#me and my friends (the locals) said it's haunted

[marcsquez]

at this point i believe my joke is real bc wdym marc for three years in a row did bad in mandalika, is santet pohon beringin 13 is real like-

[area51-escapee]

I am also fascinated by the stories we tell as local urban legends that turn out to seemingly exist in every community. Warning for mention of hypothetical child death here but when I was a kid, my dad told me about these train tracks in San Antonio. He said that a school bus got stuck on the tracks and hit by a train, and that the tracks were no longer in use, but you could go and park your car on them and if you put flour all on the back of your car, you’d feel the car move and when you got out to check you’d see handprints left in the flour. Which that story FUCKED ME UP as a kid I was obsessed with it, I told it to everyone I knew, I wanted to move here so badly just to see these haunted train tracks. As an adult now I’ve seen this same story attributed to train tracks in Houston texas, as well as many towns and states all across the country, likely outside of it as well. It’s likely rooted in a single instance that did really take place but probably not as near constant as how wide spread it is makes it seem. Unless we’ve had really really shitty bus and train track protocols and kept making the same fuck up for several decades all over the country. Which isn’t too hard to believe but y know

[dreamsteddie]

There is an AITA out there that I can't find but it's been haunting me for weeks with visions of semi-angsty Steddie that I need to release onto the world. (If anyone happens to know what I'm talking about hit me up and I'll link it)

Edit: @jazzathebunny found the original AITA from Reddit linked Here for anyone who wants to read it. I'm definitely not doing exactly the same premise but this was my jumping off point 😊

Part Two! ------

Modern AU, Eddie and the guys are a moderately successful local band in the Chicago area playing gigs on the weekends and doing small tours whenever they all have the time. Gareth and Jeff are both in college while Eddie and Freak are both working part-time at a game store. Eddie managed to lock down that assistant manager position that lets him work 30 hours a week with weekends off for gigs. All in all, it's a pretty sweet deal and they can't complain.

Eddie had sworn off dating after a small handful of disastrous relationship attempts in their first year in the city. He dismisses any advances from people who attend their shows and tries not to think about how much he wants to make a genuine connection with someone and have something real. He's been burned one too many times to try and make something with someone he met in a bar or at work.

He knows the guys talk about it behind his back sometimes, he catches Jeff and Gareth fervently whispering to each other and stopping when they catch him entering the room one time too many to not suspect they're talking about him and he can't think of anything else going on in his life that they would feel the need to whisper about.

The fervent conversations take a slight uptick one day and about a week and a half after they do, Gareth hits him up and tells him he wants to set Eddie up with a guy from one of his classes. At first, Eddie is skeptical and cites all the reasons why he doesn't want to try with anyone right now but eventually, Jeff jumps in to plea the case and Freak jumps in on top of that and under the combined weight of his best friends he agrees to meet up with this Steve guy.

The guys set up the whole thing and before Eddie knows it it's Saturday night and he's wearing his best black jeans and a gray button-down, untucked, to go on an honest to God blind date like his life is some low-budget romcom.

Steve is not at all what Eddie thought he would be. Not the kind of guy he thought his friends would pick out for him given they know he usually goes for other alternatives like himself. Steve, who is shyly waving him over and getting out of his seat to great him, is the very epitome of prep. Well-fitted polo, light blue chinos, and what Eddie assumes this guy thinks are casual loafers. He's handsome to be sure, a 12/10 at least with perfect hair and defined biceps but Eddie is fairly sure he's being punked.

But, Eddie doesn't want to be rude so he goes to meet Steve at the table, confirming just in case that he's actually here to meet with a guy named Eddie. Steve gives him a bit of a confused look, saying that Gareth showed him a couple pictures of Eddie before he agreed to meet and figured he'd done the same for Eddie off Steve's Instagram. Gareth had, in fact, not done anything of the sort but they both dismiss it and get on with their date.

In all honesty, Eddie is expecting it to be a complete wash, but it turns out that even if Steve is not at all what Eddie would have previously said what his type, Steve is damn near perfect. He's funny, kind, a little bitchy, and even though he proves himself to be every bit the sports nerd he looks like he doesn't turn his nose up at Eddie's own much more classically nerdy interests. By the end of the date, Eddie has a new type and that type is Steve Harrington. He's quick to lock down a second date for the next weekend which Steve happily agrees to. They exchange numbers and Steve gives Eddie a chaste kiss on the cheek that has him floating all the way home.

Steve texted him that next morning letting him now he had a great time and is really looking forward to their next date and Eddie thinks this might be the start of something big for him. When he gets to practice he's clearly still floating on cloud nine and in his own little world designing their marriage invitations and matching tombstones so he doesn't notice the sly grins on his bandmates' faces.

"So...how'd it go last night? Everything you dreamed it would be?" Gareth asks, a strange glint in his eyes that Eddie doesn't clock.

Eddie goes on and on about how nice Steve was and how he might be The One, thanking Gareth profusely. Freak looks pleased for him, giving him a hard pat on the shoulder in congratulations but when Eddie finally tunes back into the real world he's greeted by Gareth's livid expression and Jeff's overly concerned one.

He asks the guys what the fuck is up and it turns out that Gareth and Jeff set this whole thing up as a prank of sorts. Eddie was never supposed to hit it off with Steve who Gareth selected specifically because he's a "totally brain-dead prep" and as far away as someone could get from Eddie's previous relationships. He was supposed to be someone Eddie could go on a date with and not form a connection with without getting completely burned at the end like all his previous relationships in the hopes of getting him out of his slump.

Jeff was in on it as well. He wanted to get Eddie back out there, so when Gareth presented the plan he sat in on a couple of Gareth's general credit business class sessions to help pick the guy out.

After Jeff and Gareth finish explaining he does a complete 180 and just...leaves. In any other situation, he would be raging and verbally tearing his friends a new asshole but instead, he completely disengages and walks out the garage door, ignoring his friends' shouts to come back.

He goes back home, socked and hurt and so very confused about how the hell he found himself in this position when his phone lights up.

New Message: Steve H.

Fuck.

-------

Part two coming soon??? Maybe???? We'll see.

[mcuamerica]

Stranded | Part Two

Featuring : (future) Azriel x Fem!Reader, Eris x Reader (platonic), Rhys x Sister!Reader

Summary: Amarantha is dead and you finally get to go home. Requested by @sidthedollface2 here.

Warnings: 18+ only, description of ruined wings and skin scarring, canon level violence, not proofread (i'll do it later), let me know if anything was forgotten...

Disclaimer: I do not own SJM’s characters, only the ones I create for the purpose of this story. This is a work of fiction. I do not give permission to repost my work on any other platform or medium. Please be respectful.

Dividers from @saradika

Part One

You felt your magic return to you the day Amarantha died. It was such an ordinary day.

You were in your cabin, that Eris had found for you the moment your wings were burned. You couldn't return to the Night Court without putting yourself in danger of Amarantha finding you, so you stayed in Autumn.

You were cooking when it washed over you, feeling as if you could finally breath again. You tested your abilities, seeing how much you could do. You were able to engulf the entire room in darkness when you were satisfied it returned.

You lost hope 10 years prior, when one of the local villagers said that all of Amarantha's court was bound to Under the Mountain. That meant you wouldn't be getting anymore visits from Eris, and even in the 40 years before that, those were few and far between. You were lucky Autumn Court was on her "good" side, because she never looked too deep into the woods. From what Eris told you, Rhys had taken her to bed.

You knew Rhys, and you could guess that he did it to keep her eyes from turning towards the Night Court. Towards you. Or Velaris.

So, you lived your simple life. The cabin Eris gave you came with a horse, that you would take to and from the local village. You were able to maintain a garden. And the best thing about living in Autumn was you never had to brace a bad winter or a sweltering summer. You missed the seasons dearly, you missed Solstices and Starfalls. Most of all, you missed your family.

It still haunted you that Rhys was taking on the burden of the Night Court by himself. You wished you could be there with him.

And, the rest of your family was running Velaris. Without you. You had to wonder if Azriel and Mor ended up together, being trapped in the beautiful, romantic city all these years. You wouldn't if Azriel regretted leaving you that night. Or if he was happy you were gone.

One thing you couldn't get over, even after all these years, was that he left you. Sure, you could handle yourself, but he left you. His best friend. Even when you were young, you always wanted to be around Azriel. Once Cassian and Rhys stopped tormenting him, you were allowed to be around him. He was always the first one to show you techniques with his sword, or new flying maneuvers. But then Mor came alone, slept with Cassian, and that was it. Azriel had been pining after her since then. You weren't resentful of it until he left you the night everything went to shit. When you lost your magic and your ability to fly.

Even know, when the wind was raging in the forest, you teared up. You wish there was some way to be able to fly again. But you grew up in the Illyrian war camp with your mother and brother. You knew what destroyed tendons looked like. There was no hope. Even after Eris and his healers did everything they could to heal them as best as they could. The membrane was in tact, albeit thinner than normal, and you had full function of stretching them in and out. But, the proper strength to fly would never be resorted.

At least you had your magic back. And you waited for Eris to come find you, to placate his father enough that he had time to tell you what happened. You assumed, knowing the depletion of magic was tied to Amarantha, that she died. You really hoped that was the case. You could go home. You could see your brother. You could ignore Azriel for the rest of your life. It never even occurred to you that you could probably winnow back home. You hadn't been able to do it for a long time.

Instead of Eris bursting through the door that afternoon, it was shadows, followed by a heaving Azriel trying to catch his breath.

"(Y/N)!" Azriel exclaimed, bounding over to you. Before you had a chance to step away, he wrapped you in an embrace. One you couldn't help but melt into. You might be mad at him, but after 50 years of being apart, you were happy to see him.

You pulled away, seeing tears in Azriel's eyes as he looked you over. His eyes landed on your wings. "What did they do to you?" He asked, searching your eyes.

"After you left me that night, three of Beron's sentinels burned my wings." You said, taking a deep breath.

"I need to write a note, and then you can take me home. Is Rhys there yet?" You asked.

"I don't know, I've spent all day having my shadows look for you. I was hoping you made it to Winter... I didn't think you would still be here." He said, pausing as you started to write.

You wrote to Eris, letting him know that you would be going back to the Night Court. You also told him that you would support him if he ever needed anything. You tucked the note into an envelop and left it on the counter.

"Okay... can you winnow us?" You asked, holding out your hand.

He gazed over you again, unsaid words clear in his eyes. "I'm sorry, (Y/N). For everything. For leaving you. For not coming to get you-"

"Azriel.. please.. take me home. And then we can talk about it." You said.

He nodded, staring at you for a few moments before he took you hand and darkness enveloped you both.

Rhys was pissed.

He may have been happy to see his family, and to tell Mor and you about how he found his mate (even if she was with Tamlin), but the instant he saw your wings, he knew something was wrong. Before even asking the rest of his family what happened, he pulled you into a room alone.

After recapping what happened Under the Mountain, and more tearful hellos, he asked you to sit down. "Tell me what happened." He said.

You looked down, taking a deep breath. "That night that Amarantha took your magic, and you closed the borders to Velaris, I got stuck in Autumn. Azriel had left to go help Mor with something. I couldn't even winnow to the Night Court borders." You told him what happened with the sentinels, how Eris found you, and then watched as Rhys settled into the quiet deathly rage.

"He did this to you?" He asked, barely above a whisper.

"No," you quickly corrected. "Eris helped me." There were tears in your eyes now. "He- Let me just tell you how it started..."

Eris brought you to a cabin on the outskirts of the Autumn borders, close to a village but far enough that no one would look for you here. He had his best healers come to help heal you, but with their lack ox experience repairing wings, they couldn't completely heal them. You back even still had scarring on it from how hot the sentinels burned through them.

When Eris couldn't stay because Amarantha sent for all High Lords and their heirs, he had a healer stay with you. Until you were back to your normal health. And then, he offered to help you get to the Night Court. Said he would personally take you to the Moonstone Palace. But he warned you how cruel Amarantha already was, and how she was taking more and more people prisoner (to be part of her "court") Under the Mountain. You chose to stay in the cabin. If you couldn't go back to Velaris, you didn't want to go to the Night Court. Not when your brother was actively trying to get Amarantha to avoid it. The return of the Lady of the Night Court would surely set her eyes towards you. And Rhys would pay the price.

Eris would visit you as often as he could. Since Autumn was on Amarantha's good side, she let Eris and his brothers out more. When he was able to step away from the Forest House, he would visit you. Bring you more supplied, new clothes, sometimes even new furniture or paint to refresh the cabin. All the while, he kept you up to date on what was happened. One day, you asked why he was helping you.

"Because I can... and it was my family's sentinels that harmed you. You had no one else around. If you were to die out here, what would I tell you brother? It would have caused an even worse relationship between us. And I'm hoping to have his support when I overthrow my father. If we can tackle Amarantha first... and.. I'm hoping one day you can counsel your brother to help me as well." He explained.

"So you're helping me for your own gain?" You asked.

"I'm helping you because it's the right thing to do... and I've grown fond of this little escape." He answered.

That's how it was until three courts tried to rebel, and Amarantha barred anyone from leaving Under the Mountain. Even Eris. You wondered why he hadn't shown up when you went into the village to grab some more food, when you overheard the rumors.

"He truly helped you? He never hurt you?" Rhys asked.

You shook your head. "No, he never hurt me. He never tried anything. He... was kind. And caring. And I owe him my life." You said, looking up at Rhys.

He nodded, thinking for a moment. He paused his pacing and looking at you dead in the eyes. "Azriel left you?" He asked, seeming to recall what you first told him.

"...Yes." You said after hesitating.

"I'm going to kill him." He growled.

Your heart skipped a beat, knowing Rhys might just well kill Azriel for putting you in harms way.

"Wait- no. Please.. go easy on him." You said.

He paused, taking a deep breath. Darkness was pooling around his ankles. You could tell he was trying to reel it in. "I'm going to beat him to a pulp."

Better than killing him, you thought. You relaxed for a moment before Rhys rushed out from the door. You chased after him to see the first blow to Azriel's face. Then to his gut. Then to his legs to knock him on the floor. All while Rhys growled out in between each punch,"You. Left. My. Sister. In. Autumn?!"

Azriel didn't even fight back.

Part Three

A/N: Another tough one... I think this will have 1 or 2 more parts... which I probably won't get to writing until Sunday or Monday night (I know, i'm sorry!) Thank you all so much for your support!

Tagging: @feiwelinchen @circe143 @sidthedollface2 @crazylokonugget @i-am-infinite @thestartitaness @buttermilktea11 @tele86 @yearninglustfully @bunnyredgirl

Main Masterlist

[noyasmashing]

Current fave idea is the karasuno gang meeting up after they graduate to catch up, and there's a person there none of them recognize(Sugas younger sister by like a year) and one of them (noya, tsukki, tanaka, kageyama... tsukki.. I'm bias lol) catches her eye, and suddenly, they're back at her apartment crying out for her

OML I love when i get specific requests they r so fun to write 🙈

Sub!Tsukkishema x Fem!Reader

CW: Alcohol usage, cryin, overstimulation??, objectification, nasty (unprotected) pnv sex, chocking (mention of it at the end), kinda sadistic reader tbh, bondage, foodjob??

The old Karasuno team was gathering at their previous haunt, the local ramen shop near their high school. It had been a while since they'd all been together, and they decided to meet up, along with some other mutual friends from back in the day. As they chatted excitedly about their lives post-graduation, reminiscing about their volleyball days, there was someone among them they couldn't quite place.

Nishinoya, ever observant, noticed a young woman sitting quietly at the edge of their group. She was sipping her ramen and listening intently to their stories, occasionally smiling or nodding along. "Hey guys," Nishinoya interrupted, "Who's our new friend here?"

They all turned to look at her. "Oh, I'm Koshi’s younger sister," she replied with a warm smile. "I heard so much about all of you from my brother. It's nice to finally meet you!"

Nishinoya's eyes widened in surprise. "Suga's sister? Wow, I didn't even know he had a sister!" he exclaimed.

"Yeah, I'm a year younger than him," she explained, her hand circling the tip of her glass, the alcohol bringing the rosiness out of her cheeks.

Tsuki gazed at the girl seated in-front of him. Truth be told he didn’t really notice her until Nishinoya had said something, but he couldn't help but be intrigued. This girl had a familiar spark about her—maybe it was her smile, or the way she listened so attentively. She seemed to share Suga's kindness and warmth.

Throughout the evening, Tsuki found himself stealing glances at her. he didn’t know what it was, maybe her easy going demeanor, or her smile when she giggled at one of Hinatas dumb jokes. He wasn’t used to looking at someone and not wanting to immediately insult them.

As the night progressed, Tsukki discovered himself engaging in more and more conversation with her. Normally not one to talk much, he was content listening to her stories from high school, her interests, and more.

They hadn’t noticed the time passing until others started saying their farewells and leaving the venue. Amidst the commotion of the crowd, Tsukki momentarily took his eyes off her, and just like that, she vanished. He anxiously scanned the dining room, navigating through the sea of people in search of her.

It was safe to say he was hooked. He wanted nothing more but to be in her presence, and he was starting to give up on that idea, as he spotted Sugawara leaving too. Then, as luck would have it, he turned his head one last time and caught her gaze, smirking up at him through her lashes.

She was tucked away towards the back of the shop near the bathrooms, chatting with Nishinoya, casually leaning against the wall.

"Bye, [name]!" Nishinoya exclaimed, before skipping away in his usual hyper manner. She smiled warmly in response, giving him a lazy wave goodbye.

As Tsukki timidly approached her, he noticed a mischievous smirk on her lips. "Were you looking for me, like a little lost puppy?" she teased, tilting her head to the side with confidence.

His cheeks burned embarrassingly red as he shook his head and muttered a quiet “fuck you." He knew she was right, but he couldn't summon the courage to defend himself properly, especially when she stood up and closed the gap between the two. He could feel the warmth of her breath, tinged with the scent of alcohol, and he could almost feel her breasts press against him.

Avoiding her gaze, he looked away, attempting to maintain his usual stoic expression.

"You're all bark and no bite," she grinned again, grabbing his face to make him meet her gaze. His glasses were perched low on his nose, and he peered at her over them, his breath catching in his throat. The only thing on his mind was how good she looked up close.

She grinned at his hesitation, “I have an uber outside, would you like to come home with me, pretty boy?”

And that’s how Tsukishima found himself in this predicament, kneeling with his very own tie binding his hands.

He grumbled in frustration as he attempted to free his hands from the tie once again. He wanted to appear irritated, not willing to admit the reason why his dick was pressing against his pants at that moment.

But, when she leaned down and planted her foot, encased in sheer stockings, against his groin, he could no longer hide it. His lower lip quivered as a whimper escaped him, his hips instinctively moving to press against her foot.

She sneered at him, increasing the pressure as she spoke, "You will take what I give you, understand?" Her previously kind and gentle demeanor was completely replaced by a more intense and commanding presence. Tears welled up in his eyes as he nodded weakly, trying to maintain his composure in the face of her dominance.

She started to glide her foot up and down the length of his pulsating erection. He could feel the sticky mess seeping into his boxers, the urge to remove them growing stronger by the second.

He couldn't help but utter a desperate "please," a plea that earned him a sadistic smile from her.

"Please what, pretty boy?" She teased, her movements becoming more deliberate against his crotch. He felt his entire body heating up as he craved more stimulation. This was unlike anything he had experienced before, and he was on the brink of making a mess in his dress pants.

He took a deep breath before nervously replying, "Can't you use a little more..." his voice trailed off, unable to meet her gaze. He could feel her seductive eyes fixed solely on him, but he couldn't summon the courage to look at her, knowing that if he did, he might climax right then and there.

"Hmm... We wouldn't want you spoiling those nice pants now, would we?" She questioned, tilting her head slightly with a mischievous smile playing on her lips.

He finally mustered the courage to look up at her and replied with a shaky, "Y-yeah," his eyes reflecting a mix of nervousness and anticipation.

“Why don’t you join me up here then?” She suggested, patting the bed where she sat, a warm invitation in her voice and smile.

He stood up shakily, his hands still bound behind his back, but before he could even take a seat, she pushed him onto his back with a forceful yet gentle motion.

“Be a good toy and let me use you a bit,” she instructed this time, her hands deftly moving towards his zipper with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

With swift movements, his aching member was now free, proudly displayed on his toned stomach. He couldn't help but let out a gasp at the sensation, feeling a rush of embarrassment as she gazed at him with interest.

"A-are you surprised?" he quipped, trying to sound confident even with a blush covering his ears. But she saw through his facade in an instant, especially when his tip was leaking pre-cum, giving away his nervous excitement like a virgin eager for his first fuck.

She sneered at his comment, biting back without hesitation, "Good toys stay quiet for their owner."

His head fell back in utter embarrassment at her sharp retort. Embarrassed at how his cock twitched she said that. Embarrassed that the second her pussy grazed his sensitive member, his hands instinctively pulled at the tie, his back arching in a desperate, pathetic display of need.

As his cock sank into her wet pussy, he let out the prettiest of moans, feeling a surge of pleasure as his eyes rolled back uncontrollably. Her hips rolled forward against him, causing his member to throb with intense arousal. He couldn't resist raising his hips, wanting to be buried as deeply inside her as possible, lost in the blissful sensation.

It didn't help that every time she raised her hips, just to aggressively slam them down, she whispered filthy things in his ears. Her words sent shivers down his spine and added a delicious layer pleasure to every sensation.

"Cummin'," he would slur, as she rode him through his body-shaking orgasm, but she never stopped. He wanted desperately to caress her soft skin, to cover his mouth to muffle the embarrassing whispers escaping him, but she would giggle at his struggles against the restraints. The sensation of her teasing laughter only added to his pleasure, driving him further into a frenzy of ecstasy as she continued to ride him with relentless abandon.

"Such a good... good toy for me," she panted between breaths, continuing to fuck herself on his raging cock. The natural curve in it, plus the sheer thickness of him, was just too perfect.

She brought two fingers to his lips and clumsily pushed them inside, his tongue swirling desperately around them, seeking distraction from the overwhelming sensations. But her fingers were gone too soon, leaving him wanting more as she pulled them away and pressed them against her sensitive clit. The sight of her pleasuring herself with the very fingers that had been inside him moments before was too much for him.

The sound of her gasps of pleasure as she pleasured herself was torture for him, even though he was still buried deep inside her. He yearned to be the one touching her, driving her wild with desire himself. The sight of her lost in her own pleasure, eliciting those intoxicating sounds from deep within her throat, fueled the fire of desire burning within him. He couldn't help but let out a string of whines, the need to touch her, to bring her to the edge overwhelming his senses.

He had likely cum at least twice, doing everything in his power to muffle his moans, even resorting to biting his lip until it bled. But she did not stop for a second, her relentless pace and intensity driving him wild with desire. The pleasure and the pain mingled together, making hot tears roll down his cheeks.

It seemed his tears only fulled her desire, as her hands made their way to his neck. “You would look so pretty with my hands around your throat.”

It became clear that this night was going to be longer than either of them had expected.

[sunny44]

I can stay

Pairing: Lando Norris x Fem!reader

Warnings: none I guess

Summary: Y/n, feeling hurt and insecure after seeing photos of Lando with another girl, assumed that he moved on but he unexpectedly shows up at her door, leading to a heartfelt conversation about their feelings.

Previous Part

Several months have passed since Lando decided to leave, leaving behind what we had. I had already grown accustomed to his absence, trying to move on with my life. Tonight, I planned to go out with my friends to a local bar, hoping to distract my mind from the thoughts that haunt me.

We were having fun, laughing and chatting animatedly, until I decided to take a look at Instagram. And there they were - photos of Lando with a girl, smiling and looking completely in love. My heart sank as I read the caption confirming my worst fears: she was his new girlfriend.

Suddenly, the atmosphere in the bar felt heavy and suffocating. I could no longer concentrate on my friends' conversation, my mind spinning around the image of Lando with that girl. And then my insecurities started to creep into my mind, of how that girl was everything I was not, and that led me to a conclusion.

And apparently the problem was me.

Without a word, I abruptly stood up from the table and ran out of the bar.

Back in the comfort of my apartment, tears began to stream down my face, smudging my makeup. I sank into the couch, trying to process the flood of emotions flooding my heart. How could I be so naive as to think he would come back to me or that I would be enough for Lando Norris.

After I finished cleaning my makeup, I put on my pajamas and as I was finishing tying my hair into a bun, I heard knocks on the door.

My heart skipped a beat with the startle I got from the loud knocks, but I couldn't help but feel a glimmer of hope and at the same time I was full of anger and hurt. Reluctantly, I went to the door and opened it.

And there he was, standing in the hallway, with a look of regret on his face.

"Y/n, please, let me explain," he began, his voice full of urgency.

I looked at him incredulously, my mind spinning with a mixture of emotions.

"What is there to explain, Lando? I saw the photos. You have a new girlfriend, so if you came here to rub that in my face you can leave, you wasted your time.”

I went to close the door but he held it.

"No, Y/n, you're misunderstanding. She's not my girlfriend.” He said with some despair. “And I would never do something like that.”

I rolled my eyes, unable to believe a word of what he was saying.

"Oh, sure. And the romantic photos are just a coincidence, is that it? Or the fact that you show up at my door after months right after the photos went viral on the internet?”

"I know it looks bad, but please, give me a chance to explain."

“And why do you care to explain to me? We are nothing to each other and you made that very clear when you walked out that door leaving me alone that night.”

“Please.” He begs.

I hesitated for a moment, fighting the urge to slam the door in his face. Finally, I took a step back and let him in.

"All right, Lando.” I muttered, my voice full of resignation. "But I can’t promise that I’ll believe you."

He nodded, silently thanking me for the opportunity. We sat on the couch and stayed silent for a few minutes, me waiting for him to speak and him thinking about what he would say.

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“You've already said that, but those photos show otherwise.”

“They were taken out of context, you know how it is.” I sighed because I knew how his world worked. “Max dragged me to that party and she was a friend of his who yes, hit on me and tried something but I pushed her away.”

“That doesn't change the fact that you broke my heart. That I begged you to stay that night and you simply turned your back on me and ended everything we had or didn't have.” He tried to wipe the tear that fell from my face but I dodged his hand. “And then I open Instagram and see a photo of you with a girl much prettier than me, and then with the writings “Lando Norris and his new girlfriend”, and then I felt like garbage because you wanted a girlfriend, just didn't want it to be me.”

“Don't say that, never say that again.” He holds my face. “You're perfect for me and it's all I want, but I'm an idiot who doesn't deserve your love let alone that you cry over me.”

“If you really think that, why did you leave me?”

“Because I'm a coward, I was afraid of my feelings for you.” He dries my tears. “I've never felt for anyone what I feel for you, and that scared me so I thought it was easier to leave than to say out loud that I love you.”

“What did you say?”

“That I love you and that I'm an idiot for leaving and even more idiotic for leaving it for months until I had the courage to come here.” He sighs. “I admit that the photos were what encouraged me to come, because I didn't want you to think I was with someone after saying I didn't want a relationship with you, even if it was a lie.”

“All right.”

“Do you forgive me?”

“I forgive you, but it still hurts to know that you preferred to run away than to talk to me.”

“I know and I'm sorry for that and I promise to make it up to you.”

“Can you stay? Please?” I asked and he smiled.

“I can stay.” He kisses me and for the first time he really stayed.

Taglist: @sltwins @hiireadstuff @lunaetxc @ssararuffoni @lansmclaren @ushygushybaby @daemyratwst @alymariec @mahhi7 @kaa212 @halaxxxx @ryanandshanearemydads @kapsylia

Guys, the names that have a line on top is because I couldn’t tag

[callmerainman]

Cameras | Reigen Arataka x fem!model!Reader

plot. The last thing you expected when you entered the office of Reigen Arataka, was to be head over heels for him. Reigen can't seem to believe it himself when Dimple points out that the beautiful model who came in his office for help is, in fact, flirting her way towards him. It's your first time chasing a man and not the other way around, and it's so much fun.

fandom. mob psycho 100

word count. 2.2k

tags. fem!reader, reader is a model, flirting, seducing, awkwardness, suggestive tones, implied sexual reference, oblivious Reigen Arataka, photoshoots, smoking, wingman Dimple.

part. 1/2

An elegant smile softly spread across your face, your hands touching your soft hair with delicacy, your legs crossed under the wooden desk. And, hard to ignore, your foot moving slowly in a circling motion. Your classy composure hides your real emotions so well, you're a woman of style. But, in reality, you're completely losing it.

Shit, he's handsome.

The blond man sitting in front of you is explaining his parcels and exorcism plans as he moves his hands left and right. He looks serious, professional, and focused. His name is Reigen Arataka, or The Greatest Psychic of the 21st Century. You didn't know anything about him until twenty minutes earlier, when you entered his office.

You work as a photo model in a well known modeling agency in Seasoning City. You recently started catwalks, but you're mainly featured on local fashion magazines covers and billboard signs across the city. Your career is going well, except for this feeling that you just can't shake off. In the last few months, every time you pose for a picture you feel a haunting presence weighing on your shoulders. It's like a cold, gloomy breeze. It didn't stop you from getting your work done, but it was more energy consuming than it should be. You didn't believe in ghosts, to be clear. But your friends suggested you call a psychic, and so you did. You chose the cheapest in town, just to give it a try. But nothing could have prepared you for this situation.

«So, considering the context, I think the best exorcism plan is the second in my list, miss»

You snap back to reality and quickly realize that you didn't listen to a single word he said. Too busy staring at the smooth gestures of his hands. You have to play it cool.

«How about you come with me to my next shooting? I have to get there in 30 minutes. Maybe you can take care of the problem on the spot. I'll be glad to pose for you if it can help, Reigen-san» you smile, resting your chin on your open palm.

It's weird. Usually men were the ones who chased you, and fell for you right on the spot. This is your first time being head over heels for a man, and at first sight too. You can't exactly pin point what it is that makes you twirl your hair around your index, and smile so intently. Maybe his ginger hair, or the way he articulates words. Or his grey suit and eccentric pink tie, and charismatic smile.

The man exudes sex. In sort of a pathetic, sketchy way.

«Fine by me» Reigen replies.

You clap your hands together and spark him a shiny smile «Great! Let's go then!»

As you go ahead to bring your car in front of the building, Reigen closes the office. Mob is at school and no clients are expected to come for the next few hours.

The conman trots down the stairs quickly so that he can go wait for you outside the building. But he feels a presence floating behind him.

«Oi, Reigen»

Reigen turns around and grumbles as his gaze meets a familiar green cloud.

«What, Dimple»

«That lady is most certainly hitting on you»

Reigen almost trips down the stairs. He quickly recollects himself as he stops in the middle of the stairwell.

«That's not true»

«Pff» the spirit spits «it's so obvious»

Reigen descends the stairs again, the sound of his shoes stomping on the floor booming in the echoey building.

«It's not obvious because she's not hitting on me! You're just saying it to make fun of me»

The green spirit floats backwards, in front of Reigen's face. He looks dead serious.

«Look man, I would never use such a poor excuse for a joke. I mean, a knockout of a model hitting on you? That would be too unrealistic!»

Reigen rolls his eyes and just keeps going, trying to ignore Dimple.

The latter agitates a little green arm in front of his face «Hellooo? She was literally eating you up with her preying eyes! Basically giggling and kicking her feet like a schoolgirl! And what about the "I'll be glad to pose for you~"»

Dimple channeled his most feminine, high-pitched voice to say that. Green little hands intertwined, eyes glittering and lashes fluttering. It pisses Reigen off.

«Miss (Y/N) is not hitting on me. And even if she were, obviously in a very parallel and distant world, I would never get my way with her. She's my client, and I'm a professional»

«Whatever you say dude...I warned you»

Dimple didn't pop out until later on, when you and Reigen get to your modeling agency. Everything is ready for today's photoshoot: lights, cameras, setting. As Reigen wanders around pretending to scan for spirits, you're approached by your publicist, Haru.

«Is he the male stripper we rented for Sakura's birthday?» she asks, pointing a finger towards Reigen.

«What? No! That's the psychic you suggested I call!» you exclaim.

«Oooh! Is he here to help you exorcise that spirit?»

«We don't know if there's a spirit yet, but he's here to help me out»

«And how are things going?»

«I want to sleep with him»

«(Y/N)!»

«I'm sorry, I can't help it!»

«Okay, I'll reschedule your Christmas jumpers shooting for next week. No big deal even if we don't do it today. Now go put some lingerie on»

«I love you so much, dearie»

In the end, there really was a spirit giving you a hard time during shootings. Or, to be specific, a curse. Dimple was able to detect it in no time, a cloud of gloomy, red smoke hovering over your shoulders. He absorbed it completely and you immediately felt the pressure on your back being released. Your pics came out perfect, flawless. You even put some extra work with that lingerie since you had a guest. And you did catch his brown eyes getting lost in the fabric of your garments, not without a sprinkle of guilt. It was a sight you yearned from men. Seeing them guilty for how mesmerized they are. But Reigen was dense. All afternoon you sent many hints that you, in fact, were flirting with him, but he didn't catch them. You still have time. Of course you have no idea that the one to get rid of the curse was Dimple, Reigen played it out as if he was the one doing all the magic. Dimple got accustomed to it.

«Thank you so much, Reigen-san» you smile, stunning as always. You already changed in your casual clothes, your body covered in a long, beige trenchcoat.

«No big deal, it was a small fish»

Dimple rolls his eyes behind Reigen's shoulder, but you can't see him. The sun is setting behind the building of your modeling agency. Reigen is smoking a cigarette, he asked you in advance if it bothers you, and you asked if you can join him. Reigen takes a quick glimpse at you. Even the way you smoke transpires elegance. His cheeks are lightly powdered in pink.

«I feel kinda bad though, I didn't pay you enough»

«No need to feel bad, I'm confident in my pricings»

«So you're gonna reject my drink invitation?»

Reigen chokes a puff of smoke. He throws you a quick glance and sees you smiling calmly, smoke slowly flowing out of your half-open lips. Dimple's words started floating in his own head. Was he right all along? Or you're just being nice? Do you really want to go out for a drink? Then, words just spill out on their own.

«Never said that»

You take a hit of your cigarette «Good, I'll lead the way»

There's something in your presence. So resolute, classy, confident. A different kind of confidence compared to Reigen. You always know how to behave, how to present yourself. It's hypnotic, magnetic even. Reigen can't help but be left speechless. He would lie to himself if he said that you weren't the prettiest woman he has ever seen. As you two walk towards your parked car, Reigen feels a familiar presence again.

«I told you, dude! She's all over you!» Dimple exlciams, waving his cloudy hands in front of Reigen.

«Shut the fuck up, she's not!»

You turn around «Did you say something?»

Reigen shakes his head vigorously, a bead of sweat running down his temple in embarrassment «N-nothing!»

The lounge bar you picked looks too expensive for Reigen's pockets. But you assured him that the drinks were on you, and ignored his insistence in paying. So now you and Reigen are sitting in front of each other, still dressed as you were this afternoon. He kinda feels out of place with his office suit on. But you fit the luxurious atmosphere so well. Your figure, your red dress, your make-up and smile. The way you talk, and laugh, and politely order two martinis. This place looks like it was made for you and you only. Talking with Reigen is an experience that you honestly expected very much. He's an interesting person, he's kind, funny, and smart. You didn't get the hots for him only for his looks. You understood the kind of person he was the moment he started listening to your problems this afternoon. He might look like the average japanese functional working citizen, but you saw right through him immediately.

And Reigen thinks the same of you. You're not only extremely attractive, confident and classy. You're cultured, intelligent, witty. He feels like talking to you is so easy, a feeling he didn't always get from others, or at least it wasn't often reciprocated. He wants to listen more of your words, of your mind. He's slowly getting hypnotized. You have a way with words, with gestures. The way you place your hand on your chin, or tuck hair behind your ear, is not casual. Everything you do is measure and balance. And the way you listen to his most complicated thoughts makes him want to tell you more, to stay a bit longer. He's enjoying himself for once in a while, laughing without thinking about anything else.

You put down your martini after taking a sip «By the way, Reigen, I think my photoshoot came out really, really well»

In a slow, sensual movement, you cross your legs under the table, your dress brushing against your bare skin with a velvet-like sound. You let one of your heels hang from the tip of your foot, then drop it down to the floor completely. Without any premeditation, you let your foot travel up Reigen's leg, first his ankle and then all the way up under the fabric of his pants.

«Maybe you should come to all my shootings from now on» you coo.

His shock is evident. Reigen locks his lips and holds his breath as he feels your foot stroking his leg under his pants. He wants to say something, but he can't.

Is she playing footsie with me?!

And then, for only God knows how many times, Dimple pops out again behind him, making Reigen jump on the spot.

«I fucking told you man!»

«I'm flirting with you, Reigen-san»

«Okay Dimple maybe you were right but what the fuck do I- say what?!»

You suppress a small giggle «I said that I'm flirting with you, Reigen. Since you didn't really seem to catch it»

Reigen is too stunned to speak «Oh!»

«I can stop though, if you're not interested in...more. Pursuing men so much is not my style. But I don't regret trying»

Your foot falls down from his leg and gets back to your heel, sliding it inside. You rest your chin in your hand, scanning Arataka's face for a reaction. He looks so embarrassed that it has you concerned. Did you go too far? To be completely honest, you liked messing with men. Making them look at you, leaving them speechless. But in a completely harmless way. Your last wish was to make Reigen uncomfortable in any way. You're about to say something, but you get interrupted.

«No, it's fine!» Reigen yelps, a nervous smile cracking on his face.

He mentally facepalms himself for sounding too excited, and too high pitched. But the reassuring smile you show him makes all his worries fade away. He doesn't feel judged, or under scrutiny.

«I-I mean» he resumes «I won't hold back if you're interested in...more»

Jesus he feels so stupid. But maybe you like stupid. It's written in the way you lean forward on your shared table, your hand reaching for his pink tie. You lightly pull it to encourage Reigen to come forward as well, sensually stroking it with two hands as you see his throat gulp out of nervousness.

«I'm glad to hear, Reigen. Otherwise I would have felt very lonely tonight, in my apartment»

«Good...»

Then, you let go of his tie and get up from your seat, and Reigen does the same. Mustering up some courage, Reigen extends his hand for you to take it. You happily oblige, placing yours in his palm. With a satisfied look on your face, you proceed to walk out of the lounge bar, hand in hand.

Without you noticing, Dimple appears in front of Reigen one last time.

«Can I come?» he asks.

«Fuck, no!» Reigen growls under his teeth.

«What did you say?» you ask.

«Nothing!»

[yourmomsawh0r3]

haunted 🔮🕸️🕷️

pairing: tyler owen’s x f! girlfriend reader

summary: Tyler Owens and Y/N join their friends to explore a haunted sanatorium, but when eerie events escalate, Tyler refuses to let Y/N face the darkness alone, standing by her side as strange noises and shadowy figures turn their thrillseeking adventure into a chilling experience.

It was a crisp October night, and the air was thick with anticipation as Y/N, Tyler Owens, and their friends Boone, Kate, and Javi arrived at the abandoned sanatorium on the outskirts of town. The place had a dark reputation long-abandoned, it was rumored to be haunted by the restless spirits of its past patients. Local stories of shadows moving in empty hallways, whispers echoing through the rooms, and doors slamming shut on their own had drawn their group to the site for a Halloween dare.

Y/N wasn’t thrilled about this adventure, but her friends had been eager, and she didn’t want to be the one to back down. Tyler, however, had picked up on her nervousness the moment they pulled up outside the looming, crumbling structure.

As the group gathered their equipment from the back of the van, Tyler glanced over at Y/N, noticing the way she pulled her jacket tighter around herself. “You sure you’re up for this, darlin’?” he asked, his Southern drawl cutting through the chill in the air. His eyes held a softness, a mix of concern and warmth. It was the look that always made her feel like she was more than just a part of the group like she mattered to him in a way that went beyond their shared adventures.

Y/N forced a smile, adjusting her camera strap and trying to steady her nerves. “Yeah, I’m good. It’s just a bunch of old ghost stories, right? Nothing we haven’t faced before,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt.

Tyler chuckled, reaching out to brush a loose strand of hair behind her ear. The touch was brief, but it sent warmth coursing through her, grounding her against the chill that seemed to seep from the abandoned building in front of them. “Hey, if it gets too much, you just stick by me, alright? Ain’t no way I’m letting anything scare you off.”

Y/N rolled her eyes playfully, but the corners of her mouth quirked up at his words. “You better not run off and leave me to the ghosts, cowboy.”

He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ll even let you hold my hand if it gets real spooky.”

She laughed, feeling a little lighter despite the nerves buzzing in her chest. For a moment, with Tyler’s steady presence next to her, the sanatorium didn’t seem quite so intimidating. But as they joined the rest of the crew Boone, Kate, and Javi who were already testing their EVP recorders and flashlights, the eerie atmosphere settled back over them like a heavy blanket.

The sanatorium’s front doors groaned as they pushed them open, revealing a long, dark corridor lined with dusty windows. Cold air rushed out to meet them, and their footsteps echoed in the empty lobby. Boone, always the thrill-seeker, led the way with a confident stride, while Kate followed closely behind, her camera already recording. Javi stuck to the rear, muttering about how this place gave him the creeps.

Tyler stayed close to Y/N, his flashlight sweeping across the broken tiles and faded wallpaper. He glanced at her whenever she jumped at a sudden noise or flinched at a gust of wind that rattled the windows, offering her reassuring smiles. And she was grateful for it, even though she tried to hide her nervousness behind a brave front.

They started their investigation in the main lobby, recording audio and taking photos, but it wasn’t long before things took a strange turn. Y/N swore she saw something moving just beyond the reach of her flashlight shadows slipping across the walls where there shouldn’t have been any. She spun around, her heart racing, but when she pointed it out to the group, no one else saw it.

“Relax, Y/N. It’s probably just your imagination,” Boone teased, flashing her a smirk. But Tyler caught the worry in her eyes, stepping a little closer to her as they continued exploring.

After a while, the group gathered in a hallway leading deeper into the building. The air seemed heavier there, colder, and the shadows seemed to stretch out longer. Boone, ever the daredevil, grinned at Y/N and then nudged her with his elbow. “Hey, Y/N, you wanna prove you’re not scared? How about a dare?” He gestured toward a dark corridor branching off to their right. “Go get some footage down there, alone. It’s the hotspot, they say.”

Y/N hesitated, glancing down the pitch-black hallway. Her nerves prickled, every instinct telling her that nothing good would come from venturing into that darkness alone. She tried to brush it off with a laugh. “Yeah, right. That’s how all the horror movies start, Boone. Nice try.”

But before she could respond further, Tyler stepped forward, his expression hardening. “Not happening,” he said firmly, his voice leaving no room for argument. He shot a look at Boone, making it clear he wasn’t joking. “She’s not going anywhere without me, got it?”

Boone raised an eyebrow, but Kate elbowed him, sensing the tension. “Fine, fine,” Boone muttered, holding up his hands in surrender. “Didn’t mean to push it.”

Tyler turned back to Y/N, his hand resting gently on her shoulder. “I told you, I’m not lettin’ you out of my sight,” he said softly. Y/N felt a flutter in her chest at the way he was looking at her protective, unwavering and she managed a small smile.

“You’re my hero, Tyler Owens,” she teased quietly, but there was genuine gratitude in her voice.

But almost as if the building itself took offense to Boone’s words, a loud crash echoed through the hallways, reverberating off the dilapidated walls. Everyone froze, their breath catching in their throats as the sound of footsteps heavy and deliberate followed, as if something unseen was pacing just around the corner.

Tyler instinctively moved closer to Y/N, his arm brushing against hers. “Stay close,” he whispered, his voice barely audible over the strange sounds. Y/N nodded, gripping the handle of her camera with trembling fingers, feeling the warmth of his body next to hers as a shield against the creeping cold.

They moved toward the noise, Tyler leading the way with his flashlight. As the heavy metal door slammed shut behind them with a deafening clang, the darkness seemed to thicken around the group, swallowing up what little light their flashlights provided. Y/N’s breath hitched, her hand instinctively clutching Tyler’s arm as the sudden sound echoed through the empty hallways. Tyler’s grip tightened around his flashlight, his knuckles turning white as he scanned the darkness. The air felt colder now, and there was a tension in the silence, as if the building itself was holding its breath, waiting for something.

Boone was the first to speak, his bravado faltering as he turned back toward the closed door. “Alright, very funny. Who’s messing with us?” he called out, trying to sound more confident than he felt. His voice echoed, but there was no answer, only the steady creak of the building settling around them.

Javi swung his flashlight back down the corridor, his face pale. “Man, that door wasn’t supposed to be able to close like that,” he muttered. “This place is supposed to be abandoned.”

Kate, who had been holding up her camera, stopped recording and looked around nervously. “Okay, maybe we should just leave. This place is seriously creeping me out.”

Tyler kept his arm around Y/N’s shoulders, his body tensed as if ready to protect her from whatever might come out of the shadows. He glanced down at her, concern etched in his features. “You alright, darlin’? We’ll get out of here, okay?”

Y/N nodded, but her eyes darted around the hallway, her mind playing tricks on her as shadows seemed to shift and dance just beyond the flashlight’s reach. She tried to keep her breathing steady, but a shiver ran down her spine when she thought she heard a faint whisper, her name barely carried on the stale air. “Did you hear that?” she whispered to Tyler, her voice barely audible.

Before he could respond, the whispers grew louder, weaving through the air around them. They were indistinct at first, like the murmur of a distant conversation, but then they began to form words taunting, eerie words that sent a chill through the group. “You shouldn’t be here…” the voices echoed, seemingly coming from all around them, as if the very walls were speaking.

Boone’s bravado evaporated entirely as he spun around, his flashlight flickering. “Okay, nope. I’m out. We’re leaving. Right now,” he declared, tugging at the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. He pulled harder, panic rising in his voice. “This isn’t funny anymore! It’s stuck!”

Kate backed away from the door, her face pale. “This has to be some kind of prank. Or maybe it’s the wind?”

Javi shook his head, swallowing hard as he glanced back down the dark hallway, where shadows seemed to writhe and stretch toward them. “That’s not the wind, Kate. There’s no way.”

Tyler turned to face the others, his jaw clenched. “Alright, let’s stay calm. We’ve got to find another way out of here,” he said, but his voice wavered as the whispers continued to creep through the air, growing louder with every passing second.

Y/N’s grip on Tyler’s arm tightened as she fought to keep her fear in check. The shadows seemed to pulse around them, growing darker with each flicker of their flashlights. Her pulse quickened when she thought she saw a figure standing at the end of the hallway, barely visible in the dim light a dark silhouette that didn’t move. “Tyler… there’s someone down there,” she breathed, barely able to form the words.

Tyler turned his flashlight in the direction she was pointing, but the beam only illuminated an empty hallway. He squinted, straining to see beyond the darkness, but the figure she saw seemed to melt into the shadows. “I don’t see anything,” he said, though he kept his voice low, as if afraid that raising it might make the darkness react.

Boone finally gave up on the door, turning back to the group with panic clear in his eyes. “Let’s head back the way we came. We’ll find a window or something to climb out of.”

But as they turned to retrace their steps, a chilling breeze swept through the hallway, carrying with it a deep, raspy voice that sent shivers down their spines. “You’ll never leave,” it hissed, the words wrapping around them like ice.

The lights flickered wildly, and Y/N felt Tyler’s arm slip around her waist, pulling her closer as if to shield her from whatever was lurking in the shadows. He met her gaze, his expression serious despite the fear that flickered in his eyes. “I’m not letting anything happen to you, Y/N. We’re getting out of here. Together.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when a loud bang echoed through the hallway, the sound of a door slamming shut deeper inside the building. Boone and Javi jumped, nearly dropping their equipment, while Kate let out a small yelp, stumbling backward.

Tyler’s eyes darted to the shadows, his jaw clenched. “Alright, that’s it. Everyone stick close. We’re finding another way out now.”

Just as they started to move down the hallway, there was a scuffling noise, like footsteps shuffling across the dusty floor behind them. Y/N turned, her flashlight cutting through the darkness, but all she saw was empty space until she caught a glimpse of movement, something slipping out of sight around the corner. Her breath caught in her throat, and she squeezed Tyler’s hand, forcing herself to keep moving forward even as dread twisted in her stomach.

The group pressed forward, but the whispers followed them, growing louder and more insistent, as if urging them deeper into the darkness. Tyler kept Y/N close by his side, his arm brushing against hers with every step, a steady presence amid the chaos. She clung to that comfort, even as the air seemed to grow colder, each breath visible in the dim light.

And then, just when it felt like the building was closing in around them, the whispers stopped, plunging the sanatorium into a heavy silence. For a moment, all they could hear was the sound of their own breathing, the rapid thumping of their hearts.

But before they could process the sudden quiet, another door creaked open somewhere down the hallway a slow, deliberate sound that sent a fresh wave of fear washing over them.

Tyler turned to Y/N, his expression grim but determined. “Whatever happens, stay close to me, you hear? We’re getting out of this place if I have to carry you out.”

She nodded, managing a small, shaky smile. “You’ve got yourself a deal, cowboy.”

But as they moved toward the sound, knowing it was their only hope of escape, they couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching them something that had no intention of letting them leave.

And as the next door creaked open, revealing a staircase descending into pitch blackness, Y/N couldn’t shake the feeling that their night had only just begun.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[selkiesongss]

listen. when it comes to which manifestation of magic would choose sam, i'll admit that seegenpelater is the obvious answer. i get it, i do! like lou mentioned in today's AP, it's literally persuasion magic, obviously that meshes well with sam's magical strengths

HOWEVER !!! i am a firm believer that at her core, sam is more aligned with miskoro (alteration) than seegenpelater

lengthy and incoherent rambling below the cut

as @/wanderingsoftly noted in an earlier post of theirs on this topic, sam's very first spell was transmuting lint into a sundae. i'd like to point out that when given the reality-warping powers of magic, she doesn't think to just poof a sundae into existence - her first thought is to use the lint from her pocket as some kind of equivalent(ish) exchange.

i see this mindset of 'work with what you've got' as a huge part of sam's character, since in her interactions with both the pilot program and the world, she always meets people where they're at. she consistently matches people's energies in a way that neither diminishes nor amplifies, but in a way that illuminates. i think the clearest manifestation of that is in her local charm effect- she doesn't try to be likeable, her presence is just so warm and kind that you can't help but be disarmed. you bare your soul to her, and she responds with a compassionate and tender understanding that opens up an entirely new world of possibilities.

sam sheds light on the ugly, harsh edges of a person and embraces them as they are- not to be romanticized but not to be neglected either. she's an amazing friend when life is good and a safe haven when life gets rough; she was there for jammer when he took on alexis the dragon's curse, for k after they accidentally killed evan, and for evan when he was still a shadow haunting a pair of shoes. there is no aspect of humanity that sam butler/black/britain is too afraid to hold, because no burden is too great to be shared.

with that being said, i'll try to get to my actual argument.

sam is undeniably magnetic, able to compel demons into releasing their grip on evan's soul, and i'm not going to dismiss that at all! sam's ability to influence the people around her is a fundamental part of her character, but i think it's important to draw a distinction between being magically persuasive and being naturally persuasive, as sam usually falls into the latter category.

as for why that distinction is important, it's a matter of intention.

the magic of seegenpelater is inherently subjective, taking perceived reality and molding it into illusory shapes at the whims of its user. on the other hand, the magic of miskoro is inherently objective; its alterations are exactly what they present themselves to be. as we've seen on weugan, sam is deeply opposed to projecting her desires onto others and seegenpelater is entirely antithetical to that. in contrast, miskoro represents the honest potential to change- which sam has always kindled in those around her- and i think that perfectly aligns with who she is at her core.

sam has been helping people out since day one. she provides the warmth and safety they need to grow past their fixed ideas about who they should be and into who they could be. she's been a sailor moon fangirl, a twitch streamer, a scuppers player, a television host, a celebrity, the world's greatest wizard, and only the qohlye knows who she'll be next!

sam butler/black/britain is a woman who treats surnames like haute couture, a wizard perpetually moving forward, unbridled by the threat of stagnation, and i am deeply obsessed with her. somebody please sedate me.

anyway save my girl from cannibal island PLEASE !!!! drop by purble place and get some dope ass alchemy powers instead :3

LET SAM COMMIT CRIMES AGAINST THE NATURAL SCIENCES '24

[arcane-vagabond]

Meet Me at the Sea: Chapter Thirteen

Meet Me at the Sea: Chapter Thirteen

Pairing: Jake "Hangman" Seresin x Reader

Summary: Your best friend, Bob Floyd, had insisted you join him for the summer at his family's home along the Carolina coasts. You had been hesitant at first, but ultimately agreed to his request. Now, here you were in a new town with strange locals who spoke in hushed whispers and cryptic retellings about glistening scales, glowing eyes, and haunting songs that echoed from the sea. You didn't believe them at first, but when you wake up on the beach one morning after having fallen overboard the night before, you can't help but think that maybe you hadn't imagine the strong arms and deep, green eyes of the man that had saved you.

Chapter Warnings: Jake and Skipper fight, Bradley flirts, Vivid descriptions of drowning, Supernatural elements, Siren Song, Biting, Smut (P in V, fingering, dirty talk), Confrontations, Love confessions, Fluff, Angst, Happy Ending. Think that's it, but let me know if I missed anything!

Word Count: 6k

Series Masterlist || Moodboards || Playlist

Your group walked down the lamp-lit streets silently, an air of tension surrounding the four of you. Of course, you knew what you had done had been completely stupid, and they were right to be mad at you. But you knew you had done the right thing, and you knew they knew that too. That didn’t mean that you hadn’t scared them though, and you let out a quiet sigh as you waited for the inevitable blow up from one of them - most likely Jake, if you had to guess.

He was tense beside you as you all continued down towards the house, his jaw clenched so hard that you swore you could hear his teeth grinding. His eyes still glowed ominously, though not as vividly as they had only minutes before. He refused to look at you, eyes trained forward as he kept his hands shoved in his pockets, refusing to touch you.

You deserved his ire.

Bradley hit the steps of the house first, walking up them casually as if he didn’t have a care in the world. You saw the way his nostrils flared though and the way his eyes seemed pinched as he ripped the screen door open and stepped inside.

Bob was close behind him, lips pulled into a tight frown with eyes trained on the ground. He grabbed the door before it slammed shut, pausing for just a moment to look back at you, blue eyes reproachful. You met his gaze, silently communicating your apologies for having scared him, and he must have understood you because he let out a defeated sigh before stepping inside.

You moved to follow him, letting out a shocked gasp as you were dragged backwards and pinned against the pillar of the porch.

Jake’s gaze was thunderous as he finally looked at you, a deep frown on his face as his eyes glowed that ominous green in fury. He leaned into you, forearm pressed to the wood above your head as he crowded you.

“Do you have any idea,” he hissed, eyes narrowing at you, “of how badly you scared me just now?”

You said nothing as he took a deep breath in before letting it out, eyes falling closed for a moment. He opened them again, and this time you could see a mixture of fear and despair beyond the palpable anger.

“I need you safe, Skipper,” he continued, voice so low that it was almost a growl. His hand came up to cup your cheek, eyes begging you to understand him. “I needed to know that you were going to be okay, and what did you do? You ran off without telling anyone where you were going. Do you have any idea how out of my mind I was when I realized you were gone?”

“I’m sorry for scaring you,” you whispered, heart thumping in your chest as you watched him. “But I’m not sorry for what I did.”

Jake’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second before narrowing at you, jaw clenching.

“What?” He all but spat at you. Despite his obvious anger, his hand remained gentle on your face.

“I’m not sorry for what I did,” you repeated, voice firmer this time as you jutted your chin out. “I did what I had to do. Running away wasn’t going to fix any of this, and you all know it. It was a temporary solution to a bigger problem. I did what needed to be done.”

“You could have gotten hurt,” he growled, the glow in his eyes brightening as his pupils once again narrowed to slits at the thought of what could have happened to you. “You could have been killed.”

“But I wasn’t,” you reminded him. You knew you were pressing your luck in that moment, but you couldn’t find it in yourself to care. Jake let out a hiss mixed with several different clicks, the sound not unlike that of a dolphin.

“You’re mine,” he hissed.

“If I’m yours,” you started, “then you’re mine too. And just like you protect what’s yours, I’m going to protect what’s mine.”

Jake let out another growl, dropping his hand and pushing away from you, running a hand through his hair as he let out a frustrated grunt. You pushed off of the pillar, following him towards the edge of the porch as he paced back and forth, feeling your own emotions rise up in your chest.

“I did what I did because that could have so easily been you, Jake,” you choked out, tears welling up in your eyes. “I saw you in Cole. It could have been you losing control. It could have been you hurting people. Jake, I could have lost you.”

He paused at that, coming to a halt in his movement. He looked up at you, his pupils returning to normal as the anger and despair melted from his face, leaving behind a look of uncertain neutrality.

“But it wasn’t,” he told you.

You stared at him, slack jawed before pulling your shoulders back and pressing your lips into a thin line.

“It wasn’t,” you agreed. Jake’s own lips pursed as he shook his head, taking a step towards you and offering you his hand.

“It won’t be,” he promised, eyes shining in the low light of the porch, the glow having altogether vanished. Your bottom lip began to tremble, heat rising to your cheeks.

“I know,” you whispered, cursing at how your voice cracked. Jake’s gaze softened as he looked at you, crossing the distance to cradle your face in his hands. His thumbs stroked over the apples of your cheeks.

“It won’t be,” he repeated, offering you a gentle smile. “And do you know why?”

“Why?” You asked, lifting your hands to rest over his.

“Because Cole didn’t have what I have,” he murmured, resting his forehead against yours, nose brushing you. “He didn’t have you, darlin’. With you by my side, nothing bad is ever going to happen.”

You huffed out a laugh, lips tugging into a shy smile as he grinned along with you.

“There you go being all cheesy again,” you teased, earning a chuckle.

“Only for you,” he agreed, leaning down to place a chaste kiss to your lips. You hummed against him, eagerly returning the kiss, and he pulled back with a chuckle.

“We ought to get inside and let the others say their peace,” he winked, and you let out a tired sigh.

“Might as well get it over with,” you muttered, allowing him to lead you into the house.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Nat cried out as soon as you stepped foot into the living room, running up to you and pulling you into a hug. “You had us all scared to death.”

“Thought Jake was gonna break all the furniture,” Mickey agreed, pulling you from Nat to give you his own hug.

Javy shook his head with a look of pure exasperation. “Thought we were going to have to knock him out there for a second if he didn’t calm down.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Reuben chimed in, patting you on the back with a sympathetic smile. “She’s safe and here now. That’s all that matters, right?”

“I don’t know,” Bradley drawled from his spot on the couch. You all turned to him, watching as he slowly stood to his feet and sauntered over to you, a serious look on his face.

“What you did was impulsive and reckless,” he continued, coming to a stop right in front of you. “You scared the hell out of all of us.”

“I’m sorry,” you murmured, looking down at the floor.

“Sorry isn’t good enough.”

Your head shot back up, eyes wide and lips parted in shock as you stared at him. The others also turned to look at him, confusion written all over their faces.

“You have a lot of making up to do,” Bradley sniffed, leaning down so that his face was right in front of yours. A slow, lascivious smirk pulled on his lips as he looked at you. “You can start by letting me take you out, and then we can come back here to-”

“Bradshaw, I will bite you again, so help me god,” Jake growled, pulling you back towards him so that your back bumped his chest. Bradley threw his hands up in surrender, shooting you a wink with a much more playful smirk.

“Alright, scrap that last part then. But you’re buying me some cheese fries from the diner,” he told you, pointing a finger in your direction.

“Deal,” you grinned.

It had been a couple of days since you last saw Jake, your boyfriend having told you that he needed time to prepare for the height of his frenzy.

“I just want things to be perfect,” he had told you, holding your fingers to his lips with gentle kisses against them as he looked at you. “You deserve the best.”

“I suppose I do,” you hummed, a teasing grin on your face. “After all, I am pretty great.”

Jake’s lips quirked into a grin as he placed another kiss to your fingers.

“The greatest,” he agreed.

And now here you stood on the deck of Susan and Richard Floyd’s home, a small piece of paper in your hands. You had been sitting in your room, reading when a familiar feeling overtook you, your ears perking up as a song called out to you from down below.

Come outside, It sang. Obediently, you set your book down, making your way down the stairs and out the back door. You stepped out into the summer evening, breathing in the ocean air. You frowned when you realized that you were all alone, your boyfriend nowhere in sight. You walked the length of the deck, turning the corner to still find no trace of him. With a huff, you placed your hands on your hips, moving to go back inside when something caught your eye.

On the top of the stairs that led down to the dock sat a large whelk shell, the coloring dazzling as it sat on the wooden step. You walked over, crouching down to pick it up and revealing a small piece of white paper laying underneath. Furrowing your brow, you plucked it up, sitting down on the top step to read it.

Meet me at the sea. One hour.

You didn’t have to be told where to meet. You and Jake had discussed it before and he had made it clear to you that he wanted to be close to home, the comfort of knowing that safety was nearby soothed his anxiety about the situation.

You glanced towards the water, a small smile on your face as you tried to catch a glimpse of your boyfriend among the waves. You could feel him watching you, but you saw nothing. Shaking your head with a little laugh, you stood back up, making your way back into the house to get ready.

And hour later, you were walking down the road towards Jake and Bradley’s shared home. The house was uncharacteristically quiet as you walked past it towards the beach, the small dock coming into sight as the sun dipped towards the horizon. The sand shifted underneath your feet, soon giving way to the solid wood that led into the ocean in front of you. You slipped off your shoes, placing them next to you as you took a seat at the end of the dock, your feet swinging back and forth casually as you waited.

You didn’t have to wait long as the sound of the water sloshing to your right caught your attention. You turned, eyes meeting intense, glowing green as Jake rested his arms on top of the dock, cheek pressed against his forearms as he watched you. You could see the length of his tail as he watched you, the brilliant silver shining in the waning light. His face remained unreadable as he continued to watch you, but his eyes were so tender as you took him in.

“You’re so pretty,” you whispered, voice sounding a little breathless as your eyes continued to roam. A smile crept onto Jake’s lips at your words, and you watched in awe as he lifted himself the rest of the way up onto the deck, the scales of his tail fluttering and falling away to reveal his legs. He wore nothing as he shifted between the two forms, and though you had seen him change many times before now, it still left you a little breathless to see him.

He moved so that he sat next to you, his shoulder pressed against yours in a bid of silent comfort. You sighed, resting your head against his shoulder as the two of you looked out at the water. The two of you said nothing for a long stretch of time, simply watching the sun sink lower and lower towards the horizon and enjoying each other’s company.

“I kicked Bradley out for the night,” Jake said finally, voice quiet and pensive. “Wanted it to be just you and me. There’s a cave that people use sometimes for the claiming bite, but I wanted you to be comfortable.”

“Oh,” you breathed, soaking in his words. Wordlessly, your hand drifted from your lap to grasp his as you felt nerves rise up in your stomach. Jake sensed your hesitation and turned to look at you, worry pinching his brow as he pursed his lips.

“We don’t have to do anything that you don’t want, Skipper,” he told you, squeezing your hand in his. It wasn’t that you were inexperienced or didn’t want to. No, it was the thought of the process itself. You knew what to expect, and still it was different from actually doing it.

“I want to,” you assured him, giving him a tight smile that you could tell only served to amp his worry.

“Are you sure?” He asked. You chewed on your bottom lip for a moment before nodding.

“I’m sure about you,” you answered earnestly. “I’m sure that I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

A smile broke out across his face as he let out a chuckle, leaning forward to kiss your forehead. He pulled away after a moment, resting his forehead against yours as his thumb stroked the back of your hand.

“I love you,” he said, eyes glowing bright as he looked at you. Your heart skipped a beat as your grin matched his.

“I love you too.”

“Are you ready?” He asked, worry creeping onto his face once more.

“I’m ready,” you nodded. Jake swallowed thickly, pulling away from you and pushing himself off the dock and into the water. He entered smoothly, the water barely making a sound as he did so. He resurfaced only a moment later, eyes looking at you expectantly as he reached out his hand. Without hesitating, you placed your hand in his and allowed him to pull you into the water.

The water rushed around you, bubbles skewing your sense of direction as you were engulfed on all sides. Your t-shirt billowed out around you, and you felt strong hands take it and left it up over your head, leaving you in your shorts and bra. You opened your eyes, the sting of the salt water almost making you close them again, but you pushed through it as you caught sight of Jake.

He really was beautiful, silver tail flashing in the low light that was left by the setting sun, golden hair looking soft as it floated in the water, and eyes the color of sea glass glowing, pulling you in and practically suffocating you as you got lost in them.

His hands came up to cradle your face, eyes searching yours as the two of you floated there. A song spilled past his lips, the sound both haunting and comforting. His hands lowered to wrap around you, pulling you farther out to sea, the water growing darker and darker the deeper he dragged you. Your lungs began to burn from lack of oxygen, your body starting to panic as Jake held fast onto you. You clung to him as water rushed by you, your vision beginning to grow blurry as you fought to for air, only to inhale the surrounding water. Slowly, your vision began to grow black, his song being the only thing you could focus on.

It was full of lament, the pain of seeing you near death’s door evident in the way he cried, but the promise of relief sinking in around the edges as your grip on him loosened, losing the fight within you as he let you go. Your eyes fluttered closed as your body accepted its fate, all the fight within you gone. The water was still around you, only the sound of the song and your slowing heartbeat to be heard.

You felt the water whip around you as glowing green came into your limited vision, the dream of strong hands cradling your face once more as you drifted further and further into oblivion. The hands moved to wrap around you once more, the song growing louder and more insistent as your limbs grew heavier despite the weightlessness of the water. You were vaguely aware of a body pressing closer to yours, lips skimming over your cheek, along your jaw, and down the column of your throat before settling at the junction of your shoulder and neck.

A prick of pain shot through you, followed quickly by a rush of warmth that spread from your neck and through your veins, the heavy weight of drowning lifting off of you as your mind came rushing back to the surface. The water around you sharpened in clarity, growing brighter as the warmth continued to seep through you, giving strength to your limbs and easing the ache within your lungs. You suddenly realized that you were able to breathe, eyes searching wildly about you as they finally landed on Jake. His pupils had narrowed into slits, the green glowing so brightly that for a brief moment, you wondered if it hurt.

You reached up to cup his cheek, watching as he immediately nuzzled into the palm of your hand, eyes never leaving you as he did so. A wave of heat washed over you as desire clutched at you. Jake must have sensed the change because he pulled you towards him, swimming towards the surface. You buried your face in his neck, suddenly overwhelmed by the new sensations within you as you hurtled for the surface.

The two of you broke the surface with a splash, the sun having slipped below the horizon during your time beneath the waves. The stars began to litter the night sky above you as the faint glow of orange grew dimmer and dimmer. Your eyes searched Jake’s for a moment, taking in his appearance. Eyes still narrowed into slits, his teeth were sharpened to points as he panted in front of you, chest heaving as if he were trying to hold himself back. The sight of him sent a twinge from the fresh mark on your neck down to the apex of your thighs, and without thinking, you surged forward, crashing your lips against his in a heated frenzy.

Jake crooned against you, hands gripping every part of you that he could as he pulled you along towards the shore, scales once again giving way to legs as the two of you sat in the surf on the beach. Your lips moved against each other in a kiss that became more tongue and teeth with each passing moment, your hands wandering across his chest and shoulders as if you could never get enough and already had too much all at the same time.

Jake pulled away after a moment, eyes roaming over you as you worked your mouth along his jaw and down the length of his throat. You nipped at the spot just below his ear, drawing out a pleasured moan from him as you laved your tongue over the spot, sucking a bruise into the skin.

“We should go inside,” he panted, hands tight on your hips as if to help ground himself in that moment. You shook your head, dragging your lips down his neck and to his shoulder where you placed several open-mouthed kisses along his golden skin.

“Need you now,” you whined, nails dragging down his torso and earning a hiss as he threw his head back. “Need you inside of me.”

Jake’s eyes snapped back to you, the beast within taking hold in that moment as he crashed his lips back against yours, swallowing your moans as his hands worked on shoving your shorts down your legs. His hand came back up to cup your mound, the heat of him drawing out a cry from you as you arched into his touch. A finger ran up your covered slit, an embarrassing keen spilling past your lips as Jake grinned.

“Already so needy for me,” he murmured, pressing another kiss to your lips before pulling away, repeating the motion with his hand as you whined. “So desperate. Wonder if you could come just like this.”

“Jake,” you pleaded, eyes wide and imploring. He chuckled, pushing your underwear to the side as finger circled your clit. You squirmed against him, but his hips shifted against you, pinning you down as he toyed with you.

“So wet for me,” he cooed, slipping a finger inside you, stretching you. Your back arched up against him, a wanton moan escaping your lips as he began to thrust into you with lazy strokes, content to watch your face contort with pleasure as he worked the one digit into you. He soon added a second finger, picking up his pace as his thumb swirled around your sensitive nub, free hand stroking your hair out of your face tenderly.

“So tight and warm around my fingers,” he whispered reverently, eyes drifting down to where his fingers were stills buried inside of you. “Can’t wait to feel you wrapped around my cock, squeezing and milking me dry.”

His words sent you sprinting towards the edge, the coil in your belly tightening as he found the spongy spot inside of you. Your hands flew up to his arms, nails digging into the skin as you met his thrusts.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” he cooed once more, kissing your lips in a chaste kiss that was a stark contrast to what he was currently doing to you. “Come on my fingers. Give it to me.”

The coil inside you snapped as you came, release flooding out of you as you rode out your high. Jake watched you, mesmerized as you came down. Once your breathing had evened out, he pulled his fingers out of you with a squelch that had your cheeks heating. He brought the fingers to his lips, sucking on them with a hum as he closed his eyes, savoring the taste of you as your breathing picked back up.

“We should really go inside n-”

He didn’t have a chance to finish before you had him on his back, straddling his hips as you undid your bra, throwing it off to the side and quickly ridding yourself of your underwear. You had never considered yourself to be bold like this, but the combination of adrenaline and lust running through you had you acting in ways you would never have dared to before.

Jake stared up at you with wide, shocked eyes before relaxing into the sand below as his hands rested on your hips.

“Need me that bad, huh?” He teased, squeezing you as you huffed.

“Shut up,” you grumbled, leaning down to press your lips against his once more. He licked into your mouth, and you hummed at the taste of yourself that still lingered on his tongue. The two of you stayed like that for a moment before another wave of desire rolled over you, and you pulled away, shifting to line him up at your entrance, teasing the tip through your folds with a moan.

“Skipper,” he gasped, eyes hooded and lips parted as he watched you, feeling your tight, wet warmth run over him.

“Now who’s needy?” You teased breathlessly. Jake glared at you, but there was no real heat behind it as you slowly sank down onto him, letting out a pleasured hiss at the stretch of him inside you.

“Fuck,” he ground out, eyes pinched closed and head thrown back in ecstasy. You leaned over him, head resting on his shoulder as you sank further and further onto him. When you were fully seated, you took a moment to bask in how full you felt.

Jake’s hands were like vices on you, fingers flexing as your walls fluttered around him. You raised yourself up to look down at him, the two of you simply content to feel each other in that moment. Slowly, you raised yourself up, dropping yourself back down onto him just as slowly. You worked yourself on top of him, alternating between bouncing and grinding as moans escaped his lips. His hands left your hips for a moment to push himself up into a sitting position as you continued to ride him, your own gasps and moans mingling with his. One of his hands rested on your back, pulling you flush against him as the other guided your hips over his, his mouth seeking yours out for a languid kiss.

“Feel so good wrapped around me like this,” he murmured as he pulled away, a strand of saliva connecting your lips as you whimpered when he nudged that spot deep inside you. “So fucking tight, sweetheart. You were made just for me, huh? Made to stretch around me. Such a good girl taking all of me like this, yeah?”

The hand on your back trailed down to reach between your thighs, rubbing small circles on your clit that sent you keening, the pressure in your belly quickly building to another peak.

“Gonna come around me?” He asked, voice sweet as you rested your forehead against his, movements growing erratic as you chased your high. “Wanna feel it, baby. Wanna feel your tight, little pussy come around me. Wanna feel you squeeze and milk me dry just like I said. You like the sound of that? Like the sound of me filling you up? Fuck, I can’t wait to see you leaking with me. Gonna fuck it back into you so you don’t waste a drop, how’s that sound?”

You whined, fingers running through his hair as you teetered at the edge, your eyes drifting down to look at him as you hurtled towards the edge. Your gaze flickered down to his lips, and He smiled up at you tenderly before crashing his lips against yours, nipping at your bottom lip as he pulled away.

“Come for me, sweet girl,” he cooed, nuzzling his nose against yours, breath fanning over you. “I’m right there too, but I need you to come first. Please, baby. Let me feel you.”

Your climax hit you with a cry, your head thrown back, exposing your neck to Jake. His lips pressed against the claiming mark on your neck, and you saw stars as the warmth of his own climax filled you. Jake moved you against him as the both of you came back down from your individual highs, breaths coming out in pants as you came back to yourselves.

The water crashed against the shore as the two of you basked in the afterglow. Your fingers carded through Jake’s hair, his face buried in your neck as his hands soothed up and down your back.

“I love you,” he whispered into your skin after a moment, and your heart swelled with so much love, that it startled you for a moment. Jake chuckled against you, pulling back to look at you.

“It’s not just you that you’re feeling,” he explained, nodding towards the mark on your neck. “That mark is not only a sign of our bond, but a link to each other. You can feel me, just like I can feel you.”

Tears welled up in your eyes as you took in his words.

“I love you too,” you sniffled, leaning in to kiss him once more. Jake smiled against your lips, thanking whatever forces were out there that he got to experience this.

The bell above the door chimed as you entered the shop, the cool air conditioning a sharp contrast to the late July heat. It had been a couple of weeks since the night with Cole and the night when you finally let Jake claim you. You wore the mark proudly as a symbol of the love you shared with the man.

The shop was filled with familiar knick-knacks as you moved deeper and deeper into the space, a fan blowing behind the counter with a faint buzz. You perused the shelves, fingers trailing over the different shells and trinkets that lined them.

It wasn’t long before the sounds of footsteps sounded from the back, stopping as they stepped out into the room. You looked up to see Mrs. Cambroni eyeing you warily, a frown tugging on her lips as she regarded you. The two of you stood and stared at one another for a few moments before she broke the silence.

“I suppose you’re here to yell at me,” she sniffed, voice croaking, and it was then that you noticed how red her eyes looked. “You’ve every right, of course. I should have stopped him.”

“Why didn’t you?” You asked, curiosity instead of anger lacing your voice. Mrs. Cambroni’s eyes darted to the ground before looking back up at you.

“To be truthful,” she began, letting out a heavy sigh as her eyes looked past you. “I knew something was going on to an extent. I tried to talk to him about it because I knew he was getting older and I knew that he was struggling. Did you know that late bloomers tend to have more feral frenzies? His second had been so hard on him, and I suspected that his third was nearing. Late bloomers tend to have delayed frenzies, you see, so it was hard to pin down when exactly it would strike.”

She let out a breath, chewing on her bottom lip as tears filled her eyes.

“He told me that he had found someone,” she continued, voice filled with emotion. “Told me he was courting her, so like an old fool, I let my guard down. I trusted him and that he knew what he was doing.”

A tear ran down her cheek, her face contorting with grief, and your heart broke for her.

“I thought the murders were done by a vagrant, a sea person not from here. I admit, I should have known better, should have known that it was him, but I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe that he was capable of doing those things, even if he didn’t intend to do them.”

She looked at you then, grief so palpable in her gaze that it sent you back a step.

“I’m so sorry, my dear,” she whispered, breath coming out as a choked sob. “I should have done something to stop him. I should have done more. Words can never express how truly sorry I am for what he did. If I could go back and change things, I would, believe you me.”

A moment of silence stretched between the two of you as her words settled in the air.

“He was your nephew,” you said finally, an edge of uncertainty coating your words. “You loved him.”

“I did,” she nodded, hands clasped tightly in front of her. “And while his actions were inexcusable, at the end of the day, he was still my nephew, and I still loved him dearly.”

“I’m not asking you not to,” you sighed, glancing out the window as a group of friends passed, laughing loudly as they walked down the street. “I wish he didn’t have to go through all of that alone.”

“Me too,” Mrs. Cambroni nodded, a sad smile pulling on her lips as she regarded you. “But from the sounds of it, he wasn’t alone in the end, and for that I have to thank you.”

“You shouldn’t thank me,” you told her, shaking your head. “I did it for purely selfish reasons.”

“Love will make you do strange things,” she agreed, eyes drifting towards the front door. The bell chimed, signaling someone entering the store, and you turned to see Jake already heading towards you. A sense of worry pulled at your bond, and you gave him a reassuring smile as he glanced over at Mrs. Cambroni. He wrapped an arm around you, hand running up and down your side in greeting. You gave another smile to the older woman, moving to leave the shop.

“I’ll see you around, Mrs. Cambroni,” you told her, Jake following along after you, pausing to give a tight-lipped smile to the shop owner. The bell chimed one last time as the two of you exited, heading down the street towards the beach.

“I won’t even be that far away,” you laughed, looking at your boyfriend with a look of pure incredulity. Jake grinned up at you, leaning against his arms as the two of you sat on the sand.

“Doesn’t matter,” he proclaimed, eyes shining in the waning sunlight. “I’m gonna miss you no matter where you go. I miss you when you’re off with Nat. I miss you when you leave our bed to go make breakfast. I miss you when you go to the bathroom-”

“The bathroom?” You exclaimed, giggles falling from your lips. Jake’s grin grew as he watched you.

“Especially when you’re in the bathroom,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, and you laughed, shoving at his shoulders. He chuckled, shifting so that his head rested on your lap. Your fingers immediately began carding through his hair, a contented hum coming from the man below you.

“See,” he chirped, “now why would you want to leave this and go back to school? This is perfect.”

“Because I want to expand upon my education so I don’t end up as some trophy wife?” You challenged. Jake pretended to think, hand rubbing at his jaw before another grin split across his face.

“You’d make such a pretty trophy wife, though,” he purred, hand reaching up to curl along your side, sending a shiver down your spine.

“You’re ridiculous,” you scowled playfully, glaring at him. Jake shrugged, letting his hand fall to grab one of your own, playing with your fingers as he continued.

“Seriously though, I’m going to support you no matter what you do, Skipper,” he murmured. “Even if what you want to do means we’ll be separated for a little while. I’ll live with it.”

He paused, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he tried not to smile, green eyes dancing with mischief.

“Even if it also means I waste away from loneliness.”

“You’re so dramatic,” you laughed, throwing your head back. Jake turned his head to press a kiss to your thigh.

“You love it, though,” he grinned. You smiled down at him, eyes soft as you took him in. You and Bob would go away to start your studies in grad school in just a week’s time, and though you were reluctant to admit it, you would miss Jake just as much as he claimed he would miss you. Of course the two of you would have video chats and texting, and you’d come visit every chance you got, but that didn’t mean you’d miss him any less. Jake must have seen the look on your face because he leaned up to press a kiss to your lips, one you happily reciprocated.

“I’ll always be here for you,” he murmured against your lips, thumb stroking your thigh. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” you hummed, nodding slightly. “I know that.”

“I love you,” he said, pressing another kiss to your lips. You sank into his touch for a moment before pulling away, eyes shining with pure, unadulterated happiness.

“I love you too.”

A/N: Oh my god, it's finally here! The finale! This has been such a wild ride, you guys, and I want to thank each and every one of you for sticking around. I have so much love for every single one of you. Whether you've been here since the beginning or this is your first time reading through it, thank you from the bottom of my heart! If you are interested in receiving updates on when I post, please follow my sideblog ( @arcanevagabond-library ) and turn on post notifications! As always, reblogs and comments are greatly appreciate. You can also find me on AO3 under arcane_vagabond. Until next time!

[jooniperbonsai]

Penalty Shot (pjm) | Part 1

Pairing: professionalhockeyplayer!jimin x minorleagueplayer!reader (afab)

Rating: 18+

Word Count: 22,512

Release Date: December 24, 2024

Genre: Smut, holiday romance fluff, angst, hockeyau, holidayau, comedy, slight rivals to lovers

Summary: He's the worst hockey player on the worst team in the national league, with an awful attitude to go with it. You're the best player in the local chapter, but turned down your chance to go pro. After a scandal benches him for part of the season, he recruits your help to get him ice ready by the New Year.

Warnings: mentions of threesome, Jimin is bi, probably inaccurate ideas about hockey, Jimin is an asshole, swearing, misogyny in sports, slightly homophobic comments, hometown trauma, arranged marriage, corny Christmas references, holiday party stress, mentioned death of minor characters, teen pregnancy, abortion and discussions of abortion processes, emotions, and characteristics of shame angst, misunderstandings, Y/N is a self sacrificial person, fighting and threatening violence, alcohol, sexual innuendos, omg look it's Shinee's Minho as the role of bff, mention of random kpop artists on y/ns team, groping, oral (f receiving), hand jobs, unprotected sex, creampie, rivals but not, friends but not? Who knows, Christmas is all around and the cheer is in the air idk

a/n: It's here! I mean, kind of! Here's part 1 of what has become a monster of a fanfic. I just have 1. Learned so much about hockey it's ridiculous, and I feel like I need more time with these characters. To all who celebrate, Merry Christmas. I hope everyone enjoys this fic. Be easy on me with the proofing errors. I rushed the proof a bit to get it out on time.

“That’s it, babygirl; Cum on my cock. That’s it. Fuckkk.”

“No no no, what did I say? Did I say you could ride me? No. On your knees. Mouth open. Just your mouth, not your hands. Be a good boy or you won’t get my cum. There we go. Open. I said open. Do you want my cock or not? There we go. Ah-ah, swallow. That’s a good boy.”

“Fuck, Jimin, my turn, please please please.” 

“What did I say about begging? There’s plenty to go around.” 

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Close the damn laptop. I’ve seen enough.” 

The sharp, wet slapping sounds and deep, guttural moans echoing through the conference room cuts off as the laptop is snapped shut. As if rehearsed, all bodies in the room turn toward the subject of the scandal, expectedly awaiting a very different response from the one they’re given.

“What? Everyone has sex, it’s not new,”  Jimin says. 

“Yes, everyone has sex. But not everyone is filming a sex tape, much less an orgy, and putting it out onto the internet,” Sophia, the public relations manager says. 

“I didn’t put it on the internet. I’m not that stupid. And, it was a threesome, not an orgy.”

“Well, clearly you are stupid, if you thought attending, much less filming, your not-so-private sexual exploits wouldn’t come back to haunt you. And yet, shocker, they have, and we are swiftly becoming the top headline in every tabloid magazine on the planet. You seriously thought none of these participants would want to brag about how they bedded the bad boy of the UHL?” 

“Park, you finished off last season being one of the most famous people in the Universal Hockey League, and not in a good way. Need I remind you that we just spent the whole summer trying to implement a marketing campaign to improve sales of your jerseys since manufacturers don’t even want to make them? That after ‘Park the Park’ became a trending hashtag on every social media site, you suddenly caught attention as the ‘Hottest But Worst Player in Professional Sports’?” Coach sighs heavily into his hands, clenching his fists as if he needs to punch something. 

It’s very much the Coach way. It’s not unheard of for him to be taking swings at the punching bag during gym training days. Clearly this is how he releases steam. 

Only the problem is, the steam is channeled directly at Jimin. 

“I thought any press is considered good press.” 

Sophia snorts and rolls her eyes. “That is a load of bullshit that PR reps say to make shitheads like you feel better. But I’m not here to soothe your ego. I think it’s been stroked enough, based on what we all just saw.” She clears her throat, shaking her head. “The point is, JImin, you’ve cost this team a lot, and at this point, I can’t advise the staff enough to let you go. You’ve caused fights on the ice that almost turned lethal, you have the worst stats, and the highest lien we’ve had to take out after you damaged the rink in LA and caused them to end their season early. In any other job, you’d be fired by now.” 

Sophia scoops her laptop up off the table and places it in her bag. She stands, hastily collecting her other things. Her assistant-slash-lackey, some nameless, anxious young woman, follows suit, clattering her impressive collection of color-coded pens across the conference table. She bows in apology, shakily attempting to collect her things. No one, including Sophia, moves to help. 

“I have to go, because I need to figure out some way to spin this story now that we are receiving hundreds of requests for interviews, quotes, and extra footage.” She fake gags, as if Jimin and the debauching act on the screen is repulsive to her. “Stay off social media. Do not make a single claim unless advised by your lawyers. We are petitioning the website to take the video down. I know it’s out there forever, but I think if we act fast we can reduce views and hopefully end its virality quickly. Once I hear back from the firm I’ll send you an update.” 

The door shuts behind them slowly, but once the final click ensures that no one outside can hear what’s being discussed, Jimin turns to see the deep set frown of Coach and Assistant Coach Jay sharply aimed toward him. 

“Do you. Have. Any fucking idea. How bad this looks?” Coach’s voice is clipped, fury piercing through his staccatoed breath. Gone is the negotiator, the collected cool that he’d worn while Sophia was here. Instead is the same anger and resentment that Jimin has gotten used to experiencing in the locker room before and after every game, as well as his many meetings as of late. 

“It only looks bad because people take shit way too seriously. If this was a threesome with two women, I’m sure it wouldn’t be blowing up right now. But add a man into the mix and all the homophobes come with their torches and pitchforks. This’ll all blow over in a few weeks, or days even depending on what new scandal the tabloids decide will get the most clicks. Really, Coach, it’ll be okay.” 

A vein protrudes from Coach’s neck, and he huffs a heavy sigh. “You’re missing the point, Park. It’s bad because it’s gay or bisexual or pansexual or whatever the hell your generation is calling things now. But that’s only part of it. All those celebrity gossip pages have been reporting on you for months as is, detailing your explicit sexual appetite and partying with celebrities. You’ve built a reputation for yourself as a playboy, and they’re eating that shit up. And maybe that would all be fine and fun and you could be the next Travis Kelce of the world toting around your celebrity fuck buddies, but there’s one thing Kelce’s got that you don’t.” 

“…Taylor Swift? Whiteness? A mustache?” 

“No you dumbass, talent. Travis Kelce is good at his sport, Jimin, and you fucking suck at yours.” Jay interjects. He reaches into his padfolio, pulling out a complex spreadsheet. “We’ve pulled the totals of all the stats. In the Universal Hockey League, you have the lowest stats out of every active player. Minor players are doing better than you. A hell of a lot better.” 

Jimin reaches out and takes the page, scanning it, brows furrowed. “Okay, so I need to clean up my game a little bit. I don’t see how those two things are connected.” 

“Then let me explain it to you, son.” Coach leans back in his chair, revealing the lower portion of his suit coat, stained from the bit of pasta sauce that dribbled down during his lunch. Jimin finds himself staring at it for so long that it takes Coach three tries before his attempts at calling Jimin’s attention actually works. 

“Focus, Park.” 

“Sorry,” he responds reflexively. 

“Basically, what Sophia said in the meeting is true. I have been advised by her as the official Public Relations Director to fire you. You’ve caused significant risk in various ways. And what I didn’t tell her is that the manager of the Bells and team owner both called me this morning worrying about the integrity of the team. Your little bullshit behaviors have been adding up. Not only are you impossible to market to Bells fans, you’re untradeable and undesirable to any other team. No one wants the Scarlet A you’ve tainted the team with.” 

Jimin raises an eyebrow. He didn’t know Coach was so familiar with classic literature.

“The point is, investors are backing out. Brand deals are falling through. The capital gains of our team are dwindling because we have a shitty player with an even shittier attitude.” 

It feels like a brick has been launched at Jimin’s chest. A hot, crumpling feeling washes over him, and the very cool and collected nature he’s kept fresh this whole meeting has now taken the backseat. 

“I don’t know what happened to you, Park, but you weren’t always this way. When I scouted you and signed you onto the Bells, you were just this young kid with a dream. You loved the game more than you loved the fame. I miss that guy. That’s the one who I wanted. I wanted the fresh energy of early morning practices led by a player with eagerness and potential. And you were that for a while. 

“But all I’ve seen in the last two seasons is someone who cares about hair gel and being an A-lister for afterparties. When you’re supposed to be driving the net, you’re getting flanked. You can’t control your mouth so you start chirpin’ and hand every opposing team at least one power play, usually in the third period and leaving your team to handle the mess you created as you sit in the box.”

Heat floods Jimin’s cheeks. “Am I supposed to just let all those guys walk all over me? I’m one of the shorter players in the league, and they love to talk shit.” 

“Of course they love to talk shit when you’re such an easy target! It's a practical strategy! If you target the hothead, they’ll take themselves out of the game! They don’t even need to be good to do that!” 

“Isn’t that allegedly your strategy anyway?” Jay says, raising an eyebrow. “Doesn’t seem like a very good one.” 

“Shut up, Jay,” Jimin retorts, blowing air sharply out of his nose. 

“Don’t you two get started on me now,” Coach says, snapping his fingers. Jimin refocuses his gaze. 

“So, what does that mean for me then? Am I fired? Just like that?” He folds his arms over his chest defensively.

Coach rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know, son. It depends on what you want from this.”

This shocks Jimin. Is he seriously being asked if he wants to be fired? Isn’t the answer obvious? He opens his mouth to speak, but is cut off by Coach. 

“What I mean, is that now is a good time to think about your goals. Do you just want to be a celebrity or do you want to be a player? A good one, one who makes his team proud.” 

His chest twists with sadness. For nearly ten years, Jimin has been with the Bells. He’d been scouted by Coach himself at the age of 19, having just completed high school and graduating from his own league. During the try-out period, he’d been one of the best, and after a summer of ups and downs, he was offered a contract to be the rookie starter of the season.

 “I want to play. You know that. You know how much this means to me!” His voice trembles as the pain in his chest spring tears into his eyes. 

Coach gives him a sympathetic smile, nodding. “I do. At least, I used to. But now, I need you to prove it to me. To all of us. Which is why I think this break will be good for you to do so.” 

He knits his eyebrows, counting how many days of break he’ll have over the holidays. Then he nods. “Sure. It’s not much, I know, since we have a game between Christmas and the New Year, and one next week, but I’ll come to the arena every day, morning ‘til night. I’ll do explosion drills and I’ll rework my stickhandling. Shit, I’ll even do one better. I know we’ve been struggling to get the puck out of our zone, so I’ll focus on drills that shift us into neutral position. I know Zelensky was complaining about that last game and–”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down kid. I’m glad to hear you’re taking this matter seriously, but it’s not going to correct itself in a matter of days. It’s going to have to be a change in attitude. You need to learn how to not let every little thing trigger you on and off the ice. That’s going to take some time. Therapy, maybe.” 

“I’ll get a therapist. Right after this, I’ll call my friend Yoongi who can recommend me to someone and…” But already they’ve moved on, Jimin’s promise hanging in the air. 

Coach opens the folder he has in front of him before digging into the pocket of his jacket to fish around for something. He produces a glasses case, and then pulls out his reading glasses, placing them on the bridge of his nose. “Let’s see here. What are you thinking, Jay?” 

Jay careens his body to glance over at the schedule Coach has unfolded and laid before them. “Well, you already know what I think.” 

Jimin and Jay haven’t always had such a sour relationship. They were friends once, before Jay was hired as the Assistant Coach. Before there was a significant power imbalance between them. Most days, they can get by without making snarky remarks. Some days, Jimin even likes the guy still. Jay is a good AC. He looks at problems with a square eye, knows usually before anyone else what strategy the opposing team is laying out. He protects and vouches for all his players in press meetings, including Jimin. But when he doesn’t have to be doing his job, Jay is ready to cut down anyone and everyone who gets in his way of going home early. 

Jimin sighs, looking around the conference room. A framed poster from the 2000 season Choice Cup championship stares back at him. It’s faded, but he can see the beaming face of his favorite player: Lee Wonhyuk. 

Wonhyuk is seen as a hockey legend, having more hat tricks than anyone in Bells’ history. Always a balanced player, he led his team to the 2000 Choice Cup Playoffs. Jimin was just a kid then, but that was what started his love for hockey. 

“Hmm, well, then I think this is going to be the only option. Park, you’re suspended until late January.”

Jimin freezes. “What?”

“Suspension. I don’t want to see you on the bench in your jersey until the 23rd.” Coach marks the calendar with a thick black marker and nods. “That’ll give you enough time to start getting your shit together and maybe we will have cleared the air from this scandal long enough to recover some of our team’s reputation.”

Coach stands, gathering his folder and heading toward the door. 

“B-but I said I was going to fix this! Did you not hear me promise I’d get a therapist?” 

“We heard you, Jimin. That doesn’t suddenly erase everything you’ve done. How can we even be sure you’ll take it seriously? It doesn’t seem like you’ve taken much of your career seriously for a while now. You’re just lucky you’re not being fired,” Jay knocks his knuckles on the table, almost like a gavel from a judge. 

“Don’t take this thing too much to heart, kid. A suspension is kind of like a break. A vacation even! Go enjoy Christmas with your folks and enjoy some eggnog. Watch one of those ridiculous Hallmark movies about the magic of Christmas making some uptight lawyer into a farm girl because of the hot ranch hand or whatever it is. Take a crash course in anger management, I don’t know. Either way, stay away from the team or else you might not be part of it for much longer.” Coach idles in the open doorway, wafting his hand for Jimin to leave. “Either way, let’s go, we need to go. Our time is up with the conference room and I gotta get home to the Mrs. to help make enough cookies to feed an army.” 

Jimin deflates, grabbing his bag and shuffling out of the building and into the mild winter air swirling around him. 

Christmas with his folks sounds like a nightmare. He hasn’t talked to them since the scandal leaked, despite the worried calls from his mother and the less-than-enthused follow-ups from his father who began calling on behalf of his mother. 

He wasn’t planning on going home for the holidays. The excuse of his work schedule would keep him away another year, and he also suspects that the invite to attend Christmas is one that has no real urgency behind it. He hasn’t been home since his first year going pro. He was just a kid then, trying to balance this new life with the one he left and heal a broken heart. He had hopped on a plane home, only to have to turn around just after the Christmas dinner was finished. The entire flight he was nauseated from overeating. 

The idea of coming home now, while being the biggest loser in the UHL just sounds like another way to rub salt in his wounds. 

He drives home, calling Yoongi and getting a number for a therapist, only to realize that they would be closed until the new year. Of course they will. He turns the key to his apartment, he can’t help but feel like the place looks completely different even though it’s exactly as he left it a handful of hours ago: blinds drawn, warm-lit sconces on his display shelves in his living room giving everything a soft glow. Everything is pristine. Jimin values tidiness and control of his home. Of his life.

Which is why standing here with nothing to guide him for the next 30 days suddenly feels paralyzing. How is he supposed to become another person in a month? He’s not allowed at the arena for practice, and god, he knows everyone will recognize him at the next closest community one, though who knows if he’ll even be allowed in after how “inappropriate” his type of fame now is. 

And it’s too warm here to skate outdoors. He checks the weather app on his phone. No snow is forecasted for the next two weeks. It’s looking to be a warm Christmas this year. Meanwhile, he knows from the location settings that his hometown he’s saved into his favorites is reporting frigid temperatures and at least a foot of snow by the end of the week. Which means the pond he spent so many winters on with his father learning the rules of hockey and practicing on will be frozen solid. A safe place to anonymously practice. 

“Fuck.” He knows what he has to do. And as the phone rings one full time before an answer, Jimin tries not to feel the heat that floods to his cheeks in humiliation. “Hi, Mom. It’s me.” 

“Okay, now drive through! Tighter, tighter! That’s it Y/N! Go! Go! GO!” 

You weave through the blur of jerseys, somehow avoiding a tripping maneuver that would have had you crashing head-first into the wall. Well, barely. Maybe you’d be easier to trip if you hadn’t calculated their positioning early enough in the quarter. 

You drive forward, just as you’re told, scanning. Where’s the weakest link in the defensive lineup? Ah, there he is. Number 55. The taller one who has already spent half of the game tailing you as if he’s an offensive player. The one that said shit on socials about your pussy being so tight because of how much you enjoyed being anal. 

As if that made any sense. Encountering an entitled, hot-headed loser in the minor leagues is about as unique as a tiny, crusty white dog being named Bella. They exist in abundance. Lucky for you, these are always the worst players on the team, and it became immediately obvious to you who was going to be your target for the rest of the game. 

As you redirect your position toward his direction, 55 seems to have plenty to say. 

“Hey Baby, why don’t you leave the big game to the big boys?” he coos, clumsily regripping his stick as he glides toward you. 

“Mm, if this is a game for the big boys, then why are you here?” you say with a smile, cutting the puck around his right skate before tapping your stick against his. It clatters to the ground. 

“You fucking bitch!” he yells, but you’re already well past him, leaving just the rookie goalie between you and the goal. 

He tightens up when he sees you barreling toward him, the puck guarded tightly behind your stick as you weave it, turning slightly to your side to make it seem like you’re going in for a slapshot on the left side of the goal post. 

Naturally, the goalie floats to the left, creating a huge gap on the right side. 

Suddenly, you pivot, shooting the puck to the right, where your teammate, Minho, has stationed himself perfectly to receive and slide the puck neatly into the net. 

Easy. As the buzzer sounds at the end of the game, you high five Minho, solidifying the hottest win streak the Griffins have had to date. The teams line up, a slur of “good games” parroting from the mouths of each team member as you go down the line tapping sticks. That is until you reach 55, whose expression has soured significantly. 

“Fuckin’ slut,” he mutters under his breath. You pause, turning to him. 

“But I thought my pussy was so tight since I’m so anal? Now I’m a slut? Wow, I really got around fast,” you laugh, rolling your eyes. “Leave it to the worst player on the team to have the most unoriginal, misogynistic insults. Maybe if you practiced holding your stick properly instead of trying to craft an insult, you would have one less thing to suck at. I’m sure not knowing how to handle your stick isn’t just a problem on the ice either. Yikes.” 

You feel a nudge on your back, knowing your team captain, Christopher, is bringing up the rear. 

“Easy there, Y/N, don’t make the guy pop a blood vessel when the season’s barely started,” he says and you chuckle. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t tolerate the sexist machismo you’re carting around. You’re lucky you didn’t lose some teeth this game. If I hear you chirping more bullshit on the ice next time, I’ll personally make sure you have a dentist on speed dial, we clear?” 

Christopher smiles with shiny white teeth, making his threat all the more menacing despite his usual golden retriever energy. 

55 deflates, giving you one more loathsome glare before spinning on the ice and skating away. 

“Bang, Y/N, hustle! We have a party to get to!” Your coach, Bee, curls one gloved finger in, her impatience apparent on her face as she waits at the end of the rink. 

You and Christopher shrug at each other before racing across the ice, the high of the victory still swirling in your head. 

“Oh, bullshit! You know for a fact that if given the chance he would rather be cameoing in some D list movie in LA than getting his shit together. I get that he was your idol, Chris, but times have changed.” 

Jihyo takes a swig of her beer, jabbing a tipsy finger in Christopher’s direction. 

“So he’s gotten a little big-headed with his team. It happens to the best of us. Jimin still remains a hometown hero and we should be grateful he put us on the map!” 

“What map? No one has come here to scout talent since Y/N was being considered for the UHL. I still don’t get why you turned that down. Fucking moron.” Wonpil scoffs as he bites down into his pizza, effectively silencing Christopher, and well, the rest of the room. 

“Ah yes, the awkward silence about me missing out on my once chance,” you snort, glancing around the room as the remaining members of your team devour the last of the team holiday dinner. Bee left not long after the party started, getting some phone call that appeared urgent. Slowly, your families and friends made their way home, leaving only a handful of you behind in the old bar. 

Taeyon, one of the servers you’ve known forever, smirks at you as you gather some plates together to make cleanup easier. 

“Why did you turn it down?” Soobin, the youngest and shyest member of the team asks. 

Everyone in the room turns to you. Everyone in the room besides Soobin knows why. 

“Uh, well, a lot was going on in my life at the time. I had a scholarship to go to college, but then I’d heard that some coaches were coming to scout for the UHL during the summer so I deferred the fall semester, just in case. I was up for consideration and offered a spot with the Bells, but um…I was…sick. And he only had room for one person on his team. While he’d told me I was his first pick, I don’t know, I was…sick, and the other player deserved it. He had a future in it, a need to get out of this place more than I can say I had. So I declined the offer and made plans to use my scholarship and go to school.” 

“I didn’t know you went to college,” Soobin says, eyes wide. 

“She didn’t. Finish the story, Y/N.” Minho says before shoving a tree shaped cookie into his mouth. 

You click your tongue. “Honestly. It was no big deal. It turns out my deferment voided my scholarship, so I didn’t go.” 

“So you gave up on both the major leagues and college? Who’s the other player?” 

You wince at the question, knowing the storm that Soobin has just unknowingly unleashed. 

“What do you mean who’s the other player? Who do you think? She’s talking about Park Jimin, dumbass. He’s the only pro hockey player from here.” Christopher says, delivering a light punch to the maknae. 

“Oh, right,” Soobin says, blushing in embarrassment. 

“And look at what he did. He’s fucking up his chance in this after everything Y/N went through. He knows how to rub it in.” Wonpil downs the rest of his beer. “Honestly, Y/N. If I were you, I’d want to beat that guy to a pulp for being such a loser when you were the one who was rooting for him the most, it seems. Bastard. Good thing he doesn’t come around here much.” 

“Yeah, ha, well. He’s probably off somewhere warm and sunny and not thinking about anyone but himself anyway. It’s for the best, probably.” 

“I never knew you were sick,” Minho says later that evening as you two gather the empty bottles of soju and beer and place them on the counter for the barkeeper to collect. “Bummer that was aligning at the same time that you were about to make it big.” 

“Yeah, it was. Um, hey, my mom wants to know if you’re going to the caroling party,” you say, hoping to change the subject. 

“Oh, uh, no sorry I can’t make it. I have a date.” 

“A victory and a hot date? Well, Minho, look at you! Looks like you’re growing up.” 

He rolls his eyes, chucking a wadded up napkin at you. “Shut up. She’s nice. We are going to that Thai place downtown.” 

“Well, it sounds like we need to get you out of here so you can get your ass downtown. Are you even going to be hungry? You ate like, a half a package of those cookies by yourself.” 

“I’m a growing boy! I need my calories! And yes, I’ll be fine, Mom. And I’ll remember to wear my coat and hat too.” 

“Well, good. It’s supposed to be sub zero tonight. Not the night to be outside without the proper gear.” 

You grab your purse, doing one last run of the room before you shove Minho out the door to prepare for his date.

“Fuck, I thought you said it wasn’t too cold, Mom!” Jimin climbs into the passenger seat of his mother’s car, his luggage practically owning the backseat. 

“It isn’t! It’s just a cold snap! I thought you’d be used to it from spending so much time in the cold.” She clicks the turn signal, pulling them away from the curb while Jimin fidgets with the heat settings. A thin stream of hot air puffs out of the ancient sedan. 

“I usually have tons of padding on me and am moving so much I’m sweating. That’s different from whatever tundra this is.” The heat finally kicks in. “Where’s the Kia I got you for Christmas last year? Don’t tell me you traded it in for the cash or something.” 

His mother scoffs, merging into the freeway. “No, we didn’t trade it in. It’s in the driveway. You can drive it while you’re here.” 

“Why aren’t you driving it?” Her annoyance is annoying him. 

“Because it’s too complicated. Touch screen and Bluetooth and heated seats and cameras. I don’t need that. I just need to go from one place to another place!” 

The old car roars as if it is in agreement. Jimin rolls his eyes. 

“You could have told me you wanted something simpler. I would have at least gotten you a car from this decade. This piece of junk’s falling apart.” 

“It does what I need it to. It’s fine. I didn’t ask for a car anyway.” The lights of the bigger city begin to fade. With a metropolitan city so close to where he grew up, it’s shocking how much Jimin’s mother is clinging to the outdated ideas of small town life.

The strained conversation dies out as his mother turns up the volume of the radio. As the final commercial clears the airwaves, the car is flooded with Christmas carols. 

“It’s good to have you home, my little star.” 

Jimin’s chest wrenches with guilt as he hears the term of endearment. His mother always called him that when he was a child. For a long time, he really lived up to it. Lately though…

I’m more like a fallen star. A star on its way to burning out. 

He lets the music do the talking for the remainder of the drive, and as his hometown comes into view, he’s surprised by how little has changed in the time he’s been gone. Everything is just more worn, older than it used to look. The faded sign of the main grocery store still has the same design. 

The bar where Jimin drank his first beer is still open, and he watches as two people leave through the door, a tall, handsome guy who is laughing and smiling while a woman with her hood up hits him with her purse, also laughing. 

For some reason, his stomach churns at the sight. God, what a miserable place to be stuck in. How can anyone still want to live here? How can anyone smile about the idea of being outside in that frigid air? 

He grumbles to himself and folds his arms, hoping to trap some of the heat back in his body while his mother drives confidently to the sounds of jingling bells. 

In the near decade since Jimin has last been home (he doesn’t count the quick stop-ins during longer layovers at the airport or his grandfather’s funeral), his childhood home has gone through enough renovations to disorient him but still create the same pang of nostalgia.

He goes to hang his coat up in the front hall closet and finds that there no longer is one. Instead, it’s an inset wall with a set of drawers tucked away. His parents have a new dog, Bada, who isn’t even all that new. He’s five now, a full fledged member of the family. Bada growls when Jimin walks through the door, but barely lifts his head off the couch cushion to do so before falling back asleep. 

“Are you hungry?” his mother asks as Jimin pads into the kitchen. 

“I ate on the plane,” he replies. His mother turns to him, her face twisted in disgust. 

“Ugh, that’s not food they serve on those things. It’s cardboard! Here, come sit down; I have some rice and mackerel from lunch leftover. And soup. You’re so skinny. It’s time we plump you up.” 

“I’m not skinny. I have a very specific diet and exercise regimen in order to stay light and fast on my feet while on the ice.” 

But his mother has already left to duck into the kitchen, the sounds of the rice cooker turning on making Jimin wonder if she really had leftovers at all. 

When she reappears about twenty minutes later, she comes with an entire filet of hot fish, black beans, radish kimchi, a mountain of rice, some clear broth soup, and cut up pears. 

“Eat! Eat my son!” she orders, and Jimin obeys, his full stomach betraying him over the promise of home cooked food. 

He is about to ask his mother where his father is when he hears the door open, his father bundled up tight with a dusting of snow on his coat. 

“Storm blew in earlier than I thought.” 

“Oh, honey. Come sit. Give me your coat, I'll hang it to dry.” 

With a grunt from his father, he settles next to where his mother was sitting before, casting his eyes across the table. 

“So you finally made it home to see your parents, huh? When’s the last time we saw you in person again?” 

“Uh, I think last summer. When you guys came to visit.” 

A year and a half. That was the last time they’d been partially together as a family. His brother comes home much more frequently, though this Christmas he’s in Hawaii with his girlfriend. 

Lucky bastard. 

“Well, it’s good to see you. How was the flight?” 

“Fine,” Jimin responds awkwardly. 

He and his father haven’t been close since he moved, and he’s gotten used to vague and scripted questions his father often asks. 

His father nods, slurping his soup from his bowl. 

“So did they fire you for being a porn star or is something else bringing you home.” 

His cheeks flood with heat. Of course his father would bring this up. 

“Um no, just suspended for a bit. And I'm not a porn star.” 

His father shrugs and continues eating. “Hey if it’s what you want to do I’m not here to judge. Just wondering what brought you back home after years of trying to convince you. Your mother was so happy to hear from you that she deep cleaned the house.”

A heavy weight of guilt settles in Jimin’s gut. He’s been gone for so long. And while he knows his parents will never wish for anything to be different for him and his career—well, up to this point— the fact still remains that Jimin has been distant and detached since he moved away. He looks over to the curio cabinet that has been filled with his sports memorabilia. A photo of Jimin when he was on his first team, the bulldogs, sits in the back, Jimin’s two front teeth missing as he gives a gummy smile to the camera. 

“It looks great, Eomma,” Jimin says to his mother when she returns, not even blinking an eye to the fact that his father took her spot. 

“Well, thank you. Now eat up, before it gets cold.” 

As the dinner carries on, Jimin learns that his mother has agreed to go to some neighborhood caroling event tonight. 

“Do you even know who is hosting it?” he asks when his mother fails to name anyone associated with the event besides her friend. 

“I’m sure she told me her name but I’ve forgotten. Names are hard to remember when your friend of a friend invites you. Even harder to say no.” 

“But isn’t there a storm happening?” He glances out the window, confirming the heavier sheet of snow blowing around outside. 

“Sure, but that’s no problem. It’ll make it more festive. Walking in a winter wonderland and all that.” 

“We’re already in one. There’s like, a foot of snow out there.” 

Jimin looks to his father, who has since abandoned the conversation for a sudoku puzzle. 

“Well, I need the exercise. If you’re so concerned, you can always come.” 

No. Absolutely not. The idea of caroling in a blizzard sounds like the bottom of the list of his favorite things. That’s just above dying. 

But as he watches his mother bundle up for the snow and move to grab the keys to her dying sedan, something prompts him to snag the keys for the Kia off the hook, and after a few minutes of painfully shoving his body into his former winter wear his mother kept all those years, he walks out into the snow, insisting to his mother that he drive. 

“Hot chocolate has arrived!” you sing, carrying a large steaming carton to the drove of community members who have shown up to bring “Christmas cheer to all”, as your mother has claimed. 

It’s freezing. You have heat packs shoved into just about every nook and cranny of your body. Even as you pour the warm, sweet liquid into cups to be passed around, you have to fight the urge to shiver. 

“Don’t worry, everyone! Once we get our bodies singing and moving, we’ll be warm in no time!” 

“I thought you said there would be a heat shelter we can go to!” someone says among the crowd. 

“Well, not exactly. It’ll be my house! I have my husband getting the snacks prepared now. And a warm, crackling fireplace. So let’s get this carolfest started!” Your mother beams, unfazed by the sour mood that has fallen upon the group.

With a deflated woo, the carolers set off on foot from the parking lot. 

You have been specifically instructed to wait ten minutes past start time in case anyone else shows up. But given how fast the clouds have rolled in to dump more snow on you, you don’t foresee anyone else coming. 

Still, you abide by your mother’s wishes, pulling your hood over your hat and rewrapping your scarf over your nose, hoping that will encourage less heat to escape. 

Just as your timer buzzes for you to ditch the greeter position and catch up to the crowd, you see a Kia pull into the parking lot, two people shuffling out toward you. 

“Did I miss it? Is it over?!” the woman says, panicked. 

“No, no, they just got started. They’re just down here.” You pull out your mother’s hand-drawn map she passed out to all participants at the start, and point to the one block your mother marked with a star for newcomers. “We will be able to catch up to them easily.” 

“Ah, thank you! Thank you! My son is visiting from out of town, so I was a little late.” 

“It’s no issue, really, this is a volunteer activity. I’m just glad you made it in this snowstorm. Would either of you like some hot cocoa? Or hand warmers? I have some extra.” 

“Oh, you’re so sweet. Nothing for me, really, but maybe my son would like some.” The woman pivots her body toward her son, who is still idling by the car, bundled up from head to toe and appears to be staring at you. “Jimin! Come here!” 

The second you hear the name, you freeze. 

No. There’s no way he’s here. Because he never comes home for Christmas. He’s always playing hockey around the holidays. But then you remember. He’s suspended. So where would he be able to hide and wait for his scandal to blow over. Where else could he hide but here?

Slowly, the bundle moves, shuffling his way toward you. You’re prepared for an awkward conversation, for some unenthused hey to leave his lips, but instead he says nothing, just looks at his mother. 

“What?” he asks. His voice is velvety and soft, just like you remember. Even annoyed, it’s a powerless annoyance, one without much heft to sting. 

“Hand warmers. Hot cocoa.” His mother gestures, forcing his gaze to follow her hands and over to you. 

“No thanks,” he says flatly. When his eyes meet yours, they’re empty, and something about how impersonal it is sours your stomach.

Jimin’s mother sighs before turning to you and smiling. “Is this the way we go?” she asks. You cock your head, confused. 

Before you can ask what she’s talking about, Jimin interjects. “Yes, Eomma, it’s this way. Come on. Let’s get this holiday bullshit over with.” 

His mother trudges forward and for a moment you’re too shocked to move. You stand there as the snow continues to float down onto your coat and bare hands, until Jimin speaks again. 

“Uh, hey. You comin’ or…?” 

You blink up at him, still seeing no recognition in his face, no anger, nothing. 

“Oh, uh yeah,” you say, quickly depositing the leftover hot z cocoa and maps into your car and matching your pace to Jimin’s. “So, um, how have you been?” 

You don’t risk looking at him, insteading focusing on placing your feet carefully into the snow. 

“Fuck, it’s cold,” he says, not quite answering your question. 

“Oh. Yeah, it is.” You pull a heat warmer out of your pocket. “Here, take this.” 

He eyes it for a moment, then relents, taking the heat pack from your warm palm. “Thanks.” 

The crunch of snow under you sounds loud, an occasional crack as you step on a patch of ice fills the silence. 

“So, you’re home for the holidays?” you ask lightly. 

He snorts. “Something like that. Although you’ve probably heard everything on the news already.” 

“Something like that,” you parrot, turning the corner of the parking lot to head down the side street you know the carolers will be on. Mrs. Park has outpaced the both of you, already joining the cluster of people on the far end of the block. 

“Are you home for the holidays too?” he asks and you frown, clearing your throat. 

“Oh, um, not really. I live here. Well not here, here, but in town.” 

“Right. Hm. Well…cool. And you grew up here?” 

You stop dead in your tracks, turning toward him. 

“What?” he asks, facing you. His plump lips look even more rosy in the cold, and his nose has gotten red to match. 

“Don’t do this. Don’t pretend you don’t know me.” 

His eyes flick across your face and he furrows his brow. “Why?.” 

“What do you mean why? You know damn well why.” 

He kicks at the snow under his foot. “Well, I mean we were good at pretending we didn’t know each other for so long, Y/N,” he says sharply. “So you’ll have to forgive me if that’s an old habit.”

Your heart sinks, and you shove your tongue into your cheek. “Right. Forget the fact that you were the one who initiated it. But the truth is that I do know you, Jimin. Your mom seems nice, by the way.” 

His head snaps up and he glares at you. “Are we just going to pick up on the same argument from a decade ago? I might have initiated but you’re the one who shut me out and never let me know what was going on. I think then, maybe it makes sense to say I don’t know you. And you may have read everything the tabloids have said about me, but let’s make one thing clear. You don’t know me, anymore, Y/N. You know nothing about me at all. So don’t start acting like you do.” 

His voice is cold, this time a true seething annoyance and anger leaking out of his words. 

You blow air through your lips. “Wow, yeah I guess I don’t. The Jimin I used to know wouldn’t jump down my throat the second that I ask him if he’s home for the holidays. Some hot headed macho temper you’ve got there.” 

He rolls his eyes. “Whatever, Y/N.” 

He begins to stomp off toward the crowd, but clearly thinks better of it as he waits for you to catch up. 

“Temper tantrum over?” you say sarcastically, and he grumbles under his breath. “What was that?” 

“I said it wasn’t a temper tantrum. You’d be pissed too if your hockey career was pulled away from you because someone couldn’t keep shit to themselves.” 

Your mouth drops open, and while your stomach churns, all you can do is laugh, your laughter forcing you to misstep in the snow and land right on your ass, which only leads to more laughter. 

“What is wrong with you?” Jimin says, his eyes cast down on you judgingly. 

“Oof, man, I haven’t had a laugh like that in forever. A good joke coming from you of all people.” 

You pull yourself up from the snow, ignoring his outstretched hand in front of you. 

“I don’t think it’s all that funny.” 

“Yeah, well, you really should learn to lighten up,” you say, dusting the clods of snow from your legs. ”And work on that temper of yours.” 

“You sound like my coach,” he says, lifting his eyebrow. “Did he send you to watch me?” 

You squint your eyes at him. “Huh?”

“Forget it. Let’s get this shit over with so I can go dethaw in the comfort of my own home.” 

“Oh yes, heaven forbid Mr. Heatmeiser is out in the snow for any longer.”

Jimin is pretty sure that he’s a lost cause when it comes to redeeming himself as a somewhat decent person. 

He’s not sure what compelled him to lie and pretend he didn’t know you. Maybe it’s because when he stepped out of the Kia and he realized it was you, his throat dried up. Over the last decade, he’s distracted himself from thoughts about you and what happened when he left home. How much it destroyed him when you stood in front of him during one of the last days of warm weather and called it all off. 

He was so in love with you. So in love even though you were his biggest competition. Someone who had just as much of a chance at going pro as him. Maybe even more so. And while your town was too big to know everyone, but too small to not recognize people, Jimin had always known you. Had watched you on the rink practicing for your figure lessons while he waited for junior hockey practice. And how slowly your movements became less dainty and more powerful, less whimsical and more fierce as you dashed around the ice to be faster than everyone else. 

One day you were tossed into hockey with him, but as you both grew older and your bodies shaped themselves around different figures of puberty, it led to the eventual discontinuation of co-eds. 

His mother wouldn’t remember you. Because Jimin never told his strict parents that he was breaking the rules and went to your home games when his schedule allowed it in high school. That in the spring of his senior year, he finally got the guts to ask you out after he heard you’d broken up with your shitty boyfriend. That nearly every night after the first date he spent sneaking in through your bedroom window or driving you around in his car with the windows down. 

When he said he was going to practice, you always were in the parking lot waiting for him, your skates and gear ready for you two to practice drills and place bets on who could win in a shoot-out, only for him to buy you a blue raspberry slushie an hour later as you glowed from your victory, poking your stained tongue out at him to tease him. 

He loved that flavor when he tasted it on you. How many of those sweet kisses had turned hot and filthy, leading to your little whimpers and cute little sighs as he thrust into you in his back seat when everyone had left for the night? 

You told him you hadn’t told anyone you were together either. Not because your family wouldn’t understand, but because if word got out in this town, the chances of someone telling Jimin’s parents would mean the end of your relationship. It was easy, you said, to let things be private and just for you. 

Which is why the breakup felt like an unexpected death sentence when it happened. You’d both been scouted by Coach, and Jimin was certain you were going to be the one signed to the Bells. 

But then you’d both gone to a grad party for a classmate in August. And much like every other social event, you’d agreed to not be too friendly together, to not rock the boat of parental expectations or be a part of the town gossip. So you went to the party with your separate friend groups, danced around each other but never with each other. When one of the girls drunkenly stuck her tongue down Jimin’s throat, you watched without jealousy. And when Jimin begged on the walk to his car for you to forgive him, you’d laughed and said easily that there was nothing to forgive because he didn’t consent to the kiss.

But after that night, after you showered him with plenty of kisses in many places he did consent to and closed the door to his car, everything shifted. 

Suddenly, you were absent from try-outs and had texted Jimin saying you were sick. When he offered to come over, you replied that he needed to stay away for a bit. He’d tried to talk to you, but you often left his texts on read. After two weeks of pseudo ghosting, he had finally had enough.  

This wasn’t what you did. Something was clearly wrong. And after hearing that day that he’d officially been selected to contract with the Bells, he needed answers. He drove over to your house and snuck into your bedroom when your light was on. 

You were sitting on your bed, hair neat and dressed comfortably, with no signs of ailment despite what you’d said before. 

“So you’re feeling better I see. You don’t look very sick,” he said, bewildered at how normal you seemed. 

“It wasn’t that kind of sickness,” you’d replied, teeth gritted as you turned down the volume of your TV. 

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie to me?” His anger had started building, lifting the volume of his voice to above the whisper-level policy that you’d both implemented. 

“Shhh, my parents will hear you.” 

“Fuck it! Let them hear me! It’s stupid to keep this shit a secret anymore!” 

Your jaw had dropped. You had looked at him with venom. “I was only keeping it a secret for you!” 

“Why? Why then was that a secret you could keep between us but you couldn’t even tell me what’s been going on! Are you mad about the party? About that kiss?” 

By that point, both of you were talking loudly, and Jimin had heard your parents call up to ask you who was in your room. 

“Don’t worry about it!” you called back, returning to your argument. “I can’t believe you think I’m mad about that when I told you it was fine!” 

“What do you expect me to think when that’s the last time I saw you? The last time things were normal between us, Y/N?” 

“Nothing between us has ever been normal, Jimin.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“We’re rivals. Competition for each other. You really think that this would hold up if either of us went pro? How would that work? The sore loser just carts themselves behind the other and sits on the sidelines despite their dream being crushed?”

“What? Baby, that’s crazy. Is that how you would feel if I was signed?” 

“Maybe, but maybe you’d feel that way.” 

“Y/N, I wouldn’t. I would be so happy for you. And maybe I would still have my chance too. To get signed for another team or–” 

“And then be on opposite schedules in different places? Really? You think that would work out?”

“It could! Why are you being this way? Did you fake being sick because you’ve been rotting in here thinking about things that haven’t even happened yet?” 

You shook your head. “No, I was sick but it’s whatever now. Anyway, I know you were signed today. Coach called me.” 

An early fall breeze blew through the open window, settling the heat between you. 

“I haven’t signed yet,” he said quietly.

“You will.” 

“Maybe I won’t!” 

“Oh be serious for one fucking second, Jimin. All summer you’ve talked about this. This is your dream. This has always been your dream.” 

“Yeah well that was before you! Before this.” 

“What is this?” 

“Love! I’m in love with you. I want to spend every day of my life with you, don’t you know that? Since we were kids on the ice, when you were a failed ice skater because you were too gruff. Don’t you love me?” 

Tears had welled up in your eyes, but you didn’t move from your bed. 

“You can’t give up on hockey Jimin.” 

“I’m not going to, Y/N. Now tell me, do you love me, too?” 

He sat down on the edge of your bed, looking over at you sadly. He wanted so badly to hold you, to wipe away your tears, but he knew if he moved any closer, you’d be sure to kick him out. He sat anxiously as you silently looked at him, more tears spilling forward. 

“You need to leave.”

“Then tell me you don’t love me. If you say that, I’ll climb through that window and I promise I will never bother you again.” 

“Stop it. Please, just go home.” 

“What is wrong? What happened? I don’t understand. We were fine. Please, tell me.” 

The desperation in Jimin’s voice cracked him open, tears falling down his face too. 

“It’s over, Jimin. I’m breaking up with you.” You didn’t look him in the eye as you said it. Instead your eyes were fixed on your shelf above your dresser, decorated with trophies, team photos, and medals from your years of hockey. Noticeably gone from that shelf was the stuffed purple whale he’d gotten you from an arcade that summer. 

When he looked around, that’s when he noticed every trace of him was gone from your bedroom. The little things you’d put there as symbols of your relationship like postcards he’d written love letters to you on the back of, a small picture you kept by your bedside of your reflections in the water, and the dried flowers from the field off the highway he’d picked for you the day his car stalled on your way into the city. Almost like every trace of him was gone.

“Y/N? I’m coming in.” The sound of your father opening your door pulled Jimin off your bed, wiping his tears as he turned toward the window. 

When your father saw him –and as Jimin assumed, you– he cleared his throat. “I think it’s time for you to go, son.” 

With one glance back, Jimin looked at you, pleading for you to return his gaze. And as he for the first and last time walked out of your bedroom door, you looked up at him. Your eyes were filled with an agonizing sadness. One that answered every question he asked that night. You loved him. But that somehow, didn’t mean anything. 

Now, as he stands in the deep snow looking out across the frozen pond in his parents’ backyard, Jimin can taste the memory on his tongue. Not just of you, even though since he’s gotten home from caroling with his mother he’s been obsessively replaying the memories he thought he put to rest. But he also is remembering his first time skating on the pond. 

Back then, it felt like it stretched on for miles, but back then Jimin was also about half his height and terrified the ice was too thin. Over time, he’s learned how to get a better idea of the ice’s thickness and safety, but even if he fell in, the water in the pond is only 4 feet deep. 

Carefully, he takes the shovel to the surface, trying to scrape away at the layer of snow that has caked over the ice. He knows by tomorrow the snow will just be another layer of thicker ice to reinforce itself, but he can’t wait. 

After shoveling, he returns to the bank and props himself on the old log bench his father put on the edge of the water, replacing his boots with his skates. It feels so natural and right to lace himself back into them, though the missing bulk and weight of his padding feels out of balance. Still, he pulls himself up, shuffling over to the pond and shifting his weight forward to feel it out. 

It takes a moment to get used to the rougher ice. It reminds him of the time the zamboni driver was on paternity leave and the roughed up edges from practice after practice made it harder to glide across. Yet this is the pond he first learned to skate on. He knows its bends, how to steady himself among it. And once he feels the ice glide easier under him, it feels like a giant weight has been lifted off his shoulders. 

“Do you think they’ll want wreath cookies or tea cakes? Or those ones with the snowmen cutouts! Ooh, we should get those while we’re here, too, just in case.” 

Your mother has been leading you down aisle after aisle of the grocery store, nervously questioning every decision she’s made for her Christmas party. After the lackluster turnout post- caroling, she decided she wanted to try again, and for some reason has decided that the selection of cookies was the reason for low turnout, not the record-breaking snowstorm occurring during it. 

Unlike yesterday, when you were forced to carol alone, you managed to lie to Minho about needing to get a few things from the store and wanting to hear about his date, waiting until he got in the car to inform him that you would be meeting your mother at the store. 

You sigh as you turn the heavy cart around, back in the direction of the dairy section from where you just came. “They’ll be back here. I’ll go get them.” 

But her attention is focused more on the list in front of her, so you wheel the heavy load through the masses of shoppers, Minho grumbling behind you about how much he hates you. 

“Listen, now that we’re away from my mother, you can give me all the juicy details. How was the Thai food? How was downtown? Did you kiss?”

“I don’t think you deserve to know,” he pouts, pretending to stall at the discounted advent calendars.

“Look, I have stuff to tell you too, so let this be an equal exchange of tea.” 

“Y/N, I don’t want to hear about whatever some loser said to you on a dating app about hat trick record holders.” 

You arrive at the section with the pre-cut cookie dough. Minho snags two boxes and holds them up, trying to make you pick between the Rudolphs and the Christmas trees. After a second deliberating, he puts both in the cart, knowing your mother will be pleased with his decision making. 

“It’s not about dating apps. It’s about Park Ji-”

“Hi!” A bright voice chirps close by, and you jump, focusing on the source. You whirl around to see Mrs. Park waving with a tree shaped butter mold in her hands. Standing behind her at the handle of the cart is Jimin. 

“Oh, hi Mrs.Park,” you say, your voice strained. “How are you?”

Mrs. Park smiles at the question. “Good! Please tell your mom I had a fun time yesterday. Lots of good singing! Especially you. Are you a professional?” 

Minho snorts behind you, causing you to elbow him in the stomach. 

“No no. I’m really not good. I’m not a professional by any means.” 

“Oh, I see. Well, what do you do for work then? Is this your husband? He’s very handsome.”

Your eyes widen in horror as you realize she’s talking about Minho. 

You try not to look at Jimin, but you do, and he still wears the same blank expression from yesterday, only his jaw is set and the tips of his ears are red. He looks back and forth between you and Minho, almost like he’s trying to imagine you two together. 

“Oh, you’re really sweet, but, no. I’m not her husband. Neither of us are married.” Minho pipes up, his hand gently rubbing up and down your back. Somehow, you know he has pieced what you were about to say together, and the comfort of his touch makes you feel a little less like running at full speed out of the store. 

Jimin’s blank expression has turned into a glare. 

You clear your throat, not only drawing his gaze up to you but also his mother’s. 

“I, um, I own the ice arena. So I am usually there, sorting out bills and repairs. Or driving the zamboni. When I have downtime I play offense in our hockey league.” 

This seems to draw Jimin’s attention. “You own the arena?” 

“Yeah, the Lee family who owned it? Both of them passed away a few years ago. None of their children wanted it, so I bought it from them about two years ago.” 

Jimin frowned. “Oh no, that’s so sad. They always gave me extra time to practice and always had those licorice laces at the food counter. Remember the time we–”

His mouth snaps shut as he realizes his mistake. His eyes flash to his mother, who is looking between the two of you. “Oh! Then you must know each other!” she says ecstatically. 

You raise your eyebrows at Jimin expectantly. What narrative is he going to choose?

“Yes, Eomma. Y/N and I went to high school together. And we saw each other a lot.”

“Yeah, something like that,” you say, quietly challenging him even now to say the whole truth. He responds with a shake of his head. His mother doesn’t notice. 

“Oh, how nice! Such a shame my son never mentioned knowing you before. He could be the one shopping with you now if he had gotten you sooner instead of your husband! But, my son was always so focused on sports. Do you know the UHL? He’s on a team there!” 

Something twinges in you at the mention of the truth. You know Jimin never mentioned you, as that was part of your arrangement. But the thing his mother says about getting you sooner really throws you. 

“She knows, Eomma. She of all people will know about the UHL. She had tried out during the same trials as me.” 

“Is that so? Well, a pity that he beat you then. He’s always been so talented. I guess fate really made things work out for both of you then.” 

You find yourself folding your lips into a thin line, trying to avoid spilling the details about her son’s talent. But just as you wrap your hands around the cart rails until your knuckles pop, you feel MInho reach over you, loosening the cart from your grasp. 

“Hey, uh, you know, your mom is probably looking for us,” he says, introducing the bait that you can take to escape the increasingly painful conversation. 

As if summoned, your mother appears, rambling on about how long it has taken before she recognizes who is standing in front of her.

“Oh, well hello there! It’s great to see you again. Thank you for attending yesterday, it was wonderful having you. Too bad you missed the post-caroling cookies!” 

You sigh, knowing that your mother is sounding passive aggressive to anyone within earshot. 

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry we couldn’t attend. My son had just flown in earlier in the day, so we went home after so he could rest.” 

Your mother’s smile falls a little, no doubt from the guilt. 

“Of course! Well, no harm done. In fact, I’m having a soirée on Christmas Eve, and you should attend! Bring the whole family!” 

You glance back at Minho, whose mouth is pursed to hold back a laugh, much like yours. A soirée. Sure.

“I don’t know Eomma, we still have–” 

“It sounds amazing!” Mrs. Park interrupts, shooting a harsh look at her son. “We would love to attend, thank you.” 

“Perfect, I’ll email you the details then. Well, we should get going. These cookies won’t bake themselves!” 

As you peel yourself away from the Parks, you take a deep breath. 

“Well,” Minho says, “I don’t think I need to hear your story anymore.” 

“Well, there’s something more I need to tell you, but not here.” 

When you first met Jimin, you were seven, though you don’t remember him. While he once claimed he’s known you for forever, it wasn’t until you were both teenagers before you actually remembered him. 

In high school, you’d laid low, avoiding just about every social event that you possibly could. Your focus was on academics and the ice, with 5am wake times to get to the arena to practice, and late nights doing extra cram school sessions to keep your grades in shape despite your busy schedule. You had friends, but they were ones who lived in different cities, most of them commuting to your traveling team. Because co-ed hockey wasn’t an option and your high school had only invested in boys’ leagues, Park Jimin wasn’t someone on your radar. 

Until you’d learned that you were on his. 

It started in the early spring. Rumor had it that major league coaches were scouting for new recruits. Of all genders. There was a special trial process, and the trials would happen during the summer, with a potential for newly contracted players to begin their rookie season as soon as the fall. 

You’d tried not to get too excited. With an early decision college acceptance under your belt, your future was already looking bright. There was even an athletic scholarship attached. You could play on the women's team. But the potential of playing for the UHL, to be scouted and live out your dream to play hockey professionally was still filling your stomach with butterflies. 

So you kept yourself chill until the rumor became official, and marched into the arena you knew so well with your head high, ready to take on the other recruits. 

It was then that you and Jimin officially met. 

He was a bit scrawny looking then, his mop of black hair almost shadowing his face. It was hard to believe that this kid was the one you knew to be the MVP of the boy’s hockey team at your school. 

But once you saw him move, you understood why. Jimin had the form and movement almost of a dancer, with his build keeping him strong but light on his feet to race forward and snake around even the most complex of defense measures. He instinctively knew how to bend his body and stick away from a targeted maneuver, and cut swiftly enough to throw off the goalie and score. He would have made a great figure skater. 

You, however, were different. From the start, the grace of figure skating wasn’t with you, with your skates sloppily digging into the ice so you could chase after the object of your affection. A little brutish, you were also cunning, and the strategy of hockey and the game board that laid before you made it all the more satisfying. Your patience and ability to unfold a game play before it fully manifested often led to your team’s win. 

It also made playing against Jimin all the more intriguing. 

Because during each scrimmage, shoot-out, and obstacle you faced for the try-outs, Jimin was often neck-in-neck with you, somehow knowing your own plan of attack, and sliding the puck out of your hold as if he was plucking a feather from a pillow. It appeared so effortless, like he’d studied you for so long and knew your every movement. When he would shrug and give you an angelic smile during his wins over you, it made you all the more angry. 

One day after a scrimmage, you were stressed and hormonal and pissed. Some of the other players had gotten under your skin, shit-talking you for being the only woman on the team. 

“You sure you aren’t on some steroids or some shit? Performance enhancement can happen to everyone.” 

“I’m sure your daddy taught you quite a bit when you played on your little ponds, sweetheart. But this is the big leagues. There’s guys out there three times your size who will ruin that pretty little face.” 

“Are you sure you’re cut out for this? The position of Puck Bunny is open. If you want to experience hockey with the pros, might as well be safely bouncing on my cock to do so.” 

The sexism was rampant in hockey, and you knew it. But that was a day where it was too much. With graduation on the near horizon, just breaking up with your boyfriend, and the scouting day schedule being released soon, your nerves were as tired as your body. 

When Jimin found you crying in your car outside of the arena, he’d gently knocked on your window, a light smile warming his face as he held up a protein shake and a Kit Kat. 

You’d let him in, and from there, your whole world shifted. 

The days grew longer, the sun warming parts of your life you’d forgotten winter took away. Jimin was there to listen, to sit and strategize plays with you, to eat Subway sandwiches after practice and walk you to your car after school. 

“Hey, so, there’s this movie coming out. It’s a documentary, actually, about my favorite player, Lee Wonhyuk? Would you, uh, like to see it with me?” 

You knew that was his favorite player. He mentioned Wonhyuk nearly every day, and wore his jersey when he wasn’t in his own padding. You also had learned other things about Jimin during this time, like how the tips of his ears would turn red when he was embarrassed, and that his parents had a no dating policy because he was supposed to have an arranged marriage some day. He dreamed of leaving the town you both grew up in, wanting more for himself and hoping the distance from his family would allow for him to be more himself than simply fulfilling the dreams of his parents. 

He wanted it so badly he repeated it like a mantra to you often, it sometimes sounding like a plea to the heavens as tears fell from his eyes. 

He had a tooth that was a little crooked, and sometimes when he was tired, his voice would lisp a little. When he laughed, it was often with his full body, a cute giggle that scrunched up his face and folded him nearly in half with joy. He was allergic to cats but loved them. He had a brother. He learned to skate on the pond in his backyard. 

But he never bragged. Never let his anger get him on the ice. Was respectful to you and held open doors or carried your equipment bag when your shoulder hurt. 

So of course you said yes to the date. Of course you let him tuck your hair behind your ear and kiss you in the warm night, his breathy finally he sighed when your lips broke apart ensuring you’d made the right call about him. 

“So you were seeing each other in secret,” Minho says, drinking his Americano smoothly, like it isn’t a pile of caffeinated sludge. 

“Yes,” you respond, the cinnamon on top of your gingerbread latte making you cough slightly. 

The café’s window is foggy, but you can still make out the figures of bustling shoppers. For the sake of discretion, you agreed to Minho’s suggestion to go into the big city for “decent coffee and the ability to be strangers in a larger public”. 

He was right. Everyone is either deep in their own discussions or blocking out the world with headphones as they work on their laptops. The soft jazz Christmas music makes it feel safer to speak your secrets into the air. 

“Well, then what happened? What led to you breaking up? It sounds like you two were in love.” 

“We were…I think” you say, correcting yourself immediately after. 

“You think?” 

“Can you be in love when you’re nineteen?” 

“Uh, yes? Nineteen is young, but have you seen the teens these days? I think they have emotional maturity.” 

“Well, I didn’t, I guess. Because that summer was so intense. We graduated, but we were already together. And then we were hanging out with our own friend groups and trying to balance things. But we saw each other just about every day. And then it was almost like an obsession. We were unable to go a singular day without each other. He would sneak into my room to be with me at night and then leave before either of us had to get up to go to practice. We didn’t want to get caught, so we would makeout behind the movie theater in his car or drive to a more secluded part of the woods so we could…you know.” 

“Have sex? Come on, Y/N, don’t get all shy on me now when I know you were eating up the details about me taking my date the other night and eating her out while she–” 

“Shh!” You look around, but if anything, your shushing is the thing that drew attention. 

“You’re such a prude,” Minho laughs. “Anyway, go on. So you would sneak around, make love, and spend every hour with each other possible. Sounds like you were being nineteen.” 

“Well, it was intense. And once the coaches came it was rigorous and terrifying. Jimin was getting better and stronger, but I was constantly getting slower and I felt weaker. At first I thought I was just tired, like I’d overworked myself, but then I was getting more anxious and nauseous. So I just assumed that it was nerves. But I was playing pretty good and I was drawing attention from the coaches in a great way. Well, one in particular. The coach for the Bells. He was the only one who seemed to be interested in signing a woman.” 

“Well, yeah, because we live in a hellish and misogynistic society and you kick ass!” Minho says enthusiastically, pounding his hand onto the table. 

A woman carrying her tiny Pomerainian in her purse whips her head over. “Do you mind? Snowball is trying to get her beauty sleep.” 

“Sorry,” you both say in unison. 

“Anyway, yeah, I was so excited about the opportunity. And so was Jimin. He kept going on and on about playing on the same team as his idol. But Coach approached me one day after practice and told me that despite there being another three weeks in the trial period, he’d already made his decision. He wanted to sign me on for the fall season. And he would see through the process to be fair, but he had already contacted the legal team to begin drawing up my contract.

“And I had to keep it a secret. While it’s kind of known that coaches do this, they usually keep it to themselves. But Coach said that he hadn’t seen the strategy his team needed in their play execution for quite some time and I would be a huge asset to the team. I’d asked about Jimin, too, out of curiosity but he kind of skirted around the details, saying that there would only be one recruit for the team from this area.” 

“Oh my god, that’s incredible! So why didn’t you go through with it? What did Jimin say when you told him?” 

“I didn’t,” you shake your head, fiddling with the cupsleeve of your latte. “I couldn’t. Not only was I sworn to secrecy basically, but how was I supposed to tell the person who adored the Bells that he wasn’t going to play for them? How could I crush his dreams like that? He needed this. Not only because he wanted it, but he was good at it. As much as I hated to admit my shitty opponents were right, I physically was going to be one third of the size of my competitors sometimes and there is a danger in hockey.” 

“Okay, but it’s not like Jimin is some massive dude.” 

“No, but you’ve seen how graceful he is. He slips out of the hold of the other team fairly easily. I’ve only seen him get body checked recently, when he got whatever that temper is he now is known for. He wasn’t like that at all when we were younger.” 

“Did he find out? Is that how things ended?” 

You shook your head. “I never told Jimin about this meeting. Maybe he knows now and that’s why he’s always pissed whenever he sees me, I don’t know. But there’s multiple reasons why I didn’t sign on, and yes there’s that part I just told you about, but there was more to it than that.” 

Minho sips his coffee, gesturing for you to continue. 

“So, as the week went on, my stomach was hurting more and more. And with all the stress and nerves but all the crazy workouts, I’d been skipping my period for a few months. Jimin and I had been safe for the most part, but not always. Sometimes we were too hot and heavy and we’d do the pull-out method instead. But I didn’t ever make the connection. A lot of the time, female athletes who are super physically conditioned have lighter or missed periods. It had happened before, but that was before I was sexually active. Stress, too, can sometimes make you miss periods. So one night Jimin and I went out to this party. Nothing really important happened but some girl threw herself at Jimin and he was worried I’d be upset. I wasn’t, but all-too conveniently I was super sick the next day. I missed practice. And that’s when I started putting the dots together and bought a test that was clearly positive.” 

“Oh my god, Y/N. What?” 

“Yeah,” you chuckled, taking a deeper sip of your drink. “Pregnant. And for a little while actually. When I got into the clinic and they took the blood tests and ultrasound, they suspected I was about 8 weeks along. Which means I had been drinking, getting body checked, and all sorts of shit during that time. But, they said it was still viable.” 

“Did you want it to be viable? I mean, how did you feel? Scared, I can imagine.” 

Your lips curve into a soft smile. “I don’t think I really gave myself much time to decide how I felt besides that I was terrified and that this was happening at the worst possible time. I asked for an abortion right then and there. So they sent me home with the pills, and I just waited. It takes a few days, and god, honestly it was awful to experience alone. I didn’t tell anyone, because if I told my parents I was afraid they would ask whose it was, and I didn’t want that to get back to Jimin’s parents. So, I just spent about a week at home, saying I had a really heavy period this time, experiencing heavy cramps and crying and letting it pass. The following week I had to go back in and make sure it worked, but in that time I just laid low and didn’t talk to anyone. 

“My parents didn’t suspect much, but Jimin was freaking out, thinking I had some infectious disease and threatening to come over every five minutes with soup or a Hazmat suit. I didn’t want him to be there, though. If he knew I was pregnant, I knew it would throw him off. He’d be worried about me even more and start thinking about us having babies together and getting old and staying in this town.” 

“I can understand why you didn’t tell him, I do. But I do wonder what’s so wrong about letting him think about those things too.” Minho reaches his hand out gently, stroking his fingers on the back of your hand. “I’m not saying what you did is wrong in any way, Y/N. It’s your body and always your choice matters the most. But based on how you described him to me before, do you think he would have thrown it all away or tried to make you keep the baby? Do you think that your decision and his wouldn’t be aligned in that way?” 

You think for a minute. “No, I think he would have been on my side. He was really adamant on letting me be independent and pursuing what was best for myself. I just couldn't give him the option at the time. I was too focused on making sure things went right for him.” 

Minho smiles softly and nods. “I just hate that you went through that alone.” 

“I do too. But I’m glad I can finally talk about it. I did end up telling my parents, about a year or so later, that I had an abortion. I didn’t say whose it was, but my mom cried for like three days because she was so sad for me that I went through it alone.” 

“Is that why you turned down the offer, then? Were you okay after?” Minho furrows his brow with concern. 

“Oh, I was fine after about two weeks. I felt completely back to normal. And it wasn’t really that reason that I turned the offer down. I mean, it was a part of it, obviously, but mostly when I was having the abortion and was alone at home I was thinking about how fucked up life is. I was a normal teenager and then shit I was pregnant. I was in love with someone but oh god we were almost parents. We were breaking rules despite being adults. We were living in secret and baby or no baby, life was going to change for us and soon. If I was signed to the Bells, I would be leaving home, but what about Jimin? Would he come with me, stay back? Would he get other offers and we’d play on opposing teams? If I said no and he said yes, would he seriously be okay coming back and seeing me or trying to figure things out while I was away at school? 

“Keep in mind, at that time, I didn’t realize my deferment was me rescinding my scholarship. I just suddenly felt like the world was so, so big and the tiny, romantic solitude we’d coveted was not going to work out. So I made up my mind. I turned down the offer for the Bells. I told Coach the world wasn’t ready for a woman in professional hockey and told him about Jimin and his drive and passion and dreams. I told him to sign him instead. Or at least I hoped I told him. I was really laying it on thick,” you laugh. 

“And then you broke things off with Jimin,” Minho finishes. You frown softly. 

“Yeah. And it was awful. He begged me not to. He didn’t know where all this was coming from. He told me he’d only leave if I told him I didn’t love him, but I couldn’t do that. Eventually my dad busted into my room and sent him away. And that was it. That was the last time we talked or saw each other.” 

“Until now.” 

“Until now,” you confirm. 

‘Well fuck, Y/N, that’s one hell of a story.”

“I’ll say.” 

Your head pivots to the Pomeranian lady, who is turned toward you and Minho, sipping her coffee indulgently. 

“You were eavesdropping that entire time?” you ask. 

“Well, it’s not like you were being discreet. Either way, honey, these kinds of places absorb everyone’s biggest secrets. That’s what makes the coffee so good.” 

When Minho dropped you off at your house, you felt like a huge weight had been lifted off your chest. After years of holding onto something that wasn’t necessarily shameful but still heavy, someone else knowing the full story was relieving. 

However, one question he asked before leaving has been popping around in your head, taking up a residence that you weren’t quite expecting, even as you unlock the doors to the ice arena the next morning.

“Are you going to tell him?” 

Had Jimin not been only mere miles away from you at this very moment, you would say no. There’s no point in bringing up the past if it’s never around to haunt you. But it seems like Jimin is determined to make your small town feel even smaller. 

When he walks through the doors behind Bee, you can’t help but feel like you manifested him. 

“So, Y/N, here’s the deal.” Bee always tells you news this way. A deal, a situation. This is her way of telling you she’s made a decision and you’re probably not going to like it.

“I got a call the other day from the Head Coach of the Bells. I don’t know how, probably Jay gave it to him since he’s the AC but whatever.” Bee suddenly admitting that her long distance boyfriend, Jay–the Jay she has baby talked to multiple times after a game loss– is the Assistant Coach for the Bells is shocking. But not as shocking as what next comes out of her mouth. “He wants us to rehab Park. Drill him, get him back to his roots and all that shit. He’s hoping some time on a familiar rink will help him shape up. So starting today, he’s going to be training with you.” 

You blink silently at Bee, wishing you could communicate “I want to strangle you” through the pattern. 

“What?” Jimin says incredulously. “I thought I was just going to be training with the space, not with her specifically.” 

Bee cocks her head at Jimin. “You got a problem training with women, Park? Because if so, I would be happy to call Jay and let him know you’re not complying.” She smiles viciously. 

Jimin sighs in resignation. “No, ma’am.” 

“Bee,” you say. “That’s not fair. If he doesn’t want to train with us, he doesn’t have to. I have some opening slots since the junior teams and figure skating lessons are on hold until after the new year. He can just come do drills during those times if he wants to.” 

Bee flicks her gaze between you and Jimin, raising an eyebrow. “What’s with you, Y/N? You’ve never disagreed with my plans before. Are you guys ex lovers or something?” 

You suck in a breath, ready to deny the accusation, but Jimin beats you to it. 

“Yeah, actually. We dated in high school.” He says it calmly, with no malice or venom. It actually shocks you a bit. 

“Oh. Well...do you think you two can make it through the holidays without killing each other?” 

Jimin laughs lightly. “I don’t know, you’ve seen her slapshots. I think you know how lethal she can be.” 

Bee smirks, nodding. “Fair.” 

You knit your brows together. Jimin making light jokes to Bee? What reality do you live in? 

“So, Y/N? Can you not enact Kill Jimin at this time?” 

Despite yourself, you find yourself smiling, allowing a light laugh to fall from your lips. 

“Yes, I promise I won’t kill Jimin.” 

Practicing with you feels like a weird dream Jimin is walking through. Familiar because the arena looks about the exact same as it did back when you were teenagers. Only now, you are both older, and when Jimin gets a good look at you without a giant winter parka over your body, he can’t help but notice how good you look. 

Your body has filled in, with wider hips and strong legs that lunge forward with ease, carrying you as you slam the puck into the goal post, chiming in the air before it pivots in. Your ass has gotten bigger, too, and it looks perfect in your leggings you’ve chosen to wear for practice. He can’t see much of your arms due to the bulky hoodie you’ve chosen, but he can tell by the way you bodycheck one of your teammates that they are far from weak. 

It’s almost enough to get him hard. Until he hears you laugh, and then he remembers how long it’s been since he’s experienced your laughter, and the empty ache of his past drags his sulky mood back up. 

Being home sucks. Seeing his parents is great, but he’s been coddled since he got here, being sent off with homemade lunches from his mother and warnings from his father not to stay out too late. He’s almost thirty and he feels sixteen. This morning his mother woke up even before him just so she could corner him in the kitchen and ask if he’d reviewed any of the potential matches she sent him so he can also go on a date while he’s home. 

He’d said not yet, but what he wanted to say was “No, Eomma, because marriage couldn’t be the furthest thing from my mind right now when my career is dying in front of me.” 

Now, witnessing you be still so much of yourself after nearly ten years, Jimin can’t help but feel even worse about himself. 

“Park, you’re up.” Coach Bee whistles for Jimin to begin his drill, handling the puck quicking between a set of cones. It’s a familiar drill he’s done hundreds of times with the UHL, but this time there’s a twist: he must avoid the agitator, a player who will skate behind him tightly, not only trying to intercept the puck, but also piss him off. 

Naturally, you’re the agitator. 

“Before we do this, no low blows,” he says as you glide up to him. “Treat me with the same knowledge any other player would have. Nothing too personal.” 

“Oh, uh, I wasn’t going to, but sure,” you say softly. 

When Coach Bee blows her whistle, he begins, curving his body along the cones, with you right behind him. 

“Pussy,” you say, which catches Jimin off guard immediately, throwing him into a laughing fit and knocking a bunch of cones down.” 

Coach blows her whistle. “Reset! Come on Park, Y/N, be serious.” 

“I am being serious!” you shout back, but Jimin is still laughing hard. 

“Oh come on! Pussy? You’re kidding me!” Jimin wheezes. Your lips twitch. 

“Okay, fine, I haven’t gone into my zone yet. Give me a break.” 

“I know you can be mean,” he says. Your face falls. 

“I don’t want to be mean.” 

“Well that’s your job right now isn’t it? To agitate me? So just suck it up and do it. Or are you a pussy?” He raises an eyebrow. You clench your jaw. 

This is how he knows he’s got you. All it ever used to take was a little bit of a challenge to rile you up. And Jimin knows just what buttons to push. 

“Reset your shit and let’s go,” you say. 

He smirks. 

This time when Coach Bee blows her whistle, you’re practically on top of Jimin, careening your body so your stick is just millimeters away from his. 

“You know, you used to be hard to crack. What’s wrong? All that fame get to your head? Or was it the fake orgasms you gave that girl in your little sex tape?” 

“Oh, baby, you of all people should know those orgasms were real.” 

“Hmm, I don’t know. You were going awfully hard on the poor girl with your needle dicking. Does being shitty at hockey now amount to being shitty at sex these days?” You smack his hockey stick, causing it to rattle uneasily in Jimin’s grasp. 

He chokes up on the handle, reshaping the curve of his arm so the puck tucks behind the stick when you go in for another slap. 

“Aw you’re asking about sex? Has no one fucked you since me or are you just having awful sex?” he retorts. You scoff. With a twist, Jimin begins the second set of cones, this time with a more fluid movement that feels natural to his body. 

“So interested in my pussy, aren’t you. If you were maybe more attentive to the other people you fuck, you wouldn’t be the worst player in the major league.” 

“As opposed to what? The best player in the minor league? I’m not the one stuck at home.” 

He feels your skate sliding between his legs, the force of your body checking, almost knocking him to the ground. He steadies, glaring at you as you coast behind him gracefully. 

“Oops, sorry. Did I almost trip you?” 

“You always played dirty,” he spits. “Come on, babygirl, give me your worst.” 

You roll your eyes and fall into position as he passes the puck back and forth between his stick. 

“Being awfully quiet back there. What’s wrong, big boys got your ego down?” 

“Hardly. I think you’ve got enough ego for the whole fucking town.” 

“And how did I get it, hmm? It didn’t come from sucking, Y/N, it came from talent. Something you didn’t try hard enough for.” 

“And you did? I’m sure Coach really loves to tell you all about your talent.” 

“He does, he said I had drive and passion and that’s why I needed to come back here. To show how far I’ve come from this shithole. How skilled I am and how much I deserve to be there instead of here.” 

“Well lucky for you to have been the top contender.” Your voice drips with anger, and Jimin peers back to see your eyes piercing through him. You drop your stick, shifting to Coach Bee. 

“Bee, I’m done. Send in someone else to agitate.” You skate off the ice, whispering angrily to her as you jab your finger in Jimin’s direction. She nods, blowing her whistle. 

“Alright, reset! Let’s get this show on the road. Wonpil, you’re with Jimin. Minho, go take goalie position. Hustle! It’s Christmas Eve, we all want to get home!” 

Everyone resets, and the player named Wonpil pulls up behind Jimin. As the fellow players begin their drills, Wonpil immediately jumps in where you left off. 

“God, I can’t believe they let an asshole like you in here,” he says, leering over Jimin’s shoulder. 

Jimin snorts, focusing on his positioning. 

“Seriously, you’re the scum of the entire UHL and you really think you’re the shit? Embarrassing.” 

“Well, at least I have a contract. How's a dinky rink going for you, bud?” 

“You know you only have that contract because Y/N turned it down, right?” 

Jimin grips his stick harder. “Nice lie, you almost got me with it.”

Wonpil laughs, empty and cruel. “Oh you don’t know do you? Your coach scouted her for the Bells. She only turned it down because she was sick and felt bad for you.” 

“You’re lying,” Jimin said, teeth gritting. 

“Sure I am. Keep telling yourself that. But facts are facts, Jimin. You playing like a piece of shit is a disgrace to not just yourself, but everything she built for you too.” 

“Stop. Lying.” Heat flares through Jimin’s body, and he pivots on the ice, slamming his body into Wonpil. 

“Oh, I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” Wonpil says, teeth sharp as he smiles at Jimin. “Someone really needs to put you in your place, and I’m more than happy to do it.” 

Jimin grabs Wonpil’s shoulders, jerking him into the barrier. “Go for it, bud. Show me how cool you think you are.” 

Wonpil jerks his arm up to bring his elbow down onto Jimin's face, but something stops him. A hand squeezes his forearm, and as Jimin follows the limb, he sees you.

“Stop it, Wonpil. That’s enough.” Your voice is soft but ragged, and Jimin realizes you’ve been crying.

Somewhere in the background, the whistle is screaming through the arena, and the entire team of the Griffins are streaming forward to break up the fight. But it’s your touch, your voice that seems to break Jimin from his fury. 

“Are you okay?” he asks, but the question confuses you, and you stand there staring at him, your body only looped through one arm of the hoodie, your skates untied. 

You don’t answer, instead skating back off the rink, grabbing your equipment bag and disappearing behind a door marked for employees. 

Jimin doesn’t see you until closing time. While practice ended hours ago, he stayed, doing drills, eating a hot dog from concessions, and most of all, waiting for you. 

Your hair is messy, eyes puffy and red, but when your eyes land on Jimin, you don’t look fazed by his presence. 

“I saw you on the security camera,” you say softly. 

“Ah,” he responds. Your arms are crossed, the long sleeves of your shirt confirming the muscle definition he suspected before. 

“I assume you wanted to talk to me?” you ask. 

Jimin clears his throat, nodding awkwardly. “Um, yeah. Your teammate, Wonpil. What’s his deal?”

“What do you mean?” 

“Does he have it out for me or something?” 

You shrug. “I’m not sure what you mean. Besides you trying to beat the shit out of him. Did something happen?” 

“Well, I didn’t try to beat the shit out of him for nothing. The guy has a screw loose or something. He was saying all sorts of shit.” 

“Didn’t you tell me that this is what the agitator does? Of course he’s going to say shit. Come on, follow me. I need to lock up.” You lead him through the various lobbies and areas around the arena, checking bathrooms and corners for anyone who might be loitering. Jimin saw the last people leave about an hour ago, but he doesn’t say so. 

“Yeah, but this was crazy stuff.” You duck your head into the women’s bathroom. 

“Mhm.” 

“He said that the only reason I’m contracted with the Bells is because you turned it down. Isn’t that nuts?” 

You freeze, your hand on the key that turns off the lights to the south side of the arena. 

“Oh.”

Jimin watches you. Your voice sounds shaken, and when you turn to him, you don’t meet his gaze. 

“Y/N,” Jimin says. 

“Yeah.” 

“Look at me.” You obey. “Is that true? Did you get a contract for the Bells?” 

“I did,” you say. 

Jimin’s chest clenches but he forces a deep breath through it anyway. 

“And did you turn it down so I could go?” 

“Yes,” you say. Tears well up in your eyes. Jimin blinks in disbelief. 

“Why? Why the fuck would you do that? It was your dream and you just threw it away!” Anger pulses through him again, making him flushed and hot. “Why didn’t you tell me? What the fuck, Y/N?” 

“You wanted it more than I did, Jimin! You needed it more than me. What was I supposed to do? Leave you behind?”

“You were supposed to tell me! You were supposed to be honest so I could figure things out for myself! If I wasn’t the first pick, I deserved to know! Now I know I was the pity pick? All this time I was thinking I was chosen because I was wanted, but I wasn’t even good enough for that?” 

He rubs his eyes with his hands, trying to stamp out the burning he feels in them. Despite himself, his throat tightens, and the hot lick of tears begins to fall in mirror to your face. 

“Of course you were good enough! Why else would you have been contracted! He saw in you what I saw!” you yell, a ragged cry leaving your chest. 

“So that’s why you dumped me all those years ago? Was it guilt for what you did?”

“No! No, it was because I couldn’t be the one dragging you down, Jimin. You spent that whole summer telling me how badly you needed to escape. You talked about your dreams, everything. If I went and played for the Bells, would you have been happy for me? Would you have been okay with letting your dream go?” 

“Of course I wouldn’t Y/N! Because you were my dream. You never seemed to get that! All along you were playing with my future like I was your puppet on strings. Did I live up to your expectations? Hm? Is watching me fuck strangers in a threesome that has since ruined my life been a dream for you? Has watching me become the loser that I am been satisfying for your sick idea of reality?” 

“No, it isn’t. It’s been sad, Jimin. It has been absolutely awful to watch! And keep in mind, there’s no way for me to be a puppeteer if I’m not around to pull the strings. You became who you are now by your own hand. Not mine. Yeah, it was wrong of me not to tell you, I know that now. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you. But I’m not responsible for your career failing. That’s all you.” 

You turn the key to the set of lights, shutting the arena down into darkness. 

“Now, excuse me. I have a Christmas Eve party to get to.”

You manage to get the swelling of your eyelids to go down with some cold spoons your mother shoves into the freezer when she sees you arrive at the party. 

You know you’ll have to face Jimin again tonight, but some resolve has washed over you in the time since you left the arena earlier this afternoon. You’ve had time for a shower, and thrown on some makeup so no one can ask you why you’ve been crying. 

With Minho here, things are feeling a little less stifling, as he instinctively knows how to assemble a killer charcuterie board while also wearing a dashing smile on his face when your aunts ask him if he’s single. He’s good for the distraction, giving you more time to mentally prepare for when Jimin walks through the door with his parents, wearing a white button-up shirt and open suitcoat. 

He looks good. Put together, unlike earlier when he and you were crying and screaming at each other. Composed in only the way a celebrity with PR training could. 

“Oh, hello Y/N!” his mother says as you greet them at the door, taking her pea coat into your hands. 

“Hello, thank you for coming. My mom will be happy you’re here.” 

“Thank you, dear. It’s our pleasure to be here. Jimin, help Y/N with our coats while we go put the tapenade on the table.” 

Mechanically, he obliges, taking his and his father’s snow-dusted coats and following you to the spare bedroom down the hall that has become the coat room. 

“You look nice,” he says, nodding in your direction. You chose to wear a sparkly black dress with shooting stars on it. It was one of the few things in your closet you could deem festive enough without being tacky. The only downside is that it’s shrunk in the wash, making your breasts spill over and your ass practically falls out the back when it rides up. 

“Thank you,” you say, trying not to notice too much that his eyes are glued to your chest. You feel a light jolt of warmth in your stomach. “You do too.” 

Jimin flushes, looking down shyly. “Thanks.” 

Without much effort, you turn toward the door, falling back into the warmth of the party. Your mother clinks her glass, drawing the attention of others. 

“Thank you all for attending this party at the last minute,” your mother beams, clearly pleased with the turnout. 

“That being said, we have lots of games at the ready, song sheets with lyrics, and plenty of eggnog and mistletoe to help you feel some holiday cheer.” She looks at you and winks. “So, enjoy! And cheers!” 

The partygoers cheer, and some swingy, festive rendition of “Deck the Halls” kicks on. You retreat to the designated bar table, where Minho is pouring a heavy glass of something. 

“What’s ailing you?” he asks. 

“Jimin,” you scoff, gesturing for him to pour you a shot of vodka. He goes to top it with cranberry juice, but you shake your head. 

“You sure you want to get wasted?” 

“Absolutely. I can’t imagine getting through any of this sober,” you grimace. Minho laughs. 

“Fair point. Cheers.” 

You clink your shot glasses, downing the alcohol quickly. The burn pulls down through your chest, warming you instantly. 

For the next two hours, you and Minho take turns pouring each other drinks before jumping into games like Christmas Pictionary, where your father draws the worst reindeer you’ve ever seen in your life, looking more like a group of sausages on a grill. 

Jimin hovers around, refusing to partake in the fun, and his Grinchy attitude is still weighing on you too. 

When your mother passes out her caroling sheets and your father shoves someone over to the piano, you find yourself stuffed into the corner with him. 

“Having fun yet?” you ask, the alcohol giving you the guts to feel daring enough to speak to him. 

“Is this supposed to be?”

You frown. “God, you’re such a grump. You better be careful, or you’ll be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future tonight.” 

“I’d say that I’m already experiencing it,” he says, gesturing toward you. “You get to be all three it would seem.” 

You roll your eyes, putting some distance between the two of you. 

At some point, you’re stuck together again. This time near the snack table and you try to pad your stomach with something other than alcohol. As you load your plate with salami roses and lots of different cheeses and vegetables, Jimin reaches over you, grabbing the bag of potato chips and depositing some of his plate. 

“Here,” he says, when he sees you struggle to balance your stash, and he carries it into the kitchen so you can eat against the counter in peace. 

“Um, thank you,” you say, and pop a tomato into your mouth. 

“About earlier,” he says. Something in his voice sounds less tense than before, and it prompts you to look at him, taking in the softness of his face. 

“Yeah?”

“I was being an asshole,” he finishes. “I’m sorry. I just…it was a shock is all. And a bit disappointing.” 

“It’s okay to be upset,” you say, dusting your hands off on a napkin. “And I’m sorry, too. It wasn’t right of me. I know it’s not an excuse, but I was really young at the time and I was scared.” 

“I was scared too,” Jimin says, lifting his eyes to look at you. “God, leaving here was terrifying.” 

The room is warm from all the crockpots still heating the various delights your parents have encouraged others to serve. Jimin’s face is rosy, and he looks almost like a teenager again.

You nod. “I can only imagine. A new place to start from scratch. Trying to get a hang of everything and be independent. You were practically a kid.” 

“I was,” he smirks. “We both were.” 

“Yeah,” you smile. 

“I do have another question, if that’s okay,” he says quietly. 

“Sure.” You bite down on a piece of cheese, chewing softly.

“When you broke up with me, you said something about how if you got the contract you were worried that I would be miserable. Was that why you did it? Didn’t take it.” 

You sigh. “It was more complicated than that.” 

“How so?” 

In the living room someone whoops as the partygoers sing along to “Jingle Bell Rock”. 

“Not here, let’s go somewhere more private.” 

He follows you into the guest room where you left your coats earlier. The room feels colder than the rest of the house, since the door has been closed despite the groups of people warming the living room. 

You sit. Jimin sits, too, though on the far side of the bed. 

“Well, I guess that me worrying about you was part of it. But I think looking back, I was also worried about myself. We had such a hot and heavy summer and this contract felt like a huge question mark over both of our futures. And we’d never talked about it. While I was at home, I just kept twirling the idea of how things would work out over and over in my head.” 

“Did you skip trials because of it? I had no idea you were so anxious. When I saw you and you didn’t look sick, I thought you’d lied. I never considered that you would have made yourself sick with all of that.” 

“Um, well that wasn’t fully it.” His composure takes you by surprise. “The week of the party. The one you assumed I got mad at you for? I was kept after practice by your coach. He said that while the try-outs weren’t done, he had made his choice. He picked me. And I had to keep it a secret from everyone. Including you.” 

Jimin folds his lips into a line. “Ah, I see.” 

“But, I also had been feeling really shitty. Nausea, heightened anxiety, stress related stuff. Missing periods and stuff, which I know I told you some about. But the day after the party, I felt really bad. And then I finally realized what was wrong. Um…I was pregnant.” 

Jimin’s eyes flare wide. “What?” 

“Yeah. Turns out a lot of my symptoms were signs of pregnancy. And you and I weren’t exactly careful a lot of the time.” 

Heat floods to Jimin’s face, and you watch as his ears turn pink. “No, we weren’t.” 

“I knew I couldn’t have a baby. I wasn’t really thinking what you would want in that but–” 

“What I would have wanted doesn’t matter.” 

You smile, some warmth spreading to your chest over your instinct being right. “Well, thanks. I got an abortion. And then I turned down the contract. I was going to go to school but I guess my deferment resulted in me losing my scholarship.” 

Jimin stares at you, unmoving. 

“You okay? I’m not shocking you too much?” 

“It’s not that it’s just. Holy shit, Y/N.”

“People keep saying that,” you chuckle. 

“Because it’s a holy shit situation. Were you okay? Did your parents take you?” 

“No, I just did it alone.” 

“Fuck, god. And I was just off dicking around on a rink while you were going through that”

“Which is what I wanted you to be doing, Jimin. I didn’t want you worrying about me. You had to focus!” 

Jimin rolls his eyes. “God, you are ridiculous. You were all alone having an abortion by yourself, going through that pain by yourself. Something of which I caused and you were still thinking about me instead of yourself?” 

Your mouth opens to speak, but no words come out. You never thought of it like that. 

“I’m not mad you didn’t tell me, just so you know. I don’t think I really have a right to be mad because it’s not my body that had to go through it. I just…I would have wanted to be there for you through it. More than anything. You were my world, Y/N.” 

“But I couldn’t be. I needed you to be your own world. I needed you to go make something of yourself that wasn’t just because of me.” 

He snorts. “But it was because of you that I made something of myself. I got contracted because of you. I played hard to not think about you. I kept myself busy for nearly a decade with my career so I could forget about you.” 

“Well, did you get close?” you ask carefully. The alcohol has made your head feel a little fuzzy, but the conversation has sobered you up. 

He picks up a throw pillow and tosses it at you. You laugh. “No, of course I didn’t. It’s you, for fuck’s sake. You were my every wet dream of my teenage years, do you think I would just forget you like that?”

“Well, you tried to pretend you didn’t remember me.” 

“God,” he runs a hand over his face. “I think I was just shocked, honestly. I thought you would have left here. Gone away to college and got your sports physiology degree and I would run into you one day in LA after a bad injury and I could convince you to fall in love with me again.” 

You scoff. “Oh is that the dream?” 

“Well it was. I really didn’t think I’d see you ever again, actually.” 

“I hope it’s not too much of a disappointment.” 

“Well, we’ll see…it wasn’t because you were pregnant that you broke up with me, was it?”

“Oh my god, no. You’re obsessed with this like there’s a singular reason but there wasn’t. It was a culmination of everything. Besides, I’d had the abortion during the time I was home. When you showed up, I had just gotten clearance from my doctor that it was a success.” 

Jimin frowns. “Were you sad about it? The abortion? Not that you had to be.” 

“I was sad that I was alone. I was sad that I felt like I couldn’t tell you. I was worried that if I did, I would be the reason for you not getting contracted. It was a lot of worrying for you. But also for myself. I worried I wouldn’t be okay. And I worried I would regret it somehow, that I would wake up one day wondering what could have been.” 

“Did you?”

You look down at your hands. “No, I mean, not really. I have since, I guess, but it’s less wondering what life would have been like without an abortion and more what life would have been like if I didn’t call everything off. That decision hurt me. And it never felt completely right. But my fear of things ending kind of ruled over me. I was so in love with you that I couldn’t imagine a lifetime where things would work out. Not when you had an arranged marriage you’d someday have to fulfill, or one of us would go pro and have to figure out how to make both our dreams work.” 

Jimin nods. “Well, thank you for telling me. I’m glad you made the decision that was best for you at the time. It gives me some closure.” He scoots closer to you before reaching over and squeezing your hand. “And I hope that if you ever go through something like that again, you have someone by your side so you feel less alone.” 

“Thank you,” you say. 

The warmth of his hand comforts you both as you sit in the room. Your mother squeals in the other room, shouting at your father for allegedly grabbing her ass. 

“Come on, babe! It’s Christmas!” he replies. 

You and Jimin burst into laughter. 

“You know,” Jimin says behind gasps of air. “I don’t think I hate being here as much as I thought I would. Sure, it sucks being under my parents’ roof again, but god, the sound of a holiday party is a welcome change from a bunch of locker room groans.” 

“You smell better too,” you add. You sniff the air between you too. “I always liked that cologne on you.” 

He smirks. “Remember when I ran out and you drove your car, broken A/C and all, into the city to get me a replacement?” 

You groan. “God, my car was truly an oven that day. When I finally got home I thought I was melting like an ice cream cone.”

“I remember that.” 

“I have a question for you now,” you say. Jimin blinks a bit, taken aback by your abruptness. 

“Oh, sure.” 

“Why are you home? Why didn’t you stay at your place and just see your celebrity friends? Why come back here which is clearly full of bad memories and feelings and experience all of this?” You gesture around you. 

He takes a sharp breath. “Well, it felt like something that I had to do. First of all, I’ve been instructed by our PR team not to be seen out with any of my celebrity friends. I’m not supposed to be seen anywhere near Bells Arena, so practicing locally was out. And with it being too warm there to skate on a natural body of water, it seemed like home was the only option.”

“That sucks,” you blurt. “I mean–”

Jimin laughs. “Yeah, it does suck. But home isn’t the worst place to be, and I feel like there hasn’t been a lot tying me to anything lately. The last few years have been rough. Threesome notwithstanding, but my life hasn’t been exactly private for a while. And I guess that kind of presses you to become someone else.” 

“Like a prick?” 

“Am I really that much of an asshole?”

“Uh, yeah. You lost your drive because you’re too busy chirping on the ice and not focusing on the game.” 

“You’re sounding like Coach again.” 

“Well, he had a good point. Do you have your gear with you by chance?”

“It’s in the car, why?”

“Go grab it and meet me out back.” 

“Why?”

“Just do it,” you roll your eyes and stand up, smoothing your dress. When you turn to face Jimin, his gaze moves from your ass. 

You pretend not to notice. 

“You have a rink in your backyard?”

“Yep, Dad built it back when we were trying out for the pros, thinking that during my break times I could come home and practice.”

Now knowing the truth, Jimin can’t help but feel an ache in his chest for you and the dream you left behind. 

“It’s incredible. But are you sure that you’re not too drunk to skate?” 

You balk at the question, laughing. “You think I haven’t skated absolutely wasted? Come on now.” Fair point. “Besides,” you add, “I feel fine now. The fresh air is nice.” 

You’ve traded your tiny little dress he was admiring in the bedroom for a more sensible outfit. “Now, lace up your skates, Park. Let’s get to drills.” 

An hour later, Jimin is sweating through his button down. He didn’t have an extra outfit with him in the Kia, just his skates, so he’s been sweltering in the stiff button down. A little perspiration is beading your forehead, but you still have a healthy glow to you, and are not nearly as out of breath as he is.

“You’ve gotten sloppy with your passing,” you say nonchalantly. 

A lick of heat prompts Jimin to argue, but he shoves it down. He’s supposed to be working on that, after all. 

“Just a tiny bit,” he says. 

“You’ve got a long way to go if you’re going to be ready to hit the ice in less than a month.”

He pouts a bit, despite himself. 

“Oh come on, you used to love the challenge of beating me on the rink. Did time change that much?” 

“Well, there was a pretty good incentive for winning. Like seeing you naked.” 

“Is not being kicked off your dream team not enough incentive?”

“I mean I’m a guy, Y/N. Of course my career is important, but I’m just saying, sex was always my best motivator. And if I remember correctly, yours too.”

You look away from him for a moment, thinking. 

“Well, then, fine, let’s give you an incentive then. If you beat me in a shootout, I’ll let you see my ass.” 

Jimin stalls. “What?” 

“I know you’ve been checking me out like, all day. It’s obvious. So, you beat me in a shootout, I’ll show it to you.” 

Jimin chuckles. 

“What’s so funny?”

“Y/N, I’ve seen your ass. And while I’m absolutely sure it’s even better than I imagined, I hardly consider that a motivator.”

“Fine, then what do you propose? What is it that you would like to do?”

Heat pools into his stomach. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, Jimin can’t ignore the intense attraction he still has for you. It’s like 10 years hasn’t changed much about his body chemistry. 

He skates up to you, putting his hand on your waist, testing the limits of what in his desires he truly is allowed to ask for. As his hand works up your side toward your breast, you let out a small gasp. And that’s when he sees it in your eyes: arousal. Unmistakable, just as easy for him to spot as it was all those years ago.

“Do you remember that time we went to the beach? And you got vanilla ice cream all over your bikini because it melted before you could even eat it?”

You cocked your head to the side. “Yeah?”

“And so I licked every inch of you? That’s what I want.” 

“Jimin!” you gasp, but as his other hand loops around your back, you don’t fight his touch.

“You tasted so sweet,” he whispers, his mouth hovering over your neck. 

“Stop.” But it’s a weak gesture, mechanical. 

“You fucking loved it, didn’t you?” 

Your heart beats a little faster. “I did.” 

“What else did you like, hm? When I fucked you that summer.” 

Jimin’s voice lowers, a deeper, seductive tone replacing his usual, cheerful one. It’s the same one he used to use on you, and the pressure building in your core tells you that it’s having the same effect. A hand finds its way to the curve of your ass, and you melt into his body.

“Jimin,” you rasp. 

“Yeah?” 

“Fuck.” 

“Tell me,” he whispers. “What used to make you come so hard that I had you screaming?” 

“God.” 

“Do you think about that as much as I do? Do you think about the little whimpers you made when you came all over my lap that day? Do you think about how hard my cock was for you? How desperate you were for it after I told you you’d have to wait?” 

“You’re such an asshole,” you heave. 

“I know. But if I win, I want you under me again. I want to lick every inch of you until all you can think about is me.” 

He pulls away, ignoring the hardening of his cock, rasping a deep breath. You blink at him, confused, before taking in his form as he sails the puck into the net. 

“That’s one, babygirl. Now show me what you’re made of.” 

Sex, it turns out, is Jimin’s greatest motivator. Which is why after he wins in the shootout up to ten, you end up naked in the guest bedroom. 

“Your nipples are so hard,” he says, sucking one into your mouth. “That’s how I always knew how needy you were. How badly you needed to be fucked.” 

A moan escapes you. He squeezes your thigh again, his other hand roaming up your side. 

“You were always so sensitive there. I’m glad to see that hasn’t changed.”

Your hands lurch forward, digging into the open ends of his jacket, pulling him closer. 

“When was the last time someone fucked you good, Y/N?” he asks, and your brain searches through your list of ex lovers, turning up empty handed 

“I don’t know,” you groan, hissing when you feel his other hand land on your breast. 

He clicks his tongue. “You poor thing. Tell me, what do you need, hmm?” 

“I don’t know,” you say again. Your thoughts are jumbled, how you got here, stripped naked while he still hovers over you fully clothed, your focus faltering as you clench your thighs. Jimin pulls away, grinning down at you. . 

“I bet you’re just as sweet as I remember,” he says. “I bet you still get so wet that when you get fucked the nastiest little sounds come out of you.” 

“Fuck, Jimin, god.” 

“I told you I would like every inch of you. Do you think I was joking?” 

“We can’t,” you say, your eyes flitting to the door. 

“Does the door lock?” he asks. 

“Yes, but–”

“Then lock the fucking door and come sit on my face.” 

Heaven. Jimin has died and gone to heaven. As he laps at your clit again, he can’t believe this is really happening. 

“Fuck, harder,” you order, and he finds himself grinning, sucking your bud into his mouth hard. Your legs immediately squeeze around his face, and he reaches up, forcing your thighs down harder, pressing himself deeper into you. 

You really shouldn’t be doing this. He has no idea how long you’ve both been away, but all he knows is that they’ve finished singing the entire “12 Days of Christmas” and someone has been getting your friend Minho to do a rendition of “Santa Baby” that hopefully everyone is too drunk to remember. But he can’t help himself. Couldn’t help the electric feeling when he squeezed your hand, couldn’t ignore how your tits spilling out of your dress had him rock hard the second you gave him a knowing look. 

And now, knowing what Jimin knows about you, about your past and why things ended, he can’t be mad. While yes, he’s frustrated by your positioning of him as the priority in your life, even seemingly now, he isn’t mad. And whatever happens after tonight, he hopes you’ll both be able to talk about it so you can reframe the future. 

Until then, he really, really wants you to come on his face. 

His fingers leave your thighs. You lift off of his face, gasping as you look down at him. 

“Do you have a death wish?” 

“Yes, now smother me with your pussy.” 

You roll your eyes, lowering yourself back down onto him. He laps at you again, this time flicking your clit with his fingers before rubbing them through your slick folds. “Fucking missed this pussy. Do you know how many times I think about this? How much cum have I spilled thinking about this?” 

“God, you’re such a perv,” you say. But he can hear the lightness in your voice, knowing that despite the slight embarrassment, you’re also flattered. 

“How tight is it, hmm? Do you ever fuck your toys thinking about me?” 

“Not often,” you tease before you wail as he bites your ass. 

“Liar.” 

“Ugh, fine. I think about your cock a lot, okay?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yes, now are you going to make me come or not?” 

“You know, I could, but now I can’t stop thinking about you thinking about my cock and fuck, I’m so hard.” 

Jimin feels you leaning forward, your hand roving down his toned chest until you reach the tent in his pants. 

“Please, babygirl, don’t tease me too much,” he warns and you chuckle, tugging at the zipper and clasp and reaching into his pants. 

Your hand dips into his briefs, tugging the elastic and pants down his hips to free his throbbing cock. 

“Fuck,” you say, sliding your hand up and down his leaking shaft. “Were you always this big?” 

Jimin groans, sliding a finger into you. You moan. “Shit.” 

“You used to take this cock like such a good girl,” he says, sliding a second finger in. “Though I’m not sure how with such a tight little cunt you have. I think I need to fuck it open.” 

“Oh.” 

“You like that, baby? My fingers fucking you open so you can take my cock? You’re so wet, god, listen to you.” 

The room fills with the wet sounds of his fingers fucking into you, his tongue returning to your clit and sucking hard. 

“Shit, shit, we need to change positions or I’m going to collapse on your face.” 

He obliges, pulling his fingers out so you can lie on your back. You watch as he sucks your juices from his fingers, your mouth slightly parting as he moans. 

“So sweet.” 

“Fuck,” you say suddenly, your eyes once more turning toward the door. “We gotta hurry. Once we get to the cookie shots, it’s only a matter of time before my dad makes us do round two of competitive games, and they’ll be looking for me.” 

 “Aw, but I was just getting started,” he whines.

You roll your eyes. “You can fulfill your fantasy later. Skip the foreplay and fuck me already.” 

“I don’t know if you’re warmed up enough for that–”

“Jimin, I promise you the second I feel your cock slide into me, I will be ten seconds from cumming because of how good it feels. Now you can take your time with me later, but if you don’t fuck me right now, I might lose my goddamn mind.”

He feels precum dribble from the tip, and he looks at you. “Shit, okay. Well, um, I don’t have a condom.” 

“IUD. I’m clean. Please,” Your voice cants into a whine, which makes Jimin feel delirious. 

“Okay, lie back down baby, I’ll take care of you.” 

Despite your desperation, he moves slowly, sucking your nipples back his mouth, giving a little bite to one that makes you whimper. 

“Please, Jimin,” you beg again. He reaches down, taking his cock in his hand and rubbing it through your slick entrance. As the head of his cock dips in, your eyes meet his, and a sigh leaves your throat. 

“Yes,” you say when he seats himself to the hilt. You pulse around him, and Jimin hisses at the tightness. 

“Shit, watch it babygirl or I’ll come right now.” 

“Just feels, so good, fuck,” you pant, your body convulsing around him once more. 

He pulls out slightly and thrusts back in, his cock tapping your cervix. Your whole body quakes and you moan loudly. 

“Shh, do you want to get caught?” 

“Kiss me, then,” you say and Jimin being the fool that he is, he does. 

Your lips meet, and you taste like a peppermint candy cane. He licks along your lip, trying to get more of the taste in his mouth. Your lips part, welcoming in, his tongue tangling with yours as he thrusts fully into you. 

You moan into his mouth, silencing yourself as his pace increases, sharp snaps of his hips making you curl and clench around him, your wetness coating his pelvis and balls as it drips down your thighs. 

On a particularly hard thrust, you come, your body shivering and pussy spasming around him. Your nails dig into his back as you seat him deeper into you, riding out the aftershocks. 

“Holy shit,” you whisper. 

“Mm, feel good baby?” 

“Yes. You’re so big; It feels so good.” 

He kisses your nose.”Well, I want to make you come one more time before I do, so hold on.”

He rolls you over, propping you up on your knees. 

“When I saw you earlier at practice in those leggings, I was imagining this moment. My cock deep in you while I watch your ass bounce on me. Do you think you can show me that, Y/N?”

You moan a yes, thrusting yourself back onto him as he pounds into you. The flesh of your ass bounces against him, and Jimin is hypnotized by it, his hands repeatedly slapping to spank your cheeks as you fuck yourself on him. With each slap, you clench harder, and as he places his hands firmly on your hips and bucks into you with speed and precision, it’s only a matter of time before you’re face down in the pile of coats, moaning freely as he thrusts into you. With one final gasp, you come, legs shaking violently as you succumb to your orgasm. Jimin follows behind, is cock pumping a heavy load of cum into you. You sigh satisfied, holding your hand under yourself to catch it while Jimin watches it leak out. 

“Jesus, Y/N. That’s so hot.” 

“Well, hot and practical. I’m not spilling your cum onto all my guests’ clothes. Now go get tissue from that bathroom over there. I need to clean up.” 

Despite Jimin fucking you within an inch of your life, you manage to make your reappearance with your guests fairly easy, a glass of some concoction your mother has named Jingle Juice in hand. 

“So,” Minho whispers after your father divides up the room into teams. “Are you creaming of a white Christmas with Jimin?” 

“Ew, Minho! No! That’s disgusting!” You slap him on the arm. “How did you know?” 

“Well, first I saw you two go out back and grope each other on the ice. And then you practically ran into the guest bedroom. After about thirty minutes of not seeing you, I figured I’d come check. But then I heard you and that confirmed my suspicions.” 

Your cheeks burn with embarrassment. “Were we loud? Oh god, does everyone know?” 

“I think everyone was too busy drinking or eating or singing to notice. But to answer your question, my god, Y/N, you’re so loud. He should put a muzzle on your or something.” 

“Shut up. Besides, this is no big deal. A little Christmas stress relief. A one time thing.” 

“Sure it is. Well may Santa bring you more stress relief very soon because you’re glowing from the orgasm he gave you.” 

“Two.”  

“Huh?” 

“Two orgasms. With the promise of a third later if I meet up with him."

Minho looks at you uneasy. “I want to be happy for you, but I’m honestly not sure what to think. I thought you hated him. Or at least wouldn’t fuck him at your parents’ house.” 

Heat floods your cheeks as the reality of your decision begins to set in. 

“Yeah, uh, I don’t know.”

Minho takes a final sip of his drink, grimacing as he sets it down. “Well Merry Christmas to you, Y/N. Maybe you can fuck him into a better attitude while you’re at it. Because you’ve only got a few weeks before his suspension ends and if he isn’t ready by then, he can kiss his professional career goodbye.” 

“I think he can do it. We have plenty of time.”

“I hope you’re right. Not to ruin your post-fuck glow, but be careful. People don’t change overnight. While I’m glad you two had a fun little reunion romp, there’s still a lot of work to be done with Park Jimin.” 

©2024 by jooniperbonsai

[marvelwitchergilmore]

Punch At First Sight

Summary: Anthony Lockwood x Fe!Reader -> You and Lockwood have met a few times before, however after a punch to the face for the third time, Lockwood, which a push from Lucy, decides to make things different.

Disclaimer: Multiple uses of the f-word. Mentions of accidental violence, ghosts, Kipps being a dick, a slap across the face. Fluff, angst, hints of jealousy, and Lucy giving Lockwood a needed talking to. Not Proof Read.

It was meant to be an easy case. 

A couple of type ones haunting an abandoned building just outside of London. The local ghost hunters had all created that big of a myth they had scared themselves away. And the cost of a Fittes agent was too high of a price for the type of ghosts they had. So, Lockwood and Co were the business chosen. 

Only, it would have been nice to know if one of the previous agents had reached out to an old friend to take care of the job as well. 

But, no. 

Instead, whilst listening out for the ghosts, Lockwood stepped around a corner and when getting ready to attack what he thought was a ghost, he was met with a punch to the face and then a voice calling out; “Oh my god, you’re human.”

“Do you make a habit of punching ghosts?”

Then, through watered eyes, he saw the outline of the person who had punched him and it seemed she had clear enough vision in the dark to recognise him. 

“Lockwood?”

“Wait.” he knew that voice. “Y/n?”

“Holy crap. I am so sorry. Are you okay? Wait. Why are you even here?”

“The same as you, I’m guessing. Unless you tend to sneak into abandoned buildings at two in the morning.”

“Sophie didn’t even tell me they hired someone else. Are you sure you’re alright?”

Lockwood managed to stand up straight this time just as Lucy and George came running round the corner. 

“We heard a scream.”

“What’s going on?”

George looked from Lockwood to you. “Y/n?”

“Hi, George.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“She was hired.” Lockwood explained just before Lucy spotted him. 

“Holy crap, are you okay?”

Lockwood nodded. “Just a little stunned.”

“I really am sorry.”

“We really have to stop meeting like this.” Lockwood said, with a slight smile as he looked at you. 

Then came a scream. 

“Considering we’re all here and considering no-one else was hired to do this job-” George began. 

“That wasn’t a human.” Lucy finished. 

“And since we’re here with minimal weapons.”

One of the ghosts, a woman, came floating through a wall and turned to look at them. 

“Run?” you offered. 

“Run.” Lucy replied. 

Making a break for it, you all tried to outrun the ghost before another one of her friends joined her, pushing all four of you down a different corridor. 

“I’m Lucy, by the way.”

“Y/n. Nice to meet you.”

“You, too.”

By the time the sun was beginning to rise over the city, you all made it back to Portland Row where a fresh bruise had made its way to decorate Lockwood’s face. 

“You have a hell of a punch.” Lockwood said before prodding his own bruise in his reflection of the pan on the stove. 

You chuckled, pulling a bag of peas from the freezer before closing it and walking over. “Quit moaning. It could have been worse. Here.”

Standing, Lockwood seemed to have grown even taller than you. Taller than when you’d both last met. 

Looking at you, you watched as his eyes closed at the cold contact of the bag as you pressed it to his face. 

“Hold it there for a while. It should help with the swelling.”

“You know, we really need to stop meeting like this.”

You narrowed your gaze a little and clicked your tongue. “You’ve already used that line.”

“Have I?” Lockwood seemed to think for a moment before, “Oh, yeah. Suppose I have. But it is true.”

“Hey, the first time was an accident. I thought you were trying to-”

“The first time is an accident, three times is a pattern.”

You smiled sheepishly. “An accidental pattern.”

“Sure about that?”

“Yes.” you said before, “Maybe? Can never be too careful when hunting alone.”

Lockwood’s demeanour changed for a moment. “Alone? You’re hunting alone again?”

“Relax. I’m safe enough.” 

You moved backwards and began to tidy the kitchen a little to give yourself something to do whilst Lockwood leaned back against the kitchen counter, lowering the frozen bag from his face so he could watch you more closely. 

“Are you?”

“Yes, Lockwood. I’m fine. Honestly, you don’t have to worry about me.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t.”

You held his gaze for a moment, a million thoughts running through your head until it landed on He’s just a friend…

From there, you shifted yourself from the kitchen table and placed the empty glasses in your hand in the sink beside him. 

“Move here.”

“What?”

Lockwood stood tall once more and turned to face you properly. “Move in here. Lucy got a deal when she bought her bed, so she’s got a second one spare. We can set it up on the other side of the loft. I don’t like the thought of you hunting alone.”

“Lockwood, I said I’m fine.”

“What happens if something happens to you? Look, I can put you on the payroll so it won’t be a favour. You’ll be working with us. And you’ll have a team behind you. You’ll also be safe. Please.”

“Lockwood-”

“Please.”

Looking up at him, you saw the desperation in his eyes. 

It wasn’t often he opened himself up or let himself show any kind of vulnerability but when he did…

“Okay. Fine. But you can’t hover over me.”

“I don’t hover.”

“You hover.”

“No I don’t.” 

“Why did George kick you out of the Archive room in the last case we were in together?”

Lockwood thought back and when he didn’t answer, you answered for him. 

“Because you hover.”

“Okay, maybe I hover a little.”

“But before anything is written, the others have to agree. Lucy, too.”

“She will. I know so. It’ll be nice for her to not be outnumbered.”

You moved in three days later.

Lucy had prepared the spare bed for you and even decorated the walls behind your bed with a couple of pictures she found in some old boxes that had yourself, George and Lockwood in them. 

“I didn’t know what you’d want to do, but I thought I would do something to help at least.”

“I love it.” you smiled, dropping one of the boxes onto your bed. “Thank you.”

Over the following week, yourself and Lucy got to know one another, sharing stories late into the night when researching cases and in desperate need of a break. 

Lucy came to learn what Lockwood meant by the punch when you all met not being the first time. You came to find out what brought Lucy to London. And you both came to discover that, with the right planning, you could both scare Lockwood and George. 

Only, one night, George and Lucy decided to tag team which also gave them a chance to talk about you and Lockwood. 

“Do they know? They have to know.”

“Don’t bother.” George sighed. “Three years and nothing has changed.”

“They’ve been like that for three years?”

George just nodded. 

“Seriously?”

“You know I walked into the kitchen yesterday and they were slow dancing in the kitchen and…it was like nothing happened.”

“Yeah…” 

“What?”

“What?” Lucy asked. 

“Your face. You have that…look.”

“What look?”

“The “I’m making a plan” face.”

“Maybe because I am.”

“Well then?”

“What if we tried?”

“I already have.”

“Maybe,” Lucy nodded. “But that was then. Now you’ve got me. Tag-team. What do you say?”

“Well, considering it would take an earthquake to wake them both up from whatever coma they’ve convinced themselves that they’re in…sure. Why not? But how.”

“I haven’t got that far into the plan yet.”

But it didn’t take too long. 

After six months of living with each other, the plan practically made itself. The chemistry between yourself and Lockwood was palpable and even more so when you were outside together. 

Like when you and Lockwood were in the library with George and Lucy where Lockwood was standing behind you, reading the section of paper you were pointing to, his arms caging you in from where you sat, when a group of Fittes Agents waltzed over. 

“You might want to give your girlfriend a little breathing room, Tony. After all, PDA can be off putting especially in such a public place.”

Standing, and not denying it, Lockwood practically burned Kipps a hole in the ground for him to fall through. 

“Relax, Tony. Just having a little fun. So, are you going to introduce me to your girlfriend?”

“I’m not his girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

Kipps couldn’t help but widen his smile. “You’re not. Well then, Tony.”

However, you were up like a shot standing beside Lockwood. “But I would be very careful in your next choice of words. He might not be my boyfriend but he is my friend.”

Closer up, Kipps seemed to recognise you. Or at least, that’s what his face told you. 

“You know, for all the people in the world, I wouldn't have considered one of the best rogue agents being best buddies with our very own Anthony Lockwood.”

“And why not?”

“Although, rogue is very fitting for Tony. After all, it was breaking the rules that got him into trouble in the first place. Sweetheart, if I were you, I’d walk away whilst you still can.”

The only thing anyone could remember was hearing the contact of your palm across Kipps’ cheek and the red mark left in its place. 

“Fuck you.”

It took a moment to get over the shock before Kipps and his team walked away and you relaxed a little before grabbing your jacket and telling the others you’d be back. 

“Are you-”

“I’m fine, Lockwood. I’ll be back in five.”

It was in those five minutes that one of Kipps’ team found you by the vending machine. 

“I’m sorry about what he said.”

“Why? You didn’t say it. And I’m guessing you’re assigned to be with him.”

“Still, I could have said something to stop him and I didn’t.”

“Something tells me even if you did, he still would have said it anyway.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s your name?”

“Victor.”

“Nice to meet you,Victor.”

Meanwhile, across the room and up a level, Lucy spotted you talking to Victor. Even laughing every once in a while. And when Lockwood joined her, she saw the pain in his eyes before a brick wall came up. 

“We should be getting ready. George found something. I’ll be back in a minute.”

For the rest of the day, Lockwood seemed closed up. Especially towards you. 

“What is your problem?” you eventually asked him. 

“Nothing.”

“Lockwood, I heard you snap at Lucy earlier.”

“She made a mistake.”

“Exactly,” you cut him off. “A mistake. And she’s never made one before.”

“One that could have put one of us in serious danger-”

“We were outside the perimeter.” You could have laughed, until Lockwood asked you a question you weren't expecting. 

“Do you like him?”

“Who?”

“The guy you were talking to earlier.”

“Kipps? You did see me slap him, didn’t you-”

“Not Kipps. Vinny. Or Vincent or…whatever his name is.”

You thought back for a moment. “Victor.”

Lockwood nodded. 

“Do I like him? What are we? 12?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to know if you’re fraternising with the enemy.”

You laughed. “Fraternizing?”

But when Lockwood didn’t change, you did. 

“You know what, fuck you, Lockwood. What I do with my time outside of work is no concern to you. You know what, do this yourself. I’ll go and help George.”

A few minutes later, Lucy walked inside the room to a very grumpy Lockwood. 

“What the hell did you do? Fraternising? This isn’t Bridgerton, Lockwood.”

“Will you just help with the set-up?”

Sighing, Lucy did as she was told, but not before telling Lockwood a couple things he desperately needed to hear. 

“You’re gonna lose her.”

“What?”

Picking up some of the iron chains and laying them down, Lucy explained. “It might not be Victor, but one day it will be someone. And it probably won’t be long before they come along and whisk her away from your grumpy arse because you’re too stubborn to tell her the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That you like her. Love her, even. If my gut feeling is right. And it usually is.”

“Lucy-”

“Look, you can go on being an arsehole because you’re scared. Or you can talk to her. All I’m saying is do something about it before somebody else does. Both me and George have seen the way you look at her. It’s more than you want to admit, Lockwood. But one day you’re going to have to, or else you are going to lose her and all you’ll have is a bruised eye and a broken nose once every couple of years, if that.”

Lucy didn’t say anything else after that but Lockwood did apologise for snapping at her earlier which she forgave him for after calling him a frustrating bastard. From then, she watched as you all completed the job together and that look that she often saw in Lockwood’s eyes, returned when he looked at you. 

Yet, by the time you had all gotten home, he still hadn't apologised to you. So, with a hard nudge from Lucy, Lockwood finally made his way to find you. 

“Do something before somebody else does, and that includes apologising. And she’s in the Library. Goodnight.”

Lockwood stood outside of the Library door for a while, trying his best to find the right words so he wouldn’t end up with a broken nose, despite how much he probably deserved one. 

You had lit the fire to try and cancel out the cold that had seeped in through a forgotten open window, and if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought it was midnight, not 6 in the morning. 

“Hey.”

Looking behind you, you tried your best not to roll your eyes at Lockwood as he walked inside. 

“I’m just looking over some old cases. Just so you know that I’m not fraternising with the enemy by reading a book.”

“I shouldn’t have said it like that.” Lockwood began. “I shouldn’t have said it at all. I just…I guess I panicked.”

“That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it.”

“You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

You looked at him.

“Really, really sorry. For the fraternising comment and the bullshit excuse.”

You took a minute and it was the longest minute of his life. 

“Okay, guess I can forgive you.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“I know, that’s why I forgave you. But a cup of tea wouldn’t hurt.”

Lockwood smiled. “Okay. One tea coming up.”

Only, as he walked away, you answered his question. 

“And I’m not…fraternising with the enemy. Victor and I were just talking. I think you’d like him. I think he might hate Kipps just as much as you do. And, no.” you shook your head. “I don’t like him. Just so you know…”

Lockwood nodded and for a moment, turned to walk away until Lucy’s words echoed again in his head. 

“Do something about it, before somebody else does.”

So he did. 

Sighing under his breath, he took the jump, turned around and reached for you. 

Taking your head in his hands, he cupped your jaw before bringing your lips to his. At first, it shocked you and for a split second, he thought he was about to get his nose broken for good this time. 

Until you kissed back. 

You felt yourself stumble a little but Lockwood caught you, holding you close to him before his forehead came to touch yours, your eyes still closed. 

“Wow.”

“I’m sorry but I just had to-”

You shook your head, “Don’t apologise.”

“No?”

You couldn’t help but smile. “No.”

“So you’re not going to break my nose.”

“Not this time,” you laughed a little. 

“Okay…then I’m gonna jump. I like you. Well, I more than like you. Like way, way more. And I…I want to do something about it before someone else does.”

“Like Victor?”

“Yeah,” Lockwood laughed a little. “Like Victor.”

“Then…good. I’m glad you finally jumped.”

“You are.”

You nodded. “I mean, you have terrible timing but yeah, I’m glad you jumped.”

“Good.”

“Good. Now, are you gonna kiss me again or am I gonna have to-”

Lockwood didn’t need telling twice. 

[ladykailitha]

Around the World Part 6

Hello! And welcome to another chapter of this very underrated fic. Thank you to everyone who has given it love in the way of comments, reblogs/tags, and likes.

It's London calling! And we meet a Murray Bauman in the wild. Eddie and Steve get a little introspective and Steve does something rash.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

~

Their trip through the haunting and beautiful Ireland was amazing. So many tales and history. This is why Steve wanted to do more than just America like Eddie had originally wanted, because America just didn’t have the history Europe and other places did. Not unless you wanted to disturb actual First Nation people and that was something he wanted to avoid at all cost, thank you.

They were on the ferry from Northern Ireland to Scotland and Steve was looking out over his shoulder at the water as he leaned against the guardrail. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, allowing the wind to blow through his hair.

Eddie slid his arm around him and Steve laid his head on his shoulder.

Today Eddie had his beard and faux-dreadlocks in a light blue button up shirt and cream colored wide-legged pants. His chunky sunglasses covered the his face.

“You know,” Eddie murmured, “until we reached this leg of our journey and you started to disguise me, I didn’t realize how much I missed just being Eddie Munson, regular guy. I can really see the appeal of you and friends’ way of doing it.”

“Yeah,” Steve said softly. “Of course it means that we can’t go all out and buy everything we want, stay in fancy hotels, show up at restaurants without a reservation and get in. But I can go into my local grocery store and buy two tubs of mint ice cream because I felt like it.” He lifted his head to look Eddie in the eye. “Like some Karen would judge me, but it’s not going to go up on TMZ that I’m letting myself go.”

God, Eddie had had that happen more times than he cared to count. Like once Chrissy was on her period and he went to go get her chocolate, Ben and Jerry’s, and pads. Before he even got to his car it was all over the internet that he was letting himself go, just because it was 2am and his best friend needed something to help her feel better.

“You think you’ll ever come out?” he asked, pulling Steve in closer.

It was a familiar and well-worn topic of theirs; whether or not Steve would ever come out as bisexual at least.

He ducked his head and looked away. He didn’t know. He didn’t like hiding parts of himself for those he loved. He would like to tell people this is the love of my life.

“Would you leave me if I said no?” he mumbled, not daring to look up.

Eddie placed his finger under Steve’s chin and lifted his head gently. “Of course not, Stevie. There are literal actors who have been married for years and no one knows. It’s just between them. We could do that too. Just a quiet ceremony, Robin and Chrissy as the witnesses, and a justice of the peace.”

Steve let out a weak sort of watery laugh and shook his head. “I want all our friends there, famous and otherwise. I want a full tilt party with music playing into the early hours of the morning. I want fancy tuxes and flowers galore. I know I might not get that, the absolute coward that I am. But if I marry you, it be to scream from the rooftops that I love you.”

Eddie bumped their shoulders together. “Softy.” Steve blushed. “Besides there is nothing in the world that says we can’t have it both ways. Have a quiet little ‘just us’ and then go full tilt when you come out. You don’t even have to tell anyone. Just a little comfort that I’m not going anywhere.”

Steve pressed a gentle kiss to Eddie’s cheek. “I’ll think about it.”

Eddie kissed him deeply and then tucked his head under his chin and they stayed like that until the ferry docked in Scotland.

~

God, Scotland and England were beautiful countries Eddie decided as he watched the rolling green hills from his train window. That was another thing he really liked about Europe in general, just all the different ways to travel that weren’t a car.

He looked over at Steve who had his glasses on and reading a book. He smiled at the title. His boyfriend wasn’t a fantasy fan or science fiction either, really, but put a clever mystery in his hands and you would have to pry to the book from his cold, dead fingers.

He glanced over at Chrissy and Robin who were playing Go Fish! They had asked him if he wanted to join them, but he passed. He rarely got time to just relax and watch the scenery go by when he was on tour. He was always doing something related to the band. Writing music, practicing, talking about the next venue, interview, or TV spot.

Him and his friends had fun, because of course they did. But it was nice to just let his mind wander. Currently he was sad that they were going to have to miss Wales this time. He really wanted to buy some Welsh gold jewelry. It’s super rare and absolutely gorgeous.

Maybe he would have to come back later and get something special for Steve. Just something simple like matching bands even if it wasn’t on the left hand. Or necklaces. Just something simple to prove they were it for each other.

“I made an appointment with a well-known tattoo artist in London,” Steve said nonchalant, but like he was reading Eddie’s thoughts.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to Steve. Robin nearly giving herself whiplash in her speed.

“As your friend, manager, and platonic soulmate,” she said darkly, “I advise against that. You can cover it up but someone, somewhere will see it.”

Steve looked up from his book and leveled her with his best bitchy glare. “Not if it’s on my ass.”

Chrissy and Eddie’s eyebrows shot up and they shared a shocked glance. Eddie always loved tattoos, he had a couple of stick and poke style ones from when he was young and stupid and couldn’t afford to pay for an artist to do the job, but there was one place, well technically two if you included his dick, which he absolutely did, that he refused to get a tattoo on and that was his ass. Not being able to sit down properly for what would probably be weeks was not his idea of a good time.

“Not really, though, right?” Chrissy asked with a grimace.

Steve took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Of course not really. Sheesh, you guys. But I hid fucking hickies from the both of you for a year and you never noticed, so I’m pretty sure I can hide one fucking tattoo.”

Robin and Chrissy shared their little ‘manager’ glance and Chrissy folded first.

“You’re right, Steve,” she said calmly. “Not once did you forget or slip up and you should be applauded for that. But is there a reason you’re deciding to get a tattoo now instead of waiting until we’re back in the States and you can use Eddie’s personal artist?”

He looked over at Robin and their little telepathy thing went off again and this time Robin folded first.

“It’s for Eddie,” she murmured. “They can’t be out as a couple and with Steve being the romantic that he is, wouldn’t want to get married without all his friends there, so this is his way of telling Eddie he isn’t going anywhere either.”

Eddie blinked for a moment. “Do you think they take walk-ins?”

“I booked it for both of us.” Steve smiled at him and took his hand. Eddie beamed back at him.

“They are so disgustingly cute,” Robin huffed, crossing her arms. “I bet Steve has this really sweet idea for a tattoo that even if people do notice it they won’t be able to tell the meaning but he and Eddie will know and be so sickeningly precious about it.”

Eddie gave him a huge kiss on the cheek. “I love my super clever boyfriend and can’t wait to see what this brilliant plan is.”

~

Steve’s brilliant plan was half of a white mask on Eddie’s inner wrist and half of guitar on Steve’s and when they held hands it formed almost heart.

The tattoo artist was really impressed with the idea and was more than happy to implement it. Steve walked out of there, completely smug as Chrissy pointed out. Deservedly so.

They were to stay in London for three days because of all the haunted places in London alone, there were so many worth visiting. They were going to start at Jack the Ripper tour and move onto the tour of London.

The tour they learned with deep dismay had accidentally been scheduled at 2pm and not 2am like Eddie had thought it said. It was so boring and their tour guide so dull, Eddie accidentally tripped of one of those concrete pillars they had in the middle of the sidewalk to prevent cars from driving up on it.

“Oof!” Eddie wheezed as he straightened up. “Why do they even put those things here?”

“Chrissy Cunningham,” a nasally voice said from behind them. “What are you doing in my neck of the woods?”

They all turned slowly to see a weaselly little bald man with thick horn-rimmed glass.

“Holy shit,” Chrissy said slowly. “Murray Bauman, as I live and breath. What the hell are you doing in London?”

He shrugged. “Eking out a living doing tours for bored tourists. When the biggest metal band in the world drops you, so does everyone else.”

Chrissy and Eddie shared a grimace. Corroded Coffin had deliberately did that to Nancy after the shit she pulled with Steve and trying to be The Fallen’s agent. But this one was a complete accident.

“Oh fuck off,” Robin said with a grin. “You love it. I can tell. You have actual notes written down, you have a map marked with all the spots the murders take place. I bet you have all the great stories.”

Murray flushed and cocked his head to the side. “I mean I didn’t want to brag. But yeah, certainly better than Molly over there.” He jutted his thumb at their tour guide. “Most of the good ones are from tour companies and then you get people like Molly who make it look legit online and trick people into taking day tours.”

“God, I was so bored,” Eddie huffed, shoving his hands into his pockets, “I felt jet lagged.”

Murray’s eyes instantly narrowed and cocked his head to the side and instantly everyone else tensed up. He took in their reactions and mimed zipping his mouth shut.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “if you’re still in town tomorrow, meet me here at 9pm and I’ll give you a proper tour.”

Chrissy licked her lips slowly. “Or what?”

“Huh?” He was confused for a moment before he smacked his forehead. “Oh! No, no. I’m not going to blackmail you. Holy shit. If people want to enjoy a vacation without all the publicity, good on them.” He looked Eddie up and down. “Looks good on you kid.”

Eddie was suddenly glad for the large sunglasses and beard because it hid the blush on his cheeks.

“No, I’m just saying,” Murray continued, “that if you wanted to experience a proper Jack the Ripper tour, I’m willing to do it. I don’t have a tour currently booked and beside I like her.” He pointed at Robin, who grinned back him.

The four them all shared glances at each other.

“I’m down,” Steve said with a shrug. “If you’re as good as you say you are and aren’t trying to actively ‘get back’ at Chrissy for taking your job, I know I’d be interested in seeing what Whitechapel has to offer after dark.”

“I like him too,” Murray said brightly, rubbing his hands together. “So what do the rest of you say?”

“Aye, aye, Captain!” Steve’s three menaces said together.

He just smiled fondly and shook his head.

~

Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

Tag List: CLOSED

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[deconstructivesurgery]

listen i haven't posted seriously in long-form about bg3 in a hot minute but i've been getting back into it bit by bit and i'm still on my gale and astarion shit.

not the "they hate each other but they love each other" stuff or the "toxic yaoi" (although it is funny to me sometimes) dynamic people seem to typically slap onto them, but rather just- whether you wish to see it in a romantic light or not- the pure potential for a true bitchy wine aunt relationship that lies there.

not only do i think they genuinely like each other in a surprisingly uncomplicated way at times despite how complicated both of them are personally, i will die on the hill of them just being... a bit snobbish together. bitching about wine or food that astarion can't even taste (won't stop him from insulting something based on look alone), reading and reviewing books together, perpetually remaining pretentious about architecture and style in distinctly different ways (grand and gothic versus the absolute hullabaloo of softer maximalism that i can see gale enjoying).

i can see in their good endings an outcome where once in a blue moon a vaguely irritable Newly Minted Adventurer/Locally Morally Dubious Hero Astarion Ancunin occasionally manifests his merry little self at one Prof. Gale Dekarios' door because what IS he there for if not to serve as a free-to-access resource of magical aid anytime he encounters some sort of odd curse or magical foe or what-have-you that he isn't well-versed in. who else is going to gleefully and without question provide him with enchanted weapons that most people would look at with concern. to boot, who else is going to provide said things while also being a good conversation partner.

if he happens to dredge up odd magical shit once in a while while he's romping around the country and drops it off at gale's doorstep (chance of spontaneous combustion, mad howling emanating from a haunted amulet, etc. be damned) every so often, it's only fair.

people love the drama that comes with a less stable outcome to their relationship, and that's entirely fair if that's the dynamic that you prefer out of these characters, but i think the potential for just genuine non-spiteful banter and connection is often overlooked. i think, at very least, that they could and should be good lasting friends. send tweet

[lightdancingwords]

Come Find Me - Part Five

Pairing: Beau Arlen x F. Reader

Series Summary: You are a new arrival to Big Sky, Montana, and found gainful employment with the local insurance department next door to the sheriff’s department. A whole new life with your past haunting you, while Beau is still dealing with the entanglements with his ex-wife. Can either of you succeed in overcoming your ghosts?

Word Count: 4,086

Tags/Warnings: Mentions domestic violence, intimate partner violence, police work, very little fluff, lots of fear, angst, escalation of threat

Song Inspiration: My Tears Ricochet by Taylor Swift.

A/N: Beau’s POV plays stronger here. If you want to be added to the tag list, please let me know! Yes, the song inspiration was so darned powerful I had to use it as the chapter title.

Divider: credit to @tsunami-of-tears

Chapter Five: My Tears Ricochet

You’d spent quite a few nights at Beau’s trailer since that night he invited you over. It was strictly platonic, with nothing more than a few hugs and sweet cheek caresses. Beau seemed determined to not overstep his boundaries as friend while you found yourself wishing he’d jump that line and then some. You weren’t sure if it was because he was cautious to not rush what was growing between you or if it was, as Doris said, because of his lingering feelings for Carla.

In the end, you decided it didn’t matter. You were okay with how it was progressing, despite the snail’s pace, because you were just so skittish still. Damn Mark. Damn him to hell for eternity.

After that night at Beau’s, you asked Doris for references for a therapist experienced in domestic violence. You needed the help. You knew you needed it. You had to get used to living alone. You had to get used to having an attraction to a man that was actually a good man. Beau was nothing like Mark, yet you kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

You regretted voicing that out loud once to Doris… because later that week, not only did one shoe drop, so did the other.

“I just… I keep waiting for him to get mad,” you said to Doris during lunch Tuesday afternoon. “To get fed up with me asking to come over and sleep outside.”

Doris arched a brow at you. “Girl, it’s freezing at night and you’re still sleeping on those chairs… outside?”

Sheepishly, you nodded.

“Why the hell won’t you go inside? I’m sure Beau has a pull out in that blasted trailer of his. Or make him sleep outside while you take the bed?”

“Because…” You trailed off. You honestly didn’t know, not really. Then it hit you: “Because I feel like I’m imposing,” you said, your voice small.

“Girl.” Doris was exasperated. It was obvious. You found yourself shrinking into yourself. She saw it and narrowed her dark eyes at you. “Stop that.”

“I can’t help it—”

She lifted a hand and cut you off. “Yes, you can. You feel the fear, want to shrink into yourself, to avoid—” Doris stopped herself and sucked in a breath. “Mark threw things at you, didn’t he? You tried to stand up for yourself. You tried to take space, your rightful space… and he threw things at you.”

You looked down, the fear clutching at you. “Yes,” you whispered.

“Jesus.” Doris took a breath. “Hon, listen to me. I need you to really listen to me.” Doris placed a gentle hand over yours and squeezed. “You told me, word for word, that Beau told you to impose on him, to cut into his routine, didn’t he?”

You nodded meekly.

“Then cut into his life and his routine. Take that bed. That boy is used to sleeping in worse conditions. Comes with the job,” she said with a wry chuckle.

“But Doris…” You pushed through the hesitation. “I actually like sleeping outside. No, really, I do. It’s so beautiful. So peaceful. I… I’ve been sleeping so well, I’m actually amazed.”

“You feel safe,” Doris murmured, studying you with those keen eyes of hers. “And it’s not just because it’s Beau’s home.” You shook your head. “It’s because all you see is land for miles.” You nodded. “I keep forgetting you’re not like me. That, and I’ve had time to get over my Stan. You’re still so newly freed.”

You gave Doris a rueful smile. “I wish I was brave like you, Doris.”

“You are brave.” Her gaze flickered between your eyes. “Oh… you don’t remember.”

Your brows knitted in puzzlement. “Remember what?”

“Now, I told you I saw the files. That I spoke to your landlady.” You nodded. “You fought back. Even as Mark was… well, you fought back.”

“I did?” You were shocked. You honestly don’t remember much of that moment of when Mark was trying to kill you. The therapist said it was normal, that the brain automatically tried to protect against trauma. It’s why so many trauma survivors will have blank spots in their memories.

“Yes,” Doris said, leaning forward, squeezing your hand. “You tried to tear out his eye. He’s got this lovely scar down his face because you kept trying to claw at his face.”

You sat there, floored. Your heartbeat was so loud in your ears. A memory, a snapshot of a moment, flashed in your mind. You had a vague impression of trying to gouge out his eye. Slowly, you nodded, and pulled your hand free of Doris’s comforting grip to stare at your hands. Long fingers, with short nails. You’d fought back.

You didn’t want to die then. Nor did you want to die now. Mark didn’t rob you of that.

“I’m glad,” you said at last. “That I fought back. And I hope he never forgets that.”

Doris smiled at you, proud of your declaration. “Good. Now for the love of God, go sleep inside Beau’s trailer. I don’t want you getting frostbite, hypothermia, or a stiff back. Those damned chairs are uncomfortable.”

You laughed, embarrassed. “You’ve been?”

“Yes. Beau invited us all out for Christmas last year. I spent all of five minutes on those chairs and told Beau I’m an old woman. I need cushion.”

“And how did he respond?” you asked with a grin.

“He went inside, got this big ol’ pile of blankets and set them down as a temporary cushion, apologizing profusely the whole time. That boy is bony as hell,” she said with a shake of her head. “I don’t know how he finds those chairs comfortable. Or you!”

Despite the shaky moment during lunch, you found you were grateful that Doris talked to you about what happened. You admired her so damned much. She was brave and no-nonsense. As you were finishing up paperwork on a phone call, the front door chimed and entered an unknown woman.

She was tall, or at least her heels gave her height. She had dark brown hair and dark eyes. She was in a lovely suit, clearly tailored for her figure, if your assessment of her appearance was correct. She had money, you could tell.

“Hi there! Welcome to The Big Guy,” you said, immediately getting up to offer her your hand. There was something wildly familiar with her, but you couldn’t put your finger on it.

“Hi there, thank you,” she said, taking your hand with a firm grip.

“How can I help you? Please,” you added, gesturing to the chair across from you.

She took it and sat down. “Well, I was looking to switch insurance carriers for my car. I’m having issues with mine and, well, it’s time.”

You nodded, understanding that. It was a common complaint. “Of course. Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m Y/N,” you added.

“Oh.” There was a tone in her voice that had you looking up.

“Um… is—is something wrong?” you asked, confused and more than a little anxious.

“I’m Carla De Lugo,” she said carefully. “Emily’s mother.”

Your stomach dropped. You had no idea what Emily told her mother. You had no idea what Beau might’ve told her. Not to mention what, if any, gossip she might have heard. Doris and Beau reassured you that domestic violence gossip was a no-go, but that didn’t stop the other kind.

“Emily told me you were working here,” Carla went on. “I hope this isn’t going to create problems.”

Confusion rose. “Why would there be problems?”

Carla took a careful breath. “Because of your interest in my ex-husband.”

Oh boy. “Carla,” you said gently, “Beau hasn’t said anything about you to me.” Which was true. Beau skirted talking about Carla as much as he possibly could. The closest you got to anything negative of her came from Emily, but you weren’t going to say that. “He’s kept that to himself.”

Surprise crossed Carla’s face. You wondered if she had that strong of a negative perception of her ex-husband. “He hasn’t said anything?”

“No.”

“I… oh.”

You narrowed your eyes at her slightly. “Carla… I want you to know, nothing is happening between Beau and I.”

“But you’re interested.”

Were you? God, there were days when you were glad nothing was happening, because relationships just felt like too much to handle. “I… yes, I am,” you decided. The way he called you “darlin’”, the way he looked at you…. “Yes. I am.”

Carla nodded, then smiled faintly. “I’m sorry. I ambushed you in the worst ways. I knew who you were, but you didn’t know who I was. Emily told me about you, after the festival. I guess… I just wanted to know who had my daughter raving so excitedly.”

You blinked, surprised. “Emily was… she was?”

“Yeah. I’m… Y/N, I’m a protective mom. After last year…” Her voice tightened, and something dark passed over her face. “It was a bad year. I almost moved back to Texas with Emily. Beau said if we did, he’d come with us, because he didn’t want to lose Emily.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Emily did, actually.”

Your brows rose in surprise.

“Yeah.” Carla smiled a bit at your expression. “Same. But she said that it felt like she’d be running away from everything that scared her. And it…” She paused, clearly being careful in how she chose her next words. “It didn’t change one major fact: her father came and he saved her. Beau kept his promise. He said he’d come for her and he did. So she knew she’d be safe no matter where she went… because he’d be there.”

You felt your heart swell. That was exactly how you felt so far with Beau. He cut through your doubts and kept telling you to mess up his life, impose on him. And he never got mad. Not once. Despite waiting for that to happen, he kept surprising you.

“He’s a good man,” you murmured.

“He really is. I knew no matter what happened between us, I knew Beau would be there when we needed him.”

You smiled, that realization blooming in your heart. Maybe it was time to change the dynamic between you and Beau. If you could gather your nerves. “And now that you’ve met me?”

Carla tilted her head slightly and smiled. “I can see why Emily likes you. I’d like to bring you my business, Y/N, and maybe we can be friends too.”

—

Meanwhile, at the sheriff’s department, Beau was agonizing over a report he had to write. He really didn’t want to. That was the one chore of being a sheriff he honestly hated. He wished he could fob it off on Doris, but he knew he couldn’t. He did the work, the interview, it had to be him that did it. But God, if and when they invent a device that allowed it to transcribe what happened in real time or just took his memory and wrote it down, they’d be billionaires. And then he’d never have to do paperwork again.

He groaned, raked his fingers through his hair. The phone rang, a welcomed interruption, and he reached for it. “Sheriff Beau Arlen,” he said without preamble.

He sat up, the news on the other end ominous. “How long ago?” He paused, then scowled. “Why the fuck did you let him loose? Don’t give me that bullshit! You knew! He nearly killed that girl!”

He saw Doris glance over at him at the rising volume and his profanity.

“Sonvabitch! Get your asses in order and do your job,” he snarled into the phone. “I’ll do my part!” And he slammed the phone down on the receiver.

Doris rushed over, closed the door behind her. She had a look of fearful anticipation. “What happened?”

Beau wanted to flip his table, or possibly throw the lamp. He did neither. It was bad enough he just cussed out Billings PD. “Mark broke bail,” he said with a heavy breath. “They checked his apartment. It’s empty.”

“He’s on the run,” Doris said at once.

“Doris…” Beau swallowed hard. “He knows where she is.”

Doris stared at him, stunned. “Beau… you have to tell her.”

“I know, Doris.” He dreaded it. He didn’t want to see the light that was just beginning to sparkle in Y/N’s eyes fade. He didn’t want to see the fear. “I’ll… I’ll tell her tonight.”

“She’s coming over again?”

Beau fought the blush. The way Doris phrased it made it sound like Beau and Y/N were copulating like bunnies, when he hadn’t even kissed Y/N. Though, God, he really, really wanted to. “Yeah.”

Doris nodded. “You better bring her inside this time, boy.”

“Doris!”

“Bring her inside or no more lasagna.”

He rolled his eyes. “That threat will stop workin’ eventually, you know that?”

“Is it working?”

He muttered something under his breath. Doris nodded with a smirk. It was working.

—

Y/N was so glad the day was over. While meeting Carla had been a shock, it turned into a good one. Carla seemed to be a good person, and you hoped you might be able to be friends. Wouldn’t that be a nice dynamic? You dating Beau, Carla being a friendly ex-wife and Emily….

You froze outside your door, keys in hand. The door was open, just a crack. Your heart stopped, then pounded wildly. You felt stuck in place, your brain screaming at you, but your body wouldn’t move. Couldn’t move.

You don’t know how long it took for you to finally move, to reach for your cellphone, as you ran for your car. Just as you locked the door, Beau picked up.

“Hey darlin’—”

“Beau, someone broke into my house,” you said, your voice shaking badly, interrupting him.

There was a moment of silence, then, firmly: “Stay in your car. I’m on my way. I’ll call Jenny Hoyt. She’s closest to you.” You heard the truck door close, the engine start up. “No, change that. Drive to the sheriff’s department. We got cameras there. Jenny’ll meet you there.”

“O-okay.”

“Darlin’,” he said firmly. “You’re safe. You’re gonna stay safe.”

You suddenly remembered what Carla said. That Beau would do everything to keep his family safe. Did that also include you? You wanted so badly to believe that Beau would raise Heaven and Hell to keep you safe.

“Okay,” you said, your voice teary-edged.

“I’m on my way, darlin’,” he said, and hung up.

With tears blurring your vision, you started up the car and drove to the sheriff’s department. Somehow you got there without a car accident. Somehow you got there intact. The moment you pulled into a parking spot and put the car in park, the tears came. You sobbed, gripping the steering wheel, unable to stop shaking.

You didn’t know how long you sat there, weeping, when Jenny gently knocked on your window. You gasped, looked up, and relaxed at the sight of the deputy. You turned the car on long enough to roll down the window.

“Hey, you doing okay?” Jenny asked, her brows knitted in concern.

“You mean besides my home being broken into?” you asked, wiping at the tears.

“Yeah, that was a dumb question. Sorry.” She glanced over her shoulder, scanning the area, before turning her gaze back to you. “Beau called me. He wants me to stay here with you until we get the all clear.”

“O-okay,” you said, hating how your voice couldn’t stop shaking. “God.”

“Hey. There’s no shame in being afraid.” Jenny grabbed your shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “You’re not trained like us. You did the right thing by going to the car and calling Beau, okay?”

You stared at Jenny, then absurdly: “Deputy Hoyt—”

“Jenny, please.”

“Jenny.” You actually smiled, just a bit. “Do you… teach self-defense?”

She tilted her head at you. “I can do private lessons if you’re interested.”

“I am,” you said. You decided then and there that you wanted to learn how to defend yourself. Not just some lucky attack. No… you wanted to really learn.

Jenny smiled. “Twice a week. There’s a gym three blocks down from here. They let me use a room on the side if I need it. We’ll use it there. Sound like a plan?”

“It… it does.” You studied her for a long moment. “Jenny… how long did it take you to learn to hit back instead of cringing in fear?”

“Honestly? It takes a lot of practice. Even then, in the heat of it, instincts are hard for us to break. My instincts, when I’m in a fight, is to hit back. To defend myself. Whatever your reactions may be… don’t hate them. They’re a part of you.”

“So… what do you suggest then?” Your instincts had always been to cringe, to make yourself smaller. You were tired of being afraid.

“Lean into it. Use that fear. If your fear is to make yourself smaller, do it—then, when your attacker comes at you, punch up.” Jenny demonstrated on the parking lot. You watched as she made herself smaller, as though cringing against an attacker, and then doing an upper cut.

You took that in, and wondered how Mark would handle that. You decided he wouldn’t expect it, and determined to follow through the next time you ran into him. Or… anyone else.

Jenny’s cellphone rang and she reached for it. “Hoyt.”

You watched her as she walked away for a moment, her voice low and indistinct. A few moments later, she came back. “Beau’s at your place. He needs you to come with me and see if there’s anything missing. You up for it?”

“Yes,” you said firmly.

“Come on. You’re riding with me.”

—

You got to your rental and stared. There were several sheriff vehicles, all unmarked, but with their portable lights on the dashboards. You hadn’t expected that.

“Did Beau call all the deputies within driving distance?”

Jenny shot you a smile. “It sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” She pulled up to curb just as Beau came out of your rental. His expression was grim, dark, and you were terrified of what could bring that man down.

“Deputy,” Beau said with a nod to Jenny. “Ms. Y/N, I need you to come with me.”

He was so distant, formal. You know immediately he had to be on duty and that meant being business first. You took a breath, vowed to not take it personally. You walked alongside him as he took you inside.

“We searched the perimeter, checked windows, the back door,” Beau said, keeping a hand behind your back. “There’s no other sign of forced entry. What I need you to do is tell me if anything looks moved, disturbed, missing. I know you can’t search the whole place, but first impressions is a start.”

You bit your lip, nodded. You looked over the living room, stopped when you came to an end table. “There’s a photo missing.”

Beau’s expression darkened. “What was on the photo?”

“M-me,” you said, thinking. “And my parents. I was… I was 18, just graduated. High school graduation photo.”

He nodded, noting it on a small memo pad. “Keep going, darlin’,” he said, his voice low. You glanced at him as he slipped with the endearment.

It took an hour. Every photo you had up was gone. Even the one of just your cats when you were a child, one you loved dearly. Nothing else was disturbed, nothing else was missing. Beau noted every single one of them down while a forensic team checked for fingerprints, checked the door for damage.

Then it was done.

You sat on the sofa as Beau did a final check around the home. Jenny was the only one of the deputies to stay behind. She stood by the front door, watching both the interior and the exterior.

“You doing all right?” she asked kindly.

“Why would he take the photos?” you asked, the question having been on your mind for hours. “I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“To hurt you, is my guess.” She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Break you down, piece by piece. Sentimental pieces at a time.”

“God.” You rubbed your face.

“You can’t stay here,” Jenny said firmly.

“You’re right, she can’t,” Beau said, stepping right up to the front door. “Not until we find him.”

Jenny nodded. “What about the Blue Bird outside of town?”

“That works. It’s down the way from my trailer,” Beau said.

You looked at both of them, confused. “The what where?”

“Blue Bird Motel. Ridiculous name I ever heard,” Beau said, glancing at you. “Pack a go bag, darlin’. Tomorrow, I’m goin’ through this whole place, top to bottom, make sure nothin’ is hidin’.”

“Beau,” Jenny said quietly, grabbing his arm. He glanced at her and she tugged at him to go outside. You heard their voice, low, heated, but not the words.

You hesitated, then decided to go just pack a bag. You grabbed a few sets of clothing, underwear, socks, and even a change of shoes. Then you packed your toiletries. You debated what else you’d need for the next few days. Like a book or music.

“Cell charger,” Beau said gently at your bedroom door.

You whipped around, startled.

“Sorry,” he said, stepping inside. He glanced around your room, at the simple setup. “Nice. I dunno why but I always thought your room would be full of flowers.”

“Flowers?” you echoed in surprised.

“Yeah. Flower… what is it… motifs. Paintings. Duvet.” He shook his head. “You deserve flowers, darlin’. Every day.”

You smiled faintly. “Why?”

“You just do,” he murmured, touching your cheek for a brief moment.

You stared at him, heart pounding. Something soft and dark passed in his green eyes, then quickly concealed once more.

“Poppernak’s here,” Jenny said, poking her head into the room.

“What?” you asked, confused.

“He’s takin’ you to your car,” Beau explained. “I’m gonna follow you there. Then you follow me to the Blue Bird.”

Relief flooded you as you realized that Beau was going to be with you at every step of the way. You felt the knot inside you loosen. “Okay.”

—

The Blue Bird was… quaint. That was the most respectful way you could describe it. It was two stories, with the most obnoxious, giant blue bird sign you’d ever seen. You parked next to Beau’s truck and he walked you inside the front lobby to check in.

Everything went smoothly until it was time to pay. Beau stopped you and offered the cashier his card.

“Beau,” you whispered, confused.

“It’s on the Big Sky sheriff department,” he said in explanation.

That made you pause. You hadn’t expected that. “But…”

“I ordered you outta your house, darlin’, at least I could do is cover the motel bill,” he said with a faint smile.

The cashier quirked a brow at him and you fought a blush. Did Beau not realize how that sounded? It took everything you had to just let him pay, take the receipt and handed you the motel key. You followed alongside him in silence as he escorted you to the room.

“You gonna be okay here, darlin’?” he asked as you walked into the simple motel room. It was a queen sized bed flanked by two night stands, a television set on top of a dresser, and a small table with two chairs. It wasn’t much, but it’d do. You only wished it was his trailer, not some strange motel room.

“Not my favorite idea, but… yeah, I’ll be okay,” you said, glancing around with an internal sigh.

“I’ll find him, darlin’,” he said firmly, holding your gaze.

You gave him a shaky nod. “Thank you, Beau.”

He went up to you, cupped your face, and your breath hitched in your throat. For a brief moment, you thought he was going to kiss you, then he leaned down, pressed his lips against your forehead. “Anytime, darlin’,” he whispered. “Get some sleep.”

When he left, you stood there, shaking. After you finally got into gear, changed into your pajamas, brushed your teeth, you decided to check through the peephole. That’s when you did a double-take. Beau was outside, in his truck, fast asleep in the driver side.

Absurdly, you smiled, and despite being in a strange bed and in a strange room, you actually slept.

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