#this venn diagram was originally made like. last year i think

[callonpeevesie]

I'm onto something I'm telling you

[writingsfromhome]

If you Love Something II

A/N: okayy I’m finally going to stop overthinking and just post this one. Please note the tw in part 1. Thank you all SO much for the comments and love on the original…hope this one meets ur expectations. It’s definitely more focused on the lost daughter relationship rather than you and Harry so p dense but...here it is 🫣

——————————————

Age 36:

“Dinner’s almost ready,” Harry informs me over the phone. “I went with chicken noodle soup.”

“Mmm,” I close my eyes. “I could use something hot and hearty right now. I’m freezing my ass off.”

“I didn’t need to make dinner for that.”

“So come here, warm me up,” I crane my neck to the left again. “Stupid delays.”

“I can come get you."

I’d mapped it out before calling Harry, it would take him too long to get here. “That’s alright. Doesn’t make a difference.”

The screen on the platform showed 6 minutes…for the past 15 minutes.

“I’ve either been living in the longest minute of my fucking life,” I mutter. “Or this line is taking the piss out of all of us.”

Two dozen of us had gotten off the last train when it announced it was out of service. Now the number on the platform had tripled waiting for the next one.

“Patience,” Harry says. “Is a virtue.”

“Easy for you to say in the warm flat with the chicken noodle soup.”

“It’ll be yours soon.”

Soon. I sigh and try to release the anxious energy with it. “Thank you for taking care of dinner.”

“Of course.” He replies. Like it was that simple. But being with Harry was like that nowadays.

Despite all the catching up we had to do with the 17 years we had lived separate lives, emotionally it’s like we picked up where we last left off.

I’d be lying if I said it was smooth sailing the whole year we’d been together. There had been a hard few first months where both of us felt unnerved by the peacefulness of the relationship. We weren’t used to such an easy quiet.

I’d tried to self-sabotage first by going awol and working longer hours than I needed to. I think I was scared Harry would wake up one day and realize too much time had passed and he didn’t like who I’d become so I minimized our time together. Until Harry called me out for it.

But then he went off the rails, and for a few weeks I’d been an even bigger ball of anxiety. Ultimately I had to give him the hard truth even though the last thing I ever wanted was to convince someone to stay with an ultimatum. But I’d told him, he had to at least attempt sobriety if he wanted us to work.

There were a few sleepless nights, I didn’t know if we were going to make it. But one morning he asked me to go to an aa meeting with him.

Going together, being in the same boat as a group of people gathered in the back room of a dusty church finally gelled us together. For good. He’d been sober since.

We moved in together 7 months ago. Even though it doubled my commute time—tripled with delays, I had never been more sure that I was exactly where I needed to be.

We held space for each other. Even the heavier bits; we knew what they were. What it was like to hold them on our own. We always joked about how our loads had halved despite taking on half of the other’s. Because just like our venn diagram of love, our venn diagram of hurting was the same.

“Oh god, I better not be hallucinating.” I nearly jump up and down when the twin headlights of the next train peek in the distance. The platform board still says 6 minutes.

“You’re cutting up what?”

“Nothing! Train’s here!”

“I’ll pick you up from the station.” Harry says before I hang up.

I spend the remaining 15 minute ride going over the lecture I’d given tonight.

3 years ago when I applied to be a lecturer I didn’t actually think I’d get it. But in the 10 years of my career I had collected, I had done exceptionally well. It was ironic with all the bullshit life threw at me, I had somehow channeled it into a determined work ethic. After failing many math tests in high school I had found a love for it in uni—it made me work hard, get out of my head with its constant thoughts. Harry now took to calling me a masochist for teaching something mathematical.

In reality it wasn’t that mathematical. I taught Management Econ which was a snorefest on paper but I tried to be engaging and include a whole host of ways to teach—I knew not everyone excelled with a textbook.

It had made the course popular, it went from being offered once a semester to 3 times this year because the waitlist spoke for itself. It was one of my proudest accomplishment—getting students motivated and interested. And because it was mostly first and second year students, they were still eager and not jaded by the uni system.

That was how I spent my evenings on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Otherwise I worked for the city the same hours Harry worked his creative exec job at a major firm in the city. Sometimes we met up for lunch. It was the little things like that, making time to see each other in the middle of the day even though we woke up and fell asleep to each other, that made this relationship feel so secure.

It felt like coming home each time I caught sight of his face, and knew his smile was just for me.

My thoughts drift to our daughter. She would have celebrated her 18th birthday a few weeks ago. I always lit a birthday candle for her, this year Harry and I bought a cake and a symbolic drink for her. Our baby was old enough to drink.

“Do you think she takes after her parents?” Harry had asked.

“I think she grew up alright.” I always imagined her to have. “I hope she has no reason to drink herself silly.”

“Being 18 is reason enough.”

We talk about her often. She slips into conversation as easily as inhaling. It keeps her with us.

When I spot Harry’s car at the station I nearly weep.

“Your cheeks are so cold,” Harry says after a peck hello. He holds them both in his heated hands and plants exaggerated kisses on each cheek.

“Please sir,” I kiss his mouth and continue in what Harry called my Oliver Twist accent. “Take me to the chicken noodle soup. I hunger.”

Harry responds in the same accent (although it wasn’t as good as mine) and pretty soon I’m forgetting the 20 minute delay, the lecture with 100 technical difficulties, and anything in between.

After dinner and completing my 20 step night time routine I crawl into bed beside a cozy-looking Harry.

“Whatcha reading?” I peek at his book. I can’t believe he was the reading-before-bed type. In a way it was so different from the 17 year old guy I knew. It was also a reminder that even though we knew each other through and through, there were still so many habits and stories and quirks to discover.

“It’s a boring as hell sci-fi novel, don’t ask.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

“I accidentally joined a book club at work!?”

He tells me the story of how he told some people he enjoyed reading, and then being unable to say no when they bought this month’s book for him and presented it to him a week later.

“I bet you that’s their ponze scheme. It’s like an MLM, the latest recruit has to guilt the next joinee. You’ll be doing it soon.”

Harry laughs and holds his book out to me. “That actually brings me to my next question with this very generous gift, do you like reading?”

“Nope.” I push the book away. “I also don’t like book clubs.”

He tosses the book down lightly. “Damnit!”

We laugh. I cuddle into his side and lay my head on his chest as he finishes his chapter. His heart beat is steady, like the life he’s helped me create as we committed to each other. I listen to it as it lulls me to a calmer place.

“So how was work? How’s your students this semester?”

“Work’s good. Same old right now. Teaching was interesting. It’s the second week of classes so still seeing a lot of people come and go. You start to see the regulars by week 3.”

“Full class?”

“Almost,” I tell him. “A few empty seats. There was one girl who was obviously watching tv the whole time, another guy that fell asleep halfway, and this other kid kept looking at the door like he was physically trying to decide whether he would stay. Weird lot.”

“They won’t be there next week.”

“Nope.”

“You think she’s starting uni? I wonder what she’s decided to study.”

“Mmm, I always think it’s something creative like you.”

Harry squeezes his arm around me. “I think she’s a masochist like you.”

We talk more about her, about the upcoming weekend, and as sleep visits we drift away still intertwined like most nights.

***

“Does anyone know why?” I ask the lecture hall. Just like I predicted, most of the people I knew wouldn’t make it were gone. Now there were just under 60 students in total. What had surprised me was the guy who looked nervous the second week stayed. He’d been joined by two friends who only showed up in week 4. He was probably the designated note taker.

A girl to the left puts her hand up and I point to her. “The growing gap between upper and middle classes?”

“Yes.” I give her a reassuring smile. Until I started teaching, I forgot that most answers they gave were questions. “Anyone else?”

The girl beside nervous guy puts her hand up. “The ageing population, it skews the demographic from what was initially projected?”

“Exactly,” I try not to show favourites but that was beautifully said. Maybe she didn’t need to come to all the classes.

“That would also affect the workforce,” a guy sitting in the front pipes in. I smile, pleased that a discussion was forming.

A few others join in and I nod at each point. I loved this job.

After class is over I always got a few stragglers asking questions. The nervous guy comes up to me.

“Um professor,” he hitches his backpack and glances back at his friends. “For the assignment due next week, can groups of 3 be okay?”

I glance at his friends, it was supposed to be in pairs but what the hell. “Sure. But I’ll need extra stuffing in the assignment to make up for it.”

I say it with a joking tone but he’s so wound up that he takes me seriously.

“Of course. We’ll increase the citations and make sure to include more research-“

“Philippe,” one of the girls is suddenly a few feet away.

“Thank you.” He says, finally meeting my eye. I smile and he relaxes. I turn to his friends, to acknowledge them but they stare at me like I’d grown a second head. One of the other students asks her questions and I turn my attention away—weird.

***

“Mid-terms?” Harry asks. I’m reading a textbook while I stand over the simmering pot. We had accidentally ordered 4 times the tomatoes on our online order last week and with three still left I’d decided to batch make spaghetti sauce. It had been a long time since I made it from scratch.

“Kind of.” I push the book aside. “Someone in the department wants to update the textbooks and they left notes in the old one for what needs updating. They asked me to take a look.”

“That’s cool,” Harry walks over to me. He smelled like cologne and outside, the way he usually did right after he came home on chillier days. “That he wants your opinion?”

“She actually,” I poke him. “And it is! I can’t believe I get paid to lecture about one of my passions.”

“Economics,” Harry makes a face like he smelled something bad.

“Makes the world go round,” I smile sweetly.

“Remember when you liked things that were cool like Harry Potter and Coldplay-“

“I still like them! If I recall you’re the one who motivated me to do well in maths.”

“I did?” Harry looks off into the distance but his slow smirk is evident that he was remembering. He tilts my chin up and brushes my lips. “You’re right. So how about now? Would that still work?”

“Do you want me to stroke your ego right now?”

“Amongst other things,” he muses, his hands drop down to my hips and then lower, giving my bum a squeeze.

“Cut it out,” I scold him but it’s cancelled by the smile on my face. I shake my head and go back to the simmering pot.

“Is that tomato soup?” Harry’s suddenly distracted by the pot. We’d been having a lot of it this week because…well tomatoes.

“Nope, I’m making spaghetti sauce. From scratch.”

“Hey, didn’t you make that one time? When we were kids.”

“Hm,” I think back. It felt like so long ago but something niggles at me. “I think? I used to help my mum—it’s her recipe. Maybe you had dinner on a night we made it?”

“Yes. Dinner at your place, around Easter.”

I remember that Easter clearly but not for dinner. It was a night Harry and I had talked our lives all out.

“Aw. We were so young then.” I wrap my arms around Harry.

“I’m still young,” Harry says. “I’m in my prime.”

I pat his cheek. “Of course you are love.”

***

“Taylor I can’t really do this right now!” I tell my sister as she whines to me. No matter how old we got we were always somehow 17 and 12.

“C’mon just call mom! Tell her you met him and he’s really awesome.”

“I’m not lying to mom so you can invite your newest loser boyfriend to dinner. Anyway I can’t talk. I have to get to class!”

“I know.” She says weirdly. And I understand why when I walk into class and see her sitting in the front row. Ugh she knew I would try to blow her off!

My sister had somehow taken up the bad habit ever since her mid-20s of having a string of shitty boyfriends. We all blamed it on her longterm bloke breaking it off around her 26th. I don’t think she ever fully let herself heal from that.

After two separate guys were invited to two separate family dinners and both ended in mum or dad exploding over something, they were banned. This new guy, as she insists, was different. Mature. He deserved an invite.

She holds up 9 fingers and mouths, 9 months! That’s a long time!

I shake my head and start setting up my laptop.

“Hiya,” one of the students, Kim, walks up to me as I do so. “Sorry I was just wondering when we’re getting our assignments back? Will it be before midterms?”

Midterms were in 2 weeks for this class. The assignments were in my bag, marked and ready. I tell her and watch the relief spread through her.

I spend the next hour teaching, and before we break at the hour I announce I’d return assignments. As I call them out student walks down to me and pick them up, leaving with a smile or a frown.

“Philippe?” He had stuck to his word and his group had gone above and beyond. It was a beautiful paper, albeit overly-sourced. But I appreciated it.

“He’s not in,” one of his friends comes down to get it. She looks at me in that same way again, with just as much fear as curiosity. It’s odd.

“C’mon then,” I shake the paper I was holding out. “I don’t bite.”

“Oh sorry,” she grabs it from me in a rush I nearly get a papercut. She doesn’t even look at the grade, turning quickly away before halting, pivoting halfway, changing her mind, and running back up the steps to her seat. That group of kids were weird. Maybe they were on drugs.

I catch eyes with Taylor and she raises her brow. I shrug and continue handing out the papers.

I don’t expect the girl to come up to me after class. Her friend stays hovering behind, close to my sister who I know must be desperate to have sat here the whole lecture.

“Um ‘scuse me. Professor?”

“Yes?” She was the last person in the small line that had formed after class.

“I had a question about the assignment? You um, you said we missed the equations for our answers but they’re um-“ her hands are shaking as she flips the pages to the last page. “They’re on the bottom here.”

“Oh,” I did remember they were missing it but my pen marks were all over the back of it. “I must have missed that, bloody hell sorry about that!”

“Yeah um, do we get the extra points?”

“Of course but I-“ I glance back at Taylor. She’s talking to the friend. I had to get her out of here before she said something ridiculous. “I have office hours after my Monday class. I’ll have it remarked by then and you can pick it up?”

“Um, okay?”

I quickly shut my things down and grab my sister, getting her out as quick as possible.

“I’m a professional,” she reminds me. “Jeez. Anyway Y/n listen it’s the longest I’ve been in a relationship since, well y’know. 9 months! It’s different with this guy. He works like you! A cushy office job. He’s serious. Please!?”

I hadn’t seen Taylor since last month’s dinner when she had tried to convince me to get on board with this guy. She’d been pleading for a month. “Fine.”

“Oh I love you!” She squeezes my arm. “Text me when mom gives the okay.”

I sigh. I’d really got myself in the middle again.

I retell this to Harry when I get home.

“She’s persistent. But 9 months is a new record.”

“I know!” Harry knew all about her string of boys, I’d caught him up months ago. “Anyway I can’t believe she sat through the whole lecture.”

“Maybe this is the guy. The One.”

“You don’t believe in that do you?”

“Yeah?” He squints at me. “Of course I do?”

“So I’m The One?”

“Baby do I even need to say yes? I knew it as soon as I saw you when we were 14. You confirmed it when you kissed me on the roof that day.”

“I can’t believe I did that. I had my first drink that day by the way so I might’ve been drunk.”

“You were not drunk when you kissed me,” Harry points his fork at me.

“Look at you getting all worked up,” I tease.

“I’ll get you all worked up,” he mutters into his plate. I grin as I stretch my leg out under the table and run it up his leg. He grips my ankle when it gets too high and the look he gives me across the table sends my heart racing.

“Oops,” I drop my foot and go back to eating.

We put on a movie after, something we can zone out to. It doesn’t take Harry long to get bored and nuzzle into me, and it doesn’t take much longer after that before the movie is just for show and we’re tangled in our sheets.

There were 17 years of experience Harry showed up with now, and it was another one of those things that made catching up on lost time all the better.

***

In the first half hour of my office hours, the girl walks in. I should remember her name but I just associated her group with Philippe. I was surprised he wasn’t here actually. He seemed to be their spokesperson.

“Hi come in!” I wave her into the tiny cubicle-like room I borrowed for a few hours every Monday. “I’ve got your assignment here all done.”

“Thank you,” she hovers over my desk and I hand it over. Her fingers fidget with the strings of her hoodie and I seriously consider the drug angle. Or maybe her and her friends had serious anxiety issues. I didn’t miss that part about being a teen.

“You wanna flip through one more time? I try not to make mistakes twice but…”

She sits down tentatively and buries her head in the paper as she flips through.

“It’s alright,” she says. Her expression is so serious it nearly makes me laugh. She had pretty hair—blunt cut bangs that I remember rocking in my early 20s, but on her they hide the expression in her eyebrows. Maybe that’s why she always looked so sullen. Her lips are painted a pretty mauve colour and it complimented her green eyes.

“I really um…your class is really interesting.”

Kids saying that was like injecting pure joy right into my veins.

“I’m so glad you’re enjoying it,” I smile at her. But it still doesn’t crack a smile on her end. “It’s dense material but that’s nice to hear.”

“Yeah, I didn’t know if I was gonna keep the class.” It’s subtle but she inches back in the seat. The more she talks the more she relaxes back. “But I heard it was worth taking. And people were right.”

“Are you in your first or second year?” I ask.

“First,” she tucks her hair behind her ear. It’s covered in piercings.

“How are you liking uni so far?”

She meets my eyes for a second before they shift away. “Yeah it’s nice? I’ve never lived away from home but I have some friends here that I’ve known since before so it helps. It’s really different, less structure but I like the freedom.”

Wow, she really spoke a lot more when she was comfortable. But I find it endearing.

“That’s really nice. It’s good to have a support system, especially with such big change.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. Her eyes dart around the desk as she goes silent. I wait for her to get up and go but a minute passes and the room starts to feel even smaller.

I could ask her if she needed anything else, or maybe continue the conversation? Did she want me to ask about her? No, that would be weird.

“So um, was that your sister in class last week?”

Okay, didn’t see that coming.

“It was! My baby sister, although she’s not really a baby. Did she tell your friend that?”

She nods again. “She was talking to her.”

“You have any siblings?”

“An older sister yeah.”

“So you get it,” I say. “You love them, they get under your skin, you’d do anything for them, and the cycle continues.”

For the first time she smiles and my breath catches. For a moment…no. No, I was imagining things.

“Yeah. My sister and I were close growing up, but she’s the one person that really knows how to get under my skin. I swear she does it on purpose sometimes.”

“Probably,” I want to say something funny again. I just want to see her smile.

Back off, my inner voice says. Don’t do this again.

Some years back, when I was still in the throes of alcohol, I had followed a girl at the mall for nearly an hour. She had looked so much like my sister but with brown curly hair. I could have sworn it was her—my daughter. But after an hour of drunk stalking she had met up with her mum, a direct clone of her.

I couldn’t be obsessive again. Nobody knew about that phase. Not even Harry.

“D’you have any kids?” She asks. I don’t expect the question and it throws me off what with the thoughts looping in my head. She watches me, waiting for an answer.

“Um,” I usually answered no. To anyone who had asked in the last 18 years. But for some reason I nod today. “Yeah. One.”

I imagine it, I must have. Her face draws in for a second before she looks down. “Does she ever come to your lectures?”

“Oh no,” I feel the prick of tears and try to blink them away without being too obvious. “I’m not sure she’d find them interesting.”

“Oh.” She finally stands. “Maybe when she’s older…but I’ll see you on Thursday I guess?”

“Yeah,” I watch her go and realize she’d forgotten something. “Don’t forget your paper hon!”

She stiffens by the door before coming to get it.

“Sorry, it probably makes me a bad prof but there were two female names on the paper. Which one’s yours?”

“Bridget,” her voice cracks.

“Bridget,” I try to match the name to her face. It fit. “That’s lovely.”

She scurries out and I hear someone say “well!?” Outside followed by a “shh!”

I shake my head and try to focus back on my work, my heart racing an unusual amount.

***

It takes a couple days but I confess to Harry. He’d decided to meet up with me after class on Wednesday to eat out. We didn’t go far from the uni, a pub a few roads down. I actually spotted a couple former students there and they’d waved at me warmly.

“You’re not crazy,” Harry holds my hand on the table. “A few years ago I realized the volunteer interns we took on from the nearby school? They were the same age as her, teens? And I used to check up on them all the time, make sure they were feeling comfortable, until one of the guys on the team told me to quit being so weird and find someone my own age. I don’t know if it came across that way but…I got lost in that.”

“Oh Harry,” I squeeze his hand. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“Me too,” I pop another chip into my mouth. “But really I’d kind of pushed those memories out of my head until the other day. I can’t explain it, when she smiled it just felt like I knew her.”

“Yeah. Maybe she just looks like Taylor?”

We finish dinner while Harry tells me about a story about some friends of his I knew. We reminisce about our old friends as we wrap up and head out into the brisk November air.

We’re near the station when I gasp and clutch Harry’s arm. Standing outside one of the nearby pubs, smoking with her friends, was Bridget.

“Harry! That’s her!”

“What? Who?” He’s so oblivious as he whips his head around.

“Hushhh!” I nod towards the northwest side. His eyes scan the group. “Red beanie. We have to walk past just look at her okay? Tell me if you see it.”

Harry laughs to himself, “This feels like we’re in high school walking past a crush.”

“Is that how you walked past me?” I tease.

“I did.” He looks at me in that way that still gives me butterflies. It never got old.

“Stop making me want to jump your bones out here. I have a reputation to uphold!”

“Hey I’ll still have a job to support us,” he whispers as we near closer to the group. “Feel free to do whatever you feel.”

“You’re a bad influence.” I whisper back. By now we’re a few feet away and I sense Harry slow down beside me.

Bridget’s nodding to whatever her friend is saying. Philippe is waving his drink around as he responds. We almost pass by unnoticed when someone completely different calls my name.

“Hey professor! Can we buy you a drink?”

I turn and spot a group of students I taught last semester. They were all friends, always battling out their wits during group discussions. It made my class lively, even distracting at times. But I tried going with the flow of whatever group of students I got.

“Hey kids!” I say. Then I have no choice but to acknowledge Bridget and her friends. “And more kids! Is this the new spot to be at?”

I sounded so lame but shite! We weren’t supposed to get caught.

“It’s always been popular,” one of my old students says. “Can we pick your brain? Buy you a drink? We can buy one for your friend too.”

“I uh,” I glance at Harry but he’s frozen solid. I look to what he’s looking at and it’s Bridget. They’re locked in some silent conversation and her friends eye each other. “Harry?”

“Huh?” He focuses on me, flushed and just as confused as I had looked on Monday.

“We’ve gotta get him home,” I pat Harry’s arm. “Our alcohol metabolizes differently at our age.”

“You’re not that old,” Bridget says. She seems to be surprised she said it at all and her eyes widen. “I just mean you look younger than my parents.”

“We’ll take that as a compliment.” I smile up at Harry who still looks a little lost.

“Miss aren’t you going to introduce your male friend?” One of my old student goads.

“Don’t assume,” the other chides.

“Aren’t you a nosy lot after a few drinks.” I missed dishing it back in class with them.

“Oops!” They laugh.

“Anyway. This is Harry.”

“You can call me Mr. Professor,” Harry jokes and it’s a crowd pleaser. God they were drunk. Harry leans into me, “I can see why you like teaching. They’re an ego-booster.”

“Not in a 6pm lecture on a Thursday night.” I whisper back. He hides his laugh.

“Are you guys heading home?” Now it’s Philippe. I’m surprised he was getting involved in the conversation. He was usually the quiet nervous type.

“We are. Need a good night’s rest so I’m not falling asleep in your lecture tomorrow.”

“We wouldn’t mind,” Philippe goes for joker but his face flushes. It’s cute.

“Philippe you take way too many notes during class for me to believe that.”

His two friends, Bridget and the other girl, look at each other wide-eyed before losing it. And I watch Bridget’s face transform again and I get the same feeling. I look up at Harry and he’s transfixed.

I tug his sleeve and he looks at me, swallowing like he was parched.

“Weird right?”

“Yeah,” he whispers but his mouth turns down ever so slightly.

The girls are too busy cajoling Philippe to say goodbye to so we make our exit quietly. We don’t talk much on the train ride home but Harry simple holds his hand out on my thigh, palm up, and I lock my fingers into his. Even when we didn’t have words, we never stopped staying in touch.

***

It’s exam and holiday season before I know it.

I was actually looking forward to Christmas this year. It was the first that Harry was going to join with my family. Taylor’s bloke was also showing. He had been a hit with my parents and even I could admit he was the better of all the guys she’s every brought over.

It’s the last 30 minutes of the last exam I was facilitating this year. I announce the time left to the group. There were only about 15 kids left.

Bridget is one of them. I watch her tuck her hair behind her ear and bite her lip. She’d been pretty quiet the remainder of the semester, and I tried not to let my eyes wander to her too much.

After that night, bumping into her with Harry, we hadn’t spoken much about it. The hope that was initially so buoyant turned crushing as we faced the reality that the odds were slim to none. That our wishes were just pennies tossed in a fountain, sinking to the bottom of the pool.

Dreary winter days pass by and Harry and I try to keep the seasonal depression away with regular outdoor dates, cozy nights in bed, and seeing friends as often as we could.

On Christmas we go to my parents’. It’s a loud affair as my grandparents and a few cousins join us. After dinner I go up to my childhood bedroom, it’s now a guest room but some of my things still lay around. I open the window, it was cold so I drag a blanket out and sit outside. The street is quiet, I see families in a few open windows and I watch the festivities through them. I feel a mix of nostalgia and an ache that goes even beyond that, like I was missing something.

“Y/n?” Of course Harry would find me even though I’d left the door closed and the window tilted.

“Here,” I say.

“Ah,” he struggles to hoist himself out. “Some things never change.”

“You need help?” I watch him climb on all fours.

“I’m steady,” he grins as he crawls to me. I open the blanket and he gets in.

We sit in silence for a bit.

“It was getting really loud downstairs wasn’t it?” I ask.

“I think your grandma’s in love with Taylor’s guy.” Harry says so bluntly that I burst out laughing. He joins in.

“I feel like old people get to flirt with whoever they want because it’s always harmless.”

“Maybe that’s the case with older women,” Harry grimaces. “Can’t say the same thing about old men now can we?”

“Jesus!” I laugh and then laugh even harder when Harry says: “it is his day.”

By the time I wipe my tears Harry’s gazing down at me.

“Sorry,” I lean my head against his shoulder. “You have to stop being so funny.”

“Nah,” he kisses my head. “Have I never told you how much I like your laugh?”

He had. On a night many years ago on a roof like this.

I go to remind him but he’s pulling away. I watch as he shifts to face my slowly. He pulls something out from behind him and my brain only connects the dots as he starts talking.

“Y/N, this is something I wish I could have done 18 years ago but only feels incredibly right to do now. Especially out here.”

“Harry,” I gasp. When did he get the ring? When had he planned this?

“We somehow found our way back to each other again y/n, and you know I love you more than ever before.” He clears his throat as it clouds with emotion. “Some 18 years ago I told you I knew you, because the first time I ever laid eyes on you my heart knew. You were something special. And I never ever want to spend another moment apart again. So Y/N Y/L/N, will you do me the honour and finally be mine? Will you marry me?”

“Yes!” If I wasn’t sitting on a roof I would launch myself at Harry. I settle for pulling his face down to mine and kissing it. “I’ve always been yours Harry. But yes, of course yes!”

He slides the ring on and it fits perfectly.

It was perfect.

When we go back down my mum knows right away, and if it was loud before it’s absolute chaos as everyone descends on me and demands to know how he proposed and how the ring looks.

“On the roof? When there’s a perfectly pretty tree here?” My grandma asks. Harry and I exchange a look then, trying not to laugh all over again.

We ring in the New Year with friends, as fiancés. I can hardly believe it. Apparently most of our friends knew Harry was going to propose and they all toast to us and our happiness.

Somewhere in mid-January, I drop by my parents’ house to drop off some groceries. That’s when my dad hands me a letter that had been mailed home.

“It came for you, I dunno who thinks you still live here but it looks handwritten.”

I take it from my dad as I say one last goodbye. I barely make it to the tube with wobbly legs. Because somewhere inside I know.

It’s a long and agonizing 2 hours that I wait for Harry to come home. He finds me sitting in the dark; the sun had set while I waited, and I’d been too busy staring at the feminine scrawl on the front of the letter to turn on the lights.

“Hello-y/n, what are you doing in the dark?”

Harry drops his things where they are when I look at him. “Y/n are you alright? Say something.”

I open my mouth but nothing comes out. I just push the letter forward.

He walks towards it. It’s like he hits a brick wall when he puts the pieces together, he halts a foot away.

“What is that?”

“Is was…” I try to swallow so my voice doesn’t sound so hoarse. “My dad gave it to me. It was sent to the house.”

“Is it…”

“I was waiting for you.”

Suddenly he’s in motion. He puffs his cheeks out and lets out a noisy sigh. Then he paces the floor one, two, three, four times before standing in front of the couch.

“We should read it.” I say.

“Yeah,” he deflates into the couch. I want to join him but it feels like my arse has been glued to the chair.

I inch it towards me and Harry nods. He wanted me to read it.

My mouth is parched. I can barely make out any sounds as I open it up. It’s three pages folded in two, the paper itself isn’t anything very special, it’s typed up so it’s literally just ink on paper. And yet it’s worth a whole goldmine.

“Y/n and Harry,” I read before my voice breaks and I bury my face in my hands. Our baby girl had written to us. She had reached out.

“C’mon love,” Harry’s suddenly beside me and his hand squeezes my neck. The touch gives me enough strength to stand with him. He sets me down where he just sat and leaves again, returning with water and the letter.

“Can you read it?” I ask.

He settles in beside me, we touch along every edge of us. The letter sits in between us like our love, our hurting—it’s where it belongs. He begins to read in his soothing voice.

“Y/n and Harry,

I hope it’s okay I’m calling you that. I don’t know if it’s proper but ever since I found out about you two last year that’s what I’ve been calling you.”

Harry lets out a shaky breath and I intertwine my arm through his. He kisses my temple and continues.

“When I turned 15, I asked my mum about you. I started to wonder where I came from. I knew I was adopted for as long as I could remember but it didn’t mean much to me for a long time—I had a mother, a father, and a sister. I had a family so why did I need to know where I came from?

But over the last few years it’s been like an itch I couldn’t get to. See when I was 15, what set it off is that my sister decided to look into her birth parents. They were separated, her father lived in Tokyo and her mother lived in Wales. It took her a year to convince our parents to go to Wales. I went with and I found myself in the home of a woman who looked just like the girl I grew up with. The whole time it ate away at me. I wanted this ending too.

I asked my mum and dad when I turned 15 but they were weird and evasive. I turned my skills to the internet but I didn’t really know where to start.

I felt the missing part more and more as I turned 16. I used to fall asleep thinking about you two, if you were alive, what you looked like, where you were, what you did.

I love my parents. They’re wonderful and amazing, they are supportive and never made us feel like we were anything but theirs. But I wanted to know my background.

On my 17th birthday my parents gave me a letter like the one I write today.” Harry stops reading and takes in a deep shuddering breath. “She got the letter.”

His shoulder shake and he pinches the bridge of his nose. I clench my teeth so I wouldn’t cry too. I wanted to finish this letter. I wrap my arms around him and hold him.

This was unbelievable, what we’d dreamed of. Her words, in our hands.

“Here.” I take the letter from him and continue. “Let me read it.”

Harry stays hunched over, so with my hand on his back I continue, “in it you told me how much you loved me. How much you loved each other, your families, where I came from. And Why you had to give me up. For a better life. I saw the picture of you, and I felt broken and complete at the same time. I realized I was the same age as you in the photo, I had to meet you but I was terrified. And I didn’t know how.

I spent a year agonizing and looking through every google page I could find about you. I learned a lot! But I needed to meet you.

I don’t know how to do this. I’ve made decisions that may not have been the best but I’ve left my number and a picture of me when I was 5 in the envelope.

I hope you call.”

With shaking hands I turn to the third page that has one of those polaroids taped to it and a phone number in the same handwriting as the envelope.

“She’s beautiful,” Harry says while tears continue streaming down his face. I can’t even hide mine anymore.

She was beautiful indeed. She had his eyes, and her curly locks in a deep brown frame her chubby face. She had my nose, she looked a little like my sister as a baby. A scatter of freckles over her cheeks confirm it. She was ours. Our baby had reached out. We knew what she looked like.

“We need to call her,” I say. “We need to meet.”

“Yeah,” Harry wipes his face. “We…we need to do this carefully. It’s delicate right?”

I wanted to call her right now but what would I do but cry into the phone? No, I had to wrap my head around this. Harry was right. “Right.”

“She’s out there,” Harry turns to me. “She wants to know us. Y/n she wants to meet us! She saw the picture I-“

“I can’t believe it,” I whisper. “Our daughter wants to—did she leave her name?”

We open the letter and flip over every piece of it but her name is nowhere.

“Maybe she didn’t want us looking her up?” Harry offers.

“Maybe she has an awful digital footprint.”

Something about it makes us laugh and we can’t stop. But pretty soon it shifts back into tears and we’re left holding each other on the couch, tender and content and anxious.

Our daughter had made contact. Would she like us? Would she be mad at us? What did this mean for us?

The thoughts continue to spiral the rest of the evening. We don’t make much of an effort, we reread the letter and try to get dinner in us. We face each other as we try to fall asleep, whispering questions into the darkness. The darkness doesn’t answer, it grows heavier as does the night, and we fall asleep for the first time in our lives knowing the weight of a decision so long ago was a tiny bit lighter.

***

It’s a few days later. All I’d been thinking about was the letter, when I woke up, at work, during my commute, during breaks, when I went to bed.

It sits on our dining table, we glance at it as we pass by. It becomes part of the decor, three pieces of paper and an envelope. It’s so much weightier than that.

I come home from my lecture on Wednesday, a slight buzz of anxiety humming in the background. It wasn’t unusual for Harry and I to get busy at work and not talk the whole day but today Harry had been radio silent. He hadn’t answered my texts or phone calls in a very un-Harry way.

I walk in to Harry sitting on the couch in the dark, staring at the coffee table. On it sits the letter.

“Hey,” I don’t even take off my jacket. I slide next to him. “Is everything alright?”

“Hey,” he whispers. He stays frozen sitting forward, elbows on his knees, head cradled in his hand.

I wait for him to speak, to say something about what was going on. I rub my hand over his back and he glances up. I tip forward until our foreheads touch. “What’s going on in that brain of yours? Let me help you.”

“It’s a lot,” he whispers. It tears me in two.

“Hey,” I remind him. “Just one day at a time. Let’s just talk about today.”

“I want to call her so bad,” he leans away and buries his head in his hands. I wanted to call her too, I’d been waiting for Harry to give the cue since I knew I could be rash and impulsive about something like this. But something was going on with him.

“We will.”

“We gave her up. What if she hates us?”

“She wouldn’t have written us that beautiful letter, or sent a photo, or left her number if she did.”

Harry sniffles and then asks what he really wanted to, “what if she hates me.”

“Harry look at me,” He unfolds slowly and I make sure he’s looking at me. “You’re her father, you’ve carried her with you for the last 18 years. You love her. She wants to know you. Why would she hate you?”

“I’ve fucked up so much!”

“You’re not your mistakes.” I remind him. I get teary eyed as I feel the echoes of his insecurities. I’ve thought about it too: what if I didn’t meet her expectations? “She’s not going to see you and see every good and bad decisions you’ve ever made. She’s just going to see her father—her biological father, and see where she got her eyes from and her hair from and every other quirk she has.”

“You’re not worried?” He asks, looking at me with grief.

“Of course I am,” I confess, tears leaking out of my eyes damnit. “I’m so fucking worried. But my curiosity overtakes that, my love for her is what I’m focusing on.”

“I love her,” he says.

“That’s all that matters.” I cup his face and press a reassuring kiss to his lips. “That’s all she’ll care about.”

Harry untangles himself from me and my heart sinks. He paces the length of our living room a few times, running his hand through his hair.

“We really should talk about the letter,” he says.

“Yeah. I know. I want to call. Badly.”

He pauses. It’s like all the anxious energy drains out of him at once. He sits back down beside me.

“What do we do?” I ask

“How about Saturday? She’s probably going to be home then right? No school—if she’s in school.”

Two days. Two more days of agonizing over the letter.

At this point the letter is memorized, seared into my brain like I had an exam on it. I want to know the person behind it.

When we wake on Saturday it’s a cloudy day. I don’t take it as a bad omen.

We sit with our phones out after breakfast, just staring at everything before us.

“You should do the talking,” I tell Harry. “I’m too nervous.”

“I think you should.” Harry says. “She sent the letter to you.”

“Only because that’s the address my mum gave…gave her mum.”

It hits me again in another wave I try not to drown in. She was eighteen, she’d lived a whole life with a whole family. There was everything of her we’d missed out on.

“Please Harry?” I was already overwhelmed with the realization. I just couldn’t.

He watches me, must hear the desperation in my voice, and slowly pulls his phone forward.

It rings, and rings a few more times. When it goes to voicemail he turns it off.

“I didn’t think that was an option,” Harry says and we laugh. It feels good.

“It’s only 10 maybe she’s asleep. Try one more time?”

He pulls my phone and tries again but it still goes to voicemail.

We sit there, unsure of what to do. We agree to try again later, in the afternoon.

But around half past 12, while Harry’s working in our spare room and I’m scrolling through my phone, it rings. I don’t think much of it and pick it up automatically.

“Hello?” It’s silent on the other end. “Hello?”

I wait, but as I do it dawns on me. Who called me?

I check my phone screen and swipe through as I say hello again. I match the number. It was her.

I run to Harry but the phone is still silent. I wave the paper with the number saying hello again.

“Is this…well you never gave us your name. But we got your letter. We’re so gl-“

The line goes dead and so does my heart.

“You called her again?” Harry whispers, his brows furrowing as he stares at the phone.

“She called.” I think about calling her back but that was pushy. She was backing out of this.

All of a sudden I feel myself giving out. I catch myself against the wall and slide down.

“She’s backing out. It must be…too much for her.”

Harry stares at a spot on the ground, a million thoughts flickering through. Finally it settles on acceptance. He sighs.

“We can’t force her to talk to us,” he says softly what I already know. But his words are like a saw to my resolve and I just start crying. He gathers me in his arms but the grief feels endless. It felt like she was slipping away again; I’d lost so much and I lost her again. She had been so close. How could she do this? Why did she reach out if she wasn’t ready?

Questions without answers. More of them piled on top of the lifetime of questions I’d built for her.

I know Harry feels the weight of them too. We carry them together. That’s the only reason I hadn’t broken yet.

But I come close to it that day. We don’t hear back from her. And we don’t try to call her back. It didn’t feel right.

It killed me she was so close. And something changes inside.

For weeks I feel like I’m on autopilot. It’s like my first semester of uni all over again.

Harry tries his best to keep me together but he struggles too. It makes me feel worse I was taking the bigger hit, not being there for him as much as I wanted. But life feels like a a million blankets covering me.

I try to keep my usual momentum for my classes, but I’m always exhausted after. It pulls me deeper into my sadness, something I loved made me so tried.

It’s a Thursday at the end of the semester and I’m marking exams during my study hours when there’s a light knock on the door.

I’m surprised to see an old student.

“Bridget,” I wave her in. “Come in, what can I do you for?”

“Hi professor-“

“Call me y/n, I’m not teaching you anymore am I?”

“No,” she says with a stiff smile. The last time I saw her was in February, I’d spotted her with Philippe and a few other friends at a local coffee shop. She had been explaining something to one of her friends from a textbook.

Now her hair was short and more pronounced with waves. I wonder if she styled it, her longer hair had been pin straight.

“I had a question?”

You already asked it, I want to joke. But she was usually wound up so I knew it wouldn’t land well.

“What’s that?”

“Um, well.” She perches on the chair and I wait patiently for her to continue. “Are you taking any applications for TA next year?”

I wasn’t expecting that. She always found a way to take me by surprise. I stare at her for a few seconds, trying to remember what year she was in.

“Aren’t you in first year? If I do TAs they’re usually 3rd or above.”

“I know,” she tucks her hair behind her ear. “But seeing that one of my majors is in econ and my gpa is really high, and I did well in your class, I wondered if you would consider me?”

I hadn’t done TAs since my first year of teaching. I found I liked the work because it got me more familiar with the class.

“What’s your other major?” She had said one of them was econ.

“Sociology, I’m pre-law.”

Ambitious. “Why TA for my class?”

She balks as she meets my gaze. There’s something that flits through her face that I can’t quite read before she drops eye contact.

“Um, I really enjoyed it. I did really well. I think you’re super smart and would learn a lot by TA-ing for you.”

“I don’t give special lessons to my TA,” I let her know. “You’d typically attend some of the classes, mark assignments, and maybe teach exam tutorials, and have office hours of your own for students.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Why should I pick you?”

She pushes her shoulders back, “I’m responsible, dependable, I submit all my assignments on time and have experience teaching.”

“Teaching?”

“I used to tutor when I was in high school. I didn’t really get an allowance so I found a way to support my hobbies.”

“What are your hobbies?”

She blushes a little, was she still nervous? “I love reading, books are expensive.”

I nod. For Harry’s birthday I’d told him he could get any books from Waterstones and it had been over £100 for 3 only.

“I also enjoy cooking. And um, it’s been a while but my friends and I sometimes go to like. Do you know comic con?”

“Yes,” I’d seen things online.

“Yeah we liked to dress up for that sort of thing. We used to make our own outfits and usually the cost varies depending on what you’re making and how realistic you want it and…” she trails off as I smile. She was really enthusiastic about it. I couldn’t help it.

“Tell you what. Leave your number with me and I’ll think about it. I haven’t had a TA for the last few semesters but I am going to take this into consideration.”

“Really?!”

I laugh. “Yes. Really.”

“Um…” she starts to fidget again. “Can I leave my email? I’m getting a new phone soon so I-“

“Sure. Anywhere I can reach you.”

I expect her to get out a pen but she says it verbally and I type it out.

“Um, are you alright?” She asks out of the blue after I type in the last letter.

“Alright?” I raise my brow.

“I mean, you seem…I just heard, um.” She tries to backtrack but I ask her again and she spills. “Some people just said your last few classes seem scattered. Not that people don’t like you. I just…that’s what they were saying. And I don’t know if having a TA would help? And I just wanted to ask if you’re okay sorry I shouldn’t…it’s none of my business.”

God, this girl was so awkward. But she was sweet for caring, I think. “You’re not applying for the role because you feel bad that I seem…scattered right?”

She blushes. “Sorry. I think I said too much.”

I want to laugh but it strikes me that my students had noticed. I’d let it affect their learning. It didn’t feel very good.

“Life’s hitting me hard recently,” I tell her simply. “But I’m alright. Thank you for reaching out Bridget.”

As I finish up the semester I think about her. It wouldn’t hurt to have her TA for one of my lectures, see how she does. I didn’t care for TAs as a lecturer but something about her is compelling and I find myself emailing her in the middle of the night in June. She responds back a few minutes later,

Thank you!!! You’re the best. I’ll do whatever you need just tell me I can do anythingggh

Sent from iphone.

I laugh to myself as I put my phone away and go back to bed. My guesses were she was drunk at a party.

Harry’s asleep beside me and I reach out to touch his back but think better of it. He’d been busy at work with a project nearing its deadline and I didn’t want to accidentally wake him.

I turn around and try to drift off, thinking about my daughter, about how Harry and I hadn’t really talked much in the last two weeks, about my teaching, and my new TA.

Age 38:

It’s a depressing summer. The air of dashed hopes still hangs around Harry and I. It’s less thunder clouds and more of a fog.

One weekend morning, it’s one of those mornings that start off heavy. I can’t get out of bed, but I hear Harry pattering about doing his weekend morning thing. I hear the dishwasher turn on, and soon after he walks in with our laundry folded in a basket. I feel awful as I normally do, but not awful enough to get up and do anything about it. I think I’d have to feel less awful, to do that.

I don’t expect him to get in beside me once he’s finished putting everything away. He smells like laundry and shampoo, I must smell like rot and decay.

“Y/n,” he says gingerly. I just look at him in response. I felt too heavy to even reply. He sits up and calls my name again.

“Mm,” I say.

He sighs. Despite months of this Harry’s been nothing but understanding but this morning seems different.

Suddenly I’m being pulled up by my shoulders and I find myself sitting up in bed.

“Y/N,” Harry says again. I fold my arms as the duvet slips down and the cool air raises goosebumps. “I love you, which is why it’s so hard seeing you like this. You have to get on, my love. We have to move forward. It’s been months.”

All I could remember after our daughter hung the phone up on us was when I almost got to hold her. Right after she was born, I almost got to hold her but they took her away. And that piece of me that followed after her was nearly returned. It was that almost that was a death blow.

“It’s hard,” I feel myself tear up. It was hard not to these days.

“I know baby,” Harry scoops me into him. “I know. It’s hard for me too but we have to get better. We have to live our lives. She’ll come back to us, I just know it. She’s scared, we’re hopeful. Fear’s gonna keep her away. Hope keeps us patient.”

I cry into his shirt and he rocks me.

“I’m sorry,” I say into his shirt.

“It’s alright,” he grips the back of my neck.

So for Harry, for us, I try to get back to myself. I start to pick up my outdoor hobbies, I try to keep conversations going with Harry, I reintroduce my multi-step night routine. I look forward and re-light the candle of hope, even though I ache to blow it out before it can burn down to its wick.

My wounds inside stay tender.

We had booked our wedding for November and as the days approach we find ourselves with one thing on our mind.

Harry and I finally talk about it.

“I always thought she’d be there at the wedding once she reached out.”

We’re sat in an outdoor space near King’s Cross, coffees in hand as we people watch. We’d just come back from a cake tasting and neither of us felt like going home with such a glorious August day. Kids splash in the water sprinklers and couples sit around arm in arm. I touch shoulders with Harry unconsciously.

“Me too. I think that’s what’s kept me from mentally committing to the fact that the date is coming closer.”

“It can’t be forever,” Harry says. “She reached out. She just needs time. She’ll call again one day and we’ll meet her.”

“I know.” I lean my head on his shoulder. This was a realization I’d also been slowly digesting. I’d waited 18 years, what was a few more months, another year? Her baby picture lived on our fridge, at least we were one step closer.

And the love, I had to remind myself in these moments. Hold onto the love.

***

“I can’t stay for this class,” Bridget tells me. It’s the second week of classes and there were still 10 minutes until it officially started.

“Is everything alright?”

“Not really,” that’s when I notice her nose is red and her eyes are too. “My um, my parents had to put my dog down. She…she wasn’t feeling well yesterday and the-they found cancer? And she was in a lot of pain but she never showed it? And-“

I put my hand on Briget’s shoulder and lead her to the exit. There was no reason for the whole class to see this.

“Sorry. I’m-“

“Don’t apologize.” I rub her shoulder. “I understand. Take the time you need I have this covered.”

True to her word, Bridget had been a loyal TA over the summer. I considered it a trial run not expecting much but she had shown up, aced marking, and I’d gotten good feedback from the students at the end of the semester.

I’d also taken to her. She’d join me during my 2 hours every Monday and when no students would come she would loosen up. She’d told me all about the dog she grew up with, she showed me costumes her friends and her made, I’d asked her about the books she was reading and the classes she was taking. It was like having a younger sister again, except I was mature enough to appreciate her.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Bridget says and this statements seems to be the breaking point. She curls in on herself, shoulders shaking. I don’t even think, I just pull her into me like I would for Harry, for Taylor, for any of my friends.

“You have a lifetime of memories with her,” I hold her. At first she stiffens up and I almost let her go but she only breaks down further and wraps her arms around me. Tighter than I expected.

“I wish I said goodbye,” she says into my shoulder.

“I know hon,” I squeeze her against me, something maternal washing over me. “I know.”

After a minute or so she regains her composure, wiping her face with her sleeve. When she looks at me she looks so much younger, her face grief-stricken and regretful.

“I’m sorry-“

“Don’t be.”

She seems to want to say something more but whatever it is, she swallows it and takes a step away.

I don’t see her for two weeks and I miss her.

When she walks into the lecture the first week of October I try not to rush her but I’m overjoyed seeing her face. It had become so familiar to me.

She smiles shyly when she walks up to me and I pull her into a hug. This time she doesn’t stiffen.

“How are you?” I whisper. Students were still trickling in so I use the time to catch up.

“Okay. Better than that day I cried all over you sorry again. I went home last week, thanks for letting me take it off.”

“Of course. You forget I’ve been doing this without a TA before you. I can hold down the fort.”

She cracks a smile, her dimple making a rare appearance.

“By the way, week 10’s lecture is supposed to be cancelled.” I tell her later during office hours. “But I wondered if you wanted to hold a tutorial that week for some of the material?”

“Really?” A light comes on in her eye. It’s fiery and bright with excitement.

“Yeah! You know the material! I’ll leave you with slides and you can go about teaching them.”

“I’d love to!” She grips her laptop close to her. “Wait why is it cancelled?”

“I’m getting married that week!”

The light dims. Or maybe I imagine it.

“Oh! I thought you were married already?”

“No,” I’d referred to Harry as my partner any time he was brought up. “We’re getting married in November. You’ve met him actually, kind of, that night we ran into you and some students at the pub. Last year?”

“Oh yeah I remember,” she says but her eyes are somewhere else. “So you’re getting married?”

“Yes Bridget,” I laugh. “Married. Tying the knot. You alright?”

“Yeah,” she blinks and she’s back. “You never mentioned the wedding. Do you have a dress?”

“Yeah! Just finalized the tailoring last week. Most things are ready, we’re just finalizing the rings!”

“Cool!” She fidgets with the hem of her shirt. “Is it in London?”

“Yeah, it’s not too big but we didn’t want people travelling too far. This is where Harry and I were born and raised so this is where we want to marry too.”

“Wow,” she seems lost in thought and she stays pretty quiet the rest of the time. I didn’t realize my news was that surprising.

Maybe I still didn’t have Bridget completely figured out.

***

“Harry I can’t pick them up! I need to get home and then head back out to class!”

“Y/n it’s on your way home!”

“Not really! It’s a 30 minute detour. Why can’t you do it?”

“Because you can still get to him right before he closes. I won’t be done here until after he closes. I’m sorry love!”

“Agh and why can’t he do tomorrow?”

“He’s off until Saturday! We need it today.”

It’s the Wednesday before we marry and our rings are still at the jeweller’s. He’d finished them last weekend but we’d been so busy with other things we hadn’t had time to pick it up. And now it was either today and be late for class, or the day of the wedding.

I had gotten delayed at work and missed Harry’s texts explaining the situation. I’d only responded while on the tube, but going out of my way for 30 minutes meant I’d be 30 minutes late to get back to class. And since I’d left marked assignments at home that the kids needed for next week’s tutorial, I had no choice but to head back.

The idea hits me at once.

I hang up on Harry and ring Bridget. She picks up right away.

“Bridget, I’m on a crazy tight schedule. I’m going to be late to class by half hour at least.”

“Oh no. Is everything alright?”

“Yeah it’s just wedding thing but can you do something crazy? And feel free to say no okay?”

“Okay?”

I explain to her that if she rode to my flat, Harry would be there by then and she could pick up marked assignment. She can delay class by taking them up.

She’s silent but eventually I get a yes. “Okay. Can you text me your address?”

“Yes! Yes. Thank you Bridget. I owe you your trip fare and lunch or something. I’ll text you now, leave as soon as you can!”

I call Harry again and confirm he’d be home by the time she arrived. Everything works out.

I get the rings, and have to head home so Harry can try his on. The jeweller was expecting both of us, and let me know he couldn’t do adjustments if I didn’t text him by today. Just my luck!

When I get to the flat I tell Harry not to read his inscription but to try it on and thankfully it fits.

“Hey,” Harry calls out as I try to rush back out the door.

“What?” I was out of breath and frantic.

“Slow down,” he pulls me into a lingering kiss and despite being breathless before, I get some air into my lungs when we part.

“Sorry, so hectic.”

“I know I’m sorry,” he strokes my cheek. “I would have gone if I could make it. Also don’t be mad.”

“Be mad?” I let go of the door handle. “What did you do?”

“Your TA stopped by, Bridget. I forgot she was coming so I didn’t have your papers ready. I invited her in and she was in the living room looking at our pictures and she stopped in front of the baby picture. Of our daughter.”

“Okay,” did Harry tell her our history? I get antsy. “And?”

“Well she asked if that was our daughter. And I didn’t know what to say, if you’ve said anything to her? I panicked?” Harry runs his hand through his hair. “I just changed the subject.”

“Okay, that’s not bad. What’s the bad part I don’t get it?”

“Well. I changed the subject and told her she should come to the wedding.”

My jaw drops. “Harry.”

“I know! I know I’m sorry! I know she technically works for you, she was a student, all that! You’re so fond of her though maybe it’s not a bad thing?”

“Harry that’s…she was my student! I’m a prof at that school I…is that even allowed?”

“Yes? I panicked and googled it.”

I groan, “I swear you’re getting worse the closer we get to the wedding.”

The other week he had tried to buy out a whole bakery in case there wasn’t enough cake for our guests.

“You can tell her we have a full guest list? I don’t know what came over me! She just looked at me with those puppy eyes and she asked about the picture and I tried to talk about something else but the only thing on my mind-“

I kiss him. Just to shut him up. I was getting really late.

“This is like that book club you were tricked into joining all over again-“

“Hey I really like that book club now! It might be a good thing!”

“We’ll talk later.” I shake my head at him. “It’s fine, it’s not a big deal. It’s weird but what’s one more guest?”

“I also said plus one.”

I let out a long exhale and then kiss Harry again. I didn’t want him spiralling while I was gone.

“Baby don’t worry, it’s okay. I’m fine with it. We’ll talk when I get home?”

I mull over it on the ride to uni. But I can’t find a way to uninvite her without it being awful. I text our wedding planner if we could squeeze in two more seats and she gives me the thumbs up.

I did have a soft spot for Bridget, and technically I’ve known her for over a year now.

During office hours, we get a few people in for the first half hour. Then we’re back to just the two of us.

“Thanks for taking over today,” I tell her. “I really appreciate it.”

“That’s alright. Happy to help out.”

An awkward silence slithers in.

“So my partner invited you to our wedding.”

“Yeah! I didn’t know if that was serious am I…?”

She looked so hopeful I couldn’t shoot her down. “Yes! I have a couple people from the faculty coming. And some colleagues from my day job. You’ll probably have to sit with them but?”

“That’s fine!” She’s chirpy Bridget again. “I’d love to. That would mean a lot.”

I watch her as the smile stays on and she gets out her phone, typing away. Maybe her friends, her plus one.

I realize I’m not entirely against it. It had happened, and I was okay.

***

I stare at myself in the mirror, smoothing down my dress in a nervous habit. I never thought I’d get married twice, I always thought after Tatum I was done with marriage, but Harry would always be the exception.

I feel a flutter of nerves thinking about him. Walking down the aisle to him. We started talking on a rooftop one day, we had just been two kids.

“You better not cry,” Taylor threatens as she walks into the room. She had gone to fetch lash glue after my teary eyes loosened an edge.

“I’m not,” I say weakly.

She stands beside me in the mirror, “They’re all waiting downstairs.”

Just 30 minutes ago this room had been a chaotic mess. From my mum, to my friends, to the wedding planner. I’m kind of glad my lash came loose, I’m able to ground myself in these few minutes of silence.

Taylor talks about our family downstairs as she fixes my face. I get up with her help and she beams, but her eyes look misty.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Nothing!”

“Why do you look sad what happened?”

“Oh my god calm down, I just can’t believe you and Harry are getting your happy ending! I’m just…emotional.”

“Aww,” I cup her face even though I want to squeeze my baby sister against me. But my white dress, although not entirely traditional, would be ruined for the ceremony.

A ping on her phone—mum. We rush out. It feels like getting caught when we were younger and quickly getting away from the scene of the crime. I grip my sister’s hand until I stand in front of the doors leading down the aisle.

I don’t remember walking, it felt more like floating. Even if there was a chimpanzee and a talking dog in the pews I wouldn’t have noticed. My eyes are locked on Harry’s teary ones, they anchor me as I glide towards the man I’ve never stopped loving. Who always saw all of me.

When he reaches for my hand I grasp it and I know I made the right decisions. Even the painful ones. After all, I wanted to be nowhere but here.

“Y/N,” Harry reads his vows to me and I try not to cry as he sweeps me away with his delicate words about our love story.

“To be so deeply known by another, without even saying a word, shouldn’t make sense and yet with us we have a language that goes beyond words. A brush of your hand or a look in my direction, it can be enough to unload whatever burden I’d just been carrying. I promise to do the same for you, and to never end this dialogue between us. To love you and to cherish you forever.”

Harry couldn’t keep the tears in and they slide down his cheeks as he reads his words out to me. I reach out instinctively and brush his tear away and he laughs because I was doing it again.

“You’re can’t make me cry in my makeup,” I tell him and our guests laugh.

I had sat and thought so hard about my own vows. In the end after 50 versions, I’d settled on short and sweet.

“Harry, when we first spoke on the rooftop of that party in high school,” I say at my turn. “You told me everything you wanted. One of them was to make the world a better place. And I don’t know if you still want those things as much now as you did then, but one thing is true. You’re made my world a better place. I can’t imagine doing life without you. I love you with all of my heart, there’s no equation that could calculate how much.”

Harry grins at me and my breath catches. My man, he was my Harry.

We finish our vows with a kiss and a lot of noise from the crowd. When we turn to everyone I’m struck by how lucky we were.

The absence of our daughter was tough but when it came to love we had an abundance of it. I see it in every smiling and shiny face in the crowd. It’s like photographing a sunny day with one of those old school films, the sun is covered by a dark spot but the rays still wash everything in gold.

Harry squeezes my hand and I look up to him. He’s already looking at me.

He holds his hand up and lets out a whoop before he pulls my face towards him again for an even longer and borderline inappropriate kiss. I feel myself start to blush in front of the crowd.

We start down the aisle and this time I beam at every guest I catch eyes with.

My mum and Harry’s wave with tear-streaked faces. My friends from high school shout out, always the biggest supporters of our relationship. I catch eyes with Bridget, forgetting for a second she was here. Philippe is beside her, but what’s surprising is her blotchy face. I didn’t take her for someone who got emotional at weddings. I throw her a wave and she smiles through the tears.

Whoever ordered weddings to have a small break between the ceremony and the reception deserved a billion dollars. Harry and I spend the quiet moment doing our outfit change but afterwards we hold each other and let the moment sink in. The day sink in.

“We’re married,” Harry whispers when I tell him we should get going so we weren’t late.

“We took the long way to get here didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” he tucks me under his chin again and even though we would be late we just sway together for a little while. Our own private first dance, before the one for our family and friends.

“We did it all quite backwards actually.” I look up to him.

“Yeah, but we were never ordinary.”

“No, and I don’t think anything we’ve ever done is either.”

“Including our kid. I really wish she were here.”

“We’ll tell her all about it one day,” I promise him. His face eases into a loving smile, the fact that we’d made it to a place again where I can comfort him about this said a lot. Said we’d make it through everything, despite.

“I don’t want to do life with anyone else y/n, I have everything I need right here.”

“Remember that day at Whole Foods?” I remind him. “The first time we bumped into each other.”

“It’s a core memory,” Harry remembers. “I feel like the sun never set on that day. Getting to see you after all those years…it’s cheesy but it felt like coming home.”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Me too. I recognized you by the back of your head did I ever tell you that?”

“Stared at it enough in maths, of course you did.”

“That’s probably why I did so poorly that year remember,” I laugh. “Just staring at the back of your head.”

“That’s why I never sat anywhere but in front of you.” He swipes lightly down my nose and I smile. “Now I get to see every angle of you whenever I want.”

“Oi,” I slap his chest. “Save it for tonight.”

He brushes my cheek. Under his gaze I’m stripped naked. There was nothing to hide with him, ever.

“I understand how long it took you to get ready,” he says in his deep silky voice. My stomach flips. “So I can’t do anything right now. But y/n, our wedding night will turn into a wedding dawn, and then to day again. I promise you.”

I tip-toe, even in my heels, and brush my lips along his cheek. In his ear I whisper, “I don’t expect anything less.”

I step away, feeling unravelled by the look of desire in his eyes. I’m sure I had the same look of want. But before we can give in to what we wanted to do, I open the door to our suite and embrace the gust of cool air.

“You should get some air too,” I say and he laughs, following me behind.

***

“Bitch!” Taylor comes up to me on the dance floor later that night. We had dinner, Harry and I had our first dance, there’d been toasts and tears in between. I was finally letting loose as the wedding party crowds the dance floor. We had been taking pictures all night, after this next glass of champagne I was going to call it quits on photos lest anyone captures anything that’s not an elegant bride.

“What?” I turn away from Harry to face Taylor. She’d been running around all day making sure my wedding day was perfect and seeing her just warms me with love. I squeeze her against me despite her protests. “I love you Taylor. Thank you for everything!”

“Ugh c’mon,” she wriggles out. She’d never been very affectionate.

“Where’s your bloke?” I look out for him.

“He taking a call. Anyway don’t change the fucking subject!”

“What subject!?” I ask as someone dances past me, fluttering their fingers in my direction. I blow them a kiss.

“C’mere,” she’s annoyed I’m distracted. She drags me off to the side and I hold a finger up to Harry as he watches us. “When the fuck were you going to tell us about her? And you invite her to your wedding and everything and nobody knows anything!?”

“What?” I was drunker than I thought or Taylor was making no sense. “Wha?”

“The girl you just took a photo with? Don’t act stupid Y/N jeez I can’t believe it. You hid it from me when it happened but why are you still hiding…”

My sister grows more upset as she talks, I realize it was serious. Taylor rarely allowed herself to get this worked up in public.

I put my hand on her shoulder but she shakes it off. I think hard about who she was talking about. Who had I just taken photos with?

Some of Harry’s friends took a picture lifting us up, then there was a photo with my cousin but that can’t be who Taylor was talking about. There was Andie, a few other friends and their partners, then Bridget and Bridget and Philippe.

Bridget.

“Wait what are…who do you think that is? Taylor I work-“

“Your daughter! Why are you still acting fucking clueless!”

“What’s happening?” Harry walks in mid-way into the conversation.

“God you too!” Taylor turns to him and hits the back of her hand on his chest. He rubs the spot and stares at her like she’d gone crazy.

“Me too what?”

“Harry?” His mum walks up to us, her brows pulled together the same way Harry’s does when he’s confused.

“Yeah?”

“Who’s that girl? With the brown hair? Purple dress?”

She’s eyeing Bridget who’s laughing with Philippe.

“Bridget?” Harry glances at me and Taylor grows more pink.

“Bridget? That’s her name?” Taylor blinks away tears. “Really y/n? I get when it happened I was a child, you and mom kept it from me. But she’s, you invite her to you-“

“Invite who?!” I shout. What the hell did Taylor think.

“Y/n,” Harry puts his hand on my lower back in warning.

“Your daughter?” Taylor says with teary eyes and a look of betrayal on her face. “That’s your daughter isn’t it? She looks just like…”

“Jesus I thought the same thing,” Anne looks at all of us. “Harry?”

“That’s not-“ he stops talking and we all look over at her. I had to say, right now she really could be. With her hair curled and wearing what she’s wearing. She could be family.

“She’s my TA. I’ve known her for a couple years guys I’ve bloody taught her. That’s not our daughter. She wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight? Harry invited her last minute.”

They all turn to look at me. Taylor looks miffed, she bites her lip as she looks at her one last time.

“That’s weird. Nevermind.”

She leaves like she didn’t just make a big scene. Anne covers her hand with her mouth and shakes her head. “I’m sorry loves, I didn’t mean to upset anyone-“

“You didn’t do anything,” I reassure her. Taylor did. And she couldn’t even say sorry.

“Don’t worry mum,” Harry pays her arm. She fades into the crowd and Harry stands in front of me so all I see is him. “She’ll get air, she’ll be fine.”

“But how could she just cause such a big scene like I’d hide something like that from her? On my wedding day! And then leave without even apologizing ugh! She is still such a brat sometimes!”

“I know, she’ll apologize later just let her be.” He knew Taylor enough. He knew her at 13 and he knew her now. That’s exactly what she would do. “We’re getting you a shot.”

“That’s the last thing I need! I’m already kinda tipsy Har.”

“This won’t tip you over c’mon. Shake it off.”

He leads me to the bar and we take a shot. I nearly spill half of it, it was awful whatever it was. I lose Harry as we get back to the dancing and end up behind Bridget instead. Philippe noticed me first and slows his dancing, which signals Bridget to turn around.

“Y/n!” Her smile is so bright it hurts to look at. It dims as I just stare at her.

It would be crazy. It was a big fat coincidence. She had a mum, a dad, a sister, she told me all about them. Her childhood dog and the time she twisted her ankle playing football in year 4. She wasn’t who we wanted her to be.

“Are you alright?” I read her lips. There’s only ringing in my ears. “Hey! Y/n!”

Philippe is suddenly on my other side and I’m being led to a chair. He disappears and Bridget pulls a chair beside me.

“What’s,” my voice sticks and I clear my throat. “What’s going on between you two? He’s your date?”

“Philippe?” Bridget’s brows draw together and I can’t stop looking at where they meet. I knew her. I didn’t know her. I was too afraid to ask. “No just friends.”

“That’s not the way he’s looking at you.”

“What?” She tucks her hair back. “No we’ve been friends since high school. It’s not like that?”

“What would you do if he got a girlfriend?” It was a random conversation to have, here and right now but it helps me from tumbling anywhere else. Especially into a pool of what-ifs.

“I’d,” she shrugs but a flicker passes through her face, for a second her jaw clenches. “Be happy for him.”

“Liar!”

“I’m not! Why are you asking?”

“You two like each other. I see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking. Why did you invite him tonight?”

She shrugs, picking at something on her arm. “I dunno. He’s good at being a plus one. He always supports me? He’s always been there for me.”

“Sorry,” he shows up with a glass of water. “I swear the guy behind the bar was ignoring me.”

“Thank you Philippe,” by now I didn’t really need the water but I hold the icy glass in my hands. “Let’s see the pictures you took. I want them in my inbox or something soon. We don’t get our official photos for months.”

“Oh yeah here,” Phillipe hands over his phone after opening the photo. There are a couple of all of us, and then a few with just Bridget standing between Harry and I smiling.

I look between all three of us and feel something in my gut. But it’s too scary and big to unpack right now. I shove it away. I couldn’t do this. Not today, not tonight.

“You look beautiful Bridget,” I touch a lock of her hair. “Did I already say that?”

“Yeah,” she smiles awkwardly. “You said that before the photo.”

“You do. And so do you Philippe. Thank you for attending my wedding.”

“Thanks for inviting us,” Bridget looks at me wide-eyed, like she’s about to say something but when Philippe’s hand lands on her shoulder she looks down.

“What?” I ask anyway. Her eyes dart like prey to me, to Philippe, and down to her hands. I grab her hand and force her to look at me, like I could read something in her eyes. Like I would know. “Bridget.”

She looks up and her eyes well with tears as we look into each other’s eyes. My throat feels tight like I was having an allergic reaction, it travels down to my chest, I inadvertently feel myself squeezing her hand.

“I’m so-“

“Bridget,” Philippe’s voice cuts through whatever Bridget was going to apologize for. I look up at him and he’s burning a hole staring at her that hard. Over his head I see Harry.

“Oh look I see my husband,” Harry’s spots me too, relief in his features. His eyes stay on my face as he walks towards me and his eyes keep my steady. I want to tell him something, but everything that just happened was so non-verbal and unreal that I think I made it all up. I must be because this was insane and there was no explanation other than I was drunk, and sadder than I realized. “Gotta go kids. Have fun. I think I need another shot.”

I remember the rest of the night in snapshots. I forget myself later, giving myself up to Harry after that. We actually make it to dawn in a mixture of love and declarations, filthy words and I love yous, laughter and deeper conversations. It’s everything we were. It’s just like he promised.

***

Life moves on and I don’t bring anything up to Harry. I couldn’t, either I’m wrong and get his hopes up, or he thinks I’d gone insane in my sadness.

I feel like Bridget avoids me the week after, I return to class and she sits there, even takes questions after class, but she makes an excuse of studying during office hours and I barely get a few words with her. The week after she has an exam and she skips out after class.

I’m antsy. I want to know more about her; from her. I’m tempted to find a way to access her profile, get more info via the school. But I wait.

Harry notices, as we prep for our honeymoon booked over the holidays, he continues to ask if I was alright. And I try to convince us both I was.

About 3 weeks after the wedding, it’s a Saturday afternoon. Harry’s making lunch and I’m sitting in a pile of our books trying to decide what can be donated.

“Can you get that?” Harry asks.

“Hm?”

“The door?” He says just as there’s another knock. I’d been so entranced in the book I’d randomly started reading a passage of I hadn’t even heard.

I scramble to get it before the next knock and nearly stumble back when I find Bridget at the door.

“Hiya,” she says with an awkward wave.

“Hi…Bridget. What…come in what’s going on?”

“Sorry? Now that I’m here I should have called first.” She comes in and I go further in, waiting for her to follow. She hesitates before peeling her wet boots off.

“Harry? We have a guest,” I announce as I take her further into the home. I guess she’d already been here once before. “Bridget what can we do you for? Did you need something?”

“Bridget!” Harry pops out of the kitchen into the adjoined living room when we get closer. “Nice to see you again! I’m nearly done lunch, did you want to stay?”

What was it with Harry randomly inviting Bridget to things that were not pre-discussed.

“Um, I no. I probably shouldn’t. I just, came by to talk?”

“Sure,” I lead her to our dining table. “Is it about school? Did something happen?”

I sit across from her and Harry mumbles something, turning the dials down on the stovetop before sitting beside me.

Bridget’s eyes dart everywhere, from me to Harry, to the pictures on the wall, the kitchen, the books all over the floor.

“I was just doing a clearout,” I say to fill the silence. “Hey you like books right? Look through that pile there later if you want any of ‘em.”

“Actually,” she tucks her hair behind her ear. I feel Harry tense beside me. “I have a book for you.”

She leans down to where her tote rests and pulls something out. She lays it on her lap first, where we can’t see it. When she looks up to us she has tears in her eyes and her chin quivers.

“Please,” she whispers before pausing. My stomach drops as I take her in. Her face is blotchy and her hair hangs around her face, hiding half of it. She’s definitely cried before coming here, and I almost feel like deja vu as she places the book on the table. “Please don’t hate me.”

She slides it across to us. It’s just a simple leather hardcover, about 30cm by 30cm. The thing in my gut, the suspicion or the intuition, it turns into a cackling ball of energy and moves up to my sternum. I put my hand over it, and then move it to Harry’s leg. He’s frozen like a statue, staring at the book.

“Please open it?” Bridget says with tears streaking her face.

When Harry doesn’t make a move I pull it the rest of the way towards us. I open the first page to a few baby pictures.

I’d never held her in my hands, never even saw her. I’d pushed her out into this world, into another’s arms. But somehow I know who this is.

“Bridget,” I don’t even look at her. I start to frantically flip through the pages. The baby grows, 2 months, 6 months, 1 years old. Another girl joins in some photos, she always has an arm around the other child. I flip and flip and flip and even though I’m expecting it the photo stops my breathing.

I stare at the clone, or the original, of the photo on my fridge.

I’m frozen until another photo is slid towards us. It comes into view: two teenagers on Halloween night. The guy is dressed like the girl, the girl is dressed like the guy.

I throw my chair back and in the time it takes to walk to Bridget she stands too.

“I’m so sorry,” she sobs but I just do what I wanted to do the second she was born.

I hug her. I hold her to my chest the way I never got to over 19 years ago. She belonged here. She never got to be here.

She was finally home. My daughter.

“Bridget,” I cry into her hair. Harry’s hair. She had Harry’s hair, his eyes. She got my nose and everything else. I was holding my daughter. She was in my arms, finally.

She really did look like Taylor as a baby.

“I’m sorry,” she cries again. “I was so scared and I screwed up and-“

“No.” I say fiercely. I push her out of the hug so I can grab her face. I wipe her tears and I nearly cry again. How many tears had I missed? Over skinned knees, playground taunts, first crushes and friendship breakups. How many tears had I missed? “Don’t say that. You’re here. You’re—Harry!”

I turn to him, why wasn’t he here?

He’s sat exactly where he was before. Frozen, staring at a spot between the picture of us and Bridget.

I let go of Bridget and move back to him.

“Baby,” I touch his arm and he springs up. Tears coat his lashes.

“‘Scuse me,” he brushes past me and heads out into the hall. Away from us. I want to go after him but I don’t want to leave Bridget—our daughter, alone.

“I’m sorry I knew I would ruin things I-“

“Please,” I want to go after him so bad but I go to Bridget and pull her into a gentler hug. When we part I keep hold of her shoulders. I never wanted to let her go. “He’s just processing it. He’s fine. He’s not mad at you I promise. Promise.”

She bites her lip, it reminds me of Taylor. She was a bit of everyone I knew and loved. She was the love that Harry and I always had. She was ours.

“I just got so scared when I tried to reach…I didn’t mean to deceive you. I didn’t. I felt terrible every day.”

“It’s okay,” I tuck her hair behind her ear. “There’s nothing to be sorry about-“

“But I saw you,” she cuts me off. “After I finally called you back and then just like, ghosted you. And every time I saw you at school it was like…I knew I was to blame. And it made me want to tell you even more but I got more scared any time I came close to it. I almost said it at your wedding—it would have been so stupid. Philippe stopped me.”

“I understand,” I did. I also didn’t care about any of it. She was here. That’s all I cared about. I wanted to know everything about her, I needed Harry here though. “Look Harry…your…Harry. I’m just going to check on him. You stay here and just…”

I trail off and leave. I had to be sure he was okay.

He’s not in the bedroom, or the office. I try the door to the toilet and it opens, he’s sitting on the edge of the tub with his head in his hands.

“She leave?” He asks in a hoarse voice.

“Oh baby,” I crouch in front of him. “No. She’s still here but I just wanted to check on you.”

“I’m pathetic,” he buries his hands in his hair. “I’ve been waiting my whole adult life for this and all I do is freeze. Her first impression is of her dad just freezing and then running away.”

I try not to laugh at his dramatic retelling. “Har you know that’s not true. She’s known you before this. It was a shock-“

“You were fine.”

“You know I…always suspected. Especially after the wedding.”

He looks up at that, finally. “You never said.”

“Harry, I felt crazy. Saying it out loud would have forced me to check myself into the psych ward. We all react differently, it doesn’t matter though. Our baby girl is here. The day we talked about!”

He takes a deep breath, and then another one. I guide him to stand and he looks so limp and sad that I squeeze him in a hug. “She doesn’t care how you reacted. She just wants to know you.”

Harry sighs again, he splashes his face with water and we walk out. I was nervous for him.

We walk back into the living room and my heart sinks when Bridget isn’t there. But her things are?

A few steps further and she’s at the stovetop, stirring a pot.

“Oh sorry,” she steps back and nearly throws the spatula into the pot. “It was boiling a lot and-“

“Bridget,” Harry ignores most of what she’s saying and she freezes at the sound of her name. He’s a foot away from her now. I watch him raise a hand to her face and then drop it. His face is a cross between heartbreak and awe as they drink each other in. I wait in anticipation.

“Hi,” she finally says shyly. But it breaks the ice. Harry pulls her into a hug and she returns it tenfold from the looks of it. I can’t tell who’s crying, but I give them their moment as I turn the dials off on the stovetop.

It was just a regular Saturday, except it wasn’t. Our worlds exploded with our past and was putting itself back together again, all the old broken pieces were being mended back together with love. My chest drowns in it, I can barely breathe. In Harry’s arms, there’s no denying she’s ours.

***

“Thank you,” Bridget says as we tuck into dinner. Harry’s lunch prep had gone cold as we’d all sat down and talked about how Bridget found us (looking me up, finding out I was teaching a course she was interested in, forcing her friend Philippe to take it to see if I was who she thought I was), and going through her album. I found out more about her sister Louisa and her parents. It was weird seeing pictures of them, in my mind they were the people that took my baby as their own and for Bridget they were mum and dad.

We finally decide to do something about food when our stomachs rumble. Harry goes back to cooking, showing Bridget what he’s doing until she leaves to take a call. I recognize Philippe on the caller ID.

I take Bridget’s place but I’m more of an extra weight tied to Harry’s back as I hug hun from behind. We don’t even have words on what this all means to us. For now, just touching each other keeps us grounded, it keeps is in what was happening together.

Bridget comes back from the call when we’re nearly done.

“I just want to say I am sorry—and I know you said not to be,” Bridget says quickly before I can get a word in. “But I never meant to deceive the both of you. My plan was to take your class, leave the letter and then talk. I Googled you so much it felt like I knew you. Yet when we spoke in your office that day, you felt familiar but In a different way than the person I studied. I just liked you so much, and I wanted you to like me. I was scared maybe you wouldn’t. So I just screwed the plan and messed up everything.”

“Hey,” Harry hands her a tissue and she takes it. Under the table he squeezes my hand. “It’s in the past.”

“I know. Still made me feel awful. And I couldn’t tell you but I also couldn’t stay away. I applied for TA and, it felt like having a friend and a sister and a mentor all in one. And I…I screwed up. I took it too far. And then you invited me to your wedding—I got to attend my parents’ wedding! It was so absurd. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Sounded like me. But I don’t say anything. We listen to her attentively.

“I only told my sister. I wanted to tell you two before I told my parents.”

I think about my parents. Harry’s. I didn’t want to overwhelm her but I couldn’t wait to introduce her to everyone that already loved her.

“I just hope…no, I know I hurt you two a lot. I didn’t mean to. I am really sorry about it all.”

“Bridget,” Harry’s hand comes down on hers. “What’s done is over. There are so many things we wish we did differently but ultimately it’s all done. All that matters is you’re here, now. You’re our daughter we never got to meet and you’re finally here.”

Harry’s voice cracks on the last word and he sits back and laughs away the tears. “Sorry. I’m a mess today aren’t I? Your first impression of me is a crying mess.”

“That’s not my first impression,” Bridget laughs but her eyes also fill with tears. “That night at the pub. When I saw you two together I nearly bloody fainted! When I looked you up y/n, there’d been an old wedding registry with another bloke. But then seeing you two together?! I just couldn’t believe it—I thought I dreamed it. And then I nearly cried because my bio parents were somehow together?? And the way you just stared into my soul it felt like you knew who I was.”

I laugh, remembering but also knowing exactly what look Bridget was talking about. “He does have a piercing look doesn’t he?”

“Yeah. It could gut someone!”

“That makes it sound awful!” Harry laughs. “Don’t say that.”

“It nearly gutted me! I really thought oh shite—“ Bridget freezes and looks between us like we were gonna scold her for swearing and I nearly leap across the table to hug her again then. “I uhm, I thought you knew who I was.”

“We thought it then,” I let my eyes roam over her. I realize I’d always been a mother, despite not having my daughter. Holding her earlier had awoken an instinct in me and now every time I look at her I feel a rush of love and something fierce. I wonder if Harry felt it too. “But we thought we were mental!”

Her phone chimes as we laugh. She flips it around and then tucks it into her purse.

“You need to take that?” Harry asks.

“No it’s just Philippe. He was at the wedding? I was just talking to him, I hadn’t texted him in a while he wanted to know how it went.”

“Philippe,” I say with a knowing smile. Bridget blushes and Harry asks what he’s missing out on so I fill him in.

“He sounds like a good lad,” Harry comments.

“A good lad?” I repeat. “Are you hearing him?”

Bridget laughs behind her hand and I can’t stop staring at her. I have to force myself to go back to eating.

“He is. I might have told him about how I felt?”

“Wow,” I put my fork down. “You’re confessing an awful lot lately.”

She blushes even deeper. And suddenly I’m grateful of the weird and layered way she’d come into our lives. Despite hiding the truth, it had allowed us to get to know each other as people first. Without any baggage or give me any inclination to fit who I thought she should be onto who was in front of me.

I got to know her for the young woman she was first, so did Harry in a way. And I would be forever grateful for that despite all the pain in between.

“Sorry,” I get up. The affection was overflowing from my cup. “I’m going to give you another hug because I just can’t believe all this.”

“Ohh,” Bridget stands to meet me and we wrap our arms around each other. Here was a girl I already knew, here was my daughter waiting to be known.

“God, she really is our daughter.” Harry quips from his side of the table. He explains when Bridget looks over at him, “y/n is known to be a big touchy person, I’m kinda like that too.”

“Oh my god,” she smiles at us. “I’m like that too! My sister hates hugs. My dad’s 2 pats on the back man, 3 if he’s feeling a lot. I always wondered if…”

She trails off. It seems to hit all of us all over again every so often. For me it’s when she talks about her mum and dad and it’s not Harry and I. The reminder that she went 19 years becoming her own person that we now were catching up on.

For her, it seems it was realizing all the parts of us that were in her.

“You got Harry’s hair, and eyes.” I comment.

“I did! I realized that as soon as I saw a photo online. But I do look a bit like you.”

“You do! I should show you some younger pictures of us and our families. You’ll see more similarities.”

“Wow. So you have a younger sister. How about you Harry?”

“Older sister. Seems we all have sisters.”

Bridget and I make eye contact, remembering a conversation we had what feels like ages ago about having sisters.

We continue our dinner, swapping stories and filling her in on anything she wants to know. She leaves after, claiming to have to get back home, she had an exam on Monday to study for.

When she leaves Harry and I can’t stop talking about her. Or gushing would be more accurate.

“Did you see the way she laughs?” I’d tell him. “Pure you!”

“The way she tucks her hair back,” he would retaliate. “Just like you. You did that especially back in secondary.”

We talk until we’re exhausted, crawling into bed just staring in wonder. There were still so many details to figure out, so many things to cover, it could drown a person thinking of it all.

But like an anchor in the sea, Harry and I fall asleep with hand clasped together. We keep each other buoyed amidst it all.

It was going to take time for this all to sink in but all I’ve ever had was time, and questions. I think I was finally getting time and answers.

Age 39:

Harry’s pov: Having our daughter in our lives is simple and complicated at the same time. At first there were a lot of things to untangle but as time went on, the knots loosened until our lives became their own knots, tangled into each other.

Meeting her parents, the people I met once many years ago, was likely the strangest part. They already felt so familiar as soon as they greeted us in a warm embrace, as if we were there own children. I guess the last time they saw us we were.

“Oh look at you,” Bridget’s mum had squeezed us tight. Her dad had pat us three times and we took it to mean as much as a hug.

In my mind they were always the age they had been then. They were probably around the age we are now. Seeing them sport greys and fine lines, it was like stepping into a time portal.

Lou, Bridget’s sister, eyes us for the first little while before warming up and sharing all kinds of stories—especially the embarrassing kind with us.

When Bridget meets Y/n’s family, I can tell they’re loud and overwhelming at first but we’re all surprised when Taylor embraces Bridget and takes to her immediately.

She brings out old pictures they had of Y/N and I, but every time she says, “your mum and dad…” when she talks about us through the pictures, I notice y/n protesting less and less.

It makes me feel funny, I keep thinking I was going to wake up and find out it had all been a dream.

“This feels very full circle to me,” y/n’s mum says. She’s watching Taylor talk about her baby bump—she was 3 months along. “I saw Bridget as a wee baby when they handed her over to her parents. I remember running late to hospital and making it to the room just in time to see it. I blinked and now she’s in my living room!”

“Sometimes I feel the same way,” I confess.

My family is slightly quietier but they all fuss over our daughter. They ask a million questions and when it’s all over we take Bridget for ice cream. It’s a pseudo-recreation of a life we never had.

Bridget eases into it too. At first she had bouts of disappearing on us. No more than a couple days. But we give her space, understanding it was overwhelming.

Every time I see her, I see her mum—y/n. I was never there when y/n gave birth. We had to drive up from London when we got the news and by the time I got there the dust had settled.

I never even had the potential of seeing her. I’d always been more sympathetic of y/n; her loss had been physical, mine was slightly more abstract.

Even though I’d spent every year since regretting that I wasn’t there to at least glimpse her, I’m glad now I hadn’t been there to see her. If I had to live the last 18 years with this feeling in my chest I don’t think I could have lasted that long. I don’t know how y/n did it. It’s a concoction of deep unconditional love, and tenderness, and recognition, wrapped in a shell of protectiveness. It took me a while to sort through it all but I had a conversation with my parents one night at dinner Y/n and I had visited. And they’d laughed because they had told me that was simply what being a parent was.

“Maybe she regrets it,” I had said the second time she ghosted us. Really it had just been over a day where she hadn’t gotten back to us. But I couldn’t help the overthinking, being tuned into any potential of loss with our daughter.

Somehow, y/n was the cool headed between us two in these moments. Maybe it was being a mum, maybe it was knowing Bridget beforehand, but she was very in sync with her.

“She needs space. The last thing we want her to be is overwhelmed too. Now don’t overwhelm yourself love, at least she’s in our lives.” She’d say.

It takes us the start of the summer and all those meets later for Bridget to finally feel at ease.

We invite her on a road trip, we were renting a place in the Cotswold for a few days and told her to bring Philippe. When she doesn’t even hesitate to say yes Y/n tells me we’d done it: she was finally more comfortable than overwhelmed.

“Y/N made me a better man,” I say after a couple drinks. We’re all sat around a fire outside the house. Despite it being a warm day of hiking the night had cooled significantly and we’d decided that boozy hot cocoas was the way to go. “I’ve lost my ways a lot of times as an adult. But she’s always been my north star. Even when we got back together she led me to being sober and getting my shite together.”

“Oh…” Philippe looks down at his drink. “Are you…”

“No,” I laugh, Philippe was the most-conscientious teen I’d ever met. “I got sober to get my life in order. But…it’s in order now. I haven’t done anything crazy for over a year now.”

A little before our wedding I decided I wanted to end my sobriety. It had been a thought for months, and I had waited before giving in. But I really felt more in control of my life. I faced my life decisions head on, I confronted my past with y/n’s help, and I didn’t think I’d lose control again. It had been a shaky first week but I was right. It was a proud moment for me.

“You two really have something special,” Bridget comments.

“They do,” Philippe adds. “I can’t believe you got your happy ending after so many years!”

“Yeah,” y/n says as I lay my hand on her thigh, palm up. “Y’know what they say about loving someone and letting them go.”

“I guess you did that with me,” Bridget says so quietly we almost don’t hear her. But out here in the countryside we do.

“We didn’t want to,” I remind her.

“No I know.” She smiles, it’s a bit sad. Philippe tugs her closer. I could see how much he cared for her in that small gesture. “I’m not saying it like that. I hear your story and I just imagine how different my life would have been if I was raised by my, by you two. I wouldn’t have this life. And I really like this life.”

She looks at Philippe and I feel y/n squeeze my hand. She often said they reminded her of us when we were younger; the kind of love you’d do anything for.

“But you two loved me enough to let me go. To let each other go. It’s fucking sad but it’s beautiful. Life’s weird.”

“Here here,” Y/N raises her nearly empty cup of hot cocoa. “Life’s weird, sad, beautiful, but lately my life’s been full of so much love. I wish I could sell all the excess, I think I could solve a lot of world problems with it.”

“Wow,” I lean over and kiss the top of her head. “That’s one hell of a speech.”

“I have a speech,” Philippe stands, a little tipsy, and clears his throat. Bridget rolls her eyes but they shine for him. “Bridget you’re the love of my life. Since we were 13. But Harry and Y/N, I think I love you too. Ever since we were 15, I’ve watched Bridge struggle for answers about her past. And you two have given her all the answers, welcomed her—and me actually, into your lovely life. I’ve watched her become old Bridge but even more confident. I’m falling harder for her these days. And I can’t thank you guys enough.”

“Aw Philippe come here,” y/n lets of my hand to walk around and give him a hug. How quickly strangers became family.

Bridget grumbles about being left out and joins the hug. Soon I join in too. I want to create a mold of this moment, I think as I squeeze them against me, I’d make it out of plaster and let it dry. Any time we wanted, we could always find our way back to this moment here.

Age 40:

Y/N and I watch our daughter cross the stage. Beside us are our parents and in front of us sits Bridget’s parents and her sister. She has a whole army cheering for her. This was the first milestone event we could all really show up for, and show up we did.

“I can’t believe this,” I was so proud of her. I know the kudos went to her parents, and herself, but I beam with pride. Honestly Bridget could spin in a circle in front of me and I would be a proud dad.

“We need to get photos,” mum leans over and says so seriously, as if we hadn’t planned on getting a million already.

We have a framed picture in our hall, Y/N and I on our wedding day, our daughter in between us. Her graduation photo is definitely making it. She makes fun of this wall, calls it the Styles hall of fame, and I never mention it but she always lingers a few second longer in front of the photo of the three of us.

I do too.

“It makes me so sad you won’t be so close to me anymore,” my mum tells Bridget later. We’re all piled in our flat, drinks and celebratory cake in everyone’s hands.

It reminds me of mine and y/n’s 40th birthday, we had gathered our family and friends here and it was some of their first times meeting our daughter. Today is more intimate, and focused on Bridget.

“I know it makes me sad too, but I’ll be here often, visiting Philippe.”

“Only visiting Philippe?” I raise a brow.

“Is there someone else I’m supposed to be visiting?” She mirrors my raised brow.

As Bridget’s gotten more comfortable, me and her could banter for hours if you let us, it’s one of those things that brought us closer together—having the same sense of humour. It’s allowed us to have just as deep heart-to-hearts, a handy joke always close to the surface.

Y/N always says seeing me like that, thoughtful and silly, reminds her of the boy she fell for. I can’t deny that I’ve been feeling closer to my 20 year old self than my 40 year old self lately.

“She’s too cheeky,” Bridget’s mum says. “But I have to say I’ll be glad to have her back.”

Lou, Bridget’s sister, was moving to Wales. Apparently she wanted to know more about her background, and take a trip with her bio mum to visit her bio dad.

I think Bridget was moving back to Coventry to keep her parents’ loneliness away; she said she would commute to Birmingham for school. Even though she got accepted into law schools in London, going to a uni close to her parents just showed me how close she was to her parents. It was a bittersweet feeling.

“I’ll have somebody to watch cricket with again,” her dad says.

“Ohh,” Bridget throws her sister a side-eye. “I love cricket…”

We all laugh at her complete lack of concealing her true feelings.

Later that night, it’s just Bridget’s parents and us. The kids are on the balcony talking.

“I know we’ve said it before,” I say after a long silence. We’d just been watching the kids talk and laugh outside. “But I want to say thank you again.”

Bridget’s dad shakes his head. “It was the greatest pleasure of our lives getting to raise those two girls.”

He looks over at his wife and they smile at one another. Seeing them interact, I’m grateful that somehow fate had led us to them. While Y/N and I were figuring life out, while I fucked up a lot of things, she was raised on a steady and stable foundation.

“She’s incredible,” I murmur. “She’s gonna be a lawyer. She’s going to change the world.”

“She sure will,” her mum says. “We should be thanking you two. For giving us Bridget. I know it wasn’t easy, you told me you thought about her nearly every day. But we can’t imagine our lives without her.”

We sit in a comfortable silence, looking out at the kids until they notice and start to ask questions through the glass.

“She’s happier,” her mum says smiling at Bridget and Lou exaggerating their words through the glass. “She stopped being like this before she left for uni. We thought we lost her but…I think everything worked out for the best.”

Y/N glances at me. Her eyes crinkle when she finds me looking at her first, her eyes steady me as she says what I was thinking, “I think so too.”

Age 45

Your pov: “When did she say she would be here?”

“6?” Harry says for the tenth time.

“It’s 6:20 do you think something happened? She hasn’t texted has she?”

“My love,” Harry puts down the cutlery he was arranging on the table and holds my face in his hands. “They’re driving from Coventry, they probably hit some traffic.”

“Maybe I should call her?”

Harry sighs and squishes my face.

“Don’t! You’ll make more wrinkles.” I warn.

“I love your wrinkles,” Harry kisses my forehead right where the pesky wrinkles had been growing deeper over the last few years despite the additions to my night routine.

Harry always said our wrinkles were just the stories of our lives showing through. I told him to get himself undereye cream.

“You don’t think I’m aging handsomely?” He strokes the moustache he started growing last year. At this age, even I couldn’t deny it made him even more attractive.

“Well it’s no good if you’re ageing handsomely and I age like a troll.”

“I will love you if you age into a troll.”

“But will you love me if I turn into a worm?”

“Do you even have to ask? I’d buy you the best soil and keep you in a beautiful pot.”

“You wouldn’t take me fishing?” I ask. He sighs. Last year while we were taking a trip up north for Lou’s wedding, we’d gotten into a fight and when I asked him the question while he was still stewing he said he’d take me fishing. It had, ironically, broken the iciness of his anger and we’d laughed about it so hard he’d nearly had to pull over.

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he wraps me into his chest nearly suffocating me.

I’d spent half my life with a lot of difficulties, but life now felt easy compared to it. I had the privilege of getting older with the man I adored, got to watch my daughter flourish as an adult and a lawyer, watch her get married to the love of her life, and all the while live comfortably in the heart of this city I called home.

When Bruno starts barking though, I gasp and push myself off of Harry, “that’s them!”

Bruno continues to bark as I rush to the door. We’d got him a couple years ago as a pup and I can’t believe it had taken us that long to get a dog. He filled our lives with laughter and long walks. We loved him.

“Down.” I say to him. I open the door and hold my hands out while Bruno runs in circles beside me.

“Ahhh sorry we’re late!” Bridget steps into my hug and I tug Philippe’s hood so he can join. Bruno goes for Philippe when they walk in, he’d gotten obsessed with him after Philippe took care of him while Harry and I took an anniversary trip last year.

“Where are my hellos!?” Bridget says to Bruno and he barks, standing on his back legs to paw at her leg.

I hadn’t seen the two of them since March, that was 6 months ago. It had been their wedding, and they’d gone on a month long honeymoon after that, after which Harry and I had taken time off to road trip around Europe with Bruno, and then time had just zipped by.

After a hearty dinner, Harry and I carry out the birthday cake we’d been hiding.

“You didn’t have to do this!” Bridget fans her face but we treat it like we do any special occasion, plus making up for all the ones we’d missed. We get photos and exchange presents, she cries reading the cards and the whole time she says she had a present for us.

It’s a small bag, Harry and I guess that it was something for Bruno but when we take out a box it doesn’t sound like much when we shake it.

“Is this a prank gift? There’s nothing in it?” Harry asks.

“Open it!” He was making me antsy.

“You open it,” he hands me the box. Bridget and Philippe stare intently at my hands.

I undo the bow and slowly open the box. There’s a small square of tissue paper, and then a piece of paper. I remove both but something catches my eye.

I flip the paper over and stop breathing.

“Is that-“ Harry stops talking too. We stare at the piece of paper in our hands. It looks so much like one I had held 28 years ago. But it’s not.

“Bridge,” I look up at the couple. The parents-to-be.

“We’re having a baby,” Bridget says. Philippe and her are gripping hands and I throw everything off of me to launch myself at her.

“A baby!” I hear Harry say and joining us. “You’re having a baby! Y/n!”

“I never thought we’d be grandparents,” I look up at Harry.

“Those wrinkles were coming in for a reason,” he teases.

We never did have any other kids. Quite frankly, neither of us wanted any. When we first got together we were just starting to get comfortable with the reminder that we had a daughter out there and we could talk about her freely with each other. It felt like having a third person in our little family.

After Harry proposed, while we planned our wedding, we talked about it but we never thought it felt right. We both had first marriages where a lack of conceiving had just put a strain on the relationship we didn’t think we needed. We’d also felt like it was betraying something, before we met our first child.

When Bridget did reach out, it became about catching up on lost time. And then with her in our lives we knew what we suspected all along. We had each other, and that was enough. Bridge was our bonus. And getting to be aunt and uncle to our nieces and nephews it was enough. It was a full enough life.

We never even dreamed in our 20s we’d get to be parents and now we would get to be grandparents! I never realized until this moment that I wanted this. Really wanted it.

“Do you know the gender?” Harry asks.

“No,” Philippe answers. “We were thinking of doing one of those reveal parties? But not for a couple months.”

“Wow,” my hands drift down to Bridget’s belly and I remember I had something. I leap away from the group and find the box in my closet, it’s painted pink with random collages from old magazines. It hosts old diaries, photos, a hospital bracelet, and an ultrasound.

“This was you once,” I show her the picture when I get back. “I carried you like that once upon a time.”

She takes it with teary eyes, holding it close to her face to make out the shape of her. She hands it to Philippe and grabs my hands.

“I’ve thought about it before, but when I got pregnant I couldn’t wait to tell you-“

“She kept telling me I had to make a trip out to London just so she could give you the news.” Philippe interrupts, eyes scanning the ultrasound still.

“No really,” Bridget laughs. “I did. It’s like I got this new perspective.”

She puts my hands on her belly and covers mine with hers. I feel everything at once then, all the heartbreak I ever went through to get here.

“I can’t imagine giving this baby up. And it’s barely 3 months. What you were willing to do to give me a better life-“

She breaks off and Philippe squeezes her shoulder. I watch my daughter try to gain control of her emotions. I remember when I was pregnant with her, anything would set me off.

“It must not have been easy. After carrying me like this for 9 whole months. Thank you-“ she looks up to where Harry’s standing. I barely register his hand on my shoulder. “Thank you as my mum and dad, for making the hardest decision I can imagine ever making, so I could have something you knew you couldn’t provide.”

I reel my tears in, save them for later that night in bed while Harry holds me tight against him.

Right now I kiss my daughter and tell her what a good mother she will make. I tell her and Philippe how proud I was of them, how excited, how wonderful this was.

Age 46

The day we meet our granddaughter is seared into my brain. We get the call at 8:35pm, Harry and I were staying in a B&B in Coventry despite Bridget’s mum insisting we stay with her. We’d been here all weekend, booked it all week, not wanting to miss Bridget’s delivery date.

“Y/N she’s here,” her mum whispers into the phone. Her voice is filled with joy and giddiness. “She’s here.”

“We’re coming,” I say. Harry’s already at the door and we rush out into the night to see our granddaughter.

She has the perfect little face, and when she finally wakes up I gasp when I see Harry’s eyes looking back at me. I turn to him, to see if he noticed, but he’s teary-eyed and gazing at the baby in awe. I soak it in for a second, imagining this exact look if we’d kept our baby so many years ago.

Bridget’s parents had given us the room, to give us a moment alone, and I can’t be more grateful. Bridget encourages us to hold her and as her soft body is pressed into my body I let out a sob and hand her over to Harry. I excuse myself and step outside the room.

Lou’s kids sit on the floor outside, playing with whatever toys are spilling out of a miniature backpack. I focus on the flashy colours, trying to calm down, counting the number of toys falling out.

My life was a 180 from 10 years ago. This moment would go down in our history books as one of the best days of our lives.

But I can’t deny the bittersweet. The experience threatens to push me into the bitter past of not even getting to hold Baby Bridget. But with it comes an undeniable sweetness of getting to experience this now.

I take a deep breath and walk back in. Harry and Bridget stop mid-sentence and turn to me. Bridget’s face is streaked with tears, Harry’s looks concerned but I smile. He sits with the pink bundle to his chest and I ache.

“Don’t look so obvious you were talking about me,” I try a joke.

“Are you alright?” Bridget asks.

“May I hold her?” I ask in return.

I sit on the edge of the bed and she’s placed in my arms; she’s perfect. Just as perfect as Bridget must have been.

“She’s got Philippe’s hair,” I gently stroke the wispy blonde strands.

“She’s got my eyes, her grandpa’s eyes.”

I look at Harry. And he catches the stricken look on my face when Bridget tips forward and whispers to her baby.

“Look baby, this is your mumma’s mum, and your mumma’s dad. You’ve got his beautiful eyes. Say hi to grandma!”

My throat tightens. “Bridge.”

She leans away, her eyes dart between us. “I know I call you Y/N and Harry. It made it easier at first but…you are my mum and dad. Even though I have another pair. You are my mum and dad. And I want her to know you like that.”

“Oh love,” Harry leans down and kisses the top of our daughter’s head. She keeps her green eyes trained on me, grasping my hand that’s wrapped under her baby’s.

I mouth a thank you, my voice couldn’t pass through the block in my throat. She squeezes my hand and it sets the baby off. Remembering when my nephews were this young, I just hand her back to Bridget knowing she only wanted her mum.

Harry and I stay in the waiting room. We couldn’t go home, even though we had spent our allotted time we had inside the room, we stay there.

We watch Lou’s kids as Bridget’s family gathers in her room. We stay as they fall asleep, draped over us. I remember when Taylor’s kids were this small, they would fall asleep anywhere.

We talk in whispers, I don’t remember what about exactly. Mostly how excited we were. How there was so much to look forward to. How different our lives looked a decade ago.

“One day we’ll tell our grandkids,” I remember Harry saying. “We’ll tell them all about us, how we met, how our love burned so bright it shone in the sky. We lost each other but our love was always there to guide us back home.”

“We’ll see them grow up, all the memories we missed.”

“We’ll change diapers.”

“We’ll change diapers,” I giggle, half-delirious by the lack of sleep. It was probably 2am and I was tired.

When I gaze up at Harry I remember him holding our granddaughter. I replace her with Bridget. For a minute I allow myself to imagine how that would have been.

“I think you would have made an amazing mum if we did things differently,” Harry whispers into my hair.

“You too.” I whisper back.

“An amazing mum? You think?” The edge of his lips tug upwards.

“Harry,” I warn. We had kids sleeping on us we were trying not to wake.

“I love you.” He says in response. “To the stars and back.”

On our drive home I can’t stop looking at him. I always wondered how it would be like to grow old with someone; when I was younger and watch my own parents celebrate anniversaries. And then when I was older and my first marriage was so rocky.

But thinking about it now is like a simple mathematical equation. You take two lives, two individuals, and you bracket them in love. You add an exponent—the decision to continue choosing each other. And you get a lifelong commitment. No matter the situation, no matter the challenges or the changes, you choose to choose each other.

His side profile lights up by an oncoming car. For a second he’s the same boy I feel in love with, a few more gray hairs, a few more wrinkles, and a moustache. But he’d always be the boy I followed out to the roof, who held my hand in our high school hallway, the one who turned an I into a we when I got pregnant, I see the man I had coffee with after a run-in at the Whole Foods, I see the broken heart from a harsh life sitting on the steps of a church, I see a bookworm, I see a father, a husband, and now a grandfather. I see the one person who knows me like the back of his hand. The one I am home with always.

“What is it?” Harry asks as we pull into our b&b. “Have you been asleep this whole ride or have you been staring at me?”

“Staring at you?” I ask. “You think I was staring at you the whole ride?”

“Well you were really silent. And facing me

“I was thinking.”

“About me?”

“Why are you so desparate!? Do I not show you enough love regularly?”

“I could always use more,” Harry looks half asleep as we reach our door.

“The people are right: you give someone a hand and watch as they take the whole arm,” I tease.

“When you gave me your hand, I made you a wife.” Harry retorts.

“Ooh,” I poke him. “I have to say that’s a good comeback for being half-asleep.”

Harry grins back. “You keep me sharp.”

“And you keep me happy. Now open the door so I can stop freezing out here!”

We walk into the warmth of our b&b.

For so much of our lives, our past decisions haunted us. We let so much go. Now life was repaying us, returning it all back, with interest.

***

In a small b&b in the middle of a town called Coventry, two lovers crawl into bed. They’d just become grandparents and they carry an exhausted buzz about them as they try to fall asleep. They’re both thinking of the other, of their daughter, of the tiny bundle they held in their arms today.

Some 20 minutes away their daughter lays in a hospital bed, an exhausted buzz putting her to sleep. She dreams of her mother who gave her up, how she had found her parents in the end, and dreams about the kind of mother she’ll be.

A few doors down lay her newborn daughter, she doesn’t dream of much, not yet, but she’s in for a lifetime of love.

Most of life is what we made it. Y/N and Harry loved deeply enough to make it.

———————————————

TAGLIST: @quinnwritezz @unknownnbihh @dilfhrrys @umadirectioner @hermionelove @anonymous-91 @meganxfddf

[danvillecheese]

the dwampyverse and all its timelines

welcome to the analysis i've been promising for like two years! this will be phineas and ferb centric simply due to the sheer amount of episodes compared to milo murphy's law and hamster and gretel. with the inclusion of hamster and gretel, i will admit this has gotten a little less easy to navigate, but i'm hoping with a bit of analysis and suspension of belief, it'll be okay. ready? lets go!

the best way i can describe this first part is by providing a visual of how i see it. and using a three-circle venn diagram makes perfect sense with all of the overlapping and individual parts.

so - pictured above is said venn diagram. each part is its own timeline. ones where each show is their own timeline, ones where pnf/mml overlap, mml/hng overlap, pnf/hng overlaps and the one right in the centre where they all overlap. this doesnt include timelines where "endings" are separate (read: quantum boogaloo, act your age, doof 101, owca files... any ending that isnt last day of summer. but i'll get to those ones later). make sense?

1. where only phineas and ferb exists.

this works best before 2015. this timeline is the one that has zero murphy crumbs on it. dan and swampy haven’t yet had the idea of doing a show about a kid with awful luck and time travelling shenanigans. this is the most nostalgic timeline, for phineas has reigned over the disney channel cartoons for eight years. the lumberzacks dont exist, hamster and gretel dont save danville each week. pnf is its own show. no other shows have an influence on it.

adding to this - if you ignore any of the alternate timeline episodes and stop at last day of summer, you get my personal favourite way of watching the show. this one is basically just ignoring owca files, doof 101, all of mml and most importantly - act your age. I love the idea of an open book ending for these characters, especially for ones we saw on our tvs for over eight years [when it aired]. the events that take place after last day of summer are simply giving an idea of what COULD happen to our beloved cast, and without them, they really make no impact on the original story. the events before the end of summer are in no way impacted by the other alternate ending episodes.

2. where both phineas and ferb and milo murphy’s law exists

this is the canon, everything-exists-all-at-the-same-time timeline, pre-hamster and gretel. every piece of context works together, and everything is all connected. everything is canon! everyone is friends with each other! the pnf effect works! doof moves in with the murphy's, and this timeline is basically if you watched pnf and mml chronologically, without any of the alt ending episodes (in case you forgot which ones: quantum boogaloo, act your age, doof 101 and the owca files). this is the one i think we're all familiar with - it also includes candace against the universe (mostly uh... broadly speaking, the lumberzacks are the only mml thing in there).

3. where only milo murphy’s law exists

a timeline where pnf and hng are nonexistent. this timeline would probably exclude anything past season one, really. the crossover would not work. maybe even in this timeline the pistachions take over everything and the human characters cease to exist. (eleanor shellstrop this is the bad place!.jpeg) this further pushes the point (that I haven’t made - I’ve been thinking it I just haven’t said it lmao) that you can’t have milo murphys law without phineas and ferb. the crossover plot proves it. both in the real world AND in mml.

4. where just hamster and gretel exists

this one is a little hard to explain, especially since hng has only just finished its first season. there are a few pnf references in this show but it stands on its own feet much more than mml did. i think the likelihood of hng existing in its own timeline works a lot better than mml - but the chance of there being a surprise crossover is moderately high. like i said, it's a little hard to analyse this since its that much more removed from its predecessors.

5. where milo murphy’s law and hamster and gretel exist

this is a very unlikely scenario, but there is a chance a timeline like this exists somewhere. it’s a bit difficult to analyse or even prove since there haven’t been any kind of references or even characters that pop up in hng from mml. I wouldn’t expect the opposite either, considering that mml ended in 2019 and hng didn’t exist until after that, so hng within mml is basically impossible without a third season.

these last two timelines make a lot less sense, especially since hng still has stories to tell and we havent seen mml characters there yet (well... unless you count doof. hes technically a mml character, right? as much as some of us dislike that fact? haha. ahahaha.)

6. where phineas and ferb and hamster and gretel exists

this one works. i think it’s basically how dtva thinks it works (basically completely ignoring mml’s entire existence lmao) but this is basically the canon timeline of hng currently. but we’ll wait and see if there’s a crossover.

7. where all of phineas and ferb, milo murphy’s law and hamster and gretel exist all at once

like I say, a surprise crossover could happen (but based off what happened with the pnf effect I can’t even imagine how messy this would get) so yes, they could exist all at once. and they probably do, just that hng is a lot further removed from its predecessors in terms of references and characters popping up out of nowhere (doof and his inators don’t seem to have much importance yet, but who knows how it’ll end). this timeline, basically, is for those who don’t really mind that everything’s in a collective universe, and it seems like the easiest one to comprehend if you aren’t pedantic about all of this.

but what about the episodes where timelines end?

you’re probably here thinking okay, so what? there’s different timelines. this isn’t news. what about the other individual episodes that are within the umbrella timeline? I like to think of them as individual timelines within the show, along with all the other ones mentioned above.

quantum boogaloo

timelines have been a thing pretty much since season 2 of phineas and ferb, notably in the episode quantum boogaloo where they go forward in time and see a potential future where stacy is the president of uruguay. this is an example of something ‘canonically’ happening after last day of summer, 20 years in the future. this episode has a couple of potential timelines - the one where everything is fine, and the one where doof is emperor and everyone is named joe. the first timeline has candace ending up with jeremy and having three kids, along with ferb at camp david and phineas at an awards ceremony in switzerland. however, this particular timeline doesnt match up equally with act your age, since their ages dont line up. in quantum boogaloo, pnf are aged 30 twenty years later, in aya, pnf are aged 18 ten years later. this means they could either be 8 or 10 in the original summer, depending on the timeline. the second one is pretty much null to me since they time travel back and both of the future timelines cancel out.

doof 101

so. this is an episode i havent seen for a while. however, this is one of the perfect examples since the theme for doof 101 says "and this all takes place in fall so don't let the timeline throw you" like hiiii thank you for acknowledging that this is a separate timeline! there's a short bit in the title that shows doof facing either prison time or teaching at the high school in court, and its something we don't see the events leading up to. sure, he's done crimes against humanity but there weren't ever any consequences during the show. who turned him in? why is he on trial? what happened between him being evil and becoming a high school science teacher? and why does this monobrow edward rooney ass guy have beef with him and charlene out of nowhere? timelines, dude. got me stressed out and its not even my show.

act your age

[through gritted teeth] this episode also shows another potential canonical ending for the cast. phineas ends up with isabella 10 years after last day of summer, showing that this particular timeline has the kids aged around 8 or 9 in the original summer. we all know my thoughts on this particular ending, notably posted here. this timeline is easy to ignore if you dislike it, like the majority of us.

what does line up with the original summer, however, is doof's b-plot in act your age. I'm not a huge hater of his arc in this episode, and honestly, it might be his most in-character timeline ending out of all of them. yes, you heard me, theres something i dont dislike about act your age. like i said in the post linked above, i dont find it hard to believe he would bowl with perry and carl and monogram every week. he would totally have a mid-life crisis that wasn't real, like this guy canonically can't even hate christmas. this is so in character for him! in terms of it being a different timeline though, the only proof i have is that it's one of many different timeline ending episodes.

last day of summer

this episode is kinda like a flagship for the timelines, and as mentioned above, my favourite ending. i don’t think I need to reiterate it, but it really just provides an open ending for the entire cast, and makes room for anything else to happen. I’m curious to see how it pans out in the reboot; if they keep the continuity and acknowledge that ldos happened, or if they just kinda skip over it if it’s true that the new seasons will happen in the summer after the original one. but don’t worry - if the reboot adds any kind of canon divergence (I’m literally counting on it) You Will Certainly Hear From Me About It. lol

the owca files

I'll admit i haven't watched owca files for a number of years but i still remember bits of it. its a very strange timeline to me. i understand that doof is legally an ocelot and can be an agent but it does feel like the beginning of that out-of-characterness he displays in mml. and i guess the owca files is canon there, right? the bit with monogram during the pnf effect?

this also includes the pine tree. it feels like a way of letting us know owca files is in a different timeline. the flynn-fletcher house gets blown up, they get new plates, and we have symbolism of the end of an era with a pine tree in their backyard.

milo murphy's law

this one in particular is mostly just the pnf/mml overlap but ensures that doof ends up as professor time. if you've seen mml i don't think i need to explain it - after last day of summer (and owca files if ur nasty) the events of mml occur chronologically as if its one continuous timeline.

wait! what about the other canon divergent episodes?

ones that aren’t necessarily an ending but are set smack bang in the middle of the show with no explanation? don’t worry. I got you.

phineas and ferb christmas vacation

this episode features doof being evil in the middle of winter. dan povenmire has said he relapsed, but this is a perfect example of different timelines. a lot of the “ending” episodes were written and aired well before last day of summer so the chance of them knowing how the show was going to end was likely very little, if not zero. so, let’s imagine that last day of summer doesn’t happen. none of that arc happens, it’s just doof being passively evil throughout the year and then this christmas event happens. i don’t think he ever stopped being evil in this timeline. the chance of him just getting less… violent with his schemes is probably the best way of thinking about it. hell, he got perry a present. yes, it was a vase, but would the s1 heinz have done that? probably not. he’s definitely less evil as the show progresses, and even an episode like this one that aired in season 2 shows how quickly they turned it around.

on the other hand - the boys make their santa clubhouse invention and candace stresses what to get jeremy as a gift. does she try and bust them? surprisingly, no. her main focus is jeremy, and when it all goes south she’s in on what the boys are doing when santas elves show up. she mentions “what’s different this year than last year?”, insinuating that the boys weren’t inventing anything before the summer that the show is set in, and that this episode is definitely set after that summer. the B plot is definitely more solid proof of the alternate timeline, with heinz “relapsing” although I struggle to believe that with all the canon divergency that happens within the show and in mml/hng the chances of it just being a relapse are very remote.

that’s the spirit!

this one is similar in that it diverges from our last day of summer ending. doof is still evil, and candace - wait, she doesn’t even try and bust them. she’s keen to trick or treat with the gang and then go to jeremy’s party. she doesn’t even try and bust them. (man, it’s almost like it’s another timeline or something.)

back to doof though - he might have relapsed like in the christmas vacation episode, but he’s not necessarily evil here either. sure, he declared war on grass for an unknown reason and turned himself into a were-cow, but it’s not established that he wants to take over the tri state area like usual. if anything, it’s the opposite. he runs from the masses like it’s a witch hunt.

the curse of candace

this episode is all fine until the end where candace turns to dust and phineas says "we're gonna need a dustpan and some glue." there isnt much else to say about this one, but it indicates another timeline where candace is glued back together afterwards. and she’s also a vampire.

happy new year!

this is set after the summer the show is set in, considering that jeremy and coltrane are at the party as candace and stacy's respective dates. doof is still evil as his plot is to become ruler of the tri-state area. candace makes one last attempt at busting her brothers. this is definitely another timeline, and also apparently one where gangnam style exists. pretty easy to understand - doof doesnt have his giving-up-evil arc and continues to be passively evil like always. this could also work chronologically with christmas vacation, where he tries his naughty-inator and then a week later comes up with the resolution-changer-inator. candace's arc is a little different, she could have stayed consistent and tried to bust the boys from summer onwards, only getting to new years and wanting to change her ways with a new years resolution.

for your ice only

evil doof is back again in the fourteen days of winter vacation that fall between christmas and new years'. for him, this could be an evil scheme that takes place at some point in between christmas vacation and new years, or it could be its own timeline altogether. candace also attempts to bust the boys again, as per usual.

what's interesting about this one though, is the fact they refer back to football x7 when talking about hockey z9. and you're probably thinking 'obviously? whats ur point' and yes. obviously they bring up the original episode when referencing the sport with the same name format. but this also implies its in the same timeline as the football x7 game, meaning there's at least two timelines that divert off my fair goalie - one that doesn't include hockey z9 and one that does (this episode). and this one (i'm circling back) includes evil doof. bam!

escape from phineas tower

what! this is a normal episode, right? if that was your reaction upon reading that subtitle, you'd be thinking the same as me, until you remember the ending where the tower extends its forcefield around the entire milky way galaxy. but here's where things get really interesting. what film, may i ask, has a plot where the ensemble cast has to fly to another planet to rescue two other ensemble cast members? thats right, candace against universe! this means that catu is set in a timeline that doesn't include the escape from phineas tower episode, since they're able to exit the milky way galaxy and enter the vroblok cluster. this would be impossible if it were in the same timeline as this episode, since they would have stopped at the dome and wouldn't have been able to get to feebla-oot.

she’s the mayor

honourable mention to this episode since it features time travel and timeline fuckery and I never see anybody talk about it!

"Back at the golf course, Roger is astounded at how fast the game is going as Dr. Doofenshmirtz points out that the slight chance that the Accelerate-inator could destroy the very fabric of space-time and possibly the entire universe is a small price to pay to get done with the game. Perry then breaks the Accelerate-inator using a golf club, causing time to flow backwards at the exact moment when Linda and Candace are about to bust Phineas and Ferb, also undoing all of the day's events back to the announcement in City Hall and causing an alien from another universe to appear.

At City Hall, Mayor Doofenshmirtz prepares to announce the winner of the Mayor-For-A-Day Essay Contest. The alien destroys the Accelerate-inator, causing the time-line to be altered once again as the new honorary mayor is announced: the old coot and telling everyone that any gold that they find is now his, causing Candace to lament, "I was robbed."" (from the pnf wiki)

what would’ve happened if doof's machine wasn’t destroyed and set the timeline back into place? the fabric of time and space would have been destroyed, and there is a very high chance there would have been a last-day-of-summer-esque situation where everything within the void would cease to exist. right from the start of the episode, it begins with a clock chiming, so from the beginning we are made aware that time will somehow have significance, which it does. after the timeline resets, we hear the clock chime again, which lets the viewer know we're now in a different timeline. there don't seem to be any repercussions of this timeline fuckery later in the show since it doesn't get mentioned again.

night of the living pharmacists

second honourable mention goes to this ending that @momphineasandferbmadeablog reminded me of (tysm bestie) where it "ends" with stacy turning off her tv as if the entire episode was a horror film the whole time. however, even before verifying, i had a feeling it was debunked and its just the ending of the grievance film. and i was right.

"Dan Povenmire made it clear that the entire episode was canon instead of a film Stacy was watching, and that the "The End" card on Stacy's TV was merely the "The End" title card of the Grievance movie she was watching." (from the pnf wiki)

there isnt a citation for it and none of his tweets showed up while i was looking for actual proof but i definitely remember him saying it somewhere, but please, absolutely feel free to think of it as a separate timeline! without dan saying it's a canon episode, there isn't actually any proof within the episode that it isn't its own timeline.

across the second dimension/tales from the resistance: back to the second dimension

and for our third and final honourable mention, this one is basically the existence of the second dimension. I haven't added it as its own since the concept is pretty obvious - its another dimension where a different timeline occurs. i mean, idk if i need to fully explain it, if youve seen the film and the s4 episode you know what happens. it's explicitly stated to be another dimension, however the specific mention of timelines is nonexistent. semantics, yes, but i do really feel like atsd is separate from all of it.

it's certainly a timeline that could happen - doof could lose his choo-choo and eventually take over the tri-state area and the events of the film would occur, but the fact that the main characters cross over and meet each other puts it into a different category for me. but by all means, feel free to think of it as yet another timeline!

I want to specifically mention: this list of episodes is not at all an exhaustive number of timelines. the way I see it, this is just the ones that are “labelled” (for lack of a better word) as their own timelines. there can be as many or as few timelines within the dwampyverse as you like. this analysis is not a rulebook, but rather answering the conundrum with one solution out of an infinite number of possibilities.

the dwampyverse and its "current year syndrome"

i think we can all agree that phineas and ferb is a relatively timeless show, in that you could watch it at any point in the past fifteen years and it wouldn't feel particularly out of place. that being said, the technology used in the show makes it feel aged or weirdly out of time. most notably, the switch between candace having a flip phone in the first three seasons and a touch-screen phone in everything post-season four. this is clearly influenced by the smartphone boom that occurred in the 2010s when iphones became mainstream, and thus impacted everyday life, including in tv and film.

so, when the animators jumped on this trend, phineas and ferb became a lot less timeless. candace owning something like a flip phone, something that didn't even exist for a long period of time in real life, felt less like something that was trying to keep up with the times than when she suddenly appeared on screen with a smartphone. not to mention the alexa joke in candace against the universe. now that was a jumpscare.

if you did want to carbon date the summer that the show is set in, like this post did for example, and if you're like me, you might headcanon phineas and ferb's summer taking place somewhere between 2009 and 2012. the other times where they've crossed over is set whenever it makes sense. the pnf effect? i think its pretty much canon that it takes place in 2017, what with all the pop culture references like pokemon go, dabbing, and uptown funk. definitely things you can date back to that mid 2010s era.

milo murphy's law also makes sure it stays current too, like specifically mentioning the year 2016 when the lumberzacks formed, milo's bag of toothbrushes labeled 2012-2014, and king pistachion doing a selfie with everyone which is like the most 2016 thing ever. (you guys remember the oscars selfie?) there's certainly some purpose behind dating some of the events within the show, since its entire B-plot is about time travel, but it doesn't feel like its really trying to be a current show. at least, not until they have references and allusions to pop culture things like ducky mo-go.

hamster and gretel has what is unfortunately the worst display of the three - there's a lot of social media references in the show. not necessarily memes, but just a lot of display of the characters using social media. the first one that comes to mind is the destructress, where her typical Thing is her doing a livestream or some kind of story update announcement with her phone, clearly showing that this is a 2020s cartoon, and it feels the need to be very current. hell, eight year old gretel has an iphone in this show, but i won't go down the track of why that fact alone is so weird to me since it'll derail this entire analysis.

granted there are a LOT of inconsistencies throughout these three shows but the current year syndrome, although sometimes unavoidable, proves the fact there are multiple timelines - and they can be traced back to candace's flip phone.

so, what do we do with this?

I personally love cherry-picking the parts of canon that exist, purely from a selfish point of view but also because this universe allows for it. there are a lot of different endings or alternate paths these characters can go down, and as exemplified by act your age, we can either ignore them or embrace them. sure, it’s unlikely but there are some people who like the aya ending and say it’s their own canon, and others who like the ending where doof becomes professor time. or there's others, like me, who absolutely adore last day of summer as their timeline end. the openness of it in such a positive light makes it feel like it’s not even the ending for these characters.

it also begs the question - does everything go back to the status quo at the end of every phineas and ferb episode? well... it can't, really. most character arcs within the show are tied to events that happen, like monty and vanessa getting together, or buford joining the backyard gang, or even doof's slow arc to being a good, if not morally grey character.

no, it’s not a big deal that there’s a lot of different timelines in the sense you have to constantly think about it as you watch it. but it does present us with the classic conundrum: which one is actually canon? and to this, i say, pick your own ending. if you like cherry picking as much as I do, indulge yourself. skip episodes you don't like. ignore parts of canon that don't actually have that much impact on the timeline. hey, its not like the show doesn't allow for it!

[kurisus]

So you love noragami we all love it any reading recs of things like it? Or that you just like?

YES!!!!!

So I have to preface this by saying there's nothing quite like Noragami. And there is nothing wrong with rereading Noragami over and over. But I still have a lot of recs that give Vibes or in general make me Feel Emotions, so here's a non-exhaustive list.

Anime/Manga:

Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya. I've been saying for years that Fruits Basket is Noragami if it was a shoujo. It deals with the same cycles of abuse and an outsider who tries to break them with pure compassion that Noragami does, although it's much more of a drama than a fantasy. Just watch it and think of Yato as the Zodiac cat. I rest my case.

Fullmetal Alchemist (Fullmetal Alchemist) by Hiromu Arakawa. Chances are you've read or seen this already but it's objectively a masterpiece by any standard you care to use. Whether you like shounen fights, deeply emotional interpersonal relationships, political dramas about war and revolution, fantasy based on Greek myth, or anything else, FMA balances them all perfectly (another thing it has in common with Noragami). I love it so much.

Code Geass. This may seem like a wildcard pick but I rewatched Code Geass a few years ago and realized there are a lot of shared elements (like, Suzaku and Kazuma are the same guy). I may be delusional but it's hands down one of the most insane anime I've ever seen, in a good way. Like how FMA and Noragami balance a bunch of genres, Code Geass is a mecha action anime, a school slice of life, a political drama, and a Shakespearean tragedy all at the same time.

Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Again this may be one you're familiar with, but after I caught up on Part 1 of the manga I was so deeply wounded I had to start thinking about Noragami again (which is a worse idea). Chainsaw Man is much more of a Shounen™ than Noragami is, and I still maintain that the saddest parts of Chainsaw Man are like happier Noragami chapters, but it's a very good story and one that also has a lonely, cast-out protagonist who craves human affection but has no idea how to get it (and when he does, it's ripped away from him).

Durarara by Ryohgo Narita. In the anime adaptation, pretty much the entire voice cast is shared between it and Noragami (in the Japanese dub). It is a very weird story about a lot of weird people who are competing to be The Most Normal Person In Ikebukuro, a task which they all fail at spectacularly. It doesn't have much in common with Noragami aside from the voice cast but I love it so I recommend giving it a watch (or reading the light novels if you're feeling adventurous).

Link Click. This is a donghua (Chinese anime) about time travel and it steadily drives me more insane the longer I think about it. The three main characters have such lovely relationships with each other and the emotions go OUCH every time. It's a little harder to pinpoint the connection with Noragami here, but it is a story about the things people will do for love. The writing is crazy good especially considering it's not based on a novel or comic; I haven't seen an anime-original with writing this good since Code Geass.

Not a specific anime but the other week I thought about, what if Yuki Kajiura had been the composer for Noragami? Her style suits its aesthetic so well so now whenever I watch something she wrote for, I yearn.

Books:

The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir. If you've looked at my blog at all in the last 2 years you'll know I am very sane over this book series. I actually made a Venn diagram comparing it to Noragami a while back, but the gist of it is that they deal with a lot of similar themes such as love, death, and the curse of immortality. It also has soooo many messy and complicated relationships and twists that leave your jaw on the floor. You can also use the worldbuilding to put your blorbos into and it's very fun for giving yourself Thoughts. For example I've done it both ways by putting the Noragami characters into the TLT universe and the TLT characters into the Noragami universe. Both are very painful.

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint by Sing-shong. I'm not done reading this yet (about 2/3 through), but the further I get the more I realize it's about all kinds of love, the same way Noragami is. The narrator forms a "party" of people in the apocalypse, and they go through life-or-death scenarios together, and the way they grow to love and care for each other is so natural and feels so earned whenever it pays off. If you want romantic relationships, queerplatonic relationships, parent/child relationships, or any other type of relationship, ORV has it. There is also a webtoon adaptation but I'm reading the novel because it's completed; the webtoon will take many more years to get there.

Miscellaneous:

The Adventure Zone: Balance. This is a DND real-play podcast and it doesn't really have anything in common with Noragami but, like Noragami, it made me feel every possible human emotion, so I recommend it. It has a slow start but it grows into something so beautiful and creative and by the end of it I was sobbing in my car. Listen to it if you can, or at least listen to the music (it gets music later on and all of it is soooo good).

Okami. This is a video game heavily inspired by Legend of Zelda and much like Noragami it's a retelling of Japanese mythology, so the storyline will def have some familiar elements. I recommend playing it for yourself (it's available on Steam for PC and pretty much every other platform you can name), but a playthrough would be good too. It's nearly 20 years old and has withstood the test of time because the creators decided to make it look like a classic Japanese painting come to life, and the gameplay involves drawing, so it's very artsy and fun (although the controls are really weird).

Thanks for the ask! Hopefully you found something new, and I'll be sure to share if I find anything new to add to this list because I am always on the prowl for Noragami-adjacent things ❤

[rhaaclaws]

How I go about making [Original] character playlists

someone in a server asked for some help on making OC playlists and I made a think piece basically on how I do it and realized this could help people outside the server so 👍

This is a long post, 1.6k words so it's under a read more.

for character playlists, I make a Venn diagram of like

“Would this character listen to this song vs does this character Actually listen to this genre vs what story is this song telling”

If a song is important to a character/influenced a lot in their making absolutely add it in

that's very obvious but ummm let me use an example song

ok this one. I'm gonna be relating it to Nikki's playlist since it's on there

Would this character listen to this song? Nikki has a darker aesthetic with a lot of gothic influences, both in how they act, dress, and decorate their own house. in this case, Nikki Would listen to this song because it has that general 'dark' theme 

Does this character actually listen to this genre? while Nikki has been around for 500ish years, they do listen to modern music and also prefer longer pieces. Nikki does listen to gothic music as they frequent lots of clubs that would play stuff like this. Also, she's canonically a type o negative fan

What story is this song telling? obvs this depends on your interpretation of the song and how this could relate to the character since lalala whole analysis thing I'm not gonna get into. but its generally about a (vampire) woman on Halloween/eve and just how she is. also the whole "loving you was like loving the dead'' thing that relates to another character I'm not gonna mention

The last part that I forgot to talk about but kinda goes into the last one: could you relate this song to that character and have it make sense? both in how it sounds and in lyrics. bc I've found songs that lyrically fit someone Perfectly but then it sounds like shit or it just doesn't fit the character

like ex: Disturbia by Rhianna with Chimera

sound wise it's not like the rest of its playlist but I do have my reason for putting it on there: lyrics that they relate to and because her best friend listens to pop music and would show her this sort of stuff.

I try to have a general Sound for a playlist but obvs there are some outliers 👍

Unfortunately, some songs fit a character really well but they wouldn't exactly listen to it/does nottt fit the general theme of their playlist

example: ayumu's playlist. it has a lot of just Glam music and it features mostly van halen, judas priest, kiss, etc just stuff like that 

there's one song, somewhat damaged by Nine Inch Nails, that fits him exceptionally well in terms of lyrics that relate to his backstory and how it's a slow progression with a climax at the very end. but I don’t have it on there because sound wise it would stick out like a sore thumb

Of course, not everyone is gonna have One Set Genre and Sound

and some characters I focus more on different categories

Ex1: Dani's playlist is fully made up of what he listens to and I did that on purpose because she's a character who is veryyyy focused on music [specifically metal] and also one who Makes music in canon. so I focused more on the sound aspect and what he actually listens to but still tried to vaguely match the lyrics to her backstory [and unsurprisingly, a lot of them are about anger in one way or another. while Dani isn't an angry person anymore, she still goes back to it since its an outlet] 

Ex2: going back to Nikki's playlist, it's made up of 3 parts. 

In the first part, the thing I focused on the most was How people perceive her/how she wants to be perceived. so I tried to go for more 'seductive' songs and also tried to keep a general darker sound. 

The second part is stuff that relates to her past/highly personal aspects, which is why its more hidden within, and probably wouldn't notice it if you quickly scrolled; in this one, I stuck to lyrics [and it mostly lined up to what Nikki listens to since their top modern band is Depeche Mode all the way through and for good reason]. 

The third part is made up of instrumentals, mostly classical music bc well this is what Nikki listened to for most of her life, so I wanted to reflect on it a bit. so here my biggest focus was Sound and trying to fit her theme

Ex3: Andros' playlist

while I of course tried to have a general sound, I purely focused on lore. the order of each song on here is purposeful because it's meant to tell his entire life story within a playlist. kinda hard to talk about it minimally because the only other way is literally sending that director's cut document I have explaining each song and why it's on there in that placement

this was the hardest route imo for a character playlist since its Hard to find stuff that relates to specific experiences, but it's very worth it if you have a character you have a full-on story for 👍

now for actually finding music

One of the first things I figure out when making a character is "If they had a character theme what would it sound like" and/or what bands/genre do they listen to

When I have a theme I usually go off on what I already know and try to see "ok what artist comes up the most for this" and then go to their discography or similar bands [ill send my fav resource for it in a sec]

if you already have a stand name/namesake though, try to stick to that [you don’t have to but its a base you can use]

Here’s my thought process using all that to make a playlist, with our playlist of choice being Jing’s.

Their stand is called I Talk To The Wind, which is a song made by king crimson. so my first thoughts were "ok I’m gonna go through their songs and see what's similar/what I could put on this" and I really only felt like putting Moonchild up next. 

next, I was like “ok what's the theme of this character”. The first thing I came up about them was being able to see ghosts so "ok I’m gonna find songs that relate to death, ghosts, and just that general theme" So now I got came back haunted, ghosting, La Mer, I'm looking forward to joining you finally, Bela Lugosi's dead, Otherside, and (don't fear) the reaper. for sounds, I also went on this Halloween ambient noise playlist and added Laila pt1, black venom, and scary spirits

ok, what would they listen to? well, I know that their fav bands are King Crimson, but i also want to add in New Order and someee Bauhaus. so I put in ceremony, procession, burn, etc

and now lore stuff. how do these lyrics relate to their character/what would it mean to them? this usually requires some general lore in hand but you can just listen to songs and be like. hm. it'd be interesting to make this relate to a character so then you go off that. on this category I added: new feeling, macro, introspectre, i get wild/ wild gravity, and who is she ?

obvs your thought process depends on your character and the music you already know

I am insane because I am constantly playing music or otherwise I’d die so I have a lottttttt of music in my mind catalog basically so I usually go off on that

if you want to know more songs and such or know a character would listen to this genre that you're nottt super familiar with here's what i do

try searching for general terms so you pull up playlists on spotify

if you have a song already you can put that bad boy in something like spotalike or any alternative you like

thissss beautiful website https://everynoise.com/

every noise at once lets you scroll through basically every single genre ever and if you click on it you get bands that are part of that genre

something you can also do is use the find artist search engine and see what genres they belong to so you can find similar stuff

obvs theyre not exact butttttt

say i wanna look in the industrial rock genre. if i double-click on it i get to this page

you can use the scan button at the top to get a general sense of the artist [since you egt a sample] and you can go in deep into an artist's discography

i used that website a lotttttttt for tyhis one playlist that is purely sound based/what this character would listen to 100%

but yeah this is my general process on making a character playlist 👍 I’m veryyyy thorough with it and you can literally ask me about any song on any character playlist and i can tell you exactly why i put it on there

is it a little excessive? sure but this is my way of doing it

[anterocash]

lowlife.

part two to this. tw for drug mention and Cash being weird again. 

Cash likes his building, it has everything he needs and if he needed fresh air he can just sit on his roof. He makes the bulk of his money in that building so he doesn’t really need to leave. But he does, often, actually. Cash likes driving, which is how he got roped somehow into taking Jay, Minho and get this – Minho’s girlfriend, Astrid to a party, for ‘work’ purposes and image is everything to the crowd that ‘hired’ Minho and Jay for the night. Cash originally said he wasn’t going to get involved more than necessary, he could clean the money the best could with various investments and work opportunities, flipping profits but he didn’t want to get involved when it came to handling products minus his own purchases. 

His curiosity won in the end though and he found himself driving his Urus down a quiet street tucked away in Gangnam with his headlights off. 

“Am I invited to this party or am I just the Uber?” Cash asked as he slowed to a stop so they could get out of the car directly in front of the inconspicuous-looking building, other than the faint lighting in some of the windows higher up the building you wouldn’t think it was anyone in it. Jay laughed and nodded, “yeah, you’re with me, it’s fine. When’s the last time we partied together?” Cash hated to admit it but Jay was right, it had been quite some time since Cash hung out with Jay, they were supposed to be friends or something like that and they only talked when Cash got his ounce or Jay was giving Cash his cut of the profit. He can’t remember the last time he went to a house party and not just a bar or club. 

Cash shrugged and cut the engine, he took his beanie off for a moment and looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror, pushing his fingers through his hair, he sighed and reached behind his seat for a nicer hat, glancing at Astrid as she stepped out of the car and their eyes lock for a second and he dragged her into a staring contest, face blank he held onto the brim of his hat as his eyes bored into hers until he remembered the last time he saw Minho and he loses on purpose to glance down and see the necklace around her neck, the corner of his lips lift for a second and he turned around again and switched hats, popping a couple Adderall dry. Root beer barrels rolls were his current hyper fixation so he popped a piece of minty gum into his mouth, slipping the pack in the inner breast pocket of his denim jacket, and got out the car last, locking it. 

It was a quiet elevator ride once they were inside, the subtle thump of the bass from the music growing in volume the higher they went, finally stopping at the penthouse. Sometimes Cash thinks about getting a penthouse, just something to be more of a creative space for him to work in and it just happens to have a bedroom and a great view of the skyline. They let Astrid walk out first. 

He should be used to it, the stares in recognition or confusion but that doesn’t stop it from making Cash feel weird, but it was a party and that feeling was going to shake itself off sooner than later. He’s not affiliated with them like that – yet so he veered off on his own, the less he sees the better and he could keep himself entertained in other ways, it was a house party with a bunch of rich kids masquerading as a starved artist doing it all on their own when in reality their parents were paying their rent, Cash’s options were endless. He quickly got a cup of tequila with a splash of cranberry juice. He reflected on how much he drank last year and pushed it to the back of his mind and went to work the room, greeting familiar faces, the literary world overlaps with the rich and privileged like a Venn diagram so Cash did know some of the people in attendance and made conversation, networking because it’s not what you know, it’s who you know in order to climb up the ladder. 

Somehow during the night, Cash found himself in the same room as Astrid with Minho nowhere to be found, she didn’t really stand out to Cash visually and he usually liked foreign girls. He remembered Minho said they were together for four years? Or was it five? Cash couldn’t remember and it truly didn’t matter to him more importantly. He limped over to Astrid and she smiled at him when he got closer and he softened his eyes purposely, the hint of a smile on his mouth, they turned to talk to each other at the same time, and he squinted at her. 

“I like your necklace,” he repeated after they shared a small laugh and he knew she was wading closer to the hook. Astrid’s cheeks went pink and she reached up to touch said jewelry with a look of happiness on her face and Cash could have vomited; projectile vomited into her face because fuck her for thinking she can be happy in front of him like that. ‘Disgusting,’ he thought to himself. “Thank you! Minnie got it for me for my birthday last month.” She recalled, looking at Cash with stars in her eyes, Cash’s mother used to call him Minnie, it made his skin crawl and he took a sip of his drink. He had so many questions he had wanted to ask her yet couldn’t pick which one first, and when he settled on one, she beat him to the punch. 

“This doesn’t really seem like your style,” she said so casually as if they’re close enough for her to freely make assumptions about him and say it to his face. Cash shrugged in response, “I like to keep people guessing, what can I say?” 

–

Minho tried to keep what he did for extra income from Astrid for as long as possible when they had first started dating but she was no fool, confronted him one night after he got out of bed at one am and didn’t come back for a week. She had assumed he was married with a family or something and that was far from the truth, he told her the setup he and Jay had going on and suddenly small things here and there started making sense to Astrid and she adjusted to the news fairly quickly after that. He tried to keep her out of the dealing for the most part but it was a party he thought she would actually enjoy herself at instead of sitting at home waiting for him to come back. He was initially on the fence about asking Cash for a ride but Jay wanted to arrive in one of Cash’s flashy cars, something that didn’t interest Minho, being flashy like that but he kept that to himself and thought Cash was Uber just like he had asked, no one saw the look on his face when Jay invited Cash in and he decided that he wasn’t going to let Cash get it to him. Was he only there to sell drugs to some rich kids? Yes, but it’s still a party, he was going to try and enjoy himself and have fun with Astrid.

It only took Minho turning his head away for a second for him to lose Astrid, swearing underneath his breath when he realized he had to deal with everyone as he searched for her, he wanted to think things will be okay and didn’t get up, suddenly deciding not to look for her, he’ll just text her when it’s time to go. Minho trusted Astrid, or else she wouldn’t even be there. He was getting another drink when he finally found her and his stomach dropped to his feet as he saw Astrid and Cash talking, both of them seemed very… animated, oh god what if he was telling her that he paid for the necklace? Time had gone by and Minho had pushed that so far into the back of his mind he unintentionally relived the event all over again, breathing in harshly despite nothing obstructing his breathing. Dread filled his gut, how would he fix things with Astrid? Would she be mad he didn’t pay for it himself? Did she really want a ring? Minho was so confused and it was all Cash’s fault.

Cash liked to say that he hated talking about himself but he’s incredibly good at it. Apparently, Astrid was aware of Cash’s work, and that opened the door for him to go on a spiel and Astrid the avid book reader was captivated and hanging onto every word. Cash paused to take another sip, using the lifted up to obscure her vision of him as he glanced over with the corner of his eye from behind his glasses to see Minho watching them and wondered what he was thinking. She was officially on the hook, then it was time to dangle the bait in front of her fishy mate Minho. Because it wasn’t about her at all, Cash wasn’t attracted to her physically and had no desire to get to know her enough for that to change. Did Minho know this? No. Was Cash going to play into his paranoia? Hell yes, he was. He turned his head to see if Minho was still to only see that he had vanished. Boo.

The penthouse had a gorgeous balcony and Cash took advantage of it, starting out at the night sky as he smoked his joint. He heard Minho before he spoke, the man sighed and Cash waited to hear what he had to say, he was curious. The only reason why he was even at the party was that he was curious.

“How did she react?” Minho said finally breaking the silence that covered them like a bubble, popping it swiftly. Cash just happened to be mid-inhale when Minho dropped his question and Cash began to cough. A lot. It felt like minutes went by as he coughed and tried to catch his breath, it was awkward in the most hilarious way, Minho just standing there watching. Cash swallowed as he composed himself to look at Minho with the glint in his eye that made the older man feel so small in every sense of the word when Cash directed it his way.

“Why would you assume that we talked about you?” Cash deadpanned staring into Minho’s eyes with what Minho took as genuine confusion. Cash was insulted that Minho thought he would bore Astrid further by making conversation with her about her mediocre boyfriend who sold drugs out of  Bean Through. His words caught Minho off guard and he questioned himself for a moment, something he did entirely too much when he was in the same room with Cash. Flustered, Minho shook his head,

“I just thought…”

“Well you thought wrong. You want to know what we talked about?” Cash offered, letting smoke waft into the air before looking at Minho, with a smirk as he stepped closer to him. He was going to ruin this man’s whole night. Before he could get a word out, Astrid materialized out of nowhere, tipsy. She giggled, wrapping her arms around Minho from behind, “found ya! I was wondering where you went.” Cash watched them interact for only two seconds before he turned away, looking at his phone, maybe the opportunity to tease Minho will come at a different time, he wasn’t fussed.

“I saw you two talking earlier,” Minho said to Astrid and she hummed, nodding before breaking out into more giggles. “Yeah, I told Cash all your dirty secrets,” she wasn’t telling the truth of course, Cash knew what they talked about but that was the opening he needed. “Mhm, every embarrassing story…” Cash didn’t know much about Minho, but from the conversations he overheard him have with Jay, he more or less alluded to his mother being an alcoholic and being very close with his dad instead. “We bonded over your blunders,” he added and Astrid laughed even more at his alliteration.

Minho wanted to believe that they were joking, he knew for sure Astrid was just teasing him, she got cheeky when she drank, Minho couldn’t pinpoint where Cash’s words were coming from, he could never see where his angle started and it kept Minho on edge, subconsciously reaching for his neck as his phone went off. It was Jay. “Duty calls?” Cash asked before glancing at his own phone and looked up in time to see Minho subtly telling him to stop.

Does Astrid not know? Oh… this was…

“ – I swear, he spends more time with Jay than he does with me sometimes, they’re always hanging out,” Astrid pouted as Minho detached her from his person, smoothing his hand over her hair, he kissed her forehead. “Not true. C’mon.” He took her hand, leading her away from Cash. Minho was not going to leave her alone with him again if he could. Cash twirled his fingers in a cheeky wave as they left, Astrid waved back and laughed. Bait was securely on the hook. Cash was sure of it.

Eventually the party started to die out as time went on and Cash found himself playing Uber again, dropping Jay off first, they bumped fists and Cash didn’t bother to watch him go inside, not his job. Astrid had to pee something vicious and hopped out of the car and ran to the front door without Minho and Cash took the moment to turn in his seat to finally say what was on his mind the rest of the party. “How does she not know?” He asked getting straight to the point, he didn’t think Minho had it in him to keep how he made his money a secret from the woman he loved so much, not to mention they lived together how did she not notice something was up?

“She knows,” Minho answered quickly, glancing out of the opened car door to see if she was coming back or not. “I just don’t like to talk about it front of her you know? It’s complicated, out of sight, out of mind, yeah?” Minho explained and Cash nodded in agreement, that’s how he felt about this whole thing with Jay and Minho using the shop in the first place. “I get it,” Cash mumbled and turns to face forward again, “thanks for inviting me, well, I didn’t think you wanted me there but thanks for hanging out with me anyways.”

Minho nodded, “no, any friend of Jay’s is a friend of mine. Thanks for driving… again. This was my first time in a Lamborghini, even if it was an SUV, you didn’t drive this to the mall –”

“It was only two of us, why would I drive a five seat SUV for that? This is my ‘group activities’ car,” Cash explained and they shared a small laugh. Something about Minho that Cash couldn’t shake, maybe that’s why he acted the way he did around him, he didn’t want to think too deeply about it, Astrid popping her head out of the bedroom window that faced the street, calling out to Minho to finally come inside, letting the empty street know how horny she was.

“Duty calls.” Cash repeated and Minho laughs again as he steps out of the vehicle.

“Duty calls.”  

[doomonfilm]

Ranking : Spike Lee (1957 - present)

There have been countless directors whose careers have spanned my lifetime, but out of these countless masses, the one whom I can find the most in common ground with (as well as endless inspiration from) is Spike Lee.  A New Yorker through and through, Lee went from a series of films that seamlessly blended hip-hop and old school Hollywood aesthetics, to personal films, to his take on the blockbuster, and currently, to the point where his canon has earned him artistic freedom and expression that many of his peers have not been able to achieve.  He is the perfect bridge between the director-driven mindset of the 1970s and the cultural boundary-pushing films of the 1990s-forward.  Not everything that he directed was a hit or a masterpiece, but this man has more iconic films under his belt that some directors have films to their name.  That being said, it’s time to stir the pot and make an attempt at the monumental task that is ranking the films of Spike Lee.

I will only be including theatrically released feature films of Spike Lee that I have seen.  His documentary work will be excluded, as well as his films I have missed or have yet to see.  Here is a list of these films : Da 5 Bloods, Chi-Raq, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, 4 Little Girls, The Original Kings of Comedy, When the Levees Broke, A Huey P. Newton Story. 

20. Oldboy (2013) Every film that you make can’t be a winner.  In the case of Lee’s attempt at remaking Oldboy, there were already two major strikes against it : a superior version of the film already existed, and that version was the middle film of a trilogy.  I doubt that even a team of the most talented directors could have made a superior version of Oldboy that surpassed the original, but after 30 years of making films, it’s admirable that Lee would even attempt something so bold and seemingly insurmountable.  

19. Red Hook Summer (2012) When your film catalog covers three decades, there’s bound to be some overlap, be it stylistically or narratively.  I’ve only seen Red Hook Summer once, but it was impossible for me to look at it subjectively, as it seemed to be a modern day mirror to another one of Lee’s explorations of New York adolescence.  While this story is not a direct copy of a Spike Lee film that I will go into more detail on later, it does feel like the update equivalent that focuses on himself rather than the childhood of his sister.  While an entertaining film from what I can remember, it sits behind a list of previous impressive achievements.

18. She Hate Me (2004) Humor has been an element present in a number of Spike Lee films, but for my money’s worth, this film is the closest thing to an outright comedy that he ever made.  Like a number of films on the back half of his career, he is touching upon important topics (sexuality and toxic masculinity, in this case), but these are topics that he has hit with more nuance and creativity in earlier films.  This film did help transition Anthony Mackie into a leading man role, and he certainly took that opportunity and ran with it, so She Hate Me could be heralded for that alone.  That being said, it was a great idea that slightly missed the mark, therefore placing it on the backend of the memorable films list for Lee.

17. Miracle at St. Anna (2008) This film had the potential to be a breakout resurgence for Spike Lee.  He was coming hot off the heels of Inside Man, a perfect blend of Lee’s style and modern Hollywood fare, so having a period-piece war film seemed like a slam dunk.  His cast was strong, while also being filled of relatively unknown young actors on the verge of becoming stars in their own right, but for whatever reason, this film failed to make a connection with the masses.  While I do remember mostly enjoying my watch, I also remember feeling a bit underwhelmed by the ending, which in turn left me lacking a reason to revisit it.  Maybe it’s a hidden gem that I haven’t seen enough times yet, but at this moment in time, its home is near the bottom of Lee’s impressive list of films.

16. Get on the Bus (1996) Many people’s eyes were opened to racial injustices during the COVID-19 pandemic, as several African-American men and women found themselves on the wrong end of violent acts from the police and other citizens in the midst of a ‘shelter-in-place’ era.  Not only have these injustices been going on for my entire lifetime, but they’ve been a generational trauma for many African-Americans in the United States.  When the Million Man March was announced in 1996, it was not surprising that Spike Lee took it as an opportunity to both document the march and build a narrative around it in which he could showcase a collection of actors he’d either featured in past films or would work with in future films.  To my knowledge, this is one of maybe two or three films about the event, and it was certainly the film released in the closest proximity to it.  For an independent, quick shoot, it definitely stands up, but in comparison to Lee’s other works that benefited from full crews and production schedules, it finds itself paling in comparison.

15.  BlacKkKlansman (2018) Despite the fact that this is the film that finally got Lee some sort of recognition at the Oscars, BlacKkKlansman was not quite the true return to form that many fans of Spike Lee expected.  The film had moments of humor, compelling moments that directly focused on racial injustice and systematic oppression, and it pulled no punches while doing so.  Like a handful of Lee’s other films, however, this one falls when compared to his other films that deal with similar subject matter.  Adam Driver continued to show fans his expansive range, and  Jasper Paakonen deserved INFINITELY more recognition than he got, but ultimately, this film checks all the ‘good’ boxes where it was expected to check the ‘great’ ones.

14. 25th Hour (2002) As the year 2000 approached, Lee seemed to attempt and make a shift from films that specifically spoke on aspects of the African-American experience in favor of occasional films that reached a wider audience.  While Summer of Sam would be considered the first foray into that realm, the true mark of this elevated sense of creative duty came in the form of 25th Hour.  With the actors in tow, in tandem with the cinematography and skilled directing ability displayed in the film, one would expect a powerhouse movie, but ultimately, the expectations exceeded the narrative of this film.  This one is entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but I personally did not find a connection with the story, meaning that the film was, at best, fun to watch.

13. Summer of Sam (1999)  I’ve been a true-crime junkie since my early teenage years, and even the most casual of true-crime fans is more than likely familiar with David Berkowitz, also known to many as the Son of Sam.  While Red Hook Summer did come out after Summer of Sam, it’d be hard to deny the fact that Summer of Sam is the last of Lee’s love letters to New York City.  This was the film where Spike Lee stepped out of his comfort zone of the African-American experience, choosing instead to focus on more colloquial aspects of the American experience, and for my money’s worth, it was the start of an important shift for him.  Despite being light on the Son of Sam action, the actors this film does focus on (and the story it chooses to tell) is a fresh look at a familiar era, and a crowning achievement that signaled new things for Spike Lee.

12.  He Got Game (1998) If you made a Venn diagram of people familiar with Spike Lee, the two biggest circles would be film fans and people who have seen at least one New York Knicks game since the 1990s.  Therefore, the only thing that was really and truly surprising about He Got Game was the fact that it took Spike Lee 15 years and 11 films to make a film about basketball.  On the outset, that’s exactly what it is : a film about basketball.  Viewed with a wider lens, however, this story is a love letter to one of the most popular American inventions, and a story about how it can serve as a common-ground bridge for those from wholly different walks of life.  The juxtaposition of Aaron Copland and Public Enemy made the soundtrack provocative, and Ray Allen stood out in his lead role, holding his own against the living legend that is Denzel Washington, who is always good for a stellar performance in a Spike Lee joint.  Don’t mistake this film’s place on the list for my feelings about it... this is a stellar film, in my opinion, and one of my favorites to revisit.

11. Crooklyn (1994) After making what many would argue to be the most important film of his career (which we will eventually get to), it’s no surprise that Spike Lee circled his creative wagons and made the focus of his next film inward.  Crooklyn covers what seem like many personal bases for Spike Lee : he portrays the New York of the past vividly and beautifully, while spinning a true-to-life tale based on his personal experience, but opting to focus on his sister Joie Lee and his father Bill Lee.  Of Lee’s many, many films, this was the one that I felt the most compelled to see at the time of release, it is one of the two I have the most vivid memories and recollections of, and it has a number of stylistic choices that keep me wonderfully perplexed to this day.  Despite not cracking the top ten Spike Lee films, this one ranks high on the list of Spike Lee films that hit the bullseye of my heart.

10. Jungle Fever (1991) Interracial romance is one of those things that seemingly will always be a sensitive subject.  I’ve heard many people say that Jungle Fever has a dated look on the subject, but I’d argue that the film was very forward thinking, especially in showing that an interracial romance is not the answer to the cultural and societal problems that life presents us.  The movie also touches deeply on drug addiction without crossing over into the realm of being preachy or talking down to the viewer.  It didn’t hurt that Stevie Wonder also managed to create a soundtrack’s worth of new material that instantly brought the seemingly controversial film directly into the public eye.  Maybe it is dated... maybe it is uncomfortable... but what it is, undoubtedly, is an early masterpiece that fell near the end of one of the most stellar introductory runs that any filmmaker has presented us.

9. Clockers (1995) Ever wonder what would happen if a Martin Scorsese film found its way into the hands of Spike Lee?  Well, wonder no longer, because Clockers is out there waiting for you to discover it.  The amount that this movie gets slept on is an outright tragedy and travesty.  The soundtrack is KILLER, the color-timing puts the viewer in an immediate ‘cold-world’ environment, the order of operations presented in this film is brutal and unforgiving, and yet, it manages to be one of the most heartfelt films in the Spike Lee canon.  EVERYONE presented in this movie brought their A-game to the table, from the Spike Lee regulars like Isaiah Washington, John Turturro and Harvey Keitel, to the glorified cameos and supporting roles, like Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Sticky Fingaz and Fredro of Onyx, and relative newcomer but promising leading man Makhi Phifer.  This film is intense, but it is more than worth your time and attention.

8. Bamboozled (2000) Bamboozled was shocking when it was released, to say the least.  The true revelation, however, has been the way that relevance has seemingly caught up to the film... fake wokeness, modern day minstrel shows, low budget/high yield television and behind the scenes scandals have all come to light many years after this film had its initial run.  While this film did not transition Savion Glover into the world of superstardom and crossover success, it certainly crystalized his immense talent and charisma in a way that his recordings of stage shows had previously been unable to capture.  The imagery of America’s strange fascination with the dehumanization of African-Americans for generation after generation is rich, and every performance is compelling.  This was definitely Spike Lee’s first masterpiece of the new millennium, and at the risk of being bittersweet, probably one of his last truly stunning achievements.

7. Girl 6 (1996) Every ranking list has to have the controversial placement, so here’s mine... Girl 6 started as a lingering interest for me.  The internet was just about to change the world, but we were still locked into landlines at the time, with cellular being a luxury, so the world of phone sex still had relevance.  Upon seeing the film, however, I quickly realized that the phone sex exploration was playing counter to a Hollywood hopeful narrative that was brave enough to explore new ground (per the changing times) while being mindful enough to pay homage to the countless stories of Hollywood hopefuls that came before it.  Many of the shifting cinematography looks that made Clockers so gritty were used to make Girl 6 feel dangerously euphoric.  The list of cameos and brief supporting roles were not only a who’s who of cultural movers and shakers at the time, but it ran about as long as my arm.  I recently revisited the film and expected it to be a bit more on the side of kitsch, but surprisingly, the times had not been as hard on the film as I anticipated.  The film shifts quite well between light and dark, and even the ending that initially slightly annoyed me has found a strange sort of charm in my older, more life-experienced years.  Add to this the hilarious running joke of Isaiah Washington being a kleptomaniac in nearly every scene he appears in, and there’s a realization that there are sublayers going on right in front of our eyes.  This collaboration with Suzan-Lori Parks gives me hope that maybe one day, we’ll get a Spike Lee film adaptation of Topdog/Underdog, but we will see.

6. Inside Man (2006) If you had to pick the most ‘Hollywood’ of the Spike Lee films, my money would be on this film ending up as the chosen one.  By this rationale, it makes the film that much more impressive, as it also stands out as one of the most compelling, well-directed and well-acted Spike Lee films.  At the time of its release, it was not only a return to form, but it seemed to signal an evolution.  Spike Lee was able to use his signature, iconic shots that he was known for, like his camera-turned-to-dolly float, or the push-pull zooms, but he was also able to incorporate familiar Hollywood tropes, including the twist ending, and give them a breath of fresh air via an newly infused sense of style.  Lee also stayed true to himself by educating as well as entertaining, bringing to light how atrocities from the past have more than historical connections to modern day benefactors.  While I do think there are a handful of better ‘pure’ Spike Lee films, if I had to pick one movie for a curious party that my be skeptical, this would easily be my pick.

5. She's Gotta Have It (1986) Oh, the joy of having your first film be a breakout success, but not to the point of pigeon-holing your career.  She’s Gotta Have It was an important introductory step to the masses for Spike Lee : it showed his dedication to putting African-American performers into familiar narratives, it showed an appreciation for the voice of women on film that many first-time directors would likely not want to be the initial association to their style, it introduced the world to Mars Blackmon (who became a cultural icon), and it presented sense of style that switched on the viewer the moment before they could label it pretentious.  Having characters address the camera made it feel like a play or a novel, but when the film shifted into movie mode, the camera moved with the energy and grace of a performance artist or dancer, which in turn fed into the character development and narrative it presented.  As a bonus, the property found new life nearly 40 years later as a Netflix original series, introducing new generations to a modern day classic statement of feminism, and how it does not excuse bad behavior.

4. Mo' Better Blues (1990) Those familiar with Spike Lee’s family know that he was raised by jazz bassist Bill Lee, who scored some of Spike’s early films.  By this rationale, it comes as no surprise that Lee could make such a rich, nuanced and heartfelt film about jazz music that serves as an allegory for the hurdles that beset those driven purely by passion.  The conversations about race, musical integrity and commercialism also work on both direct and symbolic levels, giving Mo’ Better Blues some of the highest repeat viewing value of any film in the Spike Lee canon.  The film also marked the first collaboration of Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, a combination that yielded artistic, career, creative, commercial and critical success, led to a multitude of classic performances, and ultimately led to a generational collaborative changing of the guard in the form of John David Washington.  The only negative I can give this film is that it did not lead to future films that explored genres of music like hip-hop and soul.  While She’s Gotta Have It did focus heavily on relationships and intimacy, it could be argued that Mo’ Better Blues was Spike Lee’s first adult contemporary film, and his first look at modern romance in the more ‘traditional’ sense.

3. School Daze (1988) The African-American college experience, specifically that of HBCUs (Historically Black College and Universitys), is one that has often been neglected in the annals of film history.  As a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, it makes total sense that Spike Lee’s second commercial film would focus on that specifically overlooked culture, as it became a fitting vehicle for establishing Lee’s sense of duty and responsibility for education, sharing the African-American experience to the masses, and exposing systematic injustices and hypocrisies that kep the disadvantaged in a disadvantaged position.  The real genius of this film, however, comes in the juxtaposition of presentations it jumps between... for the majority of the film, it is an unflinching look at the coming of age process that teenagers must traverse on their way to adulthood, including the hurdles of romance, forming your identity and expanding your view of the world around you.  At key moments, however, the film switches into musical numbers, song performances and school dances that not only expand on the inner feelings, emotions and desires of characters, but heighten the reality of the story to a dizzying pace.  In all the ways that She’s Gotta Have It put the world on notice that a unique voice was present in the industry, School Daze signaled the continuation of a run that would last another handful of films, and it firmly established Spike Lee as a generational talent. 

2. Do the Right Thing (1989) I would guess that over the course of a career, a director secretly hopes that at least one of their works comes close to making an impact culturally.  In the case of Spike Lee, however, we have a man who released two cultural-shifting films, and did so in a span of less than 5 years.  They say the third time is a charm, and that’s exactly what Do the Right Thing was for Spike Lee.  The vivid colors, stylistic earmarks, historical and cultural sense of urgency and focus on telling minority stories all expanded greatly with this film, which acted as both a parable of how past injustices can come back to haunt you, and a harbinger of how the reactions to these continued injustices would only amplify if not addressed.  The fact that Spike Lee not only directed this film, but played the lead actor as well, is a monumental achievement, especially considering how few flaws the film has, if any.  Several established actors played some of their most iconic roles in this film, and a breadth of newer, younger faces exploded onto the scene, almost all of whom either continued to work with Lee or found themselves evolving their careers in the wake of Do the Right Thing.  The film is also directly responsible for perhaps the most iconic hip-hop song of all time, Public Enemy’s classic protest anthem Fight The Power.  Any fan of film would be foolish to skip the Spike Lee catalog, but regardless of whether you’re interested in his work or not, this film is one of two he made that should flatly be considered required viewing across the board.  The other one, being...

1. Malcolm X (1992) For everything that Do the Right Thing did for Spike Lee and those involved in the production, the monumentally powerful biopic Malcolm X did all of that while also managing to humanize, canonize and create and icon out of a man that America tried its best to demonize.  The masterful hand that Lee used to direct this film shows, as this film is the most ‘every frame a painting’ in his canon.  Everything from the period costuming to the locations to the dance numbers to the cinematography absolutely leaps off of the screen.  The editing is kinetic, the performances are full of life and depth, and the narrative does just enough going forwards and backwards to make proper connections without beating it over the head of the viewer.  The respect shown to Malcolm X is massive, so much so that almost seemingly overnight, Malcolm X went from being a feared and often heavily criticized sign of aggressive blackness to a commercial commodity and household name, with the famous X suddenly adorning t-shirts, baseball caps and necklaces of all American youth, not just minorities.  The impact of this film was so immediate that many schools held field trips for viewings, which further cemented the immediate and historical value of the film.  Often, the connotation of saying someone ‘peaked’ for a film so early in their career would be negative, but the heights to which Malcolm X achieved on all fronts meant that even if the rest of Lee’s career was a steady decline (which it certainly wasn’t), he more than likely still would have ended up in a pantheon far above that of the average director.

With projects reportedly in the early stages of development, it doesn’t look like Spike Lee has any plans on stopping anytime soon.  I certainly owe it to myself to see the handful of his films and documentaries that I’ve not seen yet... who knows, perhaps I may even go back one day and add the documentaries into the list, or find a surprise gem in one of his more recent movies I’ve yet to see.  

[writeiolite]

i’m trying to pick up writing again. i used to write when i was younger but it was the cringe type. i wouldn’t use paragraph breaks and my grammar was off. now i’m older and don’t know how to actually write something good T-T. do you have any tips? specifically on characterization. i really respect and love you because yours always turns out good.

the cringe type.... we have all been there✊😔 i am... still there sometimes KSNDNSJ

i’m rly rly flattered ur asking me tho omg bc i’m definitely still learning and my technique isn’t the best so 🥺 thank you so much for this (and reading my stuff!!!) wow. i love u too pls this makes me so honored and happy and flattered and wowowo i frl don’t deserve thIS AAAAKAKENSNSBDNS

so lemme say that in no way do i think my methods are superior to someone else’s!! i don’t want to come off as some arrogant writer that believes they know all the ins and outs to writing bc honestly... unless ur a professionally paid writer with a career for writing then we’re all just some tumblr bloggers on the same path and probably going to end up doing smth other than writing later on LOL. so pls take this all with a grain of salt and pls lmk if i come up arrogant or smth bc i don’t want to and i’ll work on wording myself differently!!

for characterization, i sometimes do tiny analyses. so if a character has done action A and action B, i put them in a mental venn diagram to figure out what the reason behind them was. is it a response to an external or internal factor? is there a consistent trait underlying one or both actions? how have the characs changed since these actions? what are the changes?

i’m big on asking myself questions bc then i get a deeper understanding of who i’m writing for — like solving a mystery case or something. i do that for hq characters and my reader/oc characters ^^ it rly helps get away from the stereotypical tropes (like shittykawa) that people use bc u can make the character yours with diverse responses and stay true to the canon. it also helps get away from writing characters as foils to one another, although there are cases where that’s unavoidable

u guys already know that i use astrology in my writing so.. that’s a thing AHAH. i try to figure out which planet, house, transit, aspects, asp patterns, etc would be most influential during certain scenarios and fics so thats always helped me have some originality with characterization.

and another thing is childhood!! not just <10 y/o but even teenage years. i think abt that stuff and how my own influences me. like there are things in my childhood that occurred that ik made me who i am today (ex: hardass narcissistic phase -> being a lot more appreciative + humble for what i have + my efforts). so characters are the same too! if there’s even a small mention of smth that happened in their past, u can use it to map out its impacts.

even no impact is impact. did they not learn from it? are they ignoring it on purpose? are they stagnant?

another thing i can think of that i do is maybe mbti? not too much tho, only with characters i’m rly familiar with.

and last thing is events! whether it’s taking place in a real world setting or a made up one, there are events that go around and shape characters. kamino ward for bnha or new technology being released in the 2010s for hq. things like that seem so small and are never considered when you can rly take advantage of them. ik i’ve experienced a diff life than some of my older friends bc of the events that went on when i was growing up vs their events (same for ppl much younger than me). so with every character being different, u can take their responses to these events, find their foundation, and use them!

i hope some of this helps and if not i can try to explain it better ^^” again, there are so many ways to characterize and there is NO RIGHT WAY!! and this is just the right way for me ♡ if you guys have any tips u wanna share to help me or this anon out then pls do!! i’d love to improve my writing and lately i’ve been feeling my progress slow so ㅠㅠ ♡ anything and everything is appreciated~~ 

[talltalesandbedtimestories]

The Hunter Who Loved Me (Part 2)

Series Page

Characters/Pairing: Dean Winchester, Castiel, Jack Kline, Dean x OFC

Series Summary: Part Three of Some Sunny Day. Dean’s trying to balance his new relationship with Julie and his need to hunt. How long can he keep it from her? And can Julie keep her curiosity at bay?

Section Word Count: 8100

Section Content: language, fluff, angst, lots of dirty talk, role playing (a little of Dean taking orders and giving them), lots of smut, face riding

“So. Dean. This list. Enjoyment versus Duty.” Tricia lifted up a piece of paper. Dean squinted at his therapist on the screen. She’d printed out his hurried picture snap of the scribblings he’d texted over the other day. “First, I appreciate some of the venn diagramming going on here.”

Dean smiled, as proud as a little kid about to get their artwork slapped to the fridge. “Is there a ‘but’ coming?”

Tricia’s pixie cut spiked up her greys in the haphazard “I don’t give a fuck” style. It was 8am Tricia time, on a Wednesday morning. She sipped from a beer bottle. Salivating like Pavlov’s dog, Dean slid his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It seemed almost sacrilegious to watch her drink alone. But he’d been trying to wait until at least mid-afternoon before any alcohol passed his lips. “Second,” her small, bright blue eyes blinked away the question behind her glasses, “I was expecting you’d ask for more explanation or guidance on the task.” She placed the paper out of view on her desk and studied it for further inspection.

“You clearly don’t know me well enough, Doc.”

“Well, the arrogant part of me thinks I do. You take orders and fulfill them without question, when you agree with their importance and merit.” Her almost unnoticeable, grey eyebrows lifted over the top rim of her glasses. “I thought you’d think this was bullshit.”

Dean shrugged. “Maybe all this psychobabble crap is rubbing off on me.”

“You have your original masterpiece with you so we can reference it together?”

Dean tapped the paper on the coffee table. “Right here.”

“So. It looks like you’ve got the sheet broken down with enjoyment on the left and duty on the right. This first drawing. You have a ‘hunting life’ circle really big on the duty side, and a smaller one, labeled ‘being with family’, right inside it.”

“The whole enjoyment and duty thing going together that we talked about. Is that not right?”

“No right or wrong in this assignment, Dean. Just gives us things to discuss.” She leaned back in her chair a bit. “Hunting became everything for your family?”

“Hunting was my family. I know you know the stories, Doc. Hunter’s have the loosest lips on the planet, amongst themselves.”

“Humor me and pretend I didn’t hunt for decades and don’t know a damn thing.”

He sighed. “Before I was even born. Both parents. Both families. The Winchesters. The Campbells. I didn’t learn about the lineage, the legacy, the responsibility we all had in God’s master plan until much later.” Tricia took a swig from the bottle as she listened. His lips smacked together. Fuck it. It’s five o’clock somewhere. “I need a drink. Keep going. I’ll be right back.” He darted to the fridge.

“So.” Tricia’s voice rose. “Is it safe to say that the duty to your family, all that went along with that, ate away at the enjoyment of them?”

The fridge door swung shut and Dean popped the top off a cold one. He tipped his head back. The much needed liquid flowed down his throat. A large gulp filled his inner ear. “Ah.” There it was. The sweet, temporary relief. “Yeah! I’d say duty sat down at an all you can eat buffet, wearing a large ass fuckin’ bib, and went to town on enjoyment.” He yelled back at the laptop and placed the bottle on his breakfast bar. Flat palms leaned into the counter. He bent back, arms locked and stared at the vinyl kitchen flooring he kept meaning to replace.

“Any enjoyment at all, being with family?”

He sighed, rose up, swiped at the bottle and brought it back with him to the couch. “Yeah, of course.” My head hurts. Fucking finding feelings crap. “Taking care of Sammy’s that one circle in the middle of both columns with a line down the middle.”

“Taking care of him brought you enjoyment along with duty?”

He nodded at the screen with a ‘yeah, obviously, or I wouldn’t have written it down’ expression.

“I find it interesting that you had to title it ‘taking care of Sammy’ instead of say, being a big brother.” Dean leaned back, not knowing what to add to that little bit of insight from Tricia. “So. What filled both of those, enjoyment and duty, when you didn’t have to take care of him anymore? You said it’s been over two years since you and Sam have hunted together.”

“I don’t know. Bounty huntin’, this house, Cas and Jack, the occasional job.”

“But not really anything outside of that? No new territory explored or relationships that didn’t relate to those things? At least, prior to Julie?”

“No. Hung up my adventurous hat.”

“Scales tipped more on the enjoyment or duty end?”

“Before Julie? Duty filled up the days.”

“Explain the last drawing to me.”

Fuck. “Those diagrams. I don’t always see them as connecting, so much as pulling apart.”

“Explain.”

Dean sighed. “You know those magnified videos of cells dividing? Ones we’d have to watch in Sex Ed?”

Tricia nodded. “Cell division after fertilization.”

He focused on the drawing to which Tricia referred. “I’m enjoying her right now.” He looked down at the circle on the left. “But, it’s only a matter of time before hunting, that duty, pulls me away. Or she pulls away because of the hunting. Away from me.” The edges of the equally proportioned Julie and Dean circles barely touched each other between the dividing line.

“So. Can you put Julie in the duty column with you?”

Dean shook his head. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

“But, you do?”

“It’s all I know, Doc.” Dean mumbled.

“Back to Julie and sharing the duty. She might want that. Has nothing to do with deserving.” Tricia spoke, a little softer. The tone reminded him of Mary, when she had to reel in her impatience with her grown-ass sons acting like kids. “We all have duty in life, Dean. Those duties change, shift, evolve. And they can co-exist with enjoyment. You are a hunter. But, you aren’t just a hunter. Just like Julie isn’t just an accounting manager.”

“She goes all in with the duty and she’s in danger. All the time. Even now, being on the edge of it...” He sat up and chugged the beer. “There’s no way this is going to work, me riding this line between in and out. It’s me being selfish. Me wanting something with her is…”

“Human.” Tricia ended. “You won’t know what she can or can’t handle unless you're honest with her.”

“I tell her and it’s over.” He thumbed the opening of the bottle.

“Is that the worst thing that could happen?”

“No. The worst thing would be that she dies.” He nodded, resolute. “Because of me.”

Tricia’s thin lips pursed. The lids shut slowly over her blue eyes, then opened to stare at him. “Dean. I understand that over the past forty years you’ve been given a burden of unimaginable responsibility. Unfair, unwanted, unbelievable responsibility. Understand that simply your existence or being in close proximity to Julie does not make you responsible for every bad thing that could possibly happen to her.”

“I don’t buy that, Doc. That’s a fuckin’ cop out. My decisions make a difference. Actions have consequences.” He heard the resistance in his own voice.

Dean watched her hold in a sigh. “Of course they do. But, it’s the motive behind those actions that define your responsibility for the outcome.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I made a mistake, you know? Getting involved with a… civilian, for lack of a better word. It’s a lot to ask of someone. This life.”

“It is. But, there are lots of couples who are in similar situations. Military spouses, for example. Someone goes off to war, there’s no guarantee they come back. There’s a certain amount of independence and resilience necessary in both partners for those relationships to have any chance of success. Does Julie possess those qualities?”

Dean smiled. “Yeah, I think so.”

“What attracted you to her?”

“Besides her hot little nosey ass?”

Tricia shook her head and smirked. “I’ve got the initial attraction part down. I mean when you interacted. Her personality? Manner?”

Dean reminisced about the first day they met. When he mowed her lawn. When they shared dinner in the backyard. “She was real. Wasn’t putting on an act.”

“You’ve got radar for that stuff?”

“My bullshit meter is very sensitive and highly accurate.” Dean confirmed with an assured nod, then explained further. “She was careful, too. And, considerate.” He chuckled to himself. “She sent me home with some cobbler.”

“Dean?”

“Hm?”

“Would you like to be able to be real with Julie? And, not have to bullshit?”

Dean scoffed. “I’m not…”

Tricia tilted her head. “This dancing around the truth is only going to work for so long. It will exhaust you. Get you more on edge. Understand, I have no doubt you care for her and don’t want to hurt her. But, you can’t expect a strong relationship to be built on a foundation of half-truths. This will damage any chance of being with her long term if you aren’t honest about everything. Soon. So. Do you want to be real with her? Let her really see you? Hear your story? See if she wants you for who you are and can handle the job? Share the responsibility with you?”

The moments ticked by. “Let’s just say, hypothetically, I wanted all those things…” Dean’s gaze flitted over the keyboard. “How do I break it to her?”

The silence was deafening in Dean’s ears as he waited for an answer. “Well, if you want, during our next session, we can brainstorm, act out some scenarios.”

He nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good. So. Will we be good for the same time next week?”

“Unless a job comes up.”

“Uh-huh. Well, if that does happen, I’m happy to reschedule and work around a job. Alright?”

She ain’t letting me out that easy. “Yeah, Tricia.”

*

Hot little librarian is home. Julie shut the driver’s side door of her compact and strolled out from the carport. Her fingers fiddled with her messenger bag strap. A serious look - what she would call her “resting bitch face” - appeared to inspect something on the path. The car beeped like a preschool toy.

Dean caught the moment Julie realized he sat under the enclosed patio in her backyard. A glance in his direction halted her, then produced a wide smile that he couldn’t help but match. She began the walk toward him. He licked his lips in appreciation at the tight pencil skirt and form fitting blazer in a matching purple. She even had a crisp white button up underneath. Damn. Heels replaced her usual flats. Hips swayed. Hair, twisted up in a tight bun, showed off the slope of her neck. When she got within ear shot, he rumbled, “I wouldn’t have let you leave the house if I’d seen that outfit this morning, sweetheart.”

Eyes narrowed behind her glasses. “Do I need your approval for what I wear?”

“Nope. I just wouldn’t have let you leave the house.” He wanted to say more but Wes and Samuel were in their backyard.

Julie got the hint and smiled over to the neighbors, offering a wave, before staring back at Dean. “Had that big presentation today.” She reminded him.

“Ah.” Something about projections and investments. Dean nodded. “How’d it go?”

“Eh.” She scratched the side of her neck. “It’s done. I’m home. And, you’re here.” She noticed the pizza box on the patio table. “A Margherita from Cosimo’s?”

He grinned at how her eyes lit up.

She pointed to her back door. “Why aren’t you inside?”

He shrugged. “Wanted to wait for you out here.” He inventoried her again. “Making me regret that decision. Inside would be much better for what I want to do right now.”

Julie dropped her messenger bag on the concrete and bent down to give him a kiss. There was firm intent behind the pressure of her lips on his. “Give me a slice of that first.” She smiled and slid into the chair beside him, snatching the bottle of iced tea he’d placed nearby.

Dean flipped the box lid open and presented the pie with a flourish.

“Hm.” Julie took in a whiff of the mozzarella, tomato sauce, and basil symphony. Her fingers danced above and over the selection like a conductor, eventually pulling out the slice Dean had eyed for himself. It had a singed bubble of dough and leaned a tad on the wrong side of crispy.  She folded it in half and dangled the tip near his mouth. “Share?”

She read his mind in that way she always did when it came to food, satisfying his tummy and his heart. Damnit, Jules. He snatched at the offering with his teeth. Mozzarella threatened to fall off the dough. But he gobbled about a third of it up to prevent any spillage.

She giggled and took her own enjoyment with the half eaten piece, pushing a napkin out from under the box toward him. “Thank you for getting dinner.”

He finished munching before answering. “I had time. Work’s been slow and I was home.”

“I’ve noticed not much on the hunting end.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t be because I’ve been tiring you out this past week?” She licked the sauce off her lips.

He gnawed at his bottom lip, then grabbed another piece for himself. “Might be.” He tore into the slice with abandon. “I may be turning down jobs so I can be home every night.” A wiggle of his eyebrows accompanied his stare that stretched down to her crossed legs. “And, I’m so glad I stayed home tonight.”

Julie shook her head and sipped at her drink.

He cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you about something.” He knew the tone in his voice would shift her posture into cautious mode. She sat up straight in her seat. “I’ve been thinking…”

“Thinking’s good.” She took another bite.

He pursed his lips for emphasis before continuing. “Sam. Eileen. They’ve got about a month or so before she pops.”

“Yeah. I’m sure they’re super excited and nervous.” Julie nodded.

“Was thinking, maybe I should go to California and visit for a while.”

He thought he spotted a tinge of sadness as she processed the assumed details. She slumped a fraction. “I think that’s a great idea.” She picked at some cheese. “How long do you think you’ll be gone? With the drive back and forth, and all?”

He spoke, still chewing. “Might buy a plane ticket. You know, cut down on the time away.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you contemplating a cross country flight?”

He grinned and shrugged. “Got a reason or two to wanna come back to Delaware sooner rather than later.”

Julie smiled more to herself, a little pink painting her cheeks.

“Unless…” He inhaled sharp, then exhaled. Do you want to be real with her? “Would you…” He sighed under her stare. “Would you be able to take some time off from work? Go with me? In a couple weeks, maybe?”

Surprise washed over her face. “I’d have to check, submit a leave request right away.” She paused. “Where would we stay?”

“Sam’s always telling me they have a ton of space at their house.”

“Are you sure, Dean?”

He smiled. “Yes, sweetheart. If you want to, I want you along for the ride.” That made her beam back at him. He shook his head. “But, it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

Her mouth tilted, waiting for explanation.

“Me, on a plane.”

She laughed and reached for his hand. “But, it will be entertaining.”

He huffed. “Thanks.”

Her fingers threaded around his. There was a slight change in her expression. “So?”

It was his turn to wait, but he continued to eat. Grabbing another slice with his free hand.

“You like this outfit?” Her voice had lowered, mindful of the outdoor company, but obvious in an attempt to get a literal rise out of him.

He stopped in mid-chew. Swallowed. Almost choked at the laser focus Julie donned behind the lenses. She leaned forward. He wished she had a few more shirt buttons undone. “Yeah.” He squeaked out, not recognizing the voice that emerged from his throat. He tried again, lower. “Yeah.”

“Does it remind you of something in particular?” She smiled, watching him. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you blushing?” She whispered.

He straightened up, shaking his head. Another scoff. “No.” His cheeks were most definitely warming up.

She squeezed his hand. “Come on. Tell. What installment of the Casa Erotica series is playing in that head of yours?”

He thought back to a night, maybe a month back. It was Dean’s turn to pick a movie and he thought he’d be a smartass and pop in a porn flick. Julie had been up to the challenge. So much so that after about ten minutes in, they were having sex on the couch. The background soundtrack and noises from the television had turned it into an exceptionally fun experience. Julie did her damndest to outdo the moans; Dean, the cheesy dialogue. The memory made his lips pop out in a corkscrew grin. Aw, Jules. Would you be jealous of the fact that I’ve slept with Carmelita from Cabana Nights or jealous that you didn’t get the chance to yourself?

“Is it the one that had the CEO Boss Lady of DRILLER?” She leaned back in her seat and broke the grip, thinking hard. “Or the Professor at CUN Tech?”

“Those were all awesome. Certainly could apply.” He licked his lips. “But, no.”

“Not what immediately came to mind. Huh.” She tapped a finger to her cheek. Then, she snapped her fingers. “Librarian?”

Dean felt his eyes go wide.

“Dean.” She whispered. “I haven’t seen you read a book. When’s the last time you were in a library?”

He shrugged, then chuckled. “Couple years back. I’ve been in lots of libraries.”

“Really?” Her mind was working. It was sexy as hell. Dean’s arousal pressed against the now tight denim. A quick gaze to his lap had her eyes pop open. She cleared her throat, then snapped her eyes up to his. “Got any overdue books you need to return?”

Oh, it’s on. “A couple.”

“Well, I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. Winchester...” She adjusted her glasses and held his stare. “There’s a penalty when they’re brought back late.”

His eyebrows rose. “How big of a penalty are we talkin’?”

“Depends on the length.” She smirked. “Of time the books have been checked out.”

“Oh, wow.” He scratched the back of his neck and did his best ‘Aw Shucks’ expression. “I think I’ve had one for two years. It’s, ah, hard… cover.” He shrugged.

Julie stifled a giggle. “Two years? I don’t have any experience with a delinquency THAT LONG overdue.” She shook her head. “Really, Mr. Winchester.” She stood up and grabbed her messenger bag. “I’ll have to go check our files in the back and look up the fine for that.” Acting disappointed, she sighed. “You can meet me in the periodicals section on the second floor in about five minutes. Then we’ll get things squared away.”

He gazed up at her. “I guess I’ll get what’s coming to me.”

She nodded. “Actions have consequences.” The phrase he’d uttered to his therapist earlier that day slapped him in the face. It knocked him out of the daze of the sultry game for some seconds. “Don’t be late this time.” A curt nod punctuated her flirty command.

He watched her ass sway away, even more sass and bounce in those hips than usual. The view centered his focus on the task at hand. Hot damn. I guess we’re really doing this role playing thing. The sliding door closed. He contemplated waiting a minute before going inside. It made sense to stay on her good side, give her time for whatever her dirty little mind was thinking up. In case we can do this again. He closed the pizza box and packed up the other takeout items, cleaned up the space, and headed in to find his sexy librarian.

Dean dropped the food off in the kitchen and put everything where he knew Julie liked things. He checked his watch every ten seconds to give her the five minutes she had requested. Then, he took the stairs up two at a time. His heart sped up and his cock hardened with each step. He gripped the railing and stopped at the top, glancing around the landing. His chest heaved. The office door was closed. Never closed. The quick click to snap his jaw shut held back a moan of gratitude.

A shuffle over to the door, then his knuckles hovered as he contemplated the best knock. Tap, tap. Pause. Tap.

“Come in.”

Dean grinned. He was curious how long she’d be able to play along without cracking. A deep throat clearing on his part was mostly for her enjoyment. He pushed the latch and entered. She waited for him seated at her desk. A swivel of the office chair in his direction gave Dean a good look at her attire. He couldn’t suppress the groan at the slight alterations she’d made to her work outfit.

Julie had switched out her glasses. To the thick black rim glasses she wears at home. Legs crossed. The professional work heels from earlier were replaced with shiny black stilettos. The white shirt under the blazer had been unbuttoned so low that Dean got more than a peek at the white lace bra underneath. His mouth watered. A hunger filled up his belly having little to do with food. “Mr. Winchester. Have a seat, please.” She motioned to the sofa. Both her hands wrapped over one knee cap.

Dean played up the nerves with a hand to his neck. The room was bright from the ceiling fan light. He inhaled. She put on my favorite perfume. She’d pulled the roman shades all the way down. Whatever we’re about to get up to isn’t for the neighbors to see. He walked over and sat as instructed. Elbows rested on his knees. Legs splayed wide apart. He leaned forward. The springs in the sofa bed cushion creaked. “How much trouble am I in, Ma’am?” It took every ounce of his control to not return her slight smirk with a grin.

“Not good news, I’m afraid.” She shook her head. “Turns out that book was extremely valuable. I found a note from the head curator in the catalogue database with strict orders. We’ve been asked to release information to the police about the person that returns it.”

Shit. She’s doing a whole backstory and everything. My busty little bookworm. Dean raised his hands in slight defense. “Oh, woah, wait a minute. That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

A shoulder raised. She uncrossed her legs and swiped at the fabric over her thighs. “I’m afraid my hands are tied, Mr. Winchester.” She had to throw that out there. Hands tied. He didn’t know how much more his cock could take.

He did his best Sam impression. Wide, puppy dog eyes begged. “There has to be another way. Some other penalty or… punishment.” Her eyes lit up at that word. Dean swallowed. “Please, Ma’am. I’ll do anything.”

One of Julie’s eyebrows quirked up. “Excuse me for being so forward, Mr. Winchester. But, you don’t appear to adhere to the simplest of rules. It’s almost as if you like misbehaving.” She straightened in the seat and popped the two buttons of her blazer free. A slow strip peeled the jacket from her shoulders and arms. There was precision and care taken to rest it on the chair back. She turned back, focused on his reaction, her knees locked together. “Do you like being punished?”

Woah. This is definitely new. Dean licked his lips. “I-I guess.”  

“Well, then… maybe we can find some way for you to atone for this egregious error.” Mischief lined her lips before she bit the bottom one. Her fingers went to work on the buttons of her blouse next.

His nostrils flared at the sight of her bare skin when she turned to place the shirt with the same care on the chair back. He wanted to run his fingers up the dip of her spine. The creamy lace caged those breasts he wanted to squeeze and lick. “I’ll do anything.” He repeated, groaning. The act was long gone.

“Will you?” He could see the sweet struggle on her face to stay in character. In control. Her hands fanned across the frilly fabric of the bra cups. Nails, coated in wine colored polish, scratched at the lace. The nipples, already pebbling and popping through the flimsy material, hardened further at her touch. Those big brown eyes closed and her chest arched forward.

“Damn, Jules.” He swallowed.

“Want to touch me?” Her eyes opened and returned to his gaze.

“You fucking have to ask?” He grumbled, burning with want.

“Hands and knees.” She smiled, sure and in charge now. She’d won the battle. Her eyes did not break from his. “Crawl for it.”

He smirked. “Want me begging for it, huh?”

The speed of her breath quickened and she gasped, continuing to play with her nipples. “Yes, Mr. Winchester.”

“Alright, Ma’am.” He slinked onto the area rug with a soft pounce, bent arms settling onto his palms. He contracted his fingers, getting a grip of the material, before his knees followed. The surprise and excitement on her face at his action was worth the theatrics. He surveyed and stalked her like a lion. The pace towards her was slow and steady. His gaze never left hers.

Dean angled his head to watch her reaction as he approached. Her hands were squeezing the bra cups now. She bit her bottom lip. Dean halted as her legs parted. The skirt rode up her creamy thighs. Her ass scooted towards the edge of the chair. He got an amazing view of what awaited him.

“No panties, sweetheart.” A low growl left his throat. He rocked back and rose up, sitting on the heels of his sneakers. His hand reached out to touch her thigh.

“No hands.” She whimpered. “Nothing but that mouth and tongue on me.”

He grinned. “That’s my punishment?”

She stilled. “You’re right. That would be too good for you.”

Dean wanted to slap himself. Should have kept my goddamn mouth shut.

Julie’s nails clawed at her thighs, slow and purposeful. Light pink trails skirted over the flesh. She shifted on the seat, pulled the skirt up past those hips to bunch at her waist. She straddled the edge of the seat with a wide stance, her legs bent at perfect ninety degrees.

“You’re fucking gorgeous, you know that right?” Dean shook his head.

“Flattery will get you nowhere.” She shot back. “But, thank you.” The palm of her right hand cupped her pussy. “Is this what you wanted?”

“Yes.” Dean nodded. She pulled her hand back, let him watch while one finger tested the waters between her folds. “Oh, I so want that.” He added.

“How do you want it?” Her middle finger dipped inside. “Nice and slow?” She slipped a second digit into the mix. “Fast and loose?”

“What do you want right now, Jules?” He shook his head, licked his lips, and clenched the denim covering his thighs. “Whatever you want, baby.”

The blush broke the act. There she is. A gasp left her mouth. “Really?”

Dean arched his brows. “Of course.”

Her lips rubbed together. “Lie on your back?” She stared at him, hard, then let the request escape her mouth. “I want to ride your face.”

Shit. How long has she been keeping that on reserve? He flopped onto his back, and onto the rug, like a dog playing dead. He tapped his chest. “I’ve died and gone to heaven. Get up here, sweetheart.”

His focus was on the ceiling fan above him, whirring as fast as his X-rated thoughts. Her giggle filled his ears. “Why do you have to be so addictive?”

He shrugged. “Could ask the same thing about you? But, I’m all about this mid-life sexcapade. I mean, any moment, you could go running for the hills.” Her frame was above him in a second, by his side. She was a disheveled, sexy, hot fucking mess. His tongue clicked. “May I suggest you take off the skirt?” His hand drifted up the back of her bare leg, from ankle to calf, resting on the back of a knee. “But keep the heels and bra on. Please.” Rug fibers rubbed into the back of his head as he tilted. “For now, at least.”

She nodded. The side zipper released. Fabric puddled and bunched atop his forearm, trapping her movement. He stared at all of her from his vantage. A deep breath steadied him. He slid his hand out from under the skirt. Both hands locked behind his head, cradling it.

“Whenever you’re ready, sweetheart.” He smiled.

She stepped out of the skirt and swished it away. Her soft tummy and hips jiggled. “I’ve never done this before.”

“I guaran-fucking-tee there’s no way you can disappoint me.” Dean chuckled. He sighed when she stepped over him, heels twisting into the rug. “Such a pretty view.”

*

The rush and embarrassment of being pantiless for Dean’s inspection from a very new angle flooded through Julie’s veins. Her whole body was on fire. He was relaxed now, leaning back onto the rug like it was a towel on a sandy beach. He was content now, staring up at her with brilliant bright green eyes. “Such a pretty view.”

“Pointers?” She shrugged.

“Well,” his palms unclasped from behind his head and latched onto the ankles caging him on either side. “You aren’t going to sit as much as hover. A throw pillow from the sofa will help get me into a better position.” He smirked. “And those pretty thighs need to get up by my head. Pronto.” A throat clearing followed. “You can face forward or do a reverse cowgirl up here.” His eyebrows wiggled.

Julie bit her lip.

“What are you thinking about it?” Dean asked. “Now’s not the time to be thinking.”

“It’s just… I want to, but…”

His bottom lip sucked back into his mouth. The tip of his tongue peeked out for an agonizing, tantalizing second. He was grazing over her figure from down below. “You know, I’m really enjoying this, Jules. How could I not? If that’s what you’re worried about. Don’t. And, you get to continue this little dominant dance you started. Fucking hot as hell. You’re in charge.”

She sighed.

“You’re good at it. Giving orders. It’s fun to switch roles every now and then. Come on.” His ass squirmed into the rug now and he smiled. “Break in this bronco.”

“I give orders everywhere else, Dean.” She pulled out of his cuffed palms and took a couple steps to grab a tiny pillow for his head. He ‘oofed’ and chuckled when she tossed it onto his face. “I know I’m good at it. But, I like it when you take the lead.” She melted onto the floor and sat by his head, leaning into the front of the sofa. The back of her high heels curled against bare ass cheeks.

He cocked his head around to stare up at her once he got comfy on the pillow. She teased at the strands of his hair. “I know you do, sweetheart.” His voice lowered further. “Honest? In this moment?”

Oh. He’s using it against me now.

“The thought of your business being all up in my face, with you on top… kind of makes you feel totally exposed, right?” He asked, reaching for her. The warmth of his hand caressed a thigh.

“Yeah.”

“You got to switch that thought process. It’s all up to you. I’m just a means to get you to an end.” A throaty groan slipped out of his perfect pout. “And, I fucking love that idea. With you especially, baby. I wanna give you that control. Let me let go of it. The need to be in charge for a while.” The final three words came out in a soft beg. His eyes narrowed. “Ride me, sweetheart.”

His voice made her core clench, like always. She was slick, ready. “Sounds like an order.” A massive grin threatened to emerge but she fought it back. “I’m surprised I can still walk after the week I’ve had with you. Now, I have to ride you.”

He didn’t hold back the cheesy, ear to ear grin. “Oh, yeah. It’s gonna tire you out. But, I promise, you’ll love it.” Julie lifted up onto her knees and shuffled closer. He stared back at her, upside down, arching his eyebrows. “Oh, so it’s reverse cowgirl, huh?” He hummed in satisfaction.

Julie frowned, realizing an important fact with this particular position. “I don’t get to watch that pretty face of yours.”

Forearms disappeared behind her. Those huge biceps flexed and stretched the fabric of his grey and white flannel. His palms patted the back of her thighs, trying to edge her forward. “Trust me, baby.” He tilted his chin up. “We can do it all sorts of ways. Next time.”

She nodded and held her breath, luxuriating in the fact that she knew there would be a next time. So many next times. The anxiousness crept in again. But, she situated herself above his face.

The groan of delight from him was one she had heard countless times. “Fuck.” He whispered. She clenched again. “Absolutely nothing to be blushing about from where I’m at.”

The bulge straining against his jeans became somewhat of a needed distraction and fortified her courage. God help me. This man is ruining me in the best way imaginable. Her knees wedged under the comfy material covering those hunky shoulders. The seam and soft give of the pillow rested against her calves. Her gaze dipped down, tracked his head tunnelling between her thighs. She lost sight of his eyes and nose and top lip.

His mouth dropped open to speak. “Get down here, sweetheart.” He urged. She quivered at the hot breath hitting her pussy. “You can lean on me. Remember, I’m here to be used. If you get a little carried away and I can’t breathe, I’ll tap out.” He chuckled and shot more heat up to her core. A few light kisses covered her inner thigh. “You do whatever feels good. No shame in your game.”

“Dean?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“Shut up.” Her palms splayed atop his shirt covering his pecs. Those perky little nipples pressed into her skin. His chest was strong and supportive; the view of his supine body was quite spectacular. Even if he had way too many layers on. One bow leg shifted as he planted a sneaker against the base of her filing cabinet to steady himself.  Arms locked, she guided herself down and closed her eyes.

It was the scruff of his chin that connected first. A gasp left her mouth. He’d maneuvered a bit, could feel him searching with his lips. He glided all over her wet and swelling flesh. Fingers had sunk into the plush of her ass cheeks. He found her entrance with his mouth. Then, he moaned. It rumbled into her pussy. He played her body like an expert musician. The tip of his tongue circled her hole.

“Shit!” She pushed into his stiffening muscle as it swirled and offered itself. Her arms provided leverage to move up and down over that face. “You should be against the law, you know that?” She whimpered.

That arrogant chuckle emitted from his throat, vibrating inside. The sounds were glorious as she rode him. Hesitancy faded. Curiosity emboldened her. She rocked her hips back and forth. His tongue flattened and he stilled, static, so she could lead and swipe her most sensitive spots over him. He snuck in a suck here and there at her clit when her arching became more pronounced.

“Oh, God. Dean.” Moans toppled one after the other as he clamped down on her ass and spread her cheeks open. His strength held her in place. He worked her over with every part of his face. His chin, his lips, his mouth, his nose, his tongue. A fleeting thought entered her mind that even his cheekbones and eyebrows had found a way to fuck her senseless.

Dean gasped for air under her. “Please, baby.” He moaned.

She froze, every inch of her ached, but she worried she was actually hurting him. “Can you not breathe?”

“No. No. I’m good. You’re so fucking good.” He praised her. “I just, wanna…” His fingers had continued to massage her ass. One digit slid closer to her back hole.

Julie gasped. Her body hopped in shock at the realization of what he was requesting.

“Only if you wanna see how it feels.” He kissed her folds. “Can just circle it. Or use my mouth.”

She sighed at his words. “Maybe just your finger. Outside.”

He moaned. “Thank you, sweetheart.” He feasted on her pussy once he’d been given permission.

Julie’s eyes bolted open wide at the new sensations. The pad of his finger circled her rim, testing her give and resistance. She couldn’t help but buckle under the pressure and pleasure he was providing her everywhere.

“Dean…” she groaned. “I’m gonna cum.”

He nodded, not stopping any of it, humming into her pussy.

“Yes, Dean. Oh, God.” She cried out, her body tensing with the impending orgasm. A wave of light and levity crashed into all her senses. His moans, his touch, they all felt far away for the briefest of seconds. Then, it all slammed her back. Cells, every one of them, super sensitive, on edge, as he continued to lick and tease her when she came down from the high.

“Fuck.” An obscene slurp followed his exclamation, still under her slackening body. “I gotta be inside you, baby. Can you handle that?”

She sighed. “Of course I can.”

He chuckled and eased out from under her like he’d been working on Baby’s undercarriage. His whole face glistened with her, tinted red with exertion. “That’s my girl.” He heaved and took in a deep breath.

She fell back on her ass, her whole body a quivering mass. He groaned and sat up, stripped off his flannel, then his t-shirt. Her fingers reached out to touch his skin. “But can you take the lead this time?”

He grinned. “Of course I can.” His head cocked to the side. “But, I don’t want to be any kind of gentle.”

Holy shit. He’s looking at me like I’m dinner. Even more than before we started this whole damn game. “Okay.”

“You sure?” He rose up and pulled her along. Her feet wobbled in the heels. “I mean, it could get a little rough.” His fingers sunk into the base of her scalp and her hair. He pulled her head back with a jolt, tipping her chin up. Her breath hiccupped. “Like that.” He sucked at her bottom lip. “You okay with that?”    

“Yes.” She was dazzled by the green and intensity of his eyes. She licked her lip and tasted herself. He was thick with the smell of the excitement and ecstasy he’d pulled out of her.

He turned and looked over his shoulder. He grabbed her by the waist and twirled her toward the desk. She clamped onto his forearms. The office chair rolled away, loud and careless, slamming into the closet door due to his forceful push. “Hope your shit’s insured.” He rotated her again in those massive arms, determined. His mouth latched onto her neck. His chest pressed into her back. She heard his belt unbuckling. The leather swished from the loops and thudded onto the rug. “Cause you’re getting good and fucked on this desk.” His voice thundered against her skin.

“Dean.” Her head fell back into the crook of his neck.

“Okay.” He sighed. His denim covered thigh wedged between her trembling ones and soaked pussy. He edged her to the corner of the desk where she’d normally sit. His hands shot out around her frame, grabbed at the computer monitor, and brought it back down to rest parallel to one of the walls. His hands returned to her thighs, raked up her skin and back. “Safety in the workplace, right?” The confinement of her bra released with the unclasping by his dexterous fingers. He slipped her out of the straps and cups, grasped her breasts. Fingers tugged at her nipples. Then he smashed her whole body back into him. His head bent to her ear, intoxicating with the sound of his voice and warmth from his mouth. “Let’s get to work. Bend over, sweetheart.”

“Jesus.”

He chuckled and used the firm grip on her breasts to bend her to his will. “Whatever feels better for you once I go to town, you do. Okay?”

She nodded and rested on her elbows, waiting. There was some shuffling again. His zipper. Out of the corner of her eye she noted he wasn’t even bothering to take his jeans completely off. The waistband of his denim and grey boxer briefs wrapped tight around his muscled thighs, spread wide.

“I already know how good and used up you're going to feel around my cock.” The tip brushed against her folds from behind. They moaned in unison. “And, still nice and wet for me.” A hand clamped onto one of her shoulders. She felt the pull back; groaned at the slide of him inside. He bottomed out. “Shit. This is gonna be hard and quick.” He inhaled and exhaled. “Sure you’re ready, baby?”

She knew what she was asking for when she gave him the flippant response. “Don’t I feel ready, hot stuff?”

His hands clamped onto her waist. “Alrighty, then.” A few “Ughs” and “Fucks” and “Shits” flew out of Dean’s mouth as he began to pound. He slid her back and forth over his cock, her ass smacking into his groin, balls rocking into her cheeks with his fast thrusts.

He used one hand to encourage her shoulders into the desk surface, her breasts flattening into the cool wood. She tilted her face and leaned her cheek on a hand for support, moaning at how the slight shift had arched her up into more pleasure. She was going to get a desk burn, if that was possible.

“Damn, Julie. You gotta wear these heels more often.” He grunted out the suggestion. “Gets you in just the right position.”

Everything on the desk was teetering and jostling with every one of his thrusts.

“So fucking lucky.” She caught the mumble fall out of his mouth. He swore again. “Aw, fuck. Yes. Close, baby.”

His admission made her pussy clench.

“Shit. Yeah.” She felt the tension in his body mount. He sped up into her. “Gotta, need to… feel so fucking good.” He pounded in all the way one more time and she felt him go rigid, his fingers sink into the flesh of her ass. Dean let out a soft gasp, connected into her like a jackhammer with one final thrust, and let go, spilling inside. He toppled over, sandwiching her between his body and the desk. His cheek rested on her back. Deep breaths matched hers. His heart beat pulsed against her skin. “Damn.” He finally spoke. A kiss planted along her spine. “Are you alright?”

She nodded into her hand. “So alright.” She smiled. “But, it’s official. I can no longer walk.”

He groaned and pulled out. “Shit. We made a mess of everything.” She could hear him slide his jeans back up.

Her body peeled off the desk surface, sticky with sweat. “Dean, I’m serious. I don’t think my legs work.” She giggled.

Without warning, his arms swooped her up and he carried her to the sofa. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He plopped onto a cushion and settled her on his lap, scooping every naked inch of her into his embrace. “Better?” His lips caressed her mouth.

Her forehead found his. “You make everything better.”

He pulled back. There was worry on his face. “I might not always be able to make everything better, Jules.”

How can he be so sure of himself one second and unwilling to take a compliment the next? “You’re right. Too much pressure.” She tried to ease the tension. “You make it better right now.”

That made him smile. His hand stroked her cheek. “You know, I’m going to have to go back to work. It’s not like I’m getting paid to be your sex slave.”

She frowned. “I feed you.”

He laughed. “I bought the pizza.”

She leaned on his shoulder. “I feed you most nights.”

“True.” He reclined back onto the sofa, taking her with him. “Will you be alright if I check in and see if I can grab a skip tomorrow? There was word of something in upstate PA. Might have me out of town for a day or two.”

“Honestly,” she giggled, “I could probably use the break.”

“Well, now, I’m just hurt.” He scoffed. “You could try and act a little upset.”

She snuggled. “Of course I’ll miss you.” She tapped his chest. “Don’t forget. Mom is having us over her house for lunch on Sunday. So, whatever you do, wrap it up before then.”

“See what I mean about how good you are at giving orders?” The sarcasm evident in his voice.

“Hm.” A forceful grab at his chin met his eyes to hers. “Kiss me.”

Dean grinned into the liplock. His words spilled into her mouth in between the tangle of their tongues. “Only a matter of time before I get on your nerves and you want nothing to do with me.”

“You get on my nerves now.” She smirked, tasting his salt and sweat and her sex again. “And, I still want everything to do with you. Glutton for punishment, I guess.”

“Guess we deserve each other, then.” He leaned back and ran a hand down her chest. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

She nodded. “Starving.”

He hopped off the sofa and grabbed his flannel off the floor to toss it to her. “I’ll bring up the pizza box.”

She slipped into the warmth of his shirt, bringing her knees to her chest. “You’re bringing up that greasy thing?” Her eyes narrowed in half-jest.

Outstretched arms reminded her of the current condition of the room. “Might as well take advantage of the mess before we clean it up. Hey, I’m not taking it into the bedroom.” He put up a hand before she could protest again. “Remember, you don’t get to be all up in this for the next couple days.” He smirked and then did a flourish of his hand from head to toe.

She shook her head. “Hurry up before I change my mind.”

His bare chest flexed as he buttoned his jeans up. “So cute when you give orders.” He slapped the door sill and disappeared.

Julie situated her compacted frame in the corner of the sofa, buttoned up the oversized shirt. Her toes dug into the cushion. A pull of the shade cord gave her a view of the backyard. The sky was pink and darkening by the minute. How long have we been up here? So easy to lose track of everything else when I’m with him.

Her body was pulsing. Every part he’d touched, entered, hypersensitive. Thank God I’ve got my gyno visit tomorrow. She blushed at the thought of having to explain to her doctor that she and Dean had gotten a little carried away over the past week.

She had fallen into a rabbit hole of lust. How could I not? More worrisome? She was trusting him more and more. The safety with him was something she craved. What if I fuck it up? A pang in her gut. What if he fucks it up?

“Jules?” His voice drifted up the stairwell. “You win. I’ll bring up a few slices on a tray. Gonna heat ‘em up. Be up in ten. But, you’ve gotta clean up the office.”

She smiled and called back down. “Aren’t we bossy? Deal, Dean.”

Part 3

Series Page

[dippedanddripped]

As the number of abandoned storefronts and closed retail outlets continues to mount, the once unremarkable activity of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores can feel like reality askew — like a stroll through the Twilight Zone. As this glum new normal becomes, well, the norm, signs of life can be almost as jarring.

Take, for instance, a pair of storefront windows on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. Just recently they were lifeless reminders of an upscale furniture store, now defunct. Then, in August, they began to fill with seemingly unconnected objects: bluejeans piled in a chest-high mound, a lounge chair upholstered in denim, a mannequin in a jumpsuit with an eyeball for a head standing amid a sea of paint-splattered drop cloths.

Hand-painted signage in the other window offered only that this “Appointment Only” storefront with the cryptic displays, and the 6,000 square feet of retail space behind them, are the domain of Gallery Dept.

Despite the name, Gallery Dept. isn’t a gallery or a department store but a hybrid clothing label that sits somewhere in the Venn diagram overlap between street wear label, denim atelier, neighborhood tailor and vintage store. Just as accurately, you could call Gallery Dept. the personal art project of its founder Josué Thomas, a designer whose own creative urges are just as disparate and layered.

With so many small brands in a state of retreat this summer, Mr. Thomas’s label has not only weathered these spirit-crushing conditions but thrived. In less than two years, Gallery Dept. has moved from a crowded workshop a few blocks down Beverly Boulevard to its new space in part because its hoodies, logo tees, anoraks and flare-cut jeans — each designed and hand-painted by Mr. Thomas on upcycled or dead-stock garments — have become unlikely objets d’art in a crowded street wear market.

This corner of the fashion industry is a crowded one, and in recent years there have been a glut of collaborations and merch drops that have taken on a corporate cadence. In contrast, Gallery Dept. is something of a bespoke operation, offering street wear basics that are blessed with an artist’s (in this case Mr. Thomas’s) singular touch.

Mr. Thomas began to cut jeans and screen-print shirts as the mood struck in 2017, and since that time Gallery Dept. has grown from an underground cult label for collectors to one with atmospheric clout after being worn by Kendall Jenner, LeBron James, Kendrick Lamar and two of the three Migos (Offset and Quavo).

Those lucky enough to enter the appointment-only space, now booked with up to 20 appointments a day, are greeted inside by a 20-foot-tall span of wall that reads, “Art That Kills” in a large crawl text, and the occasional reference to Rod Serling’s seminal sci-fi program.

Throughout the sunlit store, Mr. Thomas’s abstract paintings and writings fill the spaces between clothing racks and bright brass shelves heavy with the brand's thick hoodies and sweatpants. Over the chug of sewing machines, one can hear snippets of bossa nova Muzak, a vinyl-only mix also made by Mr. Thomas. (There are also plans to release music by other artists, including the New York rapper Roc Marciano, under an Art That Kills imprint.)

Gallery Dept.’s new space was financed on the strength of e-commerce sales from this past spring, and not with the help of venture capital or outside investors, Mr. Thomas said on a recent walk-through. This freedom gives him and the label, which now employs 12 people, the freedom to operate on its own esoteric terms. And there are a few. In the store’s dressing rooms, there are no mirrors to survey a fit. (“We’re going to tell you if a piece works or not,” he said.) Nor are there price tags on its garments.

“If the first thing you look at is the price, it’s going to alter your thinking about a piece,” he said. “I’d rather people engage with the clothing first.”

The Gallery Dept. does not indulge pull requests from stylists or send its pieces to influencers, a practice Mr. Thomas explains with a trace of punk indignation.

“Kendall doesn’t get a discount,” he said. “We don’t seed. I don’t care who it is — we don’t cater to different markets.”

Wearing cutoff carpenter pants and a white T-shirt, each dusted in a fine rainbow splatter, Mr. Thomas looked every bit like an artist roused from his creative flow, complete with paint-stained hands and individually colored fingernails. Standing in a mauve-carpeted room, Mr. Thomas pointed out his latest ideas: pewter jewelry in eccentric shapes, like an earring in the shape of a zipper pull, made in collaboration with the Chrome Hearts offshoot, Lone Ones, and shorts cut from dead-stock military laundry bags — while explaining the origins of his own style.

“I liked my parent’s clothing growing up,” Mr. Thomas said. “As a teenager, I was able to fit into my dad’s leather jacket. The beat-up patina on it was perfect, and I realized that that was personal style. It was something you couldn’t go to a store and buy.”

Mr. Thomas, who turned 36 in September, never studied fashion or garment making, and he can’t work a sewing machine. But growing up as the son of immigrants from Venezuela and Trinidad, he watched as his parents subsisted on their raw artistic skills to create a life in Los Angeles. And he now uses those same talents as an artist and designer: sign-painting, tie-dying, screen printing. For a short time, his father, Stefan Gilbert, even ran a private women’s wear label.

Similarly, in his early 20s, Mr. Thomas worked at Ralph Lauren. As one of the few Black people in creative roles in a predominantly white company, he soon realized that the only way to survive in the fashion industry would have to be with a project of his own making.

“I was the ‘cool’ Black guy, but there was nowhere for me to go,” he said. “Best case would have been sourcing buttons for women’s outerwear or something.”

Gallery Dept.’s spontaneous inception came about in 2016 when Mr. Thomas sold a hand-sewn denim poncho off his own back to Johnny Depp’s stylist. At the time Mr. Thomas was focused on making beats and D.J.-ing, but after selling all of the pieces he’d designed for a small trunk show at the Chateau Marmont, he realized he’d discovered a new creative lane.

It had less to do with ponchos, which were dropped from subsequent collections, and more to do with old garments being remixed in the heat of artistic paroxysm, with as little second-guessing as possible. With the help of Jesse Jones, a veteran tailor, Mr. Thomas began churning out made-to-order pieces for customers who often were unaware of what, exactly, they had stumbled into.

“We were creating pieces while we were selling them,” he said.

Working with heavy vintage shirts, hoodies, trucker hats, bomber jackets, whatever was at hand, Mr. Thomas would frequently screen-print the brand’s logo, adding paint or other flourishes as the feeling struck.

Today that extends to long-sleeve tees, sweatpants and socks. At the time, he also began blowing out the silhouette of vintage Levi’s 501s and Carhartt work pants into a subtle flare, accented with patches and reinforced stitching, resulting in a streetwise update of the classic boot-cut jean.

Mr. Thomas christened this style of jeans the “LA Flare.” And where denim has so historically hewed to “his” and “her” categories, the LA Flare is the zeitgeist-y “they” of street wear denim. (The label labels its items as “unisex.”)

The jeans come with a luxury item’s price tag, with a basic version starting at $395. Custom tailoring and additional touches by Mr. Thomas, can push the price upward of $1,200. One early collaboration with Chrome Hearts, a pair of orange-dyed flares patched with that brand’s iconic gothic crosses, has gone for $5,000 on Grailed.

“There is nothing like Josue’s repurposed jeans,” said George Archer, a senior buyer at Mr Porter. “They are both a wearable piece and a work of art. No one else is doing what he’s doing.”

For Mr. Archer, who first noticed the Gallery Dept. logo popping on men in Tokyo in March, Mr. Thomas “interprets and creates” clothing as if it was an end in itself — and not a commodity to be monetized. (Nonetheless, Mr Porter hopes to monetize a collection of Gallery Dept. pieces via its e-commerce site later this year.)

“You can feel the warmth of Josue’s hands on each of the pieces,” said Motofumi Kogi, the creative director of the Japanese label United Arrows & Sons. An elder statesmen of Tokyo’s street wear scene, Mr. Kogi found the label on a trip to Los Angeles last year. It’s not only Mr. Thomas’s artistic touch that stands out to him but his vision for remaking a staid garment into something that Mr. Kogi believes has not been seen before.

“He took this staple of hip-hop culture and refreshed it,” he said, referring to Carhartt pants.

Getting the people who make that culture to buy in was another matter. “The first year we did the flare, in 2017, skinny jeans were in,” Mr. Thomas said. “Rappers would come into the shop and say they’d never wear a flare. Now, everyone is wearing it.”

On Instagram, fit pics by rappers like Rich the Kid, along with the aforementioned Migos, Quavo and Offset, Gallery Dept.’s flare has become a familiar silhouette, skinny jeans breaking loose below the knee, usually coiled up at the ankle around a pair of vintage Air Jordans.

One fan of the jeans, Virgil Abloh, sees Mr. Thomas’s “edit” of the classic garment as the next chapter of its history.

“Their flare cut is the most important new cut of denim in the last decade — since the skinny jean,” Mr. Abloh said. A self-described Levi’s “obsessive” who owns more than 20 pairs of Gallery Dept. jeans, he walked into Mr. Thomas’s workshop one day after a routine stop at the Erewhon Market across the street.

“I thought: ‘This is amazing. Here’s some guys editing their own clothes in a shop,’” he said. “It reminded me of what I was doing when I started out, painting over logos, making hand-personalized clothes.”

Mr. Abloh considers Mr. Thomas’s work to be the fashion equivalent of “ready-made” art, and he offers Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air as a distant contemporary. He suggested that he and Mr. Thomas come from a lineage of Black designers that is still in the process of defining itself.

“He’s a perfect example of someone creating their own path from a community that hasn’t traditionally participated in fashion,” Mr. Abloh said. “I see Josue as making a new canon of his own, showcasing what Black design can do.”

Mr. Thomas didn’t argue with that. But he was also a little preoccupied with whatever was taking place at the tips of fingers to get lost in the thought. The future of his brand, after all, depends on his ability to stay in that moment.

“People want things that aren’t contrived,” he said, pulling at his own shirt to drive the point home. “This paint came from me working. I wanted to recreate this feeling. Once something is contrived, when you can see through it, it’s ruined. There’s only so much you want to explain.”

[beatricebidelaire]

Vera are you still doing Various Final Dialogues??? If so, I’d love to read Esmé and Beatrice!!! 💓

Beatrice and Esme had both once anticipated that their last conversation would be the one at Beatrice’s wedding. The one which of course Beatrice had issued an invitation because she wanted Esme to see her in that glorious, fancy, exotic wedding dress and the wings that came with the dress, also to show she’s generous enough to invite her, and Esme had of course gone to because if she hadn’t gone, then that would mean letting Beatrice win. Letting Beatrice win what, exactly, was unclear. But nevertheless, Esme couldn’t let Beatrice Baudelaire win. Not when Beatrice had (or so she claimed, anyway) moved on from her.

The first person Esme ran into at the wedding reception was Kit Snicket. Her expression twisted into a displeased one as she recognized Esme. “I’m surprised you got invited.”

Esme smiled coyly at her, “If they don’t invite their exes, they would have almost no one to invite.”

Kit’s expression soured a little more, and Esme remembered, amused and vindictive, that Kit Snicket was never an ex. She might’ve committed a crime with the married couple, but she was not an ex, despite how it was clear, at least in Esme’s eyes, that Kit harbored more than affection for Beatrice. Ramona had a brief summer fling with Beatrice, and Esme herself a longer entangled love-hate relationship that ended up in angry kisses backstage, or the morning afters of various performances, but Kit had gotten nothing. How amusing.

Esme just smiled, overly sweet like the type of tea she knew Kit hated, and Kit’s annoyance deepened.

She greeted a couple of people perfunctorily once she entered, before her eyes landing on Georgina chatting with one of the Denouement twins. Esme couldn’t tell the twins from each other, but she doubted the firefighting side one would want to chat with Georgina, so she assumed he’s Ernest.

“The firestarting exes circle?” she asked, in lieu of greeting. Ernest raised his glass in salute, while Georgina eyed her speculatively.

“One and only,” Georgina said, her voice cool and calm just like Esme remembered. She’s wearing a very neat suit, unlike the lab coat Esme remembered.

“Lovely suit,” Esme said, the compliment slipping out before she could stop herself, before she could remember that she wasn’t one to compliment anyone. Georgina looked smug, and Ernest vaguely amused. Esme would blame it on Beatrice’s wedding making her temporarily a different person, someone who complimented others, except that would mean admitting Beatrice still had some kind of effect on her, which Esme was reluctant to do, even if Beatrice Baudelaire probably still had some kind of effect on half the guests invited today anyway.

“I’m going to congratulate our bride,” Esme recovered a bit from internal worrying about complimenting Georgina, and said in an almost clipped tone. She turned sharply on her heels – made from actual silver, thank you very much.

“We’ll see you later,” Georgina drawled. (Esme would hook up with her later, after the reception, but neither of them know that yet.)

“Say hi for me if you happen to run into the groom,” Ernest called after her.

Esme ignored both of them.

Esme found Beatrice soon enough, passing by several fake sugar bowls along her way, which angered her. She was sure Beatrice put those fake sugar bowls out deliberately to provoke her.

Beatrice was in a glorious gown that seemed to stretch out a mile, lavishly and outlandishly, after tightening in certain areas to accentuate her figure that complimented her upper body in a way that made Esme’s chest tighten, even after all this time. She was chatting with Jacques Snicket’s date, a man whom Esme recognized Geraldine Julienne had mentioned once in her report to Esme. Esme decided to look into it later.

Beatrice noticed Esme approaching, and authoritatively commanded Jacques Snicket’s date to dance with Jacques, and turned to Esme with a beautifully sharp smile. There should be some law of universe making sure annoying people were not allowed to be too beautiful.

“Esme,” Beatrice greeted her, her voice strong and smooth like honey, a single word managing to showcase her marvelous singing skills.

“I see you’ve collected quite a few sugar bowls.” Esme had planned for many things she could say once she actually talked to Beatrice – disingenuous congratulations, mostly – but now it’s all coming out as a single accusation. Well, perhaps it didn’t matter.

“You can take one of them, if you like,” Beatrice offered, generous and chivalrously, except they both knew that it was hardly generosity or chivalry, and none of those sugar bowls could not replace what Beatrice originally stole from Esme. The single sugar bowl with utmost importance, not those cheap replacements.

“How generous,” Esme simpered. “But no, thank you. I’m sure I will find better souvenirs to take home from this wedding.” She hadn’t decided what yet, but she was sure she would take something that would make Beatrice regret having invited her.

Beatrice narrowed her eyes. “Or you might find yourself accidentally leaving certain belongings of yours behind,” she suggested, with an innocent tilt of her head, her curls falling casually to one side. Esme wanted to run her fingers through those curls and pulled at them at the same time. It’s a mixed feeling.

“Don’t worry, I would be very careful with my belongings,” Esme said archly.

Beatrice opened her mouth to say something, but being the center of the attention at this wedding reception filled with her exes and admirers, someone else came up to talk to her, and Esme used this chance to slip away, eyeing her surroundings for potential wedding souvenirs.

Beatrice and Esme were both wrong about this being the last time they met, because it turned out being married didn’t exactly change one’s ability to remain fashionable if one was determined enough. And two people who were both good at being in ended up running into each other at expensive stores or restaurants sooner or later, if they both lived in The City.

But one day, perhaps the snide insults and nostalgia and odd tension that Esme almost mistook as sexual tension got too much for Beatrice to handle, they suddenly stopped running into each other. Esme hired an investigator and found out that Beatrice was still in the city, she and her whole family, but she seemed to start avoiding Esme skillfully, even if they seemed to still be running around the same circles (the venn diagrams of their social circles, after all, were still too overlapping for anyone’s liking) and shopping at the same places. But perhaps Beatrice had taken some efforts in avoiding Esme, and Esme considered that a win, despite the longing ache in her heart that never really left.

It was a good few years before they saw each other again, and at that time, Esme hadn’t expected it to actually be the last time they met.

It was at the Victorious Finance District. Right across Mulctuary Money Management, in fact. Beatrice was doing whatever shady stuff she was doing and Esme was busy being a fabulous and influential financial advisor.

“Mrs. Baudelaire,” Esme said, silkily. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Mrs. Squalor,” Beatrice replied coolly. She was wearing a dark blue suit that day, simpler than anything Esme remembered seeing her in, yet somehow maintaining a sort of elegance of her own. Esme didn’t know Beatrice was also capable of pulling off simple elegance, and she wasn’t the most pleased to find out.

Esme didn’t like the way Beatrice called her Mrs. Squalor, as if it was some kind of reminder that while Beatrice kept her own last name Baudelaire, Esme had taken Jerome Squalor’s last name. It was an annoying yet tolerable fact most of the time, because one had to make some sacrifices especially after the star reporter of Daily Punctilio told you that according to her research you had to take the Squalor name when married in order to be legible for inheriting the enormous Squalor fortune one day. However, the way the words “Mrs. Squalor” rolled of Beatrice’s tongue and away from her perfectly soft lips suddenly made the usually tolerable fact unbearable. It grated on Esme’s nerves.

As if reading what Esme was thinking, Beatrice smiled, brightly amused. She had always been good at realizing what Esme was thinking when they’d been dating, and apparently she hadn’t lost that skill even in motherhood.

“How is Jerome?” Beatrice asked pleasantly.

“Rich,” Esme replied in an instant.

Beatrice rolled her eyes, suddenly not the perfect smiles beauty she usually displayed in front of most people, and the familiarity hit Esme liked a sharp stab of nostalgia mixed with the delight of seeing this side of Beatrice Baudelaire.

“I see you haven’t changed,” Beatrice remarked.

“One of my many talents,” Esme replied. “I cannot say the same of you.”

“Thank you,” Beatrice said, easily twisting what Esme definitely did not mean as a compliment into a compliment anyway. Esme loathed her. She hoped she never see this horrible woman again. “Well, I’ll leave you to your business.” Beatrice told Esme, and climbed into her car before Esme could reply.

Esme watched her drive away, not knowing that her wish about never seeing Beatrice again was about to come true.

If she had, perhaps she wouldn’t have made that wish.

[seenashblog]

Nash Watches & Rates Cheesy Hallmark Original Christmas Movies, So You Don’t Have To (2019)

This is the thing where I recap and rate cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies (mostly - if other channels do "original" holiday movies, like Lifetime, I may sneak those in there, too). This post will be updated with new entries as I go, all below the cut. I'm rating based upon The Cheesy Christmas Movie Bingo Card. Here it is, and feel free to use it for your own watching:

More quick clarification on ratings: 

When something's pulling in a 4 or 5 star, that means the Bingo only popped a few squares. When something's hitting at a 3, it's a handful of squares, maybe came in the ballpark of having a Bingo. The 2s mean definitely got a Bingo. The 1s mean anywhere from more than one Bingo to nearly filled the damn card. Outside of the card, stars can also get docked because of piss-poor writing, embarrassing acting, draggy flow, and shitty casting (read: lack of chemistry).

Put another way - 3 stars means they aren’t exactly a waste of time, 2 stars are debatable/up to personal taste, and of course 1 star means I will never get that time back and I’m that much closer to death because of the movie and what it drained from my soul.

Here's the 2018 list

And remember: never, EVER watch “My Christmas Love” 😉

Let’s roll. Most recent entries will be first.

#6

Once Upon A Christmas Miracle (Hallmark, 2018 - Brett Dalton, Aimee Teegarden - the latter of whom will make you think "I know someone who looks like her" because she looks like that girl you went to school with or worked with or was a friend of a friend, or maybe is a friend of yours - she's just got that look about her. My Aimee Teegarden's name is Jessica.)

This movie is infuriating.

Brett is a great actor, Aimee is serviceable, let's just get that out of the way. Matter of fact, you're not going to find any of the acting grating. Overall, everybody's fine.

Here's what you need to know: this is based on a true story, and that story is that a woman who needed a liver transplant gets a random donor (no one in her fam was a match apparently). And donor's this awesome dude, and they end up falling in love. Cool story, right?

Yeah, then Hallmark got their hands on it.

Everything is shmoop. Everything. The family (including the - way to go casting - sister who looks nothing like her, I mean NOTHING like her) is on Christmas like it's crack. Details include her hand-making wreaths, and oh by the way she does it for every holiday. Okay. Whatever. Some of us have more time on our hands than others. Look at me, I pause in housework to type this shit up when I could be doing said housework. It's all about priorities.

There's of course The Conflict, which is that he gets a job offer out of town. But before all that, he organizes a Christmas Eve party focused on fundraising for her because of the medical bills and because she won't go back to nursing school since money. Welcome to the USA, the only advanced, developed country on the planet where they don't consider investment in our populous as important as investment in, well, you pick. I'm furious. I'm also grinding my teeth over the gross medical inaccuracies in this one, but I won't go down that road or we'll be here all day. I bring that up because the thing upon which this story pivots is the medical issue, so some realism there is important so that we as the audience can understand the gravity of what they went through, the sacrifice he made for a stranger, why this bonded them, etc.

I hate this movie. I hate it. The family is insufferably perfect. It's so overblown it's unrealistic. And that wasn't needed - it's okay to show them stressed and worried, this is a big deal. But nope, they're just perfect. And she's perfect, everyone loves her, she's pretty and smart and sweet and EVERYONE LOVES HER. There's not one moment of her being, say, bitter and resentful  that she's having to go through this, and again - THAT'S NORMAL. Just some normalcy is needed to balance the "Wow!" of what happened which is that they ended up falling in love, because that truly is not the norm and is extraordinary.

So I got curious and wondered what, if any, of this - beyond what we know - was actually true. Okay: he and his motorcycle club did arrange a fundraiser. They did end up several doors down from each other at the hospital and would take their walks together (that's mandatory post-surgery, they want you up walking ASAP, just FYI). But here's what I was looking for: this didn't happen at Christmas. He overheard a coworker talking about a sick cousin in January 2015. The surgery happened in March. They started dating, and in July he actually asked her father for permission to ask her to marry him. And THEN at Christmastime, he proposed to her, which was the very last scene in the movie.

I guess what I'm getting at is, why couldn't this have just been a regular Hallmark movie at a random time of year. They made the focus Christmas instead of it being on Heather and Chris. They had an opportunity to dig in a little deeper than they usually do, they were handed a wonderful love story that was filled with a major REAL trial, and they blew it. They swapped true love and loyalty, for romance and fluff. Yeah, love and romance are on the Venn diagram together, but they ain't the same thing.

This can't be a 5 because it was so schlocky, not to mention because there were zero character arcs, our two leads were the exact same people at the end as they were at the beginning. I can't in good conscience make it a 4 because of what I've said above. But the production value was fine, the acting was fine, the script dialogue-wise was fine, and the pacing was fine. IT WAS FINE. You may be into this, but I was greatly disappointed, especially after learning about the material with which they had to work. So I have to drop it from a 3 to a 2. Be warned, though - if you google, everyone rates it off the charts. [shrugs]

2/5 stars

The Christmas Note (Hallmark, 2015 - Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Leah Gibson - the former of whom you better know, and the latter of whom is incredibly familiar to me - and there's also several other familiar folks, namely the guy who plays the lawyer who is a great actor and should be in more stuff)

Now, even though this isn't based on a true story it is a good example of how to dig into tough situations and allow people to be imperfect, along with elements of lightness and sweetness and happiness. (The next one does this well, too, but hang on let's knock this one out.) Both our leads - and thank god on high this isn't a romance for once - are excellent actors with great chemistry, so no worries there. This *is* a love story, however. Because not all love is kissing and sex and romance.

One more time for the people in the back: meeting someone and growing to love them is not always about sexy times and kissy face and shmoopy romance.

So here's the scoop, and I'm not looking up their character names: Jamie-Lynn, along with her son (who, despite being a good lil' actor, is mildly annoying, but it's the script, not him) has moved back to her small hometown and gotten a little house to be closer to her parents, because her army hubby got nearly blowed-up overseas and he's in the hospital recuperating enough to where it's safe for him to travel home. Next door lives Leah who seems stand-offish at first but it's just because her life is basically work-home-work-home, wash-rinse-repeat. They start to get to know each other because this dude shows up and knocks on Jamie-Lynn's door and is like "I can't get hold of your neighbor but her mom's died and she needs to come clean out the apartment, like, yesterday." Jamie-Lynn goes with her to do it, being all - Nobody should have to go through this alone - and Leah accepts the offer, because this is gonna be hard, and double-hard because due to a falling out, she hadn't talked to her mom in like 10 years. They end up finding a letter her mom left her, and in part of it, she tells that before Leah was born she gave up a child for adoption. That's it. No other leads.

And after Jamie-Lynn and various folks around town encourage her, Leah decides she'll make effort to find her sibling, and Jamie-Lynn helps, and as they follow up on various things in mom's possessions, they get closer and closer, and end up becoming friends. There's no silly misunderstandings as excuse to farm emotion - there's just actual emotion because jesus, did you read what this plot is?! Nothing is smothered by shmoop and nobody is shoving Christmas spirit up your ass. Nobody's family is perfect (you know the scoop on Leah, and as far as Jamie-Lynn's, turns out husband may not make it home for Christmas, and her parents are divorced and slightly cantankerous), so again - it's keeping grounded in the midst of what's about to be a (kind've) fantastical ending.

Skip beyond the next divider if you don't want to be spoiled.

While they don't look alike, they do both have dark hair and dark eyes (I can't tell if maybe some dark hazel is happening, but their eyes ain't blue and brown is my point). And note the way they occasionally part their hair (far to one side), the way they'll occasionally move in sync (standing from chair, for instance), similar style purses and coats. You may've guessed the ending - and it was mentioned early on though not heavy-handed that Jamie-Lynn is adopted - but Jamie-Lynn is Leah's older birth half-sister. And of course, husband makes it home for Christmas.

The only thing - and I mean THE only, even the music is on point - I would've changed about this (but it's based on a book, so Hallmark couldn't, so I guess I'm critiquing the author) is that I'd have made it that the husband is her older half-brother. So that when he gets home on, say, Christmas Eve the lawyer could've shown up at the house being like "Sorry if I'm intruding but my contact at blah-blah-blah agency came through, I just read the documents, and you have to know this right away", etc. Otherwise, this movie is solid, top to bottom. I would give it a 4 vs a 5 because it is highly, highly, HIGHLY improbable that they'd be neighbors. Better for them to have met via work or at the coffee shop or something. But let me tell you, the thing that puts this over the top? In the scene where they find out the truth, they nail it. In lesser hands (including the lawyer actor), this would've failed and ruined the entire movie. Instead, it actually made me a little teary-eyed.

5/5 stars

The Santa Con (Lifetime, 2014 - the very stacked cast of: Barry Watson, Melissa Joan Hart, Melissa Sagemiller, Jaleel White, Scott Grimes, Wendy Williams, Alimi Ballard, John Ratzenberger - every single one of whom you'll recognize or know right off the bat)

Lifetime does this better than Hallmark, and tenfold: casting. And this is a drama vs. a romance, but they all nail it. It helps that the director was Melissa Joan Hart, and I'll put in my disclaimer here that I said last year....

I am slightly biased because Melissa is a friend of a friend (sister-in-law, specifically) and she is good people, a hard worker, and a smart cookie. She knows what roles she nails (sharp wit, no shmoop, strong chicks), so that’s what projects she and her mother choose (they produce most everything Melissa’s in), she stays in her lane, is my point, so if you agree with that assessment, then you’re good to go, this is classic Melissa Joan Hart fare.

Except this time? It's not exactly her typical fare, but it's just as solid. Here's the basic summary, and I'm not going too far down the road because with all those characters, as you can imagine, there's lots of back-and-forth as far as who's interacting with whom at a given point. So Barry plays a conman who finally landed himself in prison but he charmed the warden (Ratzenberger) and the board and gets parole. His goes to live with his sister (Hart) and we meet his fellow conman buddy (White), and the job he gets is part-time gig as a Santa at the mall (sister has a shop there). He is just going through the motions, and he promises this kid - the only bit of poor casting, IMO, but kid actors are six of one, half dozen the other - that his wish of his parents being back together will come true (Sagemiller and Grimes).

Problem: Grimes' character is an alcoholic, and the kid finally gets an eyeful and quits being pissed at his mom for the separation when dad shows up absolutely lit to the school play. In any event, Barry feels like he needs to make good on the promise somehow because he feels guilty and he insinuates himself into their lives (I am absolutely going blank how, sorry), and he at least wants to give Grimes a fighting chance at being reunited with his family (Sagemiller says she would totally take him back if he got the drinking issue taken care of because she genuinely loves him, she just can't tolerate that shit anymore). So Barry's doing things like helping Grimes get to AA and revealing that his boss at work took credit for his awesome idea (that, coupled with the drinking, is why he got fired if memory serves, I'm writing this post-movie).

There's one angle that irritates me - the issue with Grimes shouldn't have been alcoholism. That's a tough topic to tackle, and I don't know that a Lifetime Christmas movie is the place to do it. I didn't mind him coming drunk to the play, I think that would've been in line with him being, broadly, Mr. Fuck Up. Like losing his job - we learn that the reason is because his idea was stolen, but from her perspective it's part of his pattern. And maybe he kept missing things he'd promised to do with the kid. Whatever, fill in all those blanks. In addition, it irks me that Sagemiller's romantic choices here are a felon and an alcoholic. Are all felons bad? No. Are all alcoholics bad? No. Because people vary. My point is, both of their lives are messy at this moment and they need to work on themselves before involving another person and her kid. Barry's also been lying to her this whole time, and regardless of the good intentions (and that's debatable, his reasons, at one point), it's still a bunch of deception.

But I have to give credit where credit's due. It's a very original plot, both the writer and Hart did a great job balancing it out and keeping it streamlined to the degree that they could, and, again, I cannot praise the casting enough. Because there is a distinct lack of shmoop, and because there's some humor, and because the pacing was on point, and because I think it maybe hit 2 squares on the card if that, I deem this not even close to being a waste of your time. Like I say, there's just that thing that I feel like could've been better, but it's kind've a big thing, so I gotta ding for it. I'll say this, though: seeing Urkel and Sabrina flirt cures a lot of ails.

4/5 stars

The Perfect Christmas Present (Hallmark, 2017 - Sam Page, who I recognize, and a gal called Tara Holt, whose parents should be popped upside the head for naming their child Terre Haute; I mean, unless they've got a real hard-on for Indiana, in which case you do you)

She's from Chicago (as in, grew up there) but then her mom moved them to L.A. (after dad died, so check dead parent box), but she's moved back to establish a charity there, and also because boyfriend lives there (I missed how they got together if she lived across the country). She wants to hold a charity event, and he helps arrange for a former client's historic home to be used for free. Pertinent info: he's essentially a personal shopper but his specialty is figuring out the perfect gif t for people (hence the subtle title ::sigh::) by getting to know them really well. My presumption is this usually happens by targeted questioning about said person via the client, the more obscure stuff, but I'm writing this after the fact so I can't be sure. But I get the impression it usually isn't - really, it can't be - direct interaction with the person themselves, because the surprise would be ruined. Unless he goes around being a lying liar all the time, and if there was a person - especially at the behest of a loved one - who integrated themselves into my life under false pretenses (read: anything other than they enjoy my company, I intrigue them, etc.) I would be both absolutely livid and absolutely crushed. We'll come back to this.

Side note: Let me tell you right now, re: former client - I love this chick, she is the highlight of the movie, the snark is real with her, she's upfront about the fact she's into our lead male, did I mention she's snarky? I liked her the minute she came on the screen, continued to like her up until her last scene (spoiler: no she's not a villain, she's just snark and if you don't like it, piss off).

Back to plot: basically, that's the "in" - she doesn't know that boyfriend hired him to figure out perfect present, all she knows is that this is boyfriend's old fraternity buddy who's a make-things-happen, got-connections-all-over sort of guy. And he's happy to help with the event, because that means he can use the opportunity of them working together to get info on her and essentially profile her - like for instance, when they were touring that house, when in kitchen, she snitches a macaroon (or one of those fat almond cookies from wedding showers with which I have a love-hate relationship), he makes a quick note of "sweet tooth".

Also to know, the relationship between her and boyfriend is struggling a little, so that's why he's going to the extra effort, and - spoiler alert - as I'm sure you've guessed he gets the shaft for his trouble. He's an okay guy, I guess, and I do give them props for not making him this complete dickhole or something, but with that comes the issue that you kinda feel shitty for him. On the other hand, it's only been a year and he's jonesing to get married and have kids, and she's like "Whooooaaaa". While I'm here, though, talking about secondary characters, I also have to shout out best friend who she's Skyping with off-and-on, she is dynamic and runs any scene they're in, every line is delivered realistically and casually, you feel like you're talking with a person in real life. Having said that? This is a weird, unneeded gimmick. Matter of fact, the character isn't needed at all, but if it had to be done then they should've just had her there, as the partner in the charity.

Regarding casting: it's cool that Terre Haute went into acting because she has these big, expressive eyes and I think it helps because she's not got an "it", if that makes any sense - as opposed to the ladies I mentioned above, there's not a dynamic presence, at least in this she's easily forgettable. Regardless of her character and dialogue, it's delivery that sells it, and while there's inflection and facial expressions (she's not flat, not at all), it still smacks of her just delivering lines. And that's fine! There's a need for actors who are on it and that the studio gets what they pay for, that they do what they're hired to do. My point is, she's serviceable and I think in a meaty role she could step up. He's great but also only serviceable in this particular movie, and I honestly don't know what else these two could've done - while the idea of the story is decently creative (though event planner - which he essentially is - has been done, and done better), it plays out as pretty much how you'd think. I'm typing this as I'm about an hour in, and here's my guess: Yes, she'll end up falling for him but she'll also be pissed when she finds out that he's been collecting facts on her, regardless of the reason. Also I predict that in rich gal's moves to get dude, she'll be the one to go "You know that he's stuck around because he's fallen for you, right? That this ain't about the gift anymore?" and be the one to give her a kick in the. At least, that's what I'd write.

Because the alternative is actually realistic, which is that she says what I said above: you ingratiated yourself under false pretenses, when we started having feelings for each other - or at minimum when we started being friends - you should've told boyfriend you couldn't help with the present anymore, and told me the truth. Period. End of story.

I'll leave it here, I think. Watch if you want to see how it ends - not that it matters, of course she ends up with him. And I gotta go with my gut, here, even though this doesn't hit a ton of bingo squares, not at all, but the issue is it's.... well, it's not dragging, the pace is decent, it's just.... well, it's boring. It's *shrug*. It's meh. There's just no spark to it. I can't justify giving it a "Don't miss this one!" type of rating. It's a "Maybe you'll enjoy it", "Not entirely a waste of time" sort of jam. Which makes me wonder why I wrote so much on this.... eh, I'm avoiding housework.

3/5 stars

Northern Lights of Christmas (Hallmark, 2018 - Ashley Williams, and that's the only cast that matters... besides, won't recognize anyone else)

Let it be said that anything with Ashley Williams, I'm giving a minimum of 3 stars. That's the lowest it can possibly get, merely due to her presence. She's a great actress, and I don't just mean by Hallmark standards, she should be in all the things, that's how magnetic and scene-stealing she is. No, I'm not her cousin or something. I've just yet to dislike her in anything I've seen her in, she even lit up the screen in How I Met Your Mother which going up against Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders and Jason Segel (I don't mention the guy that played Ted because beyond not liking the character, I will never understand that casting).

Now, stay with me, here. Because this is one of the more ridiculous summaries on one of these things (and by "things" I mean Hallmark and/or Lifetime Christmas movies, AND I MEAN IT WITH LOVE OF COURSE) that I've seen. *clears throat*

"Zoey has been working hard to own her own plane but everything changes when she inherits a reindeer farm."

If you're anything like me, my What The Fuck radar shot right up. The story is she's left a reindeer farm/ranch by the old man who taught her how to fly who has, obviously, died. And by "farm/ranch", I mean 2 reindeer and y'all, again, huge props when Hallmark bothers to have real animals on these farms and ranches they make their settings, double points when the characters interact with them. So by flying, they mean Cessna-type planes, though we're about 25 minutes in and I've seen no plane. Anyway, she lives in Seattle now (our setting is Alaska) and is a commercial pilot but as summary says, she wants her own. For crop dusting? I have no idea why, they don't really say (or haven't yet) if it's for personal reasons or a new career venture.

Ashley - and I won't be calling her by her character's name in any of these, get used to it - meets the live-in handyman/animal tender/etc. person who is a real pill. Like, he's not exactly rude but I'd just call him brusque and blunt. He initially wants to quit even though he's paid through the winter, but she convinces him to say explaining she needs him to be a partner of sorts, help her decide who she should sell the place to. Ashley grows on him when he sees that even though she had to move away, she genuinely cared about Gus and his wife (the dude who died and his wife who had died prior) and the farm/ranch (they call it both dunno why I think ranch suits better) and that she's a hard worker.

Gus and wife were beloved by the town, and they did it up right at Christmas - part of the barn where the reindeer aren't chillin' is filled with decorations, most notably a sleigh, and it's not lost on me that they're way up north, there's reindeer, there's that sleigh, and he taught her to fly. I mean, "Gus" and not "Kris" or "Nick", but we'll see where this is going. Oh, also? Wife had a box of recipes that Ashley's best friend (whose hubby is the son of the cranky man who owns the local hang-out diner, Americana-type restaurant in town, the menu of which she's always trying to nudge him to add new things) was dying in particular to find a certain cookie recipe that everybody in town loved because she's always wanted to know how to make them. Sounds like Mrs. You-Know-Who To Me. But again, not enough info, I'm writing this as I go, but I tell you I almost don't want it to turn out as that, I like the inference much better. May dock a star if they go full-court-press You Know Who.

I'm eating homemade soup for breakfast because it's getting really nippy here, and there's no oatmeal. I just felt the need to share this with you. I mean, it's hella awesome soup, I'm a good cook. I heated it up during the part where she's going around telling people she's doing up the old Christmas festival like it used to be, the one Gus and wife would host at the ranch. Her angle is, she wants to attract the right sort of people as buyers, people who get the small town mentality and want to keep the ranch essentially the way it is, and people are pumped and excited about the booths they'll have and the food and the post-fair barn dance, and I got bored. Not painfully bored, just wishing-they'd-speed-this-up bored. Put it this way: I was able to make coffee and walk the dog and flip the stove on and heat up said soup whilst only needing to pop in to look at the TV to make sure I hadn't missed something. I hadn't. I get it's necessary, I just think it could've been montaged instead of introducing us to a bunch of side characters by name and hearing what they're gonna do, all we need is showing us their faces during montage, then we'll see them and what they're doing at the fair. Because they're inconsequential to the story. This is classic Hallmark padding runtime when it's simply not needed, not everything has to take up a 2 hour time slot.

Hey, if you want good soup, go on and cook the veg you'll be adding a little more than halfway, and *then* add it to your base, which should consist of some water, yeah, but either beef broth or chicken broth (or I guess veg broth, but gross), your choice, and the other trick is to set it on low and go about your day, homemade soup's better when left to do its own thing over time. I've digressed.

Ah, charter flights. That's what she plans on doing. She mentions it because she's calculating how much she's invested getting stuff up to speed and cost of festival. We've still yet to see Gus' plane. Also, I don't care much for the leading man, he's Dollar Store Brett Dalton (Ward from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and if you're familiar with Dalton, I'm telling you that all you'll be thinking is "Damn, Brett Dalton would've cleaned up in this role", because this dude's a bit flat. Dalton's been in one of these cheese Christmas movies, too, so the chance is there; matter of fact, he should be either above or below this in one of the other recently reviewed. I can't be bothered to look for the title. None of this matters, moving on.

We see them ride his motorcycle together to go out to the local airport - mainly cargo and quick charters and such - and wouldn't ya know it, the dude that owns/runs it is retiring at the end of the month. Hmmm, wonder where that's going. And I also wonder if this is where the plane Gus flew came from, if he picked up work there, too. If it's been said, I've missed it. Anyway, owner needed her because his dude is sick or something and he says it's 6 towns, mail delivery gig, she is jazzed because as she says "This is the longest I've been on the ground in a long time". Our co-lead doesn't like to fly but he does like to take pictures, so that's how she sells him on coming with her to deliver the stuff.

Kinda like You-Know-Who. Ahem.

Kudos to Hallmark for (a) not going with shitty FX folks, re: the greenscreen for when they're in the cockpit, and (b) for some nice aerial shots of somebody flying a plane. The aurora/northern lights effect also ain't bad. I mean, if you've seen photos of it, it almost looks fake anyway because it's one of those too-good-to-be-true natural occurrences that shouldn't be that vivid. It's like reverse of animal camouflage, I'm thinking specifically of octopi (apparently you can say octopuses now and it's acceptable, but it's not in this house) and if you've not seen that, get yourself to You Tube and get ready to be shocked at those undersea aliens. We've (okay I've) digressed again.

There's a moment of her reminiscing about Gus, but it's short, and this is when our leading dude learns she's gonna be going to Florida to be with her parents for Christmas, and I like this for two reasons: one, these pseudo-dead parents have only been brought up once in a sorrowful way, people have been focused on remembering the good times, and second, she's not leaving because she gives no shits about Christmas and is gradually learning to love it or the usual garbage, nor is she being called away for some career-related thing, it's a legit, understandable reason. Neither of those are getting a bingo square, because even though they may skirt the line, they're being done well.

All right, I'm not going to tell you the ending, because you should put it on your list. As whack-a-doo as the summary has it sounding, they make it work. So because of good casting and a solid script and a unique premise and tied up something in a great way (and because I got ever-so-slightly teary-eyed at one point shut up), this one gets a score of....

4/5 stars

Here’s your 4-and-5 stars so far (in no particular order):

Trading Christmas - 5/5 stars Christmas In The Air - 5/5 stars Mingle All The Way - 5/5 stars The Christmas Card - 5/5 stars The Christmas Note - 5/5 stars Fir Crazy - 4/5 stars Small Town Christmas - 4/5 stars Switched For Christmas - 4/5 stars The Christmas Contract - 4/5 stars Rocky Mountain Christmas - 4/5 stars Christmas A La Mode - 4/5 stars Northern Lights of Christmas - 4/5 stars The Santa Con - 4/5 stars

#5

Christmas A La Mode (Lifetime, 2019 - Katie Leclerc who I've never seen before in my life but who is quite good in this, and  Ryan Cooper who is really hot depending on the angle, that's the best way I can explain it)

Let me be clear: the *only* reason I am watching this is for y'all. Well, and I'm mending dog toys and need something to semi-stimulate my brain. The title is incredibly off-putting, it's too sweet right out of the gate. But I shall give it a chance.

Your basics are that a dairy farm was left to two sisters by their deceased father and the farm's been in the fam for several generations. Older sister has long since been in the city and sounds like she's some sort of real estate flipper (acquisition, buff up, then sell) because she and her partner, Sometimes Hot Guy (who frequently drops his American accent), are going to sell the farm to a dairy corporation... well, that's what we're told. Put a pin in that, shiftiness comes up later unnecessarily. Anyway, the agreement has a provision that one sister can buy out the other's shares and fully own, so little sis has to raise a hefty six figures in a short amount of time. Older sis is a major dick; having said that, the farm has been circling the drain for awhile now, so she ain't totally out of line.

The summary I saw neglects to mention that they also own an ice cream parlor in town that's typically closed during the winter because of course it is. But, I mean, Baskin Robbins and fro-yo joints and Ben & Jerry's stay open year-round, and yup they bank in hotter months, but why not keep making money? Throwing out stock over, what, 4 months of slow time? Is just stupid. No wonder they're going under. But all right, we'll let that go. Anyhow, her plan is to get some money via opening the ice cream parlor and doing a little contest for people to submit their best Christmas-themed flavors, and she'll whip 'em up, people can try them, then vote on the winner and the winner gets a year of free ice cream. She also does a crowd-funding site.

The summary also neglects to mention (and this is okay, it's supposed to be a plot "oooh") that business partner Sometimes Hot Guy is from the family who is essentially like Mrs. Fields or some shit. So there's this cute moment where her co-worker friend is like - You know, now that we are aware of this, we don't really need his recipe (he won't - and I guess, legally, can't - give it to her), we can just get them from the store. Yeah, co-worker. Yeah. But we can't have pie-baking scenes where she wipes flour off his cheek if they aren't in the same room together.

Oops, left out that part: the killer flavor is this pie he made for her mom mixed in with their vanilla and they call it, fuck my life, Christmas A La Mode.

Compliment: This actress is likely average size IRL (camera adding pounds and all, plus wardrobe didn't do her any favors on her lower half) but I mean in terms of body shape? She's built like a farm girl, she's got actual thighs and rosy, round cheeks, she's not some coathanger in skinny jeans up in there. I am applauding casting department wholeheartedly.... though they whiffed in that she and sis look *nothing* alike. Sis is discount Eva Green, and mom and leading lady are redheads. C'mon casting, just the hair color, that's all we're asking.

Issue: She's a really good actress, I was very pleasantly surprised. But initially there's something slightly juvenile about how she's playing this - "this" being determined to save the farm. She's kinda petulant and refusing to accept reality - and, I mean, maybe they save the farm now but with a disinterested sibling and a mother that's getting older, unless she cranks out some babies (read: farm hands) like, yesterday, I'm not quite sure how this is gonna be sustainable long-term.  (Granted she'll end up with incredibly wealthy pie guy, but I'm saying if she's a business owner, this is something she needs to learn.)

I'll tell ya this, talking about characterization, the gal playing the sister can flip a switch and play the cunt card like a dream, she's a scene-stealer, though my issue here is we have zero background on why she's ice queen about the farm save a mention that when they were little, she was always dying to leave farm life and go to the city. Right, fine, lots of farm kids I am sure feel this way, but why the vitriol? Why not sit down and be kind and explain the financial situation to her mom? Even if little sis is being a brat, why wouldn't she be kind to her mother? I'm fine with her being Bitchy Mc Cuntface, I just wanna know why.

Continuing from above about the pie - it's not just once, he tells her three separate times, and one of them vehemently (and then a follow-up of "You can't tell ANYBODY where these pies came from, say you found the recipe online or whatever") that he ain't telling her the recipe so she can make it herself. Which, I suspect this is gonna come back to bite her in the ass if it's not her original recipe. And it should be - anything they come up with needs to be theirs or else they owe $$$ to whatever the featured product is in a given flavor. So like, early on one of the flavors is Christmas Kiss and she comments that she unwrapped all the Hershey's kisses herself. Well sugarsnap I hope you have some sort of blanket licensing agreement because that ain't cool. You can buy other company's ingredients, of course, but when it's the core of it, the key feature of it, you're in trouble. That's why if a product's "cincher" revolves specifically around another company's product, it'll be noted clearly with a "C" copyright or "TM" or whatever, because that company is - and should be - getting a kick off the profits.

I bring this up because this is an excellent opportunity for a plot point - unless they partner with the pie company or get direct permission (and no, random son saying it's cool matters nothing to a board of directors) then they're out of line. An interesting storyline would be if sister finds out and threatens her that she has to stop or it's gonna mean big legal probs for Sometimes Hot Guy so if she doesn't want that, needs to let sis sell the farm. Then of course Sometimes Hot Guy comes in and says "Hey meet my dad, he owns the company and not only does he give permission but he's investing by way of making up the difference of whatever sum's left over so she can buy you out, Dollar Store Eva Green."  They've not given us any real reason to empathize with our villain of the story so go whole hog, keep her the villain.

All in all, we've ticked a good handful of squares, but we're not in danger zone, miraculously. And even though it ticked the farm box, I have to give compliments that for once one of these stories involving a farm has actual animals shown and the characters interacting with them. The side friend character is also fantastic, I wish I could see her in more stuff, she was great. I know I was nitpicky about the stuff I didn't like (and my resolution is close to the ballpark of what they end up doing.... my tweak is more interesting #humbly), so overall my non-nitpicky complaints are that (a) Sometimes Hot Guy is hit-or-miss with his acting, and (b) the ending scene is fine but they tack on this weird post-end scene that completely takes you out of the moment and is wholly unneeded. But because this was a creative attempt at a unique plot and - above all - our leading lady sells the shit out of it, the score is.....

4/5 stars

Rocky Mountain Christmas (Hallmark, 2017 - Lindy Booth who is great across the board, Kristoffer Polaha who I swear I've seen in something non-Hallmark but I'm not looking it up, and Treat Williams who is and has always been a solid actor)

Let's get the tropey-ness out the way: the bingo boxes this ticks are as follows - family home in danger of being lost; character(s) not really into Christmas for reasons; town festival/celebration; dead parent(s); somebody's famous; somebody owns a ranch; playing in the snow; I stopped counting but I think that’s all.

Lindy is an interior designer and is back home on the horse ranch not only because she had a bad breakup that was really public (a Zuckerberg-esque computer dude who broke up with her for an actress) but it's good because also turns out uncle (who, with his wife, raised her and brother after their parents basically dumped them) has been growing increasingly bummed missing his wife who died recently, and he's gonna sell the ranch. Now this famous dude shows up (I refuse to type "Kristoffer" continuously) and he wants to stay at the ranch and learn the life and horses and whatever for an upcoming movie role, and uncle and brother are actually cool with it even though she's all "Ehhhh..." understandably. But props to them, they do it right, he's put to work and has to stay in the bunk house and the whole nine yards, they ain't just having him follow them and observe or whatever.

She also makes it part of the deal that he's gonna help her finish getting the Christmas parade organized - and by the way, this isn't because she's a Christmas fanatic, it's because her aunt did it every year and she's doing it in her stead. And he is good natured about it, and is happily taking pictures with fans while they're out running errands and afterwards giving them flyers and being like "Here's a couple more, share with friends, you better come!" etc., and basically using his celebrity for good - he also combos it with getting donations at the same time when he gives the streetside bell-ringing Santa a coffee break,  and I genuinely liked this little touch, these are the touches that these canned movies miss that endear us to characters by showing us who they are, not telling us who they are.

The only part that really made me roll my eyes hard in terms of plot is that Lindy's brother (and good casting here, they click really well and are believable as bro and sis) happens to have dreams of being a Hollywood stuntman in the field of horses. Oh and also, their mom was an actress (not Hollywood, I mean working actress). It's just a little too much, we got the point that she's meh on Hollywood types given what she just went through, and the second you hear about brother's deal it's like "Yup, Actor Dude's gonna learn cool shit from him and then he'll get him work on the upcoming movie." I mean, duh. It's overkill. It's fine if it was like - Hey you have taught me so much, have you ever thought about trying to be a stuntman? I'd recommend you, etc. And it was definitely unneeded for the mom part. It's like: we got it. Really. And the songs used (2 if memory serves) are grating, to me, at least but you may disagree.

Otherwise, this is a unique story to my knowledge and the production value is good, and kudos to them for doing a ranch vs. a tree or poinsettia farm, and they actually got horses and had the actors riding/interacting with them - some of these other movies say they're a farm and there's not an animal to be seen and it's fucking weird. So lotsa props in this respect. Also great is that the rando pseudo-girlfriend is actually just a nice person, she's not fake, though I will say this part of the plot is hamfisted and not needed, it just served as a tiny divide between them, that she's shown up wanting to have a real relationship with him (it was a publicity thing, them being together), when the divide of her being gunshy about being with a celebrity was already there, it was fine, the writers didn't need to add anything else. (And also, she seems to care not one flip that he's spending more time with Lindy than herself, and on top of that she is way more into the brother anyway. ???? Ya got me.)

On the whole, this one's really good, it's not a waste of your time, most all the dialogue felt natural and even if shaky it was delivered naturally, everybody's acting is solid across the board, he's not a douche, she's not a bitch, and most importantly your two romantic leads have chemistry, and they got to know each other gradually, and she wasn't all starstruck so if you're into this particular trope and wanna see it done well, then check this one out.

4/5 stars

Matchmaker Santa (Hallmark, 2012 - Lacey Chabert, two basic bitch white dudes, an old man playing Santa who can't act, two really good character actresses who've each been in a lot of stuff, Florence Henderson who I just love seeing in anything, and John Ratzenberger who played Cliff on Cheers and who is a breath of fresh air in this stupidity)

Yup, stupidity. You heard me. This is somehow about the third time I've caught it, so I'm giving in. Boy howdy, does it suck.

Surface area irritation: Everybody's hair is from the 90s. I hated 80s hair but at least it had distinct style; the style of 90s was nobody had any idea what the hell they were doing, particularly when it came to styling and color. Our lead guy's haircut doesn't suit him and is too gelled and sticky-outy in the front (and second lead male, the cut suits him but same with gel and purposeful cowlick look), then Lacey's looks like Helen Keller did the color (at least when she's standing in certain light).

Here's some summary according to googlings because I'm not taking the effort:

As a little girl, Melanie Hogan wished to find her own Prince Charming, just like her parents found true love. Now an adult, Melanie is running her own bakery and dating a handsome CEO, Justin. Although things seem perfect when Justin asks Melanie to spend the holidays together at his beautiful lake house upstate, and meet his mother, Melanie finds herself spending more time with Justin's best friend and loyal assistant, Dean, who just might be harboring a secret crush on her. When complications arise that throw Melanie and Dean together over the holiday, will the two realize they're meant to be?

They get thrown together because best bud went to pick her up from airport, they run into Santa along the way and give him a ride, the car breaks down in a little town that's en route back to the lake so they stay the night. They then have to share a room :::sigh::: And of course as movie goes on, boyfriend is more concerned about anything but her though I will say he's not acting particularly dickish, it's more that he invited her for a romantic evening then planned this party to essentially introduce himself to the board of directors and also to spring introducing her to his (difficult, bitchy) mom all in the same weekend and didn't bother to tell her that the plans had changed. Also in a convoluted turn, his high school girlfriend is the daughter of the head of the board and his mom absolutely loves her, and honestly? She's better suited for him than ol' Lacey is anyway, they click better.

Lacey Chabert, IMO, is not a good actress because she plays the same character in everything she's in (excepting Gretchen Weiners in Mean Girls), and that character is - I have to assume - Lacey Chabert. I mean she's fine in the sense of she isn't a talking stick, there's tone and inflection and actual facial expressions and all that, I'm saying that with the exception of Mean Girls I've never not been like "Yeah that's Lacey Chabert", I've never forgotten it's her. But I mean at least people know what they're gonna get when they hire her. Thing is, I've seen her in several of these movies now and I gotta say, if she's had chemistry with *any* of her male leads, I've yet to notice.

Bottom line: this story is just dumb. It's basic. There's nothing creative or noteworthy about it. Person makes Christmas (or birthday or falling star or New Year's or what-fuck-ever) wish when they were little and now it's coming true, and here comes romance. We've seen this and iterations of this a thousand times. Add in tropes, stir, bake at 350 til gold and bubbly. It is obvious nobody tried - except the Santa man, he tried, but he's ill-cast so oh, well. Flo Henderson and Ratzenberger ain't in it enough to help it skate by on charm. The pacing is bad, too, at an hour in we've only just gotten to the hotel.

Let me give you an example of how stupid this movie is: When boyfriend and old prom date are walking outside to leave to take her car to go pick them up from small town (where, by the way, they are presently dressed as elves and helping Santa I shit you not), glitter-shiny-whoosh-fade-in, it's a grizzly bear by the car growling, because ooooooh Christmas magic. I'm not against "magic" in these movies but can we be a little more subtle? I have no idea how the quality/old school actors got roped into this trash.

Also? If you make it to the end? The final scene is possibly one of the worst, most ridiculous, most implausible (yes, even for this movie) things I've ever witnessed in these movies. It gets a star for the good side character casting. 

1/5 stars

A Crown For Christmas (Hallmark, 2015 - Danica McKellar, other people)

The plot's what you think, re: see title.  He's a king, she's the nanny to precocious princess child. They have negative levels of chemistry, it's that bad.

As discussed last year, something's happened in the time since Wonder Years, and Danica McKellar absolutely positively cannot act. There was one exception (again, see last year) but that's one out of like, a half-dozen of these Christmas movies I've seen - or have *tried* to see - with her in them. 

This movie isn't worth a write-up, it's seriously that bad. The kid does remind me of a young Lindsay Lohan circa Parent Trap, and the guy playing the king is an okay actor. Problem is, the character of the king is a real bitch pussy. I hate this movie, even the sets and costumes look cheap. Ugh. Seriously, don't bother, it is garbage. 

0/5 stars

The Christmas Contract (Lifetime, 2018 - Hilarie Burton, Dannnnnnneeeeeeeeeel Ackles guest starring botox, a dude called Robert Buckley who seems familiar, apparently fourteen other people from an old-ass teen show called One Tree Hill which I never watched, Cheryl Ladd, Bruce Boxleitner, and Jason London who you will not recognize even a little, and you'll see this movie and think I'm wrong, and I'm not wrong, I swear it's Jason London, he's the brother in law, look it up)

I avoided this one last year for Reasons, but upon catching it again, it cannot be denied.

First, the ticked boxes: there's a Christmas festival. Pretend to be my boyfriend. Lots of Christmas activities. Someone is a lawyer. Someone is an author. Character demonstrates a talent.

Basically dude agrees to go with Hilarie back home and act like her boyfriend - they literally sign a literal contract - and while he's at it, he's supposed to be working on a ghostwriting assignment about romance wherein he's given a list of plot points and told that the characters have to tick off every item on the list. But he feels a little lost about how the scenes should play out so he starts sneaksy playing them out with Burton under the guise of "Hey we need to make this look good for everyone".  There's an ex boyfriend who reveals the plan, which, you know, whatever, by this point they're genuinely into each other, but it's when she finds out that he's essentially using her for a book plot, she understandably gets pissed.

I will give 'em this: no one went bugfuck crazy with affecting super thick Creole accents or something. And minus Ackles and some of the randoms (Ackles in particular cannot act in a natural manner to the point it's distracting in any given scene), everybody can act. Burton especially deserves to be in higher caliber stuff. And she and the lead dude have solid chemistry. She has chemistry with everybody, honestly, she's just a good actor, period. Well, at least in this, it's not like I've seen her in tons of stuff. But I recall liking her in White Collar. Okay, I digress.

Irksome is that music is a featured artist so I don't know if this is another friend of theirs from that old show, or something? If so then hey, meta. But his music plays a couple times, then they even have him in person at the festival or whatever it is, and we get to hear him sing "live" and so that all takes up precious minutes we'll never get back. I mean, he can carry a tune and all, it's just that it's basic bitch music. And he actually pimps his album, it's awkward. Now, I will say the score itself though is overall great, really a step up from the usual fare in these movies. They do have a moment where she is supposedly playing fiddle and it looks horrible. I don't care if she can play in real life (I'm not looking it up), the way it was filmed, then, made it look as if she can't, and I don't know why they did this, it was completely unnecessary.

There's some schlock (especially the end), and family's just a hair too far on the shmoop side, but it's not intolerable. Also good is that Ackles' screentime is limited. I can't express enough what a poor actor she is, but again, as I've said about others, this is a prime example: if you dream of becoming an actor, someone has hired this person and therefore you can get hired, too. Here's the thing: it is such a shitty plot, so lazy. This is one of the granddaddies of all the tropes. I mean, the official summary doesn't mince words--- "It’s Jolie’s first time going back home to Louisiana since her devastating break up with Foster . Seeing him is inevitable as their parents run the town’s annual Christmas Market together, but when she discovers Foster is bringing home a new girlfriend, Jolie cannot bear the thought of going home alone and seeing them together." ---so you can't say you didn't know what you were getting into.

But.

And I can't believe I'm saying this.

Minus a slightly stilted kick-off the pace is even, the chemistry of the leads (+ with her family) is there, they elevate some dialogue that in other hands could've been clunky, we've got a unique setting that isn't fucking Vermont and snowing (blessedly this means we have no awkward snowball fights and snowman making and pine tree cutting down and snow angel making and ice skating), they show her making hot chocolate but there's no big gingerbread cookie making scene so that's refreshing, and nobody is like coked-up elves about Christmas, they dig it, they run a fair at this time of year, but no one's foaming at the mouth over it.

I do have to dock it stars because of the music thing and because of the premise of it - we could've gotten to this same place differently, re: these 2 people who don't really like each other needing something that the other can provide without it having to do with the chick being insecure over another guy. On the other hand? Burton doesn't play it insecure, she is not weepy or looking longingly at the ex or what-have-you, she's actually dodging him for the most part. Because of that, I'll give a star back. And if they'd not done the hamfisted music thing with that guy it'd probs be 5. In any event, the ending was pretty damned good and creative.

4/5 stars

Here’s your 4-and-5 stars so far (in no particular order):

Trading Christmas - 5/5 stars Christmas In The Air - 5/5 stars Mingle All The Way - 5/5 stars The Christmas Card - 5/5 stars Fir Crazy - 4/5 stars Small Town Christmas - 4/5 stars Switched For Christmas - 4/5 stars The Christmas Contract - 4/5 stars Rocky Mountain Christmas - 4/5 stars Christmas A La Mode - 4/5 stars

#4

Fir Crazy (Hallmark, 2013 - Eric Johnson and Sarah Lancaster, both of whom I've liked in non-Hallmark stuff and both of whom are good actors, and Colin Mochrie who is typically a delight but is miscast here)

I could've sworn we did this one last year but nope.  Anyway, out of the gate we're kickin' it on the bingo card: somebody isn't into Christmas, family owns a tree farm, family business in danger of being lost, precocious children - but it doesn't tick too terribly many.

So she gets laid off from her big city exec job but it is kind've fortuitous because her parents' prime time for the family business is upon the horizon, because Christmas, and because they have a tree farm upstate (we're in NYC). Since she's got free time, she calls a headhunter and is like "Holla when shit comes up" (a side plot we don't need, as well as smarmy ex-boyfriend, neither were needed, just have her lost job), as she has to run the tree lot in the city this year because for some reason the parents can't, I forget why, so it's basically her and her cousin (who is great) trading off staying nights in the trailer they've got parked next to this sidewalk area that the fam has had an agreement with the city to rent for a bazillionty years now.

Okay, so, the store next to where the sidewalk area is, is some accessories-furniture-type thing (Restoration Hardware-esque, but more expensive, but looks cheaper) and the owner is a real Scrooge. That's Mochrie's role, which is why I say he's miscast, and it's a shame. He should've been allowed to be in a fun role because I think the intent was for his character to be snarky-funny but it's just coming off as obnoxious, so it's not fun (though of course, this is a Hallmark movie, so he un-Scrooges by the end). But as far as good characters - there is this one little girl who is a hoot and the barista had me chuckle once, too.  Then we meet this great couple who bounce off each other well and are just completely wonderful and they come in at about 45 til the end and it's a shame they weren't utilized more. Actually all the side characters are great, from the homeless man who they hire to the manager of the store to the customers.

And your leads click, both in ease of convo and believability that they could be romantic, though only to about the 90% mark - I could see them as best friends more (it's one of the poorer kisses I've seen in romance movies, eeeek), but both are charming and likable and nothing is shmoopy. Seriously, there's no barfy shmoop in this movie, there's sweetness and sincerity. Plus, even though it's tree farm trope, this is creative. It's putting them smack in the middle of NYC instead of everybody being upstate. I say that to say, it's a mix of hometown (a "forest" as it were) and the city (though we're not subjected to the typical ice skating at Central Park and the like) and hey, I'm even gonna give it props for the title being only mildly eye-roll cutesy and ::gasp!!:: not having "Christmas" or "tree" in it.

Guys, this one's solid. The only thing that's not smooth is the store owner being a PITA angle, so it gets a touch grating, like, you know what's coming so you're more than ready for them to get on with it, but that's really the only thing that is a hitch in the pacing, otherwise this one is worth your time.

4/5 stars

The Nine Lives of Christmas (Hallmark, 2014 - Brandon Routh, Kimberley Sustad)

Official Summary: 

Fireman Zachary Stone (Routh) is a confirmed bachelor who doesn’t believe in love or commitment. When a stray tabby cat named Ambrose shows up at his door, Zachary takes him in and slowly starts to see that a little companionship might not be so bad after all. Zachary’s commitment to solitude is further challenged when he meets Marilee (Sustad), an animal lover and veterinary student who teaches Zachary how to care for his new feline roommate.

Nope.

1/5 stars, don't even need to see it, and that 1 star is because Brandon Routh is awesome

Welcome To Christmas (Hallmark, 2018 - Jennifer Finnigan, Eric Mabius - both of whom I recognize from non-Hallmark stuff)

So, Christmas is the name of the town.

We're getting fucked, just right out of the gate. ::sigh::

Squares ticked: town in danger of being lost, dead parent, children, somebody's not into Christmas (the holiday, not the town), celebration/festival in town. shmoopy activities, main characters sing carols, etc.

All right, she's a real estate something-or-other who's there to scope out the joint for development purposes. They tell the town everything will be the same, just that they'll have a ski resort and it will bolster income. However, towards the end, she discovers the firm does want to modernize the town, and blah blah blah you know where this is going.

I thought of, right off the top of my head, three other movies with this plot, one of which we just covered in the last entry.

He is the handsome sheriff with the dead wife and two adorable daughters who, of course, immediately take to her. I mean, this is just basic bitch shit, there is nothing original whatsoever about any of this. The leads have chemistry and both are good actors. Matter of fact I really like Mabius, he is talented and haaaaaandsome, I wish he were the lead in all these.

It's the standard fare, you may like it, but otherwise it's fine background noise. Other than an intolerable song at about the 20 'til mark. * cringe *

3/5 stars

Switched For Christmas (Hallmark, 2017 - Candace Cameron Bure x 2, Eion Bailey and Mark Deklin, both of whom you'll recognize)

Mentioned this last year but for whatever reason didn't go over it. Again, and I'll keep saying it - no matter how shitty the script, Candace elevates everything she's in, but in this case the script ain't shitty, it's actually a solid premise, however fantastical. Chris and Kate (both Candace, of course) are identical twins and they decide to switch places for Christmas. Several people are in on the secret - Chris has 2 older (teen/pre-teen) kids and they are pretending to be her niece and nephew around the dude who becomes her romantic interest because... reasons? I'm not certain. But their dad also knows the scoop, which I actually liked because there ain't no way any of those 3 would've been fooled so it was - shockingly for Hallmark movie - sensible.

Here's Hallmark's summary that tells more about why they did it:

"Just because they are identical does not mean these twins even like each other. Estranged twin sisters get together for an obligatory pre-Christmas lunch, a year after their mother's death. Both women are unhappy and frustrated with their own lives. Though not close, each is envious of the other's life. What's a twin to do but take advantage of this? And who would be the wiser? They do what any identical twins in need of new outlooks would do: they swap lives until Christmas Day, and by doing so, each woman discovers the true meaning of her life and gains a deeper perspective and appreciation for what she already had."

They each fall for somebody, and the dudes in turn fall for them, but the issue is that the twins think they've fallen for the personality/the life/etc. of the opposite twin so they each kinda feel like they aren't the one the dude is interested in, that they're into the other sister.  These guys should be pissed but they aren't, not really. I'll let you guess the end.

Your three leads are awesome, all can act, and - as said - especially Candace, and this had to be exhausting to pull off. Not only is each scene probably done at least couple times to get a handful of takes, she has to double-back and do it more times because of the opposite twin role. The amount of lines she had to memorize is astounding, not to mention developing two different characters with different (although not drastically) personalities. She nailed it.

Bottom line: this movie could've gone trash in a hot minute, but it didn't, because they did some stellar casting (Candace's daughter Natasha actually plays her daughter) and everyone can actually act. The premise is unrealistic and likely unsustainable for longer than a couple days in real life (the mention of them being "estranged" is particularly odd to me because there's definitely no way they'd be able to pull this off without being close so that they knew a lot about each other's lives), but what saved it was, like I say, the sensibility of having some key players in the know who supported them. This also, surprisingly, didn't tick a ton of bingo boxes, and I didn't find it a waste of my time. It's a fun flick, I'm only dinging it for the making estranged thing and the dudes not being more upset for being lied to than they were because in whack-a-doo stories, you gotta write everything else as real as possible so that the audience is more accepting of the whack-a-doo, and they slipped a touch there.

4/5 stars

I have two stupid ones for you to avoid that are just over-acted and either totally ridiculous + poorly acted (the first one) and totally typical + poorly acted (the second one). Let's just make this quick for all our sakes:

Magic Stocking (Hallmark, 2015 - nobody you'll know... well maybe this dude called Victor Webster, he's actually decent, hate he got stuck in this dreck) Official summary:

"Lindsey, a single mom with an adorable daughter, is closed off to life after losing her husband a few years back. When she buys a stocking at her town’s Christmas craft fair, the family begins “magically” finding items in the stocking that they learn have importance in their lives."

It's schlock and just plain insulting to your intelligence, and I didn't give a shit if they got together or not, something about the leading lady worked my nerves. I didn't need her to believe in the "magic", I just needed her to be able to investigate it without being so dialed up to 11 about it, she looked like she was close to exploding in the majority of it.

And....

Christmas At Pemberley Manor (Hallmark, 2018 - that chick Jessica Lowndes from that movie we covered in prior entries who can't act, and Michael Rady who you may recognize, too)

I mean, she can't act, so it's irritating the whole way through the basic bitch plot. Also? Check what they did with the names, which is absolutely positively insulting, and Austen has triple Salchow'd in her grave. Official summary:

"As Christmas approaches, Elizabeth Bennett, a New York event planner, is sent to a quaint, small town to organize their holiday festival. When she arrives, she finds William Darcy, a high-profile billionaire lacking in holiday spirit, in the process of selling the charming estate she hoped to use as a venue. Determined to make her event a success, Elizabeth persuades the reluctant Darcy to let her hold the festival on the historical estate once known for its holiday cheer. When they wind up working together to arrange the festivities, the unlikely pair begins falling for each other. But when complications arise and the festival is unexpectedly shut down, the couple parts ways and Darcy moves forward with his plans to sell the estate. On the night before Christmas, a wistful Elizabeth hopes for a Christmas miracle to revive the festival, save the estate and rekindle her holiday romance."  

For both of them: 1/5 stars

Here's your 4-and-5 stars so far (in no particular order):

Trading Christmas - 5/5 stars Christmas In The Air - 5/5 stars Mingle All The Way - 5/5 stars The Christmas Card - 5/5 stars Fir Crazy - 4/5 stars Small Town Christmas - 4/5 stars Switched For Christmas - 4/5 stars

#3

Picture A Perfect Christmas (Hallmark, 2019 - Merritt Patterson who is familiar to me from other of these movies, and a dude who I've never seen before in my life)

We kick off the movie with single dad who has custody of his nephew, and they're talking about how they have to pick out a new nanny for him for the two weeks kid is off school for the holidays and Uncle Daddy has big shit going on at his office. Then we cut to her, and she's having dinner with her boyfriend, who she is completely uninterested in even though right now he seems like a pretty decent dude. We cut to see that kid's babysitter is an elderly woman (their neighbor) who is really nice and mentions her granddaughter... or niece, I can't remember even though I just heard it... and guess who she is, and she's coming to visit?

This is what kills me about Hallmark movies: They front load you with so much information that you're like "Baaaahhh!", and then they drag out the movie, and then it abruptly ends. 

Okay, it's her grandma. And she's on a Christmas pageant planning committee. (Box ticked) Kid's an orphan, so dead parents. (Box ticked) And of course, kid himself, who is precocious and will likely bring everyone together. (Box ticked) I have to take a shower, I bet money I can be away from this movie for 15-20 minutes and not miss a damn thing. Let's find out, for science.

[time passes]

Yeah, I've missed nothing. Here's what's kind've odd - it's like she's falling for the kid and not him. They have zero chemistry, and it's like she's wanting more to be the kid's mom than wanting to be this dude's wife. Also, his haircut is really distracting, it is some kinds of awful.

Okay, well, this is just cookie-cutter. There's nothing remarkable or original or super-egregious about it. So if you just want something to pass time, here you go.

3/5 stars

Mingle All The Way (Hallmark, 2018 - chick named Jen Lilley who should be in more shit, and dude named Brant Daugherty who is discount John Krazinski but still great)

I checked, and we talked about this one last year so I'll re-post the scoop below, but anyway it came on and I re-watched it while I was ironing, and it holds up, it's just solid from top to bottom. I rated it 4/5 last year, but it's getting top score this year upon reconsideration, because there's so few flaws. It's creative, the script has sharpness to it, and acting's good across the board, and most importantly our 2 leads click. Here's what I wrote last year:

Inventive concept here, though they kinda shit the bed with naming their business something affiliated with Christmas if it’s clearly a year-round affair, but okay. What it is: a dating app that’s not a dating app, it’s purely for folks who need a +1 to specifically business/work social events, but also more formal family and friend events (so, say, Christmas party where it’s not just family, or friend party that’s not just show up in your jeans and sweaters - the cocktail stuff, is my point). The thing is, no one is pretending to be the boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s supposed to be like “And this is Susie/Steve, an associate of mine from ____ business”. Nothing romantic, no false pretenses, no lying to others (well… not supposed to wink-wink).

The chick - who runs the biz/came up with it/helped develop it - is needing to take on investors, and one of them is like “Sold! But can I get some firsthand testimonial? Have you yourself tested your product?” and since she’s got shit coming up on her agenda, she does. Plus, her mom’s on her ass about working so much and not dating since a bad breakup years ago, and it’s compounded because baby sister just got engaged. (Mom is bionic woman Lindsay Wagner. She’s not really bionic. Google it, youths.)

Dude is in a situation where he’s not advancing at work because scuzzy kiss ass co-worker is shmoozing with boss during off hours because boss doesn’t invite the single people to brunch or whatever with him and his wife, he’s only inviting the ones who he knows has a partner to bring. I know to some of you this may sound absolutely ridiculous but, um, I’ve experienced this many times. This is not out of the realm. Not even a little bit. I had a gay boss who understood how this happens (likely because he experienced it) and he was wonderful about including everybody. Otherwise, yeah, I been there. I’ve digressed.

The leads have good chemistry, there was great snark and back-and-forth when they met each other a couple times prior to the set-up (‘cause you guessed it: the app paired them with a high %age of compatibility - his sister suggested he do it after he heard about it on the news and he told her of his situation) and they click really well. There’s touches of shmoop, of course, but this was an above-average story amongst the typical Christmas dreck.

5/5 stars

Last Vermont Christmas (Hallmark, 2018 - Erin Cahill, Justin Bruening - both of whom I recognize)

Hey guess what, this may be their last Vermont Christmas. ::sigh:: Main chick and her 2 sisters and her daughter (single mom, dead husband, box checked, as well as adorable child, check) have converged on the family home in Vermont to find that mom and dad are selling, and I get it, it's huge and they're ready to scale down because they're retired. But, selfishly, one of the sisters - oh, and PS? they look *nothing* alike, casting couldn't even be bothered to get women with the same hair color - decides to sabotage things. So like, when the inspector comes, she and her sorta boyfriend follow him around and make little comments about stuff like termites, then they made sure the fuse box had all kinds of fat wires with caps protruding out of it - you know, like what you'll find if you're changing a light fixture, which is not how fuse boxes work - and I think there was something with some steps.

Anyway none of this matters. What matters is that lead dude is a contractor and is also lead chick's ex from way-back-when, before she met man of dreams and had daughter and moved away to some far off state, I wasn't paying attention. But they get along great and are occasionally a little cheeky with each other, so that's fine. So now he's around doing these faux repairs and they're kind and looping him into their Christmas stuff, which they are disgustingly picture perfect. They cut down their own tree. They go caroling. They bake cookies. They hand-make their ornaments every damn year. I hate them. Well, the writers. It's too much. That was all in roughly the first 45 minutes, too. I'm sure some families out there take it to the mat with Christmas, but holy shit. Okay, add gingerbread houses from scratch (they made sure to show the baking pan with more squares so you know this) to the list. 

This is blowing up the bingo like 'Nam. There's now a snowball fight. Family tree decorating scene with, of course, these special handmade ornaments plus ornaments from years past where they're recalling special times. Ohmigawd, I need to fill out a card for this one, it's insane, I almost can't keep up. Oop, "Grandma's special hot chocolate". Character demonstrates talent (one of the sisters, singing). I legit am not lying, these are coming so fast I'm having trouble keeping up.

He's also somehow in cahoots with the realtor, because he had committed to buying the house, but he says it doesn't feel right now that he's back to getting chubs from his ex, and she's like "Well if you don't then we're still gonna settle up" and I have no idea what that means, does that mean she expects him to pay her the commission she'd have gotten? Is this normal practice? Realtors must have stuff fall through all the time, they'll end up selling and get a commission and who knows, maybe at a better price, so.... ????? The hell? 

Speaking of him, two things: one, his name is Nash (heh) and two, I went to imdb to check the summary to see if I forgot/missed anything and the reviews are hilarious, a ton of them mention how distracting his hair is - he just has lots of it, seems really thick, and it's shaved tight on the sides, so he's got a decent amount atop his dome, but it's only really noticeable when it's slicked straight back. But people were losing their shit over it. I don't find it that distracting, but you may, I find youngest sister's perpetually greasy 1970s hair (not her fault, that's hair and make-up's fault) more irritating.

Okay, so, there's no way this can get a 3, there's too much bingo hits. But aside from that, the acting - especially from youngest sister, who overacts - is very stilted and unnatural, and on occasion the editor left in these pauses in dialogue that are just a touch too long, so I think that's part of the issue. I don't mind the story at all, it's not something we see all the time and thank the lord it's not "family business in danger" - though oh shit, I forgot, this counts as "family home in danger", so there's another square. This is trope-a-palooza. Wait, snowman building. Town has celebration. Okay, I'm done listing, I think we all know where this has to go.

1/5 stars

Reunited At Christmas (Hallmark, 2018 - Nikki Deloach, who you'll recognize, and other character actors you'll recognize)

So lead chick's mom and dad are making everything weird with all these passive-aggressive comments about the past via mom and shmoopy comments about the past via dad. (They're divorced so I can't figure why they're all shacked up in this house for Christmas with their adult children and their partners.) Lead chick also agreed to her boyfriend's proposal - and he seems like a great guy - even though she's not ready, which is mature. At least within about 10 mins. of it happening she ponies up that she's not into being engaged, and he's a good actor, and it really is kinda sad, I feel for him. So he's all - Imma finish chopping this wood then head back to spend Christmas with my family and we'll regroup after the holidays, and she's all "For real?!" and I'm all "Are you surprised?!"

Y'all this one bored me, I didn't make it past roughly the first 45 minutes, I just didn't care if they got back together and I presume based on the title that they do. Nobody's acting was egregious or anything, it was just slogging and I wasn't engaged because this plot isn't creative at all - I mean, here's the official summary:

Frazzled and struggling with writer's block, novelist Samantha (Deloach), along with her boyfriend, heads home to her late grandmother's home to spend Christmas. While at home with family, her grandmother's wise words reveal the true meaning of Christmas with Samantha at a time when she most needs encouragement.

But again, based on the first part, that doesn't seem to be the plot - I mean seriously, we go through all this family activities stuff, and her and the boyfriend having several different conversations about the not wanting to be engaged thing (one at skating rink, one whilst he's chopping wood, one while back at the house), so there's literally no real mention of grandma by that point, and we're almost at an hour what with commercial breaks and such. So that's it. That's all they've accomplished in basically the first half of the movie. And they managed to hit a bunch of squares (someone's an author, someone gets engaged, skating, tree decorating, baking, etc.) and I'm sure there was more to come. It's the pacing that kills this one, as well as the basic bitch plot, but hey it'll serve as background noise.

2/5 stars  

Small Town Christmas (Hallmark 2018 - Ashley Newbrough who is poor man's Denise Richards, Ryan McDonell who you'll recognize and is a really good actor)

She's an author (check box) on a national book tour and her last stop is the town she's from, upon which the book is based, and her name is Nelle and you'll remember this because for some reason every time someone speaks to her they have to say her name. Okay, maybe not *every* time but it caught my ear, even when I was distracted doing something else or had stepped into another room, they just say her name *constantly* and I don't get it.  The bookstore owner is an almost-was from the past, and there was some mix-up back when they both lived in New York about her leaving him a note and saying to meet her for some reason but he didn't show because turned out he had to leave because his sister had unexpectedly died, but then also he'd written her a letter explaining that she never got but he assumed she got and never contacted him. But then she had texted him a few times over the years and he'd never responded. Because everyone is twelve. I'm not tracking with this completely, though I do get the feeling of just wanting to let something go and let it be in the past. 

Anyway, more drama is that his sister had died so he - name is Emmett - has custody of niece, who is a great little actress and not one bit irritating, she's very cool. Also, her dynamic with uncle is great and like I say, he's a fantastic actor. Poor man's Denise Richards is fine, too, I've got no complaints, honestly. Also pleasant are the peripheral characters of the townspeople. Seriously, across the board, nobody is annoying or eye-rolly, everyone's acting is natural. All right, so close-knit town and some drama is that Brad, this real estate agent who's repping a big dawg firm wants to essentially buy up the town, at least the entirety of the main street/the shops to redevelop, and the part that's cool is that they all talk about it reasonably - some of them being hold outs, some of them really considering it - like adults, nobody's fighting or being douchebags. Then it gets to where the last hold-out is Emmett and he's thinking of Marnie, the kid, because this was her mom's store and so it's technically hers though he has power of attorney. 

Also happening is that Brad is trying to sell the investors on the fact that this town is Ideal Christmas Place, that it's super traditional and the townsfolk do it up right and whatnot, and they are thus far not impressed by what they are seeing. ???? I don't get it, if they want to redevelop then aren't they more concerned about the land/the property value? I'm missing something. Emmett finally agrees and Nelle fusses at him and because Brad's been into her, he's shared what the plan really is with her, and she swipes his notebook and shows Emmett "Look this is some shitass mall or something, you dun goofed". And Brad whiffed because the promise was that the stores would be left alone and they'd all still work there/be the management, it'd just be owned by the corporation and - oh I get it now, they want it to be a big tourist town like thing during the winter holiday seasons. Okay, gotcha. Anyway, I'll let you guess how everything turns out in the end.

I actually liked this one, it could've gone majorly shmoop and tropey fast - I mean, it popped on more than a few bingo squares (bookstore owner, dead parents, author, Christmas tree decorating, town festival/celebration, family business is in danger of being lost, child character) but again, the whole vibe of this movie is casual and natural and it flows and the pacing is on point. The reason for their initial fall-out is a bit "Huh?" but I appreciate that it wasn't something complicated, it was more to real life which is that it is more often than not that it's silly little misunderstandings that drive us apart and if we'd just friggin' speak the hell up, we'd realize it's not a big deal. The two leads really clicked and that was so nice to see since the majority of these movies they don't. Guys, this is one worth watching, I'm only dinging it because too many squares were hit.

4/5 stars

The Christmas Card (Hallmark, 2006 - Ed Asner, Alice Evans, John Newton)

Ed Asner is a gift, and I won't hear otherwise. You'll also recognize the two leads, I've seen them in other stuff. And no, that date's not wrong, this is an oldie and by my estimation these Hallmark movies get more solid on the whole the further back you go, it's like they gave a fuck about nuance in the script vs. recycling plots for the most part so they can crank these babies out like rabbits in perpetual heat. I suspect that's the reason for the 2 star rating you'll see when you hit "info" on the remote. But fuck that, because here's a factoid - other than that I'm about to give this one a 5 (spoiler), Ed Asner was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for it, so I assure you, it's better than that 2 star will indicate.

So here's the first part of the plot from Wikipedia:

In the midst of war in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Master Sergeant Cody Cullen (John Newton) is given a Christmas card from a fellow soldier who had received it from his hometown, Nevada City, California. The card was sent by Faith Spelman (Alice Evans). As months pass, the card never leaves his side. Cody, who has no family, and whose father was killed during the Vietnam War, is deeply affected when the soldier who gave him the card is killed. A few weeks before Christmas, Cody travels to see the soldier's widow, back in Nevada City. Just as he is about to leave town, Cody runs into Faith at a local luncheonette, where they happened to have placed identical orders. They part, but on his way out of town, Cody saves Faith's father, Luke (Ed Asner), from being hit by a speeding car. Luke takes a liking to Cody and convinces him to stay on as temporary help at his family's logging company. Paul (Ben Weber), Faith's longtime boyfriend who travels much of the time, and who selfishly wants Faith to move away from her close-knit family in Nevada City, arrives to meet her.

Everyone nails it. You believe that a part of Faith genuinely cares about the asscrack who's been stringing her along, and that actor nails the whole dickbag routine without being so obnoxious it makes you want to drop-kick the TV. Cody is quietly charming and sells you on the fact that yes, he loves her, and so much that he's not willing to potentially ruin her life, even if it's a life without him. Ed Asner is perfection in his role as the loving and slightly meddlesome dad. The mom is great. The friend is great. All the side characters are great. There is not a bit of cheese in this movie, nothing is tropey, nothing is schlocky, it's just heartwarming. And there are *zero* of the typical cliche elements that arise in these movies featuring troops/veterans. It was so goddamned refreshing as compared to 95% of what Hallmark cranks out now, I genuinely can't believe this is from the same braintrust. 

If it comes on, do yourself a favor and watch it. 

5/5 stars 

Here’s your 4 and 5 stars thus far:

Trading Christmas - 5/5 stars Christmas In The Air - 5/5 stars Mingle All The Way - 5/5 stars The Christmas Card - 5/5 stars Small Town Christmas - 4/5 stars

#2

Christmas Made To Order (Hallmark, 2018 - THE DUDE WHO PLAYED AARON SAMUELS IN "MEAN GIRLS"!!!! and a chick who can't act even a little bit)

I cannot emphasize how bad an actress the leading lady is, it is painfully bad. It's not as intolerable as Kellie Pickler, but she's a close damn second. That's how bad it is. I looked her up to see who the fuck would've ever hired her, her name is Alexa Pena Vega, which I tell you so you can immediately change the channel if you see her name in the credits. The only thing from fairly recent past that's of note is that she appeared in 7 episodes of the TV show "Nashville", 90% of what she's done I've never heard of but she's had steady work since she was a kid, and I tell you this because you, too, can be an actor if this person can. 

This movie's plot is bland, the script is stilted, the tone is shmoopy, the pacing is draggy, and it hits way too many bingo squares. Everything about it is irritating. The part that irritated me most was where they're singing "Angels We Have Heard On High" and when getting to "in excelsis deo" they pronounce it "egg-shell-sees", which is wrong, it's more like "eck-chel-sees", hitting that "ch" and last "s" light. I've sang in choirs in Carnegie Hall not once, but twice, you can trust me. There, now you know. 

I feel sorry for Aaron Samuels (Jonathan. His name is Jonathan Bennett. I'm sorry also that everyone, including me, probably calls him Aaron Samuels). He ain't that great in this, and I feel like it's because of the material/people he had to work with. The peripheral family members are overall kind've stiff or something, too. So maybe this is also a director issue? But ol' Alexa, man, she is of the suck, high school kids do better than this. I'm not bothering to give you the summary... I mean, it's basically the title, she's a Christmas party coordinator who's hired by him. I will say I'm happy it reminded me I need to pull a recipe for crockpot mulled cider, so there's that. I'll give it a star for that. We'll file this under background noise, because if you pay attention to it, she's gonna work your nerves then squeeze the last. 

1/5 stars 

Holiday For Heroes (Hallmark, 2019 - Marc Blucas, Melissa Claire Egan)

This one ain't too terribly bad. It's the second military-at-Christmas movie that Blucas has been in for Hallmark (that I've seen) and I have to confess, I was subconsciously comparing that one to this one because that one was pretty damn good (see last year's list, linked above). But Blucas is a really solid actor, everything I've ever seen him in, it comes off naturally. Having said that, I feel like he's been some sort of military something-or-other in most everything I've seen him in (*waves to fellow Buffy fans*), so it could just be he's nailing this shtick. 

She's a little too Mary Poppins - you know, practically perfect in every way - except without the sass, so it's saccharine but I don't blame her, she seems a decent actress who's playing the cards she's been dealt. One of those cards is that her phone ring is a Christmas carol. ::sigh:: I actually laughed out loud at the skating part because any full shot to where you could potentially see her face coupled with a body that had feet wearing skates was either super-far away like they were filming from Mars or, I shit you not, her face was obscured by a hockey net. Girl, it's cool if you got weak ankles or were traumatized by a zamboni or something. But like, don't take the role, ask for a summer movie. 

Okay, here's the problem - this movie is pretty boring. I looked at the clock probably every thirty minutes because I kept thinking "This has to be getting close to the end, right?" These two don't have any romantic chemistry, but they click, it's just I could picture them playing more brother and sister. But the story is blah, I simply didn't care about her getting her party to happen and yeah, it's not for personal, self-serving reasons, it's for a good cause (kids! soldiers!), but I just couldn't find myself caring if she pulled it off or not.  And then he's struggling between choosing a teaching job  or re-enlisting, but he didn't seem particularly stressed, so I wasn't stressed, and you know what *would* have been interesting? How the whole thing started out: somehow (and I can't recall how - maybe through her brother? because he's in the same unit?) they were paired up writing letters while he was deployed and so they knew all this cool stuff about each other, not terribly intimate but definitely personal tidbits, and I could've gotten into a movie that kept them writing letters for a little longer - there was actually a brief thing about his last letter that was lost, and that definitely could've been something interesting, when it finally turned up, that he'd written something very personal/important that he opted not to tell once he met her in person, but that potential firework turned out to be a dud. 

Instead he's back and they meet in person in essentially the first 20 minutes, maybe the first 10 - it was fast, is my point. I think maybe if they had them meeting a little later, we could've gotten to know them better and then we'd be rooting for them in both their individual issues and be rooting for them to get together. Or not, fuck, I don't know. All I know is that the title is deceptive because there were no "miracles", not in a magical or spiritual sense, and also because nothing exciting or unexpected happened, everything unfolds precisely how you expect it will. No really. What you guess early on is exactly what happens. Eh. It didn't hit enough squares to launch it down to 1 or 2 stars, it's not a complete waste of your time, but man is it dancing on the line. 

3/5 stars

Merry And Bright (Hallmark, 2019 - Jodie Sweetin and her new teeth, Andrew Walker who's that guy in lots of these movies upon whose cheekbones one could cut diamonds)

She owns a candy cane company. That's it. That's all they do, candy canes at Christmas. The red and white standard kind. They have business at one time per year and are super successful, mega rich judging by the offices and the houses in which they live. 

Suspension of disbelief, check.

Classic "family business is in danger" story, bonus dead grandmother which is the catalyst for her taking over the company. Side storyline of her mom fostering a dog that's going to end up being her Christmas present. There is no reason for this side storyline, but doggie is cute as all-get-out, so we'll give it a pass. Of course there's a baking scene. Somebody who's not into Christmas gets converted. It hits multiple boxes. 

So, Cheekbones is a consultant sent to advise Jodie on where to cut costs and consolidate, and I hope he tells her first and foremost that one cannot sustain a business for, broadly, two months out of the year, not unless they are the monopoly on candy canes. Which, they aren't. So my first thought is "make flavored canes" and "make sprinkles of said flavored canes" and "make frosting and cake mixes based on said flavors" and liqueur and patent a certain stripe pattern for the canes, then sell wrapping paper in these patterns. You know, shit that sells all year. I majored in business and minored in marketing in undergrad, I can't control when it kicks in.

They find each other difficult, which means of course they'll fall in love. Let's just jump to the end: they diversify with different flavors and they fall in love. PS: no chemistry PPS: her last name is Merriweather and the town's name is Brightwell. Get it? Merry and Bright? Yeah, they didn't just mean the song.  ::sighs::  This is just Typical with a capital "T". I was bored, but it's well-made production value-wise and is fine for background while you're cleaning or something. 

3/5 stars

A Christmas For The Books (Hallmark, 2018 - people you've neither heard of nor will recognize... unless they've been in other Hallmarks, which I'm sure they have)

This one drags so, so badly. It hits too many boxes. There's a Christmas gala. Pretending to be someone's boyfriend. Somebody's famous. Somebody's an author. Did I mention it drags? It draaaaaaags. And I am 99% certain the plot is identical to another one of these movies I've seen (perhaps on a different channel, though). The deal is that she's a romance "expert" but her own relationship just fell apart so she asks her show's producer to pretend to be her boyfriend for the benefit of the higher-ups who are giving her said show, which he does but then his on-again-off-again girlfriend shows up. She's pissed, naturally, and our lead gal lies to her and says "No I'm counseling him so he'll be a better boyfriend to you" and she's an idiot and falls for it, and they end up being best buds. ??? Okay. But here's the thing: she still ends up with dude at the end. And they have zeeeeeero chemistry. Just skip this one. Draaaaaaag. The acting is flat across the board, excepting aforementioned girlfriend who is over-the-top. 

Swear I've seen this exact plot, though. I can see one of the early scenes clear as a bell in my mind. Beautiful brunette lady, they're all outside by a gazebo or some such, she's about to go live or tape in front of audience for her show, and fiance breaks up with her, and I want to say that the guy she pretends with is either a long-time friend, or that they dated in the past. Possibly both. I'm googling this. 

* time passes *

Holy shit, it's another Hallmark movie. It's called "The Convenient Groom" from 2016, summary: "Dr. Kate Lawrence, a celebrity relationship expert, plans to publicly announce her engagement to Bryan, a handsome and perfectly polished businessman. As Kate prepares to share the news, Bryan shocks her by breaking up with her and calling off the wedding. Wanting to save her from humiliation and protect her public image, Lucas Wright, Kate’s childhood friend, steps in and pretends to be Kate’s fiancé. Stars Vanessa Marcil and David Sutcliffe." It also looks like this one was based on a book. 

Ugh. We don't do plagiarism. 

0/5 stars

Christmas In The Air (Hallmark, 2017 - Catherine Bell, Eric Close)

I don't think we did this one last year, but even if so, worth mentioning again. If you don't know him by name, you'll recognize Close, he's a good actor, and Catherine Bell is just solid across the board in everything I've seen her in. So he's a single dad who owns a toy company with his brother and of course they're slammed at this time of year and on top of that they've got a new toy (a drone-type thing) that they're trying to sell an investor on so they're busting ass trying to perfect that, too (on top of, investor and wife are coming to town to see it and somehow they get roped into having them over for dinner). Plus the kids are of an age (looks like maybe 4th grade boy and 6th grade girl?) that they're really getting into activities they've chosen for themselves now so that's on top of the usual parent stuff and we all know it's a lot for single parents at that age, it's almost like they're back to the amount of work of toddlers, they're just back to going in all directions again and starting to get more independent and need more attentiveness. I am pleased to report the kids are not brats nor are they sugar sweet, they're just normal kiddos. Now, she's a professional organizer and they meet by chance at Target or wherever and I forget the circumstances but it is evident to her that he needs some organizing and she gives him her card. I bring this up because it is not a "meet cute", it's just somebody who's astute at networking and she's polite and so's he and it's a normal interaction. 

That's the thing I like about this movie - everything unfolds in a natural manner, nothing is far-fetched. Their jobs make sense, such as - see above - they aren't limited to the Christmas season, even though people do/may need more of their services at this time of year. Close and Bell click and they're both attractive in their own ways and it's believable they grow to fall for each other. Nobody's cutesy and precious and obsessed with Christmas and hyperactive, they're adults going about their daily lives who end up realizing they kind of need each other. And on that note, they don't portray her as this lonely 40-something single woman, it's just evident that she's maybe getting dissatisfied with her routine and maybe actually needs a some messiness in her life because sometimes a little messy can be interesting, if she lets loose to a degree when it comes to all her self-imposed rules that help her keep control on her life. The only thing that was eye-roll worthy was the cookie-making montage scene and the cheesy music that backed it, but! It was incredibly short.

She also has this adorbs little greenhouse out back of her house of which I'm jealous. Not that I can grow plants particularly well. But I'm good at keeping those suckers alive. I want an herb garden when I grow up. [checks watch] Shit, I'm a grown-up. Anyway, this is a well-made, well-written, well-casted (in addition to the leads, the brothers actually resemble each other and the kids click, too), well-paced movie with well-developed characters and my final verdict is that it is most certainly not a waste of your time.

5/5 stars 

Here's your 4 and 5 stars thus far:

Trading Christmas - 5/5 stars Christmas In The Air - 5/5 stars

#1

Once Upon A Holiday (Hallmark, 2015 - some chick, a guy called Paul Campbell who's vaguely familiar)

Princess of tiny country wants some Christmastime to herself without all the royal obligations, she of course has dead parents because somebody has to. But listen, the 2 leads can actually act, nobody's shmoopy, nobody overreacts when the truth comes out, the ending is simple, it's basically very... well, basic. It's calm. It's sweet. It's not *not* worth watching, though I'd classify it as simply nice, non-irritating background fare. You're not going to go ga-ga and love it, but you're not going to loathe it, either. 

3/5 stars

A Shoe Addict's Christmas (Hallmark, 2018 - Candace Cameron, the lady who played Charlene on Designing Women)

Candace Cameron is a solid actor and she elevates everything she's in. However. This one is just stupid. It's convoluted in its premise, which is this: when this chick puts on a pair of shoes, it takes her to a certain point in her life where pivotal decisions were made (whether or not she knew at the time), and is giving her an opportunity to play Choose Your Own Adventure and see what could've happened if she'd chosen differently. We don't need the shoes for this story to happen, is my point, because just have her hold an object or have a magical person take her there a la ghosts of Christmas past. Which, well, okay - here we go.

It's also *very* convoluted in how the magic happens and how the love interest comes into it, and is as follows: she works in a department store and gets locked in there randomly one night, and meets her fairy godmother-esque guardian angel who is klutzy and quirky and initiates this whole flashbacking in time with shoes jazz, and in addition Ditzy Angel Fairy is always there kind've interfering and being bumbling while Candace and love interest are working together planning some charity thing involving his firehouse (yeah, he's a fireman, there’s additional backstory for him about following in his dad’s footsteps and something-something-something), and the department store, which somehow necessitates awkward moments in stock rooms and whilst cookie baking, oh and by the way he's also her new next door neighbor. 

Did you follow all that? Congratulations, and pass the liquor. Holy shit. Again, Candace elevates this dreck, as does - oh damn, now I remember her name, it's Jean Smart! - so a star for that, and it doesn't tick like a thousand boxes on the Bingo, but those things don't rescue the bizarre nature of this one. It's all over the place. And so it loses its charm. The shoes are a stupid shtick to try to make this be *not* the same story that we've all seen and heard a million times. And then they piled on all that other extraneous stuff to distract us from that? I guess? Question mark? You may enjoy it because it's chipper and moves at a quick clip, but... yeah, it just didn't do it for me. This type of thing has been done elsewhere, and done better. You make the call.

2/5 stars

Jingle Around The Clock (Hallmark, 2018 - Brooke Nevin, other people)

Career chick gets overwhelmed trying to balance work and the holidays, then she and the dude who's one of many in a pool of potential candidates for a job she wants end up falling for each other. Nevin's a decent actress, and she and the other lead have decent chemistry, and the plot is... you know, it's... well, decent. The only thing that really irked me is that - as in a lot of these movies - there's a stupid misunderstanding that could easily be remedied by one person holding up their hands, interrupting the person who's doing the misunderstanding, and saying "Whoa, hold on. I know what you heard/saw, but here's what actually happened." 

And in this movie's case it was reeeeeally a stretch - like, in other movies, sometimes they'll have one person get pulled away or some other thing where the misunderstood person kinda doesn't have a chance to explain, but this time it's a convo where they're both standing there for minutes upon minutes. Fucking SAY SOMETHING. Anyway. Whatevs. Some of the acting from the peripheral characters is clunky, and pacing is a little off, but overall not intolerable. And it doesn't check a metric shitton of bingo boxes. So, it's cute, not a complete waste of your time.

3/5 stars

Trading Christmas (Hallmark, 2011 - Faith Ford, Tom Cavanagh, Gil Bellows)

Outstanding production value, above-average script, and the 4 shared leads can all act. It's one of those happenstance stories, where - as in real life - no one would've been expecting to meet someone they click with when they're doing what they're doing, and what they're doing isn't some fantastical thing, they’re just trying something new (traveling/staying somewhere else for the holidays).

Everybody behaves like the grown-ups they are, there's no drama, and a tiny spat that occurs between two of them is cute, not grating. Speaking of, particular kudos to best friend character who pulls off the nosy-sassy vibe without being irritating. Even the occasional pop-over scenes to the daughter and her boyfriend at college are fine, they also can act, and they're sweet together, no shmoop, just average folks you'd have been friends with in college, and boyfriend is supportive of daughter when she has a change of heart about them doing their own traveling for Christmas. 

Everything was balanced, no one interlude at a given location lasted too long before getting back to the parallel stories going on elsewhere, and since the scenes with daughter and boyfriend are secondary, even less time was spent with them, and good, that's as it should be. And here's the part I like the best, because it's *different* and *interesting* - your 2 primary leads? Ford and Cavanagh? They aren't each other's romantic will-they-won't-they, so how's about that? This barely hits anything on the bingo card, ergo the score is....

5/5 stars

Time For Me To Come Home For Christmas (Hallmark, 2018 - Josh Henderson, Megan Park) 

I should take off a star right now for the long title. You'll know by the end of the review what I've decided. Anyhow, out of the gate, understand that I had to make myself watch this one because the synopsis tells me part of this has to do with the dude being a country music singer and that means somebody's gonna sing - likely, him - and it'll probs be a Christmas song, and that also carries with it the risk of *original* Christmas song, which is infinitely worse. I also have no idea who this Josh Henderson person is - if he happens to be a singer by trade and this is what got him the role, well, I'm not looking it up, I'm reserving my judgment for when I actually hear him sing and see him act.  

Second thing to know, there's something very important that sold me on watching this: turns out Megan Park is the actress who played my favorite character in one of these Christmas movies so far - and some of you will understand the gravity of this, but if you don't then go now and read my write-up on the worst of the worst, My Christmas Love. Folks, Megan Park played Janet. *The* Janet. Light of my life during that shitstorm Janet. She who kept me afloat in a sea of dreck Janet. I owe this to Janet. 

Henderson's a fine actor, Park is way above average and should be doing more than Hallmark movies, and they click together, so good casting, there. (Also good casting? He's actually Southern, the accent isn't fake - though on the occasional word he bumps it up a bit but that could've been because of director, who knows - and for my Southern ears that is so re-fucking-freshing). The dialogue is better than usual for these movies (read: it sounds like things real people would say), and it's elevated by the fact that our two leads are delivering it well. The story unfolds in an easygoing, natural manner (as in, it's not smitten at first sight, they grow to fall for each other over the course of their journey), while at the same time moving at a nice clip. The quick and dirty: they're both from nearby towns/cities in the same state in the midwest, she thinks she knows him from local choir competitions so he's appreciating her treating him like anybody else vs. famous, they're both kinda dreading going home - her because breaking news to dad that the family business is in worse trouble than they thought, him because it's going to be first Christmas since his dad died, plus he's stressed anyhow because he's got songwriter's block. 

A run-down of the songs, so you're fully prepared.... I'll give you the length too because I'm a super nice person... okay not really, but Christmas miracles and hope and bleccccch....

Song one: Deck the Halls, piano, solo, shortish

Okay, he can carry a tune but there's nothing exceptional about his voice. I'm still not looking him up.

Song two: Jingle Bells, acoustic guitar, two old people harmonizing (poorly), short

Bless.

Song three: Joy To The World --> O Come All Ye Faithful, acapella, choir, shortish (but most part in background), they're ever-so-slightly flat which is worse than being completely flat (hi, choir nerd here)

Sigh.

Song four: Away In A Manger, him & 2 precocious children, acoustic, shortish

Twice.

Second time longer.

Second verse with him. 

Fuuuuuuuuu--------

Song five: 

The original song (which isn't entirely bad), acoustic, she inexplicably knows the tune and words well enough to harmonize and so does the mom and then there's inexplicable ability for sister to play 2nd guitar, and inexplicable background somebody to fiddle along, as well. It's a brand new song. He just wrote it. He essentially had just finished it in his mind. Length: Long, as it finishes the movie.

Stupid. So, so stupid. Just have him sing it. I don't mind the 2nd guitar or the fiddle because people skilled on such can pick up chords after watching another person run through it once, and can insert a little complementary medley in between verses, respectively - it's the people magically knowing the lyrics that's irritating and takes you out of the movie completely.

Major Complaint: there's three separate misunderstandings. One: she thinks he was trying to make a fool of her (huh?) by not telling her who he was (re: famous) and he reacts calmly; two: she sees a tabloid saying he had a girlfriend, acts pissy til he finally gets her to pony up what the hell is wrong, she says, and he reacts good naturedly; three, he offers to invest in the fam business so they don't have to rely on bank loans, and she gets all offended saying this must mean he doesn't believe in her (::sigh:: no, it doesn't), and he again takes it well. What annoys me is that all three of these are stupid and are on her, and she's not a stupid person, so her behaving this way is contrary to the other 90% we've seen. I don't get it. It was really odd.

Okay, I won't give it stars off because of the title, fine. But the title *is* cumbersome and kept me from this movie last year, it should've been called A Sweet Christmas Song or something of that ilk - sweet since she makes preserves and candy bars, then of course him writing the song, and also we can't possibly have one of these movies without Christmas in the title. 

Here's the problem: this ticks way too many bingo boxes. The family business is in danger of being lost. There's a dead parent (one for each lead, bonus sick spouse of random friend). There's Christmas songs sung by lead character. There's precocious children (three, specifically). One of the lead characters is famous. Character performs an instrumental talent. Group baking scene. Visit to a town with a holiday event. Characters make Christmas wishes. 

Those coupled with the annoying triple-play of Standard Hallmark Movie Misunderstanding Moment means this should be in negative star territory. But we're going to break the rules. I am docking it only one star for all the tropes, then another star specifically for song overload, as it would've been more impactful to hear his voice for the first time (bits in background as he comes on radio/TV notwithstanding) in the song he's been struggling to write when it happens at the end. All the music was just too much, between him and rando touring couple and choir and kids (twice), then the family sing-a-long. Good god almighty, I actually got tired just typing all that out. This movie is so strange because the components are of the suck, but afterwards you'll be like "Eh, that wasn't bad". 

Bottom line: if you're going to watch a Christmas movie, this one is way far from the worst, it's not a waste of your time, just beware the huge trope minefield and know it's only saved by the quick pacing and very natural acting on the parts of your two leads. 

3/5 stars (but just barely, and easily could've been 5/5 which is much disappoint)

Magical Christmas Ornaments (Hallmark, 2017 - people named Jessica Lowndes and Brendan Perry, the latter of whom I recognize from something)

So, I caught part of this last year and I don't think I went over it, but don't worry if I did because I am not going over it now. Brief synopsis: Mom, who has a real hard-on for Christmas, sends daughter ornaments and they turn out to be "magical", because they are reminding her of happy anecdotes from Christmases of her past so it's changing her attitude, plus coincidental great stuff is happening after she receives each one. To sum: anti-Christmas person starts to get into the spirit, lady lead is really focused on her career, falls in love with physician neighbor, precocious kids - it's trope-a-palooza from what I've seen (about an hour). 

Here's why I'm not bothering to get into it - well, beyond the fact that the lady lead couldn't act her way out of a paper bag, plus (and this is *not* her fault) her hair and makeup are poorly done and it's very distracting - it's a commercial for Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments. The very first one she opens, it's an over-the-shoulder shot and she's got the box tilted precisely to where the logo is clear-as-a-bell into the camera. Fuck that noise. I'm not sticking around for the rest of the ornaments, it may've only happened with that one but I don't care. Also, the pacing is soooo slow. 

1/5 stars (the one only because the male lead can act, and may make it tolerable for you)

[communist-dinosaurs]

so have any of y’all seen that old College Humor picture of the Venn diagram of Muppet names?

yeah, me neither.

anyway, the other day at work i was thinking about it--and i had just watched Starship Genius parts 13 and 14, so i was in a pretty Ratboy mood--when i had an epiphany.

the name of every character in the Ratboy Genius mythos can be described as:

a common american given name

a name that’s a title

a name that’s a description

or some combination of the three.

so, uh...i made this.

full character list, footnotes, and more after the cut:

*****

full character list:

common (american) names: Bob, Clyde, Fred, George, Sue

titular names: The Professor

descriptive names: Bat Friend, The Caveman, Green Flipper Friend, Green Monster, Happyman, Hat, The Hoo Hoos, Leaping Friend, The Little Summer Solstice Baby, Old Fingerhead, Old Froggy, Ratboy Genius, Sneezy, Very Tall Friend, Yoga Friend, Young Mouthbottom

common / titular names: Big Cousin Fred

common / descriptive names: Buck Dodger

titular / descriptive names: The Big Fish Boss, Caterpillar Minister, Miss Big Feet, Mister Bigarms, Mister Fisheater

common / titular / descriptive names: Little King John

*****

footnotes:

1. i love how even within the constraint of this weird naming schema, Little King John still manages to be extra as fuck by being the only character who fulfills all three name types. i mean, look at him. he’s little; he’s a king; he’s John. amazing.

2. i’m assuming the “Dodger” part of “Buck Dodger” is descriptive, based on this line from The Flood part 6: “i used to travel from planet to planet / dodging the stars, chasing the comets”

3. in Starship Genius part 14, Bob refers to himself as “Captain Bob.” this might be a plot point that hints at some upcoming character development. or it might’ve just been thrown in to make Bob’s name scan better with the original Happyman Opera lyrics. i’m assuming it’s the latter. but if Bob does end up changing his name to Captain Bob, he’ll just be shuffled over to the “common / titular names” category.

4. due to the...uh...mysterious nature of the Hoo Hoos, i wasn’t exactly sure what their name is supposed to mean. are they Hoo Hoos because they go “hoo hoo hoo”? is “Hoo Hoo” some sort of title? is it referring to the abstract concept of “hoo” that Old Fingerhead repeatedly says he wants none of in the Galactic Superheroes series? the world may never know. i ultimately decided to stick ‘em in the “descriptive names” category, as you can see. but if you disagree, i would be tickled pink to see some Hoo Hoo-related discourse in the notes ;)

5. as far as i can tell--and believe me, i watched a lot of RBG videos while preparing this chart--the only character whose name is never mentioned anywhere in canon is Miss Big Feet. i got her name from the Ratboy Genius wiki.

6. ah, the Big Fish Boss. i put him in the “titular / descriptive” category because, in my mind, “Boss” counts as a title. but i waffled for a long time between that and just the pure “descriptive” category. do you think i made the right decision? discourse away ;) ;)

7. and last but not least, Big Cousin Fred. this is one of the few category decisions i’m not currently accepting discourse on, for a couple reasons:

i parse the name “Big Cousin Fred” as referring to a big cousin (as in, an elder cousin) whose name is Fred. the other option--referring to a cousin who is named Fred and who happens to be big--just doesn’t make sense. plus...

...that would’ve put BCF in the center category, alongside Little King John, and i don’t think John would take well to sharing that rare, coveted spot with a third-string character who hasn’t been seen since 2007 :D

*****

whoo! this was actually a lot of fun to put together. it compelled me to rewatch Ratboy’s Kingdom, which i hadn’t watched since i first got into RBG, uh, like...two years ago? dang. (i’m sure i’m not the only person who got into RBG via Worthikid’s explanation / tribute video circa 2017.)

anyway, it allowed me to re-remember just how cute-fun the music in Ratboy’s Kingdom is, which is always a good thing.

i also have to express my undying gratitude to the Ratboy Genius wiki, which allowed me to fact-check the details on the more esoteric characters...

and mad props to this picture by opaattack, which helped remind me just how many characters the Ratboy Genius mythos has in it.

[lemonietrinket]

Himawari ||| Kevin x Reader

Summary: Kevin is a ray of sunshine, and so are you. This time, Kevin has something to say to you. Genre: Fluff, as per usual Word Count: 1750 Theme Song: Man in a Movie - Day6; Spark - JBJ95 AN: Kevin Woo, an underrated ball of soft. Another request from @idont-knowabrian​ because they have good ideas. Thanks for reading!

Kevin took a deep breath.

It wasn’t like him, usually, to be so nervous. He’d been on so many stages, in so many recording studios, before so many important people, he reckoned he’d abandoned the idea of being nervous way back in his debut years.

And yet here he was, at your front door, freshly painted citrine by your own hand, cold dispelled by a smart but thick jacket, and  ever so slightly shivering,

Ah yes, that was the day he first met you. Walking past the terraced houses on his way to work, he’d glanced to his right and seen you coating the door in a very diligent fashion. Once he’d passed your door several times, greeting you with a wave and a shy smile every morning, and after you’d worked up the courage to ask if he really was who you thought he was, did he find out why you insisted on painting it in such a primary shade.

“To fulfil a childhood dream of mine.” You had shrugged. “I always wanted to live in a house with a big front window and a yellow door. Not that it originated from any great tragedy! I just... you know. Really like the colour yellow.”

You’d gone on to explain how you had finally had the chance to control the environment that surrounded you, after a youth characterised by restrictive policies that now as an adult you had escaped from. He would never admit it, out of politeness and slight shame on his own behalf, but he was more focused on your face at that very moment. He could still picture how your eyes flickered to the side, how you frowned and scrunched your nose at your own words, at the very moment your lips twitched into a smile, sheepish but no less relaxed. 

The memory did little to calm his nerves, merely lending a hand to his heart’s fluttering.  But it was no use now, as the very door opened to reveal you.

He was 90% sure his heart stopped.

“Kevin! Hi!” you exclaimed, face glowing in the dim streetlight behind. “You’re actually right on time. Not even a minute late!"

His eyes swept over the visage before him. You, in a mustard wool blouse, tucked into a deep moss-green skirt that billowed in the breeze at your ankles. Your eyes glittering in the twilight—a pool he wanted to sink into and also avoid for his own heart’s safety—outwitting the moon in a knowing gaze aimed only at him - a concept that almost stole his words - standing somewhat awkwardly in the doorway, hands clasped behind his back.

“You must be some kind of miracle,” you stated, voice touched with wistfulness.

He coughed, being very abruptly dragged from his thoughts. “What? Me? No! No, not...” He shook his head, playing it off with a laugh.

“What? Always here perfectly on time, always looking as dashing as you always do, it’s not a preposterous proposition, you know!” 

He shook his head, tipping his head away from the playful glint in your eyes, and letting his hands do the talking for him. 

You gasped, even though you saw the gift coming from a million miles away. Even if those million miles was only the couple of metres of your front path.

“Oh Kevin...!” You took the bouquet into your hands, eyes mottling with tears that you couldn’t quite contain, that matched the polka-dotted ribbon of pastel blue that neatly held the piece together.

The sunflower petals, smooth and radiant, were no match for you, Kevin decided. But as you cradled the bouquet close to your chest and stared up at him, lips—kissed by the sunshine itself—wavering in joy, he felt his heart swell to the point he felt as if it could burst.

“I hoped you’d like them,” he mentioned.

“I love them, Kevin, thank you so much!”

You sighed, peering down at the soft plumes. “Let me get a vase and water for them real quick—I won’t be long!”

And you disappeared from his sight.

What was he to do with himself? All tongue-tied and very nearly misty-eyed for you, a child of the sun. You’d been dating for a while, and what he’d planned wasn’t something to get this worked up about, surely.

But for you, he could barely contain the emotions that flooded from his soul. Feelings could no longer be caged by his ribs. They already struggled to contain the rapid march of his heartbeat.

He forced himself to take a deep breath, ironing out the tremors and his blending fears with it. He straightened his jacket, an undefeatable smile playing upon his lips. How luck had been on his side for him to even have the opportunity to meet you.

“Ready to go?” you suddenly enquired, reappearing in his vision and hanging from the door as much as you hung off his words—not that he was quite aware of that.

“If you are, then of course!”

“Great!” You locked your door with a grin, swinging your keys into your satchel, before coming to his side happily. You looped your arm around his, pulling your coat’s collar up to your chin to keep out the windchill while sending him the glimmering smile he adored so dearly. “Where to, fair knight?”

“Oh, um...” he rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, there is this small late-night vintage cafe I thought you’d feel at home in. We could go there first, and then the park after?”

“Sounds like a quest.” You nodded. “Let’s go!”

.

~ ~ ~

.

Your laugh fluttered in the breeze, blissful and very near misty in the shadows the lamps and stars could not banish. Skirt flowing, you span, arms wide as if to welcome.

“And then she went round and round like this!”

Kevin could barely hold back his laughter, feeling tears well in his eyes at your performance. He didn’t care if people questioned as they passed. In fact, he barely noticed them. Why would he, when the most important person was skipping along the cobblestone a few feet ahead of him?  “Why would she do that?!”

“I don’t know!” you feverishly giggled. “Wouldn’t you in that scenario?”

“No!”

“Well, she’d say ‘that’s your loss’!” 

As you wound around the paving, you drifted back to his side, arms clutching at his sleeve as you stumbled, dizzied.

“I shouldn’t have given you that much sugar,” he chuckled,.

You twisted your face in an exaggerated scowl. “Why ever not?”

Kevin felt his mouth continue without the accompaniment of his brain. “Ah well,” he guffawed, “it’s dangerous for me, you know.”

You played along with a hum. “How so?”

He felt the mild horror of his rational mind press him to change tact, but his words just continued to... spill.

“Well, you’re already too sweet for me to handle, and now? It’s just... too much for... my...”

“Heart?” you finished, expression twisted in an amused grimace at the cheese.

“Yes, I...” he broke down to breathy laughter, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what the was at all—”

“Kevin, it’s fine, don’t worry,” you linked arms once again, “it’s just, unexpected of you.”

He gazed down at you, edging you to continue without another word passing his lips. Just in case whatever hysteria enraptured him the first time infected him again and he said something even worse. 

“I pegged you as the sweet type, but not the cheesy,” you placed a finger to the corner of your mouth, “however, I suppose on the Sweet & Cheesy Venn Diagram, there is instinctively an overlap.”

Bemusedly, he gushed, “What?”

“What?” you echoed, confused by his outcry. “Do you not understand me?”

“No,” he admitted. He immediately looked back to you, searching your face for any signs of offence taken. He found only mild excitement, as you awaited his continuation.  “No, I don’t think I do. But I feel I prefer it that way. You’re so... unique? Your energy is different from other people—friends and coworkers, I mean. I don’t know how to explain it but... things are so much more different with you here. I don’t think I could ever be without you.”

The two of you drew to a stop beneath a lampost. High above, the wind grasped a spider web and swung it into a waltz.

“Do you mean that?” you murmured, voice no higher than a mid-summer zephyr.

He, who’d continued to walk a couple of paces even though it had left you slightly behind, turned back to face you, as well as the anxieties that had lasted all evening.  “Yes. Of course. Without a doubt,” he insisted.

You stepped forward until the lamplight illuminated only you. Crested with a halo, your hands slowly wringing one another at your chest, you were lost for words.

Your silence only prompted him further, as he bit the bullet.

“Y/N, you’re the brightest piece of light in my life, sometimes you shine so brightly I could confuse you with the sun. And, I love you.”

You were stunned, to say the least. You had seen it coming but, not for another couple of weeks, you’d assumed.

But here he was, a few feet away, ever so barely shaking out of subtle fear, but his shoulders brazened, a determined expression painting his soft features that you cared for so dearly, with his eyes glistening in the auburn light and nearly flooding with sincerity.

You made the rest of the distance in a few steps, refusing to tear your eyes away, even if it would be for the entire world’s sake.

Once you reached him, you reached up to cup his cheeks, smoothing his nerves and drawing him closer to your level, before melding your lips with his.

Feeling the one thing he’d dreamt of ever since the first time he’d worked up the courage to utter words to you wash over him, he very nearly froze.

However, he managed to hold himself together—though only just—and relished in the brush your sweet lips against his own. He threaded his hands through your hair, to barely rest on either side of your jaw. His touch was so light you could almost imagine it missing, not that you ever would even dream of doing so.

Melting further into the kiss, you knotted your hands behind his neck, just as he let his hands fall to the small of your back, and the two souls drawn together by luck finally combined.

~~~

AN: I know how to em-dash on my Chromebook now and I am so happy oh my jesuuuusss Also, zephyr is a great word that should come back into common use

Masterlist

[omniversalobservations]

Fandom Mashups Are On The Rise

Fact: Two fandoms are better than one. When your favorite fictional worlds collide, it’s a mashup made in fandom heaven. Fandom mashups are becoming more popular, with crossovers popping up in TV shows and movies, fan art, original cosplays, and even new collectibles, making pop culture hybrids a top trend in the geek world.

Fandom mashups have such a powerful impact because they join together two groups of extremely passionate fans — or two halves of your own geeky heart. While products and entertainment moments that feature themes from two separate worlds may be a little more niche —  not every Dungeons & Dragons fan would get schwifty with Rick and Morty — they have the ability to draw fans from one property into another. And the most accessible way for companies to pull off this concept is with gotta-have-it merch — and lots of it. With the right properties and the right fan bases, the collaborations can be seamless and maintain the integrity of each brand.

Take FOCO’s line of Game of Thrones MLB Bobbleheads, for example. The cross-licensed series pairs Major League Baseball players and mascots with Game of Thrones characters and settings. The first series merges three distinct bobblehead styles — the Iron Throne, the Night King, and the Ice Dragon Viserion — with mascots and branding from all 30 MLB teams.

“We definitely think it’s an emerging category, this cross-licensed mashup that we’re going to explore,” says Matthew Katz, licensing manager at FOCO. “… We tried to make sure we had the right balance. You don’t want to go too far one way or the other because you want to capture the people who are superfans of either baseball or Game of Thrones, and then capture those people in the middle as well.”

The bobblehead collaboration started off as a partnership for MLB’s theme nights, during which every fan who walks through the stadium gates gets a promotional item, like a bobblehead. The promotion opened the door to a conversation on how to expand at retail, especially for people who couldn’t make it to the promo nights or desired a more high-end collectible than the ones handed out at the games.

A unique aspect of pop culture mashups is that it gives the creators a bit more freedom in playing around with storytelling. The Night King was an ominous Game of Thrones villain, but he’s a bit more lighthearted when he’s wearing team-themed armor and ditching his spear for a baseball bat made of ice with the team’s logo on it.

“Developing a non-traditional product line like this gives a fresh perspective and allows a fan who has love for both brands to get a refreshed look,” says Josephine Fusezi, MLB’s vice president of global consumer products. “Being able to play with key elements from both baseball and Game of Thrones gives the consumer something different and refreshing. It also gives us an opportunity to have a little fun with our fans.”

Response to the first bobblehead series was so positive that FOCO quickly developed a followup series in just six weeks, featuring characters such as the direwolf, the Kingsguard, and a White Walker, available now for preorder. New MLB theme nights began in June for a Netflix Stranger Things collaboration, too.

Fans will also know exactly who to call with Hasbro’s new Ecto-1 Ectotron figure. The Transformers universe already has heroic Autobots, evil Decepticons, and now ghosts! The iconic Ecto-1 Cadillac from the 1984 Ghostbusters movie is now a Transformers robot — a converting Paranormal Investigator called Ectotron. The figure comes with its own Proton Pack and Slimer accessory, and it converts between Ecto-1 and robot in 22 steps.

This year marks the 35th anniversaries of both Transformers and Ghostbusters, making it an ideal year to combine the best of both franchises. A five-part origin story from IDW Publishing will also be available this year, giving fans insight on Ectotron’s background.

“Brand anniversaries not only allow us to celebrate a franchise, but we can also tap into nostalgia around a brand,” says Tom Warner, senior vice president for the Transformers franchise at Hasbro. “The Transformers and Ghostbusters brands are filled with waves of millennial nostalgia as new parents share the toys and brands they loved as children with their own kids.”

Ectotron preorders sold out within 24 hours after the figure was revealed at Toy Fair New York in February, so additional preorders were made available. Fans should also be on the lookout for other potential Transformers and Ghostbusters collaborations soon, according to Warner.

“On the surface, the Transformers and Ghostbusters franchises may seem vastly different; however, they share more in common than one may expect,” Warner says. “Both have two passionate fandoms, sharing a mutual bond over out-of-this world storytelling rooted in science fiction. When combining both worlds, our goal was to create stories and a product that stays true to the origins of both brands.”

The Avengers movies are probably the most well-known, most popular crossovers, but they weren’t the first. Think of all the “most ambitious crossover event in history” memes that circulated around the time that Infinity War came out — and how we were reminded of Disney Channel’s That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana, which came out in 2006, or 2003’s The Rugrats Go Wild, in which the band of babies met Eliza and her family from The Wild Thornberries, on Nickelodeon.

Entertainment crossover content is so successful because fans of these franchises can see all of their favorite characters interacting in situations they normally wouldn’t, like when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles visited Gotham in Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019). In this movie, the heroes in a half-shell and the Dark Knight team up when Shredder joins forces with Ra’s al Ghul, and all of the heroes need to work together to defeat the combined might of the Foot Clan and League of Assassins.

These crossovers can also span multiple age groups, such as Sesame Street’s “Respect Brings Us Together” campaign. Two commercials launched in April featuring Elmo and Cookie Monster, one of which starred the notably at-odds Lannister siblings from Game of Thrones. And if anyone can convince Cersei and Tyrion Lannister to get along, it’s Elmo.

Fan demand for this type of content is loud and clear, as is the case with The CW’s DC Universe. The network has created crossover content yearly since 2014 through its DC TV shows, starting with Arrow and The Flash. At the time, in December 2014, the two-part Arrowverse crossover between the two shows was the most-watched December telecast in seven years for the network, and the most-watched episode for both shows since their respective series premieres.

In 2016, the network’s #DCWeek event delivered The CW’s most-watched week in six years, featuring a four-night DC crossover between Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The CW’s fifth-annual Arrowverse crossover last year, Elseworlds, introduced Gotham City and Batwoman into the mix, and concluded with a tease of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, set to air this fall.

The ratings for The CW’s crossover events clearly show that fans crave this content, and it’s safe to say we can expect more of it in the future.

Pop culture mashups also come from the most important community: the fans themselves.

While manufacturers and entertainment companies have the power to bring pop culture mashups to the masses, fans can express themselves through cosplay and fan art — without the shackles of licensing rights getting in the way. And here, creativity is key. Out-of-the-box fan mashups, including one-of-a-kind cosplays and stunning illustrations, all have one thing in common: They fuse two things that would likely never be together otherwise.

Eric Proctor is a digital artist at TsaoShin who draws vibrant fantasy pieces, with a heavy focus on pop culture artwork. His gallery features bright, fun, and whimsical pieces that incorporate characters, such as Stitch from Lilo & Stitch and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon.

“For me, the crossovers are a Venn diagram where the two circles completely overlap of things that I absolutely love,” Proctor says. “So, any crossover that I’m currently doing is going to just be just that I love A and I love B, and I’d love to see A and B together.”

Proctor is currently working on an ongoing Grumpy Cat and Disney series, which had accidental roots. Proctor bought a new rig and tablet for his illustration setup and was practicing with his new equipment. He sketched out the iconic The Little Mermaid scene in which Ariel is singing on the rock with water splashing around her, and because he doesn’t like drawing people, he drew in Grumpy Cat as a last-minute decision. He showed it to his friends, expecting to delete it, but then people asked him what Disney scenario he was going to put Grumpy Cat into next — and the series was born.

“I say that I love both of those things, but one of the things I felt so guilty about making that particular series is that I really, really love Disney, but I’m putting Grumpy Cat in a scenario where it’s just ruining it,” Proctor says. “It’s this little bit of dark humor where you’re like, ‘I really love Disney, but honestly if Grumpy Cat was in it, this is probably what would happen.’ So it’s taking something that’s a little sacred and then ripping it to shreds a bit. I think the humor was one of those things I had to play around with.”

Proctor is currently working on his next Grumpy Cat Disney installment, a Cinderella-themed piece titled “Bippidi Boppidi No.” It will show the scene from the animated film in which the fairy godmother grants all of Cinderella’s wishes, but with everything completely ruined, such as a pumpkin dress, Lucifer the cat being the size of a horse, and other mishaps.

“It’s one of those situations where it’s so easy to imagine a lot of those crossovers together; they seem so real and fitting that it just feels like a marriage of two ideas that you’ve enjoyed both of those things so much,” Proctor says. “For me personally, when I look at a crossover that just succeeds so well, I just get so happy because someone else saw the thing that put those two things together and they made that real.”

With pop culture mashups, fans get to express themselves in a whole new way, and manufacturers and entertainment companies are taking note of the increasing fan demand and creative potential. The possibilities are limitless.

Source: The Pop Insider

(image via DeviantArt)

[elenaleegold]

Week 2 - One Step Back

Typically, I love brainstorming activities. Although I sometimes struggle to come up with ideas, I find it easy to give myself over to the ~*process*~ and try to make connections quickly without thinking too deeply about it. I realized during the brainstorming activity in class that rather than focusing on my thesis questions, I accidentally started to move far beyond the scope of my initial question. Instead my brainstorming turned into a dumping-out-my-brain-onto-the-table activity unintentionally. This led me to coming up with categories that initially felt far away from my more specific, initial brainstorming question regarding pleasure and joy in our everyday technologies more specifically. While this initially left me feeling frustrated and with a fair amount of confusion, I decided to home in on a few questions: 

- How did the larger picture represented through my brainstorming encapsulate my initial question? 

- Why did I find focusing on my initial question less exciting? Or more generally, why did I move away from it?

- How might I move forward? 

To categorize the broad strokes of this particular exercise, it mostly brought up intimacy, safety, searching, love, and spirituality. As time ticked down in our brainstorming session I became overwhelmed realizing I couldn't quite categorize the results of the exercise within the framework of my original question. Though this felt like a challenge at the time, I decided to let the two exercises sit with me and percolate. In the meantime I turned to my other favorite brainstorming activity: research. 

Through research I found a great article by Adrienne Shaw and Katherine Sender entitled "Queer technologies: affordances, affect, ambivalence". My MS2 project last year thought a lot about technology through the lens of queerness, and part of my final product was motivated by the drive to "queer" technology, and render it less effective in a capitalistic sense, but more “effective” in a human sense. Two questions the two authors posed are: 

- How can taken-for-granted technologies express queerness? 

- How can hacking and resistance of heteronormative technologies offer alternative forms of engagement and experience?

 It dawned on me that these two questions hit the mark when it came to what my MS2 project was attempting to do, and also encapsulates the overarching theme of my thesis questions. Originally focusing on this idea of joy over the addiction-triggered pleasure in our everyday technologies is, ultimately, an attempt to queer these technologies. The pleasure component is largely engineered into design interfaces to increase face-time users have with the app, platform, etc. This tends to be in service of gaining capital, rather than, or at least over, serving the service's user base. Queerness in this context instead takes a critical look at design features that go unquestioned. Ultimately I'd love to have my thesis focus on a particular technology or technologies, and dismantle and rework core design principles that we take for granted. While I think the questions above may generally encapsulate my design questions for the semester, I'd like to combine and tailor them to fit exactly what I'm interested in pursuing. 

Though this feels like a step back in some ways, and I know we were told that specificity is a greater than generality, I think it’s really important for me personally to identify what it is that is driving these questions. In order to move forward, in this case, I need to take a step back.

Below is my venn diagram or what I'm calling a "venn-map" with my more general question in mind:

I decided to focus on three domains: Queerness, Internet, and Intimacy/Connectedness. I'm not totally sure about "Intimacy/Connectedness" as my third domain but, because it appeared so strongly in my initial brainstorm, I thought it might make sense to include it for this particular map. I found this format especially challenging, as I wish I had a way of processing the positive and negative elements of each domain and how they might interact in a clearer manner. Right now, there's no distinction between the two which makes the map a bit hard to read. This exercise was helpful in some way, though! I think it really helped me think deeply about aspects of my domains that I hadn't quite connected the dots with yet. In future brainstorming exercises I think it’ll be useful to dive into this map and pick out specifics of each domain at random to create “what-if” scenarios. I also think that having this information out there percolating now will yield some good. 

Having these three “puzzle-pieces” that I can mix and match has actually brought me an immense sense of relief. I no longer feel quite as trapped within my thesis topic, confused about where to go next, but rather, like I can easily explore within the confines that I have now set up for myself. I’m really happy with the progress I made this week, and I hope that I can continue to face the frustrations and challenges that arise during thesis by taking a breather, and maybe taking a step back, as difficult as it might feel. 

GOALS FOR WEEK 2 

My goal for this week is to confirm "the internet" as my technology or dig into other taken-for-granted technologies or elements of technology. Luckily I found a massive archive from the article referenced above and I feel confident that looking and reading through that will help give me an idea of what interests me. I also plan to come up with a series of questions that think about queering various technology within the framework of intimacy/connectedness. Ultimately I think the technology that I choose will inform the third domain and what I plan to focus on queering within that specific technology. So, if I complete my first task, hopefully I can make a list of aspects of the tech that I find ripe for hacking , radicalizing, etc!