#something remains same for years and decades
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Honestly, Arcane needed at least another act to close it properly. There was just.....too much going on. Jinx's ending ground my gears and the way that Vi just.....seems to move on. Bro,that's the baby sister you sat through nearly a decade of psychological and physical trauma to get back to. Her reaction should have been way more visceral. If Vi developed alcoholism over her situationship going south, her sister (and dad!) going out like that should have had her thoroughly crashing out.
Ekko and Mel......now that was personal. They really gave them the Magical Negro™ treatment and no explanation for it. And oh boy, am I tired of it. I hate the narrative of black characters having to self-sacrifice for people who would not do the same for them. Could you imagine being fucked with by something like the Arcane or LeBlanc for allegedly a year or so,just to immediately go to war the moment you're back in normal surroundings? Do they get a break at all?
THANK YOU ANON for describing how myself and my friend both feel about this (we’re both poc)
I’m also upset at how minimized Vi and Ekko’s relationship is, especially with ekko thinking Vi was dead in season 1, and we only get one more interaction between them both this season. And Ekko is just….so lonely after he has suffered great losses as well, ESPECIALLY after seeing all that he did back in the alternate timeline and remaining selfless to save those he loves back in his timeline.
Ekko, Mel, and Sevika deserved SO MUCH better as well and way more screen time to do their stories justice. Things happened way too conveniently and too quickly. I’m also struggling to understand how Mel managed to control her powers the way she did at the last moment.
Vi absolutely should have crashed out. I wanted her to go find Ekko and talk to him, at this point they both need each other because they’re family too.
Honorable mention, Ambessa. I have…..feelings about that whole thing.
#arcane#arcane league of legends#league of legends#arcane season 2#arcane season two#arcane critical#arcane act three#arcane act 3#vi arcane#jinx arcane#ekko arcane#mel medarda#arcane ambessa#ambessa medarda#arcane silco#singed arcane#vander arcane#warwick#piltover#zaun#arcane zaun#jayce talis#viktor arcane#arcane jayce#hextech#riot games#caitvi#caitlyn kiramman#timebomb#arcane caitlyn
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— what does it mean to be a star?
pairing: sunday x gn!reader
premise: sunday has stayed with you and the stellaron hunters for a few years. your lives has been filled with many adventures, both good and bad. but like any other story crafted by elio, they must come to an end eventually.
– warnings: slight angst if you squint, implications of committing suicide, not proofread that much.
– author’s note: one final (?) stellaron hunter!sunday fic before he gets released. ive missed writing for this man. art credits to 冒火锅海台 on Weibo for the art. | 1.9k words.
— tags: @ryescapades @mitsvriii @https-sourlimes @dazaisms ; if you'd like to be tagged, please let me know by sending an ask off anon or filling out the forms in my pinned !!!
“what do you think makes a star, a star?”
elio asked you that question decades ago. and only now have you arrived at one final answer. out of curiosity, you asked each hunter the same question over the years that have passed, each of them giving one answer that didn’t quite match the rest.
“to be the top player of course!” silver wolf exclaimed, her tone in a matter of fact manner as she didn’t even look up from her console. you only shook your head in amusement, jotting her answer down in a new journal your boss had given you as a present.
“a star you ask,” kafka tilted her head curiously at you. eyes freed from her usual contacts and makeup followed your movement as you stirred the coffee in your cup. “well, a star for me would be something that captures the attention of others without much effort. stars often piqued your interest, didn’t they?” you only smiled in response and nodded. you made a mental note to write it down later before you went to bed.
firefly took a little longer than the last two to answer. you patiently waited, spooning pieces of cake to your lips as the girl in front of you was deep in thought. “a guide. even in your darkest moment, a star will shine as a guide for you to follow so you don’t stray from your path.” she answered in a whisper. eyes wistful as she played with the dessert on her plate.
“a star,” blade’s gruff voice cut through the night like a knife. a few bottles of local xianzhou wine separating you two as you sat on the roof overlooking the stars above. you hadn’t expected blade of all people to humor your questions, but here you were, grateful in his presence. “it means to burn. so brightly you are unrecognizable, to others and yourself.”
“you have a sad answer,” you mutter, taking a sip of the wine from the small cup as the man huffs.
“time takes a heavy toll for both you and i,” the wind sways his hair in a deathly dance. he brings his cup to his lips and drinks in one go. you don’t mention how you can barely finish a cup with how strong the drink was—blade could not feel the pain of it in his throat, and he never will. “you’ve already burned through the remains of your past self. it won’t be long before you look in the mirror and be unable to recognize your reflection.”
you frown at his response. “you’re pessimistic.”
“and you’re hypocritical.”
you have no rebuttal to his accusation, after all, at the very core of your character, the word “hypocrite” hangs like a thorny crown.
“tell me, starcatcher,” red eyes reflected the conflict you’ve been massing deep within the columns of your bones. they crash onto your being like how the oceans do to the shores—unrelenting and loud. “are you that afraid of losing another that you love them as if tomorrow they’ll die?”
you fled the roof that night. unable to face your hopelessness head on after a fresh wound of death lingers by your heart. another attempt, another reminder of the welling darkness that swells from the tip of your fingers and slowly corrupts your entire body. it drowns you and you can’t help but fear that time is clutching your shoulder, weighing you down to the ocean floor as it laughs at your predicament.
“so it’s decided then.”
but that’s no longer the case. no, not anymore. it's been decades since then, and you’ve changed.
elio sits by his office chair, typewriter moved to the side as he personally penned the final bits of your songbird’s script. you were elio’s editor and proofreader. you don’t exactly remember when it started but when you were still an unwilling understudy—an actor who refused to acknowledge the stage—he would trap you in his office and force you to read over his script to make sure there were no errors.
a small and sad smile tugged at your lips as you read the pages of inked fate. “this is for the best.”
“the best, yes,” elio ceases his writing. compiling the papers into one bulk and staring right at you. “but it's not the ending you wanted.”
you shook your head, “my preferred ending isn’t relevant to how the story ends. it’s not my story to tell.”
“yes, but it's a story you’re meant to read,” there was pity in his eyes. your heart felt too heavy with realization to even feel offended by such a look. “you have the right to feel dissatisfied.”
“thank you, elio, truly,” you only gave destiny’s slave one final smile before standing. you quietly made your way to the door, forcing your steps to sound quiet and lacking sadness. but you can’t do that, you never will. building up walls will only prove to be a waste of effort. not when elio knows every brick by heart.
with a heavy sigh, you linger by the office door before making your way to your workshop. memories from years ago flood your mind as the halls fill your senses. photos from vacation, missions, and simple outings hang by the walls while certain trinkets and relics from bygone travels litter the many desks and drawers. time did take a heavy toll just like blade said. kafka’s skin started to wrinkle a bit, silver wolf started growing taller, firefly grew paler and paler, and blade looked more like death with every breath he took.
time was a painful thing to remember—it’s not infinite. and even if it was, it's never always kind to everyone. and you? you are worse than time and death itself. you were the inevitable–finality.
“good morning, [name].”
a voice from behind greets you like a new sunrise–a reminder that a new day is here. you couldn’t help the smile that tugged on your lips. seeing sunday in blade’s shirt hang over his body like a blanket, firefly’s hair ties on his wrists and a spare console from silver wolf in one hand brings you so much joy.
“sunday, good morning!” you sounded breathless. tucking both hands behind your back to hide your shaking as he joined you on your way to the workshop he’s made as his makeshift nest.
sunday smiles—filled with all the hope you’ve craved and lost. it stings your heart like a needle but you don’t show it. you’re first to look away, like all the other times in his presence, unable to face the way his wings flutter and smile twitch in concern.
when you reach the workshop, you flicker the lights on and sunday makes himself at home. sitting by the windowsill as you sat down by your table. scattered fabrics for sunday’s final mission lay in your hands, and you’d be damned if you messed up now. even with a heavy heart, you willed your hands to work, all the while ignoring the concerned stare of the angel sunbathing by the window.
the two of you spend the first few hours of morning in each other’s quiet presence before your tongue itches to ask him a question. “sunday,” you call his name and you curse the flutter in your chest when he immediately looks at you. he noticed his overly quick response and covered half of his face with a fist, pretending to hide a cough instead of his coloring cheeks.
“yes?” he asks, attention solely on you as you pin the needle back on the cushion and smooth out any creases.
“what does it mean to be a star?”
he blinked owlishly at your question. a soft hum escaped his lips as his fingers tapped on the rim of his cup in contemplation. “is there…” he tests the waters—seeing if it's too hot or too cold. “any particular occasion for you to ask me a question?”
you shake your head in amusement when his more formal tone slips out. “no, not at all. just a little tradition is all.”
“well, then,” the words die out on his tongue. every once in a while, sunday would peer at you like a lost child but you’d only nod encouragingly. “a star means to be remembered.” he looked out the window, watching the clouds pass by in a blur. “even if they aren’t always there, you know they exist.”
sometimes you wonder if it's possible for sunday to look at himself through the lens of your eyes. he was beautiful like the praise of idrila, happiness like aha’s laughter, and the curiosity for adventure like akivili. sunday wasn’t just a star, he was the entire universe. and he remained blissfully unaware of it.
“[name], is everything all right?”
you’re snapped out of your daze when you feel his hand on your cheek. lost in the replays of sunday’s image in your mind, you didn’t notice the stray tears that had betrayed your image of an unbothered editor.
“please, don’t cry,” he whispers, pressing your foreheads together. his thumb gently wiping away the tears that escaped your eyes. you can’t help but chuckle. sunday truly was like a sponge when it comes to others’ habits.
“what hurts you so?”
“what makes you think i’m hurt?” quite frankly, you were hurt. so incredibly hurt by his eventual departure but your heart knows his stay was only temporary. but that didn’t mean you never hoped.
hoped. over the course of a few years, sunday had succeeded in the mission the other hunters failed at. he made you hope again.
“kafka is cooking everyone’s breakfast. it’ll surely brighten up your mood.” he states taking your hand in his and tugging you in the direction of the dining room and kitchen. sunday maneuvered through the headquarters with such ease your ribs began to clamp on your heart again.
this was his home, his respite. but only for a short time.
when the two of you enter the room, you notice his frown. the emotions of everyone were palpable—it felt suffocating. your eyes met blade and you just smiled. one deep breath in and you snapped back into your joyous self. bringing temporary light to the room.
even as you ate and chatted, there were undertones of sadness. sunday nudged your side and quietly asked you, “are you quite sure everything is alright? everyone seems sad today.”
you look at them one by one. kafka’s eyes are slowly being accompanied by eye bags and wrinkles, silver wolf is nearing blade’s shoulder, firefly looks paler, and blade’s hand shakes as he holds his chopsticks. you look at sunday’s eyes, and smile. even he was a victim of time with the way his hair grew longer and face filled with more life.
“they’re just worried,” you look away first like always. meeting blade’s gaze halfway and smiling to yourself when you see him huff in denial. “your next mission is here.”
what does it mean to be a star? elio asked you that question a long, long time ago. and you only found the answer in the form of an angel with wings behind his ears and eyes that shined like the sun. the star you’ve grown to love burns brighter than the sun but still requires rest when night falls.
to be a star means to be remembered, even in the face of departure. you remain bright and unforgotten. left in the care of a conductor and an express you’ve once loved.
to be a star means to face the inevitable that sunday was meant for greater things than being just a fugitive venturing the universe.
© vxnuslogy 2024. please do not copy, repost, or translate any of my works.
#sunday x reader#honkai star rail x reader#—stellaronhvnters.#honkai star rail imagines#honkai star rail headcanons#honkai star rail x you#honkai star rail sunday#hsr x reader#hsr imagines#hsr headcanons#hsr x you#hsr sunday#sunday x you#sunday imagines#sunday headcanons#( 🂡 ) – royal flush of stories .ᐟ
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लम्बी लम्बी रातों में नींद नहीं जब आती
कभी कभी इस फ़िराक़ से
कितने हसीं ख्वाब बन जाते हैं
उन में से कुछ ख्वाब भूल जाते हैं
कुछ याद रह जाते हैं
उन में से कुछ लोग भूल जाते हैं
कुछ याद रह जाते हैं
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On the verge of doing a deep dive compare and contrast between both Wicked and Evita being adapted for films because the parallels are RIGHT THERE. In this essay I will
#that same twenty year gap between the shows and the films though#STARTS WITH A DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT OF A MORALLY AMBIGUOUS PROTAGONIST#(i joke. the stage/film version of wicked really isn't even a little bit morally ambiguous#aaand the many many diplomatic negotiations with both Argentina and madonna about preserving Eva's image)#something something Glinda in the second half of Wicked channeling expensively dressed blonde political figurehead#literally the only two musical soundtracks i know inside out#but hilariously i imprinted on the film of Evita at an impressionable age and the show didn't get a west end revival for another decade#ironically that was 2006 when i also saw Wicked for the first time#more importantly the film of evita is based on the concept album rather than the show (and later productions use some film inspired changes)#and wicked the film moves even further away from the original book than the show does#i just have a lot of thoughts okay#and i really do have a terrible fondness for the heightened sepia nostalgia visuals of Evita it's a genuinely beautiful film#alan parker knows his shit#is it ~good~? i mean idk that that's quantifiable#i find it more watchable than the 2006 show revival#(also. also. Antonio Banderas. that is all.)#i think it uses screen space and the hinted at spaces beyond the stage much better than Wicked does in the film version#also? Evita is just allowed to be consistently snarky (because Che) and they kinda... stripped some of the snark from Wicked for the film.#i remain baffled by Choices.#(my new favourite Evita trivia is that both Meryl Streep and Michelle Pfeiffer were signed to star at various points and the CHOICES)
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In case it's hard to read/understand: "If I had a nickel for every time I had a story with a blonde girl named after a plant, who has a German father and a French mother but absolutely hates said mom, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice."
weird, extremely-specific tropes in my stories: pt 1
#oc liveblogging#ughhhhhhh i really CANNOT afford to be procrastinating rn but i know this happens when im extremelyyyyyy fucking stressed.#creative/art related classes always get me for this reason bc ill use 'wait but i need to find inspiration!' as an excuse to procrastinate.#fuckkkkkkkkkk. UGH IM NOT EVEN WRITING SOMETHING FROM SCRATCH ITS JUST A FINAL REVISION BUT IM CONVINCED IT SUCKS#the worst part is hkjhkjGHKJ I HAVE TO PRESENT SOME OF THIS SHIT AT AN. INTERNATIONAL FUCKING CONFERENCE GUYS. GUYSYSSSS#anyways this post is sadly not related to that. nothing im presenting is related to my ocs [un]fortunately lmao#ive just been thinking rotating various oc stories around in my head again ourgghhhh.#and i realized this LMAO. i mean maybe technically not 2 separate stories anymore because im recycling a lot from one for the other?#one of these was already established lowkey and the other was something i made for an assignment for a class like 2 years ago#i actually don't know if petunie will be blonde in her final incarnation?? ive always imagined her as silvery blonde ig but idk#if ill keep that. she doesnt have proper colors like colin but at least colin has his design set more straight somewhat.#and all the recent petunie development is lowkey really fucking funny to think abt. i girlbossed with her character development so#hard that she really replaced lucian as a protagonist HAHAJSDHKGJ. ok well not 100% kamille's story is a shoot-off#of lucian's technically? i guess? it started becoming that and now its solidified as that lowkey bc same town same place time period people#but man if im not careful i might accidentally make kamille/petunie's arc THE default one and lucian's main one the offshoot instead#a lot remains to be seen. but also yeah the other one who's story is mostly getting recycled (myrtille) actually ALSO HAD HER MOM#COME FROM THIS SAME FUCKING PLACE BASICALLY. a few decades later but still bruh given developments for lucian's story too its just like#at this point im noticing a pattern man wtf is wrong w/ women who come from this town specifically lol. 😔🥴#this town in general is just fucking cursed though i think ahkjshkg. i mean that jokingly and literally lolololl i gotta. work on it. but y#I HATE IT HERE WHY ARE WEIRD LITTLE FUCKING TOWNS WHERE BAD SHIT HAPPENS ALWAYS A CONSISTENT TROPE IN MY STORIES /silly#I DONT EVEN COME FROM A WEIRD LITTLE TOWN MY HOMETOWN IS LIKE. AVERAGE NORMALISH NOT SUPER LARGE??? IDFK?????#haaaaaaa fuck i need to finish this by the end of TODAY I S2G!!! SO I CAN MOVE ON TO ALL THE OTHER SHIT I OWE FUCKKKK
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OH MY GOD.
I forget about Tumblr for 2 days, then I come back and I find this. MAN what a find it was!
Part 13!
For the last few days the only time I can function, draw and work is at night. And summer nights are so fucking short jfhfhf
I hate summer -_-
Anyway. All the brothers are in the past now. In one way or another, at least haha
Part 1
#here I go crying again weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee#AGH DONNIE LOOKS SO SAD AND TINY#LEOS SOUL IS SO SAD AND TINY#POOR RAPH IN THAT ONE PANEL WHERE HE HOLDS CASEY... HE LOOKS SO CONCERNED OMIGOSH#Loving Caseys new outfit btw-#BUT LOOK AT DONNIE HES SO SMOL AND SAD#He's just. Holding Leo. He's holding the very same brother who's been holding him for decades. And it hurts him so much to do so.#Donnie. for all his life. has been thinking of being able to hold Leo up just as Leo held him up for so long. Now that he's actually doing-#-it though... It's taking a toll on him. Mentally and physically. Because he's looking down at such a prominent figure in his life. such a-#-strong and capable brother. He's holding on to the one thing that remains of such a person. He's holding onto Leonardo's soul.#And deep down inside. it's killing Donnie.#ALSO I WOULD LIKE TO MENTION THAT LEOS SOUL IS THE ONLY TIME WE'VE SEEN COLOR IN THIS COMIC!!!!#I WOULD LIKE TO MAKE IT KNOWN THAT THIS IS THE FIRST INSTANCE OF COLOR WE HAVE SEEN IN THIS COMIC SERIES.#THIS SHITS BEEN GOING ON FOR ALMOST A YEAR AND THIS IS THE ONE TIME WE HAVE COLOR#It means something but ima touch on it later maybe idfk#All I know is that its beautiful and sad at the same time cuz it has multiple meanings#ANYWHIZZLE tag time~!#cass apocalypse au#angst#I'm tagging this as angst because I do what I want
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My parents are very incompatible. I'm very incompatible with them too lol. sometimes i try to stitch together scenarios in my head of how we could work better together; led me to this late at night: i think no matter how incompatible you are in terms of approaches and interests and preferences, you can still work together (any relationship dynamic) if only you're respectful and willing to work out a system for it. I've felt this way so many times around not-quite-friends-just-random-classmates. especially around people your age, it's how you get along with people. discovering this made school soo much better for me. tho, this kinda becomes impossible with adults (parents) with too big of an ego to swallow :/
#i think hard about how my parents have remained the same exact degree of incompatible through decades#how they break out into the same old tired arguments and quarrels#and i find it astonishing#like how come you dont work out something after THESE many years of the same old shit#purely logistics wise#aa mine#bobblehead
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On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.
It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.
So, where to start? The plaque.
There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."
Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.
It reads:
God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.
We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.
John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.
Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.
Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.
It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.
You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?
Benjamin Barron's.
Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.
Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.
But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.
Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:
Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.
Yes, that Betty Parris.
Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.
Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.
I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?
We'll never know.
All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.
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the motel room, or: on datedness
I.
Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.
As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)
To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.
But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.
We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.
As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.
But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.
II.
I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.
At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.
Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.
However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.
One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.
In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)
Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.
When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.
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Scars – A Joel Miller/Reader Oneshot
“You have them too.” You say, tracing your fingertips along the pale scar that sits at the side of his head, disappearing into thick dark hair. “Yes,” He replies, his voice thick, accent dragging out the vowel. “Show me.”
Summary: When Joel stumbles into the kitchen at 2am, restless and tense, he doesn't expect to find you at the table, nursing a cold mug of tea. He certainly doesn't expect to end up tracing the scars on your skin, explaining how he got his, your hands mapping the contors of each other's old wounds until something new emerges.
Warnings: 18+ MDNI, smut, mutual pining, kind of angsty but also fluffy?, descriptions of old injuries, explicit sex, PIV, fingering, dirty talk, body worship, flirting, yearning, mentions of alcohol.
Word Count: 3.3k
It’s late, and the rest of Jackson is asleep.
A single street lamp lights the dark kitchen, casting a soft orange glow over the table and your half empty mug. The tea is long-since cold, but you keep your hands wrapped around it anyway, trying to soak up the last of its heat. There’s a microwave behind you, and a coffee machine, and enough hot water to fill several baths, but after twenty years of surviving by fire light and camping stoves, these modern conveniences still seem like the technology of your childhood, distant and unrealistic. And so the tea remains cold.
You’re not sure you’ll ever get used to the normality of Jackson: the routine and order and kindness that seeps into every interaction, every town meeting and evening out. It’s been four months since you arrived – limping and half-dead, frozen almost solid by the bitter Wyoming winter – at the town’s gates.
And now you’re inside on a mild spring night, sharing a house with a man and his not-daughter, healthy and almost whole again. The town council were apologetic about housing you with Joel and Ellie: it was the only house with a spare bedroom at the time, but in truth it had been a relief. There was something overwhelmingly comforting about being around other people again, sleeping only a thin wall away from another human being, sharing meals and chores.
Joel’s quiet and serious most of the time, but you see cracks appearing in his hard exterior when he’s with Ellie, or his brother Tommy. Something of the man that existed before the world ended. And more recently he’s started opening up to you, too; rolling his eyes at you behind Ellie’s back when she swears or insults houseguests, chuckling at your bad jokes, letting his guard down when he gets home from a hard day’s construction work, allowing you to make him hot drinks and massage his sore shoulders.
You’re careful not to push anything too far, but the slow roll into familiarity with Joel has bred something less familial, too. Something wanting and churning that settles deep in your belly when you’re around him. It makes you want to press yourself against him, settle yourself in the crook of his shoulder, lick the thick tendons of his neck. Whether he feels the same is a mystery. He’s older than you by a couple of decades, not that that matters to you – you’re both adults – but he maintains a distance. Lets you massage his shoulders but never makes a sound while you do it. Holds the door open for you but keeps a respectful distance when you walk side-by-side through town. Allows you to rest your feet in his lap in the evenings on the sofa, but doesn’t touch them, or acknowledge them. You’ve heard him moving around in the night, restless and fidgety, but he never comes to your room on those long dark nights seeking comfort or companionship.
He's been quiet since he went to bed several hours earlier on this particular night, which is why it’s a shock when the kitchen light flickers on, illuminating Joel’s broad silhouette in the doorway. You scramble out of the chair onto your feet, heart thumping. He holds a hand up, calmingly, doesn’t move as your eyes adjust to the light.
“Fucking hell, Joel. You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” He takes a step into the kitchen, feet bare on the terracotta tiles.
He’s still in his clothes from today, dark jeans under a thin grey tee, both slightly crumpled as though he’s slept in them. He always does. Undoubtedly it’s the same ritual that makes him keep a pistol on his bedside table, leave a packed go-bag by the front door; the same anxiety that casts dark shadows under his eyes, fuels his insomnia and maintains his habitual whiskey drinking. He’s ready for anything, always, because he’s been through shit and he thinks at any moment it’ll happen again. You understand. It’s why you’re in the kitchen at 2am, cold tea clutched between shaking hands.
“Couldn’t sleep?” You ask, as he opens a high cupboard and pulls out a tumbler.
You move around him, tip the dregs of your tea down the sink.
“Something like that,” He replies, voice croaky.
He pours the whiskey out into the glass, swirls it in thick fingers and then rests back against the kitchen counter opposite you, eyes finally finding yours. They hover for a moment on your face, dark and penetrating, then flick to one shoulder, the other, down your arm.
You keep them covered, normally. Wear long sleeves even in the heat of summer, never undress around anyone. You’ve avoided the swimming pond that opened three weeks ago, even though the water looked heavenly in the warm April weather, unwillingly to bear the scars that litter your body to the town, afraid they’ll show the community who you really are, reveal the terrible things you’ve done to survive. But unlike Joel you don’t have a habit of sleeping in your clothes, and the thin vest and shorts you’re wearing now reveals those long-hidden scars to him in the bright kitchen light.
The bullet wound is the worst one; a puckered, deep purple starburst across one shoulder, skin wrought into something alien and terrible. It’s this one that his gaze linger on, dark eyes making heat roll up your spine. His fist is gripping the whiskey glass so tightly that the tips of his fingers and knuckles are white with the strain of it.
“They’re awful, I know.” You say into the silence.
“What? No- God, no. They’re not.” A pause, his eyes flicking away from yours, over to the far wall, back across. “I’ve got ‘em, too. We all have.”
You scoff at this. Move your hand up, place it on your shoulder. His hand twitches where it rests on the countertop, but he doesn’t move.
“You cover them.” He says. It’s not a question, but you feel like you have to answer anyway.
“Yes.” A breath, shaky on the exhale. “They’re ugly.” “No.” His voice is firm, commanding in the quiet kitchen. Despite yourself, you feel heat pooling between your thighs and you fidget, pressing them together, crossing your feet. The movement makes his eye dart down to your bare legs. You watch the apple of his throat as he swallows thickly, eyes trailing up to the hem of your shorts. There’s a scar there, too, bisecting your upper thigh. Thin and white, a reminder of a long ago incident with barbed wire.
“They’re not…” His voice trails off, eyes searching your face. “Nothing on you is ugly. Not even the scars. Especially not the scars.”
“No?”
“No.” He shifts, puts the whiskey glass down on the counter behind him and lifts his hand to your shoulder. Fingertips trace the edge of the bullet scar, and you feel goosepimples rise in their wake despite the warmth of the kitchen. He runs his hand up past its end, to your throat, along your collar bone and to the other arm. The scars there are paler, older. Shrapnel and grazes from a fall. Each one his fingertips trace reverently, as though they’re a holy text written across your skin. When he reaches the last, the one that loops around your wrist, the indent of a handcuff, you’re sure your heart is thumping so loudly he must be able to hear it, too. Slick is pooling between your thighs, hot and wet against the thin shorts you’re wearing.
“There are more,” You say, so quietly that it’s almost a whisper.
“Show me.”
It’s like a dance. You pull off your vest and Joel’s hand follows the curve of your waist, thumb dipping to press the small coin-shaped scar just below your rib cage. You sigh and he lets his hand run over your ribs, fingertips finding the spaces between like piano keys. When he reaches the curve of your bare breast he pauses, the weight of your flesh resting in the valley between his index finger and thumb. You don’t say anything, just lean into him, holding his eye contact, the pleasure and warmth of his hand making you bold. He moves slowly, carefully, rolling the bud of your nipple between his finger and thumb, pinching just so, pleasure blossoming in your chest, down your spine and to your cunt.
“This okay?” He asks, eyes flicking up from his hand to your face, tracking the pull of your eyebrows as they pitch together, the move of your mouth as you answer him with a shaky exhale.
“What about this one?” He asks, hand leaving your breast to trace across the scar that laces up your thigh under the hem of your shorts. “Can I?”
You’re not sure what he’s asking but you know that you want him to, want him to do whatever it is he’s asking so you nod. His hand grip your waist to lift you, setting you down on the kitchen counter. You grasp at his shoulders, the solid breadth of him hard under your hands. The counter is cold against the back of your legs, but before you can complain his hot hand is wrapped back around your thigh, thumb tracing the scar there again, fingertips inching up to the apex of your legs. He moves to stand between your open legs, still keeping a few inches of distance between you, the extra height of the counter making your eyes level. His burn into your face as he slips his hand higher still, fingers seeking out the wet heat of you, dipping inside, gathering slick and gliding it up to your clit.
“Joel,” You say into the aching gap between your lips and his.
“You’re fucking perfect,” He says, the words hot on your mouth, his breath mingling with your needy sighs. “All of you, you understand?”
You can only nod into his shoulder, head dropping to rest against the broad heft of it, his fingers thrumming a steady rhythm against your clit that has pleasure ratcheting up inside you. You’re still in your tiny sleep shorts, Joel’s hand forcing the crotch aside to palm at your drenched cunt. He slips two thick fingers into you, presses his thumb to your clit, and that tips you over the edge, pleasure coursing through you like fire.
He talks you through it, keeps up the firm press of his fingers, praises falling from his lips like prayers.
Good girl, that’s it, such a good fucking girl for me, taking what you need, so fucking perfect.
It’s only then, as you come down from the high, that he finally kisses you, tilting your head up with a gentle hand and fitting his lips to yours. They’re soft and dry, plush against your own. He slides his tongue against the seam of your lips, into the wet heat of your mouth, pulls back, before driving forward again, breathless and frantic. You thread your hands into the hair at the base of his neck, tugging him against you, teeth clashing in your mutual desperation. His pulls his fingers from your wet heat, smears your slick up your sides as his palms your breasts, his earlier gentleness gone. But when you slip a hand between your bodies, seeking out the hard length of him in his jeans, he pulls back. His eyes are dark despite the bright kitchen light, pupils eating up the thin sliver of brown at the edges, but there’s a reticence there.
“You have them too.” You say, tracing your fingertips along the pale scar that sits at the side of his head, disappearing into thick dark hair.
“Yes,” He replies, his voice thick, accent dragging out the vowel.
“Show me.”
He steps back, out of the circle of your legs, pulls at the neck of his t-shirt and drags it up, over his head and off. His eyes are fixed on you, watching you as you take in the broad bulk of him, the sloping plains of his shoulders and chest down to a softer stomach. He’s all strength: hard where you’re soft, his scars stretched across thick muscle and tanned flesh. There’s one at his side that canters a jagged line across his stomach, and that’s where your hand goes, holding his waist to rest your thumb against its uneven edge. It looks fairly fresh, no more than a couple of years old, still red.
“What’s this from?” You ask.
“I was stabbed,” He replies, “while I was with Ellie.”
“It looks like it was bad.”
“Well, she stitched it up, so,” He smiles, a hint of mischief returning to his eyes, growing bolder as your hands map his chest and stomach.
“And this one?” An old one, hardly noticeable in the light, to the right of his belly button.
“Appendicitis, when I was twelve.”
“These?” A collection of four or five small white gash marks, peppered across his shoulders and along his collarbone.
“Makeshift grenade.” He says. “Went off in my hand.”
You lean forward, press your lips to the first of the scars and kiss it, drag your lips along to the second, and then the third. At the fourth you let your tongue dart out, tasting the skin at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, salty and warm. He stands stock still as you do so, hands resting at your hips, fingertips gripping the flesh there tight enough to leave bruises. He sighs at the feel of your tongue against his skin, the insistent press of your mouth to his collarbone, your teeth, scraping at the tendon that jolts in his neck.
This time, when you reach for the button of his jeans he helps you, pops the first button, drags the zipper down and pushes them off his hips, revealing thick thighs corded with muscle, dusted with dark hair. He kicks the jeans the rest of the way off, steps forward again into the circle of your hips, letting you knead the thick flesh of his ass, pull him against you so that his hot length is pressed to the crotch of your shorts, two pieces of thin cotton the only thing separating you.
You kiss up the column of his throat, press your teeth to his ear lobe, and are rewarded with a soft groan that sends pleasure sparking up your spine again, cunt clenching down on nothing. His cock twitches against you when you lick a stripe along the underside of his jaw. You fit your lips back to his. This kiss is sloppy and uncoordinated, teeth clashing, his strong nose pressed to yours, one of his hands fisting in your hair, gripping tight at the ponytail at the base of your neck, holding you to him. You shuffle on the counter, pull your shorts off and down to join his jeans and shirt on the tiled floor.
“Take them off,” You say into his mouth, needy fingers sliding into the waistband of his briefs, seeking the length of him.
He does as you ask, bending to push them down, cock dipping and slapping up against his stomach as he frees it. He’s big, thick and beautiful, veins standing out against the shaft, precum beading at the tip. He hisses into your open mouth when you wrap your fist around him and stroke slowly up and down, thumb seeking out his slit, spreading his arousal and yours over it and down his length.
“Jesus, darlin’,” He sighs against the side of your neck, stubble rough against you, his hands seeking out the weight of your tits again, pressing open mouthed kisses against your skin.
You pull him back against you, press the blunt head of him to your slick entrance and watch him watch himself sink inside you, inch by inch, stretching you open. The burn of it is intoxicating, his thick length opening you up, pressing inside deliciously, white-hot pleasure blossoming up through your body.
“Feels so good, Joel,” You tell him as he shakes against you, bottoming out and dragging himself out only to press back inside.
“Pussy’s so goddamn perfect,” He says, his voice almost cracking with the effort of it.
“Please, Joel,” you hiss, “harder, please.”
The sound he makes then is animalistic, something between a grunt and a growl, teeth clenched, jaw pressed hard to your neck. He tightens his grip on your hips, anchors you to the counter and starts pounding into you. The strength of him is something to behold, his hips snapping into yours, muscles of his back shifting and clenching beneath your grasping hands.
“So fucking good,” he groans, “wanna stay inside you for the rest of my fucking life, darlin’.”
You don’t know how he’s so articulate; it’s all you can do to hold on to his shoulders and let him fuck you, whimpers and moans pouring from your open lips as he does, the slap of his hips against yours filthy in the otherwise silent house. When he slows his thrusts again he pulls back from you to watch where you’re joined, eyes dark, perspiration beading on his forehead. There’s a vein in his neck that’s pulsing visibly, a drop of sweat trickling down beside it, charting a course through patchy stubble. He reaches between your bodies, splays his hand over your mound and presses his thumb to your clit.
“Yes, Joel, please, God.”
“I can feel how close you are, darlin’” He says, “can feel you gripping me so tight.”
He strums his thumb over the swollen bundle of nerves, drawing small, tight circles that have you seeing stars within seconds, tension coiling inside you, ratcheting up until it breaks on a hard thrust of his hips, his cock hitting that spongy place inside you that sends pleasure right down to your toes. You come hard, fingernails digging into the hard flesh of his shoulders, Joel’s mouth clamped to your throat, teeth worrying the skin there, repeating the same phrase over and over as you come down.
There it is, there it is, good girl, I’ve got you.
He thrusts lazily into you as you slowly relax again, little aftershocks continuing for several long minutes, the blunt head of him hitting that same spot inside you again and again. You can tell he’s close now, his hands shaking where they’re gripping your hips again, face set in concentration, squeezing his eyes shut every few thrusts as though he’s desperately trying to hold himself back.
“Let go, Joel. Please,” You whisper, and he hisses through his teeth, pulls you bodily forward on the counter so that the angle changes and he can drive up into you, his pace quickening again.
“Jesus fucking Christ, darlin’” He rasps, thrusting into you once- twice- three more times.
He pulls out then, fist gripping the base of his cock as he paints your stomach and cunt with his cum, hot and thick. His face is a rapture, eyes pitch black, teeth bared with pleasure and need, the strong set of his jaw holding together what little restraint he has left.
He kisses you again after, drags kitchen roll from the holder to clean you up, presses sweet lips to your cheeks and temples, down your neck, across your chest, like he’s trying to taste the ecstasy that’s written across your heated skin.
Outside, dawn is quickly approaching. The weak rays of sunlight that filter into the kitchen illuminate the tan glow of Joel’s face and paint the scars on your bodies in pale yellow light. You don’t think anything’s ever looked more beautiful.
#joel miller#joel miller fic#joel miller smut#joel x reader#joel x you#the last of us fic#joel miller x reader#joel miller x you#pedro pascal#joel miller fanfic
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ik this is known but no successful settler colony has reached relative "internal stability" without genocide. north america is the first example of this that comes to mind: during the early years all up to the 19th cent., wars and attacks between native americans and settlers were frequent. and yes, while the settler armies were more well armed and more powerful, the native americans were a great force against the european invasions and did cause casualties among white populations, "including civillians", and halted expansion and development for many of the colonies.
this was met in 2 ways:
federal programs sponsored by the colonial states (violent deculturation, seperation from families through residential & boarding schools, expulsion from ancestral lands and destruction of the indigenous identity)
and unofficial, "individual" settler and enlistee actions of massacres upon indigenous populations. these events obviously were never prosecuted because they worked in tandem with the colonial powers, supported and encouraged by them.
the extermination of the american indigenous people wasn't just a facet of american success but the foundation of it. if they weren't subject to the genocide, the wealth and vast land in north america wouldn't have reached the white populations and the continent would be unrecognizable today, with canada and the united states not slightly as globally influencial as they are today. imagine a usa reliant on tourism.
and ik this is all elementary level information, but israel mirrors this entire process in eery similarity, with ancient, ancestral lands seized from palestenians exploited and destroyed for capital gains following violent expulsions (the nakba created israel). palestinians remaining within the israeli border endure lynchings and attacks by settlers as well as repression and persecution under federal law. israel was founded on the same colonialist principles that america and other european settler colonies (algeria, mozambique, kenya) were: their survival just depended on how far they would go to destroy the indigenous population.
what im dreading is that israel is on course to go further and proceed with that destruction. we are currently is a uniquely horrifying moment: 2,600 dead palestenians and 6,000 in hospitals with 0 supplies and 0 power - and the ground assault following the impossible evacuations is looming. the massacres about to sweep palestinian lands with the gifting of the ten thousand rifles to settlers. the unprovoked, unwarned and constant airstrikes. the monolithic, hysteric nature of mainstream western media. the army's sentiment of hunting animals. the global unrepentant backing. the repeated promise of complete victory.
what would complete victory mean? you cannot quell palestenian resistance without exterminating palestine. the palestenian people are a tortured people, hungry, radicalized simply from their day to day life: not one gazan hasn't watched corpses being pulled from the rubble, not one gazan doesn't have murdered family, not one gazan doesn't have something to mourn. their friends and family disappear or lose limbs on the daily now, building on grief from the previous 7 decades deep destruction. the homesickness is constant. the sounds of explosions is never far. of course there would be resistance movements, of course there would be revenge attacks, of course it will be bloody, because no humans in the world could silently endure these conditions. if hamas was entirely destroyed tomorrow, the next generation of palestinian youths would simply form another. for a complete, permanent victory, you would need to raze palestine.
this is why i balk at people hoping for coexistence. coexistence goes against the very founding strategy of israel. it goes against every principle and long term plan israel has for itself. israelis themselves do not want coexistence, they want gaza flattened and the west bank annexed, they want palestine destroyed and the palestenian people extinct. any sympathy with israel is a transgression on humanity.
#palestine#gaza#anti zionisim#this is a very base level knowledge of native american history by the way im sorry
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Wrestle Me
Tokyo had reached record temperatures that day. The sun was roasting the city, every street was a mirage from the bending light of its shine. The weather recently had been sending everyone either inside or to the nearest water source.
Yuji had gone to the beach with Megumi and Nobara in a futile attempt to escape the heat that had Japan in the sweaty palm of its hand. They had offered you and Sukuna a spot on the railway car there, but you knew that Sukuna was too exhausted from his recent missions to do any sort of going out. Not to mention the draining effect of the heat stacked on top of that. You were in the mood to just enjoy each other's presence.
The two of you were sheltered away in the darkness of his bedroom, lying sprawled out across the floor in front of his small rotating fan. Sukuna and Yuji never turned the A/C on. Since they had moved into their own apartment, the brothers had become rather stingy when it came to the bills. The air didn't start up until the room felt like a sauna, and it turned off much too soon to give relief.
Sweat continued to drip down the both of your spines, but Sukuna didn't seem to mind it. He was enjoying the peace of his day off, dressed against the heat in nothing but his boxer briefs and a tank top. He had his head resting in the cushion of your lap, his eyes were transfixed on an old leather notebook that he had stolen from one of the professors a few days ago. It was in a language you hadn't taken at the academy yet, but Sukuna tells you it was early notes on jujutsu from the old world.
You had been scrolling through your phone, occasionally showing him something you found amusing or anything that reminded you of him. He only gave you a reaction to maybe 10% of the material, but it was fun to see him roll his eyes, or scoff and wave your phone away.
The longer you remained in the same spot,however, the sweatier you felt and the more frustrated with the heat. You tried not to squirm under Sukuna's head, remaining as still as possible as though he were a sleeping animal taking refuge on your lap. Boredom, however, eventually pulls the last straw that has you stirring.
An idea comes to mind.
Sukuna glances up at you, as though he expects you to show him something else on your phone, but instead his attention is caught by the mischievous glint you feel twinkling in your eye.
"Wrestle me." You beam at him.
It was somewhat of a joke.
Compared to your boyfriend, it was clear who would win in a pinning tournament between the two of you.
Sukuna, who enjoys kickboxing in his spare time. Sukuna, who has never missed an opportunity for a fight in the decade that you've known him, who could dead-lift your torso with ease if he so desired.
Sukuna, who has never touched you with anything but heart wrenching gentleness.
His eyes widen at your command, the notebook he had previously found so interesting has been completely forgotten. He seems to catch the drift of your lack of entertainment, and quickly plays along. His surprise melts into an amused little smile.
"Oh yeah? Think you got a chance, kid?" He taunts, placing the book beside him. His attention now fully focused on you.
You snort, you were only a year younger than he was, but he loved to emphasize it when he could. Sukuna mistakes your noise as a scoff and cocks a daring brow at you.
You love when he’s in a playful mood.
"I could take you any day." You tease. Part of you is running for the hills inside, but another part is having fun with the big bad wolf. That was the constant state you were in with him. Sukuna didn't even have to try and he always had your heart racing.
Sukuna makes an impressed noise, "That, I'm well aware of. I don't know about in a fight, though."
You groan at his joke, shaking your head in disappointment, but Sukuna grabs onto your chin before you can get even one turn of your head out.
"Let's find out."
~
Ten minutes later, you're drenched in twice the amount of sweat as you were before, but Sukuna has barely lost a drop. He's got you twisted like a pretzel beneath him, holding your limbs in just the right way so that you're completely incapacitated in his hands.
Your first mistake was thinking Sukuna knew how to play-fight. The only person he had been remotely close with in your childhood was his twin brother, and the two of them had often "wrestled", but it only ended when one of them had blood dripping out of their noses. You learned early on not to question it. Having two boys as your childhood best friends had you turning your gaze from a lot of things, in fact.
The only thing you questioned now, was how you were going to get out of your current predicament. You were sure Sukuna was having a blast practically hogtying you with his hands, and now he knew how easy it was to get you in this position. It was a double whammy that would surely effect you in the future.
"Did you really think I'd go easy on you?" The weight of his chest presses into your back as he leans over you, sending hot breath over your neck. "How cute."
"Okay, okay! I give!" You whine, trying to wriggle out from beneath him. You had to admit that it was getting slightly painful, but Sukuna was well aware of your pressure points and where to stay away from. You still had one last trick up your sleeve, however.
Satisfied with your surrender, he nips at your ear with his teeth before he slides off of you and relinquishes his effortless grip. Before he can fully turn away, however, you're leaping onto his back like a monkey and tackling him into his mattress. It was a dirty tactic, but you had been wrestling your childhood best friend Yuji since the two of you were in elementary school, so you were no stranger to tricks of the trade. Especially the feign defeat card.
He blinks up at you. It was a difficult task to take Sukuna off guard, but you had accomplished it.
"Sucker." You playfully stick your tongue out at him, blowing a raspberry. Inside your chest, your heart is racing like a hummingbird’s wings. It’s almost like Sukuna knows this, because even though you’re the one on top of him, he’s still looking at you with an amused grin- unaffected by your change of position.
"You have a higher pain tolerance than I thought you did." He notes, tilting his head to the side like he's considering something. "What can we do with that new information, I wonder?"
It was another intimidation tactic. A good one. It had chills running down your spine. But, you weren’t going to let him win so easily this time. Suddenly, you were interested in how far you could push him, as well.
"Come on 'Kuna," You chide, your nose is practically touching his- a rabbit pressing against the snout of a hungry wolf. "Can't take defeat, my love?"
"Oh doll," His voice is a husky drawl, rough hands slide their way from their resting places on your hips to slip under the hem of your shirt and brush the skin of your waist. You try to contain your shiver. "You're playing a very dangerous game."
One last wave of confidence sweeps through you as you lean down, just like he always did, to murmur lowly into his ear. "And you're losing."
That did it.
Sukuna grabs onto your waist so quickly, you barely have time to register it before he loops his leg around your knee and easily flips the two of you back to your original position. You're giggling beneath him as he gathers your face into his hands, pressing calloused fingers into your cheeks. You've gotten under his impenetrable skin. You didn't know it, but you always did.
No matter how strong a man is, he will always lose to the woman he loves.
Sukuna was slowly starting to accept that.
#jjk#sukuna#sukuna x reader#sukuna x you#sukuna x y/n#jjk x reader#jujutsu kaisen#fluff#little something something#is it obvious how obsessed I am with the thought of him pinning someone down?#makes my heart go bingabangdingdang#also can we talk about this manga panel#my writing
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𖤐 𝕯𝖆𝖒𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖔𝖋 𝖆 𝕾𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖙 𖤐
pairing — fem!nun!reader x sin of lust!seonghwa ft. ateez as the other sins
rating — smut | mdni
wc — 13.7k
synopsis — life is dull when you are an immortal being such as seonghwa. every day is the same and you live (or rather, merely exist) through the times crushed by the burden of boredom. until something new comes along in the form of a kind, compassionate and righteous newly ordained nun. and so the sin of lust makes it his personal mission to corrupt the purest of souls: yours.
nsfw tags under the cut
tags — *strap up babes this is a wild one*, a tad of plot, my attempt at humor, heavy religious/blasphemous themes (don't read if you're uncomfy <3), inclusive writing (reader is not physically described), also reader is the embodiment of purity, 20240127 hwa (moodboard here), kinda slow burn kinda vibes, so much tensionnn, mentions of a pxrn magazine, sooo much teasing, hot make out sesh, dom!hwa, also very sly demon!hwa, virgin!reader, supernatural sex, corruption kink (obviously), masturbation (f), oral (f), the (un)holy trinity =teasing, begging, mind breaking), thigh riding, nipple play, clit play, some light impact play (kitty slaps + 1 face slap), breath play, hair pulling, fingering (f), monster cock!hwa, size training, pet names (angel, love, darling, sweetheart), praising, degradation (slut, whore), unprotected sex (don’t recommend), denied and ruined orgasm (f), dumbification, multiple orgasms (f), overstim, an ungodly amount of cum, cumflation, lil breeding kink at the very end
playlist — me and the devil by soap&skin, unholy by sam smith, going to hell by the pretty reckless, smells blood by kensuke ushio, american horror show by snow wife, toc toc toc by zazie
ateez masterlist | navigation
a/n: i had an absolute blast working over my fave fic ever posted. i love it even more now <3
also wanted to say a special thank you to @hwaightme who really helped me pulled through with one <3 ily bai <3333
Seonghwa was bored out of his mind. Like he had been for decades now, even centuries. He couldn’t remember what it was like to feel… well… anything at all really. And after years upon years of vegetating he didn’t care enough to even try anymore. He just laid there, endlessly staring blankly at the emptiness. He tapped his slender finger on his thigh, comfortably set on the bed of dark purple smoke he had materialized out of thin air.
He let out an audible annoyed groan as he was nonchalantly stretching out his long limbs which didn’t fail to catch the attention of the others.
“What’s wrong?” Yeosang asked as he was feasting on some delicious meal he poofed out magically. He didn’t even take a second to look up the bucket full of chicken drumsticks, wrapping his greasy fingers around the bone and eyeing the meat like one would their life long partner. But then again, that wasn’t too far from the truth for Yeosang.
“I’m bored” Seonghwa complained, pushing his long silky black hair back on his forehead and choosing to ignore Yeosang’s lack of interest, dragging out the word on his tongue, transmitting his state of utter apathy to the others.
“Why don’t you go up and play with the Humans?” Mingi suggested while checking himself out in the mirror, readjusting his bangs and sliding his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose before striking a pose to himself, remaining completely self absorbed.
Once again, Seonghwa wasn’t getting much attention from his counterparts but he was somewhat used to it when it came to Mingi.
“What’s the point? They are no fun anyways!” Seonghwa sat up straight and crossed his long elegant legs on the cloud of cotton like smoke.
“Why?” Jongho asked, unlike the others he deigned looking in Seonghwa’s direction with somewhat surprised eyes. “You used to love going around and breaking up happy marriages, luring men and women in with your charms… That was always fun!” He said a little sluggishly, but still with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.
“Yeah… Maybe it was…” Seonghwa replied. “Two millenniums ago…” Another prolonged sigh. “When everything still felt fresh.” He got up from the comfortable cloud of smoke, pacing the endless void as his heels clacked and echoed with each step. “Now I know that Humans are only self centered vile creatures who only claim to have better morals than us because they are scared of the consequences that inevitably ensue from succumbing to their primal desires. When in fact, all they want is to eat, kill, have sex or not do anything at all. They are nothing short of underdeveloped, unevolved, spineless piles of meat”
“Meat? Where?” Yeosang said, finally lifting his head from the bucket of fried chicken to look around, eyes rounded in panic.
Not a single one of them reacted except Mingi who side eyed him with disdain before returning to more important matters at hand such as swapping the aviator sunglasses for narrower, more rectangular ones.
“That’s not entirely false” Jongho concluded, shrugging, easily giving up on the idea of comforting Seonghwa.
“I mean where’s the fun if you can’t break their minds to give in?” Seonghwa placed both hands on Jongho's shoulders, slightly shaking him while the latter lifelessly swayed back and forth. “What is the point if they don’t resist the call of evil? If you can’t erode their will like a rock made smooth by the incessant beating of the waves of the cruel sea.” Seonghwa huffed in a quiet, defeated voice, letting go of Jongho's shoulders to let his arms hang at his side while the other one stared at him blankly.
“Hm… okay” Jongho said before slipping off Seonghwa's reach to take his place on the fluffy bed of purple smoke, crashing head first onto the soft cloud.
A silence settled for what seemed like a long moment, even for them, immutable creatures to whom the very concept of time couldn't grasp at their permanence.
“Well you never tried with that girl…” Wooyoung said, slithering his way to Seonghwa without a sound. He had been watching the scene unfold from afar up until then. “What was her name already?” He snapped his fingers and looked to the side trying to access his memory. He turned to Mingi for help but he was too busy looking through the mirror, slipping on yet another dangling necklace and smirking, satisfied at the results. Wooyoung then tried his luck with Yeosang but he now had his face buried in a huge bowl of chicken broth, the empty bucket of fried chicken abandoned and slurping up a big mouthful of noodles in a rather unpleasant way. “Jongho?” he called, finally settling for the one that looked almost passed out on the bed of smoke, but still this one wielded the most positive result.
“Y/n” Jongho responded without conviction, still laying flat on the cloud of smoke, eyes growing heavier by the second.
“Yeah! That’s right!” Wooyoung exclaimed. “That girl is unbreakable,” he affirmed. Seonghwa scoffed and threw an unconvinced look to his peer.
“No really! I’ve tried to corrupt her but I really couldn’t”. Wooyoung said, raising his brows and talking loudly to support his point. But that did little to persuade Seonghwa, he was convinced that Wooyoung was just not as good as him at breaking the mortals’ souls. So yes, it was possible that Wooyoung had struggled with that girl. But not him, surely not him.
When Wooyoung saw Seonghwa was not budging his face dropped, and he turned to the others. “Please someone back me up on this one”
“Oh yeaaah… I remember her” Yeosang said, voice cut by various sounds of loud lips smacking and open mouth chewing. “Even I tried!”
Now, that was different. Seonghwa was interested. Most people are quick to indulge themselves when it comes to food. It was, so to speak, the easiest sin of the seven to succumb to. The Humans often say “there’s always room for dessert” and innocently eat a generous slice of cake after devouring a full meal. They don’t even notice Yeosang forcing the big spoon full of buttery sugary goodness into their mouths. They don’t even know Yeosang, himself, made this saying.
“She refused to even do as much as taste the delicious meal I made her sister cook for her even though she was starving… instead she gave it to the homeless man living not far from her apartment.” Yeosang stated with aberration shaking his head in disappointment before plunging right back in the ramyeon bowl.
“Hmmm” Seonghwa scratched his chin, his curiosity for the mysterious righteous girl was piqued.
“One day I tried to make her give in” Jongho chipped in from the dark purple smoke bed, even pushing himself on his elbows to look at the others, to Seonghwa’s surprise. “Made her miss the train and the bus she needed to take to get home after work and conveniently laid a juicy wallet stuffed full of even juicier bills in the gutter. All she had to do was to bend down and get the money to take a taxi to her apartment. But instead she took the money and walked to the police station to report the lost wallet, which was in the opposite direction by the way and then walked back home only to take a shower and leave right after to attend the charity soup kitchen. Anddd… Explaining this made me tired. Please don't talk to me for the next two hundred years, thank you.” Jongho concluded in one single breath before laying back down and turning on his side to nap comfortably.
“Maybe that one can be interesting after all” Seonghwa thought aloud, his pretty face taking on a pensive frown, his sharp brows joining on his forehead.
“Yeah no kidding” Wooyoung added. “And you don’t know the best part yet…” A perfidious and sly smile pulled on his handsome features. “She was just ordained nun.”
Seonghwa’s face turned serious as his eyes snapped back to Wooyoung. All of a sudden the girl went from distraction of the day to possibly the ultimate challenge of corruption Seonghwa has been waiting for god knows how long (and he surely did not use the expression lightly).
“Don’t mess with me, Envy!” Seonghwa spat, suddenly calling Wooyoung by his biblical name, testifying the gravity of his statement.
“I’m not kidding, Lust” Wooyoung mocked Seonghwa’s serious tone by also using his sin name. “She decided the life of material things wasn’t the way to happiness so she devoted herself to a humbler one, gifting her time and belongings to the poor and destitutes while she devoted her body to God. God only…” Wooyoung said, feigning nonchalance while he snaked an arm around Seonghwa’s shoulders. “Look… Here she is” he purred in his neck.
With a flick of his wrist, green smoke emanated from thin air and formed a pierced circle where in the middle the reflection of a girl could be seen. She was quiet, in the very humble room, a single window shone down onto the bed as she knelt at its side, palms joined, retreated into silent prayers.
She’s perfect.
That was Seonghwa’s first thought as an obscene smirk tugged at his mouth, his tongue swiping across his lips making them shiny and wet. He eyed the girl kneeling by the bed as he lowered his chin, one strand of hair falling over the piercing siren eyes. The black and white uniform she was wearing, the habit, couldn’t fool the seasoned eyes of Seonghwa. All the fabric in the world couldn’t hide away the glorious curves of her body, the beautiful arch of her back leading to the roundness of her bottom gently resting on her heels. The holy swells of her chest softly lifting the thick black material of the habit and the simple wooden cross held by humble twine she was wearing around her neck.
Divine.
Was what described her best.
“She’s stunning,” Seonghwa huffed in a soft murmur, mesmerized and captivated by the image Wooyoung was showing him. And he smirked in victory, relishing on the way he had convinced his peer, once again living up to his name and very nature.
“Yeah I know.” Mingi said, finally turning his face away from his reflection to address Seonghwa. “I thought with such a pretty face she’d be easy to convince that she’s above everyone else and just make her a pretentious too-far-up-her-own-ass bitch. But I quickly realized she was a lost cause” he concluded, shrugging and stepping away from the mirror, sitting down next to Jongho, already fast asleep only to materialize another handheld mirror. seconds later.
“Yes…” Seonghwa spoke softly as he stared intensely at the girl. “She just might do.”
***
You were on cleaning duty at the church today after the mass. Even if the church was quite big it didn’t intimidate you. You settled the two buckets of warm soapy water and your floor cloth before tying your hair up in a rather unaesthetic but very practical hairdo and stretched your shoulders before giving yourself a determined little nod.
You started with scrubbing the ancient cobblestone of the old church with soap and a lot of elbow grease. Then you immediately followed up with dusting the chairs, the altar and the numerous effigies.
You diligently washed, dusted, scrubbed, cleaned, polished, until everything was neat and right. Simply happy and content with the idea of being useful to the community. The rhythmic sounds of your hard bristle brush against the pavements were setting the pace of the silence which helped you connect to the spiritual nature of the ancient place of worship.
But as you were tidying the confessional booth you noticed a small piece of colorful paper peeking from underneath the bench lined with worn burgundy red velvet. When your hands reached under the seat and hazardly caught the object you knew it was a magazine from the glossy feeling of the paper underneath your fingertips and when you finally let your eyes fall on it you realized the nature of the magazine.
Porn. A pornographic magazine.
The cover displayed several nude women adopting very suggestive poses, one of them even dangerously leaning her face towards the intimate parts of another one.
The obscene imagery made your heart race and you started to feel dizzy. You sat yourself on the bench and rested the lewd magazine in your lap. You took a deep breath and, very slowly, parted the red curtains to make sure you were alone in the church. Then you opened the magazine and flipped the cover page.
“Oh my… Look at that! She is flipping the pages!” Yeosang exclaimed.
“Oh she’s definitely curious about it,” Mingi laughed, his lips stretching into a satisfied half smile. But Seonghwa was more cautious, he refused to believe it just yet. Something about your body language was not right.
“Shhh” he shushed the others and motioned for them to keep looking through the green smoke.
As your fingers glided across each page. You felt hot in the face with each scene more obscene than the last one, tension building in your neck.
Seonghwa didn’t lose sight of you for a second, his lips curling on his teeth in a vicious smile as your trembling fingers went over every single page, your wide open eyes darting to every corner of each page. He could almost hear your heart thumping in your chest he could almost taste the adrenaline in your blood.
When you came to the end of it and closed out the magazine you sighed, letting your shoulders drop, closing your eyes in relief.
“Well…” you started “nobody left their name in it” you said to yourself, completely unaware the demons were spying on your every move. Not that you expected that anybody would leave their signature in such a piece of literature but still you had to at least try to find the rightful owner before taking actions.
A loud complaint erupted from the demons. All in disbelief. You looked at the magazine, true. But it was not for an impure purpose. It was only in the hopes of finding the name of the true owner and hopefully, returning it back to them. You had no interest in the salacious scenes presented in the glossy pages. The rushing blood to your cheeks wasn’t due to any feeling of arousal or libidinousness. It was only the shame of invading someone’s privacy.
Once again your intentions were completely commendable. Immaculate.
As the demons protested and complained, Seonghwa, on the other hand, stayed completely silent as he watched you bring the magazine to a trash bin without an ounce of regret. He wasn’t disappointed, he was excited. He felt excitement. A feeling so distant and faded that it felt foreign. Seonghwa had forgotten all about this thrill. He didn’t remember how tingles tickled the tip of his cold fingers or how his guts swirled around in frenzy. This feeling was joy. Pure joy. Sweet intoxicating euphoria. And it was all thanks to you.
“I’m gonna have so much fun with you” he whispered to you, as if you could hear him, his eyes glued to the reflection in the pierced circle of deep green smoke, he whispered to the image of the unsuspecting girl discarding the impure magazine. A paltry, too poor of a stratagem to have you yield to the darkness. You, the pious and saintly nun.
***
You never really liked cooking, before you joined the covenant your sister was always the one in the kitchen preparing delicious home cooked meals for the family. But what you did like on the other hand was helping. Usually you cleaned up the kitchen but when your sister was running out of time she would ask you to peel the vegetables or cut them. So naturally cutting the vegetables was not your favorite task around the convent. You liked cleaning and tidying up better. Only because you were more on the active side and you liked how cleaning would make you break up a sweat when the whole monastery needed a dust off but nonetheless what you liked most was to help the community. And knowing the soup you were cooking up with the help of two of your sisters was going to feed everyone was a fulfilling feeling. Well enough to make you happy.
So you were contemplating life cutting off the homegrown zucchinis when Sister Chaeyoung started to giggle. You didn’t pay much attention until Sister Nayeon started to snicker along with her.
You lift your eyes up and the both of them instantly stiffened up and started to act suspicious.
“What are you laughing about you two?” you asked, an amused smile playing on your lips.
“Oh nothing” Nayeon said, hiding something behind her back.
“Come on, I want to laugh too” you said, the smile spreading further on your face, lifting up your cheeks adorably.
You three were the youngest in the convent so you did many duties together, you grew quite close with the girls.
Chaeyoung ripped something from Nayeon’s hand and proudly showed it to you.
“Look at this carrot” she said, puffing an adorable laugh.
It was true the carrot had quite the… interesting shape. First of all it was quite large, abnormally thick for a simple carrot. Homegrown vegetables were never like the perfectly shaped ones you could find at the store and it was definitely the case for this one. It had a slight upward curve and the extremity had a very distinctive shape. It was phallic.
You delicately took the vegetable from the hands of Chaeyoung to examine the orange root closely.
It was almost unnatural how close the resemblance was, like it couldn’t be due to fortuity… The thick tip, the robust and curved upright shaft, the asperities reminiscent of the blood engorged veins, even the small slit at the top… The details were impressive.
“Look look” Mingi exclaimed, nudging Seonghwa in the ribs as he observed you through the green fog. “She looks interested. I think she’s done this time”. He declared self-assured, cocking a single eyebrow. But Seonghwa remained completely silent but a smirk pulled on his lips when he noticed how you were eyeing the forbidden vegetable (no pun intended), how your throat seemed to thickly swallow and how your lip slightly trembled.
It felt so empowering, finally getting to chip away at your strong willed spirit, finally getting lust to creep under your skin. For these long seconds of contemplation, Seonghwa could only imagine the wicked places your mind raced to. But right when he was about to open his mouth and declare victory. You laughed.
Seonghwa’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets as this laugh ripped through him, like a dagger through the skin.
You laughed so openly, your head hung back, eyes creased. The laugh was like the rest of you, joyful, clear and pure.
You are only amused by such a coincidence. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course it was funny and you were never the stuck up kind and it felt right to have a bit of lighthearted fun with your younger sisters.
“I guess she’s only laughing at your stupid tricks,” Wooyoung said, his sly smirk mocking Seonghwa’s failure.
“Fuck off Wooyoung” Seonghwa spat as he watched the scene unfold.
The three of you just laughed, enjoying this bonding moment together while the stricter, older sisters and the Mother Superior weren’t there to dim down your childish and silly amusement. It was just some playful, innocent humor to you.
Nothing to shake your faith or virtue.
“Now let’s finish up the soup, girls” you said, setting the amusing carrot on the cutting board. Before chopping it up and tossing the pieces in the big pot.
“Maybe we should have kept it” Chaeyoung whispered with pouty lips. “It could have been useful.”
“Don’t be silly,” you replied with a smile.
Seonghwa felt anger bubbling up in his stomach and rushing through his veins to burn down his chest and neck. As much as he hated to admit it… Wooyoung was right, these stupid tricks were no match for the unwavering righteousness of your mind. These would certainly suffice if it was any other soul but not yours. Not you.
So Seonghwa resolved to resort to drastic measures. Something he hasn’t done for centuries. But something necessary. This anger he felt, the deception upon failing once again. He hadn’t felt that in so long, he felt alive finally. It was ironic how an immortal soul would forget how to feel alive for the simple reason that nothing is a threat to their existence. Their presence is immutable, infinite, certain. Therefore unexciting, monotonous and lifeless.
The negative feelings reminded Seonghwa of a purpose he once had, they reminded him of the stakes that used to be. In a way you reminded Seonghwa what it felt like to feel. You reminded him what it meant to be alive. Him, the unholy and vile Sin of Lust.
***
“You cannot be serious,” Hongjoong exclaimed, rubbing the deep crease between his eyebrows, this conversation was starting to give the Guardian of the Gate a headache.
“I am most certainly serious,” Seonghwa assured. “Now is the best time.”
“Why?” Hongjoong asked. “I’m sorry but I can’t let you through unless you give me a solid explanation.”
“Come on Joongie~” Seonghwa said innocently smiling at him leaning on the smaller man in front of him, wrapping his arms around his waist and tilting his head adorably. “You and I go way back, right?”
“Your ways have no power against me, Lust. You know that.” Hongjoong just looked at him scornfully. “Now if you don’t tell me your plan I’ll shut the gates for the next century.”
“What has this place come to? We used to be able to go and play with humans all day and not get questioned,'' Seonghwa complained, throwing his hands in the air and slipping away from Hongjoong. But the latter didn’t budge. “Fine” Seonghwa spat.
“You see my dear friend, today she’s ovulating. Her body is most likely to respond to the primitive instinct of the survival of the species. Meaning that her spirit is most likely to be weaker.” Seonghwa explained his reasoning.
“But how do you plan on actually interacting with her? You know you won’t be able to have physical contact, you'll go through her like a ghost. Unless she summons you. And I don’t see how or even why she would call your name three times” Wooyoung pointed out, as he was watching the feud from afar.
“I know that I’m not stupid” Seonghwa said with an eyeroll and a sigh. “I won’t need to touch her to break her” he assured.
“But how if she can’t even see you?” Hongjoong yelled, ready to pluck the hair out of his head. Seonghwa was about to become the Guardian's breaking point.
“Hey relax, okay” Seonghwa said, slipping behind the man and gently pinching the muscles of his shoulders. “You are starting to look like San.”
“What did you say about me? “ San yelled from across the empty space, interrupting his card game with Yunho.
“Just play” Yunho instructed with a monotonous fed up tone, pointing his chin towards the deck of cards.
“This game is stupid anyways!!” San screamed before flipping the table over in a loud grunt as the cards flew everywhere, floating gracefully to the ground. Yunho sighed deeply.
“He always does this…” he whispered to himself, getting off the chair and walking to Hongjoong and Seonghwa as Jongho was peacefully snoring close by.
“How can he sleep through this?” Yeosang looked at Jongho in disbelief, as he was stuffing more cheesecake into his mouth. Yunho scoffed.
“How can you eat through this?” Yunho underlined and Yeosang just shrugged before smiling with his mouth still full, earning disgusted grunts and complaints from the others.
“Can we focus for one minute here?” Hongjoong interrupted, desperately trying to get back on track. “How are you going to corrupt her if she can’t see you?”
“Oh but she will see me” Seonghwa smirked.
“Not in the monastery she won’t, not on sacred ground” Wooyoung mocked his overly confident tone.
“It’s true, you know” Yunho chipped in, putting his large palm on Seonghwa’s shoulder. “I can’t believe I’m about to say that but… I think you’re being greedy” Yunho concluded, as Seonghwa whipped his head to him.
“Wow… That’s so out of character for you.”
“Well that should speak volumes about the foolishness of your plan” Yunho shrugged, taking his hand back.
“It’s not foolish because she will see me. For the simple reason that she will invite me in” Seonghwa’s smirk grew wider as silence settled in the unholy space between hell and earth. Wooyoung laughed hysterically, holding his ribs as he wiped off a tear in the corner of his eyes.
“And how will you manage that?” Hongjoong asked with a raised, unimpressed eyebrow.
Just then a chiming sound could be heard in the emptiness. Seonghwa fished out of his pocket a small human device. All in the room looked incredulous As Seonghwa smirked at the small screen illuminating his pretty face.
“Since when did you-” Hongjoong started but Seonghwa simply brought his long pointer finger to his lips and shushed him.
“She’s waiting for me”
***
“A disaster” Mother superior exclaimed as she threw her arms at her side, looking at the flooded basement. “We cannot go to the retreat and leave until the problem is fixed. The humidity can damage the foundations of the monastery. “I’ll stay and sort it out.”
The sisters all let out frustrated sighs.
“You should go Mother” you stepped in. “The sisters need you at the retreat as well as the faithful… I’ll stay and get things in order. You can count on me” you said with a determined nod and a smile, tightly holding the wooden cross on your chest.
As much as you wanted to go. Someone needed to stay, that much was undeniable and the wisdom of the Mother Superior was needed at Lourdes. So it wasn’t without a little sting at the heart that you waved goodbye to a bus full of your friends, your sisters.
You went back in and sighed at the mess. The ancient timber beams were slowly soaking up the stagnant water, the old stones of the walls were being eroded and the humidity was not good news for the cheeses you were maturing, not even mentioning the ruined mushrooms you were about to harvest before the disaster. Of course the boiler was old and rustic but Mother Superior always made sure it was checked annually and repaired when it was needed before any damage could be done. But even the most diligent measures sometimes can’t prevent the unforeseeable hazards of life.
You went back up and searched for a plumber in the local newspaper. Luckily there was an ad for one that was living in town.
Park, plumbing/heating engineering at your service, the flashy ad read.
You looked at the time, it was late afternoon, probably a little too late to take up a new job, but you figured there was still hope he could at least pick up the phone and maybe appoint a day to come have a look at the leakage. You didn’t waste anymore time and dialed the phone number in the ancient and only phone located in the Mother Superior’s office.
As the tone rang you suddenly got nervous. Ever since you joined the convent you didn’t interact much with the outside world except the followers coming to church or the people you were helping. So this upcoming conversation was making you agitated.
“Hello, Park, plumbing and heating engineer, how can I help you?” You are surprised by the voice at the end of the line. You never expected such a smooth, melodic voice to pick up the phone.
“H-Hi! I’m Sister y/n from the Monastery of the Sacred Mission, our basement flooded, we think the boiler possibly needs to be replaced. Is it possible for you to come take a look?”
“Oh! Sorry to hear that. I’m guessing much damage has been done…” his concerned tone somewhat eased your nerves.
“Unfortunately yes”
“I see… I can come right now”
“Really?” you blinked your eyes twice in surprise. “Well that would be marvelous” you said cheerfully “but wouldn’t you be working past hours? I fear there’s quite a lot of work” you ask concerned.
“It’s okay. You help others so much. Now it’s my time to help you” his tone changed, a subtle switch you can’t put into words but the difference sent a shiver down your spine.
“Thank you”
***
“Thank you so much for coming this quickly” you thanked the man as he stood in the impressive frame of the heavy convent door.
You took a step aside to let him in but he just stood before the front steps not moving an inch. You threw him a puzzled look but he just stared back blankly at you. There was a moment of hesitation on his behalf that left you quite perplexed.
“Please come in” you hesitantly said while amicably smiling at the man.
“Thank you” he simply responded, almost sounding relieved.
As soon as he stepped foot in the door frame you felt a cold breeze run on your neck under the habit and shivers run down your spine. Autumn was indeed well advanced now but such cold winds were usually never felt before winter. Of course, you made little of a simple gust of wind.
“Hi. I’m Sister y/n. Nice to meet you” you stuck your hand out to him. He looked down at it and fumbled with the tool boxes but opted for a polite nod instead of a handshake.
“Sorry, I’ve been working all day and my hands are dirty” he laughed nervously “and the name is Seonghwa” he flashed the brightest smile you have ever seen. For a second your heart skipped a beat and a foreign feeling blossomed in your chest. You never expected this unknown plumber to be this handsome.
He had long and shiny raven black hair perfectly framing his face and just as healthy thick eyebrows complimenting the dark, round and benevolent eyes, reminiscent of boba pearls. A long elegant neck, a defined jawline, high cheekbones and tanned olive glossy skin.
His body was cladded in an unbuttoned navy blue overall that let peek out a simple white t-shirt underneath. You could tell the outfit had undergone various difficult jobs as the fabric was thinned out at his knees and had various stains of paints and plaster.
He looked like a kind man. Like the kind of person you would give communion to without confession. The kind of person that just has a good heart. It was that kind of reassuring and warm aura that you felt from him, something that put you at ease right away.
You led him to the faulty boiler.
Right away he got on one knee and started to inspect the recalcitrant piece of machinery.
“Well I’ll leave you to work on your own” you said as you retreated to take your leave. Seonghwa only politely nodded and smiled in your direction before turning his attention back to the problem.
While the plumber was working you put your time to good use and organized the paperwork of the Mother superior. Doing such work was always tedious for her because she wasn’t exactly the organized kind of woman but you were. You knew doing that you would be of great help. Since the task was quite large, it took quite a long time and it’s only when your stomach emitted a loud grumble that you realized the evening was well advanced.
You figured Mr. Park was hungry or at the very least thirsty after working for so long. So you grabbed a metal tray and brought him a set of the specialty sugar cookies the convent was selling along with a generous serving of cold water embellished with a dash of freshly squeezed lemon juice to make sure Mr. Park’s thirst would be thoroughly quenched.
When you passed the archway that was leading to the boiler room your heart nearly stopped beating when your eyes met the working man.
Swiftly you spinned on your feet and hid behind the wall, only peeking an eye out the corner to still be able to witness the novel scene taking place in front of you.
Seonghwa had tightened the sleeves of his blue overalls around his waist and was wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, clearly the labor was not restful. You couldn’t tell if it was from sweat or from the leaking water but his white t-shirt was wet and sticking to his skin, making the fabric lightly translucid. You could guess the dark pinkish color of his nipples and the outline of his well built body underneath. The short sleeves of his t-shirt were rolled up and were tightly hugging his arms while his long fingers were wrapped around a wrench as each twist of his wrist was making the veins of his forearm bulge out.
You loudly gulped down a lump in your throat. Your hands tightly held onto the tray in fear of letting it fall to your feet.
But your misery was far from over because before you could realize it Seonghwa was pulling on his shirt and passing it over his head. Every muscle of his back moving around, contracting and relaxing in a beautiful dance, shining under the golden hour sun seeping through the small single window of the basement. Water and sweat was running down his back and at his flanks, when he turned around, your eyes dashed around his naked upper body. You couldn’t decide where to settle them. His collarbones, his pecs, his abs, the dent at the sides of his abdomen, his (very) low resting overalls…
Your heart was about to give out. You had seen male bodies before, never in real life that was true but you did once or twice on TV or on billboard ads of men’s underwear.
But, never, you felt something like that. That feeling. This tingly feeling budding in the low pit of your stomach, making your guts stir around, making your palms sweaty, making your heart helplessly hammer against your ribs, making your eyes widen as you couldn’t peel them off the naked wet skin of the handsome stranger. This feeling of immoral interest for another person’s body, this longing for somebody else’s touch.
This feeling of Lust.
It was completely foreign to you.
If it wasn’t for Seonghwa you would have chugged the whole carafe of lemony water by yourself because you never felt your throat as dry as it felt right now.
“Look! Look!” San shouted, wrapping a strong hand around Wooyoung’s forearm and making him wince in pain as they both stared at you through the green smoke. “Y/n is giving in!”
“Look at the way she’s staring at him!” Yeosang said, briefly reaching for a napkin to wipe his mouth.
“Wow” Yunho added “She definitely isn’t thinking about church-appropriate things”. Yunho laughed but Mingi scoffed.
“If she likes him, wait till I show my human form. I’m infinitely more good looking than him”
“Not everything’s about you, Mingi” Yunho scolded him.
With trembling hands you settled the metal tray onto the window sill. You poured a glass of water and presented it to Seonghwa.
“Here” you unexpectedly manage to keep your voice calm and steady. “I figured you might be thirsty or hungry.”
“Oh thanks” he said, wrapping his hand around the glass, carefully avoiding touching your hand in the process, probably trying not to get sweat and dirt smeared on you. “I just got done actually”
“Oh wonderful” you exclaimed, maybe a little louder than expected. Maybe eager to get rid of that immoral feeling that was awakened by his presence. Seonghwa cocked an eyebrow and gave you a puzzled look at the unexpected outburst of joy.
“Why? Are you impatient to throw me out?” he smirked, pushing his long and soaked hair back as he took a step closer, doe eyes narrowing, becoming sharp. You did your best to lock your eyes with his, not to let them wander down his still half naked body. Seonghwa didn’t make any effort to cover himself. Your heart seemed to be trying to break through your rib cage to get a chance to beat closer to Seonghwa’s chest.
“No, it’s just that…” you took a step back “you have been working for so long you must be wanting to go back to the comfort of your home” you quickly get back on your feet before smiling politely at him, trying to conceal your uneasiness.
“Why?” he asked tit for tat, taking a step closer again, siren eyes bored deep into yours, trying to lull you in. “No one is waiting for me at home.”
Seonghwa heard the faintest little gasp escape your lips and he knew you were shaken. You, the unwavering nun, the faithful saint. You were at last considering him. Contemplating giving in to the primal and lowly instinct of desire.
Seonghwa sensed it. He saw it in the way you hurriedly licked your dry bottom lip, he saw it in the way your eyes darted between his lips and his eyes, he saw it in the way you stopped backing away from him.
You, y/n, you were giving in to pure sensual need. No love, no sentiment involved. Only desire to feel a complete stranger’s body against yours, only pure, untainted lust.
If only he could touch you. If only he could, it would be so much easier to help you gently fall into the welcoming and serene arms of corruption. But he couldn’t and that was making the whole experiment that much more exciting. He had to use deceit and trickery. Like a siren numbing your mind with a beautiful song.
But if you gave the slightest hint of submitting, if you let your guard down and let him into your heart then he would have won and that was all that mattered. If you tilted your head and you puckered up your lips to kiss him, if you took a step towards him to press your body against his, if your lifted your hand to feel his wet, glistening skin under your fingers, if you did anything to welcome the unholy desire, if you opened yourself to lust, then touching you would have been unnecessary because Seonghwa would have won and you and God would have lost.
And victory was oh so close. So close when he was as near to you as he could. So close when he slowly approached his face to yours. So close when your heart was pumping scorching hot blood through your veins, so close when your mouth started to water, so close when your lips started to quiver, so close when your eyelid started to flutter but…
Again, you stepped back.
“WHAT?!” San shouted.
“No way!!” Yeosang added, staring at your unsuspecting reflection in the green smoke.
Seonghwa’s shoulder dropped along with the satisfied little smirk.
“Thank you for fixing the boiler this quickly, Mr Park” you said, averting your eyes, finally breaking the spell he had casted on you and peeling your eyes off him.
Seonghwa had cried victory too soon. He had counted the chicken eggs before they hatched, he had put the cart before the horse. In other words… he had underestimated you.
He underestimated your will, your faith and your unwavering sense of righteousness. The other Sins had warned him though but he didn’t listen. They told him it was impossible to bend you. All of them had tried before and none succeeded so it was undeniable now that Seonghwa was just going to join them in failure.
“Don’t worry about it” he smiled at you, disappointment peeking behind his shiny brown orbs.
Seonghwa had accepted defeat when you led him back to the door of the convent. He walked away but turned around half way only to see your still body standing straight in the doorframe, perfectly incarnating your strong, unbending mind.
You only politely smiled when you pushed the big heavy door with difficulty, finally closing it in with a loud thud.
“Fuck… I guess Seonghwa failed too…” Yunho stated as he watched you close the door. But Wooyoung looked at you with a knowing grin.
“I’m not so sure…” he said as the smirk tugged further at his lips.
***
When you finally escaped Seonghwa’s taunting eyes, you leaned your back on the sturdy door, your spirit drained, your mind exhausted. You closed your eyes to catch a breath but the only thing you could see was the working man’s godlike figure carved onto your retinas, the translucent white t-shirt clinging to his golden skin, the sweat dripping down his temples and wetting the beautiful long strands of black hair, the bulging veins of his forearms and the dents engraved at both side of his lower stomach. And the more you thought about it, the quicker your breathing got.
You were all alone here… Your sisters and Mother superior were all gone. What wrong could it cause if you gave in just this once? Not that much, right?…. Just this once.
With big strides you walked to the kitchen and handpicked a nicely shaped carrot, almost regretting not listening to Chaeyoung and keeping that other one.
But this one was going to do the trick. It was not too thick and just long enough to help you carry out your shameful business but not too big to actually taint you and strip you of the precious veil of chastity that you managed to keep intact all of these years.
You climbed up the stairs with haste, avoiding the marble eyes of the holy figures represented in the halls only to take refuge in your bedroom.
You slipped out of your shoes and laid on your bed. You didn’t even bother taking the habit off, it wasn’t going to take long anyway, you simply pulled it up.
When you slid off the white panties you realized how soaked you were. You couldn’t believe it. Your whole life you’ve never felt this way, the feeling was overwhelming and needed to be dealt with immediately. Yes, that was what you were doing simply ridding yourself of an impure feeling!
You whipped out the orange root and clumsily rubbed the thinner tip on yourself. The cold sensation took you aback and pulled a small gasp from your lips.
You coated the root with your juices and then you aimed it at your entrance. You slid the carrot inside, it was too thin to hurt in any way but it was well long enough. When you reached the bottom of yourself you couldn’t help but to let out a satisfied grunt at the sensation of the vegetable rubbing against your sensitive spot.
You pulled it back out and slid it back in, this time a little faster. Heat gained over your body as your eyes fluttered close and you recalled the unfairly handsome and devilishly sexy working man.
The muscles of his back, his long slender neck, his collarbones, his beautiful sun kissed skin.
“Aaah” you sigh. “Seonghwa” his name rolled off your tongue so naturally, almost like it was meant to be said like this.
His long and dark wet hair, his plush lips getting close to yours, his warm breath fanning your face.
“Seonghwa” you moaned again, more high pitched this time as your wrist was getting more and more reckless, each time deliciously scrubbing your walls in divine and forbidden pleasure.
The way he looked at you, the way his dark eyes were filled with the same desire you had for him. The way they spoke volumes about the sinful things he wanted to do to you. And God… did you almost let him have his way with you.
You started to clench around the root, each time you pulled it out your walls were eagerly gripping on it, refusing to let it go, so you smashed it back in with force to grant their wish. Your walls quivered around the vegetable, a foreign and unknown euphoria was taking over you and you knew you were done for.
“I’m… ngh… c-cumming” you whispered to yourself as you felt the tightness in your core reach a brand new level. “Seonghwa” you cried out one more time, being only a few back-and-forths away from your sweet release but alas you couldn’t pull it through.
Because without knowing, without realizing, completely unsuspecting, you called his name. You called his name three times. You summoned him.
Purple smoke started to erupt from the corner of the small dimly lit room by the late evening sun. With terror you ripped the vegetable out before you could finish and covered your modesty with the habit you were still wearing.
From the smoke appeared slick black leather chelsea boots resting under a pair of anthracite gray dress pants coated with a shiny silverish finish. As the smoke got thinner you could distinguish a matching cropped blazer with an asymmetrical and deconstructed silver vest underneath that was held together by one single button right under his neck, you could see the soft and glistening golden skin underneath. And finally when the smoke was completely gone you saw his face. The sharp features and the slender slithering body reminiscent of the one of a serpent, eyes just as sharp and presence just as menacing. A face you hadn't known for long but couldn't forget. Seonghwa’s face.
But he looked different. His long bangs weren’t framing his face anymore, instead he had tied the long wavy strands in a high half bun. His aura was also different from when he was wearing the blue and spotted overalls. Now cladded in the revealing ensemble he looked expensive, confident and sensual.
Your jaw practically dropped to the floor when your mind finally wrapped around the information your eyes were transmitting.
“Well well…” Seonghwa stepped closer while you jolted yourself up the bed, your body cornered between the headboard and the wall.
“What are you?” you whispered with trembling lips, heart pounding, adrenaline rushing through your veins, ready to flee if need be.
Seonghwa looked at you, puzzled for a second. Then he laughed, head tilting back. The laugh made the hair in your nape stand. It was unnatural, cold and fundamentally evil.
“Me?” he asked. Right then you felt your body being magically lifted from the soft mattress. You shrieked again, utterly confused while Seonghwa’s magic slammed you against the bare walls of the humble bedroom, the tip of your toes barely scraping the worn out wooden floor.
“Oh my, please pardon my awful manners,” he said in an overly polite tone. “I’m Seonghwa, Cardinal Sin of Lust” he said, bowing respectfully, elegantly bringing his right hand on his chest in a princely manner. “But for you, love…” Seonghwa stepped towards you, taking his time to look at you. He leaned on your ear to whisper.
“I’m a dream come true” his voice was deep, sultry, self-assured. Everything you’d imagine it to be.
A faint gasp escaped your lips as you felt his warm breath on your neck.
You wanted to scream to all heavens, you had brought a demon into the convent. You had desecrated the sacred ground of this place of worship, your home. You led the wolf to the sheeps. But you couldn’t scream, you couldn’t even if your life depended on it.
“W-what do you want?” you managed to push the few words past your teeth. Your voice, perfect opposite of the one of the demon: muted and trembling.
“Just want to finish my business with you” his face stayed right where it was, nestled in the crook of your neck. Lips so close you could feel the heat radiating from them but somehow they were still too far, unable to touch you.
“What business?” you whimpered.
“Darling.” Seonghwa clicked his tongue and shook his head in disapproval. “There’s no point in fighting anymore. Stop playing dumb with me. I know you’re a smart girl.” He took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of your shampoo. “I already won, darling… that very second you decided to give in to the thought of me. That second you closed the big heavy door and thought you escaped my eyes. That very second I had won.” A wicked smirk pulled on his lips. But his words didn’t make any sense to you.
This languish was torture, this state of expectation, of suspense. This proximity. You wished it would just stop. Be it touching you for good or get away finally. Just as if he read your mind he got even closer. Now it wasn’t only his lips taunting the thin skin of your neck, it was his whole body, hovering over yours; but still… Not touching you.
“Sure winning felt good. But you know what feels even better, darling?” You couldn’t bring yourself to formulate words and only whimpered in response.
“I asked you a question, sweetheart” he grinned, relishing on your anguish, placing both of his palms at both sides of your face, trapping your frail figure between his arms and the wall.
“It’s to finally touch you.”
So he finally let himself take a deep dive into you. The plush warm lips crash onto your neck, giving wet sloppy open mouth kisses while you couldn’t help but to tilt your head back giving him more access.
“What a good girl you are” he purred, not taking the time to part his lips from you.
His left hand went to your chin and turned it to make you face him, without much hesitation he planted a wet kiss on your lips, your cute whimpers and gasps were the perfect opportunity to deepen the kiss.
The kiss got heated as Seonghwa pried your hesitant mouth open with his long thumb and pushed his tongue inside to breach your lips. His delicious taste spread through your mouth, making your head dizzy. He tasted like candy, like you just took a bite of the juiciest strawberry. Ripe, just in season, absolutely delicious.
You moaned into his mouth and he smirked as his grip around your chin got tighter, he lifted his knee to part your legs and his thigh rubbed against your center through the habit. You couldn’t help but to moan louder, the unsolicited pleasurable friction made you incapable of reciprocating the kiss, your dangling feet nervously giving small kicks in the air.
Seonghwa finally parted from you, allowing you to catch your breath. But he was far from done with you.
“I know you long for more than this, angel” he whistled while his hand went up your thigh, still clothed with the thick black fabric of the habit. “I know you languish for pleasure” his blunt nails went up your arm and you realized you were still holding onto the carrot. He ripped the root from your hand.
“You won’t need this anymore” he said before smashing the poor vegetable on the ground sending millions of orange pieces flying across the room, you flinched once more at the demonstration of strength.
“Mine is much bigger than this. But don’t worry, love, I’ll make you nice and ready for me” he purred before placing both of his strong hands on the habit and just like that with astonishing ease he rips through the black gown. But not only, everything covering you is ripped in two and that also goes for your bra that fell to the ground. With the deafening sound of the fabric ripping you found yourself completely naked in front of the demon apart from the veil on your hair and the rosary beads laying on your chest.
You flinched and your hands flew to cover your nude frame but Seonghwa once again laughed and you felt an irresistible magical force pin your wrists at each side of your face. You sniveled and squirmed trying your hardest to go against the invisible force to hide away from the avid eyes of the demon.
“How cute.” The demon snickered when you failed to fight back. “Sweetheart, you don’t get to hide anything when you look this good” he said in a breath, eyes darting over your naked figure. From your dangling feet, to your thighs tightly pressed together, to your flushed face and to the Rosary beads sitting between your gorgeous breasts, swaying every time you kept trying to break away from the spell pinning you against the wall.
He brought a cold hand to the side of your breast, you couldn’t help but to moan as you felt his soft hand against you, his finger suddenly pinching your sensitive and hardened nipples. You let out a high pitched whimper.
“So sensitive” Seonghwa mocked you before he flicked the sensitive bud. Then he lifted his hand to harshly slap against the innocent lump of flesh, you jumped in surprise at the sensation. The surprise didn’t lie in the sudden surge of pain but rather from the enjoyment you got out of it, the sting sending electricity down your spine to light up your core.
With another faint movement of the head Seonghwa made you open your legs widely. You whimpered and felt tears build up in the corners of your eyes when he finally laid eyes on your most private part. And you realized with dread how wet you were. Soaked. Juices streaming down to your inner thighs making them glisten under his persistent gaze.
“Fuck, sweetheart” he exhaled out one heavy breath. “You got this fucking wet for me?” he said as he crouched down, inching his face dangerously close to your exposed center.
Embarrassment and shame reached an unbearable level, tears finally spilled out of your eyes, wetting your cheeks as you squirmed, trying your best to escape Seonghwa’s spell.
“So here’s the little hole I’m going to split in two” he said as his breath brushed over your wet folds.
You squirmed even harder, somehow feeling Seonghwa’s spell loosen around your wrists and ankles. But when he aimed his pointer finger right on your swollen bundle of nerves, earning a loud scream from you, the sudden pleasure from the perfect amount of pressure he applied on you made you completely immobile. Torn between the need for more of the foreign forbidden joy but also the fear and shame of letting the demon have his way with you, tainting you, taking away your most precious possession: your purity.
“What? Are you not fighting me off anymore?” He started to draw small circles on your bud. Your wetness made it easy for his finger to glide across the small and stiff nub. You moaned a little louder and he started going faster.
“Does it feel good, angel?” his voice went down an octave as pleasure got to your head, making the room spin, luckily you don’t have to stand on your legs.
Seonghwa went even faster when you didn’t reply.
“I said, does it feel good?” his tone was as harsh as his restless teasing of your clit. Hellish circles sending blazing heat to your whole body as you felt the pleasure rising in the deepest part of your core, your walls quivering on themselves.
But Seonghwa slowed down at the worst moment, a wicked smirk pulling on his plump lips, narrowing his piercing siren eyes.
“Good little sluts should answer when asked a question.” His pace was now just fast enough to keep you at your limit, each spasm of your core, testifying of the agonizing muted pleasure he was inflicting on you.
“Answer!” he ordered while he delightfully pressed on your painfully sensitive bundle of nerves.
“YES!! Yes it feels good” you blurted out, panting, sweat pearling between your breasts, giving in to the pressure.
“Good girl” he praised as he finally lifted his hand from your sensitive parts. You sighed in both relief of finally being let off the hook but also in frustration at the displeasing feeling of his denial.
But before you could celebrate or pester he pushed that very same finger inside you. You didn’t know by what ungodly miracle he managed to aim straight at your sensitive spot, but he did, applying divine pressure deep inside you. Your eyes instantly rolled to the back of your head as you felt the will of fighting off slipping through your fingers.
Seonghwa chuckled at your reaction, he was enjoying himself very much. After centuries of boredom he intended to savor every second of your agony.
“Darling, you really are hungry for my fingers, aren’t you? Your slutty little cunt is gripping so tightly” he chuckled again while he pulled his finger back. You hated how right he was. You hated how you felt your walls clench around him, how you felt your own body crave for more of him as soon as his finger slipped out.
But the yearning didn’t last long because he pushed past your entrance again, this time fitting two fingers inside you, taking the time to gently stretch you until his blunt nails reached as deeply as they could.
You let out a moan through gritted teeth, the pleasure making beads of sweat pearl at the sides of your face.
“Fuck! Your virgin little pussy just loves to be stretched out like this, doesn’t it?” He leaned even closer to your sopping center.
Tears continued to run down your cheeks as pleasure rose again. Seonghwa picked up the pace, stretching your walls so deliciously, pumping his two fingers in and out of you, each time he pulled out he ripped a moan out of you. Again, you started to twitch around his fingers and he smirked down on you. Pleasure continuously grew as you made this silent prayer that he would finally take you over the edge, over the barrier of this beautiful and forbidden land that you stayed away from all these years.
But again he slowed down and came to a stop. This time tears of pure frustration ran down your cheeks as you pathetically bucked your hips up trying to fight against Seonghwa’s spell pinning you down the wall.
“Aww.” He cooed in a mocking tone. “Darling, I’m sorry… were you about to cum?” He said while you shot him a death glare. He chuckled at your reddened cheeks and your frowned brows.
His finger swiped across your fold, pressing on the lonely bud once and you instantly dropped the angered look, your eyes drooped at the sensation and you couldn’t help but to grind against him, your womanliness made so eager by his touches.
“Fuck, look at you” he slipped one finger back inside, pumping it very slowly in and out. You bit down on your lip. “Acting so fucking distant only a few minutes ago…” he added a second one as you moaned out in bliss. “When in fact you were craving this… craving me…” he fitted a third one inside your already crowded heat as your moans now mixed with confused sobs. The intense feeling of pain and pleasure blending into a dangerous cocktail.
“Fuckkk” you cursed out, allowing yourself another sin you managed to avoid up until now, which has the demon showing more teeth.
“What a good little slut taking all of my fingers so good” he said as he took his time thoroughly stretching you out, his blunt nails pushing against your sensitive spot, while his face was closing in the distance with your intimate parts. Your eyes fluttered close as the muscles in your neck gave out and you let your head hang back on the wall.
“Look at me” Seonghwa grunted and your eyes snapped back open instantly meeting his dark ones, his irises seemed to go black with perversion.
“Now I’m gonna make you cum” He announced as he picked up the pace once more, you can tell he didn’t intend to stop before it was over. “I want you to never forget this. This feeling you’re about to experience.” His wrist took on a punishing pace as your eyes were locked with his. Pleasure sending radiating heat through your body, chest heaving up and down as you moan out loudly with your jaw hanging open. “Every time you’ll think of me I curse you to feel exactly… like… this”
Seonghwa finally wrapped his mouth around your lonely and eager little clit, flicking his tongue on it as his fingers relentlessly punched your g spot, both sources of pleasure go to your head and your first orgasm finally drops over you like a wave, taking you away with its raging current.
Your cum squirts out of your body, water like fluid rushing out of you and filling Seonghwa’s mouth, drenching his neck and exposed chest in the asymmetrical silver vest. He moaned, lips against yours and sending delicious vibrations into you.
You screamed out as the level of pleasure ripped through you, your walls clenching around Seonghwa and twitching uncontrollably as your whole body shook, still magically pinned down to the wall.
When you finally settled down he slowed down and took his fingers out of you, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and licking his fingers clean.
“Hmmm” he hummed contentedly and smacked his lips, seemingly enjoying your taste. “It’s true… Good little sluts, like you, taste much better”.
Seonghwa cut the spell and stood back up, your exhausted body dropping to the floor, your weakened legs unable to support your weight.
Seonghwa had enough of this teasing and had grown impatient. He brushed back the cum-soaked locks of charcoal black hair sticking to his forehead and cheeks, the wet skin of his chest glistening under the silver asymmetrical vest. Your eyes trailed down below the belt you gasped as you saw the outline of what was hidden from your eyes all this time… Even still restricted by the fabric of the shiny gray dress pants, the thickness and the length had your heart racing again.
“I want to feel you around me. Now.” he ordered, in a sultry tone that lifted goosebumps all over your naked skin.
Suddenly your body was magically lifted up again but this time Seonghwa threw you on the bed. The veil was barely hanging onto your hair anymore.
Seonghwa walked to you as he took off the cropped blazer along with the rest of his clothes. You gulped down at the sight of his nude and perfectly sculpted body standing beside you. The glistening chest made wet with sweat and cum, dripping down his abs even down to his groin where you barely even dared to look.
There it was. The Absolute Sin.
Seonghwa’s long, thick, twitching, veiny, hard cock.
You could have screamed at the monstrous thing if you weren’t still in a daze from your first crushing orgasm . It was so thick, so long you couldn’t even begin to imagine how this was about to fit inside you.
Seonghwa chuckled when he caught the panic swimming in your wide eyes. He thrived on this fear. And he knew exactly how it was going to go. And he couldn’t wait. He couldn’t wait to see the very same doe eyes grow heavy with pleasure and look back at him with need when you will inevitably beg him to keep going, to never stop fucking you. Because he broke you once and he intended to do it over and over and over again until you will no longer remember anything but him.
Seonghwa dipped both his knees at your sides, his body weight making yours sink in the soft mattress while he shimmied his way up between your wide open legs.
He rubbed the thick blazing hot tip on your still very sensitive bud while he stared down at the place your two bodies met. You tried not to moan by biting down on your bottom lip.
“Please” you meekly whimpered, his dark eyes shot back to yours.
“Please what?” he slithered between his teeth, smirking.
“Please don’t… do that…” you puffed, as fear crushed your chest. Seonghwa snickered again and brought his hand to very gently and softly brush his thumb over your wet cheeks and lips.
“Darling” his deep voice purred so softly. “You are not under any spell here. You can control this tiny little body of yours. So go ahead” he taunted you as his hand went down from your face to your sensitive nipples. “Go ahead and close your legs.”
What? No… It isn’t possible.
There was no way he was not the one forcing your thighs apart like this. But when you gave it a try, when you attempted to lift your ankle it actually worked. You indeed could move. But… somehow you…. still didn’t.
“Come on show me. Go ahead, pretty” his hand went down again to your stomach. “Close your legs on this poor, aching, desperate….” he flicked his pointer finger on your clit “virgin little pussy”. The sweet sting made you moan out and arch your back instinctively.
Seonghwa waited a few seconds staring down at you with amusement as you didn't move an inch. Your body kept your legs nice and wide for him against your own will.
“You know what?” he took his hand back and you swallowed back a whine and the loss of contact. “Okay, I won’t… if you are still this strong headed after all of this maybe you’re right. You are a pure spirit and I can admit defeat when I have lost.”
The smug look he wore completely gave him away. You knew it was a ruse, a ploy to get to you, to toy with you but you weren’t listening to reason anymore, only your delirious body tortured with vicious need and you just couldn’t risk it. You couldn’t risk him leaving you, not like this.
“NO!” you wailed, extending your hand to him as he was already getting off the bed and on to his feet. “I-…I-… Ok… do it”
Seonghwa’s expression here took a turn. The smug smile was completely wiped off his face, only dark brown and grave eyes looking down on your naked frame.
“Yeah?” he came back to bed and laid over you. He brought his lips close to your ear and he seductively whispered against your neck as your eyes fluttered close. “If you want it, sweetheart. You’ll have to properly beg for it”.
Your eyes snapped open. But Seonghwa only looked dead serious.
“I- I-” you started but Seonghwa lifted his hand to let it slap against your wet cunt. The whacking sound bounced off the bare walls and the stinging pain had you grunting in unsolicited pleasure.
“I said properly. I want to believe you” his voice had nothing of the playful undertone it had a few moments ago. You didn’t think twice, maybe not even at all.
“Please, Seonghwa. I implore you to fuck me. Please fuck and use my slutty virgin cunt as much as you’d like. Please hurt me and rip my virginity away. I want to scream and cry out your name. I want to be yours. I want to forget everything about the good girl I used to be, I want to be your whore. Forget about my soul, just take it with you back to hell.”
Silence fell as a grin played on his lips. It’s not smug or playful, it’s wicked, downright evil.
You were not just begging him. The desperate prose was not just a plea. It was a prayer. You were praying for him to taint you. Begging him to take away your purity like it was nothing but a nuisance to you, discarding it. Seeing you abandon your values and principles was the greatest achievement, a victory so sweet it made Seonghwa lose control. The feeling was intoxicating, blissfully filling his veins and making his evil heart thump. In his infinite existence he had never felt that. And it was all thanks to you.
Suddenly his body was elevated in the air and purple smoke enveloped him again. For a second you were scared that he was actually leaving you but the thought vanished as quick as it appeared when you heard the distinctive shrill sound of the metal scraping against the wall. You looked above your head and you witnessed with dread the crucifix above your bed being slowly turned upside down, engraving the white plaster of the bare walls. The foreboding omen lifted goosebumps off your skin and sent a cold shiver down your spine.
Soon you saw his body peek out as the smoke evaporated. It was still him but he had changed.
Huge wings were open behind his back, covered in raven black lustrous feathers, shining under the moonlight peeking from the window as the dark night was now settled. Two black horns have pierced his skin at each side of his head, pointing upwards, resembling the ones of a spanish bull. His body, somehow, looked even more defined, the muscles of his abs and shoulders seemed to bulge out. He looked strong, ominous, dangerous.
“You have such a way with words” he said as he floated back between your legs and settled his huge cock on your stomach. “Now I’m gonna make all of your wishes come true”. He brushed the tip of his cock, wet with precum, once again on your slick folds. “I've never fucked a mortal in my true form before.” he started, still rubbing against you, the muted pleasure making your brain fuzzy. “I can’t guarantee you’ll come out of this alive”.
But you were already set on it and if you had to die, so be it…
“I don’t care” you whispered as your eyebrows met and you looked back at him with need.
You braced yourself when you felt him finally push himself inside you. You could practically hear your hymen rip in two to make way for his huge cock. The puny little carrot could have never compared to the size of him.
“What a good little slut you are,” he cooed, before grunting as you were gripping around him. “Willing to die for a round of fun on my big cock”.
Sharp throbbing pain ripped through your lower stomach as you frowned and grunted.
“I know…” Seonghwa purred as he leaned over in your ear “I’m big” he said as he finally reached the bottom of you, linking his hips with yours. And he pulled out a lot faster than when he came in. Your eyes rolled back and you crushed the pillow over your mouth to yell in it.
But when he went back in again somehow the ache had lessened and pleasure was slowly taking its place. Soon the pain, as sharp as it was, vanished to become only a vague memory you couldn’t even recall as your mind was too preoccupied by the incommensurable pleasure Seonghwa made you feel.
“Fucking whore” Seonghwa grunted as he mercilessly ramed up your pussy, making it the shape of his cock. “Cheating on God feels good, doesn’t it? Your whorish little cunt can’t resist this fat demon cock, can it?” he growled.
You started twitching once again around him and Seonghwa instantly recognized the familiar clench he felt earlier around his fingers.
“Are you going to cum?” he asked, panting above you.
You couldn’t even process the words you were hearing as your eyes rolled back and your jaw fell open. But you were brought back to your senses when Seonghwa’s big clawed hand slapped your cheek forcefully. The burning pain took you aback and stopped your never ending ascension to pleasure. You whined a complaint and Seonghwa grabbed your face into a strong grip making your lips pout.
“Good little whores have to ask first” he said, still deeply pounding your precious little pussy.
“Pleasepleaseplease… C-can I cum?... F-fuckk… Please” you mumbled as his pace made it hard to hold yourself back.
“No!” he responded sternly. “Not now” he said, smirking evilly. Enjoying this anguish in your eyes as you tried your best to control your body. He brought his hand and pinched hard on your swollen little clit.
“Aaaah” you screamed, arching your back and pressing your head back into the soft mattress.
“You’ll cum when I’ll tell you too” he snickered, looking down at you. And the pleasure kept on building, frustrated tears starting to wet your cheeks again.
“My God please…” you whined, as tears streamed down your face and your pussy clenched around his thick cock. Seonghwa scoffed.
“Sorry but he has left you, darling.” He started to draw circles on your sensitive and aching clit, still maintaining the punishing pace of his cock rearranging your guts, making the rosary beads jump along with your breasts with each powerful thrust. You cry out as it’s becoming nearly impossible to keep yourself from cumming. “He abandoned you to me” he growled, his low voice sending electricity down your core.
“Pleaseeeee” you pleaded once more, desperation oozing out of your broken up voice and finally Seonghwa pronounced the magic words.
“Cum. Cum for me like the godless little whore that you are”
Finally you let go. You let Seonghwa’s skillful hand and monstrous, merciless cock take you down to the hellish pit of lustful sin. Pleasure took over you and clouded your vision, everything came to a blur as you could only concentrate on the throbbing of your cunt around Seonghwa’s thick dick. You moaned out his name in pure agonizing bliss. The orgasm was even longer lasting, even stronger than the one he gave you moments ago. And you knew for a fact now that there was no going back.
The good girl that you were had died, Seonghwa killed her. And you had let him do it without batting an eyelash. But fuck did it feel good. You felt no shame, no regrets, only unholy desire for the demon’s heavenly cock.
Soon the high wore off but Seonghwa didn’t seem to care and kept on pounding you, taking a bruising grip on your parted thighs with both his hands.
“Please” you whimpered again as your poor little pussy might split in two from clenching and throbbing this much right after an earth shattering orgasm. Seonghwa chuckled in between heavy breaths.
“I just came” you cried out, turning into an over-stimulated mess.
“I don’t care” he spat, using you like a fucktoy just like he pleased, after all you had asked him to do so… ‘to fuck and use your slutty virgin cunt as much as he’d like’. The exhausted quivering of your restless pussy started to build up again and before you could even realize it, Seonghwa’s thick cock had you flirting with the edge of the bottomless pleasure pit again.
“Please” you whined “Please stop” you begged him, breast lewdly jumping up and down with each of his brutal thrusts. But he kept on going, growling as his eyebrows met, handsome face contorted in pleasure, biting his lip. Body pressed over yours and full black feathered wings completely concealing you, one of his horns even scraping the wall with one too violent move.
“Pleaseeeee” you whimpered yet again. And suddenly your body was being lifted and flipped over by Seonghwa’s spell. You land on all fours, completely confused but worst of all, completely empty.
“Don’t you get it?” Seonghwa said as he slowly pushed himself back into your soft, warm little throbbing cunt. You moaned as you gladly took him back. “You sold your soul to me. You don’t get to ask for anything anymore. So I’ll fuck you for as long as I see it fit” He said before pushing down on your face, shoving your head into a shamefully submissive position, your ass up in the air, ready to be destroyed by him once more.
His fat cock parted you so deliciously as lewd wet sounds rang to your ears. It was like your once virgin pussy had completely taken the shape of his monstrous dick. Every movement he made ripped a delighted moan out of your lips, you didn’t have the will to fight anymore. You only wanted him and this delectable high he made you feel.
“Fuckkk” you cried out as he started to go faster again, the quiver in your lower stomach making a quick return.
“You’re my thing now.” He ripped the veil of your hair, the last relic of your past self and sent it flying across the room. He grabbed a fistfull of your hair, harshly pulling on it maintaining your face forward but your chin still firmly planted in the mattress, asserting his dominance on your frail figure. “My toy, you hear?” the sting on your scalp added to the full feeling of his cock had you completely fucked out. Your eyes rolled as heat spreaded through you again, your jaw fell open and your tongue slipped out. You were fucked out dumb, completely. Brain nice and thoughtless just from him.
“Yeshhh” you mumbled.
“I’m gonna make you cum again and this time I will fill your dirty little cunt with my cum” The obscene sounds of his balls slapping against your slick folds and clit bounced off the walls.
“Yesshh pwweathe” you replied as your tongue slapped against your chin with each inhuman thrust of his hips deep into you, sending strings of drool on your chin and staining the sheets.
“Today you’re ovulating, you know what it means?”
Your eyes snapped back open.
“I’m gonna force a child into you. You’ll take my seed into your fertile womb and life will sprout inside you” His grip on your hair tightened and you felt him start to twitch inside you.
“You’d like that?” he teases, knowing the answer.
“Yesssshhhhh!!!” you yelled, you were ready for anything if it meant he’d let you cum again.
“Then take it. Take my cum you depraved slut” His second hand left your hips to grab the rosary still around your neck, twisting his wrist to wrap the beads around his fingers and pulling on it while still maintaining his grasp on your hair.
Bloodstream to your brain became restrained and you started to feel dizzy. A deliciously light headed sensation filled your head up as your pussy quivered with a third orgasm. Your hungry cunt squeezed Seonghwa’s thick length as if its life depended on it, demanding every last drop of cum the demon had to offer. You clenched and throbbed around him in pure joyful sin as he took you to the deepest part of this abysmal and cursed pleasure, taking your sanity and everything that was left of the old you to the pits of hell with him.
Seonghwa’s rhythm faltered and he shuddered and grunted in bliss as his throbbing cock gushed out streams after streams of piping hot cum that stained your walls with white, shooting straight up to your womb, assuredly knocking you up in the process.
You yelled and moaned one last time. You were so full of him, belly round and swollen with the ungodly amount of cum Seonghwa gracefully gifted you. You were so unbelievably full that you couldn't help but to let it flow out of you and run down your thighs, no matter how much you clenched to keep it all inside.
You were in heaven. This was pure euphoria. A kind of contentment not any amount of spirituality and virtue could ever give you. The kind of happiness you could only experience when you let go of everything you’ve ever known to throw yourself into the arms of the most pleasurable sin of all.
Lust.
***
The next morning when you woke up at dawn with the chirping birds you felt nauseous and disoriented. You looked around the room and found it immaculate. Your habit was not ripped in two, it was neatly folded on the wooden bedside table along with your veil and underwear. The room was clean and neat: no traces of small pieces of orange carrot anywhere or puddles of cum on the wooden floor. And you were wearing a comfortable full length pyjama gown.
In a flash, disjointed memories came back to you. You remembered the anthracite gray suit, the black bull horns, the raven wings, the defined abs, the devilishly handsome good looks, the tempting smirk and the huge thick angry cock and the immense forbidden pleasure that came along with it.
You sat up and looked behind you hastily, the wall was perfectly smooth, no scrapes of the black horns and most of all the crucifix was perfectly normal, hanging right side up.
You spotted the small, thin, intact carrot next to your pillow and sighed in relief. Yes, you had sinned but you knew if you confessed and prayed hard enough God would forgive you. Afterall, you had never done such a thing and it was shameful and wrong, yes, but they were far greater sins than this one, like selling your soul to the Sin of Lust and bearing his child… You shook your head, chasing away the blurry memory of the nightmare, feeling a weird tingly build up in your lower stomach as you saw flashes of the evil smirks and the huge monstrous-
“It was a dream” you said out loud, sighing, hoping the sound of your own voice would prevent your mind from imagining more of the sinful imagery. “Just a meaningless dream” you told yourself again.
Convinced the soreness between your legs was only due to masturbating for the first time, that the nausea was nothing to worry about and that the spasm inside your belly were benign little cramps.
Seonghwa smirked in victory as he looked at you through the pierced purple smoke. He made it. He broke you beyond repair. He went, won and marked you. And soon he would back to take what you had promised him: an offspring and your soul, body and mind, you.
“See you soon, y/n” he chuckled.
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a/n: leave a comment or even a cheeky lil reblog if you liked it <3
taglist: @written-in-flowers @wlv-asteria @wisejudgedragonhairdo @skz1-4-3 @atinism @watamotee33 @sanhwalvr @alicedawitchbish @caratsmatic @reeateez @bts-army380 @woohwababes @yoonivjpg @salam2salang @seokqt @hotteokkay @itza-meee @stanredvelvetforstdprotection @meowmeeps @ingloriousbasterdss @roomsofangel @cheynalexilaiho @kyukyustar @seonghwasstar @oddracha @aaa-sia @lol-imtrash2000 @luminouskalopsia @yandere-stories @shocymer @bangchansbackohmygod
#seonghwa#seonghwa smut#ateez#ateez smut#ateez fanfic#park seonghwa#ateez hard hours#ateez hard thoughts#seonghwa ateez#seonghwa x reader#seonghwa hard thoughts#seonghwa hard hours#seonghwa fanfic#seonghwa imagines#kpop smut#ateez fic#ateez imagines#seonghwa x you#ateez x reader
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“I love you.” The first time he says those simple three words, he doesn't mean it. Not really. And he knows you're aware of it too, with the stern glare you give him in response to his smug grin. He's teasing you—or, it looks that way anyway. In reality, he hopes that there's a glimmer, a sliver of your heart that welcomes his enticing and open arms. It’s routine. A habit. It feels more natural to lure you in with songs of promises than to simply tell you what he needs. He hopes you take his hand and ignore the sharp nails digging into your skin. He hopes you fall.
“I love you.” The second time is months later. He thinks he might genuinely mean it this time, considering how heavy his heart feels in his chest as the words leave his lips. But it’s hesitant. You can tell. And ever so patient, you only smile at him, taking his hand this time to squeeze it gently. Ah, that feels nice. Does he love you? Have you grown on his cold, dead heart? The fact that he doesn't want to recoil from your touch is enough if an answer..
“I love you.” The third time is at his grave. He’s confident now. Feeling. Wanting. He wishes he could hold your fingers against his skin forever. He doesn't want to even let go, because he fears you might vanish into thin air, like every other caring thing in his life. You're good. Understanding. Nothing like him. You deserve better than him. But he's always been a selfish man, and even though your presence urges him to be better, he remains selfish when it comes to you. He doesn't--no, he won’t lose you.
“I love you.” He’d feared he would never get to say the words again. He had faith in you of course, but an Elder Brain is no easy feat to defeat. But as he watches the brain sink into the darkest depths of the sea, the others cheering behind him, he feels the sun begin to prick at his skin again. It stings. Gods, does it sting. For a moment, he wonders if he should even run. He's had a taste for the sun kissed glow and he's not sure if he wants to part ways with it if it means he’ll rot away in the shadows forever. But when he feels you hurriedly toss a cloak over his shoulder, covering his face with the hood just enough for him to meet your eyes, you offer him something he doesn't want to ever imagine himself without again. Something he’s still in disbelief he has. Someone to worry for him.
I love you, I love you, I love you. As years pass, the words become more frequent, yet they never lose their weight, no matter how they're said or when. It’s funny, really, how he'd almost feared saying the same exact words just a few decades ago. To Astarion, they remind him that you're still here, allowing him the privilege to let him love you as much as he does.
“I love you.” The last time he says it, whether it be after an untimely death or simply from old age, he’s holding your hand again. He hates that instead of the adoration it’s supposed to convey, he hears more of the wobble in his voice as he realizes his time with you is up. Even though he's said it so many times, he finds that it still wasn't nearly enough. Open your eyes, he pleads to nobody in particular. He breathes. Why is he breathing? He doesn't need to. But the breaths become faster, and he realizes he’s crying too. Curses, how immature. Ah, your hand is so cold, almost like his own. He hates it. Don't be like him. And when he begs, he begs. Squeeze his hand again. Touch him again. Smile at him again. Live again.
Let him love you again.
#is this too corny..#idk I love him#astarion ancunin#baldur's gate 3#baldur's gate astarion#astarion x tav#bg3 astarion#astarion x reader#astarion#bg3 x reader#astarion fanfic#astarion x oc#astarion x you
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‧₊˚✧ ❛[ to have & to hold ]❜
ft. logan howlett x f! reader — xmen, marvel
╰₊✧ you allow him to possess you entirely, body & soul┊1.2k words
kinktober 2024: oct 8. virginity loss
setting: logan (2017) old man! logan contains: fluffy smut!! dom logan & sub reader┊age gap, virginity loss, receiving oral & fingering, unprotected piv, abrupt ending
➤ author's note: i’m sorry for this being short and the abrupt ending, i’m just so tired from college because my substitute professor is a bitch and i have to work twice as hard just to get a 70% T-T the single mother reader is ending up to have three parts so look forward to that when kinktober is over teeheehee
your old man isn’t sure what kind of small deed of goodwill he must have done decades ago to deserve you, but it makes him perform more of them in his day-to-day life thanks to the existence of the biggest blessing of his miserable life. every time he comes back after a long day of work and dealing with customers of varying irritation levels, there you are patiently waiting for him no matter how late into the night it was. you help take off his suit jacket and tie in well-rehearsed moments, whistling a little old-timey tune on your lips and asking him how his day was.
he’s never really been a talkative guy, so most of the time he’ll just say it was fine and leave it at that, but occasionally, he’s willing to complain and vent about something that happened that got on his nerves. all the while, you’re finishing off a freshly cooked meal with garnish and serving it to him with a smile, listening to everything he has to say and massaging his weary muscles.
usually, however, you’re the one doing all of the talking, telling him about what happened today at work with that annoying co-worker and how you got invited to the wedding of an old friend from high school. he settles himself in the worn leather recliner and feels himself relax with your voice almost acting like a form of meditative music, and even if he doesn’t look like it, he listens to every word— you can tell because he doesn’t turn the newspaper page once and asks little questions like “who?” “when did that happen?” “is that so?” instead of just humming deafly.
he doesn’t even remember how you ended up moving in with him and acting like his housewife, giving him a taste of domestic life he didn’t realize he was yearning for. you’re just a stubborn little lady, he guesses, remaining persistent about how much you liked him despite his claims that you should steer clear of a bad man like him. he’s glad it ended up that way though, he couldn’t imagine where he would be without you by his side if you listened to him and went off with a human your own age who didn’t have the shackles he did.
there’s always a bit of lingering guilt regarding the last part, worried that he’s holding you back from fully experiencing life like a ball and chain bound to your ankle, but you were an adult who was mature enough to make your own decisions. if you didn’t want this, you wouldn’t have spent over a year trying to pursue it with someone as headstrong as him.
sometimes logan dozes off in that armchair, allowing you to drape a blanket over him and place a kiss on his forehead with a whisper of sweet dreams for the cherry on top. sometimes you coax him to join you in bed where it’s more comfortable, tangling your legs with his and clinging onto his frame like he was a giant living teddy bear. maybe he’ll do the same if he’s feeling particularly soft tonight instead of sleeping on his back like a soldier on active duty would. both of you always get a night of better sleep in the presence of the other, holding onto the dead weight of the other’s still body, feeling the slow rise and fall of their chest, and listening to their steady heartbeat.
yet your relationship had never gone past heated makeout sessions, not until tonight when you pleaded with him so sweetly to help you relieve the ache between your legs that you couldn’t fix yourself.
he’s hesitant at first, surprised at the slight and unfamiliar feeling of fear tugging at his consciousness. is this really okay? is a lovely angel like you really asking a dirty old man like him with the blood of dozens on his hands to be your first experience of something so intimate? he’s profoundly aware that he’s never been a good man, but maybe he would start now and let you go in your own direction…
before he could say anything, you reach out to kiss him, so tender and full of adoration to ease his worries. the way you look at him while gasping his name and making pleas for him is almost overwhelming with how blown-out your pupils are from need, looking at him like he was the only other soul in the world— like he was the only other soul in the universe who was meant to complete you.
he asks you one more time if you’re sure, absolutely sure, before taking the opportunity to
taste the sweetness of your arousal and quickly realize that he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get enough anymore, scraping at the soft skin of your inner thighs with his beard although the pressure in your core overpowered the feeling of friction. your hands find their way into his graying hair and tug on them whenever he swirls his tongue around your engorged clit, making him groan and repeat the motion until you gush all over his mouth.
then he drags a calloused finger along your folds, collecting your slick and instinctively licking his lips at the sight of it despite just eating you out seconds before. his eyes aren’t really what they used to be, he briefly wishes he had his glasses on so that he could watch your virgin pussy take his index followed by his middle. even if he can’t quite see it clearly, he can certainly feel your walls pulsating at the intrusion as you let out a breathy whine.
you feel a bit dizzy already from your first proper orgasm, much less from the pleasurable stretch of his fingers starting to move in a scissoring motion as your cheeks burned in embarrassment from how intently he was staring like a man hypnotized. if you were in your right mind, you would have asked him to quit it, but all you were focused on was the unfamiliar feeling of tension in your torso while he praised how tight you were.
logan is exhibiting more gentleness with you than he’s ever been with anything in all his two hundred years, scared of hurting you and treating you like a fragile porcelain doll. you basically need to beg him to fuck you right because you worry you’ll be far too exhausted to continue if he continues like this, already reaching peak at least three times now and needing to pull at his belt to free his throbbing erection.
kiss him when he lines himself up with you and slowly pushes in, allowing you to feel every inch of him and taste yourself on his lips. claw long scratches into his back as you take him, allowing his regenerative powers slowly take effect yet still being able to leave lasting marks in his skin for him to admire the next day. tell him you love him when he finally bottoms out in you, watching him through teary eyes as he rests his forehead on yours, and listen to his beating heart open up to you as he tells you he does too.
#📜. her works#logan howlett#logan howlett x reader#logan howlett smut#marvel#marvel x reader#marvel smut#wolverine#wolverine x reader#wolverine smut#old man logan#x men#x men x reader#x men smut
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𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐃 𝐁𝐄𝐒𝐓 | 𝐣. 𝐡𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐬
₊⊹ 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘 — secretly pining over someone is never fun—even less so when they’re your childhood best friend, and dating someone else.
₊⊹ 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 —all the angst, jealousy, thoughts of inferiority, cursing, big sadness from reader over here, not proofread i got better things to do
₊⊹ 𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 — jack hughes x fem!reader
₊⊹ 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄 — my valentine’s day jhughes special (albeit a day late ☹️), as promised! sorry it took me so long. couldn’t figure out how to end it. this is unapologetically self-indulgent. also not a wip, but i HAD to do it to em. i’m sorry if your name is brooke or bianca. i love you. promise. maybe we’ll make a part two, if yall like it enough!
₊⊹ 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 — @dancerbailey3, @bellstwd, @kashee-h, @crazycat-ladys-blog, @brucewaynegfreal, @love4dlr, @jackhughesily, @leavethemonsteralive, @loveforaugust, @43hughes, @nathandoe, @choppedlamphandscowboy, @bunting58, @angelayse, @ru-kru, @sleepretreat, @nonsensical-nonsence, @maih23 (if your name is white, i couldn’t tag you!)
𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓
Everyone knows the saying you never know what you have until you lose it. Truth was, you knew exactly what you had—you’d just never imagined you’d lose it.
You never imagined you’d lose him.
A shared childhood and mothers’ who found friendship with each other had brought you and Jack Hughes together, kept you glued even as skin stretched and futures diverged—where he’d gone on to be a star hockey player, you’d quietly came into adulthood, trekking through the difficulties of college.
In your younger years, Jack had always been there. Life of the party, a mirrorball everyone gravitated to for its decadent shine—you, contrastingly, felt like a sore thumb at parties, attending them only to see the smile on Jack’s face. Differing personalities and life routes aside, Jack was your person. The first person you called whenever you were sad, or happy, or bored. The one who knew all of your test scores first, who took hours long flights just to visit you during breaks in the season.
Distance nor time had left a lasting mark on your friendship, kept together by constant phone calls and texts. Whilst you remained imbedded in the hustle of Toronto, Jack was trapped in New Jersey—a gap that you closed every summer, when mutual desire to see one another (as well as his brothers) brought you and him to Michigan for a few months.
From childhood, to high school, to now—it had always been you two. Jokes passed in the years, swirling around with assumptions of the two of you ending up together, finally realizing it after years of proclaimed friendship. For Jack, it’d never been romantic. Loving and caring, a relationship he’d never trade for the world, but the intimacy ended there. Memories of him outwardly flirting with girls in front of you at bars or parties flashed in your mind any time you figured maybe; he’d never given any indicator that you were or would ever be more to him than his best friend.
For you? It was an embarrassingly different story.
College had stolen much of your time—left none for a love life. But truthfully, that didn’t much phase you.
Hookups, flings, boyfriends—all of them paled in comparison to Jack. A childhood crush perpetuated by maturation without loss of contact, Jack had just… always been there. Always a best friend, never a lover; the hanging axe of rejection was too dire a outcome for you to ever consider telling him. Killing a friendship you’d grown with would kill you. And maybe he felt the same way, maybe the kisses he reserved for the crown of your head and the guiding hand he kept on the small of your back meant something, but you couldn’t continue existing if they didn’t.
So, a dutiful friend, you kept quiet, spared the connection and suffered in unrequited love.
And it hadn’t really changed until Jack had gotten a girlfriend. In all your years of knowing him, he’d had a few—though they rarely lasted more than a handful of months, and a selfish and bitter part of you liked that. Sometimes they overstepped, viewed themselves above you in the ranking of Jack’s life; he made painfully clear they never would be.
And it felt good, to be that cherished. But then you remembered he didn’t actually love you and it felt a whole lot less impactful.
Not Brooke.
Brooke, a box-dye blonde with a less-than-stellar reaction to your friendship with her boyfriend, was unarguably beautiful—unapproachably so, someone you’d picture whenever thinking of the girl Jack would end up with. You knew it would never be you, but you hated that it was her, hated that it was finally cemented, the coffin wheeled out.
A friendship you’d cherished for years had been weathered down by the abrasive actions of his girlfriend. It left a bitter taste in your mouth; Jack never seemed privy to Brooke’s nonverbal dislike of you, and you never made comment of it. If Jack was happy, what did it matter? If you said anything, all you’d appear to be was a child throwing a tantrum, the attention torn from them. You refused to jeopardize Jack’s happiness, even if it meant shredding your own.
Brooke tolerated you; that was the best word you could think of. There was surely no excess of love, but you didn’t think she flat out despised you, either. Passive aggressive to the point of just being aggressive, snide looks whenever she didn’t think you could see, intentionally separating you from Jack whenever the two of you were talking—it all made you hate being around her, and by extension, him.
So when he’d invited you to dinner with him—and some of his teammates, a monthly ritual at his house—the knee jerk reaction had been to decline, lie, run while you were still free from the piercing glare of Brooke; because you knew she’d be there, clung to his side, as if you had any intention of taking him away.
… Well, you’d did have the intention. Never the will, so then again maybe she was right to hate you. Feelings you’d never act on, words you’d never say—none of it mattered. She had him. Not you. Never you.
You should’ve said no.
Pouting eyes and pleading lips caved you. As soon as you’d agreed, you’d regretted it—knew in your bones it would only serve to wedge the knife in your heart deeper, solidify the loss of a what you thought would be a lifelong partnership. Your platonic soulmate, twin flame pinched out by hateful fingers.
Getting ready for the dinner felt like preparing for a cage fight, where all night you’d have do endure blow after blow—them kissing, them touching, him loving her in a way you wished he’d love you.
Night blanketed the sky by the time you’d arrived to Jack’s home, shadows slipping by the window, shapes of people telling you that you were likely late—the stone in your stomach had slowed you monumentally. The torture was self-inflicted, you knew. There would be no pity when your heart finally gave out.
She did this to herself, they’d say. Hearts can only endure so much before they break.
Voices coalesced into one as you pushed open the door, welcomed by the familiar atmosphere of friendship and loud laughter. You’d completely forgotten to text Jack that you’d gotten here—and for some reason, as you crossed the threshold into the gaping space of his living room, you felt like an outsider. Sudden eyes landed on you like bullets, and all you saw was Jack—his side taken dutifully by Brooke, always beautiful, striking in a way you didn’t think you’d ever been.
Looking at her, it made sense why she was the one Jack chose. Why you hadn’t been. A best friend. Childhood acquaintance. Faded t-shirt he’d strung along for too many years, even as the design weathered away and the fabric weakened. He’d gotten a shiny new one, the novelty still in tact, yet he hadn’t let you go.
Some part of you, deep in the caves of your wounded heart, wished Brooke would ban him from your presence. Maybe then your hurt would lessen. You knew you’d never be able to let go on your own.
Jack’s eyes caught you, stood awkwardly in the mouth of the hallway. He attempted to stand, only for Brooke to tug him down by his t-shirt—the shirt you’d bought him for his birthday last year, impressed with two hearts holding hands. She said something to him, something low and hissed between clenched teeth. Before you could see his reaction, Nico was invading your space, arms winding around you.
“There she is!” he announced, the ground leaving your feet as he lifted you playfully. “We were waiting on you to eat. Sure do like to take your time.”
Residual bitterness faded at Nico’s words—Jack may have been your best friend, but years of being attached to him introduced you to his teammates; they were always kind, if a little overbearing. A big brother that toed the line of overprotective and well-wishing.
Grateful for the attention distractor, you allowed your shoulders to relax and lungs to decompress. The first cut at seeing Jack, still happily in love with Brooke, was already dealt; you just needed to get through the dinner, and not look like a hostage while doing so.
“Yeah, yeah,” you laughed, shoving Nico’s shoulder as he brought you towards where the others were gathered in the living room. “Make fun of me for driving like a grandma all you want, at least I’m safe.”
Not looking at Jack took more self control than you’d care to admit. Blurring in your peripheral, a mess of colors stacked atop one another, you knew if you glanced—saw the claim Brooke was staking for all to see—it would only make you want to leave. So you didn’t.
Luke was next to greet you, offering a pity-imbued smile. Despite never mentioning your affections for his older brother, you knew he knew; saw it in the way he would look at you, the frowns offered. In times when Brooke inadvertently talked you down, it was Luke who told her off, put balm on the wound.
A side hug and a soft smile—you barely were able to muster one yourself. “How have classes been?”
You graced Luke with an exasperated groan. “Terrible, thanks for reminding me. Economics is kicking my ass.”
Luke sat. You remained standing. A loose thread peeking from your sweatshirt seemed far more intriguing than eyes you were trying desperately not to meet.
“Tough luck,” remarked Luke, conversations reviving after the novelty of your arrival wore off. You recognized a couple of faces around you—Dawson, Jesper, Alexander, and John. Faces you’d become acquainted with in your years of being Jack’s friend.
The title felt a bitter reminder of your ceiling, never surpassing Jack’s best friend. Loved and cherished, a desired presence, just not how you wanted. Who were you to complain? It was better to be his friend than nothing at all; to have a little piece of him, proof that at one point, you’d mattered enough to get it.
You just weren’t sure if you did anymore.
Where once Jack’s name was a regular occurrence, flashing on your phone screen—texts, calls, FaceTimes, they all faded once Brooke came into his life. Movie nights on his couch, reruns of old films that you could quote down to the last line, stopped. You knew Jack cared enough to extend invites, but at this point, you figured it was more out of pity and shame than actual want of your company.
Beggars really couldn’t be choosers.
Eventually, everyone made their way into the dining room. Chairs lined a large wooden table, one chosen and haphazardly assembled by you and Jack when he’d first bought this house. Scratches imbedded in the finish sent flashes of dropped hammers and clumsy feet into your mind, memories that felt too far to touch.
Mind far afield, you sat down—somewhere between Luke and Nico, far enough from Jack to be inconspicuous but close enough to feel the sharp burn of his eyes. It was petty, you knew, to have still not greeted him. Not that Brooke would’ve likely even let you. A sadistic part of you wanted him to feel even a modicum of the agony that rattled you whenever you were forced to watch him and Brooke, wanted to wonder and question why you were so cold.
Then again, maybe he didn’t care.
Body detached from your mind, the last thing you expected was to be spoken to—least of all by Brooke. But there her grating voice was, verging on overuse, but you knew that was just how she talked. Chafing and annoying and awful—
“Still no boyfriend?” A venomous smile curled her lips; friendly to the untrained eye. You knew better.
Your fingers twitched. The food in front of you spoiled, appetite evaporated. Of course she asked that—both a jab and a reassurance; if you had a boyfriend, her relationship with Jack would be safe. Not that it wasn’t, regardless.
You wished you could scream at her, leap across the table and force her to hear your words: you’d never have Jack. Want him, yes. Spend years pining over a boy who looked to you like the sister he never had, absolutely. But actually have him, feel his love in every touch and kiss? No. That wasn’t on the cards for you; you’d folded long ago.
“Nope,” you drawled. The pressure of Jack’s stare caved you—you caught his eyes, eyebrows creased, the wrinkle of his forehead that made itself prominent whenever he was annoyed.
What did he possibly have to be annoyed about?
Catching Luke’s gaze only irked you further, alit the urge to push out of your chair and flee Jack’s home. Pity swelled in his eyes, the beginnings of a frown quirking down his lips. You didn’t want pity; didn’t want to feel like the entire world was in on some inside joke you’d never understand. Everyone saw it, your love for Jack. Saw the lovestruck comedy that was your life—girl loves boy, boy isn’t even aware of it, hilarity ensues.
Everyone but Jack. And honestly, that was for the best.
You didn’t think you’d be able to handle the frown when he found out. Jack Hughes, always kind, never malignant, searching for a way to politely turn down his best friend without taking an axe to the connection. Really, there would be no bloodless way to let it die—so you lived in moments between, where nothing felt impactful or important or real.
When Jack was without Brooke, you could almost imagine he was your Jack—the one who turned down every girl so that he’d be free to go to prom with you, the one who got banned from a restaurant for life for pouring a drink over your cheating ex-boyfriend’s head. The Jack who always protected you, always cared, even when all of his friends couldn’t understand it.
That Jack who currently hand his arm around the back of Brooke’s chair, shoulders touching—a casual thing, something you’d done with countless strangers, yet it felt impactful enough to make bile swim in your throat.
“Probably for the best,” Luke interjected after the conversation—if it even was that—between you and Brooke came to an awkward stalemate. “Guys are dicks.”
A tension somehow always existed whenever you were in a room with Brooke. One you never wanted, never fed into. Like a shadow, the morning mist, it hung thick as smog. Choking you, nearly forcing you from the room.
“You’re a guy,” you laughed weakly, offering Luke a pointed look.
“No one at college, then?” Nico piped up. You felt bad for not looking at him, but he was too close to Jack and Brooke—you didn’t want to see them.
Cozy, warm in a way you thought only you’d ever be with Jack. Familiar, united. Their relationship didn’t seem as superficial as his past ones had, woven together under the pretense of good sex and no real connection. Watching Jack love his new, perfect girlfriend made you physically ill; and maybe that was dramatic, maybe it made you a backwards person with failing morals—you couldn’t care anymore.
Years of hiding your love, months of watching his own be poured into a girl that wanted you out of his life—it wore you down to your bones, dangerously close to burning to ash.
“Most of them are… strange, to say the least,” you responded with a wince. And that was true; your major seemed to just attract men whose one quality was making women uncomfortable. “Plus, having a boyfriend would just distract me. Finals are coming up and I’m already worried about how I’m going to do on them.”
Luke scoffed. “Hookups exist.”
A wince followed Luke’s words. Eyes fell to where Jessica was rubbing her hand—Jack apologized, albeit half-heartedly. Confusion overcame you; had he squeezed her hand too tightly?
In the past, you’d had boyfriends. Not that they lasted very long. Somehow, there was always something wrong with them—something only Jack could see; he’d endlessly nitpick, nag, explain why your newest boyfriend wasn’t good enough for you.
They were too old, too uptight, not nice enough. Always something. And without fail, Jack was right—scarcely did they make it past the first date before some measly excuse fell from their lips. But maybe it wasn’t them; maybe it was you. So, with an aching heart refusing to connect with any other but Jack’s, you gave up. Delved headfirst into college work and stayed below the waves, even as they began to drown you.
All you offered in response to Luke was a shrug.
Conversation picked up then, thankfully fell away from you. Limelight sufficiently dimmed, you allowed yourself to watch Jack; a habit you’d never quite shaken, even in the embarrassing moments when he caught your peering gaze.
You weren’t sure exactly when you’d fallen in love with Jack—just that you had, and now you couldn’t touch the bottom of him. Water filled your lungs, suffocated you, but if drowning meant being near him, you’d happily do it. Dying in his platonic embrace seemed better than dying all alone.
Ruffled brown hair, the sort of charm that every boy-next-door seemed to possess, and clear blue eyes that shone every emotion like a transparent window to his soul—all of it made Jack Jack, the boy you loved, would admire even in moments he didn’t think he deserved reverence.
You’d seen it all: the self-deprecation after his failure of a rookie year, dwindling confidence, tears imbued with hurt and disappointment, frustration of someone who knew they were better. It was you who’d been by his side, proved an anchor to a person you couldn’t live without.
Yet he’d still chosen Brooke.
For most people, that would be the last step off the cliff, boneless body breaking against the canyon. Not you—so full of hope and dreams, undeterred by every sign the universe gave you. You weren’t his only, but at least you were one.
Jack’s lips parted into a smile, one you could tell was real—his kissed Brooke’s temple, pinched her on the side. An intimate moment in a crowded room. You felt almost as if you were trespassing, a stranger watching two people in love. Part of you didn’t even associate that boy as Jack, because you couldn’t understand how he could love someone so averse to you, so… mean. But then again, it wasn’t about you.
It was about him. Accommodations had been made for years—leaving parties early because you were uncomfortable, blowing off his guy friends to comfort you after a bad date, scrapping his wants and his plans because of something to do with you.
He was probably sick of it. Sick of you, dictating what he could and couldn’t do. Who he could and couldn’t date. Because who cared if Brooke hated you; Jack loved her, despite it all. And that was what made dread swirl into a storm in your heart, ribs nearly cracking under the rate it was thundering at.
Abruptly, you stood. Felt the chair nearly topple. Eyes came to you—Jack’s friends. Yours, yes, but Jack’s foremost. You were just intruding, butting into a life that no longer fit you. Time had passed, the wishful minds of children grown into adulthood. He didn’t owe you anything anymore, especially when all you were was a storm cloud over his parade.
Just as soon as you had, Jack stood, concern clear in his gaze. “What’s wrong?”
Your tongue felt like lead. “Nothing—nothing, sorry. I’m—I need to use the restroom.”
You didn’t wait much longer before leaving the room.
Air felt scarce, lungs punctured and deflating quicker than you could patch the holes. Clumsily, you pushed open the door to the bathroom, steadied your shaking hands on the edge of the sink. Looking at yourself, reflection marred by the onset of tears, all you could do was compare—compare to Brooke, to every girl Jack had ever wanted, ever liked, ever loved.
Was it their features, doughy lips that worshipped him in a way you didn’t? Was it their bodies, womanly and free in a way you didn’t like to be? Or was it deeper, were their souls crafted from the same light, in a way you’d always thought your own had been with Jack’s?
Idiot, fool, dreamer—you were all of it. Like a lap dog, bird in its teeth, you always returned, remained dutifully at Jack’s side for the moment he might open the screen door and finally let you in.
Brooke had every right to hate you. Perceptive in a way Jack wasn’t, she saw what everyone else did—the lovesick eyes, foolish faith chaining you to him, an unrealized desire that would never be acted on. Had you been in Brooke’s place, you would’ve hated yourself as well.
Water poured from the faucet, gathered in your cupped palms. Attempting to desecrate any evidence of tears, you gently splashed the water in your face—went to dry it when you heard the sound of the front door creaking open.
“Oh, thank God you’re here, Bee.”
Cold crept up your spine. Eavesdropping was wrong—you knew that, yet still found yourself leaning against the bathroom door to catch Brooke’s words.
“What’s going on?” came the response, likely the voice of Bianca, Brooke’s best friend. You’d met her once at a game (met was a loose word; she’d given you a snide look and taken to ignoring you the entire time).
Brooke’s voice lowered to the point where you were forced to strain to hear her speak. “You know Jack’s little pet?”
A lapse. Your heart seized, taken by some concoction of shame and surprise.
“No.”
“Yes!” responded Brooke. “She’s fucking everywhere. I asked Jack not to invite her tonight, and lo and behold—”
“Wait, I thought you talked to Jack?”
“I did.” Vexation laced every letter. “I told him it made me uncomfortable how close they were, how she was always around, blah blah. He got defensive, but he said he’d talk to her.”
“Clearly not,” Bianca muttered. “Look, I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re childhood friends, yeah? He probably feels like he has to stay her friend, or something. I mean, Jack’s a good guy, he wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone; if he dropped her, he’d look like a douche. I’m sure she’ll get the hint eventually.”
Footsteps began, voices fading along with them. “I fucking hope. It’s honestly pathetic.”
Blood roared in your ears, drowned out the sound of your beating heart—if it was even beating anymore. Something bitter and hot invaded your airways, lashed like whips against your flesh. It was no secret Brooke disliked you, disliked the closeness of you and Jack, but to hear it, the vicious way it fell from her lips—it made your gut twist and constrict, pushing bile towards your throat.
Pathetic. They thought you were pathetic, hopelessly waiting, like a dead plant praying for flowers that would never come. Lovelorn, seeking affection that only came by way of friendship and never more; they were right, and it became evident with a strike of lightning to your body.
Is that truly how Jack felt? Was he waiting for you to give up, so to spare you the hurt of being let down? Had you become baggage? Chained to him, the memory of childhood the only thing keeping you relevant, when times were less impactful and his life didn’t center around being a professional athlete. The stain of youth, remaining only for its joyful memory; that’s all you were now—a memory.
Just like your love, it seemed everyone saw Jack’s hints but you. Rose-colored lenses blurred everything but what you wished to see; of course you missed them, ignored them so your narrative remained intact.
God, you were an idiot. A fucking idiot.
Head pounding, the squeeze of an oncoming migraine rattling your brain, you opened the bathroom door. Felt like a trapped bird all the way back to the table—you just had to get through dinner, only an hour or two, so as to not raise any suspicion, and then you could fade from Jack’s life.
Not that he’d notice. He hadn’t even spoken to you tonight, though no fault of his own; Brooke kept her claws deep, and it was clear he didn’t want to risk an argument. Not that you could blame him—she was his girlfriend. Her. Not you. He didn’t owe you anything.
Conversations filled your ears, ostracized you—every time you had opened your mouth before, it had felt wrong, the scratch on a vinyl everyone skipped over. You saw him first—noticeably tense, chair a bit further away from Brooke that it had been earlier. Tensed forehead, hands balled on the table; you longed to ask what was wrong, as you were used to doing. But you imagined talking to him, and it somehow felt wrong, a peasant addressing a king.
Then, your eyes fell to your seat.
No longer empty, occupied now by Bianca, who was talking casually with Brooke, as if her actions hadn’t changed your entire perception of the situation. There were no more seats. No more room. The metaphor wasn’t lost on you, hit with the same sting of antiseptic on a wound—there wasn’t any more room for you at the table, just as there was no room for you in Jack’s life.
Maybe this was always meant to happen. Childhood didn’t remain forever, and it seemed, neither was your friendship. You’d always wondered why Jack had chosen you, someone so dissimilar to himself and his friends. Eventually, you made peace with it. His friendship was a balm to everything negative. Now… here you were again, more ostracized than ever.
What were you supposed to do? The long haul wasn’t meant to have an end.
Everyone was looking at you now. Stage fright, you lost your speech, thousands of eyes from a crowd looking at you, spotlight centered on your face, and you couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t—
Blue eyes found you, stood stonily at the entrance of the dining room. Jack’s eyebrows knitted, confused as to why you were still stood. When he saw Bianca, his lip curled. Frustration sparked, bemusement painted over. Once more that protective streak flared, something you were so used to—it had once felt the greatest trophy, proof that the Jack Hughes cared enough to stand up for you. It felt a sore consolation now, a reminder that, as always, you’d be the meek girl from his childhood he was forced to drag along, defend, shield from his new life that he fit into perfectly, that you spilled out from.
“Get up.”
Then, the attention went to him.
Brooke glanced at her boyfriend, annoyance flashing on her face. Their conversation paused. “What?”
Jack nodded towards Bianca. “She took her seat,” he explained in a clipped voice. “Get up.”
Brooke rolled her eyes. “Jack, it’s not a big—”
“It is,” he interrupted. Tension sparked in the air like a misfired firework. “She needs to sit and Bianca took her place, so—”
“It’s fine!” The words spilled out before you could second guess them. They came out raw and pained and everything you didn’t want to appear as; pity pooled from everyone, that sort of second-hand pity you saw on strangers faces when you’d lose your footing and fall.
It was too much. Pins dug into your skin, all of a sudden too tight. You needed to leave. Now, before your bones crumbled and heart gave out and finally everything burst.
“I—um, I should probably get going, anyway,” you said, nodding as if trying to be convincing. “With finals comin’ up I should get in as much studying as I can.”
Determination was something you’d always admired about Jack; it only irked you now. He stood, shrugged off Brooke’s outstretched hand and came to stand before you, and God—it was a disservice to not admire him, even as annoyance creased his eyes and drew inwards his lips. Beauty, in such a raw form, it startled you. Growing up, he’d always been the center of everyones attention. The hockey prodigy, the first overall draft pick, the franchise player for the Devils.
You? You’d been nothing special. Yet he’d still chosen you. And here he was, apparently doing it again—but why? Why when he had a beautiful girlfriend and a perfect life and fun friends did he always come back, when clearly you were no more than a burden?
You tried not to seem spiteful. You did. But it was so hard to hide your wounds and ignore their pain. He may not have seen them, but they were unfortunately still there. And it seemed they always would be.
“You can’t,” he said, searched your gaze—he’d always been able to see straight through you, with such simplicity it frightened you. You tried to shuttered your expression, hide your pain. It wasn’t a conversation you wanted to have. “Dinner’s just started—”
“Really, J, it’s fine.” Heat bored into your face where you knew Brooke was staring, daring you to express any deeper connection with Jack past the sheltered friendliness you were currently forcing.
You weren’t going to budge. Jack saw that, and so he sighed and glanced out the window. “I’ll drive you home.”
Oh, God. Nothing was ever easy. Pushing and pushing and pushing until you weren’t sure you even wanted to get up anymore, to even try. Every time you did, right back down you went, encapsulated by everything Jack.
Freedom felt a forgotten thing. You couldn’t remember a time when you didn’t love Jack, when he wasn’t at the forefront of your mind, main star of the play.
And honestly, you were tired. Tired of wishing for something that would never happen. Tired of being viewed as the shackle around Jack’s wrist. Just tired.
“No need,” you muttered noncommittally, saw the way Jack’s face twisted with concern and confusion and everything you didn’t want to see. “It’s your dinner, J. With my grandma driving, I’ll get home safe.”
The attempt at a joke didn’t land. Smile didn’t even begin to twitch his lips. “It’s dark outside,” he stated, an obvious fact that held no weight for anyone but you and him. “I always drive you when it’s dark.”
That was true enough; your inability to see properly at night meant Jack became your chauffeur, not that he ever complained—even still, it was another thing he did for you, time sacrificed to accommodate you. Prepared to leave his own dinner, his own girlfriend, just to make sure you didn’t have to do something you were uncomfortable with. Conceptually, it was sweet, a sort of gesture that would’ve normally made your heart soar. Now? It made you feel like a burden, an incapable little girl still hiding in the shadow of her protector, afraid of the sting of daylight.
No more.
“I’m going to be fine,” you reassured. Jack didn’t appear convinced—he never was satisfied when it came to you, to your safety, unless he was directly involved. “Stay and have fun.”
“What if—”
“Let her go, babe.”
Brooke’s voice proved the nail in the coffin; a part of you heard the undertone of excitement shot through her words, the possibility of your leave alleviating any annoyance your presence had brought. Without you, Jack’s attention would be fully on her. Without you, he wouldn’t have to concern himself on whether you were having fun and if you were okay.
You. You. You.
You’d considered yourself Jack’s anchor, the grounding of his mind—unfortunately, you’d forgotten an anchor also keeps a thing in place, forcing inactivity.
Let her go.
It rang like a death knell, struck sharp as a poisoned dart, invisible but so unmistakably fatal.
Gathering what remained of your dignity, you grabbed your purse off of your—Bianca’s—chair, caught the commiseration shining in Luke’s eyes like a tarnished trophy. It only stung, reminded you that you needed pity.
Before you could flee the room like a scolded dog, Jack caught your wrist. Heat bloomed, a fever rushing to your head—his simple touch made you sick with want and need and something deeper that would never be realized or fostered. Something you had to let die.
“Text me when you’re home,” he said softly. Fingers gently squeezed your wrist. Where once you’d feel comforted, you just felt trapped. “Please.”
Not trusting your words, all you did was nod.
Honestly, you’d expected some dark cloud to cover you when finally you decided to move on. A procession of funeral goers flocking like crows, unable to understand why you’d abandoned a years-long friendship over something insignificant. Over words spewed from hateful lips.
But it wasn’t what you’d overheard. Deeper, a more sharp knowledge that even if Jack loved you, held you closer than anyone in his circle of friends, he’d never want you in the way you desired. And for a while, that was okay. Because he existed separate of everything—and then came Brooke, and it all crumbled.
You could handle him not loving you. You couldn’t, however, handle him loving someone else so openly.
Street lights blurred behind tears, a mess of streaky lights like a watercolor canvas. Flashes of nights when Jack would drive you home, insisting on taking the wheel so that you didn’t have to toe out of your comfort zone, they haunted you like a inescapable film reel on repeat in your mind. Memories fogged by lost youth, angry words from Jack’s lips as he’d stand up for you—never a party person, denounced for draining the fun. Jack never let those insults slip lip before he was barking at whoever said it.
A responsibility. A burden. The lines had become blurred in recent years.
The latter seemed more fitting.
Through a barrier of tears, you were able to send Jack a text as your car rolled to a stop in the parking lot.
me
at my dorm
j :)
ok good. u ok? u seemed off @ dinner
Fingers hovered over your screen. Make movements to draft a text. Nothing seemed sufficient.
You let the text stale. Sit stagnant on your phone. Jack would likely worry, eventually call—you just wanted to fall into a void and never return. Not after the mess you’d made of dinner.
The mess you’d made of your life.
Making a ghost of yourself was far more difficult than you’d thought it would be.
Incessantly, Jack had texted you, called you—you didn’t answer any of them. Silence felt a balm to your shame. Selfish, you knew, to just ghost Jack without offering any explanation, but nothing would be sufficient, not without souring the connection you were hoping would die without pain.
Cowardice, craven, pathetic—you knew you were all of it. To you, you were giving Jack a chance to pull back, to fizzle the friendship of his own accord. Maybe then it would’ve stung less, if the desire of its end was reciprocated, mutual. As it were, it was not.
Even with your withdrawal, Jack still tried. Shot texts, called and punctuated them with voicemails, sent you TikToks and Snaps and everything he would normally do if everything was fine; but it wasn’t. And you knew he knew, could sense the urgency in his attempts at communication.
You felt dirty, filthy with shame and guilt.
Despite your best efforts, you didn’t appear as unaffected as you hoped. While your insides were shredding themselves, you tried valiantly to paint over your visage with the normal happy-go-lucky smile you always wore. Most people, if they noticed, didn’t comment on it.
Unfortunately, Kaylen did notice.
Since your freshman year of college, Kaylen had been your roommate—low maintenance, intelligent to the point of making you stupid without even trying. As such, she was far more perceptive than you gave her credit for.
There’d been times you confided in her about your feeling for Jack, sought out advice that never seemed good enough. Because no one but yourself could fix the valley that had split between Jack and you. You could seek outward help all you wanted, but nothing would change unless you did something—and, really, you weren’t sure that was even a good idea anymore.
Two days of moping resulted in Kaylen’s intervention.
“Get up.”
Sunlight bled through your shut eyes, forced a wince. Hands rolled you onto your back, the somewhat stiff mattress of your bed providing a measly cushion. Sleep intruded on, your hands extended, attempted to push away the figure you knew what trying to rile you.
“Go away,” you grunted, throat thickened by sleep and other terrible emotions.
“No,” Kaylen hissed. When finally you opened your eyes, her squinted expression invaded your vision. “Look, I’ve let you be miserable for two days, but it’s getting ridiculous. What the hell happened with you and loverboy?”
A jolt nearly paused your heart mid-beat. Thinking about Jack stung in a way you didn’t like to admit, mainly due to the fact that it was painfully embarrassing that he had such a control over you.
“Don’t call him that,” you muttered, bit your tongue to stop anything else from spilling out.
Kaylen’s eyebrows quirked. “So it is about him?”
Nails scraped your lungs. “No—yes—fuck,” you moaned, sitting up and balancing your forehead on bent knees. “It’s… all fucked up, K. I don’t know what to do.”
A sigh left her lips. You felt the bed dip as she climbed beside you. “I can help if you tell me.”
And so you did, started at the beginning of dinner to the end, as you left like a dog defeating in a cage match, heart crying blood. Comforting circles were rubbed into your thigh, but all they did was remind you how Jack used to trace shapes onto your leg, or arm, or back—how he touched you, just to know you were there, with him. He said it placated him.
It was shameful, how bile teased your throat even imagining it.
Rationally, you knew everything was your doing. Loving Jack, torturing yourself by being in his presence whilst he focused his attention on his girlfriend. Expecting any semblance of affection or intimacy even as another held his heart, branded her name over your own. It was always going to happen—knowing that didn’t make it hurt any less.
When finally you finished, the conclusion of your mournful, self-pitying tale followed by the sting of unwanted tears, Kaylen’s thoughtful silence waned. Her lips pursed, fingers twitching. You expected her to berate you; what had you expected, stupid girl? He has a girlfriend!
Instead, Kaylen hugged you. “Shit, babe, I’m sorry,” she murmured, pulled back with that pitiful smile you’d seen one too many times—one you’d be fine with if you never saw again. “He cares about you—”
“Not how I care about him, though,” you finished, and Kaylen gave a weak nod.
“I mean, if you told him what Brooke and her little bitch of a friend said, I’m sure he’d leave her. He’s done more for less.” That much was true. Regardless of whose lips it came from, Jack didn’t tolerate disrespect towards you—cut long time friends off for assuming they had any authority to speak poorly of you.
And you knew—knew with the same certainty that you knew your own name—that Jack would break up with Brooke if he knew how she’d spoken of you.
That should’ve made you giddy. Bursted bright light in your chest at the prospect of having Jack to yourself once more. Instead, it made you feel heavy, sand packed into your bones. Who were you to invade his happiness? If he’d chosen Brooke, so be it.
Sure, she’d disparaged you, but Jack’s life wasn’t yours to dictate anymore. If he wanted Brooke, he’d have her, until he decided to leave—not because you decided for him.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.” Eyelids heavy, the residue of late-night tears remaining on the skin, you felt the fight leave you. Kaylen frowned. “I just want it all to be over.”
She didn’t look convinced. “Seriously? You’re giving up on an eight year friendship because of something some dickface said about you? I thought Jack meant more to you than that.”
Kaylen’s words stung. Made you defensive, because she was right—you were giving up and you did care about Jack, but the pain had become too much. “It’s not—it’s harder to explain than that. He’s outgrown me, K. Everyone can see it but him. I’m an obligation, a burden, and yeah, maybe he loves me as a friend and maybe he wants me around, but his friends never have—his fucking girlfriend doesn’t. And at this point, I just want it to end, I want him to be happy without the conditions of making me happy.”
Silence followed. Contemplation showed clear on Kaylen’s face. You could tell, even without her words, that she didn’t agree—but, she didn’t comment on that. Rather, she placed a hand on your leg and squeezed.
Just like Jack always did.
“It’s your life, babe,” she conceded. “And if you want to do this, I’m not going to stop you—but you have to be content with it.” She gestured to you, the nest of blankets and red-rimmed eyes. “Because this? This isn’t happiness over a good choice. You’re miserable without him, and it’s been barely two days. Think about what you’re doing before it’s irreversible.”
With that, Kaylen got up and went to her own bed, and neither of you made comment of it for the rest of the day.
Her words came again and again like a fractured turntable. Of course you were miserable—Jack had been a constant in your life for eight years, consistently preserving your peace, including you when you’d never felt more like an outsider. Happiness was synonymous with Jack, his smile, his presence, him.
Did you regret your decision? Yes, and no. You regretted the way you’d gone about it. The petty silence, ignoring a person who’d made your younger years bearable. Your friendship deserved a better death than that, a reason rather than just… fading from existence, as if it never mattered in the first place.
That wasn’t the message you wanted conveyed, and so with fingers unsteadied by aftershocks, you texted Jack.
You weren’t sure how you’d explain, if you could tiptoe around the actual reason. Maybe you couldn’t, and maybe that was okay.
me
i’m so sorry for everything. i’ll explain in person. can we meet up?
Your response came half a second later. As if he were waiting. That selfish part of you prayed he had been.
j :)
ofc. my place tn?
me
yeah. that’s good. brooke won’t be upset?
Asking after her made you want to puke, but you knew it was necessary—she didn’t like Jack even breathing near you, having an entire sit down conversation with him was certainly out of the question.
Thrice, the little text bubble appeared and disappeared on your phone screen. You could sense the apprehension without any background knowledge.
j :)
not a problem. we broke up.
It was shameful, the backwards type of pleasure that brought you.
Maybe you were a terrible person. A terrible friend. You tried to reason that it wasn’t wrong to love someone, to wish they were yours.
me
shit j. i’m sorry
j :)
i’m not. i’ll see u tn. 7:30 work? have dinner w the guys.
me
yeah, that’s fine. see you soon, j.
j :)
be safe. i’ll text you when i’m home.
The hard part wasn’t even over, and your heart was already breaking in two.
Sweat beaded at your palms, the cold claws of apprehension raking down your spine. Countless times you’d been stood here, facing the lifeless beige of Jack’s apartment door. This time, however, you stood here knowing it was the last time. A silent farewell to familiarity, the ties finally cut. Jack would fight, you would cry, and maybe he’d be able to change your mind—it seemed such an unlikely outcome that it calcified every inhale in your throat.
Shaking hands rapped the wooden door, where behind would come the execution of a friendship you’d held like a crutch for years upon years. Your childhood had died, and maybe it would’ve been better had it been left there as well, so as to spare you this heart-rending pain.
Even still, you wouldn’t have traded those years for the world—everything they taught you, through pain and happiness. It made you who you were, brought you to his doorstep with melancholy eyes and a failing heart.
Footsteps echoed on the other side of the door, urgent in a way that picked up your heart rate. The next moments you imagined with brutal clarity—Jack’s hopeful gaze, blue in a way no one else’s ever had been, the soft slope of his nose you teased him for, scrunched whenever he was particularly concerned. How he’d usher you in, hear your words, plead for a moment to explain, and then admit his love for you.
That was how you dreamt it. Unsurprisingly, it was not how it went.
Instead of the door opening to reveal the man you’d love for a lifetime, the squealing hinges were followed by a face that nearly knocked you backwards. Previous indifference smeared into flat-out disdain as Brooke’s eyes caught your figure, engulfed in one of Jack’s faded hoodies and likely disheveled in a way she’d never experienced herself.
Arrows punctured your lungs, sole your breath and defaulted your barely beating heart. Brooke was here. At Jack’s apartment. After they’d supposedly broken up. Had he lied? Was he tricking you, making you the fool? He never would, you knew that, but your wounded mind spun falsities to perpetuate your pain, as if punishment for trusting him in the first place.
“What do you want?” Brooke grunted, leant against the doorframe. Lips twitched into a smirk, the smile of the victorious.
You’d never considered yourself a violent person, but the urge to punch her in the teeth itched your fists. “Is Jack here?”
Her face fell. Something dark flashed in her face—she hesitated a moment, tossed a look over her shoulder. “Yes.”
The curt response was better than nothing, you supposed. “Right, well, can you tell—”
Brooke ran a hand through her hair. Adjusted the clasp of her necklace. “We were kind of in the middle of something. Come back later?”
The axe struck down.
Gravel filled your throat. Suffocated you. If Brooke knew the affect of her words, for once it didn’t show on her face. Years of life had taught you many things, drug you through agonies you wouldn’t relive for anything, yet somehow, this was the worst pain.
To be betrayed, trust snapped by a single action, it stung. Wormed venom in your veins and contaminated your bloodstream, poisoning your heart. Realistically, Jack hadn’t actually done anything wrong. He was allowed to hook up with other girls, to love them—he had, for years.
That wasn’t the issue.
No, it was the fact that he’d set a time, invited you over, and somehow forgot? Or had he set it all up, just to rub it in your face, get his lick-back for your prolonged silence towards him? Either way, it hurt, hurt like a bitch.
Made stone, all you did for a moment was blink at Brooke before a voice called from the background, “Who is it?”
Jack.
Fright found you then, broke away your shell of stone. You couldn’t let him see you, the dog wishing once more to come in from the cold. If he’d planned it, and saw you, he knew he’d won. If he hadn’t planned it, then he realized that—irrecoverably—he fucked up. Both choices felt like a criminal trial you didn’t want any part of.
“I—um—have a good night,” you rushed out, feet stumbling over themselves as you practically ran away from Jack’s door.
So much for closure.
So much for being broken up.
Maybe this was your sign. The one you needed to finally pull away.
Because Jack Hughes didn’t love you. Not past platonic soulmates—a relationship stained with past memories, ones that made both of you incapable of letting go, even as you outgrew it.
You were done being second best. Done trying to squeeze into a place you didn’t fit anymore.
If Brooke was Jack’s choice, so be it. You didn’t want any part of it anymore.
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