#not my best work but yolo | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month

Text

“Disenshittify or Die”

youtube

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that��s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@[email protected] (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

#pluralistic #defcon #defcon 32 #hackers #enshittification #speeches #transcripts #disenshittify or die #Youtube

882 notes · View notes

deformedcat · 3 months

Text

"do you really wanna die as a virgin, boy?"

Haruto Shimizu (oc) x switch ? incubus male reader

warning: blood mentioned, subby top!1!1, blowjob, boobjob, not proofread,, short

not finished 😔,, listened to will stetson's rabbit hole cover and had this idea but after i wrote the boobjob scene my mind went blank 🧠💣💥

Haruto knew this probably wasn't the best idea.

He had tried doing this countless times before and failed, but who knows he's gonna succeed this time?

..summoning a demon by himself isn't the smartest thing to do, too bad cause he’s gonna do it anyways. (yolo)

Standing in the center of the magic circle he had painted in blood (pig’s blood, he was too much of a pussy to use human blood.), he carefully lit up the candles around the bloody circle.

Opening the magic book he borrowed from the library, Haruto began to chant words in another language. Once he was done, he looked up from his book to see.. nothing.

Safe to say he was disappointed but not surprised, sighing in defeat, he got out of the circle to start cleaning up,,

Suddenly, a gust of wind forcefully opened the window and entered the room blowing out the candle, the room became surrounded with pink mist.

He put an arm in front of his face, backing up from the center of the room. The mist was too thick for him to see, but he's able to make out a dark silhouette of a.. human?

with horns and tails, that is.

“How desperate are you for you to use blood this time?” a deep alluring and sweet voice said, startling Haruto.

Walking out of the mist reveals you, with dark red horns and tail, wearing clothes that look like they came from Japan edo era.

“d-demon?” Haruto stuttered, you grinned at this and walked closer to him.

“mm.. close.” you successfully trapped him against the wall, towering over the trembling boy.

“I didn't think that it would work..” he muttered, looking up at you in fear.

“mm.. by the look of you, you want something don't you? Perhaps a contract?” you asked.

“huh?”

“People summon incubus for a reason. so, what do you want?” you ask once again, walking away from Haruto to look around the room. slightly cringing when you see a bucket of blood in the corner of the room

“i-i don't want anything.. wait— did you just say incubus-” poor guy didn't get to finish his sentence before getting cut off by you,

“sex? or something just to please yourself? c’mon, it gotta be something.. don't tell me you summoned me for nothing.” you huffed.

“w-well.. u-um.. I was just.. curious..?”

you looked at Haruto with a blank face, as if you’re saying ‘you're joking, right?’

you saw how Haruto fiddled with his fingers and looked down at the floor, letting out a sigh, you snapped your fingers to grab his attention.

“Well, I suppose there's nothing you’d like. so, I'll go back. bye.”

right before you could summon a portal to go back where you come from, he suddenly grabbed your wrist and mumbled out something,

“yousaidyouwereaincubuscanyoupleasetakemyvirginity”

“what?”

he looks up at you, eyes filled with determination and repeated his words, louder this time.

“please take my virginity!”

“fine.”

so you agreed, thinking this is just another case of ‘pls let me hit plsplsspls im bitchless since birth’

you pushed him down the bed, straddling his waist and marking his jaw and neck while pulling down his pants along with his underwear, slowly stroking his manhood to life.

..for someone small and shy as Haruto, he definitely is packing, you grinned.

getting off from him, you kneel down to face his dripping cock, softly sucking on the tip while toying with the remainder of the length before taking it all the way to the hilt. you hummed after hearing the other whine, you looks up for the human’s reaction.

Haruto stares at you, his face slightly red and is letting out a few groans and whines, trying his best not to buckle his hips into your mouth.

how cute. you thought to yourself.

deciding to tease him more, you pull off from his cock with a pop, he let out a confused whine at your action,

“hhah what are you-” haruto whined, almost getting up from the bed but was stopped by you when you slide his now wet member between your pecs (manboobs??)

his already red face turned into an even darker shade of red, eyes wide open with his jaw dropped,

“a-ah?!” he stared at his member resting on your chest, his pupils turning into swirls.. is that even possible? I thought that thing only happens in slice of life manga whenever one of the

“go wild.” you told him, taking his tip back into your mouth, humming when you felt him thrusting his hips between your chest.

you grabbed the base of his member, tugging him into your chest like you would jerk him off.

he didn't last long, you felt him throbbing in your mouth and pulled off right before he could come into your mouth.

white sticky substances spurted out of his member, landing on your chest and some on your lips.

you grinned, swiping your lips with your finger before licking the baby batter.

“salty.”

Haruto was suspiciously quiet, you rose from your feet, crawling back onto the bed and straddling him on his waist. You lightly poked him from the side looking for a reaction.

“Human? Helloooo.. Is post nut clarity that bad for you- woah!”

He unexpectedly wrapped his arms around you and hid his face into your chest, face clearly red and mumbling nonsense.

“please..”

“mm?” you lift his chin up, holding in your giggle when you see him drooling and tears slowly filling his eyes.

He really reminds you of a puppy.

“please.. want to be inside of you,,"

how can you say no when he's begging so nicely?

a/n me trying to find motivation so i can finish this (soon i hope),, i was stranded in the airport for 4 hours bcos my flight keep delaying and i didnt have any money ww. anyways,, lev lauv laurve

#mayi'swriting—#bottom male reader #male reader #oc x male reader #bttm male reader #sub character #mayi'scharacter—#mayi'srants—#sub male reader #dom male reader #imhungry

665 notes · View notes

aajjks · 9 months

Text

please please PLEASE! (m)

synopsis. He’s a determined man, and he knows a magical word, please.

warnings. ännöyïng köö, hë häs göt thë fättëst crüsh ön yöu, përsuätïön, bêggïng, tsündërë yn, evïl bräïnêd köö, cütê köö, mänïpülätïön, cöcky köö.

He is kinda cringe but yk yolo.

note. HEYYYY I already miss him so.. I wrote this in like 37 minutes.. kinda rough kind of cringe but you know… and based on the interactions and reactions, this will get this may become a little Drabble series. OK OK NOW ENJOY. AND PLEASE SEND ME SOME FEEDBACK OR ASKS THEY MAKE ME REALLY HAPPY.

“PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE YN!”

When are you ever going to agree?

Do you know that he cannot sleep because of you? Do you know that he’s not even able to eat without feeling sick to his stomach, ALL BECAUSE OF YOU.

You are very evil. Jungkook thinks that you are very mean, insensitive! You are evily beautiful, frustratingly sexy and awfully perfect.

He HATES you.

“You evil woman! I hate you!” He’s crying, he’s devastatingly frustrated right now. He has been persuading you for a month. But you still haven’t agreed.

He looks up at you, you look bored. He’s on his knees, his hands resting on your thighs, he’s got tears in his eyes, “JUST ONE DATE!” He chokes out.

He’s looking at you constantly, but it doesn’t have an effect on you, you’re looking at your nails while he’s begging you. “I said no.” You shrug, he scoffs. What is your problem? He’s hot. He earns well. AND HE LIKES YOU A LOT.

So why won’t you give him a chance?

“JUST ONE DATEEE PLEASE.” he sounds really cringe and desperate. He’s a grown man. But he’s on his knees, begging you. “Ynnnnnnn!” Are you enjoying this? he’s sure.

He doesn’t mind entertaining you, but… he really wants you.

“Yn!” He whines, he’s even tired of crying and screaming. His throat feels dry now. He stares at you dumbfounded. You are one stubborn woman.

But he’s also very stubborn, and he knows you very well, your reason to not go on a date with him our date is very ridiculous in his opinion..

He rolls his eyes. You are about to say it.

“No kook. You’re my best friend.”

Of course he’s your best friend, that is the problem.

“BUT I LIKE YOU.” He argues back, biting his lower lip, he doesn’t know how to get you to agree. Even though he knows you very well… he’s not sure.

But one thing is for sure, he won’t stop annoying you until you agree.

You don’t reply, still looking at your manicured nails. They take his attention as well, distracting him. They are a pretty color of brown, with a gray sparkly French tip.

He loves your hands so much.

“FINE.” Jungkook pouts. “because of you, I’m gonna die alone.” of course guilt tripping has to work. You’ll have to agree now.

He has been your best friend for the longest time ever, and he knows that you cannot see him sad. He’s liked you for as long as he can remember.

And you know that very well.

“Yn… you make me very sad.” He turns his eyes away from you. And he feels your gaze shifting to his face. He can feel the heat of your gaze suddenly.

He smirks.

He feels kind of evil, but he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.

“Y-You know I’ve liked you for the longest time! A-AND IT CAN BE KIND OF WEIRD TO DATE YOUR BEST FRIEND, BUT… just one chance.” He speaks in a very low sad tone.

Crossing his hands across his chest. And then he hears you sigh. “You are a very evil man, kook.” His ears perk up, you are definitely about to agree.

His hard work is finally starting to pay off. Maybe begging you for the last couple of weeks… was worth it after all. He’s got a goofy smile on his face, you can’t see it because he’s turned his face away from you.

“Ugh… don’t give me the silent treatment… I can hear your pout.” he is sure you’re rolling your eyes right now. The thing is that you both know each other very very well.

That’s why you are perfect for each other.

Go on… go on go on!!!

“Okay fine. UGH DON’T MAKE ME REGRET IT.” You say, finally giving in.

And at the speed of light, he turns his head, almost breaking his neck. Jungkook is looking at you with wide eyes. His mouth is agape.

Did he hear you right?

“SAY THAT AGAIN!” Standing up, he giggles. Clapping his hands like a toddler. He knows he’s annoying the fuck out of you right now, but a man’s got to celebrate.

“OH MY GOD YN Thank you I promise you won’t regret it and you will want to date me every single lifetime of yours.” He smirks, his changing from desperate to cocky in 00.0 seconds.

He winks at you while you give him the middle finger.

“You are going to want me so bad after this. I WON.” He Throws his hand into the air, doing a dramatic pose.

“Now I’ve gotta go!!! GO TO PREPARE FOR THE DATE. It has to be perfect. Bye bye ynnnnnn!!!! I love you.” He blows you a flying kiss before yeeting out of your home.

You just hope you won’t regret this.

1K notes · View notes

mountainsandmayhem · 5 months

Note

congrats on 500!! 💗

ILYSM!! could you write this drabble we were talking about😈 a lazy Sunday morning riding Joel..he says something like “use your daddy” and/or “that’s my girl.” thank you daddy 🤭😂

Sunday With Your Dad’s Best Friend

18+

DBF!Joel x Fem!Reader

AN: thank you baby for this great request. I hope this lives up to your expectations 🩵. Did I proof read this? No, of course I didn’t. ✌🏻 YOLO.

CW: I don’t want to give away too much, but wrap it up (be better than these two) use of nicknames and based on the ask one of those nicknames is daddy.

Joel freakin Miller. Your dad’s best friend and your secret hook up for the past few months. Sunday mornings with Joel might be your favourite. Your parents think you’re at work, but instead, you park your car in his garage and spend the day flirting, cuddling and fucking.

It’s a beautifully warm summer morning, Joel is sitting on a pool lounge chair in his backyard, long legs stretched out, one ankle crossed over the other. He’s in mid thigh length neon green shorts that accentuate his tan, and no shirt. Sun kissing his chest, and it feels weird to be jealous of UV rays that get to touch him in places that are only for you.

He glances up over his book to watch you swimming laps in his pool. The water glistens off your bare back and ass, legs fluttering gracefully beneath the water. As you reach the end furthest away from him you dive under, spinning your body and pushing off the wall to swim back towards him. As you come up to the surface you spin onto your back, cherry pink nipples skimming the surface as you backstroke through the water. He’s never been more thankful for all the tall trees and bushes he planted to make his backyard completely secluded from his neighbours.

Joel puts his book and reading glasses down as your naked body ascends the steps of the pool in front of him. He crosses his toned arms and tilts his head to the side, eyes watching the water droplets run down your body, pooling in the curvy areas he loves so much.

“Gonna get a sunburn if you aren’t careful, baby girl,” he says, concern and arousal fighting each other in his voice.

You blink at him, gathering your hair to the side and squeezing out the water. “Yes, daddy.” You tease, water splashing against the hot paving stone of the pool deck.

He shakes his head and smirks, a dimple forming on his cheek, highlighted by the sun glinting off his greying facial hair. “Careful with that nickname, darlin’.”

Baby girl and darlin’ in a matter of minutes has you itching to get your hands on him. “You just called me two nicknames back to back. That’s cheating.”

“Cheatin’, hey? How so?” His voice has dropped an octave, and that’s almost worse than a nickname.

You wander over to the table beside him where your towel sits. You reach out for your towel as you say, “Makes me want you.”

Joel grabs your wrist, his large, strong hand easily circling the tapered part of your arm. “That right? Someone feelin’ needy,” he pauses before adding, “Sweetheart.”

A little whimper escapes your throat as his coffee and brown sugar-speckled eyes wash over you.

“Tell me what you need,” he says, pulling gently to stand beside him. Your eyes flick down to the tent forming under his swim trunks.

“Can I…” you start, voice shaky and shy.

“Don’t be shy, baby girl. I’m yours, remember?” You nod as he continues, “And you’re mine. So anything you want. Anything.”

You shut your eyes and take a slow breath, perky breasts rising and falling close to Joel’s face as his thumb caresses the smooth inside of your wrist as a form of silent encouragement. “I wanna ride you.”

You open your eyes to see Joel smiling proudly at you. “Good girl,” he hums, releasing your wrist and slipping his swim trunks off. His cock is hard as nails from just the sight of you, he leans back in his lounger - not quite sitting at a full 90 degrees.

“Come on, baby. Straddle me,” his hands come to your hips as you stretch one leg over him and then down onto his lap. His thick shaft rests between your bodies, your pussy sliding along him as you sit. Your clit twitches with every vein and ridge.

Your hand's card through his hair as his hands move to the globes of your ass, encouraging you to grind along him. You lower your face to him, kissing him slowly as you buck your hips back and forth. You swallow the deep moan that passes his lips, slanting your head and licking along his bottom lip.

He kneads the curves of your ass, “more,” you whimper.

He lifts you slightly, then brings one hand to his cock, pumping it a few times before teasing your clit when the head, pre cum leaks from the slit and he spreads along your already soaked and silky cunt.

“Shit, darlin’, so wet already,” he whispers, sliding the head to tease at your tight entrance.

This is your favourite part, the painful little stretch when he first pushes himself in. He always gives you time to adjust before fucking you, today is no different as he pushes your hips down to swallow all of him. You cry out as you settle onto him and his lips crash into yours to stifle you. “Sshhh, the neighbours could be out,” he mumbles into your lips, chest heaving as he adjusts to your tightness choking him.

“Sorry, just feels so good,” you moan quietly.

“I know, baby girl. I know.” His strong hands massage at the creases of your hips. “This what you needed? Me buried deep inside that beautiful little pussy?”

You feel the walls of your pussy flutter around him. Joel is good with his hands and tongue and has the perfect sized cock for you, but it’s his filthy mouth that usually starts that familiar ache to build at the base of your spine.

“Yes,” you huff, slowly grinding into him.

“I can tell. So tight for me. Can feel you fluttering around me already.” Your hands move from his hair to his broad shoulders, using them to leverage yourself so you can get better momentum to slide back and forth.

“Oh god, Joel,” you coo. The ache turns into bubbling lava.

“Kiss me,” he says, strong arms winding around you and pulling you into his chest. You kiss him deeply, tongues lazily flicking against each others as you glide your hips back and forth against him. At this new angle, the soft part of his lower body hits your clit, the slight curve in his cock hitting that spongy part that makes you weak and boneless.

All of the movements from you and Joel are slow and soft, almost lazy. Neither in a rush to orgasm or to get to the next part of your day. This is all that matters right now.

Joel breaks the kiss, hand sliding up your back to the nape of your neck, gently encouraging you to turn your face so he can kiss along your jawline toward that soft part below your ear. “That’s my girl,” he says quietly, just for you to hear. “Use your daddy to cum.”

Your body jerks faster, the bubbling lava close to the eruption point. He lets you move at your own pace, flicking your hips once, twice, and three more times before you feel it. “Good girl, let go,” his teeth graze your earlobe as you fall apart.

You bury your face in his neck. Whispering his name, body going slack. He takes over, hands gripping your lips tightly and moving them in the same pattern you were.

“Oh fuck….yes, daddy. Please,” you’re a whispering, mumbling mess as the pleasure waves through you. The sensitive hard bud at the top of your cunt twitching and pulsing with each graze of his belly. “Don’t stop, Joel. Please - please don’t stop.”

“I know, sweetheart. I got you,” he doesn’t speed up, doesn’t slow down; he does exactly as you ask. “That’s my good girl. So fuckin’ pretty when you cum.”

“Fill me. Fill me, please.” You whine, kissing the crook of his neck.

“Fuck. Shit, baby girl.” He says, head falling back to the lounger. You pull back to watch him. Eyes clenched tight and mouth slightly agape. Small beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

“Look at me,” you whisper, slowly retaking control of your body, swivelling your hips into him. His soft brown eyes peel open, dancing around your face. “Please, Joel.”

“Call me daddy,” he moans, his dick getting harder as you ride him.

“Please, daddy. I’ve been such a good girl. Fill me.” You say sweetly, just the way he likes it, before sucking your bottom lip between your teeth.

Joel’s breath hitches as his hips stutter, hands clamping down on your hips to still you. “Shit, yes. Yes. Oh fuck, you’re so good for daddy.” His cock jumps and twitches inside you as ropes of cum coat you, marking you and claiming you as his.

As he comes down he pulls you onto his chest, lips kissing lightly along the hairline of your forehead. “God damn, little one. I love when you talk dirty to me like that.”

You nuzzle deeper into his warm chest. “Noted…daddy.”

A deep growl fills his chest. “I’m still inside you, careful with that nickname.”

“I’m having Deja Vu,” you joke.

“As soon as I get control of my legs, I’m takin’ you inside and lickin’ that little pussy clean in the shower,” Joel says matter of factly.

You giggle, “Anything you say, daddy.”

#joel miller #joel miller tlou #pedro pascal #joel miller smut #joel the last of us #joel tlou #joel x reader #joel miller x reader #joel x oc #joel x f!reader #joel x female reader #joel x y/n #joel x you #joel miller x f!reader #dbf!joel miller #dbf!joel

308 notes · View notes

ragnarssons · 2 years

Text

“din used to be smart and careful idk why he went on mandalore just like that” you mean the din djarin who knocked himself unconcious against a force barrier because he tried to force it not once, not twice, but three times? the din djarin who went head on to save his son who was not yet his son, from the empire, and didn’t think his escape plan through? din djarin who jumped into a krayt dragon’s mouth hoping for the best, being like “take care of my kid” to the first dude he saw, literally 12 seconds before being swallowed? din djarin who walked straight up into a room full of empire officers, trying to avoid having to show his face from a machine requiring face recognition to work?? din djarin who abandoned his not-yet-son in a bar yoloing into the unknown to find an old rebel fighter, hoping that same rebel fighter wouldn’t kick his ass? din djarin who, all too often, leaves his infant son alone in a spaceship (yknow to the point of said son almost crashed the whole ship more than once)? and that’s just some examples.

#the mandalorian #yes din can have good plans #but most of the time that man is Improv King #and that's what he did there #the mandalorian spoilers #he works well under pression don't ya worry

2K notes · View notes

yeoblurbs · 10 months

Text

Why Won’t You Love Me

University AU

Pairing: Joshua x Female Reader - Angst with a happy ending, somewhat slow burn, rejected to friends to lovers

Synopsis: Despite the fact that Hong Jisoo has been cold to you from the start, you have only ever looked at him with heart eyes. Except lately it's been harder to pretend like you were fine with his aloof demeanor, and things get much worse when you overhear a conversation you were not supposed to, revealing how Joshua truly feels about you.

WC: 11.6k

Content/Warnings: Mentions of alcohol & drinking, curse words, toxic relationships with siblings, one scene of body shaming/food portion shaming, little bit of Hongjoong from Ateez, shua cries:(, he’s also unreasonable in the beginning, pov switches between yn & shua, Seungkwan is the best friend everyone needs, y/n is a cutie.

a/n: not edited and ending is rushed but yolo

When Hong Jisoo breaks your heart, it comes in a way that hurts more than anticipated.

the two of you shared close mutual friends, and yet, there was a distance that stopped you from becoming any closer. despite the fact that you were often around each other, it seemed as if Joshua did not want to get closer to you. things weren't necessarily awkward, but they certainly weren't comfortable. and that was something you craved immensely, comfort with the person you liked.

though you were not deterred easily. you would ignore the way his smile faltered the moment he saw you, and greet him the same as you would with the rest of your friends; a beaming smile with kind eyes. you would ignore the way he slipped out of conversations that you participated in, staring sadly at his retreating back each time.

and most of all, you ignored the way his genuine smile was never directed at you.

and perhaps you are to blame, for not taking the very obvious hint that Hong Jisoo did not like you. but you were always a little foolish when it came to love, even more so with Joshua. and while you're sure you could have gone months enduring his cold behavior towards you, it all comes to an end at Mingyu's birthday party.

you're getting dressed with Seungkwan, your best friend who knows how you feel about Joshua and your dilemma. He sighs as he lays on your bed, watching you through a frown as you try on your fifth outfit of the night. "Y/n, please, you look good in all of them! Just pick one so we can go." he whines.

you pout back at him, "I promise this is the last one! Be honest, how does it look?"

you're dressed in a tight black cropped tee and a black skirt that hugs your hips well, with sheer stockings underneath. you finish the look off with an oversized black leather jacket.

Seungkwan looks up, "Perfect! Now can we go please?" and you giggle sheepishly, feeling somewhat bad for your best friend.

"Okay, but quick, what about my makeup?" you walk closer and close your eyes, displaying your hard work.

Seungkwan scans your face quickly and flicks your forehead. "It looks good, don't worry."

you jump up and rub your forehead pouting, but happy with his approval.

the two of you leave soon after, and you sit in Seungkwans car feeling jittery at the thought of seeing Joshua tonight.

Seungkwan looks at your wringing hands and smiles softly, "What are you worried about? You know you look gorgeous, and I'll be there with you."

you look to your best friend and sigh as the corners of your lips tug downwards. “You make it sound so easy, but any time we hang out with everyone, Joshua refuses to even look at me." you turn to glance at your reflection in the window, "And even though you’re with me, and everyone else seems to like me just fine, I can't help but want him to like me and stay with me too."

Seungkwan pats your leg sympathetically before returning his hand to the wheel. "Honestly, I don't know why he acts like that either, but maybe tonight will be different. Maybe you'll catch his attention with that outfit you spent ten years choosing." you laugh at his teasing, feeling reassured enough as you see Mingyu's house come into view.

once parked, Seungkwan looks at you and grins encouragingly, "Ready?"

you look up at him nervous, yet determined.

"Ready."

the moment you walk in, you're bombarded with the intense smell of alcohol and sweat. a disgusting mix truly, but Mingyu was notorious for his grand number of friends, so you didn't expect anything about this party to be different.

you grab Seungkwans wrist gently, unnerved by the number of people everywhere.

"You're here! Welcome, Kwannie and Y/n" a booming voice comes, and you smile excitedly at Mingyu.

"Happy Birthday, Minnie!" you jump to hug him and he catches you with ease. you and Seungkwan engage in quick pleasantries with Mingyu as he gives you the rundown of where the beverages and snacks are located. The two of you hand your gifts to him before making your way through the crowd to grab a drink.

Seungkwan pours himself a cup as you opt for a water bottle; you are not trying to get shitfaced in front of Joshua tonight.

"Let's go find the others?" Seungkwan asks, and you nod in agreement, heading up and entering the room closest to the stairway.

you look around, eyes subconsciously searching for Joshua as you study the people sitting on the couch and standing off to the side.

"Y/n! Seungkwan, over here!" you hear someone shout and look to find Hansol, Jihoon, Soonyoung, Jeonghan, and oh, Joshua is there too.

Your stomach feels as if it's in knots as the two of you make your way over to them. you greet them one by one before your eyes land on Joshua.

you smile sweetly at him, “Hey.”

though all he does is nod back with a tight smile and look away. you try not to let his lack of a response affect you, but you're sure it shows on your face as Seungkwan quickly grabs your hand and drags you over to sit down.

when conversations begin to pick up, you try to engage in them happily, though your eyes often drift to Joshua throughout the night, and you feel defeated as he ignores your existence entirely despite participating in the same discussion.

you sigh and stare down at your feet before abruptly getting up; your friends turn to you, and you quickly put on an easy smile looking at everyone but Joshua.

"I'm gonna go get a drink, I don't think this water is going to get me through tonight." you say with an easy grin. they all nod in understanding, though Seungkwan pulls your wrist before you leave.

his wide eyes scan your face, "Do you want me to come with you?"

you shake your head, patting his hair and forcing yourself to smile once more. "I'm okay, I'll be right back, promise."

Seungkwan looks worried, but he lets you go with a reminder. "Call me if you need anything, okay?"

you nod, chuckling at his protectiveness as you walk away.

you exhale softly once you're far enough, allowing the sadness you've felt throughout the night to finally show on your face. with a frown, you pour yourself a drink, though you dilute it with some of your water to ensure you don't end up drunk. you take a sip, shoulders sagging at the subtle bitter taste, and head back up toward the boys. except upon reaching the room, you see a pretty girl in your seat.

but that isn't what bothers you, no, it's the way she's engaging in a conversation with everyone else, Joshua included. your chest hurts when you watch Joshua smile and nod at her, eyes sparkling in genuine interest; something you wish he would do with you. you want to run away and isolate yourself in a corner, but you promised Seungkwan you would be back.

you bite your lip and force a cheerful smile on your face as you walk toward them, choosing to stand behind Seungkwan and lean on him since your seat was occupied. Jihoon sees you standing and moves to get up, but you shake your head and urge him to sit back down.

When Seungkwan looks up at you though, his brows furrow and you know you aren't hiding your hurt very well. He stands up beside you and grabs your wrist before turning to your friends, "We're gonna go get some air, we'll come back in a bit." Seungkwan wastes no time dragging you toward the empty balcony.

"What's up? Did anything happen when you went to get a drink? Did anyone bother you?" he asks worriedly, eyes scanning you for any injuries and you quickly shake your head, moving to hug him. "It's not that, nothing happened. I just..."

you sigh into his shoulder, "I don't mean to overreact, but it's so obvious he hates me at this point. Did you see how he was looking at that girl?" you look up to Seungkwan with a sad smile, "I tried so hard to get his attention, not only with this outfit but every time I speak he just won't look my way. But he seemed to like her just fine."

Seungkwan pats your head, and you continue to ramble, "Clearly, the problem is me. At this point, I would rather just hear him reject me." you finish dejectedly.

Seungkwan sighs at your defeated tone.

"Listen, I can't excuse the way he's been acting even if he is my friend. He's being an ass, even if he doesn't like you, you haven't done anything to him for him to treat you that way."

he smiles at you encouragingly, "But, I think you should talk to him about this."

you look at him incredulously, and he laughs at your expression, "Just listen!"

you cross your arms and deadpan. "Okay, I'm listening."

Seungkwan grins gently at you, "I just think if you pulled him aside and forced him to speak with you, he might just be honest and tell you why he's acting that way. There must be a reason, and I think he might tell you if you ask." and though the thought of speaking to Joshua alone and confronting him sounds absolutely terrifying, you figure Seungkwan has a point; maybe there was a logical reason behind his behavior. maybe he would tell you if you asked.

your heart feels lighter at the notion, and you find yourself smiling at Seungkwan as you jump into his arms, "Thank you. For listening to me and the advice and overall just being the best friend ever." you murmur into his shoulder. He pats your back, and you can hear the smile in his voice.

"What else are best friends for, dummy."

ꕥ

and so, with a newfound mindset, the two of you head back to your friends. upon reaching the room, you find the door is closed. Seungkwan moves to open it, before you hear the conversation taking place inside.

"Dude, you have to just tell her soon. I feel so bad when I see her try to get your attention just to see you ignore her." Soonyoungs muffled voice says, and you pull Seungkwans arm away from the knob as you step closer to the door.

"Soonie is right, Joshua. You've put it off for too long now. She's already friends with everyone, there's no getting rid of her and you know one of these days she'll start crying." Jeonghan adds on, and you feel your hands shake as you begin to put the puzzle pieces together on just who they are talking about.

Seungkwan is silent beside you, and the two of you stand still when Joshua speaks. "I know, I know. But... it's so hard." you can hear him exhale tiredly, "She technically hasn't done anything wrong, so I feel guilty that I don't like her. How am I supposed to tell her she makes me uncomfortable with just her presence?" he asks desperately.

Jihoon is quick to respond rationally, "Well, you don't say it like that. You just have to tell her that you can tell she likes you, and while you are flattered, you would appreciate it if she toned her admiration down since it makes you uncomfortable. That's completely valid, Joshua."

A tear slips down your cheek as you take a step back, though you're still close enough to hear Hansol’s voice; you hadn't known that many of your friends were aware of Joshua's discomfort with you, and the realization hurts more than you care to admit. “Just make sure you tell her sooner than later. She looked really hurt when you didn't spare her one glance the whole night but then saw you took interest in Dami."

and if you weren't humiliated before, you certainly were now.

you feel Seungkwan grab your wrist gently, pulling you towards him for comfort, but before you can appreciate the gesture, you hear Joshua speak, wedging a knife into your heart once more.

"I'll see if I can tell her soon. It's just kind of annoying to me, y'know? I have never given her the impression that I like her, so I don't understand why she insists on pushing me so much. She bakes me stuff, stares at me whenever we're all together, and makes me feel like I have to be close with her to not hurt her feelings."

he's silent for a moment before adding the final blow to your heart. "I wish she would just take the hint and leave me alone."

but you've heard enough now; you wipe your cheek and gently shake Seungkwan off before placing your hand on the knob and opening the door. you don't look at your friends' faces, though you can see their mouths open in shock in your peripheral vision. you strut straight towards Joshua, heels clicking as you walk before you stop in front of him.

you observe his pretty parted lips, the way his eyes glimmer when the light hits them just right, and the fact that the boy in front of you who has just shattered your heart is someone you have liked for quite a while.

he opens his mouth, looking to say something, but you didn't think you could handle hearing him speak any longer.

"I'm sorry." you blurt out softly.

"I... you were right, I did like you from the start, and I tried to show it in ways like baking for you and trying to talk to you whenever I had the chance." your voice rings in the quiet room, and the muffled music coming from downstairs makes your head spin.

"I didn't know I made you uncomfortable with my presence, I never would've acted the way I did had I known." your throat hurts and you wish to cry, but as you stand in the middle of the room with your friends and crush looking at you, you hold your tears back.

"I am so incredibly sorry for inconveniencing you all these months. I thought that even though you seemed uninterested, I just had to work a little harder to make you like me, even just as a friend." you smile bitterly as you look into Joshua's widened eyes. "I understand now though, so you won't need to put up with me anymore. I'm sorry that being around me was so hard for you." your voice is laced with heartbreak though it is firm.

you look around at your mutual friends in the room, smiling disappointedly at them, "Well, I'll leave you all to it then. Have a good night, guys."

and with that, you walk out, past Seungkwan, and finally allow the overwhelming amount of tears out.

that night, you wait for Seungkwan in his car while he comes up with an excuse to tell Mingyu, as you two were leaving quite early.

and once you're home, showered, and makeup-free, you lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling. you spiral at the thought of Joshua disliking you all along, and you wonder how many of your friends stood there and watched you make a fool out of yourself each time. it feels suffocating; the knowledge that you have been nothing but a pitiful burdensome girl to Joshua and your friends for so long.

but after tonight, you know you need to change.

and so, while on the brink of falling asleep, you make a promise to yourself to never bother Hong Jisoo again; it would be as if you didn't exist, just as he wanted.

your weekend consists of Seungkwan, Jun, and Minghao comforting you. the two had attended the party as well but arrived quite late so you were not able to catch them. Seungkwan updates them on the events that occurred, and while they feel angry with Joshua on your behalf, they are also upset with the rest of their friends who didn't clue you in on how he felt either.

you enjoy the company, however, and attempt to use those two days during the weekend to heal as much as you could; Minghao does some skincare with you, Jun helps you bake a batch of comfort cookies and Seungkwan convinces you to dye some of your hair as the cliche heartbroken people normally do.

and though it all helped immensely, you still feel unprepared at the thought of what Monday brings.

ꕥ

except when Monday arrives, everything feels anticlimactic. you attend class as usual, spend your break with Seungkwan, Minghao, and Jun, and attend your last lecture of the day before heading home. and that should be the end of it.

unfortunately for you, however, nothing is ever in your favor. while exiting the campus, you find yourself running into the last person you want to see; Joshua.

he’s standing a few meters away, back turned towards you while he talks to Jihoon and Hansol. you are not ready to face them, you realize. you move to turn around and find another way home, but Hansol spots you and waves awkwardly, causing Jihoon and Joshua to turn to you as well. you curse internally at his endearingly unsure smile and wave back tight-lipped.

you figure you might as well keep walking now that they’ve seen you. hiking your backpack higher on your shoulder, you make your way toward them. you know they’re all looking at you still, and the knowledge that Joshua has his eyes on you as well makes you want to crawl into a hole and hide for eternity.

you’re not sure if they expect you to stop and greet them, but Jihoon greets you. “Hi, Y/n.”

you nod once in response with an empty smile before continuing to walk home.

while part of you wants to run back and greet the two and Joshua with a happy smile, you haven’t forgotten the promise you made to yourself to leave Joshua alone. and while that normally wouldn’t include your mutual friends, you’re still upset that they hid his immense discomfort from you for so long. you sigh, shaking your head to rid yourself of these thoughts and continue walking home; you would get over Hong Jisoo, you would make sure of it.

Joshua stares at your retreating back and hears Jihoon sigh. “Well, she’s definitely pissed at you and I, Hansol. I’ve never seen her look so unhappy with us.”

Hansol nods, face pinched, “I don’t blame her, I can’t imagine how she felt after hearing us talk about her like that.” he sulks, looking in the direction you walked in.

“I need to apologize, there’s no way I’m letting things stay the way they are.”

Jihoon pats his shoulder in agreement.

he glances at Joshua, “So, how did it feel finally getting what you want? Happy that she left you alone?”

Joshua frowns at him, unsure himself why he is not very happy, but decides there must be a reason. “Who knows, it feels too early to tell.” he dismisses, ignoring Hansol's narrowed eyes at his response.

he was probably in shock, he reasons. you’ve been consistent in his life for almost a year now, and despite the uneasiness that came with being in a friend group with you, Joshua was not used to your lack of attention. It’ll feel better soon, he tells himself; if only he knew how wrong he was.

you spot your friends again as you begin heading home, though this time they are without Joshua. you sigh before placing your headphones in your ears as you tune out the rest of the world. your eyes are still slightly swollen, courtesy of the humiliating situation you experienced just a few days ago at Mingyu’s party. you have yet to get over it, and the sight of your friends only worsens the heartache. you wonder when the pain will subdue.

you want to be at home, wallowing in self-pity in your bed; the thought makes you move to walk faster until someone grabs your arm. you turn around, jerking your arm with an annoyed expression, ready to tell off whoever grabbed you until you see Jihoon. you tug out your headphones as you press pause on your music.

“What can I do for you?”

Hansol beside him gulps as you take your time to observe him, Jihoon, Soonyoung, and Jeonghan. they all look extremely apologetic, and the sight does diminish some of your pain. some.

“We wanted to say we’re sorry.” Jihoon begins.

the wind blows softly on your face, a contrast to the raging emotions you feel inside of you. the unease you feel surrounded by people who used to make you feel so safe is saddening, but you know none of this is your fault.

Jeonghan moves closer, “There’s no excuse we can give you. We were shitty friends, and that was that. We should have told you about Shua earlier, or defended you. That was on us.”

you stay silent throughout the apology, not exactly pleased with them but willing to hear them out.

“Yeah, and we understand if you aren’t willing to forgive us right away. We’ll work for it.” Hansol interjects. the words sound sincere coming from them all, but you know you’ll need time before you can trust them again.

you nod, face expressionless as the rest of them begin to look dejected.

Soonyoung pouts, “I’m really sorry, Y/n. We all are. And as long as you’re okay with it, we’ll do our best to make it up to you.”

you press your lips together before sighing softly. “Do what you want, no promises that I’ll forgive you right away. You really fucked up and broke my trust.”

the rest of them nod with somber faces at your words, before you wave and begin to turn away, placing your headphones back in your ears. you knew you’d forgive them. it was simply a matter of time for you.

The next incident when Joshua sees you is on a Friday afternoon in the library. upon entering, his eyes immediately find you; clad in an oversized hoodie that looks much too cute on you, reading glasses perched on your nose, and your eyes trained on the book in front of you. you look like a dream.

Joshua blinks back to reality at the thought. you look like a nightmare, he corrects himself.

he sighs, choosing to focus on finding the book he needs, skimming through all of the genres and textbooks, unable to find the one for his Chemistry class. he approaches the front desk, speaking lowly to the librarian, “Do you know if the Chemistry 2L5 textbook is available?”

“One moment.” she responds quietly, clicking her keyboard to search for the availability.

she looks up to him with a shake of her head, “Sorry, it’s not available right now. If you’d like, I can add your name to the wait list?”

Joshua's lip juts out in a slight pout, and he is about to accept when someone places the exact textbook he needs next to him.

he looks up and his eyes find yours; you turn to the librarian, “I’d like to return this, please.”

she takes the book from the desk and glances at Joshua, “Looks like you’re in luck, I’ll sign this out for you now.”

he nods, surprised yet pleased, and moves to thank you, but when he looks to the side, you’re gone.

when Joshua walks home that evening, a dazed look in his eye and textbook in his hands, he thinks of you. he had always thought of you as a little too childish and pushy, but as he glances at the book in his arms, he realizes there may be more to you than he initially thought.

two weeks have passed since Joshua’s encounter with you in the library, and it is as if you do not exist- or rather, it is as if he doesn’t exist.

he should be celebrating, he should be comfortable; he should be happy. and yet, it feels like something is missing.

he sighs and collapses onto his bed. he doesn’t understand why you ignoring him is bothering him so much. but for someone who really liked him before, you sure are good at avoiding him now. he purses his lips, thinking of your past encounters- or lack thereof.

exhibit a.

Exiting his class, Joshua is startled when he hears Hansol’s honking laughter from across the hall. He chuckles quietly to himself as he walks over to Soonyoung and places a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, what’s Hansol laughing his ass off about?” Soonyoung immediately clues him in, going on a tangent about some embarrassing situation that took place moments before.

except Joshua’s eyes dart to you, a few feet away from him, your arm entangled with Minghao’s. he tunes Soonyoung out, watching you glance at him before whispering something to Minghao and leaving without looking back. Joshua snaps out of his daze once you're out of sight and looks back up, noticing Minghao glaring at him.

Well, it seemed many of his friends were upset with him lately. he realizes he can’t blame them.

and of course, the avoiding didn’t end there.

exhibit b.

Joshua entered the popular cafe next to your campus during his break, knowing it was the group's go-to spot for lunch.

“Shua!” Hansol calls. he looks to the side and sees everyone at the corner table; including you.

Joshua motions to the front, “I’m gonna grab something real quick.”

Hansol gives him a thumbs up in response. Joshua orders a simple sandwich, quickly walking to the table, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

but as soon as he begins unwrapping his lunch, you rise from your chair.

“I actually have a class in 10, so I’ll see you guys later.” you announce, grabbing your bag and leaving with a wave.

Jihoon squints as he watches you leave the cafe, “I thought her class wasn’t for another hour.”

Jeonghan shrugs as he chews, “She probably doesn’t want to be around Shuji. We should give her the space she wants.”

The table is silent for a moment before Soonyoung breaks the awkward atmosphere and everyone speaks again.

Joshua, however, stares at his half-opened sandwich ignoring the conversations around him. suddenly, he did not have an appetite.

but once again, things didn't stop there, leading to:

exhibit c.

“So, who’s house are we meeting at for tonight?” Jun asks no one in particular.

Mingyu sighs dramatically, “Not mine, my place is still trashed as fuck from last week's party.”

Joshua internally rolls his eyes, Mingyu and his weekly parties.

“We can do mine? I’ll text Y/n and tell her we’re doing a movie night.” Minghao suggests, and everyone agrees. Joshua wonders if you’ll come, since you’ve made it your number one goal to not be in the same vicinity of him for the past three weeks. he bites his lip in anticipation, discreetly staring at Minghao typing on his phone as he texts you. he watches Minghao’s brows furrow and lips tug down before he sighs and clicks his phone off.

He lifts his head up, “Y/n can’t make it, but she said ‘Have fun and don’t watch a super scary horror movie or Seungkwan and Soonyoung won’t be able to sleep tonight.’” he giggles as he reads out the last part.

Soonyoung and Seungkwan stand up with matching pouts, yelling all kinds of nonsense but all Joshua can think about is how he’s ruined the entire friend group dynamic from his own stupidity. he wonders if things will ever go back to normal again.

another week has passed since you rejected their movie invite, and Joshua feels as though he is losing his mind. it has been well over a month since what occurred at Mingyu’s party, and nothing feels the same. he tries to convince himself that it’s guilt, but even he knows that what he feels goes deeper than that.

but today he can’t think about you; Juyeon, his brother, informed Joshua that he would be visiting tonight. and while lately you’ve been occupying his mind, he knows he has to focus on his brother unless he wants to get scolded.

he sighs for the umpteenth time, staring at the front door of his apartment and waiting to hear the bell. despite knowing it was going to come, he still flinches at the sound. Joshua rises to his feet and inhales deeply before opening the door.

“Hey, Hyung,” he says with a hesitant smile, ignoring the way Juyeon nods in response, face blank.

Juyeon removes his jacket and hands it to Joshua who obediently hangs it up, before sauntering over to the couch.

Joshua quickly takes a seat on the couch in front of him, “I ordered from your favorite restaurant, the food is on the table.” he speaks quietly.

Juyeon ignores what he has said and spreads his legs comfortably, “How have you been doing in school, Jisoo?”

Joshua swallows; suddenly his throat feels dry. “I’m doing well, I’m still at the top of all my classes." his voice is soft, gentle; weak. but he's always been weak when it came to his brother, and it has never gotten better with time.

Juyeon nods, face unreadable, "Okay, good. I expect you to email me your grades when they arrive. Don't disappoint me, Jisoo."

Joshua dips his head, face passive. "I won't, I promise." he stands up, holding his hands behind his back to hide the fact that they are shaking. "Let's eat? I'll get the food ready."

Juyeon nods once again, and Joshua is reminded of his hatred for his mannerisms; his inability to speak if it's not to scold him or ask about his grades.

Juyeon takes a seat at the table, posture straight and face confident as Joshua places the food for his brother first, and himself after.

Joshua is in the midst of placing food on his plate when Juyeon squints his eyes, looking at Joshua's portion. "You're going to eat all of that?" he asks unabashedly.

Joshua pauses, wide eyes looking at his brother as he nods slowly.

it was the wrong answer it seemed, as his brother frowns. "You may want to limit how much you're eating. I noticed as soon as I saw you that you've gained some weight." he dabs a napkin on the sides of his mouth before looking up at Joshua, "You need to keep in good health to take over the company when I'm too old."

Joshua ignores the way his eyes burn, nodding at Juyeon's words, and places half of the food on his plate back in the pot.

The rest of the night goes uneventful, with only a few snide remarks and insults thrown Joshua's way. but that is how it's always been with Juyeon, and Joshua hadn't expected anything different.

when Juyeon leaves, Joshua stands in his apartment alone with an empty stomach. his eyes crystalize with tears and he sniffles, wiping them half-heartedly. he decides to go on a walk, heedless of it being dark outside.

he doesn't know where he's going, but he walks, and walks, until his feet take him to a playground. It's empty, quiet, and dark; the perfect place to cry alone. so he does. he sits on a swing and cries, albeit softly.

he hates his stupid family, and his stupid brother, and the stupid company he has to take over. Joshua hates it all.

he doesn't know how long he sits there crying, but it must be a while as he suddenly feels cold. the night air brushes against his bare arms, goosebumps arising to the touch as he continues to sniffle.

"Um, are you okay?" a hesitant voice reaches out, and Joshua jumps at the sound.

they put their hands up in alarm, "Sorry, sorry! I've just been hearing you cry for the last ten minutes and I finally built the courage to just come and ask-" they step into the dimly lit yellow street light; it's you.

"-if you're okay..." you trail off, arms falling to your sides as you observe Joshua's appearance. Joshua on the other hand, feels horrified; someone he wasn't close to in the slightest caught him crying alone at a park in the middle of the night. he doesn't know what to say as he looks at you with wide teary eyes.

after a moment of staring at each other, you sigh and slowly step closer as Joshua continues to stare at you.

you take a seat on the swing next to him.

"So, what's got you so sad tonight? Did something happen, or was it a particularly sad movie?" you ask quietly.

Joshua certainly isn't in his right mind after all that has occurred in the past hours and decides to stop thinking rationally.

"You know of a movie that would make someone cry in the middle of the night at a park alone?" he asks with a watery smile, and you look back at him sheepishly.

"Not really, but I figured I would give you an out if you didn't wanna talk," you shrug. Joshua appreciates the sentiment.

the two of you sit in silence for another minute, until a harsh gust of wind causes Joshua to sneeze. your eyes dart to his bare arms as he sniffles, brows furrowing. "Dude, why would you leave the house without a jacket at this time?" you berate worriedly.

Joshua sulks when he looks at your concerned eyes, "I wasn't really... in the right state of mind." he whispers. you nod in understanding, before standing up and unzipping your oversized sweater.

Joshua watches you wearily as you walk over to him, stopping in front and bending down to his eye level, before gently placing your sweater around his shoulders. he stares into your eyes confused, but his shoulders sag as the feeling as warmth and comfort overtake his senses.

"Put your arms in, hurry up before you catch a cold." you remind, smiling when he listens and does as you ask.

he's missed your smile, he thinks.

he looks up at you once putting his arms in, and you nod in approval before gesturing to the zipper.

"You do it," Joshua says petulantly, and you look at him with an incredulous face before sighing in exasperation and doing as he asks. he is definitely going to be embarrassed when he wakes up tomorrow, but you've already seen him sob alone before this, so he figures his dignity can take one more hit.

you stand up when you're done, and Joshua murmurs a "Thank you," covering his face with his sweater-covered palms, enjoying the warmth it brings to his cold cheeks.

"I should get going, I'm really not trying to get kidnapped by going home any later than this," you say, and Joshua looks up, trying to ignore the pit of disappointment he feels at the knowledge you are leaving.

you smile faintly at him, "I'll see you around, Joshua. Don't worry about returning the sweater, you can just give it whenever you have the chance."

you turn to leave, until-

"Wait."

you turn back to him in confusion, and Joshua knows he needs to take this chance to make everything right; apologize, ask for forgiveness, and suggest starting over. you have been plaguing his mind for too long now, and after tonight, Joshua knows that he doesn't want to be strangers with you. he wants to get to know you as a person; as a friend, and to do that, he needs to apologize.

Joshua stands up, hands curling on the ends of his sleeves- your sleeves, "I... I just wanted to apologize." he starts, watching your brows furrow.

"For what?" you ask softly, sounding genuinely confused, and Joshua feels like the biggest asshole to exist.

"For everything!" he says frustrated.

"I... was so horrible to you from the start. I didn't even get to know you before I started disliking you, and it's been eating at me for the past month, but I regret every single thing I said that day." he bites his lip, sniffling, and stares at your feet, refusing to look at your face.

"You were never the problem, it was me. I think I got nervous that you liked me and were so forward, but that didn't mean you deserved to be ignored like that, or talked about behind your back." Joshua is breathless at the end of his apology, and he looks to see you staring at him with surprised eyes. "Um... you don't have to forgive me right away- or forgive me at all, of course! but, and I know this is a long shot, but if you were by chance open to it, I'd like to start over with you... as friends?" he finishes hesitantly, chest rising with each breath as he awaits your response.

when you seem to process everything he's said, you blink harshly and look into his eyes with a friendly smile, "Thank you for your apology, Joshua. It means a lot." you turn, starting to walk away.

Joshua's shoulders sag in defeat; he figures this was your wordless rejection to his proposal, until you turn back around.

"Sure though, let's start over!" you call out, voice echoing slightly in the silent neighborhood.

Joshua's eyes light up, smiling widely as he nods back at you.

that night, once Joshua is back in his apartment dressed in pajamas and drowning in the soft covers on his bed, he stares at the sweater on his desk with a giddy smile, shoving his face into his pillow with a happy noise.

he was so excited to see you tomorrow.

ꕥ

“So what, he apologized and you just forgave him?! just like that?” Seungkwan yells, looking at you as if you were crazy.

you giggle at his wide-eyed expression, “Yes, I did. It was a very genuine apology, okay?” but he shakes his head at you in response.

Minghao interjects from his place on your desk chair, “Lighten up, Kwannie. Y/n can make the decision for herself. I’m sure she knows better than us whether or not she can trust him,” he takes a bite out of the apple in his hand, “After all, she’s the one who he hurt the most. She would be more skeptical than us.”

Jun nods, “And I’m sure he won’t do anything like that again. Y/n ignored him for so long which clearly made him react.” he shrugs, moving to pat your head in comfort.

You smile at their responses, “Exactly! Don’t worry Kwan, I won’t get hurt again. I expect quite literally nothing from him.” while you are endeared by Seungkwan's overprotective behavior, you don’t regret forgiving Joshua. you know had you rejected his apology, you would’ve regretted it.

Seungkwan sighs, moving to hug you with a pout, “Okay, as long as you’re sure Y/nie.”

he grabs your face in front of his and squishes your cheeks, “Just promise me you’ll tell me if he does something again, I’ll beat him up!”

“Okay! I promise.” you remove his hands from your face laughing, before Minghao interrupts, “Beat him up with what muscles? You’re about as weak as they come.” he teases, but shuts up when Seungkwan levels him with a glare.

you giggle as they bicker, standing off to the side and watching them with Jun. you had told them part of what happened with Joshua. you just cut out the entire fact that he was sobbing uncontrollably, figuring it was a personal thing.

and so, things have changed once again.

the next time you see Joshua, he’s with the others. you greet them all with a cheerful grin, smile widening when Joshua waves at you and blushes. you assume he’s still embarrassed about last night, and though you should feel bad, you find his reddened cheeks look very cute.

“So! What are we doing for lunch?” you lilt, leaning your head on Minghao's shoulder.

he wraps his arm around you, "Nothing at this rate. These losers are still fighting over where to eat."

that was not the correct thing to say it seemed, as they began quarreling with him now. you sigh and clap your hands loudly, "Okay! Sucks for all of you, I'm choosing now, and I say we go to the cafe like we normally do."

the rest of them stay silent and agree begrudgingly, and you giggle as you step out of Minghao's arm and take the lead to walk there. you hear footsteps get closer to you, and turn assuming it is Seungkwan, until you look up and see Joshua.

you raise your eyebrows and smile, "Hi. You okay?"

Joshua presses his lips together and nods. you notice his cheeks are still a little pink. you bite your lip to stop yourself from grinning.

"Yeah, uh, the others didn't wanna go to the cafe at first because they wanted to try somewhere new, but we couldn't agree on a place." he rubs the back of his neck sheepish, and your stomach jumps slightly when you realize he's actually engaging in a conversation with you.

but you're not as nervous around him as you were before, the blissful innocent feelings you harbored for him have simmered down into a muted version of what was once so intense.

you nod understandingly, "Ah, I see. Too bad for them then." you shrug, and Joshua chuckles at your demeanor.

you arrive at the cafe and everyone goes to order their food. you take a seat right away, however, as you bought your lunch in the morning. you take it out of your bag, unwrapping it as someone takes a seat in the chair beside you. you look up to see the last person you'd expect; Joshua.

he promptly ignores your questioning face and unwraps his own lunch. "So, how were your classes, Y/n?"

you squint your eyes before shaking your head, “Good, good. except my first one, I got paired with someone I don’t really like, but it’ll be okay.”

Joshua is surprised, finding the idea that someone upset you so much you disliked them very shocking, “Oh, what did they do for you to not like them?” he asks curiously.

you open your mouth to respond, but the rest of your friends arrive with their own food. you smile at Joshua, “I’ll tell you another time.”

his bottom lip pushes out unintentionally, and you giggle as you look away from him.

the next thirty minutes consist of the familiar comforting atmosphere that existed between you and the others, before Minghao calls out to you from across the table.

“Y/n, Hongjoong was asking about you the other day.” he wipes his mouth as he speaks, arms folding on the table as he leans over. the table has quieted down, all eyes staring at you with raised brows.

you tilt your head, “Oh? What for?”

“I think he’s into you. He asked for your number, but I figured I’d ask before giving it out.”

Joshua shifts in his seat beside you, an uncomfortable look taking over his face. what was this deep pit he feels in his stomach? he frowns as he watches you smile shyly. “Ah, I see. I don’t know him that well, but you can give him my number.”

Joshua’s breath hitches at your words, and the rest of the table goes completely silent. you to look around in confusion as your cheeks puff out, “What?”

the ruckus picks up again, Hansol waving his hands awkwardly, “Nothing, nothing! We just didn’t know you were interested in dating right now.”

Joshua’s heart drops at the word. you were interested in dating? he wants to pout, why would you go out with this Hongjoong guy when you liked him just a little while ago?

“I’m not saying i’ll date him, I’m just saying you can give him my number and i’ll see where things go, that’s all!” you smile reassuringly, though all it does is make Hansol nod unconvinced.

Joshua knows the others are just as shocked as he is, especially since your feelings for him were not exactly a secret. but you giving your number to Hongjoong meant something has changed. either you wanted a new friend, or you’ve moved on from Joshua.

he finds the latter an upsetting thought.

ꕥ

“Who’s that?” Joshua asks, brows furrowed slightly as his eyes narrow.

Jun’s lips tug upward at the sight of Joshua’s face, “Hongjoong.”

Joshua’s head whips to Jun, “That’s him? He isn’t even her type!”

Jun chuckles at his friends’ words. “And who exactly is her type?” he leans his face closer, eyes mischievous, “You?”

“I never said that. I just meant she’s out of his league.” Joshua huffs, crossing his arms. Jun shakes his head at Joshua who is still burning stares into your back as you giggle at Hongjoong’s words.

what exactly was he saying that was so funny? Joshua could be funny too. why were you standing so close to him too? did he know a thing about personal space? Joshua doesn’t know what expression is on his face, but it must be comedic as Jun beside him bursts into giggles.

“If you like her, maybe you should just confess?”

Joshua splutters, “I do not like her! I’m merely…concerned for her well-being.”

Jun nods, rolling his eyes. “Uh huh, sure.”

there was no way he could like you. the two of you were only just getting to know one another properly! especially after the past events, Joshua was simply glad you accepted him as a friend. he could not like you now after rejecting your advances for so long as well.

“I’m serious. I do not like her.” Joshua stares at the glimmer in your eyes, the pretty color of your lips that stretch into a grin, and the way your hair falls perfectly around your face. “There’s no way I could possibly…”

but then his eyes dart to the man before you, eyes scanning the flirty smirk that is directed towards you as you tuck a lock of hair behind your ear. Hongjoong moves closer, arms wrapping tightly around your waist as you move yours around his neck, and Joshua bristles. when the two of you part, he exhales rather dramatically.

turning to Jun, Joshua presses his lips together. “Okay. Maybe I like her.”

Jun cackles, lips curving into a grin, “Yeah, I could tell.”

Joshua looks at his friend, expression hopeless, “Fuck. What do I do?”

“I refuse! I reject you! Not even in one thousand years!”

Seungkwan grabs a couch pillow and chucks it at Joshua as he hides behind Jihoon. Minghao is trying to calm Seungkwan down, pulling at his arm gently but all Seungkwan does is glare harder at Joshua from across the room.

“You can’t like her now! You had your chance, you fucked up and now she’ll date Hongjoong and you can suffer!” Seungkwan laughs wickedly at Joshua’s fear, and he can hear Hansol’s barely contained giggle from the corner of the room as well.

Jihoon intervenes calmly, “Kwannie, that’s not your choice to make. Y/n can decide for herself. Joshua just wanted to tell you because you’re her best friend and you mean a lot to her.”

Seungkwan pouts, cheeks puffing out cutely as he falls rather dramatically onto the couch. “Yeah well, you should’ve seen her the night your best friend Joshua said she makes him uncomfortable to a bunch of people she thought were her friends.”

the room quiets at that, Jihoon not exactly having a response as even he knows the night of Mingyu’s party was something that impacted you and your friendship with most of them.

“Listen…” Joshua stands up, hands falling from Jihoons shoulders as he moves to the side. “I fucked up. I know, I admit it, okay?”

Seungkwan crosses his arms, head tilting up as he listens.

“But I’m really trying here, Kwannie. I should’ve given her a chance before, but I didn’t and that was on me. This time won’t be like before, I’ll be the one chasing her, I promise.”

he walks forward, closer to Seungkwan as Jun, Hansol, Minghao and Jihoon watch in silence. “I’d really like it if you could also give me a chance, I’m sorry I was a horrible friend to you and Y/n. I’ll do my best to make it up to you both.”

Seungkwan deflates, “Y/n especially.” he seems to have given up on his anger after Joshua’s apology, and Joshua smiles happily at the notion.

“Y/n especially.” he repeats.

ꕥ

"Mingyu, hi!" you greet with a giddy smile, moving to hug the tall man as you enter his home.

he grins back, "Y/n!", and sweeps you off your feet, spinning you around as you giggle like children. the rest of your friends watch with amused expressions as he places you down, ruffling your already messy hair even more. you turn to look at the rest of them, "What are we waiting here for, why haven't you guys set up?"

you walk into the living room, placing your basket of snacks down, and beginning to put pillows on the floor. it was movie night, which meant you and the others met up at Mingyu's house and all watched a movie that the majority voted on. tonight it was either The Little Mermaid, or The Exorcist. two very different options, and you were voting for The Exorcist; Seungkwan was the funniest when watching horror movies.

“We were waiting for you to show up.” Jihoon interjects from across the room, beginning to help you place pillows and blankets on the floor.

you stand up, stretching as your arms go up, “Ah, my bad. Well i’m here now!”

you all begin to take your seats on the pillows, snuggling into the blankets. you sigh, content, turning to the side and smiling at Seungkwan. you look to your right to see who is sat beside you there, and lo and behold, there sits Hong Jisoo. your heart jumps for a moment at the close proximity, and you mentally berate yourself for it. you promised yourself you would move on from him, so why was he sticking to you like glue now?

Joshua smiles, “Are you excited to watch The Little Mermaid?”

“Yeah, but I was looking forward to seeing Kwannie all scared. It’s too bad.” you puff out your cheeks, pouting, until Seungkwan hits you with a pillow beside you and you burst into giggles.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” you plead through laughs, falling onto your back as your head lands in Joshua’s lap. Seungkwan stops his assault, causing you to look up with a breathless smile, and you find yourself face to face with Joshua.

he looks at you so sweetly, your heart jumps; the smile on your face falls. you look up at him with wide eyes as you realize your current position.

he looks down at you with an amused grin, “You good?”

you immediately sit up, ignoring the butterflies that run rampant in your stomach.

“I’m good.”

the rest of the boys watch your interaction closely, before Jihoon sighs loudly and presses play on the movie.

you sit with your knees to your chest, trying your best to focus on the movie and not the boy on your right. you knew getting over him was not going to be an easy task, but his sudden friendly behavior has made it hard to make any progress.

half way through the movie you feel him lean closer, “Don’t you think Flounder is cuter in the live action?” he whispers into your ear.

you barely register the words, shocked with the closeness. “Yeah, his voice actor is that kid from Wonder.” you whisper back, glancing at the others to see if they noticed you two speaking. they all remain focused with the television, and you feel silly for thinking you had anything to hide.

Joshua nods beside you, subtly moving closer until your shoulders are touching. the skin on your arm tingles with the warmth, and your mind scrambles for some sort of reasoning as to why he was acting this way.

the movie finishes soon after, with you quickly standing up and excusing yourself before heading to the bathroom.

your face looks flushed in the mirror; you hate that Joshua still manages to get you so flustered.

you slap both of your cheeks, closing your eyes as you take a deep breath. you can do this. you will get over Hong Jisoo.

you exit out of the bathroom, finding most of the guys passed out on the couch, save for Seungkwan, Jihoon and Joshua. you ignore Joshua’s intense stare as you head straight for Seungkwan. you wrap your arms around him, “Ready to go?”

Seungkwan pats your back, “Yeah, let me grab my keys and we can leave.”

you turn, watching as Seungkwan says his goodbyes to Jihoon, though your attention falls onto Joshua when he takes steps towards you. you tilt your head up, crossing your arms, “I’ll see you around, Joshua.”

“Don’t avoid me anymore, okay?” he asks, “We’re friends now, right?”

you hadn’t exactly thought the two of you were close, but you supposed friends was okay. after all, he’s already apologized to you and you’ve seen him in a fairly intimate setting; him crying in a playground at night. you sigh softly at the reminder of that night.

“Yeah. Friends.” you smile, arms uncrossing as he moves to hug you. you wrap your arms around his back, unsure, as he tugs you close. you can smell the subtle cologne coating his skin as you inhale, hating the way you enjoy the scent.

the two of you part, and you say your goodbyes to Jihoon as well. you leave with Seungkwan, feeling more confused than ever. you had given up on Joshua, not only romantically but as a friend. you feel conflicted, but you suppose you should take things as they go.

it wasn’t like he liked you, so all was well. you can still get over your feelings for him as you stay friends, you’re sure of it!

you are not sure of anything. ever since your night meeting Joshua at the park, he’s been acting weird; clingy.

and there was nothing wrong with being clingy, you adore your friends who cling to you and shower you with affection! but Hong Jisoo was no ordinary friend of yours, and you find yourself stumped at his behavior. in the span of three weeks, he has baked you cookies; you specifically.

“I baked these just for you, will you try them?” he smiled sweetly. you simply nodded in response.

he’s also waited for you after class; “Y/n!” he shouted, waving with a cute smile as he stands off to the side. you looked at Joshua in shock, before walking towards him and tilting your head, “What’re you here for?”

“You!” he grinned, “Let’s go find the others, i’m starving.” your eyes scan his face, looking to see if this was some sick joke, but he was completely serious. you walk side by side as you meet up with your friends, shrugging when Seungkwan looks at you two with raised brows. you didn’t know either.

what really did it for you however, was his behavior when you mentioned meeting Hongjoong again.

“Yeah, Hongjoong is gonna be at the party, so I…” the smile slipped from his face as soon as you brought it up, causing you to trail off as you tilt your head.

your brows furrow as you stare at Joshua, “I told him I’d meet him there.”

you bite your lip, figuring you should just ask. “Are you okay? You look kind of annoyed.”

Joshua’s face changes immediately as he forces a smile, “Yeah, yeah. I just didn’t know you and Hongjoong were still talking.”

“Oh, yeah, we haven’t stopped. He’s really sweet, we get along well!” you smile happily as you speak, and though Joshua smiles back at you, you feel something off about his demeanour.

“Oh! That’s good, that’s good.”

you pause. he doesn’t sound as genuine as he normally does. he almost looks… Jealous? you try to scrap the thought immediately, but it stays with you as you go about your days.

ꕥ

you’re getting ready for Mingyu’s party, thinking about the fact that Joshua and Hongjoong are going to be in the same vicinity. you just hope it won’t be awkward, but why should it be? the guy you used to like and the guy that currently liked you. that isn't odd in the slightest.

but that doesn't stop you from overthinking it as Seungkwan sighs loudly behind you. you feel a sense of deja vu as he waits for you on your bed, though this time you are not attending the party in hopes of catching Joshua's attention.

much has changed, you realize. you figure any change is a good change, even if your feelings for Joshua were still there.

"Let's go?" you ask with a cheery smile. Seungkwan nods before getting up and shrugging his jacket on. the two of you arrive somewhat late; a consequence of you taking time to get ready.

the moment you walk into the house you are reminded why you dislike parties, until Seungkwan grabs your hand and you relax. you look around, though before you are able to find a familiar face you feel Seungkwan pull you aside. you look up once you are out of the crowd, finding your friends.. and Joshua. you suppose you should consider him part of your friends now, but he was always going to be a little different to you.

"Y/n! Seungkwan! Where have you guys been?" Soonyoung yells, and Seungkwan responds with a shake of his head as he points his finger at you.

you giggle unapologetically, "My bad!"

the rest of them begin to make conversation, before you feel someone stand next to you causing you to look up. you find Joshua, clad in a white button-up and black pants. his sleeves are rolled to his elbow, and you struggle not to ogle his hands.

he smiles, "You look good."

you look down at your outfit abashed, smiling back as you sigh softly, "Thanks, you too."

Joshua opens his mouth, but before he can speak, someone calls your name.

"Y/n?"

you look behind Joshua, finding Hongjoong. "Oh! Hongjoong, hi!"

he walks closer to you, looking at your outfit from head to toe with a small grin, "I've been looking for you. You look gorgeous tonight."

the rest of your friends sit silent, including Joshua who stands off to the side with his arms crossed. you shift nervously as all attention is on you.

"Let's get a drink?" Hongjoong suggests. your eyes dart to Joshua's, finding that he looks rather annoyed. you know you need to get over him, however, so you accept as Hongjoong takes your hand in his, whisking you off to another room.

"What the fuck was that?" Jihoon asks once you’re gone, and the rest of them shrug in response.

Seungkwan takes a sip of Minghao's drink, ignoring his friends' incredulous expression as he responds, "They've been texting, so it makes sense that he'd wanna see her tonight. Sucks for Joshua but looks like my little Y/n has moved on."

Joshua glares at Seungkwan before his eyes find you, across the room, drink in your hand and Hongjoong by your side. that should be him, beside you.

but then he remembers the last time you were here, and knows he has no one but himself to blame.

"I'm going to get a drink," Joshua announces, stalking off before he gets a reply.

Jihoon sighs once Joshua is gone, "Seriously, Seungkwan?"

"What?" Seungkwan pouts.

ꕥ

the rest of the night goes by fast; you enjoy your time with Hongjoong, finding his personality and yours mesh well.

but you can’t shake off the feeling that you don’t see him romantically. perhaps it is your unresolved feelings for Joshua, but you know you can’t lead him on much longer. you’ve tried to move on, but involving another person was not something you wished to do.

it’s almost 12:00am, and your feet are beginning to hurt so you tell Hongjoong you’re going to leave. he moves to hug you, arms wrapping around you tightly as you hug him back.

but once you part, he pauses. he stares at your face, and you stare back up at him. your eyes are wide as he leans closer, and you know he is about to kiss you. you know you need to reject him, and reject him now.

but before you can, you feel someone grab your arm and you are ripped away from Hongjoong’s embrace.

you blanch, looking up at- Joshua.

he looks annoyed, smile nowhere to be seen as he stands tall. he glances at Hongjoong, “We should get going, you’ll see each other another day!”

you hear Hongjoong yell “What the fuck?!” as Joshua tugs you down the hall and into a room.

you follow, too stumped to pause and ask him what the hell he was doing. he shuts the door, finally letting go of you as you look up at him as though he is crazy.

“What the fuck, Joshua?”

you look around, finding yourself in the same room you were in when you overheard Joshua on that night.

he stands off to the side, silent once again but you aren’t having it this time.

“No, you need to say something, Joshua. That was so disrespectful to Hongjoong-”

“Please, enough about Hongjoong.” he interrupts.

you scoff, “Is that what this is about? You always seemed weird when I talked about him but I don’t understand why. You can’t just hate him for no reason.”

you feel your hands shake beside you as you question Joshua, unsure and angered that he would do something so rude in front of someone you considered a friend. because even if you didn’t like Hongjoong romantically, he was someone you cherished as a person.

Joshua sighs, “I have my reasons.”

you roll your eyes at him, “Care to elaborate? That’s not enough to justify your behavior back there.”

Joshua is silent once again. you observe the way he fiddles with his sleeves; he looks almost nervous, and you feel yourself calm down at the notion.

“Is something wrong? Did I do something? Or did he do something?”

Joshua shakes his head firmly, “It’s not you. And it’s not him either. Well, it’s kind of you, but also me.”

you’re at a complete loss now, “Please, just explain Joshua.”

the silence is deafening. the loud music blares through the door behind you, muffled lyrics that you can’t bring yourself to decipher as you stare at Joshua across the room. what could possibly be so important that he had to interrupt your goodbye with Hongjoong? especially in the manner he did it? you are completely confused.

Joshua sighs, glancing at the floor before staring directly at you. your heart jumps as your eyes meet.

“I like you. I have feelings for you.”

your breath comes to a halt and your hands shake once more, this time for a reason other than anger.

“What do you…”

he sighs, ruffling his hands through his hair. “I started liking you somewhere along the way after that night at the park. I should’ve done things differently.”

your lips part at his confession.

“I should have never avoided you, I should have apologized as soon as you heard me. And I shouldn’t have ruined your chances with Hongjoong back there.”

he looks sulky and annoyed, “But he was going to kiss you! And I hadn’t even gotten to confess. I know it’s unfair, but I couldn’t have let him have the chance to kiss you before I told you how I felt. I’m sorry.”

he’s out of breath by the end of his apology, and you find yourself utterly stumped at the confession. of all things, you were not expecting the man you have been chasing for a year to suddenly confess.

but before anything else, you needed to clarify things. “Joshua, I wasn’t going to kiss him.”

his brows furrow, “Yes you were, he was leaning closer to kiss you, Y/n.”

you huff out a laugh at the anger coating his words, “Yes, but I wasn’t going to kiss him.”

“Oh…” he mumbles. “So you don’t like him then?”

you shake your head with a shy smile, “No, actually. There’s this other guy I’ve been interested in for a while now.”

Joshua perks up, “Oh really? Do I know him by any chance?”

he takes slow steps towards you, hand darting out to gently grasp yours, fingers intertwining as he squeezes softly. you stare into his brown irises,

“Hmm.. dunno. You may have met once or twice.”

Joshua leans closer, breath fanning your face as he bends down. “Just to be clear, we are talking about me, right?” he asks lowly.

you tilt your head up, rolling your eyes with a smile, “Yes, doofus. Who else would I be talking about?”

he frowns, “Well, you could’ve easily been talking about Hongjoong, since-”

you roll your eyes once more before grabbing his face and pulling him towards you. you interrupt his rambling, “I’m going to kiss you, so if you want to run away, now is the chance.”

“Like I’d run away after pining after you for so long,” he scoffs, leaning in and capturing your lips with his.

his lips feel soft against yours, moving slowly as you push forward, deepening the kiss as your hands shake. his left arm moves to wrap around your waist as his right one tilts your head up, maneuvering you into the perfect position. you know you need air but Joshua’s lips make you delirious.

“Jisoo.” you pant, breaking away.

he presses another kiss to your lips, “Mm?”

your hands push gently at his chest, “That was great, but I need air.”

he smiles at your comment, pearly teeth coming into view. he tucks a lock of hair behind your ear, “Whatever my girl wants.”

your chest warms at his words as you push him away with another roll of your eyes. he laughs softly at the action, only pulling you closer as he pecks your temple.

ꕥ

“So, what did you end up telling Hongjoong?” Seungkwan asks, eyes wide and lips parted curiously.

you sigh, “I just told him I was interested in someone else and that I was sorry. He was really sweet about it and promised we’d stay friends.”

Minghao exhales, shaking his head, “Wow. What a nice guy. You sure you didn’t make the wrong choice, Y/n?”

Joshua tugs you into his embrace tighter as he glares at Minghao, “Haven’t I learned my lesson already?”

Minghao sticks his tongue out at him in response causing you to shake your head with a laugh.

Hansol snorts across the room, “Children, I tell you.”

the rest of them begin bickering with one another as you sink into Joshua’s embrace. so perhaps happy endings did exist, even for someone like you. the love and care you so desperately craved from Joshua seemed like a wishful dream, only coming true when you had truly given up.

but you appreciate the journey that led you to where you are now. with a new friend; Hongjoong, and a closer bond with your current friends who made mistakes and made it up to you, you know happiness is not a mere myth.

as Joshua wraps his arms around you and places his chin above your shoulder, you smile at the scene of your friends surrounding you. everything you’ve ever needed was right there.

Extra:

“What did you want to talk about, Jisoo?” Juyeon asks distractedly, the soft sound of pages turning echoing through the phone.

you are seated beside Joshua, hand in his as his other one holds up his phone to his ear. you squeeze once, shooting him a reassuring smile as he smiles shakily back.

“I’m not taking over the company.”

the sound of ruffling papers pauses, a deafening silence comes before his brothers low voice asks, “What?”

Joshua sits up straight. “I’m not taking over the company. I don’t want to.”

“Have you forgotten why you must take over the company? It’s your responsibility! You cannot just refuse!” his brothers' voice sends shivers down his spine; a result of the exhausting power dynamic that has always existed between the two. but Joshua was done with that life, he was done playing the quiet little brother who did everything Juyeon asked for.

a glance at your encouraging face has his heart seizing up. he could do this, if not for himself then for you.

Joshua sighs quietly, “I’m paying for my own tuition, so I’ll choose what I want to study. I’m done with the company, and I’m done with you, Juyeon.”

“That is not your decision to make, Jisoo!” Juyeon shouts, voice so loud your eyes widen as you hear it. Joshua squeezes your hand to let you know he’s okay. he wishes things could have been different.

“Actually, it is. You hold no power over me. I don’t want to hear from you unless it’s an apology. I’ll talk to you some other time, Juyeon-hyung. I hope you grow into a better person and become a better brother. As much as I wish things didn’t have to be this way, I know they have to be for now.”

his voice begins to tremble as he sucks in a deep breath, “Goodbye, Hyung.”

he removes the phone from his ear, finger pressing the end button even as he continues to hear Juyeon yell.

Joshua sighs, placing his phone face down on the couch beside him.

“How was it?” you ask, though you already know the answer. Joshua smiles, somewhat forced as he collapses into your arms.

he inhales softly, “I just need my Y/n hugs and I’ll be okay.”

you run a hand through his hair as you kiss the top of his head, “Sure, that and Y/n’s food. Don’t think you’re getting away with sleeping and not eating dinner.”

he groans and picks his head up, lip jut out as you kiss his pout away. “No pouting, eat and then sleep! I’ll be here the whole time.”

he drops his head on your chest, snuggling back into you, “Yeah, that’s the best part.”

you smile down and peck his head once more. you truly were so lucky.

@scuzmunkie ;>

#seventeen x you #seventeen x reader #seventeen angst #joshua x reader #jisoo x reader #hong jisoo x reader #joshua hong angst #joshua fluff #seventeen imagines

401 notes · View notes

hearts4golbach · 4 months

Note

hello can you do fella x reader and they have been dating for a few months and tyler announces them on stream 😈

btw please don’t die i love ur work 🥰😇🙏🏼

His Little Secret.

Hansumfella: Tyler x Fem!Reader.

a/n: I'm not gonna die on you guys oml I PROMISE I'll keep feeding you until nature has its way with me xx

the day Tyler asked you to be his girlfriend was the best day of your life. you two had met through the internet. you started streaming together and eventually hanging out in real life, as well. although your relationship had started out strictly professional, with a couple drinks, fella had admitted his feelings for you that you reciprocated. your talking stage lasted for 3 weeks, and during that time, you two were inseparable.

he took you out frequently, not to mention the way you two streamed together pretty much every night. you kept your talking stage private. only family and close friends knew. you loved how conservative he was since you were as well.

but, the day he asked you to be his girlfriend was much different than the usual, casual dates you went on. it was a beach date. the sun had just started to set whenever he turned to you and asked 'will you be my girlfriend' over a drink and take out. of course, you said yes. the two of you laid in the sand in each others arms.

after that day, you frequently spent the night at his place. you also streamed with him in person now, since you were already there anyway. people had their suspicions, but you always being at his house while he streamed did not help.

you dragged in a chair from the kitchen and sat next to Tyler. he was just about to start his stream. it was your idea to do a truth or drink stream, since he had only ever done a truth or drink hot sauce version. you figured drinking would spice it up a little.

"what's up, guys!" he exclaimed with a smile. the chat was being spammed with greetings to both of you. at this point, they were accustomed to seeing you tagging along for the stream. "if you read the fucking title, you'll know what me and y/n are doing today."

"truth or drink!" you exclaimed.

"just the usual, send a question in with 50 bits, blah blah blah." he peered at the chat then back at you with a smile. he rested his hand on your knee under the table, which was out of the view of the camera. "so, why don't we just get started. i know you guys are creaming your pants with impatience."

he swiftly turned on the text to speech with submissions. the first one came through immediately. "which one is the real skibidi sigma rizzler?"

"me, obviously." you responded immediately.

"you really wasted 50 bits on that?" he tossed up his hands in defeat. "i guess i'm going to have to admit y/n is the real skibidi sigma rizzler." he replied sarcastically. "let's get some actual juicy questions up in this bitch."

the next question interrupted him mid sentence. "favorite position?"

"bruh." he rolled his eyes and glared at me. "i'm gonna have to pass on this one."

you considered your options for a moment, "should i expose myself?" you asked, turning towards Tyler.

"i mean, go for it," he flicked his hand towards the camera, "it's your digital footprint on the line."

"yolo, I guess." you rolled your eyes. "either missionary or reverse cowgirl. next question."

it was hard for Tyler to hide the smirk on his face. you took a peek at the chats to see what they were saying.

'fella DEFINITELY knows something we dont'

'bro knows he's getting it tonight'

'BAHAHAHAHA'

'wtf fellas face 😭😭'

the next request rang from the computer. 'are you guys together or no?'

your heart sank. you looked at fella, but the hesitation made the answer obvious. he looked back at you quizically, and you nodded. you had been dating in secret for 4 months, what could announcing it now hurt?

"yes, yes we are." he grinned, "anyway..."

the chat was filled with people screaming.

'NO WAY HE PULLED'

'WHAAATATTTAATTAR'

'I KNEW IT BRU'

'THATS CRAZY'

'SHES WAY TOO FINE FOR YOU FELLA GTFOO'

'LMAAOO YUH'

'GOOD JOB FELLA'

another question, which wasn't really a question, came through. 'kiss or it isn't real.'

"I don't know about that much.." you trailed off, raising your eyebrow at tyler.

he shrugged at you, "it's okay with me if you wanna, babe."

him calling you babe made your heart flutter. you shrugged back. "alright."

he pulled you in and pecked your lips, causing a light blush to spread across both of your faces.

'OWAH'

'GET A ROOM'

'DAMNNN OKAY SO HES SERIOUS'

the comments made you laugh. "well, know you guys know." you grinned at the camera.

#fanfiction #fanfic #hansumfella #twitch #drinking #hearts4golbach #request #hansumfella x reader #hansumfella x you #streaming #stream #streamer

281 notes · View notes

sohnric · 1 year

Text

sweet like candy – e. sohn

pairing: eric sohn x fem! reader

genre: summer au, strangers to something more ?? fluff, suggestive. very much stargazing by the neighbourgood and fantasize by the boyz capsuled into a fic. eric is a simp and a hopeless romantic because i said so. a girl romanticizes sharing a lollipop (its me im girl)

warnings: alcohol, maybe some minimal swearing, a heated make out session that hints onto a hookup (no smut mentioned!). the use of a cheesy nickname babydoll (dont @ me or i will deactivate), reader has hair long enough for a claw clip

word count: 6.9k

a/n: almost cried while trying to name this fic somebody send help. Also this doesn't feel like my best work its kinda rushed imo but 🤠 yolo

part of the @deoboyznet summer on you event! cant believe i made it on time

a summer tradition of renting out a cabin every year invented by a couple of friends takes a turn for eric when a new addition to the circle brings him to his knees - in other words, he never knew tequila could taste so sweet.

If anyone ever asked Eric Sohn if he believed in love at first sight, he would, without a doubt, say yes.

What was the proof he had? Well, absolutely nothing. All he ever knew about love at first sight was from romance movies he watched during lonely nights with his roommate Juyeon, never having the experience of the whole world stopping and zooming in on one particular person, taking his breath away– but to put it simply, Eric Sohn is a true romantic. Call him cheesy if you want– he wouldn’t like it, but he also wouldn’t disagree.

On one summer afternoon, though, his world tilts in its axis– the moment comes, and he is finally able to test out his theory.

You walk out of the passenger’s side of a red 2008 Toyota Auris, hair put up into a claw clip, jean shorts showing off your long legs and a pearl white button-up opened and lazily thrown over your outfit, and suddenly, Eric Sohn finds his knees buckling and his palms sweating with affection. He was aware that Juyeon’s girlfriend was bringing her best friend to tag along to their little summer retreat (more like a trip to a cabin in the middle of the woods), but he sure as hell didn’t expect the stranger to make him feel this type of way.

Sure, it might just be him being incredibly attracted to you. But with how fast his heart was beating when you smiled at everyone after introducing yourself to the group, he was sure he was slowly, but surely falling for you. And he was falling hard.

He feels like the world is moving in slow motion as he watches the group go and unload the car– you and your best friend Yeri were the last ones to arrive– and what wakes him up from the haze is when he watches you struggle to carry a cooler out of the trunk into the cabin, his legs dragging him closer to the vehicle and near to your body.

Now is his time to shine. “Let me help!” he hurries out, sneakers crunching on the gravel. His hands firmly grab onto the handle of the blue cooler, muscles flexing under the weight (making him wonder why you would willingly want to carry the thing and not ask him or any of the guys for help in the first place), and when your eyes look up at come in contact with his, he presses a smile to his lips. “I’m Eric, by the way.”

“Ah,” you gasp, a grateful expression breezing over your features, “thanks. I’m Y/N, nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Eric hums, watching your every move. Your figure walks over to the front of the car, your head popping in close to the window to look inside, and when a satisfied look overtakes your features, Eric finds himself asking. “Is that everything?”

“Yeah,” you nod, “we can head inside, I think.”

The boy tries hard to keep his cool, he really does. But with how he’s trailing behind you like a lost puppy, attempting to find a topic that would engage him in a conversation with you, he feels like a boy that is just experiencing a crush for the first time in his life. Everything about you is enchanting– and sure, you could say he was just painfully attracted to you and this had nothing to do with love– but he was also convinced that if you asked him to jump off the Empire State Building, he would do it without giving it a second thought (which is kind of worrying, but again– it says a lot).

You open the door to the cabin for him, and he finds himself speechless at the action. Once your eyes meet again and you offer him another subtle smile, he finds himself gasping at the sentence that comes out of your mouth.

“Hey! We’re matching, kinda,” you note, pointing towards his outfit.

And you’re right– Eric didn’t even notice at first, too enchanted with your sheer existence– but you two were indeed wearing the same thing. Jean shorts, and a white button-up– in your case, thrown over a white tank top, in Eric’s, closed (although he did leave it a bit open at the top, revealing his tanned skin). Suddenly, the boy is glad he’s wearing a red cap to cover up his hair, since he foolishly thinks the hat provides him enough shade in the face to not reveal his burning cheeks as he utters out a weak response.

“It looks so much better on you, though.”

With that, he walks into the cabin– escaping the situation, not really paying a single thought to chivalry and letting you go through the door first– and as he reaches the crowd of people in the kitchen, he prays for all high sources to find him, get to him and wipe his brain clean of all thoughts, because

even though you are basically matching (and he does think you look so much better in the outfit than he does), all he can think about is just how much more he’d like your outfit if the white button-up enveloping your body was the one he’s wearing right now instead.

The next time Eric finds courage to talk to you is when it seems like you’re not finding it to talk to anyone else yourself– the big group is currently sitting around a fire, marshmallows and sausages slowly burning in the blazing flames– and while everyone around was either talking to each other or singing along to the songs Jacob was playing on the guitar, you were sitting alone in the middle of two commotions: Chanhee and Changmin arguing about something seemingly important, and Yeri and Juyeon making out right in front of everyone’s eyes.

And Eric was supposed to listen to Sunwoo talk about his latest heartbreak– how the man still gets no girls despite having such an objectively handsome face, Eric truly doesn’t know– but the topic of the conversation was too boring for him to engage with it. That, and he was also painfully aware of your every move– you didn’t even move much– and word– you weren’t talking to anybody– and that was slowly driving him insane.

You looked a little out of place. Eric supposes it was because you didn’t really know anyone here– except from your best friend and her awfully sappy boyfriend– but even though it was logical and a little expected for you to be a bit excluded in such a foreign circle, the man took it as his mission to make you feel as welcome and as included as he physically could.

Completely ignoring Sunwoo’s blabbering (like he was doing for the last few minutes anyway), Eric confidently (and a bit shakily– hands sweating and breath hitching in his throat) walks to the other side of the bonfire, from where he’s been watching your stone expression through the flames, and sits down in the small place between you and Changmin. Changmin wasn’t even facing you, too engrossed in the debate he was having with Chanhee, and so it was Eric’s job to wobble his bottom into the place, efficiently making the older boy move away with a light elbow jab sent into his lower back.

“Hi,” he clears his throat, “are you having fun?” he asks, but mentally curses at himself right as the question escapes his mouth– does she look like she's having fun? Of course she doesn't, you stupid idiot.

You smile at the question, though, nodding. “Yeah,” you hum, “having lots of fun listening to your friends argue and my friends making out next to my ear.”

“You seemed like it too, y’know,” Eric laughs, “they’re always like this, by the way. They’ll forget about the fight in the morning.”

“Oh, that could never be me,” you sigh, shaking your head at the sentiment.

“No?”

“No,” you shrug, “I get too petty. If we have a fight, I’m not speaking to you for at least two weeks.”

Eric finds himself laughing at your comment. “I’ll remember that for future reference.”

Straightening your back and looking at your companion– as if you were going to call him out on his subtle hint of there being any future meeting between the two of you– you suddenly gasp and swiftly turn towards the bonfire, an honest mourn escaping your lips.

“Oh fuck!” you curse under your breath as your hand reaches towards a stick that’s had its end in the flame, the device efficiently resting against a rock in a position where you didn’t have to pay any attention to the snack you were cooking– more like burning– for yourself. With a quick move for the stick, you pull the tip of it out of the scorching red of the bonfire and look at it in an examining way, as if the result would be different and the marshmallow would unburn itself if you stared at it long enough. “I completely forgot about this!”

Eric takes a glance at the burnt piece of fluff, letting out a laugh at the black marshmallow in front of your face. “That’s not how you make a good s’more,” he notes, poking fun at your annoyed face.

“Oh, no shit, Sherlock…” you mutter under your breath, but your face looks a bit sad to see the piece go to waste. “I don’t know why I even tried, I’m bad at this stuff.”

There comes his moment, Eric thinks. “Well, you’re lucky, ‘cause you just met an expert at making s’mores.”

“Does a thing like that even exist?” you chuckle, rolling your eyes at the male in disbelief.

“Of course it does! You’re looking at one now,” he grins, leaning over you to take a brand new marshmallow out of the bag to your right– sandwiched between your thigh and the couple in love– before he reaches over to your hand and takes the roasting stick out of your hand, slides the white fluffy cloud through the sharp tip and hovers it above the flame.

“The key is to hold it above the flame, and not in the flame,” Eric chuckles as he looks at you from the corner of his eye, watching your expression change.

“Oh, but I thought the key is to burn the thing,” you ironically gasp, shaking your head at his teasing. “Where did you even learn all of this?”

“I grew up in the States,” Eric hums, “they would deport me if I didn’t know how to make s’mores.”

The comment gets a giggle out of you– a sound Eric almost folds at and falls into the open fire (thankfully, he held his composure– he doesn’t think 3rd degree burns would suit his look) – and it takes everything in him to not scream like a teenage girl at the thought of making you laugh. Yes, that’s how down bad you managed to get the male.

“Do you have a special recipe?”

“Just the basic one,” he shrugs, turning the skewer in his hand to make the marshmallow equally glazed on each side, “I will make it extra good for you, though.”

“I thought a master always does their best?” you tease, watching as the boy crumbles under your gaze.

“Not always. I don’t like to put effort into things that aren’t worth it,” Eric hums as he takes the marshmallow out of the burning fire, examining it, and after deeming it worthy, taking the skewer and holding it up in between his knees. The male takes a graham cracker and tears it in half, before adding chocolate to one of the sides. After he’s done, he carefully places the golden fluff ball onto the cracker and closes it, offering the sweet sandwich to you with a subtle smile.

“For you,” he winks as he turns back towards the fire, putting another marshmallow onto the stick to make himself a s’more as well (and also mentally kicking himself at the sudden burst of courage). He hears you take a bite out of the snack, his knee bouncing up and down nervously as he awaits the verdict.

“Man,” you hum, “this is so good.”

“Told you,” he says, “if there’s something I’m confident in, it’s making s’mores.”

“That’s a very unuseful skill to have,” you note, but continue to eat. The comment has him chuckle and shrug.

“Well, I used it now, so I’d argue it’s actually very useful.”

A hum cuts out of your throat at this, finishing the s’more he made for you with a satisfied sigh. “Is this how you got girls back in the States?” you ask, making the male choke on his spit.

Eric was too young to get girls when he learned how to make the greatest s’mores. He went camping with his dad and his older sister and he burned a couple before he got it right. He was in middle school and before what the kids call a glow-up these days (back in the days, you just called it overcoming puberty), but still– he decides to test the waters with another lazy, half-assed flirty comment. “Only the pretty ones.”

He hears a chuckle out of you– a reaction he decides to not pay much attention to or overthink, for he doesn’t really remember what a good reaction to flirting is anymore– but then, you sigh and nod. “Well, I give your s’more a 5 star review, so I’d find that believable.”

The comment has Eric press his tongue into the inside of his cheek, battling a victorious smile that wants to oh so desperately appear on his lips. Turning his attention fully to you, he looks at you with confidence coating his insides– it only grows when he notices you staring at the side of his face, the flame of the fire twinkling in your eye and making your features sharper and twice as attractive to the poor boy.

His eyes scan you over for a few seconds before he notices a glimmer of something on the side of your lip– a chocolate stain that has him cautiously lean in and swipe a thumb over the sweetness, not even thinking twice before smoothing his finger over your skin.

“You had a little… something there,” he hums as he licks the chocolate off his thumb. Your eyes still trained on him force him to avert his gaze back to the fire– for it was unbearable, as if sparks were flying and burning his skin, everything about the interaction making goosebumps appear over his body; even though he felt hot in his cheeks and not at all cold– when the sight of his marshmallow in flames suddenly comes to him, startling him awake.

Hurriedly dragging out the burnt snack out of the fire, he hears you chuckle at him from the side– so much for not ruining the moment. (It’s okay, though. As long as you’re entertained.)

“I thought you were a master at s’mores,” you poke fun at him, “got distracted?”

Meeting eyes with you, Eric shrugs, a lazy grin settling to his lips. “I guess you could say that.”

The night progresses quickly– with Sunwoo getting so drunk he borrows Jacob’s guitar and clumsily strums the strings, freestyle rapping about the most random topics with flushed cheeks and eyes dramatically glued to the fire; Hyunjae wanting to have a competition of who can jump over the flames and Sangyeon having to stop his drunk friend with the force of his own body– and Eric finds his eyes lacking the candy he’s been occupying himself with the whole evening. You disappeared somewhere into the house a few minutes ago, and although he didn’t want to be clingy, he walked up to the cabin with a nervous pep in his step– that’s it, he just wanted to make sure you were okay.

Eric walks through the doorway, having his body immediately be met with the joined common room slash kitchen area. The cabin is kind of small (too small for the amount of people currently occupying it) and kind of old, but it’s a tradition to rent it every year during the summer, so no one ever questioned the decision or made the move to rent out a bigger one, no matter the growing friend group.

Your figure finally appears in the dimly lit kitchen area, your back turned to the doorway. Standing at the kitchen sink, it seems like you were doing the dishes– tons of plates used to carry grilled meat and sausages dumped carelessly into the sink, forgotten in a minute and leaving the last remains of food dry up on them and get hard to scrape off, a couple of glasses and mugs with their ears broken off from their age waiting with coffee stains at the bottom– and Eric immediately feels his heart fall down to his stomach, because why would one do the dishes in the middle of the night? Those usually get left there until the morning, when the least hungover person will take mercy on the rest and take care of them. Were you feeling excluded from the conversation? Did you feel bored?

“What are you doing here so alone?” he asks, making you turn your head over your shoulder and smile at him– a stone falling off his heart at the action– before you shrug at him.

“Washing the dishes,” you say, as if it wasn’t clear already.

“I see that,” Eric chuckles, “what I meant to say was, why are you washing the dishes in the first place?”

“Well, somebody’s gotta do it.”

Eric huffs– and he doesn’t even know why he’s so defensive about it. “That someone didn’t have to be you, y’know.”

He’s standing next to you now– your eyes meeting as you stare at the boy for a heartbeat– a smile spreading on your face at his furrowed brows. The action has him visibly relax, watching as you shrug and get back to the dish washing. “I just wanted some alone time for a bit,” you muse, “outside was getting too loud for a second, I’m not used to crowds.”

“Ah… once Sunwoo drinks, he can’t shut up, so I kinda get that it was starting to feel insufferable,” Eric notes, nodding at you in acknowledgement before the realization hits him. “Wait– you said you wanted to be alone, so I should probably-”

You halt him with a soft laugh– the one Eric finds his heart liking a little too much, with how it jumps up and down and makes all of him feel warm inside– a soapy hand reaching out in his direction. “It’s okay, you can stay,” you muse, “I enjoy your company.”

“O-okay,” Eric stutters– so much for the smooth lines he had prepared in his head before coming in here, all of them flying out of his head straight out of the window– and to not seem so silly, he gets his hands occupied and reaches for the clean dishes you started stacking on the counter next to the sink, deciding to dry them and put them away. The kitchen falls into a comfortable silence that only gets broken by an occasional scream landing through the walls from outside, and Eric can’t help but indulge himself in the domesticity of the act.

He can almost imagine you two washing the dishes like this in your shared apartment after you two cook dinner together and eat it in your cozy living room. That scenario sounds almost too good for the boy, having warmth slowly ooze into his cheeks, and that, he finds to be the hint that he should probably stop thinking about you in that way now or else he’ll get too distracted and break the glasses he is currently putting away. (God forbid– there were not enough of them for the entire friend group in the first place.)

“Are you having a good time, though?” Eric finds himself asking through his weird delirium.

You smile– oh god you smile, you should stop doing that if you want him to survive the night– and nod at the boy, calmness overtaking your aura and slipping into his cracks as well. “I am. It’s nice meeting new people and everyone’s very nice,” you say.

“That’s good to hear. How long have you and Yeri been friends?”

“A couple of years,” you note, “we met during high school. We always dreamt of moving away to college and living together at dorms or something, so it’s… it’s nice that it worked out for us,” you say, having Eric nod at your words with a sweet smile.

“That’s great to hear,” he muses, “I met Juyeon and Sunwoo in my freshman year of college, and the rest just… came along after a while.”

“Your friend group is pretty big,” you point out, having the boy shrug.

“I guess so,” Eric mumbles, never really thinking of it this way– in his eyes, this was normal. This was how he operated, how he lived. A lot of people around him, always close– one would think such a large friend group wouldn’t be as close with each other, but it’s quite the opposite in his case, he thinks. Maybe he was just blessed.

“How do you do that?” you sigh, shaking your head in disbelief.

“I dunno,” he snickers, “guess you could say I’m quite the social butterfly.”

“I can see that,” you laugh. Eric watches you, his hands now empty of any dish– he’s been drying them quicker than you manage to clean (and rightfully so, the food is stuck on there) – he starts noticing the details of your sheer presence. How you have a slight smile playing with your lips even when your eyes are glued to the sink, how your hair slightly slips out of the claw clip and frames your face, how close you’re standing– his eyes slip towards your hands, noticing the water running down your forearms and dangerously close to the sleeves of your shirt.

Acting on reflex, mostly, the boy reaches towards your sleeves and gently tugs them up, the contact of your skin that he initiates and should realistically be prepared for making the tips of his fingers tingle, the action having you stop in your movements and glance up at him through your eyelashes– a sight he wishes he could engrave into the back of his eyelids so he could stare at it forever and always.

“Thank you,” you hum, voice barely louder than a whisper when he retracts away from you, taking his previous stance against the kitchen counter.

Eric hangs his head low for a second, clearing his throat to ease his own tension. Now is your turn to start up the conversation, a casual question falling off your lips as you get back to washing the last remains of dishes. “Yeri said you come here often?”

The boy nods enthusiastically to your sentence. “We do. We started in freshman year, because Juyeon was going to this exchange program to Paris for a couple of months, so we threw him a goodbye party. Then he came back, so we threw a welcome back party here. And then we celebrated Younghoon hyung’s birthday here, and it kind of stuck, I guess? We go here at least once a year during summer.”

“That’s a nice tradition to have,” you sigh, turning the faucet off as you finish rinsing off the last dish– a big bowl that Sangyeon used to marinate the meat a few hours ago.

“It is,” Eric nods, smiling fondly at the sentiment. He reaches for the bowl and dries it with the now damp rag (there were a lot of dishes to dry, after all), and moves to put it back to its place under the sink. With your figure still in its previous spot, the boy puts away the towel onto the kitchen counter and gently grabs your waist with his free hand, moving you away a few inches to the left. He crouches and opens the cabinet under the sink and puts the bowl into the pyramid of other ones, straightening his back when he goes back into a standing position, catching you staring at him from above, watching his every move. Your body is leaning against the counter, having Eric mirror your stance only a few inches away from you before speaking up again.

“You’re welcome to join us when we come back next time.”

The time reads 3AM– or at least that’s what his circadian rhythm tells him, because he doesn't bother to check as he twists and turns in the bed, too hot and too alert to fall asleep– when Eric decides to walk down the steep stairs and try to get some fresh air. The cabin is hot inside, but he still takes his lost button-up that he had thrown over one of the kitchen chairs and puts it on before he makes his way outside, knowing that the forest will make his bones get cold with the crisp breeze.

He opens the door and moves to sit on the little patio– the silence of outside is overwhelming even after the cabin has quieted down and everyone has gone to sleep (each one on a different level of tipsy ranging from completely chill Sangyeon to doesn’t know where he is Sunwoo– with Eric somewhere in the middle of the spectrum). His legs drag a little tiredly as he scans his surroundings– god forbid there’s a bear out waiting for him– when the sight of a figure sitting on the floor takes him by surprise, their head already turned to him after hearing the sound of the door opening.

“What are you doing here?” he asks as he walks over to you, noticing your frame dressed in a tank top and sweatpants, hinting that you at least tried to get some sleep before coming out here, just like he has.

“Couldn’t sleep,” you shrug, confirming his suspicions.

“Same here,” the man sighs, “mind if I sit with you?”

“You’re welcome to join me,” you smile at him, patting the floor next to you and watching as Eric crouches down before taking a seat on the wood, ignoring the sunbeds and old rattan chairs situated all over the patio. (If you’re on the floor, he’s on the floor– it’s as simple as that.)

You’re holding a lollipop in between your fingers, your other hand occupied with a half-empty bottle of tequila that was previously passed around the circle at the bonfire. Eric raises his brows at the sight, having you shamefully avert your gaze from him.

“I thought it would be a waste to not finish this,” you say, snickering, “and I also… kind of hoped that it would put me to sleep…”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures?”

“I guess you could say that,” you laugh. Taking a sip from the bottle, you gulp the alcohol down before putting the lollipop inside of your mouth, sucking on it and licking your lips after. This is not the way you’re supposed to drink tequila, but Eric figures that gathering salt and a lime would be too much work anyways.

“Are you really using that lollipop as a chaser?” he giggles, making you hum.

“Yeah,” you stare at him, a grin overtaking your features, “this girl taught me to do that at a party last year. It’s not as good as literally anything else, but it gets the job done. Wanna try?” you ask, offering him the sweetness on the stick and the bottle.

The truth is, you were only a bit tipsy when the group slowly started to scatter into their beds. Eric didn’t drink as much either– only enough to make him laugh at everything that was said and make his staring at you twice as obvious as it was before– so he thinks he can take some more. As you said, it would be a shame if the bottle went to waste– and also, something about the idea of drinking with you alone on the patio was making his hopeless heart hammer against his chest in dangerous measures.

“Sure,” he agrees, taking the bottle first. The boy takes a sip, feeling the alcohol burn down his throat, and when he moves the dark brown glass away from his lips, he is met with the image of you leaning closer to him, offering him the lollipop. His hand instinctively grabs the plastic stick, thinking you’re letting go of it, when he’s met with the feeling of your flesh under his fingertips. You put the lollipop against his lips, making him open up on instinct and suck on the strawberry flavored candy, a million different sensations (all unrelated to the alcohol) swimming through his brain– you’re so close, you smell so good, he’s holding your hand, he’s sucking on the lollipop you previously had in between your lips and it’s driving him crazy– before you take the candy out from between his lips and put it back into your mouth, tongue swirling around the sweet ball.

The lollipop had an aftertaste of tequila on it, but it was enough to chase down the faint bitterness– Eric finds himself wanting to taste more of the sweet strawberry, but foolishly desiring to get the sensation off your lips instead. His eyes stay locked with yours throughout the whole exchange, sparks flying in between the two of you even though the bonfire has long gone out, his fingers lazily dropping from the candy.

“How was it?” you ask, voice barely louder than a whisper– goosebumps appearing all over Eric’s skin when he swears your eyes flicker to his lips for a split second.

“Good,” he admits. It’s silly how he feels so breathless at the action.

The sound of the wind playing with the leaves of the forest is the only thing accompanying you two. It’s as if you two were thinking of the same thing when you pull out the lollipop out of your mouth and offer it back to Eric, watching with utmost interest as the boy leans closer to capture it in between his lips, never breaking eye contact. The action feels a little too electrifying to him, a little too intimate, but he can't stop– can't even imagine wanting to.

Taking a sip of the tequila, but not chasing it down with the candy, you speak up again, lazy eyes practically glued to him. “This would be a perfect moment for a kiss…” you mumble, licking your bottom lip for a split second before biting down on it.

“Are you flirting with me?” Eric foolishly asks, tone of voice a bit weak, a little unsure, the candy still in his mouth, making his words come out a little jambled.

“Mhm,” you nod, grinning to yourself– Eric wonders how much of your behavior and how much of his raging heartbeat is due to the effect of alcohol in both of your veins.

His fingers pull at yours as he takes the candy out of his mouth, voice dropping as he answers you. “Then we probably shouldn’t waste the moment.”

Even though the intentions are clear, the boy can’t bring himself to make the first move– he’s completely enchanted with your presence, staring at you with tension in his shoulders and eyes trained onto your face, watching and examining it for any shift or change. Focused on the way you move, he thinks you must have realized you were going to have to be the one to take the first step– your lazily smile before you lean closer, impossibly close– making Eric’s eyes flutter shut with anticipation, your breath fanning his face making goosebumps appear all over his body.

When your lips finally touch his, he feels like he’s being kissed for the first time again, with the amount of fuzziness in his stomach and buzzing in his ears. He regains his composure quite quickly, though, as he positions his head in a way that makes you two even closer to each other, lips pressing firmer against yours now. His hand instinctively reaches out to hold your jaw, fingertips glazing the soft skin under them, your lips retracting only to go in for more.

Blindly placing the bottle onto the floor next to your bodies, you peck his lips and sigh into the kiss. “Damn, you’re good at this…”

“We’re only getting started,” he muses, making you chuckle.

“Oh yeah?”

“Mhm,” he nods, watching as you once again lean in and suck on his upper lip, making his eyes flutter close again. A weight appears over him as you shift in your place and move to straddle his lap, your hand moving to cup his cheek and tilt him upwards, everything about the kisses getting more hurried– less gentle, less hesitant– when you tug on his bottom lip with your teeth and grant your tongue entry into his mouth.

Sweetness mixes in between you, your hands moving around his neck, heavy breaths shared across the patio. Eric feels like he’s levitating, his body having an out of body experience, yet being awfully present– every little shift pushing him to overdrive, the slightest touch making his skin burn and heart drum against his ribcage.

You shift in his lap, making him huff under the pressure, his lips trailing wet kisses down the side of your neck. Teeth glazing the jointure of your shoulder, kitten licking the place and sucking in a bruise that will eventually be visible to everyone when you two wake up in the morning, Eric feels your hands tugging down the sleeves of his shirt, fingers feeling up his biceps. The action makes him chuckle into your neck, but the smile fades quickly as he feels your nails scratching gently at his flaming skin.

“Take this off,” you mutter, and Eric finds it endearing– helping you take him out of the button-up, sitting under you in just a white tank top and black basketball shorts.

“Why?”

“Your arms looked good in this,” you hiss before you hide your face into his neck, leaning down to give him your fair share of kisses and love bites, having the male teasingly joke as his hands run up under your tank top, painfully aware of the fact that you weren’t wearing a bra anymore.

He moves his head to the side to give you more access before speaking out, tone of voice husky and coated in lust. “What if I get cold now?”

“Then I’m more than happy to move this to your room,” you purr into his ear.

Eric sighs, fingers playing with the hem of your top before he lets his palms drift towards your exposed stomach, roaming across naked skin. Goosebumps appear all over your body at the action, making the boy victoriously grin. “It looks like you’re the one that's cold, though, babydoll.”

Rolling your eyes at the male, you shut him up by latching yourself onto his lips before you speak against his mouth. “I’ll take that as an invitation, then?”

“Wake up Eric! The girls are leaving, you should at least go say goodbye!” Sangyeon roars into the boy's room, making the male turn over in the bed and huff out in frustration. He drags his arm up to shield his eyes from the sunlight hitting his face, the intention of just rolling over and sleeping more written very clearly in his face.

“Come on man, we’re leaving in an hour too, so you should go send them off and then pack your shit so we can load the cars,” Sangyeon says when he gets no reaction from the youngest. It’s to no use, apparently, and so as the oldest and most observant out of the group, Sangyeon decides to use physical force– he knows Eric would hate to have you go without saying goodbye. He’s not stupid. Or blind.

A strong hold on his calves drags Eric out of the bed and makes his half-naked body fall to the floor, a yelp coming out of his throat finally making Eric’s body fully alert and awake.

“Yo! What the fuck–”

“Put a shirt on and go say goodbye to Y/N before she goes, would you, sleeping beauty?” Sangyeon huffs before rolling his eyes at his younger friend, escaping the room and shutting the door close after himself with a loud thud (to add more effect to the scolding, Eric thinks).

The mention of your name has Eric quickly scrambling out of the bed. His heart hammers at the adrenaline rush, pulling a clean shirt out of his bag and dragging it over his head, the basketball shorts from yesterday’s night found on the floor being pulled over his lower frame in approximately 0.5 seconds. Eric takes the stairs 3 at a time– with how steep they are, he questions how exactly does he not trip and break his spine on his way down– and puts on a pair of slippers he finds at the door (that are not his, or his size, for the matter, making his heels comically stick out from the back).

Without checking his appearance in the mirror anywhere, he swings the door open and walks out of the cabin, watching as the group settles in a half-circle around your car, Yeri loading the trunk with her duffle bag before she closes it shut and smiles at her boyfriend Juyeon on the side. Eric joins the crowd, clearing his throat when his eyes fall onto your figure, the sight in front of him freezing him in his spot.

You’re standing there, in your jean shorts from the day before, an oversized white button-up enveloping your frame. A clueless stranger might not tell the difference, but he does– you put the shirt onto your bare skin and buttoned it just enough to reveal a bit of your cleavage– and it’s so similar to the outfit you had on yesterday, just with one difference.

You’re wearing Eric’s shirt. You’re wearing his shirt and your neck is scattered with red and purple-ish bruises, and no, Eric wasn’t that drunk and he remembers everything, but the events of last night suddenly play out right in front of his eyes like a movie, still nailing him to his spot and wiping out all of his vocabulary.

The boy feels hot in his cheeks as he watches you and your best friend pay your goodbyes to the rest of the boys, the men pulling you into side-hugs and fist bumps, shared ‘It was nice meeting you’s and ‘You should come by next time too’s resonating through the place. Soon enough, you reach the end of the make-shift half circle and lock your eyes with Eric, a playful smile softly appearing on your face.

“It was nice meeting you, Eric,” you hum, “I had fun,” you note, shooting him a knowing look.

“Me too,” he nods, nervously chewing on his bottom lip. He doesn’t know where the confidence of last night went, but he suddenly feels unarmed and lost. What does one do now?

The sight of you in his shirt makes him feel like his biggest (wet) dream has come true– call him cheesy, but it also wakes up a sense of déja vu in him from the day before– you with sunlight in your eyes, hair messed up in a claw clip. He feels like he just fell in love at first sight again. Is that even possible?

It’s good you have a sense in you that makes you take the initiative and be in charge when you see him faltering. A giggle cuts out of your throat as you lean in and hug the boy around his neck, your lips dangerously close to his ear as you speak in a hushed whisper, not wanting to be heard by the men around you.

“I stole your shirt from you, by the way. You should text me if you want it back, so we can meet up, or something,” you mouth, lips gently glazing the sensitive skin of Eric’s ear, and god does he feel like he's going to suffocate from the lack of oxygen this causes in his lungs.

“You look amazing in my clothes, so I won’t ask for it back,” Eric hums, “but I’ll text you just in case you ever wanna bless my eyes with the sight again.”

“Deal. I’ll make Juyeon text me your number,” you say before you pull away from him, shooting him a wink that almost has his knees buckling like a school boy in love for the first time.

You walk backwards and wave at the group, sending Eric one last look before you join the passenger’s side and close the car door behind you, the sound of Yeri starting the engine resonating through the quiet forest. The men wave at you until the Toyota disappears out of sight, only scattering inside when it does to gather their things and load up their cars as well.

Eric is woken up from his trance by a teasing whistle coming out of Sunwoo’s mouth and a father-like slap to his back from Sangyeon.

He wonders if he’s truly being so obvious. (He's unaware of the fact that you two had very visible matching love bites on your necks. It doesn’t take much effort to put two and two together– don't tell him that, though.)

Still, Eric shrugs and goes inside with a different kind of pep to his step.

When he licks his lips, he swears he can still taste the strawberries.

#dbn: summer on you #deoboyznet #the boyz #eric sohn #tbz #eric sohn x reader #eric sohn fluff #eric sohn angst #eric sohn scenario #eric fluff #eric angst #sohn youngjae #tbz fic #tbz x reader #tbz fluff #the boyz x reader #the boyz fluff

380 notes · View notes

mrs-weasley-reid · 1 year

Text

ONE DANCE

Aaron Hotchner x bau!reader

Sypnosis: One dance. That's all it took for Aaron Hotchner to lose control. WARNING: nsfw, MDNI!!! first person pov (if you don't vibe with that sob in the corner move on). unprotected sex (piv). curse word(s). a bit of betrayal? (not really). tell me if I missed anything A/N: not my gif, ctto! This is one of my hidden drafts that was originally for a different character, but YOLO.

— ✦ — ✦ ✦ — ✦ ✦ ✦

A smile ran over my lips as my hips swayed at the heart-pounding beat of the music. My hands slid down my figure slowly as I let my eyes close to devour the rhythm.

Nothing ever beats Friday nights after a long, grueling case. Especially when Penelope and Emily forced the entire BAU team for a night out.

"Let me get us drinks! I'm going to pass out! I'll tell Spencer to keep an eye on you!" Emily shouted through the music with a chuckle as her support on my sides retracted.

I hummed softly and nodded without the care of opening my eyes, letting the rhythm take over my entire body in such a daze that I craved.

My body swayed and rolled, all while my hands traced every inch of me in a sensual and seductive way. I was not aiming for anything. I just really loved letting my body get lost in the melody.

Different sets of hands lay atop mine, keeping the grip on my waist as it hit the beat from side to side. I smiled as our bodies clashed with a type of warmth I so loved, friction sparking as my back kissed their chest.

It tasted so lustrously devouring. The way every movement felt so close, so passionate. Whatever drink Spencer—I assumed—had, I would love to get a sip. It seemed to give him a lot more confidence to match my rhythm.

"Freaking finally, Spence! Get those sneakers moving!" I shouted in a teasing tone. "Admit it! You love dancing too!" I laughed, running my hands up to my chest, past my shoulders, and on his—toned?—pectorals, aiming farther to slide up on his neck.

Spencer wasn't this toned from what I remembered, but I had no complaints. I loved the way he moved on my lead, and he has never done such a thing, especially with me. I wanted to savor the moment and question it later.

He traced my figure, giving me chills and little temptation to gasp. And so I did. My head was thrown back on his chest.

Spencer was my best friend. I'm very comfortable with whatever we do together. Besides, I had already tried playfully seducing him once, but it never worked. I wasn't his type, and nor was he mine.

I felt him squeeze my flesh sensually, "I don't know, sweetheart. Shall I?" He whispered hoarsely close to my ear.

My eyes darted open, and my body froze. My hands that traveled up his neck passed through the line where I usually felt Spencer's long, curly hair intertwine with my fingers. Instead, I felt short, soft strands stubbornly escape my grip.

I turned around so swiftly that the man behind me placed a hand on the small of my back so I would not fall, my hands landing on his chest.

My heart skipped a beat as I met Aaron eye to eye. A sly smirk covered his handsome face: sharp jaw, pointy nose, earthy eyes, and pinkish lips.

Brows furrowing, "What are you doing?" I asked, pushing a gap between us. I was very much flustered at the fact that it was Aaron all along. And more so that he was my boss.

Aaron kept me close with his strong, rough hands wrapped around my waist. They were so big that it felt like he could hold me like a sandwich if he wanted. "Dancing," He answered nonchalantly, beginning to sway my body once more on his lead.

"Yeah, I know, but you can't dance with me," I said, slowly retracting my hands at such a pace that made me feel the structure of his body.

"And why is that?" He curiously asked, an eyebrow raised in so much interest. "You seem fine rolling your body on Prentiss and Reid. How am I any different?" Aaron squeezed my sides again, earning a satisfying small gasp from me.

My eyes widened. Oh no. I couldn't possibly tell Aaron that I couldn't be seen this close and intimate with him because one of my best friends had a big fat crush on him, and I didn't want to ruin my friendship with Emily.

I looked down, changing my line of sight on his chest. "Fine," I said in full confidence. "One dance." I added sternly.

He gently pinched my chin with his index and thumb and tilted my head up to meet his gaze one more time. "Deal, but you have to actually dance." Aaron had a mischievous grin.

I have to admit how handsome he was, especially with the lights flickering in so much pace. It highlighted the sharpness of his beautiful visage.

But I couldn't be attracted. Emily liked him. I couldn't do that to my best friend.

Aaron raised an eyebrow. He squeezed my waist to snap me out of my trance.

I jumped a little, and I glared at him. "Stop doing that." I subtly pouted, a habit I always had and hated at the moment.

He let out a very seductive chuckle, leaning close to me. "Then dance. Grind that body on me again." Aaron's voice was utterly electrifying. So authoritative and gently alluring.

I felt a shiver shot down my spine to my cunt, and I had to shut my thighs together. My body began to sway again, but not much of the friction I emitted minutes ago.

It was so awkward. So fucking awkward that I wanted the floor to swallow me whole. Aaron made me tense. Us being breathlessly close made my body stiff.

And then the music began to switch, the fade of the last song filled with hundred beats that synced with my heart.

I raised my head to listen to the song in awe. I could feel my blood pump ten times faster. "Oh my gosh!" I looked at Aaron with sparkly eyes. "I love this song!" I exclaimed, and as soon as the beat dropped, my body took over.

I was jumping, swaying, tracing my own body.

Lights flashed, flickering neon colors. I wrapped an arm on Aaron—not caring that he was my boss anymore—and ground my body, whipping my head as my other arm pumped up.

I was biting my bottom lip. And then I felt Aaron hold my raised hand and turn me around without his other hand leaving my waist.

Aaron's hold went lower, now aligned under the small of my back, getting a little feel of the top of my ass. His grip got tighter when I ran my palms on his chest down.

"You know that's a dangerous game you're playing." He whispered close. His breath was ragged, probably from dancing.

I laughed hysterically, "Dangerous? Well, isn't that your forte—" I fluttered my lashes as I looked up at him, "—Hotchner?" I challenged, giving an emphasis to his last name.

Tongue pushed the inner side of his cheek. His lips were slightly parted as he looked at me amusedly. I stumbled when he pulled me closer, and my eyes widened when I felt something hard poke just above my abdomen.

Was I dreaming? What type of fuckery was this?

Aaron trailed his hand to my back and down to my ass, giving it a tight squeeze. My face heated up, no doubt turning red. My throat felt blocked, a lump forming quickly inside.

The song finished, transitioning to another. I was more than happy to push away, but Aaron never gave me the chance to. "I said just one dance." I pointed out, struggling to get out of his grip.

"Oh, but we're playing a game now." Aaron rubbed circles on my ass, and all I could think was how his huge handprint would look good tattooed on my skin.

He pulled me tighter, pressing his body against mine. I gulped at the throb between my thighs.

I opened my mouth, blinking in disbelief. "I-I can't." I stammered, panicking to get out of his touch without crumbling and hoping that Emily hadn't seen us.

His eyebrows narrowed, jaw clenching. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the dancing sea to a more quiet part of the club.

Aaron led us into the alleyway behind the building and stopped next to the huge trash bin. I was like a lasso flicked once when he made me turn to face him. His hand still gripped my wrist, and it felt like it would snap any moment.

"Why the hell not?" Aaron growled. Such tension vibrated down my wet folds. He was heaving, eyes roaming up and down my body.

I still wore my work clothes, except I didn't have my blazer and just left my white buttoned-up long-sleeved shirt with a few buttons off.

I bit my lower lip, looking straight at his chest to avoid his blazing eyes. It felt like I was going to melt if I dared to meet his stare. "Stop it." My eyes went back up to him.

My brows now creased. Stop what? I wasn't doing anything. I kept my words silent. This man is delusional. I swore to every psych test we had to take.

As if I was thinking out loud, Aaron cupped my chin, and the base of his hand wrapped around my neck. "Stop that." He demanded, pulping my cheeks together and my bitten bottom lip set free.

I was blinking hard, trying to process the tension inside of me that swiftly craved him and more of his breath-hitching touch.

"You didn't answer me. I'm still waiting."

My chest heaved, and I only looked at him, his dark, messy hair that made my cunt drool. I only noticed the silver chain on his neck that seemed so tempting to brush over my skin while he feasted on my breasts.

I knew Aaron knew how my mind ran, and I wanted him to. I wanted him to know how tempted I was to get him to use me as his little toy for the rest of the night. But I wasn't allowed to drill first.

I didn't realize how hard my free hand was gripping the arm he stretched to squeeze my pipe or when I did so, but all I saw was how his eyes darkened.

So quick. It was so quick I didn't have time to react. Aaron pulled my face up to meet him. Our lips crashed, following the beat that pounded inside the wall that grazed my back.

His kisses were rough, searing, yet caressed. I moaned when he let go of my wrist and gripped my waist.

It only encouraged him more, trailing down my jaw and under my ear. "Hotch," I rasped, and I was irritated when he pulled away. My mouth flung open, "Why'd you stop?" I entreated breathlessly.

As if my uncoordinated gasps weren't enough proof of lack of air in my lungs, Aaron knocked my breath away by swooping me off the ground.

He connected our lips again, craving for more as he walked us to his car. My arms wrapped around his neck to keep him as close as possible.

My legs dangled over his grip, toes curling inside my shoes. I loved how he tasted. How bitter yet so sweet his lips tasted.

Aaron opened the door to the backseat, setting me down carefully. Although the gentleness subsided quickly, he pinned me on the door across, making my back arch from the uneven surface.

"Fuck, you looked so hot." He went down on my jaw again, fiddling with my buttons until it was all unhooked. Aaron paused, eyes filled with adoration as he moved back to get a look at me. He bit his lower lip in hunger, shaking his head with a grin. "You look so much hotter now." He exclaimed and feasted on me again.

I tilted my head to give him more access to my neck. The sting of sucked blood left remarkable hues on my skin. "On top of me," He rasped, lifting me up by the waist in one grip.

I did as I was told, straddling him. His face now aligned with my breasts, my bra not so useful as it let my mountains spill, which Aaron didn't seem to mind.

He dove into the middle of my cleavage, licking it with a searing tongue. Biting, nibbling, sucking, he adored me with so much lust. Like my fantasy, his necklace brushed on my skin with cold tickles.

Below my waist was a lot more intimate, a hand squeezing and supporting my ass, and the other snaked up under my pencil skirt, giving my cunt the attention it craved. I yelped at the coldness I felt from one of his fingers. I didn't even know he wore rings for fun, nor did I see what color they were.

I moaned aloud when he began to circle my clit, throwing my head back in pleasure. My hands, on the contrary, unbuttoned his shirt with no problem. And when I reached his waistline, I unbuckled his belt with eagerness.

Aaron pinned me down on his suffocated bulge. He maneuvered to pull down his dress pants and boxers. His cock sprung free, the tip kissing the thin fabric on my wet cunt.

"Hotch," I moaned, asking for more friction. I needed him inside of me. I wouldn't last any longer. I wanted him to break me.

He hummed on my collarbone, the vibrations spreading all over my body, throbbing my cunt to more wetness I've ever felt.

My eyes shut tight when he set my underwear aside and pushed his tip in. "No one can find out," I whispered. My lips parted as steam escaped me.

Aaron groaned in pleasure as he inched deeper, my walls tightening around his throbbing cock. It was so good. He felt so good inside of me.

"Oh, I do love the thrill," He said lovingly. "Don't worry. I'll keep it to myself as long as you're just mine."

My hips jolted, and I moaned at his promise. Aaron kissed my jaw gently, "They'll never know I'm the reason you won't be walking properly to work tomorrow." He mumbled with heat.

He placed a kiss on my lips, "No one would know who gave you all these brands." Aaron looked at me, wrapping a hand on my neck with the finger that had a ring, the cold causing a vein of mine to tremble. "As long as you promise only to be mine, I'll keep my word." He added and let go of my neck to give me attention elsewhere.

I heaved, "Move. Fast. Break me, please." I begged in broken words. My lips quivered in so much need.

Then he snapped. He pounded on me relentlessly, pupils dilated, eyes raven-ly dark. He pressed our bodies closer, the heat burning my skin in such pleasure.

"Mmm," I hummed breathlessly. I was digging my nails down his muscular biceps. He was so good. "Faster, Aaron." His name slipped out of my lips.

It seemed to fuel his lust even more as he thrust a lot faster than what I asked, but exactly what I needed. "Fuck, I'm not going to last longer with you feeling this good around my cock." Aaron growled, biting on my skin to emit a loud cry from me.

And he got what he wanted. I screamed his name, each clashing of our hips. My hands deeply tangled with his dark hair. He filled me to the hilt, filled my hunger so well.

I felt my high approach. I knew he felt it, too, by the way he mumbled my name like a prayer. I tugged his hair for his head to pull away from my hued skin and smashed our lips to heighten the intimacy I've felt.

Not long when my body tightened even more, "I'm going to—fuck," I shuddered, pulling on his roots even harder.

Aaron rested his forehead on mine, watching how his cock disappeared in me while my body shook from intense euphoria.

His words were sacred, like a rule I was set to abide by. I crumbled in a pleasurable cry for his name. Hammered down my zenith as my essence spilled all over him.

"Fuck—" Aaron groaned, burying his face in my nook. I felt his thrusts turn sappy, cock twitched inside of me in such painful stimulation. He came in me with a cunt throbbing growl.

We stayed in the same position, panting. Only then did I notice the fog that masked the windows.

I looked at his blissed face. I didn't know when he started to adore me. I didn't care whether the alcohol was the only proof of his feelings for me, either. It was the most amazing time of my life. I wasn't willing to change any of it.

And speaking of care. Hell to Emily—bless her heart and our friendship— but I'd love to own the man who fucked me this good.

588 notes · View notes