particularly from an experienced Dungeon Master who seemed to have an ego of steel and a tongue of venom. You, with your faded t-shirts and your ‘Dungeons and Dragons for Beginners’ book loaned out from Mike’s vast collection felt like jumping out of a plane without a parachute. When Dustin noticed the distinct tension between his two new leaders, he voiced concern.

“We just go way back. Don’t worry. We’ll play nice.” You offered as explanation, seated as far away from Eddie as the small table could manage.

You kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Daily, you wondered when the teasing quips or the taunts would pick up. After all, Eddie was always eager to voice any amount of displeasure. Often, it was other students or teachers who didn’t know how to do their job. Sometimes it was as simple as the sun shining too bright or his bangs not falling the way he favored. But never you. He never had a single negative word to send your way.

Instead, he was patient. He started teaching you the ins and outs of D&D, offering pointers and directions for your character to take. He told you which weapons were worth your time and even gave insight into upcoming battles he had planned, offering you the slightest edge.

Before long, you were hanging out without the kids – which seemed like an impossible task because at least one of them seemed to always be trailing behind one of you. But when you had a late-night shift at Bill’s or Eddie just felt like bugging you (a near daily occurrence), there he was. He helped stock shelves even though that was your main job description, he played his favorite songs over the store loudspeakers, much to the displeasure of the customers, and he was so fucking nice it was driving you up the wall.

“Hey, just so you know, I got my Tuesday night shift switched for Thursday. In case you felt like dropping in again and driving even more customers away.”

Eddie was stationed at the classical section, flipping through records to laugh at the artists’ powdered wigs and cherub cheeks.

“Oh yeah? Got a hot date?”

Your silence spoke wonders.

“Dear lord. Who?” He demanded. You shrugged, not ready for this conversation. “C’mon, don’t be embarrassed. If it makes you feel any better, nobody is good enough for my best friend.”

A term he had adopted when you first let him use your employee discount and had stuck since. Dustin pretended not to be jealous – and a little curious – the first time Eddie had said it in front of the whole group without a single note of sarcasm.

“So, you might as well just tell me.” He wasn’t really paying attention, deft fingers still flicking through a crate of records. You were perched on the register counter, watching the clock at the seconds ticked by endlessly. Sunday night shifts were rough in a town like Hawkins, where everyone was too tired after a hot church service to spend any of their hard-earned money.

“His name is Jake.”

“Ugh. I hate him already.”

“You only know his name!”

“That’s enough. Imagine being named Jake. Depressing.” Eddie finished one crate and moved on to the next. “Sounds like he sells insurance and cheats on his wife.”

“Jesus. It’s one date. A free, hot meal, at worst.”

“That’s what prostitutes say, babe.”

He was always like this. Argumentative and honestly a little annoying. But he was somehow your favorite person in the world because of and despite those things. Maybe you were those things too, and you flew to each other like moths to a flame. Kindred spirits, of sorts. You didn’t have a retort, so you resorted to throwing a coin at him from the Take-A-Penny, which he easily dodged.

“Fine. But when it turns out he’s trying to get you to join his cult, just say-”

“Sorry, I’m already in Eddie Munson’s?”

“Ha ha. Anyways, word of advice? Don’t do that thing you do.”

“Thing? I have a thing?”

“Oh yeah.” Eddie abandoned his crate, hoisting himself onto the counter next to you. His thigh pressed to yours, his hair brushing your shoulder as he silently offered his hand over. You fiddled with his rings, slipping one from his pointer and shoving it onto your thumb. “Your ordering thing. I find it so adorable and endearing but any normal person would probably just put you out of your misery.”

“Sorry if I like things a certain way.”

“Don’t apologize, babe. I like that about you. But it might not be first-date material, y’know?”

You huffed in annoyance but didn’t disagree.

“And if he’s a douche, I’ll plant some pot in his locker and get him expelled or something.”

Jake was a total douche.

He was nice, sure. At first. Held open doors, pulled out your chair. All the stuff you had seen in movies Robin made you rent to broaden your horizons. When the time for conversation came, though, it felt…off. There wasn’t that easy back and forth, the endearments and nicknames. It was fumbling for topics and finally settling on extra curriculars.

You’d sat through twenty minutes of him chattering on and on about the basketball team and something called man-defense, but he scoffed at the very mention of Dungeons and Dragons.

“Like that Munson guy? My dad said only Satanists play that shit.”

You politely excused yourself to the bathroom and bolted out of the staff exit before he could get another word out.

And when you appeared at Eddie’s front door, dressed up and visibly annoyed, he didn’t even make a comment. You knew the told you so was sitting on the tip of his tongue, so desperate to make an appearance it was nearly painful for him to hold it back. He just ushered you in, mixtape quickly slotted into his speaker system, and Dio’s ‘Rainbow in the Dark’ sounding off as the soundtrack to Eddie’s quiet comfort.

It was almost as if the date hadn’t happened in the first place, that you both knew you would end up here.

“Any deals tonight?” You asked, so accustomed to the knocks that would interrupt your quiet nights in. Eddie would disappear for no longer than a few minutes, leaving you to twiddle your thumbs on his bed until his return.

“Nah. Wanted to keep my schedule wide open for you.” He was sorting through his most recent supply, acting as if that wasn’t the nicest thing anyone had ever done for you.

You had years filled of missed holidays, forgotten birthdays. You didn’t blame your mom for her horrible boss or her proclivity to ignore the calendar. To think Eddie had pushed aside any other plans for when you would come running had something bubbling in your chest.

Eddie knew you would come. You knew you would end up there, like some sort of escape method. An escape back to Eddie Munson.

If only Freshman you could see you now.

fourth meeting.

Christmas was a notoriously solitary holiday for you. Luckily, this year’s holiday season had been filled to the brim with gifts for the kids on Christmas Eve and a little party at Steve’s place so the ‘adults’ could exchange gifts and just be relaxed for a bit – free from high school and work and otherworldly monsters.

Eddie had become such a fixture to your life, so easily attached to you that Steve didn’t even bat an eye when he ushered you both into the living room, eagerly accepting Eddie’s version of a Christmas present (a few joints to hand around). Even Nancy, with her big college plans and life scheduled down to the minute, let loose a bit and took a few overeager puffs followed by long bouts of coughing.

Steve and Robin pitched in for a new set of headphones for you, Nancy eagerly watched you unwrap some ungodly floral wrapping paper to unveil a cassette of some UK indie band she swore up and down you would love, something Jonathan had introduced her to.

You had been saving up for the past few months to get gifts deserving of each of your friends. You had spent endless hours obsessing over JC Penny mailers and gossip magazines that swore they knew the secret to buying the perfect gift during slow shifts at Bill’s.

Robin got a new pair of Converse and a pack of Sharpies so she could doodle to her hearts content. Steve got a new Walkman, since he had leant his old one to Dustin who swore up and down that he had returned it. You had even taken the time to get it engraved – Property of Steve Harrington, not Dustin! Nancy got a new journal for all her editorial notes, though you had filled the first page with a few polaroid’s of the group together.

As Steve, Robin, and Nancy got to work on properly defacing Robin’s new shoes, you felt a little nudge on your foot.

Eddie Munson.

Looking sheepish and nodding towards Steve’s kitchen. You followed behind him, hand patting at your back pocket to make sure his gift was properly secured. At least the other three had the decency to pretend to not be interested in whatever was developing.

“So I, uh, thought a lot about what to get you.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything, Eds.”

He rolled his eyes – his default facial expression when it came to you - and fished in his pocket for a second. A chain clinked as it dangled from his hand, offering it up for judgement.

“A guitar pick?”

“Not just any guitar pick, babe.” His fingers worked to unhook the latch. “Believe it or not, this is the very guitar pick I used when Corroded Coffin auditioned for that bogus talent show.” He latched the necklace around your neck as delicately as he could, hands lingering as he watched it fall to your collarbone. “The day we first met. The best day of my life.” He finally pulled away; eyes still glued to his guitar pick on your neck. “Y’know, besides the whole making you cry thing.”

“Eds, you absolute sap.”

“Yeah, yeah. Shut up about it.” He stepped back, and it felt like it was the first breath of air you had taken since walking into the kitchen. “Would’ve given you something worth more, like my soul or something. But you know that thing is long gone.”

“Well, my gifts no better.” You promised, fishing in your own pocket. “Here.”

His eyes scanned over the tickets you offered up.

“No way.”

“Yeah, they’re playing in Fort Wayne next month. We’ll probably die from altitude sickness from how high our seats are.” You shrugged. “But they’ll probably play ‘Rainbow in the Dark’, right?”

Eddie Munson, with his loudmouth and unwavering ability to find any situation hilarious was struggling to form a single coherent thought here. The way you looked with his pick around your neck certainly wasn’t helping either. His vision felt hazy, his ears were ringing in and all he could see was you. You, with your stupid optimism and endless music trivia. You, his best friend.

Was it normal to think about shoving your tongue down your best friend’s throat?

Eddie thought back to the last campaign you had barely concluded before Winter break. You and Dustin carried the party, right down to the wire. You were beaten up, barely ten hit points left between the two of you. Eddie had heavily pushed for a retreat. Orcus was one of the most powerful foes the party had faced to date and the odds were slim. Retreat, he had advised them. Retreat and live to fight another day.

Eddie didn’t think he could live another day without being able to kiss you.

No more retreating.

His hands were back around your neck, fingers curling into the newly placed chain. He didn’t even have time to steady himself before his lips were on yours. Aching, needy, desperate for something beyond best friends. Your tickets fluttered to the floor.

You returned in kind, hands gripping at the lapels of his stupid denim vest, the band patches scattered across the material much more familiar to you, now. Your back was pushed into Steve’s granite countertop painfully. You curled even further into Eddie, mouth eagerly opening for him as one hand traveled down your sternum, side, before settling at your waist.

A finger hooked into a loop in your jeans, pulling your hips flush to his.

You stepped on his sneakers in your eagerness to get closer, as close as you possibly could. He didn’t mind, hand weaving into your hair to tilt your head back, desperate both for a breath of air and a better view of his guitar pick disappearing beneath your blouse.

“How long?” You asked, wondering how many of those solitary nights camped on his bed, how many of those closing shifts spent thumbing through Beethoven’s classics, how many late-night campaigns could have been substituted for more of this.

“The whole time, I think.” He answered, nose nuzzling into the expanse of your neck. “You?”

“The same. I think.”

A boisterous laugh from the next room over burst your little bubble.

You were in Steve Harrington’s kitchen. It was Christmas night. Eddie Munson was sucking a hickey on the column of your throat like he’d drop dead if he didn’t accomplish his mission.

“I love you.” He pulled back, those doe-eyes finding yours. “You know that, right?”

There had been a time where the very thought of Eddie Munson brought tears to your eyes, memories of that botched audition had you seriously considering dabbling in witchcraft and fashioning a voodoo doll in his likeness. Now, it all felt so warm. Like his mixtape that was surely worn down to the bone with how often you flipped that thing, or his bedsheets tangled in your legs as you spent summer evenings watching him strum his acoustic guitar – the only one his uncle would tolerate at that late hour.

“I know. I love you too.”

It felt like meeting him all over again. This was not the Eddie that had made you cry outside the high school gym. You weren’t the girl who put your name on that audition sign-up sheet. You were just two strangers – deeply, desperately, foolishly destined to love each other until your last breath.

What a perfect introduction.

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