#next generation toyota

[theadventurek9]

As the Subaru approaches closer and closer to 200k miles and it is getting more and more rattly. I'm considering my next vehicle.

So help me god it might be a mini van. I might be THAT dog person.

[globalbrandsmagazine]

Toyota's Next Generation 4Runner Roars into the Future - Global Brands Magazine

Since 2000, Toyota 4Runner SUV owners have not seen major modifications, yet an all-new version is finally on its way with some key highlights including hybrid options. This variant of the Toyota 4Runner hybrid powertrain combines a 48 horsepower electric motor with its 4-cylinder turbocharged engine to generate up to 326 horsepower overall power.

[gaycarboys]

What is so Surprising about Toyota’s New Camry?

[femreader]

♯┆love wears designer .ᐟ smau

summary: stockholm based designer, a model and a f1 driver

pairing: Charles Leclerc x fem!designer!reader x alexandra stmleux

warnings: homophobic comment, usual media

dont repost/translate my work on other platforms, everything is fiction and correlations to people and/or places are purely coincidental (slay enjoy)

author: i am so new in f1 world so please correct me if stuff is wrong ily hope you enjoy

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

INSTAGRAM STORY

y/n.official posted a story

yourbff: design me something I beg

y/n.official: always for you babes 💋

user1: new collab when?

user2: i need new thingggss i beg

user3: i will sell my kidney for a bag

INSTAGRAM

y/n.official leisure pleasure (and some work)

liked by sydney.sweeny, yourbff, voguestockholm and others

comments

user1: mother is mothering

user2: i miss her lover era the things we got

user3: i dont those ex-guys can choke

yourbff: pretty as always

y/n.official: älsklingggg 😭

sydney.sweeny: i miss you

y/n.official: next month. you and me and drinks

alexandrasaintmleux: beautiful <3

liked by y/n.official

user4: overrated jesus christ

user5: move along bitchy boi

user6: foaming at the mouth

user7: omg i cant believe i got to meet you

user8: i am going to be so calm when I ask WHATTTT

user7: i was on vacay in Stockholm and saw her at a cafe she was the sweetest omg

user7: i was like ’i’m so sorry to interrupt’ she just put everything down and gave me all her attention for the whole time and I almost died

y/n.official: you were so sweet 🤍

user8: peoples princess 😭😭

bill.skarsgård: the whole family misses you

y/n.official: missing you guys more ❤️

user9: very demure very mindful

y/n.official: i dont know what this means 😭😭😭

more comments

MESSENGER

INSTAGRAM

alexandrasaintmleux: beautiful weather and beautiful people. Biggest thanks to y/n.official for saving me from a total wardrobe malfucntion!! <3

liked by y/n.official, scuderiaferrari, charlesleclerc and others

comments

user1: god has favorites 😫

user2: 💚💚💚

user3: that's?? a vault piece??👀

user4: THANKYOU! I thought i was going crazy

user3: since when has y/n give stuff from the vault i need them

user5: money talkssss....

user6: yea or she just wanted to impress rich people

user7: she's alrady one of the most succesful designers of her generation, it’s not like there’s a lot she has to do to impress anyone😒 stay mad

y/n.official: you look beautiful älsklinggg, i had the best time altercating this to your preferances 💕

alexandrasaintmleux: come by again when youre in monaco, charles is jealous he didnt get anything

charlesleclerc: ALL I'M SAYING I'D LIKE TO GET CUSTOM Y/N BAG

y/n.official: deep breaths, i'll see what i can do 😗

liked by charlesleclerc, alexandrasaintmleux

user8: and all I'm saying charles deffo could jsut order one online instead of mentioning it under y/n's comments....

charlesleclerc: always so beautiful mon ange ❤️

alexandrasaintmleux: ❤️❤️❤️

more comments

INSTAGRAM

y/n.official: nordic f1 track whenn? Thank you scuderiaferrari for having me over, I'll design you new helmets anytime <3

liked by yourbff, scuderiaferrari, alexandrasaintmleux and others

comments

yourbff: nvm me just crying in my toyota odyssey

y/n.official: girl youre sitting on my couch eating my ice cream

user1: omg are two of my lives colliding?

use2: älskar dig så mycket ääääää

scuderiaferrari: pleasure having you, please design the next helmet so carlos and charles can stop pestering us

y/n.official: copy that 🫡

alexandrasaintmleux: so lovely to see you again

y/n.official: you too babes! we need to go get drinks again

charlesleclerc: what about meee

y/n.official: fine. you can join i suppose.

charlesleclerc: I suppos- I WON ???

user3: ...."again?"

user4: im telling yall but none of you are ready

user5: ily y/n!

more comments

TWITTER

INSTAGRAM

y/n.official: tack så mycket stockholm, once again. It’s always an honor to be part of your pride. LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE

liked by yourbff, alexandrasaintmleux, omarrudberg and others

yourbff: love is love and everyone thinking otherwise can fuck off

liked by y/n.official

omarrudberg: <3

liked by y/n.official

alexandrasaintmleux: beautyyy

charlesleclerc: waiting for that bag

alexandrasaintmleux: timeout, phone down

charlesleclerc: ....sorry 😔

charlesleclerc: y/n.official you look beautiful cheri <3

liked by y/n.official

user1: charles is so under their feet lmao

user2: or down bad

user3: both

liked by carlossainz and pierregassly

user4: 👀👀

INSTAGRAM

charlesleclerc: Quick get-away between races

liked by scuderiaferrari, alexandrasaintmleux, y/n.official and others

user1: omg travel leo

user2: THAT'S GAMLA STAN THAT'S STOCKHOLM HOLD ON

user3: lmao you sure?

user2: lmao yea, i live in the damn neighborhood 🙄

user4: just saying y/n.official is based there and was for a fact there too just now for stockholm pride

y/n.official: told yall would love fika-ing 🤭

y/n.official: cuties

liked by charlesleclerc and alexandrasaintmleux

alexandrasaintmleux: beautiful baby boys

y/n.official: and an angel i see 👀

alexandrasaintmleux: stop trying to make me blush

y/n.official: but it's so adorable

charlesleclerc: then there's two of you

user5: ?????

user6: ahsgfs oh my god they’re flirting on main

user7: idk if i saw them but i think i saw leo looking dog in the kungsträdgarden

user8: i need my poly girl y/n happy again pls 😭😭

user9: yall people can be just friends 🙄

MESSENGER

MESSENGER

INSTAGRAM STORY

y/n.offical posted a story

yourbff: are you in monaco and didnt tell me

user1: stop trying to convert normal people

user2: mmmmhhmmm i see

yourbff: do not leave me on read bitch (affectionately)

y/n.official: teehee mind your biz (affectionately)

y/n.official: yea i am

yourbff: i want invites to the wedding

yourbff: i also coin coming up with chalexyn

INSTAGRAM

USweekly: Stockholm based designer Y/N Y/L/N's upcoming winter collection attracted full house to the fashion show held in Stockholm. Designer herself could be seen with fresh new hair reigning in the show, hardly showing attention to the guests. Recent speculations between the designer, Formula One driver Charles Leclerc and his girlfriend Alexandra Saint Mleux have kindered, although none have been confirmed or denied.

liked by user1, user2, user3 and others

user1: jesus christ let woman work

user2: ikr it's not like she has a whole ass fashion show to co-ordinate

user3: i love how sydney is always where y/n.official's shows are

user4: sydney's said many times she loves her brand because Y/N allows altercations to pieces it's so cute

user5: can i now freak out that charles and alex where there too

user6: yea but they hardly interacted with y/n

user7: you dont exactly stand around when your brand is having a fashion show bruh

more comments

INSTAGRAM

y/n.official:

i love you my team, my incredibly talented models, my friends and family who have been a continious support in making this winter's collection. My biggest and heartfelt thank you's go to you and my incredible fanfollowing who never cease to amaze me with your love, support and concern.

I love my job. I am grateful for what I have and proud how I have gotten here. Each piece is the work of hours and hours of love, dedication and passion from multiple people. They stand for uniquity amongst people, courage to be yourself and love all around us. Every collection we've made is special to me, but this one just a clip above the rest.

Therefore, me and my team proudly present Y/N design's Winter collection 2024:

Love wears Designer.

liked by charleslecler, alexandrasaintmleux, yourbff and others

yourbff: so incredibly proud of you, min favorit tjej <3

user1: all i do is cry on this app 😩😩😩😩

user2: y/n can stomp on me, skin me alive, sew a dress from my skin, wear it and reuse my teeth are accesories and i'd thank her🫵🏼

charlesleclerc: always so proud of you mon cheri <3

y/n.official: thank you min skatt

alexandrasaintmleux: my best girl, congratulations for this. So so proud.

y/n.official: thank you both for supporting me every step of the way <3

user3: their comments!!?? 😭🤍

user4: this was not just a launch. IT WAS HARD LAUNCH. im telling yall

sydney.sweeny: loved the show, loved the pieces, i am so proud of you as always!

liked by y/n.official

more comments

INSTAGRAM

y/n.official: my muses ❤️ charlesleclerc, alexandrasaintmleux

liked by charleslecler, alexandrasaintmleux, yourbff and others

alexandrasaintmleux: thank you for all you've given us. We love you, our incredible skcetcher

liked by y/n.official, charlesleclerc

charlesleclerc: I love you my girls

liked by y/n.official, alexandrasaintmleux

y/n.official: you two are making me cry. Jag älskar er så mycket. Thank you ❤️

yourbff: fuuuuuucking finally

yourbff: happy for you all 🤍

liked by y/n.official

charlesleclerc: still waiting on that bag

y/n.official: check your backseat 😇

charlesleclerc: both of you get back from the brunch. right now.

comments are restricted

author: teehee im dabbling in smau’s in hibernation

[redxx95]

How Cherry Magic avoids romanticising self-sacrifice

Alright strap in boys, this is gonna be a long one.

Spoilers for the manga (mostly the english volumes but I will include a bit from vol 12. I'll mark it tho so yall may skip it if you don't want to be spoilered).

So in this one I want to examine how cherry magic does a great job at portraying self-sacrifice in a relationship as an actual flaw rather than a romantic ideal to aspire to. Very often you'll see characters in media putting their own needs aside for their lover. A lot of people will swoon at that because it is usually presented as proof of how dedicated they are to their partner and their wellbeing. (See... well the thai adaptation actually).

But what has pleasantly surprised me is how Toyota handles this in her manga.

Starting from the beginning, we all know the millions of things Kurosawa did for Adachi to get closer to him. After all, that is what's usually expected of him if we talk traditional gender roles. But one of the reasons Adachi even starts falling for Kurosawa is because of how he was for once able to do something for him.

For someone with very low self-esteem, being able to help this super-capable perfect man is a big boost in confidence and also raises his own selfworth.

So now let's look at a few instances of selfless action and the consequences resulting from them.

First one is the disaster-date in volume 4

Kurosawa does his very best to choose activities that he thinks Adachi will enjoy. That is his primary concern.

The effect this has on Adachi though is that the gap between them feels impossibly wide, only worsening his already low opinion of himself.

Whenever Kurosawa does something big, it makes Adachi feel that much smaller. That's why he'd rather them be equals in everything instead of one giving more than the other.

Next is the argument they have in volume 8

Kurosawa attempts to, very selflessly, protect Adachi from his lowkey homophobic parents. He doesn't want them and their opinions to hurt Adachi personally, so he ends up lying to him to keep the peace. The effect this has on Adachi though is disastrous. At first he's just generally worried about why Kurosawa would even lie to him in the first place, but then they have that fight in their living room and you really get a good look at how negatively this affects Adachi.

The very first conclusion he jumps to is that he's not doing good enough for Kurosawa to feel secure with him.

The next one is even worse, where he thinks he's not good enough in general. Both of these show how when pressed, he will default to blaming himself, believing that he is the problem first and foremost.

And then, if all of that wasn't bad enough, this happens next:

He's actually being self-deprecating again, something he hadn't done ever since Kurosawa told him not to in volume 5. And yes you can actually go back and check for yourself. Whenever he has negative thoughts after this point he's always pushing back.

So there's an escalation happening here, one that is entirely caused by Kurosawa not sharing his burdens with him, by making their relationship unequal.

I think it also hurts him extra bad because they've had this argument before, just with their roles switched.

So to him it must feel like Kurosawa is betraying the important lesson Adachi learned from that argument, which is that communicating with your partner is important, even when you feel like it might hurt them.

There's also something to be said about how most people would've probably stopped prodding when someone says "it's something I can't tell you", but Adachi knows that Kurosawa has a pattern of hiding his issues from him thanks to the mind reading, which is the whole reason they had that argument in vol 6 in the first place.

So, to summarize: Whenever Kurosawa acts selfless it takes a toll on Adachi's mental health. Because of his low self-esteem he needs to feel on equal terms with Kurosawa to be able to see himself as worthwhile. (And obviously he also loves Kurosawa and doesn't want to see him in pain just in general.)

So after all that, surely Kurosawa would have learned his lesson, right? Surely he wouldn't just do it again, right?

... Spoilers for volume 12 start here ✨

So volume 12 is all about Kurosawa overworking himself because he's been assigned this big project by their chief to oversee their company's spot at a stationery convention. (I didn't look up whether or not that's a real thing but it is in the manga universe I guess lmao.)

Adachi tries to help alleviate his burdens with mixed success.

(On the left he feeds Kurosawa because he needs to finish his work and doesn't have time to eat. On the right he tries to take a phonecall for Kurosawa but gets told that Kurosawa needs to hear it personally so relaying a message won't do.)

Then Adachi muses to himself how Kurosawa was always helping him out in the past and how Adachi can't do anything for him in return, especially since they're in different departments. He feels very useless, which is once again bad for his mental health.

Later at home, he offers to at least take over the chores for the time being, but gets told that Kurosawa actually enjoys doing chores so there's no need for him to help.

Kurosawa tells him that all he needs is Adachi to be close to him, while making out with him on the sofa. And right here we see how he only got half the lesson he was supposed to have learned in volume 8: In their fight Adachi told him that they should both be happy and he should share "all the hurt" with him, too. Well, the simple solution to that is not to see all his burdens as burdens, then he's not hurting and Adachi doesn't need to bother fussing over him! Win-win. Epic mind gymnastics 😎 (To be honest, I feel like this is actually very relatable to people that tend to give more than they take. We get so used to the weight of the burden that we don't notice it slowly pulling us down.)

So Adachi obviously notices what's going on and berates him about not having understood anything he said from that fight.

Throughout the volume Kurosawa gets more and more overworked, makes mistakes and is confronted with unexpected complications. He's very adamant about not asking anyone for help though, stating that he "can't be bothering his senpais any more than he already has" and that he's "doing this all for the sake of his future with Adachi".

He also still has some hangups about people seeing him as just a pretty face, as you can see in that flashback in the second page. He constantly feels the need to prove himself to others, which prevents him from ever seeking out help.

So when he inevitably reaches his limit, Adachi is finally able to be there for him, being the only one that sees through his facade.

(That hand kiss is so precious 😭)

Also, on that first page Adachi asks him whether or not he's fine, which reminds me of this panel from volume 6:

He really knows him so well.

Emboldened by his husband, Kurosawa finally does ask for help and is, of course, met with understanding and sympathy.

.

Spoilers for volume 12 end here ✨

So all this to say: Sometimes, when we try our best to be selfless and to protect the people close to us, we do more harm than good. Sometimes we cause harm to others (see volumes 4 and 8) and sometimes we cause harm to ourselves (see volume 12). It is of course a noble cause but it's not something to strive for at all times and can sometimes be actually counterproductive to what we wanted to achieve in the first place.

As someone who breaks themselves apart to help all the people around them, this aspect of the manga resonated very strongly with me and is probably the biggest reason I got so obsessed with this silly little BL romcom.

I know that this manga is not like, the best in quality. I know it's super niche and silly and cannot compare to the big popular mainstream manga with lots of depth and thought put into it, BUT.

A piece of art doesn't need to be "good" in order to resonate with people. You don't need to paint the mona lisa to reach someone and make them feel seen. You just need some sort of medium and a will to communicate something to the observer. (Something an AI could never replicate but that is a whole other discussion.)

This manga reached me when I needed it and it communicated a message that resonated with me and that is all it needed to do for me to love it to the point of obsession. 💖

Finally I'm done with this essay it is so long oh my god. If you reached the end of this, I'm so sorry. I hope you enjoyed it tho.

[dreamauri]

♪ — 𝗟𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗦 𝗥𝗢𝗖𝗞 - part one max verstappen x fem! driver! reader ( fluff ) series summary . . . when the lives of an f1 and wec prodigies collide, hey find out hey find out that they're not that different and carve out a place for their selves in each others hearts. the commentators from sky sports call this puppy love

( fic master list | general master list ) ( requests ) ( next )

fic summary . . . it's unexpected when you make an entrance into max's life and maybe a bad idea as well to let you in. but you seem unavoidable, like a clear neon sign that says take the chance. so when he's near you once more he takes the chance.

★ ☆ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“I— oh. Actually, I just got news from Y/N. She’s getting out of the hospital.” Luke Crane’s voice informed over the voice chat. Max Was too concentrated on the race ahead of him to ask questions or look away from his screen.

“She’s-- oh she can join the chat actually. You can hear her . . . now,” “mother fucker thinks were playing bumping cars.” The men on the call laughed once they heard you speak, quickly shouting greetings and ‘get well soon’s.

Max didn’t know you personally, he’s never interacted or been in the same room as you. He’s heard of you, Y/N L/N, redline driver and a WEC racer. “What happened?” “Man kissed my ass.” You chuckled a little calmer now. “To be fair though, it was their gentleman driver.” “Yeah but now my wrist is broken.”

The chat continued on while the men raced. Max didn’t intervene or butt in, he just listened quietly. He’s never seen you before, or knows what you look like. It’s his first time hearing your voice as well, and he hated how sweet and sugary it was, sending shivers down his spine, reaching his toes with each giggle or laugh.

You’d left the call once you’d arrived at the hotel you were staying at, you’d been talking with them throughout the drive. From the information Max gathered, you crashed out at your constructor, Toyota’s, home race. Your wrist bone was fractured, a small crack so it was hanging in a sling.

Silence enveloped the group until someone spoke up, chuckling about how they forgot Max was there. The dutch shrugged, "I'm concentrated on beating your asses right now." He joked, brushing the situation off. He probably wont run into you anytime soon.

He didn't want to either. He hasn't even been in the same as you and you were already making him feel things. It probably would be a good idea to keep distance.

★ ☆ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

"Y/N! Y/N!" The calling of your name attracted some attention as Martin Brundle followed you through the grid. "You're still here?" You smiled at the question, waving a small greeting to the commentator.

Max gulped as he walked up the grid to his car, watching you chat it up with the brit. "I decided to stay over for a bit. Can't really do anything with this," you waved your slung arm. "So I'm just spending time in the factory and around Japan."

Max was looking at you through his visor, thankful no one could tell his eyes were turned your way and that you couldn't see him admiring you. You looked like such a strong woman, someone who was fun to be around, a woman who gave a good challenge and a night to remember.

He wasn't particularly happy with you being in the McLaren garage, hugging lando after the race, which he won. Max gave a little celebration up on his car before jumping down to take his weight and the post race interview.

It wasn't long before he was sat in the cool down room and pulled out for the podium again. And while the Dutch national anthem played, his eyes searched for you. With your arm in your sling, you stood between the papaya employees, waving to lando once the anthem concluded.

That sort of stirred something in max. He wanted you to wave at him. But then again, you didn't know him. And he didn't know you. And Max did want to know you.

Being in your radius maybe wasn't such a bad idea?

★ ☆ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

"You are taller than I expected." Max felt you whisper in his ear from beside him. He tried to play it off but the shivers got down to his spine and his voice went straight through his body, head to toe. "What do I reply with?" He found himself asking you quietly as everyone gathered for the FiA prize giving ceremony's award winners picture.

Out of the corner of his eye. Max could see you lifting up your WEC champion trophy, a smile on your face. "You could ask me out for a drink after this." You whispered back just before the camera went click!

People started to pull away from each other, ready to return to their seats and leave. And even though you were seated on the other side of the room, you walked beside max. "I know a place. Care to join me?" He asked quietly, walking down the stairs first, holding his hand out to help you down.

He was glad you took your hand. His soft eyes on you and your dress as you kicked it annoyed to walk down. "As long as I get to wear a hoodie and sneakers." You told him before taking your hand from his and walking back to where you and your team was sat.

Max watched you until Horner broke him out of his trance, guiding him back to their own table on the other side.

[intheorangebedroom]

Tonight you belong to me, chapter 2

Summary: He comes to you every Friday, in a shady motel on the outskirts of town. 

Two months have passed since your first time at the motel with Frankie. What has changed, what hasn't. Who are you now?

Pairing: Frankie Morales x fem!Reader (OFC)

Rating: Explicit 🔞 PLEASE, see series masterlist for extensive trigger warnings.

A/N: Happy Frankie Friday, Orange besties 🧡 How are you all? Gentle reminder that our Reader is an OFC. In this chapter, we get to know her better, and there are indirect physical descriptions of her. Sincerest apologies to anyone who knows Tampa. I did a lot of research, but I'm afraid my ignorance will still show… I swear I did my best. Raul is real, though. He's a friend of a very dear friend and he lives in Paris.

@frannyzooey my love, as always, I am in your debt. Thank you for your help. I love you more than words 🧡

I hope you enjoy this one, Orange besties, it made me sweat blood, @dreamymyrrh and @pedrit0-pascalit0 had to listen to my constant whining to put me on life support. Ily 🧡

Word count: 8.6k

[prev] * [series masterlist] * [next]

Chapter 2: Closer

The traffic is dense, but you spot Ava’s red Toyota as soon as it turns into E 7th avenue. 

On any given Saturday, the upbeat neighborhood is bustling with cheerful crowds of leisured weekenders and hip thirty-something. On this particular Saturday, the first after Thanksgiving, the streets are a vision from hell. 

There’s a constant ballet of cars pulling in and out along the curbs. On each side of the avenue, the sidewalks are swarming with jittery shoppers, frenetically prospecting for good deals on potential Christmas gifts. You’re willing to bet that most of them will stretch their budget thin on useless, meaningless knickknacks. Generic trinkets without soul nor purpose but that will, for the first half hour of ownership at least, fill the void in their consumers’ existence. 

The traditional Christmas tree of unholy proportions is up and sparkling. Wrapped around the iron porch columns, electrical garlands blink in rapid sequences like luminescent spasmodic snakes. Storefronts are decorated with more or less taste. The temperature has dropped twice below 70. It’s that time of the year. 

The merry season usually finds you adding a generous helping of anxiolytics to your daily cocktail of little helpers. This year, however, you haven’t popped a pill in days, and everything feels… more. Louder, too vivid, more oppressive. Sensations magnified and emotions amplified. Which is, after all, what you were aiming at when you unilaterally decided to taper off your intake. 

Ava miraculously secures a free spot on the other side of the avenue, about a hundred yards in front of yours. You watch her parallel park, the maneuver surprisingly sloppy, given the parking assist technology the brand-new hybrid car is equipped with, and you wonder if you really needed to spend that much money on it.  

In front of your own parked car, pedestrians agglutinate at the crosswalk. When the light turns green, they move as one, like flocks of extras on a movie set, coming to life on cue when the director yells “action!” 

They’re not extras, however, each one of them is the main character in the movie of their life. Together they form a constellation of individual and interconnected stories, while you stand at the margin, forever exhausted, willfully forlorn. At best, a supporting part in Ava’s fantastic tale of eccentric adventures, but more likely a backdrop in your father’s gripping success story.

Although, your narrative has changed drastically over the past two months. You now got a part in your own right, unfolding in between takes. 

You wait until Ava gets out of her vehicle before you exit yours, reluctant to leave the hushed safety of your old sedan’s cab, even for the few minutes it’ll take you to meet with her and step into the coffee place. 

You wave at her from across the busy street until she sees you, but when she proceeds to jaywalk over to you, reckless and entirely indifferent to your pleading expression, you have to avert your eyes. There’s a crosswalk right in front of you, god dammit.

She levels up with you and pecks a kiss on your cheek, hitting your cheekbone with force, more headbutt than demonstration of affection. 

“Hey,” she says, barely stopping in her tracks before she pushes open the glass door to the coffee shop.

“Hello, pup,” you answer fondly, your words lost to the street’s bustle. 

Inside, the artificial air instantly pulls at your skin. The atmosphere is cool but dry, saturated with the smell of freshly grounded coffee beans and greasy-sweet pastries. The high-ceiling, cement floor, wide open-space is packed. The brick walls reverberate the ambient noises, and the late morning sun beams brightly through the large floor-to-ceiling windows, evenly spaced along the lateral walls. People sit in small parties around the white designer tables, sipping iced coffees from tall red paper cups with white snowflakes, large shopping bags at their feet. 

Trying your best not to shrink and shrivel from the multiple overwhelming stimuli, you focus on Ava’s back, walking behind her as she leads the way to a free table at the rear of the coffee shop, between the counter and one of the windows. There’s a regal quality to her gait and the way she carries herself, not unlike your father, the resemblance enhanced by her preference for masculine clothing, and you have to love the irony, given how much she hates the man. She has your mother’s beauty, though. The same luxurious dark hair, fair, flawless skin, and wide green eyes, her frame tall, her figure athletic. She’s the masterpiece. Next to her, you look like a clumsy first draft, with blurry edges and hesitant features.

She throws her jean jacket on the back of her chair and collapses on her seat with a theatrical sigh. 

Across from her, you sit down gingerly on the edge of the hard wooden chair, balancing your weight around the sore and delicious ghost sensation of Frankie between your hips. 

“You look good,” you start. 

“Yeah, you too!” she exclaims, like it’s unexpected, “tired but like, good. Are you getting any sleep?”

You smile, waving your hand dismissively. 

“Don’t we have to go to the counter to order?”

“No, it’s fine,” she answers, “they serve at the table. I’m having an oat milk matte, what do you want?”

“An espresso, I think.”

Right on cue, a young woman dressed in a black cropped top and black skinny jeans presents herself at your table and proceeds to tap in your order on a rectangular electronic device. Her long acrylic nails hit the screen with a rapid succession of click-click-click. The sound brings you back to your parents' dining-room, the large table standing like an angular island on the shiny square of reflective tiles, in the middle of a shag carpet ocean. Your mother’s nails, painted in Revlon Desirable #150, rattling impatiently over the lacquered surface of the dining table near her untouched plate and a glass of G&T sweating with condensation. She never ate her food. She drank even when she was pregnant. 

Your fingers find the back of your knee and pinch the thin skin there, so hard you flinch. 

The waitress waltzes off, and Ava returns her full attention to you. 

“I’m happy to see you,” she offers, and you smile softly at her uncustomary expression of affection. Your chest expends. “It’s been a while.”

There’s no reproach in her tone, but you are usually the one expressing ill-concealed concern over her long silences, and the reversal in your dynamic throws you off. Guilts gnaws at you. You choose defense. 

“You were away.”

“Yeah, but like, I came back three weeks ago.”

Three weeks. Your smile fades and you slump in your chair, running a quick mental calculation. 

Time has never been an easy concept for you to grasp, but until recently, you’ve managed to remain afloat and functioning, on a practical level at least, amidst a society that revolves around schedules and timetables. The watch on your wrist, yearly organizers, recently and reluctantly replaced by the iCal app on your phone, sticky notes, tin boxes filled with tickets stubs… All clutches to your failing memory, anything to keep you tethered against an overpowering and primal instinct to escape, let go, drift away. And perhaps, most of your exhaustion stems from this endless swimming-race against the current. 

Lately, your inability to remember appointments, to navigate time and hold an effective grasp on reality has reached a new high. For the past two months, your life has revolved around Friday nights and the sound of a red pickup truck pulling in and out of a decrepit motel’s parking, tires screeching on the gravel. Inside this timeframe, your entire life is contained. Around it, the days stretch, spiral, and blend. And you’ve lost all motivation and interest in any counter-current swimming. 

You frown slightly, scanning her face, but she doesn’t let on anything out of the ordinary. After all, if she genuinely worried, if she so badly needed to see you, she could have given you a call. You were the one to reach out and ask to see her this morning. 

Something’s different about her, in the way she holds herself straighter on her seat, with her legs crossed and her head tilted to the side, exposing the undercut she got before the summer. You’re still not entirely sure if this was the bold fashion statement she claimed it to be, rather than a dramatic reaction to her girlfriend moving back to New York. With Ava, it could be both. She’s not wearing any makeup today, her face looks disarmingly young, and the concern she’s expressed, however subtle, churns your insides with guilt and affection. 

You plaster a polite smile on your face. 

“Well, I’m here now. It’s good to see you, too. Tell me, how was New York? How’s Polly?”

The waitress returns with the pastries and beverages you ordered, and Ava begins to narrate her two-week trip to the big city. She speaks fast, punctuating her words with large gestures to describe the cultural buoyancy, the hip neighborhoods and her thrifts finds, the street food and the refined, cutting-edge restaurants, how everything is bigger there, faster and better, how she fell safe walking hand in hand with Polly, the clubs, the galleries, the weather, crisp air and chilly winds from the north, a refreshing, comforting seasonality to pace the existence. 

“I was fucking crying when I boarded the plane back, you have no idea.”

“Oh, I can imagine,” you sigh, shaking your head. “You don’t miss her too much?” 

She doesn’t answer, and something in the way she avoids your gaze makes you frown again. 

Polly and you have always gotten along well. You genuinely appreciate her solar personality and her worldly conversation. Their encounter four years ago had been the silver-lining in an otherwise horrendous year. The happy, coincidental consequence of a chain of events that had been years in the making. 

When Ava dropped out of college halfway through her freshman year, it provided your father with the excuse he had been waiting for to kick his own child out of his house. You had seen it coming. In fact, you had spent your entire adult life shielding Ava from the paternal discontent, investing all your strength into becoming the son and successor he had wished for, and that neither of you could ever be. 

Ava, however, had never put in the effort. She didn’t fit into the family portrait. She never had. You didn’t want her to, and she simply couldn’t. Too rebellious, decidedly unconventional, and, well, queer, to boot. Your father had spent years formatting you and there she was, standing proud, strengthened by your unconditional support, a glaring highlight of your diverging values, a breathing reminder of his failure with you both. 

In the aftermath of the fall-out, Adrian had refused to take her in, and she had spent days out of your sight, sleeping god knows where. Eventually, you’d dug your heels in, as you only ever did when Ava was concerned and her wellbeing on the line, and obtained that she move in with you. The cohabitation hadn’t gone smoothly in the least. As usual, Adrian was more concerned about potentially upsetting your father than making you happy. You were once again caught between crossed fires.  

The strained situation with your fiancé notwithstanding, Ava couldn't spend her time sitting idly at home. You had pleaded with her for weeks before she agreed to resume her studies. Only this time, it had to be with your funding. The realization that you didn’t have any consequential money of your own had been brutal, even though it shouldn’t have been a surprise: you lived in Adrian’s apartment, and were employed by your father, who refused point-blank to let you sell some of your company shares, knowing the money would go to his estranged daughter. 

All you could afford was Hillsborough Community College, but things had eventually taken a turn for the better when Ava and Polly had met. Polly was teaching psychology, waiting for a tenure that she would never be granted. Because of the 20-year age gap between them, she insisted Ava graduate with her BA before they started properly dating. And when they did, the improvement in your sister’s mental state and overall balance was immediately noticeable. 

Calm and collected, affectionate and thoughtful, Polly grounds your young sibling. She eases her anger and channels her energy into creative and fruitful endeavors, without snuffing her rebellious temper. 

And now, despite Ava being almost fully independent, with a job and a place of her own, you don’t know what you’d do if they were to break up. If one of them were to decide that a long-distance relationship is not what she wants. 

You lean forward, your hand coming to rest over hers, warm and smooth. “Hey pup, what’s up? Is everything ok between you two?”

“Oh yes,” she quickly assures you, withdrawing her hand, “and by the way, she sends you her best.”

Understanding downs on you like a bucket of ice. You suddenly feel stupid, pathetically naive, forever one step behind. Leaning back in your chair, you let out a short, soundless huff. What you’re facing is not a breakup, but the likely possibility that Ava will soon move out of town to follow Polly to New York. 

Ava is talking again, about New York you’re guessing, but you can’t focus on her words. Behind your impassive eyes and your attentive smile, your mind reels and wrestles with a downpour of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Pride flares in your chest at the prospect of your baby sister setting roots in a city as intimidating as New York, but it tugs at something else, something you’re too scared to consider, and an ugly feeling you’re reluctant to acknowledge.  

Would she hesitate before leaving you behind, after you’ve prioritized her freedom over yours? After you stayed so she could fly away? And wouldn’t it be the point? 

Your eyes travel up along the trail of small tattoos adorning her forearms. Dominos, tea cups, a white rabbit with round glasses, a flamingo, several thin arrows, a broken heart in flames. 

What’s your purpose, if she’s not here anymore? If someone else is looking after her? If your sacrifice is no longer necessary nor justified?

“How was Thanksgiving dinner? Did you have fun talking about politics with Richard?” 

You wince involuntarily at your father’s name. She never refers to them as “mom” and “dad.” She hasn’t for a long while. But today the sarcasm doesn’t fool you, no more than her feigned indifference. 

She’s not truly asking if you had to bite your tongue and smile through conversations that make you nauseous. She knows well enough you’ve got just enough political convictions to carry you to the voting poll, but hardly a step further. Listening to him is painful, but you get by, and your shameful silence buys you necessary peace. 

No, what she wants to know is if your family inquired about her. And you don’t have it in you to answer that no, no one has, not last Thursday, not for the past four years, not ever. Not your indifferent father, nor your inebriated mother. Not your bigot grandparents, not your egotistic aunt and her gold-digging husband, not even the housekeeping staff.  

You shrug noncommittally. 

“Who were the guests of honor, this year?”

The question makes you groan and briefly close your eyes at the memory. 

“Adrian’s parents.”

“No?! Fuck! They really want this marriage to happen, don’t they? Looks like you’re not gonna be able to dodge much longer.” 

She smacks her hand over her thigh, letting out a short staccato of a chuckle, as if the subject of your confinement through marriage was a laughing matter. You glare at her, crossing your legs and folding your arms over your chest, but the shifting in your demeanor goes unnoticed.  

Suddenly, her levity riles you up. She got away. You didn’t. And the only thing that carried you through this year’s Thanksgiving dinner is the perspective of being fucked senseless by a stranger on a dirty motel floor the following night. 

For a brief moment, you’re tempted to bite, and retort that, contrary to her, you didn't spend the holiday on your own. But the truth is that you envy her the privilege, and she knows it.

Taking a deep breath that does absolutely nothing to calm your growing nerves, you stir the conversation towards another topic, finding neutral ground with her job. You’re stalling, and you’re not even good at it. You sit restless on that damn hard chair, squirming uncomfortably, sweat prickling under your armpits in the chill artificial air, eyes flicking down to your watch every other second. 

“Do you have to be somewhere, or something?”

Your head shoots up. Again, you have no idea what she’s talking about, or how long she’s been rambling for. This is ridiculous. You are being ridiculous.

“Listen, Ava, I have to ask you something. A favor. I have to ask you a favor.”

Her eyes widen at your sudden change of tone but she nods. “Hit me.”

“I need you to… I need to be able to tell Adrian that I spend… that I spend Friday nights at your place. Actually, I’ve already been doing it for a while. He thinks we see each other on Friday evenings. I just… I need more time. I need the night.” You grip your shin with both hands and dig your nails in. “It really doesn’t matter anyway, he’s not home on Fridays, he plays poker and he never comes back until like, 3 or 4am, and I just need— I need to be able to come home after him. Not, like, every week. Or yes, maybe every week. Just in case. If ever. You know?”

She remains completely still and silent as you wrestle your words out of your throat. Her face hardens, her wide, green eyes strained on you. She gauges you in silence for another moment, while you rub your clammy palms on your jeans under the table. Above the table, you do your very best to maintain a casual air.

“And what exactly is it that you do, on Friday nights?”

You anticipated the question, of course you did. You swallow around the sharp stone stuck in your throat. Your eyes dart down to your espresso cup. It’s empty. 

“I’m just taking a bit of time off for myself.” 

More time, to commit his body and his face to your long-term memory after he’s left you, depriving you of his heat. The tiny bits of him that add up to form the formidable sum of the man he is. The locks that curl around his ears. The dip in his collarbone. The little target tattooed on his hand. You’re never sure which hand it’s on, you need more time, that’s all. And you won’t lie to her, not exactly. You set your mind on that early on. But you will not tell her the whole story.

A large shit-eating grin slowly parts her plump lips. 

“Are you telling me that Richard’s favorite daughter is getting some side dick on a weekly fucking basis?”

“Jesus, Ava, why do you always have to be so crude?”

“But you are? Right? You are getting dicked down, every fucking Friday night? Right? Are you on Tinder, or something?”

“I’m not—” you start, but her excitement is louder than your exasperation. She uncrosses her legs to lean toward you, propping her elbows on the table and threading her fingers together, talking over you. 

“Why didn’t you tell me? For once that something cool–”

“Because there’s nothing to tell,” you retort through clenched teeth, raising your voice. Her mouth hangs open in shock. You don’t give her time to recover. “And look, if you don’t want to do that for me, it’s fine, it’s not like anyone is going to call you to ask if I’m with you.”

She takes the blow, leaning back in her chair. “Wow. You really thought this through, didn’t you?”

You don’t answer, shame and anger burning your cheeks.  

“Why you’re telling me now, then?”

“Like I said. In case.”

“I case what? In case I find myself on a Friday evening in the same place Adrian takes his cuntsluts?”

You steel yourself and stare at her. 

“Something like that, yes.” 

—

Two months. 

Two months of lies and deception, shoving your bright secret deep down inside you, shrouded under a veil of routine and normalcy.

Nine weeks, split into six days of stretched out hours, swirling languid and excruciating, like smoke from a cigarette stub in a room without air, and one day of counting. The minutes, your steps, your breaths, your heartbeats.

Saturdays, worn-out, appeased, pleasantly aching. Sundays rising slow like a lurking threat. Mondays-Tuesdays-Wednesdays merging, dragging and useless. People talking to you, expecting words, when your mind is filled with two glistening bodies entwined in golden hues. A tremor on Thursdays, the nearing promise, and by Friday morning you’re all frayed nerves and aching want, tapping into your pent-up emptiness for focus and patience. 

Friday evenings sliced up into a ritualized sequence of actions. 

At 6pm, you leave your office and head toward the employees' underground parking. There are 37 steps from your desk to the two silver-doors elevators on the landing. Seventeen stories down, including 2 underground levels, and 58 steps from the elevators to your designated parking place. It is crucial that you don’t allow the pace of your steps to catch up with the racing thumps of your heart. 

From downtown Tampa, it’s an hour and thirty-six minutes drive north on the 589, before you reach the motel. An hour and fifty minutes, two hours top, if the traffic’s bad. There might be faster alternative routes, but you don’t use the GPS, so you don’t know about them. 

Once you’re there, you park in front of room number 7, the one with the missing brass  number. You stuff your phone into your purse, which you slide under your seat. 

You exit your car and walk towards the reception in short, hurried strides, cursing the tight skirt that hinders your steps and gives your posture a subdued aspect, which is probably why your father imposes the garment on his female employees. 

The reception is a square room with an old humming AC unit, dark-brown fabric wallpaper, yellowing popcorn ceiling and a counter behind which sits Raul, the night clerk. Raul is a short man in his mid-60s. His dark eyes are reshaped into tiny concentric boot buttons by the thick lenses of his small, round glasses. His light brown, straight hair is styled in a bowl cut. He only wears beige Henley’s with rolled-up sleeves and indigo painter overalls. You’ve never seen his shoes.

Every week, Raul hands you the key to room number 2 without lifting his boot-button eyes from the charcoal drawing he busies himself over behind the counter, and tells you in a thick accent that “everything has already been taken care of.” 

Every week, you thank Raul, grab the key from his stretched out left hand, and chance a glance over the counter to see what he’s drawing. Mountains, infallibly, week after week, the scenery only varying in shape and shades of anthracite. 

And every week, as you exit the reception, you feel Raul’s boot-button eyes strained on your back through his round glasses. 

When you step inside room number 2, you flick up the two toggle switches by the door, turning on the lights and the overhead fan, and you go to the bathroom to wash your hands and check your reflection in the antique black-edged mirror. 

Then, you return to the room and you sit on the bed. That’s where you wait for him. 

You don’t undress, you don’t lie down, you don’t undo the bed. 

You know what he’ll do to your clothes. Anticipation trickles down along your spine all the way to the ripe heat between your thighs, and it travels right back up to tug up at the corners of your lips, but you press them together, lips and thighs, as you wait.  

He comes in after dark, preceded by the sound of tires on gravel and that of his boots stomping on the porch and he’s here, Frankie’s here, the rush of night air from outside when he storms into the room wafting over your face. 

He greets you with a hoarse voice, like he hasn’t used it all week, and he takes a couple of long strides towards the desk, where he sets down his cap. You peer at his reflection in the framed mirror when he combs his fingers through his dark curls, tense jaw, creased brow. You study his broad shoulders, the rippling muscles of his strong back, when he takes off his jacket and drapes it on the back of the chair, swift, precise gestures. It’s his own ceremonial, you let him have it, his transition into this world that you share. The confine of this room. Brown carpet, yellow curtains. 

When he turns to face you, at last, it’s always with a heavy, grating sigh, a sound so rough and primitive to express his relief, his hunger, the limit of his patience. You stand up slowly, unfurling in slow motion from your sitting position on the edge of the bed, eyes on him, forever and always. His want radiates from him in colorful angry waves, like a tangible, virulent aura, black eyes boring into your skin and you welcome it as it pours out of him and creeps up to you like thick fumes. 

You stand tall in the charged stillness of the motel room, offered, but not quite yet within reach, waiting for him to come and seize you. 

“Take off your clothes,” he says as he comes closer, tilting up his chin. The command rumbles low and guttural from his throat, and those words are your cue. You clamber out of your statuesque stillness, twisting your ankles out of your pumps while he tugs at your blouse, as he crashes his lips onto yours. 

His first kiss is voracious, unescapable, your face trapped between his cupped hands, and you’re engulfed in the taste of him, drowning in the scent of him, leather and soap and musk. And something metallic you have no name for. It’s intoxicating, you’re floating, losing both bearings and balance, like when you were thirteen, and you’d sneak to the downstairs pantry to drink your mother’s gin before dinner. 

On some Friday nights, you’ve already made it back to your glass prison when you notice a tear in the seam of your shirt, or a missing button. “Take off those fucking clothes, I wanna feel your skin.” 

“Yes,” you answer with parted lips, parted heart, parted life, jaunty fingers working your skirt open.

Beyond that point, neither of you talks much. 

It’s his name –Frankie– falling from your lips, a long but quiet whimper when you come, a whine of pleasure-plain when he inches into you, a moan when you plead for more, a whisper when you promise you can take it all. 

It’s his clipped orders, sharp and short. 

Open up

Push back into it

Let me hear you

I want you to come on it

And two words, always the same since that first time in the parking lot. 

Stop me.

Stop me when he pins your hands above your head or folds your arms in the small of your back, his fingers like shackles around your wrists, and he lines himself up. Stop me before his saliva drips down his tongue in fat drops between your breasts, and he straddles your chest. Stop me, when he closes a fist in your hair and slides you down along his hard length, your chest caving in under your gag reflex, beads of tears like precious shiny diamonds clinging to your lashes. Stop me when he angles your spine backwards with a sudden tug on your hair, when he bands an arm across your belly and ragdolls you to the floor to fuck you harder and deeper. Stop me when he ties your wrists to your ankles with the black zip ties that bite into your flesh. 

Stop me with the flat of his hand pressing down between your shoulder blades, Stop me with his thumb teasing your tight ring, Stop me with your legs around his neck. 

Those two words, a beacon guiding you through the week that precedes. 

Sometimes, when you’re alone, you repeat them to yourself. 

“Stop me,” you say, low and quiet, facing the mirror when you're applying makeup, staring straight into your eyes, so intently it twists your reflection. 

“Stop me.” A whisper, and a slow-spreading, carnivorous smile that splits your face in two because someone, at last, wants you beyond reason. 

Stop me. You will never stop him. 

He fucks you twice, three times a night, before he leaves you covered in him, sated and sprawled on the rumpled bed around 2am, with a nod and a husked, “I’ll see you next Friday.” He sounds calm at last. Drained. 

Once he’s gone, in the rumbling of the pickup’s engine and the screeching of the tires, your mental countdown to the next Friday is reset. You crouch into the narrow bathtub of dubious cleanliness, and ruefully wash him away in the trickle of hot water. You try to hold on to the thought of him, even more so than to the feeling of his touch. That’s what the soreness is for. It will stay with you until Monday at least. 

But in your memory, his face is blurred. Only his sad angry eyes stand out, dreamlike, entrancing.

There's a conflicting distance beyond his hunger. An underlying restraint beyond his roughness. Withheld intimacy. A reluctance to give into your softest touches, when his forehead briefly rests on the plane of your chest, and you circle his neck, or carefully run your fingers through his sweat-soaked curls. 

It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to understand that if he wasn’t in here with you, he’d be somewhere else, doing something worse. 

Some weeks, you go through strings of sleepless nights and restless days of anguish, your mind spiraling to the agonizing thought that you are nothing more to him than an empty and interchangeable vessel into which he can fuck his rage. 

With masochistic thoroughness, you pull taut a red woolen thread to connect the clues of your insignificance. 

He doesn’t name you. There are no sweet names, no terms of endearment, and he certainly never calls you Marion. The sounds he produces when he’s inside you, that’s your reward. Deep guttural grunts, and if you’re lucky enough, they resonate through your whole body when he holds you tight and close. 

He never comes inside you. Where do you want it? he pants, when his hips start to fall out of pace. “Mouth,” you quickly answer, always, a greedy match for his gritty ways. And most times, he obliges. Flips you around or scoot over you and shoves his pulsating cock into your warm, wanton mouth. 

But sometimes, he doesn’t. The thick pearly white ropes of his spend spurt over your back, your belly, your chest. That’s when he’s got a mind to rub it into your skin. That’s when you want to believe he might have chosen you to be here with him. 

In those scarce instances, you are tempted to rely on your instinctual understanding of your relationship. Far from the toxic codependency that, according to Ava, you feed into with Adrian, what you share with Frankie is elsewhere entirely. Week after week, he presents himself before you, visibly wounded, willing to offer exactly as much as he needs to receive. The balance is perfect. No travesty, complete equality. The purest form of interaction. The most honest transaction you’ve ever taken part in. 

And thus, no matter how remote he may seem on some nights, no matter how dark his eyes, how clouded his gaze, or how brutal his hold, you can’t help but feel safe. 

The feeling thrums underneath your skin and finds an echo in his bloodstream. You hear it in your shared silence, when you lie side by side on the bed and stare emptily at the ceiling, chests heaving, bodies cooling off. When a shiver rakes through you, he gets up and turns off the overhead fan. Walks over to the bathroom to bring you a glass of water. 

He’s given you everything you wanted and didn’t know how to ask for. 

And when he looks you in the eyes, he doesn’t blink. 

Stop me, he says, and what you hear is, Trust me. 

He’s been quick to learn your body, and he’s greedy with your highs. He keeps you pinned down onto the threadbare linen with his mouth fastened around your cunt until your legs tremble and your throat is hoarse with your repeated high-pitched moans, the stubble on his cheeks scraping the sensitive skin of your inner thighs. Bestowing pleasure, drinking it right back. 

Your body expands into new sensations, after years of a dormant existence, curled up within your outer shell into the tightest ball, the smallest possible shape. You’re spreading, stretching into your limbs, filling them in. Growing nerve endings that shoot farther along your extremities with each fiery kiss, each starving touch, each orgasm, like trees rooting in beautiful, intricate ramifications. 

The wild creature nestled between your lungs has a mind of its own. You’re developing emotions unknown to you until now. 

The tranquil contentment he leaves you with when he steps back into the night and closes the door behind him rapidly fades over the following days. By Sunday evening, there’s nothing left of it, and you find yourself shivering, deprived of his heat, unsettled, agitated. 

Your mind wanders to her. The faceless, nameless woman he drives back to after you’ve fucked each other free of your pain. 

Envy, tinged with hatred, pours ugly inside your chest, pressing against your rib cage, hindering your breathing, its heavy particles tainting your oxygen. 

Does he handle her with reverence? Does he use sweet names to beckon her into his embrace? Does he spit in her mouth, does she beg him to? Does he rub his spend into her skin, or does he stuff her pussy full of his seed?

Whenever you loosen the grip on your thoughts, you’re brought back to a large reception room on the last floor of another glass prison, stilettos wounding your feet, strangers with empty smiles and cruel eyes drinking from crystal champagne glasses. The excruciating misery of having to interact with Adrian’s colleagues, laughing at golf jokes you did not understand, desperate to fit in. Fighting your survival instinct, to tether yourself and not present a blank stare to those people you were supposed to impress. As Adrian’s fiancée. As your father’s daughter.

The effort seemed worth it, then. You were in love. Or so you thought. In hindsight, you’re not certain anymore. Reinterpreting your past is a temptation you try not to succumb to. In more then one way, you still love him.

There was a hushed tremor in the faceless assembly of tuxedos and cocktail dresses, and you saw her entering the room, parting the crowd. Slender, swaying, lush honey blonde locks and incandescent hazel eyes. Junior partner at Adrian’s firm, quickly climbing the ranks, flawless makeup and oozing self-confidence, she smoked Vogue cigarettes and when your gaze returned to Adrian, everything fell into place. You knew with a chilling certainty that this formidable young woman was fucking your boyfriend. 

Adrian had had a couple of flings in the past, but this one was different. He fell for her hard, a grown man in a teenage-like trance. Your blood left your face when you realized everyone else in the penthouse, and most likely in the firm, could see what you were seeing. 

You decided then and there that you were never going to marry him, regardless of what he or your father would threaten you with.

But even then, what you had experienced wasn’t jealousy. You’d felt trapped, and yes, betrayed. Wounded, in what little self-esteem you possessed. Thoroughly defeated. But you did not feel jealous. 

You understand it now, and every time you think of Frankie’s touch grazing the faceless woman. Every time you torture yourself into considering the nature of their bond and the depth of their attachment.

Would Frankie look at you the way Adrian looked at her? With blunt desire, unabashed, irrepressible thirst? With belonging? Would people around you know? Would they identify you as lovers? 

After all, a single glance had been enough for him to take you from a bar, to a parking lot, to a motel. To make you desperate to mean something to him. 

Does he miss you outside your shared time? Does he think of you? Does his mind wander to your skin in the blue morning hours, does he try to name your scent?

Deep down, you are no fool. If there’s one thing you’ve always known in this life, it’s your place. 

But some Friday nights are more dangerous. They give you too much hope. Prompting you to call your sister, for instance, and risk your little secret so you can spend more time in the small room with the yellow curtains. Wrap yourself in the dirty sheets that bear his musky scent, instead of jumping into the shower. Linger into that breach of your life’s continuum. Extend the delusion.

Last Friday, he buried his face into your core and drew violent waves of release that he kissed back into you, swirling his tongue into your mouth to coat it with your taste. 

His face was shiny with your slick and his body glistening with sweat in the soft yellow hues from the bedside lamps, when he got up to the desk and slid his belt out of the loops of his pants.  

Your eyes grew wide, but not with fear. 

He placed you face down on the bed, with your arms along your chest, and he trapped your body with the belt. You accompanied his movements, docile, curious, without apprehension. The metal buckle was cool on your feverish skin, and the leather smelled like him. 

Stop me. He was hard and thick, and he fucked into you in long, thorough strokes, dragging the round tip of his cock along your clenching walls, slamming his hips into the swell of your ass. With his thumb pushing into your asshole and his hand around the belt to keep you where he needed you to lie still. 

You came in seismic tides that quaked along your body in concentric ripples, from your wrung out core to the extremities of your fingers and toes. The sound that came out of your throat was unrecognizable, and perhaps it was his. Your mind tipped over into unconsciousness. When you resurfaced, his cock was rubbing in the cleft of your cheeks, his come leaking down the curve of your back, mixing in with your combined sweat, his chest pressing down onto your shoulder blades. 

You felt his lips brushing against the shell of your ear, hot breath searing his choked up words into your soul. 

“You’re a good girl. Say it. Say you’re a good girl.”

“I’m— I’m—“

“That’s it, say it for me.”

He was lying heavy on top of you, sinking you into the mattress, his belt buckle digging into your side. This was going to leave a mark. 

“I’m a good girl.”

“You’re my good girl.”

You will never stop him. 

—

Sitting on the edge of the bed, with your back straight and your ankles crossed, you wait. Eyes on the yellow curtains, darting beyond the dusty fabric into the warm December night. It’s yours. All of it. Yours until morning.

There’s the faintest hint of a bad taste sitting on the back of your tongue. Coppery, bloodlike. It comes in waves every time you remember how you twisted your baby sister’s arm into covering for you. But the night is yours. You swallow hard, force a smile. You want to be guiltless, for once. 

“Polly says you’re overly secretive. That you like to live ‘hidden between the folds of life’, as she puts it. Something about culpability being a coping mechanism…”

The words, delivered flatly after you’d stubbornly diverted and defused all her questions, had cut through the most tender parts of your flesh. 

“Is that her professional opinion?” you had retorted, your chin tilted up as if you were not bleeding inside. 

You swallow hard again. If you close your eyes, if you concentrate, you can almost hear it. The pickup’s engine, bolting down the asphalt, bringing him into your needy arms. You can feel the heat radiating from his solid chest and seeping into your body through your palms, resting empty and upwards on your lap. Your tongue tingles with his tangy taste, a trail of goosebumps breaks across your skin, anticipating his caress.

Frankie.

The daydream that carries you through the week, carries you through that very last stretch.   

Until the man himself storms into the room like bad weather. Dark, electric, a standing threat. 

One look at his face and you know. It’s going to be one of these nights that make you doubt everything. 

At first, the change in the script is barely perceptible. There is no gentle acclimatization, no ceremonial, no tacitly shared ritual. He doesn’t face away to let you observe his reflection in the mirror. But he looks like he hasn’t slept since last Friday. The crease in his brow is forbidding, his eyes are too bright, too clouded, circled in black and you’re dizzy with the distance you find there. Tension rolls out from his taut muscles underneath his clothes and you stand up, alert, if not entirely ready. 

“Get naked,” he growls, tugging his gray t-shirt over his head, his trucker hat falling to the floor and tonight, you miss your cue. 

Instead, you come closer, extending your hands towards him. You call him in a murmur, Frankie, but the wild thumping of his heart under your trembling palms cuts you short. 

The light flickers in his eyes, so you hang in brave, hang onto the thread of your touch, sliding your hands up his burning chest. He stills. His gaze focuses on you for the first time since he came in. Your fingertips brush lightly along his collarbone, to the dip at the base of his neck, where they linger, underlining the hollow shape of it, skating around his neck to his nape. His brow shifts, his jaw ticks, and you draw him in for a kiss.  

He jolts when your lips meet his. His hands grip your hips, rough and desperate. This is the part where you melt into him, surrender to his touch, but tonight the balance is tipped off. He licks into your mouth with a pained, muffled whimper, and your eyes remain open. 

You’re powerless, powerless to get to him and bring him back to you from wherever the hell he may be. And his distance settles between your two bodies, an invisible partition. It stands erect and opaque, projecting its shadow over you when he lies you down on the synthetic quilt and dives between your hips. His ministrations are detached, performative, mechanical. There’s no contained urgency in his handling of you. Empty touches, empty silence, and you orgasm weakly, the sensation floating on the surface of you. 

You can sense him, trapped behind his black eyes and this damn crease that splits his face above them, only you can’t reach him. He won’t let you. For every one of your attempts at a caress, at tenderness, is rejected by a shrug, a push of his hand, a shake of his head. 

Sweat breaks on his forehead and dampens his curls as he becomes restless, showing none of the familiar signs of the relief he finds in your release, when he hums softly into you, lapping at your entrance to capture what you offer him, what he drew from you. Impatience and desperation roughen his grip on you. He shoves you to the head of the bed and you scramble, sliding on the slippery quilt, curled on your side, until you’re caged between his rigid body and the headboard. 

There’s no warning, no Stop me, when he lines himself up with a stifled groan. You bury your face into the pillow and bite down on it to muffle the pain when he splits you open. He starts rutting into you with unrestrained strength, forcing through the vice grip of your tight cunt around his hard length. You try to relax into it. That’s all you ever want, for him to fill you up, to be inside you and around you, but that’s the thing: he’s not touching you. Not really. 

Instead of gripping the curve of your hips, or kneading your breast, or lying between your shoulder blades, his hands are clenched on the headboard, white knuckled. His bent knee doesn’t quite touch your folded legs, his hips don’t even slap against the swell of your cheeks.  

“Frankie,” you try, but your voice comes out thin as a ripping thread. It’s immediately drowned under the sounds filling the room, the creaking of the bed, his strained breathing.  

“Frankie,” you call again, louder this time, reaching to the side to grab his thigh. 

He jerks at the contact, sliding out of you with a hiss like you just burned him with a red-hot iron. You grab the side of the headboard to haul yourself up. Behind you, you feel him falling back on his knees. For a few seconds, you can’t bring yourself to move. You remain hunched over, fingers wrapped so tightly on the hardboard, your nails digging into the cheap, tender wood. 

“Fuck,” he breathes out, and you turn around to face him. 

Your heart sinks and chatters at the sight of him, of his glassy, pleading eyes that won’t meet yours. His chest heaves with exertion, and the weight of something else. He grazes a palm over his face, tilting his head down. 

“I hurt you. I fucking hurt you, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

Tonight, this is it. These words are your cue. 

“No,” you start, scooting closer to him as he shakes his head, exhausted, isolated. The gesture no longer carries the warning it did as he was about to succumb. It’s a measure of his failure, of the depth of his defeat, and it chills you to the bones.  

“No,” you repeat, stronger, and you offer him the only lifeline you know. 

Closing the physical distance, you straddle his lap and wrap your arms around his shoulders. When his body stiffens, you harden your hold.

“Frankie… Frankie…” you coo, again and again, like his name holds the solution, and all of your devotion. You say it as you press your forehead to his, as you rub your cheek against his stubble, as you nuzzle the sharp edge of his nose, and trace his plush lips with yours. 

Until his shoulders sag under your embrace, until you feel the choked up breath that quakes his chest, you keep repeating his name. A few minutes, or an infinity of seconds, time doesn’t matter anymore. The night is yours, your skins are glued together in the soft yellow light. 

His arms circle your waist, hesitant at first, but you encourage him, raking your fingers through his hair, twining them into his soft curls. He lets you, he gives in, tucking his face in the crook of your neck. He inhales you there, raising the soft hair on your nape. His voice is broken when he speaks.

“I’m not–” 

“Frankie don’t, please don’t,” you cut in. 

You know the words that are piling bitter and desperate on his tongue, know them on an instinctual level. You feel them swirling, black and hopeless inside his head, you’ve known them from the very beginning, recognized them in the sadness of his angry stare. And you won’t let him pronounce them inside this room you share, you won’t let him give them any kind of substantiality. Not between your arms, not against your skin. 

“I’m not hurt,” you begin, pulling back to see his face, to look into his eyes and sink your words of hope and faith into him, past the barrier of remorse and regret, “I want everything you–” but his brow furrows deeper as he clenches his eyes shut, and you trail off. 

Panic briefly floods your brain. You’re acutely aware of your shortcomings and limitations, of all the things you’ve never been taught growing up. How to translate feelings into words, how to express compassion, how to care for others. How to be heard. 

You take a deep, shaky breath, your breasts pushing into his chest. 

“Look at me, Frankie baby. Look at me. Let me–”

Let me in. Let me be yours. Let me mean something. 

Your plea dies on your tongue when his eyes shoot open. They shine with unshed tears, pierced by a ray of light from the bedside table, and for the first time, you see that they’re not black. They were never black. His eyes are brown, a deep, rich, precious mahogany brown. The color paints your vision, it flows into your bloodstream and courses along your veins. It spreads into your heart, gets tangled in your soul. Around you, the whole world disappears, along with everyone in it. There is only him, his mahogany eyes brimming with tears, and the feeling of his hot, damp skin against yours. 

His arms wrap tighter around your back, his warmth seeps into your bones. His hands find purchase on your curves, drawing you closer. 

“I want you so badly to be real,” he whispers, quiet and pained, like he can’t ask you this much, but you know that, for him, you’re willing to be. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says again. 

Swallowing down the tremor in your throat, you give him a tender smile, tinted with gratitude, colored with praise. You cup his face, fingernails scratching at the heart-shaped patch on his jawline. His eyes flicker down to your lips, and you give him what he needs, leaning in to press them to his. 

Underneath you, his length throbs with unreleased hunger, and you sway your hips over it. He moans against your lips, the vibration trails down to your core like hot, liquid amber. His tongue peaks out, and you open up for him, like you always have, like you always will. A grating sound comes out of his throat, an echo of your gratitude, a mirror of your pain, a reflection of your loneliness. 

He breaks the kiss to lift you up gently, helping you find friction with his cock sliding between your folds, where it pulsates hard and thick against your clit. Your limbs turn to molasses, toffee soft and sticky, but your hips lock into a slow, languid rhythm, slick pooling down on him as you stroke him between your two bodies. His right hand skates up flat along your spine, to settle on your nape. 

He draws you in closer, closer than you’ve ever been. His heart beats inside your chest, enveloping the purring wild creature you still can’t name or tame. 

“Make us come, baby.”

A dry sob undulates up to your throat. Your eyes fill with hot tears, they spill against his temple. Mahogany explodes inside your brain. The night is yours. 

“Yes, Frankie.”

“Make us come together.”

****

Taglist (thank you 🧡): @elegantduckturtle @mashomasho @lola766 @flowersandpotplantsandsunshine @nicolethered @littleone65 @bands-tv-movies-is-me @the-rambling-nerd @saintbedelia @pedrostories @trickstersp8 @all-the-way-down-here @deadmantis @hbc8 @princessdjarin @harriedandharassed @girlofchaos @gracie7209 @mrsparknuts @your-voice-is-mellifluous @mylostloversbookmarks @readingiskeepingmegoing @lovesbiggerthanpride @youandmeand5bucks-blog @sarcasm-theotherwhitemeat @southernbe @blackvelveteen1339 @anoverwhelmingdin @casa-boiardi @nandan11 @jessthebaker @pedroshotwifey @angelofsmalldeath-codeine @noisynightmarepoetry @missladym1981 @laughing-in-th3-purple-rain @survivingandenduring @jeewrites

[things-about-cars-in-posts]

Which cars are most bisexual?

Ever get the chilling feeling that you made a grave mistake long ago and you are about to reap what you sowed?

In short, I hit some of my friends up to ask for help. In random alphabetical order:

@jettacar suggested the fourth gen Nissan Quest:

"It's like, no one really bought these. They aren't particularly common. But also, there's no one type of person that buys a car like this. Rationality would have you believe only families are buying this, because it's a giant minivan - but i can't immediately think of another car with a wider variety of types of people that own them right now (excluding cars that just sell incredibly well)"

Unfortunately, that made the conversation derail into minivan talk.

Up next, @rabidragon suggested the Fiat Multipla, due to its peculiar seating arrangement of two rows of three seats:

"3 seats in the front for you and your man and your woman".

Indeed, the peculiar thing about the Multipla is its row of three full-sized seats in front (many old cars had a front bench with some having three lap belts, but the Three Individual Front Seats club is as exclusive as it is devoid of prestige) and the many peculiarities that it caused, like off-center pretty much everything (mirror included) because the driver is further to the side than usual and where most of the centered things go there's now a passenger who would like to be.

But the even more peculiar thing about the Multipla is how spectacularly ugly it is. It's one of the few cars I've ever actually seen that manages to be full-on ugly not just outside but inside. Click on any list of ugliest cars in the world and if it doesn't contain the Multipla I can promise you that list was created by a machine that has since been physically shot. And if you're thinking "Well, it's not bad enough to warrant that hyperbole" - you are looking at the second generation. This is the pretty one. I put the first one and its interior at the end of the post under a read more because I genuinely did not want to be responsible for you seeing it.

I noted that Honda's FR-V managed the same seating layout with downright smart looks inside and out...

...and unfortunately that made the conversation derail into engine swap regulation loopholes.

Finally, @chevyventure suggested multiple. In (roughly) his words:

First generation Mazda 3 "It's a hatchback, good for many different uses - and Mazda is a little silly, charming and off the beaten path (if you were getting a Japanese hatchback you'd probably get a Toyota or a Honda) with a cute lil' smile like a Miata"

1988 Volvo 240 Wagon "Volvos are frequent hand me downs from family like all the cool childhood trauma the LGBTQs get"

[Editor's Note: bro.]

Renault Clio "It's peak hotness while also being cute in its own way, not necessarily preferring a masculine or feminine audience. I've never seen an ad for a Clio before, but if my assumptions about the car market are correct my guess is the normal one is kinda marketed towards women"

[Editor's note: So, I wanted to check that, so I just looked up "Renault Clio ad". These were the first two ads I found.

So yeah. I feel it qualifies.]

Unfortunately, talking about the Clio made the conversation derail into TWR's involvement in- oh wait, you're not gonna know about that Clio variant, are you.

So, many racing series can only be entered with racecars based on some production car - which is great for manufacturers, because they get to advertise their brand and one of their models simultaneously! But since there are rules on how much of the base car can be changed and how much of it must be retained, the stricter they are the more what you want as a base for your racecar is something high performance. So when you want to go racing with a dinky little thing like, say, first car to ever use plastic bumpers and only car to ever be called Renault Le Car in America Renault 5...

...what you are going to want to do is what, among many others, Toyota did with the Yaris GR and Lancia did with the Delta: the homologation special. Basically, you make a special version of the car with the characteristics you'd want in racing, sell enough to clear the rules's bar for "production car" (or at least, convince the officials you've done that), and go racing with that. So Renault did that to the 5 and hit up one Marcello Gandini to redesign it around the changes. You know, Marcello Gandini, guy most famous for designing mid-engined Ferrari-slayers:

Which makes sense, because the Renault 5 Turbo was a mid-engined Ferrari slayer. It was faster than the top-of-the-line Ferrari both in acceleration and in cornering speed. This thing.

(sidenote: The Interior. end of sidenote)

Well, twenty years on, some legend at Renault thought "You know what? We were onto something with that. Let's do that again but HARDER." Presumably, into the headquarters of Tom Walkinshaw Racing, a racing team that developed for Aston Martin, F1 teams, and made Jaguar's Fastest Production Car Ever record holder, and of course a fuckton of the most exciting racecars around, showed up uninvited that Renault madman saying "Y'all wanna work on something REAL prestigious?" before chucking them the keys to a second generation Clio and walking off with a "Don't thank me".

The result was the Clio V6, most notable for HAVING A FUCKING V6 WHERE THE BACKSEATS WERE. This car is genuinely incredible. Like, you see it and you go "Ooh ahh, the Clio V6!" and you look inside to see, you know, the huge V6 compartment thing and you see the interior and you realize this thing cost good sportscar money and when you got in it was a fucking Clio.

Mental stuff- wait shit this post was about bisexual cars wasn't it? How did the conversation derail like this? I swear this never happens. Well, I guess it's time for my pick.

Personally, chatting with Mr. Venture about hatchbacks, I realized that I cannot think of a more "girls car" than a Fiat 500 Cabriolet (which actually is called 500C) and cannot think of a more "boys car" than a Fiat 500 Abarth (which actually is called Abarth 500)...

...so how about the Fiat 500 Cabriolet Abarth?

It actually isn't called that but I think you could piece that together. As though a spoiler on a canvas roof wasn't weird enough, it contains the third brake light, probably making this the only car out there in which it can change position during use. Although I assure you, you're not gonna be thinking about that when driving it. Thing's a RIOT.

But honestly, that wasn't what I started off wanting to answer. So, last but most definitely not least, I candidate my first, gut-reaction answer: the NA Mazda Miata.

See, to me bisexuality (and pansexuality, but awareness of the nuances between them is so low they may as well be picked over flag preference) is someone appreciating all the beauty in the world, seeing no point in gatekeeping themselves out of half of it. And is that not what a spider is about? Is it not about saying "this world we're in is so full of beauty, who would rather blind themselves to half of it?". And look at the damn thing. It's bursting with exactly the kind of joie de vivre one would associate with such sentiment. It oozes enthusiastic curiosity. OwO what's this?: The Car.

Also, just look at this picture.

It can drift. IT CAN WINK. IT CAN WINK MID-DRIFT. I mean, what more than this degree of flirtatious playfulness can you possibly need to be convinced?

Links in blue are posts of mine explaining the words in question - if you liked this post, you might like those!

...

...are they gone? I think they're gone.

The Multipla pictures are down here. Go on then if you're gonna, you sick fuck.

If you have dealt with traumatic tumor-related experiences and seeing that dashboard caused you genuine discomfort, well, do not say I didn't warn you.

[chicgeekgirl89]

Summary: While responding to a multi-car pileup, Carlos is involved in an accident that leaves him fighting for his life. A/N: This was a request from @rubinsteinsilva126. They requested: I’d want a Carlos Whump story! Carlos getting injured, riding in the ambulance that TK responds to the call of, and then TK later holding Carlos in the hospital bed because Carlos was in pain and needed comfort 🥺 (Also, they requested this almost a literal year ago. So I am no longer taking requests because I am clearly bad at following through on them! 😂)

Read on AO3

T.K. does not want to be at the scene of a multi-car pileup. T.K. doesn’t want to be at work in general today. What T.K. wants is to be at home, in his bed, with the covers pulled up over his head, his moody playlist blasting in his ears.

But unfortunately his work schedule doesn’t care about his feelings in the slightest and instead he’s arriving in an ambulance at said multi-car pileup in the middle of the highway.

And his husband is here. Because of course he is.

T.K. spots Carlos directing traffic around the accident as soon as they pull up in the rig. Usually this would be a delight. Usually he would smile and wave and feel a rush of joy at seeing Carlos during a call. There’s something special about working together to save lives. 

But today he is not thrilled.

“Oh look, there’s Carlos,” Nancy says as they jump down from the rig and start gathering supplies. “Are you going to go say hi?”

At that moment Carlos sees them, his eyes locking with T.K.’s. Neither of them smile and after a second Carlos looks away, focusing on directing a blue Toyota around the mangled mess of cars.

“Well that seemed a little frosty,” Tommy says as she steps up next to them.

“Frosty? That was downright arctic,” Nancy says, eyeing him curiously. “Trouble in paradise?”

T.K. shifts the backpack on his shoulders, annoyed at how the straps are already digging into him after only a few seconds. “Carlos and I,” he says testily, “are in a fight.”

“Well that explains it,” Nancy says with a roll of her eyes. “You’ve been grouchy all day.”

“No I haven’t,” T.K. snaps back at her in annoyance. The only thing worse than being pissed off at your husband is having your friends point out that you’re pissed off at your husband.

“Sweetheart if looks could kill we’d both be dead,” Tommy says gently. “Several times over.”

“Well I’m—” T.K. huffs, “I’m mad at him.”

“Yeah that doesn’t mean the rest of us should have to suffer,” Nancy says. “What are you so mad at him about?”

T.K. turns his hands into fists, squeezing them tightly as all the feelings of the last twenty-four hours bubble just underneath the surface of his control. “He keeps turning the thermostat down.”

Tommy and Nancy both blink at him. When they don’t speak he presses on. “I turn it up and the next thing I know I come back out and it’s turned down again. It’s like he doesn’t even care about climate change at all!”

“Haven’t you two lived together for like, a long time now?” Nancy asks. “Shouldn’t you have worked out the temperature of your living space at this point?”

“We had to replace the thermostat last week,” T.K. says. “It’s all different now.”

“I understand that must be frustrating, but I’m not sure it’s worth having a fight about,” Tommy says.

“That’s not the only thing,” T.K. continues. “It’s the pillows.”

“The pillows?” Nancy asks.

“He buys allllll these throw pillows and puts them all over the place, but guess what? Are we allowed to touch them? Lean on them? Use them for what they’re intended for? No. Why? Because they’re ‘decorative’ and if I lean on them they’ll ‘lose their shape.’ Isn’t that insane? Why do we have them if we can’t use them?”

“Okay, yes, that does seem kind of annoying,” Tommy says, but T.K. is on a roll, and now that he’s started airing his grievances to the public he can’t seem to stop.

“Also he got his hair cut too short last time!” he gripes, glaring at the back of his husband’s head.

“Um, his body his choice dude,” Nancy says.

“I know that!” T.K. says with a scowl. “But he knows how much I like his curls and he didn’t even tell me he was going to do it, he just showed back up at the loft looking like a sheep after shearing!”

He can hear the words they’d hurled at each other even now, as if he’s reliving them.

T.K. had come out of his shower, still toweling off his hair when he’d heard the whoosh of the AC system kicking on. Eyeing the thermostat on the wall he’d sighed. “Seriously Carlos?” he’d said, turning to look at his husband, who was reading in their bed.

“What?” Carlos asked in confusion.

“You turned the thermostat down. Again.”

“Yeah…” Carlos said slowly. “It was getting stuffy in here.”

“You know that air conditioning is a big part of the issue with our carbon footprint.” This shouldn’t have been a big deal to him, but T.K. had come from a meeting grumpy and in the mood for a fight.

Carlos set his book down and scoffed. “I don’t think using the air conditioning that was built into our home long before we moved in is that big of an issue T.K. We live on the top floor. Heat rises. It gets warm up here without it on.”

“Then open a window.”

Carlos bristled, rising to the bait T.K. was laying out for him.“It’s ninety five degrees outside! The air is so stagnant out there it’s like opening an oven door! Why are you freaking out about this?”

“I’m not freaking out, I’m just asking you to think about the environment and our electric bill!”

“Our electric bill is fine! What do you want me to do, plant a tree every time I turn the temperature down a degree?”

“That would be a start.”

Carlos rolled his eyes. “It’s my home too T.K. I should be allowed to have a say in it.”

“Oh, like I have a say with the throw pillows?” T.K. snapped.

“That’s totally different!”

“How Carlos? How is it different? You want to use the air conditioning, I want to use the throw pillows. It’s exactly. the. same.” He gestured sharply with his hand to emphasize his point.

“Because the air conditioning doesn’t lose shape and color when you lean against it! I picked them all out, I’d like them to stay nice so that when people come over they don’t look like shit!” Carlos’ eyes flashed dangerously, a sign that he was well and truly pissed off.

“You think our friends are judging us for our misshapen throw pillows? Wow you really are a control freak.” 

“You don’t care if our friends think our home is nice?”

“I really don’t.” That wasn’t true, but it felt good to say it in the moment.

Carlos rolled his eyes.“Okay. Sure. Next time we have game night we’ll just let our all friends sit against lumpy, flattened pillows.”

“Do you not hear how insane that sounds?!”

“Oh, is it as insane as keeping mealworms in our refrigerator next to our food so they last longer?”

T.K. gapes at him. “You said it was fine!”

“I said it was fine. I didn’t say I liked it,” Carlos said, his lips pressing together into a thin line.

“So you’d rather Lou II starve? Is that what you want?”

“No, of course not T.K.! It is unbelievable to me that you would even say that after all I’ve done for that stupid lizard!”

They’d gone on for another fifteen minutes before descending into frosty silence after T.K. declared he hated Carlos’ new haircut. Both of them refused to move to  the couch so they laid angrily next to each other until they fell asleep. The silence had persisted through the morning as they readied for work, ending in a terse, “Love you, be safe,” from both of them before they headed out the door.

“You’re comparing your husband to a sheep?” Tommy asks, an amused smile on her face.

“Yes!” T.K. gripes. “And that’s not all. He also—“

There’s a screech of tires and a car, a silver Honda, pulls out of the line of vehicles that are waiting to pass the accident and tries to zoom around them. Time slows and T.K. sees what’s about to happen and realizes there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

The Honda clips Carlos and sends him spinning, his body whirling like a top before he collapses to the ground, unmoving. 

“CARLOS!” His husband’s name tears from his lips and T.K. is running before he can think, feet flying over the ground to reach Carlos’ side. He skids to a stop and drops to his knees, backpack falling to the ground beside him.

Carlos is flat on his back, eyes wide, mouth gaping as a harsh, rasping sound escapes from his chest. He looks shocked, terrified, and T.K. can tell his own face is a mirror of the same horror. “Carlos, Carlos, hey, hey talk to me,” T.K. babbles out, hands hovering, afraid to touch, all his training completely gone from his mind as panic takes over.

“T.K.” His name comes out on a whimper and T.K.’s heart shatters inside of his chest. He’s never heard Carlos make such a terrible sound in his entire life.

The world around him feels like it’s moving through sludge, everything slow, muffled out of focus. The only thing he can see is Carlos’ pained expression. And then there are hands on T.K.’s back and everything snaps into real time as Nancy and Tommy join him on the ground.

“T.K. back up,” Tommy says sharply. “Give us some room to work.”

T.K. shuffles back awkwardly, hands clenching into the knees of his uniform pants to stop them from shaking. 

“Carlos, baby, where are you hurting?” Tommy asks as she takes scissors to Carlos’ uniform shirt.

“My…chest…” The words barely come out, strung together on forced gasps that sound terrible and painful. “Leg…”

“He’s not moving air,” Nancy says, a stethoscope pressed to Carlos’ chest. “I think it’s a pneumo Cap.”

“Okay, we’ll have to decompress him,” Tommy says. “Grab the kit. And a splint, he’s got a tibia fracture in his left leg.”

“On it.”

It’s all moving so fast, everything a blur, and T.K. is struggling to keep up with it all. It doesn’t feel real, this can’t be happening. Not to them. Not now. Not again—

“T.K. come hold his head,” Tommy orders.

In hindsight he’ll wonder if she really needed his help or was just giving him something to do so he didn’t come apart at the seams on the asphalt of the highway, but in the moment he does exactly what she asks without question, his hands, cloaked in blue gloves, cradling Carlos’ head just above the c-spine collar they’ve put on him to keep his neck stabilized.

Carlos’ terrified eyes look up at him, boring deeply into his own and T.K. should offer some words of comfort, tell him he’s going to be okay, that they’re taking good care of him, but he can’t. The words won’t come.

He can tell when they finally shove the needle into Carlos’ chest, feels relief when air hisses out and Carlos takes a huge breath. “That’s it, keep breathing Carlos,” Tommy says as Nancy slips an oxygen mask over his face. “You’re doing great. Just relax and let us take care of you.”

She glances up her eyes finding T.K.’s and usually he would grab onto the calm he sees in them, but he can’t right now. His spirit feels wild, like it’s been torn loose from his body and is whirling around in an uncontrollable storm. “T.K., you with me?”

“Yes,” he rasps out. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Good. Because I’m going to need your help getting him onto the backboard.”

They roll Carlos on and then get him into the ambulance. Later T.K. will find out the entire event took less than ten minutes. In the moment it feels like hours. 

T.K. sits in the back of the ambulance with Tommy as Nancy drives. He watches as Carlos’ body finally starts to relax, morphine doing its work as it drips into his veins. 

He looks up into T.K.’s eyes and it’s only then that T.K. realizes he’s crying, his eyes a darker brown color than usual that only comes when tears are falling. T.K. reaches down and carefully wipes them away.

“I’m—“ Carlos’ voice is breathy and muffled behind the mask, but he pushes the words out anyway, “—sorry.”

T.K. shakes his head his own tears falling now, droplets landing in his lap and soaking into his pants. “You don’t need to be sorry,” he says, brushing a hand gently through those short curls that he said he hated last night and now he loves more than anything in the world. “I’m sorry.”

“Call…my….mom?”

T.K. nods. “As soon as we get to the hospital and you’re checked in okay?”

Carlos’ eyes close and T.K. thinks the medicine and the pain have finally pulled him under, but then the blinks them open again, and they spear him with a terrified intensity. “Scared.”

Oh god. Oh god this is going to break him. “I know you’re scared,” T.K. says, clearing his throat when his voice cracks and resuming brushing his fingers gently through Carlos’ hair. “But you’re okay. You’re stable and we’re almost to the hospital. They’re going to take good care of you and soon…soon all of this will just be a memory. We’ve got you. Tommy’s here and Nancy and…and we’ve got you.”

He hopes that will be enough.

Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the hospital Carlos is taken off to be prepped for surgery. That’s when T.K. finally loses it, collapsing into a chair and sobbing into his hands as Nancy rubs his back while Tommy takes over the task of calling Andrea and his dad.

“He’s going to be okay,” Nancy says, but T.K. can hear tears in her voice too. “It’s a pneumo, some bleeding, broken bones, it’s all fixable. He’ll be all right.”

“What if he’s not?” T.K. cracks out. “What if this is…what if he…and the last thing we did was fight about the thermostat?”

“T.K., Carlos knows it was just a fight,” Nancy says. “Couples have fights. About important stuff and stupid stuff.”

“She’s right.” Tommy sits down on his other side. “Just because you were having an argument, it doesn’t negate everything else. Carlos knows that. And you do too.”

“It was just so stupid,” T.K. says, sniffing and wiping ineffectually at his eyes which will not stop crying. “How could I have been so stupid?” He struggles to push the next words past his throat. “I don’t want to lose him.”

“I know,” Tommy says. “Let’s not go there yet though, hm? Let’s have faith. Carlos is strong. He can pull through this.”

Andrea and his dad arrive and T.K. pulls it together enough to be strong for his mother-in-law who needs to believe that she’s not going to watch her only son die when the loss of her husband still feels so fresh. T.K. explains what happened, interprets everything the doctor told him on arrival, discusses what the surgery will entail, and the possible outcomes. 

It’s exhausting and he takes himself off to the bathroom for another crying jag about two hours after they arrive, returning with red, swollen eyes that they both can see. Andrea immediately folds him into a hug and they stay that way until the doctor finally returns.

He reports that Carlos’ surgery went well. They repaired his lung along with some other internal damage and set his leg fracture. He’s also got three broken ribs and a concussion, but overall he’s in good shape considering. It could have been much worse.

Somehow that phrase doesn’t feel like a comfort.

Tommy and Nancy leave once Carlos is settled into a room. He’s very out of it, the sedation and heavy pain medication taking a severe toll on his ability to stay awake. He manages a hello to his mom and Owen before lapsing back into sleep again. It’s brief, but it goes a long way toward reassuring them all that he’ll be okay. 

His dad heads out after that to grab some things from the loft so T.K. doesn’t have to spend the entire night in the hospital in his uniform and Andrea decides to go to the chapel for a little bit. T.K. is grateful for the space.

He sits in the chair next to Carlos’ bed, picking at a stray string on the cuff of his shirt. God he fucking hates hospitals. They’ve spent more time inside these walls the last few years than any human should have to. If he never has to come here again it will be too soon.

“T…K.?”

The croak has him snapping his head up to find Carlos struggling to open his eyes, pain lining the tension in his limbs, the darkness of his eyes, the creases of his forehead. He has medication onboard, but it’s like his body still knows how broken it is, even if he can’t fully feel it.

“Hey.” T.K. sits forward and forces a smile that feels like it’s straining his face. “Hey baby.”

Carlos swallows, the pain mixing with confusion in his eyes. “Am I—?”

“You’re okay,” T.K. says. They filled him in the first time he woke up, but it’s clear that it didn’t stick. “You were in an accident. Your lung was collapsed and you have a broken tibia and some ribs, but you’re going to be okay.”

Carlos nods, his eyes closing briefly as if he’s struggling to take it all in. “I’m okay?” Carlos asks, like he’s really not sure.

“Yes,” T.K. says firmly, reaching out to cover the back of his hand. “Yes, you’re okay. It’s going to be a long recovery, but you are okay.”

Carlos’ next breath is shaky and full of tears. “I’m not—I don’t want to leave you.”

God damn it just when he thinks he can’t cry anymore. “You’re not leaving me,” T.K. manages to choke out, squeezing his hand. “You’re not—you’re not dying. I promise baby. I promise.”

“I love you,” Carlos is crying in earnest now, like he has absolutely no control over his emotions. “I love you. I’m sorry.”

“Shh,” T.K. soothes, sliding the chair closer so he can run his hand up and down Carlos’ arm. “There’s no need for sorries.”

“I wasn’t safe.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Carlos swallows hard like it hurts him to do so. “Do you want some water?” T.K. asks and when Carlos nods he helps him sip a little bit.

When he’s done he licks his lips and meets T.K.’s eyes. “We can turn the thermostat up.”

T.K. chokes out a laugh, his eyes still damp with tears. “I don’t care about the damn thermostat.”

“I don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Me neither.” T.K. grabs a tissue and uses it to gently wipe the tears from Carlos’ face. “We’ll bring in a neutral third party to deal with the thermostat setting. Paul can do it.”

Now Carlos manages a small huff of a laugh. “And we can use the throw pillows.”

“Thank god,” T.K. says, trying to lighten the mood. “I was ready to sign the divorce papers on that one.” He reaches up and brushes a hand through Carlos’ hair. “And I love your hair. I love all of you. All the time. Any way you are.”

“I love you too.” He shifts a little bit, trying to get more comfortable. “Was my mom here?”

“She’s in the chapel. I think she needed some time to herself,” T.K. says. “My dad was here too. He went to grab us some stuff. If there’s anything particular you want from home I can text him.”’

Carlos shakes his head. “Just you.”

“I’m here,” T.K. says immediately. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Thank you.” Carlos closes his eyes and a shudder runs over his frame.

“Are you cold?” T.K. asks. He knows all too well that blood loss brings on a special type of chill. One that settles into your bones, that you can’t get rid of no matter how hard you try.

“A little,” Carlos says, shivering again and then letting out a small, pained sound as the movement jars his injured body. “Can you…can you hold me? Please?”

He shouldn’t. There’s barely any room in the hospital bed. And Carlos is covered in bandages and IV’s and the cast on his left leg. But honestly, T.K. needs some physical reassurance as much as his husband does right now.

So he carefully maneuvers himself into the bed, moving so slowly that it’s almost painful, tucking himself up against the railing so that his touch against Carlos is practically featherlight. “Why don’t you try and get some sleep,” he says quietly, running his fingers gently over Carlos’ stomach in a soothing motion. 

It always helps Carlos sleep to have his back rubbed, but this will have to do for today. He watches as the tension slips out of his husband’s body, sleep pulling him down and T.K. breathes out. They’ve survived. Again.

[coimbrabertone]

NASCAR is Kinda Maybe Vaguely Doing Something and People Are Mad About It

In a race weekend of rain, delays, and Stewart Haas cars hitting the barriers every five minutes, the biggest story coming out of the NASCAR Chicago Street Race seems to be this crossover EV prototype...and people are mad at it.

Well, people are also mad that Bubba Wallace steered race winner Alex Bowman into the wall after the race, but one: a NASCAR driver getting mad and bumping into someone else after the race is a non-story, two: the same people that are mad at Bubba are probably the same people that are mad about the EV prototype.

So, at the Chicago Street Race, NASCAR finally unveiled the EV prototype that everyone already knew about - they were going to unveil it at the LA Coliseum preseason race but then they didn't because that race also saw rain and they ended up truncating the weekend - so how did they do this?

Did they announce it was going to replace one of the three national touring series? Maybe trucks since, you know, trucks and crossovers are both big.

Or maybe the Xfinity cars, since those are still a generation behind and Ford and Chevy just run the same models there as in Cup, so maybe a crossover for that series would make sense.

Or maybe start out with a new, more standalone series on street courses or something, sorta like a stock car version of Formula E.

Well, no, they did none of that.

Quite literally all they did was having the car speed off from a standing start and talk about some of the specs.

It's a 1300 hp car designed in collaboration with Ford, Chevy, and Toyota, David Ragan has been the test driver, and it was to promote a new collaboration agreement between NASCAR and ABB - who is also the title sponsor of ABB. That's all it was.

And yet, NASCAR fans are acting like these things are gonna replace Cup for next year. It's a dramatic overreaction.

I'm not even particularly a fan of EVs. I enjoy the noise and power coming from a car and I think that EVs - particularly Teslas and wannabe Teslas like the Ford Mustang Mach E - are deliberately garish, bulbously proportioned, and expensive props that the driver uses to convey how much more environmentally conscious and morally superior they are to the average driver.

So yeah, to a degree I understand why the "core" NASCAR fan or whatever may not agree with that message.

But...they're not even doing anything with it. It's a promotional piece for NASCAR to take to corporate events and all that.

The closest NASCAR is to an EV series is that there was also talk about them partnering with Dana White to invest in Nitrocross, an EV rallycross series that Conor Daly raced in once.

Even if NASCAR did launch an EV national series, you could just, you know, not watch it. I don't pay attention to Formula E or MotoE despite having long been an F1 fan and currently being a MotoGP fan.

It's just weird to see this very weak, very minor gesture from NASCAR and there being this vicious backlash towards it. I'm the kind of person that gets vaguely disappointed every time I find out a new performance car has some sort of hybrid element to it, so do you have any idea how off-base you need to be for me to disagree with your anger on this?

It's just such a nothing storyline, calm down.

Elsewhere in the Chicago Street Race weekend, the Xfinity race was pretty great actually, another SVG win and some cool battles between him, Gibbs, and Larson throughout, so that was nice. The Cup race was pretty good when it was running but that long rain delay did kinda suck a lot of the energy out of it. Plus, SVG getting speared by an out-of-control Briscoe was pretty lame.

Especially since Chase Briscoe and Josh Berry in their SHR cars would basically spend the whole second half of the race hitting the barriers and/or going off every five or so laps.

Oh, and postrace, Bubba Wallace banged doors with Alex Bowman while Chase Elliott banged doors with Daniel Suarez because, once again, this is NASCAR and that's just the kind of stuff that happens in NASCAR. People are only mad when Bubba does it though. Odd. I wonder if there's a certain thing about Bubba that leads to him being on the receiving take of all this bad faith criticism...

Other than that, Indycar had its hybrid era start at Mid-Ohio in a race that started off boring but ended in Pato O'Ward holding off Alex Palou to take the win for Arrow McLaren.

Something much appreciated since, earlier in the day, McLaren was running 1-2 in the British Grand Prix until they kept Oscar out on slicks on a wet track to lose second, and then switched Norris onto the wrong tyres once things dried up.

And then there was MotoGP. Pecco Bagnaia was chasing down Jorge Martin in the closing stages, Martin first in the championship, Pecco second after dominating the last two race weekends to chip away at Martin's lead. Martin is feeling the pressure, feels he needs to win to stop the bleeding, but just pushes too hard into turn one, the bike slides out from under him, and Pecco goes through to win.

Marc Marquez, the man who beat Jorge Martin to be Bagnaia's 2025 Ducati teammate, came through in second, his brother Alex Marquez in third, and Enea Bastianini - Bagnaia's current teammate - came through in fourth. After the Spanish GP sprint, Jorge Martin was forty-two points ahead of Bagnaia, as recently as after the Catalan GP, that gap was thirty-nine points, now? Bagnaia leads by ten.

Pecco won the Catalan GP main race, swept both races at Mugello, both races at Assen, finished third behind Martin and Miguel Oliveira at the German GP sprint, but then won the German GP main race as Martin crashed out to take the championship lead. Truly a tremendous four race run from Bagnaia.

Keep in mind, nobody won back-to-back main races at all in 2023! Pecco just won four in a row.

This is why I love MotoGP so much, it still has that drama, that magic, that I find so many series lack these days.

Unfortunately, it's schedule is also crap, so MotoGP is off until August 4th. Fuck.

NASCAR at Pocono and Indycar's double race weekend at Iowa will hopefully provide some entertainment next weekend. Now I just need to hope I don't die of MotoGP withdrawal in the meantime...wish me luck.

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Toyota FT-3e Concept, 2023. A prototype for a next generation BEV that was presented at this year's Japan Mobility Show. Digital displays running from the lower side body to the upper door provide information, including battery charge, onboard temperature, and interior air quality when the driver approaches the car.

[pamperthemplump2reborn]

This mission comes from our subsidiary, General Motors

Toyotathon on Rubicon is being held during Chevy Truck Month. This is unacceptable. Toyota has deployed Tacoma's around the strip mall next to the McDonalds, just beyond the PCA refueling base, but before the Taco Bell. You will be accompanied by our best Silverado. Good luck.

[identifying-cars-in-posts]

so i want to get a small/compact pickup truck for my next vehicle, but with how huge pickups are getting now, i imagine i'll have a hard time finding one from within the last 10ish years that's actually "compact". i tend to like trucks from the 80s or 90s when it comes to design and aesthetic, like 9th generation F150s or 1st/2nd gen ford rangers, but i also don't know how good my chances are of finding a truck that old that's in decent shape and reasonably affordable. do you know of any more modern "compact" pickups that are still truly compact and not huge? or any tips for investing in an older truck that may or may not be in the best shape? you can also just use this ask as a platform to rant about the hugeness of modern trucks if you want bc it sucks

yeah the hugeness of modern trucks is absolutely awful and i hate it. there really isn’t, at least in the us, a true compact pickup anymore. the tacoma is massive, the ranger is massive, they’re all just enormous now. so the biggest killer of old cars in general but especially trucks tends to be rust. if you live somewhere where rust isn’t as much of an issue like the south or like desert regions, a once over with a mechanic and willingness to keep up with maintenance a bit more strictly than you might with a new car should be all you need to keep a lot of older trucks on the road. in terms of models i recommend toyota tacomas, chevy s10s and silverados, dodge dakotas, and ford rangers and f150s like you were looking at. if you’re in an area where snow and salt are a concern, like the northeast, try to find one that hasn’t spent as much of its life in the rust belt, or consider traveling to get one. if you can’t, then just try to find one with as little rust as possible, just know that rust will eventually cause a problem somewhere. but with proper maintenance, an old pickup will easily go for hundreds of thousands of miles, so don’t shy away from them just because they’re old!

[aeide-thea]

Summer Chen Chen

You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.

Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.

Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, & quite often Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.”

Or dead.

Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.

Your powers are great, are growing.

One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.

The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.

To make me promise I would. To make me promise.

& promise.

[chaos-and-codeine]

June of Doom 2024

Day 9 - I made a mistake

OC’s: Dellan, Nate, Raine, Trey

Warnings: Gunshot wound mention, blood, blood loss, near passing out, general panic from the friends, medical help

Word count: 1147

Summary: Nate shows up at the facility a week early with a very injured Raine. Dellan is scared, Nate’s covered in Raine’s blood, and Trey is trying to save a life.

(Obviously this is my first original post, but I hope to introduce you more to these characters later! Just having fun with June of Doom for now!)

Dellan held his pistol towards the ground as he warily watched the small Toyota sedan wind up the drive. No one was due to come in tonight, much less an unregistered car of a visitor. There was never a call from the gate, so either they belonged there enough to have an all access code or they possibly didn’t belong there at all.

So there Dellan stood with his pistol at the ground, unsure whether he should be more or less ready for a fight than he was.

The car got close enough to see that there were at least two people in the front seats, but Dellan still couldn’t see into the back. The headlights burned into his eyes as the car bumped over the cracks on the final curve. Dellan cocked his head as he finally started to make out the silhouettes of his friends' faces. Friends that weren’t supposed to arrive back for at least another week.

“Help now, ask questions later,” Nate started speaking before he was fully out of the driver’s seat, circling around the front hood to the passenger side. He flung open the door to reveal the blood that the night and dirty windshield had yet hidden from Dellan.

“What happened?” Dellan finally managed to say, still trying to comprehend what was unfolding. Nate began to carefully pull the second person, soaked in red, from the car.

“I jacked up,” Raine said through a tight jaw. She put her right arm around Nate as he lifted her out, her other arm held against her, “a stupid mistake and I got made.”

Dellan could feel the urgency squeezing at his chest, but he was still grasping for something solid for his swirling mind. She was talking. She was alert enough to hang on to Nate’s shirt. That was good. She’s not unconscious. She’s not dead.

The amount of blood left on the leather seat brought the next wave of panic. Adrenaline. It could be adrenaline keeping Raine this alert. She might be worse off than it seems. She could be better off.

“Stop overthinking,” Nate kicked the car door shut as he swiveled with Raine in his arms. The slam of the metal made Dellan jump, looking at Nate before taking a shaky, but full, breath. He nodded and Nate started up the steps to the main entrance.

“Nate,” Raine’s voice was painfully soft, her grip loosening on the Nate’s shirt collar. He looked down at her as his pace increased even more.

“Stay awake, Raine. We’re almost there and then we’ll get you taken care of and then you can sleep,” Nate’s words ran together, a mixture of fear and exhaustion as he walked.

“Hurts too much,” Raine hissed, her eyes rolling, but not quite closing. Her eyebrows pulled together, a desperate plea for consciousness to stay a minute more.

Dellan jogged ahead of the pair, his shaking hands threatening to keep him from pressing the right code into the keypad. As if the doors were hesitating with him, they stayed silent for a moment before the click of unlocking echoed through the empty lobby.

Nate nodded his head in thanks as Dellan held open the door. He headed for the left hallway, towards the small trauma bay the facility held, and turned his head as they went, “When we get up there I need you to snap back into it. You’re like her brother; she needs you.”

“Okay,” Dellan squeaked back. He hated how much he was freezing up. He’d seen his fair share of blood. He’d inflicted his fair share of blows and taken enough himself, too. He’d even seen his own team members get hurt before, but this one hit different. Nate was right, they were like siblings. Dellan knew she needed him, but right now he was trembling because he needed her too.

“Okay,” Dellan said again more confidently. He had to shake himself off and get his mind to straighten out. He noticed the blood being trailed behind them and almost caved into himself again, but balled his hands into fist as he skipped ahead of Nate again. He shoved open the door, holding it as they turned into the second door labeled ‘medical’. The unfitting serenity of the empty hallways was replaced by an immediate chaos as they entered.

“What happened?” Trey’s chair hit the cabinet as he bolted up from the desk. He scrubs were wrinkled, a result of the previously relaxed evening. He shouted several names as he rushed toward Raine. Various people came out from where they’d been hanging out, not expecting any commotion. Any of the agents in the field weren’t due back for days and even then all the current jobs weren’t terribly risky.

“Shot twice at least forty minutes ago,” Nate said robotically. His face was pale as Trey motioned for him to set her down on the gurney being pushed up beside them. Raine’s face twisted and she groaned at the movement.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nate apologized as he removed his arm from behind her.

“It’s good,” She told him, still not wanting anyone to feel bad. Her expression remained tight, showing visibly the growing pain.

“You’re awake?” Trey sounded astonished. He walked alongside the bed as it was briskly pushed toward a room to the left. His hand now replaced Raine’s own, holding pressure with sterile towels against the wounds. He could see her eyes open slightly, flitting between the ceiling and himself.

“Barely,” She said quietly, “Dellan?”

“Yeah,” Dellan’s voice cracked as he moved closer. He watched as the bed was pushed into a bright room and the wheels locked to still it in place. People were moving everywhere, but each one seemed to flow together without interfering with the next.

“I’ll be fine,” Raine was trying to tell Dellan that confidently, but he could hear the question in the statement. She was trying to convince herself too.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Dellan squeezed Raine’s hand as he pulled every ounce of his own confidence, or hope, from the pit of his stomach, “I’ll be right here when you wake up. Trey’s gonna fix you right up and you’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be right as rain.”

Dellan felt a hand on his elbow that gently pulled him towards the door. He let his hand slide off of Raine’s as he reluctantly backed up. He could see Raine’s face calm ever so slightly as the first drug got pushed in. And then the door was shut.

“She’s strong,” Nate said directly to Dellan.

“I know.” Dellan responded, looking back at his friend. He could see the amount of blood on his shirt and arms, some even on the pants now. He could tell Nate saw it too, but neither of them said anything about it. Dellan took a deep breath, “She’ll be right as rain.”