#roxy was already sitting crooked so she got what was coming to her

[leiandroid]

im gonna die im gonna die im gonna die

[maddiewritesstucky]

IT’S SOMEONE’S BIRTHDAY!! 😆💕🎉

How do I possibly sum up how loved you are, how special you are, how deeply appreciated and important you are @howdoyousleep3?!

I thought long and hard about what I could give you, what I could do for you from such a great distance, and I could think of no greater show of love than to take the very two things I said I would never do, and use them both to create something extra special smutty for you 💜

😘 So K, angel, light of my life...I give to you the most esoteric thing I will ever write, my first (and likely only) reader insert, definitely my only RPF, I give you...

Rating: Explicit (18+)

Pairing: female reader x douchebag CEvans character we coined ‘Jersey Boy’

Tags: Public sex, fingering, mild degradation / humiliation, dirty talk, hypothetical girl-on-girl, gratuitous use of the word ‘fuck’, not a condom in sight

Based on a dangerously horny WhatsApp conversation that will live rent free in the spank bank for the rest of eternity. Beta credits to @buckyandthejets - thank you for holding my hand on this one 😂

***

“Your eyes better be open,” he rumbles, tequila-slick lips hard up against your ear. 

You’d laugh if you had the breath to do it, if you weren’t strung bow-taut trying to stay off the bouncer’s radar. He’s kicked the two of you out before, more times than you’d admit to, and he’ll do it again if you give him reason enough. 

You’re not going to give him a reason, tonight. 

You’re gonna sit there, tucked away in your favorite corner booth with your mouth shut and your eyes on the stage; perched in your boyfriend’s lap with your back against his chest and his hand stuffed between your thighs, and you’re not gonna make a fucking scene about the fact that he’s knuckle deep in your pussy. 

“She’s good, tonight,” he sighs, all false nonchalance like he doesn’t know how that particular set of curves up on the pole always makes your blood run a little hotter.

‘Roxi’ she goes by on stage, but you can call me whatever the hell you want, when she’s in your lap with her tits in your face.

“She’s always good.”

You stare, transfixed, at the sensuous shift of her body; that sinful rhythm that rolls through her limbs and makes every movement seem like something you should have no right to see.

He hums a noncommittal sound behind you, stroking languid at that spot inside that’d get you in trouble if he went any harder with it. That’s why you know he won’t - he’s not about to risk getting kicked out when it’s so much sweeter to send you spiraling like this, subtle and silent.

“You should learn to dance for me,” his breath falls warm over your shoulder, his lips nestled into the crook of your neck, “put on a show, get me all worked up…”

“You don’t need any fuckin’ help getting worked up.”

The sharp flick he deals to the peaked bud of your nipple makes your breath hitch, even through the barrier of your shirt. 

His hand is working slow and lazy between your thighs, but you know his body is winding tighter for this, too. It’s there in the vague shudder at the top of his inhales, the twitch of his cock inside his jeans. 

“Bet she could teach you some moves,” he hums, squeezing at your hip and your waist; tracing the curve of your rib cage. 

She could teach me a lot of things, you think, swallowing hard for the endless stretch of her legs and the curve of her ass.

You lift your eyes to her face and she’s looking right at you, her gaze flickering familiarity before it drops to the hand buried under your skirt. She smirks so goddamn knowing, and it’s your saving grace that the lighting is already washing your skin in shades of red. 

“Aw, look at that,” that voice at your back coos, “is the pretty stripper smilin’ at you?”

“Shut up.” 

It comes out breathy and insipid, and you feel more than hear the soft, mocking laugh that rumbles through his chest. 

He tucks his chin over your shoulder, presses his smirk right against your cheek as his hand snakes up under your shirt.

“What’s the matter, baby? Don’t you wanna be her friend? I bet you girls would get on real well…”

Your skin flushes hot under his lips, under the maddeningly chaste kisses he’s leaving there like he’s not fingerfucking you in public. 

“That’d be nice, huh? The two of you, gettin’ close...maybe she’d let you touch that body you can’t stop staring at.” 

“Jesus...”

He’s kneading slow and hard at your tits, drawing mindless circles around your nipples and flexing his thighs beneath you, just enough to keep you a little off balance. 

You can almost taste blood for how deep your teeth are sunk into your bottom lip.

“You think about it, don’t you?” he whispers, “You wonder what it’d be like, getting your hands on those curves, maybe getting your lips on hers...That what you want, baby? You wanna give her a little kiss?” 

...Fuck, but you hate how he does this. 

You do wanna kiss her. 

You wanna get on your knees and swap spit with her around the dick currently pressed up against your ass, but you’re not about to tell him that.

“Maybe...” 

“‘Maybe’?” He slips his fingers out of you just to push them back in slower, shallow this time because he’s an asshole. “‘Maybe’ don’t drip like this, sweetheart.”

“Fuck,” you press back against his chest; tip your head back against his shoulder as you suck a shuddering breath in.  

“Yeah, I know this ain’t for me,” he draws his fingertips up through the warm, wet center of you; sweeping figure-8 strokes that kiss your clit and dip shallow inside you. “Maybe I should call her over here, tell her she went and got my girl’s pussy all wet...maybe she’d help you out with it.”

You almost crack, then; barely catching the hoarse cry that’s shocked out of you as he smacks those soaked, taunting fingers down in a tight swat against your pussy. 

Your whole body lights up for it, your cheeks flooding hot and your pulse throbbing to rival the bass from the speakers. 

“Jesus, you can’t just—”

“I can’t what?” His other hand slips up to curl around the front of your throat, gripping you tight under the line of your jaw. “What can’t I do with this pussy, huh?” 

God, your body’s screaming. 

There’s nothing he couldn’t do, nothing you wouldn’t want, and you both know it. Fuck, does he know it...

You cuss under your breath, splitting your thighs wider over the spread of his lap, and he huffs a laugh that catches in your hair. 

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“Fuck you.” 

You roll your hips forward against that broad palm cupped between your legs and the grip on your neck tightens; his face tucking in close against yours as he growls right up against your cheekbone.

“Watch your fuckin’ mouth.”

He’s so hard beneath you, nudging his hips up to rub the denim-clad line of his cock against your ass; toying with your clit and pulsing his fingers inside you. 

The cigarette he had before you came out tonight is still clinging to him, making the amber notes in his cologne sing sweeter, and every time you squirm you can feel the chain around his neck rubbing cool against the back of your shoulder.  

“You gonna fuck me?” 

You already know the answer, just like you know you might not even make it home before he’s getting it in you. You might not make it to his car, and you’re nowhere near as ashamed as you should be that it wouldn’t be the first time he’s fucked you in the alley behind the club.

...It might be the first time for something else though, you realize, as he squeezes your hip and tells you to lift up.

“Here?” you hiss, “Are you fucking kidding me?” 

Your eyes frantically sweep the room, your entire body flooding hot as he pulls his hand from between your legs and slips it under you to get at his zipper.

“What, you wanna wait ��til we get home?” he scoffs like the notion is ridiculous. “You want some fuckin’ rose petals, some jazz playin’? Should we do it missionary?!” 

“God, you’re an asshole.”

You try to put some venom in it, but it’s lost to the fact that you’re pulling your panties to the side; trapping a gasp behind your teeth as the blunt head of him nudges up against you. 

“And you’re about to get fucked in a strip club,” he hums, “so what does that make you?” 

Another place, another time, and you might bite back. You might get up and walk away entirely, just to hear him hit you with that ‘aww come on, baby, don’t be like that!’ 

But right now you’re here, and his hands are on your hips and his cock is pushing into you bare, and you know exactly what this makes you.

Your fingers dig an iron grip into his thighs as you sink down on the length of him, grinding against the heavy stretch of him inside you. It takes your breath away every goddamn time, makes you spread your legs wider like it’ll make a lick of difference to the way he fills you up; immense and overwhelming and so fucking good. 

“Oh my god,” you whimper, circling your hips as you settle your whole weight down onto him, “oh my god.”

“Hey, you take this quiet,” he chides, his arm wrapping tight around your waist. “You start makin’ a scene, I’m gonna pull out.”  

Fuck, if he pulls out you’re gonna put him in his grave. 

There’s no move you can make here that doesn’t send you reeling, no shift of your body or swivel of your hips that doesn’t wind you further up the spiral; not with the way he takes up every last inch of space inside you and then some. 

His voice is a constant rumbling bass in your ear, and it doesn’t fucking help, those coos of that’s it, baby, and find the spot, and make it feel good. 

It doesn’t help when he starts rocking up into you in tiny pulses, when he uses his grip on your hips to angle you just perfect so his cock strokes you right fucking there.

It definitely doesn’t help when his fingertips find their way back between your thighs to drum a soft staccato against your clit.   

“Gonna come?” He curls his body closer around you as you start to shake; as your breath leaves you on a reedy exhale.

You can only nod, screwing your eyes shut and sinking into that building surge of heat. You are gonna come, right here in this room full of people. And he’s never gonna fucking let you forget it. 

“Open,” he commands, low and rough.  

You’re about to open your eyes, but then his fingers are pressing at your lips, and you’re swallowing a soft groan as he stuffs them into your mouth.

“Not a fuckin’ sound, you hear me?” 

You barely have time to nod before he’s jacking his hips up into you faster, rubbing tight circles around your clit to send you careening over the edge.  

You can’t moan, so you suck. Your eyes water, and your thighs twitch, and you shake apart right there in his lap, in front of god and everyone. 

Silently. 

Like the good girl you are.

“Jesus,” he buries his face in the crook of your neck, gasping a weak strangled sound as your body clenches around him. 

His muscles are drawing taut, his thighs and his  stomach tensing. He’s breathing shaky and shallow, and you want him to break; want him to lose it so you can call him a slut later and goad him into giving it to you all over again. 

So you let yourself go boneless in his lap. You tip your head back against his shoulder, and you make damn sure he hears it when you choke out “do it, Daddy,” around the gag of his fingers.

And he does. He comes inside you with his teeth sunk into the flesh of your shoulder and his hand white-knuckling a grip on your thigh. 

It’s objectively disgusting, the half-hour drive home you’re gonna be facing with his come dripping out of you. But you’d put good money on him pulling you into the backseat and licking you clean before you even start the car, so you can’t bring yourself to give a shit.

“Christ,” he shakes his head softly, slipping his fingers from your mouth and wiping them on your skirt. “Can’t fuckin’ take you anywhere.” 

“You could take me home.”

There’s too many clothes on you, too many eyes and ears around you for the way your skin’s buzzing; the way you’ve barely scratched the surface of that rippling need inside you. 

He hums at your back, pulling out of you slow and tugging your ruined panties back into place. “Just you? Or you wanna invite your friend?” 

You can hear the smirk in his voice and you know he’s fucking with you when he cocks his head toward the stage. But you chance a look up there and she winks right at you, and it’s not the worst idea he’s ever had.

“Two girls at once, huh?” You arch a brow at him, incredulous. “You think you got the stamina for that?” 

He holds your stare as he downs the rest of his drink, sweeps his tongue out over his slick bottom lip. 

“Well her shift ends in ten minutes,” he rumbles, “...why don’t we find out?”

***

And there you have it, the beginning and end of my het-writing career. Goodnight and good luck everyone, and the happiest of birthdays to you my beautiful soul sister 😘

[imagines-by-rose]

New Recruit - FINAL

Hello, lovelies! I’ve decided to go ahead and post the last of the fic as one big finale rather than break it into small chapters. Thank you all so much for reading!

Summary: Y/n is brought into Kingsman as Lancelot after the events leading to Roxy’s death, and Eggsy is furious. As the two work together to stop a notorious jewel thief, however, attitudes change - and feelings develop.

Pairing: Eggsy Unwin x Reader

Genre: Angst w/ a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort

Warnings: Near Death Experience, Cursing, Blood

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An ‘out of body experience’ wasn’t exactly how y/n would’ve described it.

She was very much in her body, but it wasn’t hers. The now foreign limbs felt unimaginably long as her consciousness nestled itself fully behind her eyes; two enormous windows that cut through the darkness, showing her an unknown, yet vaguely familiar world. She looked on passively -- curiosity her only motivation, if one could even call it that.

He was crying, she noticed, his trembling hands firmly pressed against a wound that was now miles away.

It all seemed so strange to her. She felt nothing; her pain long forgotten. Why was he still trying to staunch the bleeding? Didn’t he know it wasn’t her anymore?

How odd.

Indifferent, she continued to watch him attempt to fix the empty body. Sometimes, if she focused, she could even hear his pleads echo in the fog around her.

“Please, y/n! I love you. Please don’t leave me--”

She almost pitied him. He looked so...sad, wasting his time on someone who didn’t even exist anymore.

It was only when those windows began to close that she truly remembered fear. She may not have felt any attachment to the world in view, but she dreaded the boredom that she knew would surely come with oblivion.

She let out a silent scream -- for a moment she thought she heard him scream with her -- as the waning light was finally snuffed out, leaving her in darkness.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Eggsy could only watch helplessly as her eyes closed, her body now completely limp.

He cried out in horror, his instincts letting him do little else.

“NO! No, no no no! I can’t lose you, too! Stay with me. Open your eyes, y/n, come on! Please. Please!”

Her wound continued to weep blood, mocking his attempts to slow it.

“Merlin! Where the fuck is the damn evac team?!”

“They’re going as fast as they can, Eggsy! They’re nearly there, just a few more seconds!”

“She hasn’t fucking got seconds!” he bellowed. “I need them here NOW!”

His whole body was shaking. It was all he could do to apply more pressure to her chest. He felt useless.

“Please, baby” he begged, “don’t you fucking die on me. You can’t leave me like this, love. I need you here. I need you.”

Just then the doors burst open, a rush of Kingsman medics racing toward them.

Eggsy sobbed in relief.

*  *  *  *  *  *

The first thing she saw was the clock.

She had no idea how long she’d been staring at it, her consciousness coming in waves. She could’ve sworn the minute hand sat by the three, but now it was hovering near eleven.

Where am I?

As her awareness grew, her eyes traveled around the room. Fluorescent lights were embedded in the tiled ceiling, and she noticed a track that carried a thin blue curtain. There was a window to her right -- is it nighttime? -- and a doorway to her left. Various medical instruments stood everywhere, a faint electric ring sounding every few seconds.

A hospital. So I’m alive, then.

She continued taking in her surroundings when she noticed a light pressure on the bed. She looked for the source, her eyes landing on Eggsy. He was sat in a chair, his head resting on her bedside as he slept. He held her hand so close that his soft breaths landed on her knuckles and his stubble just brushed against her fingers. He must not have shaved in a week, at least.

Still in a daze herself, y/n watched him sleep, admiring how peaceful he looked.

It occurred to her, then, why she was there in the first place. She had been shot, and Eggsy had been the one to save her. With guilt she remembered his desperate cries as he did everything he could to keep her awake. She could see now how worn his features were despite his relaxed state.

He must have been through hell.

Pain shot through her and she sucked in a choked breath, her senses fully returning. Eggsy’s sleep must not have been as deep as it appeared, as he was immediately upright and fawning over her with concern.

“Y/n? You’re awake. What can I do? How can I help?”

She tried to sit up. A pained cry left her as her ribcage screamed in protest. Eggsy’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, preventing her from moving any further.

“Woah, hey, easy now” he cooed. “Don’t try to move too much, yeah? That’s what the bed’s for, love.”

Strong arms carefully held her as if she were glass. Eggsy propped cushions behind her, hoping to make her as comfortable as possible while the bed readjusted to a more upright position.

“That better?” he asked after easing her back onto the pillows. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

Y/n nodded, her movements strained.

“T-thank…you” she managed through harsh breaths.

I feel like I haven’t spoken in days. How long have I been here?

“I’ll call the nurse. They can give you something for the pain.” He pressed a chaste kiss to her cheek. “I’ll be right back, y/n.”

Y/n tried to take even breaths, focusing on moving as little as possible. It wasn’t long before Eggsy returned, followed by a woman in a white coat. Y/n didn’t miss the Kingsman insignia on her clipboard.

“I've brought the doctor, love” Eggsy said, taking her hand. “You’ll feel better in no time. Promise.”

The doctor spoke in a kind voice. “Hello, y/n. I’m Dr. O’Malley. Glad to see you’ve finally woken up, Eggsy here hasn’t left your side at all these past ten days, you know. Maybe now you can help me get him off my nurses’ backs, hm?” she laughed good naturedly.

Y/n managed a smile, but she was sure it looked more like a grimace.

Ten days? I’ve been here for ten days?

No wonder she felt so weak.

Dr. O’Malley put something in y/n’s IV drip -- has that been in my hand this whole time? -- and the pain was almost immediately overtaken by a soothing warmth.

“There. That should feel better.”

Y/n sighed in relief, her body relaxing. “Much. Thank you.”

“This medicine can cause fatigue, so don’t be alarmed if you begin to feel groggy. I’ll give you a while to adjust, and then I’ll be back to run a few quick tests to see how you’re improving. Sound good?”

Y/n nodded.

“Great. Call if you need anything, you two.”

The room was quiet when she left. Eggsy was rubbing gentle circles into y/n’s palm. His eyes were somber and he looked like he wanted to speak, but his mouth kept closing as if he couldn’t.

“Eggsy?”

He took in a shaky breath. “Y’know…you gave me a real scare, love. I don't want to think of what could've happened, if-- "

Eggsy’s voice cracked. His lips pulled into a tight line, brows furrowed.

Y/n brought her free hand to his face, prompting red-rimmed eyes to meet hers. He looked miserable.

“Oh, Eggsy…”

She pulled him into her, guiding his head to the crook of her neck and rubbing soothing circles on his back. He was careful of her injuries, even then, making sure not to put too much weight against her. She held him while he processed everything that had happened.

Y/n kissed his head. “Eggsy, you’ve been through so much. I don’t even know how to thank you.”

He sat up, y/n’s hand affectionately following to wipe his tears. He put his hand over hers. “You don’t have to thank me, love. You went through the worst of it, anyway. I’d do it all again if I had to.” He turned to kiss her palm, his lips lingering over the soft skin. His eyes closed in relief.

She’s awake. She’s okay.

He threw her a sideways glance. “That doesn’t mean you have permission to get shot again, you know,” he teased.

Y/n chuckled. “I won’t make a habit of it, I promise.” Her expression grew dark as the severity of what happened settled in. She felt her own eyes well with tears. “But I’m serious, Eggsy. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I remember everything. You were so upset.” She sniffed. “I just-- I wish I could’ve-- ”

“I was upset because I love you.”

Her eyes widened.

“…what?”

Eggsy’s gaze never faltered and he threaded his fingers with hers. “I love you, y/n.” He quirked a brow. “Didn’t you hear me in the museum? And here I thought you remembered everything.” He faked offense, pulling their entwined hands to his chest and closing his eyes, drawing a tearful laugh from y/n. “I confessed my heart to her and she doesn’t even remember. I knew she was a wicked woman!” he shook his head.

“Oh, shove it. I love you, too, cheeky. And I already told you, I’m lovely, so don’t you start that nonsense again.”

He leaned forward, grinning. “You’re wonderful, love.”

They shared a tender kiss, Eggsy’s free hand lightly caressing y/n’s cheek as he rubbed her tears away. Y/n rested her head on his shoulder when they reluctantly parted, exhaustion beginning to overtake her.

“‘M Sorry. Guess those miracle drugs are finally kicking in, huh?”

She felt his chuckle resound in his chest. “S’alright, sweetheart. You should get some rest.”

Her head tilted up towards him. “And what about you? Dr. O’Malley said you’d been here ten days. You need to take better care of yourself, Eggsy. Have you eaten? Tell me you haven’t slept in that chair every night.”

He pressed a quick kiss to her nose.

The woman’s been shot and she’s worried about me. What am I gonna do with her?

Eggsy laughed, peppering y/n’s face with kisses while he spoke. “I have eaten. Merlin made sure of that. He says hi, by the way. And you win -- I won’t tell you that I’ve slept in the chair every night,” he smirked.

Y/n sighed, exasperated. “Baby, no, that’s not fair,” y/n tutted in protest, but the grogginess in her voice did little to make her sound commanding. Eggsy helped her lie back while he readjusted the bed. She squeezed his hand with what little strength she had left. “Don’t sleep in the chair again, s’not good for you. This bed is big enough, you should come up ‘ere with me. I’ll scoot over.”

Eggsy laughed. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m messing with you, love. They have cots here so I’ll be just fine. You caught me nappin’ is all. I can rest easy now that you’ve woken up.”

Y/n closed her eyes, her voice growing faint. She sighed into Eggsy’s touch as he softly brushed his fingers through her hair. “M’kay. Promise me you’ll eat something. And tell Merlin hi.”

“I promise, sweetheart. And I will.”

Eggsy brought his lips to her forehead. His smile was the last thing y/n felt before drifting off to a restful sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: That’s it! I had a lot of fun writing this, and I really appreciate all of you who’ve read/liked/reblogged my posts! It really means a lot. I plan to keep writing and have a few imagines in mind, and who knows? Maybe I’ll start taking requests soon ;)

‘Til next time!

[russian-romanova]

all is right before the storm, part two. | bucky barnes x reader

series masterlist

spotify playlist

part title: two ; a dinner and a drink

pairing: 1940s!bucky barnes x reader

word count: 4K

warnings: they drink a lil alcohol, although no one gets drunk, little bit of language, mentions of super minor character death offscreen

notes: thank you, everyone, who read part one. this means a lot to me, so thank you! i tried to bring in some personal memories from having a large family, but also had to make up a family for bucky since his pre-steve life is pretty unknown in the mcu. 

taglist: @20coldhearts (ask to be added!) 

summary: bucky is pleasantly surprised by your family’s comforting yet unique aura during dinner, and afterward the two of you talk family and war over some drinks. 

                 +       +      +

The rain droned on softly throughout the afternoon. Although it was harder to hear downstairs, far from the roof and surrounded by the buzz and chatter of your family, it became white noise in your childhood room.

Staying once more in your old room brought with it a strange mixture of comfort and unfamiliarity. You hadn’t lived in it in close to three years, yet it was as if you came home to it every day as you had done for a large amount of your life. You knew where everyone was since it was as you had left it. The lamp on your bedside table was like habit to turn it on, and you remember where you kept your old hairbrush like you had put it away twenty-minutes earlier. The mind and memory are fantastical things, you thought to yourself. They tend to remember the littlest of things that seemingly won’t matter in the long run. 

Whatever the reason, you were glad you wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes searching for an object you would utilize for twenty seconds. With you hairbrush in your grip, you made your way over to a mirror that you had spent many hours in front of, using it to fix your hair and perfect it. Once you had finished the little correcting you felt necessary, you found it nice to just sit there, listening to the rain and clearing your head before rejoining your family. You loved them to death, of course, but they were often crazy. 

You were called down by your mother’s voice, informing you of the doorbell. Time had passed quicker than you had expected, and you knew it must have been Bucky already. 

You rushed down the stairs, politely pushing past Helen, Jean, and Marjorie who had been standing and talking at the bottom of the stairs. You quickly opened the door to be met with Bucky huddled under the coverage your larger porch offered, the sound of the rain growing louder behind him. 

“You’re here!” You exclaimed, hoping for a moment that you didn’t sound too happy. “Did you forget your mom?”

“No, my sister Rebecca arrived early and offered to look after her.” Bucky gave you a half-smile and gestured in the direction of his mother’s house. 

“Well, she can come over too!” You smiled, peeking behind him a little as if you would see her. Quickly you reposition yourself and apologize, “Not that your company isn’t enough. We…” You noticed your own fast speed in talking and paused to slow down. “We’re so happy to have you.”

Bucky grinned, outstretching a hand that you noticed was full of flowers. “Here, these are for you.”

Your smile became more soft and real. “Oh, thank you! You didn’t need to do that.” “My ma taught me to never come empty-handed.” He pushed them a little closer to you until you took them in your own hands. 

“Thank you.” For a moment, you forget what came next, too flustered by the appearance of Bucky Barnes with flowers. “Here, you can come in. We haven’t started yet.” Bucky walked in, politely closing the door behind him and pushing his shoes off and placing them on the mat near the door. “I’m going to put these in a vase and we can all get to eating.” You hurried to the back of the kitchen, Bucky waiting patiently as he watched you fill up a tall and skinny vase with water and place the flowers inside. He hoped you couldn’t tell that they were just cut from his backyard and nothing special. His mother had, of course, told him to never show up empty-handed, but the lesson that resounded on his mind was that most women liked flowers. 

You walked past him in a hurry, placing the vase on a small table in the kitchen and moving past him to enter the dining area. “Y/L/Ns! Food is getting cold.” You took your seat, and Bucky found his way next to you. Like a flood breaking a dam, your sisters and brothers entered, taking their seats and saving the heads of the table for your father and Jack since it was his meal.

Your mother and father entered last, and your oldest brother George jokingly announced them as if it was a fancy event. You looked from person to person, each one making eye contact with you and then moving onto another sibling as a child excited for Christmas might do. You were excited after all. It had felt like ages since everyone was together for a big meal like this, especially now that big meals were becoming more difficult to come by with rationing and lack of hearty foods in general. 

“Everybody here?” Your father looked from face to face as if expecting any absent person to tell him they weren’t there. “No? Well, dig in!” The clinking of food began almost instantly, and chatter followed, giggling arising from the younger girls. 

“We don’t really pray,” You made an apology in Bucky’s direction, grabbing a roll from the basket being passed around the table. 

He took them once you were finished. “Nah, it’s fine. I can’t say I do, either.” 

A smile of relief found its way onto your face. “Oh, well it works out then!” 

“I’d say so.” Bucky returned the smile. Your eyes flashed across his face, and the way his glimmering eyes and crooked smile seemed to make him fit in even more. You could feel your face fluster red, and you turned to the table as you examined the platter laid before you. There were meats and salads, green beans and chopped potatoes. To the far end of either table there lay a basket of rolls, waiting to be passed around with a plate of butter that accompanied them. Sweet potatoes sat in the middle next to a large bowl of your mother’s famous stuffing, and you reached first for that. 

“So Bucky,” Ruth’s voice rose from across the table over the clattering and clinking of silverware against plates, and you blushed the moment she spoke. She hadn’t said anything and you knew it was on the way to embarrass you. Ruth had been that sort of person since you could remember, making sure to say the things that didn’t necessarily hurt or harass you but made you embarrassed enough that she got a little delight from it. “You said you’re from Brooklyn too?”

“Yes, but it’s big enough that I’ve never met your sister,” He looked up and spoke politely, clearly striving to impress your family. “Not that I know of, anyway.” He didn’t seem uncomfortable in the new atmosphere, which surprised you. Perhaps that was just because you seemed to be practically pathetic in new situations, constantly fiddling with your skirt or any bracelets that would adorn your wrists. 

“That’s so crazy,” Marjorie spoke up, shoving a fork full of green beans into her mouth. You almost laughed, your hand moving to your mouth to cover your snort. You knew from the forkful that it was too full for her mouth to intake, although Marjorie didn’t realize it until she began wildly coughing and spitting a few of her beans back onto her plate. 

A few of your siblings groaned, and your mother almost gagged. “Marjorie, please!” You were surprised that she wasn’t saying anything to you or your laughing siblings, disciplining you for egging her on. When your gaze cast to a chuckling Bucky, however, you figured she was being polite to your family’s guest. 

“Good to know you guys have a good sense of humor,” Bucky smiled. “I was worried for a minute there that maybe you didn’t laugh.”

Still giddy from the green bean incident, even that thought made you giggle. “Out of everyone, I think I’m most likely to laugh.” 

“I can see where you get it from,” Bucky laughed, gesturing slightly to your mother. She was laughing almost hysterically from something Helen had said, although Helen seemed less than thrilled she was laughing.

“Alright, alright, I’ve got something to say about good ol’ Jack Jr.,” George stood up, raising a glass as if to say something emotional. “Eat up, buddy. Have fun starving in the army.” Laughter and chatter rose, and George had to raise his voice to be heard. “And a reminder for the rest of us -- this is just half of the feast we’ll have once Jackie’s gone!” George joked, raising a glass.

Jean laughed, her bright green eyes looking over at her twin’s. “Here, here!”

Was it cruel? Perhaps. But to you, it was natural. Your family joked like this every day, and you remembered it being this way since the day you were born, and you sure it had been going on for years before that. 

“Oh come on, come on,” Jack stood up, laughing as well. You smiled at him. Noticing for the first time how similar his laugh was to your father’s. “We can all have a feast that will make this seem like nothing when I kill Hitler.” 

“Personally?” Ruth giggled.

“Bring us his head,” You laughed along with her, the two of you making giddy eye contact.

You were surprised when Bucky added, “Which’ll happen before or after Germany elects you as their new chancellor?” Jack responded as if Bucky was another sibling he had dealt with his whole life, and now a stranger that he hadn’t even personally met. “Well, killing ol’ Adolf will come before, naturally. How’d you think I won the chancellorship anonymously?” With that statement, he found his chair once more, now seemingly speechless and Roxie planted a kiss on his cheek, giggling and saying something you couldn’t hear over your family’s talkative roar. 

“You certainly come from an ambitious family,” Bucky joked as he leaned towards you a little, spooning a potato onto his fork as he did so. 

“Oh, when it comes to war, we never joke,” You put on a very sophisticated face and straightened your posture, clearly in a silly mood already. “Legend has it, our Grandfather David Y/L/N the second ended the first world war. And you know what they say -- the apples don’t fall far from the tree.” By now you were fighting to suppress a laugh. 

“Legend has it our Grandpa David was crazy,” Samantha corrected. “And you know what they say-” “-The apples don’t fall far from the tree!” Marjorie finished, laughing like a hyena. 

The rest of the night seemed to continue along similarly, everyone laughing and the looming loss of Jack Jr. to the Air Force seemed a threat not to be mentioned. When the main food was finished, Ruth excused herself and brought out two pies that she had made earlier that way, to which everyone cheered. After eating, everyone was required to help out with the dishes, and you and Bucky had too much fun drying them with the long white rags you had used since you were four years old. 

“Do you want to head to the porch?” You asked once you were all done with dinner and the continuing aspects, suddenly a timid teenager as you looked from the groups your family had already formed to Bucky.

“Sure,” He looked towards the window briefly. “Funny, I didn’t even realize it had stopped raining.”

You met his gaze before looking back to him. “Oh yeah, I think it stopped during dinner.” Wordlessly, you made your way over the refrigerator as Bucky watched you. “Do you want a beer, Bucky?” He leaned his head back a little, straining to see what kinds you had from his standing spot. Giving up, he asked. “What do you got?” You used your hand to rummage through the pale yellow refrigerator. “Lots of Hamm’s. George and Roxie were in charge of alcohol and they live in Minnesota now, so…” You trailed off, pausing a moment longer as you double-checked. “Yep, just Hamm’s.”

“Hamm’s sounds fantastic.” 

You chuckled, although you were sure only you could hear it and you leaned in to grab out two beers. Once you swung around, Bucky accepted the beer before walking with you outside. 

Your family’s porch brought back more memories than almost any other part of your house. The white paint was chipping in some parts more exposed to weather, but that paint had been there for as long as you could remember. There was worn and flattened grey fabric underfoot, and white half walls that went around the border not attached to the house, save for the entrance in front of the door. Bucky and you both situated in outdoor chairs next to one another. You found yourself too immersed in recalling past times since you entered this porch to even think of a conversation starter. 

“What’s your favorite childhood memory?” Bucky asked as if reading your mind. “Like here. On this porch.” 

You paused for a moment to think it over. It was a big question, but you chuckled once you realized. “Yeah, when we were kids we had this giant bus, like an old school bus-” You used your hands to exaggerate the size. “And mom and dad let us paint it. However, we wanted. I mean, I must have been five at the time. Ruth wasn’t older than ten. We had no idea what we were doing! But it was…” You trailed off, smiling to yourself. “It was so wonderful. The art wasn’t good, and it was all on the bottom half of the bus. But when it was all done, we went camping. With the bus. We just packed all of the shit we needed, put it in the back couple of seats, and drove across the state. God, it was crazy. But the porch-” It took you a moment to remember what the point of your story and your face turned redder than usual once you realized your ramble. “When we came back home, we drove for hours. Over twelve. When we got back, it was dark, and we were so tired that we literally just collapsed on the porch and slept. Our parents went inside, but they just let us stay there. We slept on this porch. I don’t even think we realized it until we woke up.” 

Once he was sure you were done, Bucky chuckled lightly. “Wow.” 

“Yeah,” The alcohol already brought up a chuckle from your throat. “I was right there.” You pointed to a corner against the house. “I was the second to wake up, after Ruth.” 

“Good thing it didn’t rain,” Bucky pointed out. 

You looked over to meet his eyes, smiling. “That’s very true.” You leaned forward, resting your head on your hands, while your elbows positioned themselves on your knees. “Hey, what about you? Your family?”

“Well,” Bucky stretched his legs for a moment as he spoke, “There’s me, I’m the oldest. Then there’s Rebecca, Marie, and Judy.”

“All girls? So you’re the odd man out, then.”

“Oh, yeah.” He laughed before his voice fell a little quieter. “And there’s my mom, and she’s over there, and my dad left when I was twelve.” 

“Oh.” Your voice was just as soft. “I’m sorry. That’s horrible.” 

Bucky took a drink of his beer, shrugging. “We’re fine without him, you know?” You nodded, although you clearly didn’t know, and kept silent as you waited for the right words to come to you. “Is all of your family here?” 

You took the opportunity. “Yeah. Ruth’s the oldest, and she brought her fiancé Dick. Then there’s George and his wife Roxie, Samantha, me-” You gestured to yourself, “Helen, Jack Jr., and Jean are twins, and Marjorie is the baby of the family. It’s crazy.”

“All families are crazy,” Bucky laughed. “But you can’t imagine life without them, right?” 

“Right.” It was true. You were the fourth of eight kids, right in the middle and at the point where you never knew the life of an only child as the oldest might before its counterparts are born, or as the youngest might after its counterparts move out. You had always had family, large chunks on either side of you. You see so fortunate, you realized now. Bucky’s father was gone and his mother was sick, and he was the only boy in the family. No other males to interact with or really learn from. You loved your brothers to death, but you couldn’t imagine being only surrounded by them. 

“I’ve thought about enlisting,” Bucky spoke, his eyes remaining fixated on the distant hills. The topic came from the far reaches of his mind, but you could tell he was trying to keep the conversation up. “From time to time.” 

You took a drink. “Well, what’s stopping you?” 

Bucky shrugged. “My mom,” He leaned his head a little as he spoke, unmistakably tired but too used to pushing through it. “My sisters and I have been rotating looking after her as she recovers, but I couldn’t leave when she’s like this. I think she’s getting better though. I hope she is.”

“Look, I’ve never met your mom but I promise she’d be fine without you. Your sisters sound amazing, they get it.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Honestly, even leaving tomorrow is gonna be hard. I just love her so much and it hurts that I can’t be there for her,” He paused, his eyebrows lowered in a somber gaze. 

“So you’ll be leaving tomorrow?” Your hand swirled the beer around in your can, feeling the liquid push enough against the metal of the can that it was felt in your palm. “For Brooklyn?”

“Now that Becca’s back, I guess. If not tomorrow then Thursday.”

You nodded slowly, almost having to process his words. “Yeah, I’m leaving Thursday. We all wanted to see Jack Jr. off tomorrow.” “Yeah, yeah,” Bucky agreed. “That makes sense, yeah.” You stared ahead, any comments staying behind your somber expression. For the first time in a long time, you felt as though you could let down your chipper personality and personal guard to be the person you felt like at that moment. Bucky’s charismatic personality spurred that, you supposed. “Hey, um…” You spoke without really thinking, your speech slowing as you thought of what would come next. “I feel like we should visit in Brooklyn. Or something like that. You know, it just seems like such a shame that we’d live so close to each other and forget ever talking. Right?” 

“I didn’t want to intrude, but I was thinking the same thing.” Bucky looked at you, his lips turning up to a smile. “Do you have an address or phone I could write down?”

“Oh! Yeah, let me just grab a piece of paper and a pen,” You stood up, reaching to place your beer can on the ground. Bucky intercepted it and offered to hold it, which you graciously let him do.

“Paper. Pen. Where?” You walked in through the screen door, speaking to no one in particular as you tried to minimize the time you made Bucky sit alone outside. For a moment it was silent, and you wondered if anyone could even hear you over the loud talking. 

“To your right!” Helen glanced up at you, and you turned to see a notepad and pen by the phone. “Just put it back in the same place.” “Will do! Thank you!” You shouted your response, grabbing it and walking back outside. Bucky looked towards you as you walked out, outstretching a hand to pass you back your beer. 

Thanking him, you sat down. “I’ll just tear a piece of paper in half to share,” You pulled a piece off, carefully ripping it in half and giving half to Bucky. In your neatest handwriting, you wrote:

Y/N Y/L/N

BR-20880

3517 Hoffman Avenue

Under which, you attempted to draw a small happy face, although it turned out worse than you hoped and considered scribbling it out altogether. You caught a glance of Bucky waiting for the pen, however, and you passed it to him instead. 

“Nice drawing,” He commented.

“Oh, shush,” You laughed, bringing Bucky smiled at your reaction. “This is why I’m an English major and not an art major.” 

“You’re an English major?” He looked up from

his scribbles. “Brooklyn College?” 

“Yes,” You nodded your head slowly at his guess. “Probably wasn’t hard to figure out, though.” 

“What, just because you live there?” He passed you the now completed sheet of paper, which you stuck in your pocket. “You seem like the type of dame who likes to travel.”

“To school every day? No thank you.” You chuckled. “And Brooklyn suits me very well.”

He nodded, chucking again. 

“What’s so funny?” You tilted your head. 

“A real live college girl. Learning English. Wow.” You could tell he was trying to be a jerk, and you laughed and pushed him softly with your hand. It was an action you had seen your mother do affectionately to your father hundreds of times, and you weren’t even sure it registered in your mind when you did it yourself. 

“I’m not learning English. I’m perfecting my English.” 

He whistled. “Give me a big word. I want to feel smarter, go.” 

You twirled your necklace in your hands for a minute before saying, “Axiomatic.” “Axiomatic?” Bucky repeated slowly.

You nodded. “It means obvious.” You hadn’t actually learned that one from school, but from your younger sister Jean. You had no idea where she had gotten it from, but it had been one of your favorite words for years

“Ooh, give me another. Hit me.”

“Meleagrine,” You said slowly. 

“Gave me chills,” He joked. 

After waiting for a moment, you answered, “Pertaining to turkeys,” smiling smugly. Bucky gave a hearty laugh, and you felt your own smile grow. “You liked that one, did you?”

“Oh, did I!” He looked back at you, his smile lingering. You realized how blue his eyes were. Not a dull sort of blue as your father and Ruth shared, but a bright blue. Reminiscent of the sky in the summer, or the ocean when the sun rises. For a second you thought you should look away, that you had been staring too long. Then you seemed to notice them all over again and were enthralled with the color once more. 

“Thanks for this,” You smiled at him, raising your voice to catch his attention before flickering your eyes away. “I should go inside, I think.”

“Yeah,” He looked back at you, his voice distant but his smile was near and warm. “Anytime.”

[itsanerdlife]

Captivated (MC Series) 13

Pairing: Biker!Eggsy Unwin x Reader

Characters: Natasha Romanov, Merlin, Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers, Scott Lang, Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy, Michelle Unwin, Frank Castle, Roxy, (Mentions of) Harry Hart, OFC Logan and Markus, Tony Stark, Charlie Hesketh.

Warnings: Swearing, creepy boss, a girl who can handle her own, stalking, creepy guy, law breaking, random hook ups mentioned, angst, sass, drama, cops involved, sexual harassment (nothing happens tho promise), melt downs, and allegations of abuse.

In your town there is a Biker club Called Kings Rebels, you weren’t a good girl and you surely weren’t a biker girl, or were you? One night changes everything in your life. You started that night out as a hostel waitress who works in Stark Tavern, one ass grab and a sucker punch later, did you just slip the Pres of a Biker Club, Eggsy Unwin, your work hours? But is MC life for you, being an old lady? When your faith is tested for the club, they follow through with everything Eggsy promised you. Will your world stay upside down since walking into the Clubhouse, or do you fit into their lifestyle more than you ever thought possible??

A knock on the door, makes you stretch, sitting up you look around. The room was empty, the other side of the bed, made. The door opens, Nat’s red head pops in, grinning at you.

“Good morning sunshine.” She comes into the room, holding two bags.

“Morning.” You smile at her.

“Interesting night?” She wiggles her eyebrows at you.

“Nothing happened.” You laugh, swatting her with the pillow as she sits down on the bed with you.

“God, you aren’t any fun, are you?” She laughs.

“Where is Eggsy?” You run a hand through your beer crusted hair, wincing.

“Church.” She nods, you look at her confused. “It’s basically a meeting for the MC behind closed doors, they discuss business and things happening in their town.” She explains, as you nod. “They’ll be done here in maybe an hour.” She looks at the alarm clock on the night stand.

“I guess I should head home and get around for the day.” You sigh, part of you didn’t really want to leave. You enjoyed being around Eggsy, more than you really wanted to admit too.

“Nope. I got you some things from your apartment. Eggsy asked Buck last night, if I would head over when I woke up. I also figured you’d want to shower, so I grabbed you stuff, he said you can keep it here for the next time.” She grins at you putting the bags on the bed.

“Steal anything from my closet?” You smirk as you open your bag.

“What? Me? Never.” Nat laughs.

“Do you stay here too Nat?” You look up.

“Yeah. Buck and I are across the hall and down three.” She smiles. “Why?” She stands up, looking at you.

“Cause I’m going to raid your closet for revenge.” You laugh.

“I should have seen that coming.” She nods.

You showered, dressing in a pair of cut off shorts, a grey T-shirt that read ‘Sorta Sweet. Sorta Savage.’ You pulled your sneakers on, before heading out of the room. You run into Eggsy coming up the stairs, he grins when he sees you.

“Good morning.” He looks you over.

“Do you usually slip out before the girl wakes up in your bed?” You grin at him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a girl spend the night in my bed.” He thinks that over as you gap at him.

“Eggsy.” You laugh. He grabs your hand, turning he starts down the stairs.

“Come on there’s someone I want you to meet.” He throws a crooked grin over his shoulder back at you.

“Meet?” You laugh as he pulls you around the corner, the clubhouse is alive with movement. Woman are carrying in trays and platters, grocery bags, cases of beer. You look at Eggsy, he shakes his head, pulling you towards the back.

“Mom.” He calls to a woman with dirty blonde hair, skinny jeans and a black T-shirt, large hoop earrings, and a dark pink lipstick.

“Your mom?” You hiss at him, trying to not laugh.

“Babe.” His mom turns gushing over him instantly. She comes towards the two of you, he keeps his fingers laced with yours as he hugs his mom. “You’re looking good.” She holds him at arm’s length.

“I manage.” He laughs. “Mom, this is Y/N. This is my mom Michelle.” He pulls you forward, he’s grinning at you as you stand fidgeting in front of his mother.

“I hear you’re a little fire cracker.” She grins at you. “Scott’s nose says he learned real quick.” She smirks. “The girls have been telling me all about the woman who smacked down Hanna.” She laughs.

“You know.” Your mouth flutters open and closed looking for words.

“You should join us tonight.” She nods, looking at Eggsy who looks to you.

“Family dinner.” She looks around the kitchen.

“Oh, no. I’ll spend the time with my brothers.” You wave your free hand, flattered she would invite you.

“I already invited them.” Eggsy smirks. You shoot him a look, he squeezes your hand.

“Okay.” You nod. “Is there anything I can do then?” You smile.

“We need to pick a dessert and basically wait till later and clean down all the tables.” She sighs.

“Well I make a really great cheesecake. You can ask my brothers.” You shrug.

“You bake?” Eggsy tips his head looking surprised.

“I’m full of surprises.” You wink at him; his lips turn up into a grin.

“Can you make about eight of them?” She smiles at you.

“I’ll be spending the day in my apartment.” You look at Eggsy, knowing he didn’t really want you to leave, having sent Nat to keep you from going.

“Mind if I join you?” He shrugs.

“Deal. But you’re going to have to do a few things.” You sigh, smiling at him.

“Things?” His eyebrows snap up.

“I have a few stops to make. Oh and you’ll have to help me with the cheesecake.” You grin.

“I’ll get the car.” He sighs, kissing your cheek he walks out of the kitchen.

“My boy, doing domestic things. You maybe God sent after all.” Michelle smiles at you.

“Funny, I think I’m from somewhere much warmer and a lot farther south than God.” You smirk, running a hand through your hair.

“Sheets, grocery shopping, baking. Interesting taste for someone from hell.” She winks at you, a smile on her lips.

“Text or call Eggsy if you need anything. I’m only four blocks away and I have to misfit brothers if you need a hand.” You laugh, waving as you back out of the kitchen.

“Where to first?” Eggsy holds open the door to one of the black SUV’s.

You laugh, pushing open the door to your apartment, Eggsy’s hands filled with bags, leaving you with two. Your brothers on your couch, the TV on, you squint at the both of them, they freeze in fear.

“You owe me new sheets, and I hate you both.” You walk into the kitchen without another word.

“Clearly you didn’t get laid, you’re still a Scrooge.” Markus laughs, you pick up the apple in your fruit bowl as Eggsy puts the bags on the counters. You whip it at Markus, it hits his chest, bouncing off hitting Logan in the side of the face.

“HEY!” They shout at you, Eggsy chokes on a laugh.

Captivated: @mo320    @rileyloves5   @irepeldirt   @travelwithwords   @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked   @elle88531   @lesmiserablememelovingfuck   @taylorjacksonandtheolympians   @lovemarvelousfics   @mrskokitztelford   @live-for-the-avengers   @shamptainshmerica   @misspygmypie   @mariekoukie6661   @bluebird214   @allyp1023   @sarahp879   @nerdyandexhausted   @i-love-superhero   @supernatural-girl97   @petersunderroos   @kazuha159   @sweet-honey15   @ingridsigne     @red-writer13   @nessy-bearxb   @cece-daughter-of-pitch-black   @thedarklightwithinus   @itsemmyb   @debbienewnes84   @captain-princess-smash  @eggsy-unwinnn   @paranoiadestroyah   @mellxander1993   @crazyblonde124  

[mellicose]

That Woman Over There

A You Me and Him Fix-it Fic

Rating: Teen, for some suggestive language

Word count: 3464

Warnings: none

Summary: ~ Set after the birth of Monty, Olivia’s baby ~ A dear friend of Olivia comes to visit for a week, and she disturbs the fragile peace between her, Alex, and John.

So, um, there’s been some drama about this wee likkle film. Maybe it will work to its advantage. There were some things that puzzled me in the writing, and this is my way to unravel the plot and weave it into something I might understand as a member of the tasty LGBT sandwich crew.

Chapter 1 | Read Chapter 2

She was still telling Alex stories of Livvie’s awkwardness when there was a quick rapping at the door. The baby bounced in his high seat - he seemed to recognize the knock.

“Uncle John’s here!” said Alex, and lifted baby Monty out of his chair.

Connie froze. Olivia grabbed her wrist as she stood from the table.

“Stay. Please. For Montmorency.”

“I still can’t get over the fact you named your little one after a cherry. Why don’t you call him Billy?” Connie said, referring to his first name, William. She sat back down slowly. Olivia stuck out her tongue. Connie winked.

“Monty’s a family name. I promised daddy,” Olivia said. She heard John in the foyer, cooing at the baby. He grunted, and Monty squealed with glee. Olivia popped up.

“You better not be throwing him up in the air again,” she said, heading out, and bumped into his chest. He had a goofy grin, and his eyes were huge with curiosity. The baby bounced in his arm, pulling at his sculptured beard.

“Is this her?” he said without preamble, holding his other hand out. She stood and stared at it. After a couple of seconds, he put it down, but his eyes moved up the long line of her body. “Bloody hell, you’re a tall gay.”

Alex slapped his arm. “Don’t fuckin’ curse in front of the baby,” she said through her teeth, then slapped her hand over her mouth. Olivia’s face twisted in distress.

“Jesus, Al!” she said, putting her hand on her hips. Alex blew her a kiss through her fingers.

Connie watched all this with a jaundiced eye. She loved Livvie, but this was almost too much to bear. It was weird. And she despised John already.

John’s eyes moved appreciatively over her body. It made her want to rip his beard out. Olivia gave her an importunate look.

“The higher the boots, the closer to God,” she said. Monty squealed as he got a solid grip on the beard and pulled. John howled. The baby giggled as Alex pulled him away, clucking at him softly.

Connie finally smiled. 

They sat around playing happy family for an hour or so in the living room. The baby lay on his stomach on the floor, rocking and kicking his chubby legs. They all took turns making funny faces at him to make him laugh his huge, almost adult laugh.

Connie was in love.

She took Monty in her arms and gave him a raspberry on his fat cheek. He grabbed the cloisonne rose barrette in her hair, fascinated by the gloss and color. He tore hair out of her head trying to get his prize, and still Connie kissed him.

He held up the pin to the sun and babbled happily.

“It’s a rose, darling,” she said, pulling it gently out of his mouth when he tried to have a taste of the pretty red thing. “Una rosa.” She wiggled his chubby legs. The baby squealed, as if trying to repeat it.

“It’s lovely,” John said, but he wasn’t looking at the barrette.

“She’s damn near the ambassador for the rose industry in America. I’ve seen the photos on Facebook,”  Alex said. She was referring to her business - a flower artist for the crème de la crème, coast to coast. She could cover a ballroom with complex swirls of colorful flora and transform it to a perfumed dream world.

And very rich people paid her a lot of money to do just that.

“Roses are the queen of flowers - not only graceful and gorgeous, but they exude their perfume for days after they’ve been cut, giving the exhibitions another layer of beauty,” she said. “I love creating with them.”

“What do you do with the flowers after?” John asked.

Connie’s smile faded, but she took a deep breath and kissed the baby’s tiny foot.

“What makes the installations so meaningful are their evanescence,” she said, as if speaking to a child.

“The band?” John quipped.

“Their short-lived nature,” she said. “No matter how large-scale, I must work quickly to make sure the client enjoys the flower’s beauty to the fullest. And the best part is knowing that such beauty won’t last forever - that they are standing in perfect moment in time, making a a memory…”

“Poetic. Is that in the brochure?” John said. Connie flipped him the bird with both hands. His eyebrows rose.

She put her hands over the baby’s ears. “Newflash, asshole - it’s a website,” she said, and picked Monty up and walked out of the room

Olivia punched his side. “Why d’you have to be such a twat?”

“I’m just following suit,” he said, crossing his arms.

Alex and Olivia sighed, but Connie came back in and lay the baby on the floor.

“It was about damn time you became a mum,” she said, and poked the baby’s swollen belly. “but what a crazy way to go about it. I know some rad New York gays who could’ve helped you. Artists. Musicians.”

“Dirty hipsters,” John whispered.

“You’d fit right in,” Connie said, not looking at him.

Olivia’s smile faltered. Connie crawled to Alex and took her hand.

“We both know Livvie’s high strung, but she’s a blessing isn’t she?”

Alex smiled. “I’m not used to all this Livvie talk. How exactly did you two meet?”

Connie sat between them and put her arms around them both. “She didn’t tell you?”

Olivia began to turn red.

Alex shrugged. “She said you met in New York, when she was there as an exchange student. That she had a crush on you, but it never went anywhere.”

Olivia bit her lip. Connie smirked.

“Imagine it - New York in the 90’s. Everyone’s wearing baby tees and parachute pants and Doc Martens and mourning Kurt Cobain…”

“Sounds rad,” Alex said, perking up. She was only in primary school in the 90’s.

“It was appalling,” Olivia muttered. They made terrible fun of her and her plaid skirts and pearls. Everyone except Connie, the girl next door. Her dad was a Nicaraguan diplomat, her mother bored and medicated.

“But Livvie never liked Nirvana or Oasis,” Connie said, smiling at her. She preferred N*Sync.”

John and Alex snorted in unison. Olivia went crimson, but she didn’t deny it. She still had a thing for Justin Timberlake music.

“I didn’t like Nirvana or Oasis either - I preferred New Order, Depeche Mode, or Verdi. So, it didn’t matter anyway.”

“Verdi?” said Alex.

“You know, La Traviata,” said John. Alex made an I-don’t-know face. “Opera music. Fat ladies singing?”

“Eww - but not at the fat ladies. Just the singing,” she said.

Connie patted her shoulder. “Anyway, I was bored out of my mind, sitting on my front stoop when this vision in pearls walks by. I mean, it was a sight - the longest pleated plaid skirt I’ve ever seen, poofy blond hair, clutching her books against her chest so hard her knuckles were white -“

John chortled. “Sounds about right.”

“Shut up,” all three women said in unison. John went back to playing with the baby.

“Anyway, I was listening to some Roxy Music on my boombox, and as she passed, she lifted her nose at my glam rock - but it was a very cute nose indeed - and it quivered, a bit like a bunny's-“

John whooped. They stared lasers at him, and he picked up the baby. “He needs a change. I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked quickly out of the room.

Connie sighed, as if a weight had been lifted.

“Why do you have him around?” she said.

“Because we do. No use in being so unpleasant,” Olivia said, then winced. She knew why Connie didn’t like him. And she understood. But she couldn’t deprive the baby of a male role model. Although she didn’t say it, John had grown on her. He only looked, and occasionally acted like an absolute twat. But his heart was pure gold.

At least, most days.

Alex poked her side. “You were saying. Her nose quivered like a bunny's,” she said, tugging at Olivia’s pony tail and wiggling her eyebrow at her.

“Oh yes. Well, she was acting all posh and snooty-“

“-It was because I was afraid you would yell something cruel at me.” Olivia interrupted.

“Never!” Connie said. She knew all about being different.

“I was a diplomat’s daughter with a shitty Spanish accent. Everyone at school pretended they couldn’t understand what I was saying. It was a hilarious joke. Even the teachers did it.” she said. She was freshly arrived from Managua, and at the time, she still had a strong Spanish accent. It didn’t make things easy.

“Me too,” Olivia said, and sighed.

“Speak American,” Connie said, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue.

“I hated when they said that,” Olivia said. “Even with an accent, you still knew more English that most of them.”

Alex was in between them, with a bemused look on her face. Connie didn’t have any accent - except an American one.

“Where did it go?” she said.

“I worked really hard to get rid of it. I got sick of people calling me Selma Hayek,” Connie said. “I even changed my name to make things less awkward.”

“What’s your real name?” Alex said.

Olivia giggled.

“You shut up,” Connie said, pointing at her.

“It’s … Encarnación,” Olivia said. “It means incarnation in Spanish.”

“Incarnation? Sounds goth,” Alex said.

“It’s a Catholic thing,” Connie said. “Like Jesus being the incarnation of God?”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t do religion.”

“S’okay. Neither do I, these days,” Connie said.

“That’s a lie and you know it,” said John, walking in with the baby cradled in his arms. Monty sucked placidly on a bottle of milk. “You leave the windows open a lot nowadays. I hear the name of God often enough at night.” He gave them crooked grin.

Alex chuckled, and Livvie blushed. Connie didn’t understand it. Why didn’t they want to snatch his perfect, seal-smooth wig right off?

Connie popped up. “I’m gonna see a man about a horse,” she said.

“What the f- does that mean?” John said, but he was amused.

“To powder her nose,” Olivia said helpfully.

“Nay, darling. Take a leak,” Alex offered.

Connie pointed and winked at her. “Bingo!” Then, she disappeared.

“Well, she’s nice,” John said, putting a burp rag on his shoulder and hoisting Monty up to tap lightly at his back.

“She hates you,” Alex said, picking up some errant toys. “Stay away from her.”

“Most women do when they first meet me, but I change their mind with my irresistible charm,” he said. The baby burped loudly. He giggled.

“I don’t know whether it will work this time,” Olivia said, holding her arms out for the baby. John gave him back reluctantly. “I think you should go. We’re about to head out for dinner.”

“And why can’t I come?” he said, sticking his lower lip out. “Or, better yet,  I can take care of Monty while you ladies are lesbian together as a group. What is it called … a preponderance, or a velvet box of lesbians?”

Alex laughed, and shrugged at Olivia. It had been over two months since they had some baby-free fun.

“Connie’s not a lesbian,” Olivia said. “And I don’t think so. She wants to spend time with the baby too. She’ll only be here a week - you’ll have Monty ‘till he’s 18.”

“But not when he’s soft and tiny like this,” he said, cradling the baby’s downy head in his hand over Olivia’s shoulder.

“It’s just five days. Don’t … rile her up. She has a temper,” Olivia said, putting the baby down in a play seat.

Connie sauntered back, holding an old bronzing lotion bottle. Alex yipped.

“I’m surprised you haven’t let John take this with him,” she said, throwing it underhand at him.

He caught it smoothly and stuffed it in his pocket. “For midnight mass.” He winked. Alex and Olivia rolled their eyes.

Connie glowered.

After coming back from dinner, they sat in the garden, drinking and laughing softly.

He could hear them through his open windows. He had been trying in vain to get the G flat scale on his guitar, but his fingers were failing him. He threw it on the bed and walked downstairs.

Connie. Although he had a clever quip for all her insults, they still stung. Why didn’t Olivia stick up for him? He was good enough to take care of Monty, but not good enough to demand respect from her tall, irritatingly clever friend?

Bull shite.

It was an unusually warm night, and his back windows were open too. He took a beer out of the fridge and sat at his painfully fashionable butcher’s block table in the kitchen, listening to the feminine sing-song of their voices.

“-Damn it why’d you even come back with us?” Alex said. “In another time, I would’ve gone home with ‘er, no questions asked.”

“Al!” Olivia squealed.

“I said in another time. Right now, I’ve got my girl. With the sexy quivering bunny nose,” she said. He heard the smack of kisses.

“Oi, you too. You got time enough for that after I pass out,” Connie said, but her voice was full of mirth.

“She was really into you,” Olivia said.

“I think it was the magic of Monty,” Alex said. They laughed. John smiled in his dark kitchen.

“It was kind of creepy. How are you gonna hit on a woman holding a baby?” Connie said. He noticed that since she was drinking, her accent was different. There was a bit of something else in there. It was … nice.

“I think she knew he wasn’t yours,” Alex said. “You look far too fresh-faced to be a new mum.”

John giggled.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Olivia said.

“I adore you, dark circles and all,” Alex said. “In any case, I’ve a got a nice set of my own.”

He heard clinking glass, and smelled wine on the breeze.

“I’m not in the mood for lady love right now,” Connie said, finally. “I’m kinda drained on lesbian drama.”

“What?” Alex said.

“The New York queer scene can get really weird sometimes. Too much politics,” Olivia said, quite matter-of-factly.

“And not enough pussy,” said Connie.

John wriggled on his bar seat. He didn’t want to be aroused by the thought of Connie rooting slowly between the thighs of another beautiful sapphic lady, but he still swelled and made his skinny jeans uncomfortably tight. Jesus, not again. At least it wasn’t about Alex and Olivia. He had gotten over that a while back.

“To pussy!” Alex said loudly. It must’ve been a toast.

“Without a side of politics!” Connie said, and glass clinked again.

“Hear hear!” Olivia added. It was adorably posh, and there was laughter.

“It’s been a while since you did anything, though,” Olivia said. “Don’t deprive yourself on our account. We can do without you a night or two.”

“I have plenty of time for single serving affairs in New York,” she said. “And I haven’t seen you in over two years.”

“But this would’ve been a guilt free vacation affair,” Alex said.

Connie laughed. “Nah. Not my thing,” she said. For some reason, John’s heart dropped.

He heard the canned sound of a crying Monty - the video monitor.

“I’ll see to him,” Alex said. He heard the soft smack of kisses again, then the sliding door clicked closed.

“Have you found anything on Ella?” Olivia said.

“Not really. PI is just about exhausted every source.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You warned me. I didn’t listen.”

He was lost. Ella? PIs? Sources? She must be an ex-lover. It sounded sordid.

“I’m sorry anyway,” Olivia said. Monty’s crying stopped, and they heard Alex softly singing to him.

“I’m so happy you made it up with her,” Connie said. “I told you to have faith. Not all artists are self-involved jerks. I knew Alex would come around. A strong woman, she is. I can’t imagine-”

The baby hiccuped, and started to sing himself softly to sleep.

“You should’ve dropped Monty off with Scoliosis Boy after dinner,” she said.

“Jesus, Con! I told you that in confidence!”

John frowned, and his eyes began to burn. He got up and sat on the counter, by the window. Although his first reaction was to walk away, he needed to know what Olivia would say.

“Squeak squeak. Squeak squeak,” she said, then snickered. He didn’t need any explanation. She was imitating the sound of a brace.

“Stop it, Connie. It’s cruel.”

“Fucker’s back is straight enough now,” she said. He didn’t comprehend her bitterness. He tried to be nice to her. He didn’t really succeed, but he tried. “He looks like a leather-clad pipe cleaner.”

The sound of Monty’s sleepy song cut out - she turned off the monitor.

“You seem more bitter about what happened that I am,” Olivia said. “And I forbid it. I’m over it. I’m happy. I’m sorry …  if your life hasn’t turned out the same.”

There were a few beats of silence.

“That was a low blow, Liv. And for that affected, misogynist asshole next door? Wow.”

“You don’t know him like we do-“

“-I know him well enough!” Connie said. “He ruined her life.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Olivia said. “but you can’t blame him individually for what happened. It’s not fair.”

“He put it out there. He poisoned him. It’s his fault.”

“It was a long time coming, long before John. And it’s not terribly surprising. Aren’t Latin men misogynist to begin with?” Olivia said.

There was silence. He stuck his head out to hear better. The window box heavy with potted herbs creaked with his weight.

“I’m sorry,” Olivia said, so softly he could barely hear it. “Ella was a horror. You deserve better anyway. And you will find it. I know it, Con.”

“That man. He wheedled his way into your affection, and I don’t understand it. How about if he fills Monty’s head with that Mannism nonsense too?”

“I’ll eat his heart in the marketplace,” Olivia said. 

John gasped. The wood groaned, and the window box fell to the patio with a crash.

The women screamed.

“Good night, ladies,” he said, poking his head out fully and waving bashfully.

“Good night, John,” Olivia said.

Connie’s face was set in stone. “I’m going to turn in, love. Thank you so much for today. Tell Alex good night,” she said, and walked into the house. Olivia walked across to his yard and started picking up the broken planting pots.

“How long were you eavesdropping?” she said, handing him an intact pot of thyme.

“Just a little bit. Squeak squeak,” he said, giving her a hurt look.

“I was angry at you when I first told her about you. But I never said anything like that. I promise.”

“I told you that in confidence. Not even Alex knows the grim tale,” he said. “Not all of it.”

“She’s beyond my best friend. More than a sister. I tell her everything,” she said, kicking loam into the bed of irises just beneath his window. She looked at him. “I know that isn’t an excuse.”

“Did you guys ever…” he wiggled his brow. He inspected the rotting wood of the broken window box.

Olivia shrugged. “Not really.”

“What does that even mean?” he said. Already, he was designing a far stronger, more beautiful box in his head.

“We were young, and didn’t know what we were doing,” she said. She leaned into his window and rested her elbows on the sill.

“Even if you don’t know exactly what you are doing, you’re still doing something,” he said. He handed her a fresh beer. She drank, then burped quietly.

“We experimented. But she was my first love.”

His eyes widened.

“It was more than sexual. It was … a deep, intense, passionate friendship. The sex was … inconsequential.”

“That’s bull shite,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “Sex is never inconsequential.”

“You say that to the steady stream of ladies who come through here?” she said, and took another drink. “Turn on the light, will you?”

“If you’ve noticed them, then you must’ve also noticed that there are many less lady guests since Monty,” he said.

“You don’t have to curtail your activities because of him. Especially if it drives you to listening for naughty noises at night through open windows.”

“I was joking about that,” he said, throwing the broken box on the table. He would start on the new one tonight. He had too much energy to sleep.

“It was crass,” she said.

“You know I don’t perv over you ladies anymore, right? That was before I really knew you. I wasn’t gonna let her have the last word, though.”

Olivia bit her lip. “That might be a losing battle, John. She’s clever, and has a very sharp tongue.”

“By what I heard, so do you,” he said. draining his beer. “Who’s Ella?”

“Shit,” Olivia said. “It’s not your business.”

“And yet…” he said.

“What did you hear?”

“Stuff about a private investigator and running out of sources,” he said.

Liv sucked her teeth. “She’s an ex-girlfriend. Ex-fiancee, actually.”

“I thought you said she wasn’t a lesbian.”

“She’s bi,” Olivia said.

“Oh. Is Ella why she doesn’t want to be with a woman now?”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “You really got stuck in, didn’t you? Ass.” She put the beer down and walked away, but John stuck his hand out the window and whistled at her.

“Wait!”

Olivia stopped, but she didn’t turn around.

“I like a difficult woman. You think she’s in the mood for some guilt-free, vacation man love?”

“Good night, John,” she said, and walked into the house.

Next Chapter

[unsettlingshortstories]

How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Neil Gaiman (2007)

"Come on," said Vic. "It'll be great."

"No, it won't," I said, although I'd lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.

"It'll be brilliant," said Vic, for the hundredth time. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" He grinned with white teeth.

We both attended an all-boys' school in south London. While it would be a lie to say that we had no experience with girls -- Vic seemed to have had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister's friends -- it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys. Well, I did, anyway. It's hard to speak for someone else, and I've not seen Vic for thirty years. I'm not sure that I would know what to say to him now if I did.

We were walking the backstreets that used to twine in a grimy maze behind East Croydon station -- a friend had told Vic about a party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not, and I didn't. But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was Vic's guest at his house, so I was trailing along beside him.

"It'll be the same as it always is," I said. "After an hour you'll be off somewhere snogging the prettiest girl at the party, and I'll be in the kitchen listening to somebody's mum going on about politics or poetry or something."

"You just have to talk to them," he said. "I think it's probably that road at the end here." He gestured cheerfully, swinging the bag with the bottle in it.

"Don't you know?"

"Alison gave me directions and I wrote them on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S'okay. I can find it."

"How?" Hope welled slowly up inside me.

"We walk down the road," he said, as if speaking to an idiot child. "And we look for the party. Easy."

I looked, but saw no party: just narrow houses with rusting cars or bikes in their concreted front gardens; and the dusty glass fronts of newsagents, which smelled of alien spices and sold everything from birthday cards and secondhand comics to the kind of magazines that were so pornographic that they were sold already sealed in plastic bags. I had been there when Vic had slipped one of those magazines beneath his sweater, but the owner caught him on the pavement outside and made him give it back.

We reached the end of the road and turned into a narrow street of terraced houses. Everything looked very still and empty in the Summer's evening. "It's all right for you," I said. "They fancy you. You don't actually have to talk to them." It was true: one urchin grin from Vic and he could have his pick of the room.

"Nah. S'not like that. You've just got to talk."

The times I had kissed my sister's friends I had not spoken to them. They had been around while my sister was off doing something elsewhere, and they had drifted into my orbit, and so I had kissed them. I do not remember any talking. I did not know what to say to girls, and I told him so.

They're just girls," said Vic. "They don't come from another planet."

As we followed the curve of the road around, my hopes that the party would prove unfindable began to fade: a low pulsing noise, music muffled by walls and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It was eight in the evening, not that early if you aren't yet sixteen, and we weren't. Not quite.

I had parents who liked to know where I was, but I don't think Vic's parents cared that much. He was the youngest of five boys. That in itself seemed magical to me: I merely had two sisters, both younger than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely. I had wanted a brother as far back as I could remember. When I turned thirteen, I stopped wishing on falling stars or first stars, but back when I did, a brother was what I had wished for.

We went up the garden path, crazy paving leading us past a hedge and a solitary rosebush to a pebble- dashed facade. We rang the doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not have told you how old she was, which was one of the things about girls I had begun to hate: when you start out as kids you're just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed, and you're all five, or seven, or eleven, together. And then one day there's a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they know all about everything, and they have periods and breasts and makeup and God-only-knew-what-else -- for I certainly didn't. The diagrams in biology textbooks were no substitute for being, in a very real sense, young adults. And the girls of our age were.

Vic and I weren't young adults, and I was beginning to suspect that even when I started needing to shave every day, instead of once every couple of weeks, I would still be way behind.

The girl said, "Hello?"

Vic said, "We're friends of Alison's." We had met Alison, all freckles and orange hair and a wicked smile, in Hamburg, on a German exchange. The exchange organizers had sent some girls with us, from a local girls' school, to balance the sexes. The girls, our age, more or less, were raucous and funny, and had more or less adult boyfriends with cars and jobs and motorbikes and -- in the case of one girl with crooked teeth and a raccoon coat, who spoke to me about it sadly at the end of a party in Hamburg, in, of course, the kitchen -- a wife and kids.

"She isn't here," said the girl at the door. "No Alison."

"Not to worry," said Vic, with an easy grin. "I'm Vic. This is Enn." A beat, and then the girl smiled back at him. Vic had a bottle of white wine in a plastic bag, removed from his parents' kitchen cabinet. "Where should I put this, then?"

She stood out of the way, letting us enter. "There's a kitchen in the back," she said. "Put it on the table there, with the other bottles." She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was beautiful.

"What's your name, then?" said Vic.

She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his crooked white grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had ever heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he meant it.

Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen, and I looked into the front room, where the music was coming from. There were people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance, swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.

This was during the early days of punk. On our own record players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people's parties you'd hear ELO or 10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During the German exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on was Neil Young's

Harvest

, and his song "Heart of Gold" had threaded through the trip like a refrain:

I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . .

The music playing in that front room wasn't anything I recognized.

It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk, and a bit like an LP I'd been given for my last birthday, of strange sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a beat, though, and the half- dozen girls in that room were moving gently to it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone.

Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a can of lager. "There's booze back in the kitchen," he told me. He wandered over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn't hear what they were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in that conversation.

I didn't like beer, not back then. I went off to see if there was something I wanted to drink. On the kitchen table stood a large bottle of Coca-Cola, and I poured myself a plastic tumblerful, and I didn't dare say anything to the pair of girls who were talking in the underlit kitchen. They were animated and utterly lovely. Each of them had very black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes, and their accents were foreign, and each of them was out of my league.

I wandered, Coke in hand.

The house was deeper than it looked, larger and more complex than the two- up two- down model I had imagined. The rooms were underlit -- I doubt there was a bulb of more than 40 watts in the building -- and each room I went into was inhabited: in my memory, inhabited only by girls. I did not go upstairs.

A girl was the only occupant of the conservatory. Her hair was so fair it was white, and long, and straight, and she sat at the glass-topped table, her hands clasped together, staring at the garden outside, and the gathering dusk. She seemed wistful.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" I asked, gesturing with my cup. She shook her head, and then followed it up with a shrug, to indicate that it was all the same to her. I sat down.

Vic walked past the conservatory door. He was talking to Stella, but he looked in at me, sitting at the table, wrapped in shyness and awkwardness, and he opened and closed his hand in a parody of a speaking mouth. Talk. Right.

"Are you from around here?" I asked the girl.

She shook her head. She wore a low-cut silvery top, and I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts.

I said, "What's your name? I'm Enn."

"Wain's Wain," she said, or something that sounded like it. "I'm a second."

"That's uh. That's a different name."

She fixed me with huge, liquid eyes. "It indicates that my progenitor was also Wain, and that I am obliged to report back to her. I may not breed."

"Ah. Well. Bit early for that anyway, isn't it?"

She unclasped her hands, raised them above the table, spread her fingers. "You see?" The little finger on her left hand was crooked, and it bifurcated at the top, splitting into two smaller fingertips. A minor deformity. "When I was finished a decision was needed. Would I be retained, or eliminated? I was fortunate that the decision was with me. Now, I travel, while my more perfect sisters remain at home in stasis. They were firsts. I am a second.

Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all I have seen. All my impressions of this place of yours."

"I don't actually live in Croydon," I said. "I don't come from here." I wondered if she was American. I had no idea what she was talking about.

"As you say," she agreed, "neither of us comes from here." She folded her six- fingered left hand beneath her right, as if tucking it out of sight. "I had expected it to be bigger, and cleaner, and more colorful. But still, it is a jewel."

She yawned, covered her mouth with her right hand, only for a moment, before it was back on the table again. "I grow weary of the journeying, and I wish sometimes that it would end. On a street in Rio at Carnival, I saw them on a bridge, golden and tall and insect-eyed and winged, and elated I almost ran to greet them, before I saw that they were only people in costumes. I said to Hola Colt, 'Why do they try so hard to look like us?' and Hola Colt replied, 'Because they hate themselves, all shades of pink and brown, and so small.' It is what I experience, even me, and I am not grown. It is like a world of children, or of elves." Then she smiled, and said, "It was a good thing they could not any of them see Hola Colt."

"Um," I said, "do you want to dance?"

She shook her head immediately. "It is not permitted," she said. "I can do nothing that might cause damage to property. I am Wain's."

"Would you like something to drink, then?"

"Water," she said.

I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another Coke, and filled a cup with water from the tap. From the kitchen back to the hall, and from there into the conservatory, but now it was quite empty.

I wondered if the girl had gone to the toilet, and if she might change her mind about dancing later. I walked back to the front room and stared in. The place was filling up. There were more girls dancing, and several lads I didn't know, who looked a few years older than me and Vic. The lads and the girls all kept their distance, but Vic was holding Stella's hand as they danced, and when the song ended he put an arm around her, casually, almost proprietorially, to make sure that nobody else cut in.

I wondered if the girl I had been talking to in the conservatory was now upstairs, as she did not appear to be on the ground floor.

I walked into the living room, which was across the hall from the room where the people were dancing, and I sat down on the sofa. There was a girl sitting there already. She had dark hair, cut short and spiky, and a nervous manner.

Talk, I thought. "Um, this mug of water's going spare," I told her, "if you want it?"

She nodded, and reached out her hand and took the mug, extremely carefully, as if she were unused to taking things, as if she could trust neither her vision nor her hands.

"I love being a tourist," she said, and smiled hesitantly. She had a gap between her two front teeth, and she sipped the tap water as if she were an adult sipping a fine wine. "The last tour, we went to sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the whales. We heard their histories and we shivered in the chill of the outer places, then we swam deepward where the heat churned and comforted us.

I wanted to go back. This time, I wanted it. There was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to world. Do you like it?"

"Like what?"

She gestured vaguely to the room -- the sofa, the armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.

"It's all right, I suppose."

"I told them I did not wish to visit world," she said. "My parent-teacher was unimpressed. 'You will have much to learn,' it told me. I said, 'I could learn more in sun, again. Or in the deeps. Jessa spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.'

"But there was no reasoning with it, and I came to world. Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here, embodied in a decaying lump of meat hanging on a frame of calcium. As I incarnated I felt things deep inside me, fluttering and pumping and squishing. It was my first experience with pushing air through the mouth, vibrating the vocal cords on the way, and I used it to tell parent-teacher that I wished that I would die, which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit strategy from world."

There were black worry beads wrapped around her wrist, and she fiddled with them as she spoke. "But knowledge is there, in the meat," she said, "and I am resolved to learn from it."

We were sitting close at the center of the sofa now. I decided I should put an arm around her, but casually. I would extend my arm along the back of the sofa and eventually sort of creep it down, almost imperceptibly, until it was touching her. She said, "The thing with the liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody told me, and I still do not understand. I have touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed and flown with the tachyon swans, and I still do not understand."

She wasn't the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my arm slide down a little, tentatively, so that it made contact with her back, and she did not tell me to take it away.

Vic called to me then, from the doorway. He was standing with his arm around Stella, protectively, waving at me. I tried to let him know, by shaking my head, that I was onto something, but he called my name and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa and walked over to the door. "What?"

"Er. Look. The party," said Vic, apologetically. "It's not the one I thought it was. I've been talking to Stella and I figured it out. Well, she sort of explained it to me. We're at a different party."

"Christ. Are we in trouble? Do we have to go?"

Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed her, gently, on the lips. "You're just happy to have me here, aren't you darlin'?"

"You know I am," she told him.

He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his white smile: roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a little bit wide- boy Prince Charming. "Don't worry. They're all tourists here anyway. It's a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany."

"It is?"

"Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you got to listen to them, too. You understand?"

"I did. I already talked to a couple of them."

"You getting anywhere?"

"I was till you called me over."

"Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to fill you in. Right?"

And he patted my arm and he walked away with Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.

Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy.

Stella was the most lovely of any of them, but she, of course, was Vic's, and they were going upstairs together, and that was just how things would always be.

There were several people now sitting on the sofa, talking to the gap- toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and they all laughed. I would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her again, and it didn't look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had gone, so I wandered out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found myself wondering where the music was coming from. I couldn't see a record player or speakers.

From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.

Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn't see any signs of someone's mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen table, then I poured a half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my plastic cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple of ice cubes and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the drink.

"What's that you're drinking?" A girl's voice.

"It's Pernod," I told her. "It tastes like aniseed balls, only it's alcoholic." I didn't say that I only tried it because I'd heard someone in the crowd ask for a Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.

"Can I have one?" I poured another Pernod, topped it off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets. It's not a hair style you see much now, but you saw it a lot back then.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Triolet," she said.

"Pretty name," I told her, although I wasn't sure that it was. She was pretty, though.

"It's a verse form," she said, proudly. "Like me."

"You're a poem?"

She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps bashfully. Her profile was almost flat -- a perfect Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school theater the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of Antigone's death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry Smith's drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was only fifteen then.

"You're a poem?" I repeated.

She chewed her lower lip. "If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea."

"Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?"

"What's your name?"

"Enn."

"So you are Enn," she said. "And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?"

"But they aren't different things. I mean, they aren't contradictory." It was a word I had read many times but never said aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places.

Con

tradict

ory

.

She wore a thin dress made of a white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a pale green, a color that would now make me think of tinted contact lenses; but this was thirty years ago; things were different then. I remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.

Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking nonsense, even if her name wasn't really Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, "We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."

"And then what happened?"

She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. "You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."

I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg pressing against hers.

She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.

"There are places that we are welcomed," said Triolet, "and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?"

"I don't know," I said, still smiling. I could hear the unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and boomed in the front room.

She leaned into me then and -- I suppose it was a kiss. . . . I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips, anyway, and then, satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own.

"Would you like to hear it?" she asked, and I nodded, unsure what she was offering me, but certain that I needed anything she was willing to give me.

She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the strangest thing about poetry -- you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.

Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don't remember. I know I wanted to.

And then Vic was shaking me violently. "Come on!" he was shouting. "Quickly. Come on!"

In my head I began to come back from a thousand miles away.

"Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on," he said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.

For the first time that evening I recognized one of the songs being played in the front room. A sad saxophone wail followed by a cascade of liquid chords, a man's voice singing cut-up lyrics about the sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.

She said, "I am not finished. There is yet more of me."

"Sorry love," said Vic, but he wasn't smiling any longer. "There'll be another time," and he grabbed me by the elbow and he twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I did not resist. I knew from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me if he got it into his head to do so. He wouldn't do it unless he was upset or angry, but he was angry now.

Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the door, I looked back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in the doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.

This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten much, and I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella's face as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall remember that.

Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes --

You wouldn't want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.

We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the tourists and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a mad helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer. We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long, into the gutter.

He wiped his mouth.

"She wasn't a--" He stopped.

He shook his head.

Then he said, "You know . . . I think there's a thing. When you've gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn't be you anymore? You'd be the person who'd done that? The places you just can't go. . . . I think that happened to me tonight."

I thought I knew what he was saying. "Screw her, you mean?" I said.

He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and twisted it violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him -- and lose -- but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me, making a low, gulping noise.

I looked at him curiously, and I realized that he was crying: his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran down his cheeks. Vic was sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a little boy.

He walked away from me then, shoulders heaving, and he hurried down the road so he was in front of me and I could no longer see his face. I wondered what had occurred in that upstairs room to make him behave like that, to scare him so, and I could not even begin to guess.

The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat.

[deathtonormalcy56]

Full Circle

Prompt: “Nipples is not a name!”

Characters: Dean x Reader

Warnings: Fluff, literally just fluff

Word Count: 1375

A/N: This is my entry for Cam’s (@babypieandwhiskey) 200 follower writing challenge. It’s a little late, but thanks for being so sweet and working with me. (: This is also the first thing I’ve written in a while so please bear with me, my creative side has been getting placed on the back burner thanks to engineering stuff. It’s unbeta’d so any mistakes are mine. But yeah, hopefully this isn’t terrible lol. 

“Dean!”

“What? That’s totally an option.”

Your eyebrows scrunched together as you glared at the older Winchester boy. He had been your next door neighbor since you were toddlers, but as years passed and melded into the grandeur of being a teen, one thing had never changed – Dean was still a pain in your ass.

Shaking your head softly, you watched him shrug his shoulders. “I mean the thing has twenty of ‘em already,” Dean nudged the playground sand with the front of his boot, a puff of dust covering the weathered material, “Don’t see the big deal in giving it an accurate name.”

“She.”

He caught your eye as you swayed slowly on the rickety swing set, “What was that?”

“She,” you reiterated, “Not ‘it’, she.”

The squeaking of rusted bolts, and chirping crickets filled the thickening night air as Dean mulled over your response. His tongue grazed his bottom lip before his face lit up with a toothy grin. “Well she deserves a proper name,” he answered, emphasizing the pronoun, “and I already gave ya’ one.”

“Nipples is not a name!” you exclaimed before playfully punching him on his bicep. The action pushed his swing to the outer side, only for him to come back in and collide with you. Dean chuckled as you struggled to keep your balance on the plastic seat and regain control.

Easily he took hold of the metal chain and steadied your movement. “You didn’t have to do that,” you scowled at him, your cheeks flushed with embarrassment, “I was more than capable of doing it myself.”

“Whatever you say, sweetheart,” Dean snickered, bringing his hand back into the pocket of his leather jacket.

Glancing up to hide the small smile at the endearment, you scanned the sky. The night was quite clear, the ink colored background coated in sprinkles of white stars. From one end to the other the twinkling dots decorated the scenery, leaving just enough space for the full moon to illuminate the abandoned playground.

“It’s so beautiful out tonight,” you whispered, suddenly taken back by the spectacle.

Peeking towards you, Dean couldn’t help but notice the way your (y/c/e) almost sparkled in the moonlight. “Yeah,” he cleared his throat before kicking the sand once again, “A lot better looking than that mangy piece of fur snoozing away in that cardboard box.”

Scoffing, you rolled your eyes, “Her name is Bitsy.”

“Bitsy? That’s what you came up with?”

“It’s a lot better than Nipples,” you retorted as you slid off the swing. Ignoring the sand that magically seethed into your tennis shoes, you walked to the edge of the designated area for the swing set, where a small cardboard box was laid.

“And,” you grunted, leaning down to carefully pick up the tiny, black mass that was inside, “she’s not mangy. Just a little banged up is all.”

You made your way back to where you had come and plopped yourself onto the swing. Rocking yourself back and forth with your toes, not once did you let your eyes shift from the bundle that was cradled in your arm.

“Nothing a little love can’t fix,” you cooed as you ran your fingers through the tangled fur, “Right Bitsy?”

A set up bright blue eyes blinked back at you, followed by steady purr. “See?” you met Dean’s gaze with a bright smile, “She even agreed.”

It was then that Dean knew there was nothing getting in the way of you and that kitten, but he didn’t mind. You were happy – that was worth much more than the allergy medication he was going to have to invest in to hang around you from now on.

“Yeah,” he softly answered, “I guess she did.”

“Sweetheart?”

Dean gently squeezed your shoulder, jolting you out of your daze. Lightly shaking your head to clear your mind, you quirk your eyebrows at him, “Yeah?”

“You alright?” his forehead creased with worry as he began to swirl comforting circles up and down the curve of your arm, “You zoned out for a while there.”

Shifting on the park bench, you flashed him a slight smile, “I’m fine. Just reminiscing the good ol’ days.” Looking back to the playground that was erupting with small children, you nodded to the two-person swing set off in the far corner, “Think we could still sit on that thing, or would it collapse?”

“You? Definitely. Me?” Dean patted his stomach, “Not so much.”

You snorted and rolled your eyes. The two of you may have been heading into your thirties, but you both knew the only thing his flannel was shielding was rock hard muscle. Just as you scooted closer to his side to whisper a highly inappropriate comment, the moment was interrupted by a very familiar shrill.

“Mommy! Daddy! Look what I found!”

Whipping your head to the side, you were welcomed with the sight of your toddler practically sprinting towards your bench. You couldn’t exactly pinpoint what is was she had wrapped in her arms, but by the size of her gap-toothed smile, you knew it was something important.

“What is it honey?” you sweetly asked as she slowed in front of you.

“Look!” she squealed again before glancing down. Removing her left arm from the top of her other one, she revealed a ball of white neatly tucked into the crook of her elbow. “It’s a kitty, mommy! And she looks like Bitsy but white!”

You were speechless as you stared into the piercing, tiny blue eyes that peeked through the tufts of white. It had been almost a year since your beloved Bitsy had passed, but time never fully healed the wound her loss left behind.

“Where’d you find it?” Dean warmly smiled at his daughter, leaning forward to get a better look at the fur ball.  

“Behind a bush over there,” she pointed with her free hand briefly before staring back to her father, “Can we keep it, daddy? Pretty please?”

Tucking a strand of her dirty blonde hair behind her ear, Dean’s smile grew, causing the corners of his eyes to crinkle, “I don’t see why not, but let’s ask mom to make sure.”

Immediately she zoned in on you, still gaping at her discovery. “Daddy said yes, mommy, can we keep it?” Your daughter punctuated her question by wiggling on her feet and her signature puppy-dog face. “Yeah mommy,” Dean mimicked her tone perfectly, “can we?”

Your eyes darted between the two of them for a moment before replying, “Let me see it, Gaby.”

Not bothering to hide her hope, your daughter eagerly held out the kitten to you. Carefully you took it from her and placed it on your lap. Choosing to plop onto its side, it slowly closed its eyes and purred loudly.

“It likes you!” your daughter shrieked.

“She,” you muttered as you reached out to rub behind the kitten’s ear.

“What?” she asked.

Trying your hardest to suppress a laugh, you looked back at your daughter, “Not ‘it’, ‘she.’ And I guess we can keep her.”

You had never seen her more ecstatic in her life. Gaby promptly jumped and threw her fists into the air, followed by an impromptu happy dance. “Yay! Mommy said we can keep it! Did you hear that, daddy?” she shook Dean’s knees and beamed up at him, “she said yes!”

“Whoa now,” he chuckled before picking her up and placing her onto his lap, “You know, having a pet brings a lot of responsibilities. Think you can handle such a big job?” Without hesitation Gaby nodded her head.

“Good,” you answered for him, “The first one being giving our newest family member a name. Got any ideas?”

Her face scrunched together in thought for a moment, but it didn’t take long for her green eyes to light up, signaling her decision. “Nipples!”

“Excuse me?” you quickly replied, shooting daggers at Dean. He rose his free hand up defensively and shrugged.

“Nipples,” Gaby repeated again, completely serious, “she has them all over her belly, you know.”

Still bewildered at her name choice, you shook your head in disbelief. As you took in a short breath, you couldn’t help but break into a fit of giggles, “You are so your father’s daughter.”

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