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babaleshy · 3 years

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I'm Autistic

Because this will likely be a lengthy, wordy post about my self-diagnosis as Autistic as well as all of my experiences regarding Autistic traits, I'm going to leave a "read more" link so that you're not scrolling for ages just to catch up on your feed.

Ah, I see you've clicked "keep reading" or "read more" or whatever this site has it labeled as, now. You don't get to be mad at how long this is or how much of a waste of time reading this may be to you because you consciously clicked on the link. Therefore, I am exempt from taking responsibilities of eating up any bit of your time, including the time you've wasted reading this disclaimer.

So... Yes. I am. And it's a self-diagnosis right now.

You're probably thinking that I saw a Tik Tok clip, checked out a page on WebMD, and decided that I'm Autistic (this is in reference to a Tik Tok I saw last night that nearly made me spit out my drink because of how painfully accurate the "what people think self-diagnosis is vs reality" clip was). That is, of course, not the case.

A few years ago (likely 2018), I don't recall what it was I read online, but it made me go, "Oh wow, that makes so much sense to me," in regards to a neurodivergent trait. However, this was then I thought I had ADHD. My husband has ADHD, was diagnosed with it as a child, and because his dad forced the doctor (this was like, in the late 90s, early 2000s I think) to put him on Adderall and Ritalin, my husband does not remember 3 years of his life because he was a drooling, zombified mess. Why did his dad do this? Because his grades were bad. Did this help with his grades? No. Did his dad take him off the meds because he didn't get the desired result? Also no. My husband wasn't even informed on what ADHD was. He was simply told he had it and to take these pills. It wasn't until he (my husband) read the label saying that it could increase the risk of heart issues that he cussed his dad out and flushed all the pills down the toilet. Up until very recently, he wasn't sure if he actually had ADHD until he saw a YouTuber who was actually diagnosed with it display the exact traits he had.

But he didn't see this YouTuber when I thought I had ADHD, so my husband couldn't exactly relate, plus I didn't want to trigger anything with him on the subject.

But the more I researched, the more I realized I could be on the spectrum. It wasn't until 2019 that I was printing out articles, trait lists, etc. to highlight and put into a folder (which is thick and nearly bursting with what I've printed out to have a hardcopy of records highlighting the traits that I have, including traits my husband and my mom see in me) that I realized "I could have Asperger's."

Of course, I no longer use that term after finding out it was named after a n*zi, and I began to embrace the term "Autistic" instead.

But the thing that triggered me into going, "Wait, so it's not ADHD that I think I have, it's Asperger's?" was, like my husband, seeing a YouTuber talk about their traits and experiences. I had identical struggles, myself. (Through this same YouTuber, I also found out I'm greysexual, too! There's a name to describe my experience with sexual attraction! Yay!)

There are a lot of VERY SPECIFIC TRAITS Autistic people experience that aren't mentioned by the YouTuber or in anything that I've printed out and highlighted that I have found through various Tik Toks that I have personally experienced that simply further solidifies the fact that I'm definitely on the spectrum. When I showed the Tik Tok I mentioned earlier (I don't remember their name) to my husband last night, he was wide-eyed because the description of how that individual self-diagnosed themselves WAS EXACTLY WHAT I DID WORD FOR WORD HOLY SHIT.

I was already convinced I am Autistic, but each time I read Twitter threads of people's experiences with their Autistic traits, each time I watch Tik Toks or certain YouTubers share their experiences, it further solidifies that yep, I'm Autistic.

What's amazing is that my husband is very supportive. I'm extremely lucky to have married him. I've been a terrible masker but he loves me anyways. He never gave me shit for my meltdowns and tried to help me out, thinking I was just horribly overly stressed. Now that he knows why I've had the few outwardly noticeable meltdowns that I've had throughout our years together, he knows how to help me more, now. And while he's figured out my traits and what issues I have, knowing that I'm on the spectrum helps him make sense of why I'm like this, and he can help me accordingly whether it's to prepare for something in advance, help me calm down, etc.

(I should also add here real quick that there's a high chance I have OCD as well, but less of the compulsive actions and more of the obsessive thoughts, but I'm not entirely sure just yet if this is the case. I'm actually hoping to see someone about this but with the pandemic, I don't know when that will be.)

Now... onto the traits and experiences.

My Traits (that stand out with neon lights)(Will copy word-for-word a trait my mom or husband see in me and it will be typed in a different color.)

Having a folder that has all of my research I've obsessively looked up, printed out, highlighted what I saw in myself with one color (yellow) while highlighting what my mom and my husband see with another color (pink). I'm also using this folder to make this list as a reference because I sometimes forget certain traits I do have are because I'm Autistic. (I'm 32 as I write this, so when so much of what you think, do, and experience that you see is normal for you turns out to be an Autistic trait, it takes a while to get used to it and thus remember that because you haven't had a label for it your whole life.)

Despite being goth/punk, I dress as comfortably as I can. Textures aren't a very big issue for me, but what feels like strangulation of my body tends to be a problem. I cannot handle having the cross seams of pants feeling like I have a chopstick slowly impaling my vulva, or I can't stand how tight some shorts are that they pinch my hip joints.

I've NEVER spent much time grooming my own hair. It's either tiring, I"m impatient and want it done NOW, or both. This is why I have a Tank Girl haircut (all buzzed except for bangs), where I can basically "wash and go." (Husband does my haircuts and dyes and he's kickass at it.)

Eccentric personality; may be reflected in appearance.

Is youthful for age, in looks, dress, behavior, and tastes.

Usually a little more expressive in the face and gesture than male counterparts.

"May not have strong sense of identity and can be very chameleon like before diagnosis." (This resonates with me in the form that I never saw myself in ANY fictional character other than Tank Girl. My husband agrees with this opinion, but he also says he also sees a lot of me in Caulifla from Dragonball Super.)

I enjoy reading and films as a retreat, often sci-fi, fantasy, children's (sometimes), can have favorites which are a refuge.

Uses control as a stress management (like routines, rules, rigid certain habits, etc.)

Usually happiest at home or in other controlled environment.

I've been seen as "sensitive" by some, and mocked for crying a lot by others.

I struggled with social aspects of college and have 2 partial degrees.

Often have trouble holding a job and finds employment very daunting.

Slow at comprehending at times due to sensory and cognitive processing issues.

DOES NOT DO WELL WITH VERBAL INSTRUCTIONS; MUST BE WRITTEN DOWN

Special interests (I'll get into these later).

Emotionally immature and emotionally sensitive.

Anxiety and fear are predominant emotions (some of which might be due to possible OCD).

I do have some sensory issues such as visual processing issues at times, certain sounds, certain smells, food I think, and issues with sunlight and my goddamn retinas.

Moody and prone to bouts of depression. Both of my parents as well as my husband have described my personality as reminding them of a cat.

Mild to severe gastro-intestinal difficulties (some of which could be due to endometriosis, btw).

I stim a little such as leg-bouncing, foot-waggling, some hand-flapping, some bouncing, the "spine-shimmy," joint-cracking, or playing with my ears.

Prone to temper or crying meltdowns, sometimes over seemingly small things due to sensory or emotional overload.

Hates injustice and hates being misunderstood, which incites anger and rage.

Prone to mutism when stressed or upset, especially after a meltdown, likely to stutter and may have a raspy voice.

Words and actions often misunderstood by others.

Perceived to be cold-natured and self-centered; unfriendly.

Very outspoken at times, may get very fired up when talking about passionate/obsessive interests.

Will shutdown in social situations once overloaded but generally better at socializing in small doses. May even give the appearance of skilled, but it is a "performance."

Doesn't go out much; will prefer to go out with partner only (aka my husband).

Will not do "girly" things like shopping.

Takes relationships seriously.

There's a bit on this chart (some of you probably already know by know what chart I'm using here) that says due to sensory issues, one would either really enjoy sex or strongly dislike it. I'm in the former camp complete with a pretty high libido.

Often prefers the company of animals.

So there are the traits that REALLY stick out like a sore thumb. These come from a site regarding female Asperger traits or however it's labeled as. I have plenty more from two other articles I printed out with lots of highlighting, but the chart actually sums a lot of the definitive shit quite nicely. At some point in this list, I could tell I went "fuck it" and copied many things word for word anyways since I'll be talking about experiences later in this post.

But it was this chart that I'd discovered that I started to realize that I really am on the spectrum, and to triple check, I asked my mom and my husband if they saw any of this in me. The traits typed in green are ones I wasn't sure of and had to ask them if they saw it. I'm not always aware of how I am, who I am at times, etc. I also didn't want to lie about it, so I had to get second and third opinions.

Despite all of this, only very few people that know me IRL know about me being Autistic. This is because I was heavily bullied growing up and since I haven't exactly left my hometown, I really don't want whoever stayed in the area as well to either have more fuel and re-enter my life that way, or try really hard to relieve their guilty conscience and demand that I forgive them or some shit. I also don't want "Autism Mommies" to come at my ass either asking that I help their kid (I'm not fond of children so that's not happening, plus ableism is what fucks a lot of Autistic people over regarding of age but they won't take that for an answer) or that because they---a neurotypical person---have a child who's Autistic, then that means they know all about it and because I'm not exactly like their child then I can't possibly be Autistic. It's just a whole mountain of shit I don't wanna get into.

This next bit will be split into 2 parts. One will be my special interests, and the other will be my experiences from my past that are prime examples of being Autistic long before anyone in the common public knew what Autism actually was.

My Special Interests (Both Forever & Temporary)

The following list will have my special interests but with indicators in parentheses as to whether they are forever-interests (as in, I never lost interest in the thing) or temporary (meaning, it was short-lived be it by weeks, months, or a few years). This will be in chronological order, meaning: the order of which these have appeared throughout my life.

Barney (temporary; helped me skip preschool and become honor roll student in kindergarten though)

Halloween (forever)

the color orange (forever)

dinosaurs (forever)

Donkey Kong Country esp. for SNES (forever)

animals (forever)

Godzilla movies (forever)

monster movies (forever)

Pokemon (temporary; I still like Pokemon, but it's not as hyperfocused as it used to be)

Digimon (temporary; same situation as with Pokemon)

Dragonball Z (forever)

Sailor Moon (on-and-off)

Ultimate Muscle (Kinnikuman Nisei) (forever)

Freddy vs Jason movie (still like, but the hyperfocus was temporary)

horror movies (forever)

Transformers (temporary)

Dark Knight movie (temporary)

Harley Quinn (temporary)

Lobo (temporary)

X-Men (forever, but only certain universes, mainly the 90s cartoon, and the character is always Hank McCoy)

neon-colored stuff (temporary; kind of some sort of semi-rave/techno phase)

books (forever; this was when I discovered it's "legal" to enjoy books if you "aren't smart"; I may explain this logic I had later in the post)

sex/sexuality/sexology (forever on the first two, temporary on the last one)

BDSM (on-and-off)

feminism (temporary in regards to doing research and educating myself; I still hold the views I've developed as a result, just not obsessively researching this topic anymore)

anarchism (forever)

ecology (forever)

Pleistocene epoch (forever)

goth and punk stuff (forever after discovering what these things are all about for real compared to when I was in high school and had no idea how to ask, who to ask, or where to look this stuff up at in rural Ohio)

Hellblazer (temporary)

Serbian heritage (on-and-off)

bats (temporary)

arachnids (forever)

teratophilia (forever; finally have a word to describe this damn kink)

gardening (current; unsure)

Russian language (current; unsure)

DIY things (forever)

Towards the end, it may not be in the proper order thanks to slowly losing my damn mind being cooped up mostly in my room on this farm since moving back here in 2014. The two that are "current;unsure" are ones I have a hyperfocus in right now, but I don't know if this will be temporary or not. I certainly hope not, especially considering how useful these things will be. And while I have gardening as one of them, I haven't properly begun yet because I get empty promises from my parents where they claim they'd help me, not to worry about it, then get irritated when I ask where the help is and they suddenly can't give me the help when I told them I needed it.

I should also note that I don't exactly have an encyclopedic knowledge in a whole lot of these interests that are forever-interests because I'm normally exhausted just trying to exist with minimal trouble from people. I'm hoping this will change. The things I know I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge in would be Dragonball Z, animals/ecology, and... a-and that's it. That's really it. That's all I've got because Dragonball Z was so profoundly different compared to other cartoons I've watched in the 90s that it was a wonderful escape, and I grew up around animals, taking care of animals, and watching nature documentaries. The stress I went through growing up has caused my memory of some of that wonderful animal knowledge to be lost and what could be re-gained may be easily forgotten again, hence why I need to narrow my focus for what I'd like to be an ecologist for. While I love paleontology, I want to help the living world's ecosystems and environments, too. I'd love to go back to school for this stuff now that I'm more informed of who I am and what I want in life (as opposed to being forced to pick a college major while still in high school while I'm just trying to survive the concept of existence).

In terms of collecting things pertaining to my interests, a common pattern you'll see me have is a very slowly growing Hank McCoy collection. This is largely because there isn't too much stuff made regarding this character. (There also isn't much stuff I can find that involves Piccolo, Cyndaquil, Donkey Kong, giant ground sloths, etc. that isn't already snatched up by other fans.)

Now, I'm going to get into the list of experiences. Some of which will talk about my special interests, but I also really want to talk about my struggles, too.

Experiences That Screamed "I'm Autistic"

In gradeschool, I was friends with someone who probably wasn't actually a friend and her mom made her hang out with me since I didn't really have any friends. She has told me several times that she didn't want to be my friend anymore with some kind of hostile catty smile, but I just.. I wasn't getting it. Because there was a smile. Why say that with a smile? After all we've been through? Then she's back to being my friend the next week. She really wanted to hang out with the popular girls (yes, there were cliques in 90s American gradeschool) and has done countless things to sabotage our friendship such as telling me Barney is a fake, Donkey Kong was a real gorilla who hung himself, etc. And I believed all this shit, too, in an attempt to still be an acceptable friend. She even told me that I couldn't be a witch because I liked toads so much (toads were the only wildlife I excitedly interacted with in my back yard on a regular basis).

I love Halloween for many reasons, but one of them (aside from my favorite color being involved) was the fact that it was acceptable to wear a mask. I love (and still do) the idea of covering my face because I feel less "naked" to the world. So this pandemic had a small plus for me in the form of mask-wearing outside of Halloween has become somewhat more acceptable.

In 5th grade, another classmate who had more obvious Autistic traits and was diagnosed with Asperger's at the time was an asshole to me. They would constantly give me shit and bully me for whatever reason. When I finally took a stand, the teachers on duty at recess called me to the bottom of the hill, forcing me to look at them WITHOUT allowing me to have my hands up to block the sunlight that hurt my eyes, and were able to manipulate me into "admitting picking on so-and-so for no reason" because I chased them around the playground where a group of girls (the same cliquey assholes the former "friend" wanted to mingle with) had to group-carry me away. They're the ones who snitched and they gave me those same hostile smiles. That's when I learned that not all smiles meant good things. I was 10.

I sometimes "lose the ability" to ask for help long before the "help" I ever got in any circumstance was just me being met with frustration by whoever is trying to "help" me or I'm met with "sorry, can't help you there. (The former being with homework or school work, the latter being with going to authorities about bullies.)

Growing up, I was never girly (or girly enough) and I've tried to, but I failed miserably. My special interests would roar through and because it was too odd or different or annoying, it gave other girls fuel for bullying me with.

Regarding the lack of being girly enough, I was at a pool party with the former "friend" mentioned earlier and she started this "game" where she and the other girls would leap into the pool saying, "I love you, Leonardo!" This was in 4th grade and in reference to the Titanic movie, which at that point, I'd never heard of, because I was too pumped for the latest Land Before Time sequel. So when I leapt into the pool, I said, "I love you, Raphael." All the girls were confused, asked who that was. I then asked, "Aren't we playing Ninja Turtles?" Because the only Leonardo I knew of was a fucking Ninja Turtle, goddamnit. Who let you brats watch that shitty romance film anyways? Boring as fuck.

Aside from the occasional weekend visits or sleepovers at the former "friend's" house, I didn't get to socialize much, so I would spend most of my days (especially in the summer) watching what was on TV or watching from our very large VHS collection. During which I would make mental notes on how certain characters acted or what they said and try to remember that to mimic them in a social setting, which would be out of place because I'd be so focused on mainly the dialogue that once it prompts me to say the thing, they don't respond how I expect them to and then I'm at a loss.

I was very ignorant of music and didn't even know the concept of independent or underground bands existed. Plus, rural Ohio is a cultural wasteland. Otherwise, I would've gotten into metal, goth, and punk way earlier in life. So I thought that bands that existed were because television said so.

Speaking of an odd logic... If it was taboo or bad to talk about, I thought it was illegal. Thus, I thought any knowledge about sex was illegal and that it was supposed to happen "naturally."

I also thought that, because I wasn't considered as smart by my peers, some teachers, and even as such in the form of an insult from my parents from time to time (despite what they claim NOW), that also meant I wasn't allowed to enjoy books, because only smart people are allowed to enjoy reading. So therefore, it would be illegal for me, a not-smart person, to enjoy reading a book. So I had to focus on the pictures because if I enjoyed reading, somehow everyone would know and then I'd get into trouble.

I also thought it was illegal to talk about periods.

I socially struggled BADLY when I got to middle school because my brain was like... 4 years behind? How the fuck do people know all these bigger words? Or complex issues? This was also when I had to start suppressing ALL urges to cry because at that age, I'm not "supposed" to cry over everything. So I still, to this day, suppress it to the point of guaranteeing inducing a headache. Because I've always caught shit for crying.

Middle school was when I met an oppressive "friend" who was obsessed with me because she had a crush on me and was rather controlling of who I could and couldn't talk to and got pissy if I got close to making a new friend. Because I was desperate for a friend that wasn't like the former "friend," I allowed this abuse into my life.

High school was me just trying to survive. By the time I got home, I was too mentally exhausted to enjoy anything short of watching TV or whatever was rented from Blockbuster.

My brain was still feeling like it was years behind, and I struggled to keep up with whatever was supposed to be something I knew about, including the concept of masturbation.

Like I said earlier, anything sex-related might've been illegal to talk about, and because masturbation was still kinda taboo, I feared I'd get in trouble, but my teenage hormones compelled me to do it a LOT. It consumed my free time almost like an escape, a form of stimming, but I was shameful of it to the point of suicidal thoughts.

The former bullet was due to being raised in a christian household. My parents didn't have such views on sex like this, but I was afraid of being in trouble for asking, took to the internet, and caught some misinfo about how immoral it was. I mourned I'd be going to hell.

Speaking of religion, I thought it was illegal to change your religious beliefs, and there was only Judiasm, Muslim, and Buddhism outside of christianity (I'm Pagan, now).

While I was excited to get away from my parents presumably for good after high school, college was a new form of hell. The sudden, dramatic change in environment and lack of ANY preparation for living like an adult on my own caused me to mentally/socially/emotionally malfunction. I had outbursts I desperately tried to suppress, I felt stupid because everybody sounded smarter than me, I didn't actually want to go to art school but wasn't smart enough for anything else and never really bothered to better my artistic skills and thus felt like I shouldn't be there anyways, I struggled to fit in better, I had no idea how to function that certain habits such as neglect of my own dishes on my desk developed because I LITERALLY COULD NOT SEE MY OWN MESSES DUE TO THE STRESS I WAS EXPERIENCING. This was 3 or 4 long YEARS of this.

Attending art classes mostly run by very demanding (and demeaning) teachers while my art skills weren't up to par added to this stress on top of me not actually wanting to be THERE in the first place, just away from my parents.

I nearly ruined a friendship with a roommate because of my struggles. I'm not even sure if she is aware of my Autism because I'm afraid to approach her about it for some reason.

Plenty of times throughout my life where I'm loud and don't even realize it.

I've info-dumped on my parents, but right now they half or completely ignore me.

I've tried making eye contact, but it's like staring in the sun not in the sense of pain, but in the sense of by natural reaction looking away. When I force myself to make eye contact, I'm spending so much focus and effort into doing that to the point where I am unable to pay attention to what the person is saying. Instead, I stare at the mouth so I make sure I hear correctly the words they're telling me.

Each time someone is mad at me and gives me the silent treatment, and I inquire what I did to piss them off, they get madder because I'm somehow supposed to immediately know when I fucking don't. Then, half the time, they continue not telling me and I have to hear it from someone else. This further confuses me as to why they don't just simply fucking tell me.

I've annoyed people to listening to the same one or few songs over and over again. A lot (currently obsessed with the Sunset Overdrive and Tank Girl movie soundtracks).

I can "smell" the heat outside on a summer day.

I can smell other people's unique scents sometimes (especially when in someone's house; also experienced this in other people's dorms).

I can't remember what grade this was, but in high school, we went to some kind of space camp facility thing, and our class was split into two groups: one group was the group who was on Mars and ready to come home, the other was on Earth and can't wait to go to Mars. I was in the former group. My job in this little fun display interactive room thing was to examine the isotopes and report... uh.. I can't remember.. Report something that was off. Everyone else was dicking around with what they're supposed to do, and I was actually doing my job, and then said something, like I was supposed to, if I found something that was off (I don't remember the specifics). When the scientist who worked at the facility praised me on "saving the crew," I caught this look from the entire class a look I can't quite describe other than they didn't seem to like the fact that I did a good thing and was being praised for it instead of any of them (or they were shocked that a "dumb girl" like me could achieve this and get praise for it, I don't know.. hard to tell). This was a science class field trip, but despite this, I didn't have an interest in space, and still didn't feel I was smart. (Come to think of it, I think this was actually an 8th grade field trip, I can't remember.)

Just discovered this today: I'm actually very easily overwhelmed that could trigger a meltdown when I wake up. I don't know for how long until that point passes, either. But this could also be explained with how I've reacted to certain alarm clocks (the ones with the bells just induce pure rage in me). Either I will be on the verge of a meltdown or I'll have a fucking headache all day. Normally, I just wanna drink my coffee and either read or practice a little on Duolingo.

I don't always have enough room for a lot of info in my head for things that I like, so I have to carefully narrow shit down. Right now, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my urge to get my hands on some monster movies while making sure nothing else I've retained info for wanes. Not sure if this is due to stress or what. But apparently I have designated compartments for certain categories in my brain. If I get into monster movies, continue to work on my knwoledge on ecology and paleontology, and gain more knowledge about arachnids, that shouldn't impede on the "language" category, so whatever I learn in Russian will remain safe.

Interest "Webs."

I have what I'd like to call an "interest web." My special interests in one thing can lead me to having an interest in another. I care about nature, and I also care about paleontology. Paleoecology is something I'd like to dip my toes into. But because this all involves nature, I have an interest in botany (though it's still intimidating so I'm sticking with local native trees) and arachnids (after conquering my fears and learning more about them). So the web stops at arachnids there (no pun intended).

Back to ecology and paleoecology...

I have a major interest in the Pleistocene because it was just before we humans started writing shit down. Hints of that era echoes within our current environment, from the pronghorn being "unnecessarily" fast (due to miracynonyx, the "American cheetah," which is now an extinct cat) to avocados not seeding like they should without human assistance as well as the yucca trees (Joshua trees) going into retreat thanks to the absence of giant ground sloths.

But the planet is warming, and we could use all the help from plants that we get, especially when it comes to making sure that permafrost stays frozen. So there's this "Pleistocene Park" project taking place in Russia, and one day, if I get into the field of paleontology, I may want to chat with those involved in that project, but one can't expect every other country to know English.

There's also FROZEN PLEISTOCENE MEGAFAUNA CARCASSES BEING FOUND IN PERMAFROST, too.

On top of all of this, Russia's northern lands will become habitable for humans if shit hits the fan and the planet's mostly fucked, so it's still nice to know the language.

See how all of these interests intertwine? (It also helps that since I am of Serbian heritage but can't find accessible resources to learn the language and I wanna know a Slavic language that Russian is kind of accessible. It also seems to be the only Slavic language "commonly" found in colleges when it comes to foreign language courses.) This is why I call them "interest webs." Not sure if other Autistic people have them, but it's something that I have.

The second one could simply involve Halloween, punk, goth, monsters, and teratophilia with Halloween being the gateway because my favorite color is orange.

Just thought this would be a fun thing to touch on real quick.

My Sensory Traits

I do experience some sensory traits, but they're not intense like some people would assume (unless I'm simply not noticing how intense they can be).

I can "smell" the summer heat, which was something I thought everybody else experienced but I'm wrong.

My retinas hurt in bright sunlight despite not looking anywhere near the sun, which I also thought everybody else experienced.

Drinks taste different or off in some way if they're not in a particular mug, glass, etc. that the drink is supposed to be in. (I have certain mugs that I enjoy my coffee in, but the other mugs? They taste off. I can't explain why. I have ONLY TWO acceptable little tumbler glasses for orange juice.)

Breakfast food does not taste like breakfast food unless it's on this one specific plate from my childhood.

Dinner can be iffy on certain plates, but the safest go-to is the knock-off blue willow plates.

Lunch is acceptable on anything, but if I'm having simply a sandwich, it must be on a small plate.

I have specific forks I'd prefer to use because of how they feel in my hand, how the food-part feels in my mouth, and how the fork itself tastes.

Gotta have cinnamon in my coffee. I just do. It's not coffee without it.

I cannot fucking handle hair snippets of any size for any reason on my body. This is why there is a rigid procedure to where my husband must buzz my hair over a paper-towel-covered sink (to avoid clogging the drain) while wearing a particular tanktop Harley Quinn night shirt, and then I must shower immediately afterwards. During the haircut, my skin itches like mad like I'm being poked by the hairs directly even in places where hair snippets have never, ever gone.

I'm overly sensitive to the cold to the point of pain, especially in my fingers and toes.

Also cannot brush teeth with cold water because it's so painful (this was LONG before I had dental issues and persists to this day). Even my tongue hurts from it.

I'm picky as fuck with candy. Trick-or-treating was sometimes difficult because all I cared about was either orange-flavored stuff, or chocolate. Only specific chocolates, too (Krackle, Mr. Goodbar, Crunch, Butterfinger, Reese's, that was it.) Skittles were okay, but a lot of the baggies I got had a LOT the red ones and the red ones suck. Can't stand the other candies. (But my tastes have changed since then, and I opt for European chocolate from Aldi's as they are far superior, especially Moser Roth's 70% dark chocolate and Choceur's coffee and cream chocolate.)

Speaking of candy, the Whopper's Robin's Eggs tasted better than regular Whoppers and I will never be able to explain why.

Despite loving orange flavored stuff, I have trust issues when I see an unlabeled orange candy because there's the dangerous chance it could be fucking peach flavored. *gag* (I like real peaches, but the artificial flavored ones suck balls.) Due to my dental situation, I cannot enjoy very much in a way of candy, and the only artificial orange flavoring I CAN enjoy is through Vitamin D gummies... And even then, EVEN THEN I have to worry about the fucking peach flavors if I have to go with a different brand because we can't get our hands on a bottle from Simple Truth.

Artificial cherry flavoring is death.

The ONLY flavored medicine that was acceptable to me was orange (of course) and those dissolving strips that were grape-flavored that they don't fucking make anymore because fuck me that's why. Everything else was peer-pressured to do shots kiddie edition.

The different colored coatings on M&M's taste different from one another and I cannot explain why. It's very subtle, hardly noticeable, BUT I CAN TELL.

Peanutbutter is fucking amazing.

The smell of peanutbutter is fucking not.

There are these frozen meals my husband gets for days he doesn't have energy to cook and one of them (all from the same brand) smells like fucking hell.

My husband's Nissan Cup Noodle ramen overpowers my incense despite what other household members say.

I love incense, especially dragonsblood, "coffee time," pumpkin spice, raven, and rain.

All of the autumn scents or scents associated with autumn are orgasmic to me.

The smell of artificial cherry is death.

I would love to have perfume or body spray of Play-Doh.

I can compare smells of some places to others, such as the library branch I frequent smells like my gradeschool, as do SOME of their books' pages, and when my husband and I walked through this hall-like tunnel-like storefront in downtown Pittsburgh, I said it smelled like my grandma's basement, and he thought the same, so we're in aggreeance that all grandma's basements smell the same. Except for my Baba and Deda's. Their basement smelled like they actually still enjoy life and had their shit together.

Speaking of gradeschool smells, my gradeschool had two directions of classrooms, one led towards the gym, but the hall off to the side was carpeted, had some nice colors, and held 2 kindergarten classes and 2 first grade classes. That section of the building had its distinctive smells. The other direction led to the office, the cafeteria, and the hall with the 2 classes of grades 2 through 5 plus the preschool and the art/music class was. The smell was different in all classes EXCEPT for the music/art class, and I never went to preschool so I wouldn't know what that smells like.

ALL PRINCIPLE OFFICES SMELL THE SAME. HOW.

I could smell when my husband accidentally put in cinnamon when he thought he grabbed paprika in a dish that I liked. He was terrified of telling me. That was a happy accident and it became a permanent ingredient. He was mortified and shocked that I could smell his whoopsie in my dinner he made me.

I can also smell the cinnamon they use in Little Caeser's pizza crust. Yes. They use cinnamon. But I was the only one to notice.

Honey is like peanutbutter: it tastes amazing. But holy shit fuck that smell.

Gas stations smell like death, sadness, and questioning life's choices.

No two people's car interiors smell alike.

I can smell when it will rain soon, especially if it's about to storm.

I'm the one who noticed that hairy white oldfield asters smell like cake batter.

Dominant yellow filling my entire vision can be sometimes painful.

I used to be able to "hear" the color yellow in my head so much I thought yellow actually made a noise. It was a particular shade of yellow, and it made this Playskool toy-like clicking bell ringing noise, but really obnoxiously, almost painfully. I don't know how to describe the shade other than "cloudy pastel lemon?" It looked like the fucking lemon-flavored medicine I had to take as a kid.

My parents tried mixing in this cherry flavored death medicine in with my orange soda thinking I wouldn't know the difference but I did, so I dumped it down the drain and opened a new can because that can of Big K orange was fucking ruined.

Orange is wonderful to my eyes. But it's a hard color for me to find when it comes to getting things in a particular color. My back-up colors are red, green, and purple.

The sunlight hurts my retinas, even when I'm not looking at the sky at all, but the pain intensity increases the further I look up on a sunny summer day. This has been like this since childhood. Prescriptive sunglasses shouldn't be fucking expensive and should be covered by healthcare insurance.

I have to try really FUCKING hard not to stare at someone's muscles in person because ugh... Good thing I rarely see anybody who's well-built. (No really, this isn't even really a sexual thing, I'm so fucking fascinated and once I realize "oh, so that particular muscle looks like that from that angle", I get a glimmer of hope that I MIGHT be able to draw something humanoid since I suck at drawing people.)

Orange trees as so pleasing to the eye, and these are much more socially acceptable to stare at, lest I'm in person and the property owner might think I'm plotting to steal some (luckily I've never been anywhere near a place that grows orange trees).

Neon lights are amazing and I want them to come the fuck back. I swear, stores were so much more enjoyable of an environment when they were common. Such lights improve my mood in a way I cannot describe. I'm no longer in a hurry to get home if I am in the presence of neon lights.

Sunny days during winter are painful because the sunlight reflects off the snow. I'm painfully blinded if I look outside or go anywhere.

I cannot handle the sight of someone having boogers/snot hanging from their nose, not the sight of someone vomiting, nor the sight of an syringe needle piercing flesh.

I cannot handle the sound of alarm clock bells. I have woken up in a rage and been in a bad mood I try so hard to suppress for a good portion of the day. If I hear an alarm clock bell now these days, I wanna take it and chuck it across the room regardless the time of day or if I'm already awake. It's not so bad if I hear it from a video. In person? That's starting a war with me.

Children crying or screaming (especially babies) are almost painful to me and triggers my fight-or-flight response.

The reason why I was the loudest mellophone player in marching band was to drown out hearing the fucking trumpets. And I did; I was louder than the trumpets. (I quit marching band my sophomore year but for different reasons.)

Much of the music from the 80s that gave it that sound that definitely said it's from the 80s is very pleasing to my ears.

I love punk music for its messages, lyrics, and energy, but goth always puts me into a headspace where I feel like I'm at home; I'm at peace and want to cuddle the monster under my bed.

However, some punk songs can hit deep or strong and live rent-free in my head, such as Anti-Flag's "Racist," Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl," and Skarpretter's "Nazi Scum."

One particular artist's voice I cannot get over because his is the first voice of any kind that makes me wanna fan myself is Peter Steele of Type O Negative. My favorite song, however, is "All Hallow's Eve" because his voice, the subject, and the lyrical content.

I'm able to hear something off in the oscillating fan my husband likes to use before he notices it.

I'm the one who can hear coyotes at night (doesn't help my mom wants to blast westerns to drown out the world and I'm back here in my room away from that shit though).

I can hear the branches scraping against the house, gently making creepy noises before I realize what the fuck it is, BUT NOBODY ELSE HEARS IT.

I can recognize the call of a robin because we had so many at the house I grew up in, and nobody else in this family fucking noticed.

I tend to notice the sound of the rain over all the house noise first.

I don't like tight clothing, which is why I prefer bralettes because my tits hurt.

If I could, I'd go without the bra because the band can sometimes suddenly feel tighter than it actually is, but because I have large nipples, I kinda need that bra for a bit of protection.

Shorts can be tight around the crotch, hip joins, and lower belly region, and that's a big no-no for me.

I'd prefer baggy pants, honestly.

Can't have tight footwear. No.

The seam at the top of socks or tights hurt my pinky toes if the whole sock/tights shift that way.

I already covered the hair snippet thing so since this is the sense of touch, another body hair thing is I kinda don't wanna shave my pits anymore because they are extremely itchy when they grow back. HAVE to shave my crotch because if I don't it gets horribly itchy, and my thick, fast-growing hair weaves into underwear, gets caught in pads, etc.

Ah yes. Pads. I hate them, but they're far more acceptable than a tampon or a cup because I have vaginismus.

Certain fabric textures are itchy as hell. There's a black shirt I have whose collar and cuffs are gorgeous but I have to wear something underneath to avoid feeling itchy.

Winter is hell for me here in the midwest, as I am very susceptible to the cold to the point of pain, especially in my fingers and toes. I become very slow, too. I feel like I can't get warm enough most of the time.

Air conditioned places in the summer feel almost similar, so I don't always wear shorts if I'm expected to go into, say, a Walmart with my husband to pick up everything. I'll shiver.

(We're gonna get into TMI territory here.) Can't masturbate by hand unless I've got a nitrile glove on because my brain only focuses on what my fingers are touching more than what my cunt feels.

Can't have any sex with my husband without anything brighter than low-light because things can be visually distracting in the room, or lights can suddenly feel way too bright to me. (Halloween string lights or those LED rope lights with adjustable brightness features and colors are excellent for this situation.)

In Conclusion

This is all that I've figured out so far. None of this hit me at once as a realization when I figured out that I'm Autistic. This took a while to realize it, and the realizations were mostly at random times through examples of other people experiencing it on the internet or through me going, "Huh, is that an Autistic trait?"

There may be even more that I'm currently unaware of or have forgotten to type here.

I apologize for how extremely lengthy this was. This took all day to type because of having to get up and do other things that needed to be done. One of the reasons why I really wanted to type this is because it's much easier to organize this on a computer, and I am absolutely shit at organizing files on my computer.

Unfortunately, while my husband is wonderful in supporting me, my parents aren't exactly all that great at it. Especially my dad, who is either vaguely dismissive or outright "forgets" that I'm Autistic (he honestly just... doesn't care, and tries to make things convenient for him at the expense of others most of the time). My mom... I'm not real sure. There are times where she seems to remember and others where she doesn't. I'm honestly wondering if they don't like knowing that I'm Autistic because that means my brother would have been as his traits were far more obvious than mine.

I hope that whoever is questioning whether or not they're Autistic has found this helpful at least in the sense that it would point you in the right direction on where to go next, but I would highly recommend checking out online Autistic communities, as that's where I've discovered that I'm on the spectrum.

#autism #asperger's #adhd #special interests #sensory traits #autistic traits #sorry for how long this is

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project-ohagi · 4 years

Text

Dabi x Reader

Buy me a coffee!! <3

Greyromantic: Can experience romantic attraction, but weakly or infrequently; feeling alienated from romance; only feeling attraction in specific circumstances.

Asexual: Having little/no sexual attraction or interest in sexual activities.

Questioning: Process of exploration regarding gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity.

----

The phenomenon of love is a complex, chemical concoction that has long been weaved into the fabric of our society. It is presented as a requirement, with those who find the concept either too challenging to thoroughly comprehend, or lacking in appeal, branded as anomalies. In its pursuit of normality, it quickly alienated those whose hearts just couldn't conform. In a different society, one not quite so dominated by this 'normality' of romantic and sexual interests...you might be forgiven for your limited knowledge. But this one...it seems to blanch at the very idea that happiness can be attained in the absence of romantic attraction.

As such, those identifying along the Aromantic or Asexual spectrums are often overlooked - even shunned. But, the greatest truth of it all is a lot simpler than you may expect: an emotion as profound as joy cannot be induced solely by succumbing to carnal desires, or tasting the lips of another. No...it is through self-acceptance, and the acceptance from those for whom your heart beats - parents, siblings, friends...and perhaps in this manner, the meaning is amplified.

But...what happens when you are forced into complacency, into setting aside your own interests, to 'further evolution', or to 'finally be normal'?

You were still trying to figure this out.

Who were you...really? Why couldn't you summon an emotion as free and universal as love?...Romantic love? Why did it seem so incomprehensible, so...intangible? These were the thoughts you battled with, every waking moment. They burrowed deep into your mind, so that you could never pull them out. They were elusive, yet...constant, nagging.

Why am I so different? Everyone else has crushes...even Toga likes that one UA boy! Ah, yeah...she asked me if I have someone I love. I just said "No". Saying: "I don't even know what 'love' is" seems a bit...she'd definitely call me weird. Then the others would probably laugh at me...

You felt...incomplete, like a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces. You felt the isolation, suffocating you. It hadn't been a conscious decision. You didn't awaken one morning and think 'You know what? This whole 'love' thing? It just isn't for me! ' You craved a connection, a bond of some kind - holding hands...a hug at most. Anything more was frightening to imagine. What if someone...pressured you? Or stole a kiss, as an offhanded action? You couldn't bear it...not even the mere thought. It was likely the main contributor to your chronic anxiety and paranoia. Your treatment at the hands of society, the ridicule and the fear of phrases such as "It's just a phase!" or, "You need to find the right person!"...they fuelled the flickering spark of villainy in your eyes.

After all, outcasts and monsters are interchangeable to most common folk.

But you didn't want those labels. You were a lost lamb, wandering aimlessly - what you really needed was guidance...someone who would listen and advise, someone who would accept you and every burden you carried, without question or quandary. But you said nothing...so you got nothing in return. Dabi was the closest to a...a source of strength? Motivation?...Potential love interest? But...how would you ever truly know? How could you discern the romantic from the platonic? It seemed impossible - simply a waste of time. Still, you never fully resigned to this fate of...loneliness.

You wanted to cherish, and to be cherished.

You wanted to love, and to be loved.

Perhaps it was the unyielding voice of fear, of desperation and pain, but...you just didn't know! You didn't know...and, it was difficult. You studied Dabi's face, and while nothing immediately heated your cheeks, he wasn't...unattractive. Aha! Maybe that was love? Alas, you discovered it to be more aesthetic attraction. It was a little disappointing, but perseverance should've been the key, right...?

Why? Why do I feel so little? Dabi is there for me, right? So surely if anyone, I should love him!...Do I love him? How can I tell? Is there some sort of test? How would a test even be administered? What kind of questions would I have to answer? I don't think I could answer them, even with study. If I'm struggling so much now...

And anyway...Dabi was a dominant male, whose sexuality was unclear. Even if you managed to settle on a definition of 'love', and figure out what role it played in your life...there was no guarantee that Dabi would want you. The jury was still out, on your gender - 'questioning' was your placeholder for the moment. But, you usually dressed masculine...would he be okay with someone so indecisive? Someone who might be neither male nor female? And, what if...what if he wasn't the one?

Say I can find love, and I start to understand it...who's to say that the person I love will be Dabi? It could be anyone! Maybe they were right, and I just haven't met the right person...but, I kind of want it to be Dabi? Is that...bad? Oh god, it sounds so selfish! He'll just be tied down, and if we find out that I don't actually love him...what would he do? At the very least, he'd be angry...

Dabi...the more you recalled his honey-laced voice, all the flirting you failed to notice until it was pointed out (clearly, he was doing that in jest), and those blue eyes (steely from years on the run, that probably depleted the pools of guilt and regret often accompanying mass killings, thievery and other criminal acts), the more confusion festered. You just didn't understand! Was it love? Or was it conversion? Were you trying to become 'normal'? Well, as normal as a villain could be...? Or did Dabi really mean something...something greater than you believed? Something...beyond what you currently knew?

This journey of self-discovery had approached a torturous junction.

Why were relationships so sought after, so expected? Even you desired one. How else could you ever hope to form a deep bond, or receive that fabled 'feeling of ecstasy' from holding hands or hugging? If there was no romance, mainstream media would lead you to the conclusion that there isn't a 'proper' or 'deep enough' connection - there can't be. You wanted to experience these things with Dabi. No-one else. You couldn't explain why. He was...an unusual character, mysterious and with perhaps a similar level of complexity as the daunting questions you were asking yourself. But mentioning your plight to him simply wasn't an option. Villains were responsible for themselves; the League was nothing more than a safety net.

Besides, Dabi was heartless.

...Or so he liked to be portrayed.

Urghhh...why is this so complicated? How am I supposed to know if I love him? The signs are...increased heart rate and blood to the face, right...? That seems unhealthy...is that actually supposed to be a good thing??

"Hey, you stopped spacing out yet, (V/n)?"

Shit! No, no, no! I haven't finished spacing out!

Sheepishly, you turned in the direction of the voice. Why did Dabi always seem to materialise out of thin air, whenever you thought about him? Did you magic him here, by accident? Subconsciously? However you managed that...you hated it. Your existential crisis really didn't need a spectator. Break out the popcorn, why don't you?

Can't I have a break down in peace? Wait...am I even in my room?...Did I seriously question my entire existence right here in the bar? It's a good thing there's no-one else here...I don't need more people telling me that I'm crazy...

You sighed. "...Yeah."

His brows furrowed - this was unfamiliar territory. Helping people had never been his speciality, especially given his own trauma . But for you...it was certainly worth a shot. "What's up? You on your man-period or something?"

Off to a spectacularly dreadful start. "I - I don't know if I'm a man, though...how could I-"

"Relax, it was a joke. Your pronouns are they/them, right? I'm not gonna call you a man just for the sake of argument. Nah...Hey, scoot over." A for effort.

"You could sit literally anywhere else."

He smirked. "You gonna stop me, sweet-cheeks?"

Sweet...?

"Thought not. Anyway, what's going on? You've been all doom-and-gloom for the past...two hours." He motioned over to the clock.

Had you honestly spent so long in contemplation? Gods, you could've unlocked the secrets of the universe, but no. "I've...kinda been asking myself that."

"Oh?" It was obviously a prompt, but talk of your romantic inclination (or lack thereof) would likely be regarded in the realm of 'stupid' and 'childish', so...could really you trust him?

I've always been too nervous to take risks...Guess now's as good a time as any to change that.

You swallowed down the uncertainties, the anxiety and everything in-between. They didn't help - they only hindered. And...you did need to release this burden, that weighed you down so heavily.

"Um...it's - it's...confusing. Really...confusing. I guess, I simple terms: I don't know what 'love' is. I know it probably sounds really dumb to you, and I feel stupid for even saying it, but...I've never...never had a crush, never been in love. I don't...I don't feel anything romantic towards, well...anyone!"

"Not even a bit?" He asked, blank-faced.

"I - I don't know. I really want to, though. I'm just...I'm scared. There's always this underlying fear of...what if - what if someone forces me? Y'know? What if...I date someone, and they can't accept that I'm different...that I might never feel anything for them? I don't want to be lonely forever, Dabi! I want someone, I really do! I say I've never been in love, but...the truth is, I just don't know! I know that I don't need to kiss someone. That's what I...what I don't want, but...I - I still want to hold hands with someone! I'd still like a hug, every once in a while...I don't know what I'm doing, or really...who I am."

For a few moments, he was silent beside you, just drinking in the flood of information. He refrained from reaching out, or gazing too intently. It took time to settle on an appropriate response. "You're looking at it as an issue, though - something you've gotta resolve, before you can move on. I'm not the best with advice, trust me...but I can tell you that it's a journey. It'll continue and evolve, as long as it needs to. You'll...probably know when you're ready, or...something. All that sappy crap. You don't have to force yourself to understand it all now."

I'll know...?

"When I'm...ready?" You repeated, eyes tracing the lines on your palm.

"Yeah...probably."

Just before you lost all coherency, a single thought fluttered to the forefront of your mind: My heart...just...skipped a beat?!

[Word Count: 1775]

#bnha dabi #my hero academia x reader #mha dabi #dabi is a todoroki #dabi x reader #pride #greyromantic #asexual #questioning #honestly same #bnha x reader

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maladaptive-ninja-returns · 5 years

Text

Stakeout (2)

Loki x fem!Reader

Prompt: @marvelrose had this awesome idea of taking Brooklyn Nine Nine’s episode Stakeout and turning it into an angsty fic. Will it end in smut or will it end in more angst?

Warnings: not much. Just some little fights.

Word Count: I am not sorry that I cannot connect with people twice my age having a specific set of ideas of what exactly I should be doing with my life when I have reached a certain age. And then you expect me to hold conversations with them. Why??? And no I do not enjoy you asking me how much of a contribution I make in my family’s internal workings. I am your colleague not a new potential match for your sister’s brother-in-law’s son.

Masterlist in bio

You woke to your phone’s ringtone piercing through your skull, making you growl and slide further under your blanket.

Blanket?

Yes, blanket.

But I didn’t have a blanket over me last night.

“Y/N, wake up. It’s Tony,” a familiar voice called out to you.

Screw Tony, you shook your head from under the cosy fabric. Want sleep.

“Y/N you better pick the call now,” the smooth low tone came again, making you bring your legs closer to your chest, “before I make you.”

You were already diving back into deep sleep, the words resonating somewhere in the back of your head, reaching your mind a bit late.

Within a flash, your eyes opened and witnessed Loki’s smug face hovering just above yours.

“What the hell are you doing?” your croaked voice tried to question the God’s actions while your eyes did their best to appear fully awake.

“Restraining myself from doing something gory,” he responded, his hot breath fanning the mini hair strands on your face. Throwing your worst glance of judgment at his glistening green eyes, you snatched your phone from him and picked up the call.

“What?” you snapped at the phone, receiving nothing but twelve seconds of silence in return.

“...I’m guessing you’ve got nothing yet.”

“Tony,” you took in a good deep breath just like he had taught you to do when your head and heart felt like they were running a marathon, “I will call you when I get something, okay? I promise. It’s just…”

“I know,” Tony continued when you did not carry the explanation any further, “I know you are not really made for stakeouts but I had to ground you some way. I couldn’t have possibly grounded you at the compound because that’s practically what you do all day!”

Well, he’s not wrong.

“But Tony you do realise one tiny distraction on my part and I could blow up our four week’s work,” you nearly whined, “and not to forget Sam’s still pissed about his wings being blown up.”

Loki stood by the window, his gaze outside towards the target but his ears towards the conversation you were having with Tony.

“That’s the reason you’re not doing this alone. Loki’s senses are inhumanly sharper. He won’t let you miss anything even if you want to.”

Recalling last night’s conversation filled with nothing but sexual innuendos you wished there were some things Loki made you miss.

Signing off, you looked around you while stifling a yawn, your brows turned in confusion as you were quite sure you were sitting on the chair covering the night shift as Loki’s ass had commanded the bed last night. You also remembered putting a blanket you had brought over him. For you, anyone sleeping without a blanket was practically sleeping naked, no matter the weather, no matter human or God.

What you didn’t know was you passing out on the chair, your light snores catching the trickster's attention within seconds. He had watched you shiver in the cold air of this unheated apartment, taking him a clenched fist and a twisted jaw to get up. The thought of helping you had sounded absurd, especially when it came from his brain. But he knew all too well if he did not do something about it, your already ruined health might worsen.

And with that one note to satisfy himself, he had picked you and laid you over the already warm bed, covering you in your blanket before taking your place at the desk.

“Seventy-five,” your tired voice declared, “that house has seventy-five horizontal lines on its walls.”

You were hunching over the desk now, half of your weight supported by your right arm, your cheek squished mercilessly within your palm.

“FIve hundred and sixty-three,” Loki interjected, “the leaves on our tree there.”

You looked at the tree and then back at him.

“Show off.”

The clock read ten minutes past two, making you get out of your chair, do a little stretch, feel your bones crack and let all the unwanted air be expelled out of your lungs.

“Lunch?” You yawned before a slight wince out of you made you remember the *forsaken* injuries.

“PB and J isn't lunch,” Loki declared.

You chuckled as you reminisced the one time Clint's self-declared best and most convenient lunch aka PB&J sandwiches receiving nothing but horrid stares from stomachs growling since six in the morning.

“Something we can agree on,” you mentioned before gathering ingredients from the fridge for a proper sandwich- thankful that Clint had stocked it with more than just peanut butter and jelly- along with two bottles of beer.

You came back to the seat with two plates of overloaded pieces of baguette, which barely lasted more than five minutes in Loki’s hand.

“Easy, darling. Such rush! What’s the point if you don’t savour it?” you cooed as Loki ended the appreciably large last bite in its entirety in his mouth before looking at you.

“Hmm?” he tilted his head and raised his brows, “What was that? Was that about the sandwich or-”

“Oh bite me!” you scoffed before realising the duality of your words. “Don’t say it.”

He didn’t turn away as he chugged down his beer bottle, watching your ears turn red as you tried to hide the embarrassment inside your own large bites taken off your sandwich.

Cleaning the bread crumbs off his hands he motioned them towards your bottle only to feel a sting as you smacked them away.

“No. Mine,” you tried to growl through your mouthful.

But his hand came back again.

You smacked it again; harder this time.

“You are nearer to the fridge,” Loki articulated already moving towards your beer again, “get another one.”

“And you are nearer to that wall, go hit your head in it,” you spat back.

There was nothing more excruciating than the daggers that your fiery y/e/c and his adamant green sent each other in the moment of silence that passed with the evaluation of who would be a dick enough to pick up the bottle first.

Loki was that dick.

Before the bottle could reach halfway to his mouth, you were already landing a swing at his throat and going for the beer. But Loki’s reflexes were better and his defence quite thought out- courtesy of him watching you workout with the rest of the Avengers while he sat in a corner with a book that tickled his musings for the day- catching your arm and turning you with one good twist. A chuckle nearly broke out of you as you cursed his fast brain and slid his leg apart with yours in one smooth motion, driving him back and giving you enough room to turn take grip the bottle.

“You don’t give up, do you?” Loki mocked you in his breathless state, his hair flying everywhere but his grip still strong on the beer bottle.

Curse his super strength.

“I’ll take what’s mine,” you softly implied before using your legs to put a death grip around his shoulders, pushing him back and down.

With one hand grabbing the beer and one smushing each other’s face, no normal human would have believed that one was a God who had tried to take over earth while other was a spy in training right under the world’s two most lethal assassins themselves- Natasha and Bucky.

Had the avengers been here, half of them would have been placing bets by now.

But to the annoyance of them both, the only person there had tripped the heat traps they’d put in the street outside, sending a low monotonous blink over the systems on the desk; the chime of the signal both of you had been waiting for overworking the brains and pushing the bottle out of the window you two were huddled under.

“Oh sh-” you both whispered in unison before untangling your concerned selves from each other’s limbs with frustrated grunts and crouching towards the screens to watch a man with a heavy built wearing a shirt that was clearly two sizes smaller than his, suspiciously look in the direction of the house. The familiar face from your last mission brought back the sting in your arm when he had landed you right into the concrete wall.

“Oh, we are so screwed,” you heard yourself whisper as the man walked down the street to pick up the bottle and a cat sitting next to it.

Scrutinizing the label on its back, he turned towards the cat. “What are you doing drinking a year old beer mister fluffmaster?” he cooed at the cat before turning back to walk into the target house with the said cat.

The entire apartment around you took a huge sigh of relief as both you and Loki plopped down into the ground, knowing full well how both of you had just walked away from the potential wrath of Anthony Edward Stark.

#loki x reader #loki x you #loki x y/n #loki fanfic #loki #brooklyn 99 #loki (marvel)#loki x oc #loki x original female character #loki fluff #loki fandom #loki fic #loki series #loki smut #marvel fluff #marvel smut #maladaptive ninja returns #stakeout #marvel

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sisterofiris · 5 years

Note

I'm sure you've seen the Tumblr post talking about how bisexual Gilgamesh and Enkidu are and that they're in a gay relationship- but I was wondering if there is any actual backing to that claim? Do any researchers agree with the idea or does their "wrestling" have literary and cultural contents that don't translate into homosexuality? Sorry if this has been asked before.

I think I know what post you’re referring to, and if I remember correctly it was written by an Assyriologist who knew what they were talking about. (Though I would greatly appreciate it if someone who has seen the post could link it - I tried searching for it but couldn’t find it. As far as I recall it was a photoset that began with something like “Gilgamesh and Enkidu were gay for each other, here’s why”.)

Regardless of who wrote the post, yes, it’s fairly well-accepted that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were more than friends. I’m not quite sure about the wrestling, but there’s an oft-quoted passage before Gilgamesh meets Enkidu, where Gilgamesh has a dream that an axe falls from the sky, and he cradles it and loves it “like a wife”. This scene is also likely a wordplay on the Akkadian word for “axe”, ḫaṣṣinu, and the word for a (sort of) genderqueer man, or possibly a male prostitute, assinu. Another scene which seems to insinuate a sexual, or at least romantic relationship between the two is Gilgamesh’s mourning over Enkidu.

By the way, if you can understand French, one of my lecturers gave an excellent conference on this topic last year, which you can listen to here.

***This is your obligatory reminder that ancient terms for non-straight and/or non-cisgender people do not map onto ours, and in general it’s very difficult to attribute modern sexual and gender categories to ancient people. I personally use the terms “queer” and “genderqueer”, which I think express the idea without forcing specific labels onto people who had their own, untranslatable identities. But as always, please bear in mind that these are modern terms I am using to make sense of concepts which don’t exist in our society.***

#gilgamesh #lgbt history

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auroraphilealis · 6 years

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any book recs?

Heck yes I do!

Simon VS. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli: Even if you saw the movie already, the book is like a different storyline. They’re super close but very different and I literally can’t decide which I prefer

It by Stephen King: I’m not actually the biggest horror fan of all time but after seeing the movie, I fell in love with this idea. I’m only about half way through the novel version, but there is something insane about the way Stephen King writes. He truly understands human’s on a level not many people do, or at least understands them enough to REALLY draw out the true horror of the world. I don’t know man, it’s a good fucking book.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Actually though, i re-read this after having read it 6 years ago, and holy shit this is actually amazing. I love this novel. Frankenstein is… a fascinating story.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: Seriously fucking amazing. It’s about a little girl growing up in Nazi Germany only it’s told from Death’s point of view, and I know what you’re thinking - how the fuck? But holy shit it is a fucking crazy good story, and the character of Death had me hooked on the first page

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski: One of my all time favorite books. It’s kind-of sort-of the story of Hamlet, but with a totally different modern revamp. The main character is mute, was born mute, and his closet relationship is with his dog. His mom marries his uncle after his father dies in a fire, and.. well. It’s just incredibly beautiful and amzing.

The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind: Look. This is the longest book series I have ever read. I used to spend every second of every day reading these books. But if you’re a fantasy fan, and huge word counts don’t scare you, then good LORD is this the series for you. I think back on this series so fucking often, and I’ve read certain books in it like, six times each. Currently, my mom has my copies or I would be READING IT AGAIN since this series hass been on my mind alot again. Again, it’s super long. I think currently we’re on book like… 27. I googled it. holy shit it’s grown since I last picked it up. The best part about this series is 1. You can technically stop at any point because each book has a relatively good ending that will keep you satisfied (except book 1 and 2, you really have to finish 3 while youre at it). 2. They reflect the modern world so well sometimes you’re just godamn wow. Seriously. If you love fantasy, please give it a try. It’s worth it.

The Host by Stephanie Meyer: Look, I know what you’re all going to say. Twilight was terrible, why would we read this? Listen, LISTEN I actually love The Host. It was really well done, and it definitely Stephanie Meyer’s better novel. The movie adaptation sucked ass but I actually DO still read this book over and over again. It’s a sci-fi novel about alien’s coming to Earth and taking over host bodies. They do this on lots of planets, and Earth is their newest requistion. It’s also the only planet to fight back well enough that the aliens actually think they might win. It’s not as weird as it sounds. It’s a love story, and it goes far more in depth with the meaning of life and stuff like that then Twilight could dream of, so give it a try.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: Actually amazing. I read it for class like… idek, 5 years ago maybe? When I heard it was getting it’s own show I was like !!!! but I haven’t actually watched the show version yet, so I have no idea how it compares to the novel. The novel is fucking amazing though. Legit made me cry. However, if you have a sexual trauma or trigger, this might be a difficult read in some select parts :/ Still fucking worth it times ten. I literally bought the book when my class was over, it was so good (the teacher actually, actually handed out copies, how insane is that? She was amzing)

Beloved by Toni Morrison: FUCK SO GOOD. I’ve read it twice, both times around school, and got to write papers on it twice as well. This is… this is one hell of a book. Both times I read it, I got so much more of it than the first time. THERE IS SO MUCH TO UNPACK. It’s about a former slave whose haunted by the baby daughter she killed to prevent her children from ending up slaves as well. This was just before slavery was abolished, as well, and while her baby daughter died, her other three kids lived. However, now her home is haunted, and the baby ACTUALLY comes back. It’s crazy and amazing and one of my favorite novels of all time. I can’t pick favorites guys, okay, but I love this one so fucking much.

Pellinor Series by Alison Croggon: Listen. Listen. I read this book when I was in high school immediately after I hurt my back so bad I was stuck in bed for a week, and literally continue to have issues with too this day. I CANNOT TELL YOU what the fucking plot was, and apparently there are 2 more books in the series that I didn’t know about, BUT I LOVED AND ADORED THIS BOOK OKAY IT WAS A WONDERFUL FANTASY NOVEL AND IT HAS A FEMALE LEAD ALRIGHT ITS GREAT JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT AND READ IT

Uglies Series by Scott Westserfeld: I remember finally getting my hands on this series and reading it in like, two days. Idk. It was great. If you can’t tell, I love fantasy and sci-fi and horror, which all mesh together horribly and you can never tell them apart. This isn’t horror though, just the other two. It’s about a world where when people turn a certain age, they get to become a “pretty’ which means to have surgery done to make them look perfect - only the reason for this is to dumb down society. Read it. I love it.

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead: I love vampire novels. If you couldn’t tell, this is a vampire novel. It’s one of my preferred series though, I think Mead did an amazing job crafting the world she crafts. Vampires aren’t under wraps, nor are they inherently evil, but they do work in a really weird system where you have the Special vampires who the other vampires protect, and then like the bodyguard vampires. I can’t fully remember, it’s been a long time. But regardless, I remember this being one of the few novel series that made me cry, and I still love it to this day.

Harry Potter by JK Rowling: I thought this was such a give in that I didn’t put it on the list until now but actually like. Super good. I grew up in this series and sometimes I talk about it and remember I’m 24 cause some people I know have never read it and IT WAS LITERALLY MY CHILDHOOD. Still think it’s worth it, even as I poke more and more holes in the story, because the older you get, the more you start to recognize problematic things. Clearly, Harry Potter was meant for children, not an adult who wants to critize everything. GOOD READ THOUGH

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: I grew up the girl writing fanfiction hid away in the back of the class because I didn’t want anyone to know. I look up to the people older than me at the time who developed and crafted the world we live in now, where Fanfiction is almost acceptable. Reading this novel... brought me right back to the Harry Potter days when the fandom was sitll new, underground, and ao3 didn’t exist. Honestly... it’s a really good book, and really hits home for people like me who write fanfiction and want nothing more than to write novels one day.

Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin: But actually the books are really good. I fucking adore the show and that’s what got me into the books, but the books are HELLA good. Weirdly, Daenery’s Targaryen is not the most well written character ever, and I blame it on Martin being a guy, becasue sometimes I actually hate her in the novels (seriously, he makes her sound... like a child, which I guess she kind of is) BUT one of my favorite things in the novel is that her husband Khal Drogo does not sexually assault her in the novels. He’s super sweet and good to her, and honestly just. Yep. Yeah. Good series.

What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum Ucci: The most heartwrenching book of all time. I can’t tell you how long I cried over this book. I’m literally getting tearful as I think about it. It is... fucking BEAUTIFUL. I want to read it right this fucking second. It’s about a girl who was in remission from cancer, but who joins the cheerleading team. Only, shes technically too tall to be a cheerleader, so she gets an ED which actually puts her at risk for remission. She meets Lani Garver - the literal emodiment of a nonbinary person before that term every existed. Lani Garver is... a fucking angel. An actual angel okay. They help the main character through so much, specifically bullying, and Lani taught ME so much when I read it. The author refers to Lani as he, but remember that it was written before nonbinary was an accepted (possible even before it was a fully labeled) thing, but the book is SO worth reading. I. I’m going to go read it again.

Streams of Babel and it’s sequel The Fire Will Fall by Carol Plum Ucci: I originally read the second novel first on accident, which just goes to show you how good an author Ucci is becasue I didn’t even NOTICE until I got to the end and saw there was a first novel, oops. But, its a take on the lives of 4 kids in a situation of chemical warfare, and what happens to them when they get poisoned by the water. I think one of the kids is a fucking comptuer genius. Idk, I can’t fully remember, but it is one of my favorite novels, so check them out.

I’m like 100% that there’s more I could list but those are the ones I could currently recall BECAUSE THIS IS A MONUMENTAL TASK AND I LOVE BOOKS

#Anonymous #asks #book recs #book rec #books

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egoiistas · 6 years

Text

may i feel, said he (14)

first | tag | ao3 | ffn

[co-written with @tsaritsa]

a/n 10k views on ao3 and nearing 20k on FFN. we're absolutely gobsmacked.as always, ty for all ur comments!!! we hope this update will satify u - ana has been waiting a very long time to write one particular scene and we've had to push it back so many times...I finally let her have it.

Warnings: Sexual Content ™, cursing Words: ~7.5k || Rated: M - Royai

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

salt-laced and arched / dorianne laux, this close

The days, then weeks go on without Olivier.

Easier than it should be, Riza adjusts to another walking out the door. Every once in a while, a sad wave of nostalgia washes over her when she sees the significantly vacant living room or looking at the bare wall that once held frames and chic paintings. Even if some called her icy and dull, she had impeccable taste and Riza misses the colors on the wall. These small moments creep up on Riza when she least expects them, during the most inane moments of the day, and it's hard not to feel the loss and how it still stings like an accidental pinch to sensitive skin.

Perhaps she judged Olivier incorrectly, a voice in her head tells her snidely. Perhaps you chose wrongly, a darker, but smaller voice said. Riza can’t fault her former flatmate’s inability to understand her affair, no matter how much or how little it stings. It burns in the hollow parts where their friendship used to be, knowing that this man has a better and more intimate understanding of her as a person than Olivier would ever be capable of or want to be capable of. The sentiment is selfish and she knows this. In other situations, she respected Olivier’s ability to remain steadfast in her convictions.

All this comes to mind on a Friday evening, a quiet one when they are rarely so for Riza. Earlier she relished at the fact that she could take advantage of the quietude to get lost in her annotated-to-death anthology of Pablo Neruda’s works; to be comfortably situated in her own bed and just take in the evoking prose, and catch up on her laundry she was woefully behind on. The space would do her some good, she reasoned. A lot had happened in the last few weeks and a bit of alone time with her favourite poets and a Greed pizza from Hell’s would do her some good. It’s been a while since she’s had a moment with just her and a book and four walls.

Riza looks at the time, the walls, the fading pages, and realizes … why did she ever come to miss this. When did she grow to enjoy company?

Rebecca had come and gone after her classes, commenting on how rare it was to see her there on a Friday. Riza tried to explain but her friend looked like she was short for time, making a racket with her closet and in the bathroom. Riza could hardly catch where she was going, she’d hardly made mention of it as she was hurrying out of the apartment and then those words were cut off by the slamming on the door. Not that she expected it, but the lack of invitation probably meant that it was a date or something of the sort. That was hours ago and Riza finds herself a little disappointed, but mostly strange, that her phone isn’t blowing up with a play-by-play of the date’s shortcomings or successes. The commentary is a specialty of Rebecca’s humor.

Her friend was right: ordinarily, she wouldn’t be here. Over the course of a few months, Riza has slipped into a routine that she is loathe to have issue with. A bus would take her on a route that went past his neighbourhood, following her afternoon biochem class. Sometimes, she’d make a detour to the supermarket nearby to pick up a few things if a mood struck for something in particular, but more often than not she was content with takeout. It was a nicer environment than the library - she could spread out all the work she needed to do on the coffee table in his lounge and sprawl herself along his couch. The hot chocolate powder that had mysteriously arrived in the pantry one day wasn’t amiss either.

This time, however, her excuse was moot and she couldn’t expect a phone call or exchange of texts to change that either, because tonight he was travelling to Central for a conference where chemistry nerds were converging to relay to each other the latest findings. Roy was not as excited as she expected. In fact, he looked particularly disgruntled by the way he told her about it two weeks ago. He whined how not even professors were spared from homework, or ‘paperwork’ as he referred to it.

Eventually, she pushes away the distractions and enthralled for the millionth by The Heights of Macchu Picchu when her phone lights up and pings on her desk. Mindful of the book in her hands that is practically falling apart, she sets it down carefully, before stretching out to pull on the charging cable. The phone falls into her hand with practiced ease, and Riza can’t help the smile that grows on her face as she sees the name - nickname - emblazoned on her lockscreen.

Spanish Inquisition, 7:02pm I had a very interesting visitor today Spanish Inquisition, 7:02pm You didn’t think to warn me?

A chill runs down her spine. She’s trying her best not to jump to conclusions but a familiar sanctimonious smirk appears in her mind’s eye. She wouldn’t...would she? Calmly, she responds:

Avecilla, 7:02pm I would if I knew who to warn you about.

Spanish Inquisition, 7:03pm So you didn’t know. Hmm. Spanish Inquisition, 7:03pm Your other flatmate. Not blonde. Bushy black hair. Very opinionated. Spanish Inquisition, 7:03pm And loud

Spanish Inquisition, 7:04pm Came into my office hours in middle of a meeting with another student.

Her relief is short-lived as the reality settles in. Palm meets skin and she smacks her forehead. She loves Rebecca - honestly, truly - but the girl lived in the moment and rarely considered the consequences of her actions in the aftermath. She can’t discern his reaction though, not through text alone. Her thumb hovers over the icon at the top of the app. Surely he would’ve called her if he felt the conversation warranted it.

Avecilla, 7:04pm becca? Avecilla, 7:04pm oh fuck

Spanish Inquisition, 7:07pm ah so, becca’s her name! I wish she would have told me that

Spanish Inquisition, 7:07pm She said a lot about a lot of things, but not her name Spanish Inquisition, 7:08pm tbh I wasn’t really given a chance to say anything Spanish Inquisition, 7:08pm Do you know how weird it is to be lectured in my own office

Riza mutters a string of curses under her breath.

She switches messaging windows to Rebecca’s and stares at the blank chat box wondering which side to approach this from. Her fingers rest on the bridge of her nose imagining the scene of a riled up Rebecca busting in through that office door, telling the unsuspecting student to scram and then potentially ripping Roy a new one about who-knows-what with the signature hands-on-hips stance. It’s frustrating, it should be incredibly frustrating. What she had said, the manner in which she barged in, how it’s interpreted - all of it could be her demise but a chuckle bubbles up because... Classic Rebecca.

Unaware that the screen had dimmed, she sees it light up again with a call this time. “Hello?”

“You left me on read?” The other voice on the line greets her with hints of playful tones under that indignant choice of words. He continues smoothly, “Are you starting to think you’re the exception in all of this, avecilla?”

She snorts, smiling as she sat up. As far as she can tell he’s not irritated. “No exception to the embarrassment knowing Rebecca did that. If I had known that was even remotely crossing her mind - well, I would have stopped her.”

“Something tells me even if you did know, there’s no much that you could have done from stopping a force of nature like that.” Despite the noise of what she assumes is Central all around him, she can hear the tired smile on him. “I think you’re very lucky to have such a loyal friend who has terrifyingly specific medical knowledge on how to best remove a penis.”

“She didn’t...” Riza groans and leans back against her pillows, sliding the dog-eared anthology back from the edge of the bed before she covers her face.

“She did. I was perplexed for most of it, blinking at her as she paced in front of my desk.” Riza let the words sink down with her mortification and then she’s frozen when he says, “Does she do this with all your boyfriends?”

She isn’t sure why it tenses her; maybe its because it's finally given a name, even if it’s only a label, and an unsure, timid smile crosses her face. “Consider yourself special for getting the Rebecca treatment.”

“I consider myself lucky for other reasons, Riza.”

Her demeanor changes with the teasing lilt in his words. A half-smile begins to spring up over her lips, thankful he’s understanding - in whatever capacity - of this. “Care to share with the class?” She says coyly.

“Yes, that no one else heard. Or made any comment about it.” He says sternly and she sinks back into her pillows.

“I don’t know why she thought storming into your office would be a good idea.”

“Well it certainly worked out well enough for you, didn’t it?” Even though he’s making fun of her, she bites her lip at the memory, and the way his voice has dipped now, sultry and inflected with the accent that he was well aware that made her weak in the knees. He’s blatantly flirting with her.

Riza scoffs. “I believe our aims were a little different if we are going to be making comparisons.”

“Ah, so you did come with a goal in mind then.”

“Yes, sir. I-”

There are stifled chuckles on the other end. He is one of the few people clever enough to really get under her skin, get her riled up.

“If I recall correct, you admitted that I was baited into your office because of your stunt.”

“Mmm, did I now?” he asks, low and throaty.

At least the whiplash from the back and forth keeps her on her toes; she looks at them wiggling even now as she talks to him. “Mhm, I was there.”

He chuckles lightly and she hears someone greet him faintly in the background. “Let me call you back so I can get into this hotel room.”

“Oh, of course.”

They don’t share many phone calls but even from the first day, she’s known his voice was pleasant. Especially when he wants it to be. His laugh was warm down the line, and inexplicably she finds herself missing him, despite talking to him this morning however briefly.

The phone rings and she greets him with a standard “hello.” When no sound comes from the other end, she checks the screen to make sure the line is connected.

“So…” he starts and it sounds like he plops on a bed. “What are you wearing?”

She blinks. “What?”

He enunciates each word. “What - are - you - wearing?”

She sinks down the length of her headboard. “You’re not serious.”

He tuts. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Clothing.”

“You’re no fun, Miss Hawkeye.”

“Maybe it’s because I’d rather have you here to show me what you want.”

“So would I.” There’s a wistful edge to his voice. “Do you have other plans? I was under the impression that you had a date with some laundry and pizza.”

“I had a date,” she emphasises. “Besides... I don’t think I’d be too good at it.”

“Trial and error, right? There’s no pressure to do anything you’re not comfortable with and we can always stop whenever you’d like.”

Likewise, she gets up and locks the door to her bedroom even though she knows Rebecca won’t be home for a while yet - certainly not after that stunt. “What a gentleman.”

“I like to think so.” She can hear his smile. “So...what are you wearing?”

Riza smiles in turn, feeling foolish. It’s such a ridiculous question on top of a ridiculous act. Tightening her grip on her phone, she figures telling him the truth of her rather vanilla pyjamas would probably detract from the mood of… whatever this was. She knows enough about “phone sex” - even in her mind it leaves a weird, tingly feeling - to at least humor him. She sighs into the phone, “It’s warm tonight, so I decided to wear something comfy to bed. Something so I can wiggle under the covers without feeling ...constricted.”

“Shorts?” The voice at the other end sounds surprised and she clearly sees him, in her mind’s eye, leaning in closer with interest and probably a smirk.

Riza bites her lower lip. “Less.”

“Oh.” He sounds delighted. “Well, if you’re going to have me guess what Riza Hawkeye wears on her days off… the top to her pajamas and her small clothes.”

He knows her too well. With little movement, she slides her underwear down her legs, letting them fall to the floor. She laughs, a little nervously. “Less.”

“Aren’t you naughty tonight?”

“I’ve been asked to,” Riza teases and shifts against her pillows. “Now, tell me something.”

“Yes?”

She’s unfamiliar with this certain kind of ...adventure. Nonetheless, she’s still willing to try. “How... excited are you?”

“Mhm. Let’s see.” She faintly hears fabric shifting, zippers unzipping, and if she wasn’t listening so intently, she would have missed the light groan. “Very.”

She licks her lips, imagining him sitting on the edge of her bed. Her legs cross; as a pleasant surprise, her arousal settles hotly in between them. “Tell me why.”

“You. Your legs. Spread and losing myself between them. Your body on mine.”

“You’re worse than me, sir.” There is a throbbing pulse right at her core in rhythm with the hard thrumming in her chest. It feels warm and slick without having to touch herself, though the temptation to is becoming harder to ignore. “What would you do?” she asks, cradling the phone between her shoulder and her ear. “If you had me there.”

His laugh is delicious - she closes her eyes as a shiver runs over her bare skin. “Enough about me, avecilla. How eager would you be if you were here?”

“I’m hardly-”

“Try.”

Leaning back, Riza tries to imagine her own fantasies. “If I was there-” she hears a throaty chuckle, “- I’d get on my knees, relieve you of those pesky trousers...” A daring hand slips in between her legs and her fingers are glistening when she lifts them back up to the light.

“And?” His voice has become husky, rumbling through his throat.

“I’d take you into my mouth.” She answers automatically, distracted from her slow stroke, playing with herself. It’s true - previously, with other fumblings, she had done her part to make her partner feel good - but with him she is surprised to find herself enjoying the act so thoroughly. Maybe it’s a power thing. The image of him watching her take him into her mouth with hooded eyes and a slack jaw is something she holds close to her heart. She does that to him.

Nobody else.

It takes him a moment to respond and when he does, his words are marked with a smidgen of strain. “Fast or slow?”

She doesn’t realize until this moment that her eyes have fallen shut, her head thrown back. “Slow at first, tasting you, feeling how hard you are in my mouth and growing harder with my tongue.”

“At first?” Roy asks curiously. “You’d want me to make you go faster, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I do-” she admits, gasping with the building pleasure of using two fingers to stimulate her clit.

“Grabbing you by your hair to so you can feel me go deeper.”

“Yes…” His fingers coiled in her hair, his cock around her lips getting wetter each time she retook him in her mouth, the aching between her thighs increasing with every second -

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir.” Riza thought a laugh would leave her, instead she moans into the phone, feeling a warmth flush her skin pink. She’s wet enough to hear it, rubbing herself. She settles on the bed properly now, lying flat with the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear. Gasping lightly, Riza slides a finger, then two inside herself as her other hand grabs her own breast, ghosting over the tip of her sensitive nipple.

“And where would you like me to fuck you?”

“Take me however you’d like me.” The truth is she can’t really think. She’s lost in her own fantasies. Against the wall with her legs over his hip; from behind where he could dig his nails into her as they picked up the pace; on top of him where she could feel him reaching depths that had her voice filling the room - it didn’t matter. There is an aching in her that her fingers cannot fulfill. He was too far away. She wants him here, with her and her shitty second-hand bed and the evidence is soaking her digits to her knuckles.

His groan reverberates through the phone lines and into her ear and she can almost feel the hot breath in her ear and his familiar scent.

She breathes in as hoping his phantom scent would materialize just for her. She begins, “I’m y-”

Her bedroom door opens.

“Rebecca!” she screeches. Mortified, she drops her phone, urging her roommate to get out. She can only imagine his confused expression as she swears black and blue and Rebecca is cackling madly in the background. She covers herself with her blanket, chasing her out and slams the door behind her. There’s a chuckle wedged in between the “I’m sorry!” Rebecca shouts from the other side of the door.

Her phone is still lit up, the call remaining in progress as she approaches her bed. “Roy..?” she breathes after the entire debacle. Paper crinkles beneath her feet. She quickly pulls them back and hisses under her breath.

“I’m here,” he responds after a moment and he sounds a little spent. “Did we have unfortunate timing again?”

She sighs as she kneels down, her blanket pooling around her feet. “What’s the matter?” he presses.

Riza groans as she sees the scattered pages across her room. The hardcover of her anthology lies face down, open. The spine of it must’ve hit the floor first. She crouches though her legs shake and picks up the annotated papers. “It’s nothing.”

Other than the shifting of someone on a bed, there’s silence on the other end until he speaks again. “It doesn’t sound like nothing, avecilla.”

She nestles the phone in between her ear and shoulder as she collects the remnants of the book in earnest. “A book I was reading before you called fell off the bed and the pages came apart.”

“You certainly haven’t shown me that kind of vigor to make a book fall apart.”

She huffs into the phone, hoping her flattened brow expression would be received telepathically. “It was old.”

“I’m not that old.”

“The book.”

She can hear him stifle a chuckle, but he fails by snickering anyway. It makes her smile too. “Now I see. In any case, I’m sorry to hear that. Which book was it?”

Riza flips the cover as if she didn’t already know. “An old poetry book I bought when I was younger. Neruda.”

“Ah, that’s unfortunate.”

“What’s unfortunate is that I was… almost getting into it,” she admits, slipping on a different pair of underwear.

She can just imagine the disappointed expression on his face. “That’s even more unfortunate. But there’ll be other times if the moment is ruined.”

Again, she smiles because of his understanding, despite her embarrassment and she’ll admit to herself that she’s little forlorn over missing the opportunity to hear him reach an orgasm right in her ear. “I think for right now it is. I need to clean up this mess and then there’s my other date that needs tending to.”

“Laundry isn’t that necessary, is it? By all means, walk around naked if you’d like. I certainly won’t protest.”

Riza grins, holding back the laughter. She manages to sternly volley back, “One of us has to remain civilized.”

He scoffs. “I’m hurt.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“Call me back once you’re done?”

Genuinely and warmly this time, she smiles. “If you behave.”

“So no dick pics?”

It takes a lot of willpower not to snort audibly. “Surprise me, sir.”

With his return, she realizes only a few weeks remain before classes end officially. Riza’s always taken initiative for her assignments with diligence, but there’s always the influx of assignments at the end of the term, projects to wrap up, or reports to finalize. Still aiding him when she can in the evenings, her free time becomes increasingly limited.

There’s a new, long list of journals and books that Roy requires for his research that they read and eventually determine the value of this information. On top of this already tedious work, she offers to help grade the essays from the two 100-level courses he teaches in addition to her Chemical Literature class.

It’s boring, menial and uninspiring work: the amount of grammatical, spelling and formatting errors has Riza throwing her pencil away from her in frustration on more than one occasion. The content of said work is of an even lesser quality. It aggravates Riza when it’s obvious to her that some these students don’t give a flying fuck about their education. Or they do, but they have a shit way of showing it.

Some dark part of her forms from this trial and she takes joy tearing into the worst of the essays via text messages to him. In turn, he responds with the excuses and the pleas for extensions or redacted frantic emails that come in once students factor in the weight of the participation grade.

Spanish Inquisition, 11:53 pm 3 years Spanish Inquisition, 11:53 pm 3 years and they still ignore the bolded text Spanish Inquisition, 11:53 pm It’s in caps you know. Spanish Inquisition, 11:53 pm PARTICIPATION GRADE: 35% Spanish Inquisition, 11:54 pm It’s almost like they forget that in order to participate they have to attend class.

Avecilla, 11:57 pm Strike them down Spanish Inquisition, 11:58 pm HA Avecilla, 11:58 pm I mean Avecilla, 11:58 pm How cruel are you going to be?

Spanish Inquisition, 11:59 pm Most will get a B or similar Spanish Inquisition, 11:59 pm Not enough for them to storm to the dean and complain i’m unfair, but maybe enough to encourage them to maybe try next time

The weeks fly by because of this and she can only think of one time in the last few weeks where they’ve actually managed to do more than just kiss. Riza isn’t one to keep tallies, but it was after a late night of simultaneously grading, reading and working on her final assignments. She was tired. She knew he was too, and while she could only blame herself for suggesting it, it didn’t make her any less frustrated when he drifts to sleep with his dick in her mouth. Rebecca harbored no sympathy for her either. She merely texts ‘HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA’ and then sends far too many tongue-in-cheek gifs implying Riza was “thirsty.”

Even if she was, Riza muted her best friend and finished herself off, but not before almost succumbing to sleep once or twice.

Every time after that, when they managed to have more coffee or sleep in, they were rudely interrupted in some other way. As if it were sacrilege he had taken that one time for granted, he jested once, and it soon became laughable what the universe kept throwing at them.

The workload was understandable, forgivable, and inevitably out of their control. Then, it was constant miscalculations of how little time they had: either she had a class or he had one to teach or office hours, or I’m about to crash and we both know how the last time worked out. It was driving her up the walls - and not in the ways she’d preferred.

They reach a point of recklessness. They take advantage of his empty office with a locked door on the final days after class. He cancels his office hours that morning after her assurances that her assignments were up to par and she could afford the distraction. Riza finds herself pleasantly nestled between euphoria and giddiness from the frantic way they paw at each other’s clothes. Or it’s the way she sat on the edge of his desk and the cool air tickled in the moist heat in between her legs. Or the little tinge of pride from cancelling his office hours just for her. Or perhaps a combination of it all. Irresponsible, to be sure, but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t flattered how much he desired her, as if it were anything to question. She thinks, in foolish desperation, that the odds are in their favour this time.

She’s wet and ready from his fingers playing with her as they kiss, bringing him closer with her legs as her soft moans are muffled by his lips. Her hands reach for the buckle of his belt and she chuckles lightly when she detours further south to palm the erection under the cloth of his pants. Let’s free it, she thought then and refocused on the buckle, because she is fed up with all this teasing and none of the fingering. He’s given her a light orgasm already - the kind that leaves her wanting, that she only needed to bite down on her lip for - but it’s made her insatiable now. There’s just something so good about having him in her, and as much as she loves his fingers and dexterity, they cannot mimic the stretch and feeling of fullness he alone provides. “I want you,” she murmurs under his lips, drunk from her lust, as she unbuckled the belt with practiced fingers.

Loud and obnoxious, an alarm suddenly blares. Sound fills the room and it’s like a bucket of cold water over her; it takes them both a moment to recenter themselves back to earth. Her fingers uncurl from his pants and inwardly she mourns the loss of contact. The urge to keep going is strong; after all, when are fire alarms set off for a legitimate reasons anyway? It’s an irrational thought and Riza can hardly hear anything else. They fix themselves up hastily and exit the building; everybody they pass seemingly none the wiser. She lets herself drift away from him - a few metres and several people between them when they reach the evacuation point, reminding herself that there are other people here and this close to the end of classes is no excuse to relax her standards. She’s just...frustrated. A voice that sounds a lot like Rebecca’s teases that she’s actually just horny.

If she’s honest, she hates the shame that trickles down her spine at this unadulterated want. In a different time, with a less conservative upbringing to influence her choices, she wouldn’t find this shame and guilt currently she’s currently wrestling with. She would be more like Rebecca or even Olivier where it’s not on her radar, coming and going as she pleases. But if her circumstances were different, she probably wouldn’t even be here, studying for a Bachelor of Science as a means to connect with her absentee father.

Riza miraculously catches his eyes as the crowd slowly shuffles further back on the field as more people spill out of the Joseph Hunter Science Building. He mouths something to her, but her lipreading is terrible and she shrugs her shoulders, lifting up her phone to their field of vision.

Spanish Inquisition, 10:23am 10 minutes leaves enough time to return the favor of the other night.

The fire alarm had killed most of their time before her next class, but she forgoes punctuality in favor of four minutes of feeling his hair in between her fingers while his lips kiss in between her legs. In the end, her tardiness was excused.

Finally - finally, she thinks they’ve managed a miracle. Her final assignments are as ready as they’ll ever be, waiting for one final read-over before submission, and his last block of essays have been graded and handed back to their respective classes. Draped over him in the same chair in his apartment study where they first fucked, she’s allowing herself to celebrate as she cups his jaw with her hands, her tongue sliding against his pleasantly.

He hardens underneath her and she’s none too shy about unbuttoning his shirt as he has done for her. Pushed down to her elbows, the shirt is rid of her and it’s a painful few seconds when she pulls away to be free of it properly. He looks sinfully decadent beneath her, a lazy smirk growing on his face as one hand deliberately hooks a finger under her bra strap, tugging it down. Her lingerie choices have been adventurous in recent weeks - the pastel blue lacy number she’s currently wearing is definitely not designed for any exercise more taxing than walking, and judging by the way his Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, Riza knows with certainty that she’s found a keeper.

His fingers brush over her nipples, and she briefly shuts her eyes as he pinches before pulling the fabric down and draws her close, tongue soothing the puckered skin. Her hands curl into his hair, scratching at his scalp and Riza’s uncaring of the breathy moans leaving her - this is divine, and the wait has certainly been worth it.

Roy’s hands drift down and slide under her skirt, fingers gliding over the sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs, leaving tingling sensations in its wake. He is only mere inches from her arousal and a great deal of willpower goes into preventing herself from pushing his hand forward.

He takes off his glasses and she sets them behind her on the large desk. Her hands go through his hair as he cups her breast and brings her other nipple into his mouth, using his tongue to tease the tip and even nip at it gently with his teeth. His other hand clutches at her ass to bring her closer as if the distance they have was remotely unbearable. Riza gasps into his hair, grinding her hips over his lap, and his scent is mixed with sweat. It’s a dangerous, addicting blend, and she shudders in his lap as his fingers stroke across her bare skin. He releases her nipple slowly from between his teeth before shifting back to her other one and she remembers a joke he said about her breasts deserving equal treatment.

And then, in the middle of this achingly wonderful treatment - his ringtone goes off.

Roy groans for all the wrong reasons, throwing his head back. He keeps them steady as he awkwardly reaches his back pocket for his phone. “Pfft, it’s just Hughes,” he mutters after a concerted effort and sets the cell down on the chair of the arm. Softer and locked on her other unattended breast, he mumbles with a mouth full of her, “He can leave a message.”

Riza doesn’t remember which one is Hughes and she’s not given much time to think about it when his mouth returns to her breast and his hand squeezes, massages, tweaks at the other. She’s at the point of moaning out if you say so when the vibrations and standard tune rings out again.

He stops altogether and after a few seconds, it dies to a stop only to start up again. His attention is needed again, and she’s never felt quite as pissed off at an inanimate object as she does right now. Roy growls and sits back, picking up the phone. “Let me just see what he wants.”

She nods wordlessly and he starts the conversation, going beyond standard small talk after a few moments. She can hear the other man talking; an excitable person who gets even more excited when he talks about certain topics. She can’t discern what they’re talking about exactly, but Roy gives the occasional mhm and yeah when it’s warranted.

Riza figures she can go wait for him in the bedroom. Perhaps sprawled out with a bright, blinking sign that says ‘insert here’ in between her legs should he fail to see how much she wanted him that afternoon; she blames Rebecca’s influence for that kind of ridiculous humor. Riza starts to climb off him and stops when she’s kept in place from his hand gripping the fabric of her skirt. He wants her to stay there? She frowns and points at the phone. His brows furrow and he shakes his head, putting a finger over his mouth, telling her to be quiet.

Well, she can go be quiet in the other room. She can respect his privacy. It’s not a big deal; they had the entire evening to themselves. Well, nearly - but she’d be damned if she’d let any other distractions interrupt them after this call. She deserves to be fucked thoroughly.

Roy is apparently impatient, however. The hand holding the finger over his mouth flattens over her thigh and coasts up to the edge of her skirt. He thumbs the skin there, teasing the idea that he could touch her in the middle of this conversation. She looks at him knowingly when he crosses underneath the folds of her skirt, yet he continues on talking as though nothing has happened. He caresses the skin inside her thighs as he talks about something or the other: Riza isn’t concentrating on that, instead absorbed with the sensation of his fingers drifting higher and higher. She waits patiently, but his touch somehow makes her hotter, wetter. A devious finger lightly ghosts over the linen of her damp underwear and he says a perfectly timed “Oh?” towards the caller and to her. Riza blushes and grabs at his wrist.

She can sit up, she can leave the room, she knows that he’d respect that, but she doesn’t want to. She realizes there’s a morbid curiosity as to how and why he does things and she always wants to know. This is moment is one of them. It’s why she doesn’t stop him when he tugs aside the cloth of her underwear and wets his fingers with what’s in between her lips. Her frown dissipates and she gasps as if she’s been starved from his touch, like it’s an electrifying drug she’s been having withdrawals from. The sensations of his fingers rubbing against her clit is familiar and unknown, and she lets her head fall back, relishing in the feeling and clawing lightly at the armchair.

His fingers leave her and he cleans them off with his mouth before gesturing her to be quiet with a finger over his mouth again. She thinks she can hear his friend say “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he responds, looking directly at her with a devious glint in his eyes. “Just eating. Go on.”

A warm tingle shoots down her spine and spreads across her abdomen down to her groin. She’s been enraptured by a lunatic and she’s allowed it to happen, even now when he aims to touch her again. With a bite to her knuckle, she grasps at his loosened shirt when his fingers return to remind her how obnoxiously needy she has become. Giving into this notion, she moves to hover over his lap for shameless access. He bites a bottom lip at this, staring her from the wrinkled mess of her skirt to her flushed, knuckle-biting face. She’s wet enough that an easy orgasm is on the horizon from the slow, rubbing stimulation on her clit. Riza makes the mistake of thinking he’ll stop there, because then one finger enters her and then another. Her reaction is unexpected, even to her. She falls back to his lap and bites the fleshy side of her palm to quell the noises. Her spread legs allow him to finger her, so he does. Slowly. In and out, and the noises would make her die of mortification if she weren’t enjoying every satisfyingly building moment of this pleasure. His palm is hitting her stimulated clit with each stroke and she’s grasping at his shirt once more, trying to salvage what solid ground she can keep as the pleasure rises within her..

He slows down when she’s at the precipice of a delicious orgasm that she even licks her lips, and decides to become an active participant in his phone call. But it’s not in English. He shifts to Spanish while his hand moves against her more patiently. She tries to catch her breath from holding it but it’s impossible not to listen to the way he’s talking. It’s fascinating how melodic a different language sounds and how much of a turn on it is for her. He speaks this language faster. His R’s roll off his tongue and somehow there’s more sensuality in his voice. It’s mesmerizing.

His attention turns back to her when moments ago he was staring at some place off to the side. He looks to her hips and she doesn’t even realize - until he does - how subtly she was moving them. Roy pauses, eyebrows furrowed before a downright hungry grin forms on his face, and his fingers begin to move once more.

“Estoy eschuchando,” he answers the person on the other line, his diction shifting into a huskier tone, each syllable pronounced lower and slower. She thought it was bad enough when he spoke it casually, but when he did it deliberately? She can only handle so much stimuli, and by this point she’s uncaring of how shameless she’s acting, how she’s become putty in his hands. She’s drunk on this orgasm she can feel barrelling towards her, on the lust and desire she feels for him. She’s never felt it quite like this before - this want that feels more like a need with every passing second. She wants to take the phone and hang it up for him, but she opts for pulling at the collar of his partially unbuttoned shirt and biting the taut muscle at the meeting of his neck and shoulder. He maintains that paced fingering in and out of her. She knows she’s tightening around his fingers because of the paced movement.

With his deliberate words at her ear, his fingers inside her, and the smell of his bare skin, she climaxes against him, taking deep breaths and every measure to stifle the moans and groans. Her head rests over his shoulder, hot breath hitting his neck. She can see him swallowing and doesn’t know why she didn’t think to give him the same torturing she just endured.

He’s hard. She can feel it and see it in this light. She palms it, clutches it, strokes it, and he swallows thickly again. He sounds strained when he cuts off the caller and abruptly says, “I’ll have to call you back.” Roy ends the call and the phone is tossed to the wayside as his fingers slide out of her.

She grabs his cock harder and he surprises her by standing up, supporting her by her underside until she’s laid on his desk directly behind her, over the papers she had spent last week meticulously highlighting. She lifts her hips to help with the removal of her own underwear. As he works with his own pants she tries to salvage what’s underneath her to little success. Distracted by her menial task, she gasps, surprised, when her wrists are manacled and set at either side of her head. Her breathing is heavy, his too. The tip of him nudges at her entrance and she moves against it, towards it just for the stretch a little bit more of him inside her.

“A little bird tells me you have a secret.”

Riza smiles coyly after a futile attempt to use her legs to bring him forward. “Hardly a secret if you know about it,” she manages, half-heartedly trying to move her arms. He doesn’t budge an inch, his smile dark and promising. She supposes at this point nothing should really surprise her when it comes to her newfound appreciation for less-than-vanilla sex, but there’s just something so inherently sexy about being pinned down by him, even as simply as she is right now. The temporary loss of control is so easy to lose herself in.

Roy observes her hungrily. “A kink then.”

The initial thrust makes her gasp sharply and he groans pleasantly. Her limbs dangle off the side as he fucks her over his desk. Where he was well-paced before, he is erratic now, but he won’t find complaint from her in that regard. She has no means of quieting herself with her hands where they are, and biting down at her teeth proves inefficient when each of his thrusts touch places she’s been yearning for weeks, when the stretch she’s been hungry for is finally given to her. Her eyes are shut, mouth open, body subject to this carnal movement. She doesn’t think to see beyond her eyes for the time being, what expressions his face is making or anything that will take her away from the here and now of the feelings of the sex. She feels selfish for relishing in this, but fuck, it’s been a long time coming and this sex proves it.

He lets go of her wrists and brings her toward him to hang just a little more over the desk by way of her legs. She reaches over her head at the other end of the desk, moaning into the inside of her arm, clutching the edge as if it were her salvation from plunging into the deep.

Her eyes open suddenly when he thumbs her clit. She looks at him and there’s a wolfish grin on his face, enjoying her reactions in the ways she squirms, moans, mewls, and tightens. Her fingernails scratch at the desk for purchase, for breath, but he continues with sweat beading his brow until he grunts a little louder and his final thrusts hit deeper as he cums inside her.

Her own orgasm follows shortly after, and she’s left quivering on the desk, well aware of the sight she is before him. She can feel his seed leaking out of her as her pulls out, and automatically her fingers move to catch it - like hell was she going to completely debase the paperwork that was crumpled underneath her. He utters a strange, strained grunt, running a hand through his hair roughly.

“I’ve told you, you can’t just do that with no warning.”

“Oh?” Her hand rises back up to her mouth and she wets her lower lip in anticipation. “Do this?” Her tongue darts out to lap at the milky, viscous fluid and while the taste is not delightful, the reaction that he has most certainly is. She barely has time to repeat her actions before his hand closes firmly over her own, and pulling her up to a sitting position at the edge of his desk.

“No,” he tells her firmly, though the matching smile on his lips belies any real annoyance. “If you’re going to be the death of me I’d at least like to get my money’s worth.” The kiss he drops on her forehead is soft. “I’ll get you a washcloth,” he says, fixing up his trousers loosely. The faint trail of hair sticks out against his lower abdomen like a beacon and Riza swallows the urge to coax him back for another round.

She adjusts the straps of her bra back up on her shoulders and nicks his discarded shirt from the ground. Her skirt is a crumpled, lost cause, and Riza makes a mental note to pick up an iron at some point this weekend - she hadn’t noticed it immediately, but of the many appliances Olivier had taken with her, the iron was the one she had relied on the most. Rebecca had bitched endlessly about the mini espresso machine that had also disappeared, though it had quickly been replaced.

She rolls up the sleeves of his shirt as she walks down the hallway towards the kitchen, humming under her breath. Roy would probably appreciate a cup of coffee, she thinks, focusing on doing the buttons up correctly as she passes by the island countertop and the man sitting there.

She stills, before turning to make sure she’s seeing right. The man looks up from the plate in front of him and raises his mug in greeting, the lowlights from the kitchen reflecting strangely on his glasses.

“You kids had fun?” he asks, before taking a sip. His tone is light, breezy, and he gestures to the plate in front of him when she doesn’t respond. “You’re probably hungry after that, uh-” he breaks off laughing, ducking his head “-after that workout. My wife made a quiche - you should have some, it is the best in the world, and I’m not biased.”

#royai #roy mustang #fullmetal alchemist #royai fanfiction #riza hawkeye #*may i feel #*shine #fma #A LONG ONE #and hey look two weeks within the last one #AYYYYYYYYYY #hope you enjoy because.....i know i did

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maevefiction · 6 years

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Your Light in the Mist - Chapter 12

Sleep eluded me after our parking lot conversation. Tom and I had taken a long bath together, during which neither of us were injured, surprisingly, then went down to the beach so we could listen to the waves crashing on the rocks prior to retiring for the night. Luke and Simon had popped out for a quick hello and a late night swim, then disappeared again into the privacy of their suite. I was beginning to think they might have us beat as far as incorrigible went, then quickly stopped myself before my mind wandered into what-has-been-seen-can-never-be-unseen territory.

Tom was out like a light in a matter of minutes, while I tossed and turned like a dog with a bad case of fleas. I knew it was pointless to continue to try and doze off, so I said fuck it and decided to get up and attempt to get some work done. I wormed my way out from under Tom’s leg, climbed out of bed, put on some shorts, grabbed my laptop and headed for the door. He mumbled incoherently in his sleep, and I waited until he was silent again before I opened it, padding in my bare feet through the soundless house and out onto the lanai.

After trying to determine whether to go with a horizontal or a vertical menu on Tom’s site for forty-two minutes, I called it quits and perused Twitter comments instead. Alani’s tweet had amassed the most, and screenshots had spread to Tumblr. Honestly, I was glad of the way she’d mentioned me in such a specific context …there was very little, if any, speculation about whether or not I was, in fact, his girlfriend. Everything was out in the open, which I always thought was the best choice. Though the initial negativity was far worse than if the topic’s legitimacy was in question, it would likely die down much more quickly. That’s how it had worked for clients in the past, anyway. Hopefully my methodology would apply to my own situation as well.

My revelation regarding my weight plagued me…I replayed what I’d said over and over, and I wished I’d gone into greater detail. I hadn’t meant to impose a blanket statement that being overweight was unhealthy, or that it made one unworthy of attention from the opposite sex – or the same sex, or both, whichever was personally preferable, of course. That’s not what I believed, at all. Quite the contrary. Beauty comes in all shapes, colors and sizes and is entirely dependent upon the eye of the beholder, and if said beholder opts to eliminate certain sizes from their pool of eligible candidates, that’s their choice. And their loss.

And as far as health was concerned…illness doesn’t discriminate based upon the number on the scale. It can strike anyone, at any time, and originates from a multitude of factors that are more often than not out of our control entirely. Unfortunately for me, a poor genetic inheritance and horrifically nutritionally deficient diet, combined with an excess of weight and my wickedly sedentary lifestyle had compromised my health considerably. Losing weight seemed to be a better option than medication, though there were many, many days on which I questioned that choice. Usually while sweating my ass off, literally, on the treadmill in some hotel gym. In all honesty, if I hadn’t been diagnosed with early stage diabetes, I probably wouldn’t have changed a thing about the way I lived my life.

“Maude, think about something else, you schmuck. This is a rabbit hole you do NOT want to go down at 2 AM.”

I sighed. Too late.

I’d told Tom there were reasons for me putting on a significant amount of weight, and my sleep deprived brain decided that this was the ideal time to refresh my memory as to what they were. I tapped my finger on the table and quietly ticked them off out loud.

“Let’s see, we’ve got… pain, anger, grief, depression, replacing one addiction with another, self-medicating, a convenient excuse that allowed me to reside in my fortress of solitude without constantly having to justify it to everyone because they’d be inclined to think ‘oh, she’s alone because she’s fat, you know, the poor thing’, and, my favorite, to spite my mother. Okay, maybe that’s not my favorite. Because food is fucking delicious. That’s my favorite. Plus, cardio sucks balls.”

Groaning, I crossed my arms on the table and rested my head on them, intending to collect my thoughts and get back to work. I woke up four hours later in a puddle of drool with Simon yammering in my ear.

“ ‘ello, Polly. Wakie Wakie!”

I raised my head and wiped the saliva off my face with my forearm.

“Ewe, Maude, that is so thoroughly vile. Were you out here all night?”

I nodded. “Don’t you even dare to ask me if I’m doing yoga with you today. I feel like grim death.”

He patted my head. “You look like it, too. But your excuses mean nothing to me. Shut up and go get your mat.”

I lowered my chin to my chest, peeled myself off of the chair and shuffled into the house, nearly smacking right into Tom as I opened our bedroom door. Brows raised, he pulled me inside and into his arms.

“Couldn’t sleep again?” I shook my head. “Want to talk about it?”

I shrugged, wishing I could talk about it, but knowing that anything I’d say would require additional context that I was not willing to supply. “Just another bout of insomnia brought on by chronic over analysis of every minute detail of my existence.”

“Oh, that’s all, is it?”

I feigned surprise. “What, that doesn’t happen to you?”

He grinned. “It does. Quite often, actually. But the sheer physical exhaustion that results from your incessant attentions seems to have solved that particular problem for the time being.” He ground his erection against me. “This problem, however, persists.”

“And it’s such big problem, too.” I bit his shoulder gently, then pulled back to look at his face. That beautiful, talented pink tongue was peeking out just the slightest bit from between his lips and I damn near lost my shit. He winked at me.

I poked him in the chest. “Well, Thomas, since you’re…up…why don’t you join me for some yoga?”

He rolled his eyes. “You mean you and Simon. I abhor doing yoga with Simon.”

I tilted my head. “Seriously? Why?”

He pinched my nose between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers, shaking gently. “Because he’s so much better at it than I am, that’s why.”

It was my turn for eye rolling as I walked to the wardrobe to grab a bra, pulled off my sleeping shirt and slipped the bra straps over my hands, up my arms and backed towards him. “Hook a sister up, wouldja?”

He lifted the cups up over my breasts, tweaked both nipples, then wrestled them back into place and licked my neck as he connected the clasps. I moaned and pulled away. After putting on a fresh shirt, I turned around and walked past him toward the door, slapping him on the ass as I went.

“Nice try, Thomas, but we’re still doing yoga. Now you put on a fucking shirt and get that ass moving.”

He followed me. “Sorry, no.”

“Fine. I’ll just keep my eyes closed.”

“You won’t.”

I sighed. “No. I won’t.”

Simon’s snarkiness was at orange alert status due to Tom’s presence, and watching the two of them compete was wildly amusing. Tom was right, Simon was better, but watching Tom do yoga shirtless was better than any porno I’d ever seen. A light sheen of sweat coated his skin, and when he moved into camel pose I made a…sound. A gasp? A moan? A dying whale noise? I honestly couldn’t label it properly.

Simon turned his head to the side so he could face me without breaking his pose.

“What the hell was THAT, woman?”

“Nothing. Got a cramp. Just a little cramp. I’ll be fine. Carry on.”

He moved his arms above his head, brought them forward and sat on his haunches. He looked over at Tom, then back at me. “Mmm hmm. Cramp. Thomas, if you wouldn’t mind concealing your torso beneath some clothing next time so your girlfriend won’t blow my focus with her inappropriate vocalizations I’d be ever so appreciative.”

Tom chortled. “I’m rather fond of her inappropriate vocalizations, especially when she’s blo…”

Simon put is fingers in his ears and chanted loudly. “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA…”

I grabbed my iPod and put my earbuds in, hoping music would distract me. It was a successful strategy for the most part, and I felt myself shifting into the transcendent space that was the reason for me deciding upon yoga for both physical and mental fitness. Tom almost ruined it when I caught him staring at me during my easy plow pose, but I managed to breathe through it. While doing my cool down stretches, I wondered if the intense sexual chemistry between us and the overwhelming desire it fostered was because we were so new to each other, or if it was always going to be like this. I smiled, recalling Diana Gabaldon’s brilliant prose in Outlander, when Jamie is addressing Claire.

“Does it ever stop? The wanting you?“ "Even when I’ve just left ye. I want you so much my chest feels tight and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.”

When I’d read it years ago, I thought it was beautifully written, but, you know, fictional. Filed under ‘shit that never happens in real life’. For once, I was totally okay with having been wrong about something.

We discussed our options for the holiday over a breakfast of the most mouth-wateringly delicious sausage, egg and cheese burritos I’d ever tasted. I wanted to work for a while, but that was shot down in a chorus of noes and ‘but-it’s-a-holiday’s. Our final destination of the evening would be the Nawiliwili Tavern, which was back on the other side of the island near the Marriott. It so happened that this was the first Saturday of the month, and that’s when Kaua’i’s gay community gathered there to celebrate with drink specials and, much to my wicked delight, karaoke. I needed to see Luke doing karaoke. It was inexplicable, but I just knew I NEEDED it to happen or I couldn’t go on with my life.

Since I’d yet to park my ass on a proper beach after an entire week on the island, I offered it up as my next suggestion. It was well received. Kalapaki Beach was a 14 mile ride from the house, but less than a mile from Nawiliwili Tavern. Available activities included volleyball, surf lessons, catamaran cruises, stand up paddle boarding, kayaking and body and boogie boarding, none of which I was interested in but were certain to keep my companions occupied if sitting on a lounge and reading all day wasn’t their idea of fun.

Simon got to work assembling a picnic lunch, Luke and Tom each had another burrito, and I hit the shower. Afterward, I sat on the bed wrapped in my towel as I waited to air dry enough so I could squeeze into my bathing suit. Tom walked in, bent down to kiss me, rammed his tongue in my mouth, then dropped his shorts and paraded around the corner for his turn under the spray.

I packed a small bag before dressing since we wouldn’t be coming back home…black Birkenstocks, a pair of hiking shorts, a black V-neck tee shirt, underwear, a bra, hair ties, my beach towel, Finders Keepers, Neuromancer, my iPod, my phone and my glasses. Just in case.

My bathing suit was still buried at the bottom of my suitcase, but it didn’t look any worse for wear when I shook it out. It was black, halter style, with cutouts along both sides and a built in strapless bra so I wouldn’t look like Saggytits McSaggerton. Anyone who claims to have natural double D’s with nipples that point anywhere other than down is utterly full of shit. Or maybe that should be udderly. I was still giggling to myself when I heard the shower turn off, and I quickly tossed my gauzy black cover-up over my head and slipped on the pair of flip flops I’d also unearthed from my suitcase.

Tom came out, dripping wet, towel slung low around his hips. I told him I’d meet him in the living room and used the half bath in the hall for my last pee so I wouldn’t have to watch him dress, then helped Simon gather beverages and put them in the cooler. We decided to take the car instead of the Jeep as it had actually room for all our stuff, including the folding lounge chairs we’d found in the garage. Luke volunteered to drive on the way there if I’d be the designated driver on the way back home tonight, which was fine with me since I knew I’d be sober. I figured he did as well and hoped he’d keep it to himself, then wondered how the hell I’d handle it when the subject finally came up. Because it would. It always did.

************************************************** The beach was surprisingly empty…by my standards, anyway. Try the Jersey Shore on July 4th…you’d have to get there at the crack of dawn to get a decent spot, and someone would fucking steal it if you went to get a snack or use the restroom. Perhaps it was because there was a lot more beachfront to choose from here, or maybe everyone was boating or something, but I was thrilled that I wouldn’t be spending the day elbow to elbow with strangers.

We managed to get everything in one trip and set ourselves up about twenty feet back from the shoreline. I unfolded my chair, pulled Neuromancer out of my bag and set it gently on the sand, then relieved myself of my cover-up. Simon whistled loudly when he saw my suit.

“Maude, you look like a 1950’s pin up model in that thing. Those cutouts…va va va VOOM!”

Tom had his back to me, but spun around upon hearing Simon’s comment. He looked me up and down, then again. And again. I made a mental note to do some lingerie shopping ASAP, then plopped down in my chair with all the grace of a drunken hippo on rollerskates as I released a long, triumphant sigh.

“Ass in lounge chair. Goal achieved. Sand trophy awarded. Beach level unlocked.”

Tom leaned down to whisper in my ear. “I have my own goal to achieve, you know…and it also involves that luscious ass of yours. What’s the optimal way for me to go about unlocking it, Maude?”

I closed my eyes, hung my head down, shook it, then looked up and spoke through gritted teeth. “God, do you have any idea how much I hate being beaten at my own game?”

“I do now.” He grinned, then ran down the beach and into the ocean.

Over the course of the day I read most of Neuromancer, and Tom bought a copy for his tablet to read along with me. We paused after each chapter to discuss, noting the parallels between Gibson’s text and modern technology as well as how much the Matrix had liberally borrowed from his work. I was coerced into playing volleyball, despite citing that my bathing suit and my boobs were not meant for such activities. My refusal to jump led to a stunning loss, at which point Luke and Simon decided to go paddle boarding. Tom and I walked the shoreline, quietly enjoying each others company as we left our footprints behind in the wet sand. He ran in front of me, squatted down and drew a heart with an arrow through it and our initials in it. I rolled my eyes, squatted and drew two stick people fucking doggie style. We giggled like ten-year-olds as we ran away from our creations.

Luke was sitting on one of the lounges scrolling through his phone, and Simon was setting up lunch on a blanket he’d spread out when we returned from our walk. His culinary skills were mind-blowing…pesto, tomato and fresh mozzarella sandwiches served on toasted garlic bread, a platter of paper thin prosciutto, and little cups of mascarpone and dark chocolate cream topped with white chocolate shavings for desert. I glared at Luke, who had eaten his entire meal with his phone in his hand.

“Um, are you working over there, Luke?”

He looked up, frowning slightly. “I know, I know. I’m the one who said ‘but it’s a holiday’. We’re still getting lots of queries from prospective clients, though. And I’m not sure how to handle them all.”

“I’ll help you with it, if you want. Tomorrow. Now put that away and enjoy the day.” I laughed at my unintentional rhyme. “Damn, I’m funny when I’m not even trying.”

Simon grunted. “If you say so.”

I flipped him off, got up from my spot on the blanket and returned to my lounge chair, Tom already draped over the one to my left. He took my hand, I closed my eyes, and dozed off straight away, wiped out from my lack of sleep the night before.

My nap was rudely interrupted by Tom, bent over and shaking my shoulder gently.

“Maude, love, wake up.”

My eyelids fluttered open and I smacked his hand away. “Yeah. Fine. Awake. Why?”

He tipped his head back and to the right. “We’ve been spotted. Just fans, probably. No paparazzi yet.”

I yawned, stretching my arms above my head as I sat up to look and take a head count. Five, so far, about twenty feet away, phones raised. Three adults, two children. Adults were women, children a boy and a girl. Luke was in front of them, back to us, holding up his hands, saying something that I couldn’t quite make out over the roar of the waves. Simon was hovering nearby, watching and waiting.

I hoisted myself out of the chair and stood next to Tom. I elbowed him in the side.

“Come on, cowboy. Let’s go do this.” I rooted in my bag, searching for my phone.

I felt his hand grasp my forearm, and I glanced up at him. He was staring at me, eyes wide. “Really? This is all right with you?”

I shrugged. “They’re just people. One smile from you will make their day, and then some. So, why not? Spend a few minutes, they’re happy, they leave, it’s done and we’re back to being beach bums.” He shook his head in disbelief. “What? Is it really so shocking that I practice what I preach?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I’m just not used to…?”

I interjected. “…having someone around who doesn’t think that they’re several rungs higher on the social ladder than the folks who are a huge part of what makes your successful career possible?”

“Oh, I like that. Let’s go with that.”

Twenty minutes later, the crowd had dispersed, Luke had informed me that I was a natural at wrangling fans as well as Tom and that this was my one true calling, and Simon was itching to move on to Nawiliwili Tavern before the crowds hit the beaches in hopes of getting a better view of the fireworks. I’d forgotten that sand was so intrusive and decided to shower before changing in one of the stalls provided, Tom keeping watch for me. I did the same while he rinsed and dressed. Simon and Luke were wearing matching Hawaiian shirts, which I thought was adorable, though the shirts themselves were hideous. Tom emerged wearing a tight white V-neck and tan shorts, and I wondered how in the hell I was going to make it through the evening without spontaneously combusting.

Simon, several yards in front of us with Luke as we all walked back to the car, began chanting, fists in the air. “KARaoke, KARaoke, KARaoke!”

Tom gave me a lopsided grin, eyes alight with mischief. “Care to wager on Luke’s participation again, Maude?”

“What stakes?”

“A late night dalliance of the oral persuasion, underneath the moon and stars? Winner is the receiver.”

“You’re on. Though that’s not really much of an incentive.”

His mouth dropped open. “Why not?”

“Because I’ll enjoy it just as much whether I win or lose.”

He sucked my earlobe into his mouth, then flicked it repeatedly with his tongue. “Are you certain that’s the case?”

“Not anymore.”

“Good.”

“Shut the fuck up, Tom. Terms?”

“Guess how many alcoholic beverages he’ll need to consume before he’s loosened up enough to sing in front of an entire bar. We each pick a number, one closest without going over wins. I choose five. Absolutely NO coercion or interference from either of us.”

“Fine. I’m going with two.”

He laughed. “Luke needs to be intoxicated in order to sing, period. He doesn’t even sing in the car, to the best of my knowledge. So very many drinks would be required for him to perform in public that he’ll likely pass out first. You won’t win.”

“Yes. I will. I’m already plotting all the things I’m going to make you do with that tongue of yours….”

“Damn.”

“Damn right.”

************************************************** From the outside, the Nawiliwili Tavern is an unassuming white building with green and red accents. Inside, it’s a quirky, homey, wood-laden watering hole with televisions everywhere, a horseshoe shaped bar, a Foosball table, a pool table, lots of neon and local artifacts aplenty. Karaoke happened right smack in the middle of all the action, and when we walked in the place was packed, with a grey-haired gentleman in a white tank top and Bermuda shorts belting out Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. There wasn’t an official dance floor, but that didn’t seem to hamper the crowd’s enthusiasm as they moved and shook in place.

Simon turned to me and grabbed my hands, shouting above the din. “Maude, I have found my people. And if they’re my people, I’m thinking they might just be your people, too. Are they your people?”

I nodded as he dragged me closer to the sound system speakers, still shouting. “LET US DANCE WITH OUR PEOPLE!”

Luke and Tom joined us after the song had ended and things quieted down as the next person browsed the available selections. Luke had two Blue Hawaii drinks, one for himself and the other for Simon, and Tom had something that looked like orange juice in a hurricane glass and what I assumed was a Coke for me.

He smiled widely and handed me the tumbler. “Nice moves there, darling. Since you’re the designated driver I brought you a soda. They don’t have Coke, only Pepsi. Hope that’s acceptable.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. “I guess I’ll just have to make do.” I kissed his cheek, then pointed to his drink. “Thank you. Now, tell me what the hell that thing is.”

He caressed the side of the glass, running his fingers over its curves. “This is a Tropical Itch. Rum, vodka passion orange juice and orange curacao. Bamboo backscratcher included at no extra charge.” He took a sip, then offered me one.

I shook my head. “I’m driving, remember?”

He pouted. “So there’s no chance of me getting you snockered and having my way with you?”

I snorted. “Riiight. Because you haven’t had your way with me already.” I grabbed his ass and he emitted a low hiss.

“Minx.” His tone seemed…off. I looked up at him, noting that his expression didn’t quite align with his words, either. He met my gaze, then shifted his eyes to the side for a moment, then back to me as he smiled softly. I knew instantly that the topic of my lack of participation in the consumption of alcohol had reared its ugly head while he and Luke were ordering drinks, and that he’d offered me a sip and posed his suggestive question in the hopes that I’d volunteer an answer to another question…the one he’d rather not have to ask.

It wasn’t as if I’d never been down this road before, but that didn’t make it any less awkward. And this time, I actually gave a shit about the reaction I’d get, which was terrifying but I decided it wouldn’t get any less awkward as time went on. And if I was lucky, he wouldn’t press me for too much background information.

Taking a deep breath, I put my hand on his forearm and looked into his eyes. “To answer your question…no, Tom, I don’t drink. Historically, alcohol and I make incredibly poor bedfellows, so I’ve made it a point to abstain. Hope that doesn’t pose a problem.” I swallowed and cast my gaze downward as he put a hand on my shoulder.

“How did you know…I…lord, you…I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to you seemingly reading my thoughts, though I certainly do adore it.” He kissed me briefly, his lips soft and warm, slightly sweet with orange and passionfruit juice. “I’m very sorry, Maude. When we were at the bar I initially ordered two Tropical Itches and Luke looked at me as if I had three heads and said ‘don’t tell me you’re such a dolt that you haven’t noticed that she doesn’t drink’, and apparently I am such a dolt because, I hadn’t. I asked if you told him why and he said you hadn’t even told him you didn’t but unlike me he actually possesses observational skills so he picked up on it and that it wasn’t anyone’s business but yours and if you wanted me to know you’d tell me, but…”

He paused, waiting for a response from me. I met his gaze but remained silent.

“I…Maude…of course it’s not a problem for me, not at all…but…is it a problem for you that I do drink? I suppose if it was you would have mentioned it or run for the hills already…shit, I…please, say something before I make an even bigger arse of myself, won’t you?”

“You aren’t making an arse of yourself, Tom. That’s an odd word, isn’t it? Arse. Doesn’t sit well on the tongue.” He raised his left eyebrow, smirking just the tiniest bit. “Other people’s drinking preferences are of no concern to me as long as they don’t impact my own existence in a seriously detrimental fashion.” I patted his bicep. “For the record, abysmal drunken singing is not automatically considered to be seriously detrimental. That’s a case by case basis kind of thing.”

He crossed his hands at the wrist and put them on his chest, right above his heart. “I am deeply offended that you believe my singing will be…abysmal.”

I shrugged. “I was actually referring to the lovely woman currently butchering ‘We Built This City’, which is bad enough when sung on key. But if you think the shoe fits, prove me wrong, Thomas. Get in the karaoke line.”

He leaned down, frowning as he touched his forehead to mine. “You okay?”

“Good, actually. I’ve been dreading that whole conversation. I always wind up feeling like a freak show because the general consensus is that if you don’t party there must be something really, really wrong with you.’”

“Again, my apologies. If you ever want to talk about it…”

“Someday. Thank you. And no need to apologize. By our own admissions, there’s still a ton of shit we don’t know about each other yet. Please, never be afraid to ask me questions, Tom. I’ll always answer as best I can.” I chuckled.

“What?”

“At least you didn’t ask me if it was because it’s against my religion.”

“You’ve been asked that?”

“Yes. Yes I have.”

“Might I inquire as to what your reply was?”

“Let’s just say the conversation went sideways. And that the person hasn’t spoken to me since.” His brow furrowed. “Turned out they didn’t appreciate being lectured on the impact of religion on personal freedom and how it was engineered from the start as a means of controlling the populous…”

Simon came bounding over and put his arm around my waist. “Time for singing, Maude. Let’s go.”

I raised both eyebrows and handed Tom my soda. “Um, okay…mind telling me WHAT it is we’re singing?”

He poked his index finger at my chest. “We will be performing one of my personal favorites – ‘It’s Raining Men’ by the Weather Girls.”

Tom threw his head back and laughed, then fished his phone out of his pocket and waved it at me.

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Film away, baby. I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back in the habit of tweeting more than once every hundred years.”

We sang, we danced, and by the end of the song most of the bar had joined in. After enjoying a round of applause, Simon and I found Tom and Luke in the crowd and pushed and shoved our way to them. I sucked down my entire soda and set the glass on the nearest table while Luke handed Simon a Tropical Itch. He was still nursing his first Blue Hawaii. Simon kissed his cheek.

“Your turn, love. Come sing with me.”

I grinned evilly at Tom. He shook his head. Luke handed me his drink.

“Watch this for me, will you?” I nodded, and Simon passed off his beverage to Tom. I pulled out my phone since I had a hand free, then realized I was way too fucking short to be able to get anything other than the heads of the people in front of me. Tom had set the rest of the drinks on a table, and took Luke’s from me and put it there as well. He held out his hand, palm up.

“May I do the honors?”

I handed over my phone. “Please do. I can’t see for shit.”

He took my hand and worked his way to the front of the crowd so he was directly in front of Luke and Simon, then moved behind me. When the first notes of the song hit my ears and I realized it was ‘I Got You Babe’ I believe I may have actually squealed with delight. Luke did Sonny’s parts, and Simon did Cher’s. It was adorable, the depth of their feelings for each other so blatantly apparent that it moved me to tears. I felt Tom’s arm slip around my waist, followed by him kissing the back of my neck. Looking around the room, I saw that nearly every other couple was entwined in some way, swaying to the music. Tom managed to capture it all, and as soon as the song ended I grabbed the phone and logged into Twitter.

My boss, Luke. My co-worker (and Luke’s fiancé), Simon. Karaoke USUALLY only makes me cry because the singing is SO very bad. #happytearstonightthough #igotyoubabe #tooadorable #thisjobgetsbetterandbetter

Tom whispered in my ear as he slowly lowered his hand from my waist to my belly. “Well, it appears you’ve won again, Maude. I’m anxiously awaiting the settlement of my debt.”

“You should stop talking, Thomas. Rest that tongue.” He pressed me back against him and I could feel him hard against my ass. I clenched, knowing his hand was in just the right spot to feel everything tighten. His groan almost made me come right there, in the middle of the bar.

“Maaaaauuuuddee.” He bit my neck, and as I turned my head to the side to allow him better access I noticed a woman a few feet away with her camera pointed in our direction. I waved, hearing her gasp as she quickly turned around. I chuckled, and Tom mumbled into my neck. “What’s funny?”

“Prepare yourself, dude. I just caught some woman taking pictures of us…which are totally going to show up on Tumblr any second now.”

“Good. I want the world to know you’re all mine.” He growled and laved the spot he’d bitten with his tongue, then released me as Simon and Luke approached us. “I do believe it’s time for my abysmal performance.”

I rolled my eyes and burst into song. “Let it go, let it GOOOOO…” He blew me a kiss and began perusing the song catalog.

Simon crossed his arms and tapped his foot. “He’ll do Piano Man. I guarantee it.”

I shrugged. “I have no point of reference for his karaoke habits, so I guess I’ll have to take you at your word.”

When Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ began to play, Simon’s jaw dropped and he patted his pockets frantically as he tried to locate his phone. “Well, fuck me. This is definitely not ‘Piano Man’! Shit, where is my phone?!”

I handed him mine. “Will you film so I can watch him, please?”

He pinched my cheek. “No, let’s make Luke do it. I can’t stand still during this song.”

Luke sighed, but obliged. Since Tom had taken center stage, so to speak, more people began to recognize him. Cameras were raised all around the bar, some patrons standing on tables to get a better view. I heard him singing, and was surprised at how good he sounded, but the majority of my focus was directed upon watching him move. His hips gyrating, pelvis thrusting, spinning with his arms extended, jawline and cheekbones so perfectly shadowed in the dim lighting of the bar. I was sure I heard ‘get Loki’ from somewhere in the crowd a few times, which made me grin like an idiot. It was all over before I could truly process what I’d just witnessed, the sound of the crowd clapping and cheering snapping me back to reality as I watched him bow deeply several times. As he strode toward me, everything else faded in to a blur, and all I saw was Tom. He picked me up and spun me around as if I was as light as a feather, then set me down and dipped me as he kissed me. His smile as he set me upright again nearly made me swoon.

“Well? Was it as terrible as you expected?”

I punched him in the shoulder. “Shut up, asshole. You’re well aware that you were fucking amazing.”

Simon gave my phone back. “Post it, Maude. POST IT.”

Oh look, it’s this guy again. Karaoke. Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’. You’ve never seen it done like this before, trust me. You’re welcome. :) #upallnightforgoodfun? #indeed

Luke’s phone dinged. He checked it, and suddenly his head lolled back, eyes closed, mouth open and tongue protruding.

Simon snorted. “Whoops, I think you finally did him in with that one, honey.”

Tom peeked at the screen over my shoulder and cackled. “Since it’s entirely your fault I expect you’ll be covering all of the funeral expenses?”

I wiggled my fingers and tickled Luke just under his armpit. He tried to maintain his composure but was unable to resist, finally dissolving into a puddle of giggles.

Simon shouted “IT’S ALIVE”, which earned him a huge hug and a rather lengthy kiss. I looked up and Tom, who firmly planted his hand on my back and walked me to the laptop that contained the song list.

“Your turn, my love.”

The left corner of my mouth turned down. “Um, you’re kind of a tough act to follow, you know.”

He shook his head. “I’ve heard you sing. No one will even remember what I did when you’re through.” He kissed my cheek and went to rejoin Luke and Simon, his phone in his hand, ready to record.

I considered Blondie’s ‘One Way or Another’ but decided it was a little too high for me in spots, thought about Adelle’s ‘Skyfall’, which was well within my range but not really a crowd pleaser, and then I found it. Amy Winehouse, ‘Back to Black’. A little raunchy at times, brutally honest and incredibly dark…rather like me. Perfection. It had been at least fifteen years since I’d sung in front of an audience of more than a few people in public, and they were forced to listen to me because we were in the grocery store or on a plane, but I was incredibly calm. I’d sung this one more times than I could remember, and I knew it inside out and upside down. I hit the button and grabbed the microphone, ready to roll.

Halfway through I noticed that the room had gone quiet, not a single sound to be heard other than the music and…me. I knew if I looked at Tom I’d fuck up royally, so I kept my eyes on the screen. When I finished the silence continued for what seemed like an eternity, broken suddenly by thunderous applause, whistles and cat calls. I bowed, then searched the faces around me, trying to find Tom. I saw Luke and Simon, but he wasn’t with them. I made my way over, head tilted, questioning.

Simon pointed to a nearby table. “Honey, you were so good the man had to go sit the fuck down. And I got it all on video. Luke filmed you, and I filmed Tom watching you. Your grandkids will thank me. Or throw up in their mouths a little. Something.”

I followed Simon’s finger, and there was Tom, sitting in a chair, legs spread wide, hands on his thighs, head down and looking at the floor. I approached him slowly, coming to rest between his legs. He wrapped his arms around my waist and buried his face in my stomach. I put one hand on his shoulder and the other on the back of his head, stroking his hair. I heard the first strains of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and turned to see Simon, mic in hand, doing his best impression of Rick’s dancing . I gently pried Tom’s arms from around me, slid down and squatted in front of him. His eyes were still directed at the hardwood floor. I leaned my head in and under in an attempt to get him to look at me.

“Hi there.” He raised his head ever so slowly, mouth turned up at the corners almost imperceptibly. His eyes wavered from angry to pained, aroused, and then to adoring as his emotions cycled. He stood, taking my hands and pulling me up with him, then let go so he could place them firmly on my shoulders as he stared at me.

His words came out haltingly, but firm. “I. Love. You.”

I reached out to cup his jaw and ran my thumb along his cheekbone. “And I love you.”

“That was both beautiful and terrible all at once, Maude.”

“Okaaaay…”

“There was so much pain in your voice…raw, naked, real pain.”

“Maybe I’m just a top-notch performer.”

He took two steps towards me, closing the gap between us, his hands still on my shoulders, eyes ablaze. “Is it wrong that I want to decimate whomever is responsible for that pain?”

I shook my head, wishing it was that simple. He let his hands slide down my arms until they were clutching my elbows.

“In addition to that, I’m overwhelmed with pride, joy, and, more than anything else, desire. Everything I’m feeling is a jumbled, incoherent mess and I need you in order to sort it all out. Right now. I need to be inside you, to feel you all around me, your skin against mine, flushed red by the pleasure we’re giving each other, enveloped by your scent…” His hands were shaking, eyes full of desperation. “I…I…just…I need you. I need you, lest I lose my fucking mind, Maude.”

It took all the willpower I possessed to not fuck him senseless right then and there. I felt in my pocket to make sure the car keys Luke had given me when we arrived were still there. Check. The vehicle was roomy enough, I thought, and the windows were darkly tinted to ensure the occupants could remain relatively anonymous. I pulled out my phone and shot off a quick text to Simon, who was just finishing up and basking in the accolades bestowed upon him by the bar’s patrons.

We’re taking a little ride. Won’t be long, about thirty or forty minutes max. Everything’s fine, Tom just needs some air. - XO, M

Talk about uncharted fucking territory. I pushed any negative thoughts aside, telling myself that yes, it is perfectly normal and absolutely possible to grow to love someone so deeply in such a short period of time that you began to need them as much as you needed…well, air. I took Tom by the hand and led him out to the parking lot, and he hesitated when I opened the door for him.

“Maude?”

“Get in the car, Tom.” He complied. I hopped in, put on my seat belt, turned the engine over, put it in reverse and backed out of the parking space. I forgot to brake as I tried to shift it into drive, corrected myself, and headed down the road to find what I was looking for. Two miles down, there it was. A large office complex, dimly lit and completely deserted as it had been when we passed it on the way to the bar. Since it was a holiday, I was reasonably sure it would remain that way. As I pulled into the lot Tom finally realized what I was up to. He unbuckled his seat belt, leaned into me and began licking the hollow between my collarbones as he wriggled his hand under the waistband of my baggy shorts.

“You need to stop that or I’m going to wind up driving the car right through the fucking building.”

He ignored me and began rubbing my mound with the palm of his hand while he slipped three fingers inside me. I drove around to the rear of the property and parked as far back as I could, right next to a privacy fence. He climbed on top of me as soon as I put it park, devouring my mouth, his free hand in my hair as the other worked me into a frenzy. I rode his hand, fingernails raking up and down the back of his white V-neck, screaming his name as I came. He opened the driver side door, rose up off of me and gracefully exited the vehicle, hand extended. I took it, and he helped me up. Neither of us spoke.

I opened the trunk, searched for our beach towels and spread all of them across the back seat, tucking the edges into the space between the top and the bottom of the bench. I didn’t think it was nearly long enough for him to stretch out, but we’d most likely be able to fit without having to leave the door open. I turned around to find him completely naked, cock standing proudly erect. I yanked my T-shirt over my head while he unhooked my bra, taking a breast in each hand, bending to suck on my nipples in turn as I wiggled out of my shorts and underwear. He stood back to look at me in the moonlight, fireworks sounding off in the distance and reflecting in his eyes, then moved closer to touch my face with his fingertips. He pushed me backward gently, motioning for me to lie down on the seat. I squirmed as I did, struggling to find a comfortable position, and when I finally stilled he bent over, entered the car headfirst, closed the door behind him, then crawled between my legs and up my body like a cat. He looked as if he wanted to eat me alive, and I was SO totally fine with that.

I could feel him hard against me, poised at my entrance. He stared at me, unmoving, waiting. For what, I didn’t know. His voice startled me when he spoke.

“Will you let me make love to you, Maude?”

I raised my hips, shifting so the head of his cock slid into me. “Please, Thomas. Fuck me.” He pulled back and out of my reach.

“No. I don’t want to just fuck you. I want to make love to you. Pleasure your body with the reverence it deserves.”

The realization that I had no idea what that actually meant hit me like a freight train. I panicked, then decided to opt for honesty.

“I don’t think I know how that’s supposed to work.”

“You let go and let me love you. That’s how it works.”

I frowned. “Still not getting it.”

He resumed staring at me, and it slowly dawned on me that what he so desperately needed was not just a physical connection, but an emotional one as well, wherein we focused on the way our bodies came together, instead of them just…coming. Two people becoming one. Possessing each other fully, completely. I twined my legs with his.

“Take me, Thomas. Make me yours.”

He thrust his tongue into my mouth as he sank into me, his lips finally closing over mine, our breath mingling. He propped himself up on his elbows, raised my hands so they lay beside my head, then wrapped his fingers around mine as he rested his full weight on me.

Our tongues danced around each other, pulling back, pushing forward, licking, mouths sucking, teeth biting. He lifted his head so he could meet my gaze as he began to move, a fraction of an inch at a time at first, finally pulling nearly all the way out then sheathing himself fully over and over again. I was panting, and the urge to clamp down on him was overwhelming, but I breathed deeply and concentrated on the way our bodies joined, fitting each other so perfectly, the way his cock felt when it was completely buried in my cunt, the way it dragged against my walls as he thrust in and pulled back again and again. This beautiful man above me, looking deep into my soul, making me feel like I was his entire world. And he was mine. There was nothing else, just us, skin on skin, pleasure emanating from where we connected, and I never wanted it to end.

I felt him twitch inside me, and our eyes locked. He sped up, full weight still on me, hips undulating like waves. My breasts moved with him as he rocked us, nipples rubbing against the hair on his chest, his pubic bone pressing deliciously against my clit with every thrust. The tension in my belly rose, setting me alight, the fire spreading throughout my entire body. When I began to shudder, he let go of my hands and slid both arms underneath me, raising my upper body to him, cradling me, one hand buried in my hair and holding my head, my name an invocation on his lips.

I wrapped my arms around him, clinging to him as if I were drowning and he was the only one who could save me, staring into his eyes as I…let go. It was almost an out of body experience, an orgasm that seemed to go on forever, involving every molecule that comprised the shell that housed my spirit. An explosion, bathing me in warm, bright light. And he was right there with me, coming and coming deep inside me, anointing our union with his essence.

I burst into tears, overcome with emotion. He moved his hands to my thighs, lifting me, and shifted us, still joined, to a sitting position so I was on his lap, holding me and rubbing my back as I sobbed against his neck.

“Shh, shh, I’m here, I’m here.”

The minutes ticked by, and as my storm subsided I lifted my head and brushed away my tears with my forearm, then placed my hands on either side of his face, leaning in close.

“I love you, Thomas. Sorry for falling apart. I…it’s…I…I’ve never experienced anything like what just happened before. Ever. Not even close. Thank you. For that. And for loving me.”

He rested his forehead against mine, eyes wet with tears of his own. “And oh, how I do love you. Please don’t be sorry, Maude. The fact that your feelings about me, about us, are so intense means…well, everything. And I’m the one should be thanking you. You gave me what I needed. You let me in. You let go. You gave me you. All of you.”

We held each other until I began tittering softly.

He cocked his head. “What?”

“Nothing.” He raised his brows at me. “Fine. It’s just…we’re having, like, this MOMENT and then I remembered that we’re naked in a fucking rental car in a parking lot on the 4th of July in Hawaii and that we totally ditched Simon and Luke at a bar like we’re a couple of fucking horny teenagers and…” I was laughing so hard that I thought I was going to pee my pants, and then I realized that I wasn’t wearing pants and that pushed me over the edge and I was crying again.

Tom’s laughter began as a low rumble in his chest, then escalated to full on guffawing, and soon enough we were both weeping and clutching at each other.

Once we could look at each other again without losing our shit, he grabbed the towel nearest to us and slipped it under me as I lifted myself off of him, then opened the car door to gather the clothes we’d strewn across the macadam. He dressed me, kissing me everywhere as he went. My ankles, the backs of my knees, my belly button, up and down my spine, my eyelids. When I wanted to return the favor he refused.

“If your lips even so much as graze my skin, we’ll never make it back to Nawiliwili tonight.”

Since he hadn’t even finished his first drink, I let him drive while I checked my phone. There was a text from Simon, sent five minutes ago.

Your forty minutes were up ten minutes ago, girlie. I’m a total slut for karaoke, but I don’t think my voice can take much more. Get your asses back here, please. – XO, S

I texted him back.

We’re on our way. Be there in two minutes. I’d say I’m sorry, but…I’m really not, so… - XO, M

He replied immediately.

Bitch. ;P – XO, S

We parked and walked in, hand in hand. Simon and Luke were chatting away with another couple, and as we approached them I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see the woman from earlier who’d been taking pictures of us. Tom looked at me, and I nodded and let go of his hand so he could go join Luke and Simon.

“Um, hi. I’m really sorry to bother you but I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about before. It was really wrong for me to take pictures of you guys when you’re just living your lives. That was a totally private moment. I mean, I wouldn’t want a stranger taking a picture of me and my boyfriend like that…anyway, I didn’t post them online or anything, and I deleted them off my phone. I was just really excited because I’m a big fan and…so, yeah. Sorry for being an asshole.”

I patted her arm and smiled. “Thank you for apologizing. And since you didn’t post them, you are absolutely not an asshole as far as I’m concerned. I completely understand how it happened. He’s just so damn beautiful, how could you not, right?” She laughed. “Want to meet him?”

She blushed and held up her hands. “Oh, no, no…I couldn’t, not after what I did, I feel like such a shit.”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on. And sorry, I forgot to ask…what’s your name?”

“Samantha.”

I shook her hand. “Nice to meet you, Samantha. I’m Maude.”

Her blush deepened. “I know.”

I brought her over to Tom, introduced her and took their picture, and when I told her it was fine to post it online she said she’d think about it but would probably have it printed instead. She thanked us and went back to her group of friends across the room. As Luke took a handful of glasses back to the bar, Simon pointed at me accusingly.

“You’ve had your fun, now I want mine. For the love of Christ, let’s get OUT of here already. And please tell me you’re a fast driver. Please.”

I nodded. “I am. But I’m not driving. Tom is.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oy. He drives like my grandpa. We’ll just have to fuck in the backseat on the way there then, I guess.”

Tom snickered, and I pretended to smack the back of his head.

Simon’s face scrunched up in disgust. “You didn’t. Did you?” I shrugged. “You did!”

Luke returned, brow furrowed. “Did what?”

Simon shook his head. “You don’t want to know. All I’m sayin’ is that I’m putting towels down before I sit in that car.”

I held up a finger. “Yeah. About those towels…”

#your light in the mist #chapter 12

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hobiboo1 · 7 years

Text

The DUFF

the duff au // college au // future smut // humour // basketball player jungkook // dancer jimin // best friends jin + taehyung

Your annoying neighbour and childhood friend, Jungkook, strikes a deal with you to help you get the attention of your crush, Jimin, if you help him pass his philosophy class.

warnings: sexual content, drinking, swearing, use of the words ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’

@hobijoon @baepsaetan @rimuslymoony @lordofassgard

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4;

Part 1:

It was no secret Kim Seokjin and Kim Taehyung were two of the best-looking humans to ever grace this godforsaken campus, and it was no secret that they were your best friends. The three of you were practically attached at the hip or rather… hips. See, the thing is, neither Jin nor Taehyung were always sex gods. In fact, Taehyung was bullied by an upperclassman for a little while in preschool and that upperclassman happened to be Jin, who turned out to be projecting his own experiences onto the little nerdy tater-tot that was the young Taehyung. It was after class that you heard a yelp coming from the boys’ bathroom and, being young and pure at heart, you didn’t hesitate to check it out- finding Taehyung shoved up against the sinks, Jin holding him by the collar.

“Hey!” You remember yelling.

“What are you doing in here, yucky girl?” Jin taunted, letting go of Taehyung.

“What are you doing with Tae-Tae?”

Anyway, long story short, you’ve been best friends ever since then. They’ve always had your back and you’ve always had theirs. The fact that they were practically angels on Earth, with features that looked like they were painted by the masters, didn’t really have any affect on you. You never felt like an odd one out or anything… you just felt normal. Of course, in high school, the occasional person made a comment about you being out of their league, but mainly people wanted to be on your good side to get to them, hiding their intentions with great skill while momentarily making you feel special. There are countless examples of girls befriending you to get closer to them. Those things almost always ended up the same way, with them in Jin or Taehyung’s bed. You were always too ashamed to tell either of them how used you had felt and they were both too oblivious to see it as that.

In university, however, you didn’t have a problem with any of that childish shit. Everyone here seems so much more… ‘chilled’. Even Taehyung chilled out, only sleeping with one, maybe two, girls a week and limiting his alcohol intake to the weekend only… usually. Your relationship with him has also… evolved. Occasionally, and you mean occasionally, the two of would hook up, but that’s because you’re both now mature adults and, as Taehyung told Jin, you are both capable of ‘handling that shit’. Not to mention how undeniably good it is, which is why you both come back to it. But when the morning comes, it isn’t a big deal for him to roll out of your bed and pad tiredly across the living room to his, well, to his room. They aren’t just your best friends; Taehyung and Jin are now your roommates, too.

At first, you and Taehyung tried to keep it a secret, knowing how Jin would react, you always planned on telling him, the three of you practically shared everything and it was always a three or nothing dynamic. You still recall his lecture after he walked in on you and Taehyung cuddling naked in your sleep in Taehyung’s room.

“What is this?” He asked in a shrill voice.

“Oh, fuck,” Taehyung grunted after realizing what Jin had just walked in. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes to clear the sleep.

“Jin?” You asked after you managed to force your eyes open.

“I swear to god I’ll move out if you ever, and I mean EVER, keep me up with your gross sounds and shit.” He exclaimed, throwing his hands around passionately, his face getting red. He suddenly disappeared, leaving you and Taehyung sitting there with the blanket over your bare chests, watching the door in confusion. “Absolutely DISGUSTING,” You heard him muttering to himself. “Here!” Jin yelled, throwing a bunch of condoms from various labels over the two of you after he returned. “I fucking hate you both.” He whined loudly, slamming the door behind him.

But, truthfully, the thing between the two of you did nothing to interfere with your friendship, if it did, you would have ended it long ago. Hell, neither of you blinked an eye when the other one brought a person home, unless it meant an interruption to your movie night or something. Taehyung was fucking infamous for forgetting plans. In fact, Taehyung was probably the most active supporter of your big ass crush, constantly urging you to talk to him or shoving you in his direction whenever you saw him around campus… which was pretty often due to your shared classes. And it wasn’t even that often that you hooked up, only every couple of weeks when you found yourselves alone at the apartment and were both in the mood. Usually you’d just take the opportunity to watch Bachelor in Paradise because Jin would always veto it, giving some sob story of how it brings back memories of the terrifying world of high school dating and being pressurized to be with someone within a pretty shitty circle of people. The story never failed to make you and Taehyung roll your eyes. So yeah, usually, you’d both just revel in the chance to catch up on the admittedly terrible show that, somehow, had you both addicted. Sometimes you’d pause to give him a blowjob or because his cuddles turned too touchy, his hand slowly falling to your breasts, his long fingers slipping under your shirt to give your boob a squeeze, but you never failed to finish the episode.

“Taehyung!” You yell, smoke coming out of your ears, your footsteps loud as you stomp angrily to his room. Swinging his door open you are faced with a familiar sight of him sharing his bed with a beautiful girl, usually you’d spare a friendly ‘morning’, but right now you are way too angry.

“Morning, sunshine,” Taehyung teases, the snarl on your face obvious to the freshly woken prick head.

“Shut the fuck up,” You snap, “sorry.” you smile at the girl apologetically, realizing, while this is normal for this household, it may not be very normal for her.

“No proble-” She says softly but gets cut off by Taehyung’s raspy morning voice.

“If you’re looking for your portfolio, it’s on the toilet in my bathroom.” He tells you, noticing the way you are looking around his room like a mad woman.

“Your bathroom? You know what, I don’t give a fuck,” Your voice trails off from him as you disappear into his bathroom. “I told you to get this back to me last night!” You yell loud enough for him to hear you, then appearing in the bedroom again. “I’m fucking late, ass bag.”

“Have a good day!” He shouts happily so that you can hear him after you leave his room, the door banging loudly behind you, causing Jin to yell from his room.

“Hey! Shut up, you pigs!”

6:30 am. You were already 10 minutes late. You practically kick open the fifth door of the morning as you exit your apartment in a frantic rush, your body vibrating with nerves and three cups of coffee and no food. But instead of stepping into the passage of your apartment building, you step into something, or rather someone. You walk straight into a hard chest, fumbling backwards and hitting your door, the pages from your portfolio flying everywhere. Looking up, you finally manage to see who the person is. Jeon Jungkook.Your annoying ass neighbor who literally followed you from your hometown to a university you chose specifically to get away from everyone except Jin and Taehyung. He was the typical charming boy who won over every parent’s heart. The boy who turned out cute but was too daft to form a coherent sentence unless it was to get into a girl’s pants, the boy who became a high school jock, leaving you and your once decent friendship in the dirt to hang out with the ‘cool kids’ and smoke weed in the locker rooms.

“Shit,” He mumbles under his breath, immediately crouching to start collecting your scattered pages.

“Of course the reason you followed me across the country was to do things like this. Why is it you get such pleasure from fucking up my life, Jeon?” You ask, your body now also crouching, close enough to his to get a whiff of his fresh cologne while you rush to collect your work.

“Oh come on, Y/N,” You prepare yourself for the comeback you can already hear in his tone, “you know that’s not the reason.” He hums in disappointment making you look up and into his daring eyes, dark and playful as always. “I couldn’t survive without you as my neighbor, you give me confidence.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?”

“You make me look good, babe.” He winks.

You scoff at his underhanded jab. Please, as if. You? Making Jungkook look good? Jungkook could barely make himself a bowl of cereal while you were working towards one of the top positions in your major.

“Whatever,” You hiss, grabbing the pages from his hands as you stand up. “Just try stay out of my way. Alright, Jeon?”

You don’t wait a second for his response before you’re rushing down the hall, stumbling over your feet as you try to organize your mess of work. Jungkook smiles fondly to himself.What a weird girl.

“You know I can’t stay away from you, Y/N!”

Seeing Jimin on campus took you by surprise, causing you to stumble back into the person behind you on the way out of lecture hall.

“Jesus Christ, woman,” The person grunted, shoving himself passed you. You couldn’t even get yourself to say sorry; you were way too focused on the head of blonde hair and the angelic smile that went with it.

What was he doing so early here on a Friday morning? Not that you’d worked out his timetable or anything… You shuffled behind one of the big shrubs just outside the door and watched as the boy walked across the quad from the opposite side, throwing his head back as his laughter rang itself all the way to your ears like a choir of church singers. He parted ways with the group of people he was walking with and started walking right in your direction. Realizing he was literally walking towards you, you dropped down in a panic, hiding from him before he could get a chance to see you. He, however, was soon enough standing beside you, clearing his throat. You slowly lift your head to look at him, your cheeks burning with desperate embarrassment. He smiled down at you with curiosity on his features and a slight tilt of his head.

“Oh, uh, Jimin! Hi!” You rush, standing up to your feet and dusting off your skirt, “I was just, uh, just relaxing after my lecture.”

“I’d say you’ve found a good spot,” He starts, his face friendly, but then he starts to reach one hand out to your face, causing you to get stuck on a breath. “But it looks like this bush wouldn’t like that.” He finishes in a joking, endearing tone, picking a leaf from your hair and flicking it to the side.

“Oh,” You laugh, hoping to god you don’t sound as awkward as you feel, and rake your hand through your hair to see if there are any more leaves.

“Hey, so I gotta run, but I came over here to ask if you wanted to come to a party tonight?” He asks, sliding his hands into the pockets of his chino shorts, which he matched with a white button up and red sneakers.

“A party? Yeah, I like parties. Go to them all the time.” You mentally slap yourself as soon as you say that.

Jimin chuckles, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen you and the boys around the town,” He smiles, his tone still interestingly jokey. You didn’t realize how airy he could be in actual conversation. “So yeah, my frat is throwing a party and… wait, you know my frat, right?”

“Yeah… I think so. Alpha Nu, right?” Of course you know his fucking frat.

“Yeah, that’s the one!” He grins and you get butterflies knowing you made him smile that way. “It starts at 7 but I’d recommend you only pitch around 9? That’s when things actually start getting fun,” He tells you, but cuts himself off, “that’s if you even wanna come, of course.” He smiles sheepishly. He’s so cute your heart might explode.

“Of course I do!” You let slip and clear your throat, “I mean, I’ll probably check it out after this other… thing… with, uh, Tae.”

Jimin’s eyes show a glimmer of excitement. Is this seriously happening?

“Awesome! See you there.” He smiles, squeezing your shoulder briefly before spinning around to leave. “Check you around, Y/N.”

Y/N, Y/N, Y/N. He knows your name.

Your smile practically splits your cheeks in half as you pull your phone out of your pocket and start walking. You start typing a message on your group chat with Taehyung and Jin when you walk into something hard again. And, telling from that voice you hear in your nightmares, it’s Jungkook again.

“We’ve really gotta stop meeting like this,” He smirks, his hands on your upper arms to steady you. You shake out of his grip (when did he get so tall??) and roll your eyes.

“You know,” You begin, “at first I was just kidding when I called you a stalker, but now I’m really starting to get weary about you.”

Jungkook laughs, turning his head to the side and, you’re pretty sure, checking out the ass of the girl who just walked past you. “Um, excuse me?” You click your fingers in his face. “Good to see your attention span hasn’t increased one bit since high school.”

Has she always been this funny? “I’ll have you know, my attention span has always been fucking great. I could look at that ass all day.” He says, tilting his head to get one last glimpse of the girl.

You scoff and roll your eyes again. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Not really, he thinks, but he isn’t quite ready to walk away. “Why were you smiling like an idiot at your phone when you walked into me?”

You think for a second if Jungkook is worth the story, the words will probably slide down the water slide in his mind and right out his ear. But still, you can’t help but talk about Jimin whenever you get the opportunity. “I’ll have you know, I was just asked out by a very cute guy.”

“Jimin?” Jungkook frowns.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s what supposed to mean?”

“That look on your face. You’re not always that ugly.”

Jungkook laughs like you’re a friend, teasing him like friends do. Which only has you rolling your eyes for the third time in the course of 3 minutes. “Just tell me, fuck head!” You punch his chest lightly.

“Ok, ok,” He raises his hands in defeat. “It’s just, I’m pretty sure he has a thing for Jin… I think he was talking to you because you’re the D.U.F.F.”

“What the fuck is ‘the D.U.F.F’?”

“You’re not serious are you? You’ve been the D.U.F.F since those friends of yours hit puberty.” Jungkook says, looking genuinely confused.

“I’m being serious, Jungkook, what is that?”

“The designated ugly fat friend,” He reveals, his tone normal as if he didn’t just say what he did.

“Excuse me?” You ask, bitterness on your tongue as you boil over with anger.

Jungkook immediately starts to look defensive, his hands coming up into the air once more in surrender. “Look it’s not a big deal it just means-”

“It’s not a big deal that you just called me fat and ugly?” You yell whisper as a professor walks past you.

“No, I didn’t call you that!”

“That’s exactly what you said, Jean Fuckhead.”

“The D.U.F.F is just the least attractive friend in a friend group,” He says like that makes the whole thing mean nothing.

“Oh, so you’re just saying that I’m the ugliest one amongst my friends?” You ask spitefully.

“Yes, yes, that’s all I’m saying!” He smiles, relieved you finally ‘get’ what he’s saying. But when he sees your face contorting with even more anger (which he didn’t think possible at this point) he realizes how that, too, came out. “No, I mean, you’re not ugly, you’re just not as attractive as Jin and Taehyung.”

You stay silent for a little bit. It’s pretty much impossible to be more attractive than Jin or Taehyung. “Ok… so, that has nothing to do with Jimin asking me to his party.” You try convincing him and yourself. Of course, it is very much public knowledge that Jimin is bi, and… Jin is obviously very hot… and he tutors Jimin… But then why would he ask only you? Why wouldn’t he ask you to invite Jin as well?

“Y/N,” Jungkook sighs condescendingly and you want to kick him in the nuts, “that’s what the D.U.F.F does… they’re the gateway friend to their hotter friends”

“Shut up, and would you stop calling me the fucking D.U.F.F?” You push yourself past him. “That isn’t even a thing.”

Jungkook stops you with a strong hand around your wrist. You let out a breath and turn to look at him, “What?”

“I wasn’t trying to insult you-”

“Save it, Jeon.” You wiggle your wrist from his grip and turn to walk away, putting both your middle fingers up to flip the dickhead behind you off.

Jungkook smiles, funny.

You unlock your phone again and see the message you started typing:

To ‘mains’:

JIMIN JUST INVITED ME TO A PARTY!!

You groan and delete it, stuffing your phone back into your pocket grumpily.It was always a mystery to you how Jungkook managed to be so popular. Like, college is full of people. Thousands of them. It’s pretty difficult to manage to get people to give a shit about you, yet, here he was. Apparently he was ‘hot’ or something. To you, it was all bullshit. You reckoned someone like Yoongi, the overwhelmingly talented music major and Jungkook’s friend (he never could be friends with guys his own age, could he?), should be the name everyone knew, not someone who could bounce a ball on a court and had abs and was… ‘good looking’.

“Good looking my ass,” You grumble through a mouth full of salad.

“Who’s licking your ass?” Jin asks, faking a face of utter terror as he plops down next to you at your tiny kitchen table.

You laugh, already feeling a sense of relief from your otherwise shitty day. “No one’s going near my ass with a ten foot poll, I tell you.”

“Oh, don’t lie,” Taehyung suddenly chimes in, entering the kitchen to scour the fridge.

“Yeah, we both know you’re kinky as fuck, dude.” Jin agrees.

“Have you met yourself??” You throw yourself around on your chair to ask Taehyung.

“Hey, I’ve never denied I’m kinky.” Taehyung says casually and takes a gulp of his water before joining you at the table.

“What are your plans for tonight?” You change the subject.

“Gotta tutor,” Jin tells you, he looks sad about it so you give his hand a sarcastically reassuring squeeze.

“At least you’re making money. You, Tae?”

“We’re going to the opening of that art show,” He reminds you.

“Oh shit…”

“Oh, how the tables have turned,” Jin shakes his head with a shit eating smile. “Finally, Taehyung shall feel the burn of being forgotten by one’s so called best friend.”

You laugh but stop when you meet Taehyung’s eyes and realize he’s serious. “Is there something important that’s come up?”

“Uhm,” You stutter, trying to figure out how to tell him the boy you’ve liked for months invited you to his party and that it completely took up all your thinking capacity… that and Jeon Jungkook’s stupid face. Pffft, ‘the D.U.F.F’. What does he think this is? High school?

“Cat got your tongue?” Jin muses.

“Not the time, Jin.” You sing, not sparing him a look as you let Taehyung’s slow burning glare eat you alive.

“Spit it out, Y/N, at least be honest.” Taehyung says plainly, his words leaving a sting.

“See, the thing is,” You twiddle your thumbs on the table, “Jimin may or may not have invited me to a party at his frat tonight…”

“JIMIN?!” They both exclaim at the same time, well, Jin more squeals, but anyway.

“Yes,” You whisper, trying but failing to contain your smile.

“Permission granted,” Taehyung grins.

“Like you don’t ditch us all the time,” Jin says in your defense, hitting Taehyung over the head.

Taehyung has no witty response so he just moves on, “What are you gonna wear?” He asks excitedly, the crazy fashion major side of him shimmering across his eyes.

“Oh, no, no, no,” You quickly dismiss that notion, “I am not getting all dolled up.”

“So basically you’re gonna go out with your crush, the one you’ve liked since practically day one, in mom jeans and a faded shirt?” He asks with crossed arms.

You look down at your pale blue shirt and paler high wasted jeans and then back at Taehyung who is judging your outfit obviously.

“Yes,” You say simply.

“That’s what you’re going to the party in?” You seem to hear a fly or something of the sorts buzzing behind you as you walk down the passage towards the elevator. Jungkook sighs, “Y/N, don’t ignore me, Jesus.”

You throw your head back and let out a groan loud enough for him to hear. “I’m not really up for one of our fun games of ‘insult Y/N.” You say, turning around to come face to face with Jungkook.

You take a secret glance down at what he’s wearing- a cameo jacket that comes down to his hips which he wears over a slightly longer grey shirt that comes down over his black jeans, slightly baggy towards the thighs and go skinny into his black Doc Martins. Not bad,you think for a second before remembering who you’re talking to.

Jungkook laughs, “Relaaax, babe. You look… nice.” He lies.

“Look, I know that living opposite one another means it’s inevitable we’ll run into each other, but three times a day is a bit excessive, don’t you think?” You question.

“You’ve been counting,” He winks.

You give up and turn around to continue your way to the elevator but hear his jogging footsteps behind you, and he is walking next to you within seconds. “You’re going to Alpha Nu’s party, correct?” He asks.

“Yes,”

“Great! I can give you a ride.”

“Uh, I’m ok thanks.”

“I’m not getting drunk, I promise.”

“Fine,”

The song playing off Jungkook’s phone in the car reminded you of your childhood, it was the one that played at your first high school dance. Jungkook had already started hanging out with the cool kids, but he hadn’t completely started ignoring you yet. You remember standing at the back of the hall, watching everyone else dance. You felt so awkward. Jungkook had come up to you and asked if you wanted to dance as this slow song started playing. That was before he’d gotten tall and buff and good at sports, that was before he became an asshole who spent his days insulting you despite being able to do literally anything else. You doubted Jungkook even remembered this song. He probably doesn’t even remember that night.

“You really think this outfit is that bad?” You ask.

He glances your way for a second and smirks, his face being lit up by passing streetlights. “I mean, it’s not great. You’re going to this party to impress Jimin, right?”

“’Impress’ is a strong wor-”

“The least you could have done is put on a black dress or something like that, black dresses drive guys crazy, especially with red lipstick.”

“I’m not trying to sell myself to him,” You cross your arms.

He laughs, the veins in his hands visible as he changes gears. You look out the front window instead. “You always take things so seriously. I’m not saying you should ‘sell’ yourself to him. I’m saying you should work on how you present yourself to him.”

You silently take in what he’s saying, but you don’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know you internalized what he said.

“You do that?”

“We all do,” He answers. “I mean, like us normal sexually active people.” Of course he had to add that.

“Excuse me, I’m sexually active.” You laugh awkwardly; knowing full well the last time you got laid was 1 month ago when you climbed into Taehyung’s bed at 4am after studying all night. You were 100% sure you had chocolate all over your mouth and were wearing your old gym shirt from high school and your period underwear and he was wearing those strange posh silk pajamas. So that doesn’t really count. Taehyung doesn’t really count. And the last time you hooked up with… someone else… was 3 months ago…

“Oh yeah, when was the last time you got laid?”

“Recently,” You lie. “Look, I don’t know what your obsession with me is all about but-”

“You know what, I’ll help you,” Jungkook suddenly announces proudly.

You stare at him as he busies himself parking about a block from the frat. “What?”

He turns the engine off and turns to you with a look of pure self-satisfaction on his face. “I’ll help you get Jimin’s attention.”

“I don’t need your help,” You scoff.

“Yes, you do. Come on, Y/N,” He almost sounds like he’s pleading. “You know I know what I’m doing. Jimin won’t know what hit him. I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

He can’t just want to help you from the goodness in his heart. He doesn’t have a heart. “Why the fuck are you being so weird, Jeon? What do you want from me?”

He looks like you’ve just insulted his entire family tree and brings his hand to his chest in pain. “Can’t I just help you out… as a friend?”

“Oh please,” You scoff. “friend is a very strong word.”

“What do you mean, babe?” Jungkook frowns, “We’ve been friends since primary school.”

You roll your eyes and don’t answer. “Why do you want to help me get Jimin’s attention, dude? Why are you so weird?”

“Nice to know this is how I’ll get treated when I try and offer help-” He stops when he sees your unamused face. “Ok, I may be struggling a bit with my grades and I know you know your shit so, like, I was thinking you would… help… tutor me, or something, I don’t know…” He rubs his neck awkwardly.

So that’s it. “I see,” You hum. “How interesting.”

“Oh, come on, don’t give me that look,” He shakes his head. “I’m kind of in shit at the moment. I was just thinking we could do a friendly a trade. I’ll help you get dick and you help me up my grades before the end of term.”

“For the last time, I don’t need your help getting dick!”

“Yeah but what about Jimin’s dick?” He tries to convince you. Is he that dumb? Does he not understand humans at all?

You’re about to tell him to fuck right off when someone bangs against the window next to Jungkook making both of you jump. Jungkook looks down for a second after seeing who it is and you hear him mutter ‘fuck’. You don’t see whom it is but he takes a breath and turns on the engine to roll the window down.

“Hey, baby,” One of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen says sensually and takes his head into her hands and you notice her perfectly done yellow nails with small cherries on them. She places a lengthily smooch on his lips and you nearly puke. She finally lets go of him with a smack of her lips just as you were about to get out of the car and avoid the sex scene as well as your conversation with Jungkook.

“Why were you sitting in the car for so long?” She pouts and then finally notices you. “Who is this?” You kind of want to laugh out loud.

“Oh,” Jungkook rubs his neck, “this is one of my friends. We were talking.”

“Ok, well anyway,” She completely brushes you off and opens the door to literally pull him out, “can we go now?”

Jungkook sighs, “Hana, I’m having a conversation right now.”

You watch them but the car cuts off their heads but you can practically hear her scowling. “Whatever.” She says and walks off back towards the party. You laugh to yourself as she flicks her long red hair over her shoulder.

“She seems like she just walked out of a high school movie,” You can’t help but say as Jungkook climbs back into the car.

Luckily he doesn’t get insulted, he just laughs but it sounds tired and not like his usual boyish laugh. “Tell me about it.”

“Your girlfriend?”

Jungkook closes the window and door and turns the engine off again before answering, “Ex.”

“Ah,”

He turns to you and smiles, “What do you think about my proposition?”

“We still on that?”

“Y/N, you’re literally wearing a shirt with a zombie on it.”

“Everyone loves zombies,” You say like it’s obvious.

“Ah yes, and the very sight of the gruesome and oddly large breasted creature will definitely cause Jimin to pop a boner from the other side of the room.”

“That’s the plan,” You say sarcastically and open the door to finally walk away but you hear Jungkook opening and closing his door and once again he has no trouble catching up to you.

“Ok, here’s the deal. How about you see how things go tonight and if my idea at all entices you, you know where I live. Sound good?”

You reach the lawn in the front of the big house and start making your way through the scattered crowds of people.

“Y/N,” Jungkook puts his hand on your shoulder and makes you stop to look in his eyes and he actually looks sincere. “Sound good?”

“Yeah, yeah,” You smile, knowing you aren’t promising him anything except to think about it.

“Do you want me to get you a drink?” He grins.

“I’ll survive.”

Ever since Jungkook brought up the stupid concept of the D.U.F.F, you feel like that’s all you can see. You haven’t seen Jimin since you got here. You’ve greeted people and taken one or two shots with some friends from class, but you find yourself leaning against one of the walls in the large living space. You watch the groups of people bitterly.

Stacy from English? The D.U.F.F.

Adam on the basketball team? The D.U.F.F.

Jimin? The person people go through D.U.F.Fs to get to.

Jungkook? The person people go through D.U.F.Fs to get to. Also the man you currently want to kill.

Seriously, how could someone be so immature? With those big teeth and his cocky smile. Did he stop growing in the first year of high school? Well, obviously not physically because he’s tall and strong and has a thick neck and a nice jaw… and he’s dumb. Very dumb and right now you hate hi-

“Y/N!”

Jimin. Shit, you forgot you were even here for him, your brain was so consumed by all this D.U.F.F shit. It’s better than brooding over not getting any attention from the man that invited you, you reckon.

“Hey, Jimin,” You smile, suddenly worrying if you look normal or like a sad, drunk girl as he leans himself against the wall next to you.

“Enjoying the party?” He asks, his eyes piercing as a small smile plays on his lips. His arms are crossed, the lighting dim on his sharp features and his hair slightly curled and hanging over his brows. Shit, he’s sexy.

“Uh, y-eah,” You giggle. Why the fuck are you giggling?

“Let’s go get a drink,” He announces, grabbing you by your hand and pulling you through the people. You watch where your bodies are connected in wonder, your skin is burning.

He let’s go as soon as you reach the kitchen and you catch yourself nearly reaching out to take his hand back into your own. His smile is blinding as he spins around to grab a bottle of vodka.

“Why do we get drunk so often?” He asks then laughs, bringing the whole bottle to his lips. He puts his hand on your shoulder; his eyes glisten with something foreign and distant, but happy nonetheless. “Isn’t everything pointless?”

You don’t know how to respond, he didn’t exactly say the lightest thing, and his angelic face and sparkling eyes contrast to the dark concept, but he waits for you to say something. “Wow…”

Jimin takes your answer well and soon he’s grinning again and thrusting the bottle into your face. “You know,” He starts as you take a sip of vodka, “there’s something about you that makes you easy to speak to.”

His unintentional compliment makes you blush, even though he’s only said 10 words to you. Suddenly he’s taking the bottle from you and taking your hand again, pulling you out the kitchen door and towards the steps, causing you to almost fall down them. He sits down and drags you down with him, his warm hand still holding onto yours. The evenings are getting colder and his long exhale turns into a subtle white cloud. You shiver and rub your arms, you obviously get nervous around Jimin, but right now you might explode.

“You know,” He sighs, “I’m not sure if drinking while I’m sad makes me feel better, or if it just makes things a thousand times worse.”

Your eyes widen and you straighten your back, “You’re- you’re sad about something? What’s,” You clear your throat, “what’s up?”

“I want to dance, Y/N. I want to dance so bad, that’s what I want to do with my life, but I don’t think my parents will ever talk to me again if I do something as ‘reckless’ as that. Plus, there’s something else driving me a little crazy right now-”

“Jimin, get your ass in here,” A man emerges from the kitchen, pulling Jimin up by his shoulders, causing his hand to fall from yours. He’s pulling Jimin inside and he only spares you a glance to share one of his dazzling smiles before disappearing from you.

So quickly, so quickly was he here and then he was gone. How could you ever expect him to want to spend the night with you? How could you let yourself get your hopes up like that? You’re just one of the many people he invited to his party. You groan and look out over the lawn and watch as some people stumble down the relatively empty street. From the corner of your eye you spot figures, when you look you see a man pushing someone up against a tree, engaging in some intense make out session. When you notice the familiar tall, firm frame broad shoulders, you know it’s Jungkook. You nearly puke. Of course it’s him. He looks like he’s swallowing the poor girl whole.

You push yourself up from the steps and make your way over to him, it takes a few pats on his shoulder for him to even notice you’re there.

“What?” He groans when he sees you, his breath coming out in pants from suffocating the girl unfamiliar to you.

“Ok,” You say.

“Ok?” He frowns, looking impatient, his hands still playing with her breasts. You visibly gag and that makes him chuckle. He squeezes them and grins, “What?” Squeeze. “What do you want?”

“I agree to the,” You glance to the girl who is occupied with kissing his neck, you whisper, “deal.”

“Seriously?” He looks excited and he looks cute with his eyes all-wide like that.

“Yes,” You say already turning around to walk away.

“Wait, Y/N!” He calls after you. “Where are you going?”

“Home!”

Jungkook looks down at the girl he has pushed up against the tree, he looks at her large breasts and groans, “Look, I gotta go.” He steps away from her rather unapologetically and runs after you.

When you see him next to you, you let out a noise of annoyance. “Can’t get enough of me?”

“I told you I’d be the designated driver.”

#jungkook scenario #bangtanbuds #bangtanwriters-net #busanboysnet #kwriterskollection #jungkook smut #jimin scenario #jimin smut #bts scenarios #jungkook imagines #jimin imagine #featuring:#taehyung #jin #hoseok #yoongi #namjoon

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edsrich · 6 years

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I Walk The Line - Reddie [ 01 ]

Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak is finally enrolled into the Boarding School that he had been fighting for years just to get in. However, not all is what it seems between these walls, full of shadows and unsolved mysteries that dangle on loose threads. Derry Academy has a dark secret that is yet to be revealed and the more Eddie finds out about the unknown, more grains of sand fall to the depths of the hourglass.

Warning(s) For the Whole Series: Rape, self harm, sexual assault, depression and death.

A/N: Please ask in my inbox to be tagged in a taglist for this series if you wish :)

Playlist ( X )

Part 1 | 2 (Soon)

"And this is your room, Edward."

"It's uh, Eddie. My friends call me Eddie."

Mr. Maguire lifted a single key that was attached to a metallic hoop, it hanging between the Principal's wrinkled fingertips and scraping at the thin air. Other students passed, giving almost shocked looks as the two stood in front of his now new dorm room.

"Well, Eddie, I'm sure you'll be a good student here at Derry Academy however, I'm going to go over the dorm rules with you. Does that sound good Eddie?" Mr. Maguire spoke with his monotone voice, his eyelids slitting his eyes.

Eddie could only nod, feeling very intimidated by how his new Principle said his name in such a broad manner.

"One, in your dorm you shall not play any loud music after 8pm. Two, you shall not have lights on past 11pm. If you are going to study, you should use your desk lamp and not your main room lamp. Three, you only leave your room for the bathroom after 9pm and you shall not stay in other dorms overnight; weekends are an exception." Mr. Maguire paused before tilting an eyebrow down at Eddie, "Do you understand, Eddie?"

"Yes Sir, I understand completely." He tried to keep his voice stable, however his tone only quivered all over the place.

A smirk toyed at Mr. Maguire's lips as he then nodded at Eddie's hands, Eddie caught on straight away and held his hand out before his Headmaster who placed the key into his palm. Eddie quickly closed his fingers around the silver key, tightening it between his fist.

"With that in mind, this is now your room Eddie. I expect you to design it to your liking; this room is already slightly altered as someone used to live here before you. Although, you can't alter the wall colours."

"Oh, thank you Mr. Maguire!" Eddie grinned, pulling his pastel pink polo down by the collar to allow air to flow through.

"No problem, kid." The Principal's facade faded slightly as something flashed through his eyes, but with a clear of his throat the facade was quickly hardened. "If you need me, I will be located in my office. Have a good day."

Before Eddie managed to muster the words to even form a goodbye, the Principle of Derry Academy had already legged himself down the halls of the boys dorm. Eddie sighed shakily, pulling his suitcase along beside him in his other hand, stopping it right in front of his wooden door that had a chalkboard before him that was nailed deeply into his door along with a stick for him to write his name upon. The chalkboard itself looked as if it had been scrubbed at many times with faded skids of white crossing over each other's paths. Eddie's fingers lifted away from the suitcase handle and grabbed at the thin stick of chalk and that was then he wrote his name onto the black surface. He simply wrote the name 'Eddie' with a smiley face right next to his name and a few squiggles here and there to let his personality shine through his name introduction to those who walked by.

Eddie placed the chalk back down on the small indent of a shelf before lifting the key to room 27 and unlocking his door to be revealed to what was before him, his new room.

The room was quite bland, as if it had been cleared- but some aspects shown that someone had been living here before his presence was. Such as how the bookshelf was half full with a variation of different colours and sizes with some more thick and some more slender. Even how the bed that was cramped into the corner of the room and how it had a plaid bedding with specifically three pillows and the fourth tucked at the end as if it were a foot rest for when the boy that lived in this room previously slept.

Something about this place was off, though; Eddie couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Eddie walsted his way inside with his brown suitcase rolling behind him, chipping at his heels with discomfort. A ragged sigh left his lips as his feet sunk into the rug below him which too must've been something that the person previously had in the room as an accessory to give a more homey feel.

His hand dropped from the suitcase as he placed it up against the pale wall and resting against a few cracks that had surfaced past the thin paint which showed its age just by that small detail of a crack. Eddie then walked forward, going over to the bed and bouncing down on it to test its comfiness.

It wasn't comfy.

Eddie could practically feel the springs through the thick blanket sticking up into his skin, causing his eyes to narrow as he quickly became unimpressed.

He was already starting to regret stepping his foot through the door of this school. He recalled how his Mother actually was hesitant to let him go after forcing him to go here herself; all because she was scared of him around other kids his age and staying under the roof of other girls. Eddie rolled his eyes at the thought.

Eddie was glad to be here though, he was finally away from home and from the tight grasp of his Mother, he finally felt independant just being away from her. The truth was that Eddie's Mother was far too protective over her son; to the point where Eddie couldn't leave or sleep without taking his medicine and wasn't allowed to eat certain foods for some odd reason. Eddie hated it, but he knew that he needed to take the medicine.

As he thought about his medicine, he stood up and walked over to his upright suitcase and quickly flattened it against the dark oak wooden floorboards and pulled the zipper across to unravel its insides. Inside of his suitcase was mostly matching pyjama sets and a few weekend clothes that he could rewear; most of the things inside contained medicine, decor and some personal belongings to keep him occupied.

Eddie huffed, grabbing his medicine packet which was sealed tightly at the top and placing it on top of his chest of drawers- quickly organising them after taking them out of their clear plastic bag.

Each was labelled with when they should be took, for example, the bright orange packet had the words '9pm / 7am' stuck to them from his Mother, alike to others but with different times. Each capsule holder was organised with what time they were to be took so that it was easier for himself somewhat.

With that done, he knelt next to his open suitcase once again to start packing away his personal belongings neatly just as he always would. His underwear kept tidy inside of his top drawer, his pyjama set collection and in the final and bottom drawer he kept his usual clothes and soon to keep his uniform for school days. Eddie sighed at himself, shutting over the final drawer and resting his frame against the wooden chest.

Did he really want to be here? He had friends back at home that he would barely see until Christmas at this rate and who was to say that he'd make friends at this school? Bad vibes were written all over it.

The only good thing that was coming out of all of this was that he didn't have to have his Mother breathing down his neck at every possible moment. He felt free, but at the same time these walls still enclosed him.

The air that surrounded him in his own dorm started to thin; becoming congealed. For some odd reason also, Eddie's small brown thorns along his arms stood on ends along with the goosebumps that strengthened the strands upwards.

Eddie didn't feel as safe as he probably should within his own dorm.

Maybe it was something about the aura of this place- afterall, it was quite an old building from the 1800's. Who knew what lurked these halls.

He hummed a soft tune, setting up his boom box up against the side of his chest of drawers and setting his stack of mixtapes next to it- each one labelled different to the other. Yes, he labelled his mixtapes based on certain moods and vibes that he was looking to listen to, some even labelled just as genres. It was out of habit, he couldn't help it.

What was also left in the room was in fact a large grandfather clock that was snug into the corner of the room and ticked itself to and thro by each passing second. The clock currently struck itself at 20 past 7 in the evening.

Tomorrow was going to be his first official day.

Eddie clung the metal key in his grip as the thoughts of his uniform and schedule ran over his brain, as he now realised that he should probably go and grab what was his from the office- which was probably downstairs where he came in through the dorms.

Bonus points: he also stayed on the first floor, so it wasn't hard to find his way around.

With making sure his keys were intact with him, the small boy walked towards his dorm door and opened it up- walking out as it shut itself behind him. Other male's of his age walked past his door and up and down the corridor and getting lost into the shadows of the night.

Eddie walked by his lone self, not making eye contact with the unusual eyes that scanned over him. They could probably already tell that he was the new boy, hopefully that wasn't a bad thing. But from what Eddie had seen so far, he couldn't tell; this place gave him a bad vibe. With each step that he took against the oak wood creaks beneath him, he felt like an outsider even more. Everyone here already seemed to have cliques, especially since groups of either those in two's, three's of four's were just staring in confusion.

Please, don't let me be an outcast again. He thought.

His feet strode to the staircase and eventually he allowed himself to tiptoe down each step; each one creaking which put Eddie on edge. Again, this was another reminder to how old this building truly was.

One person shoved themselves into Eddie's side as they passed on the stairs, causing the hand railing to stick into Eddie's waist- causing a subtle squeak to surpass Eddie's parted lips.

When Eddie glanced to the side, he saw a slightly older and much taller blonde with a scraggy mullet glare at him with a sickening smile of some sort- his three other friends trailing alongside him. One more on the chubbier side with a few pimples sporting to his face and dark brown thorns sticking up on his head, showing that his hair was gelled a bit too much. One of the other boys was rather thin and was the smallest out of the boys that were stood, he was more of a platinum blonde and his face was sort of scrunched up from his sour expression and oddly pale. Finally, a lanky tall boy with wavy brown strands of hair that almost danced at his shoulders, his smile wasn't as teasing however- but more odd, it was hard for Eddie to specifically pinpoint an emotion to it. He did know that it was weird, however.

"You're next, girly boy! " The mullet boy snickered, his friends too laughing.

Eddie felt as if they knew something that he didn't know, yet. His chest tightened as his thoughts were swarmed over with his kneecaps trembling close together.

Great, I've only been here for 30 minutes and I'm already being teased. Eddie thought. But why? No one knows who I am yet.

The laughs echoed through the small space, before they trotted upwards and to the dorm sections. Eddie could feel himself able to breathe properly again, for once not needing his inhaler.

With that situation quickly passing, Eddie stumbled his way down the stairs much more urgently so that he could get back to his room as soon as possible. The new scenery of the entrance to the dorm space and it's bottom office came into view, a large chandelier hanging from the ceiling before Eddie and down onto the long old fashioned rug that was placed over the new change of floor, tiles.

Eddie sighed, noticing another boy was waiting at the office and leant up against the wooden desk. Eddie didn't want to start a conversation at all, especially after his first experience seconds earlier- but he needed his schedule and his uniform for tomorrow. The sooner he got back to his room the better, right? Right.

The desk grew closer as Eddie eventually found himself in front of it, with no one attending the desk as they probably should. A sigh drew from his lips yet again as Eddie pressed the bell in order to alert the receptionist that someone needed assistance.

"I-I've been here for ten m...minutes now, I wouldn't get your hope up."

Eddie's eyes flickered beside him, seeing the boy that he saw when walking up to the desk. The boy was tall and looked around his age, his hair was cut neatly with some of his forehead exposed to the light, his bright blue eyes blinking as he too scanned the new Eddie.

"Oh." Eddie replied, feeling a sense of awkwardness rile up.

The boy blinked again, before speaking up. "Y..You new?"

"Huh?"

"New, as in new t-to D-Derry Academy?"

Eddie finally managed to pick up on the fact that this stutter wasn't just a nervous habit- but an actual thing for the boy.

"Oh... Yeah, I'm Eddie Kaspbrak."

"I'm William D-Denbrough, but call me Bill."

Eddie finally found a smile to twitch over his face as he finally had met someone who was nice despite his first experience. He nodded to the boy known as Bill and fidgeted with his sleeves.

"So... W-what's your room number?" Bill questioned, his head slightly tilting.

"Oh, I uh- room 27 on the first floor, what about you?"

Eddie also too found out that he was terrible at continuing small talk, or any type of talk in general.

However, with Eddie's response Bill almost stiffened up- with his prominent adam's apple bobbing up and down in his throat, signalling something had changed in this innocent conversation that Eddie was unable to figure out.

"O-Oh, I um, I-I share o-one of those spuh-special rooms with another g-guy, it's r..room 45 on the second f-floor."

Eddie could also pick up on how his stutter had gradually gotten worse within the few seconds between their answers.

"Oh!" Eddie nodded, tapping his fingers against the polished wooden desk to create a soothing rhythm for himself. "I didn't know you could share with others."

"Y-yeah, we've been friends since kids a-and when we first joined we.. we saw that it was an o-option in the leaflet."

Luckily for Eddie, he didn't have to respond as the receptionist at the office was quickly back in her seat with smudged crimson lipstick and a pen between her claws. Eddie gulped but before he could speak up, the woman cut him off.

"Oh you must be the newbie." She cooed, almost admiring him. "Edward Kaspbrak, right? Mhm honey, I've been expecting you- Mr.Maguire informed me about you."

"It's Eddie." Eddie spoke up, trying to be polite as possible.

He hated being called anything but his nickname that he had grown used to over the years, Edward was just too much and Eddie was simple.

"Oh alright, Eddie."

Eddie flashed his eyes down to her name tag on her blouse, the name Elaine imprinted onto the shiney gold. Of course her blouse had popped buttons upon her white blouse and her glasses were slid down to the tip of her nose. Her eyebrows were drew overly arched, almost Marilyn Monroe like; her hair was curled into tight ginger ringlets. If she wasn't wearing so much makeup, she'd probably look around mid-20's, however right now she seemed late 40's at the youngest.

Her green claws moved away from the pen and pulled out a cupboard near her feet, rummaging around for a few seconds before pulling out a sheet. She then handed it over the desk to Eddie, looking through her clumped lashes at him.

"I'll go get your uniform, honey."

"H-hey, can I-"

"Wait your turn, Billy." Elaine spoke sickly, standing up and flattening her skirt down before strutting into the back office.

Bill sighed exaggeratedly, rolling his eyes at her usual behaviour and drummed his fingertips into the wooden surface; his eyes rolling back to Eddie.

"Well... She's certainly a character." Eddie muttered, glancing at Bill.

"Y-yeah, she's banging the Principle."

Eddie almost choked.

"W-what?"

Bill smirked at the smaller boys reaction, "Yeah, that's the only r-ruh..reason why she still has her stupid job. She can barely s-stand in her own heels, n-nevermind sort out who's timetable is which. I'm surprised his wife hasn't found o-out already."

"Wife?" Eddie expasterated, completely in awe of shock and disgust to already find out that an affair was taking place under the school premises.

"Yes, wife." Bill hummed, standing a little closer to Eddie and shakily picking up the sheet that was his timetable, "Lucky, she g-got yours right."

Eddie peeked at the sheet, wanting to see his classes and teachers.

Bill's eyes scanned over quickly, as if he was digging for information that he needed to confirm for himself- however, his eyes quickly settled on a class that he wasn't sure to expect or not.

"D-drama?"

Eddie felt his face flush lightly to a dusked rose, "Yeah, I suppose I take drama."

"Suppose?" Bill looked to Eddie.

"W-well.. I specifically asked for that to be my chosen subject."

"Ah." Bill confirmed it with his very eyes, "Well h-here."

When he handed the sheet back, Eddie could almost see something click in Bill's brain. But again, Eddie found himself to struggle why he saw that.

Bill then hummed between his stutters again, "W-well, I also saw you take History with a friend of mine, Mike. He's one of m-my teammates."

"Teammates?" Eddie asked, tilting his head.

"Yeah!" Bill smiled, his straight teeth poking through his lips. "W-we're on the b-basketball team."

"Oh!" Eddie nodded, trying to show as if he was impressed in order to seem kind to Bill. "So you're popular?"

Bill practically laughed in his face, in mockery of himself.

"P-popular? With this stutter? I wish." Bill's smile only grew in surprise to Eddie, "I-I also write a lot, which is n-not cool at all."

Eddie shrugged, "I think writing is pretty cool, it's cooler than acting."

"I write about c-creepy stuff, it makes m-me look weird." Bill stuffed his hands in the pockets of his pants and swayed back and forth onto his heels, then his tiptoes.

"Well, you're not weird to me Bill." Eddie spoke gently, smiling softly.

Bill just looked at Eddie with soft eyes, his eyelashes dangling over his own iris as he scanned the boy with his own thoughts battling against one another. Eddie, confused, just stared back awkwardly.

"I'm g-going to make an offer, Eddie." Bill paused, "And this is s-something I or we don't do anymore."

"Oh? Do go on." Eddie urged, his curiosity growing by the seconds.

Again, Bill was silent for a few seconds before clearing his throat.

"I'm willing to offer y-you a place in a club, there's si- I mean f-five of us, including myself. We're all weird or d-different and I think you'd fit in."

Eddie felt his heart skip a beat at the thought of actually being offered to practically make friends; his first day of school had not even started yet and this was already a sign of luck.

"What kind of club is it?" Eddie beamed, trying not to show too much excitement.

Bill poked his tongue into his cheek as if to think for a moment before finally finalizing on an answer, "Well... I guess i-it used to be a uh- well... A club where y-you'd go if you needed to t-talk to someone for help or to let something off your c-chest, a escape." He paused, his smile growing and infecting his face yet again. "Over time w-we all became friends, did things t-together and the club just became... ours. We call it the losers club now. Because w-we are all losers."

Eddie enjoyed watching how Bill was obviously happy reminiscing on how he met his friends and how he found his place in school, the nostalgia clearly softening him.

"Are you calling me a loser?"

Bill's smile quickly fell and his lips fell into an 'o' shape.

"No! It's just... I feel as if you'd fit in with us e-even though we might have differences, we call ourselves losers b-because its funny."

"Oh, are you sure they wouldn't mind? The rest of your members- friends, I mean." Eddie fumbled around with his words, his eyes flicking down to his pumps.

"They'll u-understand why you've joined, so they'll be f-fine." Bill grinned, cutting himself off at the sight of Elaine.

Her buttons were fixed this time, but her lipstick still remained trailed to her chin; a stack of clothing in her grip.

"I hope this is the right size, pudding." She dumped the fabric against the wooden surface, "Your Mother called up earlier and told us all of your measurements and sizes- even telling us what fabric is the best for you!"

Eddie felt ashamed.

"So this seems to be the best match, now you hurry along. You have a big day ahead of you tomorrow sweetheart."

Eddie nodded frantically not bothering to say goodbye, scooping up his new belongings. Just as he was about to walk past Bill, he was stopped when Bill placed a hand on his shoulder.

"If you d-d-do want to join, go to the room next to the d-detention room just beside the cafeteria during breakfast time." Bill smiled, "W-we always provide breakfast anyway, so you won't g-go the day with an empty stomach."

Eddie nodded, making a mental note. "Got it. I'll see you there?"

"We will." Bill nodded, smiling as Eddie parted pathways with him.

That night Eddie laid in bed wide awake with his matching pyjamas, his eyes staring at the cracked ceiling above him with soft and strained eyes. His bambi like eyes were slid over with exhaustion, but for some reason he still couldn't sleep like he wanted to. Something about this very room seemed off, almost eerie.

His window was shut, along with the blinds and curtains. His door was shut and locked tight too. So why did it feel as if eyes were boring into him?

Everything about this place was just weird, more weird than expected.

This school was supposed to be strict and ordinary, like any other boarding school. But it wasn't. How is a married principle having an affair a receptionist normal? Also, the vibe of this school had gotten worse as the night ticked on. The building would constantly creak and the sound of the old grandfather clock ticking put Eddie on edge, despite his medicine calming him down as they usually would.

But what did that boy mean by 'you're next'? Eddie could only imagine the possibilities of what it could mean. Was he next on their list? Was he next to be shoved into a locker? Was he next to die?

Oh gosh, he didn't want to die.

Eddie's exaggerated thoughts quickly became calm whilst he turned onto his side, facing the chipped wall in order to cut off the feeling of being stared at.

With those thoughts pushed back, Eddie closed his eyes once again and brought up fluffy thoughts of rainbows and future dreams. Anything but thinking of how stressful and nerve wrecking tomorrow was going to be.

A/N: Thankyou for reading part 1!! Like I said at the top ^^ if you wish to be added to a taglist, please ask me in my inbox :)

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d0gdaze · 7 years

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Also on AO3

Chapters: 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . (ongoing)

Reddie / Stenbrough

Word Count: 3289

Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak is set up on a date with a friend of a friend, and this Tozier guy is a hot mess. || Stan has feelings. Bill is confused. Long and angsty and may or may not contain a roadtrip. AU - no IT. Characters are 17/18. Set in early nineties. More film based but contains elements from the miniseries and the book.

-Chapter 6-

The next day, everyone awoke in their own beds (or in Richie's case, the back seat of his truck), all hungover in one way or another, either from alcohol or emotion, or both. Ben was decidedly worse off than the rest of them, having had to rush to the bathroom at three in the morning to puke.

Bill had never felt worse. Knowing that he had probably just ended his friendship with Stan, someone he had known and loved and trusted, and who had trusted him, since they were kids. Knowing that they would have to talk, and it would be so hard and he would be stuttering so bad, and he would probably cry. And if Stan cried, fuck, he wouldn't be able to handle that. So he had lied there all night, counting the seconds, hoping that hey, maybe the sun would explode, or maybe he would succumb to some illness he didn't know he had, or maybe the floor beneath him would open up and swallow him whole, all of these things sounding so much better than talking to his best friend the next day.

Straight boys don't make out with other boys.

He couldn't get that particular thought out of his head. It felt so constricting, so uncomfortable. He had no idea what to do about it.

Straight boys don't make out with other boys.

But he was straight. He was sure of it. It had been one of the only constants in his life, up until the night before.

But straight boys don't make out with other boys.

The sun came up all too fast. Soon he could hear his family downstairs, Georgie switching on the television to watch morning cartoons, his mother idly humming as she cooked, the smell of bacon and eggs slowly sifting up to his room. Stan would undoubtedly be knocking on his front door within the hour.

Stan had gotten up before sunrise to go for a walk, deciding that he needed the fresh air after a very restless night. He had grabbed his birdwatching handbook and binoculars before he left the house. Birdwatching was something he used to do a lot when he was younger, whenever he wasn't with his friends or filling his religious obligations you could usually find him sat on a park bench, binoculars fixed on a birdbath or a specific tree. He had had a lot less time for it lately, but he still indulged himself when the rare opportunity occurred. When he was younger he could have named every bird as soon as he saw it and spell it correctly back to front, but that information had since been replaced with more important things, and he was much slower to recognise anything. It didn't bother him too much, really. He still enjoyed himself very much.

But he wasn't thinking much about birds as he walked down the street.

He was thinking about Bill.

His feelings were so muddled about the night before. He couldn't really remember any specific details, and what he did recall were broken up in fragments that didn't make sense when he put them together. The feeling of Bill's arms around his shoulders in the living room. Of Bill's breath, hot on his skin. Bill moaning softly as Stan dug his fingers into his waist. Bill's tongue in his mouth. He felt his face heating up.

It was everything he wanted, right? Yes, he liked Bill, he wanted to be with Bill, and that's what he got. He should be happy, right?

But it feels so wrong.

He had wanted to be with Bill, eventually, but not like that. Not so drunk they couldn't see straight. Not locked in someone else's bathroom covered in each other's drool, barely remembering any of it the next day.

He figured he should go talk to Bill about it, but what would he even say?

'Hey babe, had a super fun time eating your face last night but I think it was a mistake and I wish it never happened!'

He shook his head. It'll be fine! It was Bill, for god sakes, they trusted each other enough to talk about this.

Everything will be fine.

Bill dragged himself out of bed at 7.38am, figuring he would have to get up sooner or later, and he didn't really want his parents coming into his room to wake him.

He stumbled his way to the bathroom, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

He nearly screamed when he saw his reflection.

The left side of his neck was littered with hickeys. Big, blueish-purple marks all the way from his collarbone to his jawline.

“Oh fuck,” he said, leaning in closer to the mirror to get a better look, “motherf-fucker.”

There was a knock at the door, and he jumped.

“You okay in there Billy? Heard you swearing.”

Georgie.

“Y-yeah, George, I'm fine,” he called out, “just d-dropped something.”

“Mkay!”

Bill went back to inspecting the lovebites Stan had gifted him.

Fuck.

He knew that if his parents saw they would not be happy. And he knew that if any of his friends saw, they wouldn't let him live it down.

FUCK.

He searched his brain for a resolution, something, anything.

It was far too hot out to hide it up with a scarf, so that was out.

Maybe he could cover it with something?

He opened the mirror cabinet, knowing his mother kept some of her makeup in here somewhere. He rummaged around the shelves until he found a small tube labelled 'foundation'.

Here goes nothing.

He squeezed a far too generous amount into his palm and awkwardly rubbed it onto the side of his neck, and after he worked at it for a minute he decided that it was good enough, nowhere near perfect (it was too dark for his skin tone and you could still see the bruises coming through if you looked close enough), but enough to get away with it as long as he didn't draw attention.

He replaced the tube back in the cabinet, and cleaned up what had dripped onto the sink.

Stan had cut his birdwatching endeavour short, only staying in the park for half an hour or so before the lack of actual birds started to frustrate him and he left. He decided to take the long way around to Bill's, figuring that it was a nice enough morning, and the extra time he would have to think couldn't do much harm.

He could hear birds chirping in the trees around him as he walked, which irritated him slightly because where were the little bastards when he was looking for them earlier, huh? But it was still a sound he found soothing, and it helped calm his nerves, if only a little.

Somehow the walk that should have taken twenty minutes seemed to only take three, and before he knew it he was standing on Bill's front porch.

He straightened himself up and knocked on the door. He heard excited footsteps approaching him and soon enough Georgie was standing in front of him, flashing a toothy grin.

“Hey Georgie, is Bill here?”

“He's upstairs, I'll take you to him!”

Before Stan could refuse, Georgie had taken him by the hand and was leading him up the stairs, bounding up them two steps at a time. Stan just followed and laughed.

They stopped in front of Bill's room, and Stan braced himself before opening the door.

A few minutes later they were sitting under the tree in Bill's backyard, they didn't stay in his room as they didn't want to risk his parents overhearing anything or walking in while they talked.

“L-l-look, S-stan, I th-th-th- ab-b-b-bout l-l-” Bill was getting frustrated, it showed on his face, and he dig his fingernails into his palms. Stan just listened patiently, nodding gently, letting him know to continue.

“L-l-last n-nuh-night, it wh-was,” he could feel tears forming behind his eyes, a dry lump in the back of his throat.

Just talk, talk like a normal person for once, fucking hell.

“It w-w-was, was a m-m-m-muh, fuck,” his tongue just refused to do what he wanted, he could feel his hands trembling, his eyes blinking rapidly to stop himself from crying.

“It was a mistake,” Stan finished his sentence for him, “yeah, I know.”

Bill stared at him, feeling confused and angry and relieved all at once. He broke down, collapsing into Stan's chest, and just sobbed until the tight pain in his chest disappeared. Stan held him the whole time, not saying anything, not crying, not being able to pinpoint any particular emotion. He felt blank. There was no other way to describe it. He felt as if all of his feelings, good or bad, had just left his body, leaving an empty shell. Maybe they would return, maybe they wouldn't. He didn't know. Maybe they had left him and fallen into Bill somehow.

So he held his friend on his lap, unable to cry, or speak, or feel anything.

Eventually Bill stopped crying, stood himself up, gave Stan a weak smile, and headed inside, making sure he avoided his parents and brother as he went to his room.

Neither one had said what they really wanted to say. In a weird way, they were both glad they didn't. As it was, they could just spend a few days apart, and then they would be able to continue as if nothing happened. Their friends wouldn't ever need to find out. They wouldn't fight. They could just shake it off and pretend it didn't mean anything.

They didn't need to make it worse by talking about it.

That afternoon, Richie had met up with Beverly in town, and they had sat on the curb outside of the ice-creamery (Bev got vanilla and Richie got strawberry), talking about everything and nothing at all. Eddie, Mike, and Ben were all invited but turned the offer down, Mike and Ben had gone to the library together and Eddie was staying home to help Mrs. Kaspbrak clean up the house a little. So they were alone, and they both rather appreciated that fact.

“You and Eddie seem to be going pretty well,” Bev said, ever so casually, after finishing off the last bite of her cone.

“Yeah, well, I dunno about that.”

“Really? You looked pretty comfortable with each other a few nights ago.”

“That was before I told him I was leaving.”

Bev's smile faded from her face.

“Leaving?”

“Bev, you know I can't stay here. I love you guys but-” She was glaring at him now.

“But what, Richie?”

He shook his head. “I just... it's like I've spent my entire life in this cage, just wishing to be able to get up and go, and live the way I want to, and now I can, Bev. And I did, I left home in the middle of the night and just drove, and it's the best feeling in the world. And I need my life to be like that, Bev. Derry's just another cage. And maybe it's much better than my old one, the bars are wider apart and I've got other's to share it with. But it's still a cage.”

Beverly had to stop herself from slapping him in the face.

“This isn't fucking Dead Poet's Society, Richie! You can't just scream 'cease the day' and go live out of your fucking car!” The outburst was making a few people on the street turn their heads. Richie was in a mild state of shock. “I actually can't believe you right now, Tozier.”

“Bev-”

“What do you think is even out there for you, dude? It's like, we're all here, and we care about you, and we will help you, but you still don't think that's good enough?”

“Bev, please-”

“You don't think I'm good enough? Or Bill? Or Eddie, for god's sake?”

“Beverly.”

“Because I have known that kid for years and he has never, ever, opened himself up to someone the way he has with you. He was looking at you last night like you were the whole goddamn world. And if you fuck that up, I swear I'll-”

“BEV.”

“WHAT?”

Beverly fell silent, breathing heavily, eyes still angrily and somewhat desperately fixated on Richie.

Richie had plenty of things he wanted to say right then.

If I don't leave now, I'll never be happy.

If I don't leave now, you're all going to get sick of me.

If I don't leave now, I'll never want to go.

If I don't leave now, Eddie will realise how fucking messed up I am.

He said nothing.

“You know what, Richie? Fine. Go. If you don't want to stay then don't.”

She stood up and looked down at him, scowling.

“But don't call in seven years and ask to come back.”

And with that she stormed off, leaving Richie feeling wounded on the side of the road.

“What the f-fuck do you mean you're l-leaving?”

The seven of them were standing in Bill's front yard, all looking with differing expressions towards Richie, who was nonchalantly leaning against his truck, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, appearing much more relaxed than he actually was.

“I mean I'm leaving. Hitting the road. Saying sayonara. Adios. So long, fair well, auf Wiedersehen good night. Thanks for the accommodation Big Bill, hopefully I'll see you round the way sometime.”

Eddie couldn't understand what he was hearing. He felt helpless, unable to do anything. It was a bad dream, surely. Surely he wasn't really going, that it was all a joke. He would get in his truck and wave goodbye only to drive around the block and reappear yelling 'SIKE!' or something stupid, and they would roll their eyes and he would laugh and he would stay.

They still needed time.

They still needed to work things out.

He knew he didn't love Richie yet, but if he left he would never get to find out if he would.

Eddie felt panic set in, his breathing becoming shallower, his body completely frozen. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. All he could do was watch as Richie started to walk towards Bill, saying what might be his last goodbye.

Richie walked around to each of them individually, exchanging parting words and hugs.

“Bill, say goodbye to ol' Georgie for me. I wish I coulda seen him again.” “Stan the man! You bloomin' legend! Stay gorgeous, babe.”

“T'was a pleasure Hanscom, just wish it hadn't been so short-lived.”

“Mikey, my boy, keep keeping 'em in line, champ.”

Beverly had been avoiding eye contact with him through the whole affair.

“Miss Marsh,” he said, sounding as genuine as he could, keeping his voice low so the others wouldn't overhear, “I would say sorry, but I know it wouldn't be enough.” Bev finally met his eye, and he could see the utter distraught in her face before she wrapped her arms around his neck.

“If you ever find that you've forgiven me, I pray you'll call.”

Beverly kissed him on the cheek before letting him go.

And then Richie turned to Eddie, who had watched him the whole time, trying not to blink, trying not to hyperventilate.

Richie stood close enough that he was all Eddie could see.

“Don't leave now. You said two weeks.” Eddie whimpered.

Richie pulled him into a tight hug, resting his chin on the top of his head.

“Perhaps in another lifetime, love.”

“Please stay.”

Richie pulled away, only slightly, and tilted Eddie's chin up with one finger.

Then, Richie whispered something into his ear. To everyone else, due to the angle, it looked like a kiss.

And with that, Richie Tozier got into the driver's seat of his dirty, maroon, pick-up truck, waved at them one last time, and drove away. The next ten seconds were the longest ten seconds Eddie had ever experienced. As the rest of them watched the truck's taillights get further and further away, he stared at the ground. Suddenly he saw his whole future split in two. One half where Richie drove away into the night, never to be seen again. He would go back to his house, his mother would scold him for being out at night without a jacket. He would go to sleep and wake up and Richie would be in some other town. And Eddie would see his friends every day until eventually they moved or drifted apart as friends often did. He would leave his mother's house in a few years and have a place of his own, and he may even fall in love with someone else, get married, live a good, content, happy little life. And there would be days when he thought about Richie and there would be days when he didn't. And there would be days when Richie was just a foggy memory, possibly a dream, a good dream, but with out any reason to believe it was real. And Richie would do much the same or maybe he would just drive until it killed him.

And then the was the other half.

The half that scared him nearly to death.

Every single atom in his body was telling him to stay where he was. Just stand there, just watch him drive away. Don't do anything stupid. Dear god, don't do anything stupid. He's gone. He's gone and you can't change that. Don't do anything stupid. What would your mother do? What would your friends do? What would you do? DON'T DO ANYTHING STUPID.

“The offer still stands, you know.”

Eddie's feet hit the pavement before he even knew what he was doing. He sprinted as fast as he could possibly go, chasing after the truck, chasing after Richie. He could hear his friend's calling out his name, telling him to stop, what the hell are you doing?

He just ran faster, faster than he had ever run before, smiling and laughing the whole time, so weightless and euphoric that he felt he might start flying.

Richie had turned the radio all the way up, trying to drown out his thoughts. He had used all of his strength trying not to cry in front of the others, so as soon as he was out of their line of sight he just bawled, ugly, fat tears pouring down his cheeks, his glasses fogging up so much that he had to pull over.

He didn't notice Eddie sprinting to his car. In fact he didn't notice Eddie until he had already climbed into the passenger side seat, red-faced and drenched in sweat, panting and wheezing, looking like he had just finished a marathon.

“Ed, what are you-” he didn't have time to finish sniffling his way through his sentence before Eddie kissed him, probably the grossest kiss ever between all the snot and sweat and the fact that Eddie could barely breath and Richie was still uncontrollably sobbing, but in the moment they swore it was the best kiss that either of them had ever had.

Eddie had to use his inhaler a few times after they pulled apart, and Richie went to work drying his own face with the sleeves of his jacket.

Soon they could see Beverly, Bill, Stan, Mike, and Ben approaching quickly through the rearview mirror.

“Drive,” Eddie said, turning to Richie with wide eyes and a slightly crazed look on his face. “Ed-” “God damn it just drive!”

Richie quickly started the car and speeded away, until they couldn't see them anymore.

“Where are we going, love?” he asked, glancing over at Eddie who was smiling wider than ever, looking insane but still so fucking beautiful.

“Wherever the road takes us.”

#writing #reddie #stenbrough #reddie fanfic #stenbrough fanfic

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lodessa · 6 years

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@icecream-junkie sent me:

Yay, fanfic commentary! Great idea, though I had a hard time choosing a passage from Promotion. If I thought I’d get away with it, I’d just copy pasted the whole story. ;) Anyway, here goes:

“Would you believe I was defending your honor,” he tells her glibly.

“No,” she rolls her eyes, “And my honor doesn’t need you defending it.”

“Of course not,” he slurs with a false exaggeration, “Because you are the model of what a Starfleet officer should look like.”

“Gabriel,” she interjects, “Why did you come here?”

“I miss you,” he tells her and she knows he does, in his own way.

He reaches out and places one hand just below her chin, barely brushing her skin but she lifts it up towards him anyway.

“Are you sure it wasn’t because you want me to make you feel better, about the fight and about not getting that post?”

“I thought you couldn’t be my counselor,” he evades, “You know given our history.”

“And I’m not,” she reminds him softly, “I’m just reminding you I’m here to talk. That is a thing friends do you know.”

“And what if I don’t want to talk,” he replies suggestively, fingertips trailing down her throat. He’s always preferred to claim that is why he shows up like this, that it is sex he is seeking and not something beyond just that. “Nobody is better at cheering me up than you, Kat.”

That part, that part she thinks is true. He turns to her for comfort, even if it’s easier for him to swallow paired with sex. Not that the sex isn’t worthwhile on its own. It definitely is, which is probably part of why she can’t seem to be bothered to try and form any real attachment to something with more potential for stability and commitment. Though how many so called committed relationships between officers has she seen last this long… not many. She and Gabriel have never promised each other anything but that hasn’t stopped either of them from following through on being there.

“No one is less impressed with your bullshitting than me,” she replies but she is already well aware they will end up in bed together tonight.

“I seem to recall you being very impressed with some of the things I can do,” he continues unabashed.

“Gabriel,” she sighs, “Talk to me.”

“Fine. I was upset about not getting that first officer spot so I picked a fight for no good reason and when that didn’t work I came running to you to make me feel better. Does that make you happy?”

“That you are talking to me about it, yes. That you’re hurting and making bad rash decisions, no.”

“I don’t think coming here was a bad decision and I don’t think you really believe it was either.”

He’s right. She let him in and that’s because some part of her narcissistically thinks she’s good for him, that she can help him in ways no one else can.

One of the things I am finding I have to balance in writing them is that Kat is too smart and too knowledgeable on psychology not to recognize the dysfunctional elements of their relationship/dynamic, but at the same time she’s obviously still engaging in it. So this section features both of my ways of dealing with it. The first is when she draws a line by pushing him to talk to her and admit at least a little. She calls him out on his evasion, presses him to talk, because I wanted to show her making these little rules that she tells herself mean she has not lost control. The other is where she openly comments to herself about these red flags she keeps ignoring, like somehow noticing them changes doing them anyway. For example, at the end of this section where she admits her motivation and delusion about helping him to herself. It is my intent here that basically she tells himself if she can name it honestly it’s not out control, just so long as she doesn’t start romanticizing it to herself. That’s also why I have her constantly labeling things: Gabriel “evades”, he “falsely exaggerates”.

I also should probably note that I borrowed heavily from an “un-relationship” that I was (not) in throughout most of my college years and that I was recently reading back through old livejournal entries from that era and remembering what it was like. Specifically I borrowed his “joke” evasions and sexualizing things to avoid places he doesn’t want the conversation to go (which of course Gabriel does on the show when he puts his hand on her knee and changes gears from a serious conversation she’s trying to have to them hooking up), and also the paragraph where she thinks about how even though outwardly their relationship is a “friends with benefits”/”fuckbuddies” relationship with no strings attached it’s actually outlasted most “real” relationships, but especially the fact that they are the person the other can count on for comfort and emotional support. Because, ultimately, the reason that people really keep hooking up with that same person over and over whenever something else isn’t working out or “can’t resist the temptation” is never just about sex/physical attraction in my experience. There is some emotional need getting engaged with there, whether it is sating it or not. And I feel like this is clear to a certain extent in the show with these two. Kat knows Gabriel well enough to recognize he is having a hard time and she comes to help him through it, even in the end when she’s leaving to meet the Klingons she tells him they will figure out a solution together. She was angry and scared when he pulled that phaser on her and she recognizes that he needs more help than just their “friendship” but she is still there for him, whether he appreciates the way she is doing that or not.

As for Gabriel and where his head is at (in my mind) in this section: I think that the more uncomfortable he is the more exaggerated his bravado becomes. It’s a defense mechanism and also it is an attempt to control the scene a bit. So he starts out with the obviously false line about “defending her honor” a joke to deflect her question, but it escalates to something physical as she presses for answers "fingertips trailing down her throat” and then bragging “I seem to recall you being very impressed with some of the things I can do“. It doesn’t work (directly) because Kat knows exactly what he’s doing and he does have to admit weakness, but I feel like he knows that and he admits just enough to satisfy her enough to move on. At the same time, I think Kat is right that he is also coming to her to help him process the feelings he doesn’t want to admit he has about losing out on that post. It is precisely because she will push that he goes to her for support, even though its sort of inappropriate since he lashed out at her earlier.

It’s also inappropriate (on both sides) because he does sort of use her as his therapist and she admits she thinks “that she can help him in ways no one else can”. I say that right after the bit about her pushing; because, its relevant to Gabriel’s canonical ability and willingness to manipulate and fake interactions with counselors. I suspect that the people Starfleet has assigned to trauma/ptsd treatment/evaluation are the “nice” type. Soft, comforting, supportive types who are careful not to upset you further. There are people who need that, who are too raw for anything else. However, I have never done really meaningful for work them. I mean it’s nice for someone to listen to you for an hour, but honestly I have friends and family who will do that. My real growth has come from the type of therapist who calls you out on your bullshit. I feel like Kat is that person, as a counselor but also just as a person in the world. So Gabriel seeking her out (even though he would say it was to have sex) is really a cry for help here.

(If there are any specific questions you have or thing I didn’t mention that you wondered about , feel free to let me know so I can address them directly.)

Also I’m still accepting these, so everyone feel free to send me sections of my own fic to discuss.

#lorca x cornwell #fic commentary meme

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your-iron-lung · 7 years

Text

Mixed Up 17 | Rosemary |

Chapter Word Count: 2869

Pairings: Zoro/Sanji

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Chapter Warning: Strong Language

Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Next Chapter: 18

Nami's truck had to have been the smallest little Ford pick-up Sanji had ever seen.

It was older than he was and coated in an ancient, peeling, white matte paint that revealed various rusted spots throughout the truck's body. The bed hardly looked capable enough to transport whatever it was she used it for, as the scarce space it supplied was being threatened by a toolbox Nami had somehow managed to fit in it.

It looked like a piece of junk, but he dare not tell her so.

It was ugly to behold, but sitting in the cab with her made it tolerable.

To a degree.

Inside the two-door cab was a small bench seat that looked like it could barely hold the two people it was designed for. Sanji's legs barely fit in the space between the seat and the dashboard, and the only thing keeping them separated from Nami's was the stick shift transmission that tried to exist between them.

Sitting in the truck was hard, but it was not the cause of the grief he'd suddenly been overcome with when she'd begun to question him.

He stared forlornly at the glove compartment, feeling the heat struggling to come through the air vent and, rather melancholically, wondered if this was the lord of Saturdays' doing.

Just when he'd thought his curse had been lifted, it struck down harder than it ever had before.

Beside him, Nami appeared apologetic, but didn't know what to say to try and make him feel better. She'd invited him to sit in her car with her so they could at least make an attempt to talk about his feelings for Zoro - whatever they may be- a little bit when he'd appeared on the verge of a breakdown after she'd brought it up.

Looking at him now, she felt guilty, and wondered if she should have waited to say anything about it, though, she doubted that a better time would have ever presented itself.

Still. Sanji looked absolutely miserable.

"So…" she began slowly, trying to spur him out of his thoughts so that he might try and explain them to her.

"I'm not gay," he blurted out, frowning. "I've never in my life even thought about being attracted to another man."

"Sexualities aren't set in stone," she said. "They can change."

This seemed to only distress him further.

"So what does that make me now then?" He turned to look at her with a panicked look in his eye. "What happened to make me like this?"

Nami's lips twitched into a frown. She couldn't say she was a fan of his phrasing, but let it slide. Rather than comment on it, she sighed and turned away.

"The only one who knows the answer to that is you, Sanji. Maybe you were always this way, and just hadn't met a guy who peeked your interest 'in that way' until now."

"I don't even know him," Sanji moaned, attempting to slouch in his seat. The dashboard prevented him from slouching, though, and ultimately made him look like a cramped fool. "I've only known the asshole for a week!"

"It only took Romeo and Juliet a day," Nami added in what she hoped was a supportive manner.

"That may be, but that's a fictional love story; that whole love-at-first-sight plot was only meant to expedite the narrative, not, y'know, mimic how this stuff actually works." Exasperated, he tried to find a way to lower the seat so that he could lean back a little bit, but ultimately couldn't find one. "This is reality; that sort of stuff isn't supposed to happen here."

That was true, Nami acquiesced; usually those sorts of things took a bit more time, especially in this day and age.

"I had you pegged as a real life Romeo, you know?" She spoke lightheartedly, attempting to break through his current emotional state with a joke. "You're surprising me right now."

He shrugged and laughed slightly, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes.

"Sorry to disappoint you, my sweet," he said, a hint of bitterness in his voice. Nami watched him take out a cigarette and put it to his lips before he realized he probably ought to ask. "Do you mind if I-?"

"Go for it."

Nodding his thanks, he cracked the window with the hand-crank and lit up, easily setting into his relaxing habit. Neither of them spoke for a while as he smoked languidly, each of them trying to comprehend his feelings.

On her side of the seat, Nami was locked in a mental debate with herself. There was something she hadn't yet told Sanji, but couldn't figure out if it was something that would benefit him if she were to bring it up. Perhaps it would, but there was always the chance that it would somehow make him feel worse.

Through the windshield they could watch the cars on the main road lazily drive by. She bit her lip and glanced at Sanji again, taking in his unusually depressed demeanor and made a decision.

"Y'know," she began, speaking slowly. She put her hands on the steering wheel and flexed them against the leather. "I kinda get where you're coming from."

"How's that?" Sanji mumbled, listlessly staring at a couple walking by.

Anxiously, she felt her heart rate increase as she said, "Zoro and I used to date."

Sanji blinked and turned to look at her with what appeared to be shock. Nami forced a smile. Somewhere, Zoro sneezed.

"What?" he stammered, cigarette threatening to tumble out of his mouth in surprise. "You- him-?"

"Years ago, yeah," she admit, speaking with a bit more confidence than she actually felt. "Back in high school. It was… not very good, for either of us.

"He'd just broken up with his long-time girlfriend, and I'd had a crush on him for so long-" She had to stop and take a breath to calm herself. Though their relationship had been short, it had been intense, too, and still sometimes took its toll on the both of them to recall what it had meant to them. "And, well, I just couldn't believe he'd date her before me, that I kinda forced it on him when they finally broke up."

Sanji was speechless. His cigarette dangled forgotten on his lips as he listened to Nami's confession. She looked stricken, but was smiling fondly despite the way her voice shook.

"I knew he was on the rebound. He knew it, too, but I still insisted we try. We did our best, but broke up before it got too bad that we'd hate each other afterwards, so, um, I guess what I'm saying is, if you want to try with Zoro, I have experience." She felt her eyes watering up with sentimental tears a little bit and wiped them away, laughing lightly to herself. A huge weight seemed to have lifted from her chest as she spoke. It was so relieving to share, that she hoped she could help to lift whatever weight Sanji was carrying by continuing to talk things out.

"Um," he said, suddenly remembering his cigarette as it nearly fell from his mouth and into his lap. Replacing it, he inhaled deeply and looked out the window before exhaling and turning back to her. "I don't know what to say."

"I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm just trying to tell you that I have experience. You just need to tell me where you want me to apply it."

Looking at her now post-confession, Nami seemed stronger. She shone with a new light in Sanji's eyes; one that made her trustworthy and relateable to him. Determination sparkled in her sweet brown eyes that, under normal circumstances on any other, regular Saturday, would have made his heart skip.

"Is he even- is he even interested in men?" Sanji asked quietly, afraid of the answer being yes or no.

"Zoro's his own thing," Nami reassured him with a bit of a laugh. "He's such a punk that he refuses to label himself, but I can tell you that he's pretty open-minded. He's not attracted to specific genders so much as he's attracted to capable people. He's dated men before."

Capable.

Sanji had heard that from Zoro before somewhere. He just couldn't remember where, or what he'd been talking about when he'd said it.

"Capable people? Capable how?" Sanji found himself asking.

Nami shrugged.

"Usually it's people who can match him in some regard. Strength, wit, etcetera. It impresses him, I think." Taking her hands off the wheel, Nami relaxed back against her seat and closed her eyes briefly. Opening them, she turned to Sanji and smiled warmly. "I can help you, Sanji, and I know you know that I can, but you need to tell me whether or not you plan to pursue something with him so we can give you some kind of peace of mind."

This was the longest week Sanji could remember living, but he was, inwardly, so thankful for Zeff for giving him the time off so he could live it to meet Nami. She was nothing short of god-sent; truly an angel sent to bless him in his time of need. He was about to tell her so when he thought better of it.

For once, he kept himself in check and forced himself to think.

The cigarette he'd been smoking finally reached the filter. Tapping off the ash, he flicked the butt out the window and sighed deeply.

What did he want to do?

Zeff had given him the month off to explore new interests, and Zoro, unfortunately, seemed to be his primary interest as of late. But how would that play out? What would happen when he inevitably had to return to work in, what, 3 weeks' time?

Would it be worth it in the long run if he couldn't guarantee that there'd be anything left between them when it was time for him to return?

"Sanji?" Nami asked, stirring him from his thoughts. "I don't mean to rush you, and I don't need an answer now, but I need to leave soon to get ready-"

"I want to try." Sanji seemed surprised by his own voice, for his eyes widened and he sat up rather quickly, bumping his knees against the dashboard. Nami seemed surprised too, but the shock of it faded fast and was replaced with a big, broad smile.

He felt rather queasy, but if these feelings he seemed to have developed for Zoro were romantic in nature, then what better way to quell or satisfy them by at least giving the oaf a try?

Sanji returned Nami's smile weakly, feeling far less confident in his person than he'd had only an hour ago.

"Alright, I'll help walk you through this, but try not to worry too much about it, okay?" she said, reaching over and grasping his arm in support. "It's nothing to lose sleep over, and, hey, if it doesn't work out, at least you'll know, and that's a hell of a lot better than not knowing."

"Yeah." Agreeing, his hands fumbled out another cigarette for him to light, He took a quick, shuddering whiff before he regained some of his resolve and could muster an honest, heartfelt smile. "Thank you for this."

"Don't mention it," Nami said, taking her hand away and replacing it on the wheel. "But, like I said; I have to go. We can talk about this some more later."

She gave him an apologetic look as he quietly said "Oh," and opened the passenger door. He slid out and shut it behind him, returning her wave when she sent one his way.

"Talk to you later!" she said cheerfully through the crack he'd left in the window before backing up and pulling out of the lot, driving away as he stood alone on the pavement, smoking.

Waves of anxiety were rolling through his stomach and were beginning to make him feel ill. He forcefully reminded himself that what Nami had said earlier was true, and nothing was set in stone. If, later, he didn't feel like he wanted anything more to do with Zoro, then that was okay.

He was going to be alright, regardless of what happened between them; after all, Zoro had only been a part of his life for a week. They never need interact again if it didn't work out.

With that thought in mind, he felt a bitter sort of relief manifest itself as he returned to his car and drove back to his apartment.

As he walked through his front door he sighed heavily and removed his coat and made to hang it in the small closet that was positioned near the door.

Being in the comfort of his own apartment, Sanji did begin to feel better and almost felt foolish for being as distressed as he had been earlier. Wandering into the living room, the smile he'd allowed himself fell away when he heard the familiar sound of Zoro's motorcycle engine pulling into the parking lot.

He froze and listened to him as he let it idle, turning to look out the window that allowed him a view of the lot. As he watched, he saw Zoro finally cut the engine and take off his helmet, and even at a distance, he could see that the biker looked pissed off about something.

'Shit,' he thought, panic rising up from the dredges of his stomach to cloud his mind. Had Nami said something to Zoro?

No, there was no way- he trusted her, and she didn't seem the type to do something like that.

Then again, he'd known her less than he'd known Zoro. Could he really be sure-

Zoro was moving again, dismounting his motorcycle and pulling the guitar case off his back and then turned to stare directly at Sanji through the window. They both appeared surprised in that moment as they made eye contact, the two of them momentarily stunned until Zoro pointed, first at himself, and then at him.

Sanji didn't know what it meant, but he nodded, and watched Zoro turn away so that he could enter the building.

A loud, strong knock on his door told him that Zoro's vague pointing meant that he'd wanted to talk. Swallowing dryly, he shoved his anxieties aside and took a deep, calming breath before he went to answer it.

He forced an annoyed expression on to his face as he greeted Zoro, saying, "What do you want, asshole?"

Zoro rolled his eyes, but the pissed off expression he'd had in the parking lot had returned. Sanji ignored the creeping feeling of his insecurities trying to slowly overtake him again and noticed that the guitar Zoro was carrying was suddenly being shoved into his hands.

"What? What's this for-?" he began to stammer, struggling to hold onto the bass guitar case that had been rudely passed to him.

"If you so much as leave a scratch in the finish, I'll kill you," Zoro growled, putting his helmet on the ground to pull out a cd case he'd been keeping in his leather jacket. He handed it to Sanji who took it, appearing confused, and reached down to pick his helmet up again.

"That," he said, pointing to the cd case. "Is the mixtape I told you I was going to make. Listen to it. Find something you like. And that," he repeated, this time pointing to the guitar case. "Is Shusui. You told me you didn't have anything to practice at home with, so, practice with that."

Baffled by the sudden gifts, Sanji could only open and shut his mouth, unsure of how to thank him. Zoro seemed to be waiting for him to say something as he stood there, still looking angry about loaning him one of his best guitars.

"Okay," Sanji finally said, flipping the cd case over in his hand to see if the back had a track listing. It didn't.

Zoro frowned, but seemed satisfied enough with his reply. Without a word, he turned away, walking up the stairs to his floor. Sanji stood there for a second, listening to him ascend as attempted to process the sudden generosity Zoro had shown him. Shaking himself from his stupor, he retreated back into his apartment, shutting and locking his door behind him.

He took the guitar and the cd into the living room and sat down on his couch, carefully setting the guitar case on the floor and placing the cd on his coffee table.

"Holy shit," Sanji whispered under his breath, staring baffled at the gifts.

Zoro had remembered he didn't have any instruments at home to practice with. He'd loaned him one from his personal collection so that he could. He was actually invested in Sanji learning.

Realizing that Zoro genuinely wanted to help him learn made Sanji smile, but rather than dwell on the good feelings for too long, he stood up and grabbed the mixtape. Popping the cd out of its case, Sanji made his way over to where he'd last used his laptop and prepared to immerse himself in the music that shaped Zoro's life.

#zosan fanfic #zosan fanfiction #zosan #zoro/sanji #one piece fanfiction #one piece #punk au #modern day au #slow burn #mixed up

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textales · 7 years

Text

“Country Code 33.”

It was well below zero that early morning in December when I got the call. “Go to a pay phone and call me back at this number,” he said. This way, we’d be able to talk for free instead of paying some ridiculously high long-distance charges. Even though AT&T had just broken up, spawning a surge of competition among American long-distance phone companies fighting for pennies from customers like me, this was an international call that would cost unknown dozens of dollars. I was a broke college student after all – plus I wouldn’t even know how to call someone in another country without specific instructions.

“Can’t I call you later? It’s like five in the morning,” I whined. He insisted we needed to do this right then, since he was at a pay phone in Paris and would be going out to dinner soon somewhere near the Eifel tower. I conceded, and after bundling up with a scarf and winter parka I managed to drag my sleepy hungover ass the five blocks to the closest available payphone. It was across the street from Jesse Hall, a dormitory on campus at the University of Montana in Missoula. We talked for a good 45 minutes or so until my boogers froze and I couldn’t take the cold anymore.

Ross was the first person to introduce me to the concept of a “comfort zone,” and he was always challenging me to go just one notch beyond mine. He loved doing stuff like this – and it was so efficient that in this one call he could stroke his ego by: waking me up in the middle-of-the-damn night, sending me to a payphone, and forcing me to go that one notch beyond my “comfort zone” while simultaneously and not-so-subtly bragging about being in France.

Being bold and impressing people was so very Ross. And clearly he made an impression on me with this phone call, since I’m still thinking about it over thirty years later. Oh Ross, you fucker.

“Cruel to be Kind”

I first met Ross in 7th grade in the cafeteria of Paris Gibson Junior High School. He was carrying a lunch tray – the plastic kind with compartments to keep the Salisbury steak separate from the mashed potato mixture, served by old ladies with floppy upper arms. He seemed a bit lost, looking for a space at the table – any table – that would take him. There’d been a storm, and he was a wayward ship looking for the first available port. Somehow I could see the desperation in his eyes, so I moved over a couple inches to indicate that I was making way for his lost soul seeking refuge.

Ross intimidated me. He was stunningly pretty with deep blue eyes and Scandinavian skin that could tan in the dark. His blond hair had shimmer and would glisten with the slightest hint of sunshine. According to locker room folklore, he was very well endowed down under….extremely, actually – which is probably why the jocks left him alone: they secretly wanted to be like him. And he was witty and articulate and came from a prominent family known by all the right people. He was different enough to attract the attention of bullies, but thankfully they picked on lower-profile kids not likely to make a stink.

He was mysterious and magical and loud and enticing. I knew from the get-go that being around him would draw attention, but I wanted to live quietly and “under the radar” so I kept my distance for years. I didn’t recognize I was gay at that young age in junior high – I was just a clueless teenager desperately wanting to hide. But later in high school, as I started to question my sexuality, I feared there would be guilt by association with this social standout who, at six foot one, was also physically striking. Ross was a big deal swimmer – an Olympic hopeful. He spent one high school summer swimming in the same pool used by Greg Louganis. Ross had lived in Southern California?! How cool is that? I hadn’t even been to Butte.

I was nervous when he cornered me once to inquire about my report card. He was envious because I got straight A’s that quarter and he didn’t. What he didn’t know is how those straight A’s came at a high cost: I had walled-off myself emotionally from even my closest friends, and buried myself in the books to keep the toxic thoughts of homosexuality from overcoming my conscience. At that moment at my locker, fearing just being seen talking to him might be as much as admitting I was gay, I blurted “I gotta get out of here,” and ran to my next class before the bell rang. Whew, that was close.

I was always polite but standoffish – I didn’t dare let him get too close. Ross never gave up…every so often he would reach out…he just wanted a buddy to hang out with. He had the purest of intentions – he was light. Even in broad daylight, I was dark.

By our senior year I was lonely as fuck. Sure, I seemed like I had my poop in a group. I was an aspiring DJ on the big country radio station and had lots of friends, but honestly I was a ship lost at sea, and I figured Ross was – pardon the pun – in the same boat. I spoke on the air in the middle of the night…a one-way transmission, constantly wondering if anyone was listening. All the while, Ross was right there in front of my eyes in the flesh and for real and listening and communicating….why couldn’t I take what was given instead of constantly looking for something or someone else in the ionosphere?

“Let’s Hear it For the Boy”

I remember a Saturday in March of my senior year in high school when Ross and Dan Pugh showed up at seven in the morning to invite me for breakfast with the promise of flying kites afterwards. “Kites?! That’s so nerdy and faggy, no thanks,” I thought to myself. But Ross was insistent, and my father thought it was good for me to get out of the house. My parents had separated two weeks prior and my dad and I had just moved into a small rental house near the big trailer park – the fancy one with a swimming pool. Ross was the first person to visit me in this new situation and I really didn’t have a choice in the matter – damn he was persuasive – we were going to 4Bs for breakfast and that was that.

Accepting his invitation for breakfast meant I would meet Ross at my emotional barrier – a wall erected to contain my homophobia. It was every bit as strong as cast iron, yet delicate enough to be cracked with the slightest tap of the right tool.

Oh Ross was a tool alright. We was funny and sarcastic and worldly and completely worthy of my awe and respect. He was always bold, never ordinary. I loved living vicariously through him, although there were times when I just wanted to duck and hide. Like when we were buying a sundae on a Sunday at the new Dairy Queen on Tenth Avenue South.

Ross: “Stormy…is that really your name?”

Stormy: “Yes, are you really that rude?”

Wow. That one cut like a knife and sterilized at the same time. He found his match that day. I wanted to melt.

After years of flirting and courtship I finally let my guard down. Fuck it. We are graduating in a few months. What do I have to lose? This guy has been trying to be my friend forever – since Junior High for criminy sakes. He really is cool and beautiful and I’m done giving a damn about whatever people think.

“What’s Love Got to Do with It”

We spent every spare moment together in those few months before graduation. There were many sleepovers at his house when we’d stay up late talking about music and dreams and numerology. He loved Eurythmics and Tears for Fears. We talked about architecture and our visions for what kind of homes we would have after making our respective first million each in the next couple years.

I loved his house and staying there. It was such an architectural jewel – uber-modern yet warm. I was so impressed with his story about how the architect interviewed him and the rest of the family before it was designed and built. I remember it had a commercial toilet in the guest bathroom…an odd thing to remember I suppose, but a distinctive detail that stuck in my mind. I also recall how his parents made their bed together - I was impressed by that, and it is a habit I continue with my partner to this day.

The parent’s bedroom had no doors and no privacy as it was an open loft that floated above the living room. Having no privacy meant there would be no hocus-pocus or hanky-panky at our sleepovers. Lead me not into temptation?

Actually, there wasn’t much temptation….our relationship wasn’t the least bit sexual. Hell, I’d buried my sexuality so far underground I was practically sexless. I was never really attracted to Ross because I wouldn’t let myself be. This was what today would be labeled a “Bromance,” and truth told, it’s a good thing we never had sex – I would have fallen in love with him and things would have gotten sappy and complicated. It was best we just kept this as “just friends.”

“Missing You”

Once the pomp and circumstance of graduation was over, we moved to our respective college towns and communication became spotty at best. Oh sure, I’d get an occasional note or phone call and I would hear through mutual friends about how he was doing and where he’d been, but at times I felt like he was giving me the same cold shoulder I’d given him all those years. Was this payback for when I was trying to keep my distance? I knew not put pressure on him nor to rely on him for maintaining our relationship…we were going in different directions and I got that.

To say he lived with flair and liked to brag about it was a bit of an understatement. He was always doing something glamorous and fabulous. Whether it was seeing the Olympics in Los Angeles or writing words in the sand on the beaches of Nevis in the Caribbean, Ross was a magical mythical traveling unicorn. His travel stories were awesome. He made the best of everything and every experience was epic and incredible. Hell, he made Moscow, Idaho sound exotic.

It seemed so easy for him to travel. He had been all over Europe. I worked. I was envious of his portability. He gave me shit about my boat anchor cars. He had freedom and a passport. I had a job and a car payment.

“Emotions”

There had been a years-long gap since we’d written or talked to each other. I heard from a mutual friend who said Ross had not only HIV but full blown AIDS. I was trying to remember the timing of it all so I dug up some old journals – here are some notes:

2/6/85: Visit Ross in Moscow, ID

12/16/86: Ross called from France.

10/1/87: Ross called from New York last night. Seems a bit lost - it’s a big town. I love him and kinda wish we could do sex just once but know it would be disastrous.

8/28/88: Ross is in Glacier Park will be back in New York soon - he’s getting rather serious with some guy.

10/4/88: (Mutual friend) says Ross is thinking of me and that he came out to his parents and introduced his boyfriend to them. My God! I can’t wait to hear from him.

12/4/88: We talked for an hour and a half tonight - he did tell (his parents) he broke up with his boyfriend of one year, wants to move back on campus.

4/2/91: Ross has AIDS.

Oh my. Reviewing that journal was a bit jarring….I guess I had suppressed a lot of memories from that time. Funny how the mind works.

“The Promise of a New Day”

Around Labor Day of 1991 I was headed to Maui to work on a project for the Dr. Pepper Company. I had nothing to lose and time on my hands so I wrote a letter to Ross during the eight hour plane ride from DFW to Honolulu. I remember explaining how my roommate had been recently diagnosed with HIV and how I’d spent dozens of hours in lines at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, interpreting for Robert who was deaf and in a subsidized program to help fight his infection.

I babbled on to Ross about how I missed our friendship that blossomed during the spring of our senior year and how I felt like he’d stopped communicating with me because he feared I couldn’t handle the truth. In the last paragraph of that thirteen-page handwritten letter I finally got the guts to ask: “So, do you have AIDS?”

When I got back to town a week later there was a simple 4”x 6” white card waiting in my mailbox. It had a New York postmark on one side, and on the other, in handwriting I immediately recognized, was just one word: “Yes.”

Finally, the silence was broken.

Next thing we’re on the phone and in two minutes caught up on three years. We no longer had the luxury of time…Ross was on the clock and we knew we needed to be efficient. We agreed he would escape from New York for a visit to see me in the Southwest…sometime soon.

“End of the Road”

The last time I saw Ross was around Thanksgiving of 1992. As an expert traveler and one who knew how to do things on the cheap, he found a frequent flyer voucher for America West Airlines and caught a flight from New York to Phoenix. I met him at Sky Harbor – there he was looking like Mr. Clean with a shiny shaven head and carrying just a gym bag. He didn’t look sick at all.

He swam in my pool, met my boyfriend, and we talked about architecture and love and life, just like we did as high school kids in those months just before graduation. But this time, we were brutally honest. Even though we had all our clothes on, we were finally naked.

This trip was like a farewell tour. A mutual friend from Great Falls who had moved to Phoenix met us for lunch in Scottsdale. She brought a handsome young guy friend of hers who looked like a Greek god…he was tall and pretty enough to be a model, and he and Ross had an instant connection just like Margaret thought they would. As I looked at these two new friends interacting I couldn’t help but feel a bit of validation. That’s the type of person Ross should be with - someone exotic, not a regular guy like me. I knew my place and felt like I got verification that our status as “just friends” was just right. Ross went back to New York and I said goodbye for the last time.

“I Will Always Love You”

We knew the timer was ticking. And sure enough, in four months I got the call from a mutual friend who told me Ross had passed. I was so grateful to have reconnected with him, and I wanted to pay my respects by attending one of the two services that would be held. Since New York was a big unknown, I figured I would go to the funeral in our hometown. There was one big problem: money. Because I had just moved from Phoenix to San Francisco I was absolutely broke.

It was a sign from above when I got a commission payment weeks earlier than expected, and three days before the funeral I was able to fork-out over $1,500 for a last-minute flight from SFO to GTF on Delta Airlines. I remember going to the ticket office in downtown San Francisco, and because the dollar amount was so huge I had to pay with a cashier’s check.

I made the trek to Montana for the Great Falls funeral. You couldn’t fit one more human in that church – hundreds of people were in the house to pay respects for this kid whose life was stolen at the young age of 26. Ross would have been impressed by the massive turnout.

He had a fascination with numbers and numerology. We talked about that in those late night chats.

He died March 13th, 1993. I’m not really sure if it happened at 3:33 in the morning, but it would be just like Ross to have timed it that way, for dramatic effect. His favorite number was three. The international calling code for France is 33…well, that’s just a coincidence. Or is it?

I know one thing…. had I insisted on sleeping-in that windy morning on the third month of 1984 I would not have experienced what developed into a “best friendship” that ultimately changed my entire outlook on life. Thanks, Ross. I miss you man.

#loveyouRoss

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dystopialiving · 7 years

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Case Study #9: President-Elect Donald Trump

Welcome back, readers! The next subject on my list of topics was supposed to be the “Let’s Play” genre of YouTube videos, but I felt that the spirit of this blog mandated that I address this subject first.

Some Background

Throughout the course of the 2016, I toyed around with how I would approach this subject if it ever came to pass. But, like most people, I didn’t take the possibility seriously.

I didn’t honestly think that American voters would choose to be their president a man who has no military or political experience, has a spectacular record of failure and fraud in the one area of experience he did campaign on, seems to have little idea what the President actually does, is notoriously thin-skinned and petty, and has been dogged by substantial accusations of racism and sexual assault not just during his campaign, but for decades prior.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious:

However, it’s important to note that the American public didn’t actually choose Trump for president. As of this writing, Donald Trump received nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, and will be the first President in US history to enter the office with a negative approval rating. That’s a big part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is that there’s not much to write about Donald Trump that hasn’t already been written. His flaws and failures received no shortage of coverage during the election cycle. Trump himself calls this ‘unfair.’ A rational person calls it ‘accurate,’ particularly when all that most sources have to do is quote the man verbatim to paint him in a negative light. Americans who voted for Trump saw this coverage and thought one of two equally troubling things:

It couldn’t possibly be true, because the media is a horrible bias machine that makes up lies to discredit a man who just wants to Make America Great Again

All of this was probably true to some degree, but it didn’t matter enough to disqualify Trump as a candidate, because he’s going to Make America Great Again

The reality, of course, is that sometimes a person is awful enough that unbiased coverage of that person will portray him negatively. Donald Trump is one such kind of awful.

While defenders and apologists of Trump have been quick to point out that economic anxiety was the primary determinant of votes in this election, the numbers say otherwise. Per a recent study from political scientists at the University of Massachusetts, racism and sexism were far better predictors of one’s proclivity to vote for Trump than economic dissatisfaction was. In other words, a big part of what’s going on is a white, male America gasping against a world in which they have to share their prosperity with people who are fundamentally unlike them.

And now, a man who spent his entire campaign alienating most Americans who don’t look or think like him is charged with leading our country.

So, rather than reiterate work that’s already been done by better writers—again, most of what there is to say about Donald Trump has already been said, and there’s not space here to touch on even half the shit that’s wrong with him—let’s look at the surrounding circumstances that led to his presidency, and how they align with the tropes we know from dystopian fiction. Given the circumstances outlined below, I’m certain that nobody who voted for Donald Trump will have their mind changed by this post. Still, it’s worth trying to understand how we got here.

The Dystopia

What’s amazing about Donald Trump’s dystopian rise is the sheer number of things that had to go wrong for him to get elected—like a goddamn Rube Goldberg machine designed by H.R. Giger.

Artist’s rendering

Practically every dystopian trope was on full display during the 2016 election. Let’s look at them one by one, and assess how each trope contributed to what, in four years, we’ll be calling “Our Second Long National Nightmare.” In isolation, any one of these tropes probably wouldn’t have resulted in a Trump presidency. Together, however, they resulted in what may end up being the most dangerous election outcome in American history.

Misinformation/post-truth

In George Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarian regime of Oceania depicted therein is engaged in a perpetual propaganda campaign against truth. Readers of the book likely recall the iconic line, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” In the context of the novel, the line is disseminated as propaganda by Big Brother, the shadowy head of the totalitarian state. Midway through the novel, the state is engaged in Hate Week, an event designed to drum up patriotic fervor. Prior to this point, Oceania has been engaged in a perpetual war with Eurasia, but midway through a Hate Week speech, the target changes to Eastasia. The population buys into it immediately. In the totalitarian regime of Oceania, the facts don’t matter—only the galvanizing effects they have against an external enemy.

That is Donald Trump’s campaign to a T.

Fact-checking Donald Trump is a bit like banging your head against a wall. To date, Politifact has ranked nearly 70% of his statements as somewhere between “mostly false” and “pants on fire.” For reference, that number is 26% for Barack Obama. But again, that doesn’t seem to matter, because a large part of the conservative electorate seems convinced that facts are biased against them. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence from multiple sources that their party members are less honest, the broad conclusion that Republicans draw is not that they need to try harder to back up their statements with facts, it’s that the fact-checkers are secret liberals trying to ruin their reputations—see accusations about PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.Org for example.

(As an aside, engaging in mental gymnastics to avoid drawing the most likely conclusion is certainly not new or unique to Republicans in 2016. If you’re interested in a similar rabbit hole on the fallibility of the human mind and the unwillingness to admit it, I’d recommend reading up the recent Shazaam spat that has swept across sections of the internet.)

Beyond the outright fabrications, everything about Donald Trump’s broader popularity among a conservative base is backwards. From a party that until very recently championed moral absolutes and raged against concepts like cultural relativism, we now have pundit after pundit claiming that facts don’t matter. Hell, here’s Newt Gingrich, a Republican stalwart, openly stating at the RNC that it doesn’t matter that violent crime is down, because what matters more is that people feel unsafe:

“We care the most about feelings. We have always cared the most about feelings.”

This pattern of blatantly dumping facts (but still kicking and screaming when being called out on it) carries over into another truth-related issue that has sprung up in 2016 and is poised to become an even bigger problem in the future: Fake news. Fake news (more accurately called hoax news) is, very specifically, news that has been deliberately fabricated to generate clicks, usually in pursuit of ad revenue. It is not a small problem. On Facebook, where somewhere between 20% and 50% of Americans get news regularly, fake news articles actually outperformed real news articles leading up to the election. Those fake stories overwhelmingly skewed in favor of Trump, and included such obvious falsehoods as Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS. This conservative bent to hoax news stories led Facebook to pull back from plans to develop an algorithm to weed out these stories from users’ news feeds, for fear of a backlash from conservative users.

Not that long ago, this would be taken, as would the aforementioned fact checking, as clear evidence that the right has a truth problem. But again—all of this has been said already, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Instead, as a whole other layer to the shit sandwich that is our post-truth dystopia, the idea of fake news itself has now been appropriated as an attack against legitimate media. Case in point, Sean Hannity of Fox News (a person either duped by or deliberately spreading fake news) has taken to labeling stories he doesn’t care for as “liberal fake news,” such as the recent (bipartisan, verified) reports that Russian hacking was directed at swinging the 2016 election. And he’s not alone—You can read more on the phenomenon here. Given this reality, the introduction of the terminology of fake news seems to have backfired. It’s become ammunition for the very people spreading it to fight back.

What makes the specter of fake news ultimately more frightening than a totalitarian anti-truth propaganda campaign is how decentralized it is. While some fake news clearly has an ideological bent (and director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggests that Russian interference played a role in its dissemination), the reality is that much of it was created simply, as is becoming a common theme on this blog, to turn a profit. This interview in the Washington Post with perennial hoaxer Paul Horner illustrates the fact that because incendiary fake news stories are clicked and shared far more often than the real thing, there’s a genuine living to me made from AdSense and Facebook traffic—On the order of $10,000 per month, in Horner’s case. Horner insists what he’s doing is satire (a dubious claim at best), but seems to be beginning to understand the negative consequences of his actions. Coupled with the fact that young people seem increasingly unable to distinguish real news from fake news, the post-truth reality is poised to become far worse before it gets better.

While a disregard for traditional media and the dissemination of falsehoods were part of the problem, much of the blame rests on traditional media outlets themselves, in particular network newscasts, for a failure to report substantially on policy during the election. Leading up to the election, evening network newscasts had dedicated just 32 minutes of coverage to policy—That’s not an average. That’s a total. This lack of policy coverage almost certainly contributed to the trend among voters to vote against the candidate they disliked rather than for the candidate they liked. They were voting for a person, not a set of policies.

Of course, media is a market. This change in coverage was ultimately brought on by the public’s thirst for entertainment over education. Regardless, it’s only in an environment that so substantially devalues facts and evidence that a candidate like Donald Trump can succeed. Only in this environment can voters seeking to push back against the liberal coastal elite take a look at this asshole and think he’s on their side:

A working man’s man if ever I did see one.

Beyond the problem of active disinformation, comparing rhetoric around Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 to Trump's campaign in 2016 yields so much cognitive dissonance that it’s a wonder more Republicans’ heads haven’t exploded. Republicans went from insisting that Obama was unqualified to be President due to a lack of experience to lauding a man who has never held any political or military position. They went from throwing a shit fit about Obama (a man who by all accounts is a practicing, if liberal Christian with a substantial understanding of scripture) not being Christian enough to hold the Presidency to supporting a man who transparently only cares about Christianity to the extent to which it earned him votes. Seriously—In his speech at Liberty University, he referred to Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians, and at the Family Leadership Summit, he stated that he’s never bothered asking God for forgiveness. The right raged against the moral bankruptcy of Obama, a family man apparently absent of any personal scandal, then threw their weight behind a thrice-married unrepentant adulterer, philanderer, braggart, and supporter of the pornography industry.

Any case that the Republican party is one of values, morals, or principles has gone out the window with their support of Trump, and it’s seemingly no big deal. None of it matters as long as their team wins. Yet again, this has been covered widely, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

The caste system

The problem of fake news and the distrust of media would certainly be less severe were it not for another dystopian reality we now face: our increasing division and segmentation. There are a number of ways to frame this: echo chambers, cyberbalkanization, the splinternet, or even a new caste system. This level of division is present in many dystopian works, including 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Iron Heel, and others. However, while most dystopian fiction sees populations divided into castes based on power, the divisions we see now are based on ideology. Furthermore, rather than being enforced top-down by some totalitarian regime, these divisions have been self-driven through recent advances in technology.

The promise of the internet was that it would connect us like never before. Divisions of geography, race, class, and even language would melt away. What’s happened instead is that we’ve mostly chosen to interact and organize with people who think the way that we do. Conspiracy theories, hate groups, and other fringe movements have seen their popularity explode in the age of the internet. People who hold absurd or reprehensible ideas that would have been normalized out in polite society can now opt to find kindred spirits across the globe. This is how we end up with Neo-Nazi groups like the “Alt Right” holding openly racist victory rallies rife with the type of language and imagery this country fought a war against just a few generations back.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that ideological divisions have been reinforced by the tech companies who run our social networks. Facebook in particular is an egregious offender, though it’s hard to argue with their actions given their endgame of generating advertising revenue. In short, because Facebook’s business model is based on time spent on the site and pay-per-click advertising, its News Feed algorithm is designed to show you the kind of content you’re most likely to engage with. Invariably, that’s content that you’re already inclined to agree with. Coupled with the fact that Facebook’s massive data machine probably has your political views nailed based on your behavior, you’re likely to only see your side of the political debate. It’s essentially a tech-enhanced form of confirmation bias, and its presence is obvious as soon as you consider the alternative would look like:

In this divided environment, fake news and misinformation thrives. If you only encounter one set of news sources or one ideological perspective, you’ll never naturally come upon any information that contradicts the what you’ve been fed by unscrupulous sources. These divisions, by the way, also played a substantial role in why journalists were unable to predict Trump’s victory: They simply lived their online lives in a different ideological sphere than his most ardent supporters.

The central problem is that humans have never really overcome our evolutionary proclivity for tribalism. Fundamentally, we don’t like dealing with people who are different from us. It takes significant effort and discomfort to expose ourselves to and tolerate those outside our established tribe, however we define that. Advertisers and tech companies know this, and they are exploiting it for profit.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracies turn up in a number of dystopian works, often the product of totalitarian regimes. However, the best example of this type of dystopia in isolation is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In Brazil, there’s no Big Brother figure—The entire dystopia stems from a reliance on bureaucracy and overly-complex, poorly-maintained machines. The characters in the film see their lives irreparably destroyed as the bureaucratic inertia of the state machine, spurred a clerical error, employs catastrophic means to reach its built-in ends.

It’s a real laugh-riot.

In the 2016 election, two equally harmful pieces of bureaucracy came together to pave the way for President Trump.

The Electoral College is one such piece of dystopian bureaucracy, and to understand why, we need to explore its origins. Electoral College was, in part, designed to mitigate fears that the founders had about direct democracy—i.e. a system in which every citizen has direct input in the government’s actions. Electoral College votes are allocated based on a state’s total population, rather than its population of eligible or registered voters. While may seem like a middling distinction, it’s anything but. Consider the historical context of the Constitutional Convention, when the Electoral College was established. You likely learned about the Three-Fifths Compromise at one point or another in your educational history—and I can find few more egregious examples in history of a dehumanizing bureaucracy than an agreement to assign fractional personhood to an entire category of human beings. For the Electoral College, it’s important to understand what effect the Three-Fifths Compromise actually had. Because slaves were fractionally counted toward a state’s total population even though they were without franchise, slave-holding states ended up with disproportionately more representation in the Federal Government relative to their population of eligible voters.

Without the Electoral College, the candidate who received the most votes would be elected President—which is absolutely how Presidential elections should work, particularly in a country that loves to toot its own horn over how great freedom and democracy supposedly are. Instead, we have a heavily bureaucratized system that doesn’t actually incentivize voting—i.e. it doesn’t matter how many people in a given state are registered to vote or choose to vote in a given election; that state receives the same number of electoral votes regardless. The powers that be know this, and those interested in preserving the status quo have taken concrete measures to exploit it in the form of a second piece of bureaucracy.

Since the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 17 Republican-led state legislatures moved to implement measures deliberately designed to suppress voter turnout among poor and minority populations—In particular, voter identification laws, restricting polling locations and hours, and limits on early voting. Ostensibly, these laws require voters to jump through additional hoops to mitigate the problem of voter fraud. However, all evidence suggests that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, and for a good reason—It’s an extremely ineffective way to swing the vote.

In reality, these bureaucratic hurdles are disproportionately difficult and expensive to navigate for the poor, the elderly, and people of color, and deliberately so. This isn’t some wild conspiracy theory, by the way. Republicans have openly admitted that voter suppression among likely Democratic voters is the ultimate aim of voter ID laws.

It’s the Three Fifths Compromise all over again: States get to continue to pull representative power at the federal level from their sizable populations, even in the face of actively restricting the franchise of many within their borders.

Fortunately, some of these restrictions have recently been struck down by courts at various levels, but much of the harm has already been done.

The vilification of the other

A recurring theme in dystopias is the creation and vilification of an enemy from outside. 1984 has both the aforementioned Hate Week and the Two-Minutes Hate, a daily period of propaganda spewing vitriol at the enemies of the party. The Black Mirror Episode “Men Against Fire” provides a more recent example of this trope.

Donald Trump’s campaign was built on the vilification of many groups, including Muslims, journalists, Hollywood, refugees, undocumented immigrants, and other racial minorities. Hate groups latched onto this, leading to Trump’s unprecedented level of support among white supremacists.

During his presidency, Donald Trump’s Twitter feed will be his Two-Minutes Hate. Here’s just the most recent example in a long line of insults against those who disagree with Trump:

(full story here)

Disregarding the fact that Trump may just have spent so much time around washed-up has beens while hosting Celebrity Apprentice that he doesn’t recognize talent when it slaps him in the face, this is the tone that we can expect from him. If someone speaks out against him in the slightest, it doesn’t matter how well-respected or successful that person is—He’ll call them sad, a failure, a loser, or some other (often laughably incorrect) insult.

This goes beyond propaganda. Trump’s tweets have actually mobilized direct threats and action among his followers against his selected targets, such as in the case of United Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones. Jones, a man otherwise entirely outside of the public spotlight, was interviewed on CNN following Trump’s claims that he’d personally kept more than 1,000 jobs at Indiana’s Carrier Corporation from being outsourced to Mexico. Jones, as a source close to the situation, explained that Trump’s claims were an exaggeration, as 350 of those jobs were already staying in the US before Trump got involved. In response, Trump lashed out on Twitter, and Jones received a deluge of threatening calls and messages from Trump’s supporters.

It’s not an overstatement to say that this level of harassment will have a chilling effect on individuals’ willingness to exercise their right to free speech. Beyond that, Donald Trump’s equal willingness to make enemies from within and without will have a genuine impact on our unity as a country. Following 9/11, then-president George W. Bush famously drew a line in the sand: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Trump is poised to take things one step further—There’s no “us” in a Trump presidency, only “me.” Donald Trump is so petty and so thin-skinned, so absolutely thirsty for praise and approval, that we can expect lines to be drawn based not on principle, but personal allegiance to Trump himself.

More broadly, the tone Donald Trump has set in his campaign spells disaster for many minority groups in this country. In the wake of his election, reports of hate crimes in the US skyrocketed—higher even than they were in the wake of 9/11.

Authoritarianism/totalitarianism

Let’s just run down a quick list of the un-democratic, hyper-authoritarian, borderline fascist shit that Donald Trump said or promised to do in recent months:

Advocated violence against protestors at his rallies

Advocated for jailing his political opponents

Promised to build a giant, high-tech security wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border we share with a friendly country

Threatened to crush freedom of the press for those who cover him unfavorably

Threatened to reject the results of the election if he lost

Supported a complete ban on all Muslim immigration

Demanded every Obama appointee vacate their office by inauguration day, even absent a Senate-confirmed replacement

Moved to purge civil servants from the Department of Energy who worked on climate-related initiatives

Against two Supreme Court rulings protecting the act as free speech, advocated for jail time for those who burn the American flag in protest

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and the man’s not even in office yet.

Redeeming Qualities

In the immediate aftermath of the election, some people took on the “wait and see” perspective on a Trump presidency, cautioning that it might not be all bad—absent any evidence to support that position, and disregarding the real harm his candidacy had already done. Well, we’ve waited a few weeks, and if Donald Trump will have redeeming qualities as a President, we haven’t seen them. The decisions he’s made since his election have been so colossally bad that you couldn’t make them up if you tried. He’s been skipping intelligence briefings because he’s “a smart person” (reminder: smart people don’t feel the need to regularly tell people they’re smart), and he’s stacked his cabinet and administration with picks so extraordinarily awful that many of them stand for the exact opposite of what their positions are supposed to accomplish. Let’s look at just a few:

Rick Perry for Secretary of Energy—When Rick Perry was running for the Republican Nomination in 2012, he explained that he wanted to eliminate three departments on day one: Education, Commerce, and, uh... a third that he forgot. That blunder more or less killed his chances at the presidency, but had he been diligent enough to remember this very basic policy point of his own campaign, he was supposed to name the Department of Energy. Now, he’ll be leading it. Awesome. Oh, and don’t forget that the Department of Energy is responsible for the design, testing and production of all nuclear weapons.

Jeff Sessions for Attorney General—Jeff Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s for being too racist. If you’re too racist for 1986, you’re way too fucking racist for 2017. Oh, and if you live in one of the states that has legalized recreational or medical marijuana, be ready to kiss that goodbye, because Sessions loathes the stuff. If there’s one idea that summarizes Sessions, it’s this, straight from his mouth, regarding the KKK: "[they] were OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

Scott Pruitt for head of the EPA—As Attorney General in Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt has sued the EPA over and over in attempts to block the safeguards that limit air and water pollution, i.e. the main thing the EPA does. Pruitt has taken nearly a quarter of a million dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry over the years, and co-authored an op-ed in which he claimed that “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” which they absolutely do not—it’s pretty much a 100% consensus among those with the most knowledge of climate science. But again, who gives a shit about facts anymore? Pruitt is not the only climate change denier in the cabinet.

Andy Puzder for Secretary of Labor—I’d be remiss not to address this one, because (and I’m not making this up) readers of this blog already know this dickhead from Case Study #7. He’s the asshole CEO of Carls Jr. and Hardees who wants to replace his workers with robots because he hates the idea of paying them a living wage. That’s definitely a man we want in charge of federal wages and hour standards.

Some of these picks must still be confirmed by the (Republican-controlled) senate, though in a troubling development, many of them have failed to complete the ethics reviews typically required to tease out conflicts of interest. This is particularly important given that Trump has assembled the richest cabinet in US history, many with substantial foreign business ties. I’d like to think that the working class folks who voted for Trump are mildly peeved about this, but, to beat a dead horse, none of this is new information. Yet, people are carrying on like this administration won’t be the Michael Jordan of fuck-ups and disappointments.

Just kidding, that title is already held by Darko Milicic [note: I don’t know shit about sports and I have no idea if this joke lands].

If there’s a single silver lining about Trump himself, it’s that he is in no way a man of his word (see, again, his consistent record of dishonesty), so he may decide not to pursue many of the horrible causes he’s championed in his candidacy. Most recently, he ditched both formally and practically the “drain the swamp” concept that characterized the latter part of his campaign—all it takes is a quick look at his picks to see that he probably never cared about it in the first place beyond its value as a tagline to bring in votes.

If there’s a silver lining about Trump’s election, it’s that it’s a wakeup call. Progress is not inevitable. The government will not always have your best interests at heart. The US is not immune from the tide of authoritarianism, and only direct action will stop it.

Can We Fix It?

Donald Trump will be President. There’s no changing that, though we shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t complete a full four-year term, for any number of reasons including impeachment or simply giving up. What we can change is the tide that swept him into office, because absent serious action, Trump will not be the last of his kind. Change starts with education in four crucial areas: Civics, history, pluralism, and critical thinking. By education, I don’t mean formal training in an academic environment (though it certainly wouldn’t hurt)—I mean direct, personal interaction with the kinds of people and experiences that create personal growth.

I have to believe that if we as citizens had a better understanding of what the President does (and, perhaps more critically, can’t do), we wouldn’t be stuck with Trump. Hell, if Trump had a better understanding of what the President actually has to do on a daily basis, he probably would have dropped out before the election. Democracy needs to be more than just background noise—it needs to be an active pursuit. It’s not something you engage with every four years (or even every two). Healthy democracy requires regular involvement at local, state and national levels. Know your representatives and communicate with them. Volunteer for or donate to worthy organizations. Get involved in a campaign for a candidate that you believe in. Sign petitions. Protest.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that as the generation that fought against fascism in World War II has started to shuffle off this mortal coil, we as a country have renewed our own flirtation with authoritarianism. Absent that direct link to warn us off this path, we have moved down it yet again, and a poor education in history is partially to blame. It’s not enough to know about the historical reality of the rise of fascism in Europe—we need to know why it happened in order to stem its tide here and now. America also seems reluctant to revisit its own historical failures: slavery, internment, racism and segregation come to mind as topics that we need to be reminded of to understand why we need to continue to actively reject policies that limit the rights and freedoms of others. America is by no means perfect, and it is only by reminding ourselves of that fact that we can turn away from our darker instincts.

An education in pluralism is actually quite simple to accomplish, if uncomfortable to experience for some. It boils down to this: Talk with people who do not share your beliefs or background. Meet your neighbors. Read news sources that you violently disagree with. Visit parts of your town that you don’t normally venture into. At the same time, be vigilant: While it’s always worth hearing another side of the story, it’s important to remember that not all viewpoints are equally valid, and not every idea deserves a platform. That kind of false equivalency is part of what got us here in the first place.

This is where critical thinking comes in. I can’t believe that we need to keep revisiting the old adage of “you can’t believe everything you read on the internet,” but here we are. We as a country need to do a much better job of understanding how to properly evaluate the strength of our sources. Healthy skepticism is essential, and we can’t be shy about fact-checking claims—especially those that would confirm our existing biases. The C.R.A.P. test is a good place to start when evaluating sources, and it never hurts to find a secondary or tertiary source that backs up your findings. However, I’m not optimistic that we can ultimately overcome the stronger forces at play here. Confirmation bias has been a problem as long as humans have had access to external information, and we continue to organize ourselves into tribes regardless of the level of interconnectivity available to us. Can we really expect people to voluntarily confront uncomfortable truths in order to move towards a more objective picture of reality? Furthermore, given the profit motive that drives social media’s segmentation of its users, I’m not sure if there’s any way to break out of an ideological echo chamber besides entirely disengaging from Facebook and Twitter. At minimum, if those platforms are our primary means of social contact, that needs to change.

Aside from the issue of education, there are plenty of fixes we should work towards, though it’s unclear how easy any of them would be to accomplish. Ideally, the Electoral College should be done away with entirely, but a similarly amenable solution exists in allocating electors based on total votes cast, rather than total population. That change would have the effect of disincentivizing the kind of voter suppression efforts that have become increasingly common in recent years—making it harder for residents to register as voters means your state loses electoral power (For the record, I’ve run the numbers on this scenario, and it looks like Trump would still have come out on top).

Perhaps the most important things we can do, however, is stand up for one another and push back against the tone that Trump has set. If you’re fortunate enough not to belong to one of the groups that Trump and his followers have targeted, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the kinds of attacks many people are already facing. As this kind of oppression and intimidation grows, it’s up to everyone who witnesses it to speak out against it, firmly and directly. Be prepared for direct confrontation, and be prepared to push back against the tide of post-truth nonsense. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and unsubstantiated bullshit deserve to be called out.

Finally, if you support a progressive cause, don’t count on the government to have your back. Individual behavior will become increasingly important as the regulatory ground gained in recent years begins to roll back. In other words, it’s time to put your money (literally and metaphorically) where your mouth is.

Here’s a quick exercise—whether you’re liberal or conservative, take a moment to reflect on your values (political and otherwise) and write them down. I’m guessing most of us have a pretty similar list: Freedom, limited government, justice, equality, family, truth, faith, peace. We may have different ideas of how each of those values looks in execution, but we can probably all recognize that, based on everything he’s said and done, Donald Trump’s list of values does not align with our own:

And so, the time comes for us to live out our values, openly and aggressively. Want to stop climate change? Better start driving less and eating less meat. Can’t stand big banks? Better move your money to a local credit union. Want to push back against racial injustice? Join one of the many social movements working to keep those in power accountable. Give of your time and of your resources to those causes that align with your values.

The road ahead will not be an easy one, but what we do in the next four years will be critical in determining our future as a country. Donald Trump would have you believe that he has a mandate, when in reality, he won the election on a bureaucratic technicality. The same people who have spent years blocking Barack Obama at every turn will now pivot and try to appeal to unity.

Don’t buy it for a minute. Trump’s ideas are un-American, and they are beneath the ideals that this country was founded on—even if we’ve failed many times to live up to those ideals throughout our history. It’s up to every citizen to push back against fear and ignorance. This is not a question of right versus left. It’s a question of right versus wrong.

America will likely never be a utopia—We are only as good as our worst instincts. But if we recommit ourselves to our living our common values, and stand firm against the authoritarian, spiteful, dishonest and divisive tide of Trump, we can return to a path that leads us toward the pursuit of our ideals.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars: Midterm elections are November 6th, 2018.

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#DystopiaLiving #dystopia #politics #donald trump #hillary clinton #election 2016 #orwell 1984 #brazil

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