#wait wait im realizing this could be taken to mean that its ambiguous whether or not he's queer

[thepringlesofblood]

[lxveille]

as in ‘crush’

joshua x reader

word count: ~ 5900 a/n: american university!AU; ambiguously non-american/non-native english speaker!reader; probably too much actual talk about IPA; the tiniest dash of  nsfw at the end

If only the course listing had warned you that concentrating in your English phonetics course would be made ten times harder by developing a truly GPA-threatening crush on one Joshua Hong.

“To facilitate pronunciation, the nasal consonant changes its place of articulation to match that of the consonant directly following…”

You are really trying to follow along with your professor’s eloquent example of an assimilation rule in the phonetics of standard English. Thus far all you have written down in your notebook, however, is just “ASSIMILATION RULES”, underlined twice with ‘homorganic nasal rule’ jotted underneath it. Since then, all you’d managed to do was rewrite over the word homorganic several times over. A part of you was trying to remember whether the professor had pronounced homorganic with five syllables or four. So at least you were still a little bit studious.

Most of you, however, is having to focus way too much on not letting your gaze flicker over to your left to where you know Joshua is sitting. He’s probably having no trouble at all following the lecture. His calm yet intensely focused gaze had been one of the first things that you’d been taken by. Other than just his overall appearance, which has been a distraction since day one of class.

“I think I’ve been mispronouncing im-polite  for years,” Seungkwan whispers to you from the desk next to you, emphasizing the nasal enough for you to clue in that he must be referencing the phenomenon your professor is going on about.

Most of those in Phonetics of the English Language are international students. Without anyone suggesting it be done, you tend to arrange yourselves in the classroom so that you’re arranged by homeland, or at least by mother tongue. You happened to be one of two in this class from your country; the other girl always sits on your right.

As it happens, the small group of students from South Korea sit to your left. Seungkwan was the one who sat on the rightmost end of that group, and so it was purely by this coincidence of this self-selected, entirely unofficial seating chart that the two of you struck up a friendship which seemed to exist exclusively within this one classroom.

You’re doing your best not to make your horrible infatuation with his friend too obvious.

“What does homo-organic mean?” you half-mouth at him, gesturing with your pen to your sorry looking notes. Seungkwan holds back a snort of laughter and shrugs at you. You give him a panicked look and then turn to your right, whispering desperately in your first language.

When you glance back over to Seungkwan, he raises his eyebrows to wordlessly ask if you got an answer.

“Can we compare notes after class?” you ask quietly. While you're posing the question, you gaze flickers beyond him and two more desks down to where Joshua is still. He has one elbow propped up on the fold-down desktop, chin resting in his palm and fingers curled in towards his lips.

“If you take notes!” he nearly threatens to go above the volume any student would dare use during side conversation.

“Shht, okay, okay,” you wave your hand at him to urge him not to risk making any kind of scene and turn your attention towards the front of the room.

Fifty-three minutes later, when the professor has struck her signature end-of-class pose of shutting her folder of notes and settling both hands on the table in the front of the room, the room erupts into a symphony of languages. Yours included, as you bid your compatriot goodbye. You about close up your notebook when Seungkwan pauses his conversation to remind you that you’d asked to revise together.

“I’ll meet you at the chairs in the hall?” The word lounge occurs to you to use, but you aren’t certain if it counts if the comfy furniture and low-set tables aren’t technically in a separate room of themselves. He nods and then slips back into Korean with his friends. You take it as your cue to finish gathering your things.

It’s cooler in the hallway. You’ll never understand why the university seems to think the classrooms can only either be uncomfortably warm or overly air-conditioned. You arrange yourself with your notebook and the course’s main textbook, already searching for extra answers in the chapter you’d only half-read the night before.

You hear Seungkwan and his friends leaving the classroom before you look up to see them. They’re laughing and (you assume) saying their goodbyes as he breaks off from the group to join you.

The two of you spend about twenty minutes going over notes and textbook chapters and doing google searches in your respective languages just to double check. At the tail end of this, Seungkwan is making notes in Hangul in the margins of his notebook while you’re busy flipping through the syllabus.

“Oh, I’m so glad the homework is just some IPA transcription,” you think out loud.

“Ah -- is it really?” Seungkwan doesn’t sound as relieved as you as he glances over at the paper in your lap. “I hate those assignments.”

“Why? It’s much easier than having to read all that theory and research.” Sure, the international phonetic alphabet had taken some getting used to, and one of the front pages of your notebook was covered in your handwritten practicing at writing the symbols out along with your notes on model words you were confident of in English for each consonant and vowel.

“I worry I don’t know how to say things correctly. Then get it wrong because of that.” He frowns only for a moment before his phone buzzes and distracts him from the conversation at hand.

“I’m happy to help if you ever want to check transcriptions together.” You doubt he’ll ever take you up on the offer. That’s been your experience with most other classroom friendships since you started school here. Friendships had mostly been found in your dorm’s common room and in extracurriculars.

“Thank you,” Seungkwan gives the standard response to such an idea, looking up from his phone with a sincere smile.

When you arrive to the next class session approximately ten minutes early, Seungkwan comes in shortly after and promptly starts asking to compare your homework. You blink with surprise for a moment before you click into action, pulling out your notebook and flipping the page where you’d completed the required transcriptions. In his evident rush to verify his work, you decide it’ll be easiest just to hand over your notes. With other students streaming you, you watch as Seungkwan glances back and forth between your work and his own.

“Ah, wait, why did you write this one with epsilon, but not schwa?” he asks, nearly slamming your notebook back onto your desk and pointing at the neatly-numbered seventh one down on your paper.

“Well… it’d be, like… wunt if you wrote it with a schwa. And it’s went,” you explain simply.

He glances over his shoulder, checking which of his friends have already arrived. “Thanks,” he says, and then he rounds on Joshua, nearly yelling something emphatically to him in Korean that has you feeling guilty even if you can’t understand a single word. An apologetic smile twitches at your lips when Joshua glances in your direction while Seungkwan is pointing at the transcriptions on his paper dramatically. As far as your aware, this is the first time Joshua has ever looked at you intentionally; the first time he’s looked at you for longer than a millisecond and it’s absolutely overwhelming to think that it’s happening because of homework corrections of all things. You divert your gaze before you get the chance to see the smile Joshua sends your way even as he’s being reprimanded.

Two weeks later, midterms are officially right around the corner. You have a study session scheduled in the library exactly fifteen minutes after your phonetics class finishes with a group of students in your semantics course. You spend probably a good part of the second-half of the lecture worrying about whether or not your classmates will able to help you with the questions you still have on the midterm material.

The moment your phonetics professor finishes going over the format of the midterm exam and announces she’s done for the day, you’re hurriedly putting your belongs back in your bag. The moment you’re about to stand up, however, a figure suddenly appears in the space you were about to step into, bocking your quick departure. You look up and find yourself at a total loss for words when Joshua is smiling down at you.

The hand holding the strap of your backpack lowers meekly as you give him a curious look. You close your mouth as soon as you realize you’re practically gaping at him.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

You nod, feeling as though the gesture must look dumb.

“Seungkwan says you’re really good at IPA and I think I’ll legitimately fail if I just using a schwa every time I can’t figure out a vowel. So, do you think you could help me study up on that?”

This is a joke. You think as much because the universe would never be so kind as to dump a beautiful boy in need right at your feet with a smile as sweet as Joshua’s. “Okay,” you answer despite the paranoid voice chiming in at the back of your mind trying to convince you that this will be a horrible mistake.

“Cool. Would the student lounge on this floor work?”

“I have to go to the library,” you snap back to your reality. “Um, now,” you add as you take a glance at your phone’s screen. Another international student has frantically texted you that he’s gotten to the library early and is already freaking out at the prospect of sustaining small talk with the quick-talking native speakers in your study group.

“Oh,” he sounds disappointed and your wistful heart is devastated at the notion. “Do you have enough time to take my number? We can text to figure out what’ll work.”

You’re in a daze through the whole exchange. Mostly because Joshua’s fingers brushed against your own as took your phone to type in his contact information. It wasn’t what you’d call sparks. More of a numbing sort of static that washed over you in a wave that left your fingers itching to be wound up with his.

“If you don’t text him I will grab your phone and message him on your behalf asking when he’s next available to spend a couple hours making out,” your closest friend scolds you in your shared mother tongue in the dining hall during lunch the next day.

You blush, and find yourself grateful - and not for the first time - that there’s no guarantee those around you can understand what you’re saying.

“I don’t think I can be alone with him. I’ll go out of my mind. My soul will escape out my stupid, open-hanging mouth and he won’t even get the help he wants.”

“There’s no way this guy is that attractive. You need some perspective, I swear.” She stabs a fork into one of the fries on her plate and then points it in your direction as another idea occurs to her. “Getting the chance to help him might help you realize he’s not some flawless being dropped down from the heavens. Nothing messes up my infatuations like hearing a guy say something  completely wrong on a basic facts level.”

“IPA is hard,” you defend, saying only the acronym alone in English.

“And you are really smart for mastering it. Be confident!” she urges. “We’ve also yet to consider that he might be asking for help from you not just for the sake of passing your phonetics midterm.”

Before you can reply you hear your name from over your shoulder. When you turn to look, you nearly drop your fork when you’re greeted with the sight of Joshua.

“Hi,” you switch into English and worry instantly that you might have food in your teeth or unflattering crumbs fallen in your lap.

“Everything go alright with your library thing?”  

“Is that him?” your friend asks, utterly shameless with the confidence that he wouldn’t be able to understand.

“It was alright,” you answer Joshua without acknowledging her.

“Oh, good.” He smiles and you’re certain your mirrored expression will give away the answer to your friend’s ignored question. “Any time to help a guy out with phonetics today?”

“Sure.” The word slips out before you think it through.

“Awesome.” His smile only flourishes. “I’m just grabbing lunch now but I’ll text you when I’m done?”

“Okay. That sounds good.” Truly, you’re astonished that you don’t stammer over your agreement.

Does my dorm work?

It had taken you a good fifteen minutes to answer that text after it first arrived from Joshua. You’d been managing a cohesive, casual conversation about when and where would work best to study up until that.  Once you’d brought yourself back to rational thought, you’d message back that it would be fine.

Which is how you’ve ended up standing outside a dormitory other than your own with a bag full of your phonetics materials and your phone in one hand as you wait nervously for Joshua to come let you into the building. He appears with a bright, appreciative smile and holds the door open for you as you come inside.

“Sorry if my room’s kinda a mess. My roommate and I keep putting off our big clean-it-all day,” he apologizes in advance as he leads you up the stairs to his floor.

His room doesn’t look that bad at all, save a few stray wrappers from snacks and bit of strewn laundry on the side of the room you quickly discover is not Joshua’s. When it’s decided that the most convenient place for you both to sit and work through the phonetic alphabet together is side-by-side on his bed, you’re grateful that the only thing that crosses your mind is how soft his duvet is.

“So… the IPA vowels?” you recall him mentioning being his point of weakness. He chuckles, and you spot a slightly embarrassed tinge to his smile. “Do you want to show me your transcriptions from class?”

Joshua hops up from the bed and brings back his notepad from class. “You’re playing teacher here, so no laughing,” he requests as he hands it over, opened up to a page full of messy IPA with corrections written in anywhere he could find space.

“You’re… obsessed with the schwa,” you conclude after about forty-five seconds of scanning the page.

“Hey! Obsessed is the wrong word,” he suggests, propping one socked foot up on the bed as he leans back on his hands, “I just default to it.”

“It’s usually not a stressed vowel,” you begin with, as you lean down to grab a pen out of your bag. With one hand holding his notebook, you resort to uncapping your pen with your teeth, holding the cap between your lips as you twirl the Bic around in your fingers to slip it onto the backend. Your preoccupation with the task means you miss the way Joshua’s gaze zeros in on your lips at the action; his own press into a thin line as he reminds himself you’re just doing something practical.

“This is an IPA chart for vowels, okay?” you speak idly as you start drawing out the arrangement of front-central-back and closed to open sounds. “And your favorite is right in the middle, mid-central. It seems like you mostly confuse it with other mid-placed vowels. But… um, both front and back placed ones.”

“You’re losing me already,” Joshua confesses with another short laugh at his own expense.

You hum lightly, drawing over a few of the phonetic symbols a second time as you try to think of how to explain it. “I usually think of an example word. One syllable. That way I know what sound for sure goes with each vowel.”

“Like, epsilon is more front than schwa,” you tap lightly at where the symbol is positioned on the chart you’d written out in his notebook. “And it sounds like in ‘bet’.” Joshua’s spine straightens up some as you beginning this explanation. You jot down your example underneath the symbol and underline the e in bet. “Then, more closed and more front is the /e/, which makes the, um… ‘ay’ sound, you know, like…”

“Bait?” he suggests. You nod, smiling encouragingly as you copy the word down, once more underlining the vowel. “Your handwriting’s nice,” he compliments as he leans in slightly to get a better look at everything you’re putting down.

“Nearby,” you carry own without expressing any kind of gratitude. His closer positioning has you feeling a bit more self-conscious. “Is the small capital i. It’s easy, like what’s in the word ‘it’, or ‘miss’, or... ‘kiss’.” He hums in understanding beside you.

“The back ones you mix up with schwa are maybe a little harder.” You tap the back of the pen against the paper; you hope Joshua won’t know it’s a sign of your nerves at his proximity. You’ve been smitten enough so far with just the look of him. You hadn’t anticipated that the smell of him would endear you all the more to him. A stay glance over towards his dresser doesn’t tell you what cologne he wears, but you’re certain he must be wearing something. No one smells this nice all on their own.

“Open-o isn’t too bad. Just, if anything makes the sound like in ‘thought’, it’s this one.” You circle the vowels in the word lightly, the ink barely leaving a mark on the page. “And then there’s the caret, which is sort of… right in the middle of schwa and open-o?” You trace the flipped v shape of the symbol. “It’s the ‘uh’ sound, as in ‘crush’.”

“I think I say it was a schwa,” he muses, watching as you write the word out.

“Crush?” you repeat, finally lifting your head to look at him.

“Crush,” he echoes more firmly. You have to admit his vowel is a bit more relaxed than when you pronounce it, making it sound closer to the schwa sound.

“I don’t know,” you surrender, fearing yourself unable to sustain eye contact without starting to blush. “You’re probably right.” You can practically hear the scolding your friend will give you for not sticking with confidence already. “You’re probably the best at English of the international kids in our class, I mean,” you reason.

“I’m from California,” he corrects you after a beat of awkward silence. You look up at him for a moment just to confirm his sincerity and proceed to shut your eyes with a grimace of embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” you apologize because it feels like the only thing you can do. “I assumed because…”

“It’s okay,” Joshua cuts in gently, like he wishes this whole thing had not come up in the first place. Another aspect of the situation for you to feel guilty for. “It happens.” You are filled with dread. Just because he’s dealt with this sort of mix up before doesn’t make you feel any better for having added another tally to the instances of it.

Your mind is searching for some kind of segue into leaving, or any kind of excuse to get out of the room.

“They’re pretty close in pronunciation,” Joshua points out instead, pointing to the caret and the schwa on your vowel chart. Guilt still leaves you wordless, so you nod in agreement. “Maybe I should try a couple transcriptions with the tips you’ve given so far?” he changes the subject officially. It’s obvious he wants to move along. At this point abiding that desire seems like the only polite thing to do.

You only spend fifteen minutes more in his room, helping him through a few transcriptions with the vowels he struggles over the most. When you gather your things to leave, he offers to walk you back down to the front door of the building. You accept only because insisting he does otherwise seems like it will make things more awkward.

When your phonetics class rolls around again, you stop in your tracks at the doorway when you see the Seungkwan and Joshua have traded spots. Trying not to make your missed beat too obvious, you push yourself back into motion and slip into your usual seat.

“Hey, how’re you?” asks Joshua, eyes following you as you settle in.

“I’m okay,” you answer as you flip through to a clean page of your notepad. “Tired,” you add for a touch more honesty as you turn your head to look at him. “How are you?”

“Same, pretty much.” He shrugs. “I think I did alright on the transcriptions for today. Thanks again for helping me out with that.” You feel forgiven, or even as though he was never mad.

Throughout the entire lecture, your gaze plays a furtive version of tag with Joshua’s. Every so often you’d let your glances meet for more than a second. And these instances are accompanied with an upwards tick in Joshua’s lips every time, however fleeting the expression was before one of you would redirect your sight to the front of the room or to your notes. It feels as though each flickering glimpse at one another is tugging away at whatever chance at subtlety you ever had.

Next class, when it’s time to take the midterm exam, you sit one sit further over than usual. Putting space between you and Joshua is the only chance you’ll have at passing.

Come Thursday, when all your midterms have been completed, it’s easy to convince you to attend some party being thrown by some friend-of-a-friend in one of the suites in the more modern dormitory. You and your friends made the trek across campus with plastic water bottles filled with cheap whiskey and lemonade.

It isn’t difficult getting into the building. It takes a few moments of pounding on the front door before one of the residents passes by and is kind enough to open it for you. From there, finding the suite hosting the party is as easy as following the sound of heavy bass and loud chatter.

The suites may be bigger than a standard room, but it’s absolutely packed with students eager to let out pent-up stress from midterms. You take a large gulp from your bottle as your friends make their way further into the festivities.

Loud music keeps you from hearing Seungkwan calling your name the first time. He’s impossible to miss once he taps you on the shoulder. “I’ve never seen you out before!” he exclaims the obvious.

“Me neither.” You have to shout from the volume around. “How did your exams go?”

“Ahh,” he throws his head back dramatically before putting it in clear terms, “I’m so glad they are over!” You nod an eager seconding of the sentiment. Unsure what else you can say to him, you take another drink from your bottle instead. “That doesn’t look like water,” Seungkwan comments with a grin.

“Do you want some?” you offer, “It’s lemonade and, ah… Jack Daniel’s?” You only half remember the brand name of the bottle your friend had passed you.

“Sure,” he accepts quickly; it’s likely the answer he would have given regardless of what you told him was inside the clear plastic. You hand it over and watch him grimace as he swallows a sip. “That’s strong,” he tells you as he passes it back.

“Sorry,” you laugh as you bring it back up to your own lips. “Sidenote -- is English easier to speak drunk?”

“Yes!” Seungkwan concurs, smiling so brightly that you can’t help grinning back at him. “Should we be drinking before class?” he asks facetiously.

“Probably not,” you advise through giggles you might not have had if it weren’t for the buzz of alcohol in your system.

You watch with widened eyes as another boy comes all but crashing into Seungkwan, arm looping around his shoulder and saying something energetically in Korean. You’re about to turn to go find your friends again when Seungkwan calls out for you to wait. He says something more to the newcomer which you can’t understand, though you swear you hear the name ‘Joshua’ somewhere in the middle of it. The stranger’s lips quirk into a smirk as he glances over to you.

“My name’s Jeonghan,” he introduces himself at Seungkwan’s behest. You give him your own and find that the handshake the two of you exchange feels oddly formal in this setting. “Let’s go find Shua!” he proposes immediately after, handshake turning into him leading you through the crowd unexpectedly. Seungkwan yells something at him in his first language as he tails after the two of you.

Joshua, as it turns out, is sitting playing some card game you don’t recognize in one of the bedrooms with a handful of others. He looks up from his hand with evident surprise as you three of you burst in. You find yourself caught in the middle of a conversation you have no chance to following as the three boys carry on in Korean. Jeonghan releases your hand around the same time that Seungkwan leans into your shoulder in a gesture that seems like it’s solely so he can keep his tipsy self upright.

“Sorry,” Joshua tells you just as you’re beginning to feel truly lost and a little bit paranoid about what they’re discussing. He stands up from the game in order to speak to you directly. “Jeonghan is ---”

“I’m what?” Jeonghan doesn’t let him finish, slinging an arm around Joshua much as he’d done to Seungkwan not long ago.

“It’s okay,” you intervene, utterly uncertain what’s going on but hoping nevertheless that you can take this chance to switch the conversation into English. “It’s nice to see you.”

“You too.” Joshua smiles softly, and the expression shifts as soon as he glances to Seungkwan. It makes you feel like that fleeting look had been exclusively for you; that is was something quiet and meant to be kept between the two of you.

“How do you think the phonetics midterm went?” you ask, twisting the cap of your bottle back and forth idly.

“I have no idea! But could you believe one of the transcription exercises on it actually had the word ‘crush’ in it? I nearly gave up then and there,” he remarks. Up until that moment, you had forgotten about that particular part of the test. Though you had shared a similar feeling in the moment.

“How did you end up transcribing it?”

“With a caret, like you said.”

You burst with laughter and cover your eyes for a moment your free hand. “I used a schwa because of you!” you admit, shaking your head in disbelief.

“I guess we’ll find out which one’s right in the next week or so,” he laughs along with you.

You turn when you hear your name being called and send a quick wave in the boys’ direction before heading back out into the suite’s common room, where two of your friends are waiting with curious looks on their faces.

You don’t see Joshua for the rest of the night. Or rather, you don’t see Joshua again until hours later, when the bottle has long been emptied and you’ve started sobering up. You’ve switched your heels for the cloth flats you’d smartly thrown into your purse before leaving for the night and failed in convincing your friends who haven’t already left with somebody that it’s time to go.

You send a brief text that you’re leaving to the group chat to prevent any confusion before you begin your way down the staircase. It’s in the landing between floors three and four that you see Joshua again. He’s chatting with other students you don’t know, and you plan on slipping by without saying anything to him. In part because you know your hair and makeup must both be mussed up from the dancing you’d spent most the party doing.

You’re two steps down the next set of steps after passing by the group when his voice calls your name and draws you to a halt. With one hand holding the straps of your heels and the other one the handrail, you turn to face him. “Are you heading home alone?” he asks; there’s a different kind of concern in his tone than the one you’d heard from your friends.

“Yeah, it’s… less fun in there without being drunk.” The thought sounds worse out loud than it did in your head. But it makes Joshua laugh and sends you another one of those small smiles that you’ve officially decided are not good for your health with the way they make your heart flutter.

“Do you want someone to walk you?”

You don’t feel compelled to have someone go with you. You feel confident enough in the way home and lack fear in crossing campus alone at this hour from the number of times you’ve done it before. So, do you want someone to walk you? No. But do you want Joshua to go with you?

“That would be nice,” you say, smile growing in spite of yourself.

“Give me one minute to grab my stuff?” he requests. You nod. The moment he disappears, you lean back against the wall of the stairs as it dawns on you that you’ll be spending a good ten-minute walk alone with Joshua. The two of you hadn’t spent time alone since the study-session-turned-disaster.

True to his word, Joshua is coming back down the stairs before too much time passes. If he’d taken any longer, you think to yourself, you might have fled.

The awkwardness you fear will come never does. He asks you about where you’re from, about what made you want to study in the States. He’s patient when you struggle to find the exact words or syntax that you want. So much so that you’d say it doesn’t even require any patience on his part to sustain a conversation with you. You rally questions back at him and hang off every syllable of his answers.

It’s good that you both know the campus well enough that you can get away with spending most of the walk looking at one another rather than where you’re going.

He doesn’t work up the nerve to take your hand until the two of you are already at your building’s front door. The gesture keeps you from reaching into your purse for your keys. His hand sways back and forth with yours as you turn to face him with directly. “I’m sorry again, about Seungkwan and Jeonghan. They should know how frustrating it is to have people saying things you can’t understand right in front of you.”

“I’m not worried,” you try to prompt a smile back onto his features. “It would be self-centered to assume they were talking about me. I just… happened to be there.”

His head falls forward for a moment, blocking you from seeing most of the repentant look that crosses his face as he thinks of how wrong you are there. But he can’t bring himself to tell you that they were speaking almost exclusively about you.

“It’s a bit rude either way,” he tells you in place of any admissions.

You shrug and fail to find any words as Joshua lifts his eyes yours once again. There’s a shift in the atmosphere. A thin wire has been drawn between the two of you and is waiting simply for the right tug that will make the whole thing snap. You move a centimeter closer, testing just what will break the tension. The fingers laced with yours press a fraction firmer into your skin.

And then the moment is shattered by the door of your dorm digging into your back as it’s opened from the other side.  You’re jostled forward, nearly into Joshua’s chest before you catch your balance. He releases your hand in the same instant.

“Sorry,” the girl leaving the building says casually as she passes the two of you by.

Deciding it’s a sign, you take hold of the door before it can close all the way. When you turn to bid him goodnight, you find he’s taken a step closer to come inside as well. You tell yourself he’s just taking the way home all the way to your own door. It would parallel the way he’d insisted upon walking you to the front door of his dorm before.

You pull your keys out of your purse while the two of you are still going up the stairs to your floor. When you reach your door, Joshua catches you off guard as he brushes a hand against one of the cut-outs of motivational words you and your roommate had put up in honor of midterm season. “This is cute,” he remarks, scanning over the rest of the decorations on your door. You fiddle with the key in your hand and tell him it was your roommate’s idea.

“Is she in?” he asks, turning at the shoulder to face you while his hand still rests against the glossy wood of your door.

“I don’t know,” is the only honest answer you can give. “I know she went out tonight but I’m not sure where.”

“Can I come in if she’s not?” is his next question, and this one you have no idea how to decipher. So you answer nonverbally, with the ambiguous combination of a shrug and a nod at the same time.

At least, you have no clue until Joshua provides a touch of clarification in the form of a soft kiss. Your heels and keys all clatter against the hallway floor as the affection makes you drop everything. He pulls away from you with a chuckle that’s warm against your still-parted lips.

He crouches down and picks the shoes and keys up for you. “Only if it’s okay with you,” he reassures as he hands your keys back out to you.

“It’s okay,” you say quickly, and avert your gaze to unlock your door.

When you flick on the lights, you’re embarrassed by how relieved you are that your roommate isn’t yet home. You give him an okay sign with your fingers and wave him inside.

Joshua closes the door behind him and sets the heels he’d picked up for you down beside the door, careful that they remain upright even once he’s released his hold. You toe off your flats and set your keys down on your desk.

He catches your stare while he’s shrugging off his jacket and sends you a new smile. It isn’t soft and secret like the ones you’d been melting over before. But it sends a spark down your spine all the same. As he comes close, you find yourself immersed once more in the that unnamed, pleasant cologne of his.  

“Still okay?” he checks as his hands find their way to your hips.

“Definitely,” you respond, though your racing heart protests that it might not be okay if you end up bursting from the strange fortune midterm week has brought you this semester.

You only get a momentary glance at the smile your consent brings to his face before his kisses have you closing your eyes and surrendering to feeling.

But the chances for soaking in Joshua’s different smiles are far from over.

For instance, in about twenty minutes he’ll be smirking up at you from between your thighs and asking which IPA symbols you’d use to transcribe the first of moans he draws from your well-kissed lips.

[tumblunni]

OH MAN GEEZ IM FUCKIN EMOTIONAL ALREADY black butler: book of circus spoilers below:

oh god, the ways they expanded the story for the anime are SO FUCKIN SAD I kinda like that they made it so you actually do see the circus crew kidnapping children this time. I mean, I dont think its made to make them any less sympathetic, but it definately reminds you that the playing field is even here and they’re morally complicated rather than just poor innocent victims of mr evil protagonist. Also its REALLY GORY and REALLY PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR

Its so messed up, seriously These poor kids are being sent to kidnap other kids, by a creepy asshole murder pedophile fuck. And they dont know WHY theyre kidnapping kids, they don’t know what happens to the ones they hand over. And they’re all JUST FUCKING KIDS, they’re fucking children who’re all heavily disabled in different ways and LITERALLY owe their life to this horrible villain man. And they dont know why they were saved and why these other kids are.. going.. somewhere else. And they really dont know whether to trust their ‘father’, but its pretty clear they all have their suspicions that the kidnapped kids might be dying. But they dont have anywhere else to go if they disobey their father, and he’s fucking with their heads so they all feel like they’re the only onw with doubts and they cant even question it or everyone will turn on them and they’ll get kicked out on the street again and never see any of their siblings. And they all VERY MUCH know what its like to be dying on the streets. And this time they’d had a chance to know what its like to have prosthetic limbs and medical help and be able to eat three solid meals a day and wear pretty clothes and have a family. Having all that taken away will hurt even more than if they’d never known what it’s like..

So I sympathise with them, I really do. And I really believe they could have been rescued, and could have been redeemed, and ultimately we shouldnt be blaming them for what they did, only blaming the man who forced them into it and gave enough illusion of choice that they were able to feel guilt about it... BUT STILL that was REALLY FUCKED UP AND DISTURBING AND SAD AND DISTURBING AND SAD

seriously they PUT ON A FINAL CIRCUS SHOW for every single kid they kidnap part of it is about luring them in so they trust them, but also it seems they take it way too far for it to just be that. They almost got caught because they spent so much time doing their performance for this poor lil matchstick seller girl! and its equal parts heartwarming and DISGUSTING because this poor kid is like.. I dont even know if they drug their victims or if she was just going insane from having to see them killing the policeman that tried to save her they’re just horribly gorily fighting the policemen, stabbing a fucking knife through some guy’s eye, and the kid is sitting there having a complete mental collapse, laughing as if this is all part of the show. And we get this twisted vision of her point of view, seeing the nice clown man doing a funny show smacking mr teddy bear with a mallet, as the dead body of the policeman falls at her feet. And then they bundle her into the carriage and thats just the end. We dont find out what happens to the kidnapped kids, any more than the kidnappers know... We just got to learn so much about this poor kid, and that poor policeman, and have a bunch of heartwarming moments of them becoming friends, and then she just turns the corner for like five minutes and the policeman is like ‘wtf is that flute music’ then sees a fuckin ENTIRE CIRCUS IN AN ALLEYWAY and gets stabbed through the goddamn eye trying to reach the kid in time. And she’s so out of it that she couldnt even see him. His last thoughts were probably seeing her glassy eyes staring right through him... And we know that he had a daughter that this street urchin reminded him of, and we know she had a sick little brother who really needed the money the policeman gave her, and an abusive mother that’ll probably be forcing that poor brother to go out panhandling now her daughter is gone.. And just... GAHH my fucking emotions my sadness and also A LOT OF FEAR so much blood

and I KNOW HOW IT ENDS i know that the kids don’t fuckin go to a happy place with a nice new dad and ‘father’ only spared those few kids so they could be pawns he could manipulate into capturing more kids, and test subjects for his evil science team’s freaky bullshit and they dont even KNOW that they’re test subjects! they dont know that their prosthetic limbs are MADE FROM THE OTHER KIDNAPPED KIDS WHO NEVER CAME BACK god, im already imagining how they’d fuckin animate the poor ringleader guy throwing up as he realizes his arm is made from someone else’s bones and then he just DIES they all just die horribly in service of this disgusting fucking child murderer pedophile that they thought was their father half of them never learn that they were the villains all along, the other half get to know it just in time to despair utterly as they’re killed off too

and evil bastard’s trump card that kept them all obeying him it DIDNT EXIST he fucking held it over their heads that their other siblings were still out there somewhere, at his ‘orphanage’, and they had to work with him so he could send money back to them so they could all be happy too when really he’d killed them long ago, and for all we know they could be the ones that joker’s prosthetic arm was made from T_T and ciel’s fuckin only chance to do something to help the people he completely failed who all died hating him and thinking he’d betrayed them, that they were the good guys and he was the villain... that last chance was a fucking lie he tried to save the ‘other kids’ and the fucking ‘orphanage’ was an empty abandoned building full of nothing but maybe a stray doll they left behind before they were all horribly murdered so we just end on our protagonist being the absolute villain of this arc, and the actual villains being sympathetic kids, and him laughing like a madman as his last chance of redemption blows away on the wind

oh, and he fuckin personally murdered a bunch of kids too, even though he didnt kill all his villain friends with his own hand. he found some of the kids in the lab that were test experiments, the few who hadnt been killed yet. the few who’d had to watch potentially HUNDREDS of friends be dragged kicking and screaming to that operating table, and see every second of them being eviscerated into pieces. And ciel just sees himself in them, they’re all so catatonic that they cant even see him and all he can see is himself and he knows from personal experience that a kid can come back from that, but he knows how much of a monster he’s become and he thinks the kids would be happier if they could die as they are instead of losing themself so he just sets the whole building on fire and i end up crying for him even as he’s committing a horrible act! fucking moral ambiguity: the show

and god, even this episode’s goofy friendship fun parts were horrifying too! it starts off with the whole ‘ha ha ciel doesnt know this kid is Doll, cos she ~looks like a boy~ when she’s not in costume’ random stupidness but its still cute cos she’s being so kind to the newbie, and you can learn a lot about her character from it how she’s trying to be all smiley and goofy and giving him candy and saying how she’d never even tasted it before, and now he can stay here and be her lil brother and never get hit by anyone and never go hungry and she knows the goddamn price she has to pay for all this, and she wants to keep ciel innocent of it she doesnt know he’s already just as corrupted, and he’s really a spy sent to take them down and then just DEAR GOD THAT SCENE THAT IS NOT OKAY but it was absolutely fucking necessary I think, to keep the moral ambiguity and not make us just hate ciel forever she fuckin.. accidentally triggers a ptsd flashback in the poor kid he’s never been homeless before so he doesnt realise its a group bathroom, and then freaks out and tries to run. but she’s just teasing him as part of her cool big sis persona, and doesnt realise he has an actual reason to be scared. So they end up fighting and she accidentally reveals the scar on his back to everyone the fucking brand that was burned into him when he was kidnapped and enslaved and the episode just ends with our usually unflappable protagonist curled up in a ball under a towel, shaking and crying and his only comfort is the demonic butler he’s using to enact his revenge, and all he says is just ‘you’re better than this, you’re a badass’ ciel never really has any form of actual sympathy, does he? the only person who knows about what happened to him is this morally ambiguous monster minion guy. and the whole hook of the series is that we never really know if Sebastian actually gives a shit about ciel or any of the other humans, or if he’s just waiting for the poor kid to fuck up and leave an opportunity to devour his soul. I wanna believe that Sebastian does have some sort of fatherly affection for ciel, or at least they both care about each other in a sort of.. mutually evil way. But even if thats true, its not like sebastian is gonna really be any good to talk to in a time like this. he;s just gonna sass ciel for showing weakness. he just has this fuckin motivational speech of ‘yo ciel youre a fuckin evil bastard, remember? get up and continue your evil bastard ways’. and somehow it actually kinda works and actually kinda feels affectionate in context :P BUT STILL SERIOUSLY POOR CIEL he could have turned out a lot better than this if he had someone in his life who could actually give him a goddamn hug but I guess thats not really what he wanted, even though its what he needed instead he wished for the power to enact revenge on the one who killed his family and enslaved him and he set off on this long horrible path of becoming an evil bastard to track down this other evil bastard when he’s only fuckin ELEVEN and he’s happy to throw away his soul, and doesnt care if sebastian betrays him in the end and he burns in hell forever, as long as he can stop that evil bastard from doing the same thing to more children and this arc is so fucked up cos he failed so horribly to stop some OTHER evil bastard from doing the same thing to more children and he’s become so twisted and antiheroey and cynical that he missed his chances to redeem those poor other twisted kids, and maybe he could have done better in stopping the real villain if he had.. and the only fuckin thing we got out of this arc was that the bastard kidnapping these children was a copycat criminal of the one who did it to ciel, so we at least finally have one clue that might lead to a resolution someday but EVERYONE DIED and ciel’s even more fucking traumatized! and he’s jumped off the deep end and become full antihero evil bastard and all the character development he had during the arc has been negated and fuckin completely reversed cos of how it ended and he lost a bazillion friends and he was betraying them the entire time, and they died resenting him, or resenting him AND learning that he was right and they’d been working for the villain all along, and then he couldnt even save their other siblings cos they were long dead and just THIS FUCKING ARC IS SO FUCKED UP GAHHHHH

I guess sometimes you just wanna watch depressing cinema, yknow? I do hope that someday this series actually ends with at least a bittersweet ending, not an equally fatalistic one that means everything was all for nothing. i want the poor circus kids’s deaths to actually mean something...

Also, randomly and incidentally, I want the giant creepy pedo incesty shipping fandom to die in a fire. Before I even started watching it, Black Butler was famous as ‘that pedo anime’, everyone acted as if Sebastian x Ciel was canon and they kept teasing it in every episode or something. BUT NOPE. NONE. NICHT. NON. NAG YDW. Where the FUCK did they even get it from, seriously?? We don’t know if Sebastian is gonna betray ciel or not in the end, but im PRETTY FUCKING SURE that he doesn’t have a boner for a fucking ten year old! I know the idea of a demon servant is a common romance novel thing, but seriously wtf is wrong with you... I know I’m mad that this arc ended so horribly, but still I feel like the various moral ambiguity discussions are super interesting and I would have regretted if I’d never read any of this manga just because of some awful fanbase members.

ANYWAY IN SUMMARY bunni cry over episode