#why am i like this i stg

[almostgenerallyalways]

mamas (don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys)

Pairing: Jake Seresin x fem!reader Category: angst / fluff / run-on sentences Word count: 3,1k CW: language, I’ve been to Texas once okay forgive me, divorce Author’s note: this was supposed to be a holiday fic but I got stuck on it and almost abandoned it, but here it is rescued from my drafts, shoutout to all the amazing tgm fic writers your writing truly astounds me

Summary: Every year around the holidays, you hear from your ex. This year when you don’t respond, he decides to show up at your door. 

2022

Jake UT  [November 23, 2022 at 10:24 PM]

Hey stranger

Visiting my mom for Thanksgiving

How’ve you been?

You ignore the message. How you’ve been in the last twelve months is not something you feel up to discussing with him.

You spend the next weeks dealing with crisis after crisis at work, leaning into the chaos like you have been all year. Your personal life? Garbage fire. Reconfiguring your entire pump setup two weeks before going to production, because the DoC slapped an import ban on one of your key suppliers in China? You’re on top of it.

But then, the week before Christmas, another message comes in:

Jake UT  [December 17th, 2022 at 3:47 PM]

Hey

In town for the holidays

Would love to see you if you’re free

Brett welcome too, of course

A pang in your chest, but curiosity gets the better of you, so you text back:

Thanksgiving and Christmas? Judy must be thrilled.

You’ve met Jake’s mom all of one time, ten years ago, but she made a lasting impression. Fiercely protective of her only son, she’d been wary of you at first (you were, in order of importance: Too non-Texan, too vegetarian, and too focused on trying to rescue an almost-due group project for your sustainable water management class in which no one was pulling their weight).

And yet, over the Thanksgiving weekend you’d spent at Jake’s mother’s house in Colton, she’d slowly warmed up to you. You’d asked her endless questions about her job as a project manager at Austin-Bergstrom, and she’d poured you half glasses of wine (still exotic, to you, back then) at the kitchen island, shooing Jake back into the living room.

She’d even called you, after you guys broke up, to say she was sorry to hear it, and to tell you to call her up any time you needed someone to talk to. You’d tried your best to keep your voice even, not to break down in tears for the seventh time that day, and never called her again.

* * *

“Dude. Put your phone away for two minutes.”

Jake looks up apologetically at his friend, and pockets the device. “Sorry. Just expecting a text.”

Sandeep holds out his bottle of Lone Star, and Jake clinks it with his own. “It’s good to see you, man. Sorry I wasn’t around at Thanksgiving, we were visiting Jed’s family in NC. I didn’t expect you to be back so soon.”

Jake takes a swig of his beer, the cold liquid feeling like a balm to his throat. “Yeah, well. It’s been a big year, work-wise, so they owed me one. I wanted to spend some extra time with my mom.”

Bringing up his drink to toast again, Sandeep says: “Here’s to you, bud. And to getting that permanent assignment in California. At least we knew where to send our holiday card this year.”

Condensation drips down the neck of his bottle, and Jake spins it slowly in his hand, stopping himself from peeling off the label. He feels on edge, unmoored, despite this 6th Street dive bar being as familiar to him as the back of his own hand.

Sandeep’s got his number. “Seeing anyone else while you’re in town? I don’t know, Myers?”

Jake doesn’t look up, but feels his cheeks heat up fractionally.

His friend takes another swig of his beer. “I guess I should stop calling her Myers. You know, with the divorce and all.”

The bottle escapes Jake’s grip, and amber liquid sloshes across the table, into Sandeep’s lap. “Shit, Seresin! Grab some napkins, will you?”

* * *

 2012

 You’d always known there was an expiration date on this thing with Jake, which is why you’d been reluctant to meet his mom to begin with.

You wanted fundamentally different things. He, the Navy: Adventure, excitement, a chance to serve his country. You: Stability. A family. A place where you belonged.

Both of you: an opportunity to prove yourself.

It’s civil, as far as breakups go.

“You always knew I wanted to fly.” He says, over breakfast at Magnolia Café. There’s a hard set to his jaw that makes you soften in contrast, because of course you do, everyone who’s ever been near Jake Seresin for longer than ten minutes knows he’s always wanted to fly.

From your first date he told you about how Judy used to park him in her office at the airport when her summer childcare fell through; little Jake happily spending the day watching commercial jets taxiing and taking off in quick succession.

How her coworkers, the civilian engineers who’d stayed on after Bergstrom Air Force Base was decommissioned and commercialized, would regale him with stories about generations of F-4 Phantoms. Or the British Airways Concorde, one of only twenty of the ill-fated aircraft ever made, bringing the Queen to Austin in a little yellow hat. The Reconnaissance Air Meet bringing in the best fighter pilots from across all divisions of the military and abroad, to compete and show off their skills.

Jake would listen to them with stars in his eyes.

You pick at your migas, your appetite gone. “I know, Jake. I would never stop you.”

But you look at him, and you know your face mirrors his determination. “But I can’t come with you, Jake. I can’t start my career following you around from camp to base year to year. I’m forty-thousand dollars in debt getting this degree, and I need to follow my own plan.”

You haven’t moved in together, though Jake spends most of his nights at your tiny off-campus apartment, where you’ve made him countless cups of black coffee trying to fuel weekend study sessions. Where he would come in past midnight, back from the late shift at his part-time job at the H-E-B, and bury his face in your neck, waking you up even though you’d been asleep for hours. Where you would hold his sleeping head to your chest, his deep breathing somehow felt inside of you, and run your fingers up and down the bare skin of his back, trying to memorize him.

You’re twenty-two, you tell yourself. This is not the end of the world.

So you see him off at the front door, a box of his things clutched to his chest, and you force yourself to be strong. “You better be,” and you try to smile up at him, but you’re not sure you’re doing a convincing job, “You better be the best goddamn pilot the Navy has ever seen, Jake.”

For a second, he looks like he wants to say something, but then he just puts down the box, and pulls you into a last embrace. You sink into it, the fundamentally safe feeling of his arms around you, then make yourself pull away after a minute, pretending you don’t see the wet stains on his shirt.

Later you look at all the spaces in your apartment he is now conspicuously absent from (no dog-eared volume of Game of Thrones on the nightstand, no boots by the door), and it hits you then; the crevasse he’s left in your life. It may run deeper than you thought.

* * *

Jake had gone to Officer Candidate School in Rhode Island, then designator-specific training in Pensacola, Florida, and done his best not to think about you.

It helped that his days were intense and exhausting. It helped that, on liberty weekends, girls would flock to him and his friends in bars.

It helped to be several states away from you.

It helped to be living his dream.

* * *

There is a bit of a backslide, that first Thanksgiving after, where you both think it can’t hurt to see each other for one drink, for old time’s sake, which ends in him taking you up against the door in your new apartment, your legs wrapped around his waist because he does not have the willpower or presence of mind to figure out the way to your bedroom.

He knows it was a mistake, at about five AM the next day, when the blue light of morning starts streaming through a gap in the curtains, illuminating your tousled hair fanned out over the pillow, the steady rise and fall of your chest so familiar to him he could cry.

Untangling himself from you hurts, and he does perhaps the most cowardly thing he ever will: he sneaks out before you wake up. But next week he’s shipping out, and the thought of the same dead-end conversation over coffee made just the way he likes it is unbearable, so he makes himself walk away.

Somehow it’s worse, the second time around.

* * *

You’d met someone else, like he’d known you would. He sees the engagement announcement on Facebook, browsing on his phone between drills, and likes the post. It’s the third year he’s been away, and he’s at TOPGUN by then, so he has a lot on his mind. He has a girlfriend, even, a local: cute as a button, beats him savagely at pool.

It doesn’t fully hit him until the first time he sees you with your then-fiancé, at a little holiday reunion of college friends. He sees you with that ring on your finger, another man’s arm around your shoulders, and he gets an acute sense of the alternate reality that could’ve been his.

It feels a little like losing altitude too fast.

Your initial reception of him is understandably frosty, but you seem too genuinely happy to hold a grudge. By the third round, when he sidles up to you at the bar, you give him a quick hug, looking up at him with a smile that squeezes his heart: “I’m so proud of you, Jake.”

He nods, not quite trusting himself to speak, and pulls you back in, just for a moment, tucking your head under his chin. You smell like apple and magnolia, like nights spent with his nose pressed into your back.

You don’t invite him to the wedding, and he’s all too glad not to have to make up an excuse not to go.

* * *

Things settle, after that. Jake gets deployed and reassigned, breaks up with his girlfriend and eventually gets another. You get promoted to senior engineer, then project lead. You see each other, not every year but close enough, sometimes with your husband there, sometimes without.

He braces himself for the next Facebook post; that you’re pregnant, but it never comes. Over time, even that seems to lose some of its potential emotional impact on him.  

Until three weeks ago, when you don’t text him back.

* * *

 2022

 You kick your shoes off in the entryway, then head into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. Before you can reach the tap, the doorbell rings, and for a second you think somehow, some way, your terrible Bumble date has followed you home.

Grabbing the biggest kitchen knife you own off the magnet strip over the sink, just in case, you creep back to the door, barefoot, to press your face up to the peephole.

You don’t really expect to see the guy you just left, the ice in your glass not even melted before you were thinking up excuses to get out of there, but you sure as fuck don’t expect to see Jake either.

The door feels heavier than usual as you slowly slide it open, or maybe you’re just a little stunned. The night air hits your skin, and you can make out the sound of dogs barking in the distance.

For a long moment, Jake just looks at you, but then he says: “What were you planning on doing with that, sweetheart?”

You follow the jut of his chin down the line of your arm, and contemplate the knife for a second, Jake’s sudden appearance having made you forget all about it.

“I thought someone might have followed me here.”

“Ah.” He says, a spark in his eyes, clearly suppressing a smile. “If you were going to defend yourself in hand-to-hand combat, a knife is a terrible choice. I could give you some tips, though.”

Putting the damn thing down on your entryway console, you turn back to look at him. It’s not cold, exactly, in December in South Central Austin, but he looks underdressed: a long-sleeved light grey t-shirt, hands shoved in the pockets of a faded pair of jeans.

He looks good, you can’t deny it: he’s always had an immediate effect on you.

Jake, your somewhat gangly, sweet college boyfriend had it. Jake, ten years of military training later: older, filled out, fine crinkly lines starting to appear at the corners of his eyes (helped along by the California sun and God knows what far-off places), irrevocably still does.

You shake your head, trying to clear your thoughts. “What are you doing here, Jake?”

At that, his expression sobers, and he looks at you for a long moment before he says:

“You didn’t tell me.”

* * *

Fucking Sandeep, you think, rubbing the back of your hand across your eyes, because that fucker has not been subtle with the hints lately, tutting like a Victorian matron while you pass the time evaluating your Bumble matches with his husband during Monday night football’s ad breaks.

The granite of your kitchen countertop feels reassuringly cool beneath your thighs, and you take a deep breath, keeping your eyes on the tile below:

“I wasn’t ready.”

Jake huffs, or so you assume by the little sound that escapes him, as you determinedly face only his sneakers: “It’s been a year. You sure told everyone else we know.”

That makes your head snap up, emotion rising in your chest in a way you don’t like, have always had to tamp down when it comes to him, these last ten years. “Fuck off, Jake. You know it’s different when it comes to you.”

He leans back against the fridge, arms folded, just slightly lifting his right eyebrow at you in that irritating way of his: “I could’ve been there for you.”

Fuck it, you think, all cards on the table then. “I was heartbroken, and embarrassed, and trying to figure out how to exist on my own again after being married for five years to someone who didn’t turn out to be who I thought he was, Jake. Sorry my first impulse wasn’t to come cry on my hometown hero ex-boyfriend’s shoulder.”

His eyes soften, and he pushes off the fridge to come stand next to you, running his fingers over the edge of the countertop. “I’m sorry,” he says, voice quieter than a moment ago. “I’m being a dick. It’s just, you have to know, I would’ve been there for you.”

He pauses for a second, takes a deep breath: “It’s always been different when it comes to you too, sweetheart.”

You start to shake, a little, or maybe it’s your imagination. But your voice wavers as you say his name, everything about your tone a warning: “Jake.”

He closes his eyes, shakes his head: “Our timing sucked, and I don’t regret our decision from back then. I’m proud of who I’ve become in the last ten years, and I’m proud of you. You think I don’t keep up with what you’re doing? The articles you’ve published?”

This stuns you, momentarily. “No, Jake Seresin. If I’m completely honest, I didn’t think you gave a shit about the latest advances in Texas drought management.”

Just being near him, the familiar smell of him bringing up memories you’ve had years to unsuccessfully repress, is overpowering.

He makes it worse by turning to you, face so goddamn heartbreakingly earnest as he says: “I couldn’t give you what you deserved, ten years ago, but I always told myself, if I was ever in a position to…” He swallows. “I tried to forget about it when you got married, I tried to root for you and Brett, I swear.”

His hand settles next to your thigh, not quite touching, and your hand comes down on its own accord to cover his. He straightens almost imperceptibly, uses his other palm to wipe a tear that’s made its way down your cheek.

Cupping your face, he draws a deep breath. “I have a permanent assignment now, in San Diego. I know it’s…”

“Jake.” You interrupt, squeezing your eyes shut, grabbing the hem of his shirt. “I’m not remotely the same person I was back then.”

He moves to stand in front of you now, and you draw him in between your thighs. Suddenly it seems imperative that you feel him, that he holds you.

Dipping his head to yours, you can hear the smile in his voice, watery, tentative: “Then let me get to know you again. Get to know me again.” He leans one hand on the counter, the other tracing your cheekbone. “No pressure. I’m totally very cool about this. Whatever you want.”

You laugh, a little choked up through tears, but genuine. It feels liberating. “What if I say yes? How does this work?”

His smile broadens, eyes crinkling at the corners, and he’s so goddamn close, nudging your nose with his. “Come visit me, for a start. I’ll show you the sights.”

You draw him in a little closer still, legs wrapping around his waist, one hand finding its way into his close-cropped hair, and you could cry for how familiar he still feels after all these years.

But when you close the gap between your lips and his, it’s like coming home and yet not at all: he’s different and rougher and sharper and it floods you with emotion, something big and terrifying and old and new.

He leans into the kiss, grinning, cards his fingers through your hair before he moves to cover your chin, your brow, the space next to your ear with kisses, and you remember this with a jolt to your heart – how singularly intense it is to be the focus of Jake Seresin, like the strength of the sun is aimed at you, how he never does anything by halves.

You take his chin in your hand, kiss him again for good measure, before saying, into the stubble of his jaw: “One visit. No pressure.”

The grin he gives you in return could power half this city: “One visit. No pressure.”

He dips his head to yours again, kissing the skin behind your ear as he tells you: “Southern California has a lot of drought problems, you know. I’ve actually been reading some really scary articles about it.”

.

.

.

i hope you enjoyed :):) - if you liked this I hope you’ll check out some of my other work:

where the wild things are (rooster x reader)

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[just-jessiejames]

you mean to tell me that normal people don't catalogue every single detail of another human beings entire existence down to the fact their hair is frizzier than normal and their eyes are more tired and they have a stain on their pants leg and their ear has a freckle under it

people don't pay attention to others like this?? what??? I literally cannot go a single second without studying another person. is it because I'm a writer? am I just strange?

[introspectivememories]

been watching mashle and oh my god, the eugenics???? the way lance's parents were so ready to give up their daughter??? no second thought???? just "why did this child have to be born to us?"???? um everyone talking in mash's face about how non-magic people are inherently worthless???? the triple line dude fucking making dolls out of people and somehow no one??? is??? checking him???? and then when questioned immediately jumping into "well humans are little more than mindless beasts and i will become a creator deity and reshape the world in my liking!"????? the, um, corruption in the government??? the way this story is so clearly "h*rry p*tter if it was actually funny"??? the slytherin coded characters are blood purists???? they took out hufflepuff??? one of the magia lupus' mage's powerset was just big shuriken???? another one is rip off kisame???? lance is a siscon and the first thing mash says is "that doesn't make it better"???? lemon is genuinely so fuckin funny??? dot is incel-coded but like in a funny way??? dot says that lance is playing life on "easy mode" cause lance has a good face??? dot likes tea??? dot has good manners??? everybody only has one spell they can use??? finn ames is like if you transported is regular human into this stupid ass world??? i think the old man and the cop have explored each others bodies.

[lazylittledragon]

Feel free to ignore if it doesn't match your HCs BUT since you draw a lot of dad astarion/gale etc I thought you'd appreciate the midwife Halsin headcanon that goes around a lot!

I'm just getting cuteness aggression imagining him being there for Dorian/Astarion's kid :')

nO WAIT THIS IS SO CUTE???? that fits him so well aaa :OOO

idk if cyra would want him hanging around but dorian is pretty crunchy and would probably appreciate him adkfjf

[oakitty]

literally why are people so mad that this episode was about billy and not about agatha and rio. like who caaaaares !!! it was a good episode!!! if we never got a back story for billy non-comic readers would be so confused.

like, i am an agathario fan as much as the next lesbian, but romance isnt the be all and end all of story telling. i appreciated the building of the somewhat-familial relationship between billy and agatha, and the recontextualizing of said relationship.

that being said i definitely want them (agatha and rio) to have SOME kind of intimate scene bc i wanna see those hot women kiss

[xxplastic-cubexx]

i’m sorry it’s just so hilarious to me how charles goes back to erik one way or another in almost every iteration like … was the d that good…????????????

girl i get it tho ....... if i fumbled erik lehnsherr i'd never forgive myself id draw my skin through hot coals if it meant having a MODICUM of a chance with him

[lovereadandwrite]

he cooked ! he served !! HE ATE😮‍💨🥵

[littleplantfreak]

[lqfiles]

i vouch to finish ptp before the end of the year and if i don’t i will DEACTIVATE THIS ACCOUNT.

[allsketchesnononsense]

Summer Time

[littleoceanbabe]

loki: i don’t want to be alone.

the s2e6 loki writers, for some reason: so anyway i have an idea-

[bpdohwhatajoy]

You know a really insufferable type of person? The ones who move through the world as if they’re the main character and everyone else is a supporting character instead of human beings with their own rich inner lives

[clochanamarch]

see this? the hand trying to take the spoon from her? aisling would have Words. "i'm trying to be cute" ur STRESSING her OUT. this is her domain! this is her happy place! wHY ARE U MANSPLAINING HOW TO STIR FECKIN PASTA--

[magniloquent-raven]

yall mfers need to stop

[geraskierfanficprompts]

RUH ROH RAGGY MY RIGHTS ARE GONE

[geddy-leesbian]

I am once again feeling sad and unappreciated on main