#tell me why this 17 year old boy is sobbing curled up on his 20 year old brother

[angosmom]

reading batfam fanfics is so funny cause I’ll be giggling kicking my feet at the brothers being actual bros while they go and hold each other in their laps and call each other “baby bird” and it’s like . they wouldn’t fking do that

[blouisparadise]

Here are so many amazing bottom Louis fics that were posted or completed during the month of November. We hope you enjoy this list. Happy reading!

1) Work Me Breathless | Explicit | 1678 words

Note: this is the sequel to this fic.

Louis visits Harry at work after the doctor got a new promotion. They christen his new office...

Louis leaves a little breathless.

2) Skeletons In My Closet | Not Rated | 2051 words

Basically soft core porn. Harry decided to treat Louis on Halloween.

3) Looks Like We Made It, Look How Far We’ve Come, My Baby | Teen & Up | 2161 words

Louis and Harry are going to officially move in together, they’ve chosen the house and everything is ready, they just need to wait a few months before the owner gives them the keys.

So what’s the problem, you may ask. Well, they’ve been arguing for days and Louis is honestly considering strangling his alpha with one his ridiculously ugly designer scarf. Okay, not really. But he’s going to lose it soon if they don’t stop fighting.

4) Little Devil | Explicit | 2241 words

The pair had just finished taking a round of shots when the one and only Harry Styles saunters over, clapping Niall on the back to say hello. “Louis,” he drawls out, not even trying to hide the fact that he’s raking his eyes over the smaller boy. “You know this is a costume party, right?” Louis rolls his eyes, starting to ramble on about how he is in a costume and what a nit Harry is when he gets it. Harry is saying Louis is a devil.

“And what are you supposed to be Styles? An angel, really?”

“It’s a costume Lou, ’s not supposed to be real,” he says with a smirk, sliding past Louis but stopping long enough to whisper, “I can assure you, I’m no angel baby.”

5) After the Lilo Kiss | Explicit | 2477 words

"I guess I need to show you who you belong to, hmm baby boy?" he growled in my ear while choking me with his other hand.

6) Oh So Thankful | Explicit | 3034 words

Or the one where Louis and Harry both stay at college for Thanksgiving break, and decide to spend the holiday together.

7) Tell Me What You Want (What You Need) | Mature | 3246 words

Louis didn’t plan on getting laid tonight. When he invited Harry over the day before, it was completely innocent. Just two lads hanging out. He still doesn’t plan on it, no matter how hard he’s getting as Harry’s fingernails start scraping over his nipples lightly every time they pass.

8) Calling Out For Someone To Hold Tonight | Not Rated | 3819 words

Harry’s straight. Louis isnt. They still manage to fall in love.

9) Your Love Delights My Soul | Explicit | 4186 words

"Alpha..." Louis moaned against Harry's lips, chasing the friction against his thigh.

"You are my one and only," Harry bit his jaw, "And you know it quite well. Pretty sure I remind you every night, but you have to rile me, have to make me angry. Why, Omega?"

10) Life and Death | Explicit | 4122 words

In which Louis is Life and Harry is Death.

11) When You Turn Off The Lights | Explicit | 4305 words

Gothie Louis/Normie Harry.

12) On My Mind All The Time, Say You're Mine | Explicit | 9261 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

“Dude, we’re inside, and it’s night time. Those don’t look as cool as you think they do.” Louis could kick himself, he sounded so stupid, but it certainly got the guy’s attention.

It was at that unfortunate moment that he noticed several other things about this hot asshole, that he hadn’t noticed just staring from afar. First, when Louis spoke to him, his gaze was kind of unfocused behind his sunglasses, and secondly, that he had a red and white cane folded up under his arm.

“I’m… Blind,” the man chuckled, awkwardly.  

Louis wanted to melt into a puddle out of pure embarrassment.

“I— am so sorry. I have to go.”

“Hey, wait, wait,” the man soothed, grabbing at Louis’ shoulders before he could get away.

“I’m sorry,” Louis repeated, looking down at his shoes.

“It’s alright,” He cackled. “I get it a lot. More than you know.”

13) Let's Break The Internet | Explicit | 9505 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here. Please note that the pairing for this fic is Louis/OMC.

The one where Louis is an Only Fans baby.

14) With the Certainty Of Tides | Mature | 13980 words

“Love you,” Louis whispered in the dark. He didn’t know what time it was or where the light had gone, he knew that he was in Harry’s arms, basking in the afterglow of all their love and he’d be a fool to not tell Harry that. As if Harry didn’t know.

“Love you,” was whispered back, as if Louis didn’t know. They confessed to each other as if it was their first time saying it, raw and painful, and listened to it the very same way, but they knew those words to be the only ones true.

With all the certainty of the tides, with all the light from the sun, with all the steady beats of their hearts, they were deftly in love, in secret and so loudly. They were brave and fearless and strong and hopelessly devoted in every sense of their breaths.

“We made it, baby,” Harry mumbled, bringing their lips into a final kiss, sweet and soft and the color of pink. They already knew that, didn’t fight tooth and nail and argued through every petty year and bleed their hearts into the words they sang and on their skin for them to have not made it home.

They were home.

15) A Moment In Time | Explicit | 14004 words

The one where Harry and Louis used to be together, until they weren’t, but with a twist of fate and a bit of magic, could this be their chance to find forever in each other’s arms?

16) I'm Still A Little Bit Yours | Mature | 14921 words

“Harry?” Louis asked to the empty apartment. "What the hell?" He sat up on the bed, his comforter pooling around his waist. The place wasn’t big enough to lose someone. Harry must have left in the middle of the night. And then he felt it. The new twinge of pain in his already bruised heart. He forcefully threw his upper body back and grunted in frustration. Then he looked over to the bedside table and noticed a note under the cup of cold chamomile tea he never got around to drinking.

He reached over and there were only two words scrawled on the otherwise blank page, “I’m sorry.”

He was so damn stupid! He curled up on his side sobbing and trembling. He covered his face with the comforter, tears soaking his pillow, as he begged his body to go back to sleep.

17) I Couldn't Face A Life Without Your Lights | Mature | 15538 words

Louis and Harry are college students who haven't been the same in the past two years.

18) Practice In Pencil, Seal It In Pen | Explicit | 16486 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Harry is in love with Louis but he doesn't know.

19) Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) | Not Rated | 16683 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

The one where Harry wants a little more in the bedroom and has a habit of putting his foot in his mouth.

20) The Animals, The Animals | Not Rated | 16721 words

Admittedly, it’s not the first time Louis Tomlinson finds himself in handcuffs.

The difference this time is these handcuffs are attached to a year long sentence. Not just that, but a year long sentence sharing a cell with a possibly mute 19 year old with dark eyes and even darker secrets.

21) Colder Weather | Mature | 19103 words

When Harry comes around, it’s the coldest time of year. Louis, for once, just wants Harry to take him away from colder weather.

22) Across the Grey, Salty Sea | Explicit | 19968 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Prompt 212: Alex from Dunkirk and French escort/prostitute Louis who ends up in Alex’s quarters more nights than not. Alex gives him his dog tag to wear maybe just a lot of smut and dirty talk with Louis being a pretty princess.

23) Blinded By The Sparks | Explicit | 22205 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Harry is a scammer who drifts from casino to casino. Louis is the new waiter who wants in on the scam.

24) Rainbow Bloom | Mature | 22711 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Louis is in denial. Louis has been in denial for far too long. Then Harry enters his life and everything changes.

25) What A Sight For Sore Eyes | Not Rated | 24216 words

Louis’ playing Danny in their uni’s production of Grease. They’re missing a Sandy, and Harry’s sort of been in love with Louis for a year.

Everything else just kind of happens.

26) MISSING | Mature | 26950 words

Louis brothers report Louis missing after they can’t get hold of him for 24hours

Harry Styles and Charlie Stone, detectives of the teenage homicide and missing persons division, are long time friends of the Tomlinson's and take the case.

27) Even The Best Laid Plans | Explicit | 25175 words

Louis wants to have sex with someone and decides Harry is the perfect alpha for the job.

28) Sunflowers, Sunshine, And You | Explicit | 28778 words

Sunshine county is small but mighty and Harry takes pride in knowing nearly each and every person that lives inside of it. For nearly eleven years now he’s been sheriff, and not one of them he’s ever regretted settling down here.

He knows the road names like the back of his hand, knows the people and the animals and the way the world works here. In all of the time he’s been here, not a thing has changed.

So, all things considered, when he starts seeing a beat up pickup truck roaming through town with plates he’s never seen before, Harry, to be frank, jumps on that like a fly on fresh dog shit.

29) Blue Songs Are Like Tattoos | Explicit | 30739 words

“Good morning, University of California, you’re listening to KALX 90.7 FM Berkeley, this is DJ Harry Styles. If the owner of the tapes I’ve been finding around the studio doesn’t come forward and introduce himself, I’m going to continue tossing them straight in the trash!”

or the DJ Harry and Rockstar Louis fic.

30) Sweet Like Honey | Explicit | 33117 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Harry and Louis need money and they find an unconventional solution in the form of PornHub. It’s not supposed to be a big deal.

31) When Our Worlds They Fall Apart | Explicit | 42228 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Harry put his hand over his heart as if Louis had wounded him. “You’re so harsh, my liege! Perhaps you need to relieve some tension…” He let his voice trail off suggestively.

“The day I ask YOU to relieve tension is the day I lose all my wits and join the Imperials,” Louis said. “It will never happen”

Prompt 325: Star Wars AU with Harry as Han Solo and Louis as Leia.

32) Somewhere In Between | Explicit | 42765 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Louis wakes up early. He brushes his teeth and can only stomach a piece of toast for breakfast, dressing quickly and heading for the car. He pulls into the parking lot of the Department of Dominance and Submission just as they’re unlocking the doors. It takes him all of an hour in the uncomfortable chairs to fill out the paperwork to the best and most accurate of his ability, handing it over to the receptionist as soon as he’s finished and wiping his sweaty palms on his business trousers.

There’s a high chance that within ten to fifteen business days, Louis will be matched with a dominant.

Shit.

33) Spoonful of Sugar | Explicit | 42900 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here. This fic is also a sequel to this fic.

Louis Tomlinson cares for his family above all else, a fact that’s led him on a twisted path peddling drugs to support them. Just as he’s made the decision to jump ship, Louis gets snared between the two largest crime syndicates in the city. To keep his family safe he’s forced to trust the man that failed to keep his promise two years ago, the resident drug lord he’s unknowingly been working for, Harry Styles.

34) Breakable Heaven | Explicit | 44594 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

“What do you think?” Louis gets captured by Harry’s green eyes, unable to look away or even take a breath.

“I think you’re the most magnificent creature I’ve ever met.”

“You must not have met many creatures then.”

Harry’s eyes glance downward to Louis’ lips and his tongue darts out to wet his own. “None like you.”

35) You're The Habit That I Can't Break | Not Rated | 44940 words

When Louis crosses paths with a green eyed stranger in prison, he learns that some habits aren't so bad.

36) Fine Line (The Story of Us) | Not Rated | 46191 words

Walking through Harry's album Fine Line. Each chapter reflects a song off the album.

Harry knew he was a lucky guy, really he did. He knew that in the cosmic pulling of straws he had pulled the long one and basically won the lottery. With a number one debut album, millions of adoring fans, and many a celebrity praising his work Harry should feel happier. He should be skipping instead of walking, singing instead of talking, and grinning from ear to ear. Maybe he was ungrateful. Maybe he was numb to it all. Or maybe he had a big, ocean-sized crush on his best friend.

37) Tastes Like Summer, Smiles Like May | Explicit | 47519 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

A cold prince, an alpha with nothing left to lose and a kingdom with a secret.

38) A Silent Whisper (That's Left Unsaid) | Explicit | 50842 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

A Fake Relationship & Exes to Lovers AU ft a failed proposal ten years ago, an oblivious Harry, an overworked Louis, Zayn as the protective best friend, a meddling aunt and a lot of talks about weddings and rings.

39) Lost And Found | Explicit | 51736 words

Where Louis is just looking for his dog but finds love along the way.

40) Don't You Know That I'm a Moon in Daylight? | Explicit | 58770 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

Prompt 79: Louis and Harry fell in love in the 18th century, Louis wanted Harry to convert him into a vampire, but he ended up resenting Harry for it. Fast forward to our modern days, they haven’t seen each other since then, but one day they meet again through a mutual friend. Harry was bitter for a long time, but he accepted that being angry wouldn't erase the fact that Louis was the love of his life. He wanted to court and spoil Louis like in their original time period, but Louis avoided him every time Harry tried to reconnect. Happy ending!

41) The Guesthouse | Explicit | 61951 words

Louis has a secret that could break him. With every trip to the Guesthouse, with every fuck he offers himself up for, he gets a piece of the freedom back that he's lost.

Seven nights a year he goes to the exclusive sex club; every day he fights to keep that little bit of information to himself.

And there's another thing - his unwavering and pointless obsession with his bandmate.

There's the Guesthouse, and then there's Harry, and Louis works tirelessly to keep the two apart. Soon, very soon now, he won't be able to.

42) My Friend Lost A Bet | Mature | 74965 words

The one where Louis ends up on the list of potential fake-boyfriends for Harry Styles because Stan really sucks at football bets.

43) In A Sea Of Mist | Explicit | 126725 words

Note: This fic was written for the Bottom Louis Fic Fest. Check out the full collection here.

A Greek Mythology/Camp Half-Blood AU where Harry is lost, the road to peace is a wretched one, and somehow, through a mist of confusion and regrets, Louis seems to be the only thing that makes sense and everything Harry needs.

Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.

You can find other monthly roundup fic rec lists here.

[dancerlittle006]

With Fancy Ties and a Top Hat On

First things first, I don’t own anything related to Disney or Newsies. Second of all, this is a continuation of my “The Many Adventures of Sammi & Race” series. You may want to read the others in the series but it’s not necessary! There are two poems that are mentioned in this part and I do not own either one of them - see end notes for proper credit. 

Tuesday, October 17, 1905

The night before the wedding, Spot and Race were commandeered by their respected boroughs for one last night of fun before the big day.  Jack and Albert had stolen Race away from Spot, dragging him from a long drawn out goodbye. The two men gave Race a proper sendoff into marriage, with a party at Jacobi’s filled with all the Manhattan Newsies before collapsing on the roof of the Lodging House for one final send off. 

Race had been loud and excited the entire night but on the roof of the Lodging House, he was quiet and withdrawn. Jack and Albert traded glances before Jack nudged Race. “Yous okay?”

“Justs thinkin’.” Race resting his head on his drawn up legs, his eyes looking over on the city he loved. “What ifs I ain’t too good at marriage?” 

Albert and Jack grinned at each other, knowing exactly the doubts their brother had, as they had each experienced the same, Albert much more recently than Jack. Jack cleared his throat before speaking.  “Yous be fine. It’s Spot yous marryin’. The best part is that yous never been married to anyones and neither had Spot. Yous discover it togetha.” 

Race shook his head, knowing his brother was right. “What’s botherin’ you Race?” 

“Is excited to be marryin’ Spot but there’s just an unsettledness there, ya know?” Race looked between his best friend and brother before his gaze drifted to the city around them. 

Albert put his hand on his shoulder. “Yous worried that Spot ain’t gonna show? Becauses that's the last thing yous should be worryin’ about - the ‘Hattan boys’ll make sure hes shows.” 

“Nah, he’ll show.” Race grinned. “Is don’t know how to explain it.” 

Jack smiled, reaching over to ruffle Race’s head. “Let me give yous some advice. Don’t go to bed angry, always tell him he looks pretty, say “I love you” at least once a day, pull yous weight equally - in the house, in the relationship, in life - and surprise him every now and then.” 

Race nodded, taking every word to heart. He raised an eyebrow in Albert’s direction. “Always offer to pick something up when yous out and about. Argue - it’s healthy for a relationship and communicate - don’t let them fester, get them out in the open.” 

“Have yous met Spot? Hes the king of arguin’.” Race chuckled.

 “And yous the king of arguin’ right back.” Albert bit back. 

A calm quiet rest over the three, all lost in their own thoughts.  All three had been very involved with the wedding details and knew the entire rundown by heart. Katherine had made them all agendas with every single detail on it on where they needed to be and what needed to be brought with. Race chuckled, thankful to have Kat by his side as he and Spot planned this. 

“How many peoples comin’ tomorrow?” Jack asked, nudging Race’s shoulder. 

Shruggin’, Race bit his lip. “I thinks we mailed out 100 invites but we’ll see whos shows up.” 

“Yous nervous?” Albert reached over putting his hand on Race’s shoulder before gentle squeezing. “It’s completely okay to say yes.” 

Race smiled. “Not nervous to marry Spot. But to stand in front of those people . . .”

“Yous just have to stand there and looks pretty. Yous don’t even have to look into the crowd, just stare lovin’ly into Spot’s deep brown eyes.” Jack chuckled. “And Albert and Is will be right beside you. But nothin’ gonna happen. Yous and Spot are gonna get married and live happily ever afta.” 

Race grinned. “Yous been readin’ too many of Sammi’s fairy tales, Jackie Boy.” 

“It’s true. Yous and Spot will run off into the sunset and live happily ever afta. Mark my words.” Jack gave him a pointed look. “Yous two will build a great marriage, just as yous built a great home and relationship to begin with.” 

As he woke up that morning, Race grinned knowing a big day lay ahead. He took a few minutes to himself, to mentally prepare for the day before walking out of the guest room. He heard a gentle hum of activity, including a little girl singing off key to a song. Peeking into the living room, a grin slid across his face as he saw Jack holding Tommy, Kat trying to wrangle Sammi’s curls, and Albert enjoying a cup of coffee. 

“Mornin’ Race. How are you feeling?” Kat looked away from Sammi’s curls for a moment when she noticed him standing in the doorway of the living room. 

Shruggin’, he hid his yawn before collapsing into the chair in the corner, looking around the room. “Good. Ready for 4:00.”

“Well considering that’s 8 hours away, you’ve got some things that need to be completed before that.” Kat gave him a look before sending Sammi over in his direction. 

Sammi crawled up in his lap, her finger at her lip before snuggling deeper into his embrace. “It’s yous ‘eddin’ day, Uncle Race.” 

“It is Sammi. Yous excited?” He hugged her a bit tighter. 

She nodded her head as she looked around the room at her parents and other uncle. “Momma says theres cake.”

“There will be cake. Will yous help me eat it Sammi?” He chuckled at the four year old’s excitement for the sweet. 

“Yeah.” She went quiet, looking at her uncle. “Momma says theres dancin’ and Is has a ‘retty dress.”

Race nodded. “Yous do have a pretty dress; I bet yous’ll be the best dressed girl there.” 

“Not uh huh.” She popped up and looked at him. “Momma will be.” 

Looking over at Kat, Race grinned. “Is think yous and your momma will both be the prettiest girls in the room.” 

Bouncing Sammi on his leg, her sweet giggles filled the room. Looking at her friend, Katherine smiled. “Hey Race, how about you take a walk around the neighborhood? Spend a little bit of time by yourself before the madness starts.” 

He smiled at Kat, loving how she knew him so well. Taking his leave from the house, Race promised Kat he would be back in 20 minutes. Putting the familiar cigar in his mouth, he made his way down the sidewalk. The street was busy with Newsies hawkin’ headlines and the street vendors were busy setting up for the day. His feet led him, no real destination in mind. 

Coming up to a stall, he bought a sour green apple before continuing on his journey.  Biting into the juicy apple, his mind was packed with details of the day and nothing all at once. Pausing to stand on the corner, he heard a Newsies hawkin’ a completely made up headline “Dozens injured as fairy crashes in the harbor.” 

Race grinned, remembering all the ridiculous headlines he and his friends would make up just for a penny. Feeling in his pocket for a dime, he approached the Newsies. “Buy a pape, mister?”

Holding out the dime, Race grinned. “Good headlines today?” 

“Dozens injured as a fairy crashes in the harbor.” The kid grinned, handing over a pape to Race. 

Race hummed, opening up the paper before seeing the story on page 3. “Only two people were injured, kid.” 

“Gotta embellishin’’ a bit mister; ya know to sell papes? Thanks for the dime.” The kid grinned. Race folded the paper back up, putting it under his arm before nodding. “I know that all too well. Have a great day.” 

Race had a grin on his face as his feet led him back to the Kelly House. Walking up the front steps, he let himself in the front door, causing the conversation to die down in the room. “Where did you go?”

“Corner for an apple and pape.” Race grinned at Jack. “Kid on the corner is quite the embellisher.” 

Kat raised her eyebrow at him. “As I recall, you were quite the embellisher as well Higgins.” 

“And look at me now.” He grinned, sitting on the couch opening the paper to read the headlines. 

Jack sat next to him, raising an eyebrow. “Why the pape?”

“Sentimentally sake. Remind myself where Is was and wheres Is now.” Race shrugged, giving Jack a smile. “Besides Is wanted somethin’ from the wedding day.” 

“Yous a sap, Racetrack Higgins. Sap.” Albert quipped from the opposite couch. 

Kat smiled at the three. “Leave him be. He’s allowed to be a sap on his wedding day. Need I remind you two of your own wedding days?” Kat gave them both a look. “As I recall, one of you was sobbing in the corner just before you walked down the aisle and the other was sentimental for many days before the wedding.” 

“Yous don’t gotta remind me.” Albert put his hands up in surrender before shooting Kat a mean glare.

“Love you too Albie.” Kat kissed the top of his head before depositing Tommy in Race’s lap. “I’m going to start to get ready. Jack, my mother will be here at 9 to pick up Tommy. Will you make sure everything is in his bag?” 

Race grinned at his nephew who had just started recognizing his own voice and loved to vocalize it. “Hey Tommy boy. Yous get to go to yous grandparents tonight while mom and dad are at the weddin’.”

Tommy just babbled as Race nodded his head. Thankfully, Sammi had warmed up to her brother. Sammi is the only one who Tommy will laugh for and as soon as she’s up in the morning, she’s always looking for him. She’s a great helper with giving him his bottle or a toy. 

Once Tommy was handed off to Kate, Jack clapped his hands and suggested they get some breakfast before starting to get ready. The three men and Sammi ventured down to the local diner, hungry and excited for the day ahead. 

2:00pm

Arriving at the Pier A Harbor House in Battery Park, Race hopped out of the carriage before straightening his black tuxedo. He had a black jacket with tails on top of a grey vest over a crisp white shirt, a grey and white stripe tie around his neck.  He took a quick look at himself - everything was rented for the wedding, including the black top hat that Jack had just handed to him. Jack and Albert had stepped out of the carriage, both dressed in tailed tuxedos and matching top hats. 

“Wow do you three clean up!” Kat exclaimed watching them walk up the walkway towards the venue. Her hair was tied up in an elegant updo while pulling off an elegant emerald green wrap dress. Sammi was at her side in a white and navy blue flower girl dress, her hair up as well. 

Meeting them halfway, Sammi ran to Race’s side, the older bending over to pick her up. “Wows Sammi, yous so pretty.” 

“Tank yous Uncle Race. Yous gettin’ ‘arried!” She placed a kiss on his check and grinned brightly at her uncle before pushing away from him. “Mys dress ‘wirls.” 

She turned around, letting the edges of her dress twirl around her, her giggles echoing off the buildings. “Sees, Uncle Race?”

“Very pretty Sammi girl.” Bending over, he placed a kiss on her cheek before looking over at Kat. “Where do wes need to go?” 

Kat looked over from having her own private moment with her husband with a grin. “You’re in the Willow Room. There’s some food in there for you guys and you can relax before the next part.” 

The three headed inside, feeling the cool of the air circulating within the building. Finding the Willow Room, the three settled in, Race flexing his fingers and toes tapping while waiting for 4pm to roll around. 

“Yous got your vows?” Jack asked, looking over the back of the couch. “You did write them out, didn’t yous?” 

Race smirked, tapping his head. “Its all in here. I didn’t writes them out.” 

Albert snorted loudly. “Yous gonna remember?” 

“Someone told mes to just speak from the heart and thats all Is gonna do.” Race shrugged, not really understanding what the big deal was. 

Jack smirked. “Yous be fine. Just make sure you don’t cuss in yous vows.” 

“Yous should be tellin’ Spot that, not me.” Race’s eyes went wide. “But that’ll be a memory wes have forever if hes did that.” 

Chuckling, Albert shook his head. “Well yous always go your own way so cussin’ in vows shouldn’t be anys surprises to anyone.” 

A knock at the door caused the three to look over. Standing in the doorway, Crutchie, Specs, Elmer, Finch and Romeo were all standing there looking dressed to the nines with grins on their faces. Even though they were all at Jacobi’s the night before, there was a loud excitement as the eight men greeted one another.  Settling in various places around the room, a calm quiet enveloped the room. “So yous ready?”

Race grinned at Elmer’s question. “Just antsy . . . wants to just get the show on the road.” 

“Why a Tuesday and why 4pm?” Finch asked, raising an eyebrow at Race. He was used to this question by now, almost all of the Newsies had asked at one moment or another.

The groom looked around the room at all of his friends. “Tomorrows a year since Spot proposed . . . wes didn’t wanna go a year so wes gettin’ married today. Four is when the venue would be ready.” 

Jack started a conversation regarding the New York Giants baseball team which pulled all of the Newsies into the discussion. Every Newsies was very invested in the game, often standing outside of the stadium on game days trying to hear the familiar crack of the bat as it sent the ball flyin’ into the outfield. 

Race caught a glance at the watch on his wrist, a present from Spot. 2:50pm. He knew Kat would be comin’ to get him in a few minutes to give him some alone time prior to the ceremony.  

In those few minutes, Race ran over the details of the afternoon. He knew Spot had Itey and Hotshot standing up as his best man and groomsman. But Spot had told him nothing’ about his tuxedo for the wedding. All Race knew is that they would both wear the same boutineer, a white Ranunculus flower with some greenery and some twine wrapped around the stems. Kat promised the ceremony would be pretty straight forward - two readings and exchange of vows then they would be pronounced husbands and the party could start. 

The loudness of the room pulled Race from his thoughts. The room had split into two different conversations. Albert caught Race’s eye, raising his own to ask the nonverbal question if he was okay. Race nodded, a grin on his face, toes continuing their nervous taps. 

A knock on the door caught Race’s attention. He grinned seeing Sammi and Kat standing there. “Race?”

Nodding, he stood and told the guys he would see them in a little bit. He followed Kat and Sammi out of the room, walking out of the venue to see the harbor in front of him. Kat gave him a big hug and a grin. “I’m so proud of you. You are going to be a wonderful husband.” 

“Thanks Kat.” He paused, pulling her back into a hug. “Thank you for everything yous done. This day has gone so smoothly, simply because yous got everything handled. The venue looks amazing.” 

Squeezing his arm, she grinned at the praise. “You’re welcome. Now you’ll have 30 minutes out here before I’ll come get you. I’ll try to keep the boys away from the windows.”

“Thanks.” 

He heard her heels click as she made her way back to the venue. He leaned against the barrier, listening to the waves crash and the seagulls call as they lazily flew around the harbor. He heard a door click shut and gentle footsteps behind him as a grin slid across his lips. 

“Are you waiting for someone?” The smooth voice of the one and only Spot Conlon caused him to turn around, his eyes moving up and down taking in his appearance. “Because if yous not, that’s a damn shame.” 

Spot was dressed in a navy blue tuxedo with tails, a cream vest, and a navy blue polkadot tie around his neck. In his hands was the familiar Newsies cap Spot was rarely seen without. “Yous look breathtakin’.” 

“You don’t look half bad either, Higgins.” Spot closed the gap between the two, pulling Race into his arms. “Happy Weddin’ Day, love.” 

Race nodded, suddenly overcome with emotions at seein’ his soon to be husband dressed to the nines. He sniffled, trying to keep the tears at bay. Spot softened seeing his boy so emotional, taking a handkerchief from his pocket, and gently wiped the tears away. “I love you.” 

“Love you too.” A watery smile crossed Race’s lips before he bent over and placed a chaste kiss on Spot’s lips, turning to face the harbor, watching the water hit the pier. “Been wanting to do that since yesterday.” 

Spot chuckled. “Soon, cara, soon. What did you do today?” 

“Nothin’ much. Got breakfast, bought a pape, played with Sammi and Tommy, and came here. Yous?” 

Spot leaned against the barrier, mimicking Race’s stance. “Swam in the harbor for old times sakes then went to the Lodgin’ House before getting ready and comin’ here.” 

Hummin’ in contentment, Race laced his fingers with Spot’s, squeezing them gently. “Of course yous swim in da harbor before wes got married.” 

“It was relaxin’ and its a tradition.” Spot exclaimed, Race shaking his head at him with a chuckle. 

“I love you.” 

“I love you too. Ready to be married to yous. Is it 4pm yet?” Spot whined as Race brought their connected hands up and kissed the back of his hand. 

Looking at his watch, Race smiled. “We’ve got 45 minutes until the weddin’. Kat will be heres in 15 minutes.”

“And in 75 minutes wes married and time to party.” Spot grinned, squeezing their connected hands. 

The clicking of high heels caught their attention. Looking over their shoulders, they both smiled seeing Kat coming closer to them. “Sorry boys to interrupt, but I figured you’d want to pin these on each other.” 

Handing over their boutineers, Kat gave them both a smile before disappearing back into the venue. Facing his betrothed, Spot took the pin out of the arrangement, before quickly attached it to the lapel of Race’s tuxedo before kissing his cheek. Race followed suit before dippin’ Spot and placing a kiss on his lips. “If yous gonna do it, do it right, Conlon.” 

“Last time you’ll get to call me that, Higgins.” Spot grinned. 

Race’s eyes lit up at the thought. “Last time you’ll call me that, Sean.” 

“That might be a new nickname for you snookums.” 

Race paused as a thought hit him. “Jack and Albert told me Is shouldn’t cuss in our vows.” 

“Was that a bet?” Spot turned, leaning over the barrier, watching the waves crash against the pier. 

Race shook his head. “No but then they amended that would be a pretty amazin’ memory if wes did.” 

“There may or may not bes a cuss word in mine.” Spot shrugged, grinning as Race’s head whipped up in his direction. “Gotta keep you on yous toes, cara.” 

Running a hand through his hair, Race chuckled. “Did you write yours?” 

“No. Is gonna speaks from my heart.” Spot smiled, lacing their hands together once more. “Did yous?”

Squeezing their locked hands, Race smiled, a seagull catching his attention as it flew by. “No. I just figured Is speak from the heart.” He shrugged. “So Is apologize if its a jumbled mess.”

“Wes steppin’ into this togetha. If it’s a jumble mess, then its our jumbled mess.” Spot grinned, Racce’s heart melting at the sweet words. “Is love you Anthony Racetrack Higgins and no messy vows will every change that.”

Tears clouded Race’s eyes once more, Spot reaching up to catch the tears on his finger. “Is love you too Sean Spot Conlon.” 

The door opening once more caught their attention. Spot and Race both smiled seeing Kat coming towards them with a grin of her own. “Alright you two, you have 30 minutes until the wedding. Back to your rooms and I’ll come get you when it's your time to walk down the aisle.” 

The two kissed for the last time as boyfriends before making their way to their own rooms, where their boys were waiting. Walking into the room, Race grinned, shutting the door behind him. “How about you be a little more lovey dovey there Higgins?”

Looking around the room, all seven of his brothers were still in the positions he left them before he met Spot. He shrugged, grinning at Finch who made the comment. “Not sure whats you talkin’ about but it’s my weddin’ day so Is be as much lovey dovey as Is want.” 

“That was quite an impressive dip you did to Spot, Higgins.” Crutchie piped up giving Race a big grin. 

Race chuckled, pausing and looking at each of the seven people in the room. “Is know I haven’t said this lately, but yous my best friends. Yous been there for the good times and the bads and Is damn lucky to have yous in my life. I love you guys.” 

“Yous a sap Higgins.” Specs grinned. “But wes loves you too.” 

And with that, the others left the room, leaving Race with Albert and Jack. “Any partin’ words before Is walk down the aisle, oh wise married ones?” 

Jack and Albert traded glances with each other. “Just be good to each other.” 

Jack nodded, agreeing with Albert’s sentiments. “Just be happy. Don’t let anger fester, talk it out, and just loves him. He’s really good for you, Race; better than anyone wes could’ve picked out for you.” 

Kat came to grab Albert and Jack, getting them in place leaving Race in the room alone. The door opened, causing him to turn around and grin. “Hi Sammi. Hows you doin’?”

“Good, there’s music playin’. Uncle Race?” 

“Yes Sammi?”

She climbed up into his lap, throwing her arms around his shoulders. “Yous gettin’ ‘arried, right?”

“Yes, to Uncle Spot.” He chuckled, seeing the girl’s excitement. “Is that okay?”

“Yes! Love Uncle Pottie!” She exclaimed. “But Is still yous best girl, right?”

Hugging Sammi tightly to his chest. “Yous always will be my best girl, even if Is have a girl of my own, got that?”

“Got it. Love you Uncle Race.” She reached up and smacked her lips against his cheek. 

“Love you too Sammi.” Kissing her forehead, he gave her a tight hug. 

Kat stood in the doorway and wiped away tears that had clouded her eyes at the sweetness between her daughter and uncle. “You two ready? Everyone’s seated and Spot’s up front with the boys.” 

“Momma, Is throw ‘lowers?” Sammi hopped off Race’s lap before running over to Kat.

Kat bent down, wrapping her arms around Sammi’s shoulders. “Yes, you’ll throw flowers before Uncle Race walks down the aisle.” 

Grabbing the basket full of white rose petals, Kat handed it to her daughter before giving her a hug. “Go stand by daddy when you get up the aisle, okay?”

Nodding her head, Sammi grinned. Hearing the music change, Kat quickly opened the door, allowing Sammi to slip through, before starting her journey up the aisle.  “You doing okay?”

“Me? Is should be askin’ you that.” Race grinned. “Yous been runnin’ around like a crazy person while Is been relaxin’ in a room.” He paused. “Is ready to be married.” 

“Kat, Is need to ask you somethin’.” Race had stopped by the brownstone after work one afternoon in September. She was typing up her newest article as a four month old Tommy slept soundly in his bassinet across the room. 

Motioning him to give her a minute, she finished her sentence before standing and making her way to him. “What’s wrong? Is it Spot?”

“Spots fine.” He looked at her. “But wes were talkin’ last night about the weddin’ and Is wanted to asks you something.” 

Kat smiled, giving him a quick hug. “Anything.”

“Spot wants to watch mes walk down the aisle but I don’t wants to walk down by myself.” He paused. “Jack’s in the weddin’ along with Albert so neither of them can do it. But since yous my sister, will you walk with me?”

Tears clouded her eyes. “Race, really?”

“Yous my sister, Kat. Always has been and always wills be.” He squeezed her hand. “Please?”

Throwing her arms around his shoulders, she bounced on her toes and let out a happy squeal. “Of course I would. It’ll be an honor to walk you down the aisle. But why didn’t you want to walk down by yourself?”

“I wouldn’t be heres if it wasn’t for yous, Jack, or Albert. Those two are already ins the weddin’ but I wanted a few moments where its just yous and me.” He shrugged. “Besides, yous always been not only a sister to me but a moms as well.” 

“Race, Racetrack.” She cooed quietly putting a hand on his back, not wanting to startle him from whatever memory he was in. “Are you ready to walk down the aisle?”

Shaking his head, he looked at his sister with a grin. “Let’s do this.” 

Standing side by side with their arms linked, Kat winked at Race as they stepped into the chapel. The music had changed to “Clair de Lune,” by Debussy and Kat and Race took their journey down the aisle.  Race had locked eyes with Spot about halfway down and hadn’t looked away. 

Standing with Spot was Buttons, who had gone into Seminary School and become a preacher. When Spot and Race had gone to him with the request to marry them, Buttons happily accepted. 

Coming to a stop at the end of the aisle, Kat turned to Race with a smile before standing on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek and whisper “be good to one another,” before making her way to her seat. Spot walked over and laced his fingers with Race’s, giving them a squeeze before they both faced Buttons. 

“Dearly beloved, we gather here to witness the union between Anthony ‘Racetrack’ Higgins and Sean ‘Spot’ Conlon. Before we begin, does anyone object to this union, speak now or forever hold your peace.” 

Spot and Race glared around the chapel, daring anyone to speak up. After a few uncomfortable moments, Buttons grinned and continued on with the ceremony. 

“Marriage is a sacred act, between two people in the presence of God, their family and friends. Race and Spot have decided on their own twist to the ceremony. I believe York will start us off with a poem.” 

York stood, walking over to the side of Spot with a piece of paper, grinning at the two grooms. 

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

York made his way back to his seat as Buttons shifted. “A marriage is not only the joining together of two individuals, it is also a joining together of two families. The care, support, and nurture which have been extended to Anthony and Sean by their families is as important now as it has ever been. In fact, it needs to be extended now to include another person” 

“Katherine, I believe you have a reading Anthony and Sean would like you to read.” Buttons said with a smile in his friend’s direction. 

Kat walked to the front on Race’s side. Clearing her throat a bit, she started reading, keeping her eye on the grooms, a smile crossed her lips. 

"A good marriage must be created. In the art of marriage the little things are the big things –- It is never being too old to hold hands. It is remembering to say ‘I love you’ at least once each day. It is never going to sleep angry. It is having a mutual sense of values and common objectives. It is standing together facing the world. It is forming a circle of love that gathers in the whole family. It is speaking words of appreciation and demonstrating gratitude in thoughtful ways. It is having the capacity to forgive and forget. It is giving each other an atmosphere in which each can grow. It is finding room for the things of the spirit. It is a common search for the good and the beautiful. It is not only marrying the right partner –- It is being the right partner."

Race squeezed Spot’s hand after Kat finished reading. Flashing a smile at his sister, she flashed him one back. Waiting until she sat down, Button looked between Race and Spot. “Now the grooms have written their own vows. Sean, would you like to begin?” 

“Race, from the first time I laid eyes on you, Is thought you were a pain in the ass. But Is guess from this day forward, yous will be my pain in the ass. I love that you may sometimes make questionable decisions but what Is love about yous is Is know that you do those things because you care so deeply about those who are close to you and are genuinely one of the most thoughtful and considerate people Is have ever known. As we continue to grow in our lives together, Is promise to give you all of my words when needed, and to share in the silence when they are not, to pick you up if you are down, and to love you unconditionally. Anthony, yous my everythin’ and this is my promise to you.” Sniffling, Spot squeezed Race’s hand as he finished.

“Anthony, your turn.” Button smiled as Race squeezed Spot’s hand. 

“Spot, I never imagined this day would come, but now that we are here.  Is couldn't have imagined choosin’ anyone else but you to go through life's journey with. Is love your laugh, your smile, your tough guyness and the sentimental side that you only share with me. Yous my best friend, my biggest cheerleader, and the one Is want to spill all my secrets to. Is will not take our time together for granted. And because words cannot do it, Is promise to show you, for the rest of my life, how much Is love you. Is promise to make you laugh when you are takin’ yourself too seriously.  From today forward, you’ll never walk alone again; I’ll forever be bys your side. Spot, yous my everything and this is my promise to you.”  Sniffling, Race bit his lip trying to keep the tears at bay. Spot reached over with a handkerchief and wiped the tears that had slipped down Race’s face as the two smiled at the tender moment. 

“You have chosen to seal your vows by the giving and receiving of rings. The ring forms a perfect circle, without a beginning or an end, and is thereby a symbol of eternity and signifies the duration of the commitment you are making. Let us now exchange these rings.”

Handing a beat up silver ring to Race, Buttons looked at him. “Anthony, repeat after me: I give you this ring, as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and with all that I have, I will honor you.”

“I give you this ring, as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and with all that I have, I will honor you.” Race smiled, sliding the ring onto Spot’s ring finger. Spot squeezed his hand with a smile before Buttons continued. 

Handing a ring to Spot, Buttons looked at him. “Sean, repeat after me: I give you this ring, as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and with all that I have, I will honor you.”

“I give you this ring, as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am, and with all that I have, I will honor you.” Spot grinned, sliding Race’s engagement ring back onto his ring finger. 

“And now, by the authority invested in me as a preacher, and in accordance with the laws of the State of New York, I now pronounce you man and man. Anthony, you may kiss your husband.” Catcalls and excited cheers rang out from both sides of the aisles as Race pulled Spot into his arms and dramatically dipped him before kissing him not so chastly. Settling Spot back on his feet, Race pulled him and dropped a chaste kiss on his lips before linking their hands together. 

“Gentlemen, please face the congregation.” Buttons grinned at both his friends before clearing his throat. “It is my pleasure to introduce to you, for the very first time, Mr. and Mr. Higgins-Conlon.”

The noise level in the chapel escalated as the two raised their hands in celebration before walking down the aisle to the catcalls of their friends.  Walking out of the chapel, Race drug Spot behind a column, where the two wouldn’t immediately be found. Pulling Spot to him, Race grinned before kissing him. “Hello husband.” 

“Hmm . . . Is could get used to hearing you call me that.” Spot purred before standing on his tiptoes kissing Race once more. “Hello husband. Wes did it, wes married!”

Their bubble was busted a few moments later as Kat found them with her eyes covered. “Is it okay to peak?” 

“Wes still decent if thats what yous asking.” Spot chuckled, watching Kat remove her hand from her eyes. 

She rolled her eyes before grinning at the two. “You two have some things you need to take care of before you run off. Come greet everyone before you sign your marriage certificate.”  

Standing outside the chapel, they greeted all of their guests with hugs, kisses, and a few comments. Medda was wiping her eyes as she greeted them while Elmer and Specs were both looking for the free booze they were promised. Jack, Kat, and Sammi were the last ones out of the chapel. Sammi quickly ran to her uncle who easily picked her up and put her on his hip. “What did yous think Sammi?”

“Yous married Uncle Race to Uncle Pottie.” She exclaimed, throwing her arms around his shoulders before smacking her lips to his cheek. “Con’tulations!” 

“Thank you Sammi. Yous threw the flowers perfectly.” He snuggled her before she jumped into Spot’s arms to congratulate him. 

Turning to his brother, he was surprised to see the remnants of tear tracks on Jack’s cheeks. “You okays, Jackie?”

“Yous vows got me.” He shrugged. “It was a beautiful ceremony, Race. Congratulations!” 

Race brought him in for a hug before slapping the back of his back. “Yous wife is a godsent. She’s an amazin’ planner and wes got her to thank for this.” 

Jack smiled. “She is pretty spectacular. But it’s your day today. Makes sure you take some time to commit this to memory. It’ll go by too fast.” 

Nodding at Jack’s advice, Race patted him on the back before turning to the one person he knew was the biggest piece of the day being pulled off beautifully. “Plums, yous amazing, yous know that right?”

“Race, your the amazing one. I just did what you asked.” She pulled him into a hug. “Congratulations, the ceremony was beautiful and look, you’re a married man now.” 

“All thanks to you, Kat. Seriously, yous pulled off an amazing ceremony.” Race grinned at his sister before Spot popped up, with Sammi still in his arms. “He’s right yous know. Thank you, Kat. Wes couldn’t have done it without yous.” 

Hugging them both, she grinned pulling back, grabbing Sammi from Spot’s arms. “You’re more than welcome. I’d do anything for you two since you’ve done so much for me and Jack. Enjoy tonight but take some time and really soak this in - tonight will go by too fast for you both. Trust me.” 

Looking in the chapel, she saw Itey, Albert, and Buttons waiting for them. “Go sign your marriage certificate. Then, you’ve got a few minutes before they’ll announce you as husbands inside the dining room - take some time just for the two of you and I’ll come get you before they announce you.” 

Quickly signing the document, the two made their way back down the aisle waiting to be called in as Albert, Itey and Buttons all walked into the dining room. Race pulled Spot into a hug, letting the calm of the moment pass over them. “Is love you.” 

“Is love you too.” 

“What song did yous pick for the dance?” Race had given that to Spot as he had no idea what to pick. Spot was quite secretive on what he had picked. 

Spot grinned. “Yous just have to wait. Any surprises tonight, snookums?” 

“Not that Is aware of. Wes havin’ dinner, dancin’, speeches; Albert and Itey may has come surprises up their sleeves but none that Is aware of.” 

Spot shook his head. “Is told Itey to go easy on us.” 

“Is told Albert the same but Is slightly afraid of what lies ahead.”  Race reached for Spot’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “Husband . . . when do you think it’ll hit us?”

Spot squeezed his hand, grinning at the metal on his ring finger. “Is hopin’ not for a longs time.” 

Kat stuck her head out in the lobby. “You two ready?” 

They walked over to the room’s entrance, hands intertwined before hearing a booming voice speak. “For the first time, please welcome Mr. and Mr. Higgins-Conlon.” 

The room was loud and crazy as the two walked in. They were both greeting people as they made their way to their own table. As soon as they sat down, there were clinking glasses, signaling them to kiss. Race happily obliged, leaning over and sweetly kissing Spot. 

Soft music started to play as everyone got situated at their tables and the waitstaff started serving salads. Race took a moment to look around the room at all the tables set up. They hadn’t made table assignments, instead all of their friends could sit wherever and with whoever they wanted to. There were vases of white peonies on each of the tables with a candle (or tea light as Kat always corrected him) flickering bringing a gentle ambiance to the room. 

Spot nuding his shoulder broke him from his thoughts. “You okay?” 

“Just takin’ it all in.” He smiled, leaning over and kissing Spot’s lips. “Is love you.” 

Spot smiled. “Is love you too, snookums.” 

Soon, the buffet opened for everyone while the servers delivered plates to Spot and Race. The room quietened into a comfortable hum as everyone got their food and started eating. 

Before long, Itey stood up and clanked his glass, getting the attention of everyone in the room. 

“Ladies and Gentleman, if there is anyone here amongst us this afternoon who should be feeling nervous, apprehensive and maybe little queasy at the thought of what lies ahead… It's probably Race because you have just married Spot. For those who donts know me, my name is Itey and Is would like to thank Spot for finally confirming that I am indeed the best man.” A hearty laughter rolled through the room as Itey gave Spot a cheesy smile. 

“Some would describe him as loyal, caring, sincere, popular, honest, good looking and most of all modest. But that's enough about me; we should maybe talk about Spot. Spot and Is met back in 1887 when we were just wee lads as we ended up in the same Lodging House hawkin’ papes for the World. Spot was a reserved young man who rarely talked, a skill he seems to lose as hes gotten older.” Spot sent a glare in Itey’s direction before shaking his head. 

“Is could go on humiliating Spot but I have to remind myself that there are children present and he can do a good job of it himself anyway. Is have other stories about Spot that are available for a small fee at the bar later, just buy me a lager. Spot has been a wonderful friend with a tough guy exterior but once you break through that exterior, you’re friends with him. Over the years I've been taught several great things by Spot, the art of drinking-too much, how not to go chatting up a pretty girl. But the biggest thing he’s taught me is how to be a decent person; hows to keep your word and how to be a great leader. Spot, Is happy for you and Race and I  sincerely hope the pair of you have a long and happy marriage together. I know that you will make him very happy and you are everything that he needs. Just please try and look after him as much as we do.  Please raise your glasses and toast Spot and Race.”

“To Spot and Race!” The room echoed Itey as he made his way over to the grooms with a grin. Spot bearhugged him as Race gave him a bright smile. 

As soon as Itey was seated, Albert stood up with a piece of paper and a big grin on his face. 

“Hi! For those of you who don’t know me I’m Albert, Race’s best man. When Race asked me to be his best man I felt honoured and had to say yes.” Albert grinned, looking between Spot and Race. “I’ve known Race for 16 years now, and he’s asked me to talk today about what a great guy he is, so I can honestly say that he is handsome, brilliant, funny and char…. (TURN TO Race) … Race, I can’t read your writing. What’s this last word?” A loud ripple of laughter sounded through the room while Albert grinned brightly at Race. 

“Since we first met, I have seen his transformation from an awkward youth to a slightly less awkward adult and it’s my great pleasure to speak on this important occasion. I met Race when Jack picked me up from the streets and brought me into the Lodging House. We struck up a good friendship and it’s stayed like that ever since. We may have gotten into our fair share of trouble - can anyone recall the incident in Central Park?”  

“Moving on Albert!” Race yelled, squeezing Spot’s hand as he glared at his best friend. Albert grinned brightly and turned his head. “Love you too Race!”

“Moving on . . . Is look back at some of the stuff we have done together and it makes me proud to have a friend like you. We have had some truly great times and have shared some great experiences together, memories Is will never forget. Is have been honoured to have been your best man and want you to know that Is look up to you more than you could imagine. Just remember, love is like a circle, it goes on forever and I love you man! I can see how happy you make each other and I wish you both nothing but happiness for your future together. Ladies and gentlemen, it truly has been an honour delivering this speech to you, so please, join me in raising your glasses to the happy couple!”

Raising his class, Albert grinned. “To Race and Spot!” 

Everyone in the room reciprocated the action while Albert hugged Race. “Thank you, Albie. Why the Central Park incident? Nothing really happened.” 

“You’re welcome, Race. Gotta let the people wonderin’ what happened.” Chuckling, Albert patted him and Spot on the back, he headed back to his seat beside Marie.  

Music started up as Spot held his hand out for Race. “Shall we?”

Spot pulled Race into his arms as they started twirling around the dance floor. Race grinned, letting Spot lead him across the floor. “So Is got a question for you.” 

“What’s that?” 

“Hows many kids yous want?” Race titled his head, giving Spot a soft smile. 

Spot gave him a look, shaking his head. “Shouldn’t wes talked about this before the weddin’?” 

“Ugh . . . I knows you want kids and yous know I want kids. We knews there’ll be kids but Is askin’ how many.” Race gave him a cheesy look while tryin’ to look innocent. 

Spot chuckled, dancing in tune with the music softly playing. “Maybe 2 or 3. More than 1 for sures.” 

“Sounds like a plans to me.” He said before Spot dipped him in the middle of the dance floor as applause rang around them at their first dance. 

They parted ways after their dance as people wanted to talk with them. Race got pulled into a conversation with some of his coworkers as Spot headed to the Brooklyn table. Within minutes, Race was scanning the crowd looking for someone in particular. He grinned when he spotted her, excusing him from the conversation before heading over to where she was. 

Bowing at her, he grinned at her. “Can Is have this dance, m’lady?” 

Sammi giggled, her curls falling out of her ponytail. “Uncle Race, yous silly.” 

“Is silly? Will yous dance with me?” Race gave her a puppy dog smile as she nodded her head before hopping off the chair she was kneeling on. 

Following him onto the dance floor, Sammi hopped on top of his shoes, as they twirled around the dance floor. Her giggles were loud as Race sang along to the music. Picking her up in his arms, she threw her arms around his shoulders as they moved together. “You havin’ fun, Sammi?”

Nodding her head, she looked over his shoulder. “Uncle Race?”

“Yes Sammi?”

Cupping her hands around his ear, she leaned in to whisper. “Whens da cake?” 

Throwing his head back laughin’, Race shook his head at his niece. “Soon, Sammi. Yous’ll get the first piece, alright?” 

“Okay!” She giggled before her eyes went wide. “Momma!” 

“Samantha.” Kat giggled as the two stopped dancing. “May I cut in and dance with Uncle Race?” 

Sammi looked at her uncle. “Its a plea’ure dancin’ with you, Uncle Race.” She kissed his cheek before he set her on the ground. A moment passed before she headed back to the table where her coloring book and crayons were. 

Pulling Kat into his arms, Race started dancing as they made their way around the dance floor. She took a moment to look at her brother. “You doing okay, Race?” 

“Is just over the moon happy.” He sighed. “Alls I want is to go home and just be with Spot.” 

Kat laughed. “I remember that all too well from my own wedding. You just want the quiet and your spouse.” 

“Yes!” Race grinned. “Lookin’ forward to the rest of the week in Cold Springs just the two of us. Wes rented a cabin ups there.” 

Kat grinned. “You’ll enjoy that. We used to spend summers up there at a family cottage. There’s a lot to see and do. Jack and I really enjoyed getting away from the city on our honeymoon. Dinner when you get back?” 

“Is sure Spot and Is can swing that.” Race grinned, pulling her into a hug. “Thanks Kat. Is know you’re probably tired of hearin’ it but yous been a lifesaver and Is thankful for yous friendship and sisterness.” 

She grinned. “Just remember that when you have kids and you need to think of a middle name. Kate or Katherine would be great middle names.” 

Throwing his head back, Race laughed loudly, catching the attention of several others on the dance floor, including Jack as he made his way towards his wife and brother. “You two causin’ trouble over here?” 

“No more than usual.” Race grinned. “Where yous been, Jackie? Thought you’d be tearin’ up the dance floor.” 

Sticking his hands in his pockets, Jack rocked back on his heels. “Just conjuring up a surprise for yous and Spot. Can yous grab him and meet me in the Willow Room?”

Kissing Kat’s cheek, Race promised he’d meet Jack there in a few minutes before going to find Spot. Sliding up beside his husband, he slid his hand into Spot’s squeezing it gently, as Spot looked up from his conversation with Itey and Hotshot. 

“There’s my husband.” Spot exclaimed. 

Saying his hellos to Spot’s best friends, Race grinned. “Can I steal you away for a few minutes?” 

Promising to catch up next week after they returned, Spot followed Race across the room and out into the lobby of the venue. Spot squeezed Race’s hands but not asking any questions. “Jack wanted to see us in the Willow Room.” 

Walking into the room, they saw Jack leaning against a table with something on the table. “Ah there yous two.” 

“What’s up Jackie?” Race asked looking at his brother for any signs of what Jack needed them for. 

“I wanted to give yous something as a present. I sketched it earlier and was trying to figure out how to get it to yous two - thought about sneakin’ it into the house but Kat said this would be better for yous two.” Jack rambled, which never happened, giving Race the heads up that he was nervous about whatever was on the table. 

Stepping forward, Race looked at the frame on the table. Jack had sketched the two of them as they stood on the pier earlier before the ceremony. Spot’s face was facing the river as their hands were linked, perched on the barrier. Race’s face was turned towards Spot’s with a big grin on his face. Race’s top hat was skewed on his head while Spot’s Newsies cap was perched delicately on top of his head. 

Race swallowed the sudden rush of emotions of seeing the sketch. “Jack . . . this is incredible. When did you have time to do this?” 

“While you two fools were standing out there.” Jack smiled. “I asked Kat to ensure that you two had 30 minutes to just see each other before the weddin’. I knew I wanted to sketch something from today but didn’t know what - this just sorta happened.” 

Spot swung his arm around Jack, pulling him in for a hug. “This is incredible - it’ll go in the living room of the house, right above the couch. Thank you for sketching it - we’ll cherish it always.” 

Race followed suit, pulling his brother into a hug, tears in his eyes. “Thanks Jackie. This is the best present yous could’ve given us. A perfect weddin’ memento.” 

“Kat and Is will take it to the house tomorrow but Is wanted you to see it tonight.” Jack grinned, the nervousness from earlier gone. 

Spot and Jack gave him one more hug before they headed back into the lobby, taking one moment just the two of them. “Yous made me the happiest man alive, Sean Higgins-Conlon and Is love you forever for it.” 

“Yous made me pretty happy yourself, Anthony Higgins-Conlon. Is love you.” 

They joined their guests in the room as an upbeat song was played. They danced, laughed, and shoved cake in each other’s faces as the night came to an end. Long drawn out goodbyes to their friends and family were said before the two left via carriage as tin cans tied to the undercarriage sang their departure. Mr. and Mr. Higgins-Conlon married at last. 

Okay some credit is due. There are two poems that are read in the wedding ceremony. The first poem York read is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. You may recall that this was partially read when Spot proposed to Race. This poem wasn’t written until 1916 but I felt like it fit Race and Spot so well - so forgive me for utilizing artistic liberties. The second poem that Kat read is called “The Art of Marriage” by Wilferd Arlan Peterson. When I read this, I immediately fell in love with it and knew that it fit our two leading men perfectly. 

So what did you think? This is 8,900 words of pure love written over two days and I would really appreciate some comments on what you loved, hated, or got emotional at. I had some tears in my eyes as I wrote this. Any feedback would be appreciated!!!! 

[northofsomewhererp]

Your Name, Age (17+), & Timezone: Meg, 22 oof, EST

Your Birthday: January 13th

Jaemin Moon turned 20 years old on September 1st. He’s a freshman at Rosewood University. His faceclaim is Jeongguk Jeon.

Admin Note: We love shy shady so much because shy shady is beautiful. Like, wowza. (I’m still in awe of you.) Welcome back! 

Bio (10+ sentences, include brief history, personality, potential plots):

Although he was born and raised in America, Jaemin’s traditional beliefs shine through in his very Korean upbringing. Both of his parents escaped North Korea after their recklessness got his mother pregnant out of wedlock, something very frowned upon in the North. They were in search of a better life, and after many trials, safely arrived in America where they planned to expand their family. As much as they like to pretend they’re perfect and that everything is peachy keen, spending the majority of your life in a conservative country, under a communist government certainly changes your views on the world. And in a place like America, where diversity is celebrated and welcomed, there was an adjustment period. Even so, Yongsun and Taeyong maintained a lot of disturbing beliefs, which they passed down onto their son. Jaemin’s first memory of sexual attraction, now buried so deep within himself that he’s forgotten it, was watching a Korean drama with his father. The main actor was so handsome, so much so that he’d let it slip. After that, he got heavily reprimanded, then locked away in his room. “Man shall not lay with man”, those words echoed in his mind, he repeated them through quiet sobs like a mantra, hoping that maybe he’d start believing them someday. And he did. Now having just turned 20 years old, Jaemin is at a crossroads. He lives two entirely different lives, unbeknownst to his parents. To them, he’s the picture perfect son. He was that kid that was enrolled in almost every extra curricular activity at school, his many talents and hardworking attitude earning him the respect of his parents. He’s currently studying to become a doctor, at his father’s request, and keeping a very clean image to them. He’s polite, calm and collected. But the moment he’s out of sight, the true Min shines; snarky, loudmouth and competitive. Those are just a few words to describe the boy. Drugs and partying are a day-to-day occurrence for him. With his very flawed vision of the world, Jaemin’s made a lot of enemies in his lifetime. He’s hated by most, feared by some. He’s bitter, ready to snap at any moment for any reason, and to be quite frank, he doesn’t know why. He’s repressed his sexuality troubles so far down within himself that he doesn’t even know why he’s angry anymore, why he craves to fight and to scream all the time. But the truth, the one he’s forced himself to forget and the one he’ll forever deny, is that he’s gay. Jaemin’s entire life is a lie, and this lie is swallowing him whole bit by bit, slowly extinguishing his inner light. The question remains, how long will it take for Jaemin to look in the mirror and see himself for who he truly is?

Activity (1-10): 5

Have you read the rules?: removed

Would you like to be paired with a buddy to have character connections with (For new applicants)? uhh, no, not specifically. but when and IF (big if) i’m accepted, i have a plot bunnies page that i incite anyone to peek at and create connections uwu

In the event that you leave, can we keep your biography for future use? no, he’s my special son uwu Any comments/questions?: idek if you will have me back at all, if you want me at all. but i missed this place and i just figured “hey, i don’t have anything to lose by giving it a try.” can you believe i first joined this rp when i was seventeen? that’s insane. i hope i’ve grown as an rper since then but that’s probably false.

also huh, i guess i’ll add a few notes about my son here bc it’s surprisingly difficult to accurately depict a bitter, closeted gay man being homophobic but like internally and deep down being an okay person, it’s hard to make that point come across in a bio. the whole theme of this character will be development, so yes he would be an asshole to start with but yanno.

Sample( 2+ paragraphs): TRIGGER WARNING: homophobia, violence, slight nsfw-ish.

“Come on, Minie… just give me a taste”, the voice was distorted, but Jaemin distinctively felt someone push against him even in his alcoholic daze. His shirt lightly hiked up his hip, skin colliding to skin, simmering hot and so wrong… yet so right. The biting cold of the bathroom mirror contrasted so beautifully with the warmth of the hands crawling across his torso. His breathing was heavy, reduced to pants as lips forced their way against the column of his neck. He bit his lip, trying to muffle down a moan that threatened to burst out of him. Sitting on the countertop, Min’s hands wrapped themselves around whoever the fuck this was kissing him, any shame he would’ve had in a sober state completely jumping out the window.

The truth was, his parents could think he was a goody two shoes all they liked, their perfect son. But Jaemin himself didn’t know in how many women’s beds he found himself in weekly, in a similar drunken haze. He wasn’t about to suddenly develop a semblance of scruple over a woman he most likely wouldn’t remember in the morning, and neither would she. Moon only started getting antsy when he realized how strong those hands were… how pungent this person’s scent was, clinging to his sweltering skin. Men’s cologne. His breath got stuck in his throat, hands shoving blindly forward until the man stumbled backwards, falling in the tub with a grunt.

Jaemin’s eyes were wide open, darting around the room as if looking for a sign to tell him this wasn’t real, this was a dream. He felt sick to his stomach, covering his mouth as if he’d just been violated. “What the hell is your problem, man?” The other guy stood up, rubbing his head where he’d hit it against the edge of the tub.

“Don’t fucking talk to me, fag”, Jaemin’s words were venomous, he almost spat them at this other, innocent man, leaving him speechless, but only for a short moment.

“Fag? Who the fuck you calling a fag, dumbass?” The man got physical, pushing Jaemin right back. “You dragged me into this bathroom, you rubbed your perky little ass on my dick and you’re still fully torqued!” He nodded towards Moon’s crotch, making him cover it almost immediately.

“You must h- have me mistaken for someone else, I… No, I didn’t…” Jaemin trailed off, his gaze blanking out as he tried to recall the events of tonight. He recalled drinking, drinking plenty, laughing with his friends. He remembers… a voice whispering sweetly in the crook of his ear. This wasn’t happening. Even better; this never happened.

His heart was pounding through his skull, sending shockwaves of pain through his nerves. Jaemin coiled up, letting himself fall to his knees as he groaned in agony. “H- Hey… hey are you alr-” The boy didn’t have time to even try to comfort and help Jaemin that he threw himself at him fist first, his screaming getting louder and louder the more his knuckles connected to any part of the other man he could reach. “P- Please! Please stop, I… I- I won’t tell anyone, I just… please don’t hurt me.”

It wasn’t until this boy was curled up on the ground, tears spilling freely from his eyes with a busted lip and with blood dripping from his own knuckles that Jaemin snapped out of it, blinking slow and hard. He stared at what he’d done, his little heart still hammering against his ribcage as he backed up against the bathroom door, eyes never leaving his victim. He patted the surface, desperately searching for the handle, which he quickly found, turned and pulled the door open to escape.

The music was blaring, deafening even. But he couldn’t hear a sound. All he could hear were the sweet nothings this man murmured in his ear, followed by his cries of pain when he rammed into him full force. Bodies pushed up and down against him as he made his way to the crowd, what a crummy party this was, Jaemin regretted even showing up. With a shaky hand, he poured himself another drink when he reached whoever’s kitchen this was. He gulped it all in one go, leaning against the counter and throwing his head back, waiting for the sweet tingle of intoxication to wash away those awful memories.

[b0blegum]

Game On (a request)

Author: b0blegum

Pairing: Monsta X x Reader (or more to Minhyuk x Reader too)

Rating: PG!

WARNING: Bullying

Genre: fluff?

Status: more than 1 part possible

Okay, it is a requested fic. I was at first really confused on how to make a bullying story, so again, i changed plot more than five times lmao and ended up with this one, which i think the most proper to be published.

And since i already write the trigger warning for this fic, i hope those who are underage and easily triggered with any forms of bullying will scroll this post through and enjoy yourself looking at silly videos or photos of our boys, Monsta X.

Hope you like it!

“You okay?” The blonde haired guy on the screen worriedly asked when he noticed something in your upper arms.

“Of– course. Why did you even ask, Hyukkie?” You awkwardly laughed. Not to him, but to yourself.

“That. I saw… your upper arm. That’s not you experimenting with make up again, isn’t it?” He brought his face closer to the camera.

“N–o. Why would I put make up on my arm, you silly?” Subtly, you tried to hide the blueish-purple mark he meant by rubbing it.

“Well, you did do that on your thigh, once.” He answered quickly.

“That’s for halloween, for God’s sake, Minhyuk.”

“Whoa– no need to be angry, (y/n)! I’m just saying.” He chuckled. “I remembered. Completely that it was for halloween, even though you ended up staying at the dorm, right?” You rolled your eyes at him and flattened your lips.

“Yes.” You answered lazily. “Oh, by the way, Minhyuk. Can we talk again later? I am soo hungry that I really need to eat something.”

“What time is it there?” The blonde looked like he’s looking at the small numbers on the upper right side of his laptop. “Here’s 1 pm so there must be–“

“Eight.” You saw him your cute Gudetama bedside clock. “How many time do I have to say this, Grandpa? I am 17 hours behind. I am from the past. You’re from the future.” You joked.

“Stop calling me grandpa, will you!” He scoffed. “You’re the one who always forgot about everything, including my birthday, which I have it every year.” He teased.

“Whatever, Minhyuk.” Rolling your eyes, you lowered the screen a bit. “Alright. I really have to go. Bye for now?”

“Bye, (y/n). I miss you!” The boy smiled brightly, but you just replied him with a short by before closing your laptop screen.

Sighing deeply, you looked at the reflection of yourself on the mirror you placed next to the door. A horrible mark that was too visible to anyone not to notice, took your attention.

“Concealer won’t help anymore.” You lulled your head back as you rubbed the still stinging bruise.

Breaking the silence in your dorm room, your phone vibrated. It was a text from your bestest best-friend, Lee Minhyuk. The blonde guy who just hung up on you on Skype.

What’re you cooking? Suddenly I feel hungry… but Kihyun is not home L

You closed your eyes for a couple of second, leaving the chat unreplied before you scrolled through your photos, looking for an old cooking picture to send it to him.

[PIC_1312]

There u go. The usual. The quickest. Because I have group meeting in an hour.

The chat was immediately read by him and in no second, a new chat is coming in.

Again?? Are you not fed up eating spaghetti?? Don’t you have side dishes in your fridge?? Meat?? Don’t you miss korean food??

Yes. Yes you do miss korean food. Yes you do want to eat foods from the place you spent years of your childhood in, but it’s just you’re either too tired to cook them or just too busy with college’s assignments.

Ignoring Minhyuk’s chat. You limped onto your bed and about to curled into a cocoon under your fluffy blanket when a loud knocking sound startled you.

“God.” You clenched your fist. Already know who was coming.

“I know you’re in there. Open up quick, turtle!” You sighed hearing her shrill voice.

“On my way.” You whispered. You didn’t want to shout back, because if that happened, the bruises is not going to be visible in your arm and legs, but also some other place on your body.

Opening the door, you tried to look as strong as you could. As if you didn’t have a tennis ball sized of bruises.

“I ran out of foods and my friends will be coming over tonight.” The girl who shared the same hometown with you looked at you intensely into your eyes. “I need 50 dollars.”

“Fifty?” Your eyes widened as you involuntarily let out a word from your mouth.

“Come on. Clock is ticking and I am waiting. You know I hate waiting and I know you know what will happen if you keep me waiting.” She leaned on the door frame with her arms crossed on her chest.

Biting your lower lip, you turned around to find your wallet.

There was only one bill left in it. Two twenty dollar bills and a ten dollar bill. “This is what I have left for this month.” You whispered.

Walked back to the door, you put a pitiful expression. “I ran out of money. Sorry.”

The girl scoffed and shook her head. “You know what I hate more than waiting?” she waited for your silent answer. “A liar.”

She barged into your room and began to looking for the thing she wanted. She walked straight to your desk, where she saw your wallet and immediately looked inside. “Oh, yes! You really don’t have money, do you?” She pulled out your last 50 dollars and threw your wallet.

“Pl–ease! That’s my last 50 dollars! Please, I don’t have anymore money, i’m begging you!” You began to cry, when she immediately shut you up by covering your mouth.

“Shut up! Don’t be so loud, you moron!” She said in a low voice, uncovered your mouth.

“Please–“ you kneeled down and keep begging at her.

“I’m saving for a trip to Vegas, because my dad won’t lend me the money. So, I keep all my allowance and i’m still taking this.” She stepped forward before she turned around and lowered yourself to the same level with you. “And this is for a liar.” Without mercy, she slapped your cheek, leaving a prominent red mark that made you squinted your eye due to the stinging feels. “Thanks, bitch!”

You dragged yourself, leaning to the nearest wall behind you, sobbing while covering the still red mark on your face.

This was not the first time she did this kind of thing to you. This happened since a year ago. Ever since you accidentally spilled some curry sauce on her t-shirt. But later you knew it was not the sauce on her t-shirt that made her mad, but coincidentally, she got dumped by her boyfriend and that day was actually her birthday, so… she just need a place to let out her anger and there was suddenly the unlucky you, tripped with your own shoelace and spilled some sauce. Fortunately, this girl you spilled the sauce on was hell popular, since her dad is running on entertainment business and she often hung out with lots of celebrities and you, unfortunately just a girl who left your hometown to get a better education, but didn’t manage to made lots of friends because of how how shy you are around new people. So, the girl successfully took advantage of that and made you as miserable as ever.

Your room was dark. Yes— you intentionally did that. You just wanted to be in a complete silence for awhile while sobbing under your blanket and thinking what did you do to deserve all this bullying.

You always were shy in back in those school days where you were still in Korea, but no one really bullied you— well, now you thought it was because Minhyuk was always there to stepped up in front of you and that he always was a cheerful mischievous little boy, so anyone would want to become friends with him. But now that he was miles away and was a popular kpop group member, you know he can’t always be there for you anymore.

Your phone vibrated,  breaking the silence between you and you. Grabbing your phone, you looked at the screen.

Hyukkie

6 Missed Call

You got 10 texts from Hyukkie

Quickly you turned off your phone and put it back on your nightstand.

Lying to him was better than telling things that have happened since you moved to the dorm and started college. You just didn’t want him to worry and want him to only focus on his work.

Days passed. Yes, you passed the rest of the month with the money you found between the pages of your book. It’s only 20 dollars but enough to fed you for two weeks by buying cheap instant noodles.

Joey, the korean-american girl who bullied you, didn’t show up at your dorm nor bullied you at campus, you didn’t know why, but that was rarely happened.

Throwing your books on the bed, you sat on your desk, flipping the screen of your laptop.

Just as soon as your Skype status turned into Available, an incoming call is up.

“Hiiiiiii!” It’s the blonde guy again.

“You’re at the company?” You asked, noticing the background. It was the practice room.

“A simple hi would do, but yeah, i’m at the company. We just finished rehearsing.” He threw himself on the couch and made himself comfortable.

“You must be tired.” You nodded.

“I am.” He put one arm behind his head. “(Y/n), actually there’s something I need to tell you.”

“And… what is that? You looked serious, i’m scared.” You chuckled.

“You know I have a month worth of free time until we begin again preparing for comeback,”

“Yes and?”

“Well, Jooheon told me that we should go to LA,”

“Seriously? Are you guys really going?” You became pretty excited and suddenly you heard Jooheon singing at the back, something that has the word LA in it.

“We… bought the tickets and—“

“Oh my God! When?” You almost jumped out of your chair from this great news.

“Uhm… tomorrow.”

“You must be kidding me. Why so suddenly?” Your eyes widened at this another unexpected surprise.

“Because we missed hanging out with you and want to see you really soon!”

“Ugh, so cheesy.” You rolled your eyes.

“Unnie, i miss you so much!” The youngest stole Minhyuk’s phone and started acting cute. Yes, he always called you unnie because you told him once that he was like a sister to you.

“I miss you too, sis. Oh my God are you guys really coming?”

“Is that I.M I see on the screen?” A girly voice startled you that made you quickly force closed your laptop.

Turning back, you’re just as shock as the girl who stood at your wide opened door. “E—h,”

“Was that I.M? Do you know them? Personally?” She walked in, eyes locked on your now closed laptop.

“They– uh it wasn’t him. I don’t— you know I.M?” You curiously asked.

Joey shook her head subtly, “Wait, so that really was I.M? From Monsta X?” She asked again. “You know them?”

“Joey, I need you to get out of my room, please.” You said. Hiding your laptop behind you. You never said more than a word to her before and this was the first time you did it. Right after you finished the sentence, you remembered that she’d be mad and started to bully you again.

“Wait, hold on. Just tell me the truth. You do or do not know Monsta X, personally?” She asked again, emphasizing the last word.

Both of you were silent for couple of seconds before you finally nodding slowly.

“Holy shit!” She held her own head, as if it was going to burst anytime soon. “I should tell the girls. Oh my God!”

She repeated Oh My God multiple times, while you just stood before her, looking at her in surprise, when suddenly, the idea popped up in your head.

“Jo, you do know Monsta X?” You carefully asked.

“Of course! They’re like the hottest boygroup nowadays, duh?”

“They’re coming to LA tomorrow.” You smirked, already sure that your idea will be a success. Joey’s eyes widened as if it was about to popped out of its sockets.

“Are you kidding me?”

“I’m just as surprised as you are, but I can make you meet them.”

“Holy fuck.” She covered her mouth. “How? Oh my God.”

“But you need to do one thing in return.”

“Yes, of course. Anything, you name it, i’ll give it.”

“Stop bullying me.”

Joey suddenly stop squealing and raised one of her eyebrow.

“That, I cannot do.” She turned into her usual self in less than a second. “You deserved to be bullied, excuse me, miss.” She turned around quickly and immediately left your room.

You were left in disbelief. You were wrong when you thought giving her a free pass to meet Monsta X would stop her from bullying you.

“Ugh, I hate my life!” You slammed the door before you jumped onto your bed.

Hyukkie, i’m sorry something came up. I had to go, so I hung up.

You replied his text that was received ten minutes ago, right after you roughly flipped down the screen.

Alrighty, we know you’re busy with college, (y/n) ;)

Oh, anywayyyyyyyyy

[PIC_5621]

WE’RE DONE PACKING! Can’t wait to see you!

You smiled as you look at the picture he sent you. Seven luggages ready to be carried far away from South Korea.

I’m stoked! See you boys!

p.s don’t forget to tell Changkyun to bring his milk. Baby should have enough milk on board

You hit the send button.

“It was 5 PM, the boys should’ve arrived already three hours earlier, but why none of them were replying to my texts?” You tapped your phone screen, waiting for at least one of them reply to your text when suddenly, one text did appear.

(Y/n)! Come down! We’re waiting at the bench near the entrance door.

It was from Minhyuk. Finally.

Entrance door?

You squinted your eyes.

Your dorm! We’re down here. Come on!

In just a second after you read his text, you grabbed your jacket and rushing down. And yes, seven beautiful boys whom you really missed were there.

“Hey, boys.” You greeted them with a big smile plastered on your face. All of them greeted you back and immediately gave you a hug one by one. “How’s the flight?”

“As always. Tiring.” Wonho fixed his beanie.

“By the way, (y/n), why did you never tell us that you have such cool friends?” Jooheon put his arm around your neck.

“Friends?” You repeated.

“Cool and beautiful.” Hyungwon added. “Speaking of the angels itself…” He shot his eyes passed you. Turning around, you were more than surprised to see who was walking.

“Sorry, to keep you waiting. There was line, so…” Joey smiled to all of the boys. “There you go.” She and her friends immediately gave them a refreshing americano. “Oh, (y/n). You’re finally here!” She hanged her arm around your neck. “Where were you? I tried knocking on your door.”

“U– uh,” you startled.

“Anyway, have you guys had lunch? I mean proper lunch, because I know airplane foods suck.” Joey took a step closer to the boys.

“Well, funny because we were about to ask you guys to join us and (y/n) for lunch,” Shownu collu answered. “So are you guys free?”

Joey looked at her friends, she was deadass smiling so bright, but was clever enough to change into a normal one.

“Of course we are plus, we know some good restaurants around here. So why don’t we go right now?” Joey led. Everyone was smiling, excited to explore LA without having a tour the next day.

“(Y/n),” Joey walked back to you. “You told me if you meet me with them, I have to stop bullying you, right? So why don’t we make another deal?”

“What is it?”

“Whoever stole their heart, is winning. If I win, I won’t stop bully you, but if you win, well, you got what you always wanted.”

You replied with a silence.

Winning their hearts? Is she kidding? I mean, I am friends with them for years. Is she killing herself?

“Deal.” You answered confidently.

“Well then,” she smirked. “Game on.”

[deactivated4179291]

Star Crossed - Part 21 (H.S AU) - “I Know”

Maddie’s POV

My mother stares at me in a state of shock her two feet glued to the hardwood floor just beyond the doorway. Her head shakes and her eyebrows pull together indicating that she’s unsure of what I mean.

“What are you not telling me, Mom?” I grit my teeth. Her eyes flick behind me. I follow her eyes to where Harry is sat staring at her with what I can only make out to be disappointment before he looks away. She looks back to me and gives in. She steps aside and holds and arm out, telling me to come inside. I stalk over to the couch and plop down, huffing in defeat. My mother slowly comes to sit down across from me, wiping her palms down her thighs as she leans forward lowering herself down to sit in the loveseat timidly.

“What exactly are you talking about?” she asks calmly sighing.

“I-I don’t really know,” I shake my head, “I just-I keep having this dream about you, me, and dad, and he…he gets taken away by these officers,” I pull my bewildered stare from the rug beneath my mother’s feet, and drag my eyes to hers, pulling myself together, speaking with nothing but resilience. I wasn’t about to let her think I was weak or naïve. If that thought crossed her mind she wouldn’t tell me what I so desperately needed to know. Just like I couldn’t tell Robin about the beach. “why does it feel like it happened, Mom?” I stare her down as she shifts uncomfortably in her seat. Good, I thought. I wasn’t about to let her avoid the situation at hand. Her silence is secretly my answer.

“It’s true…” I say quietly, though it��s more of a question than a statement, ”is it true?" I ask.

"Maddie-"

“Is it true, Mom?” I bite before she has the chance to try and earn my sympathy. She nods sadly, closing her eyes as tears slip past her eyes and she releases a sob she was holding back.

“Oh my God,” I gasp quietly, standing from the couch. My hand comes up to cover my mouth as it hangs open in doubt. My eyes water as I shake my head so unable to trust the woman sitting before me. “Y-you-lied to me,” I say shakily, “you lied to me - for ten fucking years?!”

“Please, just let me explain,” she cries pleading me with desperate, emotional eyes.

“You fucking better explain,” I scoff, sitting back down slowly not once breaking my burning stare from her face. I grit my teeth and clench my jaw so that she can speak without me interrupting her.

“It’s a long story,” she groans rubbing her temples slightly, “How much do you want to know?”

“You better tell me every damn thing, Mom. No more lies.” I spat. She sighs, and nods slowly, before uncrossing her legs and leaning her elbows against her thighs. Her hands clasped together between her knees as she begins with the story.

“It all started when I was 17 years old. My family had moved to Westbrook – the city between Adelton and Silverlight. The town I lived in was so small that the only high school I could go to was in Silverlight Beach. At said school, I met a boy training to become a professional surfer by the name of Dean Wilkinson,” she pauses. I stare at her confused, not knowing why she’s addressing dad with a different last name. “I’ll get into that part later,” she says with a wave of her hand, “Anyways, as senior year neared its end my father was offered a job in Adelton. It was an offer my family couldn’t afford to refuse, and therefore we moved. As time had gone on though, I had fallen in love with the surfer boy from the beach. Transferring halfway through senior year was a struggle, but I still made time to go down to that beach every chance I got. We somehow made it work…until we found out what he was, and then we graduated.”

“What he was?” I ask, confused, “what do you mean what he was?”

“Your father, though he identified as a Pisces in the eyes of the government, and he was, he was also and Aries, a sign that is known for compatibility with the Leo sign…”

“But, how is that possible? You can only be one-“

“He was born on a day that falls between the designated birthdates for both a Pisces and an Aries- March 18th.” She explains. I nod, even though I’m still not quite sure what this has to do with my dream.

“It’s called a cusp, and it’s long been outlawed to exercise cusp behaviors. The law states you can only be one thing, so cusps threaten the law. Your father and I ran, he changed his name, we got married and had you, and then they found out what he was…that’s why they came for him that day. All throughout the city that day, cusps were rounded up and dragged off somewhere, never to be seen again. The list of victims included your father.” With the words that fall from her mouth, I fully realize the majority of my life has been a complete and utter lie. There was no drunk driver, no accident on that March day in 2006. I can’t even think straight I’m so shaken by what I’ve just come to know. I feel the urge to leave, so I begin to rise from my seat, but my mother stops me.

“I vowed not to let the same thing happen to you, ever. But then I saw the way Harry looked at you. I knew that look. It was the same way your father looked at me. I knew he loved you,” she shrugs as if it was simple, “There’s something else, though,” she holds up her hands signifying that she wants me to sit back down, which I do, staring blankly at her ”Maddie, you were born on the 20th of May…” NO, no, no, no don’t say what I think you’re about to say…”Maddie, you’re not just a Taurus. You’re a Gemini, too.”

Harry’s POV

3:45 PM

The moment she exited the front door, I could tell just by her tear stained cheeks that her mother had told her everything. Everything I had been forced to hid from her out of fear of losing her. Everything I swore not to tell her, knowing it would break her. Yet here she was, broken. What if I could have prevented her broken heart? What if I could have done something? Said something? The worst part is that deep down I know I should have.

She slides into the passenger seat without a word, shutting the door behind her.

I know better than to try and get her to open up right now. Instead, I start the car and back out of her Mom’s driveway. The entire drive home, I hope so desperately that Robin will wake up and somehow lighten the mood like she always does, but she’s out cold. I notice that Maddie’s no longer wearing the necklace her mother gave her, as I pull the car into our driveway a mere ten minutes later. The atmosphere is still silent as I open up the back door, and carry a zombie-like ten-year-old inside. I bring her up the stairs and tuck her into her new bed before I make my way back downstairs with my heart full of uncertainty. I’m so unsure of what I’m going to encounter – is she going to be angry? Is she going to lash out? Or is she going to fall to her knees, weeping in sorrow?

As I reach the bottom of the stairs I’m not surprised to find her sitting on the couch. What troubles me is how she’s sat – with her sock covered feet flat against the couch cushion, and her knees pulled to her chest. One arm drapes across both the tops of her knees while the opposite hand is to her face – her fingers rested against her lips like she’s deep in thought. In sad, dark thought, while she cries silently. When my boots scuff against the wood of the floor her sad eyes look up to me and my heart completely shatters at the sight before me.

Maddie’s POV

4:00 PM

I keep trying to tell myself it’s not true – it can’t be true, surely it can’t. The sound of Harry’s feet against the wood snaps me out of my tearful eyes’ staring contest with the wall.

“Harry, my mom…she-“ I croak, but can’t finish the statement as I start to sob. I try again “She-“ but the words get caught in my throat.

“I know…” he mutters. He…knows?!

"What do you mean you know?!" I shout as my breathing grows uneven.

“I wanted to tell you, baby, I did but I swore not to, your mother she...she convinced me that it would destroy you-“

“How could you keep this from me?!” I shriek, cutting him off and standing up from the couch. I can’t even believe my ears. My own boyfriend, the man that I love has been lying to me for god knows how long.

“I tried so many times to tell you, but I couldn’t find the words-“

“I can’t even- oh my God,” I shake my head in disbelief. I want to run, but I can’t leave. I can’t afford a hotel, and I can’t just leave Robin here with no notice. My hands start to shake, and I know I’m about to have a panic attack. I rush past Harry, making a break for the stairs when I feel him try to wrap his hand around my arm as he cries for me to just let him explain himself.

“Maddie, please-“

“Don’t touch me!” I scream, running up the stairs. I hear him following me as he continues to ask me to stop, so I make a break for the upstairs guest bathroom, sprinting and locking myself inside. I let my back press against the door once it was secure, and covered my mouth to muffle my sobs as I sank down to the floor. The doorknob jiggles indicating that Harry’s trying to get in, as he cries on the other side of the wood.

“Maddie, please, just let me explain,” he sobs, “please.”

But, I am so upset that I can feel the anger built up like a balloon inside me suddenly burst. I can’t open this door right now. So I cry. I curl up pulling my Knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them - hugging each other tightly. I cry until I shake. Until my face Is as red as the pillows decorating our couch downstairs, and my eyes are tainted pink. The blue shades inside my irises become clearer as the red makes them stand out. I just sit here, and cry and shake - until I am hyperventilating and cannot breathe, which leads to a knock on the door.

6:30 PM

“Mads, it’s just me,” Niall’s voice says muffled from behind the bathroom door, “can I come in?”

I reach up in defeat and flick the lock undone, sliding over against the marble floor to lean against the wall instead of the door. Niall slips in and wraps his arms around me tight. It feels like it's been hours since he came in, as I continue to gasp for air with tears forming waterfalls on my face. I let myself curl up into a ball as he pulls me into his lap rubbing my back to try and soothe my pain.

“Niall he-“

“I know, Mads. He told me everything before he left…thought staying in a hotel for a few days would be best, for your sake.”

It’s crazy how even when I was so hurt by his mistake, I cared about him this much. Because it’s only then that I realize Harry’s silent pleas have disappeared, and it’s actually been several hours since I clicked the lock on that shiny silver doorknob before succumbing to my emotions. Because even though Niall was holding me so tightly in his arms, trying to calm me down, I was alone. It was the first time in a long time that I felt completely and utterly alone.

Harry’s POV

7:00 PM

"How do I get her to forgive me for what I've done when I can't even forgive myself for what I've done, Lou?" I grumble, as Louis and I sit on the bathroom floor of my hotel room. I only let him in because I was out of any alcohol that came in the mini bar and needed desperately to forget about what had happened. I had lost the love of my fucking life all because I was too selfish to risk losing her. The irony.

“Mate, I don’ think there’s anything ye can do,” he places a hand on my shoulder giving it a reassuring squeeze. He means well but the gesture could never have sufficed at a time like this. There’s a knock on the door to my room and I know it’s Niall. Lou has to get back to work, but for some reason, Niall wanted to check on me. As Louis exits the bathroom the irishman plops down onto the tile floor, facing me so that he can talk to me easier.

10:45 PM-

A few hours have passed as Niall and I are sat here in the small bathroom while I continue to get sick. Get sick, sip whiskey, repeat. She’s all I can think about. Every minute that passes is another thought about what I’ve done, or how she feels right now.

“How is she?” I immediately ask. 

“I’m equally as pissed at ye as she is, so don’t think I’m here for you. I’m here as a favor, but I'll play nice tonight because I'm a pity taker.” he almost spat his words at me.

“A favor?...To-to Maddie?” I tilt my head in confusion.

“She asked me to check on you, yes – she loves you, Harry obviously she cares if yer alright but don’t get yer hopes up. She hasn’t spoken in hours according to Lou.”

"I meant it you know?" he closed his eyes, leaning his cheek against his hand on the toilet, "I love her...I was so scared that if shee knew, she would run. That she wouldn't let me run with her. I can't lose her, Nial," I cried.

“I know, mate, I know.” He mumbles, patting my back as I begin to wretch into the toilet again. 

It was then that I realized I grabbed the whiskey bottle from Louis, not because I want to forget but because I'd rather wallow in the pain and burn for what I've done without her, knowing that I got to love her and that she loved me, than lie to myself and say everything is going to be okay. I'd rather know that what she did was her own choice and that I was selfless. I was finally selfless and I had let her make her own choice. I wanted to burn in that thought. I'd rather burn in that thought than feel nothing. I’d rather feel pain than feel like I have no more reason to want to live. Pain was all that I had left to keep me going, now. And there was no one to blame other than myself.

Maddie’s POV

11:45 PM

Movies always taught me that tubs of ice cream and warm blankets were the cure to a broken heart. They couldn’t have been more wrong, yet I sit here, wallowing and feeling sorry for myself as I open my third pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Shout out to Louis Tomlinson for the ice cream hook-up. I owe you one boo-bear.

“’m gonna head downstairs now, alright love? If you need anything just text me. It’s soundproof down there so I won’t be able to hear you if you need a proper cuddle, yeah?” He says sweetly. I nod, forcing a pitiful excuse for a smile his way.

“Thanks, Louis,” my rough, sad voice calls back to him. He opens the door that leads to the studio, and disappears. Just as he closes the door back there’s a knock on the front door to the house. It’s almost midnight...who could be visiting at this hour?! I groan as I place my ice cream and spoon on the coffee table, and drag myself to the door. I don’t even bother making myself look presentable. If the person behind this damn door knew what I’d been through in the past 12 hours, they’d cry for me. I slide the door open and am greeted by two men in strange white outfits. The only reason I was able to make out their figures in the pitch black of night was  the porch lights.

“Hi...” I awkwardly greet them, while they took in the appearance of me bumming it in sweats and a t-shirt with a messy bun that just looks more like birds next on my head... “can I help you?”

“Yes, I believe you can. Is Maddie Wilkinson here?” His gravelly voice asks. I know that voice from somewhere. It’s the same voice that haunted my dream and tore my father from our family. He was a law officer...

[ask-themaraudersmap]

The Promise

Ship: Wolfstar

June 1996

Dear Pads, do you remember our promise?

It was your idea to write it down. It was my idea to send it on a journey.

Remus was lying on the dusty and old bed in the room he once called his bedroom. It was just the way he left it. His dull eyes focused the door through that Sirius walked into his room so many times. He pain inside of him made him feel numb. Knowing that this time Sirius wouldn't come back filled him with despair. He was gone.

A sob so silent he could hardly hear it himself left his mouth. It seemed to echo from the walls and become so loud he had to cover his ears with the pillow. He curled up, pressing his eyes shut and bit his lips so hard he felt a metallic taste on his tongue.

A knock on the door made him cringe and he sat up in confusion and shock. His hand started shaking. Nobody knew he was there. Nobody could know. He didn't tell anyone he would go back to his parents house for some days. Slowly he got up and looked out of the window. A postman was turning around and walking away. Remus rushed out of the room. Why was there a postman knocking on the door of a house that had been empty for years. When he hurried towards the front door he noticed a crumpled and quite roughly treated envelope on the floor.

Slowly he picked it up and took a closer look at it. 'Indonesia'. He blinked. Why would someone from Indonesia send a letter here? When he turned the letter around he nearly let it slip out of his hand. 'To Remus J. Lupin and Sirius O. Black'.

With the letter in his hands he sat down on the mothy sofa, turning the paper around again. 'Indonesia'. He swallowed hard and started opening the envelope. He took out the paper and something slipped to his lap. When he took it he identified it as a photo. A small family was visible. Parents with three children. One of them was carried by its mother while the other two were standing in front of the adults. All of them smiled widely. He lay down the photo next to him and now took the paper that was in the envelope, unfolded it and started to read.

Dear Remus J. Lupin and Sirius O. Black,

I found your letter in a bottle in April of this year, 1996, which is 19 years after you sent it. I don't know if you are ever going to receive this letter, but if so, I would be happy to let me know with a short answer.

My wife thought this is a very important promise to keep, so she made me send this letter. She would also like to know if you kept your promises nearly 20 years later.

You were kids then, and now you are adults. So you grew up and many things must have changed.

My name is Putu. I'm 38 years old and have a wife and three kids. You can see them in the photo. We live in a city called Pangandaran which is close to the sea. On the beach, I found the bottle during a walk. I sent the letter with mine as told on it.

I wish you two all the very best. I hope you were able to keep your promise.

Putu and his family

Remus turned to the next page and saw the handwriting of Sirius and himself. Tears were dwelling up in his eyes.

I, Remus John Lupin, promise to always be with you, take care of you, hold you back when you're bringing yourself in danger.

I, Sirius Orion Black, promise to always be with you, trust you with everything I have, because you're worth so much.

To the finder: Please send this letter to its writers. You can find the address on the back of this letter.

Thank you very much. Remus (17) & Sirius (17), August 1977

Summer 1977

These days were the last summer holidays they would have during school. And although they hadn't known back then... those were the last holidays they spent all together. The four boys known as the Marauders made a trip to the sea together. It was that day when Sirius suggested to write down this promise. He took the pen he once got from Remus as a present and gave it to him. Remus hesitated a lot before he finally grabbed a parchment after a bit of convincing through Peter. He started writing tentatively. When he was done, he folded the letter and also let Sirius write his part before finishing off their letter. “What does that mean?”, Sirius wanted to know in confusion about the last words. “We will send it on a journey around the world”, Remus suggested. “A journey?”, Sirius asked. “We put it in a bottle and close it. Then we throw it to the sea. Some day it will be found by someone.” Sirius agreed instantly. This seemed to be an amazing idea. They didn’t read each others words, instead planning to read them when they got the letter back.

June 1996

Remus hands were shaking. He read Sirius' words over and over again not holding back the tears anymore that were running down his face. He had never been able to make him trust. He had never been able to keep him away from the danger he was running into.

It was his fault he was gone for the first time. And it was his fault he was gone for the second time – once and for all.

I'm sorry I wasn't able to keep the promise.

[adambstingus]

Goldie TaylorThe Search for My Fathers Killer

ST. LOUIS—Just before daybreak, sitting at the edge of her bed in an upper bedroom, she clutched her pale blue housecoat and listened tearfully to the transistor radio on the nightstand. At the top of the hour, a familiar, melodic voice confirmed what she already knew: Her husband was dead.

It had been a tumultuous relationship, at times beautiful and at others marred with ugliness. They were separated and had been for several years, living worlds apart and with other people now, but he was still hers—still her husband and the father of her youngest child. The news that he had been murdered—found shot in the head and pronounced dead on arrival at a city-run hospital—was devastating.

She’d gotten the fateful call from nightclub owner Gene Norman—who doubled as a disc jockey on KATZ-AM 1600—as she closed her shift as a cocktail waitress at The Windjammer. She left the bar, situated atop the Marriott Hotel near Lambert Field, and began the 20-mile drive home east along Interstate 70. As she crossed the Mississippi River into East St. Louis, Norman took to the airwaves and dedicated a song—Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia”—to “Jerry.”

…he couldn’t make it,so he’s leaving the life he’s come to know…

It was still dark out when she pulled into the public housing complex in the Duck Hill neighborhood. She wailed, screaming and shaking in her car.

…I’d rather live in his world,than live without him in mine…

I watched my mother descend the stairs that Sunday morning. Overcome with grief, her voice breaking and her body still trembling, she reached for me. “He’s gone,” she whispered, grabbing me with both hands. “Your daddy was killed.”

It was 1973 and I was 5 years old. Even then, I knew what death meant. As our family gathered at Aunt Geraldine’s house on 10th Street that evening, my uncle held me through the night. I curled up in his lap and sobbed until I slept.

I am 48 now, with grown children and grandchildren of my own, but—in so many ways—those tears have never stopped falling. I still think about him every day—how our lives might have been different, about who killed him and why. Some 43 years later, his murder remains unsolved.

In the months and years following his death, relatives floated theories when they thought I wouldn’t understand or was out of earshot. I quietly tallied the names and places as I listened to grown folks recount pieces of the story, some fact and some folly, over liquor and card games.

When I was old enough to ask questions, few answers came. Each person I asked came to the same dark, dead-end alleyway and stopped. For my father’s mother, Catherine, and for my mother, Mary Alice, I know, the memories were far too painful.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Grandmother Catherine said, repeatedly, until I stopped asking.

When Grandma Cat died in 1994, I’d started digging through old newspaper clippings and scouring court documents for clues, finding loose threads to pull on in the story that no one—whether out of fear or loyalty—would tell me. In doing so, I discovered things about the man my father had been, things that made it tough to keep going. It could not have been easy to love this “dreamer” with “delusions of grandeur,” as my mother described him—certainly not to love him as hard and as thoroughly as both she and my grandmother had.

He kept dreaming,That someday he’d be a starBut he sure found out the hard way,That dreams don’t always come true…

With stops and starts, I have spent decades looking for answers, slowly and methodically stitching together the fabric of a story no one would talk about. New questions and new answers have emerged over the years as I chased down a faceless killer. But in the end, I came up short—unable to answer the driving question: Who murdered my father?

My search ended where it had begun: with a man named Roland B. Norton Jr.

***

Roland was a desperate man—desperate to survive the violent drug war brewing in north St. Louis and desperate to stay out of prison. Charged with two counts of dealing heroin, Norton was quickly released on bond and hit the street with one end in mind: find the government informant threatening his freedom and kill him.

In the weeks leading up to his November 1973 federal drug-trafficking trial, two men were shot, in separate incidents, execution-style. The second man, Wyart Taylor, was my father. He was found, blocks from his house in north St. Louis, face down on a sidewalk in a pool of blood.

A grand jury indictment—announced by Donald J. Stohr, the U.S. district attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri in the fall of 1973—spelled out the damning case against Norton, who was suspected of having connections to at least two notorious drug rings that kept north St. Louis awash in “brown sugar” and “snow.” On Aug. 10 of that year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that 24-year-old Norton—who was then employed as an auditor in the city license collector’s office—and another man named Bernard Pratt were allegedly part of a “large-scale narcotics sales operation.”

Secured in March, the Norton indictment had been sealed for nearly six months to protect the identity of a federal witness and the integrity of other ongoing investigations. However, once Norton was arrested that August, the document became public and Norton immediately launched a city-wide manhunt for the witness.

Eager to unmask the unnamed informant, Norton’s defense attorneys filed a “bill of particulars” on Sept. 6, demanding that the government “furnish him with the time, place, and name of the party, if there is any, who are witnesses to the transactions.” They also moved to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that “the delay had prejudiced his ability to present an effective defense, thereby violating his Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

The judge in the case, John F. Nagle, denied both motions, leaving Norton to guess who was cooperating with the FBI and DEA.

According to court records, there were two transactions on or about Feb. 26 of that year—one for $350, the other for $500, together weighing 3.9 grams—and, based on that information, Norton figured out who set him up. Just over a month after the indictment was unsealed and the defendant was released on bond from federal custody, Michael “Big Mike” Jones was tracked down and killed on Sept. 17. Although he was not among the listed witnesses and had no known drug involvement, the second man—my father, Wyart—was murdered on Nov. 5 as he walked home from an illicit card game.

Norton—the son of a disgraced St. Louis police officer—was never charged in the murders, nor is there any evidence that he was an official suspect in either shooting. According to Grandma Cat, local authorities quickly wrote off both as robberies gone bad and she said the investigations were summarily closed. When she went downtown to police headquarters to offer a cash reward for information about her son’s murder, the desk sergeant allegedly told her, “Go home, lady. Nobody cares who killed your boy.”

But the streets were whispering about the likelihood that Norton, also a reputed pimp who was said to be fond of fine clothes, flashy jewelry, and beautiful women, was involved. Before his arrest on federal drug-trafficking charges, Norton enjoyed the high life—replete with full-length fur coats, silk-ribboned wide-brimmed hats, and scantily clad, cooing cocktail waitresses who answered at his beckoning. Despite those trappings, and a well-paying city job secured with his father’s connections, he frequently borrowed money from a local loan shark named “Papa Joe” Henry.

The younger Norton also relied heavily on his father, with whom he still lived in the 4500 block of McMillan Avenue at the time of his indictment.

From the first time I overheard his name in the early 1980s, I was told Norton was the son of a Korean War veteran and “dirty cop” said to have taken bribes to protect area drug dealers and underground nightclubs, and to have fed police information to Italian mobsters. How much of what my older cousins said was fact or folly I did not know. However, some of that information was confirmed recently when I learned that Norton Sr. had been brought up on decidedly thin charges of public corruption and demoted by the St. Louis Police Department in 1959, after just three years on the force. He resigned five years after that, amid a second investigation into allegations of wrongdoing and after he’d allegedly been seen frequenting a “tavern of ill-repute” as an off-duty officer.

“The formal charge cited specific instances” that he was “alleged to have collected admittance fees, removed objectionable customers and closed the doors at closing hours.” He had also “associated” with a “woman wanted for burglary.” Two years later, in 1966, Norton Sr. was shot in the leg during an altercation over “a strip tease dancer.” Tragically, his wife, Ellyn, was killed along with two others in a 1970 car accident on Illinois Route 127, just north of Greenville, Illinois, after another vehicle crossed the centerline and struck them head-on.

By 1973, Norton Sr. was a widower living on his military pension who did not have the means to make his son’s five-figure bail. A few months ago, I tracked down a woman, a family acquaintance who had been the live-in girlfriend of a rival drug lord. She hesitantly told me that a pair of Norton Jr.’s midlevel drug captains posted the $50,000 cash bond. I was unable to find a trace of either man in public records, but she said they were looking after their own interests. The drug-runners needed Norton out of jail, away from federal agents and potential jailhouse informants. They need Norton to “handle that business,” the ex-girlfriend told me.

The government witness needed to be found and silenced.

When Norton was first taken into custody, investigators reportedly pressured him about his ties to drug gangs operating in St. Louis—including the notorious Petty Brothers—and offered him a deal that included immunity but no federal protection. Norton refused to tell FBI and DEA agents who he was working for. “Roland ain’t wanna die,” the rival’s ex-girlfriend said, “and he damn sure ain’t wanna to go to jail.”

Norton had few real options and, the way he saw it, there was just one way out. He knew who made the buys from him based on the dates and amounts listed in the indictment. Prosecutors believed by sealing the indictment against Norton they were buying time to make headway in breaking up a suspected ring of high-end dealers and put an end to the bloodshed. The document, unsealed by federal law upon Norton’s arrest, might as well have been a death warrant.

“Big Mike was a dead man walking,” an older female cousin told me.

Described by my cousin as a large “flamboyant gay man,” Big Mike was making a decent living setting up dealers for the federal investigators. He was “a small-time hustler,” she said, and court records confirm that Jones was actively helping in several cases.

“Bodies were dropping every other day,” my cousin, who was once engaged to one of St. Louis’s most notorious crime bosses, told me.

Few—even my cousin—would talk with me on the record without anonymity about the drug war that was touched off in the early 1970s and lasted into the early ’80s. Almost no one wanted to talk about the violence—which included car bombings and movie-theater shootings—that littered the nightly newscasts.

But Dennis Haymon, a former drug kingpin himself who led one of the area’s deadliest gangs, knew both Norton and Jones well. My cousin told me about Haymon, and I quickly found him still living in St. Louis.

Haymon remembers that Big Mike was a drug addict “who knew how to get money.” Jones, he said, was also a well-known “booster” and a “money-getter” who peddled stolen goods around the corner of Pendleton and Finney avenues.

Despite Norton’s legal predicament, he wasn’t “a real killer,” Haymon, who was once one of the most feared men to walk the streets of St. Louis, told me over a series of phone calls spanning hours in recent months. Now an ordained minister and an anti-gang activist writing his memoirs, Haymon served 25 years of a life sentence after he was convicted on murder charges in 1979.

Haymon confirmed what I’d read in old newspaper clips, that he had been locked in a bloody war with the Petty Brothers—Samuel, Lorenzo, and Joseph—for nearly a decade. In one incident, he said the Pettys climbed atop a nightclub and sprayed a crowd with bullets in a failed attempt to kill him. Five club-goers were shot and a woman standing five feet from Haymon was killed in the incident, but Haymon got away.

My family had been close to the Pettys when I was growing up. As a child, I had been fond of Joe—who was engaged to my cousin and fathered two of her now grown daughters. He was a good-looking man with wide, nickel-sized eyes and a full beard. I remember how he had always been especially kind to me, even helping me land my first job at 14 as a dining-room attendant in a downtown St. Louis restaurant that was reputedly run by the mob.

I knew nothing of about his life as a drug dealer or about the string of gangland shootings in which he had allegedly been involved. Joe had been shot once, I knew, while sitting outside a convenience store that he owned. He refused to talk to the responding police officers about the incident, saying only that he would “take care of it.”

When I asked him about my father back in 1983, Joe kissed my forehead and said, “You can’t bring him back.”

Joe, who died after a suspicious motorcycle accident the following year, used to tell me how much I looked like my father. If he knew what happened to him, he never said, and that secret was buried with him. But in so many ways, Joe had been my protector. A once stern music teacher in junior high school suddenly treated me more gently after she learned that I had family ties to Joe. I never met his brother Sam, an ex-convict who was sent away on federal drug-trafficking charges and died of bone cancer in the 1990s.

But recently, I contacted Lorenzo—the only surviving brother—after cajoling a mutual acquaintance for his cell number. Though I had never actually met Lorenzo, I had always been told that he was an “evil” man. His first arrest came in 1964, at just 15 years old, when he stabbed 21-year-old Leroy Chappel over 25 cents.

“Lorenzo is one mean dude, and just about everybody is scared to death of him,” a detective said after he was arrested in 1978. “Maybe, just maybe with him being locked up, things will cool down.” A search warrant for his Northwoods house turned up sticks of dynamite, assault rifles, ammunition, and a bullet-proof vest.

My fingers twitched as I dialed the number. I stammered, at first, then told him why I was calling.

“I can’t help you with that,” Lorenzo said, repeatedly, as I peppered him with questions about Roland Norton Jr. and Big Mike Jones. He hung up at the mere mention of my father’s name.

If the Petty Brothers knew what happened to Big Mike or my father, those secrets will almost certainly die with the last of them. I phoned Haymon again, pressing him for more details.

“Roland was soft,” Haymon—the only person willing to talk on the record with his name attached—said of Big Mike’s murder. “He had problems pulling the trigger.”

A second, unidentified man supposedly took the pistol from Norton and finished the job.

But even with Big Mike dead, there remained at least one potential witness to testify against Norton—one of his closest associates, in whom he confided nearly everything and to whom, a source said, Norton purportedly owed “a piece of money.”

Seven weeks after Big Mike was killed, minutes after a resident on Kossuth Avenue called police to report shouting and gunshots, a 30-year-old man was discovered face down on the sidewalk. The victim had been shot four times in the head, at close range, with a .22 caliber pistol. Three rounds were still lodged in his brain. The last blast entered his left temple and exited the right side of his face.

“Die nigger. Nigger, die quick,” the gunman reportedly said, according to the St. Louis Daily Whirl, a notorious local crime tabloid.

Given the circumstances and the coroner’s report, I thought it had to be more than a “robbery gone bad,” as my grandmother had been told. Everything I knew about my father’s killing—four bullets to the head at close range and the words allegedly said as he lay dying—suggested it was personal. The shooting reeked of vengeance and malice. And the more I learned about Norton and his connections to St. Louis’s underworld, the more convinced I became that my father’s association with Norton had cost him his life.

How much did my father actually know about Roland Norton’s dealings? Was he one of the government’s witnesses in the federal drug case? Was he in league with the drug gangs that ruled the streets of St. Louis? And perhaps more critically, was my father the trigger man in the murder of Big Mike Jones?

Candidly, there were moments when I did not want to know the truth. Over four decades later, I know that most of those questions will go unanswered. To find some of them, I had to search the annals of my own family history.

***

Florence Blackard (née Carroll) was a drug-addled prostitute. In the mid-1930s, my great-grandmother was penniless and estranged from her husband, Murray, when she was forced to give up her two daughters after child services intervened. The timid, malnourished girls—marked with old scars, mended bone fractures, and fresh bruises—were led from the rodent-infested apartment on Pine Street that had no running water or electricity.

A busted radiator, situated near a sheet-covered window overlooking the avenue below, emitted no heat. The bone-cold, three-room unit was festooned with cockroaches, rotting garbage, and empty bottles of cheap liquor still in their brown carry-out sacks. A well-used douche bag, stained with a deep red Betadine solution, hung on a hanger in the moldy bathroom.

The beatings, Florence’s youngest daughter, Catherine, would later tell child welfare workers, came almost daily, and they rarely attended school. She and her older sister, Juanita, had been whipped by their mother, she said, with electrical cords and flogged with the buckle end of a leather belt. Social workers also deemed their father, an alcoholic who worked as a janitor and lived in a rooming house, unfit to care for his daughters, who were sent to the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home (now known as Annie Malone Children and Family Services).

In the late 1930s, Catherine and Juanita were adopted by a former “chicken picker” turned “cement mixer” from Middle Fork, a tiny settlement in northeast Missouri near Macon, and his college-educated wife, who hailed from the same town. Raised in The Ville section of St. Louis—once home to tennis star Arthur Ashe, boxer Sonny Liston, comedian Dick Gregory, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Chuck Berry and Tina Turner—the girls flourished under the watchful eyes of Thomas Angell Hubbard and his wife, Nina Grant.

Catherine and Juanita, who took their adopted father’s name, spent holidays and summers in Macon enjoying hayrides along with a bevy of new cousins. In old photographs, they appear healthy and well-fed, beaming at the camera and wearing new clothes for the first time.

However, when 15-year-old Catherine became pregnant in 1942, she was sent to live with Hubbard’s family in northern Illinois. She gave birth to her first and only child the following summer.

Born on July 17, 1943, in Galesburg, Wyart Taylor Jr. was a slight boy with an apple-shaped cleft chin and serious eyes. With the his biological father largely absent, Catherine married an Army private the following year and moved to Minneapolis, where he was stationed at Fort Snelling.

Catherine, my paternal grandmother, spoke little about her early life and said almost nothing about her life in Minnesota. She did tell me that my father had a son with his girlfriend. In 1963, my oldest brother, Terrence, was born in Minneapolis. I tracked him down in 1993, the year before our grandmother died, when I was 25. At the time, he was a 30-year old Navy officer, stationed in Jacksonville, Florida. Terry, who looks strikingly like our father, never really knew him. It had been my grandmother’s dying wish to see Terry—now retired from military service—and me together. We missed that chance, but he was with me at her small memorial service and, in the years since, I’ve tried to give him the family he missed.

As I came of age, my grandmother enjoyed telling and retelling stories about my father and their exploits, and I’ve shared many of them with my brother. Over breakfast in her Miami kitchen, the retired housekeeper would launch into soaring tales.

There was the time, in 1965, when my father was holed up in a motel room. Four or five armed men, to whom he owed a sizable gambling debt, had the building surrounded. Every exit was covered. According to Grandma Cat, they were careful about who they allowed in or out, and my father didn’t have his pistol.

Cat hatched a plan. At nightfall, she stuffed an overnight bag with three handguns, a box of ammunition, and some old rags. She slipped on an old tattered dress, a floppy hat, and a pair of house slippers. Pretending to be drunk, she stumbled past the men and into the lobby. Once upstairs, grandmother handed over the suitcase of weapons. Cat claimed that she and my father shot their way out of the lobby.

A week later, the same men drove up on my father as he walked to work. Someone sitting in the back seat opened fire. Shot in the upper shoulder, he rolled under a parked car and played dead. He stayed there until his brother-in-law, my Uncle Ross, had the vehicle moved and took him to the hospital.

Years after my biological grandfather—Wyart Taylor Sr.—was crushed to death in an elevator shaft, allegedly by his stepfather, Richard, my father ran into Richard tossing back whiskey shots at a local tavern. Wyart Sr.’s death was ruled an accident but, when my father saw Richard, he promptly introduced himself and, according to my grandmother, he beat the old man to within an inch of his life.

My father was the hero in every story my grandmother ever told.

Cat didn’t talk about the time my father broke a long-neck beer bottle over a bar and sliced a man’s throat for calling my mother a “black bitch.” I overheard my late Aunt Doris Jean saying the man—known on the streets as “Red”—survived, but only because my dad had him dropped off at a nearby emergency room. It was Doris Jean, my Uncle Willie Byrd’s wife who was prone to gossip, who revealed another incident in 1967.

After a neighbor told my father that it was my mother’s nephew who had robbed our house in broad daylight, my father beat him so badly that his jaw had to be wired shut. Because he was family, Daddy then drove my cousin to the hospital himself and paid the bill in cash.

But the year before he succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 1995, my brother Donnie—my mother’s son from a previous marriage—opened up about the beatings he suffered as a child. I will never forget how he broke down that Thanksgiving, sobbing as he told me what my father had done to him.

There were few mentions about my father’s life in the newspapers of the day. I do not know if he was arrested in any of the incidents my grandmother described or others that she would not talk about. But recently, while tracing through the archives of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that he had in fact been arrested once and charged with aggravated battery related to a fight on March 5, 1967. The charge was upgraded to involuntary manslaughter when the victim, a foreign exchange student, died after languishing on life support at Barnes Hospital.

Bog Soo Byun, a third-degree black belt from Seoul, South Korea, studying engineering at Washington University, suffered a skull fracture after being repeatedly stomped and kicked. His brother Ho Soo escaped with cuts and bruises. They had come to my godmother’s bar, the Gold Room, on the corner of Delmar and Euclid, to take Polaroid photographs and sell them to customers. My father ordered them out. The fight allegedly started when Bog Soo karate-kicked my father, according to defense attorneys.

They told the jury that my father had acted in self-defense.

The trial, held in September 1968, ended in a hung jury, and the charge against my father was abandoned.

Learning of moments like these, I wanted to forget that I was his child. The more I looked, the less he looked like the loving son and devoted husband and father I had been told about. I wondered how a man could truly love his children if he lived that life.

Even though my mother relayed side-splitting stories about her high school classmate, Anna Mae Bullock—who would later become known the world over as Tina Turner—it wasn’t until two years ago, sipping salted margaritas on my sister’s back porch in Tampa, that my mother told me how she met my father. Those were good times, she said, as she giddily recalled spotting the man with movie-star looks walking up the street. Riding in the car with my Aunt Geraldine, she begged her sister to turn around and follow him. She watched as he went into a nearby nightspot.

My mother went home, quickly dressed up in her finest clothes, and went back to the tavern. She sat at the far end of the bar, night after night, watching woman after woman make his acquaintance. He was a hairdresser, she learned, who specialized in bouffants, roller-sets, up-dos, and the women who wore them.

She decided to send him a drink, and that was enough to get his attention. A few weeks later, when he took sick with the flu, she nursed him back to health while his then girlfriend was watching television in the living room.

After a brief courtship, they married in my Grandmother Alice’s living room in a small house on Cabanne Avenue in 1966 and settled in University City. If my math is right, he was 23 and she was 25. My brother Christopher and I were born two years later.

In the summer of ’68, he’d been out on a bender to celebrate his birthday when my mother went into labor. When he stumbled into St. Luke’s Hospital the next day, the nurse said we were ��gone.” Thinking his wife and children were dead, he went back to the Gold Room and continued drinking until somebody saw fit to carry him home, where he discovered us happy and healthy. He proudly hoisted his babies onto the bar. I was named after its owner, my godmother, Goldie Holly.

During their time together, he adorned my mother with fur coats and expensive clothes, including Chanel nightgowns, and diamond rings. A sought-after hairstylist who worked nights and weekends at the Gold Room, he frequented social balls and some of the city’s most notable nightclubs with my mother.

Until a few weeks ago, I never knew the details of why she left him, though I had my suspicions. The drinking and the women were likely too much. Until two years ago, when my mother finally began to crack the door on her life with my father, no one ever talked about that snowy night in January 1969. In a drunken jealous rage, he’d slammed my mother’s face through a plate-glass window. That story rests in a keloid scar still visible above her eyebrow. If there were other incidents of violence in our house, my mother never spoke of them.

“Your daddy was the love of my life,” she told me, time and time again. But that night would be “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.

She hid her two older children from a previous marriage with her sister, Geraldine, and her husband, Albert Ross, separated her babies, and went to stay with a friend at Fort Leonard Wood until she could figure out where to go. Within weeks, she was living a new life five hours away in Chicago. On April 1, 1969, she started a job as a waitress in a family restaurant at the Marriott Hotel next to O’Hare Airport. She saved her money, got a place of her own, and sent for her children.

One afternoon, my father showed up unannounced at the restaurant, sat in her station, and ordered coffee. He begged for forgiveness. She told me she was too afraid to go back to work the next day.

“You’re a damn fool if you go back to him,” her mother, Alice, scolded. He soon moved to Chicago, took a job at the post office, and continued his entreaties.

Though they never reconciled, in time things cooled and in 1971 they returned separately to St. Louis, where she continued working for a Marriott Hotel near Lambert Field. He later moved in with a woman named Sylvia, and my mother began dating Tony, a diminutive Italian man with his own checkered past who was easy on the eyes. Despite their newfound relationships, my father never gave up on my mother. He cajoled her with sweet talk and gifts, but my mother never took him back. He never stopped being hers.

My father was killed less than two years later.

I sometimes remember more than I want to about him. Sometimes I want to forget the haunting stories and hold on to Christmas mornings and the buckets of pennies he would deliver on my birthday. I still have fond memories of the yellow kite he bought for me from Miss Cherry’s store and how I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world. He’d come to Aunt Geraldine and Uncle Ross’s house in East St. Louis for a family cookout. It was Memorial Day 1973, and he was still trying to find his way back into my mother’s heart.

We never could get that kite to fly.

***

By all accounts, my father was a cautious man who kept few friends and allowed almost no one into his personal space. Fatefully, the night he was killed, he’d decided at the last minute to go to a late night poker game.

He was worried, he’d told my mother—about what and who he did not say—but couldn’t resist the temptation of easy money. He never played back his winnings and knew, if he was sober, when to walk away. Besides, the address in the 4700 block of Kossuth Avenue was less than a half-mile from his job and mere blocks from his house on the corner of Margaretta and Euclid avenues.

Aunt Doris Jean said the invitation came from someone he trusted: Roland Norton.

At closing time on Nov. 5, 1973— just before Norton was set to stand trial in the federal drug case—my father left his part-time job at the Polynesian Room, a Tiki-style local haunt situated on the ground floor of the Carousel Motel on North Kingshighway, and walked to the address he’d been given.

Except there was no game that night.

As he knocked on the door of a dark house on Kossuth Avenue—a narrow, tree-lined street two blocks from his own house—he was hit with a baseball bat and then shot four times in the head with a small-caliber handgun.

Two gold and diamond rings were stripped from his fingers. His gold necklace and the watch his mother had given him for his birthday that summer were also taken, and his empty pockets left turned inside out. The nearest emergency room was less than a mile away, but according to the death certificate, the victim was pronounced dead on arrival at Homer G. Phillips Hospital.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Aunt Doris Jean said of his murder.

Though they never said as much, my conversations with Haymon and others led me to believe that my father might have been targeted because he had been the trigger man in the killing of Big Mike. My grandmother would have strongly disputed that notion, saying my father never shot anyone who didn’t point a gun at him first. However, everything I know about this case—about the trail of violence that seemed to follow my father—says it is possible.

After Big Mike was murdered, prosecutors in the federal drug case against Norton were forced to rely on written statements that detailed his alleged participation in a heroin ring being operated out of the Hi-Note Lounge located in the 4800 block of Delmar Avenue. With Jones dead, on Nov. 26, Norton’s defense attorneys saw another opportunity. They appealed to the court again in an attempt to get the case against him tossed out before a verdict could be rendered.

This time, the defense filed a motion to “dismiss the indictment for failure to produce a material witness for the defendant to interview,” claiming that by not arresting Norton when the indictment was initially handed down and denied the ability to question potential witnesses that he had been irreparably harmed. The irony, of course, was that Big Mike Jones was dead and Norton had likely planned and helped carry out his murder. And, with my father now lying in the city morgue, I found it reasonable to think that Norton’s tracks had been sufficiently covered.

The motion was denied. Norton was convicted on Nov. 28, 1973. He was sentenced to a federal prison camp on Dec. 21, 1973. He lost a subsequent appeal, but would be released within 10 years.

In 1973, Bernard Pratt and former state representative John F. Conley were also found guilty after being charged with selling heroin from the same lounge.

I believe the three men are dead now; I’m certain that Conley and Norton are dead. My older cousin told me Norton was destitute when he “died getting high” in 2002. Few of his surviving associates will talk about him. Some won’t even admit that they knew him, and others, like Lorenzo Petty, simply hang up the phone at the mention of his name.

When I first went looking for Norton, as an 18-year-old, first-semester college freshman in 1986, he was back in federal custody. This time on credit card and mail fraud charges, after he and a live-in girlfriend filled out hundreds of department store applications and made purchases under fake identities. In June 1986, I wrote him a letter in hopes that he could tell me something, anything, about my father. The envelope had been opened but was re-sealed when it arrived in my student mailbox, marked “return to sender.”

Court records show Norton was arrested again in 1988 and convicted the following year for possession of cocaine and heroin with the intent to distribute. U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh sentenced the 38-year-old to 41 months at a federal prison camp.

Haymon says Norton didn’t work directly for the Pettys in the early ’70s. But multiple sources confirmed that Norton had a close relationship with the brothers and that they reconnected shortly after his second release from a federal prison.

But if Haymon is right about Norton, he did not have the stomach to kill a man. Over the course of three decades, I’ve had doors slammed in my face, been hung up on, and had mail returned. That silence, and a lengthy conversation with others who knew Norton, left me convinced of two things: Norton was indeed involved in the murders. And at least one of the co-conspirators—maybe even the man who killed my father—may still be alive.

The answers, I have now come to believe, are unknowable. As my father had been when he was alive, they feel just out of reach.

***

I remember the funeral. I remember the throng of mourners, the hundreds of people who filed into the pews at Mercy Seat Missionary Baptist Church on Washington Street—where my maternal grandmother, Alice, had been a member since 1941. Her pastor, Pastor Roosevelt Brown, gave the eulogy.

I remember the baptismal pool, situated high above the pulpit and the choir stand, and the four chandeliers that dangled over the altar. I remember the beautiful brown suit mother chose for him, his jet-black, shoulder-length hair and receding hairline. I remember the white flowers draped over the bronze and gold casket. The smell of lilies never left me. The wailing started when a soloist began singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me…

One by one, each of us—his wife, his mother, and his children—were escorted to the altar to say goodbye. My mother, brother Christopher, and I were the last to stand, the last to touch him before the funeral director closed and locked the coffin. But I’ve never forgotten the stillness of his face, his perfectly etched mustache and silky smooth skin. And then, the next day, being scooped up by my godmother, carried over the gravel driveway and across the lawn at Greenwood Cemetery off Lucas and Hunt Road on St. Louis Avenue.

Of the boys and men present at the memorial service, almost none have survived. Nearly 20 years after we laid my father to rest, my brother Christopher was shot dead in a remarkably similar ambush, and my brother Donnie succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 1995. The oldest living man in my immediate family, excluding my long-lost brother Terry, was born in 1986. For me, there are no fathers, no uncles, no grandfathers, and no brothers left whom I was raised with. We are a family of women. My mother, who retired after nearly 40 years with Marriott, raised us on her own.

Curiously, a pallbearer discovered a folded two-dollar bill tucked into my father’s suit pocket—an omen, my decidedly superstitious Aunt Doris Jean said, of bad luck. My father’s killer was said to have been among the mourners.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is an excerpt from Taylor’s forthcoming memoir, Let Me Still Be Singing When Evening Comes.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/goldie-taylorthe-search-for-my-fathers-killer/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/172568680547

[allofbeercom]

Goldie TaylorThe Search for My Fathers Killer

ST. LOUIS—Just before daybreak, sitting at the edge of her bed in an upper bedroom, she clutched her pale blue housecoat and listened tearfully to the transistor radio on the nightstand. At the top of the hour, a familiar, melodic voice confirmed what she already knew: Her husband was dead.

It had been a tumultuous relationship, at times beautiful and at others marred with ugliness. They were separated and had been for several years, living worlds apart and with other people now, but he was still hers—still her husband and the father of her youngest child. The news that he had been murdered—found shot in the head and pronounced dead on arrival at a city-run hospital—was devastating.

She’d gotten the fateful call from nightclub owner Gene Norman—who doubled as a disc jockey on KATZ-AM 1600—as she closed her shift as a cocktail waitress at The Windjammer. She left the bar, situated atop the Marriott Hotel near Lambert Field, and began the 20-mile drive home east along Interstate 70. As she crossed the Mississippi River into East St. Louis, Norman took to the airwaves and dedicated a song—Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia”—to “Jerry.”

…he couldn’t make it,so he’s leaving the life he’s come to know…

It was still dark out when she pulled into the public housing complex in the Duck Hill neighborhood. She wailed, screaming and shaking in her car.

…I’d rather live in his world,than live without him in mine…

I watched my mother descend the stairs that Sunday morning. Overcome with grief, her voice breaking and her body still trembling, she reached for me. “He’s gone,” she whispered, grabbing me with both hands. “Your daddy was killed.”

It was 1973 and I was 5 years old. Even then, I knew what death meant. As our family gathered at Aunt Geraldine’s house on 10th Street that evening, my uncle held me through the night. I curled up in his lap and sobbed until I slept.

I am 48 now, with grown children and grandchildren of my own, but—in so many ways—those tears have never stopped falling. I still think about him every day—how our lives might have been different, about who killed him and why. Some 43 years later, his murder remains unsolved.

In the months and years following his death, relatives floated theories when they thought I wouldn’t understand or was out of earshot. I quietly tallied the names and places as I listened to grown folks recount pieces of the story, some fact and some folly, over liquor and card games.

When I was old enough to ask questions, few answers came. Each person I asked came to the same dark, dead-end alleyway and stopped. For my father’s mother, Catherine, and for my mother, Mary Alice, I know, the memories were far too painful.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Grandmother Catherine said, repeatedly, until I stopped asking.

When Grandma Cat died in 1994, I’d started digging through old newspaper clippings and scouring court documents for clues, finding loose threads to pull on in the story that no one—whether out of fear or loyalty—would tell me. In doing so, I discovered things about the man my father had been, things that made it tough to keep going. It could not have been easy to love this “dreamer” with “delusions of grandeur,” as my mother described him—certainly not to love him as hard and as thoroughly as both she and my grandmother had.

He kept dreaming,That someday he’d be a starBut he sure found out the hard way,That dreams don’t always come true…

With stops and starts, I have spent decades looking for answers, slowly and methodically stitching together the fabric of a story no one would talk about. New questions and new answers have emerged over the years as I chased down a faceless killer. But in the end, I came up short—unable to answer the driving question: Who murdered my father?

My search ended where it had begun: with a man named Roland B. Norton Jr.

***

Roland was a desperate man—desperate to survive the violent drug war brewing in north St. Louis and desperate to stay out of prison. Charged with two counts of dealing heroin, Norton was quickly released on bond and hit the street with one end in mind: find the government informant threatening his freedom and kill him.

In the weeks leading up to his November 1973 federal drug-trafficking trial, two men were shot, in separate incidents, execution-style. The second man, Wyart Taylor, was my father. He was found, blocks from his house in north St. Louis, face down on a sidewalk in a pool of blood.

A grand jury indictment—announced by Donald J. Stohr, the U.S. district attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri in the fall of 1973—spelled out the damning case against Norton, who was suspected of having connections to at least two notorious drug rings that kept north St. Louis awash in “brown sugar” and “snow.” On Aug. 10 of that year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that 24-year-old Norton—who was then employed as an auditor in the city license collector’s office—and another man named Bernard Pratt were allegedly part of a “large-scale narcotics sales operation.”

Secured in March, the Norton indictment had been sealed for nearly six months to protect the identity of a federal witness and the integrity of other ongoing investigations. However, once Norton was arrested that August, the document became public and Norton immediately launched a city-wide manhunt for the witness.

Eager to unmask the unnamed informant, Norton’s defense attorneys filed a “bill of particulars” on Sept. 6, demanding that the government “furnish him with the time, place, and name of the party, if there is any, who are witnesses to the transactions.” They also moved to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that “the delay had prejudiced his ability to present an effective defense, thereby violating his Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

The judge in the case, John F. Nagle, denied both motions, leaving Norton to guess who was cooperating with the FBI and DEA.

According to court records, there were two transactions on or about Feb. 26 of that year—one for $350, the other for $500, together weighing 3.9 grams—and, based on that information, Norton figured out who set him up. Just over a month after the indictment was unsealed and the defendant was released on bond from federal custody, Michael “Big Mike” Jones was tracked down and killed on Sept. 17. Although he was not among the listed witnesses and had no known drug involvement, the second man—my father, Wyart—was murdered on Nov. 5 as he walked home from an illicit card game.

Norton—the son of a disgraced St. Louis police officer—was never charged in the murders, nor is there any evidence that he was an official suspect in either shooting. According to Grandma Cat, local authorities quickly wrote off both as robberies gone bad and she said the investigations were summarily closed. When she went downtown to police headquarters to offer a cash reward for information about her son’s murder, the desk sergeant allegedly told her, “Go home, lady. Nobody cares who killed your boy.”

But the streets were whispering about the likelihood that Norton, also a reputed pimp who was said to be fond of fine clothes, flashy jewelry, and beautiful women, was involved. Before his arrest on federal drug-trafficking charges, Norton enjoyed the high life—replete with full-length fur coats, silk-ribboned wide-brimmed hats, and scantily clad, cooing cocktail waitresses who answered at his beckoning. Despite those trappings, and a well-paying city job secured with his father’s connections, he frequently borrowed money from a local loan shark named “Papa Joe” Henry.

The younger Norton also relied heavily on his father, with whom he still lived in the 4500 block of McMillan Avenue at the time of his indictment.

From the first time I overheard his name in the early 1980s, I was told Norton was the son of a Korean War veteran and “dirty cop” said to have taken bribes to protect area drug dealers and underground nightclubs, and to have fed police information to Italian mobsters. How much of what my older cousins said was fact or folly I did not know. However, some of that information was confirmed recently when I learned that Norton Sr. had been brought up on decidedly thin charges of public corruption and demoted by the St. Louis Police Department in 1959, after just three years on the force. He resigned five years after that, amid a second investigation into allegations of wrongdoing and after he’d allegedly been seen frequenting a “tavern of ill-repute” as an off-duty officer.

“The formal charge cited specific instances” that he was “alleged to have collected admittance fees, removed objectionable customers and closed the doors at closing hours.” He had also “associated” with a “woman wanted for burglary.” Two years later, in 1966, Norton Sr. was shot in the leg during an altercation over “a strip tease dancer.” Tragically, his wife, Ellyn, was killed along with two others in a 1970 car accident on Illinois Route 127, just north of Greenville, Illinois, after another vehicle crossed the centerline and struck them head-on.

By 1973, Norton Sr. was a widower living on his military pension who did not have the means to make his son’s five-figure bail. A few months ago, I tracked down a woman, a family acquaintance who had been the live-in girlfriend of a rival drug lord. She hesitantly told me that a pair of Norton Jr.’s midlevel drug captains posted the $50,000 cash bond. I was unable to find a trace of either man in public records, but she said they were looking after their own interests. The drug-runners needed Norton out of jail, away from federal agents and potential jailhouse informants. They need Norton to “handle that business,” the ex-girlfriend told me.

The government witness needed to be found and silenced.

When Norton was first taken into custody, investigators reportedly pressured him about his ties to drug gangs operating in St. Louis—including the notorious Petty Brothers—and offered him a deal that included immunity but no federal protection. Norton refused to tell FBI and DEA agents who he was working for. “Roland ain’t wanna die,” the rival’s ex-girlfriend said, “and he damn sure ain’t wanna to go to jail.”

Norton had few real options and, the way he saw it, there was just one way out. He knew who made the buys from him based on the dates and amounts listed in the indictment. Prosecutors believed by sealing the indictment against Norton they were buying time to make headway in breaking up a suspected ring of high-end dealers and put an end to the bloodshed. The document, unsealed by federal law upon Norton’s arrest, might as well have been a death warrant.

“Big Mike was a dead man walking,” an older female cousin told me.

Described by my cousin as a large “flamboyant gay man,” Big Mike was making a decent living setting up dealers for the federal investigators. He was “a small-time hustler,” she said, and court records confirm that Jones was actively helping in several cases.

“Bodies were dropping every other day,” my cousin, who was once engaged to one of St. Louis’s most notorious crime bosses, told me.

Few—even my cousin—would talk with me on the record without anonymity about the drug war that was touched off in the early 1970s and lasted into the early ’80s. Almost no one wanted to talk about the violence—which included car bombings and movie-theater shootings—that littered the nightly newscasts.

But Dennis Haymon, a former drug kingpin himself who led one of the area’s deadliest gangs, knew both Norton and Jones well. My cousin told me about Haymon, and I quickly found him still living in St. Louis.

Haymon remembers that Big Mike was a drug addict “who knew how to get money.” Jones, he said, was also a well-known “booster” and a “money-getter” who peddled stolen goods around the corner of Pendleton and Finney avenues.

Despite Norton’s legal predicament, he wasn’t “a real killer,” Haymon, who was once one of the most feared men to walk the streets of St. Louis, told me over a series of phone calls spanning hours in recent months. Now an ordained minister and an anti-gang activist writing his memoirs, Haymon served 25 years of a life sentence after he was convicted on murder charges in 1979.

Haymon confirmed what I’d read in old newspaper clips, that he had been locked in a bloody war with the Petty Brothers—Samuel, Lorenzo, and Joseph—for nearly a decade. In one incident, he said the Pettys climbed atop a nightclub and sprayed a crowd with bullets in a failed attempt to kill him. Five club-goers were shot and a woman standing five feet from Haymon was killed in the incident, but Haymon got away.

My family had been close to the Pettys when I was growing up. As a child, I had been fond of Joe—who was engaged to my cousin and fathered two of her now grown daughters. He was a good-looking man with wide, nickel-sized eyes and a full beard. I remember how he had always been especially kind to me, even helping me land my first job at 14 as a dining-room attendant in a downtown St. Louis restaurant that was reputedly run by the mob.

I knew nothing of about his life as a drug dealer or about the string of gangland shootings in which he had allegedly been involved. Joe had been shot once, I knew, while sitting outside a convenience store that he owned. He refused to talk to the responding police officers about the incident, saying only that he would “take care of it.”

When I asked him about my father back in 1983, Joe kissed my forehead and said, “You can’t bring him back.”

Joe, who died after a suspicious motorcycle accident the following year, used to tell me how much I looked like my father. If he knew what happened to him, he never said, and that secret was buried with him. But in so many ways, Joe had been my protector. A once stern music teacher in junior high school suddenly treated me more gently after she learned that I had family ties to Joe. I never met his brother Sam, an ex-convict who was sent away on federal drug-trafficking charges and died of bone cancer in the 1990s.

But recently, I contacted Lorenzo—the only surviving brother—after cajoling a mutual acquaintance for his cell number. Though I had never actually met Lorenzo, I had always been told that he was an “evil” man. His first arrest came in 1964, at just 15 years old, when he stabbed 21-year-old Leroy Chappel over 25 cents.

“Lorenzo is one mean dude, and just about everybody is scared to death of him,” a detective said after he was arrested in 1978. “Maybe, just maybe with him being locked up, things will cool down.” A search warrant for his Northwoods house turned up sticks of dynamite, assault rifles, ammunition, and a bullet-proof vest.

My fingers twitched as I dialed the number. I stammered, at first, then told him why I was calling.

“I can’t help you with that,” Lorenzo said, repeatedly, as I peppered him with questions about Roland Norton Jr. and Big Mike Jones. He hung up at the mere mention of my father’s name.

If the Petty Brothers knew what happened to Big Mike or my father, those secrets will almost certainly die with the last of them. I phoned Haymon again, pressing him for more details.

“Roland was soft,” Haymon—the only person willing to talk on the record with his name attached—said of Big Mike’s murder. “He had problems pulling the trigger.”

A second, unidentified man supposedly took the pistol from Norton and finished the job.

But even with Big Mike dead, there remained at least one potential witness to testify against Norton—one of his closest associates, in whom he confided nearly everything and to whom, a source said, Norton purportedly owed “a piece of money.”

Seven weeks after Big Mike was killed, minutes after a resident on Kossuth Avenue called police to report shouting and gunshots, a 30-year-old man was discovered face down on the sidewalk. The victim had been shot four times in the head, at close range, with a .22 caliber pistol. Three rounds were still lodged in his brain. The last blast entered his left temple and exited the right side of his face.

“Die nigger. Nigger, die quick,” the gunman reportedly said, according to the St. Louis Daily Whirl, a notorious local crime tabloid.

Given the circumstances and the coroner’s report, I thought it had to be more than a “robbery gone bad,” as my grandmother had been told. Everything I knew about my father’s killing—four bullets to the head at close range and the words allegedly said as he lay dying—suggested it was personal. The shooting reeked of vengeance and malice. And the more I learned about Norton and his connections to St. Louis’s underworld, the more convinced I became that my father’s association with Norton had cost him his life.

How much did my father actually know about Roland Norton’s dealings? Was he one of the government’s witnesses in the federal drug case? Was he in league with the drug gangs that ruled the streets of St. Louis? And perhaps more critically, was my father the trigger man in the murder of Big Mike Jones?

Candidly, there were moments when I did not want to know the truth. Over four decades later, I know that most of those questions will go unanswered. To find some of them, I had to search the annals of my own family history.

***

Florence Blackard (née Carroll) was a drug-addled prostitute. In the mid-1930s, my great-grandmother was penniless and estranged from her husband, Murray, when she was forced to give up her two daughters after child services intervened. The timid, malnourished girls—marked with old scars, mended bone fractures, and fresh bruises—were led from the rodent-infested apartment on Pine Street that had no running water or electricity.

A busted radiator, situated near a sheet-covered window overlooking the avenue below, emitted no heat. The bone-cold, three-room unit was festooned with cockroaches, rotting garbage, and empty bottles of cheap liquor still in their brown carry-out sacks. A well-used douche bag, stained with a deep red Betadine solution, hung on a hanger in the moldy bathroom.

The beatings, Florence’s youngest daughter, Catherine, would later tell child welfare workers, came almost daily, and they rarely attended school. She and her older sister, Juanita, had been whipped by their mother, she said, with electrical cords and flogged with the buckle end of a leather belt. Social workers also deemed their father, an alcoholic who worked as a janitor and lived in a rooming house, unfit to care for his daughters, who were sent to the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home (now known as Annie Malone Children and Family Services).

In the late 1930s, Catherine and Juanita were adopted by a former “chicken picker” turned “cement mixer” from Middle Fork, a tiny settlement in northeast Missouri near Macon, and his college-educated wife, who hailed from the same town. Raised in The Ville section of St. Louis—once home to tennis star Arthur Ashe, boxer Sonny Liston, comedian Dick Gregory, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Chuck Berry and Tina Turner—the girls flourished under the watchful eyes of Thomas Angell Hubbard and his wife, Nina Grant.

Catherine and Juanita, who took their adopted father’s name, spent holidays and summers in Macon enjoying hayrides along with a bevy of new cousins. In old photographs, they appear healthy and well-fed, beaming at the camera and wearing new clothes for the first time.

However, when 15-year-old Catherine became pregnant in 1942, she was sent to live with Hubbard’s family in northern Illinois. She gave birth to her first and only child the following summer.

Born on July 17, 1943, in Galesburg, Wyart Taylor Jr. was a slight boy with an apple-shaped cleft chin and serious eyes. With the his biological father largely absent, Catherine married an Army private the following year and moved to Minneapolis, where he was stationed at Fort Snelling.

Catherine, my paternal grandmother, spoke little about her early life and said almost nothing about her life in Minnesota. She did tell me that my father had a son with his girlfriend. In 1963, my oldest brother, Terrence, was born in Minneapolis. I tracked him down in 1993, the year before our grandmother died, when I was 25. At the time, he was a 30-year old Navy officer, stationed in Jacksonville, Florida. Terry, who looks strikingly like our father, never really knew him. It had been my grandmother’s dying wish to see Terry—now retired from military service—and me together. We missed that chance, but he was with me at her small memorial service and, in the years since, I’ve tried to give him the family he missed.

As I came of age, my grandmother enjoyed telling and retelling stories about my father and their exploits, and I’ve shared many of them with my brother. Over breakfast in her Miami kitchen, the retired housekeeper would launch into soaring tales.

There was the time, in 1965, when my father was holed up in a motel room. Four or five armed men, to whom he owed a sizable gambling debt, had the building surrounded. Every exit was covered. According to Grandma Cat, they were careful about who they allowed in or out, and my father didn’t have his pistol.

Cat hatched a plan. At nightfall, she stuffed an overnight bag with three handguns, a box of ammunition, and some old rags. She slipped on an old tattered dress, a floppy hat, and a pair of house slippers. Pretending to be drunk, she stumbled past the men and into the lobby. Once upstairs, grandmother handed over the suitcase of weapons. Cat claimed that she and my father shot their way out of the lobby.

A week later, the same men drove up on my father as he walked to work. Someone sitting in the back seat opened fire. Shot in the upper shoulder, he rolled under a parked car and played dead. He stayed there until his brother-in-law, my Uncle Ross, had the vehicle moved and took him to the hospital.

Years after my biological grandfather—Wyart Taylor Sr.—was crushed to death in an elevator shaft, allegedly by his stepfather, Richard, my father ran into Richard tossing back whiskey shots at a local tavern. Wyart Sr.’s death was ruled an accident but, when my father saw Richard, he promptly introduced himself and, according to my grandmother, he beat the old man to within an inch of his life.

My father was the hero in every story my grandmother ever told.

Cat didn’t talk about the time my father broke a long-neck beer bottle over a bar and sliced a man’s throat for calling my mother a “black bitch.” I overheard my late Aunt Doris Jean saying the man—known on the streets as “Red”—survived, but only because my dad had him dropped off at a nearby emergency room. It was Doris Jean, my Uncle Willie Byrd’s wife who was prone to gossip, who revealed another incident in 1967.

After a neighbor told my father that it was my mother’s nephew who had robbed our house in broad daylight, my father beat him so badly that his jaw had to be wired shut. Because he was family, Daddy then drove my cousin to the hospital himself and paid the bill in cash.

But the year before he succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 1995, my brother Donnie—my mother’s son from a previous marriage—opened up about the beatings he suffered as a child. I will never forget how he broke down that Thanksgiving, sobbing as he told me what my father had done to him.

There were few mentions about my father’s life in the newspapers of the day. I do not know if he was arrested in any of the incidents my grandmother described or others that she would not talk about. But recently, while tracing through the archives of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that he had in fact been arrested once and charged with aggravated battery related to a fight on March 5, 1967. The charge was upgraded to involuntary manslaughter when the victim, a foreign exchange student, died after languishing on life support at Barnes Hospital.

Bog Soo Byun, a third-degree black belt from Seoul, South Korea, studying engineering at Washington University, suffered a skull fracture after being repeatedly stomped and kicked. His brother Ho Soo escaped with cuts and bruises. They had come to my godmother’s bar, the Gold Room, on the corner of Delmar and Euclid, to take Polaroid photographs and sell them to customers. My father ordered them out. The fight allegedly started when Bog Soo karate-kicked my father, according to defense attorneys.

They told the jury that my father had acted in self-defense.

The trial, held in September 1968, ended in a hung jury, and the charge against my father was abandoned.

Learning of moments like these, I wanted to forget that I was his child. The more I looked, the less he looked like the loving son and devoted husband and father I had been told about. I wondered how a man could truly love his children if he lived that life.

Even though my mother relayed side-splitting stories about her high school classmate, Anna Mae Bullock—who would later become known the world over as Tina Turner—it wasn’t until two years ago, sipping salted margaritas on my sister’s back porch in Tampa, that my mother told me how she met my father. Those were good times, she said, as she giddily recalled spotting the man with movie-star looks walking up the street. Riding in the car with my Aunt Geraldine, she begged her sister to turn around and follow him. She watched as he went into a nearby nightspot.

My mother went home, quickly dressed up in her finest clothes, and went back to the tavern. She sat at the far end of the bar, night after night, watching woman after woman make his acquaintance. He was a hairdresser, she learned, who specialized in bouffants, roller-sets, up-dos, and the women who wore them.

She decided to send him a drink, and that was enough to get his attention. A few weeks later, when he took sick with the flu, she nursed him back to health while his then girlfriend was watching television in the living room.

After a brief courtship, they married in my Grandmother Alice’s living room in a small house on Cabanne Avenue in 1966 and settled in University City. If my math is right, he was 23 and she was 25. My brother Christopher and I were born two years later.

In the summer of ’68, he’d been out on a bender to celebrate his birthday when my mother went into labor. When he stumbled into St. Luke’s Hospital the next day, the nurse said we were “gone.” Thinking his wife and children were dead, he went back to the Gold Room and continued drinking until somebody saw fit to carry him home, where he discovered us happy and healthy. He proudly hoisted his babies onto the bar. I was named after its owner, my godmother, Goldie Holly.

During their time together, he adorned my mother with fur coats and expensive clothes, including Chanel nightgowns, and diamond rings. A sought-after hairstylist who worked nights and weekends at the Gold Room, he frequented social balls and some of the city’s most notable nightclubs with my mother.

Until a few weeks ago, I never knew the details of why she left him, though I had my suspicions. The drinking and the women were likely too much. Until two years ago, when my mother finally began to crack the door on her life with my father, no one ever talked about that snowy night in January 1969. In a drunken jealous rage, he’d slammed my mother’s face through a plate-glass window. That story rests in a keloid scar still visible above her eyebrow. If there were other incidents of violence in our house, my mother never spoke of them.

“Your daddy was the love of my life,” she told me, time and time again. But that night would be “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.

She hid her two older children from a previous marriage with her sister, Geraldine, and her husband, Albert Ross, separated her babies, and went to stay with a friend at Fort Leonard Wood until she could figure out where to go. Within weeks, she was living a new life five hours away in Chicago. On April 1, 1969, she started a job as a waitress in a family restaurant at the Marriott Hotel next to O’Hare Airport. She saved her money, got a place of her own, and sent for her children.

One afternoon, my father showed up unannounced at the restaurant, sat in her station, and ordered coffee. He begged for forgiveness. She told me she was too afraid to go back to work the next day.

“You’re a damn fool if you go back to him,” her mother, Alice, scolded. He soon moved to Chicago, took a job at the post office, and continued his entreaties.

Though they never reconciled, in time things cooled and in 1971 they returned separately to St. Louis, where she continued working for a Marriott Hotel near Lambert Field. He later moved in with a woman named Sylvia, and my mother began dating Tony, a diminutive Italian man with his own checkered past who was easy on the eyes. Despite their newfound relationships, my father never gave up on my mother. He cajoled her with sweet talk and gifts, but my mother never took him back. He never stopped being hers.

My father was killed less than two years later.

I sometimes remember more than I want to about him. Sometimes I want to forget the haunting stories and hold on to Christmas mornings and the buckets of pennies he would deliver on my birthday. I still have fond memories of the yellow kite he bought for me from Miss Cherry’s store and how I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world. He’d come to Aunt Geraldine and Uncle Ross’s house in East St. Louis for a family cookout. It was Memorial Day 1973, and he was still trying to find his way back into my mother’s heart.

We never could get that kite to fly.

***

By all accounts, my father was a cautious man who kept few friends and allowed almost no one into his personal space. Fatefully, the night he was killed, he’d decided at the last minute to go to a late night poker game.

He was worried, he’d told my mother—about what and who he did not say—but couldn’t resist the temptation of easy money. He never played back his winnings and knew, if he was sober, when to walk away. Besides, the address in the 4700 block of Kossuth Avenue was less than a half-mile from his job and mere blocks from his house on the corner of Margaretta and Euclid avenues.

Aunt Doris Jean said the invitation came from someone he trusted: Roland Norton.

At closing time on Nov. 5, 1973— just before Norton was set to stand trial in the federal drug case—my father left his part-time job at the Polynesian Room, a Tiki-style local haunt situated on the ground floor of the Carousel Motel on North Kingshighway, and walked to the address he’d been given.

Except there was no game that night.

As he knocked on the door of a dark house on Kossuth Avenue—a narrow, tree-lined street two blocks from his own house—he was hit with a baseball bat and then shot four times in the head with a small-caliber handgun.

Two gold and diamond rings were stripped from his fingers. His gold necklace and the watch his mother had given him for his birthday that summer were also taken, and his empty pockets left turned inside out. The nearest emergency room was less than a mile away, but according to the death certificate, the victim was pronounced dead on arrival at Homer G. Phillips Hospital.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Aunt Doris Jean said of his murder.

Though they never said as much, my conversations with Haymon and others led me to believe that my father might have been targeted because he had been the trigger man in the killing of Big Mike. My grandmother would have strongly disputed that notion, saying my father never shot anyone who didn’t point a gun at him first. However, everything I know about this case—about the trail of violence that seemed to follow my father—says it is possible.

After Big Mike was murdered, prosecutors in the federal drug case against Norton were forced to rely on written statements that detailed his alleged participation in a heroin ring being operated out of the Hi-Note Lounge located in the 4800 block of Delmar Avenue. With Jones dead, on Nov. 26, Norton’s defense attorneys saw another opportunity. They appealed to the court again in an attempt to get the case against him tossed out before a verdict could be rendered.

This time, the defense filed a motion to “dismiss the indictment for failure to produce a material witness for the defendant to interview,” claiming that by not arresting Norton when the indictment was initially handed down and denied the ability to question potential witnesses that he had been irreparably harmed. The irony, of course, was that Big Mike Jones was dead and Norton had likely planned and helped carry out his murder. And, with my father now lying in the city morgue, I found it reasonable to think that Norton’s tracks had been sufficiently covered.

The motion was denied. Norton was convicted on Nov. 28, 1973. He was sentenced to a federal prison camp on Dec. 21, 1973. He lost a subsequent appeal, but would be released within 10 years.

In 1973, Bernard Pratt and former state representative John F. Conley were also found guilty after being charged with selling heroin from the same lounge.

I believe the three men are dead now; I’m certain that Conley and Norton are dead. My older cousin told me Norton was destitute when he “died getting high” in 2002. Few of his surviving associates will talk about him. Some won’t even admit that they knew him, and others, like Lorenzo Petty, simply hang up the phone at the mention of his name.

When I first went looking for Norton, as an 18-year-old, first-semester college freshman in 1986, he was back in federal custody. This time on credit card and mail fraud charges, after he and a live-in girlfriend filled out hundreds of department store applications and made purchases under fake identities. In June 1986, I wrote him a letter in hopes that he could tell me something, anything, about my father. The envelope had been opened but was re-sealed when it arrived in my student mailbox, marked “return to sender.”

Court records show Norton was arrested again in 1988 and convicted the following year for possession of cocaine and heroin with the intent to distribute. U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh sentenced the 38-year-old to 41 months at a federal prison camp.

Haymon says Norton didn’t work directly for the Pettys in the early ’70s. But multiple sources confirmed that Norton had a close relationship with the brothers and that they reconnected shortly after his second release from a federal prison.

But if Haymon is right about Norton, he did not have the stomach to kill a man. Over the course of three decades, I’ve had doors slammed in my face, been hung up on, and had mail returned. That silence, and a lengthy conversation with others who knew Norton, left me convinced of two things: Norton was indeed involved in the murders. And at least one of the co-conspirators—maybe even the man who killed my father—may still be alive.

The answers, I have now come to believe, are unknowable. As my father had been when he was alive, they feel just out of reach.

***

I remember the funeral. I remember the throng of mourners, the hundreds of people who filed into the pews at Mercy Seat Missionary Baptist Church on Washington Street—where my maternal grandmother, Alice, had been a member since 1941. Her pastor, Pastor Roosevelt Brown, gave the eulogy.

I remember the baptismal pool, situated high above the pulpit and the choir stand, and the four chandeliers that dangled over the altar. I remember the beautiful brown suit mother chose for him, his jet-black, shoulder-length hair and receding hairline. I remember the white flowers draped over the bronze and gold casket. The smell of lilies never left me. The wailing started when a soloist began singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me…

One by one, each of us—his wife, his mother, and his children—were escorted to the altar to say goodbye. My mother, brother Christopher, and I were the last to stand, the last to touch him before the funeral director closed and locked the coffin. But I’ve never forgotten the stillness of his face, his perfectly etched mustache and silky smooth skin. And then, the next day, being scooped up by my godmother, carried over the gravel driveway and across the lawn at Greenwood Cemetery off Lucas and Hunt Road on St. Louis Avenue.

Of the boys and men present at the memorial service, almost none have survived. Nearly 20 years after we laid my father to rest, my brother Christopher was shot dead in a remarkably similar ambush, and my brother Donnie succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 1995. The oldest living man in my immediate family, excluding my long-lost brother Terry, was born in 1986. For me, there are no fathers, no uncles, no grandfathers, and no brothers left whom I was raised with. We are a family of women. My mother, who retired after nearly 40 years with Marriott, raised us on her own.

Curiously, a pallbearer discovered a folded two-dollar bill tucked into my father’s suit pocket—an omen, my decidedly superstitious Aunt Doris Jean said, of bad luck. My father’s killer was said to have been among the mourners.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is an excerpt from Taylor’s forthcoming memoir, Let Me Still Be Singing When Evening Comes.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/goldie-taylorthe-search-for-my-fathers-killer/

[blouisparadise]

Here’s a collection of amazing friends to lovers fics that are all bottom Louis/top Harry. These fics are in order from shortest to longest. Enjoy!

1) Lagrangian Point | Explicit | 4055 words

They find each other again the night of Valentine's Day.

2) Just Like Live Wires | 5427 words

Harry climbs into Louis’ bed when he’s cold. Louis pines.

3) There’s Magic In This Life | 7326 words

Harry comes out to the band as bisexual on a Tuesday.

4) Read You Like A Book | Explicit | 8089 words

Louis realises Harry can read his mind. He'll do anything to make Harry admit it. Set during the North American leg of the WWA tour.

5) Makes Perfect | Explicit | 8610 words

"What if you practiced on like, a mannequin?" Louis presses. "Or one of those blow up sex dolls? Or even just like, I don't know, a pillow or something. Whatever it'd fit around."

Harry tilts his head thoughtfully, curls catching the light so entrancingly that Louis finds himself reaching up to push his fingers through them. "It's different, though, innit? When it's a real person. A pillow won't snog me."

"Why should it?" says Louis. "You can't even take its bra off."

6) To Be A Fool | 9156 words

Harry’s perception of Louis begins to change.

7) Come A Little Closer | 9867 words

Louis puts on lingerie. It’s not, like, a thing.

8) Gnossiene | Explicit | 11276 words

Note: This fic is locked and can only be read by AO3 users.

Louis sets a challenge for himself; it gets a bit out of hand.

9) Won’t See It Coming Til It’s Already Gone | 12631 words

“Tell me that this is a fake,” Peter says, slapping a handful of papers against Louis’ chest. He says something else, something loud and demanding, barely even pausing for a breath, but Louis doesn’t hear it. All he hears is the sound of his own breathing, the sound of his own heartbeat.

Because this - this looks like a marriage certificate.

For a minute, everything stills, quiets. Louis drags his eyes up, meets Harry’s gaze, fixed on him.

Then the noise is back, shouting voices clamoring to be heard over each other, and Harry is still staring at him.

The ring that Louis hadn’t been able to stop noticing in the loo weighs heavily on his hand. His left hand.

10) No Bleeding Hearts | 12651 words

“I’m going to come out,” Louis says abruptly. His grip on the controller is tight, knuckles whitening. He doesn’t look at Harry when he says it.

“What?” Harry says. Louis sucks in a breath through his teeth.

“When we re-negotiate our contracts. I’m going to come out.” Harry fumbles with the controller and manages to set it down on coffee table without cracking it in half.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Harry says. Louis is still pointedly not looking at him.

“I’m not having this argument with you again, Harry,” Louis tells him. He leans forward and deposits his own controller on the table beside Harry’s before standing up. “I’m gonna go to the hotel.”

11) Ain’t No Telling Who’s In Charge Here | 14562 words

The thing about Louis’ and Harry’s dynamic is that while Louis is the instigator of 99% of the foolishness, Harry will always come back at him with something ten times dirtier than whatever Louis had thought up. Of course, Louis can’t let that go, so he does something else, so Harry has to do something else, and then it’s a vicious cycle that continues until one of them makes a plea for a truce.

It’s like that even when they’re at home. Sometimes it’s like that especially while they’re at home, because Louis gets bored easily and Harry is just such an easy target. The point is that the kind of foolishness that Louis is known for doesn’t stop when the cameras stop rolling, so when Louis lets himself into Harry’s bedroom at 5:30 in the morning to annoy Harry into waking up before he goes for a run is completely normal and to be expected.

Except that it turns out not to be so normal.

12) With Love Comes Strange Currencies | Explicit | 16508 words

They're accidentally mated and dealing with it rather badly.

13) Carried Away Like Butterflies | 17234 words

It was probably a huge mistake for Louis to let his former One Night Stand move into his spare room, especially when said One Night Stand doesn’t seem to remember him.

14) Monsters At Home | Explicit | 21566 words

High School!AU. Everyone's eyes are on Harry, the beautiful, charming new student. Harry's only got eyes for the school golden boy: football captain Louis Tomlinson, whose homophobic father complicates matters a bit.

15) Fumbling in the Dark | Explicit | 21599 words

Louis is straight, Harry is not. They still shag a lot.

16) Indestructible | 24243 words

“Hi,” Harry murmurs, and Louis hiccups out a sob.

“Hi,” he manages, still clutching onto Harry’s shoulders. Harry’s fingers drift across Louis’ cheeks, and there’s something off about Harry’s expression, but Louis can’t figure out what it is.

“I’m okay,” Harry says, and Louis is going to say something to that, even if he doesn’t know what, except Harry’s kissing him.

Louis freezes.

17) The Same Ground | Explicit | 27286 words

What if the one that got away came back?

18) Always Come Back To You | 28682 words

“I’ll do it,” Harry offers brightly. No one even blinks. “I’ll do it?”

Louis sighs irritably. “Shut up,” he orders, tossing a pillow in the general direction of Harry’s face. This is a terrible time for jokes, especially Harry’s lame, old people ones.

Not that it was an old people joke. Just that most of the time Harry’s jokes consist of knock-knocks or terrible puns. The type of jokes old people like, Louis’ pretty sure. His nan always finds them hilarious when Harry tells her one.

Harry bats the pillow out of the air without even blinking. “Be reasonable, Lou,” he says in his most reasonable voice.

Louis is perfectly reasonable, thank you very much, and he’s also frustrated and upset and tired and he really wants to punch something. Maybe he should have held on to that pillow a little longer.

“You’re not gonna fucking do it,” he snaps. “That’s the last thing I need.”

19) (Your Heartbeat) Rang True Inside My Bones | 32945 words

Harry goes as Louis’ date for a weekend wedding. He ends up taking the role a bit too seriously.

20) The New Romantics | 36100 words

After being blindsided and dumped by his boyfriend Isaac, Louis does the only thing he can do: wallow and mope. But when Harry tells Louis that karma’s going to get Isaac eventually, Louis decides karma isn’t moving fast enough. He takes matters into his own hands, and if he has to drag Harry into his schemes and seduction plans, then so be it.

21) Runner On Third | 39639 words

The AU where Louis and Harry were best friends growing up, but lost touch after Harry moved away. Ten years later, Harry has moved back to town, but he and Louis don’t pick up where they left off.

22) Roots | 43233 words

There aren’t many things that make Harry Styles nervous. He’s spent the past couple of years on and off various stages, filled with screaming fans, all chanting his name, loud and adoring. He’s done countless interviews, some even on live, national television, never faltering over his words, answers meticulously planned out, smooth and steady. He’s signed countless autographs, taken just as many photos, and even when he sat in his label’s studio, waiting to see how high up on the charts his single made it, he didn’t feel uneasy or uncomfortable. It’s all been unbelievably fun. No, there aren’t many things that make Harry Styles nervous.

Enter Louis Tomlinson.

23) Tangled Up In You | 45152 words

“What did you get me, then?!” Niall must hear the tinge of hysteria in his voice, because he’s pulling himself together, trying to stop himself from laughing.

There’s still a big grin on his face, though, when he says, “I got you a professional cuddler.”

A professional…what. “What?”

24) A Promise Lives Within You Now | 45925 words

A Lord of the Rings-inspired Middle Earth AU. Louis is an Elven prince, next in line to become King of Mirkwood, and Harry is the orphaned Human boy who grows up alongside him. They fall in love, but Louis’s obligations to the throne, Harry’s mortality, and impending war threaten to tear them apart.

25) Something In The World Today | Explicit | 48027 words

It shouldn’t be a surprise, the first time that Louis drops to his knees in front of Harry. It shouldn’t be, because it’s been something that Louis has needed for a long time. It shouldn’t be, because he’s been crawling out of his skin for weeks on end. It shouldn’t be, because Harry always makes him feel better. It shouldn’t be, because he’s needed this even when he didn’t know that he needed it.

Somehow, it still is.

26) I Carry Your Heart With Me (I Carry It In My Heart) | 55844 words

Harry thinks he has good reasons for avoiding relationships. Meeting Louis puts those reasons to the test.

27) Amazing Sin | Explicit | 56034 words

The story of Louis ‘Steal Your Man’ Tomlinson.

28) Somethin’ Bout You | Explicit | 59855 words

Of all the government agents in the world, Louis had to go and land the most charming one.

29) Tug-Of-War | 63000 words

Louis’ husband dies suddenly and he is left with nothing. Well, not really nothing. He has Harry. And a St. Bernard puppy named Link, whom his late husband left behind for him. Louis takes care of Link and Harry takes care of Louis. Everything is okay until suddenly, it isn’t.

30) Waiting On You | 76575 words

“Vampires,” Louis says with disgust, glaring over at the vampire who is noisily slurping from the woman’s neck nearby.

 Zayn gives the neat fang marks on Louis’ neck a meaningful look.

 “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them,” Louis finishes, ignoring Zayn when he rolls his eyes.

Louis takes a long sip of his milkshake, presses his fingers against the marks on his neck, and definitely doesn’t think about the vampire who left them there.

31) Pinkies Never Lie | 83616 words

AU in which Louis hates his job and loves Harry, Harry just wants a distraction, everyone else wants them to get their shit together, and Louis learns the hard way that new beginnings are only possible when something ends.

32) Your Name is Tattooed on My Heart | Explicit | 86809 words

Note: This fic has mentions of top Louis.

Louis is ready to find the love of his life, but first he has to stop falling for the punk rocker next door.

33) Here In The Afterglow | 88649 words

1970’s AU. In a tiny town in Idaho, Louis’ life is changed forever by the arrival of a curious stranger.

34) Never Be | 117552 words

The one where Harry Styles moves to Connecticut from England for nine months as a part of a study abroad program, and he just so happens to move in with Louis Tomlinson and family.

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