#p: Comedown

[sebastian-morey]

Sebastian was glad that aside from brushing off his hand, he didn't argue. If only because he felt firm on this standpoint, and he would have argued back if his brother refused. Gemmy shouldn't be alone. Not tonight. It wasn't like it was unfamiliar to him anyways, having a brother sleeping close by. Though it was usually Iz or for the most part Elliot.

The last time it had been Gem who'd come to him was so long ago he might've still been in secondary.

While his younger brother looked for something unburned to wear, Sebastian gave him his space and moved to just make sure nothing was still smoldering against the other man's bed, checking the sheets until he was sure Gem was ready before he led the two of them back over the short distance to Sebastian's own room.

His own shirt was pulled off once the door closed behind him, tossed haphazardly against the rim of his laundry as he pulled another on within the moonlit room, his gaze finding Gem's. He offered a gentle squeeze to the man's forearm, careful not to try and startle more flames from his exhausted brother as he moved by him to crawl back into bed.

He shifted all the way to the side, leaving plenty of room for his brother as he tucked his arms under one of the pillows with a soft sigh, waiting to feel the weight settle beside him to signify his brother's presence. Sebastian didn't know if it would work - but for Gem's sake, he hoped it did. That even just for a few hours he could sleep peacefully, unplagued by his worries.

"...buona notte."

@gem-morey

Comedown || Spicy Meatball

[suqqubus]

desire to drink/be on some sort of drug consistently throughout the day & avoiding activities that dont involve drugs/alcohol

lack of motivation and energy

being the last one trying to keep the party going despite everyone else being exhausted/not into it anymore

feeling the unquenchable desire for sexual validation in a way that makes me question my commitment to (partial) monogamy and romanticize destructive decisions at risk of my health and relationship

hm

[vapekingg]

accidental i love you’s during sex is sooo steve harrington it’s unbelievable…..

Oh fuck yeah. I'm stoned as shit right now so I got you.

MDNI Steve HarringtonxFem!Reader FWB/Friends to Lovers CW: recreational drug use, choking, unprotected sex, p in v sex, creampie

Banner by @inklore

It started as a drunken mistake — hooking up with your best friend.

You and Steve had one too many beers in the parking lot of Family Video after work and ended up in the back seat of his car, windows fogged up and messy handprints leaving evidence of your tryst.

It wasn't a mistake the second time though, or the third.

You and Steve are one too many joints deep after your closing shift together now, the race back to your house was a near bloodbath as you tore at each other’s clothes and gnashed at each other’s flesh. He’s pressed against your back, moving fluidly against you. His breath hot on your ear but chilling your spine, his hips snapping forward to bury you deeper into the mattress.

Steve gets pissed off at work. He needs an outlet, and you’re happy to be just that.

With another rut of his hips, his palm ricochets off of your ass.

“Fuck!” He curses.

His other hand is hooked around your front, fingers lodged deep in your throat. You’ve been drooling around his digits, mouth wide open so that you don’t accidentally scrape him with your teeth.

“Oh my g-fuck…” Steve grinds into you, pushing the swollen head of his cock against the back of your needy cunt.

It’s hours of this. This give and take. This violent brutality pushing you to the edge and then his soothing ministrations tugging you back.

“I fucking love this,” he accentuates his words with a kiss to your shoulder, another stroke of his cock against your walls. “Fucking love it-mmf..”

He tugs his hips backwards just to slam into you again.

“Love this pussy,” he continues, hand creeping over your hip to stroke between your thighs.

“I love this fucking voice,” Steve’s fingers slip out of your mouth and a gush of saliva follows, then you’re gasping for air.

His hand travels down your throat and squeezes the columns gently. You can tell by the twitch of his hips that he’s edging on delirium.

“Love fucking you. Oh my god," His knee shifts, and suddenly his weight is pressing into you. Burying you against sweat-soaked sheets. His teeth scrape against your shoulder and dig into anywhere they can fit: your bicep, your shoulder blade, your neck. He's sinking into you as if you'll never see each other again, as if the world is ending just outside.

"I love you.”

You hear the words, but grenades are detonating in your ears. Steve's precise fingers work frantically between your thighs, toying with your overstimulated clit as you squirm and writhe beneath him.

His hips jerk, he's swelling inside of you, and then you hear it again.

"Fuck, I love you..."

You hear it in the far off corner of your mind as your release hits, and those words carry something with them. Something warm and safe that hadn't been included in this arrangement before. It cradles you during your comedown, provides that cushion between Steve's heavy body and yours and his breath begins to quicken in your ear.

A moment later, it's over. Steve stills inside of you, his length beginning to soften and then slip out, followed by the gush of his release. He's getting heavier, it's getting harder to breathe, and there's a laugh stored in your chest that you can't hold for much longer.

Steve presses a tender kiss to the shell of your right ear and you smile.

"Should we talk about—" You begin.

A breath finally enters your lungs as Steve rolls off of you.

"Nope!" He answers while falling onto his back.

Sweat clings to his chest hair and shimmers in the yellow light provided by the lamp that illuminates the room from the corner. He doesn't ask for permission, this is all routine by now. Steve closes his eyes and throws out his arm, waiting for you to join him at the rib for a post-coital cuddle.

"Well, yes. Tomorrow." He continues.

Finally, that laugh escapes you.

[lipglossanon]

What You Do To Me (No One Knows)

˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶

Stepdad!Leon S Kennedy x fem!reader-part 2

(Part 1)

(Part 3)

Warnings: 18+ minors DNI, mean Leon, bully Leon, fem!reader, stepcest, unprotected sex, dirty talk, daddy kink, breeding kink, oral (f receiving), slight dubcon, pussy slapping, choking, spit kink, dacryphilia, overstimulation

Not proofread so ignore any mistakes! It’s straight up nasty from the get go, so be forewarned 😈 hope you guys like it 🫣

Title from the song No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age

˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶ ⋆｡˚ ⁀➷˚ ༘✶

Leon has fucked you dumb at this point. You don’t know how many times he made you cum on his cock, but he has yet to let up. 

“Such a pretty pussy and s’all mine right baby?” 

You nod tiredly, “Y-yeah daddy.”

“Such a good girl,” he groans, grinding his cock deeper into your cunt and settling. 

He pins you to his bed—your mother’s bed—, chest pressed along your back as he slowly continues to fuck into you. He presses a hot kiss against your neck, nipping at the skin before dragging his mouth up to your ear. 

“If you’re tired baby, you can go to sleep,” he nips the tip of your ear, “s’okay to just keep using you, right?”

You moan weakly, hips arching into him while your hands twist in the sheets. 

He laughs at you, “You like that, sweetheart? Yeah you do. Just let me use you whenever I want, huh.”

“We can’t,” you hiccup even as your pussy clamps down harder on Leon’s dick. 

His hands come up to slot his fingers in between yours, pressing your palms flat onto the bed as he ruts into your wet cunt harder.  

“Sure we can,” he coos, dropping a kiss onto your hot cheek, “your mom is gone all the time and daddy gets so lonely, sweetheart. Lucky for me, I got a wet little hole ready and waiting just down the hall.”

Your eyes roll back as an orgasm hits you out of nowhere, walls convulsing and clenching down on Leon’s cock. 

“Damn baby, that’s it, cum on my cock,” he groans, slowly circling his hips to grind deeper into your wet heat. 

You can faintly hear an alarm going off but you’re so dizzy on the comedown you’re not sure. 

Humming, Leon sucks a bruise into your neck.

“Guess it’s morning already,” he sucks another bruise next to the one he just left. 

He pulls out of you with a soft groan; the empty feeling makes you whine before you can catch yourself. 

“Baby, I’m coming right back,” he soothes, walking to the other side of the room. 

Picking up his phone, he turns off the alarm. The realization that you’ve been fucking Leon all night leaves you dizzy while you shakily raise up on your hands and knees. When you turn over to your front, his cum oozes out of your sore pussy and drips all over the sheets. 

You hiss in discomfort and slowly scoot to the edge of the bed. Unbeknownst to you, Leon watches your every move with sharp eyes. 

“Going somewhere, sweetheart?”

You pull your attention away from your throbbing lower half to look over at him. 

“I need to clean up,” you fidget under his dark stare. 

He walks back over and kneels in front of you. 

He rubs your calves with gentle hands, “I understand. Such a messy girl, but you’re my messy girl, right?”

You duck your head but give a shaky nod. 

“Then daddy needs to clean you up,” his voice deepens to a low rumble as he grabs your legs and pulls them over his shoulders. 

You gasp out as you find yourself flat on your back with Leon between your thighs, hungrily eating your pussy. 

“Nooo,” you whine, reaching down to push him away. 

Ignoring you completely, he grabs your wrists to pin them to the bed. You try to buck your hips but it only lets him dip his tongue deeper into your leaky cunt.  

“Stop,” your voice warbles, “it’s too sore.”

Leon pulls his face away just enough to speak, “I’m just cleaning you up, sweetheart. Stop being a little brat before I get upset.”

A broken gasp escapes your lips at the intense look on his face. 

“Now say sorry.”

“Sorry.”

“Please eat my pussy.”

“P-please eat m-my pussy,” your eyes water at the dull throb of arousal pulsing in your clit. 

His lips curl in a smile but it does nothing to instill comfort. 

“Good girl, now you gonna behave for me?”

“Uh-huh,” your breath shudders out as you agree. 

“Good,” Leon croons, eyes drifting from your face down the line of your body. 

He spits on your pussy and follows the line of drool down the puffy, abused lips of your cunt. Groaning, he buries his face back between your legs and eagerly fucks his tongue in your hole. He eats the mess he left inside, cum and slick dripping down his chin. 

“Such a sweet little cunt,” he praises.

You mewl, feeling a gush of wetness at his words. 

“C’mon, give me more, sweetheart,” he slips a couple of fingers into you, coaxing your hole to spread open for his mouth. 

Leon laps and sucks at your clit, moaning against the sensitive bundle like he can’t get enough of you or your taste. Your mind goes hazy from the overstimulation and pleasure and by the time your orgasm washes over you, you’re a boneless mess. 

You must drift off from sheer tiredness because when you come to, you’re lying on your side in the center of the bed—body feeling sore and used. Leon’s palm is covering your mouth, the other hand holding onto your rib cage, as his hips piston in your wet pussy. 

You realize he’s mumbling and panting into the skin of your shoulder. 

“Been wanting this for so long. Don’t even know how many times I thought of you when fucking her.”

He nips the skin then runs his tongue over the mark. You’re so sore and tired and yet you like how Leon’s cock constantly bullies into your cunt. He’s ruining your pussy… but you still want him to fuck you more—deeper, harder. 

“Pictured you under me, begging me to fuck you, crying cause you can’t take it,” he groans, “love when you cry, gets me so hard, baby.”

Your walls flutter around his cock as you moan a high whispery sound behind his palm. His quick thrusts turn into slow, deep rolls so his fat cock keeps your hole stretched out. 

“Finally awake, sweetheart?” he laughs meanly in your ear. 

His hand drags from your side up to tease and flick your nipples, “Been so good for me, baby. Keeping me all snug and warm as I fill this needy pussy over and over again.”

You clench down as he pinches and tugs on your nipples. He strokes his fingers over the hard buds as he sloppily kisses your neck and shoulder. He moves his palm away from your mouth to cup your neck. 

“S’too much,” your hands scratch at his forearms, “please.”

A slap rings out before you can register it, the sting of Leon’s hand imprinted on your pussy. Your legs kick out as he smacks your cunt again. He brings his hand back up to tug harshly at your nipples. 

“Behave,” the hand on your neck tightens, “and let me finish, sweetheart.“

The hand teasing your breasts slips down your body to softly rub your overly sensitive clit. Even as tired as you are, you thrash a little in Leon’s grip from the too much feeling his fingers are causing. 

He doesn’t stop or change, just keeps rubbing and stroking your clit as his cock fucks deep into your body. 

“C’mon, you can cum for me one last time,” he’s the devil in your ear, coaxing more from your spent body than you can give.

Tears drip from your eyes as you sob. 

“I’m gonna cum. You’re gonna make me cum again, L-Leon.”

Your orgasm is syrupy and slow, but it hits you so hard you can feel the muscles in your thighs seize. Your eyes roll back as you feel slick spill from your pussy, drenching everything below your waist. 

“Fuck me,” Leon gasps like he’s out of breath, “perfect, so fucking perfect baby. Squirting all over my  cock.”

His voice trails off into a low groan as he cums inside you, burying himself as deep as he can get. His hand moves from your clit to hold your side as he rocks his hips into you softly. The warm sensation of his cum spurting inside your cunt makes you weakly squeeze down on his dick. You feel hot all over. 

“Such a good girl,” he laughs, “you got me hooked, baby. Can’t wait to fuck you stupid again.”

You’re bone tired, body feeling like jello, so you only whine in reply. As he pulls out, you both moan at the feeling. He tugs your shoulder to roll you over on your back. 

He smiles down at you, eyes hungry and mean. 

“The way we’re going, might accidentally knock you up, sweetheart.”

Your eyes widen with shock even as your pussy thrums with sick want, “N-no. I can’t— it’s wrong.”

He mockingly pouts at you as he brushes a stray tear away, “I said might baby. ‘M not trying to breed your little pussy. It just might happen is all.”

He slips a couple of fingers into your used cunt and fucks the cum slipping out back into your sore hole. 

“Gonna make that birth control of yours work extra hard.”

You’re left speechless as he pulls away and stands up. 

“Go get cleaned up, sweetheart. I’m gonna order some food,” he grins at you, eyes crinkling and fond. “Then we can finish that movie we started.”

You raise up and nod, still feeling unmoored. 

“Don’t look like that, honey,” he murmurs, tilting your chin up. 

He kisses you, soft and slow, slipping his tongue into your mouth to tease alongside your own. He pulls back and drops a kiss on your cheek. 

“I’m gonna take good care of you, okay?”

You nod again, feeling shy. 

He tsks, “Words, baby.”

“Okay, daddy.”

His eyes sweep down your body, taking in all the teeth marks and bruises. He kisses you again, harder and insistent. He cups your breasts and squeezes. 

“Lay back, sweetheart,” he whispers against your lips, “gonna eat you out one more time.”

You moan, “I’m so sore though.” 

“I know, I know, baby,” he shushes you with more kisses, “just let me eat you out and I’ll let you go get cleaned up.”

You sigh into his mouth, “O-okay. Last time?”

He hums, “Yeah, just want you to cream all over my tongue one more time, sweetheart.”

You reach up to run your hands through his hair, “‘kay, thank you.”

His eyes soften for a moment, “Of course.”

He kneels on the floor and brings your legs over his shoulders. Leon drags the broad flat of his tongue across your hot, soaked pussy. 

You sigh out in pleasure as he places sloppy kisses to your clit over and over making your legs twitch. Your hands come down to tangle in his messy hair. 

He grunts and moans, pushing his mouth further into your pussy. His nose rubs against your clit, tongue flicking and stroking in and out of your hole. You grip his hair and ride his face, shaking and moaning. You can hear him jerk off while he tongue fucks your pussy and it makes you even wetter. 

Twisting your head to the side, you can see him fisting his thick, swollen cock. His knuckles are shiny with precum as he fucks his hand in a tight grip. Your clit throbs with want. You tug his hair harder, trying to get his attention. 

“D-daddy,” you mewl, “in me, in me please.”

His eyes are barely blue when he pulls back from eating you out. 

“What is it, baby?” He rasps, voice husky. 

“In me, please. Want to feel you,” you arch your hips. 

He doesn’t stop pumping his hand, but he slows to soft teasing strokes on his dick. 

“Hmm but I thought you were sore, baby?”

You nod but grasp at his shoulders, trying to pull him up. 

“I am, but it looks like it hurts”, you bite your lip. 

He huffs a laugh, “It does, but I don’t wanna hurt my sweet girl.”

“Go slow,” you bargain, clit pulsing as you watch him stroke his cock. 

“Yeah? Okay then,” his voice is low and wanting, “s’what my girl asked for after all.”

Leon raises up and presses your knees to your chest; his cock nearly bottoming out as he sinks into your warm, welcoming hole inch by inch.

Your hands scratch and claw at his broad shoulders, head tossed back with how intense it feels to be fucked again so soon. Leon pulls out and slowly sinks back in, never changing tempo as he buries himself in your pussy over and over. 

It feels so good, but it’s not enough. 

“Please,” you whimper, legs twitching against Leon’s hands. 

“Please what? Is it too much?”

You shake your head back and forth, “Daddy, please.”

He bottoms out, cock so deep you’re gasping for air. 

“Like that?” He smirks down at you.

“Yess,” you whine, “more, please”

He slowly pulls out and presses in deep; he does it again and again, getting quicker with his thrusts until he’s railing you into the bed. 

You’re openly crying now. He’s rubbing and pinching your clit as he fucks his cock deep into your pussy. He has you squealing every time the head presses against your cervix. 

“Right there?”

You only choke on a whine, eyes rolling back in your head. 

He groans, “‘m really gonna breed you deep this time, sweetheart.”

You moan, mind completely whited out by pleasure. 

“Breed me, daddy, please,” you’re babbling, not thinking at all of what you’re saying. “Want you to cum in me.”

One of his hands moves from your leg, to wrap around your throat. 

“Say it again,” he squeezes your neck. 

“Breed me,” you’re drooling, spit leaking down your chin, “want daddy to breed my pussy.”

“Yeah? Want me to knock you up? Cum all in this sweet little pussy?”

Your cunt spasms as your back arches. 

“Want it, want you to cum in me, please!”

His hand tightens on your neck. 

“Open up, sweetheart.”

Your bleary eyes look into his face as you drop your mouth open. He spits directly onto your tongue. Moaning, you swallow and quickly open your mouth again. 

Leon’s hand clenches around your throat and he drools into your open mouth. Moaning, you swallow his spit down your throat. 

“Knew if I fucked you good enough, you’d want it,” Leon groaned, “now you’re just a cock hungry little slut, huh.”

You barely hear him over the roar of blood in your ears as you shake apart from the longest orgasm of your life. He squeezes down on your throat as your nails dig into his shoulders to the point of breaking skin. It’s a kaleidoscope of feelings as your walls clench rhythmically around Leon, urging him to spill inside you. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chants under his breath, “gonna drain me dry, sweetheart.”

You gasp what little air you can and Leon releases your neck as he fills your pussy again. His thrusts stutter into your pliant body as rope after rope of hot cum fills your squelching cunt. Your walls clench repeatedly around the thick cock splitting you open. His dick throbs and kicks inside you as your hole keeps milking him for every last drop of cum. He lets out a low moan as he continues to finish inside you. 

Your throat feels raw as you try to catch your breath. Leon drops his forehead onto your clavicle, panting into your skin. A sharp sting followed by wet suction makes you tense as he leaves another bite mark. He lifts his head up to look at you. 

“So good baby,” Leon kisses you, nipping your bottom lip, “I’d say you earned a break.”

You feel floaty, thoughts drift in and out with no purchase in your mind. You smile at him and bring him down for another kiss. 

“Thank you, daddy.”

[is-this-a-strokes-reference]

yes 🎉🎉

on the top right monitor, the third song in is call it fate, call it karma !!

[millerscoffee]

Congrats on your 500 😎

I was thinking...“Touch me there. Right there.” with Jonathan Levy

boy, can i ever - thank you nonnie! hope you enjoy ♡

late night

770 words | jonathan levy x f!reader (professor x student)

rating: 18+ MDNI

warning: professor x student, cock warming, creampie, pet name (honey mostly), praise kink, no use of y/n

A/N: this is part of my 500 followers celebration running until 9/9 ♡

You’ll keep my cock warm, won’t you, honey?

That was an hour ago.  You’d been fooling around with Professor Levy for a couple months at this point – Jonathan in the middle of his divorce, and you thought every time you saw him you discovered something new about him, but nothing quite topped this evening in his office: the door locked, the blinds shut, your thighs quaking.

He promises you no one is around, his hands teasing your skirt up, bending you over the desk.  Sits down behind you to peel your underwear to your ankles before working you up just enough to sit you down on his length.

“P-Professor,” your voice is shaky, your skirt hiked up to your low back, his slacks at his thighs, you could tell how wet you were around him.  The collection of your sex makes things slicker as the minutes ticked.  You felt his palm warm over your shoulder and that alone made your insides flutter around him, “Just a minute, honey.  Alright?  I’m grading papers, you know that.” his dominant hand held a red marker, and the warmth moves from your shoulder to your hip on the opposite side.  You gasp at his greedy touch, the way his fingers dig into the skin and curvature there.  You can’t help it, you shift enough to make his cock hit your cervix.  “Ooh,” you squeak, perspiration making its appearance at the nape of your neck.  Everything felt sticky.

Your eyes wander to the paper just to the side of you, focus on his hand critiquing and it’s all blurry.  Your brain is useless like this, and you need movement.  “Please,” beginning to beg, you wonder if that would be of any use, but you can practically feel him ignore you leaving you to whimper, burying your face in your arms.

“You’re being so good for me, you know,” his words are distant, like he’s speaking at you rather than to you, but the praise lifts your head, fingernails clawing at the desk you bite the plush of your bottom lip.  You can’t help but gasp when he puts his pen down.

“How can I help?” He's so attentive, even when he’s busy, and it makes you appreciate him more than Mira ever could.

“N-need to move.  Need you to touch me.”

“Lean back up, honey.”

So you do as you told, head rests back against his shoulder and he ghosts his hands over your body until you’re trembling with need.

“Touch me,” your pathetic pleas fall into his mouth, his tongue lapping and exploring past your lips – his hand reaching for your split clit.  “Here?” Professor Levy teases, his middle finger flicking at the nub teasingly before rolling it under the pads of his fingers, and you’re gone – panting and clawing at anything you can.  “There, there – right fucking there!”  Jonathan’s mouth stops you from making too much noise, his hips only shifting up for a handful of thrusts before you’re clenching and it sends you to your orgasm as the rush of heat pools from your core out to your extremities.  It’s floaty, blissful as you make sweet noises into his mouth, and he’s eager to hum against the current.

“Fuck,” he gruffs, not slowing down the movement of his now eager hips work doubletime, pawing at your tits through your blouse.  “You’re so beautiful, I’m so lucky,” his praises leave you blushing, nails curl into his naked thighs and you nod hopelessly, “Give it to me, J,” you bite your lip in the desperation and that sends him over the edge, spilling hot ropes inside of you to feel so complete.

Moments pass, and you feel the twitching of his inevitable comedown.  You’re both breathless, fighting for oxygen as you see the side of his lip twitch in a charming smile.  “Don’t think you’re leaving.”  you swallow hard, pulling back to get a good look at him and you shake your head, laughing without the proper oxygen – head dizzy.

“Death of me, Professor Levy.”

“I don’t hear you complaining,” Jonathan hums, swiping his fingers over his tongue from where they once landed on your middle.

Your eyelids are heavy when you adjust yourself – still inside, to curl your legs into your lap, the side of you now nestled into his chest.

“Wouldn’t dare do such a thing,” you muse, lips painting over the side of his neck, the slightest of him spills from your entrance.

He pets your hair back, leaving you to a comfortable silence as he goes back to finishing his work, and it feels so good at this moment.  Perfect.

[deadboyfriendd]

𝙑𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙤 𝙂𝙞𝙧𝙡. E.M.

Summary: Eddie isn't in college, but he sells drugs at college parties. He usually isn't into these kinds of girls, cokeheads home for the long weekend, but what happens when he meets you?

Warnings: Fem!Reader, Eddie Munson x Reader, obvs a lil canon-divergent, fratboy adjacent!Steve, wingman!Robin, drug use, angst to fluff, smut included

My content is 18+ Minors DNI

Word Count: 9.1k

Author's Note: This is secretly based off of a Fall Out Boy song. Spear me please.

Also this is 100% for @dr-aculaaa , Drac helped me out with a TON of the dialogue and plot in this and she deserves 100% of the hype for this. PLEASE go read her work.

Eddie isn’t in college, but he sells drugs at college parties. 

He’s overstimulated. Both by the heat of the girl grasping and gripping his arm that was turning it unpleasantly raw and by the lack of anything substantial that he could focus his senses on. He can’t remember her name, and it wasn’t because of the seventeen other things distracting his senses, either. She was inherently unremarkable. Another cokehead from The Hideout. College girls home for the long weekend. Love does not occur in dive bar bathrooms, Eddie knew that much. 

He could tell her apart immediately, a Pamela Anderson wannabe with all of the intuition to sniff out anyone remotely Tommy Lee adjacent. The glorification of hard drugs and dysfunction. This would not go anywhere but possibly the bathroom, where she would emerge with a misty ring of powder white around her left nostril and blown pupils. He would taste the drip on her later that night when she would kiss him in a grotesque masquerade of her own cold comedown, denial dripping from her lips with a sticky sweetness disguised with L’Oreal Colour Riche Rich Brown. There were a thousand more like her, some here at home, others in Indianapolis, even more in Chicago. 

She was pretty for a cokehead, but not nearly as pretty as you. 

He spotted you through past the popcorn ceilings, under the fluorescent kitchen lights that were not particularly attractive for any given reason. You were the only girl here who didn’t know how he was. He had been stuck in the pipeline of town deviant to Indiana’s metal microcelebrity. His eyes locked on the kiss of your lashes as the aforementioned date dragged him through the density of other sweaty, coked-out bodies. You swung your legs back and forth as the scuffed rubber from the heels of your sneakers thudded against the hollow cabinet beneath you, rattling the pots behind it. 

She shrieks your name like a birdsong, and you whip around with wide eyes. She drags him along, pulling uncomfortably at his fingers. She bounces up and down in a way that she thinks is attractive, but to everyone else, the jingle of bangles and sequins and squealing is inherently annoying. 

You are not her friend. 

You had become acquainted with the girl before you in an entry-level introductory course for environmental design. It was offered as an elective across all majors but was also stupidly a requirement for all design-specific majors. And, even more unfortunately, the majority of the class was group work. This is how you met her. And she attached to you like a fungus— roots buried in branches that grasped your bones and made her impossible to remove without the inevitability of spawning again. She was a roach of a friend, not even nuclear warfare could rid you of her. But you were too nice to her, in fact, you were the only person that had given half a shit to include her. 

“Oh my God!” There’s a resonant tenor screech that reverberates off of the tile floors and pitches in your own ears so high that it could shatter any champagne flute within a ten mile radius. The guy— poor bastard– being dragged ruthlessly behind her like a content stray cat that had been claimed by a small child twitched an eye nearly shut at the pitchy shriek that plagues him as much as you. 

She explains how you met in an effortful, but drawn-out and utterly painful, story. It was a class. You were assigned a group project. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. 

But his hand was warm when it encased yours in an entirely professional handshake. You shook the thought from your head before it was even allowed to form. You desperately needed to kick the habit of falling in love with strangers in passing. You would not find the one at a party— at least not this one. 

It wasn’t long until she had gotten distracted, an old friend, as she had put it. There was no friend. Only powder on a mirror in the next room over. You questioned why she lied, because she wasn’t even discreet about it. 

“How can you be a nurse and do so much blow?” He asked, face twisted up in a sickening scowl. She had long forgotten about him and he tried his best to forget about her. 

“Girls like that usually are.” You deadpanned back, your face mirroring his own disgust. 

“Nursing majors?” He questioned, her major the only thing he could remember about her at this point. 

“Yeah. It’s the safest option. It keeps their parents happy while they put their financial aid up their noses.” You watched her try to discreetly gum some remnants off of the mirror sitting on the coffee table, pinkie finger dragging alongside the glass and disappearing behind her bottom lip. 

“I’ll bet she won’t finish off the semester.” You stated bluntly after a few seconds of spectating. 

“What about you?” He asked, in reference to your major. 

“Basket weaving. It’s really not much.” You didn’t want to come off as judgmental, or a prude. Especially not after admitting you were a design major. You cringed at how pretentious it sounded.  

“I like baskets.” He said, plopping himself down on the barstool across the island from you, toe thudding against the exterior to stop him from spinning too much. 

“Design.” You said, more of a mumble than a statement. You felt stupid. People usually thought you were stupid when you told them you dropped out of nursing school to be a design major. He didn’t need to know that part of you. After all, he was just some guy at a party and not the love of your life. 

“Of what nature?” He questioned, laying his head tiredly against his folded arm and looking up you you through thick lashes. 

“Of the graphic nature.” You were thoroughly surprised when he stuck around, head tilting to the side in curiosity — a stray curl bouncing from one side to the other. 

“What, like Chip Kidd?” Your head shot up. Sure, he was one of the hottest names in design this year, but who cared about design outside of designers? Next to no one. You forced yourself to play it cool. 

“More like a Stefan Sagmeister.” You grinned, bringing you knees to you chest and folding your arms over them. 

“You’re a Stones fan?” He questioned, brow cocked. 

“Who isn’t?“

“You’d be surprised.” 

“Well, surprise me, then.”

+

Eddie isn’t in college, but he knows a girl that frequents college parties.

This time it’s at some kickback in the woods, and this time it was to sell drugs— but seeing you was like a reward as you folded and contorted your own softness into comfort in the back compartment of his van, legs leaned against his side in search of warmth against the brisk nip of the reminiscence of winter. He draped his arm over your knees as he stood casually in wait, wondering how women could fold their bodies into strange statutes of comfort in only the ways they know how. 

You were good for business. Everyone and their mother seemed to know who you were. Probably because you were sweet. Especially to him. 

You’ve been casually sleeping with each other for a few weeks now, only when you can catch each other through hushed communal dorm phone-calls or whenever you come home for the weekend. No-strings attached, no commitment. But this outing sure felt like commitment, in the same way it felt like commitment when he held your hand earlier, and the same way it felt like commitment when he pressed his forehead against yours during your last entanglement. 

He leans over to you, alabaster skin of his neck stretching over bone and artery so he could whisper to you, 

“This is kind of lame. Let’s get out of here.”

You weren’t one to refuse him, especially not when he looked at you like that. 

“I’m not losing out on high school drama. I’m down.” You whisper back to him, pulling the end of an unruly curl just to watch it spring back up into place. 

While he’s watching the road, you’re memorizing the features of his face. If he could sparkle right now, he would be, even as the only light catching his face was from the too spaced-out street lamps. He drives in near-silence, whatever cassette buzzing hushedly over the radio but quiet enough that you could hear the vapid spinning of the tires and his occasional slow breath. 

You see the headstones before he has a chance to speak. 

“You’re gonna murder me.” You breathed out, joking mostly. 

“Yeah, right here, in the cemetery. Then I’m gonna bury you in a fresh grave.” He said to you, between eye rolls, getting out of the van to go pull the back doors open and straighten the woolen saddle blankets so you could sit. 

He pulls an acoustic guitar down from a makeshift bungee-cord rack fixed to the sidewall of the interior of the van, This Machine Slays Dragons crudely scrawled across the face to mimic Guthrie’s own. 

“I didn’t know that fascists breathed fire.” You said to him through a halfway-crooked sort of smile, pushing yourself up to lean against the sidewall of the van, facing him. You let one  leg swing back and forth, the rubber toe of your shoe tapping mindlessly against the seemingly useless tow hitch. 

“I knew you were more than just pretty.” He said, mouth turning up at the sides of his mouth. He was pretty, peering at you from beneath lashes before turning his attention back to the tuning knob. He strummed a calloused thumb across the tight string, listening to it upturn until he thought it sounded right.

It was a foreign ritual to you, his own prettiness being the catalyst for your own destruction before his vapid excuse at being a boyfriend ever could. . You watched silken curls slip over his shoulder and brush over the neck of his guitar. You watched as pretty deft fingers strummed a progression you would never understand. You desperately wished it was you, instead. 

It was like you were experiencing him through a macro lens, and it only made him more beautiful. His eyes came up to meet yours, dark and rich in the twilight that fell over you. You couldn’t have stared at him for more than a few seconds, but it was enough for your own giggles to bubble over. 

“Oh god.” You say through cupped hands, burying your face in your palms. You knew he was looking at you like you were crazy– all in good humor. 

“What?” He asked, unable to contain his own chuckle at this point. 

“You are literally the guy at the party that brings the guitar.” You managed through your bouts of giggles. 

“I don’t see much of a party here, sweetheart.” That smile curled again at his lips, this time with more teeth. You didn’t want to stare more, despite his fingers strumming the beginning cord of a song with all of the tenderness he could muster.

“Then who are you playing for? The ghosts?” You giggled again, looking around at the eeriness of the headstones. Had it been cooler, it would have been more off putting, but the swelling heat of summer that had settled over Indiana almost gave it some comfort. 

“You. Five regulars at The Hideout. Any ghost that wants to listen.” He laughed back, stopping his strumming to look back up at you. 

“Are you actually good?” You folded your knees upwards, turning yourself fully towards him. You rested your folded arms on top of them, pressing your chin against them to stare at him. 

“Would you just shut up and listen? I wrote a song about you.” It wasn’t hurtful, never was it hurtful. He said this towards you through pretty lips and even prettier winks. 

It wasn’t anything great. Three cords and two lines, but you wished you could record it and play it on a loop over and over again until your walkman caught fire. His voice wasn’t smooth, but it wrapped around you like a blanket, and, suddenly, it was your favorite sound. There was one thing you knew for certain, you wanted Eddie to sing to you every day for the rest of your life. 

“So you actually are good.” 

He rolled his eyes at you, casting the guitar aside as quickly as he had gotten it down. His lips met yours in a rapid staccato of haste kisses, first long, then followed by the plethora of short. You felt calloused fingers dig into the plush of your waist. 

It usually ended up like this. You’d laugh, you’d fall in love with him over and over and over again. You would have sex, and then it would be weeks. Weeks of trying to get your life back together and weeks of trying to remember yourself before him. But, God, when he kissed you over and over like that you would gladly break your heart for him. You wanted him to break it– if it meant that you could have him for this moment. 

“This technically is a party, you know?” You whispered a breathy giggle against his lips, peeling an eye open to peer at him. 

“What?” He asked, pulling back slightly. His lips were still glossy with the taste of you, but his eyes peered down at you in a way that made your stomach flip. You debated letting him take you in a cemetery. 

“Earlier, you said that you didn’t see much of a party. But we are here… at one, I mean?” Eddie looked around, eyebrow raised in utter confusion before clueing into what you had meant. 

“What with… them?” He asked you from behind the back of his hand, as if the bodies beneath you would be offended if they had heard. 

“Yeah. With all of the people buried here.” You stated, matter-of-factly. 

“I don’t think they’re much partying anymore.” Eddie explained to you, looking around the cemetery with raised eyebrows.

“Look… you know how the saying goes: one's company, two’s a crowd, and three’s a party? Well, this is a lot more than three. They don’t specify if they’re of the living disposition or not.” You argued back, trying your hardest to contain your own smile. 

“I’m saying no one here is having a good time.” He argued back in mock frustration, palms jutting out towards the headstones around you in confusion. 

“Besides us?” You asked him, with wide eyes. 

“Yes, besides us.” He said to you, reaching out to grip the opposite side of your waist and pull you into his side. 

“I can see it now. Here lies Edward— what’s your middle name?” 

“Not a chance.”

“Edward ‘Not a Chance’ Munson. He partied so hard he died.” You said, holding your hands out in a picturesque fashion. You couldn’t contain your own giggles. 

“Are you always a wise-ass?” He said, from behind a forward chuckle. 

“I don’t know, am I?” 

“Yes.” He looked down at you from beneath his shoulder, his eyes meeting your own endearingly. 

Eddie had a really bad habit of completely derailing your life with a single look. Once your eyes met the ambergris bourbon of his, you swore you could see the next ten years of your life. You swore you would ever be domesticated– at least not by any frat guy you met at a party. You hoped you were never domesticated. You hoped you never learned the subtlety of wifelyhood of motherhood. You never wanted to be reduced to that. But Eddie wasn’t in college, and Eddie could reduce you to that with one soft glance. 

“ –What about him?” You asked, averting your eyes from his. You would not let him derail your life again. Not tonight, at least. 

“Who?” He asked, genuine confusion registering across his once-soft features. 

“The guy buried there.” You specified. The headstone read a barely decipherable name, followed by 1902. 

“Was he a wise-ass?”

“No, stupid, how did he die? What kind of life did he live?” You said, bringing up your hand to deliver a soft slap to his chest. He wished you would do it again. 

“Tuberculosis.” You stated, bluntly, looking back down towards you with a smile. 

“Not everyone in 1902 died of tuberculosis.” You rolled your eyes. 

“Yeah, but a lot of them did.”

You figured he was right, your microbiology prerequisite failing to regurgitate within your brain. A silence settled over the back of the van, but it was comfortable. You allowed yourself the comfort of leaning your head against his chest, and rested his against your own. You tried to hear his heart from here, wondered if he had one at all. Surely he didn’t, if he could break your heart and put it back together all over again. Part of you hoped he did, and an even bigger part of you hoped that you had a place in it somewhere. You wouldn’t allow yourself to dwell on that fact for long. 

“Hey, Eddie?” You asked, barely above a whisper. Yet, breaking the silence felt like breaking glass. Had you been talking too much?

“Yeah?” He asked, in an equally quiet tone. You wonder if he felt it, too. 

“Why here?” You asked, without needing to elaborate further. 

He thinks about it, silent for a second, and then breaks the glass again. 

“I feel more like a ghost than anything– makes me feel less alone.” He says, finally. He refuses to let his eyes meet yours. It made sense. 

Some of the girls you went to school with still talked about it. Still talked about their friend, Chrissy. You understood that he had been a key suspect in a high-profile murder case. 

Well, as high-profile as Hawkins, Indiana, population: 2000, could get. 

They had found their suspect— apparent suicide. It happened all of the time. Kids try drugs, and drugs end badly. You had seen it before, and you’d see it again. It wasn’t Eddie, nor was it his Uncle– the man with the kind eyes and the gruff exterior that sometimes waved at you from outside Eddie’s van. You tried not to wonder if he thought you were a skank. You should introduce yourself, sometime.

A lot of people forgot about it after the Earthquake, their own lives crumbling enough to where they didn’t have to speculate the downfall of someone else. 

It made sense why he would think that. The same as the ghost that inhabited the loft above The Hideout where he played. 

It must have been exhausting having someone vilify and formulate your existence all the time.  

You decided not to pry. Instead, you read the headstones in front of you, children, the elderly. You focused on one elongated headstone fixated into the ground in front of you. William and Helen Lester. Born in 1910 and 1912, respectively. Died the same year as each other, 

“What about them?” You asked him.

“They were madly in love, they reserved their plots together before they died so when one joined the other they could take comfort in knowing that they would stay together.” He answered, without hesitation. You wondered if he knew them personally. 

“Do you believe that they did?” You asked, instead. 

“Stay together?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess that depends on what they believed.” He shrugged, rubbing his hand up and down your shoulder a little bit. 

“Well, what do you believe?” 

He lets out a long sigh, more joking then not.

“Well, way back when my uncle first got custody of me, he thought it would be a good idea to start taking me to church. Save me before it was too late… or whatever.” He raked his hands through his hair, sitting up a little to look at you before continuing, 

“ -Wayne wasn’t much of a church guy, either, but the nice lady that lived next door to us was, so we started going to church with her. They told us that if we did everything we were supposed to do… tried to live by the book, and that we found our person, that it would be an eternal binding after marriage, or something like that.”

“Do you really believe that?” You questioned. 

“If there’s anything from my churchgoing days that I hoped would be real, I hope it’s that.” He sighed, pulling his arm off of you to lean back . 

“Why?”

“I don’t think I could ever stand to be alone like that again.” He shrugged, and you knew you had struck a nerve. 

“Well, what about us?” You questioned. 

“What about it?” 

“Do you think we’ll stay together?”

“We’re not really even together.” 

It was then that you realized that maybe he did have a heart, but you didn’t have a home within it. There was one thing for certain, however, and that was that he had made himself a home in yours like a fungus. It was then that the introductory biology courses you could never remember remained heavy on your brain. 

Mycelium

Mycelium are incredibly tiny threads of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or bore into tree roots. Taken together, mycelium composes what's called a “mycorrhizal network,” which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals—

Eddie was a fungus in dormancy. He had a mycelial network, and its threads had wrapped and wound their ways through the finest intimacies of your life. Their hairline structure filled their place between any gaps you weren’t careful enough to seal. Even when he wasn’t in your life, he was there. 

You can’t be heartbroken over him if you never had him. 

You know he is talking. You know he continued with a backstory in some form or another. Your guess would be something about spending every waking moment alone after the incident. How no one’s mothers who were kind enough to give him the benefit of the doubt in the first place would no longer let their children— his friends, around him. Something about how he wouldn’t blame them. 

“Hey, are you okay? You went all silent on me there.” He finally asked, tugging on a strand of your hair, playfully. You felt like crying, but you wouldn’t. Not until he was gone. 

“Yeah, just tired I guess.”

Tired of getting attached, tired of derailing your entire life for him. 

“Oh. I guess I should probably get you home, then.” He said, beginning to slide out of the van. 

You were thankful he didn’t pry, but a part of you wished that he would. You had him for weeks, it was commitment-adjacent at the very least. It felt like you had him tonight, and it felt like you had him in all of your spare time. It also felt like you had him in class, doodling his funny little devil horns all over your notes. It was the subtlety of this heartbreak that was the worst– or maybe the fact that it wasn’t really heartbreak in the first place. 

You still let him sleep in your bed. 

+

Robin is a textbook lesbian, which also makes her the best wingman on the face of planet earth. She assessed the situation over a pre-roll, as someone who was both a woman and someone who pleasured women. 

Steve isn’t a frat boy, but his relentless good looks and halfway dumb demeanor are wasted on that fact. He assessed the situation as such. 

Eddie swore they both only hung out with him for the pot. 

It had been weeks since your last call, in which you had mentioned something about a final or something before the line went dead. Maybe you were actually dead. Killed in some freak accident that the news didn’t even know how to cover so they just… didn’t. Eddie’s dignity thought it would be preferable if you were. 

“ — Boys are stupid. Hence why I date women.” Robin stated bluntly from Steve’s bedroom floor, between clumsy, fumbling lighter flicks. 

Eddie rolled his eyes, did he have to do everything? He plucked the lighter from her hands, lighting the pre-roll in one swift motion before looking back at her. 

“Some of us aren’t as lucky.” Eddie said, throwing his body back against the side of Steve’s bed, causing Robin to bounce alongside him. 

“To be of the homosexual disposition?” Robin questioned, turning to face him. 

“To understand women.”

“Again, you don’t need to understand them, You’re just stupid.” She waved her hand, dismissively. 

“God, I know I’m stupid, please just help me.” He said to her, dragging his hands down his face with a vigor. 

“Okay, run the cemetery scenario by me again. Word. For. Word.” She said back, joint tucked between her pointer finger and thumb, elbow rested atop the comforter. 

“Okay—”

Eddie can remember everything about that night. He remembered what you were wearing. He remembered seeing the smattering of new freckles across your shoulder as it peeked out from under your summer sweater– a reminder that the heat of summer was quickly settling over you. He remembered the rhythm that the rubber toe of your sneaker tapped out as he strummed against his guitar. He remembered how you knew Gutherie and batted your eyes at him in that pretty— so fucking pretty– way and how you batted your lashes at him when you asked too many questions that he was suddenly inclined to answer. 

Eddie remembered what he said. 

“And then I said, ‘well, we aren’t really even together-”

“There!” Robin shouted finally, hands splayed out, smoke continuing to roll from between her fingers, 

“What?!” Eddie jumped, running his hands from the crown of his head and down his t-shirt, in search of whatever bug Robin had screamed at him about. 

“That’s where you fucked up!” She clarified. 

“ — really fucked up.” Steve chimed in from his desk chair, sunglasses slipping low on his nose despite the approaching twilight, using the toe of his sneaker as traction in order to spin himself in half-circles from his corner. 

“How?” Eddie asked, raking his fingers through his hair and giving his roots a soft tug. 

“You totally took everything you had with her and threw it right in the dumpster.” Robin continued, fully ignoring him. 

“ — and lit it on fire!” Steve chimed over his shoulder, chair spun backwards towards the wall. 

“Shut up, Steve.”

“Just saying…”

“Anyways, you implied that you didn’t want a relationship with her.” Robin said, finally softening a bit. 

“No, I wanted her to say something like, ‘Well, then can we be?’”  He explained back to her, almost on the verge of tears. 

“That’s the problem, dingus.” She rolled her eyes, delivering a soft smack to the side of his head. 

“Ugh,” Eddie muffled out loudly from behind his palms. 

To him, you were pretty, and smart, and entirely too good for him. You were right for ghosting him, he would never blame you for that. You had all the reason in the world to hate him and you still didn’t— until he gave you one. 

 To you, he was just a boy– one who harbored too much heartbreak that makes him meaner than he anticipates. Eddie wasn’t mean by nature, but right now, he sure felt like it.

He pulls his temples back with the heels of his hands, “She’s just so smart and she has to think I’m the dumbest human being on planet Earth.”

“You are the dumbest human being on planet Earth.” She snuffed out the roach into the ashtray, twirling around for slightly too long. 

“Gee, thanks.”

“But not for that reason.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, turning to face Eddie, “You’re stupid because you expected her to read your mind. You had the upper hand. She was prompting the love confession from you and you probably shattered her heart into a million tiny pieces.”

“Can I even fix this?”

“I’m a wingman, not a miracle worker, dude.”

“Steve? Anything to chime in?”

“You fucked up.” 

“No shit.” 

+

Eddie isn’t in college, instead he plays guitar. 

In the midst of his own suffering, he still has to perform. He isn’t one to pass up the money or the attention— especially since they’re crowds now exceeded into the double digits. They had graduated from the Tuesday-night noisemakers, to the Friday-night headliner, a few people even making their way over to bar-crawl from the next town over. 

Eddie leaned his weight on the speaker, tuning and strumming in a half-assed, absent-minded routine. There was a decent group tonight, people grouped standing in the back once the tables and bartop had been promptly filled. 

Jeff approached him, bass slung heavy over him, “Don’t look now, but I think you might know someone here.” He peered at you over his shoulder. 

Eddie looks anyway, met with your eyes. 

You looked pretty tonight. You looked pretty always. 

You had your toes propped against the bottom rung of the barstool, knees pulled tight together, and a drink in hand. He didn’t recognize the people you were with, but he didn’t know very many people anyway. Not like you did. You were likable, and he liked you a lot. 

He didn’t know what he was expecting you to look like after a month, but he was stupid thinking you’d look dramatically different. You were still soft— still glowed even in this not-particularly-flattering light. You looked happy and he hated it. He hated that you could smile at a time like this. It was selfish, he knew it. He wanted you to be a wreck over him. He wanted the comfort in knowing that you were the same mess that he was in over you. 

Jeff gives him a nudge to say something into the mic once they got the go-ahead to play. He tells Jeff he can do it tonight. The tether that binds you together is made of water— the softest vibration would break the surface tension and it would splash on to the concrete. He wanted to watch you be pretty for just a few more seconds, even if it meant giving up his ego for tonight. He wanted to remain unseen on stage, but the pinch harmonic of his opening riff sent your head snapping towards him. 

Your look made him want to crawl beneath the floorboards. 

Your acquaintance, a girl that was a friend-of-a-roommate who had invited you out, placed a hand on your shoulder, warm and too-friendly,  “This band is really good!”

“I know!” You shouted over the music, too warm already. Maybe it was the bottom-shelf peach schnapps. It was most likely the bottom-shelf peach schnapps. 

“Oh, you’ve seen them before?” She asked, pulling her chair up closer to yours. 

“Something like that!” You had explained, pulling the strap of your purse from your neck where it dug in too harshly. 

You felt underdressed for the occasion. Despite definitely having people to impress, you didn’t feel the need. But now, with Eddie’s eyes that you tried desperately to avert yourself from, you’d felt your skin in a way that you never had before. Maybe you were drunk. 

You were most definitely drunk, enough so that it was teetering off the edge of pleasant and dipping into the waters of uncomfortable. The music was too loud and there were too many people and your purse strap kept digging into the crevice of your neck in a way that was both painful and overstimulating. 

You couldn’t remember how many songs Eddie’s band had played– fuck— you couldn’t remember what they were called. Had been playing for a while, enough for the lines between songs started to blur and it felt like forty-five minutes of continuous time signature. You couldn’t decipher a lot between the hum of the nearly-blown speaker anyways. 

Eddie’s eyes met yours, shiny beneath the bar stage lights. He looked angry. You couldn’t tell if it was because of the genre of his song or because of you. He isn’t insatiable or anything, and he had hoped to God that you were still paying attention. By the look on your face and the way you craned your neck to look at the girl next to you, you hadn’t been for a while now. Your nonchalance had poured the gasoline, your smile lit him ablaze. 

The next line of the song was about you, an ode to the women he’d loved before– which weren’t many– conveniently placed as the last song of the setlist. He wrote it with the fantasy that you would stroll through the doors and hear it, but now that you were here, he didn’t know if he had the heart to be mean to you. He didn’t want to be mean to you. It was vaguely written enough so that the other girls that looked up towards him would think it was about them, a heartbreak anthem, a sorry anthem. An ode to the cemetery and the ghost that he had become without you. 

You understood it, though you chose not to act like you had. You didn’t think you had been in his life for long enough to warrant a song– at least one with more than three cords and fifteen seconds of play-time. Why would he? You were never even together. Your ears rang with the remnants of sound, yet you watched your party— the greek bar-crawlers, get ready to head to the next location down the block. You couldn’t even remember what bar it was. 

The girl next to you– fuck— you couldn’t remember her name either, was leveling with your tipsiness. Maybe she hadn’t teetered over the edge of drunk like you had. You let her take your hand anyways, pushing through the double doors in your party of eight. 

The familiarity of the van backed in front of the entrance haunted you, like it had brought a ghost back with it from the cemetery. Maybe Eddie was the ghost. Maybe he was haunting you. Maybe you were haunting yourself. 

The party discussed some form of game plan. You thought it was stupid, hockey practice was over. Yet they were drunk, and they were rowdy, and they were a spectacle. Suddenly and all at once, unfamiliar lips were on yours, violent and sloppy. You tasted cherry, sticky against your own peppermint chapstick. Soft feminine hands gripped your jaw, pretty tuberose and jasmine on the girl from earlier filled your nostrils in a way that was not quite suffocating, but all encapsulating. It was an Estee Lauder Eau de Parfum. You recognized it from the yellow bottle you had gotten for your fifteenth birthday. 

Kissing a woman was a different ballpark, kissing a woman drunk was an entirely different sport. She was softer, less volatile. She had a languid softness to her waist where men were typically more solid. Her hands were more graceful. You relinquished it, both in the spectacle of the others in the group and the fact that she was what Eddie wasn’t.

From behind the van, Eddie watched you. The floral passion in which you sloppily tangled your manicured hand into the blonde mass of the girl in front of you. Isn’t it unfair? He desperately wished it was him. Wanted to be the reason for the surrounding wolf calls. Eddie wasn’t particularly introspective, but he was dying to be her. A notch in your bedpost, a one night stand, a lover. 

Eddie wanted to be her. 

+

Eddie isn’t in college, and it's mostly because he’s stupid. 

Robin let him know it, too. 

There is an afterparty, or, at least, the loose adjacent to one. The band, some friends of the band, and communal alcohol strung loosely across the island at Gareth and Jeff’s condo. Donated pot courtesy of a combined effort of Rick and Eddie. He didn’t feel like partying, but he did feel like getting really, really drunk. Lecture be damned. 

MD 20/20 Red Grape Fortified Wine tasted a little like alcohol and a lot like feeling sorry for himself. 

The grave was already dug, all he had to do was sit in it and wait for someone to backfill. 

Robin stood, arms braced against the island across from Eddie. The fluorescents in Gareth’s unrenovated kitchen burned his eyes, “I can’t help you if you don’t want it.”

“I don’t want it,” He specified, pulling a long drink from the glass bottle, “ –but I have a feeling I’m gonna get it anyways.” 

“I thought you wanted her back, dude.” The fluorescent lights casted a downwards glow across her forehead. Eddie thought it gave her a Kubrick stare. 

“I don’t know what I want, I thought I did but then I got up there and I sang about her and she didn’t even care.”

In one swift motion, she hopped onto the counter, crossing her legs beneath her, “Well, obviously you care.” 

“I don’t care.” 

“If you don’t care about her then why do you lose your shit every time you see her?”

“Because, Robin, who the fuck else is gonna love me after all of the shit we’ve been though?” He slammed the bottle down on the table. It was enough to rattle the cabinets beneath it, “She was the one good thing that’s happened to me in a long fucking time and I couldn’t even let myself be just content with that.” 

He’s angry, suddenly. With himself, with the universe. The alcohol didn’t help. The feigning headache was more annoying than it was painful. Robin wanted to roll her eyes, to call him stupid and dramatic– but she figured he knew it already. It’s not like he wasn’t warranted in his anger, he was, but she wondered why he had been so pent-up lately. Maybe it’s because there was no Eddie way for Eddie to deal with this. After a bleating silence, she spoke:

“Have you even talked to her yet?” She asked.

“No, and I’m not planning on it.” 

“Why not?”

“Because, dude,” Eddie played himself out across the tile island, trying to ignore the way his t-shirt just mopped up the sticky sweet liquid on the counter, “ – you know why.”

Robin did know why. 

“And?” She asked. 

“They were all over each other, like, like…” He was getting frustrated now, unable to string words together in a cohesive sentence. 

Robin finished for him, “Like you were?”

“Yeah. Like she didn’t even care.” He leaned his head down on his folded arms, 

“Maybe she wanted you to think that.” Robin asked him. She thought she sounded more like his mother than a lesbian wingman. This is what he needed. “Maybe she wanted you to chase her.”

“I don’t understand why.” He groaned, “She’s unpredictable. And pretty. And smart. And fun. And everyone likes her. Do you know how many friends she has? How many people like her?”

“Because maybe you’re not as bad as you think you are.”

And he isn’t. Eddie isn’t inherently bad– albeit a little bit dumb. Maybe that just came with age, or the nature of him. Actually, behind the external composite disposition and his defensive nature, Eddie was the opposite of bad.

That first ‘surprise me’ reverberated in his mind like a crescendo. He was feeling brave that night. It was all ego, and most likely a touch of golden whiskey courage. He could still taste it on the back of his tongue when his mouth met yours in a clumsy, quick, spur-of-the-moment kiss. He didn’t have time to be insecure about it, the afterthoughts of gum or mints being pulled from his mind by your fingers as they combed through the soft curls at the nape of his neck. As he moved down to press pillowy-soft kisses in the soft of your throat, he took in your scent– like the citrus groves just outside of town in the spring, when the little white flowers covered the expanse of the rich green rows. 

It was fast and sweet, his hands pushing your summer cotton t-shirt up your waist with warm, rough hands– encasing the ribs where they curl to meet with your spine in a vice. You were eager, not that you were easy– you almost didn’t care if he thought of you that way– in the way you slid his vest off of him. He threw his arms back quickly, shaking it loose from his wrists as he came back up to meet you. The chain of his bracelet was cold against the plush of your stomach as he dragged it down towards the button of your denim shorts. 

“We don’t have to do this now,” He separated from you in hesitation, “I can take us back to my place, use my be—”

“No, ‘need you now.” You insisted, your kiss more pressing than before. You clung to him fervently. 

You aren’t confined to your softness. You are vocal, grip on his shoulders and his heart like a vice. You were soft in the right places though, in your waist and beneath his hands coming undone, soft in the way you spoke to him behind closed van doors. Pillows over sharp corners, a guard to balance your too-loud laugh or the frequency in which you found yourself too drunk. 

You were stone-cold sober that night, and he thanked whoever was up there looking out for him that you were. You wouldn’t have been here, otherwise. 

You were a painting, and not one of those stupid ones that he had to talk about in history class. Like a real, in-your-face, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Not quite like a centerfold, better than anything he’d counted pennies for at the drugstore, ethereal beyond words. Soft for him and only him, bumps and curves and dips and folds in places you didn’t see in those. Real, right in front of him. His for the taking. 

The night had turned already to that imperceptible pivot where midnight turned to early morning hours. This moment has come and gone, yet you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which is all gratuitous damage and the play of unraveled nerve endings. 

He plunged his middle and marriage fingers within you with a vapid expanse for pleasure, reaching in deep and curling upwards, gathering slick between fingers and back out again. You could feel every ridge within yourself, your softness pulling him back in once he had pulled out again. 

You allow him, no, encourage him to line himself up within you, and you are warm. Warmer than anything he has ever felt in his life. Tight like a hug. The flavor is vaguely tribal– pendulous guitar-pick necklaces and ritualistic moans of endearance. A gathering drum of heartbeats and a bonfire lit within your core. 

His chest is hard above you, expanding with deep breath and soft cries– the softest cries you had ever heard from a man in your existence. There is a small patch of hair in the center, that follows down his navel in a thin line. You tried to hold it together, but you loved it so much. You could love him, not like the novelty it was right now. Like, really love him. 

If he could tell you he loved you without scaring you away, he would have. Now, he wished he just did. 

Clumsily, almost enough for you to tell he was still new to this, whether the van or women in general, he thrust into you, chasing his own rhythm while still finding your own high. His wrists radiate heat where they brace him on either side of your head, caging you between them. 

“Fuck– I– I,” he begins, looking for his thoughts.

You look up at him through low, sultry eyes. Your own release nearing in moments. “Together.” was what you could manage. 

He cringed looking back, he probably looked like such a virgin. He had been so previously wound with the Pam Anderson wanna-be and the post-show adrenaline that his release was feigning. He took comfort in knowing that you would later find out that he is not that inexperienced. 

It was the after that he remembered. How your little manicured finger traced over the raised ink of the tattoo, now disfigured by the purple fibers of scarring. 

“They’re from the accident.” He explained to you, knowing you were wondering. Everyone wondered. You had been too afraid to ask. 

“The earthquake?” You specified, looking up at him. 

You watched the way his stomach flexed as he pushed himself up, taking your body with him, “Yeah, sorry they’re not pretty.” He sighed, holding out his arms to look at the ones there. 

“You are pretty.” You reiterated, and he chuckled, pressing a kiss to your lips. 

“You’re prettier.” 

“You wanna see mine?” 

“Your what?”

“Scars.” 

You were going to show him anyway. 

That patch where the hair grew wonky across your eyebrow from where you had fallen as a child. You cracked your eye socket and they had to reconstruct the tendons in your eyelid. 27 stitches including the internal ones. He laughed at how you claimed it like a trophy. 

The small white line on the side of your knee you got trying to pet a feral cat. You wanted to be it’s friend so bad and it didn’t return the sentiment. 

The blown out tattoo on your ankle, done by your friend who worked at the cafe with you. It was the second one she had ever done on another living person. Your mom had flipped when you came home from college that first weekend with it. If you weren’t too old to ground, she would have done it. 

Your stretch marks, in which you didn’t dwell too much on. They started happening the summer you turned thirteen and you remembered the palsy of lotions and topical ointments your mom made you smear over the expanse of your body in order to reverse them when you we’re too young to recognize that there were nothing wrong with them. The scars they left on your psyche. 

The ones on your hands and knuckles, burns from your barista days. He remembered your giggle as he pressed soft kisses to every burn scar. 

Eddie was not bad. 

+

Eddie isn’t in college, but, for you, he’d at least brave the college housing. 

This was also not Robin’s plan, instead devised by Steve while he was crossed— and at his most authentic self. Despite her best efforts, they persisted. You roomed in a smaller house with several other girls in Indianapolis— a three hour drive as the crow flies. All in their girlish forms, all soft skin and little shorts and effortless beauty. Sometimes you wondered if you looked the same way- or if they even knew what they looked like. 

All of whom were gathered out the window, ogling at a relic unknown to you. 

A familiar face, the hometown heartbreaker, Steve Harrington himself stood in your freshly mowed grass, boombox held over his head like an idiot. Slovenly waving at the girls through the window. You sighed, palming your face tiredly. You knew who he would have in tow. He is a shadow of either Eddie’s best self of his worst self, you couldn’t tell which quite yet. You are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of his own pleasure, haphazardly balancing the expensive boombox blasting Head Over Heels on a loud, obnoxious loop. You wouldn’t have been more annoyed if Roland Orzabal was here playing the song himself. Robin stood at the entrance of the small white picket fence, face in hands. 

When you meet with the man that has not quite et. cetere’d you, you are slumming the door open, visiting your own 7:00 A.M Lower East Side with your soul on a lark. He is stepping nimbly around gardenia pots and little happy concrete garden gnomes as if they will bite his ankles if he gets too close– if only you’d trained them sooner. More un-nimbly, he trips up the stairs, and you’ve caught him red handed. He stands there wide-eyed and apologetic, a dog kicked. You lean against the frame, nonchalant, unimpressed, arms crossed. 

“Ew. You like Tears for Fears?” You speak before he can. He seems taken aback. 

“I should have played The Cure.” He speaks truthfully, rubbing the skin on the back of his neck where an itch did not occur. 

“That was my second choice!” Steve called from the one-man show happening on your lawn. You feared if it went on for longer, it would turn to a strip-club.

“Shut up, Steve.” Eddie barked towards him. 

The tension feels like being at the bottom of a swimming pool. Eddie’s drowning in the deep end but the bowl’s empty. He drained it himself. He doesn’t know quite what to say to you. He didn’t think it would get this far. 

“Come on, please just hear me out–” He starts, yet it’s overused. You decided then to drown him in the pool yourself. The door closes in his face. 

Almost immediately, the knocking persists. Your roommates watch from beside the door, half still fixated on Steve, the others watching you ascend the stairs towards your bedroom. You choked down your embarrassment, suffocated in it. You needed to be alone. 

“Ladies.” Steve nods from the front lawn, watching his friend scale the old lattice attached to the stucco on the front of your house. 

“Ladies.” Robin parrots, coming to watch with a hand shielding her eyes from the sun. 

There is a commotion down the stairs, a door opening and footsteps quick. You don’t get the chance to look because there is a body, an apparition of scarecrow limbs and embarrassment parallel with your second-story window. You might be mad, but you definitely aren’t heartless. 

This isn’t what he expected your room to look like. In his wet dreams, he pictured more pink. More coquette lace abundance and stuffed animals. Save for the raggedy menstrual bean-bag bear, it’s relatively neutral. In hindsight, every girl’s room is pink coquette in a wet dream. This felt more like you, the twinkle lights, stacks of old books holding plants, moroccan-patterned pillows lining the daybed. Plush, white bedding. It’s natural, like you. 

Your glare is like a mother’s reproach. He doesn’t know how to react. He didn’t have a mother. Only Wayne and only teachers, the latter of which he had a certain amount of push before they let him do whatever he wanted. You, he could not push further. 

“Please don’t kick me out,” He begs, hands together like a prayer. It’s cheesy, you avoid laughing. 

“I’m waiting.” You say. It’s rude. You sound like a bitch. He thinks you’re warranted. You try not to think of the ears against your bedroom door. 

“I love you.” He said it like a plea instead of a declaration. It was the first and only thing that came to his mind. 

Of course he did.

You rolled your eyes at him, folding your arms and jutting your hip, “You don’t love me.” You corrected, “You just think you do now that you’re lonely.” 

He takes a few more pacing steps towards you, frantic and panicking “Jesus Christ– Yes, I do. I could’ve slipped and broke my neck trying to climb up here for you.”

“Well, I didn’t tell you to climb up here,” You placed your hand over your chest, then turned your finger towards him, “You don’t love me, you love this version of me that thought Tears for Fears would work.”

He stared at you with wide eyes, pleading and sad. 

“ —For once in your life think, idiot. What song would I have really liked?” 

“I– I don’t know.” He said. It came out like a whimper. He was more broken now, softer, yet still desperate. 

“Exactly. You don’t love me.”

“You know what? You’re right.” He stood, closing the gap between your bodies in a few strides. He wanted to touch you, but was too afraid to ask, “I don’t love you.“ 

“I hate all of your stupid questions.” He started, and you didn’t speak, “I hate how all of my clientele comes from you now. I hate that I only get you when you’re home for the weekend. I hate that stupid little scar on your eyebrow. I hate the way your hair gets in your mouth when you laugh. I hate that dumb little scar on your forehead. I hate that you’re so goddamn perfect for me and I hate myself for letting you walk away like that.” He finished, breath heaving. 

You felt the tears pull at the corners of your eyes, but you didn’t warrant them to spill. 

“I hate that you’re a grown man with fucking bangs.” You said, unable to finish. You felt stupid, two stupid little tears slipping from your eyes and streaking down your face.

He opened his arms to you, prompting, and you took it. Part of it so he couldn’t see you crying, the second part of you desperately needing to feel him. 

“I’m so mean.” You wailed into his chest. You felt the rumble of the laugh he couldn’t suppress. 

“I know, so mean.” He said, not as an insult or an agreement, but in endearment. He pressed a sympathy kiss to your crown. His hand was warm as it pulled up the expanse of your back. 

“I’m sorry.” You pulled away, wiping your face furiously with the heels of your palms. 

“No- no. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve to get caught up in my hot and cold like that.”

Your feverance prevails, “I should have asked what happened.”

“I should have asked you out.” He counteracts, pulling back to smooth down the wiry hairs at your crown, his hand heavy against your skull. 

“Can you do it now?” You plead, and he laughs. 

“Will you stop crying?”

“Yeah.” 

He pulls away from you for a second, you want to whine at the loss of contact. He crouches down on one knee, keeping your hands squeezed tightly in his calloused palms. 

“Then will you do me the tremendous honor of being my girl?” He runs his hand up the back of yours, trying to feel for an electric pulse of an answer. The seconds that you take nearly kill him. 

You stare down at him, eyes still red and puffy, but wide, “And not just like at parties?” 

“No, like the full weekday thing.” His smile is warm. You take great comfort in it. 

“Yeah.”

You think you look stupid, crying in your bedroom while he holds you like this. But he burns this memory in his mind. Even when you’re crying, you’re still the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. 

[my-pink-4ddiction]

Made sure I stayed under my calories out yesterday just to b/p on breakfast this morning now I got to workout on a hangover/comedown fml

[jaaklops]

Playlist 1: "I'll Be God"

Personal Jesus - Depeche Mode

Metaphor - The Crane Wives

Dark Red - Steve Lacy

Copy Cat - Billie Ellish

God Complex - VIOLENT VIRA (Or any of their songs in general)

Emperor's New Clothes - Panic! At The Disco

Copycat - Circus P

Everybody Loves Me - OneRepublic

Rat - Penelope Scott

Candle Queen - Ghost and Pals

Policy of Truth - Depeche Mode

Things I Deserve - Ghost and Pals

End-World Normopathy - Ghost and Pals

SCAPEGO∞T - Ghost and Pals

Reckless Battery Burns - Ghost and Palls

The Main Character - Will Wood

Who Is She? I Monster

New Discover - The Crane Wives

HEAVEN SAYS. - chart

Wrecking Ball - Mother Mother

Hayloft II - Mother Mother

ooh sounds tasty. some for you in return:

juice (slothrust)

sweet jane (cowboy junkies)

cool (soccer mommy)

cutie (coin)

the zoo (scorpions)

punch22 (carwash)

true blue (boygenius)

cubicle (slothrust)

new scream (turnover)

diazepam (turnover)

dizzy on the comedown (turnover)

the bus (laundry day)

smiley (between friends)

don’t dream it’s over (crowded house)

under my skin (jukebox the ghost)

and before this gets too long:

andromeda (weyes blood)

(also go listen to all of phoebe bridgers lucy dacus and boygenius’s discographies ok bye)

[acrosstobear]

ohhhhhhhhhhhh we’re in the comedown so hard rn h e l p

[trashydemigodmess]

gulf shores, alabama, 2017

Let it come down on me, Let me see all the things that I was supposed to see. Light up a darkness I was never meant to climb out of,  Like a bursting sunrise from the deepest sleep. — comedown, luke hemmings

Grace had used some of her Disney money to buy her parents their dream beach house. 

“Grace LeeAnn Wagner, you better not have just left your cup on the table and walked away like that.”

But, international fame or not, she was still a daughter first. 

Grace had already made it up a few stairs. She dropped her head with a sigh before retreating back to the dining room and grabbing her coffee. “Shh, Mom,” She moved to the kitchen and put the mug in the dishwasher, “You’re so loud, he’s still asleep.”

“I’m sure he’s sleepin’ like a rock.” The woman shook her head, “Having your own room and a big bed after sleeping in a cabin for years will knock you right out.” 

“And if everything you’ve told us is true, he deserves it.” Her dad was still sitting at the table, sipping his coffee as he scrolled through the news on his phone. “He can sleep until three in the afternoon for all I care.”

The comforter on Dex’s bed was fluffy and soft as he rolled over, messily pushing his glasses onto his face. It was unsettling. There was no blaring horn to jolt him awake, no barracks full of people and constant noise. Just the morning ocean waves crashing onto the beach outside and the smell of fresh bacon wafting through his open door. He touched his face. The tension in his jaw was noticeably absent, his mind weirdly quiet. 

“Oh, good, I thought I heard your alarm go off.” Grace smiled as her head appeared in the doorway. She strolled in and flopped across the bed, still in her animal print matching pajamas and hair in braids. Her eyes washed over him in cautious analysis. The moment Dex told her he’d had enough of Camp Jupiter and was going to go to college, she’d snatched him up. Called it a summer vacation. She’d made sure he hadn’t bought a return flight yet. 

Dex stretched his arms over his head as he yawned, and she once again noticed just how much he’d grown. Describing her best friend as “beefy” felt wrong. But, here he was: beefy and strong with arms that’d make anyone swoon from training and fighting every single day. But, his energy when she’d picked him up at the airport was tight and unsettled, just as erratic as when he’d fallen apart two years prior. Dex’s eyes took in every inch of a room the moment they stepped in it, anticipating anything, like stepping outside of California was a risk. 

But already, after one night, she could see bits of calm breaking through the surface. The way he lazily smiled and rubbed his eyes, jostling the glasses on his face, grumbling, “I forgot you’re so goddamn chipper the moment you wake up.”

She always loved his glasses. There was Dex the popstar, then this Dex. The nerdy boy she met when they were twelve. Who liked music, and history, and staying up until 4am to read a book, who wrote silly little poems and songs to make her laugh when work days got too long. She hadn’t seen this Dex in a long, long time. And it made her heart swell up, watching him rub the sleep out of his eyes, but scoot over in the bed so she could crawl up beside him. 

Grace laughed as she settled beside him, “Mom is making biscuits and gravy.” She glanced back outside the door, “Take your time though. Seriously. I think we’ll just sit on the beach today and chill?” 

He swallowed, like something had lodged in his throat and nodded, voice soft, “That sounds perfect.” 

She kissed the top of his head, like she knew exactly what he wanted to say, and hopped off the bed.

—————

“So, you really met at the other camp?” Dex asked, doing his best to not absolutely shove his face full of biscuit while he spoke.

It was a relief, in a way. Dex had spent so much time with her family, as if he were a brother or cousin and not just a friend. Omitting just the right details from every story of her parents’ life had been a pain. But now it was different. Now—all along, really—Dex had been sucked into that circle as well, saw all of the same things she could. How bizarre that the number of Demigods in her life had jumped from two to three.

Grace’s Mom nodded. She had a soft smile and Grace’s same eyes. A Teacher. And like Grace, similarly always prepared. “Capture the Flag.” She smiled over her mug of coffee, “Did you guys have that in California too?”

“Like, the game you play in Gym class?” Dex raised an eyebrow, shaking his head, “I wish. We had Deathball. Which is paintball, but with acid and fire.” He said it so nonchalantly, too busy devouring a piece of bacon to notice the shocked looks on her parents faces, “And literal Gladiator fighting.”

“Well, one of us—” She cleared her throat and glanced over at her husband. Mr. Wagner was a painter, known for his dramatics, prone to forgetting his glasses on his head and staining all of his clothing, “Was ill-prepared for the game. So when I absolutely demolished him and accidentally gave him a concussion, I helped him to the infirmary. And that was that.”

She looked at him with such love in her eyes, like he was her best friend in the entire world. He reached over and brushed her cheek. “And I don’t know what I’d have done without her.”

Grace watched Dex physically hold back a swoon. She was glad to know he was still a romantic sap at heart. Instead he chewed his food methodically, thinking. “They always made it sound like the Greek camp was lazy and unprepared.” He frowned, “Sounds like y’all were just kinder.”

Mrs. Wagner’s smile was sympathetic, “I think you’d enjoy it there much more than whatever they do at Camp Jupiter.”

“It sounds inhumane and worthy of a lawsuit.” Mr. Wagner chimed in.

“I’m just glad you’re done there. And now you get a normal ass life. For once.” Grace quickly flipped the subject, giving her parents a glance, “And you never have to worry about that shit ever again.”

—————

The house was large, three stories, two levels of balconies, jutting up against a private beach in a community of other opulent beach houses. They’d baked on towels in the sun and read, went swimming. Made sandwiches and ate them sitting in the sand. Her dad showed him the best technique for grilling a steak. They played goofy board games, explored the little beach town’s shops and brunch spots. And slowly, piece by piece, day by day, Grace watched the cement walls around Dex chip and fall away, the brightness coming back to his eyes.

It was dark. The only light coming from the moon in the clear, starry sky; Reflecting off of the slow waves lapping at the shore. Finally, he’d cracked under the weight of it all. Dex was curled up on an adirondack chair, knees pulled up to his chest, crying. 

Grace was in a matching chair beside him, leaning over hers to keep a steady hand on his arm. There was something deep and broken in the way the sobs heaved out of him.

“I don’t even—How am I supposed to—” He tried to put together an entire sentence, “It’s like there’s nothing there. I feel so—” His breath caught on the corner of another sob, “Empty.”

“You’ve been in survival mode for years,” Grace shook her head, “You haven’t had the time to feel or process, like, anything. You’re not empty. You just need rest.” 

“How? How am I supposed to rest when my whole life it’s felt like there’s someone stepping on my neck?” He sniffled, “I’m never getting another job. I’m never going to be me.” There was a certain sort of levity in his words. Something Grace knew she wouldn’t understand. “I fucked it all up. I’m just going to be another name on a BuzzFeed list of trainwreck child stars or whatever the fuck.”

“No.” Her voice was strong, definitive, “The system failed you.” It was a stunning realization: even after all this time, Dex still wanted to please everyone. “No one’s relying on you. No one’s watching your every move. You’re free, Dex.”

That brought him pause. Like it was a revelation. He was staring at the ocean, tears still falling down his face, “I feel like I’m going crazy.” The sobs had lessened, his shoulders less tense, “It’s like I look out at the future and it’s just…blank white space. I don’t even know who I am. All I know is who they molded me to be.”

She didn’t know if that meant Hollywood, or Camp Jupiter, or maybe it was a mix of both. “Well, now you have the chance to figure it out.”

“I’m scared.” He finally admitted, softly. Dex turned to her, eyes full of tears, “I miss my Dad.”

She remembered the night he was shipped off to camp too well. Dex had begged her to come over, absolutely freaking out on the phone. His Dad said she could help him pack. There was a lot of screaming (mostly Dex), and tears (mostly Dex, but she did spot his Dad out the window, quietly crying on the patio as she helped Dex throw things into suitcases). The memories of that night still chilled her to the bone. “Have you tried reaching out to him at all?”

He shook his head, “I can’t.” It looked like he was holding back another sob, or a confession. “He tried to come and take me home. Back at the beginning. I think he got worried that I wasn’t answering his calls.”

Grace’s face fell. “Dex…”

“I know.” The held back sob sneaked out as a half sort of hiccup. Dex hugged his knees closer, “Since I wasn’t with him, he couldn’t find his way to Camp Jupiter again. And I told him…” He sucked in a breath, like it hurt, “Whatever hell I was going to endure there would be better than dealing with him.”

Grace realized she had been holding her breath. “And that was it?”

He nodded, wiping the tears from his face. “I worked with my accountant, I officially have all my money. And I’m nineteen, so…” Dex shrugged, voice small, “I’m on my own, I guess.”

Her hand hadn’t left his arm the entire time. Grace squeezed it and shook her head, definitive; A promise,

 “You have me.”

[glassgears]

Post-Stuffing comedown #selfie #gayuk #christmas #merrychristmas #happyholidays #gaywales https://www.instagram.com/p/CmmN9lHsVFh/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 8 - Sands of time.

That title was a joke about Granular Synthesis. It means a little more than that, but we'll get to it after this latest iteration of the-

Granular sound began as a way of thinking. First conceived by Dennis Gabor in 1946, he suggested that sound be interpreted as a collection of microparticles, each containing the sonic information that forms a sound on a macro scale.

Coinciding with tape technology at the time, composer Iannis Xenakis put this into practice, with the 1959 release of Analogique A-B, composed from a speckled string section, which accompanies - or is 'mimicked' by - scatterings of granular samples, "...spliced together" from "...hundreds of tapes" of synthetic tones.

With this, Xenakis made the following proposal: "All sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time."

Over the following decades, incorporation of computer technology into synthesis would further aid the creation of granular synthesis.

Where this form of soundmaking gets especially interesting is with the offshoot of Micromontage, which accomplishes a granular composition through samples.

In fact, when messing with the time-stretch features in Audacity, I accidentally made this sort of granular micromontage back in August! (See 0809_006 - DdddIiiiRrrrEeee from Week 5)

Most inspiring in this field is Motion Control MODELL 5 (1994-1996), a micromontage video work from group Granular Synthesis (confusing, I know) which replaced the 'grain' with a frame of video.

It's astounding.

With a recording of Akemi Takeya providing the source video, MODELL 5 took up four massive back-projection screens, her face incomprehensibly jittering in audiovisual fragments of screams, warbles and neck jerks, at first horrifying, then mesmerizing; as Takeya's movements speed up and slow down, carried by growing drones of sound.

Where things get especially fascinating is how Granular Synthesis (again, the group) planned this all out.

How do you subdivide a video like this? Break it down into small sections and build it back up again?

Most interesting, and perhaps a byproduct of the granular view of sound is how the sonic structure of the piece was mapped out. Instead of a storyboard, or general list of actions, the procedure of MODELL-5 is instead envisioned as a monolithic structure.

I've never seen anything like it before.

Granular Synthesis is alive and well, just last month Roland unveiled their P-6 mini sampler, which contains a (gimmicky) "granular" button which breaks down your sample into reusable micro-fragments.

The comedown from the group exhibition was TOUGH! Picking myself back up from what seemed like the zenith of my sampling work this year left me out of steam... but not out of ideas.

In 2004, I was one (you should feel old). My parents had just moved back to Timaru, and my mum's family back in Brazil were asking about me. In response, my dad recorded a 'day-in-the-life' video on his friend's camcorder, which he then put on DVD in 2011.

For a WHILE now, I've had the idea of sampling this DVD - as it is a time capsule for a life before I could remember; seeing my parents so young (and with hair) is an emotional experience, these people raised who I am today!

As such, it would bring a fundamental self into the action of sampling, to reconnect, reshape and reorganize my formative years through the artmaking of today; to remember not through the brain, but through the sample.

With the disc drive I brought for my earlier project this year, I uploaded the DVD to my PC with utmost care, making sure to backup the files, just in case.

From there, I played it! Loading the video file opens up a DVD menu.

…And voila! Me as a toddler, hobbling like a drunk man and speaking like one, too. With this being a day-in-the-life of a one year-old, there are points in the video where I am being breastfed, or am naked. These parts will be removed for every video edit hereafter.

In "22 Short Films About Springfield" - a 1996 episode of The Simpsons - there is a 3-minute skit between Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers, commonly dubbed 'Steamed Hams'.

The namesake - and generally absurdist theme - come from a web of lies that Skinner lands himself in, as he tries to pass off fast food as his own cooking to his suspicious guest.

The endless quotability and short runtime saw this become an internet meme back in 2016, and the fad hasn't died since. Instead, the format involves creating increasingly-contrived variations on the original scene.

At first, this involved rearranging dialogue to form a new set of events. Then people began reanimating scenes, and generally taking the original formula to a point of abstraction that it became one big inside joke.

And most recently, programmer Arden Butterfield coded an ENTIRELY NEW PIECE OF AUDIO-EDITING SOFTWARE just for creating 'Steamed Hams' edits:

Put into action, the result is as ridiculous as it is granular. You can find various examples of 'STAMMER' on YouTube, but this is my favorite:

With the following description taken from the GitHub (a code-sharing site), the program is defined - and works in a similar manner to SampleBrain.

Butterfield also discusses how the project came about, and serves as a better description of the inner workings of this thing than I could ever muster.

To paraphrase the cunning Principal Skinner himself - But what if I were to acquire this meme editing tool and apply it to my own sampling? Ohoho, delightfully devilish, Índio.

Using STAMMER, and much like the

Of course, this thing is not user friendly. Or at least, not to a person of my expertise. There were instructions, sure. But I was still going to have to bite the bullet and dip my toes into what I swore off years ago... coding.

Following a talk with lecturer Martin, I was put on to Jason Salavon's works, straight out of the delightfully mushy era that was late 2010's AI imagery.

And much akin to the algorithmically-resampled processes of STAMMER and SampleBrain, Salavon's experiments have involved using his own AI to transform one pop media into another, as seen in the video below, where he turns Seinfeld into Family Guy, Star Wars and The Simpsons.

I went home this week, and talked to my parents about how my sampling project was coming along. I also introduced them to Steamed Hams.

On Friday, I had a workshop in the Block 6 printing room, all about the joys of risograph printing. It was a nice change of pace.

But the joys were not for long, as I now had coding to do. Even worse, I had no idea what I was doing, let alone why it wasn't working.

Following a desperate online search, I found sweet, sweet salvation, and perhaps an overlooked benefit of the internet age: A tutorial video? For making steamed hams granular synthesis? Why not?

Like some sick parody of Bob Ross, I followed step-by-step like a trained orca, completely illiterate to whatever the hell I was being guided to do.

Which only worried me more when things started going wrong.

So I browsed more forums, frantically looking for coding solutions - but ultimately brute-forcing the whole thing again.

Good gravy. It worked.

The first test video I got was just the source video in reverse - for storage purposes, no video of this has been uploaded. Did I have my audio and video files prepared correctly? Turns out I did, they were just in a different folder.

With a second attempt, my test video was complete, and hopefully I would never have to follow another Python tutorial again.

Here it is, constructed from its reverse self at 25 frames per second: "Me as a baby attempting to eat banana porridge while the space-time-continuum collapses around me."

To have a little more material prepared for the class critique, I also made a variant - using the same clip - but with a noise gate on the audio, which results in long pauses occasionally dotted by fragmented speech.

I had trouble actually getting STAMMER to work with this one. Errors kept popping up, and any online threads on the issue were too jargon-laden for me to understand. Windows PowerShell came in handy, and I was able to load my file straight there. Huzzah!

Upload limits meant that I had to put this one on YouTube: "Me as a baby attempting to eat banana porridge while communicating from a black hole with a poor signal."

CRITIQUE TIME, BABY.

I didn't have time to organize anything fancy for my presentation, so I showed off my two test videos on one of the lab computers.

The group reaction was a mix of humor and terror, as the rapid scatterings of banana porridge-related imagery were as comical as they were uncanny.

Lili compared it to a flashback scene in a horror movie, or of some repressed memory being held back. Kaylee pointed out the familiar hand-me-down experience of early childhood.

"...It reminded me a lot of the [Golden Years] at Te Papa where you [...] would sit down in this theatre in the whole thing was interactive [...] ...very much the same effect going on."

Generally, people wished for the interactive nature of EIBY from a few weeks before. I knew how to accomplish this with audio, but video is a whole new ball park! There were some suggestions for this, perhaps through two-channel VJ mixing or passing magnets over a CRT.

Martin drew connections to Ryan Trecartin's experimental video works. I-Be AREA (2007) in particular is quite a difficult watch, being a series of somehow-connected nonsensical skits, each being remixed into what I can best amount to a fever dream.

[renewingagain]

tuesday 27 august 2024 // 2pm

just went to manchester pride! got soo drunk pretty much 4 days in a row and did a significant amount of drugs lol. it was so fun though. went with james and tom and others tagged along. saw soo many people there and met such lovely new people too. met some cutie queer south asians which was amazing, i didnt know that manchester has such a big queer south asian scene but they were talking about how they have regular get togethers etc, it was so lovely to hear

im feeling a bit of anxiety heading back to brum now but i need to be kinder to myself - it is still ok to rest! its only been about two weeks (if that!) of being unemployed and moving home, i want at least two months before i have to do anything else :D i really need to let my mind and body rest now for a while

i said that manchester pride will be my last big blowout for a while now. i just want to look after my health for a bit and start getting fit again and prioritize my sleep. i ordered huel again so maybe this will help me slim down a bit and i can start running again etc etc. kish also left weights in the room at bibis house so maybe i can even start getting hench :p

FUNNILY enough i happened to bump into benjamin on the sunday of pride and it was heavyyyy. he was absolutely not happy to see me at first lol and he was very hostile in our first encounter and he ended it with saying something like ‘i think its best we dont really talk again’ it was weird and awkward and painful lmaooo so i wished him a happy pride and left

however he then ended up bumping in to me again at churchill later and apologised as he acknowledged he wasnt being very nice. i asked him if we could go outside and have a conversation so we chatted for a bit about us and albeit him being drunk he basically said he fell in love with me when we were dating.. if that really was the case then i can see why he was very very hurt by what had happened with us..

he didnt seem to think i was all that bothered about us ‘breaking up’ for lack of a better term but obviously i was! ive been thinking about him every day even still 🤣 and god i missed his smell.. the convo had to end after about 10 mins cus his friends were going to other clubs but we hugged goodbye and it was an ok ish conversation..

he messaged me the next day with a short stream of consciousness nnd said it was nice to see me and ive basically texted him again just to say sorry for everything etc … i am glad i got to see him again and hope we can find some closure from it

i think i regret us not continuing to speak and not trying to make it work but here we are - ive wrote before that i’ve met people before like lewie alex etc and i met him and i will meet other people! if life reconnects us then it does .. if it doesnt then it is what it is. a cliche but maybe he is the one that got away

im obvs feeling a bit weird anyway probably a slight comedown lol, but this next season and period for me is to just be kind to myself and to reconnect with friends and family here in birmingham. i am loved here

[dilfsuzanneyk]

1, 10, 25, 30

hi gray!!

what song makes you feel better?

i answered this earlier but since there's so many, another song that does this is parklife by blur!

10. what’s something you’re excited for?

right now i'm just excited to go home and sleep lmao

25. what’s the best personal gift someone could give you (playlist, homemade card, etc.)

if you gave me any of these i would cry happy tears and we shall have a summer wedding /silly

no but in all seriousness any kind of homemade gift would mean a lot to me. cards always have a lot of thought put into them, i think, and playlists are just fun because i get to see what the other person likes. i loove little handmade jewellery and accessories like chains and patches though. because then i can wear them out and about :] i'm like a proud parent the way i'm showing off all the little things my friends make for me.

30. what reminds you of home (doesn’t have to mean house… just things that remind you of the feeling of home)?

also answered this earlier, BUT i will say there are certain songs that really feel like home to me. the strokes' album, comedown machine is full of songs like that. the beatles' stuff, and the 50s/60s malay music style (listen to P. Ramlee!!) is kinda like this for me too. music in general make me feel very comfortable and at home but these specific ones replicate that warmth and comfort of a home.

thank you for the ask :]

[bloodhailmp3]

comedown from saturday is not treating me nicely but on the plus side i think that night really genuinely helped shift something in me n redacteds relationship...... being sat in that room full of ppl i love and being so real and honest and it all coming from a place of love and just so firmly cementing i dont have to be scared of what redacted thinks of me or whether i have to put up barriers around them i can just be open and honest and nothing will be a burden on them its just. ahhh. between seeing yves tumor on md last week and bonding w my besties and partner this weekend on 2cb and mkat im p sure drugs have drastically improved my life and personality