#though looking back at the amazon listing those things it listed under the same book (like hardcover and paperback and stuff) were not even

[leluxiboi]

I got the book of fairy tales I ordered. Turns out it was the WRONG BOOK.

[astaroth1357]

Demigod MC Series: Hermes

Hey guys, still doing what I can to stay healthy (and entertained) in quarantine. Staying still, keeping calm, and trying not to exert myself too much because of the shortness of breath thing going on. My lungs just can't get enough air it seems… 😅 Anyway, I've gotten a lot of suggestions on this series and I'm excited to keep it going. Just going to be a tad slow until I'm feeling better. Thank you for the support, y'all!

Demigod MC Series: Intro, Aphrodite, Hermes

Lucifer

Oh no… it’s everyone’s worst nightmare… Another Mammon, but competent. Devil help us all…

Had he known who their father was, he'd have never assigned Mammon to watch over them. Hell, he would have made sure those two never even met. They became a new handful for him to manage from the day they first arrived…

When even more things started going missing around the House than normal, he knew he had made a grave mistake… They were clever, quick, and skilled. About the best WORST combination for a burglar to be…

Worse still, they were fast on their feet. He would pretty much have no way to nab them on foot and always had to resort to his wings or magic to have any hope of catching up to them… At least Mammon usually gets himself cornered!

But, paradoxically, he also came to notice that the mortal had an odd honesty streak to them... Like, they’d steal but they’d always admit to it, unlike Mammon who would try to deflect till he was blue in the face.

Were they proud of their work, maybe? Or just didn’t see the point in trying to get away with it...?

There would be several occasions where they’d take something, sell it with Mammon, and then steal the thing back later just to put it back where it belonged, seemingly never with Mammon’s permission to do so either… 

Is it better that they returned the stolen item or worse because their actions went from just robbery to a full-on scam? Either way, it gives him headaches trying to deal with it…

He pretty much gives up getting the mortal to stop after 6 months, they are legitimately that good, but makes them swear to always put back whatever they take at some point. It seems to work out and he lets more things slide, but please someone get them out of here soon… 

Mammon

Soulmatesoulmatesoulmatesoulmate, or maybe more accurately “Partner-in-Crime” but that means pretty much the same thing to him anyway. 🤷‍♀️

He’s never met a person better at thievery than they were. The day they met, they managed to pick his pockets without breaking a sweat (or a finger) and that was it. He was in love.

They could teleport! Actually teleport!! Suddenly, NOTHING was off limits to him any more! Lucifer’s rare records? Easy. Levi’s secret safe? Cakewalk. The Castle vault?? Child’s play!! It was like they could steal anything they put their mind to!!

He didn't even have to worry about them when they made getaways because they were fast too, the two actually have parkour races through the streets for the hell of it!

On top of all that, they were wicked creative. He’d come up with a money-making scheme then they’d offer him all sorts of little tricks to help get away with it...

HE’D have never realized that they could turn themselves into rats in order to frighten and sneak past Barbatos, but they thought of it the instant they heard of his fear of things. They're a mad genius!!

The only real downside was they seemed to like stealing for the sport of it instead of for the money… so they always steal back whatever they took.

That kind of defeats the purpose of all that work in the first place, right? Ah well, at least that's more money for him.

These two pretty much became a walking menace to Devildom society- Sorry, not sorry.

Leviathan

Not another Mammon!!! WHY?! What did he do to deserve this?!?

When he started noticing that EVEN MORE of his stuff was going missing than usual, he straight-up flipped! Like, had the mortal not been pretty tough in their own right they would have been Lotan-chow. End of discussion.

… And then they started using their powers for good? Kind of?

Like, first off they would always give back what they stole, which was a nice change from Mammon. Annoying, but at least he didn't have to go buy replacement games or anything…

And then they started stealing him limited edition merch or tickets and stuff because they… liked him?? He guessed???

Why else would they go to all the trouble of swiping one of the five ultra-rare Kitsune Ruri-chan figurines from its original collector? He would have had to pay Mammon half his tail for something like that but the MC just brought it to him one morning because they could!

Is… is this love? Has he grown to love that which he hates?! What is even happening anymore!?! Who is he?!? 😫

Eventually he has to reconcile his conflicted feelings by dubbing them the real life Peony Phantom Thief, Jane and even making them a cosplay. Yes, they have to wear it when they bring him things. No, it's not weird, shut up.

Satan

He wants to be irritated, no - furious, that they keep taking his stuff… But he’ll be damned if they aren’t making Lucifer’s life a living hell right now. 😏

He's honestly not even sure how they managed to swipe half of the priceless portraits in the Castle (a considerable feat since there's one for Every. Room.) but they pulled it off in under a week. Barbs didn't even notice the replicas…

If that's not mildly terrifying, he doesn't know what is. Who knows what things he could be missing at any given moment...?

At least the mortal had the good sense to return his things, unlike Mammon, which gets them off his shit list for the most part. 🤷‍♀️

It helps that they’re also impressively well-traveled. They claim to have been across every human continent and sailed every ocean. Though he was skeptical at first, just hearing their stories eventually convinced him.

What sort of person has sailed the Amazon River, hiked through Arctic tundra, seen every major capital city, and still had time to explore the sights of the French Riviera?

One that has magical teleportation powers apparently.

Frankly, he could listen to their stories of the human world all day and still ask for another. He's told them that they may as well just write a book of their own for him at some point, it'd be beneficial to their poor vocal chords.

Asmodeus

Ugh! Really? Another thief in the House?? Wasn’t one hard enough to deal with?!

Honestly, stolen beauty products aren't exactly something you can just sell or give back, so unfortunately a lot of Asmo's clothes/accessories get targeted and he is NOT happy about it...

Around the time his favorite scarf was stolen for the third time, he was about to gut the mortal himself, but they struck a deal with him. They could nab his clothes SO LONG as they returned them with an extra little "gift."

Jewelry, perfume, creams, nail polish, etc. Asmo kept a running list and pretty much treated his thieving friend like a less moral version of Akuzon. Whatever he asked for, no matter how rare or expensive, they always got their hands on so who was he to complain?

He once decided to test them by asking for the Hope Diamond - which they got for him - but he made them return it after a week after the curse on it made him ruin a particularly intricate manicure so…

Like Satan, he's also pretty impressed with all the places they've seen. He's pretty traveled in the human world himself so they exchange travel stories all the time!

He may bother them to him out traveling from time to time. There are so many gorgeous and romantic places to visit in the human world after all, it's not like anybody could stop them from just… popping in to have a look. Right? 😏

Beelzebub

They learned very quickly that his food is absolutely off limits and after that, they were good.

Seriously. Beel caught them once trying to swipe a piece of pizza from his dinner and he nearly ripped their arm off for it…

But on the flipside, he also knows that he can go to them if he REALLY needs a snack and is short on cash. 

It's pretty comical watching the fleet-foot mortal running from angry demon vendors with a basket of stolen apples for their buddy… But he appreciates their enthusiasm! 🙂

Beel actually likes to hear about their travels too, but mostly what they've eaten. They can keep him enraptured for hours by describing all the food they've come across in the human world…

Watch out for the drool, though.

Since they can teleport, they'll sometimes pop up with a human world treat for him and the man internally swears his undying love for them every time...

Outwardly, though, he just smiles. 'Cause he's a sweetie.

Belphegor

They… they opened the attic door on, like, the first day they met… They didn’t even make it look that hard, they had some kind of knack for breaking and entering…

Seriously, imagine the look on his face when they just walk into the attic to say hello… He had this whole, “Lure and Trick the Human” plan all thought out then they pulled out a magic lockpick or something and BOOM! Freedom!

He laughed, perhaps a little closer to the edge of sanity than he was intending, and he tried to attack them but they were so damn fast he couldn't land a single hit!

Damn was it embarrassing when the others came in…

MC: "LUCIFER! LUCIFER!! There's a monster in your attic!!!"

Lucifer: "That's not a monster that's my brother!!"

MC: *stops midway through kneeing Belphie in the stomach* …. Ooooooooh!

MC: Whoops. 

It was a… rocky start.

After they settled their differences quelled Belphie's bloodlust he found that they kind of grew on him rather quickly… Something about that mischievous energy and how much they gave his brothers (minus Beel) grief with it.

He absolutely helps them with their plans if it will annoy Lucifer in any way. Occasionally, they'll even take Belphie out on raids instead of Mammon.

Turns out he's surprisingly good at distractions because all he has to do is pretend to fall then take a nap. People around him will legitimately believe that he needs medical attention so the MC can sneak through crowds undetected...

Of course, Mammon gets PISSED when they do this, though. How dare his baby brother try to steal away his perfect partner!! Get your own damn mortal, Belphie!!! 🤬

[yerawizardjulia]

Too Rich for a McNugget (Wolfstar)

A university student enters an antique shop in a panic. How do you buy a wedding gift for a cousin you hate? 

Sirius wouldn’t have looked twice at the dusty shop if he wasn’t stupidly, desperately late. The high street itself was laughing at him and he was uncomfortably aware of the scrubby guy on the bench that had definitely seen him walk past the same shop window three times in a desperate attempt to see anything other than tea towels and obnoxiously cheerful decorated mugs with ‘World’s best dad’ printed on the sides in Comic Sans. His fingers were slippery in anxious sweat as he pressed the home button on his phone, his iPhone six, another reason his presence would be scorned at this godforsaken gathering. The smudgy screen blinked into life and displayed, seemingly smugly after Sirius’ growing resentment towards the device, 12:42.

Twenty fucking minutes. If he didn’t show up with a gift he might as well not show up at all, an option he would have embraced wholeheartedly if his mother hadn’t pincered him into a corner at their last, regularly depressing routine coffee catch up and told him the deeds to his inheritance were under considerable threat if he did not attend. He wouldn’t have minded, but being twenty grand in debt to an English degree in a rented apartment with black mould creeping onto the ceiling made him reconsider his options.

Fucking Narcissa.

He wouldn’t have been looking forward to the wedding even if she wasn’t marrying a right wing, Eton-educated, ‘can’t control these blasted immigrants’ CEO of whateverthefuck that looked as though he’d never even touched an item of clothing that didn’t come from Armani. It was so typical of his cousin to find a man who deferred so minimally from their shared families’ frankly alarmingly consistent Tory heritage that Sirius had had to do some extensive Googling to confirm that Lucius Malfoy was not in fact, a not-so-distant relative.

A text buzzed in his hand, the little green notification welcome on the screen. At least it was an excuse to loiter outside this shop window for another minute or so without looking like a genuine psychopath.

‘Just get her a toaster or something idk.’

Sirius hadn’t really expected James’ solution to his predicament to be helpful, but his flatmate’s response nevertheless sent the hopeless feeling in his stomach a few inches lower. He had never expected for his future to be balanced on the purchase of a wedding gift, but he would almost prefer to sit his first-year exams, which he had taken with a hangover so severe it felt like he was going to vomit out of his eyeballs, all over again than have to look at this shop window for a second longer. He pictured sitting in a gutter in London, like the tramps that his mother refused to make eye contact with during their trips out during his childhood, drinking from a bottle wrapped in brown paper and thinking; if only I had gone with the luxury jam set. He had discarded the idea after noticing the Tesco’s Finest logo above the barcode, but it was beginning to look like his best option.

Another text. No, a call. Sirius shoved the phone back into his hoodie he was using to mask the aristocratic wedding attire beneath. Keepers of pretentious little shops such as the ones lining this dusty high street tended to bump their prices through the roof if they saw someone of his blood walk in. Old blood. Old money. It was unfair, really, because Sirius didn’t actually have any. If he did, he probably wouldn’t mind paying the exorbitant prices; James spent half his life agonising over how independent businesses were being suffocated by Amazon. But Sirius had nothing to his name until his dear grandparents decided to snuff it. The phone ceased buzzing waspishly in his pocket, and he decided he had better check who he was ignoring. 

Typical fucking Regulus. 

Probably the only human being under twenty that actually went out of his way to call people, rather than text. He would be there already, exchanging pleasantries in the foyer of the Malfoy’s third manor home. Checking to see whether the Black family disappointment was showing his face, or if he’d have to rely on his six predicted A* grades and brand new Porsche that probably cost more to insure than it did to buy to present himself as the golden child. He’d probably have a stupid little flower in his stupid little button hole. Being a cousin of the bride and a groomsman of the groom, Regulus had firmly nestled himself already into this hideous conjunction of families. He had a job lined up for him in Malfoy’s London branch. In six months, he’d probably have his own office.

Sirius had diluted his shampoo with water for the second time this morning.

He scowled and kicked a bottle cap along the pavement as he stumped, once again, down the row of shops. The circular metal projectile skittered across the tarmac and bounced off a door frame. He stopped, staring suddenly at the sign swinging on a pair of metal hooks like it was a medieval fucking tavern.

Fletcher’s Quality Gifts and Trinkets.

Somehow, inexplicably, Sirius’ eyes had slid over this shop four times as he’d panicked his way up and down this stretch of pavement. There was no window display, that was why. The door fit seamlessly between Bobbin’s Haberdashery and a derelict Cafe Nero. Sirius felt his phone buzz again and suppressed the urge to throw it into the path of the lazy, midday traffic crawling its way up the high street. He stared at the chipped paint and begged silently, to whatever entities may have been listening, that he would find something, anything to take to this fucking wedding.

The door jammed awkwardly on the floor as Sirius pushed it open. It made a juddering, dry squeak, scuffing on the splintery wood. Sirius winced, and half thought about just turning tail and walking out again, going back to pick up that cheap-as-shit jam set. Narcissa probably didn’t even eat jam. Was jam vegan?

He had to push his way in sideways, and as he did so, the door unstuck, swinging open and leaving him standing, pointlessly squashed back against the door frame. Sirius closed his eyes and wondered whether anything was going to go right today.

When he opened them, a guy was blinking at him from behind a checkout desk. A book was open on the surface before him and his long legs with too short trousers that showed a few inches of garishly coloured socks were rested upon the desk next to the till. He removed them hastily to the floor as Sirius stared.

“Sorry, the door- It gets stuck- you have to like-“ He mimed something that Sirius couldn’t even begin to relate to unsticking a door. “Sorry,” he finished, lamely. He bent over his book. Sirius peeled himself from the frame, not taking in the low beams that he would probably hit his head on or the items grouped together in nonsensical piles on the shelves and stacked on the floor.

This guy was gorgeous. He had an odd collection of features that were nothing special, when you looked at them individually- a nose that listed to the left, a thin top lip, a smattering of pigmentation on his cheeks that suggested acne that had been grown out of- but together... Sirius couldn’t stop staring at him. That tawny hair- fucking tawny, who am I, William pissing Wordsworth?- That sharp chin, those long fingers that teased the edge of the paper as he finished reading his page.

He was absolutely, fundamentally, not Sirius’ type. Any romantic entanglements he had had- and granted, it was not a long list (he and James had one sellotaped to the fridge)- involved men so deep in the closet they were practically choking on mothballs. They were footballers, mostly, insecure, ‘just experimenting’. Sirius didn’t know why his gaydar was sounding off so strongly. Was it the deeply uncool granddad jumper that somehow looked like it belonged in Men’s Vogue when draped over his long torso? Sirius was hardly modest about his own looks, but if he tried that jumper on he would look like the kid that forgot his P.E. kit. The same went for the not-skinny, not-baggy jeans that looked as though they were made for literally anyone other than him but somehow, looked really cool and why did Sirius love those hideous socks so much? Did they have pineapples on them? 

The guy, seemingly unaware of Sirius lurking behind the shelf closest to the door, propped the book up in his hands, and Sirius read the title- The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Well, there it is.

“IneedapresentforacousinIhatewho’smarryingaguythathasprobablynevereatenaMcDonald’schickennugget.” Sirius was hardly more aware of the words projectile vomiting from his mouth than he was of the way he was sidling towards the checkout desk with his hands wringing in front of him like he was expecting this guy to stand up and shout at him.

Brown eyes emerged from behind the finest work of Oscar Wilde, carrying a look of mild alarm.

“Because, he’s rich, not a vegetarian.” Sirius finished. His mouth seemed a long way behind his brain, but perhaps that was a good thing, because his brain was currently screaming FUCK ME and Sirius was not willing to be barred from any more establishments for hedonistic behaviour.

“A wedding present?” His voice was mild, like Sirius had just asked a perfectly normal question for a stranger to ask a shop employee.

“Uh, yeah.” Why was he blushing? He never blushed. He stepped back needlessly as the guy rose from behind the desk. He was tall. Proportionately tall, with long limbs and a long neck and long god knows what else. Sirius nearly fell to his knees in reverence when the guy cracked a smile that caused a dimple to poke in his cheek and exposed sharp canines that Sirius never considered worth noticing in anyone before but holy fuck he would be now.

“You know what, I think I’ve got something.” He was walking away down one of the dark-ish isles, stooping considerably to avoid the beams and Sirius was trailing after him, awkward and out of place and acting so drastically not like himself he wondered if he had sustained a concussion at some point. Maybe when he was forcing his way through that rude fucking door. The hair at the nape of this guy’s neck curled slightly like he was due a haircut. His trainers were really beat up and old, and Sirius was sure he could see one of the laces fraying and considered whether he should warn him he was about to trip.

“When is this wedding?” His voice was still mild and almost disconcertingly polite; he had stopped and was rummaging among a pile of objects on a shelf-seriously, how was anyone supposed to find anything in here?- and Sirius was still staring at his trailing shoelace.

“Well, sort of now.”

He stood up a bit straighter as the brown eyes widened, and he was looking at him, properly, for the first time and Jesus Christ, how were you supposed to stand normally? Where were your arms supposed to go? Eyebrows, light brown and shapeless and a bit sparse at the ends, furrowed and he let out a small huff of amusement. It was the politest expression of ‘this dude’s a complete disaster’ that Sirius had ever seen. “I’ve been putting it off,” he added needlessly. Something about the way this guy was now looking him up and down as if he could read his life story just from Sirius’ tailored trousers that he’d forgotten to get dry cleaned and his hoodie that was actually James’ and his shoes that looked expensive but were actually from TKMaxx was making him need to offer increasingly poor explanations for his shambles of a life. “I don’t want to go, but I have to, and I hate weddings anyway, but especially this one, and I-‘

The look of curious amusement on the guy’s face- god, Sirius really wanted to know his name- halted his rambling. “Sorry,” he mumbled, “I’m not normally this stressed.”

“That’s okay,” he replied, as if it was his job to tolerate a load of garbled nonsense from strangers, like he did it regularly, in fact, which made him wonder what kind of people actually came into this shop that you could barely tell existed. He was still rummaging through the shelves, Sirius was pretty sure a couple of things had fallen off the back and were now in the dark recesses of the between-shelf-and-wall space where things went to die. God, did anyone ever actually buy anything in here? He found it easier to control himself when the guy stopped x-raying him with his eyes, so he said “er, how long’s this shop been here?”

“Oh, I’ve only worked here six weeks. No idea, ages, probably.” He picked up a remarkably creepy porcelain figure of a shepherdess that was covered with so much dust that at first glance, Sirius thought it was some kind of radioactively-deformed elephant.

“I see what you mean,” said Sirius, staring at the figurine reproachfully. “How does anyone find anything in here?” The questions were not what he actually wanted to ask, which involved something along the lines of are you gay-are you single-are you safe from asbestos in this shop and do you think I’m a complete weirdo. He perked up when the guy let out another polite huff of laughter.

“Most customers have been coming in here for years,” he said, “I don’t see a lot of new people.” His eyes flickered to Sirius and back again and Sirius felt as if he was preparing to dive from a very large boat into a sea that was very cold.

“What’s your name?” Sirius asked, louder than he had meant to. He cringed inwardly and for the second time, considered legging it out of the door when he was once again regarded by a pair of searching brown eyes.

“Remus,” he said. Sirius could tell he was waiting for him to laugh. When he didn’t, because how the fuck could this man get any more attractive, and somehow the name Remus suited him down to his shredded laces, he turned to face him, as if in defiance.

“Hilarious, I know. Remus Lupin, which makes it even better.” Sirius’ resolve cracked at this.

“What?” He squawked, dragging his eyes over Remus again, because he looked like any novelist's wet dream and his name was Remus fucking Lupin... “Mine’s worse.” Sirius said, straightening again. Remus Lupin was rolling his eyes as if in grim acceptance of the barrage of snide jibes that had yet to tumble from Sirius’ mouth, but his eyebrows had disappeared into his hair at Sirius’ response and his arms were folded across his chest, which pulled the loose neck of his jumper down and exposed a few inches of pale sternum.

“I don’t believe you.”

Sirius grinned at this. He cleared his throat and pulled his hand out of the pouch/pocket/thing on the front of his hoodie which was definitely not a secure place for his phone, wallet and keys, and held it out.

“Sirius Black. Pleasure to meet you.” Remus’ mouth had fallen slightly open and a smile was touching at the corners of his lips as he took Sirius’ hand. Sirius was almost surprised that there was no jolt of electricity from all the built up static in his woollen jumper, but his skin was cool and his fingers were thin and twiggy and the knuckles were surprisingly big, and he didn’t drop it straight away, which made Sirius wonder if it was intentional, like a sort of gay signal, and then he remembered the Oscar Wilde book on the checkout desk and stopped trying to look for gay signals.

“Holy shit,” Remus spluttered. The profanity rolled masterfully from his lips; Sirius had never quite got the hang of swearing after his stuffy, conservative upbringing. Remus made it sound graceful.

“What a pair, eh?” said Sirius, and then cringed inwardly again because they weren’t a pair, they were complete strangers but somehow it felt like they’d known each other forever and fuck when did it get so hot in here? He looked at the shelves where Remus’ other hand still rested, and tried to ignore the eyes that were sliding up and down his body as Remus Lupin gave him what Sirius recognised as ‘the gay once-over.’ Dressed in the odd assortment of James’ secondary school football hoodie that had been surpassed by the frankly unnatural growth of James’ shoulders, pretentious shoes and crinkled dress trousers, Sirius was acutely aware that he was not looking his whole and considerable best. Christ, he might even look straight.

“There’s um-you said you might have something?” Sirius said, after another twenty five seconds in which Remus’ gaze had lingered on the rings Sirius had forgotten to take off (his mum would kill him if he turned up to a wedding looking like anything other than a Conservative Straight Man) and then drifted to his hair which was probably fried from all the sweating and running about and cheap shampoo. Remus blinked at these words, and whipped his head back to the shelves as if startled he had been caught in the act.

“Yes! Sorry, it’s-erm-can you hold this?” He plonked a cast iron sewing machine into Sirius’ arms who sagged beneath the weight, wheezing as he tried to lock his knees without Remus noticing. What the hell kind of Hulk body was hiding under that jumper? Eyes streaming, he balanced it on top of a pile of ancient National Geographic magazines and prayed it would not succumb to the inevitable force of gravity. Remus was deep into the recesses of the shelf, standing on tiptoe to reach the very back. His socks were visible again and Sirius could see now that they were not pineapples, but durians. Cute. His jumper was riding up as he stretched to whatever unknown artefacts lurked at the very rear and now it was Sirius’ turn to stare, because there was some pale midriff exposed above the waist of his jeans and he was skinny, but not skinny, kind of-lean? Was that the word? He had that vee of muscle above his hip and Sirius was suddenly struggling not to choke on his own tongue.

"Here it is!", came Remus' muffled voice, and Sirius took a step back hurriedly. He was pretty certain he had been gazing glassy eyed at the shop-keeper's navel where a delicate line of dark brown hair descended below his belt, and pinched his own wrist hard behind his back as Remus' head emerged, and he shook some cobwebs out of his curly hair. He was holding a small box, and Sirius’ first thought was that if something covered in that much dust came within eight feet of Narcissa, her immune system would likely spontaneously combust due to overexposure. People like her didn’t have immune systems, they just loaded themselves up with fucking multivitamins and avoided any establishments without at least two Michelin stars. 

“Sorry it’s a bit-“ Remus blew a cloud of dust off the top of the box, coughed, and wiped it off on the back of his jeans, muttering ‘need to stop smoking.’ 

Sirius almost went feral at the image of his lips pursed around a Marlboro, but managed to pull his face into a socially acceptable frame in time for Remus to pass the box to him. “What do you think?” 

Squatting in a bed of midnight blue velvet, sat a pair of silver napkin rings. They were ornate, and completely hideous. Sirius started to grin. He picked one up to examine it. It was decorated with a stag, and the other with a doe. It was likely the engraver had never seen these animals in the flesh, which would account for their mildly horrifying humanoid faces. 

“Perfect,” muttered Sirius, turning the ugly silver object over in his hand. It was heavy and looked antique, and Sirius knew it would fit right in with the future Mrs. Malfoy’s entirely tasteless kitchen decor. He looked up at Remus, disbelieving in the way he had absolutely nailed Sirius’ mission. “Absolutely bloody perfect.” 

Remus grinned back, a wondrous sight, his hands half in the pockets of his faded jeans. Sirius returned the napkin ring to its box, and then thought of something that made his smile falter. 

“Are these solid silver?” 

“Yep,” Remus said happily. “Nineteenth century antiques, I believe.” But Sirius was pushing the box back into his hands, shaking his head. 

“I can’t afford that, sorry I-“ 

“Five quid.” The box flew back into Sirius’ hands before he could blink. 

“Come again?”

The shopkeeper shrugged. “I’m the only person who knew they were there, and I doubt anyone else would want to bestow something that vile on a newly wedded couple.” 

Was this guy even real? Sirius couldn’t quite fathom what he had done to deserve this act of kindness, but he wasn’t about to turn it down. 

“Thank you,” he said, earnestly. Remus shrugged again, but the smile remained. He took Sirius back to the counter, where he took the box back from him and, while Sirius dug in his pocket for some change, produced some silvery wrapping paper and parcelled it. Sirius stole a surreptitious glance at him as he tied it off with a navy ribbon. His eyelashes were sandy like his eyebrows, but they were thick and almost touched his cheeks when his eyes were cast down on his work. 

Sirius was having a crisis. He had never asked for anyone’s number before, but the thought of walking out of this shop and never seeing this god-sent individual again was criminal. His mouth felt dry. What if he had misread this interaction completely, and Remus was just a friendly, helpful guy? He glanced at the book, now balanced on top of the till while Remus rang up, and took a breath. 

“Good book, that” he said, indicating The Picture of Dorian Grey awkwardly. Remus looked from him, to the book, and back again. While Sirius experienced a burning sensation in the base of his chest, Remus nodded non commitantly, and swept the stack of pound coins Sirius had placed on the desk into the till. He looked away, agonising, kicking himself internally at his own ineptness, as he pulled a receipt from the till and passed it and the neatly-wrapped box across the table. 

“All done.” 

“Thanks.” Sirius could feel his cheeks burning, and decided a clean getaway was well overdue. He had picked up the items and had half turned away when he heard- “I wrote my number on that receipt, you know.” 

The burning in his chest now felt like a slowly inflating balloon. He looked down at the smooth piece of paper and saw a number scribbled in biro on its surface. Eleven numbers. Definitely a phone number. He turned hastily back to Remus, who was- Sirius was pleased to see- also looking slightly bashful. 

“Thought my gaydar had malfunctioned for a minute there,” Sirius said. Remus laughed. 

“It was really great to meet you.” He said, placing his feet up on the desk again. 

“And you,” Sirius replied. Elated, he headed for the door before Remus could change his mind. He dreaded to think how late he was now, but he couldn’t think of a situation more worth a bollocking from his mother than this one. He had yanked the reluctant door open when- 

“Hey, Sirius?” 

“Yeah?” He looked over his shoulder. Remus was peering over the top of his book at him again. 

“Let me know how the wedding goes.” 

[writefinch]

Family-Owned Small Business

(CN: incest, sex work, mentions of sexual assault & suicidal ideation)

The worst part of my job is administration. Last-minute rescheduling when a client flakes on us. Chasing up payments. Booking accommodation at short notice. Answering messages! Jesus, every time in the last year when I've slumped, sighed, and thought to myself "fuck working, I need a break from all this" it's been when I've opened my messages and seen thirty different texts that need a reply. Some people are fine with it I guess, but for me it's boring, time consuming, and stressful.

Big deal though, right, I mean nobody loves doing admin, why even bring it up? Well, if I tell someone that for work last night I ate a client's cum out of my mom's pussy, I'd expect that they'd get fixated on the sex work and the incest. I'd expect them to freak out and not pay attention to the specifics of what I'm saying. So, first, I'd like that person to know that the thing I hate about my job is probably the same thing that *they* hate about *their* job. I would rather lick my mom's asshole for five minutes than answer emails for five minutes, and I answer a lot of emails.

Do we have to worry about violence, danger, cops, and legal trouble? Yeah, we do. Am I scared of these things? Yeah, sometimes, but I had to worry about all of those things before I started doing sex work. At least now we've got the money to buy our way out of the worst of it.

I'm not saying that what I do with mom is an objectively healthy relationship, let alone a perfect one. If you took me back in time and told me I could pick a completely different life for me and my mom, I'm sure there's a bunch of choices I'd pick over this one. But I never had that choice. I got hurt a lot growing up. I feel like I've finally escaped the things that hurt me, but I know that I've barely started to recover from them.

That's why I'm writing this. We've saved enough money to afford some therapy and my first session is next week. I want help with the fear, the nightmares, the mood swings and insomnia, I want to stop the rush of rage and terror that flows through me every time I see the word 'dad,' I want help untangling the stuff that came out of being told I was a pansy when I was growing up, then figuring out I'm gay, then figuring out I'm a girl, then figuring out I'm all three of those things while I was living in a place that kept trying to kill me for it. What I don't want is for the psych to pin it all on the two least harmful and least fucked-up things about my life, and worse, I don't want them to make me believe it. This journal is a prophylactic, an assessment of my job, my relationships and my life that I can refer back to if and when someone sticks their fingers in my brain and swirls them around.

I'll start with a problem statement: my dad. The memories that hurt the most are the ones where he almost appeared human, the flickers of joy, curiosity and humor that stood out from the bland cruelty that made up the rest of his personality. I'll remember him buying me ice cream or talking about a book or a movie with me, I'll doubt myself and wonder if I just went crazy and cut him out of my life for no reason, and then my brain will hook onto a random act of sadism he inflicted on me.

The physical abuse was bad all on its own, real psycho shit like driving me out into the woods and making me pick through the brush for a switch he could hit me with and a whole lot more I won't go into, but the emotional abuse was worse. When I was eleven, I forgot to feed my cat one day. He gave her away to my uncle, but told me that she'd developed malnutrition and had to be put down. I didn't find out the truth for another two years, when he just let it slip at Easter. He bragged about it, even, like he'd invented a really smart child-rearing technique. I don't want to write too much down here because I don't need to, if anything I want therapy to *stop* everything he did from running through my head. He's a punishment-obsessed sadist, a Baptist, and he works as a judge. Did he ever sexually abuse me? No. Parent of the year, right? He kicked me out for being a fag the day I turned eighteen, so it's ironic that my biggest fear is that he comes looking for me. He doesn't even know I'm a girl.

On the other hand, my mom has had an interesting life. She's kind of a fuck up. When I was one year old, mom and dad split and dad got full custody--being a judge helped with that--while mom left the state. She spent a decade trying to kick a heroin habit and a year and a half in prison for related stuff, got banned from even entering the state I lived in on account of her parole--again, dad being a judge helped with that--illegally emigrated to Canada for a while, and went to Oregon by mistake, doing a mixture of bartending, delivery driving, MDMA dealing and whoring to stay afloat.

The only reason we met again is that I was in the same city staying with friends, also whoring. I don't remember the first time I saw her, but the first time we talked was in a mutual friend's tiny studio apartment with a few other hooker friends. We ended up comparing our Pest Lists, shared a few drinks, and swapped numbers. A week later we fucked, and a month after *that* we realized that we'd Oedipus'd ourselves. It seems funnier now than it did at the time.

That was an emotional time. We cried with joy that we'd found each other, we started tip-toeing around the ideas of rebuilding our lives together, and we agreed to pretend that the sex had never happened. Of course, we got drunk together a week later and fucked again. She's hot! I have a thing for older women, I have a thing for breaking taboos, and I have a thing for being mommied in bed. Blame dad for raising me like this, I dunno.

We started doing sex work as a team after she got a dental abscess. The bill for the hospital stay and the tooth removal was insane, and the dentist straight-up told her that she'd end up with another in a different tooth within a year if she didn't get two root canals. Even when she was recovering, we could only afford fish antibiotics off of Amazon. We crunched some numbers and made some inquiries, and figured out that we could pull in two week's worth of our combined income with one night of mother-daughter stuff.

Our first joint session was with a real estate pervert I'll call Stan, a chubby balding powerlifter in his fifties who we'd both had as a client before. Mom took me over her knees and switched between spanking me and fingering me while he watched. I sucked him off while mom made out with him, made out with my mom with his cock between our lips, licked his balls as mom licked my ass, then let him fuck my ass while mom sat on my face. That was the first half hour. He came six more times before we passed out in the early hours of the morning, and I drifted off nursing his finally-limp cock in my mouth. He paid us the price of a used Volkswagen for our trouble, and I blew him one last time before we left as a thank-you.

Six months later, mom's teeth were fixed, I was on spiro, and we had just under a dozen clients for our "doubles sessions." Only a few of our appointments are ones with me and mom together, three or four a month, we mostly work alone. That's not out of a deliberate choice, it's just that we've got a strict criteria for who we'll double up on.

Trust is one thing: depending on the lawyers we can afford, what we're doing is either kinda illegal or extremely illegal. Since my dad is presumably still a judge, I don't want him to ever find out about this. He'd put us in a prison or a mental institution. We won't do a double session with a client unless we've both had individual sessions with them.

Money is the other thing. Getting your dick sucked by a hot mom while her daughter sucks your balls costs a week's wages for the average person. Hiring us for the night is more like a month's wages. Even in a city like this, there's only a few thousand people that can drop that kind of money on hookers. Then, they've got to *want* to fuck a trans girl and her mom together. Don't get me wrong, more people are into mother-daughter incest than you'd expect, but it's not a universal thing.

Clients are, on average, annoying. It's a fact of life. The thing that all clients have in common is a ton of disposable income and a fondness for fucking hookers. They're not necessarily bad people, but there’s a heavy ‘What can a banana cost, ten dollars?’ vibe to them. It’s not that they’re adrenochrome-drinkers who don’t see regular people as human, it’s more that they don’t have an intuitive awareness that other people don’t have savings accounts, health insurance, an investment property, and four figures of walking-around money at any given time. I guess I'd feel differently if I was like, a concierge or a PA, but there's a lot more pillow talk in my job.

I've had bad and dangerous clients before, there's been at least two occasions where I was pretty sure I was going to die--one where the hospital afterwards stay wiped out four months of income, not counting the month where I couldn’t work--but they were all before I met mom, when I couldn't be so careful about screening prospective clients and dropping them if they threw up red flags. I'm sure we'll get bad clients in the future, but we're in a better place to deal with them safely.

I also wanna write down what a "normal day" is like. Friday was a good example. I woke up early at 9am and cooked breakfast for mom. She was up already doing the laundry. We entertain some clients in our apartment, so we go through a lot of clothes and a lot of sheets. You can't fuck a guy on top of another guy's cum stains, that's rude. Some of the job is Housework But More. We don't really use the main bedroom or the sitting room because we treat them like bed and breakfast guest rooms. It's annoying but every time we have a session without getting an actual hotel or motel room we save like $50 minimum.

After breakfast I epilated, showered, and went for a run. Personal grooming isn't that big a deal in terms of time, I'm not saying I don't spend a lot of time on it, I do, but I'd be spending that time even if I worked in a bar or an office or something. Look: I'm hot. I might have been a weird-looking spotty nerd when I thought I was a boy, but as a girl I'm a fucking dime. I could get like, 25% uglier before it had any impact on my earnings. The only part of personal grooming that's necessary for sex work and I wouldn't do all the time anyway is power-washing my guts an hour before every session.

After lunch, mom went to see some friends and I played Magic for a few hours. At two pm, the actual work started. I picked up the work phone for the first time that day and began answering texts. An hour later I'd cancelled the 6pm appointment, blocked out all of Sunday evening, checked in with a few regulars, and provisionally moved three guys to the 'Time Wasters' list.

I spent a while sexting with a good prospect. He was a good prospect because he paid up-front for the sexting instead of treating it like a free samples platter at Costco. We scheduled a tentative appointment for next Tuesday, when his wife would be out of town on a business trip. Most of the guys I fuck have kinks, and I swear that 'cheating on your wife with a sex worker' is the most common one there is. Do I feel bad about it? At my hourly rate, absolutely not.

Mom got back at half four, so I took a break. We made tacos for lunch together and ate while watching Billions. She nudged me and told me that I need to do my injection, and, well, we have a little ritual for that. I'm scatterbrained and I'm not great with needles, but mom has been incredibly supportive with my HRT, and when I told her I was having problems taking them on time, she came up with a way to make me as comfortable as possible. As soon as the needle is ready, I laid down in her lap and she cradled my head in her arms, pressing her bare chest against my face. I took a nipple into my mouth and nursed it softly while she stroked my hair. She called me a good girl, telling me how proud she is of her daughter, how much she loves me, and asked if I was going to take my medicine like a big girl. On good days I inject myself while she pets me and coos over me, and on bad days she takes the needle and does it for me. As soon as I dropped the needle in the sharps container, mom pressed a Hitachi against my cock and took one of my nipples into her mouth, called me her big brave girl, and asked if I was gonna cum for mommy.

As usual, the answer was yes.

Late afternoon and early evening is when the messages start flowing in, especially on Fridays, when the kinds of people with hooker money have either left work early and thinking about getting laid, or are still held up at work and are desperately thinking about getting laid. This kind of messaging gets trickier, because it comes down to what I'm providing. Like, setting up a session is the kind of normal administrative stuff that's baked into the price of a session. It's also partly a sales job, so I'm naturally flirty and solicitous, and because I do sex work I talk openly about sex.

However, *sexting* is not normal administrative stuff. If I'm sending you messages for jerking-off purposes, I can charge by the hour or by the text but I will insist on charging for it. Also, it's not just sex that me and mom provide. There's a reason that 'companionship' is an old euphemism for whoring, it's because whores are good company. I'm a good listener and I don't judge, which means I'm like the fun parts of a therapist but without all the homework and self-improvement. I'm (unsurprisingly) friendly with all of my clients, and I have more than a few clients and former clients who I'd consider good friends and vice versa. I talk to a bunch of them outside of a business context, especially the ones I met outside of my job, and that's a normal part of maintaining a pool of clients for any sales job, but on the other hand... it's a demand on my time and it's a part of my services. I can and have bluntly told guys that they're wasting my time when it comes to uncompensated sexting, but the platonic stuff requires a lighter touch.

One of my regulars, Fintech Pete, sent me a message. Two messages later, he sent me $100, and we're off. Describing in gratuitous detail exactly how I'm going to suck his cock, begging him to fuck me until my clit is drooling all over the sheets, sending him feet pics, things of that nature. Pete is great for sexting because he barely jerks off while he's doing it, he saves all the messages and pictures and jerks off to them later, because he's got some biohacking routine where he only cums once a week. He said once that part of the reason he hires sex workers is that he takes each nut a lot more seriously if he's paying three digits minimum for the privilege. He does this teleconferencing report with the board of directors at his company four times a year, and every time he hires me to kneel under the desk in his home office and suck him off while he makes his presentation.

Anyway, while we were going back and forth like that, he mentioned that I'd made a joke one time about doing a joint session with my mom. I told him it wasn't a joke, and to cut a long story short, half an hour later I was asking mom if she was up for an overnight session starting at 9pm. She agreed, Pete confirmed, so we both got ready--think getting dolled up for a night out but with a more thorough enema--and drove to his place. He lived outside of town in a two-bedroom suburban home, alone with his two dogs.

As soon as we were parked in his garage I did the safety call in front of him: I rang a friend of mine, told her we were visiting a friend, told her it was at the address I sent her earlier, and told her we'd call her again tomorrow morning. Was it really necessary to do that with someone like Fintech Pete? No, but practice makes permanent. If you let these things slip when there's no danger, eventually they'll slip when there is danger.

Now, I don't want to imply that I'm in a lot of danger! There's a reason that most of the faces you'll see on the Trans Day of Remembrance are of poor black and brown women, because real danger comes when you can't turn skeevy jobs, when you can't afford to take precautions, when you have to make the choice over and over between maybe starving and maybe getting murdered. I'm white, I've got a good support network, and I've been relatively lucky in that I can do all these things to minimize my risks. I've still got to do them, though! Things like safety calls are a good habit to get into and it helps all sex workers if there's an expectation that they've all got someone looking out for them.

...I get that there is some bravado creeping into this journal. I start off saying that admin is the worst part of the job and a page later I flippantly mention that the job has put me in the hospital. On a day to day basis yeah, the admin is the bit that sucks the most, but if you offered me a deal where the admin is twice as bad but I never took that session, I’d take it in a heartbeat. This job has left me with some scars. Any time something cold touches my wrist I get a vivid flash of the first time I had my hands zip-tied behind my back in a cop car. I've had nightmares all my life, and more than a few of my nightmares are about stuff that's happened since I got into sex work.

If it seems like I’m downplaying it, it’s because the harrowing stuff is where the job has gone wrong, it’s not baked into the everyday stuff, and most importantly it has nothing to do with my mom. The work I've done with her is some of the least stressful and dangerous I've had since I started this job, and whatever wounds I have, she's not the one who caused them.

On a more positive note, a cool thing about doing sessions with my mom is that we can dress pretty conservatively and still have it come off as insanely lewd. Mom wore a black cocktail dress with an imitation pearl necklace and her hair up in a bun, I was in a white blouse under a lambswool sweater, a pleated short skirt, cheap dark tights--Pete has a thing for tearing them--and patent leather shoes. When you're going to suck a guy's world entirely off alongside your mom, the more modestly you're dressed, the more perverted it looks. Out in the suburbs it also means you get to avoid the microskirts and fishnets look which screams to the neighbors 'I've just hired a pair of hookers' or the mid-range raincoat over microskirts and fishnets look which screams 'I've just hired a pair of pricey hookers."

Pete's living room looks like the back room of a Radio Shack, computer guts everywhere, every surface turned into a makeshift workbench. It's not a suitable place for lovemaking; I don't want to have to pull shards of a soundcard out of my perineum. His bedroom is a lot neater, with a king-sized bed to sit on, a ton of pillows to lounge up against, and a TV mounted on the wall. Mom poured out some wine, a mid-range red zinfandel that we'd picked up on the way, Pete brought out some imported dark chocolate that costs like $40/kg, and I swung my legs over his lap and turned on the Food Network. I took a bite of chocolate, mom took a sip of wine, and before either of us swallowed she pulled me into a deep kiss, mixing the wine and the chocolate. It's a good combination, and Pete enjoyed the show.

The night started off with chatting. None of us were in any rush, not with an overnight session, and since Pete has been a client for each of us for a while it was a pretty relaxed atmosphere. Pete's fingers danced over my thighs, absent-mindedly plucking ladders into the fabric as we talked baseball, business, sex work, the difference between the gentrified fag bar downtown and the really gentrified fag bar downtown, programming and other nerd shit, local politics, the contestants on Cutthroat Kitchen, just normal stuff. Mom and Pete started talking about fancy cooking stuff so I started annoying them both by claiming that sardines are just fully-grown anchovies, that DOP labels are all fake, and that instant grits are better than the regular ones until mom jabbed me with a finger and told me that my mouth should be put to better use elsewhere.

You know how some people say "Cilantro tastes like soap, that's why it's good?" Same thing for how weird it feels to go down on my mom. The first time I ever jerked off, watching a 144p clip of Rocco Sifreddi fucking a girl in the ass while flushing her head down a toilet bowl, knowing that this meant I was going to go to Hell unless I begged God for forgiveness and never did it again, I came so hard I passed out. It feels good, it feels wrong that it feels so good, and it feels even better because it feels so wrong.

She was already wet when I got between her legs. I kissed her clit and started licking, her bush tickling my nose and her thighs squeezing my ears. Fabric rasped over my head as she hiked her dress up to run her hand through my hair. Everything was muffled but I could hear kissing and clinking, and I knew that mom was undoing Pete's belt and jeans to give him a Catholic-quality handjob.

I got mom worked up, bucking her hips and getting all breathy, until she asked me to get up here and give her some help. I crawled up to his groin and winked up at him. He blushed and grinned back. Pete's not a bad-looking guy. I mean, I don't care about looks in general, I guess I can look at someone and say that objectively they're ugly, and if someone is beautiful it adds something to the experience, but like... it doesn't really figure into it. Obviously most johns don't look like supermodels but they're not uniformly ugly, as I said before the thing that johns have in common is being horny guys with a lot of disposable income. Still, Pete is towards the better-looking side of that scale.

...Okay there is one thing about him that's weirdly common for my clients, I call it 'John Balding:' where a guy is losing his hair but in a slow, uneven, and kinda weird pattern, so that even when they cross into being more bald than not, they never bite the bullet and shave it all off. Pete is only like 30% of the way through that process so it doesn't look terrible yet, but he's on that track.

Anyway, back to the sex. A fun thing about double blowjobs is that you can take them a whole lot slower than solo blowjobs. Me and mom have had a lot of practice so we go at about 1/4th speed and it feels twice as good. She started off by wrapping her hand around the shaft, slowly stroking it while she softly kissed the tip, and I licked his balls, gently lapping at one, then the other, cleaning away the day's sweat and musk, carefully taking both of them into my mouth at once. Mom swallowed half his length, and I started kissing my way up his shaft as she pulled back up, my lips touching the head as hers reached the very tip. She grabbed me by my hair and pulled me into a deep French kiss with his cock in the middle, precum mixing with spit, moaning as we felt him twitch and grunt, mom's hand on his balls and my hand on his shaft. We broke the kiss and repeated it in reverse, taking his cock in my throat as mom kissed her way down to his balls. He came after five minutes of gentle little schoolgirl kisses on each side of his cock from the pair of us. The first rope caught mom on her cheek, the second hit her hair, but I wrapped my lips tight around the head and sucked him dry before he could spill another drop.

You can't give a client a mother-daughter blowjob and not snowball the cum back and forth in front of him. We've done it enough times to get the timing down: wait until he sits up straight, because if you don't he'll be too dazed from nutting in your mouth to really appreciate it. Make sure he's looking at you, move your hair out of the way so it doesn't obstruct his view, open your lips so that a trickle of jizz almost sloshes out, move in close to your mom so that your noses are touching and it's clear that you're about to kiss, sink a palm into her tits as she grabs your ass, and then you gotta really go for it: wide-mouthed, feral, energetic, like you're trying to reach each other's sinuses. If a little bit of cum spills out because you're being so sloppy, that's a sign that you're doing it right. You're going to lick it up afterwards anyway.

We broke the kiss, I licked mom's face clean, and we took a break. We drank some more wine, he offered us cigarettes--the coolest clients are the ones that let you smoke indoors--and we cuddled and relaxed for a while with Guy's Grocery Games playing on the TV. Pete went to get some water, and returned with three bottles and a strip of Cialis. He downed two pills, we both stripped off--it was sweltering by that point--and got ready for the next round.

Mom played with his nipples and I got between his legs again, this time going lower than his balls to eat his ass out. Rimming is a trusted client privilege like the mom-daughter stuff is, except it's less about trusting them in the legal sense and more about trusting that it won't be grainy down there. I like it when a client is clean enough to rim, because I'm extremely good at it. Mom says she's better, she claims she once made a guy no-touch cum with a rimjob, but I don't fucking believe her.

He got hard after a minute of digging my tongue into his ass, but his cock was still super-sensitive so we figured we'd tease him for a while longer. We swapped places, mom ate his ass while he made out with me, squeezing my tits and playing with my cock. I like it when guys touch my tits, my cock is... fine, I guess? I don't viscerally dislike people touching it but it doesn't do much for me. After a minute of that he reaches around and works a finger into my asshole, which is much more my speed.

By the time he was two knuckles deep I looked down and saw his cock twitching, leaking precum onto his stomach. He seemed pretty worked up. I kissed his neck, nipped at his ear, and whispered, "Do you wanna breed me, Mister?"

He sure did.

I use condoms unless I've got an extremely compelling reason not to, and mom has a cool trick for getting them on. She grasped Pete's cock around the base, placed her lips around the tip, deepthroated the entire thing in a single stroke, and as she slowly lifted her head back up, his cock was neatly fitted with a condom.

As soon as I lubed up he put me on my back, pushed my ankles up to my ears,  pressed his cock against my hole and sunk into me inch by inch. He muffled my moans with a kiss and rutted me into the bed. I gotta give it to him, all that biohacking and cardio is doing something right because he railed me at a fast, steady pace until my dick was leaking all over my tummy and I couldn't form sentences in my head any more. Mom made out with him as he finished, and at that point I was just babbling nonsense. He was gentle and cautious as he pulled out of me, stroking my hair as I reached down to take off his condom. I poured the contents out over my tits, slumping back against the headboard as mom licked them clean.

It wasn't yet midnight by then, and we went on like that through the night. Licking his feet, mom-daughter 69, him sucking my cock while mom rode his dick like a Sorority cowgirl champion, more wine, more double-blowjobs, tacking an extra $200 onto the fee for the privilege of pissing in my mouth instead of having to get up to go to the bathroom, a whole buffet of fun whore stuff.

We woke up at around ten in the morning, stayed for breakfast, then said our goodbyes. Me and mom thanked him for his custom, and he thanked us for a good time. By midday we were at home, we both showered, checked our calendars, messaged our evening clients to confirm that they were still on, and then... well, the rest of the day kinda evaporated. I played Demons' Souls until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, passed out in bed, and woke up when my alarm went off in the evening.

That's one of the things I don't like about overnight sessions: you're technically only spending like, ten to twelve hours with a client, and for some of that time you're either not fucking or actively asleep, but it kinda feels like it destroys two days. By the time it's scheduled, everything in the rest of the day is either preparing for it or doing it, and when you get back it takes the rest of the day just to recover. I don't like that part of my job, and if I sit down I can probably go through a whole bunch of things I don't like about my job. I still know that my job isn't a *bad* job, because the last time I had a bad job it was at a chicken processing plant. Know how I know that the chicken job was bad? Because I excused myself for a bathroom break four hours into the shift, walked off site, and never came back.

You know what, there's another reason I know that this isn't a bad job and that mom isn't a bad mom, and I guess it's part of the reason I've written all this down in the first place. I was seven years old when I first wanted to die. By the time I got to high school, suicidal thoughts were just the radio static in my brain. I can't remember any point after like, grade school where I didn't daydream about suicide every single day.

Now? I sometimes go for weeks without thinking about killing myself. It hasn't gone away completely, it still pops up when I'm upset or stressed out or tired or really hungry, but what I do is I talk to mom about it, and she talks me out of it. I feel guilty sometimes about putting that pressure on her, and taking that pressure off is part of the reason I'm going to therapy I guess.

I hope it works out.

I really think it will.

[nancydrew428]

How To Figure Out What Year Your Nancy Drew Book Is From

For anyone who doesn’t know, the newer flashlight edition Nancy Drew books (the books with the glossy, yellow cover, with the flashlight on the back and spine) are not worth very much money. None of them are rare. Many of them are still available on Amazon or at the bookstore, like Barnes & Noble, so don’t be tricked into paying a higher price for them.

Many sellers will list them as their original copyright date, but these books are all reprints. Their copyright years are not going to be the same as the actual print year. In fact, these iconic books were not being printed until 1986. Some of the books will actually say “[Year] printing,” so you know what year it was printed, but many do not.

Despite not being worth very much monetary value, these books are fun to have and to read. And although the print date doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to price in the flashlight editions, it can still be fun to learn when your book was printed. Right now, I’m making a log of all the ND stuff I have and their dates, so I wanted to give y’all some tips to figure this out as well. Again, though, this isn’t necessary. This is just for nerds who like making lists :p

I’m going to be using The Message in the Hollow Oak for this example, because I’m struggling to find the copyright date. I want to show you how to narrow it down, but if anyone knows more than me and wants to help me figure out the exact year, feel free lol. All of this will be under the cut!

This is the book I’m dealing with:

The copyright page doesn’t give me any information, because the latest date on it is 1972, which I know is much older than this book, because as mentioned above, the glossy books didn’t come out until 1986 and later anyway. At the bottom it does have 9 10 8. If Grosset & Dunlap is like other publishing companies, this should mean that this book is on its 8th edition. However, I don’t know how often these books came out, so the edition number doesn’t mean much to me. (This is also where some of the books might say “2008 printing,” for example. If it says that, then you don’t have to follow any other steps, because you know when your book was printed.)

Then there’s the ads in the back for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books. It says that they’re celebrating over 70 years with both of them, but those ads hadn’t updated for a while. Even when the book was printed over 80 years after the first Nancy and Hardy Boys books came out, the ads still say 70+ years. That being said, I know that first HB book came out in 1927, and the first ND one came out in 1930. That means this book is from at least 2000, but it could be really anytime after that.

Then there’s the Her Interactive ad. It has a picture from the 13th game, Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon which I know came out in 2005. Again, though, I have no idea when (if ever) this ad is updated. But that means that this book came out in 2005 or later.

Then there’s the ad for Nancy Drew, Girl Detective. Yet again, I have no idea when that’s updated either, but it doesn’t seem to be updated frequently, at least in the books that I own. The last book in the picture, Troubled Waters, came out in 2007. This means that this book was printed in 2007 or later.

Now, I got lucky. On the back page, I have a sticker from when I bought the book. Most books probably won’t have this, but some might, so feel free to look for that. The book was put on the shelf in 2010, which means that the latest the book could have been printed was in 2010. Like I said, most books probably won’t have this, though.

With this information in mind, I was able to narrow the book down to being printed between 2007 and 2010.

The last thing I do is look at the price on the book. Many of these books will have a USD and CAD price up in the top left corner. After trying to figure it out for this book, I’m wondering if the prices are even based on exchange rate, because I can’t find a similar exchange rate at any point between 2007 and 2010... Does anyone know?

But, assuming this is just a weird price (because most of my books are $6.99 USD, but not $9.99 CAD), this is how to calculate it: divide the Canadian price by the United States price to find the exchange rate. For example, for this book, I would divide 9.99 by 6.99, which gets me 1.4291845494. Exchange rate is not going to be as exact as that, as it usually only goes out to 4 decimal points, so this could be rounded to around 1.4292. Now, exchange rates also depend on the bank you’re looking at. So even if you look at the same day of the same year, depending on the bank, it might be a couple cents off, and it even changes at the same bank from one day to the next. So far, I’ve had pretty good luck with this website trying to find a similar exchange rate to the one I calculated. However, for this book, I have not.

With all of this in mind, I can usually whittle down the print date to either a one or a two year period. For this specific print of this book, I can only determine that it was printed between 2007 and 2010. Ultimately, these books aren’t really going to be worth any different depending on their print date, especially within such a small time frame, so if you’re collecting the books or trying to sell them, you don’t really need to know the year they were printed (just make sure that you don’t buy or sell one of these books based on the copyright date, which is not the printing date!). I hope this helped! Let me know if you need any help determining the date of your book.

[welllpthisishappening]

Welllp These Are Books: the April 2021 Edition

I did not read Romeo and Juliet this month. I read a bunch of other books. Like, a bunch. More than one series. Because Big Bang burnout is real and grown adults missing their deadlines is a real good way to stress me out. So, I read a bunch. Good books, very bad books, books that caused limbs to flail. For positive and not-so-positive reasons. Naturally, all those reasons must be shared. Under the cut with occasionally long and rant-prone reviews, as well as spoilers. Beware of spoilers under the cut. Please keep telling me what to read, internet. My library wish list is almost comically long now.

GIVE ME ALL THE WORLD BUILDING AND SNARK AND FIGHTING! WITH MAGIC! AND SWORDS! IT’S MY FAVORITE THING IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!

Shades of Magic Series by V.E. Schwab

Kell is one of the last Antari—magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black. After an exchange goes awry, Kell escapes to Grey London and runs into Delilah Bard, a cut-purse with lofty aspirations. Now perilous magic is afoot, and treachery lurks at every turn. To save all of the worlds, they'll first need to stay alive.

— Picture it, approximately twelve forty-seven am. My husband is asleep. I am reading. The second book in this series ends. And I say, right out loud, at what might now be twelve forty-eight am, HOLY SHIT IT JUST ENDED. Justin thought we were under attack. No man has ever snapped awake quicker. He was not pleased. At least not in the same way that I was about these books. Which I goddamn LOVED. Loved. The world building. The magic. The banter. Rhy and Kell’s relationship. Once more. RHY AND KELL’S RELATIONSHIP. Which I might have cared about more than the romance??? Maybe??? I cannot get over how good this world building was. I know people have quips with it, and that’s fair. I saw the “twist” coming in the first book, and I think trying to preserve that left some plot holes that are understandably frustrating. Because Lilah definitely needed depth perception to fight as well as she did. Also did Schwab really refer to her as a cross dresser in her author’s note? Yikes. She wore a dude’s jacket, like—c’mon V.E. Other than that though. I loved it. Also shout out to @peglegsjones for suggesting this one in my 2020 post and call out to me for taking so long to read it.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can't pull it off alone. . . . A convict with a thirst for revenge. A sharpshooter who can't walk away from a wager. A runaway with a privileged past. A spy known as the Wraith. A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums.  A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes.   Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz's crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don't kill each other first.

— I’ve talked about how little I cared about anything that happened in Shadow and Bone before, but I kept seeing gifs of the Crows in the Netflix show and my brain was like: huh, I could like them. So, after some help from the very helpful internet, I’m happy to report I do in fact like them. At one point, I slunk into the couch. Like that’s how overcome with emotion I was. Kaz ripped a dude’s eye out! For Inej! Matthias loved Nina’s laugh! I would like to hug Jesper. Seriously, this hit all my high points and world building and banter and I lol’ed at “scheming face.” I would like my hold to come through faster on the sequel.

THEY DID NOT CALL INTERMISSION HALFTIME AND MY COLLEGE EXPERIENCE WAS WAY DIFFERENT THAN THESE KIDS

The Off Campus Series by Elle Kennedy

Hannah Wells has finally found someone who turns her on. But while she might be confident in every other area of her life, she’s carting around a full set of baggage when it comes to sex and seduction. If she wants to get her crush’s attention, she’ll have to step out of her comfort zone and make him take notice…even if it means tutoring the annoying, childish, cocky captain of the hockey team in exchange for a pretend date. All Garrett Graham has ever wanted is to play professional hockey after graduation, but his plummeting GPA is threatening everything he’s worked so hard for. If helping a sarcastic brunette make another guy jealous will help him secure his position on the team, he’s all for it. But when one unexpected kiss leads to the wildest sex of both their lives, it doesn’t take long for Garrett to realize that pretend isn’t going to cut it. Now he just has to convince Hannah that the man she wants looks a lot like him.

— The first book in this series was free on Amazon. So, I read it. And really liked it??? It was so chock full of cliches and badly written tropes and Garrett probably should have accepted that Hannah didn’t want to go out at the start, but like—he was cute? And as we all know I am TRASH™ for stories set in the same verse, so, like, I just kept reading these trashy college hockey books. Trashy is a compliment here. God, these kids had so much sex. So much. An incredible amount, really. I once had a guy tell me he was physically attracted to me, but not emotionally attracted to me in college. Like, that was my college experience. The first and second books were the best, I think. I didn’t really like Dean that much.

MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE HE WAS A RABBI???

The Intimacy Experiement by Rosie Danan

Naomi Grant has built her life around going against the grain. After the sex-positive start-up she cofounded becomes an international sensation, she wants to extend her educational platform to live lecturing. Unfortunately, despite her long list of qualifications, higher ed won't hire her. Ethan Cohen has recently received two honors: LA Mag nominated him as one of the city's hottest bachelors and he became rabbi of his own synagogue. Low on both funds and congregants, the executive board of Ethan's new shul hired him with the hopes that his nontraditional background will attract more millennials to the faith. They've given him three months to turn things around or else they'll close the doors of his synagogue for good. Naomi and Ethan join forces to host a buzzy seminar series on Modern Intimacy, the perfect solution to their problems--until they discover a new one--their growing attraction to each other. They've built the syllabus for love's latest experiment, but neither of them expected they'd be the ones putting it to the test.

— Ok, I know that sounds bad. Again, I’m a creature of predictable habit and this was the sequel to The Roommate, which I absolutely LOVED last year. But where as the relationship in that one was kind of swoony, this one was...I don’t know, really. Everyone was a well-rounded character and the plot was good, but there was this semi-invisible something that made it difficult for me to get fully on board with the whole story. Honestly, it might be because he was a religious figure?? Also, they got together real quick. Like zero to sixty in twenty-six seconds flat.

I KNOW IT’S BAD, IT WAS BAD AND YET—I CANNOT STOP READING IT???

Too Wild to Tame by Tessa Bailey

Sometimes you just can't resist playing with fire . . . By day, Aaron Clarkson suits up, shakes hands, and acts the perfect gentleman. But at night, behind bedroom doors, the tie comes off and the real Aaron comes out to play. Mixing business with pleasure got him fired, so Aaron knows that if he wants to work for the country's most powerful senator, he'll have to keep his eye on the prize. That's easier said than done when he meets the senator's daughter, who's wild, gorgeous, and 100 percent trouble. Grace Pendleton is the black sheep of her conservative family. Yet while Aaron's presence reminds her of a past she'd rather forget, something in his eyes keeps drawing her in. Maybe it's the way his voice turns her molten. Or maybe it's because deep down inside, the ultra-smooth, polished Aaron Clarkson might be more than even Grace can handle . . .

— Last month I read the first book in this series and it was absolutely ridiculous. This one even more so. The Clarksons are still on the road trip (sans one sibling because she fell in love in a week in the first book) and Aaron was, like, not a root’able character? Very Edward Cullen I’M A BAD GUY, BELLA vibes and his relationship with Grace was so strange. Super rushed again, obvs. Meeting in the woods is weird enough. Professing love forty-eight hours later is decidedly unbelievable. Also there was a kidnapping involved? I totally put a hold on the next book in the series.

COME UP WITH DIFFERENT TRAUMA, I DARE YOU! OR NO TRAUMA. WHAT A CONCEPT!!

The Trouble With Hating You by Sajni Patel

Liya Thakkar is a successful biochemical engineer, takeout enthusiast, and happily single woman. The moment she realizes her parents' latest dinner party is a setup with the man they want her to marry, she's out the back door in a flash. Imagine her surprise when the same guy shows up at her office a week later -- the new lawyer hired to save her struggling company. What's not surprising: he's not too thrilled to see her either after that humiliating fiasco.

Jay Shah looks good on paper...and off. Especially if you like that whole gorgeous, charming lawyer-in-a-good-suit thing. He's also infuriating. As their witty office banter turns into late-night chats, Liya starts to think he might be the one man who truly accepts her. But falling for each other means exposing their painful pasts. Will Liya keep running, or will she finally give love a real chance?

— I had such high hopes for this one. Which is on me, I guess. Because I didn’t hate this one, but it was...not great. Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I am BEGGING romance writers to come up with different trauma for their female protagonists. Not every woman has to have been assaulted to rationalize their current personality. Doesn’t have to happen. Like, ok, yes it does happen. Far more than it should. But that’s an entirely different story, and I am so tired of female characters getting absolutely destroyed by their past only to have that be their defining characteristic for so much of the book. Until a nice man they were initially mean to shows up and he’s UNDERSTANDING and he CARES and it’s just, bleh. It’s bleh. Tired and predictable and I’m over it.

IN WHICH I SHOULD HAVE LOOKED AT THE COVER

Much Ado About You by Samantha Young

At thirty-three-years old Evangeline Starling’s life in Chicago is missing that special something. And when she’s passed over for promotion at work, Evie realizes she needs to make a change. Some time away to regain perspective might be just the thing. In a burst of impulsivity, she plans a holiday in a quaint English village. The holiday package comes with a temporary position at Much Ado About Books, the bookstore located beneath her rental apartment. There’s no better dream vacation for the bookish Evie, a life-long Shakespeare lover. Not only is Evie swept up in running the delightful store as soon as she arrives, she’s drawn into the lives, loves and drama of the friendly villagers. Including Roane Robson, the charismatic and sexy farmer who tempts Evie every day with his friendly flirtations. Evie is determined to keep him at bay because a holiday romance can only end in heartbreak, right? But Evie can’t deny their connection and longs to trust in her handsome farmer that their whirlwind romance could turn in to the forever kind of love.

— Ok, so I had had this book on hold for so long that I genuinely forgot about it and forgot who it was written by. Samantha Young wrote that one book that I called the worst book I had ever read. Only I did not realize that when I started reading this one. So, you see how this sets us up for disaster. Because this book was a disaster. Everyone was goddamn annoying. And whiny. Shit, everyone whined. About everything. Also, the actual writing was atrocious. I am not usually one to be like “men can’t write,” but at one point I told both @shireness-says and @optomisticgirl that this book must have been secretly written by a man because no woman writing it would be so obsessed with pointing out where her cellulite was. Like, what??? Also the first sex scene? Oh my God, I laughed. Guffawed. The so-called love interest literally asked: “Are we going to have sex now?” And then they just did. It was so bad. Also there was a dog? Who went everywhere with the so-called love interest. And they just never explained that? I thought it was going to be part of some crushing and depressing backstory. Nah, he was just there.

HOLY SHIT THIS WAS SO DUMB I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS WAS A BOOK! A BOOK MEANT FOR YOUNG ADULTS! WHAT IS YOUNG ADULT???

The Queen’s Secret by Melissa de la Cruz

Lilac's birthright makes her the Queen of Renovia, and a forced marriage made her the Queen of Montrice. But being a ruler does not mean making the rules. For Lilac, taking the throne means giving up the opportunity to be with love of her life, the kingdom's assassin, Caledon Holt. Worse, Cale is forced to leave the castle when a horrific set of magical attacks threatens Lilac's sovereignty. Now Cal eand Lilac will have to battle dark forces separately, even though being together is the only thing that's ever saved them.

— Remember last month when I was like: can’t wait for my hold to come through on this sequel so I know what happens? What an idiot. THIS BOOK WAS SO DUMB I CANNOT BELIEVE IT WAS A BOOK. As always in my rage-induced rants, no apologies for spoilers because seriously do NOT read this, but Lilac (legit, that was her name) married some other dude but just kept fucking Cale??? Like she had a secret door? So he could come in and they could fuck?? I just—oh my God. So, all these things kept happening. Magic and bad stuff and horses were killed. Lilac’s mother was the absolute WORST. Honestly the most worthless character who at one point was like “well, my story is over, guess it’s time to leave,” and then just left?? Forced Lilac into a marriage of alliance and no love and then everything evil was defeated in point two four seconds. It happened so fast I wasn’t even sure it happened. So, then I’m like, ok, how are Lilac and Cale going to end up together? Because this is YA and that’s how it’s supposed to work. Only her being married and that marriage requiring an heir is something of a rather large hurdle. Don’t worry! Remember when Lilac and Cale were fucking? Everyone totally knew. Including the king Lilac is married to. Who is somehow like...ok with this? And tells Cale that Lilac is pregnant. ISN’T THAT WONDERFUL! Sure, because now they can lie and claim its the king’s heir. ONLY IT’S CALE’S KID! AND CALE IS COOL WITH THIS! His entire internal monologue during this is about how he realizes he might not ever be able to tell his kid he’s their father, but he’ll be around and that’s good. Wait, what??? But there’s more! Not only is Lilac having Cale’s kid, but the king she’s married to is in love with one of Cale’s spy associates. So the king and the spy are going to go hang out (and presumably have their own kids) at one castle and Lilac and Cale are going to go to another. Lilac and the king never get divorced or annulled or whatever. Everyone stays as is and married as is and—they all live happily ever after? This was presented as a good ending, I swear. What the shit, guys, seriously.

[samnatandsteve]

Nat gets Amnesia

 so @mockinghawk-romanogers asked for a fic of this based off a post of mine. it took a lot longer to get to than I planned thanks to university and life, and it’s not really the same as the of post but that’s okay. I like both of them. 

This is the post in question by the way: 

[Steve and the Bucky are in central Asia following a lead on a terrorist organization after Civil War][Nat and Sam are following other leads in central America, Nat got hurt and can't keep things straight in her mind]

Nat : *gets a long and well written love letter from Steve*Nat : awwww

Nat : *writes back* "you have a crush on me? That's embarrassing :P"

[A week later]

Steve : *calls Nat on burner phone only for emergencies* Nat, we're litterly married!

Nat : is that how I got your dog tags with your mom's ring on it?

Steve : yes! Don't you remember?

Nat : not really... did I look nice?

Steve : ....of course you did, can I talk to Sam?

Nat : why?

Steve : I need him to check something for me

Nat : what is it? I can do it

*Sam walks in, sees the phone, panicks, and grabs the phone*

Nat : hey!! What gives?

Sam : *trying to act nonchalant while shooting Nat away* hey man, what's up?

Steve : why doesn't my wife remember she's my wife?

Sam : whaaattttt? that's crazy!

Steve : is Nat hurt?

Sam : Not a cut

Nat : *in the background* tell the pizza man I want extra banana peppers on mine

Sam : *to Nat* sure thing

Steve : Sam what happened?

Sam : what do you mean?

Steve : what happen-

Sam : woops well look at that, times up, got to go! Tasha, say bye

Nat : why do I have to say goodbye to the pizza man?

Sam : because he likes you

Nat : likes likes?Sam : ohhh yeah

Steve : wait a minute Sa-

*Sam hangs up*

I can do the whole pizza man part in another one if you guys want me to. But this is the oneshot I whipped up today because I finally had the time and motivation :) 

-

They were on a mission in Brazil that of course brought them to the Amazon Rainforest and not only there but at a Hydra base right on the banks of the river itself. Hydra and their fucking cliches. Sam and Natasha went down there to do some snooping around - “Recon” as Tasha put it. Which of course quickly turned into “innocent intel gathering” as she put it in the middle of the night. Then one trip wire (fucking cliches) got them into a “good old fashion shoot out” as she so cheekly put it as she put a bullet in a Hydra goon’s head. Which may or may not have made Sam question Steve’s sanity for marrying such a scary woman. And they just in Brazil that morning, barely had any lunch and Sam’s stomach is really pissed at him. 

   But back to the point! Hydra, Amazon River, terrifying  woman for a partner, kicking Hydra goon ass all in the very humid and very yuckie air of the Amazon. Just one other reason to add to the list of “why I hate Jimmy”, Sam should've gone with scissors that last round, at least then he would be in Central  Asia and just  be dealing with the heat. 

They managed to get outside where they could get the upper hand,  mainly thanks to Tasha’s kick ass assassin skills. Now he was providing air support and Redwing was being awesome and finishing up the intel theft. 

So Tasha was on the ground kicking ass like only Sam could dream of doing, Sam was playing snipper and taking out stragglers and thinning them out for Tasha when suddenly Tasha was in the river face down and Sam was fighting to right himself midair with his ears ringing painfully.

Cold sweat ran down Sam’s back as the biting air rushed in his ears and brought tears to his eyes. He’s going to blame it on the wind if any of those Hydra idiots brought it up, because Sam Wilson does not cry for his friends, he was a stone cold certified bad bitch (by Tasha the queen of bad bitches herself) thank you very much. His stomach twists painfully making him want to throw up and he does and it’s just acid and it burns his throat and he hates today. 

In just another example of classical Hydra cliche, they blew up their little super secret base and bebrie hit Tasha, sending her into the river. His mind registers the fact that Redwing’s still connected to the goggles’ computer and online. Sam thanks the beings that be as he takes a swan dive to Tasha. One thing is for sure, Sam thought as he pulled Natasha out of the river, Steve will kill him if he finds out about this. 

“Redwing buddy tell me I didn’t just let cap become a widow.” The electronic drone bird chirps as they run away- make a strategic withdrawal into the night sky to their hotel room. Sam breathed a sigh of relief as her vitals popped up and he saw her steady heart beat. “Thank god! He still can’t know about this though!” Redwing chirps again as Sam readjusts the spy in his arms. “Well if she snitches we just have to go into hiding.” Another chirp. “Can you stop pointing out faults in my plan?” Silence. “Thank you.”  

Natalie grones as the light hits her eyes causing a pounding headache to erupt across her head. “What the fuck happened last night?” Her cold hand helped a bit when she held it against her forehead. A black man walked out of the bathroom with a hesitant smile on his face.

“Heyyy girl, how’re you feeling?” She  grunted in reply and she threw her bare legs over the side of the bed. Pausing, she looked down and raised an eyebrow, she had her underwear and tank top on. 

“Why the hell am I half naked with a hell of a hangover? Did we sleep together? You better have used protection!” She jabed her left index finger at the man who was still standing on the other side of the room by the desk. Her eyes caught the gold of her wedding band. “You better be my husband too, I am no cheat!” The man’s mouth went slack as his eyes went wide. 

“I broke her- Hydra broke her and I let them.” He started to ramble to himself, rubbing his hands over his head. Natalie pauses again, what the hell does a Nazi subdivison have to do with this? 

“I thought Captain America took care of those guys.” The man stopped and she could practically see the dread set in as she watched his back. Something in a bag on his side of the room chirped and he snapped at it to shut up. 

After a slew of questions the man, Sam, tells her she had memory loss and thinks she’s one of her covers for her job; A history teacher named Natalie Rushmen when she was really an intelligence agent named Natasha Rogers. They were on a mission in Brazil when she got hurt and they will not be leaving until she gets her memory because “Your husband will kill me if he finds out about this and as my friend you would be obliged to kill him and the whole thing would go down into history books and I don’t want to be in history books like that.” 

They stared into each other's eyes for a while, sweat running down Sam’s face as a smirk played on Natasha’s. She hummed, putting her head in her hand, finger tapping her chin,  pretending to mull it over. 

“Hmmm? What do you mean hmmm??” 

“He is my husband, and I like to think we-” 

“Then don’t think! Trust me, you love to pull shit over him, it's your favorite pastime!” 

“Okay” She got up and left him to get dressed “But i think my other favorite is to keep you on your toes.” She calls from the other side of the closed bathroom door. He flops onto the bed, rubbing his face. Thank god the mission was originally planned for a week and radio silent. 

_

A day later the front office stopped Natasha and gave her an envelope. Said envelope found its way into her purse quicker than a snitch in those Harry Potter books she was working through for the eleventh time according to Sam.   

 When she found the room to be empty and void of said man, she plopped onto her bed and opened the letter. A love letter from a guy trying to be mysterious by going by S - how sweet! But she was married and the most faithful wife-who-can’t-even-remember-her-spouse’s-face there ever was!  But she wasn’t a mean woman either, plus it was so nicely written, clearly S loved her a lot. And she was going to love breaking that big heart of his, gotta set her foot down. 

 So she got to writing her own letter complete with a lipstick kiss on the letter’s bottom corner next to her N.

“Dear S, 

Fuck you, I’m married. 

With nothing but love, 

      N <3” 

Short and to the point, just how she liked it. Smiling to herself with a bounce in her step, she hands her response to the young girl at the front desk, thanked her and went back into the room to watch some Brazilian dramas. The letter from S tucked away in her bag, she was going to ask Sam about it  later when he got back with dinner. 

But dinner came and went and the letter was left forgotten under one of her bras. That was until two days later when Sam got a call on a flip phone. Well the phone in his bag did and like always he way out, so she did the friendly thing of answering it when she saw the unsaved number thinking it was spam. 

“Hello, this is Cathrine from Bed Baths and Beyond, how can I help you on this wonderful day?” 

The midwestern American accent came easily to her as she played with her hair with the phone held in place with her shoulder and cheek 

“Nat what’s going on?” She doesn’t know how she knows but that was Mysterious Mr. S on the other end of the line. 

“Who the fuck do you take me for mr S?? I am married and I’ll bet twenty bucks you’re not even half the man my husband is!” She fished the letter out of her bag “I mean seriously! ‘Words cannot even begin to describe how beautiful you are, Aphrodite cannot even hope to compare.’ “ She reads the line in a high pitched mocking town. “Did you read that from ‘Pickup lines so used and abused even their mothers won’t recognize them’? I wouldn’t be caught dead with a man who thinks that’s the hot shit.” 

  There was a pause and Natasha had to check that he didn’t hang up. 

“What - I’m your husband! Me! Steve Rogers am your spouse!” 

“Yeah okay buddy nice try.” 

“Where’s Sam?” 

“Who’s Sam?” 

“Natasha please don’t, where’s Sam?” 

“He’s at work, doing accountant stuff with the numbers and shit.” 

“Sam barely passed algebra, he hates math.” 

Just  as about to call him a staker, Sam the man walked in with food. 

“Got you some waffles!” He did his best Donkey impression at the word waffles as he closed the door behind him. When he turned back he dropped the food and basically tackled her like a linebacker or something to get to the phone. - Point is it hurt her bruised and battered body.  “Give that to me woman!” 

“No!” 

“What’s going on with you two??” -Steve 

“Yes!” 

“I don’t wanna!” 

“I’ll buy you ice cream!” 

They pause in their battle for the phone. 

“Chocolate?” 

“I’m not a heathen like your husband.” 

“I heard that!” - Steve 

She let go, hand up and palms out in surrender. Sam put the phone to his ear.

“Heyyy Steve, whatsup man?” Sam shoved his unused hand into his armpit as he started to walk the length of the room. Nodding to the food to tell Natasha to start eating, which she does. So she watched him talk while eating her waffles far more entertained than she would be watching a Brazilan show. 

“Why doesn’t my wife remember me?” 

“You have a wife? Wow, congrats man! Who’s the lucky lady?” 

“The one you let get amnesia apparently.” 

“Amnesia-what?” 

Steve sighed on the other end.

“She hurt in any other way?” 

Sam shared a glance with Natasha who had booth cheeks stuffed with waffles. 

“Not a scratch.” 

“You sit on a throne of lies.” Natasha hisses. “I have three broken ribs Mr. S!” 

“What! Thre-!” Steve is sooo going to kill Sam. 

“Oh wow don’t you look at that! Time’s out, gotta go! Bye Steve!” And with a snap of the phone, the yelling voice of an angry husband is cut off. Sam joined Natasha at the table and started to eat his waffles. 

“Is that really my husband?” She pointed her fork at the phone laying on one of the twin beds. Sam nods as he poured syrup over his waffles. “What was I thinking?” 

“To this day I still can’t figure it out.” 

[perriewinklenerdie]

Back to the sun (Ethan Ramsey x MC)

Open Heart, Ethan Ramsey x MC

Author’s note:  Hello, hello, hello! How are you guys? I hope everyone is doing okay. In this terrifying and stressful time it's important to take care of yourself and your loved ones, stay safe <3

I’ve been spaming my blog with La Casa de Papel, because I’ve addicted myself to it and I have no shame. If you haven’t watched it and you have the chance to do so, I strongly recommend it, Sergio and Raquel is my newest OTP and I will fight for them.

  This fic is long. Like, *long*. Not the longest one I've written but it's up there. It uses the information from OH2, takes place most likely before chapter 6.

AO3 link:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23546905

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--------

„We have to stop getting ourselves into situations like these.” He muttered under his breath, gripping the handle of his suitcase so hard, he was scared it would break. He used it as an anchor, trying not to drown in the ocean of his confused emotions and feelings. She bit back a laugh, choosing instead to smirk at his remark.

“Yes, please, remind me to say ‘no’ next time you give me an assignment. I’m sure you would be over the moon.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm, feeling distant and much too cold for his liking. It’s been that way for a few weeks now, the utter and complete ‘control’ she had over herself whether they were in close proximity. A month ago, she might have been a bit more friendly, but those times were long gone, leaving only the stiff sense of professionalism that he so desperately wanted to maintain with her.

They wouldn’t be in that impasse if he hadn’t been such an idiot and just talked to her. Instead, he chose to ignore her completely. The hospital was in trouble, the team was in trouble, and deep down he knew that. He knew that she might have had a point, going against him and contacting that patient when he oh so clearly told her not to.

But she did, and now the Board sensed profit. Who could blame them, they had to figure out a way to keep the hospital afloat; it made perfect sense to use her idea, and no amount of his protests would change the fact that in their situation, with a knife against their throat, they had no other choice.

Deafening silence dropped between them, increasing the discomfort they both felt when interacting with each other tenfold. Without even a second of hesitation, she walked past him and went to the security line. He followed, feeling even worse about the whole trip than he did when he left his apartment this morning.

Because apparently, the team was now being rented out to the patient’s home like some device, they were called to the patient all the way on the island in the Philippines. They couldn’t just leave their patients, so it was decided that half of the team would go, while the other half stays behind. It was Ethan’s luck that June had her dentist appointment that week and Baz had to attend a class, which left Claire and Ethan at the airport, about to board the plane.

And still, not another word was being said. If he had a wand, he would have gone back in time and smacked himself in the back of his head. Told his past self that being stubborn when it came to situations like those had never been a good idea, especially when the only woman on his mind was involved in the situation. Pushed him towards her so they could talk, so they could avoid being stuck between hatred and emptiness.

His every try at sparking up a conversation with her that had nothing to do with their work was immediately shut down. He couldn’t even count how many times he wondered if this was what she felt like every time he pushed her away. Feeling like an idiot was bad enough, but now he also felt like an asshole, and it just added to the emptiness that roared in his chest every time he looked at her and she turned away from him.

Once they were stuck in a plane in adjacent seats, he figured there would be nowhere for them to run, so, logically, they would have to talk eventually. Oh, how wrong he was. Books, music, sleep, something called Netflix that was confusing to him but from what he gathered, it allowed her to watch movies and shows. She did it all, just so that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. Turning towards the window so she wouldn’t even have to look at him.

What a long week that would be.

-----------

He could only hope that no one heard the door to his office slam behind him. He didn’t even reach his desk when they opened again, then slammed shut once more. Steps followed, then a chair got pulled back in haste and suddenly they were seeing eye to eye.

“Can you talk to me? Or are you going to be throwing that hissy fit of yours for the rest of my residency?” she asked, as calmly as she possibly could, given the circumstance. He scoffed, leaning back in his seat with folded arms.

“I don’t see the need to talk to you. Just like you didn’t see the need to talk to me before you went behind my back and compromised the team’s ideals.”

“I did talk to you, but you were too busy caring about morals that aren’t even yours, Ethan. I get that Naveen wanted the team to work differently, trust me, I do. But times changed, situation has changed along with it, and we can’t afford to be guided just by those aspirations, no matter how noble they are. If we can’t keep the hospital alive, we can’t help anyone. Don’t you see that?” she explained slowly, refusing to let the emotions get the best of her. The last thing she needed was an argument with him, another one for the books.

“It’s not okay to throw away the sole purpose for the team’s existence because you couldn’t stop and wait for us to come up with other solution. It’s not okay to decide for yourself how the team works. You may be there because you are a brilliant young doctor, but that doesn’t give you a free pass to do whatever the hell you want.” he was getting even more winded, his knee going up and back down as he struggled to not slam his hand on the desk. It was enough that he already raised his voice at her, but it would only be a matter of time before he says something he regrets.

“You’re a goddamn hypocrite! How is it that I’m an idiot when I came up with the solution for the team to stay alive, but when you threw away Naveen’s vision because you needed Nash’s help, it’s suddenly okay?” her tone rose slightly, her whole body shaking from anger and anxiety. What he was doing was wrong, and she was having none of it.

“I didn’t have a choice. You did, and you fell right into the trap that this circumstance set up for naïve weak links like you.”

In that moment, the world has stopped for a fraction for a second. He could see the exact moment in which she broke, like a twig on the ground in the forest when it’s stepped on. A loud crack in the otherwise silent and calm environment.

A lone tear shone in her eye before rolling down her cheek slowly, a mere whisper against her skin. The blow took her breath away, made her recoil, as though she had been shot. And maybe she was. Her chest hurt, like someone grabbed her lungs and squeezed, making it impossible to breathe. Barely holding onto the last sliver of her strength, she nodded, a barely visible move, then stood up and left the room, letting the door fall shut with a gently click behind her.

-----------

He regretted those words more than anything else in his life. Only once she placed the very strict and very stern barrier between them did he come to terms with the fact that he needed her. He wanted her. It felt different than when he was in the Amazon, and despite now seeing her every day, it felt like the distance was all the same again. When he left her for two months, he felt in control. It was his own decision, he was in charge of the situation, at least to some degree. Now, it was her. She built walls between them and set an entire ocean of space between those layers, just to make sure that he would never get through them.

It took him some time to realize that she was protecting herself from another blow from him. He hurt her enough times for her to have enough. When he finally connected the dots and came to the realization of what exactly he said to her, she was already out of reach from him. They were now stuck like this, for indefinite time, and he had no idea if there was a way out of this for either of them.

Long hours later, when the plane touched down, he felt some weight being lifted off his chest. They spoke a total of two times during the whole flight, both times about their patient, and both times it was a stiff and empty conversation.

You should be happy, Ramsey. Just like you wanted.

The hot, humid air hit him as soon as he took a step outside the plane, and he immediately regretted his choice of clothing. It crossed his mind to lose the sweater, but he found his thoughts freezing and then instantly flying out the window when he turned towards Claire, just in time to see her taking her shirt off. He choked on air, being acutely aware of how the tank top she had underneath hugged her body. When she folded the shirt and hid it in her bag, she ran her fingers through her hair to tame it a bit, and it was at that moment that she chose to look at him. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why he was staring, and that alone earned him a scoff from her.

“What are you looking at, Dr. Ramsey?” she asked, putting her sunglasses on and walking past him, not bothering to check if he was following her.

Yes, a long week ahead of them indeed.

--------

The road from the airport to the marina went without a hitch. Ethan was surprised to find out that she actually knew a bit of Filipino, so she could talk to their driver, even though most of their conversation was spoken in English.

It always fascinated him, how much he still didn’t know about her. There were so many layers to who she was, and even if he spent the rest of his life uncovering them, he wouldn’t discover everything. She was so open to people, so warm and welcoming, drawing them to her with just the way her smile warmed up the room she was in. It’s one of the things that made him fall for her, so hard and fast that he didn’t even feel when or how it happened.

He observed her as they got onto the boat. How her hair shined under the sun, how she gesticulated vividly while speaking to their Capitan, laughing at something he muttered in the language Ethan didn’t understand. He remained silent, focusing on the lines on his hands, the turmoil in his head getting louder. A shadow passed his skin and the bench he was sitting on suddenly bent under additional weight as she sat down next to him.

“Do we know anything about the patient? Who are they even?” she asked softly, gazing over her shoulders, locking her eyes on the rays of sunshine that sparkled on the surface of the water. Ethan’s line of sight, however, found its place on the side of her face, where it remained until she looked back at him.

It was a rare moment for him, when she allowed him to look into her eyes. The underlying pain, the sadness so powerful that it felt like a kick to his chest, and unspoken question of Is that really what you think of me? that he could almost hear her ask, breathlessly, barely above a whisper.

“His name is Andres Blanco, he’s 47. Used to live in Spain, then decided to move here with his wife. I don’t have any information about his condition though, so that remains to be seen.” He recited, knowing all the details by heart by now. He’s read the file he was given by Naveen more times than he could count, just so that he could distract himself from thinking of yet another way he could get Claire to talk to him.

“I can see why he moved. It’s such a peaceful place.” She mused, leaning over the side of the boat to dip her hand into the water. Her hair flew forward covering her face almost entirely, the tips getting darker as they got wet.

“Do you see yourself living here?” he remembered her asking him a very similar question when they were on a home visit a few weeks back. His answer didn’t change, but he never found out her opinion.

“I almost moved here. Five years ago.” Her reply was met with wide eyes, which in turn made her grin. “I decided to stay in The States, go for my medical degree.”

“I think you would fit in here nicely. It has just enough quietness to balance out the craziness of life.” he pointed out and for the first time in weeks, he saw her smiling. Dimples created a stark contrast with her otherwise sunlit skin, making his gaze stray from her eyes for just a moment.

An island came into the view, causing silence to once again fall between them. It felt different though, a tone lighter, made it easier to breathe. It gave him a glimmer of hope, maybe they were not doomed after all. She did leave his side in haste, but the coldness on her face wasn’t as biting as it once was.

A young woman was waiting for them on the shore, smiling brightly as she waited for them to approach her. The very second Claire was in her proximity, her arms went around her neck in an overly enthusiastic hug, but it seemed as though Claire was expecting it, for she reciprocated the gesture in kind.

“It’s so good to finally have you here! Mr. Blanco was awaiting your arrival. Please, come this way.” She nodded her head slightly, then led them inside the house. Ethan hurried after the two of them, touching Claire’s elbow gently to get her attention. To his surprise, she didn’t jerk away from him.

“Are all people so…”

“Happy?” she suggested, grinning at his evident discomfort, watching how his eyes narrowed at her, making her grin even wider. “Most people here are. I’d say you’re going to get used to it, but I know you long enough to know that it’s not true.”

“So, what do you propose I do?” he ran his fingers through his hair, breathing out heavily. She patted his shoulder briefly in return.

“Deal with it.”

He still wasn’t used to her being so detached from him, so indifferent to everything he was doing. Of course, he had no way of knowing if she was truly over him, or if she was only pretending, but in that moment, he could only go on what was in front of him. And all he saw was her indifferent demeanor, with rare moments in which he could see glimpses of how she really felt.

The inside of the house provided much needed shade and protection from the sun, along with the pleasant sensation of coolness. In the grand living room, he spotted a pair, fully focused on the game of chess between them. A man looked up when he heard them walk in and smiled widely.

“Ah! Doctors, I assume? Please, come on in, have a seat. Would you like some iced coffee? Are you hungry?” he stood up slowly and approached them, greeting Claire first, then Ethan. “Paula, if you would be so kind to-“

“Please, Mr. Blanco, it’s quite alright. All that can wait, we’d much rather get started if that’s okay with you.” Ethan interrupted, aware of how rude it might sound. A warm touch on his arm stopped him from saying anything else.

“What Dr. Ramsey meant is that we would love to, but it all can be done in the meantime. If you could clue us into your symptoms? Where did they start?” Claire smiled, speaking softly and quietly, handling the situation far better than he did. He was grateful that she did get his point across without sounding stiff, and the fact that Andres immediately nodded and complied with her wish only made him appreciate her more.

They found out that his wife’s name was Carla and that it was her who reached out to them. His symptoms didn’t point towards anything specific, exactly how they expected it to be. After taking samples to run some tests, they decided to retreat to their rooms for the afternoon, giving their patient some space.

“So, what do you think is wrong with him?” he asked when they were alone in the hallway, hoping not so silently that she would actually talk to him. She leaned against the wall, taking a deep breath, drilling holes into the floor with her gaze.

“I don’t know. Let’s wait for the test results and then we’ll pick up this conversation.”

And with that, she disappeared behind the door to her room. A sinking feeling in his stomach got worse every time she did that, but he couldn’t really blame her. Ever since the argument in his office, their relationship was practically nonexistent, and he had no one else but himself to blame. She refused to let him talk, and he refused to run after her like a kicked puppy. Both too stubborn to resolve the situation.

--------

The evening air brought a gentle breeze from the ocean, making trees around the house whisper softly as their leaves moved. They were seated on the patio, lit by candles and lit torches that lined the way to the beach. Food was already gone from the table, only glasses of wine left. Claire fell into an easy routine, insisting that Paula joined them, noticing how Carla called her ‘Paulita’ with a voice full of fondness. The three women found the common ground almost immediately, getting lost deeper and deeper in their exchange. Meanwhile, Ethan and Andres watched them, the latter with a smile on his face, and the former with an unreadable expression.

The last rays of sunshine left the sky, prompting them to finish their gathering and head to beds. Claire excused herself, heading for the beach without looking back. It took only a fraction of a second for Ethan to decide to follow her, his feet carrying him after her, his lips curling around her name.

She couldn’t say she expected him to follow her. Truth be told, her initial intention was to get away from him so she could get some perspective on the situation, but that thought flew out of her head almost as quickly as it entered it. She’s had plenty of time to go over their last real conversation, over and over again, in great detail. She could quote it, line for line, complete with his tone and facial expressions.

Up until now, she didn’t want to face him. But now, she was ready to finish it.

They both came to a slow stop right at the edge of the water, the waves brushing against the tips of their feet slightly. She was looking ahead at the horizon. He was looking at her, unable to remember what words even were or what language could he speak. In the soft light of the moon, she looked even more radiant than in the full sun, the slightly tanned skin of hers creating a contrast in the white light during the night.

“I’ve been here before. Philippines, I mean. During high school, an exchange program. A very different time, a very different Claire, but the water feels the same. The stars look the same.” She mused, drawing a shape with the tip of her toe, watching as the waves dissolved it. “What an easy time that was.”

“Claire… I… “ he stuttered, unable to even form a coherent sentence. He could feel his breathing get elevated and his emotions flying high. Like never before, he wanted to say the right thing, he wanted that goddamn impasse to be over, but he was aware of how badly he screwed up. A simple ‘sorry’ just wasn’t enough, not this time.

“Look, I don’t want you apologizing to me. For the past month I was brewing in this state of self-loathing because with each day that passed, I realized that you may be right. That being said, I’m not sorry about my decision, and I’m not going to apologize for what I did. I’m hotheaded, I act before I think and it’s going to get me in trouble more times than save my ass, but it’s just who I am. I can’t exactly change that.” She shrugged, then looked up at him. His eyes were staring straight through her, morphing from nothingness, to a sliver of panic, to understanding.

She continued after a moment, letting out a breathless laughter, like she was relieved. “The moment I realized that, I understood what I wanted. What I needed.” Her hand went up, about to touch him, and then fell back against her side. “I need you to hold me so tight that I lose the sense of time or let me go. Keep me close or let me walk away. I’m tired of not knowing what ground I’m standing on, always feeling like I’m about to be swallowed whole. I need stability, Ethan. I need security, one way or another.”

The silence was something both of them were used to, allowing her words to ring between them before setting in properly. He was stunned, his throat closed, and he couldn’t speak if her tried. There were so many things he wanted to tell her, and yet, when he opened his mouth, no sound would come out. She understood that, knowing the feeling all too well, so she bid him goodnight, leaving him with a lasting image of her fleeting smile in the moonlight.

-------

The next morning, she greeted him at breakfast with an easy smile. There was no trace of tension in her posture, not even a hint of uncomfortableness whatsoever. Calling out to ‘Paulita’, she jumped in to help her with setting the table, leaving him to his thoughts.

She seemed okay. Definitely better than she was the night before. Miles above the pit she seemed to be treading above for several weeks. He was happy for her; how could he not be? It was his words that hurt her, it was him that made her cry, the sight of it burned into his memory.

Their conversation from the night before hadn’t left his mind for even a second. She made him face the hard truth. His anger may have been directed at her, but the real issue was the feeling of helplessness in the situation they were facing. As much as he would want to lie and say that the way she handled the problem was the source of his sour mood, he had to admit that her going behind his back hurt him more. His morals didn’t match the reality, amplifying his temper and blowing everything out of proportion.

She wasn’t a weak link. Of course she wasn’t, she was one of the strongest, and he knew it damn well. But at that point, it didn’t matter what he knew and didn’t know, because all she knew was that he considered her a liability.

His line of thought was interrupted by everyone gathering for breakfast, making him point his attention to the problem of Andres’s condition. Ethan’s eyes strayed from his plate to Claire only once, noticing how the air around them seemed lighter. He felt like he could breathe again, and chances were that it would only get better from that point on.

----------

It must have been four in the morning, but it didn’t really matter. They all stayed up until ten pm to solve the case, and it paid off. Celebratory champagne was opened, and music began flowing in the air, furniture got pushed to the sides of the room to make space for dancing. Ethan remained seated, watching how everyone around him threw all the reservations aside and just relaxed. He was never much of a dancer, not that he couldn’t, he just didn’t feel the need to.

Someone stood before him, casting a shadow upon him, prompting him to look up. Claire’s eyes sparkled with happiness, champagne and so much life in them, making him want to jump up and scream at the top of his lungs. She extended her hand towards him, wiggling her fingers invitingly.

“Come on, dance with me.” she said, pulling him up with surprising strength when he placed his palm in hers. He stumbled, catching himself onto her for support, his arm wrapped tightly around her waist.

It might have been alcohol that made him twirl her with such enthusiasm. It might have been the fever from the high temperature that made him dip her onto the floor, only to pull her back into his arms and back out again. It might have been the music she sang along to, the utter happiness on her face that made him smile too.

As fast as she pulled him onto the dancefloor, she was gone, giggling when Paula twirled around her, jumping to the beat of the song. He sat back down, taking a sip of his drink, watching the world around him go by.

It was now hours later, the sun was beginning to rise again. He should be sleeping, but the turmoil in his mind makes it impossible to even close his eyes.

There used to be a time when he would wake up early to watch the sunrise. Much like it was now, the tranquility of the world at such a young hour of the day filling him to the brim. No one else was around, he was alone with himself. It felt comforting and empty at the same time, the contradicting feelings causing waves to roll through his head.

But he wasn’t the only person up as it turned out. In a long, white dress, flowing in the breeze, stood Claire. Her feet in the water, the edges of the material wet from the contact with the liquid. She seemed lost in thoughts, swaying from side to side gently to some tune.

His feet carried him to her side, standing next to her wordlessly. They watched the sun go up, changing the sky, creating lines and shadows on their faces. In that moment, he was ready to swear that he’s never seen a more beautiful scenery before in his entire life.

The ocean was warm against his skin, his toes sinking into the wet sand slightly, providing just enough stability to help him ground himself in the situation. No words were needed, at least not now. For once, the silence was comforting, not filled with rage, loathing and regrets, but instead with comfort and security.

Suddenly, she took a step forward, then another, getting deeper into the water, her dress clinging to her body more and more. She stopped when half of her body was gone from his view, her head falling back slowly, shoulders moving up and down as she took a deep breath. He followed her, reaching for her hand with his, their fingers brushing against each other.

Eventually, she turned her head to look at him, her face blank of any emotions. His other hand brushed against her cheek, a look of wonder taking over his features.

“I’m an idiot.” He muttered, still focused on her eyes. An amused smirk appeared on her lips.

“You are. And you are welcome for the honesty too.” She added, making him laugh breathlessly.

“I mean it, really. I’ve been carrying this guilt and anger with me for such a long time, and I realized that it’s not you I’m angry at. It’s not your actions that made me say all those reckless words. It was my own cowardice.” Ethan admitted, anxious about her reaction. Her eyebrow shot up, an even combination of pensiveness and curiosity now present on her face.

“What cowardice?”

“I wasn’t brave enough to do what the team needed me to do. What you did. I wasn’t brave enough to admit that you were right. I wanted to hurt you, push you away, as far as I could, so I wouldn’t have to look at you every day and be reminded of the biggest act of cowardice I’ve ever committed.”

This was the moment in which he cuts himself open and lets her see him for who he really was. He suspected that she already knew it all, after all, she knew him better than anyone else. At times, it felt as though she could see right through him.

“I wasn’t brave enough to admit that I never wanted to let you go. I don’t want to let you go. I don’t want space, I don’t want time.” He stepped closer to her, moving his hand to the small of her back, pulling her just a bit closer to him. “I want to get lost in you, hold you so tight that the rest of the world disappears. It usually does, when I’m with you. I’m sorry I’ve been an asshole, you have every right not to believe a word I say but… I want you close”

She looked up at him without saying anything, prolonging his torture even more. They both knew it. And then, something in her face changed. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him downwards, making them both fall into the water. Her laughter rang in his ears, then got quickly cut off as she dove beneath the surface and swam away from him.

He chased after her, getting them both closer to the shore so they both could reach the ground with their feet. Claire wrapped her arms around him tightly, bringing their faces together. Right before their lips met, she managed to whisper.

“Don’t let me go.”

The kiss was like a breath of fresh air, filling him up and reaching every far end of his whole being. The intensity hit them both, making them stumble and fall to the ground, her hands gripping his hair as she laid on top of him. The waves crashed against them, soaking them to the last thread, but neither seemed to notice nor mind. He hummed quietly, letting himself get swept by the force of her influence on him, his grip on her sides tightening slightly.

Flipping them over, he wrapped one arm around her to keep her close, bracing himself above the ground with the other. She broke the kiss and leaned away, watching him with attentive gaze. His hair was dripping, droplets falling onto his skin and lips. Feeling playful, she dove forward and licked the water away, then bit his lower lip and pulled on it, eliciting a growl from him.

“If I didn’t know any better, I would think that you’re trying to seduce me.” he muttered into her ear, grazing the side of her neck with his nose. A shiver ran down her spine as she shook her head.

“Wherever would you get that idea. I was watching the sunrise, it was you who attacked me.” giggling, she detangled herself from his grip. A rush of panic rose in his chest, wondering if he read the situation incorrectly. She stood over him, hands on her hips, looking at the horizon again. “So… are you going to continue or…?”

The look on his face must have been a work of art. All the insecurity evaporated, and he couldn’t stand up fast enough. Once she was close enough for him to embrace her, he gathered her in his arms and threw her over his shoulder, a surprised gasp escaping her lips.

“You think we can make it back to the house without flooding the floor?” he asked, laughter coloring his voice. She drummed her palms against his back, pondering upon his question for a short while.

“Only one way to find out.”

[shebpaw]

Books I Haven’t Read/Finished Yet But I Want To

Hello again! 

From my last post about animal book recs, I noticed a LOT of people mentioning other books I missed. In that post, I included books/series I’ve already read, and the suggestions you guys have given sound awesome and I can’t wait to read/finish them!

In the same vein, I wanted to share some books/series that I’m either currently reading or want to read and why I’m excited.

1. Guardians of GaHoole/Wolves of The Beyond/Bears of the Ice - Kathryn Lasky

A lot of you suggested Guardians and TRUST ME, I’m right on the same page! I actually own the entire series and a few one-shots I have yet to read. The thing is, I am an INSANELY SLOW reader. I have a bit of dyslexia and ADHD so reading is actually pretty hard at times, even for books so short. I usually listen to audiobooks because it gives me the freedom to occupy my hands while “reading” (also helps pass the time while I work/drive). GoG only has the first 3 or 4 books on audio, so it’s been a while working through all 15. I’m on “Exile” right now so I’m aaaaaalmost there! 

There are, however, audiobooks for Wolves of the Beyond and Bears of The Ice, so I’m mostly caught up there. I recently cancelled my Audible subscription for money reasons so I’ve had to drop WotB until I can get it from my library. 

I really REALLY encourage you guys to read the two spin-offs of GoG if you haven’t. I feel like those two series get forgotten because GoG is “over”, but these series actually continue the series in a way, albeit peripherally. And they’re just as good! I love all three series a lot and I’ll definitely come back here after I’ve FINALLY finished GoG.

 2. Swordbird - Nancy Yi Fan 

I don’t see a lot of hype for this series and honestly there should be! Nancy Yi Fan was the youngest published author, 14, at the time of Swordbird’s publishing. So far, it’s Redwall with birds, and I’m loving it! I love birds very much, and I’m excited to see where this goes!

This book is important to me because I remember reading about Nancy Yi Fan and her accomplishments when I was about 11 and wanting to be just like her. Not to get too dramatic, but I’ve struggled with writing/grammar for a long time (again, Dyslexia and ADHD) and was told by a particularly awful teacher that I’d never write anything of value. Nancy Y Fan’s accomplishments made me feel otherwise and I really think she was the start of me working past my disabilities to write stories. I still write as an adult and I’m hoping to be published someday, and I’ll always think back to Swordbird. 

It’s a shame I haven’t read it yet. It was never in any libraries and I only just recently learned it was on Kindle and I was really excited! Life gets in the way, but I really am trying to read it. I hope Yi Fan is still writing and it would be really cool to meet her one day and thank her. 

3. The Wild Road - Gabriel King

Oh, look! More cats! After Tailchaser’s Song I was itching for more Warriors-esque books, and I’ve been told The Wild Road fits the bill! Also, Richard Adams liked it, so I have high hopes. 

I had to buy this book also because no libraries had it again. It’s really a shame, but what can you do. I get kind of hesitant to buy books I haven’t read at all because I’ve been duped before by what I thought was a good book. Also, Im poor. 

Anyway, so far I like this one! It’s a series so I hope it holds up as it goes. 

4. Catamount - Micheal Peak

Another unusual animal protag book! Sadly, I don’t own this one or seen it in a library. It’s been sitting in my Goodreads list for sometime, but I’m excited to find it! It gives me The Rescuers: Down Under vibe for some reason, its probably the eagle. 

5. Dragon of the Lost Sea - Laurence Yep 

Oh boy, I’m gonna get passionate again. 

Lemme preface this by saying I have read this book, but only NOW did I learn that it’s part of a series.

Look, EVERYONE knows Laurence Yep. He’s a prolific author. You probably had to read a work of his in school. Which is why its breaks my heart to know that this book series not ONLY has no audiobook or even e-book exists, but physical copies are REALLY hard to find. I recently tracked down one on Amazon and they were out of stock. 

I wasn’t even sure that I didn’t dream this book up for YEARS. When I was in middle school, I remember picking this book up in my school’s media center. That is the ONLY place I’ve EVER seen this book in person. I fucking loved this book. After a while, though, I forgot the title and for a bit I thought I had just made it up. This series is almost NEVER mentioned when looking up Laurence Yep, and this book is awesome! 

So, wish me luck tracking down the rest of this series, its kind of become my life’s work, ngl. I’ve considered calling up my old middle school to see if I can buy their copy off them. 

6. The Named - Clare Bell

Shout out to @climbdraws​ for reminding me that this series existed! If you haven’t seen their fan art for the series, go check it out! 

I swear I saw this in a Borders years ago, forgot the name, and had a mindblowing epiphany when Climb mentioned it some 6-ish years later. 

If you guys don’t know, I like prehistoric creatures A LOT. The Named, I think, is about prehistoric Cheetahs or some similar cat. I recently bought the first book and I’m really looking forward to it! 

7. Silverhair - Stephen Baxter

More prehistoric animals! Also another book that I haven’t found yet. It’s always out of stock when I check Amazon (as of writing I just learned that this is at my local library but I’m moving to another state in less than a week so SHIT). 

8. Song of The Summer King - Jess E. Owen

Y’know what I love more than prehistoric animals? GRIFFINS! Oooooh, do I love griffins! I literally cannot tell you how much I WISH there were more griffin books. Dragons are great, but they need to take a rest and let Griffins have the spotlight for a bit (I’m also writing a book about Griffins hint hint hint). 

I have this one on Kindle and I’m working through it. It’s a series too, so hooray! 

That’s all I got so far. I’m always open to suggestions, it’ll just take me a long ass time to read them.  

[fangirlxwritesx67]

Cross Timbers

Dean Winchester x Donna Hanscum, Sam Winchester x Jody Mills, no warnings, G-rated

Chapter 1 - 1830 words

A/N: This story was just a passing idea until I brought it up in my Slack chat and got a ton of great ideas from the folks there! Friends, I hope I have remembered everyone’s ideas and done them justice. Thanks for this and everything else! 

@boondoctorwho​ , @cherry3point14​, @cracksinthewalls​, @dawnie1988​ @fookinghelljensensthighs​ , @icemankazansky​, @itmighthavebeenintentional​ , @justcallmeasmodeus​ , @lastactiontricia​ ,  @mskathywriteswords​ , @rockhoochie​ ,  @there-must-be-a-lock​ , @thoughtslikeaminefield​ 

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

"You ready Sam? Ladies?" Dean asked.

"Oh yah, you betcha!" Donna exclaimed, swatting his ass playfully as she walked around Baby to hop in the passenger side. 

Sam was already in his SUV, Jody by his side. He gave his brother a broad wave.

"Cross Timbers State Park. Here we come!"

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

It had started one cold night earlier that year. The four of them were at Jody’s in Sioux Falls, relaxing with pizza and beers after a hunt. Sam couldn’t remember how they had gotten on the topic, maybe joking about making dinner in the fireplace.

Dean had begun to wax eloquent about the best parts of camping: cooking around a campfire, fishing, and of course, tent sex. Donna was nodding along eagerly before Sam scoffed. 

“That’s your favorite part of camping, Dean, really? The closest we’ve ever gotten to camping is sleeping in the Impala in a field somewhere when we didn’t have any place else to go.” 

Dean looked down and shrugged sadly. “Ok, so maybe I’ve never been camping. But it always sounded like fun.”

“Never been camping?!” Donna’s mouth dropped open. 

“Oh, boys,” Jody chimed in. “We have to fix this. There are so many great places we could go, either here or in Kansas.”

“We could show you such a good time!” Donna added with a giggle. “But not right now. It’s too cold right now to sleep any place but my own cozy bed.” 

It turned out that the bed in Jody’s guest room was cozy enough for Donna, especially once Dean joined her there. Sam didn’t mind, though, since he was in Jody’s own bed with her.

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

Sam and Dean had long since forgotten the camping conversation, but they soon discovered the ladies had not. In early April, the two of them began to hint in the group chat that the four of them should go camping. It took no time at all to realize it was less a suggestion and more a coordinated campaign to rope the Winchesters into camping. 

The ladies were pleasantly surprised when it didn’t take that much effort. Sam and Dean knew better than to argue with the combined power of Jody and Donna. They knew they were outsmarted in the camping department, but they were eager to learn, to try the experience. 

Jody and Donna had already determined that state park was the perfect camping spot. Remote enough to have plenty of trees, hiking trails, and water for canoeing or fishing, but still with a certain amount of running water and facilities for drinking and basic hygiene. 

Dean immediately appointed himself in charge of meal planning, because of course he was. Sam started researching camping equipment and gadgets, digging out back issues of magazines and shopping on Amazon. The group chat was busy for weeks while the four of them planned and prepped.

The ladies rolled into town and spent one night at the bunker so they could all shop and pack before heading out. It took a surprising amount of gear to go off-grid, tents and sleeping bags and more. Donna brought an air mattress, although Dean laughed and assured her they would be fine roughing it. They packed their clothes in canvas duffels: jeans and button downs, hiking boots and sandals, and of course, swimsuits.

Dean brought his guitar and fishing tackle. Sam brought a book, a notebook and new pens, as well as several boxes of unidentified tubes and pipes. 

“So many years after college and still a nerd, huh, big guy?” Dean joked when he saw it. 

“I don’t get much time to do what I want, whatever I want,” Sam retorted. “I’m not sorry I’ll be reading in a hammock while you drink beer and dangle a line in the water and call that fishing.”

“Hey, at least if I’m successful, we have something to eat.” 

“Everyone finds their own happiness.” Donna interrupted with a grin. “You boys ready?” 

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

Cross Timbers State Park was about 4 hours away, and the afternoon sun was still warm and bright when they pulled up. They rented adjoining camping spots, patches of clear level ground amidst the towering trees. There was a firepit already set in an iron ring, and the first thing the Winchester brothers did was haul the two picnic tables to either side. 

After that, they took a moment to ward the site, putting salt and sigils on every corner to keep themselves safe. Once done, they returned to the picnic tables where Jody and Donna were setting out supplies. 

Dean, as head of meal planning, reminded everyone that dinner that night would be in Donna’s hands. She had requested a list of sandwich supplies. She went to one of her bags and pulled out a set of sandwich making irons.

“These good old irons will make the best Pudgie Pies you ever tasted!” she crowed. 

“Pudgie Pies?” Sam whispered to Dean.

“It’s sandwiches and a campfire, I’m in,” he answered out of one side of his mouth. 

The two Winchesters left the ladies prepping food while they headed to opposite sides of the joined campsites to set up their tents. Their initial research into tent dimensions had been shocking. So-called “two person” tents clearly didn’t take into account one of those people being well over 6 feet.

In the end, they bought a pair of tents, each of them marketed to sleep six. Each tent seemed to have almost enough room for a couple, their duffels, and the Thermarest sleeping pads that Jody brought.

Sam spent a few minutes studying the instructions and then laid out the interlocking frame poles and nylon tent body exactly as directed. He understood the directions, but even with his reach, he couldn’t quite do it himself. Without him asking, Jody stepped to his side.

“It’s easier together,” she said as she took the opposite corner of the tent. 

The tent rose between their hands, and they staked it down securely. He arranged the bedding, rolling out sleeping bags and pillows, then stacked their bags neatly against one corner of the front wall. 

The tent had a small awning over the door, a space for them to kick off their shoes. Jody had brought a sun-bleached rag rug that she laid out right there. It was no bunker, but for a temporary habitat, well, he had seen worse. Once he had everything staked down, he looked across the campsite. 

Dean’s tent was a tangle of nylon on the ground. He was holding poles in both hands and swearing, the instructions nowhere to be seen. 

Sam started to close the space between them. “Can I give you a hand?” he called.

“I don’t need a hand!” Dean shouted, before throwing down the poles. “I’m gonna go get … water!” He stormed off into the deepening twilight. 

Sam followed the same steps he had before, but once he had the ridgepole assembled and in the tent, he called for his brother.

“Dean, I need help.” No matter how much Dean protested that he could do things by himself, he would never dream of letting his younger brother down when he needed him. Together, the two Winchesters finished setting up the second tent. 

Just in time, because Donna called from beside the fire, “Oh boys! Time to make Pudgie Pies!” 

Packages of ham and turkey were open alongside a stack of American cheese and a loaf of bread. There was mayonnaise and mustard, pickles and tomatoes too, Donna demonstrated how to coat the irons with cooking spray before layering in the sandwich makings, while Jody stoked the fire. 

A couple of sandwiches were burned in the process, but ultimately, everyone had dinner. They opened beers from the cooler and settled into folding chairs around the fire and passed around a bag of potato chips. 

“Hey you know what this needs?” Dean spoke up. “Ghost stories!” 

Everyone nodded enthusiastically, so he gave it his best shot. He opted for a classic, the hook hand in the car door. Somehow he managed to fumble it, much to the bewilderment of his audience.

“Dude,” Sam cut in. “How can you be so bad at this? Our lives are a ghost story. You literally could’ve told me how you spent your Monday morning and it would’ve been scarier than that story was. 

Dean looked to Donna and Jody for support but they shook their heads as Sam continued.

“You want a horror story? How about you in the morning, no coffee, no bacon, no nothing.”

“No nothin’?” Donna chimed in. “Now that I’d like to see.” She held out her hand with a smirk, and Dean took it. 

The four of them were comfortable together, Dean and Donna, Sam and Jody. This was a rare moment of ease for them, no one worrying about anything, just enjoying one another. 

But camping was a new thing for the brothers, still a whole different experience. They let the fire burn down and then everyone brushed their teeth at the pump out in front of their campsites, downing meds with handfuls of the metallic water. 

Sam and Jody ducked together into their neatly organized tent, leaving their shoes outside on the rag rug under the awning. That night, just being together was enough. They held hands and whispered to one another until they drifted off to sleep.

Dean and Donna tumbled into their tent, kicking their shoes off as an afterthought. They were too tired for more than sleep. But sleep eluded them. Well, it eluded Dean. Donna settled in comfortably and drifted off. But he tossed and turned on the hard ground.

By Dean’s watch, it was past midnight when Donna woke up and nudged him. 

“Still awake?” 

“No, I’m fine. I just -- can’t sleep.” He hated to admit it. 

He was a hunter, after all. He had been to heaven and hell and back. Damned if he would be beaten by a thin foam sleeping pad. But the front seat of Baby was more comfortable than this sad excuse for a bed. 

Without speaking, Donna got up. Dean reached for her but she was too quick. He heard the door to Sam’s SUV open, and then a motor running. He drifted in and out of a drowsy sulk until he heard her voice calling him softly in the dark.

“Dean,” she called from the door of the tent trying to wrestle in a giant air mattress. He got up and helped her to bring it in, lifting their sleeping bags and pillow on top. 

“Really?” he asked, his voice rough from trying to sleep.

“Okay, sure, Princess,” she answered with a giggle. “It’s me that can’t rough it, not you.”

Cross Timbers Tags: @deangirl7695, @elliloumom, @meeshw777​

“Hush,” he told her as he settled down and held out one arm. She sighed happily and curled into his embrace. Finally, for the first time all night, Dean was comfortable. His eyes grew heavy, and he yawned. Then he fell asleep with Donna’s blonde curls against his face. 

_/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_ _/\_

SPN First Last and Always: @boondoctorwho @dawnie1988 @deanwanddamons @defenderrosetyler @divadinag @emoryhemsworth @fookinghelljensensthighs @idreamofplaid @kalesrebellion @kickingitwithkirk @maddiepants @magssteenkamp @onethirstyunicorn   @there-must-be-a-lock @tloveswriting

Sam Girl For Life: @awesomesusiebstuff @lilsylvia @winchesterxfamilybusiness

Dean Curious:@adoptdontshoppets @awesomesusiebstuff @deangirl7695 @deans-baby-momma  @mrsjenniferwinchester @stoneyggirl @wayward-gypsy @winchesterxfamilybusiness

[route22ny]

New York Unmasked

by Harry Siegel

Imagining our city, for worse and for better, after the coronavirus pandemic

The city that never sleeps is taking a nap now, and it’s going to be a very different place when it finally wakes up.

Not long after the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, and again after Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, there was a lot of talk about how New York wouldn’t be the same. Both times, reports of our collective demise proved to be greatly exaggerated as the city quickly recovered, economically speaking, and resumed the upward path — ever more prosperous, populated and pricey — it’s remained on for at least the last quarter-century.

This time is different.

Any remaining vision of the city somehow picking up more or less where things had been left off went away with the decision to start shutting down the trains for four hours each night. That’s a huge though supposedly temporary shift for a system that’s run 24 hours a day for over a century with only the briefest of interruptions — until now the only one in the country that doesn’t turn off, as I’ve been shocked to re-learn every time I make the mistake of visiting another city. As with many of the decisions New York and the nation have made in this plague year, it will be much more difficult to turn things back on than it was to turn them off.

Already, the devastation is staggering. In less than eight weeks, the 13,168 (as of Friday night) confirmed coronavirus deaths here have exceeded the total number of murder victims, 12,509, over the past two decades — and that’s counting the 2,977 victims of 9/11.

New York managed to keep the death count down to 13,168 at the cost of putting the city and its economy in the equivalent of a medically induced coma, and with no assurances at all that a second wave of infections won’t be coming despite that.

While putting New York under helped keep the first wave from completely overwhelming the medical system here, as happened in Italy, “the point where we can really start at reopening…obviously is a few months away at minimum,” Mayor de Blasio said Friday.

Even at that point, whenever we finally get there, it’s hard to see everyone just getting back on the train for a crushed morning commute to the office, or servers returning to packed restaurants and bars and theaters and nightspots. Forget about tourists flying in to burn dollars; it’s an open question how many of the generally better-off New Yorkers who’ve left in the course of this will return here, or how many families will borrow or pay now so students can have the city as their campus — or if there will be a campus at all this fall.

This is all surreal. While some people talk about how the virus ravaging New York compares to 9/11, Donald Trump — who claims he lost hundreds of friends on 9/11, though he’s never named a single one of them — dispatches fighter planes to fly low over the city as a tribute to first responders.

While we still don’t know why New York was hit so hard by the virus, it’s clear that density — in places from the Meatpacking District here to the meatpacking plants in the Midwest — plays a big role in spreading it. And this is a place built on density, by far the densest big city in America as well as the biggest.

So this witchy hour we’re in is looking less like a PAUSE than a painful and fundamental shift in how the city functions and what it means to be a New Yorker.

To get through it, many people need to keep looking ahead and, I hope, looking at what New Yorkers can do in their own lives and demand from their politicians to see the city finally emerge as a fairer and more resilient one . I was born in New York City just ahead of the blackout babies, in November of 1977 — the month that Ed Koch was elected mayor and started to set the city on the path it’s mostly remained on until the virus — and I’ve remained here pretty much since. My dad grew up here, and his dad , and me and my brother are both raising our daughters here now, walking distance from each other and Rosie and Zadie.

I’m committed to the city for a lot of reasons, in addition to my family here: I own a house (or at least the bank lets me live in it), and one that’s bizarrely worth much more than I bought it for, at least if I was to sell it. My kids have a couple hundred square feet of their own outside as we shelter in place. And I know a bit and write a lot about New York, which really isn’t a skill set that travels.

But the truth is that the city of the past two decades has felt less and less like home, and more and more like the parts of Manhattan I try to avoid. I’ve spent too much of my adult life railing against the hipsters, gentrifiers, trustafarians and yuppies who didn’t have the good taste to spend their money here and then leave but instead “discovered” neighborhoods and remade them in their images, often to be priced out in time by new “discoverers.” I saved a bit of spleen for the people who rail against those people, rather than do something more productive with their time.

New York has become a city of increasingly sterile retail, one where internet listings have made real estate a more transparent and internationally accessible marketplace for foreign capital to reshape neighborhoods that preserve less and less of their old characters — for better and for worse.

It’s a corporate town, full of semi-interesting hustlers and characters along with its steady share of the depraved, the doomed, the damned and the dull. I’ve seen enough and read enough to know that none of that is new. But it’s metastasized over decades of financialized and increasingly monopolized and VC-fueled growth to swallow other values and ways of life. It’s hard to swim against a tide of money, and it takes a certain mania to even try.

Some of this is selfish, for sure. I preferred the waterfront of my youth, when the piers were barren and all but off-limits but for the bold and the desperate. No one with means would walk there, let alone live there, since it still had the taint of not so long ago shipping and industry and the rougher trades that lived by the waterfront, when the High Line was just a long-abandoned elevated track west of the projects that you could break into and walk on.

That all became part of the steel-and-glass luxury city that Mike Bloomberg described, one here for companies that can afford the best and priciest, and the people who draw incomes from those companies, directly or by providing services for their FIRE (that’s finance, insurance and real estate) workers who live in The City while firefighters commute in from Westchester and Long Island, or by constructing the buildings these people live in, or from the bloated government that services the “other” people who need help to stay here at all. A city that’s priced hospital beds out of big swathes of Manhattan and Brooklyn to clear space for luxury housing.

For years, I’ve been anticipating a reset as office space declines in importance with the rise of remote work, and that in turn brings down commercial and residential prices; hoping for a different, sturdier and livelier New York that exists for and better reflects the people who live here rather than serving as a clearinghouse for the world’s money. Over my adult life I’ve read endless warnings — including in this paper — about the return of the “bad old days” that are long gone for most New Yorkers, if they were here for those days at all. Now, we’re about to get a real taste of what a sharp downturn, along with a hostile federal government, feels like: “Drop Dead.” Now they’re looming as trading floors are vacant along with everything else that isn’t actually essential, and much of what���s abruptly left won’t soon return or the money that they brought in and splashed around.

This will be painful, but New York has always found ways to make new uses of what’s here. The same way that small and sturdy Brooklyn rowhouses built for the burgeoning middle class woke up one day as $2 million “townhouses,” and Single Residence Occupancies that single men depended on to maintain lives here, such as those were, become mansions with enough money and time, office spaces can become creative spaces like warehouses became artist’s lofts. Finally, housing prices, and everything else, should relate to the incomes of the bulk of the people working here. Right now, they relate to the vagaries of the global markets.

I’ll repeat that: The size of our economy, and real estate prices, should relate to the value of the goods and services people here actually produce. That will hurt a lot of New Yorkers who’ve invested in the city, including me, as property values and rents flatten or even go down, but some of that pain is needed. A city that’s too expensive for gas stations or grocery stores — looking at you, Manhattan — is too expensive for most people.

I hope we’re becoming a city that gives a proper Bronx cheer to Airbnb and Seamless and Uber and WeWork and all the venture capital-funded wannabe monopoly “tech” companies looking to “disrupt” fundamental aspects of our life by losing money for long enough to drive their competitors out of business altogether. That resists the convenience of Amazon and its ilk to support our local grocery and book and hardware stores, so that those are still there when we really need them.

A city that knows better than to cut off its nose to spite its face, now that we know better than to touch our faces. If New York has to sleep now to survive, it’s the perfect time to dream.

harrysiegel@gmail.com

***

This essay appeared in the New York Daily News, May 3, 2020.

Photo via ShutterStock

[maverick-werewolf]

Wulfgard: The Hunt Never Ends Preview - Story 6, “Troubled Waters”

Interior illustration from The Hunt Never Ends story, “Troubled Waters”

We’re almost there - the book releases one week from today!

I am a very special kind of stressed, lemme tell you.

This preview is of the final story in the story collection and my personal favorite: “Troubled Waters.” If you didn’t know, this is a preview for my upcoming story collection, Wulfgard: The Hunt Never Ends. It’s a book, but it’s something in-between a novel and a short story collection.

Each story in the book is individual and stands on its own, but they also go in order and build upon each other. So I’m not sure if one should really call it a novel, but it’s also different than just unrelated short stories. It bridges the gap between the two mediums.

Anyway, here’s another preview - enjoy!

For more info on the book itself, you can also check out this post. Also be sure to check out the Hunt Never Ends tag for a whole lot more book previews!

And remember - Wulfgard: The Hunt Never Ends is available for preorder (digital only; physical available on release date) on Amazon.com!

Pre-Order Link

Please note that, while the ebook is now available for preorder, Wulfgard: The Hunt Never Ends will also be available in paperback on October 30 from the same Amazon listing! Paperbacks cannot be preordered using Amazon’s system, however.

Be sure to check back October 30 for the physical (paperback) edition!

If you’re interested in purchasing the book digitally, you can now pre-order it right here and have it immediately on October 30!

(Paperback edition will be available on Amazon on October 30)

------------

There were a lot of things Caiden knew how to do. Clean a sword. Maintain a bow or a crossbow, even customize the latter almost beyond recognition. Make his own arrows or bolts. Investigate a crime scene. Bandage a wound, make a tourniquet, brew a potion, hunt, forage, track, forge his own tools or weapons, carve wood, build houses or fortifications, command an army, cook meals…

But one thing he didn’t know how to do was read. And it pissed him off.

The beds in Castle Greywatch weren’t much. Some straw, changed daily, for a mattress, and some sackcloth to cover it. Any Venatori better off liked to buy their own beds, but Caiden wasn’t exactly drowning in coin. Following the dullahan encounter on Samhain, Kiya had given him a feather pillow as thanks – he didn’t want to think it had belonged to Relgar, but it probably had – and that was the nicest part of his sleeping arrangement in the castle.

He shifted his back against that pillow, currently squashed between him and the shoddy headboard and struggling to retain any fluffiness as a result. He tried to focus. Focus, he tended to be good at, but staring at the book in his hand almost made him wonder. It was a much smaller bestiary than the one Gwen had been given by Illikon, with a likewise smaller amount of illustrations.

If he had any sense, he would have just asked Gwen for help with reading. But his dignity – or maybe his stubbornness, or both – had long since thrown that idea out. He had all day to struggle with this, unless something came up. So, he reached to the nightstand beside him for the bottle of whiskey there. If there was something Castle Greywatch did have, it was decent booze.

Not that it seemed to be helping right now. It made things a little fuzzier, maybe. Slightly dulled that deep, gnawing, empty pain inside him, but not enough.

After they left Illikon, that feeling had grown louder, rowdier – tried to make itself more known. Whatever it was found claws to dig into his spine, using them to reach his skull. There, it chewed into him, left seeds of growing frustration – restless anger he couldn’t seem to muzzle. Any unwanted feelings of loneliness, of being lost, only got worse. A pulling, a need, telling him to do something.

After a few nights spent at Greywatch, it had grown to take a shape he almost recognized: hunger. Impossibly deep hunger that absolutely nothing satisfied.

That was why he couldn’t think. Not the drink. Not the page in front of him, covered in small symbols supposedly forming words, all of which made no sense. It was the smoldering flame in him turning into an empty inferno, and he had no idea how to put it out – or how to give it more fuel to burn.

Caiden’s eyes lost focus on the bestiary, staring at something inside rather than out. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand, his grip on the book loosening, letting it droop.

Some tentative excitement came creeping up the stairs just outside the room. Caiden snapped the book shut and shoved it under his pillow, folding his arms and feeling an awful lot like a five-year-old trying to hide something embarrassing.

Except the bottle of whiskey. Couldn’t really hide that. Not like it mattered, anyway; she already knew it.

Gwen rounded the corner, peering into the room past the partially ajar door. She gave a few tentative knocks, eyes on him.

Caiden grunted. Yeah. Come in. You already have.

When she stepped into the room, Caiden instantly noted she was fully suited up, wearing her leather jerkin, belt of potions, weapons… Which for her, unlike him, was unusual to see when they were around the castle. Something was up.

Gwen paused, looked at him, followed his gaze to the far wall obviously in search of something interesting there, then at him again.

He met her stare evenly. “What?”

She shot the whiskey bottle a glance. “It’s a little early to be drinking, isn’t it?”

Caiden shrugged. Did that actually matter right now?

“Sure… Okay.” Cool worry filled the room, emanating from her, lapping jittery and mildly annoying waves against him. Gwen fumbled with a letter she’d been holding halfway behind her back. “Well, everyone in the great hall was talking missions, and a new one just came in. I snatched it up – thought it might be interesting. It’s not really like anything we’ve done before…”

An unnatural urge to snap at her, tell her to get on with it, rose in his throat and forced him to swallow it. Barely. It settled in his stomach, uncomfortable and heavy, and he tried to tell himself not to be a half-drunk asshole.

“What is it?” he prompted, voice coming out too flat as he struggled to find his usual patience.

That made Gwen screw up her brow at him more than a little, but she said, “There’s a village in the mountains not far from here – secluded little place called Norhaven. It doesn’t seem very noteworthy, except it has its own freshwater spring coming out of a mountain. But now a monster’s attacking them over the water, or that’s what they’re claiming. They say it’s been burning people, of all things, and it only attacks in the dark.”

For half a second, Caiden’s mind stuttered and ground to a halt. The first time he met something that only attacked in the dark, it had been his first monster hunt. It wasn’t something he liked recalling.

But he nodded.

“They… want us there as soon as possible,” Gwen added, almost tentatively. No, not almost. Definitely. Her nerves were frayed. She was worried about something, and it only seemed to get worse the longer she looked at him.

Caiden didn’t much like people worrying about him. He never had.

So he huffed, trying to figure out how to give what she might consider a ‘normal’ response. He stood and popped his neck in a short shock of painful relief. Even if it didn’t help the pinching headache he’d gotten from being bent over a book and trying to read for so long, it felt slightly better.

“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow morning,” said Gwen, still eying him like he was sick.

He eyed her right back. “I’m fine.”

“Caiden, you’ve drunk way more than usual lately – and that’s already saying something – and way earlier in the day. You know how terrible that is for you, right? And besides that, you’re talking even less.”

Gwen frowned. Some kind of hurt came off her then, enough to make his insides almost start to shrivel.

“You can trust me,” she said at length. “If something’s wrong, talk to me about it. Wouldn’t you be the first one to tell me that you need to know if I have something going on, so it doesn’t jeopardize our mission?”

Caiden’s jaw tightened, hard, before he gave it permission. You know she’s right. Yeah, she was right, and he couldn’t tell her. Every word, every phrase that came to mind sounded dismissive. Uncaring, or at least untrusting.

But Gwen gave up fairly quickly, still wearing a frown. She nodded and said, “Okay. Want to leave in an hour or two? It isn’t far to ride. We’ll get there before sundown and we can find a place to sleep.”

Caiden nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll meet you by the stables.”

With that, Gwen turned and left – though not without throwing a quick, and decidedly worried, look back at him over her shoulder.

(More preview under the cut!)

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“These attacks,” said Gwen, “do they usually happen around the spring, under the trees?”

Asger nodded. “Mostly.”

“And has anyone been in that cave since it started?”

“Where the source is? Gods, no. Gotta have a deathwish to walk into the dark after this thing.”

“Yeah,” Caiden said, already walking around the trees and toward the cave. Behind him, Asger sputtered, while Gwen’s quiet footfalls and building, anxious excitement followed in his wake.

“Go on back to town and get some rest, Asger,” Gwen called back to him.

Caiden stopped before the mouth of the cave and squinted into it, reaching for a potion on his belt: one to enhance his senses. Beside him now, Gwen shifted, tension radiating from her like constant lightning.

“If you drink that and that thing burns you, it’ll really hurt,” she said. “I heard some Venatori pass out from pain if something catches them with one of those.”

Caiden huffed. “I didn’t last time. I won’t this time either.”

Just as he drained the potion bottle, Asger’s panting caught up with them again as he stopped by their side, drawing his bodkin dagger and holding it up in a shaking hand. Gwen blinked at him, and Caiden furrowed his brow.

Asger’s face slowly drained of color as he stared at Caiden’s eyes – a side-effect of the potion was his eyes glowing. Not much, just softly, but it tended to scare the hell out of the average person.

“You probably shouldn’t come with us,” Gwen offered slowly, like she was trying to calm Asger down from some fit of panic. “Especially since… your weapon there looks like something my partner might pick his teeth with.”

“This’s a finely-made dagger, I’ll have you know,” Asger blurted. “And I’m the watchman here, this is part of my job. Let’s go on then—”

He stepped forward, but Caiden snapped one hand out and got a firm grip on Asger’s arm, stopping him in his tracks.

“I’m on point,” he said. “You shouldn’t come, but if you’re following us, then stay behind me. Gwen…”

“On it. I’ll cover your rear— I mean, the rear.” A blush quickly rose in her cheeks. “Tom ruined me,” Caiden faintly heard her mutter under her breath.

Caiden grunted. Then he turned and led the way.

Didn’t take long for his eyes to adjust, then to adapt, thanks to that potion. Faint moonlight spilling in let him see limestone walls slick with condensation and a violently gushing spring, churning the water on the far end of the cavern at the base of the wall. Spitting it out straight into the reservoir, the flow of it turning gentle by the time it left the cave.

Heavy mist hung in the air here, maybe kicked up by the water. But something didn’t seem right.

Then he realized why.

Fear washed down upon them like frigid rain – so much fear that, for half a second, it froze every muscle in Caiden’s body. His nerves pulled taut, ready to break and snap down on him like a whip, hard enough to leave a few more scars on his back. Hand shooting to his sword hilt in a white-knuckle grip, he drew in a sharp breath and fought the chill that ran fast up his spine and forced him to be afraid.

This wasn’t natural. Gwen, from the way she was suddenly fumbling with her gear, seemed to know it.

Asger, on the other hand, didn’t. He bellowed out a hoarse shout, nearly fell spinning around to face the exit, and ran for the cave mouth.

All around them, a shrill voice echoed, “Leave this place!”

It spoke the words very clearly – not the gibberish he’d been told about.

Everything happened at once. A rush of air ripped by him, trailing cold in its wake, like off the surface of the spring itself. Asger screamed, his heavy boots scuffing the stone as something made him stumble and fall. Caiden charged forward at a surging shadow, blade ready to swing.

And an arrow lodged itself in his upper arm with a hard lance of pain and a meaty thunk.

Caiden coughed out a grunt and staggered from the impact, the arrow locking up his sword arm and stopping him mid-strike. Whatever had come past him and attacked Asger seemed already gone, moving faster than he could even understand.

Gwen appeared beside him in an instant, hand on his uninjured left arm and sputtering apologies. “Caiden!? I – gods— I shouldn’t have tried to shoot it, it moved so fast—”

The cave around him was far from silent. Asger swore as he scrambled to his feet, Gwen kept on apologizing as she tried in vain to tug Caiden out of the cave until he, halfway in a stupor, finally staggered along after her.

Boots against stone. Grass under their feet, bright moonlight overhead. Plenty of pain in his right arm that twitched useless and limp at his side.

These sensations stayed, but something was missing.

He’d heard once that silence was golden. He had never understood what ‘silence’ entirely meant. This was the closest he’d ever come.

The whispers had stopped – the fleeting memories. All of it. The fear from the monster was gone – his, Asger’s, Gwen’s – he felt no terror from anyone, though they still looked afraid. Sounded afraid. Moved like it. But he couldn’t sense it. It didn’t invade his mind, twist into him, and try to make itself at home.

And he suddenly felt blind. Deaf. Neither of those things, yet both at once – because it was gone. A sense he had known for his entire life, something that was always there. Gone, no trace left. He felt dumb.

Caiden blinked. Furrowed his brow. His shoulders tensed, pulled against the arrow still biting deep into his arm, and made him wince.

What the hell was going on?

In the corner of his vision, he saw Gwen fumble for something in a pouch on her belt, only to draw out the shattered neck of a bottle. She swore and threw it aside, turning her attention to him instead as he stared straight ahead at nothing in particular.

“Caiden – Caiden, hey, look at me!” Gwen grabbed the harness around his shoulders and tugged on it hard enough for his eyes to snap to her and stare. Her face was pale. “That arrow was poisoned. Okay? You’re probably woozy right now; it’s very fast-acting…”

“Gwen—”

She sucked in a hard breath and blurted, “Caiden if you say ‘I’m fine’ I swear to Athena I will punch you in the stomach.”

He paused and cocked his head at her, his mouth ever so slightly ajar.

“Listen,” she said, voice quivering and straining to sound strong, “the bottle for the antidote I had on me broke – I have more of it, but it’s in my saddlebag. We have to get you to the inn so we can get that arrow out and I can give you the antidote. Okay?”

“Just pull it out,” Caiden mumbled, his words coming out slurred.

“I’m not doing that, you don’t just suddenly pull an arrow out – there are procedures for this!”

One sharp tug on his uninjured arm later, and he was following her back down the mountain path, both of them led by a stumbling Asger. The watchman looked at a deep welt on his forearm, his flesh twisted and reddened – what was left of it. Most of it had burned off entirely. Asger swore more colorfully than the average sailor, wearing a deep grimace.

He separated from them with a few hurried words to Gwen – words Caiden should’ve heeded, but paid no attention to – and disappeared into a nearby home. Gwen kept leading the way, up the stairs and into the inn, still tugging on Caiden’s uninjured arm.

“By Jove!” the innkeeper shouted, starting up in an instant from where he’d been sitting in his quiet tavern.

He quickly started throwing questions, which Gwen just as quickly deflected. She mostly did that by dumping a handful of coins on the counter and asking for two rooms. All the while, Caiden leaned his uninjured arm on the nearest table and pulled in one deep breath after another.

Pain quickly found its way across his body, tightening every muscle and settling heavily in his chest, like having molten lead poured into his lungs. It didn’t leave him any room to breathe, and that didn’t leave him much room to think.

[letterboxd]

Stanning the Ancients.

Valerie Complex probes the intersection of Greco-Roman mythology and queer experience in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Neon Demon, Jumbo and Midsommar.

Ancient stories have a way of influencing modern filmmakers—in part because of their “glorious” approach to love, as actor, writer and Greek-myth-lover Stephen Fry noted at this year’s digital Hay Festival. But even beyond depictions of same-sex love, Greco-Roman mythologies lend themselves well to tales of otherness and transformation.

Mythology isn’t just a bunch of stories from thousands of years ago—it’s something we create every day. Greco-Roman mythology, in particular, has less to do with the “godly” part of the pantheon, and more with their human qualities. Their lust, jealousy, wrath and greed: on display for not just other gods but all mortals under them. These stories were a portal for us to reckon with the less-savory parts of ourselves.

More than that, these stories were a cipher; a way for us to relate to one another without the need for conversation. What are celebrities and the gossip they inspire, if not modern myths? Stans are acolytes worshipping at the temples of their respective gods. They make offerings, pray to them, build altars. Every celebrity’s past is of great interest to their worshippers, who mine their back-stories for nuggets of relatability.

Beyond direct adaptations (Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and the like), these ancient myths have informed many recent films (Prometheus and The Lighthouse; the Amazons and Wonder Woman; Oedipus and Old Boy; Homer’s The Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou? included). But queer scholars have long seen Greco-Roman myths as having a particular way of helping shape queer cinematic experience, because they exist at the same intersections.

Consider the queer sensibilities in the tall tales that feature trans and intersex characters, and all the other ways the ancient poets encompass LGBTQIA expression: through their tales of otherness, outcasts living on the fringes of society, relationships that reject heteronormativity, or that push the bounds of sexuality and identity.

When myth and movie come together to create loose adaptations, film lovers are blessed with art like The Neon Demon, Jumbo, Midsommar and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Let’s look at how Ovid, Euripides and Virgil have woven their way into the fabric of each of these stories. (Spoilers ahead!)

Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel and writer-director Céline Sciamma on the set of ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (2019). / Photo by cinematographer Claire Mathon, courtesy of NEON

The Melancholy Experience of Finite Love and the Desire of the Gaze: Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire meets Virgil’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’

Virgil’s story of Orpheus and Eurydice is woven so literally and metaphorically into Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire that it’s interesting to discover how late in the piece it came. Sciamma told me in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 that the story was one of the last elements to be included in the script. When she re-read the myth, she felt it ran perfectly parallel to Marianne and Hëloise’s relationship because the concept of gaze is extremely important for both couples.

In Virgil’s tale, it was prophesied that the marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice would be short-lived—and so it was. Eurydice dies from a snake bite, and her soul is sent to Hades. While in mourning, Orpheus gets the attention of the gods by singing and playing the lyre.

Being the rule-breaker that he is, Orpheus travels to the underworld to bring Eurydice back. Hades and Persephone are moved by his music and grant his wish that he will reunite with his wife, instructing him to keep his eyes front while his wife walks behind him into the living world. Unfortunately, he turns around—and loses her forever. We don’t know why he turned around when he was told not to—did he make the poet’s choice, or the lover’s? Perhaps the memory of Eurydice felt more feasible than having her physically.

In Sciamma’s film, Marianne (the painter), Hëloise (her subject) and Sophie (the maid) are isolated on a small island in eighteenth-century France. The trio carve out a microcosmic community where they are equal peers and status has no power. Hëloise reads the story of Orpheus to her two friends; they discuss whether he makes the poet’s choice, or the lover’s choice. Marianne and Hëloise engage in a romantic relationship, subverting the hostile, patriarchal world they live in. When their time is finally up and Marianne is running to the door to leave, Hëloise requests she turn around to see her one last time, thus imprinting a lasting image in Marianne’s mind. No one dies in their story, but, with a look, their love for one another lasts beyond the physical world.

Watch: Céline Sciamma discusses the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus in this clip from the new Criterion release of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Elle Fanning as Jesse in ‘The Neon Demon’ (2016).

Reflections and personae in The Neon Demon: Nicolas Winding Refn takes on Ovid’s ‘Echo and Narcissus’

The harsh modeling world is the perfect backdrop for The Neon Demon, which deals with ideals of beauty, deceit and narcissism. The film is also a loose adaptation of the Roman poet Ovid’s story of Echo and Narcissus from Book III of Metamorphoses. Narcissus is the beautiful hunter who upsets Aphrodite when he rejects a low-level goddess in the most asshole-y way. She curses him, and he ends up drowning when he falls in love with his reflection and tries to kiss it over a pool of water.

In The Neon Demon, Jesse (Elle Fanning) wants to be fashion’s next ‘it’ girl. She has youth and beauty on her side, which invokes jealousy in others. As her star rises, Jesse is consumed by vanity. After her harsh rejection of make-up artist Ruby (Jenna Malone), and going on an egomaniacal tirade, she is pushed into an empty pool by Ruby’s friends Sarah (Abbey Lee Kershaw) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote), thus breaking her neck.

Two stories from different millennia share a common thread: characters who love themselves to death (literally). What separates them is the queer subtext, particularly in The Neon Demon. Does Refn know his film had queer subtext? Perhaps not, though the film itself is often included in modern queer horror lists. There is an explicit attraction between the main characters, and he does an excellent job examining what that looks like when they are clouded by envy. For the women, this desire manifests in the form of companionship (Ruby), status (Gigi) or consumption (Sarah). This queer interpretation aids Refn’s exploration of relationships that exists outside of the typical portrayal of female desire.

There is a debate among viewers regarding the queer subtext and the lesbian body horror aspects of the film. Many of the film’s critics denounced the level of sexual objectification of the young women. However, objectification is a hallmark of the story: it’s a movie about the modeling world. What people miss is not only how the external world oversexualizes these characters, but how they objectify one another, and that gaze lends itself to a strong queer asthetic.

Florence Pugh as Dani in ‘Midsommar’ (2019).

Outcasts and killer cults in Sweden: Euripides’ The Bacchae as told through Ari Aster’s Midsommar

In Greek tragedy The Bacchae, Dionysus tells the citizens of Thebes he is the son of Zeus. No one believes him. He is gaslit to the point of shame. With his reputation in a shambles, the spurned demigod leaves Thebes. He soon returns in disguise with a pack of rabid women who call themselves the Bacchae—they kill King Pentheus and burn Thebes to the ground because they didn’t listen. No-one listens to Midsommar’s main character, Dani, either.

Dani is in an emotionally abusive relationship with the gaslighting Christian, and is surrounded by Christian’s friends who reject her and see her as an emotional burden. Imagine how unhappy they are when Dani accompanies them on their trip to Sweden to visit the commune of the Harga people for their Midsummer celebration. Things spiral out of control when Dani unintentionally rises to godlike status within the Harga cult, which leads to, let’s just say, consequences for her dissenters.

On its surface, Midsommar is not queer cinema—at the center of the film is a heterosexual couple. However, Dani is an emotional outcast and feels like an outsider no matter where she is; it’s an echo of queer experience that is heightened when the women of the Harga embrace Dani. She gains status within the group and receives cathartic support from the young women of the commune. This allows her to purge the toxicity she’s experienced at the hands of Christian, his friends, and the outside world.

Sure, the Bacchae and the Harga are both dangerous, insular, microcosmic communities. Those attributes aside, these are two groups that exist separate from society at large, because their way of life is unique only to them.

Noémie Merlant gazes up at the object of her desire in ‘Jumbo’ (2020).

The Allure of Inanimate Objects: Zoé Wittock’s Jumbo vs Ovid’s ‘Pygmalion’

Another story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses features Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion, who swore off women in his city and took to isolation. In his time away from society, he carved a woman out of ivory and fell in love with it. He prayed to Aphrodite to bring the sculpture to life—and she did! Could this be an early case of objectum sexuality? While there is no divine intervention in Jumbo (which premiered at Sundance this year), Zoé Wittock’s film explores the meaning of objectum sexuality, which is a form of sexual or romantic attraction focused on particular inanimate objects.

In the film, Jeanne (Noémie Merlant—yes, Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Marianne) isn’t interested in human interaction, other than with her mother Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot). Working for the cleaning crew at an amusement park, she falls in love with the newest attraction, a tilt-a-whirl ride named Jumbo. As Jeanne’s desire grows, the ride comes to life and begins to communicate via colors and sounds.

Jeanne is a societal outcast who rejects human romance; her relationship with Jumbo subverts what society understands about sexuality and connection. Coming out to her mother about her attraction is also a challenge. Margarette isn’t open to what her daughter is feeling and reacts harshly toward Jeanne by coercing her into engaging in sex with men, and, when that doesn’t work, throwing her out of the house.

Eventually, Margarette realizes love is love, and as long as her daughter isn’t hurting anyone, she can learn to accept Jeanne’s love for Jumbo. Being pushed to the fringes of society for being honest (like Jeanne), or isolating yourself (like Pygmalion), is a scenario that queer folks are all too familiar with. At least Jeanne and Pygmalion don’t face tragic ends. The odds of being rejected by loved ones is high.

Coming out to family members is hard enough, especially when your very existence challenges their sense of normalcy. But this is why chosen families are important, and in both stories, the love of an accepting, chosen few is better than the approval of the majority.

Related content

Follow Valerie on Letterboxd

Valerie interviews “Celine the Machine” at the Angelika in New York earlier this year.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Celine Sciamma answers your questions in our Letterboxd Q&A.

Jumbo and Portrait of a Lady on Fire star Noémie Merlant answers our Life in Film questions.

Midsommar director Ari Aster talks pagan rituals and psychedelic drugs in a Letterboxd Q&A.

MundoF’s essential list Opening the Vault: A Chronological History of Queer Interest & LGBTQ+ Cinema.

The Top 100 Narrative Feature Films by Women Directors

The Top 100 Women Directors of the 2010s

The 2010s—Top Romance Films

[yeonchi]

Kisekae Insights #11: Sea Princesses Part 1 (Introduction and Rider List)

(Art by Rainbow’s Network, formerly Princess Rainbow Channel, source here)

You thought five months of Sea Princesses content wasn’t enough? Why don’t we make it six then? Oh, I’m sorry, you thought this was going to be one part like the other shows we’ve gone through so far? Oh no, the Sea Princesses series has so much significance in my project for a niche (and almost forgotten) series that it’s going to take three instalments to cover everything I want to cover.

I was planning to cover my versions of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger and Kamen Rider Decade first, but I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I haven’t had time to prepare those instalments ahead of time. Also, I thought it would be better to cover Sea Princesses while it’s still fresh in my mind. In case you didn’t know, Sea Princesses content has taken up the majority of my Tumblr posts in the last six months under the coronavirus lockdown; from April to June, I reposted my reviews of the cartoon series that I wrote in 2019, then from July to September, I fulfilled an item in my bucket list by translating and reviewing the books that inspired the cartoon series. You can check them out here.

In the next three instalments, I’m going to take a look at the involvement of Sea Princesses in my personal project, as well as share some theories about the series that I’ve implemented in my project and teased in my reviews.

A brief introduction

The first mention of Sea Princesses in my personal project was in 2010, when I assigned them warrior names like I did with the Flowertots. Unlike Lucky Star, however, whose characters were divided into five different clans, the characters of Sea Princesses form only one clan, namely the Uesugi clan. In the Moushouden Series, the Uesugi clan would also be known as the Salacian Army.

After being inspired by the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XI segment Night of the Dolphin, I drafted up some mock battle fixtures for a storyline named Salacia Rebellion. The storyline wouldn’t get made into actual stories until 2017 with Three Kingdoms Series 3.

Sure enough, the Sea Princesses made it into Doctor Who as well, crossing over with two sea-related animes. They had appearances in Series 7 Part 1 (the Salacian Time War arc) and the Next Gen Series (a two-parter in Series 8 and then a minor appearance in the Series 9 finale two-parter). In the Moushouden Series, they became Kamen Riders, which I’ll elaborate on later.

Regarding timelines

Most of this series’ involvement in my project is based on the timeline of the animated series. When I bought the books, I was hoping that I could implement them into the series as well, but I decided to stick to adapting the animated series because the timelines for them and the books are very different.

So what is the series’ timeframe in terms of this project? Officially, I decided that the events of the series would be set in 2004, the release year of the first book, assuming that everything in the series takes place in one year as there is no indication anywhere in the series that the class has moved up a grade. This means that the characters would have been born around 1996-1998. You can calculate for yourself how old they would be during the years my stories are set in.

Original characters

What would any adapted series be without any original element to them? There are four original characters that I’ve made, but one of them isn’t as “original” as you may think.

The Squid Princess: Squid Girl

You thought I couldn’t make an original character for this series with a character from another series? Haha Rider machine go brrrr.

Yes, that’s right, Squid Girl is, in fact, a Salacian. Her father, the Squid King, was killed by Maurice Mouseling at the fourth Battle of Kawanakajima in 2006. He was the first king to suggest an invasion of Dryland to prevent Drylanders from coming into Salacia. Initially, the other kings were not willing to join him, but they eventually warmed to his cause, given the damage the Drylanders were doing to the ocean. Following the Squid King’s death, his daughter went onto Dryland to take revenge, but she ended up in the wrong place and well, you know the rest if you know about her series.

Squid Girl was one of the two who worked behind the scenes with the Master to bring about the Salacian Rebellion of 2010. She is seen fighting Maurice during the final battle as she attempts to take revenge for her dead father. She also served at the catalyst for the group’s backup plan when the Salacians were defeated by the Dryland armies, eventually starting another conflict amongst the Drylanders before returning to her home at the Lemon Beach House.

In 2012, Squid Girl met the Fourth Doctor in an episode of his spinoff series before she became a companion of the Fifth Doctor, alongside Tsukasa Hiiragi in Series 6 Part 2 and Series 7 Part 1, and alongside Clara Oswald and Takeru Aizawa in the 50th Anniversary Series.

In 2018, Squid Girl was part of a faction of princesses who became Amazon Riders thanks to Narutaki and Nozama Pharmaceuticals. She gained the Neo Amazons Driver and fought as Kamen Rider Amazon Neo.

The Squid Girl anime also featured a girl named Kozue Tanabe, who is implied to be an octopus. She is only mentioned once in Three Kingdoms, but I stated that she was related to the Octopus Royal Family.

The Mermaid Prince: Zhuge Shu (and son, Zhuge Sōta)

Originally, I created this character in 2012 out of nowhere and it wasn’t until 2018 that I actually gave him a backstory. Believe it or not, this was going to be my answer to the Barracuda Kingdom saga until I thought better of it and kept it separate by making him the Mermaid Prince. He was also one of Hiroki’s echoes created when he split himself all over his timeline.

A long time ago, the Mermaid Kingdom was notorious for frequently breaking the First Law of Salacia, which stipulates that Salacians are not to be seen by Drylanders. This resulted in the other kingdoms turning on them, forcing the royal family onto Dryland. The Mermaid King transformed into Agito and fought with all his might, but was killed in battle. His daughter, the Mermaid Princess, was saved by a Drylander before they could hunt her down. They eventually got married and had a child named Seretao. When Seretao was still a baby, the Shark King invited the Mermaid Princess and her husband to discuss a treaty, but his real intention was to kill them.

Luckily, Seretao was left in the care of the Wolonggang Academy, the same academy where Parker trained when he was very little. Upon graduating, Seretao became a mercenary for hire and changed his name to Zhuge Shu (courtesy name Hutiao, made from separating the characters in his name – 虎 and 儵, the latter is made up of the characters 條 and 黑).

Sometime in 2005, one of his jobs led him to the city of Hiroki’s primary school army, where he overheard two girls plotting to kill him. He eventually managed to find Hiroki and tell him to escape to Honnōji, which only served to delay the inevitable.

Over the next few years, he became acquainted with Salacia and worked odd jobs both there and on Dryland. At one stage, he took on the name Magoichi Saika and fought for the Date Army, led by Doctor Eggman. He was the other person who worked with the Master to facilitate the Salacian Rebellion and he was also the Shark King’s strategist, supplying him with weapons and strategies.

Later on, after Squid Girl executed the backup plan, Zhuge Shu, now the leader of the Saika Renegades, defected to Parker’s army. Not much was seen of him, even after they disbanded, until the Salacian Time War in November 2012. Zhuge Shu meets Parker again and helps him set up a delta wave generator, which is actually a trigger that would fire the Harmony Signal once it was charged. Following the battle, Zhuge Shu was entrusted with Akeno Shiranui, a woman who Parker accidentally married following events that led him to see her true form as a mermaid. The two got married and had a baby boy named Zhuge Sōta, who was born in October 2013.

Salacian General: Lorah

Lorah is a Salacian general who fights as Kamen Rider TheBee, with his underlings, Hugo and Tata, fighting as Drake and Sasword. He isn’t known to be a part of any royal family (that never came to mind when I created this character), but given who his underlings are, you could argue that he is affiliated with the Turtle Royal Family.

At the end of his debut episode, Lorah would be revealed to be a Roidmude alongside Hugo, Tata and the goddess Salacia; Narutaki had kidnapped their templates and had some Roidmudes copy them so she could trigger the Global Freeze. After Narutaki’s plan was foiled, Lorah and the others were rescued and they continued fighting as Kamen Riders.

Characters and Riders

When I first implemented this series in 2010, I wasn’t able to include all the characters because I was unable to find or keep records of them at the time. All I had was the characters that had descriptions on the official website at the time, including Agostinha and Dinho, even though the former had no lines and the latter had no appearances (I thought he did at one point, but after watching both series, I was proven wrong). Naimo was also added as I did remember watching The Babysitters back then.

Jaune, Goldina, Flourison, Matilda, Veto, Caton and Caramelo, the “forgotten characters” (who had no descriptions), were implemented in 2017. The speculations I had for them weren’t added onto the wiki until 2019 for the sake of completeness.

The great thing about Sea Princesses having so many characters is that I can make armies of Riders out of them. The characters’ Rider designations are derived from Ryuki, Hibiki, Kabuto, Agito and Amazons. Most of the Riders were featured in Kamen Rider Decade, while some additional Riders were added in Soulbound Series 3 and 4 because god, I can’t stop thinking about Rider War storylines with them. The Salacian Riders are split up into factions typically consisting of Riders from one series.

Ryuki Riders (led by the Shark King):

Kamen Rider Ryuki – Daniel Camielez

Kamen Rider Knight – Kelvin Galvarro

Kamen Rider Scissors – Sirilo

Kamen Rider Zolda – Elektra

Kamen Rider Raia – Soraia

Kamen Rider Gai – Marcello

Kamen Rider Ouja – Tubarina

Kamen Rider Odin – Shark King

Kamen Rider Tiger – Ester

Kamen Rider Imperer – Leia

Kamen Rider Femme – Polvina

Kamen Rider Verde – Vivi

Kamen Rider Abyss – Bia

Daniel and Kelvin are Drylanders; additionally, Daniel is the Dryland boy from The Boy and The Secret Admirer. He will be elaborated on in Part 3. Kamen Rider Ryuga has not been implemented into Decade or Soulbound, but he will be implemented in Zi-O.

Hibiki Riders – Ibuki Faction (led by Marli):

Kamen Rider Ibuki – Marli

Kamen Rider Todoroki – Caramelo

Kamen Rider Zanki – Delfi

Kamen Rider Danki – Naimo

Kamen Rider Sabaki – Matilda

Kamen Rider Eiki – Dinho

Kamen Rider Shuki – Socita

Hibiki Riders – Kabuki Faction (led by Maurico):

Kamen Rider Kabuki – Maurico

Kamen Rider Tohki – Isa

Kamen Rider Nishiki – Lia

Kamen Rider Habataki – Camarina

Kamen Rider Kirameki – Angelica

Kamen Rider Amaki – Jaune

Kamen Rider Kyoki – Goldina

Kabuto Riders – TheBee Faction (led by Lorah):

Kamen Rider TheBee – Lorah

Kamen Rider Drake – Hugo

Kamen Rider Sasword – Tata

Amazon Riders (no leader):

Kamen Rider Amazon Omega – Juli

Kamen Rider Amazon Alpha – Jessi

Kamen Rider Amazon Sigma – Agostinha

Kamen Rider Amazon Neo – Squid Girl

Unaffiliated Riders:

Kamen Rider Agito – Zhuge Sōta

Kamen Rider Gills → Chalice – Zhuge Shu

Kamen Rider Hibiki – Marcela

Kamen Rider Saga – Salacia

Soulbound Series 3 additions (2019):

Kamen Rider Amazon New Omega – Akeno Shiranui

Kamen Rider Amazon New Alpha – Miss Marla

Kamen Rider Gouki – Caton

Kamen Rider Touki – Veto

Kamen Rider Shouki – Flourison

Kamen Rider Banki – Serena

Soulbound Series 4 additions (2021):

Kamen Rider Aqua – Duante

Kamen Rider Poseidon – Windy Adams

Duante is the mysterious boy featured in The Healer while Windy is the name of the Drylander girl in The New Princess, not to mention that she is named after the Drylander girl featured in the third Sea Princesses main series book, The Windy Letters.

I’ll start covering the history of Sea Princesses’ involvement in the project from the next instalment.

[theladylovingcrow]

Black Panties and An Angel's Face Pt 1 (Sanny Christmas Fic)

** A Continuation of Silk and Satin, Leather and Lace, but there's no actual sex in this part (sorry horny friends, sorry) **

Author (As known on Various sites): Lady Lover- Rockfic, Luluthechoosingcrow - AO3, theladylovingcrow - Deviantart and Wattpad, @sammy_bluebells - Instagram, @imacrowcawcaw - main Tumblr, @theladylovingcrow - writing/art Tumblr, @insannywestan Sanny shipping Tumblr

Fandom: Greta Van Fleet

Pairing: Sam Kiszka/Danny

Length: about 3k

Warnings/tags: lingerie, cross dressing, no smut yet, established relationship, gift giving, Christmas

Summary: Sam had said that he would wear whatever Danny bought him.... would he, really? Fuck, if not them this was about to he a sucky Christmas for the both of them.

Author's notes: I've been busting my ass all morning and last night trying it finish this, because honestly a Christmas fic after Christmas is just kinda... meh. But, alas, I only got the first half, the sort of build up, done. Well, something is better than nothing, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

From @therealswanqueen 's request for me (:

"Oh if you're going to write a continuation of the lingerie fic it would be nice if Danny buys it for Sam ♡♡♡ like if he's out shopping and sees something pretty and thinks 'Sammy would look gorgeous in this' ♡"

------------

Danny mentally went over the list in his head, arms too full of stuff to actually pull it out of his pocket at the moment. He had gotten the regular shopping out of the way, and was now working his way though the upper level of the mall, searching for Christmas gifts the one day he could get away from those sneaky brothers.

He had already gotten a variety of gag gifts and weird oddities the twins were sure to enjoy at Spencer's, and a new Christmas sweater for Sam; after some deliberation, a matching one for himself, as well. Their mothers were sure to enjoy it.

It was hard to know what exactly to give when they already had most things they could want, but Danny still tried to be thoughtful and give nice things to the people that meant the most to him.

New boots, a watch, and an engraved harmonica for Jake? Check.

A vintage fur coat for Josh? Yep, and surprisingly cheap.

Books for all three Kiszka's? Yes, as well as some parchment, ink, and quills for Joshie - it was one of those random finds that hadn't been on his radar of gift ideas, but as soon as he saw them he knew Josh would love them.

All that was left was Sammy. His best friend (now lover, too) always seemed to be both the easiest and worst to shop for. He was picky, so picky that, even after all these years, Danny could rarely be 100% sure that he'd like his gift.

He went in and out of every store, desperately searching for *something* that Sam didn't already have, and that he would appreciate receiving.

Nothing.

Not a single item that would be a good fit to give his new-ish boyfriend, not even a cool pair of sunglasses to just fill put some space in his gift bag.

Danny sighed, deciding to fuck the mall and go Amazon it in the comfort of their bed. But, just as he was heading towards the exit, something caught his eye.

A blue something - pale, like a robin's egg, but speckled with small, shimmering beads instead of brown splattered spots. It was a lacy bra, hanging several racks in inside of a Victoria's Secret.

Danny stopped and stared at it, considering. Sam had said.... Sam had said that he would wear whatever Danny bought him. It had been nearly two months, and, while they had definitely had sex many, many times since then, none of the lingerie items had made another appearance. Sam hadn't even mentioned it again after that day, instead only shooting Danny the occasional meaningful look that he interpreted as "Well? I'm waiting, it's on you to continue this."

He took two steps forward, but stopped just before entering onto the lighter tiles of the store's entrance. Would Sam actually like this as his Christmas present, instead of other stuff - namely, things he could actually tell their family he got?

Danny turned and was about to walk away, but then spun around for just one last look at the bra. It was so, so pretty, and would look so, so good against Sam's tanned skin; he could envision his lover perfectly in that little blue piece, coyly teasing Danny as he ran his hands over his lacy chest.

He took in a sharp breath and marched into the store, bags of presents banging against his thighs as he rushed over to the rack to closer inspect the bra. Danny set his purchases down on the ground so he could touch it, tentatively reaching out a finger to run over the scalloped trim along one of the cups.

Danny realized that the one he was looking at would never fit Sam, but, luckily, there was a whole row of blue items in different sizes behind it. He flicked through the hangers, eyebrows knitting together at all of the different numbers, letters, prices, and, he realized, slightly different styles and designs.

Which one should he choose - what would look best on Sam, and what would fit him? Danny was at a loss. The first bra he had seen and fallen in love with appeared to be the only one of its kind, which was highly disappointing but he knew that often happened when shopping - if you fall in love with something, chances are it's not going to work out. Such was life.

The other bras, though: all were the same pale blue, but some had no beading, some possessed a ridiculous amount of straps, and one was also covered in purple, trailing vines embroidered over the lace, curling over the soft fabric.

"Sir, do you need any help?"

Danny startled, looking over his shoulder at a friendly, understanding looking employee. He nodded sheepishly, nudging aside some of his bags with his foot so he wasn't barricaded in a circle of paper bags.

"Yeah, I'm... I don't know what size to get- yeah," he cut himself off, nearly saying "to get my boyfriend" but realizing that maybe he shouldn't.

It wasn't like Danny was ashamed of being bisexual, but he figured that revealing he was dating a guy and buying him lingerie was not a good idea - not only because she could react weird, but because who knew who could recognize him. He decided it was safest to just pretend to be buying a present for his girlfriend, it was close enough and completely plausible, if only requiring more thought before he spoke.

"Of course! Do you know what size she is?"

He shook his head, looking back at all of the tags. Like every guy, he knew, roughly, that A was small and D was big - stereotypically perfect, though Danny disagreed - but there were also double letters and numbers that were confusing him. He had no frame of reference to know what size the numbers indicated, nor the scope of the sizes. 28 was the smallest he saw, but it still seemed like an awfully big number for Sam's tiny ribcage, and many of the other girls he'd met, too.

"That's all right, this is probably a surprise, huh?" The employee, he saw her name was Stephi, gave him a knowing look and a grin, and Danny nodded again, smiling back.

"Yeah, she... she's been kind of hinting, but this is totally going to be a surprise and I didn't really think to check sizes before I came. She's really small though, very skinny and uh, an A cup, I think. What are the numbers?"

"Oh, the numbers are for band size, it's like the circumference of the of the ribcage. She'd probably be a 28A, that's the smallest we have," Stephi said, sorting through the rack methodically and picking out several of the blue bras as well as a few others from a lower rung. "Do these look like they would fit?"

Danny squinted at them, trying to imagine if they would hang slack on Sam's body or sit snug like they were supposed to.

"I guess, yeah, those look like they'd fit. Though, I've never really seen her wear the shaped ones, she likes softer things. They're called, uh, it has 'bra' in it..."

Really, Danny didn't want to get the shaped ones because he thought they would pop off of Sam's body weird with nothing to fill them, and that looked both unsexy and uncomfortable. He'd heard one of his past girlfriends talk about some bra thing before; it had sounded like a lighter fabric or something, but he just couldn't remember what it was called.

"A brallette? Yes, we have those, here's a few."

She took the shaped bras and set them aside, holding out a few that looked like lacy, cut off tank tops or teddys, soft and thin fabric that would most likely lay flat if nothing was underneath.

Ah, a brallette! Danny swore he was going to pay more attention to what his partner was talking about when it came to stuff like this, be it Sam or another girlfriend - though, he hoped it would only ever be Sam from now on.

Danny looked at the bras she was holding, trying to decide. There was the soft blue one with purple vines crawling up from the band at the bottom, little flowers budding up high over the mesh and lace top and then continuing over the straps. He really liked that one, so he gently took it from her and kind of tucked it under his arm, then continued surveying.

Another was completely pale pink lace, "Millenial Pink" he was pretty sure. His eyes passed over it, going instead for one of similar design but of a rich, deep green color. He grabbed that one too, and decided not to get any of the others Stephi was holding.

He thanked her for her help, figuring he had a good grasp of what bras to get, now.

"No problem! I'm sure she'll love these, let me know if you need anything else, I'll be at the counter."

Stephi turned and started walking away, then came back to him. "Hey, you have a lot of bags, do you want to put them next to the counter while you shop, if you think it'll be awhile? It might make it easier."

Danny grinned at her. "Oh, yes, please, and thank you."

He appreciated how nice she was being to him, even though that was technically her job and she'd probably seen many hapless boyfriends in the store before. Still, it was the busy week before Christmas, and she had taken the time to patiently help him while people were rushing and yelling and making a mess of things all around them. Danny carried his bags over to where she directed and took the metal basket she gave him, turning back to survey the store for anything else that caught his eye.

Over in the left corner, he spotted a table full of colorful pieces of cloth - panties, he realized, looking at the mannequins modeling a few pairs. Danny wandered over to them, stopping briefly to run his hands over another bra but moving on when he realized it wasn't something Sam was likely to wear.

There were so many options! Danny knew that there were many, many styles of women's underwear; he was proud to say that he had seen quite a few of them first hand. Still, the colorful piles were almost making his head hurt, though his heart was beating faster with something that felt like excitement.

He picked up pair after pair, settling on the 10 for $100 deal he saw advertised. It seemed ridiculously expensive for tiny, flimsy pieces of fabric, but it would be so, so worth it when he got to see Sam's sinful hips in these cheeky little triangles.

Danny grabbed one more pair of panties and another bra - a matching, strappy set - and brought everything over to the front of the store, waiting in line with all the other ladies and boyfriends to purchase his secret gifts. He grinned at Stephi as she rung him up, thanking her profusely for the help and adding the pink striped bag to his cache of others.

He made his way past the giggling groups of teenage girls out of the store, pausing to give a few of them a smile when they blushed and pointed at him. He would stop and take pictures if they asked, but otherwise, he was a man on a mission.

Danny couldn't get the image of Sam all dressed up for him those two months ago out of his head; his stockings and garter, the corset, his sweet smile. He wasn't likely to find a corset like that at a commercial mall, but the other stuff - he wanted, he needed, to get the complete outfit.

His next stop, after dropping all the other gifts at the car like he had originally intended, was a high-end 'bohemian' boutique right next to Macy's. Danny pushed open the door, quirking his lips at some indie cover of Jingle Bells playing over the store's speaker.

Danny smiled widely, looking over the store. Florals, paisley, glitter, lace and satin and taffeta, all hung like shimmering, rainbow banners on the walls. He knew what Sam's style was, the only thing he had to do was build the bridge between the lingerie he had gotten and what Sam would wear, normally, and it was - hopefully - going to be an unforgettable gift. He decided to start at the hair clips and work his way around to the mini skirts on the other side.

~~~~

Two hours and nearly two thousand dollars later, he had three full-to-bursting bags of clothing and accessories for Sam. Danny knew he had gone over board, and over budget, but every time he thought he had found the last item he turned around and another was screaming at him, sometimes from an entirely different store, how good it would look on Sam's lithe body. This new idea had shone a new light on the mall where he had previously found nothing of interest to get his lover; now, it was like he couldn't stop the floor of gifts.

He sighed, hands straining to grasp all of the bag handles as he made his way to the parking lot, trying not to knock anyone over with his haul. Now all that was left was wrapping everything up and placing it under the tree, where Sam could receive it in a few days time.

Danny worried his lip in between his teeth as he loaded up the trunk of the car. He was happy with his purchases, but that didn't mean Sammy would like them. He tried to quell any doubt in his head, though; Sam had asked for Danny to buy him more stuff, so he had. Simple.

The only thing he had to worry about was the wrong person opening the presents - which, shit, maybe they shouldn't go under the tree.

~~~~

Jake was smirking, looking back and forth between Danny's red face and his little brother's more self satisfied, but also blushing one.

"So, Sammy, what did you get? Let us see."

Sam shook his head at first, looking like he was being asked to feed his arm to a lion, but then slowly raised his gift out of the mess of tissue paper. It was a top, silver and covered in shimmering fringe all the way down its torso and in lines along the sleeves. Some of the things Danny had gifted Sam toed the line - lacy shirts, crop tops, one skirt, booty shorts (though he already wore those) with the hope that Sam would actually like them, as in making them a part if his every day wardrobe. Dressing up for sex was fun, but Sam's androgyny, even when not sexual, was still incredibly attractive and Danny wanted to encourage it.

Jake whistled. "Dang, Sammy, I might have to "borrow" that from you. But that's not what made you blush, now let us see it. "

"Nuh-uh, no can do Jack-o. Do I demand to see everything your girlfriend gives you?"

"Ooh, so it's that kind of gift!" Josh laughed. He was sitting on the floor, surrounded by shining bits of metallic paper and rainbow wrapping, swaddled in a plush red robe and grinning like the little Christmas elf he was; he had demanded they each open one gift before they did Christmas with the entire Kiszka-Wagner clan like usual.

Danny squirmed in his seat, his face getting even darker. He had gotten Sam some regular things so as not to arouse suspicion, and then saved most of the special items for later that night, privately hoping Sam would try them on and give him a little show. But, he had slipped in one pair of frilly white and black panties to let Sam know what was to come.

Sam adamantly refused to show his brothers anything else in the bag, setting it aside behind his chair and shooting Danny a look that could only be described as sultry. Danny swallowed, dry, and opened his own gift from Sam.

It was a gorgeous silk robe, starting at a light lavender and melting into a deep, inky black at the bottom. There was embroidery along the edges, little flowers and curls trimming the sweeping bell sleeves. Black lace formed a belt along the gathered waist, little silver buttons shining against the darkness.

Danny gasped, softly running his fingers over the fabric, feeling the cool softness and already imagining it against his skin.

Sam leaned over and whispered in his ear, one hand curled around Danny's bicep. "I'll wear anything you get me, but I want you to do the same, at least try it. What do you think?"

Danny turned to Sam, almost at a loss for words. "It's... it's beautiful, Sammy, of course I'll wear it. We'll be matching."

It was incredible how fast Sam was able to take the reins of a situation and flip it - here, Danny had thought that he was indulging his lover's interest, but, apparently, Sam had realized that Danny was just as into it and brought the control back to himself. Danny was putty in his hands, buying what he wanted and following every order, and he always would be, with joy.

"Woah, that's cool. But why'd you get Danny a lacy robe?"

Danny looked up, startled, to see both of the twins leaning over and staring into the box on his lap. He quickly put the top back on and shrugged, not sure how he had forgotten they were there. It was the excitement, he supposed, and the sentimentality of the gift, too, that had distracted him.

Jake shook his head, mumbling "Weirdos," under his breath and going to start gathering up the wrapping paper strewn all over the floor. There was a weird air in the room, one Danny couldn't quite shake. Sam was still sitting way too close to him and giving him looks, not at all helping him get his head back on straight.

"So, anyways, did I mention that I got us matching sweaters? Mom will love them!"

~~~~

To Be Continued

~~~~

@satans-helper

@okietrish

@lazingonsunday

@bigthighsandstupidguys

@karrotkate

@oblvions

@lantern-inthenight

@mountainofthesunn

@ryetheruler

[writingquestionsanswered]

Rejection Woes

Anonymous said:  Hi. I apologise for the missing part. I've been rejected by 250+ agents. Most said I have an intriguing and original premise with complex characters, but it's not right for their list right now. Some loved the concept and writing, asking for the full manuscript, and then rejected it for reasons like it had too hard issues, the violence made them uncomfortable, a character seemed underdeveloped, they didn't connect with the voice, or they simply don't feel passionate enough to represent it. I've had two professional editors and one literary agent look it over. They didn't mention any of the above issues, but felt immersed and connected, and they told me that my manuscript is different. The literary agent also told me to query the best agents out there because that's what my manuscript deserved. I sent it to an independent publishing house for yet another opinion (since I always doubt praise), and the director there compared my writing to Kahlil Gibran and wanted to publish it. However, I have to pay for the publication, and they'll distribute it to Amazon, Waterstones, and Barnes & Nobles, as they have some kind of deal with them. (I checked the publishing house and it's legit). 

At this point, I'm so lost and I don't feel like a writer, or that my manuscript is worth being published. I can't figure out if something's wrong with my writing, or if it's just a matter of taste and whether my manuscript fits the format of a mainstream YA Fantasy for the agents. One of the professional editors was also a consultant at a well-known press and she was adamant about acquiring my manuscript from me (claiming that it was a powerful and different manuscript) once I'd cut the things that she wanted me to cut to follow the YA Fantasy formula, so I reworked most of it, but didn't feel comfortable compromising on the things that represented my culture and were essential to the plot. She seemed insulted and rejected me. This entire process of querying, receiving all this contradicting feedback, and being rejected over and over, has convinced me that I don't have what it takes to write a successful story, and my writing isn't good enough for the publishing world. All I wanted was to tell a story that mattered beyond just the entertainment value. To have my voice be heard. I'm sorry for dumping this on you. I don't even know what I'm trying to ask anymore. 

First, more than anything else, I want to give you some virtual hugs and make sure you understand that rejection, and having a hard time finding a home for an unusual story, is not a reflection upon the quality of your story and your talent as a writer. It also doesn’t mean there’s not an audience for your book. There’s an audience for everything--it just takes a little longer to find that audience for books that stray from the “tried and true” formula, and neither agents or publishers are interested in putting in the time to search for an audience. (More on that in a bit...)

So, what’s the explanation for the conflict between the praise you’ve received and the inability to find an agent to represent you? The explanation is money. Plain and simple.

You see, the traditional publishing industry has one goal: to make money. Every decision they make is what’s best for the bottom line. And what people may not realize about the publishing industry is that every manuscript they take on presents a potential financial risk. Why? Because they’re going to pour a ton of money into that manuscript in order to turn it into a book that can sit on shelves. They have to buy the manuscript from the agent, thus paying both the agency and the author. They have to pay their in-house team (editors, cover artist, marketing, legal, overseas rights, etc.) to get the book ready for production, and then they have to pay for the physical production of the book and thousands upon thousands of copies. Finally, they have to pay to ship those books out to book stores and Amazon, and they have to pay to promote the book. It’s a costly venture. The cost of publishing a single book for a traditional publisher can be well into the tens of thousands of dollars range, and they not only need to make all of that money back, they want to make a profit, too.

The bottom line is that a traditional publisher is going to do everything they can to minimize that initial risk by making sure every manuscript they take on is one that is likely to do well. In other words, they’re always going to look for books that follow “tried and true” formulas, because they know they’re probably going to sell well. The more a book strays from what’s known to sell well, the bigger a risk it presents. For that reason, books that stray from the usual formula are almost always written by established and successful authors. Why? Because established, successful authors have a built-in fan-base, so their name alone will drive much of the book’s sale. This grants some wiggle room in which the author and publisher can take bigger risks. They’re not going to do that with a debut author or an author with only a few books to their name. So, what can you do? These are your options...

1. Pursue Traditional Publishing with Another Manuscript

If you want to break into traditional publishing, you have to do it with a manuscript that falls in line with current trends and doesn’t push the boundaries too hard. Once you get published and have a few more formulaic books under your belt, if your books sell reasonably well, you can talk to your agent or publisher about the more risky manuscript.

2. Pursue an “Assisted Publishing House” (But Beware...) It’s super important to understand that any publishing house that makes you pay to publish your book isn’t an “independent publishing house” but an “assisted publishing house,” often called a “subsidy publisher” or “vanity press.”

An “independent publishing house” is a small traditional publishing house, meaning that you don’t pay them. They cover the costs of book production, just like in the bigger traditional publishing houses. The only difference is that you may not get an advance or may get only a very small one (hundreds of dollars vs thousands.)

The problem with assisted publishing houses (again, not the same thing as an independent publishing house) is that they are a breeding ground for scammers. They can look “legitimate” and still rob you blind. And, unlike traditional publishers (who don’t pay themselves until your book sells), most assisted publishers pay themselves out of what you pay them to produce your book. In other words, they’re not taking a risk by publishing your book. They get paid (out of your pocket) whether your book sells or not. And, despite what many of them claim, they simply do not have the same reach as traditional publishing houses as far as getting your books onto actual bookstore shelves.

The advantage to this kind of publisher, if you can find one that’s vetted by groups like ALLi, is that you don’t have to worry about doing all the footwork to get your book produced. You pay them and they do most of the work. It can also make a writer feel like they look more legitimate if they have what sounds like a traditional publishing house behind their book. And, obviously, since they’re not taking on a financial risk by contracting to publish your book, they’re much more likely to publish books that don’t follow current trends and known formulas for success.

3. Self-Publish (AKA “Indie Publish”)

The indie publishing industry has bloomed over the last ten years or so. The advent and popularity of e-books and the accessibility of indie author services has made indie publishing a more accessible, more viable route for writers whose books don’t follow current trends or “tried and true” formulas, and for writers who, for various other reasons, aren’t interested in the traditional publishing industry.

The main drawback to self-publishing is that many still view it as an inferior route to getting published, which is unfortunate because traditional publishers are just as likely to crank out some really awful books, and indie authors are just as likely to publish really fantastic, award winning fiction. The other drawback is that it’s a lot of work and it does cost money, though depending on how much you’re able to do on your own, it’s possible to publish an e-book (and even a print version) pretty much for free. The amount of money you put into your book is entirely under your control.

The benefit to being an indie author is you’re 100% in control of everything. You control the rights, you control the content, you get to decide on the title and choose what’s on the cover... no one can tell you what you can and can’t do. There are boat loads of services out there targeted toward indie authors, everything from editing and book formatting to cover design and marketing, all in a variety of price ranges. The indie author community is also strong and supportive, with lots of wonderful social media communities, not to mention organizations like The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and The Association of Independent Authors. 4. Try Social Publishing

This is an emerging yet popular means of publishing that is cost-free and a great way for budding authors to find an audience. Ultimately, social publishing is when you post your story to a site where others can read it for free. Sites like Wattpad, Tapas, Swoon Reads, Booksie, and Underlined allow you to post your book so others can read it and offer feedback, and sometimes popular authors on these sites catch the attention of agents and traditional publishers. Alternatively, you can post your story in installments through your blog.

The downside, obviously, is that you don’t get a physical copy of your book and you don’t get paid. But the upside is that it’s free, there are few restrictions, and it’s a great way to help you find an audience for an unusual story, not to mention start to create a built-in fanbase. Having a built-in fanbase can be hugely important if you decide to indie publish, as well as if you decide to seek traditional publishing. You can also go on to open up a Patreon account, which at least gives you an option for making some money off the content you create.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope that one of these options will work for you. The important thing is to not get discouraged. Try to focus on the fact that you’ve gotten so many wonderful compliments about the manuscript. People love what you’ve done--they’re just too afraid to take a risk in publishing it, but the options above offer a variety of routes around that obstacle. Good luck and hang in there! <3