#you deserve all of the nice things forever and ever 🫶

[neverthatsirius-jo]

[present jo note: read this last night with my notes app open so i could go annotating hope u don’t mind i wrote a lot :p]

if u couldn't tell it's very inspired by early 2000s romcoms

wooo, just as im in my romcom watching era. perfect 🥳🫶

James was nothing to fawn over.

?! ?! ?! ?!?!2€/ ?!;@/€:@

"Was it professional when I was your first kiss?" He stepped closer and you instinctively stepped back, feeling the plaster wall graze your back through your work blazer.

"It was spin the bottle and we were twelve, it's ancient history. And do you mind? I know you're some kind of god around here but I have a reputation to uphold,"

YOU WERENT FUCKING LYING THIS IS SO ROM COM GAAAAAH

"Not Lily! Have I missed my chance forever?"

this made me giggle teehEe

"She doesn't like beer, thinks it tastes like piss." You whipped your neck around at the familiar voice, mouth dropping open at the sight of James Potter.

i would murder him. my face would be so red

"Are you thick? I only said that because I fancied you!"

"What do you mean you said it because you fancied me? That is not normal!" You whirled around, accusatory finger pointed his way.

"I don't know! I thought I was supposed to! It wasn't cool to be a sap!" James argued back, running a hand through his already tousled curls.

ilovethemilovethemilovethem

thinking of u :P <3

GODDDD WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE JAMES POTTER NOT BEING REAL

"This photo was taken when we were twelve or thirteen years old at someone's party. That night, as you tend to do when you're young and bored, we played spin the bottle and ended up being each other's first kiss. I'm sure you're all wondering why I'm telling this story now, and it's because ever since that night as I have recently realised, almost a decade later, I have been embarrassingly, stupidly in love with her."

giggling and crying all at the same time

"And though I've done some incredibly dumb things over the years, somehow she's managed to like me back -- at least a little. So I'm setting the record straight right now, she is not 'sleeping to the top' or trying to get a secret scoop out of me because I'm the one who's been chasing after her for twelve years.

"I know I've been rambling on for far too long so I'll wrap it up here, but I just wanted to end this little conference with a warning that if I see any more disgusting, hateful articles about her, you won't be getting another comment from me again. So nice to see you all!"

😔😭🥳✨💗👹 i cant

11k WORDS? WERE BEING FED FOLKS. i feel like a squirrel with her supply of nuts for the winter HAHSH WHAT AM I SAYING SOMEONE SHUT ME UP (preferably james potter and with a kiss thanks)

summary: loved this, gia. it was very rom-com, very cutesy 💗🫶✨

our names in the paper - footballer!james potter x fem!sports journalist!reader

wc: 11,151

cw: swearing, fade to black but suggestive moments?, smoking, slut-shaming, kissing

info: r and james are about 24, set in 2007ish solely for the romcom vibes. james is the equivalent of like David Beckham in his prime, all pics are for vibes only, not reflective of r's appearance etc

me: i've been working on this for soooo long i am so happy it's finally done!! if u couldn't tell it's very inspired by early 2000s romcoms and i am honestly so proud of it so praying it doesn't flop LOL

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"James, James! Over here! What's the defence strategy this season?"

If you had to hear James' name one more time you might scream. Unfortunately, you were locked in a room with nothing but that. Worse, you were part of the problem.

"Mister Potter, what do you think about your striker's goal-to-game ratio falling rapidly this season?" You called, begrudgingly hoping for a moment of the soccer star's attention. Fortunately (or unfortunately), his glittering eyes settled on you, singling you out from the room of hungry journalists.

"I think that you miss one hundred per cent of the shots you don't take," He said, smirk turning to something challenging, "And as long as my team is training and working together, I'm not gonna cry over a bit of spilt milk or missed goals. And, as far as I'm concerned we're still winning games, aren't we?" You rolled your eyes, scribbling down his answer nonetheless.

You continued the catfight of trying to get answers for your newest article, keeping the balance of vying for James' attention and showing him you didn't care for him personally, unlike the other journalists you were pushing against. The conference room was full of men and women who wanted to be James or be with him. Aside from the professional questions, there were certainly several invitations to the pub thrown around, and you were sure you saw one woman try and give him her cellphone number. You rolled your eyes again at that, James was nothing to fawn over.

He might be a big shot now, but you'd known him almost all your life. The two of you had gone to school together and had bickered through every interaction since then. James had always wanted to be a football star, and you a journalist. You'd never believed in him and vice versa, both of you taking every opportunity to tease the other or cut each other down. Maybe it was just clashing personalities, two people too ambitious to be friends. The rivalry had lasted past school, and unfortunately, the two of you often crossed paths in your respective careers.

The press conference wrapped up soon after your question, and you ended up lingering in the room trying to finish your notes. James was still over at his podium next to his coach, drinking out of a plastic water bottle and arduously texting on his flip phone. Seeing you hovering by the door he called your last name, sauntering up behind you. You rolled your eyes and braced yourself for the encounter.

"Potter." You smiled curtly, moving to leave.

"You don't have to call me 'Mr Potter' during the conferences, you know. James is perfectly fine, everyone else calls me that."

"Just trying to stay professional," You said through gritted teeth, aware his coach and a few others were still around you. It could cost you your job to snap at him.

"Was it professional when I was your first kiss?" He stepped closer and you instinctively stepped back, feeling the plaster wall graze your back through your work blazer.

"It was spin the bottle and we were twelve, it's ancient history. And do you mind? I know you're some kind of god around here but I have a reputation to uphold," You whispered, glancing around anxiously. James laughed at your distress which only annoyed you further. Maybe he could get away with anything, but you had to fight for your place in your field as a female sports journalist, you couldn't afford to take it lightly.

You couldn't help the physical reaction to being trapped between James and the wall though, your breathing shallow and quick, face tilted up slightly to look at him. You felt a bit like prey, caught in the predator's territory and resigned to imminent death.

"Let her go, will you? She's just doing her job," Remus Lupin said, entering the conference room with his nose crinkled from the smell. You couldn't blame him, sweaty players and hungry journalists didn't make any kind of utopia together.

"I wasn't doing anything!" James cried, hands up in surrender, "Come on love, I was just giving you the scoop, right?"

"First of all, if you were giving me 'the scoop' right now I'd certainly be accused of sleeping to the top by all the blokes waiting out there," You gestured to the group of other reporters still lingering in the hall waiting for any scraps of information, "And secondly, I work for the bloody Sunday People, not the BBC. I honestly think they'd rather I just write about your 'dashing good looks' or a drug scandal than your games," You complained, falling back into the ease of conversation now that Remus was there. He'd been at school with the both of you, growing up to be a physiotherapist, but was always much more palatable than James.

Both men laughed at your plight.

"If you ever need a more detailed look at my dashing good looks just ask, sweetheart. I'd be glad to show you, you know, for your articles." You rolled your eyes at James' attempt to be charming, snapping your notebook shut.

"Alright, I think that's my cue to go," You said curtly, smoothing out your work trousers. "Remus, I'll return Dracula next time I see you; I'm almost finished." You remembered you'd had his novel for quite a while, sparing him a smile on the way out.

"You lend her books?" James asked incredulously, hazel eyes curiously following your figure down the hall. Remus just shrugged, patting James on the shoulder and attending to his actual job, checking up on the players after the match.

James was still hung up on the fact when he returned to the apartment he shared with Remus and Sirius, flabbergasted as he hung his coat on the rack.

"Since when are you two close enough to be sharing books?" He cried as he paced through the kitchen, "Have we not all been in agreement that she is stubborn and hard-headed and annoying and has been since school?"

"No," Remus shook his head, "You decided that, and I daresay she feels the same about you. I've always rather liked her."

James was unexpectedly dumbfounded at the realisation that you weren’t the common enemy he thought you were. Even Sirius didn’t seem to dislike you, always stopping for a chat when you were around the stadium and giving you extra comments with a flirty wink.

James didn’t need to think about you for another few weeks; his team hadn’t played one week and you’d been assigned other matches for the others — he read your very amusing pieces on lawn bowls and chess-boxing, partly because he knew you’d hate the assignment.

You were blissfully apart until one Saturday night. You were out with your friends and a few coworkers and James was out with his. He’d started in the local pub while you were at a fancy cocktail restaurant for Lily’s bachelorette party, however, your groups crossed paths in the depths of a nightclub.

Maybe you were getting too old for them, waking up with sore backs and knees after nights of dancing, but it didn’t mean you wouldn’t give it a red hot go. And with a few cocktails in your system, nobody could convince you it wasn’t a good idea.

You'd been shaking what your mother gave you for the better part of an hour before it was your turn to get another round, telling the girls you'd be back before stumbling through a sea of sweaty bodies.

Some gross man who was definitely too old for you obstructed your path, grabbing your arms to make you dance with him. Your face crinkled in disgust of its own accord, trying to wiggle yourself free. He continued to encroach on your space, forcing you around despite your persistence. Finally, a man's hands landed on his shoulders, yanking him away and subsequently freeing you from his grasp. The momentum sent you tumbling in your strappy heels, right into something warm and solid. You cringed, having been there before. You turned slowly to meet your unwitting saviour, huffing when you realised it was James.

"Oh, fuck off," You grumbled, mostly to yourself, producing a quick apology to not seem totally impolite.

"Alright?" Sirius asked, revealing himself as the one who'd gotten you away from the creep. You shrugged, fixing your hair.

"Been better," You told him, preparing to leave before seemingly their whole team had surrounded you, all greeting you loudly. You weakly waved at them, feeling dreadfully underdressed and professional. You were used to seeing them in the stadium and press conferences where you were much more modestly dressed. The strapless mini dress wasn't giving you the same layer of protection.

"Right," You said when there didn't seem to be any more productive conversation happening, "I'm off to the bar then."

"Let me buy you a drink, to make up for the freak," One of the players, Frank, said. You smiled but shook your head.

"I'm buying for several, it wouldn't be fair. It's Lily's bachelorette." You directed the last sentence to those who knew her, the football and journalism professions having considerable overlap due to events and the never-ending scandals and interviews. James covered his face in mock-devastation.

"Not Lily! Have I missed my chance forever?" He moaned, earning some shoves from the rest of the group. You and Lily had been friends since uni, and you'd introduced her to the boys at one of the terrible house parties you'd endured over your three years studying. James had developed a thing for her right away (no one knew how much of it was serious and how much was for comedic value) and had been loudly pining for her ever since, despite her long-term relationship with Dirk Cresswell, an economist who worked in the building down the block from your office.

"I think you missed your chance the first time," You retorted with a snort, a little drunk to have any ferocity in your tone. You both made a face at each other, ignoring the laughter of those around you. You dismissed the group and danced away, shaking your arse over to the bar.

A few rounds later and you were not in your best shape. The girls had been absolute menaces, feeding you shots and deceiving colourful cocktails that actually held like seven standards in them, and you were certainly feeling the effects. You excused yourself from the group to find a loo, bile rising in your throat as you pushed past dancers, not even sparing a comment for James as you saw him.

That confused both James and his friends, becoming used to your insistent teasing over the years. He exchanged a look with Sirius, following you through the crowd and to the bathrooms.

He figured something was wrong when you burst into the gender-neutral bathrooms, not bothering to lock the door behind you. James and Sirius silently fought about who was going to follow you in and check on you; James found you insufferable, Sirius had severe emetophobia and would probably throw up himself if he had to be close to you vomiting. James rolled his eyes, it was his responsibility. Sirius clapped him on the back gratefully, leaving him to return to the others. James sighed, reciting some affirmations before he cracked the door open, calling out to you.

When you responded with a disgusting wretch, James slipped inside, gagging a little as he saw you leant over the toilet bowl, bare knees on the grimy tile floor.

"Alright?" He asked for lack of anything better, unsurprised when you replied with another gag.

"I feel ill," You said pathetically, head hung low in the bowl which James knew you would resent tomorrow. He laughed quietly, getting closer to you.

"No shit, idiot," His tone was light as he began to rub your back softly, making sure your hair was away from your mouth. You vomited a few more times, your body reacting in violent hurls as James tried to be both soothing and as far away as possible.

When your stomach was finally empty you slumped against the toilet, cheek pressed against the cool porcelain.

"Woah," James pulled you up to a sitting position, "That cannot be good for your skin. Let's get you home, okay?" You nodded petulantly, letting yourself be led out through the club, James telling Lily he'd make sure you got home (and congratulated her on the upcoming wedding).

"Can we get some gum or something? My throat tastes like vom." James looked down at you from where you were lodged into his side, legs shaky as you wobbled down the street. He sighed and steered you in the direction of a convenience store, picking out strawberry gum for you since it tasted better than mint, your words. Good you thought when he paid for it, the football star can shell out 2 pounds, makes more than you anyhow.

You chewed happily, stumbling down the pavement as James held onto you, keeping you upright.

"You're so muscly," You said, somewhat in a drunken haze.

"Thank you?" James laughed, patting you softly on the forearm he was holding. To be fair, you weren't quite sure if it was a compliment either. Your words were admittedly oddly nice but your tone made it confusing, drunk thoughts not completely translating to sober dynamics.

You meandered for a few oddly peaceful minutes, neither of you starting an argument or picking a fight. It was a nice break from normal, the two of you even sharing some peaceful small talk -- discussing a movie you'd both seen recently.

Of course, nothing good lasts.

"James!" A voice yelled from the other side of the street, a short man with mousy mannerisms. James groaned beside you.

"Peter Pettigrew," He whispered to you, trying to pull you along faster, "We used to be mates but turns out he was just using me to get team secrets out into the papers." You whipped your head around to look at him. Oh! You knew Pettigrew, unsurprising given you both reported on essentially the same topics, but he had a bad name even in your circles. He was closer to a paparazzi than a journalist, going for the cheap stories and ad hominem approaches rather than searching for any meaningful insights. Simply put, in an already sleazy career, Peter Pettigrew was the bottom of the barrel.

"Later, mate. I'm in the middle of something right now." James put his arm around your shoulder, better shielding you as he tried to make a getaway. The telltale flash of a camera reflected off the grey pavement, making both you and James whip your heads around to face Peter, looking hardly ashamed of himself. After a moment of shock, you both covered your faces, stumbling down the street as fast as you could manage. The damage was already done.

Suddenly you didn't feel as drunk, navigating the cobblestone streets with unanticipated nimbleness. James might've had the athlete's advantage but you were on home turf, leading him through local shortcuts and to the front door of your apartment building.

On the journey over you'd attracted a few more photographers all fiending for a scandalous picture of James, a small mob forming as you tried to punch in the door code despite your shaking hands. James was right behind you, front pressed to your back, holding his Adidas windbreaker out in a position to shield your face from the prying eyes.

You slammed the door shut, the nosy questions and camera clicks immediately muffled. James let out a long sigh, running a hand through his already tousled hair. Neither of you spoke for a while, processing what had happened.

"Make yourself at home then." You cringed as you surveyed the state of your flat; clothes flung over chairs and dishes still in the sink. Your only option for living alone was cramming all your stuff into what was essentially a shoebox, so any amount of mess made the place look chaotic.

"Nice place," James said and you immediately rolled your eyes, snatching up a stray bra strewn across an armchair. "No, I mean it! It's cozy. Very you." He gestured up at the colourful, mismatched glassware in a kitchen cabinet and the beaded curtain separating your bedroom. You blushed slightly; you didn't often take men home, your flat staying a girly paradise just for you.

You put on the kettle, comforted by the familiar sounds of water beginning to boil. James sat awkwardly on an armchair near the window, anxiously peeking out from behind the curtain every few minutes. His reactions told you the paparazzi were still loitering outside.

James took his tea gratefully, surprisingly still agreeable despite all the terrible things that had happened in the course of a few hours.

"Do you have a back exit or something? Somewhere I can slip out and get home?" You shook your head with a grimace.

"Only the fire exit, but that still goes out near the front. Otherwise we're surrounded by other buildings."

"You must be exhausted after everything. Head off to bed, I'll wait until the gits outside fuck off then lock the door behind me. We don't have to ever mention this again if you don't want." The orange lamp light made James' eyes look unfairly soft, highlighting the golden flecks amongst the brown. You steeled your nerve and shook your head.

"I'm not that bad of a host," You tried to joke, "Besides, don't you have training tomorrow? You're already up later than I'm sure you intended to be. I couldn't live with myself if I ruined England's star player by making him stay up all night, you take my bed and go to sleep." You were both very carefully trying to keep things light, not wanting to spend any more of the night miserable and fighting.

"Well, I'm not taking your bed, that's just impolite. I'll take the couch, if you're being so generous as to let me stay." He had a cheeky smile on his lips as he said it, both of you dancing around the fact that in any other circumstance James wouldn't have been allowed within fifteen feet of your flat.

"That couch? No way." You pointed at the teensy vintage sofa sitting in front of the boxy television. It had space for maybe two and a half arses to sit on it, maybe horizontally extended legs if you were short-ish, but there was no way the goliath James Potter was getting any decent sleep on it. "You take the bed. I'll survive the couch tonight."

"Don't be stupid, I can't sleep in your bed. If not the couch I'll take the floor."

"Speaking from a purely medical standpoint, I haven't cleaned these floors recently enough for it to be safe to have your face in such close proximity. Take the bed, Potter."

You bickered for a few long minutes, both of you trying to outdo each other's respect as host and guest, respectively. You didn't miss the irony that even when you and James were getting along you were fighting.

"I'm not letting you go without, that's final." You turned away to go fetch a pillow for your night on the couch when James said something you never ever thought you'd hear from him.

"Then sleep with me."

"Excuse me?" You all but shrieked, immediately cringing as you thought about your poor neighbours.

"Look, it's basically morning, we're both shattered and I'm sure your bed is much comfier than whatever alternative you're planning. We can even go full pillow-wall if it'll make you feel better." You stared at him for several moments, lips actually agape. Never in your life did you think James Potter would be asking you to share a bed with him, and never in your life did you think you'd be considering it.

"Fine."

Twenty minutes later and you were both ready for bed. You'd found James an old pair of an ex-boyfriend's long abandoned pyjamas, stuffed in a bottom drawer. They were slightly too small to accommodate all his muscles, the t-shirt sitting a few inches above the pants' waistband, giving him a very '90s crop top and exposing his happy trail.

You were almost definitely more embarrassed than James. You were in a similarly aged pair of pyjamas, a cartoon of Spongebob over your chest. You couldn't tell if you'd prefer to be in the lame pair that you were wearing or a cute pair -- no, it would probably look like you were trying too hard. Which you weren't. You didn't care about looking cute in front of James Potter, why would you?

He was already in bed when you'd returned from your skincare routine, face fresh and moisturised, and though you knew he was going to be there, nothing could have prepared you for the sight of James Potter in your bed. Tucked up to the chin under your frilly floral grandma sheets, he looked the picture of cozy.

"Don't bloody touch me, I mean it. I want to feel alone in my own bed," You snapped, sliding under the covers, pulling the doona similarly high up to your chin. You turned over to the centre of the bed to find James already on his side looking at you. You let it be for a moment, surprisingly enjoying the sleepover vibes you'd created.

"Okay this is weird now, the pillow's going up." You slammed a long decorative cushion in between the both of you, secretly smiling at the sleepy giggle James let out.

The first time you awoke it was hazy, still early in the morning with golden sunbeams streaming through your curtains. Warmth enveloped you, keeping you cozy despite the winter morning outside. You shifted to burrow deeper into your blankets when a groan came from behind you, startling you more awake as you recognised the feeling of muscular arms wrapped around your middle. It suddenly all came back to you, James walking you home, the paparazzi, you making an absolute fool of yourself. However, James was a portable heat source and extremely comfortable so you let yourself ignore everything that had led up to it, allowing yourself another few hours of blissful sleep.

The second time you woke up James was gone. That wasn't surprising given he definitely had early morning training, but you would reluctantly admit that it was a little lonelier in your bed than it usually was.

You didn't leave the house for the rest of the day, finally cleaning your apartment after much too long. Turns out all you needed was to be embarrassed in front of a guest to get you motivated.

Monday morning you weren't hungover anymore, but you were mourning the weekend that had passed much too quickly. Still, things were running smoothly enough; you didn't miss the tube and had snagged a seat, and your makeup was looking absolutely grand. You were absolutely thriving.

That was, until you crossed the threshold of the Sunday People offices and the jerks from the politics columns started bothering you, as if a Monday morning wasn't punishment enough.

"Meet anyone nice over the weekend, sweetheart?" One crowed from his desk chair, looking positively dickhead-ish in his too-small button-up.

"Or still on the clock maybe? We know you're always hunting for a good story." The combination of both remarks confused you, but you strutted past them with a quick glare in their general direction, your clicking heels producing enough attitude that you didn't need to say anything.

As you approached your own desk area, you had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that everyone was looking at you. You couldn't think of why, but subtly wiped the edge of your lips in case it was foolishly smudged lipstick.

You even swore you heard one of the royal writers -- an awful woman maybe twenty years older than you -- say something about your 'promiscuity' and 'unprofessionalism'. You didn't know where it was coming from. You weren't friends by any means but you usually just stayed out of each other's way, you didn't throw around insults at your workplace. You glanced down at your outfit but nothing seemed especially revealing, the same button-up and pencil skirt you always wore if you weren't doing field work.

You were really starting to wonder why everyone was looking at you when even Lily was sending you pitiful glances. You had just made up your mind to say something about it when your boss came striding towards you, anger emanating in a way which only middle-aged men can do.

"What is this?" He slammed a Daily Mail tabloid down on your desk. The office was dead silent. You looked down at it, wholly confused as to what it could be -- your last article was approved without any troubles.

THE 'INSIDE' SCOOP? POTTER GETS COZY WITH REPORTER ON NIGHT OUT

And there, right under the brazen headline, was the stupid picture that Peter Pettigrew took. The two of you out on the street, you tucked into James' side with his arm around you. Your face wasn't totally visible, but anyone who already knew you would recognise the figure and fashion.

You could feel your face drop as you read the article, a barrage of slut-shamey insults and reports of how intimate you and James were out on the streets of London -- all entirely false, of course. When you'd finished reading the piece the whole office was staring at you, waiting to see how you'd react.

"It's a lie," You said quietly, trying to stop your hands from shaking as they rested on your lap. There was a pregnant pause as your boss processed what you were saying, clearly confused. None of your coworkers dared to speak.

"Bullshit," He replied, face blooming red as he decided you weren't being truthful. "That's you and that's James, there's no denying that. The whole bloody country will be able to see you two getting cozy on the street. How do you reckon this reflects on me, having your name and workplace published alongside your completely unprofessional affair?"

"I understand that it looks bad, but it's not what you think at all. J- uh, Potter was just helping me get home after a chance encounter because I wasn't feeling well, then he hid at my place because of all the paparazzi. Nothing happened." It was a weak explanation, even you could tell, even though it was completely true.

The arseholes over in Politics were already sniggering to themselves and you wished you could have ripped them a new one. Instead, you were cowering underneath your brutish boss.

"It's your word against Pettigrew's, and only one of you's been printed. You've been publicly humiliated and we're getting bad press for it."

Your boss had left you with the threatening promise that the issue would be brought up with your superiors and the whispered opinions of every single person you worked with. You choked out an excuse to get out of the office, taking the lift up to the rooftop to cry.

You had peace for a few minutes, getting the most embarrassing of the sobs out alone.

"Did you actually sleep with him?" If it was anyone else you probably would have snapped, yelling at them for being so insensitive. Marlene said it with such earnest curiosity and sympathy that you turned to face her instead. You were met with her and Lily, your very best friends who you were feeling especially lucky to work with at that moment.

"No!" You told them the full story, about getting sick at the club, James just being polite and walking you home, and Peter Pettigrew's terrible betrayal. Both women listened attentively, taking it all in.

"I thought you hated Potter," Lily said finally, "How'd it get that far in the first place? Usually you'd have ditched him in the first five minutes of being in his presence."

"I don't hate him." You studied your hands intently, observing the peeling red nail polish you should have reapplied yesterday. "I think he's annoying and obnoxious and I've always hated that he's never believed I could be a serious writer, but I don't hate him. He has his moments. Besides, why would I waste energy on hating Potter when I could hate Pettigrew with all my heart?"

"What a snake," Marlene spat, lighting a cigarette as she got comfy next to you. You and Lily both nodded. Peter was not only now a backstabber, but he'd been becoming increasingly insufferable over the years you'd all been writing.

He started out quite nice and was in your periphery of friends in the same way Remus and even James were, but as he'd gotten the job at his shitty tabloid magazine he'd become downright intolerable, always twisting what you'd said both in official articles and when gossiping with other friends. You had all had enough a few years ago and stopped inviting him places. Clearly, he'd held onto the grudge.

At his own work, James was facing the same rumours, though not nearly to the same peril. As he rocked up to his home pitch for the morning training session he was received with catcalls and high fives which made him nervous. No one was ever that happy to be working out on a Monday morning.

"Thought you hated her, mate."

"Maybe all she needed was a good shag to get the stick out of her arse."

"Woah! Can we take it back a few steps and not talk about women that way?" James sent a look over to one of his teammates.

"Sorry bud," He held his hands up in surrender, "Thought you wouldn't mind since you're always moaning about her." James' eyebrows knit together as he tried to piece together what the men were talking about, finally giving up and asking for a plain explanation.

He was met with a copy of Peter's article, outlining the flirty touches and 'electric chemistry' the two of you shared. Scanning it quickly James felt his face screwing up in disgust. Never mind that it obviously wasn't true, what a disgusting violation of privacy. He'd only recently launched into the spotlight, working his way up into the Premier League and then team captain in the last few years. He still didn't know how to handle the fame, especially invasive press like this.

His first priority was setting the ruth straight for his team, explaining exactly what happened and outlining strict instructions not to bring it up the next time they saw you.

"This is going to be a lot worse for her than me," He said, ending the conversation there.

He was correct. Rumours only spiralled from Peter's article. You'd stupidly created Google Alerts for your name; as a journalist, it made sense to keep track of where your writing was being shared. One day of this nonsense and you had all alerts silenced, not wanting to ever visit the internet ever again.

Apparently, this alleged affair was the most interesting thing young British people had ever experienced. The football star and the sports journalist. As you packed up to leave at the end of the day you were feeling sick to your stomach, already overwhelmed by the attention you never wanted on you.

Your face blanched as you approached the dizzying glass windows, a mass of reporters swarming the door. You didn't have to think hard to know they were waiting for you. You retreated to the restroom where they couldn't see you to rearrange your exit appearance. Pulling your coat tight against you and scarf up to cover the bottom half of your face, you plugged your iPod nano in to appear busy (and touched up your eye makeup for the inevitable photos that would make it back into the news cycle).

Physically and emotionally prepared you braved the crowd again, moving through with a polite but firm shove, making yourself a path down to the tube. You only snapped at one particularly rude paparazzi, giving him an instruction of where to 'stick it' as you hopped down the stairs to your station.

You ate a haphazard dinner by your computer, obsessively clicking through the various articles (and now personal blog posts) that had mentioned you. Every link made you feel worse about yourself.

The articles themselves were bad, most of them degrading you and congratulating James. Some had even produced old school photos of the both of you, even a few from your uni days when James was just starting out professionally and you were attending similar parties.

The articles were one thing, at least they usually had to be somewhat impartial. The blog posts by James' fangirls were downright cruel, calling you a slag based on a singular photograph and dragging your name through the mud.

You were drawn from your doom-scrolling by your cellphone ringing, Britney ringtone at least drawing a smile from you.

"Hello?"

"Get off the internet," Sirius Black said from the other end of the line.

"How'd you know?" You exited the webpage dutifully, already feeling the weight of the world's ugly words lifting from your shoulders.

"I figured. First time being written about isn't easy."

"It's certainly making me grateful I've never been so bitchy in my articles," You produced a hollow laugh, "I don't know how people can say these things about someone they've never met."

"That's why we like you," He said, "Mostly, at least. You stick to the sport and not our personal lives."

"Don't inflate my ego, Black, it's just because I don't like you guys," You joked, your mood already blooming back to somewhat more chipper.

"That's what I've been telling him!" You heard Remus call from further away, probably the other side of their living room. Sirius made an offended noise.

"Is Potter there?" You changed the topic, swirling your mouse around the window aimlessly, too afraid to check your work or personal notifications.

"He's out right now, calling someone official -- a publicist or lawyer friend. He's tearing his hair out about this, he feels awful for you." Both men explained, bickering about who exactly he was talking to.

"Yeah, I'm noticing only one of us is getting called a slut." You rolled your eyes even though they couldn't see you, balancing your cell between your shoulder and ear as you made a cup of tea. Sirius' barking laughter crackled through the speaker.

"Don't worry about it, love, everyone knows The Daily Mail is full of shite. Besides, I got that all the time."

"Yeah, in school! Not when you have a grown-up job to save face at!" Sirius conceded, apologising lightly. You shrugged him off; he was not the target of your anger at all.

"James'll be back soon, do you want to stay on the phone?" Remus asked and you answered without hesitation.

"No. I don't want to talk to him right now. We'll just find something to fight about, it's not worth it."

"He wants to make things better," Sirius offered, "He feels terrible."

"Maybe when I'm not so angry at the world." You left them with the offered compromise, hanging up to pity yourself for a few more hours before bed.

You didn't end up being fired over the incident, your bosses couldn't find a good reason to cite, but everyone in the office knew you were on thin ice. Most weren't afraid to highlight that fact. You were really starting to hate the Politics guys.

You just tried to keep your head down, diving into your articles and trying to keep in the higher-ups good graces. Amidst the drama though you'd been taken off all football coverage for the time being, banished to the irrelevant 'sports' you never even knew existed.

The week had taken you out of London to cover bizarre rural events like cheese rolling and bog snorkelling; not uninteresting but a big change of pace to the Premier League drama you were used to.

It did take your mind off of James and the media shitstorm for a day or two though. Being in a small town was much preferable to London, at least for the moment. The paparazzi weren't going to make the drive to find you for a single day when there were plenty more interesting figures to find in the city.

Plus, you were meeting the most interesting people. Though it was no Premier League final, everyone around was so wholly invested and excited by the competition that you couldn't help feeling the same, despite your initial hesitation.

Throughout the day it was just you, your notepad, your camera and the few thousand people who came to participate and observe. You'd already met and interviewed the woman who made the cheese, the previous year's winner and you were waiting impatiently to see who'd prevail now.

The paper was paying for you to stay overnight so you could chronicle the post-event celebrations, and you'd never been so glad to be working late. The key players in the day, organisers and competitors had all convened in the town's old pub, basically heaving under the weight of you all.

You held up your beer with the others despite hating the taste, grateful to be included in their toast to the day. You laughed as you tried to down it quickly, wanting the taste out of your mouth as soon as possible without refusing such a kind gift. Holding the pint up in the air victoriously you accepted the cheers of those around you, including the lovely middle-aged lady who made the ceremonial cheese and the man only a year or two older than you who'd won earlier.

"Finally letting your hair down!" He laughed and you smiled back, trying to remember his name. A glance down at your notepad said Drew. "Can I get you another?" You hoped he didn't notice your eyes widen, not expecting attention like that, not when you were allegedly working no less. You opened your mouth to agree when someone else answered for you.

"She doesn't like beer, thinks it tastes like piss." You whipped your neck around at the familiar voice, mouth dropping open at the sight of James Potter.

"What the hell are you doing here?" You asked, jovial politeness abandoned.

"You didn't remember that my family comes to watch every year?"

"Respectfully, why the fuck would I remember something like that?" You snapped, moving to leave and follow the much nicer Drew to the bar. James grabbed your hand lightly, stopping you from leaving.

"Wait, can we talk please?" You just looked at him for a long time, considering how much patience you had after a full day of work, then shrugged half-heartedly.

He led you outside and away from the crowd, both of you letting out a huff as you noticed the change in temperature.

"I liked your story on the bog snorkelling -- interesting stuff," James broke the awkward silence and you rolled your eyes aggressively.

"As if you read my pieces."

"I do!" He insisted, silently refusing the cigarette you offered. "I've read all your pieces, honest."

"But... huh? You're the one who always said I'd be a shit writer, I've spent years trying to get the negative internal James out of my head! You absolute dickhead!" You shoved his chest, turning back towards the door to return inside.

"Are you thick? I only said that because I fancied you!"

James' words rang heavy in the air, the street otherwise silent. You stared straight ahead of you for a moment, his words settling on top of you as you focused on the orange street lamp.

This whole time, this whole time, you'd been fighting the image you believed James had of you, striving to be better, never being satisfied, for nothing. This whole time you and James had been bickering and trading insults for nothing? And all his flirting... James' annoying charm and ironic compliments and innuendo-filled teasing were all genuine, after all this time? Suddenly your whole world had turned on its axis.

"What do you mean you said it because you fancied me? That is not normal!" You whirled around, accusatory finger pointed his way.

"I don't know! I thought I was supposed to! It wasn't cool to be a sap!" James argued back, running a hand through his already tousled curls.

"Jesus Christ," You muttered, "So what, you thought all my arguing back was just flirting?" James' silence told you all you needed to know.

"Come on, don't act like you didn't like it a little bit! As I recall you were always up for the fight, weren't you? You never avoided me or ignored me. Let's face it, you enjoyed it as much as I did." He stepped closer to you, breath visible in the cool air.

"I didn't enjoy it, what the hell are you talking about? Why would I enjoy trading schoolyard insults with some arrogant, idiotic football player who discredited the one thing I wanted most in my life?" Suddenly you were inches apart, heat emanating from both of you as you fought.

"Like you never said I was stupid for wanting to be a footballer? Face it, love, you're just as bad as me."

And suddenly, despite all your better judgement and every bit of sense in your head, you were kissing him. You didn't know exactly how it had happened, and if anyone were to ever ask you you would absolutely pin the blame on James but there you were, out in the middle of the street without a care in the world.

Every one of your senses was on fire, the smell of his cologne, the taste of his lips, the feeling of his soft curls under your fingers. Everything about James felt like he was made for you, like all the years of you revolving around each other, playing off the other's insult was just a lead-up, preparation for the very moment you kissed for the first time.

James' arms around you were warm, strong from years of working out and protective like a weighted blanket. One hand wrapped around your midsection and the other firmly on your neck you felt wholly surrounded by him, isolated in your own bubble of James.

It was probably a bad idea, but you weren't overly concerned with addressing that fact in any rush. It didn't come as you tilted your head to bring him even closer, it didn't come as you said hurried goodbyes in the pub and collected your coat, it didn't even come as you closed the door to your hotel room, undoing the buttons to James' shirt like they had a personal vendetta against you.

The admittance only came as you lay entangled with him, faces millimetres apart.

"Was that a bad idea?" You asked, genuine self-consciousness mixing with pragmatic anxiety.

"I mean, I quite enjoyed myself, love. Did you not?" James' cheeky smile made you snort out a giggle but you sobered up quickly, hitting him lightly on his toned chest.

"Don't turn this into a joke!" You ordered, "Have we just fucked everything up?" James just looked at you for a minute, taking in the sincerity in your voice and the depth of your eyes.

"Of course we haven't," He assured you. "Do you like me?"

"But--"

"Ah! Do you like me?" He reiterated and you paused, nodding shyly. "See? You like me and I like you. We'll figure everything else out. Start slow; baby steps."

"Baby steps," You agreed, sharing his smile. It really only hit you how much you actually liked James once you'd said it, finally noticing how he might've been looking at you the whole time.

You sent James off early in the morning, both of you needing to make it back to London quickly. You had to get your article written up and James had training. Thankfully there was no awkwardness in your goodbye; James had to rush to meet his parents to drive back by car and you had a train to catch. The only moment of hesitance came as you said goodbye, waving at each other with a giggle as James hopped down the steps. He hesitated halfway, turning to look at you with the glint of mischief in his eye that you'd become very well acquainted with.

In a moment he was at the top of the steps again, swooping in to steal another kiss. You rolled your eyes to hide an embarrassing smile, pushing him back in the direction he came.

"Haven't you got somewhere to be?" You asked, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. James mimed twisting a knife in his chest but continued down the stairs nonetheless, giving you one last smile before he turned a corner and disappeared from your sight. You sighed like a schoolgirl then laughed at yourself, packing the last of your things to get home.

As you sat on the train, green landscapes passed you through the window and you felt your cell phone buzz from the minuscule pocket of your work trousers.

thinking of u :P <3

You grinned, looking out at the scenery so the people around you wouldn't be able to figure out your embarrassing secret. You felt like a teenage girl again, blushing over a text from the guy you had a crush on.

Everything turned to shit in a matter of hours after returning to London.

First, James' publicist made his statement. It wasn't necessarily terrible, but it really had no regard for you. No statement declaring you both on good terms, no coming to your defence or asking for the press to respect you. James looked like the hero saving a stupid drunk girl, and you still looked desperate for the most popular footballer in the country. You were decently sure it wasn't James' fault, but it did significantly dampen your lovesick giddiness.

The office was half-empty when you arrived, kitten heels clicking against the ground. You said a quick hello to Lily, still dutifully typing away at her computer. You followed her lead, exporting your notes to your desktop computer, formatting the piece and going through edits to have it ready for the next paper.

The sun was setting, sending orange and pink streaks through the sky when the door to your boss' office slammed open, echoing above the cubicles.

"You kissed him?" He yelled and you paled, knowing exactly what he was talking about but not how he knew. That problem was solved when he slammed the magazine down in front of you, no doubt just delivered by the skittery young receptionist running back to the elevator.

FACT OR FICTION? POTTER AND REPORTER CAUGHT SNOGGING AMIDST PUBLIC DENIAL

Fuck. That could not be worse.

The whole piece was essentially dragging your name through the absolute mud now that they had the confirmation there was something going on between you and James. The whole world thought you were sleeping to the top, or for the best scoop, and everyone hated you for it.

You looked up at your boss, words dying on your tongue.

"Please tell me that's not you," He said, grasping at the thinning hair on his head. You couldn't deny it.

"I..." You trailed off, searching for anything you could say to make it better. "I didn't mean to. And I'm being completely honest when I say that the first article was all bullshit. Things have... happened since then." You were already on the verge of tears. Even on an optimistic day, you couldn't have denied that this was utterly shit.

"Jesus." Your boss muttered, beginning to pace. "Look, I like you, you know? You do good work and you're never outta line, but I reckon the higher-ups are gonna be done with you. They wanted you out over the first article but I convinced them it was all speculation. This is proof and makes us all look bad that you're sleeping with someone you interview every other bloody week. Look, I'll do what I can in damage control, but I'd be bringing your stuff home tonight. I'm sorry."

How could he have just left you with that absolute bombshell? Effectively firing you, just like that? The tears had made their way up to your waterline, sitting there mocking you as you refused to let them fall. You submitted your piece and shut off your laptop, angrily stuffing your sparse personal decorations into your shoulder bag to get the fuck out of the building as fast as possible.

The paparazzi were waiting again, of course, like that was what you really needed. You pushed past them, making sure to land an extra hard stomp on Peter's foot, lips twitching into the beginnings of a smile as you heard him curse.

You sat on the tube, staring intently at your feet and trying desperately to think of anything but your current situation. You'd already been approached by someone who'd coughed out "Skank," which really hadn't done anything for your sour mood. All you wanted was to crawl into your bed and never emerge.

You wandered down the street between the metro station and your flat, hands shoved deep in your coat pockets.

"Hey!" Someone called and you glanced over on instinct, senses drawn by the interruption of an otherwise quiet evening. "You're the girl who kissed James Potter, yeah?" It was a girl still in her school uniform, probably sixteen or seventeen. You thought through your options quickly and shrugged.

"Yeah, I guess."

"Wicked. How was it?" She asked, chewing on pink gum. There was an aura about her that you liked, not judgemental like everyone else you'd met. If you were still in school you thought you might've been friends with her.

"Pretty good, I'd do it again." A cheeky almost-joke between the two of you, ironic given the shit that it had caused for you.

"We were talking about it at school. Pretty shit how they've treated you. Like they all wouldn't jump at a chance to get close to 'im." You liked the way that she didn't get any closer. Just the two of you standing face to face, divided by the empty road.

"Exactly what I've been saying," You agreed, tucking your hair behind your ears.

"If it was the other way around, if you were the famous one, James would be getting congratulated for getting with you, not ridiculed by the mindless gossip columns. All my friends think it's utter bullshit, stopped buyin' 'em and everything." You could have kissed her if that wasn't tremendously creepy. In five minutes, this schoolgirl had vindicated everything you'd been saying for the past week in a way no one else had.

"Thank you," You said, with more sincerity than you probably should have had for a complete stranger. The girl just shrugged with a smile, nodding before continuing down the street, the sound of her leather school shoes growing quieter with every step.

You felt it in your whole body every time you thought of the interaction for the next few hours, warmth spreading through your chest as you were reminded there were still good people around.

Your other reminder of that fact came with the sound of your buzzer, the laughing of Lily and Marlene echoing off the stone of your building. As you let them in curiously they presented armfuls of takeout, the smell of Chinese food immediately floating through your flat.

Lily took the responsibility of setting out the food while Marlene took control of your little television, flipping between channels until she found a suitable romcom starting.

You didn't speak about what had happened, no one mentioned James Potter or the bloody Sunday People. Yet, there was an air of tenderness that let you know the girls knew exactly what was happening and how you were feeling about it.

Still, there was something bothering you. You couldn't give it a name immediately, only a tugging in your stomach while the girls were entertaining you, but persistent nonetheless.

It wasn't until you were all crammed into your bed, the other two peacefully asleep, that you could identify the sensation. It was an overwhelming desire, a need to write that you hadn't felt in ages. It was the same feeling that had pushed you to be a journalist in the first place, an inspiration you typically only felt watching a magical soccer final.

You crept out of your bedroom, switching on your computer at the kitchen table, squinting at the aggressive blue light. And when a blank Word document appeared before you, you started writing. Obsessively, feverishly, words poured out of you at a rate that hadn't happened since you'd started at Sunday People.

The words of the school girl fresh in your mind, you started an article vastly different from your usual kind. Instead of strategies and highlights you dissected your own experience of the past week, saying everything you hadn't let yourself unload to the paparazzi outside your office (though with fewer curse words than they would have received). It could have been minutes or hours that you were writing and you wouldn't have noticed, eyes glued on the screen in front of you.

You didn't realise you'd fallen asleep until Lily woke you gently with a hand on your shoulder, offering a steaming mug of tea. It was light outside, the world already up and awake. You were glad it was a weekend as the girls didn't need to rush off to work, cooking a simple breakfast for you all to share.

"What've you written?" Marlene asked, the second part of her sentence unnecessary: since you don't have a job to write for. You shrugged, taking a bite of some eggs.

"Just something I had to get off my chest. Might see if I can sell it to someone to tide me over 'til I figure out what I'm doing with my life."

"Can we read?" You made a 'go ahead' gesture, the computer already open to the screen.

A WOMAN'S UNWILLING WEEK IN THE PUBLIC EYE:

How a woman always loses.

You sat in mild discomfort as Lily and Marlene read your piece in silence, anxiously awaiting their reactions. They weren't what you were expecting.

When they turned back to face you, Lily had tears in her eyes, red tones brought out in her skin. Even Marlene looked uncharacteristically moved, not at all the reaction you were expecting. Firstly, it was completely unedited so you suspected it was somewhat of a mess from your midnight haze. Secondly, it was more of a vent than anything, getting your hatred for invasive paparazzi off your chest. You thought you'd all laugh about it then move on with your days.

"Lils, what's wrong?" You didn't mean to laugh, it was more out of surprise than anything else.

"It's just, it's so raw and real. It's so unfair," She sniffled, wiping her eyes with the sleeves of her sweater.

"Jesus, you don't have to cry," You said lightly, "I'm fine! I hated that bloody place anyway."

"That's not the point," Marlene pointed out, "And Lily's right, this is really confronting stuff. It's great."

"Thanks," You mumbled, studying a lamp for something to do.

"Can we talk about James?" Your head snapped back to look at her.

"What about him?"

"Clearly there's been some... developments in your relationship, which we don't have to talk about--"

"Yet," Marlene interrupted.

"The point is that it looks like there's feelings involved now. What are you doing about them? Because if you publish that, it's putting everything out there, and even I can't tell how you feel about James right now," Lily finished.

"I don't want to talk to him," You said quickly, "I know it's not his fault but I can't think about him without getting mad. It's like I wrote; he ends up fine while I lose my job over one kiss."

"Understandable," Marlene nodded, "But if I know James at all, he'll be going crazy every minute that you ignore him."

You had much to consider when the girls left. The state of your career, your feelings for James, everything felt too big and overwhelming to make any decisions about. So, you took a nap.

The rest of your weekend was spent sending your then-edited article to as many newspapers and blogs as you could and hiding out in your flat, dodging James' calls.

Unfortunately, you liked him. You'd figured out that much. More unfortunately, he hadn't done anything to help you out in all this mess, benefiting from the press in a way that only England's favourite footballer could.

On Monday morning your piece was published. Not the biggest or most reputable newspaper, if your name hadn't still been trending it probably would have gone largely noticed. Instead, it blew up.

It had mixed reviews, of course, a tell-all so blatantly feminist would always attract its haters, but you were floored by the support it was receiving. Women were validating your experiences in a way you hadn't expected even a few days ago. It made you not so scared to leave the house anymore.

On Tuesday morning, Remus called you. You had the thought that it might have been James calling to grovel on Remus' phone, but you thought it was a smart enough idea you'd indulge anyway. If it was Sirius you wouldn't have picked up.

Instead, it was actually Remus.

"Come to the media room this afternoon," He said, evidently not wasting time with pleasantries.

"What?" You asked, caught off-guard.

"Just do it. Two o'clock."

"Remus, you know I don't have a job anymore, right?"

"Come off it, you know anyone on the team would let you in. You've got quite a name for yourself," He chanced a joke and you rolled your eyes.

"What, whore?" You retorted, only a little worried it would be true.

"I'm hanging up," Was all he said before the line went dead. You huffed, snapping your phone closed with all the attitude of a spoiled private schoolgirl.

Yet, at two o'clock you were standing in front of the media room at James' team's stadium, questioning all of your life choices.

The room seemingly went silent when you entered, dozens of pairs of eyes staring you down as you nervously stuck to the wall. You felt the derogatory, leering stares from all the sleazy men who'd been accusing you of sleeping with players since you first started in the field. It made you want to drop dead.

James made his way to the lectern up the front of the room with a cough, quieting down the chaos.

"Afternoon, everyone. I'm sure you're all wondering why I've called you here, I've got some things I'd like to address.

"As you all well know, I've been a frequent face in the papers lately, and not for my brilliant playing as it usually is. I recently got followed down a street after a night out looking after an old friend who happened to be a colleague of yours. Now I know that my godly good looks lead you to believe that I don't feel the same as all of you, but I do. And I'd like you all to consider how you'd feel if a man with a camera followed you all the way home after you'd been out for a night with your friends and a few cheeky drinks. It's pretty invasive if you can't imagine.

"Now, all this press hasn't really affected me. However, my dear friend has been subject to misogynistic articles, slut-shaming and harassment all because we were seen out together and a few hateful words from someone I used to consider a mate." You had no idea where this was going, but you were absolutely fascinated. James was more well-spoken, more mature and solemn than you'd ever seen him, though he still had his audience in the palm of his hand with his casual jokes. It was a masterclass in public speaking.

"If you haven't read any of my friend's pieces I would highly recommend them; she's got a brilliant voice and I personally read everything she publishes. However, I'm not here to talk about her work; I'd actually like to talk about her if you all don't mind."

What the hell was happening?

"In the midst of all these articles over the last week, I know you've all seen various pictures of us, including from secondary school. A few come to my mind, our graduation picture is a highlight, but I'd really like to talk about this one." James brandished a printed-out photo you recognised instantly.

"This photo was taken when we were twelve or thirteen years old at someone's party. That night, as you tend to do when you're young and bored, we played spin the bottle and ended up being each other's first kiss. I'm sure you're all wondering why I'm telling this story now, and it's because ever since that night as I have recently realised, almost a decade later, I have been embarrassingly, stupidly in love with her."

Your life wasn't real, it absolutely could not be.

"And though I've done some incredibly dumb things over the years, somehow she's managed to like me back -- at least a little. So I'm setting the record straight right now, she is not 'sleeping to the top' or trying to get a secret scoop out of me because I'm the one who's been chasing after her for twelve years.

"I know I've been rambling on for far too long so I'll wrap it up here, but I just wanted to end this little conference with a warning that if I see any more disgusting, hateful articles about her, you won't be getting another comment from me again. So nice to see you all!"

The room started to trickle out but you were stuck to your spot against the wall, frozen in absolute shock. You hardly even noticed the dirty looks you got from some of the people you'd been working alongside for years.

You spotted James in another corner, drinking out of a plastic water bottle and messing with his hair. A nervous tell.

The room was almost completely empty when you approached him, heels muffled by the carpeted floor.

"Hey stranger," You said softly, feeling way out of your depth. He turned in an instant, smile lighting up his face then melting away as it was replaced with an insecure frown.

"Was that okay? I didn't want to embarrass you but I wanted to step up and do something and protect you and--"

"Have you really loved me since we were twelve?" You cut him off bluntly.

"Every day since, as I've figured out," He agreed with a slight nod, glasses slipping down his nose slightly.

"What about all the flirting with Lily? The other girls over the years?"

"So obviously fake. Distractions. It's never been anyone but you, love."

You could only stare at him for a moment, your whole world shifting beneath your feet. James' face became increasingly worried, brow furrowing more the longer you remained unresponsive.

"If you don't feel the same that's totally alright, I still stand by what I did and I don't want you being harassed for--"

You'd always thought that cutting someone off with a kiss was ridiculously cheesy, reserved for shitty Hallmark movies with grown-up child actors who never got their big break. Turns out though, when you realise that your girlish crush on the star footballer has actually been a complicated love of twelve years, you don't really want to waste any more time.

When you woke up on Wednesday morning with James next to you, body heat keeping you cozy, you were convinced you had to be dreaming. When you eventually got up to check your emails and start your day the hypothesis was only solidified by the impossible email waiting in your inbox.

The fucking BBC wanted to hire you as a football commentator and sports writer. Your dream job at your dream company. If you let out an embarrassing squeal then that was none of your business.

You were still convinced you were hallucinating the whole thing until James came in with his biggest smile and that look in his eyes that told you he probably had a hand in getting your name on the BBC desks.

Even a few weeks ago you would have been mad at him, assuming it was mocking or he had ulterior motives. But it wasn't a few weeks ago anymore, and James Potter's whole, endless heart belonged to you. You weren't letting that go anytime soon.

[pedrithink]

too much ✩ kylian mbappé

KYLIAN MBAPPÉ X NON FAMOUS! READER

you get a lot of hate online and kylian is tired of seeing you suffering

faceclaim: gracie abrams

Liked by k.mbappe, ethanmbappé, and 5,626 others

ynusername today was such a good day 😄👍🏻

View all 517 comments

ynhater1 whore

ynhater2 wtf 🤣 why are u so fckng ugly

mbappefan1 don’t worry about the bad comments, y/n!! you are pretty and an amazing person.

ynhater3 how can kylian date someone as weird as you?

ynhater4 💩💩☠️

ynhater5 we don’t want kylian dating you 🤮🤮🤮

Liked by k.mbappe, neymarjr, and 6,727 others

ynusername date night 💗

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ynhater1 you are so ugly omfg

ynhater2 we hate you

ynhater3 you just want kylian’s money

ynhater4 i hope kylian cheats on you ☠️

mbapperfan1 why are you mean to her? I can't understand, she never did anything wrong.

�� mbappefan2 i can’t understand either, she makes kylian so happy.

ynhater5 🤮🤮🤮🤮

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ynusername fun day at the park :)

View all the 537 comments

ynhater1 even the cat wants to run away from you

ynhater2 how do you manage to look ugly in every single picture? ☠️

ynhater3 kylian deserves better

ynhater4 💩☠️🤮

ynhater5 #freekylian

mbappefan1 if you guys really like kylian you wouldn’t be saying things like that about his girlfriend

ynhater6 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

mbappefan2 what’s y’all problem? omg, poor girl!

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ynusername special day <3

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ynhater1 you are so ugly, hope you know that

⤷ ynusername you guys never let me forget that, thank you :)

ynhater2 you so close to another man, aren’t you ashamed??? 🤮

⤷ mbappefan1 it’s her cousin, dumb ☠️

ynhater3 i hate you

ynhater4 kylian is ashamed of you

ynhater5 kylian doesn’t love you

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ynusername loving being around people who make me happy :)

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Liked by neymarjr, antonelaroccuzzo, and 2,345,628 others

k.mbappe The most beautiful girl with the purest heart I have ever met in my entire life. I really can't understand why such a nice person is treated so poorly by some of you, please don't say you are my fan if you treat the people I love in the most insensitive and ridiculous way possible. I don’t even have words to define the way this woman shows her love for me, the way she makes me feel like the luckiest man in the world, and the way she made me feel truly understood for the first time. I just want to ask you to see what an amazing woman I have by my side, I am sure that if you get to know a little bit more about her, you will know the reasons why i fell in love. And finally, Y/N, I love you even without love, as if this is all so big, so great, so absurd, that it almost isn't. I love you in such an impossible way.

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ynusername thank u for making me feel loved and comfortable with myself, i love you forever and ever.

antonelaroccuzzo 🥰❤️

mbappefan1 you are amazing, y/n!!!! 💗

mbappefan2 stay strong, y/n. kylian loves and cares about you!

ethanmbappe proud to have you as my sis 😍 @ynusername

neymarjr don’t pay attention to the comments of haters, y/n. we all know what an amazing woman you are ❤️

mbappefan3 it’s so important that kylian talked about it, very happy for them both 🥰

antogriezmann 😍👏🏻

notes: hope y’all liked it!! 🫶🏻

[emometalhead]

Happy 2024!! 🎉 I wanted to take a minute to spread some love to my mutuals to start off the year. (Thank you to Alessia for reminding me to do this!!)

I'm going to do this in alphabetical order by url, because that's easiest for me.

@americanrecord - Kelsey!!!! Hiiii. I love you so much, and I hope this year brings you everything you deserve. You are so brilliant, hardworking, and kind. You're one of my best friends, and I am so grateful to have you in my life. Forever proud of you and forever cheering you on. Here's to another year of friendship, daily check ins, and conversations about anything + everything. 🩷

@arnold-layne - Arnold!!! Hello my dear! I'm so proud of you for your recent accomplishments with school and work!!!! You are such a talented writer, and I know you're going to go far. I hope this year is productive for you and your passions. I'm excited to see you flourish, and I'm sending hugs!!!! I hope you have a year of love and light. 🫶🌞

@awrestlinggirlwholoves80sbands - Hi Alessia!!!! You are one of the absolute sweetest people I've ever met. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for checking up on me and always bringing some light into my day. Last year was rough, but you made it better. I want to be more intentional about reaching out this year, and I'm grateful to have your friendship along the way. Ilysm. Wishing you a year that is as kind as you are. 💕💕

@a-queen-of-the-clouds Jori your url is so fitting, because you're absolutely a queen. I'm not sure when you'll see this, but you deserve good vibes year round. I love when you grace Tumblr with your presence. I miss you a ton when you're not here, and I hope you're doing so well irl!!! Sending hugs 🥰.

@born-to-lose - Hi Mel!! I'm so proud. I know this year threw some curveballs at you, but I also know you're going into this year stronger. You're an absolute girlboss is the best and least ironic way. 😎 You're a talented writer, and I love how you share your creativity. I'm so glad to know you. I'm obsessed with you, and I know you'll keep slaying in the new year. Wishing you all the best!!!! Love you!

@day-trippin-dreamer - Tina!!!! 🩷🩷 What can I say? You're one of the best friends I could've ever wished for. I am eternally grateful for you. Thank you for your kindness. I live for our daily conversations. You're part of my routine, and you always make any bad day become a good one. I love you so much. You're so much fun, and you have the best opinions+judgement. I can't say enough good things about you.

@doctorqueensanatomy - Sheamus, I have no clue if or when you'll see this. On the chance you will though, I want you to have something nice to read. I'm so grateful for our friendship! It has grown a lot in the last couple years, and I hope we'll grow even closer this year. I love your passion for your interests, and I love how much you care about the people in your life. Our conversations are always so fun or so heartwarming. I hope this year treats you kindly. You are so genuine and wonderful. Also you have a fun accent lol. Love you!! 🥰

@idontwanttospoiltheparty - Hi Fiona!! 😁 In the best way, you fascinate me. I love seeing how your brain works. I appreciate the time you put into expressing your thoughts and opinions. I may not always agree with your music opinions, but I respect them fiercely. You are the most dedicated Swiftles person I know, and I love that for you. I want to make more of an effort to reach out to people this year, so I hope we are able to interact a little more in 2024. I hope you have a wonderful year! 🩷

@inquisitiveheretic - I feel like every time I write out things for multiple people, I feel compelled to write yours last. You're really good at making me want to slow down and really think about what I want to say. I often feel in a rush for no good reason, so I appreciate that something about you gives off an effect of calm. I think you're one of the coolest people I've had the privilege of meeting here, and I'm grateful for our little chats. We are very different people, and I enjoy that you help me broaden my horizons. I hope you have a lovely year full of good things and good times. Thanks for being here 🖤.

@losers-yurio Hi Rylie!! 💛 I hope you know I think about you daily. You are a ray of sunshine, and I will never be able to say enough how glad I am to know you. You have had such a profound impact on my life. I love you so much, and I hope you're doing well. You're amazing, and I'm so excited for you heading into college!! The world is a better place for having people like you in it.

@morska--vila - Hi Andi!! I have no clue when you'll see this, but I want you to have something pleasant to see next time you're here! 🥰 I think about you all the time, and I miss you!!! I hope you're doing well. I'm always rooting for you. You have the best sense of humor, and I'm so happy to know you. As much as I love your presence here, I hope you're thriving irl.

@nocturnal-light - Lynne!! My dude you impress me so much. You're an incredible artist, and your talent as a skater is so cool! Seriously you're one of the coolest people I know. We don't talk a ton, but our interactions are always sweet! I appreciate your presence on my dash, and I hope you have a wonderful year!!!! 💜

@no-fxn-club - Frankie, you are one of my favorite people. I love the passion and joy you bring into the world. I have so much fun every time I talk to you, and I love the splices of life you share with me. I'm sorry I fell out of communication last year. I really want to mend that this year. I miss our daily conversations!! I love you a ton!! You're so damn cool, and you're my favorite southerner by a longshot 😂. Here's to another year of kindly making fun of each other!

@nuttmeg13 - Hi Megan!! 💜 I have to commend you for sticking through so many phases of this blog. I'm grateful to go into another year with you as a mutual! I'm wishing you the best, always. Here's to another crazy + exciting year as Swifties 🎉. Btw you're still the Swiftie with the most valid opinions lol.

@ramblinguitar - Hi Alexa! You're the best grunge blog around, and I think you're iconic. I love that you have such a deep love and respect for music, and I think it's great that you share so much music on your blog. I love receiving personal song recommendations from you, and it's always so cool when you post about new stuff I haven't heard about. Your jewelry is so cool, and you have such a creative soul. You're awesome, and I hope you have a great year!! 🖤🤘

@rebelrollerqueen - Renae!!!! I don't think I can ever say it enough, so I'm going to say it again: I am so proud of you!! I'm so proud of you. You are smart, creative, kind, and talented. I am so glad to know you, and so grateful to have been bestowed the Internet Mom title ❤️. I love hearing your covers, and I'm forever impressed with your hair+makeup+fashion. You are leaps and bounds cooler than I'll ever be, and I know you're going to achieve great things. ILY!

@rosyfingereddawnn - Hi Syd! You have such good vibes. You are such a caring person, and everyone should consider themselves lucky to be in your life. I appreciate your check ins so much. You deserve the best, and I hope life is treating you well!! 🩷 It's so fun seeing your post threads when you're listening to music. You radiate love and joy!!!! Ily 🌞

@smokeandmirrorz - Hi Jeordie!!!! I know you're spending more time away from this blog, and though I miss you I'm glad you're taking time for yourself! I hope you're doing well, and I know you'll make this year into something wonderful! Happy belated birthday, dude. You rock. 🖤

@therockywhorerpictureshow - Ella!!!!! You have such lovely vibes. You are so kind, and I love seeing you on my dash. Thank you for sharing pieces of your life. It is wonderful to see your dogs and baking!!!! Your blog makes me feel cozy and warm. I'm so happy to know you 😁🥰. Happy New Year!!! May this year bring you peace and joy!!!!

@xx-key-xx - Key, you are my 2000s fashion icon. I'm literally so obsessed with you. I know we don't talk much, but you're killing it and I'm always here to support you!!!! Keep slaying and live it up like it's 2004 ✨️🖤.

[miraclewoozi]

fanning u from a distance. this made me giggle like a schoolgirl. thank you sm😭😭😭

DON'T SWEAT IT. - l.jh

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you.

pairing; lee jihoon x fem!reader.  content; fluff / gym crush au / strangers to lovers / kinda idiots to lovers / smut towards the end (MINORS DNI). w/c; just a breezy 18k- and some change? warnings; swearing, this is only proof read once because if i read it again i was going to lose my mind. please let me know if i've forgotten any. smut tags under the cut ( not sure that this counts as a warning but a heads up: the gym weight units, whenever mentioned, are in kilograms not lbs because i’m british and the metric system, am i right? sorry if there are any other british-isms, i try really hard to avoid them/catch them on a proofread but there are inevitably some that have slipped through the net.  )

note; gym-selfie jihoon, you will never not own my ass. ( screaming internally this is the first fic i've written since my dan + phil youtube era. i don't know what i'm doing. this has been in my wips for about two months. it's a bit all over the place. that's. literally just me. bon appetite. <3 )

smut warnings: making out, grinding, fingering (f rec), oral (f rec), blowjob started/implied (at the end), protected sex (be safe out there gang), little bit of biting, no huge power dynamics? reader & jihoon are both switches (and simps), some use of pet-names (good girl/baby).

—————

He first sees you around lunchtime on an otherwise unassuming Sunday. 

As you walk in, the gym is wonderfully quiet. A handful of regulars mill about, making full use of the rare freedom of the machinery. One of the club’s personal trainers is marching an impossibly steep incline on a treadmill. It could just be any other weekend session in this criminally over-equipped and under-used gym: the town’s worst kept secret. But when the door slams shut behind you, his head jerks up; it, in this moment, is the loudest sound in the room. It’s sort of the only one he hears at all.

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you as he sits with dumbbells rested against his thighs. He catches his breath as he wonders who you are, if you’ve ever been to this gym before, why he doesn’t recognise you. Are you a new potential regular, maybe? Or just visiting the area and making good use of the cheap pay-as-you-go rates? Maybe, he considers, lips turning downwards in thought… maybe you’ve been coming here for a long time and he’s somehow just always been so in his own head that he’s never noticed.

The last, he thinks, is sort of unlikely. No. He would definitely remember a face like yours.

His heart rate slows more than he usually lets it as he finds himself watching you fill up your water bottle at the fountain, taking a long sip on your way over to one of the stairmasters. His brain blanks out when he realises that he’s not just looking anymore, he’s sort of staring, and swallows the saliva on his tongue hard, looking back at the mirror. He doesn’t want to be that guy. He isn’t that guy – he just got distracted by the loud noise, and this is exactly why he checks the damn battery on his headphones before he leaves the house. 

The only problem is that now, he can’t remember how many sets he’s done. He lies back and stares straight into a slightly sketchy light-fixture, neglecting to pick up the dumbbells that he put aside for his next set of pushes. Jihoon adjusts the position of his shoulders against the bench, arches his back off it slightly, digs his heels into the spongy floor beneath them and pushes the ones still in his hands until failure. 

Today, he finishes his routine and leaves the gym without allowing himself so much as another glance your way.

He neglects to notice that your eyes are avoiding him right back. 

—————

You smile at him for the first time on a Tuesday. Not the following one – a week and a bit later.

Seungcheol is with him tonight. Jihoon prefers to train alone nine times out of ten: this is a truth widely acknowledged, accepted and respected among his friends. Gym time is his down time, his equivalent of movie marathons and comfort food, of face masks and glasses of wine. But it’s not a hard rule: occasionally, someone will ask to tag along and use one of his guest passes, and Jihoon very rarely says no. There are two reasons. One, he isn’t actually rude, contrary to approximately eighteen running jokes in the group-chat. But also, it adds a little bit of variety to his otherwise very set-in-stone regimen, and mixing it up doesn’t hurt. Like tonight, for example. Seungcheol is pulling him into the studio off the main gym floor, his own gym bag packed with boxing pads and gloves for them to play with.

Variety.

Jihoon grumbles a little at the idea, at first. He has a very love-hate relationship with cardio, favouring a simple steady-state run over everything else, and it just feels a bit against his moral code to use gym time for something like this. However, he comes to discover very quickly that smacking Seungcheol’s hands is very therapeutic; Jihoon knows he’s maybe getting a little too into it when his friend asks if they can switch around, grimacing and shaking out his wrist after a particularly beefy punch. 

He agrees, albeit reluctantly, tugging off the gloves he’s wearing and pulling on the pads instead.

This half of the activity is considerably less enjoyable for Jihoon; he starts to cool down and loses his flow almost straight away and after about thirty seconds, his breathing is back to normal and he feels ready to go again. Even so, he does what he needs to do to be a good workout partner, and goes one step further into ‘good friend’ territory as he allows Seungcheol to vent about the bad day he had at work in-between hits, offering murmurs and looks of disgust when it feels appropriate. Suddenly, the impromptu request to come to the gym tonight makes much more sense, as does the slightly bizarre choice of activity, but Jihoon tries not to ask about it in too much detail.

They swing at each other for a few more rounds apiece, working up a healthy sweat and getting out a few frustrations as the hour wears on. On the last set, Jihoon switches out Seungcheol’s hands for a punching bag, putting a lot more of his weight behind every hit and really tiring himself out. By the end, his hair sticks to his forehead and his cheeks have flushed bright red; he only stops when he gets that weird, metallic taste in the back of his mouth that says he’s probably overdone it. Again.

“Hit the shower?” Seungcheol asks breathlessly as he finishes his last set of Russian twists and lies down flat on the floor, equally sticky and flushed all over. 

Jihoon pats his face dry with his towel, shaking his head. “You go ahead. I’ll have one at home.” 

He doesn’t give Seungcheol much of a chance to respond, already cleaning down anything he’s touched or managed to sweat on and riding out the high of the endorphins flooding his veins. Secretly, he hasn’t had a cardio session this high energy or this satisfying in a long time. He isn’t going to readily admit to that though.

“Nah, I’ll do the same,” Seungcheol agrees. He starts packing the gear he brought with him into his bag and they leave together after, heading towards the exit. 

That’s when he sees you again. 

He doesn’t notice at first; you’re stowing your things into one of the higher lockers, and you have your headphones slung around your neck as he walks past. It’s the sound of a song he vaguely recognises through your speakers that makes his head snap over from the conversation he’s in the middle of. They walk past at the moment you drop down from your tiptoes, and you flash a small (but insanely pretty) smile at Jihoon.

By the time he manages to process this fact, he’s already walked past you and you’re headed over into the main gym area, so even though he turns around to try and catch your eye, all he sees is your retreating figure. He stumbles over his own feet, not looking where he’s going, and just barely catches himself on Seungcheol’s upper arm before he actually does fall over. His older friend glances down at his bicep before he adopts a look that Jihoon has seen many, many times before: just never directed at him. His cheeks heat up further and he looks away.

“What was that?” Seungcheol asks, one eyebrow so far up his forehead that it’s disappeared almost entirely under his soggy hair. He looks so smug, so incredibly entertained. Jihoon wants to smack that expression off his face, immediately.

“Nothing,” Jihoon rushes, managing not to act on the violent thought even though he wants to. He clears his throat. “No-one. I-... they’re new, I think. I don’t know.”

Seungcheol lets out a soft laugh, pushing the door open for them both to leave through. “Yeah,” he scoffs, eyes glimmering with something Jihoon doesn’t think he likes the look of. “Nothing, my ass.”

—————

Three days later, he hears you speak for the first time.

Granted, you aren’t speaking to him – at least, not at first. But that’s not really what matters.

It’s late, and it’s a Friday night. Fridays are usually Jihoon’s days rest days, but sitting around his apartment had him feeling impossibly twitchy, with far too much energy to burn and no way to do so without leaving the house. And he knows that he needs to take days off, now and again. He knows that they’re good for recovery and that it’s healthy to take time to himself that involves not lifting weights. But what he also knows is that if he doesn’t manage to shake the weird buzzing feeling in his muscles, in his joints, in his veins, he’s never going to get to sleep. So, here he finds himself at almost 10PM, walking down the street to get to the gym.

To begin with, he doesn’t know (or really care) who it is that’s coming up behind him. He can hear quite clearly that the mystery person is on the phone, and that they’re in the middle of what seems to be a rather heated argument: his brain latches onto occasional words, phrases, curses. Every now and again, their voice drops to a deep, frustrated mutter and he cringes slightly, making a point to keep his eyes forward and down so as not to draw attention to the fact that this presumably private conversation has become everything but.

He touches his entry fob to the sensor on the door as he arrives and pushes it open. Jihoon uses the opportunity to stand still, to glance back at whoever it is that’s walked behind him for the past four and a half minutes, and his eyes come to land on you. He falters, noting how your eyes are a bit glassy and your cheeks are stained with what he can safely assume are tear-tracks. In this moment, he wants to run; he doesn’t want anything to do with that, and he certainly doesn’t want to hear any more of your call. It’s none of his business, and he feels plenty weird enough already with what he has overheard. But, for some unknown reason, he stays in place.

“No – no, you don’t get to-...” you hiss into your phone. “It was our fucking anniversary, you asshole.” Jihoon’s face tightens at that, lips drawn between his teeth and his eyes blowing slightly wide. You pass through the door in front of him, flashing a small smile as you go. Another smile, he thinks to himself, but he’d be an idiot to compare them in any way; this one is so dramatically dissimilar to the first, he thinks it could almost have come from a totally different person. 

Unfortunately, there’s nothing ‘insanely pretty’ about it this time. Your smile is tight-lipped and exhausted, slightly apologetic. Maybe even forced. He does try to return a warmer one to you, but he doesn’t know if you notice. 

“Look, I’m at the gym – we’re not doing this right now. I’ll call you later.” You hang up the phone with the kind of sigh that groans in the back of your throat.

A small part of him wants to take this moment and use it to ask if you’re all right, but an even larger part of him doesn’t. It isn’t because he doesn’t care. In a weird way, considering this is only the first time he’s clearly heard your voice and he knows absolutely nothing about you, he does care. But there are a few things that stop him. Not only are you a near-complete stranger, not only would he have no idea what to say to you if the answer happened to come out as a ‘no’, not only is he already coming over a little bit clammy at the thought of having a conversation with you… Jihoon isn’t stupid. He knows from the sound of your voice and the way you’re rather aggressively typing a message into your phone that it’s a ridiculous question.

You’re walking into the gym at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, your eyes literally brimming with tears. Of course you’re not all right.

He’s still standing in the open doorway mulling all this over, but Jihoon only realises when a gust of wind slaps over his calves and sends a draught not only through the reception area, but up the length of his spine. He comes inside fully as you close the locker you’re using – he notices, but he isn’t sure why, that it’s the same one as last time – and throws his things into the one he always uses. Two below and one to the left of yours.

It’s quiet tonight: just the pair of you and one middle-aged guy. Jihoon recognises him as the friendly man who seemingly knows everyone who comes in here – including you, apparently, judging by the way he strikes up a short but energetic conversation. When the other guy walks away, you clamp your headphones back over your ears and return to what you were doing before, occasionally bobbing your head or moving your lips in time with whatever it is that you’re listening to. Jihoon steals little glances at you now and again when you’re in-between sets, watching how you breathe deeper, how your skin glows with sweat as you tap your fingertips against your thighs.

He almost drops the bar he’s holding when you catch his eyes in the long line of mirrors. He turns away, swallowing hard, completely missing how your own gaze lingers.

Jihoon becomes so obsessed with not being caught looking at you again that he doesn’t even notice when you disappear off the gym floor completely. It’s only when he pulls his headphones off at the end of his session and glances around that he registers your absence: your third companion is long gone, and he assumes you must have snuck out without him noticing too. He settles the speakers back over his ears before pulling on an old zip-up, flicking the hood over his head to shelter him a little better once he gets outside. But he’s in no rush to get home so he takes his time, resting his bag between his abdomen and the lockers, replying to a few messages and clicking his tongue at some of the nonsense being spewed into the group-chat. 

He isn’t sure exactly how long he’s standing there for, but he does know precisely what pulls him back to the world outside of the device in his hands.

To begin with, he doesn’t notice you approach, lost completely in his screen. He doesn’t hear your footsteps, or the way you politely clear your throat to announce your presence so he can move out of the way. He misses your moment of realisation that he’s listening to music and has no idea that you’re standing three feet behind him. He doesn’t even see you walk up next to him, your hair still damp from your shower and sitting loose over your shoulders.

It’s only when you try to reach over him to grab the last of your things that he snaps out of his trance. The fragrance of your body wash hits him first, and oh boy, does it hit him. Sweet, and delicate. Then, he gets something beautifully fruity: it’s not a perfume (it doesn’t smell like a perfume), but it’s you. Your shampoo, maybe? A conditioner? He can’t tell. Whatever it is, the combination of fragrances has him feeling like he’s been slammed into by a damn freight train. He drops his bag to the floor, freezing for a second, and then finally moves away just as the little door swings open. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says hurriedly, tugging his hood down and pulling his headphones off completely. “I didn’t even think you were still here.” He can’t shake the smell of you, nor the feeling of your warm frame leaning so close to his own. God, why is his heart pounding like he’s just finished a round of sprints? Why can’t he breathe?

“No – hey, no, don’t be,” you rush, shaking your head. You finally succeed in pulling your coat free and start trying to get it on; Jihoon wonders if you often struggle to find your sleeves like this, if you’re always chasing them around like a puppy after its own tail. He does it too, sometimes. He gets it. It’s cute. “It’s okay. I was trying not to disturb-... I’m sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he tells you. For the first time, he’s able to smile back at you properly. 

Why is it so hot in here, all of a sudden? Do they shut off the air conditioning after hours or something? He’s breaking out in a sweat.

“Call it even?” you suggest shyly, extending out a hand now you’ve managed to get both arms through your sleeves. He looks down at your fingers for a second before reaching to shake your hand once, a semi-firm grip securing the ‘deal’. (He feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted after, but he tries not to make that too obvious).

It goes awkwardly quiet for a moment then, and Jihoon wishes deeply that he had it in him to say something. Anything. But his brain has gone completely empty and apparently, all he knows how to do is stand completely still like a fucking statue. He shifts his gaze from you, to the wall behind you, to the carpet beneath his shoes, all the while tugging at the collar of his sweatshirt as if it might bring him a tiny breath of fresh air. The gentle sound of you clearing your throat has him looking back at your face again though; he assumes for a second that this is maybe you about to announce taking your leave. All the while, he’s cursing himself out in his own head for being totally inept, and he’s not entirely sure that it isn’t written all over his face.

“Alone, today?” you ask, idly fiddling with your zipper and succeeding in taking him by surprise. He really didn’t think you were going to continue this. And yet…

“Hm?” he questions. 

You swallow before answering. “You… the last time, you were with a friend?” you explain, and now it’s your turn to look away. He wonders if you’re a little warm too, if he’s right in what he was thinking about the air-conditioning. 

“Oh. Right.” 

He nods. An annoying train of doubt in his mind wants to know why you’re asking about Seungcheol; if maybe it was him that you smiled at the other night, even though he knows your eyes weren’t looking up at the man he brought with him. He thinks maybe he should be used to these turns in conversation by now – you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to ask if one of his friends is available, after all – but somehow, he isn’t, and he has a slightly bitter taste in the back of his mouth as he goes on.

He really didn’t have ‘you being interested in one of his best friends’ on his bingo card for tonight, that’s for sure. 

“Yeah. I think he’s with his partner, or… I don’t know. I don’t really bring other people, often. That was a one-off.”

You nod silently and Jihoon can’t quite get a read on what that means. He wonders if you’re upset at the revelation of Seungcheol’s partner, or maybe that he doesn’t tag along to every session. Or maybe, maybe, you were just being polite, and you don’t really care what his friend is up to that means he isn’t here. But whatever it is that you’re feeling, you do far too good a job at hiding it; he’s suddenly very overcome with the desire to run, again, except this time he might just bury his head in the sand too for good measure.

“How much were you deadlifting, just then?” you ask in the lull, just as he thinks he might have perfected the best way to say goodbye that doesn’t make him come across as even more of a tool than he probably already has. It throws him off kilter, but somehow, he manages to answer you in reasonable time.

“Oh, God… uh, one… 160?” He says uncertainly. “That’s not… I can do heavier-...” In his mind, he slaps his forehead. “Wait, no, that’s-... I mean, it’s true, but I didn’t mean-...”

You bite back your smile as he talks himself in a circle but Jihoon is too flustered to notice, convinced that he now sounds like every arrogant gym rat on the planet. God, he’s given himself the ick.

“I guessed you could,” you say. 

Oh boy, this freezes him. Mid-thought, mid blink, mid-breath: he’s completely stuck. What does that mean? What does that mean? He only just manages to unstick his now suddenly dry tongue from the roof of his mouth, looking at you with surprised, confused eyes and parted lips. There aren’t any words on them, though. Like a deer in headlights, he just… stares.

“I mean, okay. Come on.” Your eyes visibly drop as you look him over, gaze lingering at his shoulders, his biceps, his waist. “You can get another twenty on that at least, right?”

He doesn’t know how to explain what’s happening to him, but if he thought he was burning up before? It was nothing compared to this, now. And there’s no way you haven’t noticed how everything from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears has suddenly started staining scarlet. He bows his head and pinches his lips tight, wrestling away the train of thought that appears as you drag your bottom lip between your teeth momentarily, still eyeing his arms. God, he’s never felt so overwhelmed in his life. 

“Something like that, yeah,” he strains. He’s trying so hard to be nonchalant, even though he knows all of his personal bests by heart. Deadlift, 195kg. He hit it a few weeks ago: a couple of days before he first saw you.

“Mm. You can tell.”

Jihoon tries to shake off the compliment, but he fails. In equal measure he wishes you’d stop (he doesn’t know how much more blood can rush to his cheeks before he keels over) and never wants you to stop talking. It’s all going straight to his stomach, though, and he doesn’t remember having felt this specific brand of nervous and excited and stupidly shy since he was in high school.

He can hardly keep up. This is the danger zone.

Maybe it’s a bad idea that he says the next thing that comes into his head in a desperate attempt to change the conversation away from how much he can pull. But somehow, his voice doesn’t break when he asks, “are you parked far away?”

What? It’s dark outside, and this part of town isn’t exactly known for its upstanding citizens and pretty flowerbeds.

“Oh,” you say, eyes a little wide. “I’m-... just staying close-by. I walked here.” The space between his eyebrows must crease a little too quickly because you immediately hurry to speak again. “Really. It’s like… not even ten minutes. All main streets. It’s nothing.”

“Ten minutes longer than I’d walk around here at night on my own,” he says lightheartedly. In tone, at least. He’s actually completely serious.

You laugh at that; he lets out a chuckle, too. Now, Jihoon doesn’t believe in fairies but he thinks that if they were real, they’d giggle just like you do. 

With a smile still on your face, you say, “what? A strong guy like you? Come on, now.”

Do you have to keep doing that? Fuck, he’s absolutely done for.

He tilts his head forwards, eyes closed, trying so hard to stop the muscles in his cheeks from lifting in a grin that it becomes a workout in and of itself.

“I mean it,” he says, taking what he hopes is a subtle breath to settle the fluttering in his chest. The next thing he knows, he’s leaning one shoulder against the lockers, a little reminiscent of every douchebag in every teen movie ever made. If he doesn’t think about it too much, he won’t cringe into oblivion until he gets home and replays this interaction over and over in his head instead of going to sleep. “Maybe I’ve just lived here too long. I might be jaded, but it’s still true.”

“How long is too long?” you ask.

“All my life,” he tells you.

“No way?”

“Mm.” A beat. “What about you?”

“I’m just staying with a friend, right now.”

“Oh, right.” He falls quiet again as he remembers the first time he saw you, remembers making the list in his head of all the possible reasons he hadn’t seen you before. The second was true, then.

Why does that feel like the worst possible scenario? He decides not to unpack that here.

“Maybe-...” you start, glancing down at your hands, which have been twisting in front of you for a few seconds now. Your chest inflates, filled with the words you’re about to speak, but only a breath comes out when you shake your head instead of saying them. “No, don’t worry. Scratch that.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, because he thinks that whatever you were about to suggest, there’s not much he would have said no to. He feels like it’s only fair to give you another chance to say it.

But you don’t.

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” You pause. “I… should probably get going.” He glances over your shoulder at the clock mounted on the far wall, squinting to see the time. 11:45.

“Shit. Yeah, me too,” Jihoon agrees. He didn’t realise it had gotten so late, so fast: he’s hardly ever out at this time. Lord, he already knows it’s going to be an open inquisition when he gets back to his apartment. His neighbours, Soonyoung and Seokmin, are about to have a fucking field day. 

But it’s already long past the time he usually goes to bed, so he asks his next question anyway. He still can’t shake the thought of you walking back on your own at this hour. “Do-… you need a ride?” 

He’s not sure if you actually consider it, or just wait a moment before you answer just to be polite. Either way, you end up shaking your head.

“It’s okay. I’ve-… got a call to make, so.” Your voice is a little quieter, lips tweaking up into a regretful half-smile, and Jihoon curses in his own head. How had he forgotten about that? “Thank you, though. Really.”

“Don’t mention it,” he says. “Just… get back safe.”

You smile and nod, taking a step towards the door and Jihoon does the same. He reaches the exit first and holds it open for you; when you’re both out in the street, he suppresses a shiver and looks in the direction of where he left his car earlier. Feeling the full force of the cold, it crosses his mind to ask again if you’re sure about walking home, but you’re already pulling a beanie down over your still damp hair and tapping something into your phone, so he doesn’t say anything.

“I’ll see you around, uh-…” you start to say, only looking back up when you falter, realising that this is the first time you’re about to use his name and it occurs to you both, at the same time, that you haven’t done this part, yet.

“Jihoon,” he introduces himself, lips quirking into a side-smile. His gaze is expectant and you respond to it perfectly. 

“Y/n,” you introduce yourself. 

“See you around, y/n.”

You split off in the opposite direction to where he’s heading. Before he clamps his headphones over his ears for the short walk up to his car, the last thing he hears is the retreating sound of a dial-tone. 

—————

He doesn’t see you then for two whole weeks. 

For the first couple of days, he only idly notices; it’s not a big deal — it’s not like you’re always there when he is, and he’s sure it’s the same vice versa. But he notices your absence, nonetheless. By the end of the first week, he casually wonders if you’ve had a change in schedule. Maybe you’re on a different working pattern, something that means you can’t be there on Monday and Thursday evenings and at 11:45am on Sundays. 

It’s not weird. He only knows this because prior to that first conversation, acknowledging you as you crossed paths by the free-weights became part of his routine. It’s fine that he sort of misses those little interactions, isn’t it?

Maybe you’ve decided to start training ridiculously early in the morning instead? He tried that once. Never again. It then occurs to him, in the middle of a self-enforced rest day as he sits in the dark nursing a headache, that perhaps you’re not well. He sort of wishes he’d had the guts to ask for your number the last time he saw you, now: he thinks he’d check in, see if you were okay, ask how work was going or something. 

Deep down he knows he’d probably actually just be staring at a blank text thread with a ‘casual’ message typed, tweaked a few hundred times, and ultimately unsent. But that’s fine. It’s the thought that counts. 

The next time he sees you isn’t even in the gym, at all. It’s a Sunday afternoon — he finished his morning session, went home, showered, and headed back out into town after some lunch with a few errands to run. He finds himself spoiled with the luxury of a spare few hours to kill and dips into his favourite coffee place, thrilled beyond belief to find that it’s not obnoxiously busy and that there’s only one other person in the queue waiting to be served. 

Oh, he thinks when he looks up from his phone and sees a vaguely familiar set of headphones sitting on top of a definitely familiar mane of hair, standing right in front of him. Oh, shit. It’s you.

Jihoon goes back and forth with himself over it but ultimately decides he probably doesn’t know you well enough to just say hello out in the wild like this, so even though the urge to do so strikes, he holds himself back. It’s agonising, though. He really wants to. 

You step forward to order and he’s typing out a reply to a message in his, Seokmin and Soonyoung’s three-way group chat, in which he’s literally been fighting for his life as of late. He made the mistake of mentioning you in passing a few days ago and ever since, he’s had to vehemently deny that he has developed his first gym crush, insisting that actually, he’s just made a friend. They don’t believe him, because of course they don’t. That would be far too reasonable. Seokmin says that Jihoon wouldn’t be blushing just from saying your name if you were really ‘just a friend’. Soonyoung argues Jihoon wouldn’t have mentioned you at all.

“I’m so sorry — bear with me, just-…” your voice is quiet but Jihoon hears you apologising to the cashier in front of you, and it snaps him clean away from the tiff he’s having with the men who live in his building. He glances up and you’re elbow-deep in the bag over your shoulder, red in the face with your bottom lip pulled between your teeth. He turns his head slightly and sees the small hand-written sign that says the card machine isn’t working, and they’re cash only, today. 

He can hazard a guess at your predicament. 

After another few seconds of you trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for in your bag, he starts feeling bad for you. This, right here, is his own worst nightmare. Should the roles be reversed, he thinks he would’ve just turned around and walked out. It’s exactly why he doesn’t bother with backpacks and satchels day-to-day: if it doesn’t fit in his pockets, he doesn’t take it out with him. The system isn’t perfect but it has saved Jihoon a decent amount of public distress. 

But the roles aren’t reversed, and he has his wallet already in his hand, so… he only gives himself a few seconds to wonder if it’s appropriate before he does the stupid thing anyway.

“Don’t worry — I’ve got it,” he says, stepping around you, pulling out the cash to pay for your order. You’re dumbstruck when you look  at him, head tilted to the side. The person stood behind the counter glances at you, then at him, and back at you; you don’t see this, however, because your eyes haven’t left Jihoon’s face since he appeared — as far as you’re concerned — out of thin air.

“I can’t ask you to…” you start to protest, but your hands have stopped fishing around and he’s moving the cash further towards the barista, who hesitates just a second longer. 

“You’re not asking. I’m offering. I’ve got you.” He says this with such finality that you quite literally can’t argue with him. The lady behind the counter accepts the cash and you nod, shyly, mouthing a thank you. He orders his own drink — an Americano, nothing exciting — and you both go to stand at the other end of the counter while you wait.

“Hi,” you finally say, and Jihoon can’t help but give a small chuckle. 

He doesn’t have anything hugely witty or creative in his arsenal, though, so he comes back with a matching, “hey.”

“How… have you been?” you ask. 

“Can’t complain, really,” he says. “Are you okay? I haven’t seen you around for a few weeks.” Oh, God — the second the words are out of his mouth, he wishes he could take them back. Why did he have to add that last part? Why didn’t he just leave it at the question? 

“Yeah — about that,” you breathe, ducking your head to conceal the heat that’s spreading over your cheeks. “You know how I said I was staying with that friend?” He nods, and you continue. “I was waiting for some stuff to get sorted out with an apartment and it all finally got resolved, so… I’ve been moving my stuff over to a new place.”

Jihoon feels his heart sink for a moment, but he keeps his expression pleasant and engaged. His fingers threaten to give him away as they fiddle with the aglet on the drawstring of his sweatpants. 

“Sounds tiring,” he says lightly, and you laugh again, nodding. It’s odd, having his heart taking residence low in his stomach and somehow also in his throat, all while hammering away at a mile a minute. All the caffeine in the world couldn’t have this effect on him. “Is it going okay so far?”

“Yeah.” You nod. “It’s a process, but… it’ll be worth it.”

The barista behind the counter announces herself by clearing her throat and slides your drinks across the marble surface with a little glimmer in her eye. Jihoon picks them both up, extending yours out to you. There’s a pause (in which he swallows a large helping of self-doubt) as he glances to the door, working through several combinations of his next words in his mind before he looks back at you. 

“Do you… maybe have ten minutes to sit with these?” He asks. You light up immediately, not even checking the time on any of your devices, nor the wall clock behind your head. He doesn’t let himself think about why it makes him giddy that you’re accepting the offer, just like that.

“Yeah — yeah, sure.” You smile, walking through the lines of tables and sliding into one of the big, comfy chairs by the window. He unzips his jacket and slings it over the arm of the other chair before settling in himself, his long fingers wrapping around the to-go cup. The drink warms his perpetually cold palms and he sighs sweetly.

“You must be excited to get into the new place, then?” he asks after taking a sip, letting it heat him up from the inside. It could be argued that this job is already being taken care of, but Jihoon is not about to go there.

“Oh, God yes.” You nod, relaxing back in the seat with your own cup. Jihoon subconsciously leans a little forward in tandem. “It’s been fun staying with my friend, but…” You pause, lips slightly parted, before going on. “Okay, a warning: I’m a terrible person for this, I know. She’s done me a huge favour, letting me stay there — but I can’t deal with how untidy she is. It’s driving me nuts.”

A chuckle bubbles in Jihoon’s chest, cheeks starting to ache as his smile grows and grows. It hasn’t fallen since he sat down opposite you, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, any time soon. “That bad?” he asks.

“You have no idea,” you groan, covering your face with one hand. He wishes you hadn’t — he thinks you look quite lovely when you’re all lit up like this. “She doesn’t clean her dishes after she eats — she piles them up in the sink for like, three days. I don’t think she’s used the vacuum the entire time I’ve been there. I keep finding wrappers and packets and mismatched socks everywhere —” 

His snort of laughter rolls off the back of his throat rather ungraciously and he settles back into his chair. You gently bump his ankle under the table with your foot, beaming at him. “I’m serious! I can’t live like this, Jihoon. I can’t!”

The more you speak, the less he can control the fits he’s descended into, and his abs start to ache after a while; there’s desperation in your voice but it’s just wrapped up so cutely in your lighthearted frustration and decoratively tied together with your sunshine smile… he can’t help it — he’s in pieces. It’s okay though, because you’re laughing too: it makes him think of fairies again, and he can picture you with dainty, intricately patterned wings under the soft lighting in the café. He wipes the corner of his eye with the heel of his hand as he starts to calm down, taking a few deep breaths all the way into his stomach.

“You’re so much stronger than I am,” he says.. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

“You know, I had a feeling you’d be a clean person, too,” you say, sipping at your coffee again. “I mean… I’ve never seen you use the gym showers, so I wasn’t sure, but…”

“Hey,” he says, mock-defensively. “I don’t trust the locks, okay? I shower at home!”

Your cup is lifted to your mouth and he can only see you from the nose upwards, but by the creases at the corners of your eyes, he knows you’re concealing a smile behind it as you nod back at him.

Ten minutes turns to twenty and then somehow becomes thirty — Jihoon starts feeling like you’re someone he’s known for years, and not just the person he accidentally ended up paying attention to in the gym just a couple of weeks ago. He bounces off you and you bounce off him. Both of you have long-since finished your drinks, too: there’s no real reason for either of you to still be here.

Except the obvious. 

“So, the apartment,” Jihoon says, leaning forwards again with his elbows resting on his knees. “Is it…?” He makes a few circular gestures with his hands with which he tries to imply something to the effect of ‘local’, or ‘nearby’, but he can’t quite bring himself to say that out loud. You seem to catch on though. Somehow.

Then again, you did say — a few subject changes ago — that Jihoon is on your wavelength. Maybe that’s it.

“About… a fifteen minute walk from here? Give or take,” you say, and his eyebrows shoot up his forehead so fast it’s like they’re on strings, being controlled by someone else. He doesn’t realise for a few seconds, by which point he isn’t even sure how to relax them. 

“No way?” he says, trying to feign nothing more than an idle interest. Obviously, he’s soaring. 

“Yeah. I’ll want to get back training soon, too, so there’s some incentive to get this done quickly. I miss it,” you tell him.

Jihoon comes out with what he says next without thinking. His mouth is moving before fully engaging his brain. It’s the coffee jitters. Apparently.

“Well, if you need any help with anything, I’ve got a car.”

“You’re too sweet,” you say. “I really couldn’t put you out like that, but…”

“You wouldn’t be,” he assures you with a shrug. “If I’m not working or in the gym… I’m never really that busy. It’s up to you, but-… I’d be happy to.”

You bite the inside of your lip for a moment, apparently mulling this over, before wiggling in your seat to pull your phone out of the front pocket of your jeans. You unlock the device and hand it over on a ‘new contact’ screen. 

Jihoon goes completely stupid: he thinks his brain stops functioning as he takes it to put his number in — for a moment, he’s staring dumbstruck, struggling to even remember the order of the digits now he’s under pressure, but it comes back to him eventually. His thumbs dart across the screen and he checks, double checks and triple checks that he’s typed it right before placing it back in your waiting palm. 

His fingertips brush against yours and it tickles, sending small shockwaves up his arms and straight into his chest. You smile down at your phone before glancing up at him.

“You need an emoji,” you tell him, and he raises an eyebrow at you.

“Huh?”

“Everyone in my contacts has one — I’ve been doing this since I was in high-school. You need to pick one, too.”

“Oh, uh-…” Jihoon swallows, and for some reason he’s completely forgotten every single little emoticon option there is. He draws a blank. “I can’t — you pick one for me. I don’t know.”

You narrow your eyes at him for a second, pouting your lips as you seem to scroll through the endless options. Now and again, you look up at him, as if trying to see what best fits him before you continue your search. He waits. And waits. And waits. He’s about to throw in an admittedly useless suggestion of some sort of boring animal when you turn your phone around to show him what you’ve chosen.

Jihoon, the contact name reads. And there’s the little angel face next to it.

“Oh, come on,” he says, blushing deeply. “You can’t be serious.”

“I totally am,” you say proudly, turning it back and pressing to save it. He hides his face in his hands. “If you won’t pick your own, you get what you’re given. You did this to yourself.”

“Wow,” he chuckles weakly, sliding his hands up into his hair and raking it back off his face. Your eyes move quickly across every inch and boy, does he notice. You shrug in response and test it, sending the same little emoticon to him. He blushes harder when it comes through and he saves your number into his own phone before placing it face-down on the table. 

More than an hour after buying your coffee, Jihoon stretches his arms above his head and checks the time on his watch. He frowns slightly, not sure how the afternoon got away from him so fast, and lets out a sigh.

“I think I need to get going,” he says reluctantly. Leaving you is absolutely the opposite of what he wants to do, actually. Alas, “I have some friends coming over tonight.”

“Yeah — yeah, of course,” you smile, leaning to one side to pick your bag up off the floor. “No worries.”

You both move to stand up and he throws his coat over his arm, leading the way out. He holds open the door for you to leave first, then follows you outside into the afternoon sun. 

“It was really nice to see you,” you say, turning to face him. 

“You too,” he agrees. “Text me if you need anything, okay? But actually do. Don’t just say you will?”

You laugh sweetly. Fairies. His ears might have actually caught fire this time. “Okay, okay. I promise. I’ll text you — thank you.” There’s a pause, but only a tiny one. “And for the coffee, too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he insists, waving it off. You shake your head. He thinks your hands are twitching when you stuff them into your pockets but he can’t be sure. Your breath definitely stutters, though. 

“No, really. Um… next one’s on me?” 

He blinks, and blinks again. Next one? The next one? He feels like he’s malfunctioned and been forcibly rebooted. The next one? 

“I-…” he starts, his throat dry. “Yeah, okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” You nod, smiling with — what he doesn’t realise is — relief. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah — I’ll see you, y/n.”

—————

Jihoon has no choice but to admit defeat to the group chat that night when Seungcheol and Jeonghan come over for a takeout.

Within minutes, his oldest friend is asking about the girl from the gym — he’s been just as relentless as Seokmin and Soonyoung in quizzing Jihoon, except it’s slightly harder to deny to Seungcheol because he did witness, first-hand, the way you had his friend tripping over his own feet with a single smile. At first, Jihoon tries to shrug it off. Play it down. Change the subject. He doesn’t mention that he’s actually spoken to you since he and Cheol trained together, or that he accidentally bumped into you and paid for your coffee, or that you stayed talking with him for as long as you did. He definitely doesn’t say that you exchanged phone numbers. 

He absolutely won’t confess to being smitten. 

All Jihoon willingly admits to is that from what he’s seen of you around, you seem nice, and with a roll of his eyes he does agree that he thinks you’re attractive. He gets a bit of a glare later in the evening when  Jeonghan asks if he’s thought about where he wants to take you on your first date, and Jihoon tells him to stop asking stupid questions and eat his chicken before he eats it for him. But all in all he thinks he evades the worst of it pretty well. For now, anyway — he knows their pestering isn’t going away any time soon. 

Especially not when, on their way out, Seungcheol leans close and whispers that whatever is going on with his gym crush, it suits him. Jihoon jabs him on the arm and the two men leave, laughing brightly.

It’s about an hour after his friends have gone home, having washed the dishes and cleaned up his apartment that Jihoon is sitting on his living room floor doing a few lower body stretches before he turns in for the night. He finds himself tapping into your text thread — not for the first time this evening — and skimming over the short conversation you had earlier. You messaged him when you got back to your friend’s place to thank him for the third time, and Jihoon replied back telling you that if you didn’t stop being silly, he was never going to respond to you again. Your reply came in the form of a “:(“ and his was a simple “:)”. That was it, but he’s been thinking about the exchange ever since. 

He’s not sure why. Nor is he certain what about that has him looking down at the messages and grinning like a fool in his apartment, alone, at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. He could probably take a stab in the dark at what it means, though. He rubs at the back of his neck with one hand as he changes conversations and types out a short message with the other. 

jihoon: fine. you’re right. 

seokmin: ?

soonyoung: probs true, does need context

jihoon: about the gym girl. you’re right. 

soonyoung: OH

seokmin: Hahahahahaha

seokmin: Yeah, you’re definitely the last to know, dude

soonyoung: fr even chan and hansol know atp lmao 

jihoon: they what?

jihoon: how do they know?

jihoon: they don’t go to my gym! i haven’t seen them in weeks!

soonyoung: because we told them????? 

seokmin: So, we might have told everyone

jihoon: blocking both of your numbers immediately.

seokmin: Hey! We’re just glad you’ve accepted it

seokmin: When do we get to meet her?

jihoon: blocked.

Well, great, Jihoon thinks as he fights the urge to lay face down on the floor and let the laminate cool his searingly hot cheeks. 

At least he’s admitted it now. 

He’s vaguely confirmed in writing that maybe he has a bit of a thing for you — it’s out in the open and at minimum, two of his friends know that it’s real. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Fingers. Whatever. No doubt by morning, all of his friends will have found out. The point stands that he hasn’t confessed to something like this since he was approximately sixteen years old, so whatever you’re doing to him, whatever this… is, it matters. 

So, he asks himself, standing up off the hardwood floor and stretching his spine, arms locked behind him and pushed back as far as they can go. He turns off all the lights, checks the front door, goes through the motions to get himself ready for bed. So… what the fuck am I supposed to do now?

—————

Come Monday evening, he’s about ready to hit the roof.

As far as bad days go, Jihoon thinks he’s in the running for one of the worst ever. He slept awfully, tossing and turning through the night despite the usual winning combination of freshly washed bed sheets and his white noise machine drowning out the occasional disturbance from the street below. He wakes up two minutes before his alarm is due to go off, only to discover he fell asleep before plugging his phone in to charge overnight, and it’s sitting at a very risky 13%. The gel he uses to keep his hair off his face at work has gone weird and only does half a job, strands tumbling back in front of his eyes the second he goes to leave his apartment, very nearly forgetting his keys. Then, to really put the cherry on top, he sees that — at some point between getting home yesterday and now — someone has scraped his car while parking up next to him. There’s a large scratch right down the passenger side, with no note nor reliable CCTV in his apartment’s parking lot to confirm who it was, and of course, the space is currently empty. 

All this before he even gets to work.

He fundamentally knows that starting the week off with a bad attitude will only lead to a really shitty remainder, but when Vernon sends his routine ‘Monday Motivation’ booster message — “you’re going to have a great day, today!” — into the group chat, Jihoon responds with a crude photo of his middle finger, right in front of the massive scuff on the bodywork of his Hyundai. Jeonghan replies with an ‘oof’, Wonwoo with a ‘yikes’, and Joshua, ever the comedian, sends a picture of Garfield lying face-down captioned ‘Mondays’ that nobody replies to. All responses feel kind of appropriate. But he pockets his phone without sending anything else, sighing again; he locks the car and checks the handle just in case before he finally heads into the building.

It’s going to be a long day. He just has to get through it.

Things don’t necessarily improve. He ends up in and out of meetings all day, so when 5 o’clock rolls around and he’s on his way out the door, he’s feeling a bit like he’s done nothing of actual value. Just, for some reason, thinking about you and tapping out a catchy beat on the top of his desk as he pretends to pay attention to useless presentation after useless presentation. But it’s still somehow been exhausting on his brain and on the drive back to his apartment, Jihoon feels so drained that he contemplates skipping the gym altogether and going straight to bed. This internal argument takes up most of his journey, but it does keep him occupied during the rush-hour traffic if it does nothing else. 

Nothing has ever been fixed by ruining a perfectly good routine, however — so no sooner than he’s back in his apartment, he changes out of his button-down and trousers and into his regular gym gear. His protein shaker is ready on the counter for when he’s home again, the lights are off, his bag is on his shoulder and the door is locked. He pushes against it a few times, checking out of habit, despite the fact that his only neighbours on this floor are Soonyoung, Seokmin and an elderly couple with a cat they’re not technically supposed to have. Nobody tells, though, because Boots has become everyone’s emotional support animal. The only actual security threat is Seokmin maybe stealing something from his fridge, but he’s only ever satisfied after the third test anyway. 

A quick warmup and a few easy stretches later, Jihoon sets about his business. Mondays are for training legs (and often, as a result, incapacitating himself for the rest of the week), and these workouts are always some of his most intense.

So intense, in fact, that he’s sweating buckets and cherry red when he steps away from the squat rack, tugging up the hem of his t-shirt to dry his face, a brief flash of his toned abdomen on full view. He’s just about catching his breath when he glances in the mirror, and his knees nearly give out when he sees you walking in. You lock eyes and smile at him in the reflection as you start to walk towards him.

It’s not just any smile, but he’s way too flustered to notice.

He spins around to face you, mortally embarrassed that you definitely just saw that, but in a weird way… kind of elated? You drop your headphones to sit around the back of your neck to greet him as you get closer. He pushes his hair back off his forehead and tries to act as cool as he can, but Jihoon suddenly becomes incredibly aware of everything about himself in this moment: his posture, how his arms hang by his sides, the exact positioning of his feet. The fact that he’s breathing pretty deeply, that his pulse is so loud in his ears that he can see your lips moving but can’t quite hear what you’re saying.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit — you’re talking. Focus. He needs to focus. 

“Sorry — what was that?” he asks, eliciting a soft laugh from you.

“I like your shirt,” you repeat, a fraction clearer. Jihoon glances down at himself, at the same sweatpants and tight black workout top he wears in here several times a week, and looks back at you with a raised eyebrow. God, he lets himself think for half a second, entertaining his own stupidity with the idea that you’re finding this as hard as he is, too. Maybe I’m not alone in this. 

“Oh?” he says. “Um — thank you?”

“How’d it go with your friends last night?” you ask, hardly skipping a beat, and he’s a little thankful that you skim over his poor attempt at gratitude for a compliment he isn’t sure he deserves. Instead, his confusion wraps itself around the fact that you actually remembered what he was doing last night. Hell, even he’d forgotten in the heat of the day he’d had, but you remembered. He’s sweating over it a little and briefly wonders what the chances are of the gym floor opening up and swallowing him whole.

Slim, he decides. But not zero. 

There’s hope.

“Yeah — yeah, it was nice,” he says, internally kicking himself for overthinking this so much that he’s apparently lost his ability to speak. In the space of 24 hours, he’s gone from giggling over coffee with you to completely weak just at the sound of your voice. It should be easier here, if anything — this is home turf for him. His comfort space. He supposes the tight fit of your gym clothes accentuating your hips and thighs isn’t helping matters, and neither is the wide neckline of your own t-shirt exposing your throat and a collarbone. But still. He’s not a teenager. He should be able to handle a little bit of skin. 

He clears his throat, rolling his head side-to-side. Focus. “Sorry — I’m-… I just didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.”

“Yeah,” you chuckle. “I-… couldn’t stay away. Missed it a little too much.”

“I get that,” he concurs, willing his eyes not to drop down your frame to a newly exposed area of skin just around your waist, your t-shirt riding up as you adjust your bag on your shoulder. “It’s good to-… have you back, anyway.”

“Good to be back,” you agree. “Hey — can you leave that set up for me, when you’re done? I’m on legs today, too.”

Jihoon doesn’t want to say that he knows Mondays are your leg days, as well, so he doesn’t. Even if it is true. He wonders if you would find it odd that he’s remembered. “Sure,” he says with a small smile, which you return. Just as you’re about to walk off to drop your things into a locker, he pipes up again. “I mean — hey, if you wanted a spot, or to-… do, you know… anything…”

“Are you asking me to train with you?” you ask, eyes bright and smile wider than he thinks he’s ever seen it. This is torture. He’s not even lifting anything and his heart is about to burst out of his fucking chest — God, maybe this was a bad suggestion.

“I-…” he starts, but he lets the breath out of his lungs and shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. I am.”

“Give me two minutes,” you agree, hurrying off to put your stuff away and fill up your bottle.

He manages to squeeze another set of squats in before you get back, which is sort of a miracle seeing as how his knees have gone completely weak ever since you arrived. He’s scrolling through his playlist as you cross the gym floor on your way back to him, but he looks up and smiles as you approach. 

“You go ahead — I’ve just finished.”

He knows he’s really fucking done for when, after the first round, you add plates onto the bar to out-lift him. All before he’s even positioned himself behind you to be a good spotter.

Jihoon doesn’t go down without a fight though, and things get a little competitive from there. Both of you throw some of your favourite (see: most agonising) exercises into the mix over the course of the hour, taking it in turns on the equipment and creating a session that just about has him able to move by the time you’re finished. You talk to each other when you’ve got the breath to do so, otherwise focussing on your workout with more intensity than either of you remember training with for a long time. 

And so what if he has to turn away from you once or twice to compose himself when breathless whines spill from between your lips on your last few reps, the sheer effort of the movements pushing your muscles to their absolute limit? So what if he feels his entire body run a thousand degrees every time you sweetly encourage him to manage just one more? So what if his palm stays tingling for fifteen seconds every time you high-five him for a set well done?

You slide out of the hamstring curl machine with a deep breath and legs like two sticks of jelly at the end of the session, and he holds a hand out to steady you as you regain your ability to weight-bear.

“You okay?” he asks, and you nod, patting what’s exposed of your chest and neck with your towel. 

“Yeah. Yeah — just… fuck.” You laugh, laying your hand over the top of his and squeezing. Only for a second — not even, only for a breath — and really just to let him know that you’re okay to stand on your own, but Jihoon feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted straight up his arm all the same. “You don’t come to play, do you?”

“Says you,” he scoffs, only now moving his hand from your upper arm. “I was wrong about you — you’re insane. Clinically insane.” 

Using the paper towels he went to gather while you were finishing up, he wipes the machine clean as you stretch out your now slightly exercise-swollen thighs. 

“I was just gonna finish up on one of the stairmasters,” you tell him, taking a long sip of your water. His eyes widen to the point of comedy, eyebrows high on his forehead. You snicker at his horror, the rim of your bottle hovering tantalisingly over your bottom lip. “What?”

“That’s-… got to be a form of masochism,” he says, exhausted just at the idea of marching up the never ending staircase even for a minute. You almost choke on your mouthful of water, only just swallowing it in time before a sudden, uncontrollable laugh erupts from your chest. 

“How?!” you ask, covering your mouth with your hand. Just like yesterday, the urge to pull your arm away, to reveal your hidden smile strikes him. He doesn’t act on it, but he wants to.

“What do you mean, how? Why would you put yourself through that after what you’ve just done?” It’s completely lighthearted, and the rush of heat on your cheeks intensifies at the cocktail of shock and awe in his gaze.

You shrug your shoulders once. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just better than you.” The way the tip of your tongue teasingly sits between your teeth as you grin at him sends bullets of adrenaline through his veins and Jihoon runs his hand over his face.

For about three seconds, he tells himself he isn’t going to take the bait. He’ll lose, he’ll admit it — he’ll put his hands up and say you’re absolutely, definitely better than he is, if it means he doesn’t have to push through a round of cardio after surpassing every single one of his physical limits. But God, he thinks you look completely irresistible standing there challenging him like this, your hands on your hips. His eyes don’t leave yours and yours don’t leave his; both of your chests stutter, just a little bit, and he can see your smile grow in his periphery.

How the fuck is he supposed to walk away?

“Ten minutes,” he concedes, matching your footsteps as you start to walk backwards towards his least favourite line of equipment in any gym, ever. “And you’re definitely getting the next coffee, now.”

——————

That Friday, you finally text him again.

His muscles have just about returned to a working state and Jihoon is quite proud to say that he has regained the ability to sit down without needing something to hold onto. He got home from work, showered the day away and has just settled down into the sofa to start on the book Wonwoo has been on his ass about reading when his phone vibrates on the side table. He reaches over for it, trying to figure out which of his friends might be trying to get hold of him early evening on a Friday, and already going over excuses in his head as to why he can’t go out to do whatever they’re inviting him to. But when your contact name flashes up on the screen, every single thought disappears from his brain.

y/n: hey :)

y/n: just out of interest, how good are you at assembling furniture?

He furrows his brows at this. There’s a very obvious answer, which is that he’s not. He doesn’t want to reply saying so, though, so he goes for what he thinks is the next best thing.

jh: well…

jh: what are you trying to put together?

y/n: a bed :(

y/n: today’s your rest day, right?

y/n: can i bribe you with dinner after? :)

Oh? His brain stalls, fingers hovering over the keypad. He can literally see your face forming a little pout before growing into a hopeful grin in his mind’s eye. He doesn’t see how he could ever say no. 

jh: apparently yes, you can.

jh: text me the address? i’ll leave in 5.

He changes out of his basketball shorts and hoodie in record time, abandoning Wonwoo’s book on his couch in favour of attempting to look at least somewhat presentable for you. He tugs on a pair of jeans that he hasn’t touched in about 6 months and one of his nicer t-shirts instead, even going as far as to spritz aftershave on the column of his throat. You’ve sent him your address and he makes to leave, doing his regular essential item pat-down on his way out the door. He puts your new apartment into his phone as he crosses the parking lot, stupidly delighted to discover it’s only 7 and a half minutes away from where he lives, and settles into his car with a series of deep exhales.

The breathing exercises don’t achieve much. His head is still spinning when he parks up in the street by your new place and lingers just outside the building. He sends you a text to say he’s arrived and you reply saying you’re on your way down. You appear in the lobby just a few minutes later.

“Hey,” you greet him warmly, crossing the space and putting your arms around him in a hug. He goes limp for a fraction of a second before his arms slide around you, too. God, he hopes you can’t feel his heartbeat right now. He thinks that the effect you have on him should be considered dangerous. But whether you can or not, you tighten your arms to squeeze him once before you unwind them from around his neck and step away. 

“Hi,” he says, feverish from the tops of his ears all the way down to his toes. His hands find his pockets as you take a few more polite steps back.

“Thank you so much for this.” Your bottom lip finds temporary home between your teeth before you’re nodding back towards the stairwell. “I’m on the third floor. Follow me.”

He does. He walks up the stairs behind you as you ask about his day at work, and he tells you that he thinks today has probably been one of the best he’s had in about 2 months. When he asks how your day went, you turn your head back to look at him and stumble on the next step, gently laughing and saying that you think you’re at your tether’s end with D.I.Y, but it’s been pretty good otherwise. By the time you reach your floor, his thighs are aching, a bit of residual fatigue from your session earlier in the week making it a little harder than it ought to be. He can’t imagine how you’ve coped every day since then; if his own building didn’t have an elevator, Jihoon thinks he’d have been sleeping in his car.

You give him a little tour of the apartment, and he stands next to you at the window as you point out where you were staying with your friend a few blocks away. He thinks the view is seriously pretty in the evening light, enchanted by how he can see the tops of the slightly lower buildings and the street below, lined with neon storefronts and currently alive with shoppers and bar-goers, but… He cringes at himself for thinking it, but the view through the glass is nothing compared to the one he has inside. 

You’ve started to put up a few decorations and knick-knacks around the place too. He doesn’t know you very well, but he still thinks it’s very you — all of it, and he likes them. Even with the room full of boxes and half-unpacked cases, there’s so much personality in it already. Charm. He brushes off your attempts to apologise for the ‘mess’, as you called it, despite everything being neatly pushed out of the way of the main space. It’s easily tidier than any other mid-move apartment he’s ever been in. 

“Did you want a drink?” you ask him, walking over to the refrigerator and resting a hand on the door. “I’ve got wine, or-… anything, really.” 

“Just some water would be great,” he says appreciatively, and a few seconds later you’re handing him a bottle, turning another one over in your hand. “I really wouldn’t be much help after a couple of glasses, trust me.”

“Does this mean you are good at it, then? Before a drink?” you ask him. Is it hope in your voice? Or do you somehow know how hopeless he is, and are you teasing? He can’t tell. Regardless, clearly his evasion earlier wasn’t quite as successful as he hoped it would be.

“About that…” He chuckles, taking a sip from the bottle and glancing sideways at you. “I’m sure between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.”

“My knight in shining armour,” you say with a laugh, closing your fingers around his wrist and leading him through the door to your bedroom. You’ve managed to separate all of the individual pieces, but you haven’t made any real progress otherwise. He settles himself down on the floor and reaches for the assembly manual, pursing his lips as he looks at the little baggies of screws and bolts and various other things he doesn’t know the names of.

“Okay.” He frowns, looking back up at you where you’ve kneeled down a couple of feet away. You’re grinning innocently back at him, but Jihoon’s lips are more aligned with a pout. “You maybe should have mentioned that the instructions are in Swedish.”

——-

Ignoring the fact that you can’t understand the directions printed on the flimsy little pieces of paper, you get to work. It’s… an interesting process, but somehow between the pair of you, you successfully manage to assemble the bed in just under two hours by mostly following the diagrams (and having to backtrack several times because Jihoon managed to miss a few steps). At three minutes to nine, you’re both finally standing up off the floor, stretching out stiff joints and tight muscles; the bed is fully assembled and made up with your sheets in the centre of the room, headboard against the back wall, the lamp you set on the dresser casting a pleasant orangey glow on every surface.

“We did it,” you say, a little in shock, a lot exhausted, and absolutely starving. At least, that’s what he assumes you’re feeling, because it’s what he is. “We actually did it.”

“I mean, you did most of it,” Jihoon says. It’s true; at a point, he was just handing you the pieces you asked him for and holding parts steady so that you could fit them together. But if you want to call it a joint effort, he isn’t going to stop you, and the roll of your eyes tells him that you do want to call it that. 

“Shh. You helped,” you scold him, bumping his upper arm with your elbow. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“If you say so,” he chuckles, taking another sip of his water. Jihoon isn’t sure he believes you, but the way you’re challenging him to argue further with your tongue pressed against the inside of your cheek scrambles his brain. Any remaining argument dies on his lips. “We make a good team.”

“We do,” you agree, expression shifting into a shy smile, bumping his arm again, your elbow lingering against him for a second longer. “Come on, I think I promised to feed you, too. What are you in the mood for?”

A movie has been playing in the background for about an hour by the time your food arrives and you’ve eaten everything. Jihoon relaxes back against the cushions of the couch and you’re settled comfortably next to him: there’s plenty of space on either side of you both, so there isn’t really any need for you to have your upper arm basically pressing against his, but Jihoon is too comfortable to say anything and you certainly aren’t making any attempts to move away. You shift your legs after about ninety minutes, bringing them up underneath you so your thigh is pressed against his now, as well, and you’re twisted slightly so you’re physically facing him but your head is still turned towards the TV.

Everywhere your clothed body touches him is scorching, and he wonders if maybe he should’ve worn a thinner t-shirt, or at the very least something a little less heavy on his legs. His jeans, slightly tighter around the thighs than perhaps would be their peak level of comfort, are clinging to him everywhere and he’s so aware of himself, so aware of you, of your sweet body wash, your fruity shampoo, every single one of your breaths… He’s cursed people out for breathing too loudly around him before, but he thinks he could replace his white noise machine with an eight hour track of just this and he would sleep like a fucking baby.

One of your elbows is propped against the top of the cushions behind you and you’re resting your head in your palm, and (not for the first time this evening) he glances sideways to look at you. They’ve been fleeting glances thus far, only stealing fractions of a moment before he turns his attention back to the TV. But this? This is the wrong moment. Entirely the wrong fucking moment because as his head turns, so does yours, and you catch him in the act. Fuck, if he thought he was burning up, before? He’s pretty sure he’s somehow just descended straight to the second circle of hell, greeting all the other lusty sinners like old friends. Several of his thoughts tonight have been considerably impure, and in this half second of blistering eye contact, they all come rushing back.

The universe is really testing him this evening, and Jihoon is stumbling. It feels like any minute now, he’s going to explode.

He straightens his spine and looks back at the TV, trying to force his eyes to focus even though he’s completely swallowed by the feeling of your arm straightening across the back of the couch, your fingertips grazing over the skin at the bottom of his hairline. He can feel your eyes still on him, your gaze burning into his cheek, no doubt following as his tongue darts out subconsciously over his lips. But he can’t quite help himself, can’t get the image of how sweet you looked out of his head; he clears his throat quietly and looks over at you again, coming over almost completely blank the second he notices the glimmer your eyes hold when they’re trained on him. 

Any. Fucking. Minute. 

“Jihoon, I-…” you start to say, and he turns himself a little bit so that he’s facing you better, completely forgetting about the movie now. That’s not a great loss: he couldn’t explain the plot even if he tried. “I don’t know if-… you can tell me if I’ve read you wrong…”

“You haven’t,” he hurries. Relief starts to ease the tension between your brows, before you scrunch them again and cock your head to the side. “I’m sure you haven’t, I mean.”

In this new position, one of his legs is bent and sitting up on the couch beneath him and you’ve adjusted your own posture to accommodate. Your knee sits just over the top of his, more of your impossible body heat radiating through his clothes, and he glances down at the site of contact before he looks back at you. 

“I just-... I don’t know, I think I knew I was interested in you from the first time I saw you, but the last few weeks especially…” You’ve been rehearsing this. He can feel it. It’s written in your eyes, holding the weight of the words you’re struggling to say, and behind them he can see cogs turning as you try to get the words in the right order. (He knows how that goes, because he’s been trying to figure out how to tell you, too.) He nods, urging you to keep going.

“I can’t get you out of my head. I really like you.”

He short-circuits, then. Even though part of him knew what you were going to say, hearing it out loud flips a switch inside him and he stops functioning. Blinking at you slowly, lips parted, heart racing – he feels as if his brain has been sucked clean out of his ears and is floating somewhere way above his head. Way outside of a contactable range, way beyond any level of rational decision-making. Jihoon knows what he wants to say, of course – he knows that he wants to say that he likes you, and that he has for a while, and that maybe you should let him take you out on a date or something, but all of that sits just behind the barrier of his teeth, so…

He leans forward and kisses you, instead.

He almost can’t believe that he’s only wanted this for as short of a time as he has; it feels like it’s been building inside him for so much longer. Relief floods through his veins, the emotional dam finally breaching. It only lasts a few seconds, but with his lips pressed to yours and yours pressing back, the static in his brain goes quiet, the movie falls silent: everything stops, except you. He thinks you could’ve been carved from stone around each other — he thinks something just feels so inexplicably right. Your hand tightens in his hair and he gasps softly as he pulls an inch back, eyes heavily lidded and looking straight at you through his lashes. You move forward, leaning your forehead against his, and the feather-light hold he has on your chin slides up to your cheek instead. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to-…” he says after a long, long moment of remembering how to breathe, how to blink, how to exist in your space without combusting on the spot. He still isn’t sure he knows how to do any of those things, especially not now he can see every single line of your face this close. He’s trying, though. “But — shit, I’m crazy about you.”

You kiss him, then, harder than before, colliding in a mess of half-finished breaths and bumped, stinging noses. His other hand comes up to sit against your rib cage, yours pressing into the material of his t-shirt over his chest. He smiles and parts his lips as yours move against them, your tongue gently sweeping into his mouth, finding his own; a soft, low moan tickles the back of his throat, his fingertips curling slightly to tighten his hold. 

Jihoon isn’t sure how you end up on your knees, straddled astride his legs with one of his hands tucked between your thigh and calf, the other on the curve of your ass — he just knows that he doesn’t mind one bit. You’re warm and comfortable, the arch of your back pressing you into him deliciously. He’s kissing you like his life depends on it (he really fears that it might), and you’re doing the same back, licking against his tongue and rocking slightly with every separation and reconnection of your lips. He feels your fingers brush at the hem of his t-shirt and slip just underneath at the same moment as you pull away from him, and he’s so dazed, so fuzzy, so lost in you that he can only tilt his head back to stare up at your face. In your current position, you’re towering over him. It’s easily the best view he’s ever had.

“Can I-…?” you ask breathlessly. The new roughness to your voice goes straight to his cock and he has to restrain himself from bucking his hips upwards.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward slightly to try and aid you. Your hands tug at the bottom of his shirt and peel it up over his chest: he raises his arms slightly and soon, you can toss it to the unoccupied side of the couch. He shivers slightly as he relaxes back, both at the chill in your unheated apartment and upon noticing the way you’re staring down at him. It’s addictive. 

“Oh my God,” you whisper, jaw a little slack, smoothing your hands over his shoulders to feel every ridge of hard-earned muscle. You travel down his arms, over to his chest, down his stomach… Jihoon sucks in a breath, your warm hands absolutely searing against his skin, and his abdominals tighten beneath them. Tilting your head, you press a line of kisses down the side of his neck, your lips brushing against one almost unbearably sensitive spot when you continue. “Fuck, you’re so hot.”

He smiles bashfully, rolling his head to the side and giving you all the access you want. Your lips tickle euphorically against him as he tugs you flush against his chest, both his hands now tightly pressing against your ass, fingers kneading the muscle concealed by your pants. You’re sitting right over his clothed cock and he’s reasonably sure he can feel your pulse between your thighs, letting out a soft grunt when you roll your hips deliberately down into his own. Your kisses travel to the swell at the curve of his shoulder before moving back up to his lips, where he meets you with a fire that he’s never kissed anyone with, before.

“Says you,” he murmurs into your mouth, your teeth clashing, his hips pushing slightly up off the couch. Just enough to make you sit back from him, just enough for Jihoon to open his eyes and look at you. His hair, thoroughly scrunched up and pulled around by your desperately gripping fingers, fans out at all sorts of angles and his chest has taken on a rosy hue since you last looked at it. With swollen, shiny lips, glossy eyes, breathing deep, he looks completely blissed out, like a man who could unravel beneath you if you moved just right. All from a little tongue action. He’d usually feel embarrassed, but it’s hard to when you’re the person on top of him; to be honest, neither of you would mind much if he did.

You’re pushing yourself up and off him before he can really get his bearings and an audible whine of despair parts his lips at the loss of your weight against his cock. Fuck, these jeans were a bad idea: he’s straining against the denim so much that it hurts, and there’s a near perfect outline of his hard-on. He stops pouting the second you take hold of his hand and tug him upright, though, your eyes dark and determined and intense. He thinks he might faint, actually: from standing too fast and feeling as though all the blood in his body is pulsing through his aching dick, he has to take a moment to stop the edges of his vision going dark before you’re pulling him through to your bedroom.

Something flips inside him the second you have him there. Jihoon, who was more than happy to sit beneath you and let you take all the control in the living room, is pushing you back onto the mattress by your shoulder and slotting himself between your parted thighs the moment the door is closed behind him. He’s past the point of wanting you, now: he needs you, and he needs you to need him, too. 

And God, do you. You prop yourself up on one elbow, staring at where he’s now leaning over you with wide eyes and your bottom lip drawn between your teeth. He bends down and kisses along your jawline in response, nipping gently just below your ear. Your back arches up and in a flash, one of his hands is beneath you, snapping open the clasp on your bra with a few slides of his fingers.

“Wh-…” you start, giggling and panting at the same time. He smirks against your pulse point. 

He flattens his tongue against you and licks a salty bead of sweat off your skin. “What?”

“Had no idea you could-…” You’re cut off by a gasp as one of his hands slides under your sweater, slipping beneath the garment he just unfastened. His fingertips graze over your breast and a pleading sob escapes you. His smile grows even wider. “You were so…”

“So what?” he prompts, pinching your nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Another one of those beautiful sounds breaks the air above you. He does it again, massaging your breast with the palm of his hand. “Come on… talk to me.”

“So good,” you gasp, lying down flat and tilting your head back against the pillows. He rocks forwards to press his cock against you again and your thighs tighten around his hips, one leg hooking around his to keep him there. “So-… fucking good.”

You’re so impossibly irresistible to him, especially like this, and he sits up, settling on his knees to look down at you. Jihoon doesn’t even get the chance to move his hands towards the hem of your sweater to tug it off you though: you’re already grabbing it yourself, crossing your arms to pull it over the top of your head. He can see your bra now, and hell, it’s pretty even if it is just hanging off you. Baby pink and lacy. He thumbs over the material as he helps you pull it down your arms, briefly letting himself wonder if-…

“If only you’d been patient enough to see the set together.”

Oh, so you can read his mind now, too? 

You glance down to the small space between your bodies and his eyes follow, lips slightly parted, a heavy sigh on his breath. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck — he wishes he had. Even imagining it, he’s throbbing.

“You wear all this for me?” he asks, hands creeping up the insides of your thighs. You nod up at him and he smiles down at you. “Fuck. I bet you didn’t even need my help tonight at all, did you?”

You’re bucking your hips now as his thumb brushes, agonisingly slowly, over your clothed cunt. One arm has come up to cover your face: for the first time, he acts on his impulsive need to see you shy, see you needy, and leans over you to gently pull it away and pins your wrist down against the mattress. He kisses you, his fingers on the other hand pressing slightly more firmly to where he’s pretty sure your clit is.

“Y/n, you’re so pretty. Let me see you.”

“I didn’t,” you admit, voice wobbling as he works you up so much you’re actually soaking through not just your pretty underwear, but the leggings you’ve had on all night, too. He can feel it against the pad of his thumb and he raises his eyebrows for you to continue. “Just… really wanted you to come over…”

“Mhm. I know,” he soothes, bending low again and kissing down towards your chest. His lips purse over one of your nipples and he sucks it up into his mouth, flicking his tongue over the bud. He releases your wrist with the hand currently taking most of his weight and leans on his elbow, teasing your other tit with his fingers. The weight of it in his palm has him murmuring soft praises against your skin, telling you over and over how good you feel. You push up onto your elbows to try and press him closer — when his teeth tug just slightly, you’re about ready to beg.

“Jihoon, please,” you murmur. He short-circuits, again. Goes blank. His name has always sounded so much sweeter on your tongue, but this? This? Oh, he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to recover. That sound is going to stick in his head for days, months, forever, if he has anything to say about it. But even if his brain isn’t working, his body moves on autopilot: he sits up and hooks his fingers under your waistband, pulling your pants down your legs and discarding them onto the floor. 

He’s staring between your thighs with zero functioning brain cells and literal galaxies in his eyes, trying to figure out what cosmic miracle brought someone like you into his life, how on Earth he’s ended up between your thighs. The question is so overwhelming in his mind that he barely notices that you’re moving, at first. Jihoon doesn’t know what causes you to try and bring your thighs together — if it’s shyness or arousal, desperation, a search for friction? — but he stops you as soon as he realises, laying a hand on each of your legs, pinning your knees down now, instead.

“Keep your legs wide for me?” he asks, to which you punctuate a nod with an assenting hum. “Good girl.” 

You’re so wet that when he strokes two fingers over your covered pussy, pressing the fabric of your panties into your heat, they come away thinly coated in the arousal that’s seeped through them. He brings his fingers to his lips then, eyes fluttering as he licks your slick off them. You taste otherworldly and he doesn’t hesitate to tell you so with a groan.

“God,” he murmurs, tugging at the waistband of your panties with his other hand. His eyes ask if you’re ready — if you’re sure, and when you nod down at him, he pulls them off completely too. His middle finger slips between your folds, collecting the wetness dribbling out of you, and he drags it slowly upwards towards your clit. He repositions himself again, leaning down over you with his head at your neck, the heel of his hand resting against your lower abdomen. He draws small circles over the bud, laying open-mouthed kisses at your collarbone and listening to the gorgeous sounds you make, learning what you like, following each gasp and moan and chasing as many of them as he can draw out of you.   

At the same time as you start rocking your hips up to meet his hand, your nails scratching gently against his scalp again, Jihoon slips his finger down from your swollen clit to press it inside you. You gasp, high-pitched and needy, your cunt spasming around his finger and pulling it in deeper. He’s only in up to his second knuckle but the way you keen for him has him pushing further until it’s buried inside your pussy completely. 

“S’this okay?” he asks, but he knows your answer thanks to your vocal responses to him already slowly easing his finger in and out, in and out. You nod your head almost aggressively as he glances up at your face, your eyes squeezed tightly shut, jaw tense, throat bobbing as you swallow hard. 

“More — please,” you say not long after. A breath hitches in your throat when he does exactly what you ask, pressing the heel of his hand against your clit and positioning another finger at your entrance. He flexes his wrist slightly to get comfortable, pumping both fingers into you now, and he curls them upwards at just the right time to make your back arch off the bed. “Fuck — mhm, just like that—…”

He moves down your body slightly, reattaching his lips to one of your nipples as he fingers you deep and slow. He’s in no rush: Jihoon thinks he could do this all day and just deal with the RSI later on. You look so unbelievably hot with your face scrunched in pleasure, your thighs quivering as you fight to keep them apart like he asked you to, with your hips twisting down against his hand to try and get his fingers deeper and faster. When he lowers himself all the way down, settling completely between your thighs, he flicks his tongue out over your clit and your back arches up off the bed with a gasp.

“Don’t stop,” you whine, all high-pitched and rushed, both syllables merging into one hurried sound. “Fuck, fuck — please, don’t stop.”

“I’m not going to,” he murmurs, keeping pace and rhythm as he works you towards your high. God, he thinks there couldn’t possibly be anything in the world more sexy than watching you come undone from this angle. Your chest rising and falling in stuttered breaths, your hips rocking down against his hand, your pussy right on his mouth. Just the thought of it has his cock jumping in his boxers. “You gonna come for me, huh?”

“I-…” you start, releasing your death-grip on the bedsheets to bring a hand to cover your face. He clears his throat deliberately — perhaps it’s sort of closer to a growl than a cough — and he thinks maybe you really can read his mind, or maybe you’re learning that he wants to see every inch of you (especially like this), because a second later, it’s tangled up in his hair and holding him in place. “Y-yeah, fuck, I…”

“Good girl,” he coos again, and that breaks you. Your pussy tightens around his fingers and you feel yourself convulse, muscles clenching and releasing as you go over the edge with a cry. He eases you through your climax, tongue laving over your clit, fingers slowing but not stopping inside your cunt until your thighs close around his head in your oversensitivity. He takes the hint, then, and he slowly pulls away, sucking his fingers clean of your arousal while you take a few breaths to recover.

“Oh, my God,” you sigh as he moves back up and starts pressing small pecks over your chest and collarbones, your fingers lacing through his hair again to pull him up to kiss you. You groan softly at the taste of yourself on his lips, and can’t blame you. He still isn’t over it, either.

“You’re so gorgeous,” he tells you in-between kisses, one hand supporting the back of your neck to keep you close. “So pretty. So sweet. So good.”

“Shh,” you giggle, but he doesn’t. Just about every adoring adjective Jihoon has in his arsenal is murmured against your lips until you’ve gathered enough strength to get up on your knees and push him back onto the mattress, fumbling with the button of his jeans. 

He groans at the relief as you tug them down over his hips and thighs. “We don’t have to do anything else if you’re—”

“Shh.” This one’s a little more insistent, and he makes a show of clamping his lips back together. “You wore the tightest jeans on the planet, had your cock on-fucking-display for me all evening, and you think I wanna stop now?”

His jaw falls slack at the words that come out of your mouth. The incredulous way with which you say them has him involuntarily bucking up into nothing. Your expression matches his when you finally get his jeans all the way off and his thin, black boxer-briefs are the only barrier between you. The outline of his cock strains against them, tenting the fabric: Jihoon doesn’t miss the way you lick over your lips before glancing up at him through your eyelashes. It’s your turn to give him the look, now, asking that this last part is okay, with your fingertips hooked underneath the elastic waistband. He nods feverishly up at your heavy gaze.

“Please,” he groans, lifting his hips so you can pull them off. His length springs free the moment they’re pulled low enough, slapping back against his abdomen, sitting pretty against his toned muscles, thick and veiny and red-tipped. Desperate. His underwear joins the pile of clothes down the side of the bed as you throw one leg over him; sitting across his thighs, you take his cock into your hand, giving it a few gentle strokes. He fucks up into your palm when you squeeze your fingers around it.

“I need you so fucking bad,” you murmur, head spinning, and Jihoon isn’t in much of a better state himself; he’s fighting to keep his eyes open, fighting to keep his breaths coming. He sits upright, one arm behind him for support, and kisses you hard as you continue to tug at his length. 

“Need you, too,” he breathes, shifting so he has both arms around you. In a swift movement, muscles rippling, he lifts you off him and turns you over so he has you sitting on your now impossibly scrunched comforter.

He finds home back between your legs as you reach over into the drawer at your bedside and fumble around for a few seconds. He hears a little clatter and a rustling and when your hand resurfaces, you’ve pulled free a small foil square. You don’t even give him a chance to lean forward and take it; you’re ripping it open and looking up at him with the biggest doe-eyed stare he thinks he’s ever seen. He nods at the silent question, a grunt tumbling free as you roll the condom down his length. This is the most pathetic little bit of contact and he’s fighting demons.

“Okay?” he asks, shuffling back a little and giving you space to lie down flat on your back. You nod up at him, already wrapping your arms around his shoulders. 

“Mhm, just-... take it slow?” you ask him, anticipation rendering you already a little breathless. “S’been a while.” 

A grin blooms all the way from his lips to his eyes and he leans down to kiss you again, positioning his tip at your hole and pressing forward just enough to tease.

Your thighs tighten around his hips and he pushes himself further inside you with a stuttered groan, agonisingly slowly, inch by inch. He stills every few seconds, both to give you the time to adjust and so that he can take a steadying few breaths and not collapse at how good you feel wrapped around him; he stops pressing his hips forward before he’s fully sheathed inside your pussy and you let a whine slip, the stretch slowly easing. 

“You can move,” you tell him, laying a kiss to his chest. “I’m okay.” 

Jihoon gives a soft laugh. Oh, he wishes this was just to be polite, but no. He’s in real danger of losing control any second. “Yeah, this isn’t for you, baby.”

“Oh?” you ask. You clamp around him and he gasps at the tightness, hips jerking forward until he’s buried up to the hilt. Fuck, there’s a bruised cervix if you’ve ever had one; a high-pitched whine erupts out of your lips and he ducks his head down to your ear.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You just-... fuck, you feel so good.”

“Mm, says you.” 

It’s another moment before he thrusts with intent, though. But when he does? When he pulls out halfway before sliding all the way back inside you, losing and regaining the feeling of your heat enveloping him entirely, hearing your gasps against his collarbone? The invisible reigns holding him back unravel and he settles into a slow but intensely deep rhythm, guiding your legs around his waist. You hook your ankles behind his back and somehow, you suck him in deeper still, your bodies touching everywhere they possibly can, so impossibly close.

The arm not holding his weight slides beneath your hips and raises them just a little. Now, at this angle, every time he rolls into you he grazes against your sweet-spot and you’re reduced to an incoherent mess within a few minutes. Good, he thinks, because he’s not doing much better, himself.

You hug him tighter after one particularly well-angled thrust, sinking your teeth into the muscle of his shoulder. He hisses at the sting, and your lips part as if you’re about to apologise but he doesn’t give you the chance to; he bumps your nose with his own to ask you to lift your head slightly, before he bends down and kisses you hard.

“Do that again,” he gasps, almost all of his weight against you as the hand not around your hips comes up to rest on your cheek. When your brows tighten, he swipes his thumb over your spit-covered, swollen lips. “Please. ”

So, you do.

Maybe not as harshly as the first time, but your teeth find his collarbone and you suck a bruise into his skin, drawing from him the highest pitched sound you think he could possibly make. He squares his jaw, ducking his head back down, biting on his bottom lip before he has no choice but to speak.

“I’m close, y/n,” he confesses, fucking into you slower, trying to stave it off for a few more seconds, his hips stuttering. “Can-... can you give me one more…?”

You nod, the knot in your stomach already growing tighter and tighter with every movement he makes, and when one of your hands unwinds from around his back to slide between your sweat-slicked bodies, he moves slightly away, letting you reach down.

It’s the sight of two of your fingers finding your clit and rubbing your favourite movements out on yourself that takes him past the point of no return, his cock sliding in and out of you messily, desperately, chasing the high that he’s right on the brink of. He kisses and nips just below your ear, breathy groans tickling your neck, and your high-pitched whine tells him you’ve hit your orgasm just as he starts to spill his into the condom, gushing around him, your walls fluttering and milking him for all he’s worth. 

—

You offer for him to shower first – an offer he gratefully accepts. While you’re taking your turn afterwards, Jihoon hunts down a fresh duvet cover in your room; he changes it, grabs you a glass of water for when you’re done, and sits on the edge of his bed with just the towel wrapped around his waist, scrolling through his phone. He looks up with a bright grin as the door opens and you emerge through it in your pyjamas, glowing from the light behind you, stray droplets of water clinging to your arms. 

You pause gently rubbing your hair dry with the towel, eyes brightening when you see him. “You didn’t have to do all this,” you say, and he pushes a hand through his own still damp hair with a laugh.

“It was the least I could do,” he counters. You raise your eyebrows at him, crossing the room to sit opposite him. He drops his phone down onto the mattress. “I couldn’t leave and make you change them yourself.”

“Leave?” you ask, picking up one of his hands and playing idly with his fingers. 

“I mean, it’s getting pretty late, so…” he says. “I probably need to get going at some point.”

“Or…” you say, tongue darting out over your lips. “Maybe you don’t.”

Jihoon looks down at your hands, then back up at you. Are you suggesting what he thinks you are, or has he still not quite come back to himself from earlier? It’s hard to say if the look on your face is hope, or something else.

“Are you… asking me to stay?” he asks. 

“Only if you want to,” you tell him. He lifts your hands up, pressing a kiss to one of your knuckles, then using it to tug you closer to him until he can plant one on your own lips. “I’ve probably got an old t-shirt you could sleep in.”

“Of course I want to.”

So you slip away from him to go rummaging through your drawers, trying to find the promised article of clothing. The whole time, he’s awestruck. Jihoon can’t take his eyes off you.

——————

He wakes up next to you for the first time on a Saturday morning. His sleep-fogged brain registers lying on an unfamiliar mattress, tucked beneath new bedsheets, eyes fluttering open to take in a room he doesn’t quite recognise at first. Part of him wonders if he’s still dreaming. When he rolls over onto his side, and his eyes land on the curve of your shoulders, the fall of your hair down your back, he has to ask himself the same thing again. 

All of last night must’ve been a dream, he muses, smiling shyly to himself and watching your frame rise and fall with every slow breath you take. There’s no way you really told him you liked him, too. There’s no way any of it could have really happened.

“Y/n?” He asks in the gentlest of whispers, only wanting to stir you if you’re awake already. When there’s no response, he moves a tiny bit closer to you, hesitating before he slips his arm around your waist and settles with his chest pressed against your back. A wildly insecure part of his brain tries to argue that just because you wanted what happened last night, that doesn’t mean you want all of this now. Maybe you only wanted to sleep with him, or maybe you’ll have changed your mind somehow now the sun’s come up. He considers moving away again, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling until you wake up and he can have a real conversation about where both of your heads are at with everything, but he barely gets a chance.

Those thoughts are silenced almost immediately, his brain falling quiet the second you roll over in his arms. You bury your head in the valley between his pectorals, tucked away from the world beneath his chin. His arms tighten around your sleep-warmed body.

“What time is it?” You ask. He contains a shiver at the softness of your voice, bliss running the length of his spine. Jihoon thinks that he could get used to this.

“I don’t know. Early, I think,” he murmurs, and you whine softly, burrowing deeper against his chest. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not if you’re awake,” you say. He’s not entirely convinced you can stick to that promise, though, with the way you yawn and he feels your eyelashes fluttering. 

“Don’t worry about me,” he tells you, the tips of his fingers ticking against your side. He ducks his head, pressing a kiss to your hair. A soft hum rumbles in your throat and he can’t hold back the smile that spreads over his lips. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

True enough, you fall back asleep curled up against him and Jihoon, to the sounds of your slowing breaths, drifts off too. A few hours later, at a far more reasonable time, you wake him up with a press of your lips to the tip of his nose.

Innocent, exploratory kisses grow heated in the warmth of the sun that streams through your blinds. Hands start to travel, sleep clothes get discarded, and you have him lying on his back, pressing kisses down his chiselled stomach when his phone starts to vibrate on the floor next to the bed.

He groans at the distraction, again as you shuffle up to sit on your knees and look at him expectantly. 

“Are you gonna answer that?” you ask, the tips of your fingers grazing his thighs. He shakes his head, no. “Come on, Jihoon. It might be important.”

“Not important enough,” he sighs. 

“At least see who it is,” you laugh. Despite a huffed protest, he props himself up on one elbow, leaning over the side of the bed and glancing down at his phone screen.

Seungcheol.

The arrangement to go for a run this morning comes rushing back to Jihoon, who slaps a hand to his forehead and reaches down to grab his phone off the floor, looking at you apologetically.

“Give me two seconds,” he says, and you grin wickedly up at him, ducking low to press a kiss to one of the lines that disappears down into his boxers. 

“Take all the time you need.”

He answers the call frowning, flopping his head back against the pillows. 

“Hey, look – I’m really sorry,” he starts to say, but Seungcheol’s voice cuts him off almost straight away.

“Jihoon, where the hell are you? I got to your apartment and your car wasn’t here, and Seokmin said he didn’t hear you come home last night. We all thought you’d died,” he hurries. Jihoon can picture the expression on the other man’s face perfectly, which is pretty unfortunate seeing as how you’ve moved to start palming his hardening cock through his briefs.

“I stayed out,” Jihoon says, a little wobbly. “I can’t make the run, someth-... shit.” You press an open-mouthed kiss to the outline of his length, the heat of your breath through the fabric sending him into overdrive. “Something came up-...”

The line goes silent for a second, and his breath stutters as you do the same thing again. Each press of your lips is euphoric agony, and he’s really not hiding this as well as he wishes he could. One look down at you tells him that you’re very proud of that.

“Dude,” Seungcheol gasps, snickering suddenly. “Tell me you’re not with a girl right now.”

“Shut up. Go away,” Jihoon grunts. “I’ll call you later.”

“Oh my God, is it gym girl? Did you finally-...”

“Bye, Cheol,” he hurries, hanging up before his friend can say anything else. He drops his phone onto the mattress, fake-glaring down at you and shaking his head. “You’re the worst, you know that?”

“Yeah?” you ask, pulling at the waistband of his briefs to tug them down his legs. “Let me make it up to you, huh?”

[jongbross]

Hi <3

I’ll be honest there’s one thing I wanna discuss, it’s Lay’s situation in exo. I’m kinda new fan so I’m wondering if you could tell me your opinion about it. I don’t know him much and I’m curious why he’s like he’s still part of exo when he doesn’t appear in promotions for years ? The sad truth is international fans are more ot9 while korean eris are rather ot8. If he’ll ever come back with exo I’d be really surprised, but if he really ‘left’ then it has no sense claiming to be part of the group.

I didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just my opinion with no intention to offend Lay or anyone.

Have a nice day! 🫶

this has been laying on my inbox for a while, but everytime i tried to answer, something happened - so i'm sorry for taking so long.

well, you weren't rude, don't worry, darling! it's okay 💕 and it's also okay to have an opinion like that.

for me, yixing is still part of exo. i love him just as much as i love any other member, and i have never, ever lived a single moment from him with the members. i'll believe that he's an exo and defend him on it till the day he says "hey, i'm not part of the group anymore".

there's a lot of factors that i believe it helped his current situation. first of all, sm's treatment towards him wasn't the best one, let's be for real now. him being the first member to debut solo says nothing to me, tbh. then, i think that when he saw he could do much better without sm, he eventually grew apart from exo (not individually, but as a group) - and that's okay. he found himself as an artist, and that's what most artists wish for, you know? this being said, i think all of these took a part on why he hasn't fully come back to the group (and to be 100% honest with you, i don't think he ever will), but at the end of the day... he made a promise to us, a literal promise.

when exo started to fall apart and members started to leave, all 9 of them made a promise to us, that they would be here with us. so yixing may not be active in the group, but he's still an exo because of that, and that's why he always claims himself as an exo member. now, i wouldn't be sad if he ever left the group, but i can see why he doesn't, at least not officially. when we say exo is 9 forever, that's what i mean, at least - they're 9, no matter what; they will always be 9, because they're the 9 who believed in their dreams and capacity and overcame so much just to be together, you know?

anyways, i love yixing so so much. he was so underrated in exo, he deserved and still deserves so much love. i'm not joking when i say he's one of the best artists i ever had the chance to meet in this life - he's like, the most complete artist. i love him, truly. 💘

[saturnskyline]

10 BL BOYS I WILL THROW HANDS FOR <3

tagged by @chaotic-aro-incarnate and @dream-thief-forever-amen, thanks besties!! 🥰

ngl this list was a fun opportunity to walk down blorbo memory lane lol. anyway here we go :D

1. team (until we meet again/between us)

i mean. he's my everything 🥺 idk what to say except that his huge puppy eyes have captivated me beyond belief and i would go to war for him any day <333

2. sean (not me)

this man suffered so much throughout the course of the show so it might be a little late to throw hands, but I WOULD STILL ABSOLUTELY DO THAT 😤😤 good thing he got his happy ending though

3. sky (love in the air)

best boy ever!!!!! would do sooo much more than throw hands for him ngl. sky deserves the entire world, and i'm just glad he has prapai to give it to him 💖

4. gene (lovely writer)

few bl boys have activated my "he's just like me fr" response as much as this guy did haha. literally my bestie and i adore him beyond words 🫶🫶

5. oh-aew (i told sunset about you/i promised you the moon)

the thing with oh-aew is that he just feels so REAL :( the way that itsay portrays queerness and coming of age is so incredible, and this boy did the absolute most. love him forever and ever 💕

6. pob (don't say no)

leon is just like me bc i too would lose my mind in front of this angel boy and his cat. cutie patootie is a GROSS understatement

7. yok (not me)

i mean what can you even say. he's the light of my life and he has never done anything wrong, nor will he ever. first kanaphan my belovedddd

8. pran (bad buddy)

his dimples make the world go round! that is a true fact, just ask pat jindapat!! or take my word for it i mean look at him 😭

9. porchay (kinnporsche)

BABY. BAAAAABY. deserves to live a nice life outside of the mafia and adopt cats and play music and be happy forever amen (also be with kim if he so desires fkshshd)

10. shi on (you make me dance)

prettiest smile in the world 🥹 he did fall for a loan shark, but hey, it all worked out! also, as a former dancer, he has a special place in my heart :)

idk who to tag soooo i'll just say, whoever wants to do this, feel free!! 💌💌

[popponn]

hehe popon !!! i'm like trying my best to keep my eyes open bc i am v tired 😞 so i am apologising in advance if there are any grammatical mistakes in this chunk of text 🤞🏻😸 but hi lovely:

WISHING U A HAPPY BIRTHDAY, POPON !!!! i not sure whether it's like ur birth date where u live yet, but it is for me, so i hope this mssg is on time ! but happy birthday to one of the cutest, cleverest and sweetest yoichi kissers in the world 🫶🏻😽 isagi loves u sm and giggles and kicks his legs when u post him on ur blog (real. bro told me and i was "damn yoichi 🤨")

on my friends' birthdays, i usually write a letter and give them my thanks for a number of things. and i think the number one thing i wanna say "thank u" to u for is definitely our interactions <3 u have always been friendly to everyone who interacts w u, including me, and i reckon i'm rly lucky to met u this year !!! u're a kind soul w a lot of love to give, and i think that's why we all love u sm !!! and i'm super thankful for all the times u've visited my inbox/mssges 🫶🏻🫶🏻 it makes me happy hehe

i must also mention that i am so thankful that i was able to find "coincidences and flickers" one fateful day,, like that series has the potential to forever change me as a person and even make me become a temporary isagi kisser (never forgetting who i am 😤) <33 it was that series that helped me find ur blog and realise the insane amount of talent u have for writing !! my favourite writers on this platform often changes (sometimes it's a, or sometimes it's b), but i think u have a fixed position up there <3 i truly adore u and the way u write, so thank u for all the works u post 🫂 it's such an honour to be mutuals w a v skilled writer

i also wanna thank u for all the reblogs u make on everyone's works <3 when u reblog my fics w a bunch of tags, it truly makes me feel like that the effort i have put in didn't go to waste bc there was someone who appreciated what i wrote. also like,, the quality of my writing often fluctuates (😞💔), but u reblog them anyways, and i will ALWAYS thank u for that !! i love uuu (⁠づ⁠￣⁠ ⁠³⁠￣⁠)⁠づ🫂💞

oh, and, thank u for constantly feeding my reo delusions 😸😸 not sure if i'd love him the same without u telling me that reo loves me too lol 😽🧎🏻‍♀️

i do hope that everything will treat u nicely today !!! and every other day bc u deserve it <33 eat cake, laugh w friends and mb be silly for a little while—u're not a grandma yet, so have fun being in ur twenties, popon !!!!

love u always 🫶🏻☹️

(i hope u like words bc this was a bit of a read lmao)

SAKI IM SOBBINGGG???????? WHATT????? D: JESUS I WILL BE WORDY TOO!! HOW DARE U MAKE ME ALL SOFTTTT thank u so much for typing all this despite being very tired omg ;;;; im gonna bawl mom im so glad i meet saki the sweetest adgudk (also...my grammar is also a mess i hope this shall be forgiven as i am sincere ( ˘͈ ᵕ ˘͈♡))

it already is!! :">> thank u for remembering it bae :""" and omg yoichi did all that? i get even more in love :(( pls tell yoichi i also kick and giggle when he breathes :(( AND HEY YOU ARE OVERPRAISING ME WHAT IF MY HEAD GET BIG [ahjussi voice]

saki :(((( im also very thankful i get to meet you this year ue ue ue ;;; i never thought i will ever talk to you (or anyone here at all tbh sksk) like i was very shy and hesitate a lot, but then you are there?? being so sweet friendly and welcoming ;;; like you are one of the reasons i'm here and i mean it??? like you are one of the person who gave me courage to be more friendly here too hehe <3 im so glad i meet someone as kind you saki <3

im gonna start blushing and bawling fr now. IM SO GLAD I MAKE THAT SERIESS ;;;;; (CHAPTER WILL COME SOON TRUST!!) hdfkdj idk what to say here before sounding like a madman so uh ;;;; pls know that i was so happy too when u commented and reblogged so positively ;;;;;;; ghjk saki your praises i think i read them over and over girly u r too sweet for me sometimes ;;;;;; ♡( ˘ ³˘)♥︎

okay channeling my coolness energy a bit, saki 🫵i like your writing GENUINELY!!! okay! so im glad you like the madman ramblings in the tags :>> and come on buddy fic writer to fic writer, it would be impossible to like everything we write SKSKSK remember that one time i immediately lose it after posting that rin studying fic. sigh. stupid ass me. BUT YOU AND EVERYONE WERE THERE AND IT SERVED ITS PURPOSE HOHOHO SO I TOO FEEL IT WASNT A WASTE HEHEHEHE

and i will keep feeding ur delusion get ready (❀❛ ֊ ❛„)♡ also quick mention real quick your cats are cool sunglasses or not

THANK YOU FOR THE WISHES SAKIII!!! omg :((( thank you so much for?? writing all these gosh uhuhuu i will reread this over and over again a lot of times today hehe (no matter how busy and hard it is to open tumblr today!!!) this make my day so much ;;;;;; uhuhuhu and aw <3 i will!!! i wanna make a grandma joke again but for today i will spare saki uwu

i love you always too!!!! 🫶🏻😤

[satorisoup]

I’m glad my message made you feel happy 🫶🏼

My Haikyuu top 3 are Semi, Shirabu and Kenma! My life before was 99% SemiShira >//< they’re so cute! But my first Haikyuu crush was Nishinoya hehe :3 what about you? You love Bokuto, right? :3

Life is not that nice to me, but I’m handling it :) I hope you’re doing amazing ‹𝟹

Loads of love and happiness to you 🌸

UWAHHH HELLO MA LOVE !! ٩(^ᗜ^ )و teehee m’ so happy to see you in my inbox again, you’re such a delight to chat with !! <3

EEEK semi, shirabu, and kenma ?? you have perfect taste !! :3 omigoodness, ME TOO !! i was absolutely obsessed with semishira back in 2021, i used to post about them all tha time on tiktok teehee >//<

my first real haikyuu crush was tendou !! :3 i was absolutely smitten with him for two whole years, & i still love him very much !! >//< YES !! bokuto is my dearest forever and ever !! <3 my top 3 are bokuto, akaashi, and kita !! ^_^

do you have any other favorite anime’s ?? if so, who are your top 3 from them ?? i must know !! :3

oh nooo sniffle i’m soso sorry life hasn’t been kind to you lately !! T^T m’ hoping that things will get better for you & that you feel okay very soon !! you deserve all the best !! <3 THANK YOU SOSO MUCH MA LOVE !! >_<

WAHH i’m wishing you the bestest of wishes, please make sure to stay hydrated and get plenty of rest !! things will get better in time, i promise !! i’m hugging you soso tightly and giving you a yummy strawberry cake from my bakery !! MWUUUAH !! <3 🍓🍰

[beneathashadytree]

MAYA’S 2K+ FOLLOWERS EVENT!

Just a month or so ago, this blog hit 2K followers! It feels so surreal; to have so many people reading (and actually enjoying! Like, can you imagine?) my fics is a dream come true. To celebrate this incredible milestone, I’ve decided to hold an event! I will be opening my requests for the upcoming weeks—from today, 26/1/2023, till 9/2/2023. I’ll be outlining my requesting rules here💗

FANDOMS I’LL WRITE FOR:

One Piece

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

Moriarty the Patriot

Attack on Titan

Boku No Hero Academia

Bungou Stray Dogs

Haikyuu!!

Kuroko no Basket

Tokyo Revengers

Juiutsu Kaisen

Mr. Love: Queen's Choice

Ikemen Sengoku

Ikemen Vampire

Ikemen Prince

Ikemen Revolution

Check my regular rules for requesting to find out where I’m at in each series/game! And here is my full masterlist, if you’d like to check out my works!

GENRES I’LL WRITE:

Fluff

Angst

Smut (as long as I’m comfortable with it)

Hurt/Comfort

Angst to fluff

Platonic or romantic

PS: I generally write for gender-neutral readers! I try to be as inclusive as possible 🫶🏽

You can, of course, request more than one dialogue prompt. Any additional details you'd like, just let me know.

EXAMPLES OF REQUESTS:

Hi, I would like to request an angst piece for Jotaro Kujo in JJBA, prompt "Would you stop that?"

I want to request a smut piece for Vinsmoke Sanji, prompt number 64, reader is a switch and is the one saying it to him!

EVENT PROMPTS:

“No one's ever done that to me before.”

“Could you play with my hair?”

“I can't remember the last time I did this with someone.”

“That feels nice.”

“I haven't been hugged in years.”

“I never want to let go.”

“Let’s just cuddle forever.”

“You put your arm around me and I literally felt my knees buckle, this is so pathetic.”

“I just want to be held for a little while.”

“You’re legally obligated to keep holding me.”

"I think I forgot what human contact felt like.”

“I need to remember what hugs feel like.”

“Do you mind if we stay like this for a little longer?”

“My family was never the touchy-feely type.”

“I’ve never been in a relationship before, so I don't really know how to do the whole…..kissing thing.”

“You were my first kiss.”

“Could we cuddle, like, platonically?"

“I’m in desperate need of a hug.”

"What's wrong with me?"

"Are you mad at me?"

"Can this stay between us?”

"I don't want you to go."

“Would you stop that?"

"Can we talk?”

"I have to tell you something."

"Take my hand."

"Sometimes I can't help but get lost in your eyes."

"This is my fault.”

"Talk to me. I'm here for you."

“Please, just come home."

"I didn't want to go to bed without you."

“You're doing it wrong."

"Go ahead, hit me."

“You don't give yourself enough credit."

"Why do you hate me?"

“Tell me something I don't know."

"Please don't make me go home."

"I've never seen you like this."

“You’re up early.”

"Let's just have sex instead."

"This part of you…seems to be very sensitive."

"Prove to me that you deserve this."

"If you give me a hickey, I'll have to give you one too."

"Ah, I see you have a little problem. I can help."

"I've never been into this stuff…until I met you."

"I just like keeping you close. You're so warm."

"Be quiet. We're not alone."

"And what if I want you to do that?"

"It's okay, you're doing great. Keep going."

"Come back to bed."

"You haven't seen anything yet."

"Can you feel what you've done to me?"

"Okay, but we have to be quick."

"Fine, I admit, I've fantasized about this before."

"I'll go gentle. Though, we can always change that."

"You shouldn't have said that. Now I can't resist you."

"I knew you were secretly a pervert, but this…!"

"That's it, there we go…just like that."

"Are you trying to seduce me? Because it's working."

"It's time for payback. Turn around."

"So you do like getting spoiled after all."

"Don't stop looking at me while you do it."

"You say that, but all I hear is 'more, more, more'"

"I want to love every inch of you tonight."

"Hey, hey, two on one is not fair!"

"Enough of that, let me fuck you."

"You can still keep going?! What in the world are you?"

"Take your time. The whole night is ahead of us."

"You like the way this fabric feels, don't you?"

"Your face is a mess… a very pretty mess."

[Prompts by @bewitchingmemes, @violettduchess]

EVENT MASTERLIST:

Spellbound (Giorno Giovanna, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure)

Desperate (Mori Ougai, Bungou Stray Dogs)

Silk (Louis Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

Inside (Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty the Patriot)

Call on Me (Chifuyu Matsuno, Tokyo Revengers)

Seduced (Albert Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

Tender Love (William Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

All Sensitive (Albert Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

Obedient (Sir Crocodile, One Piece)

20 Years (Jotaro Kujo, Jojo’s Bozarre Adventure)

Hide Away (Sebastian Moran, Moriarty the Patriot)

Let Him Watch (Albert Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

Show Me (Mori Ougai, Bungou Stray Dogs)

All Marked-Up (William Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

After the Fall (William Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

Firsts (Mycroft Holmes, Moriarty the Patriot)

Perfect (Jean-Pierre Polnareff, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure)

Shameless (Mori Ougai, Bungou Stray Dogs)

Messy (Louis Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

Nights with You (Mycroft Holmes, Moriarty the Patriot)

Earnest & True (Albert Moriarty, Moriarty the Patriot)

All your positive feedback throughout this entire time—even when I was on hiatus—has uplifted me during the toughest times. I am eternally grateful for every single one of you wonderful people, and I want to give all that love back to you!💗

[industrations]

NICE THINGS FOR YOU VIA A LONG ASS ASK:

1. I literally just had to talk to my psych today about body shit as yes indeed as the weather gets warmer my mean brain voices get louder. So I'm so so so sorry your brain is doing that to you and the things the voice is saying aren't true (trust me I'm a stranger on the internet). And, something I've been remembering recently is the mean brain voice isn't an enemy to be shouted down or ousted, but a part of child you who is scared and just trying to keep you safe. If you listen to what it is they are afraid of, you may then know how to soothe their fear and quiet them down

2. I adore your art and Reggie of the day makes me smile Every. Single. Time. Thank you for sharing your creations with us. What you do directly brings joy and happiness to people like me every day

3. I'm a decade older. I wish I could tell you that the voices go away forever or that there is a magic answer to gender and presentation and figuring out how to exist peaceably in a meat tupperware. What I can tell you is things are SO MUCH BETTER now than when I was 22. I know it's a fucking queer cliche to be like "it gets better" but it does. It really really does. I love my body now, and the way it exists in the world, in a way I didn't think I ever, ever would.

3a. ****Queer joy and pleasure is your birthright.**** you DESERVE TO EXIST exactly as you are. Right now. And be celebrated and affirmed and given full-throated praise and support and validation from the people who love you. Me (again, stranger on the internet), and all your followers are here for you in that. We celebrate you! We appreciate you! We literally have conversations where we talk about how great your work is and how awesome you are in the fandom!

4. *TW: PHYSICAL COMPLIMENT* Your aesthetic is mint and you are def a dead ringer for Reggie, esp Gender Reggie, and in fact you don't look like Reggie, Reggie looks like you. I think all my writers would back me up on that.

Anyway

Sending you love and gay hugs and like, auntie care packages with nail polish and homemade cookies and fancy gel pens from the expensive stationary store. 💌💅🏼🍪🖊💖💙💜💛🖤🩵🤍🩷

This was a journey haha and with every section it made me smile more (and cry a little but in a good way) I don’t even know what to say to it all just that i’ve stored it away in my brain and i’m keeping it safe treasuring all the nice words.

Also reggie looks like me?!!! :0 look at me go, that’s pretty damn cool

That you guys talk about my art outside of social media where i can see always surprises me (in a good way) like whaa there really is people out there thinking and talking about something i made right now.

THANK YOU so much for the nice words and the auntie care package 🥰🫶💕

[bravemikhailo]

a very late 2022 fic writer’s interview ✍️

thank you so much for tagging me @vintagelacerosette @thisdivorce and @very-sleepy-head 🫶🏻

1. how many works do you have on ao3?

10!

2. what’s your total ao3 word count?

141,535 👁👄👁

3. what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

forever now

fade into you

never letting you go

warmness on the soul

beginners

4. do you respond to comments? why or why not?

i do! it’s nice knowing someone took the time to leave a comment so I always try to reciprocate with a response :) also comments just make me happy. a lot

5. what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

I think it might be boys don’t cry — even though it kind of has a hopeful ending, but we all know what happens in 4x12 so 😔

6. what’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

I think warmness on the soul — it’s just a buncha birthday love for mickey as he deserves <3

7. do you write crossovers?

nope, just get a bunch of inspiration from other media and put ian and mickey in that situation lol

8. have you ever received hate on a fic?

I don’t think so? not directly at least

9. do you write smut? if so, what kind?

I did write some smut for this year’s kinktober :) existential smut my beloved

10. have you ever had a fic stolen?

not that I know of

11. have you ever had a fic translated?

someone asked to translate one of my fics once but I don’t know if that ever happened (I also once translated one of my fics into my language for fun lmao)

12. have you ever co-written a fic before?

no, but I’d love to someday :)

13. what’s your all time favourite ship?

👉🏻👈🏻

14. what’s a WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

the only WIP I published is wanderers above the sea of fog, and I plan on finishing that, even though it’s gonna take a while. I did start writing a moulin rouge au in march but I never finished it. hopefully I will

15. what are your writing strengths?

I guess vivid imagery? had to go look at some comments on my fics and a lot of them say that I’m good at conveying the emotions, so I think maybe that one sksjs

16. what are your writing weaknesses?

definitely world building because I’m lazy </3 also I tend to forget a lot of what I’ve written, especially when it’s been a while between updates, which I think is a normal thing but still annoying. I also experience a lot of very long writer’s blocks (like right now) so that sucks. shall I keep going? because there’s definitely more

17. what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I actually enjoy it

18. what was the first fandom you wrote for?

gallavich :) I posted my first ever fic around two years ago!

19. what’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written yet for but want to?

I’ve only written gallavich so far. not sure I could write any other ship actually, but I wanted to write a gentlebeard fic (our flag means death) a while ago. never happened but still

20. what’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

it’s gotta be wanderers above the sea of fog, which is also the biggest thing I’ve ever written in my life so far. really proud of this one not gonna lie

I haven’t been here a lot lately and I’m pretty sure everyone’s done this already but I’ll tag my dear friend and incredible writer @oatmilkovich if you want to 💜💫

[agirlwholovesrockstars]

out of touch part 5 ♡

OUT OF TOUCH PART 1 ♡

OUT OF TOUCH PART 2 ♡

OUT OF TOUCH PART 3 ♡

OUT OF TOUCH PART 4 ♡

word count : this is might be long but I hope you'll still enjoy reading it! :))

summary : it's all coming too much for you, it almost feels like yesterday that you came to the school for the first time and now your love for Eddie keeps on going and gets even more stronger the more you spend your time with him- you've been bonding with each other in 6 months and ever since then you're both inseparable- the night when he kissed for the first time over at his trailer- at that moment you wanna do everything to not break his heart as you keep your distance away from him.... Eddie wants to stop this once for all- he wants you since day one and he'll do whatever it takes to make you get a hold of your own thoughts.

IF ANY OF THIS WARNINGS TRIGGERING YOU PLEASE DON'T CONTINUE TO READ

warnings : 18+ Eddie Munson x FEM! reader, language, no use of y/n but reader is Amanda Jones, mentions of anxiety, mentions of harassment, divorced parents, the reader made an action again but not bl00dy but still badass as always, I think that's all!

what to expect : fluff, angst, mutual pining, clueless idiots who can't make the first move, of course happy ending ;))

author note : I’M ALMOST FINISHED WRITING PART 6! 🥺🫶🏻 I hope you enjoyed reading my first Eddie Munson fiction series and there's a lot more to come! and if you have ideas about this universe I would totally wrote it down make it for you! :))

THE STORY IS SET IN 1987!

and yes I remove the part where EDDIE DIDN'T DIE! 😤

You've been thinking about it a lot if you should say it to him right now

But you don't know after you confess, maybe things will change.... the bond you have will be gone forever if you did

It's all going too much for you- that's why you can't even think clearly of what you should do about your feelings

But deep inside, you know, you know that Eddie has the same feelings that you have since the first day you saw him, the first time you talked to him, the first time he walked you to class

Not only you can see it in his actions but also you can see right through him

even you're so overwhelmed at everything- you're still grateful that someone like him respects your boundaries and not pressuring you at any sort of way to make you feel uncomfortable

You're so very thankful that you know someone like him that is very thoughtful and kind since the first day.... He always puts you first before him... He wants to know if you're surely fine with everything....he wants to know if you're doing alright... He is just so very caring which is unbelievable to you

It almost feels like you don't deserve him because you're treating him this way.... leading him on and out of nowhere you became uninterested but you don't know he knows why.... he knows exactly why you're doing this.... He's not mad at you, he doesn't hate you about it... he just wants to be there for you and listen to you whenever you feel down

He even told his Uncle Wayne that he is willing to wait for you and for sure he will be when you're ready....

Do you think he can? Do you think he will be there through good times and bad times?

Steve calls out your name and you jumped back into reality

he walked towards to your side "Hey- wait- Are you alright?"

You looked over at him and you hesitant to make eye contact at him "y-yeah, Steve- I am"

he scoffed "Nice try, Amanda, you can't fool me." he squints his eyes on you with a sarcastic smile

you sigh and you shake your head to the side "fine... I am not" you crossed your arms and you lean your back at the wall

His eyes turned into concern "What's the matter?" You didn't care to respond to him so he follows your eyes to where you're looking at and it lands on Eddie

He burrow his brows at you and he looks back at you back and forth

"Wait- did he hurt you?" Steve asks

"What?! No- Steve No!" The way you defend him makes you even more ill to the situation

"So? what is it then?!"

"I- I can't tell you" you turn away from him again but Steve stops you by holding the both of your arms

"Why not?"

"Because-" you glance at Eddie again which Steve does the same as he tries to understand you

You shift from where you standing and Steve tilts his head at you and he says "Amanda, you know you can tell me everything."

"I know, Steve" you look down on the ground

He ducks his head down and he searches for your eyes to make you look at him "So, tell me." He says softly

You look back up at him again but this time he saw your eyes

Eyes mixed with fear, guilt and love

"Oh" he says with a whisper

You uncrossed your arms at him as you hold back the tears

"It's Eddie"

"What about him?"

"I've never met someone like him before- I think I-" you stutter

Steve's eyes soften as he realizes why you're acting this way

He knows that you're afraid to love and to trust but he also knows Eddie, he is a good guy and willing to do everything for you

"You should tell him"

"What?"

"Tell him- how you feel"

You blink away your tears- that's how close you both are as if he can read through your mind- that's why Steve is so special to you cause he is the first person to understand you completely with no judgement at all

"You know, I can't do that"

"Nah- I believe that you can do that"

"But what if, I confess maybe things will change"

"What makes you say that?"

"I- I don't know- I am really just afraid"

Steve sighs "I've never seen a girl with Eddie until you came"

you calm down a bit "Really?"

"Yeah- he is not really much into relationships before until he met you"

"Hm- I refuse to believe that"

Steve throws his hands up in defense as he says "Okay, well, maybe, before he has feelings for Chrissy"

"Chrissy Cunningham?" You already heard her name before but you've never met her- even she already graduated last year she is still the talk of the school as everyone says that she is doing good at college and even more popular and since her and Eddie are friends.... You know that she is not like the other mean popular girls that you met in your other schools.

"Yeah- but they've never been together but he told me- he admits his feelings and ever since then he never regret it telling it to her"

You don't know why you're feeling this way- if you're a random person right now listening to this- you should be extremely jealous right now but you aren't and that's how much you trust Eddie you've never think twice about him

"Do they still talk to each other?"

"I don't know but as far as I know, they're still friends until now"

You nod and you purse your lips together

He holds the back of his neck as he says "Anyways, you gotta tell him! tell him how you feel, you can't go on like this"

"I know, Steve, I know"

Steve frowns at you- you look back up at him and you sigh "I'm so hard to love, Steve"

"What-"

"I hate myself so much that I hurt people who try to love me genuinely" you cut him off and your eyes are glassy from tears

"The reason why I can't tell him it's because I wanted to protect him and our bond together and I don't wanna break his heart- my god" you can't take it anymore so you cried shoving your hands on your face

Steve doesn't have to think twice as he pulls you into a hug- rubbing your back with his hand

Eddie saw you from afar as he watches you at concern- he is talking to Robin but he take a quick glimpse at you and he worries about you seeing you like that

Steve pulls back and he cups your face and using his thumb to wipe away the tears

"You're not hard to love, Amanda, everyone deserves to be loved the way they wanted it to be" he says while you sniffle

You flash out a sad smile and he added "Eddie is a great guy- hell- I've known him since we we're kids and he never changed since then except from his hairstyle"

You chuckled and that warms his heart and he hugged you again while he puts your head on his chest

"You gonna be okay and he is going to be okay and the both of you are going to be okay just trust me." while he rubs the back of your head

You pull away and you look straight to his eyes "Thank you, Stevie"

He rolls his eyes playfully but he smiles "You better move along before you can miss your class!"

You smile widely and hug him again for the last time and he told you that he is available whenever you need him and you nod

"Have you told her yet?" Robin asks

"Told her what?" Eddie responds without looking at her

she scoffed "I'm not dumb, Eddie, you know what I mean"

He turns to look at her as he shifts from where his standing and he scratched his neck

Robin notices his action and she burrow her brows "You did something stupid don't you?"

"What?! No- Buckley no"

"Then why you suddenly became nervous?"

"I just- don't wanna mess it all up that's all"

"Oh"

"I asked her out on the first day and she told me that she would love to go soon she just wanted us to get to know each other first but-

"But?"

"I think it's all becoming too much for her right now and I don't wanna force her or pressure her about her feelings and I told my uncle that I am willing to wait for her"

Robin eyes soften and she shows a fond smile at him

"She's lucky, you know"

Eddie burrow his brows in confusion "What?"

"I said she's lucky, cause she has you."

He huffed but heat rising up from his cheeks "you're just saying that to make me feel better"

Robin rolls her eyes at him "Look, I understand why you're feeling this way but trust me on this- you're the only one that she wants and if she's been acting like this way- I'm sure there's a good reason why she does it maybe she just wants to protect you"

"Why would she want to protect me?"

She shrugged "I think she doesn't wanna hurt your feelings because I feel like she's having a hard time trusting herself"

Eddie's eyes glistens with tears and he blinks away and turns to look at you still talking at Steve

Robin rests her hand on Eddie shoulder "This is destiny and time will come and you'll both will be okay, maybe not now but soon you both will be."

He tears his eyes at you and he look back at Robin

"Thanks, Buckley" he says with a fond smile

"Hey, don't go soft on me rockstar, you got a class to attend" she push him playfully in the shoulder and that made him laugh

Dustin, Mike, Lucas and Max are the first one to leave- all of them waving as they walk away

Robin and Steve gave you a last hug and they both glanced at Eddie and give him a pointed look- you furrow your brows at them but before you can look at Eddie he pushed both of his friends out of the way that made them both snicker

He stops his tracks when he turn at you- your arms crossed over your chest and you smirk at him "I'm not even going to ask what was that about" you scoff as you shaking your head

"Good" he replies reaching out to your hand to hold and you can't deny how his touch makes you feel safe

It's the same routine as always- he never gets tired of helping you out to the simplest things that you can do it by yourself but he always insisted and he laughed at how he can beat you for carrying your bag- having lunch with his friends throughout your first week of school it feels like you're with them for a long time- the bond is very solid which makes you forget that you only knew them a few days ago but they treat you like you're a the part of them and that makes you feel so emotional that finally you have a place to call home

Spending a lot of time with Eddie made you fell for him a lot- like it doesn't stop the feeling that you're having with him it's different it grows more and more and even more stronger and it scares you- and you wished that this would be it- this is what you've been looking for- but you know it yourself that nothing will ever happened it's just these thoughts are clouding up your mind to make you feel bad

Finally, it's Friday night- you remembered on your first day of school that you're invited to their movie marathon over at Steve's house

You wore a black blouse and denim jeans- you picked out a black short small heels as for your shoes and you put a little bit of makeup that enhances your features and you fix your hair- you let your hair down but adding a little bit of clips and hairtie to make it look presentable and proper....

You heard a beep outside and you know damn well- that it's Eddie waiting for you outside...

You take a deep breath and you quickly grab your purse and you look over to your parents at the couch looking at you with a questioning look

"Oh- I'm having a movie marathon at Steve's house!"

"You finally met? When?" Your mom asks you notice how her eyes light up

"Few days ago" you smile

"Okay, well- have fun! but be home soon!" Your mom says

"I will!" You're about to turn the doorknob to go outside but you heard your dad's voice

"You gotta tell him or else I will" your dad says and he grins not looking at you while he keeps his eyes on the TV

You huffed "what do you mean, dad?" you act dumb but you know what he means

He finally moves around from the couch to look at you "Oh- come on- you act like you're not my daughter- I know your every move and emotion- and I can see clearly right now you're fighting your feelings with this boy" he points out to the window and you see Eddie leaning his back on the van

You ignored his words that cut you up slightly "hmm okay, dad, I'll see you later." You walked outside before they can say something to you

Your dad shakes his head returning to his previous position earlier saying "she's gonna hurt herself not showing her true feelings to him"

"Just let her be, the important thing is that we're here for her no matter what happens." Your mom saids as she put his hand over the back of your dad's hand

He gently smiles at her and he sighs that hoping you can let yourself be happy and not putting yourself again in fear

The cool wind let your hair flow as you try hold it down- Eddie stares at you in adoringly and he loves the way you smile and hear your sweet giggles

"I must be fucking dreaming" he thinks to himself he couldn't believe that he finally found the perfect girl that he wants to spend the rest of his life with-

As always- Eddie The Gentleman always helps you to get in the passenger seat and he runs around his way to get in the driver's seat but before he can tell you to put on your seatbelt- you already did it

"Huh" he smirks "good thing- you're taking down notes" he says while placing the keys and turning on the engine as he grips his ringed hands on the steering wheel and you swallowed

You arrived at Steve's house and you eyes soften as you roam your eyes around his house- a little bit has changed but it's still the same house that you loved to stayed over a couple of times...

Eddie turns off the engine as he take a glimpse at you- he noticed your eyes filling up with adoration but also sadness

"Hey, are you okay?" he asks

You had much going on inside your head- not realizing that he is staring at you waiting for you to respond

You looked at him "Oh- yes- E-Eddie, I'm fine, let's go? yeah?" you flash out a small smile while you fix yourself once more on the rearview mirror, grabbing your purse over your shoulder and you reach out for the door

Eddie just tugs out a smile on the side of his lips as he watches you and of course he doesn't buy it but he doesn't wanna push you for it and he scratches his head "you know- I wouldn't let you do that"

"Yeah, I know" you roll your eyes at him playfully

He chuckles as he gets out from the driver's seat and as soon he helps you get out of the passenger seat- Dustin hugs you unexpectedly "Amanda! You came!"

"In the flesh" you say and you're still in shock by his actions but you recovered quickly and you snort while you hug him back

"Come on! You gotta see how we fixed this movie night" Dustin pulls your hand as you look back at Eddie mouthing out to him "Help Me!"

But Eddie throws his hand up saying "I'm sorry I can't help you!" You laughed and you look back at Dustin still gripping at your hands tightly and you can't help but smile widely at the thought that someone this excited to spend the night with you-

This is like your first movie night with friends- yes, sure you had movie nights with Steve but this one is different- you never experienced this before and this is what you always dreamed of...

You look over around Steve's house as you can still remember the old layout before- things have changed but the comfort that brings you to be back at his home still remains the same

You eye out the familiar backyard and Dustin stops his tracks as he removes his grip from you watching you as your jaw dropped and his smile widens

"Wow" you say- Eddie appearing from the behind and he says "you outdid yourself, Henderson- this is fucking amazing."

"I wouldn't take the credit for it! I only helped!"

You and Eddie both looked at Dustin in question

"It was Steve's idea." He grins

"Oh really?" You say excitedly

"Yeah- it's my idea" Steve approaches on Eddie's side

"I've never knew you liked doing decorations." Eddie says with a look that he couldn't believe that Steve could do that- not that he invalidates his talent or his hobby at things- is just that he never thought of Steve has this love for decorating

"it's because you've never asked, Munson" he narrow his eyes at Eddie

"Hmm- Good point" he shrugs

"This is really beautiful, Steve!" You jumped slightly and that made the three chuckled at your excitement

Your eyes still traveling around the lights are perfectly place at the top- the white blankets and a bunch of cushiony pillows sits on top of it and a table full off goodies

"You got the movie that I'm talking about right?" Dustin asks to Steve

"Yeah- I got it right here, man" he holds up the VHS to Dustin and he made a thumbs up to him

Eddie grabs the VHS out from Steve hands as he reads the title "Brian De Palma's The Untouchables."

That made you stop from admiring the place that Steve did

"Oh my fucking god! I couldn't believe that you actually got it!" You grip on Eddie's arms jumping slightly and he smiles at you

Dustin burrow his brows "What do you mean?"

"I don't know- I just thought- you guys are only joking that you want to watch that I suggested."

"Oh- that's just some bullshit, Amanda" Steve put his hands over his hips

"Look, Amanda- when I say we want to watch it- we really meant it!" Dustin says and you show a grateful smile at him

"So- what are we waiting for then?" Eddie says waking towards to the VHS player

"Everyone is not here yet we just gotta- but he can continue he heard something-

The door slams open on the front porch and as he watches everyone come inside without any carefullest to his home and you laughed at the sight of him as you remembered yourself in the same situation- they feel at home like you did and he sighs in exasperation "And here they are!"

Everyone is there Max, Lucas, Mike, Robin, Nancy, Jeff and Gareth who quickly hides from you and you gritted your teeth in the sight of them

Everyone greets you and hugs you except for Jeff and Gareth waving at you shyly and you roll your eyes at them- you walk towards to the table where all the goodies are- a bowl of everything! from candies, chocolates, chips, ice cream, crackers, sandwiches and two pitchers of ice tea and blue lemonade but you wanted something else and you step back and bumped over to Steve his holding a buttered popcorn on his hands with a smile on his face holding it out for you and you pout at him grabbing the bowl out of his hands and he watches you while shoving his hands on his pockets

"You remembered?" You say while you pick out the popcorn and putting on your mouth "it tastes so good! I miss this"

"I would never forget your most favorite snack ever." He says while stealing a popcorn from the bowl and you shock at his action

You're suddenly fueling mad at him- you put down your popcorn on the table and he snickers running away from you as you chase him

Eddie's on the couch drinking a blue lemonade on his cup while he watches you and Steve chasing off each other

Nancy sats on the arm of the couch while eating crackers

Robin flops down beside him "P with a capital P in Platonic" she mumbles while she shoves chips into her mouth

Eddie turns to glare at her annoyingly

"Don't ever think about it" Eddie warns her

"You gotta tell her how you feel, Dude- you can't keep yourself like this- like assuming and I know your mind is all over the place." she says as she continues to chew

"She's right, you know" Nancy says as she puts down the plate on the coffee table

But before he can reply at the both of them- you throw your arms around Eddie neck and you lean down yourself at him resting your head on the top of his- that made him stop to overthink and his heart warms at your touch

Nancy and Robin smirks at Eddie and at you and Robin bites her lips controlling herself not to say anything

Eddie places his hand from where you holding him and he pulls back at you to look at you and smile at him lovingly and you saw his doe eyes at you and you lean down and kiss his cheek- his cheeks turned red after and he smiles sheepishly

Steve tickles your sides and you squealed at him unlocking the hold that you had with Eddie and he frowns at he already misses your touch

You hit Steve from his shoulder and he laughs at you teasingly

"Come on- Eddie, it's so obvious- tell her-" Robin says as she put her hand over mouth squeezing her eyes shut in the process as she realizes what she just said

Nancy just facepalm at the scenario

Eddie's eyes widen at her and he groans "You can't keep your mouth shut do you?"

"Tell me- what?" You asked

Steve dart his eyes from his friends to Robin, Nancy, and back to Eddie

His eyebrows knitted together as he tries to understand his friends

"Yeah- tell her what" Steve he says and he nods at you

"It's nothing" Eddie says but Robin kicks his feet off and that made him say "OW!" he winces as he massages the pain away

"This is stupid" Nancy throw her hands up in defense

"You're not helping, Nance!" Robin exclaims

Nancy rolls her eyes

You and Steve looked at each other confused by their weird behavior

Robin whispers to Eddie but you can clearly hear her saying "Now's your chance!"

"Come on, tell her right now!" Nancy pushing Eddie to the edge causing him to become more nervous

Eddie tries to hide his face away from you but Steve can still see his panic expression

"Just spill it out, Eddie!" You sigh in annoyance

Eddie says something but he just stutters

Robin scratches her forehead while she shakes her head at the same time "You're so fucking dumb, Munson!"

Nancy laughs at Robin's frustration "Just let him be, Robin."

Steve tries not to smirk in front of Eddie as he hides his mouth with his hand- he knows exactly why he is like this- Eddie is his bestfriend he knows him too well like he knows you too...

"Are we going to watch or not?" Mike says as Eddie sighs in relief that the tension is over

You squint your eyes at Eddie that made him gulp and smile shyly at you

Robin rolls her eyes at the sudden interruption as she says "Fine, we're going over there!"

Lucas pops the VHS on the player as everyone chooses their seats and get comfortable

You chose to sat down on the blankets that are layed out in the ground while holding your popcorn bowl

Eddie sats down beside you sitting in a indian seat position as you watch how dork he is and you giggled slightly

"You need a drink for that" he extended his arm holding out the iced tea for you

"Thanks, Eds" you say as you grab the drink from his hand

"Anything for you, sweet thing" he says as he ates his sandwich and turn his attention on the TV screen

You eye him up and down and you smile gleefully

It feels like you're almost imagining this moment- you couldn't believe that everyone is enjoying the movie that you just suggested

Everyone panics at the scene where Kevin Costner and getting indecisive on what to do- help the poor lady with the baby? or stick to the plan?

You have a lot of favorite scenes from this film and you couldn't pick which one but this one is the most nerve-wracking sequence

Dustin repeatedly saying "I can't watch this" he says as he squeezing his eyes close gripping the chip bag that he's holding

You overheard Mike on the other side saying "Oh- that's just brutal!"

Nancy squints her eyes as if she can avoids the stressful scene

You laughed the way Robin drops her jaw slowly and breathing heavily as she watches closely of what might happen

Steve shifted from his seat more than like god knows what- while he bounces his knee from up and down as he places his hand over his mouth

Max and Lucas complains jokingly on how the earth you chose to suggest this film not informing them on how stressful it is

You shrugged at them playfully

Eddie, Gareth and Jeff you can tell that they all nervous but out of all the people- they're the most serious and very focused on the scene

Gareth is sitting and leaning forward while he's grasping his hands together

Jeff is sitting arms are crossed, his eyebrows are knitted together

Eddie is quiet and he's keeping his eyes only to the TV screen and it's unbelievable to you that he is very serious watching this film- you thought that he's not going to pay attention to it or just want to tease you the whole night but he didn't- he is more interested to learn about your taste in films

"Hey, Eddie are you- he cuts you off

"Shh" he says while he places his hands over your mouth and he pats it still looking at the TV

You chortled silently

As everyone is concentrated until the scene unfolds

Everyone shouted and cheered that nothing happened to the woman and her baby but all of them praises the performance of Kevin Costner

If these we're random people- they would not pay attention to any of your interests in films, they would never value your existence and they will disregard you and you won't even matter

You look all of them around you for a moment and it still feels surreal

"I like him" Eddie whispers to you as he points at the TV

"Andy Garcia?"

"Yeah, he's cool"

"I like him as well, but I love Sean Connery more"

"Now, that's a excellent choice"

"Why, thank you"

He chuckles as he says "So- uh- nothing will ever happened to them, right?"

You raise your eyebrow at him and you made a gesture zipping your mouth

"Oh, come on" Eddie groans

You shrug at him- and you got confused why the movie paused-

You startled when everyone is secretly sneaking behind your back and you know it already why- they overhead your conversation with Eddie

"Please, tell us Amanda!" Dustin begs

You still kept your mouth shut

"We're dying in here" Mike exclaims

"You can whisper it to me" Max says and smirks at you

You look at her and you shake your head

Max rolls her eyes while Lucas eyeing you with pleading eyes

Robin starts rambling "You have to tell us! If you do care about us, you gotta tell us!"

That's the only time you cackled but still nothing comes out of your mouth as you gesture the same thing again zipping your mouth

Eddie laughs as he watches everyone begging for you

You look over at Nancy "Oh- don't worry about me, I'm fine with it."

Everyone is overlapping with arguments until Steve speaks

"You know, whatever you do- she won't ever tell you, trust me, I've been there." He chuckles as he looks over at you

You nod at everyone

"Can you explain to us why she wouldn't wanna tell us?" Dustin dramatically asks

"It's because it would ruin the whole purpose of shock factor while watching it." Gareth says

You made a thumbs up to Gareth and he salutes to you

"and I think she also wants to witness all of you react in the film" Jeff says

You made an applause and Jeff bows to you and you mouthed "We're even!"

"Y'all bunch of nerds" Max jokingly saids

"Don't be like that" Lucas says and Max immediately apologizes

"As much as possible, I don't like spoilers." Nancy added

"So in conclusion- she wants us to suffer?" Mike asks

Everyone turns their heads to look at you waiting for an answer

but before you can respond to them Eddie speaks up

"You know what, it's getting late we should finish watching it not wasting time on this foolishness." He says as he presses play

Everyone groans and Steve just snickers at all of them

"I got a bad feeling about this" Dustin says worriedly

Everyone is hooked up at the scene where the action gets intense and you smile to yourself when you hear all of their comments having the same thoughts as you do- they also hate the villains of the film

Steve excuses himself as he goes back inside of his house

Eddie saw him get up and he wanted to talk about something to him and he excuses himself to you and you nod

Eddie saw Steve in the kitchen grabbing his jar of cookies and he looks around as he heard someone enter

"Oh, hey man, is everything good?" Steve asks as he takes a bite of his cookie

"Y-yeah, yeah, everything is cool" Eddie says as he shoves his hands inside of his pockets

Steve noticed the slight shakiness of his voice as he flick the crumbs off of his fingers

"Drop it, dude."

Eddie takes a deep breath "You know, Amanda right?"

"Yes?" Steve scrunches up his forehead as he getting impatient of Eddie is trying to say but he loves his dear friend though- he just wanna know right away

"You're both childhood bestfriends and-"

"Just get to the point, man"

"I-I'm"

Steve raises his eyebrows

Eddie panics and stutters but he still tries to say it "I think- I'm falling in love with her."

Steve purses his lips and nods while smiling in the process

Eddie looks at him in confusion

"I know"

"You- what"

"I know, since the first time that I saw her again with you." He says as he brings back his cookie jar to where it belongs

"Wait, What?!" Eddie says as he places both of hands on the counter leaning down

Steve giggles "I also know that's the reason why Robin pressuring you to confess with her earlier" while he washes his hands on the sink

Eddie swallows and his cheeks are heating up

He turns around grabbing a paper towel to dry his hands

"So- what's bothering you then?" Steve asks as he throws the paper towel in the trashcan

Eddie looks at his eyes for a second and looks away guilty of thinking that Steve has feelings for you

"I thought"

"You thought what" he crosses his arms

"I thought- you might have feelings for her" Eddie winces at himself thinking something like that to his friend

"Oh" he uncrosses his arms "Well, Munson, just because we have this a long time friendship- doesn't mean we have feelings for each other."

"So, you're not mad?"

"Why, would I be mad?"

He shrugs "fuck- I'm sorry, man, I know we also been friends since we're kids, it's so wrong for me to think something about you like that"

Steve chuckles "it's alright, Eddie, you're good"

Eddie nods but Steve notices his fidgeting with his rings- it's a sign that he's having anxiety

"It's Amanda, isn't it?"

"Yeah" Eddie sighs

"You just gonna have to trust her"

"I do trust her- I know- I'm not like this before having these thoughts in my head but I just couldn't help but wonder why she acts like that- I don't judge her but I'm trying to understand her-"

"There's nothing wrong with you, Eddie, she's just having a hard time dealing with these things as you do." He cuts him off

"It's all new to her and you couldn't blame her not giving herself fully to you." Steve pauses

"And I'm sure, she love you just the way you love her."

Eddie shows a sad smile "Thanks, Steve."

"And you thought of me? being mad to you just because you fell in love with my bestfriend- dude be fucking serious for once! I am happy that someone sees that she is worthy to love and that's because of you." Steve says as he points his finger to Eddie and laughs

Eddie pushes his finger away out of him as he shakes his head in the process while a fond smile coming out of his lips

"Look, I am serious, man, you have nothing to worry about, and she will be there for you, I know it." he says

Eddie nods and smile at him

You entered inside and that made the two boys clear their throat and acts like nothing happened

"What are you guys doing in here? You're going to miss the movie!"

Steve thinking a better reason why and he remembers you both love chocolate chip cookies "I-I'm just going to grab my jar of cookies!"

and that made you stop from the suspicion "Wait? Is that the cookies?!"

"Yes, it is"

"Oh- gimme, gimme!"

Eddie smirks as you ran to where Steve pointing out the cookies

While you're busy- Steve looks back at Eddie and they both sigh of relief

"Let's go back there, yeah?" You mumble as you holding onto the jar of cookies and you already ate a piece

They let you walk out first and Eddie say

"That's her weakness, huh?"

"Gets her everytime" Steve grins

Eddie laughed as they continue to walk outside

Everyone is nervous at the scene where Sean Connery is the next target to-

"Oh no!" Lucas exclaimed and Max looks away from the TV as she already knows what will happen

"I knew it! I knew it!" Dustin yells

"No- this can't be!" Mike shouted

Jeff and Gareth shake their heads and slumped their shoulders in the scenario

Robin frowns at you "Next time, don't take any suggestions from Amanda." she jokingly said

"What can I do? I can't just jump into the TV screen and save him?!" You said as you lick off the butter on your fingers from the popcorn that you just ate

Steve laughs at your response

"You like tragic characters, huh?" Eddie says as he grabs a cookie on the jar beside you

"They're very interesting, you know"

"Even though they can hurt you?"

"Yeah, sometimes they suck but they really add up to the whole plot without those kind of characters it would be boring."

"I hear you" he paused "The Outsiders broke me"

"It only broke you? That film destroyed me" you start

"I was bawling" you gesture to eyes falling tears like waterfalls

Eddie chuckles "I guess we're going to have a lot of bond to do."

"I guess we do" you smirk

Everyone is at shock to the scene where the antagonist of the film finally ends with his demise- as soon as the film ends everyone applauded and whistled

Everyone wanted to help out Steve to clean up but he insisted that it's on him

Everyone complimented the film that you suggested and they wanted to see more from your interests

Say their goodbyes and always hugs you before they go- except for Jeff and Gareth who rushes off quickly and just waved bye to you- it's not new to you anymore that they act like that you got used to it

Eddie drives you home and he says he'll see you in Monday

The weekend happened and you had a lot of fun spending time with your family and you're looking forward to it

But your heart is searching for something else and you chose to ignore it but you couldn't- you're longing to see Eddie again

Excited going to school on Monday it's not the usual thing you do and your parents didn't expected that

The bond with Eddie and his friends having them in your life are the most grateful thing that you ever had

Tuesday another night at The Hideout

You're aware that it's Tuesday and Eddie knows that.... If you don't wanna go after the incident it's alright with him.... But he's even more happier when you're there

"I know what you're thinking, it's alright, Amanda."

"N-no, Eddie, it's not"

"But I don't want you to come with me, if you really don't want to."

"I wanted to"

He looks at you with a small smile "Okay" he says softly

He pulled your hand on his and you walked away from the school's parking lot

You halt your tracks in the middle of the school's campus "Eddie, wait"

Eddie stops the minute you told him to- he turns around and notice your cryptic expression

"What's the matter"

You took a deep breath "I should've told you this before, but I don't want you to worry." You paused

Eddie tilts his head at you and his eyes are flashing with care and unease

You know that Eddie will always be there for you and will never let you get into any harm

"You deserve to know" you say it with misty eyes

"To know what?"

"My first night at The Hideout- Jason approached me and touched my thighs but I slapped him and told him to get away and Marlon was there to help me." You say while blinking away your tears

Eddie is now seething and clenching his jaw

"After your performance.... that thing happened." You added as you quickly wipe away that one tear that escaped in your eyes

"Please- don't be mad at me, I just don't want you to worry more that's all." You say while you sniffle

"I knew it" he starts "I knew it, that he approached and touched you"

"What a fucking pervert" he says with an anger coming out from his voice

You hug him instead and that made Eddie loosens up a bit "I'm sorry" you say weakly

Eddie places his hand at the back of your head and caresses it "I understand, it's fine" he says

You pulled away from him to see his face "No, it's not, Eddie, I've shouldn't kept this with you, I should've been more honest with you."

"For now on, I won't keep secrets with you, I will keep telling the truth to you." You say

Eddie eyes flashes with so much fond and smile at you full of gratitude "How could I ever deserve to have someone like you?" He says while he tucks your hair behind your ear

You smile at him and he says "Same goes with me, I will be honest with you."

After class- you and Eddie are ready to go at the Hideout again

You're wearing a black tube top with black leather jacket and black denim shorts with small boots and you let your hair down but still presentable with soft waves

Eddie can't help to compliment you again he just wants you to know that you're-

"I'm just gonna say this out loud" Eddie says as he gets into the driver's seat

Your face crumpled in confusion

"you look stunning" he throws his hands up in defense

You snort "Oh- I thought it was something else." You say breathlessly

"It's the truth! You have to get used to me of complimenting you."

"Why do you do this?" You gesture to him

He chuckles and he takes your hand "you deserve to know that you're beautiful inside and out." He smiles

You smile but got shy under his gaze and blushes

"Well, you're stunning as well, Eddie- and you're also beautiful inside and out." You say

and now- it's Eddie's turn red and smiles sheepishly at you

You roll your eyes playfully "Come on, let's go."

You and Eddie arrived at the Hideout and Marlon and Wayne was there and even Eddie didn't knew that his uncle is in there

You admire the friendship of Marlon and Wayne and you hope that you can have that someday but you don't realize it that you already have it since day one

You sat down beside Wayne as you both watch Eddie and his friends perform for another spectacular show

You cheered and shouted for them and Eddie winks and smiles at you more than once- you didn't notice Wayne eyeing you and Eddie with so much fondness- he is very happy from the both of you

But as soon as the performance ends- Eddie saw you remove your jacket and run towards the jukebox

Marlon smirks as he already know what you're going to put- meanwhile Wayne burrow his brows in confusion

You don't know what's gotten into you- you just had this boost of confidence rushing over you-

One thing that you haven't told with Eddie, is that you're a dancer, you love dance with so much passion- and this is the moment that you're going to show it to him

Jeff, Gareth and Eric asks Eddie what's going on and he just shrugged with his eyes saying "I don't even know" all of them are confused

but as soon as the song I've Had The Time Of My Life playing

The crowd goes wild and starts to whistle and applauses for you- the crew puts on a spotlight for you and you start to dance

Jeff, Gareth and Eric starting laughing and of course they know it too- this is Eddie's guilty pleasure- he might deny it but he truly loves this song so much

Eddie shoves his hands in embarrassment but there's a fond smile coming out from them

Marlon and Wayne are laughing as well too but they're very impressed at your dancing skills

Eddie watches you twirl around with your hair bouncing up in the air so nicely

He just watches you in awe

You kept your eyes on him as you do your dance moves- he is very amazed on how you move across the floor is like you're with the music- you just go with the flow

He has no idea that you're a dancer and he just smiles widely that you have this wonderful talent- he just loves you even more deeply

Jeff, Gareth, and Eric supporting you fills warmth in your heart

Jeff looks at Eddie completely unfazed and hypnotized by your moves- his eyes are showing with so much love

He calls out to Gareth and Eric mouthing to them "he is so lovestruck"

When the song is on the bridge verse- you're asking for Eddie to take your hand in yours

The crowd calling out for Eddie "Take her hand, Eddie!" and you look behind them as you look at him with a smile on your face

Eddie scratches his head and puts his hands over his hips and his cheeks turned beet red

Jeff, Gareth and Eric goes over to Eddie pushing him to go with you

He looks over at Marlon and Wayne "Go over there, son!"

He chuckles and bites his bottom lip and he looks at you- still raising your hand to him

He doesn't waste time as he removes the guitar sling over his body and gave it to Jeff

He jumped out of the stage

Everyone cheered for the both of you

Eddie walked towards to you and he says "I didn't know that my girl was such a captivated dancer." He says with a smile

"I just wanna surprise you" your eyes flickering with coy

He scoffs "Well- you surprised me- alright-" he smiles

"You wanna do it with me?"

His face drops and swallows "B-but, Amanda, I don't know how to- you cut him off

"Just follow my lead" you say while you caressed his cheek

He smiles and he trust you even when he's scared- he trust you with all his heart

You wind your hands up on Eddie's neck and you put Eddie hands on your waist but he refuses and your heart flutters how much he respects you and you say "It's okay"

As soon as the chorus starts you're both start swaying back and forth and you're impressed how Eddie is such a fast learner

Just like you said- he follows your lead

You start to move around him and you both start circling around with each other

And the epic chorus began- you got startled by Eddie taking your hand and spinning you around as you both start dancing with your feet and hitting every beat

Your eyes widen and you laugh "You're a natural!"

"I've learned from the best" he leans his forehead against yours

Your heart might explode at this very moment

Steve and Robin comes inside at the bar and they both saw you dancing together

"Holy shit"

"Wow"

Eddie takes the lead again by extending his arm on the side- you follow his lead and you spin and he brings you down and him leaning down at you

You gasp and your saw his eyes lights up with so much love and you smile your eyes flashing with tenderness

You both didn't know that everyone in the room are cheering for you- screaming- calling both of your names

All of the sudden it's just you and Eddie

He puts you back up still swaying into the song- he cups your cheeks, your hands on his chest then you hold his arms

His eyes flicker through your lips and back to your eyes

Your heart beats faster and faster and your eyes are swimming in tears but you're smiling at him- Eddie knits his brows "What's the matter?

You laughed "Nothing- I'm crying"

"Why are you crying?"

"I'm crying of happiness" you say as you sniffle

"And so do I-" he says with misty eyes

He leans down and he holds the back of your head and he kisses you passionately and slowly and you're still at shock but you close your eyes and you kissed him back and your hold his neck

The kiss was long until Eddie cuts it off that both of you are running out of breath

With your lips apart and you're breathing heavily and you smile and laugh

"you leave me breathless" he says while shaking his head and smiles

"you also take my breath away" you say as you wipe your tears away

Eddie pulled you into a hug as everyone cheered for you

Wednesday

At lunch time- Jeff and Gareth couldn't stop teasing you and Eddie about what happened last night at the Hideout as they repeat the same thing over and over again with your friends

Not gonna lie, you love to hear it all over again because it's almost like a dream of what just happened- he finally kissed you and your mind replays it till you fell asleep

Eddie couldn't believe as well that he finally did it to you- it is one of his favorite nights ever at The Hideout- the way your body flows through the music and your skin in the spotlight just glimmers perfectly- his heart might come outside because of his friends keep repeating the same story

"After they danced, and it finally happened- they kissed!" Gareth says dramatically

"And the crowd goes wild!" Jeff says as he mimicks the crowd screaming

You and Eddie are both quiet but glancing at each other with a smile

Dustin looks over at you and you smile sheepishly "So- it's true- it finally happened" he says as he raises his eyebrows

"We get it! You guys! Stop!" Mike annoying exclaims and that made you and Eddie laugh

"That's very beautiful" Lucas says as he smile at you and Eddie

"Oh- shoot- I forgot to grab a drink-" you say as you get up quickly from your seat

"Wait- I'll do it-" Eddie says as he holds your hand

"No, it's fine- Eds- I'll be right back" you say as you pat down his hand

Eddie sighs in defeat but smiles at you and nod

As you walk away

"So- it's official?" Dustin asks as he ates his peanut butter & jelly sandwich

"What?" Eddie answers without looking at Dustin- he keeps his eyes on you

"That you're together?" He says as he licks off the jelly from his fingers

Eddie turns around to look at him as he answers hesitantly "I-I don't know yet"

"You- what?" Lucas asks with his brows knitted together

"So, what are you guys then?" Mike says as he crossed his arms together

Eddie's eyes turn uncertainty but a hint of hopeful one as he ducks his head down

"Well- I'll be damned" Gareth as he throws his trash like a basketball ring

"Man, I thought after that- it's over- you got nothing to worry about" Jeff pauses

"you got the girl of your dreams! and Eric was so happy last night seeing you both like that- We never seen you with so much happiness in your eyes." Jeff says as he tries to find his friends eyes to look at him

Eddie can feel what he's doing as he raise his head over to look at him

He sighs "I know that" he starts "I just don't know how to say it to her."

A miracle solution just came right between his hands

A senior highschool girl student giving out flyers to everyone

"A night to remember 1987" he reads it out loud "senior high and junior prom" his eyes widen as he gets up

"Give this flyer as an invitation to the certain person that you want to take with you- Please write your name on the attendance list-"

As soon as the student walks away from them Eddie runs after it "Wait!" he writes his name on the clipboard

Dustin, Mike and Lucas starts grinning

Jeff and Gareth smirks at each other

He grips the paper like it was the important thing in his life "This is it! This is my chance!"

"What chance?" as you appear on Eddie's side

Jeff and Gareth panicked

Dustin swallows

Mike pretends like nothing happened

Lucas starts to whistle

"Uh-" Eddie stammers as he quickly hides the flyer behind his back

You knit your eyebrows at him as you eyeing him up suspiciously

"It's about the new D&D campaign" Dustin says as he breaks the silence

"Oh- yes, yes that one" Eddie points out to Dustin

You purse your lips together and you squint your eyes at Eddie and he smiles at you sheepishly

You look over at all of them and you raise your eyebrows at them

Eddie knows that you don't believe him- he knows that- he can feel it

Dustin nudges Mike's arm "Yes it is true, Amanda"

"It's the chance of destroying Gareth's team!" Lucas winces as he carefully look over at Gareth his eyes are now flaring with anger

Jeff clears his throat

"That's what they're talking about, yeah" Gareth agrees as he glares at Lucas

"Huh" you say as you sat down and place your A&W can on the table "Very well- then"

Eddie sighs of relief and looks over at Dustin mouthing "Thank you"

3 weeks later

Everything is the same but still the feeling is there- sometimes you stayed a wide awake at night thinking about him

You wish you could just remove the gnawing feeling inside your chest- you want to give all to yourself to Eddie but you can't- as the fear takes over with you again

Since you and Eddie are always partners at school projects- you both always left with an A+

Sometimes you both go each other's houses to complete everything

Even at school activities like this- you both are really made for each other

Everywhere you go- there's no disaster or something else that can happen- like everything is possible when you're together

He loves how you decorate your room- there's a lot of band posters everywhere from Queen, Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, and so much more- you even have movie posters as well- you already defeated his room- your room is much more cooler than his

Eddie already met your parents more than once and they loved him very dearly- Eddie is always excited to meet you and your parents again at Friday dinner

Eddie is taken a back for the first time they met him- they don't care if he had this reputation at school- they don't care if he dressed up like this- it's because of him, you're finally happy and that's why they wanted to express their gratitude over him

He doesn't think it was bad- he just doesn't expected that to happen as they treats him very nicely and that made his heart soft

Wayne loved you very much, he is proud of what his nephew has become- he finally catching up with his school work- he is even more active at school- he stops selling drugs and Steve offers him a job at the Family Video and he takes it and he did all of that, it's because of you-

You're his inspiration, his life was no direction until he met you- he finally had the reason to live

You even rewatched Some Kind Of Wonderful with him- since it's his favorite movie you can't just say no to him- you love the way Eddie is so hooked up with the story as if he already saw this film for the millionth time- you admire him while he holds your hand

You're at Eddie's trailer finishing up the class report for tomorrow and you're both presenting it

You excuse yourself going into the bathroom and he nods

Eddie digging out of his pockets and he unfolds the prom invitation

He squeezes his eyes shut as he wishes "Please, let this be it."

as soon as he heard the bathroom door open- he looks over to your notebooks and founds the one that is personal to you and he puts it inside

You sigh "I'm so famished- you want to take a break?" You ask him

"Yeah- sure"

You smile "Okay- it's on me! My treat!"

"Whatever you want, darling" he smiles

You blushed but you duck your head down as you walk towards the phone ordering a pizza

Eddie looks over the notebook of where he puts the prom invitation and he throws his head back on the couch

The weekend began

Your parents let you hang out with Eddie

You're wearing a dark red off shoulder top and black ripped jeans, a touch of makeup just about right and you curl your hair a bit and you wore your Nike's

He kept his usual style but he probably didn't do it on purpose as he also wears a dark red checkered hoodie and black ripped jeans and as always he wore his white Reebok

And you both laugh when you noticed the similarities of your outfits-

The first place that you both visit is a record store and Eddie is right he knows the perfect vinyl record store

The store looks so amazing and spacious there's a lot to choose and to look from until Eddie clears his throat behind you

You turn around and you look down of what he's holding- it looks like a gift

Your forehead scrunches "What's this?"

"Only way to find out" he says and he smirks as he gives it to you

You roll your eyes playfully but you smile at him and you take it

"Did you wrap this?" You say as you admire how beautiful gift is

He nods "Open it" he says as he gestures to the gift

You look up at him and you smile- as you tear off carefully of his hardwork of wrapping it

Your eyes widen it's the Michael Jackson's Bad album

"Oh my god- no" you say as your eyes are now brimming with tears

Eddie chuckles "yes it is! It's his new album"

"I just heard this over the radio and I don't have the enough allowance to buy this" you say as you let your tears fall

"And now you have it in your hands" he says with a smile

"How did you get this? like how you even manage to get this? Did you know how hard it is to get his new album?" You pause as you sniffle

"I literally stayed up all night falling in line in a record store just to grab his Thriller album!" You say as you fanning your tears away

"Hey, I have a lot of experience as you do, I just made it in time, that's all" he shrugs

You pout at him "Why are you doing this? I-I don't deserve this- this is too much!" You exclaimed

Eddie stares at you "You look so cute when you're having a meltdown" as he thinks to himself

You hug the vinyl that he gave to you and you don't know what to do as the mixed emotions washes over you and you hug him instead

And you laugh while you cry over at his chest- he smiles as he hugs you back

"You like it?"

"I don't like it- I love it! you dumbass" as you pulled away from him and you push him playfully

He snorts "Hush now- I don't want to see my girl cry" he grabs his handkerchief as he wipes your tears away and he cups your cheek and he pecks your lips as he kisses it with a loud "MWAH"

You laugh at his action "Now- that's what I wanted to hear more" he says as he caresses his thumb on your face

You hold his hand "Thank you, Eddie" you say

"You're always welcome, sweetheart" he smiles as he throws his arm over your shoulder and squeezes you

You both ate- milkshakes and burger with fries- the lunch was great and so fun- you love spending your time with Eddie like this- it's always been so comforting it gives you the warmth that you needed

As you walk towards to Eddie's van- you overheard a distressed woman asking for help as she claims that a man stole her purse

You saw the man running away holding the purse

Eddie saw you looking over there "Amanda, don't" as if he already knows what you're up to

But before he can stop you- you're already running after the man

"Fuck- Amanda wait!" as he runs after you

"Hey, you! Stop!" You shout at the man and he glares at you like he doesn't care

You got even more furious as he looks back and his eyes widen that you're gaining on him and you jump and pin him down

Eddie stops running as he got shock by your action

"Don't you ever fucking dare to look at me that way- as I swear you won't ever see the light of the day again." You whisper to the man's ear

You say as you grab the woman's purse out of his hands

As you stand back up away from him- he tries to escape but you kicked him in the part where he can't move even if he wanted to-

The whole town is overlapping with conversation and exclaims

You look down "you're so fucking dumb for trying to escape, huh?" You look over the side of the road and thank goodness the Hawkins is just right there at the corner

You grab him by the collar "Well- let's see what you're going to say with Hopper."

The man is now shuddering in fear and Eddie looks over at him and the people who witness it- he smirks how they all reacted

He mouth to them "That's my girl"

You smack his face down on the police desk and that got Hopper startled

His face turns to a puzzled expression as why he couldn't understand why you're here and why you have this man

"A-Amanda?" He looks at you "Eddie?" He says while Eddie waves shyly at him

But before he can ask you- the distressed woman enters the police headquarters

"They saved my belongings- this disgusting man took my purse away from me!" As he hits the man who is now beatened and doesn't try to fight anymore

You smile so innocently like nothing happened

He scoffs "Amanda, why'd you do that- you could get yourself killed!"

"Nah- it was nothing- I just wanna help that's all"

"Thank you, my dear, that was a very brave thing you did!" The distressed woman holds your hand and you smile at her

"Hey, chief" one of the police called out to Hopper

"Yeah?"

"Isn't that the guy that we're looking for the whole time- the one who steals a lot?"

"What?!" He takes the man by the collar and he saw his face and he stumbled and looks over at you "Yes, you're right- he is"

The man tries to escape but Eddie blocks his way from the entrance

The man looks up at Eddie as he says "Get out of my way, Munson"

Eddie's face turns to a confusion as he doesn't know who is this person but he knows his name as he continues to talk "You're just going to end up just like your unfortunate father"

Eddie finally recognizes him- he is one of his dad's colleagues who is always been so jealous of his father but a tragic strike happened over at his dad business

Eddie's dad may not the best father but he tries to be- he tries of what he can give to his one and only son and his mother does the same

His parents never showed any affection to him but he can always hear his parents argue every night when he was a kid until he met his Uncle Wayne who gives him the bestest care ever than his own parents

Eddie never showed any pain, grudge and hatred over at his parents- he never give into sadness- he might be sometimes but that's how he really is- he is nice and he doesn't want to confront his parents of why they're getting a divorce

The last thing that he can remember from his parents is that they truly loved him- and Eddie believed that- there's some just things that can't work from the both of them

"Just don't try to escape, dude" Eddie say as he push him away

He laughs "You look even more like your dad, and you act like him" he starts

"Has a heart of gold but life has a different plan" he says

You can see Eddie's hand gripping in pure anger as he about to throw a fist on him

You look over at Hopper as the tension gets more loud

"You're going to sell drugs for the rest of your life!" He says

Eddie punch him so hard that made him fall and almost knocked unconscious

You gasped as you ran over to Eddie to stop him "I'll prove it you- you will see- I will be successful and you're just gonna whine about it." He paused

"My father may not be the best of taking care of me- but he helped a lot of people and even you- he helped you! but what did you do? this is what you repay him back? By ruining his name?" He says as he holding back the tears but his eyes are nothing but fire coming out of them

The town knows what happened to Eddie's father- he became a drug dealer just to help out his family- the bankruptcy from his business before destroyed him and no matter what he tries- no one accepts him for a job- he is now at jail as he got caught 2 years ago

His mother however has a new family but she is willing to help whatever Eddie needs

"Okay, enough- settle down" Hopper walks over the police desk

It's been a 1 hour in a half that you're both sitting there in the police headquarters

Eddie is now calm but he plays with his rings- you take his hand and you rest your head against his shoulder

"I'm sorry, Eddie"

"For what?"

"For dragging you into this"

He huffed "it's the best weekend ever if you ask me"

You laugh but you hold his face to make him look at you "are you sure, you're alright?"

He holds your hand and caresses it with his thumb "Yes, I am- Amanda" he pauses

"You didn't spoil the fun and you make it even more exciting though with all of that action!" He says as he tries to copy your moves earlier

You laugh at the way he cutely scrunches up his face in serious mode

"Alright, kids- you're good to go" Hopper says while he puts his hands over his hips

"Just call me, if something's goes wrong okay? I just don't want you kids get harm."

"Okay, we know that, Jim" you say to him as you both get up

"I just wanna say sorry for my behavior-" Eddie apologizes but Hopper stops him

"It's all good- Eddie- if I were you I would do the same thing." He says as he pats his shoulder

You and Eddie smile at him

"Alright- take care and drive safely, okay?" He points to Eddie

"Sure, will- chief!" Eddie says as he headed out to the exit and you follow him

"and Amanda?"

You stop and turn around "Yes?"

"Thank you" Hopper smiles

"You're welcome, see you again soon" as you walk away from the police headquarters

It's 2pm and you don't wanna go home yet- Eddie saw your face and he chuckles "Don't wanna go home- huh?"

as if he can read your mind "Yeah" you pout at him

"How about we walk around the mall? You want that?" He says

"Yeah- sure!"

As soon as he gets up from the driver's seat and you stare at him with a smile on your face

"What's gotten into you so smiley today as if nothing ever happened earlier" he snorts

"Nothing, I just love the way you did back there" you say

He turns on the engine "What did I do? other than punching the douchebag?" He raises his eyebrows at you

You chortled "What I mean is that I love the way you don't let others define you."

His eyes flicker with so much love and appreciation as he grabs your arm and the back of your head

As he slams his lips on yours and he kisses you aggressively but lovingly- he loves caught to you off guard and you gasp and you kiss him and he pulled back as he deepens the kiss and you moan as he tilts his head at a different direction and he smiles at the kiss

6 months

It's been 6 months you're with Eddie and his friends

It's all going so good and you loved every minute, every second, every hour- you're spending with him and his friends

Until all of the sudden you became cold and distant towards him

He doesn't understand it- you haven't talked to him for 2 weeks

2 weeks

It feels like forever to him, he doesn't know what he has done, he doesn't even know if he did something wrong to make you upset

But he knows and he is sure of himself that he didn't do anything bad to you- but if he does he swore to himself that he will do anything to make it up to you

But the problem is he really didn't do anything wrong- it was you- it was you who's having a hard time thinking about your own feelings and you're still struggling to decide if you're ready for this

You keep avoiding him until it comes to the point where you changed your class schedule so you won't see him

You don't even eat with them anymore and his friends saddens as they see Eddie looking at you longing for you- he wants to ask you about it why the sudden change?

You're still beautiful as ever even you don't dress like the way you do before- you always wear hoodies and sweatpants at school now but he misses your smile that could light up his day all the time when he sees it

He doesn't pick you up anymore from your house or take you home from school as your parents always say that you're coming at school early than your usual time with Eddie before

He frowns as why everything goes so wrong and his life almost crushed apart

But he doesn't give up on you and on himself he still at his goal- is to graduate with you

You decided to talk it over with Nancy- so you went into the Wheeler's house

Nancy is the only one girl that you befriended with- she treats you like her own sister

Nancy opens their front door and she burrows her brows in confusion

"Amanda? What are you doing in here?"

"Can we talk please?" You say and you smile shyly

Nancy saw your eyes with a hint of sadness "Sure- come in" and she flashes you with a smile

"What's the problem?" she says as she gives you a glass of water

You take a sip and she sats down on the couch beside you "How do you know if you're sure of it?"

"sure of what?"

"the one you love" you trail off

"Oh- it's about Eddie" she smiles sadly

You chuckled "yeah" you start "I feel like I'm the worst person ever on the planet right now and I'm hurting him"

"No- you don't" she says she takes your hand "You're just having a hard time catching up with your feelings that's all- he can never hate you."

"Thanks, Nance"

"I'm sure he'll understand why this is happening to you- but as soon as possible you must make it up your mind." She says

You nod "I don't know why after all of what just happened- I still don't know why am I still afraid to love." You say

She scoots over closer to you "You're just gonna have the courage to do it"

"But what if something bad happens?"

"You will never know unless you don't try, right? maybe it will, maybe it will not happen" she pauses

"Eddie will always be there for you no matter what happens from your bad days and good days....he will be there." she says and she smiles

You quickly wipe away the fallen tear from your cheek

Mike goes down the stairs and he saw you in their living room

"Amanda?"

You turn around to look at him "Oh- Hi, Mike" you sniffle

"Is there something wrong?"

"Nothing- it's just-" Nancy cuts you off

"Girl stuff" Nancy says

"Okay, I hope you're doing well." Mike smiles at you

"Thank you, Mike"

Mike watches you closely before he continues to what he was doing- he has never seen like you this, your dark circles under your eyes, you're so pale it almost like you haven't slept properly, he saddens him to see you like this- but he hopes that you and Eddie will get through at the end- he is rooting for you

You left the Wheeler's house- Nancy insists driving you home but you want to walk instead and it's not even that late, it's a bit far from where you from but you don't really mind it at this moment

she smiles at you sadly but there's a hope in her eyes as she hugs you

While walking back home- you saw Steve sitting on the bench outside of your house

"Steve?"

He stands up straight and smiles at you "Hey"

"What are you doing in here?"

"Uh" he searches for the right words as he scrunches his forehead trying not to mess this up

You walk up towards him "What is it, Steve?"

he sighs as he clasped both of his hands "Eddie, asked me to check on you"

You stumbled back and you blink "Oh" you frown at him and look down shamefully

Steve studies your face and he knew exactly why are you like this- you're still afraid

He doesn't want to push you too far but as your childhood bestfriend he wants you to confront you about it and he doesn't like seeing his other friend hurting...

He takes a deep breath- he decides to go straight to the point

"Amanda, I know, you're scared, but you can't do these things to people, you're hurting them, they try to be there for you, love you, and take care for you and you're just gonna disappear and act like nothing happened. As your friend for years I'm so disappointed in you."

You suddenly became nervous around your bestfriend and you can't be angry at Steve because he is right, you shouldn't have done that to Eddie or with anyone else

You can't hold back your tears anymore, you let them fall right in front of Steve

Steve is upset by your actions but you know he can never hate you, you understand the way he acts this way he just wants to help you get out of there and act the fuck up, you still feel grateful that you have a friend like him even though you treat him like shit like you're doing right now- it sinks down real hard on your chest

You chest rise up and down heavily and you ran over the bench and sat down- you still continue to cry

Steve's face drops as if he wasn't mad at you earlier and he lets out an exasperated sigh

You sniffle "I-I just need time" you croak out still not looking at him- you're ashamed of yourself to look at him

"You know I can't hate you"

"Y-yes I know that, Steve" you say as you wipe your tears

"I helped you with anything I can but it looks like you're not listening to any of my advices! I see no progress in you like everything I just said you don't even apply it to yourself, you gotta help yourself too, Amanda, we're just here to guide you and be there for you... nothing will change unless you do something." His tone is very serious and you can feel the anger and frustration in them

You rise you head up- eyes are still overflowing with tears

"I-I'm sorry, Steve" you say as you ran your hands up down in your thighs

"I saw you both together at The Hideout, I've never seen you like that, you have that look in your eyes whenever you're with Eddie. I'm so happy because my bestfriend finally got what she d-deserves." that one line broke him to unleash his tears that it's heating up behind his eyes

He covers his face with his hands as he started sobbing hard- Steve only shows his vulnerability when he's with you... He is comfortable with everything when he's with you- it's because even you're a bad friend sometimes you don't invalidate his feelings

He hiccuped and your eyes widen as you rushed hugging him on the spot

He hugs you so tight and he rubs your back

You both cry into each other's arms

"Look, all I wanted for you is to be happy, this is your moment, take it, you gotta forget the past, leave that behind you, take that weight off your shoulders, I-I don't want anyone else to be with you, I want Eddie for you." He sniffles as his eyes still blurry from the tears

You pulled back "You want Eddie for me?"

"Yes, he told me everything, he loved you since first day you came to school, Amanda he loved you ever since, you can't find love like that, you're going to blame yourself if you didn't do something" he says as he wipes your tears using his thumbs

You shake your head "I don't think I deserve him."

"Stop, that, you deserve him- this is destiny- the one you've been looking and wanting for all of your life is right in front of you"

You tears fall once again and he does as well and you nod at his words "I'm so sorry, Steve for everything, Nancy told me about you and her before, fuck- I didn't realized that I'm such a bad friend- I'm so ignorant and didn't care about what you're doing and I didn't think of it, if only I had the chance to turn back the time I would do so much better than before- meanwhile- you're here with me again doing the exact same bullshit I did with you before- I-I apologize for everything that I done." You breathing so fast and tears kept falling right before your eyes

He hushes you and pulled back you into a hug and you hold him so tightly

"I know, Amanda, I know," he says and he rubs his hand on your head and he smiles looking down at you and kisses the top of your head

"I love you so much, Steve- you're so good to me." You say as you hiccuped on his chest

"I love you too, Amanda, I believe you can get through with this, you got a good heart, you're so strong and brave, you don't even realize it." He says and he pulled back to look at you and both smile at each other

[depressedbagpipe]

heyo! i hope you won’t mind me pasting this into other writer’s asks, and here’s why i’m doing it: i’ve had a lot on my plate recently, which makes it hard for me to have time to talk about the fics i read with their respective authors, and that is why i wanted to send all of you this ask.

this is me thanking you for all the time and effort you put into the stories you share here. i’ll usually save them up for when i’m done with the tasks for the day so i can relax and enjoy them properly. these fics are probably the best part of my day, and they will never fail to make it brighter and better. i’ve told some of you how much of a picky reader i am (although i am working on it), and your works have just about everything i’ve always enjoyed. the plot, the writing style (which is something i love paying attention to and see how much it differs from person to person), the roller coaster of feelings i go through while reading... the list could go on forever. i just hope you know how much i appreciate you guys, not just as writers, but as people as well. each one of you deserves the world of nice things, because this planet is a better place with you in it.

aside from being thankful for all of you, i also hope you guys are taking care of yourselves, or i’ll have to personally threaten you to do it.

lastly, please don’t ever forget that you are important, talented and that i’m reallt thankful for having you around.

with love,

lyra

lyra, you truly are the sweetest ♥️

i know i say this all the time but it truly means a lot that you took the time to write (copy-pasted or not) this message. it’s people like you who make writing easier, knowing that there’s someone on the other side willing to read whatever we authors have to say. the fact that you, as a picky reader, picked me (and us), out of every writer on this site, is mind-blowing. it’s easy to write rather anonymously here and even i sometimes forget that there’s actual people reading, much less interacting and taking time off their day to write some feedback and thanking us for our work. never in a million years would i have thought that some day i was gonna get this beautiful message and tear up every time i read it. so thank you, for reading, for commenting, for appreciating, and for everything 🫶🏻

i sincerely hope life works out for you too, because you also deserve the world of nice things.

much love

♥️

[sirensplayhouse]

I need to vent somewhere I’m hoping you don’t mind. But my mum omg is the most over dramatic person. She I don’t think has ever said any nice anything about me. She guilt trip literally everyone and over exaggerates literally everything about what is happening. I have affirming that this is not real it is just an illusion and that I’m living my ideal peaceful dream life. Ughhh this has happen all time. I feel like a shit person when I say things like this but it’s been bothering me since like forever but like I said it is illusion and that I’m living my peace ideal dream life. Thank you for listening. Btw love your blog :))

hey love <3,

it’s not problem I’ll be here if you ever need to vent some more 🫶🏾but you don’t deserve dealing with someone who is like that and I apologize that you’ve been going through that, if you need anything my asks/pms are always open 💗 and instead of telling yourself that it’s not real and that it’s an illusion how about you tell yourself that it’s completely malleable/changeable, because saying it’s not real and is an illusion is implying that the 3d isn’t real when it is in fact real and sometimes when people convince themselves that it isn’t real they bottle up their emotions and never let them out. moral of all of this😭because I am not the best at explaining things is, the 3d is real and the emotions you’re currently experiencing are real as well and there’s no shame in allowing yourself to feel those emotions , just don’t stay in that state

[t-nd-rfoot]

heyo! i hope you won’t mind me pasting this into other writer’s asks, and here’s why i’m doing it: i’ve had a lot on my plate recently, which makes it hard for me to have time to talk about the fics i read with their respective authors, and that is why i wanted to send all of you this ask.

this is me thanking you for all the time and effort you put into the stories you share here. i’ll usually save them up for when i’m done with the tasks for the day so i can relax and enjoy them properly. these fics are probably the best part of my day, and they will never fail to make it brighter and better. i’ve told some of you how much of a picky reader i am (although i am working on it), and your works have just about everything i’ve always enjoyed. the plot, the writing style (which is something i love paying attention to and see how much it differs from person to person), the roller coaster of feelings i go through while reading... the list could go on forever. i just hope you know how much i appreciate you guys, not just as writers, but as people as well. each one of you deserves the world of nice things, because this planet is a better place with you in it.

aside from being thankful for all of you, i also hope you guys are taking care of yourselves, or i’ll have to personally threaten you to do it.

lastly, please don’t ever forget that you are important, talented and that i’m reallt thankful for having you around.

with love,

lyra

DID I MENTION I LOVE YOU!!!!!

Thank you so much for this, my love 🥹 After the number of anon hate discussions I’ve seen, it’s messages like these that remind me of what a fandom is meant to be—supportive, open, and most importantly, kind.

And after reading this, I also want to share my appreciation for all the creators I’ve ever encountered on this site! You guys are the backbones of fandoms and your efforts are definitely seen and appreciated by many 🫶

[moonchildsthoughts]

Girl, you speak my mind 😄😇 Ohh Lord, i LOVE his outfits so much!! The colors and ties and them shoes and boots?? Yesssss 🫠

Okay, put your drink aside, or you're about to spill it when you continue reading 😄 the sign said: let me sit on your angel face 😂🤣🤣 he completely lost it and couldn't stop laughing. Whenever I think about it, I can't help but crack up. It was so funny!

I first heard of him because of my dad. He saw him on TV and told me about it. "There's that guy. He's doing music in that old classy 50/60's style. I think you'll like it." And what can I say?? My dad was right. And ever since, I can't stop listening to his music and obsess over it all. I'm sure my dad is tired of it already, lol. 😄 but he said he likes his voice, too. And he's sure he'll come far. And from what I see and hear, I wish Stephen gets the recognition he deserves because he's such a sweetheart and so down to earth. I love him so damn much, oh lord 😭🥰🥰

Listen. Whenever I think my fangirl days are over and there won't be anything else I could ever obsess over, the universe proves me wrong, haha. I'll forever be a passionate lover of the things I love. No matter if that's music, movies, art, or writing, It's part of me, and that's cool 😁😇💕

Anyway, I'm glad you're here. It's nice talking to you ☺️🫂✨️🫶🏼

Oh my God, you like Stephen Sanchez, too??? You're an angel!! 🙌🏼😁💖

Yessss, he is lovely. I listened to Angel Face so much last winter that I got a little sick of it, lol. Jealous of anyone who gets to see him live, those concerts look like so much fun. 😍