#this isn't even it the well isn't even dry

[e1dritchjackal0pe]

ᴋᴇʏꜱ ᴛᴏ ʟɪᴍʙᴏ

Synopsis: A man arrives at your door in the dead of night asking for a simple favor, but once he's let inside, he begins making offerings too good to be true.

Now you're alone with a stranger that's odd in a way you can't quite place, trapped and isolated within a house that offers no safety . . . and normal men don't drool like that, do they?

Warnings: Fem! reader (in pronouns and body descriptions). 18+ content, MDI. Oral (Fem! receiving). Hints of sub! Remmick, but he's still a manipulative brat. Drool, religious themes, abusive relationships (nothing too graphic), infidelity (but her husband's abusive, so who really cares).

Notes: 28.9k words (This is way too long, I'm sorry). Not yet proofread, so please ignore any errors. I'll fix them later.

You've been staring at it for too long. Possibly only minutes, but truthfully it must be closer to an hour. You've long since fallen into a sort of daze, glazed over and trapped while your mind wanders, but you're still able to notice how the muted sunlight has dulled from the soft way it had streamed in through the window. Faded from the powdered shade of dusk and dimmed into a thick dark that eclipses shadows over everything. 

The only light now comes from the old fixture on the ceiling above, spreading out over the room in a warm, yellowed glow. Somehow, it only seems to make you feel more suffocated. The almost rhythmic drip, drip, drip, of the leaking faucet does little to quell the dread prickling and coiling in your stomach. 

It's haunting somehow, if not a little pathetic. Your hands have gone clammy. Palms turned damp from the thick air, all humid and dark from the night. Not even the setting of the sun has helped to cool the temperamental heat. It makes the atmosphere feel like a physical thing. Weighted; a damp blanket that's been draped over your body and tucked tight around the shapes of you. 

It makes you uncomfortable in your own skin, held in too tight it. The unease skirting across your nerves does little to help your predicament, and the wink of the light reflecting from the glass of the bottle, catching across the clear liquid contained inside seems like a taunt. It makes it tempting to drink from it. To feel the scorch of it run down your throat, fueling the fury in your veins. 

You had intended to simply pour it empty down the sink. To crack the top open and watch the booze spill down the drain. And you were planning to do the exact same to the three other bottles of gin that your husband has hidden beneath the floorboards, but you've found that he's already drank them empty. And somewhere along the way, the liquor has wound up out of your hand and down on the kitchen table. It's been sitting there for roughly around the last forty-five minutes.

Never in your years could you have imagined that a simple bottle would be so intimidating. You've been eyeing it as though it's a snake, all coiled in, ready to strike. But it isn't just a bottle. Not anymore with the dry laws, and if Colin knew what you were planning to do with it then you're certain it would send him into a frenzy. You can already hear the echo of his booming voice in your ears, ringing so loudly that you nearly flinch. 

You draw in a deep breath instead, curling your fingers tight to keep yourself still in your seat. He'd paid a fortune for the liquor; you know that well enough. Paid too much. Dug through the tin box that had once been hidden in the floor - the same space that the liquor now occupies - to remove the bills that had been kept there for safe keeping. Wasted through the little you had for some bathtub liquor. 

He needed to take the edge off, he deserves it after all the work he's been putting in, laboring for hours out of the day, callouses built on his skin and sweat staining his brows. His voice had edged close to that tight drawl, anger biting at his words while he seethed through his teeth while he had kneeled on the floor over the open gap in the planks. All you could look at was the money clutched in his tight first, the fierce, irritated glare of his eyes. 

You knew not to pry then. To agitate him any further. Not when his mind had already been made up. It might as well as been set in stone then. Once he's made a decision, he latches on with all the fury and ardor of a dog. You had swallowed down the angry words that welled up in your mouth, trapping the fire behind your lips to keep all the frustration he's been harboring for the past week from releasing out onto you. 

You can't stand the sight of booze anymore. It only reminds you of loses and arguments over money and his dependency. You've found that the fights are more trouble than it's worth. But the impact of them remains vivid. Stained behind your eyes, and the bottles always seem to be the incarnation of all that strife. 

You should pour all of it down the sink and be done with it. It's not a solution, but you know that it would feel good. A temporary relief but one that you would hold onto for years to come. A small retribution for his wandering eyes . . . and hands. 

It makes you nauseous to know that's where he reasonably is now. Out indulging in another woman. Finding pleasure between her thighs and comfort in her arms. He's turned his back on you long ago. You've known it for longer than you'd like to admit. He should have been home at dusk. You would have heard the thump of his footsteps on the porch, the low metallic whine of the door hinges as he let himself inside, his dirty boots would have thumped a little when he slipped them from his feet. 

And yet, he's still nowhere to be seen, but you can hazard a simple guess. Always bending to his impulses, he's probably already dragged himself up to whatever shady gambling den or dingy back alley that might still be willing to take him. If you're lucky, he might be holed up in the house of one of his friends from work, drinking up their booze and taking up a spot at their dinner table. 

He's built a name up for himself for being a man with a shaky poker face, poor luck, and stupid persistence. In some respects, that's what is more embarrassing, what stings and gnaws at you the most. How people look at you now, passing you fleeting, sympathetic glances as you walk past them. Now you're only the wife to the unfaithful gambler, the man who drinks himself into a stupor. Who finds solace in other women while he lays all of your funds out on a table. 

When they all look at you, all you see reflecting back is pity, oversaturated sympathy. It fills you with loathing, mostly because you can't blame them. If you were in their shoes, what more could you do but watch hopelessly from the side lines? 

They hardly see you as an individual anymore, only a woman who can't keep her man from straying. But that's the thing about some dogs, no matter how much love you give them, you can't always keep them from wandering from home. Sometimes you wish that he would wander so far off that he couldn't find his way back. That would save you from the agony of it all. 

But mostly you just wish that you could leave this place yourself. Countless nights you've sent a prayer out that you'd find the courage to finally save yourself and pick up the pieces you have to search for something better. That nerve hasn't found you yet. 

Now you just sit alone, plopped on a rickety chair in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the bottle as though it's full of kerosene that might light up at any moment. Take you up in a roar of fire. That might be a mercy. 

Your mind wars. It tells you to snatch up the liquor and dump it all, while another, more vindictive, fantastical side demands that you finally face your reality for what it is and leave. Fold and pack your belongings into that special suitcase and take off into the night. 

A wife's job is to endure, the words that your mother had said to have all but been branded across your psyche, burning. Permanent. What would God think? You made a promise, sweetheart - a vow, as the Lord your witness! 

The pain you've almost come to grow used to in a twisted way. Though the debasement is another beast in its own right. It digs deep, burrows down into your marrow and carves you out of your skin until you're nothing but bare. Stripped for the judgment and prying eyes to hail down upon. 

Common sense warns you to take the bottle and put it back in its place. He wouldn't even know that it's been moved. You could still nestle it down under the floor, tuck the wood back over into their places and he'd be none the wiser. And yet, you don't move. Don't so much as twitch in your seat. 

Defiance rages inside of you. Thick, heavy, pinning you down in place and thrumming through your limbs, making your fingers tremble. The hatred smoldering in your chest frightens you sometimes, as hot as it burns. Scalding and boiling just beneath your breasts. Sometimes it makes you feel as though you can't breathe, lungs choked on your own ire. 

You've gotten little victories in this marriage, and it's made you desperate. Foolhardy. Downright stupid from your anger and hopelessness. Often times you find yourself thinking, so what if he gets mad? What could he possibly do that he hasn't already? 

Let him hit, let him swear. Like a vagrant you'd take what you could get, no matter how lowly you'd have to scrounge, or how pathetically you'd strike back, you'd get yours. The urge dawns on you suddenly, a weak, scrambling idea, but you cling to it all the same. Colin can go out all that he likes. He can waste himself away, stick his hands up other women's skirts, and in turn you'll take what you can get. Scavenge and prod for the little triumphs you're afforded. 

You almost feel detached from yourself as your hand slips across the tabletop and reaches for the bottle. The chilled glass somehow seems hot on your skin, but you keep your fingers fixed around the shape of it. You hardly think, hardly resist the urge when you lift it up, listening to the liquid sloshing within the vessel as you press the mouth up to your lips to toss back a swig. 

You wince as soon as it touches your tongue, lukewarm and stinging as it slips down your throat, traced with smoke and earth. You haven't bothered with a sip of liquor in years. It wasn't worth the cash or the trouble, from the law or Colin. The last you drank had to have been back when you were a young girl, and your curiosity had you searching through the cabinets for your father's bourbon. He'd caught you red handed. You had expected a punishment then. For him to order you to scavenge the yard and search for your own switch among the fallen branches and twigs from the black gum and oak trees. You had stood awkwardly while you waited, bottle held in a shaky grip while your heart fluttered wildly. 

But there had been no discipline dealt that day, only a small drink shared on the porch while he made you promise him that you wouldn't do it again. When you had first tasted the unpleasant burn of the booze, it had been easy to agree to that vow. But the odd tenderness that he had regarded you with had alleviated the sting of it. If you concentrate enough, you can feel the balmy glide of the breeze on your skin from that evening, you can hear the soft thrill of the birds that had been chattering nearby, the rustle of the trees. 

That memory seems a lifetime ago, and the next gulp you take of the gin seems to bring you closer and pull you farther away from it all at once. You bring the bottle down on the table with a noisy thump. Your muscles tense while you suck a breath in through your teeth through a revolted grimace. The alcohol tastes as awful as you remember. Harsh, biting, and the hint of juniper, distinct and a touch too bitter, it makes your mouth twist. 

For a moment you consider actually just evicting it down the drain, but your hatred keeps your hold fixed around the bottle, though you don't make any moves to lift it back up to your lips. It sears its way into your stomach, settling there heavy and warm. It doesn't help. It doesn't soothe to ache that's been splitting you apart. It doesn't quell the anger and hurt. Not even while you imagine the indignation Colin will feel when he finally stumbles home and finds the last of his booze gone. The brief show of betrayal that will be in his eyes, the irritation that will show there, will be enough to turn your rage into a smug satisfaction. 

But it's difficult to allow yourself to try and bask in what that might could feel like while you're sitting alone in the kitchen with nothing but the sound of your own quiet breaths and the dull chirp of the crickets outside to occupy the silence. It's times like these where you start to fantasize. It becomes a simple thing, for your mind to drift somewhere safe and better. 

There's a suitcase in the closet inside your bedroom. It's made of dark, chestnut leather and brass buckles. You can't recall where exactly you got it from. It might have been an old purchase that's slipped your memory, or it's possible that you had taken it from parent's home when you had finally left it, when the wedding band around your finger was shiny and new. Despite the kind of enigma around it, you think of it often for an entirely different reason. 

Sometimes, when the house is quiet and vacant like this, you take it out of the closet and open it up on the foot of the bed. You remove your clothes out from the dresser - only after thoroughly evaluating each garment - and choose carefully. The room available in the luggage is sparse, and you'd have to make do for the journey ahead. You pick through all of your clothes, picking meticulously - sometimes for different destinations. You went through all of your thicker clothes for a trip to Missouri; you know the winters there can be brutal. You had selected all of your best dresses for a journey to California, the ones made of lighter materials to keep you cool during the heat, though you're sure that the dry temperatures would be nothing in comparison to the humidity down here. 

You organize all of your things, packing only what you'll need. You fold up your clothes, tuck in a book or two for something to entertain yourself during the monotony of travel, some of your makeup and the little pieces of jewelry you own, and then you shut the suitcase tight. You flick the buckles closed and it's a noise that's final. You still don't think you've ever heard a sound sweeter than the heavy, metallic click that always echoes out against the four walls of the small room. A private, gentle noise. 

It's the sound of being able to go anywhere, and you like to tell yourself that that's true. One day you'll get on a train. You'll head to the depot in town and buy a ticket. You don't care where to - Las Vegas, New York, Boise, Charleston. Anywhere else is better than here. But you think of the Californian coast often, sand under your bare feet and a sweet sunrise blooming over the stretch of glittering water in gold and blush. 

You have a postcard of the ocean. An artist's rendition of the waves, done up in pastels, watercolors, blues and beiges and pinks. A pier stretching out over a large body of water. You imagine often stepping out onto it and walking into the sunset, to be touched by a new light. You've held the postcard so often that the corners have become all bent up, weakened from too much touch, turned soft from your palms. You keep it safe inside the suitcase, but sometimes you can't keep yourself from admiring it, tracing the elegant font that's scrawled across the face of it, dreaming you were there instead of here. 

Deep down in the pit of your soul, you know that you'll never leave. That's what's killing you inside. Twisting you up, chewing you down and grinding you into a pulp. Brutalizing you in a way that not even Colin can. The hatred is like an affliction that's tainted you down the marrow. It's festered. Turned your blood black and eaten you down from the inside out, and now you hardly recognize yourself. When you look in the mirror you hardly see the person you had once been. You aren't the naïve girl who had fallen in love with Colin all those years ago, when he had been alluring one-liners and the protective nature he had shielded you with seemed well intentioned and not stifling and controlling. 

How dumb you had been. All ignorant and blinded by sugared feelings and young love. You'd dug yourself into a hole. Allowed yourself to be pulled in by the charm he'd once had, now curdled and rotten by time, and it's become too late to dig yourself up from the soil. This is where you'll take your final breath, curled up in a quiet house, blood on your busted lips while the cicadas send you off with a warbling cry. 

It makes your heart burn like a coal. It spreads through the sinew inside of you white-hot and coiling. Worse than that is the emptiness. The defeat that hollows you out in a shell. You're a ghost now. Dead and dull. You have no choice but to hate who you used to be, to be jealous of that youthful spark you once had, but it's all but been snuffed out and relit into something hateful. 

You want to scream. No one would here you all the way out here, tucked around the thicket of heavy trees and the swaddle of the night. It would be your secret if you let it all out, pitched your voice up into a wail that you know would pierce your own ears, release the tension that's been trapped in your lungs. And yet, no matter how much you long for it, the cry never rattles past your teeth. It's stays lodged there, like a rock behind your sternum. 

You hardly recognize the desperate reach your hand takes for the bottle again, slipping over the scuffed tabletop to grasp the smooth glass. The feel of it in your palm feels wrong, like it doesn't fit, but you hold onto it all the same. You don't want it, the bite of the liquor on your tongue. Not even the soft warmth that's scattered over your limbs, as balmy and satin as heated water, is tempting enough to want you to keep drinking, but the ire you have for Colin is. 

Your fingers slip up, smoothing up to clasp tight around the neck so that you can lift the bottle up from the table. The glass is cool on your skin, just whispering against your bottom lip when you tilt your head back to take another swig. 

Your grip slackens just a bit, a clumsy error, but that's all it takes for the bottle to slip from your clutch. The bottom of it hits the table with a heavy thud, and you hardly have time to track it as it tilts on its side and careens over the edge. It's a blur of silver as it hurtles towards the floor, and your breath snags harshly when it meets the wood in an eruption of shards. 

Everything in you locks in place. You go completely still as you stare down at the mess, taking in the liquor staining the floor, darkening the worn oak. The sting of the spilt gin pierces the air in a pungent bite that makes you sick to the stomach, blending with the sheer horror wracking your body and for a moment you fear that you might actually be sick. That you might double over and evict your guts all over the wooden planks; the pungent scent of alcohol already permeating across the air, staining the walls. 

You don't give it an ounce of thought when you crumble out of the chair, falling so abruptly the seat's legs scrape in a shrill cry and your knees smart when they strike the floor. You can't pay it any mind though. Not while you're cursing in a frantic stream, reaching down with shaky fingers to pluck up the shards of glass, desperate to pick it all up. 

Suddenly you don't feel invigorated or empowered, but just foolish. A dumb girl who tried to get the upper hand, who tried to feel big and crumpled under her own weight. 

You pick up the shards as quickly as you can, cradling them within a shaky palm one delicate piece at a time. It seems not even the universe is willing to allow you a victory, as miniscule as it may be. 

A cursory glance out through the kitchen window confirms that it is indeed deep into the night. It's so dark out that there's no definition to what lies outside the pane; there's simply just a strip of black velvet. An infinite void that stretches too wide, means to swallow you entirely.  

You aren't certain for how long you've been sitting here, stewing in your own chaos, but if you had to try and guess it must be close to 10 p.m., if not nearing midnight. When Colin vanishes like this, he often isn't back for hours, sometimes not making his way back until the dawn, all but barraging through the door in a noisy shuffle as though he'd been ushered in by the rising sun.  It makes you thankful at least, that you'll have time to clean up properly without him stumbling upon you, a mess in the kitchen with his drink now a collection of glass on the floor. The very thought of it makes your hands shake, fingers trembling. 

A hiss rips from you when a sharp throb pulses through your hand. When you look down again, there's a bit of red beading from a sliver in your skin, long and thin from the serrated edge of jagged glass. It's a clean cut, narrow and not too deep from what you can make of it in the low light and the smear of blood, but it still palpitates white-hot across your flesh. Sliced from the heel of your thumb and easing off just shy of the direct center of your palm. 

"God dammit all," you swear but your frustration is snuffed out by the tone of ragged panic and defeat in the inflections of your voice. You lift yourself up to your feet on wobbling legs, knees turned feeble from the dread weighing you down, but you still manage to cross over to the sink. You toss the glass shards that you picked up and toss them into the basin as though they're hot coals; the clatter of them striking across the cast iron sounds akin to a round of gunfire. 

You snatch the rag draped over the lip of the sink up in a mean jerk to press it against the wound. It burns to hold it to the laceration, but you clench your teeth together to distract yourself from the pain. You're almost entranced in your watch, seeing how the scarlet blossoms across the thick cloth, turning some of the fabric a rich red, distant from yourself as your mind chants to hide the evidence - to hide the remnants of the bottle before it's too late. You got too big, too bold, and now God or fate set out to knock you down a peg. To remind you of who's in control. Humiliation burns at you, unforgiving, fire raging, violent and fueled by hatred.  The smell of the gin is noticeable in the air. Thick, burning in your nostrils. He'll smell it once he gets home. It'll hit him as soon as he steps through the door, distinct, undeniable. Truthfully, if you had drunk it or broken the bottle, the result would still be the same. It would earn nothing but one reaction: anger, the strike of an open fist.  But somehow this seems so much worse. Perhaps it's the lack of control. The fact that it hadn't been a conscious decision, not part of the plan. But it's horrific, leaving you panicked and frantic, mind spinning out in a blind terror.  You'll have to open some of the windows, let the house ventilate and breathe and hope that that'll be enough to get rid of the smell - A repetitive noise sounds out from the front of the house. Steady, polite. Knocking. Someone is knocking on your door. 

If Colin had come home, he wouldn't bother with announcing himself. He'd simply ram in through the front door without a care, probably dragging his feet and slurring his words as he mumbled in a drunken drivel. 

Not many drift this far out, apart from the occasional neighbor you might spy while out pulling weeds in the yard, many driving out in their vehicles or hitching it on foot for a trip into town. You're all fairly quiet. And despite the cordial wave in greeting or a nod of acknowledgement while in passing, you mostly keep to yourself unless something calls for it. The last time you had someone at your doorstep was when Helen Young needed to borrow some flour, and that had been nearly a year ago; you'd kept her for as long as you could, sharing recipes and nuggets of gossip. 

You can't think of a single reason why anyone else would be at your house at such a late hour. You struggle to come up with a logical explanation and it only seems to sweep you up in a bigger whirlwind, one too great for your scattered psyche to handle.  There's another knock tapping on the door, still mild, considerate. Decidedly unlike Colin, but you're still unable to deny that there's a slim possibility that it might be him regardless. That all it takes for your body to go up in an uproar of confusion and dread, but it can't help but to obey the call coming from outside. Not if it's Colin who's out there, waiting and impatient, temper turned hot by alcohol. 

Every facet of you winds tight from the possibility of him actually being home. But the nature of his arrival is abnormal. Though maybe, the prospect of someone having dragged him back here, having become too drunk and incoherent, isn't an absurdity. Just the thought douses you with the sensation of cold water, and you long to move to crawl back over to the splinters of glass on the floor and clean them up, to toss them away in the bin and pretend that your ignorance never got the better of you. 

But that's only a temporary fix from the inevitable. Colin will find out regardless. He'll know what you've done. Look in the hollow under the floorboards and find that it's empty. Smell the fumes in the air. It's pathetic how all of the defiance and rage in you has been snuffed out into a wild disquiet, traded in for fear.  

Despite your panic, your feet don't stop in carrying you towards the door. It goes in a blur how quickly you cross the space from the kitchen to the adjoining living room until you're standing in front of the entrance with your heart thumping wildly inside your chest . The floor creaks under the shuffle of your feet, seeming too loud. The door seems to stand imposing, nothing more than a tall structure of wood, and yet it might as well as be the Grim Reaper standing before you. Ice sinks low in your stomach, becoming weighted as you eye the knob in your cautious approach. 

You wind the cloth around your hand, binding it tight and tucking the loose edge into the wrap of the fabric so that you can hide your hand behind your back, just out of sight without fear of the makeshift bandage falling free and giving evidence to your crime. You have to steel yourself as best as you can, sighing deeply to calm your nerves, but it does little to help as you twist the knob until you hear the telltale click of the latch bolt slipping from its divot. 

It's cold when you finally grip it, a shock to your skin despite the sticky warmth that's swaddled the air. You have to brace yourself, swallowing a shaky breath as you prepare for who's on the other side. But as much as you'd like to cling to the shaky bit of peace that you have, you can't hold onto this moment for long. 

You loathe the low whine of the hinges as you draw the door open, like the hissing of feral cats. It nearly sets your teeth on edge when you press yourself to lean out and peek around through the gap between the threshold and the door, just enough to be able look out onto the porch. 

The dark outside dares to swallow you whole. It's only from the dull light of the oil lamp on the accent table on the far side of the room that offers a wisp of illumination to slip out past the threshold. A muted, buttery hue that struggles against the oppressive shade of the night, but it's enough to highlight the figure that stands at the edge of the porch, just above the first descending step. 

It strikes you immediately that you've never seen this stranger before, and that manages to alleviate you from the fear of facing Colin and distress you all together. Uncertainty seems to press down on your shoulders, nudging at the nape of your neck as you eye the man warily. You can feel your brows pinch close from your confusion as you sweep a glance down at him from down to his shoes and all the way up to the relaxed smile on his lips. 

The expression on his face is polite, friendly, but that doesn't make this situation any less odd. He - whoever he is - doesn't seem to have the same reservations or thoughts as you, not with how relaxed his posture is. Fully comfortable in a space that doesn't belong to him in the late hours. His boots are a little worn, the leather scuffed slightly around the toes from all of the walking he's probably done, and there's a banjo hanging from his back. Not by a proper shoulder strap but by a pale, old rope. 

It isn't entirely unusual to have travelers come walking through here. All in search of different things, individual goals and destinations. Many follow after the train tracks that depart from town, using the rails as a guide to help themselves along to the next town over. What is unusual is to have one standing outside of your house. It sets you on edge, and you're taken away with the worst-case scenarios, the possible horrors that might arise from being alone out here. Horror stories of people attacked and murdered in their own homes. 

It makes your heart thud. 

"May I help you?" you ask, and you hope that he doesn't take notice of the way you scan a vigilant glance around the surrounding land, looking out for possible figures lurking off on the dirt road in the near distance or hiding in the trees. Luckily, you see nothing out of sorts. 

When your attention flickers back onto him, something about him seems amused. There's a glimmer in his eyes and the shadows that are being spilt across his face seem to pronounce the lilt at the corners of his mouth. "I'm sorry for disturbing you at such a late time, but I'm on my way through here and I was wondering if you'd be kind enough to spare a sip of water." 

It's a simple request, and good manners encourage that you comply, but common sense presses you to slam the door shut and lock the bolt. The urge to deny his ask rests in your mouth, right there on your tongue, but the refusal never makes it past your lips. It dies out when he dares to creep a little closer, stepping further into the murky fire light, and the weight of his shifting feet, despite their soft shuffle make the boards beneath creak. It could be a trick of the shadows, but you're sure that when he lifts his chin just the slightest, that his nostrils flare likes a dog that's caught onto a scent, and his eyes seem to flicker down to trace down your shoulder, following where you've tucked your wounded hand behind your back. 

Then his eyes are on yours, a movement so quick that you think you might have imagined the entire thing. The dark fashioning illusions, exacerbated on by your frazzled state. 

"I can't let you in," you blurt. It's all rolled out as though it's been struck from your chest, like you were worried he might try to shove past you and allow himself through the threshold. "My husband's asleep - he doesn't like to be disturbed." The lie rolls from your tongue easily enough, but it feels clunky too, unnatural. You find yourself hoping once again that he can't notice your discomfort, that the night will cloak your expression enough to keep your uncertainty hidden, the ceaseless cries of the crickets will hide your tone. 

"I don't need to be brought in," he replies. A reassurance, but you swear that something about its delivery seems . . . entertained. Like you've said something vaguely amusing. "I can stay right here on your doorstep. Take what you're willin' to give me and then I'll be on my way. It'll be like I was never here." 

There's something unsettling about the suave nature of his voice, like velvet wrapped around teeth, honey soft to lure you in and placate you. As tempting as it is, something animal skirts down your spine. Still you stand in the part in between the open door. You don't move. It's as though you've been stuck in place, caught by the societal etiquette that's been engrained in you since birth and something more damning, the weight of his stare. 

It isn't right, you know, to turn down a person in need, but your paranoia demands that there's a menace in the air. That danger might lurk right around the corner. Or that it's already standing directly in front of you, watching with a smile. 

You should step back, bid him to leave before your husband does actually make his way home, slam the door shut and sweep up the glass, tend to your wound. But you don't do any of those things. Instead you move back a hair, sparing the stranger a brief look as you begin to nudge the door closed. "Wait here," you relent. "I'll be back. But once you're done drinking, I expect you to leave." 

You don't wait to hear his response, but you think that you might catch a distant 'Yes, ma'am' passed you way as you head off towards the kitchen. You make quick work, opening the cupboard above the sink and grab the first glass you see to begin filling it from the faucet until it's full, almost trickling over the rim. You try not to glance at the broken shards still dusted over the floor beside the table, glittering and winking under the light, taunting you from the distance. You ignore the heated pulse that thumps and flares across your hand in time with your heartbeat. 

You twist the water off, catching it before it can overflow from the cup, turning the knob with a pronounced, rusted squeak. 

With another deep, steadying inhale, you find yourself opening the front door for a second time tonight. It's all too soon, as though you've blinked and lost time even though you can remember the steps you had taken to get back to this point. Your nerves feel shot, all fired up and confused, and it makes the minutes pool around you in a blur. The faint warmth that you had just begun to feel from the gin has all but left your system; chased out by the anxiety. 

When the door rasps open again, a part of you is disappointed to see that the stranger is still standing on your porch even though you fully expected for him to be there. When your eyes meet it's as though you've entered some sort of stalemate. He creeps closer, but there's a calculated edge to movements, as though he's approaching as one would a startled animal. 

You don't meet him halfway. You can't manage to get yourself to twitch past the threshold. Your hand that holds the cup hovers close to your chest. There's a disconnect somewhere. You tell yourself to extend your arm out to let him take the glass, but it doesn't happen. You remain tucked against the door. There's a safety here. An ability to close the man out if need be and hide yourself within the safety of familiar walls, but your hesitation has pulled a hush over the space. 

There's a clear uncertainty extended from the both of you now, but he doesn't eye you with awkward puzzlement but almost an intrigue. His head tilts a little, a minute movement that makes you feel studied all the same; an insect pinned to a board. That's how both of you remain for the next passing minute, for probably just a blink but a void seems to wrap out around you, turned hauntingly private from the dull hiss of the breeze shifting over the grass and the chirp of noisy nocturnal insects. 

It's another catch of the contained flame flickering within your home, but his eyes seem to reflect the night, the glimmer of distant stars catching in his pupils. You don't know if you've ever been consumed by a stare before; it's definitive that you have now. 

Your hand twitches forward, fingers flexing around the glass as though you might actually stretch your arm out past the doorway for him to take, but it hardly makes it more than a few scant inches. 

You notice the corner of his mouth nudge upward. "Plannin' on letting me keel over from thirst?"

A part of you can't help but hate how playful he sounds, as though you're well acquainted - cordial, familiar - and not outsiders to each other. The other, more buried half, the side that used to know how to smile easily and share harmless gibes in a second nature, rouses under his light ridicule. Maybe you would have insulted him for being the one crawling up as a beggar on a stranger's doorstep, and the desire to do so slips over you like a ghost. But you can't allow yourself the possession of that temptation. 

You force your hand out then, stretching it just enough to offer him the glass. 

The paranoid concern that he might grab you instead rises in your gut, but when his hand reaches, it only takes the cup with a polite, "Thank ya kindly," muttered out to you. There's a purposeful gentleness when he removes it from your own grip, keeping eye contact with you the entire time while he raises it to his lips, lifting his chin to drink it down in heavy gulps. He empties it in drawn out sips, pouring down his throat as though it's the only water he's had for miles. It has something like guilt whispering over you. 

 "What are you doing out here . . . so late?" The enquiry leaves you much more tentatively than you intended, and you reflectively clear your throat as though that might banish the nervousness in your chest. 

He seems delighted by the question. His posture straightens just the slightest, shoulders drawing up, boyish and pleased, as though he thought you'd never ask. "Oh, I'm a musician you see." He reaches behind to pull at the neck of his banjo, rotating it around to brandish it against his hip. "We've got ourselves a gig not too far up the road there." 

He lifts a finger up from the grip he has around the now empty glass and points out to his left in the direction of the path paved by car tires and wagons, cutting up through the earth and trees. The crickets chirping seems to ring out, raising up higher and higher as though they're loudly declaring him a liar. You hardly pay that any mind. 

"We?" Once again, you're scanning the surrounding dark with a worried glance, expecting finally see shadows lurking. Still and quiet, waiting for the perfect moment the lurch forward and take what they want. 

"A couple of my friends," he clarifies. He pulls on the rope around his chest, tugging the instrument back around in its proper place behind his back. He shifts on his feet, slipping about half a step closer, making the floor groan in a faint protest. "They're just up ahead, not too far from here. I thought I'd be able to make it just fine, but I have to admit that this heat is gettin' to me." 

"Yeah . . . It's plenty warm out here." You agree, half-hearted, struggling in your effort to keep him appeased with a geniality that you know must seem forced. 

This is odd. Something about this - him isn't right. It nudges at the back of your head like the weight of a reprimanding hand, pokes and prods at you to cut this interaction short and shoo him away from your doorstep like a stray that's overstayed its welcome. Regardless, you're stuck. All spun up in a glimmer of intrigue that sinks into you with a stubborn influence. All the isolation out here has made you deprived in a way, starved for interaction that doesn't come with the threat of scathing insults or the swat of a hand. 

You'd be fooling yourself if you couldn't admit that your fascination has been piqued. There's a magnetism around him that you can't quite explain. He looks like he could be any other man, not exactly plain faced, but his handsomeness shows in a way that isn't particularly arresting. It's pleasant, strong despite his rounded features and eyes that seem dark, impish. It's how he carries himself you conclude, the puckish lift of his lips and the lively way he expresses himself. 

There's a sort of energy around him that is almost palpable, thrumming and brushing through the light fabric of your dress to run over your skin; charged air in an oncoming storm. Suddenly, you feel a lot like a moth daring too close to an open pyre. You fear you might have already drifted too close to turn back now. Something instinctual and buried begs that you do, but like a bass captivated by the glimmer of a bobbing lure, you don't know if you're able to. 

It's like you can see the traces of his journeys on his body, remnants of the treks he's taken immortalized in the scuffs on the toes of his boots. You had seen that the calfskin face on his banjo has been turned darker in certain areas, made that way from frequent use; the brushes of his hand while he played. It aids you in picturing all the places that he's probably strummed the instrument in, plucking the strings with deft fingers while people dance and laughed, jovial in their celebrations.   

"Oh, it sure is," he answers with an excited grin. He tilts back just enough to place the glass on the railing, freeing his hands before he turns to you. It reminds you of a salesman preparing to make a pitch. "You could join us tonight, you know. It's fixin' to be quite the party, and the more the merrier." 

The invitation takes you aback, knocks you off quilter so that you're staring at him dumbly from within your doorway. "Excuse me? I can't - that's very kind, but I don't know you." You shake your head while it all leaves you in a sort of jumble, turned messy from your bewilderment. 

"C'mon now," he encourages as though he's a longtime friend and not an unknown, a stranger shrouded in mystery. When you lean back a little, tucking one of your shoulders tighter against the threshold, he tracks the movement with a stare that seems too eager, like an animal watching its prey twitch. "Everybody's a stranger to somebody; take a chance and we might just wind up as thick as thieves."  The smile on your face is tight, muscles twitching as you wield your mouth to shape an expression that's hardly convincing, too strained.  "I'm sorry, I have to decline. It's late. My husband is sleeping-"

"Your husband is occupied, all tucked into bed, sound asleep, just as you've said." His brows perk up a little, embellishing the question and he leans in close as though you're both sharing a secret. "So he wouldn't notice then, if you disappeared for an hour or two. He didn't even hear me knocking on your door - dead to the world, huh?" 

The last comment borders on mockery. A sardonic jab that's thinly veiled with an easy smile. It's knowing, as though he's in on something that he shouldn't be and can't help but to be a little smug about it. A distant, but clamorous voice cries from the corners of your mind in a paranoid stream of he knows, he knows you're all alone out here. 

He has an arrogance and condescension that leaves you a little speechless. You've only been in his presence for less than fifteen minutes, but the blurred genial character he has and the thinly veiled snark makes your head spin. You can't tell if he's attempting some strange, boorish flirting tactic, or if he's simply ignorant enough to believe that you would truly feel comfortable enough to allow yourself to be swept away by a complete stranger.  Even worse than all of that though, is that a side of you, dull but persevering, a remnant of your former self turned alone and quiet, is tempted. It's easy to fantasize about being spirited away, about being pulled into a whirlwind of titillation and celebration, flowing drinks and bubbling laughter. 

But those thoughts bring nothing but danger. A sinking in your gut that seems to tug you down to the bottom of a river, dragging you like a rock. 

"I can't." That's all you can manage to say. 

"Well, that is a shame." He concedes a lot easier than you had expected. He doesn't strike you as the type to roll over and except defeat, but he lets out a dispirited sigh. He nods like he understands, a minute gesture while he shifts his focus to his left, looking back off towards the road - a kicked puppy. That's what he looks like. Eyebrows furrowed over the wide shape of his eyes. He's actually pouting.  For a moment, you think that he's relenting. That he's finally picked up all the signs that he's been ignoring (willfully or otherwise) and that he'll turn and leave with a thank you, vanishing in the dark like a phantom that never existed. 

It would be easy then, to believe that you had made him up. A figment of your imagination come to haunt you. 

When his attention shifts back onto you, that glimmer of the faith you had fizzles out like water doused coals. It's involuntary when the hand behind your back flexes, clenching your thumb around the bandage. It licks a painful heat up the wound and you can feel your face wince. His nostrils flare in that peculiar manner, again. An animal scenting a trail. 

"I hate to take advantage of your kindness, but before I go, would you mind if I got another glass?" He lifts the cup up between you both and tilts his head as though he's eager to hear your response, rotating the glass back and forth to hold your attention. "I'm real parched." 

No. It's right there again. At the ready. But once again you can't find it in yourself to speak your mind. The stare he holds you in is testing. Evaluating. As though he's weighing you for your worth, challenging you to see how you might respond. It's become instinctual in you to waver, to shrink yourself down beneath a heavy stare. 

That's all it takes for you to grab it from his hand. You aren't sure if you appreciate the smile he gives you. He's stopping you before you can turn around and fill the glass - or get rid of him. 

"You wouldn't mind if I stepped inside, would you? Only to take some pressure of my feet. And these damn bugs, they're hungry tonight. I must taste good with how they're nippin' at me." 

He grins like he's said the funniest thing. As though you're close friends and he's made an inside joke. You can't manage a laugh though. You feel heavy, turned into stone as you stand in the doorway, tense, wound throbbing, and concern gnawing in your gut. It's kneejerk to want to refuse his request. Common sense nags at you to do just that, but fear keeps the words trapped inside. 

He's acting calm now, friendly, all things considered, but would his mood take a turn if you refused him? Would he lash out? Barge through the door if you slammed it shut or crash his way through one of the windows? 

Another voice entirely chides you for making assumptions. For being so judgmental in the first place. He might be a bit odd, but that doesn't make him a threat. He's a weary traveler looking for a place to rest his feet before he moves on, and you can hear your mother berating you from the grave, scolding you for turning a man in need away from your home. You can hear Pastor Hemley's voice raising high in that unwavering timbre, booming off the old, polished walls that existed long before you; echoes of one of his old sermons as he gripped the edges of the pulpit in an impassioned grip. "Who are we to turn away another man in need? What if it was the Lord himself asking, seeking you out for your aid, testing you of your humanity and goodwill, and you shunned him? Or what about your fellow man? Is it not our sympathy, our empathy - that makes us in His image? It is the meek who shall inherit the earth." 

Now you aren't ignorant enough to believe that Jesus himself has wandered up to your doorstep, but it still feels a sin to deny the stranger now. The prospect of it turns sour, bitter on your tongue, iron turning to rust. 

"You'd have to be quiet. My husband - "

"I'll be quiet as a mouse," he assures quickly. 

"I just don't want any trouble." You draw the door a little tighter, just enough that your shoulders and head can peek through the gap. Your hand tightens over the empty glass making the smooth shape of it dig at your palm. Your right hand squeezes tight too, and involuntary action that makes pain flare. A wince pulls a little at your face, makes your brows twitch. "My husband has early mornings; he needs his rest." 

"I ain't no trouble." It's a promise that brings you little comfort despite the sincerity. "If I so's much as look at you wrong then you can go ahead and throw me right out the door. Knock me out on my ass right on your front porch, if it pleases you." 

A kind of inner voice whispers from somewhere in the hidden fringes of your mind, distant but no less profound. It's like a brush along the nape of your neck, raising the small hairs there and it threatens to make you shiver. It settles in your bones, takes root deeply but as light as a phantom, distorted and chilled. It almost begs you to step out from the threshold and back into the familiarity of your house, and you nearly do. You can feel yourself coiling, the muscles in your leg bunching and it the heel of your foot slipping back just the slightest. Not even an inch but he notices, you can tell by the way that the corner of his mouth perks up. He's not even bothering to try and hide his amusement. 

You have to flex the grip you have clasped around the glass. Gripping it hard enough the rounded shape of the cup bites into your palm and keeps you centered. You really shouldn't let him in. The instincts creeping up your spine urge you don't, and yet you somehow find yourself split. Ensnared in a stubborn limbo that seems to hold you tight. 

The way that he's watching you doesn't help. His head is a little tilted, the smile on his face is still there, and the relaxed nature of his posture is intimidating despite that casual air of it. As though he's made a pocket for himself in your space. As though he's entitled to it. That it's belonged to him this entire time and you simply weren't aware. It irritates you. It intrigues you too. Everything about him seems to have been fashioned to lure you in. The easy confidence he emanates, the roguish glimmer in his eyes. 

He's laidback and odd all at once. The way that he stuns you is a product of pure roguish charm. He moves as though he's someone important, even while there's a soft smear of dirt on the cuff of his shirt, his boots are worn, and the leather has long lost its sheen, and yet you don't think you've ever felt so captivated in your entire life. It's as though you're held hostage. There's a grip that you can't shake, and it has your attention pinned onto him as though there's some sort of magnetic pull stretched between the both of you. You stare all while your mind chants in a repetitive, startled loop: Make him leave, close the door, lock the bolt. 

The crickets sing into the night. There's a caution somewhere in their cries. High pitched. Warbling. Animal. 

You best listen, they seem to say. 

You draw in a deep breath. 

"Alright, you can come in. But only for a moment." You relent so quickly that you hardly register it at all. It's not until you're shifting out of the way, nudging the door open and turning your body to give him a berth that you notice what you've said. Something in the pit of you urges that you slam the door shut before he can act out on your compliance, but like a spirit trapped inside a doll, you sit idle as he steps forward.  

Something seems to break now that he's crossed the threshold. A membrane has broken, been torn through and invaded as he moves across the floor, boots thumping softly in a hushed murmur over the worn wood. Each creak sounds like a scream to you. Ragged, strained, ringing out on a thin breath. The air is tense, strained with an awkwardness that you don't know how to navigate. 

The cup in your hand seems heavy. As weighted as a big stone. You track him from your place at the door as he comes to stand in the middle of the living room, not caring to hide how he sweeps a curious, evaluating look over the space. Eyeing the furniture, the outdated floral wallpaper - turned stained from age - and the family photographs hung on the wall above the sofa with an eager eye. A vulture scavenging. 

He just evaluates them for a moment. Staring as one might a set of paintings in a public museum. It strips you bare. Makes you horrendously vulnerable as he observes the images of your life; the glide of the satin air pouring in from the open doorway seems to perpetuate that vulnerability. Skirting over your flesh in dark, damp brushes. 

He scrutinizes photograph of you and Colin, the one of you tucked into each other's bodies, caught staring in each other's eyes while standing out on the stoop of the church. It was a time when you were still able to smile, when Colin built a warmth and love in you that burned inside, that could keep you safe. 

You had felt so beautiful that day, wearing your mother's own wedding dress, adorned in optimism and fine beading. Now you just feel stupid. 

It makes you sick to look at the picture. To see yourself draped in lace, all dolled up for a wedding that you'd come to regret. It's worse to have someone else staring at it with a kind of strange fascination. As though it's the most interesting thing in the world. 

It's worse still when his eyes drag downward to the frame directly underneath, taken a year apart, but the difference was telling. When you had first slipped the picture into its frame, you had wondered if others would be able to notice the strained nature of your smile or if it was an element that only you could see. If they would be able to notice how the light had dimmed from your eyes, turned dull in a muted reflection of the argument that had taken place only a few hours before. 

You know now that he, at least, is able to tell. 

"Happy couple," he comments, and it seems suspiciously sardonic. The remark could be private, an inside thought that slipped out, but he seems guiltless to have spoken it. 

He looks so normal and yet he's entirely out of place in the middle of your home in a way that you can't quite place. It's unnerving. It makes your skin itch. You can only watch as he steps around the coffee table to admire all of your belongings. The knickknacks and useless tchotchkes in the display cabinet, the bits and pieces of you collected over the stages of your life all held on the end table tucked close to the edge of the sofa. Unabashed that he's in a stranger's house. Stalking along the room with steps that are leisurely, but there's a calculated edge that can't be ignored. The saunter of a predator, careful but confident. 

When his eyes flicker back onto you, they seem to glimmer. Fire reflecting in their centers, gold pooling where the black should be. Abnormal. An animal's eyes peering through the dark. They burn through you, reaching at the edges of your soul. The suddenness of it snaps you from your daze like the pop of a hand. 

A trick, you tell yourself again. An illusion thrown by the light. 

"I'll just . . . go and fill this," you manage stiffly, brandishing the glass. You don't wait for a response, carefully shutting the front door with a heavy click before making off for the kitchen as though fire is licking at your heels. It's déjà vu to be standing back at the sink, tap running, watching the water bubble and churn from the flow from the spicket. 

For the first time in in years, a part of you longs to have your husband home, and that pitiful need disgusts you. You loathe that you crave the volatile comfort that he would provide. There is a familiarity in it. A predictability. But this man - the stranger - is a complete unknown and it's terrible. 

You have to curse yourself for crumbling. For weakly relenting and allowing a potential danger into your house with hardly any fight. It has self-hared, hot and boiling, twisting in your stomach. The disappointment is debilitating, sinking down into your shoulders as piercing as a set of talons. The chaotic panic swirling in your mind does little to help your state, injecting ice into your veins as you ponder the worst. That same worry has your eyes straying from the filling glass, drifting over to a set of drawers. The same one that's full of silverware. You think of the knives tucked into the left side of the top drawer, nestled right by the forks and spoons. 

It'd be easy to turn off the sink, sit down the glass and long enough to grab a knife. You could hide it under your skirt, slip the blade along your thigh and keep it held there by the material of your bloomers. The knife would have some weight to it, but you think that it wouldn't be enough to keep it from staying in place. 

Water pours over you hand in vigorous rivulets, welling out from over the lip of the glass in a heavy current that patters down onto the sink below. You curse under your breath, startling from the chill of it, and jerk from your fantasy. You reach clumsily for the knob, hissing through your teeth as your injured thumb clamps around the steel with too much force, licking lightning up the wound. 

It twists shut with a strained, metallic squeak. Even once its off it drips. A steady tap of water falling near the edge of the drain after a temporary pause. Just that has managed to set your heart fluttering, a simple overflow of water has it thrumming wildly in your chest. Like it's fit to burst out and leave your body behind. 

You draw in a shaky inhale, tainted with the bitter sting of the spilt alcohol that's long since seeped into the floorboards, perfuming the air in an acrid cloud. It has you feeling nauseous. Unwell from the thick of it burying in your nose - a reminder of your previous accident. Your thumb throbs at the reminder, smarting and warm. But you don't want to leave the kitchen either. You'd rather choke on the scent of the gin than have to face the man skulking about your living room.

God, you've just realized that you still don't even know his name. 

It's such a trivial thing, an absurdity, but a laugh almost bubbles up from your lungs. A loose, hysterical noise that lodges in your chest and stays there in an almost painful sigh. 

You don't want to leave, but you have to. You know you do. You can only hold off, resist the inevitable for so long before he becomes curious and comes looking for you, lurking around the corners of your house like a creature scenting prey. 

You hold the glass tighter, ignoring the damp feel of the water on your skin, blocking out the unease prickling over your skin as you turn from the sink. 

Your spirit leaves your body and soars far away from earth. It happens in a blink. You flinch, drawing up tight with a sharp gasp. You think your heart might have burst too, thumping in a craze as electricity scatters through your limbs. It's a scattered blur, your body recognizes that you aren't alone before you do, notices the silhouette standing directly in front of you before you can properly process it. 

You nearly bump into a chest, run right into it. You can't help the yelp you let out, can't even be embarrassed about it because you're so swept up and startled, your body draws up in a primal reflex, tensing like you might have to make a run for it. Muscles and tendons all clenching like they were going to eject your spirit up and out of them, send you flying high over the earth and into the heavens. You're sure your soul would have done just that if not for the pair of hands settling over your arms, gently clasping to keep you in place. 

"Sorry, didn't mean to startle you." His voice is apologetic, but the glimpse of teeth, the mirthful spark in his eyes, reveals just the opposite. 

You feel all shaken up, heart racing too fast in your chest, thumping up against your sternum in a frenzied patter. You can't speak, can't berate him like you truly want to or reassure him like your manners chide you to do. It's all a jumbled-up mess, and the sight of him standing so close, the weight of his fingers on your bare arms, callused from plucking strings and tepid despite the stifling heat, anchors you in a way that you don't quite enjoy. It forces you back into the moment, packs you into your skin with a sharp jerk that commands you to meet his eyes. 

Your tongue feels useless, your voice stalled and broken. For a pause too long, you can only stare. "It's quite alright," you just hardly manage, it's more of a whisper.  It feels as though you're lying through your teeth. You are, in a way. He shouldn't be here. You know that much. It won't stop howling at you, screaming under your flesh in a wild chant that tells you to send him off, to get him gone before the worst can happen. What the 'worst' might be, you aren't sure, but your paranoia and gut assure you that it's just looming over the horizon. 

"Appreciate ya," he thanks as he plucks the glass from your weak grip. You're grateful for that. You would have likely dropped it too, sent it shattering along the floor just like the gin if you held it for any longer. 

You can only nod. He doesn't step back. Doesn't give you room to breathe. He keeps you pinned between his body and the sink, only a sliver of space given between you both, just little more than a foot. It's as though all of the oxygen has been siphoned out of the room, turned viscous and too thick, pooling in your lungs like stove-hot molasses, burned and scorching. 

His eyes seem too dark, a pair of yawning pits held open to see, to taste. It's stripping, tearing you down in some terrible manner. It's as though you've been stripped of all your clothes. As exposed and naïve as the day you were born. You can feel yourself waver, shrinking under his attention as he raises the glass to his lips. But it is worse, so much worse when he rotates his shoulders just enough to comfortably look behind him, and you know instantly that he's taking notice of the broken glass scattered and winking on the floor. 

You're flooded with ice. Frigid, seizing. Even while it's fragmented into shards, it's still clear to see what kind of bottle it had been. The cap is still intact to the neck, severed and jagged from what had been the rest of it. It'd take a complete and utter fool not to realize just what it was, what it had contained. He doesn't seem like the law-abiding type, the sort to go running for the cops as soon as he spots something illicit, but the apprehension springs up on you regardless. 

You struggle for an excuse, anything that sounds remotely convincing, but you know you can't deny it. Not while all the air in here smells of liquor, doused so strongly with it that you could choke on it. 

He must catch your expression - not that you're doing a particularly good job at keeping yourself schooled - because he seems downright amused. All pleased to see you so stressed. 

"Oh, I ain't one to judge someone for lettin' a little loose. I've been at the bottom of a bottle more times than I can count," he consoles while grinning too much. "Nothing wrong with enjoyin' life's simple pleasures. Shame you went and dropped it." It's another comment that you're unable to tell if it's a mean dig or not, but it makes you bristle regardless, and unsaid retort sits heavy on the tip of your tongue. 

You don't like how he seems to effortlessly see right through you, how he toes a line between impish charm and disconcerting arrogance and unpretentious amiability. It makes you unsteady. Lost while standing inside your own home. You've been backed into a corner, herded there willingly, shoved there by a subdued snapping of teeth and eyes that don't seem quite right. 

It's too much, being held under his stare, standing as close to him as you are. You can smell the night on him; subtle and pleasantly honeyed from the pollen of blossoms, earthy with dew and humidity; there's the light tang of salt too, sweat and something you can't quite place, but it's severe like the traces of coins that have been left behind in a tight fist. Like copper or iron. Dust and ancient soil. 

It makes your skin crawl. 

You need a distraction, something to keep your mind from losing sight of itself and giving under the weight of your own discomfort and panic. You need to distract him too, it feels, wave something in his face like distracting a dog from lashing at your jugular in exchange for a fresh bone. 

But in a pattern that is swiftly becoming uncomfortably common, he knocks you off kiter before you get the chance to help yourself. 

"I don't think that old rag is doin' you much of a favor." 

Your brows pinch, your confusion evident as you try to make sense of what he's said. But just as fast you're able to connect the dots, much quicker with the dull, pained throb in your hand that seems to highlight his words in a burning scarlet. 

You can't keep yourself from looking down at your hand, tracing the tight bundle of fabric that coils around your palm and thumb like a worn, fabric serpent with your eyes. It's stained dark. The red dulled into a shade that nearly seems black in the murky, yellowed light. It's already coming loose. The edge that you had used to tuck into the rest of the clothe is beginning to slip, but using the one hand you had to fix it place had made it difficult. A few more minutes and a couple more twitches from your fingers and the poor bandaging you had done would unravel. 

"It's fine," you say instead. But when your hand protectively nudges close to your hip, that's involuntary. 

"Let me tighten it, at least," he offers. "The least I can do, as payment for the water." 

There's a gentleness somewhere in his tone that you don't trust. It doesn't sit right, it lurks and saturates his words, all sickeningly sweet. As tempting as the honeysuckle that used to grow outside your family home, the ones you'd pluck from the vine as a child, taking them as treats while you headed down to play in the creek that flowed in the nearby thicket. 

You've been tricked by pretty things before. Sweet sounding and tempting. Look where it's gotten you. 

"Really, it's alright." 

Surprisingly, he doesn't pry. Still, he doesn't quit staring. His stare seems fastened onto your hand, unwavering and fascinated, bordering on fervency. The glitter of the kitchen light reflects a fire in his eyes, shimmering in the dark pits of them. It's just another thing tonight that has you out of your depths, tugged down and far away from reason. This entire encounter has spread across so many different levels: he seems normal in certain lights. A laid-back traveler, just looking for a place to rest his feet. Relaxed until he's almost blithe. And that's what's so confusing. How heedless he is despite all the charm. 

Your skin crawls, nervousness shuddering in your bones. It's as though your wrist is tugged by a string when you nudge your wounded hand around your hip, hiding it behind your back. All out of the outlandish fear that he might reach for you. He seems akin to a dog tracking a strip of bloodied meat, following your hand until it disappears from his vision. And like a dog salivating, you need to distract it lest it lunge. 

"Have you ever seen the ocean?" you blurt. 

His brows perk at the question, the corner of his mouth curls, but the intensity that had been alight in his eyes seems to shift - redirect. It lets you draw in a breath that you didn't know you needed, just seconds away from becoming lightheaded. 

"There isn't an ocean in this country I ain't seen," he claims. He steps away from you then, backing towards the little dining table across the floor. His focus doesn't waver when his boots crush over the shatter glass, shattering the fragments into shimmering dust with his weight, the brittle pops and crunching peppers softly over the air. To you they sound violent, but he doesn't so much as acknowledge them as he slips the shoulder strap for his banjo over his head, lifting the instrument to lean it against the edge of the table.  He invites himself to sit, just opposite of the chair you had once occupied, like he belongs there.

"The Pacific, the great Atlantic. From sea to shining sea," he finishes in a familiar singsong rhythm, amused with himself and smiling. "I spent weeks harbored up on a ship once. Sometimes, late at night when I'm alone, I can hear the wood shudderin' around me. Groaning and moaning from the waves." 

It's almost conspiratorial, how he talks, though there's an unspoken invitation in his posture, relaxed, welcoming, thighs wide and spine slumped against the backrest of the chair as though he's sat there a thousand times before. It's as though you're the stranger now. Uncertain and delicate in a kitchen that suddenly doesn't belong to you. You're a phantom in a new space, lurking and banished to the outskirts while he observes you with a stare that's too disarming. Too calm, too wild simultaneously. 

"What's it like? Being able to travel like that?" You feel compelled to move closer, but your movements are still tentative as you approach the unoccupied chair. You don't remove your attention from him as you sit, watching him as though he might jerk forward at any moment. 

"There's hardly anything that compares to it. Free to wander wherever the wind takes you, just followin' after your own spirit." He finally sits his cup down on the table, now empty, and it hits the wood with a hollow thump. "And then I remember, that there truly ain't nothing else better than comin' home. That after being gone for so long, just lost and ramblin' through days and years, chasing after little more than a feelin,' the relief of coming back to the ones that love you the most is - well, it's religious. Better than breathin'." 

He speaks with something euphoric and distant. The tenderness and fervor of someone recalling a thing that's become lost but no less cherished. The passion he contains frightens a part of you, that flighty, uncertain part that jumps at shadows. But it's difficult to accuse yourself of being paranoid while he looks at you with the sort of restrained ferocity of a feral creature.  If you were truly a person that you could admire, you would have chased him out with a broom or a blade by now. And maybe you should do just that. The caution to do so has been weighing down heavy on you all night, and still, you can't manage to get yourself to act on that instinct. You can't keep yourself from being the least bit captivated when his eyes glitter with a passion and excitement that you haven't witnessed in ages. 

And you truly are entranced with how he's watching you. Staring as though you're some sort of cipher that must be understood. An artist staring down a slab of marble, mapping out the figure that resides somewhere beneath the stone. You aren't sure if you entirely enjoy it or not. 

"Have you ever felt that way before? Longed for something that's been taken from you? That you used to, but now it's entirely beyond you, jus' out of reach?" he asks. 

The questions suspend between you both. It's punctuated by the quiet. If you listen closely enough, you can catch the chitter of the crickets outside, but they're voices are muffled. Miles away. 

The inquiry is so outlandish that you can't help your laugh, as stilted and unsure as it is. He's still smiling, but he doesn't seem amused, entertained, certainly, just not as smug as he was before. There's a solemnness to it that could almost frighten you, as though the answer to the question is paramount, of the upmost importance.  You're pinned down in your seat. Terrified that you might answer incorrectly, as though this is some sort of test. All the while your mind chants to lie to him. Lie, lie, lie. 

"Of course not." You wrangle it out, muttered through a dry mouth, and now you're the one longing for a glass of water, though you can't seem to gather yourself up to fetch one.  What proceeds is an excruciating stretch of silence. A pause that spans over the kitchen like a chilled blanket, making you shiver despite the heat of the summer.  Once again you get the thought that he knows you aren't telling the truth. He knows, somehow, that you aren't allowing yourself to be honest, that there's a mountain you've erected between the both of you. 

You can't deny that it sounds tempting. You've dreamed of traveling, of packing up all of your clothes into a suitcase and vanishing into the night countless times, letting your mind drift up to the heavens to look down on every place you've ever dreamed of. Sinking your spirit down to cities that you'd never be able to see or touch or experience outside of books and paintings. You can only attempt to imagine what he may have discovered in his lifetime. The people who he's spoken with, the stories they've exchanged, the music they've shared. A hundred lifetimes in a single one.  Your vision drifts down to his left hand, idle on top of the worn tabletop, gold band encircled around his ring finger. It's lost its polish, gone a little dull from what must be years of being worn. He hasn't mentioned a wife once during this interaction, and you can only wonder if his she might be among the pair of friends that he has waiting for him up the road.  It seems typical that a man would neglect to mention that he has a wife at all while asking to enter a woman's home. You can't even manage the desire to scoff. 

"Don't you have family?" You pry, clasping your fingers together in your lap, smoothing your thumb over your nails and running it over the old cloth around your palm. You ignore the subtle sting when the fabric shifts the cut, but you don't think you kept the wince from your face. 

"Yeah, I've got family. If all goes well, I'll be seeing them tonight. It's long overdue" His voice is jovial, a sincere mirth shaping around his teeth in a visible expression of fondness. An excitement bleeding in alongside something that seems vaguely melancholic. Hopeful. Strangers with no clear description dance about in your mind, but if they're family of his, then they must be just as rugged and peculiar. You imagine dust smudged cheeks and fingertips worn from calluses, leathered from plucking and strumming musical strings. "It's been a long while since we've seen each other. Hardly feels real at all."  His expression goes a little soft and earnest, but you aren't able to share in his delight. Your too busy tussling with an envy that you don't recognize. It scatters across your sinew and nerves in a flash, as hot and bright and otherworldly as a lightning strike. You don't appreciate the guilt that comes with it, the confusion or the lick of self-hate. It doesn't belong with you. That jealousy doesn't have a place - it shouldn't. It seems impossible though, not to get all caught up in the brunt of your emotions. It would be easy to believe that this stranger isn't real at all. That you've manifested a vessel for the life you never got to live, the sort of ties and friendships you weren't fortunate enough to make. 

Colin lost his loyalty to you a long time ago. Or maybe he never had it at all. There was something about him that had seemed too good to be true, even way back when. Dahlia, his own cousin had seen it. Saw him for what he was. Warned you against him. Perhaps that's why Colin had shunned her out, nudged her back from the parameters of your marriage until she finally gave up and made a new life for herself up in Pittsburg.

A 'playboy' is what she had called him. All brawn and looks but nothing of substance, like a bit of candy. All sugar. But too much sugar does havoc on the body. It's unfortunate that you had to find that out for yourself. You still had time to set out for yourself back then and have all things your ever wanted. That's all too late now. 

It makes it horrible to have all of your wants echoed back at you. Reflected in a man you might never see again. It's as though the universe has dangled a trinket in front of your face, taunted a key before you to test if you'd reach for it. You clench your fingers tighter, threading them stiff in a lock as though it might keep you contained in your seat. The floor creak and groan beneath your feet. 

"That sounds lovely. Will your wife be there?" you probe. More of a slip of the tongue. You feel as though you've made an admittance that you shouldn't have. Your lips purse, sealing closed. 

His eyes glimmer in that odd way again. Catching light in an animal fashion. That ain't normal. That's not normal, is it? It makes you hate yourself as soon as you realize what you've asked him. You're certain that your mother is scolding you from her grave, cursing you for your poor manners. Humiliation stings at your cheeks, hot and damning, but the damage is already done.  "No, she ain't gonna be there." Is all he says, and the cold implications behind it is enough to make guilt turn to stone in your stomach. You can guess as to why she would be absent. Death or divorce, as rare as the latter is, but quite frankly, the state of his marriage and family affairs truly aren't any of your business.  "I'm apologize, I really shouldn't have ask-"  He leans over the table then, his chair creaking with the minute shift of his body weight as he crosses his arms over the counter. His teeth show in that good-natured smile that seems to be permanently displayed on his face, a flash of pale enamel - too sharp. "Are you lonely?" 

A chill seems to settle in with his words. Unwelcome and latching, gripping for whatever bit of skin isn't shielded by clothing. It stalls you in your seat, keeps you still and silent for a beat too long. You aren't certain how to properly answer. If you should at all. Quite frankly, it isn't any of his business at all. He's only been tentatively welcomed into your home, and he still conducts himself as though he is invited fully in your space, entitled to your honesty and situation. 

The anger in you - your exasperation with him - demands that you ignore him all together. To change the subject, maybe put him on the spot for a change - if that is at all possible. You know deep down though, that getting the upper hand on a man like him is a slim one. Men like him don't allow themselves to be bested. They throw their weight around, makes themselves the biggest thing in the whole room, sucking up all the oxygen until everything and everyone else dims out, starved flames. 

"Sometimes," you admit instead, gasping it out around a choked sound. Forbidden, lodged from somewhere in your throat.  He doesn't speak, but there is an unsaid question on his face, a gentle nudge for you to expand on it. He's leaving you to continue. To decide if this is something that you truly want to say. Somehow the choice of it all seems to make it so much worse. "Colin - my husband - works a lot. Long hours. He's rarely home. And when he is, he's . . . " He's mean, you want to say. As angry as a beaten dog. Lashing out at everything that moves, that looks at him the wrong way. And that thing is so often you. You can't make him happy, not anymore. There was a time that he used to admire you as though you were the prettiest creature he ever witnessed. That's all ash now. "He's usually sleeping. Or he spends his time somewhere else. Out with friends from work mostly." 

You don't know what to think of the stranger's expression. It sympathetic, understanding. There's a calmness in his eyes, though the friendly merriment from before hasn't dimmed, it's simply changed, become honed and tense as he falls silent.  He's steady as he observes you from the other side of the table. Unnervingly still, motionless. You can hear yourself breathing and the sheer realization of it makes you want to flee out of your own skin. You don't think you've ever felt so watched. Studied. Inspected. 

"I don't really mind when he leaves though. " You blurt it out in the beginnings of a nervous ramble. The need to fill the sudden quiet ripples up your spine. Makes you spit out your words in an anxious stream. "It's more . . . quiet. Peaceful. He works a lot. I'm sure you know how working men can be. All particular and all after a day of being on his feet. Can hardly blame him really." You pluck at your fingernails, curling your fingers together while your lips instinctively press up in an expression that you hope is convincingly relaxed.  You aren't sure why you're baring it all to this man. This knock at the door, a figure in the dark, a stranger at your table. Perhaps that's what it is. The comfort in knowing that he'll be gone long before the sun rises. That in a few short moments you'll finally urge him up from his seat and walk him to the front door, guiding him out into the night with a polite smile and a farewell. In due time, he won't be anything but a curious memory. A bizarre recollection that you might recall years down the road, distorted and strange. An odd man in the night, drifting along as bird perched on your windowsill might, spying into your house before fluttering away into the sky. 

There's a safety in that thought. You aren't ignorant to the insinuation hidden in your words. The implications they hold. If you were wiser, you'd might keep your mouth shut, but you can't stop yourself now. All pent up, restrained, left alone apart from the monthly trips you take to the grocery store, reduced to short, good-mannered interactions with the clerks. Brief, temporary, alone.  "What if I could help you?" 

You stare at him. You aren't sure for how long. A few seconds, maybe a minute at most, but the silence is disturbing. It gnaws at the reluctant comfortability that has settled between the both of you, fragile and cold and foreign like a sheet of snow. You aren't sure if you should laugh or scoff or ignore the comment all together. It's absurd that a man who had wandered up to your door, asking for help is now claiming that he would be able to do the same for you. His pants are worn from what's likely years of use, his knuckles are rough and there's uncountable number of miles on his shoes. He probably doesn't have much more than a couple dollars in his both of his pockets, and here he is, offering you salvation. 

He's earnest in his delivery. Unsmiling. Sincere. It's frightening because you don't know what to make of it. This doesn't seem to be some kind of play, and if it is then he's mastered himself fully. There isn't a hint of a smile or deceit. He's firm and committed, resolute in his proposition. It would have been more tolerable if this were a joke. There would be a punchline, a reason to laugh. That safety net isn't here. 

"How could you help me?" You can't cover the judgement in your tone, an inflection that would have gotten you nothing but pain had it been your husband sitting on the other end of that table and not the stranger; another row of bruises on your skin, mottled plum and scarlet and yellow with hurt.

The corner of his mouth quirks. Like he thinks he's caught you, shown you the light to something so much bigger than yourself. 

"How far will you let yourself go?"  

There's a challenge expanding out in front of you. A hurdle raising high that you've never jumped. It's intimidating, it's foreign. Once again, he's extending something out for you to take. For you to reach for. But this is much more pivotal somehow. It has you stuck, ensnared once again. Held captive within your own reservations and trepidation. Suddenly, this seems like some sort of pitch. A snake oil salesman waving a vial full of water and nonsense in front of you with the assurance that it's a cure-all. One sip of it and you'll be a brand-new person with a brand-new life.

Maybe it's the remaining remnants of a buzz that just haven't quite left your system, feeble but clinging, or maybe it's just the intrigue of having someone else to talk to. The relief of having another soul in your kitchen that doesn't belong to your husband, that isn't sneering or pacing about the house as tense and testy and as a pissed off as a junkyard dog. 

But this stranger is interesting in the same way that you can't help but entertain one of those traveling salesmen, but instead of a suitcase in one hand, he's got a banjo instead.

You've only had one drummer in all the years you've lived in this house wander up to your doorstep in the hopes of making a customer and fool out of you, knocking on your door and prattling on about combs and nifty pairs of scissors that would 'cut through fabrics like a dream'. How he had managed to take a look at your ramshackle home with its rickety porch and chipping paint and figured that he'd be able to make a client out of you is beyond your reasoning or imagination. 

You had wondered who he was. What paths in life had led him out in the middle of the sticks during the heat of the day, trying to sell useless wares; pins and lighters and needles. You could picture his life, a young kid that flunked his education or perhaps never had any at all and clung to the best means to make money. And now he's out catching trains and going from door to door in the hopes of squeezing a penny out of poor bastards that hardly have any at all.

That young man had been all nerves, sweating through his button up and stumbling over his pitch - no doubt a practiced one - while he struggled to keep your interest. But this stranger carries himself as though he has all the time in universe, as though you're the one who needs to impress him. You aren't sure how to adjust to it, the weight of his focus on you, heavy and evaluating. 

There's no consolation or support offered by the walls of your house. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever. A familiar feeling but never extended from the presence of a stranger. He's unsettling in a way that you've yet to grasp. A nervous ball has been lodged in the pit of your stomach since he greeted you out of the front porch, and it hasn't waned yet. It's been thrumming and prickling over your nerves, pooling deep, all wild and surging like the feral crack and blaze of lightning across heavy summer clouds.

You should tell him to go. To pick his banjo from where he's leaned it alongside the table and tell him to get lost.

But you know you won't. You would have done that a long time ago if that were the case.

There's an allure to him that can't quite be explained. A magnetism that's haunting. It isn't right, it doesn't feel normal. It's sinking under your skin, pulling on your bones and at your blood. You could blame it on the loneliness, but that doesn't seem right.

All you think of when you look at him is something's not right. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be in your house.

You tell yourself that he's trying to play you somehow. That he's some dumb hustler that's picked the wrong house. You're just as broke as him, if not more so, with only pennies and scraps left to your name.

Maybe that's what keeps you from dismissing this man all together. The twisted kick you might get out of pulling the rug out from beneath him - the promise of the satisfaction you might get when he realizes that he's spent his time trying to work money or means out of a woman who has neither to spare.

You could smile about it if you had the strength to. Maybe you're just bored, maybe the isolation of being trapped in these four, dying walls has finally caught up with you. Closed around you as tight as a pair of jaws because you get the wicked temptation to play whatever game he's set, to string him along and see where he thinks he might be able to take you.

Maybe that's why you find yourself speaking out, hushed as though it's some kind of reluctant confession, or a joke that you shouldn't be sharing.

"How far will you take me?"

You don't like the quiet that follows. The look of consideration on his face, the satisfaction that glimmers in his eyes. A wolf that's got its prey held between its teeth. You're choked, suffocating while you wait for those fangs to close in and puncture. Stuck on your seat while he watches you carefully from his side of the table, seeming miles away and too close all at once.

You seem to be toeing the line of something dangerous. There's a quality reflected in his eyes, one that you haven't had directed at you in a long while, and you nearly think that you might be imagining it.

It's heated, hungry, and you don't know if a man has ever looked at you in such a way. Not even Colin has, not even in the beginning.

It could be mistaken for raw lust, but there's an aspect about it that almost seems . . . God it almost seems violent. Glossed over but ardent, like a starved animal staring down a bit of meat.

You aren't sure if you should run or stay. More concerning that all of that is that you don't think you can run. Not now. Not with how your feet have seemed to stick to the floor again, gone all heavy limbed and immobile as though his gaze has turned you into stone.

"All you gotta do is trust me." That's his reply, cool and smooth toned. It's terrifying. All too soon you know that you're over your head.

He keeps you pinned down with that stare of his, held in your chair while he raises himself up from his; limbs shifting smoothly, water gliding over rock. And just like that you're watching a snake coil up in its hiding spot, body winding tight and tongue tasting the air while it braces for the strike.

The boards creak with his steps, the weight of his boot's thump lightly and hiss lowly with each drag of his footsteps as he moves around the edge of the table. The glass crunches under his boot and you nearly flinch. His eyes don't leave yours in his approach, tying you together while he consumes the distance between your bodies at a careful pace.

You've gone all breathless once he finally stops in front of you, his legs nearly brushing your knees as he looks down his nose at you. It's nerve-racking, waiting in silence for him to make a move, to say something, and it makes it terrible how you can hear your own heart racing, how you can feel it pitter-pattering in your throat.

For an awful stretch of time he simply stares. Quiet and still. It seems like another strange test; waiting for you to twitch so that he can lunge for you.

You don't. You're as motionless as a statue as you wait for him to do something, anything.

What you aren't expecting for him to do is to lower himself to the floor. The unexpected nature of it has you gasp, thin and surprised as he crouches down at your feet, slipping low until his knees make contact with wood, making it shift and groan from his weight. 

It's gone so quiet that you could hear a mouse rustling through the walls if there was one. Instead, you're doomed to listen to your own breathing, to hear the distant glide of the breeze shifting outside, the steady drip from the sink. But all of that fades out, dies into a useless background chaos when he takes one of your hands in his, the one bound in bloodstained cloth.

Now you truly do jerk, trying to pull yourself free from his grasp, just as an animal might try to rip itself from drooling, violent enamel, but the gentle clasp he has on your wrist turns firm. Long fingers curling tight around your flesh and bone, a vice grip. You're locked in place. "What the hell are you-"

"Easy now, I ain't gonna hurt ya, darlin'."

He smiles at you good-naturedly, as though he's placating you. He watches you as though this is normal - as if anything about this night has been normal.

It's unusual somehow, when his head tilts when he speaks. Something about it isn't right. Isn't human. Lacking fluidity and possesing too much of it. It's uncanny in a way that you can't place; a creature donning human skin with eyes that are too compelling, flat marbles glimmering in fire. Dark, bottomless, drawing you in with all the infinity of the night sky. Just two pools of black that glitter faintly; a pair of lights winking over ink.

Fire, your mind chants. Fire of damnation.

When his eyes flicker over your form, tightly wound in your seat, they leave scalding trails in their wake, burning underneath the shield of your dress.   You notice distantly that no warmth projects from his flesh. Even with the sparse space separating you both, a faint sliver, you can detect the chill that seeps through the fabric of his shirt, as though his vitality had been stolen from his body. Instinct itches at your hindbrain for you to do something. To resist (resist what?), to fight, flash teeth, claw and kick if you must. You do nothing of the sort.  You think somewhat dementedly that it's almost as though a corpse has wandered into your home and gripped you. But his stare is too lively, too impassioned to belong to a dead man.  Your tongue is dry, parched, rendering you voiceless as he smooths his fingers over the flimsy compress dressed around your hand. You can't manage to inspire yourself to speak when he plucks the bandage free and begins to unwind it from around you palm, the rejection dies somewhere in your throat. He does it slowly, tenderly cradling your wrist as though it were a wounded bird while he unwinds the old fabric free with a deft hand.  He doesn't look away from you once, holding your attention with the soft coos that have begun to spill from his mouth. A gentle stream of "Easy, we're almost done," and "Atta girl" that drifts over your mind in placid, hazy brushes. The tone of his voice has dipped all low, a smoky timbre that pours over you in a whiskey hue, buttery and tepid, dipping past your flesh to simmer somewhere past your ribcage.  And it soothes and placates your muscles just as alcohol would. The tension that had drawn you up tight and rigid ebbs away, relaxes as easily as hard wax held over an open fire.  It's intimate.  Undeniably so. The last bit of the makeshift bandage slips away, tugged free from your skin and you wince as loose threads in the fabric cling to the blood that's begun to congeal, tugged free only with a delicate pull from the stranger's hand. He hushes you when you hiss through your teeth, gritting through the sting that spreads across your palm in a smarting web. 

The wound is angry already. Inflamed around the edges of the gash, a deep, ugly red that throbs with a pulse of its own. You can't stop yourself from swearing, huffing it low within the strained base of your breath. You expect him to chide you for it; there's nothing more unbecoming than a lady lacking manners. Colin would have been keen to reprimand you for the slip of your tongue. Your body shudders from the memories of old bruises and welts, the lashings you'd taken on your rump. 

You almost flinch from the echoes of it, bracing to receive an admonishment. It never comes. 

You gaze up from the wound slowly, hesitantly glancing over the shape of the man knelt before you with a reluctance that you loathe to notice within yourself, but you can't manage to shake it. 

You don't meet the harsh stare of a person offended. There's no vehemence in his eyes for your transgression, no annoyance for a woman speaking improperly. His eyes are glazed. Glassy and distant, the sort of expression you see on drunks that are one too many bottles deep; rapturous, numbed to the world. 

He's barely paying you any mind, attention fixated onto your hand with a rapt fascination. Observing the wound, admiring the way that the blood catches that light as though it's the most interesting discovery. But there's a zealousness too. A detail to his stare that goes beyond intrigue and borders on a kind of mania. But that's not exactly right either. 

It takes a moment for it to click into place but once you recognize it, ice douses through your bones and sinew, seizing your body tight. Hunger. That's what it is. He's staring at it as though he's starved and longing to lick it up. 

Something damp drizzles across the heel of your palm, thick and cold. The press of it on your skin startles you out of your panicked daze. A gasp rips out of your lungs, thin and sharp when it snags inside of your chest. 

God - oh, God, he's drooling. 

You hardly believe what you're seeing at first but it quickly becomes undeniable. It's there, as clear as day, drool pouring from the corner of his mouth in heavy rivulets. The sort of slobber a sick dog might make, something rabid. Wet and smearing down the shape of his chin where it dangles precariously before dripping down to patter onto the floor below, and drop, drop, dropping on the palm of your hand. It starts to collect in a pool, blending with the blood that stains along the irate edges of the gash. 

There's no hiding your grimace. No swallowing down the appalled gasp of terror and disgust. It's a raw, animal panic that snatches you, tugging you back like a marionette on strings. You would have toppled yourself right over in your seat but the hold he has on your wrist turns ungiving, anchoring you in place. A rabbit pinned down by a serrated maw. 

The legs of the chair scream as they slip along the floor, stopping in place with a grating hiss when he snags you back down before you could flee. Wings clipped and earthed bound before you could even take off. It rattles you back into place, head snapping on your shoulders when he forces you still in your seat. 

He begins to hush you but it's no longer a comfort. It's patronizing, revolting to the ears and you fight against the grip he has on you, but now a manacle on your arm, it doesn't budge. 

"Shh, shh, shh, darlin,' I ain't gonna hurt you none." 

"Let go of me," you snarl, showing teeth that hardly pose a threat. "You best go and get out of here. Before my husband wakes - " 

"Oh, come now, you and I both know he ain't really here." 

He says it so casually and it's terrifying. Deep down you knew he figured you were bluffing, some unexplainable instinct in you urging that he was a lot more aware than he had let on, and like a fool you'd still ignored common sense when it had screamed at you. When it had knocked and wailed at you to turn him away. 

But to hear him confirm it is a humiliation all on its own. An insult to injury. 

He lifts his head then, an animal that's caught onto a scent and his nostrils flex as he draws in a heavy breath and huffs like one, tasting the fragrances on the air. It's a slap to the face and conformation simultaneously, all of those peculiarities that you've been ignoring, that your mind has been seeming to overlook all crash into you as his eyes burn in a demonic reflection. 

This isn't a man at all. This is a creature, a monster masquerading in human hide. You've heard stories before, whispered around the Delta, centuries old information exchanged from mouth the mouth and passed to willing ears, depicting creatures that wail and hunt in the night. It's why some paint the ceilings of their porches blue - a barrier between them and troubling spirits, meant to ward off and protect - folktales and ghost stories, you had called them. 

Well, unfortunately, a ghost story has wandered up to your door, and always the fool, you've let it right in. 

You don't bother battling with reason, there's no place for all of that here. Not now, while this man - this thing looks up at you with eyes that scintillate red, as bright as any fire, as crimson as the blood on your split flesh. 

His smile is one of brogue satisfaction, the pleasure a hunter would feel from having caught an animal in one of their traps. 

"It's just you and me now," he says. It's a punctuation, final. As though he's bent reality to his will, taken your fate in his hands and shaped it to a mold of his approval. And you let him, dumb and tricked, easily led astray by false fronts and pleasing smiles. It's an affront just as much as it is alarming. How you've been tugged adrift so simply, allowed yourself to be played by a simple disguise. 

And now this beast is inside of your house. 

"What are you?" You apply strength to your voice, but it's hollow, fragile around its fringes, ice thawed into mist. 

"You're savior." A response uttered without hesitation. Said as though it's an undeniable truth. 

If it's possible, you think your soul shudders and recoils in your body, shrinking away from his talk - downright blasphemous speech. A conman, a snake oil salesman, that's what he is. Some kind of test sent by God or the Devil himself, you aren't sure. Perhaps he is the Devil, or at the very least some kind of trickster spirit, voice tempting with that strange charm, the kind that sticks to your skin like a sap and drones in your ear in a smooth hum. 

You've heard how they often hide themself behind pretty faces, masquerading behind attractive guises to catch the ignorant unawares, and you've slipped into the razor teeth of his trap with hardly any resistance. 

"You can't save me," you shake your head, trying to slip your arm from his grip one last time but his hold remains persistent. 

"Of course I can. You asked me to show you remember?" His brows perk up, expression open and hopeful - vulnerable despite drooling, jaw damp with it. He's still on his knees before you, an imagine of submission, of seeking consent. You don't like how it makes the wedding band around your finger feel heavy and chilled, an uncomfortable pressure that seems too tight. 

"Just let me show you, like I promised," he offers softly. There's a plea on the fringes of his voice, delicate. His thumb strokes down the column of your wrist, smoothing over the impression of the bone that faintly lurks beneath your flesh, pausing along the thump of your pulse. Your skin prickles, heat sparking where his fingers touch, a sensation that's warm and sweet - sickeningly so. Nauseating in the pit of your stomach, and yet your mouth waters all the same. 

Something akin to anticipation coils inside of your chest, fluttering, alive. It's foreign, strange, and you find it difficult to try and shun it. It's instinctual to try and ignore its simmer, stuffing it beneath the anger and repulsion that turns in your stomach like an illness, but he doesn't allow you to ignore the ache. He holds your hand, locks his stare onto yours and forces you to confront the uncertainty settling across you, as fit as a tailored coat, smooth and fuzzy. Uncomfortably welcoming, molding across your person, inside and out. 

"Let me see where it hurts?" You don't believe you've ever heard a man beg before. Not while at your feet, but he certainly is. You get the terrible impression that you . . . might enjoy it, a perverse kind of satisfaction purring behind your ribs and it makes you shift in your seat as though it will help to shake the feeling off. It doesn't. Of course it doesn't. 

It doesn't make him quit staring up at you as though he's seeking absolution in your being. This isn't right. It must be a corruption against nature for some man - some thing to gaze up at you with the starved patience of a saint desiring solace. 

It's wicked. This is the temptation that you've been taught to resist, the resilience that you mother had done her damnedest to try and build within your marrow. Good women don't feel things like this, not for strangers in the night, not for demons that might possibly be posing as men. Especially not a married woman. 

You wait for a surge of guilt to crash over you, but when it does it's dull. Feeble. A pale sting in the back of your mind that's soothed away by the cool caress of hand along yours. He's hardly done a thing, and yet you can feel your determination wearing thin, the barrier protecting your will getting chiseled away at one breath at a time, turning brittle under the pressure of his stare. 

You have to gulp down an unsteady inhale of air, swallowing down your nerves.  "I shouldn't." 

That's not a no, and it should be. It's an excuse to your own ears, weak willed and flimsy. 

"Why not?" His head tilts on his shoulders while he squints up at you, analyzing the frequent rise and fall of your chest. "Holdin' out for your husband who's probably wet between some other woman's thighs?" 

You almost slap him, but old instincts stop you before your free hand could lift away from your side and strike his cheek. Lashing out's never gotten you anywhere before, still the itch to give into it never truly fades. You know that he can see the hatred burning in your eyes. Unlike your husband, his face doesn't contort from rage, he doesn't raise his voice to spew venomous insults, his patience remains intact, satisfied and deceptively sweet. 

" Don't get angry, get even. I can show you how to live without him." You can't get yourself to protest as he shifts closer still, nudging himself forward until your knees are only able to comply in giving him more space, spreading open to allow him room to wedge his body between your legs. It has the fabric of your skirt pulling taught and lifting up, threatening to give and slip over your knees.

It's purely indecent, revealing more skin that he should be able to witness. You can't keep yourself from reaching down to try and pluck your skirt back at a more respectable length but the way that he has your thighs wedged apart obstructs you from properly doing so, leaving the fabric to remain in place, creased and high around the shape of your knees. 

You can smell him like this, the night still clings to him, humidity and earth. You don't like how it sticks to you now, how he speaks of 'getting even,' of insulting Colin even if he won't be directly aware of the transgression. It's petty, perhaps disgusting how you long to give in. How curiosity sings against logic and urges you to relent, to see where this man with fire in his eyes and temptation pouring from his lips might take you. 

You've been in denial for a long time, you think, walking around with your eyes closed shut, pretending to see that parts of yourself that are ugly and ache and hate. You've always been the woman you were raised to be, holding your longing close, shutting it tight behind your chest, pretending that it isn't there. 

It's gotten you nothing but hurt and man who only touches you when he's raising his hand against you. And now he's probably a few miles away from home, swaying drunkenly on barstool while he drinks himself one bottle closer to an early grave. And this is what's set to be your life, isn't it? 

One day blurring between the other, smearing between weeks left isolated behind old wallpaper and smarting bruises. You know deep down that if you let this strange man win, let him get what he wants, then maybe you won't be surviving the night. You've heard that beings like this usually settle in taking your life in some way, regardless if it's by collecting your soul or sinking their teeth in until all that's left is bloodied remains, is inconsequential. 

You've always known that you were going to die in this house, at least now it'll be done by your terms. You've always been too afraid to take risks, too much of a coward to allow yourself to act, keeping your fantasies of escaping your life firmly trapped within your head. Abandoned and left for you to ruminate on, spinning around inside of your mind like a stunned bird flapping uselessly across the ground, trying desperately to find lift on damaged feathers. 

It's laughable that for the only time in your life, you've been allowed to know what it feels like to have control, though you know in your bones it's only the illusion of it. The stranger crouched between your legs could (will) surely kill you in a blink, snap the wrist he has clutched within his palm with the flick of his hand. It shouldn't thrill you, but it does. 

"Fine then," you relent, strengthening your tone with a confidence that you don't entirely feel. "Show me." 

His guise fully slips then, the both of you seeming to come to an unspoken unanimous agreement to quit with facades. You feel disgusting, allowing yourself to relent, baring the grimy parts of your soul to this demon in human flesh; in turn he grins, victorious. Shows teeth that aren't human, jagged and serrated, designed to cut flesh and tear. 

He drools and his eyes reflect, the gleam of blood-soaked coins. You've known now that he isn't human, but to see your suspicions so clearly confirmed, revealed to you so casually is as terrifying as it is reaffirming. 

"I'll make it all better, don't worry." You feel puffs of air brush over you from his words, drawing over your hand, ghosting along the cut on your palm. The wound throbs and stings from the chill of his voice, aching while he speaks into your blood as though he's making a vow, trying to imprint it into your being. 

Blood and his spit smears on your hand. It seems profane to see the blur of it so close to the ring on your finger. The sight alone has to be a sin, a perversion, but worse than all of that, you find that you don't truly care. The thought doesn't wrack you with guilt, it doesn't char in your gut, it rolls past you, as slick as any oil. Reason and morality begin to abandon you, leaving you behind to be a helpless observer as he lowers his face to your open palm. 

Fear shifts dim in your veins, unimportant, overpowered by the fascination while his lip's part and his tongue slips out to trace over your blood. You can hear the voice of rationality crying distantly, your psyches last resort to try and snap you from the daze of intrigue that clouds over you. But not even the burn of his tongue dragging over the split in your skin is enough to save you now, not even while your hiss through your teeth and twitch from the pain. 

The ruined nerves within the raw slice shriek, boiling hot from the press of his mouth. Your muscles bunch in preparation to tear your arm out from the source of the pain. Just as quickly, the urge nullifies, washes away from the look in his eyes. He watches you, seeming to gauge your reaction while he continues to lap at your blood. But that glazed quality is back in his stare, intoxicated, enraptured, lashes fluttering like he's consuming an ambrosia. 

You don't expect the groan that rumbles from his chest, though you probably should, a guttural, heavy noise that skips through his throat in a snarl - an inhuman noise that causes the small hairs on the nape of your neck to stand on end, goose flesh prickling on your arms and legs. 

"Don't pull away. Lemme see you." A gentle warning if you've ever heard one. Slurred from how he doesn't bother to remove his mouth to speak, smothering his face to your palm. He's hardly lapping at this point, unwilling to sacrifice the sliver of space that would require, instead opting to latch his lips around the laceration to draw in the scraps of blood draining from it, gulping and sucking like he means to drink down your very heartbeat. 

He curls himself closer, torso pressing into your knees so close that his head is practically in your lap, severing the minute scale of space between your bodies while he latches on to you with more conviction, holding onto your wrist with all the fervor of a disciple cradling a sacred object. 

Your jaw parts open, a revelation of your disbelief, a gasp stuttering inside of you while you watch. It's paralyzing, the constant pain and soothe of his mouth, the wet drag of his tongue curling and stroking. You can see his throat flexing; the thin gold chain draped around his neck catching light while he drinks down what must only be thin remnants of your blood. The flow had been previously staved off by the bandage, already congealing and turning thick to heal. 

He's groaning over what could only be compared to crumbs, a dog eating off of the floor, happy to gnaw the old dry bones given. A part of you uselessly attempts to convince yourself that this isn't real, an odd dream, or strange fantasy. That truly, you've swallowed down all of Colin's gin and drunk yourself into a stupor, passed out at the kitchen table and you'll wake soon, safe and sound. Untouched. 

You know that isn't the truth though. This strange man is here, kneeling at your feet, teeth too sharp to be normal scraping over the heel of your palm, breathing heavily through his nose, panting as though he'd die without the taste of you on his tongue. 

It's hypnotic. You've never seen anything like this in all of your days. Your imagination had never been inspired to create an image such as this and seeing it before you with your physical eyes has you breathless. Sparks scatter down your spine, pouring down to settle inside the shape of your hips, molten, honeyed, a shock of heat and stars that simmer between your legs. 

It should be insulting, shameful, the familiar heat coiling deep inside your belly, but the remorse doesn't have time to settle or secure itself, because he parts his mouth from you. A brief lull, a break from the sting and a strange glide of his tongue before he's rotating your hand around with his own. He descends just as quickly as he had separated, slipping your thumb inside his mouth to lave his tongue over the sliver of a cut slicing up the length of it, sucking on you the digit.  

His violent teeth trace over it, and he eyes you when the enamel grazes. You swear an unspoken, I could bite if I wanted to hangs in the humid air. It's twisted tight between you, a tense, quivering thing that hums while he cradles your thumb beneath his tongue. 

It's an indecent show, far beyond what is respectable between a man and a woman - strangers, no less. Then again, there hasn't been a single thing about this night that's been respectable. Your mother would swat you if she could see you now, pull you up by your nape and strike some decency into you. Prompt you to recite prayers until you lost your voice, until the words stung your throat. 

But shame is a faraway concept now. Diluted and vanquished from the fever spreading through your being, the calefaction building inside of you is poisonous, as steady and potent as any disease. 

Your thighs switch, muscles involuntarily squeezing to seek out a friction that isn't there, impeded by the wedge of his shoulders between them. Your cheeks tingle, humiliation waxing across your face when your mind, sluggish and hindered from the syrup that clings to your thoughts like molasses, processes what you've done. When you fully notice how your hips have begun to move on their own, subtly shifting on the seat of your chair, longing to raise and find something to ease the ache that's pooled between your legs. 

You're as rigid as a doll when you freeze, bunching your muscles up to coerce yourself back still on the seat. You can only hope that he hasn't noticed it, but you know that he has. There isn't a chance in hell that he hadn't seen you starting to hump at the air, as flagrant as any dog. 

You almost wish that he'd scold you for it, that he'd call you out for the degenerate that you are. He doesn't. He does look at you though, watching curiously, staring with eyes that see you for what you truly are but don't judge. 

Still, you can't keep yourself from apologizing, a hushed whisper of a thing uttered out on humiliated lips. The need to rectifying the wrong ignores that he's much more debased, polluting you slowly, drinking your blood from an open wound.  "I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me." 

It's only then that he removes his mouth from your thumb, slipping his mouth from it with a damp pop! He shakes his head, not a silent admonishment but a confirmation of sorts - the apology isn't necessary. He licks his lips instead, cleaning up the drool that's sapped around his mouth, as though even the faintest pieces of you, small scraps and thin iotas deserved to be savored. 

He laps at the pad of your thumb one last time, like a parting kiss, before he trails his lips over heel of your palm, just outside the damaged flesh. It's as though he can't bear to part, inhaling deeply to draw in the scent that clings to your skin, the fragrance of blood staining the angry slash. 

You aren't expecting him to say your name (I didn't give him my name, you note distantly, thoughts distorted under fog. Haven't said it once), you aren't anticipating the reverence it's spoken with either, the tenderness, candied between his teeth. It shocks you immobile, confuses you into silence. He regards you - sees you entirely, you know that now. He watches like he's picked you apart, slipped past your flesh and rummaged around in all your parts, traveled from the fringes of your soul and all the way down to the pit of it, and equally delighted and sympathized in what he's seen. 

It has you naked while you sit fully clothed. Vulnerable and exposed within your own home. 

"He don't treat you right, does he." It isn't really a question. It's rhetorical, an observation. For perhaps a moment too long it takes a while for it to click, for you to make sense of what and who he's referring to. But once it all does, weak threads tug together, connecting under the inert pace of your mind, you can only stare at him. Voice stolen, snuffed out. 

It's as though he well and truly knows, as though he's carded through your memories, felt the strikes of an open palm and closed fists himself, tasted the echoes of violence and agony held within your veins. Perhaps he has. You've heard of the power that flows in blood, it's uses in practices. In spells and prayers, blood vows, pacts made and forged by blades to flesh. 

You aren't certain of what he is. Some sort of demon sent to prowl about the earth, a starved spirit that preys on the weak, either of those could be true or false, so it shouldn't surprise you that he was able to peek inside of your soul through the passage of your blood. That he's witnessed the reflections of your life, learned your name all from drinking you down with his tongue, but it does. The possibility of it unsettles you, curdles inside of your marrow, makes your stomach roll with nausea. 

It's wrong - this is wrong. This entire night has turned bad, unnatural, mangled and warped. He isn't meant to be here. He shouldn't be in your home; you never should have invited him inside. And yet your jaw remains a steel trap, containing your fears and opinions inside on a shuddering breath, just as it always does. Rendering you voiceless, compliant, the same as when Colin comes home in a mood, set on seeking out an outlet in your flesh. 

You stopped fighting years ago, the fervor for survival dying inside of you, a forgotten thing. 

You shouldn't enjoy that this unnamed man from the dark, this otherworldly traveler has seen the worst parts of you. The secrets that were supposed to remain hidden, the horrors you've kept close. What happens between a man and his wife isn't meant for the attention or council of others, it's a private affair, and yet he's peeked inside of you. Seen more than Collin ever will, forever set to be ignorant to how much you loathe him, how you wish that God would finally answer your prayers and strike him dead. 

There's been countless nights where you've sat across from your husband at this very table, hardly able to sit from the welts burning your ass, raised and white-hot, hellfire on your flesh. All while he perched directly across from you, unaffected by the sting on his right hand while he ate and partook in the dinner you'd spent hours making for him. 

You would dream that he'd choke on it. That the mouthfuls would catch in his throat and he'd collapse onto the floor in a suffocating heap, looking up to you with a plead for mercy glazing over in his eyes. Asking for the empathy that he's never shown you. 

"Men such as him deserved to be beaten within an inch of their lives."

It snaps you from your reverie, your fantasizing like the crack of dead branch splintering over a knee. 

There's a danger that lurks in his tone, sinister and coarse, the inflections enclosing on the sound of a growl. You swear the noise of it reverberates throughout your skeleton, it thrums up the nape of your neck, itching, clawing, phantom fingertips skirting over your scalp. His eyes are still burning, alight with the depths of hell, scorching, consuming. It'd be easy to believe that his body has been hollowed out, a vacant shell captained only by the flames of damnation, seeking to burn and corrupt. 

Maybe you were just easy kindling. 

"But I'm gonna make it alright," he presses the plush of his mouth to your palm again, a cloying glide of lips. "Let me kiss it better." 

You don't get to object or agree. There's not a second to process the salacious nature of his words because he lies to you. He doesn't kiss - he bites. 

It's a blur. A contorted smudge, grease besmirching a fine painting; he pounces forward, lithe and too quick to be tracked. And then teeth sink in, parting meat between the fine, daggerlike points, puncturing tissue and sweet flesh with a brutal mouth. Liquid fire douses across the heel of your hand, the one already damaged by the slice of glass, previously soothed by the sweep of his tongue. 

You cry out, from shock, from terror and agony. A shrill wail that cuts and chisels at your quivering ribcage when it pours from your throat. You writhe and heave in place, a rabbit caught in snare, struggling to hoist yourself out of your seat. You don't know if it's possible to feel betrayed by a man you don't truly know, but the sting of it blossoms regardless, violent and fatal. 

The chair wobbles beneath you, feet dragging across the floor with a shrill scrape that sounds like the call of a wounded animal. Despite all of your flailing, he doesn't budge. He's latched onto you, hand secured around your wrist in a vice, jaw locked onto you as though his teeth have become one with your being, enamel suturing to the bone beneath the damaged sinew. 

You try to strike him with the arm that's still free, but he takes that one too, clipping it down before it could be brought down upon the crown of his head. Gripping it within the steady clasp of his fingers, monstrous talons raking over you as they curl around the joint of your wrist to render you immobile. 

Tears blur and crystalize along your waterline, unshed but no less distressed. It's difficult to see past the watery film they leave in your vision, silvery wisps and hazy shapes making up what's visible, but you can still understand him through the distress. He's clutched onto you, still kneeling but just as selfish and persistent as any parasite, throat bobbing as he gulps down the blood that flows abundantly from where he's bitten. 

His thumbs caress you, elongated now, spidery and sweeping back and forth in motions that are meant to conciliate, but it only rouses more anger, more dread. You feel tricked even though he's been nothing but honest with his nature, drooling and flashing vicious teeth at all night. You were the one who tricked yourself, allowed yourself to believe that he wouldn't turn them against you. 

This is what happens when you allow strays inside of your home, expecting kindness instead of a snarling maw. 

Maybe a part of your soul recognized the death in his eyes long before the rest of you did. Maybe that's what you truly wanted. The solace of it, the release. 

He drinks and drinks and drinks. Filling his mouth and his belly while your head fills with fog and stuffing saturated with wine, inebriated and weighed down. Your skull lolls on its neck, suddenly heavy, too much to bear and your chin dips down towards your chest, giving you no other option but gaze down at him. An unwilling observer of the saliva and blood that slips past the seam of his lips, threading through your twitching fingers, soiling the gold hue of your wedding ring before it all drips and drops onto the floor in a rusted combination of blush and scarlet. 

It would be easy to assume that you've passed on already with how lethargic his bite has turned you, his gluttonous eating diminishing the blood in your veins gulp by gulp. It guides you into a sensation so dreamy, so airy and delicate that it feels as though you've slipped outside of your body and begun to levitate, but you know that you haven't. 

The view you have of him still kneeling before you, mouth fixed around your hand confirms it. Your limbs belong to a doll, motionless, unable to move, the connection between your brain and body having seemed to be stretched wide apart, too far for thoughts to travel. 

Limbs fill with sand, useless, unable to function from the fatigue that drips through your body and pours down your ligaments in a paralyzing pulse and boneless thrum. Something is taking root, sprouting where his fangs puncture you. Its seeps inside of your bloodstream, tingling, bubbling within vessels, sugar glazing across nerves. Working through your system, intrusive, an alien element that was never meant to join inside of your body. But you can feel it, you know that you can. Spreading, altering, searing and soothing simultaneously, rendering you stationary. 

He's a rattlesnake. Curled up in the grass, visible only until it's too late with fangs that kill. His venom's inside of you now, reaching depths beyond your understanding, altering tissue, destroying you from the inside out. 

He removes his mouth from you with a heavy sigh, one of relief. The kind of noise you let out after a long day of great labor once you're finally able to rest your feet and feed the ache in your belly. 

He bestows another kiss to the gash he's left behind. A gnarled wound, deep rows made from the rip of sawtooth fangs, torn over the cut from the glass. This kiss isn't sugared; it doesn't make that longing side of you swoon beneath his lips. You can't forget your rage, not with his mouth now glistening with the red of your blood, flickers of gold shimmering across the damp, reflecting from the light above. 

"I know you're mad at me," he answers, as though it's enough. A proper excuse and not an insult - a mockery. "I can see your anger, and I don't blame ya for it. But this - " he lifts your wounded hand, still cradled inside his lithe talons - "This is how how we're gonna get you better. How we save you from the man who was meant to keep you safe. You aren't gonna need Colin anymore. Not now, not ever again." 

You don't want to hear it, don't want to listen to the lies he spews, but the sound of his voice spirals and twines inside your ears in a that smoky drawl. Too hypnotic for his perversions. Your body yields all the same. You tell yourself that it's only the venom that no he doubt possesses that has you going lax, turning malleable despite the hatred that still lies in your heart, but you don't know if that's the case anymore. 

The truth seems murky now. An uncertain, undefined thing, and you're not certain if it ever existed in the first place or if it was always just a fairytale you told yourself for comfort. 

It doesn't help that he's staring up at you as though he's seeking your forgiveness, eyes wide, brows furrowed in a guilty pinch. The image of culpability, of remorse seeking forgiveness. It has you so transfixed that you don't feel him place your injured hand down inside of your lap, and you don't entirely register the glide of his palms cupping the outside of your thighs, honed points of his claws trailing over the supple skin, daring to slip just the scantest inch beneath the hem of your skirt. 

A suggestion, a request. 

He only deserves your denial. Your refusal. He's repulsive, a monster performing as a man, lurking around the shadows while you were vulnerable. And now here he is, still at your feet, the implication of obscene desires evident on his face. Behaving as though the proof of his deceit isn't torn into the flesh of your hand, blood trickling to stain the fabric of your dress. 

He's selfish, having injected the venom on his teeth into your veins. You're too dazed to physically reject him, inebriated fumes seeming to warp inside of your skull, fuzz brushes within your fingertips and toes, as though you've been encased within a perfumed mist. Though you still have enough clarity to cling to your animosity and pride, as tattered and useless as it might be, moth eaten paper clutched in a quivering grasp. 

You should cling to your righteous fury, your disdain, and yet it begins to slip. It grows brittle, tainted by the persistent warmth that remains between your thighs. A constant manifestation of your want that hasn't waned, not even when he'd sank his teeth into you. 

He must see the war on your face, the conflict. Because understanding shows on his, patient and lacking negativity. 

"I told you I'd kiss it better, didn't I?" 

"You lied." You don't spare him your indignation, glowering with all the visible loathing you can manage. He doesn't waver beneath it, as resolute as mountain pelted by the ferocity of a summer downpour. 

"I did," he agrees easily.

And you hate how something as simple as his admittance is enough to mollify some of the hurt and outrage storming inside of you. You're just as starved as he is, desperate for an escape, an exit that you'll only have in death. If you had something to live for, perhaps you'd find the will to fight. Maybe you'd generate an impossible strength and turn your teeth on him instead. But you don't have the resistance in you anymore. Sometimes you wonder if you ever did. 

"Let me show you I'm good for my word." His head bows, low enough for him to press the point of his nose to your knee, separated only by the thin cut of your skirt. He observes you from there, shadows spilling over his face, crimson smoldering from where peers he up at you. "Let me ease the ache." 

And you are aching, aren't you? Your body is buzzing, a humming livewire, something ancient and primal creeping up from the base of your spine. A ghost, an apparition, alive and singing with primordial promises and impulses that merge with the venom in your veins. It twists together, a confusing merge until you can't tell which symptom is a product of which, an ouroboros of heat that rides off the back of the haze clouding your head. 

You've never felt like this. So consumed. Turned inside out and left wanting. The loose fit of your dress is too tight, clinging to your hips and breasts in all the wrong ways, uncomfortable in a way that it's never been before. Your nipples brush against the material with each inhale of your lungs, annoying and tantalizing all at once. 

You're outside yourself, unable to recognize who you are as a need that you've never experienced rises up, seeking and frenzied. It's worse still because you aren't entirely sure if you can blame it on his influence, the infection that must be spreading and ravaging your body. It's terrifying to think that venom might have only induced or invigorated the desire that was already there, heating it until it could finally give and bubble up to the surface. 

Something in you breaks, snaps beneath all the conflict and pressure, the ceaseless tug between morality and longing. It could also be that you're tired of resisting, of holding yourself back from the lust coiling inside of you like a serpent. It could be how he continues to look at you, a little pathetic, devout. A worshipper at an altar. 

It's instinct and surrender concurrently. 

You allow yourself to settle against the back rest of the chair, hearing it creak softly from the weight, getting comfortable. Not once do you tear your attention from the man in front of you, not even as you reach down with your uninjured hand, using it to pluck at the length of your skirt, gathering it up to pool it on your lap. 

You don't know where this sudden surge of boldness has come from. Where the confidence that allows you to spread your thighs wide has developed, and why it's chosen now of all times to reveal itself. But it's empowering, stimulating. 

His own focus drops down between your legs, watching while you reach down to hook your fingers beneath your undergarments. You're both silent while you slip them down your thighs, gliding them down the hitch of your knees. You don't have to work them down the rest of the way. He does that for you, cutting them free from your legs with the sharpness of his claws. 

You feel them fall to the floor, useless, tattered. But you can't pay that any mind, not while you spread yourself open for him. You've bared yourself completely, and the caress of the satin air gliding across your cunt makes you crudely aware of the arousal that's smeared down the inner cushion of your thighs. 

You're soaked and aching, splayed open like a whore that's been paid, and he looks everything like a creature that's tore itself from the bowels of hell. Long talons raking across your flesh, elongated, boney fingers trembling with fracturing self-restraint, blood - your blood - blemishing his face in a stain of carnage. 

And yet you've never wanted a man as much as you do now. Not your own husband, not even when you were young and he was still tender towards you. Your fantasies then had been rose-tinted, spring blossoms and intimate embraces. Nothing as carnal as this. An animal creeps inside, snarling, vile, rippling beneath the cage of your ribs, contained only by bone and lungs. 

He stares between the apex of your legs as though he's been entranced. A hint if drool begins to drain from the corner of his mouth again, teeth flashing as he parts his lips and inhales in a greedy gulp of air. 

He's breathing you in, you realize, scenting your cunt in a disgusting display of hedonism. 

It doesn't repulse you like it should. You think you're too gone for reason to properly reach you now, floating on a high of intemperance and indulgence. Despite the temptation you know that if you go down this road, give him permission again that he'll mark each and every part of you - if he already hasn't. 

You don't know what might become of you, but you can already feel yourself changing. The exhaustion weighing you down grows heavier, dipping you closer towards a dark warmth that mimics the welcome of sleep, but it's too distorted and peculiar to be something so innocent - unusual, cold. Skeleton fingers. You assume, down in the furthest parts of you, the pieces that just know things, animal instincts, that it might be death coming to collect you. 

You aren't sure if there will be another side to great you. If you'll still be entirely you or not once you cross over it, or if you'll be just the same as him. A perversion of nature, of the soul. The venom must have done its work, set in too deep, because you no longer care what lies ahead of you. You can only think of now, of the drooling fiend wedged between your thighs. 

"Go on then," you prompt, reclining further. Draping yourself along the chair, unabashed, spread open. "You said you were going to set it right." 

He grins, wicked and pleased. He remains in place for only a second, just long enough to offer a gratified "Yes, ma'am" before he's leaning over and burying his face directly between your thighs. There's no teasing or playing, no unnecessary intention to draw it out to frustrate you. He gets right to it, dipping his tongue inside the entrance of your cunt, stroking it inside to gulp you down his throat as though it's holy water and he means to cleanse himself from the inside out. 

He eats you like he's still starved. A bottomless pit, cursed with gluttony. You couldn't have anticipated the fervency behind his hunger - not for this, at least. It has your spine bowing already, hips tilting up to catch the friction of his mouth and he groans, contented like he's the one being fucked. As though the pleasure is eating him alive and not you. 

Your jaw drops with a breathless sigh as your head rolls back to thump against the top edge of the backrest, body conflicted between going completely lax and basking in the steady drag of his tongue or allowing yourself to grind and chase after his mouth; greedy, wanton. 

The point of his nose catches on your clit, the rounded shape of it pressing onto it just as he effortlessly finds that spot inside of you - the same one that Colin always struggles to reach, probing at you with inept, impatient fingers. He doesn't struggle at all though, and the dual points of pleasure make you melt, thighs twitching while you roll yourself onto the rhythm of his tongue. 

It's messy. The combination of his saliva and your arousal is wet on your flesh, besmearing down the swell of your ass. You can hear it when his tongue splits you open, rebounding softly across the close walls of the kitchen in a lewd melody. The damp smack of his lips moves up to draw around your clit; a coarse, sloppy noise induced by the steady pulse of his tongue. Electricity skirts down your nerves and ignites inside the foundation of your spine, ravaging you with heat - lightning striking the earth in a thunderstorm. 

You can count on a single hand the number of times your husband has had you like this, an event arising only in a blue moon when you managed the confidence to request it; treating your pleasure with a detach responsibility. There was never any effort put into the curl of his fingers or the glide of his tongue. He approaches it with about as much enthusiasm as a chore, as though it's an obligation that he was unable to escape. 

Always clumsy, incurious. It never failed to make you guilty, weighing down your shoulders with an adamant shame, wracking you with humiliation and remorse, until you simply stopped asking it of him. It's what a good wife would do, after all. 

This though is shared ecstasy. There's no air of burden or indifference surrounding the man currently kneeling at your feet. He does so with passion you've never been subjected to, enthusiastic in a carnal way. Burying his face deeper as though he intends to suffocate himself with you. 

Though you wonder if a creature such as him bothers with an earthly requirement like breathing. 

You should be repulsed with yourself. This entire encounter, as unnatural as it is, goes against everything you've been taught as a self-respecting woman. Your wedding band is still on your finger, chilled and heavy despite the humidity and the balmy temperature of your skin. Another man is gripping onto your hips with claws, mouth on your cunt while he fucks you with his tongue, jagged teeth lightly grazing over tender flesh making your knees shake. 

It's obscene in every sense of the word. There's a high chance you're going to hell. You can practically feel the flames already, licking up your back, burning within your gut like a furnace. And yet you don't care. 

He's seen your thoughts, relived your memories like they were his own, slipped inside of your limbs and felt the scale and variety of your emotions. It's sickening how he's witnessed you in your most vulnerable stages of life, seen the worst of you from the reflections of your blood. There's nothing left to hide, no barrier to protect yourself under. 

It shouldn't excite you, it's horrid, invasive . . .  intimate. But there's something thrilling about a person observing the worst facets of you, the insecurities and the sins, the parts you've tried your best to repress and remaining unaffected, unbothered.

(Probably because he's so much worse.) 

Perhaps it's the blood loss giving you lightheaded delusions, darkening around your vision in a hazy vignette, or the venom infiltrating your body and soul, but you think that you can feel him too now. Twisting and invading through the map of your brain, singing in your blood to spread with the lethality of a disease, embedding down into the center of your bones where its deep and rich with life and marrow. He's in your soul too, he has to be with how something in you cries out, equally in spiritual terror and hedonistic elation. 

A wind that isn't real caresses over you, full of the scent of dew and fruitful earth, damp soil, the distant salt of far-off tumultuous water - waves, cresting and rushing. It's a land you don't recognize, but you know it now. Know it better than you know yourself, even as you see the impressions of it through another's eyes. 

Sights and sounds cocoon around you, vivid, vociferous, phantom touches of experiences you haven't personally endured pour across your body, a surge of mirages - of memories not belonging to you, expanding, stretching out years beyond your comprehension. A lucid, dramatic mosaic. You can taste his years on your tongue, like an aged wine, ancient, enduring. 

Whispers crowd your skull, fluttering about you, ceaseless, persistent, uttering a tongue unheard of to your ears. A throaty, rhythmic cadence; circling and persistent echoes that layer and overlap upon each other. Ghosts caught in different shades of emotions, some humming gentle tunes, some raising in blood curling shrieks, agony, terror; faint curls of laughter rising and falling in their mirth. You smell smoke, taste ash on your tongue, feel a terror and heartache that guts you down the middle. 

Something shifts above the rest, the silver flash of a fish gliding beneath the ripples and dapples of a stream, elusive and quick. Darting away before it can be caught. Scales slipping through an unsteady palm. You try to concentrate on it, try to pull it forward into something tangible but the pleasure distracts you, swelling and subsiding, a constant cycle of and bliss, repeating over and over again, unraveling you at the seams. 

He doesn't stop, doesn't give you time to breathe and process the sensations of it all. He's eating you alive, in each and every sense of the meaning. Taking you in, slipping little pieces of you inside of him, tunneling himself within you in turn, nesting, bridging you together until it all starts to become a little clearer. 

That one word becomes more distinct, shadows slipping back with the illumination of a midnight sun, silver scales brightening in the dark: stars crystalizing to spell names, uncovering false identities; faces he's claimed, lives he's taken, names he's stolen. Whispering them over and over, but one rises above the others, persistent among the mob, demanding, longing to be know. Chanting in the command to be spoken.  

It's right there, dangling on the edge of your consciousness, just out of bounds, suspended there as though to tease. A glimmer of gold peeking through mud and red earth, smudged in centuries, tantalizing. Each letter reverberates through your bones, lighting sparks along your nerves, the memories held with it cauterize, leaving a mark on your spirit that can't be seen with the naked eye. 

Longing undulates, the impact of a cold stone breaking water, an emotion so raw you nearly mistake it for your own, but it's far too ancient. A wound that spans years long before your making, still bleeding, gouged and picked clean, torn wide. A carcass hollowed out of all that it's made of, yearning to be filled, to have the appeasement of warmth and touch. But it's grown teeth, become violent, feral. A hatred, a starvation that's rabid, frothing at the mouth to infect. To tear when the prey isn't willing, forcing the resistant into compliance. 

Forcing just as violent hands willed it into acceptance. A hypocrisy. 

You nearly sob from the brunt of it, crushed under the agony of it, the devastation, the horror. The logic within you - the part of your being that seems to be dying off with the rest of you - attempts to swim and find the surface of reason, but the light never comes. 

His tongue glides over you, the point of it swirling around the shape of your clit in a succession of enticing circles before alternating into steady flicks that turn your thoughts and will into vapor. Dissolving, salt in murky water. His palms smooth down your hips, talons tracing down your flesh like he's tempted to leave marks; the sting blazes down your flesh from the fine points of them, and a twisted sort of pleasure scatters beneath their razor-sharp tips. 

He counters the subtle pain, dropping his mouth open to pulse the muted chill of his mouth around your clit, dousing you in bliss from head to toe. He gets greedy, apparently not close enough despite being shoved face first against your cunt. He grips your thighs, lifting them to hinge your knees over his shoulders, using the angle to shove you closer with a harsh jerk that almost has you slipping out of the chair entirely. 

Your hands fly up on instinct, raising to steady yourself and they find the crown of his head in your blind reach for an anchor, fingers threading through the sweat-damp tresses of his hair in a steel grip. Your injured palm screams from the pain of it, the pressure searing up the wound, but you can't manage to rip your palms from him, and he groans in the response to the tight clasp you have on his scalp. But it's from pleasure, not pain. 

You can feel yourself dying, fading around the edges, energy draining from you in a steady flow. You think your heart is straining inside your chest, pumping in vain on the meager flow that still supplies your system; the pathetic scraps that he didn't drink from you. 

You should tear him away from you, toss him to the floor and demand that he leaves, but you know that that opportunity has come and gone, snuffed out as a flame on a wick, a hot coal dulled to charcoal. You're already dead, you know that now, and when you wake up again, either minutes or hours from now, you wonder what kind of monster you'll make. 

A ruined, damned imitation of your current self. Unfortunately, you've always been tricked by pretty things, by decorated promises and rosewater words. You've cursed yourself once again, once with a ring and vows, and a second time with blood and teeth. 

Your fingers flex in his hair, split with the opposite desires to pull him away and bring him closer. You're between the rift of it, drawn in a limbo while your body squirms beneath his mouth, seeking out a bliss and reprieve from the onslaught of his tongue, but he's relentless. He doesn't let up, doesn't allow you a second to breathe or think, to gather a thought and center yourself. 

It's ceaseless, almost brutal in its ecstasy, tracing over you with a fervor and practice that you've never been pinned under. He's steadfast and calculated in his determination to bring you over that tantalizing edge. You're almost afraid for it to be over, horrified of losing the bliss that pulses over you, as molten as liquid fire. But more potent than anything is the fear of what comes after this ends, the promise of eternity looming over you with disturbing consequences. 

You think you've always longed for death. Yearned for the finality, the release, the embrace of it. And now that it's come to collect, smelt your desire on the air like a scent, infected your bloodstream with its venom, regret wells up inside of you. But it's come too late, you can't escape now - if you ever could. You've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it. 

"Remmick." 

It leaves your lips, thoughtless, odd, tasting ancient. Strained on a thin whisper, a beg for mercy or a request for more, you can't tell anymore. 

He answers you with another groan, not bothering to remove himself from as makes his next plea, purred out between licks on a throaty sigh. His eyes flicker up to look at you from his place between your thighs, two small flames flickering in the dark, drawing you in. "My name sounds pretty comin' from you, darlin'. Say it again for me." 

He seems determined to stir it from you, not waiting for you gather the breath to speak it yourself, he seeks to draw it out of you himself. His hands slip up, roaming over your body in a rapacious sweep, not stopping until he finds the shape of your breasts beneath the material of your dress. He doesn't waste a second to grope and feel, massaging his fingers over the fat. Your spine arches to meet his palms, seeking out more, pressing into the weight of his hands for more. 

You don't entirely register the shrill sound of fabric tearing, a thin hiss across the thick atmosphere. But then you feel it, the tepid skim of air drifting across your chest, pressing down upon your skin in a soft caress. 

You have to force your head to roll on your neck, the weight of it beginning to become too much, exhaustion creeping up on you makes your neck feel as though it's as weak and loose as a string. Your chin tucks against your chest, nudging close to your clavicle while you watch him - Remmick, your brain laggardly recalls - fondle and pluck at your now bare breasts. 

He's torn your dress, split the material right down the middle with his claws as though it was made of paper. An admonishment is right there, scathing and ready to be said, but it gets choked behind a moan. You can feel him grinning, the impression of his smile on your skin, the flash of his teeth grazing over your cunt. His hands are everywhere now, your breasts, tracing your ribs, smoothing over your hips and thighs, clinging over you as though he's memorizing your body, desperate to touch each and every part of you. 

He's inside of you in a way that no other could be, stained across your soul, minds merged together in an inseparable link. You can feel him too, the inside of him. As though you're sitting within his body. It's distant, fuzzy, but the press of the floor against his knees is on your own, textured and hard; you can feel the smooth plains of your body beneath his palms as though his hands are yours, stroking across yourself all while your fingers remain rooted within his hair. 

It's out of body, unnatural, but the doubled sensations is damning. You can feel his pleasure, the taste of yourself on his tongue, earthy and rich, the salt of your skin, subtly sweet in an aftertaste of powdered sugar. It creates an endless loop, an echo that's rapturous. You know that he's hard inside of his drawers, aching and throbbing, pressed up tight against the seam, getting off on your pleasure like it's his own. 

It makes it impossible to escape, overwhelming in the most delightful, terrible way possible. Your breaths come out quick, shuddering from your lungs in a steady rhythm of heavy panting, pitching and keening in the air. He's got you right on the edge, a burning wick, heat sparking and thrumming, smoldering into something dangerous and debilitating. 

You can't keep yourself from chasing after it, hips rolling, grinding yourself across his face and he seems all too eager to let you use him for it. His lashes are fluttering like he's actively resisting the urge to let them slip close, all so that he can watch you hurtle closer to your pleasure. 

It isn't now that you've noticed that you've been chanting his name, repeating it with the fervency of a newly learned prayer. His expression is smug, eyes shifting in the dark, a reflection of contentment and ego. 

You've never heard of a man getting off on someone else's pleasure, feeding from it so explicitly. Not like this. It's like he lives for it, hanging on the twitch of your thighs, the rise and fall of your breasts, the wet smear of your arousal glistening on his lips. And he has you right there, balancing on the precipice. All you need is a small nudge, a light push into the chasm below. 

All you can feel now is him, all you can hear is the both of you, the thrum of his pleased groans humming across your cunt, the messy, lewd sounds slipping from where you both meet; his tongue splitting you open, languid and hungry. His nose nuzzles over you, brushing along the apex of your thigh when he tilts his head to gently draw one of your lips between his teeth, sucking lazily to savor all of you. 

It's the first teasing thing he's done, parting from where you directly need him the most to skim his mouth over you, tracing it along the tender skin of your inner thighs. He nips and sucks where he goes, but he soothes the stinging just as quickly, dragging his tongue over the smarting to ease it with the chilled temperature of his spit. 

"Remmick." It's something akin to a reprimanding hiss and a needy whine. 

You hate how familiar that sensation is. The feeling of having the rug pulled out from beneath your feet, the promise of bliss being snatched out from your hands before you could bask in the brunt of it. You've been here a million times, worked up to ecstasy, tasted it on your tongue only to have it extinguished, lost on talentless fingers - by a husband that doesn't even know how to use his cock properly. Not for you, at least.  

You could sob or curse from the frustration of it. Your fingers flex with the temptation to shove him back right where you want him, but he hushes you again, head shaking just the slightest, holding your vexed stare with his pleased one while he leans down, placing a kiss just above your clit. His hands travel down as a pair, one on either side of you, drifting down to cradle the swell of your ass, holding you in place while he slips his thumbs along your cunt. 

You can't help the way you twist on the seat, instinct and worry spiking in you from the proximity of his talons held so close to the most intimate part of you. He silences your concern with a coo before you can even voice them, that patronizing sound that unfortunately works on you. Your muscles go lax, turning malleable as he spreads you open further with his thumbs, splaying you open in a pornographic display. 

You feel the old bruises there too. Still fading, reminders of Colin's last punishment, only just beginning to fade. It makes you nervous, disgust and hesitation bubbling in your gut, but Remmick doesn't allow you to ruminate on it. That new, strange connection between you hums, coming alive with a delicate caress, and that sliver of trepidation vanishes as though it had never existed at all.

"I got you," he murmurs gently. 

You can feel Remmick's devotion and lust trickle through you as if it were your own, burning and lecherous, gentle and worshipful, smoldering inside of your bones - in his. It's beautiful. It's horrible. 

"Don't worry. If I tease you, it's on purpose." At first you assume it's just arrogance, a man's confidence, but your dying mind gradually connects the dots. The realization that he's seen your memories - lived through them - catches up to you, and you see the comment for what it is. A subtle dig at your husband. A crass insult aimed at Colin's struggles with bringing you to orgasm. 

"You ain't gotta worry about your pleasure with me baby." 

That's all he says - his reassurance - before he starts right back where he left off, mouth fastening over your cunt, tongue licking over you in a persistent pattern that has stars and galaxies diffusing and streaking across your vision. It's as though he's never stopped. You're right back at the point that he had you off in, already burning, body on fire as though you've been doused in syrupy warmth, honey left to heat on a stove. 

He seems to double his efforts, going at it like he has a point to prove, and you're already splitting at the seams. You're wanton, coming undone, nerves lighting up to set you on fire. Pressure builds in your gut and your muscles drawn up tight, body winding up in anticipation while bliss and sugar washes over your palate. It's a euphoria that going to be crippling, winding back a loop, constantly recycled between the connection that's still tethering and strengthening between you and Remmick. 

You can feel him, and he can feel you, and it's overwhelming. An entire ocean dumped upon your head, a current pulling you under to pour inside of your lungs, suffocating you. Choking you on until you taste it. 

Suddenly it's on you. Too quick for you to anticipate. Cresting, churning, building, lightning beneath your skin. 

"Remmick -" You try to warn him, a plead for him not to stop, for him not to ruin the high blazing over you, but all you manage is a pathetic moan, forced out on a gasp. 

He must understand you, must feel your need, hear your thoughts in his head, because he doesn't change his pace, doesn't alter the lap of his tongue or the brush of his lips. He keeps it steady, persistent in the cadence he's built. He guides you through it, holding onto you with his hands beneath your ass, keeping you secure to his mouth, chasing after the desperate roll of your hips as you cling to and seek out the rapture of it all. 

The brunt of it rips through you, tears you open from the inside out. Guts you with pleasure until it's all that remains inside, molten, simmering, consuming you with ecstasy that blurs across your vision and blinds you; darkness and constellations rupturing in a kaleidoscope. 

The only thing to guide you through it is the press of his head beneath your hands, the grip of your fingers on his hair, clinging on to the damp tresses as though the hold might save you; the sound of his panting rising up alongside yours is just as wrecked, just as wild. All of it rings across that strange bond connected between you, singing and echoing between your minds or souls, or both, you aren't sure, but it feels infinite. Webbing, uniting, fusing, over and over and over until it seems eternal. 

He hasn't stopped, you realize. Hasn't let up, hasn't allowed the pleasure to crest over you and ebb. It as though he's determined to remain this way forever, keeping you beneath his mouth, tormented and loved by it. 

You didn't realize that your eyes had closed until you're willing them open. A simple action that takes more effort than it should, but the blood loss and the venom is doing its work, and the warmth soaking in your limbs, settled in by the blaze of your orgasm has all but sapped you of the fumes of energy you had left. Renders you all but limp and useless, unable to do anything else but watch as Remmick continues to subject you to more, gliding his tongue over you, grinding his nose on your clit. 

He looks just as blissed out as you must, eyes glazed over and drunk, hair mussed from your hands. Far too intoxicated for a man who's only been eating you out. But then you notice it, the frantic but subtle jerk of his hips, grinding into a friction that isn't there, riding out a pleasure that he shouldn't feel. It dawns on you suddenly, the severity of the connection between the two of you. 

He must have felt when you had cum. Felt it as his own, scalding and vicious beneath his skin, and his own body had reached its peak that same moment yours did. And now he's greedy, desperate like a mutt. An animal that's been spoiled, fed a proper meal and now it's ravenous. Insatiable and starved. 

He doesn't stop. He keeps his hands on you, secures you underneath his mouth and doesn't cease or pause in feasting. He must realize you're watching, feel you staring down at him through the bond maybe, because his lashes flutter open, vision lazily flickering up to take you in as you stare at him in shock. 

"Can't blame a man for gettin' off when you taste so good." He answers, voice slurred and smoky, drugged on you. "You're just too sweet." 

Everything fringes on too much, but he keeps going, pushing you to your limits. You're left to endure all of the sensations, sight, sound, the feel of him on you, inside of you. It seems impossible to recall how many times he built you back up that debilitating elation, hellfire and indulgence. Bringing the both of you to orgasm over and over again - twice more, three times, four - you aren't certain. 

They all merge into the other, pouring and intersecting, crisscrossing into an infinite torture, consumed constantly, expanding into something that the earthly flesh isn't meant to experience. 

You only know when it finally stops. A reprieve. A gasp for air after being held underwater. The kisses he peppers across your thighs bring you back to reality, escorting you down into your body, slipping you within the place of your weary bones and sweat-slick skin. Your chest heaves, lungs making an effort to cling onto oxygen, thighs quivering with the exhaustion of someone who's ran miles. 

You can feel it, really feel it now, the influence of death slipping over you, a chill on your skin that prevails in the sticky heat clinging to the air. It isn't far off in its lurking anymore, it's imminent. A hitch in your breath, a delay in your lungs. The terror that awakens within you is a primal thing, frenzied, a determination to live, unfortunately that resolve sits host inside a body that's half dead. One foot already out the door, standing on the other side. 

You could sob, cry out from the hopelessness of it, but you can't manage a sound. Not with how weak you've grown, heart overexerted, growing lethargic inside of your chest with only pitiful drops of blood left to pump. You've been bled out, and the one responsible for the bleeding caresses you like you're breakable. 

"Don't fight it now," he soothes or warns. Still knelt between your legs. He cups them both, removing them from their places balanced on his shoulders, settling them down until the soles of your feet settle back on the floor. Moving you tenderly, like one would something cherished. His eyes glitter still, red hued, stunning and hideous in the dark. "You're gonna feel so much better when you wake up. It's all gonna be so much better, you'll see. For all of us." 

He grins up at you, still kneeling, but there isn't an ounce of control in your grasp. The bond you have already sings, twines across your psyche, joins you to him, but you know that it's yet to take full effect. You aren't dead yet, and once you are there will be no escape for you then. You'll be a part of him fully, as attached as any other limb, a unit in separate bodies; sewn to him by fragments of your spirit, threads from your blood. 

Death is inevitable in two ways now: death of the body and of your soul. A wish you've always made, sent out to the universe and now it's answered the call. Delivered a creature to your doorstep and now he waits at your feet, carefully fixing your skirt back down around your knees, as considerate as any lover should be, but his eyes show the truth. A truth that you had been too stupid to see. 

When you slip off into the threads of death, as welcoming and soft as a blanket, you drift off with a life that doesn't belong to you playing across your vision. Facsimiles of a land and a time you've never witnessed before. Faces, voices, horrors and cruelties; old memories, unwelcome and unfamiliar, take root as though they're yours, clicking into place right alongside images of your own life like they'd always existed there. 

A cuckoo's egg in a blue jay's nest. 

And it's with your heartbeat dying in your ears, inspiring a final flicker of consciousness, a weak death rattle of the mind that you think of regret. The regret of opening the door when that knock had sounded from the other side. 

You see his eyes burning in front of you through the film tainting your vision, the same color of the blood on his lips - your blood - perched at your feet, as loyal as a guardian angel; a scavenger waiting for a weakened animal to finally collapse beneath its own weight so that it can feast on the remains. 

It all begins to vignette, shadows elongating, crowding around you, desperate for flesh. 

Those eyes are the final thing you see. Burning, horrid coins, unwavering in their observation of your trip to the other side. Pretty, otherworldly, grotesque. 

You never should have answered the door. 

[gldrushh]

GUILTY AS SIN? | DRABBLE

→ PAIRING: brother in law!jungkook x widowed fem!reader

→ WARNINGS: oc being a damsel in distress, emphasis on distress, mentions of insomnia, handyman!jk because he got us all feelings things, oc driving him insane (quite literally), whipped jk, flirty jk, unholy thoughts (can you blame her?), suggestive, kissing, fluff, domestic moments

→ W.C: 5.5k (whoops)

→ A/N: request from a cutieful ask that I accidentally deleted 😭😭🤦‍♀️ I'm so sorry anon I really hope you see this!! This was the ask for more context or if anyone's curious (I really hope I did it justice): "since you said you accept requests for drabbles etc.-or did you or am i making this up lol- i’d like to request a little thing. since i want y/n to understand how jungkook fits her life so easily, i imagined a little scenario in my head where something in her house gets broken and she can’t fix it by herself and gets it even messier and everything, and jungkook comes in and being a perfect handyman. Like literal husband material. Would fit in her house so well omg don’t judge me please you know what i mean right? Maybe she’ll get struck by a lightning and finally understand how jungkook is perfect for her and stops treating him with only little’s “i don’t hate you”😭😭😭 like helloo that is the most husband thing ever don’t live apart live together!!! plus handyman jk got me feeling things in my head ngl lol don’t judge me I’M SORRY HAVE A NICE DAY!💌"

Fridays didn’t feel like Fridays anymore.

There was a time when they smelled like oven-warm pizza and the kind of laughter that made your cheeks hurt.

They arrive tranquilly now, slipping in like a breeze through the kitchen window, brushing past your ankles before vanishing again.They were tired, you presume. Dragging their feet behind a week’s worth of lectures and papers, staff meetings and half-hearted nods in break rooms with bad coffee.

Tonight is no different. You return home just shy of the rise of moon, the university car park already thinning out as you sling your bag over your shoulder, exhaustion gnawing at the edges of your limbs. Your bag slumped onto the floor, missing its usual hook, but you didn’t bother correcting it. You barely managed to toe off your shoes when you enter inside, your mind already curled up beneath the comfort of your duvet, not asleep, but still.

The warmth here is a familiar fondle. The scent of coffee beans lingering from the blurry kind of rushed morning, a sweater thrown carelessly over the arm of the couch, your favorite mug turned upside down on the drying rack. You nudge your shoss beneath the bench for some dignity, and hang your lanyard on the little ceramic hook shaped like a leaf--a flea market find you told yourself you didn’t need, but bought anyway.

You tell yourself you’ll spend the night in. Maybe watch reruns of that one reality show where couples decorate homes under a tight budget, even though the drama feels scripted and the contestants are always suspiciously good-looking. You’re too tired for anything else. And sleep isn't exactly your best friend. Hasn't been for years and the slender orange bottles in the bathroom shelf only help so much.

But you'll try to make peace with it. You'll pour yourself some tea. You'll pretend to rest.

You shrugged off your coat and padded into the kitchen, your socks catching on the cool tiles. Your mother had sent a whole box of chamomile tea and though you had deemed the purchase dramatic and unnecessary, it had become a part of your routine, even had helped. Maybe not with the sleep exactly, but with the ritual. The motion of it. Perhaps there was something about the way the steam curled from the mug, about the soft floral taste blooming on your tongue.

You flicked the kettle on with one hand, digging through the tea box with the other, thumb brushing over foil packets and paper tags. You were just reaching for the mug—the one with a tiny chip on the handle, the one you never threw out because it had once been Minho’s favorite—when it happened. A sputtering hiss, like the dying breath of an appliance on its last leg. You freeze.

You pad toward the sound with the kind of dread that only adult independence teaches you. The overhead light flickers as you walk in—rude. You flick it again, squinting into the sudden brightness, only to be met with the absolute betrayal of your faucet spurting water like it’s trying to reenact a geyser, sounding alarmingly like a cough—if sinks could cough.

You turned, slowly. The faucet gave one last shake like it was shivering, then spat out a violent stream of water that shot sideways—directly across the counter and onto the floor.

“Oh, come on—!”

It happened fast. One second you were watching, horrified, and the next, you were slipping on the tile, a yelp caught in your throat as you stumbled forward, narrowly avoiding a face-first dive into the cabinet doors. Water sprayed in chaotic, unholy arcs, and all you could do was scramble for the towel drawer and grab anything vaguely absorbent to try and... do what? Patch it? Mop the mess?

The kettle beeped softly behind you, as if offended that you weren’t paying attention.

You drop to your knees, arms full of misguided hope and whatever towel you had on hand. You tug open the cabinet beneath the sink, only to be greeted with a far more dramatic leak than you were prepared for. It's not just dripping—it’s running, and you don’t need to be a plumber to know that water should not be forming a shallow puddle across your kitchen tiles.

Still, you try.

From what you learned from that one experience ages ago. Atleast it felt like it. The last time this had happened, Minho had still been here. Not that he was a great help. He had crouched down next to you, equally clueless, wearing an old college hoodie with the sleeves pushed up and a flashlight clamped between his teeth. The entire operation had failed in spectacular fashion—he had twisted the wrong knob, somehow made it worse. You remember him saying, “This is why plumbers make so much, sweetheart,” shaking his dripping bangs out of his eyes like a soaked retriever and you both ended laughing so hard you forgot to be mad.

You wedge the towel beneath the pipe, curse softly when it does absolutely nothing, and press your palm against the cabinet in frustration. It doesn’t help. “No, no, no,” In fact, the towel slips, sending a fresh arc of water across your shirt, soaking you down to the skin.

“Cool. Great."

The kitchen light above you flickers again. The universe, it seems, has a flair for theatrics.

And somewhere deep down, as water laps against the hem of your slacks and frustration coils behind your teeth, you think that maybe you should call your father but even if he dropped everything, it would take him hours. And any plumber worth their salt wasn’t showing up past eleven on a Friday night.They’d quote you something ridiculous and half of them wouldn’t even show.

You sat back on your heels and stared at the faucet as if it had personally offended you.

“I just wanted tea,” you said to it, as if it cared.

The towel slipped again. A fresh wave of water hit your calf.

You closed your eyes and took a deep breath.

When you opened them, you stood, sedate and careful, the weight of water squelching in your socks. The kettle had long since finished boiling, and the kitchen now smelled faintly of wet cloth and chamomile. It hit you then. Sharp, stupid, and far too late.

You were going to have to deal with this yourself.

You looked around the mess—water creeping toward the rug, the under-sink cabinet now a tiny swamp—and, you felt like stomping on the floor.

But you didn’t. Descions. Descions.

Instead, you walked toward the living room, your wet socks squelching softly on the floor like some small betrayal with every step. To your phone.The living room lamp glowed with its usual mellow burke, casting a familiar amber tepidity against the old armchair and the book you never finished last week.

You considered, briefly, knocking on a neighbor’s door. There was that older couple two houses down, always kind, always offering extra tangerines from their tree. But it was too late. Every window was dark. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people stayed up. It was made of quiet porches, retired teachers, and families who went to bed after the ten o’clock news. You didn’t know many of them by name.

Besides, no one young lived here who had a wrench or a better idea or just... two working hands and a sense of plumbing.. Not anymore.

Your thumb hovered over your contact list. You scrolled aimlessly at first, names passing in a blur—colleagues, an ex-classmate from grad school, your old roommate who now lived somewhere with palm trees and said things like “detox weekends."

You paused when the screen stilled on him.

Jungkook.

The last message between you was just hours ago. You tapped it open, heartbeat hitching like it always did when you saw his name.

Jungkook [10:03 PM]:

"I can come pick you up."

You had replied right before you clocked out. The university halls had been emptying, and his voice had played in your head, low and patient in a way he rarely was with anyone else. But you had remembered his mother’s voice too—her mentioning something about an urgent meeting, his father stressed, something about a time-sensitive deal.

So you had told him no.

You [10:04 PM]:

"I heard mom talking about some big deal tonight. Focus on that. I’ll be fine, I promise."

Jungkook [10:05 PM]:

"I want to focus on you, angel."

You’d stared at that one a little longer. Your reply had come thorough.

You [10:06 PM]:

"I’ll be okay. Just heading out now. I’ll text you when I reach."

Jungkook [10:06 PM]:

"Send me your location anyway, yeah?"

And you had. You remember the map loading. The little pin that showed you halfway between the library steps and the bus stop, your tired feet dragging. You had gotten home. You meant to message him.

You just… hadn’t.

And now you thumbed over his contact again, chewing the inside of your cheek.

Would it be selfish? What if he hadn’t wrapped up work yet? What if that deal was still unfolding across tense boardrooms and cigar-stale air, with his father pacing like a panther? You didn’t want to pull him away from it just because you couldn’t tame a faucet. You should figure this out alone. You could figure this out alone.

Your phone buzzed before you made a decision.

A message. From him.

Jungkook [11:40 PM]:

"Tell me you've reached home, angel."

Your stomach twisted. Guilt blooming like mold in the back of your throat. You opened the message and typed quickly.

You [11:41PM]:

"Yes! Sorry. I got in and just crashed a little. Long day. I forgot to text."

The typing bubble appeared immediately.

Then disappeared.

Then appeared again.

Jungkook [11:43 PM]:

"Live location. Again."

Your fingers hesitated. You frowned. That was odd. He sounded off. Sharper than usual. Not even the quietly protective version of him that surfaced on late walks or busy subway platforms. This was tight. Worried. Paranoid? You don’t wanna argue with that.

You tapped the map again, sent your updated location.

Your phone lit up again the second after, not even giving you the chance to type out and ask if he's good with his hands? (He is.)

Jungkook [11:43 PM]:

"I'm coming over."

You stared at the message. Read it twice. It was… certain. No question mark. No soft preface like he usually gave. Not like, “Should we stop by that bookstore again?” or “Feel like something sweet tonight?” No, nothing of that sort. He sounded definite.

You [11:45 PM]:

"Wait, now? Why? Is everything okay?"

Jungkook [11:46 PM]:

"It will be after I see you."

You sat back against the armrest, stunned silent for a second. And then, unexpectedly, your chest loosened. Not all the way. Not enough to erase the mess in your kitchen or dry your clothes or make you feel less like a walking soggy dishrag. But enough to let the weight shift, to let something else settle in.

You didn’t have to ask.

He was just coming.

You didn’t even get the chance to ask.

There was something wild and lovely in that. And you had no reason to say no.

If anything, your knees were starting to ache and the towels weren’t doing much and if one more cabinet decided to leak, you might genuinely lose it.

You padded back into the kitchen with an exasperated sigh, hair tied up in a lopsided bun, wet socks thrown in the laundry basket and sleeves shoved past your elbows. The faucet was still dripping—not a full-on spray anymore, but enough that you had to keep a rag pressed under it while kneeling on a folded towel, praying the water wouldn't reach the hallway. The bucket you’d shoved under the sink was nearly full now.

“Come on,” you muttered, gripping the wrench tighter. “Just cooperate for once, you stupid little—” The knock came—two sharp raps, low and firm. The kind that didn’t ask for permission, just announced itself.

You startled, bumping your shoulder into the edge of the cabinet with a muffled curse. You stood up too fast, nearly slipping on the wet tile again as you shuffled your way toward the door, leaving a trail of soggy towel behind you like the saddest version of Hansel and Gretel.

When you opened the door, the hallway light spilled over the man in front of you—and for a moment, all you could do was stare.

Jungkook looked… wrong. Not bad. Just undone.

His hair was mussed, not in that calculated, magazine-cover way but like he'd dragged a hand through it too many times. His under shirt that complimented his navy blue suit jacket real nice was half-buttoned, slightly crooked, and the faint glint of moisture on his collarbone made you think he might’ve walked part of the way in the rain without noticing. Or maybe he’d driven with the windows down. You didn’t know.

But it was his face that startled you most.

There were creases that hadn’t been there earlier. Between his brows, along the line of his jaw—like worry had clawed through the muscle. His lips were pressed into a firm line, but his eyes—God, his eyes—landed on you like an earthquake landing on calm soil.

You opened your mouth to speak, maybe to ask what was wrong, but he beat you to it.

“Jesus, y/n.” He crossed the space in two strides and hauled you into him.His arms came around you, sudden and firm and full.

He pulled you to his chest like he needed to feel you breathe. You didn’t move. Couldn’t, really. Your cheek bumped against his chest and a sound of confusion spilled out of you, the worn material of his shirt warm under your skin, and his breath stuttered above you. You wondered if he hadn’t been breathing right. You wondered why.

Your forehead barely brushed his collarbone. He smelled like wind and smoke and his usual cologne, but the sharp edge of it was dulled by warmth. You didn’t even know what to say at first. Your hands fumbled before curling into the fabric of his coat. Your heart beat a little faster. “Jungkook…are you okay?” you managed, a little breathless, a little confused.

He didn’t answer immediately.

You felt it more than heard it—His chest rose again. Slowly this time. Not panicked. Just… relief. You felt the faint tremor of it, the way he exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for too long. His hand at your back tightened, his other curled lightly around your shoulder, fingers flexing once, like he was still checking you were really there.

"You gave me a fucking scare." He rasped against your temple, low and rough like tension left him one muscle group at a time.

Your brows pulled together, breath catching. "What?"

"Your location glitched." His hand curved around the back of your head, his voice dropping to your ear. “Said you were halfway to some fucking bridge, then blinked out. You didn’t text, you didn’t call—” He closed his eyes for a second.

You blinked, contrition and some sort of realization crashing into your chest like a tidal wave.

His grip tightened as if remembering it. "I think I broke half the traffic laws in this city trying to get to you." he muttered, jaw clenching as he leaned his forehead against yours. “Red lights. Lanes. Might’ve clipped a side mirror. I don’t know. Don’t care.”

“Oh my god,” Your voice went small. “I—I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to— I thought I sent it properly. I didn’t mean—”

He looked down at you then, brows still furrowed, frustration still etched into his face, but it was laced with something softer. Quiet worry. A tension he couldn’t seem to shake off even now, not when you were in his arms and clearly fine.

“I thought something happened to you,” he said, quieter now.

You couldn’t hold his gaze for too long. The penance burned too hot. You ducked your head, pressing your face into his shoulder, cheeks going warm. “I’m so sorry,” you whispered.

“You should be.” he muttered, but one of his hands came up to cradle the back of your head. It took you a second too long to realize your fingers were still curled in his coat in an embarrassing grip.

Inevitably, you did pull back—just enough to catch your breath, to speak properly.

But his eyes didn’t leave you. They tracked you, unwavering.

And then they dropped.

His brows furrowed again, more subtly this time, like he was recalibrating. His eyes skimmed your form with a confusion you couldn’t quite place, until he paused halfway down, raising a lone brow.

You followed his line of sight and—

Oh.

Oh, shit.

Your dress shirt had soaked through somewhere along the way. You’d been too distracted, too frantic, to notice that the thin cotton now bore a dozen little damp spots where stray faucet spray had kissed your chest and abdomen. The fabric clung in places it shouldn't, half translucent under the low light, revealing the outline of the camisole underneath, and your cheeks went hot in record time.

Your eyes widened. You stepped back fast. “Shit—oh, god, the kitchen—” you breathed, half to yourself.You turned abruptly, feet splashing against the wet tile again, panic reigniting as the sound of dripping water resumed its dominance in your ears.

Jungkook followed. Of course he did. His long strides eating up the hallway carpet before he stopped at the kitchen threshold.

You, for lack of a better word, flung yourself inside and the sight that greeted you was even worse than before. The bucket was near overflowing. Towels had started slipping from their makeshift barricade. Water gleamed beneath the fridge now, threatening to reach the living room carpet. You cursed again, louder this time, and bent to wrestle the mop back into place even though it had already given up.

There was a beat of silence behind you.

Then Jungkook’s voice, dry and unimpressed: “What the hell happened in here?”

You turned your head, heat rushing to your face, your soggy sleeves dragging like guilty flags. "I didn’t mean for it to get this bad. The faucet handle cracked while I was making tea, and then it wouldn’t stop leaking. I tried to turn it off underneath, but I think the valve’s jammed or something, and then I slipped, and the towels weren’t enough, and—”

He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face now. Exasperation flashing over his features—but not directed at you, not exactly. More at the mess itself, at the helplessness it had clearly stirred in you.. "Baby."

"I know I didn't do great." You wipe your hands on your thighs uselessly.

He didn’t answer right away. Then—with that bone-deep steadiness you had come to expect from him—Jungkook moved. Sliding off his suit jacket with one smooth pull, the fabric whispering against itself as he tossed it over the back of a dining chair, careless in a way he never was in public.. His undershirt clung to his shoulders in a way that made your stomach tilt.

Then he undid his watch with practiced fingers, slipping the leather strap open before placing it gently on your counter, far from the puddles.Quiet. Like he had done this a thousand times. Like fixing your mess was just the next item on his list. The silver caught the light, but your eyes didn’t linger there long. They trailed upward. To his arms.

The moment he reached for the knot of his tie, you forgot how to breathe properly. He reached up, his fingers working the knot loose with one practiced twist, tugging the fabric from his collar slowly. His throat flexed as he did, and you felt something shift in your stomach. The black silk slipped from his collar like a sigh, and your eyes followed it. His sleeves rolled up.

That’s when the stuck breath made a movement. Stuttered in your throat.

Ink emerged from beneath the fabric-those familiar lines, curves, the dark threads of his tattoos curling up his forearms like they had grown there, like they belonged. They caught the light and your memory all at once. Your mouth went a little dry.

His voice low, almost careless, as he crouched beside the sink. “Where’s the valve?”

You blinked. “Um. Under—under the cabinet.”

The same hands that had once made a mess of you in entirely different ways, in stolen moments, now curled around a rusty wrench.

"You need to do nothing." He gave you a brief look over his shoulder. “I’ve got it.” I've got you.

You stared. Blankly. Still half-dripping, still overwhelmed. "Do you… actually know how to fix that?”

A small, sardonic huff left him, like he found your surprise kind of insulting. He looked at the wrench—smaller than his palm, honestly—and turned it in his hand before answering.

“One of our safehouses in Daegu had pipes older than me,” he said, voice low, casual. “No plumber, no hot water. I figured it out. Got pretty good at it too. Don’t act so surprised.”

"I'm not. I know you've been good with your hands." You're not being cheeky when you say this, and are definitely not filing away the movement of his hand as he runs a practiced palm along the copper pipe.

Jungkook glanced up then. His eyes looking at you again—his gaze heavier this time, traveling down your soaked sleeves to the water-darkened hem of your shirt that clinged stubbornly to the side of you, the faintest smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You sound like you’re remembering something, angel."

You turned quickly, heat crawling up your neck, your voice tumbling out too fast. “I’ll go change.”

Jungkook chuckled behind you. Low, deep, satisfied. Your silhouette vanishing behind a bedroom door with the softest click. He didn’t realize he was still listening for your footsteps until the silence settled in, heavy and warm and whole.

It was the first time in a long while that he’d been in your home like this. Not standing stiffly by the entryway waiting so he could steal you away.Not brushing fingertips against yours in a room half-full of people who didn’t know better. But here.

He let his eyes wander.

The place smelled like you. Something sweet, something quiet. A little bit like cinnamon and tea leaves and the faintest trace of your shampoo, clinging to the walls like memory.

His gaze drifted as he adjusted the position of the pipe, letting it drain into the bucket beneath. He didn’t rush. He didn’t want to. The metal pipe groaned as he tested the pressure, the familiar resistance grounding him. It was easy, this—manual labor. Straightforward. You tighten what’s loose. Replace what’s worn out. Drain what’s overflowing.

If only the rest of life were that obedient.

The photo frames caught his eye next.

They were perched on the shelf beside the kitchen door, slightly crooked from where you’d bumped them a hundred times, probably too tired to fix them. His knees ached slightly as he shifted for a better look.

The first was a wedding photo. Your wedding photo with his brother kissing your cheek. You were by his side, the most beautiful, your eyes squeezed shut, mid-laugh, a smear of cake icing on your chin.

Somehow, instead of jealousy, instead of resentment or guilt or the thousand other things he’d prepared himself to feel, what rose in him now was something fonder.

Before he could read more of the notes sticked to the fridge, you walked in, in softer clothes—an old cotton shirt that had seen too many laundry days and a pair of worn drawstring sweats that swallowed your ankles. Your hair was still damp at the ends from where the faucet had christened you earlier, but your skin was warm, your breath easier.

Your hands rubbed at your arms as if still chasing the chill away, but your eyes found him instantly. Crouched in front of the sink, sleeves rolled up, inked arms flexed in motion as he twisted the wrench one last time.

You watched the slow ripple of muscles beneath his skin, the way his jaw ticked in concentration, how his thumb brushed the valve like it mattered—like the faucet had personally wronged you and he was going to make it pay for its sins. There was something magnetic about the way he worked—focused, assured, steady like he belonged exactly here, doing exactly this.

“Is it… better?” you asked, voice soft, tentative, almost afraid to interrupt.

He didn’t turn, but you saw his shoulders relax at the sound of you. “Better than it was,” he murmured, tightening the last screw with a grunt. “Still leaking a little. I’m gonna seal the joint. Won’t be pretty, but it’ll hold.”

You nodded. And then you stepped forward without thinking.

“I can hold the light,” you offered. “Or the bucket?”

He blinked once. “You know I've got—”

Your shirt pooled at your wrists when you pushed up the sleeves. "I know."

He glanced up then, eyes catching on your legs first—his eyes always had a way of pausing before they moved—and then up to your face. A slow blink. A flicker of something unreadable behind his gaze. But it softened when you sank to your knees beside him, close enough for your thighs to brush.

He passed you the flashlight without a word, and you angled it as best you could while he unscrewed the makeshift clamp he’d used. Your shoulders brushed. His hand bumped your knee. You didn’t move.

Out of the corner of your eye, you noticed his gaze shift again—upward, this time. Toward the shelf by the kitchen door.

He was looking at the oldest photo. The one most guests skimmed over. Minho in the middle with his mouth wide open in laughter, arms slung around Jungkook and her both, pulling them close like they were parts of himself. Jungkook’s hair had been longer then, messier.

That photo had never made sense to others. Why he was in it. Why the three of you looked so stitched together. But you’d always known. Jungkook had been there. Not just in the periphery of your memories, but rooted in them. Always just close enough to feel like something vital.

He turned his head then, catching your gaze, that made the tips of his ears turn pink and averted his eyes back to the situation in his hands so quick, you assumed it was to hide the color before it got any more prominent. You suppressed a giggle. Cute.

You looked back at the photo, softer now. “That was the summer he dared us to eat all the ice cream in one sitting.”

Jungkook’s lips twitched. “You threw up. On my shoes.”

You grinned, head tipping back just a little. “That does sound like me.”

“Got it,” he said suddenly, wrench twisting one final time, the valve clicking into place. The pipe stilled. No more dripping.

Relieved and stupidly proud, you said. "You actually did it."

“I said I would." He confirmed.

"Just had to find the right valve. It’s mostly just pressure build-up now.”

You didn’t really understand what that meant, but you nodded anyway, watching his hands as they moved, shoulders finally sagging with something like satisfaction as he leaned back against the cabinet door and sank onto the kitchen floor fully, legs stretching out across the wet tile without care. His hands—damp, calloused, smudged faintly with sealant—fell to his thighs, fingers flexing once, then going still.

He looked… tired. In that content, bone-deep sort of way that follows after fixing something with your own hands. There was a smear of dust on his cheek, his shirt clinging to his frame in places from residual dampness. But his jaw was loose now, his brow no longer furrowed, and the sharp concern in his eyes had faded into something tamer.

You watched him for a beat longer than necessary. "I could make you coffee." You offered, gently.

His head turned slowly to look at you, blinking like he hadn’t heard right. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” you nodded, already rising to your feet and brushing off the knees of your pants. Pretending it's not a excuse to have him longer.

for a second, he just processed, like the idea hadn’t occurred to him. And then his lips curved into a lopsided smile. “Okay. Yeah, I’d like that.” Pretending he's agreeing not because that he'd get to stay around you more.

You moved through the space like you’d done a thousand times before—reaching for the coffee tin from the cabinet, setting the kettle to boil again (this time with crossed fingers), and pulling two mismatched mugs from the drying rack.

You poured the dark roast into one mug and the steeped chamomile into your own, then carried both back toward the floor where he still sat, one knee bent, arm slung casually over it, eyes trailing the edge of your bookshelf like he was trying to memorize every title. He looked so at home, it hurt a little.

You sank down beside him, passing him the coffee, fingers brushing, fleeting but lingering just long enough. He murmured a quiet "thanks, baby" and took a sip, eyes falling shut for half a second.

Your though dipped to his wrist.

The thread. Still there.Faded, frayed, stretched just a little thinner than it once was; all crooked knots and uneven loops, a charm shaped like a crooked star dangling lopsided from the string.That same dumb knot you tied when you were kids, tangled so tight neither of you could undo it without scissors.

Your nose scrunched. “It’s going to fall off if you keep pretending it’s not ugly.”

Jungkook glanced down like he didn’t even know it was there. Like it had become part of him. He flexed his wrist, the fabric barely clinging to the bend. Then he said, almost immediately. "It's not ugly."

You gave him a look. Is it?

Jungkook took a slow sip of his coffee. “A little angel once told me to never take it off.”

You rolled your eyes. “That angel was, like, ten.”

He leaned back against the cabinet again, looking at you sidelong. “She knew what she was talking about.”

You didn’t say anything to that. Just looked—really looked—and saw every year layered across his face. The boy, the teenager, the man. The moments between. And how maybe you weren’t so different from him.

His eyes slid toward you again, a subtle flick of attention like the tug of a thread. “What’re you drinking?” he asked, nose twitching, playful.

You blinked. “Hmm?”

He nodded at your mug, brows pinched slightly in thought. “That’s not coffee. I smelled it when you handed it over. Doesn't seem like mint, either."

You raised a brow. “What, are you some kind of tea sommelier now?”

"Just curious, angel. Smells like flowers."

You opened your mouth to respond. You really did. The words were halfway to your tongue—about how it was a new chamomile blend, how your mother sent it to you from some little organic store that also sold hand-knitted socks and lavender bath salts—but before you could speak, Jungkook leaned in.

And kissed you.

It wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t rushed. It wasn’t even planned, you were sure. His hand didn’t even touch you. He didn’t brace your face or cradle your jaw like he had in other moments-those aching, desperate ones.

Your breath caught-stolen in the way it always had been with him. His mouth brushed yours-warm, careful, lips parted just enough. You didn’t move. Couldn’t. Your hand hovered somewhere between your mug and your lap, suspended like your pulse.

His mouth was doing all the grab and push.

He coaxed yours open, suckled at your bottom lip like he was trying to draw the flavor from it. Tenderly sucking at your bottom lip before he bit it, just barely, like he couldn’t help himself.

A sound escaped you, half-breath, half-surprise.

He pulled back just a fraction. And when your eyes fluttered open, he was already looking at you with that maddening calmness of his, like he hadn’t just unmade you with his mouth.

“Chamomile,” he said, deadpan.

"W-What?"

He didn’t look even the slightest bit ashamed while licking the taste from his lips. "With a little honey. Suits you."

You scramed for coherence. “You're ridiculous.”

“And you’re flushed.” He smiled into his mug. "So pretty when you're flushed, angel."

You scoffed into your own mug, taking a long sip of tea you no longer needed to explain.

Fridays are forever changed. Perhaps, they are now for laconically returns and falling over people who never stop feeling like native land.

[xx-rabidpossum-xx]

Bruises from the Boar

Author's note: I had this idea and posted to a discord chat, turns out they wish for more. Hope ya like it<:}

Tag list: @thisuserislilsilly @incrediblethirst @druidwolf21 (idk who else sorry)

TW: mentions of NSFW, bruises, thoughts of death, angst/comfort

He was rough last night.

The thought runs through your mind as you wash yourself. The warm water eases your aching muscles, but were like a dull stinging pain on your bruises. The had blossomed while you were asleep, an array of red, blue, green and even purple litter all across your body. Indents of bite marks with scattered bruises along your shoulders and collarbone, as well as trailing down your body to your thighs.

Rubbing the warm wet cloth over your shoulders, hissing slightly from the pain, you clean yourself. Angron had already left before you had woken up. The feeling of his warmth being absent from your side was not something you expected to wake up from. He had usually left before you had woken up, he claimed once that it was easier so you wouldn't tempt him back to the embrace of slumber once more. Another time he claimed that his sons were calling to him and he needed to answer. Now it was, "I need to see what my sons are doing."

Wringing out the cloth, you add more soap to it and rub it together to get a frothy consistency. This time you started to work on your chest. He had nipped and sucked all over your body, but your chest had dealt the brunt of the damage. There were more green bruises around your breasts, showing that those were the oldest by far compared to the rest on your sore body. He didn't hold back, when he had ripped the dress off of you, he attacked your breasts first while ripping off your undergarments. You knew to not wear a bra, but when he saw it. It was like a boar finding a tuffle, excited and ravenous.

Rinsing off the excess soap, you stand up slowly. Looking down, the blotches of purple and blue that accosted your thighs. The were in the shape of handprints, slight scratches at the edge of each finger. He is usually rough, this isn't any different.

Stepping out of the vast tub, you grab a soft dry towel and begin to wipe the water still clinging to you. Patting the towel gingerly over the still freshly red and pink bruising. The memory of the night before rush through you as you pat down on a particular bruise, on your lower stomach.

Your lower body was limp, being held up only by Angron and his strength. His face was buried between your legs, lapping at your juices, occasionally biting at your inner thigh. Yelping in surprise, you try to lift your head to meet his gaze, only to feel him stop. A whine escapes your throat, "A—Angron please." You can make out from your blurry vision that his lifts his head. A heavy pressure is pushed on your stomach making you whimper. Tears started to stream down your cheeks again, this being the third time he has overstimulated you.

A sudden pain errupts from your lower stomach, just above your womb. A moan is ripped from you as he increases the bite force.

You were panting heavily. It was too much, he could tear you apart, spill your guts, chew through your stomach. The feeling of his teeth ripping apart your stomach to get to your uterus left you both aroused and terrified.

When the pressure was released, the tears kept rolling down your cheeks. A small wetness replaces where his fangs were. Lifting your head up the best you can, you see him licking the bite mark, kissing it every so often.

Shaking your head, you toss the towel away and make your way back to the bedroom. Carefully navigating so you don't overexert your legs. Opening the dresser, you choose the outfit that had a translucent feel. Everyone has seen me with bruises before, this isn't any different.

Walking out of your's and Angron's shared bedroom, you made your way to the kitchen. Passing by multiple serfs and marines alike, they don't look twice when they see Angron's handiwork across your neck and shoulders.

Whispers flew past you, some more louder than the others. "I'm surprised she's able to walk.", "Do you think she's broken yet?"

Down the corridors and hallways, you hear more hushed whispers. "He's getting desperate, next thing you'll see is a bite on her jugular."

More and more whispers, they started to not even hide their voices.

"Lord Angron will kill her eventually, she can't even walk without a limp most days."

It was true, looking down at your legs, you were limping. You had pushed yourself too much and now your legs were in pain, not even registering that they were in pain until someone pointed it out.

He's getting tired of you, that's why he was so rough.

Stepping into the kitchen, you request a nice breakfast, which was prepared with expertise and speed. Sitting down at the large table within a vast dining room, a few marines stand by the doorway.

Once your breakfast was served to you, the whispers started again, except this time you can pinpoint where they came from.

"When do you suspect Lord Angron's consort will be discarded?" "Not for a while now, he hasn't killed her…yet."

That made you almost stop chewing your food, you couldn't let them know you were listening. So you chewed your breakfast faster, faster you eat the faster you can leave. They have seen bruises on me, this isn't any different.

The whole day of walking, talking and attending various tasks, the whispers stayed hushed and you still listened. Anytime you had interacted with Angron, he simply responded with a grunt or a nod. He didn't look you in the eye, which made you slightly worried.

"Poor girl, I fear we will find her corpse one day.", "He must be getting bored of her soon. We'll have to find a replacement if this keeps up."

Kharn had noticed and stayed close to you when you were in the same vicinity as Angron, almost like he was making sure nothing would go wrong. You liked Kharn, he had warned you what life would be like, and saw you as a stronger person for facing those challenges head on. If you were any wiser, you would think Kharn was worried that Angron's consort wished for her to stay. Like a farrow watching over their sow.

But when Angron and Kharn had left you alone, the whispers started again.

That danmed phrase everyone does and doesn't say, "He's getting tired or bored of her." A small thought creeps from the back of your mind, maybe they're right. The nails might bite when you are in bed and that will be that. He'll bite you one last time and you'll just be another thing Angron breaks-

You slap yourself in the comfort of your own room. Sitting on the enourmous bed, with a thin dress on and covering your bruises with a healing balm, you think, He is different. He had cared for you and not once has he ever subjected you to the horrors of the butcher's nails. He always made an effort to steer clear of you when they started to bite. Everything he does is in love of you. He cares and cherishes you, you are more than a simple toy.

The door opens and your head whips around to see who was entering. It was Angron. You smile as you rub the balm into your upper thigh. "Hello my love", you say warmly. He closes the door and stands still. Staring at you. If Angron was anything like a boar, this would be it. Standing still, eye forward, stamping his hooves to the ground as a form of greeting, almost like he is ready to charge.

He slowly walks to you as you are sitting on the edge of the bed and kneels in front of you. Tilting your head to the side slightly, you set down the healing balm onto the side table. "Is something wrong, my love?"

Angron didn't say anything, but you followed his eyes. They were scanning the bruises. Heat rises to your cheeks and you attempt to move the blankets to your chest. "Oh, I'm just tending to these. They were getting sore and I didn't want these to get too bad. Besides, this isn't any different—"

"I hurt you."

You stopped in your tracks as you look at Angron. His hands were now on your thighs, gently caressing the bruises he had made the night before. A shiver runs up your spine from the contact. His hands moves up your dress gingerly, he wasn't in the mood for sex, this was different.

His hands moves your legs to one side as his face went to your dress-covered-stomach, and kisses it. Another shiver, his other hand moves and rests on your hip. He continued to kiss your stomach and moves down to your thighs. A small part of you was waiting for him to start devouring you, but it never came. His kisses trail upwards and to your chest. Your breathing was labored and your cheeks were flushed. Angron looks at your reddened face, moves one of his hand to it and holds your blushing cheek.

"I'm sorry." That seem to sanp something in you. The weight of the whole day crashes into you at once, letting a stream of tears run wild. Through your blurry vision, you can see Angron wear a faint look of worry. You felt his arms surround you and hold you close to his chest, the tears slowly streaming onto his clothing.

Through your haze of intense emotions, you could feel Angron kissing your head. He picks you up with ease and sets you more onto the shared bed. You both lay on your sides while face each other.

Angron still held you close, kissing your face and shoulder while apologizing. Every comment that was whispered throughout the day melted away from your mind as your beloved Primarch kissed each bruise he had given you. It was different, but in a good way.

[pudding-parade]

I'm thinking that I might try out @simspaghetti's TS3 Globetrotter Challenge, and when/if I do, I'm going to use @nilxis's Saaqartoq for the first stage of it. So, I wanted an as-authentic-as-possible Greenlandic Tempest preset to go with it. So here we are.

This preset is based on Ilulissat, Greenland, shown above, which is one of the largest towns in Greenland, though, being Greenland, "large" is very, very relative. I chose Ilulissat because it is known for its icebergs, and Saaqartoq has permanent icebergs in its water. The real place sits on the western coast of Greenland, above the Arctic Circle, so this climate is a true polar tundra climate. This means lots of cold, but less precipitation than you might imagine, because the poles are deserts.

This is a preset for use with the NRaas Tempest mod. General info about this project as well as installation/use instructions are here, and here is a link to the tag page for all the presets I’ve posted so far.

The download contains two files. One is a "default" version of the preset, which you can use regardless of the season lengths you have set. The other is a version which requires 12-day seasons to work properly. In that version, each season is divided into three 4-day "months," just because this gives more granular control over what kind of weather can happen when within a season. I made both versions because, if/when I do the challenge, I'll be using 12-day seasons for all the worlds, but I didn't want to lock everyone who might want to use this preset into that. So, you have choices.

For extra immersion when using this preset, I would recommend using NRaas Retuner to offset the seasonal sunrise/sunset times so that you have (sort of) 24 hours of daylight/darkness in the summer/winter. I'll put offsets for all four seasons behind the cut.

Download the preset here.

There's more detailed info about the preset behind the cut, if anyone cares.

Highest Temperature: 50F/10C Lowest Temperature: -5F/-20C

Overall Climate: Cold, but generally sunny and dry more often than not. It will only stay above freezing for entire 24-hour periods in the summer. During the spring and autumn, it can get above freezing for a time -- and it can rain or snow during those times -- but will always dip below freezing in the evening/overnight/early morning. It will stay pretty far below freezing for the entirety of winter, and any precipitation during that time will be snow. Summer is still cold -- So make sure you like your Sims' outerwear outfits, since they'll be wearing them year-round! -- but at least it stays above freezing. This certainly isn't a climate preset you want to use for growing things outdoors.

Snow: In the "default" version of the preset, it will only not snow in summer. For the rest of the year, there will be snow, and since the temperature will be below freezing during that time, that snow will be sticking around until the next summer. In the 12-day-seasons version of the preset, it can still snow in the first third of summer, even. Needless to say, if your game lags when there's snow on the ground, this isn't a preset you want to use. Fog: Fog is a common occurrence in the summer in the real Ilulissat, so fog is possible during the summer in the preset, too, and it's weighted about equal with rain, so it should happen fairly often.

Hail: Nope! Historically, Greenland (and the arctic/antarctic tundra in general) hasn't had thunderstorms and, generally speaking, hail requires strong thunderstorms. So, there's no hail in this preset. (But now? Due to climate change, the tundra occasionally gets thunderstorms, and they're very occasionally strong enough to produce hail. Yay. :/ )

Precipitation Intensity: Both the arctic and the antarctic are deserts, so while it does rain/snow in the preset, the duration of storms is set to be on the short side, with a maximum of 1.5 to 3 hours per occurrence, depending on the season. Rain intensity is set to be of only light or medium intensity, to avoid thunderstorms. Snowfalls can be of light, medium, or heavy intensity, with the highest chance of heavy snowfalls in the winter.

Additional settings:

Fireplaces that are upgraded to auto-light will do so on active lots when the temperature is 45F/7C or less.

Fallen leaves will be removed at the start of winter.

Insect spawners will not spawn in winter.

Annnnd, for those who might want to adjust their sunrise/sunset times for a more realistic arctic environment, here are offset values based on data from this site. These are the values you can plug into the Seasons Manager in NRaas Retuner, using the instructions linked to above.

Spring: Sunrise - +0.5 Sunset - +4.5 (These values are based on sunrise/sunset times on April 15 in Ilulissat.) Summer: Sunrise - -3 Sunset - +8.75 (These values are based on sunrise/sunset times from the day before the beginning of 24-hour daylight in Ilulissat.) Autumn: Sunrise - +3.5 Sunset - +0.75 (These values are based on sunrise/sunset times on October 15 in Ilulissat.)

Winter: Sunrise - +7.75 Sunset - -4 (These values are based on sunrise/sunset times from the day before the beginning of 24-hour nights in Ilulissat.)

NOTE #1: The above offsets are based on using either no lighting mod OR using a lighting mod that uses standard 6AM/6PM sunrise/sunset times. If you use a lighting mod with non-standard sunrise/sunset times, you'll need to do the math to adjust these offsets yourself.

NOTE #2: The game can't really give you an entire 24-hour period of daylight or nighttime. It's just not designed for that. The above offset values for summer and winter will result in sunrise and sunset happening 15 in-game minutes apart. However, the sky will likely be light or dark, depending on the season, for longer than that, because the game's lighting has built-in incremental lightening/darkening for a few hours around sunrise/sunset. There's not much to be done about this, but at least the sky will be mostly light/dark during summer/winter.

[venomvalley]

NEON CARNIVORES

dom!sevika x fem!reader x pathetic!vi | 5.9k words

SUMMARY: You're Sevika's long-time girlfriend. Vi is Sevika's new roommate. What could possibly go wrong?

TAGS: 18+ only! smut (porn w/ plot, voyeurism, fingering, oral, threesome). angst, addiction, mental health issues, sex as therapy. modern!zaun au. complicated character dynamics.

NOTES: been working on this for so long and i just hope its good. split this into two parts btw so.. look out!!

-> READ ON AO3 | ARCANE MASTERLIST

Saturday morning rolls around with a blare of your work alarm—an early shift to cover for your sick coworker, with the added bonus of overtime for this pay period.

Sevika isn’t too happy about seeing you go, arm wound tight around your waist, grumbling out a throaty protest when you try to wriggle beneath her hold.

You spend every weekend at your girlfriend's new apartment. Twice the size of her last, with an extra bedroom neither of you ever use outside of temporary storage. She’s been weighing the idea of getting a roommate, with the recent hike in rent by her scummy landlord, and you would jump at the opportunity, if not for her insistence that you take things slow.

(You’ve been dating for two years. In Zaunite terms, you might as well be married already.)

Ten minutes later, after wrestling for your freedom from the cage of her bed, you shuffle into the kitchen with a loud yawn. Wearing nothing but a long shirt and a pair of random underwear.

You freeze at the sight of an unknown woman stood at the sink, scrubbing a dish. Pink hair, broad shoulders, intricate tattoos. Dressed similarly to you.

Who the fuck…?

“Uh, hi,” you say, hid half-behind the wall to conceal your state of undress. The woman turns to look at you, and—

(Pot of boiling water, meet frog.

Inevitability is a crazy, crushing thing when combined with your power of extreme denial. One moment, you're sitting in a jacuzzi, and the next, your skin is peeling away from the bone.

A slow, sanguine death.)

“Oh, hey,” she replies, reaching to dry her hands off on a nearby towel. “You're Sevika's girl, right?”

You nod your head and offer up your name, stepping out to stand behind the lip of the counter.

“Name’s Vi. I'm the new roommate.” Ah. Would've been nice if Sevika had warned you beforehand. “I'm just gonna,” a thumb points to the once-spare bedroom, “crawl back in my hole now.”

“Right. Good morning, Vi.”

“Yeah. Morning.”

You return to Sevika’s bedroom with a scowl on your face and a complaint on your tongue, shutting the door a bit harder than you meant to. Her shape beneath the sheets jolts at the sound, head popping up from the pillow.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you had a new roommate?”

She blinks, swiping her palm over each eye, jaw dropping to make room for a loud yawn. “Oh, her.”

“Yeah. Her.”

“Relax. Vi stays in her room all day,” spoken mid-stretch, her lone arm reaching for the lip of the headboard.

“That’s not the point. What if I had walked out there naked?”

“Then she’d get one hell of a show.”

You physically deflate, shoulders curling inward, and shuffle over to the bed. Sevika scoots over to give you room, then lifts the sheets in invitation.

“You know I'm joking, right?” she asks, the curve of her nose brushing against your cheek.

“I know… ‘m just embarrassed.”

“Don't be. Vi has three braincells to her name. No chance she even noticed.” Sevika pauses a moment, then gives a lazy shrug of her shoulder. “Probably.”

Thus begins a new era of your relationship: Roommate Woes. Except, Vi isn't the problem here. She keeps to herself, does her chores, pays rent on time via her night shift job (whatever that is). Sevika, on the other hand, never learned subtlety, and coupled with her insatiable libido, you experienced PDA on levels previously unknown to humankind.

But gone are the days of her bending you over the kitchen counter, or fucking you on the couch, or being as loud as she wants—just to spite the cantankerous old lady living next door. While Vi works, Sevika sleeps. Opposite schedules that leave you no room for sexual intimacy. As such, both you and Vi share in this odd stall-state of perceived encroachment. Her, encroaching on your relationship; you, encroaching on her home.

So. In an amiable show, you decide to talk with Sevika about inviting her to your weekly movie night.

The two of you stand in the kitchen mid-discussion, making food to much on as the television plays the movie's menu screen on repeat.

“But why do I have to ask her?”

“Because this was your idea in the first place.” Sevika steps away from the counter with a sigh, hand adorned with a sickly-pink, heart-patterned oven mitt (she swore when you bought it for her that she would never wear it, and now it's the only one she uses). “She won't bite.”

“I think she hates me.” At the crook of her brow, you scoff, voice veering toward whiny. “I’m serious. Every time I come over, she scurries off to her room and I don't see her the rest of the weekend.”

“She does that anyway.”

“It's different, though.”

“… Just knock on the damn door.”

Against your better judgement, you trundle off and away, stopping before the looming pane of wood that separates you from Vi's bedroom.

Really, it's not a big deal. It shouldn't be. But your girlfriend's roommate is a pink-haired enigma, a puzzle stuck in a perpetual state of unsolvable. A disappearing act that, you gotta admit, hurts your ego a bit. You don’t recall saying anything wrong, but maybe, given the circumstances, you should double check that your presence is even wanted. Vi lives here, after all.

So you knock on the door—a few quick raps of your knuckles, just loud enough to grab her attention. You wait for a beat, then another, then another, and just as you turn to leave, the door swings open in a rush of cool air.

Some sort of fan whirs a steady noise from inside her bedroom, the floor strewn with clothes, room dark except for the blue-light halo emanating from her computer. She starts at the sight of you, jolting half a step backward before collecting herself.

“Oh. Sorry, I thought you were—”

“Do you wanna watch a movie with us?” The question comes out in a rush, your synapses a live-wire of anxiety.

Shit. You just want her to like you. Better for all parties involved when you show up every week without fail.

She blinks the kitchen light from her eyes, hand slipping beneath her shirt to scratch at a hip. “What?”

“A movie? Neon Carnivores just came out, and Sevika picked up the DVD after work. It's supposed to be this noir-horror filmed in the Lanes. Thought you might like it.”

“Uh,” a quick shake of her head, “yeah. I'll be there in a minute.”

Then she slams the door in your face.

You shuffle back to the living room, head emptied of all thought. Bewildered. Sevika sits on one end of the couch sans prosthetic, munching on a slice of pizza fresh from the oven. Carefree and oblivious.

“How'd it go?” she asks, bumping her shoulder into yours when you sit down beside her.

“She slammed the door in my face.”

Sevika has the audacity to laugh. To say, “Oh, she's got it bad.”

You land an admonishing smack on her thigh. “Stop, Sev.”

“It's true.” Another bite of her pizza. “You’re all she talks about.”

“What, about how much she hates me?”

“Do you want her to hate you?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.”

Your mouth drops open in half-serious shock, but she continues to eat her stupid slice of pizza and stares at you like she said nothing wrong.

Vi's bedroom door creaks open. A beat of awkward silence passes before she appears in the corner of your eye, weighing her choice of couch or recliner. One glance at Sevika makes up her mind, and Vi takes the cushion beside you. She offers up a tight-lipped smile when you meet her gaze, turning away before you can reciprocate.

The rest of the evening follows a similar pattern: Vi curled up against the armrest while Sevika cuddles you against her side, the movie you chose bathing the room in colors of neon velvet. An indie-arthouse flick hallmarked by practical effects and unusual cinematography.

Sevika spends the last thirty minutes of the movie with her head tucked to her chest, vehemently arguing against the idea of exhaustion every time you wake her up and tell her to go to bed.

When the credits roll, Vi excuses herself, and your girlfriend finally succumbs to your prodding. Kisses you goodnight and shuffles off to bed.

So here you sit, stretched out on the cushions, cold and lonely and mourning the loss of Sevika's weight against you. Some game show continues in the background as you scroll through your phone, leagues away from the exhaustion that usually sends you to bed.

“Hey.”

The sudden greeting jolts you, and you turn around to find Vi stood at the entrance of the small hallway, housing her bedroom on one side and bathroom on the other. Scarred knuckles curled over the wall's edge, almost skittish in her stance.

“Oh. Hey.” You sit up against the armrest, elbow denting the back cushion.

“Where's Sevika?”

“In bed.”

“This early?” A click of her tongue, arm swinging a lazy rhythm as she steps into the living room. “Somebody's getting old.”

The first conversation you've ever had with her, aside from the greetings-in-passing on your way to Sevika's bedroom. But those don't count, right?

“Yeah, I tell her that all the time.”

Then silence. Vi remains awkward behind the couch, glancing around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Your teeth tug at a piece of stubborn skin on your bottom lip. The show drones on, forgotten in the wake of her presence.

“So. How long have you two been together?” she asks, hands finding comfort in the pockets of her sweatpants.

“Two years tomorrow.”

She exhales a sound halfway between a hum and a grunt, brows lifting clear to her hairline. “Shit. Practically married, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Sevika doesn't believe in marriage. A piece of paper solidifying love? Bunch of bullshit, far as she's concerned. And it isn't that you don't agree, but… well. It would be nice to have the option this deep underground. That useless piece of paper is only reserved for pilties.

“She’s happy with you.”

You blink, and she's circling around the couch. “You think so?”

She plops down in Sevika's recliner, one leg thrown over the armrest. (Sevika would kill her if she knew, but you swear yourself to a vow of silence. An olive branch for a budding friendship.)

“Definitely. She helped me out a few years back. Less of an asshole now, with you in the picture.”

So, they know each other. That makes more sense than Sevika inviting some random stranger to live with her. She's made too many enemies to consider such an idea.

“How'd you two meet?”

Her foot jitters back and forth, shaking the armrest. “She knew my old man when they were young, and when he died a few years ago, she kinda… took me under her wing.”

Vi says nothing else, and you don't intend to pry. But you're curious. Who wouldn't be? Sevika stays tight-lipped whenever Vi’s name comes up in conversation, and she’s the only person you know to answer all your burning questions. Aside from the woman herself.

But you're not there yet. Your nosiness will have to wait.

So you smile and say, “Yeah, that sounds like her.”

When she smiles back with a lopsided quirk of her mouth, you think you might be kind-of-halfway friends.

—

A simple text changes everything.

Hey. Turn your tv up.

Sender: Sevika. Recipient: Vi.

A heat-of-the-moment decision from a brain fogged by hormones and the sight of your bare tits in the mirror while changing into pajamas. Post-anniversary date, mid-makeout in her bed, she grabs her phone and sends The Text.

What follows is a marathon of impressive proportions. A box of sex toys, a bottle of lube, and two very insatiable libidos. You expected this after teasing her all night—kissing her neck on the drive to the restaurant, groping her ass during the post-check bathroom break, babbling about your ideas for sex after the two of you make it home.

She fucks you like she's trying to leave a scar in the mattress, maybe carve your body into the wrinkled sheets. Heavy and hot. Angry. Staking her claim. A routine of feeding you her cock until you cry, then soothing the ache with her mouth, then flipping you over and doing it again.

Then, a shadow under the door, shifting its weight. Sevika doesn't notice, too busy lapping at your wet cunt, but you do. Head tipped upside down over the side of the bed, that little patch of inky darkness is all you can look at.

For a moment, you contemplate saying something. You should say something, but you're selfish, and the looming orgasm that numbs you down to the bone steals away every braincell capable of thought.

You know Vi's been listening. Sevika and subtlety mix as well as oil and water. That fucking text. Her shadow lingers under the door like a spilled-ink stain as you whine and whimper through orgasm number three. Even when your world shifts, and Sevika kneels over your prone form, your gaze remains on the shadow beneath the door. A constant, an anchor to the real world.

Strap buried inside your cunt, Sevika flattens herself along the expanse of your back. The soft plush of her lips ghosts over the shell of your ear.

“We have a visitor,” she mutters, and you shudder beneath her. “What do you say? Should we ask her to join?”

The scary part? You actually think about it. Not exactly crossing the line to consideration, but you entertain the idea. The width of Vi's shoulders spreading your thighs, the softness of her mouth against your skin, the layers of her mullet caught in your fist—

Okay. So you consider it.

“Seriously?” you ask, voice a hissing breath of disbelief.

Sevika mouths along your pulse, the cold metal of her prosthetic hand smoothing up your spine. “She's standing outside for a reason.” A sharp bite to the curve of your shoulder, and an inhale catches between your teeth. “That reason isn't me.”

“I—”

Her posture softens, and her voice along with it. “Just think about it, okay?”

Sweet and tender, a facet of Sevika that she reveals only to you—almost comedic given the circumstances. Dangling the idea of a threesome in front of your face, so blasé about the whole thing that you're afraid to take her seriously. No, it's nothing more than dirty talk. Fantasy.

(The disappointment that knots in your gut doesn't actually exist.

Right?)

Things become… weird after that night. Tense as a band waiting to snap. Vi avoids you like you've caught the plague, lurking at the corner of your vision but never daring to approach. No more late-night conversations on the couch, or sharing the burden of dishes, or trading memes back and forth during the week. Like she never even existed at all.

You fucked up. You don't know how, but you did.

Her absence shouldn't bother you so much, but Sevika obviously cares about her to an extent. Why wouldn't you want Vi to like you? And yeah, maybe you enjoy her being around. She's easy to talk to. A comforting presence that reminds you a lot of Sevika.

Given her indefinite absence from your life, you don't expect your phone to blare with her ringtone on a typical Wednesday night (three thirty-two a.m. to be exact) long after you've fallen asleep. You paw at the nightstand for the familiar rectangle of your phone, bleary-eyed and frustrated at the interruption.

At the sound of her voice when you answer the call, you bolt upright in bed.

Slurred and trembling, weak:

“Fuck, it's late, I know, but my boss won't let me walk and I can't call Sevika like this. Can you just—” rustling on the end of the line, a muffled exchange between two voices that you can't quite hear, “I need a ride home.”

Before she can finish her last sentence, you’re throwing a coat on and snatching your keys from the coffee table. “Where are you?”

“Um,” she sniffles, “Apex Eleven. It's this club near the apartment.”

“I'll be there. Wait for me inside.”

She mumbles in agreement then hangs up.

You know that place. Sevika took you there when you first started dating, and though the night started out awkward in that new-romance-learning-curve way, you eventually coaxed her onto the dance floor after a shot or ten. You shared your first kiss in the parking lot outside, right before throwing up all over her pants.

In the heart of the Lanes, the streets awaken at night. Traffic thickens as you near the strip of bars and clubs and brothels, neon signs blinking in rhythmic disorder. Crowds of people stroll down the sidewalk on either side of the street, a jumble of conversation and thumping music intruding on the silence inside your car.

You pull into the club's parking lot then beeline for the front door. One ID check later, and you step inside the club to meet a thick wall of smoke and the smell of sweat-masking body spray. The floor sticks to your shoes as you skirt the outer edge of the dance floor, pinballed between drunken bodies. A party of overstimulation.

Vi sits slumped at the bar, her pink hair a stand-out amongst the sea of clubgoers, undeterred by the lights that cloak her form in multicolor strobes. The tattoos branching up her bare arms ring familiar.

You sidle up beside her, shaking her by the shoulder. “Hey.”

She sits up at the sound of your voice, eyes squinting in confusion, body drawn tight and angular—preparing for a fight.

After a long, breath-stilling moment, she relaxes. “Oh. Hey.”

You nod toward the exit. “Let’s get you home.”

“Whatever. This place sucks anyway.”

Now, the hard part: dragging her to the car. A task she makes no effort to help you with, still sat at the bar, eyes never leaving your face. Low-lidded and darker than you’ve ever seen them.

“What is it?” you ask, shifting back and forth on your feet. The atmosphere of the club renders you drunk by proxy.

“Fuck, you're pretty.” A hand reaches out to touch your face, palm sweatslick against your jaw, fingers ice-cold as they follow the curve of your skull. “Anybody tell you that lately?”

You grab her wrist and step away, a suggestion written in the tug of your hand. “Sevika. Ya know, my girlfriend?”

She slithers out of the chair, balance precarious as her brain struggles to command her feet. One step, then another, until her shoulder collides with yours. You steady her with an arm slung across her back, wincing beneath the drag of her weight as you begin to walk.

None of your Vi-shaped puzzle pieces fit together. No red string to connect all the details. During all your conversations, she kept topics shallow, information casual: likes the color blue, and exercise, and video games; grew up rough; has a sister and a nameless ex. Harmless breadcrumbs to leave behind.

And now there’s a brand new tidbit, filed away under ???????

Fuck, you’re pretty.

She’s far from sober. People say anything when they get a few drinks circulating in their blood, and she passed that threshold a while ago. Mystery solved.

Vi climbs into the passenger seat of your car and curls up against the console. When you buckle her seatbelt, she barely stirs. Something tender and aching rises at the sight of her, impossibly fragile and motionless, just before you close the door.

The drive back to her shared apartment is silent. She adjusts her position every few minutes, grumbling something under her breath—thankfully, still breathing.

Dragging Vi over to elevator is another mountain to climb. She stubs up once she recognizes the run-down shell of her apartment building, slurs something about Sevika and disappointment, and you don't understand the issue. There's no way you could drag her up four flights of stairs to your elevator-less apartment.

“Besides,” you continue, “Sevika's asleep. It'll be alright.”

It takes even more reassurance before Vi finally agrees to walk. You lead her through the small hallway, into the elevator, and up to the third floor.

Before you can find the key in one of Vi's many pockets, the apartment door swings open, and there stands—

“Sev. I didn't think you'd be awake.”

You find no anger in her features, but they contort all the same. Behind her shines the kitchen light, a small halo that cuts through the empty shadows plaguing the small living room.

Her eyes cut to Vi, sharp and piercing. “Women's intuition.”

"How'd you know?” Vi asks, head lowered, unable to meet the gaze of the woman before you.

Already, she stands a bit straighter, weight easing off your shoulder. No doubt sobered up by shock.

Sevika shrugs. Takes a drag of her cigarette. Says nothing, but steps aside to allow you both entry. And once inside, she takes Vi by the arm not slung over your shoulders.

“I got her, honey,” she says, stepping forward in silent request for you to take the cigarette from her mouth.

They disappear into Vi's bedroom. You take a seat on the couch and pass the time by chewing on the filter and watching the paper burn with each lung-filling puff. A fitting end to a night of self-destruction.

A few minutes later, Sevika comes back. Worn down to the bone, wet around the eyes.

“Is she okay?” you ask, scooting over to give her room to sit down.

She collapses beside you, head tipping back against the couch. “I don't know.”

A bad sign. Whatever they talked about, Sevika can't immediately fix, and the worry carves wrinkles into her brow.

Your fingers find the soft thickness of her thigh, comfort stamped in the press of your lips to her shoulder. She's warm, impossibly so. Worked up. Angry, even.

“The deal when she moved in was that she stayed sober.” She scrubs her hand over her face, frustration tangible, thickening up the air that surrounds you. “I told her that job was a bad fucking idea.”

“Is that what you helped her with a few years back?” you ask, voice never daring to rise above a whisper. “Getting sober, I mean.”

“She told you about that?”

“She just said you helped her with a situation.”

A stretch of tense silence, where nothing you say can fix the situation, and Sevika has no interest in wasting the energy on words.

“She wants to talk to you, by the way. You don't have to, but… Vi's a good person, she's just…”

“Been through a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

You're not angry. Worried, yes, but angry? Your Vi-shaped puzzle sharpens into view: a bad childhood, a sister she either doesn't talk to, an ex she refuses to name, a struggle with addiction. One awful event after another, woven into bone and muscle and joint and tendon. Staining everything she touches.

(Really, you don’t know why you care so much.)

When you open the door to Vi's bedroom, she’s laying in bed, tucked beneath the sheets. Staring up at the ceiling, she wipes her face on her shirt.

“Feel like company?” you ask, offering up a smile when she cranes her head to look at you.

The room lay dark, her form a deep splotch of shadow against the wall as she sits up. “Yeah.”

You sit down on the edge of the bed and wait for her to speak.

“I just wanna say that I'm sorry for tonight. I know I should've called Sevika but I was terrified that she would,” she shakes her head, “kick me out.”

“She wouldn't.”

“Well, I know that now, but… sorry for being trouble.”

You shrug. “Better you call me than something bad happen.”

She snorts, pillows creaking beneath her weight. “The worst already has.”

Your jaw aches from the force you exert to keep it shut. Curiosity rears its ugly head once again, but now isn't the time for indulgence.

“You can ask. If anybody deserves to know, it's you.”

“When Sevika helped you a few years ago, what was that about?”

“Oh, that? Funny story, actually.” A sharp sniff. “I was living on the streets at the time, going to bars and clubs every night, fighting for money. Literally, by the way. And one night, this woman walks up to me and says she knew my dad, Vander, before he died.

At that point, I’m ready to knock her out and go back to drinking, but she starts giving me details about his old life that nobody would know. So we go back to her apartment and she’s an asshole about the whole thing, but she helps me get my life straightened out.”

“And after that?”

“I move out on my own. Things are good for a while, but… life always catches up with you, I guess. I start thinking about Vander and my sister and—and Cait, and I start to spiral again. Go back to my old ways.”

Cait. A name for the unforgettable.

“It’s easy, isn’t it?”

The shadow moves, and you think Vi nods her head. “Yeah, it is.”

In a stroke of courage, you move from the end of the bed to its head, and after a bit of searching, you find Vi’s shape beneath the sheets. You lean into her, throwing your arms over her shoulders in an awkward hug. The smell of vodka leaks from her pores, skin sweatslick and sticky, and you can only hope that this brings her comfort.

“You’ll be okay. Maybe not for a while, but horrible things don’t last forever.”

Her hands press against your back, following the curve of your spine. “I’ll take your word for it.”

—

Vi loses herself for a while. She regresses back to some younger, weaker version of herself; back when everything was too much and too big and too scary. She quits her job at the club and starts sharing Sevika's bed at night. Another presence to drive out the demons that plague her.

It happens in the dark.

You're trapped between two very warm, very clingy bodies after a long conversation about boundaries and adaptation and how Vi fits into your life. Sevika tells you that you don't have to stay, that she isn't your responsibility, but you aren't gonna just leave her like this.

(You don't know why you care so much.)

“Can I kiss you?” Vi asks, whispered against the shell of your throat.

The world stops turning. She leans back and rests her head on the pillow, bright eyes wide, bottom lip sucked between her teeth.

Sevika lay right behind you, fitting perfectly against the curve of your spine, arm slung over your waist. That arm tightens, tugging you impossibly closer.

“It's okay,” she says.

Her hips grind against your ass, soft enough that you almost believe it an accident. Soft enough to jump-start the pulse between your legs.

You can't come back from this. Once your lips meet, it's done.

Does Sevika really not mind? Watching you kiss her… whatever Vi is? Friend, responsibility, something inbetween?

Fuck it.

You meet Vi's gaze and nod your head, and her smile flickers beneath the light of the television. As she leans in, her nose brushes yours, and Sevika's buries her face in your shoulder.

Vi kisses you like she loves you, all passionate and needy. Like you mean something to her, for all the ups and downs of your short relationship and her isolating tendencies.

Before Sevika, you never experienced love as a universal truth, giving or reciprocal. No butterflies, or fuzzy feelings, or giddiness at the sight of a lover. But when Vi kisses you, it feels… right. Comfortable. She licks into your mouth and she's warm and soft and impossibly sweet. Tender and careful and savoring.

She pulls away with a sigh, and the hand on your belly moves to cradle your jaw. A turn of your head, and Sevika sucks Vi's taste off your tongue.

It happens quick. The pulse between your legs sparks a fire that threatens full-body consumption. The women that sandwich you in take turns stealing the breath from your lungs, over and over and over again. A competition brews between the two regarding who can turn you into the biggest mess, and while one kisses you, the other nips at your neck and gropes your tits and teases at the seam of your underwear.

You don’t know how things turned out this way, but you aren’t complaining. Not when Vi rucks up your shirt and sucks a nipple into her mouth, and Sevika's lips feel like home against yours. Too much yet not enough, brain dizzy from overstimulation.

“Wait, fuck,” you gasp in a breath when they both part from you, “I just—I need a second.”

So horny you could honestly cry. If Vi wasn't here, you'd be begging Sevika for the strap, face buried in the sheets, ass in the air. They give you time to calm down, and you mourn the loss of their weight and warmth, skin buzzing from the ghostly stamp of their hands.

“Are you okay?” asks Sevika, nosing at the divot of your temple.

“Yeah, just…” you try and fail to suppress the stretch of your lips, “I didn't think you liked to share.”

She exhales an unamused breath, eyes darting to Vi when the latter drapes herself over your middle, hair tickling your chin.

“I'm a special case, right?”

Sevika shoves her off by the shoulder. Says, “Shut up. At least I don't listen in on my roommates—”

Vi stutters a moment then holds up a defensive finger. “Okay, that happened once. Once.”

“Porn exists.” A beat of silence, and Sevika laughs under her breath. “But you don't want porn, do you?”

You're definitely missing context for this conversation, but they argue like you don't even exist in the room.

“Don't,” Vi hisses, rising onto an elbow to glare at Sevika through squinted eyelids. “Seriously, I'll kick your ass.”

“Just ask her.”

Finally, you chime in. “Ask me what?”

Vi's glare turns to pleading, but beside you, Sevika remains stalwart.

“Ask me what?”

“Vi wants to fuck you.”

You blink. The neurons in your brain short-circuit. “For how long?”

“A while,” Vi grumbles, turned on her side, facing away from the two of you.

It's not the idea that surprises you, but the verbal admission. You know how to take a hint, and Vi's slip-up at the club cemented what Sevika already told you as fact.

“It doesn't bother me, if you're worried about that. Brat wants to feel good and she trusts you.” A lazy shrug that jostles your shoulder. “Your choice, honey.”

You look over at Vi to gauge her reaction, and find her already staring at you with pleading eyes. Tender as a healing wound.

It's an easy decision. Easier than your conscience allows. Your memory returns to the night Vi stood outside the bedroom door, when Sevika teased you about inviting her in. She recognized your own attraction before you did. That soft spot on your heart for an unsolvable woman.

“Let's do it.”

The once-playful atmosphere thickens into something anticipatory when Vi crawls between your legs, and your nerves might fray to breaking if not for Sevika’s presence at your side. Always doing what she does best—why you stayed despite her every effort to snuff your relationship out.

As Vi's hands find your inner thighs, Sevika kisses you soft and slow in an effort to tame the wild buck of your pulse.

“Go easy on her,” Sevika says to you, lips stretched in a teasing smile. “I'm sure it's been a while.”

“Fuck you,” Vi mutters, but says nothing in her own defense.

As if it even matters. Your girlfriend serves as the warden of your pussy, and she loves to bark an order or ten. You’re in good hands.

Off come your clothes while the other two remain dressed, a feeling of stark vulnerability that seeks to fry the white matter of your brain. Sevika rubs a comforting hand over your belly, while Vi shoulders your thighs apart.

The first thing you do is reach down to run your fingers through her hair. Soft as you imagined.

She dives in tongue-first, licking you from hole to clit, and groans when your thighs close around her head on instinct. It's all soft, wet heat. Messy from her spit. What she lacks in technique, she makes up for in enthusiasm. Moans so loud against your pussy that you almost believe she can feel your pleasure.

Sevika doesn't let you forget her. She murmurs praise into your ear, teases you for being so wet, asks you how good Vi's mouth feels. You've made it clear how her voice affects you, and she wields dirty words as a weapon any chance she gets.

Good girl.

You look so pretty like this.

How's it feel, honey?

You kiss her just to shut her up. The burn in your belly turns to a blaze embarrassingly fast, and when Vi slides a long finger into your cunt, stars burst behind your closed eyelids. There's no holding back your orgasm when her tongue circles over your clit, slick and hot and—

You turn away from Sevika's mouth and fist Vi's hair in both hands, the muscles in your thighs twitching. "Fuck, please."

"Come on, honey." A pair of plush lips trail down the line of your neck, nipping at your drum-beat pulse. "Let her make you feel good."

That's all it takes. Permission. Weeks without so much as a finger on your clit leads you to a breath-stealing release, and your hearing blots out as you grind against Vi's face. So selfish, needing more, craving the impossible: inevitability.

When the pleasure breaks, you sink into the mattress with a heaving sigh. Each lobe of your brain makes a slow return to normal, and when you blink your eyes open, Vi's face sharpens into view.

Wide-eyed and nervous, she smooths a hand up and down your thigh. "Was that okay?"

All you can do is giggle and nod your head. Too fucked-out to form words.

To your left, Sevika wraps a thick arm around your ribs and pulls you to her. She knows you too well. A long cuddle is neccessity after an orgasm, and she's warm and soft and her chest makes a great pillow. And if you fall asleep for a few minutes, you're none the wiser.

You open your eyes again to Vi gently cleaning you with a washcloth. Sevika sits beside her, nursing a glass of water.

"Hey, Vi." They both look down at you. "Want me to return the favor?"

She shakes her head, slick lips stretching into a dopey grin. "No. I got what I needed."

When Vi moves to lay back down, Sevika catches her by the shoulder. "Wash your face."

"Why don't you clean me up?"

You watch the exchange half-lucid and half-listening, until their voices filter through a lens of fading lucidity. What they both fail to realize is how alike they are, and suddenly everything makes sense.

That's why you care so much.

[ominousgradient]

Commited Eretlout nsfw/sfw headcannons?

I was gonna say that i didn't have too many headcanons for them but once i started putting them all down i did, in fact, have many headcanons

• They hook up a couple times and then start dating in secret, Snotlout doesn't feels ready to come out yet and isn't sure how the others will react but once they have a thing going everyone else picks up on it pretty much immediately anyway

• When Snotlout finally finds the courage to make their relationship public he gathers the riders only for Tuffnut to blurt out, "is this about you porking Eret", effectively ruining the little speech Snotlout had prepared </3

• He struggled a lot with jealousy at first, as well as openly dating another man, but by now Snotlout loves showing Eret off and he constantly brags about how strong and handsome his boyfriend is (especially when he's having a pissing contest with Ruffnut)

• Jealousy is still an issue in their relationship however, whenever Snotlout is reminded of how quickly Eret managed to integrate into their village, a village that now seems to like Eret a whole lot more than him, it does sting a bit. Not to mention how perfectly Eret fits the image of an ideal viking man, meanwhile Snotlout himself continues to fall short. He hates it but sometimes he can help being a little resentful

• Eret has pretty dry skin, Snotlout thinks his rough hands are hot but he still buys him some lotion

• he hates the feeling of Erets calloused feet touching him in bed though so he makes him scrape the callouses of

• Snotlout constantly makes fun of Erets accent

• Eret shared a bunch of raunchy sea shanties with the other vikings that they now regularly sing in the Great Hall, Snotlout called them corny at first but now he always joins in

• When drunk they both like to dance, Eret needs to lean in quite a bit but between the two of them Snotlout's clearly the better dancer so he usually gets to lead

• Snotlout is an emotional drunk and gets all clingy and lovey-dovey, Eret finds it cute but reminds him not to overdo it because a shitfaced Snotlout will either end up crying or picking a fight with someone

• They do like to challenge eachother to drinking contests however, Eret always wins

• Since Eret is a pretty shoddy cook Snotlout prepares their food, he's no Heather but he can whip up a decent meal

• They learn from eachother: Eret teaches Snotlout some advanced knots, how to improve his fishing and how to read subtle weather changes, in turn Snotlout teaches him how to sew along with other domestic skills, as well as giving him advice on living with dragons

• Speaking of dragons, Hookfang is not fan of Eret and the way Snotlout is always making goo goo eyes at him

• Skullcrusher is largely indifferent towards his new owners mate, he would have picked someone taller and less shrill but the pair seems to get along well, with their sturdy builds they are sure to have healthy clutch in the future

• Snotlout and Eret also share some card/dice games the other has never heard of, Snotlout's better at cards, Eret's better at dice

• Eret often rests his chin on Snotlouts head, he started doing it to piss him off but it's by this point it has become a gesture of affection that Snotlout covets, he'll slide infront of Eret and crane his neck in the hope that Eret will put his arms around him and use him as a headrest

• Even though Snotlout doesn't climb on crates anymore, he still instinctively stands on his tippy toes when they argue

• Eret doesn't talk much about his past, Snotlout doesn't pry but it bothers him a little since at this point he feels at ease with telling him damn near everything, so whenever Eret does opens up Snotlout tries his very best to offer comfort

• When they cuddle Snotlout likes to sit between Erets legs with his back to his chest, just talking about whatever while Eret pulls him in tight

• They often playwrestle, Eret always wins unless he goes easy on purpose, Snotlout insists that he's the one letting Eret win but he finds the way his boyfriend can easily overpower him incredibly hot so he doesn’t complain

• Snotlout steals Erets clothes and sleeps in a shirt of his, he wasn't aware that this is a thing couples do at first so when Eret took on of his shirts to use as a pillow case Snotlout took it as a grace insult an made a scene

• Eret gave Snotlout a tattoo, an abstracted depiction of Hookfang between his shoulder blades Snotlout might have cried during the process but no one needs to know that MARK AS STRIKED THROUGH, he loves to flaunt it around (yes takes his shirt off to show his tattoo to people unprompted) but he doesn’t seem too keen on getting another one

• Eret also gets an S tattoo on his wrist, Snotlout doesn't poke it himself but he came up with the design (his first idea was a portrait of himself but Eret refused)

Nsfw

• Eret has had many sex partners but always shied away from serious relationships, Snotlout was a virgin until the two of them started hooking up

• He didn’t admit that of course, but the first time he sucked Eret off Snotlout did such a bad job that Eret caught on

• "Can i fuck your throat" -" sure"– *Eret thrusts once, Snotlout chokes immediately and spends the next several minutes hacking his lungs out*

• Eret loves picking Snotlout up during sex, his favorite positions are fucking him against the wall or while standing in the middle of the room

• Snotlouts prefers doing mating press, having Eret pin him down and whispering filthy thing into his ear, telling him that he'll fuck him so hard that he'll get knocked up (i can see Eret having a breeding kink and getting Snotlout into it as well)

• Their play fights can double as foreplay and often end with them fucking

• Snotlout likes it when Eret puts him in a headlock

• Eret loves leaving hickeys and bruises, he'll hold Snotlout down and nibble at his neck, pair that with some licks to the shell of his ear and his bf melts like butter

• If they fuck hard enough Snotlout will on occasion bite down on Erets shoulder, just to take the edge off. He never draws blood but Eret theatrically calls the bitemarks his "battle scars"

• He has penty of actual battle scars ofc, Snotlout thinks they make him even hotter and often runs his fingers over them in quiet adoration

[draco-abraxas]

Draco had started following Potter around the party, convinced he was being incredibly sneaky. He also knew he should not be the one doing the following, but it was far too late for that.

Potter wasn't really doing much of anything, but that's what was making him so conspicuous. He'd pick up drinks, veer off to avoid a group of people, then put it down without taking a sip. His normal party persona of jovial mingling was completely absent. Draco had seen him side step the Minister twice, and it wasn't even eight o'clock. When he meandered into a side room, Draco followed.

“Okay, stop,” Potter announced, whirling around, full of Auror bravado. “Why are you following me?”

"I don't know what you mean, Auror Potter," he murmured, trying to turn back to the large ballroom.

"Yeah, right," Potter snorted. "Why are you even here? This isn't a Curse Breaker event."

Draco sighed, deciding lying was pointless. "I came with Reynolds."

Harry looked briefly baffled by this sentence, but just huffed. “Well. Whatever. Leave me alone.”

“Are you okay?” Draco spat, inadvisably.

Potter glared, expression murderous. “Obviously not, idiot,” he hissed. He shook his head. “How dare you.”

Draco laughed bitterly. “How dare I? I don't know who the fuck you think you are, but—”

Harry suddenly rounded on Draco, backing him into a wall as he studied his face. “Why are you here, Draco,” he repeated.

“I told you, I came with—”

Harry reached out, grabbed his jacket, pulled gently but insistently, until their bodies clicked together. “That doesn't answer my question, does it?” he whispered.

Draco's mouth went dry, his pulse quickened, and unfortunately, the sound he made in response to Potter's proximity was loud enough to be audible. Harry smirked, his head tilting in triumph.

“That's what I thought,” he growled.

Draco inhaled sharply, immediately regretting it when his nostrils filled with Harry's cologne.

“If you'd wanted to come to the party, you could have just asked,” Potter murmured, leaning into Draco's ear. He shivered. “Seriously, Draco? Reynolds?”

“I'm sorry,” Draco replied in a whisper.

“Save it,” Harry spat, backing up. “For later.”

He strode away, back into the throng of people, and Draco did not recover.

[ofdarklands]

food and drink: 3, 7, 12, 15, 16, 17 / hobbies: 3, 4, 18 for mitr'a? 👁👁

whoa mama

ehem, long:

🍽️Food and Drink

3 Is there a food or drink your character is unwilling to try?

hmm i think not, at least not because of the food in itself. even meol he refused to try not so much because of the soylent green part but because it was a hateful Eulmore Product tm. also because someone (even worse, a clown of some breed) was handing it to him and it was thus suspect

he's also tried lots of things that are not technically food so

7 Is there food that has made your character sick?

man sadly somewhat lactose intolerant. i don't think keepers have herds of anything, so it didn't come up until he left for gridania. he refuses to admit this however, because the making processes of cheese and yogurt and assorted milk products are fascinating and he's not dropping that

that's regarding food that is innocent

he has eaten all manner of other things experimentally that have absolutely wrecked him until he built up tolerance or decided it was actually hopeless. fruits, roots, plants, walking plants, frogs, snakes, lizards, bugs, sea bugs, fish, that one poisonous bird, barks, water that turned out to be fouled, and many many delicious but evil mushrooms and molds <- guy who shouldn't be alive

12 Which mealtime is your character's favorite?

as a guy who lives on his own at his own rhythm, mealtimes are not particularly fixed. he mostly eats when he's hungry. but whatever he eats at sunrise before going to bed is nice. cold, but a good view. and quiet

15 What food or drink does your character consider a treat?

grilled things. with just some salt and some herbs. takes more time, not very stealthy, bit wasteful. very tasty though. mmm goat on the stick

16 Is there a food texture your character doesn't like?

doesn't like much things that are so dry and crumbly they stick to your mouth forever or too sticky-gooey, generally. like, have you tried chewing fluid honey? that kinda texture. he'll still eat it of course, but still

otherwise he's an equal opportunity chewer

17 What kind of drinks does your character prefer?

dense. give that thing some substance (his beers are basically liquid bread). otherwise, water, teas and juices are the daily go-to. he's got favourite water springs to source water from, too

.

🎲 Hobbies and Activities

3 What is a talent your character wishes they had?

he's generally very satisfied with what he can do, i think. he's skilled with his hands and his mind is adept with crafts. his body allows him to fight well. his reflexes are good. he can even manage the ocassional act of rolling a 20 on CHA, if he really cares about it. what else is there? not consistent human interaction skills, surely

4 Is there an activity your character used to enjoy that they now dislike?

not really? his range of activities has actually broadened together with his character development during msq

though! i guess he doesn't get street food anymore; he just stares somewhat creepily at the preparation process until he can do it himself and feed it to someone else to taste-test the accuracy

18 What is a topic your character wouldn't want to talk about?

economics and politics are not interesting to him, and also culturally not his problem. to him they're only worth talking about as context in stories. sadly being alphinaud's attack wol means he gets to hear a LOT about it. after the banquet he doesn't tune out anymore but by oschon's balls. torment

regarding what i think the question is actually about

things he'd honestly answer but mostly isn't asked: where he's been, his fights, his age, killing people, losing people, his job, his opinion on people, his opinion on the current plan, which cities suck the most, how he would kill lolorito, any plant or rock in sight, what sex he's been having, what the fuck do you mean ardbert was there the whole time, etc

things he might try to slide around for the sake of the other person, but would answer if asked point blank: his experiences and opinions with the wol legend (bleh), the almost-lightwarden times (bad), what the fuck do you mean zenos was there (great), do you regret almost dying at the end of the universe for no reason (no), if he likes fighting by the scions's side (fucking stressful), are you fucking my mother warrior of light (yes)

things he won't talk about: affection (not something for words), where his clan is (security reasons), hildibrand (not real), magitek (enough robots already*), any time he's failed at something he's actually good at (embarrassing. no more queshtions)

[severus-snaps]

Oh no, mentioning dialects has me thinking of killer whales (and cetaceans in general), and I fucking love killer whales, so buckle up

So, how complex can Parseltongue be? Well, I think in this situation, thinking about a fictional entire language which can be used for conversations (e.g. the Gaunts using it so Ogden can't understand them, Voldemort talking to Nagini, ordering the Basilisk to carry out complex orders), it's a fair to assume that Parseltongue is more complex than snake communication actually is in real life, given that snakes don't really make noises to communicate (excluding rattling their tail, for example, to warn predators). They communicate primarily using movement (Harry should've used interpretive dance) as they don't have a voice box, snakes in general are pretty hard of hearing, and they live largely solitary lives which sort of means they haven't faced much demand to develop complex communication.

Although in contrast cetaceans are marine mammals, and have quite complex communicatory abilities influenced by their social structure in a way that isn't reminiscent of snakes in the slightest, I'm going to use them as a proxy in this thought experiment because it's the only kind of non-human complex communication I'm familiar enough to do this with.

So, killer whales have both dialects (regional differences) and "familects" (which they only use in their immediate pods). They also have very different vocalisation habits when compared to each other, so resident killer whales (the kind that eat salmon and live in larger groups) are VERY vocal, whereas transient killer whales (the kind that eat other mammals and live in smaller family groups) are almost always silent, so they don't alert their prey. Despite all being orcas, they're basically different species (even genetically), and share very little in common in terms of behaviour, location, and eating habits - just like different species of snake might not share much in common either if they had different habitats and feeding habits.

I can't find any actual studies rn because I'm on my phone and it's shit, but this suggests animals are also prone to picking up accents, and I'm sure I've seen somewhere that dogs pick up accents or dialects as well - so, in this fictional world, why not snakes too? Also, shout out to Somerset (where I live) where even the cows moo in an accent, apparently, and some farmers noticed. It's a very Somerset thing all round.

I'm also now thinking about Michelle Paver's "Chronicles of Ancient Darkness" series, where the protagonist can speak to wolves. I think I remember from the series that when he tried to communicate with a dog using wolf-speak, he accidentally frightened it, because although dogs and wolves share lots of similarities to the point where they can crossbreed, they're obviously not the same species - so I wonder whether if Harry tried to speak to another closely related reptile there would be similar miscommunications. In fact, google tells me that adders eat slow worms - so if Harry tried to ever speak to a slow worm it might panic and slither away in a hurry, thinking Harry was a very weird-looking adder.

Another interesting idea (to me, at least) is that snakes should have language that reflects their "culture", or at the very least their own priorities. In TCoAD, wolves don't have a word for fire if I remember it correctly, they call it the "bright hot", and knife/spear blades are things that "bite", reflecting how a wolf would 'realistically' frame their world. This limitation doesn't seem to apply to Parseltongue, but I personally think it would be more interesting if it did. I think it could feed into the dialects aspect, too. An adder who lives in dry areas (open grassland, moors) would have a dialect or different words (and different priorities) to a grass snake, who tends to live in denser vegetation close to water. The Inuit have 50 words for snow, as the outdated saying goes, and the British have 100 words for rain. Maybe Harry was lucky that the snake in the first book was raised in captivity in England and not brought over from South America :P

And to answer what you actually said (not in the tags), I expect being a native speaker does help a lot, so if Harry (and Voldemort) were functionally native Parseltongue speakers, with the aid of whatever magic caused it, then maybe the dialects wouldn't even register (or more likely I've overthought it, and they don't exist) and it would be even easier for Harry to communicate, broadly speaking, with closely related species.

Which I think must be true also since a Basilisk isn't really a 'real' snake, is it? Traditionally, "The basilisk is alleged to be hatched by a cockerel from the egg of a serpent or toad (the reverse of the cockatrice, which was hatched from a cockerel's "egg" incubated by a serpent or toad)." (from wikipedia) and is "born from a chicken’s egg, hatched beneath a toad" (from PS).

So, Harry can speak to closely related species #confirmed, but I also still like to think that there are variations between snakes, and a snake 'culture' if you will, but Harry just didn't get enough experience to notice it. I also think that innate Parselmouths could more effectively communicate with adjacent species, whereas someone like Rita Skeeter might not be so easily able to communicate with other insects. Pettigrew could talk to rats, and Sirius and the others could communicate with Remus in animal form - though how much of that was dependent on Remus being part human, I can't say - and Sirius was also able to communicate pretty effectively with Crookshanks, but Crookshanks (according to extracanon) was part Kneazle, which also skews the results. Maybe it also mostly depends on the social nature and communication skills of the (real, not animagus) animal you're trying to communicate with? But if so, snakes wouldn't be that chatty in real life, and so their language wouldn't be that useful (if such a thing existed at all).

And so, my speculation continues

Quora just sent me this suggested question to read so now I'll be thinking about whether some people in the HP universe are naturally inclined to speak to, like, tapirs, but they just don't know it because they live in London

Also (as the answer points out) Animagi can speak to other animals, Pettigrew could speak to rats, Sirius to Crookshanks, plus Dumbledore to Fawkes and Dementors and Merfolk, etc. Obviously the answer is the bad reputation of snakes and association with Slytherin, but why did Parselmouths specifically get such a bad reputation 😂

[dyingr0ad]

I would not like to argue with someone on here as I see it kind of weird- but I kinda wanna make a response. I am not very good at english because it's not my first language. so I might have mistook the meaning of glazing to a different point. I am sorry for using the term and I will edit the post later.

Next thing is that you mistook my post, this post ISN'T supposed to show hate towards you at all, or to make assumptions. I would firstly like to say, That I have been in Much MUCH more OC Fandoms, and this one I joined only for the main purpose of ragebating in a safe way (as to make people laugh), I didn't try to target YOU in this post, I just explained my reasons, The post is supposed to say that this community used to be much more well...happy? idk how to explain it, but when I said "dry" and all the other stuff, I meant by people, people became more dry eventually and lowk kind of rude in some ways (from personal experience). The whole post was not targeted towards just you but many others. and just because you were a first oc creator doesn't mean it's okay for people to only accept you rather then other creators. and also just because you're not that active doesn't mean you still don't get attention. I'm not it's unfair on your behalf, considering you're VERY much talented and have a lot of magic upon your hands, and the attention is well deserved, I never tried to make you seem "bad" for... existing? I was talking about the truth. due to the fact that the community is small, it is much better to recognize a lot of people, Which I myself even remember, and I was talking about THEM, mostly. that's why I only posted this here and not on X, or Tiktok, cus this OC community is quite small, so people would understand my point of view, considering on Tiktok or X the community is much larger(?). and I was not trying to imply that the community is "dying", it has just gotten more, well, idk how to explain it but selfish(?). I never said it's shameful to draw certain stuff, the things you draw is none of my business.

the main reason I gave this explanation is because, if being on a serious note, everyone here knows each other. so because of that, people will understand my point.

forgive me if there are some misunderstandings in my reply💔💔💔🥀🥀

I feel like I haven’t explained why I just “disappeared” from the community and here’s is my explanation. (SPOILER ALERT, boopsy is actually DEADASS.😈😈 also honorable mention, my lovely dead bug zorp because my reasons are similar to them)

So my reason actually disappearing from the community is quite simple, the community changed in the WORST WAY POSSIBLE, and what I mean by that? In the past people used to be really accepting, and the community was so much welcoming and supportive, but now adays many creators leave the community and new people join, and most of those people are not welcoming, very rude and dry and it’s less exciting to be in the community like how it was before.

I know I am not a famous creator and just a random ragebait that joined the community to make people laugh and draw them silly and UGLY fanarts, but even I got sick of the community and just decided to leave.

And also, I do want to mention sweetest potatoes a bit, I am not hating on her, because in my opinion she is a really good and talented artist and I really do love her artstyle and designs, but one thing I want to mention, is ever since she came back to tumblr, many people in this community began glazing her and not paying enough attention to other creators, which really upsets me, but now only sweetest potatoes is getting most of the attention in the ranfren oc community and not the others, because in my opinion many other creators are so talented in what they are doing and so creative and they are not getting the attention they used to get because I really love every single one and I am so happy I met those kind of people.

But even so i decided to completely stop posting and just leave this community because of this issue, i do hope this issue will be fixed and that the community will come back like how it used to be in the past.

And I do want to thank everyone for all the support and joy this community have given me and i appreciate every single person with the bottom of my heart.

[doctorweebmd]

accidentally* brainstormed a very complete outline for chapters 4-8 for eih, which should theoretically take us through Part 1. which is. you know. a godsend or whatever.

*accidentally meaning i was just eating delicious pancakes and the thoughts happened. usually its me crying screaming and shitting myself in front of an empty word document where ideas manifest. this is notably much more pleasant.

[whiterunguard]

Things are in store. Things are going to happen.

[doberrrman]

I have this feeling that I have unofficial beef with my neighbor...

[arolesbianism]

I've been thinking abt my critter dupes some more and it was all fun and games until I remembered that I made Mi-ma a beeta and hm. Whoops. Uh oh. (<- Considered the implications for more than 2 seconds)

[kittlyns]

A hard pill for me to swallow lately has been that, despite everything, I'm probably the best version of myself that could've existed. And that's not really a comforting thought.

[verygoodcomments]

oh yes on the topic of submissions...

i had one from someone in my inbox from YONKS ago that tumblr is not letting me post for some reason. that person also sent me an ask about whether i could provide links to the videos/places i found the comments on (i would just answer their ask but it explicitly references their submission which, again, tumblr won't let me post... and also it was from ages ago) so let me answer that here

unless i think that mentioning the source amplifies the comment, or provides some humorous context, i usually don't do that as a general rule. if someone asks for the comment source and i still remember what it was, i'll tell them, but i don't tend to mention it explicitly on the post itself

i don't tend to redact pfps or usernames (to give some form of credit to the authors of the comments, sometimes they make the comment better, they're already public on the internet & usually posted on videos by youtubers exponentially more popular than my blog & usually post obscure comments i had to scroll for quite a while to find anyway, it's fun when someone recognizes their own username, etc etc), so this is an alternate method of security against people trying to be weirdos to the featured commenters. most of my posts come from youtube, which doesn't even have a direct messaging system anymore, which is simultaneously why i feel fairly comfortable leaving pfps/usernames unredacted on these comments and why i feel it's better if i try not to provide TOO many context hints at least in the actual text of the post. just on the off chance some bitter weirdo wants to try being a bitter weirdo, you know? and if someone goes all the way out of their way to try and track these comments down explicitly to bully these people, then at this point, it kinda seems like redacting that stuff wouldn't have helped anyway. while i definitely do not condone harassing anyone from here, i also... don't think it'd exactly be My fault there, and entirely the fault of this hypothetical extremely brainrotted rando. this has, to my knowledge, never once happened, but just putting that out there

i do give little hints or context notes in the tags on occasion, under the general assumption that anyone following this blog knows that this is a place of comment appreciation, an art gallery of Internet Humans. usually it only extends to mentioning the youtuber or what type of video it was, but as a general statement. this is the other part of my philosophy here: i enjoy hunting for comments as a sort of peoplewatching-esque hobby and i think other people should try it out (so long as they have the self-restraint to NOT reply to people even if they make you mad. it's never worth it man.). i also think it'd be a fun treat for someone to only get a hint, figure out what video it was, and then go on their own hunt and see the comments in the wild. i often skip over Loads that don't quite make the cut so you'll probably find something else fun in there

does that make sense? it does to me. anyway if anyone ever wants to know where i found a comment just ask and i'll tell you, so long as i remember. fair warning, the older the post the comment is on, the more likely i am to have forgotten what specific video it was. i usually at least have a vague idea of the original poster and/or the content/topic of the video but sometimes i don't