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requiemforthepoets · 4 months ago

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you’re such a rollercoaster, some killer queen you are 𖦹 LN4

PAIRINGS: lando norris x female!reader

SUMMARY: it was a random encounter at a club in miami during lando’s first win and all he has to remind him of you was a polaroid.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: i’m now done with my midterms, finally! i’ll be posting the requests soon. for the meantime, pls enjoy this lando oneshot i made. enjoy! :)

REMINDERS: this is purely fiction, the way how the character is portrayed in my story does not reflect the person that is portraying my character in real life. always separate fiction from reality, and do not repost or copy my work in any way.

WORD COUNT: 6.1k

WARNINGS: not proofread, typos, reader has a full back tattoo, cursing, and no use of y/n

It’s finally the summer break, a month away from all university obligations. As the summer break kicks off, you find yourself in the vibrant heart of Miami, ready to enjoy the nightlife that awaits you with your best friends. The hotel room was filled with laughter and sounds of hurried preparations, with all of your excitement evident. In front of the mirror, you admired yourself in the silk black backless dress that definitely accentuates your figure, the fabric of the dress falling just right to showcase your stunning full Sak Yant tattoo that you had gotten on your last trip to Cambodia. It was a daring choice, but you loved the way it felt, and the dress paired effortlessly with your trusty white low-cut chucks—a perfect blend of style and comfort for the night ahead. Your friends squealed in approval of your whole fit, each one hyping how amazing you looked.

“Are we ready to paint the town red?” One of them chimed, a teasing grin plastered on her face.

“Absolutely! Let’s make the most of this summer!” You replied, excitement bubbling in your chest.

The first club was already buzzing when you arrived, its lively atmosphere spilling out onto the street. It was packed—it was way more crowded than you had anticipated, and the thumping bass reverberated through your chest, the energy was electric. But as always, you and your friends pushed through the throngs of people, determined to start the night off right. You managed to snag a table near the dance floor, which is also quite close to the DJ booth. You could feel the energy of the crowd surge, especially when the DJ began playing the iconic beats of 2011 club hits.

The moment we found love by Rihanna started playing, you and your friends erupted in cheers, and memories of late-night dance parties flooding back. This song was your jam and you guys won’t let this pass, so you grabbed your friends’ hands and rushed to the dance floor. All the people began to sing along to the song at the top of their lungs, including you, and losing yourself in the infectious energy that surrounded you.

In the midst of your carefree dancing, you suddenly felt a gentle yet firm grip on your waist that made you turn. You found yourself face-to-face with an incredibly handsome man—his curly hair framed a sharp jawline, his aquamarine eyes sparkled under the flashing lights, and a small, charming smile played on his lips. You noticed that he’s a little bit tipsy, evident by his slight sway, but still managed to maintain a charming composure with an air of confidence.

“Your tattoo is incredible.” He leaned down to whisper it in your ears. His voice was low and warm, sending a delightful shiver down your spine. Heat immediately rushed to your cheeks as you blushed, momentarily lost for words.

“Thanks!” You shouted over the loud noise for him to hear you, but not really sure if he heard you or not.

Just then, your friend—the one who always photographs, had tapped your shoulder, her polaroid camera ready. She aimed it at you, and without thinking, you turned to the handsome stranger, flashing a playful smile as your friend pressed the shutter button. The photo was developed quickly, perfectly capturing the moment, and she handed it to you with a knowing look. An idea suddenly sparked in your mind, and you quickly rummaged through your friend’s bag.

“Hey, do you have a pen that I could borrow?” You asked, almost breathless with excitement.

She handed you a sharpie, raising an eyebrow but not questioning your sudden burst of creativity at the moment. You wrote a quick “thank you” on the empty space of the polaroid, signing it with the initial of your first name with a flourish before slipping it into the pocket of the white polo the stranger was wearing. The stranger looked surprised, a mix of confusion and excitement on his face, but he simply smiled back, his eyes lighting up as he reached for you.

“Wait, I didn’t get your name—” before he could finish his sentence, your friend pulled you in your arm, her eyes sparkling with mischief, “time to hit the next club!” She called, pulling you away.

You turned back at the stranger, waving him goodbye, feeling an unexpected pang of regret for leaving him behind. But you couldn’t shake the feeling that this night isn't over yet. You exchanged glances with him one last time, a silent promise hanging in the air, your heart fluttering with the hope that somehow, you’d see him again.

As you and your friends spilled out onto the bustling Miami street, your laughter filled the night as you headed to the next club. However, all you could think about was the brief connection you had felt on the dance floor, a sweet moment that seemed to linger in the air, leaving you yearning for more.

The night had ended in a blur for Lando. After the wild celebration of his first Formula 1 win in Miami, the euphoria was slowly dissipating and replaced by a wave of drunkenness that hit harder than he had expected. By the time the club lights dimmed and the crowd began to thin, Lando could barely stand on his own two feet, let alone string together a coherent sentence.

Max and Carlos had taken one look at him and immediately decided that they needed to step in. “C’mon mate, let’s get you back to the hotel,” Max grunted, slinging Lando’s arm over his shoulder, while Carlos grabbed the other side.

Carlos chuckled, equally amused and exasperated, “he kept pace with everyone at the party. Now he’s paying the price.”

Lando, wasted out of his mind, stumbled along between them, mumbling a mix of incoherent phrases. “She…she was…beautiful,” he slurred, eyes half-closed, as they maneuvered through the hotel lobby. “The tattoo…I need to…find her.”

Max raised an eyebrow, exchanging a knowing look with Carlos. “Who’s he talking about now?” Carlos asked, chuckling under his breath.

“Who knows? Maybe some random girl from the party,” Max shrugged, though the curiosity in his tone was undeniable. “You think he’s talking about some girl he met tonight?”

Carlos nodded, “definitely. He kept disappearing from the group. Bet it’s some girl who caught his eyes.”

They wrestled Lando into the elevator, which was a challenge in itself as Lando kept sagging against the walls. When they finally reached his hotel room, Carlos fumbled with the keycard, managing to get the door open while Max dragged Lando inside.

“Alright, bed time for you, champ.” Max muttered, carefully tossing Lando onto the bed. Lando landed face-first into the pillows, groaning something incomprehensible as he sprawled out, completely out of it.

As they started to leave, Carlos noticed something peeking out of Lando’s polo pocket. “Wait, hold on. What’s this?” He said, pulling out a small polaroid photo. He studied it for a moment before handing it to Max.

Max blinked, holding the picture up to the light. It was a snapshot of Lando at the club, with a girl smiling beside him. They were both smiling and looking like they were having the time of their lives, clearly caught up in the moment. Lando’s arm was around her waist, and she was beaming up at him.

“So this is who he’s been going on about, huh,” Max mused, smirking as he showed it to Carlos.

Carlos grinned, leaning closer to inspect the photo. “It has no name, no number on the back. Just the word thank you and a signature,” he said, pointing at the small initial written on the bottom corner of the polaroid.

Max gave a low whistle, eyes flicking to Lando, who had now turned onto his back, snoring loudly. “The way he’s looking at her, though…” Max said, shaking his head with an amused sigh. “Poor guy. He’ll surely lose his mind trying to find her again.”

“You think he’s going to go all in on this mystery girl?” Carlos asked, already imagining the chaos that could ensue once Lando wakes up.

“Oh, definitely. Look at that face—he’s going to lose his mind trying to find her.” Max chuckled, running a hand through his hair.

“If he does, it’ll be entertaining for us. He might actually be serious about someone for once.” Carlos smirked.

Max laughed, tucking the polaroid back into Lando’s pocket. “Well, whatever happens, tomorrow’s going to be interesting for sure. But first, I’m betting his hangover’s going to be the real pain in the ass.”

“I second that.” Carlos clapped Max on the back as they both made their way to the door. “Let him sleep it off. If fate has any say in this, maybe he’ll see her again.”

Once Max and Carlos had managed to leave the room, the soft snores of their friend filled the silence behind them, but they couldn’t help but share one last grin. Lando Norris, hopelessly wasted and smitten, was in for one wild ride the moment he wakes up in the morning.

When Lando woke up the next day, it felt like the world had caved in on him. His head pounded relentlessly like a jackhammer, every inch of his body felt heavy, and the sunlight seeping through the curtains are making everything worse. He groaned, pressing a hand to his face as he tried to piece together the events of the previous night. His mouth even felt dry, and every muscle ached—classic hangover. Glancing at the clock, his stomach sank. It was already past one in the afternoon.

“Ah shit.” He muttered, rubbing his temples.

Lando’s memories was a total fucking mess. Fragments of the party slipping in and out of focus. All he remembered is that he was celebrating his first F1 win in a Miami club with a bunch of friends, music, drinks…too many drinks, clearly. But then, there was something, or rather, someone—who stood out in the haze. A girl.

The image of you on the dance floor flickered in his mind. Lando couldn’t quite place every detail of your face, but the memory of your presence lingered, the feeling of being inexplicably drawn to you. It was like trying to recall a dream that was slipping away. He just shook his head, trying to clear the fog.

Struggling out of the bed, he tugged off the polo he had been wearing from the night before. As he did, something fell on the floor. Lando blinked, looking down to see a small polaroid photo lying by his feet. He picked it up and stared, the image hitting him like a bolt of clarity. It was a photo of you and him at the club, your face being illuminated by the flashing lights, both of you are smiling. Suddenly, the blurry memory sharpened. He remembered you—your black backless dress, the intricate back tattoo, the way you turned when he approached you. You had been so close, yet before he could really get to know you, your friends had whisked you away, leaving him standing alone on the dance floor, with only the photo to show for it.

Lando’s heart skipped a beat as he flipped the polaroid over, hoping to find some kind of clue, a way to find you. But the back was just frustratingly blank, except for the written thank you and an initial on the free space of the polaroid. He ran a thumb over the handwritten words, feeling a pang of disappointment. There was basically no number, no name. It was all just a fleeting memory. He sighed, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“She’s probably just someone who came and went,” he muttered to himself, but even as he said it, the thought didn’t sit right.

There was something about the brief connection he felt with you that night, something that he couldn’t shake off. It was strange, almost unnerving, how much he remembered the feeling of being with you in that brief moment—like everything else had faded into the background.

Without fully understanding why, Lando grabbed his wallet and carefully tucked the polaroid photo into his wallet, sliding it into the hidden compartment where it could be safe. He wasn’t even sure why he decided to keep the polaroid, especially in such a personal place. It seemed silly, but it felt right to keep it there, like a small piece of that night he wasn’t ready to let go of just yet.

Lando sat there for a few moments longer, staring at the closed wallet in his hand. The next race was in a week, and he had the time to get his shit together before flying to Italy for the Imola GP. But now, instead of just focusing on the upcoming race, his mind kept drifting back to you—wondering if you were still out there somewhere, wondering if he would ever get the chance to see you again. He finally stood up to get ready for the day and fly out of Miami, he couldn’t help but smirk at himself.

“Guess I’m going to be thinking about this for a while,” he muttered, the memory of your smile etched into his thoughts.

Miami was fun, and now it’s time to go back to reality. Once you got back home, the vibrant memories of the trip slowly started to fade into the background, already having been replaced by the familiar routine of gearing up for the new university year. This was it—your final year at university, the last stretch before graduation, and you are determined to give it your all. It was time to buckle down and focus on academics. After all, everything you had done in Miami was meant to stay in Miami.

Yet, no matter how hard you tried to immerse yourself in your studies, your mind would always reel back to that night in the club. The memory of the man you had met—his aquamarine eyes, the way he had looked at you like you were the only person in the room had kept replaying in your head, keeping you awake at night. It was frustrating how much he lingered in your thoughts. You had only known him for a brief moment, not even long enough to learn his name, yet you couldn’t forget the instant connection that had sparked between you.

The way he had complimented your tattoo, the way he had smiled when you slipped the polaroid into his polo pocket—it had all felt surreal, like something out of a dream, and then there was the polaroid. You literally had no idea why you had given it to him, that was the only physical memory of that night, the only proof that your paths had crossed. Yet, in the moment, it felt like what you did was the right thing to do. Or maybe it was the excitement, the adrenaline of the night you felt that had pushed you to make such a spontaneous decision. But now, you found yourself wondering if he had even kept it, or if it had ended up crumpled in some corner, forgotten in the blur of a party boy’s life.

You tried to push these lingering and uninvited thoughts aside. After all, he had seemed like the type who enjoyed the party scene, the kind of guy who was probably very used to fleeting moments like the one you had shared. You definitely have no reason to expect anything more from it. It was fun while it lasted—a brief, electric encounter in the middle of a packed club. Still, a small part of you couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if your friend hadn’t pulled you away so soon. Would you have stayed and talked more, gotten to know him beyond that brief moment on the dance floor? Or maybe it was better this way, a perfect memory left untouched by reality.

With a sigh, you snapped yourself back to the present, staring down at the pile of thick college textbooks and notebooks waiting for you. It was time to focus on what was real, what was tangible—your studies, your future. The man from Miami would remain just a distant memory, one that you would tuck away with all the other wild moments from your summer. After all, you had more important things to focus on now.

Still, every now and then, as you walked to your lectures or sat in the library, you would catch yourself thinking about him—wondering if he still had that polaroid tucked away somewhere, just like you secretly hoped he did.

Lando was no better. Ever since that night in Miami, his mind has been drifting more than usual. He found himself distracted during meetings, zoning out during race prep, and even spacing out in the garage most of the time. His usual easy going demeanor was now often replaced by a more serious, almost contemplative expression. It was as if something had taken root in his mind, and no matter how hard he tried to shake it, the memory of you wouldn’t let go.

He had replayed that night over and over again in his mind—the moment he saw you, how he had felt an unexplainable pull towards you, the way you had smiled when he complimented your tattoo, and how effortlessly everything had seemed to click between you in that brief encounter. It was ridiculous, really, how hung up he had become over someone he barely even knew. He hadn’t even caught your name—and yet, the polaroid was still inside his wallet, tucked away like a secret he carried with him everywhere he went.

Whenever he felt particularly lost in thought, he’d pull it out and stare at it, trying to remember every detail of your face, laugh, and the way you looked at him. He was becoming a lovesick fool. But that only made it worse—like he had been shot by cupid, now hopelessly stuck in this strange limbo of longing for someone who felt like a distant memory. The problem was, he couldn’t keep it to himself anymore. But now, half of the grid knew about the mysterious girl in the polaroid. It had all started with Oscar.

Lando had been so deep in his dilemma that he couldn’t contain it anymore and had to vent about it, and Oscar, being a good listener, and always the voice of reason, had been the unfortunate recipient of Lando’s endless stream of confusion and longing.

“Mate, I don’t even know where to start looking,” Lando groaned one afternoon, slumping into a chair next to Oscar. They were in the motorhome, waiting for a debrief. “She didn’t even leave her name, no number, nothing. Just…this. I don’t even know why I’m so hung up on this! It was just one night.” He pulled out the polaroid for what felt like the hundredth time, showing it again to Oscar.

“Well, that tends to happen when you let Max and Carlos feed you shots all night. You’re lucky that you remember anything.” Oscar teased, a small smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

“That’s not helping.” Lando shot him a look, half amused and half exasperated. “I just—there was something about her, you know? It wasn’t just the drinks. I felt this connection, and then she was gone.”

“You really got hit hard, didn’t you?” Oscar chuckled.

“You have no idea, Osc,” Lando muttered, running a hand through his curly hair in frustration. “I mean, what are the odds, right? A random night in Miami, and now…I can't stop thinking about her. What’s wrong with me?”

Oscar chuckled, leaning back in his seat. “Hey, nothing’s wrong with you. You just like her, I guess. A lot.” He glanced at the polaroid again, shaking his head in amusement. “You’ve got the entire grid buzzing about this by now, you know. Everyone’s rooting for you to find her.”

“Great. So now everyone’s invested in my love life too.” Lando groaned, leaning his head back.

“You did show them the photo,” Oscar pointed out with a grin. “It’s hard not to get curious when you’ve been carrying that thing around like a lovesick fool.”

“I know it’s stupid, but it feels like more than just a random encounter. There was something there, Oscar. I swear.” Lando let out a dramatic sigh, though a small smile tugged at the corners of his lips.

“So what are you going to do? Just sit around and hope she magically walks into the next race?” Oscar leaned back in his seat.

“I was thinking that maybe, I could hire a private investigator or something, you know.” Lando shrugged.

Oscar’s eyes widened in disbelief. “A private investigator? Tell me you’re joking.” Lando’s expression remained serious. “No, I’m not! Or, I could just post the photo online, let the fans do their thing. They could help me find her—someone has to know who she is.”

Oscar pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. “Lando, mate, listen to me.” He turned to Lando, face serious. “You’re out of your mind. You can’t hire a PI or ask your fans to find this girl. Think about how creepy that sounds.”

“But how else am I supposed to find her! I can’t even stop thinking about her, Oscar. I didn’t even get her name, and now I’m stuck.” Lando groaned again.

“Mate, if you’re meant to find her, you will. You can’t force something like this, and you definitely shouldn’t involve the internet.” Oscar sighed. “Just let it go for now. Focus on the races, and if it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.” He added.

Lando sat in silence for a moment, staring at the polaroid again. As much as he hated to admit it, Oscar was right. He couldn’t exactly post the photo online and hope for the best—that would be absolute madness and would really violate your privacy. But letting it go? That shit felt realy impossible.

“Yeah, I guess.” Lando muttered.

Lando tucked the polaroid carefully back into his wallet. He knew deep down, he wasn’t really ready to let go of the idea of finding you again. Even if it seemed impossible.

More months passed by, and life had already moved on, but the memory of that night in Miami still lingered in your mind—and in Lando’s too. The connection, however, had left an impression on both of you, though neither expected to cross paths again. You had already given up any hope of seeing him again, and had decided to leave it all to fate. If it’s meant to be, then it’ll be. Besides, life has been busy enough for you. With your final year at university, you had too much on your plate to spend time wondering about a man whose name you still didn’t know. But it seems like fate had other plans in store for the both of you.

It started when you had a week off from university, and you and your best friends decided to go on a trip to Greece over your week off. You have no qualms about it, since you really needed a break as well, and what better way to relax than exploring the beautiful beaches and Acropolis of Athens.

The trip to Greece was everything you had hoped for, but unbeknownst to you, Lando was in Greece too, enjoying his own vacation with his close friends. You were sunbathing on a pristine beach, chatting away with your friends, when Lando walked by just a few meters away. He didn’t notice you, and you didn’t see him either—both of you are too caught up in your own worlds, yet there you were, so close but so far away.

The second time was when you took a trip to Ibiza. Another spontaneous getaway with your best friends. The vibrant nightlife and endless summer energy called your name. As you danced and had the time of your life at a beachside club, oblivious to the fact that Lando was just at a private party down the shore. His friends had dragged him out for the night, hoping to help him unwind after a tough race. You and your friends left just as Lando was arriving, two paths almost crossing once again.

It was starting to become a strange pattern—wherever you were, Lando seemed to be there too. The two of you had shared the same sunsets, wandered the same winding streets, and probably passed by each other without even realizing it.

The third time was in Monaco. A beautiful city, with its glamor and breathtaking views, it was the perfect escape before starting your last semester. You and your friends are strolling down the harbor one afternoon, laughing as you all pointed at the massive yachts that were all lined up, imagining what it would be like to live such a luxurious life.

Inside a nearby café, Lando was sitting by the window, sipping on a coffee and looking out over the same harbor. He had been restless, unable to shake the feeling that he was missing something—or someone. He looked up just as you and your friends passed by outside, laughing and taking selfies by the water, but you did not look his way, and he didn’t get up, assuming it was just another passing group of tourists. Once again, fate brought you together, only to keep you just out of reach.

It was as though the universe was playing a cruel game, constantly bringing you and Lando to the same place at the same time, but never allowing your paths to fully align. You could be randomly walking down the street while he was sitting just a few doors away in a café. Lando could be entering a restaurant as you and your friends exited from a nearby boutique. It was almost laughable how close you came to seeing him again, yet how impossibly far away it felt.

As the months passed, both you and Lando accepted that what had happened in Miami was a beautiful, fleeting moment. Something to be kept, but perhaps never meant to be revisited. But there’s still a small part of you that couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, fate wasn’t done with you yet.

For now, though, it seemed like fate was content with keeping the both of you on the edge—close enough to feel the pull, but never quite close enough to collide.

One night, it seemed like that fate had finally decided it was time to stop playing games. You were in the middle of preparing for your final exams when your cousins called with an unexpected invitation. They will be flying to Singapore for the Gran Prix two months from now, and they have already secured a paddock club pass for you—for all three days of the event. The kicker? They will be paying for everything; flights, accommodations, and even meals. It was definitely a golden opportunity, and although you had no clue what a Grand Prix was or even what Formula 1 is, you couldn’t turn down an all-expenses-paid trip to a place you had been saving up to visit anyway.

“Trust me, it’s going to be amazing,” your cousin assured you over the phone. “You’ll get to be up close to the cars, the drivers, and the entire F1 spectacle. It’s a vibe.”

While you were excited about the trip, the idea of spending three days around race cars didn’t exactly thrill you. You knew nothing about cars or Formula 1, and the most you had ever watched were glimpses of motorsports on TV at home with your father. But a free trip to Singapore was too good to pass up, and maybe, you would find something to enjoy about this whole Grand Prix thing.

Fast forward to your arrival in Singapore. The sweltering heat of Singapore was almost overwhelming, but the excitement in the air was noticeable as you strolled through the paddock area, soaking in the energy of the Grand Prix weekend. You are dressed in a flowing white sundress that caught the breeze just right, paired with chic Prada Monolith Crisscross sandals, a cute beige mini Lady Dior handbag that matches complete your whole outfit, and the paddock club pass hanging around your neck—in all honesty, you looked like you belonged at a chic summer brunch rather than a motorsport event. But you were grateful for your outfit choices, especially given how hot and humid it was in Singapore. You weren’t sure what to expect from the race weekend, but at least you felt prepared for the weather.

The atmosphere was buzzing, with fans eagerly awaiting glimpses of their favorite drivers. You and your cousins meandered around, snapping photos of the three of you to send to your parents for updates, and enjoying the free-flowing drinks and gourmet food available in the exclusive paddock club. Your cousins, die-hard Formula 1 fans, were thrilled to spot drivers walking around, rushing up to get photos with anyone they could.

At one point, they had spotted Oscar Piastri, the young driver who seemed to be gathering a crowd in the paddock. Your cousins were excited and hurried up to him, asking for a quick photo. Instead of joining them, you volunteered to take the photo, your cousin had handed you his phone and took a photo of them with Oscar. As Oscar posed with your cousins, you framed the shot perfectly, capturing their wide smiles and his easygoing grin. After the photo was snapped, you handed the phone back to your cousin, but something odd caught your attention.

Oscar was staring at you, a look of recognition flashing briefly across his face, though he didn’t say anything. His gaze lingered for a second too long, as if he was trying to place where he had seen you before. But before you could ask if something was wrong, he quickly and politely excused himself, saying something about needing to be somewhere else.

“Thank you!” Your cousin beamed, oblivious to the strange moment, as they admired the picture you had taken.

However, you were left feeling slightly unsettled. Why had Oscar looked at you like that? You just shrugged it off, thinking it was probably nothing. After all, he must meet thousands of people all the time, maybe you just had one of those faces.

You continued walking around with your cousins, admiring the cars as the mechanics prepared for the weekend’s race during the pitlane walk. The energy was contagious, you could feel it in the air—tension and excitement. While you didn’t quite understand the intricacies of the sport, you were starting to get why so many people were hooked.

As Oscar made his way back to the McLaren garage, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had just seen someone important. The brief encounter with you lingered in his mind, he considered telling Lando about it, but something held him back. What if he was just mistaken? What if you were just another face in the crowd, one of the many people who flocked to the Grand Prix? He surely didn’t want to get Lando’s hopes up if he was wrong because the boy is already losing his mind of finding you.

But still, there was an undeniable spark of recognition in Oscar’s gut. The way you had smiled at him, the familiarity in your eyes—it was as if you were embedded into his memories, even if he couldn’t quite place you. The thought of Lando obsessing over someone who may not even be worth it felt almost cruel, so he kept quiet as he stepped into the garage.

“Hey Osc!” Lando called out from where he was working on some last-minute adjustments to the car. His energy was infectious, his usual charisma shining through despite the long day ahead.

“Just met some fans,” Oscar replied, casually brushing off the encounter. He knew Lando was too focused on the race to delve into any side stories, so he played it cool. “Pretty excited about the weekend.”

“That’s good! We need that energy. It’s going to be a wild race!” Lando said enthusiastically and grinned.

Lando was really in the zone, and Oscar didn’t want to disrupt that by bringing up something that might end up being inconsequential, but Oscar couldn’t help himself. As he watched Lando tinker with the car, a thought struck him. If he had indeed seen you, and if you were that same girl that Lando had met at the club in Miami, then there was a chance for another confirmation that it really is indeed you. Singapore is a big place, but the paddock? Not so much. People cross paths here all the time. Fate could also work in you and Lando’s favor.

“I have a feeling we’ll meet some interesting people this weekend,” Oscar said, casually testing the waters. “You never know who might show up in the paddock.”

“You think so? Like who?” Lando raised an eyebrow, now intrigued.

“Just a hunch. You know how these events go, a lot of fans and celebrities come through.” Oscar shrugged, playing it cool as he smiled at Lando. Hoping what he said wouldn’t come off too eager.

“Yeah, I guess we’ll see. It’d be nice to connect with some new faces.” Lando grinned.

Oscar just decided to remain quiet, but inside his mind, he had promised himself that if your paths didn’t cross naturally over the course of the race weekend, he would make sure to plan the two of you to meet. It was high time for Lando to get that second chance, and if fate wouldn’t still bring you and Lando together, then Oscar would be more happy to lend a hand.

As you and your cousins walked around the bustling paddock, the excitement of the day washed over you. You were engaged in conversation, pointing out different drivers, when suddenly, your cousins spotted someone they knew and ran off to catch up. You paused, taking a moment to soak in the atmosphere and admire the vibrant energy that surrounded you. You never knew that you’ll be enjoying the Grand Prix with your cousin—it was eventful, but really fun.

Suddenly, your eyes caught sight of someone familiar stepping out of the McLaren motorhome—a head of curly hair, sharp jawline, and those aquamarine eyes that had been burned deep into your memory since that night at the club in Miami. It was him. Most of all, you wouldn’t expect that the man you had met in the club was Lando Norris. You had seen his face all over the paddock, and your cousin telling you who he was.

You froze for a moment, your heart was caught up in your throat. Lando was walking with a group of people, laughing and chatting, completely unaware that you were standing just meters away. It felt like time had slowed down for you. Could this really be happening? After all those months of missed chances and near encounters, fate had finally decided to stop playing games and let your paths cross again—and here you were, in Singapore, of all places.

But just as you gathered your thoughts, Lando turned his head in your direction. His laughter faded, and his eyes locked onto yours. There was a flicker of surprise, then sudden recognition as his face shifted from casual curiosity to something more intense. It was like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, and neither could you.

For a moment, neither of you moved, caught in a strange limbo of disbelief. But as you or cousins called out to you, completely oblivious to the emotional earthquake happening between you and Lando, you snapped back to reality. You offered a nervous smile and a small wave, really unsure of what to do next. Would he even remember you? Should you go over and say something? Or maybe he was just staring at someone behind you.

“Hey! We’re heading over there!” Your cousins shouted, pointing toward another part of the paddock.

You felt a wave of disappointment was over you, knowing that you had no choice but follow and be with them. As you turn to leave, you glance back at Lando one last time, just in time to catch him staring intently at your back. Lando’s expression shifted as his eyes widened, and you realized he had spotted your tattoo—the intricate Sak Yant design that adored your skin.

In that moment, you could almost see the gears turning in his mind as he began connecting the dots. Your heart raced again, a mix of hope and fear. But before you could linger on your thoughts, your cousins tugged at your arm, leading you away. You felt a strange sense of longing, wishing desperately for a chance to bridge the gap. Little did you know, Lando was feeling the same way.

Fate had finally brought you together again. Now, the ball is in Lando’s court.

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majorblinks · 1 year ago

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DOWNRIGHT ICONIC (aespa karina)

(smut, male reader, screenwriter you, stranger karina, public sex, rough sex [choking/slapping/biting/spanking/hair-pulling etc], oral, anal, facefucking, titfucking, facial, bondage, degradation, name-calling, other weird stuff, 26k words, it's been 1 million years..., BUT WE'RE SO BACK BABY <3)

Hey, turns out the critics really are onto something:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this.

You aren’t surprised when the nominations are announced. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’re this up-and-coming screenwriter, this newly-minted visionary, and - cue the applause - you’ve just made the movie of the year. Clips go viral everywhere; the reviews are calling it extraordinary. They all want to know how you - a relative nobody - managed to pull it off. What’s your secret? What’s your inspiration? Where’d you get this billion-dollar box office idea?

And here’s one version of the truth:

“Well,” you’re quoted saying in every single interview: “honestly, it’s about a girl.”

Everyone eats this up, of course. It’s so fucking romantic.

You’ll tell an abridged version of this story for the rest of your life. A blip in time in early January - a certified slow-motion movie moment. You’ll say things like she was the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen. You’ll say things like, I know it sounds lame, but that’s how it went. She took my breath away. She fascinated me. I saw her and I don’t think my life has ever been the same.

You’ll never once say her name.

“It’s weird, actually,” you’ll say in an interview after the news of the nominations drops. “Making this movie about her. She’ll last forever there, you know? She’ll always exist in this film, in this one moment in time. She’s in all of it, basically - every scene, every line. It’s all her.”

“You make it sound like she’s dead,” the interviewer will say, all open-mouthed melodrama.

You’ll laugh. “Oh, God, no,” you’ll say. “She’s alive and well.” As if it hasn’t been years since you last saw her face, watching you from down the corridor, looking lost and torn apart and very, very small. “She’s okay. I mean - I think - yeah, she’s okay.”

As if you’d know.

Because here’s another version of the truth:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this. You’re going to stand up on that stage and thank your family and your friends. You’re going to stare at all those faces until they swim together into one golden, glittering blur, and then all you’ll see is her - her dark eyes, her glossy hair, her wrist in your grip, her throat between your fingers - her in your sheets, her smiling in your doorway, her shivering in your shower, her sobbing into her hands, her bleeding in your bed, her walking away. Her, her, her. Immortalized forever in this perfect thing you made, winning awards off the reconstruction of a memory. Art imitating life; reality warped into something magnificent, and beautiful, and better.

And the only thing you’ll feel like doing is throwing up.

Sure, you’ll bask for decades in the thrill of it: the fame, the fortune, the glory; the adoration, the worship, the attention; the eternal, endless love. You’ll be able to look back on your life when you’re decrepit on your deathbed and know that you - brilliant you, utterly superior you - were divinely blessed with earth-shattering success, and no one will ever be able to take that away from you. You made your mark. You meant something. You were the best, for fuck’s sake, and you have the accolades to prove it - you really, really were.

So here’s the full truth - the final bottom line:

You’re going to win an Oscar for this. You’ll live the kind of life people beg God for. You’ll get everything you ever wanted.

It won’t be worth it at all.

First, though, there’s this.

Disturbingly enough, you’re in the romance section of a bookstore when everything starts.

This is really not your genre - that’s the funniest part. Historically, you’re bored to death by the cartoonish pastel covers; you don’t get your kicks from seeing the same delightfully quirky heroines fall for brooding bad boys, or whatever the fuck goes on in those books. You have your standards. You prefer your art a little gritty, a little fucked up, a little more interesting - the kind of thing that can leave you shellshocked in a movie theater, overcome with the sort of full-body, lightning-struck epiphany only truly good work can manage. It’s not a judgment call - you’re not trying to be pretentious. It’s just that you prefer something with some fucking bite.

The second funniest part is this:

You’re pressed against the shelves, surrounded by the cutest, chastest love stories ever told-

“Are you serious?”

-and Karina’s on her knees, about to take your cock down her throat.

Maybe this is what your contemporaries call cinematic irony.

That’s gotta be the only phrase for it, really. The scene itself dripping with classless, crude, erotic filth - the way she ducks her chin to spit on her hand, the slow pump of her fist around you, the rough hum in her mouth at how achingly hard you are - nasty and irredeemable, too fast and too loud. The gross lack of subtlety in her sex appeal: all pale thighs and porn-star tits, the wet pink flash of tongue. Seductive in a way that screams at you. It’d be so easy to write this off as some deliberately controversial opening scene, gory shock value, horror-film suspense - starring you and the slut you’re about to ravage and ruin and potentially leave for dead.

“Baby - are you sure?”

It’d be so easy, if Karina didn’t look like an angel incarnate.

“I mean, you-” You’re stammering. You’ve got both hands in her hair, fingers sliding through the glossy black in petting, soothing motions - your clumsy attempt at reassurance. “You don’t have to, if you don’t - we’re in public - I’m not expecting you to - I don’t need it-”

Karina’s fine, sculpted eyebrows twitch upwards. Her lips are a twist of scarlet, distinct and amused. She doesn’t quite smirk, doesn’t give a voice to the sarcasm, but the sentiment is the same - yeah, right.

And then she lowers her mouth to lick.

“Jesus fucking Christ-”

Scratch that, then. This is the funniest part. The most inhumanly beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, debasing herself in public like some sort of desperate common whore - come on, bring in the laugh track.

Not that anyone’s laughing now.

You’re no poet - they’re a few sections over, Plath and Yeats and Dickinson - but Karina’s the kind of thing that makes you understand the motivation completely: only capable of being captured in metaphor, without context, painstakingly interpreted hundreds of years from now by people who will never get this right. All carved-out cheekbones, fluttering lashes; tight fuckable body clad in a little low-cut dress, feet tucked neatly behind her like she’s simulating worship. Dirty and religiously devoted in how she stretches her full glossed lips around your cock and lets your grip tangle in her hair and-

“Karina,” you get out, but her only response is to blink sweetly up at you and suck.

Well, who gives a shit about the poets, anyway? You doubt any of them ever got to fuck a mouth like this.

There’s an unfamiliar caution to the rut of your hips, a wincing fascination every time she gags - and she gags loud, choking and heaving, saliva dripping slick around you and down her chin - that seems to both entertain and confuse Karina. A skeptical crease in her forehead, saying everything she can’t: you don’t wanna fuck me up? Ruin me? Cloudy spit falling in strands to her tits, seeping into the crimson fabric of her dress; she’s wearing a worn black sweatshirt that’s slipping off one shoulder, exposing the clean line of her collarbone. The hollow of her cheeks, the obscene painful sound of your cock clogging her throat - it’s subtext, explicit suggestion. A preternatural understanding. I know what this is. I know what you want from me.

Which - she couldn’t possibly.

“Baby.” You sound so wretched that it’s humiliating. Karina’s sharply lined eyes seem to flash with humor, smug and lazily self-satisfied. “You’re gonna make me fucking cum.”

The thick, sloppy, choked noise she makes is the closest she’s gonna get to a laugh.

Oh, sure, whatever, it’s not like you’re not thinking about it: digging your fingertips into her scalp and really fucking her face, relishing in the way those eyes would go wide and glassy with unshed tears; refusing to let her have control, to let her lick and lap and breathe. You’re scripting it in your head already. You’d strip her bare and make her sob. You’d wreck her throat and cum all over her face and force her to walk out like that: coated in the sticky, filthy evidence of everything you’ve made her - look at this, you’d say, look at what I have. Look at what I did - all this, all me.

“God.” Your thumb braces against Karina’s temple, like the gentle stroke of a brush, like you’re painting her right into existence. “You’re just-” A harsh gag; a fall of dirty, drooling spit. “You’re really enjoying this, huh? Getting on your knees in public for a fucking stranger?”

That’s why the fantasy of fucking her into brutal submission is actually so understandable. You don’t know her. You don’t owe her shit. You could destroy her and it’s not like she could do anything to fight back - not when she’s already below you, looking up. When she asked for this.

Except-

“Karina.” You can’t stop saying her name. “You’re - fucking perfect.”

And it’s true.

So you cum.

Karina swallows it all with the same amount of sultry grace she seems to do everything - how she laughs and walks and talks and takes your cock like a fucking professional - languishing in the practiced bob of her throat, the preening flicker of her eyelids, her face shiny and pale. It tugs the same feeling out of you as a flawless shot in a film, a well-timed bit of dialogue: watching an expert at work, pulling out all their stops. One hand through her hair. Her nails the same rich color as her mouth and her dress. Nasty, slutty, impressive attention to detail - Christ, get this girl in front of a camera, get the moon to be her limelight - you’re breathless, you’re enthralled, you’re so fucking far gone.

Then: the sticky retreating glide of her pouty mouth, lipstick smeared badly down her chin, stark and arresting as blood.

“In my experience,” Karina says, finally, “being perfect’s never gotten me anywhere good.”

She pulls the sleeve of her sweatshirt up and wipes her face with her wrist.

“You’re unbelievable,” you say, dizzy.

“Thank you,” Karina says, sweet like she means it, and sits back on her heels.

You can’t help yourself; you’re petting back her hair again, cupping her face softly in your hand, caught on the dark glint of her irises. Angel was an understatement. She looks more than that - looks like something holy and all-powerful, something omniscient and blindingly beautiful, something who knows exactly what you need and knows exactly how to follow through. Something worthy of mythology. Something like a god.

And any sort of rough, ruthless, fucked-up fantasy - it’s never going to happen.

You just can’t ruin a girl like her.

“So?” Karina’s voice is a smoky bombshell lilt, like she’s just stepped out of some film noir from the 1950s. Hands folded primly in her lap, fingers interlocked like a lady. She could be a pop culture icon, an eternal sex symbol - a Marilyn, a Bond girl, a timeless universal beauty. “What now?”

You think your brain actually short-circuits. “Sorry?”

Head tilted, lids dropped low. Smirk still sharp and scarlet. “Are you gonna take me home?”

You open your mouth to respond, but then a customer walks by the aisle.

You’re a panicked flurry of motion - zipping up your pants, turning away, frantically patting down your clothes - but Karina just stays kneeling on the floor, little chin on an incline, utterly incriminating. It doesn’t matter. The customer passes you by. The world returns to the way it should be: just the two of you.

“Karina,” you say, flabbergasted by her composure.

Karina’s lips quirk. “What?”

You shake your head and offer your hand to help her up, but Karina laughs instead - actually laughs. It’s peculiar, beautiful: raspy like a chronic chainsmoker, as though there’s something foreign she’s trying to dislodge. The raw, gravelly aftermath of a skinned knee, a grisly scrape over skin.

“Wow,” she says, and stands all on her own, tugs the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fingers. “That’s a yes to taking me home, then?”

“What are you doing?” You’re laughing too - you can’t help it - reaching for Karina’s tiny waist to pull her in. “What are you - what do you want?”

When Karina smiles, it seems to set her eyes aflame. Bright and dancing, lashes like a shroud of smoke. “What do you mean?”

“You just met me.” It sounds feeble, somehow: a thin, useless excuse. Nothing against the way her body slots between your hands, a smooth effortless fit; nothing compared to how she kisses you between sentences, so quick and easy it already feels like a habit. “You don’t - you don’t know me.”

Karina’s mouth puckers, coy. “No?”

“No,” you shoot back, grinning, but it doesn’t sound convincing at all. “Come on, baby, seriously. What do you want?”

There’s gotta be some motive, you’re thinking. There’s gotta be a reason. Karina is so still, so soft and pliant under your hands, all the carved porcelain perfection of a marble sculpture but with none of the cold stiffness. Spine curving under your fingertips, jaw tilting into your touch.

A complete stranger, maybe - but every part of her body is begging to be known.

“Don’t you get it?” Karina says. “I want whatever you want.”

It’s so simple and earnest it takes your breath away.

“I - Jesus.” You’re biting on the inside of your cheek, drinking her in. “What if I told you I don’t know what I want?”

Another rasp of a laugh, sound like the serrated edge of a blade. “I’d say fine, okay.” Karina’s voice is low, conspiratorial. “But I’d think you’re lying.”

And here’s the thing you know for sure:

The very second you saw Karina you swear you saw the next hundred pages of a manuscript unfurling in front of you, lines and themes and gorgeous dark-eyed heroines, tragically beautiful endings and stunning cinematography - infinite narratives in the glossy sweep of her hair, in the seductive stretch of her legs, in the way she looked at you in a crowded room and smiled a lovely, secret smile and told you she’d follow you anywhere. She’s worth making art about. She’s worth devoting lifetimes to. The most honest thing you could say to her right now is baby, I’m writing a movie about this one day, and I think you’re really gonna like it.

Karina couldn’t possibly know any of this, but it still feels like she does - impractical knowledge in how she loops one arm around your neck and kisses you again, no hesitation. Like she actually knows you.

“I want to fuck you,” you murmur against her mouth, because it’s the next most honest thing. “Is that enough for you?”

You’re a screenwriter. You know your horror movies. A small part of you recognizes that this is precisely how they start: fanged vampires, wicked succubi, femme fatales out for blood. Karina’s so gorgeous she can’t be human - teeth so sharp there’s no way her intentions are pure.

“Sure,” Karina says, smirk glimmering like starlight. “Then I want that, too.”

It’s a murder plot waiting to happen.

You take her home anyway.

(Oh, and about your Oscar-winning script-

In theory, this is how it begins.

It’s classic. There’s a stranger and there’s a beautiful girl and they’re both sitting at a bar, talking for the very first time. The girl has a rose tucked behind her ear; it matches the crimson color of her lipstick perfectly. The stranger had asked her what the deal with it was, but she’d said something vague and nonsensical about it being a gift, so now they’re talking about normal, average things. Jobs, names, flirtatious pickup lines. It’s obvious because it’s meant to be, like a set-up to some predictable porn - everyone watching knows they’re going to fuck.

She keeps getting closer to him. At one point he thinks she’s going in for a kiss.

Instead, all she does is pluck the rose from behind her ear, and hand it to him.

It’s okay, she says. No thorns.

He stares at the rich furled petals and the whittled-down stem.

Thanks, he says, amused, charmed. He thinks there’s something odd about her. He likes it, though; if she were as beautiful as she is - which is very beautiful, exquisitely fucking beautiful - and she behaved like most people do, he’d find her terribly boring.

He takes it from her. Turns over the rose in his hands absentmindedly as she keeps talking. She’s got all this hair: wild and glossy black, pouring over her thin shoulders, her ribs, her tiny waist. After a moment he feels the sharp prick of a thorn against his fingertip and releases the rose in surprise.

You said there weren’t thorns, he tells her, laughing. Ow.

Whoops, she says. Then: Did it get me too?

She turns her head, pulls her hair out of the way. There’s a scarlet bead of blood trickling down the side of her perfect pale neck. He can’t quite tell where the point of entry was, where the thorn had dug in and broken skin. It’s bleeding a bit too heavily. Covering its tracks.

She swivels, slightly. She sees the look on his face. Is it bad? she asks.

No, he says, though he can’t really tell. But - couldn’t you feel it, though? The thorn?

The girl presses her hand to the side of her throat. It comes back bloodstained, a neat smear of red along the lifeline of her palm.

No, she echoes, though this can’t possibly be true. Hey, you wanna get out of here or something?

Alright, he says, smiling. They both stand. They leave the rose where it is. Let’s go.

He cups her cheek instead of her neck when he kisses her for the first time, so he doesn’t have her blood on his hands.

It starts simple like that.)

Karina’s so out of place in your apartment that it’s almost laughable - or it would be, if you were capable of thinking about anything but her mouth and her hands and her tits crushed up against your chest as you pin her to the doorframe. She keeps making these little sounds into your mouth: low and throaty, almost agonized. You swallow all her moans off her lips - oh, baby, you’re okay - and you only kiss her harder. She doesn’t belong, among your carpet worn-down from pacing and your laptop still open and idling and the mess of incoherent colorful post-it notes pasted to your fridge. She doesn’t fit here. Here kissing your mouth, here in your arms, here on fucking earth with the rest of you heathens-

“You wanna fuck me so bad,” murmurs Karina, chin on an incline, staring up at you, “then do it already.”

She doesn’t squirm or fidget; she doesn’t get needy or start begging. She stays pinned down by your body, lips parted, and stands completely still.

It’s like she’s telling you to make your move. Waiting for something inevitable.

“What happened to patience?” you say, anyway.

Karina’s mouth curls. She palms your cock through your pants. “What the fuck is that?”

You try to laugh, breathless and turned on, but all she does is kiss you again.

You’re a creative - you’re ready to attribute meaning to every movement - but there’s nothing so profound about it when you get Karina on your bed, all that thick black hair fanned out on your sheets, her hands grasping to get your shirt off - off, she murmurs, off. Even that comes out measured. She never shakes. She’s so sure. You kiss her everywhere you can reach, her face and her neck and her collarbone and her tits, drunk on the soft, humming sounds she makes when you do. You’re so fucking gorgeous, you can’t stop saying, and Karina keeps laughing that same raspy laugh, like it’s the most hilarious thing she’s ever heard.

“You told me you already know that, right?” You’ve got her face cupped in one of your hands and your other one at the neckline of her scarlet dress. “So what’s so funny?”

“Everything.” Her teeth glint the way fangs would, a deliberate trick of the light. She’d be villainous if she weren’t so content to be trapped underneath you. “All of it.” She presses her palm to the side of your neck. “You’re too nice.”

“Fuck.” Your thumb accidentally digs too hard into her cheek. She doesn’t wince, but you feel it - the stomach-turning thrill, the possibility of leaving a bruise. Your hand drops low - lower, down her throat and her tits and her flat midriff - and slips between her thighs, up her dress. It feels safer, somehow. “How do you manage to make the word nice sound like an insult?”

“It’s not,” she says, simply, and spreads her legs.

And it must not be - because Karina’s so wet.

She makes another low velvety sound when you first touch her, seems to melt into the stretch of your finger in her cunt - just one finger, and her back arches faintly, prettily, hips lifting to take more. “Jesus,” you mutter, but Karina’s not looking at you: her eyes are shut tight, lashes fluttering black, tits heaving in her dress with each draw of breath. You’ve fucked girls who’ve seemed unsure of themselves - embarrassed by their own wantonness, how wet they are, how bad they want it - but all Karina does is wrap her hand around your wrist and tug, once: a clear soundless plea for more.

For a second you’re actually, positively certain that you’ve lost it.

It’s abject fantasy. It can’t be real. You in your apartment with the dream girl - the personal Aphrodite - the muse; God, if anyone was ever made to be a fucking muse, it’s her - underneath you with her ridiculous tits and her tight little pussy, face like a Hollywood dream. Ludicrous. Impossible. Bucking as she tries to fuck herself deeper on your fingers, all the way to the knuckle - slowing down only to say you wanna fuck my cunt open with your big fat cock or what?

“I,” you try to say, strangled - her mouth’s so fucking filthy. “I was - I mean - we could take it slow-”

“How romantic,” says Karina - and this, too, sounds like a heinous insult coming from her - but she drags your wrist to her lips and sucks her own slick off your hand anyway.

You choke on your next breath. “Karina-”

She looks up at you, unflinching, tits half out of her dress and cunt dripping down her thighs. Lipstick worn-down, kissed-off. All over your mouth, or your throat, or your shirt. Mouth chapped from the cold and stained marvelously pink. There’s something in the way her smile forms slight and crooked every time you say her name, as if there’s some private joke you’re not in on.

“You’re such a gentleman,” Karina purrs, all syrupy-sweet condescension. Then: “You really don’t have to be.”

She licks the pad of your finger. She’s so completely shameless. You feel monstrous on top of her, in this sick, superior way, like she’s just too small to be so sopping wet and slutty and fuckable - too beautiful to be anything but treated just right.

“If you want me to fuck you like a whore, baby,” you tell her, half-joking, “then just say that.”

It’s a mistake the moment it leaves your mouth - a line crossed. Because all Karina does is cock her head, your wrist gripped delicately in her hand, her legs parted underneath you, and stares. Almost droll, bemused. Like you’re so goddamn predictable.

“Didn’t you hear me?” That perfect face sears right through you. You’d nearly fucked that face. Not quite. Not yet. “I want whatever you want.”

She’s even tinier than you originally thought she was. You only realize this now, tracing her stomach under your fingertips, feeling the sharp relief of each rib straining beneath her skin. You don’t know it until you touch her, but you can span the width of her thigh under one hand. It sends a strange shiver through you: mapping every jut of bone, every startling edge. She’s tiny. Breakable, practically. Men meaner than you have probably thrown her around, fucked her up against walls, used her like a toy.

“So,” says Karina. “What do you want?”

Your fist clenches tight in her grasp, right in front of her face, knuckles going horrifically white.

Like you - like you’re going to-

An accident. A primal sort of gesture, like you’re less than human, turned under her touch into some feral hot-blooded animal who can’t control itself: carnivorous, predatory. You stare at your own hand and then the sharp scythelike curve of her mouth and feel revolted embarrassment crawl straight up your spine.

It’s abhorrent.

It also doesn’t even seem to matter.

Karina doesn’t go wide-eyed and nervous; she doesn’t look at your wound fist like she’s scared of what it could do to her. She clicks her tongue, once. Like this, too, is something she already saw coming.

“I thought so,” she says, anyway. Maybe this is it, what does it for her; looking the devil full in the face and begging to be burned. “Then do it.”

“I can’t do that to you,” you mutter, but you tug her dress up, and you fuck her anyway.

She’s a stranger. This is the point of fucking strangers. To do things to them that you’d never do to anyone else - to take out your worst impulses and tell your best lies and know that none of it matters, in the end. Because they’re nobody, and because you’ll never see them again.

But you just can’t.

She’s too indulgent and stunning and soft, with her low moans and the addicting drenched heat of her cunt, hand gentle and careful on the nape of your neck so she can keep pulling you into a kiss. She’s made up of curves, delicate edges - those hips and those tits you can’t keep your hands off of and her lips in a dreamy smile - and you find yourself stroking her hair back from her face so you can drink it all in: the blush in her cheeks, the almost serene way she lets her eyes slip shut and her mouth drop open, slack and enticingly wet. So good, baby, you keep telling her, because she is, her entire body warm and wanting and so easily fucked open, little pussy swallowing your cock right up. She doesn’t fidget or plead. She’s so sweet, such a perfect fit, humming into your mouth as your cock eases her open; so wet you can hear it, the sloppy squelch of her cunt when you bottom out. Your voice comes out coaxing. You like that? That feel good? Taking my cock so nicely, huh?

“Mmm,” Karina breathes, in an exhilarating moan, right into your mouth, against your tongue. “Mm, mm-”

She never quite manages full sentences. Never finds it in herself to make any more obscene demands. Just gets all small and soaking underneath you, licks messily at your bottom lip, and lets you do all the talking - lets you draw a careful hand through her hair and drop your other one between her thighs, clenches tight around your cock when you rub at her clit, keens low in her throat and listens. To the good girl, to the I got you, baby, to the that’s it, there you go, this is what you wanted - I know, honey, I know, you just needed to get this cunt fucked right, you just needed to cum real bad. I know what this is. I know what you need.

“Fuck.” She’s flushed pink to her chest, delightfully ineloquent. “Yes-”

Well - good thing you’re decent with your words, when it counts. Let Karina blush and drool and slick up your cock with every stroke. That’ll work just fine with you.

It’s the kind of juxtaposition you’d really lean into - the kind of thing you’d write just to get so self-indulgent with, a personalized note to the director, a wink and a nudge to every audience member. Look at that. Look at her eyes like something straight out of poetry. Look at her body like a pornographic fantasy. Look at how she gets so tamed and docile and compliant when she gets her tiny pussy stuffed full, creaming all over that cock, huge tits bouncing - look, that’s art, isn’t it? What else would you call it? What else could it be?

“You gonna cum, baby?” She’s so fragile underneath you. Color staining her cheeks apple-red; lips swollen and begging to be kissed. Fictive little fairy tale. “You gonna cum for me?”

“Yeah.” It’s breathy and barely-there. Her chin trembles, jerks in a weak nod. “I’m - I - fuck-”

See: you just can’t rough her up. It’d be blasphemous. Sacrilege. Taking one single look at the stained-glass windows of a church and tearing it all to the ground.

Still, you’re mesmerized by how utterly vulnerable she looks: the glossy shine to her irises; the way she inhales all slow and shaky, body slipping from some sort of precipice. Not just like she’s near-tears, but like she’s stunned - struck dumb from a violent blow, mouth wide open in the aftermath. And it’s just sex - and, fuck, you’ve said it, you see things the way every obsessive artist does; sex is never just sex. Every one thing means something more. A metaphor. An allegory. You get nasty and debauched and dirty because you know exactly what you can spin it into. Put the entire scene in a silent film and everyone can swoon about the things you might be saying to her, this impossibly captivating stranger in your bed with her graceful name, her dizzying moans, her shuddering frame in her orgasm. Don’t you get it? you could be telling her, hand brushing gently over her sweat-damp hairline. Don’t you feel that? You’re a stranger to me, baby, but you don’t have to be. There’s a reason we met. There’s a meant-to-be here, somewhere. I’m not a believer, sweetheart, but you could make one out of me - I swear you could, I promise-

But that’s the reason why these things are best left to the imagination, anyway.

A million scripted sweet nothings - and none of them manage to make it out of your mouth.

“Karina.” Your hips jerk hard. You sound half-possessed. “So pretty, cumming all over my cock like that. Such a perfect little cunt, baby - so fucking good-”

Her eyes suddenly shut tight; her body arcs into your touch, lips parted in a silent gasp. And for a second it seems like such a snapshot of innocence, like she’s brand-new to getting fucked quick and rough and dirty - though you know this can’t possibly be the truth, not with the way she flirts and whines and drips for more like she’s made for it - but she’s trembling under your fingertips, and you can dream. She’s your beautiful stranger, your pristine muse; you can pretend she’s whatever the fuck you want.

“God,” Karina murmurs, so soft and weak it makes your head spin.

Before you know what you’re doing - before you can even think twice about it - you’re pulling out, and cumming all over her stomach.

You can’t help it. You shouldn’t have had that thought about innocence. Jesus. This is what you mean, about you and your own painful humanity; you’ve got all the same vile desires. When you see a pure thing - all that porcelain skin, all that thick glossy black hair, all those gleaming white teeth in her open mouth - your very first instinct is to fuck it up bad.

You’d do worse, if you were worse - you’d make a real fucking disaster out of her.

“Baby,” you say, breathlessly. “Are you…”

And Karina, then, does something truly evil:

Sighs luxuriously, stretches her arms above her head, eases those gorgeous eyes open, and smiles.

As if she’s reveling in it. The scent of sex - the defiled tautness of her tummy - the way you’re not sure where her little red dress or her shoes or her panties are, how her cunt’s dripping wet onto your sheets, her hair a glorious mess. Grinning in the face of utter filth.

“You,” you exhale, running your palm down her side. “You’re so…”

Karina’s mouth pulls up at a corner, like she’s daring you to finish the sentence, but you never do.

You can’t stop staring at the stretch of cum-covered skin before you. Coating her belly, pooling into her navel. You realize with a start that there’s a new bruise blooming on her chest, a vicious sort of bite mark. You can’t remember when you did that. You’d been kissing her - of course you kissed her - her mouth and her neck and her tits, but you’d been so gentle, sucking light and soothing her skin with your tongue after-

“You didn’t want to cum inside me?” Karina asks, hoarsely.

You blink so hard your vision blurs. “What?”

“Right.” Her eyeshadow’s smudged dark underneath her eyes, making her look deliciously used up. “You did want to cum inside me.”

“Karina,” you warn - or, at least, you mean to make it sound like a warning - but her name comes out too faint. It’s horrific. Your hand traces her hipbone so reverently. You’re no match for her.

Karina arches a brow in unhurried challenge, ghosts her hand across her tummy. Takes two fingers and drags them through the cum you spilled, pulls back with it clinging thickly to her skin. Drifts down, down, down.

“Karina,” you try to say again, even more pathetic than last time. “Jesus-”

But you saying her name holds no weight here; she’s made that more than obvious. Nothing to stop her as she smears her cum-slick fingers across her glistening pussy, gaze locked amusedly on your face, tracking your reaction. She’s still so fucking wet - she rubs your cum in circles across her clit - tossing her head back a little, chest heaving and falling, fingertips just barely dipping inside her cunt-

“I can’t.” Karina lifts her hand to pop her fingers in her mouth, sucks them clean. Pointedly flashes her too-sharp nails at you like she’s unsheathing claws. “If you want it, you’re gonna have to do it yourself.”

“You,” you say, though your hand’s already pressing hard into her ribs, “are fucking cruel, baby.”

“And you,” replies Karina, head tilting, “just want to see my cunt all filled up and leaking your cum.”

Oh, she hasn’t been wrong about you all night. She certainly won’t start now.

“What?” A sly, languid smirk tugs at her lips. “Afraid you’re gonna knock me up or something?”

Your breath halts right in your lungs.

You’d been right about her too, it seems. Succubus. Vampire. She must be; she’s bloodthirsty. Tits gleaming with sweat, the scarlet stain of that bite mark you can’t remember leaving, cunt all dripping wet and desperately empty - body like a fatal fucking blow.

Karina’s eyes glint. I want what you want, she’d said.

With the way she spreads her legs, she’s gotta be ready to prove it.

So you never stood a chance. You give in and scoop up cum with one finger and sink it deep inside her aching cunt, feeling as she clenches down, as she takes it so well; like a good girl, you tell her, letting me do whatever I want with this needy little cunt; that’s my good girl. Karina lifts her hips - goes so still and so obedient - and lets you repeat it over and over again, fucking into her with your fingers until the plane of her stomach is bare and sticky and her cunt’s dribbling your cum onto your sheets. It’s completely nasty. It’s hot. It’s Karina craning her neck back and shutting her eyes as you bury three fingers inside of her and fill her with your cum, every part of her in utter surrender, entirely at your mercy, breathing out hard through her nose until your thumb rubs at her clit and she’s cumming again, all over your hand. She gets this look on her face, afterwards - exhausted, every line of her face gentle and lax - staring up at you like you’re the only person still left on this planet. Adoring, almost. As if you’re something out of another world.

It’s an expression too sweet for a scene like this - and it’s exactly what men like you make art about.

“There,” you say, soft and mesmerized, wiping your hand across her chest. “Satisfied?”

Karina laughs her strange, gravelly, gorgeous laugh.

“No,” she says, shamelessly. “But that’s not your fault.”

Your fingers curl around the curve of her jaw. “No?”

She barely looks like she belongs in your bed - she must be something divine, lit from within, god-blessedly gorgeous. She’s a fucking fever dream: stunning eyes and the bob of her throat and her tits and her curves and all that hair. Stay, you think of telling her. Let me see what I can make of you. I don’t know you yet but I could, baby, I really could.

“Nope.” Karina smiles, and somewhere, soliloquies are writing themselves. “I always want more.”

“Okay,” you say, mouth hovering over hers. “Then stay.”

So she stays.

(An update on your script:

The stranger and the girl are back at his place. They’re sitting on his couch. Nobody has cleaned off her neck. He’s been too busy pawing at her: at her face, between her legs, at her tits in her tight dress. I need you, he’s been murmuring to her, and it feels like he really means it: like he’ll die if he doesn’t get her desperate and whining underneath him, his cock stretching her tight little cunt wide open. He doesn’t feel too bad about it. She’s a dirty slut. She’s said as much. She’s got her own needs, too.

What happened to your window? she asks, suddenly.

He pulls back from her chest, his spit clinging shiny to her skin.

She isn’t looking at him. He has the sudden, unnerving feeling that she hasn’t been looking at him the whole time. Not like she’s had her eyes closed in blinding, overwhelming pleasure - but like she’s deliberately been trying to look at anything else.

But his hand falls between her thighs, and he realizes she’s already wet.

A bird flew into it, probably, he says. That happens, sometimes.

They’re talking about the stain on the once-clean glass of his window. The backdrop of the night sky behind means it’s barely visible, but the suggestion of it is enough. Implicit gore. Tiny little black feathers, caked in blood from the impact, dark and dried. It’ll be scrubbed off soon enough, he knows. It’ll be all gone eventually.

Oh, she says. She doesn’t apologize for potentially killing the mood. She hasn’t, anyway, not really. She’s still wet and small underneath him, begging for it. Poor thing.

Yeah, he says.

She turns back to him. Her hair’s everywhere, all over the arm of his couch, wayward strands beneath his fingers. She’s clearly expecting something - to be kissed, to be fucked hard, to be called baby and angel and good girl. It doesn’t really matter either way. Those are the only things he can give her.

He stares at the blood on her neck.

Let me clean that off for you, actually, he says, and goes to the kitchen to get a washcloth.)

Much, much later:

“I admire you,” Karina says, all tucked up in your bed, underneath your sheets, half-buried into your side. Moonlight bleeds into the room. Her eyes gleam like galaxies. “For showing some self-control.”

“What?”

Karina’s hair pours over your pillowcase. She takes your hand and brings it close to her face, working your fingers into a tight fist.

“Fucking bitch,” you mutter, and then regret it immediately. It lands too harshly, too strange and serious. “Sorry. I didn’t - that came out weird. I don’t think you’re a bitch.”

Karina’s lips brush your knuckles. “Not the meanest thing I’ve been called.” Her voice twists with humor. She shouldn’t be so comfortable curled up with a man she doesn’t know in the middle of the night. You think of kissing her hard, of scraping her neck with your teeth, of warning her about self-preservation - sweetheart, you could tell her, this is how people end up dead. “Not the meanest thing I’ll be called, either.”

You shift. Your fist, unconsciously, goes tense in her hand. “What’s your deal?”

Her mouth tilts. “What’s yours?”

You huff out a laugh. “You’re unbearable,” you say softly, which feels much kinder than calling her a bitch. “What are you - what do you mean?”

I’m not hard to figure out, you want to tell her. I’ll let you in if you ask me to. But you - you, you imagine saying, cupping Karina’s face in your hands and saying her name like you’re praying to her, drafting scenes in your head with each whispered syllable - you. Look at you. I’d fill a thousand pages trying to find a way to understand you.

“If you want to hurt me,” Karina says, “then hurt me.”

Your throat dries up. Your fist falls open. “What?”

“I wouldn’t blame you.” Her voice is matter-of-fact. You see her tongue dart over her bottom lip, the slick glimmer of spit. “If that’s what you wanted.”

You stare at her, hard.

It’s not difficult to make out her silhouette in the dark; she’s illuminated so distinctly by the moon, like it’s her own on-set spotlight, professionally arranged - she’s got the cosmos calling her shots. You think about how careful you’d been with her: doing what she wanted and making her cum and kissing her like you have history and maybe fucking her like you love her, just a little.

You think about that bruise you left on her chest, her skin between your teeth, the feeling of biting down.

“It’s not,” you say, and the lie tastes acrid in your mouth. “It’s - it’s not, Karina.”

“You fucked my face in public within like an hour of meeting me. And fucked me and came on my stomach. And fingered your cum inside of me.” It’s far past midnight. She sounds more alert than she should. “You’re gonna start being polite now?”

It sends an odd knot to your gut, the way she puts it. Equating all of that to hurting her. Laughing in the face of your clenched fist - not because she thinks you won’t do it, but because she knows how bad you want it.

Hurt me. She says it like it’s so easy. Fuck me. Let me stay the night. Hurt me; you’ve earned it.

“I’m not polite.” The truth doesn’t taste much better. “I just have, you know, common fucking decency.”

“Hm,” Karina says, a nonchalant little noise, and nothing else.

You brush her hair off her neck and your fingertips graze the hollow of her throat. You feel her swallow under your touch. You open your mouth, though you’re not sure what you’re about to say - Karina, like a chant, like she’s consumed you in a matter of moments, Karina - but she shuts her eyes delicately, and curls close to you, and just like that the moment is over.

I have common decency, you’d said. I won’t hurt you. I promise. I can control myself.

So maybe you weren’t right about everything. You’re not the devil. That’d be a delusion of grandeur - the idea that you’d ever have that kind of power over a girl like her.

Not for long, she’d replied, in the knowing tilt of her smile. Not if I can help it.

In the morning, it’s a picture of crime-scene proportions. It takes a little work to piece it all together.

Karina’s not in bed when you wake up, but there are traces of her everywhere - telltale, incriminating bits of evidence. Strands of her hair on the pillow. Blood-red lipstick stains on the fabric. Her crimson dress crumpled on your bedroom floor, sporting a tiny tear in the hem that you don’t remember leaving; you can still smell her perfume all over your sheets, like a calling card. If this was a TV drama - a clichéd police procedural - she’d probably be dead in your living room right now, blank-eyed and beyond saving, rigor mortis deforming her perfect body into something grotesque.

This is also probably not a thought you should ever relay to Karina, but you do anyway.

“Sorry to disappoint,” she replies. She’s perched on your kitchen counter, dressed in one of your t-shirts, bare legs swinging. “I’m very much alive.”

“I was being dramatic,” you try to say, gesturing with your hands to set the scene - the lighting, the fake blood and the special effects, the potential pallor of her face. “I’m - I’m a screenwriter. It’s in my nature. I didn’t mean I wanted to find your fucking corpse out here-”

“It’s okay if you did.”

You choke. “What?”

“I’m right with you, babe.” Karina leans forward conspiratorially. There’s a sharpness to the dark glint in her eyes that kind of makes you think she really does understand: that she has the same tendency to jump to the worst possible conclusions. A kindred, morbid spirit. “I get it. I’m pretty devastated that I’m still breathing, too.”

She says this all in a scratchy, sultry voice, hoarse as though she’s been sleeping for years instead of hours. Lashes fluttering like she’s just told you something very adorable and sweet.

“God,” you say, desperately charmed, and laugh until you feel light-headed. “You’re sick.”

Karina’s mouth curls. “Right.”

“I’m serious.” It’s surreal: her wearing your clothes and sitting on your counter like this is an everyday occurrence, indulging every fucked-up thing you say to her. Maybe you’re still caught somewhere in a dream, just waiting to wake up. “You’re, like - not normal.”

“Hey.” A light, careless shrug; her palm rests over the back of her neck. “No arguments here.”

You rub a hand over your eyes, smiling like an idiot, and take a breath.

It’s late January, and cool sunlight drips into the room, over your furniture and your floors and the angel right in the middle of your kitchen. It should wash her out, blur her at the edges; it doesn’t even come close. Turns her to a freeze frame instead, carefully color-graded, every hue just a bit too intense: skin ghost-pale, lips pouty and pink, hair jet-black and tangled to her waist. Your shirt hangs off of her slender frame like it aims to swallow her up. You thought you’d been stunned by Karina before, lulled by the late night, the electric rush of touching her - you’d assumed you could blame it on the alcohol, the slutty dress and the sultry makeup and the long-held habit of artistic romanticization-

But it’s nothing compared to seeing her now.

Karina crosses one leg over the other, and waits as though expecting a rating: to be starred out of five like a film.

Face scrubbed clean. Bone structure a study of faultless symmetry, delicate in a way that feels both inhuman and invulnerable. She’s so classically breathtaking - a miraculous second coming of a tragic, iconic movie star, a phenomenon back from the grave; jaw and nose and mouth all clean lines, aesthetically precise art - but God, those eyes. Enormous without the thick liner, suggestive only of impossible innocence. Like some darling baby animal, some long-lashed lamb to the slaughter - something pristine and completely untouched.

The morning after, the direct light, the exposed behind-the-scenes - she’s still beyond beautiful.

And somehow she’s still here with you.

“That’s insane, by the way,” you say, unable to stop yourself. “That you stayed.”

There’s a loud cracking sound.

You squint, disoriented. “What-”

Karina blinks at you, wide-eyed; her jaw shifts. The sound echoes again, startling and sudden. “What?”

“Are-” You step closer. “Are you chewing on fucking glass or something?”

“Or something,” Karina replies, smile’s tiny and closed-off. She gestures to the cup next to her. “It’s just ice.”

She’s so calm watching you approach her. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the freakout, for the breakdown - or, at the very least, the scrambling excuses before the walk of shame. Here’s the truth: she doesn’t know you. Here’s an even worse truth: judging by her hickey that looks like you might’ve tried to rip her throat out earlier, she’d have every right to take one look at you and run.

Karina doesn’t do any of it. Just raises her cup to her lips and tips it back, the arc of her neck so inviting.

“That’s so fucking bad for your enamel.” You’re laughing again. You’re in front of her now, settled between her legs. “You’re gonna break a tooth.”

Karina sets her glass down. Wipes the corner of her mouth with her wrist, eyes locked amusedly on yours - heavy-lidded enough to seem lazy, but pupils blown enough to be a siren call, a deliberate suggestion.

“Oh, no,” she says, all smoky sarcasm. “Who’d ever want me then?”

She parts her thighs the second you touch them; her body’s so obedient under your fingertips, like a doll’s, something to be dressed up and posed and played with. Daring you to do everything you’re already thinking about doing.

“You’re ridiculous,” you murmur, and give in completely.

So:

Look, you know exactly how the movies would frame this. Pandering to the wide-eyed teenagers and hopeless romantics; adding the swell of strings every time your eyes or hands or lips meet, each motion accompanied with unsubtle cues - there’s the meet-cute, there’s the moment, there’s the love-at-first-sight. It’s ridiculous to drag any of that into your real life, of course. It’d be like believing in God. Giving up logic to put your faith in something silly and mythic and implausible - to follow true love like a religion, expecting it to save your soul; to pray to the one like a healing property, a benevolent higher power.

You can’t believe in that. You can’t.

But-

Karina pulls back the barest amount, eyelids fluttering open like a new day dawning, and smiles when she sees the look on your face. So sweet and gorgeous; so struck and adoring. So comfortable wrapped up in your arms.

“Hi,” she murmurs.

And - as though it’s some bone-deep instinct, saturating your bloodstream - you just have to kiss her again.

Don’t you feel that? you think of telling her again, your hand slipping to cup her cheek - the sentiment always seems to come back around. You swear you can see scenes flashing behind your eyelids, the beginnings of a creative epiphany; it must be seeping through your fingers, staining her skin with ink, every possible action depicted neatly between brackets. A laugh, a look, a touch. A version of Karina projected across the silver screen to a wild, wanting audience. Don’t you see what you could do for me? What you’re capable of becoming?

You can’t believe in any of this, but it’s gotta be something close.

The feeling doesn’t end when the kiss does: only intensifies, made tangible somehow. Sculpted into the spit-slick curve of her lips, the flinty gleam in her eye. Like she feels it too. Like she knows.

“And it’s not insane that I stayed,” Karina says, belatedly. “You asked me to.”

For a moment you just stare at her, seconds from her mouth and speechless.

It’s the truth without difficulty. It’s a confession with no strings attached. It’s the fucking dangerous way she says it - as if whatever you want extends to a lot more than sex.

“And you don’t-” Your throat closes over a swallow; you find your eyes darting between hers, searching for anything but honesty. “You don’t think that’s insane? Doing whatever a stranger tells you to?”

Karina only laughs her strange laugh, gritty the way good music is, demanding to be heard.

“Nope,” she says, like this is all so simple. “That’s just what I do.”

It’s unbearably filthy in its implication - and it’s exactly what you need.

The room seems to fill with potential, fantasies pouring in from the ceiling, enough to bloat any manuscript to its breaking point. You let out a breathless laugh, loud and unabashed. You think of pushing for even more, pressing your nails in and digging deeper - why me, why this, why now - but Karina leans in close before you can and slots her mouth to yours, and you’re no fool: there’s no line of questioning worth giving that up.

Seems like you’ll have to come up with this character motivation all on your own.

“Look at us,” she murmurs against your lips - meaning this very minute, the chemistry, how every glittering star must’ve conspired to get you here. “Kinda feels like this was meant to be, huh?”

She’s clearly kidding, because it’s too soon and too fucking crazy, but-

Well, the way you kiss her then is absolutely your version of a yes.

Here’s something people should probably know about artists like you:

You’re rather enamored with the idea of a magnum opus.

It’s a natural thing to reach for, to visualize - the concept of your one great masterpiece. Something you can pour years and years into, water into roaring reckless oceans; time transforming the things you make into something worth remembering forever. Everyone you know - your sculptors, your songwriters - has their own version of this, somewhere. When I finally create this one perfect thing I’ll be - go on, fill in the blank. Fulfilled. Gratified. Happy. When I finally do this, I’ll feel whole.

It’s strangely fantastical. A lifelong dream a kid would have - a childlike, storybook aspiration.

Yours - as far as you’ve figured out - looks a little like this:

“It’s not as romantic as it should be,” you admit, now. “I’m not really into that as a theme. True love, I mean. Or optimism. Or hope. I want something more…” Something rougher, you mean. Something with pain. Something with blood and bruises. “Nuanced, you know? Complicated, messy.”

“I get it,” replies Karina. She has her hands twisted in her lap, watching you very closely. You’re obsessed with the way she looks at you - like she’s drinking every word in with those smoldering dark eyes, greedy for more. For you. “All the best art is about pain, huh?”

You snap your fingers, pleased to be understood. “Exactly.”

Karina smiles, small and knowing, and gestures you on.

In your vision, your magnum opus is always about a girl. Like you said, it’s the way it goes with all the best films ever made: not about love, but the futility of it lasting. Think of all the famed examples - think of the filmmakers and their obsessions, sneaking the great loves of their lives between each line: there’s something she said, there’s a dress she wore, there’s a conversation they had in the middle of the night, tangled up in sheets and whispering against skin. Your future muse will be just like that. A reincarnation of the infamous women who haunt all the greatest artists - an amalgamation of their bodies contorted into narratives and replicated in loving, graphic detail. Someone with skin like marble, a statue you could take a sledgehammer to. Someone who looks unfathomably pretty when she cries.

Someone like-

“Uh-huh,” says Karina. She must’ve just gotten out of the shower before you found her, because her hair’s damp enough to have left wet patches on your t-shirt. She licks her bottom lip, once. “Sure.”

Someone to be what you’ve always wanted: a flawless girl to fall from the sky into your lap. To fulfill your promise to yourself: when I meet her, I’ll know. I’ll be able to make this movie. When I meet her, everything will slip exactly into place.

Karina cracks another ice cube between her teeth.

“So,” she says, low with insinuation. “When you told me last night that you found me inspiring…”

She doesn’t need to finish the question. She knows exactly what you want.

“You’re…” You shake your head. “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I saw you and I just - I felt like I knew. I knew. I wanted you.” You shrug helplessly, smiling. “Do you think I’m nuts?”

She should, probably. You’re a total stranger, a practical lunatic, an artist talking of your visions like you’re possessed. You don’t know her - that’s the reality of the situation. You don’t know her.

But then there’s everything else.

The unbelievable sex, the staying the night; the way she lets you touch her, blinking slow and subservient, like you already have a claim to her body. You think muse and you think in abstract concepts, glittering stars, guiding lights; you think of skin cut up and sewn together, of creators and their finest monsters, of the implicit poetry in the undoing. You think muse and you think of the way Karina smiles at you now, full lips and frail bones, a painter’s portrait reference. Unmoving, unafraid. Too otherworldly for your day-to-day but just right when she’s in your arms, like a trial-run demonstration: this is what we’re capable of. You could make it happen. You could make me fit.

You swear you’ve been dreaming of someone like her your whole fucking life.

You think muse, and now you can only think of her.

It’s a sign. It must be. And this, the next one:

“No,” Karina says, easily. “I think you’re just like everyone else.” But she raises an eyebrow, so you know it’s a joke. “I think you’re all the same.”

You laugh, delighted; Karina’s smile widens, shows her teeth. “Shut up.”

Karina acquiesces immediately - claps a hand over her mouth like it’ll keep any other words from escaping. It’s so adorable that you can’t keep yourself from pouncing, suddenly all over her like an animal: wrenching her thin wrist down, fingers threading through her hair, tugging her lips to yours as if you’ve been starved and she’s something to devour. She’s so cold, ice still melting on her tongue; even her body feels glacial, more porcelain than real. It drives you wild - the stunning impossibility of her. The desire to see it all reworked, unwound, shattered.

“So,” you breathe over her mouth. “I can write about you?”

“Babe.” Karina’s dark eyes sparkle, frozen-over streets in the mid-winter sun. “You can do anything you want with me.”

That’s the whole point of having a muse, after all. Everything they are becomes yours.

“But,” you can’t help saying right after: “you don’t have to be, like - concerned. About what I said. About art and pain. I mean…” You falter. You’re standing in between her spread legs now, thumbing the sharp curve of her jaw. “It’s fiction. I’m not that kind of guy in real life - I’m not going to hurt you.”

Karina just stares at you, sentiment clear and unspoken.

“Not like - not seriously.” You roll your eyes, laughing it off. “Not like that.”

“Not like that,” Karina echoes. The hickey on her neck seems to flush redder every time you look at it - a photograph in a darkroom, developing. “But in other ways.”

Your mouth opens, but whatever defense you might’ve had gets traitorously stuck in your throat.

Karina laughs hoarsely, lets you trace her bottom lip with a finger. She seems to get the picture - that you’d love to see it bitten and bloody, but only ever in the name of art. There’s a kind of sick, sadistic beauty in destruction, battles waged and lost. She leans into your touch like she’s seen all the war films and knows precisely why they’re so well-loved.

“For the record,” she tells you, arms looped loosely around your neck: “I look very pretty when I cry.”

“Jesus Christ.” You’re smiling. She couldn’t be more perfect if you’d dreamt her up yourself. “Then I guess I’ll have to make it happen.”

It’s like fate, probably.

(Up next in your script:

The girl is standing in the stranger’s bathroom. She’s turning a little glass perfume bottle over in her hands when he stops in the doorway. He’s perfectly content to watch her; she’s the kind of beautiful that deserves to be observed, like some exotic wild animal caged between four walls in an elaborate exhibit, mildly unaware of all the attention. Her hair is messy; her head is tilted down. Unseeing.

Oh, he says. That was my-

Except he doesn’t even get the rest of the sentence out before the girl whirls around, and the bottle slips from her hand and shatters on the floor.

Jesus. The stranger jolts back. Jumpy. He’s not too concerned about the broken bottle; it’s not his, anyway. Why the fuck did you do that?

Sorry, the girl says. She’s leaning rather casually against the counter, observing the glass covering the ground, the sickly-sweet smell of the perfume sticking to the tile. Honeysuckle and the sharp note of alcohol, rendered unrecognizable. You scared me.

He looks down. A crystalline stretch of tiny little shards - if she tried to move she’d slice her foot open.

No worries, he says. Hold on.

He ducks into the kitchen to get a broom and when he comes back he stops in his tracks. There’s something slightly off about the picture in front of him. She’s small against the background counter, frozen, barely blinking. Everything about her looks suddenly frail, fair skin ghostly underneath shitty bathroom lighting, cheekbones gaunt and sunken-in, hair pouring ink-black in endless waves. A vengeful spirit. An incorporeal haunting.

Did you…? he starts to say, thrown.

She blinks, finally. Did I what?

He pauses, reassesses. She’s gorgeous. She’s art. She’s vibrantly alive.

Never mind, he says.

It seems kind of like she’d moved, but he can’t tell. He forgets about it. She’s still beautiful and she seems okay and so he steps forward and clears the worst of the glass out of the way.

It’s silly, she says, watching him. I used to know someone who wore that perfume.

It was my ex-girlfriend’s, he says. She left it here a while back. I think it’s a common brand or whatever. Hey, let me help you.

He’s very chivalrous about it, sweeping her off her feet, cradling her bridal-style across the possible remnants of glass. She laughs all the while, playing into it - a princess out of a fairy tale, being carried to safety by some gallant knight. But then he sets her down and cups her ass and says, You gonna pay me back for the property damage or what? and she laughs harder, because there’s nothing funnier than that: sweet moments turned filthy, a startling hairpin turn in intention.

Or - conversely - a revelation of the absolute truth. Because what else could he ever want from her?

So she says, Yeah, sure, take everything, and leans in to kiss him.

It’s a normal kiss, mostly. It’s just that it begins pointedly erotic but seems to turn strange after a second, like he might be gripping her hair too hard, like she might be corpse-limp in his arms, like at any moment he could unhinge his jaw and sprout fangs and swallow her whole, cannibalistic, viperous. There’s too much spit and sound. There’s too much teeth and selfishness. It stretches on too long and lingers where it shouldn’t and overstays its welcome terribly - the score seems to fall off-beat, the lighting seems to shift dark and discolored-

But then the kiss breaks, and it’s over.

When he pulls off of her she looks like the perfect picture of flushed contentment. Eyes half-lidded and lashes fluttering, her pouty lips swollen and rosy. Smiling like she wants more, like she wants it so, so bad.

It didn’t get you? he asks finally, looking at her neck, thinking of thorns and pinprick pain and the rivulet of crimson that’d decorated her throat. The glass?

No, she says. Don’t you wanna fuck me now?

Oh, God, he says, grinning, and every other thought melts away into nothing. He likes how she doesn’t play coy. He likes how she’s smaller and has to tilt her chin up to look at him. He wants to fuck her, so he does.

It’s excellent sex. The blood on the tile doesn’t really matter.)

Before you really start writing, there’s just one singular problem: you don’t know anything about her.

“That’s not true,” Karina replies, right away.

You open your mouth, then close it, because - okay, she’s not completely wrong.

For about an hour now you just haven’t been able to stop talking to her. About anything, everything: your start into screenwriting, your favorite novels, your greatest inspirations, your neverending passion for eerie, erotic art. You can’t seem to shut up. And it would be bad - would be making you feel self-conscious right now, if it were anyone else - but it’s just not. Because it’s, well-

It’s you, you told her, thoughtfully, watching as the sun climbed higher into the sky, golden light grazing each scalpel-sharp edge of Karina’s body. You’re easy to talk to. Has anyone ever told you that?

Karina blinked at you. Tucked a strand of silky hair behind her ear and looked away, considering it.

She has this way about her: this serene openness to her big eyes, her body language. Leaning back on her hands, humming and nodding and saying I get it, I feel that way too, I understand with such sweet sincerity that you can’t help but believe her. Like a Catholic confessional, a pristinely blank page - something you could pour hours and hours of words into that would never, ever complain.

Yeah, Karina said, finally. She pulled one leg up to her chest; you could see the lacy black of her panties. I get that all the time.

Just one of those people, huh? Her character was taking shape already. A vault for everyone else’s thoughts and ideas, cradling them between her fingers like something infinitely precious. A listener. Such a lovely trait; a perfect protagonist characteristic. An observer.

Yeah. Her cheek rested gently against a knobby knee. Exactly.

It’s something of an art study. You’ve been filing away these details about Karina since the moment you met her, unraveling her bit by bit.

She always seems to think deeply before she speaks, a sort of charming self-scripting, like she wants to make sure she gets every sentence just right. She makes silence seem like the most natural thing in the world. She doesn’t laugh nervously or blush or get embarrassed, ever. She’d mentioned offhand during one of your tangents about your most beloved movies that she tends to like films about gorgeous, dangerous, scarily self-possessed girls: Thirteen and Black Swan and Girl, Interrupted. She seems both intensely present and consistently lost in thought, there one moment and gone the next, her long-lashed gaze falling in and out of focus like a camera lens. A contradiction, you think to yourself. An enigma, even. Profoundly complicated. Not just a girl but something more.

Art in and of itself, displayed deliberately on your kitchen counter, waiting to be understood.

“No, you’re right.” Your fingers have strayed to your open laptop; you’re seconds from typing Karina’s name like a title, something you’ve created all on your own. “I know…”

You’re trying to think of something nonchalant to say and failing. I know you - the first instinct, somehow. I know you’re something brilliant and remarkable and new. I know I’ve never felt this way before about anyone. I know there’s something here, I know what I feel, I know what I want - you, you, you.

Karina stares at the ice melting in her glass.

Then she says, mouth tripping up at a corner: “You know I’m a world-class fuck.”

“Jesus.” You laugh out loud, surprised. “Okay, yeah. That.” A pause. “And, obviously-”

“Obviously,” Karina echoes, like she knows where this is going.

“I know that you’re, like - outrageously fucking beautiful.”

Karina hums once, letting the compliment wash over her, and turns to look out the window.

You bite down on your lip - bite back all the other too-soon things you could say about her, threatening to claw their way out of your mouth - and go in on your script instead.

It’s shockingly easy to write with her in the room. The details seem to stitch themselves together on-page, the restorative aftermath of an autopsy: sealing the slit chest cavity back up, prepping a corpse for an open casket, making something disconnected whole and beautiful again. You’d pulled these specifics from her like pulsing, throbbing organs - her tits, her tone, her tiny waist - and now all you’re doing is repurposing them. You know her body now. You turn stretches of pale, bruised-pink skin into prose, the curl of her little fingers around her thigh into dialogue. You imagine taking that perfect frame and picking it apart again, bit by bit; not just undressing her but peeling back layers of flesh, familiarizing yourself with the stark scarlet of her bloodstream. Until there’s nothing to hide and you can finally say it - I know you - and it’ll feel earned, and real, and honest.

All very melodramatic, of course. It’s just the process: the natural consequence of being a writer.

Your eyes trace the jutting protrusion of muscle in Karina’s throat, and you think about fucking her again.

“Also,” you say, as though your earlier conversation isn’t long over. “I want to know-”

Karina makes a huffy, half-impatient noise.

You grin, gaze flicking back to her face. “What?”

“You want to know more?” Her brows furrow in exaggerated confusion; her smile is absurdly self-deprecating. As if there’s anything she could possibly be insecure about. “You already got the two most interesting things about me, babe.”

“Stop.” Your mouth twitches. “No way.”

Karina’s smile stills in place, expectant. “No?”

“Come on.” Your hand slips from the keyboard to trace her knee. “I’m sure there’s all kinds of interesting things about you I haven’t learned yet.”

The laugh she lets out is quiet and nearly secretive, legs parting to let you touch her. You’re already half in some faraway daydream, wondering if you can bottle the color of her eyes and turn it loose on the page.

“Okay,” Karina says, easily. She nudges your laptop away, scoots closer to you, her sharp chin pointed down at you. “Come and learn them, then.”

“God.” As if that’s what you’re doing. Memorizing her body as some private education; taking her apart in a classroom dissection. “Can I - I’m trying to write, Karina. I’m being productive. I…” You’re shaking your head as though you’re not already giving in, fingers slipping up her thighs - she’s smirking at you like she knows it. “You’re fucking insatiable, you know that?”

“Then satiate me.” Karina’s head tilts, lids heavy. “Fuck me. Use me.” She leans down like she’s telling you a filthy, sordid secret. “Cum in me like I know you want to.”

There’s something surreal about how certain she is: never tripping over her words or waffling over intentions, the most practiced actress you’ve ever seen. Every move - her tongue wetting her bottom lip, her hand sliding gracefully through her hair, her mouth forming a sweet little pout - all clean, choreographed precision.

I know you, she says - like it’s earned, real, honest. Inexplicable, but there anyway. I know you want to.

“Karina.” Her name comes out embarrassingly strangled. You’re pulling her thighs further apart, toying with the edge of her underwear. “You’re such a fucking - you’re so needy.”

Her smirk sharpens even as you tug her panties roughly to the side. “I’m what?”

“Needy.”

“No.” She’s so wet - she’s probably seconds from dissolving into a whimpering breathless thing, begging to be underneath you, begging for more. That damn smirk is probably seconds from shattering completely. “What were you going to call me?”

“Nothing.” You drag a finger down the slick drenched heat of her cunt.

“A slut.” Her voice is a purr, gravelly and sensual. “You think I’m just this fucking slut who needs your cock all the time, huh?”

But it’s the kind of question that you already both know the answer to. Karina takes your finger-fucking so well, hips raised and rutting, hair cutting across her cheekbones - seems to give herself over to desire so fucking easily, with her whole body, back arching and neck craned and hot little cunt a sloppy mess. Never puts up a fight, never demures or acts shy; never says wait or don’t or stop. Only spreads her legs, and drips down your hand, and waits to be fucked good and hard.

And - hey, there’s one dirty word for a girl like that.

“Well.” You raise your eyebrows at her: a challenge. “Are you?”

It’s dangerous. This is all dangerous. Stumbling down a treacherous path, asking a stranger something like this. Are you what I think you are? Do I know you? Do I really?

Karina makes a low, luxurious noise at the stretch of your fingers in her cunt, buried to the knuckle.

“Sure,” she says - and the gleam in her eye tells you she knows exactly what she’s getting herself into. “I’m whatever you want me to be.”

So, it’s possible this is really the most interesting thing about her: she’s the kind of girl who never says no.

That scene goes down how all scenes should:

“Fuck, fuck, fuck-”

Karina’s choking out curses like she can’t recall any other words, head lolling back to expose the pretty bob of her throat. You thrust deep right then and she lets out a sound like an aching gasp, like you’ve doubled down with a fist to her gut, like you’re knocking the the air right out of her; you might as well be - oh, she moans, like she could be in shock or awe or pain - with the way you’ve got one of her thighs pulled up so you can fuck deep into her tight dripping cunt. It’s not nice, not really. Her back keeps hitting your counter. You keep staring at her neck and her hair and her face: the faint flush of her cheeks, the flawless construction of her bones underneath - there’s so much unmarked skin - God, she’s so clean, it’s like she’s never been fucking touched-

“You gonna cum for me?” you murmur, voice coming out thick and half-animalistic.

She has one hand curled around the back of your neck. She’s got those ridiculous clawed nails on her but she never presses down. Her pussy can’t stop clenching around your cock but she takes it so well, lets you make room inside her little cunt, shuts her eyes and trips over her own breath as you force her spine hard against your counter over and over again.

“Karina.”

“Yeah,” she exhales, raspy and strained, as your cock stretches her out. “Fuck, yeah-”

“Cum for me, honey. Cum all over my cock - oh, there you go, good girl-”

It’s hypnotic. The tiny bitten-off sounds spilling from her ice-cold mouth - that small pristine face and all that hair tangled to her waist, just available to be knotted and tugged and fucked all the way up - Karina clings to you when she cums, and you feel so much bigger than her when she does, like you’ve got her sloppy and open around your cock and you could do anything to her, that’s what she told you, and even if she hadn’t, it’s not like she could stop you - she’s gorgeous but she doesn’t have it in her - she’s just too fucking delicate-

It happens too fast to process.

One minute you’re buried inside her pussy and the next Karina’s on her knees, on the ground, and you’re jerking your cock until you’re cumming all over her.

It’s obscene. It’s fucking inevitable. Thick ropes of creamy cum coating her forehead, her cheekbone, her nose and mouth and getting all in that hair-

Her hair. You don’t realize how hard you’re gripping her hair with one hand - balled in a brutal fist at the back of her head - until you disentangle your fingers from it and Karina sinks to the floor like she’s just been cut loose from marionette strings, breathing fast and hard. She doesn’t even say anything: doesn’t comment on the fact that you’d just shoved her straight to the ground or complain when the head of your cock smears cum across her jaw. Doesn’t even flinch when your cock slaps heavy across her cheek, at the indecent sound of the impact.

You’re staring at her, open-mouthed. At her gorgeous, breathtaking, defiled face.

Karina’s not looking at you. Instead, she’s preening in the most lewd, pornographic way possible: swiping her thumb through the cum streaking across her forehead, popping it into her mouth to suck. Halfway through she seems to remember you’re still in the room - seems to recall the value of a performance - and she redirects her gaze up at you, lids heavy, and smirks.

“Did I…” you start, without knowing how the sentence will end. “Did I - was I-”

Karina lifts a cum-covered eyebrow. Her mouth’s an arresting pink, puckering around her thumb like it puckered around the cubes of ice, how her lips formed a ring around your cock back in the bookstore yesterday. She lets it slip free, shiny with spit.

“No,” she says. “You’re good.”

You can’t stop looking at the cum caught in her hairline. She’d been so fucking clean.

You glance down and realize there are strands of black hair broken off in your clenched fist.

Karina’s looking at her hair in your hand too, now, but with a sort of amused detachment. She stands shakily, using the counter for support. There’s cum all over her. Her knees are red from how hard she’d been pushed down.

“You’re so cute,” she tells you, grazing the side of your neck with her fingertips. “There’s no shame in being rough with me, babe.”

“Right.” There’s an unnamed pressure coiling in your chest. “But - but you-”

“Hey.” The word comes out in a rasp, and then Karina laughs, pushing the low hoarse lilt of her voice to its limits. She steps closer, angles her little cum-stained chin up at you. “Are you really gonna tell me you don’t like seeing me covered in your cum?” She’s tonguing the corner of her mouth. “Turning me into a-” her smirk pulls wicked; your next breath hitches so badly- “messy fucking whore for your cock?”

“God,” you get out, because she’s winding an arm around your neck, and her pretty face is still sticky with your cum. “I-”

“It’s what you wanted.” Karina blinks, in a show of such doe-eyed naïveté that saliva begins pooling hot in your mouth - like you’re feral, like you’re rabid. “Isn’t it?”

You’re looking down again. Her knees are going to bruise. Black and blue, as if someone’s bullied her in the schoolyard, pulled her pigtails and knocked her to the asphalt. An echo of something teachers could’ve told her years ago: oh, look, he’s mean to you because he’s got a crush. It’s okay, really - he only hurts you because he likes you.

“You like me like this,” Karina murmurs, dangerously low. “All sloppy and slutty for you.” Her gaze is trained on your mouth. “Marking me up.” Her hair slips from your hand. “Owning me.”

Her name clogs your throat, cloying and candy-sweet. “Karina-”

Karina’s head tilts. “Yes or no?”

She’s too close to you. She’s so filthily beautiful she seems somewhat alien, some kind of foreign invention. Her jaw is smeared with your cum and her flawless teeth shine like jewels and she’s like every creative vision you’ve ever had cut in clips and playing back in a movie theater, made to be scrutinized.

“Yes,” you tell her, winded. “You’re fucking - you’re unreal, you know that?”

You’re smiling like it’s flattery, like it’s an exaggeration. Like she’s not living, breathing, visionary art.

She smiles back, like she knows just how much you really mean it.

“So I’ve been told,” Karina says, and taps your neck, lightly. “Go make breakfast.” She shakes her hair out; some of it gets stuck to the cum on her cheekbone. “I’m taking another shower.”

“Right.” You bite into your bottom lip, hand skimming down her side. “Go get clean.”

“Clean?” She steps back and flashes a disbelieving grin, gestures pointedly at herself - her creamy thighs, her porn star tits in your t-shirt, her body like sex itself. Dirty by design. “Never happening.”

Some cynical part of you keeps waiting for a slip-up, some mistake in a masterfully crafted script - no one can be that gorgeous and still be here with you. But Karina moves and your eyes are hopelessly drawn to the disheveled curtain of her hair spiraling down her back, the sharp distinct lines of her calves, the flex of muscle in her thighs. Her hands, balled into little fists. She’s alluring as if manufactured that way: engineered to be perfectly bruisable, ruinable. It defies logic. It’s movie magic.

“Well.” You snort with laughter, swat at Karina’s ass as she turns to go. “At least you can try.”

You don’t even think she can help it - that’s the thing. It’s just what she was made for.

“What would you have done if I said no, though?” you ask after a moment, as she wavers in the doorway. “Like - what if I told you I didn’t like you like this?”

Karina shrugs.

“I would’ve been something else,” she says, and closes the bathroom door behind her.

(Next:

The stranger and the girl fuck and afterwards he promises her breakfast and then he realizes his cabinets are bare, his fridge painfully unstocked. Sorry, he says, as she pokes around his kitchen. I don’t know how that happened. I usually have something to eat here, I swear.

I don’t mind, she says. Her fingertips sweep his shelves. She seems fascinated by the emptiness, admiring the vacancy. Oh, wait, look.

She finds a half-eaten jar of honey that she ends up scooping up crudely with her fingers, dripping sticky amber down her hand. He’d tell her that’s disgusting but she makes it - as she seems to make everything - into a pointed seduction, her tongue pink and wetly visible, her skin gleaming as she licks it off. It’s funny. He’d never thought it possible to turn eating into some sort of sexual performance but she manages it anyway: meets his eyes, sucks loud and lewd, smacks her lips and wipes her mouth with her thumb, ill-mannered and stunning.

I can’t imagine that’s very filling, he says, delighted by her commitment.

Yeah, well, she says. It’s a good thing I hate feeling full.

But it seems like a moment of hilarious irony when ten minutes later he’s got her bent over his kitchen counter, tits pressed punishingly to the flat surface, honey stuck to her neck and collarbone as she’s fucked hard again and again, stuffed with his cock, his fingers everywhere, like her own body barely even belongs to her - all mine, he keeps saying, and means it; you’re all mine. All filled up. Overfed. Bursting.

Sex is a manner of consuming, it seems. He might as well be eating her alive.)

“Do you do this a lot?”

Eventually, it turns into one of those lazy Saturdays. An afternoon of sitcom plot points.

It’s just so easy to fill the time, the space, the page - you tell Karina some inane story from your college years and she reacts in all the right places like your own built-in studio audience; she says something off-handed and enticingly vague and suddenly you have a new thread of dialogue to explore. You’re both sprawled out over your couch, Karina’s got her thighs tucked over your legs, wearing another one of your t-shirts, a fresh hickey bruising over her throat. There’s something delightfully domestic about it - like you’ve been doing it for a lot longer than you have, or like you could do it eternally if given the chance, holding all the silken comfort of an old routine. When you’d mentioned it - I kind of feel like I could do this forever - she’d laughed her scratchy laugh and said forever’s nowhere near as long as you think it is, babe. A perfectly cinematic line. You stared at her, leaned over, and added it immediately to your draft.

“This whole…” You’re trying to elaborate now, staring at the blinking cursor on your laptop screen. Your knuckles skim her bare, bony knees. “You know.”

“Eloquent.”

“Shut up.”

“I thought you were a writer.”

“Karina.” You’re charmed by the drawl of her voice, the raspy roll of sarcasm. “I’m just wondering.”

Karina shifts in your lap. You’ve got one hand sneaking up the hem of her shirt - your shirt - skating up her tummy, her ribs. You’re probably about five minutes from snapping your laptop shut and pulling her on top of you and saying something crass about her tits and passing it off as a character study.

“What do you mean?” She’s as close to clean as she can be. You made sure of it - licked the hollow of her collarbone earlier after she got out of the shower, tasted nothing but soap and skin. “Do I have a lot of sex with strangers? Or do I stay the night a lot after I have sex with strangers?”

“Both.” You think of taking her hair down, sifting your hand through it, wrapping the strands around your fingers. “All of the above.”

Karina shoots you a look, fluttered lashes, suggestive understanding. You hear it without her having to say it. You want me to tell you that you’re special.

“I’ve kind of been going through a phase,” she says instead, nonchalantly.

Your eyebrows fly up. “A phase?”

“I’ve been, you know.” She gives an airy sigh. “Trying to find myself in the big city. Running wild. Terrified of monogamy but being very brave and quirky about it. Sordid past with love and romance and general human connection. Doing the whole manic pixie dream girl thing.” Her eyes flick to your open laptop, abruptly too wide and innocent. “That sound about right?”

“Fuck off.” It’s a complete non-answer. You run a hand past her stomach, laughing. “You’re fucking with me.”

“What?” Karina inches closer. “Isn’t that what you wanted? Your textbook rom-com love interest?”

You make a rather disparaging sound in the back of your throat. “Ugh.”

“Oh, my bad.” Her mouth curls, contradictory. There’s nothing apologetic about her. “I forgot. You don’t believe in art about love. You wanna see broken people and broken people only.”

“See?” You’re obsessed with her tone; all flirtation, some distorted version of come-hither charm. Talking of suffering like it’s a seduction tactic. “You get it.”

Karina rakes a hand through her hair; her fingers fall to the back of her neck and linger there. She pulls herself out of your lap and turns, hooks one bare long leg over you until she’s straddling you. Your hands find her hips. You’re disarmed by her strange weightlessness, like she’s seconds from either shattering or taking flight.

Then she asks, “Is that what you’re doing with me?”

It’s gotta be a very roundabout request to fuck her stupid, because she follows it up torturously: ducks her chin, parts her lips, rocks her hips down until you groan. You watch her throat, the way muscle works over bone, picturing unspeakable things: taking her by that pretty neck and pinning her to the wall, ripping your shirt right off of her with your fingertips leaving bruises - bending her over to fuck her fast and cruel until her cunt’s raw and aching and leaking your cum - until she’s begging pathetically, saying please, God, please - and you’re triumphant, victorious. Telling her you asked for this, didn’t you? You said anything. You said anything I want.

“Depends,” you reply, when you can breathe again. “Are you a broken person?”

Karina stops, moments from your mouth.

“Depends,” she echoes. “Is that what you want from me?”

It actually takes a beat for the question to sink in. Then two, then-

“No,” you say, loudly. “Obviously not, Karina, Jesus. Why would I…”

You falter.

Karina only looks back at you, patient, tolerant. Like if right now you said that’s exactly it: I want you broken, I want you ruined, I want you decaying and dead and buried, she’d smile and say do your worst. Flashing those white, white teeth, perfect like pearls, ready to be knocked right out and strung together.

You blink the bloody vision away. “Why would I ever want that?”

Karina studies you for a second longer, expression indecipherable.

“Okay,” she agrees, breezily. “Then I’m not broken. I’m just going through a phase, like I said. I don’t like being tied down.” Her shirt rides tantalizingly high up her thighs; her hand slips down to palm your cock. There’s a twist to her lips, a dirty sort of smirk. “You understand that, right?”

You stare at her.

“Right?” Karina prods, again, low and sultry.

“Right,” you say, unable to fight your sudden smile.

The pout of her mouth’s an inevitability; her little body in your lap’s a seductive form of foreshadowing. You dig your fingers into her protruding ribs, playful, and you don’t quite get the squeal of laughter you were expecting - all Karina does is curl closer, expecting more, expecting harder. She knows what you’re capable of. You’re both just biding your time until you cross the same line you’ve been crossing and you fall back into bed again.

“A phase,” you add, considering. It intrigues you, anyway - the casualness, the connotation. “So - I’m not special, then. That’s the moral of this story.”

Karina’s fingers sift gently through your hair. “You wanna be special?”

“I mean, yeah.” Your palm falls to her neck, presses down. She doesn’t seem to mind. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Her eyebrows rise in vague, unconvinced amusement. It makes sense: she’s the most special of all, a cosmic glitch, an angelic fluke. Someone like Karina wouldn’t understand the aching, clawing, consuming desire to be extraordinary. She’s already there.

Your hand on her throat looks even bigger now, tendons straining from underneath skin.

“I think we all want to feel important,” you mumble, thumb grazing gently across her jaw. “Don’t you?”

You’re pretty sure the wry, glittering smile that sits at Karina’s mouth is an answer in itself.

Alright, forget your television metaphors - you’re not sure there’s any sitcom out there that goes quite like this.

“By the way,” you say, grinning against her hair as you pull her to the bedroom. “Did you say you don’t like being tied down?”

Karina turns in your arms and doesn’t even flinch when you force her too hard against the doorframe and its edge smacks into her shoulder blade, digging in hard. You should apologize but you don’t; the possibility of her in pain seems laughable, a distant fantasy. This is how it goes, fucking a girl who looks like a god - your brain is convinced she’s wholly immune to hurt. The universe wouldn’t actually let someone so pretty bleed.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, voice raspy with insinuation. “Let me rephrase.”

“Karina,” you say, not really like a warning - more like you’ve got something to prove. This is real. You’re really here. You’re really this perfect, gorgeous, greedy thing. You’re really made for me.

Karina only lets her lips tilt in a smirk, devilish and knowing.

“I meant that I don’t like commitment,” she says. “I love being tied down.”

She’s still smiling when you shove her through the doorway, across the threshold - across that same old fucking line.

Not that it makes a difference now, but one of the reasons you and your most recent ex-girlfriend broke up was because of what you’d both referred to as sexual incompatibility. Actually, there were about fourteen other things, too - she was a trainwreck and a textbook attention whore; you spent all your time writing and she took offense to the fact that you found your scripts more interesting than her - but the crux of the sex problem between the two of you was that she thought you wanted too much power over her. She seemed to assume that was the point of potentially tying her up and shit like that: to exert power. To put you and only you in control. To make her into this helpless little toy - and I hate that, she’d said, working herself into a fit, I hate feeling helpless.

You hadn’t pushed her. You’d also tried to justify it in a number of ways. It isn’t about that. It’s not about control. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But it hadn’t made a difference and she hadn’t believed you and you’d come to the reluctant, inevitable conclusion that that particular dream would never actually get fulfilled.

Until-

“Look at you, baby.”

Until now, when you’ve got Karina stripped bare and tied to your bed, thighs parted as you kneel over her, pretty little cunt glistening wet and tits heaving with every breath as she waits, and waits, and waits.

Eyes half-lidded. Utterly fuckable. A curated collection of every salacious desire you’ve ever had.

“You’ve been looking at me forever,” murmurs Karina, her tone still humorous, like the reason her voice is run so ragged is because she’s holding back a fit of giggles. “You gonna fuck me anytime soon?”

To Karina’s credit, the idea of tying her up didn’t seem to bother her one bit. She’d let you knot her wrists to your bedframe and only grinned sharply when you asked her if it was too much. She didn’t seem to care about feeling helpless or feeling bad. Actually - judging from the wetness that collects on your fingers as you rub two of them over her cunt - it all seemed to turn her on either way.

“You’re so fucking mouthy.” You lift your hand only to ghost it over her stomach, leaving a lewd shiny streak across her skin. “It’s like you want to be punished.”

“Well, you put in all this work.” Karina yanks at the ropes tethering her wrists to the bedframe until they bite so severely into her skin that it turns white. “I’d hate to see it go to waste.”

“Not a waste.”

“No?” She’s got that seductive little smirk on, legs spread shamelessly, head back and throat bared.

“Nope.” Your eyes rove down her body. “It’s a great view, actually.”

You’re shocked by the sound Karina makes, then: harsh and derisive, scratchy and painful, like she’s choking badly around some injury in her throat. You’re half-expecting her to turn her face and spit blood onto your sheets - all murder-scene evidence, horrifically vibrant gore. Coughing up her own vocal chords.

It’s so awful it actually takes you a minute to realize that she’s laughing.

“Karina?” you say, perturbed.

“Oh, please.” Karina hacks out one more horrid laugh. “Cut the shit.”

You draw your hand back uncertainly. “What are you-”

“Come on, man.” There’s a glint to Karina’s gaze as she looks up at you: bored, mocking, infuriating. Irises flashing like the darkest corners of haunted houses, set-ups for a summoning; lashes like cobwebs, self-spun and delicate. “Fuck me or leave me alone.”

For a second you just stare at her, unmoving, something caustic and furious threading up your spine.

And then-

Look, none of this next part is on you. You can’t blame yourself. It’s her - her tiny hands in tight clenched fists, tummy so flat it seems caved-in, hollowed-out; her own glimmer of slick smeared on her belly, physical proof of how desperately slutty she really is. The bruise on her chest; the one on her throat. Her goddamn eyes. Her lazy, lilting drawl, the exact matter-of-fact casualness she’d had last night when she’d told you to hurt her - fuck me or leave me alone.

It’s so obvious what she’s trying to do - provoke a reaction out of you. It’s gotta be the only reason she’s talking to you like that. Like, what else are we here for? Like, what else could I possibly want from you?

So - no, God, it’s not your fault.

But-

It’s over before you can even think about it. Before you’ve even rationalized doing it, before you recognize the sound ricocheting through the room as the perfect violent land of a blow, the hot whiplash of skin on skin, your palm connecting with its target. Before you blink, and recalibrate, and you take in the rapid reddening of her cheek, and her angled jaw, and her hair falling starkly past her chin - it’s too late. It’s already done.

Because you’ve just slapped Karina clean across the face - hard.

“Oh.” You’re babbling as if on autopilot, all your nerves on shutdown. “Oh. Oh, God. Karina-”

Karina licks the corner of her lip, like she can taste the impact.

“Jesus Christ,” you’re saying, panicking; you can’t shut up. You don’t know what to do with your hands; you find yourself kneeling carefully in front of her, cupping her face, stroking her temples with your thumbs like it’ll soothe the sting. You can’t believe you hit her. All the things you could do to a girl like that, and you - “I’m sorry. I didn’t - fuck, baby. I’m sorry.”

Karina blinks up at you, expression placid and blank, porcelain-doll cool.

“For what?” she asks.

You freeze, her face still between your palms. “For-”

But the serene tilt of her mouth makes the words die in your throat.

“Seriously.” Karina’s voice is softer now, a kind twist of mirth. “Isn’t that what you wanted to do with me this whole time?”

Her features seem to fall out of alignment, occurring to you in cut, edited fragments - the baby-animal eyes, the bone-white glint of teeth, the pretty blooming flush of her cheek, blood rising underneath skin but never breaking through. No evidence of a limit breached; she doesn’t wince or wail or cry. She wears the hit so well. She’s smiling. A you-don’t-need-to-be-sorry smile, a you’re-forgiven smile: I’m strong, I’m good, I can take it. Whatever you need. Whatever you have to give.

You blink and Karina reassembles, stitched up at the seams, beautiful and uninjured and intact.

“You want this,” you exhale, a wondrous revelation.

“Of course.” Karina’s shoulders rise as much as they can with her arms so tightly tied back. “You do, don’t you?”

The panic recedes, and something else - something electric and brutal, visceral, intoxicating - takes its place instead.

It’s the way she says it: rhetorical, all-knowing. As if she’s seen exactly what’s in your mind - what repulsive daydreams have settled right behind your ribcage, clawing to be set free - and she’s offering her own body in sacrifice. Saying here, put them here.

So you do.

She doesn’t even look surprised when you slap her again.

“See?” Karina’s chin tips upwards in delicious, submissive invitation: eyes darkly pleased, pale skin a burning wildfire, curled mouth a beckoning. Like it’s been what she’s waiting for, all along. “There you are.”

And when you’re finally able to catch your breath:

Oh, you think, in some exhilarating epiphany. Here I am.

Every single reservation falls out the window. Karina’s smirk slants viciously and then you’ve got your hands all over her, on her shoulders and her tits and her hips and her throat and her face, thumb digging hard into her cheekbone. Any sort of gentle caution is gone when you’re getting on top of her and burying your cock deep inside the suffocating vice of her aching little cunt, half-drunk on the high mewling moans you’re forcing out of her, head swimming at the drenched audible sound of her pussy every time you fuck into her - at how tight she clenches down around your cock. Fuck it all, then, it’s not like it means anything - hurt me, she’d said, running through your head on loop; I want it so bad, I need it, hurt me - and so you do, wrapping a hand around her delicate neck and pressing down, slapping hard against her heaving tits, salivating over the marks that you leave. She doesn’t even struggle. Takes it like a good girl, an obedient girl: something meant to be hit and torn up and pulled apart. A hands-on art piece. A disassembling, made purely for audience consumption; a sign hung around her neck that says leave your mark, that’s the point. You’d been so naïve, thinking of being careful with her - like she’d ever even fucking want that-

“You like it like this.” Your voice sounds raw, almost unrecognizable; your fingers press into the base of her throat. “This is all you needed, huh? You just needed to be roughed up real hard.” Your hand trails up to grip a fistful of her hair, merciless. Karina shuts her eyes. “Like you’re just a slutty fucktoy-”

Karina chokes out a small, wet gasp.

“Oh, baby.” You yank harder at her hair. “It’s okay to admit it.”

But in a way, she already is. Doesn’t fight against the restraints tying her wrists, doesn’t flinch at how rough you’re fucking her, doesn’t whine or blink back tears at the harsh graze of your thumbnail against her nipple. Like she’s a plaything, here in your bed for your pleasure alone. Like-

“Like you were just fucking made for this, yeah?” She comes undone so easily: cunt a wet sticky mess when you reach down to rub her clit, teeth pearly-white where they’re caught on her bottom lip - though nothing can hold back the anguished noise Karina lets out at your pace, the thick stretch of your cock, your palm smacking at her tits over and over. “Look at you. That face, these tits, this little fucking cunt-”

Like it’s her one and only purpose - to have all her fair skin turned searing red and bruised under someone else’s hands. Her cunt just begging to be split open and stuffed full, railed so hard she could break. It’s gotta be what she was created for. She’s more than mortal, so above the concept of imperfection; a nasty little fuckdoll of a girl, meant to be used hard and licked clean. She looks too irresistible all fucked-out and ruined. It has to be in her nature. Made for this, you keep telling her: to be fucked until she can’t walk. To be treated forever how you’re treating her now.

Your ex-girlfriend couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s not about power or control at all.

“You’d really just let me do anything to you, huh?” you murmur, awed, but you’re holding her throat too hard for her to reply.

You fuck her, and fuck her, and fuck her. Rub at her clit until she clamps down and cums around you, until you can really get on top of her, force her to hold those huge tits together so you can fuck them. You can’t handle how tiny she is underneath you, her face and her mouth slack with lust, eyes glazed over entirely. She squeezes her tits around your cock. She’s hardly even human. It’s the best thing about her.

“That’s how I know you’re a fucking whore.” Your grin feels wide and manic on your face. You’re gonna cum all over her - again. “None of this even matters.”

And it’s only after - after you’ve painted her collarbone and chest creamy white and let up on her throat so she can fight for air; after you’ve groped her tits and grabbed her face after just to see your cum glistening all over her perfect slap-marred cheeks; after you’ve rolled off of her and you finally leave her alone - that Karina gives you a response.

“No,” she says, hoarsely, staring up at the ceiling. “It really, really doesn’t.”

Power just isn’t the right word for it. It’s something much more beautiful than that.

Desire. You’re dozing off, halfway in a sleepy fantasy. You imagine rolling the word around in your mouth, using it in speeches, citing it as an obvious central theme. It’s about desire, you’d say, in interviews, at film festivals, patiently explaining your motivations to the masses. That irrational animal instinct. That innate human greediness. You’ll maybe even throw in some fun anecdote about how people in past relationships never agreed with you. It’s never been about power, though, you’d explain: how foolish, how crude. It’s about the ache of truly wanting something. Isn’t that so much more romantic?

So you’ll make a movie about this one day. So you tied Karina to the bed and slapped her hard and fucked her senseless. Actually, you picture yourself explaining, foggy and on verge of falling asleep: actually, it’s about hunger. Irrepressible, all-consuming hunger. That’s why I did this. That’s why I’ll keep doing it. You’re all like me; you get it. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

And it will, to raucous, riotous applause.

Good. You’ll laugh so hard. You’re dreaming, now; you can’t tell if you’re talking about the sex or the hypothetical future movie. I’m glad you understand. Anyone would’ve done what I did.

Because - honestly - what’s the point of starving yourself of something that’s right in front of you?

(Let’s pull back from your script for a second. Here’s a real story:

A few months back you were visiting a museum with one of your friends when you got into this conversation about performance art. He’d told you about a woman back in the seventies who walked into a gallery and laid out various objects and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her for six whole hours. Her as the artist, in title only; herself as the art. A free, untethered canvas.

And what happened? you asked, morbidly curious.

Your friend grimaced. What do you think happened?

It was a rhetorical question. The performance had been a test of what the general public was capable of - a reflection of their moral compass, of what they’d do if left unchecked. The setup spoke for itself. You didn’t have to get all the gory details in order to understand.

Seriously, though, your friend said, about the artist: I don’t know what’d compel someone to do something like that to themselves. He’d shaken his head, baffled. Like - I think it takes a deeply fucked up person to just give up their body like that. Like it doesn’t even matter to them.

It’s strange. It’s an almost universally accepted fact that, at least on some level, artists are inclined to put pieces of themselves into the things they create. A memory; a feeling. Condensing twenty different emotions into a single acrylic painting, or a lyrical reenactment of heartbreak into a song - something personal and unique and lovely. Often inspired, sure, but yours.

I think that’s what’s funny about it, you told your friend, before you realized that funny was a fucked up word to use here. There’s nothing personal about that. It’s so detached. It’s about the rest of the world, whatever they might make of her - it’s not about her at all.

You were both quiet, thinking. Visualizing what it might’ve been like. To be there, one of many in the audience, watching this woman who had thrown herself to the wolves and asked to be ripped apart.

She’s just - material for them to use, I guess, you said, after a moment. A blank page.

Removing her own identity; becoming nothing, no one. A ghost. An empty vessel. A slab of clay, taking on the impression of everyone who’s ever touched her: the ridges of fingerprints, the half-moon cuts of nails, molding her into something new. Even if it took some force. Even if it hurt.

Still, it’s what she’d asked for.

You can’t imagine she’d ever expected anything else.)

There’s this fascinating complaint people have about films these days, you’ve found. It’s actually quite the phenomenon. You talk to your colleagues and scroll through social media and read comments on movie trailers trying to get a grasp on it all: market research. This isn’t realistic, people gripe. It’d never sound like that. She’d never look like that. This would never, ever happen - God, are you kidding? Who are they trying to fool? As if they’ve somehow missed the point of fiction - of a sweet, escapist fantasy. As if they’ve convinced themselves that the real world is better.

Which is moronic, obviously.

“So what’s the solution?” Karina asks.

Well, you’re no expert; it’s been a while since you’d finished your last movie.

“But you have an idea,” Karina interpets. She’s perched on the edge of your coffee table, nursing a new glass of ice. She’s watching you with her head at an angle, eyes shrewd. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be telling me this.”

As with most of her guesses about you, she’s right.

“It’s all about the details,” you say, after a moment. “It humanizes a person. Having little bits and pieces about who they are - it makes them alive. Their likes, their dislikes. Embarrassing stories. Things that make them laugh. Diary entries, favorite foods - first loves, first heartbreaks. So on and so forth.” You’ve got one of Karina’s ankles between your hands; your thumb brushes against the bulbous protrusion of bone. “It’s what makes people real.”

Karina’s mouth twists, sharp and strange; it takes a second for you to realize that she’s grinning.

“Oh, right,” she says. “You want me to spill my guts to you.” She pushes her ankle further into your grip. Her legs are just like the rest of her: thin and pale, waifish. Like a nineties catwalk model. “That’s how you’re gonna make me real. In your movie.”

You pull a face, letting her ankle slip from your hands. Spill her guts; what an ugly figure of speech. As if you’re doing something much more invasive and violent than just writing about her.

“Basically,” you agree, anyway. “I mean, it helps that you’re already, you know - a real, whole, living person.”

“Ugh,” says Karina, dry and amused. “Barely.”

You wonder if she’s also thinking about this morning; you, stunned and staring at her cum-streaked hair, calling her unreal.

She’s got a point, in a way. There’s something slightly uncanny about her sitting in front of you, as if she’s been taken straight out of some wildly different scene - some spotlit stage, some movie set, some glossy high-budget existence - and haphazardly edited into your life. You reach out and press two fingers to the side of her neck, like they do on television if they think someone’s bleeding out.

Karina tips her head to allow you access. Her pulse throbs hotly under your touch.

“I don’t know,” you say, smiling at the swanlike line of her throat. “You seem pretty alive to me.”

“Sure.” Her hair tickles your wrist. “But you want more.”

She says it like it’s this given - as if she’s always faced with people wanting more from her. You wouldn’t doubt it, little tease she is. You can picture her in motion so easily. Always running. Letting people pine and plead for more.

“Yeah,” you say. It seems pointless to lie to her. “I want more.”

Karina leans in closer. She reaches up and touches one of your knuckles with the pad of her thumb. Without makeup, you can see the shadows of dark circles underneath her eyes, but even those look painted-on, pre-planned; a study on the aesthetic allure of bruises. She lets her gaze drop to your mouth, then bites down on her bottom lip. Impish.

“Karina,” you say, grinning wider now.

It’s one of those unspoken things: the translation of body language, the transcription of the tilt of her mouth. Then have me, she’s saying, almost certainly - like a swooning melodramatic heroine, throwing herself into your lap, wanting to be saved. You want more? You want me? I’m right here. I’m yours.

“Fine,” Karina purrs, and kisses you again, like sealing a contract. “Take it all.”

You don’t fuck her again - not at first. There’s more than one way to take someone apart.

Karina says she’s got a story for you and then she pulls out her phone.

“This was back in high school,” she explains, scrolling back through her photo gallery. There don’t seem to be a lot of recent additions to it; you’d expected selfies, pictures of her with friends. There are more photos of food than anything: plates of pasta and donuts and burgers and pastries piled with whipped cream. It’s cute. It makes you laugh. “When I won prom queen.”

You splutter. “When you what?”

“What?” Karina gives you a bemused, sideways look. “Does that surprise you?”

It floors you, actually. At first you can’t quite put your finger on why, but then you look at Karina again - at her intense dark eyes and pouty fuckdoll lips and the exaggerated pinup proportions of her body - and you realize you’re making that mistake writers often do: buying into archetypes. It just makes sense that she’d be some kind of brooding bad girl. Mysterious, promiscuous; in your creative vision she’s probably cutting classes and chainsmoking in the girls’ bathroom. A favorite of the rumor mill. A pretty little delinquent.

“Wow.” Karina makes a funny noise in the back of her throat when you tell her this. “No. I was - I did fine in school. Perfect attendance, almost. And I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes.” But she doesn’t look offended, either; you imagine people make these assumptions about her all the time. “The prom queen thing - it wasn’t my idea, though. My best friend did all the campaigning for me.”

“That’s sweet.” You watch as she reaches the year she’s looking for. Flashes of her in a sparkly dress with her arms thrown around another girl - a tiny doe-eyed brunette - slide by. In one of them, Karina’s got her head tipped back, clearly mid-laugh; in another, she and the girl have their heads bent close together as if they’re trading secrets, unaware that they’re being photographed. “Well - I think it’s sweet.”

Karina’s fingers stall. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I’m just saying-” You shrug. “It’s a nice gesture if it’s something you wanted, I guess. Seems like a lot of attention, otherwise.”

“Oh.” There’s a pause. “Yeah. It was - I didn’t get to go to junior prom, so it was kind of - this was - senior year. Senior prom.” Another pause. “Yeah. She did it to make me happy.”

“And did it?” She passes by pictures that fill up with more people: friends with big grins who stick close to her side, wrapping her up in an embrace. “Make you happy?”

“Of course.” Karina’s thumb pauses on a video, the preview dark and unfocused. She says it like she doesn’t even have to think about it. “She was my best friend. She always knew what I wanted. Hey, look at this.”

The video’s of her in the back of someone’s car, prom queen tiara askew on her head, satiny sash falling off one shoulder. She’s yelling, laughing; the sound isn’t on, but her mouth’s wide open and her dark eyes are crinkled to half-moons, creased underneath heavy false lashes and glittery makeup that’s begun to smudge and fade. It makes her whole face look very soft. Young, too - cheeks full and flushed pink with excitement, hair blown-out and everywhere, glossed black. As if she’s having the time of her life.

“How old were you here?” you ask, in awe.

“Eighteen. Just turned, I think.”

“You look-” Like a baby, you almost want to say. It’s true, though. Big brown eyes, scrunched little nose - grinning like the rest of the world hasn’t quite dug its claws into her yet. Skin unmarred and infant-smooth. “You look pretty.”

Karina doesn’t look at you, but you can see the slight, entertained upturn of her lips. All the nasty things you’ve called her - all the irredeemable ways you’ve touched her - and now, inexplicably, you’re going for pretty.

“Thanks,” she says, and clicks the volume up.

“Shut the fuck up,” baby Karina is saying, delightedly. Her voice sounds high, childish and carefree. “You’re so dumb. It wasn’t - it wasn’t even like that, I swear!” She flaps one hand in the air, her nails all short and painted the same rich deep maroon as her dress. “No - you’re just saying that because you’re jealous, you idiot, I know you - you just-”

The person behind the camera says something that you can’t quite make out.

Baby Karina presses one hand to her sternum, pearl-clutching, and gasps.

“I would never,” she admonishes - over-the-top like an actress from a movie - before she throws her head back and laughs.

It’s a startling, wonderful laugh. A little-kid laugh. A mess of wild, unabashed giggles, hiccupy and sweet, so loud and infectious you can hear the other people in the car start cracking up with her; out of frame, someone reaches out to interlace their fingers with Karina’s, waving their joined hands until they smack against the car window and Karina only laughs harder. With her whole body, shoulders shaking and all. Streetlights flashing across her face, making her look sort of blurry and surreal, like something out of a painting.

“Your laugh,” you find yourself saying, stunned.

Karina’s touching the back of her neck, completely engrossed in the video. “My what?”

You don’t laugh like that anymore. That’s what you mean to say. That scratchy, almost painful laugh that she’s been gracing you with since the moment you met her - there’s no trace of that in how baby Karina wriggles with laughter in the backseat of the car until her happy, breathless blush spreads to her neck and her chest. Head tipping back against the seat, like she’s all tuckered out.

“Um,” you say, voice caught in your throat.

On the screen, her eyes fall shut, lashes fluttering so delicately.

You can’t do anything but stare. Brilliant, past-life, prom-queen Karina - grinning at nothing, and sleepy from a perfect night, and laughing as if she’ll exist as this version of herself forever. As if she just doesn’t know any better, yet.

“You,” you start to say, again-

Karina shuts her phone off, and turns.

And you’re about to say something - something about the gnawing, uncertain feeling you get when you watch this former self of hers. It’s on the tip of your tongue. You don’t laugh like that. Something happened to you. For a moment the whole image just seems off - like the way people make posthumous holograms of pop stars, superimpose faces of long-dead actors on stunt doubles. A kind of intense wrongness. A murmured, uncomfortable: that’s not really you, is it? It can’t be. I barely recognize her.

“What?” Karina asks. Her smile reveals her teeth. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Then reality hits you, all at once.

“Sorry.” Your hand finds her thigh. You laugh because you’re being ridiculous - how would you know who she really is, anyway? “I was just thinking - I don’t know. Never mind.”

She seems to take that at face value. You like that about her. How she seems to trust so easily - going home with you, winding up in your bed, staying when you ask her to stay. Giving you whatever you want: her body, her story.

“So,” you say, eventually. “I can put in my movie that you totally peaked in high school, huh?”

Karina snorts. “Yeah,” she says, playing along, and taps her dark phone screen with a clawed nail. “Say it was the last time I was happy.” She pulls a face, like the thought of it is just unspeakably pathetic. “That’s a tragedy if I’ve ever heard one.”

“Shakespearean,” you agree, and let her clamber into your lap. “It’s perfect.”

But you know she’s kidding. You’d like to think that you understand girls like her. They live in a different world than the rest of you - the kind of world where every person on earth looks at them and falls to their feet, falls madly in love. You’ll write about it one day; you’ll feel out the narrative for her, a curious exploration. That rose-tinted life she must flourish in, closed-off and flawless like a snow globe, her spinning and protected in the glass.

“Perfect,” echoes Karina, and kisses you - like she’s proving she really means it.

That’s the reality, here. That’s it. This is all there is.

Well, almost.

Karina lets you scroll through the rest of her photo gallery, front to back. You take the opportunity, because you’re greedy for as much as you can get.

There’s a lot of photos that are just her, funnily enough - selfies posed in front of the same full-length mirror, over and over again, clad in unholy outfits. Swimsuits, sports bras and little running shorts, lingerie: shit that makes your mouth water, eyes lingering, groaning out loud as she laughs at you. But it’s also her in faded old t-shirts, holding the hem up to expose her stomach. Body angled to the side in girlish sundresses. Hair pulled up, showing off her neck, her gorgeously sharp collarbone - in makeup or out of it, stare intensely focused and sultry.

“That’s hot,” you comment. “Self-obsessed as fuck, but hot.”

Karina smiles - her tiny private-joke smile - and doesn’t say anything at all.

There’s one video in particular that catches your eye. It’s recent, relatively - the date reads late December, last year. Less than a month ago. Christmastime. You click on it, curious.

Karina’s immediately recognizable in it, black hair winding past her shoulders, drowning in a large black sweatshirt. She’s smiling, but it looks sort of tense and tired - bags under her eyes, like she hasn’t slept in a while. She’s got both hands balled up into fists, held close and protective to her chest; her sharp chin rests on her pale knuckles. There’s a tiny smear of red across her mouth, lower lip bitten bloody.

“You just got here,” she says. She’s looking at something behind the camera. “The first thing you wanna do is hear me sing?” She laughs once, scratchy and hoarse. “Why are you even filming this?”

The answering strum of guitar strings, a pretty, perfect chord. An invitation, or a demand.

“You’re kidding.” Karina’s voice is flat.

Another chord - evidently not.

“Wow,” says Karina. Her smile, out of nowhere, goes very soft at the edges. “You just do this because you know I can’t say no to you.”

“What?” you ask Karina now, laughing. “Is this - what is this? Do you - are you really going to sing?”

And then - crazily enough - she does.

“Oh,” you say out loud, adoring, and Karina turns her face into your shoulder.

Her voice in the video is breathy, sweet. Shyly unpracticed, raspy from disuse, completely and utterly gorgeous; lids slipping shut and open again, laugh leaking into her melody line in lyrics about black eyes and kisses and wanting someone who’s just so, so bad for you. But what surprises you more than anything is the look that dawns on her blurry on-screen face - irises sparkling and smile bashful, hiding her mouth behind the sleeve of her sweatshirt, curled up with her knees to her chest. You see now that she’s wearing pajama pants, fuzzy and patterned with snowflakes.

She looks radiantly pretty. She looks vulnerable. And not even in a sweaty, satiated, filthy post-fuck kind of way - actually, genuinely vulnerable. Soft and wide-eyed and tender.

Suddenly, you just can’t tear your gaze away.

“Stop.”

The song’s over. On-screen Karina’s fully grinning now. Porcelain-fragile, but undeniably happy, too.

“I hate you,” she says. “Baby, I really do.”

“You love me,” says the person behind the camera. “You’ll love me for the rest of your life and you know it.”

And in the video - in vivid, fluid motion - Karina laughs.

Whole-hearted, lovely. Familiar. For a moment, you swear she’s still that girl sitting in the backseat of a car with her prom queen tiara on, giggling free and uninhibited, unhurt, untouched. A month ago - less than that, even - looking like she’s coming back to life.

That’s where the clip ends.

It doesn’t change anything, if you actually think about it. It’s just another version of reality. A Karina from a whole other universe, laughing like a child, and so, so far away from whoever she is now.

(Back between the lines of your script-

The stranger and the girl drink to get drunk and that’s about it. She reads the label of his wine; he makes fun of her for being a snob. She doesn’t really drink, she says at first, but he laughs like this is a challenge, and pours her a glass anyway. She flushes pink and fidgets around. She seems to shed hair like a cat and he thinks this is the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen, picking up thin black strands off of the arm of his couch, teasing her about girls and how they really like to leave their mark, huh?

Leave their mark, she repeats. There’s some trick of the lens here, some sort of strategic camera work - he’s in the forefront and she’s in the background, and she looks so much smaller than him. Why do you say that?

He still had his ex-girlfriend’s perfume in his cabinet. He probably still has some of her clothes in his closet. Not out of any particular emotional attachment, but sometimes this is just the way things are: when you spend years intertwining your whole existence with someone else’s, it’s hard to rid yourself of that connection. You’ve grown into each other’s spaces, tangling limbs and heart lines, putting down roots. It’s gonna take a little force to get them out.

They’re just so much, he says, gesticulating with his hands. And they affect everything in your life, like a fucking infection. And then it doesn’t work out, and you - he makes a wide, sweeping motion here, attempting to encompass the wreckage. You have to fix everything they broke. Purge them from your system and all that. It’s so fucked up.

It’s like this, he means to say - you love someone and then they leave you behind and you’re left staring at the blown-up decimated crater that used to be your life together. You love someone and they don’t love you back and all you have now is the debris.

They’re both drunk. There should be music here and there isn’t. It’s only eerie, too-still silence, suffocating the both of them with every passing second.

Well, she says, laughing, and takes another sip. You and I can agree on that, at least.)

It happens like this:

There’s a monologue you want to write.

You tell Karina this after you’re finally fucking her again, when she’s balanced on the edge of your glass coffee table with her legs spread and your mouth slick with her cum. Well - not after, technically. She’s between orgasms and you have your thumb on her clit, tracking the expression on her face, the split-second moment where she comes apart. It’s then when you realize so badly that you want to write some great speech for your heroine - something about the sweat beading on Karina’s midriff and her tits that you can’t stop touching and the jerky movements of her hips, trying to get your tongue back on her clit, panting and delightfully desperate. Something about desire.

“Desire,” repeats Karina, voice halfway into a raspy, worked-up moan.

“Yeah.” You’ve replaced your mouth with your fingers, fucking up into the obscene tight heat of her cunt. She’s trembling, dripping everywhere; she’s the very picture of what it means to want, probably. “But I just can’t figure it out.”

Karina laughs roughly, and then she cums.

“Is that funny?” you ask her, after, when you’re wiping your wet mouth with your wrist and she’s sucking on your glistening fingers, licking the taste of her own cunt off your skin. Her eyes big, lips all full and pink - slutty angel on her pedestal, perched above you. “Me writing about desire?”

Karina lets your fingers free with a loud pop. She’s still clutching your hand close to her mouth, thumb dragging through the sticky gleam of her spit. “No,” she says, eyes distant. “It just reminded me of something. There’s this Anne Carson quote, about men and desire…” She shakes her head. Presses her lips once to your fingertips in a small, startlingly sweet kiss. “It doesn’t matter. Tell me more.”

There isn’t much to tell, truthfully. Except that you’ve got this love for movie lines that are just so utterly quotable - things that make their way into the pop culture consciousness. That’s the kind of work you want to be doing: creating something that has an impact, something that’ll exist long after you’re gone. Everlasting. If you had to pull for an example, you’d say-

“You ever seen Closer?”

“Yeah.” Karina drops your elbow into her lap. “Oh, I get it. He tastes like you but sweeter. Lying’s the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off - et cetera.” She hums the melody line. “So you want an early 2000s pop-punk band to make a song about your movie? Ambitious.”

“More or less,” you say as she shimmies her shirt back down, hem falling back over her midriff. “But like I said, I’m kind of stuck.”

Karina rolls her neck. Her hair is everywhere, sweet-smelling; snapped-off strands decorate your table, looking like cracks in the glass.

“Any suggestions?” you ask, thumb skimming along the pale bruised inside of her thigh.

She smiles, mischievous. “Maybe.”

That’s how you both end up curled on your couch together with your laptop in front of you, Karina’s eyes glued to the movie playing on the screen, watching as the four main characters fuck and flirt and cheat on each other and scream at the top of their lungs. Melodramatic dialogue. How do you feel about him using your life? You’re lying; I’ve been you. This will hurt, which Karina laughs at - as if announcing the pain will make it better, playacting at exoneration.

It’s also - predictably - how you end up fucking again. You barely make it an hour in, and then-

“Hey.” Karina’s breath tickles your ear. She’s already seconds from climbing in your lap already; her thigh is hooked over yours, bare and inviting. “Are you inspired?”

You’re swallowing back a grin. “Sure.”

“Oh. Great.” She’s no actress herself, clearly. She couldn’t be subtle if she tried. “Do you wanna be more inspired?”

And - whatever. It’s a movie about sex. If anything, at least you’re sticking to the theme.

The dialogue plays in the background as Karina rocks her hips down on your lap - you can feel how wet she is again, like she never stops wanting to be fucked. You’re telling her something about how she’s the most insatiable girl you’ve ever met; the sound of the film saturates the room, setting the tone like it knows its purpose. How? How does it work? How do you do this to someone? This big, infidelity-ridden confrontation. Did you phone her? Beg her to come back? Asking him why he falls for another girl, getting this ridiculous answer - it’s because she doesn’t need me.

“Huh.” You smile into the curve of Karina’s neck, already palming her ass. “That one’s funny.”

“Is it funny?” Karina’s sharp jaw brushes against your cheekbone. Her eyes are so dark, shadowed by her long lashes. “I think it’s pretty realistic. People don’t like needy girls. It’s a burden to be loved so hard.” Her tongue darts across her teeth; her smile’s somewhat caustic. “Too much to handle, I guess.”

“What are you talking about?” This strikes you as fairly fucking ridiculous, too. “What men have you met who don’t like needy girls?”

Karina just laughs and leans in for another kiss.

It’s easy to let the rest of the film float away in the background, the lines coming disjointed, unconnected. A spoken-word soundtrack, tone perfuming the air: the angst and pain and eroticism seeping into your clothing. Once in a while you’ll pull back from kissing Karina’s neck or tits or mouth and see a thoughtful little quirk to her mouth. Like she’s genuinely listening, even as you’re taking off her shirt, slipping a hand back between her legs. Where will you go? Disappear. I can’t still see you - if I see you, I’ll never leave you. I amuse you, but I bore you.

“I bet you’ve never felt that,” you say, half into the silk of her hair.

Karina pauses. Her shirt’s on the floor; she’s gloriously naked on top of you. “Felt what?”

“I amuse you, but I bore you,” you recite. You already sound sort of fuck-drunk, far gone. “You’re the farthest thing from boring.”

Back in the movie, the female lead sobs into her fists. Karina studies you, fingertips grazing the nape of your neck. You try to imagine it - her as one of those heartsick heroines, crying herself to pieces, begging a man not to leave her - but you draw an utter blank. Some people just aren’t breakable in that way.

“You’d be surprised,” Karina says, after a moment. “People get bored of me all the time.”

“Oh, please.” Even when she’s the one top of you, you can’t help feeling so completely in control. It’s gotta be the look in her eyes, dying to be obedient. “I bet you have lots of ways of keeping guys interested in you.” You smack her ass hard just to make a mark. “I bet you let them fuck you however they want.”

“Exactly,” Karina agrees, without missing a beat. She moves in close until your noses bump together. Lets her voice go all smoky and suggestive. “Wherever they want, too.”

You open your mouth - probably about to say something very rude about what a dirty whore she is and how you should’ve realized it the second you saw her; I knew it, I know you - but then your hands slip lower and Karina presses her lips to yours and licks into your mouth, over your teeth, making you swallow your words. Filling you up until there’s nothing but her and the movie, playing on.

I think I’ll be happier with her.

You won’t. You’ll miss me. No one will ever love you as much as I do. Why isn’t love enough?

“Romantic, right?” murmurs Karina, sweet against your tongue.

“Shut up,” you say, and grab her by the hair, tugging her off your lap as you stand. “Bedroom. Now.”

Later, you’ll take the time to consider the different ways filmmakers illustrate a power dynamic - it’s playing on your laptop screen right now. The heroine’s sitting on the arm of the couch, clutching desperately at the hero’s jacket. Gorgeously emotional and pleading for another chance, her tiny chin tilted up, eyes so large and watery. Made fragile and fearful by everyone: the protagonist, the narrative, the director, the audience beyond. By herself, even. It’s a stylistic choice - she wants to look that pathetic.

And you-

Well, you’ve got Karina’s long hair wrapped up in your fist, tits bouncing as she stumbles to her feet, ankle knocking hard and horribly loud against the leg of your table. Cute little ass all red from your hand. Thighs shimmering from how drenched she is, cunt dripping from how you’ve treated her. She hasn’t managed to work her mouth into a trademark smirk fast enough: when she looks at you over her shoulder, her eyes are abyss-dark and bottomless, crease between her brows, lips parted in pained surprise.

The definition of pathetic, too - but that’s exactly the point. She’s just so much more fuckable like that.

“Ouch,” you say, touching her hurt ankle with the side of your foot.

“It’s fine.” Karina’s skin feels clammy and cold. Her smirk’s intact now, camera-ready. “I’ve been through worse.”

Her ankle throbs under the pressure of your touch; you still haven’t let up on her hair. You’ll go through worse, too, you think of telling her: a sly comment about how rough you’re about to fuck her, what vicious marks you’re about to leave. How you’re gonna hurt her exactly like she asked you to.

You don’t say a thing.

She must already know all of that, anyway.

So, Karina’s not breakable like the helpless, weepy, soft-hearted girls in the movies - but that’s alright. She’s breakable in much more enticing ways.

Case in point:

“Oh, get real, baby. Don’t pretend you don’t love it.”

Well, breaking someone down doesn’t really get better than this.

It’s all a scene of your own making, a perfect pre-arrangement. You on your bed, Karina limp and bent belly-down over your lap - you in control and Karina as the most impressive toy you’ve ever gotten your hands on, creamy ass and needy cunt and skin that turns bruises to artwork. You’re goading her and failing - trying to get her to just admit to what she is, what a filthy slut, what a nasty eager fuckdoll - but it’s hard to get a response when even breathing seems to be a chore for her right now. Every noise out of her mouth is nothing but a gasping, choked-out whimper. Her face is buried in her forearm, hidden. And through the shine of lube dribbling down your hand and her ass and into the sticky wetness of her cunt, you’ve got two fingers stretching out her little asshole - and you’re just getting started.

“I know you fucking need this.” Your other hand slides up her back, slips to tangle in her hair. “You’re just too good at it.” You pull hard, wrenching her head from the crook of her elbow. “Too good at being an obedient fucking whore for me, huh?”

Karina’s whole body stiffens when you fuck your fingers deeper, as if tugged taut on a string: the flex of her feet in the air, shoulder blades straining, neck craned back almost painfully. You pull harder. It’s a buzz at the base of your skull, live-wire thrilling: the knowledge that you can yank her into whatever position you want - fuck her anywhere, work her ass open with your cock, fill her up with cum - and she’s just going to have to take it. Like she’s this pliant, powerless thing. Like she’s yours.

Your self-satisfaction seeps right into your voice. “Answer me.”

You hear Karina gulp down a breath. “I,” Karina mumbles, but she can’t do anything but babble. “I - fuck-” All teeth-clenching nonsense; she shoots a baleful glance over her shoulder, desperation clawing its way into every word. “Please-”

Your fingers pause. “You want more?”

Her cheeks are splotchy and pink; you swear there are tears wobbling in those big dark eyes. The heavy arousal in your stomach turns to violent hunger, as though your mouth could start watering at any second. You can’t help it. The thought of seeing her cry is fucking exhilirating. “You - oh-”

“Answer me. You want my cock?” You’re waiting for the breaking point. “You want me to really fuck your ass?”

“Fuck-”

But that’s not a proper reply and Karina knows it, so she doesn’t protest when you pull your glistening fingers out of her and smack your palm hard across her ass. Once, then twice, and then you just don’t stop. She yelps like a hurt animal - trembles uncontrollably, her thighs and her shoulders and her quivering bottom lip - and makes a sound in the back of her throat that might be a sob, but she still lets you hit her: gives into the harsh crack of skin on skin, over and over again. Listens as you tell her that she deserves this, that she wanted this, that you’re making her into a good girl and this is what good girls get when they’re too cock-hungry to follow orders or answer a fucking question, you know that - you know I’m this rough for a reason. It should hurt. It’s so much more fun that way.

“I’ve been too fucking nice to you,” you mutter, teeth gritted in an effort to hide your grin - as if you even need to. It’s obvious how much you enjoy this. It’s the point. “That’s the problem with girls like you - you never learned your fucking place, huh? Never really been punished for anything?”

Karina mumbles out something unintelligible, slurring from her drooling mouth to the sheets.

“Yeah.” Your hand comes down again - she flinches just before her body goes slack. “That’s what I thought.”

And after you’ve spanked her so hard that her fair skin is ravaged and raised with goosebumps along the slope of her back - her whole body in revolt - you finally, finally stop.

Karina doesn’t budge except to breathe, and even that releases shallow, unsteady. You read it all in the shaky lift and fall of her thin shoulders, her hands in white-knuckled fists, her face pressed to your sheets and hidden - her hair coats everything, all ink, all words written but left unsaid. She shivers beneath your fingers. Her cunt’s dripping all over your lap. She’s a masterpiece. She’s a wreck.

You’re filled up with thick, swollen pride. “Karina.”

Karina. Your own personal creation, transformed under your touch. Might as well have your name carved into her, too. A brand right across her back, slicing through tissue, scarring to seal her fate - this is who you fucking belong to.

“Poor baby.” You follow the sharp ridges of her spine, tracking notches, keeping a tally: counting how many times you’ll hit her, how many days she’ll stay in your bed. How many movies she’ll let you make out of her, being your brilliant muse for decades. “It’s painful when you don’t listen to me, huh?”

But then - inexplicably - you think of her bruising ankle. Her twist of a smirk, detached and humorless. I’ve been through worse.

You’re abruptly glad you can’t see the look on her face.

“Come on, sweet girl.” You dig the heel of your palm into her lower back, half a warning. “Pull it together.”

Between the strands of glossy hair tumbling over Karina’s skin and your sheets, you spot a reddish mark on the back of her neck. Like the impression of a thumbprint, small and round. Blurry enough in the dim light that your brain starts conjuring up strange theories; an old wound, maybe. A birthmark or a burn, a childhood injury.

You graze her shoulder blades with your fingertips, exploratory. She feels so small draped over you like this, a tiny wet wisp of a girl. A doll.

She still hasn’t moved.

“Karina.”

Nothing.

“Karina,” you say again, suddenly uneasy. Your hand stops. “Are you-”

For a few terrible seconds, you can’t even hear her breathing.

But then Karina shifts. Slow, sensual, deliberate. Pushing herself up off your lap, arching her back, the slick pucker of her asshole obscene from where you fucked it open with your fingers. Her bruised knees dig into your mattress as she straightens up, and her gorgeous pale face seems to glow in the midday light - heavy dark eyes, bitten-pink mouth, black hair curtaining her cheeks like a frame to a portrait.

“You,” you start to say, feeling suddenly like you’re looking at her for the first time.

“I’m really sorry,” Karina murmurs.

She doesn’t look close to tears at all. She’s so unfazed, as if having her ass spanked punishingly raw is something that happens to a girl like her on the daily. A run-of-the-mill occurrence - a consequence of having a body like that, made to be brutalized. She’s already reaching towards the nightstand for the lube.

“I just wanted it so bad I couldn’t think straight,” Karina tells you, with erotic-film certainty - reciting all the lines that’ll make her seem the most insatiably slutty. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her lips form a pout; she leans down to press them to the tip of your cock, all sweet and demure, like she thinks she needs to convince you. Eyes flicking up at you through her thick lashes, molten-hot. “I should’ve listened.” It’s only a breath, warm and torturous. “I deserved that, I know.”

Your hand winds tight in her hair. You want to force your cock down her pretty throat, make her gag and choke over her simpering apologies, spitting up your cum until it trickles down her chin, her tits, her tummy. Both a game and a power play: prove how sorry you are.

Karina pulls back before you can, and holds up the lube.

“Babe,” she says, the term of endearment almost a singsong - a lilting reminder. “I thought you wanted to really fuck me now.”

“Uh-huh.” Her tits heave as she moves, crawling closer, offering herself up. “And I always get what I want, right?”

You feel drunk with power. You forget that this isn’t supposed to be about power. You watch as Karina coats her palm with lube and pumps your cock, her fingers slick and hot, her veins starkly blue at her delicate wrists. Expression delighted at how hard you are, pink little tongue poking out between her teeth - seduction down to an art form, meticulously calculated.

“With me?” Her smile burns. “Obviously.”

You pull her in by the neck to kiss the smirk off her mouth.

It’s interesting. There’s this other thing regular critics and moviegoers have been saying about films these days: sex scenes need to have a purpose. Some sort of coherent motivation. Strip your lead actress down to nothing and get her keening and moaning and you’ve got to explain it away somehow. It forwards the plot, you could insist, pitching it to producers and directors. It does something for the character dynamics. It’ll draw in just the right audience, the ones dying to see their favorite celebrity debauched and getting dirty on-screen - they’ll see it over and over just to get a taste. Isn’t that enough? To satisfy the masses? Isn’t that why we’re all here?

Because otherwise all people are staring at is a play at pornography: useless half-convincing make-believe. The heroine can writhe and whine and arch her back all she wants. Everyone knows she doesn’t feel anything.

“Tell me the truth.”

Oh, if you two were a movie - you don’t know how anyone could justify a sex scene quite like this.

It doesn’t matter what artsy angle you take. It all comes down to the same unforgivable details: Karina face-down ass-up on your bed, the perfect bowed curve of her spine, the depraved wide stretch of her asshole around your cock - the sweat shining along her shoulder blades, the hard smack of your palm against the red raw skin of her ass, your other hand at the crown of her skull with your fingers wrapped entirely in her tangled hair - her cunt fucking ruining your sheets, wet all the way down her thighs, each brutal shift of your hips sending her little body into full-blown shudders-

“Tell me that you fucking love it.” Your hand slips lower until you’ve got her pinned down by the back of the neck, fingers pushing down: a grip she couldn’t escape even if she wanted to. “Whoring out your slutty little ass like this for a stranger. Getting on your hands and knees for me just because you’re so fucking needy for cock, baby - don’t even try to deny it, you’re so wet, nasty fucking girl-”

You just can’t stop yourself. It’s so easy. She really is so fucking pathetic. Too fragile to get free - too easily manipulated and manhandled. Trembling and drenched and giving way as you make room inside her, forcing space. She’s just so tight - it’s godless, how you make your cock fit in her lube-slicked asshole, how she moans like a bona fide bitch in heat over it: needing faster, needing harder, needing more. Cheek pink and pressed hard to your mattress, sharp nails digging into the sheets rough enough to tear through the fabric. Giving herself up to be fucked cruelly and stupid and senseless.

Like she’s a real-

“Natural fucking cockslut, huh?”

Look, seriously - you can’t be held accountable for the things you say to her here.

Because when you say shit like you’d just let me do anything - like you’d let me fucking tie you up and keep you here forever, be an eager fucking cumdump for me whenever I want you, I know it, I know you - that’s just the moment talking. The circumstances. The pretty arch of her back and the drooling wetness of her cunt and the indecent tightness of her ass, conspiring to make you lose your mind mid-fuck - that’s the whole reason you even tell her any of it. You think you’re good for anything else? Right at her ear, your body covering hers, your cock buried deep. You’re not. Just made to get this slutty ass fucked open, and your mouth, and your cunt - this is all anyone’s ever gonna want from you and you know it - better get used to it now, baby. This is all you got. This is all you are.

It’s Karina’s fault, really. She just takes it - all of it. She doesn’t even try to fight it.

“But that’s okay,” you murmur, as she gasps and squirms and cries out like you’re killing her. “I’m still gonna make you cum.”

And with your cock filling her ass and your hand between her legs, slapping hard at her sopping cunt until she can’t do anything but collapse - shaking, shattered - her whimpers fucked-out and drool-soaked and bleeding into one big nonsensical mess, everything about her used and ruined-

“You’re mine,” you tell her, laughing as she falls apart. “You get that? You’re mine.”

-then, you do.

When it’s all over, Karina rolls over to face the wall, breathing hard. She’s slick everywhere, sweat and saliva and lube, your creamy cum dripping out of her well-fucked asshole and trickling down her thigh. You trace her lower back and grin at the way her skin seems to give into you, turning pink with a press of your fingertips. You’ve come to realize you adore her like this, the fugue state after you fuck her: utterly dead to the world.

Like she could become a permanent fixture in your bed. Too tired to move. Too tired to ever leave.

“Mine,” you say again, softer.

Karina doesn’t argue.

It’s basically all the confirmation you need.

So, really, if you two were a movie-

It goes like this: life can imitate art, too. It happens all the time. The line between fiction and reality blurs together until it’s indistinguishable - until you can’t tell where the fantasy ends, or if it ever did at all.

(It goes like this: the heroine smiles sleepily and tells the hero he’s the best she’s ever had. You’ve seen this film before. The movie stars with their fake on-screen fucks might not feel a damn thing, but at least it’s still fun to pretend.)

Also, the mark you saw on the back of her neck isn’t actually what you thought it was.

“It’s a tattoo,” you realize out loud, drowsily awed, brushing her hair away so you can get a better look. You’re both tuckered out, an inevitability when you fuck like you do; you’re seconds from dozing off. Karina’s looking away from you, on her side to escape the soreness of her ass, sheets loose across her chest. She lets you touch her wherever. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before.”

“You don’t know me,” mumbles Karina, half into your pillow. “It’s not your job to notice anything about me.”

The tattoo’s crimson-red, all delicate linework. It really does look like it hurts: like someone painstakingly cut the shape into her skin. It’s of a heart, rendered in anatomical detail - valves and ventricles and arteries. It’s beautiful, you realize belatedly. Bright instead of faded, and obviously cared for. Lovely.

The only permanent stain on her perfect body. You press your thumb against the ink, fascinated.

“What does it mean?” you ask, but Karina’s already fallen asleep.

(In your script, the girl and the stranger watch some gory crime show, except they don’t pay very close attention and he tugs her into his lap and makes her ride his thigh. The episode they’ve got on is about a serial killer who murders so-called sinners - liars, adulterers, the like. Slaughters them like sacrifices, cutting their throats with vicious efficiency. Fake blood drenches the screen with every crime scene: a form of fucked-up baptism, a psuedo-religious cleansing.

The girl’s putting on an equally decent show on top of the stranger: head thrown back, eyelids fluttering, high-pitched little moans. He sinks his teeth into her shoulder and keeps watching the TV.

Hey, he says, a murmur against her skin, a close-up on his mouth. You’re a sinner, right?

She’s got her hands on his shoulders, hips rolling. Sure am.

How do you think this guy would kill you?

He thinks this’ll shock her, but she doesn’t even pause. Like he kills all the rest, she says. Like an animal.

I think he’d be more careful with you, the stranger muses. You’re too gorgeous. He’d have to use, like - a scalpel, or something. Something cleaner. Something that’d keep you intact.

It’s no use. Nothing he says seems to scare her. Her eyes are far-off, almost glazed in recollection. Like she’s thought about it too - her own untimely end. Her own vivisection, skin flayed and organs visible, viscera and bone. There, hold the shot: now the audience can consider it with her, ponder all the ways she could be torn apart, all the repulsive things they could do with her desiccated body. All the ways flesh can warp under a human touch: the blue-black yellow-green purpling of bruises, a whole palette on one tiny girl. There’s value in that, isn’t there? There’s something intimately, incomparably beautiful in suffering. There’s art.

Isn’t that why everyone’s watching?

I get it, the girl says, still soaking his thigh, smiling as if it’s an inside joke between them. You want me dead. That’s been obvious since the moment you met me.

I don’t want you dead, he says, and grabs her by the jaw. I just want to fuck you.

Okay, she says, uncaring, like there’s barely a difference. Fine. Whatever you want.

They don’t turn the TV off. They let the characters scream and bleed out in the background; he fucks her like she’s got a death wish. It’s funny - he expects her to get louder the harder he fucks her, ruthlessly working over the tight clench of her cunt - but she keeps getting less and less responsive, as if he’s pushing her little body into some sort of trance: expression vacant and blank, body limp and lifeless, mouth open and speechless. It makes him angry. Give me something, he’s saying, frustrated, clawing at her hair: baby, it’s not fair, it’s no fun like this. The on-screen shrieks aren’t enough - he wants it from her. Actually, he keeps saying he needs it - as if fulfilling desire is on the same level as food or air, as if he’ll drop dead in seconds if he doesn’t get her sobbing. He gets his overlarge hands on her face and starts contorting it, pushing her mouth open, her eyes wider, his fingers down her throat until she spits and gags and chokes. Oh, the audience will love this one: it’s reminiscent of those filthy exploitation films with their cult followings, so cleverly referential. Look at her pathetic and pinned down. Look at her helpless and struggling. Think of your favorite on-screen murder scenes, and then think of this.

Anything I want, the stranger reminds her, yanking back her hair as she drools down his wrist. You asked for this, didn’t you? You said anything I want.

Except now the girl can’t say anything at all.

This moment will start rumors, invite horrified scandal the same way some purposefully marketed horror movies are passed off as snuff films - that really went down, they really died like that. This scene’ll get a similar response. Did he actually fuck her? Did he actually hurt her? Did everyone - the writer, the director, the crew, the captive audience - actually just stand by and let that happen?

Sure. Or she might just be a really, really good actress.

There. The stranger’s murmuring to her now, watching her manufactured expression, watching the tears fill her eyes. There you go. There’s my girl. And she is his, she really is - transformed into something all beautiful and new under his clumsy fingertips, molded right into art. The camera will zoom in close on her gorgeous, cadaverous face, a perverse little gift for the audience: here, have this, take a look. She’s all yours now.

There’s something to be said here about the manmade link between sex and violence - inescapable, brutal, primeval; bodies in all shades of red - but he forgets it the second he touches her, and she’s being fucked too hard to remember.

Maybe they’ll get to it next time.)

AND WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!!!!! <33333

all my luv ever to @capslocked @worldsover @passingnotions @braaan for beta reading my dumbass shenanigans and also for being the best ever I LOVE U!!!!!! AND ANYONE WHO IS READING THIS I LOVE YALL TOO.................. PART 2 COMING SOON!!!!!!!!!!!

#kpop smut #kpop fanfiction #kpop fanfic #idol x reader #idol x male reader #reader insert #karina smut #karina fanfic #aespa karina smut

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celebtf · 27 days ago

Text

TOM, THE LOOK-ALIKE AND THE SPIDER-SUIT

Jordan Johnson had built a small but loyal following online. His TikTok account had hundreds of thousands of followers, all captivated by one thing: his uncanny resemblance to Tom Holland.

From lip-syncing iconic Spider-Man lines to recreating Tom’s interviews, Jordan’s content thrived on the illusion. Fans bombarded his comment sections with excitement.

“OMG, you look EXACTLY like him!”

“Are you SURE you’re not his twin?”

“Better than the real thing!”

At first, the attention was exhilarating. Jordan leaned into the role, perfecting Tom’s mannerisms, studying his accent, and even buying clothes that matched Tom’s public appearances.

But as time went on, the praise began to sting.

“You’re just a look-alike,” one comment read. “Cool, but… you’re not him.”

Jordan’s content, once fun, became a bitter reminder of his second-place position in life. People loved him, but only because he reminded them of someone else. He wasn’t Jordan Johnson. He was “Fake Tom.”

The tipping point came when someone stopped him on the street.

“Oh my God, it’s you!” the stranger squealed, pulling out their phone. “I love your Spider-Man movies!”

Jordan opened his mouth to correct them but stopped. What was the point?

The fan took a selfie, thanked him, and walked away without a second glance.

Jordan stood there, seething.

“I’m done being second best,” he muttered under his breath.

That night, staring at the ceiling of his tiny apartment, Jordan came to a decision. He didn’t just want to look like Tom Holland. He wanted to be Tom Holland. And he would do whatever it took to make that happen.

For weeks, Jordan meticulously researched Tom Holland’s life. Social media posts, interviews, paparazzi photos—he gathered every scrap of information he could find. He learned Tom’s routines, his favorite coffee shop, even the layout of his home.

A plumbing issue Tom had mentioned in a recent interview gave Jordan the perfect in. He forged a work order, bought a janitor’s uniform, and prepared a special sedative designed to weaken Tom—just enough to make him vulnerable.

Jordan didn’t just want to meet Tom. He wanted to take everything from him—his fame, his fortune, his

Jordan’s hands trembled as he knocked on the door of Tom’s London home.

The door opened, and there he was. The real Tom Holland.

“Hello? Can I help you?” Tom asked, his voice warm and polite.

Jordan forced a smile. “I’m here to fix the pipes. Routine maintenance.”

Tom hesitated, then nodded. “Alright. Come in.”

Jordan followed him inside, clutching his toolbox tightly. Tom led him to the bathroom, chatting casually about the plumbing issue. Jordan nodded along, barely listening, his focus on the small vial hidden in his toolbox.

After a few minutes of fake tinkering, he made his move.

“Hey, before I go, do you mind if we take a photo? Big fan,” Jordan asked, feigning nervousness.

Tom chuckled. “Sure! Let me grab my phone.”

“No need,” Jordan said, pulling out his own. They posed for the photo, and Jordan snapped it, his smirk barely concealed.

“Thanks, mate,” he said, slipping the sedative into the faucet’s filter. He turned the water on, letting it run clear before leaving the room.

But he didn’t leave the house. Instead, he waited just outside the bathroom door, listening.

It didn’t take long. Jordan heard a sharp gasp, followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. He pushed the door open slightly and peered inside.

Tom was on his knees, clutching the sink, his face pale and drenched in sweat. His veins glowed faintly blue and red, spider-like patterns spreading across his skin.

“What’s… happening?” Tom choked, his voice trembling.

His muscles tensed and convulsed as the transformation took hold. The glow intensified, and the veins began to shift, forming the outlines of a Spider-Man suit. Tom’s skin seemed to liquefy, merging with the red and blue fabric that now covered his body.

Jordan watched, mesmerized, as Tom’s features softened. His face disappeared beneath the mask, his body shrinking slightly, losing its humanity.

Within moments, Tom was gone. Where he had been stood a perfect Spider-Man suit, limp and lifeless on the floor.

Jordan stepped inside, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

“Incredible,” he whispered, crouching beside the suit. He ran his fingers over the fabric, feeling its strange, almost organic texture.

“This is it,” he murmured, standing up and beginning to undress.

Jordan slid one leg into the suit, gasping as a surge of energy shot through him. His muscles tensed, growing stronger and more defined.

He pulled the suit over his thighs and waist, shivering as his body began to change. His stomach hardened into chiseled abs, his chest broadened, and his arms thickened with new strength.

“Unreal,” he whispered, flexing his hands as they grew larger, the veins more prominent.

He zipped up the suit, feeling it mold perfectly to his body. Finally, he pulled the mask over his face.

A warmth spread through him, and he felt his face shift. His cheekbones sharpened, his jawline squared, and his voice deepened into Tom’s unmistakable accent.

Jordan pulled off the mask and stared into the mirror.

“Holy…” He touched his face, his heart racing. The reflection was perfect. He was no longer Jordan Johnson.

He was Tom Holland.

Jordan turned to the empty space on the floor where the suit had been.

“Look at you now,” he sneered. “The great Tom Holland, reduced to nothing but fabric. You’re part of me now.”

He flexed his new muscles, admiring his reflection in the mirror.

“I’ll take your roles, your fans, your fame,” he said, his voice dripping with malice. “I’ll live your life better than you ever could. And no one will ever know.”

He adjusted the mask, slipping it back over his face.

“Thanks for the life, mate,” he said, his tone cruel. “I think I’ll enjoy it.”

With that, he walked out of the bathroom, now the star the world adored, leaving the real Tom behind—trapped forever as the suit Jordan now wore.

#celebrity tf #body swap #celebtf #transformation #gay #male body suit #malebody swap #male shapeshift #body switch #character transformation #tom holland #jordan johnson #spiderman #lookalike #inanimate tf #spider-suit

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sweetbabygirlsworld · 1 year ago

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I'm not ok rn, this is so beautiful and cute and chaotic and PERFECT, I'm so happy with how this turned out, it's so full of love and warmth.

Everyone is so well written and it makes me want to cry.

Hiii!!!

So I have this idea, i hope you like it: Picnic day with steve and the kids, chaotic but full of fun and love ♡

hi angel! this was a super fun request! i hope you like it!! — the one where steve takes his babysitting gig up to weathertop and you bring peace to the ensuing chaos (fluff, established relationship, 1.9k)

bug's summer fic fest ♡

The hike to Weathertop is long and merciless. Even though Dustin warned you it would be, Steve complains the entire trek upwards.

“There’s no way we’re not there yet, dude,” the boy whines like a child, head thrown back and eyes squeezed shut.

You’re practically dragging him up the relentless mountain now. With every labored stride, full of aching thighs and blades of grass cutting your ankles, you’re pulling a human with you.

Steve’s hand hasn’t left yours since you pulled off at the side of the road at Kerley, nearly a half hour ago. His long fingers stay curled between yours — sweaty palms, incessant griping, and all.

“For the hundredth time, we’re close, alright?” Dustin gripes between heavy pants. The curly-haired boy leads the group with a duffle bag of supplies in tow. “You know, maybe if you stop complaining, we’d get there faster.”

“Alright. Watch the tone, you little shit,” Steve squints at the back of him.

You grin at the red-faced boy, equally as exerted as you tug on his hand.

“C’mon. Stevie,” you lilt with your head to your shoulder, blinking at him with pretty eyes that sparkle beneath a yellow sun. “We’re almost there, okay? I can almost see the top of it now.”

You walk ahead of him with the intent to pull him forward. He plants his feet, dirty sneakers rooted in the billowing grass — immovable. You’re not nearly as athletic as he is. None of you are. But he’s eons more dramatic than the lot of you. Stubborn, too.

“I don’t know how you dragged me into this,” Steve deadpans. Though his structured features are fixed in a firm scowl, his chocolate eyes still melt for you.

This was the one day all week he had off from the hellscape that was Starcourt. He’d had it all planned out — breakfast in bed with his girl, a little hike after lunch with his friends, maybe a swim after, and then a movie and dinner (again, with his best girl).

But it’s well into the afternoon now, with no end of the journey in sight. All his plans are ruined and, like a boy, he pouts.

“‘Cause you love me?” you reply with a scrunched nose and an innocent shrug.

Steve only huffs in response. The big, dramatic exhale deflates his chest. He lets you pull him up the hill despite the glower on his face.

He grumbles like a raincloud, “Yeah… Guess so…”

Dustin tells you all about a girl named Suzie he met at summer camp. Something about Utah, Phoebe Cates, and ‘super religious white people.’ It’s hard to hear him over the blood rushing in your ears.

“I’m not Mormon, so her parents would never approve. It’s all a bit… Shakespearean—”

“I don’t wanna alarm anyone, but I think I might have sunstroke,” Robin blurts with wide eyes.

You all still and turn to look at her. Steve scoffs. “Do you even know the signs of sunstroke?”

“Are you hot?” you ask the brunette girl who idles on the other side of Steve.

“Like an oven,” she affirms, freckled face glowing pink. “If you touch me right now, I might actually burn you.”

“Are you dizzy? Or Nauseous?”

“I’ve been debating using this picnic basket as a puke bucket for five whole minutes,” she confesses quickly.

Max leaves Lucas’ side and walks a few steps down the mountain to take the wicker basket from the girl’s grip. Just in case.

“Are you confused?”

“Always,” Robin and Steve answer at the same time.

“Well, shit, Buckley,” you quip with a huff. “You might have sunstroke.”

The boy squeezes your hand and he shoots you a look. “Don’t tell her that. You’ll just freak her out.”

“Too late,” Robin wavers, glassy-eyed gaze gaping and faraway.

“Look!” Dustin exclaims. He’s got a wide grin on his face as he points further up the mountain. “I can see Cerebro now! That means we’re close!”

“You’ve been saying that for ten minutes!” Steve shouts in response.

The curly-haired boy shifts awkwardly under the weight of his glare. “Yeah, but… Now, I mean it.”

And sure, the hike to Weathertop was long and merciless, but the view was worth it.

It was the highest point in all of Hawkins, according to Dustin’s calculations. You could see the small town vaguely in the distance, though nature consumed you most of all. The tall grass and lush trees surrounding you were virtually untouched by man — well, aside from a couple of teenagers and their satellite, at least.

Steve squints up at the metal structure with his hands on his hips. He looks too much like a dad in his basketball shorts and form-fitting t-shirt.

“Damn,” he huffs. “You guys built all this?”

Dustin grins. “Yep. Impressed?”

“By how nerdy all of you are? Absolutely,” the boy mutters before walking over to you.

You stand at the edge of the hill, your gaze glued to the green spanning miles ahead of you. Everything is tinted a flaxen shade with the sun just starting to set. In the pink sky, everything glimmers golden.

“It’s so pretty up here,” you marvel as Steve’s arms curl around your waist.

He hugs you to him, neverminding the sweat dampening your sticky skin. His face leans against yours. You can feel the scruff dusting along his reddened cheek.

“Isn’t this sunset, like, the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Hmm. I don’t know,” Steve hums with a teasing inflection. “Maybe the second most beautiful thing.”

He’s beaming when you spin in his arms. You meet his wide grin with a playful scowl.

“You’re such an idiot,” you grouse, though you’re smiling by the time he leans down to kiss you.

His lips are soft and pink like the sky above you. He tastes like peanuts and chocolate from the trail mix he had earlier. You melt into him effortlessly, too quickly forgetting where you are.

“Don’t be gross!” Robin whines from behind the two of you.

You part from Steve to look over at her. Her arms are crossed over her chest and her features are contorted in discontent.

“I don’t have an escape route up here for that, and I am not walking all the way back down there.”

“Sorry…” you wince as you step out of Steve’s arms.

“Yeah, sorry, Robin,” the boy concedes, just before pulling you back and smacking another kiss to your cheek.

—————

The day goes by in a blink.

It hardly feels like hours have passed, but the sun has long set over Weathertop now. The sky turns into a deep blue velvet shade and sparkles with twinkling stars.

Dustin hasn’t yet parted from Cerebro. He’s still trying to contact Suzie, but she hasn’t answered him yet. He certainly isn’t disproving the fake girlfriend allegations, but the rest of them gave up teasing him about it long ago.

Instead, you idle in the dewy grass with your heads tilted to the sky.

Max and Lucas share a blanket with Mike and Will. The latter two boys have long dozed off, full on candy and sandwiches. You and Steve lay across from them on your own quilt. He leans back, propped up on his toned arms as you lounge against his chest.

Robin sits on the cooler next to Cerebro and tries not to go crazy when Dustin asks, “Suzie, do you copy?” for the millionth time.

“Look! There’s Orion!” you grin as you point to the sky.

Steve follows your finger and squints. “There’s no way you’re actually seeing this shit.”

“Just find Sirius and go a little to the left,” you explain, motioning to the constellation with your hand. “It looks like a person holding a bow and arrow. You literally can’t miss it.”

You tilt your head against the boy’s chest to see his face. His bushy brows pinch together in confusion. “What the hell is a Sirius?”

“Suzie, do you copy—”

“Oh, my god,” Robin groans. “She’s obviously not there, Dustin.”

“She’s there! She’ll pick up!”

“Maybe Cerebro just doesn’t work,” Steve shrugs.

Lucas counters without missing a beat. “Or maybe Suzie just doesn’t exist.”

“She exists!” Dustin retorts, his voice a few octaves higher than normal.

“She’s a genius, and she’s hotter than Phoebe Cates?” the boy scoffs with a laugh. “No girl is that perfect.”

“Ooh,” you hear Steve wince from behind you when Max shoots up from her lazed position. You cover your mouth to hide your smile as Lucas sits up with her. He looks a little bit frightened beneath the redhead’s piercing glare.

“Is that so?” Max wonders with an arched brow. She tilts her head to her shoulder and turns to look at you. “Would Steve ever say something that to you?”

“Definitely not,” you answer with a shake of your head.

“Because he’s, like, definitely smarter than that, right?”

You nod. “Absolutely.”

“I mean… You’re perfect! Like, perfect in your own way!” Lucas stammers as he tries to defend himself. “In your own— In your own special way.”

You feel Steve’s laugh rumble in his chest. “He’s a little confused, but he’s got the spirit.”

The younger couple squints at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, that it’s not about being hotter than Phoebe Cates,” the boy answers with a shrug.

You lean back against him to watch his face as he explains. He props you and him up with one arm and gestures with the other. “Like, sure, she’s pretty and all, but she’s not real. When you love someone, you love them because they’re not perfect. Not in spite of it, you know?”

“Well, statistically speaking, no one’s perfect,” Dustin chimes in with the radio’s microphone in hand.

Steve scoffs. “That’s not true. Whatever happened to beauty is in the eye of the beholder, huh? Being perfect isn’t about not having flaws or whatever. That’s bullshit. It’s about loving someone and thinking they’re still perfect even if they are loud, and weird, and strange.”

Your chest swells with so much warmth that it starts to ache. Maybe it’s just the lingering sunburn or your adoration for the boy you lay upon. You can feel the burn of it either way.

A grin tugs at the corners of your mouth as you squint up at him. You can only see the chiseled edges of his profile from this angle. “Not to be presumptuous or anything, but are you saying that I’m loud and weird and strange?”

Steve tilts his chin to look down at you. His brown eyes sparkle, full of love and warmth, as he smiles softly down at you. “You are absolutely all of those things, yes.”

You beam up at him, bright like the moonlight bathing the two of you in neon blue. You’ve never felt so loved for all the things you hated about yourself.

Steve’s got the same dazzling smile on his face as he leans down to kiss you. You quickly find that it’s impossible to lock your mouths together when you’re grinning so wide. It’s just smiles pressed against smiles and noses knocking together for all of half a second.

“Jesus Christ,” Robin grouses in a mumble as she tears the crust off her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She shoves it in her mouth a second later and mumbles through the mouthful. “I’d rather be having sunstroke.”

“Tell me about it,” Dustin scoffs, then turns back to the radio. “Suzie, do you copy?”

He flinches when a balled-up piece of bread comes flying his way.

#max being an icon like always #and my bby steve is so perfect #*sighs dreamily*#im going to print this out and put it in a picture frame on my wall #steve harrington x reader #stranger things x reader #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington x you #stranger things imagine #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington fanfiction #steve harrington fic #stranger things fanfiction #stranger things fic #stranger things #steve harrington #steve harrington fluff

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natailiatulls07 · 1 year ago

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Pen Pals

Oscar Piastri x Female!Reader

Summary - Strangers to pen pals to lovers

Warning - Cuteness overload!

Reader works in redbull as a media girl

Hi there,

I'm Y/n and I'm excited to write you! I've had a few pen pals in the past but none have really worked out.

But I digress, maybe we should start by introducing each other with a few fun facts; I love formula one! I am and will always be a cat person, having two cats of my own and my favourite past time would have to be finding and trying new recipes which either works or becomes a disaster, there's no inbetween!

I look forward to hearing about you and hopefully we'll get on well with eachother!

Yours truly,

Y/n

Dear Y/n,

It's lovely to meet you! This is my first time so go easy on me! I loved reading your letter and found it quite ironic as I am also a big fan of formula one.

A few facts about me is that my favourite film is 'ten things I hate about you' even though my friends always tease me for it. My favourite formula one driver would have to Oscar Piastri, next best rookie since Hamilton in my opinion.

Who's your favourite driver? And which team do you support??

Yours truly,

Oscar

Dear Oscar,

What a coincidence! I would definitely agree that Oscar Piastri is a great driver, espercially after winning a sprint in his rookie year! But however, I am a Max Verstappen girl through and through so that also means I'm a redbull supporter as well. But I have respect for each and every other driver and team!

I don't see how your friends can tease you about your favourite film, it is a iconic late 90s film with a stunning cast! See picking a favourite film for me is hard! There's too many to pick from like paddington or pretty woman or even oceans eight!

So what gotten you into starting to write pen pal letters??

Yours truly,

Y/n

Hi Y/n,

Yeah with my job I find that alot of the people I talk to are very fake and greedy. I felt as those if I just starting writing letters to someone I could keep an anonymous identity. I hope you'll respect that, I'm sure you will!

Don't get me wrong I love my job, it's something I worked my whole life for. But it feels some what suffocating sometimes.

What about you? You said that you've had pen pals in the past but none have really worked out. I can't see why though, you seem lovely and have a great taste in sport!

Yours truly,

Oscar

Dear Oscar,

Understandable. I promise to remain respectful and I won't pry. I think a pen pal is the perfect way to step away from our lifestyles, it gives us someone that won't judge and you can realise to them.

I started writing to pen pal when I started college. I moved away from all my friends and had a rocky break up with my boyfriend at the time.

So from then I tried to find the best pen pal. But believe it or not, not many people start a pen pal to talk to others and hear others but to just talk about themselves.

A pen pal relationship should be equal and not one sided so often those relationship will have lasted just under two months. But lets not dwell on the past.

Wait important question now! What is your zodiac sign?? It tells you alot about a person.

Yours truly,

Y/n

Time skip a few months -

Hi Y/n!

Just read your last letter, loved your descriptive story about your now sister in laws hen party! I need to see those drunk photos immadiately.

My summer break just started, I have a lot of down time and not a lot to do. Please do you have any suggestions!? I have a feeling that I'm going to spend my summer moving between the gym, my apartment and my local store.

How did the date with that guy go? Was the trip to the jungle mini golf really worth it? I remember I went on a date once, we went to a nice restaurant and by the end of the night she was black out drunk. WORST DATE EVER!!

Yours truly,

Oscar

Dear Oscar,

I would give you suggestions on what to do this summer. However just like you, my sofa becomes me seconds home after my bed. Well actually every summer me and my bestfriend deciated a day to binge watching all the Harry Potters! We go all out, getting themed snacks and making a fort out of blankets.

Oh my god! The date was horrible! All he did was talk about his family riches and how 'successful' he is. And to add salt to the wound the place was filled with whiny children. NEVER AGAIN!

Also I've add the photos from the hen party to the envelope, non of them have my face in it but you can see that the bride is enjoying herself.

Yours truly,

Y/n <3

Photos in the envelope -

Hey Y/n,

Looks like the hen party looks as exciting as it sounded! Send my crograts to the bride and groom please.

I'm sorry your date went like that, I hate rich snobs who just glot and I work around them a lot lol! A girl like yourself doesn't deserve to be treated like that, you deserve fancy restaurents and meaningful date. I know I would give you the world.

Harry Potter marathon?? Mmm doesn't sound like a bad idea, I might rope my friend into then, he's british so he'll feel right at home!

Anyways I've been thinking...over these last few months I've grown to trust and adore our little letters back and forth. And I was wondering if you wanted to exchange numbers or something, idk.

I'm actually in Barcelona next week for work, but we can arrange something if you wanted. I just feel like I'd want to put a face to a name and exciting personality!

Yours truly,

Oscar

Hi Oscar,

The world huh? Thats a bold statement...

Wait that ironic! I'm also in Barcelona next week, we could meet somewhere. I can't really do Thursday through to Sunday, that's when my work really starts.

But yeah we can meet at some coffee shop or something, I seen some nice recommendations on tiktok recently.

I'm actually really excited for this! I've never had a pen pal that actually worked out, let alone wanted to meet me, so I feel lucky! Yeah these letters have been fun to write, it's like I've learnt so much from you. Thank you so much!

OMG did you watch the last f1 race in Montreal?! Oscar Piastri, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo podium! I'm sooo proud Piastri, he is slowly but surely moving up and competing with Verstappen for my fav driver! There I said it!

Yours truly,

Y/n <3

Dear Y/n,

Is Piastri growing on you Y/n?? Ooo that's exciting! But you wouldn't want to disappoint the current world champ, his no 1 fan is going to the dark side!

I would definitely give you the world! In a heart beat actually, you've single handedly made me feel normal and human again and I am forever thankful for that!

So you're working Thursday through Sunday...the exact days that formula one is active in the same city. I feel bad for you honestly, I'm sorry...

How about we meet up on the Wednesday? Should we meet at the three marks coffee?? I've heard great things about their coffee!

Meet me there at 1pm! I actually can't wait! See you then!

Yours truly,

Oscar <3

Outside the cafe -

Stood just outside the cafe, Y/n fiddled with her bag. She didn't know why she was so nervous, she would trust her pen pal Oscar with her deepest darkest secret if needs be.

Busy was an understatement. And Y/n knew fully well why, it was the reason why she was here this week. Formula one. Being one the media girls at redbull meant that she had to attend every race, not that she was complaining.

Just down the street was Oscar, walking head held high and a large grin on his face. He was beyond excited to meet the mysterious Y/n.

When they both began sending letters to each other, they agreed that neither would pry for surnames, addresses and other personal details.

The one thing they decided to do today was dress in all white, making it easy for each of them to pin point each other.

Oscar approached the cafe, his eyes scanning the area for a women dressed in all white. Until he spotted her, it was love at first sight!

He was obsessed with how she stylied her hair, and what she decided to dress like considering the white rule. "Y/n!" Calling out her name, as he made a quick walk towards her.

Y/n could hear her name being called and when she turned she came face to face with the one and only Oscar Piastri smiling down at her. A gasp broke through her lips, surprised that he was her pen pal.

"You're my pen pal?" She asked in disbelief. The Australian driver nodding his head excitedly. "You let me hype you up about your driving and didn't tell me?"

They both broke out into laughter. "Yep! And I loved it!" Oscars face held a cheeky grin, that Y/n instantly fell in love with.

After settling down in a small secluded table just outside the cafe, Y/n turned to Oscar. Her face now holding a cheeky grin. "Is now the best time to tell you that I work at Redbull as a media girl?"

Now it was Oscars turned to look shocked, shaking his head in disbelief.

"So you're telling me we've been right under eachothers noses the whole time!?" Neither expected that they were in reality quite close to each other whilst they were sending letters back and forth.

"What are the chances? Right?"

"Fancy leaving Redbull and join me in Papaya? maybe then Oscar Piastri will be your favourite driver..."

"Oscar!"

#formula one #formula one x reader #formula one fanfiction #formula one x y/n #formula one x you #oscar piastri #oscar piastri x reader #oscar piastri fanfiction #oscar piastri x y/n #oscar piastri x you #f1 #f1 x reader #f1 fanfiction #f1 x y/n #f1 x you #mclaren #mclaren racing #mclaren f1 #mclaren formula 1

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gatheringbones · 1 day ago

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[“Times may change, but the mechanics of a great fisting party stay the same. There’s something about the extreme sports element of fisting, the physical technique combined with athletic spectacle, that makes it perfect for showing off.

I can remember house parties in Oakland where I would walk past a bedroom only to be beckoned in by a casual acquaintance: Hey, she’s really open, do you wanna hold hands with me inside of her? And I would, of course, wrapping my fingers around a stranger’s fingers inside another stranger on a mattress on the floor, electroclash blaring tinnily from a burned CD, churning like the splattered cream in the 1977 Robert Mapplethorpe piece appropriately titled Double Fist Fuck.

Come with me as we venture into another room at this house party. I crouch over you, on my knees, my left hand holding me up. My right hand is a queer icon, a position on a hundred screenprinted T-shirts. The pads of my fingers pressed together, my nails short and filed. My elbow is hydraulic, my wrist dexterous, my knuckles flexing. You love being just a hole. You love for me to stake my claim in you.

I’m searching for something specific, something a breath orgasm teacher of mine named Barbara Carrellas calls the “Resilient Edge of Resistance,” a term she got from her teaching partner, Chester Mainard. She defines it as the sensation of being “awake and aware, but completely peaceful and relaxed. You want it to go on forever.”

I press you, searching for the place where you press back onto me, and I tenderize you like meat as I go. You are impaled on me, and every movement I make feels a thousand times larger than reality. I twist my knuckles. I pulse. I tug. I undulate. I open my hand and press my fingers together. I play you like music. You yank on me, and I let you take me with you. Bear down on me and melt away.

I’ve been fucked in my holes ever since I started having sex with other people. And realizing my potential to fist others is the thing I now know was missing where that kind of default sex was concerned. I love to top, to be in the driver’s seat, to be the emcee of the show. I crave giving people what I love to get. You don’t have to be at a fisting party to fist, but somehow, the act feels inherently exhibitionist even at its most intimate. It’s not just about me and you, or about the people voyeuring around us. In moments like these, I feel connected to the players at the Catacombs, their party technology and what my activist friend Blunt calls the technology of community. Queer pleasure makes space for everyone to fuck underground and outside the box.”]

tina horn, from why are people into that? a cultural investigation of kink, 2024

#tina horn #currently reading

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badbugbotblood · 5 months ago

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Mini conspiracy to do with lrt actually because this has been rotting my brain. The timeline doesn't necessarily make sense because there is like a small ocean of time between the unplugging of TurboTime and Turbo's incursion into Sugar Rush, BUT HEAR ME OUT!

So we know that the visual design, vocal flair and body language of King Candy is HEAVILY inspired by Disney's Mad Hatter from their original animated Alice in Wonderland (1951). The resemblance is extremely deliberate. The hair, the high collar, the iconic lisp, the presentation.

But if we look at King Candy's visual design when compared to the other human avatars of SUGAR RUSH, our little faux monarch here does NOT STYLISTICALLY MATCH UP!

The racers of Sugar Rush are very clearly emulating a typical cutesy Japanese 'chibi' style. Round heads, big eyes, little noses, and legs that (while not so long as to be anatomically realistic) fit the proportions of their bodies. Their outfits are sleek and their silhouettes are quite thin.

King Candy does not follow this same design philosophy at all (and it's for this reason that I also personally believe that King Candy's appearance as a whole was a fabrication of Turbo's, rather than an unfinished NPC character whose model he commandeered).

I think an interesting in-universe explanation for King Candy's appearance could come from another game. One which Turbo would have known well.

After all, TurboTime had had a neighbor in Fix-It Felix Jr.

While their design language definitely does not line up 1:1, I see more of Felix in King Candy's appearance than I do the likeness of any Sugar Rush avatar. There are some commonalities in the facial proportions of King Candy and Fix-It Felix. Their heads are taller, eyes are smaller, and their mouths are wider. And then there is the nose, which is to me and my delulu brain the most obvious visual similarity between these two.

So. Say you're a societal pariah after doing something seriously taboo, and you need to blend in with a group of newly-arrived strangers in order to avoid being caught and punished for your misdeeds. There's not much time, and you need to get your affairs in order before anyone realizes what you're doing.

I think that, with his take-over of Sugar Rush being an extremely time-sensitive ordeal, Turbo had very little chance to devise the perfect disguise. So he cheated just a bit, took inspiration from a place that was familiar to him.

His own appearance, ghoulish and grey, dressed in blazing red over stark white, that would never fly in such a whimsical world. But he once knew a cast of characters with designs that all the Players found appealing at that time, and he fell back on that knowledge to craft his royal façade. All he knew for sure was that his avatar had to be cute, colorful and coherent.

The end result definitely doesn't scream Sugar Rush when you really scrutinize it, but it held up for fifteen years. Fifteen wonderful years full of racing and ruling and winning to his heart's content. Turbo was satisfied, maybe even truly happy.

I wonder if part of his apparent surprise during the Big Twist Villain Reveal(tm) came from him not immediately recognizing the ashy grey skin beneath the mask he'd built more than a decade ago. After all, he'd spent right around half of his entire life as the one and only King Candy, the benevolent monarch and best racer of Sugar Rush.

He would have been more than happy to leave his loathsome original avatar behind with the rest of the eight-bit era. It had done him no favors even when he wasn't old news just yet.

How unfortunate for him that the pesky Glitch had different ideas.

#Obsessed with the potential for Turbo to have dealt w/ body dysmorphia (prior to getting bugged up and totally loving that!)#Turbo wir #wreck-it ralph headcanons #BugBot's headcanons #Turbotastic!#We stan a self-accepting bug bastard king #Love yourself. Even if 'yourself' means a twenty-foot tall biomechanical horror from the bowels of candy Hell #Wreck-It Ralph #King Candy #King Candybug

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lilmisssona · 1 month ago

Text

☃︎♡Dynamic And Vibing ☃︎♡

☃︎♡Pairing - Hyunjin × Fem Reader

☃︎♡Plot - You always thought only women got nervous meeting their boyfriend's family, but your boyfriend proves otherwise. He’s adorably stressed about finding the perfect outfit for Christmas dinner, and a shopping trip leads him to a sparkling pair of iconic boots. Little did you know, those boots would be the start of some unexpected holiday drama

☃︎♡Genre - Comedy, Crackhead Energy, Fluff

☃︎♡Warnings - crackhead energy, non idol au, strangers to lovers au, established relationship, comedy, fluffy ,dramatic

☃︎♡Word Count - 8.7K ☃︎♡ Screenshot Count - 1

☃︎♡A/N - Belated Happy New Year! Episode 4 of Staymas is here, and it's all about Hyunjin + chaotic family drama with a side of the sweetest fluff so buckle up! This is just slightly proofread so apologies for any mistakes 🙂‍↕️

☃︎♡SKZ Masterlist ☃︎♡ Staymas Masterlist

Chuseok at your parents’ house was always a beautiful chaos: comforting, loud, and brimming with life. It was everything you’d missed while studying abroad. For two years, you’d spent the holiday alone in a foreign city, attempting to recreate the flavors of home with store-bought tteok and shaky video calls with your family. But now, finally back in Seoul, the world felt familiar again, as if the missing pieces had finally clicked into place.

The past year had been a whirlwind....finishing your degree, landing a great job, and, most unexpectedly, meeting Hyunjin.

He wasn’t just an artist; he was the artist. The kind of guy who wore paint-streaked hoodies like they were high fashion and could make you laugh until you cried over his “accidental masterpiece” of spilling glitter on his sneakers. Hyunjin had an extraordinary gift for turning the ordinary into unforgettable moments, though most of those moments came with a dose of mild disaster.

But this Chuseok, Hyunjin wasn’t with you. He was neck-deep in preparations for a massive art festival, surviving on caffeine and two hours of sleep a night. Lately, your time together had been reduced to rushed coffee dates and late-night video calls.

“I promise I’ll be there next year,” he had said during one of those calls, holding a paintbrush like he was making a solemn vow. “But this festival…”

“I know,” you had reassured him, even as you wished for his presence now more than ever.

“Gotta go!” he’d added abruptly. “I need to channel my soul into these paintings, babe!”

You’d rolled your eyes at his theatrics, but deep down, you missed him - the chaos, the charm, the electric energy he brought into your life. Being home for Chuseok after two years felt monumental, but you couldn’t shake the wish that he could experience it with you.

Your family? They would’ve either fallen in love with him or been completely bewildered. Probably both.

---------------------------------------------------------

The chaos hit you the moment you stepped through the door of your parents’ house. Your mom’s voice greeted you before her eyes did.

“Close the door before all the heat escapes!” she scolded, not even looking up as she deftly flipped jeon and rolled mandu in the kitchen. The dining table was a vibrant mess of ingredients: bowls of sesame oil, chopped scallions, and a pile of persimmons waiting to be transformed into something beautiful. On the stove, galbijjim simmered away, its rich, savory aroma filling the house.

Your dad was at the table, valiantly attempting to fold rice cakes into their traditional half-moon shapes. As always, his songpyeon were hilariously lopsided, with sweet sesame filling threatening to spill from every edge.

“I think they look artistic,” he said, raising an eyebrow at your mom, who shot him her signature look of disapproval.

You smiled, imagining Hyunjin in this setting. He’d definitely find some poetic beauty in your dad’s uneven creations and probably call them “symbolic of imperfect perfection.”

“These songpyeon look like they need a rescue team,” your brother teased from his corner of the kitchen, where he was supposed to be grilling sweet potatoes. Instead, his phone was firmly in hand while the sweet potatoes burned, their charred skins proof of his negligence.

And then there was your grandmother, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, beaming as soon as her eyes landed on you. “Ah, my big-city granddaughter is back!” she exclaimed, patting the floor beside her. “Do they celebrate Chuseok over there?”

“They have Thanksgiving, Halmeoni. It’s… different,” you said, settling down next to her.

“Thanksgiving?” she repeated, her voice dripping with playful skepticism. “Do they have songpyeon?”

“Nope. That’s why I’m back here.”

“Well, come on, you haven’t forgotten how to shape songpyeon, have you?” she asked, handing you a ball of rice dough.

“I think I have,” you admitted sheepishly, eyeing the tray of perfectly crafted rice cakes.

“Don’t worry,” she said with a wink. “You’ve got me to teach you before you run off again.”

But Halmeoni wasn’t one to sit still for long. Before anyone could stop her, she was up on her feet, a piece of jeon in one hand and a fork in the other. “You don’t get legs like these by sitting around!” she declared, twirling across the room with a flair that belied her years.

Her laughter echoed through the house, and soon you were all joining in, your cheeks sore from smiling.

The house was alive with everything you’d missed - the clatter of pots, the hum of overlapping conversations, your mom’s occasional scolding, and the playful bickering between your brother and dad. After being away for so long, you’d almost forgotten how full, how warm, a home could feel during Chuseok.

---------------------------------------------------------

Later, as you helped your mom set the dishes, you couldn’t help but think of Hyunjin. He would’ve turned the whole process into a comedy sketch, complete with exaggerated groans and theatrical hand gestures. You could almost hear him whining, “Why do mine look like deflated dumplings?” as he somehow managed to get sesame filling smeared all over his face.

At dinner, the table overflowed with every Chuseok dish you’d dreamed about while abroad. Your mom didn’t hold back, piling your plate high with galbijjim, japchae, and perfectly steamed songpyeon.

“Eat, eat,” she urged, watching you with that particular kind of satisfaction only a mother can feel.

“Mom, I can’t eat all of this,” you protested, though you knew you’d try anyway.

“You’ve been living on convenience store food for years. You need to eat properly now,” she said, her tone playful but her eyes filled with concern.

As the meal went on, the chatter and laughter filled the room, with everyone reminiscing about old times and grilling you about your life abroad.

Your brother, his devilish grin fully intact, suddenly decided to strike. “No boyfriend again this year? Does he even exist, or did you make him up?”

“What’s his name again?” your mom asked, peering at you over her glasses.

“Hyunjin,” you replied with a sigh, already exasperated.

“He’s real, bro, by the way,” you added, flicking your brother’s forehead in mock annoyance. “He’s just busy with an art festival.”

“Oh, an artist!” Grandma exclaimed, her eyes lighting up with intrigue. “Does he paint bowls of fruit or naked ladies?”

You nearly choked on your drink. “Neither, Halmeoni. He’s more… abstract.”

“Abstract? Like splatters of paint on a canvas and calling it deep?” she asked, unimpressed, raising an eyebrow.

“More like…” You hesitated, recalling the time Hyunjin had proudly shown you a painting and described it as “a metaphor for a squirrel discovering capitalism.” Clearing your throat, you finished, “…Yeah, let’s go with that.”

At that moment, your dad set down his chopsticks, his posture shifting into something thoughtful. He leaned back in his chair with the kind of slow deliberation that meant he was about to drop some classic dad-level wisdom.

“This artist boyfriend of yours,” he began, voice low and serious, “does he know how to hold chopsticks properly?”

You blinked at him, caught off guard. “Uh… yes?”

“Good,” your dad said with a solemn nod, as if he’d just concluded a critical evaluation. “Then I want to meet him. Christmas dinner. Bring him over.”

The entire table went silent.

“Wait, what?” you stammered, your heart rate spiking. Was this a heart attack or just sheer panic?

Your brother perked up instantly, a Cheshire grin spreading across his face. “Oh, this is going to be so good,” he said, practically vibrating with excitement.

“Why Christmas?” you asked, your voice rising with desperation.

“Because,” your dad replied matter-of-factly, “I need to see if this ‘artist’ is worthy of my daughter. And Christmas feels right. Festive, but serious.”

“Festive, but serious?” you repeated, incredulous.

“Oh, this is a classic move,” your brother chimed in, clearly savoring your discomfort. “Dad’s going to ask him all the hard-hitting questions. Like, ‘What are your future plans?’ and ‘Do you plan on starving for your art or earning a real income?’”

Your dad shot him a sharp look. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

“But you thought it,” your brother teased, not missing a beat.

“Dad,” you began, struggling to keep calm, “Hyunjin is not… he’s not just some random guy. He’s—”

“Exactly,” your dad interrupted. “He’s not some random guy. He’s someone important to you, which means I need to make sure he’s… let’s say, ‘qualified.’”

“Qualified? For what?!”

“For you,” your dad said simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Your grandma, still contentedly munching on songpyeon, decided it was her turn to chime in. “Oh, don’t scare the poor boy too much. Artists are sensitive, you know. One wrong word, and they’ll write a tragic poem about it.”

“Or paint a metaphor about a squirrel’s heartbreak,” your brother added, snickering.

You groaned, slapping your palm against your face. “He’s never going to agree to this.”

“Oh, he’ll agree,” your dad said confidently, like he’d already won. “If he cares about you, he’ll show up. And don’t worry, I’ll be nice. At first.”

“Dad,” you warned, your voice a mix of disbelief and dread.

“What?” he said innocently, blinking at you. “I just want to get to know the man who might steal my daughter away someday.”

“That’s a lot of pressure, Dad.”

He shrugged, utterly unbothered. “If he can’t handle me, how’s he going to handle the rest of this family?”

Your grandma chuckled knowingly. “Don’t worry, I’ll back him up. Unless he says something stupid.”

“Like what?” you asked, your frustration mounting.

“Oh, you know,” she said airily, waving her hand. “If he starts talking about ‘artistic expression’ and goes on about how it reflects the struggles of the modern soul.”

“That actually sounds like something Hyunjin might say,” you muttered under your breath.

----------------------------------------------------------

The conversation shifted to dessert, but the looming prospect of Hyunjin’s impending “interview” with your dad hung over the room like a storm cloud. Naturally, your brother, ever the instigator, couldn’t resist stirring the pot.

“You know, Dad,” he began, leaning back in his chair with a grin that rivaled the Cheshire Cat’s, “you should start with something dramatic. Like, ‘What are your intentions with my daughter?’”

“Good idea,” your dad replied, stroking his chin as though preparing for a high-stakes interrogation.

You shot them both a withering glare. “This isn’t the 1800s. He’s not proposing with a cow and a handshake.”

“Well, he’d better not come empty-handed,” your mom chimed in, her tone light but firm. “A nice bottle of wine or a fruit basket would do. Something thoughtful.”

“Fruit basket?” your brother echoed, practically doubling over in laughter. “What is he, visiting a hospital?”

Your grandma, completely ignoring him, nodded sagely. “Yes, a fruit basket is good. Grapes show generosity, and apples mean good health.” She paused, then added with utmost seriousness, “But if he brings bananas, I’ll have questions.”

“Halmeoni!” you gasped, nearly choking on your water as your brother descended into uncontrollable laughter.

“What? They’re too casual!” she said, completely unfazed. “Bananas say, ‘I remembered this on the way over.’”

Your dad tapped his chopsticks on the table, like a judge calling for order in court. “Let’s focus here. This young man...Hyunjin, right?—he’s an artist. So, I need to know…” He trailed off dramatically.

“…Know what?” you asked, your patience thinning.

“If he paints with his heart or just his hands.”

“Are you serious?” you asked, staring at him in disbelief.

“Absolutely,” he replied, deadpan. “And if he paints with glitter, we’re going to have a long talk.”

“Why?” your brother asked, barely containing his amusement.

“Because,” your dad said with a grim finality, “glitter is the devil’s confetti. Once it’s in the house, it’s everywhere.”

You slapped a hand to your face. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Oh, it’s going to get better,” your brother teased, practically bouncing with glee. “Dad should ask him about his five-year plan. You know, see if he’s planning to be a tortured artist or someone who can actually pay for a date.”

“I pay for dates, thank you very much!” you shot back, crossing your arms.

“Good,” your dad said with a nod of approval. “That means you’ve got a backup plan.”

You groaned, burying your face in your hands. “This is a disaster.”

“No, no,” your mom said soothingly, patting your shoulder. “It’ll be fine. Just tell him not to take your dad’s poker face too seriously.”

“My poker face?” your dad echoed, visibly offended. “I don’t have a poker face!”

“Yes, you do,” your mom, grandma, and brother said in unison.

Your dad huffed, crossing his arms. “Fine. But I’ll keep it light.”

“Define ‘light,’” you demanded, narrowing your eyes.

“I’ll just ask him simple things. Like, does he prefer oil paints or acrylics? Does he have any famous artist friends? And why is he dating my daughter instead of focusing on his career?”

“Dad!”

Your grandma waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, don’t scare him too much. Artists are resilient. They’re like weeds...they’ll grow anywhere.”

Your brother cackled, adding, “Or like glitter. Impossible to get rid of.”

Your dad raised a finger triumphantly. “Exactly. And we’ll see if he’s the kind of glitter we want sticking around.”

That night, as you slipped into your room, still chuckling at your family’s antics, the evening felt like a scene from a sitcom. Your dad’s mock-interrogation plans for Hyunjin, your grandma’s deadpan commentary about “sensitive artists,” and your brother’s relentless teasing played on a loop in your mind.

Beneath the laughter, though, your thoughts wandered to the day you first met Hyunjin.....

----------------------------------------------------------

It had been months ago, during a wedding planning consultation. Your client, overwhelmed by the details, had sent a friend to meet you instead. “Don’t worry, they know everything,” your client had reassured you. “Hyunjin’s a good friend. You’ll be fine.”

You’d arrived at the café expecting someone serious, maybe a bit frazzled but focused. Instead, Hyunjin walked in like he was auditioning for a rom-com. Confidence radiated off him...until he tripped over the rug and went sprawling across the floor in a spectacularly ungraceful tumble.

For a moment, you were too stunned to react, staring as he scrambled to right himself. Then he looked up, grinning, and waved as though this were all part of his plan. “Hi! I’m Hyunjin,” he said cheerfully, as if he hadn’t just wiped out. “I’m here to meet the wedding planner?”

You couldn’t hold back a laugh. “That was… an entrance.”

Hyunjin shrugged nonchalantly, brushing imaginary dust off his jacket. “I like to keep things interesting,” he said, his eyes glinting with mischief. “But don’t worry...I’m all business now.”

“Business, huh?” you asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Totally,” he said, sitting down and immediately knocking over a sugar packet with his elbow. “The bride sent me. They’re handling the important stuff...catering, keeping Aunt Jeon from overdrinking, you know ? The essentials. I’m here to make sure the wedding’s a masterpiece.”

You stifled a laugh. “A masterpiece? Are you a wedding planner or…?”

“Artist,” he said, leaning back with a dramatic flair. “I paint, sculpt, create installations...basically, I make a mess and call it art.”

“An artist?” you repeated, surprised. “Then how did you end up here, planning a wedding?”

Hyunjin waved a hand as if it were no big deal. “The bride’s my friend. They needed someone with vision, and who better than an artistic genius? I don’t know anything about weddings, but I’m great at making things beautiful.”

You couldn’t help but laugh. “So… you’re suggesting we turn a wedding into an art exhibit?”

“Exactly,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “Like, why have a boring tiered cake when you could have an abstract sculpture? A cake that’s a statement piece!”

“An avant-garde wedding cake?” you teased.

“Why not?” he replied, completely serious. “It’s not just dessert; it’s a metaphor. And seating? Who needs assigned seats? Let people pick where they feel inspired...it’s freedom, an artistic rebellion!”

You shook your head, biting back a smile. “You’re really leaning into this chaos, huh?”

“Chaos is just art waiting to happen,” he said with a wink.

The rest of the meeting was a whirlwind of wild ideas, each one more absurd than the last. Despite yourself, you couldn’t help but enjoy his infectious energy. Hyunjin was unpredictable, chaotic even, but there was a charm to the way he embraced his quirks so unapologetically.

Over the weeks, he continued showing up to meetings, always armed with another outlandish idea. You never knew what to expect, but his presence made the planning process more fun than you’d anticipated.

One rainy afternoon, as you walked back from yet another meeting, a car sped through a puddle, sending water flying toward you. Before you could react, Hyunjin darted forward, attempting to shield you. Instead, he caught the full force of the splash.

Soaked from head to toe, he turned to you with an apologetic grin. “Well, that didn’t go as planned.”

You couldn’t help but laugh. “Next time, maybe skip the heroics?”

Hyunjin shrugged, dripping water but still smiling. “Hey, it’s the thought that counts.”

----------------------------------------------------------

After that day, you and Hyunjin started spending more and more time together. Between wedding meetings, he’d randomly show up with plans for coffee runs, surprise visits to art galleries, and quirky little outings. Whether he was making you laugh unintentionally or with deliberate mischief, you found yourself falling for him, one laugh at a time.

One particularly stressful day, you were drowning in wedding prep, timelines, budgets, and last-minute crises piled high on your desk. Hyunjin waltzed in unannounced, his usual grin plastered across his face.

“You look like you need a break,” he said, pulling up a chair beside you. “How about a little distraction?”

You sighed, leaning back in frustration. “I don’t have time for distractions, Hyunjin. The wedding is in three days, and everything is falling apart.”

He tilted his head, studying you thoughtfully. “Okay, counteroffer: one hour at an art gallery. I promise it’ll clear your head.”

You frowned, torn between the mountain of work and the temptation in his eyes. Finally, you relented. “Fine. One hour.”

One hour turned into two. By the time you returned, the weight of your stress had lifted, replaced by the calm and joy of Hyunjin’s chaos. His ability to ease your burdens with simple, thoughtful gestures was just one of the many reasons you’d started to fall for him.

----------------------------------------------------------

The months with Hyunjin had been a whirlwind of laughter, spontaneity, and moments that left you breathless. It wasn’t just his charm or his creativity that captured your heart-it was how he made the mundane feel extraordinary, as if life itself were art, waiting to be experienced.

That magic followed you tonight as the two of you wandered along the Han River under a warm, starlit sky. The breeze carried the faint scent of blooming flowers and the distant hum of cicadas. Lanterns strung along the walkway cast a golden glow, illuminating his face as he animatedly talked about his latest project...a series of paintings inspired by emotions that couldn’t be put into words.

“One of them is all jagged, sharp strokes for when you want to laugh and cry at the same time,” he explained, gesturing enthusiastically. “And another is this swirl of soft, pastel shades...it’s supposed to feel like when you’re overwhelmed but kind of happy about it. It’s chaos, but that’s the beauty of it!”

You couldn’t help but laugh, shaking your head. “Hyunjin, your whole life is chaos. How do you manage to make it look so effortless?”

He grinned, his eyes sparkling like the river reflecting the city lights. “That’s the secret! Chaos isn’t something you manage...it’s something you embrace. Like a dance.”

“A dance?” you teased, raising an eyebrow. “So, my life should be an interpretive dance of chaos?”

“Exactly!” he said, snapping his fingers as if he’d made a groundbreaking discovery. “And who better to teach you than me, the master of chaos?”

You rolled your eyes, biting back a smile. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Unbelievably charming, you mean?” he quipped, his dimples making an appearance as he flashed you his signature cheeky grin.

But before you could retort, he stopped walking, his expression shifting into something softer, almost hesitant. The playful light in his eyes dimmed slightly, replaced by a vulnerability that made your heart flutter.

“Actually…” he began, his voice quieter now, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

You tilted your head, intrigued. “What is it?”

He hesitated, running a hand through his hair, a nervous habit you’d come to recognize. “I know I’ve been a bit of a whirlwind...crashing into your life with all my ridiculous ideas and dragging you into my chaos. But through it all, I’ve had the absolute best time getting to know you. And… I don’t want it to end.”

Your breath hitched, his words settling over you like a warm summer breeze.

“So,” he continued, stepping a little closer, “will you go on a date with me? A real one. No brainstorming, no interruptions...just you and me.”

You blinked, caught between surprise and the warmth blooming in your chest. “A real date?” you repeated, pretending to deliberate. “Does that mean I finally get a break from your creative chaos?”

He laughed, the sound light and full of relief. “I can’t promise that,” he admitted with a lopsided grin, “but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. Controlled chaos.”

You chuckled, shaking your head as you smiled at him. “Alright, Hyunjin. I’ll go on a date with you.”

The joy that lit up his face was brighter than the lanterns around you. He let out a breath he’d clearly been holding, his grin widening until it reached his eyes. “Really? You will?”

“Yeah,” you said softly, feeling your cheeks heat under his gaze. “But remember! you promised me controlled chaos.”

“Deal,” he said, his laughter carrying through the warm night air.

Then, as if he couldn’t hold back anymore, he stepped closer, his voice dropping to a tender murmur. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

Your heart raced as you nodded, unable to speak.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked, his voice trembling with nervousness.

“Because I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, and I just… I can’t wait anymore.”

The sincerity in his eyes made it impossible to resist. You nodded again, your breath catching as the world seemed to slow around you.

The smile that spread across his face was gentle and full of warmth. His hands reached up to cup your face, his thumb brushing softly against your cheek. “I’m kind of terrified right now,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Me too,” you replied, your voice just as quiet.

And then he kissed you.

The kiss was everything you didn’t know you needed - soft, warm, and filled with unspoken emotions that made your heart soar. His arms wrapped around you, pulling you close as if he was afraid to let go. The warm breeze swirled around you, carrying the faint scent of flowers and the promise of something new.

When he finally pulled back, his forehead rested against yours, and he let out a breathless laugh. “I didn’t mess that up, did I?” he asked, his eyes searching yours.

You smiled, your hands resting on his chest. “Not even a little.”

His laughter bubbled up again, and he pulled you into a tight hug, his joy so infectious you couldn’t help but laugh along. As you stood there, wrapped in his arms beneath the warm summer sky, you realized something: Hyunjin wasn’t just chaos...he was your chaos. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

-------------------------------------------------------

Fast forward to now, as you lay in bed scrolling through your phone, a fond smile tugged at your lips as you reminisced about how you met Hyunjin. Suddenly, your screen lit up with an incoming call, his name flashing across it. Without hesitation, you answered.

“Have you eaten?” he asked immediately, his voice warm and familiar, like a favorite melody.

You laughed softly. “Yes, Hyunjin, I’ve eaten. Have you?”

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “Barely. Today was insane. The exhibition was pure chaos..like, actual chaos. One of the canvases fell off the wall mid-display, someone tripped over the lighting cords, and, oh, let’s not forget when I spilled paint on the gallery owner’s shoes.”

You winced, barely stifling a laugh. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Hey, it’s not my fault my art invites so much… energy,” he defended, though the amusement in his voice was impossible to miss. “Anyway, how was Chuseok without me? Did your family miss me?”

“Oh, you know,” you teased, “the usual chaos: food, teasing, and… questions about you.”

“About me?” he asked cautiously, suspicion creeping into his tone. “What kind of questions?”

You hesitated, knowing his reaction would be priceless. “Well… my family wants to meet you. On Christmas.”

There was a brief pause. “They what?”

“They want to meet you,” you repeated, biting back a grin.

Hyunjin groaned dramatically. “Like, face-to-face? ‘Sit-down-and-talk-about-my-life’ meet me?”

“Exactly,” you said, barely suppressing your laughter.

“Oh no,” he muttered. “This is bad. Your dad’s going to grill me like I’m the main course. He’s probably already drafting a list of questions about my job, and when I panic and start talking about spaghetti metaphors, it’s all going to spiral. Your brother will just sit there smirking, waiting for me to mess up. And your grandma… she’s going to judge me for the way I hold chopsticks, isn’t she?”

You burst into laughter. “Relax, Hyunjin. My grandma only cares about two things: whether you bring good wine and if your fruit basket game is strong.”

“Wait, what?” he asked, his voice laced with panic. “I have to bring a fruit basket and wine? Is this a Christmas dinner or a survival challenge?”

“It’s festive but serious,” you replied, grinning. “Dad calls it:

‘An occasion for celebration and evaluation’

Which is basically code for: let’s judge you while enjoying ham.”

Hyunjin groaned again. “Why does your dad sound like he’s hosting auditions for the role of son-in-law?”

“Because he kind of is,” you teased, trying not to laugh at his distress.

“Great,” he deadpanned. “I’m walking into a festive firing squad. And I have to come armed with fruit and wine? Do they prefer a classic fruit basket or something more avant-garde? Should I arrange it in the shape of a Christmas tree? Or is that too much?”

“You’re overthinking it,” you assured him, still grinning. “Just grab some nice apples and oranges. Maybe throw in a pear or two for flair.”

“And the wine?” he asked, his voice rising in panic again. “Red or white? Sweet or dry? What if your dad secretly prefers whiskey and silently judges me for bringing wine? What if your grandma’s secretly a sommelier and I offend her with a cheap bottle?”

“Hyunjin,” you said, struggling to keep a straight face, “my grandma thinks boxed wine is fancy. You’ll be fine.”

He let out a dramatic sigh of relief. “Okay, fruit basket, wine. Got it. Anything else? Do I need to dress up? Is there a secret handshake? Should I prepare a speech?”

You laughed, shaking your head. “Just be yourself. Chaotic, but respectful chaos, remember?”

“Respectful chaos,” he repeated as if it were a mantra. “Alright. I can do this. But if your dad starts grilling me and I start rambling about spaghetti metaphors, you better jump in and save me.”

“Deal,” you said, still laughing.

“And if I survive this dinner,” he added mischievously, “you owe me a nice, peaceful date. No questions, no interrogations.”

“Deal,” you agreed.

As you hung up, you could already picture Hyunjin wandering through a store, agonizing over fruit basket aesthetics and wine labels. You knew Christmas dinner would be chaotic...after all, it always was. But with Hyunjin? It would be a chaos you wouldn’t trade for anything...

---------------------------------------------------------

You used to think meeting a significant other’s family was nerve-wracking only for women. Oh, how wrong you were. In your case, it was your boyfriend, Hyunjin, who was spiraling into a full-blown, Oscar-worthy meltdown about Christmas dinner with your family.

Currently, you were perched on his bed, cross-legged, watching the spectacle unfold with a mix of amusement and secondhand anxiety. Hyunjin was on his third frantic lap through his closet, tossing sweaters and shirts around like a tornado. You leaned back against the pillows, silently debating whether to intervene or just let him burn off his dramatic energy.

“Hyunjin,” you finally said, trying to sound soothing, “it’s just dinner, not the Met Gala.”

He whirled around, clutching two wildly different sweaters: a classic black one and something that looked like it had been stolen from an 80s ski lodge. His face was the epitome of despair. “Just dinner? Do you understand what’s at stake here? This is Christmas dinner! Your dad is going to interrogate me like he’s hosting a true-crime podcast. He’ll ask about my job, my future, my intentions, and when I inevitably panic, I’ll start talking about spaghetti metaphors!”

“Spaghetti metaphors?” you repeated, biting back a laugh.

“Yes, it’s a thing!” He threw the black sweater onto the floor with a dramatic flourish. “When I get nervous, I talk in analogies. And somehow, everything ends up being about pasta. Last time I described my art process as ‘like boiling spaghetti,’ and the gallery owner looked like he wanted to fire me on the spot.”

By now, you were laughing so hard your stomach hurt. “Okay, so my dad might ask a few questions....”

“A few questions?!” he interrupted, his hands flying to his hair. “Your dad is going to stare into my soul, your brother is going to roast me like a Christmas ham, and your grandma...oh god, your grandma! She’s going to judge me for how I hold my chopsticks, isn’t she? Is there a secret technique? Should I start practicing now?”

“Relax,” you said between giggles. “Grandma doesn’t care about chopsticks. She cares about two things: if you bring good wine and if your fruit basket game is good or not. "

“Wine and fruit basket. Got it,” he said, nodding like he was preparing for battle. “Okay, one disaster averted. But what about my outfit? I can’t just show up looking like I rolled out of bed. I need to look… professional. No, wait—approachable. Charming. Like the perfect boyfriend. Do I look like the perfect boyfriend in this sweater?” He gestured to the ski-lodge monstrosity he was now wearing.

“Honestly?” you said, grinning. “You look like a backup dancer for an 80s Christmas music video.”

“Great,” he groaned, tossing the sweater aside. “I’m doomed.”

You rolled your eyes. “Or… we could just go to the mall and find something nice. Something that says ‘respectable artist’ instead of ‘escaped circus performer.’”

His face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Mall? Yes. Let’s go. I can feel it—I’m going to find the perfect outfit.”

Fast forward to the mall, where Hyunjin had already tried on and rejected half the men’s section. Three blazers, two turtlenecks, and enough dress shirts to outfit a boy band later, you were starting to lose hope.

And then it happened.

You saw it before Hyunjin did...a pair of metallic, shimmering boots that practically glowed under the store lights.

“Oh no,” you muttered under your breath, already sensing doom.

But Hyunjin’s eyes widened with pure delight. “Oh yes,” he whispered, making a beeline for the display.

“Hyunjin, no,” you said firmly, following after him.

“Hyunjin, yes!” he countered, picking up one of the boots like it was the Holy Grail. “These boots are everything. They’re bold, they’re iconic, they scream ‘fearless boyfriend.’”

“They scream ‘disco ball meets midlife crisis,’” you deadpanned, staring at the blindingly shiny boots.

“Your family will love them!” he said, slipping one on and striking a pose. “Look at this. I’m making a statement.”

“Yeah, the statement is, ‘Please stop staring at my feet,’” you muttered, rubbing your temples.

A sales assistant wandered over, clearly trying not to laugh. “Those are… bold,” she said diplomatically.

“Thank you,” Hyunjin replied, beaming. “I’ll take them.”

“Hyunjin, no!” you protested, but it was too late. He was already at the counter, handing over his credit card like he’d just won the lottery.

As you left the store, Hyunjin practically skipping with his shiny new boots, you couldn’t help but laugh.

“You know,” he said, slinging an arm around your shoulders, “your family is going to remember me forever.”

“Oh, they’ll remember you,” you said. “They might even still be talking about you next Christmas.”

“Good,” he replied with that signature grin. “First impressions matter.”

“You do realize my dad’s going to ask you about your job, right? While you’re wearing those?”

“Exactly!” he said, his grin widening. “When I tell him I’m an artist, the boots will speak for themselves. They say, ‘This man is fearless.’”

You groaned, shaking your head. “You’re killing me, Hyunjin.”

And as you both walked toward the parking lot, Hyunjin proudly clutching his shiny new boots like they were priceless treasures, you couldn’t help but feel a mix of amusement and dread. Christmas dinner with your family was already shaping up to be an unforgettable event...though whether for good or chaotic reasons remained to be seen...

--------------------------------------------------------

“Alright, so we’ve got the boots,” you said, trying to suppress a grin. “But there’s still one tiny thing left to handle: the fruit basket.”

“Yes, the fruit basket,” he repeated, nodding seriously. Then, with a sudden drop in his voice, he added, “I really hope I don’t mess it up.”

You bit your lip to keep from laughing at his dramatic tone. “It’s fruit, Hyunjin. Not a job interview. Let’s just find something nice and call it a day.”

The two of you headed to a fancy grocery store, where Hyunjin immediately locked eyes with the aisles of meticulously arranged fruits. To him, it seemed, this was no ordinary shopping trip. He surveyed the scene like a warrior choosing his weapon for battle.

“I’ve never felt so much pressure over fruit,” he muttered, holding up an apple like it was a rare artifact. “Do you think this one says, ‘I’m responsible and thoughtful’?”

“It’s just an apple,” you replied, trying to keep him grounded.

“But it’s the apple,” he insisted, turning it over in his hands. “It needs to symbolize my commitment to this dinner. The apple is my ticket to acceptance!”

You watched as he placed the perfectly fine apple back and instead grabbed a comically oversized one, clearly trying to make a statement. “Hyunjin, it’s a fruit basket, not a résumé.”

After what felt like an eternity of inspecting, analyzing, and overthinking every piece of produce, you finally settled on an assortment. Hyunjin proudly selected a particularly dramatic pineapple, claiming it “looked artistic” and would anchor the whole basket.

At checkout, his confidence was back in full force. “I think I nailed it,” he said, beaming. “This fruit basket says, ‘I’m here for family, but I’m also a little extra.’”

“Perfect,” you said, nodding. “Now just don’t forget the most important part of Christmas dinner.”

“What’s that?” he asked, his curiosity genuine.

“Grandma’s dance,” you said casually.

His face fell instantly. “What?”

“Oh, don’t act surprised,” you teased. “Every year, after dinner, my grandma gets up and does her little dance. It’s her tradition.”

“No,” he said, wide-eyed and panicked. “Please, no. I can’t do this. I can’t even dance in front of you, let alone an audience.”

“Sorry, but you’re in it now,” you said, smirking. You could already picture the scene...your grandma in her festive red sweater and apron, hopping and twirling around the living room with surprising energy.

“You’re telling me... your grandma dances?” Hyunjin asked, his disbelief apparent.

“Yep,” you said, barely holding back your laughter. “And she’s good at it. Don’t be shocked if she pulls you up to join her.”

Hyunjin looked like he was seriously considering fleeing. “This is my worst nightmare.”

“Oh, come on,” you said, nudging him. “It’ll be fun. You’ll blend right in.”

“Blend in? Wearing shiny boots and holding a fruit basket, dancing with your grandma in front of your entire family? Sure, what could go wrong?” he muttered, shaking his head in despair.

“Exactly. Nothing to worry about,” you said with a grin.

He shot you a look. “If I trip, I’m blaming the boots.”

“And I’ll be in the front row with my camera,” you teased, watching him glare at the boots like they were both his greatest triumph and his downfall.

“Great,” he sighed dramatically. “Immortalized forever on your grandma’s Instagram: shiny boots, fruit basket, and all. Perfect.”

You laughed as you both headed back to your place, bracing for the chaos to come. Between Hyunjin’s flair for theatrics, your grandma’s impromptu dance moves, and a family that wouldn’t let anything slide, Christmas dinner was bound to be a spectacle.

But as you glanced over at him, shiny boots and pineapple in tow, you couldn’t help but smile. If anyone could survive the night...and somehow make it charming...it was Hyunjin. Chaos, quirks, and all...

--------------------------------------------------------

As you and Hyunjin approached your family’s front door, his steps growing slower with every inch closer. For the fifth time since leaving the car, he adjusted the fruit basket in his hands. “Do you think the pineapple’s too much?” he asked, glancing nervously at the artfully arranged assortment.

You turned to face him, stifling a laugh. “Hyunjin, it’s a fruit basket, not a dowry. Relax.”

He sighed, unconvinced. “But what if your dad thinks the pineapple is, I don’t know, pretentious? Or worse!, what if he hates mangoes?”

“Who hates mangoes?” you asked, amused.

“I don’t know!” he whispered dramatically, his eyes wide. “I just really want to make a good impression.”

“You’ll be fine,” you said, reaching up to straighten his slightly crooked tie. “Just be yourself.”

He shot you a skeptical look. “Being myself has historically led to chaos.”

“Lucky for you, my family thrives on chaos,” you teased, giving him an encouraging smile before ringing the doorbell.

The door swung open almost immediately, revealing your grandma, her face lighting up when she saw you. “There’s my favorite granddaughter!” she exclaimed, pulling you into a quick hug before her gaze shifted to Hyunjin. Her eyes sparkled with mischief. “And who’s this tall drink of water?”

Hyunjin, caught off guard, thrust the fruit basket and bottle of wine toward her like peace offerings. “Hello, ma’am. I brought this for your family. The fruit selection is... uh, curated.”

Grandma took the basket, inspecting it like it was a work of art. “Curated, you say? Well, look at this pineapple...very artistic. You’ve got an eye for detail, young man.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Hyunjin said, bowing slightly.

“And wine, too?” she added, holding up the bottle. “Now we’re talking. Come in, you’re already off to a good start.”

As you stepped inside, Hyunjin scanned the room, taking in the cozy chaos of your family’s Christmas decor. Twinkling lights covered every surface, stockings hung unevenly on the mantel, and the Christmas tree stood proudly in the corner, laden with mismatched ornaments.

But before he could comment on the festive ambiance, his shiny boots betrayed him. He slipped on the polished floor, flailing for balance until his arm instinctively grabbed the closest thing - your beloved Christmas tree.

Grandma, still holding the fruit basket, let out a laugh that echoed through the room. “Well, that’s certainly one way to make an entrance.”

Hyunjin quickly let go of the tree, brushing pine needles off his sleeve with an embarrassed grin. “Honestly, it’s a very... huggable tree.”

Your dad, watching the scene unfold from his armchair, raised an eyebrow and leaned forward. “So, this is the boyfriend?”

“Yes, Dad,” you said quickly, stepping in before Hyunjin could spiral. “This is Hyunjin.”

Hyunjin straightened up under your dad’s scrutinizing gaze. “Sir,” he said respectfully, bowing.

Before your dad could say anything, your mom entered from the kitchen, her festive apron dusted with flour. “Hyunjin, welcome! You’ve already charmed Mom with that fruit basket, so you’re doing well so far.”

Hyunjin gave a small, nervous smile. “Thank you, ma’am. I’m happy to be here.”

“Let’s see how long that lasts,” your brother said as he strolled in, a smirk on his face. He gestured toward the tree. “Hugging the decorations already? Bold choice.”

“It was... an artistic reflex,” Hyunjin replied awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck.

Your dad cleared his throat, the room falling silent as he leaned back in his chair. “Hyunjin, let’s talk. What do you do for a living?”

Hyunjin hesitated for a moment, glancing at you for reassurance. “I’m an artist, sir. I specialize in abstract painting.”

“Abstract painting,” your dad repeated, his tone even. “Interesting. How does one make a career out of that?”

Hyunjin straightened his shoulders, his voice steady. “I showcase my work in galleries and take on commissions. It’s about creating connections and telling stories through colors and forms.”

Your brother let out a snort. “So... finger painting for grown-ups?”

You glared at him, but before you could defend Hyunjin, he laughed. “Not quite, but I’ll admit it can get messy sometimes.”

“Messy, huh?” your dad said, leaning back in his chair, his tone casual but his gaze sharp. “And what are your intentions with my daughter?”

Hyunjin’s face turned a shade redder than the poinsettias on the table. “My intentions are... entirely honorable, sir. I care about her deeply, and I...”

“Want to hug her like the tree?” your brother cut in, earning a sharp glare from you and a chuckle from your mom.

“Enough teasing,” your mom said, stepping in to rescue him. She smiled at Hyunjin. “For what it’s worth, I like you. Anyone who can handle my mom’s humor and not run for the hills is good in my book.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Hyunjin replied, his relief evident.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” your grandma piped up, a mischievous glint in her eye. “There’s one final test. Every Christmas, we dance. And since you’re part of this gathering now, you’re up.”

“Dance?” Hyunjin repeated, his voice rising slightly in pitch.

“Oh, yes,” your grandma said as she made her way to the stereo. “You’re going to have to keep up with me.”

Your brother leaned back on the couch, smirking. “This is going to be epic. Grandma’s got moves.”

Your dad crossed his arms, an amused glint in his eyes. “Consider it part of your initiation.”

Hyunjin shot you a look of pure desperation as festive music began to play. “You’re not going to save me, are you?”

“Not a chance,” you said, laughing.

With surprising agility, your grandma started twirling across the room, her movements almost defying her age. Hyunjin took a deep breath and hesitantly joined her. What followed was a chaotic, laugh-out-loud performance as Hyunjin tried to keep up with your grandma’s energetic spins and dips. He stumbled through a few steps, narrowly avoided tripping over a stray stocking, and accidentally sent a candy cane flying off the tree.

Your brother was in hysterics, snapping photos. “This is comedy gold. I’m framing this.”

Your mom leaned toward you, her expression warm. “He’s charming,” she whispered. “I think he’s a keeper.”

You smiled, watching Hyunjin finish the dance with a dramatic, albeit unsteady, flourish. “I think so too.”

Panting but triumphant, Hyunjin received a hearty clap on the back from your grandma. “Not bad, artist boy,” she said with a grin. “You’ve got spirit.”

Hyunjin gave a shaky thumbs-up, still catching his breath. “I told you... I’m dynamic... and vibing.”

The room erupted into laughter, filling the space with the kind of warmth only family can create.

As the laughter subsided, Hyunjin collapsed into the nearest chair, wiping his brow. “Your grandma should be a dance instructor,” he said, still smiling. “I feel like I just survived an audition for Dancing with the Stars.”

Your grandma smirked, pouring herself a glass of wine. “Oh, honey, if you think that was tough, wait until I challenge you to a salsa battle next year.”

“Next year?” Hyunjin repeated, his eyes wide as he looked at you for backup.

“Don’t worry,” you teased, patting his shoulder. “You’ll have a whole year to practice.”

Your brother, still scrolling through the pictures he’d taken, held up his phone. “I’m definitely printing this one,” he said, showing a particularly unflattering shot of Hyunjin mid-spin, arms flailing wildly.

Hyunjin groaned, burying his face in his hands. “This is going to haunt me forever, isn’t it?”

“Oh, absolutely,” your brother replied, grinning. “I’m thinking Christmas cards. Maybe even a calendar.”

Your dad, who had been quietly observing the chaos with a faint smile, finally spoke up. “All right, enough tormenting the poor guy. Let’s move on to dinner. I’m starving.”

----------------------------------------------------------

Your mom emerged from the kitchen, balancing a tray of appetizers with practiced ease. “Dinner will be ready soon,” she said, setting the tray down. “In the meantime, why don’t we all sit and let Hyunjin catch his breath?”

As everyone moved toward the dining table, Hyunjin leaned in close to you. “Your family is... something else,” he murmured, equal parts amused and overwhelmed.

“They like you,” you whispered back, giving his hand a reassuring squeeze under the table. “Even my brother. This is just how they test people.”

“Test me?” he asked, arching a brow. “I feel like I’ve just survived an Olympic event.”

“Consider it a rite of passage,” you said with a grin.

Once everyone was seated, your dad picked up where he’d left off, his tone now more conversational. “So, Hyunjin, tell me more about your art. Where do you find your inspiration?”

Hyunjin straightened up, clearly more comfortable with the question. “A lot of my inspiration comes from emotions - joy, chaos, even moments like this,” he said, gesturing to the lively scene around the table. “I try to capture the energy of an experience and translate it visually.”

Your grandma, mid-bite of a canapé, perked up. “So, you’d paint this? A Christmas dinner with a fruit basket centerpiece and a tree barely standing after you hugged it?”

Hyunjin laughed. “Exactly. I’d call it Festive Mayhem.”

Your brother smirked. “Can I be in it? As the voice of reason, obviously.”

You rolled your eyes. “Voice of reason? You’re the cause of most of the chaos.”

“Hey,” your brother said, holding up his hands in mock defense. “I’m just making sure the boyfriend is worthy of my favorite sister.”

“I’m your only sister,” you shot back.

“And that’s why you’re my favorite,” he replied with a wink.

Your dad chuckled, clearly enjoying the banter. “Well, Hyunjin, you’ve made it through the dance floor and my questions. That’s no small accomplishment.”

“And you’ve won over Grandma,” your mom added with a warm smile. “That might be the hardest part.”

Hyunjin let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Honestly, I was prepared to sneak out of here in the fruit basket if things went south.”

Your grandma raised her glass, eyes twinkling. “To Hyunjin and his shiny boots! May they carry him through many more family gatherings.”

“Hear, hear!” your brother chimed in, lifting his mug of hot chocolate.

Hyunjin laughed, finally letting his guard down as he clinked glasses with everyone. As dinner was served and the conversation turned to lighter topics, he leaned over to you again, his tone softer. “You were right,” he said, smiling. “Your family thrives on chaos... but I kind of love it.”

You glanced around the table....your dad telling one of his signature groan-worthy Christmas jokes, your mom debating recipes with your grandma, and your brother mock-arguing over the “correct” way to hang tinsel...and smiled. “I told you they’d like you.”

Hyunjin’s fingers found yours under the table, giving them a gentle squeeze. “I’m starting to like them too. Even your brother. Sort of.”

“High praise,” you teased, nudging him lightly.

By the time dessert was served and gifts were exchanged, Hyunjin was laughing alongside your family as if he’d been part of it for years. Your grandma even roped him into another impromptu salsa dance, which he tackled with much more confidence and far fewer collisions.

----------------------------------‐-----------------------

After dinner, the house buzzed with the warmth of a festive afterglow. The hum of your family’s laughter and chatter filled the living room, but you and Hyunjin slipped upstairs to your bedroom, seeking a moment of quiet amidst the chaos.

As soon as the door clicked shut, the lively sounds from downstairs became a muffled hum. Hyunjin leaned back against the door, exhaling dramatically. “That was... an experience,” he said with a breathy laugh, his face a mix of relief and amusement.

You smiled, crossing the room to him. “An experience, huh? That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.”

He grinned, tilting his head. “Okay, fine. It was borderline chaotic. But also kind of amazing.”

You laughed softly, reaching out to brush a stray pine needle off his shoulder. “You survived. That’s what counts.”

“Survived?” he echoed, feigning offense. “I conquered. Well, maybe stumbled my way through, but still...points for effort?”

You chuckled, leaning against him. “You more than earned your points. My family already adores you...pineapple and all.”

Hyunjin’s face softened, his gaze warm as he looked at you. “Your family is wild, but I can see where you get it from. They’re... wonderful.”

His arms found their way around you, pulling you into a cozy hug. You rested your head against his chest, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. The whirlwind of the evening melted away, leaving just the two of you in this quiet, perfect moment.

“Thank you for tonight,” you murmured, your voice soft against the fabric of his sweater. “For putting up with my brother’s teasing, Grandma’s dancing, and everything in between.”

Hyunjin chuckled, his chest vibrating lightly under your cheek. “Honestly? I loved every second of it. Even the salsa battle I wasn’t prepared for.”

You tilted your head to look up at him, your smile widening. “You were amazing out there. I mean, the tree might not agree, but still.”

He laughed, his eyes crinkling in that way that made your heart flutter. “I was just giving the tree some love. It looked lonely.”

You playfully swatted his arm, and he caught your hand, lacing his fingers through yours. “Seriously, though,” he said, his voice softer now. “I’d go through all the chaos in the world if it meant being with you.”

The sincerity in his words made your cheeks warm, and you felt your heart swell. “You’re too good to be true,” you whispered, squeezing his hand. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Hyunjin smiled, leaning down to press a gentle kiss to your forehead. “Me too. Chaos and all, this is one of the best nights I’ve ever had.”

The distant sounds of your family’s laughter drifted up the stairs, a warm reminder of the love and joy that had filled the evening. But here, in this quiet bubble with Hyunjin, it felt like time had slowed. His gaze dropped to your lips, and his hand came up to gently cradle your cheek.

“Can I kiss you?” he whispered, his voice barely audible but filled with emotion.

Your breath caught, and you nodded, unable to hide your smile. “You don’t have to ask.”

His lips curved into a soft smile before he leaned in, closing the distance between you. The kiss was tender, sweet, and slow, like he was pouring every unspoken word and feeling into it. The world seemed to blur and quiet around you, leaving only the warmth of his touch and the taste of his kiss.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested lightly against yours, his eyes still closed. “You make all of this worth it,” he murmured, his voice soft and full of sincerity.

Your heart swelled, and you smiled, brushing a strand of hair from his face. “You’re worth it too.”

Hyunjin laughed lightly, the sound vibrating between you. “Are you sure you’re not a dream? Because this feels too good to be real.”

“If I’m a dream, then don’t wake up,” you teased, your voice playful but full of affection.

He grinned, stealing one more quick kiss before pulling you back into his arms. And as the muffled sounds of your family’s laughter continued downstairs, you stayed wrapped up in the quiet joy of this perfect moment with him, knowing it was one you’d never forget....

☃︎♡ Bonus - Man's so hot he really makes even shiny boots and shiny pants stand out with an artistic impression 😌🤌😍🫠 ( Like how can you not drool ��)

☃︎♡Tags - @atinyniki @writingforstraykids @yangbbokari @theo4eve @livelovelaughmiko @silverstarburst @galaxycatdrawz @skzoologist @shua-f4lmings @iknowyouknowminho @krisstheidiot @hyunjinhoexxx @gho-ster @ezlynkisses @elmoslungcancer @b1nn1e-1s-cut3 @seungseung-minmin @cuddlylonelyperson @jeonginsleftcheek @oreoqueen @freekyfangirl

Comment your @ If you wish to be added or removed from this list ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

☃︎♡ENDNOTE - Everything Here is a work of fiction and my own imagination. This does not represent the real life characteristics of Stray Kids. Make sure to like, reblog comment, and follow me for new updates!

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nevernonline · 1 year ago

Text

✧.* twenty-seven?; ksy

synopsis: you always wanted to be considered a ‘serious’ journalist, but to get the chance at moving up the ranks and getting to produce your own stories, you’re get an idea to do one final story and impress your boss, that’s where inspiration strikes with the one and only soonyoung.

part of my ninety minute movies one shot series. ♡︎

paring: hoshi x fem! reader.

genre: strangers2lvrs

warning/s:mentions of substances (alcohol, weed, cig, vape etc.) swearing, very bad jokes!, just fluffy and nice no seggsy time

word count: 8.4k

content: . non-idol idolings, some other svt members. hoshi is down bad fast xo.

note: my next little inspired movie writing is the icon that is 27 dresses. except instead of our female lead being the one in the wedding its my fav tiger (hamster) soony. I just love sappy cutie soonyoung so I apologize in advance. also unedited bc im a loser srry. it shouldn't be tew bad bc I tried to take my time lol. ily.

Finding a cozy spot at a table to the left of the bride and groom, you flipped open your notebook and started jotting down pin points on the decor, the flowers, the bride's beautiful flowing silk gown, and the way the groom looked at her with stars in his eyes.

The first dance song rang around the room gathering all the adorned looks of friends and family watching as another couple took the leap on spending the rest of their lives together.

A rocks glass was placed in front of your pen and paper as the chair next to her was suddenly filled with the stranger who put it there.

“Taking notes for your own wedding?”

“Oh. No, I'm doing a piece for the Daily on their wedding.”

“Are you y/n l/n by any chance?”

“I am. You’re familiar with me?”

“Yeah, just through the bride. She’s my sister. She talks about you nonstop. I’m Soonyoung, I was the one who contacted you.”

“I see. Nice to meet you. What’s the drink for?”

“Working hard, I figured you should at least enjoy yourself a little bit.”

“That’s nice. Thank you.”

Soonyoung stared at the girl across from him, trying to catch a peak at her notes seeing if she was painting this night in a perfect light.

You caught on and shut the book quietly, giving him a small wink as a shout it would be everything his sister wanted.

“What’s the drink?”

“A vodka soda, lemon.”

“So, you know my drink order? Thought you said you didn’t know who I was?”

“I saw you at a wedding a few weeks ago, my friend Seungkwan. I noticed your drink, that's all. That’s how I got your contact actually.”

“Lying on the first meet, a great sign. No wonder you look so familiar to me. You were the best man right? But blonde at the time?”

“My sister would’ve killed me if I was blonde at her wedding and sorry not lying just felt creepy admitting it.

“I liked it.”

Soonyoung laughed remembering the conversation he had with his sister about his hair.

“So what’s it like being in two weddings in one month, Soonyoung?”

“Actually I’m going to be in three. Next week my coworker is getting married. Which would make my wedding count twenty-six.”

“You’ve been to twenty-six weddings?”

“Yep. After next week anyway. What’s your wedding count?”

“Ones I’ve covered? Too many to count. Ones I’ve been in? Two I think. Both of my brothers are married. That’s about it.”

“So you cover weddings but aren’t married?”

Rolling your eyes at his unfiltered nature, you couldn’t help but feel like his question was out of curiosity and not judgment. The way his eyes searched hers for answers was genuinely adorable.

“Almost at one point, but he cheated on me and is marrying her now. I didn’t actually become a journalist to cover weddings anyway, it sort of just happened.”

“I see.”

“What about you? Being at all those weddings and never getting married?”

“No. Not even close, I was in love with the same girl for a long time, but she didn’t feel the same way.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

After spending the rest of your night enjoying Soonyoungs company, you bid goodbye to the bride and groom and headed back to your home to get down to working on the article.

Digging through your black leather tote you realize you forgot to take your journal home with you, leaving it on the white table cloth being distracted by a new friend.

Realizing you don’t have his number you took it upon yourself to stalk his social media profiles in hope you could find a way to get in contact with him, maybe he was your saving grace in taking your book for safekeeping until he could give it back to you.

Saying fuck it for now you just began typing away about your night, thanking god or whomever that you backed up your calendar digitally when you get a clever idea to write an article still about weddings, but about the person you met who had been a groomsmen all those times. Searching for any kind of photos and videos of his past times supporting nuptials.

All you came up with was a couple cheesing photos of him posing in his suits of many colors and types when you get the idea to go back into your own rolodex of photos and writings from weddings you’ve done in the past, noticing him standing near the bride and groom in just a few it was now safe to say he has piqued your interest even more than before.

You decided to draft an email to your boss begging for the chance to write her an article about the types of bridesmaids and groomsmen who’ve been involved in many years of weddings as a support, if you found one person who had done so many in a short time it wouldn’t be hard to find more right?

Before getting ready for bed you sat refreshing your email waiting for the go-ahead to investigate Soonyoung further with the excuse that it was simply just for work, it took multiple scrolls to the point where your thumb was starting to hurt from running it over the screen until she replied.

‘Y/n, feel free to start drafting up the story. If I like it I’ll let you have more creative articles in the future. Please have it on my desk in two weeks.’

When the morning finally arrived, you had to make the rough decision to get out of bed and head to grab a coffee from the shop in your apartment lobby. Normally you’d be cuddled on your couch with your cat, spending your Saturday morning reading and watching reruns of your favorite reality shows, but much to your surprise the coffee stash you usually have stocked has dried up.

Exiting the silver doors of the elevator a call came from the front desk attendant and you were met by a brown paper bag tied with a bow, the outside scribbled on with some crayons of silly faces and drawings of cartoon tigers, stickers of hello kitty, and a pink note taped to the handle.

“Miss. Y/l/n! Some boy dropped this for you last night.”

“Oh? Thank you, Max.”

Ripping open the small note in line for your morning brew, it instantly puts a smile on your face.

‘Hi, I noticed you left this on the table. Hope it’s not weird. I dropped it off for you. Your address was inside. At least I can stalk you now. - Soonyoung (wedding guy lol)”

Inside the bag was your planner and a few random pieces of candy thrown around. A small bookmark was placed on a page and written underneath was a date for next Thursday and the number of your new favorite subject marked ‘single seeking wedding date.’

After grabbing the paper cup from the barista behind the counter you whip your phone out and dial the number written inside your prized possession.

“Hello, is this the single seeking a date?”

“Hey, it is. Is this the cute girl who’s planner I found?”

“I think so? I don’t know any other cute girls who like going to weddings.”

“Are you available for drinks and a little pre-wedding party?”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight? Wow. Eager to see me again I see.”

“I am. And I’m being bold right now which is new for me, so please don’t make me cry.”

“Aw. But I’m sure you’re so pretty when you cry.”

“I’m always pretty, y/n. So?”

“Sure. Why not?”

You heard Soonyoung gasp over the phone and drop something loud.

“Really?”

“Want me to take it back?”

“No. Cool. I will.. pick you up at 6:30? We can get some drinks before and then it’s just like a casual party, but my friends are kind of fancy so maybe like nice cocktail attire. I’m sure you know.”

“Okay. I’m sure you remember where to find me? After all, you did confess to being a stalker.”

“Oh my god. I was kidding, don’t take me seriously. I’ll see you then.”

“See you, Soony. Ok now I’m corny. That wasn’t meant to be a pun. Bye.”

Hearing the boy's laughter over the phone almost gave you butterflies.

“You’re funny. Bye.”

Spending the rest of your normally relaxing afternoon getting ready to slyly interrogate your new friend, you decided to not go out of your way to look overly special after all you weren’t even sure this quote on quote date was anything romantic or just a way of initiating a friendship.

Just before you leave your front door you sat to think if it was appropriate to bring along the same journal that was delivered to you the same morning, but made the conscious decision to leave it behind and not make this first night getting to know each other about you digging into his life for your own gain.

The ride down the elevator had you inspecting yourself in its small safety mirror, fixing the very last strand of hair that felt out of place on your head, not paying any attention to the people jumping off and on from their various floors.

When you finally stepped out into the marble covered lobby, you immediately spotted Soonyoung draped over the side of the couch holding his legs close, almost like a nervous child looking around the room and pouting because he can’t find his toy.

When he finally locked eyes with you his childlike demeanor changed immediately into a spunky puppy, jumping up from his seat and dusting off crumbs on his pants that weren’t even there in the first place, maybe to wipe his hands from their small sweat they were undergoing.

“Hi, y/n. You look very nice”

“Really? So do you. Where are we headed?”

“There’s a cool poet themed bar just like two blocks from here, I thought you’d enjoy it since you’re a writer and everything.”

You looked at Soonyoung with wide eyes, it was a sign of how considerate he was yet again, just like the thought he put into bringing you, your planner and decorating the bag.

His sharp brown eyes sparkled under the street lights, almost like they were reflecting stars, his baggy khaki pants with matching jacket slung perfectly over his frame, he was cute. You could admit it to yourself that something about him was magnetic and you already wanted more.

“Y/n? Is that not your thing? I’m sorry we can do something else, I shouldn’t of assumed all writers like poetr-“

“Oh I’m sorry, I was distracted. Has anyone told you that you have insanely cute eyes? But yes, poetry’s cool. I’m more of a classic novel girl, but it sounds fun. Stop second guessing yourself. You’re good.”

Your hand moved faster than your brain as you brought it up to pat him gently on his shoulder, a confirmation that you were having a good time and trying to ease his awkwardness.

“Yeah, people have once or twice.”

“Good. They really are cute.”

The pink of Soonyoung’s cheeks grew into a deep red as he led you into the bar. The walls were covered in decaying pieces of paper written with words people had to get out for comfort. The smell was like the oldest library on earth, with a tinge of vanilla and vodka ringing through.

Your brain took a moment to be present and remember all of the bad dates of your past. Maybe this wasn’t a date of your future, but if it was, he had already exceeded your expectations.

As the waitress took your order, one Body Electric for your new friend a legit inspiration from Walt

Whitman to your choice which was a play on a Sylvia Plath poem.

“Are you a lightweight?”

You looked at Soonyojng not even halfway through his drink, feeling the ease and warmth of his body next

to you.

“How can you tell?”

“You relaxed for the first time tonight.”

“I was nervous to hangout with you. I’m sorry. You’re just cool and pretty and I don’t know I feel like you’re way smarter than me and I’m intimidated by that sober”

“I’m sure that’s not true. But if it’s any help I was nervous too.”

“Really? So I have game?”

“No. But you’re so cute I’d die if I hurt your feelings.”

“So you’re a lightweight too?”

“What? No way. Just honest to a fault.”

Soonyoung smiled into the rim of his glass before taking his final sip and prompting you to finish your drink quickly, which you happily obliged.

“Okay, on the way there.. I have to admit something. The party we’re going to is for the girl I liked before she got with this guy… it’s like unrequited love in a way.”

“The girl you said you don’t love anymore?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I just wanted to see you again so I thought it was a good idea.”

“I’m down. I’m not sure what, but I’m down.”

“Cool.”

“Want me to pretend to be your girlfriend? Or? I feel like it would be weird to say we were on a first date.”

“Is this a date?”

“Is it not?”

“It was meant to be and it definitely is now.”

“So pretend girlfriend, Soony?”

“Maybe not an official girlfriend, how about… fourth date?”

“Okay, have we had sex?”

Soonyoung choked on his own spit which caused the two of you to end up in a fit of laughter on the street as you reached your next destination.

“Obviously.”

“That’s fair. I’ll tell everyone you were good.”

“I think I love you.”

“Shut up.”

After spending the night waltzing around and parading your further long relationship with your fake new boyfriend to his friends in hopes to prove his fondness for his newest engaged friend has gone away even slightly.

While maybe you were pretending to be on a date with Soonyoung, your head was spinning. If this was a fake date it was better than any date you had previously. Stepping outside to take a break from the party inside you pulled out your phone, jotting down notes and small nuggets of information you learned about Soonyoung’s past wedding experiences.

“Taking notes on me? What are you a PI?”

Behind you, you hadn’t realized the door you snuck out of opened and the boy had followed behind, curious if you were okay.

“Yeah, you’re under investigation for being overly nice. Sorry.”

“What do they say? I didn’t read them, just saw my name.”

“Just some antidotes I want to remember. Nothing crazy.”

“Do you want to leave? I’m starting to reach my alcohol limit and I would rather die than have you see my drunk alter ego the first time we hung out.”

“Yeah, come on, let's go.”

Going back through the back exit, you tripped behind Soonyoung’s tall frame grabbing onto his shoulder and giggling before he stood in the way of you hitting the ground.

His lips were curled into a goofy smile.

“I swear to god if you say something about me falling for you, you will get punched.”

“How did you know?”

“That fucking goofy smile you have on your face right now, I could just see it brewing in that head of yours.”

“Okay, I don’t like that you’ve already figured me out. Let’s go, klutz.”

Before you and Soonyoung could exit back into the fresh air, a familiar face appeared in front of you. Your ex boyfriend. Something about this night clicked for you, it was his party, there were so many people around and the only person from the wedding party you met was the bride. But taking a breath in and looking around the room, you realized how stupid you were to not see all the signs that this party was for him.

“Y/n? Hoshi? Hey, how have you guys been?”

Soonyoung still holding his arm around your shoulder gave a small back and fourth look between you and the tall boy who knew your name.

“You guys know each other?”

“Yep. Hi, Jihoon.”

“I didn’t know you knew Hoshi either?”

“Oh well we just started dating, he invited me to come hangout.”

“Dating? Wow. I didn’t know you had time for people outside of work anymore.”

“Jihoon, if you don’t mind we have to go now. Thank you for the open bar and this amazing time chatting, congratulations on marrying your hookup. Goodnight.”

The start of your walk with Soonyoung was pure silence, there was an obvious elephant in the room and you could tell he was just itching to talk about it, so you decided to prompt him.

“You’re curious aren’t you.”

“Yes. But I don’t want to ask you to talk about it because we’re having fun. So I figured I’d try to ignore it.”

“It’s fine. I’m curious too actually, it’s kind of funny that the girl you liked was hooking up with my boyfriend and now they’re married. And by funny I mean actually funny and we just spent the whole night not knowing that.”

“I didn’t even know that Jihoon had a girlfriend when they first met, he never said anything about it.”

“I don’t blame him actually, I do work way too much. I just wished he’d broken up with me instead of cheating on me for a month.”

“When did you guys break up?”

“Last December.”

“Oh.”

“It was more than a month wasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Cool, cool, cool.”

“That’s fucked up y/n, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay, we weren’t supposed to be together and his new girlfriend or future wife whatever seems like she’s really nice.”

“She is, but she’s too nice. She does everything he wants, maybe he couldn’t handle your independence.”

“Soony. You caught on that I’m a bad bitch?”

“Have you met yourself?”

“No. But, if I did I’d be obsessed with her and hate her at the same time.”

“That’s exactly how I feel.”

You punched his side, before stopping and realizing you had come up to your front door. Not even worried about the way your feet were aching to get out of your heeled shoes.

“This is me.”

“I know. I’ve been here like three times now in less than twenty-four hours. I’m starting to believe you actually think I’m stupid.”

“Not stupid. Just silly. I’ll see you again right?”

“I mean I did put days on your calendar to schedule out time for me.”

“You littl-“

Suddenly you were cut off by Soonyoung’s hand covering your mouth to put a stop to you cursing him out.

“I won’t take no for an answer.”

Sinking your teeth into his hand he retreated from his momentary confidence quickly, looking at the proud smile you were sporting, pointing your well manicured finger in his face.

“Don’t tell women to shut up, Soony.”

“I never said shut up, you were going to call me a mean name and I’m sensitive. Go back to calling me cute.”

“Maybe. Next time.”

You went in for a one armed hug when all of the sudden Soonyoung came in with both arms, clinking your heads together.

“Very smooth.”

He liked the fact that you constantly teased him while making light of situations, regaining his confidence he pulled you into his embrace enveloping both arms around your shoulders, placing a small kiss on the part of your forehead that crashed into his.

“I’ll see you next week.”

“What’s next week?”

“The wedding, check your planner. Well actually I’ll see you in two nights because we have to shop or go through your closet so we can match! Bye, y/nie.”

Caught off guard by the kiss on your head and watching him hail a cab like it was nothing, you couldn’t help but smile on your way into your building, met by Max at the front desk beaming as wide as you and giving you a wink. Knowing that he saw the cute and awkward interaction you shared with the hyper hamster outside.

The two days in between you and Soonyoung’s first official interaction, you felt yourself looking forward to seeing him again and being in his presence like your own personal serotonin boost.

The insane fact that your ex was marrying the girl he cheated on was enough, but the girl being Soonyoung’s painful crush? Especially when you felt he was becoming yours was beyond insane.

You made up separate drafts of your article about the people who make weddings shine, from the families, the bridal parties. the insane bachelor and bachelorette nights, and mainly Soonyoung’s love for love.

The two works of nonfiction were from different perspectives, one being your head and one being your heart. You couldn’t decide if it was appropriate to present a piece basically claiming how amazing you found Soonyoung for the whole world to see when you’re not even sure if he’d ever consider you to be more than a silly writer girl y/n, his friend or fake girlfriend. Your other was from the space of practicality, a genuine love letter to your career and the person who inspired this story, but also digging deep into the ideals of how frantic and selfish the wedding industry can be and what it means for an unmarried friend to take in burdens constantly for their loved ones when it takes a toll on their own heart.

The biggest debate in your body was the fact the real article, the one you wanted to write, was at the fault of someone who had only in the short space of two days made you feel again, but it was honest and genuine.

You knew Soonyoung had to have some pain working and being a part of a wedding for the girl he saw himself marrying.

Luckily you have another few days to decide which way it’ll go.

Sitting on the thought of what one you should put out, you were awoken out of your thought bubble to a string of buzzes from your cell phone sitting face down on your desk.

None other than the boy that had been living in your head for the past 48 hours.

Soonyoung’s texts were multiple lines of photos and silly messages asking you which outfit he should wear that could match any of the dresses you had hanging in your closet for the wedding.

One of the options was a beige suit, simple in theory but something about the way he styled it with a funky sage green t-shirt and matching sneakers made you smile. Even if you didn’t have anything to match this outfit you would make an effort to go out and spruce up your wardrobe to be on his level.

After quickly responding that it was your choice, he retorted back in his true fashion you’d have to send him your options too or he’d come over to help you.

In a desperate subconscious way you agreed to his antics.

Now nearly an hour later a call came from the front desk that a visitor had arrived asking for consent he could come upstairs which you happily agreed assuming it was none other than Soonyoung himself. The person on the opposite side of the door was not the sharp eyed boy you’d expected, but Jihoon.

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you after the other night, I just wanted to say hey.”

“Okay? Then text me. Don’t come over unannounced, I have a friend I’m expecting.”

“You wouldn’t have responded.”

“That’s true.”

Standing with your arms crossed in your doorway not letting Jihoon into the now redecorated apartment you once had let him live in, you weren’t budging on your gut feeling to let him in and talk.

“Can I come in?”

“Like I said. I’m expecting a friend. So.. no.”

“Who? Hoshi? You guys aren’t seriously together? He’s not your type, too goofy.”

“Isn’t he your friend?”

“He’s Nana’s friend, but he’s okay. I’m just saying it's not your style.”

Nana? A stupid nickname for his fiance who’s name was simply Anna. So as you rolled your eyes and shut your apartment door behind you as you stepped into the hallway as a clear defining factor he was not welcome you stood far apart from him as a line in the sand.

“He’s not goofy. He’s sweet and yes he’s on his way so maybe you should leave before saying anything else so he doesn’t get the wrong idea.”

Jihoon wavered a bit, looking towards the elevator door at the end of the hall as if like a movie Soonyoung would walk out of the elevator at the mention he was on his way over.

“Maybe take the stairs. I’ll see you at your wedding with my date.”

Rushing in and slamming the door in his face, you sink to the floor in a moment of pure exhaustion over interacting with someone like your ex.

Why wasn’t Soonyoung right for you? Why did you not want that to be true? And why were you so dead set on proving him absolutely wrong?

In your rush of emotions another knock came to your door. Without looking through the peephole you swung it open rapidly.

“Look I told you to g- oh, Soonyoung! Thank god.”

Your body made a move before your head could even catch up as you ended up hugging him tightly, rushing him inside as if Jihoon didn’t get the message and was watching in from a hidden spot in the corridor.

“Y/N are you okay?”

“Yes. Sorry, someone just came over that I did not want to see. Welcome.”

You watched as his eyes took in the view of your pink and green splattered apartment, things like funky vases full of wildflowers, plant tendrils floating down from shelves tucked between books of various sizes and ages, a small nook with sleeping white and black cat hid inside snuggling into his stuffed toy.

“I love it here.”

“Really? I redecorated recently, it was cold before. I love it now.”

“Also it smells amazing, do you bake? It smells like cookies and coffee. Wow.”

“I do not bake, but I do have candles that give the illusion. What’s in the bag?”

Soonyoung set a small black duffle bag down on the counter and began pulling the contents out one by one, showing them off like a beauty guru.

Wine, five small bags of potato chips, beer Incase you didn’t like wine and he was unsure, a slice of delicious looking chocolate cake, and a container marked with your name of his moms homemade soup.

“Why did you do this?”

“I thought we would have fun while picking out matching outfits. Will you let me see your closet? Please, please, please. I’m so curious.”

“It’s not that impressive at all.”

“If your apartment looks like this then I have only the highest expectations for you.”

Smiling, you jokingly made a come on motion with your fingers and led him into your spare bedroom that now existed as a half home office and half closet.

His eyes took in even more of your fun design work, the racks of records, pictures of you and your friends, and one of the things that made him feel like he could fall in love with you, your rack full of limited edition shoes and bags.

“Not impressive? You have some of the coolest shit I’ve ever seen in here?”

“I’m just a girl with a cat and a lot of time on my hands. Since being single I’ve just spent it on shopping and ordering take out.”

“If you don’t mind me asking what were you and Jihoon like together? You guys seem really opposite to me.”

There it was again, someone not right for you. Was it just in your head that you think maybe you’re the problem of why this comment is being made?

“Uh, we were okay at first. We met in college about three weeks before graduation and spent so much time together. But if I think about it, we just hung out in his dorm where I watched him play video games and watch anime even though I was not interested. I kind of wish I was more outspoken about it. I missed a bunch of things my friends had done wasting away on his futon drinking shitty cheap alcohol and waiting on him hand and foot and whatever else.”

“Really? So you guys dated for a long time I guess. Did it change a lot once you got out?”

“Not really. A lot of people knew we were ‘dating’ but in the time that we did, we probably went on one or two actual dates.”

“That makes me sad actually.”

“Why? I made the choice to do all those things. At least I don’t have an ugly poster of John Lennon on my wall just to show I loved him.”

Soonyoung was set off by that, laughing and imagining you having a photo of a musician on your wall to impress your boyfriend.

“What’s so funny? Haven’t you done anything embarrassing to impress a girl?”

“Definitely. Too many to choose from actually.”

“At least you're charming, I came off as obsessive and stupidly in love. Not a good look for me.”

“Caring too much is never a bad thing when you think you’re in love and you’re charming too.”

“Why thank you good sir.”

“And you’re weird. Which personally is a green flag for me. I didn’t expect that from you actually.”

“Is that a compliment though, really?”

“For me? Yes. I don’t like normal people well, not normal people I guess, just people who have no personality or something I can learn from. I want someone as a friend or whatever else to challenge me a little, it’s healthy.”

“I think that’s really cool of you, I agree. I like people that are willing to try new stuff or get me out of my comfort zone.”

“Was showing me your office a way of me getting you out of your comfort zone?”

“Sort of. This is kind of like my safe haven.”

Soonyoung just gave you a wide toothed smile, beaming from ear to eat that you admitted he was even just slightly somewhat of your type.

As the night went on and on the boy that has now broken down a couple of your walls, not quickly but brick by brick was sitting comfortably next to your cat curled up in the same manor helping you pick out something that would go with his two outfits, one for the wedding itself and one for the rehearsal dinner which he promised you that you’d only eat and leave to have more fun just out of respect for the couple and his friend Anna.

Now each of you taking the bottle of wine he brought slowly, sitting on your floor surrounded by shoes and loose pairs of pants, giggling over nothing he stared in your eyes almost like you could read that he had another interrogating question.

“Was Jihoon the one at the door before?”

“How did you kno–”

“I can’t remember you mentioning anybody that would come over unannounced and make you look as upset as you did.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know why he was here?”

“He just gave me some stupid antidote that he wanted to see me after the other day, I didn’t ask further. When I told him I had a friend coming over he just knew it was you for some reason and then told me we couldn’t be dating seriously because you’re not my type? As if he’d know? It was weird all around.”

“Do you still have feelings for him?”

“No. I realized once we broke up and now after knowing he was cheating on me more than a few nights that it was an amazing decision. When we first ended it I just kicked him out and ghosted all his texts, he used to update me on his life every now and again, the last time we talked for real, before today he called me crying that his Grandmother was sick, so we just had a brief talk and it ended for real there. I genuinely never thought I’d see him again.”

“Also, am I your type?”

Ss wine dribbled down your chin you were once again surprised by Soonyoung’s random fit of confidence.

“Yeah. You’re nice and I love how annoying you are. I think you get under my skin in the best way.”

“Wow. I’m surprised you admitted it.”

“What can I say, wine drunk y/n is honest.”

“And what about my physical type? Sexy, cool, handsome, the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen?”

Taking a note from his book you swung your closest arm to him, you clipped your fingers over his mouth and shut him up.

Much to your surprise he took a note from your book and instead of biting your hand he stuck his tongue through his lips and licked your fingers which caused you to lunge towards him further, jokingly pissed he did just so.

As you were fighting for comedic relief you sat suddenly face to face with him holding onto your wrists to resist more thrash fighting.

The two of you stared at each other filling the room with intense tension of your lips being so close once again.

“If I knew you wouldn’t be mad at me I’d kiss you right now.”

“Soonyoung, you’re so stupid. Why would I be mad at you?”

“So I can kiss you?”

“Nope.”

Soonyoung pushed his bottom lip out from his top, replacing his cute puppy face with a pouty one.

You decided to quickly dive in and pace a peck on his protruding bottom lip.

He immediately let you go and erupted into a fit of giggles like a little kid, as you tried to sneak away quickly he grabbed onto the arm of your sweatshirt which you quickly unzipped and slipped out of, running through the door of your office and into the rest of the house as he chased behind.

“You have to know I’m going to catch you for that, that was so mean y/n.”

As you were winning the fight, getting away from the boy chasing you around, you suddenly tripped up and felt his hand grasp your shoulder, turning you around with secret strength.

Standing face to face with him now, your stubbed toe throbbing through your fuzzy socks, you both were holding in a whole lot of laughter.

Soonyoung’s hand slipped behind your head and pulled you in for a much more romantic type of kiss than you gave him before. The two of you touched lips softly, as your smiles were still prominent on your faces.

Before anything could escalate further your phone began to ring again and your boss's name was plastered over the front, which you answered with panting breaths still in a haze from kissing the boy you made you feel young again.

“y/n? Hi, would you be able to send over a draft of your article you begged me for? We were looking for something to print for tomorrow if you’re interested? I’ll have someone expedite the editing process tonight.”

“Oh, shit. Yeah of course, I’ll rush and email it to you now.”

“Thank you, congratulations y/n.”

“Thank you. Bye.”

Oh my god, Soony, stay here. I have to email my boss quickly about my article, she wants to print it for tomorrow's paper. I’ll be right back.”

“What? Congratulations. But don't worry, I’m not leaving.”

“Good, sorry, be right back.”

Rushing back into your office you flipped open your computer and sent your final article draft, choosing the one that your gut felt would be better for your personal life at the moment, especially after the kiss you just shared with the boy it was about.

Typing a quick message along with your attachment you just said a big thank you and clicked send before grabbing the half drank bottle off the floor and ran back to Soonyoung munching on a bag of chips waiting for you.

“Shall we celebrate?”

“What are we celebrating?”

“Me, idiot. I’ve been trying to get a real article published ever since I got the job doing weddings. I love weddings, but always being so happy and cheerful and not getting a chance to stretch my creative juices is frustrating.”

“Can we also celebrate kissing? That seems more fun.”

“Shut up, asshole.”

Taking a swig from the bottle, you passed it over to your male counterpart and watching him take an equally large drink matching your energy.

You and Soonyoung spent the rest of the night talking about how tomorrow will go, where will you and he be sitting, will Jihoon be giving you side eyes or talking shit with some of the other guests. How nice of a chance it’ll be to experience a wedding simply just enjoying with someone on your side and not for work.

After sitting in bed and still thinking about your kiss with Soonyoung many hours later, you saw a text from your boss letting you know she loved the article and to watch out for it in the morning.

When that finally rolled around, you woke up to a lot of messages congratulating you and your new found success, many people from college, your parents, but the one person you were looking for was nowhere to be found in those texts.

Putting the praise aside for a moment, you slipped back out of your bed to jump into the shower and start getting ready for your dinner celebrating the devil that was your ex.

When you stepped out and went to grab onto your device once again you saw a text from the one person you were most excited to read, but it was less than exciting. Soonyoung expressed how upset the article made him and accused you of using him to further your career, something Jihoon supposedly warned him of the night of his pre-wedding party and he chose to ignore.

Confused why he would be so upset about your praise for him, you ran to your front door and ripped open the pages of the paper only to find the article that you sent was a mistake, it was the one shitting on weddings, basically claiming Soonyoung himself was an unmarried loser, not in those words but you could see why it came across that way. Some of the simple moments of praise for his hard work were cut out in the editing room, only leaving the small bits of gossip and harsh criticisms sprinkled in between.

Rushing back inside as your stomach sank to the floor you tried his number three times before getting no answer. Which made you frantically dial your boss’s number and interrogate her on why parts of your article were cut out, she simply answered that fluff doesn’t sell and she was proud of you.

Soonyoung not responding had let you in on the fact that he wasn’t going to be seeing you today or maybe even seeing anybody for that matter, he was embarrassed and rightfully so.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Continuing your quest on trying to reach him, you decided to still get ready for your night out, maybe not in the intense matching outfit way you wanted to last night, but just something where you could sneak into Jihoon’s wedding party and slide Soonyoung the real article you wanted him to read.

Running down the street to the venue with no accurate directions in sight, you saw your ex standing on a corner, smoking a brown wrapped joint in his suit.

“Jihoon. Jihoon.”

“What? Back to grovel for a favor?”

“Yes, please, just give this to Soonyoung for me. Please, I’ve never asked you for a favor like this, just once do something for me.”

“You’re really serious about him?”

“I am.”

“So you didn’t mean to slam him in the article like you did?”

“No. My boss cut out the good parts of the article, this was the one I meant to send. Just for me. I want you to be happy, Jihoon, I do. I want it for myself too, just please give it to him. Make sure he reads it.”

“Okay.”

“I know we haven’t had the best past and I know I'm coming here askin- Wait? Okay? Really?”

“Yeah. I can tell this means a lot to you and the reason I came over today was just to formally invite you to the wedding. You’re a big part of my life and now Soonyoung’s, well maybe, besides the point. My fiance is one of his best friends, she liked you too, that was the only reason.”

“Oh. Well I don’t think I’ll make it.”

“How about you come on official business and give this to him yourself?”

“No. I couldn’t do that. It’s your day not mine.”

“We both deserve a big love, y/n.”

Taking back your enveloped letter, you couldn’t help but be impressed by how mature Anna had made Jihoon become and you knew he was right. Sometimes love just falls in your lap and you can’t do anything about it.

Ashing out his joint, he handed you the other half as an olive branch to celebrate old times and bid you goodbye until tomorrow.

Before going back inside, he turned to you with one final wish.

“You better look damn good tomorrow too, no suits. Wear something nice to confess your feelings, otherwise you’ll look like a dumbass.”

“Got it.”

Catching your breath and shoving the letter and paraphernalia back into your purse, you decided to take Jihoon’s advice. To look amazing, you stumbled upon a shop called ‘All's Well that Ends Well.’ situation just a block down from the poetry inspired bar Soonyoung took you to just a few days before.

Stepping inside the store, the first thing you saw was a navy blue dress, the halter neckline and the silk straight flowing down to the floor, you knew it was meant for you. Especially because it would match the light pink suit Soonyoung was meant to be sporting with you by his side. The easiest shopping experience of your life.

As the sales associate packed your order up and sealed it with a light pink bow, you knew it was a sign or something of the sort.

With less than twenty-four hours of doing the most insane thing of your life, confessing to a man who essentially hated you after you had been kissing just hours before, you stayed up all night, using the weed that Jihoon gave you to stay focused on the task at hand, you almost considered cutting of your hair to enter a new era of your life, but only girls who were going through something would consider that and you attempted to tell yourself you were calm.

When the morning sun rang around you finished writing a letter to match the one already placed in the envelope to accompany your sorry. You even decorated the outside with stickers of tigers and spongebob characters just to make Soonyoung smile.

Sliding into your navy blue dress and silver heels, your hair was down and curled into perfect waves. You kissed your cat on the head and made your way over to the venue by foot, just to give yourself a little fresh air and piece of mind, hoping to slip in early enough so that you’d be seated before he even knew you came.

Slipping into a space near the back of the room on Jihoon’s side, you opened your phone to an encouraging text from him telling you that you’ve got this and he’s excited to hear more about it later, plus reminding you to have fun and enjoy yourself.

As the progression started you watched along with the other wedding goers, catching glimpses of Jihoon’s smiling family, which made your heart feel warm.

As the wedding part waltz down the aisle in their pastel pink suits and rosy toned dresses, you saw a now blonde again head appear on the arm of a girl who looked a lot like Anna, so it was fair to assume it was her sister.

Soonyoung didn’t glance your way, but something about the change in his demeanor made you aware he knew you had come.

“Everyone please rise for the bride.”

Anna walked out with her father on her arm, floating across the room like an angel in white. Her dress was adorned with small beaded flowers from the tips of her fingers down to the vail over her blonde hair.

She was truly beautiful, you couldn’t help but feel like a peasant in the room with this woman who both of the men you had either once had feelings for or now did once loved.

The whole ceremony was beautiful, but you missed a lot of it as you stared Soonyoung’s way trying to catch his eyes, but he never met yours. He was too busy enjoying the fact that his friends were getting married and the fact you had upset him.

When the ceremony ended you followed the other guests to the front of the church, holding your envelope in your hand and greeting the bride and groom, Anna and Jihoon beamed at you before she pointed her finger to a room off the side of the front door, some sort of administration office where Soonyoung would be waiting for you. Which also told you Jihoon had filled her in on your little plan.

You cracked open the old wooden door, trying to be subtle but the rotting wood creaked under the old floor boards making your entrance more known than you would’ve liked.

Soonyoung was seated in a red leather chair to the side of the desk, his now blonde hair meeting your eyes before his face. Not giving in to turn around and look at you.

“Soonyoung? I know you probably don’t want to speak to me. But, this was the real article. It was never meant to be that way. I’m sorry.”

You placed the letter in front of him on the desk and moved to turn back to the door before you heard his voice.

“So you didn’t mean all those mean things you wrote about me? That I was a desperate groomsman waiting for his shot to have a day for himself?”

“No.”

“You didn’t mean to say that my ostentatious nature was cringe worthy?”

“Not in that way no, my boss cut out all the good things I said about you. She put it in her own words for dramatic effect. I quit this morning.”

“You quit? Why?”

“I wanted to try to make this right in the best way I could, she wouldn’t reprint the article how I wrote it and told me that if I didn’t like her style I should get a job somewhere else. So I quit.”

Soonyoung just nodded, he couldn’t imagine why you would give up a golden opportunity just to prove your boss wrong or right for that matter all because of him. The only way he could make sense of what you were saying is that you were truly sorry and you cared about him.

He made a bold move and threw the letter in the trash can to the side of the old oak desk and got out of his chair to hug you.

“You’re not going to read it.”

Speaking into his shoulder, you got a calming exhale of his cologne.

“I don’t need to. I know you're telling me the truth, you said it yourself you don’t lie when you drink wine, and I can smell it on your breath.”

Slipping your hands up from their place around his neck into his hair you giggled slightly, looking at the now dyed blonde locks of hair.

“You dyed it back?”

“You said you liked it. I thought you’d be my date and I had the appointment so I didn’t want to cancel.”

“You weren’t hoping I’d show up here?”

“I knew you would. I saw you talking to Jihoon outside last night through the window. I wasn’t sure exactly because you did walk away and he never told me what happened. But, when I saw you today sitting in the crowd. I knew my inkling was right.”

“Did the cohesive outfit impress you? I missed one night, but I hope I made up for it today.”

Soonyoung pushed you away slightly by your shoulders and made you do a spin for him.

“You look beautiful.”

“You’re such a dork.”

Soonyoung playfully swung you around in the office covered in photos of church go-ers and crosses, bringing you into his chest tightly.

“So, what did you write in that article? That I was devilishly handsome and cool?”

“Nope. Just that you were a bad kisser.”

“Seems like you need a reminder.”

“Maybe.”

As your lips met Soonyoungs once again your heart sank into your stomach and was beating rapidly. You just fit and he never once doubted your heart.

“What do you say? Should we go outside and dance?”

“Can you even dance?”

“Y/n? Can I even dance? What do you even think I do for a living?”

“Oh. I’m such an idiot. Anna works at a talent agency. Got it.”

“Come on, silly. Before our audience outside gets bigger.”

When you exited the office back into the group of people outside, for some reason Jihoon started a cheer alongside his new wife.

Soon you and Soonyoung were dancing the night away and drinking a little too much than your stomachs could handle.

When you finally got a moment of dizzy drunkenness alone, he had you sitting on a bench where he knelt to the ground. Your mouth got the better of you once again.

“Oh my god you're not proposing already are you I mean I know I’m amaz-”

“Y/n shut up, I’m tying my shoe.”

“Cool, cool. Got it.”

“But the next wedding I attend hopefully I’ll be the groom.”

With a wink Soonyoung sat back at your side as you watched the stars together, making a mental note that the next wedding would belong to the both of you.

taglist: @sahazzy

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