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celestie0 · 1 month ago

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gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch4. in a mother’s eyes

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 4/x

ᰔ words. 10k (omg a whole number...very sexy)

a/n. hellooo my ihm friends! hope you're all doing well. ahh i'm glad to finally be posting this chapter lolol. it's a littleee off tangent from what happens in ch3, but still has some important plot developments. it does dive into feelings of depression & anxiety, so just wanted to give a warning on that! but yea other than that i hope you enjoy and see you at the bottom!! :) also so sorry if there are errors i only had time to skim through it once :((

nav. ch1 :: ch2 :: ch3 :: ch4 :: ch5 (pending)

“Just go ahead and sign right here for me.”

You take the pen from the hospice nurse’s hand. It’s cheap black plastic with a pink fuzzy pom pom attached to the end of it with peeling glue.

Your eyes briefly flit across the paragraphs detailed in printed ink until your gaze lands on the highlighted lines at the bottom of the page. Your signature. Spouse’s signature.

“We’ll need to have your husband come here to sign the paperwork as well, since he’ll have to add your mother on his list of dependents, but we can certainly get started on expediting this process for you since the insurance has already been pre-approved,” the nurse tells you as she accepts your signed paperwork and then neatly tucks it into one of the compartment holders.

The afternoon goes by smoothly, with your mother surprisingly patient as she sits in the waiting room while you wait for the nurses to formally show you to her new room.

You thought that you could put off putting her in hospice for a little longer, because in all honesty, you weren’t prepared to let her go just yet. You weren’t prepared to not have her in the house anymore. But lately, she’s been putting herself in lots of danger, like attempting to take her own medications when she does not know the correct dosing, and forgetting things on the stove when she attempts to cook.

But the last straw was when you came home from a very brief run to the grocery store at night a couple days ago to see a handful of your neighbors out on the front lawn with your mother at their side. She had apparently gotten out of the house and walked down the neighborhood, then fallen on the sidewalk but was unable to get up. When your neighbors had found her, a miracle as they were just coming home from dinner and caught sight of her in the illumination of their headlights, they tried to help her get up but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell the firefighters that came by to help her what her name was, or what year it was, or where she lived.

It was when you realized you couldn’t even keep her safe anymore that you had to let go.

“Is that a wedding ring?” your mother asks, pointing a trembling finger to it as she lays tucked inside her new hospice bed, “are you married?”

You glance down at the ring Gojo gave you in the courthouse, almost surprised to find that you were still wearing it in good faith. “Yes, mom. I am.”

“Why am I here?” she asks you, “I don’t want to be here.”

You stiffen a little. Although you were mentally preparing yourself to answer these questions, the preparation didn’t make it any easier. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just for a little short while, okay? The doctors want to run some tests on you.”

“Who are you married to?” she asks.

“To Satoru,” you tell her, “our neighbor.”

She lets out a small gasp. “The sweet boy who fixed our A/C?”

You roll your eyes. not sure why your mother has hyper fixated on that memory with Gojo when most days she’ll look at you like you’re a stranger. “Yes mom.”

“Oh, I like him,” she tells you with an affectionate nod. She hesitates slightly, wearisome of some other thought that flashes through her mind. “How long have you been married?”

You let out a small sigh. This is already a conversation you had with her a couple days ago, and it doesn’t feel good to lie to her. It was hard enough to do once, but to have to constantly lie to her over and over again over all the smallest things just so that she stays calm and safe and happy seems to drain you of all your energy and happiness you had left in your bones.

Little white lies, that’s what they are. Harmless ones. That’s what you tell yourself to absolve yourself of the guilt.

“I’ll come back soon, okay? I’ll tell you more about him some other day,” you say to her, speaking gently in the way an adult would speak to a child. The way she used to speak to you. You could never exactly pinpoint when those roles became reversed.

You finish discussing some more insurance matters with the front-desk nurse as she puts together a small folder of documents for you. While she works, you glance at the little counter shelf that includes a plethora of pamphlets on how to deal with the complicated feelings that arise from putting a loved one in hospice care, and dealing with the emotions of having a relative with advanced stage dementia. They are pretty brochures, lovingly creased at the folds as if looked through multiple times by people who walk in and out of this facility, but seemingly only few take them home. You slip one of each into your folder when the nurse hands it to you, manage the best smile possible, and then turn on your heel to head out the hospice doors.

The sun is setting outside as you take the walk back to your car, which was purposefully parked a half mile away to afford you the luxury of a melancholic stroll. Somehow, you feel like you’ve left a piece of yourself back at the hospice. A feeling you can’t quite shake from your bones.

Your feet stop walking somewhere along the sidewalk on their own, the street lights above you flickering brighter into life as the sky is now a dusty gray with only streaks of purple. There’s a liquor store you spot across a small parking lot to your right, and you’re guided towards it, but not without a sickening feeling in your chest.

When you open the door, the bell at the top jingles, and you glance to the right where you see a lanky young man playing some sort of shooter game on his phone by the cash register. You grab a bottle of vodka, a bottle of white wine, some packs of skittles, one of the mini pizza boxes at the hot food station, and then dump it all onto the counter.

The young man scans all your items without even so much as sparing you a glance, but does take a look at your ID, then says, “Total’s $68.65, cash or card?”

“Card.”

Just before you tap your card, something displayed behind the cashier counter catches your eye. Something familiar, something tempting, something you weigh in your head about twenty times within one millisecond all due to the cortisol coursing through your veins and you eventually say, “Uh, and could I get one of those, too?”

The cashier looks behind himself to what you’re pointing at before turning around. “Sure.”

The same jingle is heard on top of your head as you leave the store, now with a burning hot mini pizza box in your hand as well as a plastic bag that carries your candy and the two clinking bottles of alcohol.

“Oh!! omg, y/n,” you hear a feminine voice call out and you’re instantly wincing. The last thing you wanted was to be bothered right now. You just wanted to go home and get drunk and then pass out on the floor of your living room. But alas, the world is small.

You turn around to see Hana come running across the sidewalk lot towards you, and when she’s about a few feet away, she glances down at your hands and all the things you were carrying. You quickly shove your last-minute purchase into your jacket pocket with a shameful conscience, and try to hide the plastic bag of liquor behind your calves. There was no hiding the pizza box, but at least that was the least incriminating.

“Oh, Hana, wow! What a coincidence seeing you here,” you say to her, pressing your lips into a small smile.

“Yeah, I um,” she points over her shoulder towards the hospice that’s standing tall in the darkness of night, cells with windows illuminated with light. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a prison. “Remember I told you my friend’s mom is sick and she’s at this hospice?”

“Yeah,” you say.

“I was just visiting her mom with her,” she tells you.

“Aw,” you comment, “I see, I see.”

You adore Hana, you really do. She was there for you when the whole Yuna and Choso thing went down, picking your shifts up for a good week when you couldn’t stomach going into work when your ex-best friend’s stupid face was gloating in the halls over how she stole your boyfriend. Hana was there for you when you were a new hire and all the doctors were being bitchy about a “newbie in the ED”, but she stood up for you, even cussed the fuck out of one of attendings for the whole hall to hear when you were being disrespected by one of them. She’s someone you can beam about how hot the EMT and Firefighter men that stroll into the ED are, too. A priceless companion.

And even though you two have hung out after hours sometimes, it was still always a little awkward to see a coworker outside of work.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I actually, um, was going to tell you at our shift tomorrow, but I just admitted my mom to the hospice too,” you say, “and…thanks a lot for telling me about it. I really appreciate it. It seems like a wonderful facility.”

Her eyes briefly widen with surprise before they soften once again. “Oh, that’s wonderful, love. I hope all goes well. And your little insurance scam worked! Good for you!”

“Shhh,” you hiss at her, looking around yourself with paranoia, “the feds are everywhere.”

She laughs, sweet in the air, before the sound settles and she looks at you with something reminiscent of well-intentioned concern. Her eyes flit to the plastic bag you were still holding behind your legs. “Hey…um, if…if you ever want some company when you come to visit your mom, just let me know. I hope you know you don’t have to do everything alone.”

You blink at her, sucking in a short breath to respond, but it only leaves you as a slight puff of air. There’s a silent gratitude that you give her, because it’s hard for you to express any feelings with words, but you’ve found that the people in your life who know you best can always read you without them.

“Thank you, Hana,” you manage to say with a slight croak to your voice because you were fighting back tears.

She smiles at you. “Take care, okay? And see ya tomorroooowwwwww,” she coos at you, coming up to you to give you a small hug, a squeeze of your upper arm, and then she heads back towards the direction of the hospice.

You watch her walk away until you can’t see her anymore. And then you head towards your car.

When you arrive at your neighborhood, you park in front of Gojo’s house. You have a feeling that you won’t be able to bear the vast emptiness of your home now that your mother is elsewhere, and so you drag your feet up the stone stairs of his house with a heavy heart instead.

The spare key that he gave you weakly pushes into the keyhole with about as much force as your fingers can manage, and you realize they almost feel atrophied.

The house is dark when you step inside, spare for the ambient street lights shining through cracked open blinds on the windows, and the curtains rustle gently from the draft of the AC, a chill that reaches you too by the time you make it to the staircase.

It doesn’t seem like Gojo’s home. A glance at the clock tells you it’s close to 8pm. You briefly consider texting him to ask where he’s at, why he’s out so late, when he’ll be home, and what’s for dinner, but you can’t even bring yourself to pull your phone out of your coat pocket.

Weak legs manage to take you upstairs and you’re about to pass through to your room when the slightly open door to the master bedroom taunts you, like a peephole into some other wordly dimension. Like the wardrobe in the chronicles of Narnia. A portal into your fake husband’s life.

With a palm pushing on the door, you slowly crack it open, and you know the anxious voices in your head are getting worse by the day when the creaking of the door hinges sounds like a lullaby to you.

Was this an invasion of privacy? And did you really care if it was?

The room is big, with a king sized bed off to the left, sheets neatly made and duvet primly tucked under, like the way hotel beds are set up. You feel a slight flush of embarrassment when you remember you haven’t been making your bed in the mornings for the past couple days you’ve been living here so far, and you wonder if Gojo would judge you for something like that. If he’d think you were a messy or undisciplined person. If he would think less of you.

Truthfully, in a lot of ways, you still felt like a child. You barely weathered a lot of your formative adolescent years when dealing with your parents’ divorce, and you’ve had to put so much of your life on pause to take care of your mom ever since she got diagnosed. So here you were, in the body of a 29-year-old woman, yet still feeling so painfully juvenile. One that forgets to make her bed in the mornings, and on most nights can’t seem to stomach anything other than cereal for dinner. It was like you were still at a party that everyone else had left, except all it ever was is hell. Your life was such a stark contrast to the lives of other adults you’ve come across. The ones that wake up at six to go on runs, the ones that have paid off mortgages with five figures in their retirement accounts, oh god, the ones that meal prep, and the ones that, all things considered, have their lives together. The ones that don’t spend at least an hour of every day, in fetal position on their bed, sobbing until tears soak through the sheets of the pillow down to the feathers like bone, because you’re so overwhelmed with stress and preparing yourself for the grief of losing your mother which you know that, no matter how hard you try to save her from, will inevitably one day come.

You used to cook dinner every night, make your bed every morning, and go to pilates on the weekends. Back when you were a little younger and healed and excited to live life. But now, you barely get by. Your priorities are with your mother. You can’t remember the last time you did anything nice for yourself, including something as simple as the luxury of getting to come home to a clean house because you hardly ever had time to clean it, not with all the doctor’s appointments you were driving your mother to, not with all the extra shifts you were picking up at the hospital to pay off your debt, not with all the times you felt too depressed to even get out of bed.

But your mother is in hospice now, so you’ve made time, right? You’ve made the decision that everyone in your life has been begging you to finally do. So why do you still feel so empty inside?

By a quick survey of the room, you notice Gojo doesn’t really have many framed photos hung up on the walls or perched up on surfaces. None, actually. Only a contemporary painting above his bed frame and then a faded vintage horror movie poster plastered up near his desk. Not terribly odd, since in your experience most men don’t really do the whole “cluttering the house with millions of photos of their family” thing until they at least have a couple of kids and some purebred dog. The thought of Gojo someday setting up a little portrait photo at his desk with his wife’s—his eventual real forever wife’s, pretty face in it, posing with their two beautiful kids, makes an oddly melancholic feeling waft through you. You wonder if he would keep a two-by-two in his wallet, too.

Your feet move one in front of the other as your finger traces the surface wood of a dresser cabinet, something that looks a little vintage and oaky, in stark contrast to the modern minimalist vibe Gojo has set up in the rest of the room. A family heirloom, maybe? There’s no dust that coats your finger, which surprises you. If you were to run your finger across your dresser at home you’d have collected enough dust to snort down your windpipes like a recreational drug. But Gojo’s a real estate agent, making a living off of dressing houses up in perfect cosplay so that monetarily stable middle class families feel inclined to buy them. So you’re not exactly surprised he’s invested in keeping his own house in pristine condition too.

There is a little bit of chaos, though. Like the shirt he has haphazardly hung over his chair at his office space over to the right. There’s a coffee mug sitting there too, porcelain and reflecting the moon light off, but upon peering inside you see that it’s half empty with stale coffee. He’s got pens sprawled across the desk, in a fashion that suggests he accidentally knocked them over in a rush, and slowly, like some grounding exercise, you place them one by one back into the paper mache pencil holder. It briefly occurs to you that he has a lot of paper mache containers of sorts around the house. You lift up the pencil cup, turning it in your hand until your eyes catch something written on it with glittery pink gel pen.

i luv u unkle toru! -yur BEST FREND 4EVUR juno!!! :D

A small smile makes it onto your face. The handwriting was messy, more like scratches than smooth lines, and nothing less than what you would expect of a child. You remember making paper mache and clay trinkets at preschool for your mom and dad when you were younger. And you’re sure if you were brave enough to open the box of memorabilia that sits in your attic some day, you’d see your own scratchy scribbled handwriting on them. An innocence that is long gone and buried, never again to be delicately placed on desks or counters for all the living.

The draft from the AC reaches you once again, brushing over your skin and causing a chill to shiver down your spine. It kicks at the curtains as well, causing them to ruffle up towards you, baring the dark outside world into the streets. And you notice in that momentary glance that there’s a roof just outside the window that overlooks the backyard. A roof? Spotted by a depressed woman going through a quarter life crisis? There was nothing more tempting than that.

The window was easy to open, which only caused unease over the revelation of how easy it would be for someone to rob this house. You make a mental note to tell Gojo to get a ring camera or security system of some sort since he doesn’t seem to have one, but you can already picture him telling you something about how statistically low the crime rates are in this neighborhood compared to all the other neighborhoods, and then you’d tell him that it’s just for your peace of mind. But whether he’d compromise or not after that, you’re really not sure.

You take a seat on the roof, a little scared as you sit because of the slight slope, but it’s comfortable once you’re settled. You sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, staring out into the neighborhood of perfectly lined up suburban houses. You’ve got a better view into some neighbors' backyards, noticing that a couple of them had pools while some of them have big gardens. There's a cat resting up on a fence in the distance. A car drives by with headlights illuminating everything in its proximity briefly before zooming off. You glance up at the sky, and notice the full moon, but it’s too cloudy to see any stars. Or perhaps it was just the light pollution from the lamps making it difficult to see.

On instinct, your hand reaches inside your coat pocket for your phone, but your knuckles hit something else instead. A moment of brief confusion flickers through your head, but then you immediately recall the last-minute purchase you made at the gas station.

Your hand pulls out the object, and then you stare down at it. Squinting your eyes a little, because it’s a sight that feels familiar but also one you haven’t seen in so long: a pack of twenty Marlboro red cigarettes.

You’ve tried a lot of things to manage your stress over the years. Excessively working out, eating a lot of sugar, going on six hour hikes to touch grass, flirting with random men at bars, fucking Choso until he was rendered speechless, multiple types of antidepressants, you almost tried smoking weed once with your roommate in college but you wimped out last second. But the habit that had gotten you through the years of 21 to 24 is held loosely in your hand right now. It’s been five years since you quit, but resolve was often a fickle thing. As the saying goes, once an addict, always an addict.

There’s a brief moment of hesitation as you slowly peel the plastic off of the back, but then it all comes back to you like a reflex you’ll never forget up to where you slide a cigar up out and then pinch it between your two fingers. Forgetting to buy a lighter with the cigarettes is definitely something you would do, but because you remembered it was something that you would do, you remembered not to do it. The flick of the flame coming to life is ASMR you didn’t know you were painfully nostalgic for, and you balance the cigarette between your lips in that sort of movie-star way people used to obsess over back in the day. But just as you bring the lighter up to the end of the cigarette, and just before you can light it—

A hand shoots out in your periphery, grabbing your wrist and entirely stalling the movement.

You gasp, lips parting enough for the cigarette to fall from them and into your lap. The hand wrapped around your wrist is large and masculine, and you briefly consider screaming, but when you snap your neck to look at the perpetrator, you see Gojo crouched down next to you on this roof. You notice he’s wearing a black suit, a tie that was loosely secure hanging from his neck into the space between his spread thighs as he’s crouched, and whatever gel he had in his hair from earlier only barely remains as strands fall over his forehead haphazardly. He looks like he’s on the other end of a long work day.

You blink at him, expression plastered with surprise, but his is only earnest. With breathtaking blue eyes that you realize he could easily use to surrender a person just by looking at them, like the way he’s looking at you right now. His lips are pressed together into a firm line, as if to suppress some emotion, but the slight crease to his brow makes you feel like you’re in trouble somehow. Like he was silently scolding you for something.

“I—” you stutter.

He lets go of your wrist and discreetly pulls the lighter out of your hand. And then his hand reaches for the pack of cigarettes you were balancing on your knee, but on some reflex that you don’t even think about, you try to snatch them away from him, and now you’re both tugging at the same pack of cigarettes.

“y/n,” he says, “let go.”

“No,” you say stubbornly.

He sighs and tugs a little harder. “Give them to me.”

“But—” you stammer, voice becoming softer to see if that’d work on him, “I’m…” Your grip on them tightens. “I’m stressed.”

He raises an eyebrow at you, then finally loses his patience and snatches them right out of your hand. He stands up from his crouched down position to toss the pack off to the side onto the roof somewhere. You’re surprised when he lets out a sigh and sits down next to you on the roof, as if he felt the obligation to. His legs stretch out in front of him, but still bent slightly at the knees, and he leans backwards with his body weight braced on his palms laid flat on wood paneling behind him. “There are better ways to relieve stress,” he tells you candidly.

“Like what?” you ask, and just when he opens his mouth to speak, you clarify, “and don’t say sex.”

He shuts his mouth and his eyes flit up to the sky for a brief second. “Damn. I didn’t have a back-up answer.”

You roll your eyes, releasing a deep breath, then draw your knees to your chest before resting your chin on top of them.

“I didn’t know you smoke,” he says after a century-long minute.

You wince a little, because you were half hoping he was going to just drop the subject all together.

You bite your lip nervously and hug your knees to your chest tighter as if to hide yourself from him. “I don’t. Well, I haven’t. Um, not for a while.”

“Huh. I see,” he says.

Another silence passes, and as he shuffles next to you, the fabric of his suit brushes against the fabric of your coat, and you’ve become entirely too aware of the feeling.

“So,” he says, breaking the awkward silence, “your mom’s in hospice now?”

You nod, enthusiastic enough to where you won’t look like you’re entirely depressed about it.

“That’s good,” he says, “no issues with the insurance?”

You shake your head. “They need you to sign some papers by the end of the week though,” you tell him. “We’ll have to go in person.”

He nods slowly to affirm he’ll make time for it. “I really hope things get better for your mom,” he says, voice soft as he stares off into neighbors homes like you had been doing ten minutes ago. You see the cat that was resting on the fence get up, do a big stretch, and start walking along the length of the fence. Your eyes briefly glance at Gojo, and you notice his gaze is tracing the cat’s path.

“My—” you start, hesitant all of a sudden by the vulnerability you already feel swelling within you, most definitely due to sitting with someone on a rooftop late at night, but you decide that you’ll be nice to him for once, “…my mom seems to remember you a lot. More than she remembers me.” You let out a small humoring laugh, as if that fact doesn’t completely destroy you. “She was blabbering to me again for the seventh time about how you apparently fixed our AC.” You try to bite your tongue, but can’t help it when you say, “although I’m pretty sure you just pressed a bunch of buttons until it started working again.”

“Yup. That’s exactly what I did.”

You roll your eyes and sigh.

Another awkward silence.

“Can I ask you a question?” you say.

“Sure.” His voice sounds deeper, like he’s sleepy.

“Why did you agree to marry me? That’s not something people just do out of nowhere.”

He glances over at you, and you flicker your eyes to him. “Why? Having regrets?” he teases, with a slight nudge of his elbow to your side.

“Just answer me.”

He lifts his palms up from behind him and leans forward, placing his hands on his knees instead. “I don’t know. If something I could do would help someone out that much, I wasn’t going to say no.”

You hum quietly, still confused by his intentions. But you’re too jaded to question them.

“It costs nothing to be nice,” he adds.

You run soothing circles over your thigh through the fabric of your jeans. For some reason, your mind wanders to Choso. Thinking of all the years you wasted staying with him even though you knew his affections were long gone, just because you didn’t want to break his heart. Only to realize that you never had that privilege in the first place.

“I think,” you say, your voice barely above a whisper as you draw your knees closer to your chest, “that sometimes it does.”

A gust of autumn wind breezes by, ruffling the trees that the two of you are at eye-level with at the moment. You're pretty sure you’ve completely lost Gojo’s interest at this point, where he’s finally too tired to deal with your oddly cryptic attitudes and overall generally displeasing vibe, assuming this based solely on his prolonged silence beside you. You’re ready for him to get up and abandon you here on this roof, left to ponder every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life. It was any second now.

“Sometimes,” he instead speaks up, and it’s so surprising to you that you jolt a little bit, “you can do everything right, and people will still find a way to fuck you over. But I don’t think that’s any reason to stop being nice to others.”

You glance over at him, your eyes widening slightly, but he just continues to peer off straight into the night. His blinks are slow, lingering on being closed for a moment before he opens them again, and you’re mesmerized by the sight. The skin under his eyes is slightly dark from exhaustion, heavy with character that makes you aware that he’s just a person too. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, you realize that he’s—…handsome. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, your heart flutters in your chest.

He scoffs suddenly and dusts his hands off. “I sound like a fucking youth pastor.” He lets out an exhale before suddenly standing up onto his feet before you can think more on it. He looks off into the night again and lets out another exhale that sounds more like a sigh this time. “God, it’s getting a lot colder these days. Might have to start running the heater.”

You blink up at him with no commentary to add.

He looks down at you. His face is relaxed, but you can tell those eyes are distracted. A shimmering blue ocean in its own world while he attempts to stay present in this one.

He holds his hand out to you, and you stare at it blankly like you’ve got no clue what he intends for you to do with it. But you finally take the hint and curl your hand around his palm so that he can pull you up onto your feet too.

You stumble a little, falling forward from the sudden blood flow to your brain, but he holds you steady by the strong grip of his hands on your elbows. He’s close to you, close enough to where you can smell the faint lingering scent of his cologne. Something different than that expensive one he wore to the courthouse, but it’s comforting somehow. A fragrance that’s more him. And you feel nervous as you look up at him underneath pale moonlight.

He lets go of your elbows. You feel cold from the loss of his touch. But his right hand moves to gently hold your left hand in his palm, holding it curled as his thumb barely grazes the stone you wear on your ring finger; the one he gave you.

The way his thumb prods at the silver band is like he’s inspecting its quality, as if it has to pass some test to be worthy of sitting on your finger. Or maybe just any finger, if you were to quell the delusion. You’re not sure if he’s satisfied with his inspection.

“Where did you get it—” you blurt out.

His gaze flickers up to your face briefly before he’s back to examining the ring. “It was my mom’s.”

Your mouth gapes slightly in shock, heart dropping a little in your chest, and all of a sudden you feel guilty. Guilty that he put his mother’s ring on your finger for something that was fake, something that was essentially a business deal, something exchanged to you out of fraud when it was a precious family heirloom that should be exchanged with love. And maybe he didn’t care about it much, some people don’t care about the sentiments of objects. But your mind thinks of the oaky vintage dresser in his room, so out of place in the aesthetic of its surroundings, a decision you can only imagine him of all people, mr. “everything in this house has to look like an IKEA catalog”, would do if the dresser held some importance to him that was more than meets the eye. And so you’re compelled to think that maybe this ring did, too.

“Why would you give me this?! You could’ve just gotten a cheap fake diamond ring from a pawn shop and called it a day,” you ask him, suddenly feeling burdened by it.

“Well I wasn’t exactly given much time to think of other options.”

“But—” you start, only to realize you have no counter arguments for that.

He lets out a huh noise, like the sound someone makes when they’re pleasantly surprised by something, as he looks down at your hand that he still held in his. “It’s kinda crazy that it fits you perfectly. I wasn’t sure.”

Your mind wanders to when he slipped the ring onto your finger in the courtroom, followed by the kiss. Soft, sweet, the lingering warm sensation of his palm on your cheek as he cupped your face, the same way those heartthrob actors do in all those romance movies and kdramas that you watch on Friday nights while snuggled up in a blanket, wondering when anyone will ever kiss you like that. You remember the ghost sensation of his hand hovering over the small of your back, fingers lightly grazing the nape of your neck, his frame blocking out everything around you as he kissed you, just to pull away and for the two of you to then pretend like it never happened, as if it wasn’t one of the sweetest kisses you’ve ever known.

You slowly pull your hand out of his, the moment feeling too tender for your liking, and you clear your throat before flitting your eyes up to his.

“Rule #1,” you remind him with a soft whisper, “no touching.”

You purse your lips, watching his round eyes blink once, then twice, before he shoves his hands in his suit pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels for a few seconds, nodding slowly in submission, and then he turns on them to head back to the house. You’re standing a little stunned from the abrupt ending to this trance of a moment on the roof, and you’re also a little surprised with how your chest is heaving a little bit with fast breaths, but you eventually snap out of it to follow him inside too.

You two make it back inside the house, with little words exchanged. You pretend to not notice the way Gojo tilts his head at his desk, like he’s confused about why it looks tidier than when he left it. You’re prepared to feign innocence or ignorance, but he doesn’t press you about it.

“Y’know,” he says from behind you, his chest briefly brushing against the back of your head as he pushes the bedroom door in front of you open so that you can head out into the loft, “those oversized 1800s-esque nightgowns you’ve been wearing around the house kinda make you look like a less-hot version of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

“Sign right here for me, sir.”

You watch as the nurse slides the papers across the high-raised counter of the hospice nursing desk towards Gojo, his eyebrows narrowing as his eyes skim the words on the paper and land at the highlighted lines where he’s been intended to sign. You feel nervous for some reason, as if he’d suddenly find something disagreeable and refuse to sign, then take you to the courthouse first thing to finalize a divorce and send you off to prison while claiming he was blackmailed into the whole marriage in the first place.

Instead, he pulls a pen from the chest pocket of his suit jacket, clicking the end of it and scribbling his signature onto the paper with some jet black ink that looks like it takes a second to dry. How pretentious of him. The pink pom-pom pen was right there.

The nurse behind the counter continues to chat with him about something, blah blah dependents, blah blah tax claims, blah blah you’ll receive an itemized bill in the mail. You’re trying your best to eavesdrop in on the conversation, but most of your senses are being occupied by examining all your surroundings. When you dropped your mother off at the hospice, your feelings were at the forefront of conscience, but now that you’ve had a couple days to come down from that overwhelming emotional high, you’re here to scope out the quality of this place you’ve just dumped your mom at.

The facility is clean and sleek, with a color theme of red and an ocean blue across the signs, the furniture, even with the paperwork they hand out. All the workers had color-coded scrubs based on their occupation or specialty, and none of them had stains on the fabric. You take a glance down at the modest leather pumps you were wearing past the creases of the long skirt, and notice that the floor was shimmering off their reflection in a perfect polish. It wasn’t bad, this place.

“Thanks, you too,” you hear Gojo say to the nurse behind the counter. He has a professional smile on his face, but still kind and genuine, which makes the woman at the computer something bashful and unable to make eye contact. He folds something that looks like a receipt into his chest pocket before tucking his pen back in there too and then turns to face you. You make a mental note to pay him back for whatever he just paid for, at least once you move some money around.

Your eyebrows lift, feeling a little dazed as you blink at him blankly.

“Alright,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets, the sound of his shoes on the polished hospital floors satisfactorily tapping in your ears as he took a couple steps towards you, “where’s your mom’s room?”

“Huh?”

“What’s her room number?” he asks you.

“Y-You wanna go see her??”

“Of course I want to,” he says, “she’s my mother-in-law.”

You roll your eyes and pet the fabric of your skirt to smooth the wrinkles out. “You’re getting a little too invested in this role of fake husband.”

“I get to annoy you all day and ride the adrenaline rush of committing a federal crime,” he says, “of fucking course I’d get invested.”

You sigh, tossing some of your hair to behind your shoulder before glancing up at the signs, squinting slightly to locate the ward where your mother’s room is, before you hear an extremely high-pitched and somewhat catty feminine voice call out from behind you. You glance at Gojo’s face as he peers off to whoever’s behind you, and you see him visibly stiffen a little.

“Is that Dayton county’s sexiest realtooorrr???” the voice purrs, and you turn on your heel to see a blonde bombshell of a woman clacking her kitten heels down the glistening floors of the hospice, with another brunette bombshell just a few paces behind her. Bombshell #2 sighs something like “it issss” before they walk right up to your fake husband and take turns at giving him a playful squeeze of his bicep. You have to physically stop your jaw from dropping at the sight.

“Wow! Ladies, so–...so great to see you two,” he says out of polite obligation, and you immediately clock the fact that he doesn’t address them by name.

Bombshell #1 turns to look at you, all of her hair moving as one solid entity with the motion from all the hair spray that’s probably holding it up, and she points at you with a long slender finger that narrows into a french-tip. “Oh who’s this?? Another one of your clients??”

“Oh, no, she’s my–”

“I’m his wife,” you interrupt him, irritated for some reason.

Both the women chirp something out like oh! before their faces twist with confusion.

“I didn’t know you were married,” Bombshell #2 says in a thick New Jersey accent.

Gojo lifts his left hand up, the silver band on his hand glimmering under fluorescent hospice lighting. “Very happily,” he says, as if someone was holding a gun to his head.

Bombshell #1 crosses her arms, and you try not to stare at how nice her boobs look in the low scoop-neck jaguar print top she was wearing. You were no better than a man. And now you’re pissed off at the idea of Gojo glancing down too, but a flick of your gaze up to his face tells you he’s safe. For now.

“You weren’t married when I asked you if you were a month ago,” Bombshell #1 sneers at him. It’s true, the math wouldn’t make sense, but in his defense, this marriage was a fraud.

“Or when you took me out for dinner last week after I bought my house,” Bombshell #2 snarls with an undertone of hurt.

Gojo clears his throat beside you before pointing at Bombshell #2. “How is that, by the way?” he asks in an attempt to change the subject, “the half acre down on Maple Ave, right? You, uh, enjoying the pool?”

The woman let out an offended scoff and–were her eyes sheening with tears?? She puts her hands on her hips. “No. Mine is the three bedroom house with the cedar gazebo on 14th street.”

Her friend next to her rolls her eyes and smacks her gum between her cheek. “I’m the one that bought the half acre down on Maple Ave, jerk. Ugh!” She grabs her friend’s arm with a high-pitched hmph noise leaving her throat, and you can hear the other one sniffling subtly as she wobbles on her heels with her friend’s pull of her arm.

Right before leaving the two of you alone, Bombshell #1 turns to you and says, “I hope you find someone who treats you better,” and then they storm off together down the hallway, their perfectly blow-dried hair bouncing in sync with each stomp.

You blink at the sight, a little flabbergasted from the interaction, and then flit your faze up to Gojo. You see him awkwardly scratching at the back of his head with a grimace on his stupidly handsome face.

“That’s what you get for being a manwhore,” you tell him.

“I’m not a manwhor–”

“You went on a date with another woman while you were maaaaarrrieeeddd?!” you coo as you let out a fake gasp and slap your cheeks with your hands, “despicable, really.”

He lets out some disgruntled noise, the source coming from deep within his throat. “No. We weren’t fake-married yet,” he vindicates himself, “and it wasn’t a date. I just bought her dinner as a congrats for buying a house. Not a big deal. I do it for all my clients.”

“Satoru. You do realize you’re leading these women on, right? I mean, I’ve seen the way you talk to them. Even if you think you’re just being friendly, please know that your definition of friendly is most people’s definition of flirting.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true.”

He raises an eyebrow as he glances down at you. “Alright, how come this flirting in disguise of friendliness hasn’t worked on you then?”

You scoff in disbelief before crossing your arms. Maybe you did deserve a better fake husband. “You’re never friendly with me. You’re always rude to me.”

“What? I’m not always rude to you.”

“Well, you’re certainly much more rude to me than you are to other women,” you say, tapping the tip of your shoe with irritation.

“Can we not do this right now? We’re in the middle of a hospice.”

“God, you’re such a cop-out,” you mumble as you forcefully push past him towards the hallway that’ll lead you to your mother. You can hear that Gojo’s on your tail, following you down one of the more dimly lit hallways, and you can tell he needs to stall the strides of his Daddy Longlegs to not overtake your pace.

“What the fuck is a cop-out?” he asks you from behind.

“Look it up on urban dictionary, Grandpa. Unless you don’t know what the Internet is, either,” you spat.

You waltz right up to your mother’s room just in time to see a nurse making her way out with a clipboard in her hands. She glances over to you when she sees you approaching in her periphery.

“Hi! How can I help you?” she asks.

“Is it alright if we visit my mother?” you ask her.

“Oh! Sure, let me just clean her bed pan really quick.”

Your brow furrows. “B-Bedpan?? Why is she using a bedpan??”

The nurse stops in her movements. “Well, yesterday and today, that’s just what she has decided to use.”

You immediately become hostile. “That’s not right. She never needed to use one at home. Why is she suddenly using one here? Is that not a clear sign of deterioration? The restrooms must not be kept well enough here if she doesn’t want to use them.”

The nurse becomes something meek, her eyes widening as her mouth gapes slightly. “Ma’am,” she squeaks out, “we see this commonly with patients as they begin to adjust to hospice life. We’ll urge her to use the restroom, but as of right now, we need to prioritize what she finds most comfortable.”

Your expression softens, your shoulders relaxing from their tense position, and you duck your head a little with guilt. “Right…I’m sorry.”

The nurse presses her lips together with a well-meaning smile before shuffling into the room and closing the door behind her. You sigh and lean your back against the wall next to the number plate, cheeks flushing slightly from the confrontation. You have no idea how loud your voice was or who heard you. But you try to convince yourself that you’re just stressed and trying to look out for your mother, although the guilt still sits.

You glance up to see Gojo staring at you with slightly wide eyes, his hands shoved into his pockets, and he tilts his head to study your expression.

“What?” you snap at him.

“Are you doing okay?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Satoru,” you cut his questioning off by raising a palm into the air, “just—…just stop.”

His brow furrows together slightly, but before he can show any further concern, the nurse exits the room and holds the door open for the two of you.

“All set!” she chirps, and Gojo moves to hold the door open in her stead, and then the nurse bolts down to disappear somewhere down the hallway.

You hear Gojo let out a small huff of a scoff as he stares down in the direction the nurse ran off in. “Glad to know I’m not the only one that’s scared of you.”

You roll your eyes and walk into the room through the open door.

Your mother lays in her bed, looking out the window with her hands resting on top of layers of white linen sheets, her skin looking slightly paler than usual. You approach her bedside slowly and she finally turns her head to look at you.

“Hi mom,” you gently greet her, sitting down on the stool beside her bed, “how are you doing?”

Her eyes dart across the features of your face, and you briefly glance towards the wall to the right where you see Gojo standing from a slight distance.

“Oh, hi dear,” she says with a smile, and relief washes over you.

You match her smile with your own. “Mom, I brought someone here to see you.” You glance over at Gojo, who starts to close distance now as he approaches the foot of the bed, “this is Satoru, my husband.”

Your mother’s eyes widen, “Oh! I know him,” she scoldingly swats a hand at you, like you’ve embarrassed her somehow by assuming that she doesn’t know who he is, “he’s my neighbor!”

You sigh, “yes mom, the one that fixed the A/C?” You attempt to finish her sentence for her.

She looks confused for a moment, but slightly nods as if to avoid any further confusion for herself. “But—…but, why…” she trails off and then looks at you, “I’m sorry, are you my nurse?”

Your shoulders drop slightly. “No, mom, it’s me. Your daughter. Do you remember?”

Her face scrunches before it entirely relaxes to keep some image of composure despite the haze you know she feels in her head. “Oh…yes, yes…my little girl. I remember you, of course!”

Your eyes become layered with a slight sheen of tears, “I’m glad.”

“Where’s your father?” she asks, “he said he’d bring me some…oh dear, what—…he said he’d bring me tea. I’ve been waiting.”

“Mom, dad is—” you pause for a moment to think on your feet. You could either tell the truth, or a little white lie. You never know what to do. And either one comes with either guilt or sorrow. “Well, he’ll be here soon, I just wanted to come see you.”

“Oh okay…” she trails off, her eyes squinting at you once more with that same look of confusion on it, but then they drift towards Gojo. “Oh you’re a very handsome young man! You look just like my neighbor.”

Your eyes flicker up to Gojo, and he walks up to your side by your mom’s bed. “Yes, Mrs. l/n, I am your neighbor.”

“With the lemon tree!”

“The avocado tree,” you correct her with a small sigh. “And he’s my husband mom. And also our neighbor.”

“Oh I see I see…” she says, looking up at him, and in a moment that shocks you, she holds her hand up for him to take.

There’s a slight moment of surprise on his face too, but he accepts her frail hand in his, and you glance over to your mom to see her look at him with some look of peace on her face.

“Oh, sit down here, won’t you?” she tells him, and you both blink at her in a moment of hesitation.

He pulls a stool up to the side of the bed right next to you and takes a seat down onto it. Your mother holds his hand with both of hers now, soothing her palm over the back of it before she taps on it lightly.

“Oh, my little girl is very sweet. She would bring me flowers from the garden when she was,” she glances at you, confused once more, “well I remember her when she was so little but she looks…a little older now. Ah, but she would bring me such pretty flowers.”

Your heart aches in your chest. You never knew what version of you your mother would remember. Some days, you’re still supposed to be an angsty teenager that shuts doors in her face, some days you were just as you are right now, and other days, you were just her little girl. And it confused her, the image of not seeing you in the way that she remembers. In the only way she knew how.

“You’ll take good care of my sweet girl, won’t you?” she asks him.

And it knocks the wind out of you.

It drops your heart to the center of the earth.

The thought that, after so many moments where she doesn’t remember you, she still knows that you’re someone she wants to keep safe.

Your mouth gapes slightly, tears welling in your eyes and you try your best to blink them away, but you see Gojo’s hand slip out from being held by your mother’s hands, to instead use both of his to hold hers. Your eyes snap to his face, and you see that same earnest expression you’ve been growing used to seeing these days.

“Yes,” he responds, eye contact level with hers, “I will.”

A small puff of air leaves your lips, a single tear streaming down your cheek and you quickly swipe your trembling fingers to remove any evidence of it before you huff out a shaky, “excuse me.” And then you’re standing up off the stool, and in a few hurried steps across the room as more tears continue to stream down your face, you make it to the door to push out into the suffocating air of the hallway.

It’s hard to breathe, huffs and puffs barely leaving your lips as you struggle to pull air into your lungs while you storm down the hallway at a fast pace, your heels clicking underneath you in a way that only sets you off further. Suddenly, all the sounds around you make you sick to your stomach, a wave of nausea washing over you, and your nose burns with the intensity of the tears that continue to stream down your face. A few hospice staff look at you with concerned expressions, and you eventually reach a heavy-duty door that leads you out into a secluded staircase hallway where the dim lighting serves to relax at least some of your senses, but you still feel like you’re about to pass out.

Even in the haze of your emotions, there’s this glimmer of a memory that comes to mind. One from when you were younger and you were pushed on the playground at school. You cried and cried and cried in your mother’s arms, but even then, you didn’t want her to baby you. You would say to her, I’m a big girl now! in that same way a child knows nothing of what it truly means to brave the world.

That little girl had no idea that one day, there would be moments where she wouldn’t be remembered as her mother’s little girl anymore.

No matter how old you grow, you will always be my little girl, your mother’s voice echoes to you, the feeling of her squeezing you in her arms as she holds your sobbing little form in hers casting a ghost sensation across your skin.

In a mother’s eyes, you’ll always be her baby.

And that’s why it hurts.

Because it’s all fake.

It’s phony.

It’s not real.

This arrangement you have with Gojo.

And if your mother were to die tomorrow, there would be no one to take care of her little girl anymore.

Not in the way she believes there will be.

Of all the white lies, this one pierces you straight through your heart in a way that leaves you gasping for air.

Amidst your whirlwind of thoughts, you hear the door push open harshly, and when you glance over, you see Gojo standing in this dimly lit hallway as he turns his head quickly to the left and sees you standing there.

“Hey,” he says, catching his breath as he lightly jogs up to you, “hey, hey, hey,” he repeats with more concern now when he sees the state you’re in, and he seamlessly pulls you into a hug, your cheek pressing against his chest that feels warm even through the fabric of his suit jacket and shirt, and that familiar scent of him completely engulfs you.

You sob quietly, wiping your snot on his tie and your tears on the felt fabric beside it, your hands balled into tiny fists at your chest, squeezed between the two of you. You feel him tuck your head under his chin and his arms wrap around you tighter. You don’t even realize it at first, but suddenly, it has become easier to breathe.

Then, you wail, and you cry, and you sob, because you don’t have the words to even explain how you feel, about not just this, but with everything, a buildup of everything that has been suffocating you in your life that just comes crashing down on you all at once.

“I know,” he says, his palm resting on the back of your head as he holds your face to his chest, his voice soothing in your ears while you sob until there’s nothing left to cry. “I know.”

You two stay like this for another minute or so as you come down from the cries, your remnant sniffling echoing in the hallway while you wipe more of your snot on his jacket. You make the first move to pull your face away from his chest, but he still keeps his arms wrapped around you when you look up at him.

With your gaze darting across his face, you take in the blue in his eyes. Eyes that are looking at you so softly it’s suddenly hard to breathe once more. And when those eyes flit to your lips, your mouth parts slightly as you two breathe in unison.

It’s possible that you could have dreamed the moment you saw him lean down slightly towards you, his eyes still set on your lips, but it didn’t matter because you’re pushing him away with strong fists before you can even register the thought in your head.

He lets go of you entirely, his eyes wide once more, and you glance down at your feet.

A tender moment, just like on the roof, broken just because you can’t handle that—…that way, that intense way that he looks at you. New rule, no looking at me longingly like you want to kiss me. I won’t allow it.

“I want to go home,” you whisper, still examining your shoes. And you suddenly feel embarrassed that he had to see you this way. He’s supposed to be scared and intimidated by you, not holding you in his arms while you cry.

He’s silent for a moment, but you can tell he’s searching for things to say. “You don’t want to say bye to your mom before we go?”

You swipe your palm against the wetness on your cheek. “No. I just want to go home.”

“y/n,” he tried to convince you.

You finally look up at him. “Please.”

He breathes in a few breaths as he studies the features of your face in a way that makes you feel so seen that it’s frightening. But he slowly nods, then says,

“Okay.”

[end of chapter 4]

a/n. hi friendsss i hope you enjoyed :'') yea like i said at the a/n in the beginning, this chapter is a slight off-tangent from last chapter, but ch5 will continue with a lot of the stuffs that were brought up in ch3. but yea i wanted to explore the whole process of emotions reader would go through putting her mom in hospice, since it kinda felt like a big thing, hence why it got its own chapter. aaa i hope to see you in the next one!! much love from me :''0

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bktsjkko · 7 months ago

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og photo is so modern wangxian coded i genuinely cannot think of another ship for it

drawing challenge originally from raerart on x/twt

#mdzs #mdzs fanart #mxtx #mxtx fanart #mo dao zu shi #wangxian #wei wuxian #lan wangji #modern wangxian #photo is literally modern wangxian hot neighbors au #lwj i get u #peep lwj's bunny case tho #bktsjkko #bktsjkko art

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redwing4life · 8 months ago

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ASHES TO EMBERS MASTERLIST

PAIRING: Firefighter!Neighbor!Bucky x Fem!Reader

WARNINGS: Night terrors (Bucky), copious amounts of fluff, angst, smut, firefighter bucky is a warning in itself

SUMMARY: When an unfortunate event forces you to confront the crush you’ve had on your neighbour since you moved in, you learn that Bucky knows you better than you know yourself. As the two of you grow closer, how does he deal with his past without pushing you away?

CHAPTERS: 5 - Ongoing

tap whichever chapter title you want and enjoy reading <3

ONE: Forgotten Alarms

WARNINGS: Mentions of night terrors, trapped in small spaces, brief mention of reader being worried about bucky holding her weight, nothing else other than bucky being cute af

SUMMARY: When you get stuck in an elevator with your neighbour (who also happens to be your crush), you discover your interest in the firefighter isn’t as one-sided as you thought.

TWO: Shadows

WARNINGS: Fluff, talk about night terrors, ALPINEEE, reader continues to be oblivious, bucky being a flirt

SUMMARY: After yesterday’s elevator fiasco, you’re left with the guilt of overstepping in Bucky’s business. He could barely look at you when you went to the firehouse to thank the crew, so it’s fair to say you’re surprised when he turns up at the cafe you work at.

THREE: For You

WARNINGS: Mention of night terrors, Bucky being upset, fluff, flashbacks containing the death of a child, plenty of unholy thoughts, half naked bucky, dirty talk???, sexual tension, please let me know if i’ve missed something!!!

SUMMARY: You find Bucky at his most vulnerable when he’s sent home from work at 2 in the morning. While doing everything you can to comfort him, you realise you’re falling for him.

FOUR: Home Cooked Meal

WARNINGS: Smut (finally) - dirty talk, pet names, oral f and m receiving, fingering, tit play, praise kink, hand kink?, ball play, hair pulling, unprotected PinV sex, aftercare, reader and bucky have dinner, swearing, fluff, let me know if i missed anything!

SUMMARY: You surprise Bucky with a home cooked meal after his shift, and it’s the best damn thing he’s had in years. The pasta was pretty good too.

FIVE:

a/n: please lmk if you know the creator of the ai bucky images, full credit to them!!!!!

comment if you’d like to be added to my ashes to embers taglist 🧡

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rip-quizilla · 1 year ago

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1405 Peach Tree Lane

Pairing: Older!Neighbor!Eddie Munson x Reader

Summary: You like to watch your older, tatted shirtless neighbor now his lawn. He likes to watch you laying by your parents’ pool in those swimsuits that make his mouth water. Eventually, the inevitable happens when he invites you across the street for a drink.

Word Count: 8.2K

Tags: 🔥SMUT, modern au, age gap (Eddie 40s, Reader 20s), daddy kink, praise kink, degradation kink, slight breeding kink, spitting, light dom/sub, unprotected sex (reader has an iud), oral sex, p in v sex, shower sex, masturbation in a hot tub

(A/N: This is some of the filthiest shit I think I've ever written. You're welcome. Also I was very quick with the proofread, so if you see any spelling or grammar mistakes, no you don't.)

💜💜💜

Everyone in the posh gated community of Forest Hills knew about 1405 Peach Tree Lane.

The house was beautiful, as were all the houses in the upper-crust neighborhood- but the house wasn’t what people paid attention to.

Every housewife in the neighborhood knew that if they were lucky and timed their morning jog just right, they’d catch a glimpse of the toned, inked-up adonis who lived there while he shirtlessly mowed his lush green lawn.

You might not have done much speaking with the housewives in your parents’ neighborhood, but you knew about 1405 Peach Tree Lane- you had a perfect view of its front lawn from your lounge chair by the pool in your parents’ backyard. Luckily for you, all that separated your backyard from 1405 was a short wrought iron fence and a narrow stretch of road.

You didn’t mind living with your parents during the summers you spent home from college; they gave you plenty of freedom and while they were at work during the day, you got to spend the afternoon lounging by the pool, reading a book and soaking up the sun.

As well as soaking up the view of the way that same sunlight glinted off Mr. 1405’s sweaty, ink-riddled skin.

You didn’t speak to him- what would you even say? “Hi, it’s nice to meet you, my favorite part of the day is guessing what your tattoos mean.”? Or maybe, “Hey there neighbor, mind if I count the freckles on your shoulders? It’s for science.”

Eventually, the inevitable happened- he caught you staring.

He didn’t make it awkward, though. In fact, from the way he simply smiled and waved at you, you wondered if he thought your eyes meeting him had just been a coincidence, and you hadn’t been ogling him for the past thirty minutes and some change. You’d smiled back, thankful for your huge sunglasses that hid the way your eyes had widened under his attention, and waved in return.

An even bigger surprise had been that he spoke to you this time.

“That book any good?”

His voice, heavy with labored breathing under the exhaustion from finishing up his lawn work, had caught you completely off guard. You’d laughed nervously, sticking your bookmark between the pages and pushing yourself up from your face-down position on the flattened lounge chair.

“Oh! Ah-ha, uhm, yeah!” you shifted your weight back until you were sitting on spread knees and looking up at the source of the voice. On the other side of your parents’ fence stood Mr. 1405 Peach Tree Lane, sweaty and slightly sunburned on the tops of his shoulders. His curly brown hair had been piled into a messy knot atop his head, and you took note of the details that you hadn’t noticed from far away- a smattering of silver studs that decorated his ears, along with one on his nose. Five o’clock shadow that dusted his jawline. A more detailed view of his tattoos, some of which looked older than others but all of which looked very, very sexy on this man who had so much sex appeal already.

The crinkling of his plastic water bottle as he squeezed about half of it into his mouth filled the silence between you. After a loud gulp he piped up again.

“What’s it about?”

Your brow wrinkled confusedly before you remembered that he had just asked you about your book. “Oh!” you replied dumbly, looking down at the book as if you had completely forgotten that books even existed- looking at him had taken up your entire mental capacity, apparently. “It’s, uh, it’s a memoir! It’s this cool old lady’s life story, she does not hold back, so the narration is pretty hilarious a lot of the time.”

The inked-up Greek god smiled and nodded, eyebrows raising in interest. “That does sound good.” he mused, and his voice took on a slyer tone when he added, “What’s your definition of old, like thirty-five?” He chuckled as if he’d just told a funny joke, but your smile had all but fallen from your face.

“That’s not old,” you replied, not taking the joke, “This author was in her late seventies when she published this book, but even with that being said, this book is just told through such a youthful spirit- it’s easy to forget how old the author is when looking at her words.” You gripped the paperback a little tighter in your sweaty hands. “Plus, old people definitely don’t have the energy to mow their own lawns, and I have a feeling you’re not thirty-five.”

That seemed to catch him off-guard. A surprised laugh escaped him, exploding from his lips before they formed an intrigued grin and his arms crossed over his tattooed chest.

“Oh yeah? How old do I look, then?”

You grinned back, making a show of removing your sunglasses so that you could peer at him with greater focus. “Hmmmmmm…thirty-six?”

Another laugh, this one heartier than the last. “You flatter me, sweetheart.”

God, his voice is like brown sugar.

You tried again. “Forty, then.”

“Older.”

“No way.”

His grin became a smirk. “Are you patronizing me right now?”

You threw up a girl scout salute. “Scout’s honor, I would never.”

He chuckled. “Well, girl scout, I’ll be forty-five next month.”

“I’ll be sure to warn my parents about the rager you’ll be throwing.”

He peered up at your house behind you, like he just now noticed its- and your parents’- existence. “Nah,” he said, “No ragers for me, that ship sailed when I was your age.”

You smiled sweetly, placing your sunglasses atop your head. “At least let me bake you a cake, then, wouldn’t be neighborly to let you have a boring birthday.”

“You’d bake a cake for ‘lil old me, sweetheart?” His tattooed hand splayed over his heart, sweaty and shining in the blaring afternoon sun.

You giggled. You could get used to Mr. 1405 calling you ‘sweetheart’.

“Sure thing, just tell me what name to write in between ‘happy birthday’ and ‘forever young’.”

A flash of dazzling white teeth replied, “Eddie. Eddie Munson.”

That was when you rose a step above the housewives of Forest Hills- to them, he was still Mr. 1405, but to you? He was Eddie Munson.

You entertained yourselves with little conversations here and there whenever Eddie worked out on his lawn. You, always in a swimsuit and him, never wearing a shirt. You would ask him about his tattoos- what they symbolized, which ones he’d drawn himself before they were replicated on his flesh. He would ask you about what you were reading- it was always changing. Sometimes nonfiction, sometimes romance, fantasy, lit fic… he seemed impressed by your insatiable reading habits.

One day, however, he’d been particularly interested in a book whose cover bore a bare-chested gentleman and particularly busty woman in a corset.

“What’s today’s read, girl scout?” Eddie had greeted you with a nod toward the obviously risque reading material and a knowing smirk as he let his arms dangle over the black bars of your fence.

You looked up, glowing from the sweat that’s gathered on your dewy summer skin and smiled tightly. “Oh, just a period romance. Ball gowns, forbidden love, the scandalous touching of hands without gloves on- things like that.”

“From the looks of that cover, I don’t think their hands are the only naked body parts touching in that story.”

You laughed, glancing at the cover as Eddie waggled his eyebrows. “You’re probably right, but who knows? I’m only on the second chapter. I’ll keep you posted though.” you punctuated that last part with a wink.

“Oh please do, princess,” Eddie said with a wolfish grin. “I love a good smutty romance novel.”

You gawked. “No way you read this shit, you’re bluffing.”

Eddie raised a hand as if swearing on a bible. “Scout’s honor.” he said, mimicking your swear from the day you’d met.

You shook your head, smiling ear to ear. “You must be the first man I’ve met who openly admits to reading smut, and I respect that.”

Eddie shrugged. “Easiest way to know what women want- they’re literally writing me an instruction manual. It’d be stupid not to read them.”

You bit your bottom lip before you could stop yourself, making a mental note of that little tidbit of information. “And you enjoy them?”

“It’s porn, sweetheart,” he said, gazing at you incredulously. “Who wouldn’t enjoy it?”

“It’s porn with a plot.”

“I’m a sucker for a good plot, especially if the plot involves sucking.”

You barked out a laugh. “And one could also argue that it’s more emotional porn than physical.”

“Are you insinuating that I don’t have a heart? Because I’ve got one, princess, and it bleeds, it yearns-”

Eddie pantomimed grasping at his own heart in his chest, putting on a fucking one-man show as he hung onto the fence for dear life as if his heart were truly bleeding out. You laughed- that was something that seemed to happen more when Eddie was around- you laughed more than usual, so much that you found your cheeks aching whenever he walked away.

This time, something else ached as you watched him return to his lawn. As you continued to read, you were acutely aware of the heat between your thighs, the wetness that accumulated as you pictured corseted girls and muscled viscounts making eyes at each other across a sea of dancing courtiers. You imagined yourself, cornered in a rich rose garden bathed in moonlight, struggling to stifle your moans as a man in a tailcoat left a mark on your neck. You felt his hand hiking up your layers of petticoats until it reached your thigh, the only thing separating skin from skin being the white fabric of his gloves. You pictured his eyes, brown and bottomless as he moaned at the feeling of your hands tangled and tugging on his soft brown curls-

Uh oh.

You took a deep breath, bookmarked your page, and slipped into the cold water of the pool. You sincerely hoped that Eddie hadn’t been serious about an update on the smut in your novel; you didn’t exactly want to let slip that at some point, you’d stopped picturing the viscount and started picturing him.

But would he mind? Would he be upset to know that you’d pictured his hands on you, his lips on your pulse, your fingers in his hair?

You weren’t sure he would.

In fact, you had a feeling he might actually picture you in situations that weren’t too different. After all, you weren’t blind- you’d noticed the way his eyes would flit down from your face when the two of you were talking. He didn’t seem to put much effort into hiding his once-overs, his raking gaze that seemed more than pleased by the way your swimsuits hugged your curves, pulled your cleavage together, cut higher on your hip than your shorts ever would. Whenever you pulled yourself up from lying on your stomach, you’d seen how his eyes followed your ass hungrily as it left his line of sight.

That was the moment that you realized- Eddie Munson, more than likely, wanted to fuck you.

And you definitely wanted to fuck him.

So the next time he came over to see you after mowing his lawn, you offered him a beer.

“I’m already halfway through mine,” you said, leaning back to give him a full view of the way the sweat on your breasts shone in the hot sun. “don’t make me day drink alone.”

A salacious grin curled on his plush pink lips. “I could be tempted,” Eddie peered at the cooler beside you. “What are you drinking, sweetheart?”

You opened the cooler so that he could see the six pack of light lagers in shiny green bottles. Eddie wrinkled his nose distastefully. “Alright, young padawan,” he sighed, unlatching the gate to your backyard. “It’s time you learned your first lesson from Master Munson.” He didn’t enter the backyard, simply opened the gate and waited for you to join him outside your parents’ property.

You quirked an eyebrow; this was new territory. That wrought iron fence had always served as a sort of barrier between the two of you, never occupying the same space and keeping each other at arm’s length- flirty banter, but with boundaries.

Now, you smiled shrewdly as you slipped on your flip flops and crossed the threshold into Eddie’s space, following him across the narrow street to his driveway.

“Oh so I’m your student now, Master?” you quipped, launching him into a dark chuckle and a shake of his curls.

“Christ,” he cursed under his breath low enough that he probably thought you hadn’t heard- but you did. “Well, your college friends are obviously shitty teachers if your drink of choice is a basic ass bottle you can grab at the goddamn gas station.”

You scoffed, “Oh, what- are you trying to say you’re one of those pretentious beer snobs who only drinks micro-brewed IPA’s named after bad puns?”

Eddie laughed out loud, smiling ear to ear at you over his shoulder. “Oh that’s exactly what I am, princess!” The harsh sunlight finally relented as the two of you crossed into Eddie’s garage, and you followed him in a beeline to the old refrigerator in the corner opposite from his impressive-looking toolbench.

You nearly moaned with relief when the cool air from the fridge hit you as Eddie opened the door and grabbed a couple of unmarked silver cans from the middle shelf. You eyed them cautiously, which Eddie saw and snorted at when he saw your expression. “Not poisoning you, sweetheart, no need to worry.” He opened a door beside the fridge that you guessed- judging by what you could see past the doorway- led to his kitchen. “A friend of mine is a home-brewer, he gives these to me and the guys for free. Way better than any cookie-cutter shit you’ll find at a college party.” He held the door open for you, nodding his head toward the doorway. “You coming inside? It’s hot as hell out here.”

You hadn’t expected him to invite you into his home; it occurred to you suddenly that you were still only wearing your swimsuit. Smiling shyly, you stepped through the doorway, the chill of the air conditioning rolling goosebumps over your damp skin. Eddie stepped into the kitchen and immediately began opening the cans, handing one to you.

You eyed the can cautiously, raising an eyebrow at him. “Do I want to know what I’m about to drink?’

He smiled mischievously, inclining his head toward you as he held his can aloft. “First lesson, padawan- trust your master.” He tilted the can in your direction, to which you sighed and tapped your can to his.

Your eyes widened in surprise when the cold, bubbly liquid hit your lips. It wasn’t anything like you were expecting- instead of the tepid wheaty taste that you were used to. At first the drink was tart, but after a second it faded into a fruity dryness that reminded you of white wine. Its flavor was so light that you couldn’t even tell you were drinking beer.

“This is beer?”

Eddie chuckled. “Technically it’s a sour, but yes- it’s a type of beer. Dustin said it was a champagne sour, so if you like wine then hopefully this’d be up your alley.”

You smiled as you took your second sip. “I do like wine.” you murmured, testing the flavors on your tongue. “Like this, too. Your friend ever think about selling what he brews?”

“Dustin?” Eddie asked, laughing as if the question were something funny. “Oh I have no doubt he’ll try to sell it one day, but he’s not going to even think about it until he knows he’s perfected his recipe.”

As you took another sip of the cold drink, you felt another wave of goosebumps run through you. Coincidentally, this was the moment that Eddie fell perfectly silent. You peered over your can- his eyes were fixed on your chest. You became acutely aware that the goosebumps had resulted in your nipples growing so hard, you thought if something-anything- were to accidentally brush against them, you might moan from the sensitivity.

Stifling a smirk, you shivered and hugged your upper arms. “Brrrrr it’s cold in here!” you said coyly, “I guess my body temperature got a little too used to the heat.”

Eddie’s chest heaved slightly at the way your tits bounced and squeezed together when you shivered. He cleared his throat, looking down at the beer can in his hand for a moment. “I’ve got a hot tub, you know,” He spoke up, peering at you to gauge your reaction. “Downstairs. You’re welcome to it.”

You took another sip. “Only if you join me.”

His dark eyes snapped up to yours, lips curling up at one corner. “Yes ma’am.” he said, his voice lowered an octave and a bit huskier than before. You held his eye contact, mirroring his lopsided grin with a charged, heavy-lidded gaze.

Eddie led you to a staircase down the hall and said he’d be right back with a towel for you after he changed into swim trunks.

“Aw, no speedo?” you smirked. Eddie appeared unphased. “Mental note,” he murmured to himself, “the princess is eager to see my thighs.”

You giggled, “There might be more tattoos there I haven’t seen yet,” you countered, “How am I supposed to keep figuring you out if I don’t know the meaning of each and every one?”

Eddie placed his forearm above your head on the wall, leaning into it until he was close enough for you to feel his breath on your hairline. “You know, you seem to spend a lot of time staring at my body, kid-” You bristled at his blatant omission of the nicknames you liked. “-I’m starting to feel objectified.”

You forced the smile from your face, looking up at him defiantly. “I could say the same thing about you, Mr. Munson,” you replied, “-and I’m not a ‘kid’.”

His position didn’t change as his eyes raked over your nearly naked body, drifting from your eyes to your lips and catching on your cleavage. “Don’t I know it, sweetheart.” he whispered, before pushing off the wall. “Hot tub’s already heated, just push off the cover and hit the green button. I’ll be down in a sec.”

And then he was walking down the hall to what you could only assume was his bedroom. For a moment, you thought about following him… but if you were honest with yourself, you were actually pretty curious about this hot tub. So down the stairs you went, carrying a silver can of sour in each hand.

Eddie’s basement was cozy, but he had utilized the space to its full potential. The majority had been filled with workout equipment to create a home gym, the walls lined with floor to ceiling mirrors that created the illusion of a larger space than it actually was. Sitting on stylish wooden slats was the hot tub, topped with a brown leather cover. To the right of the hot tub was a door with a small window that was just at your eye level. Upon closer inspection… yep, that was a sauna. Eddie had a sauna.

Shaking your head in disbelief, you made a mental note to ask Eddie what he did for a living- as far as you could tell, he was the only one who lived here. How did a single guy in his forties have so much money to burn?

Placing yours and Eddie’s drinks down on a nearby surface, you removed the cover from the hot tub and pressed the green button as Eddie had instructed, and settled into the hot, bubbling water. God, it was relaxing. Just then, you heard footsteps descending the stairs.

Eddie appeared, his hair let down from his normal messy bun so that it fell in dark chocolate curls that cascaded over his shoulders. His swim trunks, simple and black with little white skulls lining the cuffs above his knees, hugged his thighs in a way that made you salivate. Tattoos you'd become all too familiar with danced across his skin, and you suddenly felt the need to taste them.

Eddie smirked when he saw you getting an eyeful without even trying to hide it. “How’s the water?”

You hummed, relaxing further into jets against your back. “Sooooooo nice.” You sighed.

Eddie climbed into the hot tub to join you, making you squeal as he practically fell into the water, splashing you as he submerged his head just enough to wet his hair and shake it out like a golden retriever.

You giggled, doing your best to ensure that your hair wasn’t wet enough to make you look like a wet rat. “I’m starting to think you’re a teenage boy trapped in the body of a middle-aged man.”

Eddie narrowed his eyes at you, tattooed arms stretching out over the edges of the tub as he relaxed into the seat across from you. “Hey now,” he said, voice laced with warning. “Careful with the term middle-aged there, kiddo.”

You matched his gaze, challenging. “Kiddo?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Eddie’s gaze was heavy, cocky as he looked down his nose at you. “Practically a baby.”

You grinned. “That one, I don’t mind.”

Eddie’s smile grew in tandem. “Oh, she likes to be ‘baby’, but not ‘kiddo’, huh?”

You leaned back into the water, looking up at the ceiling with a smug smile on your lips. “That’s right, grandpa.”

Suddenly, you felt a tug on your ankle and you were underwater. You emerged, spitting chlorine out of your mouth, struggling to force it from your nose as Eddie’s cackling rang in your ears. You gasped, sputtering in shock as you tried to catch your breath.

“You are a child!” you squealed as he tugged your ankle again- you hadn’t noticed his hold still grasping tightly- not forceful enough to bring you back under the surface but enough to remind you that he could.

“So not a grandpa, then?” Eddie teased, stroking the curve of your ankle with his thumb.

You gritted your teeth together, strategizing. “No, that would be too kind. You’ve got the maturity of a teenager. Luckily for me-”

Using Eddie’s grip on your ankle as leverage, you forcefully pulled yourself forward by your leg and launched yourself right into his lap, bending your knees so that a second later, you were straddling him.

You watched triumphantly as Eddie’s eyes widened, looking up at you with breath that hitched in his throat as you finished your sentence.

“-I know how boys like you think.”

The humor between the two of you dissipated in that instant, Eddie’s eyes blown wide and dark as he watched the way the water in your hair dripped down your neck and between your breasts, which were now inches from his face. If he leaned forward, he could catch that bead of water with his tongue. If he reached up, he could hold your tits in his hands, test their weight. Press them up, squish them together, squeeze…

You felt him growing hard beneath you, and smirked triumphantly. “See?” You said smugly, grinding against him teasingly. “Right on schedule.”

Eddie chuckled, his breathing strained as he shook his head exasperatedly. “Got me all figured out, do you princess?”

You nodded, finding your rhythm as you continued to grind against his hardening cock through his swim trunks. “I think I’m starting to.”

You shivered despite the warmth as Eddie trailed his hand from your ankle up your leg, your hip, your waist…finally resting at the apex of your sternum to splay across your neck. You hadn’t been expecting that- you faltered, breath hitching as he tested out a gentle squeeze and hummed to himself.

“Mmmmm…” He looked you over with passive attention, taking account of the way your eyes widened and your pulse quickened under his thumb. “...you know, I’m starting to figure you out too.” His other hand cupped your hip, pulling you to sit directly on his erection and holding you in place so you couldn’t grind. “You’re used to getting away with shit you know you shouldn’t do, isn’t that right, baby?” You sighed softly in response, pinned into place by his lust-blown eyes. You balanced on a precipice- on one side, obedience, which you knew would satisfy him. On the other, eventual obedience with a little bit more fight; more of a gamble, but you were willing to bet that he would enjoy that best.

“You really thought you could eye-fuck me every damn afternoon,” Eddie said, his hand on your neck moving lower to fondle one of your breasts over your swimsuit. “-and there wouldn’t be consequences?”

You breathed heavily, chest rising and falling under his hand. “I mean…” you drawled, still smiling smugly despite his authoritative tone of voice. “...I was kinda hoping for consequences.” you brought both hands out of the water, gesturing vaguely to the room around you. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

A second passed before Eddie’s hands suddenly grabbed both of your wrists, forcing them behind your back. You gasped, cheeks hot from the water and the position you were in, straddling his lap with both shoulders shoved back to force your breasts front and center. He saw the look in your eyes and leaned forward, lips brushing the shell of your ear.

“I can get rough sometimes, baby.” he said, voice low and husky. “Tell me it’s too much at any point and I’ll stop, okay?” You nodded, a shy little mm-hm escaping your bitten lips. Eddie crossed your wrists over each other, holding them behind your back with one hand as his newly free one reached up to caress your cheek.

“Fucking Christ, you’re cute.” he mumbled. “Cute little baby, all alone in her parents’ big house all day, so bored she had to go and be a slut for the neighbor. That right, baby?”

Your eyes were wide and wet, mouth opened in a slight pout as you ground your freed hips on his hard cock once again, whimpering needily. You nodded your head up and down, eager to hear more filthy words tumble from his lips.

Eddie wasn’t satisfied with that. A hand came up to grasp your hair at the base of your neck, tugging on it firmly but not painfully to force your head to nod up and down emphatically. “Use your words, baby, say ‘yes, daddy, I was a slut.’”

You gasped, surprised. You’d never called anyone daddy besides your actual father, and you’d certainly never called anyone that in the bedroom- or a hot tub, for that matter. However, his brazen demand that you call him that while you straddled him like this sent rolling waves of pleasure straight to the apex of your thighs.

“Y-yes… daddy…” You struggled against your instinct to be embarrassed, arching your back against your restrained hands and looking down shyly at your cleavage. “...I was a slut.”

“Look at me.”

Your eyes flicked up to his, wide and obedient. He was smiling at you, beaming with pride and adoration. His hand slid from your hair to the back of your neck, pulling your face to his. “Good girl, baby.” he praised, “I’m gonna kiss you, is that okay?”

You nodded eagerly. “Yes, please!”

That earned you a chuckle. “So polite, baby girl, good job.”

Eddie’s lips felt like the most comforting thing that a person could feel on their skin. His kiss felt like fresh sheets still warm from the dryer. His tongue was like a strawberry that was perfectly ripe, sweet and wet and a rush of relief. He explored you, he learned you, his lips devoured all they could reach and whenever they couldn’t reach, his tongue took over to fill in the blanks.

As you whimpered and squirmed in his lap, Eddie cooed, “What’s the matter, baby, something wrong with your legs?”

You shook your head, moaning into his mouth. “I need something on my clit, Eddie.”

“Something? You’ll just take anything on that clit baby? Is that what you're saying?”

You panted, straining against his rock hard dick for some kind of friction. He was right, you would take anything. “Yes, please touch me, Eddie.”

He made no move to do so, only looking at you pointedly with his eyebrows raised. When you realized your mistake, you corrected, “Please touch me, daddy.”

He smiled smugly, a cat watching a mouse. “Good girl,” he praised, “but I’m not sure you’ve earned that.”

Your face fell, eyes going wide as your lips formed a full-on pout. “But-” you began to stutter, but Eddie wasn’t finished.

He let go of you, pushing you gently off you and guiding you under the water to one of the seats in the corner of the tub. The jets coming off it were strong, nearly too much on your back as you turned to sit, but Eddie stopped you before you could settle into the seat.

“Princess, I want you to keep your knees open and ride your pussy on that jet stream until you cum.”

Your jaw dropped open. Whipping your chin over your shoulder to look at him in his seat opposite you, you stared and waited for him to specify or maybe apologize for misspeaking- there’s no way you heard him right. But then he repeated himself, and you realized that yes, you had.

“Press your pussy up against that jet stream under the water, and make yourself cum. Don’t use your hands. Don’t rush. I want you to fall apart in my hot tub, and I’m going to stroke my dick while I watch you do it. That okay, sweetheart?”

You were learning a lot of new information about your neighbor today.

You smiled devilishly over your shoulder at him, taking in the sight of him lounging in the opposite corner of the tub as he took in the sight of you. “You’re a kinky motherfucker, aren’t you?”

Eddie reached across the tub and wound an arm around your waist, pulling you in for a quick but heated kiss. “Yeah, I am.” he murmured into your lips before pushing you back toward the jets. “Now make yourself cum, I want you tight.”

He laughed at the pathetic little whimper that you let slip involuntarily as you situated yourself against the jet stream. You balanced your weight on your knees, spreading your legs enough to open your pussy further inside your swimsuit. Once the pulsing stream of water made contact with your clit, your automatic impulse was to flinch away; the stream was strong, almost too strong. However, with a little shifting and repositioning, you eventually found an angle that pulled a moan from your mouth that sounded almost pornographic.

“That’s it, baby girl,” you heard Eddie’s rough voice behind you, and you couldn’t help but sneak a peak over your shoulder at him. Eddie sat with legs spread open and one arm slung over the lip of the tub, his other hand palming the erection you knew was only growing harder over his swim trunks. This told you he was a patient man, a man who liked to be teased a little before taking what he wanted. A man who liked to play with his food before he ate it.

You could play, too.

You pulled your eyebrows together, pouting your lips the way you’d seen him react to earlier. “Am I doing it right for you, daddy?” You moved your hips up and down against the jet, putting on a little show for him.

Eddie raised a brow, amused. “I don’t think I can answer that question for you, sweetheart.” he said, sighing heavily with pleasure as he tilted his head this way and that to take you in from every angle. “Don’t worry about me, baby, just make yourself feel good.”

You smiled shyly, nodding in response and turning your attention back to the jets. You maneuvered your hips against them, grinding on the strong jetstream as it hit your clit at angles that you didn’t even know existed. You lost yourself in the sensation, letting your eyes fall closed and humming little sounds to yourself as your heart rate picked up, that familiar pleasure bubbling up in your lower belly as your movements grew faster and more desperate.

Eager to see if Eddie was enjoying himself as much as you were, you glanced over your shoulder to look at him. What you saw was breathtaking- Eddie, his wet curls clinging to his dewy skin, muscles flexing under his tattoos as he fisted his cock underwater. You couldn’t see it clearly due to the raging bubbles, but the flesh-colored underwater blur was enough for you to know exactly what he was doing. You had known he would jack off to you- he’d outright told you he planned to- but seeing it was enough to turn you on so much that it became the thing that pushed you over the edge.

“Daddy, I’m cumming!”

You moaned, mouth hanging open as you rode out your orgasm against the harsh stream of the jets, overwhelmed and overstimulated by the physical feeling and the intense eye contact that you held with Eddie the entire time as your body gyrated and spasmed. He watched you with hungry eyes, lapping up the scene in its entirety and committing every second to memory.

“Good girl, good fucking girl, keep fucking that jet, baby.”

You whimpered, hips jerking away from the stream as it hit your clit at an angle that was a little too intense, and your limp, still-needy body floated over to Eddie. He chuckled, still stroking his cock lightly in the warm water. “Aw, I’m sorry baby, was that too much?”

You shook your head, still eager for him- he’d barely even touched you, and yet you were so desperate for this man. “No, I can take more.”

His eyes had a darkness to them that made your breath hitch. “How much can you take, sweetheart?”

You moved to straddle your knees on either side of one of his thighs, not close enough to grind against his cock, but certainly in a perfect position to rub your pussy along his leg, teasing him. “I’ll take whatever you wanna give me, daddy.”

A low groan sounded from deep in Eddie’s chest. “You might regret saying that one, babe.”

You couldn’t resist matching his warning with a challenge. “Bring it on.” you said sweetly, and it incited a little chuckle in him. He reached back and pressed a button on the hot tub, causing all of the bubbles to stop.

“Get out, dry off.” he said, nodding to the neatly folded towels he’d placed beside the hot tub. “You look like you could use a shower.”

You stayed put, confused. “You… but…”

He cut you off, cupping his wet hands against your face. You could feel the pads of his fingers on your cheeks, wrinkled from prolonged time under the water’s surface. “Sorry, sweetheart, I forgot you don’t like following instructions unless you know you’re getting something out of it.” You scoffed at his condescending tone, but all he did was smile. “What I meant to say was- get out. Dry off. I’m going to fuck you in my shower. Mmkay?”

Your eyes widened, excited by his words and elated by a strange submissive, post-orgasmic euphoria. “Okay.” you replied, but when you saw his testy look in response you quickly amended, “Okay daddy.”

“Good girl.”

The two of you dried off before heading back upstairs. Eddie let you down the hall to his bedroom, which you were sure was filled with so many interesting mementos on the walls that you were sure it would take you hours to study all of it. The first thing to catch your eye was the golden record, framed and mounted beside his dresser. When Eddie saw you looking at it, he supplied an answer without waiting for you to ask.

“Ever heard of a band called Corroded Coffin?”

You searched your brain but came up empty. “No, I don’t think I have.”

Eddie chuckled to himself, like you’d just participated in a joke you weren’t in on. “Most people haven’t. But I bet you’ve heard the song Upside Down on the radio, yeah?” He hummed a couple bars of the chorus, which you recognized instantly.

“Oh yeah! I love that song!”

Eddie grinned. “‘Preciate it, babe.”

Shocked, you glanced up at the record and back to him. “Wait, you wrote that song?”

He shrugged as if to brush it off, but you could tell he was proud. “It was a group effort, my band and I wrote and recorded it together. After that, though, when the offers for record deals and tours and shit started pouring in, it became clear to most of the band members that this wasn’t what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives- band broke up on good terms, we just had some differences when it came to future plans.” He reached up and stroked the frame affectionately with his thumb. “But one-hit-wonder money was still enough to get my name out there, make some smart investments. I’m a music producer now.”

So that’s how he made all this money. The big empty house made sense now. “That’s pretty cool, actually.” you said, smiling at Eddie. You relished the sensation of his hands as they slid around your waist.

“You wanna see something even cooler?”

Before you could answer, Eddie was scooping you up into his arms and tossing you over his shoulder. You squealed, laughing as his palm hit your ass cheek with a loud smack! He carried you into his bathroom, placing you on his vanity counter before kissing the laughing smile right off your face. You felt his hands as they worked your bathing suit off you, freeing your breasts from the confines of the damp fabric. Eddie wasted no time, pulling one of your tits into his hand and encircling your nipple with his mouth, sucking sensually. You moaned, hands fisting into his hair. He only left your skin to turn around and turn on the shower, giving the water a chance to heat up.

Once the bathroom had sufficiently filled with steam, Eddie picked you up from the counter, pulling your legs around his waist and your arms around his neck. You kissed him greedily, wetly, and hungrily as he walked the two of you into his spacious tiled shower, which was larger than your dorm room closet back at school.

You relaxed your legs around him in a silent ask for Eddie to put you down, which he obliged. The moment your feet hit the wet tiled floor, you began to sink to your knees until…

You snorted.

“Why do you still have your swim trunks on?”

Eddie had taken the time to take off your bathing suit, but you hadn’t even realized that even after carrying you into the shower, he hadn’t even taken a second to undress himself.

He looked down, noticing this for the first time, same as you. “I, uh… I don’t know. I was-” he flashed you a smirk that was equal parts embarrassed and sexy. “-preoccupied, I guess.”

You couldn’t help but laugh as you knelt before him, now eye-level with the drawstring of his swim trunks. “Well let me fix that, then.” you said softly, working your delicate fingers into the waistband and pulling his trunks down until they hit the floor.

God. He was a sight to behold. And you were right, he did have thigh tattoos. They were large, twisting images of hellish creatures, undoubtedly older but still in good shape since- judging by the paleness of the skin they decorated- they probably never saw the light of day.

You reached up, lightly tracing them as you turned your gaze to his cock. It was at full mast, eager and waiting for your mouth to encircle it and, hopefully, make Eddie moan your name.

Which he did.

The way your lips covered the head of his cock, the way your tongue generously licked the shaft under, over, around, the way your hands were warm and welcoming as they lightly played with his balls- all of it made him moan, gasp, groan your name. He called you baby, called you princess, moaned and pulled your hair as he fucked your mouth, and you just about burst into flames when he shoved his cock so far down your throat that you swallowed on it accidentally, pulling a growled “Goddamnit, sweetheart, fuck-” from his lips.

When he pulled you off his dick by your hair, his eyes were humorless and hungry. He crouched down, leveling your eyes under the hot water from the showerhead.

“Are you on birth control, sweet girl?” he asked.

You nodded, “I have an IUD.”

He kissed your forehead firmly, one hand still fisted in your hair. “Good girl,” he murmured. “Now I can grab a condom, they’re right over there in the cabinet under my sink.” he continued, nodding vaguely in the sink’s direction. “But baby, I have been fantasizing about the way your pussy’s gonna feel for a long ass time and I hate to ask you this, and you’re allowed to say no, but-”

“Fuck me raw Eddie.” You wanted it. You needed it. You needed him. “I fantasize about it too. I think about it every day, I touch myself to you before going to sleep and wake up wishing your cock was the thing waking me up. When I’m lying by the pool reading those stupid smutty novels and some lord is fucking a lady in waiting up against a wall, I can’t focus on it! I can’t because I want it to be you and I want to feel your cock inside me, and I want it to be your cum that drips down my thighs and your lips on my-”

He cut you off there, splaying his free hand on your neck and kissing you until you were laid horizontally on the hot, wet floor. He climbed on top of you, and in a moment your mouth fell open at the sensation of his hard cock splitting you open from the inside. He didn’t spend a moment waiting for you to adjust to his size or murmuring praises into your ear- he knew you wanted all of him, and you knew he wanted all of you, and that was all you needed. You moaned, you practically screamed, and above all you clutched him for dear life.

“Dirty girl,” Eddie growled into your ear, thrusting into you deep and hard. “Dirty books, dirty mind-”

He leaned back so that his face was directly above yours and grabbed your cheeks, squeezing to force your mouth open. Your lips parted, and Eddie spat harshly into your mouth before shoving your mouth closed around it. His eyes were feral, wild with lust and dominance. “Swallow.” he commanded, you obeyed in an instant. He felt your throat moving against his hand and smiled deviously. “Dirty mouth, too.”

He picked up his pace, spearing into you at a pace so relentless that you couldn’t even keep track of the noises coming out of your mouth- an incoherent stream of sounds and swear that would have made a sailor blush. He matched your dirty noises with his own, all the while dicking you down into his shower floor as your brain went haywire at the lewd noises of skin slapping against skin that echoed through the bathroom.

“God, this pussy is so fucking tight,” Eddie groaned, “good girl, cumming so hard for daddy back there. You gonna cum on my cock this time?”

You moaned, “Need something on my clit, daddy.”

Eddie pecked your lips with his own, and the way it made your heart skip a beat was like a reward. “Good girl, always tell me what you need, okay?”

You nodded, smiling giddily from the sudden subby euphoria. “Okay, daddy.” You made a mental note that kissing Eddie Munson while his cock was inside you gave you your new favorite kind of high.

Eddie reached down and began drawing small, soft circles with his fingertip on your clit. The richly gentle sensation was decadent, pulling deeper, louder moans from you as Eddie continued to fuck you. “Oh I feel you getting tighter, baby girl, that feel good?”

“Yes!” you practically yelled it.

“Yes what?” He taunted.

“Yes daddy!” you cried, arching your back against the tile. He was fucking you ruthlessly, ravaging you mentally, and the way his dirty words melted into you made your brain go so hazy that you weren’t sure if your vision was clouding or if it was just the steam in the air.

Your release was growing closer, that heat in your core coiling tighter and tighter, ready to burst with pleasure. “I’m gonna cum soon, daddy.” you whined.

Eddie’s dick hit you in that perfect spot inside over and over, and you leaned your face against his hand as he cupped your cheek affectionately. “Yeah? You gonna make a mess all over daddy’s dick?” You pouted, nodding ‘yes’ in response. Eddie smiled at the way you could be so cute and so filthy at the same time- he fucking loved it. “That’s probably gonna make me cum, sweetheart, you want that? That pussy’s gonna grip my cock so tight that it fills you with cum, huh?”

You were whimpering and pouting and letting the sluttiest little sobs fall from you now. “Yes, daddy, fill me with cum, please!”

“You want me to fill you with cum? Fuck all that cum inside you?”

“Yes!”

“Yes what, sweetheart, gotta tell me whose dick you’re cumming on-”

“Daddy!” you cried, “Daddy’s dick, I’m cumming on daddy’s dick!”

“Fuuuck, yes, cum on daddy’s dick you little slut-”

Eddie’s filthy words tumbled from his lips as your pussy pulsed around him, fluttering walls squeezing him tight from the aching pleasure that shot through you. His cum filled you, and the size of his load reflected just how long it had been since he’d cum into anything that wasn’t his own hand. When he finally pulled out, a stream of both your releases oozed out of your hole and onto the floor. Eddie stared at it, fascinated, and he silently used his finger to catch the milky liquid and push it back into your hole. You whimpered, overly sensitive and puffy, your pussy lips inflamed and screaming, but Eddie was gentle as he sheathed his finger completely inside you, ensuring that his seed stayed exactly where he’d put it in the first place.

He pulled you up to a sitting position, smiling gently. “Hi.” he whispered, placing a soft kiss on your temple.

“Hi.” you giggled, a giant smile stretching out across your face, blissed-out and more than satisfied.

Eddie stroked your wet hair out of your face, gazing down at you adoringly. “I’m sorry if that was a little… much,” he winced. “I may have gotten carried away, usually I would talk to you to see if that kind of stuff would be okay, but I was just so fired up-”

“Eddie,” you interrupted softly. “I loved it.”

He grinned, grateful and relieved. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Eddie pulled you against him, your body fitting itself nicely against his naked chest as water poured over the two of you from above while you sat holding each other on the floor of his shower. He sighed, completely and utterly content. “Yeah.”

***

The rest of the summer days in your parents’ neighborhood went like this:

Wake up imagining what you and Eddie would do today. Touch yourself when necessary.

Do whatever chores needed doing around the house, sometimes making batches of lemonade for Eddie when you knew he would be working on his lawn that day.

Lounge by your pool and read a book- this part hadn’t changed.

Spend the rest of the afternoon at Eddie’s. These afternoons usually consisted of activities like discussing the whatever book you were reading, drinking whatever strange new beer Dustin had come up with, and fucking each other’s brains out.

The next month, Eddie celebrated his birthday. He didn’t throw a rager (true to his word) but he did have a little get-together. To your surprise, he invited you.

You got to meet his friends, their kids, their dogs- and see the way Eddie smiled for hours without reprieve when they were around. This whole summer, you’d been figuring this man out bit by bit, but it wasn’t until that night that you truly felt like you knew him.

You baked him a cake, as promised. Three layers of funfetti sponge, vanilla frosting and decorated with oreo crumbs and rainbow letters that spelled out “Happy birthday, Eddie, forever young”.

He wasn’t this way with the rest of the neighbors. To them, he would always be Mr. 1405 Peach Tree Lane, but with these people? With his friends? He was Eddie Munson. Now, you were included in that group of people who were allowed to know him, and how wonderful he really was.

You felt so incredibly lucky that you were a part of that.

#eddie munson x reader #older!eddie munson #neighbor!eddie #eddie munson smut #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson #eddie stranger things #stranger things fic #modern au

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letraspal · 1 year ago

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My neighbor Remus. ☔️

#wolfstar #remus lupin #sirius black #moony #padfoot #the marauders #marauders #remus john lupin #sirius orion black #wolfstar fanart #studio ghibli #my neighbor totoro #fanart #artistis on tumblr #letraspal #illustration #atyd #wolfstar au #James potter

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heysweetheart-writes · 7 months ago

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Some sentences Sunday!

Hi!! Wrote some words for the neighbours!au that I hope you like! I think I'm gonna go back and polish this later (I'm still debating if I should keep the bit about stories as dialogue or have it as Henry's internal monologue as I originally wrote it) but in the mean time, here you go.

"I know it's not the open road, but…” Henry walks them to the edge of the roof, where they have a view of the city spreading out before them, David flopping down at his feet. “I don't know. I think it's lovely up here. The glow of the city below, it’s humming. If you listen to it close enough, it can tell you all kinds of stories." Henry closes his eyes for a moment, trying to listen: “Stories of lovers professing their devotion to each other through hushed moans, of children blanketed by the safety a good bedtime story provides. There are stories of lonely hearts feeling a kind of solace knowing they’re not alone in this city, that there are many like them.” When he opens his eyes again, Alex is looking at him, something behind his eyes Henry can't quite figure out. "Henry..." Alex whispers, but he doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he grabs his hand, leaning against him and pressing his temple to Henry's shoulder, looking out at the city with him. Henry lets out a soft hum and smiles sadly to himself, resting his own head on top of Alex’s wishing he could kiss his worries away. But at least he can give him this. A vantage point to a city that can be both kind and cruel, busy and empty, or deafeningly quiet among all the noise.

Tags under the cut!

Thank you so for your tags @kiwiana-writes @suseagull04 @junebugclaremontdiaz (oh hello!) @cha-melodius @cricketnationrise @wordsofhoneydew & @14carrotghoul lovely words, all of you!

And I'm tagging both people I want to see what they’re up to and people I’m hoping will see this snip: @read-and-write- @bigassbowlingballhead @theprinceandagcd @hgejfmw-hgejhsf @orchidscript

@pridepages @anincompletelist @myheartalivewrites @three-drink-amy @zwiazdziarka

@priincebutt @notspecialbabe @firenati0n @tailsbeth-writes @onward--upward

@getmehighonmagic @ninzied @nocoastposts @eusuntgratie @onthewaytosomewhere

@brokenpartsmightfit @itsmaybitheway @sparklepocalypse @magicandarchery usual, sorry if you posted and I missed it and if you don't want to be tagged, let me know! Open tag, tag me so I can see if you take it!

#rwrb #rwrb fic #sentences sunday #neighbors!au #my fic #red white and royal blue #red white & royal blue #firstprince #firstprince fic #firstprince fanfiction #alex claremont diaz #henry fox #henry fox mountchristen windsor

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rebelfell · 11 months ago

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writing about going to the gym instead of actually going still counts…right? 18+, MDNI 2k

eddie munson x fem!reader (implied plus-size)

The gym at Eddie’s new apartment complex wasn’t so bad.

It had just undergone a big renovation by the time he moved in, so it still smelled faintly of paint and some of the machines had that protective plastic film over the monitors. It was on the small side, but had enough room for a row of treadmills and ellipticals that faced a big window, looking out on the grassy knoll of the courtyard behind the leasing office.

Eddie never went on them, though. He was mostly there for the weights, following the regime Steve had put him on a couple months prior. It wasn’t as rigorous as the one his friend followed, but it was demanding enough that Eddie needed an occasional break, elbows resting on his knees as he tried to catch his breath and pushed sweaty tendrils of hair from his face.

His shirt was old and ratty with the cutoff sleeves and drooping armholes stretched far beyond their natural elasticity. Truthfully, it did make him look a little douchey. But he also kind of liked the way it showed off his arms, the edges of the tattoos on his ribcage, the tops of his obliques.

Especially now that he actually has obliques.

He’s not yet worked his way up to the full-blown gym-bro attire Steve wears when he’s posting his little thirst traps all over Instagram. The videos are the worst—him planking shirtless or flexing his biceps as he curls a weight or swinging weird giant ropes with his arms.

Eddie’s only filmed himself lifting a few times now. Partly because Steve keeps demanding he send him videos so he can “check his form” but also because…he just looks good, okay?

He never dreamed he’d be the type. Aside from a (very) brief skateboarding phase, his main source of exercise when he was growing up was running from local law enforcement.

Now here he was lifting three days a week, considering adding a fourth.

He was still slacking on cardio—the smoker’s lung capacity really hindered him there. But Steve had suggested they try boxing, and a free pass to hit Harrington certainly held some appeal…

Eddie found he actually kind of liked the gym now. It was quiet and peaceful. It gave him an hour or so to turn his brain off and focus on nothing but counting sets or reps. He felt good when he walked back to his place a little sweaty and sore, feeling like he’d done something.

And he liked it especially when you showed up.

He’d seen you a few times around already, mostly walking with your dog. Or dogs, rather. By his count there were a couple different ones.

There was a Corgi who would stomp his stubby little legs like he was mad at the concrete; and a border collie you liked to take to the dog park and toss a frisbee for him to catch; and an elderly chihuahua he often saw you lift into your arms and carry for the end of his walk when he grew tired and looked up at you sadly with those big, pleading eyes. You were powerless.

Spotting you out and about whenever Eddie was going to get his mail, or taking a walk to stretch his legs after sitting at his computer too long, catching a glimpse of you from his balcony when he sat out there in the morning or evening, had started to become the highlight of his day.

He still had yet to, you know, talk to you.

If he ever had the fortune of walking past while you were out, his words immediately failed. And he couldn’t even count now the number of times he’d walked past the dog park while you were there and wished desperately he had a dog just so he had an excuse to go in and talk to you.

He wondered, regretfully, if you could tell he was a cat guy just seeing the smattering of light hairs all his black clothes attracted like a magnet.

But now you were here. Physically present in the same room as him. Close enough for him to reach out and wrap his hands around you. Looking so fucking delectable in your workout clothes.

Your shape was mostly concealed by a baggy hoodie that just barely covered the roundness of your ass and skimmed the tops of your thick thighs—both of which were only accentuated by the tightness of your black Lycra shorts.

He might have dredged up the nerve to finally say something—even a meekly muttered “hi” would have been an improvement on the nothing he’d been slinging. But your headphones were resting snugly over your ears and he generally took that as a firm sign not to bother people.

They were nice ones, he noted. Not a pair of the obscenely expensive Apple ones Steve liked to wax poetically about, but you’d probably sunk a decent amount into them for the sound quality.

Or maybe they were a gift from your boyfriend, Eddie thought bitterly.

You smiled at him as you passed, giving a little wave that almost made him drop the weight in his hand. Honestly, a broken toe would have been worth it. He tries not to ogle you, honest he does. But he can see you in the mirror as you step up onto the treadmill directly behind him, despite every single one of them being free. All he has to do is tip his head slightly to the side and his view is pristine. He won’t stare, though.

He won’t, he won’t, he won’t.

At least not anymore…

He did his best to concentrate on his workout as you got yourself situated. Absently, he wondered if you were here because you thought you needed to be, and he really hoped that wasn’t the case. Because from where he was sitting, there wasn’t a goddamn thing on your body that needed any improvement.

You don’t seem to be taking it too seriously, though. Starting out at a slow walk, flicking through your phone to choose your music as you amble along. Eventually you must settle on something and set it down before you start to hike up the incline on your machine.

He figures out pretty quickly you're doing one of those “strut” workouts he’s seen floating around, where you increase your speed with the switch of each song.

Except you’re doing more than strutting—you’re performing.

It’s subtle at first. You start out simply walking at a steady pace, but then he catches a couple motions of your arms, a few flips of your head that send your hair flying. In the reflection of your face on the window he can see you’re lip syncing along to the song, your closed fist becoming a microphone for what looks like a long belt.

He bites back his own smile as he watches you, his eyes drawn to your shape in the mirror over and over. It makes him forget what rep he’s on every time, his workout little more than a charade at this point.

As your pace increases, your breathing gets harder and sweat starts to slicken your brow. You pause just long enough to pull off your sweatshirt and drape it over the guard rail. It drags up the bottom of your shirt, revealing a flash of your bare back that sends Eddie reeling.

He can’t help but imagine himself flush behind you, kissing down the delicate curve of your spine, gripping desperately at the meat of your hips and ass, molding them with his hands as he thrusts with abandon and the fronts of his thighs slap wet against the backs of yours. He would beg you to let him go down on you just like this—breathing in the smell of your musk and sweat, tugging down those shorts to bury his face between your thighs until they were trembling like his did on leg day, brushing off your complaints about being too gross or dirty.

He’d show you what dirty really was.

Eddie jolts as the dumbbell he’s holding slips from his clammy palm and he just barely moves his foot in time. It hits the ground with a dull thud, but if you notice you don’t give any indication.

Ears buzzing now, shame radiating at the back of his neck, he set the weight back on the rack and dropped to the floor, twisting into something resembling a yoga pose he saw Nancy post once. The temptation to get on the treadmill next to you is so strong, but he’s afraid it might make you too self-conscious to keep going with your little show.

Plus, he’d probably end up tripping over his own feet and face planting on the machine. Kinda tough to put the moves on a girl when you’ve got a smashed face that’s bleeding like a faucet.

Instead, he drags out his stretching, hoping he can time it right so it won’t seem too weird if he leaves the same time you do. He’s already stayed longer than he normally does, but the promise of finally getting to talk to you is too enticing.

If he was a smarter man, he might have tried thinking of something to actually say if he got the chance, but that’s a whole other issue.

At last, the machine you’re on started to whirr as you lowered the incline to normal and slowed the speed of the belt until it stops completely. Eddie’s chest heaves as he watches, his pulse racing so fast it’s probably going to trigger the smartwatch on his wrist. You catch his eye in the mirror as you wipe down your machine with a disinfectant wipe and his head snaps forward.

Best of all, when you’re done, you tug down your headphones so they rest around your neck.

This is it, he thinks, his heart pounding harder than it ever had during a workout. Now or fucking never.

“So, uhh, how many dogs do you actually have?”

As pick-up lines go, it’s…not great. But it gets you to stop next to him on your way to the door, tilting your head and smiling as you do.

Fuck, you’re pretty.

“What was that?” you ask.

Eddie scrambled. He ran his hand across the nape of his neck, resisting the urge to smack himself in the back of his head. All of a sudden, his body is unbearably hot and he’s never been so embarrassed of his douchey shirt now that your eyes were scanning him up and down.

Wait…were you checking him out?

“I just…I’ve seen you walking them,” he chuckled. “I was wondering how many you have.”

“Oh, none,” you laughed. “It’s kind of a side gig. I walk them for some other people who live here.”

“None of them are yours then?”

“Nah,” you said, sheepishly looking down at the floor and then flicking your gaze back up to meet his, a smile curling across your lips. “I’ve got a cat, though.”

#eddie munson #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson blurb #eddie stranger things #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson smut #eddie munson meet cute #gym!eddie #neighbors!au

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yayee-pspsps · 4 months ago

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Neighbor au sketches

#vw neighbor au #vashwood #i miss them..... (i created this au)

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cubbihue · 2 months ago

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I NEED to know what CosWan think of Hazel’s parents/their lovely neighbors compared to Timmy’s bio fam

They see moments, sometimes. Scary moments where it hit them like deja vu. But, aside from their initial fears when meeting their neighbors, they find it hard to think of the Turners in the same breath as the Wells family.

Hazel’s parents are just so… different. Relieving even. There's a lot of "Never"s with Hazel's parents. Cosmo and Wanda can leave Hazel’s side for long periods of time, without worrying.

Not that they ever stop worrying. They still do. But its a first that their worries are unwarranted.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

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celestie0 · 3 months ago

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gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]

in holy matriphony ch3. domestic encounters

ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)

ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, n have been taking care of your sick mom ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.

ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, mild love triangle(s), gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s

ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!

ᰔ chapter. 3/x (probably 10)

ᰔ word count. 14.1k (i like this number)

a/n. hello hellooo my ihm bb's :'') so good to see you all again. so this is actually the first half of an original 26k word chapter 3 that i had written lmfaooo i genuinely entertained the idea of posting a 26k word chapter but like gat damn. idk i thought it would be too much. so there is this first part which is 14k and then the next chapter will be 12k! anywho, this chapter was fun to write, there's still a lot of set-up tho hahah. ihm has been really fun to write for me cuz it's kinda chaotic but chill at the same time lol :0 i really hope you enjoy!! see ya at the bottom!!

nav. ch1 :: ch2 :: ch3 :: ch4 :: ch5 (pending)

“Soooo…..ready to consummate the marriage?”

You turn fast on your heel, so fast that Gojo almost trips over his own Welcome mat at his doorstep in an attempt to not accidentally topple over you, which you’re sure by the sheer size he has on you would’ve killed you or at the very least paralyzed you from the neck down, so it’s a good thing his hands fly out of his pockets then brace himself on the wood paneling above the door.

“Wha–” you stutter, “what?!”

He stands up straight before leaning against the doorframe and crossing his arms, the sleeve fabric of his suit stretching across thick muscle but you refuse to give him the satisfaction of looking. “The marriage technically isn’t valid unless we consummate it.”

You roll your eyes and dig your finger into your heel to take it off and then do the same with your other, relishing in the freedom of your feet from the shackles of constrictive feminine clothing articles, although you’re a solid two and a half inches shorter again. “I would rather make love to one of those inflatable balloon salesmen at car dealerships that flail and flap around in the wind than let you touch me for the purpose of sex.”

“Fuck that’s harsh,” he laughs, like he’s genuinely impressed by the comeback this time, “so a dead bedroom then, huh?”

“Can’t be dead if it was never alive in the first place,” you mumble as you tread into his house and toss the documents envelope you had been holding onto the coffee table. You hear Gojo make his way across the hardwood floor behind you paired with the metal clanking of keys as he throws them into the paper mache bowl on the foyer table.

“By the way,” you hear him say, and you turn your torso slightly to side eye him only to see that he’s casually taking his suit jacket off with a flip of it backwards, “who was that guy in the courtroom that was glaring daggers into my soul?”

Your eyes widen briefly. And then you sigh. “My ex.”

He pulls the jacket off behind him by the sleeves and tosses it onto the loveseat. “Huhhh. You used to date a cop? You don’t seem like the type.”

“What?” you say as you face him fully. He’s loosening his tie now with a tug. “Why not?”

“You’re kinda…delinquent. Figured a cop would like a more ‘docile’ woman,” he says.

“You sound creepy as fuck,” you say, grimacing a little as you narrow your eyes at him.

He sighs before tossing his tie off to the side as well. “I don’t agree with it. I’m just getting into their headspace. Everyone knows how cops are. Y’know, controlling.”

“Choso is different,” you immediately spat back at him, before your head can even run the words through a filter, and you realize it came off as defensive. Your cheeks warm, because now it looks like you’re not over your ex. And you want to be. Why were you still protecting Choso’s dignity?

Gojo blinks at you, a little surprised before he swallows slowly and he holds his hands up in front of him in surrender. “Alright. I believe you.”

You turn away from him and worry your bottom lip between your teeth, feeling awkward before you scratch your elbow and then turn back to face him again. “Well. If you run into him around town,” you say, “can you try to make him feel emasculated and jealous? He did me dirty.”

Gojo runs a hand through his hair. “Uhhh. How?”

“I dunno,” you shrug, “brag about how great our sex life is or something.”

“But we have a sexless marriage.”

“Oh, yes, speaking of this sexless marriage,” you start, jutting your hip out to the side as you cross your arms sternly, “there are some ground rules that need to be set between you and I.” You point between the two of you.

“Ground rules?” he mimics after you as he undoes the top couple buttons of his white dress shirt, “like what?”

You hold a finger up. “Like no touching.” You hold another finger up. “Obviously, no sex.” You hold another finger up. “No sneaking into my room in the middle of the night.” You hold another finger up. “No peeping in on me while I’m showering.” You hold another finger up. “No ogling me around the hou–”

“These rules sound incredibly one-sided,” he snorts.

“Yeah, well, don’t break them, you creep.”

“And if I catch you ogling me around the house?” he asks.

You roll your eyes. “Such a thing will not happen.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he sarcastically affirms, and he approaches you which makes you flinch a little but you realize he’s just walking past you towards the living room.

“Y–” you stutter, “you heard me, right? Once I start living here, you have to adhere to these rules.”

He waves his hand in the air dismissively with his back facing you. “Yes ma’am.”

Your eye twitches slightly, and you storm towards him only to watch him slump down onto his couch, knees spread wide as he leans forward with a small grunt to grab the remote off the coffee table before settling back again. He lays an arm up and stretched across the backrest of the couch before he turns the TV on and scrolls through news channels.

You make your way in front of him, obstructing the view of the TV, and he leans off to the side to try to catch a glimpse at the screen but you reposition your body so that he still can’t see it. His eyes slowly move to you and he has an irritated look on his face.

“I’m tryna watch CNN,” he says.

“Punishment,” you say, “for breaking any of these rules will be severe.”

He raises an eyebrow, interested all of a sudden as he tosses the remote back onto the coffee table and leans forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “Oh? What’s the punishment?”

Honestly, you don’t know. You just want to threaten him to keep him in line. Forget the fact that he’s the one doing you the favor here with this marital arrangement, and yet you’re threatening him. But it has to be done. “You don’t want to find out,” you say, trying to sound as eerie as possible.

“Not knowing what it is makes me want to find out,” he tells you, his knee swaying side to side like a dog wagging its tail.

You briefly glance down, and for fucks sake why is all of his clothing so perfectly fit and stretched taut whenever he does anything? You try not to eye the shape of his thighs as the black fabric stretches while he’s seated.

You clench your fists at your side, worry your bottom lip under your front teeth, furrow your brow and blink rapidly from not being able to come up with something to say, and Gojo seems to read this as worry before he laughs a little.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’m not gonna break any of your silly rules, despite how tempting it might sound to me.”

“I don’t believe you,” you mutter as you walk around the couch towards the kitchen, feeling thirsty all of a sudden.

“Seriously. I won’t. You’re not my type,” he says from behind you on the couch, with a tone that tells you he’s trying to sound reassuring but it really just pisses you off even more, “I don’t really go after women with daddy issues.”

“Wha–” you gasp, offended, and you spin on your heel to glare at the back of his head. “Who the fuck said I have daddy issues?!?!”

“No one has to say it, I can feel it,” he says as he continues to clicks through channels.

You pick an avocado up out of the pile of fruits from the bowl at the center of the island, holding it over your shoulder to charge up as much kinetic energy as possible so you can chuck it at him hard enough to knock him unconscious, and it’s like he senses the malice radiating off of your body because he looks over his shoulder at you.

“What’s that in your hand?” he asks.

“A grenade,” you say, “that I’m gonna launch at you.”

“Oh, thank god,” he exhales in relief, “I almost thought it was an avocado for a second.”

You deadpan stare at him. “I don't find you funny.”

“I think I’m pretty funny,” he says mindlessly, like he’s just arguing with you for the sake of arguing.

“No. I have never once laughed at a single thing you’ve ever said. Only grimaced with disgust,” you say.

He sighs. “Look at us. We’ve barely been married for an hour and we’re already fighting.”

You abandon your empty glass on the counter, shuffling around the corner towards the front entrance of the house because you can feel the headache from your pure annoyance starting to creep up on you. You sense Gojo’s eyes on you from the couch as you shove your feet back into the uncomfortableness of your heels.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Back to my house,” you grumble, wobbling a little when you take a step towards the door and place your hand on the handle.

“When are you gonna move in?” he asks suddenly.

You freeze in your tracks at his question. You’ve never heard the question before, because you’ve never had the chance to live anywhere that wasn’t your childhood home next door. So the question is jarring at best, and threatens to make you cry a little at worst.

“Once I get my mom into hospice,” you say, quiet enough to where it’s possible he might not have even been able to hear it over the sound of presidential election updates. And then you make your way out of his house.

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

It’s a beautiful sunny spring morning, clouds trailing by across the sky offering momentary relief from the heat reaching the pavement, and you’ve got a good marching band walk going on as you stroll down the sidewalk of your neighborhood for your morning walk. Well, that phrase implies that you go on morning walks often. You really don’t, you very rarely have the time or energy. But today you decided it was time to turn your life around (your running shoes will see you same time next month).

You hear some commotion off at the right side of the street, and when you lift your head up a little to clear the obstructed view of your sun visor, you see a couple of cops standing on a lawn, chatting up your elderly women neighbors with their laughter bolstering in the air. One of the cops turns around, making eye contact with you, and— of fucking course, it’s Choso.

“Oh, fuck me,” you mutter under your breath and try to walk faster down the sidewalk in Korean ahjumma style.

“Hey! y/n! Wait!” you hear him call out and he jogs across the street to catch up with you.

You continue to military march down pavement. “What do you want, Choso? Why are you stalking me?”

He runs up in front of you to stop you in your tracks. You frown at him and cross your arms across your chest. “I’m not stalking you,” he says, “I got a call about a stray dog out here.”

“Oh. Wonderful. So glad to know our officers are keeping us safe from cute street dogs,” you say, tone dripping with sarcasm.

“The dog had rabies. It bit an old man. Had to put it down,” he deadpans.

“O-Oh,” you stutter, cheeks flushing, “well, then, leave? Your job here is done.”

“I just—” he starts, “I want to—” He sighs, looking flustered like he’s trying to gain some sort of courage. And you’re almost entirely certain he didn’t need to garner this much courage to face a rabid dog than he seems to be needing for you. “I, uh, I want to meet your husband.”

“W-What??” you exasperate.

“To say congrats,” he says, but through gritted teeth.

You roll your eyes. “Yeah fucking right. You just wanna abuse your po-po powers to arrest him then throw him into jail then kill him to leave me widowed so that I’ll get back together with you and make a fool out of myself all over again.”

“Your capacity for catastrophization never fails to amaze me,” he says.

You’re pretty sure your therapist said something similar to you last week, too.

“Ahhh!! y/n!!” you hear a familiar feminine voice call from down the street, and both you and Choso turn your heads toward the source of the sound.

Amaya, your neighbor, who is roughly thirty-weeks pregnant at the moment and therefore waddling down the street to get to you, is waving her arms in the air as her husband as well as another one of your neighbors follows after her. She finally reaches you and takes your hands into hers. “I haven’t seen you in forever!! How’s your mom doing?”

“She’s doing well…just getting by,” you say awkwardly, as Choso’s cop partner also approaches this little group that’s forming here, along with the elderly neighbors that he had been talking to.

“Doctors taking good care of her?” Amaya’s husband, Ren, asks you with a twisted expression on his face and arms tightly crossed over his chest like he was gonna beat the doctors up if they weren’t.

“Yes…” you say, “although, I think I’ll be transferring her care to Kaiser.” Oh. Fuck. You should’ve kept that to yourself. Big mouth.

You can feel Choso’s eyes on you as he watches this interaction between you and your neighbors.

“Oh! That’s interesting,” Amaya says, and as her hands soothe over yours, she feels the bump of the ring on your left hand. She glances down. “H-Huh??? Is this a wedding ring?!”

Choso crosses his arms and tucks his hands under his armpits in your periphery.

“Y…yeeeeesss…” you say awkwardly.

“You’ve finally married?” your elderly neighbors chirp out at the same time.

You shoot them a dirty look over the word finally. “Yes.” Please drop the subject, please drop the subject.

But Amaya has always been the gossipy nosy neighbor. “To who??”

Choso snaps his face to you, intently studying your body language. You take a deep breath.

“I-I didn’t tell you?? I married Satoru!!” you chirp, as if it was a normal thing.

“Ehhh?!” you hear multiple of your neighbors’ voices call out.

“You married Satoru??? But you hate him!!” Amaya blurts out, her voice loud and echoing down the street of the neighborhood.

“I—” you stammer, ducking your head a little to hide behind your visor, “um, oh, y’know…those feelings just…snuck up on me!”

“Awwww good for youuu,” Amaya coos, and one of your elderly neighbors comes up to you with a cheeky smile to then rubs your arm approvingly, “he’s sooooo handsome, you’re so lucky!!”

Ren lets out a hmph over his wife’s flattery of another man, and you roll your eyes, wanting to put Gojo in his place even in the face of just your neighbors, but then you remember that a loving wife wouldn’t say something like his personality makes him an ugly rat.

“But when did this happen?” Choso’s partner speaks up, his voice accusatory. Choso hits his partner’s chest vest with the back of his hand, as if to say cut it out.

You feel pissed off at that.

“Oh yeahhh, you and Choso only recently broke up!” Amaya says, pointing between the two of you.

You purse your lips together from the anxiety of this entire conversation. “Three weeks ago. Choso and I broke up three weeks ago,” you say, not even sure why you’re disclosing your personal matters to this group of congregated people, but the peer pressure was damning, and you’re pretty sure silence on this subject in front of your neighbors would only make Choso more suspicious, “and—” you had to get your story straight, “well…within those three weeks, Satoru and I just…got to know each other.”

“Eh?” Ren speaks up. “But he was out of town for two weeks. He only came back a week and a half ago.”

You blink at him.

“Ohhh yes, yes, that’s right, honey,” Amaya agrees with a slow nod in remembrance as she pats her husband's chest, “those chocolates he brought us were from London, right?”

Choso tilts his head at you, giving you a glare with the intent of having you crack under this pressure, because you’ve just been caught in a cold hard lie. More importantly, how the fuck did you not notice that Satoru had been gone for TWO WEEKS??? He was your next door neighbor. You’ve seriously been so damn out of it these days. Also, why the fuck didn’t he get you chocolates from London?!?!?! The fucking snake.

“A marriage within three weeks is a little odd, no?” Choso’s partner speaks up, but with less of a casual conversation tone and more of a I sense something illegal going on here tone.

“Alright, alright, alright,” Choso sighs, taking a step to stand in front of you. “Let’s all get on with our days. She doesn’t have to share any information she doesn’t want to.”

You blink in surprise at Choso’s words, of which all your neighbors acknowledge albeit slightly reluctantly as they wave goodbye to you and start dispersing back to their homes. Choso’s partner gets some notice through his radio, and he pulls it from the velcro of his chest to speak into it before heading back to their cop car with a slight jog. Once everyone is gone and it’s just you and Choso again, he turns around to face you. His arms are still crossed at his chest while he wears a very skeptical and almost reprimanding look on his face.

“What are you up to, y/n?” he immediately asks you, and you feel goosebumps tickle your skin even in the heat. “I really hope it’s not something fishy. Or illegal.”

You swallow hard. You know the U.S. federal codes in the law for marital & insurance fraud like the back of your hand, since you read through them hundreds of times before deciding if your arrangement with Gojo would be worth it. 8 U.S.C. 1033 and 18 U.S.C. 371 provide for a penalty of up to ten years in prison for insurance fraud. And under that statute, you can also be fined up to $250,000. The best case scenario is that you just have to divorce Gojo, and forfeit your chances of ever recovering from your crippling debt. And while it’s hard to prove marital fraud, Choso had reason for a personal vendetta against you, and he has the resources to launch an investigation.

“Why would I do something illegal??” you ask, as if to convince him that the possibility was absurd.

He takes a step closer to you, and your breathing picks up. “People do illegal things all the time,” he says, “for the thrill, out of curiosity,” another step closer, “the most common reason that I’ve seen?” He’s so close to you now that you catch the familiar scent of his skin. “Desperation.”

You catch a small gasp of air from his imposition in your personal space, and finally, your weak legs manage to take you a step back.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about here,” you say with a shaky voice.

He raises an eyebrow at you. And then he sighs. “Stay out of trouble.”

Your eye twitches at him, annoyance resurging but you have to bite your tongue for self preservation. Gojo’s words about cops liking more docile women ring in your ears for a brief moment, and you have to physically shake your head to get his voice out of it.

His partner yells for him from his car, something about a call they got for a robbery downtown, and Choso spares you a warning look before he turns on his heel and jogs back to the car. The sound of police sirens mimic the panic in your beating heart as you watch them speed off down the street and out of sight.

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

You pull into your neighborhood at the early hours of the morning, skin feeling dry and eyes feeling heavy with exhaustion as you yank your hospital badge clip off your scrub top to toss onto the passenger seat along with your stethoscope, releasing it from your neck like pulling a noose loose.

Before your shift last night, you had to take your mom to the hospital because she was have shortness of breath, and her oxygen saturation was low on her pulse oximeter. She’s stable now, it was just yet another flare up of her COPD, but given her other risk factors, the hospitalist admitted her to monitor her overnight and through to the evening today if all goes well. Which meant that you could have the house to yourself for once. It might sound selfish to say, because shouldn’t the more dominant feeling be I hope my mom will be okay, but the reality was that there’s only so much of that worry you can have at a time. It doesn’t mean you’re not thinking of her literally every second of the day. It just means you’re human.

The weirdest thing about working the night shift is seeing everyone else’s days start while yours is just ending. There’s a bit of satisfaction with it. Like imagining laughing at their faces ha ha! You have to go to work now at seven in the morning, meanwhile I get to sleep! as if working the night shift doesn’t lead to substantially higher rates of cardiovascular disease and other chronic illness, as well as an early death. So who really got the last laugh? Day shift workers. Literally.

It wasn’t something you did because you liked working the night shift. You do it because you get paid a 20% differential for it. And you need all the money you can get right now.

Your brain seems to be working more than usual if you’re able to think about all these things after a shift. Swiftly pulling into the driveway of your home, around the hull of Gojo’s obnoxious boat in the driveway, you get out of your car with your purse hanging from your shoulder and just before you shut the door, you see one of your elderly neighbors waving at you from across the street. You’re pretty sure her name is Margaret, but you’re awful with names. You do remember that she was in the posse of neighbors that were flocking you yesterday and asking you pushy questions about your marriage in the presence of Choso. And your body stiffens a little.

She tilts her head at you as you stand in your driveway, and you awkwardly glance over at Gojo’s house.

“Oops!” you chirp from across the street, “always forget to pull into the Hubby’s driveway instead! Silly me!!”

You grab your emergency overnight stay bag from the back of your car and hurry over to Gojo’s house, knocking on the door incessantly and ringing the bell so as to not arouse any more suspicion from your neighbors about why two married people aren’t living together. “Forgot my keys!! Hahahhahaha,” you exclaim while your pounding on the door intensifies. You’re sure you're just being paranoid, because why would sweet old lady Margaret (Janice? Patricia?) snitch on you? But you’ve been paranoid all your life. It’s one of your fatal flaws.

The door opens suddenly, right as you were about to pound harshly once again, and you stop the motion in time to not sock Gojo in the abdomen with your fist. He blinks down at you, his face a little puffy from sleep, his hair shooting out in all different directions, and he scratches at his chest through the thin cotton of his shirt, one he clearly threw on last minute before opening the door considering the fact that he put it on backwards. And inside-out.

“Huh? y/n?” he mumbles, his voice deep and kind of raspy with sleep, “what are you doing here?”

“Just let me in,” you hiss at him, glancing over your shoulder to your elderly neighbor's lawn for a second, and then duck under his arm that was holding the door open to get inside the house.

You turn around to see him shrug his shoulders and slowly close the door, clearly too tired to deal with the bullshit this early in the AM, and he turns around to face you before leaning back onto the surface. His eyes close, like he’s trying to preserve the sleepy feeling for when he gets back into bed.

“Can I help you?” he says. His head falls back with a small thump to rest on the door.

“I’m going to sleep here for the night. Er, for the day,” you say. “I will move in starting today.”

“Okay,” he easily agrees.

You blink at him. “Um. Show me to my room.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says, scratching the back of his neck as he heads for the stairs with the shuffle of his slippers across the hardwood floor. You note that he is very easily malleable and overall smooth brained when he’s sleepy. You try to ignore the fact that you find it kinda cute.

You follow him up the stairs and he leads you across the loft into a hallway studded with a couple of doors. He opens one of them for you, his head drifting a little like he’s about to fall back asleep. “Here you go,” he says while gesturing inside the bedroom and rubbing his eye with a weakly closed fist, “guest bedroom. Uh, there’s another one near the master too that’s a bit bigger, but this one has a lock on the door. So that I don’t sneak into your room in the middle of the night.”

“Thanks,” you accept and head inside. You set your emergency overnight stay bag on the bed and then turn around to face the door to find Gojo still standing in the frame. He has his hands pushed into the pockets of his pajama pants as he squints at you.

You feel…a little…nervous? Shy? Who the fuck were you to be shy in front of Gojo? You really don’t give a damn what he thinks about you, since a lion does not concern itself with the opinions of a sheep (you’ve been doing reruns of Game of Thrones this past week), but starting today, you’ll be in his territory, and this whole situation is so domestic that you feel vulnerable in front of him. Like the sheep somehow managed to splay the lion open this time, and now the real you is on display for him. You’re suddenly self conscious of the unruly state of your hair and the stains of IV fluid on your black scrubs and the fact that the allegedly flake-proof mascara you put on at the beginning of your shift has long since flaked all over your cheeks.

“Um. Can you leave?” you say in a small voice.

“Huh?” he responds, like he himself forgot that he was still standing there. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” He lets out a very long exhale. “Make yourself at home.” And then, still facing you, he walks off to the side veeeeeeery slowly until he’s out of sight.

You walk up to the doorframe and peak your head around to the left to see him still standing there.

“Satoru. Stop treating me like I’m some animal at the zoo. Leave.”

“It’s just so weird seeing you in my house like thi—”

You slam the door on him, your breathing finally slowing down again as your palms lay flat on painted white wood. You move your hand down to the handle, thumb and forefinger lingering on the lock as you look at it for a moment, but ultimately decide against locking it.

The room has a bathroom attached to it which is nice. The bed is a queen size, fitted with light blue and eggshell white sheets, tucked neatly spare for one corner of the bed where the duvet is flipped over. To the left of the bed is a nightstand and to the right is a dresser that looks very new. You take a glance at your reflection in the mirror sitting above it, and let out a small gasp at your less than flattering appearance.

A five minute shower does you wonders, and you pat yourself dry with a towel that matches the shower curtain. You find one of your floor-length vintage nightgowns, with the long frilly sleeves, after rustling through your overnight stay bag, along with a toothbrush and some moisturizer.

As you brush your teeth, you pace around the room. There’s a little staggered rack near the window that is lined with plants and the blinds are angled perfectly for sunlight to get through to them. You poke your finger to one of the plant’s soil and notice that it’s damp. Been watered recently. Gojo is a plant guy? He really doesn’t seem the type. Well, actually, he’s pretty vain about his avocado tree. But houseplants were a different story. A whole different trope of person.

After getting ready for bed, you slip into the sheets and lay stiff despite the comfortable mattress as you stare up at the ceiling with the duvet tucked under your arms. It’s bright in the room. Back home, you have blackout curtains, which help you sleep because it blocks out the morning light. Here, you don’t have that. You don’t have your melatonin either. But you do have the exhaustion in your veins, making you blink slowly and slowly until the water in your eyes feels as thick as oil. You’re so tired to the point that you can’t even sleep.

You force your eyes to close anyway. You’ll pretend you’re a queen in a palace, here in a foreign land she has recently conquered under her empire. A daydream that you find doesn’t really help you drift off to sleep. But counting sheep never fails you.

•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•

You awake in the afternoon with a headache that pounds at your head like the FBI is trying to infiltrate your own mind. And all you can hear now is the FBI OPEN UP!!! meme as you groan and rub at your temples with one hand while leaning over the bed to pet at the nightstand for your go-to bottle of Tylenol just to–

Pet around at nothing.

“Mm?” you mumble, opening your eyes cautiously before harsh light makes you close them again. But even behind the protection of your eyelids, you’re still very keen on the brightness that finds you in this room. Finally, you’re able to blink the sleepiness away and adjust to the light, and when the blur of your vision subsides, you realize that you’re in a bed that is most definitely not your own. And then you remember.

You spent your first night (well, technically morning and early afternoon), at Gojo’s house.

You swing your legs over the edge of the bed, balled up fist rubbing at your eyes ferociously as you sit groggy from the sleep that enveloped you so performatively after your shift last night. You can’t even remember coming to his house, which is concerning, since that could mean you forgot to do a lot of other things when coming home. Like changing your clothes, and scrubbing your make-up off. But it seems like habit and routine has saved you, since you glance down and see yourself in one of your nightgowns and your skin doesn’t feel dry.

A loud thud! noise from directly beneath you startles you, jolting some of the sleepiness out of you, and you finally feel inclined to head out the door.

You make it across the loft and to the top of the staircase so you can peer over the railing to the downstairs floor. But from the top, you can’t see anything except for the entry area and the family room, but you assume the sounds you hear are coming from the kitchen, because it sounds like the closing of a fridge and ceramic on marble paired with footsteps on hardwood. Lifting the hem of your nightgown up so you don’t trip over it, you creep down the stairs, diligent in avoiding the 2nd and 7th step (you’ve since learned that they creak a little), and make steady progress in getting to the bottom of the stairwell to then stealthily peak your head around the rail and peer into the kitchen. You only have a view of one side, the long counter strip with the stove and the fridge, but you freeze when you’re met with the sight of a man standing there shirtless pouring orange juice into a coffee mug.

You’re temporarily shocked, your fight of flight immediately kicking in as you clutch the imaginary pearls around your neck in fear…but then…you slowly…find yourself starting to stare. This man’s back is huge, massive really…with tense and defined muscles, expansive smooth lines with ridges that meet bone. His shoulders are broad, rounding down into strong arms that are split with veins. And your eyes trail the way his waist narrows down to his hips, of which gray sweatpants very loosely hang from. Honestly, if the door in the movie Titanic was as large as this man’s back, then maybe Rose AND Jack could have fit on it and survived. (a/n. basically picture this)

And in the middle of your drooling, you realize. That this man. Is. Gojo.

Which should be a relief to you, because if it wasn’t Gojo, and there was just some random man in the house, then you’d have to start looking for a weapon of sorts. But instead you just continue to watch him silently without coming out of your hiding. Shirtless in his own kitchen (a crime, really) as he pours OJ into a black mug (who the fuck drinks juice from a coffee mug). He suddenly turns around to face the island and a small gasp leaves your lips before you duck your head behind the rail to hide yourself from his line of sight, and when you realize you’re in the clear, you slowly peak your head back out.

The sight of his chest and torso nearly knocks you breathless, because why is his skin so smooth…and taut across the defined muscles of his abs, glistening with a sheen you can only guess is a salty layer of sweat. His fringe is damp, sticking to his forehead and the sides of his face, a droplet of sweat rolling down from his temple towards his chin but he uses his bare shoulder to wipe the sweat off before it can get that far. He brings the mug of OJ to his lips and tips it back with a swallow, the thick muscles of his neck rippling and rolling with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, a singular droplet of orange juice escaping from the corner of his lips, trailing down the vein on his neck and into the territory of his chest. Okay. You were being creepy as fuck right now. He can’t find out that you’re staring at him like this, you’d literally move to a different country if he ever caught you. And yet, for some reason, you just can’t stop either.

He pulls the mug from his mouth, letting out a large exhale since he literally just gulped it all down in one go. He places his palms flat on the table, slightly distant from one another, as he takes in the sight of his counter, while you take in the sight of the way his biceps bulge and the veins on his thick forearms tense. He looks like he’s contemplating something. And then he shrugs his shoulders slightly before grabbing the carton next to him and chugging straight from it, like whatever he poured himself wasn’t enough to quench the thirst for citrus juice he seems to have after–you can only assume–the workout he just had.

There’s a deep noise that’s muffled in his throat in the second before he pulls the carton away from his mouth and his eyes glance at something on the floor. You can’t see what it is, but you can see the marvelous shape of his ass through his sweatpants– I mean, you can see him furrow his brow a little and then he’s suddenly crouched down on the floor, ducked behind the island and out of sight, before he mutters something that you think sounds like damn fridge…

You stand on your tiptoes on the last step, trying to peer over the obstructing view of the counter, but you trip over the hem of your nightgown, losing balance and–

–fall straight onto the hardwood in front of you, on all fours.

“Ah,” you exclaim blandly, and in your periphery, see Gojo suddenly stand up straight from his crouched position.

“y/n?” he calls out from the kitchen, his tone surprised.

“Sorry!” you chirp as you feel embarrassment creeping up on your cheeks, “just, uh, fell down the stairs!”

“What?!?” he exclaims in a panic, and you forgot that most people would panic if someone said that to them. He rushes over to you and gets down on one of his knees to peer at your face, his hand shooting out to grab your upper arm with little delicacy out of concern, and his eyes roam all across you to assess for injuries. “Are you okay??”

“Just!” you chirp as you yank your arm out of his hold, “Peachy!” You’re not able to make eye contact with him as he remains kneeled next to you, but you can’t find yourself able to move either. So you just relish in the ridiculous feeling of being on all fours in your vintage grandma nightgown in front of your shirtless and, breaking news: very hot, fake husband. God you can smell the musk and sweat from him when he’s this close, and it’s sexy. You have to be careful to not just straight up mount him on the floor right now. Much to your aroused dismay.

“Um,” you squeak out, “can you put a shirt on.”

“Huh?” he looks down at himself, like he forgot he’s half naked. “Oh. Yeah.” He stands up. “Sorry, I’m not really used to having someone in the house anymore,” he says, and his use of the word anymore isn’t lost on you.

He heads over to the coat closet, pulling a gray sweatshirt that’s a shade darker than his sweatpants off of a coat hanger and then pulling it on over his head. He pulls the hood off, and now his hair looks damp with sweat and sexily ruffled up. And he’s also in a comfy-looking sweatshirt. That was way hotter than being shirtless, for fucks sake. You wonder if he’d reconsider being shirtless again. He’s kneeling down beside you once more, and yes you are still on all fours just staring down at the hardwood floor like an animal paralyzed with fear.

“Have some decency, please. Especially since I am to start living here from today onwards. I would appreciate modesty around the house,” you say as a tactic of self preservation. “Take note of my attire–appropriately covering all skin.”

“Are you gonna stand up?” he asks you.

“No. I shan't.”

“What? Why not? And why are you talking like that?”

“It appears I am frozen.”

“Are your knees okay?”

“I believe so.”

He sighs and gets up from his knelt position, then suddenly comes up behind you, bending over to wrap his arms around your waist tightly before picking you up with the same ease in which someone would pick up a plastic lawn chair. You gasp, still retaining your four-legged creature formation, until he shakes it out of you and then sets you back down onto your feet.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” he says with a sigh as he heads back towards the kitchen, and he’s back to crouching down somewhere behind the counter.

You shuffle your feet over to the kitchen and peer over the kitchen island to see that he’s examining the floor in front of the fridge.

“What’s wrong?” you ask.

He scratches at his eyebrow. “The fridge is leaking again.”

“Oh.”

He clicks something on both sides of the fridge's feet and then grips the corners of its body, pulling it out from the wall with a small grunt leaving his lips. Even with the baggy sweatshirt, you can see the curves of the muscles in his arms as he works.

You place your elbows on the island and hold your face in your hands as you watch him. “How are you gonna fix it?”

He’s dabbing at the wet hardwood with a very worn out rag to get it dry. “I just have to shut the water valve off for a bit.”

“How do you do that?”

He points over his shoulder with his thumb, and you trace the line of it to the cabinet under the sink.

“Really? You’re gonna get under the sink?”

He dusts his hands off and tosses the rug off to the side. “Uh-huh.”

“Are you sure you can fix it?”

“Yeah. No problem.”

“How long has this been an issue?”

His gaze flicks to yours briefly before he stands up. “About a week.”

“Don’t you think you should just call someone?”

“What?” He turns to face you and crosses his arms across his chest while raising an eyebrow at you, like you’ve just deeply offended him. “Why the fuck would I call someone for a job I could do myself?”

You tilt your head at him, trying to hide the smirk that threatens to tug at your lips. “Well you said it’s been a whole week.”

“Yeah, I’ve–...I’ve just been busy. So I haven’t had a chance to really take a look at it.”

“Ohhhh okay okay,” you say in a teasingly skeptic tone, poking your tongue to your cheek as it’s getting progressively harder to hide your grin.

“What?” he says to you, impatiently.

“Nothinggg,” you purr, and you watch him with a cheeky look on your face as he glares at you before he disappears off towards the garage.

He comes back with a tool box and you spend some time poking around in it curiously as he grabs a couple of tools before crouching down in front of the sink.

For some reason, you feel shy watching him. Maybe it’s because when he’s laying on his back, the top twenty-percent of him ducked underneath the sink, and he’s working his hands on some pipes that you can’t see, his sweatshirt rides up a little and you can see the very lower part of his torso. And then when he yanks particularly hard on something, it rides up more and you can see his abs tensing and relaxing with almost every breath he takes and every move he makes. You’re just grateful he can’t see you, and the urge to clench your thighs together is almost stronger than your brain’s disposition to convince yourself that he’s not attractive just because you think he’s annoying most of the time.

“y/n,” he calls out to you from under the sink, and you jump a little. He tilts his head a little so he can make eye contact with you from under. “Can you hand me those slip-joint pliers?”

“I have no idea what that is or where to even begin to know what that is.”

“The pliers that have the serrated edges,” he tries.

“Huh?”

“.........shark with sharp teeth.”

“Oh! Yes. Yes, of course,” you grab them and then shuffle over to him before crouching down, balancing on your toes, “here you go.”

“Thanks,” he says in a flat tone, slowly taking them from you.

“You’re welcome!” you chirp. You feel very useful.

His head disappears back to deep underneath the sink again to work on stuff again. Even though this whole thing is probably just his masculine ego wanting to fix things around the house by himself rather than just call a person that is literally paid to fix these sorts of things, you have to admit that you’re not complaining for getting to watch him do something handy.

“I’ve just– gotta–” he grunts a little and you hear the creaking of pipes, “tighten this up a bit–” he lets out another gruff noise, his voice strained with effort, and you’re ashamed to say it sounds hot. “Alright!” He pulls himself out from under the sink and stands up back onto his feet with a bounce in his step as he dusts his hands off. “Fixed. For now.”

The fridge starts making a strange whirring noise. You raise an eyebrow at him. He quickly reaches behind it and clicks some button before the eerie whirring stops.

“Okay. Now it’s fixed.”

You give him a very skeptic look. “Sure, Jan.”

“Don’t sure jan me. Trust. It won’t leak anymore.”

“Whatever you say,” you respond before heading back up the stairs to freshen up.

By the time you go back downstairs, Gojo is nowhere to be found, and you take the opportunity to sit on his couch in the living room to then peruse which streaming services he has on his TV. It isn’t until about ten minutes later that you hear someone coming down the stairs, because he makes no effort to avoid the creaky steps.

You put your elbow up on the couch backrest and twist your torso to look at him. He’s wearing pajama pants and an unmatching black short sleeve cotton T-shirt that’s loose around his torso but tight at the arms. He’s ruffling his hair up with a hand towel, attempting to get it dry from the shower he clearly just took. As he makes his way towards the living room, you catch a waft of the clean soapy aqua fragrance of shampoo lingering in his hair. He stops about four feet behind the couch.

You glance down at his feet. “Why the fuck are you, as a grown ass man, wearing bunny slippers inside the house?”

He opens one eye to glance down at his slippers as he continues to tousle his hair dry, “oh, Juno got them for me for Christmas last year. She wanted me to wear them ‘all the time or else uncle toru’s feet will burn off from the floor lava.”

A small smile makes its way onto your face.

Juno is Gojo’s five-year-old niece, and from the interactions you’ve seen between them, and from the way My Little Pony was the first thing that popped up when you turned the TV on, you know that Gojo absolutely adores her and vice versa. You’ve met her a couple times, even babysat her once in an emergency, and she’s a cute and bright little kid that you certainly have way more fondness for than her obnoxiously annoying uncle who is also now your fake husband. Wait, does that mean that Juno is your niece now, too?

Gojo lets out a sigh before hanging the towel over his shoulder, his hair apparently adequately dry enough for him now. He looks younger when his hair is messy and a little damp, falling over his forehead flatter than usual. It’s kinda boyish and dare-you-say charming.

He looks down at his slippers again with a pleasant reminiscent look on his face before placing his hands on his hips like he’s a baseball dad of three. “Y’know, when I was growing up–”

“Ah yes. During the Great Depression.”

He gives you an annoyed look. “Quit it. When I was a kid–”

“Back in the 1800s.”

“Aren’t you pushing thirty?” he asks you.

“Aren’t you in need of some new dentures?” you ask him.

“Fuckin’ rude,” he mumbles as he walks towards the foyer table to rip open some of the mail that was scattered across it.

“What happened when you were a kid?” you ask.

“Forget it,” he says, tucking some of his bills back into envelopes.

“What!! I wanna know,” you say.

“Yeah well I don’t want to tell you anymore,” he responds.

As you two fully grown adults continue bickering like toddlers for the better part of two minutes, your phone is ringing upstairs unbeknownst to you.

“Wait. Shut up,” Gojo cuts off your next insult as he snaps his head up-right suddenly.

“What?! Did you just tell me to shut u–”

“Shhhhhh,” he hushes you, turning his ear towards the stairs with a concentrated expression on his face.

You silence yourself, and then you hear the ringing coming from upstairs.

“Fuck,” you mumble as you scramble off the couch and jog to the bottom of the staircase, Gojo’s eyes on you the entire time as you run up the steps back to your room.

You hear your phone ringing on the bed somewhere but you can’t find it so you rummage through the sheets before finally spotting it, swiping on the call and bringing it to your ear without even checking the caller ID.

“Hello?” you say.

“Oh! y/n, hi there. It’s Dr. Johnson calling. I was prepared to leave you a voicemail,” he says.

“I’m here,” you say hastily, holding your phone to your ear with both hands as you feel your entire body tense up.

You never knew what to expect with any sort of phone calls these days, especially when you’re at work or when your mom isn’t home, because a phone call could be something as simple as approving a refill on some of her medication, to something much worse than that. Something much more final than that.

“It’s not an emergency,” Dr. Johnson says on the other line, like he can sense your fear and anxiety through the phone, “just wanted to reach out to let you know that I spoke with the hospitalist who admitted your mother to the hospital and she’s doing better now. They’ll likely discharge her by the end of the day.”

You slowly let out the breath you were holding. “Oh, that’s wonderful. I know she needs to come in for chemo tomorrow, so it’s perfect timing.”

“Yes, we’ll see her tomorrow.”

“Uh, Dr. Johnson, I do want to let you know…I’ll be admitting my mom for hospice in a couple of days,” you tell him. You wince a little, because you know it’s probably something that you should’ve discussed with him prior to all of this. “It’s…likely that you won’t have to continue her care anymore, since she’s been approved for Kaiser insurance, I’ll be transferring her care to Kaiser physicians.”

There’s a moment of silence on the other line, the briefest moment of hesitation from a self-assured doctor who always had something to say right away. “Really? That’s–...wow. I can’t say I won’t be extremely sad to not see her anymore.”

“I know…” you say, worrying your bottom lip through your teeth, feeling a sudden wave of guilt overtake your senses, “you’ve been following her progress ever since her diagnosis, even got her into remission…it’s just a little complicated with some insurance stuff and some bills as well. If I could have things my way, I would continue care with you and your team.”

Even though you can’t see it, you can tell he’s nodding on the other line. “I understand, y/n. I know that there’s more to healthcare in this country than just…receiving care. But I don’t have to explain those things to you, since you’re a nurse. Do what’s best for you and your family. Give me the details for the hospice, and I’ll have my MAs send over your mother’s chart.”

“Thank you, Dr. Johnson,” you whisper, your voice cracking slightly. “Really. For everything.”

“You’re most welcome.”

“Oh–” you stutter, in fear he might hang up right as you remembered to ask him something.

“Yes?”

“I know I’ll see you tomorrow so we can discuss it then too, but I was just wondering if the scans were back from my mom’s brain MRI she had done? I know they usually take three weeks to come back but just wanted to check.”

He lets out a low chuckle. “I had a feeling you’d follow up about that. No, there are no scans that have come back. I’ll let you know right away when they do.”

“Okay…” you say.

“I know you’re worried about a possible glioma,” he speaks up, “but let’s just try to stay positive until we see the scans, okay?”

“Yes. Sounds good. Thank you, doctor.”

“Alright. I will see you and your mom tomorrow.”

“Yes. Bye,” you say and hear his word of farewell too before hanging up.

You stare down at the screen of your phone, taking in slow deep breaths to calm down your nerves. You just wanted these scans to come back already so that you could feel at peace knowing that your mom’s worsening neurological condition is due to her Alzheimer’s and not a tumor in her brain. The average survival length of a person with a brain tumor is low, and even worse if it’s a glioblastoma, ranging at around 12-18 months. You can buy her a few years at least with the stage of cancer progression she’s at right now, even with the possibility of remission, but if it becomes severely advanced disease then–

You gasp softly and cover your mouth with your hand, unable to even fathom the thought without feeling a feverish chill run down your entire body. Now's not the time to spiral. Deep breaths. One, two, three. Now is the time to stay positive. Just like Dr. Johnson said.

Putting one step ahead of the other, you leave the room, cross the loft and slowly make your way down the stairs and stop at the very last step when you see Gojo rushing across the foyer with his dress shoes on, wearing a dark blue suit, save for the tie, and he looks like he’s pressed for time.

“Are you going somewhere?” you ask from the last step, your hand curled around the rail still.

“Hey, uh, yeah,” he scrambles, grabbing his keys from the paper mache bowl on the foyer table and then pats at his pockets for his wallet only to notice it’s absent. “Fuck.” He disappears somewhere into the house in a hurry and then returns with his wallet in his hand before shoving it in his pocket with the jingle of his keys too. “I had to push a couple house viewings from this afternoon up, so I need to leave.” He finally turns to face you and exhales slowly to regain his breath. “Small favor?”

“What’s up,” you say.

He rubs the back of his neck a little guiltily. “Well, Sana called a few minutes ago asking if I could watch Juno since she had to pick her up early from school, and I said sure, but I have to leave now, so–”

“I can watch her,” you say.

He claps his hands together in prayer form and holds them up to his face, “I owe you one.”

“Mhmmmmm,” you hum, watching as he resumes his haste to leave the house. And just before he heads out the door, you say— “Collar.”

“Huh?” He turns around to face you. “Oh.” He takes a second to flatten the collar of his shirt. “Thanks.” And then he’s out the door.

You sigh, relishing in the emptiness of the house. Maybe you should raid his pantry, or play porn on the TV super loud so all the neighbors think he’s a creep. But perhaps that is not appropriate, given that his sister will be bringing his niece over very soon.

You quickly head over to your house to change into something more appropriate than your nightgown, just some blue jeans that honestly make you look like a soccer mom, and then a T-shirt. You walk back to Gojo’s house and only get about five minutes to peruse his pantry when the doorbell rings.

When you open the door, you’re met face-to-face with Gojo’s sister, Sana. How would you describe Sana? Well, first of all, she’s beautiful, with all the same features as Gojo except in female form. Striking round blue eyes, silky white hair that shimmers silver underneath sunlight (you would describe Gojo less poetically than this, though). Her hair is pin straight, falling down just past her shoulders. She’s sweet, or at least has been the couple of times that you’ve met her, but she can also be a little serious and strict. The type to not really laugh at the dinner table if you make a pointed joke about the current political state of the country, but maybe it’s because she didn’t even understand the joke to begin with. Either way, she’s very different from the annoying and irritating temperament of her older brother, and how their mother managed to give birth to such two different kids is beyond you.

“Hey,” you greet her at the door with a small smile.

“Hi, y/n,” she returns with a polite smile of her own. She’s holding onto Juno’s scrawny shoulders as the kid stands in front of her, barely to the height of her mother’s hips. Juno was toying with the light pink baseball cap on her head, her hair pulled through the opening in the back and tied up into a ponytail. “I’m so sorry to bother you with her.”

“Oh! No, not a bother at all, I love getting to see her,” you say as you crouch down to get at eye level with her. “Hi Juno!”

Juno has curly white hair rather than the pin straight that her mother possessed, a feature that more closely resembles her father’s hair, along with her hazel eyes. You’ve only met Sana’s husband, Jun, once before. From what you know, he’s some type of businessman, and the first thing you noticed about him was that he was the same height as Sana. But his wife was blessed with supermodel height and was probably taller than most men, so it wasn’t surprising. Jun was hearty, almost suspiciously kind, laughed boisterously loud, and in the small amount of time you met him, it was easy to see that Sana very rarely humored his ill-mannered and awkwardly-placed jokes, but they seemed very in love with each other regardless. Apparently he and Gojo go golfing every other weekend. Information that you seem to know despite any desire to know it.

Juno hugs her water bottle to her chest, shy as she makes eye contact with you. “Hi, auntie y/n.”

“I loooooove your baseball cap! It’s so cute, where did you get it?” you ask her.

She blinks off to the side timidly, her fluffy white lashes fluttering over her bright eyes. “Um. Uncle Toru.”

“Ohhh I see, I see! It suits you.”

Sana nudges her a little with her knee. “What do we say, Juno?”

“Thank you, auntie y/n,” she immediately squeaks out in reflex.

Your eyes catch a glimpse of the white bandage wrapped over her tiny arm and your brow furrows before reaching out to gently hold it. Juno winces a little from the sensation. You stand up straight.

“What happened to her arm?” you ask Sana.

Sana sighs as she tucks some of her hair behind her ear. “She fell on the playground at school today. It’s a pretty large scrape and it’s been hurting her a lot.”

“Did you disinfect it?”

“Oh…I just–...washed it with some water. The school nurse wasn’t there today so I just had to pick her up early.”

“Mm, I see,” you say, “I can take a look at it. I have some neosporin in my purse.”

She lets out a relieved sigh, like she was secretly hoping you would make the offer. “Thank you. Really.” She gently pushes on her daughter’s shoulder. “C’mon Juno. Go inside and set your homework up on the table.”

Juno cranes her neck up to look at her mom. “Mommy, can I have a snack first? Pop-tart!”

“If your uncle has them in the pantry, then sure,” Sana says, and immediately upon hearing those words, Juno rushes inside the house with giggles filling the air. “But only one!!” Sana yells out to her in a strict tone, and you watch with amusement as Juno skips off before returning your attention back to Sana.

“Sooo…” she starts, a small hint of hesitation playing on her usually prim face, “I suppose we’re sisters now. Sisters-in-law.”

Your eyes widen and your shoulders stiffen. It was at least a good thing that Gojo told his family already that you two are married, because it seems that most of his extended family live here in this town. At least, you know that his sister’s family and his parents live here. Better to be heard from him directly than to run into you randomly living at his house all of a sudden when they drop by. You’re sure his family has questions about this extremely sudden marriage to say the least. You’re not sure how much they’ll try to pry, but you hope it’s not much, because you’ve never really been a great actress. “Yes. Yes, we are.”

“Mm,” she hums pleasantly at you, nodding slowly and peering off into the house beyond your shoulder, “say…I’m, um, just a little…surprised by how sudden this all is.”

“Hmm?”

“With you and my brother,” she says straightforwardly. “Obviously, you must know he’s been married before, but it’s…a little odd, it feels like just yesterday when he told us he was…getting a divorce. And now he’s married again.” She trails off when she has some sobering thought that flashes through her head. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m blabbering about this. I’m just–...I’m just thinking out loud. It must be a sore topic.”

“Oh, no, no, not at all. No worries,” you say with an awkward laugh, “I’ve, um, come to terms with it?” You try your best to come up with a believable response.

“That’s good,” she says while she runs soothing circles with her thumb over the skin at her elbow, “well, some love moves faster than others.” She displays a well-meaning smile on her face. “I’m really happy for you two.”

For some reason, your heart warms. Like when the lines of reality and imagination blur, and so you’re left here with a truly comforting feeling. Only it’s fleeting and temporary, like escapism. “Thank you,” you say softly. And after a moment, “by the way, I’m really sorry for…Satoru and I not having a proper wedding. We just wanted something simple.”

She lets out a small scoff. “Oh, gosh, don’t apologize for that. I’m sick of weddings. I was so glad I didn’t have to peruse yet another wedding registry this year. There are only so many toaster ovens I can buy.”

You’re a little surprised by the humor from her, but the two of you let out small laughs in unison at the doorstep.

Sana glances at her watch. “I have to get going. Call me if you need anything, okay?”

You nod. “Sure. Thanks.”

You close the door slowly, watching her briefly through the stained glass window as she heads towards her car and gets inside before promptly driving off.

There’s the sound of ruffling heard and then the sound of things falling off a shelf towards the kitchen. You turn on your heel and head in the direction. “Junooo,” you call out, “where are youuuu?”

“In here!” she chirps from the pantry room. You turn the light on to see her standing in the center with a couple boxes of cereal fallen around her. She’s holding an empty box in her hand. “The pop-tart box is empty,” she says with a pout and sulk of her shoulders as she makes the most :(( face you’ve ever seen a child make.

“Oh no,” you say, grabbing the box from her and inspecting the inside, “your devious uncle must’ve eaten them all in a manic episode.”

“What is a manic mean?” she asks you as she looks up, rubbing her ankle with her other foot.

“Oh, it’s like…crazy? He went crazy?”

She giggles at the thought.

“If you’re hungry, I can make you something,” you offer.

She shyly nods her head but her grin fully rounds her cheeks before she darts off towards the kitchen.

You find her standing near the kitchen island, trying to get up onto one of the bar stools but to no avail. You come up behind her to pick her up then set her down on the seat, adjusting it so it’s a little higher.

“What do you want me to make?” you ask her as you come around to the other side of the island and set your elbows up on the cold marble, leaning over to place your chin in your palm.

“Um…” she brings her index finger up to her bottom lip in thought, “pancakes? Can I have blubbery pancakes?”

“Huh?”

“Um…” she starts again, “last time, when I eated them at your house. Um, when I ated them at your house,” she tries to correct herself, “I really liked them.”

“Oh!” you perch up from your bent over position, “I remember! The blueberry pancakes. Aww, Juno, you remember that? How sweet.”

She becomes a little bashful and glances down at the her lap.

“Okayyy,” you say, placing your hands on your waist as you look around at the kitchen, “well I’ll have to see what ingredients I’m working with here, but hopefully I can make them for you.” You tilt your head at her before pointing a finger. “Have you ever seen the show Chopped?”

She sits up straight with excitement. “Yes yes! Me and mommy love it.”

“Good. Let’s pretend I’m working with a mystery basket here,” you say, and then you turn around to open Gojo’s fridge.

You can learn a lot about a person based on what the inside of their fridge looks like. You’re surprised to find the inside of his looks…sparkly? That was the only way you knew how to describe it. With clean shelves that reflect the bright lighting off the plastic, plastic that looks as mirror sheen as glass. As your eyes take in the contents inside, you notice he has some leftover thai food at the front, most likely leftovers from as recent as last night. One of the produce drawers is filled to the brim while the other is mostly empty, and you notice he separates them by leafy stuff vs. veggies. The leafy stuff is the drawer that’s filled to the brim, and you just know he’s stressed out over how to use all of it up before it starts wilting. Must’ve been on sale, you think to yourself. To the right of the fridge, there are an insane amount of orange juice cartons, and you notice he drinks the same one as you–pulp free with the added vitamins and calcium that’s made for kids. Although maybe he has an excuse for it, since he has a five-year-old niece. There’s a few containers of meal prep stacked up at the back of the fridge that look like some sort of arrangement of quinoa, chicken and Mediterranean vegetables. And then there’s just a bunch of assorted cans of beer throughout the fridge, which you assume are to appease the diverse preferences of his friends whenever he has them over.

You grab a couple of eggs from the egg carton, placing them on the counter along with a stick of butter plus a half-full carton of milk, and peer deep into the fridge past the wall of condiments to eye for any fresh fruit such as berries, but you don’t see any. You try the freezer and are relieved when you see he has some frozen blueberries in there.

“Okay!” you shut the fridge. “Just need to grab a few more things from the pantry room and then I’ll make you your pancakes, okay?”

Juno nods enthusiastically. “Um. Can I get my backpack?”

“Sure.” You pick her up off the bar stool to set her down on the ground and she runs to the coffee table in front of the TV to grab her things as you head to the pantry room.

Flour, sugar, baking powder, all tucked in your elbows as you carry the ingredients back to the kitchen before dropping them onto the counter and picking Juno up to place her on the barstool again. She starts to lay out her glittery pens and pristinely sharpened pencils in front of her as well as a packet of papers.

“I can’t believe they’re giving Kindergarteners homework these days…” you mutter under your breath as you grab a bowl. “Juno, wanna help me crack the eggs?”

“Yes!”

“Let’s go wash our hands then.”

As you mix all your ingredients together and Juno continues to stare at her papers with her face awfully close to them (does she need glasses?), you think to yourself what a nice little life this is. Although you haven’t been able to spend the day at your house like you were hoping you would, since you could finally have it for yourself, it was nice to spend it at Gojo’s. It was something different, something refreshing, something grounding. An escape that you needed.

“Um. Auntie y/n?” Juno calls from behind you as you flip a pancake at the stove.

“Yes sweetheart.”

“How is mommy?”

“Hmm?” you hum. “My mommy?”

“Yes!”

“Oh you are just the sweetest thing. She’s doing okay. She’s just a little sick still.”

“When I’m sick,” Juno speaks up with a childlike enthusiasm in her voice, “my mommy gives me grape soor–...stir–” she struggles with the word, “shrup, ah, syrup! Grape syrup. It makes me better.”

“Ohhh honey, I know,” you coo as you try to match her enthusiasm, placing two little pancakes onto a plate for her. “When you get the sniffles, right?”

“Yes! Maybe your mommy will be better too if I give her some of my grape syoorup?”

You stop in your tracks, staring down at the food you were just plating.

The innocence of a child. It was hard to stay strong in the face of it. When you were younger, you probably would’ve thought that a magical potion would make your mom all better, too.

You turn around to face her. “Well,” you say, clearing your throat a little to fight the knot that you find is twisting it, “I think,” and now you’re blinking away the faint sheer of tears as you press your lips into a thin smile, your soft soft above a whisper, “that that is a wonderful idea.”

Juno gobbles up her blubbery pancakes with the extra maple syrup on them and you watch her take every bite. There was something satisfying about seeing a little kid eat so well. The sight made you feel well-fed on their behalf.

“Alright,” you say with a small grunt as you pick Juno up and set her down onto the ground, then take her hand to lead her over to the carpeted family room. “Let me take a look at this scrape of yours.”

Juno’s hand tugs slightly when you try to pull on it, so you turn around to see that she has stopped in her tracks halfway through the trek to the other room.

“What’s wrong?” you ask her.

“I don’t want you to see it…”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s ugly.”

“Juno,” you tug on her hand a little, “I have to see it so that I can clean it. Otherwise you might get sick. A type of sick that even grape syrup can’t fix.”

She looks up at you with curious eyes, not fearful ones.

“There is sick like that?” she asks you.

“Yes. Now give me your arm.”

Juno follows you to the family room and stands still, the front of her jutting out slightly as she pouts, a display of her remaining disapproval for you taking a look at her scrape. You get down onto your knees and slowly undo the bandages, unwrapping the layers one-by-one before the end falls off and you’re staring at a 4x2cm superficial abrasion on her arm, and when your thumb lightly swipes at the skin underneath it, Juno winces from the pain.

You also notice she has a bruise on her left upper thigh, right below where the hem of her shorts end.

“You…only fell onto your right side, right?” you ask her.

“Mhm,” she nods.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“How come you have a bruise on your left thigh then?”

Her eyes widen slightly with shock and her head quickly snaps down to look at her thigh. “Um. Um. I don’t know. Um. Um.”

“Juno,” you say, trying to muster up a strict tone, but she refuses to make eye contact with you anymore as she stares at the carpet beneath her. You gently grab a hold of both of her wrists. “Sweetheart. Look at me.” Her eyes slowly lift up to meet yours. “I want to help you, but I can't help you unless you’re honest with me.”

Her big eyes blink at you slowly and her bottom lip quivers slightly.

“How did you really hurt yourself?”

She immediately starts bawling. Full on sobs that echo throughout the room and startle you slightly as the tears freely fall down her cheeks and she struggles to wipe them off with her left arm, but they only drip down her elbow.

“Oh–” you stutter, holding her by her shoulders, “Juno–”

She sniffles. “They–” she hiccups, “they pushed me…they always push me.”

“Who pushed you?? Who always pushes you??”

She sucks in a deep breath as she continues to cry and you struggle to wipe at her tears for her with the pad of your thumb. “The–hic–girls at school. They’re so–hic–...wahhh…they’re so mean.”

“They pushed you on the playground and that’s how you got this scrape and bruise?” you ask her.

She nods as she slowly begins to come down from her outburst, her remnant sniffles and short sharp inhales showing that she was struggling to breath. You run to grab some tissues and then come back, holding them to her nose before she blows into them.

“Oh sweetheart…I’m so sorry,” you say to her.

She suddenly runs into you, hugging you tightly, and you’re momentarily surprised before wrapping an arm around her too and then gently patting at her back.

“How long has this been going on?” you ask her.

“Mm…ever since I–hic–ever since I got on T-ball team…but they couldn’t get on.”

“Oh…” you coo, gently rubbing her back now. You’re not a mom, you’ve got no fucking clue how to navigate this sort of situation. But you can try your best to give some advice. “Juno, you have every right to feel happy and safe at school.” You gently pull her away from the hug so that you can look at her face. “And it’s okay to stand up for yourself and against anyone that is being mean to you. Don’t let them take that power away from you.”

She nods slowly, her lip quivering slightly again.

You sigh slowly before giving her another hug. “And we’ll work out something with your mom too, okay? She can talk to the teachers.”

“No!” Juno shrieks, pulling away from you suddenly. You blink at her. “No. Please don’t tell my mommy.”

“W-Why not??”

“Because–” she stutters, “um…I want to tell her myself. Because I lied, and mommy always says to me to not tell lies. So I have to fix it myself.”

You tilt your head at her, frowning slightly. You’re not exactly sure how much autonomy over such things you should be granting a five-year-old, but you decide to give her the choice. You hold your pinky finger out to her, “you have to promise me you’ll tell her though, okay?”

She nods and wraps her pinky around yours.

After getting her scrape cleaned up and tended to, Juno spends the next hour or so watching My Little Pony on the TV as you clean up the mess you made in the kitchen. And as you’re staring out into the backyard while wiping down the cutting board, the sound of the doorbell ringing makes you jump with a startle and breaks you out of your trance.

You were prepared to open the door to find Sana standing at the entrance, but instead you’re met with the sight of a different woman.

Much older, and with all the same features, it doesn’t really take you long to figure out who she is.

“Ah! There she is!” the woman chirps out. “I’m—”

“Juno’s grandmother,” you finish the statement for her.

“—Satoru’s mother,” she instead says.

You both blink at one another.

“Well,” she chirps, “I’m both!”

Gojo’s mother appears to be a kind woman, and it’s evident that being gorgeous must run in the family. Although she has aged features, they’re still beautiful in a graceful way, where people would take a look at her and think of aging as a privilege and not a curse. Her eyes are somewhat feline, different from the roundness of those you’ve seen in her family, and her hair is a shimmering silver all around with a pretty silk press layered hair style that flatters her frail jaw. She was wearing a French-style button up dress with a rather gaudy belt around her waist, and you catch the scent of her lilac perfume even while she’s standing three feet away.

She puts her hands on her hips and has a forced smile on her face. “My son gets married and he doesn’t even tell me a peep about it, or introduce me to his new wife! I have to come all the way over here myself!” she exclaims, and her tone is like she’s trying to play it off with nonchalance but the stiffness of her features makes it look like she’s losing her mind. “Well,” she clicks her tongue, “he’s always had the penchant for never sharing anything he ever does with me.”

“Ah…I’m so sorry, Mrs. Gojo,” you say to her, unsure why you’re apologizing, but there was this energy to her that made you realize she had a skill for making people feel apologetic in her presence.

“No worries! Not your fault. I’ll deal with him later,” she says, her smile growing to where it almost fully crescents her eyes in a frightening way that almost sends a shiver down your spine, “anywhoooo,” she takes both of your hands into hers, “you’re very beautiful, and you have a very lucky-looking nose!”

“Lucky?”

“Yes, yes. You will bring luck to our family.”

“Thanks?” you say, trying to manage a smile.

She takes a step closer to you. “Tell me, what do your parents do for a living?”

“Oh! Um, well, my mom is retired, but she used to be an art teacher. My dad is in the food business, but uh, I haven’t spoken to him in years ever since my parents got divorced.”

“Ah,” she says curtly, her face blank as if she couldn’t think of a single thing to follow up with after that. She peers past your shoulder. “Where’s the little princess?”

“She’s just inside grabbing her things.” You gently slip your hands out of her hold and turn around to face the inside of the house. “Juno!! Do you need help?”

“No!!” she calls from the kitchen.

“Say, my dear,” Gojo’s mother speaks up, “why don’t you and Satoru come by for dinner this weekend? Jun and Sana apparently have some important news they’d like to share with the family, and I offered that we all hear it together over a meal. This way you can meet your father-in-law too!”

You take a deep breath in, realizing that this fake marriage agreement involves a lot more deceit than you ever thought it would. “Sure. Yes. I’d love that. Let me know if I can bring anything.”

“Wonderful!” she exclaims, just in time for when you feel Juno brush past you towards her grandma, hunching over slightly with her backpack’s weight. Gojo’s mother pulls you in for a hug which entirely startles you and you slowly wrap your arms around her as well. “It’s so lovely to have a daughter-in-law. Oh, I am just so happy to have you in our family.”

She lets go of you but still keeps you close by a delicate hold of your elbows, a gleeful smile on her face as she looks you up and down slowly.

“Bye, auntie y/n!!” Juno squeaks out, hugging your leg, and you pat at the top of her head. Her grandmother finally lets go of you and takes Juno’s tiny hand in her frail one, and you see them off to the car.

By the time you make it back inside the house, you let out a deep slow breath, one that you didn’t know you were holding in, as you lay your weight back on the front door. You feel a pressure in your head from your dwindling social battery and all these tricky encounters.

So, you’re part of a whole other family, now?

That. Is. Frightening.

[end of chapter 3]

a/n. ah!! hope you enjoyed this ihm chapter :’’) sorry if it seemed like a bunch of random scenes lolol i swear it’s all set up for stuff that will happen down the lineee. i just be yappin so the word count ends up kinda high. hope to see you in the next one!! <3 love u all. also it’s my frank ocean anons bday today so i dedicate this chapter to themm 🫶🏼💕 manifesting dilf gojo for u bb for anyone curious about why reader is a bit paranoid w potentially being busted for her fake marriage, i had another reader that was curious about this too so i answered them here if you'd like to check it out :)

➸ take me to chapter four!

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buzzingroyalty · 1 year ago

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one thing about all my humanstuck aus is that jade and kanaya are inexplicably still monsters among humans

also what are you supposed to do when you and your bestie's exes show up as an item to the house party across the street from your place prev

#homestuck #jade #kanaya #karkat #rose #dave #terezi #june #vriska #neighbor au #melisongart #ty rowlf for the trifecta halloween costume idea #jade showing up in full fursuit was non negotiable but i got too lazy to properly design her one #happy 10/25 #davekat #rosemary #junevrisrezi #junerezi #vrisrezi

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eowynstwin · 3 months ago

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the rain

previous - neighbors - next

You return home, and let John do to you what he's promised. cw: cunnilingus

The moment you ’re home, I’ll give you everything you want.

There’s a dangerous cast to the sky—dark, heavy, near-splitting at the seams. It’s not a night to have rejected a ride home from the station, not with those words ringing in your ears.

But when the ride was your ex, you’d rather risk getting caught in the downpour.

The pavement is hard and cold beneath your tired feet. Your whole body is sore from the long train ride home, spent stiffly across from Ben as you’d avoided his gaze, but you’d walk twice the distance home to even halve the time you’d spent with him. His sad eyes and kicked-puppy stare had been stuck to you the whole time, as if magnetized, and they weigh on you now as heavy as the suitcase you drag behind you.

This trip was a mistake. You should not have gone anywhere with Ben, professionally or otherwise. Not with how weird the energy has been between you and him, ever since you broke it off.

“Can’t you just try to be happy with me?” he’d asked you then. “I’m a good partner, aren’t I? I just want to make you happy, sweets, and it’s like you won’t even let me.”

Objectively, Ben had been the boyfriend everyone seemed to want when they talked about romance—interested and engaged, excited about a future together, sensitive and willing to talk about his feelings. He even knew where the clitoris was. There was nothing—no red flags, no warning signs—that should have scared you off.

It was just you. There was something wrong with you, because none of that made you happy—not the lunch dates, not the weekly flowers, and not even the sex. All you knew was that when he started wondering when you would introduce him to your parents, ice had run down your spine.

A bad gust of wind slaps you from behind, followed by a crack of thunder, too close for you to make it home dry. Indeed, there isn’t much time after finishing that thought before the deluge unloads, raindrops falling heavy and cold and fat as bullets.

You come to a resigned stop in the middle of the sidewalk, tilting your face up to the sky. There’s no point in rushing now—thick, late-winter clouds spread low across Liverpool, slow-moving. By all appearances intending to linger as long as possible. You’d neglected an umbrella, and your coat is nowhere near waterproof. You think of the warm interior of Ben’s car and shiver.

You want John.

You struggle to understand it. He is nothing like what you’d assign yourself for a match—there is a wide gulf of difference between you and him, too wide for you to ever expect an easy crossing. He and you should feel disjointed, incongruous, as ill-suited as a war horse might be to a hummingbird. There shouldn’t be anything you could offer each other that either would have use for.

And yet, you do. It is easy. Breathable, in a way that feels unearned enough to make you nervous.

How are you supposed to navigate something that shouldn’t be working, but is anyway? How can something feel this good with barely any effort on your part? How can you go through with this, when you’re not even sure what it means?

The rain reaches its fingers down into your collar, pools around your feet. You close your eyes and try to hear John’s voice in your head again. Soft and low over the phone, coaxing. Inviting your fears out into the open to be soothed.

You’re walking again before you realize it—one cold foot in front of the other, heavy suitcase clattering behind you, familiar with the way home even through the sheeting rain. And what feels like mere moments later, you’re walking up the steps to his front door.

The window beside it glows a soft yellow around the edges. You can’t help but stand there, frozen again as this suddenly becomes real. John, and everything he’s offered you, is on the other side of the door. All you have to do is take it. All you have to do is knock.

But John opens the door before you can even lift your hand.

“Jesus, love,” he says, the moment he looks at you.

Time slows. Warmth pours from the open portal. He looks… comfortable. Soft around the edges in blue jeans and a knitted sweater—the same one he’d worn to dinner at the pub. You hadn’t realized how much you missed him, even in the few days you’d been gone, but once your eyes land on his you don’t want to look away. The angle of his brow; the shape of his mouth beneath his old-fashioned mustache. Looking at him is like looking at your bed at the end of a long day.

“Hi, John,” you reply, smiling apologetically.

“Come on, get inside!” he exclaims, hurrying you in as thunder claps behind you.

In his flat, the lights are low. As you stand dripping on his entry, you take in an arrangement of somewhat retro furniture and sparsely decorated walls. It’s utilitarian in a way that probably isn’t meant to be; spare of anything particularly homey because the inhabitant just doesn’t have time to pay attention to it. You’ve never actually been inside before. It’s very much like John himself; tidy but old-fashioned, practical, hiding absolutely nothing.

You don’t think the candles, though, sitting on a few end tables and shelves and glowing soft gold, are his standard decor. Nor is the crystal bottle of liquor languishing in an ice bucket at the center of a small coffee table, attended by two whiskey glasses off to the side.

“When you said you were on your way I didn’t think you’d be walking,” he says, taking your luggage and setting it aside. “Why didn’t you ask me to come get you? I have a car, would’ve been happy to drive you.”

“I—” and you laugh a little nervously, magnetized to the concerned slant of his brow, “I didn’t know you had a car.”

You’re not sure you would’ve asked him for a lift even if you had known.

He draws close, so close his warmth cuts through the chill of your wet clothes, his gaze moving across you like he’s drinking you in. He cups your face lightly with one hand, thumb tracing a gentle line across your cheek. The expression on his face is almost too tender for you to bear.

“You’re here now,” he murmurs.

There’s a tremble working its way through your chest. You feel desperately seen again, recognized in a way no one ever has before. “I’m a mess, I—maybe I should go and change, come back…”

“No,” he purrs, taking your chin between thumb and forefinger. “You’re stayin’ right here.” And quite easily, John kisses you for the first time.

His mouth is warm along yours. His free hand hooks your waist, pulls you closer as he moves to cup the back of your neck. You’re so surprised you don’t react for a moment, but that doesn’t deter him; he just coaxes you into responding, sipping at your lips, teasing at the seam with the tip of his tongue.

It throws you off balance. He kisses you as if he’s known all along how to do it; as if he’s studied you, all of those mornings, noting the way your lips touch the rim of your coffee mug and the way you look up at him when he talks to you. Calculating the angles, the ways your mouths could fit together.

He shifts, angling to kiss you deeper. A wave of vertigo threatens to overtake you—your hands fly to his chest, which is broad beneath your fingers. You dig them into the cable of his sweater, a little whine escaping you, and John huffs a laugh against your mouth before greeting your tongue with his.

You have never felt as small as you do now in John Price’s hands, at the mercy of the way he holds you—like he’s planning to keep you in place until he’s finished with you.

When he finally pulls away, you have the opportunity to take a deep gasp as he chuckles again. He thumbs your bottom lip, almost playfully.

“Mm,” he murmurs. “Wanted to do that the minute you walked into the pub that night.” You don’t have time to reckon with this confession—if you can even call it that, because once he says it you realize you’ve known the whole time—before he continues. “Come on, you must be freezing. Let’s get you warmed up.”

John helps you out of your coat, unwrapping you like peeling away a chrysalis. It exposes the thin, damp fabric of your dress to the warm air—and to his gaze—and you can’t help but feel suddenly naked in front of him. He’s revealed nothing that he hasn’t seen before, but irrationally, you want to cover your chest, or cross your arms over your stomach. Shield the most vulnerable parts of you from consumption.

John takes your hands in his and pulls you to an armchair—a comfortable, plush thing with a low back. He backs you into it so that your knees buckle, and you sit, looking up at him as he stands over you.

“First order of business,” he says.

He turns away from you to lift the decanter from the bucket, and pours a finger of liquor into a glass. You try to pretend your heart isn’t thrumming, like a bird’s beating wings behind your ribcage, as he turns back and holds out the drink, long fingers dwarfing the rim.

“As promised,” he purrs, “Balvenie.”

You accept it the glass; the scotch sparkles, amber-rich and glittering gold where the low candlelight catches it.

“It looks good,” you say, looking up at him.

There’s a pleased look on his face. “Give us a taste, then.”

Heat blooms across your face, spreads down your chest. You bring the rim of the glass to your lips immediately, still held by his gaze—

Smoke blooms across your tongue, heavy and soft, pricked with notes of honey and vanilla. You roll the scotch in your mouth, close your eyes as its warmth slides along your tongue, pressing it up into your soft palate, citrus appearing in a sudden, tangy splash. You let the drink flow into your throat and feel the smoke fill your head as you swallow.

You open your eyes and look up at John. “That’s really good.”

It shouldn’t surprise you, really, but it does: John bends over you, takes your chin in his hand, and kisses you again, dipping his tongue into your mouth as if searching for leftover drops of liquor. Your head swims; warmth suffuses you, waking up the nerves along the back of your neck. The hair on your arms stands on end as the world narrows to John’s mouth on yours and nothing else, the wet heat of his tongue, the prickle of his beard against your skin. It’s slow and molasses-sweet, rich and decadent. Thunder rumbles, far away.

“Mm. It is,” he says when he pulls away. Another brief kiss—like he can’t get enough of it, like he’s been saving up every moment he hasn’t kissed you, and is spending all of his chances now. “Promise me you’ll never drink Walker again.”

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, taking an unsteady breath.

The ends of his beard move against your face in a smile. “Enjoy that. I’ll be right back.”

He straightens, and steps away. The tug of his gravity is so strong that you list forward, toward him, until he leaves your orbit.

You look around his apartment again, helpless, as if to find some sort of anchor that isn’t John Price—he’s going to get you drunk on his presence alone faster than the liquor ever could. You catch sight of a bookshelf, sparsely populated with a short line of books; as you stare at them, trying to figure out what they are, you realize with a start that they’re all brand-new copies of what you’ve lent him.

Actium. Nafisi. Da Vinci. McMurtry. They’re all here. The textual foundation of your relationship aligned in a tidy, even row. Living here, in the center of his home.

You take another nervous sip of scotch.

John returns with a stack of clean towels, unfurls one, and drapes it over your head. But before you can tend to your hair yourself, he lays his big hands overtop of the terrycloth, pressing down into your scalp.

Your breath leaves you in a rush, depressurizing your lungs. Pure sensation dances up your spinal cord, suffusing the space between your ears, as he kneads with an even, firm pressure, massaging the water from your hair. Your eyes slide shut of their own accord. Your mouth drops open as he digs his fingers into the tense nerves down the back of your head.

The little sound that escapes the pit of your throat is utterly involuntary.

John huffs a chuckle. “That good, then?”

“Uh-huh,” you hear yourself mumble again. Somewhere in the back of your mind, obscured by smoke, you think you should feel embarrassed, ashamed of how naked your pleasure must be. But John gives you no time to ruminate.

He tilts your face upward and presses his lips to your forehead, down the bridge of your nose, gentle, soft, to your mouth. Your mouth, over and over again, as calloused thumbs caress your temples.

It’s a gentle way of taking control. You have no need to reach out with unsure hands, or stumble your way through half-desires with no time to think about them. John has seen into you, divined your quietest, sincerest needs, and feeds them back to you now like he’s only been waiting for your go-ahead to do so.

The bird in your ribcage flutters nervously. Is this really alright? Should you be letting it happen like this? Shouldn’t you be…participating, somehow, in this, other than to take what he gives you?

“John,” you start, but you have no idea what you want to say to him. “Shouldn’t I…shouldn’t—”

“Shh,” he says. “You should let me take care of you.”

John squeezes your hair one more time, then sets the damp towel aside. With an expression you can only describe as beatific, he smooths errant strands of hair away from your face, and then lowers to his knees in front of you. He touches your ankles; nods toward the glass of scotch encircled by your nervous hands. “Don’t stop on my account.”

You hold his gaze, and take a sip. The satisfaction on his face is almost too much to bear.

“Good girl,” he says. He lifts the heel of your shoe onto his thigh, smoothing his hand up and down your shin. “You’re doing such a good job, letting me do this.”

He takes your shoes off as tenderly as he’d removed your jacket, tucking away the laces and setting them off to the side. With warm hands, he rolls your wet knee-high socks down your legs, exposing your chilled calves to his palms. After he folds them and places them by your shoes, his mouth and the warm scratch of his beard meet the top of one foot…move up your instep, and to the inside of your ankle, then to your shin…up your calf…to your knee—

“Is this—” you begin, and have to swallow the trembles in your voice, “what you talked about on the phone?”

“Mm-hm,” he hums, kneading your other calf as he urges your legs to open for him.

Your breath is shallow in your lungs—as if any one too deep might startle John away from his quarry, convince him you’re not aching for this. John kisses inward along the inside of one thigh, keeping the other open with his kneading hand. The flesh molds like clay to his touch, extruding between the gaps of his fingers. He makes an appreciative sound, a hum, as he slides his hands further upward and under the damp hem of your dress, cresting the angles of your hips. Inexplicably, you go tight, anticipatory, like the skin of a grape exposed to a knife.

It isn’t like you haven’t been here before. Your sex life with Ben had been—while not particularly active—not nonexistent. And yet this feels new anyway; as if John is sweeping dust off a body long left unused. Your thighs are taut and sensitive as a yearling’s flank, ready to twitch at the barest whisper of breath.

But isn’t this new, after all? No one, not Ben or anyone else who’s ever touched you, has made you feel this way.

“Lift your hips, darlin’,” John rumbles, and for the first time you catch a hint of scouse in his accent—low, slung around his words and leaving off the hard edges. Like a vein of gold unearthed. “Bring ‘er closer to me.”

Heat blazes across your face. There’s a small end table beside the armchair; you take one more pull from your scotch glass and set your drink aside. Then you shift, edging your hips forward, tilting your pelvis—angling your pussy toward John’s face.

He kisses the crease of your thigh and groin. “That’s a girl,” he purrs, and then presses the bottom half of his face directly into your underwear, opening his mouth over the wet fabric and inhaling deeply. The panties are nothing fancy, simple cotton with a floral pattern, but his eyes slide shut in what you can only describe as ecstasy.

“It’s like you’re getting as much out of this as I am,” you say, trying to laugh, to make this feel like less than it is if only for the sake of your nerves.

“I am,” he says, rough around the edges, and pulls at the gusset of your underwear with his teeth. “I’ve thought about this every morning—” he runs the flat of his tongue along the outer seam, touching bare skin “—and every evening—” edging his fingertips into the leg hole at the top of your hip “—since I met you.”

“You barely knew me,” you whisper, trembling.

“I knew enough,” he says, lifting his face to meet your eyes—his pupils are blown wide, encased in a thin rind of blue. Delicately he takes the waistband of your panties between his fingers, eases it down. “Knew you were a good girl, who wouldn’t even fuss at mean old bastard for waking her up. Wanted to eat your cunt to apologize.”

Something flushed and hot radiates from your core, molten and liquid. “Every time you call me that I—I don’t know what to do, John, I feel…”

“Good,” he says. “Lift your hips again.”

You obey. You think you’d do practically anything, if he told you to in that voice, rough and commanding like far-away thunder. John peels your underwear from your hips, dragging it down over the swell of your bottom, closing your legs to pull them down and—you swallow—shoving them in his pocket when they’re off. Then, like opening the shutters of a window, he parts your legs again, and slots his face between them.

The first thing that strikes you is how hot his mouth. He eases a molten tongue into your folds and you watch his eyes slide shut, feel the soft groan he gives vibrate against your flesh. Your body heat blooms, sight going liquid around the edges—or maybe your temperature is just rising to meet John’s own, thermoregulating to avoid meltdown as he stokes a fire between your legs. Hot breath meets you as he opens his mouth, gets as much tender flesh between his lips as he can.

He’s slow. Exploratory. He tongues your pussy luxuriantly, indulgently, as he loops his arms under your legs to hook them over his broad shoulders, thick forearms dark with hair snaking overtop of your thighs. Holding you in place as he eats— savors . He maps your topography, delving and cresting the landscape like trying to discover every significant landmark, and finds a spot on your clitoris that makes your thighs seize up and your hips jerk under his mouth. He chuckles low against you, playfully flits his tongue across it at what you’d swear is the same rapid pulse of your heartbeat.

You look at him between your legs. The curls of his dark lashes are pretty against the pale hue of his skin, freckled with sun exposure. Fever pink spreads across his cheeks as his brow furrows in the middle, creasing as he laps at the beads of moisture pearling up from your entrance. You watch him, mouth hanging open to allow your shallow breaths to flow free—and he opens his eyes, sharp blue, meeting your gaze.

A sound escapes you, raw, rough in the back of your throat. He smiles, drags the flat of his tongue up your folds as if to show off, and strokes along the sensitive border of your mons and lower stomach with the rough callus of his thumb.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you, love.” He kisses your mound and then takes your pussy, soft and slow, back into his mouth.

There’s a trembling behind your sternum. Something in you breaks open—seeps cloying and honey-gold—into your bloodstream. Your head lolls back as his tongue slips deeper into you, stoking pleasure, your old friend, your old enemy, like turning embers out of ashes. Your thighs relax over the ballast of his shoulders. They’re broad enough that even as your legs fall further open, they don’t slip off.

It’s like your body and his are dovetail joints cut long ago, yet still now slide easily into place. Your heels rest comfortably on the expanse of his back with plenty of room left over; his big hands, as they spread wide across your stomach, fit along its curves and dips like rain sliding along soft green leaves.

It soaks you to the bone, warm and deep into your marrow, filling your veins and blotting the spaces between your alveoli until John, John, John is on every breath.

You must be saying his name aloud, because John’s grip tightens around you. The flint-strike of his tongue against your clitoris, lightning-sharp, catalyzes the pleasure in your bloodstream into a tight, unfamiliar gnarl. You gasp hard, almost painfully—how long has your body been able to feel like this, somewhere beyond your reach?

Has this pleasure always lived at the end of John’s tongue, along the contours of his hands, draped over his body like a mantle?

(How can something like this be a fair exchange for books and clumsy conversation?)

Your hand flies to John’s hair as it grows—a trembling feeling that touches places inside of you that you’ve always been dimly aware of, but never have given much thought to. It loosens you at the seams, grinds the fault lines inside of you together, dislodges your inhibitions from their foundation.

“John, please,” you whimper, brows drawn together, “please, please—”

He growls against you. Grinds through your center and then sucks your folds into his mouth, grazing the hood of your clit with the edge of his teeth, teasing your entrance with the tip of his tongue—

Suddenly, it overtakes you.

Flying sparks finally catch along aching tinder. A single point of furtive, glowing heat blooms between your legs, unassuming except for that you’ve never felt it before. It only sits briefly in your folds before bursting outward, seizing every nerve ending in the immediate vicinity, blazing bright like fire spreads over paper. Then you tighten around nothing, the inside of you desperately grasping something that isn’t there, body snapping taut as you arch from the backrest, mouth hanging open as a sharp gasp dies in your throat. Sensation consumes everything. Your vision darkens; the air stills in your lungs.

The only thing spared is the heat of John’s mouth, the cords of his arms around your thighs, and the ballast of his shoulders hooked in the bend of your knees—he keeps you anchored, held together as you try to fly apart. The caress of his hands and fingers across your lower belly does not stop as his mouth continues moving over your cunt, moves until your whole body is shaking, moves as you finally gasp for air and cry out in overstimulation.

You collapse back into the chair, pushing now against John’s head even though you’re not sure you want him to stop. He resists—kissing your pussy, once, twice, three times as you come down—and then takes a wrist in one big hand and kisses your palm.

“That,” John rasps, “is a fucking climax, love.”

You swallow, throat dry and smoke-rough. Even in the aftershocks, the pleasure lingers, and you squeeze your inner muscles to hold onto it for as long as you can.

It doesn’t escape his notice. Of course it doesn’t. John’s fingers trek inward, gathering some of the wet slick between your folds and then lazily circling your clitoris.

“Look at you,” he rasps, “my poor girl needs more, doesn’t she?”

Ecstasy grips you again; you whimper as he manipulates your flesh. “John…”

“How long you been aching for it, love? Years? How long’ve you needed me, and I ain’t been there, mm?” He kisses the soft part of your lower belly. “You don’t need to worry anymore. I’m here now.”

You angle your head to look at him, running your dry tongue along your lips. What you see on his face steals the meager oxygen you’ve managed to pull in since your climax abated.

His face is flushed. Lips rosy and swollen from their work. The blue of his eyes has been eclipsed almost completely by black singularity—inescapable, unfathomable, a depth more vast than comprehension. Ready to swallow you whole.

This whole time, you’ve been afraid of John’s touch the way you are afraid of a hot bath on a cold night. There is a comfort beyond the first step into the water, languorous ecstasy waiting only for you to claim it, but the toll separating it and you—the shock of first contact, the split second of violent adjustment, makes you nearly content to remain in uncomfortable but familiar dissatisfaction.

Thunder cracks outside as you reach for him, as he reads your mind and surges forward to kiss you, hand catching the back of your neck to reel your mouth to his. You kiss each other hard and fast, over and over again, eager to end each one only so you can start the next.

Nearly content, in the end, is not content at all.

“John,” you murmur against his lips, as his hand still works your cunt, “I’m still cold.”

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